CHILLINGWORTH, WILLIAM English divine and controversialist, was born at Oxford in Oct. 1602. In June 1618 he became a scholar of Trinity college, Oxford, and was made a fellow of his college in June 1628. He was persuaded by a Jesuit propagandist to embrace Catholicism and went to study at the Jesuit college at Douai. But his godfather, Laud, then bishop of London, recommended him to make an impartial en quiry into the claims Of the two Churches. After a short stay he left Douai in 1631 and returned to Oxford. On grounds of Scripture and reason he at length declared for Protestantism but declined a preferment offered to him in 1635 by Sir Thomas Coventry, lord keeper of the great seal. He was in difficulty about subscribing the Thirty-nine Articles. In a letter to Gilbert Shel don, then warden of All Souls, he declared that he was fully re solved on two points—that to say that the Fourth Commandment is a law of God appertaining to Christians is false and unlawful, and that the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian Creed are false and schismatical. His principal work, The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation; or, An Answer to a Book entitled "Mercy and Truth" etc., published in 1637, was undertaken in defence of Dr. Christopher Potter, provost of Queen's college, Oxford.
The main argument of the Religion of Protestants is a vindica tion of the sole authority of the Bible in spiritual matters and of the free right of the individual conscience to interpret it. In 1638 Chillingworth was promoted to the chancellorship of the church of Sarum, with the prebend of Brixworth in Northamptonshire annexed to it. In the Civil War he served in the king's army at the siege of Gloucester, inventing a siege engine. Shortly after wards he accompanied Lord Hopton, general of the king's troops in the west, in his march, and he was taken prisoner at Arundel Castle by the parliamentary forces under Sir William Waller. He died at Chichester.
Besides his principal work Chillingworth wrote a number of smaller anti-Jesuit papers, published in the posthumous Ad ditional Discourses (1687), and nine of his sermons have been preserved. In politics he was a zealous Royalist, asserting that even the unjust and tyrannous violence of princes may not be resisted, although it might be avoided in terms of the instruc tion, "when they persecute you in one city, flee into another." Chillingworth advocated toleration in an intolerant age.