Although there was a hostile response to Socinianism in the 1630s, the English reaction to the Socinians' ideas was not entirely negative. There were Englishmen who were sympathetic to some of the Socinians' ideas and it is this, more positive, engagement which will be the subject of this chapter. Those who read and approved of aspects of Socinianism tended not to draw attention to their interest in the Polish group; when Socinianism was discussed in public, it tended to be for polemical reasons. We saw in the last chapter that Reformed theologians like Prideaux and Barlow explicitly attacked the Socinians, hoping to shore up their own understanding of Reformed theology and to show that such a heretical sect lay well outside the boundaries of orthodox Christianity. But there were others who read Socinian works and who found in them a complex and sophisticated collection of theological and moral ideas, and who drew inspiration from certain parts of the Socinian synthesis. To those who objected to the Calvinist system of predestination and who preferred to understand Christianity as an ethical religion which had to be freely chosen, some of the Socinians' views about the message of the Gospel were appealing. These men read a wide range of theological writing, from the early Church Fathers as well as from contemporaries, and used these materials to arrive at their own understanding of religion.