CHILLIANWALLA, a town of British India in the Punjab, situated on the left bank of the River Jhelum, about 85 miles north-west of Lahore, in 32° 40' N. lat. and 73° 39' E. long. It is memorable as the scene of a sanguinary battle fought there on the 13th January 1849, between a British force commanded by Lord Gough and the Sikh army under Shere Singh. The loss of the British in killed and wounded amounted to 2269, of whom nearly 1000 were Europeans, while that of the Sikhs was estimated at 4000. An obelisk erected at Chillianwalla by the British Government preserves the names of the officers and men who fell in the action.
CHILLICOTHE, a city of the United States, capital of the county of Ross in Ohio, on the west bank of the River Scioto, 45 miles south of Columbus. It is beautifully situated in the midst of a rich agricultural district, and has extensive communication by means of the Ohio and Erie canal, and several railway lines. Its public buildings, many of which are an ornament to the town, comprise a large court-house, which cost over $100,000, fourteen churches, and thirty-six public schools; and among its industrial establishments are carriage-factories, flour and paper mills, an iron foundry, and a manufactory of agricultural implements. Chillicothe was founded in 1796 by immigrants from Virginia and Kentucky, and from 1800 to 1810 it was the capital of the State. Population in 1870, 8920.
CHILLINGWORTH, William (1602-1644), a celabrated divine and controversialist of the Church of England, was born at Oxford in October 1602. In June 1618 he became a scholar of Trinity College, and after a course of logic and philosophy he was admitted to the degree of Master of Arts in 1623, and was made a fellow of Trinity College in June 1628. In those days he industriously cultivated the art of disputation, as was the fashion among the young theologians of the university. He also excelled in mathematics, and gained some credit as a writer of verses. The controversy between the Church of England and that of Rome was the absorbing topic of the time, which had gained a deeper interest in consequence of the marriage of Charles with Henriette of France. Missionaries of the Church of Rome were busy throughout the country. The J esuits made the universities their special point of attack; and one, named Fisher, who had his sphere at Oxford, succeeded in making a convert of young Chillingworth. To secure his conquest, Fisher prevailed upon Chillingworth to go to the Jesuit college at Douay. While he was there, Laud, who was his godfather, and who then was bishop of London, pressed him with arguments against the doctrine and practice of the Church of Rome, which had the effect of determining him to make an impartial inquiry into the claims of the two churches. For this purpose he quitted Douay in 1631 after a brief stay there, returned to England, and at Oxford, of which Laud was chancellor, he devoted his energies to a free inquiry into religion. On grounds of Scripture and reason he at length declared for Protestantism, and wrote in 1634, but did not publish, a confutation of the motives which had led him over to Rome. This paper was lost; the other, on the same subject, was ...probably written on some other occasion at the request of his friends. His return to Protestantism was attended with some scruples, which he expressed in a letter to Dr Sheldon, and which probably gave rise to the report that he had turned papist a second time, and then Protestant again. The extreme sensitiveness of his theological conscience was evinced by the grounds on which he refused a preferment offered to him in 1635 by Sir Thomas Coventry, Lord Keeper of the Great Seat He was in difficulty about subscribing the Thirty-nine Articles. As he informed Dr Sheldon in a letter, he was fully resolved on two points— that to say the Fourth Commandment is a law of God appertaining to Christians is false and unlawful, and that the damning clauses in St Athanasius’s Creed are most false, and in a high degree presumptuous and schismatical. To subscribe, therefore, he felt would be to “subscribe his own damnation.” At this time his principal work was far towards completion. It was undertaken in defence of Dr Christopher Potter, provost of Queen’s College in Oxford, who had for some time been carrying on a controversy with a Jesuit known as Edward Knott, but whose real name was Matthias Wilson.
Laud, now archbishop of Canterbury, was not a little solicitous about Chillingworth’s reply to Knott, and at his request, as “the young man had given cause why a more watchful eye should be held over him and his writings,” it was examined by the vice-chancellor of Oxford, and two professors of divinity, and published with their approbation in 1637, with the title The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation. The work was well received, two editions being published within less than five months; and it called forth a shower of pamphlets from the opposite eide. In the preface Chillingworth expresses a totally different view about subscription to the articles. “For the Church of England,” he there says, “I am persuaded that the constant doctrine of it is so pure and orthodox, that whosoever believes it, and lives according to it, undoubtedly he shall be saved, and that there is no error in it which may necessitate or warrant any man to disturb the peace or renounce the communion of it. This, in my opinion, is all intended by subscription.” His scruples having thus been happily overcome, he was, in the following year (1638), promoted to the chancellorship of the church of Sarum, with the prebend of Brixworth in Northamptonshire annexed to it. He was in the king’s army at the siege of Gloucester, and invented certain engines for assaulting the town. Shortly afterwards he accompanied Lord Hopton, general of the king’s troops in the west, in his march; and being laid up with illness at Arundel Castle, he was there taken prisoner by the Parliamentary forces under Sir William Waller. As he was unable to go to London with the garrison, he was conveyed to Chichester, and died there in January 1644. His last days were spent in controversy with a redoubtable preacher, Francis Cheynell, about the dispute between the king and the parliament.
Besides his principal work, Chillingworth wrote a number of minor pieces of a controversial kind, and some 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 our Saviour’s direction, “when they persecute you in one city, flee into another.” His writings long enjoyed a high popularity. The Religion of Protestants is characterized by much fairness and acuteness of argument, and was commended by Locke as a discipline of “perspicuity and the way of right reasoning.” The charge of Socinianism was frequently brought against him, but, as Tillotson thought, “for no other cause but his worthy and successful attempts to make the Christian religion reasonable.” His creed, and the whole gist of his argument, is expressed in a single sentence, which is not without significance even for the present time,—“I am fully assured that God does not, and therefore that men ought not to require any more of any man than this, to believe the Scripture to be God’s word, to endeavour to find the true sense of it, and to live according to it.”
