Neither have we to reproach him, that, grounded and rooted in
a pure Protestant creed, he was foolish enough to abandon it for the
more corrupted doctrines of Rome. He did not unloose from the secure
haven to moor in the perilous road; but, being tossed on the billows of
uncertainty, he dropped his anchor in the first moorings to which the
winds, waves, and perhaps an artful pilot, chanced to convey his bark.
We may indeed regret, that, having to choose between two religions, he
should have adopted that which our education, reason, and even
prepossessions, combine to point out as foully corrupted from the
primitive simplicity of the Christian Church. But neither the Protestant
Christian, nor the sceptic philosopher, can claim a right to despise the
sophistry which bewildered the judgment of Chillingworth, or the toils
which enveloped the active and suspicious minds of Bayle and of Gibbon.
The latter, in his account of his own conversion to the Catholic faith,
fixes upon the very arguments pleaded by Dryden, as those which appeared
to him irresistible. The early traditions of the Church, the express
words of the text, are referred to by both as the grounds of their
conversion; and the works of Bossuet, so frequently referred to by the
poet, were the means of influencing the determination of the
philosopher.[5] The victorious argument to which Chillingworth himself
yielded, was, "that there must be somewhere an infallible judge, and the
Church of Rome is the only Christian society, which either does or can
pretend to that character.
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