This paper elevates style above substance. It speculates on the significance of literary style in debates over religious difference during the reign of Charles II, and it does so because contemporaries frequently remarked upon an author's ‘style’. The notorious clerical controversialist Samuel Parker boasted ‘a brave, flourishing, lofty stile’ or, to another's mind, ‘writ in a stile so vindictive and poynant’, while Simon Patrick displayed a ‘flouting, scoffing, jeering style’, and Andrew Marvell ‘led the way’ in the fashion for ‘a buffooning, burlesquing and ridiculing way and stile’. ‘Your style is so Exasperating,’ complained a critic of John Eachard's writings: it is ‘Lofty and Swaggering’. It was precisely ‘the Ornament of their Style, and the pleasantness of their method, and subtilty of their Wit’ that might allow dangerously heterodox writers to beguile and mislead their readers. Even Sir Robert Filmer's ‘plausible Stile’ made an effective case, conceded Locke, if not a sound argument, for his glib nonsense. ‘Style’ as used in these and other examples has a meaning that lies somewhere between the modern conception of that quality which characterises a text or an author and the traditional notion of eiocutio, the ornamentation of one's words, one of the five components of classical rhetoric. The Restoration's broad use of the term matched the diversity of stylistic practice among contemporary prose writers.