CHILLICOTHE, a city and the county-seat of Ross county, Ohio, U.S.A., on the W. bank of the Scioto river, on the Ohio & Erie Canal, about 50 m. S. of Columbus. Pop. (1890) 11,288; (1900) 12,976, of whom 986 were negroes, and 910 were foreign-born; (1910 census) 14,508. Chillicothe is served by the Baltimore & Ohio South-Western (which has railway shops here), and other railways. The city has two parks. There are several ancient mounds in the vicinity. Chillicothe is built on a plain about 30 ft. above the river, in the midst of a fertile agricultural region, and has a large trade in grain and coal, and in manufactures. The value of the city's factory products increased from $1,615,959 in 1900 to $3,146,890 in 1905, or 94.7%. Chillicothe was founded in 1796, and was first incorporated in 1802. In 1800-1803 it was the capital of the North-West Territory, and in 1803-1810 and 1812-1816 the capital of Ohio. Three Indian villages bore the name Chillicothe, each being in turn the chief town of the Chillicothe, one of the four tribal divisions of the Shawnee, in their retreat before the whites; the village near what is now Oldtown in Greene county was destroyed by George Rogers Clark in 1780; that in Miami county, where Piqua is now, was destroyed by Clark in 1782; and the Indian village near the present Chillicothe was destroyed in 1787 by Kentuckians.
See Henry Howe, _Historical Collections of Ohio_ (Columbus, 1891).
CHILLINGWORTH, WILLIAM (1602-1644), English divine and controversialist, was born at Oxford in October 1602. In June 1618 he became a scholar of Trinity College, Oxford, and was made a fellow of his college in June 1628. He had some reputation as a skilful disputant, excelled in mathematics, and gained some credit as a writer of verses. The marriage of Charles I. with Henrietta Maria of France had stimulated the propaganda of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jesuits made the universities their special point of attack. One of them, "John Fisher," who had his sphere at Oxford, succeeded in making a convert of young Chillingworth, and prevailed upon him to go to the Jesuit college at Douai. Influenced, however, by his godfather, Laud, then bishop of London, he resolved to make an impartial inquiry 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, 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. He would not, however, take orders. His theological sensitiveness appears in his refusal of 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. As he informed Gilbert Sheldon, then warden of All Souls, in a letter, he was fully resolved 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 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. Potter had replied in 1633 to Knott's _Charity Mistaken_ (1630), and Knott retaliated with _Mercy and Truth_. This work Chillingworth engaged to answer, and Knott, hearing of his intention and hoping to bias the public mind, hastily brought out a pamphlet tending to show that Chillingworth was a Socinian who aimed at perverting not only Catholicism but Christianity.