No More Learning

His prose is better than Tillotson's, easier than Butler's;
a


## p. 361 (#387) ############################################

Butler
361
but no one would quote it for its excellence, as, in his day, men
quoted the archbishop, or remember it for its massive power, as
Butler must always be remembered.
Joseph Butler is, indeed, even as a master of English, con-
spicuously the greatest of the three writers whom we have chosen
to illustrate the character of English theology during this period.
The explanation is that Butler was, what the others were not, a
great writer and a great man. His prose has a massive force,
a sheer weight, to which no English writer of his time approaches.
Under its severe restraint burns the fire of a deep and intense
conviction. He has been but poorly understood by those who
have regarded him as a convincing critic, a master of logical
acuteness. He was far more; and what he was is revealed in
every paragraph of his writing. On the one hand, his view of life
and thought was synthetical, not merely inquisitive or analytic:
on the other, he was inspired with a supreme belief, a mastering
optimism, a triumphant faith. In the cold marble of his prose,
there are veins of colour, touches of rich crimson, caerulean blue,
or sunny gold, such as one sees on some beautiful ancient sarco-
phagus. He is a master of calm exposition, as well as of irony; but
he is, even more notably, a writer of profound and unquenchable
passion. His heart no less than his head is in what he has
written; and it is this which gives him his place among the
masters of English prose. Butler has enriched English literature
with many a striking apophthegm; but his use of the language
can only be adequately tested by long passages. It is difficult to
select from him; he has no purple patches ; page after page
shines with the same massive splendour. The manner of the
Sermons is as admirable as the matter: it is typical of the prose
of his age at its very best. The style of the Analogy is more
difficult, more compressed and concise, so that it seems at first
sight to be stiff and involved; but a little study of it shows
that it is intentionally, and admirably, adapted to its matter.
The steps, as Gladstone said, are as carefully measured out as
if we were climbing the hill of the Purgatorio; and each single
sentence has been well compared to 'a well-considered move in
chess. ' From another point of view, we may again adopt the
statesman's quaint retort to the criticism of Matthew Arnold:
The homely fare, upon which Butler feeds us, cannot be so gratifying to the
palate as turtle, venison, and champagne. But it has been found wholesome
by experience: it leads to no doctor's bills; and a perusal of this . failure' is
admitted to be a most valuable exercise for the mind. '


## p. 362 (#388) ############################################

362
Divines
No religious book of the eighteenth century, save only Law's
Serious Call, had so much influence as the Analogy, and the
influence of each, different though they were, has proved abiding
in English literature as well as English religion. It came without
question from the same source. It has been said of Joseph Butler,
that he was known to be given to religious retirement and to
reading the biographies of holy persons; and, though the one was
a bishop and the other a nonjuror, the words are equally applicable
to William Law.
>
The work of Butler is the high watermark of English theology
in the middle of the eighteenth century. The descent from it is
almost abrupt. Two names only remain to be specially noticed
before we pass to a new period—those of Thomas Herring and
Thomas Secker, both archbishops of Canterbury, who were born in
the same year 1693, and died, the former in 1757, the latter in 1768.
Archbishop Herring was a complete contrast to the leading prelates
of his day. His sermons at Lincoln's inn gave him fame, and he
passed, in a career of unemotional benevolence, from the deanery
of Rochester to the sees of Bangor, York and Canterbury. He
did not contend with deists or Arians, and the Athanasian con-
troversy had for him no charms. He was prepared to revise the
Prayer-Book and the Articles, and to exchange pulpits with
dissenters. He befriended the Jews, and Hume tells us, in his
Essays, that the archbishop praised him for his History. He
raised a large sum for the government during the '45. But his
literary work, save his rather pleasing letters, is uninteresting
and ineffective. His successor at York and Canterbury, Matthew
Skelton, was little thought of and soon forgotten. But with
Thomas Secker, bishop in turn of Bristol and of Oxford, and
archbishop of Canterbury for ten years, from 1758, we reach a
higher grade. Like Butler, with whom he had been at school, and
like not a few in the list of English primates, he was not till man-
hood converted to the English church, and, to the delicate taste of
Horace Walpole, he seemed to retain to the last something of the
'tone of fanaticism' which had belonged to his early training.
Yet the beginning of methodism filled him with alarm : what-
ever he may have shown of 'fanaticism, he was certainly no
'enthusiast. ' On his sermons, which, with his Lectures on the
Church Catechism, were his chief work, the opinion of his
1 Cf. , as to Butler's Fifteen Sermons and Analogy, ante, vol. IX, pp. 303 f.
to Law, see ibid. chap. XII.
6
1
As


## p. 363 (#389) ############################################

The Methodist Movement
363
contemporaries, for once, very fairly represents what would be
thought today. Hurd, the favourite bishop of George III, said that
they had 'a certain conciliatory calmness, propriety, and decency
of language, with no extraordinary reach of thought, vigour of
sentiment, or beauty of expression. ' And Christopher Pitt, when,
in The Art of Preaching, he advises young preachers, describes
the impression made by the archbishop, in words that no doubt
sum up his merits :
Speak, look, and move with dignity and ease
Like mitred Secker, you'll be sure to please.
Secker, however, did not wear a mitre—he only wore a wig, and
the literary style in which he excelled has passed away with his
headgear. It was the methodist movement which swept away
what seemed to it to be solemn trifling. From the middle of the
eighteenth century, the new influence which passed over English
religion had its effect, gradual and much contested, upon English
literature also. The age of Wesley and Whitefield introduced what
may be called a new romanticism in religion, just as the Lake
school, half a century later, may be said to have destroyed the
classic tradition of the older poetry. A word is needed as to the
historical setting of this new departure in English theology.
The methodist movement was a reaction against the calmness
with which English theologians had accepted, and suppressed,
many of the vital elements of the Christian creed. Divinity is the
most progressive of the sciences, and no literature becomes so
rapidly out of date as theology-all but the highest. Admirably
straightforward though much of the writing of English divines in
the early eighteenth century was, it had fewer of the elements of
permanence than any of the systems that had preceded it; to
appropriate words of Johnson, it had not sufficient vitality to
preserve it from putrefaction. A new theology, or, at least, a
revival of the old, was needed, which should base its appeal on
the verities of the Christian life. The young Oxford students who
founded methodism were, above all things, anxious to rule their
daily doings by the standard, ascetic and devotional, of the English
church. It has been, in recent years, generally believed that the
tendency of the movement was from the first towards separation.
This is hardly true. In practice, no doubt, much that Wesley did
tended to separatism ; but, in theory, never. The movement
which now bears his name was at first, distinctly, a church move-
ment, owing its impetus to long neglected doctrines of the church;


## p. 364 (#390) ############################################

364
Divines
and Wesley's own first direction of life came from Jeremy Taylor.
The story of the movement, during the period now under survey,
may be briefly told. John Wesley, son of the rector of Epworth,
went to Charterhouse in 1713 and to Christ Church in 1720, and
became a fellow of Lincoln college in 1726. The society founded,
very soon after, by his brother Charles, a student of Christ Church,
was composed of a few pious young men who desired to live by
the church's rules of fasting, almsgiving and prayer, and received
the holy communion weekly. Southey, writing nearly a century
later, thought that 'such conduct would at any time have attracted
observation in an English university. ' Unpopular, these beginnings
certainly were, but it was not long before they passed beyond the
petty criticisms of Oxford. John Wesley joined this ‘Holy Club'
on his return to college in 1729, and he remained at Oxford for
some years, actively engaged in works of piety.
Among the earlier members of the society were two destined
for great public fame. The first was George Whitefield, perhaps
the greatest popular orator of the eighteenth century. He
had traced in himself, he tells, from cradle to manhood, nothing
but 'a fitness to be damned'; but the fiery enthusiasm of
his nature seems always to have been turned toward the light,
and, from his entrance into the methodist company, he became
a devoted worker and preacher. John Wesley went to America
in 1735, Charles in 1736, Whitefield in 1738. The freedom
of missionary work rendered each of them disposed to new
religious influences, and John Wesley and George Whitefield
gradually drifted apart from each other and from the accepted
theology of the English church. Wesley was greatly influenced
by the Moravians and especially by their very attractive apostle
count Zinzendorf, Whitefield by the Calvinism which seemed to
be dying a natural death in the church of England till his influence
revived it. Wesley dated his conversion from 24 May 1738; and,
soon afterwards, he began his wonderful journeys, which lasted
almost to his death. During the half-century, he preached forty
thousand sermons, and travelled (it is said) a quarter of a million
of miles. His brother Charles equalled him in devotion, if not
in tireless health, and Whitefield in enthusiasm. In 1740, Wesley
severed his connection with the Moravians, and, in 1743, the fol-
lowers of Whitefield became distinguished as Calvinistic methodists.
In 1764, the separation between the two methodist bodies became
permanent, and, from that time, perhaps, it may be correct to date
the creation, from the original movement, of a newly organised


## p. 365 (#391) ############################################

Whitefield. Hervey
365
dissent. Though Wesley himself passionately desired, to the end,
to belong to the church of his baptism and ordination and
vigorously denounced all who separated from it, in 1784 (when
his brother Charles, who deeply regretted the act, thought him to
be in his dotage) he ordained ministers, and, from that moment, the
separation was complete. Whitefield, who was the founder of the
Calvinistic methodists, Lady Huntingdon's connection, died in
1770. At that date, it may be well to conclude our brief survey.
The prominent names which belong especially to this earlier
period, when what came to be called evangelicalism was hardly
distinguishable from methodism, are those of the two Wesleys,
Whitefield, Hervey, Toplady and Fletcher of Madeley. The in-
fluence of Newton, Venn, Romaine and others, more definitely
evangelical than methodist, belongs chiefly to a later period.
Whitefield was not a man of letters, but an orator. His literary
work is negligible, though not uninteresting ; but it marks more
decisively than that of any of his contemporaries the earliest
reaction against the commonsense religious writing of the age.
Whitefield wrote plain English, the vernacular of his day, with a
touch of the university added, just as Latimer did two hundred
years before. But he was not nearly so great a writer as was the
reformer, probably because of his being a far greater preacher.
To quote from his sermons or his controversial writings would be
useless : he began a venture rather than led a school. And not
all his friends followed his style.
The first to be mentioned after Whitefield was almost a com-
plete contrast to him. There can be no doubt that the most
popular writer among those who were influenced by the earlier
stages of the methodist movement was James Hervey, who was at
Lincoln college, Oxford, as an undergraduate when John Wesley
was a fellow and, after serving in Cornwall, became rector of two
parishes, not adjoining each other, Collingtree and Weston Favell,
in Northamptonshire. He was a most excellent man and an
exemplary parish priest, but he escaped controversy as little as did
any other of the evangelical company. His disputes with Wesley
are of no importance in literary history, and his curious dialogues,
on his favourite doctrine of 'imputed righteousness' and other
opinions which he extracted from the Gospels, entitled Theron
and Aspasia, have long ceased to interest even the most assiduous
student. But his Meditations Among the Tombs, Reflections on
a Flower-garden and Contemplations on the Night, which met


## p. 366 (#392) ############################################

366
Divines
with extraordinary success in their day, illustrate most effectively
the fantastic and affected style which the most sincere writers of
the time, save the robust John Wesley himself, seemed to assume
with their ‘pulpit manner,' till it became a second nature to them.
A passage from Hervey's Contemplations on the Night may be
quoted here, since it would be difficult to find a more striking
example of the descent of popular taste in the darkest period of
English letters. The thoughts might be found in Jeremy Taylor;
but how different is the pompous and posturing performance with
which Hervey seeks to impress the reader from the plangent
feeling which inspires Taylor even in his richest and most gorgeous
prose! In Hervey, the ideas are impoverished and the expression
is at once affected and commonplace.
We need not go down to the charnel house, nor carry our search into the
repositories of the dead, in order to find memorials of our impending doom.
A multitude of these remembrancers are placed in all our paths, and point the
heedless passengers to their long home. I can hardly enter a considerable
town but I meet a funeral procession, or the mourners going about the streets.
The hatchment suspended on the wall, or the crape streaming in the air, are
silent intimations that both rich and poor have been emptying their houses,
and replenishing their sepulchres. I can scarse join in any conversation, but
mention is made of some that are given over by the physician, and hovering
on the confines of eternity; of others that have just dropt their clay among
weeping friends, and are gone to appear before the Judge of all the earth.
There's not a newspaper comes to my hand, but, amidst all its entertaining
narrations, reads several serious lectures of mortality. What else are the
repeated accounts-of age, worn out by slow-consuming sicknesses-of youth,
dashed to pieces by some sudden stroke of casualty--of patriots, exchanging
their seats in the senate for a lodging in the tomb-of misers, resigning their
breath, and (O relentless destiny! ) leaving their very riches for others! Even
the vehicals of our amusement are registers of the deceased! and the voice of
Fame seldom sounds but in concert with the knell!
a
From this, the transition to John William Fletcher is agree-
able. He is one of the examples, more common in the seven-
teenth, than in the eighteenth, century, of the attractive power
of the English church, its system and its theology, for he was
born in Switzerland (his name was de La Flechère); but he
became a priest of the English church and gave his life to the
work of an English village. His anti-Calvinist views severed him
from Lady Huntingdon’s connection, with which, for a time, he was
associated as superintendent of her training college at Trevecca,
but endeared him the more to Wesley, who preached his funeral
sermon from the text ‘Mark the perfect man, and behold the
upright, for the end of that man is peace. ' Never was there a
controversialist more honest or more gentle. The title of his


## p. 367 (#393) ############################################

Fletcher of Madeley. Toplady 367
Zelotus and Honestus Reconciled; or an Equal Check to Phari-
saism and Antinomianism, which includes parts I and II of
Scriptures Scales to weigh the gold of Gospel truth, and to balance
a multitude of opposite Scriptures, gives a misleading idea of the
wit and charm of its contents. Fletcher writes gracefully and
truthfully. He has the tendency to gloom in which Hervey
revelled; but he does not parade it. He has a wholesome
detestation of his opponent's Calvinism ; but it leads him, not to
sound and fury, but to placid and conciliatory argument. Southey
well summed up the character of Fletcher's writing when he said
that
his talents were of the quick mercurial kind; his fancy was always active, and
he might have held no inconsiderable rank, both as a humourous and as an
empassioned writer, if he had not confined himself wholly to devotional
subjects.
He was the St Francis of early methodism, and it seems the
most natural thing in the world to be told that, one day, he took
a robin for his text. If other leaders of the movement were
stern, his was always the voice of tenderness and charity. By
way of contrast, we may, like Southey, take the vehement denun-
ciations of Augustus Toplady, who deserves to be remembered
for the immortal hymn 'Rock of Ages,' while his The Historic
Proof of the Doctrinal Calvinism of the Church of England best
remains buried in oblivion. He wrote with coarse vigour, smart-
ness and abandon, in complete contrast alike to the preciousness
of Hervey and to the calm of Fletcher. His quarrel with John
Wesley, which from theological became personal, makes curious
reading today. Wesley declared that Toplady's doctrine might
be summed up thus
One in twenty of mankind is elected; nineteen in twenty are reprobated.
The elect shall be saved, do what they will; the reprobate shall be damned, do
what they can. Reader, believe this, or be damned.
Toplady replied by accusing his critic of satanic guilt and shame-
lessness in thus describing his opinion and answered him, after
the manner of Martin Marprelate, with An Old Fox tarred and
feathered and suchlike pamphlets. Wesley, he declared, was an
Arminian, which meant that he had
an equal portion of gross Heathenism, Pelagianism, Mahometanism, Popery,
Manichaeism, Ranterism and Antinomianism, culled, dried, and pulverised,
and mingled with as much palpable Atheism as you can scrape together.


## p. 368 (#394) ############################################

368
Divines
Literary squabbles do not lose their bitterness when they become
theological.
6
a
Of John Wesley himself, as a writer, it need only be said that
he was, with the pen as with the tongue, a master of direct English
and simple strength. Southey chose a passage in which he
summed up his chief answer to the Calvinists, as the most re-
markable and powerful in all his works' to illustrate his theology.
It, also, illustrates his style. A few sentences will suffice to show
the kind of writer he was. His manner is eminently that of an
orator. The sentences are short, the points clear, the assertion
incisive, the repetition emphatic: ‘Here I fix my fort'-'Let it
mean what it will it cannot mean that'-'Hold! what will you
prove by Scripture? That God is worse than the devil? It can-
not be. ' Here we have the familiar trick of the special pleader.
He asks his opponent a question, supplies an answer on his behalf,
and then knocks him on the head for it. This manner has the
appearance of logic; but, often, a fallacy lurks behind. As a theo-
logian, whatever else he is, he is smart, direct, deeply serious
and utterly uncompromising.
But Wesley is not only remembered by his theological writings
and his work as an evangelist. His Journal has all the charm of
a pious Pepys, and, now that it is being published as it was
written, the world can see through it closely into the writer's
heart, as in the curious account of his love for Grace Murray
In pathos and descriptive power, its simple narrative shows the
rugged force of Walt Whitman: the word is not sought for, it
comes naturally, and, one feels, is inevitable. Whether one reads
the Savannah journal, with its marvellous record of faith, incon-
sistency and courage, or the unvarnished record of the long years
of laborious ministry, one meets the same straight-forward, clear-
eyed observer, enthralled by the Divine vision which he saw and
tried to make known among men, yet full of humour and observant,
to the very minutest detail, of everything that concerns the daily
life of mankind. When he scolded or denounced, he thought that
he was showing that childlike openness, frankness, and plainness
of speech manifest to all in the Apostles and first Christians. ' He
had no doubt of himself, nor any of God's constant guidance and
protection. This gives to his everyday life, in all its realism, a
touch of romance, which shines through the stupendous record
of what he did and said. In the Journal, we see how English
See Leger, Augustin, John Wesley's Last Love (1910).
6


## p. 369 (#395) ############################################

The Wesleys
369
divinity was breaking from the trammels of its literary con-
vention, and the deliverer was John Wesley. If we judge the
Journal with the life which it lays bare, it is one of the great
books of the world.
No one would call John Wesley a man of letters. He had no
horror, such as Hervey's, of literature which was not spiritual.
He read Prior, and Home (of Douglas fame), Thomson, Lord
Chesterfield and Sterne : he delighted to quote the classics. But
he had not the taste for 'style' which was born in his brother
Charles. John was no poet; but Charles, among his six thousand
hymns, has left some verses that will never die. In his case, we
see that, after all, methodism was not entirely apart from the
literature of its day. He reminds us, again and again, of his
contemporaries, especially, perhaps, of Shenstone, for whose
rather thin sentiment he substitutes a genuine piety. He can
be virile, felicitous, vivid ; if his sweetness often cloys, he has
a depth of feeling which frequently brings him within the ranks
of the poets. Though he might feel strange in the company of
Crashaw or George Herbert, of Newman or Keble, Christina
Rossetti would take him by the hand. In English literature, so
long as the hymns of Charles, and the Journal of John, Wesley
are read, methodism will continue to hold an honoured place.
E. L. X.
CH, XV.
24


## p. 370 (#396) ############################################

CHAPTER XVI
THE LITERATURE OF DISSENT
1660-1760
THE narrowness of intellectual life and sterility of spiritual
life which fell upon the dissenting churches after the exclusion of
1662 were the outcome of a long chain of historical development.
When dissent succumbed, yielding itself, body and soul, to the
dehumanising genius of Calvin, it entered upon two-indeed, nearer
three-centuries of wandering in a stony wilderness. During its
birthtime in the middle and latter part of the sixteenth century,
during the period of its trial in the early seventeenth century and
during the short span of its chequered and flickering triumph
under the commonwealth, the main concern and preoccupation of
dissent was with the mere question of church membership. The
arid discussions on church polity centred in this idea ; the still
more arid discussions on doctrine were aroused simply by the
demand for a standard of the church member's doctrinal purity,
and the chief contention with the state was waged round the
demand for a church control of admission to the sacrament—the
wielding of the wooden sword of excommunication. The rock
upon which this inveterate purpose split was not so much Erastian-
ism as the national consciousness of the English race itself; and
when, as the logical result of a century of historical development,
dissent was driven out in 1662, it was pitting itself not so much
against the church of England as against this English national con-
sciousness. Throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century,
and nearly through the whole of the eighteenth century, dissent
remained true to the cramped and narrow basis on which it had
been reared. If the church of England was sunk in lethargy,
dissent was sunk in puny congregational and individual selfishness.
Of any true missionary sense, of any conception of humanity as


## p. 371 (#397) ############################################

The Historical Evolution of Dissent 371
apart from religious system, dissent was even more devoid-
because more deliberately devoid—than was the established
church. With the one noble exception of Philip Doddridge
(and, possibly, a generation earlier, of Richard Davis of Rothwell),
it was not until the missionary fervour, the wide and intense
humanity, of the methodist movement had revivified the church,
that it, also, and in the last instance, revivified dissent. From
that moment—towards quite the close of the eighteenth century,
and with gathering force in the nineteenth-dissent has deserted
its historical basis of dogma and polity, has ceased to war with
the national consciousness, and has taken up the burden of
Christ.
This main aspect of the historical evolution of dissent will be
found mirrored in its literature. But there are two other aspects
of that evolution which, also, demand attention, and these are
aspects which found relatively much greater expression in that
literature. The free churches claim the credit of the assertion
of the principle of toleration. Historically, the claim is untenable,
for, during its transient triumph under the commonwealth, dissent
was intolerant and persecuting, or tried to be. The enunciation
of the principle came from laymen, and from those sectaries whom
the entrenched and enthroned presbyterian wished to persecute.
Dissent was converted to the principle only by itself passing under
the fiery sword; and, when, in the eighteenth century, it became
the mouthpiece of the demand for toleration, it was such merely
as asserting for itself a principle, and claiming for itself the pro-
tection and benefit of that principle, which was in the air, and
which grew organically with the self-consciousness of the nation.
But, in so far as they put forth these claims, the free churches
gave birth to a considerable literature, which, though controversial
in purpose, is not the less of account in any record of English
eighteenth century literature at large.
Secondly—and this is most important of all—the process of dis-
integration, which, after 1662, overtook all three dissenting bodies
--presbyterians, congregationalists and baptists-alike loosened
the bands of doctrinal narrowness. One and all, they took the path
which led through Arianism to unitarianism. To tell the story of
that development is to recount not merely the general history of
the three bodies themselves, but, also, the particular history of a
very large proportion of the individual congregations nominally
composing those bodies.
Such a survey would, of course, be
out of place here. But the literature which grew out of that
24-2


## p. 372 (#398) ############################################

372 The Literature of Dissent, 1660—1760
development is of the greatest importance on a higher plane, as
literature pure and simple, as a contribution to human thought,
as well as on the lower plane of mere theological controversy.
Professedly, the three denominations of protestant dissenters
are the presbyterians, the congregationalists and the baptists.
But, as a matter of fact, after the secession of 1662, these terms
-or the churches they profess to designate—are in a state of
incessant Aux; and it is dangerous to use the names in a general
sense as applicable to three bodies with defined boundaries.
The
presbyterian churches became, perforce, congregational; some of
the congregational churches became, of choice, baptist, or vice
versa; and all three types took on Arianism as a garb. Accord-
ing to the particular bias or intellectual momentum of a particular
pastor, a congregation might pass from one extreme limit to the
other. In dealing, therefore, with the mere personal side of dis-
senting literature, we shall find it unsafe and difficult to employ
the ordinary terminology of dissent.
Although a theological literature of a certain sort, originating
in separation and directed against secular rule in spiritual things,
was in existence even before the period under present considera-
tion, it may be safely asserted that the ultimate basis of the
conception of toleration rested on the unadulterated Erastianism
of the English reformation settlement. Such a literature, on the
one side, and, equally, Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying
(1646), on the other, alike betray their genesis by their birth-
time. Those who were not tolerated pleaded for toleration; and
from this necessity sprang the bare assertion of the principle
of liberty of conscience. Their advocacy, therefore, has not the
value in the history of human thought which the pure and naked
assertion of the principle possesses in the mouth of Henry Robinson,
merchant and economist, of Hobbes? , of Miltonor of Locket. But
3
the final achievement of the pure principle of toleration and free-
dom of conscience came neither from the theologian nor from the
philosopher. It came from the social secular sense of the race,
and fought its way to victory through the mere mechanism and
clash of church and state politics. And, so far as the result
achieved is concerned, the only difference between the enforced,
if restricted, tolerance established by Cromwell, and the gradually
won legislative tolerance of eighteenth and nineteenth century
>
1
1 For some of the productions belonging to it, see bibliography.
2 Leviathan, pt ui, chaps. 41 and 42.
3 Areopagitica.
• Letters on Toleration.


## p. 373 (#399) ############################################

Dissent and Toleration
373
dissent, consists in the fact that, under Cromwell, the executive
constrained and led the social sense, while, in later ages, the social
sense constrained and led the legislature. With the mere political
history of the principle we are, however, not concerned, but
only with the expression which that history found in dissenting
literature.
Broadly speaking, the literary battle about the principle of
toleration passes through two quite distinct phases in the period
here under review. If we pass by the earlier toleration contro-
versy in Charles II's reign, as not possessing any permanent
importance either in literature or in ecclesiastical history, its first
real phase covers the episodes of the Toleration act of William III's
reign, the Occasional Conformity bill and the Schism act. In this
phase, dissent is on the defensive and concerned merely with vindi-
cating its claim to civil and religious rights and freedom. In the
second and later phase, it boldly challenges the very principle of an
established church, or, as we should say today, raises the question
of disestablishment.
Naturally enough, the earlier phase of this battle, from the
point of view of literature, lacks the high ethical quality that marks
the later phase. For, in the various skirmishes concerning the
Toleration and Schism acts, the attitude of dissent was paltering
and opportunist. In truth, the achievement of the Toleration act
of 1689 was rather the work of such exponents of the secular
or civil sense of the nation as Burnet, Somers, Maynard and Sir
Isaac Newton; and the dissenters, who, because of their hatred of
Rome, had refused the indulgences of Charles II and James II, were
content to accept meekly the state-given toleration of 1689, while,
as a body, supinely looking on at the legislative interment of the
comprehension scheme of the same year. Only Baxter and Calamy
and Howe could see far enough, and high enough, to deplore the
failure of that scheme, remaining, in this respect, true to their
unwavering attitude in the comprehension scheme of 1667—8, as
well as in the controversy with Stillingfleet of 1680. And, during
the interval between the Toleration act and the Schism act, dissent
showed its mettle and its conception of the pure principle of
toleration, by intolerantly attacking Socinianism, as if all the
intervening years, from the Westminster assembly to the Exeter
meetings, had gone for nothing.
Out of this limited conception and attitude of mere political
opportunism, dissent was rudely awakened by a layman. From
the point of view of consistency and principle-of logic and


## p. 374 (#400) ############################################

374 The Literature of Dissent, 1660—1760
morality-Defoe condemned the practice of occasional conformity?
His completely unanswerable Enquiry into the occasional Con-
formity of Dissenters in Cases of Preferment (1697) drew from
John Howe a deplorably ill-tempered and futile reply, Some
Considerations of a Preface to an Enquiry (1701). With Defoe's
rejoinder to this in the same year, A Letter to Mr Howe by way
of Reply, the controversy temporarily closed. But, unintentionally,
Defoe had delivered his friends into the hands of the enemy. The
tory reactionaries of Anne's reign seized with avidity the weapon
he had forged, and, coupling the subject of dissenting academies
with the subject of occasional conformity, delivered a furious
onslaught on the whole front of dissent. The scurrilous and rabid
attack on dissent generally, and on dissenting academies in par-
ticular, which was opened by Sacheverell and Samuel Wesley, was
met, on the one hand, by Defoe's Shortest Way with the Dissenter:
(1702)2 and, on the other hand, by Samuel Palmer's Vindication
(1705). But, neither matchless sarcasm nor sober logic could
avail. The theological torrent became a popular tory avalanche.
The publication of Calamy's Abridgement of the Life of Baxter
(1702) only added fuel to the fire. It was answered by Olyffe, and,
again, by Hoadly (in The Reasonableness of Conformity, 1703), to
whom Calamy replied in his Defence of Moderate Nonconformity
(1703). Other tracts on both sides followed; but the mere
literary strife was quickly swallowed up in the popular agitation
about Sacheverell's case.
The Hanoverian succession broke the storm; and, with the
reversal of the Schism act and the Occasional Conformity act, the
religious existence and civil freedom of dissent were safe. But the
paltering and merely opportunist attitude of the leaders of the
free churches was responsible for the failure to secure the repeal
of the Test and Corporation acts. Accordingly, for the remainder
of our period, dissent went halting, content with the regium donum
and with a religious tolerance tempered by partial civil disability.
Samuel Chandler's History of Persecution (1736) and The Case
of Subscription (1748) are fairly typical of this attitude. Had
it not been for the genius of Watts and Towgood, eighteenth cen-
tury dissent would appear to have exhausted its zeal for freedom
of conscience in the mere selfish assertion of its own right to
existence; for, so far as the purely political battle for freedom is
concerned, it did not achieve any further triumph until the dawn
i Cf. ante, vol. ix, chap. I, p. 7.
2 Cf. ibid. p. 9.


## p. 375 (#401) ############################################

Watts and Towgood 375
of the nineteenth century. But, in 1731, a completely new turn
was given to the old controversy by Isaac Watts's Humble attempt
towards the Revival of Practical Religion among Christians. In
this work, and in his later Essay on Civil Power in Things
Sacred, Watts defended the general position of dissenters by arguing
on lofty grounds against any civil establishment of a national
church. While thus, in one sense, reverting to the standpoint of
seventeenth century philosophy, Watts, in another sense, opens a
new era in these publications. They foreshadow the claim of
dissent for the achievement of equality by the way of disestablish-
ment. The cause of a national church of the connection between
the episcopal church and the English state-was taken up by
William Warburton in his Alliance between Church and State
(1736), written from the point of view of the state rather than of
the church, and presenting, surely, the most utilitarian theory of
the English church ever produced by a representative churchman?
From the lower ground of mere hand to mouth polemics,
Watts's treatises were also answered by John White in his Three
Letters to a Gentleman Dissenting from the Church of England-
letters which, in spite of the popularity which they enjoyed with
the church party, would be otherwise inconsiderable, were it not
that they gave birth to one of the most enduring monuments of
the polemics of dissent. White's Letters were demolished by
th Micaijah Towgood, presbyterian minister at Crediton. In The
Dissenting Gentleman's Answer to the Reverend Mr White's
Letter (1746—8), Towgood gave to the world one of the most
powerful and widely read pleas for disestablishment that dissent
ever produced. So far as the literature of dissent on the sub-
ject of toleration and freedom of conscience is concerned, this
monumental work is the last word spoken in the period here
treated; for the activity of the dissenters' committee of deputies
(a dissenters' defence board in the matter of civil disabilities)
was entirely legal and secular in its motive and expression?
The controversial literature of dissent on the subjects of church
polity and dogma covers the field of a whole series of successive
disputes. Although, in these disputes, there is a constant shifting
of the ground, yet the driving impulse, at bottom, is only one of
1 As to Warburton, cf. ante, vol. ix, pp. 296—7.
This is shown, for instance, by such cases as the corporation of London v. Sheafe,
Streatfield and Evans (1754–67). Lord Mansfield's judgment in this important case is
only another proof—if further proof were needed—that freedom was achieved not so
much by dissent leading the national civic sense as by the national civio sense leading
church and dissent alike.


## p. 376 (#402) ############################################

376 The Literature of Dissent, ,
1660—1760
By
freedom. At the outset, this freedom is purely ecclesiastical, the
irresponsibility of a congeries of churches now, at last, cut asunder
from the establishment. But it was inevitable that, in the end,
such ecclesiastical freedom should loosen the bonds of dogmatic
authority also, and so pave the way for pure free thought.
Although the two paths of development often ran side by side,
and crossed and recrossed, yet, historically, the ecclesiastical is
the precedent and necessary condition of dogmatic freedom.
ecclesiastical freedom is here meant, not merely that, after the
ejection of 1662, dissent was, or was to become, free of the yoke
of the episcopal church, but that, within the limits of dissent itself,
all bonds of authority had been destroyed. In the seventeenth
century, a presbyterian system which had not the sanction of the
state behind it was left without any compulsory force at all; and,
as a system, it instantly fell to pieces. In addition, dissent had in-
herited from the commonwealth days the heritage of the curse of
Cain—the internecine warfare of independent and presbyterian.
In the later days of the commonwealth, feeble attempts had been
made to heal that strife, and, when thirty years of later persecution
had chastened their mood, the attempts were revived with the
passing of the Toleration act. In the so-called 'happy union,
which was established in London in 1691 by agreement between
the independent and presbyterian bodies, it was fondly hoped that,
at last, the foundation had been laid for a church polity of dissent.
But the disintegrating force of irresponsibility soon laid low these
builded hopes. In London, the association of the two bodies
endured only a brief four years, and, although in the country
the heads of the agreement' of this union became somewhat
widely adopted, and were worked out into the scheme of county
or provincial associations and unions, these lived but a palsied
and flickering life, and possess little true organic connection with
modern county unions.
Although the deep underlying causes of this disruption were
inherent in the life history of dissent, it was natural that the
actual expression which the disintegrating principle took on should
be one of controversy. The first form which this took was the so-
called neonomian controversy. In 1690, the sermons of Tobias Crisp,
a royalist but Calvinistic divine, were republished by his son with
certain additional matter, to which he had obtained the imprimatur
of several London dissenting ministers. The popularity of the
book revived the spirit of the ultra-Calvinist section of dissent, at
a time when Calvinism was losing its hold. To check the rising
a


## p. 377 (#403) ############################################

6
The Spread of Arianism 377
spirit of antinomianism which Crisp's fantastic Calvinism en-
couraged, the presbyterian ministers of London deputed Daniel
Williams to reply to the book. His reply, Gospel Truth stated
and vindicated (1692), though moderate and non-partisan in
tone, and aiming only at the establishment of a via media
between legalism and antinomianism, merely increased the storm.
Williams's own orthodoxy was impeached, charges of neo-nomian-
ism, of Arminianism and Socinianism were hurled against him by
Stephen Lobb and by Isaac Chawnėy, an independent, in his Neo- !
Nomianism Unmasked (1693), and Williams's Defence (1693) failed
to still the commotion? In the following year, Williams was pro-
hibited from preaching his 'turn’ to the united ministers at the
merchants' lecture in Pinners' hall. The presbyterians, accord-
ingly, withdrew and established their own lecture at Salters' hall,
leaving the independents in possession of the Pinners' hall lectures.
In spite of all attempts at reconciliation, the dispute wrecked the
‘happy union,' to which the independents' self-defence, in their
History of the Union (1698), and Williams's own Peace with
Truth, or an end to Discord (1699) only served as funeral
elegies.
To this controversy succeeded that concerning occasional con-
formity which has been already mentioned above. But all these
pale in their significance before the Subscription controversy—the
doctrinal dispute aroused by the spread of Arianism. Under the
commonwealth, Socinianism (represented by Paul Best and John
Biddle), Sabellianism (by John Fry), Arianism (by John Knowles,
Thomas Collier and Paul Hobson) and universalism (by Richard
Coppin, John Reeve and Ludowicke Muggleton), had been alike
banned and persecuted. The intolerant attitude of both presby-
terians and independents was continued after the restoration; and
to this was now added the rigour of the reestablished English
church. To Richard Baxter, not less than to John Owen or to
Stillingfleet, the Socinians were on a par with Mohammadans,
Turks, atheists and papists. But, in spite of persecution, the
discrete strands of varying anti-Trinitarian thought remained
unbroken. Gilbert Clerke of Northamptonshire, a mathematician
and, in a sense, a teacher of Whiston, Noval of Tydd St Giles
near Wisbech, Thomas Firmin (Sabellian), William Penn, Stephen
Nye (Sabellian), William Freke (Arian), John Smith, the philo-
math, of St Augustine’s London (Socinian), Henry Hedworth, the
See Calamy, Account, vol. 1, p. 337, where the one side' may be roughly read as
independents and the other side' as presbyterians.


## p. 378 (#404) ############################################

378 The Literature of Dissent, 1660—1760
disciple of Biddle, and William Manning, minister of Peasenhall
(1630—1711) (independent), form a direct and unbroken, though
irregular, chain of anti-Trinitarian thought, extending from the
commonwealth days to those of toleration-not to mention the
more covert but still demonstrable anti-Trinitarianism of Milton
and Locke.
With the passing of the Toleration act of 1689, the leaven of
this long train of anti-Trinitarian thought made itself strongly felt.
It first appeared in the bosom of the church of England itself, in
the so-called Socinian controversy. In 1690, Arthur Bury, a
latitudinarian divine, was deprived of the rectorship of Lincoln
college, Oxford, for publishing his Naked Gospel. The proceed-
ings gave rise to a stream of pamphlet literature on both sides.
In the same year, 1690, John Wallis, Savilian professor of mathe-
matics at Oxford, was involved in a controversy with a succession
of anonymous Arian and Socinian writers (among them William
Jones) by the publication of his Doctrine of the Blessed Trinity
briefly Explained. Simultaneously, Sherlock’s Vindication of
the Holy and ever Blessed Trinity, although directed against the
same group of writers, called forth another outburst of pam-
phleteering from quite another quarter; South leading the attack
with his Animadversions upon Dr Sherlock's Vindication. The
first portion of the anti-Trinitarian literature produced in this
triangular contest is collected in The Faith of one God Who
is only the Father (1691). In the ranks of dissent, the same
controversy manifested itself in the disputes which wrecked
the independent and presbyterian 'happy union' and, contem-
poraneously, it appeared in the baptist body. In 1693, Matthew
Caffyn, baptist minister at Horsham, Sussex, was for a second
time accused before the ‘Baptist General Assembly' of denying
Christ's divinity; and, when the assembly refused to vote his
expulsion, a secession took place, and the rival ‘Baptist General
Association' was formed. In the same year, the anti-Trinitarians
published a Second collection of tracts proving the God, and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the only true God (1693). The
tenth, and last tract, in this volume was a reply to South's
Animadversions on Sherlock's Vindication. In the following
year (1694), the presbyterian John Howe entered the field with
his Calm and sober Enquiry directed against the above tract,
and, to make the fight triangular, Sherlock replied to South and
Howe together in A Defence of Dr Sherlock’s notion of a Trinity
in Unity. The anti-Trinitarians' Third collection of Tracts, which


## p. 379 (#405) ############################################

các
The Socinian and Arian Controversies 379
:
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tid
followed immediately, was a reply at once to Howe, on the one
hand, and to Sherlock, on the other.
This first Trinitarian or so-called Socinian controversy, practi-
cally, came to an end in 1708. It received its deathblow, in 1698,
by the act for the more effectual suppression of blasphemy and
profaneness, which remained on the statute book till 1813. With
the exception of John Smith's Designed End to the Socinian
Controversy (1695), the whole of the anti-Trinitarian contributions
to it had been anonymous (both Locke and Sir Isaac Newton are
supposed to have contributed under the cover of this anonymity);
and, with the exception of Howe, no representatives of the professed
dissenting denominations had joined in the fray. It is therefore to
be regarded, primarily, as a church of England controversy, in
which the churchmen had weakened the Trinitarian cause by a
triangular and virtually conflicting defence: Sherlock versus South
versus Tillotson and Burnet, and all four versus the enemy. The
agitation which the controversy produced among the dissenters
was mainly reflex, and is apparent more in their domestic quarrels,
noted above, than in their published literature. But, dispropor-
tionately small as was the dissenting share of the combatants in
mere point of literature, the intellectual ferment which ensued
in following years showed itself more in the bosom of dissent
than in the life and thought of the church of England. Thomas
Emlyn, a presbyterian, who was tried at Dublin, in 1693, for
publishing his Humble Enquiry into the Scripture account of
Jesus Christ, attributed his own Arianism to Sherlock's Vindi-
cation of the Doctrine of the Trinity.
But the Arian controversy, properly so-called, does not owe
anything to Emlyn. It was, rather, opened by William Whiston's
Historical Preface (1710), prefixed to his Primitive Christianity
(1711),and Samuel Clarke's Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (1712).
Although, however, Whiston finally joined the general baptists and
claimed to have influenced Peirce of Exeter, the importance of this
second controversy is, so far as dissent is concerned, rather practical
or constitutional than literary. Among the dissenter's, it assumed
a particularly accentuated form of the subscription controversy.
In 1717, James Peirce and Joseph Hallett, presbyterian ministers
of Exeter, were taken to task locally for Arianism. In the Exeter
assembly of May 1719, an attempt to enforce subscription to the
first of the thirty-nine articles brought about a split. In the same
year, the matter came before the committee of the deputies of
the three denominations of protestant dissenters at Salters' hall
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## p. 380 (#406) ############################################

380 The Literature of Dissent, 1660—1760
meeting-house, London—the so-called Salters' hall synod. Here,
the question of subscription followed a clean-cut line of cleavage.
The congregationalists, in the main, under the lead of Thomas
Bradbury, insisted on subscription; the presbyterians, in the main,
under the lead of John Barrington Shute, afterwards viscount
Barrington, resisted the proposal as an unnecessary imposi-
tion of a creed. As a result, the whole body of dissent was
divided into three parties - non-subscribers, subscribers and
neutrals. The minority of subscribers, being defeated, withdrew
from the synod and formed a distinct meeting under Bradbury,
while the majority of non-subscribers despatched a letter of
advice to Exeter, which, by virtue of its statement of reasons
for non-subscribing, is regarded by unitarians as their charter
of dogmatic freedom. The mere momentary controversy con-
cerning these synod proceedings gave birth to more than seventy
pamphlets.
It is claimed by presbyterian writers that there was no avowed
heterodoxy among the London ministers for half a generation after
Salters' hall. This means little more than that the great luminaries
of dissent of the era following on the Toleration act had passed
away, and that, between 1720 and 1740, no successors had arisen
worthy of the memory of those giants-outside, that is to say,
of the world of academic teaching. But, underneath the surface
deadness and mental lethargy of this later period, the leaven of
anti-Trinitarian thought continued incessantly at work, and, when
the interim of quiescence had ended, it was found to have been
merely a phase of growth, an intermediate stage between the
Arianism of 1720 and the later unitarianism. In matter of
literature, the intermediate phase was distinguished by the writings
of John Taylor of Norwich, a professed presbyterian (Defence of
the Common rights of Christians, 1737; The Scripture doctrine
of Original Sin, 1740), and of Samuel Bourn (Address to Protes-
tant Dissenters, 1737).
In itself, the literary importance of this period of nonconformist
history is not great, save and in so far as it marks the stepping-
stone to the latest phase of the development of unitarian thought
—that phase, namely, which is distinguished by the names of
Nathaniel Lardner, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley and Theophilus
Lindsey—a movement which lies outside the scope of the present
chapter 1
It is not to be supposed that the evolution of a distinctively
1 As to Price and Priestley cf. chap. XIV, pp. 344-6, ante.
.


## p. 381 (#407) ############################################

Eighteenth Century Unitarian Movement 381
unitarian church was the sole outcome of the train of development
which has been briefly sketched above. The sections of dissent,
in all its three denominations—which stood aloof from the dis-
tinctively unitarian development, yet remained profoundly affected
by the spirit of it. The presbyterian, independent and baptist
churches alike showed, in their loose internal organisations, the
disintegrating force of the unitarian movement. Both in individual
congregations and in the loose and feeble associations, the spiri-
tuality of dissent, which had been its glory and motive force in the
seventeenth century, had sunk into atrophy; and, had it not been
for the reviving influence of methodism, all three denominations
would probably, at the close of the eighteenth century, have offered
a melancholy spectacle. The intellectual gain to English thought
generally, quite apart from dissenting theology in particular, was
incalculable; but the spiritual loss was none the less to be deplored.
In emphasising, however, the free thought side, or effect of the
unitarian movement within dissent, it is not to be understood
that this was a free thought movement in the sense of twentieth
century science or philosophy. The eighteenth century unitarian
movement was, in the main, theological, not rationalistic. If any
comparison were called for, it should rather be with the spread
of Arminianism in the English church in the seventeenth century.
Both movements had for their motive springs one impulse, that is
to say, a protest against Calvinism, and, when dissent, by means of
unitarian thought, had thrown off the fetters of that Calvinism, it
remained, on the whole, during the period here surveyed, quiescent
and content. And, as a result, when the deistic controversy, a
purely rationalistic movement, engaged the English church and
English thought in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the
leading exponents of dissent, whether orthodox or Arian, are to be
found on the conservative side. James Foster, baptist minister of
the Barbican chapel, and Nathaniel Lardner, then presbyterian
minister in Poor Jewry lane, the accomplished presbyterians
William Harris, Joseph Hallett, Isaac Watts and Philip Dod-
dridge-all these dissenting writers' contributed not less power-
fully, if less sensationally and attractively, to the rout of the deists
than did Butler and Berkeley themselves.
Finally, outside and apart from the field of pure thought,
eighteenth century England owes a heavy debt to dissent for its
educational system, to which reference has already been made in
1 For a list of nonconformist contributions to the deistic controversy, and of
works of other nonconformist writers, see bibliography.


## p. 382 (#408) ############################################

382 The Literature of Dissent, 1660—1760
an earlier volume", but which seems to deserve further notice here
in its connection with the influence of nonconformity upon
literature. Although the presbyterians had but one or two free
schools (public charity schools) in London before 1714, and,
although the baptists and independents joined forces in that and
the succeeding year to establish a similar free school at Horsley-
down (subsequently the Maze Pond school), the academy system
of the dissenters, in the main, had reference only to the private
and domestic problem of the supply of educated ministers for
their respective denominations. Accordingly, each one of the more
widely recognised academies, during some period of its generally
chequered and brief career, takes on a denominational colour. As
a system, these academies date entirely from the era of the
Toleration act. Prior to that date, dissenting ministers engaged in
education acted as private tutors in families or contented them-
selves with opening small private schools in their own houses.
After the Toleration act, however, individual ministers started
private schools of their own of which it is now impossible to
ascertain the number or, in many instances, the circumstances
of origin and growth. Where the minister was a man of learning
and power, these schools endured for a generation and sometimes
longer, and linked their names with the history of dissent through
the personality alike of pupils and of tutors. And it is herein that
they claim special recognition; for, in their totality, they present
a brilliant galaxy of talent in fields of learning far removed
from mere theological studies. Such a result could not have
been achieved, had it not been for the powerful solvent of
intellectual freedom which the unitarian movement brought in
its train. Few of the academies, whatever their denominational
colour at the outset, escaped contact with it, and those of them
which assimilated the influence most freely produced great tutors
and scholars. In this matter, the academies trod the same
historical path as that followed by the individual dissenting
churches. Their intellectual activity blazed so fiercely that it
tended to burn up the spiritual life; and herein lies the secret at
once of their first success, their chequered and bickering career
and, in most cases, their ultimate atrophy.
The attitude of the church of England towards these academies
has already been detailed? But the fear which the establishment
i See ante, vol. ix, chap. xv.
? See ante, vol. IX, pp. 394-5. A reference might have been added to the later
important and illuminating case of the strife between chancellor Reynolds and Philip
Doddridge concerning the academy of Northampton.


## p. 383 (#409) ############################################

The Devotional Literature of Dissent 383
6
entertained that these academies would starve the universities
proved baseless. In their early days, indeed, they attracted a lay
clientela as well as candidates for the ministry. But, the bent
towards unitarianism which provided the intellectual stimulus to
tutors and ministerial candidates frightened off the layman, and
eflectually prevented the dissenting academies from leaving the
deep mark on the English race and on the English educational
system that might have been expected from the individual talent
and prestige of their tutors.
Whatever the theological basis of the three denominations of
which this chapter has mainly treated, there is one general field of
literary activity which they cultivated in common—that of hymn-
writing and religious poetry. A list of their chief contributors to
this branch of literature will be found elsewhere. But, apart
from this phase, in so far as the devotional literature of dissent
is merely devotional, whether it be 'practical' or 'theological
it does not enter into the wider subject of English literature as
such. All the same, there are certain outstanding products of
this portion of the writings of dissent (Baxter's Saints' Everlasting
Rest, 1650; Doddridge's Rise and Progress of Religion in the
Soul, 1745) which, by their mere literary, as well as spiritual,
quality, challenge a place in the annals of our literature by the
side of the masterpieces of Bunyan and Milton. Broadly speak-
ing, however, the course of the history of dissent, from 1660
to 1760, militated against the production of purely devotional
literature. The race of giants who had seen the great common-
wealth days, and who went out in 1662, were mainly preachers.
The succeeding generation, likewise one of giants, was occupied
with dogmatic wrangles, practical questions of church organisa-
tion, or actual political dealings with the state. From 1720 to
1740, there followed a period of almost unbroken spiritual dead-
ness; and, when this partially came to an end with the advent
of Doddridge, the spiritual impress is from without, from method-
ism, rather than from within, from the inherent spirituality of
dissent itself. During this period, therefore, English nonconformity
rather looks forward, as anticipating that later general revival of
the national religious life which was born of methodism, than
backward to that stern spirituality of Calvinistic dissent which
had puritanised the great revolution.
1 For a list of some of the chief of these academies, in the period under survey, see
appendix to the present chapter.
? See bibliography.