WHICHCOTE (WHITCHCOTE, WHICHCOT), BENJAMIN: One of the leaders among the Cambridge Platonists (q.v.); b. at Stoke (11 m. n.e. of Shrewsbury), Shropshire, May 4, 1609; d. at Cam bridge May, 1683. He was admitted a pensioner of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1626 (B.A., 1629; M.A. and fellow, 1633), and was ordained in 1636. He was appointed Sunday afternoon lec turer at Trinity College, a post which he held for twenty years, and through the work done there was beat known to his contemporaries. In 1643 he was preferred to the college living of .North Cadbury in Somersetshire, but in the following year was re called to Cambridge as provost of Ding's. The date of this appointment may be said to mark the rise of the new movement, of a type distinct from either the Puritan or the High-church, and one which gave alarm to the Puritan leaders. There was all the more cause for this alarm in that Whichcote spoke not for himself alone, but represented, as he molded, the thought of a younger and more progressive gen eration. In fact, it was as a teacher that he showed his power. Though Smith and Cudworth and More looked back to him as their intellectual master, he never appeared as an author in his lifetime. In 1649 he resigned the living of North Cadbury, and was presented to that of Milton in Cambridgeshire, which he retained till his death. At the Restora tion he was ejected from his headship, but adhered to the church when the Act of Uniformity (see Uniformity, Act of) was passed, held the cure of St. Anne's, Blackfriars, from 1662 until the church was burned in the great fire of 1666, and that of St. Lawrence, Jewry, from 1668. Four volumes of his sermons were published at Aberdeen in 1751, and his Moral and Religious Aphorisms, London, 1753. Throughout these his conceptions of human nature, of religion, and of the Church are seen to be in dis tinct contrast to the modes of thought prevailing XII. 22

when he first formulated them; a broader and more philosophical spirit is evident in them. "God hath set up two lights to enlighten us in our way: the light of reason, which is the light of his creation; and the light of Scripture, which is after-revelation from him. Let us make use of these two lights; and suffer neither to be put out." In this one phrase he takes a higher range of thought than had been reached by any earlier English Protestant theologian, with possibly the single exception of Hooker. His Platonic temper is shown in the way in which he took up the idea of religion in its full breadth, moral and philosophical, and brought it into affinity with all the powers of humanity, showing that Christianity was unique, not in rejecting and casting aside, but in interpreting and completing what is otherwise good in man. It is in.this realization of the unity of all the moral forces which govern civilization, this expansion and elevation of the whole conception of religion and of the moral rights of human nature, that Whichcote's great service to his age lay.

Bibliography: The funeral sermon by Archbishop Tillotson was published London, 1883. Consult further: The literature under Cambridge Platonists, especially the works of J. Tulloch and E. T. Campagnac; B. F. Westeott, in A. Barry, Masters of Theology, London, 1877; E. George, Seventeenth Century Men of Latitude, New York, 1908; DNB, lxi. 1-3.