No More Learning

See, also, ibid. vol. III (1912), p. 113 and note.


## p. 351 (#377) ############################################

Samuel Johnson. Atterbury 351
exceptions. No one can deny the power of Butler’s writing, what-
ever it may be the fashion to assert as to the depth of his thought;
and, while there was fire enough in Atterbury, in Wilson there
was certainly the delicate aroma of that intimate sincerity which
has in all literature an irresistible charm. Some earlier writers
may be left aside, such as Richard Cumberland, who, though a
bishop, was rather a philosopher than a theologian, and Samuel
Johnson, the Ben Jochanan of Dryden, whose divinity was not
more than an excrescence on his fame as a whig pamphleteer who
suffered excessively for his opinions. His manner of writing was
unquestionably savage. Julian the Apostate: Being a Short
Account of his Life; the sense of the Primitive Christians about
his Succession; and their Behaviour towards him. Together with
a comparison of Popery and Paganism (1682), is more vehement
and obnoxious than most of those bitter attacks on James duke
of York with which the press groaned during the last years of
Charles II ; yet its author hardly deserved degradation from the
priesthood, the pillory and whipping from Newgate to Tyburn.
As the chaplain of Lord William Russell, Johnson might be ex-
pected to speak boldly: and his writing was full of sound and
fury, as a characteristic sentence a solitary one, be it observed
- from his Reflections on the History of Passive Obedience may
show.
I have reason to enter a just Complaint against the pretended Church-of-
England Men of the two last Reigns, who not only left me the grinning
Honour of maintaining the establish'd Doctrine of the Church all alone,
(which I kept alive, till it pleased God to make it a means of our Deliverance,
with the perpetual hazard of my own life for many years, and with suffering
Torments and Indignitys worse than Death) but also beside this, were very
zealous in running me down, and very officious in degrading me, as an
A postate from the Church of England for this very Service: While at the
same time, they themselves were making their Court with their own Renegado
Doctrine of Passive Obedience; and wearing out all Pulpits with it, as if it
had been, not only the First and Great Commandment, but the Second too;
and cramming it down the reluctant throats of dying Patriots, as the Terms
of their Salvation.
We may begin the tale with Francis Atterbury. He was born
in 1663, and his upbringing, at the quiet Buckinghamshire rectory
of Milton Keynes, by a father who had been suspect of disloyalty
for his compliance with the commonwealth and, probably, atoned
for it by an exaggerated attachment to the restored Stewarts, was
in the strictest principles of the establishment in church and state.
A Westminster boy and student of Christ Church, he became pro-
minent among the scholars of his day, and his contribution to the


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352
Divines
6
Phalaris controversy made him famous. He took holy orders in
1687, and, before long, reached high preferment. Soon after the
beginning of the century, he was archdeacon of Totnes and
chaplain in ordinary to queen Anne. He became dean of Carlisle
(1704), of Christ Church (1712) and of Westminster and bishop
of Rochester (1713). Seven years later, he was imprisoned in the
Tower, without much evidence against him, for having been con-
cerned in a plot to restore the Stewarts. Banishment followed,
and he definitely threw in his lot with the exiled family. He
lived till 1732. For fifty years, he was an influential, though not
a voluminous, writer. Politically, he was vehement; in religion,
he was wholehearted ; and the two interests seemed to him in-
separable. What weighed most with him in politics, truly says his
latest biographer', was 'the consequence that the Whigs' lati-
tudinarianism would have, and as a matter of fact did have, on
the Church of England. He was, indeed, from first to last, a
'church of England man,' of the type which the sunshine of queen
Anne's favour ripened. The Hanoverian type of protestantism
was uncongenial to bim : be distrusted and feared its rationalising
influence. In his view, as he said in the dedication of his sermons
to Trelawny (famous as one of the seven bishops), 'the Fears of
Popery were scarce remov'd, when Heresy began to diffuse its
Venom. ' Thus, he came to the position which Addison expressed
in an epigram, but which, perhaps, was not so inconsistent as it
seemed—that the Church of England will always be in danger
till it has a Popish king for its defender. '
If his contribution to the Phalaris controversy best exhibits
his wit, and his political writing his trenchant diction, his sermons
may, perhaps, be regarded as his permanent contributions to
English literature. There is no conspicuous merit in their style
or in their argument; but they are lucid, argumentative and,
on occasion, touched by real feeling. Perhaps, his sincerity never
appeared to more advantage than in the quiet pathos of his
Discourse on the death of the Lady Cutts (1698), the opening
passage of which gave at least a hint to Sterne for a very famous
6
sermon.
Much the same may be said of Atterbury's friend George
Smalridge, who succeeded him as dean of Christ Church.
Smalridge was a less active Jacobite and a less vehement
i See vol. ix, chap. XIII, p. 333, ante.
Beeching, H. C. , Francis Atterbury (1909), p. 263.


## p. 353 (#379) ############################################

Smalridge. Wake
353
man, and died peaceably, though in disgrace, as bishop of
Bristol. He
toasted the Pretender in the privacy of his rooms at Christ Church, but gave
him no other support; recognising, no doubt, that anything but a Platonic
affection was incompatible with the Church principles of non-resistance to
established authority, of which he and Atterbury had been among the fore-
most champions.
Some of this quietude gives tone to his sermons, which Johnson
praised for their elegant style; and Addison wrote in 1718
he is to me the most candid and agreeable of all the bishops. '
Dedicated to Caroline princess of Wales—who, as queen, had a
striking talent for the discovery of clever clergymen- and produced
in print for an extraordinarily large number of subscribers, the
sermons are more remarkable for sound sense than for eloquence
or argument. The English is pure and unaffected ; Addison, per-
haps, is the model; but his excellence is far from being attained.
Smalridge was indignant when some one thought to flatter him by
suggesting that he wrote A Tale of a Tub: a very moderate
knowledge of his style should have convinced the most obtuse
that he could not have written the Tale if he would. In truth, he
is typical of his period. The theological writings of the day had
none of the learning, or the attempt at it, which had marked
the Caroline epoch; they had no charm of language, no eloquence
or passion. The utmost they aimed at was lucidity, and, when
this was achieved, we are left wondering whether what could be
80 expressed was worth expressing at all. Atterbury had stood
alone against the benumbing influence of Tillotson.
It needed controversy to stir the placid contentment of the early
Hanoverian dignitaries. And, of controversy, vehement enough,
they had their share. If Sacheverell did not contribute anything
of value to English literature, the same cannot be said of Wake
or even, perhaps, of Hoadly. In 1715, William Wake succeeded
Tenison as archbishop. His predecessor had possessed a certain
skill in anti-Roman controversy, and he had the very rare accom-
plishment of being able to write a good collect; but Wake was
altogether his superior. In history, his translation of the Apostolic
Fathers and his very important contributions to the discussion on
the powers of convocation give him a place in the short list of
English archbishops who have been learned men. Nor was his
learning anglican only; he was better known in Germany and
France, as well as in the eastern church, than any of his successors
till quite modern times. As a controversialist, he was lucid and
E. L. X.
CH. XV.
23


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354
Divines
graceful; but when he hit he could hit hard. The convocation
controversy, though it employed the powers of Atterbury, Burnet,
Hody, Kennett and Matthew Hutton of Aynho, hardly belongs to
the history of literature. But it gave great opportunity for the
display of that kind of antiquarian knowledge in which many of the
English clergy of the time excelled. Few of those who joined
in it were not, at the same time, writers of eminence in their
own fields : Wake was distinguished for his studies of the
Apostolic Fathers, Hody as a Hebraist, Kennett, in that admirable
book The Parochial Antiquities of Ambrosden, a very model for
local historians. And the convocation controversy was soon
merged in the discussion as to the orthodoxy of certain eccle-
siastics, some prominent, some undistinguished, which began with
Hoadly and his views of church authority.
Benjamin Hoadly was a clergyman in whom the objectionable
features of Gilbert Burnet were exaggerated to the verge of
caricature. He was a whig and a follower of the government
in power first of all, a controversialist in consequence, and only
after that was he an ecclesiastic. As a political writer, he opposed
Atterbury and Blackall in 1709—10; on the Hanoverian succession
being accomplished, he was rewarded by the see of Bangor,
which he hardly ever visited. In 1717, his famous sermon entitled
The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ caused the acid
controversy which was named after him; A Preservative against
the Principles and Practices of the Nonjurors, a treatise published
by him in 1716, called forth the drastic criticism of William Law;
and A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament
(1735), the massive treatise of Waterland on the doctrine of the
Eucharist. He seemed to live for dispute and preferment; and
he accepted both with the placid dignity which is inimitably
rendered in Hogarth's immortal portrait. As a writer, he carries
the sobriety of Tillotson to the extreme of pompous dulness; it is
safe to say that the volumes of his sermons and other argumen-
tative works which line many old libraries have rested for a cen-
tury and a half undisturbed by any reader's hand. Their manner,
which is devoid of any original touch, contrasts strangely with
their matter. Hoadly's theory of churchmanship reduced itself to
pure individualism tempered by toleration. He was a conscientious
advocate for the repeal of the whole range of test acts. He was,
in fact, a much better thinker in matters of state than in those
which belonged more directly to his own profession. From under


## p. 355 (#381) ############################################

Hoadly. The Nonjurors 355
the cloud of words and the skilful tangle of qualifications in which
his thought is enveloped, there emerges the certainty that he had
no coherent idea of a religious society at all. If he had points of
affinity with Thomas Arnold, he is, perhaps, not very far away from
the reforming theologians or even the theorists of the Middle
Age. Church and state are one in his mind; but it is the state
which turns church communion into something quite vague, general
and ultimately unmeaning; yet he has not risen to the idea of a
federation; he remains in a conception of essential fluidity. On
the other hand, his advocacy of toleration, on true principles, was,
if not an advance in theory on the position of several earlier
English writers, of different parties, at least one in actual prac-
tice, before whig statesmen as well as anglican bishops were pre-
pared to accept it. Hoadly became bishop of Winchester in 1734
and held the see till his death in 1761. It cannot be said that he
rendered any service to the church, and the controversies of which
he was the centre had no small share in that eclipse of her literary
glory, which was the conspicuous characteristic of the Hanoverian,
as opposed to the Stewart, age.
If Hoadly typifies the comfortable Erastianism of the leaders of
the establishment, William Law's enthusiasm and depth were
reproduced in not a few of the later nonjurors. It was some
time before the inspiring self-sacrifice of Sancroft and Hickes and
their colleagues died down into the sordid insignificance which
Johnson professed to have witnessed. The spirit of literary
audacity which had fled the established church was still to be
found among the nonjurors. The two Thomas Wagstaffes—the
father (1645—1712) nonjuring bishop of Ipswich, the son (1692–
1770) English chaplain to the banished Stewarts-were writers of
considerable power. The Vindication, by the pen of the elder,
of Charles l's authorship of Eikon Basilike, followed by A
Defence of the Vindication, is a work of considerable, though
not of convincing, force. Both were noted as antiquaries, and
belong, indeed, to the school, as we may call it, of Carte, Leslie,
Rawlinson and Hearne. Thomas Deacon, again, was a scholar
of no mean order with a range of theological knowledge unusual
in his day. By profession a physician, he was ordained by the
nonjuring bishop Gandy in 1716, and consecrated, probably
in 1733, by Archibald Campbell, bishop of Aberdeen, whom
Dr Johnson described as 'very curious and inquisitive but
credulous. The nonjurors (as has been seen in the case of
23-2


## p. 356 (#382) ############################################

356
Divines
Hickes) were close students of liturgiology, and the revised
communion office of the 'Usagers,' with the Compleat Devotions
of 1734, bear witness to the accuracy of Deacon's study and in-
fluenced the important liturgies of the Scottish and American
churches of the present day.
As may seem natural for men who found themselves compelled
to live more and more apart from the general religious and even
the social life of their day, the nonjurors turned to antiquarianism
as a solace for their seclusion as well as a support for their
doctrines. The older race of those who withdrew from com-
munion with the national church were often men of great learn-
ing as well as steadfast principle. Henry Dodwell is a typical
example. He held a fellowship at Trinity college, Dublin, but
resigned it, being unwilling to take holy orders. He then resided
in England, in London or Oxford at first, in later years in Berk-
shire. From 1688 to 1691, he was Camden professor of history at
Oxford. He was deprived because he would not take the oaths;
but William III is said to have declared that he would not
make him a martyr—'He has set his heart on being one and
I have set mine on disappointing him. ' Hearne considered him
'the greatest scholar in Europe when he died,' and even such an
opponent as White Kennett respected his learning. His writings
are partly 'occasional' and vehement, partly deliberate and
scholastic. To the former class belongs what he wrote about
the schism; to the latter, his work on Irenaeus and on ancient
history in general. It cannot be said that he left any permanent
impression on English literature or scholarship, though his writings
were long remembered and utilised by lesser men. His friends
Nelson, Hearne, Cherry and the rest preserved his memory in
their circle of devout ecclesiasticism. But the whole mass of the
nonjurors' literary output, even work so good as that of Brett and
Leslie, belongs to a backwater in English letters. One fragrant
survival, however, may be mentioned here for its exquisite and
simple pathos, A Pattern for Young Students in the University,
set forth in the Life of Mr Ambrose Bonwicke, sometime Scholar
of St John's College in Cambridge (1729)". It is the record of a
young nonjuror's life, told by his father, in an unaffected, but
deeply touching, manner which no man of letters of the day
could have surpassed. One is tempted to put beside it, for their
record of devotion to duty in circumstances very different, the
Journals of the Scottish bishop Robert Forbes (in 1762 and
· Edited by Mayor, J. E. B. , Cambridge, 1870.


## p. 357 (#383) ############################################

Bingham. Thomas Sherlock
357
1770)', a divine whose 'primitive piety' and ecclesiastical prin-
ciples were supported by the same doctrines of church obedience
as directed the life of the young Cambridge scholar. Men such
as these must in all ages live remote from public haunt. Joseph
Bingham, the greatest ecclesiastical antiquary of his time and for
long after it, was incessantly active as a writer, but (save that he
was unjustly stigmatised as a heretic and had to resign his fellow-
ship at Oxford in consequence) was entirely neglected by those
whose business it should have been to know what scholars wrote.
His Origines Ecclesiasticae, or The Antiquities of the Christian
Church (published in successive volumes from 1708 to 1722) is
a mine of learning, to which writers everywhere had recourse till
the Cambridge scholars of the later nineteenth century began
the critical rewriting of the history of the early church. Bingham,
it may be said, did for church history what Pearson did for the
creed. He showed what it meant at the time of its beginning and
he illustrated its growth by a store of learning which none in his
own time could rival, and few since have surpassed. At the
beginning of the eighteenth century it was, certainly, in learn-
ing rather than in pure letters that the clerus Angliae preserved
its reputation.
>
Returning from this interesting by-path, we find the main field
of theology in possession of writers of scarcely a single literary
merit. The Annual Register, when it commemorated Hoadly on
his death, allowed him the virtue that, in all his controversies
with his brethren (‘and no one surely ever held more'), he never
lost his equanimity of temper or descended to any railing ac-
cusation. In the same way, Thomas Sherlock, bishop of London,
was praised in that
he too had his controversies, and those carried on with warmth and spirit, but
without any injury to his temper, or any interruption to his thoughts and
mind.
He
was, indeed, an opponent of Hoadly even more persistent than
Law. He was chairman of the committee of the lower house of
convocation which considered the book that was the fons et origo
mali ; and, though, owing to the suspension of the sessions of con-
vocation, the report was never published, its substance, no doubt,
appeared in Remarks on the Bishop of Bangor's treatment of the
Clergy and Convocations, issued by him anonymously in 1717,
1 Edited by Craven, J. B. , 1876.


## p. 358 (#384) ############################################

358
Divines
and in other pamphlets. Sherlock's politics, in early life, were,
like those of his more famous father (master of the Temple and
dean of St Paul's), not above suspicion with those in power : the
wits compared the two thus :
As Sherlock the elder with jure divine
Did not comply till the battle of Boyne;
So Sherlock the younger still made it a question
Which side he should take till the battle of Preston.
But, in later life, he was a steady supporter of Walpole, and his
politics even more than his preaching brought him to high place.
He was appointed bishop of London in 1748, and it is said that he
had declined even higher preferment. Before this, nearly all his
important literary work had been done. He had engaged in the
deist controversy in 1725, and his Trial of the Witnesses of the
Resurrection of Jesus (1729) was a very notable apologetic, on
quite modern lines, in answer to Woolston. Next to Butler, he
was the most powerful opponent, and the most rational, whom the
deists encountered. His last work, which enjoyed the popularity
of a modern novel, was A Letter to the Clergy and People of
London and Westminster on occasion of the late Earthquake
(1750). Nichols, the bookseller, tells that 100,000 copies were sold
in less than a month; and the trenchant vigour of its denun-
ciation of vice and appeal for amendment make it still worthy of
perusal.
But books and pamphlets such as Sherlock's are at least on the
fringe of that sad class of writings which Lamb stigmatised as
biblia abiblia. We rise far above it when we come to the work
of men so different as bishop Wilson, bishop Butler and Daniel
Waterland. The three men were profoundly different. Wilson,
in much of his thought and life, was a survival of the early
seventeenth century and, indeed, of far earlier times. Waterland,
in many respects, was typical of the early eighteenth century.
Butler had affinities with the nineteenth-with Newman, for
example, and Gladstone. The life of Wilson was uneventful.
He took his degree from Trinity college, Dublin, and was or-
dained in the church of Ireland, served a Lancashire curacy,
became chaplain to the earl of Derby and preceptor to his son at
the salary of thirty pounds a year, to which was added the master-
ship of the Latham almshouse, twenty pounds more-whereupon
he had 'an income far beyond his expectations, far beyond his
wishes, except as it increased his ability to do good'-and, in


## p. 359 (#385) ############################################

Wilson.
Waterland
359
1697, was appointed by his patron to the bishopric of Sodor and
Man, in spite of his refusal. At Bishop's court, Kirk Michael,
he lived, for nearly sixty years, the life of a primitive saint, devoted
entirely to works of piety, the father of his people, not neglecting
to punish as well as to protect. His collected works were not
published till 1781 ; but many of them had long achieved a re-
markable popularity. Of the eight volumes, four contain sermons,
of a directness of appeal and simplicity of language unusual
for the time. The English is forcible and unaffected; there
are no pedantic expressions, or classical phrases, or lengthy words.
Everyone could understand what Wilson said, and everyone might
profit by it. He wrote, not to astonish, but to convince; yet the
simplicity of his manner avoids the pit of commonplace into which
such writers as Tillotson not rarely fall. No one could call the
good bishop a great writer ; but no one could call him a poor
In his Maxims and his Parochialia, he shows a knowledge
of human nature not very common among clergymen ; while his
Sacra Privata, which explains (to an intelligent reader) how
this knowledge was obtained, places him with bishop Andrewes
among the masters of English devotional literature.
one.
6
Very different is the ponderous solidity of Daniel Waterland.
He was a controversialist, a scholar and an archdeacon-callings
which tend to dryness and pomposity and seldom encourage literary
excellence. Master of Magdalene college, Cambridge, and vice-
chancellor, he was recommended, says his biographer, ‘to the
favour of the government' by his 'wise and moderate sentiments,'
but he did not attain to any great position in the church. He
preferred, it may well be, to remain an adept in university busi-
ness and a wielder of the cudgel against the heretics of his age,
among whom several, such as Biddle, Firmin and Gilbert Clerke
(to repeat the phrase used by bishop van Mildert nearly a century
ago) 'now scarcely retain a place in our recollection. ' Samuel
Clarke's Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (1712), amid all the
heavy literature which it evoked, had no more successful rival
than Waterland's Vindication of Christ's Divinity, which is almost
worthy to be placed beside the work of bishop Bull ; and this
was but one of the writings of the Cambridge scholar which dealt
with the subject. Waterland had long given attention to the
claims of semi-Arians to hold office in the church of England,
and, in a famous disputation, when he ‘kept a Divinity Act for his
Bachelor of Divinity, had had for his opponent (who was, of
a


## p. 360 (#386) ############################################

360
Divines
course, merely assuming the post of advocatus arianismi) Thomas
Sherlock,
one of the greatest ornaments of the Church, and finest writers of the age,
who gave full play to his abilities, and called forth,' says a contemporary,' all
that strength of reason of which he was the master. '
Here, in spite of a certain favour which royalty was inclined
to bestow upon Arianism, Waterland was safe from censure
by great personages of the day. His moderation appears less
favourably in his abstention from action throughout the long
period during which Bentley was unjustly suspended. His learn-
ing, on the other hand, in his treatise on the Athanasian creed, a
vindication of that much-contested symbol, which is even now not
out of date, appears in its most favourable aspect, and the book de-
served the eulogy of archbishop Dawes of York, a prelate who did
not fear, even when suspected of Jacobitism, to express his opinions :
"With great pleasure I read it,' wrote the primate of England, ‘both on
account of the subject matter of it, and the manner in which you have treated
it; the one, of the greatest importance to the Christian faith; the other, a
pattern to all writers of controversy in the great points of religion. '
In 1727, he became canon of Windsor; in 1730, vicar of Twickenham
and archdeacon of Middlesex; and he enjoyed his retirement at
Twickenham,' his visits to Cambridge and the honour of being
prolocutor of the lower house of the convocation of Canterbury,
till his death in 1740, when an opponent offered the curious testi-
mony to his merits that
notwithstanding his being a contender for the Trinity yet he was a benevolent
man, an upright Christian and a beautiful writer; exclusive of his zeal for
the Trinity, he was in everything else an excellent clergyman and an admirable
scholar.
But the most famous of his writings is, undoubtedly, his Review
of the Doctrine of the Eucharist, which was for long regarded as
the classic work of anglican theology on its subject. It is only
necessary to say of the doctrine, as stated by Waterland, that it
does not proceed beyond the qualified statement of the judicious
Hooker and would not have satisfied Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor, or
Cosin-not to mention so typical an anglican as George Herbert-
among his predecessors; still less does it rise to the views which
found expression in the notable work of John Johnson, The Un-
bloody Sacrifice. In his own words, Waterland advocates not a
sacrificial, but a federal, view of the Eucharist. As a writer, he is
lucid without being commonplace and learned without being
pedantic. 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. '


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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.