The gradual weaning of Cambridge from an allegiance to conceptions of Crown and Altar which were the foundations of tory thinking was paralleled by a retreat from a view of Christianity which made it difficult for the clerical estate to accept the submissive role which the Hanoverian regime was to require of it. Basic to these theological disputes, which were intertwined with the political debates which divided Cambridge and the Church more generally in the decades after the Glorious Revolution, was the issue of how far Christianity could be equated with the exercise of human reason unaided by the truths of the Revelation. Though no one in the Anglican fold denied that Christianity relied to some degree on Revelation there were those among the latitudinarians who appeared to suggest that natural religion differed little from Christianity; Tillotson, for example, had argued that ‘As for the revealed religion, the only design of that is, to revive and improve the natural notions which we have of God, and all our reasonings about divine revelation are necessarily gathered by our natural notions of religion…’ (Sullivan, 1982: 63). More succinctly he expressed the same view in his remark: ‘Excepting a very few particulars they (natural law and Christianity) enjoin the very same things’ (McAdoo, 1965: 175). Moreover, when the latitudinarians conceded that recourse to Revelation was necessary they tended to argue that doctrinal matters could be resolved by the reading of Scripture without much need to invoke expert clerical guidance.