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THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

F TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRI1
after a, /

THE

CHURCH OF ENGLAND

A HISTORY FOR THE PEOPLE

BY THE

VERY REV. H. D. M. SPENCE-JONES, D.D.

DEAN OF GLOUCESTER

VOL. IV.
THE ANGLICAN CHURCH

SPECIAL EDITION

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED

LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK, TORONTO AND
MELBOURNE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

5o65

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VQ I.

109164

CONTENTS.

PAGE

CHAPTER LXII.

THE ANGLICAN CHURCH UNDER JAMES I. i

CHAPTER LXIII.
THE EARLY STUARTS, THE CHURCH, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR ABSOLUTISM . . 17

CHAPTER LXIV.
ARCHBISHOP LAUD 41

CHAPTER LXV.

THE PURITANS 87

CHAPTER LXVI.

OLIVER CROMWELL AND THE SUPPRESSION OF THE ANGLICAN CHURCH . . .126

CHAPTER LXVIL
RESTORATION OF THE KINGDOM AND OF THE CHURCH 155

CHAPTER LXVIII.
JAMES II. AND THE REVOLUTION 183

CHAPTER LXIX.

LAST PURITAN ATTEMPT TO REVISE THE PRAYER BOOK. THE NON-JURORS AND

LATITUDINARIANS 199

CHAPTER LXX.

THE PERIOD OF CONTROVERSY AND SPIRITUAL DECAY . . . . . .215

CHAPTER LXXI.
WESLEY, WHITEFIELD, AND THE METHODISTS. ... 242

vi CONTENTS.

PAGE

CHAPTER LXXII.
THE EVANGELICAL REVIVAL IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 262

CHAPTER LXXIII.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, 1800-1833 286

CHAPTER LXXIV.
THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND ITS AUTHORS . . 320

CHAPTER LXXV.
THE ANGLICAN REVIVAL. THE RITUAL AND ANGLO-ROMAN CONTROVERSIES . . 344

CHAPTER LXXVI.

EVANGELICALISM IN THE LATTER PART OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. THE

SO-CALLED "BROAD CHURCH" SCHOOL 384

CHAPTER LXXVII.
THE ANGLICAN CHURCH DURING THE VICTORIAN PERIOD . . . .419

APPENDIX.
ROLL OF THE ARCHBISHOPS OF CANTERBURY UNTIL THE RESTORATION . . . 452

EXCURSUS G.
MISSIONARY EFFORT IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND . - . . 469

EXCURSUS H.
THE ORIENTATION OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCHES . .... 471

INDEX ........ ,473

LIST OF PLATES.

GATEWAY OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE Frontis.

GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL, FROM THE SEVERN To face page 59

ARCHBISHOP LAUD ,, 84

PETERBOROUGH CATHEDRAL fj 296

DURHAM CATHEDRAL, FROM THE SOUTH-WEST ... 2 g8

LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, FROM THE WITHAM ...... 329

THE CATHEDRAL (CHRIST CHURCH), OXFORD 357

YORK MINSTER, FROM THE WALLS J} ^

HEREFORD CATHEDRAL . 5

CHAPTER LXIL

THE ANGLICAN CHURCH UNDER JAMES 1.

Religious Relations of England, Scotland, and Ireland at the Accession of James I. Hopes of the
Puritans Disappointed by the Anti-Puritan feeling of the King The Hampton Court Con
ference Rebuff to the Puritan Party The Authorised Version of the Bible Convocation
passes Canons regulating Public Worship Clergy required to Subscribe to Three Articles
Archbishop Bancroft enforces Conformity Succession of Abbot to the Archbishopric Death
of King James.

WE need not dwell long on the
great political changes which
passed over England on the
peaceful accession of James Stuart of
Scotland, the son of Mary Queen of
Scots and Lord Darnley, to the throne
of Elizabeth. His claims to the crown
were indisputable ; and he was wel
comed in England, if not with en
thusiasm, yet with a well-nigh universal
acceptance. The details of English history
are too well known to call for anything
more than a bare summary. Scotland and
Ireland were now united with their old
hereditary foe, England. In matters of
religion, however, these two great divisions
of the Empire were curiously divided from
England.

In Ireland, ever since the far-back
days of Henry II. the Plantagenet
the Englishman had been more or less

the ruling power in the island ; but the
Irish all along had resented, and at times,
had fiercely and stubbornly resisted, the
authority of the invaders, and in the.
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the
power of the English in Ireland had
declined rather than advanced. But
during the sixteenth century, especially
under the strong rule of Elizabeth, the-
subjugation of the island had become more
and more a reality ; and directly after the
accession of James I. the proudest of the
national Irish princes formally acknow
ledged the English king as the sovereign
lord. But Ireland then, as now, clung
fast to the old mediaeval forms of
Christianity, and, with the exception of
certain districts, was faithful to its old
allegiance to the Papacy. Peculiar
circumstances led up to this marked
preference for the ancient rites and

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1604.

ceremonies, and to the determination of
the Irish to hold fast to the Roman
obedience. It was not the tyranny of
Rome which the people of Ireland de
tested, but the domination of the English,
so long the hereditary foes of their old
tribal princes. And the English sove
reigns, the Tudors, Henry VIII. and
Elizabeth, whose lieutenants had been so
active and, on the whole, so successful in
bringing about the final subjugation of
Ireland to England, were closely asso
ciated, in the minds of the Irish people,
with Protestantism. The papal power,
which England had thrown off for ever,
became thus especially dear to Ireland ;
hence is largely due the hereditary attach
ment of the Irish nation to Roman
Catholicism.

Scotland, on the other hand, was in
tensely Protestant. It has been remarked
with justice that nowhere in Europe
had the popular mind become generally
alienated from the Roman Catholic
church so rapidly as in Scotland. No
doubt this was largely owing to the
restless work and burning enthusiasm of
one of their own nation, John Knox, who
through his commanding intellect and
passionate earnestness was able to inspire
his countrymen with something of his
own fiery spirit of indignation against the
errors and tyranny of Rome. In Scotland
alone, among the countries affected by the
Reformation, we see the sovereign (Mary,
queen of Scots), who put herself, in the
matter of religion, in opposition to the
will of her people, deposed and even
imprisoned. The more thoughtful and
conservative form which the Reformation
took in England was all coloured with

reverential regard for the past. Scotland, as
inspired by Knox, swept away in one wide
net the good and the bad, the wheat and
the tares. With the Scots the Reformation
meant destruction. Upon the ruins of the
old mediaeval church they built up a
communion which looked to Calvin and
his Genevan school for their masters in
theology.

Such being the state of things in the
realm, now united under one sovereign,
the accession to the English throne of
James Stuart of Scotland as James L,
kindled many hopes and stirred up fresh
aspirations among the Puritan party. The
great queen, who in her heart was known
to detest Puritanism, who leaned towards
medievalism, who loved well many of the
old rites and ceremonies of the church of
the old learning ; whose ideal primate was
Whitgift, and whose views were largely
expressed by Hooker, and a little later
by Andre wes, had passed away at last,
after a reign of unprecedented length
and power and glory, and the crown
of England, with its vast and undefined
powers, which had been on the whole
steadily exercised to crush Puritanism,
now rested on the brows of . a Scottish
king brought up in an atmosphere of
exaggerated Puritanism, among a people
into whose hearts the preaching and
teaching of John Knox had sunk deep. In
the Scotland of James Stuart, Puritanism
had even assumed the form of Presby-
terianism a form of church government
utterly alien to the Church of England.
Well, indeed, might the English Puritans,
at the accession of a Scottish king, hope
for toleration, it not for encouragement.
But king James had learned, during his

1604.]

THE HAMPTON COURT CONFERENCE.

years of Scottish kingship, positively to
hate Presbyterianism. The Scottish pres
byters had insulted and terrified him, and
before he became king of England he had
learned to detest the ecclesiastical polity
so dear to Scotland, and included in his
intense dislike everything embraced under
the Puritan name. No sooner had he
assumed the crown of the now extinct
Tudor dynasty, but he at once freed
himself from those hateful Presbyterian
associations which had so long darkened
and embittered his life in Scotland, and
\vhich he could not help connecting with
the dark tragedy of the life of his mother,
Mary Stuart, the ill-fated queen of Scots ;
adopting with ardour the Episcopal gov
ernment, the doctrine and ritual of the
Church of England. The zeal of James I.
for Anglicanism was even intolerant as
is often the zeal of a new convert. The
Puritan disappointment was very great,
and, as we shall see, bore in time disastrous
fruits.

James I. succeeded Elizabeth in the
spring of 1603. Before his coronation,
some 800 English clergymen presented
to him what is termed the Millenary
petition, which prayed for a reform of
the stern and somewhat arbitrary church
courts, for the removal of what they
deemed superstitious usages from the
Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and
for other less important changes. The
immediate result was the summoning
by the king of the assembly known as
the Hampton Court Conference. This
conference met very early in 1604 at
Hampton Court, where the king was
residing. The conference was attended
by a certain number of bishops and

divines of the Church of England, and
by certain chosen representatives of the
Puritan party. The more prominent
Anglicans were the aged archbishop
Whitgift ; Bancroft, bishop of London
(of whom more anon) ; Lancelot Andrewes
(at that time dean of Westminster),,
the most profound scholar and theo
logian of the English church, of whom
we have already spoken ; and the deans of
St. Paul s, Chester, Worcester, and Wind
sor. Of these, Overall, of St. Paul s, is the
best known, owing to his able exposition
of the sacraments in the church cate
chism, so familiar to every member of the
church. Dr. Field (afterwards dean of
Gloucester), author of the famous treatise
on the church, and others, are less known.
The Puritans were represented by the
most learned and moderate of their party.
Dr. Reynolds and Dr. Sparkes, from
Oxford, and Mr. Chatterton and Mr.
Knewstubbs, from Cambridge, appeared as
the spokesmen of the more moderate of
the signatories of the "Millenary" petition.
But the most prominent member of the
conference, and the one who throughout
took with the king the leading part in the
discussions, was Richard Bancroft, the
bishop of London, who very shortly was
to succeed archbishop Whitgift in the
primacy. This eminent man was then in
his sixtieth year. Born in 1544, he had
spent a studious youth at Cambridge,
where he became a tutor of Jesus college.
Attracting the attention of the famous
Elizabethan bishop, Cox of Ely, he became
his chaplain, and we hear of him as a
famous preacher both in his university
and in London, where he became a pre
bendary first of St. Paul s, then of West-

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1604.

minster. In the controversies with the
extreme reformers during the latter part
of the reign of Elizabeth, Bancroft bore a
prominent part, and was notorious for his
animosity to the Puritan claims and pre
tensions. Of episcopacy and its divine

took his place. The old archbishop died a
few weeks later, and in the autumn of the
same year (1604) Bancroft, as was expected,
succeeded him in the primacy.

In the Hampton Court Conference, the
Puritan representatives were treated with

RICHARD BANCROFT, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.
(From a portrait at Jesus College, Cambridge, )

authority he was an ardent supporter.
Archbishop Whitgift used him as his most
trusted supporter. It was not, however,
until 1597 that he was raised to the epis
copate, as bishop of the important see of
London. At the Hampton Court Confer
ence, where the rapidly failing health of
Whitgift prevented his taking any active
part in the proceedings, Bancroft virtually

only scant courtesy, the king,* who took a
prominent part in the proceedings, having
already determined that no concessions
were to be made to the adversaries of the
established church. The conference ended

* One of his sayings in the course of the debates
is memorable : " If this be all they " (the Puritans)
"have tp say, I shall make them conform them
selves, or I will harry them out of the land or else
do worse."

I604-]

FAILURE OF THE CONFERENCE.

with a promise on the part of the Puritan bishops and privy council was appointed
representatives to be quiet and obedient, to carry them into effect. Care was
" now they knew it to be the king s mind taken to call these alterations by the

TO THE MOST

HIGH AND MIGHTIE

Prince, I AMES by the grace of God
King of Great Bricaine,Francc and Ireland,

Defender of che Faith, &c.

THE TRANSLATORS OF THB

srijtt (j

CHRIST ottr LORD.

Real aiid manifold were the blcJSngsfmoft dread
Soueratgne} which Almighty G o 0., the Father
of all Mercies, bcftowea vpon vs the people of
ENGJ.ANO, when firft he fent your Majefties
Royall perfon to rule and raigne ouer vs. For
whereas it was the expectation of many , who
wiftied not well vnto our S i o N, that vpon the
fetdng of that bright OcciJentaS Starrer Queen*
ELIZABETH ofmoft happy memory , foine
thicke and palpable cloudes of darkeneffe would fo haue ouerfhadowed
this land, that men ihould haue bene in doubt which way they were to
alke, and that it {hould hardly be knowcn, who was to direct the vnfctteo
State: the appearance of your MAIKSTIK, asof thciSVtfWJt- in his ftrcngtn,
nftantlydiipciicd thole iuppofed and furmifcd mifts , and gaue vnto all
at were well afFected,cxceeding caufe ofconifort; efpecially^when we he
ld the gouernment ertabliHied inyaur Hi G H NESS E, anayourhope-j
ullSced, by an vndoubted Title, and this alfo accompanied with Peace j
and tranquuliue,at home and abroad. ,

But amoiigft all our loycs, there was no one that more filled our hearts, !
then the bldled continuance of the Preaching of Goi&gt; s iacred word a*
jmongftvs.whichisthatincftimable treafure,which cxcelleth alltherMieS
of the earth,becaufe the fruit thereof extendcth itfelfe,not bncly to the time
feentin diis tranfitory world, but directed* and dilpofethrDenvr:toths
Eternal! happincfle which is abouc in Heauen.

j Then^iottofufferthistofalltotheground, butradiertotakeitvp.and

itoconrinueitinthatilatejWhereinthefamouspredeceftburofyourHioH-

{ H E s s E did kaue it ; Nay, togoe forward with die confidence and refo-

A i lutioni

DEDICATION TO KING JAMES OF THE FIRST EDITION OF THE AUTHORISED VERSION.

(British Museum.}

to have it so." Certain alterations of no
great importance were, however, agreed
to by the king and bishops at the con
ference, and a small committee of the

name of " explanations," to bring them
under the provisions in Elizabeth s Act of
Uniformity. The alterations received the
sanction of Convocation, and the amended

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16061611.

book was provided for the use of the
parish churches.

The more noteworthy changes and
additions in the Prayer-Book were as
follows. A prayer for the queen and other
members of the royal family was placed
after the prayer for the king, and a corre
sponding petition was inserted in the litany.
Thanksgivings and prayers for particular
occasions, such as for rain, for fair weather,
for plenty, for peace and victory, and for de
liverance from the plague, were inserted.
3ome alterations were made in the office
of private baptism. And the important
concluding portion upon the sacraments
was added to . the catechism. This last is
generally attributed to Overall, dean of
St. Paul s, the prolocutor of Convocation.

A work of the highest importance was
undertaken at this juncture. This was a
new English translation, or rather a revision
of the existing English version, of the
holy Scriptures. The translators acknow
ledged that the Hampton Court Con
ference had been the starting-point of it,
and the acknowledgment gives an import
ance to this Conference which its more
direct work would fail to bestow upon it ;
for unquestionably the "Authorised Ver
sion," completed by king James s transla
tors, is one of the glories of the Church
of England.

As early as 1604, when Bancroft was still
bishop of London, king James I. addressed
a letter to him informing him that he had
selected fifty-four divines for the work of a
new translation of the Bible. This was no
doubt in consequence of the recent resolu
tion of the Hampton Court Conference, but
it was not before the year 1606 that the

great work was really begun. Of the fifty-
four translators or revisers originally
named, only forty-seven appear in the
king s list : seven may have died in the
interval, or declined to act. The selection
on the whole appears to have been a wise
and equitable one. Andrewes, Saravia,
Overall, Barlow dean of Chester, who
wrote the account of the Hampton Court
Conference, and Montague, afterwards
bishop of Bath and Wells, and of Win
chester, represented the " higher " party
in the church ; Reynolds, Chatterton, and
Lively, the Hebrew professor at Cambridge
for thirty years, that of the Puritans. One
name of great fame as a profound student
of the Scriptures, alas ! is absent from the
list : that of Hugh Broughton, the greatest
Hebrew scholar of the age. His exclusion
is attributed to the dislike with which he
was regarded by Whitgift, and Whitgift s
dear friend and successor Bancroft. This
eminent scholar, however, seems to have
been a man of ungovernable temper, and
one who was unlikely to work in harmony
with a large and mixed company. Still
his exclusion is deeply regrettable. The
idea of the work was originally his. In a
letter to Cecil (as early as 1595) he had
urged upon Elizabeth s minister this very
plan of a joint translation. It was this
Broughton, in his translation of some of
the Hebrew Scripture, who alone among
English translators adopted "the Eternal^
as the equivalent for Jehovah, as in the
French and other foreign versions ; recog
nising the strange error of the adoption of
" Jehovah " as the equivalent of the awful
name, the true spelling of which, as
Hebrew scholars too well know, is lost.
The primary and fundamental rule laid

1606 1611.]

THE "AUTHORISED VERSION."

down for the guidance of the company in
their important work was expressed in the
following terms : " The ordinary Bible read
in church, commonly called the Bishops
Bible, to be followed, and as little altered,
as the truth of the original will permit." :
There was, however, this subsequent pro
vision : " These translations to be used,
when they agree better with the text than
the Bishops Bible : Tyndale s, Mathew s,
Coverdale s,Whitchurch, and Geneva." The
first of these rules, which was substantially
the same as that laid down at the revision
of the Great Bible in the reign of Elizabeth,
was strictly observed. The other rule was
but partially followed. The translators
(of king James) made much use of the
Genevan version, and but little ot the ren
derings of the other versions named in the
rule, when those versions differed from the
Bishops Bible. There are traces, however,
of the influence of the Rheims version,
made by scholars from the Latin vulgate,
but by competent scholars conversant with
the original, f

We possess few, if any, details respecting
the progress of the great work. " No
thing," says dean Plumptre in his ex
haustive article on the Authorised Version,
" is more striking than the silence with
which the version which was to be the
inheritance of the English people for at
least two centuries and a half was ushered
into the world. Here and there only we
get glimpses of scholars coming from their
country livings to their old college haunts
to work diligently at the task assigned to
them." For two years and three-quarters

* On the history of the " Bishops Bible," and
the earlier versions, see vol. iii., pp. 154, 369.
t See preface to Revised Version of 1881.

the work went on, the task being assigned
to six separate companies two for the
New Testament, and four for the Old
Testament and Apocrypha. They used to
meet at Oxford, Cambridge, and West
minster. A final supervision of the whole
was entrusted to certain selected mem
bers, six in all. The final correction and
the composition of the arguments of
the several books was given to Bilson,
bishop of Winchester, and to Dr. Miles
Smith, the latter of whom wrote the
dedication and the preface, in which occur
the strange adulatory epithets showered
upon king James I. which so many have
read with mingled feelings of astonishment
and regret. The scholar king is termed
" that sanctified person, enriched with
singular and extraordinary graces, that
had appeared as the sun in his strength."
This version, known in succeeding ages
as the Authorised Version, appeared in 161 1.
Five successive editions were published
in three years, but for a long time the
exceeding popularity of the Geneva
version was undiminished. This is evi 7
dent from the fact of there having ap
peared not less than thirteen reprints of
the Geneva Bible, in whole or in part,
between 1611 and 1617 the Puritans, as
has been well observed, and many others,
missing the notes which accompanied the
Geneva edition. In the year 1656, in
the Commonwealth, serious proposals were
made for another revision, and the Grand
Committee of Religion in the House of
Commons addressed themselves to a con
sideration of the question. But the project
came to naught ; the Restoration put
an end, perhaps happily, to the proposal ;
and, until the revision in our own days.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1604.

the Authorised Version has remained un
touched.

The general accuracy of the work of
the revisers of king James I., and the
surpassing beauty of the language and
phraseology of the English Authorised
Version, has been very generally acknow
ledged. Not a few of the great masters of
English literature have in succession borne
their testimony to the excellence and to
the purity of its style. So, to take two or
three examples, Walton, the famous editor
of the Polyglot, writes of it thus : " Inter
omnes eminet." Addison tells us how it
ennobles the coldness of modern language
with the glowing phrases of the Hebrew,
and Swift acknowledges "that the trans
lators of the Bible were masters of an
English style far fitter for that work than
any we see in our present writings."
" The language of the Authorised Version,"
writes dean Plump tre, u has intertwined
itself with the controversies, the devotions,
and the literature of the English people.
It has gone wherever they have gone, over
the face of the whole earth. The more
solemn and tender of individual memories
are for the most part associated with it.
Men leaving the Church of England for
the Church of Rome, turn regretfully with
a yearning look at that noble well of
English undefiled which they are about
to exchange for the uncouth monstrosities
of Rheims and Douay."

But it must be ever borne in mind that
while this, the noblest of modern versions
of the Book of Life, was the work of many
hands and several generations, all these
versions we are speaking especially of the
New Testament were either substanti
ally reproductions of William Tyndale s

original translation in its first shape, or
revisions of versions almost entirely based
on it.*

Early in 1604 king James met his first
Parliament, and the first difference of
opinion between the Crown and the
Commons, which ultimately had such
disastrous results as set out in the next
chapter was manifest. . The king was
desirous to bring about a close union
between Scotland and England. The Com
mons saw grave difficulties in complying
with James s wishes on this point, and
the question was deferred for the present.
Our own present interest, however, is
concerned with the doings of Convocation,
which met, of course, simultaneously with
the first Parliament of James I. Convoca
tion claimed the right, and its claim was
not questioned, of making canons binding
on the clergy, though not on the laity ;
and it now enforced upon the clergy that
uniformity of ceremonies which the king
desired. Bancroft, bishop of London
soon to be primate was the moving spirit
in this important Convocation. Various
articles, injunctions, and synodical acts
had been passed in the reigns of Edward
VI. and queen Elizabeth. These were
carefully collected -by Bancroft, and in the
eleventh session of this Convocation he
placed them, in the shape of a "Book of
Canons," in the hands of the prolocutor of
the lower House. f A petition from the

* Compare generally for further details Dean
Plumptre s exhaustive article on the Authorised
Version in Dr. Smith s " Dictionary of the
Bible"; the preface to the revised version of the
New Testament (1881) ; Dr. Hook : " Archbishops,"
vol. x. ; and Green : " History," chap, iii., sect. i.

t Cf. Hook : " Archbishops," vol. x., chap, xxviii.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1604.

Puritans for the further reformation of the
book of Common Prayer was received, but
little attention was paid to it.

In these " Canons " it was declared that
whosoever affirmed that the Church of
England, notwithstanding the reformation
it had undergone, was not a true and
apostolical church, teaching and main
taining the doctrines of the apostles, should
be excommunicated ipso facto. Likewise,
ifrso facto excommunication was pronounced
to be incurred by those who disparaged
the form of godly worship established in
the book of Common Prayer, or who
pronounced the rites and ceremonies ot
the English church to be superstitious. The
Common Prayer was to be said and sung
distinctly and reverently upon the days
appointed to be kept holy ; and the cere
monies were to be observed in such place
of every church as the bishop of the
diocese, or the ecclesiastical ordinary of
the place, thought meet for the purpose.
No man was to appear in church with his
head covered during divine service, unless
he had some infirmity. All persons present
at divine service, were reverently, at the
time appointed, to kneel on their knees
when the general Confession, Litany, and
other prayers were read ; and they \vere
to stand up at the saying of the Creed
according to the rules prescribed in the
book of Common Prayer. When the
name of the Lord Jesus was pronounced,
due and lowly reverence was to be done
by all persons present. In all cathedral
and collegiate churches, the Holy Com
munion was to be administered upon the
principal feast days, and the bishop, dean,
or canon in residence, as the principal
minister when he officiated was to use

a decent cope,* and to be assisted by a
gospeller and epistoler agreeably, accord
ing to the advertisement published in the
seventh year of Elizabeth. All members
of the cathedral body, including the petty
canons and the singing men, were tc
receive the communion four times yearly
at least.

As these canons never received the sanc
tion of Parliament, it has on more than
one occasion been decided by the judges
that they do not bind the laity. " We are
all of opinion," said Lord Hardwicke, "that
the Candhs of 1604 do not bind, proprio
vigorc, the laity. I say proprio vigorc, by
their own force and authority, for there
are many provisions contained in these
canons which are declaratory of the ancient
usage and law of the Church of England
received and allowed here, which, in that
respect, and by virtue of such ancient
allowance, will bind the laity.

The canons made on this occasion by
the Convocation of Canterbury were, by
the king s letters patent, made binding also
on York. Before the close of that same
year, 1604, Bancroft became archbishop
of Canterbury in succession to Whitgift.
Acting in conjunction with the king s
wish, a formal subscription to three articles
out of these canons was required of the
clergy, no person being allowed to hold
any living, to preach, or to catechise, until
he had signed the three articles in question.
The articles were taken from the thirty-
sixth and thirty-seventh canons, and were
as follows :

* It is perhaps regrettable that this canon has
been suffered to fall into disuse ; but its introduc
tion now, in the opinion of the ordinaries gener
ally, would be by many misunderstood. The
canon, however, is perfectly definite.

16041610.]

BANCROFT S INTOLERANCE.

(I.) The supremacy of the king in matters
spiritual and temporal.

(II.) That the book of Common Prayer
contained nothing contrary to the word of
God, and that he (the signatory) agreed to
use that book, and that book only in public
prayer and administration of the sacraments.

(III.) That the Thirty-nine Articles are
agreeable to the word of God.

Subscription to these canons was rigidly
enforced, and after the prorogation, some
three hundred clergymen of the Puritan
party belonging to the Church of England,
refusing to sign, were driven into open
nonconformity. Some of them fled to
Holland, and to other Protestant centres
on the Continent. The comparative ease
with which this harsh measure was carried
out is strong evidence that the existing
state of things in the Church of Eng
land was generally acceptable to the
people ; but viewed in the light of
subsequent history,* its wisdom has been
called in question. Many of the three

* One of the most immediate and conspicuous
results was the Puritan settlement in North America.
A company of these exiles took refuge in Leyden ;
but preferring a country life, some years later (in
1620) they chartered the celebrated Mayflower, and
in her sailed from England to found, after terrible
hardships, the colony of Plymouth in Massa
chusetts. The well-known picture reproduced on
page 9 represents the little colony watching with
strained eyes the fading vision of the vessel which
had brought them from Europe, leaving them alone
in a strange land. Other small bands of similarly-
minded Puritans from time to time joined them,
and in 1630 about a thousand under John Win-
throp found their way across the seas to the " New
England " home where they might worship as they
pleased, free from ceremonial which they hated,
with their own simple religious exercises. Thus it
came to pass through the severity of Bancroft,
that Puritan Nonconformity has so dominated
the religion of this vast and influential portion of
the Anglo-Saxon race.

hundred thus expelled from their positions
were devoted, earnest men ; and a broader,
more loving spirit of toleration doubtless
might have retained the large majority
in the fold of the Anglican church. This
feeling was very general in the early years
of king James s reign. Many thoughtful
men considered that this harsh expulsion
was injurious to the cause of religion, and
alas ! subsequent events only too surely
confirmed these views. The hostility thus
evoked, of the nobler Puritans to the
Anglican church, grew in intensity as the
years rolled on, and the lesson of charitable
toleration and wider comprehensiveness
has only been learned in later times by
the wiser Anglican teachers.

For six years, under Bancroft s somewhat
rigid and unbending rule, the work of
enforcing conformity went on. The Book
of Canons, the work of the Convocation
which sat until the dissolution of Parlia
ment in 1 6 10, ratified by the king, became
the constituted canon law of the church.
Before the close of that year Bancroft passed
to his rest. In spite of many errors
in judgment, the archbishop was an
earnest and devoted man, and deserves
a gentler estimate than that formed
by some historians and writers. He
was an intense believer in law and order ;
and his undoubtedly harsh measures to
enforce a rigid conformity, were dictated
by his earnest wish to see the church
absolutely at one in all points of ritual
and observance. His mistake was that
he failed to distinguish between what
was fundamental, and what might have
been wisely left undetermined.

A letter to his suffragans, written before
his death in 1610, shows us how earnest

Iii

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1610.

he was in endeavouring to remedy abuses
which then existed. Pluralities among
the higher ranks ot the clergy were
frequent. He inquired in this letter to
his suffragans into the number of ministers
in each diocese who had two benefices,

kept in repair. He called, too, for a strict
account of "collections" made. Some
curious remarks appear, too, in this letter
as to the luxury displayed by the higher
clergy and their families, finding fault with
the richness of dress affected by deans,

GEORGE ABBOT, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.
(From the originalin the collection of the Earl of I erniam.}

and he asked whether each one had a
preaching minister to supply his absence.
If he had not, the grievance was to be
immediately remedied. He stated that
his majesty s charge was that the bishops
should require the prebendaries to be
present at their benefices, and there to
preach every Sunday. Orders were also
given that parsonage houses were to be

" nay by some archdeacons and inferior
ministers." :

Bancroft was succeeded in the primacy
by George Abbot, the bishop of London,
who became archbishop of Canterbury in
1610. His appointment was at once a
surprise and disappointment to the church,

* See Dean Hook : " Archbishops," vol. x. f
chap. xxix.

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END OF A LETTER FROM ARCHBISHOP ABBOT TO KING JAMES I., REFERRING
TO THE EXAMINATION OF WITNESSES IN CONNECTION WITH THE TRIAL OF THE
GUNPOWDER CONSPIRATORS. (British Museum )

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1610

For the six years following the Hampton
Court Conference the policy of Bancroft
had been quietly but firmly exercised
in the direction of enforcing conformity.
Many of the clergy who had declined to
sio-n the articles of the canons of the

convocation of 1604 had been ejected
from their cures ; others had been won
over. What is generally known as the
High Anglican system seemed gaining
ground steadily. Under Bancroft s firm
but stern and harsh rule there were, on
the whole, years of general progress and
advancement in the church. On his death
the bishops and majority of the Church
of England desired and expected that
Lancelot Andrewes, at that time bishop of
Ely, would have been nominated to the
primacy We have dwelt at some length
upon the work and character of that good
and great divine. Round his person had
gathered a general admiration and rever
ence which no other living man could
attract. He lived, all men acknowledged,
in an atmosphere of holiness. Learned
and devout, an indefatigable scholar, and a
most eloquent preacher, he was a favourite
of the king, who ever listened gladly to
his^ fervid and winning sermons. Why,
on the death of archbishop Bancroft, was
Andrewes passed over ? Clarendon, later,
deeply regrets that the choice of the king
did not fall upon this beloved divine,
believing that Andrewes as archbishop
would have turned back the rising tide
of Puritanism.

George Abbot, the new primate, was
a man of a different school of thought.
After a brilliant Oxford career, and attain
ing considerable fame as a preacher, he
was elected master of University College,

and for a time was the most influential
of the teachers in that great seat of learn
ing at this period. He was the steady
opponent of Laud, who, although still a
young man, was fast rising into notoriety
and deserved fame. Abbot s sympathies
were with the Puritans ; his views were
Calvinistic ; but, like many of the nobler
Puritans of his time, he accepted episco
pacy as the true and primitive basis of
church government, and was loyal to the
Church of England. Before Elizabeth s
death he had been advanced to the
deanery of Winchester. King James in
1609 nominated him to the see of
Coventry and Lichfield, and in 1610 he
was translated to London. Some his
torians suppose that Abbot owed his
promotion to Scottish interest. He
had been previously much mixed up in
Scottish matters, and had served for a
time as secretary to the earl of D unbar,
the treasurer of the northern kingdom.
More likely it was owing to the personal
influence exercised by Henry, prince of
Wales, a youth of high promise, of whom
we read that " he was slow of speech r
persistent in his questions, patient in
listening, and strong in understanding."
That prince Henry was favourably inclined
to Puritanism seems undoubted ; and that
by the Puritans his early and premature
death, owing to a typhoid fever, was
deeply mourned, is acknowledged. Abbot
was with him when he was dying, and
apparently was much attached to the
young heir to the Stuart throne.

The death of prince Henry was a fatal
blow to the Puritan party and to the
influence of Abbot, who, although he was
an earnest and conscientious man, deeply

I62 5 .]

DEATH OF JAMES I.

pious, and loyal to what he deemed the
truest interests of his church, was never
a favourite of the king, who treated him
with respect and kindness, but never
seems to have been largely influenced
by him. From the year 1615 the king
bestowed his confidence upon a new
favourite, Villiers, afterwards duke of

question immediately arose whether the
prelate, by having blood on his hands,
had become incapable of discharging the
duties of his great office. The question
was warmly disputed ; and though in the
end the archbishop was allowed to retain
his office, his influence in the church was
practically gone. He acted as primate

KING JAMES S DEDICATION OF HIS I5ASILICON DORON TO HIS SON PRINCE HENRY.

Buckingham. Buckingham became the
trusted confidant of Charles, the king s
second son ; and Buckingham and Charles
gradually passed in church matters under
the sway of Abbot s life-long rival, Laud.

Whatever power Abbot possessed, virtu
ally departed from him after a most un
fortunate incident in Bramzil park, a seat
of lord Zouch. In the course of a stag
hunt the archbishop discharged an arrow
at a buck, which, unhappily, pierced the
arm of a keeper and severed an artery.
The keeper bled to death, and the

until his death in 1633, but the real power
in the Church of England belonged to
another, whose life and work we must
presently relate at length.

King James I. died at the comparatively
early age of fifty-six, worn out with the
heavy cares of a somewhat troubled life, in
which he had been but indifferently suc
cessful. His flatterers had persuaded him,
onty too easily, that he was the wisest of
sovereigns ; but, as we shall presently
see, all his favourite projects had ended

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1625.

in failure. The influence of England on
the continent of Europe, so great when
Elizabeth died, was a thing of the
past. At home his exaggerated views of
the royal prerogative had already made
a fatal breach between himself and his
Parliament, that was widening every year.
He left behind him no army and no
fleet on which reliance could be placed.
The financial position of the crown was
deplorably dependent entirely upon the
goodwill of the House of Commons ; a
goodwill which the arbitrary policy of
the sovereign and his hated favourite
Buckingham had turned into distrust and
opposition. Yet James, although not the
wise ruler he fancied himself to be, nor
the British Solomon his courtiers loved
to style him even after his death, had

earnestly striven according to his light
to do his best both at home and abroad.
His failure is attributable partly to his
exaggerated views as to the privileges
of the kingly office, partly to his inability
to understand the temper of England,
partly to his unfortunate selection of
friends and confidants.

When told that his end was at hand, he
received the tidings with serene courage.
I am satisfied," he said, " and I pray you
to assist me to make ready to go hence
to Christ, whose mercies I call for, and I
hope to find them." He wished to see
bishop Andrewes at the last, but Andrewes
was then too ill to visit the dying
monarch, who passed away calmly, after
making a confession of his faith in the
presence of his son and his courtiers.

JAMES I.
{From the mezzotint by J. Smith, after thf portrait by Van Dyck.)

PEDIMENT OF TOMB, AND ARMS OF GEORGE VILLIERS, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM, IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

CHAPTER LXIII.

THE EARLY STUARTS, THE CHURCH, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR ABSOLUTISM.

Causes of the Gradual Increase of Royal Power in England Courts of Star Chamber and High
Commission The All-powerful Influence of Elizabeth James Combines Exaggerated Views
of his Prerogative with Inferiority in Personal Character Similar Ideas held by Charles I.
The Church Supports the Views of the King Results of this Alliance Pecuniary Troubles
of James His Foreign Policy French Marriage of Charles I. Open Quarrel between King
and Parliament The Petition of Rights Discontent of the Puritan Party Death in the
Tower of Sir John Eliot Eleven years without a Parliament under Laud and Strafford
Illegal Extortion Oppression by the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission
Attempts to Impose Episcopacy upon Scotland, and First and Second Bishop s Wars The
King Summons the Long Parliament Impeachment of Straflord and Laud, and Suppression
of the Despotic Courts Anti-Episcopal Measures Troubles in Ireland The Grand Remon
stranceThe King s Attempt to Arrest the Puritan Leaders Flight from London before the
Storm.

BEFORE entering upon what is com
monly known as the Laudian period
in Anglican history, a short study
on the views entertained of the royal
prerogative by the first two Stuart sove
reigns, will throw light upon the position
of the church in the years immediately
succeeding the death of the first Stuart
king.

We have already seen that after the
close of the wars of " the Roses," the
power of the crown in England was
enormously increased. The numbers of
the great nobles were greatly reduced in

the course of these bloody, restless, seem
ingly purposeless campaigns. Their pos
sessions, too, were vastly diminished owing
to confiscation by one or other of the
alternating dominating powers in the
state. The strong government of the
Yorkist Edward IV., and the far stronger
rule of the Tudors who followed him,
completed the work of the long Roses
wars. Edward IV., Henry VII. , Henry
VIII., and Elizabeth, were confronted by
no powerful lawless nobility, and the
Commons were, during the reigns of these
mighty sovereigns, as yet too weak and ill-

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

organised to offer any real resistance to
the will of their crowned masters. Thus
the vast personal influence exercised
in church matters by Henry VIII. and
Elizabeth, in whose times "church mat
ters " occupied a prominent position in
politics, is largely accounted for. a The
chief field in which the crown during
these reigns encroached upon the nation
was in matters of judicature. The struggle
against the nobles and the struggle against
the Papacy each left its mark on the
judicial system, in a court which judged
without the intervention of a jury. The
first, the struggle against the nobles, pro
duced the Court of Star Chamber ; the
second, the struggle against the Papacy,
produced the Court ot High Com
mission."*

Of these two famous courts, which
obtained in the near future such an un
enviable notoriety, the first, the Court of
u Star Chamber," was erected early in
Henry VII. s reign, and consisted of certain
specified members of the Privy Council
and of two judges. It was empowered to
punish with fine or imprisonment all who
were guilty of interfering with justice by
force or intrigue.! It might condemn a
man to the pillory, and cut off his ears.
In the early days of its existence this
powerful and irresponsible court had done
good service in punishing rich and power
ful offenders whom juries would have been
afraid to convict. But as time went on,

* Gardiner : " The Puritan Revolution," chap. i. f
section ii.

f Its name was derived from the chamber at
Westminster where the court sat, the roof cf
which was decorated with stars. Others have
derived the name of the chamber from the Jewish
bonds or "starres " which had once been kept in it.

such a court, completely under the influ
ence of the crown, became a most danger
ous instrument of oppression, and one that
might be, and was, frequently used against
the liberties of the people.

The second, the Court of " High Com
mission," has been well described as a
kind of ecclesiastical Star Chamber. It was
founded by queen Elizabeth, mainly in
right of her claim to exercise the supreme
governorship over the church. It was
composed of clergy and laymen appointed
solely by the queen, and it had powers to
fine and imprison, and also to degrade and
suspend clergymen from their functions.
Created in the first instance to be used
against the spread of Roman Catholic
opinions, it was chiefly put in force under
Elizabeth against the Puritans.

These two courts were most power
ful engines of tyranny, and were among
the principal causes of grievance in
the troubles of the middle of the seven
teenth century. Both these royal courts
were abolished by Act of Parliament
in 1641, immediately after the execution
of Charles L s minister, lord Strafford.*

Henry VII. and Henry VIII. were kings
in a very different sense even from their
great ancestors Edward I. and Edward III.
Confronted by no great power in the state,
they were practically absolute sovereigns.
Under the boy king Edward VI. and his
sister Mary the enormous power of the
crown was temporarily diminished, the
extreme youth of the first, and the religion^
which was not the religion of the nation,
of the second of these sovereigns, preventing

* Cf. S. R. Gardiner: "History of England"
(Courts of "Star Chamber" and "High Com
mission")

GROWTH OF ROYAL POWER.

them from exercising the vast power
and influence of their immediate prede
cessors or successors. But under Elizabeth
the royal power again rose to the highest
point ever reached in England. Under
the great Tudor queen u royalty had come
to be regarded as the centre of the national
life. The personal flattery with which
Elizabeth was regarded, was but the ex
travagant echo of the wiser judgment of
her contemporaries." " And this singular
position of an almost absolute power was
maintained during her long reign by the
queen almost undisputed and unchal
lenged ; for her consummate wisdom,
guided by her wise and far-seeing min
isters, taught her, with all her arbitrary
acts, ever to seem to sympathise \vith her
subjects. Although absolute, Elizabeth
was intensely English, and this the people
felt ; so that she was ever passionately
loved as well as feared.

It will be remembered that in the story
of the settlement of the church, we have
ever pointedly associated the queen in all
the most important ecclesiastical acts and
proceedings. Nothing was done, no
prelate was appointed in the church, no
religious formulary was put forth, without
her acquiescence. Parker was her arch
bishop ; Whitgift w T as her confidant and
favourite friend ; Jewel and Hooker, Cox
and Guest, and even Andrewes, were the
chosen associates of her faithful ministers
and advisers. The hand of Elizabeth was
indeed felt throughout that momentous
period of the making of the reformed
Church of England.

James I., the first Stuart sovereign,
mounted the throne possessed with all the
* Gardiner: "The Puritan Revolution."

views and ideas of kingship entertained by
the Tudor monarchs, Henry VIII. and his
daughter Elizabeth, even in an exaggerated
form. But, different from Elizabeth r
James Stuart was never in real sympathy
with his English subjects. In the first
place he was a Scotsman a prince, in
spite of his pure, undoubted descent from
the kings of England, born and bred in a
country which had been ever more or less
in antagonism to England. Different from
Elizabeth, James I., with all his astuteness
and wishfulness to do what was right and
just, never gained the heart of that mighty
people over whom he was called to reign.
He never succeeded in evoking anything
of that enthusiasm for his person which
constituted Elizabeth s strength.

Then, also, king James was singularly
unfortunate in his selection of friends and
ministers. In the state, by his side, speak
ing words of advice and counsel, there
never stood a great Cecil or a Walsing-
ham ; in the church, never a Parker or
even a Whitgift. His greatest prelate,
Lancelot Andrewes, the profound scholar
and eloquent preacher whose work and
influence we have already dwelt upon,
he never entirely trusted ; and when the
moment came that he might have placed
him in the chair of Augustine, he put him
aside for the inferior and unpopular Abbot,
The great soldiers and sailors of the
Elizabethan era had passed away, or were
forgotten by James. Sir Walter Raleigh,
" the one great warrior of the Elizabethan
time who still lingered on," had been
suffered to languish in captivity for long
years in the Tower under some obscure
suspicion of treason, and in the end closed
his brilliant and romantic career, victim of

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

an unjust charge, on the scaffold. The termed him " the wisest tool in Christen-
foremost personages of king James s court dom." But he cherished the most ex-

Robert Carr, earl of Somerset ; George aggerated views of the rights and pre-

Villiers, duke of Buckingham ; the arch- rogatives of a king, views which, when
bishops Bancroft and Abbot were poor pressed still further by his son and suc-
representatives indeed of that splendid cessor Charles I., precipitated the death-
group of statesmen and ecclesiastics which struggle between the people of England
adorned and gave
strength to the mag
nificent court of the
: great Tudor queen.
The centre of this
-court of mediocri
ties, James L, was
himself a curious
mixture of littleness
and greatness. He
was a deep scholar
and student, of broad
reading, shrewd, and
naturally possessed
of considerable abili
ties. But, unlike
his predecessor
Elizabeth, he was
singularly incapable
of judging men, and
his choice of minis
ters, civil and eccle-

CHARLES I.

(From the portrait by Van Dyck.)

and the crown.

This conception
of the divine right
of kings, this per
suasion that the
monarch was free
from all control by
law, free from all
responsibility to any
thing but his own
royal will, had grown
gradually since the
close of the wars of
the Roses. Under
Henry VIII. the
conception of the
monarchy was that
it was absolutely
independent of all
foreign, and espe
cially of papal, influ
ence or interference.

siastical, was, as a rule, unfortunate. His But the Tudor sovereigns Henry VIII. and

presence lacked majesty, and even dignity, his daughter Elizabeth, arbitrary though

and, in common with the other princes of their government was, were wise enough

the ill-fated Stuart dynasty, he ever failed generally in all their more important mea-

to excite any popular enthusiasm or de- sures to see how needful it was to have

votion. His conceit was boundless, and he with them the heart of the majority of the

deemed himself the wisest and most far- people. Henry VIII. throughout his long

seeing of monarchs, the greatest master of career, by the majority of his subjects was

kingcraft that ever lived; while the judgment feared rather than disliked; and Eliza-

of his contemporaries, a judgment endorsed beth s great power consisted in her being

by posterity, is well though cynically ex- " the representative of the people in the

pressed by king Henry IV. of France, who highest sense. With all her faults, she

THE STUART VIEW OF PREROGATIVE.

sympathised with the people over whom
she ruled. " My good people," she once
said, * if they did not rest assured of some
special love towards them, would not
readily yield me such good obedience."

what God can do ; good Christians content
themselves with His will revealed in His
word. So it is presumption and high
contempt in a subject to dispute what a
king can do, or to say that a king cannot

THE STAR CHAMBER.

Her Stuart successors utterly failed to see
this. Their view of royalty comes out in
the words of James I. used in 1616 : "A
thing regal and proper to a king is to keep
every course within its true bounds. . . .
As for the absolute prerogative of the
crown, that is no subject for the tongue
of a lawyer, nor is it lawful to be disputed.
It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute

do this or that ; but he should rest in tnat
which is the king s will revealed in his
law." * He even declared it to be treason
to affirm that the king was under the law.

James I. was followed by his son Charles
I., " a lonely, silent man," as he has been
termed, " who kept at a distance all who
were not of the immediate circle of his

* Gardiner: " Puritan Revolution," section ii.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1626.

privileged attendants," and who knew
little of the mind of the large majority
of his subjects. Charles Stuart, too, was a
scholar ; but, different from his father, his
manner was stately and impressive, aud
his moral character irreproachable. He
possessed the gallantry and chivalry of his
long line of royal and illustrious ancestors ;
but he was obstinate, imperious, and

GEORGE VILLIERS, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM.

(After the portrait by Van Dyck.)

ignorant of the spirit of his age. His
gravest errors, however, sprang from that
strange conception of the boundless rights,
privileges, and prerogatives of an absolute
king, a conception which he inherited
from his father. In Charles Stuart this
strange idea was even exaggerated.

He, too, was unfortunate in his choice
of advisers. Buckingham, his first minister,
was vain, frivolous, self-seeking, self-de
ceiving. He considered himself at once
a statesman and a soldier : in both these
parts, while occupying the highest positions

to which a subject can aspire, he con
spicuously failed. Buckingham s successors
in the king s confidence, Wentworth
(Lord Strafford) and Laud, the primate,
were unmistakably able men and loyal
servants ; but their very ability was to
Charles an additional danger, since they
both believed with real earnestness in the
fatal error of the Stuart house respecting
the awful prerogative of the crown.

The conception of Charles I. respecting
his kingly power is best exemplified in his
own words. As early as 1626, addressing
the Commons, whom he had summoned
on the occasion of their denouncing the
corruption and incompetence of his
minister and favourite Buckingham, he
said : " Remember that Parliaments are
altogether in my power for their calling,
sitting, and dissolution ; and therefore, as
I find the fruits of them to be good or evil,
they are to continue or not to be." Some
three years later, in 1629, he repeated his
haughty threat to the Commons. " If you
do not your duty," said the king, " mine
would then order me to use those other
means which God has put into mine
hand." Nor were the royal threats
merely a vain menace. He dissolved the
Parliament, and for eleven long years
chose to reign, to levy taxes, to wage war,
to execute justice through subservient and
arbitrary courts, without the advice and
consent of the estates of the realm ; Parlia
ment, by the will of the autocratic king,
being suspended from 1629 to 1640.

Unfortunately the hierarchy of the
Church of England generally supported
the king in this exaggerated estimate of
his rights, and sorely that great church
had to rue its grave mistake. It, too, was

I627-]

THE CHURCH SUPPORTS ABSOLUTISM.

submerged in the catastrophe which fol
lowed in the later years of Charles s reign,
and was seemingly destroyed ; but it
possessed a real life which even the fatal
errors and mistakes of that sad age could
not effectually harm. In the darkest
hours of its misfortunes it never lost its
influence over the minds of the people ;
and we shall see how, apparently dead,
with extraordinary rapidity it revived
again, stronger and more influential than
ever. It was too deeply rooted in the
heart of the English nation for any
" Puritan " or u Independent " reaction
or revolution seriously and permanently
to affect it.

That the Church of England allied itself
with the cause of absolutism in the state
in the period which preceded the great
rebellion, is indisputable, and that Laud
brought the great influence of the church
to bear on the ruin of civil freedom cannot
be denied. It was a grave error, and one
bitterly expiated. But grave as was the
primate s error, it should not be exagge
rated. When a rash preacher like Dr.
Manwaring, in 1627, on the occasion of
a forced loan being levied by the crown,
preached before the king on the duty of
passive obedience, openly stating in his
sermon that the king needed no Parlia
mentary warrant for taxation, and that to
resist his will was to incur damnation,
Laud remonstrated, and advised that the
sermon should not be printed, urging that
there were things in the discourse which
he said would be very distasteful to the
people. The king was, however, resolute ;
and the unhappy book which contained
the argument of Manwaring, against Laud s
wish was licensed and printed.

The real mind of Laud and the grave
representation of the English clergy in the
matter of the royal prerogative is fairly
represented in the canon passed in the
convocation of 1640 under the title of
u Concerning Regal Power." * In it kings
were declared to be responsible to God
for the right government of the church,
and to possess the sole right to summon
councils. Subjects were warned, by
quotations from the New Testament, not
to bear arms against their lawful sovereign.
The opinions of the martyrs of old and
of the fathers were even adduced. It was
also pronounced to be the duty of subjects
to supply the king s necessities, and of
kings to protect their subjects goods.
The divine character f of the office of
the king, consecrated by the church, was
specially insisted on.

This short sketch of the great error of
the first two Stuarts in their conception
of their royal rights and duties to their
people, and of the share which the Church
of England bore in the support of this
disastrous conception, will be sufficient
introduction to a very brief summary of
the results. The character of James need

* The seventeen canons passed in the convoca
tion under the influence of Laud in 1640 were
published in quarto, under the authority of the
Great Seal, and are entitled "Constitutions and

royal proclamation. The one " Concerning Regal
Power " is the first of these.

t Laud indubitably considered that the crown
was the chosen instrument of Providence for the
salvation of the country, and that the sovereigns
anointed with the consecrated oil [cf. 33 Edward
III., " reges sacro oleo uncti spiritualis juris-
dictionis sunt capaces"] were endowed with
divine powers, both in church and state (see
Simpkinson : " Life of Laud ").

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1605 1613

not be further emphasised. Scholar and
pedant, well meaning, but utterly in
capable either of carrying out himself
his own confused and tortuous plans, or
of choosing fit and capable persons to
conduct the machinery of his govern
ment ; yet at the same time vain and
inordinately conceited of his abilities as a
ruler, and convinced, too, that his authority
as a king knew no limit, it is not strange
that the history of his reign is a history
of successive failures in every department
both of church and state.

During the earlier years of his reign
the chief minister of the crown was Sir
Robert Cecil, the son of the great lord
Burleigh. The king on his accession
found Cecil secretary of state. He gave
the Elizabethan minister his confidence,
and in 1605 created him earl of Salis
bury, and appointed him lord treasurer.
Without possessing the talents of his
father, Robert Cecil to a certain extent
endeavoured to maintain the traditional
policy of the late reign, and laboured to
prevent a serious breach between the king
and the Parliament. Unfortunately for
James, the earl died in 1 6 1 1 , and hence
forth the king s advisers were his weak
and foolish favourites : Robert Carr,
whom he created earl of Somerset, and
after Carr s well-merited disgrace, George
Villiers, who was successively created earl,
then marquis, and in the end duke of
Buckingham, and who remained in power
until James s death.

Money troubles very soon perplexed the
king. Extravagance and lavish generosity
to Scottish favourites exhausted the
treasure, and a large deficit was the con
sequence. A Parliament was summoned

in 1610, and the statesmanship of Salis
bury arranged a device by means of which
the king s difficulties might be settled.
A bargain was made with Parliament,
called the "great contract," the king
covenanting to abandon certain obnoxious
privileges, and promising not to levy any
impositions without a Parliamentary grant,
the Parliament on their side agreeing to
grant him a large annual income. But
fresh disputes arose, and James, in anger,
dissolved this his first Parliament in
1611. The same year Salisbury died.
Another attempt was made in 1614 to
enter into a fresh bargain with a new Parlia
ment, but the negotiations fell through,
and once more Parliament was dissolved.
This short-lived Parliament, which granted
no supplies and passed no act, was called,
in consequence, the " addled Parliament."
In his foreign policy James was equally
unsuccessful. He was desirous to marry
his children into influential houses on the
continent. In 1613 he gave his daughter
Elizabeth to Frederick V., elector palatine,
who was the chief of the German Calvin ists.
This alliance was an unfortunate one,
and involved England eventually in a
costly and useless foreign war. Frederick
was chosen in 1618 by the Protestant
nobles of Bohemia as their king ; the crown,
however, he was not suffered long to wear,
for in 1620 he was defeated hopelessly
near Prague, and the result was that he
lost his new kingdom and his ancestral
dominions in the Palatinate. This marriage
was popular in England, for Frederick
was looked upon as the champion of the
Protestant cause in Germany, and the
third Parliament summoned by James
was willing to support the king and a

i6u.]

JAMES I. AND THE ROMANISTS.

war to restore the elector -king to his
lost dominions.

But another royal marriage planned

dently was kindly disposed, and would
willingly lighten the burdens which
pressed heavily upon them. It seems a

QUEEN HENRIETTA MARIA.
(From the Portrait by Van Dyck.)

by James was intensely disliked in
England. From the beginning of his
reign James s conduct towards the English
Romanists showed symptoms of favour
towards the unpopular party. He evi-

strange feeling to have actuated a Puritan-
trained prince like James ; but we have
seen that Puritanism was distasteful to
him, and possibly some memories of his
dead mother were always present with him.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1623.

Mary Stuart had ever been an earnest
Romanist, and to the end the Roman
Catholic party in England had been her
devoted and enthusiastic friends, and not
a few had died for her. The discovery of
the Gunpowder Plot had for a time inter
fered with James s kindly views, and the
Romanist was more than ever hated in
England after the tragic scenes which
closed the episode of the wild and wicked
scheme of Catesby and his friends. Yet in
1611 the question of a Spanish alliance was
entertained in the Whitehall Court.

Various reasons influenced James. A
close alliance with Spain would, he
thought, enormously contribute to his
power on the continent of Europe. He
dreamed, too, of the material advantages
which he would derive from such a con
nection, supposing, not unnaturally, that
large sums of money would be easily
obtained from the boundless resources or
Spain. We have already alluded to his
constant and ever-increasing money diffi
culties. So for long years the English
king clung to his idea of a Spanish
marriage for his son and heir. Death,
however, interfered with his project. His
eldest son, prince Henry, whom he in
tended to marry to a Spanish Infanta, died
in 1612, and his second son, Charles, was as
yet too young ; but the project of wedding
his son and heir to a Spanish princess
was never abandoned. The negotiations
continued over several years. Spain s
consent was only reluctantly obtained, at
the price of many important concessions.
All the penal laws in force against Roman
Catholics in England were to be repealed ;
complete liberty of worship in their own
private houses for Roman Catholics was

insisted on ; the children of the prince
and princess were to be educated in the oid
faith ; a Romish household for the Infanta
was to be provided. With a strange and
fatal obstinacy, James clung to this curious
policy, in which Buckingham steadily sup
ported him. At last, in 1623, Charles and
Buckingham set out on their romantic
journey to Madrid to woo the princess
in person. In spite of all, however, the
negotiations in Madrid came to nothing,
and Charles returned to England without
his promised bride.

It seemed as though another chance was
offered to the doomed Stuarts, when the
Spanish marriage project was finally
broken off by Spain ; but the chance was
lost, for James in the following year made
proposals on behalf of his son Charles to
the king of France, Louis XIII., for the
hand of his sister, Henrietta Maria, a
daughter of Henry IV. of Navarre, who
had abjured Protestantism. The French
king at once consented, and 1524 saw a
Roman Catholic princess wedded to the
heir of the English crown.

The marriage, as may well be conceived,
was * viewed in England by well-nigh all
parties with the deepest dismay. Nothing
in that reign of James I., which was
throughout a preparation for the Great
Rebellion, gave such dire offence to the
nation as this strange desire of the Stuart
king to ally his heir to the daughter of a
Romanist sovereign. It was far more
than a mere question of theology. Eng
land had become, under the magnificent
Tudor queen, the centre of the Protestant
powers of Europe. What was to be
looked for in the future when the throne
was shared by a Roman Catholic princess,

ACCESSION OF CHARLES I.

whose children would probably become, if
not Roman Catholics,* at least more than
friendly to that form of religion which
England had abjured, and which, with its
memories of the past, it thoroughly feared
and disliked. Well has it been remarked
that the unfortunate marriage plans of
James I. for his heir " awoke again the old
Protestant resistance, and gave new life to
Puritanism." f Not a little of the anti
pathy aroused in England against the
house of Stuart was stirred up in the first
place by James I. deliberately setting
himself in antagonism to the deep-rooted
hatred arid dread of the English people for
Roman Catholicism and all that Roman
Catholicism involved.

The accession of Charles I. caused no
break in the continuity of the policy of
the government. The same minister,
Buckingham, perhaps with even increased
power, continued to stand alone by the
throne. The same views as to the irre
sponsibility of the king to the nation or
national representatives entertained by
James I., were held by his son, the second
Stuart monarch, in even yet more ex
aggerated form. The ecclesiastical affairs
connected with England gradually passed
into the hands of bishop Laud, who was
alike the intimate friend and adviser of
both the king and the favourite.

The fierce disputes between the king
and the House of Commons, which
culminated in the civil war of 1642, began

* Of the two sovereigns of England, the children
of that marriage, Charles II. died it is now gener
ally believed a Romanist, and James II., for the
sake of Rome, was driven into a hopeless exile.
The fears of 1511 to 1524 were amply justified.

f Gardiner.

already in the first Parliament of Charles,
in 1625. England was at war with Spain,
and money was sorely needed to carry on
the contest. A totally inadequate sum
was voted by the " Houses," a deep dis
trust of the all-powerful Buckingham, the
king s chief adviser, being almost universal.
The king, however, resolutely refused to
part with his friend, and, after an unavail
ing adjournment to Oxford, the first
Parliament was dissolved. A second
Parliament, which met the same year, was
in the same mood, and Buckingham was
formally impeached. The king remained
unmoved, and another dissolution fol
lowed, without any supplies having been
voted.

The foremost man in the Commons was
Sir John Eliot, who was reputed to be the
ablest orator of that time. In the struggle
between the king, contending for abso
lutism, and the Parliament aiming at
Parliamentary liberty, during the earlier
years of the unhappy reign, Eliot occupied
the position in the great contest after
wards filled by Hampden and Pym. He
belonged to a distinguished family in the
west of England, and, in addition to his
great gift of oratory, and a well-deserved
reputation for learning and culture, was
famous as a bold and successful sailor.
His character stood deservedly high, and
his earnestness and acknowledged ability
marked him out as a leader in the life and
death contest which had begun to rage
between the king and the representatives
of the national will. A fair example of
the temper 01 the Commons of England
exists in the words reported to have been
used by Eliot in speaking of the all-
powerful Buckingham. He termed the

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1628 1629.

favourite "Sejanus," the well-known,
detested minister of the infamous tyrant,
the Roman emperor Tiberius. "If he is
Sejanus," said king Charles when the
words were repeated to him, " then surely
I must be playing the part of Tiberius."
But no remonstrances had any effect.
The king was resolute in his ideas of his
supreme kingly power, and he remained
loyal to his unpopular though faithful
minister. In the meantime the horizon
grew darker. A quarrel with France, and
a consequent war, made money more and
more necessary. Abroad, too. the English
arms were generally unsuccessful. This
increased, naturally, the popular discon
tent. The sinews of war were impera
tively needed, and, after a futile attempt
to obtain a free gift from the nation in
lieu of the money refused by the
." Houses," a third Parliament was sum
moned in 1628.

Long and anxious debates followed, and
the famous " Petition of Rights " was pre
sented to the crown by the Commons.
The demands embodied in the " Petition
of Rights " must be conceded, before any
money could be voted. Reluctantly
Charles consented to the more important
of these, notably a promise never again,
without the will of the " Houses," to raise
money by any illegal means, such as by a
forced loan. In the end the king yielded,
and the great " Petition " became the law
of the land ; a law, however, practically
disregarded by Charles during his eleven
years of personal or absolute government.
But more was needed before any real
reconciliation could be established be
tween the king and the popular House.
The ecclesiastical policy of Laud, who was

fast growing into prominence as a favoured
counsellor of the king, had exasperated
the powerful Puritan party ; and many
changes, which must be dwelt on pre
sently at greater length, were now de
manded in the church as well as in the
state. Above all, Buckingham must be
dismissed. At this juncture a tragic
event happened which for a brief season
appeared to promise a healthier state of
things, than that which for the past
three years had existed between the king
and the Commons. Buckingham, the all-
powerful favourite, was assassinated by a
wild fanatic named Felton, and his rule,
which had endured for so long during the
reign of father and son, was thus rudely
and abruptly brought to an end. This
terrible crime was committed in the
August of 1628.

Early in the following year, 1629, Parlia
ment met again. The great obstacle to
reconciliation between Charles and the
popular assembly had been removed,
apparently, by the death of Buckingham.
But deeper questions really remained
behind. The Stuart view of the royal
prerogative was unchanged. Buckingham
or no Buckingham, Charles was deter
mined to rule unchecked. No " Petition
of Rights " should bind him. A curious
question precipitated the disastrous con
test. For a long period the practice of
the Commons had been to vote for each
sovereign during life a permanent source
of income, in certain duties on exports and
imports, duties known as tonnage and
poundage. These had never been voted
in Charles s reign, owing to the continued
disputes between him and the " Houses."
But Charles insisted on his right, inherited

1628 - 1629.]

GROWTH OF PROTESTANT FEELING.

from his ancestors, apart from any vote,
to levy these dues. Upon this nice point
a fresh dispute commenced.

A still graver and more heart-searching
question arose. We have spoken before,

guided the mighty movement. Partly,
also, it was due to the very opposition it
excited. The defenders of the old learn
ing, who lived mostly in an ideal past,
they too studied and wrote and lived and

SIR JOHN ELIOT.
(From the portrait at Port Eliot.}

and shall have occasion to speak again, of
the spirit of religious fervour which lived
and worked in the England of Elizabeth
and the two first Stuart kings. It was
due, of course, to the Reformation, and to
all that the Reformation had brought
along in its wake ; to the awakened spirit
of inquiry, to the fervid speech and the
burning writings of the great men who

spoke, with an earnestness and a fervour
which had been unknown for many a long
year, years almost counted by centuries.
The men of the new learning, the true
children of the Reformation, had indeed
need to burnish their weapons of con
troversy to meet these formidable foes,
awakened from a torpor which too closely
had resembled death. Above all, it was

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1629.

due to the influence of the at last uni
versally read Bible, the Bible purified by
Erasmus and translated by Tyndale. In
no country had this spirit permeated all
sorts and conditions of men as it had in
England. u Theology rules them," said
the learned scholar and profound observer
Grotius in 1605, early in James I. s reign.

And over Protestantism, and the " New
Learning " in general, a sombre cloud
seemed to be gathering during the latter
years of James I., and the earlier reign of
Charles I. In Germany, the first home of
the Reformation, matters had gone ill with
Lutheran and Calvinist alike. The defeat
and fall of the elector Frederick had come
as a shock to Protestants of all lands. The
dominant German power for a time was now
the Roman Catholic house of Austria. In
France, too, the Huguenot cause seemed a
dying one. And in England also the zeal
of Laud, too often misunderstood, excited
not only among the Puritans, but among
many faithful sons of the church, an ill-
concealed dread, a dread largely owing to
that great prelate s friendship with the
hated Buckingham, and the position of
intimacy and confidence which he held
with king Charles. Everything Laud did,
in the eyes of the advocates of Parliamentary
liberty, was coloured with Laud s sympathy
for Charles, and Charles s grave errors.
His many and splendid efforts to raise the
tone of church feeling, and to dignify and
reduce to ecclesiastical order her services,
in the eyes of men even like the patriotic
and devoted Eliot, were regarded as part
and parcel of the schemes of Buckingham
and Charles to bring the English nation
and her church under the uncontrolled
domination of the crown and its officials.

Thus, in addition to other grievances,
was raised in that Parliament of 1625 the
cry that Charles and Laud were drawing
nearer and ever nearer the dreaded
Rome, which was indeed growing more
powerful every year; that they were
introducing into the Church of England
at once Roman ceremonial and Roman
doctrine. That such was not the case is
little to the point. The religious question
even overshadowed the money question,
and the closing scenes of the Parliament
of 1628-1629 were extraordinarily em
bittered by the theological points of dis
cussion. " The Gospel," said Eliot in one
of his moving and eloquent speeches, " is
that truth in which the kingdom has been
happy through a long and rare prosperity.
This ground, therefore, let us lay for a
foundation of our building, that that truth,
not with words, but with actions, we will
maintain." Well knew the " House " that
dissolution by the royal will was close at
hand ; but with barred doors the Commons
of England were determined to record
their solemn protests. " By successive
resolutions, they declared whomsoever
should bring in innovations in religion
(thus setting religious points in the fore
front of their grievances), or whatsoever
minister endorsed the levy of subsidies not
granted in Parliament, a capital enemy to
the kingdom ; and every subject volun
tarily complying with illegal acts and
demands, a betrayer of the liberty of
England, and an enemy of the same." *

Thus the Parliament of 1629 broke
up, and it was years before any Parlia
ment met again in England. Upon the

* Green: "History of England," chap, viii.,
sect. iii.

I6 3 2.]

DEATH OF SIR JOHN ELIOT.

leaders in the great struggle Charles
wreaked his sad vengeance. Some were
arrested. Fines and imprisonment were
inflicted. Most made their submission.
A few resisted to the end, and among
these was the greatest of them all, Sir
John Eliot. This first, and perhaps the
noblest of the champions of Parliamentary
independence, was thrown into the Tower.
He declined to make any submission to
the king. The intrepid sailor, the country
gentleman, accustomed to the sea breezes
of the west, to a life of freedom and manly
exercises, soon pined away in the gloomy
chamber of the storied prison-house of
England, and died, after a close captivity
of some three and a half years. Few have
ever better earned the proud martyr s
title, for he gave up his noble life for the
liberties of his country. When the end
drew near, the patriot statesman sent for
a painter to preserve his likeness, all worn
and changed by the long weary captivity.
It was a strange thought, this wish to
hand down to his descendants the outcome
of his noble efforts for England. Vin
dictive to the last, the king refused to give
up the body to his children, who would
have laid the remains of the great patriot
among his fathers in his loved western
country. " Let him be buried," said
Charles, " where he died." The Tower of
London throws its grim shadow upon no
more sacred spot than upon Eliot s grave.

And now for eleven long years no
Parliament was summoned by king Charles.
Associated with the king, who during this
lengthened period ruled England according
to the Stuart views, which placed absolute
irresponsible power, if the Crown chose to
exercise it, in the hands of the anointed

sovereign, were two statesmen whose
names, execrated by some, are the object
of a strange adulation to others : Went-
wortb, better known as earl of Strafford,
the title subsequently conferred upon him ;
and Laud, bishop of London, better known
as archbishop of Canterbury. The latter
was one of the purest and most earnest of
men, a great ecclesiastic, a great church
restorer and church organiser, one who
under other circumstances would have left
behind him undisputed an honoured name
among the great divines and prelates who
have been famous in the Church of
England ; but who, from his unhappy
connection with the tyranny and mis
takes of Charles Stuart, because he played
O the pity of it ! in an unhappy era
the part of statesman as well as that of a
great churchman, has fatally dimmed the
lustre of a great reputation.

The story of Laud s life and work,
belonging as it does to the Church of
England, will have to be related with
detail. Strafford belongs rather to another
history than ours, and may be dismissed
here with a few words. Wentworth, earl of
Strafford, the famous minister of Charles I.,
the intimate friend of Laud, and his adviser
in state matters, the minister in whose busy
brain were conceived all the more im
portant measures devised and carried out
during the long period of Charles s reign
when he ruled England without a Parlia
ment, is thus described by a famous word-
painter : " Wentworth, Lord Strafford,
who ever names him without thinking of
those harsh, dark features, ennobled by
their expression into more than the
majesty of an antique Jupiter ; of that
brow, that eye, that cheek, that lip, where-

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1629- 1640.

in, as in a chronicle, are written the
events of many stormy and disastrous
years, high enterprise accomplished, fright
ful dangers braved, power unsparingly
exercised, suffering unshrinkingly borne ;
of that fixed look, so full of anxiety, of
deep thought, of dauntless resolution,
which seems at once to forebode and to
defy a terrible fate, as it lowers upon us
from the living canvas of Vandyke ? "

In Strafford the second Stuart sovereign
found a minister willing and capable of
carrying out his views of royal govern
ment. He aimed at making Charles an
absolute monarch, at putting the personal
liberty of the whole people at the disposal
of the crown ; and the far-seeing minister
discerned that to carry out these views
one instrument was imperatively necessary
a trained standing army. In Ireland,
where for several years he reigned as
viceroy, he succeeded in establishing such
a rule ; and that he eventually failed in
England was rather owing to the vacil
lating spirit of Charles, than to any lack of
will or courage or skill on his own part.

During the first years of his government
without a Parliament, Charles was fortunate
in his choice of a lord treasurer. Weston
was an able statesman and a skilled
financier. He reduced the expenditure at
home, which during the long supremacy
of Buckingham had been lavish and ex
travagant. He promoted a policy of peace
with foreign nations. Peace was made at
once with France, and in the following
year (1630) with Spain, and for a length
ened period England ceased to interfere
with or to exercise any influence in
foreign politics. By various devices, more
* Macaulay s essay, " Hampden."

or less illegal, he succeeded in replenishing
an exhausted treasury. The policy of
peace inaugurated by this wise minister
largely contributed to the commercial
prosperity of the kingdom. While the
continent of Europe was divided and
harassed by desolating wars, England, at
war with no nation, played the part of the
universal carrier, and English ships be
came almost the sole vehicles for the
growing commerce of the whole world.

This curious prosperity, which affected
all sorts and conditions of men, no doubt
largely contributed to the long duration of
the period of arbitrary rule some eleven
years. And although the gravest dis
content was excited by many acts of the
government, notably the illegal exactions
and the judicial proceedings of the courts
of the Star Chamber and the High Com
mission, there was no real resistance to the
royal will until, owing to the grave aspect
assumed by affairs in Scotland, the
"Long" Parliament was summoned late
in the year 1640. Then the long-
smouldering indignation of the nation
resulted in the formal impeachment of
the two ministers, who were held mainly
responsible for the long series of tyrannical
and illegal acts of Charles ; Wentworth,
earl of Strafford, and archbishop Laud.
Some brief details of especial importance
respecting these eleven years of absolute
government will be helpful to us, when
we come to consider the position and work
of the Church of England at this period.

In finance, grave complications would
necessarily arise when no popular House
was summoned to grant the necessary
supplies for carrying on the government.
Between 1629 and 1635 Weston was lord

16291640.]

ILLEGAL EXACTIONS OF THE KING.

treasurer. His prudent and economic
administration, and his policy of peace,
and the commercial prosperity which was
the immediate result of his policy, was

means to extort money. Knighthood was
forced on landed proprietors of estates of a
certain value ; supposed encroachments on
crown lands on the part of neighbouring

THOMAS WENTWORTH, FIRST EARL OF STRAFFORD.
(From the portrait by Van Dyck.)

enormously helpful to the king. Yet, in
spite of all care and prudence, many illegal
devices had to be resorted to for supplying
the needs of the royal exchequer. Curious
and obsolete customs were revived as a

proprietors were heavily fined ; new houses
in London were enormously taxed on pain
of forfeiture ; monopolies were revived on
a large scale ; and vast sums of money
were exacted from companies. Wine,

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1638.

soap, salt, and all manner of articles of
daily consumption thus fell, owing to
these iniquitous arrangements, into the
hands of monopolists. Customs duties
were rigidly exacted at all the ports of the
realm. All classes and orders were more
or less harassed by these proceedings. In
1635, however, Weston died, and after this
even less care was paid to the legal
character of the taxes and impositions
raised. With strange imprudence, arch
bishop Laud, who occupied the second
place in the king s confidence, induced his
royal master to raise Juxon, bishop of
London, to the high office. " No church
man," wrote .Laud, with a sad infatuation,
believing such an appointment at such an
anxious time would be an honour and an
advantage to the church, " had it since
Henry VII. s time. I pray God bless him
(Juxon) to carry it so that the church may
have honour and the state service and
content by it. And now if the church
will not hold up themselves, under God I
can do no more."

The dread experiment of absolutism in
England went on, the clouds. round the
throne growing ever darker. During the
years 1635-1638 the question of the "ship
money" tax specially agitated England.
" Ship money " was an ancient tax levied
upon the seaboard counties only, to pro
vide a fleet in time of war. In the urgent
stress and need of resources, the ministers
of Charles directed that writs should be
issued of ship-money along the towns of
the coast, in order that vessels of war
might be equipped, although the country
was in a state of profound peace. The
next step went even further : the writs
were sent into the inland counties. Never

before had England heard of such a thing.
Not even when the mighty Armada was
threatening the island shores, had such a
writ been sent into the inland counties.
The irritation and anger at this strange
and iniquitous tax was widespread.

A gentleman of Buckinghamshire
named Hampden, gifted with conspicuous
ability and of rare singleness of purpose,
of whom we shall hear again, when the
sad Civil War began, stood forth as the
champion of the people in this ini
quitous matter of the " ship money/
In 1638 the Exchequer Chamber, but
only by a bare majority of the judges,
pronounced against the bold and patriotic
Englishman. But the long-drawn-out
and bitter dispute on this question had
effectually aroused the country to see in
what danger were her most cherished
privileges. They " had forced into light
the real character of the royal Charles."

Laud and Strafford at this time were
virtually supreme at the royal council
board. Strafford, although in Ireland,
was the real mainspring of all the royal
measures. The intimacy between Laud
and Strafford was deep, and apparently
based upon mutual esteem and friendship.
And Juxon, bishop of London, Laud s in
timate friend, was lord treasurer. These
things must not be forgotten when, as
our story progresses, we relate the growth
of animosity among the Puritans against
the Church of England. The bitter enmity
was grounded on other causes, and even
on graver ones, than merely a dislike
to church order and ancient ceremonies.
The church under Laud committed a fatal
error when it meddled with these civil
matters, and, as must be confessed, ranged

16371639-]

RELIGIOUS QUARREL WITH SCOTLAND.

itself, in the persons of its leaders, on the
side of illegality and wrong.

While these financial questions, and
the methods of solving them adopted by
Strafford and archbishop Laud, were daily
widening the breach between the king
and people, the doings of the arbitrary
Courts of the Star Chamber and High
Commission were exerting a yet more
fatal influence in the same direction. The
Star Chamber, being mainly composed of
the Privy Council, was virtually under
the influence of the Crown. The court
of High Commission was likewise made
up of royal nominees. Under the
personal government of Charles I. the
great but somewhat indefinite powers of
these courts were augmented. Through
the mischievous instrumentality of these
formidable tribunals, the king and his
council were enabled to impose enormous
fines ; to imprison, pillage, and mutilate
persons of any rank who had set them
selves in opposition to the royal will.
Against their decision there was abso
lutely no appeal. Even Clarendon, the
royalist writer, perhaps with some exag
geration, tells us later that there was
hardly a man of note in the realm who
had not some personal experience of the
oppressive measures of these courts. Some
of the sentences passed and executed upon
popular favourites, notably, the cruel treat
ment of William Prynne, a learned lawyer,
whose writings had alarmed and disturbed
the king and his advisers, excited a wide
and general indignation in every part or
the kingdom. The Star Chamber sen
tenced Prynne, for no other offence than
this, to stand at the pillory, to lose his
ears, to be dismissed from the Bar, and

to be imprisoned during the king s,
pleasure.

It was, however, the treatment which
Scotland underwent at the hands of the
arbitrary government of the king, that
immediately brought about events ulti
mately issuing in the great rebellion.
The Scots, as a people, were Puritans,,
and in Scotland Puritanism had gener
ally adopted the Calvinistic doctrines
and Calvinistic discipline, known as Pres-
byterianism. King James, as we have
seen, intensely disliked Presbyterianism..
In England he gave it no countenance,,
and in his native country he determined,,
as far as he could, to discredit it and to-
undermine its influence among the people.
But it required a greater than James.
Stuart, hereditary king of Scotland though
he was, to effect such a change among
his stern and fervently religious country
men. Among them, in 1610, he planted
Episcopacy. But in the Scotland of the
seventeenth century, permeated as it was
with the Calvinist Knox s passionate teach
ing, Episcopacy was an exotic, and took no-
root among the people.

In the hour of the seeming triumph of
absolutism in England, Charles and Laud
determined to stamp out Presbyterianism
in Scotland. Canons, under the authority
of the king, were issued, placing the
government of the Scottish church in the
hands of its bishops ; and, what was more
obnoxious still to the Presbyterians of the
northern kingdom, a new liturgy, differ
ing only in a few particulars from the
English Service Book (the Book of Com
mon Prayer), was drawn up for Scotland.
This was first used in 1637, in Edinburgh r
and became the occasion or a wild

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16391640.

riot. The discontent with these religious
innovations became general throughout
Scotland. In a few weeks four committees
popularly known as " the Tables "
assumed important powers. The religious
question was in the forefront of their
assumptions, but they dealt with other
matters as well. The " National Cove
nant," which had been drawn up years
before, in the days when Mary Stuart
was plotting with Rome, was almost uni
versally signed. The " Covenant " pledged
the signatories to resist all contrary errors
and corruptions to the utmost of their
power all the days of their life, the said
^errors and corruptions being understood
now to signify the innovations intro
duced by Charles and Laud. It was
virtually a Scottish revolution.

Charles temporised, and sent a courtly
noble, the Marquis of Hamilton, to meet
the leaders of the revolt. A general
assembly met at Glasgow, and demanded
that the Book of Common Prayer should
be withdrawn, and the new canons
should be at once put aside ; that the
Court of High Commission should be
abolished, and a free Parliament sum
moned. The king at first yielded ; then
withdrew his consent, and at once pre
pared for war with his stubborn Northern
subjects. In the year 1639 the first
Bishop s War, as it has been termed
broke out. Charles s army was poorly
equipped, and half-hearted besides. The
feeling that Scotland was really fighting
the cause of liberty in England, was
generally felt even among Charles s forces.
The Scottish troops, on the other hand,
were largely composed of veteran soldiers
who had fought and bled in the foreign

wars which had so long been desolating
Germany and the Continent. Fighting
such an army with the inferior English
levies, was felt by Charles s advisers a
hopeless matter, and a pacification was
agreed upon, reluctantly enough, at Ber-
wick-upon-Tweed.

Thus ignominiously for Charles, the first
Bishop s War terminated. But the king
determined soon to renew the contest.
Wentworth (lord Strafford) was recalled
from Ireland. Recognising the hopeless
ness of the king s position, the great
minister advised the calling once more of a
Parliament. Thus, after an interval of just
eleven years, once again the " Houses "
met at Westminster. But the temper of
Parliament was bitterly opposed to Charles
and his government. Imperatively they
demanded an immediate consideration of
the many grievances of England, and in
the forefront they placed a requirement
that all idea of a war with Scotland should
be abandoned. Charles at once refused ;
and after a session of only twenty-three
days, this Parliament, known as the Short
Parliament, was dissolved. This was in the
April of 1640.

Events now succeeded each other in
startling rapidity, and the end was near.
Once again Charles, now accompanied by
Strafford, marched northwards, hoping for
a victory over the Scotch. This expedition
is known as the second Bishop s War.
Much of the programme of the first
Bishop s War was repeated ; Strafford
quickly discerning that with the English
forces at his disposal, no victory could
be hoped for. Agreeing to pay the
expenses of the Scottish campaign, by
means of what in modern phraseology is

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1641.

termed a war indemnity, a temporary
peace was made.

One more wild effort to rule on the old
lines of absolutism was made by Charles
and Strafford. The king summoned a
great council of peers at York, hoping
that thus he might procure supplies.
But the peers declined to support their
sovereign in his unconstitutional pro
ceedings, and advised him at once to
summon a Parliament. There was no
other course left. Scotland and the
north of England were in open armed
revolt, and the heart of England was
apparently hopelessly alienated. Again
41 the Houses." were summoned; and in
November, 1640, met that famous assembly
which, for good and evil, sat so many years
in session the assembly known in history
as the Long Parliament.

Very stern were the early measures of
that renowned assembly. In a few months
the edifice of absolute government so care
fully built up by Charles and his ministers,
was shattered, and the master-builders
humbled to the dust. Strafford, the prin
cipal adviser and instrument in the king s
eleven years personal government, was at
once impeached, and committed to the
Tower. Laud, who was regarded as only
second in guilt to Strafford, followed his
friend to the same gloomy fortress, from
which so few have ever emerged again
as free men. Other and less prominent
ministers fled the country. Early in 1641,
with little delay, measures were passed
dealing summarily with the principal
grievances of the country. Ship-money
was declared illegal. A statute was passed
which stopped the crown from ever taxing
the people in any form without the consent

of the Parliament. The civil and criminal
jurisdiction of the Courts of Star Chamber
and of the High Commission was
abolished. As the result of a Com
mittee of Religion, a bill was even
framed for the removal of the bishops from
the House of Lords. Before the March of
1641 had run its course, Strafford stood on
his trial to answer for his many misdeeds
against the liberties of England.

For fifteen days the terrible trial went
on. Its scene was Westminster Hall, and
the whole of the House of Commons was
present, the king and queen looking on
and listening to their great servant defend
ing himself with matchless temper and
skill. It was difficult, perhaps impossible,
to bring home the charge of treason to
the fallen minister. So the enemies of the
great minister of absolutism brought in a
Bill of Attainder ; eventually this passed
both Houses ; and to his undying shame
king Charles consented to his own servant s
death. Was it cowardice, or a momentary
overwhelming conviction that his course
had been an unrighteous one, that induced
him to give up his most faithful friend ?
No one can say ; and in truth, Charles
Stuart s character is, after all, a strange
and sad enigma.

Strafford died as many other great
ones have died guilty and innocent
in front of the grim state Prison House
of England, with extraordinary fortitude.
When told of the vast crowds assembled
to see him die, he replied : "I know
how to look death in the face, and the
people too. I thank God I am no
more afraid of death ; but I put off
my doublet as gladly now as I ever did
when I went to bed."

1641.]

THE LONG PARLIAMENT.

We may glance very rapidly through
the events of the last year before the Civil
War. For the present, Laud was not dealt
with, but was left in close confinement in
the Tower. In July, 1641, through the
efforts of the Long Parliament, the war
indemnity was paid to the Scottish army,
and a treaty with Scotland was signed.
The crying grievances had now been
redressed. Strafford, the minister of abso
lutism, lay in his blood-stained shroud ;
Laud the archbishop, his coadjutor in the
royal tyranny, was a close prisoner ; the
less prominent ministers were in exile.
All power to impose taxes or to levy
customs duties was for ever taken from
the crown, save with the consent of the
Commons. The famous courts which had
been the too-faithful instruments of the
personal government of Charles, had been
done away with. Only the ecclesiastical
innovations, as the Puritan House of Com
mons deemed them, remained to be in
quired into. Laud had fallen, but Laud s
suffragans were still the rulers of the
Church of England. The majority in that
stern Puritan House, in spite of vehement
opposition in the Lords, brought forward a
" root and branch " bill, as it was termed,
for the entire abolition of bishops in the
church.

Such a measure provoked, as may
well be conceived, serious opposition.
Noble and patriotic men like Lucius Carey,
Lord Falkland, Hyde (afterwards Lord
Clarendon), Verney, and others who
thought like Falkland, while dreading
absolutism, were not prepared to destroy
the church, although the church seemed
allied to the royal cause and all that the
royal cause had signified in late years.

The king entrusted offices of state to these
moderate men of the Parliament which had
accomplished such sweeping reforms ; and
for a moment it seemed as though things
might be peaceably arranged, and a more
constitutional government firmly estab
lished without trenching on the immemorial
prerogatives of the kings of England ; but,
alas ! no one could trust Charles Stuart.

In the November of that sad year, came
the news of a terrible rising in Ireland.
Strafford had ruled with a strong though
cruel hand ; the result of his fall was a
fierce rising among the Celtic inhabitants
of the unhappy island. Murder, plunder,
and rapine did their dread work among
the English colonists. Terrible stories of
awful cruelties perpetrated by the Irish
insurgents appalled all England. As many
as 30,000 men, women and children (the
number has been probably exaggerated)
were said to have fallen victims to the Irish
fury. Imperatively needed was a strong
army from England to put down this deso
lating insurrection. But the English Par
liament so deeply mistrusted Charles, that
they dared not raise an armed force under
the authority of the crown. Would not
such an armed force be too surely used
against the Commons, and serve as an
instrument eventually to restore the royal
tyranny ? There was, however, a party
which shrank from this mistrust a party
composed of men like Falkland and Hyde,
who longed for peace, and would still have
worked with the king. These, although
they were bitterly opposed to the old
absolutism of Strafford, constituted what
may be fairly termed a royalist party.

In the Commons there was a lengthy and
impassioned debate. The Puritans, under

4 o

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1642.

the guidance of Pym, laid before the
House " the Grand Remonstrance," which
has been well termed u a vote of want of
confidence " in the king. It recounted
from the Puritan point of view the story
of the errors of the past ele-ven years and
demanded certain grave and drastic
reforms, especially the appointment of
ministers responsible to Parliament, and
the consideration of ecclesiastical diffi
culties by an assembly of divines nominated
by the Parliament. The Royalists in
the House protested strongly against it.
But a small majority carried their point.
The Grand Remonstrance was eventually
printed and presented to the king, who
sullenly received it.

Early in the following year, 1642, Charles
determined on a fatal step. He im
peached before the House of Lords, Pym,
Hampden, and three others of the more
prominent Puritan leaders, alleging that
they had been guilty of treason, having en
tered into communication with the Scots
during the late troubles. The Commons,

however, demurred to their arrest. The
king at once, in defiance of the ancient
privileges of Parliament, accompanied with
an armed band of followers, in person went
down to the House to fetch the traitors, as he
termed them ; but the threatened members,
fearing for their liberty if not for their
lives, hearing of his intention, had taken
refuge in the City of London. The sense
less outrage of Charles, in thus attempting
to terrify the House with armed men,
excited wide and general indignation.
London refused to give up the accused
members, and the king, now sensible of
the storm he had raised, and alarmed for
his personal safety, left Whitehall; only to
return to it as a prisoner after the end of
the fatal war. In August of the same year,
1642, the royal standard was hoisted at
Nottingham; and royalists were bidden to
rally round it, arid to aid the king in bringing
to a sense of their duty a rebellious Parlia
ment. The great Civil War had begun. *

* Compare Gardiner
chap, vi., sec. iv. v.

Puritan Revolution,"

xXxxxSxx

CEILING OF THE STAR CHAMBER.

ARCHBISHOP LAUD S LIBRARY, EAST QUADRANGLE, ST. JOHN S COLLEGE, OXFORD.

CHAPTER LXIV.

ARCHBISHOP LAUD.

Permanence of Laud s Influence Sketch of His Early Life Reforms as Dean of Gloucester James I.
and Laud s first Bishopric Controversy with the Jesuit Fisher Growing Favour with Charles
I. Zeal for the Royal Prerogative, and its Reasons in Church Policy Absolutist Measures as
Adviser of the Crown, and their Calamitous Effect on Popular Opinion His Ecclesiastical Policy
Diversities in Practice The Stamp of Laud s Work in producing a Uniform Standard-
Succeeds to the Primacy in 1633 Irregularities found during his first Visitation Persistent
Measures for securing Greater Uniformity and Reverence in the Church Services Church
Restoration St. Paul s The Puritan Dislike for Stateliness in Building or Worship Timeliness
of Laud s Work His Services to Oxford And to the Church at large The Convocation of
1640 The Laudian Canons Impeachment of Laud and Strafford Their final Farewell Trial
and Execution of the Archbishop Reaction in his favour Laud and the Roman Church-
Breadth of his Views Final Influence on the King.

IN the History of the Church of England
during the momentous period we have
been briefly sketching, the work and
influence of gne great man must be dwelt
upon at some length. During the last
nine or ten years of the reign of James I.,

4 P

and still more in the days of his suc
cessor Charles I., the figure of William
Laud occupies the principal position in
the picture. All other figures on the
canvas are subordinate to his. To find a
parallel to the place filled by this great

4 2

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

churchman, we must go back to the far-
past days of Dunstan, Lanfranc, Anselm,
or Becket. Nor has his surpassing in
fluence been limited to his own day and
time ; much of his work has endured to
ours. Bitterly opposed, often misunder
stood, vilified perhaps more than any
great churchman in the records of Christi
anity, dying in the end, after a long and
weary captivity, the death cf a traitor, to
which his successful enemies consigned
him, amidst the ruins of a fallen church,
his whole life-work was apparently a
disastrous failure. But the strange turn
of the wheel of fortune, after a few short
years, restored the church over which he
had presided, and which he loved so well,
to its ancient place in the hearts of the
English people ; and this restored Church
of England bore the imprint which Laud
had stamped upon it.

It has been the fashion with some of
our most brilliant and popular historians
to vilify Laud s memory and to belittle
his doings. He stands out in the canvas
of these great historical word-painters a
mean and shabby figure. With Carlyle,
for instance, Laud and his friend bishop
Neile, of Winchester, were u a frightfully
ceremonial pair of bishops, the fountain
they of innumerable tendencies to papis
try, and the old clothes of Babylon."
Again he writes of him when with Charles
I. in Edinburgh, thus: " The chapel at
Holyrood House was fitted up with every
equipment, textile and metallic, and little
bishop Laud in person performed the
service in a way to illuminate the be
nighted natives, as was hoped ; show
them how an artist could do it." Little
pity showed Carlyle to the fallen arch

bishop : " What a Christmas of that old
London, of that old year ! On the 6th
February following, Episcopacy will be
voted down, with blaze of bonfires and
ringing of all the bells, very audible to
poor old Dr. Laud over in the Tower
yonder." And of the end of the famous
archbishop he thus writes : " The Presby
terian system is now getting fast into
action. On the 2oth May, 1647, the
Synod of London, with one prolocutor or

moderator, met in St. Paul s

Poor old Laud is condemned of treason,
and beheaded, years ago [Laud suffered in
1645], the Scots after Marston fight press
ing heavy on him ; Prynne, too, being very
ungrateful. That performance of the
service to the Hyperborean population in
so exquisite a way [at Holyrood, referred
to above] has cost the artist dear. He
died very gently ; his last scene much the
best for himself and for us." *

Another of our famous masters in history,
who in his way enjoys a wider popularity
even than Carlyle, describes Laud as " by
nature rash, irritable, quick to feel for his
own dignity, slow to sympathise with the
sufferings of others, and prone to the error
common in superstitious men of mistaking
his own peevish and malignant moods for
emotions of pious zeal." f The same
historian in another place thus pictures
the great primate : " Charles I. had two
counsellors, who seconded him, or went
behind him, in intolerance and lawless
violence ; the one (Laud) a superstitious
driveller, as honest as a vile temper would

* " Oliver Cromwell s Letters and Speeches" :
Introduction (1629-1633), and part ii. (1641) and
part iii. (1647).

f Lord Macaulay : " History of England," chap. i.

i6o 4 ]

EARLY LIFE OF LAUD.

suffer him to be. Never were faces more
strikingly characteristic of the individuals
to whom they belonged than those of Laud
and Strafford, as they still remain portrayed
by the most skilful hand (Vandyke s) of
that age. The mean forehead, the pinched
features, the peering eyes of the prelate,
suit admirably with his disposition. They
mark him out as a lower kind of St.
Dominic, differing from the fierce and
gloomy enthusiast who founded the In
quisition, as we may imagine the familiar
imp of a spiteful witch to differ from an
archangel of darkness. When we read
his grace s judgments . . . we feel a
movement of indignation. We turn to
his diary, and we are at once as cool as
contempt can make us. ... Here
was a man to have the superintendence of
the opinions of a great nation."

The famous archbishop of Charles I.,
who closed his work - filled life on
the scaffold beneath the shadow of the
Tower in 1645, was born in 1573, when
Elizabeth was at the height of her glory.
He belonged to a respectable well-to-do
family of traders in the historic town of
Reading. A brilliant, scholarly boy, a
painstaking, industrious Oxford student,
he passed through the various grades of a
scholar s life, till we find him a tutor and
lecturer of the college (St. John s) of which
he subsequently became president, and with
which his name will be for ever associated.

When Laud became a teacher at Oxford
the prevailing theology of the university
was Calvinistic, and the most influential of
the Calvinists was Dr. George Abbot,

* Essay on Lord Nugent s " Memorials of
Hampden."

master of University College and vice-
chancellor. Abbot and his party en
deavoured to trace the visible and true
church through such obscure sects as the
Berengarians, the Albigenses, Wicliffites,
and Hussites, down to Calvin ; sects which,
exaggerating the original doctrines of their
founders, had constantly lapsed into grave
errors in doctrine and practice. Laud, on
the other hand, taught that the Church
of England had lived from the earliest times
one consecutive life, through its succession
of bishops derived from British and Roman
sources. In the Calvinistic teaching
current in the days when Laud startled the
university with his lectures, the sacra
ments held a comparatively subordinate
place, and the divine origin of the
episcopacy, if not openly denied, was
ignored. In his theses for the degree of
B.D. in 1604, the young theologian of St.
John s maintained two positions which
awakened great attention and aroused
considerable opposition : the first, that
baptism was necessary to salvation ; and
the second, that there could be no true
church without diocesan bishops. If the
latter position were accepted, the churches
of Calvin and Knox would be necessarily
regarded as lacking what was absolutely
needful for a true church. Laud s the
ology was supported by the great learning
and intense earnestness of the teacher, and
he was supplied besides with the powerful
weapons lately forged by Hooker in his
great work, weapons which were being
used with rare force and power by
Andrewes and the men of his school,

He excited naturally intense opposition,
and Abbot became his life-long enemy. A
grave mistake of Laud s in 1605, when

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1611 1616.

he consented to perform the marriage
ceremony between lord Mountjoy, earl
of Devonshire, to whom he was chaplain,
and the divorced Lady Rich, discredited
him for a season ; and for some five
years he lived in retirement, serving
country livings, away from any impor
tant centre. In this period of his life he
attracted the attention of Neile, then

ARCHBISHOP LAUD S CAUDLE CUP, WALKING STICK,
AND THE SHELL OF HIS TORTOISE.

bishop of Rochester, who introduced him
to king James I., before whom he
preached, and on whom he produced a
favourable impression, for the king never
lost sight of him again. In 1611, not
without considerable opposition, he was
elected to the presidency of his college,
St. John s, and returning to Oxford, he
became a great power in the University.
His own college, under his rule, was
enlarged, the numbers of its students
increased ; as an administrator his repu
tation stood high.

In this quiet period of his life, we may
reasonably conclude, were matured his

theories of church government and dis
cipline, and, above all, of ritual observance.
The want of order and reverence, the
absence of uniformity in ritual and cere
monies, in so many English churches,
deeply impressed Laud, and to remedy
this state of things became the desire of
his life. Those who admire much in his
earnest character, who recognise his un
selfish longing to promote the glory of
God, who are sensible of his single-
hearted desire to make the Church of
England a fitting shrine of Christian
truth, to render her services beautiful
and reverential, winning and comforting,
will mourn indeed that circumstances,
strange and unexpected, should have
drawn him aside from the path he had
well and wisely chosen for himself the
path of a church reformer, doing the
work he was so admirably fitted to carry
out into the thorny and confused path
way of seventeenth century politics, where
he found work he was eminently unfitted
to carry out.

Laud s successful Oxford career, and his
known views upon church order and
discipline, so lacking in the days of king
James I, determined the king to advance
him, to place him in a more conspicuous
position than the one he occupied as the
head of the Oxford College, and where
his energies in the work of introducing
order and reverence in divine service, in
ritual and in practice, would find a larger
and more conspicuous field. So in 1616
James I. appointed him to the vacant
deanery of Gloucester. The great cathe
dral over which Laud was now called
upon to preside was a conspicuous in
stance of the slovenly, careless way in

i6i6 1621.]

LAUD AS DEAN OF GLOUCESTER.

which, owing to various influences, church
worship was performed even in the most
stately houses of prayer. In a letter
written by him, shortly after his appoint
ment, to Dr. Miles Smith, the bishop of
Gloucester, we see what was in the king s
mind when he made the appointment.

and took as good order (as in so short a
space I could) both for the repair of
some parts of the edifice of the church,
and for redress of other things amiss.
Among the rest, not rashly and of
myself, but by a chapter act, I removed
the communion table from the middle of

I &gt;

CHAPTER ACT ORDERING THE COMMUNION TABLE OF GLOUCESTER CATHEDRAL TO BE MOVED FROM
THE MIDDLE END OF THE CHOIR TO THE UPPER END, SIGNED BY LAUD WHEN DEAN OF GLOUCESTER.
(From Records in possession of the Dean and Chapter of Gloucester.)

"His majesty," wrote the dean, " was
graciously pleased to tell me he was in
formed that there was scarce ever a
church in England so ill-governed and so
much out of order ; and withal required
me in general to reform and set in order
what I found amiss. Hereupon at my
being at Gloucester I acquainted the
chapter with that which his majesty had
said to me and required at my hands ;

the quire to the upper end, the place
appointed to it both by the injunctions
of the church and by the practice of all
the king s majesty s chapels, and all other
cathedral churches in the kingdom which
I have seen."

This act of Laud immediately upon his
appointment, had gravely displeased the
bishop, who, although a profound Hebrew
scholar and one of the translators of the

4 6

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

Bible, was a strict Calvinist, and belonged
to the more rigid body of the Puritan
party. The bishop had said that if the
dean persisted in his proceedings in the
cathedral, he would never again enter the
church. It is said he adhered steadily to
this determination, to the day of his death
in 1624.

Besides removing the communion table
and placing it at the east end of the choir,
against the wall, Laud urged upon the
prebendaries and other officers of the
church to adopt the practice of making a
reverent obeisance on entering the choir.
This latter was a favourite practice of
Laud s, and one that gave great offence
to the Puritans when he pressed it
generally throughout the kingdom. There
was in Gloucester a considerable party at
first opposed to the Laudian innovations ;
but all opposition seems soon to have died
away, and during his six years tenure of
the office of dean, the city and the officers
of the church, with the exception of the
bishop, generally acquiesced in his wishes
that an orderly and reverent service
might be maintained in the cathedral
church.

With king James. Laud s influence
grew more marked, and we find him among
the king s principal advisers in his attempts
to bring the Presbyterian Scottish Church
to a conformity with the Church of
England. Their attempts, however, were
not favourably received, and late in the
reign of king Charles, when they were
renewed, were as we have already seen
among the principal causes of the Scottish
troubles.

In 1621 the dean of Gloucester was
consecrated bishop of St. David s. Laud

relates the circumstances of his new
appointment in his diary: "The king," he
says, a spoke graciously concerning my
long service. He was pleased to say he
had given me nothing but Gloucester r
which he well knew was a shell without
a kernel, and on June 29 (1621) he gave
me the grant of the bishopric of St.
David s."

From this time Laud was much at court,
and his intimacy with and influence over
Buckingham, the all-powerful favourite,
began. With Prince Charles (afterwards
Charles I.) he also became acquainted, and
laid the foundation of that future friend
ship with the doomed Stuart king, which
ended so fatally for both sovereign and
for subject. A curious and suggestive
story connected with Laud s first bishopric
is told by bishop Hacket, who dwells upon
James s reluctance to make Laud a bishop.
Dr. Williams, then lord keeper, the dean
of Westminster, was advanced to the see
of Lincoln. It was expected that Laud,
the dean of Gloucester, would succeed
him at Westminster. Williams, an am
bitious and, with all his great abilities, a
self-seeking man, who was no friend to
Laud, urged that the dean of Gloucester
might have the distant and uninfluential
see of St. David s, probably desiring that
he himself might be allowed to retain the
Westminster deanery in addition to his
other pieces of preferment. The king,
fearing the impracticable nature of Laud,
objected; but at length yielded to the
arguments urged upon him. " Take him
to you," said king James, " but on my
soul you will repent it." If Hacket s story
be true, James s strange words show an
almost prophetic insight into the far

1622.

THE CONTROVERSY WITH FISHER.

future not altogether improbable in the
curiously composite character of the first
Stuart monarch, a character made up of
great wisdom and great folly. " It may
be that James, though he saw Laud s
fitness for presiding over the public services
of such a church as Westminster, and
appreciated to the full his learning, devo
tion to the throne, and his hatred of
Puritanism, was yet well aware that he was
singularly unfitted by nature for an office
which, like that of a bishop, demanded no
ordinary temper and discretion." :

Not long after his consecration to the see
of St. David s, Laud was engaged in a public
controversy with the Jesuit, Fisher, who was
the chosen champion in England of that
indefatigable society of Roman missionaries.
Fisher, whose real name was Percy, had
obtained considerable influence in England,
notably over some very distinguished per
sonages at court. Conferences were held
between the Jesuits and certain English
scholar divines, of whom Laud was the
principal. The questions debated included
the adoration of images, the invocation
of saints, the adoration of the sacra
ment, the administration in one kind only,
the doctrine of Purgatory, and prayer
being offered in a tongue not understood
by the people. The king himself was
present during part of these conferences,
in 1622. Later, Laud published his account
of the third and most important of their
disputings under the title of " A Relation
of the Conference between William Lawd,

* Gardiner : " History of England," chap,
xxxv. (1621). Williams and Laud eventually be
came bitter and irreconcilable foes. Williams was
subsequently archbishop of York, and survived
his great rival, dying in 1650.

the lord bishop of St. David s, now lord
archbishop of Canterbury, and Mr. Fisher,
the Jesuit ; by the command of King
James, of ever blessed memorie, 1639."

The book thus setting forth the argu
ments of Laud and the doctrinal questions
at issue between the Churches of Rome
and England, was a most learned and
exhaustive compilation. It was considered
at the time to be the weightiest book on
the subject, and it still maintains its high
reputation in controversial literature. It
has been dwelt on here with some em
phasis, as showing that the later formidable
attacks on Laud as a Romaniser were base
less. The great churchman undoubtedly
valued ritual, and forms and ceremonies in
worship, which he loved to trace to a
remote antiquity. He believed in their use
as a powerful agent on the human mind ;
and some, no doubt, would view with sus
picion certain of the forms and ceremonies
he restored or re-introduced into the
worship of the Church of England, as
having a superstitious Romeward tendency.
But that he was a loyal and consistent
defender of the Church of England, and
emphatically no Romaniser, his book
against Fisher, which is still with us, is an
ample proof.

In later years, when troubles crowded
thickly upon the doomed archbishop, the
charge so constantly and persistently made
against him of sympathising with Rome,
was warmly, even passionately, refuted.
In his letter of 1640, resigning reluctantly
and sorrowfully the chancellorship of his
loved university of Oxford, it being im
possible, Laud said, for one suffering a
captivity with a very uncertain issue,
adequately to discharge the duties of such

4 8

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1625.

ARCHBISHOP LAUD S SKULL-CAP

an office ; he
wrote : "It is
voxpopuli that
I am Romishly
affected. How
earnest I have
been in my dis
putation, ex
hortations and
otherwise, to
quench such
sparks lest they should become coals, I
hope after my death you
will all acknowledge." In
his speech in 1641 before
the lords, when he was first
impeached, before his com
mittal to the Tower, he
was especially grieved and
indignant at being accused
of trying to introduce Ro
man superstitions into the
Church of England, he who
had given so much of his
time and thoughts to the
suppression of Romanism,
specially appealing to his
book against the Jesuit
Fisher. In the course of
the long trial before the
lords in 1643-4, which
lasted five months, and in which he
was heard for twenty days in his own
defence, he again dwelt on this accusation,
urging that if it had really been in his
mind to blast the true religion established
in the Church of England and to introduce
Popery, he had surely taken a wrong
method to carry out his plans. He had
been, he urged, the instrument whereby
many had been stayed from joining the

ARCHBISHOP LAUD S CHAIR.

Roman Church, and alluded again par
ticularly to the controversy with Fisher
the Jesuit.

Laud was preaching before the court
at Whitehall a Lenten sermon, when the
unexpected news of king James I. s death
on March 27, 1625, arrived. With the new
sovereign and with his favourite, Bucking
ham, the bishop of St. David s was in high
favour. The enthusiasm of Laud for cere
monial, for increased reverence in divine
worship, for a general conformity in
religion, were in perfect
sympathy with Charles I. s
marked inclinations, while
the strong views of the
great churchman in the
matter, of the royal pre
rogative were well known
and highly acceptable, and
paved the way to a yet
deeper intimacy between
the king and the bishop.
The arrangements con
nected with the coronation
were entrusted to him, and
after his fall he was taken
to task for certain of the
ceremonies which formed
part of the splendid pageant.

DOORS OF BOOKCASE BELONGING TO ARCHBISHOP
LAUD.

1626.]

LAUD S INFLUENCE WITH THE KING.

In his defence he alleged that the things
complained of, notably the three swords
offered up on the altar of the storied
abbey of Westminster, for the constant
service of the kingdom, and for the

in the church who were eligible for prefer
ment, and supplied Charles with a list of
churchmen carefully marked with the
letters P or O (Puritan and Orthodox)
against each name. The following year

tfc? Proper prefaces.

| Upon Clmfirnas day,and Fevcn daywafter.

&gt;b?tyt

operation of t&e fcoip ^fcoft , tims mabe bet?
__ maMft&efnbftanceof tt)e bteflea tattfnsfit?
Bismot&ct.anb tfxtt tbttljoot Ipotof an,tonia!ie ug dean
from all fin,1Ct)etefoje a)ttUanas,aii atcbange^ft,

^Upon Eanerday,4ndfcvendsy after.

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rious ttfarrecttonof tfar*&lt;m3efusCteiair

Eawss^ittjasoffeceijfojug, anbptt)tafeenaU)ap tljefin
cf tbe SDO?,n)Oo b? D bcatjj Batft bcfttoptb beatu,an6 &?
ijts talng to uf c again, Ijat!) rcftojca to us tueriaftmg life.

|[ Upon the Afcenfion cUy^ind fevcn daycs after.

^^mii* !% ntfift oeawiv brtobeu ^onm Hrfag
? CtjHu onr itoio, itoljo at tts t)is mo(i glouous re
1 famction mantftftip appeattn to aa DIS $po*
_ ; fHes, anfi tn tlKtt figftt afr CJIOCD op mto Ucabe%

fopicpatt a place foj tts.t^atibljcrc lj &lt;s,t|)it{)ermigljt ifit

alfo Afceo,ait o retgne mtt) l)tin tn gioiic.

&lt;Upon WhttSmda)r,and fr.x d*ycs after.

i Befits Cbiift out Jlos, accozBtng a
moft trac pjoimfe tftt Ijoip &lt;5t)oa cantt

fimn6,88itl)ai&gt;bcfflaiiMgl)tp
nrffe of fiecte tongues Ughttng upon tl&gt;e Apoftics, to tea*
tftem, anbtolcaotJ)tiiuoaii trutD, gibing fbembott)tjt
otf t of Oittets languages, anb alfo twttmcfle njtrtj ftrbtftt
ftai coaftantly to pjeatt) tftc ofpci unto all nations,
n)htttb?ttw acettfiiuOtoittoflMtlincOic amswront, mi
ttictitarUgljt,aniJtit ftnovbicDgtof tl)te,anb of t&?j*on

The Communion.

|T Upon the Feafl of Trinity oncly.

TH is WE? mect 5 rig!)t,affl&gt;OOT bounDen mtj,
tflioulo atantftmsf,annnallplaces
tnanfts to fytt , C&gt; aojD aimlgtjtp,
anu etKtlaflmg&lt;So8, Jb^teD act one &lt;So&,
oneJLo^D, not one onfl? pttfon, but t&ee
petfonsuionefobftante, iro^tljataDt^jbc
, tfte fame fljee fttlett)t of
t an? otffemue

|T After whicli Prefaces fhall. follow imrncdiady thii
doxologie.

., i anb eactu ate

slD ?U)jD tnoft fjtgjj.

CThm the Presbyter ttanding up , ftwll &v tlic prayer of con-
fecrition,asfollowK,but then during the umc of conker*-
tion , he (hall- ftand at fee h a part of the holy Taijle , where he
may with the more cafe and decency ufe" both his hand*.

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j&ontulleuts; Cba to fuffet btatlj upon
tDe to(fe fo* one rtoempfton , Itotjo niabe
tO?te ( bp ftte one oblation of Jnnfelf once
offtteo ) a fuu,p:fett , anD fofftricnt factt
fice, owation.anft fatisfactton foj tDe fintus of tfje nrtjoie
tt)oj.tt&gt; , anti wu cnftttnte , ano &lt;n *$& Dolj gofpti ronimanB
as to irontumt a pttpetuall tneino;p of tljat tits pmfous
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&gt; niecciCittl jF atl)tr,tt)e moftDnutW? beftecl) ftte , ab of
HtfaitiughtpgoomtfOf twutDfafe fo to bieflc ana fancttfic
ttftl) tlw ibozo ana l)oi? ^pitit tftefc tbp gifts ano f tca^
ton* of bjcaa ano ttute , ttjat $q map bee onto ns.tfte

bob?

PAGES FROM THE PRAYER BOOK APPOINTED BY ARCHBISHOP LAUD TO BE READ IN SCOTLAND, 1636,
CONTAINING PART OF THE COMMUNION SERVICE. (British Museum. ]

honour of the kingdom and the church,
belonged to the ancient coronation cere
monies of the kings of England.

Promotion quickly followed. On the
death of bishop Andrewes he was appointed
dean of the chapels royal, and as dean
.arranged the ritual of the king s worship.
As adviser of Charles, he was asked early
in the reign for a list of the leading divines

(1626) witnessed his translation from his
distant Welsh diocese to the English see
of Bath and Wells.

He continued to rise in the king s favour.
Laud s conception of the sovereign s pre
rogative was in perfect harmony with his
royal master s, and it was of great import
ance that an able and eloquent ecclesiastic
of the highest rank should act as leader of

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1628.

the influential and numerous church party.
Sentiments like those to which Laud gave
utterance in his celebrated sermon at the
opening of the parliamentary session of
1626 would no doubt be soon published,
conned over, and repeated in several
hundred centres of more or less importance,
by clergy who admired and would imitate
the great churchman. " Never fear him,"
alluding here to king Charles I., said Laud
in this much criticised discourse, " for God
is with him. He (Charles) will not depart
from God s service, nor from the honour
able care of his people."

Laud had a very definite policy in
regard to the Church of England. He
was determined to crush out all diversity,
and to enforce a rigid uniformity in
service and ritual ; and he was well
aware that his views were intensely ob
noxious to many still in communion
with the English church. He needed,
he felt, some power which should co
operate with him, and which, if neces
sary, would exercise even force to compel
obedience ; and only in the sovereign he
recognised the probability of such a power
being put into action. Hence his fervid
zeal at this period of his career for the
royal prerogative. These thoughts and
aims cherished by Laud had been already
expressed in a bold and somewhat
obnoxious form by one who intensely
sympathised with him in his aims and
views Montague, who was shortly after,
no doubt through Laud s influence,
appointed to the bishopric of Chichester.
Montague, in his well-known and much
attacked book, the " Appello Caesarem,"
had in a few plain words at the end of his
work given expression to the Laudian

thought. Addressing the king, in the
name of the church, he wrote : " Defend
thou me with the sword, and I will de
fend thee with the pen." The close
and intimate alliance, which he desired
to cement between the crown and the
church, was well expressed some years
later (1636), when Laud in his diary
wrote of the appointment of bishop Juxon
of London to the post of high treasurer.*
This was, however, an unfortunate ap
pointment, and identified the Church of
England yet more closely with the uncon
stitutional action of Charles I., although
bishop Juxon, during his tenure (some six
years) of his high office, behaved with
the greatest moderation and wisdom, so
as to earn the high encomium passed upon
him by lord Falkland when he spoke
against the royal policy in the Long
Parliament. u He" (Juxon), said the great
parliamentarian, "in an unexpected place
and power, expressed an equal moderation
and humility, being neither ambitious
before nor proud after, either of a crosier
or of the white staff."

The influence of Laud with Charles
continued to grow. We find several of
his friends and intimates promoted in the
church. To take some examples : bishop
Neile, his former patron, was translated
to Winchester ; Howson, one of his most
trusted supporters, became bishop of the
great see of Durham ; Buckridge, another
of his friends, became bishop of Ely. Laud
himself, in 1628, on the promotion of the
old bishop of London, was appointed to
the spiritual oversight of the great city ;
and he virtually exercised the chief
authority in the church until 1633, when,
* The passage is quoted on p. 34.

16281640.]

LAUD AS AN ABSOLUTIST MINISTER.

on the death of Abbot, who had long been
in royal disfavour, he became primate.

Unhappily for Laud s fame, the high
favour in which he stood with the king did
far more for him than merely procure him
that successive translation from his distant
Welsh see of St. David s to the English
Bath and Wells, from Bath and Wells to
the great metropolis, and eventually from
London to the arch-see of Canterbury.
An opinion has been advanced, that too
much has been ascribed to Laud s in
dividual action in political affairs. There
is, however, no doubt but that after the
murder of Buckingham in 1628, Laud and
Wentworth (better known as the earl of
Strafford) for some years were the king s
principal advisers in state matters. One
of his learned biographers * does not even
hesitate to use a word familiar in the
history of our own times, though scarcely
legitimate in the seventeenth century, to
express Laud s power during a large por
tion of those eleven years during which
Charles ruled without a Parliament. He
styles him " Premier," and in relating the
events of 1640, speaks of Laud s " Premier
ship " being at end. He was the intimate
friend of Wentworth ; but Wentworth s
actual work, after he left the North of
England until 1640, lay almost entirely
in Ireland. It is certain that nothing of
importance was done during these years
without Wentworth being consulted ; it
is even probable that this great though
mistaken statesman, initiated most, if not
all, the acts of Charles s government, and
that Laud, in state matters, was rather
the representative of Wentworth s wishes
than an originator himself. But Laud, it
* Mr. Simpkinson.

must be remembered, was ever at Whitehall,,
by the king s side, and a devoted friend
ship ever existed between the sovereign
and the bishop. After Weston (who sub
sequently became earl of Portland) died
in 1635, Laud accepted a seat on the Board
of Commissioners of. the Treasury, where
he exercised, naturally, the chief influence..
In 1636 his faithful friend and staunch
supporter, Juxon, became lord treasurer,
Windebank, another of his personal ad
herents, was, at his recommendation r
appointed secretary of state. Nor was-
Laud s activity, during the period of
Charles I. s absolute government, con
fined to home matters only ; he was also*
concerned in foreign affairs, and in the
foreign policy of the country the weight
of his great influence was felt.

In after years, however, when the whole
of the king s policy was called into ques
tion, and his ministers were impeached or
went into voluntary exile, as did secretary
Windebank, no part of Laud s administra
tion was so severely judged by the voice
of popular opinion as was his share in the
proceedings of the obnoxious and tyran
nical Courts of Star Chamber and of
High Commission. In both of these de
tested courts Laud was a ruling spirit ; nor
was his voice apparently ever raised with
any view of mitigating the cruel and often
utterly disproportionate punishment which
was meted out to the hapless offenders
against the king s policy ; to men, whose
crime had principally been that they had
spoken or written against the arbitrary rule
inaugurated by the king and his advisers,
of whom, after Strafford, Laud loomed
largest in the public eye. The punishments
inflicted by these tribunals included, besides

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1640.

long and weary imprisonment and the
imposition of crushing fines, such cruel
sentences as the loss of both ears by the
executioner s knife, and standing for hours
in the public pillory ; in some well-known
cases even popular favourites being the un
fortunate victims of these acts.

It would be a mistake to suppose that
the government of Charles, with Laud and
Wentworth as his ministers, unconstitu
tional though it was, and stained also with
the tyranny of the Star Chamber and High
Commission, was a failure in its endeavour
to increase the prosperity and happiness
of England. Both of these statesmen
were emphatically men of commanding
genius. Wentworth, had his splendid
powers been directed by an Elizabeth,
would have ranked among the foremost of
the long line of English statesmen ; and
Laud, had not his unfortunate master
called him to take a prominent share in
the affairs of the state in addition to his
own legitimate work in the church, would
have been one of the greatest and most
efficient of the Anglican or even of the
pre-Reformation prelates. Even Laud s
enemies, and those who find most fault
with his state policy, and can find no
kina word of approval for his ecclesiastical
measures, are obliged to recognise that the
life of the great enemy of liberty, as they
style the archbishop of Charles I., was a
pure and spotless one, faultlessly honest,
utterly devoid of self-seeking.

The fair historian must also concede
that the eleven years of absolute rule,
during which no Parliament was sum
moned, were, on the whole, years of
prosperity for the country. At the treasury
economy and scrupulous honesty would

have done much to redress the balance
between the royal receipts and expendi
ture, if only the regular taxes usually
authorised by Parliament had flowed into
the exchequer. Commerce decidedly
flourished in this period, a postal system
was established, mercantile companies were
founded, and the trade of the country was
very largely increased. The royal fleet
was vastly strengthened, and again the
flag of England, which had won such
distinction in the reign of Elizabeth,
began to be respected and feared on the
seas. But in spite of all this real prosperity,
a feeling of profound distrust and fear for
the future kept gaining ground. Never,
even in the days of the strongest of the
Plantagenet kings, had the sovereign arro
gated to himself such powers as Charles
and his ministers claimed for the crown.

How it all ended, the immediate cause
of the great Civil War with its disastrous
consequences to the king, being, as we
have already seen, the uprising in Scotland
provoked by the attempt of Charles to
substitute the Episcopal for the Presby
terian form of church government, need
not be further recapitulated. Before the
close of 1640 the famous Long Parliament
met, and almost its first act was the im
peachment of Strafford (Wentworth). This
was quickly followed by the impeachment of
Laud, and the last days of the year found
him a prisoner of state. Branded as a
traitor, and subsequently executed, his
memory has ever since been hopelessly
scarred with the too true charge, that
during his long tenure of influence and
power his aim had been to subvert the
English constitution, and to establish a
despotism. Thus the really great services

1627 1640.]

ECCLESIASTIC AND STATESMAN

of Laud to the church have been generally other and real claims to respect and admira-
forgotten, and the memory only of his tion have been rarely remembered. Yet
long and arbitrary administration has been the great and enduring services of Laud

188

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Pi tilian the J)o)utift br.v: 1 , J in the cafe of M/&gt;fi/fl.Bttt
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r and

PAGE OF LAUD S CONFERENCE WITH THE JESUIT FISHER, CORRKC IED IN HIS OWN HANDWRITING,
(By special perm ss&gt;on,froin the original in the Royal Library, WmdiO Castle.)

kept green in the eyes of the majority of to the church, of which he was a most:
his fellow-countrymen. The image of Laud, distinguished leader, demand something

the too faithful servant of king Charles L,
the minister of an absolutism so hateful
to Englishmen, was stamped indelibly on

far more than a mere passing notice.
In the epistle dedicatory prefixed by

the hearts of his countrymen, while his archbishop Laud to the relation of the

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16271

" conference with the Jesuit Fisher,"
addressed to Charles I., and published
in 1639, we have Laud s own clear and
lumi lous statement of the object and
purpose of his life s work in the Church of
England. Briefly he sketches what in
his eyes was sadly amiss there ; and then
he tells us how he proposed to amend
what was wrong. It is, in fact, a very
short though comprehensive apologia for
what he had done. Already, when he
wrote the " epistle dedicatory," mutterings
of the terrible storm which very shortly
was to sweep away him and his fellows
were being heard. Thus the words were
published in the last few months of his
career of power and influence. But
.although Laud lost his life in the great
tempest which broke over England almost
-directly after he had penned the words we
.are about to quote ; although the church,
too, was overwhelmed and seemingly
destroyed by the same storm in which he
himself perished ; that church arose again in
.a very few years, and, what is remarkable,
purged almost completely of the withering
errors of which Laud complained, and the
removal of which had been the great work
-of his life. That they may fairly be said
never to have reappeared, is a strong
testimony to the wisdom and devotion of
the great churchman, who emphatically,
with all his errors and mistakes, must be
regarded as one of the makers of the
Church of England, and as such must be
placed in the same gallery of noble church
builders of the second or Reformation
period wherein are enshrined the portraits
of Parker and Jewel the apologist, of
Whitgift and the statesman Cecil, of the
judicious Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes.

This published declaration of the great
bishop, though somewhat stiff and an
tiquated, and studiously compressed, is so
especially interesting that we quote it
here, in Laud s own words, as* giving us
an accurate view of the devoted prelate s
mind on the state of the church over
which he presided. " And this I have
observed farther, that no one thing hath
made conscientious men more wavering in
their own minds, or more apt and eager
to be drawn aside from the sincerity of
religion professed in the Church of England,
than the want of uniform and decent order
in the churches of the kingdom ; and the
Romanists have been apt to sa} , * The
Houses of God could not be suffered to lie
so nastily, as in some places they have
done, were the true worship of God ob
served in them, or did the people think
that such it were. It is true the inward
worship of the heart is the great service of
God, and no service acceptable without
it; but the external worship of God in His
church is the great witness to the world,
that our heart stands right in that service
of God. Take this away, or bring it into
contempt, and what light is then left to
shine before men, that they may see our
devotion, and glorify our Father which is
in heaven ?

u And to deal clearly with your majesty
(Charles I.), these thoughts are they, and
no other, which made me labour as much
as I have done for decency and an orderly
settlement of the external worship of God
in the Church; for of that which is inward
there can be no witness among men, nor
no example for men. Now, no external
action in the world can be uniform without
some ceremonies; and these in religion, the

1627 1640.]

DISORDER IN THE CHURCH.

ancienter the better, so they may fit time
and places. Too many overburden the
service 01 God, and too few leave it naked.
And scarce anything hath hurt religion
more in these broken times, than an
opinion in too many men, that because
Rome had thrust some unnecessary and
many superstitious ceremonies upon the
church, therefore the Reformation must
have none at all ; not considering there-
while that ceremonies are the hedge that
fence the substance of religion from all the
indignities which profaneness and sacrilege
too commonly put upon it. And a great
weakness it is, not to see the strength
which ceremonies things weak enough
in themselves, God knows add even to
religion itself; but a far greater to see it
and yet to cry them down all and without
choice."

The disorder here referred to, the want
of conformity in worship, the shrinking
from ceremonies not superstitious in them
selves because some saw in them a
Romanising tendency, the dread of exter
nal beauty in divine service, the fear in
many minds of over-exalting the sacraments
ordained by our blessed Lord, the neglect
of the sacred fabrics all these things
which so vexed and distressed the spirit of
Laud and his school, were the inevitable
outcome of the circumstances which accom
panied the Anglican settlement. Briefly
to recapitulate those circumstances. The
first Reformation begun by Cranmer and
his coadjutors under king Henry VIII.,
developed and systematised under Edward
VI., under strong Puritan influences, was
swept away temporarily in the Marian
reaction. The wise Elizabethan com
promise, under Parker and Cecil, always

a great deal interrupted and marred by
Puritan influences, was somewhat com
promised under Parker s successor, the
Puritan archbishop, Grindal. Whitgift,
when he succeeded to the primacy after
Grindal s death, aided by the wishes and
strong friendship of Elizabeth, largely
succeeded in restoring the state of things
mapped out by Parker. Bancroft, under
James I., was something of an opportunist,
and Abbot, who followed Bancroft, was a
Puritan at heart. These different schools
of thought, which rapidly succeeded each
other in the chief direction of the church,
produced considerable disorder, and even
seemed to encourage considerable latitude
among the clergy. The result was that
in the reign of James I., while in some
centres order and decency were maintained
in the ritual and practices of the churches,
in others a lamentable want of order, and
even uniformity, was too apparent.

To restore a uniform practice and a
generally more reverential way of per
forming divine service was the great aim
of Laud s life. To establish a beautiful
and winning ritual, possessing ceremonies
based upon primitive antiquity, was his
earnest, passionate desire. That in great
measure he succeeded in doing this is, and
ever will be, his chief title to honour. We
trace this aim throughout the various
positions he occupied during his long,
stirring life, first at Oxford, then during his
few years of comparative retirement as a
country parish priest; then again in the
university, afterwards in the more public
position of dean of Gloucester; later as a
bishop, first in remote St. David s, of which,
however, he saw but little when he became a
court favourite ; later as bishop of Bath and

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1627 1640.

Wells, and then in the more conspicuous and
influential bishopric of London ; and finally
as archbishop of Canterbury, and almost
absolute ruler of the whole Church -of
England. The same spirit, the same aim
and passion actuated Laud all through
his long and varied career as a churchman.
The subject of our present study cared
comparatively little for disputed doctrinal
questions ; speculative thought possessed
for him but slight interest. Generally, he
may be said to sympathise with what was
termed High Anglican opinion. He was
the friend and associate of Andrewes, and
may be said to have been in general agree
ment with that eminent master in theology
on the doctrinal questions which princi
pally occupied men s minds in his age. It
was, however, the outward framework of
religion that especially interested him.
Believing intensely in the educational
power over men s minds of what he loved
to term the "beauty of holiness," the
stately buildings, the rich and varied
beauty of stained and jewelled windows,
the solemn organ, the sweet -voiced choir,
an impressive ritual, the exquisite and
touching liturgy of the Church of England
well and reverently rendered, were precious
to Laud ; while everything that savoured
of carelessness and irreverence in sacred
things connected with the divine service
offered to the King of Kings was especially
hateful to him. " There was in his mind no
deep sense of the spiritual depths of life,
no reaching forward to ineffable mysteries
veiled from the eye of flesh; it was incom
prehensible to him why men should trouble
themselves about matters which they could
not understand . . . . to him a church
was not so much the temple of a living

spirit, as the palace of an invisible being." *
In the present quiet beauty and exquisite
decorum of the churches and services of
the Church of England, we see the fruits
of the persistent zeal and care of Laud.

This ceaseless care of his extended
throughout the whole church. It was as
marked in the stately university of Oxford,
as in a crowded commercial and fashionable
centre like London. It was pressed and
urged in the remote awd secluded village
churches, and in a proud and historic
cathedral like Gloucester. Early in his
career, owing to his ill-advised action in
the case of the marriage of his early
patron, Lord Mountjoy, and the divorced
Lady Rich, his Oxford career was inter
rupted, and for some five years he lived in
retirement in a country parish. During
this period he formed his ideal of the life
of a country parish priest, and was per
suaded of the effect upon peasants of a
dignified and reverent ritual. On his
return to Oxford as head of his old college,
as we have already seen, he made the
services of his college chapel a model for the
university, and the stately musical services
of St. John s college had much to do with
the increased popularity and fame of a
college which had hitherto been but a
comparatively unimportant centre of
Oxford learning.

After some years of an ever-growing
Oxford influence, he was especially com
missioned by king James I. to restore
dignity of worship at Gloucester, in which
great cathedral a careless ritual and want
of reverence and order was well known to
exist. Nor was this careless state of things

* Gardiner : " History of England," vol. vii.,
chap. Ixix

1627 1640.]

THE ARCHBISHOP S WORK.

by.any means in those days confined to the
beautiful cathedral of the west. How deeply
Laud felt the careless and slovenly way in
which so often and in so many places the

worship of God was so lost in the
church (as they conceived it); and the
churches themselves and all things in
them suffered to lie in such a bare and

LETTER FROM KING CHARLES TO LAUD ACQUAINTING HIM WITH HIS TRANSLATION TO THE

ARCHBISHOPRIC OF CANTERBURY, 1633.
(From the original in the Library of Lambeth Palace, by kind permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury. )

religious services of the Church of England
were performed, he expressed at a later
period of his life, thus : "I could speak
with no conscientious persons, but the
great notion which wrought upon them to
disaffect or think meanly of the Church
of England, was that the external

slovenly fashion in most places in the
kingdom."

As master of an Oxford college, as dean
of Gloucester, as bishop in succession of
St. David s, Bath and Wells, and London,
Laud had been able to do much by his
own authority, still more by example and

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16271640.

the influence of a powerful mind acting
upon others, to restore a more uniform
practice in the way of performing divine
service, to inspire a more reverential spirit
in the church. His views and ideas on
the importance of maintaining many of
the primitive rites and ceremonies were
largely shared, and even carried out, by
many, if not by all, the clergy ; but it
was not until archbishop Abbot s death in
1633, when he succeeded to the primacy,
that the full weight of his influence was
felt in the church. Abbot, as primate, had
been negligent, in the matters which
seemed to Laud and his school of such
primary importance. Indeed, at heart
Abbot was ever a Puritan, and the weight
of his influence, such as it was, was ever
used to counteract rather than to advance
the views of the Laudian school. But
when Abbot passed away and Laud
became archbishop, all the weight of
church authority became Laud s to carry
out in the church the reforms he so
intensely longed to see become general ;
added to which the inclinations of the
king were with the new primate, who was
his trusted adviser in other matters besides
ecclesiastical affairs. From 1633 to 1640
the power of Laud in the church was
enormous, and it was in those years that
he was enabled to introduce into the
Church of England a new spirit, which-,
with the brief interregnum of desolation
which followed his fall, to greater or less
extent has lived in the Anglican communion
ever since his day. At times it has seem
ingly faded, and apparently well-nigh dis
appeared, but the Laudian spirit only slum
bered for awhile, and presently awoke again
to become more influential than ever.

In the year after he became archbishop
he held a general metropolitical visitation.
Many and searching questions were asked,
and a general conformity in certain im
portant matters was insisted upon. He
was well aware of numberless cases of
irreverence and disorder in not a few of
the churches of his great province. u He
heard of men slouching into church with
their hats on, lolling on the benches till
they fell asleep, of churchyards left un-
fenced, of pigs rooting on the graves,
and of churches themselves left untended.
These things he determined to remedy
by the infliction of excessive penalties." *
In many churches the words of adminis
tration in the Holy Communion were used
but once for a great number of communi
cants. The holy table was often usedJJbr
profane purposes. In some churches it
was the usual receptacle for hats and
cloaks ; occasionally it was cleared that
the children of the parish might learn
their writing lessons upon it. It was even
made use of as a convenient seat for
members of the congregation.

" At Taplow, to give an instance of the
profanity with which this most sacred spot
was treated," wrote Laud to the king,
"there happened a very ill accident by
reason of not having the communion table
railed in, that it might be kept from
profanation. In the sermon time a dog
came to the table and took the loaf of bread
prepared for the sacrament in his mouth,
and ran away with it. Some of the
parishioners, took the same from the dog
and set it again on the table. After sermon
the minister could not think fit to consecrate

* Gardiner : " History of England," vol. viii.,
chap. Ixxviii.

16271640.]

IRREVERENCE IN SACRED BUILDINGS.

this bread, and other fit for the sacrament
was not to be had in that town, so there
was no communion." To remedy such
a state of things, churchwardens were
directed to place the communion table
under the eastern wall of the chancel,
where formerly the altar stood, to set a
decent rail before it to avoid profaneness,
and at the rails (so placed) the communi
cants were instructed to receive the blessed
sacrament.*

When the days of trouble came on, the
fallen archbishop was angrily taken to
task for these and other acts carried out
in the hour of his supremacy in the church.
He replied thus to his accusers, who
charged him with desiring to advance
Popery : "It is surely no Popery to set
a rail to keep profanation from the holy
table, nor is it any innovation to place
it at the upper end of the church, as the
altar stood. It was no point of doctrine,"
he added, "which was involved in these
directions which he had issued, but it
was necessary that there should be order
and uniformity." On the ground of
decency, he urged with great force, he
Iiad good reason to desire that the holy
table should be removed to a place in the
church where it would not be desecrated.
He referred also to an injunction of queen
Elizabeth, which, he said, had too often
come to be disregarded.

Among the articles for this visitation
placed in the hands of the archbishop s

* The rails now preserved in front of the com
munion table in the Lady Chapel at Gloucester,
are believed to be the identical rails placed by
Laud there when he was dean. Although not
very ornamental, they are preserved in the now
renovated chapel as an interesting historical relic
of Laud s work and care. (See page 73.)

vicar-general, Sir Nathaniel Brent, were
many notes written by Laud for his in-
structio^. Among them we find various
" instructions " which, when carried into
effect, would ensure greater order and
reverence in the divine service, and would
. secure in great measure the sacred build
ings from needless profanation. For
instance, schools were no longer to be
kept in the chancel of a church ; fonts
were to be restored to their ancient
places ; chancels severed from the church
or otherwise profaned were to be altered.
There is no doubt at all that the
grossest acts of irreverence in sacred
buildings were then too common. To
take one instance, perhaps an extreme
one, but still a fair example of many acts
of profanity : it was charged against the
churchwardens of Knotting, in Bedford
shire, that in 1634-36 (Laud was then
primate) fighting cocks were brought into
the chancel, and a fight held before the
altar, in the presence of many persons
assembled as spectators of the sport, who
betted and laid wagers and performed
the other offices ordinarily used by cock-
fighters. At this strange exhibition
the minister of the parish appears to
have been present.

Among the answers supplied to the
archbishop s visitation inquiries, let us
take a few instances, chosen partly from
great cathedrals, partly from humble parish
churches. The members of the Salisbury
chapter confessed that they had often
neglected to preach in the cathedral,
although their rules bound them to do so ;
that their choristers had not been well
instructed in singing (and hence that the
cathedral services were slovenly performed) ;

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16271640.

that their own private gardens had
recently been extended at the expense of
the churchyard ; that the ornaments of the
cathedral altar were deficient ; and, worse
than all, that they usually presented them
selves to such benefices as were in their
gift as they fell vacant ; and even in a later
instance one of their benefices had been
actually sold by one of their body. The
Norwich chapter was specially reported
by the vicar-general to the archbishop, as
having allowed the lordly cathedral to
get much out of order. The hangings of
the choir, wrote, this official, are naught,
the pavement is not good, the spire of the
steeple is quite down, the churchyard is
ill-kept, etc. ; the copes in use needed mend
ing. The arrangements for divine service
were sadly irreverent ; the mayor and his
brethren were in the habit of walking
indecently in the church during prayer
time before the sermon. In the parish
churches, in the same report of the Nor
wich diocese, there was much that was
gravely deficient. At Bungay, one of
the churches was ruinous. The material
fabrics of many churches needed care ; the
parsonage houses in not a few cases were
in a ruinous state ; much glebe land had
been embezzled.

Everywhere the hand of Laud made
itself felt throughout his broad province.
The neglectful services were commented
upon, the want of care and attention on
the part of the clergy and their officials
was reproved, and reformation was gener
ally insisted upon. The fabrics of the
churches and the parsonage houses were
examined, the careless way in which
divine service was frequently performed
was sharply reproved, and a uniformitv in

the prayers was insisted upon. In some
places it was found that the litany and
the commandments were usually omitted.
Infants were not unfrequently left un-
baptised, all kinds of liberties were taken
with the liturgy, the very psalms and
lessons being at times left out by some.
It is evident, too, that the want of church
order and discipline had in very many
cases seriously lowered the standard of the
clergy, many of them being ignorant and
avaricious, and even guilty of grosser sins.
Laud set himself in good earnest to cor
rect these grave irregularities, arranging
that for the future men should be carefully
examined and tested before they were
admitted into holy orders, and, as far as
possible, all clergy should pass through a
course ot university training. A higher
ideal of self-sacrifice was also set before
them. This was apparently needed at
that time, for in a debate held at Oxford it
was deliberately questioned whether or
not the parish clergy were required by
their office to administer the sacrament
to persons dying of the plague.*

The removal of the communion tables,
the fencing them in with rails, the more
reverent way of administering the sacra-
* ment, appears to have been carried out
generally without much opposition ; there
were, naturally, a few energetic protests.
Men, for instance, deeply imbued with the
Puritan spirit, saw in all these changes
a move Romewards ; but generally the
Laudian reforms were acceptable to the
more serious members of the Anglican
communion. Very little that was really
novel was introduced ; simply uniformity

* See Simpkinson : " Life and Times of Laud,"
chap. vi.

C a f-rx-nttJt ^ .

;

CERTIFICATE COMPILED BY LAUD OF THE DIOCESES IN HIS PROVINCE, WITH AUTOGRAPHIC

NOTES IN THE MARGIN BY CHARLES I.
(From the original in Lambeth Palace Library, by kind permission of the Archbishop cf Canterbury.)

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16271640.

in liturgical matters, a uniformity settled
already by law, was insisted upon, and
a deeper reverence in divine service was
generally introduced. Above all, in the
administration of the sacraments, a return
to the more primitive manner was gradually
brought about; but nothing beyond what
Parker and the better-instructed of the
Elizabethan divines had intended.

One ancient custom which Laud revived
will be ever connected with his name
that of reverently bowing towards the east
both at coming in and going out of the
choir. This practice he earnestly recom
mended, but never, apparently, insisted
upon. It gave great offence in many
quarters, and afterwards formed the special
subject matter of a portion of the most
bitter charges brought against him after
his fall. It is to be regretted that he so
insisted upon and made so much of this
ceremonial observance, harmless and even
beautiful in itself, but in those times of
bitter controversy on all points connected
with the holy Eucharist, so liable to
misinterpretation. It is true that Laud
carefully explained the meaning of the
ceremony, to which he seems to have been
singularly attracted. " Shall I bow," he
touchingly asks, " to men in each House
of Parliament, and shall I not bow to God
in His House, whither I do, or ought to
come to worship Him ? Surely I must
worship God, and bow to Him, though
neither altar nor communion table be in
the church." But it was in vain that he
explained the meaning of the observance.
The less well-informed Puritans connected
the act of reverence, and not unnaturally,
with the Eucharist. The more cultured
among them, accepting Laud s own ex

planation, that obeisance was made to
the Almighty Master of the House, whose
throne was the " altar " or communion
table, were equally distressed at the idea
of God having any throne in His House
save in the hearts of men who worshipped
Him in spirit and in truth.* In the canons
of 1640 the archbishop was careful to add
that the practice, as a general rule, was
left to the conscience of the worshipper ;
neither its observance nor non-observance
was to form matter for criticism.

Not only were the services rendered in
all parts of the kingdom more reverently,
and the tone of the ministers of the church
elevated, under the Laudian movement,
but a great effort was made, as we have
seen, to restore the fabrics of the churches,
which in so many cases had been suffered
to decay, and even to fall into a ruinous
condition. One of the chief characteris
tics, certainly one of the glories of mediaeval
Christianity, had been the magnificent
architecture of the sacred buildings, the
beautiful decorations, the sublime sym
bolism introduced into well-nigh every
detail of a mediaeval church of those great
building ages, the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. In every department the
highest art had been associated with

* It is in the highest degree improbable thai
this much-disputed practice was in any way what
ever associated in Laud s mind with any relic of
superstition. The words, indeed, of the Canter
bury Statutes, which were of his own drawing up,
are curious, and would tend to show this absolutely :
" Singuli vero cujuscunque fuerint gradus aut
ordinis in ingressu chori divinam majestatem
devota mente adorantes humiliter se inclinabunt
versus altare (prout antiquis quarundam ecclesia-
rum statutis cautum novimus) et deinde conversi
decano quoque debitam reverentiam exhibebant."

16271640]

RESTORATION OF THE CHURCHES.

religion. As time went on, many of the
glories of art and beauty became marred
and disfigured with superstition. After
the Reformation the reaction against this
was very marked. The Elizabethan age,
with all its glorious developments, was
emphatically not a church-building period.
We read of few new houses of God being
built ; church restoration and renovation
was almost unheard of. The noble
churches, the stately abbeys and cathedrals,
those triumphs of art and skill pressed
into the service of the Most High, in
many cases the outcome of centuries of
thought and patient labour, were suffered
to fall into decay. Few cared for them ;
some positively disliked them, and would
fain have assisted, rather than hindered,
the slow destruction which the sap of time
would assuredly work in wall and arch, in
pinnacle and tower.

One of Laud s first works at Gloucester
was to set on foot a restoration of the
fabric of the magnificent cathedral, which
since the Reformation period had been
sadly neglected. To a greater or less
degree similar work was undertaken and
largely carried out throughout the country.
But the most conspicuous instance of these
Laudian restoration works was in the case
of the great cathedral of the metropolis, St.
Paul s. Whilst he held the bishopric of
London, Laud devoted himself to the com
pletion and beautifying of the vast edifice
which then, as now, towered over the busy,
wealthy city. A famous architect, Inigo
Jones, superintended the work, and vast
sums, partly derived from public sources,
partly from private generosity, were ex
pended upon St. Paul s Cathedral. Laud
intended the great London house of prayer

to be a model and an example to the rest
of England. King Charles I. was one of
the foremost among Laud s helpers here.
Among those who assisted in the work,
very notable was Sir Paul Pindar, once
ambassador at Constantinople. We read
of this generous donor adorning the
splendid screen at the west end of the
choir with fair pillars of black marble, and
statues of the Saxon kings who in old days
had been founders and benefactors of the
church, and beautifying the inward part
thereof with figures of angels, and all the
wainscot work with figures and carving of
cherubim and other images well gilded, and
adding various kinds of hangings for the
upper end, and finally bestowing the sum
of ^400, a large amount in those days, for
other necessary work. Houses which sur
rounded and shut in the magnificent pile
were pulled down, and a restored cathedral
arose, worthy of the great metropolis of
which it was the centre.

The Puritan spirit, strangely and sadly,
was bitterly opposed to this and such-like
efforts. They considered such work as the
restoration of the magnificent mediaeval
churches and cathedrals, the " repairing
and adorning of rotten relics." To these
earnest, but in many respects mistaken
men, there was no need of beauty and
grace in God s house. " I want the chapel
cheap," said the Puritan Lord Bedford to
the architect, Inigo Jones, when he pur
posed erecting a new church for Covent
Garden, " I would not have it much better
than a barn." Milton well and somewhat
nobly, even if mistakenly, gives utterance
to this stern, uncompromising spirit, which
influenced so many earnest souls in that
day to look with mistrust upon beautiful

6 4

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1627 1640.

services and elaborately decorated churches,
when he wrote : u Tell me, ye priests,
wherefore this gold, wherefore these robes
and surplices over the Gospel ? Is our
religion guilty of the first trespass, and
hath need of clothing to cover her naked
ness? . . . Ye think by these gaudy
glistenings to stir up the devotion of the
rude multitude : ye think so because ye
forsake the heavenly teachings of St. Paul
for the hellish sophistry of Papism. If
the multitude be rude, the lips of the
preacher must give knowledge and not
ceremonies." * Intensely did that austere
school hate the teaching and system of
the Laudian school. Their bitter feeling
against magnificence of worship and state-
liness of sacred buildings was well exem
plified a few years later, when in their
day of power the Puritans actually erected
scaffolding to take down portions of the
historic pile of Gloucester cathedral, and
were only hindered in their fatal work of
destruction by the love of a few influential
Gloucester citizens for their splendid house
of prayer, which had been the glory and
charm of their ancient city for many
centuries.

Much, indeed, had the Reformation
done for religion. England possessed,
when a Stuart ascended the throne of
the Plantagenet and the Tudors, an open
Bible, at once dearly loved and highly
prized by the people. They read and
pondered over, as no nation, perhaps,
had ever read and pondered over before,
the words of the Redeemer and His
apostles, and the teaching of the ancient
Hebrew prophets and seers. The peculiar

* " The Reason for Church Government," book
ii., chap. ii.

treasure of the English church was a body
of doctrine, pure and less alloyed with
human addition and human interpretation
than any church had owned for centuries.
But its ritual was in many centres neglected,
bare and cold, careless, and even at times
irreverent. Its sacred buildings were left
uncared for, were allowed not unfrequently
to fall into a state of ruin and decay.
There was a real danger that in the Church
of England of the future, all care for what
is termed " the beauty of holiness " would
soon be wanting ; and, it must be remem
bered that " the beauty of holiness," as
expressed in religious architecture, painting,
sculpture, music, appeals with tremendous
force to the minds and hearts of many men
whom the passionate earnestness, the lofty
spirituality, the unadorned simplicity, loved
by and aimed at by the Puritans, would
never touch or affect.

At this juncture, in the providence of
God a new reformer, totally different from
any seen before in the churches of the
new and nobler learning, was raised up ;
one who saw for the first time clearly
and distinctly the weakness of the church
in that particular, and with splendid zeal
and tireless energy, determined to sweep
away what he looked upon as a grave
danger to the church of the future. Such
was William Laud, the hated and admired
archbishop of Charles I. . No fair and im
partial church historian would now think of
speaking of this great churchman in any
terms save of unstinted praise, would
dream of painting him otherwise than as
one of the chief makers of the Church of
England, than as one who saw and recog
nised, and set himself to remedy, a great and
cardinal defect which undoubtedly existed

I640.J

in the new framework. Without the work
of Laud, our church might have, probably
would have, become the church of a strong,
earnest, and God-fearing section of the
people of England, but it would never
have been, as it is now, the church of- the

WHAT LAUD ACCOMPLISHED.

remedy the grave defects he pointed out,
the impartial chronicler cannot fail to
lament the great error of Laud s life, the
unhappy share he bore in the fatal policy
of the ill-fated Stuart monarch. No
excuse can be offered for this great mistake;

CHAPTER HOUSE, OLD ST. PAUL S.
(After tfie engraving by Hollar?)

nation, loved and on the whole admired,
with a living love and an ever-increasing
admiration, by the vast majority of thought
ful Englishmen of all ranks and orders.

Yet while laying the tribute of an un
grudging gratitude upon the memory of
the great churchman, to whom belongs
the merit of first discerning what was
lacking in the church of Elizabeth and
the first Stuart king, and the yet higher
honour of showing men the way to

it was one of those errors which, affect
ing the welfare ot a people, almost rank as
crimes. The student of history reads with
unfeigned amazement the pages of some of
the archbishop s apologists here. Laud s
work as a statesman may be wondered at,
grieved over, but never can be excused.
The only pleas that can be advanced for
his acts, as minister and adviser of Charles
I. at the treasury, at the admiralty office,
at the foreign office, in the Star Chamber,

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16271640.

in the Court of High Commission, during
those fateful eleven years whilst Charles I.
was playing at absolutism without a Parlia
ment, are that throughout his conduct
was at all events absolutely free from self-
seeking, purely unselfish, fearless of the
opinion of high-born and low-born, rich
and poor alike ; and that for his great
mistake, or crime, or treason for that is
what it was against the rights, customs,
and cherished privileges of England, he
paid the supreme forfeit. Even his truest
admirers, those who reverence his high
character and pure life, who regard his
undying work for their church with a
gratitude unfeigned as it is profound, dare
not find fault with the stern though cer
tainly cruel justice meted out to him on
Tower Hill.

Some plead as an excuse for &lt; Laud s
high-handed policy as a minister, that he
worked for absolutism, believing that in
the unchecked power of the sovereign lay
the surest promise of the future security of
the church ; believing that the best friend
of the church would ever be a powerful,
irresponsible monarch. These forget that
such a friendship on the part of an absolute
king was, after all, a formidable two-edged
weapon of defence ; for the time might
come, probably would at no distant date,
when some irresponsible king would sit
on the throne of England, actuated with
feelings towards the church very different
from those which influenced Laud s friend,
Charles I. But, be this as it may, such a
view can never be pleaded with any force
as an excuse for a long-continued policy
opposed to all the best and truest traditions
of the English people.

Laud as a politician, as a powerful

minister of state, however, should not bt
confounded in the judgment of posterity
with Laud, the wise and far-seeing church
man. For his terribly mistaken work as a
minister he paid, as we shall see, the tremen
dous forfeit of his life. For his other and
truer work in the church and for the
church, his true title to honour in this
our day, when men can look back on the
results of his labours in the seventeenth
century from the vantage-ground of the
nineteenth, he receives, he must receive^
from serious members of the great Anglican
communion the deepest, truest thanks, the
most profound gratitude. In spite of the
grave and even fatal errors he committed r
as presently touched upon, in so utterly
under-rating the influence of Puritanism
both in England and Scotland, without
the work that he did in the Church of
England, it could hardly have become, as
it now is, the church of the mighty
English nation.

In painting this little sketch of Laud s
work in the Church of England, what he
accomplished at Oxford must also be
briefly added to the picture. In the midst
of his work-filled life, he never forgot the
scene of his earliest labours, and one of
his favourite projects in the days of his
influence and power was to make his loved
and famous university a real seat of learn
ing and usefulness. In 1630 lord Pembroke,
the chancellor, died, and, after some oppo
sition, Laud was elected in his room.
During his eleven years of chancellorship
he accomplished great things in the time-
honoured university. He laboured espe
cially, and not without success, to calm the
spirit of fierce religious controversy between

16271640.]

LAUD S INFLUENCE AT OXFORD.

Puritans and Anglicans, by forbidding
acrimonious public discussions ; treating
both parties with gentle forbearance. Un
der his watchful care Oxford gradually
became the chief home of learning in
England, and was most famous as a univer-

sity far beyond the limits of our island.
Discipline, which had become sadly lax, was
restored. The three hundred ale-houses
for which Oxford had become notorious,
were reduced to a hundred; drinking, a
vice too common in the colleges, was
checked and discouraged. Once more the
university dress, which under the lax
system prevailing had dropped out of use,
was insisted upon. The officials of the
colleges were treated with a respect to
which for a long time they had been
unaccustomed. The examinations were
made more strict, and to win a degree
became again a real distinction. High
birth was no longer regarded as an excuse
for disregard of discipline, and young men
of noble and distinguished families were
subjected to the same laws and regula
tions as were their less fortunate fellow-
students.

Not only was Laud s care devoted to the
restoration of discipline and order, but his
hand was visible, too, in many other direc
tions. The study of Hebrew and Oriental
letters, with a view of encouraging biblical
criticism, was assisted, the Hebrew pro
fessorship being endowed with a canonry
at Christchurch. An Arabic lectureship
was provided at the archbishop s own
charges, and the first lecturer, the illustrious
Pocock, was sent for public study to the
East, with a special commission to search
out and to purchase manuscripts. A large
store of manuscripts in every tongue were

procured and presented to the university
by Laud s continued exertions.

Another of Laud s works, carried out in
his loved university of Oxford, claims a
few lines of special mention. The Uni
versity Press, which has since become so
deservedly famous through Europe, was
virtually the outcome of Laud s far-sighted
care. In 1631, when he was still bishop of
London, and already high in favour with
Charles I., he obtained from the king a
patent for the university to print books.
Types in Greek and Oriental alphabets
were prepared, and printers were brought
over from Holland.*

On the church life of Oxford, the in
fluence long exerted by Laud was very
marked. We have already related the
change in the services of his own college
of St. John s, which took place after he
became president of the society, 1621-1631
how the St. John s services, before his
holding office so bald and unattractive,,
became reverent and even stately ; how
music was introduced and an organ erected ;
and how gradually this care for the
reverent rendering of morning and evening
prayer extended throughout the university.
Other college chapels were beautified and
adorned, and served as an example for
sacred buildings in the kingdom. Many
an undergraduate would preserve a loving
memory of his Oxford college chapel ; and
in after years, when a minister of the
church, would aim at reproducing such a
service in his own town or village house
of prayer, would endeavour to make the
church he served in some way like the
fair and reverently adorned building in

* Simpkinson : " Life and Times of Laud, "
chap. viii.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1627 1640.

which he had worshipped in his old Oxford
days.

What these college chapels had become
during the quarter of a century which had

ENGLISH CHALICE VEIL OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
(.Embroidered White Silk.)

elapsed since Laud s influence had come to
be felt in the old university, is well pic
tured in a letter written about the year
1636, the date of king Charles s visit to
Oxford : " The churches and chapels of all
the colleges," so runs this graphic contem
porary description, " are much beautified,
extraordinary cost bestowed on them.
Scarce any cathedral church, not Windsor
or Canterbury, nay, not St. Paul s choir,
exceeds them. Most of them newly glazed ;
richer glass for figures and painting I have
not seen, which they had most from beyond
the seas; excellently paved their choir with
black and white stone. Where the east
end admits not glass, excellent pictures,
large and great ; church work of the best

kind they could get from the other side,
of the birth, passion, resurrection and
ascension of our blessed Lord; all their
communion tables fairly covered with rich
carpets hung, some of them,
with good hangings." *

Between Laud and Went-
worth (Strafford), during their
long official connection in the
state service, lasting roughly
some ten or eleven years,
existed the deepest friendship.
Both were firmly persuaded
that an absolutism, unfettered
by any expression of popular
will through the voice of the
Parliament, was the form of
government best calculated to
advance the truest interests of
the people. But while Went-
worth thought mainly of the
state, its principles of taxation,
its courts of law, its foreign
and domestic policy, Laud s
mind was turned especially upon the church
and its work and influence among the
people. Both Laud and Went worth, to
carry out their objects, were advocates of
that policy, for which they invented the
term "thorough"; in other words, they
were bent at all hazards and risks upon
going " through " with it, the words
thorough and through being synonymous
terms, t

To this steady determination not to
swerve to the right hand or to the left, were
owing, no doubt, many of the mistakes of

* Quoted by Gardiner : " History of England,"
vol. viii., chap. Ixxix,

t Gardiner (chap. Ixxvii.) in his history points
this out, and further alludes to the two words
in the i7th century being spelt alike.

1640.]

CONVOCATION OF 1640.

Laud even in his church policy. While
we cannot fail to recognise that through
out the work-filled life there was ever in
Laud, at Oxford, in Gloucester, at Lambeth,
an earnest desire to guide his church
along the " old paths " traced out in the
earlier and purer days of Christianity, still
his policy of "thorough" to use his own
expression led him to be unconciliatory,
and too often ruthlessly disregarding of
that deeply-rooted spirit of Puritanism
which inspired not a few of the nobler
Englishmen. All this must not be lost
sight of when we are forming an estimate
of Laud s life and work.

The story of the ruin and disaster which
fell on the Church of England when he
disappeared from the scene, however, must
not be by any means taken as the last
word that has to be spoken of the effect
of his work upon the Church of England.
The church was, in fact, apparently swept
away by the wild torrent of revolution
which arose in 1641 and the years which
immediately followed. But it was only
submerged for a season ; and when it re
appeared, it was seen that the spirit of
the dead Laud was still active in its midst.
Mistaken at times in his ways of working,
he had taught the church a great lesson,
and the lesson has never been forgotten.
The present aspect of the church, as it
appears to both its foes and its friends,
its strength crowned with beauty, is not a
little owing to the labours of the loved and
hated Laud. Slowly but surely, under his
government, his spirit permeated the
English church. What he longed for was
increased order, more uniformity in
worship, augmented reverence in the
services of the sanctuary ; a revival of

interest in the beautiful works of art,
as true handmaids of religion works
cultivated with such conspicuous success in
the Middle Ages, including architecture,
painting, sculpture, music ; a correcter and
more exalted view of the sacraments. All
these things, in greater or less degree owing
to his zeal and that of the school we
have called " the Laudian," of which he
was emphatically the founder, became
characteristic features of the Anglican
Church.

One more important event, which throws
much light on what was ever in Laud s
mind, remains to be chronicled here the
doings ot the Convocation of 1640, just
before the end came. We have seen how
in the spring of 1640, acting upon the

COMMUNION CUP GIVEN BY LAUD TO HOLY
TRINITY CHURCH, KNIGHTSBRIDGE.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1640.

advice of Strafford, the king summoned a
Parliament, after an interval of eleven
years. Simultaneously with this session
of Parliament met, as was usual, the Convo
cation of Canterbury. After a brief sitting
came a dissolution ; but the king signified
his wish that in spite of the premature
ending of what was known as the Short
Parliament, Convocation should continue
its sitting, and complete the important
work it had in hand. Some grave doubts
as to the legality of this continued sitting
-of a Convocation after the dissolution of
Parliament were expressed ; but a com
mittee of eminent lawyers decided that
such a session was legal, and Convocation,
on the theory that it was dependent on
the king and not on Parliament, pursued
its deliberations after the dissolution.

It renewed a former grant of ^"20,000
a year to the king, under the name of a
benevolence or free contribution. But
what was more important from an ecclesi
astical point of view, were the new canons
it passed, and which were published under
the authority of the Great Seal. These
were seventeen in number, and were
entitled " Constitutions and Canons Ecclesi
astical," etc., and were accompanied by a
royal proclamation. They are to us speci
ally interesting, as expressing in studiedly
moderate language the opinions of the
Laudian school of thought on the more
important of the debatable questions of
the day.

Of these Laudian canons, one canon
especially dealt with doctrinal matters. Of
this fourth canon, "Against Socimanism,"
which was termed " a damnable and cursed
heresy wicked and blasphemous," lord
Clarendon observes that it bears more

against Socinianism than the acts of any
other Christian assembly. It is not very
easy to see the reason of such vehement
pronouncement against a heresy which has
never made any firm lodgment among the
English people, all sects Anglican,Puritan,
Roman Catholic equally repudiating its
cheerless and un-catholic tenets. The third
canon was entitled, " For suppressing the
growth of Popery." In spite of the allega
tions of his enemies, Laud and his school
never had any sympathies in the direction
of Rome.

The sixth canon, entitled " An oath
enjoined for the preventing of all innova
tions in doctrine and governments," excited
more indignation than it deserved. It was
to be imposed not only on the clergy, but
masters of arts, schoolmasters, actuaries,
and others, and was known as the " et
cetera " oath, from the " &c." which fol
lowed the words "that they, the subscribers
to the oath, would never consent to any
alteration in the government of the church
by archbishops, bishops, deans, arch
deacons, 6V., as it stands now established,
and by right it ought to stand." The
" et cetera " was introduced hastily, for the
purpose of avoiding a needless repetition
of officers ; but a bitter outcry was raised
against it. The whole oath was subse
quently condemned by the Commons as
"wicked and ungodly, as devised by the
archbishop for the purpose of confirming
the unlawful and exorbitant power which
had been usurped over his majesty s sub
jects."

But the first and seventh canons are by
far the most important, the first as clearly
and moderately setting forth the Laudian
conception of monarchical power ; the

1 640.]

THE LAUDIAN CANONS.

seventh as giving the reasons of the great
churchman for certain of the various
reforms in matters of ritual and ceremony
which are connected with his life-work,
and which had been especially selected
as objects of attack by the Puritan party.
We give both at length in the original
worc l s no doubt Laud s own. The
seventh canon, " A declaration concerning
some rites and ceremonies," is an able
and lucid apology for the introduction or
re-introduction of a simple ceremonial
ritual. All schools of thought in our
church will study with respectful interest
the reasons which induced this great
churchman to urge the adoption of customs

should rule and command in their several
dominions all persons of what rank or
estate soever, whether ecclesiastical or
civil, and that they should restrain and
punish with the temporal sword all stubborn
and wicked doers.

*****
"For any person or persons to set
up, maintain, or avow in any their said
realms or territories respectively, under
any pretence whatsoever, any independent
co-active power either papal or popular,
whether directly or indirectly, is to under
mine their great royal office and cunningly
to overthrow that most sacred ordinance
which God Himself hath established ; and

and practices which are still largely the so is treasonable against God as well as

use of Anglican churchmen. In the case of
the obeisance to be made coming in and

against the king.

" For subjects to bear arms against their

going out of church, it will be observed kings, offensive or defensive, upon any
the canon enjoined nothing, but simply pretence whatsoever, is at the least to resist
left it optional for each individual wor- the powers which are ordained of God ;

shipper.

The first canon, " Concerning the regal
power," passed just before the outbreak
of the Civil War, reads as follows :

" We do further ordain and decree that
every parson, vicar, curate, or preacher,
upon some one Sunday in every quarter

and though they do not invade, but only
resist, St. Paul tells them plainly, they shall
receive to themselves damnation."

The seventh canon was entitled "A
declaration concerning some rites and
ceremonies," and declares as follows :

" That the standing of the communion

of the year at morning prayer, shall in table sideway under the east window of
the place where he serves, treatably and every chancel or chapel is in its own nature

indifferent, neither commanded nor con
demned by the word of God, either

audibly read these explanations of the regal
power here inserted :

"The most high and sacred order of expressly or by immediate deduction, and

kings is of divine right, being the ordi- therefore that no religion is to be placed

nance of God Himself, founded in the therein, or scruple to be made thereon,

prime laws of nature, and clearly estab- And albeit at the time of the reforming of

lished by express texts of the Old and New this church from that gross superstition of

Testaments. A supreme power is given to popery, it was carefully provided that all

this most excellent order by God Himself means should be used to root out of the

in the Scriptures, which is, that kings minds of the people both the inclination

THK UILKV11 OK LXCl.AM).

[1040.

thi-irmilo.mil memory thcicol ; especially
ol tin- uli.lahv commuted m tin- n
lot which CaUW -ill popish altar- \\eie
demolished . \ct Mol\\ -illiM. iiuhng il w.is
tluMi oidcicd by the insliuclions .nul
advertisements ol queen Lli.ahcth of
blessed memory, that the hol\ tables
-hould stand m the place \\herc the .ill. us
stood, .uul accoidiiiglv h.i\ e heeu continued
IM the royal chapels ol three lamous .uul
|&gt;ious pimces, .uul in most cathedral .uul
some p.uochial churches, which cloth sulli
iieullv acquit the m.iuuer ol placing the
s.tul t.ihles Mom any illegality or just sus
picion ol popish supcistition 01 mno\.ttion.
Aiul therefore we iudgc it lit .uul eon
\emcut that all chinches and chapels do
conform theiuselves in this p.uticula- to
the example ol the cathcihal 01 mother
chinches, saving always the gcncial liberty
lell to the bishop by law, dm ing the lime
ol administration ol the holy communion.
.\iul\\c dcclaic that this situation ot the
holy table doth uot imply tliat it is or
ought to be esteemed a true and piopei
altai, \\hcicm Whilst i-&gt; a^am ically saei i
liecil ; hut it is and may be called an altar
by us m that sense in \\hich the primitive
chinch c.illed il an altai, and in no otlicr.

u And because experience hath showed

us ho\\ irreverent the behaviour ot many
|&gt;eople is in many places, some leaning,
olheis casting their hats, and some siitino
upon, &gt;ome standing, and others sitting
under the communion table in time ot

ihvine service: for the avoiding of these
and the like abuses, it is thought meet and

convenient by this present synod that the
said communion tables in all chancels or
chapels be decent !v severed with tai
serve them tiom such or worse protanations.

" And because t he admin ist i at ion of hol\
things is to lu- pcifoimcd with all possibl
decencN and icxcicncc, therefore \\ e jiuls;
il In and convenient, according to the \\oul
ol the service honk established b\ act ol
pai liament, a : , eta, that all com

mimic. mis with all humbli- ie\eience shall
ihaw iu\u and appioach lo the holy tabk-.
t hiMi- lo iecei\ i- the divine mv stci ii s \\ Inch
have heretofore in some places been unfitly
can ied up and ilown b\ the minister,
unless il shall be otherwise appointed in
respecl ol the incapacity ot the place or
olhei Inconvenience, by the bishop himself
in his jurisdiction, and other ordinaries
icspcctively in theirs.

" And, lastly, \\hereas the church is the
house of lloil, iledicated to His hol\
worship, and therefore ought to mind us
both ot the gieatness and goodness ol His
divine majcstv : ccitain il is that the
acknowledgment thereof, not only inwardly
in our hearts, but also outwardly with our
bodies, must needs be pious in itself, pi otit
able unto us. and cditving unto others.
\Ye thcrctorc think il very meet and
behoveful. and heartily recommend it to
all good and well atfcctcd pei^ple, members
iM this church, that they be ready to tender
unto the Lord the said ackno\\ ledgment by
doing reverence and obeisance both at their
coming in and going out of the said
churches, chancels, or chapels, according to
the most ancient custom of the primitive
church in the purest limes, and of this
church also for many years ot the reign of
queen Kli/abcth. The reviving, there
of this ancient and laudable custom we
heartily commend lo the serious considera
tion of all good people, not with any
intention to exhibit any religious worship

1640.]

TIIK LON(; I AK UAMKNT ASSKMBLKS.

to tlu- communion table, tlu- cast, or
church, or am tiling therein contained in
so lining, or to perlorm tlu .ml gesture in
t In- celebration &lt;&gt;l tlu- 1 Iol\ Kueh.ii ist, upon
.my opinion ol .1 corporal pieseiice &gt;l the
body "I Jesus Christ on the holy table, &gt;i
in mystical elements, but only I&lt;M the

an epitome &lt;&gt;l the opinions which
generally guided Laud s hie and work. The
nth, " ( &gt;n some rites and eei em&lt; .nies,"
is, as mi.nht have been expected, the most
exhaustive. The lirst, " Com ei mn&lt;; re^al
power," scarcely covers the ground ol the
l.audian theory &lt;l the kind s prcronal ivc ;

ALTAR RAILS IN FRONT or- IMF. COMMUNION I-AIM.K IN TUP. I.AHY cirAi-Ki., GLOUCESi EK.
(These art htinwt to bt the /,/ , placed tkert by Lau.i. .SV.- /, 59 )

but it is perfectly clear on the doctrine of

non-resistance. U was drawn up, it must
be borne in mind, on the eve of the great
Civil War, this important Convocation
hcinjr closed on the 29th May, 1640 ; and
live- months later the "Long Parliament,"
under whose shadow the many deeds were
taiiied out which have made that age
memorable , had assembled.

The "Houses" met on the ;.rd November,
and on the nth StraHord was impeached.

ol (Joel s majesty, and to give
Him aloiu- tint honour and glory that is

diu- unto I Inn, .ind no otherwise : and in
tlu- piartuv or oini^^ion ol this rite, we
desire that I lie rule ol eliarity pri serilietl l&gt;y
the apostle max he observed, wliieli is, that
tlu-v \\liieli use tins riti-, di-spisi- not them
who use it not, ami they who use it not,
eondemn not those that use it."

We have relerred to these t\\o eanons at
some length, because they e.uistitnte as it

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1641.

On the 1 8th of the next month (Decem
ber), as might have been expected, Laud
was formally attacked in the House of
Commons. In the course of the debate,
the following words were used of the fallen
ecclesiastical minister of Charles I. by Sir
Harbottle Grimston. They give us some
index to the feelings which the now domi
nant Puritan party entertained respecting
him :

" We are now," said the speaker, " fallen
on that great man : look upon him as he is
in his highness, and he is the sty of all the
pestilential filth that hath affected the state
and government of this commonwealth ....
He is the man, the only man that hath
raised and advanced all those that, together
with himself, have been the authors and
causes of all our ruins, miseries, and
calamities we now groan under. Who
else but he only that hath brought the earl
of Strafford to all his great places and
employments ? a fit spirit and instrument
to act and execute his wicked and bloody
designs in these kingdoms. Who is it but
he only that brought secretary Windebanke
into this place of trust and service, the very
broker and pander of the whore of
Babylon ? Who is it, Mr. Speaker, but he
only, that hath advanced all our papist
bishops ? I shall name but some of them
. . . Bishop Wren, the last of all those
birds, but one of the most unclean ones.
These are the men that should have fed
Christ s flock ; but they are the wolves that
hath devoured them." The House decided
that the archbishop was a traitor, and he
was committed shortly after to the Tower
(February, 1641).

A great change had indeed passed over
England. We have already slightly sketched

the events which had been lea ling up
to it : the details do not belong to our
history. A Scotch army in the north was
ready to march southwards against the
king, whom they hated : there was no
army to oppose them. If Parliament were
dissolved, Charles would be at the mercy of
the Scots. Strangely enough, the Parlia
ment of Puritans, made up of men who
detested his theory of government and the
ministers who had helped him to carry his
theory into execution, was his only resource,
for it represented England, and could at
its pleasure vote or withhold supplies and
furnish troops to resist the imminent Scotch
invasion. It was indeed a strange, sad
position for king Charles I. Strafford, his
friend and minister, arraigned for high
treason ; Laud, his archbishop and confi
dant lately his minister, too a close
prisoner in the Tower, also accused of
treason ; and the king himself compelled
to look on, and for awhile to let things
take their course.

There was but little delay. The trial of
Strafford began before the end of the fol
lowing March, 1641. Every day we read
how the king and queen came down to
Westminster Hall, to listen to the trial of
their too-faithful friend and minister, and
sitting in a side box veiled with trelliswork,
listened to the Puritan version of the story
of the last eleven years, and to the part
which Strafford had borne in that reign of
absolutism. In spite of all the skill and
ability brought to bear on the case, how
ever, it was found impossible to bring home
to the great royalist minister the charge of
high treason. But the now dominant party
were determined Strafford should die. He
had sinned too deeply against all the

1641.]

EXECUTION OF STRAFFORD.

cherished Parliamentary traditions. The
impeachment, as it failed in its pur
pose, was dropped, and a bill of attainder
Avas substituted. After some hesitation
the lords concurred, and at last the king,
terrified into submission, signed the death
sentence of his truest and ablest friend. It
was the darkest act which stains Charles
Stuart s life ; for though Strafford was the
most dangerous living foe to the. liberties
of England, he had ever been the devoted
and loyal friend of Charles.

With all serenity and high courage, Straf
ford prepared to die. Only for a moment
he spoke with bitterness, when he said,
after hearing king Charles had abandoned
him to his fate and signed the warrant for
his execution : u Put not your trust in
princes." He wished to see and speak to
Laud once more before his death, but was
not permitted. The story of Strafford s
sad march to the block is told by Laud
himself in his pathetic history " of his trials
and -troubles," composed in the course of
his long captivity in the Tower. " His
lordship " (Strafford), wrote Laud, " being
to suffer on the Wednesday morning, did
upon Tuesday in the afternoon desire the
lord primate of Armagh, then with him, to
come to me, and desire me that I would not
fail to be at my chamber window, at the
open casement, the next morning, when he
was to pass by it as he went to execution ;
that though he might not speak with me,
yet he might see me and take his last leave
of me. I sent him word I would, and did
so. And the next morning, as he passed
by, he turned towards me, and took the
solemnest leave that I think was ever at
distance taken one of another ; and this in
the sight of the earl of Newport, then lord

constable of the Tower . . . and divers
other gentlemen of worth. . . . During
the time of our restraints we held no inter
course each with other ; yet Sir W. Balfore,
then lieutenant of the Tower, told me
often what frequent and great expressions
of love the earl made to me ... But I
leave that honourable person in his grave,
and while I live shall honour his memory."

It must have been a strangely moving
scene, this silent last farewell of the fallen
royalist ministers, only a few months before,
after the king, the foremost men in
England. Laud was approaching old age,
and was worn out by a life filled with
anxious work ; and, as he blessed his friend,
swooned away. Recovering, he said to the
bystanders, " that he hoped by God s assist
ance and his own innocency, that when he
came to his own execution the world
should perceive that he had been more
sensible of the lord Strafford s loss than of
his own ; and good reason it should be so,
for he (Strafford) was more serviceable to
the church than either himself or any of
all the churchmen had ever been." Heylin,
Laud s chaplain and biographer, thus com
ments : " It was indeed a gallant farewell
to so eminent and beloved a friend."

Weeks passed into months, two or three
years went by, and the old man who had
played so great a part on the broad stage
of English politics, who had wrought also
so many and, on the whole, beneficial
changes in the church of which he had
been so long the ruler, still languished in
his grim Tower prison. His many enemies
longed for his death, and indeed were
determined he should die, as Strafford had
died, on the scaffold ; but, as it had been
seen in Strafford s case, it was no easy

7 6

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1644.

matter to bring home to him the charge
of high treason. In many instances, on the
part of the nobler of the Puritan party,
the hate changed into pity at the sight of
the uncomplaining archbishop waiting for
death. It was felt he was a dangerous
prisoner, and at one period of his long
waiting, they say he might, had he pleased,
have escaped. He thought so himself; and
we read in his pathetic memoir : " Every
day an opportunity is presented to me, a
passage being left free, in all likelihood, for
this purpose, that I should take advantage
of it . . . I am almost seventy years old,
and shall I now go about to prolong a
miserable life, by the trouble and shame of
flying ? . . . . No ; I am resolved not to
think of flight, but continuing where I am
patiently, expect and bear what a good and
wise Providence has appointed for me, of
what kind soever it may be." Laud s
courage never failed him ; to the last he
was absolutely fearless. His most envenomed
foes confess this.

In the meantime, the great Civil War
dragged its slow length along with various
alternations of victory and defeat. Now
the king, now the Parliament, seemed for
a time to be in the ascendant. But the
alternation of success and failure grew less
and less frequent ; and it became gradu
ally manifest that the royalist party would
in the end be crushed under the ever
increasing weight and power of the Parlia
mentary forces. It was not until the early
spring of 1644 that the trial of Laud was
seriously taken in hand. There is little
doubt that the final pressure for his con
demnation came from Scotland, where Laud,
owing to his ill-judged efforts to bring about
the uniformity of religion in that country,

was especially an object of detestation. The
examination of the accused lasted several
months. Prynne,* his old enemy, had
ransacked the country for evidences of
treason, especially for unjust sentences
passed by the Courts of High Commission
and the Star Chamber. The archbishop
was charged also with introducing Popery
into the church. He had striven, too, said
his accusers, to suppress religious liberty.
But although religious questions were
mainly the groundwork of the charges, the
real guilt of Laud in the eyes of the Com
mons lay in his having been, with Straf-
ford, for so long a time the principal
minister of absolutism. For this there
was no forgiveness.

The old archbishop defended himself
throughout with extraordinary courage and
skill. The tribunal of the House of Lords,
by which he was tried, was a singularly"
careless and incompetent court. The
House of Lords, as constituted in 1644, was
only made up of twelve or thirteen peers
the small contingent who had sided with
the Parliamentary party ; and it is said
even of this small band, no one, except tht
speaker, lord Grey of Wark, paid the dis
tinguished accused the compliment o
listening to the weary pieces of accusatior
and defence. Some were present in tht
morning, some in the afternoon, coming
in and going out as they pleased. " T&lt;
give him his due," said his relentles
enemy Prynne, " he made as full an&lt;
gallant and pithy a defence of so bad a cause
and spake so much for himself, as it wa

* This able and fanatical Puritan had been on
of the chief sufferers at the hands of the arbitrar
and tyrannical Court of Star Chamber, where Lau
had sat as one of the principal members.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1645--

possible for the wit of man to invent, and
that with so much art, sophistry, vivacity,
oratory, audacity, and confidence, without
the least blush of acknowledgment of guilt
in anything, as argued him rather obstinate
than innocent, impudent rather than peni
tent, a far better orator and sophister than
Protestant or Christian, yet a truer son of
the church of Rome than of the church
of England."

In the end, the Lords hesitating to
find him guilty of treason, the Commons
followed the precedent in Straffbrd s case,
and decided the matter by an ordinance of
attainder. This was sent up to the Lords
towards the end of the November of the
" trial " year. The action of the Commons
was supported by a widely-signed petition
from the City of London praying for his
execution. Still the little company of
lords hesitated, and when they at last gave
way, only six are said to have voted for
Laud s death sentence. The ordinance of
attainder was finally ratified on the 4th
January, 1645, but a brief delay before the
final scene of the tragedy was allowed,
the execution being fixed for the loth of
the same month.

More than a year and a half before, in the
April of 1643, king Charles L, conscious of
the danger of his old friend and minister,
had sent him secretly a full pardon, signed
and sealed with the Great Seal of England,
to be handed in if necessary. After the
death sentence, Laud produced this ; but,
as might have been expected, the royal
pardon was contemptuously disregarded.
One more request was made by the illus
trious prisoner, that the usual treason
penalty of the gibbet, with its awful accom
paniments, might be exchanged for the less

degrading and more merciful death by
beheading. Though the Lords supported
the archbishop s request, it was at first
refused by the Commons; in fact, the hatred
and bitterness shown by the Puritan House
of Commons to the great churchman was
extreme. On fuller consideration, how
ever, this pitiful boon was granted, and
Laud was allowed to die by the axe.

A last and cruel affront, however, was-
shown to him. Laud had requested that
three of his chaplains might attend him in
his last moments ; but his enemies insisted
that only one of these Anglican divines
should be present, appointing two violent
Presbyterians in the place of the other two
selected by the archbishop. Did his enemies
dream that the courage and faith of the
great Anglican master would for an instant
waver before the wordy though earnest
exhortation of the Puritan teachers, or was
this last and useless insult merely a sense
less cruelty ? Little recked Laud, con
scious that he was writing a page in the
island story the deathless interest of which
no lapse of time was likely to dim. He
would show friend and foe how a Christian
prelate ought to die.

On the evening of the 9th January
the sheriff brought the warrant for the
execution to take place on the day
following. We are told that after Laud was
apprised of it, he supped as usual, and
then retiring to rest, slept calmly and
soundly. He had already carefully pre
pared and written down the solemn words
he hoped to be allowed to speak on the
scaffold ; and from this paper, as well as
from notes taken on the spot, the published
report which soon appeared was carefully
corrected.

I645-]

EXECUTION OF LAUD.

On Tower Hill, as might have been
expected, an immense throng was gathered
to see the awful pageant of the public
execution of an archbishop an archbishop,
too, who for years had played the part of
first minister of the crown. The very
scaffold was so thronged that the archbishop
with difficulty approached the block. One
simple incident connected with the vast
crowd must be told. Through the chinks
between the boards of the roughly put
together scaffold, the sufferer saw people
standing immediately beneath the fatal
block. He would have these removed, he
said, " lest his innocent blood should fall
on the heads of the people." Very cheer
ful, and even ruddy, in spite of the long
captivity, was Laud s countenance during
these last moments of his life ; so ruddy
that some thought he had painted it, lest
men should fancy his cheeks were blanched
with fear. But when the headsman lifted
it up after the fatal blow, the well-known
features were noticed by the bystanders to
have turned pale as ashes.

When he first mounted the scaffold, a
zealous Puritan the name of the rude
speaker has been preserved Sir John
Clotworthy, watching the serene courage of
the archbishop, asked him, " What is the
comfortablest saying which a dying man
would have in his mouth ? " "I desire to
depart and be with Christ,"* replied Laud.
" That is a good desire," said the Puritan ;
" but there must be a foundation for that
divine assurance." " No man can express
it," answered Laud ; " it is to be found
within." He then proceeded to speak to
the people. The paper in his hands, which

*The words of the archbishop were in the Latin
version, " Cupio dissolvi et esse cum Christo."

he had written previously, was after his
death given to king Charles I. at Oxford.
He told them that long had he been in
his race ; how he looked unto Jesus, his
Master would best know ; and at the end
of the race, he told them, he had found the
cross, a death of shame ... he was
going apace, as they could see, towards the
Red Sea [probably punning, as was much
the custom in religious addresses at that
time, upon the bloody end just before him],
and his feet were on the very brink of it
. . . he was not in love with this
passage through the Red Sea, for he had
the weakness and infirmity of flesh and
blood plentifully in him. . . He had
prayed that the cup of red wine might pass
from him ; but if not, God s will, not his,
be done. He dwelt for a minute on the
martyr s death through which some of his
predecessors had passed, though none
by such a death as his. He instanced
Elphege, who perished at the hands of the
Danes, and Simon Sudbury, under the
fury of a mob. St. Cyprian, too, had fallen
by the sword of persecutors. Many similar
examples could he have cited of the great
and good they were teaching him patience
only he hoped his cause, in heaven,
would look of another dye than the colour
put upon it here on earth. He mourned
over the condition of the Church of
England, which had become like a cloak
cleft into shivers . . . and at every
cleft profaneness or irreligion was rushing
in. He dwelt shortly upon the charge
brought against him of high treason.
Against these accusations he protested,
solemnly denying, in the presence of God
and His holy angels, that it had any foun
dation whatever. In his concluding words

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

[1645-

he strikingly said, he had been baptised
and born in the bosom of the Church of
England established by law ; in that pro
fession he had lived, and in that he had
come to die. What clamours and slanders
he had endured for labouring to keep
uniformity in the external service of God,
according to the doctrine and discipline of
the church, all men knew, and he had
abundantly felt. Then he added, " I have
done. I forgive all the world, all and every
of those bitter enemies which have perse
cuted me, and humbly desire to be
forgiven of God first, and then of every
man." After praying aloud, he went to
the executioner, and giving him a present
of money, said, " Here, honest friend, God
forgive thee, as I do, and do thine office
upon me in mercy." Giving him the sign
when to strike, he kneeled by the block,
and again prayed aloud, using these striking
and singular words : " Lord, I am coming
as fast as I can. I know I must pass
through the shadow of death before I can
come to see Thee. But it is but umbra
mortis a mere shadow of death, a little
darkness upon nature. But Thou by Thy
merits and passion hast broken through
the jaws of death." With a few more
words, praying God to bless England, after
a short silence, he cried aloud the words of
the sign agreed upon, u Lord, receive my
soul," the axe immediately fell, and all
was over.

No sooner was Laud dead, than a certain
reaction in his favour at once set in. His
dying speech or sermon was published,
and had considerable effect. It was deemed
important enough to be formally contra
dicted and refuted, before the month which

witnessed his death was run out. The
very ballad-mongers who had sung his
crimes and his disgrace, now sang his
merits and his martyrdom.* His remains,
on the day following his execution, were
reverently laid in the Church of All-
Hallows, Barking, followed by great multi
tudes of people. After the Restoration, the
coffin, containing what was mortal of Laud,
was brought to Oxford, and placed in a
vault under the altar of the chapel of
his own college of St. John s, between the
founder and his friend and successor in
the primacy, Juxon, who attended king
Charles on the scaffold at Whitehall.
" There it still rests ; and the college
which he loved so dearly and endowed so
generously, counts it her highest honour to
guard the bones of the greatest of her
sons." The coffin had on it a small brass
plate with the archbishop s arms and the
following graphic inscription : " In hac
cistula conduntur exuviae Gulielmi Laud,
Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, qui securi per-
cussus, immortalitem adiit die x Januarii,
setatis suse LXXII. Archiepiscopatus xii." f
How intensely king Charles I. felt the
execution of his dearest friend, Laud ; with
what feelings he regarded the shedding of
his blood, is well shown in a letter to the
queen, dated January 14, 1645, four days
after the tragedy on Tower Hill. " No
thing can be more evident than that
Strafford s innocent blood hath been one
of the great causes of God s judgement
upon the nation by a furious civil war,
both sides hitherto being almost equally
guilty " [Charles here recognises his share
of guilt in having consented to Strafford s

* W. H. Hutton : " William Laud," chap. vii.
t Simpkin on " Life and Times of Laud."

Till-. ( HURCH ( )! ENGLAND

[1641

death] ; " hut now this last ei yin^; hlood
| I .aild s] hein.n totally their-, I heliexe i! i
no pie Mimption heiealtei (&lt;i hnju- that the
h. Mid ol ju I u e mil t hi- !HM\ in upon tlinn
.nnl lighter ii|H&gt;n u , looking now ii|)oii 0111

i .in e, h.i\ in; , pa ed i tirough &lt;in laults."*

In tlu- loyal ie.n I ion "t t In- KY-loiatmn,
\\ liieh did |MI t i.il |ii 1 ice lot he memoi \ &lt;&gt;l
I ..Hid, I lenry \\ nation, who in H.- |)iih

n ihed the " Diary," .md tlu- " Hi tor} i

I he Aii hhi hop fl Tiouhle .md Ti i.il," hot h
\\ ritteii h\ I . .ind himself, in hi piel.u e,

:-i\ in.- utteram e i what \\.i generall} ii-lt

h\ the iinne I I iou&lt;j 1 1 1 I ill aiiion^ the An
gUl .in i him hinen nl hi t line, \\ell
" I n-L .anl U the most loitunate ti.insiet ion
(.1 my \\hole hie to h;i\e emitiihuted
heiein (hy the pnhln .itioii ol the .in h
hi .hop own \ V | it in.. .md ieeit.il nl the
1 1 ouhloir, i line ) t&lt;&gt; t he vindii .it inn ol t he

nieinoi \ .md i an e oi th.it in., i excellent
pn-i.ite .md Messed 111. u t\ i , to \\ hom i have
always p.nd .1 more especial veneration,

.1 In ml\ In-hex MIL; him to h.i\e l.iken up
and piosiviited I he he I and mO ! elleet n;il
method . . . and to ha\e had the
nohl, ,| , | in- IIP, i zealOUl and nio.t MIU vie
intention t he-ruin, towards n- estahli h
; he hi-.mt\ , the honour ;md the Ion e
..I ii-hiMon in th.it part ol the ( .ilholu
( him h (the ( him h &lt;&gt;| Kngland)."

In the COUne ol I ..md \\ \.\\, hi i Hoi i

to re tore image . pi&lt; ture . and taim-d

windows in i him he \\en- n-pi e-,ent ed

.1 lui h i reason, a being * ontrary t&lt;&gt; the

l.il un oi I .dwaid VI., and t he iii|inu t ionfl
ol h;h/.iheth. Hi- leluted the * hargCS
ea ,il\ , alliiminn that hi-.toi n ,il u-pu-M-nta
Were allowed in the " I lomilies," aiitl

* " I lie Kin:; Id l! (. )IIC&lt;MI. " &lt; (noted in &lt; i.u

iiiu-i 1 1 1 .1. &gt;i \ "t Qre&l ( i\ il \Y.U ," * -ii.i|&gt;

howed with ,L ,ieat lone, hy lelerrinj.- t&lt;
early &lt; him h hi tOT} , that images were not
ol i: ,I|MI id to t he pill posc-s of

upei tihoii ; and very nohly and eleaily

in tin- i oin Be oi his defence, -poken heion-

111 bittei enemies, tllll- -el loitll III n a on
lot heinn 90 e.n neSl in In eiidi a\nurs

c heaut \ and &lt;^i .u e to t he worship o|
Ahni^htN (iod and to the saeied l)iiililin;s
piovided hy the Chuieh ol Lii^land lor
holy woiship. " ( )| all di i .1 M ," ,nd
Laud, " I have CVCl hated a paLy in
leliLMon, well knowing that too olteii a
dead palsy md the dl-e.l-e, in the learllll
loiL rtluhie . ol ( i(,d and Hi judgment.
Evei inre I Came in plan- I l.ihomed
nothing more than th.it the external
puhlie \\ oi ship ol ( iod, too imn.li slighted
in mo. t pail . (.1 the kingdom, inioht he

: ved, and that with as niueli deeem -y
and uniformity as ini^ht he; hein^ still ol
opinion that unity eamiot lon^ eoiitmiie in
t he elmn h were uniloi niily shut out o| tlu
eliineh dooi . And I e\ ideiitK saw th;
the |)iihlie nenln t ,| ( ,,) , i \ u e in tl
out\\ aid laee ol it, and t he n.M \ 1\ n
man\ plaCC! dediiated to that seiyiee, h.
almost i a t a damp upon the 1 1 ue am
inwaid wi.ship ol (iod, whuh, u hile
live in the hody, needs external hel|

to kec-|) it in an\ \ i^our."
That Laud was ii&lt;j,ht in his concept ioi
ol \\ hat \\ a olel\ needed ill 1 he ( him I
o| LiiLdand, that he hroui;lit eonxutioi
ol then needs home to the he.n t ,
I he ma)oi ity ol Amdii an ehim hinen, IK
oiil\ ol his own day and lime, hut h
generations yet unhoi n, when he pei i -In
111 the hazelly on TOWC! I lill that Jaimai
nioi iiiiii- ol [645, the words o| the M liolarh
histoiian ol the Ci\ il \\ .u tell us quiet l\\

KM. I

Till-. ARCHBISHOP S VILWS ON K oMAMSM

wii honl i hetoric, without any attempt at
piaise or admiration : " Kvcry parish
church in the land still two centime
and .1 hall alter the years in which he
was at the height of his power presents
a spectacle \\ liu h reali-e hi , hope, .
Little as those \\lio sent Laud to the hlock
imagined it, there was a fruitful seed in his
teaching, which was not 1&lt;&gt; he smothered

in blood."

To charge Laud with a desire to
" K oinanisc " the Church ol Lii-dand \\ a
ever a lavourite and olten repealed a. . u .1
lion on the part ol his Puritan and
Presbyterian Iocs. We have alreadv, at
some little length, referred to his weighty
and most ahle treatise against the Jesuit,
Kislier, as tin lx M refutation of this
( liaise. At hi I rial lie aid, wit h COD idei
ahle fott e: "I have converted seveial "
(alludinn e pet ially to some distinguished
converts made duiini; the dispnt at ions in
the rei&lt;;n ol James I.) " | have taken
an oath against it, I have written a hook
a^aiir-t it, I ha\e held a contio\&lt;

nist it, I have heen twice offered a
&lt; animal hat and rein ed it, I have hei ii
twice in dangei of my life from a popish

plot, I ha\e endeavoured t&lt; reconcile the

Lutherans and the Calvinisls ; and, there-
lore, I have endeavoured t&lt;&gt; introduce

po|)el\ "

Verv uohl\ , and not a few in our o\vn
(lav and t hue, with their hroadei and more
lai n a&lt; hin^ ( omprehensixe \ ICWS re pci t
in;. , religion, will think very riohteou- l\ ,
Laud thus wrote ol the Church o| k oiue
as hein&lt;; a true church, in spite ol hei
grievous errors and aherrations. " .She

Tin- Great civil vv.-u-." (-h.-ip.

" ( ;.-i.
xxiv (1893).

never," wrote the wise pielale, "erred in
fundamentals, lor lundameiit aL are in the
ciced, and she denies it not. \\Yie shi
not a tine cliuich it weie h.ud with the
Chun h ol Kn^land, since horn hei " the
Mn^lish hishops (K-n\e iheu apostolical
in ession. She is I heieloie a tl lie hut
not an oil hodox chun h. SaK.it ion ma\
he lound in hei communion, and hei
leliLMon and oms are "lie in the ^leal

ntials. . . . AS to i he tiarge &lt;&gt;i

unchurchin.i; lorei^n I n-ic lanls, I ( cilainh

said generally, according to St. jeiome, // /

/) /.s//o/&gt; nn (Intrtli, and the preface to the
Hook ol ( )rdination 5Ct8 NM t h I hat I lu

tine, ordei came h m ihe Apo tie ."

I .and has hecii &lt; oiisideicd, ei nuieoii \\
enough, to have heen a di\ me &lt;-l nai H&gt;\\
and exclusive views. In his striving altei
a unilormity of vv&lt;rship lor all who owed
allegiance to the hai disli crOWH, he no
douht made ,LJ,ra\e and iiuhapp\ mistal.. .

notahlv m his Interference with Scotland

lie underrated the /eal and eain. -in.
(,f I milanisiii e\en in Ln^land, and was
strangely ignorant ol the o\ i \\ helmin&lt;;
leehno m lavoiir of Prc h\ hi lain an in
Scotland, lie was a hettei SCholai in the
hidtOry ol the clmrch \\herein a Jerome
taught ot an AthanaSlU WTOte, than m I lu
st ory &lt;&gt;l Scotland, where John Knox lue.l
I he uuainnat ions and st M led t he IKMI t o|
the indomitable people win. dwell amoun
the mountains and \alle\s north ol the
Tweed. The unilotiiulv ol uoi hip
throughout the island, the &lt; IK n died idea!
of Laud, was an ideal heaulilul indeed,

* Land was not quite accurate here, Theapoi

| ( ,li( ;il |U( .sion of the hi .li -i- 1 ; "I DM- ( hun h ,,|
l.-uifl is nnlv in I . ul derived fnun KOIIH I In-
Celtic Cliiircli lias ;i sh;ur in it

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

though, as things were, utterly impossible.
But it is a curious mistake to accuse him
of narrowness or intolerance. Indeed,
Laud may be considered the precursor
of the broad Catholic school of religious
thought, rigidly orthodox thought, which
among earnest cultivated religious men is
ever making slow but sure progress among
us ; that school which, while firmly holding
on to the great fundamental truths taught
in the New Testament, the precious
treasure of the church in the first days
of Christianity, is very sparing in its con
demnation of other men, forgetting to
use the language of condemnation where
Christ has not uttered it. In his
* Conference with Fisher," we find Laud
asserting boldly that it was unnecessary to
require assent to more than the funda
mental articles of the Christian faith. The
following words are remarkable, and, as
a specimen of the breadth of Laudian
teaching, should be ever carefully remem
bered : The Church of England never de
clared that every one of her articles is fun
damental in the faith ; for it is one thing
to say, No one of them is superstitious or
erroneous ; and quite another to say, Every
one of them is fundamental, and that in
every part of it, to all men s belief." In
another place Laud wrote : " It was im
possible to set bounds to the divine com
passion, nor will I ever take upon me to
express that tenet or opinion, the denial of
the foundation only excepted, which may
shut any Christian, even the meanest, out
of heaven." *

Chillingworth, the great latitudinarian,
as he is often termed, was a godson of
Laud, through whose persuasion Chilling-
* Laud s Works, ii., page 60.

worth returned to the Anglican com
munion after his perversion by the Jesuit
Fisher.* He was much under Laud s in
fluence, and it has been supposed, not
without reason, that Chillingworth s famous
work, " The Religion of Protestants," a
masterly protest against the boundless
dogmatism of Rome, was undertaken at
Laud s instigation. Certainly, many of
the latter s thoughts contained in the
" Conference with Fisher," reappear in
"The Religion of Protestants." It was
in Chillingworth s book that the notable
passage occurs : u Take away those walls
of separation, and all will be quickly over.
Take away this persecuting,
burning, cursing, damning of men for not
subscribing to the words of men, for the
words of God require of Christians only
to believe Christ, and to call no man
master, but Him only ; let those leave
claiming infallibility that have no title to
it. ... Christians," he writes, " must
be taught to set a higher value upon those
high points of faith and obedience wherein
they agree, than upon those matters of less

* Dying in the midst of the Civil War at Chi-
chester, in 1644, this eminent writer was buried in
the cathedral cloisters. Chichester was then in the
hands of the Parliamentarians. During the pro
gress of the last rites, a minister of the assembly,
Francis Cheynell, a bitter Puritan and controver
sialist, but who had showed no little kindness to
Chillingworth during his last illness, tossed the
dead man s famous work, " The Religion of
Protestants," into the open grave, crying out
"Get thee gone, thou accursed book which hath
seduced so many precious souls ! get thee gone,
thou corrupt, rotten book ; earth to earth, dust to
dust. Get thee gone into the place of rottenness,
that thou mayest rot with the author and see
corruption." Cheynell s name is preserved from
the oblivion to which he consigned Chillingworth s
great book, through this strange, violent action at
his friend s graveside.

ARCHBISHOP LAUD.

(From the picture by I an Dyck at Lambeth Palace. Reproduced by special permission oj His Grace the Archbishop

of Canterbury.)

1627 1641-]

LAUD S INFLUENCE ON CHARLES I.

moment wherein they differ, and under
stand that agreement in those ought to be
more effectual to join them in one com
munion, than their differences in other
things of less moment to divide them."

Without by any means asserting that
Laud subscribed to and was in agreement
with all the conclusions arrived at by the
" latitudinarian," there is no doubt but that

One service of priceless moment was
performed by Laud, in the long and inti
mate friendship between Charles I. and
the great Anglican prelate. The king had
learned a lesson of measureless importance
from his friend and religious guide, which
he never forgot. In the midst of all the
vacillations which have so perplexed and
disturbed even his warmest apologists

D(f 1 644;

ENTRY OF LAUD S BURIAL IN THE REGISTER OF ALL HALLOWS CHURCH, BARKING.

Laud s teaching largely harmonised with
Chillingworth s, and was emphatically broad
and tolerant. That he loved the Church
of England with a great, even with a pas
sionate love, is indisputable : that he
thought it the purest and best of com
munions is clear ; that he endeavoured to
amend its defects, and to make it beautiful
and winning as it was strong and pure, his
life-work shows us ; but at the same time
Laud never denied that salvation might be
won by earnest Christian souls living and
worshipping outside her charmed pale.

Charles clung to the Church of England
and its immemorial traditions, u and when
the last struggle came, he still refused to
save his life, as there can be but little
doubt he might have done, by surrendering
and deserting the church of his fathers."*
In the main, the somewhat startling con
clusion arrived at in the above quoted words
is accurate ; though the vacillation, the sad
prevarication, the general lack of truth and

* See Hutton : " William Laud," chap. viii. ; who
quotes Von Ranke : "History of England," ii.,
page 466.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

[1646.

unswerving rectitude of purpose so trans
parent in all the later dealings of Charles I.
with the Parliamentarians and Scottish
leaders, have partially obscured the king s
changeless determination on this point.
The teachings of Laud, pressed home in the
many hours of an intimate friendship lasting
many years, had sunk deep into the heart
of Charles Stuart, who, with all his errors
and grave faults, was a religious man ; and
sooner than act deliberately contrary to the
will of God, he preferred to lose his crown
and even his life. The death of Laud on
the scaffold made Charles more determined
than ever not to abandon the Church of
England and episcopacy, although he must
have seen in the years 1645-1646 that
unless he chose to abandon the church,
his cause was a hopelessly lost one.

In this steadfast adherence to the great
church of his forefathers ; in rejecting
Presbyterianism, the acceptance of which,
while it would have broken up and dis
solved the church, would most probably
have saved his crown and life, Charles I.
was acting in open opposition, not only to
the advice of most, if not all, of the friends
and counsellors about him, but even con
trary to the repeated and urgent advice of
his queen, whom he tenderly loved, and
to whose words he ever loved to listen.
About a year and a half after the death
of Laud, when things were growing
month by month more gloomy for the
royalists, the queen, who had already
taken refuge in her native France, sent her
trusted ministers, Jermyn, Culpepper, and
Ashburnham, to plead with Charles to
come to an understanding with the Scots
and to accept Presbyterianism. Charles s

words in reply are memorable. " If Pres
byterianism were granted," he wrote, " the
dependency of the church from the crown
would be taken away, which, let me tell
you, I hold to be of equal consequence to
that of the military, for people are
governed by pulpits more than the sword
in times of peace. . . . Now for the
theological part, I assure you that the
change would be no less and worse than if
popery were brought in ; for we should
have neither lawful priests, nor sacraments
duly administered, nor God publicly
served, but according to the foolish fancy
of every idle parson ; but we should have
the doctrine against kings fiercelier set up
than amongst the Jesuits."* This im
portant and decisive communication to his
queen s ministers in France is dated July,
1646.

In the March previously, in a letter to
Henrietta Maria of a more private nature,
he had even more clearly and positively
written to the same effect. " For the
Scots, I promise thee to employ all possible
pains and industry to agree with them, so
that the price be not giving up the Church
of England, with which I will not part on
any condition whatever. . . . yielding
to the Scots in this particular, I should
both go against my conscience and ruin my
crown." f It is scarcely too much to affirm,
that through his long influence upon
Charles I. s mind, an influence which
survived the archbishop s death, " Laud
saved the English Church."

* Letter of king Charles I. to Queen Henrietta
Maria s ministers, quoted by Gardiner, " History of
the Great Civil War, chap, xliii.

f The King to the Queen, March 3, 1646. Ibid,
chap. xl.

CHAPTER LXV.

THE PURITANS.

Spirit of the Laudian Church George Herbert Antagonistic Puritan Feeling The Puritan Spirit
and its Power Causes of its Unpopularity Examples John Hampden John Milton Character
of the Earlier Type of Puritanism as seen in Him His Earlier Poems Gradual Change under
the Absolute Government of Charles and Laud Last Years, after the Restoration " Paradise
Lost and Regained," and " Samson Agonistes " John Bunyan, as a Puritan of the People The
" Pilgrim s Progress" Its Typical Character Oliver Cromwell His Family Life The Puritan
Consciousness of God Cromwell s Soldiery His Ferocity Pictures of the Man His Public
Work Death The Rise and Fall of Puritanism Its Abiding Influence in the Church.

EUD has been charged with intro
ducing a spirit into the Church of
England, which in its reverence
for the outward, in its devotion to
forms and ceremonies, in its deep long
ing to join the religion of the present
with the religion of the past, Anglicanism
with medievalism, went far beyond the
thoughts and aims of the school of
Ridley and of Cranmer ; beyond even
the wide comprehensiveness of Elizabeth,
Cecil and Parker, and the first group of
the reformers of the great queen s reign.
To a certain extent this is true, and the
same spirit in a greater or less degree was
observable in Whitgift, in Hooker, and
especially in Andrewes. This difference
was owing in great measure to the natural
dread which lived in the earlier English
reformers, of anything which might seem
to approve, or even to condone, the super
stitions which marred and defaced the pre-
Reformation Church of England. As time
went on, however, such dread among the
makers of the reformed church grew less
and less, and the passionate desire for con
tinuity between the present and the past,
ever on the increase, enormously influenced

men like Whitgift and Hooker, Andrewes
and Laud.

This strong feeling, this passionate desire
among the rank and file of pious churchmen
not to lose hold of association with sacred
things rites, ceremonies, places which
had been the solace and charm of religious
men and women for ages, is well exempli
fied in such men as George Herbert,, the
beloved parson of Bemerton ; so loved that
men say when his church bell tolled for
daily prayers, the wearied toiler in the
field, like the pathetic figures in the pic
ture of the "Angelas " by Millet, would rest
a moment from labour and would mutter
a short prayer before again grasping the
spade or the plough. To George Herbert
and Herbert was a representative of a
vast crowd of holy and humble religious
men in England the awful mystery of
the sacraments, the symbolism of Catholic
ceremony and rites, were the true nourish
ment for devotion. The enormous popu
larity of the great ceremonialist, as Herbert
had been somewhat unkindly termed, is
evinced in the almost incredible sale of his
devotional poem, " The Temple " : twenty-
thousand copies are said to have been

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16301632.

disposed of in a few years after publication
a strange number indeed in those days !
To Herbert every part of a church had
its teachings, each detail to him possessed
its divine symbolism. He was the faithful
pupil of the mediaeval monk-architect, who
wrote so deftly his story on the pages
of his book of stone. There was no little
danger, men like Herbert thought, of this

" Mark you the floore ? That square and speckled
stone,
Which looks so firm and strong,

Is Patience ;

And the other, black and grave, wherewith each,
one

Is chequered all along,
Humilitie.

" The gentle rising, which on either hand
Leads to the Quire above,
Is Confidence ;

GEORGE HERBERT S MEDLAR TREE AT BEMERTON.

chapter and other similar chapters of
church teaching, being for ever wiped out
by the force of the reaction of the Refor
mation against superstition. A grave and
irreparable loss it would indeed have been,
if the church had ceased altogether to
appeal to outer associations, such as archi
tecture, music, symbolism, as an important
form of nourishment for devotion a form
that indisputably appeals to many hearts
whom a bare spiritualism, however real,
fails to find. To Herbert, for instance, the
very pavement of a church was symbolic.
He wrote the lines, well known to some

But the sweet cement, which in one sure band
Ties the whole frame, is Love
And Charitie."

"The Church Floore."

The parson of Bemerton ardently loved
sacred music. Twice a week he would
indulge himself with a visit to the neigh
bouring cathedral of Salisbury, and he
thus exquisitely describes the effect of the
choir on his mind and body :

"Sweetest of sweets, I thank you; when dis
pleasure

Did through my bodie wound my minde,
You took me thence, and in your house of pleasure
A daintie lodging me assigned."

"Church Mtisich."

9 o

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16301632.

From the serene height of devotion, quick
ened by such sights and sounds in his
cherished cathedral, Herbert, who in early
days was credited with some ambition,
could afford to look with sorrowful pity
upon the most exalted of human beings :

great storm, and who longed with a great
longing to see the quiet restoration of
much that was lovely and beautiful, of much
that was really helpful to true devotion.
To not a few minds in England, religion
was ever being presented under a some-

JSP

BEMERTON CHURCH.

* Now I in you without a bodie move,
Rising and falling with your wings,
We both together sweetly live and love,
Yet say sometimes, God help poore Kings! "

And Herbert of Bemerton was a type of
many a devout and earnest parish priest of
the first half of the seventeenth century,
an example of those quiet thoughtful
churchmen who, while loyal to the Refor
mation, were pained and grieved at the
havoc brought about in the course of the

what cold and bare aspect. Laud was
without doubt strongly supported by an
important school of thought, which since
the early days of the Elizabethan settle
ment had been slowly but surely growing
up in England.

But while what is called " high Angli
canism " found a ready response in many
English hearts ; while confessedly much
that is beautiful and true and real was
expressed in what Hooker so wisely and

THE PURITAN SCHOOL.

temperately formulated in his undying
treatise, in the life preached by Andrewes
and sung by George Herbert, in the
stately service insisted upon by Laud;
the historian of that eventful age would
be one-sided and unjust if he did not
dwell with unfeigned admiration, an
admiration often coloured with sorrow,
on another aspect of religion equally as
earnest, equally real, presented to the men
who lived in the seventeenth century.
Thoughtful religious Englishmen in that
century were not all " high Anglicans."
Indeed, one famous historian* does not
hesitate to say he was writing of the
famous group of men who ranged them
selves in opposition to Charles I. s unhappy
dream of absolutism u Either in con
scious act, or in clear tendency, the far
greater part of the serious thought and
manhood of England had declared itself
Puritan" Such a sweeping assertion
is certainly exaggerated, but it has a
basis of truth in it ; for there is no doubt
that in the reign of the first two Stuarts
the Puritan ranks included many of the
noblest and most serious souls in England.
A wave of intense religious feeling had
passed over the country. We have
already alluded to it, and ascribed it
largely to the overwhelming influence
which the English Bible, read so eagerly
and with such intense interest after it
became, through the medium of the noble
translation of Tyndale and his companions,
under standed of the people, and through
the medium of the printing press multiply
ing its thousands and tens of thousands
of cheap copies, procurable by the people.
The English Bible had permeated the
* Thomas Carlyle.

entire nation, and had affected the people
as no book in the world had ever affected
a nation before. We have seen how, in
this religious England, all through the
Reformation period, there was ever a con
siderable and influential party, specialty
influential because of their earnestness,
who were discontented with the middle
course, the via media Anglic ana, traced
out by the English thought-leaders. These
longed for a more pronounced Protest
antism than that which satisfied Cranmer
and Ridley, and even Latimer ; more
pronounced than the Protestantism which
was the outcome of the Elizabethan com
promise and settlement. Cranmer and
Parker, Elizabeth and Cecil, still more
Whitgift and Hooker, still more Andrewes
and Laud, in the eyes of these Puritans,
were too favourable to medievalism. Rites,
ceremonies, usages, which these extreme
Protestants looked on as superstitious,
even in some cases as idolatrous, were
allowed to linger on in the " use " of the
Church of England, were even regarded
with ever-increased favour.

This section of Englishmen, although
not as a rule, until political circumstances
stirred up the great Rebellion, openly
disloyal to the Established Church, were
nevertheless discontented with it, and lived
somewhat apart from its life. They be
came known as Puritans. Some were, of
course, what we should term moderate
Puritans ; others intensely, perhaps fanatic
ally in earnest. As examples of the
more moderate we will presently paint
the portraits of Hampden and Milton
in his earlier years ; of the extremer
section we will sketch John Bunyan
and Oliver Cromwell.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

As a whole, the Puritan party, in the
years preceding the great Rebellion, re
garded religion their form of religion
as the one paramount object of life.
They felt what only a few enthusiasts had
ever felt before, that " God was with them
in every incident of life ; they heard the
authentic voice of God in every hour of
existence. They saw Satan in everything
evil, and heard the voices of devils in
all that was harmful, vicious, or unjust.
If they took counsel of each other of their
own judgment, they literally believed that
God and His angels prompted every
thought. If one seemed to them just
and useful, he was beloved of God ; if one
seemed to do harm, he was hated of God.
If they were undecided, they sought God.
If they felt confidence, they had found God ;
if they felt hopeless, they had lost God.
. . . . Now that which in our day
devout men and women come to feel in
their earnest moments of prayer, the
devout Puritan felt as a second nature, in
his rising up and his lying down, in the
market-place and in the home, in society
and business, in Parliament, in council, and
on the field of battle. He felt in the full
tide of daily life what pious men now feel
on their knees and on their death-bed." :

On first thoughts it would seem strange
that these men did not carry all before
them. In the earlier years of the great
Rebellion, as a matter of fact they did.
Pitted against the men of the religious
compromise, of course they would prevail,
with their terrible earnestness and immu
table confidence. But the historian who
chronicles their rapid rise in the following

* Frederic Harrison :
chapter ii.

Oliver Cromwell,"

pages, has to tell the story of their still
more sudden fall. The causes of the fall
of Puritanism are easy to discover. In
their brief day of power they suddenly
split into two opposing factions ; the one
adopting " Presbyterianism " as their form
of religious government, a spiritual tyranny
unbearable and generally hateful to the
public mind ; the other choosing in pre
ference to Presbyterianism a religious
freedom under the name of " Independ
ents," which encouraged and developed
in many cases a wild licence of practice
and teaching. The Puritan party, thus
hopelessly divided, the one section bitterly
hating the other, of course could not
endure, and its consequent disruption
was more rapid than its rise.

Another reason for the fall of Puritanism
was its complete failure to suit itself to
the manners and customs, to the tastes and
inclinations of the people at large. The
Puritan teaching was too strict, too aus
tere, too contemptuous of human weakness,
to permanently rule a great nation. u Men
missed the cakes and ale, the dance round
the May-pole, the open theatre, and all
the various modes of enjoyment which
they had loved well, if not always wisely ;.
that was a seriousness in the Puritan mind
which deepened in lesser men into con
genial sourness."* One grievance was
especially felt among the people viz.
the stern elimination on the Sunday of
everything which might make the holy-
day bright and cheerful. The Puritans
identified the Christian Sunday with the
Jewish Sabbath, transferring to the one
the stern laws of observance peculiar to

* Gardiner : " Puritan Revolution," chap, ix
section iv.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

the other, and enforced, too, by very stern
and practical disciplinary measures.*

There is no doubt that considerable
laxity in the observance of the Sunday
existed both in the pre - Reformation
and reformed Church of England, as we
see it still in continental countries ;
and the minds of many of the earnest
religious men of the seventeenth century
were bent upon enforcing a more solemn
keeping of the Lord s day. Considerable
offence was given to the Puritans by the
issue of the " Book of Sports " by king
James L, in which certain games were re
commended as lawful and even desirable.
The Sunday, indeed, had come to be re
garded as little more than one among the
holy days of the church. The popularity of
the Bible opened the eyes of many to see
how that one sacred day of the seven had
been esteemed by the ancient people of the
Lord ; but it was among the errors of the
Puritans that they ever wished to bind too
heavy burdens upon the necks of the rank
and file of men, and amongst these burdens
an exaggeratedly austere view of the
sanctity of the Sunday must be reckoned.
With its many virtues, its nobleness, its
striving after purity and goodness, Puri
tanism can never be said to have been
really popular or loved among the people.
It was too hard, too cheerless, too rigid

* The illustration on p. 93 represents two golfers
found in play on the Sabbath, and made to do
public penance in the "seat of repentance," with
balls and (broken) implements on the ground before
them. Of such discipline there are various records
in the literature of the game. This " seat of re
pentance" is carefully preserved at the town kirk
of St. Andrew s. The illustration also shows the
sack-cloth gown or coat worn by such delinquents,
which is likewise preserved at the above-mentioned
kirk.

and unbending. It was not adapted foi
the religious life of the majority of the
people, whose sympathies it never gained,
and so it perished apparently from among
us ; but not until it had done its work.

Yet the Puritanism, which was so great
a power in the first half of the seventeenth
century, speaks as with a dead language to
us now. One of its ablest admirers* thus
writes of it he is speaking of the great Par
liament in the days of Charles I. listening to
the Puritan divines preaching before them
with " rapt earnestness, as to an indisput
able message from Heaven itself." These
sermons, u in spite of printers, are all grown
dumb ! In long rows of little dumpy
quartos, gathered from the bookstalls,
they indeed stand here bodily before us;
by human volition they can be read, but
not by any human memory remembered
they have become a weariness to the soul
of men. They are dead and gone, they
and what they shadowed ; the human soul,
got into other latitudes, cannot now give
harbour to them. . . . Behold, they are
become inarticulate quartos ; spectral ; and
instead of speaking do but screech and
gibber ; all Puritanism has grown in
articulate ; its fervent preachings, prayings,
pamphleteerings are sunk into one indis
criminate moaning hum, mournful as the
voice of subterranean winds. . . . The
age of the Puritans is not extinct only and
gone away from us, but it is as if fallen
beyond the capabilities of Memory herself ;
it is grown unintelligible, what we may
call incredible. Its earnest Purport awakens
now no resonance in our frivolous hearts.
We understand not even in imagination,

* Carlyle : " Oliver Cromwell s Letters and
Speeches," Introduction.

WHAT THE PURITANS ACCOMPLISHED.

not one in a thousand of us, what it ever
could have meant. It seems delirious, de
lusive." The memory of Puritanism which
remains among us is the cant, the vulgarity,
the hypocrisy, the cunning of its protessors,
as mirrored in the press and stage plays of
the years which followed the restoration
of the monarchy and the church. Every
child student of English history is familiar
with the ridiculous phraseology of the
Puritan conversation, with the curious
adaptation among themselves of Scripture
names, which to us would seem blasphemous
if they were not absurd. The nasal twang,
the stiff and hideous dress, the studied
contempt not only for all popular amuse
ments and diversions, but even for all ac
complishments and ordinary learning, are
habitually associated with Puritanism.

Too often teacher and scholar alike forget
what these now despised religionists effected
in their day of power ; how they not only

first in good earnest saw in what the future
strength of the great island power consisted.
The Puritan of the seventeenth century
was no mere fanatic ; he was a great
power, a mighty living influence in Eng
lish history.

In sketching the portraiture of three or
four typical men of these children of the
Reformation, we will take first, examples
of the more moderate and thoughtful of
them. We have an admirable instance
of this moderate school of Puritanism in
John Hampden, country gentleman, states
man, and soldier. In his earlier years this
typical Puritan was only known to his
county as a high-principled, honourable
squire, careful in the discharge of the few
public duties which fell to his lot. A
keen sportsman, fond of society and manly
exercises, on a sudden, Clarendon tells us,
a change passed over the popular Bucking-

rescued England at home from a form of hamshire gentleman : the great wave of

government which, had it been established
among us, would have surely paralysed all
real national progress, while abroad they
made the name and flag of England for
midable among the nations of the earth ;
but that it was the Puritans who secured to
England that wonderful system of parlia
mentary government, which has ever since
been the wonder and admiration of all
Continental peoples. It was verily these
stern, grave, uncompromising religionists

Puritanism reached him. "From a life
of great pleasure and licence, he retired to
extraordinary sobriety and strictness, to a
more reserved and melancholy society. n
After the great change in his life the same
keen observer goes on to say, " he pre
served his own natural cheerfulness and
vivacity, and above all a flowing courtesy
to all men."

His known uprightness, his reputation
for learning, his urbanity and kindness of

who first taught England her surpassing heart, and perhaps above all, his character

greatness as a maritime power. In the hour as an earnest religious man, gave him a

of her great peril, this thought first dimly great and ever-increasing influence in his

occurred to Elizabeth and her sea heroes ; own county ; and when the unpopular

Strafford, in his often mistaken, but far- and illegal tax of ship-money was levied

reaching policy, aimed at the same goal ; but
it was the Puritan, Oliver Cromwell, who

in the inland counties, Hampden s formal
resistance aroused the country generally,

9 6

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16361643

and men began to see clearly the nature
of the government policy. The cause,
it is true, was decided by a majority of
the judges against Hampden, but Went-
worth s bitter comment upon Hampden s
action "I wish Mr. Hampden and
others to his likeness were well whipt into
their right senses" showed how well the
great royalist minister gauged the dan
gerous character of the resistance of such
a man.

From this time forward the events of
the great Puritan s life belong to the
history of England. The estimate formed
of him by the far-sighted minister was an
accurate one. Clarendon tells us how the
adverse judgment in the famous ship-
money case u proved of more advantage
and credit to the gentleman condemned
than to the king s service." He became
the most popular of the opposition leaders,
and his " rare temper and modesty "
gained him respect and admiration even in
the ranks of his enemies. In the discus
sions of the Parliament which immediately
preceded the outbreak of hostilities between
Charles I. and the legislature, he was dis
tinguished as one of the most formidable
debaters. Again to quote Clarendon s
estimate of the famous Puritan chieftain :
" He was of an industry and vigilance
not to be tired out or wearied by the
most laborious, and of parts not to be
imposed upon by the most subtle and
sharp. . . . the eyes of all men were
fixed upon him as their patrice pater
(father of the country), and the pilot that
must steer the vessel through the tempests
and rocks which threatened it. And I am
persuaded his power and interest at that
time were greater to do good or hurt

than any man s in the kingdom, or that
any roan of his rank hath had at any
time ; for his reputation for honesty
was universal, and his affections seemed
so publicly guided that no corrupt or
private ends could bias them.
He was indeed a very wise man and of
great faith, and possessed with the most
absolute spirit of popularity, and the most
absolute faculties to govern the people,
than any man I ever knew."

When the terrible Civil War began in
real earnest, the Puritan statesman, whose
wise conduct during the first struggles
between the king and the Parliament,
that preceded the stern arbitrament of the
sword, had been marked .with sobriety
and earnestness, with a fervent desire to
arrange such terms between the king and
the House as both parties could accept with
honour, no longer hesitated ; and seeing
with the deepest concern that the life and
death struggle for popular liberty could no
longer be avoided, took up his sword, and
accepting a colonel s commission in the
Parliamentary army, raised a regiment in
his own county of Buckingham. His
regiment of infantry, distinguished by
their green uniform, was noted as one of
the most efficient in the early days of
the Civil War, and its colonel as one of
the bravest and most distinguished of the
parliamentary officers.

Alas for both sides ! that beautiful life
was too soon cut off. In a fierce but com
paratively unimportant skirmish with
prince Rupert at Chalgrove Field, Hamp
den s force was victorious, but their leader
was mortally wounded. Half-fainting,,
with his head bowed, and his hands resting
on his horse s neck, he slowly rode out of

MR. JOHN HAMPDEN.

the melee ; his life-work was done, and with almost his last breath he declared,

Hampden knew it. In great agony, but that though he disliked the government

still with his spirit undaunted, he rode of the church, yet he agreed witn the

from the field to Thame. His deadly church in all essential matters of doctrine,

wounds were dressed, but from the first His mind continued clear to the last,

JOHN HAMPDEN.
(From Houbrakeris Illustrious Heads" 1740.)

there was no hope. He wrote several
letters to the central government in Lon
don on public matters, and then with a
high and serene courage, the Puritan pre
pared for death. He received the sacra
ment, we read, from the hands of a
minister of the Church of England ; and

and the bystanders could hear him in
his sufferings praying for the cause for
which he was dying. " Lord Jesus," he
said, " receive my soul ; O, Lord, save

my country ; be merciful to " but

the object of the final prayer was never
known. . Was it not, probably, Charles

9 8

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1620 1640.

Stuart ? the king against whom he was in
arms, but whom he would have tried to
save had his life, so precious to both sides,
been prolonged.*

John Milton in whom his own age
curiously failed to see what they possessed
gives us another and striking instance
of the highest type of Puritanism. His
career is admirably suited for our purpose,
for it stretched over the entire period of
what may be termed the Puritan ascend
ancy. He was born in 1608, and he lived
some years after the Restoration. His
boyhood and early manhood were passed
in a time when Puritanism was becoming
a mighty power and a far-reaching in
fluence in the land. His middle age was
contemporaneous with the period of its
exercising supreme power amongst us.
His old age was passed in those years
when Puritanism had fallen into the
deepest disrepute, and was seemingly,
though not really, extinct.

His life may be divided into three
periods. In the first he played the part
of a typical Puritan scholar, thinker, and
writer, of one who had attained some

* So Macaulay, in his well - known essay on
" Hampden." Mr. Gardiner, however " History
of the Great Civil War," chap. viii. (note on page
153) does not accept the tradition of the "Last
prayer" of the great Puritan given above He
believes it to have been put into Hampden s
mouth by a later writer. Be this how it may,
the question does not affect the estimate formed
above of the rare nobility of the man. Mr. Gar
diner s summary of his character is one of un
grudging admiration. He dwells on " the impres
sion which Hampden made on his contemporaries.
Friend and foe," he says, "are of one mind in
recognising his power. A thoroughly loyal man,
without even the infirmity of ambition, his first and
last thought was his duty to his country."

considerable fame and reputation a fame
and reputation, however, utterly incom
mensurate with his surpassing merits. In
the second, as Latin secretary to Cromwell,
he was ever at the centre of public affairs ;
nothing passed, nothing was done, without
Milton seeing it, watching it, being privy
to it, as the friend, though apparently
never the confidant or adviser of the
absolute master of the destinies of Eng
land, Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector.
In the third period of that marvellous life,
blind, poor, neglected, in the deepest dis
grace, he wrote that for Avhich his life had
been one long and careful preparation,
which has been well termed the great
epic of Puritanism, " Paradise Lost " and
" Paradise Regained," now as then the
chief glory of the splendid series of English
religious " songs " a series stretching
over a period, roughly, of some thirteen
hundred years, from the days of Caedmon
and Cynewulf in the seventh century, to
the days of Browning and Tennyson in
the nineteenth.

We spoke of him as the typical Puritan
scholar, between the years 1620 (when he
was about twelve years old) and 1640-1,
the date of the commencement of the
civil wars. Everything connected with
his training was Puritan, but in the
noblest, truest sense, before the bitterness
of conflict had robbed Puritanism of its
loftier features ; before it became that
exaggerated, austere, sour, and somewhat
repulsive form of religion with which we
are best acquainted. Brought up in that
home atmosphere of the love of things
honourable and of good repute, of detes
tation of all that was low and base and
mean ; in that serious, thoughtful, though

1620 1640.]

EARLY LIFE OF MILTON.

not uncheerful Puritan house of his father,
the young Milton early gave fair promise
of his future greatness. From the age
of twelve, he tells us himself, he became
deeply interested in study, and even at
that early age would sit up over his books
until midnight. His course of reading
was wide and various, and he gradually
acquired a large acquaintance with foreign
tongues ; Greek and Latin and Hebrew
were supplemented with French and Italian.

In Spenser, who only preceded him a
very few years, and in Shakespeare, almost
his contemporary, he took the keenest
pleasure and delight. Spenser, in his
early days, was his model ; he longed to
imitate the great Elizabethan master of
English song. But in common with all
who received their training in the Puritan
school, the Bible was his constant com
panion, and he became thoroughly familiar
with its expressions, its pictures, its
thoughts, its hopes and lofty aspira
tions. Our great poet was steeped, so
to speak, in the imagery of the Hebrew
prophets and poets, and in the lore
of the later Talmudic schools. Thus
carefully trained and educated, the future
friend and secretary of the mighty Pro
tector, Oliver Cromwell, the great song-
man of the Puritan age, has been vividly
portrayed as growing up u in his father s
house in Bread Street, and amongst the
thoughtless, scoffing academic youth of
Cambridge, breathing the highest life of
Puritanism, its serious thoughtfulness, its
love of all things good and honourable, its
pure morality and aversion to low and
degrading vice, yet with nothing exclusive
or narrow-minded in him."

Like Hampden, and indeed the majority

of the earlier and best school of Puritans,
he was, in the days of his youth and early
manhood, a loyal son of the Church of
England. Disliking perhaps, as did most
of his fellows reared amidst the ranks of
the more rigid Protestants, some of her
uses and ways, he was yet faithful and true
to the great church of his country, and
at one time aimed at becoming one of
her ministers. The early Puritans we are
never wearied in repeating this never
dreamed of sweeping away Episcopacy, and
substituting the defective system of Presby-
terianism or the yet vaguer and less
orderly " Independent " rule in its place.
To Puritans like Milton and he was, be
it ever remembered, a noble and faithful re
presentative of his party the solemn beauty
of architecture, the teaching power of
music over the devout soul, things so dear
to the Laudian school, were equally pre
cious and venerable : we have taken promi
nent examples of things subsequently con
demned with extraordinary" bitterness by
the party. It was only in later days, when
cruel strife, bitter political passions, enven
omed party spirit, deplorable errors on both
sides, clouded the atmosphere in distracted
England, that Milton and the Puritans came
to hate the things they once had loved
and ever supported, with hand and brain,,
with voice and pen alike. When we
speak of Puritanism, and only remember
the deplorable iconoclasm, the fierce devas
tation wrought by the Ironsides ; the stern
scene at Ely, when Oliver Cromwell inter
rupted the solemn cathedral service ; the
meditated wanton destruction of such
stately houses of prayer as the cathedral
of Gloucester ; the " root and branch "
sweeping away of Episcopacy, we should

100

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1633-1637.

turn to the early poems of Milton as to a
truer expression of a grander, holier Puri
tanism, before the fierce passions let loose
by the Civil War had marred and distorted
it almost out of recognition. It was Milton
who, in strains which will never die while
the world- wide Anglo-Saxon is spoken
on earth, wrote thus in early days of the
sacred music which Oliver Cromwell and
his fellows scorned and loathed :

" O may we soon again renew that song,
And keep in tune with Heaven, till God ere long
To His celestial consort us unite
To live with him, and sing in endless morn of
light." *

It was Milton, again, who thus wrote
of our ancient cathedrals and mediaeval
churches, and their storied surroundings :

" But let my due feet never fail,
To walk the studious cloisters pale,
And love the high embowed roof,
With antic pillars massy proof
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
Then let the pealing organ blow
To the full voiced choir below,
In service high, and anthems clear,
As may with sweetness through mine ear
Dissolve me into ecstacies,
And bring all Heaven before my eyes."t

The music of Milton here is perhaps more
melodious, but the thought and spirit
might well belong to the songs of the
Anglican follower of Laud, George Herbert.
Somewhat earlier, our famous Puritan
poet hymned Laud s ideal prelate Lancelot
Andrewes, and pictured the great Anglican
bishop entering heaven positively arrayed
in the vestments of his order.! In his

* ;&lt; At a Solemn Music," circa A.D. 1630.

t " II Penseroso," circa 1633-4.

Ecce mihi subito praesul Wintonius astat

*****
Vestis ad auratos defluxit Candida talos
Infula divinum cinxerat alba caput.

" Lycidas," put out about 1638, or a little
earlier, he describes St. Peter, " the pilot
of the Galilean lake," with his two
massy keys of gold and iron, as positively
bearing the mitre t symbol of the subse
quently detested episcopal order, when he
writes how the apostle, the friend of Christ,
" shook his mitred locks and stern bespake."
Nor did the spirit of Puritanism, as
voiced by its great poet in his earlier days,
even shrink from using in its imagery
that long-dead monasticism so hateful to
the extreme reformers. We read in "II
Penseroso " such lines as

" Come, pensive nun, devout and pure,
Sober, steadfast and demure
All in a robe of darkest grain,
Flowing with majestic train
And sable stole of cypress lawn,
Over thy decent shoulders drawn.
Come, but keep thy wonted state,
With even step and musing gait,
And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes ;
There held in holy passion still,
Forget thyself to marble, till
With a sad leaden downward cast,
Thou fix them on the earth as fast ;
And join with thee calm Peace and Quiet,
Spare Fast, that oft with Gods doth diet ; "

thus in his picture ascribing to the
"religious" of a past age, virtues which
the extreme Protestants were too ready to
deny the very existence of in the cloister.
Again, in the concluding lines of the same
" II Penseroso," the last prayer is

" And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,
The hairy gown, the mossy cell,
Where I may sit."

Such a picture of a haven of rest would
be utterly hateful to the school of Puri
tanism with which Milton in the days of
his friendship with Oliver Cromwell was

102

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1634.

closely associated. But besides this clear
witness to the sympathy with which the
earlier and nobler Puritans viewed the
beautiful church fabrics, the ancient uses
and reverent ceremonies dear to the historic
Church of England, what is more impor
tant to us in forming our estimate of
Puritanism in its higher and better aspects,
we gather from the great contemporary
poet again and again testimonies to the
still, calm beauty of the lofty Puritan
ideal. The austerity and severity of the
Puritan morals are constantly depicted in
the earlier poems of Milton. For instance,
in the exquisite rhythm of his "Comus"
(played in -1634), he paints his picture of
the fair and innocent lady of his dreams,
the example held up in a thousand Puritan
homes to be copied by English maidens,
in these lines :

" So dear to heaven is saintly chastity,
That when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried angels lackey her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt ;
And in clear dream and solemn vision,
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear ;
Till oft converse with heav nly habitants,
Begin to cast a beam on the outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it, by degrees, to the soul s essence,
Till all be made immortal."

He illustrates the anxious care shown in
these Puritan homes for the younger scions
of the house, the longing on the part of
the elders that their sons and daughters
should grow up into true and noble men
and women. So at the close of the
" Comus " we read :

" Noble lord and lady bright,
I have brought ye new delight ;
Here, behold, so goodly grown
Three fair branches of your own ;
Heaven hath timely tried their youth,
Their faith, their patience, and their truth,

And sent them here through hard assays,
With a crown of deathless praise ;
To triumph in victorious dance,
O er sensual folly and intemperance."

The quaint but rarely beautiful " Mask of
Comus," written for the festivities at Lud-
low Castle, when the Earl of Bridgewater
was appointed president of Wales and the
Marches in 1634, so rich in its references
to the Puritan life and its high aims, closes
with the following lofty thoughts :

" Mortals that would follow me,
Love Virtue, she alone is free ;
She can teach ye how to climb,
Higher than the sphery chime.
Or, if Virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her."

Time passed on ; in the seven or eight
years which went before that sad day
when king Charles set up his royal
standard at Nottingham, thus declaring
war with the House of the people s chosen
representatives, much had happened.
They had been years of unveiled absolu
tism ; for weal or woe the Stuart king and
his ministers had claimed and exercised the
right of ruling, judging, levying taxes,
without any Parliamentary consent or
approval. The policy of Laud and the
church towards the Puritans had been
unconciliatory, at times even harsh in this
particular his warmest apologists confess he
had been unwise ; and still worse, owing
to the high position Laud occupied with
the king s inner circle of counsellors, the
church had associated itself closely with
the unworthy and disastrous policy of
absolutism, so contrary to the spirit which
actuated even the strongest wearers of
the English crown, whether Plantagenet
or Tudor. In these years the mind of
Puritanism had undergone a change for

1641.]

CHANGE IN MILTON S TONE.

103

the worse. Harassed, exposed, if not to
cruel, certainly to irritating persecution
which threatened in the future to become
more severe and desolating, the more
moderate and nobler members of the party,
who were loyal to, if not enthusiastic for
the church, passed into open opposition.

A great change is plainly observable be
tween Milton s writings of 1634 and 1641 ;
and here again Milton must be the type of
the nobler of his sect. In what we believe
to be his first pamphlet, which appeared in
1641, when the flames of the deadly Civil
War had already been kindled, a very
different tone is observable. The Puritan
no longer confines himself to the aim
ing after a higher, stricter, purer life
than that too commonly lived by the
world around him ; no longer gently, if
not ardently, sympathises with the ancient
rites and ceremonies of mediae valism, with
the storied church, the jewelled window,
the sweet-voiced choir, the solemn organ,
preserved in the Anglican church, as we
have seen in the "Penseroso" lines, and in
other of the earlier Miltonic poems ; but
appears now as the stern opponent of
episcopacy, the fanatical foe of the historical
ritual ever preserved in the church ruled
over by Cranmer and Parker, but perhaps
especially prominent in the Laudian school.

" Sad it is," wrote Milton in 1641, as the
exponent of the more moderate Puritans, be
it remembered, " that the doctrine of the
Gospel . . through the blindness of her
professors, and the fraud of deceivable tra
ditions, drag so downwards as to backslide
one way into the Jewish beggary of old
cast rudiments, and stumble forward
another way into the newly - vomited
paganism of sensual idolatr} . . . they

began to draw down all the divine inter
course betwixt God and the soul ; yea, the
very shape of God Himself, into an ex
terior and bodily form, urgently pretend
ing a necessity and obligement of joining
the body in a formal reverence and worship
circumscribed ; they hallowed it, they
fumed it, they sprinkled it, they bedecked
it, not in robes of pure innocency, but
of pure linen, with other deformed and
fantastic dresses, in palls and mitres, gold
and gewgaws fetched from Aaron s old
wardrobe or the flamen s vestry ; there
was the priest set to con his motions and
his postures, his liturgies, and his lurries,
till the soul . . . shifted off from herself
the labour of high-soaring any more, forgot
her heavenly flight, and left the dull
and droiling carcase to plod on in the
old road and drudging trade of outward
conformity." ?

From this time (1641) onward Puri
tanism changed its character. Its nobler
and grander spirits became bitter partisans,
under the names of Presbyterians, Inde
pendents,, Fifth Monarchy men, Anabap
tists, and the like. The terrible civil,
dissensions of the realm and the utter defeat
of the royalist party gave them a temporary
ascendency, which they used with rare
unwisdom. With the death of the Pro
tector and the reaction of the Restoration,
they passed seemingly out of sight at
least, out of power though their greater
and grander work in the English nation
endured.

As Milton during the age of the quiet
influence of Puritanism was a conspicuous

* Cf. Gardiner : " History of England," vol. ix.,
chap, xcix., who at greater length quotes this
striking passage.

io 4

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1667.

example of his sect ; as during their brief
time of supreme power in England he was
equally a type of his changed and embittered
co-religionists; so in his old age we may
again fairly use him as an individual
instance of a great but discredited party,
but of a party to which England will ever
owe a mighty debt of gratitude. When
the defeated and once discredited son of
the ill-fated Charles I. was reigning in the
palace of the kings of England, in that
same Whitehall which had been the
scene of the cruel death of his father
and of the glories of his supplanter, the
Protector Oliver Cromwell, Puritanism as
a power or even an influence had seemingly
perished out of the land. The bodies of its
great champion and of his chosen associates
had been torn from their sacred resting-
places in the abbey of the kings, and the
mouldering remains of the mighty dead,
amidst the plaudits ot a people, had been
subjected to repulsive degradation. Amidst
all the ruin and disaster which in the course
of the .strange vicissitudes of fortune had
happened to the cause he loved, and to
the memory of the masters he honoured,
Milton the friend and secretary of Crom
well, the poet, the author of the famous
apology for the execution of Charles I., a
book which the Parliament of the Restora
tion ordered to be burnt by the public
hangman lived on, so intensely hated by
the most fanatical royalists, that for a time
his very life was in danger. Private mis
fortunes one upon another reduced him
to what was almost poverty. Above all,
blindness had stricken him.

It is a true picture, and one often dwelt
upon by historians, which depicts the
sightless, well-nigh friendless old man, after

listening to a chapter from the Hebrew
Bible, and playing awhile on the organ or
the viol in his poor chamber in Bunhill
Fields, hung with faded green hangings,
his fair brown hair clustering, as in past
happier days, dictating to his tired and
somewhat unsympathetic daughters the
lines of his immortal poems ; for it was in
the course of that long dark evening that
the Puritan wrote the wondrous poem of
his lost cause, u Paradise Lost," first pub
lished in 1667.

Its scheme has been well and tersely
described as " the problem with which the
Puritan wrestled in hours of gloom and
darkness, the problem of sin and redemp
tion, of ,the world- wide struggle of evil
against good. . . . The greatness of
the Puritan aim in the long and wavering
struggle for justice and law and a higher
good, the grandeur of character which this
contest developed, the colossal forms of
good and evil which moved over its stage
. . . the mighty eloquence and mightier
ambition which the war had roused into
being, all left their mark on the Paradise
Lost. . . . But if the poem expresses
the higher qualities of the Puritan temper,
it expresses no less exactly its defects.
Throughout it we feel almost painfully a
want of the finer and subtler sympathies,
of a large and genial humanity." *

Like so much else in Puritanism, the
poems of Milton have touched and in
fluenced English life after the apparent
ruin of the system. Gradually, but only
slowly, the Puritan epic of the "Paradise
Lost " and " Regained " attained the full
height of its reputation as the most popular

*Green : " History of the English People," chap.
viii., section x.

~ 1

io6

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16281688.

of all English poems. Its influence on
English religious thought is simply in
calculable. But in the lifetime of the
great Puritan, and for long after, it was
not so. " Waller, not Milton, was long
reckoned the Virgil of the nation. M The
exquisite earlier poems of the " Penseroso "
and " Allegro" indeed appeared to have
fallen into utter neglect ; and this neglect
and want of appreciation was evidently
bitterly felt by the blind and sorrow-stricken
Puritan poet, when in his stately and
touching " Samson Agonistes," under the
figure of the blind and persecuted Hebrew
hero, he paints himself. Alluding to Him
whom his chorus finely calls " our living
Dread who dwells in Silo, His bright
sanctuary," with sorrowful reproach, all
conscious of his mighty power he wrote :

" He led me on to mightiest deeds,
Above the nerve of mortal arm,

* * -::- *

But now hath cast me off, as never known. 1:

Dwelling again and again on his awful
calamity, he moans as he recounts his

many miseries :

"But chief of all,

O, loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind among enemies, O, worse than chains,
Dungeon or beggary, or decrepit age!
Light, the prime work of God, to me s extinct.

* * * #

O, dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon !
Inevitably dark, total eclipse,
Without all hope of day ! n

The lonely and deserted evening of
Milton s life, with the sad figure of the
blind and hated poet working still in his
poor and shabby home, not unfitly repre
sents the fate of Puritanism after 1660 ;
while the subsequent power and influence
of the Miltonic poems among the English
* Professor Blunt: " Essay on Milton."

race, are equally suggestive to us

we dispassionately review the effect of

Puritanism upon English life and character.

As an example of the vast influence
which Puritanism exerted upon the minds
of the less educated, less thoughtful, we
will take as our instance the author of
" The Pilgrim s Progress." Born in 1628,
John Bunyan sprang from quite the lower
and uncultured masses, his father being
a poor Bedfordshire tinker. But the re
ligious awakening we have been dwelling
on, permeated all sorts and conditions of
men, in the first half of the seventeenth
century. In u Grace Abounding," a kind
of autobiography, Bunyan gives us a
curious and interesting confession respect
ing the thoughts which were passing
through the minds of many of the rank and
file ol the English people in that age, when
the very atmosphere was quivering with
excited religious feeling. While still
almost a chiljd in years, he tells us how
visions of heaven and hell alternately
charmed and terrified him : u in the midst
of my merry sports and childish vanities,
amidst my vain companions, I was often
much cast down and afflicted in my mind
therewith, yet could I not let go my sins."
The sins alluded to seem to have been
mostly an ordinary love of boyish games,
and dancing and bell-ringing. On one
occasion, he writes how in the midst of
one of these sports he heard, as it seemed
to him, a voice from heaven which said,
" Wilt thou leave thy sins, and go to
heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell ? "

At seventeen, Bunyan joined the ranks
of the Cromwellian " new model " army,
whose officers and men were alike inspired

j 628 1 688. J

JOHN BUNYAN.

107

by the religious fanaticism of one extreme
phase of Puritanism; a fanaticism, however,
which largely contributed to the almost
unbroken series of successes in pitched
battles, as in smaller skirmishes, after the
" new model " army under Cromwell had
taken the field against the Royalists.
After two years the Civil War was finished,
but the young soldier of Cromwell was
more fervidly religious than ever. For a
season he was continually tormented with
terrible internal conflicts. He imagined
himself now and again a lost creature, one
who had sinned past forgiveness. Then
came a period of strange visions of distant
pleasant sunny hills, the Delectable Moun
tains he wrote about later in his wondrous
allegory ; and so he passed through his
valley of the shadow of death, emerging
at last into that bright and fair land of
Beulah, which the readers of "Pilgrim s
Progress " know so well. He became a
Baptist preacher in the free ranks of the
" Independent " Puritans, acquiring great
fame as a popular orator ; but even under
the Protectorate the fervid Independent
preacher was looked on with disfavour, as
an illegal teacher. Under the Restoration
he was imprisoned; an imprisonment which,
owing to his refusal to promise to abstain
from preaching, lasted some twelve years.
It was during this long and weary time
of enforced seclusion that Bunyan wrote
most of those remarkable works which for
more than two centuries have played a
large part in the influencing and develop
ing of the religious life among our people.
The " Grace Abounding," already re
ferred to, the "Holy War," and the
greater and more important part of the
inimitable "Pilgrim s Progress," were

written amidst these sad and gloomy
surroundings.

We must, however, pass on : ours is no
life or even study of the character of this
famous " Puritan of the people " ; he is
only introduced into our story as a typical

CHRISTIAN AND APOLLYON.
(From the 13^ Edition of the " Pilgrim s Progress" 1692.)

example of one phase of popular Puritanism
at this momentous period, sketched lightly
in to show how deeply its thoughts and
aims, hopes and fears, had sunk into
the hearts of one great section of the
people. His most important work, the
writing with which his name will be for
ever associated the allegory of " The
Pilgrim s Progress " owes its extraordinary

io8

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16281688.

and enduring popularity, especially among
the less cultured classes, to its acknow
ledged unrivalled power over the human
heart. It is the simple story of innumer
able souls longing to find peace on earth.
It shows to these poor doubting, trembling
ones, by means of a charming allegory,
which all may understand child and
grey-haired, scholar and peasant alike
how even in this busy, anxious, tangled life,
this blessed peace may be found and kept.
While "Paradise Lost 1 and "Regained"
is the Puritan epic for the more cultured
few, the u Pilgrim s Progress " is the
popular prose Puritan story for the more
slenderly cultured masses.

It possesses most of the virtues and the
faults of that great strange system which
in England sprang from the Reformation,
and especially from the newly-awakened
study of the English Bible. It essays to
teach men the way to the city of life,
with no immemorial Catholic teaching to
guide them, or blessed sacraments to help
them. It is without a ritual, or a cere
mony, uncertain, wavering, often leading
to fanaticism and dire confusion ; but with
all its grave errors, with all its lack of
that divine order and sublime reverence
(ehrfurcht) pointed out by the principal
and most revered religious teachers of
every age and land as the God-given way
to heaven, it has still its high use, and
must not be lightly regarded or scornfully
disesteemed. It has found not a few
earnest souls, and we humbly believe has
led, and is leading them still, to light and
life and heaven. Many men, holy and
humble of heart, in our Anglican com
munion, followers of the straitest Laudian
school of ritual uniformity, use as a

precious handmaid to devotion, though
not as a guide, the Puritan " Pilgrim s
Progress." Its enormous and unfading
popularity bears testimony to the con
tinued existence of Puritanism in one form
or other among the Anglo-Saxon peoples.
It is perhaps the most widely known of all
English books. It is peculiarly the story
for the uneducated. Its " vocabulary is
the vocabulary of the common people.
There is not an expression, if we except a
few technical terms of theology, which
could puzzle the rudest peasant," and yet
" for magnificence, for pathos, for vehement
exhortation, for subtle disquisition, for
every purpose of the poet, the orator,
and the divine, this homely dialect, the
dialect of plain working men, was perfectly
sufficient."* The journey of Christian
from the City of Destruction to the
Heavenly City was the record of the life
of a Puritan like Bunyan; and thousands
feel it is the record of the pilgrimage they
are now making, and pray from their heart
that the glad end of the story may be their
blessed experience likewise.

After its publication the " Pilgrim s Pro
gress " was at once eagerly read by one
section at least of religionists in England.
Bunyan died in 1688, and though only a
few years had passed since its appearance,
ten editions had been already sold ; but
although Dr. Johnson dared to say that
" Pilgrim s Progress " was one of the tw&lt;
or three works which he wished wert
longer, its vast popularity was mainly con
fined to the poor and the lower middlt
classes. Even at the end of last century,
says Macaulay, Cowper remarked " that h&lt;
dared not name John Bunyan in his ven
* Macaulay.

16281688.]

THE PILGRIM S PROGRESS."

109

for fear of moving a sneer." The critics
of our own day and time, however, with
purer taste, have recognised its many sur
passing excellencies, and its power over

in one form or another acknowledged or
unacknowledged Puritanism is too deeply
rooted in the hearts of the English-speaking
peoples for its greatest and noblest work,

JOHN BUNYAN.
(From the portrait by Sadler.)

human souls ; and its writer, with all his
exaggeration, his quaint and somewhat
barbarous imagery, his errors in theology,
and his fanaticism, is generally acknow
ledged now as the greatest allegorist the
world has seen. There is no sign that its
influence among us is likely to decrease ;

the writing that with the truest pathos
expresses its deepest needs, ever to be
neglected.

In our fourth and last little study of
Puritan character, no attempt will be here
made to relate the story in detail of Oliver

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[15991658,

Cromwell s career, or in any way to discuss
the political issues of his work and policy.
It is simply a little character-sketch of a
great Puritan life, of a somewhat different
type from that we have essayed to paint
in the persons of Hampden, Milton, and
Bunyan. Oliver Cromwell, afterwards His
Highness the Lord Protector, has been
well described as " a Puritan of the Puri
tans." In him existed all those qualities
which raised this powerful reformed sect to
the position of influence to which, in the
first half of the seventeenth century, they
attained in England. The intense, real
earnestness, the deep family affections
and traditions, the passionate love of the
Bible as the one unerring infallible guide,
the vivid sense of personal communion
with God : all these things, which made up
the strong Puritan character, met together
in Oliver Cromwell, the country gentleman,
the great soldier who developed into the
yet greater captain, the profound and con
summate statesman, the successful ruler. -

Oliver Cromwell was born in 1599 at
Huntingdon, on the borders of the Fen
country in the eastern counties, ever a
famous centre of those strong religionists we
are just now especially dwelling upon. He
belonged to a family with a great tradition
of ultra-Reformation sympathies, a family
which owed its rise originally to plunder
derived from the dissolution of the monas
teries. Its founder was a kinsman of
the all-powerful minister of Henry VIII.,
Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex ; and the
Cromwell family had occupied, in the
days of the absolutism of Charles I.,
for about a century, a considerable
position among the eastern counties
country gentry.

Everything connected with the early
life of Oliver linked him to that peculiar
school of religious thought, whose strange
rise, yet stranger ruin, and subsequent
influence is just now our especial
theme. The whole atmosphere which
Oliver Cromwell breathed in boyhood,,
manhood, middle age, was permeated
with intense religious earnestness. He
possessed a Puritan mother, a serious
father, an intensely earnest Puritan school
master. Of his father we know little,,
beyond the fact that he was a well-thought-
of religious gentleman ; he died, however r
when the subject of our study was still
comparatively young. We know more of
his mother, between whom and her son
Oliver ever existed the tenderest affec
tion ; and the influence of this typical
Puritan lady was no doubt ever a powerful
factor on the religious side of his life.

It was a quiet, beautiful character, that
of the mother of the mighty soldier and
statesman. Her portrait " shows us a face
curiously resembling her son, the motherly
form of the same type strong, homely r
keen, with firm mouth, penetrating eyes,
a womanly goodness and peacefulness of
expression, the genial face demurely en
veloped in its flowing wimple and prim
lawn kerchief."* She lived to an advanced
age, and was ever riear her son. In her
latter days the Protector took the simple
Puritan lady, who through his strange
eventful life had thus been so close to him,
to his new stately home in the palace of
the kings of England at Whitehall. In
16^4 we come across the following little
details of the mother and son, in a letter of
Thurloe, Cromwell s secretary of state :
* Harrison : " Oliver Cromwell," chap. i.

15991658.]

OLIVER CROMWELL.

" My Lord Protectors mother, of ninety-
four years old, died last night. A little
before her death she gave my Lord her
blessing in these words : The Lord cause
His face to shine upon you, and comfort
you in all your adversities, and enable you
to do great things for the glory of your
Most High God, and to be a relief unto
the people. My dear son, I leave my heart
with thee ; and good-night. And so died."
Against her wishes, Oliver laid his loved
mother amongst the royal and illustrious
dead of England in Westminster Abbey ;
but in the Restoration reaction the remains
were torn up and flung into a nameless grave.

The beautiful picture of the Puritan s
home life would be incomplete with
out one word on his wife ? who, how
ever, beyond the immediate family circle,
seems to -have exercised but little weight
in the circumstances connected with the
public life of Oliver. Her quiet, blameless
career has ever been spared by the fierce
and jealous enemies of her husband s glory
and greatness and errors. A few lines of
a letter of Oliver s, written in the Scotch
campaign, still preserved to us, lift a corner
of the veil that lies over the private life of
the soldier and statesman, and shows us how
tender and devoted was the love of Oliver
to wife and children, as well as mother.
" Pray for me truly I do daily for thee,
and the dear family. . . . My love
to the dear little ones. I pray for grace
for them. I thank them for their letters ;
let me have them often."

His father s early death recalled him
when he was about eighteen or nineteen
years old to take charge of the family
estate, and to watch over his mother and
sisters. For some ten or twelve quiet

years he played the useful but undis- k
tinguished part of a country gentleman of
small estate, with many family responsi
bilities. Carlyle in his quaint picturesque
language thus paints these years : " Diligent
grass farming, mowing, milking cattle,
marketing ; add hypochondria, fits of
blackness of darkness, with glances of the
brightness of the very heaven, joys and
cares : we have a solid, substantial farmer
of St. Ives, hoping to walk with integrity
and humble devout diligence through the
world ; and by his Maker s infinite mercy,
to escape destruction and find eternal
salvation in wider Divine worlds. This
latter, then, is the grand clause in his life
which dwarfs all other clauses. Much
wider destinies than he anticipated were
appointed him on earth ; but that, in com
parison to the alternative of heaven or
hell, to all eternity, was a mighty small
matter."

In the course of the quiet uneventful
spring-time of his career, came to Oliver
the awakening to higher aims and a nobler
life, which was the mainspring of his future
career. This awakening to the sense of
the awful responsibility of life and its tre
mendous issues, was very common among
the Puritans of that age. Their religious
surroundings, traditions, conversations
among themselves, only needed some spark
to kindle the fire smouldering within them.
These men, as did Oliver, often passed
through a long time of inward conflict,
of melancholy despondency, sometimes of
almost hopeless despair ; then on a sudden,
out of that Bible they had been taught to
read, to ponder over as a life-long study,
and to regard as the written voice of God,
would come light, and they would see the

112

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[15991658.

Redeemer, the Helper, and the Friend, in a
way in which perhaps only those who had
been similarly tried and trained ever saw Him.

Years later, Oliver describes the sadness
and the joy of that eventful hour in one
of his letters. " I live, you know where.
. . . My soul is with the congregation of
the first-born, my body rests in hope ; and
if here I may honour my God either by
doing or by suffering, I shall be most glad.
Truly, no poor creature hath more cause
to put himself forth in the cause of his
God than I. I have had plentiful wages
beforehand, and I am sure that I shall
never earn the least mite. The Lord
accept me in His Son, and give me to
walk in the light. . . . Blessed be His
name for shining upon so dark a heart as
mine ! You know what my manner of
life hath been. I lived in and loved dark
ness, and hated light. ... I hated
godliness, yet God had mercy on me. O,
the riches of His mercy ! . . Pray for
me that He who hath begun a good work
would perfect it in the day of Christ." *

The result of such training from infancy,
such traditions, such a home, in which
the Bible, with its glowing imagery, its
declaration as to God s power and love, its
mystic ecstasy, its teaching respecting
death and life, was used as the great, the
chief, the only guide produced a class of
men the like to which the world had never
seen before. A phase of religion different
in some respects from ordinary Christianity
appeared in England " that mighty
Puritanism, of which Oliver Cromwell was
the incarnation and the hero." f But

* Oliver Cromwell to his cousin, Mrs. St. John,
October, 1638.

f F. Harrison : " Oliver Cromwell," chap. vi.

Oliver was only one out of many who
lived in that age ; greater, no doubt, more
gifted far than any of his contemporaries
and companions, but only fired as they
were by the same training, the same hopes
and fears, onlooks and aspirations. Among
the Puritan party of the first half of the
seventeenth century there were many
Hampdens, Miltons, Bunyans, Cromwells,
Iretons, Hutchinsons, and the like ; less
brilliant, of course, less endowed with
natural talents and powers, but in whose
souls lived the same mighty power, and
who had experienced a like awakening to
the real meaning of life.

We return to Oliver Cromwell, whom we
have chosen as our last conspicuous example
of this wonderful Puritanism. He felt he
was never alone ; he heard in every in
cident of his life the very voice of the Most
High, guiding him, cheering him, helping
him, prompting every thought, shaping
every action. We have with us still a
number of his letters, written to various
friends, to his superiors, to his comrades,
to the official chiefs of that Parliament in
whose service he played the part of soldier
and general. Again and again in these
precious reliques we catch sight of the
very heart of Oliver Cromwell. The
letters are no formal cut-and-dried ex
pressions of a faith he did not feel, or of
convictions simulated for a purpose ; no
mere " cant," as men are too readily prone
to assume. They are intensely real,
genuine, true ; they reflect the inmost
soul of the man, and tell us something of
the secret of the Puritan power which for
a time carried all before it. In his letters
or despatches to Lenthall, Speaker of the
Long Parliament, which Oliver Cromwell

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AUTOGRAPH LETTER FROM OLIVER CROMWELL TO HIS WIFE, FROM EDINBURGH,
APRIL 12, 1651. (-SV* /. 111.) {British Museum.)

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1599-1658.

during the Civil War looked upon as the
chief authority in England, he perpetually
alludes to the great hand of God in all
this business of the war. We get such ex
pressions as " Surely, sir, this is nothing
but the hand of God." The events, such
as the striking series of victories at Marston
Moor, Naseby, Dunbar, Worcester, and
the like, were u marvellous, mysterious,
grand, providential, even supernatural."
He and his followers were " poor, despised,
weak saints instruments, nothing more
weak hands." Every success, great and
small, was solely owing to the divine
agency. " The Lord," he wrote, " is won
derful in these things ; wonderful, wonder
ful," he repeats. We come again and
again upon such phrases as " the glorious-
ness of God s work," " God s strange
work," " the seals of God s approbation,"
* His marvellous salvation wrought at
Worcester," u His crowning mercy, which
God wrought at one place and the other ;
all this, Parliament must see and acknow
ledge ; your instruments are poor and
weak, and can do nothing but through
believing."

In this stern spirit of ardent, living faith,
the great Puritan soldier created the army
of the Parliament, against which the
gallant and chivalrous Royalists were
utterly unable to stand, Cromwell s
thoughts on the religious character which
war and its instruments should assume,
seem first to have found expression in the
course of a conversation with Hampden,
who was a connection of his family, his
tried friend, and often his associate. Long
years after, the Protector, in a speech to
his second Parliament, related the incident ;
it happened in the early days of the Civil

War, when Oliver was only captain of a
troop of horse. His words possess a rare
interest, for they tell us exactly what the
Puritan thought of war and the combatants.
" I had a very* worthy friend then," he said,.
u and he was a very noble person, and I
know his memory is very grateful to all :
Mr. John Hampden. At my first going
out into this engagement I saw our men
were beaten at every hand. Your troops/
said I [Hampden was at this time colonel
of a Parliamentary regiment], are most of
them old, decayed serving-men, and tap
sters, and such kind of fellows ; and their
[the Royalists ] troops are gentlemen s
sons, younger sons, and persons of quality.
Do you think that the spirits of such base r
mean fellows will ever be able to encounter
gentlemen that have honour and courage
and resolution in them ? He

was a wise and worthy person, and he did
think that I talked a good notion, but an
impracticable one." He then went on
describing to his Parliament how he carried
out his plan, which was subsequently
known as the " new model." " I raised
such men as had the fear of God before
them, as made some conscience of what
they did ; and from that day forward, I
must say to you, they were never beaten,
and wherever they were engaged against
the enemy, they beat continually. And
truly this is a matter of praise to God,
and it hath some instruction in it : to
own men that are religious and godly."
Of Cromwell s new soldiery, Baxter
wrote as follows : " He [Oliver] has a
special care to get religious men into his
troop ; these men were of greater under
standing than common soldiers, and making
not money, but that which they took for

1599

THE PURITAN CAPTAIN.

the public felicity, to be their end, they
were the more engaged to be valiant ; as
far as I could learn, they never once ran
away from an enemy. ... He brought
this troop into a double regiment of
fourteen full troops (840 men), and all
these as full of religious men as he could
get." Not a man of this strange Puritan
regiment ever swore but he paid his fine ;
plundering, drinking, and disorder were
sternly forbidden, and rigidly punished.
On the stricken field of Marston Moor,
prince Rupert gave Oliver the sobriquet
of " Ironside," and from their captain the
name passed to his troopers ; they were
men that had the fear of God, and gradually
came to lose all other fear. These were
the men who decided the Civil War, for
upon the fashion of these Ironsides the
whole Parliamentary army was eventually
reorganised and formed, under the well-
known title of the " new model."

But the Puritan spirit which lived in
Oliver was not only displayed in thus
creating an invincible body of fervid re
ligious soldiers ; it could be, as we see
from the following letter of the successful
hero, tender and true, full of the deepest
sympathy, breathing the noblest hopes.
In the midst of the hurly-burly of the cam
paigns which in quick succession followed
one after the other in the stern, bloody
Civil War, Oliver could write as follows
to one of his Puritan comrades a colonel
Valentine Walton, a distinguished Par
liamentarian soldier, whose son was slain
at Marston Moor :

Truly England and the church of God hath had
a great favour from the Lord in this great victory
given unto us, as the like never was since this war
began. . . . We never charged but we routed
the enemy. ... I believe of twenty thousand

the prince (Rupert) had, not four thousand were
left. Give glory, all the glory to God. Sir, God
hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon shot.
It brake his leg. We were necessitated to have it
cut off, whereof he died. Sir, you know my own
trials this way (alluding here to the death in battle
of his own loved son). But the Lord supported
me with this, that the Lord took him into the
happiness we all pant for and live for. There is
your precious child, full of glory, never to know
sin or sorrow any more. He was a gallant young
man, exceedingly gracious. God give you His
comfort. Before his death he was so full of comfort,
that to Frank Russell and myself he could not
express it. It was so great above his pain. This
he said to us. Indeed, it was admirable. . . .
Truly he was exceedingly beloved in the army of
all that knew him . . . you have cause to bless
the Lord. He is a glorious saint in heaven . . .
you ought exceedingly to rejoice. Let this drink
up your sorrow ; seeing these are not feigned
words to comfort you, but the thing is so reaL
and undoubted a truth. . . . Your faithful
and loving brother, OLIVER.

But although we have painted Oliver
Cromwell as intensely earnest, as no hypo
crite, as no mere vulgar fanatic, simply as
an admirable example of that mighty re
ligious sect which was playing so important
a part in the drama of English political
life, it must be remembered that the great
Puritan was far from an ideal hero, far
from a perfect saint in the lofty sense of
the often misused word. His part in the
execution of the king may find does find
apologists ; but although the sin may
be blotted out of the Book of God s
remembrance by that Blood in which
Oliver, with all his errors and mistakes,
trusted with so unswerving a trust, England
will never forget, and the majority of
serious Englishmen can never forgive the
chief actor for his share in that woeful
tragedy. His conduct, too, in the bloody
Irish campaign, few among us will even try
to condone, much less to approve. That
fierce, relentless Irish bloodshed has left

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[15991658.

behind it, alas ! a wound which time has
as yet failed to heal ; has complicated and
marred all subsequent friendly relations
between England and the sorrowful and
unhappy island, where the ever victorious
Cromwell played so ill a part. It has left
behind it a hatred which as yet no English
statesman, however wise and conciliatory,
has succeeded in changing into even a
cold friendship and a lukewarm loyalty.
It has been, indeed, a heritage of sorrow
and confusion which Oliver has left to
his country, as the fruits of his cam
paign in Ireland and desolating victory
there. It is not our purpose to dwell on
the confused and disturbed state of the
island, when Cromwell with his Ironsides
attempted its pacification. There is no
doubt but that Ireland in 1649 was deso
lated with racial feuds, was dishonoured
by shameful scenes of murder, pillage, law
less anarchy, and confusion ; but what
can excuse such acts of stern revenge as
the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford,
deliberately planned and carried out by
the Parliamentary general ?

Of the first of these bloody deeds, Oliver
in an official letter, dated September, 1649,
to Bradshaw, president of the Council of
State, acting under the Parliament, thus
writes : "It hath pleased God to bless our
endeavour at Tredah (Drogheda). After
battery we stormed it. The enemy were
three thousand strong in the town . . .
we refused them quarter ... I believe
we put to the sword the whole number of
the defendants ... I do not think
thirty escaped with their lives." In the
storming of Wexford, in his report to
Speaker Lenthall, Oliver placed the loss
of the enemy at about two thousand ! the

Parliamentary general adding some ghastly
details. The great apologist for Oliver
Cromwell calmly relates how he put every
man of the Drogheda (Tredah) garrison to
death " I forbade them (wrote Cromwell
to Lenthall) to spare any that were in
arms in the town, and I think that night
they put to the sword about two thousand
men " and condones this merciless act
thus : u To those who think that a land
overrun with sanguinary quacks can be
healed by sprinkling it with rose-water,
these letters (Cromwell s reports to Brad
shaw and Lenthall above quoted from)
must be very horrible. Terrible surgery
this ; but is it surgery and judgment, or
atrocious murder merely ? That is a
question which should be asked, and an
swered. Oliver Cromwell did believe in
God s judgments, and did not believe in
the rose-water plan of surgery ; which,
in fact, is their editor s [Carlyle s] case
too ! " *

Few will probably be found prepared to
endorse this estimate of Cromwell s pro
cedure in the Irish campaign ; an estimate
which speaks of the relentless hero of the
still unforgotten terrible Irish tragedy, as
an u armed soldier, solemnly conscious to
himself that he is a soldier of God the
Just . . . armed soldier, terrible as
death, relentless as doom ! doing God s
judgments on the enemies of God." Puri
tanism, indeed, has been described, and
deservedly so, in language of extravagant
praise and extravagant blame, as " a form
of belief which could bring out all the
good and all the evil of the heart ; it made
some noble natures heroic, it made some

* Oliver Cromwell s Letters and Speeches, volii..
part v., " Irish War."

AUTOGRAPH LETTER FROM OLIVER CROMWELL TO LORD FAIRFAX, INFORMING HIM

OF THE CAPTURE OF WEXFORD.
Dated Wexford, October 15, 1649. (British Museum.}

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1599-1658.

base natures devilish." * Indeed, it might
well have been described as making the
nature of the same individual now heroic,
now devilish, according to its temper at
the time or its special environment. The
consciousness, true or false, of being a
chosen instrument to work out the decrees
of the Almighty, confers upon a man a
strange and an awful power, but a very
dangerous one withal. This consciousness
was the heritage of every true Puritan, and
was the mainspring of Oliver Cromwell s
public life.

We possess portraits on canvas, drawn
by skilled hands, of this typical Puritan ;
we have also pictures of him painted by
contemporary word-painters. Sir Philip
Warwick, a Royalist, thus describes him as
he appeared to himself before the Civil
War : u The first time that I ever took
notice of him was in the very beginning of
the Parliament held in November, 1640
[that is, in the early days of the Long
Parliament], when I vainly thought myself
a courtly young gentleman, for we courtiers
valued ourselves much upon our good
clothes. I came one morning into the
House well clad, and perceived a gentleman
speaking whom I knew not, very ordinarily
apparelled, for it was a plain cloth suit,
which seemed to have been made by an ill
country tailor ; his linen was plain, and not
very clean, and I remember a spot or two
of blood upon his little "band, which was
not much larger than his collar ; his hat
was without a hat-band ; his stature was of
a good size, his sword stuck close to his
side, his countenance swollen and reddish,
his voice sharp and untuneable, and his
eloquence full of fervour." Sir Philip
* Frederic Harrison : " Oliver Cromwell.

Warwick proceeded to say how later he
noticed " this very gentleman appear of a
great and majestic deportment and comely
presence."

Another description we possess, painted
by John Maidston, an officer of Cromwell s
household and a member of his Parliaments,
in a letter to Winthrop, a distinguished
man, and governor of Connecticut. It is
dated 1659. He WI "ites thus: "His body
was well compact and strong, his stature
under six feet (I believe about two inches) ,
his head so shaped as you might see it a
storehouse and shop, both of a vast treasury
of natural parts ; his temper exceeding
fiery, as I have known, but the flame of it
kept down for the most part, or soon
allayed by those moral endowments he
had. He was naturally compassionate
towards objects in distress, even to an
effeminate measure, though God had made
him an heart wherein was left little room
for any fear. . . . Yet did he exceed in
tenderness toward sufferers. A larger soul
I think hath seldom dwelt in a house of
clay than his was."

Carlyle pictures him thus in the day of
his supreme power, the details massed
together from contemporary pamphlets
and descriptions : " His highness was in
a rich but plain suit, black velvet, with
cloak of the same, about his hat a band of
gold a man of strong, solid stature and
dignified, now partly military carriage, the
expression of him valour and devout in
telligence ; . . . fifty-four years old ;
ruddy, fair complexion, bronzed by toil and
age ; light brown hair and moustache are
getting streaked with grey ; . . . massive
stature ; big, massive head, of somewhat
leonine aspect ; nose of considerable

15991658-]

CROMWELL S PUBLIC WORK.

119

blunt aquiline proportions ; strict yet
copious lips, full of all tremulous sensi
bilities, and also, if need were, of all fierce
nesses and rigours ; deep, loving eyes,
looking under those craggy brows as if in
life-long sorrow, yet not thinking it sorrow,
thinking it only labour and endeavour on
the whole a right noble lion face and hero
face, and to me royal enough." ,

It would be unjust, even in this brief
sketch, not to say a word on the
public work of that strange man who
ruined the Royalists cause, for a time
apparently crushed the Church of Eng
land out of being, and punished with
so terrible a punishment the mistaken
attempt to force a despotism upon the
English people. We have dwelt suffi
ciently on his grievous errors not to use
a harsher word never to be forgotten
on earth. This is no place to plead for
him, still less to condemn him; but we
must in all fairness acknowledge him to
have been no vulgar tyrant, no mere self-
seeking despot, no hypocritical fanatic.
His bitter animosity to the Church of
England was based on grounds deeper
than the mere antagonism of an extreme
Puritan. It was a hatred and distrust
which was a natural part of the political
creed of Oliver. The church he hated
had ever been ranged on the side of king
Charles. It was Royalist to the core.
When the monarchy which had played so
mistaken a part had disappeared, and
Oliver found himself undisputed dictator
in the country he had fought for, suffered
for ; when the church, as Oliver supposed,
was wrecked, his great care as supreme
governor was to restore order and pros
perity in the England, which had been

torn and well-nigh ruined by civil war for
fourteen long years. And his work was
brilliantly successful. " Most of the eighty-
two ordinances passed by the Protector
and his council were subsequently con
firmed by Parliament. . . . Many of
his measures treated of the reform of
colleges, schools, and charitable founda
tions, for the suppression of cock-fighting,
duelling, etc. In substance his legislation
was a wise and moderate set of reforms.
. . . He made some of the best judges
England ever had. Justice and law opened
a new era. Trade and commerce revived
under his fostering care. Education was
re-organised. . . . Men of learning of
all opinions were encouraged and be
friended. If there was a man in England
who excelled in any faculty or science, the
Protector would find him out and reward
him according to his merit. . . . 4 All
England over, these were halcyon days,
said an opponent." 1 *

But it was outside England that the
splendour of Oliver s work was most notice
able. Clarendon, no friend to him, nobly
writes here : " His greatness at home was
but a shadow of the glory he had abroad."
It will be the Protector s proudest title to
honour, that he discerned with unerring
sagacity the inescapable necessity of making
England supreme at sea. It was under
Oliver that the chief maritime power
passed for ever from the Dutch to the
English. It was Oliver who found in the
great seaman, Blake, the fitting instrument
to carry this wise, far-seeing policy into
effect, and who provided him, certainly
one of the greatest of the glorious line of
English admirals, with the means to make

* Harrison : " Oliver Cromwell," chap. xii.

120

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1658.

England mistress of the seas. u lt was
hard to discover," writes Clarendon, "which
feared the Protector Oliver most, France,
Spain, or the Low Countries."

In his home life, in his court, in the
day of his supreme power, he showed the
highest example of morality. His career
was absolutely free from all stain of per
sonal interest. He made no serious at
tempt to found a dynasty. He made .no
definite nomination even of a successor.
(The naming of his son Richard at the
last, when his brain was clouded with
mortal sickness, is doubtful.) u After his
death, he knew too well, nothing which he
could do would save the cause. He ac
cepted the inevitable, and he did nothing." *

Our picture of the Puritan soldier and
statesman would not be complete without
some account of his last hours. Of these
we possess a tolerably full and probably an
absolutely authentic record, in the words
of his faithful attendant, t They are
transparently real in themselves, and the
evidence of their genuineness never having
been seriously impugned, they will give
us one more proof, if such be required, of
the reality of Oliver Cromwell s religion
and the transparent sincerity of his faith.
He was only fifty-nine when the end
came was seemingly strong and even
young for his years, but in reality worn
out by twenty years of incessant toil,
danger, crushing anxieties. The death of
his favourite daughter, the lady Elizabeth
Claypole, after great and prolonged suffer
ings, in the August of 1658, had seriously
affected the loving father ; and as he

* Mr. Frederic Harrison.

t Harvey, groom of Oliver Cromwell s bed
chamber ; dated 1659.

watched the slow ebbing-out of the last
hours of her young life, the sickness from
which he never rallied stole upon him. It
was a kind of tertian ague ; probably the
seeds had been laid long before in some
of his many campaigns. George Fox, the
Quaker, tells us how he saw the famous
Protector riding into Hampton Park with
his guards for the last time ; this was in
the same August. li And before I came
to him," says Fox, " I saw and felt a waft
of death go forth against him. He looked
like a dead man. After I had laid the
sufferings of friends before him, he bade
me come to his house. The next day I
went up to Hampton Court to speak farther
with him " ; but the Protector was too ill
then, and Fox never saw him again.

A few more days of restless sickness, and
by the advice of his physicians he was
removed in a coach to Whitehall, the air
of London being considered better for his
ague and fever ; this was on the 24th
August. But Harvey, his groom of the
chamber, who wrote the pathetic story of
the end, tells us " his time was come, and
neither prayers nor tears could prevail
with God to lengthen out his life and
continue him longer to us. Prayers
abundantly and incessantly poured out on
his behalf, both publicly and privately, as
was observed, in a more than ordinary
way. Besides many a secret sigh, . . .
all whijh, the hearts of God s people being
thus mightily stirred up, did seem to beget
confidence in some and hopes in all }^ea,
some thoughts in himself that God would
restore him." Hope, however, in his re
covery, as the symptoms grew graver, was
at last abandoned. Many of his last
sayings and words in these few closing

DEATH OF THE PROTECTOR.

121

days of the great life have been carefully
preserved to us by the same kindly hand
of his faithful attendant above quoted.

He was seldom alone ; preachers, chap
lains, and others being constantly in
attendance. His wife and children, too,
weeping, watched him constantly during
those sad hours. The intense reality

hope of recovery. Three times, Harvey
tells us, he was heard repeating : " It is a
fearful thing to fall into the hands of the
Living God." Then he would utter words
of trust and confidence : " The Lord hath
filled me with as much assurance of His
pardon and His love as my soul can hold. "
And again, after dwelling on the promises

THE DEATH OF OLIVER CROMWELL.
(From the picture by D. W. Wynfield, in South Kensington Museum.)

of the Puritan religion is conspicuously
manifest in the touching little record.
Carlyle* has gathered up a few of
the Lord Protector s sayings and words
out of Harvey s memoir. " Lord,"
the bystanders heard him say, " Thou
knowest, if I do desire to live, it is to
show forth Thy praise and declare Thy
works." He had not as yet abandoned all

* " Oliver Cromwell," vol. iii., part x. Also see
Mr. F. Harrison : " Oliver Cromwell," chap. xiv. ;
and S. R. Gardiner : " Puritan Revolution," chap. ix.
*U

of God in Jesus Christ, the dying Protector
said aloud : " I think I am the poorest
wretch that lives, but I love God, or rather
am beloved of God. I am a conqueror
and more than a conqueror through Christ
that strengtheneth me."

On the 30th August, when none of
those who loved him well dared entertain
any hope that the life so precious to
England and Puritanism would be spared,
broke over England that historic storm
which chroniclers dwell on with awe and

122

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1658.

wonder. It seems to have swept across
the country with howling winds and
drenching rains, with a fury rarely ex
perienced in this island, uprooting trees,
unroofing houses, and scattering desolation
far and wide. u The devil," said the
cavaliers and Royalists, who still bitterly
mourned their king and their own utter
defeat, " was fetching home the soul of the
Tyrant " ; but little cared Oliver then for
storm or curses. Very touching were his
words to wife and children as they stood
and watched him : u Love not this world.
I say unto you, it is not good that you
should love this world. No, children, live
like Christians."

Two or three nights before he died he
prayed the beautiful prayer which Harvey
gives us, thus commenting upon it and its
undoubted authenticity : " Some variation
there is of this Prayer, as to the account
divers give of it, and something is here
omitted, but so much is certain these
were his requests, wherein his heart was so
carried out for God and His people, yea,
indeed, for some who had added no little
sorrow to him, the Anabaptist Republicans
and others, that at this time he seems to
forget his own family and nearest relations."

THE PRAYER.

Lord, though I am a miserable and wretched
creature, I am in covenant with Thee through
grace. And I may, I will come to Thee, for Thy
people. Thou hast made me, though very un
worthy, a mean instrument to do them some good
and Thee service ; and many of them have set too
high a value upon me, though others wish and
would be glad of my death. Lord, however Thou
do dispose of me, continue and go on to do good
for them. Give them consistency of judgment,
one heart and mutual love, and go on to deliver
them, and with the work of reformation, and make
the name of Christ glorious in the world. Teach
those who look too much on Thy instruments to
depend more upon Thyself.

Pardon such as desire to trample upon the dust
of a poor worm, for they are Thy people too.

And pardon the folly of this short prayer, even
for Jesus Christ s sake.

And give us a good night, if it be Thy pleasure.

Amen.

There is little more to tell. The long
death agony from the time of his removal
to Whitehall, lasted ten days. The evening
before the end he was heard talking as it
were to himself : " Truly God is good ;

indeed He is ; He will not ." Then,

said Harvey, his speech failed him, " but
as I apprehended, it was, He will not leave
me. This saying, God is good, he fre
quently used all along, and would speak it
with much cheerfulness and fervour of
spirit in the midst of his pain." That
night the last he was very restless. On
there being offered to him something to
drink which would give him sleep, he
refused, saying, "It is not my design to
drink or to sleep, but to make what haste
I can to be gone." A few more expres
sions of deep humility, but of consolation
and peace, were heard by Harvey. Then
he fell into a stupor, and so passed away.
It was the 3rd September, 1658, the
anniversary of his two great victories of
Dunbar and of Worcester.

He had many warm and devoted friends,
chiefly in that matchless army and fleet
which he had created. But he had no
successor ; Richard, his son, who assumed
for a brief interval his title and dignity,
being but the shadow of a name. With
extraordinary rapidity, in less than two
short years from that sorrowful September
afternoon, the whole of the elaborate
machinery of government devised by the
Lord Protector had collapsed ; the old
Stuart dynasty, in the person of the son of

i6 5 8.]

TREATMENT OF OLIVER S REMAINS.

123

the murdered king, was once more firmly
re-established on the English throne ; and
at the same time passed away for ever
Puritanism as a power though not as
an influence, as we shall see.

They gave him a funeral the most
stately, men say, ever known in this
country, copying the gorgeous and elab
orate ceremonial of king Philip II. of
Spain, who had died on the same day
sixty years before. They laid him among
the kings and queens of England in the
storied abbey at Westminster. Reckoned
in our present money, these magnificent
and more than royal obsequies cost
^150,000. Round the fate of the remains
of Oliver many legends have gathered.
The most probable account is the one
which relates how the body, after having
been embalmed, was buried in Henry VII. s
chapel of the abbey in the spot still

pointed out. After the Restoration it was

. .

disinterred, decapitated, hung up at

Tyburn, and the head set up and exposed
for a lengthened period over the gate of
Westminster Hall. A story not unworthy
of credence tells how after a time lady
Fauconberg was suffered to take the poor
dishonoured trunk down from the Tyburn
tree, and had it securely walled up in
masonry in the walls of Yorkshire New-
burgh. The whole story of the ghastly
disinterment is a pitiful memory, and not
a few of the most devoted royalists in
England, who admire the colossal greatness
of the Protector, while loathing his sin
against his king and his terrible work in Ire
land, would witness with true joy the rever
ent replacement of the bones of the great
Puritan, should they still exist, in their abbey
tomb. We do not now war with the dead.

There is nothing told in the many-
coloured pages of history more remarkable
than the rise of Puritanism, its victory,
and its sudden fall. In the pictures we
have painted of four of its typical men, it
will be seen how mighty a power it must
have been once among us. For Hampden
and Milton, Bunyan and Oliver Cromwell,
were not solitary instances of Puritanism,
but, as we have already urged with great
insistence, were simply examples of many
thousands of the English people who had
set before them "the fear of. God " as the
mainspring of all life and endeavour. The
four only differed from the great majority
of the rank and file of their party, by being
their superiors in ability and in mental
power.

But though this mighty Puritanism,
when Oliver Cromwell died, strangely
passed out of sight as an outward power,
as a visible force, its spirit has lived among
us ever since ; not, as some writers imagine,
only or even principally among the Non
conformist bodies, such as the Baptists
and Independents, the Presbyterians and
Wesleyans. Many of the truest and noblest
Puritans, it must be ever remembered,
were loyal to the Church of England. We
have instanced here such men as Hampden
and Milton before the Civil War. In some
particulars those great Dissenting bodies,
whose religious work and well-deserved
influence among our people every true
son of the Church of England gladly ac
knowledges, are the lineal descendants of
the later Puritans. But, quite apart from
those earnest and devout Protestant
sects who for various reasons are un
happily not in communion with the great
historic church of our land, the spirit of

124

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

Puritanism still lives and works among
ourselves. It is one of the great powers for
good, to this day, in the English nation.
To its grave and earnest influence is owing
much of the earnestness, the sobriety, the
"religiousness," if we may use the word, of
the Anglo-Saxon race in a word, many
of those unspeakably noble characteristics
which specially belong to Englishmen, and
which have contributed so much to make
the Anglo-Saxon equal to the task of
controlling and influencing so large a
division of the world. The historian
of the English people tells us in a
striking passage* that "the whole his
tory of English progress since the Re
formation, on its moral and spiritual sides,
has been the history of Puritanism." The
assertion is possibly a little over-coloured,
but in the main it is emphatically true;
for on whatever side of the complex society
of England in the closing years of the
nineteenth century we fix our attention,
we are sensible of its mighty influence.

To take a few obvious examples of this
blessed, far-reaching influence. In no
country of the civilised world is woman
reverenced and respected as in England
and in her daughter-lands. Among no
people is the sanctity of marriage, and the
holy purity of the home life, reverenced as
it is with us in England ; and how jealous
is her church of the smallest step in the
direction of any relaxation of the marriage
law, in the matter of divorce and separa
tion ! Again, how proud is the entire
nation of the white and stainless purity of
the Court which gives the tone to all
society, the Court which for sixty years
has been under the sway of a distinguished

* Mr. Green: "History," chap, viii., section x.

and spotless queen ! " The womanhood
of England was nurtured in the great
Protestant tradition,"* and the ideal of
English womanhood was hymned first by
the Puritan poet, Spenser, and even more
conspicuously by the yet more pronounced
Puritan, Milton, who had before him such
models as Lucy Hutchinson and the
mother of Oliver Cromwell, and others of
the nobler Puritan ladies of his day and time.

But in no department of modern life has
the influence of Puritanism been more felt
than in letters. In European letters it
is to England that all nations resort, not
only for masterpieces of literature, but
for pure books in the several domains,
of history, romance, and poetry. In
the pages of her many great historians,
romancists, song-men, very rarely comes
the student across a thought which would
bring a blush upon the cheek of even a
girl ; and whenever this canon of purity is
violated, the true voice of English society
at once repudiates it, and the works of the
offending writers are placed by public
opinion in an informal but real u Index"
of condemned and repudiated letters. Can
this be fairly predicated to the same extent
of the books of any other nation ? It is
the same in art as in letters. Puritanism
permeates all alike.

Once more : it is the same spirit to
which we owe the rigid conservation of
our English Sunday; an institution often
mocked at, even sneered at by continental
critics, but at the same time envied and
admired by the very men who now and
again heedlessly ridicule it. It affects, too,
all political life in various ways. The un
blushing cynicism and the venality of such
* S. R. Gardiner

INFLUENCE OF PURITANISM.

125

a government as was Sir Robert Walpole s,
utterly foreign to the true English spirit,
finds no apologists, and is condemned uni
versally with an unstinting condemnation ;
very rarely indeed can a flaw now be

power in her midst. The good sense
and calm judgment which, in the vast
majority of our clergy, leads them to adopt
that historic " middle way," the precious
tradition of the Church of England, often,

WESTMINSTER HALL FROM THE RIVER, IN THE TIME OF CHARLES I.

detected in the public life of our statesmen,
or in the acts of their administration.

The very Church of England is per
meated by the same influences. Her
acknowledged care for the education of the
poor, her devotion to the sufferings of the
masses in sickness and in poverty, largely
spring from the same Puritan spirit, which,
hardly acknowledged, dwells as a living

for the common weal, subordinating their
own predilections this one in the direc
tion of mediaeval symbolism, that one for
the great simplicity loved by a Hooper
or a Jewel belongs also to that spirit of
lofty Puritanism which once animated the
serene soul of Hampdenj and which lives
along the eloquent pages of the earlier
verses of Milton.

CHAPTER LXVI.

OLIVER CROMWELL AND THE SUPPRESSION OF THE ANGLICAN CHURCH.

Epitome of the Civil War The Growing Conflict between Presbyterianism and Independency Between
Parliament and the Army Pride s Purge and the " Rump " Trial and Execution of the King
Destruction of the English Constitution Fighting in Ireland The " Crowning Mercy " of
Worcester Dissolution of the "Rump" Parliament The Protectorate Oliver s Abortive
Efforts to Secure Parliamentary Government Animosity of the Long Parliament to the Church
Its Causes The "Root and Branch" Bill The Westminster Assembly Adoption of the
" Solemn League and Covenant " Abolition of Episcopacy, and Expulsion of Anglican Clergy
The Directory for Public Worship The Two Catechisms The Confession of Faith Charges
against Episcopal Ministers Wholesale Ejectment and Spoliation Anarchy in Religious
Matters The "Triers" Evelyn s Testimony End of the Puritan Interregnum.

BEFORE chronicling the doom which
befell the Church of England
during the years of the Puritan
ascendancy, we must very slightly sketch
the events which succeeded each other
with extraordinary rapidity after king
Charles I. raised the royal standard at
Nottingham in 1642 ; an act which may
be regarded as a signal that .the Civil
War had begun in earnest. This period,
including scarcely twenty years 1642-
1660 fraught with such momentous issues,
may be fairly arranged into three divi
sions as follows :

(1) 1642-1649, the great Civil War,
ending with the execution of Charles I.
and the general supremacy of the army of
Oliver Cromwell over the Parliament and
all constituted authority.

(2) 1649-1653, the Commonwealth, when
Parliament still nominally governed, and
issued orders to the army and its great
general.

(3) ! 65 3-1 660, the Protectorate, when
Oliver Cromwell was virtually dictator,
until his death in 1658, when a short
period of anarchy preceded the Restoration .
of 1660.

As regards the first period, the great
Civil War, at the commencement and
during the early stages of the struggle be
tween the crown and the Parliament, the
north and west of England were, roughly
speaking, on the king s side, the south and
east on the side of the House of Commons;
but the lines of separation were scarcely
ever definite. One broad line of boundary
between the two opponents, however, may
be held in memory. The entire district of
the eastern counties, with Bucks, Herts,
Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, Sussex, and the
cities of Gloucester, Reading, Bristol,
Leicester, and Northampton, were the
home of Puritanism, and were opposed
generally to the king and his views of
government.

In the early scenes of the war the
advantage lay with the king. " The dash
ing cross-country rider, followed by his
groom and huntsman,"* the high-spirited
loyal gentlemen who followed the royal
standard, were vastly superior to the
materiel which composed the armies of the
Parliament. But there was an officer
serving in the ranks of the rebel army,
* Gardiner : " Puritans," chap. iv.

I643-]

PRESBYTERIANISM IN ENGLAND.

127

who quickly saw this and was able to
remedy it. In Oliver Cromwell the Parlia
ment possessed one of the great soldiers of
the world. From the first days of the war
he made his influence felt. " He was
everywhere ; his zeal kept alive the fervour
of resistance, and stirred it up when it was
yet sleeping. He organised, fought, taught
men how to fight." Equally great as a
strategist or as a combatant, he rapidly
became the mainspring of the rebel forces.
His most important piece of work in the
early days of the war, however, was his
creation of that terrible regiment of Puritan
soldiers, subsequently known as the Iron
sides, which we have already described.
" I have a lovely company," he once
wrote ; " you would respect them did you
know them." Very soon he was master of
the best soldiers to be found in the two
armies. In the field of Marston Moo^, the
first real victory over the king, the Iron
sides of Cromwell decided the battle.

But while this great soldier of the
Parliament was busy forging that tre
mendous instrument which in the end
decided the event of the war, the Long
Parliament in 1643 were growing uneasy
at the state of affairs in the field. The
general superiority of the royal forces was
manifest, and they determined to enlist
the services of Scotland on their side.
The price they paid for this help, proved
one of the principal causes of the eventual
downfall of Puritanism. Scotland, before
sending its trained veterans to the help
of the English Parliament, insisted that
England should formally adopt Presby-
terianism ; and the national representa
tives, who in the Civil War were op
posed to the king, mainly to conciliate

Scotland to win her support and the
aid of her trained armies adopted Presby-
terianism as the national form of religion.
It was the price Parliament paid for
Scottish aid. u No Presbyterianism, no
Scottish army," and the Parliament were
conscious of this. The price was loyally
paid, but Presbyterianism was never really
popular in England. The Solemn League
and Covenant was, however, signed by the
members of Parliament, and Presbyterian
ism became dominant through the length
and breadth of the England which had
revolted against Charles I.

We have before touched upon the great
split, which in the hour of its seeming
triumph cleft Puritanism asunder, dividing
it into two opposite camps, utterly irrecon
cilable the one to the other. There were
grave reasons besides, which, if it became
separated from the Church of England
and adopted Presbyterianism or Inde
pendency under disguise, would have made
it impossible for Puritanism to have been
the form which Protestantism would assume
as the established religion in England.
On some of these we have already dwelt.
But the immediate downfall and ruin of
its short-lived supremacy was primarily,
no doubt, owing to this serious split in its
own ranks. For the Parliament of 1643 and
the following years had another power to
reckon with besides the Royalist party
in their own army, daily increasing in
numbers and efficiency. This army hated
Presbyterianism. In its ranks were not a
few of the exiles, who, disliking the uni
formity which was being enforced in the
Church of England, had in past years
crossed the seas to the New England of
the vast, unexplored Western Continent,

128

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1643.

but who, in hope of happier and more
tolerant days, had now come back to their
native land. These returned exiles, who
in considerable numbers joined the Parlia
mentary forces, included Separatists of
varied kinds Independents, Baptists, and
the like all animated with a dislike, even
a hatred of Presbyterian rule, as intense as
their former antipathy to Episcopalian
government. These men and their num
bers were soon increased would serve
God after their own fashion. Each con
gregation was to be perfectly independent
of every other congregation ; they suffered
no government, Parliamentary or Royalist,
to interfere with them. At the head of
these Independents, or rather Separatists,
and in entire sympathy with them, was
the formidable Puritan hero who had
lately arisen, Oliver Cromwell. Under
his protecting influence the "Ironsides,"
and soon the whole army, of which he
was the virtual commander and directing
influence, became anti-Presbyterian.

In the spring of 1643, the lieutenant-
general of the Parliament for he had
rapidly risen to this commanding military
rank, and was already regarded as the
great soldier of the rebel armies wrote his
famous letter to major-general Crawford, a
zealous Scotch Presbyterian, in which he
openly declared the position he was pre
pared to take up in matters of religion.
Utterly opposed, "root and branch," as
it has been well termed, to Presby-
terianism as a narrow and tyrannical form
of church government, he publicly declared
himself as the patron of "Independent
Puritans." The occasion of this letter was
the suspension and arrest of a lieutenant-
colonel Packer, who, simply on account

of religious opinions, was disgraced by
his commanding officer, major-general
Crawford. To this Presbyterian general
Oliver Cromwell sternly wrote :

Surely you are not well advised thus to turn off
one so faithful to the cause, and so able to serve
you as this man is. Give me leave to tell you, I
cannot be of your judgment, cannot understand if
a man notorious for wickedness, for oaths, for
drinking, hath as great a share in your affection as
orfe who fears an oath, fears to sin, that this doth
commend your election of men to serve as fit
instruments in this work ! Ay, but the man "is
an Anabaptist." Are you sure of that? Admit
he be, shall that render him incapable to serve the
public ? . . . Sir, the State, in choosing men
to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions ; if
they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies.
I advised you formerly to bear with men of different
minds from yourself. ... It may be you judge
otherwise, but I tell you my mind. I desire you
would receive this man [lieutenant-colonel Packer]
into your favour and good opinion. Take heed
of being sharp against those to whom you can
object little but that they square not with you in
every opinion concerning matters of religion. . .
I have not further to trouble you, but rest, your
humble servant,

OLIVER CROMWELL.

Very clearly in other letters and des
patches the Puritan soldier chief expresses
his strong opinions and views on these
points. To Speaker Lenthall especially he
writes : "Presbyterians, Independents, all
here [in the army] have the same spirit of
faith and prayer, the same presence and
answer ; they agree here, have no names
of difference ; pity it is it should be other
wise anywhere ! . . . For being united
in forms, commonly called uniformity,
every Christian will for peace sake study
and do as far as conscience will permit.
And for brethren, in things of the mind,
we look for no compulsion but that of
light and reason."

Thus began the long series of religious

130

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16451647.

disputes, hatreds, intrigues, between the
Parliament and the army. The great
general and moving spirit of these
formidable men-at-arms, Oliver Cromwell,
fervid Puritan though he was, was ever
opposed to Presbyterianism. The victory
of Marston Moor was decided by the Iron
sides of Cromwell, and the ascendancy of
the general and his army was becoming
more felt every day. The chief commands
in the Parliamentary forces were still held
by the earls of Essex and Manchester, but
these and other officers were regarded as
inefficient, perhaps half-hearted, by Oliver
Cromwell. A strange device was adopted
to get rid of them. His influence in the
House of Commons was sufficient to secure
the passing of an act termed the " self-
denying ordinance," by which every mem
ber of either House was declared incapable
of holding any military command. Oliver,
however, being absolutely indispensable to
the army, as might have been expected,
was exempted from the provisions of the
" self-denying ordinance." Indeed, the
whole of the rebel army was being re
organised by Cromwell and his officers
on the pattern of his own invincible
force of Ironsides.

The (i new model " army, as it was
termed, and the " self-denying ordinance,"
brought about a complete revolution in
the affairs of the Parliamentary party. A
concession was made to the Presbyterians
of the House of Commons, by declaring
their system of church government uni
versal in England ; but all true power was
taken out of their hands, and was vested
in Cromwell and his friends. Sir Thomas
Fairfax was made commander-in-chief, but
the real authority belonged henceforth

to Oliver Cromwell, who now had in his
hands an organised army of the highest
efficiency, led by officers entirely devoted
to him. Lords Essex and Manchester and
all other peers and members of Parliament
were excluded from holding any commands
in the army. Presbyterianism, though
nominally the system of church govern
ment established by the Parliament, found
no sympathy in, and was practically dis
regarded by, the army and its great
organiser and real chief. Early in 1645
this new state of things was finally estab
lished, and in the June of the same year,
in the centre of England, the battle of
Naseby was fought. So crushing was the
defeat of the Royalists, it virtually closed
the war. A few skirmishes, and here and
there a siege, fill up the dreary record of
the rest of the fatal year, but never again
were the English Royalists able to gather
together another army to meet Oliver and
the Parliamentarians. The tone of the
despatch to the Houses announcing the
victory of Naseby, shows that Oliver treated
himself as practically commander-in-chief,
and as master of the situation in the
council chamber as in the field.

In 1646 Charles, finding the situation
hopeless, gave himself up to the Scots,
who were then besieging one of his last
remaining strongholds at Newark. We
are not concerned here with the confused
and tangled negotiations between Charles
and the Scottish Presbyterians, which, how
ever, came to nought. At the beginning
of 1647, as the result of a shameful
agreement, the Scots gave up the king to
the English Parliament. A considerable
sum of money, which the northern nation
claimed -as wages for the assistance given

i6 4 8.]

THE BATTLE OF PRESTON.

131

to England in the late war, was paid to
them. This disgraceful bargain, by which
king Charles I. was sold to his inveterate
English enemies, was utterly unworthy
of the chivalrous Scottish nation. No
doubt the refusal of the English king
to support the Presbyterianism so dear
to the Scottish people, determined them
to surrender him, but no excuse can
ever palliate the deed of shame. More
negotiations were now set on foot between
the Parliament and the king, who was
confined in Holmby House in Northamp
tonshire ; indeed, at this time dread
of the enormous power of the army and
its great general disposed Parliament to
attempt to come to terms with Charles.
Oliver, however, solved the question by
forcibly taking possession of the king s
person and placing him under safe custody.
The three years following the defeat of
Charles I. to his death at Whitehall (1646-
1649), have been well described as " the
most intricate and obscure of the Civil
War." We shall in this brief historical
survey not attempt to follow them up with
any detail, but shall only indicate the
principal events. /The struggle now really
was between the Parliament and the army.
The Parliament was pledged to support
Presbyterianism, and the army was equally
determined to prevent Presbyterian dom
ination. The Parliament was fully aware or
the terrible power of the instrument they
had called into being, and was even ready
to come to terms with the sovereign they
had humbled, if by these means they could
destroy the influence of the great soldier,
and ward off the drastic political and
religious changes which they foresaw would
be carried out against their will in the

near future. The condition of their sub
mission to the crown, however, was the
acceptance of Presbyterianism by Charles.

As the event showed, the army under its
mighty chief, who proved himself to be as
wise a statesman as he was a great soldier,,
was too powerful to be dictated to or even
influenced. Once more Scotland and its
army for a brief moment seemed to hold
the key of the position. The Scottish
Presbyterians, alarmed at the prospects of
Presbyterianism in England if the army
and Oliver Cromwell were suffered to gain
the upper hand, again entered into nego
tiations with the captive king, and the
result was the breaking out of what is
termed the second Civil War. A great
army, consisting of some 17,000 Scots and
7,000 Royalists of the northern counties,
poured into England. The campaign was
conducted with little skill, and Oliver
Cromwell, with a force little exceeding
9,000, but composed of veterans trained in
many a fight, engaged the Scottish and
English forces as they aimlessly marched
southwards. The fight continued for three
days. It is known as the victory of
Preston, though the battle was spread over
more than thirty miles of country. Oliver
was completely victorious. Ten thousand
prisoners were taken, and a vast number
were slain. This closed the short but
decisive campaign.

In the meantime Parliament was more
determined than ever to carry out its
own policy of enforcing the tyranny of
Presbyterianism. The Commons issued,
in opposition to Oliver Cromwell s known
wishes, a fierce statute for the suppression of
blasphemies and heresies. Death was ap
pointed as the doom in some cases, prison

332

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1649.

in others. The latter penalty was to be
inflicted on any who asserted that k&lt; the
church government by Presbytery was
anti-Christian or unlawful." Again nego
tiations between Parliament and the king
were set on foot, and towards the end of
1648 the Commons openly declared for a
^ reconciliation with the king. Oliver was
still in the north, but the southern army
under Fairfax and Ireton, " his other self,"
acting no doubt under the direction of the
great chief, marched upon London and
quickly surrounded the u House," and a
regiment under Colonel Pride forcibly
ejected some hundred or more of the
leading Presbyterian members. This was
known as u Pride s purge." Other members
absented themselves ; in all, 146 members
were excluded from the proceedings of the
" House," and the remnant of the Long
Parliament who remained were known as
the " Rump." Henceforth this Parliament
was simply the obedient instrument of the
army and its mighty general, who now
played the part of military dictator.

The " Rump " now simply carried out
the will of Oliver and his officers. A re
solution was passed to bring the captive
king to justice, and he was brought,
strongly guarded, to Windsor. On the ist
January of the following year (1649) a
high court of justice, numbering 135
members, under the presidency of an
eminent lawyer, John Bradshaw, was ap
pointed by the remnant of the Commons
to try the king. The few lords who still
sat as a House, refused to take part in the
proceedings. The Commons upon this at
once declared that " the people are under
God the original of all just power ; that
the Commons of England in Parliament

assembled . . . have the supreme power
in the nation ; that whatsoever is enacted
oy the Commons hath the force of a law,
although the consent and concurrence of
the king and the House of Peers be not
had thereunto."

No time was lost in bringing the long-
meditated deed to a conclusion. On the
2 ist Januaiy, 1649, the trial of the king
commenced at Whitehall, only sixty-seven,
however, of the 135 appointed members
being present. The king refused to plead,
denying the competence of the court. It
was therefore simply a formality, the con
clusion being a foregone one. On the fifth
day of the trial he was condemned to death
as a tyrant, a traitor, and an enemy of the
country. The barbarous sentence was
carried into execution on the 3Oth of the
same month. The scaffold, erected in
front of the Banqueting House at White
hall, was guarded by a strong military
force, while all around the streets and roofs
of the houses were crowded with spectators.
The Banqueting House built by Inigo
Jones is still with us, the solitary remains
of the famous palace of the kings of
England ; the window out of which the
king passed to the temporary scaffold is
still pointed out with tolerable certainty.

The behaviour of the fallen monarch on
the scaffold, and as he waited during the
last two or three sad days for the supreme
hour, was characterised his friends and
foes bear a like testimony by all the
graces which belong to a chivalrous
Christian gentleman. No harsh, vengeful
words seem to have passed his lips ; calm,
courageous, and dignified, hopeless as
regards this present, passing world, he
rejoiced in the larger, grander hope with a

^34

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1649 1650.

perfect, unshaken confidence, and died
without a murmur, with that serene
courage which he had inherited from a
line of sovereign princes stretching over
well-nigh a thousand years. When the
masked executioner lifted up the head,
which fell at the first stroke, and the vast
crowd looked on the well-known beautiful
features, pale and blood-streaked, of their
king whom they had allowed to die, a
groan of sorrow and dismay burst from the
silent multitude. In foreign lands the
-execution excited even greater indigna
tion than in England, where the long
fierce wars had sadly familiarised men s
thoughts with deeds of blood and venge
ance. The death of the English king was
viewed with burning indignation alike
amongst the Protestant and the Roman
Catholic nations of the Continent.

When the head of Charles I. fell on the
scaffold at Whitehall, the ancient constitu
tion of England was destroyed. The king
and the Lords w r ere gone, and the House
of Commons was simply a docile instru
ment in the hands of the formidable
military leader, who was virtually now
dictator. A Council of State was created,
composed of forty-one persons chosen from
the Parliament and officers of the army,
the obedient Parliament registering its
decrees ; this government, known as the
" Commonwealth," bore sway in England
from 1649 to 1653. But Oliver was
the guiding spirit. His acts in respect to
the Church of England will be presently
related. His first pressing work was the
subjugation of Ireland. We have already
touched, in our sketch of the Puritan
.soldier, upon this terrible campaign. The

Irish task was sternly and cruelly, but,
from Oliver s point of view, thoroughly
done. Ireland was no longer a danger to
the peace of England. When the conquest
was completed, " three out of the four
provinces of Ireland were confiscated for
the benefit of the conquering race." * This
was fully carried out in 1652 by the
stern lieutenant whom Oliver left behind
him in Ireland to complete his work.

Yet another danger still existed, which
only the splendid military genius of Oliver
could cope with. Throughout the Civil
War, Scotland with its well-trained army
had played a considerable part, now siding
with the Parliament, now ranging itself on
the side of the king, as the chances of its
loved Presbyterianism rose and fell among
the Parliamentarians and the despairing
Royalists. In Oliver Cromwell the Scotch
knew well that Presbyterianism had no
friend. In 1650 the Scotch adopted the
cause of the young prince, Charles II., who,
for the sake of their support, swore to the
Presbyterian covenant. This constituted
a grave menace to the peace of England,
where, as Oliver well knew, a large Royal
ist party, broken and disorganised though
it was, existed. There was a short, sharp
campaign ; but as usual the surpassing
military genius of Oliver gave him the
victory, and at Dunbar the Scottish army
was well-nigh annihilated. The danger
was not yet, however, overcome. Another
force of considerable numbers, the young
king with them, pressed into England,
hoping that many Royalists would join
them. But England was exhausted with
the long warfare, and the Royalist party
were hopelessly dispirited, and only few
* Gardiner: " Puritans," chap. viii.

1653-1

THE LONG PARLIAMENT DISSOLVED.

135

joined the standard of the young Charles.
The Scottish forces penetrated as far as
Worcester, where Oliver came up with the
invaders. The result is well known. The
hapless Scottish army was destroyed. Charles
escaped, and became a fugitive and exile
for many years. Oliver termed the Wor
cester fight " a crowning mercy." He had
reason so to style it ; never again had the
Puritan soldier cause to draw his victorious
sword. England, Ireland, Scotland were
alike at his feet. Worcester was fought
and won September 3rd, 1651.

Abroad, the Commonwealth was engaged
in a dangerous war with the Dutch, a war
that sprang out of disputes concerning
foreign trade. The English navy had for
some time been growing into a formidable
power, and this war would decide whether
England or Holland was to be the mistress
of the seas. Both powers possessed ad
mirals of no ordinary ability ; Van Tromp
and De Ruyter will ever be honoured
names in Dutch story, while Blake in
England can never be ignored as the
founder of her surpassing maritime great
ness. The war for a long time dragged on.
There were no startling victories on either
side ; but on the whole England slowly
gained the upper hand, and gradually
drove the Dutch from the seas, where they
had long reigned supreme.

At home, the " Rump," as the pitiful
remnant of the Long Parliament was
termed, was becoming more and more
discredited. Its members were accused,
probably with reason, of corruption ; Oliver
urged them, but in vain, to dissolve and to
provide for the election of a new Parlia
ment. At last they proposed an iniquitous
bill of dissolution, which would secure the

sitting of the present members in the new
Parliament. Upon this, at the head of an
armed force, the military dictator ejected
them forcibly from the "House." This
was in 1653. The Council of State was
dismissed the same day, and three days
later appeared an " apologia " for the
strange arbitrary deed, in the form of "a
Declaration of the Lord-General and his
officers." The substance of it was, that as
the late Parliament were seeking to per
petuate themselves, they had been neces
sitated to put an end to it. The nation,
including the army and navy, quietly
acquiesced in Oliver s high-handed pro
cedure, and the whole machinery of state
now officially passed into the hands of the
dictator, whose will for several years had
been all-powerful, though the semblance
of a Parliamentary government had been
preserved.

Thus the Long Parliament came to an
end. The same year, wishful apparently
to preserve some of the constitutional
framework, the general and a council of
officers gathered together as a Parliament
a body of 140 Puritan notables, names
mainly suggested, it would seem, by the
"godly clergy." Some were men of rank
and position ; some were soldiers or sailors,
as Monk and Blake ; others were extreme
types of Puritan sects. In derision they
have been called the Barebones Parlia
ment, from the name of one Praise-God
Barebones, who sat in it. In less than half
a year (December, 1653) the members re
signed their powers into the hands of Oliver.
In the same month (the December of 1653)
the leading officers of the army (of course,
under the same inspiration) drew ftp an
u Instrument of Government " in other

136

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1658.

words, a " Constitution " which provided
for an elected Parliament, of one House
only, with the executive power placed in
the hands of Oliver Cromwell as Lord
Protector. Under this title Oliver now
ruled England as absolute master until his
death in 1658. Opposed to this formal
assumption of sovereign rule were a little
knot of stern Puritans, to whom u revolu
tion meant Republican equality; but he
had with him the Puritan rank and file,
the great majority of the superior officers,
all moderate men of every party who
desired peace, order, good government ;
the great cities, the army, and the navy.
With these- and his own commanding
genius he held his own triumphantly,
slowly winning the confidence of the nation
by virtue of unbroken success and (as it
seemed) miraculous fortune. *

Twice during this period of the " Pro
tectorate," which lasted not quite five
years, he essayed the experiment of a
Parliament, ever anxious to preserve the
framework and the fiction, for in his day
of power it was little more, of constitu
tional authority. But the experiment was
not a success, and a dissolution followed
not long after the assembling. Once, in
1655, symptoms of a dangerous hostility to
his government manifesting themselves in
different parts of England, he instituted
a system of provincial governors known as
that of the major-generals, ten in number;
but the insurrectionary spirit dying down,
these quickly disappeared. This second of
the Protectorate Parliaments pressed upon
him the title of king, urging him to assume
the crown. Oliver, however, refused. His
premature death, when only fifty-nine years
* Harrison: " Oliver Cromwell," chap, xi

of age, has been already dwelt upon. It wa&gt;
totally unexpected, for the Lord Protector
was still vigorous in mind and body, and
apparently, when his fatal illness seized
him, had years of life before him.

We have sketched these few dry details
of a period of rare and peculiar interest,
because without them it would be im
possible to grasp the idea of the total
seeming submergence of the church ; only
for a brief space of time, it is true, but it
was a terrible experience. In the days of
the Long Parliament, when the solemn
league giving over England to Presby-
terianism was signed, when Laud s head
fell on Tower IJill, and a few years later,
when king Charles I. followed his faithful
friend and archbishop on the same stern
road of death and shame ; in the days
of the Commonwealth; in the splendour
of the Protectorate, when every variety of
religious practice save the solemn ancient
use of the Church of England was legalised
and fostered, it would have been a daring
man who would have ventured to predict
the restoration of that immemorial church
to her ancient place and power. It seemed
to men s eyes, as we have said, hopelessly
submerged. And yet within .two short
years after the stately obsequies of Oliver
the Protector at Westminster, our task will
be to chronicle its restoration to its old
position of power, and influence on the
church of the nation.

Very deeply should the student of the
annals of the Church of England ponder
over this story of Puritan England and
the lives of the great Puritans. The most
loyal lover of his church, who believes with
unshaken belief that the weal of England,

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ORDER IN COUNCIL TO THE LORD MAYOR DIRECTING HIM "AND THE ALDERMEN OF
THE CITTIE OF LONDON .... TOGEATHER WITH SUCH YOUR ATTENDANTS AND
OFFICERS AS ARE CONVENIENT UPON SUCH AN OCCASION" TO ASSIST IN THE
PROMULGATION OF "A PROCLAMATION FOR PROCLAYMING HIS HIGHNESS OLIVER
CROMWELL LORD PROTECTOR OF THE COMON WEALTH OF ENGLAND," ETC., "IN THE
MOST PUBLIQUE AND USUALL PLACES." (Brithh Museum.}

i v

138

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16401641.

her happiness and her grandeur, are in
extricably bound up with the maintenance
of the immemorial church built up by
Anglo-Saxon and Norman, and purified by
the fathers of the Reformation, has much to
learn and some things to unlearn from the
Puritan story. He must remember, if he
is wise, that the voice of Puritan England
spoke from many centres, out of many
homes. It is speaking still. It is a voice
which should never be lightly regarded or
contemptuously put aside. Exaggerated
perhaps, mistaken certainly in its reading
of much of the teaching of primitive
Christian .antiquity, Puritan complaints
and dissatisfaction are still often weighty,
and should never be lightly disregarded.
Oh that men possessed a wise and
understanding heart ! How many of
our dissensions would disappear !

The study of Puritan England and its
story has another teaching, however, and
one which holds in its pages a strangely
deep comfort for the loyal son of the
church. The English Church, closely iden
tified with the policy of the crown, perished,
so far as the human eye could discern, in
that great shipwreck of the monarchical
institution which followed the termination
of the Civil War. The old feudal mon
archy disappeared for ever ; and when the
king came back, it was to a sovereignty very
different from that wielded by the Planta-
genets, Tudors, or the first two Stuart kings.
But there was no such change observ
able in the church of the Restoration
period. Some slight changes there were, to
be noticed in due course. But it was still
the old church of Andrewes and Hooker,
Parker, and Jewel the church which
these great divines received as a precious

heritage of many former generations. The
wonderful vitality of the established church
is what is specially noteworthy here.
She was persecuted, crushed, proscribed,
utterly ruined, and destroyed, as far as
the human eye could discern. As for her
priests, they were thrust out with igno
miny ; as for her churches and cathedrals,
they were taken from her, partially dese
crated, and given to others, and yet the
Establishment lived on. There was that
in her which was indestructible.

The picture which has been drawn of
Oliver Cromwell as a mighty Puritan of
the extreme type ; the notice of the same
heroic figure in the necessarily brief
account of the Civil War, the Common
wealth, and the Protectorate, will serve to
show what an antagonist met the Church
of England in her hour of extreme peril.
It is no exaggeration which recognises in
Oliver Cromwell at once the ablest states
man and the most successful general of the
long line of soldiers and rulers chronicled
in the pages of English history. The most
pressing political reasons v and religious ani
mosity sharpened in bitter and relentless
warfare, both contributed to the hatred
which Oliver felt and showed to the church
of Laud and Charles; and yet, with all his will
to harm it, even to destroy it, a will backed
by the unchecked power of a dictator,
and guided by one of the keenest and
most brilliant intellects ever possessed by
man, he strangely failed. The roots of
the church were too deeply entwined in
the homes and hearths of England for
even an Oliver Cromwell permanently to
harm her.

The fierce animosity against the Church
of England displayed in that famous

16401641.]

CAUSES OF ANIMOSITY TO THE CHURCH.

139

House of Commons known generally as
the Long Parliament, requires some ex
planation. That it did not at all represent
the real mind of the nation, is clear ; first,
from the overwhelming mass of petitions
from different counties of England and
Wales sent up to Parliament in the course
of the year 1642, deprecating any radical
changes in the constitution of the church,
which from the temper of the House many
felt were impending ; * and secondly, from
the quiet but generally hearty welcome
with which the restoration of the church
was received on the downfall of Puritanism,
when the strong hand of the Protector
was removed by death.

There is no doubt that Laud, true
and earnest churchman though he was,
and great though his services to the
historic Church of England are now
recognised to have been, was often un
wise and arbitrary even in his ecclesiastical
measures. With extraordinary pertinacity,
for instance, he pressed the use of bowing
to the east end of the church, where,
owing largely to his wishes, the holy
table stood altar-wise. In vain the great
advocate of church order explained the
meaning of this use. It was liable to grave
misunderstanding ; and the thoughtful,
moderate churchman cannot help re
gretting that so much opposition should
have been excited on a point, which even
ILaud himself allowed was one of quite

* Hallam(" Constitutional History," p 527 ; note)
thus writes : " I have a collection of these petitions,
printed in 1642, from thirteen English and five
Welsh counties, and all very numerously signed.
I observe in almost every instance they thank the
Parliament for putting a check to innovations and
abuses, while they deprecate the abolition of Epis
copacy and the liturgy."

secondary importance. The mode of recep
tion of the Eucharist, the position of the
holy table, the rails placed round it as greatly
increasing the reverence which empha
tically should surround the most holy rite
these things no doubt also excited op
position in many minds ; but in them was
something worth a struggle, and most
churchmen acknowledge here the deep
debt which the Church of England owes
to Laud.

But after all, none of these matters were
really the root of the bitter feeling against
Laud, and the church in which he was the
representative figure, manifested by the
Long Parliament. Laud was identified,
and alas ! but too justly, with the unhappy
policy of absolutism, pursued with such
unbending determination by Charles I.
and his ministers. In the hateful tribunals
of the Star Chamber and High Commission,
Laud and his friends were the most pro
minent figures. The archbishop also
shared with Wentworth (Straiford) un
enviable notoriety as one of Charles s
principal and most influential and trusted
ministers.

In the early days of this Parliament
(1640-41), before the final breach with the
king, this spirit of animosity was very
apparent. Sir Benjamin Rudyard uses
these words : " We know well what dis
turbance hath been brought upon the
church for vain petty trifles, how the
whole church, the whole kingdom, hath
been troubled where to place a metaphor
an altar." Mr. Bagshaw, inveighing against
the obnoxious tribunals, spoke as follows :
" When I cast my eyes upon the High
Commission and other ecclesiastical courts,
my soul hath bled for the many pressures,

140

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1641.

which I perceive to be done and com
mitted in these courts against the king s
good people." Lord Digby complained of
the new oath imposed upon the clergy,
and spoke very strongly against the pro
ceedings of the last Convocation, and espe
cially was irate with the " et ccetera " oath.
Sir John Culpepper went into matters of
detail connected with " the divers new
ceremonies in matters of religion, such as
placing the communion table altar-wise,
and bowing or cringing towards it, the
refusing of the Holy Sacrament to such as
refused to come up to the rails." : These
attacks were followed by the committal to
custody of Laud, and by his impeachment,
which followed soon after.

Early in 1641 the Commons made an
order that commissioners should be sent
into the counties to demolish and remove
from churches and chapels all images,
altars, or tables turned altar-wise, crucifixes,
superstitious pictures, and the like. Fol
lowing the tragedy which ended Strafford s
life (1641), the drastic " root and branch "
Bill, as it was termed, was drafted and
introduced into the Commons. This de
structive piece of legislation provided for
the doing away with bishops and their
officers, for the abolition of deans and
chapters, archdeacons, and prebendaries of
the cathedrals. This Bill, however, did
not become law until a later period. A
committee of religion was nominated in
the House of Lords, for the purpose of
considering the doctrines and ceremonies
of the church. Amongst other points
which they reviewed and condemned were
canopies over the holy table, credences or

* Canon Perry "History of the Church of
England" (second period), chap, xxviii.

side tables, candlesticks on the table.
Other objections to the Prayer-book were
also made. In the middle of the same
year (1641) the courts of Star Chamber
and High Commission were abolished, the
king assenting to this. It was now that
the more moderate and earnest of the
Puritans threw in their lot with the party
of destruction, and we find such men as
Milton using his pen in the controversy,
which was being wildly carried on, for the
destruction of the episcopacy.

This question of the abolition of the
episcopacy continued to be fiercely dis
cussed. A vast number of petitions, the
result of Puritan agitation, were sent up
to the House. These, however, were
largely counterbalanced by petitions on
the other side ; but the political horizon
grew darker and darker, and the church
and the bishops became, as the months
passed on, more the centre of the attack
among those who were opposed to the
king. London especially was distinguished
for its fierce animosity to the church.
Towards the end of 1641 the position of
the prelates in the House of Lords became
untenable, and the bishops were compelled
to fly for their lives. They drew up a
protest, declaring all legislation in their
enforced absence illegal. Their protest
excited great indignation, and a Bill was
passed removing them from the House of
Lords. To this Bill the king weakly gave
his assent. In the January of the follow
ing year (1642) things came to a crisis,
king Charles quitted Whitehall, and the
great Civil War began in real earnest.

We have already alluded to the Royalist
superiority in the early period of the

142

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1643.

contest, and have mentioned how the Par
liament, uneasy and restless, dreading defeat
at the hands of an incensed and possibly a
vengeful sovereign, called in the help of
the Scots, who possessed a trained and dis
ciplined army. Under the influence of
these fears, with a view no doubt of con
ciliating the Scottish people, the " Root
and Branch " Bill above described, which
swept away the entire Anglican hierarchy,
and made way for the introduction of
Presbyterianism, was passed, but was voted
evidently with some misgivings, and it was
arranged that the tremendous and de
structive provisions were not to come into
force for a year ; hope still lingering among
many that a peace might yet be arranged
with the king, and that then the " Root
and Branch " Act would of course, as no
royal assent had been given, not possess
the force of law, and would be quickly
forgotten. But the war, alas ! went on ;
and as the advantage still continued on
the side of the Royalists, the assistance of
the Scots became, as time went on,
more and more urgently necessary to the
Parliament.

It was under the pressure of this urgent
necessity, that in the June of 1643 an
ordinance of Parliament summoned the
" Westminster assembly," a body designed
as a substitute for Convocation. This
famous assembly consisted of 121 "godly
and learned divines," and 30 laymen.
The object for which they were called
together is stated in the preamble 01
the ordinance " The present church
government is evil and burdensome to
the kingdom and a great impediment to
reformation and growth of religion, it is
to be taken away, and such a government

settled as may be most agreeable to
God s Holy Word . . . and nearer in
agreement with the Church of Scotland
and other reformed churches abroad."
The assembly began its duties with a
revision of the u Articles." The changes
here were not many or of great import
ance ; the real work began when the
Scottish commissioners arrived. These
pressed, as the price of assistance from
Scotland, the acceptance by the West
minster Assembly and by Parliament of
"the Solemn League and Covenant." This
drastic and destructive document had been
drawn up in Scotland as early as 1638 ; in
it the signatories solemnly pledged them
selves to the extirpation of prelacy that is&gt;
church government by archbishops, bishops,
their chancellors .and commissaries, deans
and chapters, archdeacons, and other
ecclesiastical officials.

The need of Scottish help in the Civil
War at this juncture was urgent ; and after
some delay the House of Commons and
the Assembly agreed, with considerable
reluctance on the part of many, to accept
the Covenant. It was directed to be read
in all the London churches, and eventually
this most tyrannical " covenant " was
ordered to be taken by every person in
England above the age of eighteen, and
came into force in the February of 1644,
The Solemn League and Covenant, the
price of the Scottish assistance, was the
result of the earnest desire of the northern
clergy for the assimilation of the English
to the Scottish Church. "The English,"
it is said, " were for a civil league, the
Scotch for a religious covenant." The
covenant was drawn up on the lines of the
Sottish national covenant of 1638. A vow

PRESBYTERIANISM ESTABLISHED.

143

was adopted in common by both " that
we shall all and each of us sincerely . . .
endeavour the preservation . of the true
Protestant reformed religion in the Church
of Scotland in doctrine, worship, discipline
and government, and the reformation of
religion in the Church of England accord
ing to the Word of God and the example
of the best reformed churches, and as may
bring the churches of God in both nations
to the nearest . . . uniformity in re
ligion, confession of faith, form of church
government, directory for worship and
catechising, that we and our posterity after
us may as brethren live in faith and love."
Other clauses provide for the abolition of
episcopacy in England, the maintenance
of the rights of the two Parliaments,
. . . and the " bringing to trial of in
cendiaries and malignants."* The Solemn
League and Covenant was adopted in
Scotland in August, 1643, and by the
Westminster Assembly and Parliament
in the autumn of the same year.

During the Civil War this Presbyterian
legislation was put into force, as the Par
liamentarian forces obtained the upper
hand, in all parts of England ; and most
of the Anglican clergy were ejected from
their cures and benefices. Before the end
of 1643 many had been driven out. We
read of some thousands of churches vacant.
Allowing for some exaggeration in such a
statement, there is no doubt but that a
wide-spread desolation was the result of
the adoption of the Scotch " Covenant."

* Cf Gardiner : " History of the Great Civil
War," chap. xi. The words in italics, objected to
by the Scots, were added to the original Scottish
draft by Vane. They appear in the form of the
Covenant adopted in relation to the coming reform
of the English Church.

Episcopacy being now destroyed by
Parliament, committees were appointed to
examine candidates for ordination, and to
ordain them by imposition of hands. Thus
a form of Presbyterian government was
established. Milton, who at this time had
become an extreme Puritan and an ardent
adversary of Anglicanism, calls attention
to the greed and avarice of some of the
Presbyterian divines in this period of con
fusion and distress. These self-seeking
men seized upon the best and more
important of the vacated preferments for
their own use. He writes of these plun
derers as follows : " The most part of
them were such as had preached and cried
down with great show of zeal the avarice
and pluralities of bishops, and how one
cure of souls was a full employment for
one spiritual pastor, how able soever. Yet
they wanted not boldness, to the ignominy
and scandal of their pastor-like profession,
to seize into their hands sometimes two or
more of the best livings, collegiate master
ships in the universities, rich lectures in
the City, setting sail to all winds that
might blow gain into their covetous
bosoms."

At this time general confusion and dis
order prevailed. An enormous number of
churches were without a minister. Some
of the more important were held as we
have just described. In the churches
which were not deserted various kinds
of service were used ; some used the old
service ; some parts of it ; some substituted
conceived (extemporary) prayer. The bit
terest animosity was in many parts of the
country stirred up by Scottish influence
against the Book of Common Prayer. To
counteract the general disorder and hope-

144

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1645-

less confusion, the Westminster Assembly
determined to put out in the place of the
English Prayer-book, " a Directory for the
Public Worship of God in the three king
doms." This was sent into Scotland for
approval by the General Assembly in that
country, and was formally put out by
ordinance of Parliament in the January of
1645. It was largely based on Calvin s
form of service and Knox s Book of Com
mon Order. It has been described " as a
manual of directions, the minister being
allowed a discretion either to make the
most of what was provided for him in the
book, or to use his own abilities to supply
what he considered needful."*

The preface to this " Directory " gives
us an index to the bitter Presbyterian
spirit in which it was composed. It runs
as follows : " Sad experience hath made
it manifest that the liturgy used in the
Church of England hath proved an offence
to not only many of the godly at home,
but also to the reformed churches abroad ;
that the many unprofitable and burden
some ceremonies contained in it have
occasioned much mischief by disquieting
the consciences of godly ministers and
people who could not yield unto them, and
by depriving them of the ordinances of
God, which they might not enjoy without
conforming or subscribing to these cere
monies. . . . For these and other
weighty considerations we have determined
to lay aside the former liturgy with its rites
and ceremonies, and to adopt this Direc
tory which follows." The ordinance of
Parliament, which took away the Book of
Common Prayer and established in its stead

* Procter: "The Book of Common Prayer"
(On "The Directory").

the Directory, was followed in the August
of 1645 by an ordinance actually prescrib
ing severe penalties upon anyone using the
superseded Prayer-book, either privately
or publicly, a fine being imposed for the
first and second offence, for the third a
year s imprisonment.

The Presbyterian Directory was never
received with any acceptance in England,
and no wonder. Its tyrannical injunc
tions wounded all sorts and conditions of
men, sweeping away observances, customs,
rites, ceremonies, and prayers justly dear
to Englishmen, abolishing all holy days,
even Christmas day, and many loved
uses which had been the cherished in
heritance of the people for more than a
thousand years, the observance of all holi
days being sternly forbidden. This would
touch the lives and customs of even the
unthinking multitude, while the forbid
ding any service at the burial of the dead
would wound the hearts of thousands in
their hour of sorrow and mourning, which
comes sooner or later to all alike.

Among the more important of the
changes which the substitution of the
" Directory " for the Book of Common
Prayer inflicted upon public worship, were
the rejection of the Apocrypha, the discon
tinuance of private baptism, of godfathers
and godmothers, of the sign of the cross, of
the wedding-ring, of the administration of
the Lord s Supper to the sick at home.
The communion table was again removed
into the body of the church, with the
preference of a sitting or standing to a
kneeling posture. All saints days were
discarded, and all ecclesiastical vestments
forbidden. Most strangely, the service for
the burial of the dead, as we have noticed

146

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16451646.

above, was omitted. No creed was recited,
nor the ten commandments. These, how
ever, with the Apostles Creed, were added
to the " Confession of Faith," which was
presented by the Westminster Assembly to
Parliament in the December of 1646.

The " Directory " is conspicuous through
out for its studied ignoring of all Catholic
traditions. The sacrament of baptism, for
instance, was to be performed " in the face
of the congregation, where the people may
most conveniently see and hear, and not
in the places where fonts in the time of
popery Were unfitly and superstitiously
placed." Before baptism " the minister is
to use some words of instruction especially
teaching that the inward grace of baptism
is not tied to the moment of its ad
ministration. 1

" The Communion or Supper of the Lord
is frequently to be celebrated, but how
often may be considered and determined
by the ministers and other church gover
nors of each congregation." It was to
follow the morning sermon : " Then, the
table being before decently covered and so
conveniently placed that the communicants
may orderly sit about it or at it, the
minister is to begin the action with sanctify
ing and blessing the elements of bread and
wine set before him." The words of ad
ministration were quite changed from those
used in the Anglican Church, which, as
we have seen, were taken from the most
esteemed and ancient liturgies.

In place of the office for the burial of the
dead, the following bare and simple direc
tion is given : "When any person de-
parteth this life, let the dead body be
decently attended from the house to the
place appointed for public burial, and

there immediately interred without any
ceremony."

It was specially ordered in the Direc
tory " that only the Lord s day and days
separated for public fasting or thanksgiving
shall be kept holy."

Perhaps the most curious sentence in
the Presbyterian Directory issued by the
Westminster Assembly is the one which
apologises for the continued use of the old
churches, in the following strange language :
"As no place is capable of any holiness
under pretence of whatsoever dedication or
consecration, so neither is it subject to
such pollution by any superstition formerly
used and now laid aside, as may render it
unlawful or inconvenient for Christians to
meet together therein for the public wor
ship of God. And therefore we hold it
requisite that the places of public as
sembling for worship among us should be
continued and employed to that use."

The supremacy of Presbyterianism and
its tyranny in England was short-lived.
We have already sketched the progress of
the Civil War, and have seen how, as
the power of the victorious army under
the great general grew, another form of
Puritanism and another sect completely
overshadowed the Presbyterians viz. the
" Independents. * These nominally ac
cepted indeed the Westminster Confession,
but in matters of discipline practically
rejected the Presbyterian system. Each
congregation was independent, and settled
its own service and appointed its own officers.
Before the year 1646 had run its course, a
modified scheme of church government was
voted, and a general toleration of all sects,
even the wildest and most disorderly,
under the influence of Oliver Cromwell

16401658.]

CONDITION OF THE ANGLICAN CLERGY.

became general. The Church of England
was, however, excepted from this broad
and comprehensive policy ; the all-powerful
general, Oliver Cromwell, from reasons
already specified, regarding her existence
as highly dangerous to his plans for the
government of the country; and a terrible
anarchy in all religious matters succeeded
the swift downfall in England of the
Presbyterians. The Westminster Assembly
was never formally dissolved, but in 1646
the number of those who attended its
meetings and discussions grew smaller and
smaller as the influence of the Presbyterians
was gradually overshadowed by the In
dependents, and in 1647 it virtually ceased
to exist.

Besides the Directory for public worship,
the Assembly put out two Catechisms, a
longer and a shorter ; the longer occupying,
with Scripture proofs, 157 quarto pages,
and the shorter forty pages. The latter
was intended for the young. The doctrine
of both, as might be supposed, was strongly
coloured with Calvinism.

The " Confession of Faith," which was
meant to supply the place of the thirty-
nine Articles, was the Westminster As
sembly s last public work. It was com
pleted in 1646, and presented to Parliament.

The condition of the clergy of the
Church of England, from the commence
ment of the bitter dispute between the
king and the Long Parliament in 1640, was
terrible. From the first, the church shared
the unpopularity of the crown. The causes
which led to this unpopularity have already
been pointed out. Three days after the as
sembling of the Long Parliament, a Grand
Committee for Religion was formed, and to

this committee were referred the various
petitions and complaints against individual
ministers. The Church had relentless
enemies, largely drawn from the bitter poli
tical foes of Strafford and Laud. The charges-
contained in the petitions and complaints-
were of many descriptions. The most cruel r
and for the most part utterly baseless, were
those bearing upon immorality, it being
openly asserted that great numbers of the
clergy were living scandalous lives. No
opportunity was given them for refutation
of these accusations, and the calmer judg
ment of posterity has set aside the great
majority of them as utterly without founda
tion. As a specimen of the treatment
which the accused were likely to meet with
at the hands of a hostile and embittered
committee, the words of Mr. White, one
of the four principal chairmen of the com
mittees into which the Grand Committee
for Religion was divided, are worth quoting,
from their extraordinary virulence and
shameless exaggeration. They occur in his
preface to a book he published, entitled
" The First Century of Scandalous Minis
ters." He termed the clergy " dumb dogs,
ignorant drunkards, whoremongers and
adulturers, men unfit to live, crawling
vermin, popish dregs, priests of Baal, sons
of Belial, unclean beasts," etc.

Two thousand petitions were got up in
different parts of the country, it is said,
and sent up to the Grand Committee. By
far, however, the greater number of these
charged the clergy with some description
of ceremonial scandal ; indeed, these ritual
complaints were well-nigh universally mixed
up with the cruel but comparatively rare
accusations of evil living. The ceremonial
scandals were generally connected with

348

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16401658.

curiously insignificant charges, as it now
seems to us ; such as bowing at the name of
Jesus, causing the communicants to come
up to the rails placed round the hoiy table,

FROM "TRUE INFORMATION OF THE BEGINNING AND
CAUSE OF ALL OUR TROUBLES : HOW HATCHED AND
HOW PREVENTED."

(A Puritan Pamphlet published in 1648.)

moving the table to the east end of the
church. Sometimes merely a vague ac
cusation of popery was made. Such peti
tions were simply signed by two or three,
in some cases by only one of the parish
ioners. On these ceremonial charges ndt
being satisfactorily disproved they were
probably true in the majority of cases
the accused minister was committed to
prison, his goods sequestered, and his

benefice was voided. The numbers of de
prived ministers soon became very great,
and as the war went on the number was
constantly increasing. In the early years
of the bitter dispute between the
king and the Parliament, vast num
bers of the clergy were thus deprived
on charges which were mainly cere
monial. When the war was actively
proceeding, however, a second means
of removal was found in the simple
accusation of these ministers of the
church being well disposed to the
king. They were " malignants "
(the term in use to describe such
as were well disposed and loyal to
the king) ; that was sufficient.
Then came the acceptance of the
Solemn League and Covenant, and
the establishment of the Directory.
This was even a simpler method of
ousting those clergy of the establish
ment who had escaped the first two
dangers. Local committees were
formed in the several counties. The
"covenant" was offered for sub
scription ; and upon the clergyman
refusing to sign the fatal document,
in the acceptance of which he vir
tually abjured and renounced his
church, he was at once deprived.
It has been computed that not less than
two thousand were deprived of their livings
by this last shameless device.

Among the more notable of these sum
mary ejectment proceedings was the action
of the Parliamentarian leader, the earl of
Manchester, who was shortly after himself
superseded by Oliver Cromwell s strange
device of the " self-denying ordinance "
already described. Lord Manchester, who

16431646.1

DESECRATION OF THE CHURCHES.

149-

in 1643 was supreme in the eastern counties,
ejected well-nigh all the masters and fellows
of the Cambridge colleges, sequestrating the
revenues of the several houses. The uni
versity ol Oxford, being during a large
portion of the Civil War the head-quarters
of the Royalists, and consequently not in
the power of the Parliament, was spared a
little longer. In the middle of 1646 Oxford
surrendered to the Parliamentarian forces,
and in the following year a terrible re
tribution for the steadfast loyalty
of the ancient university to the
Church of England and the
crown was exacted. In the years
1647-48 six hundred members of
the various colleges, including ten
professors and all the heads of
houses save two, were summarily
ejected. The deprived heads, pro
fessors, and fellows of the two
universities included many of the
most distinguished men of their
day for learning and theological
attainments.

The execution of the primate-
archbishop Laud, who had long
languished in prison, stands out
prominently in these stormy years
of persecution and anarchy ; but
the special circumstances con
nected with his end have already
been sufficiently related.

The great cathedrals fared no
better than the universities and
parish churches. As examples or
the treatment meted out to them
we may instance Norwich, which was
spoiled and defaced in 1643 under the
very eyes of its bishop, Dr. Hall. We
even read of a sacrilegious procession on

a market-day, when the organ -pipes, vest
ments, service-books, were publicly burned
amid circumstances of extreme profanity.
The bishop s property was seized, and all
his goods exposed to sale " not leaving,"
to use his own words, " so much as a dozen
of trenchers or my children s pictures."
Early that same year (1643) Cromwell " did.
most miserably deface the cathedral of
Peterborough." At Canterbury the sacred
memories of well-nigh twelve centuries

FROM * TRUE INFORMATION OF THE BEGINNING AND CAUSE
OF ALL OUR TROUBLES : HOW HATCHED AND HOW
PREVENTED," 1648.

were powerless to avert the same desecra
tion and ruin from the cathedral. We
read how "the soldiers, entering the church
and choir of Canterbury, overthrew the

1=50

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16491658.

communion table, tore the velvet cloth
from before it, defaced the goodly screen
or tabernacle work, violated the monu
ments of the dead, spoiled the organs,
broke down the ancient rails and seats, with
the brazen eagle which did support the
Bible, rent the surplices, gowns, and Bibles,
mangled the service-books and Books of
Common Prayer, and exercised their malice
on the arras hangings representing the
whole story of Christ." In many an
ancient church and stately cathedral, the
marks of the fury of the excited and
frenzied Independents and Presbyterians in
the days of the supremacy of Oliver and
the Ironsides, are still unhappily visible :
they are, alas ! indelible.

To the mind of Oliver Cromwell and
his extreme school the worship of the
Church of England, her stately ritual,
her ancient churches, were simply in
tolerable. " To him the Book of Common
Prayer contained but the weak and
beggarly elements of an outworn creed."*
His conduct when governor of the
Isle of Ely is a well-known instance of
his intolerant behaviour to the church.
He visited Ely cathedral with the intention
of ordering one of the cathedral staff, who
persisted in using the choir service, for
which he had an especial dislike, to be
silent. The clergyman refused to obey
him. Oliver left the church, and returned
at once with a guard of soldiers. Then
the stern Puritan soldier rudely called to
the officiating minister, " Leave off your
fooling and come down." His soldiers
peremptorily drove the Ely congregation
from the choir of the great Fen church.

* Gardiner : " History of the Great Civil War,"
chap. xv.

For some te;i years after the execution
of Charles I. a wild anarchy in religious
matters prevailed in England. Most of the
churches were occupied by Presbyterians
and Independents, or by the smaller sects
of Baptists, Fifth-monarchists, and other
less known sectarians. The spirit of general
toleration, which was peculiar to Oliver
Cromwell, after a time did away with the
obligation of signing the Covenant, and in
its place a much easier obligation was
substituted, called the " Engagement." In
this, ministers of the various denominations
only swore that they " would be true and
faithful to the government established,
without king or House of Peers." This
novel oath, which by. substituting a simple
undertaking to be faithful to the govern
ment of the Commonwealth, did away
altogether with religious tests, was most
obnoxious to the Presbyterians, to whom
its broad spirit of toleration was positively
impious ; while to a poor remnant of the
hapless clergy of the crushed and ruined
Anglican communion it offered a possibility
of still exercising their ministry. Some of
the more prominent of the divines of the
fallen church, such as Dr. Sanderson, late
Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, had
pronounced that to take such an oath as
the u Engagement " was lawful for an
English clergyman, as it simply bound
them to be loyal to the existing govern
ment of the land. Dr. Gauden,* afterwards
one of the Restoration bishops, thus writes
of the sad remnant of Anglican clergy,
who availed themselves of the li Engage
ment " in order to resume ministerial work :

* Dr. Gauden is principally known as the reputed
author of the famous " Eikon Basilike," attributed
to king Charles I.

16541655-]

CROMWELL S " TRIERS."

" These poor ministers had gained some
little plank or rafter, possibly a little refuse
living or a curateship, or a school, or a
lecture, or some chaplain s place in a gentle
man s house, by which to save themselves
from utter shipwreck and sinking."

But even these few clergy exercised
their ministry under the greatest difficulties.
The old liturgy was strictly forbidden, and
the prayers could only be said from memory.
A kind of form as nearly identical with
the Prayer-book as possible was composed
by Dr. Sanderson and used by some, but,
so far as t he Anglican clergy were con
cerned, even these sorry expedients were
soon rendered impossible. Oliver Crom
well, disposed as he was to a broad tolera
tion of sects, intensely disliked the Church
of England, and determined to crush out
even these few sad relics of the hated com
munion. He caused an ordinance to be
passed in 1654, in which it was stated that
many weak, scandalous, popish, and ill-
affected persons had intruded themselves
into vacant posts. To remedy this state of
things, a body of commissioners, named
* Triers," were appointed, whose duties
were carefully to examine clergymen and
satisfy themselves of their fitness, before
suffering such candidates to exercise their
ministry. The questions propounded by
these " Triers" were of such a character as
to exclude ministers of the Anglican com
munion, and as the "Triers" possessed
retrospective powers, many of the Anglican
clergy who had obtained positions under
the " Engagement " were ejected.

But even this exercise of tyranny was
not deemed sufficient. Oliver was well
acquainted with the general feeling of the
Anglican clergy ; knew well how they re

garded him, and with what fervid loyalty
they hoped for a restoration of the banished
house of /Stuart. He considered, not
without some reason, that the existence of
such a body of religious teachers was a
source of danger to his government. So
in 1655 a stern and bitter edict was passed,
forbidding " any person keeping in their
houses or families as chaplains or school
masters for the education of their children
to be taught by such, . . . any seques
tered or ejected minister, fellow of a
college," etc. ... It went on to say
u that no person, who had been sequestered
or ejected, shall keep any school, either
public or private, nor that any person, who
shall be ejected for the causes aforesaid,
shall preach or administer baptism or the
Lord s Supper, or marry any person, or use
the Book of Common Prayer or the forms
therein contained." This drastic edict
closed the door effectually upon almost
every clergyman of the Church of England
ever obtaining any position whatever as
minister or teacher in England. Effective
measures were taken to put this law into
force without delay.

It is interesting to read the estimate
formed of this commission of " Triers "
by Mr. Carlyle, whose influence has been
enormous in the last half century. The
famous philosopher and historian is a
passionate admirer of Oliver, and never
can he see aught but the purest motives
as the basis of all his acts. Political
motives, as. we have seen, very largely
indeed coloured Oliver s bitter hatred of
the Church of England. The humiliation
and destruction of the Anglican Church
was, as he perhaps rightly deemed, neces
sary for the preservation of the form of

152

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1655-1657

government he had established, and the
board of "Triers" was simply an unscru
pulous instrument he created for his
purpose. But this is the great historian s
view of it : " A rather satisfactory ar
rangement. Thirty-eight chosen men, the
acknowledged flower of English Puritan
ism, are nominated a supreme commission.
. Any person pretending to hold a
church living or levy tithes or clergy-dues
in England, has to be tried and approved
by these men. . . . Independents,
Presbyterians, one or two of them even
Anabaptists, . . . they were men of
wisdom, and had the root of the matter in
them . . . the acknowledged flower of
spiritual England at that time, and intent
as Oliver himself was, with an awful
earnestness, on actually having the Gospel
taught in England." It seems curious to
read of this singular medley of Independents,
Presbyterians, and Anabaptists being " the
acknowledged flower of spiritual England
at that time," although scholars and
divines like Jeremy Taylor, Dr. Hammond,
Dr. Sanderson, Dr. Prideaux, archbishop
Usher, bishop Juxon, Mr. Pocock, Dr.
Gauden, and others were then living and
working amongst us !

Evelyn, in his contemporary diary, gives
us some little pictures of this sad time for
the Church of England and those who
loved her. His entry on the 25th Decem
ber, 1655, runs as follows: "There was
no more notice taken of Christmas day in
churches. I went to London, where Dr.
Wild preached the funeral sermon of
preaching, this being the last day, after
which Cromwell s proclamation was to take
place, that none of the Church of England

* " Cromwell s Letters, etc , part viii. (1654).

should dare either to preach or administer
sacraments, teach schools, etc., on pain of
imprisonment or exile. So this was the
mournfullest day that in my life I had seen
or the Church of England herself since the
Reformation, to the great rejoicing of
Papist and Presbyter. Myself, wife, and
some of our family received the com
munion ; God make me thankful, who hath
hitherto provided for us the food of our
souls as well as bodies. The Lord Jesus
pity our distressed church, and bring back
the captivity of Zion."*

In 1657 we find the following entry in
the diary, dated December 2fth : " I went
to London with my wife to celebrate
Christmas day, Mr. Gunning preaching
(this was, of course, in defiance of the law)
in Exeter chapel. Sermon ended, as he
was giving us the Holy Sacrament, the
chapel was surrounded with soldiers, and
all the communicants and assembly sur
prised and kept prisoners by them, some
in the house, others carried away.
In the afternoon came colonel Whalley
and others from Whitehall to examine us.
. . . When I came before them, they
examined me, why, contrary to the ordin
ance made that none should any longer
observe the superstitious time of the
nativity (so esteemed by them), I durst
offend, and particularly be at common
prayers, which they told me was but the
mass in English. ... In the end."
Evelyn tells us, " they dismissed me with
much pity of my ignorance. . . . These
were men of high flight and above ordin
ances, and spake spiteful things of our
Lord s nativity. As we went up to re
ceive the sacrament, the miscreants held
* " Diary of John Evelyn " (1655).

SMMli

yj^,...,.,,,,,,^...^^^^.^-^^^^^ ^

154

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1658.

their muskets against us, as if they would
have shot us at the altar."

In less than a year from the date of the
above-quoted entry in Evelyn s diary,
Oliver Cromwell died. With him, as we
have said, Puritanism in its many forms
ceased to be the dominant power in
England. For a few months went on
almost of itself the vast machinery of
government devised by the great Puritan
who had passed away in the zenith of his
power, still vigorous and apparently strong,
and, as men thought, with long years of
life before him ; the shadow of the mighty
Protector, his son Richard Cromwell,
occupying his seat at Whitehall, and the
" Rump," the remains of the famous Long
Parliament, for a brief interval taking up
the reins of government once more. Domi
nated by the spirit of the old Parliament,

Presbyterianism was in favour again, but
only for a few months. Another Parliament
was elected, and under the influence of
General Monk and his army the Restoration
of the ancient monarchy was decided upon.
Many of the clergy of the down-trodden
church, anxious not to delay or endanger
the carrying out of the Restoration of the
Stuarts which they so earnestly desired, in
conjunction with certain of the nobility
and gentry of known Royalist disposition,
drew up a "declaration," in which they
professed their earnest desire for compro
mise, not for retaliation. In it they said
with great wisdom and forbearance, "We
do sincerely profess that we reflect upon
our past sufferings as from the hand of
God, and therefore do not cherish any
violent thoughts to those who have been
in any way instrumental in them."

RICHARD CROMWELL.

CHAPTER LXVII.

RESTORATION OF THE KINGDOM AND OF THE CHURCH.

Reasons for the Unpopularity of Puritanism The Puritan idea of Christmas The Interregnum and
Convention Parliament The Restoration, and Position of the Anglican Church Action of the
Parliament The Anglican Bishops and Archbishop Juxon Negotiations and Efforts of the Pres
byterians towards Puritan Revision of the Prayer-Book Their Failure The Savoy Conference
Anti-Puritan Temper of the Parliament Final Revision of the Prayer-Book by Convocation-
Details of the Revision The Act of Uniformity The Great Puritan Secession Its Essential
Necessity Growing Estrangement between the Church and Nonconformists The First Con
venticle Act The Five-Mile Act Second Conventicle Act The Test Act Titus Gates and the
Anti- Papal Agitation Deterioration in Morals and Manners during this Period Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel The Caroline Divines The Puritan Divines Richard Baxter.

WHEN the king " got his own again,"
the change was welcomed in
England with almost a delirious
joy. The nation was weary of its Puritan
rulers, their extravagances, and their op
pressions. Various reasons contributed to
the wide-spread feeling which inspired the
majority of Englishmen to welcome the
restoration of Charles II. to the throne of
his ancestors.

The government of the country had
become a military despotism, although the
despotism was thinly veiled under an
appearance of constitutional authority.
The Parliament, under whose authority
the great general professedly ruled, was
called into being and summarily dissolved
at the will of Oliver the Protector ; while
such an interlude as the rule of his lieu
tenants, under the name of major-generals,
showed the nation that their fortunes and
lives were in the hands of that powerful
army, which the famous Long Parliament
had called into existence to carry out its
will, but which it soon found itself utterly
unable to guide, much less to control.
Such a military tyranny was utterly hateful
to the English mind ; and when the mighty

soldier and statesman passed away, the
jealousies and divisions which immediately
sprang up among the military chiefs,
enabled the people to express their deter
mination to put an end to a state of things
which they abhorred.

Another reason must not be ignored,
that powerfully influenced the people in
welcoming the return of the ancient
dynasty to power. The English nation
was especially a religious people. Before
the Reformation the church was ever a
mighty influence. After the Reformation,
as we have already noticed, religion became
even more than in the mediaeval period a
power which swayed men s minds. But
the form which religion assumed under the
Puritan domination was generally hateful
to the majority of Englishmen. We have
dwelt at some length upon the nobility
of the aims of the Puritans, upon their
struggles after a purer life, upon their
hatred of all that was low and base and
mean and trivial. Nevertheless Puritanism,
in its hour of success, became an oppressive
tyranny ; its very virtues in many instances
lost their reality, and became suspected
not without good reason of hypocrisy.

156

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

-Godliness," as it was termed, was required
not only in Oliver s army of the new
model, but of everyone who was admitted
into the service of the state ; and the
"godliness" in question was of a kind
which could be imitated, put on, mas
queraded in. It consisted largely in a sad
and peculiar dress. It expressed itself in a
strange phraseology, unnatural and even
hypocritical. It showed itself in a curious
renunciation of the ordinary pleasures and
recreations which go so far to render life
pleasant and agreeable.

But this was not all. The dominant
party insisted on the nation generally sub
mitting to its peculiar and austere view
of life. State ordinances were issued for
bidding all those rough and somewhat rude
diversions which for ages had formed the
amusement and relaxation of the people.
Some of these were forbidden because the
Puritans traced them to ancient supersti
tion, and imagined that they kept in
memory a form of religion they were deter
mined to stamp out. Others were abol
ished because they deemed them frivolous
and unworthy of a nation which, on their
theory, was made up of the " Lord s
people." For instance, all theatrical re
presentations, so dear to many of all sorts
and conditions of men, were ever sternly
forbidden. Puppet shows, horse-racing,
bear-baiting,* curious and rough pastimes,

* This not very elevating pastime was in the
first half of the sixteenth century a favourite diver
sion with all classes. Macaulay quaintly charac
terises the causes of the Puritan aversion to it as
having nothing to do with any idea of protecting
beasts against the wanton cruelty of man. "He
hated it, not because it gave pain to the bear, but
because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Indeed,
he generally contrived to enjoy the double pleasure
of tormenting both spectators and bear."

were all done away with. Playhouses were
to be demolished ; the actors whipped at
the cart s tail ; the very spectators incurred
the penalty of a fine. Time-honoured
village observances, such as decorating
the Maypole and dancing round it, were
swept away. Even the quiet game of
bowls was looked askance upon by these
votaries of an exaggerated Puritanism a
rigid and even ridiculous austerity which,
as we have said, too easily shaded into
hypocrisy.

The old feasts and holy-days, loved
by Englishmen partly from their associa
tions, partly because their forefathers had
loved them, were forbidden to be kept.
Even the sacred joyous Christmas festival
was changed by these extreme and mis
taken fanatics into a day of mourning and
fasting, the Long Parliament in 1644 giving
directions that the great festival of our
home life, the traditional anniversary of
the Nativity of the Redeemer, should be
strictly observed as a day of mourning for
the national sin of centuries a sin which
was specified as untimely and godless
mirth, a season of dancing and eating
and drinking. Nothing that the Puritans
did affecting the matter of the life of
the people gave more dire offence, or
was more universally unpopular, than
this change of Christmas from a season
of rejoicing to a season of mourning
and restraint. It was resented by high
and low ; from the child, who ever
looked forward to Christmas games and
gifts, to the grey-haired old man who, in
the joy of the time-honoured festival, for a
brief moment renewed the happy, pleasant
memories of his youth. With not a few
the suspension of the ancient services of

UNPOPULARITY OF PURITANISM.

157

the Holy Nativity was regarded as an
insult to the Divine Son of God, whose
whole life when on earth was a rebuke to
these stern and forbidding precisians.

Many also resented with a fierce indigna
tion that Puritan temper which loved to

God, and where the prayers of a hundred
generations of Englishmen had been offered.
Thus art, dress, and even the very lan
guage of England, felt the withering
effects of the strange revolution which
had placed the Puritan in power.

LETTER FROM CHARLES II. TO HIS SISTER HENRIETTA, AFTERWARDS DUCHESS OF ORLEANS, WRITTEN

THE DAY AFTER THE RESTORATION. (British Museum.} .

["I arrived yesterday at Dover, where I found Monke with a great quantity of the nobility, who seemed to me over
whelmed with friendship and joy at my return. My head is so furiously stunned by the acclamations of the people and the
quantity of affairs, that I do not know if I am writing sense or not."]

destroy all works of art ; which condemned
painting and sculpture, and especially archi
tecture, so long the glory of the land; which
spared nothing in its wild, unreasoning
fanaticism, hot even those graceful and
exquisite buildings which the piety of many
generations had erected to the glory of

There were many in England who
intensely disliked this meddlesome and
unsympathetic interference in well-nigh
everything which touched the beauty and
the joy of life, and who eagerly welcomed
the return to the old state of things, though
not caring perhaps very much for the im-

358

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1660.

portant constitutional questions which had
brought about the great Rebellion. To these
must be added the scattered and disorgan
ised, but still numerous and powerful party
of the defeated Royalists, who naturally
hated with a perfect hate the Puritan, who
in their eyes was connected with Oliver
the Republican and the stern Ironsides
who broke their ranks at Marston Moor
and Naseby, and whose hands were still red
with the blood of their king. And the
crowded ranks of those who welcomed
king Charles were yet further increased b}^
the more earnest, and on that account
more influential phalanx of Englishmen
who were deeply attached to the doctrines
and rites of the ancient Church of England,
and who regarded the teaching and acts of
the lately dominant Puritan party with
intense disapproval.

Among the Puritans themselves a rift,
which could not be bridged over, divided
them into two opposing sects, the one
bitterly distrusting the other. These were
the Presbyterians and the Independents,
the latter numbering in their ranks various
other Protestant sects, such as the Baptists,
Quakers, Anabaptists, and Fifth-Monarchy
men. The army of the Puritan cause, the
source of its strength, was mainly com
posed of Independents ; in the Parliament
many, perhaps the majority, of its officials
were ranked as Presbyterians. When the
great Protector died, the Puritan party he
had led to victory found itself without a
chief, hopelessly divided in the matter
of religion, with its strong and disciplined
army owning allegiance to no one general,
and hence absolutely powerless.*

* This accounts for the sullen acquiescence of
the soldiers of Cromwell in the Restoration.

Oliver Cromwell died in the September
of 1658. His son Richard, who succeeded
him, being neither soldier nor statesman r
was unable to control the army, and ab
dicated in the May of the year following
(1659). Then followed a short time of
anarchy. The Long Parliament, or rather
that small remnant of it termed the Rump,
ejected forcibly by Cromwell in 1653, was
restored by the army. After a short exist
ence, under the strong pressure of Monk r
one of the most far-seeing of Cromwell s
generals, who had fairly gauged the temper
of the country, the sorry remnant of the
Long Parliament voted formally its own
dissolution. A new Parliament, composed
of the two Houses of Lords and Commons,
known in history as the " Convention "
Parliament, because the House of Commons
was elected without any crown writs, de
termined to give effect at once to the will
of the majority of the nation, and to restore
the monarchy. Charles II. signed at Breda
a declaration conspicuous for its modera
tion, which was warmly received by the
" Convention " Parliament. On the 29th
of May, 1660, the third Stuart monarch
was once more at Whitehall. How en
thusiastically he was welcomed and some
among the reasons of this welcome, we
have briefly traced.

Of the policy of Charles II. during his
reign of some twenty-five years, we have
only to concern ourselves here with that
portion which directly or indirectly relates
to the Church of England. The position
ot that church at the Restoration was
somewhat singular. The Anglican Church
had apparently been destroyed ; the bishops
had been forcibly thrust out of their
several jurisdictions ; the primate had been

1660-1661.]

THE CONVENTION PARLIAMENT.

159

publicly put to death ; and the various
dignitaries and incumbents of benefices
had been expelled by the dominant party.
The cathedrals, and parish churches gener
ally, were either closed, or, what was
more usual, were occupied by Presby
terian or Independent* ministers. No Act
of Parliament was, however, necessary,
when Charles II. became king, to re
peal the various ordinances which had
abolished episcopacy and driven out the
Anglican clergy. These ordinances, being
clearly illegal, needed no formal repeal.
They had emanated in some instances
from a Parliament composed of two Houses,
the House of Lords being represented by
a small number of peers who had sided
during the troubles with the Commons ;
but in the majority of instances from the
House of Commons only, the consent of
the crown being, of course, ignored during
the Civil War and after. At the Restora
tion the spiritual position of the church
was at once acknowledged, but the diffi
cult question concerning its temporal
possessions remained to be settled.

The temper of the " Convention " Parlia
ment did not leave the matter long in
doubt. Almost directly, an act was passed
replacing in their benefices alt those
Anglican incumbents who, having been
illegally driven out, still survived. About
a thousand were thus restored. In cases
when the Anglican incumbents were dead,t

* Under the name of "Independent" we here
include the various other denominations who more
or less asserted the right of congregations to choose
their form of government, in contradistinction to
the Presbyterian central rule.

t It must be remembered that eighteen years
had passed since the bishops had been excluded
from Parliament, and fifteen since the Book of
Common Prayer was suppressed.

the Puritan occupants were for the present
left in possession. The ancient liturgy, so
long forbidden, was, of course, permitted
to be used. The intruders were removed
from the universities, and in the desolated
cathedrals the old beautiful services, which
had been, as we have seen, so bitterly
objected to by Cromwell at Ely and other
places, once more were heard again. The
estates of the bishops and chapters were
taken out of the possession of those who had
acquired them, and returned to the church.
But a complete settlement was still far
from being accomplished, and the Pres
byterian party, which, although in a
minority, was still strong in the Con
vention Parliament, hoped to make such
terms with the new government as would
secure to them some of their influence ;
and they expected much from the well-
known desire of the king to bring about
a general toleration. Their hopes were
doomed to disappointment, however, when
the temper of the new Parliament which
succeeded the Convention Parliament in
the year 1662 was manifested. But in the
meantime various important ecclesiastical
events which preceded the final settlement
must be related.

The " Convention " Parliament, which
had recalled the king, continued to sit
for nearly a year after the Restoration.
Largely Presbyterian though it was, it
reflected the mind of the majority of
Englishmen in being fervidly loyal. Fol
lowing out the terms of king Charles s
Declaration of Breda, it passed an Act of
Indemnity ; but the act contained many
exceptions, and thirteen of the regicides,
with Vane, who had been a distinguished
Republican, were executed. Others of the

i6o

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1660.

" traitors " were punished by imprisonment
and confiscation, and some escaped to
foreign parts and expiated their offences
by a life-long exile. These acts of retalia
tion were no more than might have been
looked for, considering the tremendous
reaction which succeeded the Puritan
victory, and the Puritan methods of using
their victory. What, however, was deeply
regrettable, and indeed admits of no excuse,
was the pitiful warfare with the illustrious,
even if guilty dead. The bodies of Crom
well, Ireton, and Bradshaw were torn up
from their graves in Westminster abbey,
and hanged. The remains of other lead
ing personages of the era of rebellion, such
as Pym, and the great seaman Blake,
through whose splendid gallantry and
wonderful ability the flag of England had
become honoured and feared on all the
seas, were also rudely disinterred and
carelessly buried in a pit outside. There
is no loyal son of the Church of Eng
land but regrets intensely these merciless
and useless acts of a stupid revenge, which
must for ever stain the proceedings of the
Restoration Parliament.

When the Anglican communion, with
scarcely an effort, resumed its position as
the national church, to the great satisfac
tion of the majority of Englishmen, nine
of the bishops who had been contem
poraries of Laud still survived. One of
them, Wren, had been a prisoner in the
Tower for nearly twenty years. Their
thinned ranks were speedily recruited by a
group of men, all of them more or less
distinguished for their literary or adminis
trative powers. These included Sheldon
and Hammond (who unfortunately died
before his consecration), specially illustrious

for the help they had given to the suffer
ing and dispirited clergy during the Pro
tectorate ; Cosin, the most illustrious
liturgical scholar of his day ; the scholar
Walton, the editor of the great Polyglot
Bible which bears his name ; Gauden, the
compiler and probably the writer of the
far-famed " Eikon Basilike " of Charles
I. ; Sanderson, a great theologian ; and
Morley.

The archbishopric of Canterbury was
vacant. No successor had been appointed
to the illustrious man whose memory the
church will ever hold in honour, who
fifteen years before had expiated his
political errors on Tower hill. For the
high post of primate of the restored
church the choice fell on one, well-nigh
an octogenarian, infirm and worn out with
years and cares, who in happier days had
presided over the difficult see of London.
But, old and worn out though he was,
bearing about indeed a dying body, the
church with one voice designated Juxon
as the only possible primate. He had
indeed a matchless record. The intimate
friend of Laud, and depositary of his far-
reaching plans for the church ; the trained
and scholarly divine ; the stainless even if
mistaken minister of Charles I., the one
whom the fallen monarch had sum
moned to his side in those solemn
hours which went before the tremendous
tragedy of Whitehall ; the wise and saintly
comforter of his monarch in the prison
chamber of St. James and in the last sad
progress through the royal park ; the faith
ful and courageous companion of the king
on the scaffold ; the friend who whispered
the last solemn prayer over the coffin of
his sovereign in royal Windsor. While

i66o 1661.]

ARCHBISHOP JUXON.

161

Juxon, bishop of London, lived, no other
primate was possible.

He lived to take the chief part in
the coronation ceremonies, and place the
crown on the brows of Charles II. Too
ailing to preside himself in the Convoca
tion which he summoned in 1661 and

he followed him subsequently in the see of
London, and finally in the archbishopric
of Canterbury.

It was about a year before Juxon closed
his eyes on the world, where he had seen
so many and such varied things, and had

DR. WILLIAM JUXON, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.
(After a picture in St. John s College, Oxford.)

which completed the ecclesiastical settle
ment of the restored church, the arch
bishop shared in and largely guided the
proceedings of that important assembly,
which restored the English Prayer-book,
and he quietly passed away in 1663, full
of years and honour. Juxon rests in the
chapel of St. John s College, Oxford, hard
by the grave of his friend Laud, whom he
followed in the headship of the House, as

experienced such strange vicissitudes of
fortune, that the relations between the
Church of England and Puritanism in its
many forms, were finally settled in the
Savoy Conference. Before Charles II. left
Holland for England in the early days of
the eventful May of 1660, some eminent
Presbyterian divines, representing their
powerful Puritan sect, accompanied the
Parliamentary commissioners who were

162

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1661.

sent to bring the king back. These men
hoped to enlist Charles s sympathies, in
order that he might be on their side when
the ecclesiastical relations of the future came
to be discussed. They saw him on several
occasions, and especially expressed their
earnest desire that he would not in his
own private chapel revive the use of the
Anglican Book of Common Prayer ; but
they obtained little satisfaction on this
point. They then urged that the surplice
might not be adopted by his royal
chaplains ; again they were met with a
refusal. When Charles arrived in England,
he was again pressed by the same party.
His reply was that he desired to receive in
writing a statement of their wishes and
views generally upon church matters.
They then presented to the king a lengthy
address embodying their objections to
the Book of Common Prayer and to the
Anglican ceremonies generally. In this
formal Presbyterian address, among other
matters, was pressed the desirability of
freedom being given to the ministers to
use extempore prayer. It was suggested
that a new liturgy might be drawn up
more consonant with Presbyterian views ;
that ceremonies, such as kneeling at the
Sacrament of the Lord s Supper, the use
of the surplice and the sign of the cross in
baptism, and bowing at the name of Jesus,
might be abolished, or at all events not
insisted upon. To these requests, or rather
demands, the Anglican bishops replied.
Their reply was virtually a refusal to change
in any way the Anglican uses as embodied
in the Book of Common Prayer.

The king, however, temporised, and
issued a declaration in which, pending
a formal settlement, considerable licence

was allowed to the Presbyterian party. In
the meantime a royal warrant was issued
appointing twelve bishops and the same
number of Presbyterians, with nine other
divines on each side as assistants or
assessors, to meet together to discuss the
questions at issue. These met in the
spring of 1 66 1 in the Savoy hospital, and
this conference is known in history as the
Savoy Conference. Again the points above
referred to were brought up, with various
other questions, such as the omitting al
together the religious observation of saints
days, the substitution in the Prayer-book
of the title " minister " for "priest," and the
appellation "Lord s day" for "Sunday";
the recasting of offices where the language
used presumes all persons within the com
munion of the church to be regenerated
and in an actual state of grace ; and the
expunging of the rubric which permitted
parts of the service to be sung or said.
The Presbyterians also desired that preach
ing should be more strictly enjoined. In
the baptismal office, especially, they ob
jected to much. Alterations were further
required in the catechism and in the rite
of confirmation ; other and less important
changes were also claimed. Generally, the
free use of extempore prayer was desired.
Baxter, the most learned and prominent of
the Puritan side, brought forward a new
liturgy, composed by himself, and embody
ing the Presbyterian requirements, which
he proposed should be adopted as the basis
of the compromise.

The differences, however, were too great
to admit of any agreement, and the church
felt itself, in this hour of reaction in which
they knew that the majority of Englishmen
were on their side, powerful enough firmly

1 662.1

THE LAST PRAYER-BOOK REVISION.

163

to reject any suggestion of compromise in
matters which its advocates felt were vita 1 .
So the Savoy Conference came to nothing.

Uncompromising as the bishops and
their assessors showed themselves in the
Conference, a yet greater and more
authoritative assembly was expressing itself
more strongly by far in the same direction.
The " Convention " Parliament had given
place to a new Parliament, elected accord
ing to the ancient constitutional precedents.
It met in the May of 1661, while the
Savoy Conference was in session. This
House of Commons, elected in the first
fervour of the Royalist reaction, " was
made up for the most part of young men,
who had but a faint memory of the Stuart
tyranny of their childhood, but who had a
keen memory of living from their manhood
beneath the tyranny of the Commonwealth.
Their bearing was that of a wild revolt
against the Puritan past. . . . The zeal
of the Parliament at its outset, indeed, far
outran that of Charles and his ministers. *
The action in ecclesiastical matters of this
so-called Cavalier Parliament was peculiarly
marked with extreme zeal for Anglicanism,
and an extraordinary bitterness towards
all the Puritan sects. It has been com
puted that not more than fifty Presby
terians were to be found among the ranks
of its members, and the bishops were at
once restored to their seats in the House
of Lords.

More singular, however, was their zeal
lest the bishops and their assessors should
be induced to make any concessions in
liturgical and ceremonial uses to the Puritan
representatives in the Savoy Conference.
To guard against any such contingency,
* Green: " History," chap, ix., sect. ii.

the Commons passed a Bill of Uniformity,
enforcing the old unaltered Prayer-book.
On the understanding, however, that the
king was about to issue letters to the
archbishops of Canterbury and York,
desiring the Convocations of the two
provinces to make a review of the Book of
Common Prayer, the House of Lords laid
the bill in question aside.

Before the end of the year a careful
report was prepared by a strong committee.
This report, which suggested certain points
in which it was desirable that the Prayer-
book should be revised, was approved by
both Houses before the close of 1661. The
amended Prayer-book was finally accepted
by Parliament in its entirety, and an Act
of Uniformity, which received the royal
assent on May I9th, ordained that the
Prayer-book in question should be used in
all the churches of England on St. Bartho
lomew S day, August 24th, 1662

The work of this final revision of the-
Prayer-book, although it was all completed
in a few months, was the result of long and
careful research. The principal hand in
it was that of bishop Cosin, the famous-
liturgical scholar, who for well-nigh forty
years had been engaged in this particular
study, bringing ever the results of his-
researches to bear upon the Anglican-
Prayer-book. He had been the librarian
of Andrewes and Overall, and was cogni
sant of the wishes of these two eminent
theologians in the matter of the liturgy
of their church. After Cosin, Wren, the
bishop who had (in consequence of the
special dislike 01 the Puritans) so long
languished in captivity, and Bancroft,
Cosin s chaplain, who subsequently filled

1 6 4

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1662.

himself the highest place in the Anglican
Church, were the most active and influen
tial members of the small committee to
whom the revision work was entrusted. It
is computed that some six hundred or more
corrections and additions were made in this
last and final review of the book. But
though these may seem to be very numerous,
many of them were extremely minute, and
the book as it left Convocation, and which
shortly after Parliament approved and ac
cepted, was substantially the same as the
book revised and corrected by the Eliza
bethan divines, known as the Second Prayer-
book of Edward VI., the original work of
Cranmer, Ridley, and their companions.

The more important alterations which
were introduced in this last revision by
Cosin and his coadjutors, were as follows.
Among the chief additions to the old
book was a preface drawn up by Dr.
Sanderson, the new bishop of Lincoln.
An office for the administration of baptism
to such as were of riper years was added, as
were also the final benediction and the
occasional prayers. Forms of prayer were
supplied to be used at sea, and also for the
3Oth of January, the day of Charles I. s
execution, and the 29th of May, the day of
Charles II. s restoration. A few additional
prayers appear in this book, such as the
prayer for Parliament, the prayer for all
sorts and conditions of men, and the
General Thanksgiving. Two or three new
collects were also appointed ; an Epistle
was provided for the Purification; the
first of the short anthems for Easter
day was added, and certain names were
added in the calendar to the list of " Black-
letter Saints." Certain changes are also
noticeable in the book of 1662. The

absolution was to be pronounced by the
priest instead of the minister. The prayer
for the king and the following prayers were
printed in the order of evening as well as
morning service. The words u bishops,
priests, and deacons " were substituted for
bishops, pastors, and ministers of the church.
In the communion service the last clause
respecting saints departed was added,
to the prayers for the church militant.
The order in Council, dated 1552, respect
ing kneeling at .communion, which had
been removed by queen Elizabeth, was
again placed at the end of the office, with
the explanation u that no adoration was
intended to any corporal presence of
Christ s natural flesh and blood " the
doctrine of a real spiritual presence being
thus implicitly retained.

These are among the more distinctive
changes, but the book virtually remained
the same. No real concessions of any kind
were made to Puritan feeling. Convoca
tion retained all the ceremonies and ex
pressions to which the gravest exception
had been taken by the now vanquished
and unpopular party ; such as the form of
the Litany, certain expressions in the
services for baptism, marriage, and burial,
the ring in marriage, the absolution for
the sick, the sign of the cross in
baptism, especially the declaration touch
ing the salvation of baptised infants.
This last was among the points deeply
objected to by the Puritan commis
sioners. The Act of Uniformity also
required Puritan ministers not only to
conform to the regulations of the Prayer-
book, but also to confess the illegality
of their past practice. They were also
directed to submit to episcopal ordination.

166

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1662.

Copies of the Prayer-book thus revised
were carefully examined by commissioners
appointed for this duty, and then sealed
with the Great Seal. These copies are
known as the " Sealed Books," and are
preserved as the standard of liturgical
worship in the Church of England, con
taining as they do the exact form of words
which was signed by members of Con
vocation and ratified by Parliament.

Since 1662 the offices of the Church of
England have never been revised. " At
tempts have been made to introduce
certain changes in its language, but hitherto
it has resisted the efforts both of latitudin-
arianism and- of Romanising innovation."
The only unimportant alterations that
have been made since that date are the
following : In 1859 the forms of prayer
for November 5th (anniversary of the
Gunpowder Plot), for January 3Oth, and
May 29th were removed by royal warrant.
Two royal proclamations in 1837 and 1859
respectively inserted the form of prayer
for the 2Oth of June (the date of the
accession of queen Victoria). In 1871 a
revised system of " Lessons " was intro
duced ; and in 1872 a special Act of Parlia
ment allowed the shortening at discretion
of the prescribed forms for morning and
evening prayer, except on Sunday, Christ
mas day, Ash Wednesday, Good Friday
and Ascension day.

The Act of Uniformity, 1662, required
all ministers before St. Bartholomew s day
(August 24th) to read publicly the morn
ing and evening prayer from the revised
Prayer-book, and to declare their unfeigned

* Procter ; " History of the Book of Common
.Prayer," Appendix to chap, v., section i.

assent to everything contained in the
book. They were also compelled to make
declaration against the Solemn League and
Covenant, and, if not episcopally ordained,
to obtain ordination from a bishop. As
might have been expected, the deepest
sorrow and indignation pervaded the
Puritan ranks, which included Presby
terians, Independents, Quakers, and other
sects far more extreme. In vain the king,
and even his chief adviser Clarendon, who
was a steadfast friend of Anglicanism,
endeavoured to find some loophole by
which some of the provisions of this tre
mendous Act might be dispensed with by
the crown. The Cavalier Parliament had
made up its mind, and was inflexible.

On the appointed 24th of August, the
ever memorable day of St. Bartholomew,
1662, the nobler and more earnest of the
Puritan party Presbyterians, Independ
ents, and others to the number of 2,000
(some writers give the somewhat smaller
number of about 1,600), refusing to con
form, went out into the wilderness, giving
up their positions at the universities, their
benefices, their lectureships, and any pre
ferment they happened to be holding.
Very many of them were confessedly men
of learning and eloquence were divines
distinguished for piety and earnestness.

Such a vast secession was necessarily a
severe blow to the cause of religion in
England. " Such an expulsion," writes
the popular and philosophic historian of
the English people, " was far more to the
Church of England than the loss of their
individual services. It was the definite
expulsion of a great party. ... It was
the close of an effort, which had been
going on ever since Elizabeth s accession,

1662.1

THE ACT OF UNIFORMITY.

167

to bring the English communion into
closer relations with the reformed com
munions of the Continent, and into greater
harmony with the religious instincts of the
nation at large. The Church of England
stood from that moment isolated and alone
among all the churches of the Christian
world. The Reformation had severed it
irretrievably from those which still clung
to the obedience of the Papacy. By its
rejection of all but episcopal orders, the
Act of Uniformity severed it as irretriev
ably from the general body of the foreign
Protestant churches, whether Lutheran or
Reformed."*

We may deeply sympathise with the
regret with which this severance was re
garded by the great latitudinarian historian,
but we cannot endorse his sweeping con
demnation of the famous Act of Uniform
ity. What else could the theologians of
our church have done ? The time had
arrived when the final "parting of the
ways " was inevitable. The hour had
come when the church had full power to
choose its future course. Was it, for the
sake of including the Puritans of all sects
within its pale, for the sake of a doubtful
union with the Lutherans and Calvinists
of foreign lands, to give up its cherished
connection with all Catholic antiquity, its
continuity with the primitive church a
connection and continuity which Cranmer
and Ridley, Parker and Jewel, Hooker
and Andrewes, Whitgift and Laud, had
struggled after and maintained ? Was it,
by ceasing to insist upon episcopal ordina
tion, to declare among things indifferent
that sacred tradition of apostolical succes
sion, which the Elizabethan bishops had
* Green s " History," chap, ix., section ii.

guarded with so much reverent care ?
Was it to eliminate from that Book of
Common Prayer which the martyr re
formers of Henry VIII. and Edward VI.
had composed out of the immemorial
formularies of the Catholic Church, rites
and uses dear to the heart of the majority
of the English people, because they were
the heritage of a thousand years ; dear
because they believed they were the usages
of the primitive church ? Be it remem
bered that this and no less than this was
demanded by the Puritan divines at the
Savoy Conference ; this and no less than
this was the price which the Church of
England must have paid to compass the
union of the Puritan party with the
Anglicans. It was a sad necessity, and
one which every true-hearted son of the
Church of England regards with a true
mourning, to part with so many earnest
and devoted men ; but, alas ! there was no
alternative. The story of the succeeding
years, the present position, the future pro
spects of the Anglican Church, have amply
justified the wisdom of the Act of Uni
formity of 1662.

It is also clear that the Act was in
accordance generally with the mind of the
English people at the time. The expul
sion of the Puritans, good and earnest
men though many of them were, excited
little disturbance, scant opposition. The
country, as a rule, acquiesced quietly,
contentedly, in the change of pastors. No
doubt there were many regrets, here and
there grave discontent ; it could not have
been otherwise, but it soon settled down.

There were many others among the
various Puritan sects who held prefer
ments, who consented to conform. Notably

i68

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16621673.

we have instances in Northampton,
Gloucester, Norwich, Chester, Northum
berland, the Isle of Wight. The majority
of the bishops of the Restoration period
were tolerant and kindly disposed, and
desired to render conformity easy for the
members of the lately dominant party.
Still, in spite of kindness and goodwill on
the part of most of the bishops not of
all, it must be confessed, for archbishop
Sheldon, who succeeded the aged Juxon
at Canterbury, was bitterly opposed to
Puritanism in whatever form it showed
itself in spite, too, of the evident bias of
king Charles II. in favour of an extended
toleration, there is no doubt but that many
severe hardships were endured by the
Nonconforming ministers after the passing
of the Act,

As time went on, largely owing to the
strong anti-Puritan feeling manifested by
the Cavalier House of Commons which sat
from 1 66 1 *o 1679 when at length it was
dissolved, the feeling between the church
and the Puritan sects grew more bitter.
A succession of persecuting Acts were
passed between 1664 and 1673, which in
the history of the English Church have
obtained a painful notoriety. By these
Acts the Roman Catholic and the Non
conformist were not only sternly forbidden
to worship God with their peculiar rites,
but were rigidly excluded from all positions
in which they might serve their country,
in the army, navy, and civil service ; even
in the civic corporations were they pre
vented from holding office. So intense
was the dread and hatred excited by the
government of the Commonwealth and
the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, that
every attempt made by the king to ensure

a measure of toleration, was shortly after
made the pretext by the Commons for
making the yoke borne by the Noncon
formists yet harder and more galling.

Nor was the church itself by any means
guiltless in these stern acts of retaliation
and unwise repression. The first Con
venticle Act, for instance, passed in 1664,
was the response to a prayer of the clergy,
headed by archbishop Sheldon, to the
House of Commons. Briefly, the series of
these unhappy pieces of legislation, which
have so sadly widened the gulf between
the Church of England and the Puritan
sects, was as follows.

The Act of Uniformity came into
operation, as already stated, in the
August of 1662. Charles II., in the
December of the same year, issued a
declaration in favour of toleration, and
hoping to soften the rigour of the Act r
asked Parliament to pass an act by which
he could legally exercise that dispensing
power which he conceived to belong to
the crown. There had been, he considered,
various precedents for such an exercise of
royal power in former reigns. The reason
of the king s zeal for toleration of Non
conformity throughout his reign, was how
ever suspected, and not without cause, to
be based on his known inclination towards
Roman Catholicism. Charles II., in i662 T
married a Roman Catholic princess ; that
he died in communion with that church is
now generally admitted. The religious
zeal of his brother, afterwards James II.,
eventually cost that sovereign his crown.
The intimate alliance of Charles II. with,
and his degrading subservience to the
great king of France, Louis XIV 7 ., a fervid
Romanist, is the sinister feature of the reign.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16671672.^

The reply of Parliament to the king s
Declaration and openly expressed wishes,
was the passing in 1664 of the " First Con
venticle Act," by which anyone, having
arrived at years of discretion, attending a
Nonconformist conventicle, was liable to a
penalty which in some cases was actually
transportation. A conventicle was defined
as a religious meeting not in accordance
with the use of the Church of England,
at which more than four persons were
present besides the household. " Trans
portation " was a terrible doom. The
convicted Nonconformist was banished,
generally to the West Indies, where in a
tropical climate his doom was to work
practically under the conditions of a slave.
Pepys, in his diary, thus comments upon
this cruel procedure : " I would to God
they would conform, or be more wise and
not be catched." In the event of the
condemned person returning from exile
without leave, he was subjected to the
penalty of death. This cruel measure also
sanctioned the forcible entry of officers of
justice into suspected houses.

Charles now suggested that toleration
might be sold to Nonconformists, and that
by these means the public revenue might
be increased. The bishops, however,
stoutly resisted such an infamous proposal,
Clarendon, the minister, much to the king s
indignation, supporting them. His op
position to it is said to have lost Clarendon
the king s favour for ever. In the year
following (1665), the Parliament, which
while the plague was raging in London
sat at Oxford, passed the Act known as
"the Oxford or Five-Mile Act." In this
piece of legislation every Nonconformist
minister was required to take the oath of

non-resistance to the king ; he was re
quired, too, to swear that he would never
endeavour to alter the government in
church or state. If he declined to take
the oath, he was not allowed to come
within five miles of any city or borough
town, or of any place where he had once
held a cure, and might therefore look to
finding a congregation. Any infraction of
this stern rule was to be punished with
fine and imprisonment. This cruel and
vexatious Act was especially levelled at the
ministers who, refusing to conform, had
been ejected from their benefices after the
passing of the Act of Uniformity in 1662.

In 1667 the king again, in his speech at
the opening of Parliament, requested that
some measure of relief for Nonconformists
might be framed. But the House was
obdurate, and in reply passed what is
termed " The Second Conventicle Act,"
which, while it mitigated the penalties of
the first Act, was, if possible, more harsh in
its provisions, such as the encouragement
it gave to informers, etc.

In 1672 king Charles issued a Declaration
of Indulgence, again claiming the disputed
dispensing power. In it he suspended all
penal laws in ecclesiastical matters. The
effect of this u Declaration " would have
been, that complete religious liberty would
be assured to Roman Catholics as well as
to Protestant Nonconformists. Although
modern public opinion would heartily
endorse the spirit of such a pronouncement,
it was confessedly quite unconstitutional,
and was said to violate forty statutes. Such
an exercise of royal authority was respect
fully but firmly resisted by the Commons,
and in their resistance they were supported
by the House of Lords ; so the king, as

1673-3

THE TEST ACT

171

usual, gave way, and recalled his Declaration
in the following year, 1673.

The u Long " Cavalier Parliament was
still sitting. Throughout the period of
its continuance it had been distinguished
for its resolution at all costs to maintain the
position of the Church of England, and if
possible to stamp out Puritanism. At this
juncture the growing power of the Roman
Catholics was looked on as a more pressing
danger to the church than even the oppo
sition of the Puritan sects. James, Duke
of York the king having no legitimate
descendant was the heir to the crown,
and he was known to be a bigoted Ro
manist. The House therefore proceeded
to pass the u Test Act." Its provisions
required anyone who held office of any
kind under the state to receive the Holy
Communion according to the rites of
the Anglican Church, and also to make
a solemn declaration against transub-
stantiation. The "Test Act" was not a
persecuting Act like the " Conventicle "
and "Five Mile" Acts ; but it excluded,
so long as it remained in force, from all
offices held under the state, civil or military,
persons holding conscientiously certain
religious opinions. In its operation it fell
with principal severity upon the Roman
Catholics, for they were of course precluded
from making the declaration of disbelief in
transubstantiation, as well as from receiving
the sacrament according to the rites of the
Church of England. The king s brother
James, for instance, at once gave up his post
as head of the Admiralty. Nonconformists,
on the other hand, of course rejected
transubstantiation, and many of them would
consent to receiving the sacrament as ad
ministered in the church.

During the last ten or twelve years of the
reign of Charles II., religious questions
continued to occupy a prominent place in
the thoughts of the people, and largely
to influence the policy of public men, both
in and out of Parliament ; but that extra
ordinary bitterness against Puritan Non
conformists, the heritage of the Civil Wars
and the Commonwealth, which characterised
the early and middle years of the reign, and
which so painfully coloured so much of the
Parliamentary legislation, gave place in
great measure to open hostility towards
Roman Catholicism. The revelation of
the so-called Popish plot by a shameless
intriguer, one Titus Gates,* in 1678, the
details of which were generally received with
a strange credulity, showed clearly what was
the temper of the nation. This pronounced
hostility on the part of the public, to which
Parliament gave utterance, was no baseless
feeling. The danger was very real, as the
subsequent history of England showed. The
undisguised preference of the careless and
indifferent king for a form of religion
utterly distasteful to the majority of
Englishmen ; the position of the king s
brother the heir of the monarchy being a
Roman Catholic himself, and the fact of his
being married to a Roman Catholic princess,

* Titus Gates was originally, before the Restora
tion, a Baptist minister, afterwards an Anglican
curate, and then a navy chaplain. His infamous
character deprived him of his posts in the church,
and he turned Romanist, and in the Colleges of St.
Omer and Valladolid he became cognisant of some
of the Jesuit schemes. Using them as a framework,
he pretended to discover a widely- extended plot,
which had for its object the destruction of Protest
antism, the death of the king, and the substitution
of James. The details were utterly false, but Oates s
pretended revelations were largely credited, and had
at the time an enormous influence over public
opinion, already greatly excited.

172

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

which naturally suggested the prospect of
a Roman Catholic race of sovereigns ; the
close though secret alliance with powerful
Roman Catholic France, which became
gradually suspected all these things sank
deep into the heart of the nation.

The once devotedly loyal Cavalier Parlia
ment passed a fresh u Test Act," which
excluded Roman Catholic peers from their
seats in the House of Lords ; and when
at length this Parliament, which had sat
since 1661, was dissolved in 1679, the
"Short Parliaments" of 1680-1681 were
even more vehement than their prede
cessor in their determination to crush
Romanism, and endeavoured though un
successfully to pass an u Exclusion Bill "
which would have shut out the Duke
of York (James), the king s brother,
from the succession. Curiously enough, all
through the long Parliamentary agitation
for the exclusion of the Roman Catholic
James from the succession, the Church of
England threw in the weight of its great
influence on the side of the king, who was
steadily opposed to the idea of excluding
his brother from the succession to the crown.
This action of the church was not owing to
any feelings of friendship or even of
tenderness towards Roman Catholicism.
The policy which declined to support the
Exclusion Bill was adopted because the
church upheld, as a doctrine, hereditary
right, which could not be interfered with,
even though the heir was a bigoted Ro
manist. In tracts and sermons the clergy
persistently taught this doctrine, inherited
in part from some of the more extravagant
divines of the days of Charles I., continually
urging upon the people the imperative duty
of passive obedience to the crown.

Thus, in the later years of Charles II. ,
we find the church siding with the king
and opposing Parliament, which for so
long had ever fanatically upheld their
position in the nation. A public declara
tion under the authority of archbishop
Sancroft was read in the churches, con
demning as absolutely sinful all resistance
to the crown. Indeed, the fact of the final
rejection of the Exclusion Bill was, no
doubt, greatly owing to the steady opposi
tion of the church to the principle. As
might have been expected on this question,
the Nonconformists were prominent in the
anti-Roman agitation, and their policy in
the matter of the exclusion of James, duke
of York, was exactly opposite to that of
the church.

We have dwelt at some length upon the
action of the Church of England during
the earlier and middle years of Charles II. s
reign, in the matter of the persecuting
acts of the Cavalier Parliament viz. the
" Conventicle " Acts, the " Five-Mile "
Act, and the " Test " Act. This unhappy
legislation was undoubtedly the work of
the reactionary " long " Parliament of the
Restoration, but there is no doubt that
a considerable portion of the Church of
England welcomed the spirit of the acts,
if it did not actually suggest them. The
effect has been disastrous. When the mon
archy was restored, and when with the
monarchy the church regained at once its
old position, Puritanism was split up into
various sects Presbyterians, Independents,
Baptists ; and the Independents were again
subdivided. The bitter and cruel persecu
tion which followed the passing of the
above-mentioned Acts of Parliament, had

THE EFFECT OF INTOLERANCE.

173

the effect of welding into one great phalanx its enemy, never its friend. The perse-

of Nonconformity, sects nearly as much cuting acts, it is true, no longer disgrace

opposed in doctrine and in practice to one the statute-book ; but the unhappy spirit

another as to the Church of England ; and of bitter, irreconcilable enmity aroused by

LORD CLARENDON.
(From the portrait by Sir Peter Lely.)

henceforth these divided communions were them has never been laid. To this day,

more or less knit together in their dislike on too many subjects of public interest,

and opposition to the church. From this % Nonconformity joins hands in resolute

time onward, Anglicanism has been con- and determined opposition to the church ;

fronted by Nonconformity alas ! ever as and the sad spectacle is often witnessed

174

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16611684.

of a strange, unnatural Nonconformist
alliance even with the community which
denies the divinity of our Lord, when
questions arise concerning such matters as
the education of the poor. This unnatural
enmity between Anglicans and the often
noble descendants of the devout and earnest
Puritans, paralyses not unfrequently the
truest and best work of God s servants,
alike in the camps of Anglicans and
Dissenters.

The reaction from the excesses and
extravagances of Puritanism, which had
offended so deeply all sorts and conditions
of Englishmen, brought in its train, besides
that spirit of persecution which we have
commented upon as living all through the
long Cavalier Parliament, much else that
was deeply regrettable. A licence hitherto
unknown pervaded the court, the capital,
and to a lesser extent the provinces. God
liness, which in many cases had passed
into hypocrisy, was scornfully regarded.
A general laxity in morals became the
characteristic feature in the society of the
capital. Duelling, swearing, debauchery in
its most degrading features, became too
common among the nobles and gentlemen
of the Restoration court. The king, who
is ever looked upon as the type and model
of society, set the evil example. The head
of the court was himself a notorious
offender against all the recognised rules of
propriety and even decency. Nowhere in
the annals of the monarchy do we possess
such a shameless record as that of the
second Charles. " Mistress followed mis
tress, and the guilt of a troop of profligate
women was blazoned to the world by
the gift of titles and estates. The royal

bastards were set among the English
nobles. . . . Gambling and drinking
helped to fill up the vacant moments when
he could no longer toy with his favourites,
or bet at Newmarket. No thought of
remorse or shame seems ever to have
crossed his mind."*

The example of the sovereign was only
too faithfully copied by the nobles and
gentlemen of his court, and the evil
example, alas ! filtered into society outside
the charmed circle of royalty. The popular
drama of the period but too conspicuously
reflects the low tone unhappily prevailing.
Nothing too severe can be said of the
teaching of the favourite playwrights of
the day. Wycherley, the best known of
them, has acquired a painful prominence
among immoral writers, and his evil sug
gestions were listened to with delight and
applause by thousands. There were, of
course, noble exceptions among the great
and influential to this general profligacy,
such as Clarendon, the great minister ;
and in the provinces, it is true, the sad
deterioration in morals was less observable.

The church was powerless to arrest this
wild delirium, which succeeded the
unnatural restraints of the generally hated
Puritanism ; but it will ever be a grave
reproach that sterner rebukes were not
publicly administered by the restored
Anglican divines. No doubt a feeling of
gratitude for the support and patronage
of the government and leading personages,
disposed the church for a season to look
too gently upon the faults and excesses
of men, who had raised their communion
from the misery and impotence to which it

* Green: "History of the English People,"
chap. ix.

1661-1684.] THE REIGN OF CHARLES II. A RETROSPECT.

175

had been reduced by the Puritan domination
and tyranny. But though the comparative
silence of the ecclesiastical teachers, when
their voices of warning and remonstrance
were so sorely needed, may find apologists,
it must ever remain a dark blot upon the
fair fame of the church of that period,
that more earnest efforts were not made to
stem the wild torrent of licence and evil
living which so painfully characterises the
epoch of the Restoration.

The story of the century generally is,
after all, a saddening retrospect, and sternly
forbids anything like pride, or even content
and satisfaction, on the part of either
Puritan or churchman. The triumph of the
Puritans had been marked by utter lack of
sympathy in and with the life of the people.
It was a dreary, sunless existence to which
they would have condemned all sorts and
conditions of men. They saw, or thought
they saw, evil in all harmless recreation.
As a party and a sect,* they were strangely
blind to all the ennobling influences of art,
whether exemplified in painting, sculpture,
or architecture. Godliness and religion, in
the sense these men understood them,
became bywords of scorn among the
people. Hypocrisy crept in when it be
came clear that a profession of sanctity
was necessary to obtain favour in the eyes
of the dominant party in the state. The
burning disputes between Presbyterian
and Independent swept away even the
semblance of order and discipline, and a
number of wild and fanatical sects con
tended among themselves for the position

* There were, of course, exceptions, notably
in Oliver Cromwell himself in the latter years of
his life.

of religious guides to the nation. The
Church of England seems to have been
the especial object of hate and persecution
among all these communions, and in a
lesser degree, because fewer in number, the
Roman Catholics. To stamp down any
thing like serious opposition, the Puritan
saints were simply merciless in the methods
they used. It would be difficult to match
the cruel severity which distinguished
Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan leaders
in the well-known Irish campaign, while
the massacres of Drogheda and Wexford
are memorable instances of the shameful
crimes which a vengeful and conquering
force thinks itself justified in perpetrating.
We have dwelt, it will be remembered,
upon the noblest and best side of Puritan
ism, and have shown how lasting has been
its effect on English life" and character ;
but, alas ! Puritanism triumphant had a
darker side.

The triumph of the Church of England r
again, we have sorrowfully noticed, was
contemporaneous with a marked increase
in immorality and in the general dissolute
ness of society, especially in the court and
capital. In literature, in the pursuits and
pleasures especially of the higher ranks of
society, a lower standard was aimed at ;
and a marked deterioration in English
social life becomes apparent, when a com
parison is made with the days of Eliza
beth, even of the first two Stuarts.

The English Roman Catholics, too, can
only view with sadness the part which
Romanism played during the reign of the
second Charles. The king notoriously
favoured Rome, and died in her commun
ion. But the influence of this compara
tively small body was ever exercised in

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1674.

favour of the pretensions of the powerful
French monarch, Louis XIV. Little cared
the majority of the English Romanists
whether or no England was the vassal ot
France. The sinister power which the
great French king exercised during most
of this reign over England, was in no
slight measure due to Rome. The prevail
ing feeling in England, that a Romanist
was no patriot where his religion was
concerned was by no means baseless.

Yet although the Anglican, the Puritan,
the Roman Catholic, in reviewing this
period, finds alike abundant material for
self-abasement, and little for self-congratu
lation, the picture of the irreligious side of
English society which the reign of Charles
II. presents is so sombre in its hues, that
the thoughtful student trembles when he
thinks what the country would have been
without the restraint and teaching of the
church or Puritanism, even such as they
were. His chief cause of complaint against
the church is that it seems to have failed at
this juncture to exercise the whole of that
mighty power of restraining vice, and the
dissoluteness so general after the Restora
tion, which to a great extent it undoubtedly
possessed.

Within the church, after it had become
again the recognised church of the land,
much was done. Generally its restored
ministrations were warmly welcomed. But
only very gradually, especially in the
country districts, was church order pro
perly restored. The long domination of
the several sects of Puritans had accus
tomed the people to various kinds of divine
service, all more or less alien to the
Anglican spirit. Especially had the fabrics
of the churches, and even of the cathedrals,

been suffered to pass into a state of shame
ful neglect, even of decay. Evelyn s words
are well known when he says (he is speaking
of Suffolk), " Most of the houses of God in
this county resemble rather stables and
thatched cottages than temples in which
to serve the Most High."* This state of
things was by degrees largely amended,
and among the restorations of the fabrics
of the churches the cathedrals deserve
special mention. Not a little renewed
care and thought in the period following
the Restoration of 1660 was devoted to the
fabrics of the cathedrals and churches.
There is no doubt that much of the decay
and desolation in these noble buildings,
which has attracted so much attention and
called forth such splendid offerings during
the last twenty or thirty years of the
nineteenth century, was due to the spirit
of neglect, almost of aversion, with which
the Puritans had regarded those noble
homes of prayer which the Church of
England has inherited from a remote past.
Conspicuous among the repairing and
rebuilding work done in the days of
Charles II. was the almost entire rebuilding
of the cathedral of St. Paul s in the metro
polis. This magnificent pile had suffered
greatly from fire in the days of queen
Elizabeth ; after remaining partially in ruin
for- a long period, Laud did much towards
restoring the vast cathedral. The great
fire of 1666 again destroyed it. Evelyn t
writes of it thus : u I was infinitely con
cerned to find that goodly church, St.
Paul s now a sad ruin, and that beautiful
portico, for structure comparable to any
in Europe . . . now rent in pieces."

* Diary of John Evelyn (1677).
t Ibid. (1666).

CHARLES II. VISITING WREN DURING THE BUILDING OF ST. PAUL S.
rmission of the owner, W, G. King, Esq. , from the picture by Seymour Lucas, R.A.)

178

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16611684.

The new church was commenced in 1675,
and the present magnificent building, the
largest in England, was completed in about
twenty-five years. Evelyn, in 1681, tells
us also how Sir Christopher Wren, the
king s architect u this incomparable per
sonage," as he terms him " was in hand
with the building of fifty parish churches "
in the city of London. Throughout the
kingdom, indeed, the works of church
restoration and rebuilding were actively
carried on in the years succeeding the
Restoration, but, alas ! were not sufficient
to arrest much of the decay which Puritan
neglect and even destructive fanaticism had
brought about.

This period also witnessed the first efforts
of what was subsequently known as the
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.*
Missionary work in America had been
commenced during the Commonwealth by
John Eliot, whose name will ever be held
in honour as the pioneer of that work for
which the Anglican communion has always
been distinguished among churches ; but
it is to Robert Boyle, a son of lord Cork,
that is owing the first real organised effort.
By his efforts a large portion of the New
Testament was translated into the Malayan
tongue, and another version of the Holy
Scripture was also made into Arabic, or
rather Turkish, for circulation in the
Levant, then becoming a great field for
English commerce.

Among the difficulties which met the
restored Anglican communion was the
lack of sufficiently trained ministers to fill
the many posts vacated by the expelled
Nonconformists; and many, no doubt, were

* The charter of the S.P.G. was granted form
ally in 1701.

ordained who possessed little learning or
fitness for their sacred calling. In spite of
this grave hindrance to its progress and
usefulness, the Church of England main
tained its ancient reputation for learning
and erudition, owing to the presence in its
ranks of a band of extraordinarily learned
and devoted leaders. No age, perhaps, pro
duced so famous a group of English theolo
gians. Amongst these eminent Caroline
divines, as they are termed, may be cited
the names of Bull, afterwards bishop of St.
David s, the author of the " Defence of the
Nicene Creed," a monumental work of
erudition and research, famed far beyond
the limits of England ; and Pearson, the
expositor of the Creed, whose book is still
the text-book, alike for the young student
and for the ripe theological scholar. Jeremy
Taylor, too, Cosin, Barrow, Ken, Tillotson,
South, Stillingfleet, and Sanderson are still
household words among us. Hammond,
perhaps one of the most distinguished of
them all, died very shortly after the fall of
Puritanism, just before he was about to be
consecrated bishop of Worcester ; but he
left behind him writings which exercised
a most enduring influence in the restored
church.

Sanderson is a good example of this
brilliant and saintly company, although by
no means the most illustrious of these
Caroline bishops and divines. He was a
type of the great church leaders of the
time, and in Isaak Walton s simple and
beautiful little memoir we gather what
those who lived in the same age thought
of him. Sanderson was a distinguished
Oxonian in the days of Charles I., who at
the request of Laud made him his chaplain.
The king valued him much, and subse-

16611684.]

THE CAROLINE DIVINES.

179

quently preferred him to the Regius Profes
sorship of Divinity at Oxford. As a teacher
and writer on casuistical divinity he was
perhaps unrivalled. Driven by the Puritan
party in their day of power from his
university chair, he betook himself to the
quiet seclusion of his country living at
Boothby-Pagnel in Lincolnshire, where
during the troubles he was left unmolested.
During the period of the church s deepest
degradation, Sanderson, with Hammond
and a few other like-minded men, kept
alive the fading torch of the ruined
Anglican Church. He was the spiritual
guide and adviser of numbers in those
days of gloom and bitter anxiety. His
biographer relates how by his beautiful
life, " his peaceful moderation and sincerity,
he became so remarkable that there were
many that applied to him for resolution
in perplexed cases of conscience, some
known to him and many not, some re
quiring satisfaction by conference, others
by letters ; so many that his life became
almost as restless as their minds." On the
Restoration he was appointed bishop of
Lincoln. Although he only occupied his
see for a short time (dying in 1662), he
was most energetic in carrying out the
royal injunction directing the repair and
restoration of all church buildings, includ
ing the houses of the clergy. The restora
tion of Lincoln cathedral was particularly
his object of care.

Sanderson s sermons are still models of
style, written in vigorous English. He left
behind him the reputation of a scholar, a
preacher, and a learned theologian, and,
above all, he set to the English Church
the high example of a devoted friend and
parish priest, fearless and self-denying.

His above quoted biographer* closes his
little sketch of Sanderson with the follow
ing touching words, which well represent
the popular estimation in which the great
divine was held by churchmen of that time
he had been telling the story of Sander
son s last hours : " Thus this pattern of
meekness and primitive innocence changed
this for a better life. It is now too late to&gt;
wish that mine may be like his (for I am in
the eighty-fifth year of my age, and God
knows it hath not), but I most humbly
beseech Almighty God that my death:
may."

In this great church revival and triumph
it must not, however, be supposed that the
Puritans, though persecuted and driven from
all positions of honour and emolument,,
and looked on with disfavour generally,,
in the country as in the metropolis, lost
entirely their influence among the English
people. Among their leading divines were
not a few men of great learning, of devoted
earnestness, and of deep piety. These, in
that period which was indeed to them a
time of clouds and darkness, scarcely lit up-
with a passing ray of sunshine, by their
writings and exhortations, private as
well as public, amid surroundings of dis
couragement and even danger, kept alive
the Puritan tradition, handing on to future

* Isaak Walton, whose biographies, especially that
of Hooker, have been several times quoted, was
born in 1593 and died in 1683, in his ninetieth
year. He is best known as " the common father
of all anglers," but his literary powers and acquire
ments were great. His biographies of a few of the
noted and distinguished divines of the century are
admirable in their simplicity, transparent truthful
ness, and exquisite language. Pie was intimately
associated with many of the eminent churchmen
who lived during the period of the Stuart kings
and the Commonwealth.

i8o

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

generations the doctrines and teachings
which had been so long dear to many of
the most earnest of their Puritan country
men. The old Puritan God-fearing spirit,
with all its many grave errors, was too
deeply cherished in the hearts of thousands
of Englishmen to be uprooted even by

(After a contemporary engraving by Robert White.)

years of unpopularity, accompanied with
bitter persecution. England, as a whole,
emphatically preferred the church, with its
immemorial traditions, with its primitive
rites and doctrines, and its greater sympathy
with the mass of the people generally. The
real joy which welcomed its restoration
in 1660- 1 tells us this with a voice none
can mistake. But there was something in
Puritanism which was deathless, and which

survived even the great Restoration re
action. Among the two thousand who re
fused to conform, and who for conscience
sake gave up possessions, place, and rank,
were not a few very learned and eloquent
men, some of whom during the Common
wealth had filled with honour and distinc
tion professors chairs at Oxford and Cam
bridge; some of them, as great preachers,
and writers and pastors, had won a deserved
reputation and a commanding influence.
Among these ejected Puritan divines, such
names as those of Baxter, Howe, and Owen
are still household words among the
English Nonconformist communities. A
brief picture of the first of these, who
may be considered as the leader of the
Nonconformists during the days of the
second and third Stuart kings, will give
a fair instance of the spirit which lived
in these men.

Richard Baxter, the son of a well-to-do
Puritan Shropshire yeoman, was born in
1615, and trained for the ministry of the
Church of England. His mind, however,
was largely influenced by Puritan teach
ing, though it is said that the study of
Hooker s " Ecclesiastical Polity " reconciled
him to episcopal ordination and the order
of the Church of England. Ordained at
Worcester in 1638, he soon obtained a
reputation as a preacher. He was also an
indefatigable student, and his Puritan bias
soon led him to question certain of the rites
and ceremonies of the church in which he
was a minister. He continued, however, to
perform his duties, and at Kidderminster,
where with some interruptions he worked
for years, his work was attended with
conspicuous success. During part of the
Civil Wars he acted as chaplain to the

PURITAN DIVINES RICHARD BAXTER.

181

Parliamentary regiment of colonel Whalley.
In spite of his fervid Puritanism he by no
means sympathised with the ecclesiastical
measures of the dominant party, and was,
especially, strongly opposed to the Solemn
League and Covenant Nor did he hesitate

Then came the famous Savoy Conference,,
between the church in the hour of its
sudden but complete triumph, and the
Puritans, dismayed at the tremendous
change in their position. But there was
at that historic meeting no attempt at

JUDGE JEFFREYS AND RICHARD BAXTER.
(By permission, from the pictiireby E. M. Ward, R.A,, in the Mn.ppin Art Gallery, Sheffield. )

openly to oppose even Cromwell. After
the Restoration, when Charles II. hoped to
effect a union between the more moderate
Puritans and the Anglican Church,
Baxter was appointed a royal chaplain,
and as he was looked upon as one of the
most learned and influential of his party,
was even offered the mitre of Hereford.

conciliation, no movement in the direction
of yielding, on either side. The leading
position among the Puritans seems to have
been taken by Baxter ; and while on the
one hand the church conceded nothing,
on the other Baxter, the great representa
tive of Puritanism, stoutly contended for
the abolition, or at least for the merely

182

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

optional use, of most of the ritual and
practice which so long had been objected
to by Puritanism.

The final rejection by the church of the
Puritan demands, determined Baxter to
throw in his lot henceforth with the men
who refused to submit to the stern Act of
Uniformity passed after the failure of the
Savoy Conference. Henceforth, as the
recognised leader of Nonconformity, he
became the object of bitter persecution,
and " in the forty-seventh year of his age
(after a life spent in ceaseless and noble
work), bowed down with infirmities, was
driven from his home and his weeping
congregation, to pass the remainder of his
life in loathsome jails and precarious hiding
places, there to compose in penury and in
almost ceaseless pain, works without par
allel in the history of English theological
literature, for their extent and prodigality
of intellectual wealth." The tremendous
catalogue of his printed works comprises
one hundred and sixty volumes, the subjects
on which he wrote covering the entire field
of theology, and comprising doctrinal, prac
tical, polemical, and casuistical treatises. Of
course, they are very unequal, but many of
them are vigorous and powerful, and con
tain passages of great majesty and beauty.
Of these the famous "Saint s Rest" is per
haps the best known and most enduring.

Towards the end of his busy, toil-worn
life, occurred that well-known scene at
Guildhall, when Baxter, then an old man,
appeared before the notorious chief justice
Jeffreys, accused of advocating sedition in
* Sir James Stephens: "Richard Baxter."

his writings. It was in a commentary on
the New Testament that the obnoxious
words occurred. The scene was a remark
able one. Never had that unrighteous
judge been more violent than when he
tried Baxter. He did not scruple to term
the great Puritan an old rogue, an old
schismatical knave, an hypocritical villain ;
and when the counsel for the defence
alluded to Baxter s noble record, and how
king Charles was willing to have conferred
a bishopric upon him, if he would have
consented to conform, " Aye," said the
judge, " we know that, but what ailed the
old blockhead, the unthankful villain, that
he would not conform ? Is he wiser or
better than other men ? He hath been
ever since the spring of the faction. Tain
sure he hath poisoned the world with his
doctrine a conceited, stubborn, fanatical
dog ! " As might have been expected
in such a court, Baxter was condemned
to a great fine and imprisonment, from
which, however, after about two years
he was released, and his fine remitted.

He survived this last cruel stroke some
five more years, working, writing, preach
ing to the last. None of the Puritan
leaders in the days of the great persecution
came up to him in power, self-denial, and
endurance ; but he had many imitators
and followers, who kept alive the torch
of Puritanism until better and calmer
days, when a measure of toleration was
extended to these men, who, with all their
errors and mistakes, have ever played, and
are playing still, a great part in the
religious training of their countrymen.

CHAPTER LXVIII.

JAMES II. AND THE REVOLUTION.

Last Days of Charles, and Accession of James II. The King a Roman Catholic His Religious Zeal-
Appointment of Romanists to Various Posts Restores the Court of High Commission, and
Suspends the Bishop of London The King s Declaration of Indulgence Tyrannical Proceedings
at Oxford University Magdalen made a Romish Seminary Various other Absolutist Measures
Resistance of the Anglican Clergy Petition of the Bishops Against Reading the Declaration
of Indulgence Imprisonment of the Seven Bishops Their Trial and Acquittal Attitude of the
Puritans The Birth of a Prince Precipitates the Crisis William of Orange Invited to England
The King s Too Late Concessions Flight of James The Convention Parliament Confers the
Crown upon William and Mary.

THE reign of Charles II. came to a
sudden end early in the year
1685.* For about a quarter of a
century, as we have seen, light and
shadow alternated in the history of the
Church of England. Never in the long
course of its existence had it been so
triumphantly shown how deep a lodgment
it possessed in the hearts of the people.
The wonderful expressions of joy and deep
content which had welcomed its restoration
to its old place of power and influence in
the realm, can never be forgotten. The
work and teaching of the great Anglican
divines during that period contributed
largely to its consolidation, and deepened
and widened its commanding influence.
Puritanism, in the more extravagant and
exaggerated forms which it had assumed
in the period immediately preceding and

* As our history proceeds, we have less and less
cause to trace the civil history of the time. The
rise and fall of the different ministers of Charles II.
and their administrations, the selfish life of the
king, his miserable subservience to France, are
more or less well known, and have been fully
painted in the well-known history of Macaulay,
and at less length by Green, and have been
described in the lucid and admirable precis of
Gardiner in his " Student s History of England "
all works within the easy reach of students.

during the Civil War and the Common
wealth, though by no means extinct, or
ceasing to be a great force in the religious
life of the country, was no longer a grave
source of danger to the church. On the
other hand, the broad rift between
Anglicanism and Puritanism had been
seriously widened by the cruel series of
persecuting acts levelled against all Non
conformists, passed by a Parliament smarting
under the remembrance of the Presbyterian
and Independent tyranny of the Common
wealth. This deplorable policy, however,
weakened instead of strengthening the
position of the church, which certainly
acquiesced in, if it did not actually promote,
these unhappy measures.

The reign of Charles II. had lasted about
a quarter of a century, and will be for ever
memorable in the annals of the church
which had in his days experienced so mar
vellous a revolution in its fortunes. The
end of that brilliant, kindly, thoughtless life
came with startling suddenness. The too
true pictures painted by John Evelyn in
his diary, of the last Sunday evening of the
king s life at Whitehall, faithfully depicts
the wild and dissolute society of the
Restoration period, to which we have

1 84

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1685.

already alluded, and of which the king and
his court were the examples and models,
sadly and faithfully copied in a thousand less

REVERSE OF ANTI-POPERY MEDAL STRUCK IN THE
REIGN OF CHARLES II. REPRESENTING THE
HEADS OF THE POPE AND THE DEVIL JOINED
IN ONE. (British Museum.}

distinguished circles. " I can never forget."
wrote Evelyn, " the inexpressible luxury
and profaneness, gaming and all dis
soluteness, and, as it were, total forgetfulness
of God (it being Sunday evening), which
this day se nnight I was witness of; the
king sitting and toying with his concubines
the duchesses of Portsmouth, Cleveland,
and Mazarine, a French boy singing love
songs in that glorious gallery, whilst about
twenty of the great courtiers and other dis
solute persons were at basset round a large
table, a bank of at least ^"2,000 in gold
before them. Upon which two gentlemen
who were with me made reflections with
astonishment. Six days after, was all in
the dust."*

That very Sunday night when Evelyn
looked on the gay and wicked scene, was
king Charles seized with his brief but fatal
illness. In his dying moments, it will be
well remembered, the king declared that
he was a Roman Catholic, and received
* Diary of John Evelyn, 1685

the last sacraments at the hands of the
Papist Father Huddleston. A new and
unexpected time of trial now lay before the
church. The duke of York, better known
as James II., followed his brother on the
throne. James had avowedly become a
u convert " to Roman Catholicism, and, like
many converts, was intensely in earnest to
promote what he considered the welfare of
his new faith. For it he risked all, and
justly lost three crowns in his attempt to
re-introduce it into England.

He began his reign well, with an unstudied
address to the Privy Council, in which he
acknowledged his debt to the Church of
England, " which he knew to be eminently

REVERSE OF POLITICAL MEDAL STRUCK IN l688
REPRESENTING JAMES IN THE FORM OF A DOG
WEARING A ROSARY, SWALLOWING A BOOK
INSCRIBED M. J. (MAGNUM JURAMEN" TUM),
TRAMPLING ON ANOTHER WITH L. C. (LIBERTAS
CONSCIENTI^), AND THROWING DOWN FROM
A COLUMN A THIRD WITH S.R.P. (SALUS RELI-
GIONIS PROTESTANTIS) AND SEALS T. P. (TEST

AND PENAL LAWS). (British Museum }

loyal ; it would ever be his care to support
and defend her." But very soon he forgot

186

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16851686.

his words, and planned a deliberate attack
on that church which had been for so long
devotedly attached to his cause, deter
mining by a series of such attacks to thrust
her from the commanding position she
occupied in the country.

The " Test Act," passed in 1673, required
from all officers, civil and military, a
declaration against transubstantiation. In
Parliament, which after a short session in
May had re-assembled in November, 1685,
he announced that he had dispensed with
the provisions of the Act in question in the
case of some officers he had appointed to
posts in the army. The Commons at once
ventured to remonstrate with the king. In
the House of Lords, Compton, bishop of
London, declared that in consequence of
the royal procedure the constitution was
in danger. The answer of the king was
the prorogation of Parliament, and the
removal of bishop Compton from his
position of dean of the Chapel Royal and
his status as Privy Councillor.

Even previous to this, James had
scandalised the Protestant members of his
court by ordering a public celebration of
the Roman Catholic rites in the private
chapel of the palace, and by having a series
of sermons preached before him by Papist
ecclesiastics. At his coronation, which was
performed in Westminster Abbey with
great pomp and ceremony, certain sig
nificant omissions were noticed. By the
king s command the Communion Service
was not used, and the ceremony of the
presentation to the monarch of a copy of
the English Bible was left out. To preserve
some show of legality for his proceedings,
James II. procured an opinion from certain
of the judges who were devoted to him,

that the Crown might dispense with laws,
and thus set the provisions of the obnoxious
Test Act at defiance. Acting at once upon
this opinion, the king proceeded to appoint
to the Privy Council certain Roman
Catholic peers, and even one or two
Romish priests who held office at court.
The royal chapel at St. James s was
decorated with all the magnificence which
belonged to the proscribed religion. A
Jesuit school was established in the Savoy,
and colonies of Benedictines, Franciscans,
and Carmelites were placed in different
centres in London. Emboldened by the
success of his armies in Scotland, and still
more by his signal triumph over the duke
of Monmouth,* who had raised in the west
of England the standard of revolt and
assumed the title of king, James proceeded
to take further steps to restore Romanism,
and to degrade the Church of England.
He especially directed his attention to the
two great universities, and at Oxford made
some significant changes, appointing
Romanists to various important posts.

The country was now thoroughly
alarmed, and many of the clergy openjy
preached against the errors of Rome-j
notably Dr. Sharp, the dean of Norwich,
who also held in London the rectory of
St. Giles. Compton, the bishop of London,
was ordered to suspend Sharp. On the
bishop s demurring, he was summoned
before the Court of High Commission,
a tribunal which the king on his own
authority re-established. This court had
been formally abolished by two Acts of
Parliament. The " High Commission "
was entrusted with great and undefined

* The duke of Monmouth was a natural son of
Charles II.

1686.]

ROMAN CATHOLIC MEASURES OF JAMES II.

187

powers, and suspended the bishop of
London for his disobedience to the royal
orders.

These extraordinary and imprudent
measures of the king were viewed with
apprehension by the most eminent foreign
Roman Catholics of that day. The im
perious and unstatesmanlike character of
James was well known at Rome and in
the cabinets of Europe. In the early days
of his reign he was urged to be cautious
and prudent, notably by the Pope, In
nocent XL, and by the cabinet of the
Escurial, the two principal centres of
Roman Catholicism. The great Con
tinental Romish statesmen felt that the
true interests of the Romanists in England
would never be permanently advanced by
sudden and sweeping measures in their
favour. Such would, they felt, only alarm
the great majority of the English, and the
reaction, they were well aware, would be
terrible. If James II. received no warnings
from the third great Romish power, which
issued its despatches from Versailles, it
was because the relations which had long
existed between Louis XIV. and the house
of Stuart were of a peculiar and dangerous
description, Charles II. and his brother
being secretly subsidised by France. Rome
and Spain, however, had had long ex
perience of the temper of the English
nation ; they were well aware of the dread
and repulsion felt in the great island king
dom for Roman Catholicism ; and the
results, which with strange rapidity fol
lowed the policy of the Roman Catholic
Stuart king, more than justified the wise
and statesmanlike cautions which came
from both.

At first sight nothing is stranger in

history than the expulsion of the Stuarts.
It seems incredible that the wonderful
reaction which brought about and wel
comed with a truly national welcome the
return of the royal family in the person of
Charles II., could have worn itself out in
less than thirty years ; incredible that the
enthusiasm which received the king in
1 66 1 could have been exchanged for the
hatred which culminated in the expulsion
of his brother James in 1688 a hatred
shared by statesmen and people of all
ranks and orders, and so intense that for
a brief period it united in one object the
triumphant Church ot England and the
persecuted Nonconformists. It needed,
indeed, something of no ordinary force,
something which could appeal at once to
the reason and passions of Englishmen of
all sorts and conditions, to weld into one
such apparently discordant elements. But
this was supplied by James s wild infatua
tion, by his imperious determination to
re-introduce Romanism as the religion of
England.

For the last Stuart king was deaf to the
temperate warnings of Continental states
men, as earnest as he was for the advance
ment of Roman Catholicism, only wiser and
more far-seeing ; deaf to the prudent advice
of his kinsmen, the lords Clarendon and
Rochester, who occupied the highest place
among his ministers and confidants ; deaf
to the counsels of tried and veteran
Royalists like Ormond. He ignored the
opinions of the wisest judges and lawyers ;
and, more than all, he flouted and hope
lessly alienated the most powerful and
devoted ally of his royal house, the Church
of England, which in its extreme reverence
for loyalty to the crown, had long preached

i88

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1687.

consistently from a thousand pulpits the
doctrine of passive obedience. Nothing
but the fear of Rome could ever have
touched the blind loyalty of men like
Clarendon, Rochester, and Ormond, or the
conscientious devotion to the throne of
ecclesiastics like Bancroft of Canterbury,
Compton of London, and Ken of Bath and
Wells. But u Quern" Dcus vult perdcrc
prius demcntat" (" Whom God has marked
for ruin, he first allows to become insane "),
and well did James II. exemplify the truth
of the saying.

Without relenting he pursued his head
long, ruinous course. In the April of 1687
he published his famous " Declaration of
Indulgence." In it he stated his conviction
that conscience was not to be forced, that
persecution was harmful to commerce, and
such like platitudes ; and then went on to
sweep away by his own sovereign authority,
by a dispensing power which he claimed
as belonging to the crown &gt; a long series
of statutes. By this " Declaration " he
suspended all penal laws against Non
conformists, authorising all sects Inde
pendents, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics
publicly to perform their worship according
to their own peculiar rites and uses.

The re-establishment of the Court of
High Commission, with its vast vague
powers, the publication of the Declaration
of Indulgence, the arbitrary acts of Janies
in the universities of Oxford and Cam
bridge particularly in the former uni
versity, showed all thoughtful men what
was in the Roman Catholic king s mind,
in spite of his protestation that he intended
to protect the Church of England in the
enjoyment of her legal status and rights.
It was evident that he aimed, if not at the

destruction, certainly at the degradation of
the church so dear to the English nation.
At Oxford he had already changed the
ancient foundation of University College
into a Roman Catholic seminary, while the
magnificent Christ Church had been placed
under the rule of a Roman Catholic dean.
With little pause the king went on with
his Oxford changes. He determined to
appropriate for his co-religionists the great
foundation of Magdalen, at that time per
haps the wealthiest of the Oxford colleges.
This important society, when James IL
was king, consisted of a president, of forty
fellows, and of a number of scholars,
chaplains, and choristers. It was in the
March of 1687 that the president of this
powerful college died ; and by a royal
letter James recommended for the vacant
headship one Anthony Farmer, a Romanist.
According to the statutes of the college,.
Farmer, not being a fellow, was ineligible
for the post. Other matters connected
with the character of Farmer rendered him
also unfit for the headship. The fellows,,
who formed the governing body of electors,
respectfully remonstrated, begging the
king, if he was pleased to recommend
them a president, that one might be found
whom they could legally elect. James
never replied, and the fellows proceeded
to elect as president an eminently suitable
candidate, who afterwards became well
known John Hough. For this disobedi
ence to the royal wishes, the offending
fellows of Magdalen were summoned to
appear before the newly-constituted Court
of High Commission ; and the Commission,
with an insolent defiance of law and
custom, pronounced Hough s election void.
A royal letter then recommended Dr.

His Ma jeffies

G R A CI O U S

DECLARATION

To all His Loving Siifeje&lt;5ls for

JAMES R.

T having pleated Almighty God not only to
bring ,Us to the Imperial Crown of theie
Kingdoms through the greater! Difficulties,
but to preferve Usbya. more than ordinary
Providence upon the Throne of Our r&gt;oyal
Anceftors, There is nothing now that We
fb earneftly defire, as to Eitablifh Our Go
vernment on fuch a Foundation , as may
make Our Subjects happy, and unite tliem
to Us by Inclination as well a^ Puty ; W i)icb
We think can be done by no Meansfp effectually, as by Grancing to
them the free Exercife of their Religion for the Time to come, s ad
add that to the perfet enjoyment ot their Property, which hai m-
ver been in anv Cafe Invaded by tl fince Our coming to the Crown .
which being the two Things Men value molt, Jhall ever be prefer ved

A in

FIRST PAGE OF THE DECLARATION OF INDULGENCE, 1687. (British Museum,}

190

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1687.

Parker, bishop of Oxford, as president.
Parker, if not actually a Romanist, in heart
at least was with the Romanist party. He
was rejected by the electors on the ground
that Hough had been legally elected.
Shortly afterwards the king made a pro
gress through a large part of England, and
in the course of his progress visited Oxford.
The fellows of Magdalen were summoned
to meet their king, who in person haughtily
required their submission to his expressed
wishes in the matter of the election of
a president. He was met, much to his
surprise, with a direct though courteous
refusal. A commission under the High
Court, armed with special visitorial powers
over Magdalen College, was appointed to
deal with the matter ; and in the end the
president Hough and the body of the
fellows were ejected. Bishop Parker
dying shortly after, the college became a
Roman Catholic seminary under the pre
sidency of the Roman bishop Giffard,
twelve Popish fellows bearing rule under
him.

This episode is here related with some
detail, because none of James s high
handed proceedings so disturbed and
disgusted the Church of England, as did
this treatment of one of the most famous
colleges of the loyal university of Oxford.
Every minister of the church, from the
vicar of the humblest parish to the highest
dignitary of the proudest cathedral, was
sensible that his freehold in the church
might be any moment taken from him, and
given at the arbitary will of the sovereign
to a member of another church. James,
by his treachery to the Establishment, had
justly forfeited the loyalty, and had lost for
ever the support, of the powerful church

whose devotion to the house of Stuart had
been proverbial.

Nor did the king in his mad infatuation
by any means limit the sphere of his
high-handed arbitrary proceedings to the
universities and the church. The great
officers of state, who declined to assist him
in his determination to restore what he
deemed the true religion, were rapidly
removed from their positions and replaced
by devoted Romanists. Neither the claims
of near kinship, nor the traditions of a
long and unbroken loyal service, sufficed
to maintain the chief servants of the crown
in their posts. His brothers-in-law, the
earls of Clarendon and Rochester, the one
lord lieutenant of Ireland, the other lord
treasurer, fell. The Romanist lord Bellasys
became first lord of the treasury, no lord
treasurer being appointed when Rochester
was dismissed. Lord Arundel, another
Roman Catholic, became privy seal.
Father Petre, a Jesuit, received a seat at
the privy council. The nuncio of the Pope
was even received in state at Windsor.

A yet. more offensive and illegal pro
cedure took place in the case of the lords
lieutenant of the counties. These officers
were commanded to effect such a " regu
lation " of the governing body in the
boroughs, as would ensure the return of
candidates for the House of Commons
pledged to the repeal of the Test Act.
Many of them at once refused, and these
were at once relieved of their offices.

The church, in the person of some of
its most famous preachers, now more and
more openly inveighed against the errors
of Rome. Evelyn in his diary notes how,
thanks to the efforts of the church, " by
God s providence the Papists made small

!688.] OPPOSITION OF THE BISHOPS TO THE KING S POLICY. 191

progress among us." The king, in the
meantime, apparently emboldened by the
absence of any open resistance to his illegal
doings, proceeded to an act which at length
roused the whole nation to an active
resistance a resistance which brought
about the revolution, and precipitated the
fate of the Stuart dynasty. In May of
1688 he issued an
order directing the
famous Declaration
of Indulgence,
which, as we have
seen, among other
provisions, sus
pended all penal
enactments in ec
clesiastical matters,
to be published in
all the churches
of the kingdom.
The bishops were
directed to cause
the said Declara
tion u to be sent
round and distri
buted through
their dioceses to
be read according."

The Anglican clergy hesitated to obey.
For a brief season it hung in the balance
whether or no the king s tyrannical man
date would be complied with. The High
Commission Court was a powerful and
terrible tribunal, and many an incumbent
would naturally hesitate, lest by disobed
ience to the royal order he might bring
himself under its arbitrary powers. At this
juncture the leading London clergy came
boldly forward, and positively refused to
read the royal Declaration. They were

POLITICAL MEDAL STRUCK AT THE TIME OF THE
TRIAL OF THE SEVEN BISHOPS, REPRESENTING
THE CHURCH BEING UNDERMINED BY A JESUIT
AND A MONK BUT SUPPORTED BY A HAND FROM
HEAVEN. (British Museum.}

supported by the patriotism of the chiefs of
the Nonconformists, by such men as Baxter
and Howe ; who, to their great honour,
in this critical juncture stood by the
Church of England in defence of the laws
of the realm. At a meeting of such of the
bishops as could be summoned in haste to
Lambeth, and of other eminent divines, a
petition to the king
was drawn up, in
which, while reiter
ating the fervent
loyalty of the
church to the
crown, earnest
protests were
made against the
illegality of the
Declaration of
Indulgence, Parlia
ment having both
in the present and
late reigns pro
nounced that the
sovereign was not
competent to dis
pense with statutes
in matters eccle
siastical.

James received the document at the
hands of the bishops who had drawn it up
with deep anger, saying, " This is a great
surprise to me. I did not expect this from
your church. This is a standard of
rebellion." The saintly Ken of Bath and
Wells was prominent in his firm though
respectful personal remonstrances to the
king. The other prelates present, to the
number of seven, were equally firm. James
was unyielding. " You are trumpeters of
sedition : what do you here ? " said the

192

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1688.

king. " Go to your dioceses and see that I
am obeyed. . . . God has given me the
dispensing power, and I will maintain it. M
Not through any official source appar
ently, but clandestinely, the bishops
petition at once appeared in print. It was
read and re-read in London and in every
village in the kingdom, and generally with
marked sympathy
and approval. The
Sunday following
the presentation
of the petition to
the king, was the
first of the four
appointed Sundays
for the reading of
the celebrated De
claration 01 Indul
gence. The dates
were the 2Oth and
2 /th May, and the
3rd and loth of
June, 1688. What
happened was as
follows : In the
city and liberties
of London at that
time were about

a hundred parish churches. In only four
of them was the royal order complied with.
In Westminster Abbey Dr. Sprat, bishop
of Rochester, a creature of the king,
officiated as dean. When he began to read
the Declaration the congregation rose and
left the great choir where the service was
being held. The same refusal to read the
royal manifesto was again general on the
three succeeding appointed Sundays. The

* Cf. Macaulay ("History of England," chap,
vii.), who relates the strange scene at length.

OBVERSE OF POLITICAL MEDAL STRUCK AT THE TIME
OF THE IMPRISONMENT OF THE SEVEN BISHOPS.
REPRESENTS THE BISHOPS (ON THE LEFT) AP-
PROACHING THE TOWER, POPULACE ON THE

OTHER SIDE. (British Museum.}

provinces followed the example of the
metropolis. Not one parish priest in fifty
complied with the order in council directing
the public reading. Seven bishops origin
ally had signed, and in person presented
the petition to James, but in addition to
these the bishops of Norwich, Gloucester
Salisbury, andWinchester had subsequently
signed copies of the
petition, to show
their full approval
of it. As we have
already noticed,
the leading Non
conformists stoutly
and bravely sup
ported the Church
of England in this
resistance to the
u n c o n s t itutional
demand of the
crown.

The king still,
in spite of this
strong expression
of the national
will, refused to
yield. The ques
tion with him was,

What action should he take in the case of
the seven bishops who, as the first signatories
of the petition against the Declaration, had
placed themselves at the head of the resist
ance to the royal will ? Several courses
were suggested in the council. The more
prudent of the royal advisers, aware of the
strength of the opposition, were of opinion
that the king would best consult his
dignity by leaving the bishops for the
present alone. The lord chancellor
Jeffreys, however, was in favour of a

i688.]

IMPRISONMENT OF THE SEVEN BISHOPS.

193

decided course of action, and induced the
king to cite the seven before the Court of
King s Bench, on a charge of seditious
libel. Jeffreys expected they would be con
victed, and that the infliction of a ruinous
fine and imprisonment would strike terror
into the hearts of the less distinguished
offenders, who would in the end be content
to comply with the king s wishes in the
matter of publishing the Declaration.
Summoned before the council, the seven
bishops were informed of the royal deter
mination. They behaved on this occasion
with dignified firmness, and the same day
a warrant was made out committing them
to the Tower. They were at once con
veyed in a royal barge from Whitehall
to the historic prison of England.

KEVERSK OF POLITICAL MEDAL STRUCK AT THE
TIME OF THE TRIAL OF THE SEVEN BISHOPS.
IT REPRESENTS SIX OF THE BISHOPS WITH
COMPTON, BISHOP OF LONDON, IN THE CENTRE.
COMPTON HAD BEEN SUSPENDED BY JAMES

(seep. 187). (British Museum.}

The names of the seven illustrious bishops
who had stood forth as the champions of
their church and of the constitutional
rights of Englishmen were the primate,

archbishop Sancroft, Compton of London,
Lloyd of St. Asaph, Turner of Ely, Lake
of Chichester, Ken of Bath and Wells,

REVERSE OF POLITICAL MEDAL STRUCK AT THE
TIME OF THE TRIAL OF THE SEVEN BISHOPS.
IT REPRESENTS THE CHURCH ON A ROCK BUF
FETED BY THE FOUR WINDS. (British Museum. )

Trelawney of Bristol. The progress of
the barge down the river with the seven
accused bishops partook of the nature of
a triumphal procession. The river was
crowded with craft, thousands being
anxious to catch a glimpse of the heroes
of the hour. Many as they thronged the
banks even waded some way out into the
stream to get nearer the captive prelates.
Their blessing was invoked, and many
earnest prayers went up from excited hearts
for their safety. A deputation of Noncon
formist divines visited the Tower after the
bishops were lodged there. Some of these
Nonconformists were sent for, and person
ally rebuked by the king for their unlooked-
for disloyalty at such a moment. Their
reply was a memorable one. They felt all
past disputings should be forgotten, and
that their solemn duty was to rally round
men who imperilled themselves for the
Protestant religion ; thus showing that
among the Puritans the dread of Rome
was a stronger and deeper feeling than even
the hope of a complete toleration of their

194

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1688

own forms of religion. Anglicanism they
had good cause to dislike, and in its too
ready acquiescence in the cruel persecution
of Nonconformity, to dread ; but Anglican
ism, with all its errors, in their eyes was
still Protestantism. The triumph of Roman
Catholicism would have been, in the eyes
of true Puritans like Baxter and Howe, too
dear a price to pay even for the toleration
of their own cherished form of faith.

The trial of the seven confessors was
hurried on. On the I5th June of that
*ame memorable year 1688. they were
formally committed for trial at West
minster, and liberated on their own
recognisances. On the 2 9th of the same
month the trial took place. The crowds
outside the hall of justice, choking up all
the approaches, were remarkable ; but
within " such an auditory had never before
and has never since been assembled in the
Court of King s Bench. Thirty-four tem
poral peers of the realm were counted in
the crowd."* Three at least of the four
judges on the bench were obsequious
servants of the king. The most eminent
counsel of the day either conducted the
prosecution or were retained for the
defence. The jury were mostly composed
of persons of good station, several of them
of high rank. There was at first some
difference of opinion among them, a
minority pressing for a conviction. TL-.y
consulted for a whole night, and when in
the morning the verdict of acquittal was
pronounced, the rejoicings not only in the
metropolis but also in the remote districts
of the country were loud and deep. It was

*See Macaulay s "History," chap. viii. His
"story of the seven bishops arjd their trial " is
wonderfully graphic, though somewhat drawn out.

a signal victory over a carefully considered
attempt on the part of the Stuart king at
absolutism ; but it was, too and that is
peculiarly what interests us in our history
a signal victory of the Church of England.
The attempt of the Roman Catholic king
to degrade that church had utterly failed,
and the result was that she stood higher in
the estimation of the people than ever.

REVERSE OF POLITICAL MEDAL STRUCK IN l688,
SHOWING PAPAL EMBLEMS BEING BURNT IN

LINCOLN S INN FIELDS. THE WEST SIDE is

SEEN WITH THE PORTUGUESE CHAPEL IN DUKE

STREET IN RUINS. (British Museum.}

Among the general rejoicings which fol
lowed the acquittal of the bishops, one
significant incident deserves mention. In
several parts of the metropolis the Pope
was burnt in effigy : in more than one
instance the effigy was surrounded by a
train of cardinals and Jesuits. No serious
Churchman for a moment would approve
such a wild exhibition of popular anger ;
but it serves to show what, after two
centuries and a half of freedom from the
weight of the dead hand of Rome, were the
feelings of the populace towards the hated

1688.]

CRISIS AT THE BIRTH OF A PRINCE.

despotism. More than two centuries have
elapsed since that attempt of James II., and
the times have changed : new thoughts,
sights, and scenes are presented to the gaze
of those who live in the last years of the
nineteenth century. But the same feeling
towards Rome lives still, and is as strong
as ever in the hearts of the English people.
Thus in 1688, James II. had succeeded
in alienating well-nigh all his subjects.
Lords and Commons were alike in bitter
opposition to his government. He had
deeply affronted all parties, all sects. His
one end and aim was the exaltation or
his church, and that church was regarded
with feelings of intense mistrust by most
Englishmen. To advance its interests he
had recklessly trampled upon the con
stitution, arad had claimed for the crown
prerogatives which had in the days of his
father, Charles L, stirred up the fires of the
great Civil War. Above all, he had reck
lessly quarrelled with the Anglican com
munion, ever devotedly loyal to his house
even in the most hopeless days of the great
Rebellion. All might, however, still have
been endured, and James II. might have
gone down to the grave as king of Eng
land, so fervid was the feeling of loyalty
to the crown, and so intense was the
general dread of another civil war and a
possible renewal of Puritan tyranny, had
it not been for an event which happened
just at the moment when all England was
thus stirred with indignation by the arrest
of 1 the seven bishops who were the special
objects of the king s wrath. That event
was the unlooked-for birth of a male heir
to the Stuart dynasty.*

* James II. had two daughters: Mary, afterwards
queen, married to William of Orange (William III.),

The prince of Wales, subsequently Known
as James III., or the Old Pretender, was
born on June loth, 1688, and the birth of
a male heir to the throne brought on the
final crisis. The boy would naturally be
brought up in the religion of his father
and mother. A Roman Catholic dynasty
would probably be established in England ;
and the prospect of a line of Romish kings
similar to James II. on the throne, dis
regarding, for the sake of a religion detested
by the majority of Englishmen, all Parlia
mentary and legal restraints, determined
the leaders of the several parties, united
by a common national danger, to invite
William of Orange, who had married
James s eldest daughter, Mary (until the
birth of the prince looked upon as the
future queen), " to intervene in arms for
the restoration of English liberty and the
protection of the Protestant religion."
The invitation, signed by a group of re
presentative men, was sent from London
to the prince of Orange (the Stadtholder) r
the chief magistrate of the great Dutch
Republic, on the day after the acquittal of
the bishops, at the end of June, 1688.

The events which followed, known as
the Revolution of 1688-89, were crowded
into the short space of a few months, and we
can only most briefly recapitulate them.
The invitation from the English leaders-
of different parties was accepted by William
of Orange, who prepared for the expedi
tion. He was, however, delayed by the
presence of a French invading army which
threatened the Spanish Netherlands, who
were then allied with Holland. Again

and Anne, afterwards queen. When in 1688 the
prince was born, five years had elapsed since th&
last pregnancy df James s queen, Mary of Modena^

1 9 6

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1688.

James II. s infatuated conduct was his
worst enemy. He rejected somewhat
rudely the proffered assistance of Louis
XIV., who immediately withdrew his
invading force from the frontiers of Wil
liam s dominions, thus leaving the prince
of Orange free. Early in November the
Dutch prince landed with his troops at the

&lt;OBVF,KSE OF POLITICAL MEDAL STRUCK TO COM
MEMORATE THE FLIGHT OF JAMES IN 1689.
THE BEAR WEARING ROSARY REPRESENTS JAMES,
THE THREE HIVES THE UNITED KINGDOM, AND
THE BEES THE VOTE OF THE HOTSE OF COM
MONS JAN. 28, 1689, DECLARING THE THRONE
VACANT. (British, Mtiseiim.}

haven of Brixham in Torbay, and marched
at once upon London. He was joined by
great numbers of the gentry of the counties
he passed through on his march, while a
great rising in the midlands and in the
north emphatically showed how deep was
the feeling against the Roman Catholic
king.

In the meanwhile James made conces
sions ; abolishing the High Commission
Court, restoring the expelled fellows of
Magdalen, etc., but it was all too late to
restore confidence. He marched to meet

the invaders, and had reached Salisbury,
when the great majority of his forces,
many of his courtiers, and his daughter,
the princess Anne, and her husband, prince
George, deserted him. Left thus almost
alone, he returned hurriedly to London.
Feeling all was well-nigh lost, he secretly
sent away his wife, queen Mary of Modena,
and his infant son, to France. This was
in December. Almost directly he followed
them, but was arrested . in his flight by
some fishermen at Sheerness. For a brief
moment all was in confusion ; we read of
riots in London and the sacking by the
mob of the Roman Catholic chapels.
Accompanied, as such riots too often are,
when religious fury has been excited, by
acts of sacrilege abhorrent to all earnest
and devout minds, sacred pictures, images,
and even crucifixes were carried along the
streets in a vulgar triumph, with wild and
exultant cries of "No Popery ! " The
house of the Spanish ambassador was
singled out especially by the rude crowd
and burnt, as peculiarly connected with the
country of the Inquisition and with Philip
II., who equipped the Armada. James
again attempted to fly the country this
time successfully and with the connivance
of the Dutch prince, whose plans would
have been interrupted by the presence of
James.

After consultation with the House of
Lords, William summoned an assembly, to
be composed of the House of Lords and
men who had sat in any of the Parliaments
of Charles II., together with the aldermen
and common councillors of London. This
assembly advised William to summon a
Convention Parliament, taking upon him
self the provisional government of the

198

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1688.

kingdom. Letters were forthwith sent out
to the electors of towns and counties, to
send up representatives to the Convention
Parliament. This met in the January of
1689. No question was seriously raised by
any party as to opening any communica
tion with the discredited king. More than
one device, however, was suggested for
the settlement of the future government
notably that of archbishop Sancroft, who,
with some of his suffragans and other
influential personages, conscientiously ob
jected to break their oath of allegiance to
king James. Sancroft suggested that
James should be pronounced unfit to
rule, but that he should continue king in
name, while . Parliament should choose
a regent who should exercise the royal
power. The Convention Parliament, how
ever, at once rejected any such device, and
declared the throne vacant. Two grounds
were alleged the one, that king James II.,
by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked
persons, had violated the fundamental

laws ; the other, that having withdrawn
himself out of the kingdom, the sovereign
had abdicated the government. A De
claration of Rights was prepared, which
condemned the dispensing power as re
cently exercised, together with other
illegal acts of James.

The throne was then offered to and
accepted by the prince and princess of
Orange as joint sovereigns. William, in
accepting the crown in his own and Mary s
name, expressed the resolve of both to
maintain the laws and to govern by advice
of Parliament as representing the nation.
The scene of the singular and important
ceremony of offering the vacant throne to
William and Mary was the well-known
Banqueting-house of the palace of White
hall, built by Inigo Jones. Outside one of
its great windows had been erected the
scaffold for Charles I. The stately build
ing is with us still, and, with its many
memories, is the only relic of the old
palace of the kings of England.

REVERSE OF POLITICAL MEDAL EXECUTED AT NUREMBERG TO COMMEMORATE THE PASSING OF THE
TOLERATION ACT. BRITANNIA CROWNED AND TRAMPLING ON CHAINS GRASPING WILLIAM S RIGHT,
HAND AND ACCOMPANIED BY RELIGION WITH THE BIBLE AND CROSS, AND LIBERTY WITH SCROLL
INSCRIBED " TEST " ; BEHIND WILLIAM THE BELGIC LION. (British Museum.)

CHAPTER LXIX.

LAST PURITAN ATTEMPT TO REVISE THE PRAYER BOOK.

AND LATITUDINARIAXS.

THE NON-JURORS

Connection of William III. with the Stuart Dynasty His Character Religious Views and Sympathies
The Toleration Act Bill for Religious Union Opposed by the Clergy Commission appointed
for Revising the Prayer Book, so as to embrace the Nonconformists Extent of such Changes and
their Failure Scruples of many Anglicans Concerning the Divine Right of James II. The Non-
Jurors Dangers of a Schism The Latitudinarian Party in the Church Its Character and
Aims Robert Nelson and other Influential Anglican Laymen Bishop Ken Other Eminent
Anglican Divines Religious Activity of this Period.

WILLIAM, Prince of Orange, subse
quently known in England as
king William III., stadtholder
and chief magistrate of the Dutch Re
public, was great-grandson of the illus
trious William the Silent, Prince of
Orange, who in the last half of the six
teenth century had successfully combated
the vast power of Spain, under the most
famous commanders of Philip II., and
succeeded in founding the confederation of
provinces known as the Dutch Republic, a
confederation that for a time was mistress
of the seas, and the principal commercial
state in the world. The prince, who after
the deposition of James II., mainly through
the hereditary claims of his wife Mary, the
eldest daughter of the deposed Stuart king,
was called to assume the crown of England,
was himself also closely connected with
the Stuart dynasty, being a grandson
through his mother, another Mary,
of king Charles I.

The following little tables will show the
connection of William of Orange with the
royal house of England, and the claim, of
his wife Mary to the English crown.
(William and Mary were, as will be seen
on reference to the tables, first cousins.)

Charles

I I

Charles II. MARY = William II. of Orange. James II.

William of Orange (William III.).
Charles I.

Charles II. Mary. JAMES 1 1. = Anne Hyde.

MARY= William of Orange. ANNE (Queen).
(William III.)

A brief description of this prince seems
called for, as through his work and influence
the present strong though constitutional
position of the crown was established, while
at the same time the status of the Church
of England was consolidated, and large
measures of toleration of other Protestant
sects were also conceded.

King William III., to give him the title
which, a very few months after the events
already recorded, became his with the
almost unanimous consent of the nation,
although far from being a popular or beloved
prince, was one of the ablest and wisest men
who ever sat on the throne of Alfred and
William the Conqueror. Early left an
orphan, his was a desolate and loveless
childhood and boyhood. Carefully trained
in statecraft, he found himself at the early
age of twenty-one in the position of chief

2OO

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1689.

magistrate of the Dutch Republic. By the
time he was twenty-three years old he was
already famous among the great ones of
Europe, alike as a soldier and a statesman.
In his marriage, politically as well as
socially, he was singularly fortunate. Mary,
the eldest daughter of James II., and the
heiress to the English crown until the birth
of the ill-fated boy-prince whose advent
precipitated the crisis which led to the exile
of the English sovereign, was not only
beautiful, but distinguished for all the
womanly virtues and qualities which con
stitute a great princess. Brought up, too,
in the doctrines and traditions of the
Church of England, she largely made up
for what was lacking in the religious train
ing of her husband William. A devoted
wife, she won by degrees the passionate
love of the cold and somewhat self-absorbed
William, who subsequently mourned her
too early death (she died of malignant
small-pox, then ravaging England, in 1694)
with a mourning singular for its intensity.

Our great statesman and warrior-king
had much to contend with. Gifted with
few of the graceful and pleasant qualifica
tions which so often win popularity even
for the most worthless, he also suffered all
through his work-filled life from wearing
and distressing ill-health. Alike in the
field and in the cabinet, his was one long
struggle against pain and sickness. As a
politician, we need not dwell here on his
undisputable merits. Ample justice has
been done to his distinguished career in
the pages of the many histories we possess
of his times. Sufficient it is for us to say,
that in his reign and in that of his sister-
in-law and successor, queen Anne, England
more than recovered the position among

the countries of Europe which it had lost
during the reigns of Charles II. and James
II., while the same period saw the fall of
France from the lofty pinnacle of power
she temporarily occupied during a large
part of the reign of Louis XIV.

The religious views and sympathies of
William are more important to us here.
The Prince of Orange, as might have been
expected in the chief magistrate of Holland*,
was himself a follower of Calvin. But here
his statesmanship modified his views. He
accepted episcopacy as a reasonable and
lawful form of church government, but
accepted it, of course, without enthusiasm
or zeal. To him, although a Calvinist, the
ritual of the English Book of Common
Prayer was no offence, though perhaps too-
much inclined, he probably thought, to
Romish superstitions, which he abhorred
with the temper of a Calvinist and the
feelings of a politician, the life-long enemy
of the powerful France and her ambitious
and aggressive Roman Catholic monarch,
Louis XIV. Such a wise ruler as was
William III., even with his Calvinistic
bias, proved no enemy to the church of
the nation over which he was called to
rule. The Toleration Act, which, owing
to t his influence, was accepted generally,
really assisted the church, as it took away
from the other Protestant sects most if not
all of the causes which placed them in
an attitude of hostility to Anglicans ;
while under his wise foresight the
Bill for "Union," which included many
proposals for drastic changes in the Prayer-
book, was dropped at once, when William
clearly discerned the strong opposition of
the church to its provisions.

Prominently in the public " declaration "

THE TOLERATION ACT.

201

published in Holland by the Prince of
Orange, justifying his armed intervention,
was expressed his intention to provide for
the security of the Protestant religion, and

of two important bills : one for " Tolera
tion " and a second for " Union." An
attempt was also made to do away with
the Test Act ; but this last project was

WILLIAM SANCROFT, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.
{From a contemporary print by Robert White.)

to establish a good agreement between
the Church of England and Protestant
Dissent. Following out this purpose, one
of the first proceedings of the advisers of
the crown in the Convention which had
become a Parliament, was the introduction

almost at once negatived in the House
of Lords.

The Toleration Bill went through both
Houses with little debate. All parties in
the church and state were generally anxious
for this righteous measure. The time had

202

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1689.

passed now when men could calmly
acquiesce in the persecution of the Non
conformist bodies for simply worshipping
with rites received from their Puritan
fathers. The Toleration Act, passed in
1689, gave to Dissenters the legal right to
worship publicly on complying with certain
not very onerous formalities ; but from this
freedom to worship as they thought fit,
Roman Catholics and Unitarians were
excluded. The act was almost universally
accepted and welcomed by churchmen and
Nonconformists alike, and thus the chiei
cause of religious strife was removed.

The second of these bills, however, met,
and rightly met, with the gravest opposition
on the part of the majority of churchmen,
and after considerable discussion was
allowed to drop. The opposition in the
first instance came from the House of
Commons. Burnet tells us " they were
much offended with the bill for Union or
Comprehension, as containing matters
relating to the church, in which the
representative body of the clergy (Con
vocation) had not been so much as advised
with." The Comprehension Bill thus wisely
rejected by the Commons on the plea that
Convocation had not considered it, con
tained provisions which, had they become
law, would have seriously changed the
character of the Elizabethan settlement.
Its most drastic changes included clauses
dispensing with the necessity of subscribing
the Thirty-nine Articles, allowing the use or
not of the surplice, save in a few churches
of peculiar dignity, as the clergyman
thought fit ; sanctioning the omission of the
sign of the cross in baptism ; permitting the
reception of the Eucharist by persons who
had a scruple, sitting and not kneeling ;

and partially recognising the validity of
Presbyterian orders, on condition of the
Presbyterian ministers submitting to the
imposition of the hands of a bishop before
being admitted to the privileges of a priest
of the established church.*

On the failure of the " Comprehension "
or "Union" Bill,t a commission was issued
to ten bishops and twenty divines to pre
pare for Convocation suggestions for such a
revision of the Book of Common Prayer as
would be necessary for the comprehension
of Nonconformists, this revision when for
mulated to be presented for consideration
to Convocation. Among the commission
ers were several most able and learned
men, such as Tillotson, the dean of St.
Paul s, and Tenison, afterwards Primates ;
Stillingfleet, bishop of Worcester ; Patrick,
bishop of Chichester ; and other well-known
latitudinarian divines. It was no secret
that the king wished them well, and would
have gladly welcomed the success of their
labours ; and it says , much for the far-
sighted wisdom of William III. that he
acquiesced in dropping the whole scheme
of the comprehension project, as soon as he
clearly saw that the alterations proposed
were utterly distasteful to the majority of
the church.

As this was the last serious attempt to
bring the Puritan sects within the pale of
the Church of England, it will be well very
briefly to summarise the principal altera
tions deemed necessary to effect this object ;
bearing in mind that the scheme of these

*Cf. Macaulay : " History of England," chap. xi.

t Cf. here Procter: "History of the Book of
Common Prayer," who gives a lengthy and ex
haustive account of the work of this commission
in appendices, p. 141 and p. 425.

1 689.]

FAILURE OF THE "COMPREHENSION" BILL.

203

alterations was drafted, no doubt after con
sultation with the Nonconformist leaders,
but still by the hand of Anglicans them
selves ; thus the alterations in question may
be fairly accepted as the minimum of what
would be required for any union.

In number the alterations were very
numerous ; they have been computed as
about six hundred. But the principal
were the following : Chanting to be
discontinued ; the use of the sign of
the cross in baptism to be omitted al
together when desired ; the Eucharist
to be administered to persons who
might object to kneeling ; the word
4i minister " to be substituted for " priest" ;
the rubric enjoining the daily reading or
hearing of Common Prayer to be changed
into an exhortation ; sponsors in baptism
to be disused ; the names of saints which
have not a service, and the table of vigils,
etc., to be struck out ; considerable latitude
in the use of the surplice ; a complete
and extensive revision of all the collects,
scarcely one to remain without some
change ; large facilities for the reception of
men into Anglican orders who had only
been ordained by presbyters. Had the
Prayer-book of the Church of England
undergone the process of change sketched
out in this scheme, the grand continuity
of the Anglican services with the services
of the pre-Reformation church, so care
fully preserved by the wise Edwardian,
Elizabethan, and Caroline divines, would
have been indeed hopelessly lost.

But the scheme came to nought. Hap
pily, upon the throne at this juncture sat
a king who, although a Presbyterian by
training and associations, was too wise and
far-seeing to wish to impose upon a

church like the Anglican communion
changes evidently in the highest degree
distasteful to the majority of those who
were the best exponents of its principles.
When Convocation met, its temper was
speedily shown by the choice of a pro
locutor. Two candidates were put for
ward Tillotson, the able dean of St.
Paul s, subsequently primate, and Jane,
Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford,
the dean of Gloucester. Tillotson was well
known as the " Latitudinarian " leader
who had been a principal mover in the
Comprehension scheme, which proposed
the sweeping revision of the Prayer-
book ; Jane, the dean of Gloucester,
had openly taken the other side. The
latter was elected by a majority of two
to one. In his address to Compton,
the bishop of London, who was acting as
president, he extolled the excellency of
the Church of England, as established by
law, above all other Christian communities,
and ended with the significant words
"Nolumus leges Anglice mutari" (" We are
opposed to any change in the laws of
England"), thus signifying his intention
to oppose all changes in the established
ritual and practice of his church.

Then followed some disputing between
the Upper and Lower Houses as to the
terms of the address of Convocation to the
king. The Upper House, sorely weakened
by the absence of the nine non-juring
bishops (of whom we must speak directly),
gave way here to the wishes of the Lower
House. So emphatically had that Lower
House shown its feeling in the matter of
the Comprehension scheme of alterations
in the ritual and liturgy, that its advocates
thought it prudent never to introduce the

204

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1689.

scheme in question formally into that
assembly.

The spirit with which the last real
attempt to change materially the ritual
and liturgy of the Church of England had
been quietly but firmly resisted by the
country as represented by the House of
Commons, and by the clergy as repre
sented by the Lower House of Convocation,
is an index to the position occupied by
the established church in this country
towards the close of the seventeenth
century. The opinion of Tillotson, dean
of St. Paul s, who was largely concerned in
the framing of the alterations suggested by
the commission, is thus summarised by a
contemporary : u When he observed with
what resolution the body of them (i.e. the
members of Convocation) from the very
first declared against any alterations, . . .
he was convinced that the method he had
been for, was really impracticable as things
then stood, and therefore was not for
repeating the dangerous experiment, or
having any more to do with Convocation
all the while he continued archbishop." "

A graver and most unexpected danger,
however, threatened the power and in
fluence of the church at this epoch of
the bloodless Revolution of 1688-89. The
feeling of loyalty to the crown was deeply
ingrained in her. The lessons of the great
teachers, Andrewes and Laud, had sunk
deep into the hearts of churchmen. Many
of the most earnest and devout among the
bishops and clergy, among whom were the
primate Sancroft and the universally re
vered bishop of Bath and Wells, the saintly
Ken, shrank from taking a fresh oath of
* Calamy s " Autobiography."

allegiance to William and Mary while
king James was still living, still claiming
the rights of kingship. These good, even
though mistaken men, after long and pain
ful consideration, made up their minds
that so indelible was the sacred office of
king, no exercise of Parliamentary author
ity could touch it. In vain was it argued
that James, by leaving the country, had
abdicated. They could not persuade them
selves that this was the case. They ac
knowledged that by his deliberate breaking
of the laws he had forfeited the right to
rule ; but they, held he was still king.
They clung to the theory of a regency,
which should continue during his lifetime,
but they could not bring themselves to
take the oath of allegiance to another king
of England.

When, therefore, the new oath ot allegi
ance was proffered, nine bishops refused it.
A considerable time of grace was allowed
them to change their minds, but they held
firm to their resolve, and submitted to be
deprived of their sees. Three of their
number died before the term of grace
expired, but in the end six bishops, includ
ing the primate and bishop Ken, as well as
four hundred beneficed clergy, were ejected
from their positions. These martyrs to
their conscientious scruples are known in
history as the Non-jurors. They were, as
a body, distinguished for their learning,
piety, and devotion, and the wound which
their deprivation inflicted upon the church
was a deep one, and was long felt.

But besides the injury which the church
sustained by the sudden loss of so many
devoted and conscientious men, not a few
of whom were scholars and persons ot con
spicuous ability, there was the danger, by

1689-]

THE NON-JURORS.

20 5

no means a groundless one, of a schism
in the hitherto un-rent church itself.
There was a strong feeling, no. doubt
largely made up of earthly motives, on the
part of some of the leading Non-jurors, that

or acted pastorally in their dioceses, and
were merely consecrated for the purpose of
continuing the non-juring succession ; but
both Ken of Bath and Wells, and Framp-
ton of Gloucester, gravely disapproved of

JOHN TILLOTSON, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.
(After the portrait by Sir Godfrey K tie Her.)

they and they only represented the Church
of England, while all others were apostates
and time-servers. Clandestinely three of
the number of non-juring bishops went so
far as to consecrate two other clergymen
to the episcopate, as suffragans to the non-
juring bishop of Norwich. Thetford and
Ipswich were taken as the titles of their
sees. These never claimed any authority

such a step. These great and good men
foresaw the evil of a perpetuated schism,
and recognised that on the other side,
among the great majority who conscien
tiously took the oath of allegiance to Wil
liam and Mary, there were many men of
equal holiness and of equal loyalty to the
Church of England with themselves. But
the mischief, in spite of the opposition of

206

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1689 1702.

Ken and Frampton, was done, and the
schism became an accomplished fact. For
tunately it never took any firm root in the
church, though it continued for many years.
In the small number of non -jurors, before
the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth
century, a separation took place, one party
among them desiring to revive the use
of the First Prayer-book of Edward VI.
These adopted the name of " Usagers,"
and formulated a new Communion office.
But before the eighteenth century had
run its course, the non-juring schism had
finally died out, and was no more heard of.

Strongly favoured by king William III.,
and under the powerful hand of court
favour, after the Revolution of 1 688 arose a
party in the Church of England which has
considerably influenced much of her subse
quent teaching. The title of Latitudi-
narian, which was given to this section
of churchmen, inaccurately designates men,
not a few of whom were among the most
distinguished ecclesiastics of that day. With
them, amongst others, Stillingfleet and
Burnet, Tillotson and Tenison, were
reckoned. The name of " Latitudinarian "
suggests to us the idea of indifference, if
not of unorthodoxy, in the person so desig
nated. It would be the grossest injustice
which could charge such a typical
Latitudinarian as Burnet with indifference,
or Tillotson with want of orthodoxy. The
episcopal life of Burnet, with its tireless
pastoral efforts, is the best answer to the
first charge of indifference ; the sermons
and works of archbishop Tillotson, still
read by us, testify abundantly to the false
ness of the second, that of unorthodoxy.

Some half a century before, the days of

William III., this Latitudinarian party had
become somewhat conspicuous, more per
haps owing to the ability and position than
to the numbers of its members. It included
such names as lord Falkland, and that
William Chillingworth whose writings and
career we have already noticed. In the
troublous times of the Commonwealth they
virtually disappeared, and became reckoned
in the ranks of the persecuted churchmen ;
the Puritan tyranny of Presbyterian and
Independent in the days of their supremacy
being peculiarly hateful to the Latitudi-
narians. Under the protection and favour
of William of Orange, after 1688 the
Latitudinarians became a great power in the
church, and for many years the majority of
the chief posts in the hierarchy were filled
with men openly professing, or at least
inclined to, their peculiar views. They
were especially distinguished in the years
that followed the Revolution of 1688 by
their efforts, not always wise efforts, as we
have seen, on behalf of ecclesiastical com
prehension and union.

They advocated in matters of belief and
practice, within certain limits, considerable
latitude, both for individuals and for
churches; hence their name. They accepted
and taught that episcopacy was the most
venerable as well as the best form of church
government ; but they hesitated in pressing
its divine character, as did the high church
men of the school of Andrewes and Laud^
and even of Hooker. On sacramental
doctrine, again, they were less . definite
than were the recognised Anglican leaders ,-
but on these points they erred rather by
their silence than by any direct teaching.
The Latitudinarians of the reign of William
III., and, somewhat later, are often generally

16891702.]

THE LATITUDINARIANS.

207

classed as " low churchmen," in contradis
tinction to the high Anglican school. But
such an appellation is misleading in the
highest degree ; because the Evangelicals
of a later period, to whom the name of low
churchmen is usually appropriated, belong
to a very different school of thought from
Latitudinarians like Burnet, Tillotson, Stil-
lingfleet, and Tenison. These very terms,
" high church " and " low church," first
appear in the course of the reign of William
III. and Mary.

It may be remarked in passing, that the
influence of the queen Mary during her life
time in some degree modified the strong
and even exaggerated latitudinarian ten
dencies of the king. Party spirit was
extremely high in those days, and much
political rancour was infused into theologi
cal disputes. There were many churchmen
who, in spite of the conduct of James II. to
the Anglican communion, for a long while
looked with regret, mingled perhaps with
some hope of a future restoration, upon
the exiled court of St. Germains. The
Latitudinarians were ever closely identi
fied with James s supplanter, William of
Orange ; and this probably intensified the
dislike with which the high church party
regarded them. They did not hesitate to
charge them with Arianism and infidelity ;
and even in the letters of the earnest and
gentle Ken, we come upon such an
expression of opinion as the following, in a
letter dated February 2ist, 1703, from Ken
to his dear friend Dr. Lloyd, the non-juring
bishop of Norwich, on the occasion of the
appointment of Dr. Hooper to Ken s former
see of Bath and Wells, after the death of
Dr. Kidder, whom Ken had ever regarded
as an intruder : a You cannot imagine,"

wrote Ken, " the universal satisfaction ex
pressed for Dr. Hooper s coming to my
see : and I make no doubt but that he will
rescue the diocese from the apostasy from
the * faith once delivered to the saints,
which at present threatens us, and from
the spirit of latitudinariamsm, which is a
common sewer of all heresies imaginable"
This is a fair specimen of the polemical
rancour of the day. Such expressions,
coming from one like him, so deservedly
held in the highest honour, indicate the
feeling towards the Latitudinarians which
at the time lived in the hearts of the high
Anglicans.

Such words as those of Ken s above
quoted were, however, utterly undeserved.
The Latitudinarian leaders were far from
being the heretics and false teachers of the
pictures painted by Ken and his school of
Anglican thought. Archbishop Tillotson,
their acknowledged leader, has been well
described lately by a distinguished scholar
and divine * of a school of thought very
alien to that of the Latitudinarians, of a
school in sympathy with Ken rather than
with Tillotson, as a " true preacher of
righteousness," as "an orthodox believer;"
as one who " with sound practical sense,
with pure unaffected piety, in unadorned
but persuasive language, gave utterance to
religious ideas which to a wide extent
satisfied the reason and came home to the
conscience of his age." And Tillotson,
who was thus described, was looked on by
all parties as the type of a "Latitude man."

That much of their teaching, perhaps,
as we have hinted, owing to their silence
rather than their voices, was erroneous, is

* Mr. Abbey, Fellow of University College, Ox
ford.

208

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1702.

clear ; but the estimate of posterity, ever
fairer than the estimate of contemporaries,
because calmer, and farther removed from
the din and dust of heated controversy, has
done them more justice, and recognised
the true nobility of their aims and purpose,
in their earnest, even passionate longing to
compass a union and to effect a compre
hension of opposing schools of thought.
They failed, as we have seen, in their efforts
at union, and justly failed, for the task was
an impossible one, and the differences were
too great, and demanded sacrifices which
no true churchman could ever dream of
making.

The result of the determined opposition
of the Lower House of Convocation to the
scheme of comprehension and union, which
would have involved such sweeping changes
in the Book of Common Prayer, determined
the Latitudinarian prelates to have nothing
further to do with Convocation. During
the primacy of Tillotson (1691-1694), who
succeeded the non-juror Sancroft, Convoca
tion, though summoned by writ, was not
permitted to meet and to discuss ecclesias
tical affairs. This same state of things
continued during the first six or seven years
of the rule of his successor in the arch-see of
Canterbury, Dr. Tenison. Much discontent
was aroused in the church by this strange
and arbitrary policy of the Latitudinarian
prelates, who during the reign of William
III. were in power. What is known as the
Convocation controversy, the consequence
of this singular policy, was chiefly carried
on by published letters issuing from both
parties in the church, High Church and
Latitudinarians, in which various argu
ments were adduced by laymen and
ecclesiastics, attacking or defending the

legitimacy of the policy of silencing the
constitutional assembly of the church in
England. The best known of these once
celebrated letters and pamphlets, some of
which were of a portentous length, were
Sir Bartholomew Shower s (somewhile
recorder of London) " Letter to a Convoca
tion Man," and the reply of Dr. Wake,
afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, who,
arguing from the Latitudinarian point of
view, maintained that Convocation had
only a right to meet, and when assembled
to debate, when the king issued his licence.
Francis Atterbury, a well-known scholar,
replied to this curious pronouncement.
The controversy was continued by bishop
Burnet, Wake, and others. In 1701 arch
bishop Tenison, who followed Tillotson in
the chair of St. Augustine, a prelate of
Latitudinarian views, thought it prudent,
in view of the growing dissatisfaction of
churchmen, after an interval of eleven
years, again to summon the long silenced
Convocation. This Convocation met, and
was especially memorable for the disputes
between the Upper and Lower House on
certain privileges of independence claimed
by the Lower House. These strange and un
fortunate disputes were closed by the death
of William III., which put an end to the life
of this Convocation of the clergy in 1702.

But such dull broils in Convocation,
painful and regrettable enough, little
affected the inner life of the Church of
England. The story of the work and
influence of the church during the latter
years of the seventeenth and earlier years
of the eighteenth century is a strangely
bright episode, coming as it does before a
period of comparative dulness and apathy.

16881714-]

A GROUP OF EMINENT CHURCHMEN.

2OQ

A rare group of scholars and divines, with that his example has been followed, con-

a few devoted laymen, cast a lustre upon sciously or unconsciously, by an almost

the church ; and their work, literary as countless number of others, and much of

well as practical, has left an enduring the splendid work in the fields of philan-

mark upon the national life. Of such thropy and religion during the last two

laymen the quiet and unassuming career centuries in England, has been done by

THOMAS KEN, BISHOP OF BATH AND WELLS.
(Front a contemporary print.}

of Robert Nelson is an admirable example.
Undistinguished either by conspicuous
rank or fortune, unendowed with any
striking abilities or scholarship, Nelson has
left behind him an enduring reputation,
and may deservedly be quoted as an in
stance of the good and noble work which
may be effected by a God-fearing English
gentleman. It is not too much to say

Christian men of various schools of thought
in the church, largely laymen, who have
trodden in the footsteps of this true man
of God, who flourished in the reigns of
William III. and queen Anne; roughly,
between the years 1688 and 1714.

Robert Nelson was born in 1656, when
Oliver the Protector was supreme. He
had the rare advantage of being long the

210

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[16891714.

pupil of Mr. Bull, who in late life became
bishop of St. David s ; but Bull is better
known as one of the most profound and
learned of the many theologians who have
adorned the Church of England ; and no
doubt Nelson s life-long interest in eccle
siastical and religious matters was greatly
owing to his early training under such a
master. When still, comparatively speak
ing, a young man, he became the intimate
friend of Tillotson, with whose Latitu-
dinarian views he had little sympathy ; but
the friendship was a life-long one, and
archbishop Tillotson literally died in the
arms of his friend, who was ever a con
sistent high churchman of the noble type
of Ken and Beveridge. Nelson was for
many years a non-juror ; but, ever moderate
in his opinions and gentle in his judgment
of others, he worked loyally in his many
philanthropic schemes with Conformists
like Tillotson, and even with Dissenters.
He was the centre of that illustrious band
of servants of God who in the reigns of
William III. and Anne were busy in those
noble works which have made that period
so famous for practical religious movements.
We have already alluded to the de
plorable laxity of morals and to the
general dissoluteness in society which pre
vailed after the Restoration, and which
long disgraced the society of that age.
To check this fatal and too general laxity,
" societies for the reformation of manners "
were formed as early as the year 1678.
These were, as years went on, developed
by Robert Nelson and his circle of friends,
who also had been largely instrumental in
forming these noble associations, to which
English society has indeed been deeply
indebted. From this faithful band of

churchmen, too, sprang those companies
which have since done such true and use
ful religious work in the country the
" Society for Promoting Christian Know
ledge " and the " Society for the Propaga
tion of the Gospel in Foreign Parts," the
former of which was formally constituted
in 1699 an d the latter in 1701. Round
this quiet, undistinguished Robert Nelson
were gathered, as we have said, a little
circle of friends of very different characters,
but whose spirit has strangely influenced
the Church of England long after the men
themselves had fallen asleep.

First and foremost was Ken, the perfect
type of the Anglican high churchman ,
perhaps one of the purest souls ecclesias
tical history ever tells us of. Preacher,
scholar, theologian, all schools of thought
delight to do him honour ; he was a
favourite with kings and princes, as with
the poor and unlettered. The courtly bio
grapher tells with wonderment how the
fearless divine indignantly refused to allow
the beloved royal favourite, Nell Gwyn, to
enter his house at Winchester, and repeats
the well-known words of the gay and
thoughtless king Charles II. : " I must go
and hear little Ken tell me of my faults. "
Another of his biographers finds in Ken s
copy of Grotius s " De Veritate " the words
of the prophet Jeremiah, which the student
made his own when favours were being
thickly showered on him, " Et tu queens
tibi grandia f Noli qncerere " (" Seekest
thou great things for thyself ? Seek them
not "). Without reluctance he accepted
the mitre of Bath and Wells ; with the
same readiness he vacated palace and
dignity rather than against his conscience
take the oath of allegiance to William of

16891714-]

KEN, BEVERIDGE, AND SHARR

211

Orange, whom he honoured, while he con
sidered himself bound to James II., whom
he feared and distrusted. So little did he
care for place and power &gt; that in later days,
after James s death, when he might with
out wounding his conscience have re-
assumed his position as an Anglican bishop,
he declined all honours and dignity ; pre
ferring his life in poverty, as the quiet
humble friend and counsellor of all good
and pious souls, to any episcopal throne.
To uncounted thousands of the English-
speaking peoples is Ken known as the
writer of the beautiful morning and even
ing hymns at least, in the abridged forms
found in every hymn-book. But few
among all these thousands who have sung
or listened to the well-loved " Awake, my
Soul," and " Glory to Thee; my God, this
night," are conscious that in the writer of
the oft-sung hymns we possess the truest
and noblest type of the high churchman, to
whom the Anglican communion owes so
deep a debt. Ken, the great example of the
school, exemplified what some consider its
shortcomings as he did its virtues. To him
the Church of England was the faithful copy
of the Ante-Nicene church the church of
the first three centuries. Free from the
errors alike of Rome and Geneva, it
possessed an apostolical succession, with the
sacred privileges attached to it. It rejoiced
in the treasure of the primitive truth,
unalloyed and untarnished with mediaeval
superstition. It was indeed, thought the
saintly non-juring bishop, a church for
which earnest and devout Christians could
live and die. The misfortune of Ken s
school lay in the fact that it left them " un
able to understand the merits of any form of
faith which rejected, or treated as a thing

indifferent, what they regarded as all
but essential."* The school of Ken,
with all its undoubted virtues and intense
spirituality, had something to learn from
the Latitudinarianism of men of the high
type of Tillotson.

Closely linked with Ken in that noble
group, was Dodwell, somewhile Camden
Professor of History, one of the most pro
foundly learned men in Europe ; and
Hickes, the non-juring dean of Worcester,
also a renowned scholar ; and, perhaps
more eminent than these, Kettle well, who
assisted Nelson in the work on " Festivals
and Fasts " which will ever be connected
with his name. It is this Kettlewell whom
Ken once described, after he had passed
away, as " that holy man who is now with
God." But these men, great and good
though they were, were inferior to Ken in
that gentle saintliness which has made
the bishop of Bath and Wells so justly
famed among our churchmen.

Another of this famous group of friends
was Beveridge, bishop of St. Asaph, also a
learned scholar and divine,whose conscience,,
however, less susceptible than Ken s, suffered
him to take the oath of allegiance to William
III. and Mary. The writings of Beveridge,
though nigh two centuries have passed
since they appeared, are still read with
delight and profit by our divines. Nelson,
in his life of bishop Bull, writes of Beveridge
as " a pattern of true primitive piety," as
one whose way of gaining people s hearts
and touching their consciences bore some
resemblance to the apostolical age.

Sharp, archbishop of York, was another
distinguished member of the group which

* " The English Church in the Eighteenth Cen
tury " : Abbey and Overton, chap. ii.

212

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1700.

did so much to strengthen the Church of
England at the close of the seventeenth
and in the early years of the eighteenth
-centuries. He, too, like Beveridge, took
the oath of allegiance to William III., and
did much by his wise and sympathetic
influence to heal the breach between jurors
and non -jurors, which at one time threat
ened to divide the church by a permanent
schism.

One more of this group of scholars and
divines must be mentioned : we have
reserved him to the last. Never will the
name of George Bull, the tutor and life-long
friend of Nelson, be forgotten, whenever
the roll of those distinguished men who
have adorned, loved, and defended the
Anglican church, is rehearsed in the ears
of its faithful sons. For some seven-and-
twenty years, in a little remote parish in
the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, Bull faith
fully discharged the humble undistinguished
duties of a parish priest. But in those
years the then unknown scholar composed
that masterly and exhaustive treatise on
the " Defence of the Nicaean Creed "
( Defensio Fidei Niccence)* which for
lucidity, learning, and accurate research, is
perhaps the most famous work extant
among Christian apologetics. So great
was it that, although written by a Pro
testant divine, it was deemed worthy of
the public thanks of the whole Gallican
(Roman Catholic) Church. This unique
expression of gratitude from a hostile com
munion was communicated to the unknown
Anglican clergyman through Bossuet, the
illustrious bishop of Meaux. The words of

* The catalogue of Bull s works is a long one, but
the " Defence of the Nicaean Creed " is certainly
the most important.

Bossuet, contained in a letter of Nelson
written in the year 1700, are worth quoting,
as they show the estimation in which the
Protestant divine was held by the most
illustrious of the Roman Catholic prelates
of the day, and by his brethren of the
Gallican Church " Quant a Touvrage du
docteur Bullus (Bull) il est admir

able et le matiere qu il traite ne pouvoit
etre expliquee plus savamment et plus
a fond. C est ce que je vous supplie
de vouloir bien luy faire savoir, et
en mesme temps les sincereres con
gratulations de tout le clerge de France
assemble en cetteville (St. Germain enLaye)
pour le service qu il rend a 1 Eglise Catho-
lique."* Bossuet goes on in the same
letter to express his surprise that so great a
man (un si grand homme), who could write
so nobly of the church, could remain out
side the Roman obedience. His own com
munion but tardily did him justice. At the
age of seventy he was raised to the bishop
ric of St. David s, but although he sur
vived his well-merited promotion some four
short years, his life-work was virtually done
before his elevation to the episcopate.
He died in 1709.

These are only a few typical churchmen
of that age, which roughly includes the
reigns of William III. and queen Anne, so
distinguished for the number of its dis
tinguished churchmen famous alike for
their scholarship, as for their zeal in

* (Trans.) "As for the work of Dr. Bull, it is
simply admirable; and the subject-matter of his
treatise could not by any possibility be more
learnedly or exhaustively handled. I would beg
you to express this to him, and at the same time
convey to him the sincere congratulations of the
whole body of the Clergy of France assembled in
this town (St. Germain en Laye) for the service he
is doing the Catholic Church."

1700.]

BISHOP BULL.

promoting useful and philanthropic work.
As usual, London possessed the most pro
minent among the clergy. Nor was this
general religious movement by any means
confined to ecclesiastics. Not a few laymen

21$

condition of the people, of which we are
about to speak briefly.

The leading Anglican clergy, some of
the more prominent of whom we have been
writing about, were, it will be observed, of

GILBERT BURNET, BISHOP OF SALISBURY.

of the type of Robert Nelson, for the most
part loyal sons of the Church of England,
were equally zealous in all these good and
true movements, and bore a conspicuous
part in the newly-formed guilds for the
reformation of manners and morals, as well
as in the recently constituted church
societies, missionary and otherwise, and in
those other endeavours to improve the

no one school of thought. They were made
up of jurors and non-jurors ; ot high
churchmen like Ken and Hickes ; of Lati-
tudinarians such as Tillotson, Burnet and
Tenison ; of moderate men like archbishop
Sharp and bishops Beveridge and Bull. As
might have been reasonably expected,
under the influence of so many devout and
learned leaders, a growing religious move--

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1714-

ment was the result. Besides the formation
of the important religious societies known
now familiarly among us as the S.P.G. and
the S.P.C.K., and the guilds and brother
hoods for the reformation of morals, many
of which at this time were formed in
London and in the provinces, we hear of
fresh missions being set on foot, new
churches being built, systematic education,
in which religious teaching formed a special
element, being taken seriously in hand by
the same earnest and religious men.
Under these influences schools known as
" charity schools " sprang up in various
localities ; in eight years some five
hundred of them were founded. These
schools for the poor were watched with
interest in foreign lands, and even imitated.
A distinct revival in church life was also
perceptible in a vast number of centres.
The administration of the holy communion

in churches became more frequent ; in many
of the London churches daily service was
said ; more ceremonial observance in the
reception of the Eucharist became general.
We read that " some would not go to their
seats in church until they had kneeled and
prayed at the rails of the communion
table." An even exaggerated reverence
was observable in certain churches.
" Services with choral accompaniments
were preferred to sermons, and even
pictures about the altar began to be the
books of the vulgar."* But this religious
revival, so noticeable in the last decade of
the seventeenth and in the earlier years
of the eighteenth century, gradually faded
as that group of eminent men and those
whom they had inspired with their fervour
and zeal passed away, leaving no successors.

* Compare Canon Perry s " History of the
English Church," and references, chap, xxxix.

THOMAS TENISON, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.

CHAPTER LXX.

THE PERIOD OF CONTROVERSY AND SPIRITUAL DECAY.

Renewed Persecution of Nonconformists under queen Anne Dissensions in Convocation, which is
indefinitely Prorogued Prosecution of Dr. Sacheverell Stagnation in Spiritual Life Its
Causes The Deistical Controversy Shaftesbury, Collins, and Woolston Tindal and Boling-
broke Bishop Butler and his " Analogy of Religion " Dr. Warburton and " The Divine
Legation of Moses " Bishops Sherlock and Berkeley John Locke The Arian Controversy
Produces the Treatises of Waterland Subsequent History of the Unitarian Heresy Absence of
Earnest Religious Teachers during this Period Suppression of Convocation Influence of
Walpole Pluralities in the Church Degraded Position of the Poorer Clergy Goldsmith s
Dr. Primrose Bishop Butler s Picture of the State of Religious Opinion Neglect of Sunday
Observance and of Public Worship State of the Universities The Eve of the Great Revival.

A the death of William III. there
seemed every prospect of the
church increasing in usefulness
and influence ; but the story of the first
half of the eighteenth century is, on the
contrary, in every way a disappointing
recital. The record of what took place
in Parliament and Convocation, even during
the reign of queen Anne, is a gloomy one ;
and although progress, especially during
the earlier years of her reign, went on
to some extent, the action of churchmen
generally in both of these assemblies, with
other causes we are about to detail, gradu
ally produced a paralysing effect on all
church life.

The Nonconformists, including all the
various sects of dissenters from the
-established church, had become very
impotent and uninfluential in England.
They seemed to be in a hopeless minority;
but though in a minority and as a rule
unpopular, they were still numerous and
had to be reckoned with. Instead of
making attempts at even a partial recon
ciliation, instead of making efforts to heal
the terrible wounds inflicted by the
Restoration policy of repression and even

of persecution, the High Church party, in
the first parliamentary session of queen
Anne, set themselves to make the con
dition of all Nonconformists yet more
intolerable. In this unhappy policy, they
were strengthened by the queen s evidently
strong church feeling. The cruel and
unwise provisions of the Test Act, to
which we have already alluded, were very
often partially evaded, by Nonconformists
consenting to receive once the Lord s
Supper according to the use of the Church
of England, and thus qualifying according
to the provisions of the Test Act, as it were,
for office of various kinds, and after this
one reception going on as before with their
dissenting worship. To put a stop to this
practice, a bill was introduced in 1702, and
warmly supported by a majority in the
House of Commons, known as the " Bill
for preventing occasional Conformity." It
contained some most severe provisions,
such as exacting heavy fines from any
officials who should attend a conventicle ;
and holding any incapable of office, until
by the reception of the Holy Communion
three times in the year they had qualified
themselves. This bill was, however, lost

216

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17021714.

in the Lords, mainly through the opposi
tion of the majority of the Latitudinarian
bishops, among whom Burnet, bishop of
Salisbury, was the most conspicuous. The
queen, however, openly manifested her
wishes in favour of the cruel measure.
In 1703, with slight modifications, the bill

law ; while others considered it as an act
of partial allegiance to the national worship,
perfectly allowable. Archbishop Tenison,
a Latitudinarian, but by no means a violent
partisan, said : "I think the practice of
occasional conformity is so far from de
serving the title of a vile hypocrisy, that

(From a print by Hogarth.}

was again introduced and passed by the
Commons, and again rejected, owing to
similar influences, by the Lords. A similar
effort was made in 1704, with like results.
Powerful arguments were used on both
sides in the course of this bitter contest.
The church party, and even strict dis
senters, spoke of the practice of receiving
the Holy Communion once after the use
of the Church of England, in qualification
for office, as a scandalous evasion of the

it is the duty of all moderate dissenters,
upon their own principles, to do it." Bishop
Burnet and others of the Latitudinarian
party argued in like spirit ; the latter
(Burnet) quoting his own practice in former
days, when abroad in the service of William
and Mary, before they had been called to
assume the English crown. He had been
accustomed, he said, to communicate with
Protestant communions abroad in Holland
and in Geneva ; so here in England the

1709.]

PROSECUTION OF DR. SACHEVERELL.

217

dissenters were perfectly right in com
municating with the church of the nation.
The contest, however, was kept alive year
after year with exceeding bitterness, and
sorely to the detriment of all spiritual life
in the church and nation.

In Convocation, too, a similar bitter
spirit was manifested, the Lower House
containing a majority of high churchmen,
the Upper consisting largely of Latitu-
dinarian bishops. The fierce disputes, to
which we have already alluded as occurring
in the Convocation under William III.,
continued, the Lower House insisting upon
its independence of the Upper. So bitter
were the disputes between the two Houses,
that in 1706 queen Anne, in spite of her
high church sympathies, was induced to
sanction an indefinite prorogation of the
Lower House by archbishop Tenison. As
might have been expected, many of the
clergy were infected with this spirit of
controversy and bitterness, which gradually
grew in intensity in the Parliament and
Convocation. Violent sermons and ad
dresses were constantly heard. The un
popularity of the Latitudinarian bishops
was very general, and a cry that " the
church was in danger " became a general
one throughout the country.

In the year 1709, a Whig ministry
opposed to the high church feeling of the
majority of the clergy being in power, the
government singled out and determined to
prosecute a certain clergyman who had, by a
notoriously violent sermon, made himself
conspicuous among the ranks of the more
extreme of the high church ecclesiastics.
This was one Dr. Sacheverell, a fellow
of Magdalen College, Oxford, a divine
more celebrated for his wordy eloquence

than for his learning or prudence ; he
had preached before the lord mayor and
aldermen of the city of London a sermon
which obtained a marvellous popularity.
It is said that in a few days the sale of
it reached the enormous number of 40,000.
It was from the text " /// perils amrmg
false brethren " (2 Cor. xi. 26). The im
agery which the eloquent but shallow
preacher employed on this occasion was

DR. SACHEVERELL.

singular. He compared the Church of
England to the city of Troy, into which
the Latitudinarian bishops and the queen s
present advisers, the false brethren of his
text, had treacherously admitted her deadly
enemies, the nonconformists, concealed in
the wooden horse of the old story. These
foes thus admitted would endanger the
very existence of the holy city the
church. Sacheverell was attacked in the
House of Commons for using violent and
treasonable language, and the House
voted that he should be impeached be
fore the House of Lords for crime and
misdemeanour. Early in 1710 he was

218

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17131731-

tried in Westminster Hall and condemned,
a majority of the bishops voting against
him ; but the comparatively light sen
tence amounted virtually to an acquittal
on the graver charge ; it was simply that
he should be suspended for three years.
The populace sided with the preacher.
A wild riot ensued, the mob calling upon
every passer-by to shout for high church
and Sacheverell ; even the queen s sedan-
chair was surrounded, and she was sum
moned to join in the foolish cry. Rich
preferment was given to the idol of the
hour, and the next election saw again a
majority of high churchmen in the House
of Commons. Sacheverell was but a sorry
hero at best-; his enormous popularity,
however, was an index of the feeling of
attachment to the church on the part
of the masses.

It is a saddening record which tells us
of the rapid deterioration of the church,
in the latter years of the seventeenth and
and in the early years of the eighteenth
century so full of vigorous life, and which
contained at that time so many men of
piety and ability. Various causes, be
sides the spirit of unrest which lived in
the Houses of Convocation, led to this
deterioration. The group of eminent men
of whom we have been lately speaking,
and who inspired the church with high
thoughts and noble purpose, passed away
in quick succession. Tillotson died in
1694, Kettlewell in 1695, Beveridge in
1707, Bull in 1719, Ken and Dodwell in
1711. Queen Anne, ever a devoted
daughter of the church, died in 1714, and
Tenison, the archbishop, the year follow
ing. These and men of like mind with
them had no real successors. As one by

one they passed away, no new men to
supply their places arose. The splendid
energy, and the ceaseless endeavour to pro
mote true religion and philanthropy, so
noticeable at the beginning of the century,
after a very few years was less and less
observable ; a lower tone generally pre
vailed ; abuses and they were, alas ! too
numerous in the church were defended,
not reformed. The energies or church
men were expended rather in barren
theological discussions than in w r orks of
piety and usefulness ; and a long period of
comparative stagnation and apathy set in.

Various other causes, direct and indirect,
were at work, especially during the first
half of the eighteenth century, which
contributed to bring about that age of
dulness and stagnation in the established
church which has so perplexed many
students of ecclesiastical history ; succeed
ing as it did to a period which, though
short, was peculiarly fruitful in spiritual
fervour and in practical benevolent works,
and which was adorned, as we have seen,
with a group of profound scholars, saintly
thinkers, and practical able workers. We
will rapidly enumerate the principal of
these causes.

First, within the church it was an age,
this first half of the eighteenth century,
of barren controversies, of speculations
utterly unpractical, advanced by men
who, under a guise of specious friendli
ness, were as a rule hostile to all revealed
religion, and who, while loudly asserting
their friendly feeling to real Christianity
carefully eliminated from their teaching
every doctrine which the Catholic
Church, from the first centurv onwards.

THE DEISTICAL CONTROVERSY.

219

has considered fundamental. There were
two groups of these controversialists who
in the eighteenth century exercised a
baleful and paralysing influence over the
English church ; absorbing interests and
consuming time which should have been
devoted to higher ends and more prac
tical purposes, alienating many from the
true orthodox faith which had been firmly
held by millions during the Christian
centuries, and adding to the immorality
of the age by weakening the restraints
which Christianity imposed upon the
passions and lusts of men.

The earlier group is that connected with
the " Deistical " controversy, the name by
which the first of these unfortunate dis-
putings is generally known. This included
in its meshes large numbers of known and
unknown men who were, some in sympathy
with, others in bitter antagonism to, its
teachings and suggestions. The church
historian has sorrowfully to record the
effect of these disputations upon the clergy
of the Establishment. Practical subjects
concerning faith and life were in too
many instances neglected. The absorbing
question of the hour had little bearing
upon the every-day existence of toiling
men and women. The sermons of the
Anglican divines began to be filled with
refutations of this or that heretic, famous
for a day and then forgotten ; the weightier
questions which live along the inspired
pages of the Gospels and Epistles, were
too often neglected. The bitter saying,
often quoted, of an Irish peer, who, when
asked why he was no longer seen in his
accustomed place in church, replied that
in church " once he heard something of
his Saviour Jesus Christ, but now all the

discourse was about one John Toland,"*
reflected with fair accuracy the feelings
of many plain English churchmen. The
result of all this argument and disputing
was unmistakably a rapid declension in
the spiritual earnestness of the church.

A very brief summary of the literature
which worked such havoc among men,
by absorbing them in aimless discus
sions, to the sore detriment of good and
practical work, will be interesting. With
most among us now the very names of the
disputants are largely forgotten ; only the
memory of the evil, which for many years
they wrought among us, still lives. It was
as early as the year 1696 that the wordy
war may be said to have begun, by the
publication in Dublin of a tractate of
inconsiderable length, entitled " Christi
anity not Mysterious," by an Irishman of
dubious religious principles who had once
been a Roman Catholic. It was a
speculative essay, and tended to show that
the mysteries, as we understand the
expression, in the New Testament, were
introduced into Christianity partly by
Judaising Christians, and partly by heathen
converts. The little work excited an at
tention far above its real importance. It
was preached against, written against, and
eventually burnt publicly in Dublin by the
hangman.

A little later, appeared a collection of
essays by lord Shaftesbury, subsequently
known as " Characteristics of Men and
Manners." It was scarcely a polemical
work in the ordinary sense of the word ;
but while professing himself an orthodox

* Toland was a young Irish writer who as early
as 1696 had published a Deistical tractate, which
had in its day extraordinary success and popularity.

22O

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17131731-

Christian, Shaftesbury handled with a
clever but hostile hand the most sacred
mysteries of our faith, the nature of the
Christian miracles, the character of our
blessed Lord, the Old Testament present
ment of the Eternal. With the practised

THE THIRD EARL OF SHAFTESBURY.
(From a portrait at St. Giles".)

easy grace of a courtier and man of the
world, he advises men to float with the
stream of popular opinion, smiling all
the while at the tales of priests. The
book and its contents had a wide and
dangerous effect on the society of the
time. Pope told Warburton later, that to
his knowledge " The Characteristics " of
Lord Shaftesbury had done more harm to
revealed religion in England, than all the

works of infidelity put together. The work
in a collected form appeared in 1713.

Almost simultaneously with the collected
edition of " The Characteristics " appeared
U A Discourse on Freethinking " by one
Anthony Collins, in which the necessity
of free thought on all matters pertaining
to religion was urged, as the only remedy
for the acknowledged evil of superstition.
The various objections urged against free-
thinking are dealt with, and a list of noble
and eminent men whom the author was
pleased to consider freethinkers, nineteen
in number, is given. This book, of no
great size, but taking and popular in its
style, was enormously read and extensively
circulated. Its author proceeded to put
forth other works showing the same anti-
Christian bias. To his most famous book
published in 1724, entitled " A Discourse
on the Grounds and Reasons of the Chris
tian Religion/ it is said that some thirty-
five answers and refutations appeared
within two years of its appearance.

Shortly after Collins s weightiest book,
a yet more famous " Deist " or free-think
ing production was published by one
Woolston. In it the author throws off all
the veneer of restraint which had hitherto
generally characterised the outburst of
anti-Christian literature in the first thirty
years of the century, and openly rails at
the beliefs of Christianity. Its title was
" Six Discourses on the Miracles," but its
fame seems to have been principally gained
owing to the persecution to which its ill-
starred composer was unwisely subjected.
It was indisputably a blasphemous writing,
and its author was condemned in the King s
Bench for each of the six unhappy dis
courses separately. Fined and imprisoned,

17131731-]

WOOLSTON, TINDAL, AND BOLINGBROKE.

221

and unable to pay the fine, he lan
guished in confinement until his death,
which happened in 1731. As many as
thirty thousand copies of this product of
his ill-directed pen are said to have been

Our brief catalogue of the chief writers
of this cheerless school will close with two
more names that of Tindal, and of the
far more famous Henry St. John, viscount
Bolingbroke. Matthew Tindal, fellow of

sold. No fewer than

have been enumerated of this freethinking

effort of Collins s. The bishop of London

HENRY ST. JOHN, VISCOUNT BOLINGBROKE.

sixty refutations All Souls College, Oxford, was the author

of the once well-known " Christianity as
old as the Creation." He had passed

of the day even thought fit to make it the through various religious phases. Once a

theme of several of his pastoral letters to
his diocese.

Roman Catholic, then a member of the
Anglican communion, Tindal had lived

222

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17131731.

a long life before he became prominent
among the ranks of the eighteenth-century
deists, freethinkers, or rationalists, as in
later times they would be popularly
termed. The influence of his cheerless
school of thought was at its highest when
Tindal wrote. After his time it seems
rapidly to have declined, and during the
second half of the century we hear but
little of its work and teaching. No
Deistical publication perhaps aroused the
feeling stirred up by Tindal s writing. The
number of answers to its suggestive and
insidious infidelity is computed at consider
ably over a hundred. The book was un
mistakably able. The writer set himself
to show how, the religion of Nature being
perfect, all external revelation was ab
solutely needless and useless. He was
styled in his own times " the great apostle
*}f Deism," and his book is popularly
known as the Bible of all Deistical readers.
Bishop Warburton even styles him the
" mighty author of Christianity as old as
the Creation. "

Henry St. John, lord Bolingbroke, pos
sesses another and a very different title to
posthumous fame. As a politician of the
first rank in the reign of queen Anne, as
restless intriguer in the interests of the
exiled Stuarts at St. Germains after the
accession of the House of Hanover to the
English throne, as at once a courtier,
philosopher, and historian, during a long
and restless life, Bolingbroke will ever rank
as one of the most picturesque and pro
minent figures in the story of the first half
of the century, upon the church history of
which we are now engaged. His various
writings, published after his death in 1754,
perhaps first disclosed to the world what a

relentless and dangerous foe to Christianity
had been long living and working among
the English-speaking peoples. His caustic
and bitter pen spared nothing. The Old
Testament especially was the object of his
destructive and hostile criticism ; of St.
Paul and his great Epistles he writes in
terms of extreme dislike and even of bitter
hatred. Only in speaking of the Gospels
is he respectful, and even there he dares
occasionally to find fault with the divine
central figure of the story. * After the
publication in 1754 of the writings of this
most able and dangerous enemy of the faith r
the long drawn-out controversy seems to
have died away, nothing further of import
ance being written on the Deistical f side.

* Among the weightier authors of the well-nigh
innumerable treatises, replies, and confutations to
the Deistical literature of the first half of the
eighteenth century, Dr. John Leland, a Presby
terian minister of Dublin, especially deserves an
honourable mention. This learned divine con
secrated his talents and learning during a long life
to the Deistical controversy, and has left us,
besides several important: replies and treatises,
a specially valuable work entitled " A View
of the Principal Deistical Writers of the Seven
teenth and Eighteenth Centuries," published in
1754, and other supplementary writings on the
same subject. These writings of John Leland con
stitute an exhaustive " repertoire," and supply us
with an analysis of this almost forgotten litera
ture which exercised so important an influence
on the theology and church work of this period,
roughly corresponding to the reigns of queen Anne,
George I., and part of the time of George II.

t The title " Deistical " has been used through
out this little catalogue or precis of the writers and
writings of this once famous but now well-nigh
forgotten school of thought. But the term is
euphuistical and even misleading. " Freethinking,"
" unbelieving," would better convey the idea of
what this "school" really was, than the gentler
and more euphonious appellation " Deistical," by
which historians and biographers have usually de
signated it. It was, as a whole, a school distinctly
adverse and inimical to Christianity and to all
revealed religion.

17131731-]

BUTLER S "ANALOGY OF RELIGION."

223

While, however, deploring the general
deadening and paralysing effect of the
famous Deistical controversy, which we
have placed in the forefront of the causes
that led to the general falling away in
religious earnestness and practical work of
the church in that somewhat dreary and
disappointing period, we must not omit
to notice one good and lasting result of
the lengthened and bitter discussion. It
enriched the theological literature of our
church with some works, which will endure
so long as lives the influence of the
Anglo-Saxon peoples among the nations
of the world.

First among these in acknowledged
excellence and in enduring popularity,
must be ranked the master-work of bishop
Butler, "The Analogy of Religion, Natural
and Revealed, to the Constitution and
Course of Nature." The student and
critic of this great book must ever bear
in mind, however, the circumstances under
which it was composed ; must never forget
the peculiar environment of the author.
The Deistical spirit had been influencing
England for many years. Much had been
said in the course of the long controversy
about " Nature," and the comparative
excellence of nature s course of action and
government. There was then no dispute
among the enemies of revealed religion
as to its divine authorship. Taking this
as the starting point of his argument, and
admitting, as was then on all hands con
ceded, the course and constitution of nature
to be divine, Butler maintains in language
ever lucid and vivacious, occasionally
rising into true eloquence, that all the cha
racteristic facts and principles of religion,
natural and revealed, are in strict analogy.

He shows irrefutably that there was
a parallelism throughout, a correspon
dence of design and fulfilment. If the
lower, the course 2nd constitution of
nature, be divine, the higher, the facts and
principles of religion, must therefore be no
less so. "You assert," he says in effect,
" that the law of Nature is absolutely

JOSEPH BUTLER, BISHOP OF DURHAM.

perfect and absolutely certain. I will show
you that precisely the same kind of diffi
culties are found in nature as you find in
revelation."

The character of this great Christian
thinker has been described as pure and
noble, candid and unostentatious, with a
tinge of melancholy. His life was, on the
whole, a fortunate one, so far as regards
public recognition of his eminent services
to the . church. He was trained as a

* See Abbey and Overton, " The English Church-
in the Eighteenth Century."

224

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1736.

Presbyterian, but in comparatively early
life he conformed to the Church of
England. He was, when still young,
appointed preacher at the Rolls, and
subsequently obtained very lucrative pre
ferment in the north of England. His
studies in the Deistical question, which
eventuated in the production of his famous
treatise, seem to have commenced as early
as the year 1718, and much of the
substance of the " Analogy " probably
formed part of his sermons in London
when preacher at the Rolls. The famous
book itself appeared in 1736. He was
appointed bishop of Bristol in 1738, and in
1 740 the deanery of St. Paul s in addition
was conferred, upon him. In 1750 Butler
was translated to the great northern
bishopric of Durham ; but he only
survived his translation two years, dying
in 1752, at the comparatively early age
of sixty.

His u Analogy " still holds its place, and
that a prominent place, among our
principal English classics. It is perhaps
a solitary exception ; out of all the mass
of literature, Deistical and anti-Deistical,
which appeared in the first fifty years of
the eighteenth century, the profound and
brilliant treatise of Butler is alone really
read and generally studied in our own day
and time. If anything, its popularity even
increases as time advances, nor are its
luminous and attractive pages only the
food of our scholars and thinkers ; there
are few cultured Englishmen who have
not read them with more or less interest
and delight, and who either in early or
late life have not been sensible of their
peculiar charm.

Another monumental work evoked by

the Deistical conflict, the name of which
at least has survived, and may be said
to be well known amongst us, is " The
Divine Legation of Moses," by Dr.
Warburton. The first volume of this most
learned and powerful treatise appeared
in 1738. It was a strange and absolutely
new argument, which Warburton himself
stated as follows : u Whatsoever religion
and society have ho future state for their
support, must be supported by an
extraordinary Providence." It therefore
followed that as the Jews had no such
future state held out before them, that
their religion and society were supported
by an extraordinary Providence. War-
burton s massive treatise was, so far as
the first book was concerned, quaintly
dedicated to the freethinkers, thus :
"Gentlemen, as the following discourse
was written for your use, you have the
best right to the address." The learning
and research of the " Divine Legation " is
enormous : the arrangement, however, is
cumbrous, and lacks lucidity. Bentley s
cynical comment was partly deserved : he
wrote of Warburton as " a man of
monstrous appetite, but of bad digestion."
Gibbon in his sarcastic way alludes to it as
" a monument, already crumbling in the
dust, of the vigour and weakness of the
human mind." It is far from "crumb
ling in the dust," although long years have
passed since Gibbon wrote ; but while all
have been ready to acknowledge the
vigour and ability and freshness of the
book, the argument is misliked by not a
few Christian students of the Old Testa
ment ; the assertion that no future state
was set before the Hebrews being open
at least to grave question. The " Divine

226

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

Legation " may, however, still be con
sidered as a classic and enduring work in
Anglican theology, although it is perhaps
little read by students of our day.
And without, perhaps, endorsing the
perfervid admiration expressed on the
little marble slab in the solemn Norman
nave of Gloucester, where the scholar
bishop is called " a prelate of the most
sublime genius and exquisite learning,"
the Anglican communion will ever hold
in honour the name and memory of
Warburton of Gloucester, as one of her
goodly company of defenders of the
Catholic faith.

Two other names once famous in the
long controversy as able and doughty
champions of orthodoxy, but over whose
writings the dust of forgetfulness has
gathered thickly, are those -of Sherlock
and Berkeley. The first of these, Sher
lock, a popular divine of ability and power,
such a one as men ever delight to honour,
was successively master of the Temple, dean
of Chichester, bishop of Bangor, Salisbury,
and London. The primacy he declined.
In the great controversy of the day he
played a distinguished part, and his " Tryal
of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of
Jesus " was deemed a masterly production.
But it can scarcely, in spite of its once
well-deserved fame, be deemed an English
classic. Its name and reputation, but only
these, have survived to our times. Bishop
Berkeley of Cloyne, whose " Alciphron, or
the Minute Philosopher " once charmed a
multitude of readers interested in the long
drawn-out discussions, was one of the most
self-denying and philanthropic of the
divines of that somewhat lifeless age. A
zealous missionary, he sacrificed his bright

prospects at home to devote himself to
preaching his Master s Gospel to the In
dians of the American continent ; though
his noble efforts in missionary enterprise
bore no fruit at the time, owing to the
dead hand of the minister, Sir Robert
Walpole, being laid upon his earnest and
devoted schemes. The "Minute Philo
sopher " and its gifted and amiable author,

JOHN LOCKE.
(Frotn the portrait prefixed to his "works in 1703.)

to us now are but the shadows of once
illustrious names.

In this brief summary of the Deistic
controversy, which, though now well-nigh
forgotten, occupied so large a space on the
canvas of the picture of the church of the
eighteenth century, the name of John
Locke must just be mentioned. He died
in 1704, some time before the great dispute
had become a national calamity. Locke
is well known in letters as the father of
modern inductive philosophy ; and one of
his many writings, the essay "Concerning

POPE AND BOLINGBROKE.

Human Understanding," still certainly
ranks as a European classic. Out of
Locke s works, both the Deist and the
defender of the orthodox faith culled argu
ments in support of their opinions. Both
schools chose to claim him as " one of
them." Locke, however, in spite of certain
passages in his writings which seemed to
favour what we should now term Ration
alistic views, was a devout Christian at
heart, and a firm adherent of the Christian
faith. When dying, this eminent philo
sopher told the clergyman from whom he
received the blessed sacrament before he
passed away, that he was u in perfect
chanty with all men, and in communion
with the church of Christ, by whatever
name it was called. 1 Locke went out from
among us into that other and grander
world, with that serene confidence which
the Christian, and only the Christian, is
justified in feeling, while the first mutter-
ings of the mighty storm which for so
many years convulsed religious England,
were being heard. With some confidence
we may assert that had his life been pro
longed, his devout mind would have been
shocked at the deductions which some of
the Deist ical writers chose to draw from
some of his perhaps too bold speculations.
With greater reason, the Deists claim
that the noblest poet of the century was
one of them. But if Pope was a Deist at
heart, which is after all very doubtful,
emphatically may we maintain that he
had no sympathy whatever with the de
structive theories put forth by the men of
whom we have been lately speaking as the
leading teachers of the unhappy school.
That he was the intimate friend and the
passionate admirer of the brilliant and

versatile Bolingbroke, who, we read, wept
over the poet s death-bed, there is na
doubt. Henry St. John during many
years largely swayed his poet-friend, and
to him the sad silences of Pope in the
" Essay on Man " and in the " Universal
Prayer," in respect to Christianity, are no
doubt due. The apostrophe to his dearest
friend in the opening lines of the " Essay

ALEXANDER POPE.
{From a contemporary portrait.}

on Man," graven on all our memories,
reminds us of this close intimacy :

" Awake, my St. John ! leave all meaner things
To low ambition and the pride of kings.
Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
Expatiate free o er all this scene of man .
A mighty maze, but not without a plan."

And in the no less grand peroration of
the same deathless song, he again turns to-
that winning but sinister personality, to
whom he clung, to use his own words,,
as his " guide, philosopher, and friend,"
closing with

228

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1708.

" Come chen, my friend ! my genius ! come along !
A master of the poet, and the song !

******
Teach me, like thee, in various nature wise,
To fall with dignity, with temper rise,
Formed by thy converse . . ."

But Pope, in spite of the assertion of the
Deists, with all his doubts and hesitances,
was no unbeliever, still less a scoffer and
an infidel ; and with his last dying effort,
we read of his receiving the sacred
memorials of his Lord s dying love from
the hands of a priest of his own Roman
Catholic communion.

Another controversy of this century,
which had less immediate but more far-
reaching consequences than the Deistical,
must regretfully be alluded to. The
Trinitarian disputes, which also belong
especially to this period, important though
the points disputed were to the belief and
life of the church, excited fewer minds
than those so-called Deistical questions
of w 7 hich we have been speaking. The
Trinitarian questioning of the eighteenth
century was indeed an old foe under a
new face. Very early in the story of the
Christian church, the relation of the Three
Persons of the ever- blessed Trinity to each
other had been fiercely disputed ; indeed,
the question may be said to have been the
chief cause of most of the early divisions in
the church. Under the general title of
Arianism,* the principal tenet of which
was the denial of the Saviour s Godhead,
the adversaries of the Trinitarians were
mostly known. Repeatedly condemned
by church councils, Arianism was ever
regarded as the bitter foe of the Catholic

* So named from a famous popular teacher, Arius,
\vho lived in the early part of the fourth century.

Church. It was a widespread heresy, and
occasionally coloured the Christianity of
whole nations : for example, it was not
until the sixth century that Spain became
Catholic and orthodox. It lived, indeed,
all through the Middle Ages ; but
mediaeval Christianity was principally
occupied with other questions, and we
hear comparatively little of the great
controversy which rent asunder the early

\VILTJAM WHISTON.

church. The heresy, however, was never
stamped out, and it appeared and
reappeared in different Christian centres
at various periods.

Towards the latter part of the seven
teenth century, the question seems to
have been agitated in England. The
special causes of the recrudescence of this
ancient heresy among us, it is difficult now
to trace. That it existed in a somewhat
dangerous form is clear, for it called out
the great work of Bull, of which we have
already spoken somewhat at length. His
u Defence of the Nicene Creed," it is true,

17081740-]

THE TRINITARIAN CONTROVERSY.

229

only touched a portion of the Arian
contention, but it was a most important
portion, and dealt, as it had never been

assume formidable proportions, in 1708
William Whiston, a widely-read but
eccentric scholar, put forth a writing

THE SLEEPING CONGREGATION.
(From a print by Hogarth,}

attempted before, with the views of the
ante-Nicene Fathers* on the subject of
the Trinity. In the early years of the
eighteenth century, the question began to

* That is, roughly, with the writings of the
Fathers before the year 325.

claiming for the " Apostolical Constitu-
tions " a work generally held to be a
forgery a value equal to that ot the four
Gospels. His strange views, strongly
tinctured with Arianism, caused his re-
jection by the Royal Society, then under

330

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17231740.

the presidency of Sir Isaac Newton.
Whiston was a voluminous writer, and
was widely read in his day.

Of still greater importance in the history
of the theologic thought of the period
was Whiston s friend Dr. Samuel Clarke, a
theologian of very considerable reputation.
Clarke has been generally considered the
practical introducer of Arianism into
England, and his book, u The Scripture
Doctrine of the Trinity," was long used as
the treasury whence the modern Arian drew
his principal weapons of attack and defence.

As in the case of the more generally
popular " Deistical " controversy, which
drew forth the great classic works of
Butler and of Warburton, the " Analogy"
and the " Divine Legation of Moses ; " so
here, the agitation of the Trinitarian
question resulted in the great Catholic
treatises of Waterland. This eminent
scholar and divine (born in 1683) at the
somewhat unusually early age of thirty
became master of his college (Magdalen,
Cambridge). The theological question con
cerning the Trinity, which was especially
agitating the minds of scholars when
Waterland was a young and ardent
student, had a peculiar attraction for him.
The study of the points at issue became
his life work. Successively there appeared
his " Queries in Vindication of Christ s
Divinity," his " History of the Athanasian
Creed," " The Importance of the Doctrine
of the Trinity Asserted "monumental
works which must ever form part of the
equipment of every Anglican theological
scholar. Following on the profound and
exhaustive writings of bishop Butler, the
treatises of Waterland may be said to have
really extinguished Arianism as a power

in England. Waterland received various
acknowledgments in high quarters of his
merits. He became canon of Windsor,
archdeacon of Middlesex, etc., and no
doubt he would have risen to yet higher
dignity in the church he served so well,
had not his somewhat premature death
removed him from the earthly scene of his
activities. He died from gangrene, alter
what seemed an unimportant operation, at
the comparatively early age of fifty-seven,
in the year 1740.

But although Waterland may be said
to have put an end to Arianism as a real
power in England, the doctrine lived on
amongst us, as it had done in so many
churches all along the Christian centuries.
Under the more familiar names of
Socinianism and Unitarianism, it is still
with us, and in most of the more consider
able cities of our land it is still represented
by a congregation, but generally speaking
small in numbers. Owing, in great
measure, to the clear and powerful teach
ing of Bull at the close of the seven
teenth, and of Waterland in the course
of the first thirty or forty years of the
century following, the boundary line be
tween the Church of England and Arian
ism, in any form and under any name, is
sharply drawn, and the slightest wandering
here from the path hewn out by the
Nicene fathers and followed so undeviat-
ingly by the Catholic Church, on the part
of any Anglican teacher^ is at once sternly
checked. No tampering with this great
fundamental doctrine, which asserts the
true Godhead and distinct personality of
the Second and Third Persons of the ever-
blessed Trinity, is ever countenanced in
the Church of England.

17231740.]

WATERLAND AND HIS WORKS.

Among the Protestant Nonconformist
bodies in England and on the Continent
this deadly heresy, with its insidious argu
ments, has been, and is still, a greater
source of danger than among Anglicans.
The liturgy of the Church of England,
with its constantly-repeated creeds, with
its Catholic prayers and collects above
all, with its solemn litany, is an
ever-present safeguard against loose
and indefinite expressions of worship.*
This safeguard is not possessed by those
religious communities who prefer to trust
mainly to extemporaneous utterances,
rather than to liturgical forms of prayer
and praise derived from an immemorial
Catholic tradition. Not a few earnest
Protestant Nonconformists are sadly con
scious of this peril, and bitterly regret that
in their communions the line of demarca
tion is not more strictly drawn between
those who believe and those who do not
believe in the true Godhead and distinct
personality of the Redeemer.!

Thus, while it is undeniable that the
effect of these great and long drawn-out
controversies had, on the whole, a paralys
ing influence on the church, drawing away
many from more practical work, distracting
the energies of the clergy, inducing them
to devote their teaching rather to the
questions of abstruse theology which were
then especially agitating men s minds, than
to the more practical questions of simple

* Compare Canon Liddon s Bampton Lectures
" Our Lord s Divinity " (Lectures I.-IV. and
Lecture VIII.), where this thought is expanded.

t For a more detailed account of these two
great controversies, which so largely occupied the
church during the first half of the eighteenth
century, see Overton and Abbey : " The English
Church in the Eighteenth Century," chapters iii.
and vi.

faith and daily duty ; it is equally clear that
in the providence of God out of what was
an acknowledged evil, came a real and
permanent advantage to the Church of
England. Had it not been for these inter
minable contests, never would those dis
tinguished theologians have arisen who
have by their writings so materially
strengthened not only the Anglican com
munion, but the whole Catholic Church.
And while we mourn over the lower
standard of spiritual life and the declension
of practical work which is so sadly per
ceptible in our church at this period of
her history, we cannot regard the age as
altogether barren which produced the
" Defence of the Nicene Creed " of Bull,
the "Analogy" of Butler, the "Divine
Legation " of Warburton, and the massive
works of Waterland:

Although, however, the first half of this
century was confessedly an age of distract
ing controversies, other causes, perhaps
more indirect but none the less real, were
also at work, which we can now see affected
gravely the spirit of devoted earnestness,
and sorely hindered the practical usefulness
of the church, and for a long time retarded
the splendid promise of progress which we
have already noticed. Among these other
causes may be noticed especially the dearth
of distinguished churchmen ; the absence
of devoted and earnest leaders who could
inspire the rank and file with the spirit of
enthusiasm and of self-devotion and sacri
fice. Butler and Warburton, Bull and
Waterland, were profound scholars and
great thinkers ; but enduring though their
work has proved to be, they were toilers
for God in the closet and study rather than

232

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1717-

in the broad field of active practical life.
They were not men who inspired their
contemporaries with living, burning zeal.
In this comparatively dull and lifeless age
no Latimer arose to fire men s hearts
with his burning words ; no Jewel whose
practical life illustrated his teaching ; no
Andre wes whose saintliness inspired thou
sands to struggle after some faint imitation
of his fair life ; no Laud whose far-reaching
energy and ceaseless work infused fresh life,
and suggested high aims and new purpose
to an entire church ; no Ken whose single
ness of heart and purity of purpose sup
plied a pattern life to uncounted holy and
humble men, who were content to live and
to labour unnoticed and unrewarded. A
curious absence of such leaders of men
is painfully observable in this somewhat
sluggish period.

And not only for a long term of years
was the Church of England without
leaders practical and able, without men of
high thoughts and tireless purpose, capable
too of inspiring others with something of
their own spirit and power ; but through
the greater part of this century there was
no Convocation of the clergy to debate
and to plan, to check excesses, and to
originate new departures in useful church
work. For the first time, save during the
troubles of the Civil War, was the voice of
the church, expressed through her repre
sentatives, hushed. The immediate cause
of the arbitrary closing of Convocation by
the government of the day was the
presenting to the Upper House by the
Lower of a report gravely condemnatory of
the doctrines preached by Dr. Hoadley,
bishop of Bangor, as being calculated to
subvert all government and discipline in

the church of Christ, as well as to impeach
the royal supremacy. The ministers of
George I., rightly or wrongly, looked on
this action of the Lower House of Convo
cation as a political act, considered this
formal pronouncement as an attack on the
Whig ministry of the day, and ordered
an immediate prorogation. Convocation,
thus silenced, was never suffered to meet
again until comparatively modern times.

As some justification for this high
handed, arbitrary act on the part of the
government, it was alleged, and with some
reason, that for a considerable time not
only in the reign of George I., but even
more conspicuously in the preceding reign
of queen Anne, Convocation had been the
scene of unseemly disputes between the
Upper and Lower Houses, and had tended
by its fierce wranglings to promote
disorder in the church and state. But
these disputes, painful though they were,
were after all ephemeral, nor did they by
any means represent the real work of the
official church assembly. Convocation
during the reign of queen Anne and the
earlier years of George I. the years
immediately preceding its being silenced
had been singularly busy with the con
sideration of many good and useful
measures, had been occupied with the
promotion of works philanthropic and
highly beneficial to the people ; such as the
re-constitution of the office of rural deans,
the establishment and maintenance of
charity schools for the people, the founda
tion of parochial charities, the increase of
church accommodation ; and last but not
least, with the inescapable duty of a
Christian people to forward and to
encourage Christian missions in all the

I7I7-]

DEADNESS IN THE CHURCH.

233

rapidly growing colonies, as well as among years of it. For nearly fifty years Sir

the heathen world beyond the seas, a Robert Walpole and his policy may be

world daily widening owing to the rapid said to have discouraged, if not actively

spread of English commercial enterprise. opposed, all religious activity. As early

We must just allude to one more of as 1710, Walpole had been appointed

..~,~v^,w^yvSfo /iracfy/e nsfat f/t&y feac&, -^

e&gt;&*?&lt;? inarm J/et6 tiferfa yvcu/djfttt /n#rt jfjcfomareacn* Jumper

*/&lt;fa.&-/ed TARTVI F 9V&MUM0 f/z /US JeO& , &lt;#- &CV*

&lt;3&&t~t.^ , A^&6&W&lt;#toa4

yAeqfaxe**, ?trt&fo ortrnvitt .
y,w/uz& nw6 /urn? 6mJfo r t

tf&lt;z6ewnfto?/j&a/for; \

(Front a print after Hogarth.}

the causes which led to the deadness one of the chief persons in the matter of

and stagnation so marked a feature in the impeachment of Sacheverell ; and the

the life of the church of a considerable disturbing political consequences of that

part of the eighteenth century, notably process, it is supposed, permanently influ-

in the period which lay between the end enced his future policy towards the church,

of the first decade, and the middle Without being positively unfriendly, he

234

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17241744.

discouraged all religious activity, and es
pecially in any foreign missionary effort.
The influence of the powerful minister s
policy of discouragement weighed on the
church long after his fall.

There was much in the inner life of the
church, at the period on which we are
dwelling, that was ugly, and urgently called
for the hand of the reformer. There
were many abuses which needed cor
rection, much more which sorely needed
quickening. There was a general lack of
enthusiasm of any kind ; everywhere, in
cities and in rural districts, a dead level of
uniform dulness prevailed. Two reasons
have been suggested * for this. The
dread of Romanism, always present in
England, but recently awakened by the
tyrannical acts of James II., induced many
of the clergy to avoid anything which
might savour of the services and ritual of
Rome. Symbolism of all kinds, elaborate
and beautiful services, were unpopular
with not a few ; even frequent services
and many communions, were looked upon
with some suspicion. In an opposite
direction, everything in divine worship
which suggested Puritanism was disliked.
Fefvid and impassioned sermons were
avoided, as partaking too much of the
kind of religion in vogue in the hated
days of the Commonwealth, when Oliver
reigned. The result was too often a bald,
unlovely service, followed by a dry, dull
sermon, bearing too much upon the some
what abstruse theological controversies

* Compare Abbey and Overton : " English
Church in the Eighteenth Century," chap. viii.
While from some pulpits morality was preached
\vithout any reference at all to religion, still there
were, as we shall point out, many noble exceptions.

of the day, and dealing too little with
every-day life, its trials and temptations,
its sorrows and joys.

And among the clergy themselves there
was much that called aloud for reformation.
A great gulf parted the few who held high
and lucrative employment, and the many
who were living in extreme poverty.
The scandal of pluralities and non-
residence was a conspicuous blot. in church
life. The bishops and leading men in the
hierarchy were curiously insensible of the
cruel wrong which this evil system
perpetuated. Even the earnest and really
devoted looked upon such abuses calmly,
and accepted this state of things without
any effort to amend it. Bishops whose
record in other respects is singularly white
and blameless, often held with their
bishopric a deanery and even a lucrative
benefice.* Pluralists were common, and
the richest posts in the church were held
by a comparatively few men. On the
other hand, the rank and file of the clergy
in numberless cases were exposed to real
poverty. The ordinary stipend of a curate
was about ^"30 a year, or even less. A
vast number of benefices in all parts of
England were wretchedly endowed.f The
social position of these ill-paid clergy
was often not higher than that of a
tradesman in a town, while in the rural
districts the status of the poor curates
and the yet poorer incumbents was that
of the smaller farmers and yeomen.

* In the case of some of the sees the income
was so small that it was really necessary to supple
ment it from another source ; hence this regrettable
practice.

f The reason of the poverty of many of these
"livings" has already been alluded to, in the
account of the confiscation of the abbey lands.

1724 1744-]

TESTIMONY OF DEAN SWIFT.

235

Not only the nobility, but very many
of the country squires attached a young
Levite, as he was commonly termed, to
the household, but this clergyman occupied
in his patron s family a subordinate posi
tion. He dined, it is true, at the master s

parson Sampson, in the "Virginians" of
Thackeray. Swift, in his caustic writings,
gives us several sad and painful contem
porary sketches of the lives led by too
many of these representatives of the clergy
of his time. That great and unhappy man

DEAN SWIFT.

table, but was expected to leave long
before the repast was concluded. Various
seem to have been the services required
from him, in addition to his spiritual
duties. Among these especially was his
presence and assistance at the various
games then in vogue, such as bowls in
the garden and cards in the house. Not an
altogether unfavourable specimen of one of
these chaplains is painted in the well-known

in his own early career had personal
experience of such a life, when in the
household of Sir William Temple.* Swift

* "It was at Shene and Moor Park, with a
salary of twenty pounds and a dinner at the upper
servants table, that this great and lonely Swift
passed a ten years apprenticeship, wore a cassock
that was only not a livery, bent down a knee as
proud as Lucifer s to supplicate my lady s good
graces, or ran on his honour s errands, swallowing
scorn, and submitting with a stealthy rage to his
position." Thackeray : " English Humourists."

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17241744.

tells us of one of these Anglican clergy,
for instance, who was admitted as chaplain
to a noble family, where his sister was a
waiting-woman, and how this chaplain
would shake the butler by the hand and
teach the page his catechism ; how some
times as a favour he was admitted to
dine at the steward s table. His revenue
(besides vails) amounted to about thirty
pounds a year. Another clergyman whose
life he depicts, although a man of con
siderable parts and scholarship, accepted,
he tells us, a curacy of thirty pounds a
year, ;md, when he was five-and-forty, had
the great felicity to be preferred to a
vicarage worth annually sixty pounds. He
describes how his spirits quite sank in dis
appointment, and eventually this scholar
married a farmer s widow.*

In another paper f the great dean of St.
Patrick s describes the life of a country
vicar. After stating that his stipend was
forty pounds a year, he went on to say, u he
hath a house and barn in repair, a field or
two to graze his cows, with a garden and
orchard. No guest expects more from
him than a pot of ale ; he lives like an
honest plain farmer, as his wife is dressed
but little better than Goody. He is some
times graciously invited by the squire,
when he sits at an humble distance ; if he
gets the love of his people, they often
make him little useful presents. He is
happy by being born to no higher ex
pectation, for he is usually the son of some
ordinary tradesman. His learning is much
of a size with his birth and education ; no

* " Essay on the Fates of Clergy," where other
saddening details are given.

t " Considerations upon Two Bills relating to
the Clergy," written in the year 1731.

more of either than what a poor hungry
servitor can be expected to bring with him
from his college." Our great pencil-
satirist tells us the same story, and the
five caricatures * by Hogarth which illus
trate this chapter, show us public opinion
in regard to both the standing and the
shortcomings of many of the clergy at
that period.

On the whole, in the eighteenth century
the clergy, especially those working in
country places, were regarded as a plebeian
class. Very few, comparatively, of the
higher ranks in society took orders, until
about the middle of the century, when a
change gradually took place, partly through
increase in the value of the benefices, but
far more owing to the new spirit which
passed over the Church of England, which
we are about presently to relate. Bishop
Warburton, for instance, in a letter dated
1752, thus writes : " Our grandees have
at last found their way back into the
church. I only wonder they have been so
long about it, but be assured that nothing
but a new religious revolution to sweep
away the fragments that Henry VIII. left
after banqueting his courtiers, will drive
them out again." Warburton, when he
wrote this, was scarcely conscious what a
change for the better was already passing
over the church. f

Degraded, however, and insignificant
though the position in society of a
vast proportion of the Anglican clergy
undoubtedly was, at a time when the
country attorney and the country

* It must not be forgotten that they are, pro
fessedly, caricatures.

t See Macaulay : " History of England," chap.
iii., where a painful though vivid picture is drawn
of the state of the clergy at this time.

i 7 6 4 .]

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

237

apothecary looked down with disdain on
the country parson, their influence, even
during the period when these melancholy
pictures of their position were painted,
was immense, especially over the lower
orders of the people in the rural districts.
We must be careful not to exaggerate,
or to allow a false impression to be left
from, these quotations and references from
Swift and Goldsmith and other brilliant
satirists and writers of the period. While
accepting, on the whole, their description
of the lives led by many of the Anglican
clergy as fairly accurate, we must remember
that there were many among the order
of a very different calibre. The London
clergy, for instance, were always spoken of
as a class apart ; not a few of them were
even men of high culture, and possessing
no little eloquence and real learning. In
the universities, too, were many scholars
and divines of high reputation. Attached
to the cathedrals, again, were ever found,
even in the gloomiest years of this period,
theologians and men of high attainments.
It should also be remembered that in an
age peculiarly notable for laxity in living
and for gross immorality, singularly few
charges of this kind seem ever to have
been brought against the Anglican clergy.
Bishop Burnet, who was severe in his
strictures on the faults and errors of his
order, especially tells us that he had found
the greatest part of the clergy leading
exemplary lives. Archbishop Wake, in a
letter dated 1726, while lamenting the
infidelity and iniquity so generally pre
valent, expressed his deliberate opinion
that no care was wanting in the clergy
to defend the Christian faith. Smollett,
a most popular writer (1721-1771) and a

vivid and picturesque painter of contem
porary manners and customs, declares that
in the reign of George II. (1727-1760) the
clergy were generally pious and exemplary.
Bentley, with some exaggeration, even
ventures the statement (in 1713) that the
whole clergy of England " were the light
and glory of Christianity."

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

Goldsmith s description of Dr. Primrose
in the "Vicar of Wakefield " (1764) gives
us a singularly interesting and no doubt
faithful picture of the simplicity and good
ness of some at least of these poor and
suffering parsons ; and the beautiful lines in
his u Deserted Village " paint the life and
influence of the parson of " Auburn " in
glowing colours :

" At church with meek and unaffected grace
His looks adorn d the venerable place ;
Truth from his lips prevailed with, double sway,
And fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray.
The service past, around the pious man
With steady zeal each honest rustic ran,

238

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17241744.

E en children followed with endearing wile,
And plucked his gown to share the good man s

smile.

His ready smile a parent s warmth expressed,
Their welfare pleased him, and their cares dis-

trest ;

To them his heart, his love, his griefs were given,
But all his serious thoughts had rest in heaven." *

Goethe (1749-1832), the great German
poet, gives us the following striking and
beautiful impressions of an English clergy
man of that period, derived from Gold
smith s " Vicar of Wakefield " (published
in 1764).

" Now Herder came," says Goethe
in his interesting autobiography, relating
his first acquaintance with Goldsmith s
masterpiece, -"and told us of the "Vicar
of Wakefield," an excellent work, with
the German translation of which he would
make us acquainted by reading it aloud to
us himself. ... A Protestant country
clergyman is perhaps the most beautiful
subject for a modern idyll ; he appears like
Melchizedek, as priest and king in one
person. To the most innocent situation
which can be imagined on earth, to that
of a husbandman, he is, for the most part,
united by similarity of occupation as well
as by equality in family relationships ; he
is a father, a master of a family, an
agriculturist, and thus perfectly a member
of the community. On this pure,
beautiful, earthly foundation rests his
higher calling ; to him is it given to guide
men through life, to take care of their
spiritual education, to bless them at all
the leading epochs of their existence, to

* Goldsmith published his great poem in 1770,
and probably the "revival" of spiritual life had
already been felt far and wide. But this striking
portrait, no doubt, was of one who had lived years
before the date of the poem.

strengthen, to console them, and if con
solation is not sufficient for the present,
to call up and guarantee the hope of a
happier future. . . . Dr. Goldsmith
can thankfully acknowledge that he
is an Englishman, and reckon highly
the advantages which his country and
his nation afford him. The family, with
the delineation of which he occupies
himself, stands upon one of the last
steps of citizen comfort, and yet comes
in contact with the highest ; its narrow
circle, which becomes still more contracted,
touches upon the great world through the
natural and civil course of things ; this
little skiff floats on the agitated waves of
English life, and in weal or woe it has to
expect injury or help from the vast fleet
which sails around it." * .

While, however, from these contempo
rary notices and pictures painted by
eminent writers, poets, romancists and
satirists, it is evident that even among the
ranks of the numerous poor clergy there
were many earnest and devoted men, who
kept burning the torch of true piety and
goodness among their flocks in the darkest
days of this period, there is no doubt
that a death-like torpor had stolen over
our church, a torpor that was by no means
confined to Anglicanism. In 1730 the
Nonconformist Edward Calamy grieves
over this dulness and want of spirituality
and life, both in the church and out of it,
Dr. Watts, the celebrated hymnologist
(1674-1748), also a Dissenter, bears a
similar testimony when he tells us how

* " Truth and Poetry, from my own Life."
Quoted by Thackeray in "The English Humour
ists of the Eighteenth Century," Sterne and
Goldsmith.

TESTIMONY OF BISHOP BUTLER.

239

in his day " there was a general decay of
vital religion in the hearts and lives of
men." This wide-spread decay or torpor in
vital religion in England, testified to from
so many unimpeachable sources, was
gradually spreading over the church, in
spite of many examples of earnest piety
among the humbler clergy, and of the
brilliant school of divines who maintained
the great Catholic doctrines with such
conspicuous ability and scholarship.

There was, indeed, a sad contrast be
tween the religious condition of England
in the early years of the seventeenth
century, and its religious state in the period
now considered, covered roughly by the
first forty or more years of the eighteenth.
We have already noticed how the in
tense interest in, and warm sympathy
for religion in the first of these periods
was so marked, that the attention and
wonderment of distinguished foreign
scholars like Grotius and Casaubon
was excited. In the second period the
change was so evident, and the declension
of all interest and sympathy in religion
so painfully apparent, that Butler, in the
preface to his " Analogy," wrote that it
had come to be taken for granted that
" Christianity is not so much as a subject
of inquiry, but that it is now at length
discovered to be fictitious"; and in his
charge delivered to the clergy of the
diocese of Durham (1751) the same prelate
alludes sorrowfully to u the general decay
of religion in this nation, which is now
observed by everyone, and has been for
some time the complaint of all serious
persons. . . . The influence of it
[religion] is more and more wearing out
of the minds of men, even of those who

do not pretend to enter into speculations
upon the subject ; but the number of
those who do, and who profess themselves
unbelievers, increases, and with their
numbers their zeal." Addison tells us
that " there was less appearance of religion
in England than in any neighbouring state
or kingdom, whether it be Protestant or
Catholic." Sir John Barnard* asserted
that it " really seems to be the fashion for
a man to declare himself of no religion. *
Montesquieu,! the famous French writer,
who was well acquainted with English
life, went so far as to say "that there was
no religion in England," and epigram-
matically summed up his view with the
words : " In France I am considered as
caring too little about religion ; in
England men say I care too much."

Such testimonies respecting the lack of
religion in England, are borne out by the
formal complaint of the Upper House of
Convocation in 1711, that Sunday was
generally neglected by the upper classes.
For instance, under Charles II. hackney
coaches were not allowed to appear in the
streets on Sunday. Under William and
Mary one hundred and seventy-five out of
seven hundred of these hired carriages of
London were suffered to ply for hire; and
before the close of queen Anne s reign
the law restraining the remainder of them
passed into disuse. In 1757 it was even

* Sir John Barnard was a celebrated lord mayor
and alderman of the city of London, and one of its
ablest representatives in Parliament. He was lord
mayor in 1737 ; M.P. for London, 1751 ; he died
in 1764.

t Montesquieu (1689-1755) was one of the great
French writers on history and law of the eighteenth
century. He was a fellow of our Royal Society.
During his stay in England queen Anne treated
him with peculiar distinction.

240

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[i7 - 9-

proposed that the militia should be exer
cised on Sundays ; but popular indignation
prevented this desecration of a day, the
sanctity of which among the lower classes
of the people was still jealously guarded.
At the same time societies of tradesmen
were arranged, whose duty it was to de
nounce to the magistrates all bakers who
ventured to bake or sell bread on the holy
day. But among the upper classes in the
metropolis, Sunday became more and more
disregarded. We have already quoted
Evelyn s sorrowful dismay, when he re
membered the inexpressible profanity, the
gaming, the immorality, and, as it were,
total forgetfulness of God, of which he was
an eye-witness, in the stately gallery of the
Whitehall Palace, the eve of the fatal seizure
of king Charles II.* This gradually gained
ground in the years succeeding Evelyn s
grave criticism. We read of cabinet councils
and cabinet dinners being constantly held
on that day. Sunday concerts, and even
Sunday card-parties, became more and
more the fashion. Sunday levees were
introduced and became usual, the court
setting here the example of striking irrev
erence by the practice of entertaining
Sunday card-parties.

As might be expected from this open
disregard of the sanctity of the immemorial
holy day among the upper classes, a general
neglect of public worship was sadly notice
able. Leland, the Dissenting scholar, whose
able account of the Deistical writers of the
period we have already quoted, calls atten
tion to this. The words of archbishop
Seeker f also are remarkable: "People of

* Evelyn s Diary (1685).

f Seeker was successively bishop of Bristol,
Oxford, and dean of St. Paul s, then archbishop
of Canterbury between the years 1729 and 1768.

fashion, especially of that sex which as
cribes to itself most knowledge, have
nearly thrown off all observation of the
Lord s day, . . . and if to avoid scandal
they sometimes vouchsafe their attendance
on Divine worship in the country, they
seldom or never do it in town." In the
" Spectator " we come repeatedly on allu
sions to irreverent behaviour in church
on the part of fashionable congregations,
" bows, winks, curtesies, whispering, smiles,
nods, with other familiar arts of saluta
tion," being common and usual.*

In the universities, a consensus of con
temporary writers bears witness to the low
state into which the ancient seats of learn
ing had fallen at this time. College dis
cipline was relaxed ; public examinations,
save in the cases of candidates for fellowship,
were unknown. The tutors and professors
alike slurred over their duties, while re
ligious instruction seems to have been
utterly neglected. To this state of utter 1
inefficiency in the universities of Oxford
and Cambridge writers of various schools
of thought, of very different positions in
the world, give their testimony. Revival
ists, men of letters, scholars, essayists, all
agree here. It is one voice which pro
ceeds from John Wesley and Johnson,
Swift and Defoe, Gray and Gibbon, lord
Chesterfield, and, a little later, lord Eldon
and Simeon.

But a sudden and startling religions re
vival was at hand ; a revival which sprang
from a strange and unexpected source, and
which in a marvellous way affected the
religious history of England. " Although

* Compare Lecky : " History of England in the
Eighteenth Century," chap, ix., who gives many
contemporary references to the profane neglect
of this time.

1729.]

THE EVE OF REVIVAL.

241

the career of the elder Pitt and the splendid
victories by land and sea that were won
during his ministry, form unquestionably
the most dazzling episodes in the reign of
George II., they must yield in real im
portance to that religious revolution which
shortly before had been begun in England
owing to the preaching of the Wesleys and
of Whitefield. The creation of a power
ful and active sect, extending over both

hemispheres and numbering many millions
of souls, was but one of its consequences.
It also exercised a profound and lasting
influence upon the spirit of the established
church, upon the amount and distribu
tion of the moral forces of the nation, and
even upon the course of its political
history."*

* Lecky : " History of England in the Eighteenth
Century," chap. ix.

FRONTISPIECE TO THE " HUMOURS OF OXFORD."
(From the print by Hogarth.)

CHAPTER LXXI.

WESLEY, WHITEFIELD, AND THE METHODISTS.

Behmen and the Mystics William Law The Society at Oxford and its Character The Wesieys
and Whitefield Influence of the Moravians upon Wesley His "Conversion" The New
Organisation - Open-air Preaching Wesley s Connection with the Church, and the Final
Breach George Whitefield Power of his Preaching Dislike and Opposition to it Charles
Wesley Secession of the Calvinistic Methodists Severance of the Wesleyans from the
Church of England.

DURING the first quarter of the
seventeenth century (1612-1624)
the writings of a German mystic,
Jacob Behmen, became widely read, and
exercised a considerable influence on re
ligious thought all through Europe. To
Behmen the work and office of the Holy
Spirit was an intense reality. He felt
that the Third Person of the Blessed
Trinity was indeed the Lord and Giver
of Life, who teaches all things and leads
into all truth ; and that to him who
longs after righteousness, and whose heart
is pure, will heavenly wisdom be granted,
and all things will become full of meaning.
Such mystics felt, perhaps as few others
felt, the vast capabilities of human nature,
though so disfigured by sin and earthly
longings and passions. Much, however,
that the great German mystic wrote was
confused, and his meaning was often hard
to unravel ; and such clear and lucid
thi-nkers as Warburton spoke of his
writings with some contempt. Warbur-
ton s estimate was, however, by no means
generally shared ; and not a few earnest
religious scholars, wearied with the dry
speculative theology of the time, found a
wonderful fascination in the writings of
Behmen, which taught the possibility of a
direct communion of the soul with God.

In England the most conspicuous student
of the mystic teacher was one William
Law. This remarkable man, the real
teacher of the great evangelical school
whose rise and widespread influence we
are about to relate, was born in 1686. A
fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge,
he forfeited this fellowship by his refusal
to take the oath of allegiance to George I.,
and for the remainder of his life lived in
retirement. He spent his days in study,
the results of which he gave to the world
in a series of works which were read far
and wide. Law was a high churchman, an
ascetic, and a solitary, and for long a deep
student of Behmen and the mystic school
of thought. The theories of his master
were reproduced by him with extraordinary
force, and with a lucidity never possessed
by Behmen. Law taught in language of
strange power, that human nature was
corrupted and fallen, and soiled with
earthly passions, but that in spite of this
fallen state, in every human soul still
dwelt the fire and light and love of God.
The grand object of all life was to purify,
by means of self-denial and mortification,
the soiled soul, and so to remove all hin
drance to the enlightening power of the
Holy Spirit.

But Law was no mere contemplative

I729-]

LAW, WESLEY, AND WHITEFIELD.

theologian. His teaching inculcated the
most practical virtues. Among his many
controversial and devotional works, one
especially stands out, which evidently sup
plied a soul-need ; for it was enormously
read, and its holy influence was felt for
many years far and wide. The " Serious
Call to a Devout and Holy Life," which
appeared in 1729, was pronounced by Dr.
Johnson " the finest piece of hortatory
theology in our language " ; Gibbon ad
mired it ; and Warburton tells us that its
author was the father of Methodism. For
a long period the " Serious Call " was
the standard devotional treatise, alike in
parsonages and in the houses of pious lay
men. " It is indeed one of the most
solemn and most powerful works of its
kind in any literature. . . . It is in
tended to demonstrate the necessity of a
real Christian separating himself altogether
in life and feelings from the world that is
about him ; to show how profoundly the
modes of life, the aims, the ambitions, the
amusements, the popular types of character
in society, are repugnant to the precepts
and ideals of the Gospel ; to prove that all
worldly attainments, whether of greatness,
wisdom, or bravery, are but empty words."*
The exalted mysticism of Law led to no
narrowing tendency in his teaching ; he
pressed home to men what he believed to
be the truth, and showed them how to
make their souls a temple fit for the

* Lecky : " England in the Eighteenth Century,"
chap. ix. See also the sketch of Law s writings by
Leslie Stephen in " History of English Thought in
the Eighteenth Century," and also Abbey and
Overton s " English Church in the Eighteenth
Century," where in chapter vii.,on " Enthusiasm,"
a fascinating picture is drawn of the mysticism of
Behmen and of his follower, William Law.

presence of the Holy Spirit ; yet he could
admire and reverence great teachers of
very different schools of Christian thought
from his own. He elected to live and die
in the communion of the Anglican Church ;
but he felt at the same time that he was
one in spirit with holy and righteous men
in other churches, even though those men
were called by the names of Ignatius
Loyola, or John Bunyan, or George Fox.
His words on " Rome " are remarkable^
and worthy of the noble charity of a later
age : " The more we believe or know of
the corruptions and hindrances to true
piety in the Church of Rome, the more
we should rejoice to hear that in every
age so many eminent spirits, great saints,
have appeared in it, whom we should
thankfully behold as so many great lights
hung out by God to show the true way to
heaven."

At the same time as the " Serious Call *
of Law was published (1729), a little band
of religious students at Oxford were in the
habit of meeting together for the purpose
of mutual edification. They were un
known in 1729, but a very few years
afterwards, the names of some of them
rang through England and her colonial
possessions across the sea, as the all-
powerful leaders of a new and rapidly
spreading school of thought. John
Wesley and his brother Charles, and their
friend George Whitefield, were the prin
cipal figures in this little Oxford coterie,
We have noticed already how lax and
inefficient had become the student life in
the universities, how careless in all religious
observances. This little band did nothing,
specially to attract notice ; but their strict
lives, their endeavours to observe the rules

244

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1729.

of the Church of England, their regular
attendance Sunday by Sunday at St. Mary s
to receive the Holy Communion, called
down upon them the ridicule and adverse
criticism of many of the easy-going and
careless, if not godless residents in the once
religious university. They were surnamed
in derision the Holy Club, the Godly Club,
the Reformers, the Sacramentarians ; and
in the end the sobriquet was attached to
them which afterwards became so famous,
of the Methodists ; this last title being
applied to the little society from their
strict adherence to method, from their care
in keeping the appointed festivals and
fasts of the church, from the regularity
.and strictness of their lives, and the
methodical observance of their religious
duties.

In their meetings they would read
together ; now the classics they were
some of them good scholars now the
Greek Testament. Nor did they, in their
devotion to the ritual observance of their
church, in their constant conferences, in
their meetings for study and for prayer,
neglect the practical duties enjoined by
the Christianity they loved so well. These
men were diligent visitors among the
poor and needy of the city, and even
among the sadly neglected prisoners in the
gaol. The spring which moved them, the
influence which determined them thus to
consecrate their young lives to God and
their neighbour, seems to have been the
teaching and the writings of that strange
and remarkable mystic, something of whose
theology we have just been trying to
sketch William Law; the text book, so
to speak, which they loved to use being
especially the " Serious Call." But they

did more than rtad his burning writings,
they came also under his personal influence.
They would now and again seek his
presence in his retirement, and ask his
counsel. Years after the Oxford days,
John Wesley wrote in his journal, in 1760,
that u Mr. Law, whom I love andrevertr.ee
now, was once a kind of oracle to me."

There is nothing remarkable to relate in
the early life-story of these subsequently
famous men. The brothers Charles and
John Wesley were sons of an exemplary
clergyman who was rector of Epworth, in
Lincolnshire ; their mother was the
daughter of an eminent Nonconformist
minister, and was a woman of great mental
power, of intense piety. No doubt her
training, and the religious influence of
the Epworth home, did much to form
and strengthen the character of the two
brothers. They both were scholars of con
siderable attainments, and John became
a fellow of Lincoln College. The strange
society already alluded to, and which
attained so singular a notoriety in the
Oxford of their day, never seems to have
numbered more than fifteen members.
The originator of it was the elder brother
Charles, afterwards celebrated as the poet
of the movement. Charles became an
eloquent and winning preacher, and
although overshadowed by the surpassing
talents of his greater brother, for years
exercised a powerful and happy influence
in the sect. Another well-known name in
this saintly Oxford group was that of
Harvey, whose writings, in the years
which followed, obtained an enormous
popularity. The " Meditations," his best
known work, went through seventeen
editions in as many years ; of his "Theron

246

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

and Aspasia," the very name of which is
hardly now remembered, as many as ten
thousand copies were sold in nine months.
Harvey in the sequel became a leader in
the Calvinistic division of the Methodists,
.and a bitter opponent of his old college
friend and leader, John Wesley.

There was one more member of the
little group, however, whose name after
wards became famous in all the churches
.as the greatest of English preachers
George Whitefield. Born in 1714 in
the u Bell Inn " at Gloucester, of which his
mother was landlady, the boy George was
employed in his early days as tapster and
in other menial occupations. His boyhood
was a wild and stormy one, his surround
ings somewhat degrading and debasing ;
alternately an earnest student and a some
what dissolute hanger-on at his mother s
inn, he became a servitor-scholar at Pem
broke College, Oxford, and there, happily
for himself, fell under the influence of
the Wesley s, and became a well- known
member of the " Society of Oxford
Methodists." Returning to Gloucester
from Oxford with considerable reputation
as a promising preacher and scholar, the
bishop of the diocese, Dr. Benson, became
his friend and patron, and ordained him,
admitting him to holy orders even before
the canonical age of twenty-three. At
once he sprang into fame as a preacher of
rare and exceptional power. In his own
words he tells us, how he preached his first
sermon to a crowded congregation in his
native city, with as much freedom as if he
had been a preacher for years.

In 1735 the Oxford society was broken
up, its principal members, for different

reasons, leaving the university. The two
Wesleys, on the invitation of General
Oglethorpe, the founder of the trans-
Atlantic settlement, sailed for the colony
of Georgia. On his voyage out John
Wesley first met some Moravians,* and
was strangely fascinated by their simple,
earnest life. Much, too, in their peculiar
teaching was based upon that mysticism
of Behmen which, as we have seen, was
the foundation of the theology of Wesley s
loved master, Law. The work Wesley
proposed to himself in the colony of
Georgia was to act partly as minister to
the English settlers there, partly to labour
as missionary to the native American
Indians. But his career in Georgia, which
lasted some three years, was not by any
means a success. At this period of his
life he was a high churchman, and at
tempted to enforce rigorously the rules
and rubrics of the church in this new and
somewhat disorderly colony. Grave dis
sensions arose between him and his flock,
and the result was that Wesley and his
brother returned to England, disappointed
and somewhat disillusioned.

Again on the return voyage (1738) he
fell in with Moravians, and passed more
and more under their influence. At one
of their meetings, in the same year, in

* The Moravian community traced their origin
back to John Huss. In the seventeenth century
we hear of them as a sect of some importance
after the wave of mystic piety, of which Behmen
was the conspicuous apostle and teacher, had
passed over Germany. The society endeavoured
to lead a Christian life after the primitive model,
and, avoiding controversy, invited all sects of
Protestants to join them without giving up their
distinctive tenets. They were ever earnest and
devoted missionaries. Schleiermacher wrote of
them as the truest Christian community which
he believed existed in the outward world.

I738-]

JOHN WESLEY FOUNDS THE METHODIST SOCIETY.

247

London, he tells us how he experienced that
change in his heart, known as conversion.
" I felt," he writes, " my heart strangely
warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ
Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance
was given me that He had taken away my
sins." Closer and closer now was he
attached to the Moravian brotherhood.
At Herrnhut* he spent a short happy
season, " exceedingly strengthened," to
use his own words, " and comforted by
the conversation of this lowly people."
There was a famous Moravian teacher,
Peter Bohler, who was Wesley s guide at
this period of his life ; and although the
great founder of Methodism subsequently
separated himself from the Moravian com
munity, not a little of what he had
learned from Bohler ever remained among
the doctrinal teaching peculiar to the
Methodist sect.f

* The famous Moravian settlement in Germany.

f " From Bohler he first learned to believe that
every man, no matter how moral, how pious, or
how orthodox he may be, is in a state of damna
tion until, by a supernatural and instantaneous
process wholly unlike that of human reasoning,
the conviction flashes upon his mind that the
sacrifice of Christ has been applied to and has
expiated his sins ; that this supernatural and per
sonal conviction or illumination is what is meant
by saving faith, and that it is inseparably accom
panied by an absolute assurance of salvation and
by a complete dominion over sin. It cannot exist
when there is not a sense of the pardon of all past
and of freedom from present sins. It is impossible
that he who has experienced it should be in
serious or lasting doubt as to the fact, for its fruits
are constant peace not one uneasy thought,
freedom from sin not one unholy desire. Re
pentance and fruits meet for repentance, such as
the forgiveness of those who have offended us,
ceasing from evil and doing good, may precede
this faith, but good works in the theological sense
of the term spring from, and therefore can only
follow faith." Lecky : "England in the Eigh
teenth Century," vol. ii., chap ix., pp. 556-7.

Wesley gives the day and the moment
when this assurance of his salvation was
given him. His brother, Charles Wesley,
with fervour adopted the Moravian theory.
Whitefield, with slight modifications, took
the same view as the basis of his teaching.
So intensely did Wesley feel that he had
attained to the right conception of " saving
faith," that he positively upbraided his old
master, Law, for not having given him
" the light." But, in spite of this strange
reproof, the loving and grateful nature of
Wesley eventually regained the mastery,
and, although he never swerved from this
the great fundamental doctrine of his
teaching, which he had derived from the
Moravian Bohler, he continued ever to
bear repeated testimony to the power and
usefulness of the " Serious Call " and other
of his old master s writings.

Very rapidly now the framework of a
new organisation was formed. There was
no idea in his mind of separation from the
Anglican Church, but much irregular evan
gelisation was undertaken, which naturally
gave great umbrage to many of the clergy
of the Church of England. The company
of Wesley grew rapidly. Societies were
formed somewhat after the pattern of the
original little Oxford society, which we
have already described as the cradle of the
mighty movement. In these " societies "
the primitive Christian agapce or love
feasts were revived.* We read of the
associates passing whole nights in earnest
prayer, confessing one to another their
various shortcomings, and submitting to a
severe examination, not only as to their

* These meetings, taken from the Moravians,
are an interesting and abiding memorial of John
Wesley s former close intimacy with that body.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17401741.

deeds, but as to their very thoughts.
Field-preaching, on the suggestion of
Whitefield, was at first reluctantly
adopted, but was soon generally made
use of as the best means of reaching the
masses, to whom they considered them
selves sent. The preaching of Whitefield
shortly to be described had a wonder
ful effect in popular dissemination of the
new thought, and has been well described
as the very backbone of Methodism. A
passionate enthusiasm was thus evoked far
and wide. Still, no open hostility to the
church was avowed, and their " preaching-
houses " were represented as simply supple
mentary to the churches.

The close alliance between Wesley and
the Moravian Brethren was dissolved in
1740. Certain points in the Moravian
system were disliked by the English
evangelist. Against these Wesley preached
and taught openly. He even wrote to the
Moravian teachers in Germany, complain
ing of various doctrinal points insisted
upon by them ; and the breach was never
healed.

A more serious dissension sprang up in
1740-1, between himself and Whitefield.
After the breach they were, and continued
to be, dear friends; but Whitefield s
teaching was strongly tinctured with
Calvinism, which was opposed to all
Wesley s teaching, and the Calvinism of
the great preacher grew more pronounced
as time went on. The two friends
separated, and eventually, after Whitefield s
death, there were two distinct parties in
the Methodist community, the followers
of Whitefield being known as Calvinistic
Methodists. A touching anecdote is
remembered of the two, separated though

they were by grave doctrinal differences.
One of Whitefield s followers asked him
if he thought they would see Wesley in
heaven. u I fear not," said the great
hearted preacher, " he (Wesley) will be
so near the Throne, and we shall be at so
great a distance, we shall scarcely get a
sight of him."

In spite, however, of this extensive
schism, the Methodist movement con
tinued to gather strength. Vast numbers
of the people were stirred and influenced
by the preachers who were sent out by the
leaders of the sect. The difficulty of
finding ordained men to carry on the work
was met by the institution of lay
preachers ; and the reluctance of the clergy
to allow the followers of Wesley and
Whitefield to occupy their pulpits, was
met by the building of many chapels in
various centres, in large towns and even
in smaller country places.

All this time Wesley still professed
himself a loyal and even a devoted
adherent of the Church of England.
Indeed, his relations to the church for
many years were confused and perplexed.
The Methodists and their leader held the
doctrines contained in the Thirty-nine
Articles and in the Homilies, and Wesley
firmly maintained that the Church of
England, with all her blemishes, was
nearer the Scriptural plan than any other
church in Europe. " Be Church of
England men still," he once said ; " do
not cast away the peculiar glory which
God hath put upon you." But the
position which Wesley had taken up was
an untenable one for a clergyman. Not
only did he send out his many mission
preachers into all parts of England ; not

17401741-]

WESLEY S IRREGULAR PROCEEDINGS.

249

only did he build his many chapels for breach with the Church of England at
these to preach in, utterly disregarding all home, and the separation of the Metho-
parochial and episcopal authority ; but he dists from the Church of England did not

JOHN WESLEY.
(From tlie portrait by G. Komney.)

was guilty of many other grave irregu- take place till after their great founder s

larities, such as preaching in Dissenting death. But the " parting of the ways "

meeting-houses, and receiving communion was inevitable,
with Dissenters. Even his rash act of

ordaining superintendents and elders for Widely different from John Wesley was

America in 1784 resulted in no formal his famous fellow-evangelist, Whitefield.
5 c

250

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

1*739

Although an illustrious group of assistants,
both in the Church of England and outside
its pale, took up and developed the work,
it is not too much to say that the religious
revival of the eighteenth century, which
has produced such remarkable results, was
really due, so far as mere earthly instru
ments are concerned, to these two men.
Nor would the one have brought about the
great " revival " without the other. Wes
ley, able and fervid though he undoubtedly
was, would never have kindled the en
thusiasm of the masses. Whitefield, on
the other hand, with all his burning zeal
and unrivalled power as an orator, a power
which never seems to have been equalled
by a preacher in any age, possessed no
organising gifts. His mighty influence
would have died with him. His eighteen
thousand sermons would have been speedily
forgotten, and only an interesting historical
memory would have been left behind. Yet
Whitefield in many respects was a more
interesting personality than his far abler
coadjutor Wesley, and evidently impressed
the minds of his contemporaries in a way
never reached by the real founder of the
world-wide sect of Methodists.

What, then, is the explanation of the
unrivalled power of this remarkable man,
who for some thirty or more years exer
cised so strange a sway over tens of
thousands of his fellows, whose influence
counted for so much in the development
of the vast Methodist communion, whose
enthusiasm indirectly awoke a new and
nobler spirit in our Church of England ?
What was his secret ? Whence came that
marvellous fascination which charmed for
thirty years at least all sorts and conditions
of men the rough colliers of the Bristol

and Midland coalfields, the peasants of
Gloucestershire and Wales, the strange
crowds who make up the population of
the metropolis? Polished sceptics like
Hume and Bolingbroke, men of fashion
and men of pleasure, all more or less came
under the mighty spell of the winged,
burning words of the homely, unscholarly
preacher.

The magician himself was, as all now
acknowledge, a plain, simple man, with a
heart all aflame with love for his fellows ;
devoid of all earthly ambitions, he was
possessed by one master and all-absorbing
thought how best to press home to others
the religion he loved and believed in. To
save souls was all that Whitefield lived
for. From the day of his ordination by
bishop Benson in the stately cathedral
at Gloucester, till the hour of his death
in a humble American lodging some
thirty-four years later, worn out with in
cessant labours, he had no other thought,
no other desire. This longing was ever
paramount ; and in good truth the wish of
that great, loving heart was granted, to
an extent few earthly longings ever have
been.

It is not easy now for us to grasp the
secret of the spell he threw over so many.
Of those eighteen thousand sermons which
he is traditionally said to have preached
(the number is probably exaggerated),
very few have come down to us ; and the
perusal of these few leaves a feeling of
disappointment on the reader. As literary
compositions they are somewhat feeble.
He was aided, it is true, by a magnificent
voice, so musical and far-reaching that it
may well be considered as matchless. The
man, too, was a born orator of the highest

I739-I770-]

WH1TEFIELD AND HIS INFLUENCE.

251

order, and a consummate actor likewise,
using the word u actor " in its highest and
noblest sense. We may dwell a little upon
these sermons, for they worked a work on
the religious life of England, and upon her
established church, the blessed effect of
which is still felt among us, though more
than a century has passed since that
winning voice was hushed in death. u O,"
he once said, " that I could flee from pole
to pole preaching the everlasting Gospel."
Again and again, with only slight variations
suggested often by the immediate sur
roundings, he seems to have repeated the
same sermon. Amazing numbers thronged
to hear him year after year as he preached
in the open fields round Bristol ; in grave
yards, as at Cheltenham ; in the vast open
spaces of London, as in Moorfields and at
Kennington, or on Blackheath ; in the
Marylebone fields, then open country, and
at Newington and Hackney ; around the
pit s mouth in the Black Country ; on
Yorkshire heaths and moorlands ; now in
England, now in Wales or in Scotland
more often in the growing American
colonies. Records meet us again and
again in that restless, work-filled life, of ten
thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thou
sand, even more, who gathered round the
great orator, and listened spell-bound to
the clear-cut utterances which fell from
his lips, and penetrated to the farthest
fringes of these mighty concourses.

This amazing popularity, in England as
well as in the distant American settlements,
where he spent a very considerable portion
of his life, never seems to have waned all
through the thirty years and more of his
career ; it was maintained to the last. The
day before his death the dying evangelist

preached his last sermon at Exeter in New
England. An eye-witness tells us how an
immense multitude assembled on this l?^t
occasion. " Let me," he is reported to
have said, " Lord Jesus, go and speak for
Thee once more in the fields, seal Thy
truth, and come home and die ! " At first
he was unable to utter a word. Then
his mind kindled, and his lion-like voice
roared to the extremities of his audience.
Speaking of the uselessness of works to
merit salvation, he suddenly exclaimed in
a voice of thunder: "Works! a man get
to heaven by works ! I would as soon
think of climbing to the moon on a rope
of sand." The sermon was of inordinate
length, lasting about two hours. On the
night following he passed away.

His unrivalled power as a preacher, to
which no parallel in any age can be
adduced, was evidently owing rather to
his marvellous voice, and to his skill as an
actor though, while a consummate actor,
he was ever intensely in earnest than to
the matter of his discourses, which rarely,
if ever, rose above the commonplace.
But he was ever intensely convinced of the
truth of his words, and he succeeded in
making his auditors share his own
confidence. He ever preached " as a
dying man to dying men." Some few of
his most telling exhortations are well
remembered ; a few illustrations will give
us some faint idea of the train of thought
by which he fired the hearts of so many
thousands in England, and in the yet
greater England then fast growing up
beyond the seas. Heaven and hell, the
future lot of the lost, the judgment which
awaits us, all were favourite topics with
him. These grave subjects he handled

252

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17391770-

with a strange familiarity a familiarity
which sometimes shocks our sense of
reverence ; but Whitefield presented them
as though these awful scenes were before
his gaze, and his real oratorical power would

the judgment of the great day, for not
complying with the precept of the text
(Matt, xviii. 8, 9). ... Think you they mw
imagine Jesus Christ to be a hard master ;
or rather think you not, they would give

G K O R G E \V H I T E F I E L D.
(Front an engraving?)

thrill his listeners, would move sin-hardened
men and women again and again to tears.

"Think often," he said in one of his
earlier efforts, "on the pains of hell. Con
sider whether it is not better to cut off a
right hand or foot or pluck out a right
eye if they cause us to sin, rather than be
cast into hell. . . . Think how many
thousands there are now reserved with
damned spirits in chains of darkness unto

ten thousand times ten thousand worlds,
could they but return to life again, and take
Christ s easy yoke upon them ? And can
we dwell in everlasting burnings more than
they ? . . . Often meditate upon the joys
of heaven. Think with what unspeakable
glory those happy souls are now encircled,
who when on earth were called to deny
themselves, and were not disobedient to
the call. Hark ! methinks I hear them

254

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17391770.

chanting their everlasting hallelujahs, and
spending an eternal day in echoing
triumphant songs of joy. And do not you
long to join the heavenly choir ? Do not
your hearts burn within you ? "

In a notable sermon on the fashionable
amusements of the day, f on the words
"They thrust him out of the city," we
find the following : " If you were of the
world, if you would conform to the ways,
manners, and customs of the world, if you
would go to a play, or ball, or masquerade,
the world then would love you . . . but
because you despise these polite entertain
ments, and go to hear a sermon in a field,
. . . they esteem you as methodically
mad, and fit only for Bedlam. If you
would frequent horse-racing, assemblies,
and cock-fighting, then you would be
caressed and admired by our gay gentle
men ; but you despising these innocent
diversions (as the world calls them) makes
them esteem you as a parcel of rabble of
no taste, who are going to destroy your
selves by being over-righteous.
Indeed, our polite gentry would like
religion very well, if it did but countenance
an assembly, or allow them to read novels,
plays and romances, if they might go
a-visiting on Sundays, or to a play or ball
when they pleased. In short, they would
like to lead a fashionable polite life, to take
their full swing of pleasure, and go to
heaven when they die. But if they were
admitted to heaven without a purification
of heart and life, they would be unhappy
there. It would be a hell to them.
Angels and all good men would be

* Preached first at St. Andrew s, Holborn, 1737.
f Preached, among other places, on Blackheath
to about 20,000 listeners, 1739.

esteemed enthusiasts and madmen.
Heaven might be agreeable, if there were
the same polite entertainments there, as
they seem so much pleased with here, but
there is never a horse-course or cock-pit
all over heaven."

He delighted in imagery, sometimes
drawn from some passing scene. On one
occasion, preaching to a vast throng, he
told them " How in a few days we should
all meet at the judgment-seat of Christ, we
shall all form a part of that vast assembly
which will gather before His throne.
Every eye will behold the Judge. With a
voice whose call you must abide and
answer, He will inquire whether on earth
you strove to enter in at the strait gate.
. . . My blood turns cold when I think
how many of you will seek to enter in and
shall not be able. O, what plea can you
make before the Judge ? . . . No, you
must answer, 1 1 made myself easy in the
world, by flattering myself that all would
end well, but I have deceived my own soul,,
and am lost. . . . O sinner, by all your
hopes of happiness, I beseech you to-
repent ! Let not the wrath of God be
awakened ! Let not the fires of eternity
be kindled against you. See there," said
the impassioned orator (he was preaching
in the open air), pointing to a flash of
lightning : u it is a glance from the angry
eye of Jehovah ! Hark," he went on r
raising his finger in a listening attitude, as-
the thunder broke in a tremendous crash :
" it was the voice of the Almighty as He
passed by in His anger." As the sound
died away, went on the narrative of the
moving scene, Whitefield covered his face
with his hands and fell on his knees,
apparently lost in prayer. The storm

1739 1770-]

WHITEFIELD S PREACHING.

255

passed rapidly, and the sun bursting forth,
threw across the heavens the magnificent
arch of peace. Rising and pointing to it,
the preacher cried, " Look on the rainbow,
how beautiful it is ; the hands of the Most
High have bended it."

His imagery was often very varied and
strangely vivid. Once, illustrating the peril
of sinners, he painted an old blind man
deserted by his dog, stumbling fearfully
over- a desolate moor, feeling his way
feebly with his staff, and gradually drawing
near the edge of a dizzy precipice, arriving
just on the verge. Lord Chesterfield, who
was among the listeners to this sermon,
lost all command of himself, and cried out :
"Good God, he is gone! On another
occasion, preaching before a great company
of sailors, he described the oncoming of a
terrible storm. " Hark ! " cried Whitefield,
" don t you hear the thunder pealing ?
Don t you see those blinding flashes of
lightning ? Every man to his post ! Mark
those waves rising and dashing over the
ship. It is growing darker, the tempest
rages, the masts are gone, the ship is on
her beam ends what next ? " " The long
boat ! take to the long boat !" shouted the
excited sailor listeners.

At another time he would describe the
solemn scene of a court of justice, and
then would paint the condemnation scene.
With eyes brimming over with tears, with
a voice tremulous with pity, after a solemn
hush he would pull out the black cap -he
had prepared ready to his hand, and,
putting it on, would proceed : u Sinner,
I must do it, I must pronounce sentence
upon you." Then, with a sudden change
of voice, he thundered forth : " Depart
from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire ! "

Tears were ever ready with this strange
man. He has been heard to apologise
thus for his emotion : " You blame me for
weeping, but how can I help it when you
will not weep for yourselves, though your
immortal souls are on the verge of destruc
tion, and for aught you know you are
hearing your last sermon ? " The cold
sceptic, Hume, has described a whole as
sembly, listening to Whitefield s burning
impassioned words, as weeping. To David
Hume this preaching seemed to possess a
strange fascination. He describes one of
these impassioned scenes thus : The at
tendant angel, Whitefield told us, is just
about to leave the threshold of this sanc
tuary and ascend to heaven. " And shall
he ascend," cried the preacher, " and not
bear with him the news of one sinner
among all this multitude, reclaimed from
the error of his ways ? " Then Whitefield
stamped his foot, and, lifting up hands
and eyes to heaven, cried aloud : " Stop,
Gabriel, stop, ere you enter the sacred
portals, and yet carry with you the news
of one sinner converted to God ! "

Peter his fall and conversion was a
favourite topic with the great evangelist.
" Methinks I see him wringing his hands,
rending his garments, smiting his breast,"
he would say. " See how it heaves. Oh
what piteous sighs and groans are those
which come from the bottom of his heart !
Alas ! it is too big to speak, but his tears,
his bitter repenting tears, bespeak this to
be the language of his repenting soul:
Alas ! where have I been ? What have I
done ? With whom have I been convers
ing ? Denied the Lord of Glory with
oaths and curses, denied that I ever knew
him and now whither shall I go ? "

&gt; *4

/ .

lS &

&gt;

BEGINNING OF A LETTER FROM WHITEFIELD. DATED FROM BRISTOL, DEC. 28, 1791.

{British Museum.)

17391770.

WHITEFIELD S PREACHING.

257

Then Whitefield would pause and hide
his face in a fold of his mantle, and a
great hush would come over the awe
struck congregation.*

It was natural that such a man, who
during so many years was the chief in
strument in the great religious revival of
the century, who stirred up among so many

CHARLES WESLEY.
(From an engraving.}

* Considering the enormous number of sermons
preached by Whitefield during his thirty-four years
of active work, it is strange how very few of these
have been preserved ; for the last thirty-one years of
his career only thirty-five of these discourses are
extant. Of the sermons of the first three years we
have some rare reports. Extracts from the more
famous of all these are given in Mr. Tyerman s
" Life of Whitefield," the latest and best account
of the great evangelist. The second edition was
published in 1890. A sympathetic sketch of the
life and work of Whitefield is given in Mr. Lecky s
" History of England in the Eighteenth Century "

(vol. ii., chap, ix.) " The Religious Revival," in
which the eminent writer does not think it beneath
the dignity of his " serious " history to insert con
siderable extracts from the few published sermons,
so important did he deem the influence of the great
preacher upon the religious life of the century.
The essay on the " Evangelical Succession " in Sir
James Stephen s "Ecclesiastical Essays " dwells at
some length on Whitefield s career. The chapter
which deals with Whitefield in Abbey and Over-
ton s " English Church in the Eighteenth Century,"
though interesting, gives scarcely sufficient pro
minence to his work and influence.

2 5 8

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17261784.

thousands a passion of devotion, would
excite much opposition, would be vilified
and criticised, would be intensely hated as
well as ardently loved. Cowper, who in a
well-known poem describes the great revi
valist in moving, eloquent language, alludes
to this when he writes of him as one who

" Stood pilloried on infamy s high stage
And bore the pelting scorn of half an age,
The very butt of slander, and the blot
For every dart that malice ever shot.
The man that mentioned him at once dismissed
All mercy from his lips, and sneered and hissed.
His aim was mischief, and his zeal pretence,
His speech rebellion against common sense." *

But the sarcasm and the gibes, the false
accusations and the lampoons, are now
forgotten, and only the mighty work for
God and his neighbour, which this strange
gifted man worked among us, is remem
bered. Well did Cowper express the fairer
verdict of posterity in the beautiful lines
of the same striking poem :

" Now, Truth, perform thine office ; waft aside
The curtain drawn by ignorance and pride,
Reveal (the man is dead) to wondering eyes
This more than monster in his proper guise.
He loved the world that hated him ; the tear
That dropped upon his Bible was sincere.
Assailed by scandal and the tongue of strife,
His only answer was a blameless life.

******
Blush, Calumny, and write upon his tomb,
If honest eulogy can spare the room,
Thy deep repentance of thy thousand lies,
Which, aimed at him, have pierced the offended

skies ;

And say, Blot out my sin, confessed, deplored,
Against Thine image in Thy saint, O Lord ! "f

The third of the great evangelical re
vival chiefs who may be reckoned in the
Methodist camp, is John Wesley s brother,
Charles. At a great distance from the
incomparable preacher of the movement
* Cowper: "Hope." f Ibid.

Whitefield, and the master spirit who
organised the vast sect and gave it its
constitution his brother John, Charles
Wesley played no inconsiderable part in
the development of the revival. A preacher
of real power, an able and devoted and,
higher still, a saintly man, he will ever be
remembered in the eventful story of the
rise and progress of evangelicalism as the
song-man of the party. Music and sacred
song has ever played, will ever play a very
influential part in all religious worship.
And the hymnology of the period when the
Wtsleys began to teach and Whitefield to
preach was sorely in need of an adaptation
to popular worship. Charles Wesley, in a
high degree, emphatically possessed the
gift of sacred poetry. The effect of his
soul-stirring compositions not a little con
tributed to the success of those vast
gatherings for which the days of White-
field and the Wesleys will be ever memor
able in the religious story of England.

An enormous number of hymns are
attributed to his prolific pen. Some of
these have become " classical " in our
language, and are found in all the hymnals
of the Church of England, as well as in
those specially used by the Nonconformist
bodies, and are among the most loved and
popular of our English sacred songs.
His hymns are loved alike in the simple
service of the village church, in the
youthful gatherings of the crowded
Sunday-schools, in the solemn praise of
the great cathedral. We would instance
the beautiful hymns, " Jesu, lover of my
soul " ; u Lo ! He comes, with clouds
descending " ; " Soldiers of Christ, arise " ;
" Hark, the herald angels sing " ; as
among the best known of the compositions.

17261784.]

WESLEY AND WHITEFIELD SEPARATE.

259

which the church owes to the saintly poet
of the evangelical revival of the eighteenth
century.

In the annals specially devoted to the
history of that world- wide Methodist sect
which owes its popular title of " Wesleyan "
to its illustrious founder, more space than
we can give here would naturally be
devoted to the memorable split in the
Methodist camp, which dated from 1740.
In the preceding year, 1739, Wesley
preached at Bristol, and subsequently
published his famous sermon on " Free
Grace," in which the doctrine of repro
bation the terrible Calvinistic teaching,
which asserts that by virtue of an eternal,
unchangeable decree of God, one part of
mankind are saved and the rest infallibly
damned was condemned in the severest
language. Charles Wesley composed a
hymn which w r as affixed to his brother s
sermon, in which some strong anti-
Calvinistic lines occur, such as

" He calls as many souls as breathe,

And all may hear the call.

*****

We all may find the lowly way,
And call the living Saviour ours.

*****

Come freely, come whoever will,
And living water take."

Closing with the strong anti-Calvinistic
expression

" No, Lord, Thine inmost bowels cry
Against the dire decree."

Whitefield, who was ever a Calvinist,
replied, and early in 1741 wrote to the
Wesleys : u My dear, dear brothers, why
did you throw out the bone of contention ?
Why did you print that sermon against
predestination? Why did you, dear bro
ther Charles, affix your hymn [above

quoted] ? " But the die was cast ; the
leaders of the revival had embraced the
views which have since distinguished the
two great schools of Methodism. Gradually
the two camps were formed. The friends
remained dear friends till death overtook
them, and carried them into that country
where these holy and humble men would
find the true solution of the hard questions
which divided them on earth. But the
schism was perpetuated, and Calvinistic
Methodism was established as a separate
communion, with its body of ministers and
its separate chapels, the followers of
Wesley (the- Wesleyan Methodists), how
ever, far outnumbering their Calvinistic
opponents. We need not trace the result
of this great schism any further, the
impulse given to the evangelistic revival
by Wesley and Whitefield, and their
followers, being quite independent^of any
internal divisions among the Methodists
themselves. What sank into the hearts of
the English people were the evangelical
doctrines revived by the great Methodist
preachers and their school; doctrines which
through the institution of field-preaching
and the marvellous power of Whitefield,
and, at a great distance from Whitefield, by
Wesley and his disciples, were brought
home to vast multitudes attracted by the
magic of their oratory, and the practical r
homely theology of the new teaching.

More important far to the Church of
England was the final separation of the
Methodists as a communion from the
Established Church. The Wesley brothers
we have dwelt already on this during
their whole public career regarded them
selves as clergymen of the Church of
England. In early life John Wesley was

260

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1784.

even a high churchman, and believed in of England, and outside, if not in open
the apostolic succession ; and to the last opposition to, her canons and discipline,
he professed a warm attachment to the The lay preachers, who were so prominent

LETTER FROM JOHN WESLEY CONTAINING THE WORDS " I STILL THINK, WHEN THE METHODISTS LEAVE
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, GOD WILL LEAVE THEM." (British

Establishment. Many circumstances, how
ever, as the revival movement developed,
contributed to the final separation. From
a very early stage the elaborate and skil
fully constructed Methodist organisation
existed a thing apart from the Church

a feature in it, were an order unknown
to the Church of England, and worked
absolutely independently of her control.
Some of them (without the consent of
Wesley) even administered the holy
sacrament of the Lord s Supper.

1784.]

SEPARATION OF WESLEY FROM THE CHURCH.

261

Time passed on, the movement every
year gathering strength. Wesley gradu
ally convinced himself* that bishops and
presbyters were of the same order, and
that the right of ordaining belonged to
him, as well as to the apostolically de
scended episcopal order. It is difficult to
gauge what was in his mind when, so late
as 1783, he said : "In every possible way
I have advised the Methodists to keep to
the church. They that do this must
prosper best in their souls. I have
observed it long. If ever the Methodists
leave the church, I must leave them."
And yet in 1784 he ordained superintend
ents and elders for America, and in the
following year for Scotland ! It is true

* Compare Lecky s "England in Eighteenth
Century," chap, ix., and Abbey and Overton s
" English Church in the Eighteenth Century,"
chap. ix. It was in 1784 that Wesley took the
decisive step which finally severed the Methodists
from the Church of England, when he ordained
Coke and Ashbury to be superintendents (Lecky
adds "or bishops") of the American Methodists,
and Whatcoat and Vasey to be elders. In the
year following he ordained ministers for Scotland.

that his growing work in the colonies
sorely needed ordained ministers ; but
such a proceeding as the one he deliber
ately adopted, could only be regarded, from
the standpoint of the church to which he
professed to be so ardently attached, as
schismatic. Its inevitable result was that
complete separation which so many ear
nest and devoted Christians unfeignedly
mourn, though many have since deplored
the inelasticity of the organisation of the
Church of England, which failed to find a
place for the somewhat irregular en
thusiasm of Wesley and his disciples.
These think, not perhaps without reason,
that the last and fatal act, which finally
separated his followers from that Anglican
communion which Wesley ever professed
to love with a changeless love, might have
been avoided had the English hierarchy, in
the earlier developments of the movement,
shown greater sympathy with the en
thusiasm which fired so many dulled
hearts with a fervent love for the religion
of the Crucified.

WESLEY S MOVEABLE PULPIT-

CHAPTER LXXII.

THE EVANGELICAL REVIVAL IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

Influence of the Methodists in the Church itself Its Gradual but Extensive Spread Grimshaw
and Berridge James Harvey and his Works William Romaine Henry Venn John Newton
of Olney Thomas Scott Value of his Commentary Joseph and Isaac Milner John Fletcher
of Madeley Richard Cecil Influence of the Evangelical Party at the close of the Century
Their Cardinal Doctrine of Conversion Their Defect in Sacramental Teaching Career of
William Wilberforce Abolition of Slavery Work of Philanthropy The " Clapham Sect "
Foundation and Growth of Religious Societies The Church Missionary, Religious Tract, and
Bible Societies Growth of Sunday Schools Opposition to Methodist Fervour The Hier
archy Opposed to Methodism But Influenced by it Nevertheless Testimony of Seeker,
Warburton, and Paley.

in any way impugned the fundamental
doctrines ever held by the Catholic Church.
No serious fault could be found with their
field-preaching, which was for years the
great engine of the religious movement.
The utmost that could for a long while
be urged against them, was a somewhat
loose submission to the discipline of the
Established Church. The grave points of
divergence from church order, which, alas !
in the end led to separation, only arose
after many years ; and when the parting of
Methodism from Anglicanism became a re
cognised necessity, the work which the great
movement had worked in the Church of
England had been done ; the new influence
had already permeated it far and wide.

A sketch of the lives of a few among
the more prominent of the English clergy
who were gradually touched by the new
spirit aroused by the Methodist evangelists,
will give some idea of the novel influence
which after the years 1738-39 slowly but
surely spread among many of the Anglican
ministers, and influenced to an enormous
degree their work and teaching. It was at
first, as we have said, very gradual ; no
sudden and sharp " revival " can be

effect of the evangelical revival
under the leadership of Whitefield
and the two Wesleys was incon-
testably very great. The passionate, soul-
stirring preaching of Whitefield, the
more thoughtful but no less earnest
efforts of John Wesley and his brother
Charles and others, before many years
had reached the hearts of uncounted
thousands. Gradually, in spite of a dis
trust which not unnaturally this some
what novel presentment of Christianity
awoke in the minds of many of the clergy,
and of an opposition which was the result
of the distrust, the doctrine and teaching
of the Methodists gained ground in the
Church of England itself.

Many devout men in the church re
cognised that a new and living piety was
being kindled among the people. For
many years after the names of the great
Methodists had become household words
in England and the new and greater
Britain which was growing up beyond the
seas, nothing in the doctrinal teaching of
the fervid evangelists seriously conflicted
with- the doctrines of the Thirty-nine
Articles, nothing was urged by them which

1748-1764-] INFLUENCE OF WESLEY IN THE CHURCH.

263

marked ; and it was well that it should
have been so, for such sudden outbursts
of religious fervour too often die down
and leave behind them no real fruit. But
it gathered strength as time went on.
Romaine, one of the earliest of the
Anglicans who became (about 1748) in
real earnest a disciple of Wesley s school
of thought, said he could then only reckon
up six or seven evangelical clergymen in
England. Several years before he died in
1795, there were more than five hundred
who were reckoned as closely attached to
the evangelical school. In 1764, when
Wesley tried to form a union of these
men, only some fifty names were suggested
as probable adherents.

Among the earliest of the more notor
ious Anglican followers of Wesley and
Whitefield, were William Grimshaw and
John Berridge. The names of these two
early evangelists are coupled together, as
examples of English clergymen who imi
tated the founders of Methodism in the
practice of constantly itinerating through
large districts. William Grimshaw, the
first of the two (1708-1763), was the in
timate friend of the Wesleys and of the
leading Methodists, and became a fervid
admirer of their ways of working. His
Calvinistic views he shared with White-
field. Throughout his career he continued
his duties as a parish priest, which, how
ever, he varied by constant preaching or
missionary journeys through Lancashire,
Cheshire, and Derbyshire. His own parish,
where for many years he laboured with
extraordinary assiduity, was Haworth,
which in later days acquired a widespread
fame as being the home of the author of
" Jane Eyre " and her sisters. So world

wide, indeed, is the name of the Bronte
family, that Haworth at once suggests
memories connected with them, while the
name of the once great evangelical teacher
is utterly forgotten. But Grimshaw in his
day was a real power, and his teaching and
life of ceaseless work did much to popu
larise the new movement in the wide
district where he worked. To give one
instance of his influence : when he first
came to Haworth, it was a desolate and
careless parish of that wild Yorkshire
county, its roll of communicants scarcely
mustering twelve. Before he died the
twelve had grown to nigh twelve hundred.

The other name, which we have coupled
with that of Grimshaw, was that of John
Berridge (1716-1793). He, too, was a
follower of Whitefield, not only in his
Calvinistic teaching, but in his success in
itinerating as a missionary preacher all
through the eastern counties. Berridge
was rector of Everton in Bedfordshire.
This early disciple of evangelicalism made
a deep and lasting impression over the
wide area (including several counties) em
braced by his labours.

Another of these earlier converts to the
new school of thought, who have left
behind them a considerable reputation as
evangelical pioneers, was a man of a very
different type from the two fervid though
somewhat erratic and eccentric teachers
whose careers we have been sketching.
James Harvey (1714-1758), a college pupil
and the spiritual son of John Wesley, later
the parson of Weston Favell in Northamp
tonshire, was one of the original band of
Oxford Methodists, and ranks among the
earliest of the evangelicals. His fame was
owing to his pen rather than to his

264

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17481790.

preaching ; and his " Meditations," and
the subsequently composed " Theron and
Aspasia," attained a vast popularity in his
day and time. It seems strange to us now
that the curiously bombastic and seemingly
affected style of his writings could ever
have been popular ; and yet they were
translated into
several foreign lan
guages, and were
long considered as
standard works 01
divinity. The in
fluence of Harvey
through his writings,
in the early years
of the movement
was very great.

William Romaine
(1714-1795) repre
sented a very differ
ent order among
the evangelical pio
neers who had been
stirred by the Me
thodist fervour. A
scholar of no mean
acquirements, he
held for a time,
though with no

great distinction, the Gresham professor
ship of astronomy. As a painstaking
Hebraist, and editor of the Hebrew Dic
tionary and Concordance of Calasio, he
obtained considerable distinction in the
learned world ; but it was as a preacher of
singular power and attractiveness that he
acquired his great reputation. Most of his
middle and later life was spent in London,
where he was successively assistant preacher
at St. George s, Hanover Square, and St.

THE COUNTESS OF HUNTINGDON

Dunstan s-in-the-West. He obtained no
preferment in the church of which he was
so distinguished an ornament until he was
fifty-two years of age, when he was ap
pointed to the rectory of St. Anne s,
Blackfriars ; his well-known loyalty and
devotion to the Methodist cause, viewed
with suspicion and
distrust by the
government and by
the hierarchy of the
church long after it
had won its way
among the lower
and middle classes,
effectually pre
vented his well-
merited advance
ment. Romaine was
the chaplain and
intimate adviser of
lady Huntingdon,
the well-known pa
troness and devoted
friend of Whitefield,
until the open seces
sion of 1781. For
many years he was
one of the most
generally respected
and influential of the evangelical leaders.

Henry Venn (1724-1797) was another
of the more remarkable among the
Anglican clergy who threw in his lot with
the earlier Methodists. During his eleven
years incumbency of the important vicar
age of Huddersfield, he made his great
reputation as a preacher. In the busy
Yorkshire town, and far and wide in
the central districts of England, he was
famed also for his successful pastoral

1725-1807.]

NEWTON OF OLNEY.

work, and the noble example he set has been styled* with some truth " one

of a devoted parish priest. When ill- of the four great evangelists of the

health compelled him to resign his Church of England in these latter days,"

busy town sphere, he retired into a the others being John Newton, Thomas

country living, where in something like Scott, and Joseph Milner, and Venn

retirement he spent the last quarter of occupying the first place among the

OLNEY.

Photo : IV. S. Wright, Olney.

a century of his life. Great, however,
as was the influence of Venn as a
preacher and pastor upon the life of
the church, his title to posthumous fame
mainly rests upon his literary work.
His devotional work, the " Complete
Duty of Man," will ever hold a very
high place among such serious treatises ;
it is by no means forgotten yet, and
is still read and admired. Henry Venn

8 D

evangelicals as the systematic teacher of
the whole Christian institutes.

The second of these four, John Newton
(1725-1807), "held himself forth and was
celebrated by others, as the great living
example of the regenerating efficacy of
the principles of his school." f His was

* Sir James Stephen s Essays on Ecclesiastical
Biography : " The Evangelical Succession."
f Ibid.

266

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17251807.

indeed a strange career. A stormy and
dissolute youth and early manhood was
spent as a sailor, and subsequently as a
slave-dealer. In the American colonies he
became acquainted with George White-
field, and under the mighty influence of
the Methodist preacher, the once profane
and vicious man was changed into the
" Newton of Olney," whose religious
fervour and humble earnestness became a
household word among those whose piety
and self-devotion has wrought so mighty
a work in England and her colonies. At
the age of thirty-nine he received ordin
ation in the Church of England, and
became the curate of Olney, in Bucking
hamshire ; this was in the year 1764. His
one life s romance was his enduring love
for Mary Cattley. It began when she was
a girl of fourteen. After seven years of
waiting, he married her. The passionate
attachment endured till her death, and
beyond her death. Among his many
writings, which unveiled the inmost
thoughts of his soul, he tells us how he
watched her die ; how, fearful of brooding
over his loss, he preached three times
while she lay dead in the house ; and then
delivered her funeral sermon.

Newton s published letters, especially
one collection, to which he gave the title
of " Cardiphonia," had a wide circulation,
and found their way into innumerable
hearts. The wild and wicked early life
was succeeded by half a century of bright
Christian endeavour. His sermons, his
published letters, his close intimacy with
the poet Cowper, his quiet but boundless
influence over most of the evangelical
leaders of the age, have placed John
Newton among the foremost of the makers

of the Evangelical school. No one of these
great men, perhaps, has succeeded like
Newton in convincing sinners where and
how they might be saved ; no one,
perhaps, has with equal force set forth the
simple evangelical gospel. He told out to
the men of his generation what he had
been, as " the willing slave of every evil, as
the seducer of others, as big with mischief,
as ever shunned and despised as a wicked
man even by the savages among whom he
once lived ; " and then he showed how even
such a prince among evil men as he had
long been, could be saved by looking unto
Christ, by throwing himself on His mercy
as the mighty, all-powerful Saviour. In
the new strength thus acquired, he
showed how the once hardened sinner
could live a life, if not of happiness, at
least of blessedness. Men may mock at
Newton ; may cynically question his taste
in thus laying bare the secrets of his heart ;
but few men have swayed the hearts of his
brethren as did Newton of Olney, or have
turned more erring men into the narrow
path of holiness and self-devotion. His
simple secret was his intense passion for
Christ, as the all-powerful Saviour of
sinners.

Contemporary with Newton was his
successor at Olney, Thomas Scott (1746-
1821). He may justly be considered
Newton s spiritual son, for it was under
the influence of Newton s life and earnest
arguments that Scott modelled his long
and laborious career. As curate of Olney,
then as chaplain of the Lock Hospital in
London, and finally in the humble and
remote benefice of Aston Sandford, this
unwearied writer during a prolonged life
struggled with deep poverty. No patron,

1746 13^:1. J

THOMAS SCOTT AND HIS COMMENTARY.

strange to say, either in the State or in
private life, arose to help him in his painful
career, although long before his death his
name as the greatest Biblical student of
the age was known and fevered wherever
the English language was spoken. He
lived, comparatively speaking, unheeded
and unknown. But no high preferment
would have done for him what his own
indomitable perseverance and ceaseless
industry accomplished, and none of the
evangelical divines in the last half of the
eighteenth century has left behind him
a more honoured memory. Uncounted
thousands have pored over that massive
Commentary which bears his name, and
have drawn their one comfort, that one
an ever-deepening faith, from his quiet
solemn words and pious teaching.

In later times men take up one or other
of the six quarto volumes of Scott s great
work, and often lay it down with a feeling
of disappointment. It is undeniably often
tedious, and a great sameness pervades
every part of the gigantic work. The
scholar who searches for fresh light on
disputed readings, or hopes for vivid illus
trations drawn from history and geography,
or who looks for patristic or mediaeval
lore, searches in vain : his hopes and pains
are seldom realised. But as a simple
devotional commentary it is unrivalled ;
and as such its words have gone home to
the hearts of thousands. It is, too, a vast
Biblical treasury, in which Scripture is
interpreted mainly by Scripture. Some
have even termed it a " magnified con
cordance," so rich it is in the comparison
of one text or statement with another,
every passage of the Bible being carefully
collated with the rest bearing upon the

same truth. The six great volumes are
" not only replete with thought, but with
a greater amount or solid thought than
perhaps any other man ever accumulated
in the solitary and unaided exercise of his
own powers of meditation. There they
stand, and shall stand for generations yet
to come, those bulky tomes ! a huge
Cyclopean mass, defying alike the laws
of architecture and the tooth of time, a
vast artificial granary from which inferior
builders may be supplied with materials
already wrought and shaped for their puny
edifices."*

The popularity of this Commentary,
although at once bulky and costly, was
enormous in England and in her colonies,
12,000 copies of the English and 25,000
of the American editions being issued be
fore Thomas Scott passed away.f Owing,
however, to the simplicity and ignorance
of the writer in all business matters, this
vast sale brought no relief to his heavy
burden of poverty, and only far on in life
the noble generosity and devoted friend
ship of Charles Simeon freed him from the
pecuniary troubles which were crushing
him. It seems well-nigh incredible that
amidst such untoward surroundings, a
work of the magnitude and gravity of
the great Biblical commentary could ever
have been carried to a successful issue.
Other works proceeded from his tireless
pen, some of deep interest ; notably "The
Force of Truth." But his opus magnum

* Sir James Stephen s Ecclesiastical Essays :
"The Evangelical Succession."

f Mr. Overton ("English Church in the Eigh
teenth Century") considers that the immediate
success, at least in the history of works of similar
magnitude, was perhaps almost unparalleled in
literary history.

268

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17441797.

was the Commentary we have described
above.

The last of the famous four was Joseph
Milner, the ecclesiastical historian (1744-
1797). There were two brothers, Joseph
and Isaac Milner, both of whom rank as
distinguished leaders in the evangelical
revival of the century. Isaac, the younger
(1751-1820), was the only evangelical
clergyman of the period who attained to
high preferment in the church. A
singularly distinguished senior wrangler,
he became professor of mathematics and
president of Queen s College, in the
university of Cambridge, and subsequently
dean of Carlisle ; and during a long life
largely contributed through his influence
to spread the peculiar views of the
evangelical party in his university, and
among the clergy of the north of England.
But his brother Joseph, the historian, ex
ercised by his writings a far wider influence.
His Church History, a very weighty and
important contribution to English literature,
has been superseded in later years by other
and more scientific chronicles, but it was
once largely read and studied. One distin
guished merit of this great work deserves
special mention, viz. his use of the
writings of the early fathers,* at a time
when patristic literature was little studied.
It was said, too, that while Mosheim wrote
the history of sinners, Milner dwelt in his
work especially on the story of the saints
of Christendom. As might have been
expected, the work was deeply coloured
by his desire to see the peculiar tenets of

* Cardinal Newman, for instance, traces his first
love for patristic literature to his delight in read
ing the extracts from St. Augustine and other
Fathers in Milner s History.

his party reflected in the teaching of
the eminent churchmen of all ages.

No general picture of the prominent
men of the evangelical revival of the
eighteenth century, who were thus strongly
influenced by Wesley, can be considered
complete without the beautiful figure of
the saintly man known as " Fletcher of
Madeley " (1729-1785) being introduced
into it. He was an earnest and soul-
stirring preacher, though not an orator.
He w r as a considerable writer, his works
filling some ten volumes. And yet none
of his books, highly esteemed though they
still are among Wesley ans, are marked by
any especial excellences. He has left%
however, behind him a reputation quite
unique among his contemporaries. There
was a something in this quiet, undis
tinguished clergyman that impressed all
who had the good fortune to come in
contact with him, with the feeling that he
who had been talking with them came
very lately from the Mount of God. An
unearthly goodness and rare graciousness
seemed to play like an aureole of glory
about his homely presence. Very singular
was the impression he made on all sorts
and conditions of men, from the rough
colliers in his Shropshire parish, to the
highly - born countess of Huntingdon.
Even Voltaire is reported to have com
pared the winning character of Fletcher
of Madeley with that of Jesus Christ. He
was the occasional visitor and general
superintendent of lady Huntingdon s
training college for ministers at Trevecca ;
and Dr. Benson, the head-master of the
institution, gives us some curious details
as to the effect of Fletcher s visits. u He
was received among us," he says, " as an

1729 --I785-]

JOHN FLETCHER OF MADELEY.

269

angel of God. I cannot describe the however, outlived him for several years,

veneration in which we all held him. The great founder of the Methodists has

Like Elijah in the school of the prophets, left us in his sermon on the text, " Mark

he was revered, loved, almost adored. the perfect man," the following remark-

My heart kindles while I write." Mr. able description of him as truly a saint of

FLETCHER OF MADELEY.

If his brother s conscience was wounded with a sense of guilt, he hastened to meet him with healing remedies." Benson s
"Life of Fletcher."

Venn once replied to one who asked him
his opinion of Fletcher : " He was a
luminary a luminary, did I say? He
was a sun." John Wesley himself, to
whom Fletcher was passionately devoted,
esteemed him above all other men, and at
one time desired that he should be his
successor and leader of his sect. Wesley,

God : " I was intimately acquainted with
him for above thirty years. . . . Many
exemplary men have T known, holy in
heart and life, within fourscore years, but
one equal to him I have not known one
so inwardly and outwardly devoted to
God. So blameless a character in every
respect I have not iound either in Europe

270

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1748 1810,

or America, and I scarce expect to find
another such on this side of eternity."
Fletcher lived and died vicar of the
remote and poor parish of Madeley. On
one occasion, when asked by one in high
position closely connected with the
government of the day, whether any
preferment would be acceptable to him,
he replied, " I want nothing, only more
grace." But his influence among the men
of the " movement " seems to have been
simply boundless not as preacher, writer,
or organiser, but higher still, as " a holy
man of God who passeth by us con
tinually."

A very brief notice of one more among
the thought-leaders of this spiritual re
vival will close these brief sketches.
Richard Cecil (1748-1810), though an
earnest evangelical, was one of those broad-
minded Catholics who, while deeply im
pressed with the fervour of the Methodist
preachers and the truth of their favourite
doctrines, saw clearly how easily their
teaching might pass into exaggeration,
and how soon great Catholic truth might
be, if not forgotten, at least ignored. He
was minister to a wealthy middle-class
congregation in Bedford Row, London,
and his work lay principally among cul
tured people. Some of his words are
worthy of quotation, as showing what
was working in the minds of many of
the more thoughtful evangelicals. " The
middle path is generally the wise path,
but there are few wise enough to find it.
Because Papists have made too much of
some things, Protestants have made too
little of them. . . . Because one party
has exalted the Virgin Mary as a divinity,
the other can hardly think of that

most highly favoured among women with
common respect. The Papist puts the
Apocrypha into his canon ; the Protestant
will scarcely regard it as an ancient record.
The Popish heresy of human merit in
justification, drove Luther on the other
side into the most unwarrantable and
unscriptural statements of that doctrine.
Papists consider grace as inseparable from
the participation of sacraments ; Protes
tants too often lose sight of them as
instituted means of conveying grace."*
His ill-health prevented him from playing
the part of a prominent leader in the theo
logical contests and discussions of the time ;
but his lofty, pure character, his culture^
and reputation for scholarship, procured him
a high place among the leading evangelicals
whose lives and teaching worked so signal
a work in the Church of England.

Before the first years of the nineteenth
century the " evangelicals," as they were
generally termed, had become an im
portant and influential party in the English
church, and their work continued to grow.
The men whose lives and teaching we
have endeavoured briefly to sketch, and
their pupils and followers, u infused into the
English Church a new fire and passion of
devotion, kindled a spirit of fervent philan
thropy, raised the standard of clerical duty r
and completely altered the tone and tend
ency of the preaching of its ministers. At
the close of the eighteenth century the
evangelical movement had become the
almost undisputed centre of religious ac
tivity in England." f It was in the cities
and principal centres of population that

* From Cecil s " Remains."
f Lecky : " England in the Eighteenth Century,"
chap. ix.

circa 1750-1800.] THE DOCTRINES OF EVANGELICALISM,

271

the new school especially flourished. We
have instanced leading evangelicals in
London and York, in Hull, Huddersfield,
and even in the university of Cambridge ;
and these are only examples of many in
populous centres influenced by the teach
ing of the spiritual sons of Whitefield and
the two Wesleys. In the rural districts,
although, as might have been expected, the
movement made slower progress and was
less pronounced, there were still many
clergymen of the type of Thomas Scott
and Venn. On the whole, the revival in
the Church of England was indeed deep
and far-reaching.

What was the especial doctrine or
doctrines which inspired this mighty
movement ? Something, surely, had been
needed to kindle those many hearts
among the people, which we have seen in
a thousand cases were all aflame with a
new enthusiasm for holiness and righteous
ness. We must be studiedly brief here,
for it is not the province of a history to
discuss theological questions at any length.
Only a few guiding thoughts can be in
dicated, which may assist the reader of our
story to form some idea of what was the
mainspring of the evangelical revival.

First and foremost, it may be laid down
as absolutely certain that every one
of the great fundamental dogmas of the
Catholic Church, such as the doctrine of
the Trinity, of the Godhead of the Blessed
Second Person in this Trinity, the redemp
tion by the precious blood of Christ, the
inspiration of the Holy Scriptures of the
Old and New Testaments, was firmly held
alike by the old-fashioned members of the
Church of England and the new evangelical

party. The very exposition of these great
truths and of other important articles of
belief, contained in the great Anglican
formularies of the Thirty-nine Articles and
the Books of Homilies, were reverently
accepted and loyally believed in by the
evangelicals. The difference between the
new and old schools in the Church of
England consisted rather in the greater
prominence which the new school gave to
some of the articles of belief, and in the
comparative neglect with which, in their
teaching and preaching, they treated others
among these articles.

One somewhat startling novelty, how
ever, was introduced by these earnest
devoted men. They maintained, however r
that it was no novelty, but that it had ever
existed in the church as an article of faith,,
only it had for ages never been pressed
home as it should have been ; that it had
been neglected rather than denied. This
new point, which Wesley, Whitefield, and
their companions, and then their spiritual
sons, the evangelicals, pressed home with
such fervour to the multitudes who listened
to their impassioned preaching, was the
doctrine of the "new birth" and the
necessary consequence of this new birth
the absolute need of a total conversion or
regeneration in every man. Closely con
nected with this teaching of the " new
birth," was the belief in the Holy Spirit
as personally influencing each individual
Christian.

In one important particular the members
of the school were divided among them
selves. We have seen that Wesley and
most of his followers were opposed to Cal
vinism in any form. Whitefield, on the
other hand, and his disciples, were rigid

272

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[circa 1750 1800.

Calvinists. The evangelicals in the Church
of England here followed Whitefield, but
not by any means to all his conclusions ;
the names of the great men who adorned
the evangelical revival in the Anglican
communion, with rare exceptions were
Calvinist, but Calvinist in a very modified

to ascribe more to the grace of God and
less to the power and free-will of man.
This change gave a peculiar colour to his
preaching ; he exalted in higher strains
the grace and love of God in Christ, and
spoke less of the power and excellence oi
man. But his Calvinism stopped here. *

COWPF.R S HOUSE, OLNEY, BUCKS.

Photo : W. S. Wright, Olney.

degree. The Calvinism of Newton and
Scott, Milner and Cecil, is well painted in
the vivid biography of their friend and
fellow-leader, Henry Venn. " He had
been," we read, "hostile to Calvinism,
which he considered repugnant to Scrip
ture and reason ; but the experience he now
had of the corruption of his nature, of the
frailty and weakness of man, of the in
sufficiency of his best endeavours, led him

These " moderate " Calvinists never seem
to have dwelt upon the frightful tenet of
reprobation, so utterly contrary, as they felt,
to the spirit and teaching of the Divine
Master of our faith.

But while these true great ones, to whom
religion in England owes so^ vast a debt
for the new life and vigour inspired by
their teaching and their lives, preached
Christ and pointed to the one Sacred

circa 17501800.]

DEFECTS OF EVANGELICANISM.

273

Figure with a force and directness never
perhaps known before,* they failed to give
that prominence in their teaching to the
blessed sacraments of holy baptism and the
Lord s Supper, which the Catholic Church
in her purest days was ever careful to press
home to men. It was one side, and one
side only of true church teaching, which
they elected to dwell upon, and that they
did it with mighty power and intense con
viction is indisputable ; but the grave
omission for it was an omission all true
Anglican churchmen, who with an un
grudging admiration look back upon their
faithful and true work, unite in deploring.
Nor was it only in their deficient sacra
mental teaching that the evangelicals failed
to embrace the great Catholic tradition.
What has been in modern phraseology
well termed " distinctive church principles"
were largely neglected, if not completely
ignored by them ; such as " daily services,"
frequent communions, the regular observ
ance of the church festal and fast days, the
due maintenance of ancient ceremonies,
uses and practices handed down from an
immemorial antiquity, carefully preserved
in the Church of England from the
days of the Elizabethan settlement, and

* The words of the famous and well-loved hymn
of the evangelical hymnologist, Toplady, are a good
example of this vivid portraiture of the Redeemer :

" Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy Cross I cling,
Naked, come to Thee for dress,
Helpless, look to Thee for grace,
Vile, I to the fountain fly,
Wash me, Saviour, or I die."

Toplady (1740-1778) was an evangelical clergy
man of strong Calvinistic bias, and a prominent
writer and preacher of the day. His early death
was no doubt hastened by his intense devotion to
his work.

defined by such men as Parker, Whitgift,
Hooker, Andrewes, and Laud. Neglected
also, and treated as of little moment by
the same party, were all those things that
contributed not a little to the reverent
beauty of divine worship. Architecture
and painting, in their eyes, were things of
little moment. In the thoughts of the

(After

WILLIAM COWPER.
drawing by Romney in

1792.)

men of this school, art was no handmaid to
religion, and symbolism, however beautiful
and touching symbolism which in all the
Christian ages had been found so powerful
in appealing to many hearts found no
place in the bare and ugly churches and
chapels of the men of the evangelical
revival; was absent altogether from their
plain and studiedly simple services. In
many respects, without intention, they

274

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[173 1 1800.

reproduced the Puritan extravagances and
exaggeratio:

Yet in spite of this one-sidedness, in spite
of this narrowness and want of appreciation
of much that experience has shown was
loved and prized by innumerable hearts,
these men were in very truth the salt of
the earth in their day. The work which
they, in spite of obloquy and cold neg
lect on the part of the ruling po\
in spite of gibes and sneers levelled at
them by the wits and men of letters and
fashion, succeeded in doing, deserves the
thanks of succeeding generations of church
men. For they aroused the church in a
time when a deadly torpor of indifference
and sloth was slowly creeping over her.
They interested the masses in religious
things, at a time when among the people
religion was being largely forgotten. Their
passionate exhortation and fiery preaching,
placarding, so to speak, the image of the
Crucified before the dulled eyes, and graving
the divine image of the One Sacred Figure
upon the world-filled hearts of tens of
thousands, reminded England, at an hour
when her people seemed in danger of
forgetting Him altogether, that Christ
was still present among them a mighty
power ready, able, willing to comfort, to
strengthen, and to save, the same yester
day, to-day, and for ever ! This was the
debt our country and its church owes to
the leaders of the evangelical revival ; and
the memory of that great debt must never
be obscured still less forgotten.

" We boast some rich ones, whom the Gospel

sways,
And one who wears a coronet and prays." *

* The allusion is to the well-known evangelical
nobleman, lord Dartmouth.

So wrote Cowper (1731-1800), the poet of
the evangelical revival, with bitter irony ;
but although the statement in the verse
is somewhat exaggerated, generally the
new teaching only touched indirectly the
highest classes. The hierarchy in the
church, as we have noticed, looked coldly
on the movement, and their attitude was
generally adopted by the government of
the day,* by the nobility, and most persons
in the upper ranks of society. It was
among the lower and middle classes mostly
that the power of the evangelicals lay.
Still, there were a few distinguished ex
ceptions.

Of these William Wilberforce was the
most notable. The son of a Hull mer
chant, who outside his commercial trans
actions po--e^ed large landed property
in the East Riding of Yorkshire, at the
age of ten the young Wilberforce lost his
father, and received his earliest training
at the hands of the famous evangelicals,
Joseph and Isaac Milner, at the Hull
grammar - school. As a boy he gave

* " I do not say that in any markedly new degree
they were debarred from the place of authority in
the church. With inconsiderable exceptions, the
Evangelicals were never in the place at all ; and I
think they little sought to be. But undoubtedly
the tendency was, on the whole, putting one brief
period aside, rather more than less to keep them
out of it. And, meanwhile, I frankly own Evan
gelicalism had many things to gain from other
tendencies. Of course it had lessons to learn. In
such matters as the corporate aspect of Christian
life, the distinctive place of the Lord s sacraments
in His Gospel, the call to sacred while simple
dignity of worship to name such things only
Evangelicals have felt strong influences from
outsiders." From The Evangelical Movement: its
Contribution to the Life and Thought of the Church
during the Victorian Era ; being a paper read at the
Nottingham Congress of the Church of England,
1897, by the Rev. H. G. C. Moule, D.D., principal
of Ridley Hall, Cambridge

17841789.]

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE.

275

promise of his future distinction as an
orator. After leaving Cambridge, at the age
of twenty-one he was elected to the House
of Commons. For the first four years of his
career the young and wealthy Yorkshire-
man gave no indication of his future
eminence as a religious leader, but was
distinguished in society for his wonderful
charm of manner and brilliant conversa
tional powers.

It was in the course of 1784-5, in the
course of a long visit to the south or
France in the company of his old tutor,
Isaac Milner, and other friends, that the
change passed over Wilberforce which in
evangelical phraseology is known as
conversion," or the "new birth." John
Newton, of Olney, whose career we have
already briefly sketched, became his
adviser. With rare wisdom Newton
counselled the young and brilliant enthu
siast not to exchange his worldly position
for that of a minister and evangelist, but to
use his great and growing influence rather
as a powerful layman for his Master s
work. Wilberforce followed this wise
advice, and without any apparent or out
ward change in his pursuits and way of
living, but with God ever in his thoughts,
he braced himself up for his life s work.
His religious views were mainly influenced
by the two Milners, John Newton, Thomas
Scott, and somewhat later by Henry Venn.
In Parliament, where already his name was
becoming known, he boldly professed him
self an Evangelical, one of that sect which
was coldly looked upon, if not despised ;
and was soon looked upon as the leading
layman of the party.

In Parliament he set himself to carry
out a noble and difficult task. From the

days of his boyhood the shameful sin of
slavery had appalled him. While a school
boy, he had written a letter to a York
newspaper, protesting against the " odious
traffic in human flesh." He determined
that the bitter reproach of the slave trade
should be wiped out of the statute book,,
and the curse which weighed so heavily
upon the fast -growing colonial empire of
England should, so far as England was
concerned, exist no longer. Then com
menced for him a long and bitter Parlia
mentary warfare. It was in 1789 that he
first publicly proposed the abolition of the
slave trade in the House of Commons,
The struggle of Wilberforce and his friends
before the great object of his life was
accomplished, lasted some twenty years..
He had aroused, indeed, a formidable
opposition when he commenced his long
campaign, for the slave-trading and slave-
holding interest in the Houses of Parlia
ment was a very strong one. All kinds of
delays in investigating the question were
interposed, and again and again the
undaunted champion sustained defeat in
the Commons. The all-powerful minister
Pitt, who in theory was on Wilberforce s
side, was prevented during the many years
he was in office, by political reasons, from
giving effect to what he felt was right and
just ; and the famous minister passed away
before that which he had himself de
nounced as the deepest stain upon our
national character, and the most enormous
guilt recorded in the history of mankind,
so far as England was concerned was wiped
out and done away with.

But Wilberforce, in spite of repeated
failure and disappointment, steadily pur
sued his purpose. His great gifts of

276

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1807-

eloquence and intense religious fervour,
his winning and singularly attractive
personality, year after year were all used
to further the great object of his life. The
moral sense of the whole evangelical party,
strong in numbers and in earnestness, ir
not in rank and fortune, was on his side ;
and gradually a persuasion of the awful
guilt of the traffic permeated England.
At last two bills were introduced by lord
Grenville in the House of Lords, under the
administration of Mr. Fox, and triumph
antly carried ; the one abolishing the
slave trade with foreign powers, the other
forbidding the employment of any British
shipping in the traffic which had not
already been- engaged in it;* while the
House of Commons resolved that the slave
trade was contrary to the principles of
justice, humanity and sound policy. These
measures proved the death-blow of the
slave trade. The Abolition Bill was passed
by an immense majority in the House of
Commons in 1807. Wilberforce was uni
versally lauded when the successful end
of his long work became generally known.
Still, though this Act of 1807 had put
an end to the traffic in slaves, much
remained to be done before the extinction
of slavery in the world-wide British
dominions became an accomplished fact ;
nor was it until 1833 that the Emancipa
tion Bill was passed, when Parliament
granted the enormous sum of twenty
millions sterling to compensate the
planters in the British colonies for the loss
of their slaves. Wilberforce, the author of

* No fewer than 60,000 slaves were annually
imported in British vessels. Cf. Professor Bright :
"History of England," Period iii., Constitutional
Monarchy, 1806.

this true piece of Christian work, was
dying when the object of his life was at
length reached in all its fulness ; and the
noble old man thanked God that he
had seen the day when England was
willing to give the mighty sum of twenty
millions for the total abolition of slavery.

Thus the greatest blot on Christianity
was wiped out, so far as England and her
empire was concerned, mainly owing to
the exertions of the evangelical party and
its devoted leader. It had even more
far-reaching consequences. The grand
example set by England bore fruit in the
great western republic ; and the result of
the terrible war between the northern and
southern states in 1861-65 was the fi na l
abolition of slavery among the Anglo-
Saxon peoples. The work of Wilberforce
and his friends was accomplished.

But although the name of the great
evangelical philanthropist will ever be
specially associated with the abolition of
the curse of slavery ; in the surpassing
glory of the success of that great achieve
ment, the other useful and beneficent acts
of that noble life must not be lightly passed
over. Round Wilberforce gathered a little
coterie of earnest and pious men who
during many years devoted themselves
with a splendid generosity to works of
religion and philanthropy. The same
influences which inspired Wilberforce
guided and directed the two Thorntons,
Gisborne, Granville Sharpe, Thomas
Clarkson, Zachary Macaulay, lords Dart
mouth and Teignmouth, all names written
large in God s golden book of saintly men,
and others bearing less known appellations,
who made up that famous group of
evangelicals known as the " Clapham

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1783-1799.

Sect." " They were the sons, by natural
or spiritual birth, of men who in the
earlier days of Methodism had shaken off
the lethargy in which till then the Church
of England had been entranced, of men by
whose agency the great evangelical doc
trine of faith, emerging in its primeval
splendour, had not only overpowered the
contrary heresies but had perhaps obscured
some kindred truths."

Several of those great religious societies
which are at once the glory and strength
of the Established Church, and indeed of
religious England, were the result of their
deliberations and wise liberality. First in
importance of these was the Church Mis
sionary Society, that great company of the
Church of England which "now commands
a wider field of action and a more princely
revenue than any Protestant association of
the same character." In 1783 a little
company of the London evangelical clergy,
under the name of the " Eclectic Society,"
including John Newton (of Olney, and later
of St. Mary Woolnoth) and Richard Cecil,
on several occasions discussed the question
of the best method of planting the Gospel
in Botany Bay, the East Indies, and in
Africa. The result was the foundation in
I799t of the Church Missionary Society,
though the famous title itself was not
adopted until 1812. All possible care was
taken by its founders not to interfere
with the work of kindred missionary
associations, such as the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel, and the Society

* Sir James Stephen s Essays in Ecclesiastical
Biography : " The Clapham Sect."

t See Excursus on Missionary Effort in the
Church of England, etc.

for Promoting Christian Knowledge, which
were already at work, but labouring on
somewhat different lines.

The foundation of the Religious Tract
Society was another of the active pieces of
work carried out by the same zeal and
energy working in this Clapham Sect. It
dates from 1799. Other associations, not
ably the Society for the Promotion of
Christian Knowledge, had already been
circulating vast numbers of books and
tracts for a lengthened period ; Wesley
and others had distributed thousands of
these useful and far-reaching little pieces
of popular literature among the people
where their labours chiefly were laid. But
the Religious Tract Society set itself to the
work on a larger and more systematic scale
than had been ever before attempted. Its
permanence, and its enduring popularity
and usefulness, bears a quiet but powerful
testimony to the need which it supplied.
Its first chairman was the eccentric though
able and devoted preacher and divine,
Rowland Hill.

A yet more prominent foundation was
closely connected with the leaders of the
great revival : the British and Foreign
Bible Society. Its operations on a smaller
scale began as early as 1787, but it was only
some sixteen or seventeen years later that
the famous association itself was formally
constituted. Starting in the first instance
from a modest attempt to supply the Welsh
people with copies of their Scriptures in
their own tongue (of Welsh Bibles there
appears to have been a curious scarcity at
that time), Wilberforce and a few others of
that noble group who lived but to help their
neighbours and to teach them how to find
the narrow way of life, conceived the idea

FRUITS OF THE EVANGELICAL REVIVAL.

279

of a society which should sow broadcast
over England, and in the yet greater
England beyond the seas, copies of the
Book of Life. Associated with Wilberforce
was a little company of evangelicals, with
lord Teignmouth, who when Sir John
Shore had gained a great reputation as
governor-general of India, as their first
president. These men laid the founda
tions of that mighty organisation which
has now, within a century of its first
meeting, provided the nations of the world
with more than three hundred * separate
translations and version of the Bible more
or less entirely, this marvellous series of
versions of the Book of Life being the work,
to use the Society s own words, " of a great
army of devoted scholars." The Bible
Society s annual issue of Bibles, Testaments,
and single books or groups of the Scriptures
amounts, in the closing years of the nine
teenth century, to nearly four millions.
In the distribution of these, above a
thousand persons of both sexes are in the
.service of this mighty association.

The London Missionary Society had
been established a few years before, in 1/95?
and must also be considered an outcome
of the great revival. It was founded on a
broader and more inclusive basis than the
Church Missionary Society, and included
Dissenters as well as evangelical church
men. This powerful missionary association
never took root, however, in the Church
of England, and is now supported mainly
by the Congregationalists. The Wesleyan
Missionary Society, now a vast and far-

* The present number of these translations and
versions nearly reaches three hundred and fifty !
More than fifty bishops and dignitaries of the
Anglican communion are among the vice-presidents
-of the Society.

reaching association, in its early days also
included among its first supporters the
leading men of the Clapham sect, but it
has passed in later times entirely into the
hands of the Wesleyan body.

In this brief summary of the results of
the "revival, 1 the rise and progress of
which we have been sketching, the institu
tion of Sunday schools, now one of the most
powerful and effective agencies in the
Church of England as well as among the
Nonconformist communions, must not be
forgotten. This simple but wondrously
successful machinery for interesting and
instructing the children of the people in
the doctrines and practice of the Christian
faith belongs to the same movement, and
dates from the middle of the eighteenth
century. There were Sunday schools here
and there probably as early as 1765. But
the real organiser of these wonderful
English schools was Robert Raikes of
Gloucester, a loyal member of the Church
of England^ who in his ancient cathedral
city established the first Sunday school in
1781. One of his rules was that the
scholars should attend the cathedral ser
vice. There was some opposition at first
among the dignitaries of the church to this
novel organisation ; but as its wonderful
adaptability to all descriptions of congrega
tions, especially in cities, became manifest,
the opposition soon died down, and the
evangelical clergy especially were dis
tinguished before the end of the century
for their zeal in adopting the new de
parture. Within a century and a quarter
of the first conception of the. idea, of the
innumerable churches and chapels in
England and her vast colonies, and in the
United States, scarcely could one be found

280

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

without its Sunday school, numbering its
few or many little scholars of both sexes.*

But although the church was gradually
invigorated by the evangelical revival ;
although the spirit of religious enterprise
and devotion was awakened from the
slumber into which it had fallen, it must
not be supposed that the new victory of
faith was lightly and easily won. Very
bitter, indeed, especially during the earlier
years of the movement, was the opposition
an opposition which often took the form
of bitter hostility to the new school of the
evangelicals and their teaching. Nor were
the causes of this opposition at all difficult
to gauge. Throughout England the estab
lished church was a fair representative of
the country. There was a general longing
for quiet in England. The sleepy con
dition into which religion had sunk
satisfied the people. There was no en
thusiasm ; zeal of any kind was sneered at.
The policy of Walpole, who so long was
the minister, as we have already noticed,
lay like a dead hand upon all religious
enterprise and on all impulses of self-
devotion. Convocation, silenced as it was,
was unable to initiate any fresh departure
in work, either at home or in the form of
missionary work abroad. Nor could it
take in hand any of the more flagrant
abuses in the church. Reform, progress,
a more earnest church life in any direction
seemed impossible, and, what was singular,
all seemed to acquiesce in this state of
stagnation. If any active feeling at all was

* The Sunday school of the writer of this
History, during his ten years incumbency of
St. Pancras (London), numbered about three
thousand scholars and teachers.

manifested, it took the form of a hatred of
Puritanism, with which in some minds
Methodism and evangelicalism were closely
associated. The fierce, widespread animos
ity which the " saints " had aroused in the
time of the great trouble, had by no means
died down in the earlier years of the
eighteenth centurv. Thus, when Method
ism began to make its existence felt
Methodism with its restless, burning, some
what disturbing enthusiasm no wonder
that it aroused far and wide feelings of
fierce hostility.

There is no doubt that alongside the
new and nobler tastes, aims, hopes which
it aroused, was much that the calm and
dispassionate critic could find fault with.
In the great revival meetings held by
Wesley and Whitefield, many thousands
were stirred up to lead purer, better lives,
to turn their thoughts to God and religion ;
but there were in these vast assemblies
not a few sad and painful scenes of hysteria,
evoked by the passionate oratory of the
eloquent and fervid evangelicals. Many,
we read, in these strange assemblies fell to
the ground convulsed with paroxysms of
agony. The air was occasionally rent with
wild screaming ; the great revival was,
especially in its earlier phases, not unfre-
quently accompanied with all the pheno
mena of strong spiritual excitement, strange
and unknown in those days of lethargy
and carelessness in all religious matters.
These spiritual excesses, these regrettable
extravagances, were quickly seized upon,
and sharply criticised by those who disliked
the new school. Such critics were blind
to the marvellous awakening of the many,
and had only eyes for the mischief worked
upon the few.

282

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

With greater reason churchmen com
plained of the insubordination of the
Methodist converts among the clergy, of
their disregard of all parochial order and
discipline, of their neglect of church
customs, however venerable, and ritual,
however ancient and legalised. Wesley,
while professing allegiance to the Church
of England and its laws and government,
openly affirmed that "the world was his
parish," and his disciples naturally followed
and often went beyond, the words spoken
and the example set by their master. All
this naturally excited much dislike and
even enmity, alike in church and in state.
In spite of the enormous and ever-
increasing influence and power of the new
departure among the masses, the Methodist
was an unpopular person, and for years,
with the majority of the cultured classes
especially, was the object of ridicule and
sarcasm. He was keenly satirised in the
popular literature of the age. The lines
of the great poet in the " Dunciad "
are worth quoting, as they show the
scorn with which the Methodist preacher
(Whitefield is even named) was held by
distinguished men of letters :

41 As when the long-eared milky mothers wait
At some sick miser s triple-bolted gate,
For their defrauded, absent foals they make
A moan so loud. . . .
So swells each wind-pipe ; ass intones to ass.
Harmonic twang ! of leather, horn and brass ;
Such as from lab ring lungs th enthusiast blows,
High sound, attemper d to the vocal nose ;
Or such as bellow from the deep divine.
There, Webster! pealed thy voice, and Whitefield,

thine !

In Tot nam Fields the brethren with amaze
Prick all their ears up, and forget to graze." *

As in poetry, so in the famous prose
* Pope : " The Dunciad," book ii., 246.

writers, .we find the same contemptuous
estimate. Fielding puts into the mouth of
Parson Adams in " Joseph Andrews "
(1742), the following criticism of White-
field s doctrine of faith against good
works : u Surely that doctrine was coined
in hell, and none but the devil himself
could have the confidence to preach it."
The imprisoned Methodist in " Amelia "
(1751) is a rogue. A few years later, in
1771, the same sect, was mercilessly
satirised by Smollett in " Humphrey
Clinker." The sorry hero of the celebrated
story, Mr. Bramble s footman, the lover
of the waiting-maid, Winifred Jenkins,
is an occasional Methodist preacher.
Anstey (1724-1805), in the "New Bath
Guide," treats them no better. And it is
only in the writings of the Methodists
and evangelicals themselves that we find
any true appreciation of the mighty work
they accomplished in influencing society
and in deepening the religious life of
England. We would instance here Cowper
(1731-1800), who will ever hold a high
position in the illustrious gallery of our
poets. Cowper was a fervid evangelical,
and the dear friend of John Newton of
Olney. Young, another well-known poet,
whose " Night Thoughts " (published 1742)
will ever take its place among our English
classics ; James Hervey, the author of the
." Meditations," and of the " Theron and
Aspasia," already alluded to ; Henry Brooke,
who published his famous " Fool of Quality "
in 1766, were all earnest members of the
evangelical party, as was also Hannah More
(1745-1833). From the poems and various
writings of these, we form a juster view of
the spirit of the Methodists and evan
gelicals. But it is, after all, in the poems

THE BISHOPS AND THE REVIVAL.

1758-1788.]

of Pope, and in the popular romances of
Fielding and Smollett, that the real
feeling of the wits and great literary men
of the age towards the men of the

283

to treat of them ably and beneficially.
God grant it may never have been for
want of inwardly experiencing their
importance. But whatever the cause, the

evangelical movement is most accurately effect hath been lamentable. Our people

mirrored.

The attitude of the more thoughtful of
the hierarchy of the Church during the
second half of the eighteenth century,
although distinctly hostile to the move
ment,* yet was, notwithstanding, evidently
influenced and coloured by the wave of
earnestness set in motion by the new
powerful evangelical preaching and teach
ing. For instance, Dr. Seeker, archbishop
of Canterbury (1758-1768), while speaking
of the new sect [of evangelicals] as
" pretending to the strictest piety," goes
on in the same charge delivered to the
arch-diocese in 1758, with an exhortation
to his clergy to emulate what is good in
them [the evangelicals], avoiding what is
bad. Seeker urged his clergy to " edify
their flocks with awakening, but with
rational and scriptural discourses." " The
truth," pursued the archbishop, u I fear is
that many if not most of us have dwelt
too little on the doctrines of the Trinity,

have grown less and less mindful of the
distinguishing articles of their creed.
. . . They have forgotten in effect
their Creator as well as their Redeemer
and Sanctifier, seldom or never worship
ping Him, or thinking of their souls in
relation to Him, but flattering themselves
that what they are pleased to call a moral
and harmless life, though far from being
either, is the one thing needful. Our
vindication will be to preach fully and
frequently these doctrines, yet so as to
reserve a due share to the duties of
common life, which it is reported some
of our censurers do not."

These wise though somewhat cold
words, spoken by the primate in his
charge of 1758, ring with an apologetic
note. Evidently the words of Wesley and
Whitefield and their school had sunk
deeply into archbishop Seeker s soul, and
he felt that there was much that was true
and real in the Methodist contention, and

Christ s sacrifice, and the sanctification of that the ways and teaching of the church

the Spirit in our sermons ; by no means, I
believe, as disbelieving or slighting them,
but . . , partly from fancying them
to be so generally received and remem
bered that little need to be said but on
social obligations ; partly, again, from not
having studied theology deeply enough

* This bias on the part of the hierarchy is un
mistakably shown by the care which was taken
not to advance any of the prominent evangelicals
(save in the solitary case we have mentioned of
Isaac Milner, the dean of Carlisle) to posts of rank
and distinction in the Establishment.

over which he ruled were grievously lack
ing. He touches some of the gravest
doctrinal points urged by the new school,
and presses them upon his own clergy for
adoption.

Bishop Warburton of Gloucester (1698-
1779), whose great services to the Church
of England as a writer and theologian we
have already spoken of, is a good example
of the position taken up by the scholarly
divines of his school towards the extra
ordinary religious outburst of Methodism.

284

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1788.

Warburton had little sympathy with any
revival movement, and indeed, while fully
allowing the miraculous conversions of
apostolic times, deemed it an impossibility
that the splendour of these gifts of the
Holy Spirit could ever re-appear in the
church. It belonged alone to the first age,
and was and could not be ever repeated.

ARCHDEACON WM. PALEY.

(From the portrait by Sir Wm. Beechey, prefixed to his
works, 1819.)

Warburton even quoted the case of the
regicides in the great trouble. " They
were," he once wrote, " mostly enthusiasts,
of the same kind as the Methodists . . .
and though these Methodists ought not to
be persecuted, yet the clergy are right in
giving no encouragement to this spirit."
Bishop Horsley (1733-1806), who was
bishop of St. David s, 1788-1800, when he
was translated to the see of St. Asaph, in
his first charge to the diocese of St. David s

in 1788, evidently felt with archbishop
Seeker, whose words, spoken some years
before, we have quoted. He clearly was
deeply moved by the teaching of the
great Methodist revivalists, and, recognised
the faults and deadness of the preaching
of the clergy of his own Anglican com
munion. This eminent divine of our
church, in his primary charge, thus
spoke : u A dread of the pernicious
tendency of some extravagant opinions of
persons more to be esteemed for the
warmth of their piety than the soundness
of their judgment . . . have given
credit to another maxim which I never
hear without extreme regret, either from
the pulpit or in familiar conversation,
that practical religion and morality are
one and the same thing, that moral duties
constitute the whole or by far the better
part of practical Christianity. . . .
These maxims have a pernicious influence
upon the ministry of the Word, and have
contributed much to divest our sermons of
the genuine spirit and savour of Christi
anity, and to reduce them to mere moral
essays. The compositions which are this
day [he was writing in 1788, some thirty
years or more after the rise of Methodism]
delivered from our pulpits are, I think, in
general of a more Christian cast than were
often heard thirty years since, when I first
entered the ministry. Still the dry strain
of preaching is too much in use. . . .
The Trinity, Incarnation, Expiation, Inter
cession, and Communion with the Holy
Spirit, are supposed above the reach of
the people." The charge of this learned
and eminent theologian showed that he,
while standing aloof from Wesley and even
the later evangelical school which was the

iSoo.j

GENERAL EFFECTS OF THE REVIVAL.

285

result of the Methodist movement, had
drunk deeply of the spiritual truths which
these despised men had preached with such
conspicuous success among the people, and
that he longed for the day when the clergy
of his own Anglican communion would in
many respects follow the example of the
Methodist and evangelical preachers.
They were right, he felt, in their estimate
of true Christian teaching, even if their
ways were eccentric, perhaps fanatical, and
their actions irregular and insubordinate.
The famous charge of Horsley is, in fact, a
vigorous defence of evangelical preaching.
He contemptously terms the dry moralists
of the Establishment " apes of Epictetus." *
Archdeacon William Paley, the author
of the much-studied " Natural Theology/
and the more valuable "Evidences"
(1743-1805), was similarly influenced by
the evangelical teaching of the revivalists,
and with equal earnestness in one of his
well-known charges thus characterises the
lifeless preaching of the church, no doubt
with the sermons and teaching of the new
school in his mind : " We are setting up a

* Epictetus was a Phrygian stoic philosopher,
\vho taught at the close of the first century, at
Rome first, and later at Nicopolis. His phil
osophy, briefly, was a system of creedless practical
righteousness. Horsley bitterly reproached the
Anglican clergy with being his slavish imitators.

kind of philosophical morality, detached
from religion and independent of its
influence, which may be cultivated, it is
said, without Christianity as well as with
it, and which if cultivated, renders religion
and religious influences superfluous. We
are in such haste to fly from religion and
superstition, that we are approaching to
an insensibility to all religious influence.
I do not mean to advise you to bring men
back to enthusiasm, but to retard, if you
can, the progress toward an opposite and
worse extreme."

Before the sands of the hour-glass of
the eighteenth century had run out, the
Methodist, or as they were later commonly
called, the evangelical doctrines, had
thoroughly permeated the teaching of
the Established Church. More or less
every pulpit in England was affected by
them, even though the pulpit were
occupied by a preacher who studiedly
stood aloof from all sympathisers with the
new departure ; while the evangelical
party, properly so called, who openly
professed their devotion and zeal for these
great truths, so long dormant in all public
teaching, " though still a minority, had
become a large and influential section of
the English Church."*

* Lecky.

CHAPTER LXXIII.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, 1800-1833.

Effects of the Continental War Pictures of Church Life in the Early Nineteenth Century Light
and Shadow General Shortcoming in Care and Reverence Prejudice against Hymns Decay and
Neglect of the Buildings Sketch of the Anglican School of this Period Dr. Sikes of Guisborough
His Remarkable Prophecy Hugh James Rose and other Anglican Leaders The Hierarchy
Societies Founded by the Anglican School The Education Question and the National Society
The Evangelical Party Charles Simeon of Cambridge His Life, Work, and influence Its Bear
ing on Missionary Work Cambridge a Centre of Evangelical Teaching London another such
Centre -Defects of the Evangelical School What it has Done Gradual Decline of Church
Influence The Utilitarian School A Moment and Crisis of Real Peril to the Church of England.

r I ARE nineteenth century opened with
church life considerably renewed
and invigorated by the great Evan
gelical revival sketched in our last chapter.
But although the revival had touched many
centres, especially in the towns, it was after
all somewhat sporadic. Its nature was, in
deed, rather calculated to influence indi
viduals or congregations than the corporate
life of the church. The circumstances, too,
of the time were unfavourable to any
marked development of religious activity
and earnestness. For the first fifteen years
of the century the one object which filled
men s minds was the great Continental
war. The very exhortations of the clergy
were often coloured with the all-absorbing
topic.

We possess some pictures of church
life as it existed in that period, drawn by
master-hands, able leaders in the hierarchy,
who from their official position were
admirably fitted to form a just estimate of
the condition of things. Dr. Porteous,
bishop of London, in his Lenten
Lectures, 1798-1801, writes that the
reason of his delivering the course in

question was " because the state of the
kingdom political, moral, and religious
was so unfavourable as to excite the most
serious alarm in every mind of reflection."
Bishop Horsley, who stands in the front
rank of the abler bishops of the day, in his
charge to the clergy of the diocese of
Rochester, 1800, tells us that " no crisis at
any period of time since the moment of
our Lord s departure from the earth, has
more demanded than the present, the
vigilant attention of the clergy of all ranks,
from the prelate to the village curate, to
the duties of the weighty charge for which
we are called. . . . We have seen in every
part but little correspondence between the
lives of men and their professions, a general
indifference about the doctrines of Chris
tianity, a general neglect of its duties. n
Bishop Burgess of St. David s, again, in his
address to the clergy on the occasion of his
translation to Salisbury in 1825, writes
that in 1803, when he first came among
them, he found the churches and ecclesi
astical buildings generally in a ruinous
condition. Many of the clergy in that
distant diocese, he noticed, were imperfectly

1803-1825.1 FROUDE ON THE CHURCH IN HIS YOUTH.

287

educated, and disgraced their profession
by inebriety and other degrading vices.*

From a very different man and in
another centre Charles Simeon, of Cam
bridge we learn that the service in his col
lege chapel (King s) was most irreverently
performed, that among the undergraduates
religious life in any " social " sense of that
word was unknown. No "Holy Club"
of Cambridge Methodists existed to draw
them together and to diffuse their
influence. Outside Cambridge, in the
then woefully neglected country side,
Simeon in the earlier days of his career,
which corresponded to the latter years
of the eighteenth century, acted as an
itinerant, preaching even at times in barns
and in many an unlicensed place to the
" forgotten " farm servants. Confirmation
was too commonly treated as the most
perfunctory of church services, and the
confirmation day was sometimes little
better than a noisy holiday.!

Mr. J. A. Froude, drawing from his own
family experiences, gives us the following
graphic picture of a good ordinary speci
men of a high-class country parson of the
time : " The curate of the last century,
who dined in the servants hall and married

* This does not, however, appear to have been
the case in any of the English dioceses.

f Dr. Moule in his "Life of Simeon," indeed,
says that the religious life in the villages outside
Cambridge, in these early days of Simeon s ministry,
was not unlike the picture we have, some thirty
years before, in John Wesley s time (1763). " The
churches in the neighbourhood were very usually
served by Fellows of colleges, who rode out from
Cambridge on Sunday, and contrived to accomplish
three or even four morning services in succession.
To expedite the process, a signal was sometimes
concerted between the parson and the clerk : the
hoisting of a flag assured the rider that there was
no congregation, and that he might pass on in
peace."

the lady s maid, has long disappeared, if he
had ever existed outside popular novels.
Not a specimen of him could have been
found in the island. The average English
incumbent [he is writing of the first
quarter of the nineteenth century] was a
man of private fortune, the younger
brother of the landlord, perhaps, and
holding the family living, ar it might be
the landlord himself, his advowson being
part of the estate. His professional duties
were his services on Sunday, funerals and
weddings on week-days, and visits where
needed among the sick. In other respects
he lived like his neighbours, distinguished
from them only by a black coat and white
neckcloth, and greater watchfulness over
his words and actions. He farmed his own
glebe, he kept horses, he shot and hunted
moderately, and mixed in general society.
He was generally a magistrate. . . . His
wife and daughters looked after the poor,
taught in the Sunday school, and managed
the penny clubs and clothing clubs.* His
own household, the great historian pro
ceeds to say, was a fair representative of
the others, his father being a rector, an
archdeacon, and a justice of the peace.
His brothers and he were excellently
educated, and were sent to school and
college. The spiritual lessons did not go
beyond the catechism. They were told
their business in life was to work, and
to make an honourable position for
themselves. About doctrines, Evangelical
and Catholic, the writer tells us he did
not think he ever heard a single word, in
church or out of it. The institution (the
Church of England) had drifted into the

* The Oxford, Counter-Reformation; " Short Studies,"
by J. A. Froude, vol. iv.

288

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[18141818.

condition of what he called moral health.
" It did not instruct us in mysteries, it did
not teach us to make religion a special
object of our thoughts ; it taught us to use
religion as a light by which to see our way
along the road of duty. . . . Doctrinal
controversies were sleeping. People went
to church because they liked it, because
they knew that they ought to go, and
because it was the custom ; they had
received the creeds from their fathers, and
doubts about them had never crossed
their minds."

The writer* of the above personal
reminiscence of the machinery of the
Church of England in a typical country
district gives. us as his conclusion, that the
church in question, though not perfect,
was still doing its work satisfactorily. Such
a conclusion, however, would scarcely be
accepted by the more earnest men of
either of the schools of religious thought.
In the hierarchy, during these earlier
years of the nineteenth century, a curiously
confused estimate of the duties and example
of a bishop existed. It seems to have been
a recognised custom for the prelate of an
English see to add to his revenues the
income of other important preferments,
without any regard to the obligations
which the holding ox such preferment
would naturally seem to entail. To give
examples of men of the highest reputation,

* A peculiar interest is attached to Mr. J. A.
Froude s memories here. He is known, of
course, wherever the English language is spoken
or read, as a brilliant and picturesque historian of
the first rank. He is, however, not always remem
bered as the brother of Richard Hurrell Froude,
one of the earliest and most influential of the
famous Tractarian Oxford School, Cardinal
Newman s dearest friend. R. H. Froude died
in 1836.

thus apparently so careless of seemingly
inescapable responsibilities : the very valu
able living of Stanhope had been held by
three successive prelates when its rector,
Dr. Phillpotts, was made bishop of Exeter
in 1830 ; bishop Courtenay held the
living of St. George s, Hanover Square,
with its vast population ; bishop Pelham
a Sussex living, and bishop Bethell a living
in Yorkshire, each with the see of Exeter.
Bishop Rider was dean of Wells, and
bishop Blomfield rector of Bishopsgate,
during their episcopate. Bishop Coplestone
of Llandaff was also dean of St. Paul s.*

On the other hand, we have undoubted
testimonies to the good work done and
exemplary lives lived by many of the
clergy of different ranks in various parts of
England at the same period. For instance,
Dr. Howley, bishop of London, afterwards
archbishop of Canterbury, in his first
charge to the London diocese in 1814,
writes of his clergy as " respected and
respectable as a body for piety, learning,
and conscientious attention to their
pastoral care, and abounding with members
distinguished in an eminent degree by all
the qualifications which bestow attraction
and intrinsic worth " ; and again in 1818
he repeats, " his anticipations had been
realised by the experience of five years.
A body more truly respectable for learning
and piety than the clergy of the diocese of

* These examples are taken from Canon Overton s
" The English Church in the Nineteenth Century,"
chap. i. The excuse, not altogether a vain one,
for this abuse was the curious inequality of the
revenues of the English sees. While in some
cases a princely income was attached to the office,
in others a miserably inadequate stipend was pro
vided, which really needed eking out from other
sources. But this system of pluralities was a
disastrous resource, and worked much evil.

THE CLERGY OF 18001833.

289

London will not easily be found." In body of men, attentive to their duties."
1833 Van Mildert, bishop of Durham, said Bishop Kave of Lincoln in 1831 thus spoke

CHARLES SIMEON PREACHING IN A BARN.

in the House of Lords, that " his clergy generally of the clergy of the Church of
in the diocese of Durham were a valuable England : " There never was a time,

290

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[18001832.

perhaps, when the clergy stood in less
need of being urged to a diligent per
formance of their duties, when they enter
tained juster notions of the responsibility
attaching to their ministerial character."

Thus during these first thirty years or
more of the nineteenth century, in the
established church, light evidently alter
nated with shadow, and it would be
manifestly unjust to accuse the church
generally of neglect and indifference. It
is clear that the state of languor and torpor,
so especially noticeable in the first half of
the eighteenth century, no longer existed,
save in certain localities. It is equally
certain, however, that many abuses still
existed, that -much coldness and deadness
was still noticeable ; that, comparatively
speaking, there was little real enthusiasm.
Men were too contented with the state of
things around them, to make any great
effort to arouse a fervid spirit of godliness
and devotion. What was done in the
cause of religion and true self-sacrificing
philanthropy, was confined to certain
centres only.

In this period, too, there was not a
little slovenliness and want of care and
reverence in the church services, especially
in the more remote country districts.* In
the matter of celebrating the Holy
Eucharist, bishop Horsley of Rochester,
above quoted as one of the foremost and
ablest of the Anglican prelates of the time,
in his second charge, dated 1800, thus
writes : " Four celebrations in the year are
the very fewest that ought to be allowed

* Canon Overton in his " Church of England in
the Nineteenth Century" devotes a long and
somewhat exhaustive section to this subject
(chap, v., pp. 127-163). Only a few typical
examples are given in the text.

in the very smallest parishes : it were to-
be wished that it were in all more frequent. "
Many years later a correspondent in the
British Critic tells us how in 1832 in many
country villages the sacrament of the
Lord s Supper was administered four times
a year Easter, Whitsuntide, Michaelmas,
and Christmas. This rareness of celebra
tions was evidently a noticeable fact in the
life of the church during the early part of
the century, in a vast number of churches.
There were, of course, many honourable
exceptions to this state of things, especially
in London and in the great centres of
population. The liturgy also was often
needlessly mutilated and cut short. The
ante-communion service was very frequently
read at the prayer-desk.

Another regrettable feature in the church
life of the period was that the singing and
the music in the Anglican church was
almost invariably neglected and unimpres
sive. An unreasoning prejudice against
hymns, because they savoured of " Method
ism," long prevailed. The great evange
lists of the eighteenth century had early
recognised what a powerful instrument to-
arouse fervour and devotion existed in
hymnology, and they were not slow to
avail themselves of it. The Evangelicals,
who inherited much of their theory and
practice, it is true, introduced this singing
of hymns in their services ; but in a large
section of the church this hymn-singing
was discouraged, and the cold and chilly
" New Version of the Psalms fitted to
the tunes used in Churches " of Tate and
Brady,* was long preferred to the fervid and

* This once well-known Metrical Version of the
Psalms, and which still, with a meagre Supplement
of Church Hymns, is appended to the "Book of
Common Praver," at the close of the nineteenth

18081832.]

NEGLECT OF SERVICES.

291

inspiring sacred songs which the Methodist
revivalists had introduced with so much
effect and power. Reginald Heber, after
wards bishop of Calcutta, a true poet and
hymnologist, in vain applied for the sanc
tion of such devout and earnest prelates as
Mann ers-Sut ton, archbishop of Canterbury,
and Howley, bishop of London, to authorise
the use of a hymn-book he had carefully
prepared for his own parish of Hodnet.
It is to the high honour of the Evangelical
party in the church, that their persistent
endeavours at last revolutionised the old
dead and uninspiring school of church
music. But it was many years before
this powerful auxiliary to popular worship
was really introduced into the services of
the Church of England. It is an un
doubted fact that during the first thirty
years of the century music was slighted,
if not ignored generally, in the services
of the Establishment.

Early in the nineteenth century the
neglect of week-day services was notice
able. From contemporary records it is
clear that, in London at least, saints day
services and week-day services generally
were more numerous in the early years of
the eighteenth, than in the first quarter
of the nineteenth century. Daily services
seem to have been, if not unknown, at
least very rare. In a church periodical
of considerable weight, The British Maga
zine, in the issue for 1832 we read the

century is little more than the "shadow of a
name." Nahum Tate was born in 1652, and sub
sequently became Poet Laureate. Nicholas Brady,
born 1659, was successively chaplain to William
and Mary and Queen Anne. The " Metrical Ver
sion," under the joint authorship of Tate and
Brady, supplanted Sternhold and Hopkins s ren
dering. The Supplement of Church Hymns was
added in 1700.

following plea advanced in support of
cathedrals: "Is it nothing that cathe
drals are the only Protestant churches in
England which preserve the daily offering
of supplication and thanksgiving ? " Bishop
Horsley, in his charge to the Rochester

WILLIAM HOWLEY, D.D., AFTERWARDS ARCH
BISHOP OF CANTERBURY.
(After the painting by W. Owen, R.A.)

diocese in 1808, sadly remarks that " the
festivals and fasts of the church are, I
fear not without some connivance of the
clergy, gone too much into oblivion and
neglect. There can be no excuse for the
neglect of the feast of Our Lord s Nativity
and the stated fasts of Ash Wednesday
and Good Friday, even in the smallest
county parishes ; but in towns and the
more populous villages the church ought
certainly to be opened for worship on the
forenoon at least of every day in the
Passion week, of the Mondays and

292

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1827

Tuesdays of Easter week and Whitsuntide,
on the Epiphany, and on some if not all
of the other festivals." Such a grave re
minder from a prelate like bishop Horsley
shows how very lax and neglectful was the
church at this period in this particular.

exception of the small church in Covent
Garden erected by Inigo Jones in 1631."
A large proportion of the village churches
thus date from the fifteenth century, and
very many from a yet more remote period.
In the earlier years of the nineteenth

STOKE POGIS CHURCH.

nester v augnan,

A marked improvement was, however,
noticeable as the century advanced.

A carelessness, which became in many
instances a sad neglect, in the attention
paid to the fabric of the churches, was
another deplorable characteristic feature of
this period. It has been remarked that
" in England no church was erected of the
smallest pretensions to architectural design
between the Reformation and the great
fire of London in 1666, with the solitary

century not a few of these venerable fabrics
presented a dreary spectacle of neglect.
For years just enough had been done to
prevent them falling into ruin, but little
more ; and often what little had been done
was unsightly and even irreverent. The
words of a charge of archbishop Seeker,
written in 1750, placed side by side with
the description in an article published

* Ferguson : " History of the Modern Style of
Architecture."

1827.1

NEGLECT OF BUILDINGS AND CHURCHYARDS.

293

in the British Critic, 1827, on the state
of the country churches, reveal a state of
things so strangely similar, that we see
little or nothing had been done during
those eighty years :

British Critic, APRIL,

1827, ART. X.

" Let any one make a
circuit of the villages
throughout a consider
able portion of these
realms. On looking at
the exterior of the
church, he will often
find it half buried be
neath the mould which
has been suffered to ac
cumulate round it for
ages and to spread a
gradual decay through
out the walls and foun
dations. On entering it
he will find that the
external provision for
perpetuating dampness
and discomfort within
has succeeded to ad
miration. The walls will
appear decorated with
hangings of green, a
carpeting of the same
pattern covers the floor,
and the very first and
last thoughts which are
excited by the whole
appearance of the build
ing are those of ague,
catarrh, and rheuma
tism."

The churchyard God s acre shared in
the general desolation and neglect of the
fabrics. The beautiful and reverently kept
God s acre, which now is one of the most
pathetic and attractive adjuncts to so
many of our village homes of prayer ;
the cemete ry hard by the city or the
town, bright with flowers and pleasant
with their tenderly cared-for lawns and
paths, were things unknown in the

ARCHBISHOP SECKER S

CHARGE, 1750.
" Some of these
country churches have,
I fear, been scarce kept
in necessary present re
pair, and others by no
means duly cleared from
annoyances which must
gradually bring them to
decay, water undermin
ing and rotting the foun
dations, earth heaped
up against the outside,
weeds and shrubs grow
ing upon them too fre
quently the floors are
meanly paved, or the
walls dirty and patched,
or the windows ill
glazed or, it may be,
in part stopped up. The
churches are damp, of
fensive, and unwhole
some. . . . Why
should not the Church
of God, as well as every
thing else, partake of
the improvements of
later times ? "

eighteenth century and in the earlier part
of the nineteenth. In town and country
alike grim neglect was the feature gener
ally observable in these sacred enclosures.
Until even comparatively late in the latter
century, the appearance of a London
churchyard was to the last degree repulsive
and even shocking. By no means exag
gerated were the following lines,* written
in 1775 ; they describe only too faithfully
the state of things in churchyards, alike in
country villages and in great cities such as
London :

" Here nauseous weeds each pile surround,
And things obscene bestrew the ground ;
Skulls, bones in mouldering fragments lie,
All dreadful emblems of mortality."

In his famous " Elegy written in a coun
try churchyard " (about 1751), Gray writes:

" Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a moitld nng

heap,

Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
*****

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid,

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire,

Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre."

But although the great war which lasted
for the first fifteen years of the century had
to a very considerable extent damped church
enthusiasm and progress; had stood in the
way of any large expenditure either upon
the building of new churches, so necessary
considering the rapid growth in the popu
lation of the country, or even upon the
very needful repairs of church fabrics ;
had crippled also important philanthropic
schemes ; still, during this period and the

* T.Webb: preface to "Collection of Epitaphs,"
quoted in Abbey and Overton s "Church of Eng
land in the Eighteenth Century," chap. x.

^94

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1800.

years immediately following the battle of
Waterloo and the peace, there was, if not
enthusiasm, at least much quiet work and
gradual progress in the Church of England.
In our somewhat necessarily brief sketch
of this, on the whole, uneventful time, we
will preserve the well-known names of the
two great parties into which the Church
may be said to have been divided the
High Church and the Evangelical. In
substitution for one of these appellations
some writers prefer the terms, the " ortho
dox " and the " Evangelical." Such a term
as the first of these, applied to one party in
the Church emphatically, is unjust and un
fair, and would suggest to the unbiassed
reader a difference in grave doctrinal points
which certainly does not exist.

For many years of the century, although
the High Church party were the least
influential, and certainly possessed less
spiritual force in the country than the
sister school, although no very distinguished
men arose in their ranks, yet there was a
long roll of good and earnest men among
them who were staunchly faithful to the
great tradition of their historic party, and
who quietly and faithfully set themselves
to do their Master s work among us.

The first year of the century witnessed
.the death of one of these quiet, saintly
men, who, although he attained to no rank
or position in the hierarchy, being perfectly
content to live and die a humble parish
priest, will ever be remembered as the leader
of the party during the later years of his
useful life. Jones of Layland (1726-1800),
as he is usually termed Layland vicarage
being the scene of his long labours
was the centre and chief counsellor for
a long period of the principal men

of the High Church school. He was
the originator of that famous quarterly
magazine from which we have already
quoted The British Critic, the periodical
which for many years was the powerful
advocate of historic Church principles in
the Church of England.

Dying in 1800, his mantle may be said
with some truth to have fallen upon his
friend and biographer, William Stevens
(1732-1807). This devout and earnest
man, whose life work was devoted to the
best interests of the Church, was simply a
well-to-do trader, a vigorous supporter of the
Christian Knowledge Society, then perhaps
the most influential of the Church societies,
and treasurer of queen Anne s bounty. He
was closely connected with all the church
work of the High Church school. He passed
his life and spent his ample means in the
cause he loved so well. In the year 1800
he founded the once well-known association,
of Churchmen called " Nobody s Club,"
the members of which consisted of tne
most prominent among the Churchmen
of the times. He died in 1807.

A very remarkable man, who lived at
the end of the eighteenth century and
through the earlier years of the nineteenth,
whose name is now well-nigh forgotten,
was Dr. Sikes, of Guisborough. He was a
well-read theologian and a profound student
of the writings of the fathers of the early
Church. A quiet, retiring scholar, he was
little known outside a small circle of
friends, who loved to resort to his country
parish in Northamptonshire for the sake of
hearing his scholarly and thoughtful views
on church matters. Dr. Sikes died in
1834. Pusey even went so far as to regard
him as a precursor of the Oxford move-

iSoo 1833.]

DR. -SIKES OF GUISBOROUGH.

295

ment. One of his conversations with his
friends, which took place as late as 1833,
was quoted later by the great Tractarian
leader, who had it from one of the intimate
friends of Dr. Sikes. Pusey often referred
to it as having a sort of prophetical value.
Some of the thoughts are of striking
interest. " I well remember," said Pusey s

in their teaching : the uniform suppression
of one great truth. There is no account
given anywhere, so far as I see, of the one
Holy Catholic Church. . . . Now this
great truth is an article of the Creed. . . .
The doctrine is of the last importance, and
the principles it involves of immense
power, and some day, not far distant, it

PORTION OF GRAY S ELEGY, IN THE POET S HANDWRITING. (British Museitm.}

informant, " the very countenance, gesture,
attitude and tone of good Mr. Sikes, and
give you, as near as may be, what he
said " :

" I seem to think I can tell you some
thing which you who are young may
probably live to see, but which I, who shall
soon be called away off the stage, shall not.
Wherever I go, all about the country I see
amongst the clergy a number of very
amiable and estimable men, many of them
much in earnest and wishing to do good.
But I have observed one universal want

will judicially have its reprisals. And,
whereas the other articles of the Creed
seem now to have thrown it into the
shade, it will seem, when it is brought
forward, to swallow up the rest. We now
hear not a breath about the Church ;
by-and-by, those who live to see it will
hear of nothing else ; and just in propor
tion, perhaps, to its present suppression,
will be its future development. . . . And
woe betide those, whoever they are, who
shall, in the course of Providence, have
to bring it forward. . . . They will be

296

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND,

lessly misunderstood and misinterpreted.
There will be one great outcry of Popery
from one end of the country to the other.
. . . How the doctrine may be first
thrown forward we know not ; but the

as Church principles. He was treasurer of
the Christian Knowledge Society, was one
of the principal movers in the development
of the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel. His name figures as one of the

Photo: G. IV. Wilson &&amp;gt; Co., Aberdeen.

PETERBOROUGH CATHEDRAL.

powers of the world may any day turn
their backs upon us, and this will prob
ably lead to those effects I have de
scribed."

A more generally known Churchman
was Joshua Watson (1771-18; 5), who for
forty years spent his life in devising and
carrying out good and useful works.
Originally a wine merchant, comparatively
at an early age he gave up his business to
devote his whole time and vigorous intel
lect to the furtherance of Church work,
and during that long period of forty years
his name is prominent in every great work
carried on under what are generally known

* Dr. Liddon : " Life of Pusey," vol. i, chap. xi.

founders, and long as the treasurer of the
National Society, which is so honourably
distinguished as the real centre whence
sprang the elaborate and successful net
work of Church schools for the poor and
artisan class.

His brother, John James Watson, some
time archdeacon of St. Albans, was for
some forty years rector of Hackney, and a
lifelong friend and helper of his better-
known brother, who lived at Clapton,
close to his Hackney rectory. He too was
a distinguished member of the celebrated
but quite unobtrusive coterie known a^
the Clapton sect a name probably
given to it as in some way the friendly

THE WEST FRONT. PETERBOROUGH CATHEDRAL.

PHOTO : WILSON, ABERDEEN.

THE "CLAPTON SECT.

297

rival in good works of the yet more in
fluential and more widely celebrated
" Clapham " sect of the Evangelicals.
Another once well-known name of the
u Clapton " sect was Henry Handley
Norns (1771-1850), who devoted his ample
fortune to good works, and nobly laboured
during his whole life without remuneration
and with scanty reward in the Church s
service, his highest preferment being a
non-residentiary stall in St. Paul s. He
was a brother - in - law of archdeacon
Watson. Norris was a man of rare
devotion and considerable ability. As
honorary secretary and one of the three

front of all good works carried on by Church
agencies during a long series of years. His
advice was so often sought by the Govern
ment of the day, that he was even termed
the bishop - maker. The British Critic
owned him, if not as the active editor,
certainly as one of its most unwearied
contributors.

Among other distinguished members
of the Hackney phalanx or Clapton sect
must be reckoned the learned Christopher
Wordsworth, brother of the poet, who was
subsequently Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge ; the chaplain, too, and con
fidential friend of archbishop Manners-

THE CHOIR, DURHAM CATHEDRAL.

founders of the National Society, and an
, active worker in most of the Church

societies of the time, he was in the fore-
5 F

Sutton, who was always the steady friend
of this celebrated group of High Church
men. Outside the great metropolis,

298

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1795-1838.

among the intimate friends and associates
of these good men, were several powerful
and widely influential personages. Of
these, Charles Daubeny, afterwards arch
deacon of Sarum, during a busy career,
took nothing from the Church for ser
vices so faithful. He was well known
for his success in building and restoring
churches, and as a writer on Church
matters he was in his own time a con
siderable power.

One really great thinker and theologian
must be reckoned in the ranks of this quiet
school of High Churchmen of the first
thirty or forty years of last century Hugh
James Rose (1795-1838), whose share in
the beginning of the famous and far-
reaching Oxford movement will be alluded
to in detail, when we come to chronicle
the work of the great Tractarians. H. J.
Rose became prominent as a preacher and
a parish priest in 1819, when he was ap
pointed vicar of Horsham. He had a dis
tinguished Cambridge career, and was soon
closely associated with Joshua Watson,
Christopher Wordsworth, and the other
High Church leaders, who early discovered
promise of future greatness in the young
divine.

As vicar of Horsham, Christian advo
cate and select preacher in the University
of Cambridge, as professor at the new
University of Durham, then principal of
King s College, London, as the esteemed
friend of bishop Van-Mildert, and confi
dential chaplain of archbishop Howley,
Mr. Rose for some seventeen or eighteen
years exercised an unparalleled influence
in his party as a writer and teacher,
struggling all the while with constant
weakness and sickness. His brilliant and

useful career closed before he had reached
his fortieth year.*

The bench of Anglican bishops, during
the thirty years of which we are speaking,
contained some very able men and several
distinguished scholars. No one, however,
among them attained conspicuous rank as
a writer. Several of them were warmly
attached to the High Church party, but,
with perhaps one exception, they regarded
their episcopal position as precluding them
from taking any decided position as con
spicuous leaders of any one school of
thought in the Church. Of these, Manners-
Sutton, bishop of Norwich (1792), arch
bishop of Canterbury (1805-1828), was ever
the kindly sympathiser with and warm
supporter of the Clapton sect. He was
the intimate friend of Joshua Watson, of
whom we have already spoken. William
Howley, who followed Dr. Manners-Sutton
at Canterbury (1828-1848), and who pre
viously was bishop of London (1813-
1828), was also a distinct High Church-
man, the intimate friend of H. J. Rose,
who was his chaplain, but was less iden
tified than even his predecessor with the
party. Herbert Marsh, successively bishop
of Llandaff and Peterborough (1816-
1839), belonged to the same school of
thought. Van Mildert, bishop of Llandaff
(1819) and of Durham (1826-1836), a
member of the Clapton sect and one of
the " Nobody s Club," and for some time
before his elevation editor of the British
Critic, was a more pronounced High
Churchman than any of his brethren on
the bench above mentioned. Thomas

* In Dean Burgon s " Lives of Twelve Good
Men " will be found a very graphic account of
H. J. Rose (vol. i.,pp. 116-295).

DURHAM CATHEDRAL FROM THE SOUTH WEST.

PHOTO: GRAPHOTONE Co., EXFIELD.

HIGH CHURCH SOCIETIES.

299

Fanshawe Middleton, bishop of Calcutta
(1814-1822) before he left England for his
great Indian see, as vicar of the important
London parish of St. Pancras was one
of the Clapton or Hackney coterie, and
was distinguished as a prominent High
Churchman, as was also Charles Lloyd,
Regius Professor of Divinity, and subse
quently Bishop of Oxford (1827-1829).
Henry Philpotts, appointed bishop of
Exeter, 1831, was perhaps the only excep
tion in the list of High Church bishops
who may be said to have taken any very
prominent part in the burning theological
questions of the day, after his elevation
to the bench ; and his writings belong
to a somewhat later date.

We have enumerated the names of
these eminent men as members of the
High school and as warm sympathisers
with its teaching, rather than as active
leaders of the party. But such a list gives
additional evidence that witnesses to the
old historic High Church school of thought
were by no means absent from the Church
of England in the period which compre
hended the years between 1800 and 1830-3.

Among the more public pieces of work
undertaken between the above dates,
mainly through the efforts of this school of
thought in the church, we must mention
the " Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts," which steadily
advanced in its useful and beneficent
work. During these thirty years its
revenues, its missionaries, and teachers
increased at least tenfold. Under similar
influence the u Society for the Promotion
of Christian Knowledge " made an almost
equal progress during the same period.
An even more important work was

carried out by the efforts of men like
Joshua Watson, Wordsworth, and Mr.
H. H. Norris, in the home-life of England.
The all-important question of the educa
tion of the poor had never received proper
consideration at the hands of churchmen.
In 1810 the bishop of Norwich, preaching
at St. Paul s, made the startling statement
that " nearly two-thirds of the children of
the labouring poor had little or no educa
tion." In the eighteenth century some
thing had certainly been done in the
matter by the foundation and support of
charity schools. The Society for the
Promotion of Christian Knowledge had
founded and maintained a considerable
number of schools in London and in
other populous centres.

As early as 1807 some friends of edu
cation founded the " British and Foreign
School Society " to assist the children of
the poor, but this society ignored the
claims of the Church of England. It
was founded, it is true, on a religious
basis, but its fundamental idea was
the principle that all forms of Chris
tianity were equally good, the Church
Catechism being excluded from the schools
which were under the direction of this
completely unsectarian association. At
this time, in country districts, the training
of the young was almost entirely in the
hands of dames, who were, for the most
part, very illiterate, and unsystematic in
their teaching. The British and Foreign
Society had a certain measure of success,
but was never very popular.

The organised attempt at unsectarian
religious education was naturally received
with misgivings by earnest churchmen,
and, in 1811, the devoted group upon

300

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[18121833.

which we have been dwelling determined
to found an education society on Church
lines, which should extend its influence
over the whole kingdom. At the house of
Mr. Joshua Watson, in London, Mr. H. H.
Norris, and a third friend, Mr. John Bowles,
met to discuss plans, and subsequently,
with the co-operation of archbishop
Manners-Sutton, founded the " National
Society," the aim and object of which was
clearly stated in the words which have
ever since formed the motto of the famous
educational company which has since done
such good work for the Church of England.
The National Society, publicly declaring
its purpose to be " to instruct and educate
the poor in suitable learning, works of
industry, and the principles of the Christian
religion according to the Established
Church," met with great and deserved
success. Bishop Howley in his charge to
the diocese of London, in 1818, writes
that at the first meeting of the National
Society in 1812 there were then, in the
earlier years of its existence, fifty-two
schools in union with it, containing 8,000
children. It grew, however, rapidly. In
1813 there were 240 schools with 40,000
children; in 1818, as many as 1,249
schools, with 180,000 children. In six
years .that is, in 1824 there were as
many as 3,054 schools in connection
with the National Society, with the vast
number of 400,000 children trained in
these schools. Its work, besides establish
ing schools for the young, was especially
devoted to training teachers.

The undoubted popularity of the Church
of England teaching of the people, as
exemplified in the useful work above sum
marised, was clearly demonstrated in 1833,

when the Government made its first small
education grant. It was then found that
the National Society had caused 690 *
schools to be erected, while at the same
period the schools of the somewhat older
unsectarian competitor, the British and
Foreign Society, numbered only i6o.f

In this little sketch of the work and
life of the High Churchmen, roughly be
tween 1800 and 1828-1832, the date of the
first of the "Reform" Acts, the repeal
of the Test and Corporation and the
Catholic Emancipation Acts, when a period
of stress and storm set in, we have shown
that the High Church party by no means
lacked able and competent witnesses,
during that quarter of a century or more r
to that historic Christianity, the precious
heritage of " a great and far-descended
school," the school in which that noble
line of divines and theologians from Hooker
to Waterland had lived and taught. But
during that period of twenty-five to thirty
years the party had failed to exercise
anything like a far-reaching, powerful
influence over the church and people.
It had done much, undoubtedly. It had
vastly improved the services of the church.
Its members in many an instance had set
a high and noble example. It had
enormously increased the foreign mission
work of the church. It had created an
ever-broadening network of education,
which embraced a large proportion of
the poorest of the population. It had

* These numbers, of course, do not include the
schools in connection with the National Society.

t Compare, for more details of this early educa
tional work, Canon Perry s "English Church
History" Third Period, chap, ix., and Canon
Overton s " English Church in the Nineteenth
Century," chap. vii.

i8i2 1833.]

WEAKNESS OF THE ANGLICAN SCHOOL.

301

somewhat multiplied the number of the devoted though the members were, no

churches, and had done much to spread leader had appeared who was able, either

pure and healthy literature. Still, it had by his writings or his words, to kindle

not to any great extent found its way enthusiasm or to stir the hearts of the great

CHARLES SIMEON.
(After the painting by Sir William Beechey.)

into the hearts of the people. No famous
preachers had arisen amongst it. No
really popular writers had appeared in the
ranks of these true-hearted churchmen.
Among the " Clapton sect," admirable and

mass of lettered or unlettered persons who
lived outside the comparatively narrow
limits of their own somewhat limited circle.

There was, however, a yet stronger

302

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1800.

spiritual force at work in the church than
that exercised by the party we have been
speaking of, all through the earlier years of
the nineteenth century. In rural districts,
in the neighbouring villages, in cities, in
the adjoining parish or even in the next
street, would often be found an accredited
teacher, an ordained minister of the same
church, whose thoughts and views were
somewhat different from those entertained
by the men whose work and influence
have just been described two parallel lines
running side by side in the same direction
but never touching each other. There
were various causes at work, which be
tween 1800 and 1830-32 contributed to
the superiority of the Evangelicals as a
spiritual force and power in England.*

When the nineteenth century dawned,
this party in the church inherited a great
though somewhat modern tradition. To
their noble efforts were largely due the
awakening which had passed over religious
life in England in the eighteenth century.
Most earnest thinking men acknowledged
the debt, though few among the dispensers
of patronage in high places were willing
to recognise the claim. Ministers of the
crown and the bench of bishops alike
viewed the Evangelicals, who had already
done so splendid a work in the church,
who in the second generation were still
with equal diligence carrying it on, with
suspicion if not with positive dislike. The

* We shall use here this well-known term as we
write of their work and influence. No other word
would satisfy the reader. Custom has legated it ;
it is commonly used by those who love their
especial doctrines, though with some little re
luctance ; it even forms part of the every-day
vocabulary " of those who perhaps look on its
tenets and usages somewhat coldly, when they
speak of the so called low churchmen.

Evangelicals were content, however, to
live and work on in the cold shade of
neglect, without recompense or reward, in
what they felt was their Master s service.

As a party, the Evangelicals in the year
1800 were also singularly fortunate in the
possession of a leader of rare and excep
tional gifts. We use the term " leader n
with diffidence, for Charles Simeon of
Cambridge would, at any period of his
long and seemingly .uneventful career &gt;
have been surprised at meeting with the
appellation in reference to himself. It is
no easy matter to discover the secret of
the vast power and almost measureless
influence which this quiet gentle spirit
exercised for long years, far beyond the
limits of his loved university, in that great
party of the Church of England with
which his name will be for ever connected.

There was nothing remarkable about
the boyhood or school life of this future
leader of men. His father was a Berkshire
vicar of good family and position. From
Eton he passed to King s College, Cam
bridge. But although, in accordance with
the privileges of the Eton foundation, he
became in due course a fellow of his
famous college, he won no special academic
laurels. His life, up to the year 1782,
when he was ordained, was quietly un
eventful, save for one strange incident
which altered and shaped the whole
course of his future life. Very shortly
after his coming to Cambridge, the provost
of King s told him that, according to the
rules of the college, " he must attend the
Lord s Supper. 1 We quote now Simeon s
own words : " Conscience told me that if
I must go, I must repent and turn to God,
unless I chose to eat and drink my own

1782179

CHARLES SIMEON.

303

damnation. From that day I never ceased
to mourn and pray till I obtained pro
gressive manifestation of God s mercy in
Christ, and subsequently perfect peace.
Thus you see that under God I owe all to
Dr. Cooke (the provost of King s)."

From that memorable date Simeon s
life was consecrated to God. Almost
directly after his ordination, as curate of
one of the Cambridge churches (St. Ed
ward s) he obtained considerable celebrity
as a preacher ; and within a few months
bishop Yorke of Ely, who was an old
friend of Simeon s father, appointed him
incumbent of Trinity church, in the centre
of the university town. It was a strange
nomination for so young a man, though
the preferment was valueless in a pecuni
ary sense ; but Simeon was already highly
spoken of, and as a fellow of King s pos
sessed a modest independency, which en
abled him to undertake the incumbency
of Trinity without stipend. The appoint
ment was, however, extremely distasteful
to the majority of the parishioners, and for
a lengthened period the young incumbent
was subjected to every kind of hindrance
and even to persecution.

At this critical period of his career he
became intimately acquainted with Henry
Venn, the once famous vicar of Hudders-
field, and author of the principal devotional
work of the Evangelical revival, " The
Complete Duty of Man." Henry Venn,
prematurely worn out with his pastoral
work and preaching, had retired to the
little secluded parish of Yelling, about
twelve miles west of Cambridge. There
the great teacher, for more than a quarter
of a century, lived in retirement, minister
ing to his few humble parishioners, but

corresponding with and otherwise assisting
a large circle of friends in his party.
Simeon for some fourteen years had the
rare advantage of the intimate friendship
and direction of this great and good man,
to whom, we read, his attachment grew till
it was a sacred passion." At Yelling he
made the acquaintance of other prominent
Evangelicals, and laid the foundation of a
life-long intimacy with men like John
Venn the younger, John Thornton,
Newton (once of Olney), John Berridge
of Everton, and others whose names were
household words in that party of fervid
and religious men. Henry Venn from the
first seems to have discerned what a power
Simeon was destined to become. We
meet with such passages as this in his
letters : " Our dear friend Simeon came
over to see me, . . . his very presence
a blessing. ... It does me good to
be with him ; none can bear and receive
profit from reproof, like him." This was
as early as 1785. In 1790 Venn writes of
his affectionate friend Simeon coming over
from Cambridge to Yelling and preaching
there. " We were all revived," he says ;
" he left a blessing behind him."

During the earlier years of his life in the
university city, Simeon s career was a most
hard and painful one. To many it was
a new, strange doctrine that he preached
with so much fervour Sunday after Sunday,
and not a few mocked and derided ; but his
followers year by year increased in number,
till virtually the whole university was
leavened by his teaching and example.
They were indeed no mere moral essays
which the young preacher delivered.
To Simeon, as to Venn and Berridge and
the older Evangelicals, " all his hearers

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17821811.

were sinful men, for whom the Gospel
was the one remedy ; and Christ was the
Gospel; and personal faith in Him, a living
Person, was the Gospel secret. To humble
the sinner, to exalt the Saviour, was the
heart and soul of his message."

It has been often a subject of dispute
whether or not Simeon was a great
preacher. In many respects doubtless the

lighthouse, who had let the light die out
so that a terrible and fatal wreck was the
consequence. He pictured the delinquent
brought out for examination before a full
court, and when the plea was urged in
his behalf that he fell asleep, " Askep /"
said the preacher ; and the way in which
he made this word burst on the ears of his
audience, who were hanging in solemn

Photo: E. Clennett, Cambridge.
CLARE COLLEGE AND KING S CHAPEL, CAMBRIDGE.

answer would be in the negative. His
address was undignified ; his features un-
beautiful ; his voice, men said, was weak
and unmusical ; the characteristics of an
orator were certainly not his. Still, he
possessed some really great gifts both of
utterance and of action. But the secret
of Simeon s power in the pulpit was the
moral force of his preaching. It often sent
a thrill through the soul. This electric
power which he possessed is well instanced
in a sermon he once preached at Edin
burgh on ministerial duty and faithfulness.
As his illustration he took the keeper of a
* Moule : " Life of Simeon," chap. v.

stillness on his lips, contrasting the cause
with the effect, was never forgotten.

Far on in life Simeon preserved
this soul-moving power. Dean Howson
related to his biographer the following
experience : Simeon was preaching in
his church (Trinity, Cambridge) on the
text (Col. i. 1 8) " That in all things
He might have the pre-eminence."
There was, as usual, assembled a vast
congregation. One passage was written
for ever on their hearts by the prophetic
fire of the utterance, as the old man
seemed to rise under the impression of
his Master s glory. " That He might

17821811.]

have the

preacher.

SIMEON S PREACHING.

305

pre-eminence ! repeated the
" And He will have it ! And
He must have it ! And He shall have it ! "
It is not surprising that his own church as
well as great St. Mary s, the university

Cambridge, where once he was scorned
and mocked at.*

For Cambridge, when Simeon began his
ministry, was sorely in need of an awaken
ing voice. The discipline of the university

1 ho. o : . Cicnnett, Cambridge.
INTERIOR OF HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, CAMBRIDGE.

church, were always thronged to hear him
as the years went on. In November, 1811,
we read how the sight of the overflowing
church was almost "electric"; in 1814
there was scarcely room to move above
or below ; in 1815 the audiences were,
immense ; in 1823 many were unable
to get inside the doors. And this in

had sunk to the lowest point. The clerical
society of many of the colleges were in
not a few cases actually disreputable. A
shameless intemperance was among the
curses of the habits of the university.!

* Cf. Moule s " Reminiscences," in the " Life
of Simeon," chap. vii.
t Ibid. , chap. i.

3 o6

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[17821833.

The services in the college chapels were
too often irreverent ; in the churches, even
in the most solemn rites, confusion and
disorder reigned. Confirmation especially,
as has been already remarked, was not
unfrequently merely looked on as a noisy
holiday. The celebrations of the holy
communion in the churches were miserably
attended. Church life indeed seemed dead
in that powerful university centre. And
never was any religious reformer more
bitterly opposed from the first days of his
ministry. Through the long period of his
working under the direct influence of
Henry Venn and the Evangelical leaders,
a time lasting many years, was Simeon
the object .of bitter persecution. He w r as
even personally slandered as a bad man,
who made a high profession of godliness ;
but more difficult to bear was the long-
continued coldness and contempt which he
met with from men of his own standing
and from his seniors in the university. In
his own pathetic words we read the follow

ing

I remember the time that I was

quite surprised that a fellow of my own
college (King s) ventured to walk with me
for a quarter of an hour on the grass-plot
before Clare Hall ; and for many years
after I began my ministry I was as a man
wondered at. A " Simeonite " was for
many Cambridge generations a contemp
tuous term which " satirised while it
denoted" a man s religious views. Em
boldened by this public disapproval in
high quarters, the more thoughtless and
noisy of the undergraduates again and
again made Trinity church the scene of a
disgraceful tumult ; and later, when within
the sacred walls comparative quiet had
been at length attained, the saintly subject

of this little sketch was exposed outside to
open insult and reviling. We come upon
such a " memory " as this from the pun
of one who was an eye-witness : u He
[Professor Scholefield] used to take us
with him to dear old Simeon s church, and
often as we walked with him thither, we
heard the coarse abuse he met with from
the idle undergraduates, who rejoiced in
nothing more than hooting at Simeon and
his curate." *

But the time came, though it was after
long years, when all this was changed, and
Cambridge men came to see that a man of
God, in the truest sense, had been passing
by them continually. All through the
long period of trial Simeon never flinched.
Unwearied in his work, boldly giving out
Sunday after Sunday his saving message,
ever with increasing power and fervour^
he disregarded opposition and persecution;
for his eyes were opened to see what was-
veiled from others, how the mountain on
which he stood was full of horses and
chariots of fire round about him. Very
grandly wrote one whose warm, bright
eloquence has been not once or twice used
to picture the splendid efforts of great and
successful reformers, of many churches and
varied schools of thought in different ages :
" In the church of the Holy Trinity at
Cambridge, every Sunday during more
than half a century witnessed the gather
ing of a crowd which hung on the lips of
the preacher as men hearken to some
unexpected intelligence of a deep but ever
varying interest. Faces pale with study
or furrowed by bodily labour, eyes failing
with age or yet undimmed by sorrow, were

* " Memoirs of Professor Scholefield," quoted
by Moule in the " Life."

1782-1833-]

SIMEON S INFLUENCE.

bei.t towards him with a gaze of which
(with whatever other meaning it might be
combined) fixed attention was the pre
dominant character. Towards the close of
that long period the pulpit of St. Mary s
(the university church) was the centre of
the same attraction, and with a still more
impressive result. . . . As was his
wont, he insisted on fundamental truths,
or enforced the great duties of life, or
detected the treacheries of the heart, or
traced the march of retributive justice,
or caught and espied the compassionate
accents in which the Father of mercies
addresses His erring children. It was a
voice which penetrated and subdued the
very soul. It was an eloquence which
silenced criticism. It was instinct with a
contagious intensity of belief. It sounded
as the language of one to whom the
mysteries and the futurities of which he
spoke had been disclosed in actual vision." *
Gradually round Simeon gathered a
group of young undergraduates, won by
his intensely earnest preaching and by his
growing reputation for saintliness. These,
as they finished their university career and
went down, handed on the torch of their
love and friendship for the strange and
often calumniated teacher, to freshmen
who filled their places, as his loving, faith
ful disciples. Powerful as was his influence
as a preacher, it is doubtful if his "con
versation parties," ever and again recruited
with the fresh young Cambridge life, had
not a wider and more enduring sway over
the Evangelical section of the Church of
England. In its way it was unique. It
went on for more than half a century.

* Sir James Stephen s Essays : " The Clapham
Sect."

Such a strange power had never been
witnessed before : will it ever be again ?
These homely meetings, which had so
broad and far-reaching an effect, are
thus described by an eye-witness, his dear
friend and sometime curate, Thomas
Thomason, of Magdalen, who subsequently
became one of the Indian band of Christian,
workers. Thomason writes thus in 1792 :

" Mr. Simeon watches over us as a:
shepherd over his sheep. He takes delight
in instructing us, and has us continually
at his rooms. He has invited me to his
Friday evening lectures. This I consider
one of the greatest advantages I ever
received. The subject of his lectures is
natural and revealed religion. These sub
jects he studies with much pains, reads the
fruit of his labours and explains it ; we.
write after him."

Another of his chamber-labours was his-
sermon class, where he taught his young"
hearers how to preach, not brilliantly, but
usefully. Thomason touchingly relates an
experience of Marsden, afterwards a mis
sionary pioneer in New Zealand, who in
1794, one day entering Simeon s rooms,,
found him " so absorbed in the contempla
tion of the Son of God, and so over,
powered with a display of His mercy to-
his soul, that he was incapable of pro
nouncing a single word." All this work
went on, we must not forget, for some
fifty years.

Far on in that beautiful and useful life,.
Canon Carus gives us the following little
picture of one of these undergraduate
gatherings in Simeon s rooms at King s.
It was in 1833, when the loved teacher
was seventy-three years old. u I see him
even now, with his hands folded upon his

3 8

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1833-1836

knees, his head turned a little to one side,
Tiis visage solemn and composed, and his
whole deportment such as to command
attention and respect. After a pause he
would encourage us to propose our doubts,
addressing us in slow, soft, measured
accents : * Now if you have any question
to ask, I shall be happy to hear it, and to
give what assistance I can. This same
eye-witness thus goes on, describing
another meeting in Simeon s rooms on
May 3rd, 1833: "This was the most
solemn and interesting Friday evening
meeting that I ever attended. I never
saw the holy man of God more full of the
spirit of the Master. His words were dis
tilled as honey from his lips ; at least, they
were very sweet to my taste, and their
savour, I trust, I have still retained. On
that memorable evening such a deep sense
of his own unworthiness rested upon his
soul, that he was low in self-abasement
before God. All his language seemed to
be Lord, I am vile, and his very looks
spake the same." Later on in the evening
he said to his young hearers, u You often
feel that your prayers scarcely reach the
ceiling ; but, oh ! get into this humble
spirit by considering how good the Lord
is, and how evil you are, and then prayer
will mount on wings of faith to heaven.
The sigh, the groan of a broken heart will
soon go through the ceiling up to heaven,
aye, into the very bosom of God."

All these successive generations of under
graduates, who in turn sat at the feet
of the great Evangelical master in the
crowded aisles of Trinity church, and in
the quiet college rooms overlooking the
broad lawn of King s and the gently flow
ing river, went out every three years into

the arena of the busy world, some as lay
men, more perhaps as clergymen, bearing
the impress, more or less deeply marked,
of the teaching of the holy man of God
who, without recompense or reward, had
shown them how to find the narrow way
leading to life themselves, and how to in
dicate the same " way " to others. With
very many he kept up a correspondence to
the end, kindling anew the torch of faith
when the light flickered or burned but
dimly. Long years before the end came in
1836, when the good old man went home to
his well-won rest, all opposition to his work
had died away. No voice of calumny or of
sarcasm was heard. Cambridge had come
to learn that a great spirit was dwelling
among- them, and no word was ever spoken
of Simeon but was coloured with the
deepest veneration and with reverent awe.
The death of Simeon was a fitting close
to his calm, beautiful life. In the autumn
of 1836, making ready for a course of
sermons he had undertaken to preach
before the university in the November
following, and apparently in good health
and strength, although fully conscious of
his seventy-seven years, he told a friend
that he rejoiced in the thought his coffin
was already cut down, and in Cambridge
at that very time; that his shroud was also
ready, and in a few days, he added, he
would join the company of the redeemed
above. His strange prophetic words were
verified. In the last days of September he
caught a chill in Ely cathedral on the
occasion of a brief visit to the newly-
appointed bishop ; the worn-out frame had
no strength of resistance, and before the
middle of the November in which he was to
preach his course of sermons before the

Photo: E. Clenvett, Cambridge.

KING S COLLEGE CHAPEL. CAMBRIDGE.

310

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1836.

university, he had departed. He faded
gradually away, but not without some pain
and suffering, ever serene and calm to the
end. Many of his last utterances were
treasured up by his devoted friends who
were \vatching him. One friend sitting by
him, knowing that he was dying and
noticing his happy look, asked him what
he was just then thinking of. He an
swered : "I don t think now ; I am enjoy
ing." Men who loved him well tell us
how rarely bright were the smiles which
ever and anon lit up the old worn face.
"Infinite wisdom," he whispered slowly,
for the voice was gone, " has arranged the
whole with infinite love, and infinite power
enables me to rest upon that love. I am
in a dear Father s hands. All is secure.
I have the sweetest peace. I cannot
have more peace." When the bystanders
thought all consciousness was gone, he
suddenly spoke again : " Do you want to
know what I am doing ? Go and look in
the first chapter to the Ephesians, from the
third to the fourteenth verse. There you
will see what I am enjoying now." One
of his last utterances was very remarkable :
" My principles were not founded on
fancies or enthusiasm ; there is a reality in
them, and I find them sufficient to support
me in death."

They buried him in the stately prayer-
home of his college in that chapel of
King s which every Cambridge man knows
so well; and there, near the west door of
almost the last built, at the same time one
of the grandest churches of the mighty
architects of the Middle Ages, the remains
of Simeon sleep. It was a fitting resting-
place for one of the noblest and truest of
the long line of Cambridge men. His

friend Francis Close, dean of Carlisle, thus
writes of his funeral, of which he tells us
he was an astonished spectator : * The like
of it was never seen, nor ever will be
seen again. More than 1,500 gownsmen
attended to honour a man who had been
greatly despised." The vast building was
filled with mourners, with men, women,
children who had been his Trinity parish
ioners. It was indeed a sorrowing crowd.
More remarkable, however, when the
story of the past was recalled, was another
vast group made up of heads of houses,
doctors, professors, men of all ages, stations,
opinions, and of every college of the
university. All these stood by the grave
of Simeon on that sad November morning.
In the busy town the shops were closed.
In the university and colleges well-nigh
every lecture was suspended.*

Great and important, however, as was
the powerful influence exercised by Simeon
for some forty years or more upon the
work of the church in England, through
the medium of those many young souls
who in their universitv career, when en-

during impressions are so often made, had
passed through his church of Trinity and
his rooms at King s, there was another
field beyond the limits of the great home
kingdom, which in a very marked degree
felt during the period of which we are
speaking, and is feeling still, the influence

* There are several important monographs of
Simeon s career. The most considerable of these
are the " Memoirs of the Life of Simeon," by
Canon Cams, Simeon s curate and successor in
Trinity church ; Canon Brown s " Recollections of
the Conversation Parties"; and, last, "Charles
Simeon," by Dr. H. C. G. Moule, now Bishop of
Durham, in the series of " English Leaders of
Religion," 1892.

1800-1836.] SIMEON AND THE GREAT CHURCH SOCIETIES.

of his devoted work and teaching. The
nineteenth century will ever be memorable
in religious history as the age when men
once more awakened to the sense of their
responsibility in the matter of missions to
the heathen world. And in the roll of
those men who will be for ever honourable
for the share they have taken in the work
of arousing this sense of responsibility, and
in the further work of directing energies
thus evoked, the name of Simeon must
ever stand in the front rank.

In the foundation of the great Church
Missionary Society his part was important.
As early as 1795 Simeon, then compara
tively speaking a young and unknown
man, was present at the meeting at
Ranceby in Lincolnshire when the ques
tions of missions to heathens was first
discussed, as he was also in the subsequent
gatherings of the "Eclectic" Club in
London, when the great subject was further
inquired into and the famous Church Mis
sionary Society first definitely formed. In
1802 we find him preaching the second
annual sermon of the Church Missionary
Society at St. Anne s, Blackfriars, and in
the years that followed he was ever one
of the trusted missionary leaders, along
with the first Wiiberforce and the other
well-known chiefs of the " Clapham Sect."
But it was his inspiring personality, and
his power in educating men for the difficult
task of missions very difficult indeed in
those days of hesitation and doubt and
dread of consequences that Simeon s great
work was so conspicuous. In his Cam
bridge church and college rooms he trained
those famous "living agents" for the
mission field, who showed to coming
generations the splendid possibilities of

mission work, in spite of the timid counsels
of some and the scarcely veiled opposition
of others in power and authority. It was
India especially, with its teeming popula
tion, its magnificent cities, its barbaric
civilisation, which especially though not
exclusively interested Simeon ; and to work
for the Master s cause, and, if needs be, to
die in those great and populous Indian
centres, over which for weal or woe the
shadow of the English power brooded,
Simeon trained those true missionary
pioneers, among whom Henry Martyn,
Thomas Thomason, Daniel Corrie, James
Hough, Claudius Buchanan are conspicuous
and well-known and honoured examples.
A very large proportion of the Indian
chaplains for forty years were men trained
and directly influenced by Simeon.

Space would fail us, if any attempt
were made, to detail the great Evan
gelical leader s work in other directions,
such as in popularising the Bible
Society, and in organising the Society
for Promoting Christianity among the
Jews. He was the chief originator of
the powerful " Trust " societies, which
have supplied so many able and devoted
Evangelical ministers to populous English
centres. In all these works, and in number
less other efforts in philanthropy and
religion, undertaken by the ever active
and zealous members of the Clapham sect
and their followers, Simeon was ever a
prominent and a leading figure.

The bitter opposition and open contempt
which Simeon met with during the earlier
period of his residence at the university,
did not begin to die down until he had
preached and taught for some ten years.
From that time onward Cambridge was

312

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[18;

justly regarded as a great centre of Evan
gelicalism, and its influence over the
church for many years kept increasing.
Few, however, among the leading men of
the university between 1800 and 1833-36
can be named as standing on the same
platform as Simeon. Among these few
may be mentioned Isaac Milner, dean of
Carlisle and president of Queen s College,
who died in 1820 ; but nervousness of
temperament, and perhaps still more in
dolence, prevented this really eminent man
from taking the high and influential place
in the party, to which his great abilities
and position would seem to have de
signated him. William Farish, who died
the year after Simeon (1837), tutor of
Magdalen and Jacksonian Professor of
Chemistry, perhaps next to Simeon exer
cised for a long period the largest influence
as an Evangelical in the university. He,
too, like Simeon, was a real power among
the youth of Cambridge for many years,
and was a trusted friend of the great
leader. Several of the curates of Trinity
church, generally men of high university
distinction, acted as efficient lieutenants
to the revered chief. Of these we would
instance Thomas Thomason, his dearest
friend, who was in his day fifth wrangler,
and who later was distinguished in the
field of foreign missions, and the yet more
celebrated James Scholefield, who survived
until 1853. In 1825 Scholefield became
Regius Professor of Greek. The two
Jowetts, one of whom was subsequently
Regius Professor of Civil Law, and William
Dealtry, afterwards vicar of Clapham in
succession to John Venn, were also notable
Cambridge Evangelicals.

But during that long period of forty

years the men of power and positioi
who stood by Simeon were compara
tively few, and the names of those few
are, after all, but little known and
scarcely remembered. The great work
was really done by that strange quiet man,
who, unrewarded and unrecognised by
earth s great ones, went to his rest in
1836 ; by whose grave, which no monu
ment has yet marked, stood that enormous
crowd of mourners we have just described,
made up of all sorts and conditions of men
in the university, from the vice-chancellor
and the heads of houses down to the
youngest undergraduate. Different, doubt
less, were the estimates formed by this
vast mixed company of mourners of the
life-work of the man whose memory they
wished to honour. One thought was
common to all, though perhaps some
silently confessed it with reluctance : that
the mightiest influence which had in
spired Cambridge life for nearly half a
century had passed out of their midst.*

In those first six-and-thirty years of the
nineteenth century Cambridge was not the
only great centre of Evangelicalism. We
have already with some detail told the
story of the rise and widely-extended work
of the powerful " Clapham Sect." It must
be borne in mind that all through this

* " He (Simeon) descended to the grave amidst
the tears and benedictions of the poor, and with
such testimonies of esteem and attachment from
the learned, as Cambridge had never before
rendered to the most illustrious of her sons ; and
there he was laid, in that sure and certain hope on
which he enabled an almost countless multitude to
repose, amidst the wreck of this world s promises,
and in the grasp of this last and most dreaded
enemy." Sir James Stephen: "Essay on the Clap-
ham Sect. "

1836.]

EVANGELICANISM IN LONDON.

time, when Simeon lived
and laboured with such
conspicuous success at
Cambridge, the Clapham
band of toilers for God
with Wilberforce at their
head, were at work in
London. "Factories," it
has been epigrammatic-
ally said, u did not spring
up more rapidly in Leeds
and Manchester, than

REV. JOSIAH PRATT, B.D.
(From t lie painting by H. U yatt.)

313

dent of the Bible Society,
Zachary Macaulay and
Thomas Gisborne to
quote well - remembered
names were built up in
these six-and-thirty years
the noble fabrics of the
Church Missionary and
Bible Societies ; there, too,
the many schemes to help
the outcast, the prisoner,
and the helpless poor,

REV. HENRY VENN, B.D.
(From the portrait by G. Richmond, R.A.

schemes of benevolence
beneath the roof of Wil
berforce." There, under
the restless energy of the
great Evangelical layman
and his true band of
fellow-workers, the Thorn
tons and the Venns,
Richard Cecil and Daniel
Wilson, John Shore, lord
Teignmouth, first presi-

REV. JOHN NEWTON.

SOME FOUNDERS OF THE CHURCH

MISSIONARY SOCIETY.

REV. THOS. SCOTT.
(From the portrait by L. Cosse.)

which so plentifully illus
trate and adorn so richly
that time, were thought
out and matured. There
the greatest design of all,
the abolition of the slave
trade and the emancipa
tion of the slaves, was
hammered out and at last
carried to a triumphant
issue. All through these

314

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

years the great metropolis with its
growing suburbs was an ever-increasing
and powerful centre of Evangelicalism,
and from many important pulpits were
its especial tenets pressed home to large
and devout congregations.* In the great
industrial centres, such as Liverpool and
Manchester, Halifax and Hull, Leeds
and Leicester, the party were by no
means without powerful witnesses and able
and devoted standard-bearers. In country
places it was perhaps somewhat more
sparingly represented. Yet not a few
country clergymen were famous in this
period for their uncompromising support
of the views of Simeon and Venn and of
the yet earlier Romaine and Scott. Curi
ously enough, in the popular health and
pleasure resorts, such as Cheltenham and
Tunbridge Wells, Brighton and Bath,
Evangelicalism was especially strong. In
these bright and sunny centres, homes
of wealth and fashion, culture and com
parative leisure, the doctrines and teaching
of the party we are describing were
emphatically in the ascendant, and
exercised a widespread and enduring
influence.

We must conclude our little picture
of this great school of English religious
thought, which, on the whole, has done
such noble work in the cause of philan
thropy, for the spread of the Master s
Gospel, for the inculcation of a true and
pure conception of Christianity, by sketch
ing in its more prominent and regrettable
faults, easily detected by the fair though

* The principal of these are enumerated with
considerable detail by Canon Overton in his
" English Church in the Nineteenth Century,"
chap. iii. (" The Evangelicals ").

sympathetic critic of the school, and
which have seriously weakened their
power and influence in the church.

And first, in the Evangelical system the
true conception of the church as a living,
visible society, was obscured if not lost
sight of. The " corporate " aspect of
Christian life was scarcely ever pressed
home by these teachers ; too justly were
the Evangelicals accused of promoting
individualism. Religious isolation was ever
a characteristic feature among the results
of their teaching. A yet graver and more
obvious weakness in the party was their
indifference to all secular learning, and
their neglect of- literature and art, even
when art was used as the handmaid of
religion. "A church which cannot speak
to the intellect of every age and of every
country in its own tongue, according to its
own intellectual methods, has lost that
noble gift of which the marvel of Pente
cost was a transient symbol." * The same
eminent writer, who wrote these words,
wistfully asks whether this gift is likely to
appear among the heirs of the Evangelical
revival ; whether these have had any
earnest desire for the gift ; " for as yet the
Evangelical movement has produced no
original theologian of the first or even of
the second rank. It has been more eager
to seek and to save the lost, than to
investigate the foundations of Christian
doctrines ; it has displayed heroic vigour
and zeal in evangelising the world, but it
has shown less courage in confronting
those great questions of Christian philo
sophy, which in all the most ener
getic ages of Christendom have tasked
the noblest intellectual power of the

* R. W. Dale: "The Evangelical Revival."

NARROWNESS OF EVANGELICANISM.

315

church."* That the Evangelicals as a
party have too often regarded literature
with some distrust is undisputed.

And as in literature, so too in art.
They cared, comparatively speaking, but
little for architecture, painting, and
sculpture. To these earnest but in
certain respects one-sided men, the
church s soaring choir, with its exquisite
tracery, its graceful pillars, with its voice
less though powerful symbolism, with its
witching confusion of beauty and of grace,
had no message. The translucent window,
with its glorious mass of tender and beauti
ful colouring, to them was no joy. They
failed to see that in the fair house of
prayer, anxiously cared for, tenderly and
skilfully adorned, the great and loving
Master of the house was honoured. They
studiedly ignored, perhaps they forgot, to
how many souls these things speak, with
a mute though mighty eloquence. The
pages of the Old Testament, eloquent with
pictures of that glorious temple of Jeru
salem, whose architects and sculptors had
learned the secrets of their craft in no
earthly school, were passed over or at least
misunderstood. u The Evangelical clergy
thought nothing about restoring or de
corating churches. It was their business
to restore men to God. . . . To spend
money in scraping columns of Purbeck
marble, which had been covered with
whitewash, or in filling windows with
painted glass, would have seemed to many
of them an odd way of glorifying God, and
work of this kind would have contributed

* Mr. Dale, from whom the above passage is
quoted, it must be remembered, for many years
ranked as perhaps the ablest of the Congrega
tionalist ministers and teachers. This testimony
from such a pen is indeed striking and remarkable.

nothing to the depth of their devotion
. indeed, the genius of the Evangel
ical movement fears rather than welcomes
the awe and solemnity which are produced
by the wonderful work of the architects of
the Middle Ages." * Edward Bickersteth s

EAST WINDOW, YORK M1N 7 STER.

remark, after he had seen Lincoln cathedral
and calculated that it would cost ^500,000
to build, was typical of his school of
thought : " Well, the religious societies of
England are doing far better than if they
built such a cathedral every year, in raising
that sum to scatter in every direction the
light of divine truth. This will do far
* R. W. Dale : " The Evangelical Revival."

3 I6

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

more for the honour of God, our Saviour,
and the salvation of our fellow creatures."
These were among their faults, and
the fair chronicler must sketch in the
side where shadows fall, as well as that
which is bathed in light and brightness.
In the days he has been describing, these

of the Sunday schools was spread over
Christian England ? Those days lie far
behind us, and much has happened since.
The great Evangelical party of the Church
of England, with its weakness and with its
strength, is with us still. u No dying
cause," writes one well competent in all

LINCOLN CATHEDRAL.

Photo : Poulton &&amp;gt; Son, London.

men were in truth, in spite of grievous short
comings, the salt of the earth. Is it not
owing to their restless labours and cease
less prayers that the curse of slavery was
wiped out for ever among us, that great
and enduring missionary enterprise once
more took its place among the duties of
Christian men, that the mighty network

* Quoted by Canon Overton : " English Church
in the Nineteenth Century," chap. iii. ("The
Evangelicals ").

respects to gauge its powers and its pro
spects, " certainly not in the young
[Cambridge] life with which I am most
conversant." "

Between 1815, the date of the close of
the great continental war, and 1828-31, a

* Dr. Moule, now Bishop of Durham : Address
before the Nottingham Church Congress, 1897.
The influence of the work of the Evangelical
party during the second half of the nineteenth
century is discussed at some length in a sub
sequent chapter.

18151831.]

GROWTH OF DEMOCRACY.

change had been gradually passing over
England, which in the later years of this
period led to the growth of democracy.*
With this change in popular feeling
our present history is not concerned.

have been lately dwelling, the Church of
England had been to a considerable extent
losing its hold upon the affections of the
people. The enormous and rapid growth
in the population of the country,* no

DR. ARNOLD.
(From the painting by J. Phillip, R.A.)

save as the movement in feeling affected
the church. During this period, in spite
of the quiet, efficient work done by both
the two great parties, upon which we

* The passing of the famous Acts, popularly
known as the Repeal of the Test Act, the Roman
Catholic Emancipation Act, and, last and most
important, the " Reform Bill," has been already
alluded to.

doubt, was a great reason of this decline,
the old machinery of the church being

* This enormous and rapid growth in the popu
lation of England will be best understood by a
glance at the following figures : In the days of
queen Elizabeth about 4,000,000 would be the
total ; in 1700 it had grown to 5,000,000, in 1750 to
6,000,000, in 1801 to about 9,000,000. 30,000,000
would scarcely represent the numbers at the end
of the nineteenth century.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[18151831.

totally inadequate to cope with the vast
increase in the numbers of the people.
Neither Evangelicals nor High Churchmen
were able effectively to reach the rapidly
growing numbers of the masses, especially
in the great centres of industry.

Another reason for this decline in popular
estimation was no doubt the fact, that
few if any prominent churchmen of either
party were of sufficient mental calibre to
attract and to influence outside the com
paratively little circle where they were
working and teaching. No great preacher
or writer or thinker, no statesman-eccle
siastic, no profound theologian, is found
in the roll of English churchmen all
through those years we have been
speaking of. In both parties there were
many good, earnest, devout, hard-working
men, but no one whose personality en
thralled and charmed the rank and file
of Englishmen, or who attracted the
enthusiastic devotion even of his own
party. With the solitary exception of
Simeon of Cambridge, no really eminent
ecclesiastic had arisen in the period
in question. And Simeon, as we have
shown, laboured to the end of his
long life in the comparatively undistin
guished sphere of a minister of a town
church ; his influence, though very great,
was confined to a comparatively speak
ing inner circle of the church ; to the
rapidly increasing masses he was little
more than the " shadow of a name."
He never can be said in his lifetime to
have obtained a hold upon the popular
imagination.

Other causes, too, were at work which
contributed to endanger the church. A
powerful school of thought had grown up

in England, known generally as the school
of the u Utilitarian " philosophy, on the
whole indifferent to, even if not positively
hostile to religion, under the leadership of
men like Bentham, James Mill, and lord
Brougham. This school began to exercise
a powerful and in many ways a healthy
influence over literature, and in the House
of Commons its effect on legislation was
clearly perceptible. An important society,
the direct outcome of its teaching, once
famous under the name of the " Society
for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,""
may be quoted. Under its auspices a large
and cheap literature was published, notably
the " Libraries of Useful Knowledge " and
of " Entertaining Knowledge," the " Penny
Magazine," the "Penny Cyclopaedia," Lard-
ner s " Cabinet Cyclopaedia," and other
works and magazines. But the church
stood outside all this movement. It pos
sessed over this school little or no in
fluence. It was losing gradually its position
as the chief educator of the people. Its
place in the hearts of Englishmen was
being filled up by other influences ; some
of them, it is true, unmistakably lofty and
ennobling as far as they went, but the
highest motive for unselfish work and
saintly striving was, alas ! absent. Religion
seemed indeed in danger of being largely
forgotten among our people.

The attitude of the leaders of this
" Utilitarian " movement towards the
Church of England is well shown in a
short pithy summary of James Mill s
opinion here, written by his famous son,
John Stuart Mill : "Next to an aristocracy,
an established church or corporation of
priests, as being by position the great
depravers of religion, and interested in

18281832.]

A PERILOUS CRISIS.

319

opposing the progress of the human mind,
was the object of my father s greatest
detestation."

Three great and burning questions con
nected with religious and political freedom
were in the air. The first of these was
embodied in the Act of 1828, which re
pealed the Test and Corporation Acts of
1673, compelling Nonconformist candi
dates for all state and municipal offices
and for seats in Parliament to receive com
munion in the Church of England. The
second was the Roman Catholic Emancipa
tion Act, passed in 1829, which restored
Roman Catholics to the full rights and
privileges of citizens. The idea which lay
at the base of these famous pieces of legis
lation was that religious opinions ought
not to be a bar to the exercise of civil and
religious rights. The third, the Reform
Bill, diminished the power of landowners
over elections to the House of Commons,
and transferred much of their power to
enlarged constituencies.

Opinion in the church was much
divided ; but, on the whole, was opposed
to these measures ; and the opposition
which it showed increased the growing
unpopularity of the Establishment, which
on the surface appeared to be opposed
to the will and wishes of the majority
of the people. The feeling of the Govern
ment was clearly out of sympathy with
the church ; and the animus shown in
the debates which took place in Parlia
ment consequent upon the bringing in
and passing of the measures in question,
manifested but a lukewarm attachment on
the part of some, and open hostility on the

part of others, to the immemorial con
nection between church and state. The
danger to which the Church of England
as an Establishment was exposed, was
greatly increased by the passing of the
Reform Bill, which threw a vast accession
of power into the hands of those classes
who at that juncture were ill-disposed
to its claims and ancient privileges.
How grave was the peril which in
1830-32 seemed to menace the existence
of the Church of England as an Establish
ment, is clear from the opinions of such
liberally-minded and far-seeing men as
Thirlwall and Arnold. Thirl wall, one of
the most eminent of the scholar-church
men, in a letter toBunsen in 1832, writes :
" The Church of England contains many
disinterested and devoted friends, who per
ceive its defects and would wish to remedy
them. But the present animosity about
its temporal relations to the state so com
pletely engrosses all other subjects con
nected with it, that it would be absurd in
anyone to propose any scheme of internal
reformation. The church remains power
less for any new good, and at the utmost
only able to preserve itself from ruin" Dr.
Arnold, in a letter written the same year,
says : " The church, as it now stands, 7/6
human power can save" and again, writing
to Whately, repeats : " Nothing, as it
seems to me, can save the church but an
union with Dissenters." *

* Thirlwall was subsequently the bishop of St.
David s (1840). Bunsen was the famous Prussian
minister at the Court of St. James for fourteen
years. Whately became archbishop of Dublin.
Dr. Arnold was the well-known and revered head
master of Rugby School.

CHAPTER LXXIV.

THE OXFORD MOVEMENT AND ITS AUTHORS.

Ecclesiastical Crisis in 1833 Keble s Memorable Sermon at St. Mary s, Oxford John Keble "The
Christian Year" Richard Hurrell Froude His Extreme Views Isaac Williams and his
Literary Work Charles Marriott John Henry Newman His Power as a Preacher The
Meeting with Mr. Rose at Hadleigh Sir William Palmer Their Plan of Campaign Addresses
to the Primate Results of this Action The " Tracts for the Times " Accession to the Party
of Edward Bouverie Pusey His Powers and Influence Character of the Tracts Opposition
Excited by the Later Tracts Criticism by Sir William Palmer The Library of the Fathers
Other Labours of Pusey and his Associates Special Literary Work of Charles Marriott:

ON the I4th of July, 1833, the world of
Oxford was startled from its custom
ary grave serenity by an assize ser
mon preached before the university. The
words and spirit of that discourse were
very different from anything which the
learned audience had ever listened to
before from an official preacher at St.
Mary s. It spoke in terms which sounded
like a trumpet-call to battle, of the relations
and duties of the church to the state.
There was much in the position of
affairs at this time which occasioned to
earnest and devout churchmen the gravest
anxiety. The church had many enemies
without, who threatened her very exist
ence ; and even within, some eminent
members of her communion were ready
with projects of crude reform which would
have rent her asunder. Proposals to elim
inate from the Prayer-book some of the
church s most cherished beliefs, were freely
advanced ; the creeds were to be abolished ;
Catholic doctrines were rudely assailed ;
it was suggested that all denominations
should be included within the lines of the
church. These views were spread far and
wide ; they were pressed in numberless

publications ; a large portion of the press
openly advocated them. It was expected,
and not without some reason, that the re
formed Parliament, which had recently met.
would be only too ready to comply with the
popular cry, would sanction the most vital
alterations in the Prayer-book, and would
probably, in the course of its destructive
legislation, pass measures which would
destroy the whole system of the Church
of England.

All through the spring and early summer
of that year, the doings of the reformed
Parliament in regard to church matters
had been in the minds of men ; some
approving, some bitterly blaming. The
difficulty of collecting tithes in Ireland had
suggested to the Government of the day
to introduce a Bill abolishing " the church
cess ;" and in order to raise money to fill
up the deficiency which would thus result,
it was proposed to suppress ten Irish
bishoprics. Not all, by any means, but the
vast majority of the bishops and clergy
bitterly resented this proposal. It seemed
to churchmen generally an act of simple
spoliation. The suppression by the state
of ten historic sees was a high-handed

I833-]

KEBLE S MEMORABLE SERMON.

321

proceeding, which was viewed by the large
majority of churchmen with the deepest
dismay and sorrow. It was no carefully-
thought-out measure of reform, but simply

that memorable July day in St. Mary s, took
for his text the words of Samuel, when the
people rejected him and demanded a king
(i Sam. xii. 23), applying the scene to

JOHN KEBLE.
(From the painting by Geo. Richmond, R.A.)

an expedient devised to solve a difficulty:
as Newman expressed it, " Half the candle
sticks of the Irish Church extinguished
without ecclesiastical sanction."

The preacher before the university on

his own times. " It was possible," he
argued, " that a Christian state might, like
Israel, repudiate its duty to God it might
wish to be as the heathen, as the nations
around it. What," he asked, " in such a

322

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

crisis would be the duty of churchmen ?
Their first duty," he urged, "would be
intercession" Then, too, there must be re-
mcmstrancc, quiet but persevering. Loyalty
was enjoined, and churchmen were re
minded that sooner or later theirs would
be the winning side. The whole of that
stirring, strange discourse, preached before
that august auditory, was a solemn call to
the church to face in bitter earnest a state
of things fraught with grave danger to all
they loved and believed in.

The preacher on that occasion was a
well-known personality in Oxford. Some
twenty or more years before, John Keble
had proved himself, by a succession of
academic triumphs, the most brilliant man
of his day. His early victories had been
amply justified by his subsequent Oxford
career. Elected almost directly after his
honours to a fellowship at Oriel, in those
days the blue ribbon of Oxford distinction,
for several years he served his college as
tutor, his reputation increasing with each
successive year. No position in Oxford
seemed too great for the successful scholar
to aim at. Of a sudden his admiring con
temporaries were amazed by his throwing
up that sunny career, and retiring in the
vigour and prime of his still young life
to a quiet country curacy. It seemed a
strange choice for one of the most dis
tinguished among the tutors of Oxford,
deliberately to give up what seemed so
useful a life s work, and one so full of
promise for the future. But Keble was
absolutely devoid of ambition, was en
tirely indifferent to what is called fame or
worldly advantages. To him money, rank,
influence, had no meaning. He loved well
his office as clergyman, and chose for the

new scene of his life-wqrk a little country
village.

Some of his pupils followed him into his
retirement. These pupils, as one would
expect, were enthusiastically devoted to
their master, and two at least of their
number Isaac Williams, who became
afterwards fellow of Trinity and curate
to Newman at St. Mary s ; and Richard
Hurrell Froude, subsequently fellow and
tutor of Oriel were in after days distin
guished as leaders of the great movement,
whose eventful story we have now to
recount.

The ways which lead to greatness are
often strange. The choice of Keble, in the
end, placed him in a position among the
sons of men higher far than any Oxford
rank could have given him. Through a
fairly long life (he lived to the age of
seventy-four) he received no earthly guer
don, no ecclesiastical dignity ; and yet he
occupies one of the highest places in the
golden roll of great English churchmen of
the nineteenth century. Perhaps none
of the most distinguished prelates or dig
nitaries of the Church of England, none
among the theologians or thought-leaders
in that momentous period, has exercised a
like mighty sway over men s hearts. In
tensely loved and highly honoured by the
school of thought to which he belonged,
his influence, whether acknowledged or un
acknowledged, has extended far beyond the
range of men who thought as he thought on
vexed questions of theology. More or less,
the whole Church of England has come to
regard as a prophet in the true sense of
the word this holy and humble man, who
chose as the better part the quiet, un
assuming life of a simple village pastor,,

- ]

JOHN KEBLE.

323-

ministering at first among the Cotteswold
hills of his native Gloucestershire.

In the ten years which elapsed between
the date of his resignation of his Oxford
position, and that memorable July day in
1833 when he preached the famous sermon
we* have alluded to, Keble put out, with
sore reluctance and many misgivings, the
little volume of religious poetry known as
"The Christian Year," with which his
name will be for ever associated. Since
1827, the year of its first publication, it
has passed through more than a hundred
editions ; it is a household word, almost a
household treasure in countless homes of
our England, and even in the homes of the
yet greater England beyond the seas. Its
severest critic * has perhaps best expressed
the reasons for the extraordinary* popularity
of Keble s sacred poems. "High church-
manship had been hitherto dry and formal ;
Keble carried into it (in his little book
of pathetic songs) the emotions of Evan
gelicalism. Everyone who was really
religious, who believed himself to be a
Christian, found Keble s verses chime in
his heart like church bells."

But during those quiet ten years of de
voted pastoral work, the great Oxford scholar
in his many lonely and solitary hours oc
cupied himself with other things besides
the composition of his sweet and deathless
songs. The position of the church each
year grew more fraught with danger. The
events, and general drift of public opinion,
already briefly alluded to, filled the minds
of men like Keble with an ever-growing
anxiety. During these comparatively quiet
years he considered deeply what means

* Mr. Froude, in his " Short Studies," vol. iv.
The " Oxford Counter-Reformation."

were available to defend the church from a
formidable attack, which seemed inevitable
and near at hand. Could nothing be done
that might change the current of popular
opinion, which every succeeding year ran
stronger against the church ? Keble and
his intimates were conscious that all the
while there existed in England " a great
historic church party;" but it was some
what sleepy, apparently incapable of action.
In its ranks were not a few good and
respectable men, but it possessed no
leaders. No men of commanding genius
had for a long period arisen among them.
How could this powerful but lethargic
section of the church be aroused to a
consciousness of its power, its duties, and
responsibilities ?

The "Oxford movement," which may
be said to have actually commenced with
the delivery of the famous assize sermon of
Keble above dwelt upon, was singularly
fortunate in its chiefs. Both its friends
and they were not a few and those whose
sympathies were mainly antagonistic to its
teachings, alike agree in their estimate of
the men who guided the great High Church
reaction of 1833-45. They were able men,
some of them profound scholars. Several
of them were real orators, others were
teachers and writers of rare power ; and
all of them were men of high and stain
less character, utterly devoid of self-
seeking, intensely persuaded of the truth
of those views, which they advocated with
an earnestness and persistency almost
unparalleled.

Mention has been made of Keble s
pupils. One of these especially exercised
a peculiar influence in the earlier years of

324

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1833.

this great effort. Richard Hurrell Froude,
after leaving Keble, became a fellow of
Oriel, and was a tutor in the famous
college from 1827 to 1830. He was there
a junior colleague of Mr. Newman, of
whom he became the dearest friend, and
over whom he exercised a powerful and
enduring influence. The close friendship
between Keble and Newman was owing to

EARLY PORTRAIT OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN.
(From a sketch by Richard Doyle.)

the younger man, who was the intimate of
both. A saying of Froude is well known :
u If I were asked what good deed I have
ever done, I should say I had brought
Keble and Newman to understand each
other." The personality of Froude
must have been a strangely winning
one. Newman* thus paints his friend :
" I knew him first in 1826, and was in the
closest and most affectionate friendship
with him from about 1829 till his death in

* "Apologia," chap. i.

1836. He was a man of the highest gifts,
so truly many-sided, that it would be pre
sumptuous in me to attempt to describe
him." Newman then enlarged upon
Froude s gentleness and tenderness of
nature, his playfulness, his graceful versa
tility of mind, his winning manner. He
struggled for years with constant sick
ness, and died still comparatively a young
man, to the inexpressible grief of his
friends, who looked on with great hope
to the services this brilliant and fervid
scholar would one day do in the cause
they loved. u Who can refrain from tears
at the thought of that bright and beautiful
Froude ? " wrote one of his inner circle of
friends a little before his death.

When all was over, his coterie published
extracts from his journal and letters. But
his often exaggerated expressions, the wild
audacity of some of his views, as they
appear in the published . Remains," were
a hindrance rather than a help to the
success of the movement.* They excited
in fact the burning indignation of many,
who not unnaturally concluded from the ex
aggerated expressions which appear in the
correspondence contained in the Remains,"

* It is a strange irony of fate, which has con
nected the name of " Froude," in the person of his
more famous brother, with the most bitter and
trenchant criticism of mediaevalism extant in our
more serious literature. R. Hurrell Froude is for
gotten or unknown, save by a very few ; but his
brother, the popular and brilliant historian, is read
by thousands. The objects of dislike and even of
the hatred of the elder brother, were the heroes of
the younger, the world-renowned historian. The
spirit of exaggeration and of misrepresentation (is
it too strong an expression ?) seems to have lived
in both the brothers, and to have sadly marred
their work. The well-known words, " Incende
quod adorasti adora quod incendisti," represents
indeed the attitude assumed by the younger
Froude to the elder.

I833-]

ISAAC WILLIAMS.

325

that R. H. Froude was disloyal to his from that brilliant and somewhat wayward

own church. Nothing, perhaps, excited scholar, of whom we have given a little

so much indignation as his unjust and sketch. Like Froude, his whole life-work

somewhat wild estimate of the great re- was shaped by his connection with Keble,

formers. Had he lived, his view of those of whom he was an ardent admirer, and

great ones to whom the Church of England whose faithful disciple he became, loyal

ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD.

Photo : Gillman & Co., Oxford.

owes so much, might perhaps have been
much modified.

Another of Keble s favourite pupils,
Isaac Williams, who from the first begin
nings of the movement was closely con
nected with its hopes and fears, its aims
and longings, and who in his quiet, un
obtrusive, saintly life, and devoted work,
will ever hold a high place among its
leaders, was a very different personality

to his master all through a laborious
life of many years, after a time sadly
chequered with constant ill-health and
suffering. Recalled early in his career to
Oxford, he became fellow and then tutor
of his college (Trinity), and Froude, his
old fellow-pupil, quickly brought him to
Newman, who in those years was the
widely sought-after tutor of Oriel, and
who as vicar of St. Mary s was known

326

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[18281833.

in Oxford and far beyond Oxford as a
strangely winning and heart-searching
preacher. Isaac Williams was chosen by
Newman as his curate, and the two were
soon dear and intimate friends.

The character of Isaac Williams has been
painted by one who intimately knew him
and his works and days, as one of great
sweetness, tenderness, and lowly unselfish
ness, pure, free from all worldliness, and
deeply resigned to the will of God. He
was a poet, too, of considerable power ; as
one of the writers in the famous Lyra
Apostolica, as the author of the "Cathe
dral " and the " Baptistery," he will be
long remembered as one of the rare purely
devotional poets of the nineteenth cen
tury. His devotional commentaries on the
Gospel narrative fill a special niche in the
theology of the church, and are still exer
cising a wide influence. Several of the
more famous " Tracts for the Times," of
which we must presently speak with some
detail, were his, notably the one bearing
the title, " On Reserve in Communicating
Religious Knowledge," around which has
gathered many criticisms some, even from
non - sympathisers with his views, highly
laudatory ; some extraordinarily bitter.
When the great secession to Rome took
place in 1845, Isaac Williams ranged him
self with Keble and Pusey and Marriott
and other leaders of the disorganised
Tractarian school, as loyal to the Church
of England and staunchly faithful to her
formularies and her government ; and
from this loyalty to his loved church
Williams never swerved.

It is hardly too much to say that the
Oxford movement was the result of the
intimacy and friendship which existed

between these four men from 1828 to
1833. In many ways they thought alike;
their studies led them to similar conclu
sions. Their conception of the church,
her sad shortcomings, her glorious mission
at least in the early days of the "move
ment" was the same.

The name of Marriott has been above
coupled with that of Keble and Pusey.
Pusey, as a leader of the new Oxford
school, will come before us shortly, but was
not prominently identified with the move
ment until some time after the celebrated
sermon of Keble. Marriott, however,
joined the little coterie somewhat earlier.
His brilliant degree is dated 1832, and in
the spring of the memorable 1833 he was
elected to the high honour of an Oriel
fellowship. " Charles Marriott," writes his
biographer,* " was something more than
an eye-witness of the Tractarian move
ment from its original inception. He was
throughout this period a great student, and
became devotedly attached to John Henry
Newman, the attractive charm of whose
mind and manner, converse and teaching,
was not to be described." Dean Church
describes Marriott as bringing to the
movement " a great university character,
and an unswerving and touching fidelity.
He placed himself, his life, and all that he
could do, at the service of the great effort
to elevate and animate the church."
Further on we shall find Marriott taking
for some fourteen long years the labouring
oar in one of the greatest and most en
during of the labours of the Tractarians,
the editing and translating of that massive

* Dr. Burgon, dean of Chichester : Lives of
Twelve Good Men : "Charles Marriott, the Man
of Saintly Life."

1828-1833.]

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN.

work which will ever be one of their chief
claims to the gratitude of the church, the
library of the Catholic Fathers anterior to
the division of the East and West ; a vast
toil bravely undertaken and successfully
carried out, and which, so to speak, popu
larised a mighty literature of the early
centuries of Christianity, a literature for
more than a hundred years ignored, almost
forgotten in the Church of England.

In these little sketches of the eminent
men, the pioneers of the great High Church
reaction, we have as yet barely alluded
once or twice to the one who became the
most conspicuous of them all, John Henry
Newman. Of him, in that interesting but
markedly hostile picture of the movement
painted by the younger Froude (the well-
known historian), occurs the following
striking passage : "Far different from Keble,
from my brother (R. Hurrell Froude), from
Dr. Pusey, from all the rest, was the true
chief of the Catholic revival John Henry
Newman. Compared with him, they were
ail but as ciphers, and he the indicating
number. . . ." Poet, preacher, his
torian, theologian, and in each of these
departments of the highest rank, his
story is, after all, a sad one. In his uni
versity, men very soon came to see that
a giant had arisen among them ; and
although, owing to various reasons, he
obtained no distinction in the schools,
he was soon elected to an Oriel fellowship.
This was as early as 1823. Three years
later we find him one of the tutors of the
college. Rapidly his fame grew. In 1828
he became vicar of St. Mary s, and the
, preacher par excellence of Oxford. Such
sermons had never in the memory of the

327

university been heard before. " Plain,
direct, unornamented, clothed in English
that was only pure and lucid, free from
any faults of taste, they were the expression
of a piercing and large insight into charac
ter, conscience, and motives, of a sympathy
at once most tender and stern with the
tempted and the wavering, of an absolute
and burning faith in God, in the awful
glory of His generosity and His magni
ficence. They made men think of the
things which the preacher spoke of, not
of the sermon and the preacher." *

Of the effect of these sermons of New
man on the life of Oxford and on many
of her most illustrious sons, one striking
example will give an index. W. G. Ward,
of Balliol, in later years one of the most
conspicuous figures in the movement, and
a man of rare power, in the earlier days of
his university career was a Rationalist.
He was often pressed by his friends to go
and hear Newman preach. For a long
time he impetuously refused. " Why," he
asked, " should I go and listen to such
myths ? " But on a Sunday afternoon
one of his intimates in the course of
a walk brought him to St. Mary s porch.
"Now, Ward," he said, "Newman is
just going into his pulpit. Why should
you not hear him once? It can do you
no harm. You need not go a second
time, but do hear and judge what the
thing is like."f Ward was persuaded,
and went in and listened. That sermon
changed his whole life.

At first, to use his own expression, New
man was "under the shadow of liberalism."

* Dean Church.

f "William George Ward and the
Movement," by Wilfrid Ward, chap. v.

Oxford

328

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1833^

Out of this he was gradually drawn,
mainly owing to his friendship with
Richard Hurrell Froude, his Oriel col
league. Froude brought him into contact
with Keble, and the three became fast and
devoted friends. Late in 1832 Newman
arid Froude went abroad for a lengthened
sojourn ; in the course of the journey New
man fell ill, and his absence from Oxford
was protracted until the spring or summer
of 1833. At this time he wrote some of the
beautiful poems of the Lyra Apostolica,
afterwards published with the signature
" S," and the hymn which became one of
the most loved of Anglican hymns, " Lead,
kindly Light." He returned to Oxford
just before Keble preached the famous
assize sermon of July I4th, 1833, entitled
"The National Apostasy." "This day,"
says Newman, " I have ever considered and
kept, as the start of the religious movement."

Not many days after the delivery of
this sermon by Keble, a few friends, on
the invitation of Mr. Rose, met at his
parsonage, at Hadleigh in Suffolk. Keble
and Newman were invited, but were not
present. Froude, however, and Mr. Palmer,
and two or three other like-minded men
remained together in conference for several
days. The Tracts for the Times and other
important results were virtually the fruit
of this little meeting at Hadleigh.

Mr. Palmer (afterwards Sir William
Palmer), who will be subsequently referred
to in bur story, was educated at Trinity
College, Dublin, and had migrated to Oxford
in 1828 with a view of completing his well-
known work, the Origmes Liturgicce, in
which with great learning and clearness of
statement he showed that the Anglican

Prayer-book is mainly a translation from
earlier office-books of the mediaeval church r
and thus demonstrated the descent of the
Church of England from the church of
earlier days. It was a work which was
largely reproduced in the " Tracts." Mr.
Palmer was an able and well-read theo
logian. His book, at once scholarly and
devout, gave him great weight in the
earlier days of the movement.

Hugh James Rose,* who in this great
church reaction first comes prominently
to the front at the Hadleigh meeting,
was in many respects better fitted to-
be the leader of the new movement
than any of those who have as yet come
before us. A High Churchman of the
old type, calm, self-possessed, and states
man-like, an accomplished divine, and
an able preacher, he too was deeply
impressed with the dangerous aspect of
things as regarded the English church, to
which he was ever devotedly loyal. He is
well described as the " one commanding
figure that the frightened and discomfited
church people were ready to rally round.
For many years after his early
death, when Newman had left Rose s
standpoint far behind, he (Newman) could
never speak of him or think of him without
renewed tenderness." t In 1833 he was
better known to churchmen than Keble,
and more trusted than Newman or Froude ;;
and many men have thought that had
Rose s life been spared, the errors and
aberrations of some of the more prominent
among the Tractarians might have been
avoided. But Rose was ever sickly, and his,

* Some account of Rose has already been given.
See p. 298.

f T . Mozley : " Reminiscences."

330

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1833-1834.

striking and useful career ended in 1838.
His last few years were spent in suffering,
and in consequence the wise, moderating
influence he could have exercised was
sadly impaired. He filled during his
short life various important and distin
guished posts, but, alas ! he was, in good
truth, ever bearing about a dying body.
In 1833, however, although weak and
delicate, the signs of the fatal illness
against which he subsequently struggled
so long and gallantly, were scarcely visible,
and he placed unreservedly his great
powers and wide church influence at the
disposal of the Oxford group of friends.

The plan of campaign, which in its
earlier developments was so conspicu
ously successful, was largely Rose s. He
arranged the Hadleigh meeting, the " con
spiracy," as Froude with some indiscretion
playfully termed it. At Hadleigh the idea
of united action on the part of the church
was first devised, and the scheme of the
afterwards famous Tracts for the Times
hammered out. The meeting was renewed
very soon after at Oxford, where the same
little Hadleigh company, with Newman
and Keble, arranged the preliminaries of
the great addresses which were presented
on the part of the clergy and laity to the
primate, and which had so powerful an
effect on the nation. Newman, however,
was always for the separate and individual
action, which eventuated in the Tracts.
" No great work," he wrote in after years,
" was done by a system, whereas systems
arise out of individual exertions. Luther
was an individual. The very- faults of an
individual excite attention, but his cause
(if good and he powerfully minded) gains.

This is the way of things ; we promote
truth by a self-sacrifice." *

In the first instance the counsels of
Rose and Palmer prevailed. Meetings
were held, and associations formed in
many of the great centres in England.
An address was formulated to the primate,
cautious and temperate in its language,
but sternly resolute in its expressed de
termination to maintain inviolate the
doctrines, services, and discipline of the
Church of England, condemning earnestly
that restless desire of change which would
rashly innovate in spiritual matters. The
address in question was signed by some
7,000 of the clergy, and another lay address
immediately followed, signed by 230,000
heads of families. The effect on the
country of these popular demonstrations
was magical. In Mr. Palmer s words,
" From every part of England, every town
and city, there arose an united, strong,
emphatic declaration of loyalty to the
Church of England. The national feeling,
long pent up, depressed, despondent, had
at length obtained freedom to pour forth,
and the effect was amazing. The church
suddenly came to life. ... To its as
tonishment, it (the church) found itself
the object of warm popular affection and
universal devotion. Its enemies were
silenced."

Churchmanship was evoked, not created
by these appeals ; but from the date of
these two powerfully signed addresses,
writes a contemporary observer, we may
fix "the moment of the turn of the tide
which had threatened to overwhelm our
church and our religion." The courage of
churchmen was rallied ; they showed by
* "Apologia," chap. ii.

18331834-]

their united action that they were stronger
and more resolute than their enemies
thought. Defenders of the church sprang
up in most of the great cities and centres
of England. Declarations of devotion and
fidelity to the church or their fathers,
and resolutions to maintain its rites and
doctrines, flowed in from all parts of the
kingdom. Petitions in support of the
church poured rapidly into the House of
Commons, and " these resolute declarations
of attachment to the church, which thus
emanated from the people, found an echo
in the heart of royalty itself, and in the
May of 1834 king William IV. took occa
sion to address to the prelates of England,
assembled on the occasion of his birthday,
his " royal declaration of devoted affection
to the church and of his firm resolution to
maintain its doctrines." The imminent
danger to which in 1832-33 the church
was seemingly exposed by the wave of
reform, and which men feared would
ngulph it, had passed away.

So much for the result of the first part
of the Hadleigh resolutions. But at that
meeting a decided though guarded ex
pression had gone forth, that something
more should be done, to instruct church
men in what the little Oxford company,
where Newman and Keble were the chief
inspirers, deemed the true principles of
churchmanship. There was something
greater, they felt, than the Established
Church ; and that was the Church Catholic
and Apostolic. The sacramental principle
must be more emphasised ; the apostolical
succession must be insisted on that
" succession, which was the essential

* Compare Dean Burgon : "Lives of Twelve
Good Men Hugh James Rose."

THE "TRACTS FOR THE TIMES. 1

331

bond recognised by the sixteenth and
seventeenth century divines, associating
the English Church, through Reformation
and Papal dominion, with that primi
tive Catholicism in which Anglicans laid
their foundations, and to which they
had always appealed." * This and such
like teaching was to be enforced and
pressed home by the issue of those
papers, subsequently known as the Tracts
for the Times.

We thus come to the literary side of the
movement. Rose s and Palmer s work
came to an end. They had successfully
stirred up public opinion ; they had
aroused the Church of England to a con
sciousness of its power ; and in a very
short time the dark and ominous danger-
cloud which hung over the Anglican com
munion had passed quite out of sight.
But, as we have said, the Oxford friends,
under the leadership of Keble and New
man, were persuaded that more was
needed. The church was aroused to the
sense of its power; but it needed, they
thought, to be awakened to a sense of its
privileges and responsibilities. Hence the
putting out of the " Tracts." These papers
began at once, in the September of that
same eventful year 1833. They were at
first short, mostly keeping within the
limits of four pages. Of the first seventeen,
nine were in part or altogether written by
Newman ; of the remaining eight, two
were from the pen of Keble, one of which
was on the all-important theme of the
"Apostolical Succession." Froude and
other less known men furnished the re
mainder of these seventeen. Newman s
* Liddon : " Life of Pusey," chap. xi.

332

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1833-1834-

words* give us a good insight into the
spirit in which he and his fellows wrote :
" I had a supreme confidence in our
cause ; we were upholding that primitive
Christianity which was delivered for all
times by the early teachers of the church,
and which was registered and attested in
the Anglican formularies and by the Angli
can divines. That ancient religion had well-
nigh faded out of the land through the
political changes of the last hundred and
fifty years, and it must be restored. It
would be, in fact, a second Reformation."
The opening words of the series struck
the keynote of the teaching they were
intended to press home. It was a sharp,
stern address to the clergy by one of
themselves, reminding them of the great
ness of their office. It contrasted the
position of ministers of Dissenting bodies
with that occupied by " the men ad
dressed." Dissenting ministers it depicted
as the creatures of the people, depending
simply upon them. The " addressed," on
the other hand, were born not of blood,
nor of the will of man, but of God. It
reminded them of their apostolical descent.
It told them that the Christian ministry
was a succession. It traced back the
power of ordination from hand to hand
to the Apostles, to whom Christ gave His
spirit. " The early Tracts were intended
to startle the world, and they succeeded
in doing so. ... They came from dis
tinguished university scholars, picked men
of a picked college, from men belonging
to a school . . . whose usual style was
especially marked by its severe avoidance
of excitement and novelty ; the school from
which had lately come * The Christian
* In Froude s " Remains.

Year. Their matter was unusual ; un
doubtedly they brought strange things
to the ears of this generation." *

Before the close of the year their ranks
were strengthened by the presence among
them of one who at first associated himself
with the little company with hesitancy, but
who soon became the foremost champion of
their cause Edward Bouverie Pusey. New
man well paints the prestige as well as the
intellectual power which this new recruit
brought to the band of Oxford writers : f
" I had known him since 1827-8, and had
felt for him an enthusiastic admiration. I
used to call him 6 piyag (the great one).
His immense diligence, his great learning,
his scholarlike mind, his simple devotion
to the cause of religion, overcame me ; and
great, of course, was my joy when in the
last days of 1833 he showed a disposition
to make common cause with us. His
tract on Fasting appeared as one of the
series, with the date of December 2ist.
He was not, however, I think, fully asso
ciated with the movement till 1835-6,
when he published his tract on * Baptism/
and started the Library of the Fathers/
He at once gave us a position and a name.
Without him we should have had but
little chance. . . . But Dr. Pusey was
a professor and canon of Christ Church ;
he had vast influence in consequence of his
deep religious seriousness, the munificence

* Dean Church: "Oxford Movement," chap, vu
f " Apologia," chap. ii. It must be remembered
that Dr. Pusey, after Newman s secession, for some
fifty years was his strongest opponent, and yet
Newman in his "Apologia," that book of strange
charm and melancholy pathos, writes of his great
adversary in 1878 as " my dearest Pusey, whom
I have loved and admired for above fifty years."
0, si sic omnes ! if only it were so on earth as
God s saints know it will be in heaven.

833-1834]

EDWARD BOUVERIE PUSEY.

333

of his charities, his professorship, his
family connections. . . . There was
thenceforth a man . . . who furnished

The wise and eloquent words spoken on
the first Sunday of the term following
Pusey s death, before the university in

DR. PUSEY.

(By permission of the executors of George Richmond, R.A., D.C.L., owners of the copyright, and of the
Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford.)

the movement with a front to the world,
and gained for it a recognition from other
parties in the university."

The subject of Newman s warm and
generous encomium stands out among
the great ones of the nineteenth century.

which for more than half a century Pusey
had been one of the most conspicuous
figures,* sympathetically but at the same
time truly express the feeling of pernaps

* The university sermon in question was preached
by Dr. Church, dean of St. Paul s. (October, 1882.)

334

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1825-1833.

the majority of religious English people
of various schools of thought, towards
the real leader of the Oxford move
ment : " No man was more variously
judged, more sternly condemned, more
tenderly loved. . . . What is the judg
ment upon him ? I think that there is but
one answer from those whose hearts thrill at
the memory of all that he was to them,
and from most of those from many, I am
sure who stood against him, disapproved,
resisted him. First and foremost, he was
one who lived his life as, above everything,
the servant of God. He takes rank with
those who gave themselves and all that
they had ... to what they believed
to be their work for God. . . . The
world will remember him as the famous
student, the powerful leader, the wielder
of great influence in critical times, the man
of strongly marked and original character
who left his mark on the age.
When our confusions are still, when our
lives and enmities and angers have per
ished, when our mistakes and misunder
standings have become dim and insigni
ficant in the great distance of the past,
then his figure will rise in history as one
of that high company who looked at life
as St. Paul looked at it. ... Even those
who do not in many things think as he
thought, will class him among those who
in difficult and dangerous times have
witnessed by great zeal, by great effort,
and great sacrifice, for God and truth and
holiness."

Edward Bouverie Pusey, who came to
play so great a part in the story of the
Church of England, was the younger son
of a distinguished Berkshire family, and
was born in the first year of the century.

In his child days his mother, lady Lucy,,
used to speak of him as her angelic son,
so singularly sweet and full of charm was
his nature. After Eton he proceeded to-
Christ Church, where, we hear, "he read
desperately." In 1825 he was in the
Oxford " schools." John Keble, who was
one of the examiners, remarked : " I never
knew how Pindar might be put into-
English until I heard Pusey construe
him." The senior examiner regarded him
as the man of the greatest ability who
had ever passed before him. In the year
following he was elected to an Oriel
fellowship. For the next several years
he devoted himself to serious study,
putting off his original intention to take
holy orders.

During this period he spent a long time
in Germany, laying there the foundation
of his subsequent great fame as an
Oriental scholar in Hebrew, Arabic, and
Syriac. He was the pupil and the friend
of several of those famous German theo
logians whose names have become house
hold words in the world of scholarship
Freytag, Tholuck, Schleiermacher, Ewald r
Hengstenberg, Sack, Neander, Liicke,.
Nitzsch, Gieseler, Eichhorn, and others
studying at the universities of Berlin,
Greifswald, and Bonn. He returned to-
Oxford finally in 1827, with a great and
well -merited reputation. In 1828 the
Hebrew professor, Dr. Nicholl, died at
the early age of thirty-five, and to the
surprise of some who were unacquainted
with the abilities and profound scholar
ship of the young Oriel fellow, on the
nomination of the duke of Wellington,,
the then Prime Minister, E. B. Pusey
was chosen to fill the vacant chair, which

i828 1833.1

PUSEY JOINS THE TRACTARIANS.

335

carried with it the stall of a residentiary
canon of Christ Church.- He was not
twenty-nine years of age when he be
came professor and canon, and, strange
to say, this was his first and only prefer
ment in the church in which for some
half a century or more he was one of
the most conspicuous thought-leaders.

Between 1828 and the year 1833, when,
as we have seen, the Oxford movement
began in real earnest, Pusey s reputation
steadily grew. He was the friend but not
the confidant of the pioneers of the new
school, whose life and work we have been
dwelling upon. But he was by no means
identified with them till the close of 1833,
when he consented to write the tract on
" Fasting " ; nor was he really heart and
soul with the movement until a somewhat
later date. The reverence, regard, and
even awe with which he was regarded at
Oxford has been already alluded to in
Newman s own words. Isaac Williams, of
Trinity, Keble s favourite pupil, one of the
earliest of the Tractarians, the theologian
and poet of after days, thus speaks of
Pusey in connection with Newman in the
memorable year 1833 : " Samuel Wilber-
force (afterwards the great bishop of
Oxford, then of Winchester) was not much
acquainted with Newman, though proud
of knowing so remarkable a person. I
(Isaac Williams) had up to this time no
acquaintance with Pusey, but he would,
now that we had lost Froude from Oxford
(his death-malady was already upon him),
join Newman and myself in our walks.
They had been fellows of Oriel together,
and Newman was the senior. But Pusey s
presence always deepened his lighter and
unrestrained mood ; and I was myself

silenced by so awful a person. Yet I
always found in him something most con
genial to myself a nameless something
which was wanting even in Newman, and
I might almost add, even in Keble. But
Pusey at this time (autumn of 1833) was
not one of us."

It was with some difficulty that he
was induced to throw in his lot with the
new school, and he only consented to
join the company of the writers of the
Tracts on the condition that his contri
butions should be signed with his initials,
thus defining his personal responsi
bility. "He saw," wrote Newman, "that
there ought to be more sobriety, more
gravity, more careful pains, more sense of
responsibility in the Tracts and in the
whole movement. It was through him
that the character of the Tracts was
changed. When he gave us his tract on
4 Fasting, he put his initials E. B. P.
to it. In 1835 ne published his elaborate
4 Tracts on Baptism, which were followed
by other tracts from different authors, if
not of equal learning, yet of equal power
and appositeness. The catenas of Anglican
divines projected by me, which occur in
the series, were executed with a like aim
at greater accuracy and method. . . .
I suspect it was Dr. Pusey s influence and
example which set me and set others on
the larger and more careful works in de
fence of the principles of the movement,
which followed in a course of years." t
Such works were " the Library of the
Fathers ", (forty-eight volumes) ; " Treatise
on the Church of Christ " - William

* "Autobiography of Isaac Williams," edited
by Sir George Prevost, pp. 69-70.
f " Apologia," chap. ii.

336

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1833-1841.

Palmer ; " Lectures on Justification "-
J. H. Newman ; " The Prophetical Office
of the Church J. H. Newman; "The
Church of the Fathers," etc.

The putting out of the famous Tracts
for the Times spread over a period of some
eight or nine years, the first three being
dated in the autumn of 1833, the "Tract
90" of J. H. Newman appearing in the
February of 1841. The brevity of the
greater part of the earlier tracts has been
already noticed. They were for the most
part short pungent leaflets devoted to the
great questions which the new Oxford
school of divines were busied in bringing
before the church ; such as the apostolic
succession, the sacraments, the sources of
divine grace, etc. The later tracts, mainly
after the influence of Dr. Pusey was felt in
the ranks of the company, were no longer
leaflets, but elaborately worked-out essays
on points of important doctrine or on
ecclesiastical history. For instance, Dr.
Pusey s tracts 67, 68, 69 formed a brochure,
or rather a volume of over 200 pages, on
" Baptism."

Two of the later issues attracted extra
ordinary attention. Isaac Williams, the
favourite pupil and disciple of Keble, wrote
No. 80, under the title, " On Reserve in
Communicating Religious Knowledge."
(Parts I, II., III.) The alarm it ex
cited was quite incommensurate with any
novelties suggested by the tract ; and the
feverish, excited condition of men s minds
at this juncture is well exemplified, by the
strange agitation which Mr. Williams s
treatise excited. It was based upon a
remark of Origen s in his commentaries on
the Gospels, where that great expositor

alludes to a mysterious holding back of
sacred truth. The writer of the tract tells
us how, in his sacred studies, he had been,
led to observe this constantly in our Lord s
conduct. He quoted bishop Thirlwall of
St. David s kindly comment upon his
theory : u The very title of the paper,
Reserve in communicating Religious
Knowledge, intimated that the teaching
of the Gospel was not withheld, for it
was in teaching it that the caution was to
be exercised." * Mr. Williams in No. 87
followed up his arguments. The two
much abused tracts consisted of 82 and
144 pages respectively.

Another of the later tracts, which
aroused much bitter criticism, was
Keble s No. 89 " On the Mysticism
attributed to the Early Fathers of the
Church." This, again, which has been
described as "a beautiful and suggestive
essay," and was of very considerable length
(186 pages), in quieter times would have
excited no hostile criticism.

All the later tracts, mostly elaborate
and learned essays on theological questions,
were rather addressed to a small and
cultured audience than to the public
generally ; nor is it probable that they
were really studied save by a few. On
the whole, the famous series excited much
opposition, and largely stirred up adverse
criticism. But, on the other hand, they
were to many strangely attractive. They
spoke in language different from what men
for a long period had been in the habit of
using when they wrote or spoke of holy
things. And the thoughts and aspira
tions which were suggested, old though

* " Autobiography of Isaac Williams," pp. 89-90.
Edited bv Sir George Prevost.

18331841.]

EFFECT OF THE TRACTS.

337

they were, were novel to the generation
addressed in the famous papers. Among
the old-fashioned clergy of various schools
of thought, by no means confined to the
" Evangelical," many objections were raised
to at least portions of the tracts, and many
" indiscretions " were pointed out. The

me to receive such a mark of your re
membrance. . . . I am sure that there
must be many points of unison still be
tween us, without ascending to the highest
of all, though by the form in which your
tract appears I fear you are lending
your co-operation to a party second to

ORIEL COLLEGE QUADRANGLE, OXFORD.

Photo : Gillman & Co., Oxford.

notes of alarm and distrust from many
quarters are fairly expressed in a letter
of Dr. Arnold, the great head master
of Rugby, who emphatically ranks also as
one of the thought-leaders of the time.
This was written early in the move
ment, bearing the date of 1834, anc *
contained a severe criticism of his old
friend Dr. Pusey s tract on Fasting.
* It was delightful," wrote Arnold, " to

none in the tendency of their principles
to overthrow the truth of the Gospel.
Your own tract is perfectly free from
their intolerance, as well as from their
folly ; yet I cannot sympathise with
its object, which has always appeared
to me to belong to the antiquarianism
of Christianity not to its profitable his
tory. . . . The admiration of Christian
antiquity seems to me to be the natural

33*

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1833-1841.

parent * of Puritanism, which calls all that
is ancient, Popery. The history and
writings of the early ages of the church
have their use, but it is an indirect, not
a direct one, like the use of some of the
historical parts of the Old Testament
that is, it will not furnish examples or
precedents to be applied in the lump
to present things, but it is . . . as
a source for direct reference, to common
persons, often dangerous." t

By men of a very different school from
Dr. Arnold or the Evangelical teachers,
who naturally were opposed to much that
was advanced by the Tractarian writers
between 1833 and 1841, were certain
portions of the Tracts for the Times, and
some of the utterances of their authors,
viewed with uneasiness ; notably the well-
known sentiments of Richard Hurrell
Froude, one of the most influential of
the earlier writers of these celebrated
papers. One, a high churchman sans pcur
et sans reproche, whose splendid services
to his party, and, indeed, to the Church of
England at large at the beginning of the
movement, can never be forgotten or
ignored, whose deep learning and unrivalled
industry produced several of the weightiest
contributions to the theological literature
of the Church of England of this period, J
thus writes, alluding to the Church of Eng
land and foreign reformers: "Mr. (Richard
Hurrell) Froude occasionally expressed
sentiments which seemed extremely un
just to the reformers and injurious to the

* That is, by the reaction which it produces
(note of Dr. Liddon).

f Arnold to Pusey (1834).

J Mr. (afterwards Sir) William Palmer, author
of " Origines Liturgicae," the " Treatise on the
Church of Christ," etc. etc.

church." The more thoughtful Church
men of this school earnestly desired that
some committee of revision should be
appointed, to whom the "Tracts" should
be submitted before publication. What
they feared, and justly, was that these in
teresting and important pronouncements
would never be regarded outside Oxford
as the production of individuals, but it
would be supposed they represented
accurately the doctrines held by the
general association of the leaders of the
movement. These more cautious and
learned scholars, while deeply sensible
that the writers of the tracts had estab
lished great verities, and had called
attention to some distinctive features
of the Church of England which had
been too much neglected, were by no
means able to concur in every position
advanced by individual writers, and
their misgivings were subsequently sadly
verified.

Mr. Palmer, a sympathising and im
partial critic, however, bears unqualified
testimony to the general absence from
the "tracts" of any Romanising tend
ency, an accusation lightly and often
without due consideration constantly
made against them.* It is only just, con
sidering the great part these tracts
played in the Oxford movement, to
enumerate a very few of the strong
anti-papal pronouncements contained in
these notorious papers. "The tracts
maintain that at the Reformation we
were delivered from the yoke of papal

* It will be observed that all these remarks have
no reference to " Tract 90," the last of the series.
This too famous treatise must be spoken of in
dependently. It did not appear until 1841.

1833-1841-]

THE TRACTS PROTEST AGAINST ROME.

tyranny and usurpation, and from the
superstitious opinions and practices
which had grown up during the Middle
Ages ; that there is not a word in
Scripture about our duty to obey the
Pope. They profess enmity against the
papistical corruptions of the Gospel, and
a persuasion that the Romanist communion
is infected with heterodoxy ; that we are
bound to flee it as a pestilence. They
admit that our Anglican church is a true
branch of the church universal, that it is
Catholic and apostolic, yet not papistical.
In them transubstantiation is represented
as a manner of presence newly invented
by the Romanists, and even that the
doctrine of transubstantiation is profane
and impious. They urge that the denial
of the cup to the laity, the sacrifice of
masses as it has been practised in the
Roman church, the honour paid to images,
indulgences, the received doctrine of
purgatory, the practice of celebrating
divine service in an unknown tongue,
seven sacraments, the claim of the Pope,
to be universal bishop, and other points,
are respectively blasphemous, dangerous,
full of peril, gross inventions, at variance
with Scripture, contrary alike to Scripture
and antiquity." Very weightily the same
earnest and scholarly high churchman,
who, it must be borne in mind, was in
the deepest sympathy with the highest
objects of the movement, winds up his
criticism and defence of the Tracts for the
Times thus : " The repeated and explicit
avowals on these points (above summarised),
the anxiety which was evinced by such
leaders as Pusey and Keble to disclaim the
imputation of Romanising tendencies, ob
tained for the tracts and their authors

339

the toleration of a great
portion of the church r

the support or
and influential
which would otherwise have been with
drawn. We endured much of what we
could not approve : exaggerated views of
the independence of the church, undue
severity to the reformers, too much praise
of Romish offices, a depreciatory tone in
regard to our own, and other points which
were more than questionable."

But if the great literary venture of the
Oxford movement the publication of the
Tracts for the Times has its double aspect;
if it has received grave censure from some r
and high, unstinted praise from others ; if
it is, to use another well-known simile, a
pillar of cloud when viewed from one point
of view, of light when looked at from
another, there was another venture, in the
world of sacred literature, issuing from
the heart of the great religious movement,
which must receive from every true-
hearted member of the Church of England
the deepest and most genuine approval.
From the far-back age of the venerable
Bede and the great teachers of the
school of York in the eighth century,
from the days of Plegmund the archbishop
and Alfred the English king, a thousand
years ago, the annals of our church are
rich in the reminders of her noblest ser
vants, addressed in various expressions of
urgent exhortation to those who minister
in her sanctuaries, not to neglect the study
of sacred letters. One voice here proceeds
from the famous Saxon teachers Aldhelm
and Dun stan ; from the great Normans
Lanfranc and Anselm ; from great me
diaeval prelates, such as Hugh of Lincoln
* Palmer: " Narrative," chap. iii.

340

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1836.

and Grosseteste ; from doctors of the
Reformation period ; from Elizabethan and
Carolinian divines. These great ones,
whose names are written large upon the
many-coloured pages of the story of our
national church, have all felt in their turn
the inescapable need of a learned clergy
of men who could give a rational
reason for the faith they preached and
taught.

Now the Christian church possesses a
storehouse of theology in the writings of
her great teachers, who lived anterior to
the division of the eastern and western
churches. There was no lack of men
deeply versed in this sacred literature,
in the days of Henry VIII. and
Edward VI. Later, in the times of
Elizabeth and the Stuart sovereigns,
Jewel and Parker, Hooker and Andrewes,
Usher and Hammond, Bull and Water-
land, are names which serve as examples
of a long list of scholarly theologians who
have adorned the Church of England. In
the seventeenth century her divines were
as well read in the fathers of the Catholic
church as any theologians which the
Romish church and her reformed learned
orders could boast of. But owing to various
causes, as the eighteenth century advanced,
the study of the ancient fathers was
gradually neglected. In the Evangelical
revival, comparatively speaking, little use
was made by the prominent thought-
leaders of this great branch of Christian
study. Milner perhaps alone of the
Evangelical revivalists possessed any deep
knowledge of the writing of the fathers.
His church history " gave evidence of his
sense of the spiritual beauty of the ancient
church " ; and Newman tells us how in

his early studious years he "read Joseph
Milner s church history, and was nothing
short of enamoured of the long extracts
from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and the
other fathers, which he found there."
But in spite of that possibly solitary ex
ception, it is absolutely certain that this
important study was practically ignored
in the Church of England in the days
which immediately preceded the advent
of the Oxford revivalists.

It is an indisputable fact that this
great branch of theological study was re-
introduced into the Church of England
by the efforts of the new Oxford school.
One of the earliest pieces of work under
taken by the authors of the Tracts for the
Times, had been to publish, under the title
of " Records of the Church," some of the
more interesting writings of the ante-
Nicene Church, or portions of them the
epistles of St. Ignatius, the accounts of
the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne, and
the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, parts of
St. Irenseus and Tertullian, of St. Justin
Martyr, and St. Cyprian and others ; thus
supplying publications of the deepest in
terest to the historian and the antiquarian,
as well as to the theologian.

For more than a century, as we have
remarked, the Fathers had been but little
studied in the Anglican Church.
Gradually the idea had gathered strength
that their u witness " made rather for
the Roman system than for the Anglican.
The Roman theologians assumed that
this was the fact. Dr. Pusey and several
of his learned coadjutors believed that if
these ancient Catholic writers were fairly
examined, it would be seen that the
contrary was the case. Very strikingly

i8 3 6.]

THE "LIBRARY OF THE FATHERS.

341

Newman, in one of his earlier works,*
thus writes on the witness of the Fathers
being hostile to the claims and errors of
modern Rome : " Roman Catholics pro
fess to appeal to primitive Christianity ;
we honestly take
their ground, as
holding it our
selves, but when
the controversy
grows animated,
and descends into
details, they sud
denly leave it,
and desire to
finish the dispute
on some other
field."

Intensely per
suaded of the im
portance of re-
introducing into
the Anglican
church a know
ledge of the writ
ings of the primi
tive church, Dr.
Pusey, about the
year 1836, con
ceived the great
idea of publish
ing an English

translation of the most valuable treatises
contained in the vast literature which has
come down to us. Men, who were not
perfectly familiar and at home with the
Greek and Latin tongues, would then be
able to judge for themselves what was
the teaching of Augustine and Cyril,
Cyprian and Chrysostorn, Athanasius
* " The Prophetical Office of the Church," p. 59.

THE REV. CHAS.
(From the portrait by

and Tertullian, Gregory the Great,
Justin Martyr, Ephrem, Irenseus and
Ambrose. The Anglican bishops, who
as a body viewed the Tracts for the Times
with anxiety if not with distrust, welcomed

this great and
useful work. And
the public in
terest in its issue
gradually grew.
It was a difficult
and costly task,
and the cost was
defrayed mainly
by subscribers to
the series. In the
first list (1838)
there were less
than 800 names ;
in the second,
which appeared
in 1 839, after the
publication of the
first two volumes,
there were more
than 1,100, and of
these seventeen
were bishops.
The circulation
kept increasing ;
though, as might
have been ex
pected, not by leaps and bounds. In 1853,
thirty-one bishops and over 3,700 sub
scribers had joined. This is a very consid
erable number, when it is considered that
only real students of theology would care to
possess and peruse these most precious but
often dry expositions, homilies, essays, and
disquisitions of men who, however vener
able and saintly, belonged to a far remote

MARRIOTT, D.D.
Julian Dru-mmond, )

342

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1836.

age. Of this valuable "Library of the
Fathers " forty-eight massive tomes have
been published. The issue closed in
1885 with the second volume of the
translation of St. Cyril and St. John.
In 1882 the venerable projector of the
work, three months before his death,
wrote the following words : " My work
for the Library of the Fathers is done.
... I have myself no longer any time
to revise anything. At nearly eighty-
two one cannot increase work." Forty-six
years had passed since Dr. Pusey planned
out the great undertaking. Only four
volumes more were published after he
had passed away.

Besides the enduring effect which this
successful effort to popularise the study
of patristic theology produced upon
the whole Church of England, it exerted
a special influence on the Oxford move
ment. " It was at once an encouraging
and a steadying influence ; it made
thoughtful adherents of the movement
feel that the Fathers were behind them,
and with the Fathers that ancient, un
divided church whom the Fathers
represented. It also kept before their
minds the fact that the Fathers were in
some respects unlike the moderns, not
only in the English Church, but also in
the Church of Rome. And above all,
it reminded men of a type of life and
thought which all good men in their
best moments would have been glad to
make their own." *

Other important publications cognate to

patristic study, which have since enriched

the storehouse of Christian antiquity open

to the theological student, may be said

* Dr. Liddon.

to have sprung from the great under
taking of Dr. Pusey and his friends.
Besides the publication of the original
texts of certain famous works of SS.
Augustine and Chrysostom, and St. Cyril
of Alexandria, for the scholar, has
appeared " The Ante-Nicene Christian
Library " in twenty-three volumes, com
prising translations into English of the
best part of the extant writings of the
Fathers down to the date of the first
General Council of Nice in A.D. 325. To
these patristic works may be added the
important publications of the Anglo-
Catholic Library, containing the writings
of the great Caroline divines, who have
been, with considerable accuracy, termed
the "Children of the Fathers"; and also
the issue, by another school of thought,
of various weighty and interesting works
of the Reformation period, by fhe Parker
Society.

Associated with Dr. Pusey in this noble
and successful effort to promote and popu
larise among the Anglican clergy the
study of the great teachers of the earlier
days of Christianity, were not a few of the
more distinguished leaders of the Oxford
movement, who contributed to the under
taking some as translators, others as
writers of the notes and prefaces. The
earlier volumes appeared under the editor
ship of Pusey, Keble, and Newman. One
name, however, will be ever gratefully
remembered in connection with this
"Library of the Fathers," as having
for some fourteen years roughly, from
1841 to 1855 taken upon himself the
severest portion of the labour. As editor
and writer of the prefaces, the name of
Charles Marriott occurs more frequently

18411855]

CHARLES MARRIOTT.

343

than any other in the volumes of the
"Library." We have before alluded to
the life-story of this devoted and saintly
scholar, who, in the annals of this eventful
period of our church s history, filled with
credit several important positions, such
as principal of the Theological College at
Chichester, tutor at Oriel, and later, vicar
of St. Mary s, Oxford ; but the main task
of his laborious life was the " Library of
the Fathers." Although constantly a suf
ferer from ill-health, his untiring energy
in the work he loved so well never flagged.
We read in his brother s touching recol
lections of the great scholar, how on a
journey, even in a boat, he would pull
out a sheet of the work and proceed to
write upon it ; he was ever collating MSS.,
correcting the translations of others, cor
recting the press. At all times and
seasons, often in suffering, the portions
of the " Library of the Fathers," and
they were by no means small portions,

for which he held himself responsible, were
never out of his hands. Worn out by
incessant toil, Charles Marriott, " the man
of saintly life," as his biographer* happily
calls him, passed away at the comparatively
early age of forty-seven. Some of his
contemporaries have since lamented that
his splendid abilities, his patient devotion,
his vast attainments, were not consecrated
to other and more prominent work than
what they termed mere literary drudgery ;
but, after all, no nobler toil can be conceived
for a servant of God than a principal share
in what was perhaps the chief and most
enduring literary work of that far-reaching
Oxford movement, of which he was one
of the chief inspirers. " If I have any
good in me," once remarked Edward
King, the well - known and honoured
bishop of Lincoln, "I owe it to Charles
Marriott."

* Dean Burgon, in his " Lives of Twelve Good
Men."

Photo : Gitlman & Co., Oxford.
ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD : THE QUADRANGLE FROM THE DINING HALL.

CHAPTER LXXV.

THE ANGLICAN REVIVAL. THE RITUAL AND ANGLO-ROMAN CONTROVERSIES.

Controversy concerning Dr. Hampden Growing Influence of the Tractarians Charges of Romanising
the Church, and Pusey s Reply An Extreme Group in the Party Change in Newman s Views
He Publishes Tract 90 General Condemnation of this Tract The Tracts Cease William
George Ward Pusey Charged with Heresy Ward Publishes " The Ideal of the Christian
Church" His Condemnation and Degradation Struggle in Newman s Mind His Last
Sermon Secession of Newman and others to Rome Effect on the Roman Church Fails to-
Permanently Affect the English Church Pusey as the Leader of the School Effect of the
Movement on the Church generally Changes in Ritual Consequent Dissensions The Bishop
of Lincoln s Case brought before a really Ecclesiastical Tribunal The Points at Issue The
Archbishop s Judgment Hopes of Peace in the Church Attitude of the Church and State
towards Roman Catholics The Emancipation Act A Papal Hierarchy set up in 1850
Leo XIII. and Anglican Orders Revival of Practical Work largely due to the Oxford Move
ment Sisterhoods and Female Work General Results of the Anglican Revival.

WE have now to relate the begin
ning of the troubles which so
sadly disfigured the Oxford move
ment. First in order come the events
which roused hostility, and divided Oxford
into two camps ; then the still stranger
circumstances which rent asunder the
party of the Tractarians, as they came
gradually to be called.

In 1832, an able and well-read scholar,
Dr. Hampden, who was well known in the
university as almost the only student of
scholastic divinity, preached the series of
sermons known as the " Bampton Lecture."
It is doubtful if these would have attracted
much public attention had not their author,
some two years later, taken a prominent
part in the discussion upon a proposal to
admit Dissenters into the university without
having first subscribed to the Thirty-nine
Articles of the Church of England. The
arguments he advanced in favour of this
relaxation in favour of Nonconformists,
being compared with propositions he had
advanced in his a Bampton Lectures,"

briefly summarised, were to the effect that
the Thirty-nine Articles were, after all,
human formularies, and were really binding
on no one but those who had reason to think
them true. His arguments seem to have led
him into admissions of a very dangerous
character. The great Catholic creeds
the Apostles and Nicene Creeds every
expression of collective belief, and every
document, however venerable, which the
church had sanctioned from the first,,
seemed to be included in his estimate of the
Articles. The argument he applied to the:
Articles seemed in his system to refer
equally to the " creeds " received in all
churches, all being " of human origin."

Fierce disputes, on these conclusions of
Dr. Hampden, naturally arose in the
university. In 1835, the proposed aboli
tion of the subscription to the Articles at
matriculation, for which Hampden and
his party had pleaded, was rejected by
an enormous majority. The angry war
of words and pamphlets, however, might
have died away and been forgotten, had

i8 3 6.]

AGITATION AGAINST DR. HAMPDEN.

345

it not been for the strange recom
mendation at this juncture, made by
the prime minister, of Dr. Hampden as
Regius professor of Divinity, in the room

The measure seemed a designed insult to
the university. . . It was to place in the
chair of divinity, with the power of in
structing and guiding half the rising clergy

R. D. HAMPDEN, D.D.
(From tlie painting by Q Macnee, R.S.A.}

of Dr. Burton, who died at the close of
1835. It was early in 1836 when, to use
the words of a contemporary Oxford ob
server, "we were electrified by the in
telligence that Dr. Hampden was to be
appointed to the vacant chair of divinity.
5 i

of England, one who would undermine
the authority of our creeds and articles."
A number of influential Oxford men
petitioned the crown against the appoint
ment. The petition was, however, re
jected, and Dr. Hampden became Regius

346

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[18361841.

professor. Again the angry discussions
were renewed discussions which finally
resulted in Convocation passing a vote of
censure upon Dr. Hampden, who was
deprived of certain privileges which be
longed to his professor s chair. It is true
that this vote of censure and what followed
was by no means the exclusive work of
the Tractarians, many who never sympa
thised with them having joined in the
proceedings against the new professor ; but
it is indisputable that " the leaders of the
movement had undertaken the responsi
bility, conspicuously and almost alone, of
pointing out the objections to Dr. Hamp-
den s teaching." From this time onwards
a bitter enmity existed between the leaders
of the movement, and Dr. Hampden and
his friends ; and much of the subsequent
unfortunate action on the part of the
university rulers was owing to the feeling
stirred up by this unhappy incident.

We must not, however, linger too long
over this confused period, when so many
angry feelings were aroused by the Hamp
den controversy, but content ourselves
with lightly touching upon the circum
stances which marked the progress of the
"movement" between 1836 and 1841;
the last-named date definitely marking the
beginning of the parting of the ways
among the Tractarians themselves. The
work of the new Oxford party during
these five or six years (1836-1841) went
on, and their influence steadily grew. As
early as 1835 the Theological Society, the
meetings of which were held in Dr.
Pusey s house in Christ Church, was formed.
Theological essays were read, some of
which subsequently formed the basis of
the later lengthy Tracts for the Times.

The tracts themselves appeared at in
tervals, some of them, as we have already
noticed, of portentous length. Articles
were written in the widely-read British
Critic and Quarterly Theological Review ;
some of them weighty and important
essays on church matters, some of them
unhappily coloured by a growing spirit
of discontent with the English Church,
and by a fatal sympathy with Rome.
Froude s u Remains " were published, and
excited grave alarm in many prudent
and thoughtful hearts by their wild and
exaggerated expressions. The Library of
the Fathers had been fairly started, and
volumes of this great literature of the
early church were appearing at stated
intervals. And all this time the famous
sermons of Newman were being preached
at St. Mary s every Sunday afternoon
such sermons, with their spiritual depth
and earnestness, with their quiet and fervid
eloquence, as for many long years had
never been listened to in Oxford before.
In addition to these, the great teacher
gave lectures in Adam de Brome s chapel
in St. Mary s* to a small but influential
group of listeners, lectures which were
afterwards developed into his work on
" The Prophetical Character of the
Church," and certain of the later lengthy
Tracts for the Times.

The interest of the world, outside
Oxford, in the questions stirred up by
the movement, by degrees extended ;
and it has been said with truth that

* This chapel has been described as a dark and
dreary appendage to St. Mary s on the north side,
in which Adam de Brome, Edward II. s Almoner,
and the founder of Oriel college, is supposed to lie,
beneath a slab of Purbeck marble, from which the
brass has been removed.

1836-1841.]

THE OXFORD LEADERS AND ROME.

347

in these years " the movement in its
many sides had almost, monopolised for
the time both the intelligence and the
highest religious earnestness of the uni
versity. In Oxford," writes dean Church,
" in vacation reading parties, in their
walks or social meetings, in their studies
or in the common room, the Tractarian
doctrines, whether assented to or laughed
at, deplored or fiercely denounced, were
sure to come to the front. All subjects
in discussion seemed to lead up to them :
art and poetry, Gothic architecture and
German romance and painting, the
philosophy of language, and the novels
of Walter Scott and Miss Austen, Cole
ridge s transcendentalism, and bishop
Butler s practical wisdom, Plato s ideals,
and Aristotle s analysis. It was difficult
to keep them (the Tractarian opinions)
out of lecture-rooms and examinations
for fellowships." And thus, not only in
Oxford, but throughout the country, a
new school of thought appeared, and
rapidly became a power in England,
and one that had to be reckoned with
by the rulers of the church, who were
not unnaturally alarmed by some of
the rash and imprudent pronouncements
which emanated from it.

The fatal rift in this new and powerful
party came about in this wise. From
1833 to J 839 the movement met with,
on the whole, marked success. The
danger-clouds which menaced the church
had been dispersed ; little was now heard
of destructive reform ; a widespread feeling
in favour of the church had been evoked
among the English people, and a marked
impulse had been given to theological
study ; and some at least among the

celebrated Tracts fur the Times had been
by many thoughtful minds in the church
received, if not with unstinting approval,
at least with respectful, even sympathetic
consideration. The gravest accusation
levelled against the Tractarian party, and
one that was listened to with considerable
attention, was founded upon its alleged
inclination to Romanism. To this for
midable charge Dr. Pusey replied in his
famous " Letter to the Bishop of Oxford."
This letter was, in fact, an elaborate
apology for the publications and public
utterances of the school, put out during
the first six years of the movement. In
it, from his standpoint, he showed with
conspicuous ability that in the " Tracts,"
and generally in the writings* of the
Tractarian leaders, there was a general
consensus of opinion adverse to Rome
a clear conception of its corruptions and
grave doctrinal errors, and a distinct in
tention to resist them.

This letter of Pasey had considerable
effect, and in many quarters was con
sidered unanswerable. But Dr. Pusey,
when he published it, forgot or ignored
that in 1839-40, although the main body
of his friends were loyal to their church,
there had sprung up in the heart of the
movement a small though powerful group
of conspicuously able men, whose words and
writings were unmistakably coloured with
those very Romanistic tendencies which he
was so anxious to disclaim for the whole
party men like Robert Wilberforce,
Oakeley, and Ward, names that afterwards
became too famous in religious England.

* Of course, there were grave exceptions, but
notably in R. H. Froude s "Remains." See
P- 324-

348

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[18361841.

The chief inspirer of this group, alas !
was Pusey s dearest friend and associate,
Newman ; and these leaders were followed
by a small but determined group of
younger men, all fiery partisans, and
devoted to Newman.

In fact, the Tractarians in 1839, 1840,
and 1841 were already fast dividing into
two parties. These younger and more
impetuous men, who had more or less
broken away from the more serious older
leaders, such as Pusey, Palmer, and Keble,
all looked for guidance and a lead to

DR. PUSEY PREACHING.

that strong, brilliant man whose winning
voice and burning words were so well
known, whose writings were so eloquent
and withal so lucid, and who since the
beginning of the revival had been the
chief inspirer of both the writings and
the sermons of the school Newman of

Oriel, the vicar of the great Oxford church
of St. Mary s. What ofchim at this critical
juncture ? what part would he play in the
drama which was being gradually unfolded
before the eyes of the church and nation ?
Would he lead these ardent but sorely
mistaken spirits back into the old patb
of the Anglicanism which they were
forsaking, or would he be their guide
on their Rome-ward way r

The reasons which brought about the
change that had passed over Newman s
views, will ever remain a mystery. One
may suggest certain plausible enough
causes which may have moved him, while
they failed utterly to touch such men
as Pusey and Keble, to say nothing of
less known but at the same time equally
profound scholars, such as Palmer and
Marriott. But when all is before us,,
the change in Newman will ever remain a.
riddle to which no perfectly satisfactory
solution exists. Even his own Apologia^
written with all the winning charm
and transparent eloquence of which he
was so great a master, fails us here. No
pen in the earlier years of Tractarianism
so trenchantly condemned Romanism, as
did the pen of him who in later years
has been known as the great cardinal.
For instance, he wrote : " We agree with
the Romanist, in appealing to antiquity
as our great teacher, but we deny that
his doctrines are to be found in antiquity.""
In another place he says : " We believe
that Popery is a perversion or corruption
of the truth," and with crushing truth
he once penned the following sentence,
which with tremendous force aimed at
and hit the darkest blot on the shield of

18361841.]

CHANGE IN NEWMAN S VIEWS.

349

Rome : " The present authorita
tive teaching of the Church of
Rome, to judge by what we see
of it in public, goes very far
indeed to substitute another
Gospel for the true one. Instead
of setting before the soul the
blessed Trinity, it does seem to
me as a popular system to preach
the blessed Virgin and the
saints." *

What, then, brought about the
great change which passed over
that great but versatile soul ?
First and foremost we would
suggest, from his own words, the influ
ence exercised over him by his dearest
friend, Richard Hurrell Froude. "He
taught me," writes Newman in the
Apologia, u to look with admiration
towards the Church of Rome, and in the
same degree to dislike the Reformation.
He fixed deep in me the idea of devotion
to the blessed Virgin." Dr. Pusey
thought the final catastrophe was brought
about owing to the ill-treatment he met
with, especially from the heads of houses
at Oxford. But this was not the general
opinion of the more serious members of
the group of older Tractarians, one of whom
thus records his conclusions, which may
be taken as a fair expression of their
thoughts here : "I have heard Dr. Pusey
speak of Newman as forced out of the
Church of England ; nevertheless, I be
lieve Isaac Williams may be right in
attributing his change more to what was

* The references to these passages from
Cardinal Newman s writings are given in Mr-
Palmer s "Narrative." He adds other similar
quotations, which might largely be multiplied.

PORCH OF ST. MARY S, OXFORD.

working within him to his natural
restless temperament. * That his sensi
tive spirit was wounded by the unwise
and precipitate treatment dealt out to
him and his friends by university and
other authorities, is indisputable ; but
that Newman made up his mind quite
independently of these circumstances, is
equally clear.

The Church of Rome, too, with its
grandeur, its far-reaching power, its mar
vellous adaptability to all conceivable

* Sir George Prevost, in the " Autobiography
of Isaac "Williams," p. 104 (note).

350

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1841.

human organisations, its more than impe
rial authority over the hearts of men, for
years had possessed a strange fascination
for Newman, even while at the same
time he clearly recognised its grievous
shortcomings. In its magnificence and
catholicity it was to him, all through
the earlier days of the movement,
nevertheless " a lost church," " the seat
of heinous error," the guardian of an
unsound creed, the " cruel-natured Rome."
In his well-known poems we come upon
such lines as

" Far sadder musing on the traveller falls
At sight of thee, O Rome ! "

* * * *

" And next a mingled .throng besets the breast

Of bitter thoughts and sweet,
How shall I name thee, Light of the wide West,
Or heinous error-seat ? "

And again,

" O that thy creed were sound !

For thou dost soothe the heart, thou Church

of Rome,

By thy unwearied watch, and varied round
Of service, in thy Saviour s holy home.

* * * *

There on a foreign shore
The home-sick solitary finds a friend."

In another of his poems we read

"And now thou sendest foes
Brecffrom thy womb, lost Church, to mock the

throes
Of thy free child, thou cruel-natured Rome ! " *

Yet, in spite of these misgivings, ever
in Newman s mind brooded the attrac
tive thought which lives along the pages
of Macaulay s famous essay, t written
about the same time, of the permanence of
that mighty Roman communion ; how
for centuries, amid the crash of falling

" Lyra Apostolica," Nos. clxxii., clxxiii., clxxiv.
t Macaulay : Essay on Ranke s " History of the
Popes," published in the Edinburgh Review, 1840.

empires, the changes of dynasties, the
migration of whole peoples, Rome has
lived on ; how when the waters of inva
sion or revolution had abated, " its deep
foundations remained unshaken; how
not once or twice it appeared amidst
the ruins of a world which had passed
away. . . . The unchangeable church
was still there." Though he was.
too conscious that the doctrines of the
Romish church were very different from
the doctrines of the early church, he
gradually and by slow degrees explained
to himself this incongruity by means of the
ingenious theory of " development " which
he subsequently thought out and pub
lished ; a theory which amazed and
interested all, which delighted some
minds, and grieved and saddened others.

But in 1839-1840 this was still in the
future, and Newman was yet a leader of
thought in the Anglican communion. It
was early in 1841 that he published the
essay, which will be for ever associated
with his name when many of his nobler
pieces of work are forgotten : the essay
known as " Tract 90," entitled ^Remarks
on certain passages in the Thirty-nine
Articles " (83 pages). Its avowed purpose was
to keep in the Church of England a certain
number of his disciples who were on the
point of seceding from the Anglican com
munion and joining the Church of Rome.
The argument in the famous tract which
excited so much criticism, was to the effect
that in the Thirty-nine Articles of the
Church of England " was there no Catholic
doctrine, or hardly any Roman doctrine,
condemned." The ingenuity of the

* Cf. Wakeman : " History of Church of Eng
land," chap. xx.

TRACT No. 90.

351

strange argument was indisputable ; but
it cannot be said to have been successful
from any point of view. It failed largely
in the primary purpose of its author : even
one of the most learned of the Tractarian
party speaks of a the universal disappro
bation which Tract 90 experienced." In
Newman s letter to Dr. Jelf, written in
1 842, in which he defended his exposition
of the Articles so severely and generally
criticised, he says, by way ot explanation,
that he was thinking only or chiefly of
some younger men who saw in the Articles,
as popularly interpreted, a reason for join
ing the Church of Rome.

But for good or for evil Tract No.
90 had been launched forth, and it was
curiously and eagerly read by friends and
foes. As is usually the case in such pro
nouncements, many read the original essay,
comparatively few the explanations*
which dwelt especially on his earnest
desire to meet a particular set of diffi
culties. Very quickly the storm broke
over Oxford. "Tract 90" was published
the last day of February, 1841. Early in
March four senior tutors f of the university
addressed the author of the Tract, charging
him with opening a way by which men in
the case of Romish doctrines might violate
their solemn pledges to the university. Be
fore March had half run out, the " heads of
houses" met and declared that in " No. 90"
modes of interpretation were suggested by
which subscription to the Articles might
be reconciled with the adoption of Roman
Catholic error ; and the resolution of these

* Such, for instance, as were contained in the
above referred to letter to Dr. Jelf.
f One of the four was Mr. Tait, afterwards
bishop of London and archbishop of Canterbury.

university chiefs was passed without wait
ing for the defence of the author of the
Tract thus condemned, though they were
aware that the defence in question was
soon to appear.

Very gently did the bishop of Oxford
(Dr. Bagot), of whom the Tractarian
leaders ever speak with reverence and
love, express his opinion of u No. 90" to
Newman. After kindly alluding to his
persuasion that the object of the Tract in
question was to make the church more
Catholic (in its true sense) and more united,
he added the grave words, " but I cannot
think it free from danger, and I feel that
it would tend to increase disunion at this
time." The archbishop of Canterbury,*
writing to the bishop of Oxford, styles it
the " unfortunate Tract." Far more stern
and condemnatory, however, was the
public language of the majority of the
bishops, who, before the end of the year
(1841) which had witnessed its publi
cation, with " very varying degrees of
decision, joined in the chorus of condemn
ation of the famous essay." f " What

* Archbishop Howley, formerly Regius professor
of divinity at Oxford, the intimate friend of H.
J. Rose, above described as one of the prominent
figures of the early days of the movement, was a
prelate of singularly calm judgment and under
standing. Lord Aberdeen, the statesman, declared
that after forty years of intimate acquaintance he
had found less of human infirmity in Howley than
in any man he had ever known.

t As an instance of the language of the episcopal
charges see, for instance, the reference in Dr.
Philpotts charge. (Dr. Philpotts, bishop of Exeter,
has been fairly described as the most advanced
and militant High Churchman on the bench.) "The
tone of the Tract, as respects our own church, is
offensive and indecent ; as regards the Reformation
and our reformers, absurd, as well as incongruous
and unjust. Its principles of interpreting our
Articles I cannot but deem most unsound: the

352

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1841.

might not the movement have been,"
Dr. Pusey said with some pathos some
forty years later, u if the bishops could
have understood us ! I remember
Newman saying to me at Littlemore,
4 Oh, Pusey ! we have leant on the

say anything ; he was already leaving
us." *

Acting upon the expressed wish of the
bishop of Oxford and of the archbishop
of Canterbury, who both showed kindly
feeling and sympathy with Newman, an

WILLIAM GEORGE WARD.
(From a Miniature by E, Combe

bishops, and they have broken down
under us. It was too late then to

reasoning with which it supports its principles
sophistical ; the averment on which it founds its
reasoning, at variance with recorded facts . . .
It is idle to argue against arguments which were
not designed for argument, but for scoffing . . .
It is far the most daring attempt ever yet made by
a minister of the Church of England to neutralise
the distinctive doctrines of our church, and to
make us symbolise with Rome." (Quoted in
"Life of Archbishop Tait," vol. i.)

announcement of the cessation of the
Tracts was almost immediately made ; and
in a judicious letter to bishop Bagot, the
archbishop trusted that such an announce
ment would terminate the troubles excited
by the 9Oth Tract. These hopes were not
realised. There were many in the Church
of England who had received the writings

* Quoted by Dr. Liddon, in " Life of Pusey,"
vol. ii., chap. xxvi.

WILLIAM GEORGE WARD.

353

and sayings of the new Oxford school with
dislike. The late attitude of the official
chiefs in Oxford, and the general coldness
or even hostility on the part of many of
the bishops, seemed in a measure to justify
these feelings of antipathy. " Tract 90"
was not allowed to drop into oblivion. It
was attacked and defended in many ways
and by many persons. But, after all, even

man when the stir consequent upon the
publication of the famous tract of Newman
arose in 1841. He was already well known
in Oxford as a sparkling and interesting
personality, but withal eccentric and curi
ously impressionable. The story of his
examination in the schools will never be
forgotten ; how, after a most brilliant display
of scholarship, he was asked an ordinary

BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD.

Photo : Giilman &&amp;gt; Co., Oxford.

this strong and excited feeling might have
died away, had it not been for the action of
the extreme wing of the Tractarian party.

We have before once or twice alluded to
a party of Oxford men, mostly younger
than Newman, and all ardently attached to
the great teacher, who more powerfully
than any other man of his generation had
the rare power of attracting and fascinat
ing others. Of these the most prominent,
perhaps the most able, was William George
Ward, a fellow of Balliol College. Born in
1 812, he was still a comparatively young

question bearing upon the classic author
he had so perfectly rendered into English.
It was one of Cicero s letters. Ward, in
reply, said he knew " nothing whatever
about them " and their history. The
examiner, wishing to assist the able young
scholar, begged him to take his own time,
thinking he was simply nervous. "No,
sir," replied Ward, "it is not nervousness,
pure ignorance." In the end, this curious
neglect of common information cost him
his first-class, but his well-known scholar
ship procured him a fellowship of Balliol.

354

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1841.

The same strange inconsistency continued
all through his career. Years later, when
his originality and great learning and un
doubted ability had made his name famous,
a similar incident is related connected with
Pugin, the illustrious architect. Pugin,
whose idolatry of everything Gothic is well
known, remarked to a friend : " What
an extraordinary thing that so glorious a
man as Ward should be living in a room
without mullions to the windows ! "
Pugin playfully attacked him on the
subject of this lack as it seemed to him
in the architecture of his dwelling.
u What are mullions ? " was Ward s reply ;
" I never heard of them." *

In the earlier years of his Oxford career
Ward came much under the influence of
Dr. Arnold and Arthur Stanley, but later
he was attracted by the sermons and
lectures of Newman, of whom he became
the follower and ardent disciple, exag
gerating, however, and going far beyond
the teaching of his master. Under Ward
and his immediate companions, what was
virtually a new school grew up in the
heart of the older Tractarian school. To
Ward " the beautiful but more indefinite "
lessons of the early Fathers presented less
attraction than the writings of the famous
medievalists. " He literally buried him
self," says his biographer, " in the works ot
Aquinas and Bonaventura and of the great
Spanish theologians of the sixteenth cen
tury, and at this time he laid the founda
tions of the deep and wide theological
learning for which he was in after years so
famous, when he had found a home in
another communion."

* Sec " William George Ward and the Oxford
Movement," by Wilfrid Ward, chap. vii.

All through this period of stress and
trial at Oxford, of painful searchings of
heart, of blind groping hither and thither,
of sombre controversy, the existing Roman
church was ever the object of Ward s
reverence and admiration. To his glowing
imagination, the loftiest types of sanctity
presented by the Anglican Church, even
when " sharing the tender piety of George
Herbert and bishop Ken, fell short of the
heroic aims, the martial sanctity gained by
warfare unceasing against the world and
flesh and devil, which he found exhibited
in Roman hagiology. 1 While in these
last years of the great movement Newman
was gradually withdrawing himself more
and more from public gaze, and in his
solitude at Littlemore, outside the Oxford
world, in silence was meditating the great
step of his anxious, troubled life ; while
Pusey, in deep sorrow at what he saw
around him, was bracing himself up to
endure hardness for what he felt was truth;
while Keble and Marriott were hoping
against hope that they would soon see a
rift in the dark clouds of suspicion and
animosity which were fast gathering over
the revival of what they held so precious
and dear, Ward became the prominent
figure in Oxford writing, arguing in
season and out of season, the centre and
rallying-point of the disaffected younger
Tractarians, day by day showing himself
more plainly as the adversary of Angli
canism ; going far to justify, indeed, the
harsh and often unwise action of the
governing body in the university and of
the rulers of the Church.

We have a contemporary portrait f of

* Wilfrid Ward s Life, chap. vii.
f Ibid. chap. ii.

THE ROMANIST SCHOOL.

355

this brilliant but eccentric outcome of the
movement, which paints him as short and
unwieldy, with clear-cut features of great
mobility of expression, and as having a
joyousness of manner which was infectious.
His voice was powerful and musical, and
his laugh mighty. His speech was frank
to a fault. Arthur Stanley, afterwards dean
of Westminster, writes of him as " a large
moon -faced man." This strange, clever man,
who worked such mischief to the cause of
which once he was so doughty a champion,
was one of the most lovable and modest
of friends, absolutely unself-seeking, at once
tender and generous. When, long years
later, Ward had passed away, and the din
of the great conflict had been long hushed,
the greatest of the poets of this century *
wrote the following touching memorial
lines to his friend :

" Farewell, whose living like I shall not find,
Whose faith and work were bells of full

accord,
My friend, the most unworldly of mankind,

Most generous of all Ultramontanes, Ward,
How subtle at tierce and quart of mind with

mind,
How loyal in the following of thy Lord ! "

It was to retain in their allegiance to the
Church of England men such as Ward,
that Newman tells us he wrote Tract 90,"
and its unreal interpretation of the Thirty-
nine Articles. But Ward would have none
of such interpretations. The " Articles " to
him were utterly distasteful. He honestly
disliked them, because he felt they were
openly Protestant. It was possible, but
only just possible, he said, for a Catholic
to subscribe to them. He would not go
further with Newman and his tract, than to
concede in his strange forcible phraseology,
* Lord Tennyson.

that these Articles \verQpatientot a Catholic
interpretation, but ambitious of a Protestant
meaning. They were, as he considered
them, the outcome of an evil age. Such
pronouncements as this, from one like
Ward, were not likely to promote peace in
Oxford, or in the church outside Oxford.

Indefatigable was his pen. A number
of articles in the British Critic, a quarterly-
review which had long been highly
esteemed in the Church, written by him,,
instituted comparisons between the Church
of England and the Church of Rome,
The field over which Mr. Ward s com
parisons stretched was a broad one, and
included much besides doctrine. The
ideals, aims, the training and education
in fact, the whole life of the clergy of
the two churches were in these articles
exhaustively reviewed, and generally the
result of the comparison was fatally ad
verse to the Church of England.

Nor was Ward the only Tractarian writer
who at this time wrote in this spirit in
the pages of the British Critic. Others
harped on the same disloyal string. Among
these, distinguished for his ability and
power as a writer, was Mr. Oakeley, also-
a fellow of Balliol, and minister of Margaret
Chapel in London. His famous article on
" Jewel " was one of the most bitter
public pronouncements by the anti-
Reformation school of Ward. In it the
Reformation is proclaimed as "- a desperate
remedy," was almost " a fearful judgment,"
and bishop Jewel is absolutely condemned
as a heretic. This article in the British
Critic openly advised its readers to with
draw their confidence from the English
reformer.

The attitude generally assumed by the

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[18411842.

heads of the University towards the Tracta-
rians in those two years which followed the
publication of " Tract 90," as regards Ward
cannot be fairly criticised. He was openly
assuming an absolutely disloyal attitude
towards the church of which he was a
minister. The wisdom, however, of some
of the proceedings of the " heads " is open
to grave censure. It was undoubtedly an

scholarship which existed in the Tractarian
ranks. With the exception of Dr. Routh,
the honoured president of Magdalen,
there was scarcely a theological scholar in
their number. The bishops, too, with rare
exceptions, followed their lead, and in their
public utterances and charges treated all the
men of the movement alike with coldness
and even with stern reproof. The bishop

MAODALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD, FROM THE CHIRWELL.

uneasy, restless moment. "Tract 90" had
disturbed and rendered anxious many quiet,
earnest minds, and the unveiled Romanistic
tendencies of Ward and his group of
friends were becoming every month more
prominent : there was real danger in the
air. But unhappily the heads of the
colleges encountered the danger as men
who were panic-stricken. They looked
on all the party of the "movement " with
suspicion, and treated them all alike as
enemies. They had no sympathy with the
earnestness and true piety and profound

of Winchester even refused ordination to
Keble s curate. In the University, when
at the close of 1841 Keble vacated the
chair of poetry, the election turned most
unfairly upon the burning question of the
day, and Isaac Williams, a singularly
devout and pious scholar, whose claims,
from his published poems, to the chair of
poetry were undoubted, was set aside for
another, certainly as a poet not to be
classed with Williams, who was looked
upon by the majority of the electors as
the "Tractarian" candidate.

Photo : Gillman & Co., Oxford.

THE CATHEDRAL (CHRIST CHURCH), OXFORD,

843-3

CONDEMNATION OF PUSEY.

357

A still graver error was committed in Pusey, and then went away. ... It

the spring of 1843, when a sermon of Dr. was pronounced useful, eloquent, striking,

Pusey s, preached in Christ

Church, was condemned as

heretical, and the preacher

condemned in consequence

to two years silence. The

sermon in question was styled

" The Holy Eucharist a Com
fort to the Penitent." It

was by no means a polemical

discourse. That it contained

statements concerning the

Holy Eucharist, which some

loyal and faithful members

of the Church of England

would have demurred to, is

no doubt true ; but that it

contained nothing which

could be with any fairness

arraigned as heresy, is
equally true. How wide
and diverse men s opinions
respecting the profound
mystery have been in all
ages of the story of the
church, we have already
borne witness. It will be
ever so. But to charge
Pusey with heresy was in
deed a grave error, espe
cially as he was refused a
hearing by his judges.

The scene when Pusey
preached what has since
been known as " the con
demned sermon," on the
fourth Sunday after Easter, CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD.

1843, has been thus graph-

. ically described. " The audience listened beautiful, pretty, such the usual remarks,
with the attention it always does to Dr. Some said it was a long sermon. It was

358

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1844.

of course, said to contain high doctrinal
views ; but as all Pusey s sermons contain
high views, there was nothing to draw
attention in this remark. The audience
went home, were perfectly at their ease,
thought nothing more about it the rev
erential impression excepted, of course,
which that preacher s discourse leaves on
the mind when all on a sudden comes,
like a clap of thunder on the ear, the
news that the Board of Heresy is sum
moned to sit on Dr. Pusey." *

Dr. Pusey at that time occupied a unique
position at Oxford. He was reckoned as
the official leader of the then unpopular
Tractarian party. But his unswerving
loyalty to the Church of England was
unquestioned by foes as by friends. In
his great university he had no peer in the
profundity and wide range of his learning.
These high qualifications, coupled with
his blameless, self-denying life, rendered
him, it has been well said, in many respects
the most venerated person in Oxford.
To strike at such a teacher was indeed
a fatal error, and it was one of the chief
causes which precipitated the catastrophe
we are about to relate.

We may now return to Mr. Ward, and
the attitude he and his friends were taking
up. The articles in the British Critic
we have already spoken of, as giving an
entirely new complexion to the movement.
Mr. Mozley, who was then editor of the
British Critic, thus writes of them : " I
continued to read Ward s articles as fast
as they came from the press . . . not
only from duty, but with a certain pleasur
able excitement, akin to that some children
have in playing on the edge of a precipice.

* Essays by J. B. Mozley, D.D., ii., pp. 150-1.

Their terminus was outside the Church of
England." In some sense they justified the
suspicion with which all the Tractarians
were viewed by the heads in Oxford
and the bishops outside the university.
Dr. Pusey and Isaac Williams suffered for
the sins of their brethren. The rulers
of the university and of the church lumped
the loyal and disloyal Anglicans all to
gether without discrimination. Men like
Palmer felt it was indeed high time " to
cut themselves free from this decayed and
dying member."

Under the pressure of these grave cir
cumstances, which threatened the very
existence of the movement, with the full
approval of the generous - minded and
sympathetic Dr. Bagot, bishop of Oxford,
Mr. Palmer put out the "Narrative of
Events connected with the publication
of the Tracts for the Times." It was
a somewhat dry, but at the same
time fair and statesmanlike history of
the dawn and growth of the "move
ment," and included a vivid contrast
between the tone and object of its first
promoters, with the excesses of the later
writers in the British Critic excesses
which were, of course, by all sober-minded
Anglicans, strongly and adversely criticised
and disowned. The " Narrative " ex
cited wide attention, was very generally
approved by a great number of leading
churchmen, and was largely sold ; in
America, it is said, 100,000 copies were
disposed of. The " Romanisers " soon
replied to it, and the reply took the form
of a bulky volume of some 600 pages,
by Ward, entitled "The Ideal of the
Christian Church considered in comparison
with Existing Practice." The "Ideal"

I844-]

DEGRADATION OF WARD.

359

was published in the June of 1844, a little
more than a year after the condemnation
of Dr. Pusey s sermon. There was no
mistaking its tendency. It boldly accepted
and endorsed the disloyal attitude of the
articles in the British Critic, at the same
time freely confessing that Mr. Palmer s
quotations from the British Critic articles
were, on the whole, perfectly fair. The
meaning of this once famous book was
painfully obvious. It not only maintained
that the Roman Church the actual
Roman system was generally superior
to the Anglican Church and the Anglican
system, but it claimed the right of holding
the whole cycle of Roman doctrine.

Such a manifesto could not remain
ignored. Before the year 1844 closed,
the heads of the Oxford houses announced
that, having examined some of the startling
propositions advanced in the " Ideal," they
proposed to submit to Convocation certain
measures. (i) To condemn Mr. Ward s
book ; (2) to degrade Mr. Ward by de
priving him of all his university degrees.
Among the passages selected as examples
by the vice-chancellor and the board of
heads of houses as incriminating state
ments, the two last of the selected
quotations ran as follows : Page 565 :
" We find, oh most joyful, most wonderful,
most unexpected sight, we find the whole
cycle of Roman doctrine gradually possess
ing numbers of English churchmen." Page
567 : " Three years have passed since I
said plainly that in subscribing the Articles
I renounce no one Roman doctrine."

Such public statements as these, in the
eyes of most fair Englishmen of any school
,of thought in the church, demonstrated
that for Mr. Ward the extreme limit of

toleration had been passed. The strongest
condemnation of the " Ideal " was certain
to be voted by an overwhelming majority
of the Oxford Convocation. But the
" heads " demanded the degradation of
Mr. Ward from all his university degrees.
The legality of such a step was doubtful,
and it was a grave mistake to propose it.
This was shown by the voting. The con
demnation of the book was carried, as
might have been expected, by a majority
of about two to one ; the degradation by
a comparatively small majority 569 to 511.
A third proposition, originally intended
to have been made by the "heads of
houses," to make a more rigorous test
as to the sense in which the members of
the university understood the Articles,
was dropped by the board of heads before
the Convocation met, so general was the
feeling of disapprobation manifested at
the idea of such a tyrannical innovation,
which would, indeed, by a strict definition
of subscription to the Articles, have
abridged the cherished liberties of the
English Church. Leading men of all
schools of thought were bitterly opposed
to any such definition.

Strangely enough, the " heads " made
another unfortunate mistake, substituting
for this dropped third proposition a proposed
formal censure of "Tract 90." The tract
was most unpopular, it is true ; but the
chivalry of Oxford revolted at the idea
of hunting down the eminent man who had
written the tract some four years before,
and, when the censure of " Tract 90 " was
proposed, it was formally vetoed by the
proctors, in accordance with an ancient
statutable university privilege they pos
sessed. Their unusual but perfectly

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1845.

legal action was largely approved. But
though the public condemnation of
Mr. Newman by means of the formal
censure of his famous "Tract 90" was
averted, owing to this bold action of the
proctors, the condemnation of the "Ideal"
and the degradation of its writer was voted
by the majorities above related. Those
who were eye-witnesses of the famous
scene in the Sheldonian theatre in the
February of 1845, when the book (the
" Ideal ") in which the Church of England
was insulted received a formal condemna
tion, and its author was degraded from his
degrees, tell us of the unparalleled excite
ment of the mighty concourse of some
1,500, made up of many of the leading
men of England, who were proud of
and jealous for the reputation of their
immemorial Oxford.

Was this, then, the outcome of that far-
reaching Oxford movement, from which
so much had been, expected : the public
condemnation and degradation of an
eccentric but very able and prominent
son of that great church revival ; the
proposed . bitter and public censure of
the honoured chief of the movement, of
one far greater and more distinguished
than the condemned Ward, only removed
out of the arena of debate by a bold and
dramatic interposition on the part of the
proctors Guillemard and Church ? * Clouds
and thick darkness, indeed, seemed to
have gathered round the party from
which so much had been hoped. All
the great names, unfairly enough, as was
afterwards seen, of the scholarly men who

* The Dr. Church in later days known as the
revered and universally honoured dean of St.
Paul s.

adorned the Tractarian party, seemed
stained with the reproach of disloyalty to
the church which so many of them loved.
On that February day, 1845, the Oxford
movement seemed hopelessly ruined. But,
strange to say, notwithstanding all this,
a great future was still before it a future
none dreamed of in that hour of sad
mistakes and fatal errors and seemingly
hopeless confusion.

Meanwhile, at a distance from the
stir and din of the conflict in the
university, the recluse of Littlemore
was preparing, in strict retirement, with
patient study and anxious thought, for
the final move which would separate
him for ever from the Anglican church,
once so precious to him for the sepa
ration which would part him from his
dearest friends, who for so long had been
his fellow-workers. From the dawn of
the Oxford movement, John Henry
Newman of Oriel had been its life
and soul. He had written the first
" tract " of the famous series, and the last,
the historial No. 90, had been penned
by the same tireless hand. As a preacher
of rare and peculiar power he has, in our
story of this great religious revival, been
more than once alluded to. " Those won
derful afternoon sermons " at St. Mary s
had gone home to the hearts of so many
men, of all sorts and conditions, from
the highly-cultured and critical fellow
of Balliol or Oriel, down to the youngest
undergraduate ; and these sermons had
gone on for some years, from 1828 to 1843,
" each continuing and deepening the im
pression produced by the last. The
world knows these sermons, has heard

18411845-]

STRUGGLE IN NEWMAN S MIND.

a great deal about them, has passed its
various judgments on them ; but it hardly
realises that without them the movement
might never have gone on, certainly would
never have been what it was." *

question, Newman, to use his own striking
words, had been on his death-bed as
regards his membership with the Anglican
Church, though at the time he had become
aware of it only by degrees. It was

DR. BAGOT, BISHOP OF OXFORD.
{From an engraving by J. Burnet, F.R.S.")

From the end oi 1841 the year of
the appearance of "Tract 90 after the
almost general storm of indignation which
followed the startling interpretations of
the Articles suggested by the tract in
* Professor Shairp and dean Church.

a long drawn-out agony though, this
" death-bed," lasting about four long
weary years. He tells the true story in
his own nervous graphic way, in the long
chapter of the Apologia dealing with
his religious opinions from 184145 : how

362

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1843-

in the spring of 41 he had given up his
place in the movement in his letter to his
bishop, expecting or intending gradually
to fall back into lay communion. He did
not at first contemplate leaving the Church
of England, but he says he felt that he
could not hold office in its service if he
were not allowed to hold the Catholic
sense of the Articles (i.e. as he had ex
pounded their sense in "Tract 90");
while, on the other hand, he could not go
to Rome while she suffered honour to be
paid to the Blessed Virgin and the saints,
which he thought in his conscience to be
incompatible with the Supreme Incom
municable Glory of the One Infinite and
Eternal. At the same time he declares
how he kept back persons who were
disposed to go to Rome, with all his might.
This, he affirmed, was his view of his duty
from the end of 1841 to the autumn of
1843. During this period he remained
vicar of St. Mary s, and continued his
sermons there, but all the while he lived
in semi-retirement, mostly at Littlemore.*
In these last months of his vicariate of
St. Mary s, lasting a year and a half or two
years, he says he was gradually surrender
ing himself to the influence of others,
younger men mostly than himself, a group
belonging to a -new school of thought,
such as Mr. Ward and Mr. Oakeley ; he
especially singles out the latter for mention.
These men had, it was known, a strong
bias Rome-wards. He also confesses that,
in spite of there being " actual circum
stances in the Church of Rome which
pained him much," the old glamour which
Rome had for long thrown over him was

* Littlemore was a district of the parish of St.
Mary, about three miles from Oxford.

intensifying that he had " a secret longing
love of Rome, the mother of English
Christianity." On the other hand, he
complained bitterly that although in a
kind of retirement at Littlemore, although
taking no part in controversy and religious
strife, after "Tract 90" the Protestant
world would not let him alone that
malevolent reports of all kinds were circu
lated about him, continually vexing and
harassing him. In vain he tried com
pletely to sever himself from Oxford, and
to quietly continue his ministrations at
Littlemore, but it was found impracticable
to sever Littlemore from the mother parish
of St. Mary. Other events, too, pressed
upon him sorely notably the foundation
of the bishopric of Jerusalem,* and the
reiterated charges of the bishops against
his " Tract 90." In the year 43, he
writes, he began to despair of the Church
of England, and before the year closed,
resigning the vicarage of St. Mary, he
gave up all clerical duty.

The closing scene of Newman s public
career in the Church of England, when,
in the presence of a few devoted and
mourning friends, the great Tractarian
leader preached in the little Littlemore
church his farewell sermon, which they
knew too well was the herald of his final

* The question of the Jerusalem bishopric was
as follows. It was a plan of Bunsen, the Prussian
Minister in England, that England and Prussia
alternately should nominate a Protestant bishop in
Jerusalem, to be consecrated by English bishops.
This prelate was to exercise jurisdiction over
English and German Protestants in Palestine. To
Newman it seemed that England, out of communion
with the East and with Rome, by this step entered
into close communion with Lutherans and
Calvinists against both the ancient churches of the
East and West. "It was one of the blows," wrote
Newman, " which broke me."

- ]

NEWMAN S PATHETIC FAREWELL.

363

separation from them and the Church of
England, is a striking episode in the
story. " When Newman entered the pulpit
there was a kind of awestruck silence ;
everybody knew that something would be
said which nobody would ever forget.
And the Parting of Friends is, perhaps,
the most pathetic of all the sermons of
this greatest master of religious pathos. . .
It is the cry which tells the world that
a work of spiritual and religious restoration,
to which in the thoughts of many earnest
and serious men no parallel had been wit
nessed in Europe for at least three centuries,
was, at least to the mind of one who had
hitherto had the chief hand in promoting
it, a failure. . . The concluding apostrophe
to the Church of his birth gives pathetic
utterance to the perplexity and sorrow
that filled so many hearts at that most
critical moment : O my mother, whence
is this unto thee, that thou hast good
things poured upon thee, and canst
not keep them, and bearest children,
yet darest not own them ? Why hast
thou not the skill to use their services,
rior the heart to rejoice in their love ?
How is it that whatever is generous in
purpose, and tender and deep in devotion,
thy flower and thy promise, falls from thy
bosom and finds no home within thy
arms ? . . . Thou makest them stand
all day idle .or thou biddest

them begone where they will be more
welcome. " *

One of the intimate friends who was
present that day at Littlemore, in the
September of 1843, wrote thus, a few
days after : f "I am just returned, half

* Dr. Liddon : " Life of Pusey," chap. xxx.
t Ibid.

heart-broken, from the commemoration
at Littlemore. It implied more than said,
Farewell. People sobbed audibly. . . .
If our bishops did but know what faithful
hearts, devoted to the service of our Lord
and the Church, they are breaking ! "

During the whole period, 1841-1845,
Newman s long agony has been well de
scribed as a cruel struggle between the
deepest affection and ever-growing con
victions ; but the struggle did not begin
with the conviction in which it ended. It
began, and long continued, with the
conviction that, although in his own
Church of England there was much that
was sadly lacking, over the Church of
Rome brooded the dark shadow of grave
doctrinal errors. His great crux as re
gards (Roman) Catholicism, he tells us
in the Apologia, was what is usually
termed the " Mariolatry " of the Roman
church. Alluding to devotional manifesta
tions in honour of the Virgin Mother, dwelt
upon in the works of St. Alfonso Liguori,
he even wrote (after he had become a
Romanist), " I say frankly, I do not fully
enter into these now. I trust I do not
love her " (the Virgin Mary) " the less
because I do not enter into these." During
the latter part of his musings at Littlemore,
he reconciled himself to what he felt was
wrong in Rome by the celebrated system
of " development," of which, though not
the author,* he certainly became the
popular exponent. In a remarkable pas
sage in the Apologia, he thus sketches
out what was in his mind : " The idea of
the blessed Virgin was, as it were, magnified
in the Church of Rome as time went on,

* Newman quotes St. Vincent cf Lerins, as recog
nising the idea.

364

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1845-

but so were all the Christian ideas, as
that of the blessed Eucharist. The whole
scene of pale, faint apostolic Christianity
is seen in Rome as through a telescope or
magnifier. The harmony of the whole,
however, is of course what it was. It is
unfair, then, to take one Roman idea
that of the blessed Virgin out of what
may be called its context."

Thus was he brought by degrees to the
principle of development in the Christian
church. The last year of his life at Little-
more was principally spent in working out
this idea, which he had been brooding
over, in the form of his " Essay on the
Development of Christian Doctrine."
There is an Oxford tradition of the great
Tractarian which recounts that as Newman
month after month stood at his desk
writing " the Essay," he grew ever thinner
and more transparent, till at last, when he
suddenly dropt his pen and made up his
mind that he must no longer delay his
submission to Rome, on peril of sinning
against the light, you could almost have
seen through him.f It was on a wet
October day in 1845 that Father Dominic,
the Passionist, on Newman s invitation,
shabbily dressed and dripping wet, arrived
at Littlemore. On the day following,
after a whole night spent in prayer, the
Passionist father formally received him
into the Roman Catholic Church.

* The famous " Essay on Development " was
never finished, but even as it stands, Mr. Hutton,
in his " Life of Cardinal Newman," tells us it has
been adopted by the most orthodox school in the
Roman Catholic Church, and it is now usually
regarded by Roman Catholics as one of the most
powerful of modern apologies for their specific
theological doctrines.

t Mr. Hutton : " Life of Cardinal Newman,"
chap ix.

Besides the loved leader, a long, sad list
of distinguished men were lost at that
time, or soon after, to the Church of
England. Among these were Mr. Ward,
Mr. Ambrose St. John, Mr. Oakeley,
Mr. Dalgairns, Mr. F. W. Faber, and
others well-known in Oxford circles, but
whose names now to many would
suggest little after all these years. About
forty or fifty of the clergy went over
with them. The secession was, how
ever, much less numerous than had
been looked for ; out of some twenty
thousand of the clergy, only some fifty,
after all, fell away. It turned out that the
Romanising party among the Tractarian s
were but "a minute fragment." The loss
the English church sustained in the great
catastrophe, consisted rather in the bril
liancy of the acquirements of the perverts
than in their actual numbers.

The Church of Rome, no doubt, gained
enormously, at all events for a time ; for
the new members of her communion
brought to her service great and con
spicuous gifts in learning and eloquence,
and, above all, in the fervid conviction which
naturally accompanied the consciousness
of their great self-sacrifice. They brought,,
as has been truly said, " such writing and
preaching as had never been seen on the
Romish side before, at least in England."
Thanks to these men, more than all others
to Newman, the world of England has
seen the intellectual recovery of Romanism.
Fifty years ago it was here a dying creed ^
lingering in retirement in the halls and
chapels of a few half-forgotten families.
Hopes have since been kindled " that
England herself, the England of Elizabeth
and Cromwell, will kneel for absolution

3845-1846.]

THE SECESSION TO ROME.

365

again before the Father of Christendom." *
But these hopes have never been realised.
After the great catastrophe above related,
there were very few more secessions, and as
years went on, and the able and brilliant men
who had joined the Roman communion
in the secession or 1845 and 1846, passed

The secession of Newman and his friends
was undoubtedly a crushing blow to the
party of the Tractarians, but it was not
ruin, as many supposed it would be. The
great school of thought which the move
ment had created, possessed too many
serious and able men to be crushed even

LITTLEMORE CHURCH.

one by one away, the void they left
behind them in the church they chose to
adopt for their own, has never been filled
up. So far as England is concerned, Rome,
since that momentous epoch, can register
no real increase either in the number f or
in the character of her adherents.

* J. A. Froude: "Short Studies," vol. iv. The
Oxford Counter-Reformation.

t The numbers of persons who have joined the
Church of Rome during the last half-century is
alluded to later, on p. 378.

by so calamitous a series of events as have
been related. Besides a phalanx of less
known adherents, two of the original
triumvirate of leaders remained, unswerv
ing in their loyalty to the Church of
England Pusey and Keble, k with their
equally staunch lieutenants, Charles Mar
riott and Isaac Williams. To these names
should be added in such a roll-call those
of the quiet thoughful scholar William
Palmer, and of that great parish priest

366

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[18451846,

Dr. Hook,* of Leeds, as representative
men of the school. Pusey, however, far
surpassed all the others in weight and
influence. Unmistakably, when Newman
had left them, he became the centre of
the shattered but still powerful party.

Much that Pusey has since said and
written, has been the subject of severe
and hostile criticism. Not a few holy
men in our church, including deeply read
scholars and divines, would decline to
endorse much of his teaching and views.
But the more thoughtful and generous
rejoice in the thought that the great
Anglican communion is wide enough
to include such teachers, recognising
how profound are the mysteries about
which such grave differences have existed
and ever will exist in the church of Christ.
There is so much substantial agreement in
vital matters of the common faith, that
some latitude of opinion in what must be
deemed speculative theology may fairly be
allowed. A spirit of mutual concession, of
loving charity one towards another, has
done much, and will in days to come
probably do more, to bring parties in our
great English church together, thus en
abling her to carry out that high and
gracious mission with which undoubtedly
her adorable Master has entrusted her to
carry out among the mighty English-
speaking peoples.

Pusey, for nearly forty years, from 1845
to 1882, was the acknowledged leader
of the Tractarian party. His high char
acter and profound learning, his untiring
labours in defence of certain parts of the
Old Testament Scriptures, which were
peculiarly the subject of the criticism of
* Afterwards dean of Chichester

the German school of Biblical scholars,,
have won him the respect of many
who gravely differed from some of his
doctrinal conclusions. He may be said to
have outlived the bitter censure which
was once directed against him, and
he died loved and honoured by the
majority of English churchmen. Dearly
as he loved Newman, with a love that
knew no change, no abatement, which
allowed not a word of censure or of
blame to pass his lips, Pusey was never
tempted by that great wandering genius
to falter for one brief moment from his
loyalty to the Church of England. The
English Church, as has been well said, to
Pusey was " as well worth living in and
fighting for as any other ; it was not
only in England that light and dark were
largely intermingled." Pusey s words as
regards the great Roman errors are me
morable, and should be graven on every
English churchman s heart : u There are
very serious things in the Roman com
munion which ought to keep us where we

* Sir William Palmer : " Supplement to the
Narrative," chap. i. Also Liddon : "Life of
Pusey," vol. ii., chap, xxxiv., pp. 505-6. With
great pathos Liddon, who knew Pusey as perhaps
no one else on earth knew him, tells us in a
curiously interesting passage how Pusey en
deavoured to reconcile his own deep *love of
and reverence for Newman with his own (Pusey s)
absolute faith in the Presence of Christ in the
English Church. He (Pusey) entertained the
idea that "Newman was, at any rate for a
time, the subject of a special call or dis
pensation, having for its object the promotion
of some great blessing or improvement in the
Roman Church. He could not even bring him
self to allow that Newman was doing wrong,
though he held it would have been wrong indeed
in himself or in any other member of the English
Church to follow his example." . . . " The-
heart," goes on Liddon to say, "has a logic of
its own."

RESULTS OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT.

367

are. I would instance chiefly this system
as to the Blessed Virgin as the mediatrix
and dispenser of all present blessings to
mankind. I think nothing short of a fresh
revelation could justify this. Then the
sale of masses as applicable to the departed,
the system of indulgences as applied to the
departed, the denial of the cup to the laity.
. . . I feel at once held by the Church
of England, and repelled by these things in
the Roman Church. ... I cannot think
that all this, so different from what one
finds in the early centuries, can be right."
On the Church of England the results
which are traceable to the Oxford move
ment and the work of the Tractarians
have been far-reaching. The catastrophe
of 1845, the secession of Newman and
Ward and their friends, and the intense
and general unpopularity which was the
first outcome of the apparent victories of
the Church of Rome, scarcely stayed its
progress, or at most arrested it for a very
little season. In Oxford itself, the de
sertion of Newman and the other leaders
had more influence than in London and in
the country generally. The effect of its
teaching generally was too deep-seated to
be permanently injured by a shock, even
like that produced by what was popularly
termed " the going out of 45." It had
taught Englishmen * to look upon their
church as a great historic church, possess
ing immemorial descent, unbroken con
tinuance, agreement in doctrine with the
ancient church. It had led Englishmen,
above all, back to the study of the great
fathers of the church of the early Christian
centuries, before the division of the east
and west. Very weighty and remarkable
are the words of the famous Tractarian

leader on this study of the fathers : " I
read them, learn of them, live among
them, as a child ; adopt their words, say
what they say, do not say what they
do not. I live in them as my home.
I have not gone about proving to myself
our identity with them ; I feel it. Theirs
is my native language ; they are familiar
accents. But it does impress upon me
that the English appeal to antiquity is
something real and substantial. I could
preach volumes of St. Chrysostom and St.
Augustine without rebuke ; I do not think a
Roman Catholic could. . . ." He examples
here St. Augustine : "We have translated,
straight through, two thick volumes of
St. Augustine, all his sermons on the
New Testament. There was not a word
to explain ; nothing which one might not,
as far as doctrine was concerned, preach
in our English pulpits."

Gradually a great revival in church life
became perceptible through the length
and breadth of England. Churches were
more reverently cared for, more richly
adorned, within and without. New ones
were built in ever increasing numbers.
The Holy Eucharist was celebrated more
often, and with increased reverence. Ser
vices were multiplied ; efforts were made
to render the services more attractive,
brighter with music and hymn-singing.
This change which gradually passed over
the Anglican communion, was by no
means confined to churches served by
ministers of one party. But while, happily,
the Church of England is at one in all
vital matters of faith ; while on the
authority and inspiration of the Bible, on

* Letter of Dr. Pusey, quoted by Liddon in
his " Life," vol. iii., chap. vi., pp. 142-3.

3 68

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

the great Articles connected with the
Trinity, the Atonement, and the God
head of the Lord Jesus Christ, there is
perfect agreement, there has been during
the second half of the nineteenth century
considerable divergence as to the ritual
and practice of our church.

The dissensions in these matters con
cerning Ritual, which have arisen be
tween the two great parties into which,
with various modifications, the Church
of England has been divided ever
since the Elizabethan settlement, nearly
three centuries and a half ago, have
been a source of real and ever-present
danger to the Anglican communion. Too
often the recriminations brought by one
party against the other have been most
bitter ; love and charity have been for
gotten, even their common Christianity
has been seemingly ignored. Unedifying
spectacles of brother proceeding against
brother, solely for transgressions on points
of Christian ritual, before civil tribunals,
have been sadly frequent : one section
openly charging the other with wilful
disregard of ceremonies and practices, not
merely legal in themselves, but hallowed
by the universal Catholic tradition of
many centuries ; the other retorting by
the grave accusation of a disloyal in
tention to Romanise the church of which
they were members. Here the old feeling
of dislike, mistrust, hatred of Rome and
her ways, engraved in the hearts of Eng
lishmen, comes in, and accounts for much
of the bitterness. The Evangelical not
unfrequently suspects Roman inclinations
and a Roman bias when neither inclination
or bias exist. High Churchmen, on the other
hand, have not unfrequently ruthlessly

disregarded such natural susceptibilities,
and in certain instances have introduced
ceremonies and practices which have given
just offence.

A High Church scholar of profound
learning and experience, one of the original
founders of the Oxford movement,* whose
wise words on certain of the questions which
were presented to the church at the period
of the great revival have been quoted
occasionally in this section of our History,
thus speaks of these errors of his party : u I
remember when, about 1845, Oakeley set
on foot a Ritualistic system at Margaret
chapel, before his secession to Rome ; and
on visiting his church I was astonished at
its ceremonial, which appeared to exceed
that of Romanism itself. Some years later
Ritualism began in the English Church
by the adoption of the vestments by
certain young men ; and we heard of
men adopting other customs from the
Church of Rome, and sometimes in the
face of strong opposition from their con
gregation and of disapprobation from the
bishops. I deeply regretted these move
ments, which seemed to be dictated by
indifference to the unity of the church,
and to be sometimes made as offensive
as possible. ... I myself should have
been glad," he went on to say, u to revive
the vestments, from a wish to restore the
customs of primitive antiquity adopted
in the universal church, and would have
had them made of white linen only, but,
knowing that they were not necessary, I

* Sir William Palmer, the learned author of the
" Origines Liturgicae " and other important works.
The words here quoted were written as late as
1883. See his Supplement to "Narrative of
Events connected with the Oxford Movement,"
chap, iv., 287-291.

370

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1890.

would not run the risk of causing division
by adopting them. In the excited state
of the public mind, I thought their in
troduction a great imprudence.
Lawsuits followed in which one view of
the case was decided by temporal judges,
and then another. . . ." He considered
that the Ritualists should have been
judged not by a committee of lawyers,
but by a committee of churchmen im
partially selected, as was soon afterwards
happily done. On this point probably
the majority of churchmen are agreed :
that the judicial committee of the privy
council, dignified though such a tribunal
certainly is, possessing, too, among its
members lawyers of the highest rank and
of the most varied experience, is not
the court, after all, best fitted to decide
on mainly spiritual questions.

There is no doubt but that the Oxford
movement, and all that this remarkable
revival in church life brought with it in
its train, drew into prominence many
curious and debatable points connected
with ritual. The newly-awakened study
of primitive antiquity, the revived interest
in the powerful mediaeval church, its archi
tecture, its ritual, its love of colour and
decoration, its ornate and often gorgeous
services, with their elaborate and often
touching symbolism all this appealed to
the student, while the immediate outcome
of the movement, the general restoration
of so many churches to a condition of
comparative beauty and in many cases
even of magnificence, suggested generally
a higher and more ornate service and ritual
than had previously been adopted. The
majority of high churchmen were content
to adopt a striking ceremonial, which after

long and careful examination has been con
sidered, on the whole, to be that permitted
by the Prayer-book and sanctioned by a
partial if not by a general use in the
Church of England since the Elizabethan
settlement.* But a few, whose zeal often
outran their discretion, without doubt
introduced ritual and practices into the
services never contemplated by the Eliza
bethan, or later by the Jacobean divines of
the school of Andrewes, or even of Laud.
These were the men so sternly reproved
by high churchmen of the type of the
eminent scholar whose words have been
quoted above.

All these things not questions of para
mount importance, it would seem on first
thoughts have served sorely to distract
and harass the church for many years, by
a succession of irritating and disturbing
contests and law-suits. It would seem,
however, that a time for mutual forbear
ance has come.t This attitude is partly
due to the action of the late archbishop
Benson of Canterbury, who in 1890 took
upon himself to hold a court to try a

* See below, in the " Judgment of the Arch
bishop of Canterbury " in the case of the Bishop
of Lincoln, November, 1890.

f We allow this hopeful anticipation to stand,
notwithstanding that even while these sheets are
passing through the press, discussion is still going
on as to the amount of freedom permissible in
the Church of England as to the adoption ot
occasional services, or unauthorised additions to the
services included in the Book of Common Prayer.
It is premature, of course, to forecast the outcome
of such a discussion : the writer of this History
may, however, be allowed to express his conviction
that in this and in other matters concerning ritual
and practice, very small indeed will be the number
of ordained ministers of the Church of England
who will not eventually submit, in regard to all
such practices, to the judgment of the bishop of
the diocese.

1890.]

THE BISHOP OF LINCOLN S CASE.

37i

most important ritual prosecution, in
which the defendant was the bishop of
Lincoln, a prelate held in the highest
honour and veneration even by men
belonging to a school of thought op
posed in many particulars to that in
which the bishop was a distinguished
leader.

The constitutional and inherent author
ity of the archbishop s court, after full and
learned arguments, was affirmed in a pre
liminary judgment delivered in the May
of 1889. Such a court, composed of the
primate and other bishops of the province
sitting with him as assessors, commended
itself to Anglican churchmen, who had been
naturally pained to see cases connected
with doctrine and ritual tried before civil
tribunals, however august, the validity of
whose judgments in such purely ecclesias
tical matters many of them could not
conscientiously accept. No such objection,
however, existed to a court in which the
judges were the primate of all England
and his suffragan bishops. It will be of
use and advantage here to quote at some
little length the words of the archbishop s
weighty judgment on the important
points of ritual and practice which came
before the tribunal over which he presided.
The questions which came before the court
thus constituted by no means exhausted
the list of disputed points of ritual, but
they included perhaps the most important
of them certainly those which came more
often and more prominently before con
gregations.

The chief of them \vere as follows :
The question of "mixing of water with
the sacramental wine" ; the question of
the " ablution of the vessels " after the

celebration of the holy communion ; the
question of the " eastward position " in the
first part of the communion service ; the
question of " breaking of the bread before
the people " ; the question of the " use 01
lighted candles on the communion table
during the communion service," when
such lighted candles were not wanted foi

Photo: W cilery, Ltd.
ARCHBISHOP BENSON.

the purpose of giving light. The com
plaints of rubrical irregularity brought
against the bishop of Lincoln were, to
quote the phraseology of the tribunal in
question : The lord bishop, when cele
brating the holy communion, allowed two
lighted candles to stand upon (or ap
parently upon) the communion table, such
candles not being wanted for the purpose
of giving light ; added water to the wine
and administered it so mixed ; before the
Consecration Prayer, stood in what is
called the eastward position ; during the

372

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

Consecration Prayer, stood so that certain
41 Manual Acts " could not be seen ; took
part in what is referred to as " the cere
mony of Ablution." Two more " com
plaints " were made the one, allowing a
hymn, " O Lamb of God," to be sung

Christ commends His Mother to St John.

tills Sii remeinbrairce o Me"

(From Isaac Williams " The Altar." London, 1847.)

after the consecration, and the other, that
the bishop made the sign of the cross
at the Absolution and Benediction.

The lighted candles. The history of
the law on this point was most carefully
examined by the court. The result of the
investigation showed that they were legal
when and after the Prayer-book became
law, and so remained. The following

important and interesting facts were, how
ever, ascertained viz. " that throughout
the whole period from Edward VI. until
recently [if we partly except the reign of
Charles I.] their use appears to have been
in the main attached to places or occa
sions of marked dignity, to such
events as public thanksgivings
and coronations of sovereigns, to
. . . chapels of princes, colleges,
cathedral and collegiate churches.
There was, however, no privilegium
entitling such times or places to
fashions or ways otherwise illegal."
Then follow some remarks on the
more dignified and solemn mode
of service which belonged to cathe
drals, etc., having during the last
half century become more diffused,
together with enlarged choral
arrangements, the fittings and furni
ture of churches, etc., and that a
certain increase in the use of the
lights has gone along with these
things.* The summing up then
states : "It would be contrary to
the history and interpretation of
the two lights on the holy table to
connect them with erroneous and
strange teaching as to the nature of
the Sacrament " ; closing, however,
with wise words, which may be well
taken to heart : "It is not likely that
they (the lighted candles) will cease to

* In other words, the court found upon investi
gation that, from the days of Edward VI. down
wards, lighted candles had been used, but their
use was confined to special occasions or to places
of special dignity, such as cathedrals and royal
chapels. In the recent multiplication of stately
services this use never forbidden of lighted
candles had become more common.

i8ga]

THE LINCOLN JUDGMENT.

375

be distasteful to many minds, and when the ritual disputes of the period we have
that is the case, even in a small de- been speaking of, ever been a burning
gree, charity and good sense ought not question. Again, here, a careful and
to be violated. This most im
portant judgment on a point
that has produced much dis
sension concludes, after the
above words of warning, with
the finding of the court " that
the law is not broken by the
mere fact of two lighted candles
when not wanted for the pur
pose of giving light standing on
the Holy Table continuously
through the Service, nothing
having been performed or done
which comes under the defini
tion of a Ceremony, by the pre
sence of two still lights alight
before it begins and until after
it ends."

The mixed chalice. The
point connected with the " ad
ding water to the wine" was
decided, after historical investi
gation, thus : The practice was
a custom existent in the churches
of the east and west, in the east
almost universal ; but that the
ceremonial mixture in the service
was omitted from the Prayer-
book in accordance with the
highest and widest liturgical
precedents. And the court de
cided " that the mixing of the
wine in and as part of the service is
against the law of the church, but it found

CELEBRATION OF HOLY COMMUNION.
(Frontispiece to Wheat ley on Book of Common Prayer, znd Edition^ 1714.)

exhaustive historical inquiry was made.
It was shown clearly and decisively that,

no ground for pronouncing the use of a subsequent to the framing of the rubric

cup mixed beforehand to be an ecclesiastical
offence."

The eastward position had,, throughout

requiring the minister to stand at the
north side or end, a general change in
the position of the holy table had taken

374

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

place. The change naturally threw con
siderable obscurity over the whole subject,
considered historically. The most im
portant by far, however, of the conclusions
arrived at by the court was that the
eastward position, if assumed, was not a
sacrificial position. " A place at the
west side of the holy table has not in
the past been invested with sacrificial
character. Many divines who have taught
what is called the highest doctrine of
sacrifice in connection with the Eucharist
tenable in the Church of England, have
habitually celebrated at the north end,
and many who have used the eastward
postion have done so with no thought that
they were teaching any doctrine by it,
or that any doctrine could be either
deduced from or expressed by the place
they took.* . . . The imputed sacri
ficial aspect of the eastern position is
new and forced, and can take no effect
in rendering that position either desirable
on the one side or illegal on the other."
The court concluded that " a certain liberty
in the application of the term north side
existed a liberty exercised not without
consideration" (owing to the change made
under authority in the position of the
holy table about eighty years after the
first publication of the rubric respecting
the "north side"). "This liberty was
less and less exercised for a long time,
but it does not appear to be lost by that
fact or taken away." The court reiterated
in its finding that this somewhat obscure
subject of the position of the celebrant
was devoid of doctrinal interest.

* Respecting the curious variation in the position
of the sanctuary and altar in the earliest known
churches of Western Christendom, see Excursus H.

Breaking of the bread before the people.
The charge here was that the celebrant
(the bishop of Lincoln) stood whilst read
ing the prayer of consecration with his
face to the east and with his back to the
people, in such wise that the communicants
present could not, when he broke the
bread and took the cup into his hands, see
him perform these manual acts. The
court decided that the order of the Holy
Communion requires that these manual
acts must be performed in such wise as to
be visible to the communicants properly
placed. The following very important
and interesting pronouncement was made
in the judgment of the archbishop here :
" The tenor of the Common Prayer is
openness. The work of its framers was
to bring out and recover the worship of
the Christian congregation, and specially
to replace the Eucharist in its character
as the Communion of the whole Body of
Christ. By the use of the mother tongue,
by the audibleness of every prayer, by the
priest s prayers being made identical with
the prayers of the Congregation, by the
part of the Clerks being taken by the
people, by the removal of the invisible and
inaudible ceremonial, the English Church,
as one of her special works in the history
of the Catholic Church, restored the
ancient share and right of the People in
divine service. Both parties of the church
before the last Revision required that the
prescription of the Manual acts should be
explicit and distinct (Savoy divines), as
a needful circumstance belonging to the
Sacrament (bishop Cosin), and the har
mony of the construction requires that the
People should follow the whole consecra
tion, acts as well as words."

1890.]

THE LINCOLN JUDGMENT.

375

The ceremony of ablution. In the charge
here no objection was taken to the clergy
man s using what he may think the best
way of consuming reverently all that
remains of the consecrated elements, in
order that no part should be carried out 01
church ; and the court decided that if the
minister so pleased, the vessels might be
cleansed of all remnants in a reverent way
after the Service was ended and the Bene
diction given, without ceremony or prayers,
before finally leaving the holy table.*

The other two points with which this
most important judgment was concerned
were of comparatively little moment in the
great ritual controversy which for so many
years has disturbed the church. The first
of these questions merely dealt with the
lawfulness of singing the anthem " O
Lamb of God that takest away the sins 01
the world, have mercy upon us " im
mediately after the reading of the prayer
of consecration. Again the historical evi
dence was most carefully gone into, and
the archbishop s court concluded " that the
singing of it by the choir was not an
illegal addition to the service. Seeing
that there is no evidence whatever to
show that bishop Ridley, or anyone else,
objected to the choir singing this anthem
at this place upon any doctrinal ground,
and seeing also that the Savoy conference
desired the restoration at this very place
of the words in a still stronger form, there

* The following remarks in the " Judgment
here, are noteworthy : " If it were the duty of this
Court to point out where and when, if not at the
Holy Table, the minister would most properly
complete the consumption of the consecrated
elements, in such way as he might think to be
necessary in compliance with the rubrics, the
Court would unhesitatingly say, At the credence
or in the place where they had been prepared."

is no ground left for believing that the
words had then, or have now, any asso
ciation with those Roman doctrines or
practices which the Church of England
repudiates."

The second of these two minor points
dealt with the charge that the celebrant
(the bishop of Lincoln) in the adminis
tration of the Holy Communion, " whilst
pronouncing the absolution, conspicuously
and ceremoniously, having both his hands
elevated, made with his hand the sign of
the Cross, and also that whilst pronouncing
the benediction in the same service, he
made the sign "of the Cross." This
ceremony, in both cases, the archbishop
in his Judgment pronounced to be an
innovation which must be discontinued.

This judgment of the archbishop s court,
pronounced in the November of 1890, was
a memorable one, and will, it is hoped
and expected, have far - reaching con
sequences in an internal dispute which
has long disturbed the Anglican Church,
and which now and again has threatened
seriously to affect its work and influence.
The court was memorable from its com
position, consisting as it did of the primate
of all England, with episcopal assessors
chosen out of his suffragans. It was the
tribunal which for so long churchmen had
been anxiously desiring to see established,
for the settlement of purely ecclesiastical
matters. The judgment in question has
been termed an eirenicon; but inaccurately,
for it was no attempt to mediate between
two opposing schools of thought. The
only attempt in this direction was in the
few remarks which in two or three of its
decisions were appended, pressing home

376

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

the advice of mutual concession and for
bearance, and pointing out how unde
sirable for the peace of the church it
would be to insist on a ceremony or an
observance, which, even if strictly legal,
might be under certain circumstances
utterly inexpedient.* The
value of the judgment to
the Church of England
largely consists in the fear
less and thorough exami
nation of the history of the
disputed points, showing,
as notably in the case of
the " Eastward Position,"
round which for so long
an acrimonious contest
has been kept up, that the
question was devoid of
doctrinal significance.

The Church of Rome,
it has been seen, was
mixed up with some of
the questions connected
with the Oxford move
ment, and, unhappily,
certain of the prominent
figures connected with

PISCINA * IN COBHAM CHURCH.
(From the engraving by J. Le Keux.}

* In the concluding sentences of the whole
judgment the following wise and weighty counsel
is given by the court : " The Apostolic judgment
as to other matters of ritual has a proper reference
to these namely, that those things which may
necessarily be ruled lawful do not for that reason
become expedient. Public worship is one of the
divine institutions which are the heritage of the
church for the fraternal union of mankind. The
church therefore has a right to ask that her con
gregations may not be divided either by needless
pursuance or by exaggerated suspicion of practices
not in themselves illegal. Either spirit is a painful
contrast to the deep and wide desire which pre
vails for mutual understanding."

that great revival were attracted, by
circumstances upon which we have al
ready dwelt, into its communion. It will
be well to add a few lines descriptive of
the present position of the Roman Catholic
body in England at the close of the nine
teenth century. We have
already seen that, during
the earlier years of Eliza
beth s reign, the attitude
of Rome towards the
Anglican church was an
uncertain one. It was
what may be termed a
waiting attitude, hopes
being entertained for
some time of a return,
or at least of a partial
return, to the Roman
obedience. These hopes,
as the reign advanced,
gradually faded away, and
the council of Trent came
to the unanimous decision
that attendance on the
part of Roman Catholics
at the prayers or sermons
of the English Church
was sinful. A further
step was taken in 1570, when the papal
bull was published actually excommuni
cating and deposing Elizabeth. From
this date onwards the historian has to
chronicle a long series of plots and con
spiracies against the English government
of the day, in which English Roman
Catholics were more or less inextricably
mixed up. We have already dwelt on
some of these, notably on the plots con-

* The piscina is a stone basin used to receive
the water which has purified the chalice.

ATTITUDE OF THE PAPACY IN ENGLAND.

PISCINA IN ST. CKOSS,

WINCHESTER.
(From the drawing by J. Le Keux.)

nected with
the hopes and
claims of
Mary, queen
of Scots, and,
later, with the
machinations
of Philip II.
of Spain.
In the next
reign the Ro
man Catho
lics were
again mixed
up in the
Gunpowder
Plot, and the revolution of 1688 was
mainly owing to the ill-advised schemes of
James II. to restore the Roman Catholics
to positions of place and power
in the church and state. ,-:-.:;

So long as Rome preserved
this attitude of hostility, so long
any measures of toleration or of
Roman Catholic emancipation
were simply impossible. At
last, however, the policy of
Rome, formally inaugurated at
the council of Trent, and carried
into terrible effect by the bull
which excommunicated Eliza
beth in 1570, was reversed ; and
a loyal declaration was made
on the part of the Roman
Catholic peers and commoners
of Great Britain. Such a loyal
declaration had been in former
years, notably in 1648 and in 1661,
formally condemned at Rome as heret
ical, and inconsistent with the claim of
the Popes to temporal power. The

377

declaration of loyalty was followed by
the English Relief Act of 1778; but
it was not until 1829 that the Emanci
pation Act was passed. Other legislation
on similar lines has since followed, and at the
close of the nineteenth century the Roman
Catholic body in England could complain
of few, if indeed of any, civil disabilities.

The body of English Roman Catholics
was governed until lately by four vicars-
apostolic. In 1840 the four were in
creased to eight ; and in 1850 Pius IX.
created for England a new Roman Catholic
hierarchy, consisting of an archbishop
metropolitan of Westminster, and twelve
suffragan bishops for England and Wales.
This act of Rome excited considerable
attention and some popular indignation,
and an Ecclesiastical Titles Bill was passed

PISCINA IN SOUTH AISLE OF CHOIR, ST. ALBAN S ABBEY.
(Front the drawing by J. Le Ke.r.)

which forbade the assumption of any title
by Roman Catholic bishops, taken from
any place in the United Kingdom. This
Act of Parliament, however, was practically

378

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

ignored, and in 1871 was repealed. The
truth was, Rome and Roman claims had
ceased to be feared in England. The
feeling that general toleration, which is
so marked a sentiment in modern English
life, should be extended to Roman Catholics,
was accentuated by the conviction among
most serious churchmen that Rome was
no longer a real danger either to church
or the state. The loyalty of the English
Romanists to the crown is above suspicion.
In their attitude towards the Church of
England, they cultivate naturally a per
sistent hostility ; but the Anglican church
can well afford to look upon their efforts
with equanimity, since, although a con
siderable network of Romish agencies is
at work, no real progress is being made
in what Rome is pleased to term the
conversion of England.* " It succeeds
in making (a few) converts among the

* The following are the totals of the collections
in London on Hospital Sunday for twenty-five
years of the different religious bodies, reckoned
from the denomination of the places of worship
where the collections were made :

Church of England

Congregationalists

Jews

Baptists

Wesleyans ...
Presbyterians
Roman Catholics ...

Unitarians

Society of Friends

627,447
46,767
25.512
24,897
24,115

20,435

12,615

6,044

3.44 6

Without, of course, making too much of any
figures, for various considerations have probably
to be taken into account, such a table of statistics
as this gives some index as to the position and
weight of the Roman Catholic community in the
great metropolis in the last quarter of the nine
teenth century, the metropolis containing roughly
a population one million in excess of the population
of England in the days of Elizabeth. The cause,
too, for which these sums were received was one
which would equally evoke the sympathies of all
religious denominations.

aristocracy and upper classes, though their
number is small in proportion to the
whole, and is falling off. . . . The
Church of Rome has considerably, it is
true, increased in England during the past
half century. Its English adherents, in
deed, are so few that, if they stood alone,
Romanism would be the smallest sect in
the kingdom. But it has received an
accession of a million and upwards of
Irish immigrants, brought over by the
manufacturers. This immigration, how
ever, is incapable of producing any effect
upon the religion of the country." *

Considering the events sketched out
above, the decision come to at Trent,
and the subsequent excommunication and
formal deposition of Elizabeth in 15 70 by
Pope Pius V. (the Dominican Michele
Ghislieri), the present position of the
Roman Catholic body in England is a posi
tion undoubtedly of schism, thoroughly un-
English. Their position in England after
1570 was that, to use the contemporary
term, of " Recusants. "f Their priests were
foreign-bred, trained at such seminaries
as Douai, or else largely educated in
foreign Jesuit colleges. They have been
with justice termed u an alien body; their
methods and their ways, like their liturgical
and devotional books, have been for the
most part foreign. They failed to main
tain a succession, and made no claim to
formal continuity. . . . The modern
Romanist English leaders have done what
they can to repudiate such historical

* Sir William Palmer: Supplement to "Narra
tive," chap. iv. (1883).

f " Recusants." The term recusancy may be
denned as "refusing to acknowledge the supre
macy of a sovereign or obstinately declining to
conform to the established rites of a church."

i8 9 6.]

THE BULL "APOSTOLIC^

379

position as they have ; they even glory
in being a new mission recently or
ganised from Rome ; they boast in being
not descended lineally from the pre-
Reformation Church of England." *

In the last years of the nineteenth cen
tury Pope Leo XIII. published a Bull
"Apostolicae Curae " (1896), which has
aroused considerable interest, declaring
that Anglican orders were invalid. This, of
course, as all acquainted with the past are
well aware, was no new assertion on the
part of Rome. The interest in the pro
nouncement of Leo XIII. lies (i) in the
somewhat novel reasons given for this
declaration of the Pope, and in the com
plete ignoring in the Bull of the old and
exploded fable so long a favourite and
popular controversial piece with Roman
teachers of the supposed consecration of
archbishop Parker and other nominees for
several bishoprics at the "Nag s Head"
Tavern in Cheapside by Scory, described
in the Romish fable as having intruded
himself without consecration into the
episcopate ; and (2) because the arrogant
contention in the Bull of the invalidity of
Anglican orders, has evoked from learned
Anglican divines an elaborate and complete
refutation of the arguments advanced in
this, the latest manifesto of the Roman
see on this subject.

The public interest in the question
being considerable, we may give just a
sketch of these objections, and the An
glican replies to them. The Pope in
this Bull " Apostolicse Curae," dated 1896,
gives his reasons for deeming Anglican

* See generally Mr. Frere s "Treatise," pub
lished for the Church Historical Society by the
S.P.C.K.. No. v. (1896).

orders invalid. They mainly turn on two
points. Leo XIII. affirms that in the
Edwardine ordinal there is a defect of form
(which would be a grave question were it
the fact), and also that there is in the
English Church, or was in the sixteenth
century, a defect of that intention which is
necessary if holy orders are to be validly
transmitted.

In the learned Anglican treatises which
have been lately published on this sub
ject, it has been clearly shown that the
Edwardine ordinal, which is now used in
the service of the Church of England,
instead of showing a " defect of form," is
closer than the present Roman use to the
more primitive formulae and custom of
the Catholic Church. Nothing is indeed
wanting in the Anglican ordinal. The
oldest form seems to have been simply a
prayer, as in Acts vi. 6, and then came
laying on of hands. The Roman use of
giving to the ordinand the chalice, with
wine and water, and the paten with a
host, accompanied by the words " Receive
authority to offer sacrifice to God. and to
celebrate masses as well for the quick as
the dead, in the name of the Lord," was
absolutely unknown for the first thousand
years, and was purely Roman.* In the
Leonine sacramentary, and indeed in the
Roman sacramentaries generally, anterior
to the tenth century, there was no giving
(porrection) of the instruments, and in these

* See, among other treatises, the XVI. Tract pub
lished under the auspices of the Church Historical
Society by the S.P.C.K. (1897), by F. W. Fallen,
the VI. Tract of F. E. Brightman, and the V. by
the bishop of Bristol. In these treatises this sub
ject is discussed at great length and most exhaust
ively, and the references to the older " uses " and
quotations from the words of the schoolmen and
other mediaeval theologians will be found.

i8g6.]

THE POPE AND ANGLICAN ORDERS.

ancient sacramentaries in their unadul
terated form there was no allusion to the
power of offering the Eucharistic sacrifice.
41 Nearly all the schoolmen," wrote the
deeply learned oratorian, Jean Morin
(1591-1659), "who dispute concerning the
matter and form of the episcopate, place
its form in these words * Accipe spiritum
sanctum (Receive ye the Holy Ghost),
which the consecrator and the assistant
bishops pronounce together while they
touch the head of the ordinand. 1 1

Thus the first allegation of Pope Leo XIII.
respecting the supposed " defect of form "
in the Anglican ordinal, is fully answered.
The second the defect of intention dwelt
upon by Pope Leo in his Bull is a much
vaguer charge, but it has been also ex
haustively refuted in the learned tracts
above referred to. a In order to prove this
defect of intention, Pope Leo XIII. lays
emphasis on the fact that in the Edwardine
ordinal (the present Anglican use) no
mention is made of the sacrifice . . .
of the power of consecrating and offering
sacrifice. . . . Now what the English
Church did was simply to revert to an

* The following are the words used in the
Anglican ordinal for the consecration of bishops :
Then the archbishop and bishops present shall lay
.their hands upon the head of the elected bishop
kneeling before them, the archbishop saying : " Re
ceive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a
bishop in the Church of God now committed unto
thee by the imposition of our hands," etc. In the
Anglican use for the "ordering of priests" the
words are (the bishop with the priests present shall
lay their hands severally upon the head of every
one that receiveth the order of priesthood): "Re
ceive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a
priest in the Church of God now committed unto
thee by the imposition of our hands," etc.

f " De Sacris Ordinationibus," pars, iii., exerc.
ii., cap. ii., sec. i. (ed. 1695), quoted by F. W.
Pullen in- Tract XVI. (S.P.C.K., 1897).

earlier type of ordination service. She
went back in several respects from the
mediaeval type to the primitive Roman
type (as is found, for instance, in the
Leonine sacramentary). In this early
service there is no allusion anywhere to
the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice." *

To what is popularly known as "prac
tical " work in the church, a vast impetus
has been given during the last forty or
fifty years of the nineteenth century.
The day school, the Sunday school, the
classes of preparation for confirmation,
communicants classes, mothers meetings,
religious guilds composed of both sexes,
and last, but not least, foreign missions
all felt more or less the vivifying
breath of the new religious spirit which
was brooding over the Church of England.
Other and powerful influences,! besides
that exercised by the Oxford movement,
were at work, and have largely contributed
to these results. The Low Church school
of practical philanthropy, of which lord
Shaftesbury was for long years the
honoured leader, and, somewhat later tne
great school of Cambridge expositors of
the New Testament Scriptures, must by

* Compare Tract XVI. (S.P.C.K., 1897), where
this is discussed very fully, and see especially pages
44, 45, 49, 50, 51, where the opinions of Cranmer,
Jewel (bishop of Salisbury), Bilson (bishop of Win
chester), Andre wes (bishop of Winchester), Field,
dean of Gloucester (representative Anglican divines
of the reigns of Henry VIII., Elizabeth, and
James I.), on the subject of the faith of the
Church of England in the Eucharistic sacrifice, are
quoted at some length.

f So H. O. Wakeman : " Introduction to History
of the Church of England " (who comes to the
same conclusion as to the several influences
ai work, though he lays especial stress on
Tractarianism).

382

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

no means be ignored in any general
summary of the various factors which
contributed to the church revival of the
second half of the nineteenth century.
But, when all due allowances have been
made for strongly-flowing contributory
streams of influence, the fair critic must
confess that a large share in the remark
able awakening of all church life during
the long and singularly prosperous and
peaceful reign of queen Victoria, belongs
to the Tractarian or Oxford movement,
the rise and progress of which we have
been recounting.

Among the novel agencies discovered
and developed in this great revival
of church life, the more universal em
ployment of women in religious and
philanthropic work in the Church of
England must not be forgotten. It is one
of the strangest and saddest omissions in
the Reformation work : the almost complete
ignoring of this mighty agency in all
religious effort in behalf of the poor so
often ignorant, sick, and destitute. The
rude and arbitrary sweeping away of the
nunneries and the sisterhoods, one of the
darkest and saddest episodes of the years
of stress and storm, 1530-40, destroyed
at one blow all that vast machinery of
female devotion and heroic self-sacrifice
which for ages had existed, which had
received its due recognition not only in
the mediaeval but also in the primitive
church, and which in the Roman Catholic
communion on the Continent was still
effectively carrying on the work of mercy
and Christ-like love. The popularising
so to speak of so many of the writings of
the Fathers of the early Christian centuries,

one of the noblest of the works of the
Tractarians, brought into light the widely-
extended character of women s work in
the church, in those far-back days. This
was to many of the readers almost a new
revelation, and gave a wonderful impulse
to the revival of female energy in works of
mercy and love, so marked a characteristic
of the renewed church life during the last
fifty years.

The Anglican sisterhoods, revived in a
very humble way by Dr. Pusey as early
as 1845, and which have since received a
great development, have without doubt
exercised a powerful if an indirect influence
upon women s Christian work generally.
The first foundation in Park Village-
West, Regent s Park, was " the beginning
of a series of experiments which re
sulted in many sisterhoods." The key
note of these female institutions was not
religious contemplation, but active work
among the poor and the sick at their
own homes, in hospitals, in workhouses, in
prisons. It included the teaching of des
titute and neglected little ones. In the
earliest rules of these communities five
hours daily were set aside, to be spent in
these active works of mercy.* The im
pulse, which was thus given to women s
work among the poor, the suffering, and
the ignorant, was felt in many centres
where the teaching of the Tractarians
never reached, and where it was even
viewed with suspicion if not with positive
dislike. But it is only just to ascribe to
the work of Pusey and his friends a large
share in the awakening of the spirit which
has since inspired the noble female church
w r ork, one of the great features of the
* Dr. Liddon : " Life of Pusey," vol. iii., chap. i.

1845-1898.]

ANGLICAN SISTERHOODS.

383

second half of the nineteenth century,
and which has developed into the great
army of nurses and teachers, women of
various classes and orders, belonging to
different schools of religious thought,
engaged in ever-increasing numbers in
hospitals and workhouses, in rescue work,
charity organisation work, and such-like
societies. With great justice it has been
remarked,* "that whatever may be said
of its priestcraft, the Oxford movement
has rilled the land with church-crafts of
all kinds."

To sum up in a few words, the great
Oxford revival has by degrees largely
assisted to transform the Anglican
churches the ministers of its com
munion, its services, its ritual, its art,
especially its architecture ; and a curious
outward uniformity in ritual is now per
ceptible in the large majority of parishes,

* ByMozley.

-in country districts as well as in cities.
Still, it would be a grave mistake to suppose
that the doctrinal teaching of Pusey and
the great Tractarians of his school, on
certain long disputed points, has by
any means been accepted even by high
Anglicans in its entirety. That English
churchmen have become more and more
" High Churchmen " is indubitable. But
even in the case of the majority of pro
nounced high churchmen, in the nobler
and truer sense of the appellation, the
teaching has been that of the school of
Harold Browne, bishop of Ely and then
of Winchester, rather than that of the
more advanced teachers of the Tractarian
school.*

* As examples of this teaching may be instanced
Dr. Hook, in " Lives of the Archbishops,"
vol. vii. chap, in., pp. 152 and 153, and Bishop
Harold Browne : " Exposition of the Thirty-nine
Articles" (gth Edition), Article xxviii., section i.,
pp. 708-9, and Article xxix., section i., pp. 726-7
and 730.

CHAPTER LXXVL

EVANGELICALISM IN THE LATTER PART OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. THE
SO-CALLED u BROAD CHURCH " SCHOOL.

Outward Uniformity in Church Ritual The Puritan Party still Existent Reasons for its Less
Prominent Position Opposition to Church Progress and Development The Church Association
and its Legal Prosecutions Effects of these Mistakes Evidences of Evangelical Influence The
Church Pastoral Aid Society Church Missionary Society English Protestant Feeling William
Wilberforce Lord Shaftesbury Some Account of his Factory Legislation The Ten Hours
Bill The "Good Earl s" Practical Beneficence The Ragged School Union His Views on
Religious Education Death and Funeral Influence on the Popularity of Evangelicalism
Undenominational Enterprises The Mildmay Conference Keswick and other " Conventions "-
The Islington Clerical Meetings Present Development and Influence of the Evangelical Party
The so-called Broad Church School Dr. Thomas Arnold Frederick Denison Maurice
Charles Kingsley Dean Stanley Their Work in Liberalising the Church.

WHILE on the one hand it is in
disputably true, as we have
already remarked, that as a re
sult of the Oxford movement English
churchmen have become more and more
High Churchmen, and that a remarkable
uniformity in ritual is noticeable in the vast
majority of Anglican churches, in rural
districts as in towns, on the other hand it
is equally true that in a large number of
instances this general uniformity in ritual
has not affected the teaching or touched
the doctrinal belief. Outwardly, the casual
observer might be tempted at times to
conclude that Evangelicalism had well-
nigh disappeared from the Anglican com
munion. But the historian, whose pro
vince it is to look beneath the surface of
things, would be strangely at fault if he
did not recognise that beneath the seeming
general Anglican uniformity still existed,
as sharply defined as ever, the old and
striking differences which have for so long
been the characteristic features of the two

great parties which make up the Church
of England. While wishing to bear
the fullest and most ample testimony
to the far-reaching influence of the
Oxford movement ; while granting that
many of its lessons have permeated
the whole Anglican Church, and largely
coloured its ritual and practice ; while
acknowledging to the full the deep debt
of gratitude which the Church of England
owes to that great revival, which has
stirred up such enthusiasm for all that
was venerable and precious in the
past, has deepened the reverence for
the Sacraments, and emphasised the
notion of the corporate aspect of Christian
life, and has shown with a scholarly
precision the unbroken continuity of the
Church of England with the Church of
the earlier times ; we would desire at
the same time to remind the thought
ful student of the Church s story of a
truth which some writers among us would
seem curiously to ignore that the great

BREADTH OF THE ANGLICAN CHURCH.

385

sister-school of thought is still a living,
even a growing power in the Anglican
communion.

And it is better so. The Church of

numbers of the Anglican communion; how,
while the great fundamental doctrines of
Christianity are equally precious to all,
certain groups are specially affected by

Photo: S.A. Walker, Regent St., W.
DR. WILBERFORCE, BISHOP OF WINCHESTER.

England would sadly lose in vigour and in
power, in its influence over the souls of
men and women, if a dull uniformity in
teaching universally prevailed. It must
be remembered how diverse are the minds
of the great multitude who make up the

one presentment of religious truth, certain
groups by another. What touches the
hearts of some, fails to make any grave
impression upon the hearts of others. The
existence of the two great schools, as many
now see, serves to quicken the spiritual

386

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

life of the whole church. Each is tempted,
too often, to exaggerate its own peculiar
and favourite views ; it is good that these
possible exaggerations of one school should
be somewhat neutralised by the teaching
of the other. The high churchman, in
his beautiful reverence for antiquity and
his touching belief in the efficacy of the
blessed sacraments, is tempted at times to
ignore, if not to forget, the action of the
Holy Spirit sometimes working in men in
dependent of all sacraments ; and even to
prefer perhaps unconsciously the autho
rity of tradition in the church to the plain
words of the Bible. On the other hand, the
low churchman, in his conviction of the
ever-presence. of the Holy Spirit, in his
passionate attachment to the inspired
Word of God, is too apt to neglect, if
not to ignore, the priceless treasure of
tradition ; to undervalue if not to forget
the glorious heritage of the unbroken
continuity of his church ; even at times
to think too little of the blessed sacra
ments, those divinely appointed channels
of grace. The teaching of one school
serves to correct the omissions of the
other, and to recall to earnest serious
men aspects of truth they might other
wise lose sight of.

But beneath these seeming differences,
common to the two great Anglican
parties there exists, deep-seated, a strong
determination to hold fast to the great
fundamental principles of " the faith once
delivered to the saints"; the essentials of
the Christian religion are held by both
parties with an equal fervour of belief.
Very strikingly was this " oneness of
faith " expressed in what then appeared
to be a moment of common danger by

the two great party leaders in 1864 lord
Shaftesbury and Dr. Pusey. Dr. Pusey
wrote to the Record newspaper, call
ing upon all Christians to forego minor
differences, in mutual resistance to the
great doctrinal errors of the day.* Re
ferring to this letter, lord Shaftesbury
wrote to Dr. Pusey as follows : " You and
I are fellow collegians and old friends, f
Time, space, and divergent opinions have
separated us for years, but circumstances
have arisen which must, if we desire com
bined action in the cause of one common
Master, set at nought time, space, and
divergent opinions. We will fight about
these another day ; in this we must con
tend earnestly for the faith once delivered
to the saints ; and it must be done
together. . . . We have to struggle,,
not for Apostolical succession or Baptismal
Regeneration, but for the very Atonement
itself, for the sole hope of fallen man, the
vicarious sacrifice of the Cross. For God s
sake let all who love our Blessed Lord
and His perfect Word be of one heart, one
mind, one action on this great issue, and
show that, despite our wanderings, our
doubts, our contentions, we yet may be
one in Him. What say you ? "

To this Dr. Pusey replied : " I thank you
for your letter and for the renewal of old
friendship. I always sought to live in
friendly relations with those who love our
dear Lord and adore His redeeming mercy.
Those few lines in the Record express
what has for these thirty years been the
deep longing of my soul, that we should

* The occasion was, when the case against the
once celebrated volume of " Essays and Reviews"
broke down before the Judicial Committee of the
Privy Council.

t Pusey and Shaftesbury were cousins.

THE EVANGELICALS AND CHURCH DEVELOPMENT.

387

understand one another and strive to
gether against the common enemy of souls.
. . . I have ever loved the Evangelical
party (even while they blamed me) because
I believed that they loved our Redeeming
Lord with their whole hearts. So now I
am one heart and one mind with those
who will contend for one common faith
against this tide of unbelief."

Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford (later of
Winchester), another well-known High
Church leader, wrote at the same time in
similar terms to lord Shaftesbury : "It is
my earnest desire that the terrible wound
of this judgment (in the case of " Essays
and Reviews ") should become the means
of healing the wound which the separation
of high and low church inflicts upon us,
by bringing together all who believe
simply in the Bible and in the plain
language of our Creeds. "*

For many years the Evangelical party
in the Church of England have occupied
a less prominent position in the eyes of
the public than their numbers (for while
decidedly in the minority, they form a very
large minority) and their earnestness would
seem fairly to claim for them. How is this
to be accounted for ? The reasons seem to
require a few words of explanation.

For some fifty years the Evangelical
body has undoubtedly suffered by its long
and somewhat stubborn resistance to eccle
siastical developments. Every kind of
Church organisation such as, for instance,
the revival of Convocation, Diocesan

* See " Life of the Earl of Shaftesbury," by
Edwin Hodder, chap, xxvii., where these letters
are given at length. The date of this correspond
ence is February, 1864.

Conferences, the Church Congress, and to-
some extent, the Lambeth Conference,,
and, in certain instances, Church develop
ment in the Colonies * has been steadily
opposed by the leaders of the Evangelical
party and by its public organs. To take
a well-known example, while bishop Wil
berforce (of Oxford) and his friends were
endeavouring by every means in their
power to restore freedom of discussion to-
the long-silenced assembly of the church
in Convocation, lord Shaftesbury, the
trusted Evangelical leader, and the Record
the recognised organ of the party were
denouncing his proposals in the most vehe
ment language. Indeed, the school as a
whole looked upon the movement for re
storing to the Church a powerful voice
in the regulation of her own affairs as an
attempt to limit the power of the State r
as an effort to infringe the Royal supre
macy^ as the manifestation of an evident
desire to subject the laity to priestly

* That this is not the spirit which lives in the
Evangelical party at the beginning of the twen
tieth century is emphatically shown by the action
of the Church Missionary Society, which entirely
supports fifteen Anglican bishops abroad, and
contributes to the maintenance of four others,

f The Evangelical leaders always strongly up
held the Royal supremacy. But they were not
open to the charge brought against them by both
Tractarians and Dissenters, of looking to the Queen
as " Head of the Church." " She is supreme," said
Hugh Stowell, at the anniversary of the Church
Pastoral Aid Society in 1851, " over all causes eccle
siastical ; but she is not the Head of the Church.
That title was arrogated by Henry VIII., who was
neither more nor less than a Pope himself.
But Queen Elizabeth refused the title. It be
longs, she said, to no mortal to none but Christ
Himself. My friends," went on Hugh Stowell to
sav, " we could never give our Queen, much as we
love and revere her, the title of Head of the
Church. The Lord Jesus Christ alone is our
Head. See Missionary Register, 1851, p. 372.

388

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

domination. On one memorable occasion,
at a great public meeting, lord Shaftesbury
even went so far as to say that Convocation
meant priestly despotism.

It is clear that the old strong Church
and State feeling which coloured the whole
Church of England during the first half of
the nineteenth century, survived chiefly in
what is called the Low Church party.
Their regrettable opposition to church
development, which has been since uni
versally recognised as an absolute necessity,
was owing, in the first instance, to undue
backwardness in perceiving the signs of
the times. It has been, no doubt, a great
cause of weakness among the Evangelicals,
this prolonged and obstinate refusal to
throw themselves heartily into church
movements. Things have gradually
changed, and the party now unreservedly
accept what they once so strongly disliked
and tried to hinder. It is a pity, however,
that they did not do so long before. They
sorely injured their position by their ill-
judged opposition to the church s fair
agitation for the recovery of ancient privi
leges, as well as by their hostility to certain
necessary ecclesiastical developments at
home and in the Colonies; and it will be
long before they recover the influence and
position they justly claim, but which in a
measure they forfeited by a policy, which
they in time came sadly to recognise as a
mistaken one.

Another cause of the loss of influence of
the Evangelical party must be briefly touched
upon. We have already dwelt upon the
disputes which have somewhat disturbed
the church during the last fifty years of
the century in the matter of Ritual observ
ances. The Evangelical party for a long

time strenuously resisted all advance in the
church in the direction of a more ornate
and elaborate ritual. Here, again, their
action was not endorsed by the evident
wishes of a large number of English
churchmen. Still, it was perfectly
legitimate, and in accordance with the
views of many, to endeavour to preserve
a plainer and more simple ritual and prac
tice than what was being gradually adopted
in a vast number of churches, generally
with the approbation of the congregations.
This striking difference of opinion was,
indeed, no new feature among Anglican
churchmen. We have, in the course of
our history, often had to chronicle such
divergences of opinion. As early as in
the times of Elizabeth, archbishop Grindal
and his school gravely differed on that
point from his predecessor, archbishop
Parker, and from his successor in the
primacy, archbishop Whitgift. A little latei
we find that archbishop Laud was again in
opposition to several of his suffragans.

Some of those we have alluded to
above (we are speaking of Evangelical
churchmen of the last forty years of the
nineteenth century) who disliked ritual
developments formed a :-ociety, known
as the Church Association, which made
the grave mistake of attacking what they
conceived to be malpractices through
individuals, by carrying the matters in
dispute before the law courts : a process
which resulted in the imprisonment
technically, for u contempt of court"
of certain clergymen who declined to
obey the ruling of the courts on the
questions submitted to their decision.
These prosecutions and the consequences
greatly shocked a vast number of persons

THE CHURCH ASSOCIATION.

389

who had no special sympathy with the
peculiar views of the prosecuted persons.*
There can be no sort of doubt that the
impression produced in the minds of

of course, was shared by the Evangelical
body in general.

Nothing, in fact, has during recent years
so much harmed the Evangelical cause in

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE.
{From the painting by George Richmond, R.A.)

average people to whom the importance
of the controversy per se did not appeal
was that prosecution was persecution
which in effect it almost invariably is.
Hence the Association itself incurred no
little odium, much of which, as a matter

* Among these were notably Maurice, Kingsley,
and Stanley, and their disciples.

England as these unhappy and mistaken
prosecutions ; and it is to be deplored that
the low church leaders did not more openly
dissociate themselves from methods which
are unquestionably, and rightly, at variance
with the best instincts of all serious English
men, who feel that legal prosecutions are
not the way to advance spiritual truth.

390

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

But when we have admitted to the full
the grave mistakes of the Evangelicals,
and the inevitable consequences of their
mistakes, pains must be taken to counteract
a common error, into which many historians
and writers in late years have fallen
viz. that the Evangelical cause is a failing
cause. The contrary is, in fact, the case.
The hold which the party have on
the people is a strong one, and not only
shows no sign of diminishing, but indeed
the opposite. For instance, the total
population of parishes aided by the Pastoral
Aid Society is, at least, between five and
six millions. That is to say, that the
teaching in these parishes is absolutely
Evangelical in character, that being a
necessary condition of the aid being granted ;
and this vast population, it must be re
membered, belongs exclusively to large
poor districts, since comparatively well-
to-do parishes scarcely, if ever, ask for
assistance from a society whose funds are,
after all, but limited, and whose opera
tions are necessarily confined to large and
more or less poor centres of population.*
This considerable number of five to
six millions, then, is only a very small
part of the population of England under
the influence of the teachers of the
school of thought of which we are now
speaking.

The splendid and ever-growing enthu
siasm evoked by the Church Missionary
Society which is mainly, though not
entirely, supported by the Evangelicals in
the Church of England may also fairly be
quoted as a striking instance of the hold on

* The income of the Church Pastoral Aid Society
is, roughly, about ^50,000 per annum, mainly
derived from voluntary yearly offerings.

the affections of the people to which we have
alluded. The Church Missionary Society,
with the wide extent of its operations, with
its elaborate and admirable organisation,
with its noble income an income, be it
remembered, largely made up of the offer
ings of the masses ranks as the first anS
most influential of the various Christian
missionary companies formed for the
evangelisation of the heathen. Such
examples, among many, are simply quoted
in this place as instances of the affection
of at least a very considerable section
of the English people for this school of
thought.

That affection is largely fostered by the
hereditary dread and dislike we might
almost use the term hatred of the people
to Rome, and to anything which in either
doctrine or practice seems to lean in
the direction of favouring Romish* views.
The Low Church school is popularly
regarded as providing the great bulwark
against the introduction of the dreaded
teaching.

Again, during the century, two great
Evangelical leaders have arisen, who, in
the eyes of the people of England, in
disputably have filled the foremost places
as the champions of the oppressed and
the down-trodden : William Wilberforce
(1759-1831), and the great and good Earl
of Shaftesbury (1801-1885). These two
eminent philanthropists, who as persistent
and successful toilers for suffering humanity

* It is, however, a fact which ought to be
pressed home, as perhaps it is not generally
recognised by the people that the great majority
of High Church responsible leaders and teachers
are as much opposed to Romish errors and papal
pretensions as are the Evangelical leaders and
teachers.

18011885.]

LORD SHAFTESBURY.

391

literally tower above all their contem
poraries, are with justice looked upon
as the representatives of the Evangelical
party. The story of the first of them,
William Wilberforce, has been already
narrated at some length, and his inde
fatigable labours in Parliament and out of
Parliament for the slaves whose treatment
was the darkest blot upon Christianity, for
the poor, and for education, have been
already narrated. Wilberforce was the
pupil of the great Evangelical teachers of
the eighteenth century, and the friend and
ler.der of the chief supporters of the same
school during the earlier years of the
nineteenth. He was the centre and the
guiding genius of that famous Evangelical
group known as the " Clapham Sect."

Lord Shaftesbury, the second of the two
well-loved Evangelical leaders, has been,
in the England of the second half of the
nineteenth century, a yet more command
ing personality. His successful efforts on
behalf of the poor and oppressed have
been more exclusively confined to u home"
abuses. Much of our first great philan
thropist s time was devoted to the cause
of the slaves in the Colonial possessions
of Great Britain ; while the work of the
second has been exclusively devoted to
the amelioration of the lot of the suffer
ing poor in England. If it were possible,
too, Lord Shaftesbury was even more than
Wilberforce a representative Evangelical.
His own words may be quoted as a just
expression of his position in the religious
life of the Church of England. "I am
essentially," he said 011 one occasion, " an
Evangelical of the Evangelicals, from deep-
rooted conviction. I have worked with
them constantly, and I am satisfied that

most of the great philanthropic move
ments of the century have sprung from
them. I stand fast by the teachings
held by that party." These remarkable
words, spoken far on in the life of this
noble toiler for God (as late as 1884), not
only emphatically declare his own re
ligious position, but express his conviction
that to the party to which he was
referring, was owing the majority of
unselfish, helpful, charitable developments
during late years. He bore this emphatic
testimony to the school of religious
opinion which had ever stood by him
in all his "works and days," helping him
earnestly and loyally to devise and carry
out those great public measures and bene
ficent projects with which the historic
name of Shaftesbury will be for ever
linked.

Deep rooted also in the hearts of the
people, is the old love of Protestantism ;
at times, we confess, a somewhat un
reasoning love, but it must be allowed that,
after all, it rests on lessons painfully learnt
in the past. This old love for Protestantism
has been wonderfully strengthened in the
past hundred years by the part played
by those two great Evangelicals of whom
we have been speaking. The people have
seen, and they will not soon forget, that
from the counsels of the Evangelical chiefs
have sprungagain, to use Shaftesbury s
words " the great philanthropic move
ments of the century." Before giving
a few details of the more prominent
recent efforts of the party of which
we are speaking, a short account of the
beneficent and far-reaching reforms planned
and carried out by the great Evangelical
leader and his party in the amelioration

392

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

of the lives of various groups among the
working classes of England, will be useful
and interesting, and will justify the assertion

which the name of Lord Shaftesbury (then
known as Lord Ashley) and his friends
will be for ever identified in the annals of

THE EARL OF SHAFTESBURY.

above advanced, as to the degree in which
the practical work of the men of the
Evangelical school of thought has stormed
the hearts of a large number of our
fellow-countrymen .

It was as early as 1833 that the great
work of " Factory-legislation " began, with

England, whenever successful religious and
philanthropic toil is chronicled. For more
than thirty years a conviction had been
growing throughout the country, that
bitter wrong was being inflicted on women
and children, especially on the latter, who
were employed in ever-increasing numbers

CHILD SLAVERY IN ENGLAND.

393

in the rapidly multiplying factories and
mills, especially in Lancashire and the
north. The hours during which these
unhappy, helpless beings worked, were
excessive ; the treatment to which they
were subjected was harsh, at times even
cruel ; the time allowed for rest and re
freshment utterly insufficient; for education

frightful. Day and night the machinery
was kept going, one gang of children
working at it by day, and another set by
night ; while in times of pressure the same
children were kept working day and night
by remorseless task-masters. The horrors
of the Factory system are scarcely con
ceivable to this generation." * From

ST. GILES, THE SEAT OF THE EARL OF SHAFTESBURY.

and moral and religious training, never
a moment was set aside. At first the
demand for youthful labour was met
by the "apprentice" system, by which
large bodies of children were drafted from
the workhouses of cities, and placed in
the mills and factories as apprentices,
where they were too often worked un
mercifully, and treated with sickening
brutality. " The waste of human life in
these mills and factories was simply

morning to night, in an overheated
atmosphere reeking with the fumes of oil,
and amidst the whirring din of machinery,
sick, with aching backs, and often lacerated
fingers, parched and half suffocated by the
dust and flue the weary slaves toiled on :

" For all day, the wheels are droning, turning,

Their wind comes in our faces,
Till our hearts burn, our heads with pulses burning,

And the walls turn in their places :

* " Life of the Earl of Shaftesbury," chap. iii.

394

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

Turns the sky in the high window black and reeling,

Turns the long light that droops adown the wall,
Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling,

All are turning all the day, and we with all.
And all day the iron wheels are droning,

And sometimes we could pray,
O ye wheels (breaking out in a mad moaning),

Stop i be silent for to-day ! "

JSM/P7 FREE LABOVREES OF ENGLAND

(From a print published in 1833.)

In 1802 the first Sir Robert Peel
championed the cause of these unhappy
ones, and carried through Parliament a
modest measure providing in some de
gree for their care and education. But
his " merciful " Act only went so far as
to limit the hours of labour to twelve,

* Mrs. E. B. Browning: "The Cry of the
Children."

exclusive of meals ! and to abolish night
work. It also appointed visitors to inspect
the factories, with the view at all events
of diminishing the most crying grievances
of the system. In 1819 Sir Robert Peel
succeeded in obtaining another Act, which
forbade children under nine
years of age working in a
cotton factory, and no young
person under sixteen was to
be allowed to work more
than twelve hours a day, ex
clusive of meals. In 1825
another Bill promoted by
Sir John Hobhouse became
law, which rendered it un
lawful to employ any child
in a cotton factory who
should be under eighteen
years of age for more than
sixty-nine hours a week, or
eleven and a half hours a day!
But this somewhat feeble
legislation related only to
the cotton factories, whilst
many other industries were
growing up in that period
of rapid industrial develop
ment, day by day. In 1830
a greater and more compre
hensive movement com
menced, which embraced the
idea of limiting somewhat the hours of
work not only for children in cotton mills,
but for children employed in the manu
facture of textile fabrics throughout the
kingdom. But the legislation attempted
in 1830-1, although in the right direction,
was miserably insufficient to remedy the
cruel, awful wrong which confessedly
existed in these dreary homes of labour.

LORD SHAFTESBURY S WORK.

395

At this juncture the Evangelical leader, five years increased labour since that time

lord Ashley (afterwards the earl of Shaftes- have carried it into operation. It has ef-

bury) appeared on the scene, and con- fected, I know, prodigious relief, has forced

stituted himself as the preacher, as the the construction of many public asylums,

general tribune, in season and out of season, and greatly multiplied inspection and care."

of the new crusade against the factory Then the diary dwells but very lightly

system ; the champion of these thousands of upon the great work of his life, in which

pale-cheeked, suffering little ones, and of he gained so vast a notoriety, the bene-
sad-eyed, helpless women employed in these
great industries. Antony Ashley-Cooper,

lord Ashley, was only thirty-two years of life for so many thousands of our toilers,

of age, when in good earnest he com- especially for the young and helpless,

menced the labours of his great and (2) "Seventeen years from 1833 to 1850

beneficent life. Intensely pious, an Evan- obtained the Factory Bill. The labour of

ficent factory legislation, which has made
tolerable and even sweetened the condition

gelical of the Evangelicals, a follower of the
best and purest teachers of the school he
loved so well, a disciple of the Venns, of
Romaine, of Cecil, and of Simeon, he
brought religion into every-day life, re
ferring every action to a Higher Power,
and seeking hour by hour fresh strength
from the source of all power and light
his blessed Redeemer, Jesus Christ.

What he accomplished in the course
of the next twenty work-filled years,
is succinctly and admirably told in
the words of his own private diary, dated
Christmas day, 1851 : " It would be curious
to take an impartial review, if I could, of

three hundred thousand * persons, male
and female, has been reduced within reason
able limits, and full forty thousand children
under thirteen years of age attend school
for three hours every day ! Let the people
themselves, let the reports of the inspectors,
let the records of bygone days, be heard
against the contempt, the misrepresenta
tion, the ignorance, the hatred, of those
who opposed or discouraged me.

"(3) A commission, moved for in 1841,
reported in 1842, and in 1843 passed a Bill
to forbid labour of females in mines and
collieries. No one can deny the blessed
results of this measure. (4) Passed Bill to

what I have gained by many years of toil, for regulate and limit labour of children and

myself, /or the public, and, may I say it? for women in print-works." t . . . "Thus

the cause of our Blessed Master. What of these helpless sufferers, are almost incredible in

have I gained for the public? That is our days^ when lunatic asylums are conspicuous for

according to my own estimation. . .

(i) Seventeen years of labour and anxiety These efforts, crowned with success, although com-

obtained the Lunacy* Bill in l8 45 , and paratively little remembered now were the begin-

J &gt;J&gt; in f\( tVio o-root TT -173 n crp 1 1 r a I nmlant nrrmif &lt;; IITP-

their order and cleanliness, for the wise and
humane treatment of the unfortunate inmates.

* Reference is here made to the early efforts
made by lord Ashley in behalf of the "insane."
His especial care, however, was directed to the
treatment of that unhappy class in our community
the " pauper lunatics." The awful revelations of
cruelty and misery, which were too often the lot

ning of the great Evangelical philanthropist s life-
work in behalf of the suffering poor of England.

* These numbers, quoted from 1851, of course
have enormously increased since that period.

f Other Parliamentary work is here chronicled
in the diary of the same kind, but of a less im
portant character.

396

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

far Parliament : out of it have spared
no trouble nor expense (and both have
been excessive) for Ragged Schools, Model
Lodging-houses, Emigration committees,
and meetings by day and night on every
imaginable subject."

great host of underground workers, many
of them of a very tender age, were simply
deplorable. The poor little ones laboured
like beasts of burden, and, toiling on
the long week through in their sub
terranean workshops, scarcely ever caught

JACK CADES INSURRECTION,
(From the cartoon by " H. /)

The " Colliery " Bill, to which reference
is made in this summary, was one of the
greatest boons ever granted to the working
classes. It dealt with a state of things
which existed in the great coal industry
a condition of things almost incredible for
the amount of suffering endured by the
wretched toilers. Children and young
people of both sexes were largely employed
and shamefully ill-treated ; education was
totally neglected, and the morals of this

a sight of the sunshine during the six
days of unremitting work. The seeds of
many diseases were thus early sown. Many
became permanently sickly, and not a few
died. Scenes of revolting cruelty were too
common in these mines and collieries.

The foes to the urgent demands for
reform urged the impossibility of working
the pits with profit, unless child labour
was largely used. Lord Ashley with
enormous pains made himself master of

1843-1851-] THE MINES AND COLLIERIES BILL ETC.

this most complicated question, procured
the appointment of a Government Com
mission of Inquiry, exposed in
Parliament and outside Parliament
the awful iniquities of the system,
and laid bare the undreamed-or
sufferings it involved. He writes
in his diary the following : " I
hear that no such sensation has
been caused, since the first dis
closure of the horrors of the slave
trade. God, go before us, as in
Thy pillar of a cloud ! " De
scribing the scene in the House
of Commons when he brought
forward his great measure, " the
Mines and Collieries Bill," which
dealt a death-blow to the iniqui
tous system of cruelty and oppres
sion, on which occasion the Evan
gelical chief thrilled the House
with his terrible picture, "Oh. *
he writes in his diary, " that I had
the tongue of an angel to express
what I ought to feel ! God grant
that I may never forget it, for I
cannot record it. On the yth
brought forward my motion. The
success has been wonderful. . . .
For two hours the House listened
so attentively you might have
heard a pin drop, broken only
by loud and repeated marks of
approbation. ... As I stood
at the table, and just before I
opened my mouth, the words
of God came forcibly to my
mind only be strong and of a
good courage. . . . From that mo
ment I was as easy as though I had
been sitting in an arm-chair. Many

men, I hear, shed
prosper the issue." :

tears.

397
God

CHILD AND WOMAN LABOUR IN THE COAL MINES PRIOR

TO 1843,
(Drawn from contemporary prints.)

This earlier legislation on behalf of the
downtrodden, oppressed working classes was
only obtained after years of toil and in the
* " Life of Lord Shaftesbury," chap. x.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

teeth of the bitterest opposition. In 1844
we find such entries in the diary as follows:
" Nearly eleven years have elapsed since
I first made the proposition to the House
which I shall renew this night. Never at
any time have I felt greater apprehension
or even anxiety. ... I know well the
hostility I have aroused, and the certain
issues of indiscretion on my part affecting
the welfare of those who have so long
confided their hopes and interest to my
charge." * But in spite of the long, sicken
ing delay, to the great Evangelical, confident
in the righteousness of the sacred cause to
which he had devoted his life, supported by
the strong religious conviction of his party,
victory came at last all along the line.
The "Ten Hours Bill " of 1 847 was one of his
greatest triumphs, and proved only the pre
cursor of a long series of kindly legislation,
which has effectually remedied many of the
crying evils that his great heart burned to
do away with. How important was that
early piece of legislation to mankind, when
we remember that out of 544,876 persons
employed in the various textile industries,
no less than 363,786 were young persons
and women, whom the Act directly affected.
The great parliamentary victory, we read,
was received throughout the country with
intense enthusiasm, the rejoicings in the
manufacturing districts being such as
had never before been witnessed. Ova
tions everywhere greeted the champion
of the poor operatives. Medals were
even struck in commemoration of the
event.

Evasions of the law were, however,
attempted, and more legislation on the
subject again occupied the attention of the
"Life," chap. xii.

House of Commons, every stage being
anxiously watched and guided by lord
Ashley and his friends. In 1850 a more
complete Bill at length received the Royal
assent. The principle laid down by the
"Ten Hours Bill" of 1847 was firmly
established, and since that memorable
date, owing to the tireless perseverance
of lord Shaftesbury, that principle has
been gradually extended, till now, in
the last years of the nineteenth century &gt;
we have " a complete, minute, and volu
minous code for the protection of labour.
Buildings must be kept pure of effluvia ;,
dangerous machinery must be fenced ;
children and young persons must not clean
it while in motion ; their hours are not
only limited, but fixed ; continuous em
ployment must not exceed a given number
of hours, varying with the trade, but pre
scribed by the law in given cases ; a statut-
able number of holidays is imposed ; the
children must go to school, and the em
ployer must every week have a certificate
to that effect ; if an accident happens,,
notice must be sent to the proper authori
ties ; special provisions are made for bake
houses, for lace-making, for collieries, and
for a whole schedule of other special callings.
For the due enforcement and vigilant super
vision of this immense host of minute
prescriptions there is an immense host of
inspectors, certifying surgeons, and other
authorities, whose business it is to speed
and post o er land and sea in restless
guardianship of every kind of labour, from
that of the woman who plaits straw at
her cottage door, to the miner who de
scends into the bowels of the earth r
and the seaman who conveys the fruits
or materials of universal industry to and

18431851.]

fro between the remotest parts of the
globe."*

Such have been the results of nigh half a
century of ceaseless endeavour on the part
of the great Evangelical and his friends ;
such the splendid results of perhaps the
noblest crusade ever undertaken on behalf
of suffering, toiling humanity by a devoted
and earnest churchman. Well indeed have
the labours of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury,
spread over about a hundred years, though
different in their direct object and varying
in their detail, been classed together. They
both were distinguished and loyal sons of
the Church of England, and both not only
belonged to, but were most distinguished
leaders of, that great school in the church
called Evangelical. They and their school
of religious thought have left an ineffaceable
mark on the story of England, and the
people will never forget what they owe to
the Evangelical leaders Wilberforce and
Shaftesbury. Very admirably, and withal
very grandly, one, long an ardent and
even a bitter antagonist, but who was
in the end converted by the exceeding
nobleness of the saintly work, thus speaks
of the lessons of the great crusade.
The writer, after stating that he had
become a convert, and that he, as far as
he was able, had been led to imitate the
example and follow in the footsteps of the
brave Evangelical earl, goes on to say :
"The present state of these poor women
and children f is a serious lesson to all legis
lators. It teaches us in a way not to be
mistaken, that we ought never to trust to

* Morley s " Life of Cobden."

f The writer is alluding to one special industry,
but he could apply it to the great mass of helpless
toilers.

FACTORY LEGISLATION.

399

the justice and humanity of masses of men
whose interests are furthered by injustice
and cruelty. The slave-owner in America,
the manufacturer in England, though they
may be individually good men, will, never
theless, as slave-owners and masters, be
guilty of atrocities at which humanity
shudders, and will, before the world, with
unblushing faces, defend cruelties from
which they would recoil with horror if
moral judgment were not perverted by
their self-interest. 1 *

But this bringing of practical religion
into actual common life, was not confined
to the classes who toiled in the great
and widespread industries covered by
the mills and factories, and the innumer
able toilers in all textile crafts, nor was
it limited to the army of workers in
the collieries and mines whence come
the vast mineral wealth of our island.
We can only venture barely to give a
catalogue of the minor industries and
crafts in which the poorest of people
earn their daily bread, which were helped
and materially benefited by the same
tireless religious zeal and Christian love.
We may just instance such half-forgotten
industries as those which employed flower
girls, water-cress girls, shoeblacks, chimney
sweeps, costermongers. To these poor
children of toil, among the clients of the
good earl and his Evangelical friends, must
be added the great army of sewing-girls,
and the unnumbered crowd of boys of
our great cities, well-nigh homeless and
destitute all these in their turn have
had occasion, in good truth, to arise and

* " Mr. Roebuck, M.P., to Lord Shaftesbury,"
quoted in the " Life," chap, xv. The letter bears
date March, 1860.

1843-1854-]

THE RAGGED SCHOOL UNION.

401

call Shaftesbury and his company blessed.
Nor were the public deeds of the good
Evangelical earl and his friends by any means
confined to great arenas. His memory will,
of course, float down the stream of history as
the unwearied public philanthropist, as the
parliamentary orator and eloquent advocate
of his well-loved sad-eyed clients, as the
statesman who piloted the far-reaching
Factory and Colliery Bills through the
mazes of House of Commons opposition,
as the impassioned defender of God s Holy
Book, as the unwearied advocate of
Evangelical religion upon a thousand
platforms. These things must be his
title of honour in the many-coloured
chronicles still to be filled with the story
of the second half of the nineteenth
century. But the great love which filled
the people s hearts for Shaftesbury, was
based upon something else besides his
splendid public services on their behalf.
Uncounted thousands, it is true, who had
never looked Upon his face or heard his voice
reverenced him as their fearless and
successful champion, as the one w r ho had
fought their battles for them in the senate
and the council chamber. But not a few
among the suffering poor, loved him be
cause they knew him. "If a poor flower
.girl or little children in distress called at
his house in Grosvenor Square to tell
their troubles to the good earl, they
would never be turned away. They
knew, too, that as in past years he had
visited day after day, night after night,
the mills and the factories, the collieries and
the mines those scenes once of nameless
suffering so in later life, by day as by
night he went to the common lodging-houses
and sought out men and women there . . .

they knew how on the day after his visit
the bare walls of their sad homes were made
gay with bright pictures that produce the
semblance of a home-look ; they remem
bered how when on some of these quiet
visits, as one or other of them told him of
cruel worry or heart-breaking sorrow, they
saw the tears pouring down his face, and
heard his faltering expression, God help
you, poor dear ! It is no wonder surely
that the poor worshipped the ground upon
which he trod, and that his name was
held in veneration in every hovel from
Whitechapel to Westminster." *

In this too brief sketch of the work of
the Evangelical school and their great
leader t during the last fifty or sixty years
of the nineteenth century, some notice
should be especially taken of the Ragged
School Union, of which lord Shaftesbury was
the indefatigable president for some forty
years. Indeed, he was its virtual creator,
and he and his friends w r ere ever the
main supporters of the " Union " and of
the vast work which gradually clustered
round it. The question of the enormous
population of London and the consequent
rapid increase of vagrant and outcast
children, began to be a pressing question to
many religious men as earl} as 1843, and
a small beginning of a ragged school in
Field Lane attracted lord Shaftesbury s
attention. He and his friends devoted
themselves to the object, conscious of the

* "Life," chap, xxxvi.

f Some of these "memories" were of course
personal, but such a personality as Shaftesbury s
touches the hearts of a whole people ; while his
public deeds were not only endorsed, but were enor
mously helped on by the religious party in the church
of which for so long he was the foremost figure.

402

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1853-1854.

rapidly-increasing numbers of neglected
children and young people in the great
metropolis. Too wild, ragged, and dirty
for the church schools which in those days
represented well-nigh the whole machinery
available for the education of the poor, these

adults engaged in some daily occupation ;
women s evening schools for improving
character and extending domestic useful
ness ; homes for boys, night refuges for
the utterly destitute, Bible classes, and
other organisations of a similar nature.

LORD SHAFTESBURY INSPECTING A COSTERMONGERS DONKEY SHOW.

utterly neglected ones were growing up
trained by their sad surroundings for a life
of degradation and crime, rather than for
a useful, happy existence. The " ragged
school," under the powerful and able
guidance of the Evangelical leader, rapidly
developed. Round the original little
" ragged school," struggling for a precarious
existence, grew up a network of healthy,
happy institutions such as day schools
for infants, evening schools for youths and

With extraordinary rapidity these ragged
schools and their various satellites, as above
faintly detailed, grew in London. After
about seven years, in 1853-4, more than
a hundred of these strange, novel " sem
inaries " for the outcast and almost destitute
class were included in lord Shaftesbury s
famous Union. Considerably over ten
thousand children (and the numbers
rapidly increased) were, before 1853-4,
brought into the sphere of their blessed

LORD SHAFTESBURY ON RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.

influence. The difficulty was evidently to
keep these ragged schools down to one
mark. To use the words of their President
and chief supporter : " You must keep
them, as I have said a hundred times, in
the mire and gutter, as long as the mire
and gutter exist. So long as this class
exists, you must keep the schools adapted
to their wants, their feelings, their tastes,
and their level. I feel that my business
lies with the gutter." But among the use
ful practical things taught in this great
Ragged School system was the simple
religion of Jesus. This was ever placed
in the forefront of the simple curriculum.
" What is wanted," wrote lord Shaftes-
bury, years later, to canon Wilberforce,
"for my small, sorrowing, abject children,
and when obtained, relished by all that
class, is the notion and feeling of a per
sonal Saviour, of one who can understand
them, enter into all their sorrows, be, as it
were, near them, almost visible."

The time, however, came when this
most useful and beneficial work was no
longer needed. With the "Seventies"
the Board School system came into
operation, and State provision was made
for the education of all children, even of
the most destitute, ragged, and forlorn in
London and the provinces. In 1872, in
the " Shaftesbury " Diary, we come upon
this pregnant entry : "The Ragged Schools
are sinking rapidly. To attempt their
prolonged existence will be a waste 01
time, health, and strength." Then, as the
Ragged School under the new State
development was dying, we catch sight
of the master-passion of the good earl.
Far above the material things with which
he longed to endow his poor, helpless

403

clients, he desired the weal of their im
mortal souls. He dreaded no baseless
dread, as we have seen since the exclusion,
or at least the discouragement, of religious
teaching in State-aided schools. Very
earnestly and unceasingly he resolved to
resist any such movement to the death.
The burning, eloquent words of the great
Evangelical on one famous occasion deserve
to be quoted at length, for the peril is ever
with us : " What we ask simply is this, that
the Bible and the teaching of the Bible
to the children of this vast Empire shall be
an essential and not an extra, that religious
teaching shall be carried on within school
hours. Take conscience clauses and time
tables enough to satisfy the greatest cor
morant for things of that kind, but they
will in my opinion be all useless. The
people of England will never require them.
What ! exclude by Act of Parliament
religious teaching from schools founded^
supported by public rates ! Declare that
the revealed Word of God and religious
teaching shall be exiled to ^the odds and
ends of time, and that only at such periods
shall any effort be devoted to the most
important part of the education of the
youth of the Empire ! It is an outrage
upon the national feelings, and more than
this, it is without exception the grossest
violation of the rights of religious liberty
that was ever perpetrated or even imagined
in the worst times by any Government
whatever. . . . We have now come to a
period in the history of our country when
there has just been granted to the people
almost universal suffrage. Is this a time to
take from the mass of the people . . . the
checks and restraints of religion ? Is this
a time to harden their hearts by the mere

404

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[18401885.

secularity of knowledge, or to withhold
from them the cultivation of all those
noble and divine influences which touch
the soul ? " *

We have dwelt at some considerable
length upon some of the works and days
of Antony Ashley-Cooper, earl of Shaftes
bury, because, to a great extent, they cover
many of the efforts of the Evangelical party
between 1840 and 1885 ; also, because in
many respects Shaftesbury was a typical
Evangelical. It has been well said that
millions in our land have thanked God
these thanks are still rising for the
noble and successful efforts of Shaftesbury
and his party for the poor and the
oppressed ; such efforts, such successes,
considering they were carried out and
accomplished in about half a century, as
are perhaps matchless in the world s
history. Still toiling in the causes he
loved so well till the last, at the ripe age
of eighty-four he passed to his well-won
rest. Before all that was mortal of Shaftes
bury was laid in the quiet village church,
under the shadow of his ancestral home of
St. Giles (Dorset), there was a solemn
funeral service in Westminster Abbey.
The scene in the storied Abbey, where
sleep the kings and queens and a great
crowd of the illustrious men and women of
our England, was such as never before had
been witnessed in the sacred national
sanctuary. It was a striking testimony
to the work the great Evangelical had
done, and to the popular love which he
had won for himself and his cause. The
mighty Abbey was full of mourners and
true mourners, not sight-seers ; it was no
* See the " Life," chap. xxxi.

impressive pageant such as a great State
funeral provides. u Never before, in the
memory of living men, had there been
brought together at one time and in one
place, and with one accord, so many
workers for the common good, impelled by
a deep and tender sympathy in a common
loss. For no other man in England or in
the world could such an assembly have
been gathered together. While the coffin
stood under the lantern of the church
buried beneath the masses of wreaths the
offering of the Crown Princess of Germany
resting beside the Loving tribute from the
flower girls of London strong men wept
as they gazed on the sea of upturned faces,
every face bearing traces of sorrow." *
The most remarkable feature in that vast
company of mourners was the number of
religious and philanthropic institutions
represented that day. There were dele
gates from some 200 to 250 of such insti
tutions, many of them of world-wide
notoriety, with which the " good earl "
was more or less directly connected.

A hundred instances could be massed to
gether indicative of the love his works had
kindled in the people s hearts, and, to a very
large degree, the love is yet reflected in
popular affection for the " party " of which
he was so faithful, so genuine a repre
sentative. Over his bed, for instance, in his
London house, hung a rough but carefully
worked piece of needlework, the offering
of factory girls. The clock in the earl s
dining-room was the gift of poor flower and
watercress girls. The bed coverlet he ever
used at St. Giles House, was a loving
present from a number of ragged children.
Well was the sorrow of the people voiced
* " Life," chap, xxxvii.

i88 5 .]

THE "GOOD EARL S" FUNERAL.

405

by a poor artisan in the crowd, with ragged Church of England stands by her formu-

clothes but with a piece of crape sewed on
his sleeve, who stood silent near the Abbey
door as the coffin passed within : " Our
earl s gone ! God A mighty knows he loved
us, and we loved him." Very deeply has

laries, her articles, and her homilies, and
so long as she crowns all by declaring that
the Bible is the sole ground of her faith,
rejecting every argument of human in
vention, so long may she confidently assert

the memory of these great and successful that she is a true church in the sight of

ALMSHOUSE WALK AND CHURCH, ST. GILES.

efforts for the people sunk into the
hearts of Englishmen, and that memory
has in no slight degree helped to keep
burning the old love for Evangelicalism
among vast numbers of our population.

Lord Shaftesbury, for so many long
years the leading and typical Evangelical
churchman, was devotedly loyal in his af
fection for the Church of England. Such
public words as the following well express
the. feeling of his party : " So long as the

God. . . ." " Leave her ! (the Church
of England)," cried the great religious
leader in a noble outburst of true oratory,
spoken in reply to some who were deeply
pained at what they deemed grave errors
in matters of doctrine and ritual ; " leave
her ! Why, I should just as soon have
expected that St. Paul would call upon
Timothy to renounce his grandmother
Lois and his mother Eunice." This was
far on his life in the seventies. In his.

406

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1898.

diary in 1872 we come upon the following
entry : " Must and will do much under
God s blessing to resist Disestablishment,
and secure the parochial system."

Loyal and devoted churchman though he
was, grave criticism advanced by certain
earnest Anglican churchmen, which cannot
be ignored by an impartial historian of
the Church of England, has been urged in
respect to some important branches of
lord Shaftesbury s religious and philan
thropic work ; a similar criticism has to be
met in the case of certain widely extending
religious operations undertaken by other
prominent members of the Evangelical
party during the last forty or fifty years.
The works to which this criticism applies,
cannot be said to be solely and distinctively
in connection with the Anglican Church
notably such causes as the Ragged School
Union, the Young Men s Christian Associa
tion, the London City Mission, the British
and Foreign Bible Society, and other
important religious movements of the
Evangelicals presently to be alluded to.
These and not a few more are what is
termed undenominational. In some of them,
however, the great majority of workers are
churchmen, and in the opinion of many,
the Church of England owes much to their
self-denying labours, for it is indisputable
that through these varied and various
agencies the Anglican Church is brought
into close touch with masses of the people,
who otherwise would have no contact at
all with her teachers. It is of course a
thing which many regret, and with good
reason, that all these religious and philan
thropic movements are not distinctively
Church of England movements, but the
historian has to accept facts, and has

honestly to chronicle them. Advantages to
the church counterbalance disadvantages,
and are weighed differently according to
the stand-point occupied by the critic. A
number of smaller but at the same time
powerfnl religious agencies which exist in
England, such as the Railway Mission,
the Policemen s Mission, the Postmen s
Mission, the Navvy Mission, the Children s
Special Service Mission, the Children s
Scripture Union, the various prayer unions
for civil servants, lawyers, etc. all these
come under the same non-denominational
category. Still they are in great measure
practically worked by loyal members of the
Church of England of the Evangelical
party, and they have been and still are
exercising a vast and perhaps little sus
pected influence upon the general Christian
life of England.

A very brief notice at least is called for
among this somewhat bare catalogue of
religious agencies, not distinctively Church
of England movements, but all the same
largely worked by Evangelical churchmen,
mostly laymen, of two most remarkable
movements of which the world at large
knows little or nothing. To a few perhaps
they are the shadow of a name but no more,
and yet the quiet influence they are exert
ing is very great, and it must be borne in
mind the influence widens considerably
with each year. These are the " Mildmay
Conferences " and the u Keswick Conven
tion." The first of these two the " Mild-
may Conferences " have been at work for
a good many years, but since 1864 have
been considerably developed. Originally
founded by Mr. Pennefather, an Evan
gelical clergyman, subsequently vicar of

i8 9 8.]

MILDMAY AND KESWICK.

407

St. Jude s, Mildmay Park, London, these
conferences have now grown so as to
require for those who attend them one of
the largest halls in London, in which
2,000 persons can be seated ; and every
June this great hall is filled three times
a day for three days. Among other things
the Deaconess Institution, which has had
widespread influence in promoting women s
work among the sick and poor, is an
offshoot of these conferences. The " Mild-
may Conferences " are professedly non-de
nominational, but are largely in the hands
of Church people. The main object held
in view is the deepening of the spiritual
life, but a strong missionary element runs
through them. This peculiar missionary
spirit fostered in these really notable
gatherings deserves a word of notice ; it
will probably one day, and that not a far
distant day, bear abundant fruit. What is
specially pressed home is not a question of
the support of a particular society ; nor is
the question of the raising of funds for
the carrying out missionary operations
mooted. The teaching confines itself espe
cially to the solemn command of the
-divine Founder of Christianity, to preach
His Gospel to all nations ; it urges as an
indisputable fact the conspicuous neglect
of this command by the whole church, of
Christ. It enforces the inescapable duty
of every individual to take his part in
pushing the holy mission cause, in some
way or other, either by taking up the
cross himself, or by inspiring others, or,
failing these, then by giving of money.

The " Keswick Convention " was origin
ated in the year 1875 by Canon Harford-
Battersby, vicar of St. John s, Keswick.
At first, for several years, it was little more

than a holiday gathering in the beautiful
lake country, where a few hundreds of
religious people met together to pray, and
to endeavour mutually to deerten their
spiritual life. The little religious holiday
gathering has, however, grown into the now
mighty Keswick Convention, where some
10,000 persons every July come together
for prayer and for religious teaching. Of
late, as in the " Mildmay Conferences,"
the missionary element has become a very
marked feature in the vast Keswick
gathering. This has been notably observ
able since 1887. Similar local conventions
are being held in imitation of Keswick in
different parts of the country. The
Keswick, like the Mildmay gathering,
while nominally undenominational, is
virtually under the direction of members
of the Church of England. Like Mildmay,
Keswick aims not at the support of
any existing society, but at infusing a
deeper and more earnest missionary spirit
among the people ; personal service, in
obedience to the Lord s last command, is
the burden of its teaching. The question
of money is rarely, if at all, referred to.
There is no doubt but that the fervour and
zeal which lives, especially in these latter
years, in the Church Missionary Society,
and which year by year increases, is in
directly to be largely referred to the
influence and teaching of these strange
quiet gatherings, so little known outside
a comparatively small circle. The seed
sown is bearing already a notable harvest.
Indeed, very many thoughtful men feel
a far greater satisfaction, and recognise
the grounds for a deeper sense of grati
tude to the Master, in the numbers
and earnest self-denying spirit of those

408

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

who devote themselves to the work of
evangelising the heathen world, than in
the vastly increased revenues of the Church
Missionary Society ; splendid though the
income of the Church Missionary Society
at present is. Those also who guide on

strength from its ranks, to the more
regular Evangelical body within the
church, a most striking proof of the
resources and vitality of the Evangelical
party exists in the comparatively recent
foundation of the sister colleges of WyclifTe

A MEETING OF THE KESWICK CONVENTION.

earth the fortunes of the Church Mission
ary Society consider men as much more
important than money. It is a fact well
known that between 1887 and 1897, a
period of ten years, the number of Church
Missionary Society missionaries has been
positively doubled.

Passing from these somewhat irregular
powerful religious movements of Keswick,
Mildmay, etc., which owe their genesis to
this great party, and mainly draw their

Photo: A. Pettitt, Keswick:

in the University of Oxford, and
Ridley Hall in the University of Cambridge.
These two colleges, now recognised among
the foundations of the older universities,
were projected, roughly speaking, in the
year 1876, but were not formally opened
till a few years later. They differ slightly
in their object from the other colleges of
Oxford and Cambridge, being destined
only for graduates of the University. In
"Ridley" as in "WyclifFe," men who

i8 9 8.]

THE ISLINGTON CLERICAL MEETING.

have taken their degrees receive especial
theological training preparatory to their
taking holy orders. The teaching is purely
Evangelical. Both colleges are always over
full of students, and the result is a constant
flow of earnest and well-equipped clergy
men belonging to the school of thought
of which we have been speaking, who
had previously received a university
training, into the Anglican communion.*

The living power in England of a school
of thought which not a few curiously sup
pose is fading fast away, is singularly mani
fested by the growth of the Islington Clerical
Meeting, which assembles at the beginning
of each year to hear a few selected speakers
or readers of papers, on subjects peculiarly
cognate to Evangelical thought and teach
ing. It is almost exclusively confined to
clergymen, and to clergymen of the Church
of England whose loyalty to the Church is
undoubted ; but it would not be an exagger
ation to style the gathering as exclusively
composed of loyal u Evangelicals of the
Evangelicals." This annual meeting was
begun by Daniel Wilson the elder, vicar
of Islington, afterwards known as bishop
of Calcutta, some seventy years ago. One
of the speakers! at the Islington Clerical
Meeting of 1898, in the course of his
address, mentioned how fifty-two years
back, in 1846, he had been first taken
to this Clerical Meeting. It was held, he
said, then in Mr. Daniel Wilson s study,

* Ridley Hall and Wycliffe Hall are at present
(1905) respectively under the government of two
well-known scholars, both of whose predecessors
are now honoured occupants of the episcopal
bench.

, t The Rev. Sir Emilius Laurie, Bart., of Max-
welton. N.B.

409

and some thirty or forty persons were pre
sent on the occasion. The speaker, looking
round the great hall where the Islington
Clerical Meeting of 1898 (January) was
being held, and where some *]$Q Evangelic a I
clergymen were assembled together, asked
his brethren if that remarkable gathering
had the appearance of being a meeting of
men who belonged to a fading school of
thought in the Church of England. "This,
my brethren," went on the venerable
speaker to say, " does not look like it.
As long as the great truths of Apostolic
and Reformation times are firmly held
and fearlessly proclaimed, Evangelical life
shall know no decay ; it builds upon Christ,
and resting upon the Rock, it must and
will prevail."

A quiet, thoughtful comment which
was made upon the general tone of this
important and numerously attended
gathering of 1898 at Islington, gives some
index to the spirit which now lives and in
spires the Evangelical party in the Church.
It was, that in the papers read and in
the words spoken there was an almost
entire absence of party spirit, the whole
atmosphere being deeply spiritual and
uncontroversial. There was a lack, per
haps, of the rousing orations of former
days, in which Popery and Ritualism were
denounced ; and in the place of these there
were high-toned addresses fearlessly point
ing out the weaknesses of Evangelicals,
while at the same time the old Evangelical
doctrines and truths were as firmly held as
in the old days when Romaine or Cecil,
Venn or Simeon, held their listeners
spell-bound as they preached and taught
the beauty and the truth of the old paths.

With great power one of the most

\ \

MODERN EVANGELICALISM.

411

scholarly of the selected speakers* described
the place held by the Bible in the closing
years of the nineteenth century among the
English people, and then pressed home the
urgent necessity for a clergy learned in and
conversant with the science of theology
this, as the outcome of the work of the
Church of England after so many centuries,
is a statement of the deepest interest : f
" Never, I believe," urged the speaker,
4i was there an age when a larger section
of the English Church were more willing
to be taught about the Bible, or out of the
Bible, than at the present. The extraordi
nary prominence given to biblical subjects
in secular newspapers and magazines
is a remarkable and significant fact. But
the people naturally require that those who
teach them should have some knowledge
of the subject they teach ; and knowledge
of the Bible can only be gained by hard,
patient, earnest, continuous, prayerful
study. . . . Let us read, study, medi
tate, pray, and they will listen to our
message." The Evangelical teacher was
re-echoing the words of Alfred, the great
Anglo-Saxon king, when he wrote a letter
to his archbishop, Plegmund ; was repeating
the teaching of the famous Dunstan when
Edgar reigned ; was reiterating the weighty
exhortations of men like Grosseteste and
bishop Hugh of Lincoln, of mediaeval fame,
when he dwelt on the necessity of a body

* Dr. Chiwasse, Bishop of Liverpool.

f The words and the spirit of very many of the
-words spoken by the Evangelical teachers at the
Islington meeting of 1898 will, the writer of this
"history for the people" is assured, be heartily
endorsed and sympathised with by all the more
serious and thoughtful of the sister school of
Anglican thought, popularly known as the High
Church school, one with the Evangelical school
in all essential doctrines.

of clergy in the Church of England at once
learned as well as devout,

Very grandly in his peroration the same
eloquent and thoughtful speaker summed
up the position in 1898 of the great party
in the loved Anglican communion to which
he belonged : " As Evangelical Churchmen
we bear a great name ; we are heirs of a
splendid inheritance ; we are entrusted
with a noble work. But we are not what
our forefathers were. The fact cannot be
gainsaid. And the reason lies here, that
they were more diligent in prayer, and in
reading of the Holy Scripture, and in such
studies as help to the knowledge of the
same, than we are. On their knees before
an open Bible, they won a sanctity and light
to which we are partial strangers. They
walked with God in peace and" equity, and
did turn many to righteousness. But we,
as a school, grew worldly and ambitious ;
we did hot lay aside, as we promised, the
study of the world and the flesh. We were
too little alone with God ; we were too
much in public before men.

" The world was too much with us, late and

soon;
Getting and spending, we laid waste our

powers,

Little we saw in heaven that was ours;
We gave our hearts away, a sordid boon.

u And even to-day cries are heard in our
ranks, which would have sounded strange
indeed in the ears of those great and un
worldly men of old, that Prime Ministers
overlook us, that Bishops ignore us, that
society looks down upon us. If they do,
may not the fault in some measure be
our own ? So long as this is our temper,
God cannot use us. The ambitious and
the worldly, the murmuring and the

412

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

complainer, He sweeps on one side as
out of harmony with His will, and as in
capable of accomplishing his purposes. It
is when we are content, like^our Master,
not to be ministered unto, but to minister,
to be amongst men as those who serve, to

the century which is fast closing* has
yet succeeded in stirring the heart of
England. The English people, as a whole,
are sturdily Protestant. They still think
much of the Bible. . . . For their sake?
let us sanctify ourselves."

THE CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY S HOUSE, SALISBURY SQUARE.

count it our highest glory and happiness
to be soul-winners and soul-strengtheners,
to heal, to sweeten, to purify our national
life with the love of God, to leaven the
Church with His truth, to evangelise the
world with the Gospel of His Son it is
then that we live out our great and beau
tiful name, and fulfil our high destiny.
The door of opportunity still, thank God,
stands open. No religious movement of

In this little fragmentary study on the
" Evangelicals " of the last fifty years of the
nineteenth century only the fringes of a
great subject have been touched upon, for
the last chapters of our History must per
force be of a fragmentary character notes,
out of which history must one day be writ
ten, rather than history itself. But enough

* The words, we must remember, were spoken
in the January of 1898.

EVANGELICAL INFLUENCE.

413

has been said to show that, as the sands
of the century were running out, the
great historical school of Evangelicalism
was still a real spiritual power in the
Church of England. Its mi-takes during

deep and permanent impression upon
the minds of a very large proportion
of Englishmen.

The influence, too, of the Evangelical
school upon religious thought and upon

BOARD ROOM OF THE CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY S HOUSE.

that period have not been glossed over ;
but the shortcomings in question have
not partaken of the nature of lethargy or
of careless indifference; they were simply
errors in judgment and in policy. Such as
they are, however, they belong to the past,
and are not likely to be repeated ; while
its work, as we have shown, has been
noble and beneficent, and has left a

religious action is a far-reaching one. It
would be a comparatively easy task to
dwell upon the numbers of the many
congregations in London and in th j
important provincial centres guided by
Evangelical teaching ; to write of the
growing work of great Evangelical so
cieties like that of the " Pastoral Aid,"
and of the many smaller and less known

414

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

societies more or less closely allied with the
school of religious teaching which is here
occupying us ; to dilate upon the glowing
enthusiasm of the Church Missionary So
ciety, and upon its great income, due, as it
has been well said, " in a wonderful measure
to the gifts of poor givers who love from
the soul the Gospel of the grace of God."
But it would be a less easy task, perhaps,
to tell of that new and nobler spirit which
is beginning to inform and to inspire this
great school. Evangelicalism as is well
known to that small circle of men to whom
religion is all in all is gradually, in its more
influential centres (but not slowly by any
means), largely divesting itself of polemical
bitterness ; it is, while accepting much that
is good and true and real, taught by men
who think differently from itself on many
points, all the while holding firmly as ever
the great distinctive truths affirmed by its
most trusted teachers in old times. It is
pressing home to the younger members of
the school the urgent, pressing necessity
of earnest, prayerful, continuous study in
all things connected with Biblical scholar
ship and learning. In the future which
lies before the Church of England an
unknown future, but a future full of hope
the Evangelical party has undoubtedly
a great part to play. Those most con
versant with its inner life look forward
to that part with a serene confidence, for
they are conscious that " underneath are
the everlasting arms."

We have now spoken at some length of
the genesis of the Oxford movement, and
of the far-reaching influence of the school
of thought which may be said to have
sprung from it. The position and work of

the Evangelical school in the Church of
England during the second half of the nine
teenth century have also been sketched.
The High Church and the Evangelical
schools of thought roughly, perhaps, but
still fairly represent the large majority
of Anglicans in the present day, as they did
a century ago and earlier. A third school
is, however, sometimes popularly reckoned
to exist beside these : men speak not un-
frequently of the " Broad Church " school.
This is, however, a mistake ; there is no
such party in the Church of England. The
term is used carelessly, and serves, as a
rule, to designate this or that teacher,
writer, or preacher who, in the mind of
the speaker, fails to sympathise wholly
with his particular views, and who can
be scarcely classed among definite pro
fessors of what is generally termed
high or low church teaching. It is too-
common to brand with the somewhat
obnoxious epithet men who would shrink
from latitudinarianism in any form, and
whose Catholic orthodoxy is unimpeach
able.

The supposed party or school is popularly
credited with having sprung from a singular
and strangely lovable little group of men
who arose in the church during the period
upon which we have been dwelling, and
whose words and writings, directly and
indirectly, have exercised a very consider
able influence upon their contemporaries
generally, and especially upon the teachers
of the two great Anglican schools. Their
names household words among us are
Arnold, Maurice, Kingsley, and dean
Stanley. To these must be added as, in
many though by no means in all
points deeply sympathising with much

DR. ARNOLD.

415

of their teaching, Thirlwall, bishop of
St. David s, F. W. Robertson, and arch
deacon Julius C. Hare.

Of these, the earliest in point of time,
perhaps the most eminent of them all,
Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of
Rugby, died in 1842, after presiding over
the well-known Midland school for some
fourteen years. It is as the greatest school
master ever known in England that he has
won his undying fame. We must not dwell
here upon this phase of his influential
career, simply contenting ourselves with
saying that he infused new life, and a
nobler, purer, more religious spirit into
the peculiar system of our English public
schools. He was something more than a
great teacher ; he recognised, in a way no
one before him had done, the importance of
the moral and religious training of the
boys of the higher classes of the country,
educated in our public schools. His chief,
though by no means his only instrument
for the work he set himself to accomplish
was the college pulpit of his Rugby school.
There, Sunday after Sunday, in those
simple but impressive school sermons, in
language the youngest boy could under
stand, he set before his pupils the besetting
sins and temptations of schoolboy life. He
told them of their duties and high responsi
bilities, and described to them, as only
Arnold could describe, their eternal destiny.
Those who listened to him have never
forgotten his burning words, which went
home alike to their hearts and heads.
Since Arnold s days, as we have said,
a new and nobler spirit has lived in and
inspired all our greater English schools.
His friends, and they were many, love
to paint his generous, pure-minded, and

withal intensely devout character, full of
sympathy with the suffering, scorning all
that was base and selfish a very knight
sans peur et sans reproche.

As a theologian he was less happy. In
his famous pamphlet on Church Reform,
he advocated the embracing of almost all
Dissenters within a church which should be
founded on an Erastian basis, in which the
distinction between clergy and laity should
be virtually obliterated.* " He divides the
world into Christians and non-Christians.
Christians were all who professed to be
lieve in Christ as a Divine Person,
and to worship Him ; and the brother
hood of Christians was all that was
meant by ( the church in the New

Testament Church organisation

was, according to circumstances, partly
inevitable or expedient, partly mischievous,
but in no case of divine authority." t
But, with all his unhistorical and revo
lutionary views on the church, Arnold was
an intense and fervid believer in the great
cardinal Christian doctrines. He was,
too, ever a persistent foe to the Ox
ford or Tractarian movement, which he
assailed in language strangely bitter, and
even violent, j And yet, in spite of his
inveterate rancour against the Oxford
Tractarians, he could write of their great
leader, whom he admired and even
reverenced, in the following chivalrous

* Canon Overton : " History of the Church of
England," vol. ii., chap, xi., who adds here that
Dr. Hawkins, provost of Oriel, Arnold s old friend,
told him " he was writing on a subject about which
he knew little or nothing."

f Dean Church : " Oxford Movement," chap i.

J See especially his well-known article in the
Edinburgh Review on the " Oxford Malignants and
Dr. Hampden."

4 i6

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

terms, to a friend who was in communi- was not in sympathy with either of the

cation with Dr. Pusey, asking his advice church parties. He detested, however,

on patristic reading : " Erom Pusey you the appellation of " broad churchman."

will learn, I am sure, nothing virulent or Kingsley, who ever spoke of Maurice as

Photo: A.H Fry, Brighton.
THE CHAPEL, RUGBY SCHOOL.

proud or false, but self-denial in its " my master," describes him as " the most
true form, combined with humility and beautiful soul whom God has ever in his

honesty." :

mercy allowed me to meet with on this

Frederick Denison Maurice, who died earth ; the man who, of all men 1 have

in 1872, was ever a loyal churchman, but seen, approached nearest to my conception

*Liddon: " Life of Pusey," vol. ii., chap, xviii. of St. John, the apostle of love." The

MAURICE, KINGSLEY, STANLEY.

417

high church party, however, suspected
his orthodoxy ; and the opinion of the
Evangelicals also is clearly expressed by
Shaftesbury, who wrote of him thus :
u Mr. Maurice is one of those who must
be ranked according to old Foxe s defini
tion, as neither sound Protestant nor
true papist. "

Charles Kingsley, who passed away in
1875, though of course not to be reckoned
as a theologian in the sense of Maurice
and who, perhaps, exercised, through
his charming and fascinating stories a
wider influence even than his master,
has been classed as the apostle of mus
cular Christianity a term he, however,
peculiarly disliked.

Dean Stanley, who survived until 1881,
touched another and far-reaching public

Photo; Elliott & Fry, Baker St., W.
CHARLES KINGSLEY.

by his brilliant studies on Old Testament

subjects, as well as by his writings on

* Hodder : " Life of Lord Shaftesbury," chap. xi.

many important points connected with
ecclesiastical history. Men of all schools
of thought, quite outside the little world

Phot : Elliott & Fry, Baker St., \V.
F. D. MAURICE.

ot scholars and students, were led, through
the wonderful charm of his style, by
his graphic and descriptive power, to
interest themselves in subjects which,
as a rule, few save those specially inter
ested in history or theology had cared
to master.

All these, and a few other distinguished
men, whose names, however, are less
known, were, without being in any definite
way his disciples, more or less influenced
by the spirit of Arnold. With scarcely an
exception, the group were bitterly opposed
to all prosecutions, whether directed against
ritual excesses or errors in doctrine. Indeed,
their vehement dislike to all doctrinal
prosecutions has caused them not once or
twice to be suspected of sharing heresies,
with which they had no sympathy what-

4i8

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

ever. The Evangelical dislike of dean
Stanley, a dislike and suspicion shared
by high churchmen, is fairly expressed by
the great Evangelical leaders. In his
diary (July, 1881), Shaftesbury writes :
" Dean Stanley died last night. I deeply
regret him. He was kind, friendly, genial,
affectionate. He was full of love and in
terest for the poor, and rejoiced in every
thought and act of generosity. His abili
ties and acquirements were brilliant. I
trembled at the contemplation of his theology,
but I loved the man. Another who showed
me attachment, and who always did rne
more than justice, is now gone."

The power that these independent writers,
teachers, preachers, and thinkers, who are
generally classed by the well-known term,
Broad Churchmen, have exercised in
the Church of England, has been well
and fairly summarised by a recent
historian, when he says that their work

and influence has " tended generally to
liberalise both high churchmen and low
churchmen alike. Let anyone compare,"
he goes on to say, " a typical high church
man and a typical low churchman of the
present day [he is writing of the last years
of the nineteenth century] with a type
of either class of fifty years ago, and he
cannot fail to observe the enormous dif
ference which half a century has made
in widening the horizon of both ; and
the change seems to be largely due to
the influence, direct or indirect, of the
remarkable men we have just been con
sidering." * But it would be inaccurate
and misleading to class these " teachers "
as belonging to any definite party. The
power they wielded and the influence they
exerted were rather wielded and exerted as
individuals, not as leaders of a school.

* Canon Overton : " History of the Church of
England," vol. ii., chap. xiii.

Photo : S. A. Walker.
DEAN STANLEY.

LAMBETH PALACE, FROM THE RIVER THAMES.

CHAPTER LXXVII.

THE ANGLICAN CHURCH DURING THE SECOND HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

General Growth and Progress of the Church The "Essays and Reviews" Controversy Failure of
Judicial Proceedings Synodical Condemnation The Modern School of Criticism The
"Colenso" Controversy The Resuscitation of Convocation The Church Congress Diocesan
Conferences The Pan- Anglican Conferences Foreign and Colonial Expansion Extension of
the Hierarchy Vast Increase in Pastoral Work Building and Repair of Churches Cathedral
Services The Gothic Revival in Architecture Apparent Finality of Gothic Art The New-
Music The Higher Criticism Summary and Conclusion.

ORE than half a century has
passed ^since the revival which
we related in some detail under
the general name of the " Oxford move
ment," took place. Sufficient has been
said respecting the special work and in
fluence during that period of the two
great schools into which the Anglican
Church may be said to be divided ; but
something remains to be said respect
ing the more general history and de
velopments of the church at large. It
has been a stirring time, a somewhat
restless period, but a period marked by

enormous activity, by rapid growth in
population and in national wealth and
power. The sounds of war and its at
tendant suffering and sacrifice have never
reached our favoured shores, though once
in the far east of Europe and several times
in India great and world-famous campaigns
have been conducted with conspicuous
success. But, on the whole, the fifty years
have been for Great Britain a period
of peace and generally prosperity. All
through this long time one sovereign has
sat upon the English throne, to whose
quiet wisdom and devoted patriotism the

420

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

prosperity in question has been very
largely owing. While other countries have
been the scenes of revolutions, dynastic
changes, and internal conspiracies, England

of the Anglo-Saxon race, although many
anxious questions tarry for a solution, is
bright with hope.

All through these years the Church of

ROWLAND WILLIAMS, D.D.
{From a photograph.)

alone has witnessed none of these things.
Whatever changes have taken place in
the British Empire, have been carried
out quietly, peacefully, with the consent of
the crown and people, acting together ;
and, as far as men can see, the future

England has played an important part.
Never, through the thousand years, or
more of the eventful story we have been
telling, has its influence been so great or
so far-reaching. With the cynicism of old
age, the great statesman, lord Beaconsfield,

i860.]

"ESSAYS AND REVIEWS."

421

is reported to have said, lamenting over under the somewhat ambiguous title of
the disappearance in modern times of Essays and Reviews. The names of the
much that was venerable and impressive : seven contributors to this book, invested

" There are not many grand things left
in England, but the national church is
one of them."

But some future hand must write the
church s story in detail during that
wonderful half-century. It is all too

it with an importance independent of any
literary power or research and scholarship
which may have characterised the several
essays. They had no direct connection
one with the other, and the preface
formally disclaimed any responsibility of

recent now. Of the men who played the authors beyond the limits of their

the leading parts, many are with us still ;

of these we can, of course, say but little.

Some have too lately passed within the position and ability, and several of them

respective essays. But six of the seven
writers were Anglican clergymen of

veil, for any writer to be able to estimate
aright their virtues or their shortcomings.

occupied posts of influence and dignity;
and " the book was at first read as a whole,

We can only venture to give a brief in the light of its more startling portions." *
account, little more than a dry summary, The six papers to which grave exception

of the work and progress of the church,
and of the events which seem noteworthy
in its history, in what we must call our
own time. That work has been most
diverse, the progress has been enormous,
and there are features in its history of great
interest during that memorable period,
not only in our own England, but in the
greater England beyond the seas.

was taken were the " Review of Bunsen s
Biblical Researches," by Dr. Rowland
Williams, sornewhiles vice -principal of
Lampeter college, and, at the time of
the publication of the book, vicar of Broad
Chalk, in the diocese of Salisbury ; an
" Essay on the Study of the Evidences of
Christianity," by Professor Baden Powell ;
"The National Church," by the Rev.
H. B. Wilson, vicar of Great Houghton,

During the period (roughly dating from formerly an Oxford tutor of high repu-
1845 to the closing years of the nineteenth tation ; "The Mosaic Cosmogony" ; "The
century) now under consideration, some Tendencies of Religious Thought in Eng-
grave controversies have arisen in the land 1688-1750" ; and " The Interpreta-
Church of England, which seem to call tion of Scripture"; the last three written
for some account. That which affected respectively by Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Mark

so many important questions connected
with the ritual and practice of the Angli
can Church has been already dealt with ;
but there were tw r o others, known as the

* It is only just to remark, that the first essay
in the book on " The Education of the World,"
by Dr. Temple, who subsequently filled with con
spicuous ability and universal approval the position
of bishop of Exeter, bishop of London, and, later,

Essays and Revieivs controversy, and the t h a t of archbishop of Canterbury is simply a

" Colenso " controversy, which touched
the articles of the Catholic faith.

In the year 1860 appeared a volume,

resume of a university sermon, preached on the
occasion of his appointment to the head-mastership
of Rugby. No charge on the score of orthodoxy
has ever been raised against this essay.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1860.

Pattison, and Professor Jowett. Of these
six essays, the papers of Dr. Rowland
Williams and Mr. Wilson were subse
quently the subjects of public litigation.

Before the end of the year (1860) public
attention was called to the book by a
highly commendatory notice in the West
minster Review. This was followed, in
the January of 1861, by a strongly con
demnatory article by Dr. Wilberforce in
the Quarterly. The press generally also
took notice of and called attention to
the startling statements advanced by these
responsible writers. The result of these
various criticisms was a general arousing
of public attention to the volume, six large
editions of which successively appeared ;
and the mass of churchmen were seriously
disturbed. Dr. Stanley (afterwards dean of
Westminster), who was then Regius pro
fessor of ecclesiastical history at Oxford,
before the great outburst of indignation,
expressed his own opinion of the two
essays of Mr. Wilson and of Dr. Rowland
Williams, in the following terms : "Wilson s
{essay) has committed the unpardonable
rashness of throwing out statements, with
out a grain of proof, and which can have
no other object than to terrify and to
irritate, and which have no connection
with the main argument of his essay.
. . . Williams is guilty of the same rash
ness as Wilson, on a larger scale, casting
Bunsen s conclusions before the public,
without a shred of argument to prepare
the way for them or to support them." :

* The words occur in a letter of Stanley s to the
editor of the Edinburgh Review. See " Life of Dean
Stanley," ii., 34; and Liddon : "Life of Pusey,"
vol. iv., chap. ii. This early estimate of Dr.
Stanley, whose subsequent article in the Edinburgh
Review excited some attention, is remarkable.

Without attempting to set forth the
various destructive conclusions arrived at
in this mischievous volume, the subject
matter of the two essays which were
publicly challenged in the courts, may be
briefly given. Dr. Rowland Williams in
his paper proposed to exhibit the destruc
tive criticism of Baron Bunsen on the
books of the Old Testament. Bunsen had
generally accepted u many of the vague
theories which were flying about Germany "
in the matter of Biblical research, and had
enumerated them in a confident tone, as
though they had been established by proof.
Dr. Williams reproduces these, not always
professing his agreement with them, but
describing them as "suggestive" or "well
worth consideration."* Mr. H. J. Rose,
whose careful, accurate scholarship and
high qualities as a divine and thinker have
been already dwelt upon at some length in
the course of our history, speaks of Bunsen
as " denying the genuineness of half the
books in the Bible, and as treating a large
portion of its history as mere idle tales or
legendary myths. "f

The other essay which obtained the
greatest notoriety, that of Mr. Wilson, is
yet more vague in its language. It has
been described as manifesting a design on
the part of the author " to show his con
tempt for all received opinions and accepted
creeds." In the extracts subsequently sub-

* See Canon Perry : " History of the English
Church (Third Period)," chap. xx.

f Bunsen s striking and winning personality, his
pure and stainless life, his many and varied gifts,
his high position in the diplomatic world, gave his
theological writings a weight they would not other
wise have obtained. His was a strange complex
character. It is noticeable that many of his
writings, however, breathe the spirit of the most
exalted devotion and piety.

i860.]

THE CHURCH ON "ESSAYS AND REVIEWS.

423

mitted to the Judicial Committee of the
Privy Council, Dr. Williams was charged
with saying that the Bible is not the Word
of God, and Mr. Wilson was charged
with contradicting the Articles and formu
laries, by holding that the Bible was not
written under the inspiration of the Holy
Spirit, and that it was not necessarily at
all, and certainly not in parts, the word
of God.

The judicial proceedings resulted in a
condemnation by Dr. Lushington in the
Court of Arches, and in a subsequent
acquittal by the Privy Council, to whom
the condemned essayists appealed. The
voice, however, of the Church of England,
by a vast majority, unhesitatingly con
demned the book and its views. A most
important declaration was drawn up at
Oxford, which, among other points, de
clared the firm belief of the signatories
that the Church of England, in common
with the whole Catholic Church, main
tained without reserve or qualification the
inspiration and divine authority of the
whole canonical Scriptures, as not only
containing but being the word of God.
This weighty declaration was signed by
no less than eleven thousand Anglican
clergymen. It was formally presented
to the archbishop of Canterbury, and
in the next month it was followed by a
synodical condemnation of Essays and
Reviews by both Houses of the Convo
cation of Canterbury. This controversy
drew together into one solid phalanx of
resistance the two great schools of thought
in the Anglican communion, thus demon
strating that the Anglican High Church
man and the Anglican Evangelical are
absolutely one in all the really great

points of fundamental Catholic doctrine,
many of which had been lightly spoken of
if not put aside in the reckless pages of the
book so justly condemned. The Bible, as
it came down to the church of the present
day unchanged from the church of the
first days, was a priceless heritage, equally
precious in the eyes of Shaftesbury the
Evangelical, as of Pusey, the High Church
leader.

The Essays and Reviews of 1860, which
at the time so alarmed the Church of
England, and which called out so un
paralleled an expression of opinion, so
general a repudiation by the church,* were,
however, soon forgotten. The book had
no successor. The various assertions and
deductions contained in it were ably and
exhaustively answered by more profound
scholars and divines than the writers of
the essa}7s in question. It created no new
school of thought ; the number of disciples
of the new views was insignificant. The
defence of the faith called forth in the
form of replies by such men as Thompson,
archbishop of York, Ellicott, bishop of
Gloucester and Bristol, H. J. Rose, of
Cambridge, McCaul, the learned Hebraist,
and others, has been a permanent and

* The formal acquittal by the Privy Council,
which reversed the condemnation of the book
previously pronounced by the Court of Arches,
and which for a time gravely disturbed earnest
churchmen, when carefully examined, will be found
to have been based, to use the words of the judges
themselves, on "the meagrest disjointed extracts
contained in the reformed articles as they came
from the lower court ; the j udges stating that they had
no power to decide doctrine, and could but examine
the plain grammatical meaning of " the extracts "
placed before them ; and these extracts, they de
cided, were insufficient to justify a conclusion that
they were in conflict with the true construction of
the Articles and other formularies of the Church
of England.

424

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[18801898.

valuable addition to the theological library
of the Anglican communion. Among the
pieces of defence thus evoked, the Lectures
on the Book of Daniel by Dr. Pusey de
serve a special notice. This work of the
great scholar and churchman is rather a
text-book for the student than a work
adapted to the ordinary reader, and though
some of his conclusions are by no means
universally accepted, the treatise will ever
remain a noble contribution to the study
of this difficult but precious book.

In the later years of the century, since
Pusey, ever the stalwart defender of the
old canons of Old Testament criticism, fell
asleep, a new school of theologians has arisen
in the older universities. Their deductions
in respect to certain dates, and also as to
the composition of much of the Old Testa
ment,* are varied, and in some cases even

startling; but the adversaries of this school
of higher criticism, as it is commonly
termed and these adversaries are numer
ous frankly admit that the tone of the
writers of the new school is very different
from the flippant and reckless assertions
of the men of the Essays and Reviews of
1860, and especially from the somewhat
scornful tone in which these speak of
Catholic creeds and Catholic doctrines. It
is characterised by scholarly research, and
generally its conclusions are couched in
guarded and reverent language. " We
are now accustomed to listen to the confi
dent hope, which speaks of the time when
the terms of reconciliation between the
New Criticism and the Old Faith may be
stated without compromise and without
surrender. . . . Pusey (years before)
saw there was l death in the pot that

* After all, the conclusions of the advocates
of the so-called " Higher Criticism " are most
precarious, and the attitude of students towards
the deductions of scholars of this school of thought
should be one of extreme caution, not to say of
distrust. The last pronouncement of one of the
most distinguished writers in the department of
theology which is especially devoted to the study
of the Old Testament Records (Mr. Sayce, Pro
fessor of Assyriology in the University of Oxford),
made at the close of 1897, is a startling one,
and his weighty words cannot be lightly passed
over. For instance, in his Preface to " The
Early History of the Hebrews" (Rivingtons,
1897), he says: " Over against the facts of archae
ology stand the subjective assumptions of a
certain school, which, now that they have ceased
to be predominant in the higher latitudes of
scholarship, are finding their way into the popular
literature of our country. Between the results of
Oriental archaeology and those which are the
logical end of the so-called higher criticism, no
reconciliation is possible, and the latter must
therefore be cleared out of the way before the
archaeologist can begin his work." In chapter ii.,
pp. iio-iu, Professor Sayce writes: "At last we
are able to call in the aid of the scientific method,

and test the age and character, the authenticity
and trustworthiness of the Old Testament history,
by monuments about whose historical authority
there can be no question. And the result of the
test has, on the whole, been in favour of tradition,
and against the doctrines of the new critical school.
It has vindicated the antiquity and credibility of
the narratives of the Pentateuch. . . . We are still
only at the beginning of discoveries; those made
during the past year or two have, for the student
of Genesis, been exceptionally important ; but
enough has now been gained to assure us that the
historian may safely disregard the philological
theory of Hexateuchal criticism, and treat the
Books of the Pentateuch from a wholly different
point of view." Again, on pages 129 and 133,
he writes: "The philological theory, with its
hair-splitting distinctions, its priestly code, and
redactors, must be put aside with all the his
torical consequences which it involves. . . .
The philological theory, with its minute and
mathematically exact analysis, is brushed aside;
it is as little in harmony with archaeology as it
is with common sense. The Pentateuch be
longs to the Mosaic age, and may therefore
be accepted as, in the bulk, the work of Moses
himself."

i86i 1866.]

THE "COLENSO" CONTROVERSY.

425

contained the wild gourds of the young occupied as a suffragan of the archbishop
prophets. Now the young prophets are of Canterbury. He was immediately re
engaged in casting in the meal ; time will appointed as metropolitan, with jurisdiction
show whether they have succeeded
healing the pot."
//V cst*

over the two new sees of Grahamstown

Adhuc sub judicc and Natal. For the new see of Natal.
Mr. Colenso, a distinguished mathematical

The second important controversy, also scholar of Cambridge, then working in

in matters connected with the Catholic
faith, sprang also from within the ranks
of the ordained ministers of the church,
and again the heresy
complained of concerned
the Bible. As we have
seen, in the first contro
versy the position of the
writers of the heretical
book gave it a weight,
and invested it with an
influence quite incom
mensurate with its lit
erary power and ability.
So in the second case,
the rank and conspicuous
place of the bishop of
Natal in South Africa,
gave his strange writings
an importance which they would never
have obtained had they been put out
under different circumstances in other
words, had anyone save a bishop of the
Anglican communion been their author.

In 1853 the vast diocese of South Africa,
which since 1847 had been under the

the diocese of Norwich, was chosen,
being already well known for his zeal
in the missionary cause.

For some time after
his appointment, bishop
Colenso distinguished
himself in his distant
and lonely diocese by
activity and earnestness.
It was in 1856 that he
incurred the displeasure
of his metropolitan by
innovations he had intro
duced into the Prayer-
book, and by certain im
prudences in his dealings
with the heathen popula
tion of his diocese. Still,
bishop Gray spoke kindly
of him, writing in the following terms :
" If he [Colenso] will only learn caution
and deliberation, this will do no harm.
His fine, generous, and noble character
will overcome all difficulties." Alas !
Dr. Gray s hopes were never fulfilled,
and in 1861 we find the bishop of

Photo : Elliott 6r&gt; Fry.
DR. COLENSO.

government of bishop Gray, of Capetown, Capetown speaking thus of his suffragan :

was divided into three dioceses. To carry
out the re-arrangement, bishop Gray re-

" The bishop of Natal is a very wilful,
headstrong man, and loose, I fear, in his

signed his see, which he had hitherto opinions on vital points.

* Liddon : " Life of Pusey," vol. iv. chap. iii. (
edited (since Dr. Liddon s death) by Mr. Johnston,
principal of Cuddesdon, Dr. Wilson, late warden

. ." And
again : u I am very anxious about Natal ;
his views are dangerous. I fear we may

have taught in South Africa another
,of Keble College, and Mr. W. C. E. Newbolt, canon

and chancellor of St. Paul s.

Gospel which is not another."

426

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[18611866.

In 1 86 1 Dr. Colenso put out a new
translation, accompanied by a commentary,
of the Epistle to the Romans, containing
many strange ideas. Bishop Gray in vain
entreated him to suppress it. The work
was carefully examined and considered in
England by the archbishop of Canterbury
and his suffragans,* with the result that it
was agreed Colenso should be requested to
withdraw the work ; and, failing this, he
was desired not to officiate in English
dioceses in the course of a visit to England
he was proposing to make.

Between 1862 and 1866 the bishop of
Natal published the unfortunate book with
which his name will be always connected,
" The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua
critically examined." The work was pub
lished in parts. The second part contained
a violent diatribe levelled against the
Anglican clergy, whom Colenso charged
with dishonesty in upholding the doctrines
of the church, and with teaching what he
was pleased to call " transparent fictions."
The book, as a whole, was a crude, ill-
digested work, mainly based on second or
third-hand sources, containing little that
was original or suggestive. The bishop of
Natal was no theologian, and had little
real knowledge of the Hebrew language ;
was, indeed, miserably equipped for the
task he had taken upon himself. The
caustic remark of the great statesman!
was well founded : " The bishop of Natal
commenced his theological studies after
he had grasped the crozier." His con
clusions in respect to the Old Testament
writings were that they contained much

* There were only two bishops who dissented
from this course of action.

f Mr. Disraeli, afterwards earl of Beaconsfield

matter that was not historical, and that,
in consequence, he could no longer use
the Anglican ordination service, in which
the truth of the Bible is assumed ;
while the baptismal office in its present
condition must, he considered, be laid
aside, on account of its allusion to the
Deluge.

In England the book was at once
generally condemned, even by those
who deemed that it would be ill-advised
to take any formal proceedings against it.
In South Africa, after a judicial inquiry,
the bishop of Capetown as metropolitan,
with two episcopal assessors, formally de
posed Dr. Colenso from the see of Natal.
Upon this Dr. Colenso appealed to the
privy council at home. The privy council
reversed the South African judgment, but
purely on technical grounds ; curiously
enough alleging that the letters patent
creating the South African bishopric had
no force, as, previously to their being
issued, the colony had received repre
sentative institutions ; and that, in con
sequence, there were no bishops of Natal
and Capetown known to the law, and no
metropolitan with any rights of judging.
The action of the bishop of Capetown was,
however, very generally approved, in South
Africa as in England, the Convocation
of Canterbury, through the archbishop,
conveying to Dr. Gray and to the bishops
associated with him the expression of
their admiration of the courage, firmness,
and devoted love of the Gospel manifested
by him and them under most difficult and
trying circumstances.

Dr. Colenso, however, insisting upon his
rights as bishop, returned to Natal. In
1866 a sentence of excommunication was

i86i 1866.

THE "COLENSO" CONTROVERSY.

passed upon him by the bishop of
Capetown, which sentence the dean of
Maritzburg was directed to read from the
altar of the cathedral church. We need not

427

approval of his proceedings. The Rev.
W. K. Macrorie, vicar of Accrington in
Lancashire, was consecrated in 1869
" bishop of the church in Natal and

Photo : Cassell&&amp;gt; Co., Ltd.

ST. GEORGE S CATHEDRAL, CAPETOWN.

dwell any further upon the details of this
painful case. The action of the bishop of
Capetown was not only generally approved
by the church in England, but the
American convention and the provincial
synod of Canada had previously conveyed
to the South African metropolitan their

Zululand, in communion with the bishops of
the province of South Africa and with the
Church of England." Mr. Macrorie took the
title of bishop of Maritzburg. The great
Anglican church societies, the S. P. G. and
the S. P.C. K., also transferred their grants
for Natal to bishop Gray, of Capetown.

428

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1852

Still Dr. Colenso refused to vacate his
office, and much difficulty for a consider
able period existed, as the churches and
schools generally, in Natal, were vested in
him. New work had to be recommenced
in the distracted diocese, fresh churches
and schools had to be built ; and, as the
result of quiet, patient endeavour, the
churches under bishop Macrorie after a
time became four times as numerous as
those which still acknowledged the autho
rity of the schismatical Dr. Colenso.

The author of all this trouble and con
fusion died in 1883, and the unhappy affair
is now well-nigh forgotten. Like the
famous controversy of the " Essays and
Reviews," it- cannot be said to have left
any permanent scar on the life of the
Church of England.

Our register of the important de
velopments of the Church of England since
1845 naturally commences with the re
suscitation of Convocation. The ancient
synod of the church had been virtually
suspended for a century and a quarter ;
having fallen under the displeasure of the
Whig government of the day in 1717,
when George I. was king, owing to its
action in the case of the Latitudinarian
bishop Hoadley of Bangor. Convocation
was regarded as unwisely taking sides
in the political controversies of the time,
by its implied censure of the Whig bishop.
It was, therefore, by the advice of the
ministers, prorogued, and never suffered
again to meet for the despatch of business
until the year 1852. Its existence was
publicly recognised by its being formally
summoned at the beginning of a parlia
ment, when it voted an address to the

crown, and then immediately separated.
In later times various spasmodic attempts
were made to revive its activity. In 1840
Samuel Wilberforce, when archdeacon of
Surrey, had urged its revival, and other
prominent churchmen had joined in the
agitation, which was principally kept alive
by a body of earnest men who in 1850
formed themselves into a " Society for the
revival of Convocation." Wilberforce, who
had become a bishop, seconded by bishops
Blomfield and Philpotts, and a lay peer
lord Redesdale, pressed the mattei
vigorously forward.

In 1852 the earl of Derby, who was
then prime minister, saw no objection to
the revival of the ancient church assembly.
The question excited much interest, and
vehement opposition \vas displayed in
some quarters. Amongst other adversaries,
the press was conspicuous ; and the argu
ment was advanced that the meeting of
Convocation for the despatch of business
would be perilous to the Church of Eng
land, and inimical to the order and tran
quillity of society. But in spite of all
opposition, the government of the day
being decidedly favourable to its revival,
the efforts of Churchmen were crowned
with success, and on November 5, 1852.
a day ever memorable in the annals of
the Church of England, the synod of the
province of Canterbury met in St. Paul s
Cathedral.

It was a curious moment for the assembly
to meet, for the great cathedral was being
prepared for the imposing state funeral of
the duke of Wellington, and was in a
state of extreme confusion. We will
quote here from a vivid and picturesque
contemporary account of this gathering

430

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1852,

of the representatives of the church under
the vast dome of the cathedral :

u The crowd of dignitaries, arrayed in
their quaint official costumes, showed that
Convocation had mustered in large force.
Deans, archdeacons, and proctors glided
about, full of mutual recognition and
enquiries, and presented a curious and
suggestive scene. We saw a highly edu
cated and ecclesiastical-looking collection
of men. They looked like what they
were, and the sight gave strength and
reality to our convictions that Convocation
had met for business. From the dome
a movement was made towards the morn
ing chapel at the -north-west corner of the
cathedral. Here the bishops assembled
in their red chimeres, and were shortly
summoned to the west door to receive
the archbishop of Canterbury. The pro
cession, which forthwith commenced to
wards the choir of the cathedral, was a
wonderful phenomenon. Here was the
Church of England by representation in
the most stately costume. Then followed
in the rear, as the climax of honour, the
archbishop himself, with his long scarlet
train borne by an attendant. All marked
to a thoughtful eye the majesty of Lam
beth, which enjoys a longer pedigree and
a more uninterrupted history than any
temporal throne or dynasty in Europe." *

Thus was the action of Convocation,
after the intermission of more than a
century, at last restored. The work of
the northern Convocation of York was,
however, longer delayed ; and it did not
formally meet for the transaction of

* From the Christian Remembrancer, December,
1852, quoted by canon Perry: "English Church
History," vol. iii., chap. xvi.

business until 1860, when Dr. Longley
was archbishop of the see. Since i852 r
when the southern province assembled
in St. Paul s, Convocation has constantly
sat, and has been busily engaged in a
great variety of ecclesiastical matters. It
has effectually disposed of all the various
objections which were urged against it,
and has largely contributed to the effectual
work of the church. Its debates have
been conducted with moderation and
dignity. It has brought to bear on many
important questions learning, experience/
and forbearance. On the whole, its in
fluence has served to heal party division
and to quench party spirit. jVIany and
various have been the subjects which have
been discussed in this representative synod
of the church ; important have been the
reforms and developments of church work
advocated in its sessions, not a few of
which reforms and developments have
been successfully carried out. We would
instance, among the questions which have
been debated in the church assembly,
clergy discipline, lay co-operation, cathe
dral chapters, rubrics of the Book of
Common Prayer, ecclesiastical fees, spiritual
provision for soldiers and sailors, the re
vision of the authorised version of the
Bible, a revised table of lessons, the
diaconate and the employment of lay
agency, cemetery fees, law of marriage,
hours of divine service, etc. etc., besides
many practical reforms, such as methods
of reaching the masses.

Convocation has a great future before
it, and its rare prudence and sagacity
in the past, which has effectually disarmed
all hostile criticism, give high promise of
even vastly extended usefulness in the

CONVOCATION. THE CHURCH CONGRESS.

future. The revival of Convocation in
1852 has, indeed, proved a real accession
to the power and influence of the church.
The comparatively recent addition, in the
form of a house of laymen, supplies, with
out in any way detracting from its ancient
composition, the element which was im
peratively needed to keep it in touch
with the people, for whose welfare the
church and the synod exist. One of the
reforms, however, which are still in the
future, and which it is to be hoped will
not be long delayed, is the inclusion among
the members of Convocation of a much
larger number of representatives of the
parochial clergy. The present number
of cx-officio members of the synod, being
dignitaries, is apparently out of all pro
portion to the number of elected members
of the whole body of clergy. But all
practical suggestions for the settlement of
this and other important reforms may be
well left to the thoughtful wisdom of a
body which has shown itself in difficult
times so thoroughly capable of wisely con
sidering measures which are best adapted
to the true interests of the great church
which it represents.

The revival of Convocation in 1852 led
to other movements of a similar character.
It was felt how extremely desirable it
was that the laity should be interested
generally in all ecclesiastical questions,
especially in those which more immediately
concerned the relation of the church to
the masses. This feeling led to the estab
lishment in 1860 of general Congresses of
churchmen, lay and clerical. The first of
these now famous gatherings of churchmen
was held in 1861, in the hall of King s

431

College, Cambridge. The idea of this first
Congress was simply that a large local
representative meeting should be sum
moned by the Cambridge Church Defence
Society. It was repeated on a somewhat
more extended scale in the following year
at Oxford, under the presidency of bishop
Wilberforce, and since 1862 it has gone on
increasing and developing. The Church
Congress, now an annual institution, is
an open assembly of clergy and laity ;
the solitary condition existing is that the
speakers at the Congress and the readers of
the papers must be really members of the
Church of England. Since the first conv
paratively small gathering at Cambridge,
the " Congress " has gradually grown in
numbers and in importance. The number
of tickets sold for these important gather
ings has even reached 5,000 and upwards.
In these congresses, subjects previously
arranged are treated first in papers, care
fully prepared by writers selected for their
knowledge of the subject dealt with in
the paper, and are then discussed by (i)
speakers previously chosen, (2) by any
member of the congress who sends up his
name to the chairman. These gatherings
of members of the Church of England
have, at the close of the nineteenth cen
tury, become a considerable power in
church life. Among various noticeable
points connected with them may be men
tioned : (i) Indirectly they have contri
buted to promote harmony and kindly
feeling between the different schools of
thought represented at them, by showing,
in the course of the discussions which have
followed the papers read formally, how
beneath much apparent divergence of
opinion, substantial agreement in all

432

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

[1864.

really vital points exists among serious
Anglican churchmen. (2) They have served
to bring the laity into direct contact with
the responsible clergy, and the laity have
been enabled in these gatherings to express
their opinions freely on many questions
connected with discipline, church order,
and other matters in which they feel re
form is desirable if not absolutely necessary.
Out of the same universal desire of the
church for the revival of synodal action,
which resulted in the restoration to ac-
tivitv of Convocation, and which led to the

Photo: Russell &&amp;gt; Sons, Baker St., W.
DR. TEMPL