 Section 7 of the History of England, from the Ascension of James II, Volume 3, Chapter 14. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ben Wilford. The History of England, from the Ascension of James II, Volume 3, Chapter 14 by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Section 7. Meanwhile, under William's skillful management, a Treaty of Alliance had been concluded between the State's General and the Emperor. To that treaty, Spain and England gave in their adhesion, and thus the four great powers which had long been bound together by a friendly understanding were bound together by a formal contract. But before the formal contract had been signed and sealed, all the contracting parties were in arms. Early in the year 1689, war was raging all over the continent from the humus to the Pyrenees. France attacked at once on every side, made on every side a vigorous defense, and their Turkish allies kept a great German force fully employed in Serbia and Bulgaria. On the whole, the results of the military operation of the summer were not unfavorable to the Confederates. Beyond the Danube, the Christians under Prince Louis of Baton gained a succession of victories over the Muslims. In the passes of Rusalon, the French troops continued without any decisive advantage against the martial peasantries of Catalonia. One German army, led by the Elector of Bavaria, occupied the Archbishopric of Cologne. Another was commanded by Charles, Duke of Lorraine, a sovereign who, driven from his own dominions by the arms of France, had turned soldier of fortune and had, as such, obtained both distinction and revenge. He marched against the devastators of the Palestinians, forced him to retire behind the Rhine, and, after a long siege, took the important and strongly fortified city of Mint. Between the Sombra and the Muse of the French, commanded by Marshal Humier, were opposed to the Dutch, commanded by the Prince of Waldeck, an officer who had long served the state's general with fidelity and ability, though not always with good fortune, and who stood high in the estimation of William. Under Waldeck's orders was Marlborough, to whom William had confounded an English brigade consisting of the best regiments of the old Army of James, second to Marlborough in command, and second also in professional skills, was Thomas Talmish, a brave soldier, destined into a fate never to be mentioned without shame and indignation. Between the Army of Waldeck and the Army of Humier's, no general action took place, but in a succession of combats the advantage was on the side of the Confederates. Of these combats the most important took place at Walcourt on the 5th of August. The French attacked an outpost defended by the English brigade, were vigorously repulsed, and were forced to retreat in confusion, abandoning a few field pieces to the conquerors, and leaving more than 600 corpses on the ground, Marlborough, on this as on every similar occasion, acquitted himself like a valiant and skillful captain. The cold stream guards commanded by Talmish, the regiment which is now called the 16th of the line, commanded by Colonel Robert Hodges, distinguished themselves highly. The Royal Regiment too, which had a few months before set up the standard of rebellion and if-switch, proved on this day that William, in freely pardoning that great fault, had acted not less wisely than generously. The testimony which Waldeck, in his dispatch war to the gallant conduct of the Islanders, was read with delight by their countrymen. The fight indeed was no more than a skirmish, but it was a sharp and bloody skirmish. There had, within living memory, been no equally serious encounter between the English and French, and our ancestors were naturally elated by the finding that many years of inaction and vassalists did not appear to have innervated the courage of the nation. The Jacobites, however, discovered in the events of the campaign abundant matter for infection. Marlborough was, not without reason, the object of their bitterest hatred. In his behavior on a field of battle, Malice itself could find little to censure. But there were other parts of his conduct which presented a fair mark for obliquely. Averice is rarely the vice of a young man. It is rarely the vice of a great man. But Marlborough was one of the few who have, in the bloom of youth, loved Lucre more than wine and women, and who have, at the height of greatness, loved Lucre more than the power of fame. All the precious gifts which nature had lavished on him, he valued chiefly for what they could fetch. At twenty, he made money of his beauty and his vigor. At sixty, he made money of his genius and his glory. The applause which were justly due to his conduct at Walcourt could not altogether drown the voices of those who muttered that, wherever a broad peace was to be saved or got, this hero was Amir Yuki-lo, Amir Harpogon. That, though he drew a large allowance under pretense of keeping a public table, he never asked an officer to dinner. That his muster roles were fraudulently made up, that he pocketed pay in the names of men who had long been dead, of men who had been killed in his own sight four years before at Sedgemore. That there were twenty such names in one troop, that there were thirty-six in another. Nothing but the union of dauntless courage and commanding powers of mind, with a bland temper and winning manners, could have enabled him to gain and keep, in spite of false, eminently, un-solder-like, the goodwill of his soldiers. About the time in which contending armies in every part of Europe were going into winter quarters, a new pontiff ascended the chair of St. Peter. And since the eleventh was no more, his fate had been strange indeed. His conscientious and fervent attachment to the church of which he was ahead had induced him at one of the most critical conjunctures in her history to ally herself with her mortal enemies. The news of his decease was received with concern and alarmed by Protestant princes and Commonwealths, and with joy and hope it for sales and doubly. An extraordinary ambassador of high rank was instantly dispatched by Louis to Rome. The French garrison, which had been placed in Avonon, was withdrawn. When the votes of the conclave had been united in favor of Peter Otto Bioni, an ancient cardinal who assumed the appellation of Alexandra VIII, the representative of France, assisted at the installation, bore up the cope of the new pontiff and put into the hands of his holiness a letter in which the most Christian king declared that he renounced the odious privilege of protecting robbers and assassins. Alexander pressed the letter to his lips, embraced the bearer, and talked with rapture of the near prospect of reconciliation. Louis began to entertain the hope that the influence of the Vatican might be exerted to dissolve the alliance between the House of Austria and the heretical usurpers of the English throne. James was even more sanguine. He was foolish enough to expect that the new pope would give him money, and ordered Melford, who had now acquitted himself of his mission to Versailles, to hasten to Rome and bag his holiness to contribute something towards the good works of upholding pure religion in the British islands. But it soon appeared that Alexander, though he might hold language different from that of his predecessor, was determined to follow in essentials his predecessor's policy. The original cause of the quarrel between the Holy See and Louis was not removed. The king continued to appoint prelates. The pope continued to refuse their institution, and the consequence was that a fourth part of the diocese of France had bishops who were incapable of performing any episcopal function. The Anglican Church was, at this time, not less distracted than the Gallican Church. The 1st of August had been fixed by act of parliament as the day before the close of which all benefits clergymen and all persons holding academic offices must, on pain of suspension, swear allegiance to William and Mary. During the earlier part of the summer, the Jacobites hoped that the number of non-juris would be so considerable as seriously to alarm and embarrass the government. But this hope was disappointed. Few indeed of the clergy were wigs. Few were tories of that moderate school would acknowledge, reluctantly, and with reserve, that extreme abuses might sometimes justify a nation in resorting to extreme remedies. The great majority of the profession still held the doctrine of passive obedience. But that majority was now divided into two sections, a question which, before the revolution, had meant mere matter of speculation and had therefore, through sometimes incidentally raised, been, by most persons, very superficially considered, had now become practically most important. The doctrine of the passive obedience being taken for granted, to whom was that obedience due? While the hereditary right and the position were conjoined, there was no room for doubt. But the hereditary right and the position were now separated. One prince, raised by the revolution, was reigning at Westminster, passing laws, appointing magistrates and prelates, sending forth armies and fleets. His judges decided causes. His sheriffs arrested debtors and executed criminals. Justice, order, property would cease to exist and society would be resolved into chaos before his great seal. Another prince, deposed by the revolution, was living abroad. He could exercise none of the powers and perform none of the duties of a ruler and could, as it seemed, be restored only by means as violent as those by which he had been displaced, to which of these two princes did Christian men owe allegiance. To a large part of the clergy, it appeared that the plain letter of Scripture required them to submit to the sovereign who was in possession, without troubling themselves about his title. The powers which the apostle, in the text most familiar to the Anglican divines of that age, pronounces to be ordained of God are not the powers that can be traced back to a legitimate origin, but the powers that be. When Jesus was asked whether the chosen people might lawfully give tribute to Caesar, he replied by asking the questioners not whether Caesar could make out a pedigree derived from the old royal house of Judah, but whether the coins which they scrupled to pay into Caesar's treasury came from Caesar's mint. In other words, whether Caesar actually possessed the authority and performed the functions of a ruler. It is generally held, with much appearance of reason, that the most trustworthy comment on the text of the gospels and the epistles is to be found in the practice of the primitive Christians, when that practice can be satisfactorily ascertained, and it so happened that the time during which the church is universally acknowledged to have been in the highest state of purity were times of frequent and violent political change. One at least of the apostles appears to have lived to see four emperors pulled down in little more than a year. Of the martyrs of the third century, a great proportion must have been able to remember ten or twelve revolutions. Those martyrs must have had occasion often to consider what was their duty towards a prince just raised to power by a successful insurrection. That they were, one in all, deterred by the fear of punishment from doing what they thought right is an imputation which no candidate infidel would throw on them, yet if there be any proposition which can, with perfect confidence, be affirmed touching the early Christians, it is this that they never once refused obedience to any actual ruler on account of the illegitimacy of his title. At one time, indeed, the supreme power was claimed by twenty or thirty competitors. Every province from Britain to Egypt had its own Augustus. All these pretenders could not be rival emperors, yet it does not appear that, in any place, the faithful had any scribbles about submitting to the person who, in that place, exercised the imperial functions. While the Christians of Rome obeyed Aurelian, the Christians of Lyons obeyed Tetrichus, and the Christians of Palmyra obeyed Zenobia, day and night, such were the words which the great Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, addressed to the representatives of Valerian and Galenius. Day and night, do we Christians pray to the one true God for the safety of our emperors? Yet those emperors had a few months before pulled down their predecessor, Amelianus, who had pulled down his predecessor, Galus, who had climbed to power on the ruins of the house of his predecessor, Deceus, who had slain his predecessor, Philip, who had slain his predecessor, Gordian. Was it possible to believe that a saint, who had in the short space of 13 or 14 years borne true allegiance to this series of rebels and regicides, which have made a schism in the Christian body rather than acknowledge King William and Queen Mary? A hundred times those Anglican divines who had taken the oaths challenged their more scrupulous brethren to cite a single instance in which the primitive churches refused obedience to a successful usurper, and a hundred times the challenge was evaded. The non-jewers had little to say on this head, except that presidents were of no force than opposed to principles, a proposition which came with but a bad grace from a school which had always professed an almost superstitious reverence for the authority of the fathers. To presidents drawn from later and more corrupt times little respect was due, but even in the history of later and more corrupt times the non-jewers could not easily find any presidents that would serve their purpose. In our own country many kings who had not the hereditary right had failed to throne, but had never been thought inconsistent with the duty of a Christian to be a true legion to such kings. The usurpation of Henry IV, the more odious usurpation of Richard III, had produced no schism in the church. As soon as the usurper was firm in his seat, bishops had done homage to him for their domains. Convocations had presented addresses to him and granted him supplies, nor had any casualists ever pronounced that such submission to a prince in possession was deadly sin. End of Section 7. Section 8 of The History of England from the Ascension of James II, Volume 3, Chapter 14. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ben Wilford. The History of England from the Ascension of James II, Volume 3, Chapter 14, by Thomas Babington Macaulay, Section 8. With the practice of the whole Christian world, the authoritative teaching of the Church of England appeared to be in strict harmony. The homily unwillful rebellion, a discourse which inculculates, in unmeasured terms the duty of obeying rulers speaks of none but actual rulers. Nay, the people are distinctly told that in homily that they are bound to obey not only their legitimate prince, but any usurper whom God shall in anger set over them for their sins. And surely it would be the height of absurdity to say that we must accept submissively such usurper as God's sins in anger, but must pertinaciously withhold our obedience from usurper whom he sins in mercy. Granted it was a crime to invite the Prince of Orange over, a crime to join him, a crime to make him king, yet what was the whole history of the Jewish nation and of the Christian Church but a record of cases in which providence had brought good out of evil. And what theologian would assert that, in such cases, we ought from the horrors of evil to reject the good. On these grounds a large body of divines, still asserting the doctrine that to resist a sovereign must always be sinful, conceived that William was now the sovereign whom it would be sinful to resist. To these arguments the non-Jewers replied that St. Paul must have meant by the powers it be, the rightful powers it be, and that to put any other interpretation on his words would be to outrage common sense, to dishonor religion, to give scandal to weak believers, to give an occasion of triumph to scoffers. The feelings of all mankind must be shot by the proposition that, as soon as a king, however clear his title, however wise and good his administration is expelled by traitors, all his servants are bound to abandon him and to range themselves on the side of his enemies. In all ages and nations, fidelity to a good cause and adversity had been regarded as a virtue. In all ages and nations, the politician whose practice was always to be on the side which was utmost had been despised. This new Toryism was worse than Wiggism. To break through the ties of allegiance because the sovereign was a tyrant was doubtless a very great sin, but it was a sin for which specious names and pretexts might be found and to which a brave and generous man not instructed in divine truth and guarded by divine grace might easily fall. But to break through the ties of allegiance merely because the sovereign was unfortunate was not only wicked but dirty. Could any unbeliever offer a greater insult to the scriptures than by asserting that the scriptures had enjoined on Christians as a sacred duty what the light of nature had taught heathens to regard as the last excess of baseness? In the scriptures was to be found the history of a king of Israel driven from his palace by an unnatural son and compelled to fly beyond Jordan. David, like James, had the right. Epsilon, like William, had the possession. Would any student of the sacred writings dare to affirm that the conduct of Shemay on that occasion was proposed as a pattern to be imitated and that Barzilia, who loyally adhered to his fugitive master, was resisting the ordinance of God and receiving to himself damnation? Would any true son of the Church of England seriously affirm that a man who was a strenuous royalist till after the Battle of Naseby, who then went over to the parliament, who, as soon as the parliament had been purged, became an obsequious servant of the rump and who, as soon as the rump had been ejected, professed himself a faithful subject of the protector, was more deserving of the respect of Christian men than the stout old cavalier who bore truth, filthy to Charles I in prison and to Charles II in exile, and who was ready to put lands, liberty, life, and peril, rather than a knowledge, by word or act, the authority of any of the upstart governments which, during that evil time, obtained possession of a power not legitimately theirs? And what distinction was there between that case and the case which had now arisen, that Cromwell had actually enjoyed as much power as William? Nay, much more power than William was quite certain that the power of William, as well as the power of Cromwell, had an illegitimate origin. No divine who held the doctrine of non-resistance would dispute. How then was it possible for such a divine to deny that obedience had been due to Cromwell and yet to affirm that it was due to William? To suppose that there could be such inconsistency without dishonesty would be not charity but weakness. Those who were determined to comply with the act of parliament would do better to speak out and to say what everybody knew that they complied simply to say their benefits. The motive was no doubt strong that a clergyman who was a husband and a father should look forward with dread to the first of August and the first of February was natural, but he would do well to remember that. However terrible might be the day of suspension and the day of deprivation there would assuredly come two other days more terrible still, the day of death and the day of judgment. The swearing clergy, as they were called, were not a little perplexed by this reasoning. Nothing embarrassed him more than the analogy which the non-jewers were never wary of pointing out between the usurpation of Cromwell and the usurpation of William, for there was in that age no high churchman who would not have thought himself reduced to an austerity if he had been reduced to the necessity of saying that the Church had commanded her sons to obey Cromwell, and yet it was impossible to prove that William was more fully in possession of supreme power than Cromwell had been. The swears therefore avoided coming to close quarters with the non-jewers on this point, as carefully as the non-jewers avoided coming to close quarters with the swears on the question touching the practice of the primitive Church. The truth is that the theory of government, which had long been taught by the clergy, was so absurd that it could lead to nothing but absurdity. Whether the priests who had adhered to that theory were swore or refused to swear, he was alike unable to give a rational explanation of his conduct. If he swore, he could vindicate his swearing only by laying down propositions against which every honest heart instinctively revolts, only by proclaiming that Christ had commanded the Church to desert the righteous cause as soon as that cause ceased to prosper, and to strengthen the hands of successful villainy against afflicted virtue. And yet, strong as were the objections to this doctrine, the objections to the doctrine of the non-jewer were, if possible, stronger still. According to him, a Christian nation ought always to be in the state of slavery or in a state of anarchy. Something is to be said for the man who sacrifices liberty to preserve order. Something is to be said for the man who sacrifices order to preserve liberty. For liberty and order are two of the greatest blessings which a society can enjoy, and when unfortunately they appear to be incompatible, much indulgence is due to those who take either side. But the non-jewer sacrificed not liberty to order, not order to liberty, but both liberty and order to a superstition as stupid and degrading as the Egyptian worship of cats and onions. While a particular person, different from other persons by the mere accident of birth, was on the throne, though he might be narrow, there was to be no insubordination. When any other person was on the throne, though he might be an Alfred, there was to be no obedience. It mattered not how frantic and wicked might be the administration of the dynasty, which had the hereditary title, or how wise and virtuous might be the administration of a government sprung from a revolution, nor could any time of limitation be pleaded against the claim of the expelled family. The lapse of years, the lapse of ages, made no change. To the end of the world, Christians were to regulate their political conduct simply according to the genealogy of their ruler. The year 1800, the year 1900, might find princesses who derive their title from the votes of the convention, reigning in peace and prosperity. No matter, they would still be usipers. And if in the 20th or 21st century, any person who could make out a better right by blood to the crown should call on a late posterity to acknowledge him as king, the call must be obeyed on peril of eternal perdition. A Whig might well enjoy the thought that the controversies which had arisen among his adversaries had established the soundness of his own political creed. The despotants who had long agreed in accusing him of an impious era had now effectively vindicated him and refuted one another. The High Churchman, who took the oaths as shown by irrefragable arguments from the Gospels and the Epistles, from the uniform practice of the Primitive Church, and from the explicit decorations of the Anglin Church that Christians were not in all cases bound to pay obedience to the prince who had the hereditary title. The High Churchman, who would not take the oaths as shown as satisfactorily that Christians were not in all cases bound to pay obedience to the prince who was actually reigning. It followed that to entitle a government to the allegiance of subjects something was necessary different from mere legitimacy and different also from mere possession, what that something was the Whigs had no difficulty in pronouncing. In their view, the end for which all governments had been instituted was the happiness of society. While the Magistrate was, only whole, not withstanding some faults, a minister for good. Reason taught mankind to obey him and religion, giving her solemn sanction to the teaching of reason. Commended mankind to revere him as Divinely Commission, but if he proved to be a minister for evil, on what grounds was he to be considered as Divinely Commission? The Tories who swore had proved that he ought not to be so considered on account of the origin of his power. The Tories who could not swear had proved as clearly that he ought not to be so considered on account of the existence of his power. Some violet and acrimonious Whigs triumphed ostinously and with merciless insolence over the perplexed and divided priesthood. The non-juror they generally affected to regard with contemptuous pity as a dull and perverse but sincere bigot whose absurd practice was in harmony with the absurd theory and who might plead in the excuse for the infatuation which impaled him to ruin his country, that the same infatuation had impaled him to ruin himself. They reserved their sharpest taunts for those Divines who, having, in the days of the Exclusion Bill and the Rye House plot, been distinguished by zeal for the divine and indefensible right of the redditary sovereign, were now ready to swear filthy to an usurper. Was this then the real sense of all those sublime phrases which had resounded during twenty-nine years from innumerable pulpits, had the thousands of clergymen who had so loudly boasted the unchangeable loyalty of their order, really meant only that their loyalty would remain unchangeable till the next change of fortune. It was idle. It was impudent in them to pretend that their present conduct was consistent with their former language. If any Reverend Doctor had at length been convinced that he had been in the wrong, he surely ought by an open recantation to make all the amends now possible to the persecuted, the calumniated, the murdered defenders of liberty. If he was still convinced that his old opinions were sound, he ought manfully to cast to his lot with a non-juris. Respect, it was said, is due to him who ingeniously confesses an error. Respect is due to him who courageously suffers for an error, but it is difficult to respect a minister of religion who, while asserting that he still adheres to the principles of the Tories, saves his benefits by taking an oath which can be honestly taken only on the principles of the Whigs. These reproaches, though perhaps not altogether unjust, were unseasonable. The wiser and more moderate Whigs, sensible that the throne of William could not stand firm if it had not a wider basis than their own party, abstained a disconjecture from snares and infections, and exerted themselves to remove the scruples and to soothe the irritated feelings of the clergy. The collective power of the rectors and the vikars of England was immense, and it was much better that they should swear for the most flimsy reason that could be devised by a softest than they should not swear at all. It soon became clear that the arguments were swearing, back to as they were by some of the strongest motives which can influence the human mind had prevailed. Above 2930 of the professions submitted to the law, most of the defiance of the capital, who then formed a separate class, and who were as much distinguished from the rural clergy by liberality of sentiment as by eloquence and learning, gave in their adhesion to the government early and with every sign of cordial attachment. Eighty of them were paired together in full term to Westminster Hall and were there sworn. The ceremony occupied so long a time that little else was done that day in the course of chancellery in King's bench, but in general the compliance was tardy, sad, and sullen. Many, no doubt, deliberately sacrificed the principal to interest. Conscious told them that they were committing a sin, but they had not fortitude to resign the parsonage, the garden, the glee, and to go forth without knowing where to find a meal or a roof for themselves and their little ones. Many swore with doubts and misgivings. Some declared, at the moment of taking the oath, that they did not mean to promise that they would not submit to James if he should ever be in a condition to demand their allegiance. Some clergymen in the North were, on the 1st of August, going in a company to swear when they were met on the road by the news of the battle, which had been fought four days before in the past of chili crinks. They immediately turned back and did not again leave their homes on the same errand till it was clear that Dundee's victory had made no change in the state of public affairs. Even of those whose understanding was fully convinced that obedience was due to the existing government, very few guessed the book with the hardiness with which they had formally plighted their face to Charles and James. Still, the thing was done. Ten thousand clergymen had solemnly called heaven to attest their promise that they would be true legemen to Williams, and this promise, though it by no means warranted him in expecting that they would strenuously support him, had at least deprived them of a great part of their power to injure him. They could not, without entirely forfeiting that public respect on which their influence depended, attack, except in an indirect and timidly cautious manner, the throne of one whom they had, in the presence of God, vowed to obey as their king. Some of them, it is true, affected to read the prayers for the new solvents in a peculiar tone which could not be misunderstood. Others were guilty of still-grocer indecency. Thus, one rich, just after praying for William and Mary, in the most solemn office of religion, took off a glass to their damnation. Another, after performing divine service on a fast day appointed by their authority, dined on a pigeon-pie, and while he cut it up uttered a wish that it was a youth's super's heart, but such audacious wickedness was doubtless rare and was rather interest to the church than to the government. End of Section 8. Section 9 of the History of England from the accession of James II, Volume 3, Chapter 14. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The History of England from the Accession of James II, Volume 3, Chapter 14, by Thomas Bavington Macaulay. Section 9. Those clergymen and members of the universities who incurred the penalties of the law were about four hundred in number. Foremost in rank stood the primate, and six of his suffragans, Turner of Ely, Lloyd of Norwich, Frampton of Gloucester, Lake of Chichester, White of Peterborough, and Cairn of Bath and Wells. Thomas of Worcester would have made a seventh, but he died three weeks before the day of suspension. On his deathbed he adjured his clergy to be true to the cause of hereditary right, and declared that those divines who tried to make out that the oaths might be taken without any departure from the loyal doctrines of the Church of England seemed to him to reason more Jesuitically than the Jesuits themselves. Cairn, who both in intellectual and in moral qualities ranked highest among the non-jewaring prelates, hesitated long. There were few clergymen who could have submitted the new government with a better grace. For in the times when non-resistance and passive obedience were the favourite themes of his brethren, he had scarcely ever alluded to politics in the pulpit. He owned that the arguments in favour of swearing were very strong. He went, indeed, so far as to say that his scruples would be completely removed if he could be convinced that James had entered into engagements for sealing Ireland to the French King. It is evident, therefore, that the difference between Cairn and the Whigs was not a difference of principle. He thought with them that misgovernment carried to a certain point justified a transfer of allegiance, and doubted only whether the misgovernment of James had been carried quite to that point. Nate the Good Bishop actually began to prepare a pastoral letter explaining his reasons for taking the oaths. But before it was finished he received information which convinced him that Ireland had not been made over to France. Dites came thick upon him, he threw his unfinished letter into the fire, and implored his less scrupulous friends not to urge him further. He was sure, he said, that they had acted uprightly. He was glad that they could do with a clear conscience what he shrank from doing. He felt the force of their reasoning. He was all but persuaded, and he was afraid to listen longer lest he should be quite persuaded for, if he should comply, and his misgivings should afterwards return, he should be the most miserable of men. Not for wealth, not for a palace, not for a peerage, would he run the smallest risk of ever feeling the torments of river Morse. It is a curious fact that of the seven non-juring prelates, the only one whose name carries with it much weight was on the point of swearing, and was prevented from doing so, as he himself acknowledged, not by the force of reason, but by a morbid scrupulosity which he did not advise others to imitate. Among the priests who refused the oaths were some men eminent in the learned world, as grammarians, chronologists, canonists, and antiquaries, and a very few who were distinguished by wit and eloquence, but scarcely one can be named who was qualified to discuss any large question of morals or politics, scarcely one whose writings do not indicate either extreme feebleness or extreme flightiness of mind. Those who distrust the judgment of a wig on this point will probably allow some weight to the opinion which was expressed many years after the revolution by a philosopher of whom the Tories are justly proud. Johnson, after passing in review the celebrated divines who had thought it sinful to swear allegiance to William III, and George I, pronounced that, in the whole body of non-juris, there was one, and only one, who could reason. The non-jurer in whose favour Johnson made this exception was Charles Leslie. Leslie had, before the revolution, been Chancellor of the Diocese of Connor in Ireland. He had been forward in opposition to Tircanel, had, as a justice of the peace for Monaghan, refused to acknowledge a papist as sheriff of that county, and had been so courageous as to send some officers of the Irish army to prison for marauding. But the doctrine of non-resistance, such as it had been taught by Anglican divines in the days of the Ryehouse plot, was immovably fixed in his mind. When the state of Ulster became such that a protestant who remained there could hardly avoid being either a rebel or a martyr, Leslie fled to London. His abilities and his connections were such that he might easily have obtained high preferment in the Church of England. But he took his place in the front rank of the Jacobite body and remained there, steadfastly through all the dangers and vicissitudes of three and thirty troubled years. They're constantly engaged in theological controversy with dais, jews, succinians, Presbyterians, papists, and Quakers. He found time to be one of the most voluminous political writers of his age. Of all the non-juring clergy, he was the best qualified to discuss constitutional questions. For before he had taken orders, he had resided long in the temple, and had been studying English history and law, while most of the other chiefs of the schism had been pouring over the acts of Calcedon or seeking for wisdom in the taggern of Onkelos. In 1689, however, Leslie was almost unknown in England. Among the divines who incurred suspension on the 1st of August in that year, the highest in popular estimation was without dispute Dr. William Sherlock. Perhaps no simple presbyter of the Church of England has ever possessed a greater authority over his brethren than belonged to Sherlock at the time of the Revolution. He was not of the first rank among his contemporaries as a scholar, as a preacher, as a writer on theology, or as a writer on politics, but in all the four characters he had distinguished himself. The perspicuity and liveliness of his style have been praised by prior and Addison. The facility and acidity with which he wrote are sufficiently proved by the bulk and at the dates of his works. There were indeed among the clergy men of brighter genius and men of wider attainments, but during a long period there was none who more completely represented the order, none who on all subjects spoke more precisely the sense of the Anglican priesthood without any taint of latitudarianism, of puritanism, or of popery. He had, in the days of the Exclusion Bill, when the power of the dissenters was very great in Parliament and in the country written strongly against the sin of non-conformity. When the Ryhouse plot was detected he had zealously defended by Tung and Penn the doctrine of non-resistance. His services to the cause of episcopacy and monarchy were so highly valued that he was made master of the temple. A pension was also bestowed on him by Charles, but that pension James soon took away for Sherlock, although he held himself bound to pay passive obedience to the civil power, held himself equally bound to combat religious errors, and was the keenest and most laborious of that host of controversialists who, in the day of peril, manfully defended the Protestant faith. In little more than two years he published sixteen treatises, some of them large books against the high pretensions of Rome. Not content with the easy victories which he gained over such feeble antagonists as those who were quartered at Larkinwell and Savoy, he had the courage to measure his strength with no lesser champion than Bossway, and came out of the conflict without discredit. Nevertheless Sherlock still continued to maintain that no oppression could justify Christians in resisting the kingly authority. When the Convention was about to meet, he strongly recommended, in a tract which was considered as a manifesto of a large part of the clergy, that James should be invited to return on such conditions as might secure the laws and religion of the nation. The vote which placed William and Mary on the throne filled Sherlock with sorrow and anger. He is said to have exclaimed that if the Convention was determined on a revolution, the clergy would find forty thousand good churchmen to effect a restoration. Against the new oves he gave his opinion plainly and warmly. He declared himself at a loss to understand how any honest man could doubt that by the powers that be, Saint Paul meant legitimate powers, and no others. No name was, in 1689, cited by the Jacobites as proudly and fondly as that of Sherlock. Before the end of 1690 that name excited very different feelings. A few other non jurors ought to be particularly noticed. High among them in rank was George Hicks, Dean of Worcester. Of all the Englishmen of his time, he was the most versed in the old Teutonic languages, and his knowledge of the early Christian literature was extensive. As to his capacity for political discussions, it may be sufficient to say that his favourite argument for passive obedience was drawn from the story of the Theban Legion. He was the younger brother of that unfortunate John Hicks, who had been found hidden in the malt house of Alice Nile. James had, in spite of all solicitation, put both John Hicks and Alice Nile to death. Persons who did not know the strength of the Dean's principles thought that he might possibly feel some resentment on this account, for he was of no gentle forgiving temper, and could retain, during many years, a bitter remembrance of small injuries. But he was strong in his religious and political faith. He reflected that the sufferers were dissenters, and he submitted to the will of the lords anointed not only with patience, but with complacency. He became indeed a more loving subject than ever from the time when his brother was hanged, and his brother's benefactor is beheaded. While almost all other clergymen, appalled by the declaration of indulgence, and by the proceedings of the High Commission, were beginning to think that they pushed the doctrine of non-resistance a little too far, he was writing a vindication of his darling legend, and trying to convince the troops at Owenslow that, if James should be pleased to massacre them all as Maximian had massacred the Theban Legion for refusing to commit idolatry, it would be their duty to pile their arms and meetly to receive the crown of martyrdom. To do Hicks justice, his whole conduct after the revolution proved that his servility had sprung neither from fear, nor from cupidity, but from near-bigotry. Jeremy Collier, who was turned out of the Preachship of the Roles, was a man of a much higher order. He is well entitled to grateful and respectful mention, for to his eloquence and courage is to be chiefly ascribed the purification of our higher literature for from that foul taint which had been contracted during the anti-Puritan reaction. He was, in the full force of the words, a good man. He was also a man of eminent abilities, a great master of sarcasm, a great master of rhetoric. His reading, too, though undigested, was of immense extent, but his mind was narrow. His reasoning, even when he was so fortunate as to have a good cause to defend, was singularly futile and inconclusive, and his brain was almost turned by pride, not personal but professional. In his view, a priest was the highest of human beings except a bishop. Reverence and submission were due from the best and the greatest of the laity, to the least respectable of the clergy. However ridiculous a man in holy orders might make himself, it was impiety to laugh at him. So nervously sensitive indeed was Collier on this point, that he thought it profane to throw any reflection even on the ministers of false religions. He laid it down as a rule that mufties and augurs ought always to be mentioned with respect. He blamed Dryden for sneering at the higher advance of Apis. He praised Racine for giving dignity to the character of a priest of Baal. He praised Cornel for not bringing that learned and reverent divine Tiresias on the stage in the tragedy of Oedipus. The omission, Collier owned, spoiled the dramatic effect of the piece, but the holy function was much too solemn to be played with. Nay, incredible as it may seem, he thought it improper for the laity to sneer at Presbyterian preachers. Indeed, his Jacobitism was little more than one of the forms in which his zeal for the dignity of his profession manifested itself. He abhorred the revolution, less as a rising up of subjects against their king than as a rising up of the laity against the saccadatal caste. The doctrines which had been proclaimed from the pulpit during thirty years had been treated with contempt by the convention. A new government had been set up in opposition to the wishes of the spiritual peers in the House of Lords and of the priesthood throughout the country. A secular assembly had taken upon itself to pass a law requiring archbishops and bishops, rectors and vicars, to abjure, on pain of deprivation, what they had been teaching all their lives. Whatever meaner spirits might do, Collier was determined not to be led in triumph by the victorious enemies of his order. To the last he would confront, with the authoritative port of an ambassador of heaven, the anger of the powers and principalities of the earth. In parts Collier was the first man among the non-juris. In Eredition the first place must be assigned to Henry Dodwell, who, for the unpardonable crime of having a small estate in Mayo, had been attainted by the Popish parliament at Dublin. He was Camdenian professor of ancient history at the University of Oxford, and had already acquired considerable celebrity by chronological and geographical researches. But, though he never could be persuaded to take orders, theology was his favourite study. He was doubtless, a pious and sincere man. He had perused innumerable volumes in various languages, and had indeed acquired more learning than his slender faculties were able to bear. The small intellectual spark which he possessed was put out by the fuel. Some of his books seemed to have been written in a madhouse, and, though filled with proofs of his immense reading, degrade him to the level of James Naylor and Ludwig Muggleton. He began a dissertation intended to prove that the law of nations was a divine revelation made to the family which was preserved in the Ark. He published a treatise in which he maintained that a marriage between a member of the Church of England and a dissenter was anality, and that the couple were, in the sight of heaven, guilty of adultery. He defended the use of instrumental music and public worship on the ground that the notes of the organ had a power to counteract the influence of devils on the spinal marrow of human beings. In his treatise on this subject he remarked that there was high authority for the opinion that the spinal marrow, when decomposed, became a serpent. Whether this opinion were or were not correct, he thought it unnecessary to decide. Perhaps, he said, the eminent man in whose works it was found, had meant only to express figuratively the great truths that the old serpent operates on as chiefly through the spinal marrow. Dodwell's speculations on the state of human beings after death are, if possible, more extraordinary still. He tells us that our souls are naturally mortal. Annihilation is the fate of the greater part of mankind, of heathens, of mohammedons, of uncristened babes. The gift of immortality is conveyed in the sacrament of baptism, but to the efficacy of the sacrament it is absolutely necessary that the water be poured and the words pronounced by a priest who has been ordained by a bishop. In the course of things, therefore, all Presbyterians, independents, Baptists and Quakers would, like the inferior animals, cease to exist. But Dodwell was far too good a churchman to let off dissenters so easily. He informs them that, as they have had an opportunity of hearing the gospel preached and might, but for their own perverseness, have received Episcopalian baptism, God will, by an extraordinary act of power, bestow immortality on them in order that they may be tormented for ever and ever. No man abhorred the growing latitudinarianism of those times more than Dodwell. Yet no man had more reason to rejoice in it, for in the earlier part of the 17th century a speculator who had dared to affirm that the human soul is by its nature mortal and does in the great majority of cases actually die with the body, would have been burned alive in Smithfield. Even in days which Dodwell could well remember such heretics as himself would have been thought fortunate if they escaped with life. Their backs flayed, their ears clipped, their noses slit, their tongues bored through with red hot iron, and their eyes knocked out with brick bats. With the non jurors, however, the author of this theory was still the great Mr. Dodwell, and some who thought it culpable lenity to tolerate a Presbyterian meeting, thought it, at the same time, gross illiberality to blame a learned and pious Jacobite for denying a doctrine so utterly unimportant to a religious point of view as that of the immortality of the soul. Two other non jurors deserve special mention, less on account of their abilities in learning than on account of their rare integrity and of their not less rare candor. These were John Kettlewell, Rector of Coals Hill, and John Fitzwilliam, Cannon of Windsor. It is remarkable that both of these men had seen much of Lord Russell and that both, though differing from him in political opinions and strongly disapproving the part which he had taken in the weak plot, had thought highly of his character and had been sincere mourners for his death. He had sent to Kettlewell an affectionate message from the scaffold in Lincoln's infield, Lady Russell, to her latest day, loved, trusted, and revered Fitzwilliam, who, when she was a girl, had been the friend of her father, the virtuous Southampton. The two clergymen agreed in refusing to swear, but they, from that moment, took different paths. Kettlewell was one of the most active members of his party. He declined no drudgery in the common cause, provided only that it were such drudgery as did not misbecome on his man. And he defended his opinions in several tracts, which gave a much higher notion of his sincerity than of his judgment or acuteness. Fitzwilliam thought he had done enough in quitting his pleasant dwelling and garden under the shadows in George's chapel, and in betaking himself with his books to a small lodging in an attic. He could not, with a safe conscience, acknowledge William and Mary, but he did not conceive that he was bound to be always stirring up sedition against them, and he passed the last years of his life under the powerful protection of the House of Bedford, in innocent and studious repose. The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 3, Chapter 14, by Thomas Bavington Macaulay, Section 10. Among the less distinguished divines who forfeited their benefices were dukely as many good men, but it is certain that the moral character of the non-jurors as a class did not stand high. It seems hard to impute laxity of principal to persons who undoubtedly made a great sacrifice to principal, and yet experience abundantly proves that many who are capable of making a great sacrifice when their blood is heated by conflict and when the public eye is fixed upon them are not capable of persevering long in the daily practice of obscure virtues. It is by no means improbable that zealots may have given their lives for a religion which had never effectually restrained their vindictive or their licentious passions. We learn indeed from fathers of the highest authority that even in the purest ages of the church some confessors who had manfully refused to save themselves from torments and death by throwing frankincense on the altar of Jupiter afterwards brought scandal on the Christian name by gross fraud and debauchery. For the non-juring divines great allowance must in fairness be made. They were doubtless in a most trying situation. In general a schism which divides a religious community divides the laity as well as the clergy. The seceding pastors therefore carry with them a large part of their flocks and are consequently assured of the maintenance. But the schism of 1689 scarcely extended beyond the clergy. The law required the rector to take the oath as ought to quit his living. But no oaths, no acknowledgement of the title of the new king and queen was required from the parishioner as a qualification for attending divine service or for receiving the Eucharist. Not one in fifty therefore of those laymen who disapproved of the revolution thought himself bound to quit his pew in the old church where the old liturgy was still red where the old vestments were still worn and to follow the ejected priest to a conventical too which was not protected by the Toleration Act. Thus the new sect was a sect of preachers without hearers, and such preachers could not make a livelihood by preaching. In London, indeed, and in some other large towns, those vehement Jacobites whom nothing would satisfy but to hear King James and the Prince of Wales prayed for by name were sufficiently numerous to make up a few small congregations which met secretly and under constant fear of the constables in rooms so mean that the meeting heizes of the Puritan dissenters might by comparison be called palaces. Even Collier, who had all the qualities which attract large audiences, was reduced to be the minister of a little knot of malcontents whose oratory was on the second floor in the city. But the non-Joring clergymen who were able to obtain even the pittance by officiating at such places were very few. Of the rest some had independent means, some lived by literature, one or two practiced physics. Thomas Wagstaff, for example, who had been Chancellor of Lichfield, had many patients and made himself conspicuous by always visiting them in full canonicals. But these were exceptions. Industrial poverty is a state by no means unfavorable to virtue, but it is dangerous to be at once poor and idle, and most of the clergymen who had refused to swear found themselves thrown on the world with nothing to eat and with nothing to do. They naturally became beggars and loungers. Considering themselves as martyrs suffering the public cause, they were not ashamed to ask any good churchmen for a guinea. Most of them passed their lives in running about from one Tory coffee-house to another, abusing the dutch hearing and spreading reports that within a month his majesty would certainly be on English ground, and wondering who would have Salisbury when Burnett was hanged. During the session of parliament the lobbies and the court of requests were crowded with deprived parson's, asking who was up and what the numbers were on the last division. Many of the ejected divines became domesticated as chaplains, tutors and spiritual directors in the houses of opulent jackabites. In a situation of this kind a man of pure and extorted character, such a man as Ken, was among the non-jurus, and what among the non-conformists may preserve his dignity, and may, much more than repay by his example and his instructions the benefits which he receives, but to a person whose virtue is not high-toned this way of life is full of peril. If he is of a quiet disposition he is in danger of sinking into a servile sensual drowsy parasite. If he is of an active and aspiring nature it may be feared that he would come expert in those bad arts, by which more easily than by faithful service retainers make themselves agreeable or formidable. To discover the weak side of every character, to flatter every passion and prejudice, to sow discord and jealousy where love and confidence ought to exist, to watch the moment of indiscreet openness for the purpose of extracting secrets important to the prosperity and honour of families, such are the practices by which keen and restless spirits have too often avenged themselves for the humiliation of dependence. The public voice loudly accused many non-jurus of requiting the hospitality of their benefactors with the villainy as black as that of the hypocrite depicted in the masterpiece of Molière. Indeed, when Kiber undertook to adapt that noble comedy to the English stage, he made his tattoo of a non-jurer, and Johnson, who cannot be supposed to have been prejudiced against the non-jurus, frankly owned that Kiber had done them no wrong. There can be no doubt that the schism caused by the oaths would have been far more formidable if, at this crisis, any extensive change had been made in the government or in the ceremonial of the established church. It is a highly instructive fact that those enlightened and tolerant divines who most ardently desired such a change afterwards saw reason to be thankful that their favourite project had failed. Wigs and Tories had, in the late session, combined to get rid of Nottingham's comprehension bill by voting an address which requested the king to refer the whole subject to the convocation. Burnett foresaw the effect of this vote. The whole scheme, he said, was utterly ruined. Many of his friends, however, thought differently, and among these was Tillotson. Of all the members of the low church party, Tillotson stood highest in general estimation. As a preacher, he was thought by his contemporaries to have surpassed all rivals living more dead. Posterity has reversed this judgment. Yet Tillotson still keeps his place as a legitimate English classic. His highest flights were indeed far below those of Taylor, of Barrow, and of South, but his oratory was more correct and equitable than theirs. No quaint conceits, no pedantic quotations from Talmudists and Scholiasts, no mean images, buffoon stories, scurrilous invectives ever marred the effect of his grave and temperate discourses. His reasoning was just sufficiently profound and sufficiently refined to be followed by a popular audience, with that slight degree of intellectual exertion, which is a pleasure. His style is not brilliant, but it is pure, transparently clear, and equally free from the levity and from the stiffness which disfigure the sermons of some eminent divines of the seventeenth century. He is always serious. Yet there is about his manner a certain graceful ease which marks him as a man who knows the world, who has lived in popular cities and in splendid courts, and who has conversed not only with books, but with lawyers and merchants, wits and beauties, statesmen and princes. The greatest charm of his compositions, however, is driven from the benignity and candour which appear in every line, and which shone forth not less conspicuously in his life than in his writings. As a theologian, Tillotson was certainly not less latitudinarian than Burnett. Yet many of those clergymen to whom Burnett was an object of implacable aversion spake of Tillotson with tenderness and respect. It is therefore not strange that the two friends should have formed different estimates of the temper of the priesthood, and should have expected different results from the meeting of the convocation. Tillotson was not displeased with the vote of the commons. He conceived that changes made in religious institutions by mere secular authority might disgust many churchmen who would yet be perfectly willing to vote in an ecclesiastical synod for changes more extensive still, and his opinion had great weight with the king. It was resolved that the convocation should meet at the beginning of the next session of Parliament, and that in the meantime a commission should issue empowering some eminent divines to examine the liturgy, the cannons, and the whole system of jurisprudence administered by the courts-christian, and to report on the alterations which it might be desirable to make. Most of the bishops who had taken the oaths were in this commission and with them were joined twenty priests of great note. Of the twenty, Tillotson was the most important, for he was known to speak the sense both of the king and of the queen. Among those commissioners who looked up to Tillotson as their chief were Stillingfleet, Dean of St Paul's, Sharp, Dean of Norwich, Patrick, Dean of Peterborough, Tennyson, Rector of St Martin's, and Fowler, to whose judicious firmness was chiefly to be ascribed the determination of the London clergy not to read the Declaration of Indulgence. With such men as those who have been named were mingled some divines who belonged to the High Church Party. Conspicuous among these were two of the rulers of Oxford, Aldrich and Jane. Aldrich had recently been appointed Dean of Christchurch in the room of the Papist Massie, whom James had in direct violation of the laws placed at the head of that great college. The new Dean was a polite though not a profound scholar and a jovial hospitable gentleman. He was the author of some theological tracts which have long been forgotten and of a compendium of logic which is still used, but the best works which he has bequeathed to his posterity are his catches. Jane, the king's professor of divinity, was a graver but a less estimable man. He had borne the chief part in framing that decree by which his university ordered the works of Milton and Buchanan to be publicly burned in the schools. A few years later, irritated and alarmed by the persecution of the bishops, and by the confiscation of the revenues of Magdalen College, he had renounced the doctrine of non-resistance, had repaired to the headquarters of the Prince of Orange, and had assured his highness that Oxford would willingly coin her plate for the support of the war against her oppressor. During a short time Jane was generally considered as a wig and was sharply lampooned by some of his old allies. He was so fortunate as to have a name which was an excellent mark for the learned punsters of the university. Several epigrams were written on the double face to Jane's, who, having got a professorship by looking one way, now hoped to get a bishopric by looking another. That he hoped to get a bishopric was perfectly true. He demanded the sea of Exeter as a reward due to his services. He was refused. The refusal convinced him that the church had as much to apprehend from latitudinarianism as from potpourri, and he speedily became a Tory again. Early in October the commissioners assembled in the Jerusalem Chamber. At their first meeting they had determined to propose that, in the public services of the church, lessons taken from the canonical books of scripture shall be substituted for the lessons taken from the apocrypha. At the second meeting a strange question was raised by the very last person who ought to have raised it. Spratt, Bishop of Rochester, who had without any scruples sat during two years in the Unconstitutional Tribunal, which had in the late reign oppressed and pillaged the church of which he was a ruler, but he had now become scrupulous and expressed a doubt whether the commission were legal. To a plain understanding his objections seemed to be mere quibbles. The commission gave power neither to make laws nor to administer laws, but simply to inquire into report. Even without a royal commission, Tillotson, Patrick and Stillingfleet might, with perfect propriety, have met to discuss the state and prospects of the church and to consider whether it would or would not be desirable to make some concession to the dissenters. And how could it be a crime for subjects to do so at the request of their sovereign that which it would have been innocent and laudable for them to do without any such request? Spratt, however, was sickened by Jane. There was a sharp altercation and Lloyd, Bishop of St. Assaf, who, with many good qualities, had an irritable temper, was provoked into saying something about a spy's. Spratt withdrew and came no more. His example was soon followed by Jane and Aldridge. The commissioners proceeded to take into consideration the question of the posture of the Eucharist. It was determined to recommend that a communicant, who, after confidence with his minister, should declare that he could not conscientiously receive the bread and wine kneeling, might receive them sitting. Mew, Bishop of Winchester, an honest man, but illiterate, weak even in his best days, and now fast-sinking into dotage, protested against this concession, and withdrew from the assembly. The other members continued to apply themselves vigorously to their task, and no more secessions took place, though there were great differences of opinion, and though the debates were sometimes warm. The highest churchmen who still remained were Dr. William Beveridge, Archdeacon of Colchester, who many years later became Bishop of St. Assaf, and Dr. John Scott, the same who had prayed by the deathbed of Jeffries. The most active among the latitudinarians appear to have been Burnett, Fowler, and Tennyson. The baptismal service was repeatedly discussed. As a matter of form, the commissioners were disposed to be indulgent. They were generally willing to admit infants into the church without sponsors and without the sign of the cross. But the majority, after much debate, steadily refused to soften down or explain away those words which, to all minds not sophisticated, appear to assert the regenerating virtue of the sacrament. As to the surplus, the commissioners determined to recommend that a large discretion should be left to the bishops. Expedients were devised by which a person who had received Presbyterian ordination might, without admitting either expressly or by implication the invalidity of that ordination become a minister of the Church of England. The ecclesiastical calendar was carefully revised. The great festivals were retained, but it was not thought desirable that St. Valentine, St. Chad, St. Swithin, St. Edward, King of the West Saxons, St. Dunstan, and St. Alphage should share the honours of St. John and St. Paul, or that the Church should appear to class the ridiculous fable of the discovery of the cross, with fact so awfully important as the nativity, the passion, the resurrection, and the ascension of her Lord. The Athanasian creed caused much perplexity. Most of the commissioners were equally unwilling to give up the doctrinal clauses and to retain the damnatory clauses. Burnett, Fowler, and Tillotson were desirous to strike this famous symbol out of the liturgy altogether. Burnett brought forward one argument which to himself probably did not appear to have much weight, but which was admirably calculated to perplex his opponents Beverage and Scott. The counts of Ephesus had always been reverenced by Anglican divines as a synod which had truly represented the whole body of the faithful, and which had been divinely guided in the way of truth. The voice of that council was the voice of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, not yet corrupted by superstition or rent asunder viscism. During more than 12 centuries, the world had not seen an ecclesiastical assembly which had an equal claim to the respect of believers. The council of Ephesus had, in the plainest terms and under the most terrible penalties, forbidden Christians to frame or to impose upon their brethren any creed other than the creed settled by the Nicene Fathers. It should seem therefore that if the council of Ephesus was really under the direction of the Holy Spirit, whoever uses the Athenian creed must in the very act of uttering an anathema against his neighbours bring down an anathema on his own head. In spite of the authority of the Ephesian Fathers, the majority of the commissioners determined to leave the Athenian creed in the prayer book, but they proposed to add a rubric drawn up by Stillingfleet, which declared that the damn natory clauses were to be understood to apply only to such as obstinately deny to the substance of the Christian faith. Orthodox believers were therefore permitted to hope that the heretic who had honestly and humbly sought for truth would not be everlasting punished for having failed to find it. Tennyson was entrusted with the business of examining the liturgy and of collecting all those expressions to which objections have been made either by theological or by literary critics. It was determined to remove some obvious blemishes, and it would have been wise in the commissioners to stop here. Unfortunately they were determined to rewrite a great part of the prayer book. It was a bold undertaking, for in general the style of that volume is such as cannot be improved. The English liturgy indeed gains by being compared, even with those fine ancient liturgies from which it is to a great extent taken. The essential qualities of devotional eloquence, conciseness, majestic simplicity, pathetic earnestness or supplication sobered by a profound reverence are common between the translations and the originals. But in the subordinate graces of diction the originals must be allowed to be far inferior to the translations, and the reason is obvious. The technical phraseology of Christianity did not become a part of the Latin language till that language had passed the age of maturity and was sinking into barbarism. But the technical phraseology of Christianity was found in the Anglo-Saxon and in the northern French, long before the union of those two dialects had produced a third dialect superior to either. The Latin of the Roman Catholic services, therefore, is Latin in the last stage of decay. The English of our services is English in all the vigor and suppleness of early youth. To the great Latin writers, to Terence Lucretius, to Cicero and Caesar, to Tacitus and Quintilian, the noblest compositions of Ambrose and Gregory would have seemed to be not merely bad writing, but senseless gibberish. The diction of our Book of Common Prayer, on the other hand, has directly or indirectly contributed to form the diction of almost every great English writer and has extorted the admiration of the most accomplished infidels, and of the most accomplished non-conformists of men such as David Hume and Robert Hall. The History of England, from the accession of James II, Volume 3, Chapter 14, by Thomas Bavington Macaulay, Section 11. The style of the liturgy, however, did not satisfy the doctors of the Jerusalem Chamber. Theyverted the colects too short and too dry, and Patrick was entrusted with the duty of expanding and ornamenting them. In one respect, at least, the choice seems to have been unexceptionable, for if we judge by the way in which Patrick paraphrased the most sublime Hebrew poetry, we shall probably be of opinion that, whether he was or was not qualified to make the colects better, no man that ever lived was more competent to make them longer. It mattered little, however, whether the recommendations of the commission were good or bad. They were all doomed before they were known. The rits, summoning the convocation of the province of Canterbury, had been issued, and the clergy were everywhere in a state of violent excitement. They had just taken the oaths, and were smarting from the earnest reproofs of non-juris, from the insolent taunts of wigs, and often, undoubtedly, from the stings of remorse. The announcement that a convocation was to sit for the purpose of deliberating on a plan of comprehension roused all the strongest passions of the priest who had just complied with the law, and was ill-satisfied or half-satisfied with himself for complying. He had an opportunity of contributing to defeat a favourite scheme of that government which had exacted from him under severe penalties, a submission not easily to be reconciled to his conscience or his pride. He had an opportunity of signalising his zeal for that church whose characteristic doctrines he had been accused of deserting for Luca. She was now, he conceived, threatened by a danger as great as that of the preceding year. The latitudinarians of 1689 were not less eager to humble and to ruin her than the Jesuits of 1688. The Toleration Act had done for the dissenters quite as much as was compatible with her dignity and security, and nothing more ought to be conceded, not the hem of one of her vestments, not an epithet from the beginning to the end of her liturgy. All the reproaches which had been thrown on the Ecclesiastical Commission of James were transferred to the Ecclesiastical Commission of William. The two commissions indeed had nothing but the name in common, but the name was associated with illegality and oppression, with the violation of dwellings and the confiscation of free-holds, and was therefore assiduously sounded with no small effect by the tongues of the spiteful in the ears of the ignorant. The king, too, it was said, was not sound. He conformed indeed to the established worship, but his was a local and occasional conformity. For some ceremonies to which high churchmen were attached, he had a distaste which he was at no pains to conceal. One of his first acts had been to give orders that in his private chapel the service should be said instead of being sung, and this arrangement, though warranted by the rubric, caused much murmuring. It was known that he was so profane as to sneer at a practice which had been sanctioned by high Ecclesiastical authority, the practice of touching for the scroffula. This ceremony had come down almost unaltered from the darkest of the Dark Ages to the time of Newton and Locke. The stewards frequently dispensed the healing influences in the banqueting-house. The days on which this miracle was to be wrought were fixed at sittings of the Privy Council, and were solemnly notified by the clergy in all the parish churches of the realm. When the appointed time came, several divines in full canonicals stood round the canopy of state. The surgeon of the royal household introduced a sick. A passage from the sixteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Mark was read. When the words, They shall lay their hands on the sick, and they shall recover, had been pronounced, there was a pause, and one of the sick was brought up to the king. His majesty stroked the ulcers and swellings, and hung around the patient's neck a white ribbon to which was fastened a gold coin. The other sufferers were then led up in succession, and as each was touched, the chaplain repeated the incantation, They shall lay their hands on the sick, and they shall recover. Then came the epistle, prayers, and Tiffany's and a benediction. The service may still be found in the prayer books of the reign of Anne. Indeed, it was not till some time after the accession of George I that the University of Oxford ceased to reprint the office of healing together with the liturgy. Theologians of eminent learning, ability, and virtue gave the sanction of their authority to this mummery, and, what is stranger still, medical men of high note believed, or affected, to believe in the balsamic virtues of the royal hand, we must suppose that every surgeon who attended Charles II was a man of high repute for skill, and more than one of the surgeons who attended Charles II has left us a solemn profession of faith in the king's miraculous power. One of them is not ashamed to tell us that the gift was communicated by the unction administered at the coronation, that the cures were so numerous and sometimes so rapid that they could not be attributed to any natural cause, that the failures were to be ascribed to want of faith on the part of the patients, that Charles once handled the scruffy Quaker and made him a healthy man and a sound churchman in a moment, that if those who had been healed lost or sold the piece of gold which had been hung around their necks the ulcers broke forth again and could be removed only by a second touch and a second talisman. We cannot wonder that when men of science gravely repeated such nonsense the vulgar should believe it. Still less can we wonder that the wretches tortured by disease over which the natural remedies had no power should eagerly drink in tales of preternatural cures, for nothing is so credulous as misery. The crowds which repaired to the palace on the days of healing were immense. Charles II in the course of his reign touched near a hundred thousand persons. The number seems to have increased or diminished as the king's popularity raised or fell. During that Tory reaction which followed the dissolution of the Oxford parliament, the press to get near him was terrific. In 1682 he performed the right 8,500 times. In 1684 the throng was such that six or seven of the sick were trampled to death. James, in one of his progresses, touched 800 persons in the choir of the Cathedral of Chester. The expense of the ceremony was little less than £10,000 a year, and would have been much greater, but for the vigilance of the royal surgeons whose business it was to examine the applicants and to distinguish those who came for the cure from those who came for the gold. William had too much sense to be duped and too much honesty to bear a part in what he knew to be an impostor. It is a superstition, he exclaimed, when he heard that at the close of Lent his palace was besieged by a crowd of the sick. Give the poor creatures some money and send them away. On one single occasion he was importuned into laying his hand on a patient. God give you better health, he said, and more sense. The parents of scruffy-less children cried out against his cruelty. Bigots lifted up their hands and eyes in horror at his impiety. Jacobites sarcastically praised him for not presuming to arrogate to himself a power which belonged only to legitimate sovereigns. And even some wigs thought that he acted unwisely in treating with such marked contempt a superstition which had a strong hold on the vulgar mind, but William was not to be moved, and was accordingly set down by many high churchmen as either an infidel or a puritan. The chief cause, however, which at this time made even the most moderate plan of comprehension hateful to the priesthood, still remains to be mentioned. What Burnett had foreseen and foretold had come to pass. There was, throughout the clerical profession, a strong disposition to retaliate on the Presbyterians of England the wrongs of the Episcopalians of Scotland. It could not be denied that even the highest churchmen had in the summer of 1688 generally declared themselves willing to give up many things for the sake of union. But it was said, and not without plausibility, that what was passing on the other side of the border proved union on any reasonable terms to be impossible. With what face, it was asked, can those who will make no concession to us where we are weak blame us for refusing to make any concession to them where we are strong? We cannot judge correctly of the principles and feelings of a sect from the professions which it makes in a time of feebleness and suffering. If we would know what the Puritan spirit really is, we must observe the Puritan when he is dominant. He was dominant here in the last generation, and his little finger was thicker than the loins of the prelates. He drove hundreds of quiet students from their cloisters, and thousands of respectable divines from their passenages for the crime of refusing to sign his covenant. No tenderness was shown to learning, to genius, or to sanctity. Such men as Hall and Sanderson, Chillingworth and Hammond, were not only plundered but flung into prisons, and exposed to all the rudeness of brutal jailers. It was made a crime to read fine psalms and prayers bequeathed to the faithful by Ambrose and Chrysostom. At length the nation became weary of the reign of the saints. The fallen dynasty and the fallen hierarchy were restored. The Puritan was in his turn subjected to disabilities and penalties, and he immediately found out that it was barbarous to punish men for entertaining conscientious scruples about a garb, about a ceremony, about the functions of ecclesiastical officers. His piteous complaints, and his arguments in favour of toleration, had at length imposed on many well-meaning persons. Even zealous churchmen had begun to entertain a hope that the severe discipline which he had undergone had made him candid, moderate, charitable. Had this really been so, it would doubtless have been our duty to treat his scruples with extreme tenderness. But while we were considering what we could do to meet his wishes in England, he had obtained ascendancy in Scotland, and in an instant he was all himself again bigoted, insolent and cruel. Mances had been sacked, churches shut up, prayer books burned, sacred garments torn, congregations dispersed by violence, priests hustled, pelted, pilloried, driven forth with their wives and babes to beg or die of hunger. That these outrages were to be imputed not to a few lawless marauders, but to the great body of the Presbyterians of Scotland, was evident from the fact that the government had not dared either to inflict punishment on the offenders or to grant relief to the sufferers. Was it not fit, then, that the Church of England should take warning? Was it reasonable to ask her to mutilate her apostolical polity and her beautiful ritual for the purpose of conciliating those who wanted nothing but power to rabble her as they had rabbled her sister? Already these men had obtained a boon which they ill deserved, and which they never would have granted. They worshipped God in perfect security. Their meeting houses were as effectively protected as the choirs of our cathedrals. While no Episcopal minister could, without putting his life in jeopardy, officiate in Ayrshire or Renfuchsia, a hundred Presbyterian ministers preached unmalested every Sunday in Middlesex. The legislature had, with a generosity perhaps imprudent, granted toleration to the most intolerant of men, and with toleration it behoved them to be content. Thus several causes conspired to inflame the parochial clergy against the scheme of comprehension. Their temper was such that, if the plan framed in the Jerusalem Chamber had been directly submitted to them, it would have been rejected by a majority of twenty to one. But in the Convocation their weight bore no proportion to their number. The Convocation has, happily for our country, been so long utterly insignificant that, till a recent period, none but curious students cared to inquire how it was constituted, and even now many persons not generally ill-informed imagine it to have been a council representing the Church of England. In truth the Convocation so often mentioned in our ecclesiastical history is merely the synod of the province of Canterbury, and never had a right to speak in the name of the whole clerical body. The province of York had also its Convocation, but till the eighteenth century was far advanced, the province of York was generally, so poor, so rude, and so thinly peopled, that in political importance it could hardly be considered as more than a tenth part of the kingdom. The sense of the Southern clergy was therefore popularly considered as the sense of the whole profession. When the formal concurrence of the Northern clergy was required, it seems to have been given as a matter of course. Indeed, the cannons passed by the Convocation of Canterbury in 1604 were ratified by James I, and were ordered to be strictly observed in every part of the kingdom two years before the Convocation of York went through the form of approving them. Since these ecclesiastical councils became mere names, a great change has taken place in the relative position of the two Archbishoprics. In all the elements of power, the region beyond Trent is now at least a third part of England. When, in our own time, the representative system was adjusted to the altered state of the country, almost all the small boroughs which it was necessary to disenfranchise were in the size. Two-thirds of the new members given to great provincial times were given to the North. If, therefore, any English government should suffer the Convocations as now constituted to meet for the dispatch of business, two independent synods will be legislating at the same time for one church. It is by no means impossible that one assembly might adopt cannons which the other might reject, that one assembly might condemn as heretical propositions which the other might hold to be orthodox. In the 17th century, no such danger was apprehended. So little indeed was the Convocation of York then considered that the two houses of parliament had, in their address to Williams, spoken only of one Convocation, which they called the Convocation of the Clergy of the Kingdom. The body, which they thus not very accurately designated, is divided into two houses. The upper house is composed of the bishops of the province of Canterbury. The lower house consisted in 1689 of 144 members. Twenty-two deans and fifty-four archdeacons sat there in virtue of their offices. Twenty-four divines sat as proctors for twenty-four chapters. Only forty-four proctors were elected by the eight thousand parish priests of the twenty-two dioceses. These forty-four proctors, however, were almost all of one mind. The elections had in former time been conducted in the most quiet and decorous manner, but on this occasion the canvassing was eager, the contests were sharp. Rochester, the leader of the party which in the House of Lords had opposed the Comprehension Bill, and his brother Clarendon, who had refused to take the oaths, had gone to Oxford, the headquarters of that party, for the purpose of animating and organising the opposition. The representatives of the parochial clergy must have been men whose chief distinction was their zeal, for in the whole list can be found not a single illustrious name, and very few names which are now known even to curious students. The official members of the lower house, among whom were many distinguished scholars and preachers, seem to have been not very unequally divided. End of Section 11 Section 12 of the History of England, from the accession of James II, Volume 3, Chapter 14. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. During the summer of 1689 several high ecclesiastical dignities became vacant, and were bestowed upon divines who were sitting in the Jerusalem Chamber. It has already been mentioned that Thomas, Bishop of Worcester, died just before the day fixed for taking the oath. Lake, Bishop of Chichester, lived just long enough to refuse them, and with his last breath declared that he would maintain, even at the stake, the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right. The sea of Chichester was filled by Patrick, that of Worcester by Stillingfleet, and the denary of St. Paul's, which Stillingfleet quitted, was given to Tillotson. That Tillotson was not raised to the Episcopal bench excited some surprise, but in truth it was because the government held his services in the highest estimation that he was suffered to remain a little longer a simple presbyter. The most important office in the Convocation was that of Prolocutor of the Lower House. The Prolocutor was to be chosen by the members, and the only moderate man who had a chance of being chosen was Tillotson. It had, in fact, been already determined that he should be the next Archbishop of Canterbury. When he went to kiss hands for his new denary he warmly thanked the King. Your Majesty has now set me at ease for the remainder of my life. No such thing, Doctor, I assure you, said William. He then plainly intimated that, whenever a Sandcraft should cease to fill the highest ecclesiastical station, Tillotson would succeed to it. Tillotson stood aghast, for his nature was quiet and unambitious. He was beginning to feel the infirmities of old age. He cared little for money, of worldly advantages, those which he most valued were an honest fame, and the general goodwill of mankind, those advantages he already possessed, and he could not but be aware that, if he became primate, he should incur the bitterest hatred of a powerful party, and should become a mark for obliquy from which his gentle and sensitive nature shrank, as from the rack or the wheel. William was earnest and resolute. It is necessary, he said, for my service, and I must lay upon your conscience the responsibility of refusing me your help. Here the conversation ended. It was indeed not necessary that the point should be immediately decided, for several months was still to elapse before the Archbishopric would be vacant. Tillotson bemoaned himself with unfaith and anxiety and sorrow to Lady Russell, whom, of all human beings, he most honoured and trusted. He hoped, he said, that he was not inclined to shrink from the service of the church, but he was convinced that his present line of service was that in which he could be the most useful, if he shall be forced to accept so high and invidious opposed to the primacy, he should soon sink under the load of duties and anxieties too heavy for his strength. His spirits, and with his spirits his abilities, would fail him. He gently complained of Burnett, who loved and admired him with a truly generous heartiness, and who had laboured to persuade both the King and Queen that there was in England only one man fit for the highest ecclesiastical dignity. The Bishop of Salisbury, said Tillotson, he is one of the best and worst friends that I know. Nothing that was not a secret to Burnett was likely to be long a secret to any body. It soon began to be whispered about that the King had fixed on Tillotson to fill the place of Sandcraft. The news caused cruel mortification to Compton, who not unnaturally conceived that his own claims were unrivaled. He had educated the Queen and her sister, and to the instruction which they had received from him might fairly be ascribed, at least in part, the firmness with which, in spite of the influence of their father, they had adhered to the established religion. Compton was, moreover, the only prelate who, during the late reign, had raised his voice in Parliament against the dispensing power, the only prelate who had been suspended by the High Commission, the only prelate who had signed the invitation to the Prince of Orange, the only prelate who had actually taken arms against Popory and Arbitre Power, the only prelate, say, one who had voted against a Regency. Among the ecclesiastics of the province of Canterbury who had taken the oaths, he was the highest in rank. He had, therefore, held, during some months, a vicarious primacy. He had crowned the new sovereigns. He had consecrated the new bishops. He was about to preside in the convocation. It may be added that he was the son of an Earl, and that no person of equally high birth then sat or had ever sat since the Reformation on the Episcopal bench. That the government should put over his head a priest of his own diocese, who was the son of a Yorkshire clothier, and who was distinguished only by abilities and virtues, was provoking. And Compton, though by no means a bad-hearted man, was much provoked. Perhaps his vexation was increased by the reflection that he had for the sake of those by whom he was thus slighted, done some things which had strained his conscience, and sullied his reputation. That he had, at one time, practiced the disingenuous arts of a Diplomatist, and, at another time, given scandal to his brethren by wearing the buff coat and jackboots of a trooper. He could not accuse Tillotson of inordinate ambition. But, though Tillotson was most unwilling to accept the Archbishopric himself, he did not use his influence in favour of Compton, but earnestly recommended Stilling Fleet, as the man fittest to preside over the Church of England. The consequence was that, on the eve of the meeting of Convocation, the bishop who was to be at the head of the upper house became the personal enemy of the presbyter whom the government wished to see at the head of the lower house. This quarrel added new difficulties to difficulties which little needed any addition. It was not till the 20th of November that the Convocation met for the dispatch of business. The place of meeting had generally been St Paul's Cathedral. But St Paul's Cathedral was slowly rising from its ruins, and though the dome already towered high above the hundred steeples of the city, the choir had not yet been opened for public worship. The assembly therefore sat at Westminster. A table was placed in the beautiful Chapel of Henry VII. Compton was in the chair. On his right and left, those suffragans of Canterbury, who had taken the oaths, were ranged in gorgeous vestments of scarlet and miniver. Below the table was assembled the crowd of presbyters. Beveridge preached a Latin sermon, in which he warmly eulogised the existing system, and yet declared himself favourable to a moderate reform. Ecclesiastical laws were, he said, of two kinds. Some laws were fundamental and eternal. They derived their authority from God, nor could any religious community repeal them without ceasing to form a part of the universal church. Other laws were local and temporary. They had been framed by human wisdom, and might be altered by human wisdom. They ought not indeed to be altered without grave reasons. But surely at that moment such reasons were not wanting. To unite a scattered flock in one fold under one shepherd, to remove stumbling blocks from the path of the weak, to reconcile hearts long estranged, to restore spiritual discipline to its primitive vigor, to place the best and purest of Christian societies on a base broad enough to stand against all the attacks of earth and hell, these were objects which might well justify some modification, not of Catholic institutions, but of national or provincial usages. The Lower House, having heard this discourse, proceeded to appoint a prolicutor. Sharp, who was probably put forward by the members favourable to a comprehension as one of the highest churchmen among them, proposed Tillotson. Jane, who had refused to act under the Royal Commission, was proposed by the other side. After some animated discussion, Jane was elected by 55 votes to 28. The prolicutor was formally presented to the Bishop of London and made, according to ancient usage, a Latin oration. In this oration the Anglican church was extolled as the most perfect of all institutions. There was a very intelligible intimation that no change whatever in her doctrine, her discipline, or her ritual was required, and the discourse concluded with the most significant sentence. Compton, when a few months before he exhibited himself in the somewhat un-clerical character of a kernel of horse, had ordered the colours of his regiment to be embroidered with the well-known words, Nollumus leghes anglii mutari, and with these words Jane closed his peroration. Still the low churchmen did not relinquish all hope. They very wisely determined to begin by proposing to substitute lessons taken from the canonical books for the lessons taken from the apocrypher. It should seem that this was a suggestion which, even if there had not been a single dissenter in the kingdom, might well have been received with favour, for the church had, in her sixth article, declared that the canonical books were and that the apocrypher books were not entitled to be called Holy Scriptures, and to be regarded as the rule of faith. Even this reform, however, the high churchmen were determined to oppose. They asked, in pamphlets which covered the counters of Pat and Osterow in Little Britain, why country congregations should be deprived of the pleasure of hearing about the ball of pitch, with which Daniel choked the dragon, and about the fish whose liver gave forth such a fume, as sent the devil flying from Ek-Batana to Egypt. And were there not chapters of the wisdom of the son of Sirach far more interesting and edifying than the genealogies and muster roles which made up a large part of the chronicles of the Jewish kings and of the narrative of Nehemiah? No grave divine, however, would have liked to maintain in Henry VII's chapel, that it was impossible to find in many hundreds of pages dictated by the Holy Spirit fifty or sixty chapters more edifying than anything which could be extracted from the works of the most respectable, uninspired moralist or historian. The leaders of the majority therefore determined to shun a debate in which they must have been reduced to a disagreeable dilemma. Their plan was not to reject the recommendations of the commissioners, but to prevent those recommendations from being discussed, and with this view a system of tactics was adopted which proved successful. The law, as it had been interpreted, during a long course of years, prohibited the convocation from even deliberating on any ecclesiastical ordinance without a previous warrant from the crown. Such a warrant sealed with the great seal was brought in form to Henry VII's chapel by Nottingham. He, at the same time, delivered a message from the king. His majesty exhorted the assembly to consider calmly and without prejudice the recommendations of the commission, and declared that he had nothing in view but the honour and advantage of the Protestant religion in general and of the Church of England in particular. The bishops speedily agreed on an address of thanks for the royal message, and requested the concurrence of the lower house. Jane and his adherents raised objection after objection. First, they claimed the privilege of presenting a separate address. When they were forced to waive this claim, they refused to agree to any expression which imported that the Church of England had any fellowship within the other Protestant community. Amendments and reasons were sent backward and forward. Conferences were held at which Burnett on one side and Jane on the other were the chief speakers. At last, with great difficulty, a compromise was made, and an address, cold and ungracious compared with that which the bishops had framed, was presented to the king in the banqueting house. He dissembled his vexation, returned a kind answer, and intimated a hope that the assembly would now at length proceed to consider the great question of comprehension. Such, however, was not the intention of the leaders of the lower house. As soon as they were again in Henry VII's chapel, one of them raised a debate about the non-juring bishops. In spite of the unfortunate scruple which those prelates entertained, they were learned and holy men. Their advice might, at this conjuncture, be of the greatest service to the Church. The upper house was hardly an upper house in the absence of the primate, and many of his most respectable suffragans could nothing be done to remedy this evil. Another member complained of some pamphlets which had lately appeared, and in which the convocation was not treated with proper deference. The assembly took fire. Was it not monstrous that this heretical and schismatical trash should be cried by the hawkers about the streets, and should be exposed to sail in the booths of Westminster Hall, within a hundred yards of the Prolocutor's chair? The work of mutilating the liturgy and of turning cathedrals into conventicals might surely be postponed till the Synod had taken measures to protect its own freedom and dignity. It was then debated how the printing of such scandalous books should be prevented, some were for indictments, some for ecclesiastical censures. In such deliberations as these, week after week passed away. Not a single proposition tending to a comprehension had been even discussed. Christmas was approaching. At Christmas there was to be a recess. The bishops were desirous that, during the recess, a committee should sit to prepare a business. The lower house refused to consent. That house it was now evident was fully determined, not even to enter on the consideration of any part of the plan which had been framed by the royal commissioners. The proctors of the diocese were in a worse humor than when they first came up to Westminster. Many of them had probably never before passed a week in the capital, and had not been aware how great the difference was between a town divine and a country divine. The sight of the luxuries and comforts enjoyed by the popular preachers of the city raised not unnaturally some sore feeling in a Lincolnshire or Canavenshire vicar, who was accustomed to live, as hardly as a small farmer. The very circumstance that the London clergy were generally for a comprehension made the representatives of the rural clergy obstinate on the other side. The prelates were, as a body, sincerely desirous that some concession might be made to the non-conformists. But the prelates were utterly unable to curb the mutinous democracy. They were few in number. Some of them were objects of extreme dislike to the baroque eulogy. The president had not the full authority of a primate, nor was he sorry to see those who had, as he concerned, used him ill, thwarted and mortified. It was necessary to yield. The convocation was prorogued for six weeks. When those six weeks had expired it was prorogued again, and many years elapsed before it was permitted to transact business. So ended and forever the hope that the Church of England might be induced to make some concession to the scruples of the non-conformists. A learned and respectable minority of the clerical order relinquished that hope with deep regret. Yet in a very short time even Barnett and Tillotson found reason to believe that their defeat was rarely an escape and that victory would have been a disaster. A reform such as in the days of Elizabeth would have united the great body of English Protestants, would in the days of William have alienated more hearts than it would have conciliated. The schism which the oaths had produced was as yet insignificant. Innovation such as those proposed by the royal commissioners would have given it a terrible importance. As yet a layman, though he might think the proceedings of the convention unjustifiable, and though he might applaud the virtue of the non-juring clergy, still continued to sit under the accustomed pulpit and kneel at the accustomed altar. But if, just at this conjuncture, while his mind was irritated by what he thought the wrong down to his favourite divines, and while he was perhaps doubting whether he ought not to follow them, his ears and eyes had been shocked by changes in the worship to which he was fondly attached, if the compositions of the doctors of the Jerusalem Chamber had taken the place of the old colleagues, if he had seen clergymen without surpluses carrying the chalice and the pattern up and down the aisle to seated communicants, the tie which bound him to the established church would have been dissolved. He would have repaired to some non-juring assembly where the service which he loved was performed without mutilation. The new sect which has yet consisted almost exclusively of priests would soon have been swelled by numerous and large congregations, and in those congregations would have been found a much greater proportion of the opulent, of the highly-descended, and of the highly-educated than any other body of dissenters could show. The Episcopal schismatics, thus reinforced, would probably have been as formidable to the new king and his successors as ever the Puritan schismatics had been to the princes of the House of Stuart. It is an indisputable and a most instructive fact that we are in a great measure indebted for the civil and religious liberty which we enjoy to the personacity with which the High Church Party, in the Convocation of 1689, refused even to deliberate on any plan of comprehension. End of Section 12. End of the History of England from the Accession of James II, Volume 3, Chapter 14 by Thomas Bavington Macaulay