CHAPTER PAGE
CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER XIV.
Tue Spirit oF Eguiry AND FELLOWSHIP -
(i) Dress and Station.
(ii) The True Nobility.
(iii) Constructive Social Work.
XV.
Tue PAssING OF A PROPHET -
(i) A Last Retrospect.
(ii) Crossing the Bar.
A PropLe Finns its Sout - "
XVI.
(i) The Streams O'erflow.
(ii) — pee New Character, New Moral and Social eal.
(iii) Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect.
(iv) The Wider Impact.
Tue PERENNIAL CRITIC
- = = A < XVII.
(i) Recreation, Education, Emotion.
(ii) Further Attacks.
(iii) A Belated Assault.
SOME FRUITS OF FAITH
Tuer ABOLITION OF SLAVERY
- = = be 35% XVIII.
(i) The Far-Flung Boon of British Emancipation.
(ii) Modern Slavery and the Forces Arrayed against it.
(iii) Abolitionists and Emancipationists.
(iv) America's Emancipation Problem.
Tue FOUNDATIONS OF PoPpULAR EDUCATION"
(i) Ill-omened Backgrounds.
(ii) The Initial Advance.
(iii) " British and Foreign" and ' National " School Societies.
(iv) Factory Schools and Ragged Schools.
(v) The State fills the Gaps.
PARALLEL CREATIVE VICTORIES
O,& (i) The Humanising of the Prison System.
(ii) The Reform of the Penal Code.
(iii) The Origin and Significance of Protestant Foreign Missions.
Io CONTENTS CHAPTER XXI.
PAGE
BULWARKS OF SocIAL LIBERTY
(i) The Emancipation of Industrial England.
(ii) Religion and British Trade Unionism.
(iii) The Independent Labour Movement and Workmen's Aspirations.
XXII.
CREATIVE SOCIAL SERVICE
(i) Christian Liberty in Action.
(ii) The March Continues.
(iii) Opportunity for the Destitute Child.
XXITI.
CHRISTENDOM—WHITHER Bounp ?
(i) The Revival and the United States.
(ii) Impacts on the British Empire.
(iii) Is Christianity Effete ?
Ris
i0Ot. (LLU LRALLONS
WEsLEY PREACHING FROM A CuirF PuLpir TO TENS OF
THOUSANDS
IN GWENNAP
AMPHITHEATRE,
CORNWALL - - - - - - - Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
Tue Fat PLurawist AND His LEAN CURATES - -
SLAVE-TRADING
ON AFRICAN
COAST AND SECTION OF
On THE Roap TO TyBURN"~ - - - - - -
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
"' SPORT"
- - - - -
OPpposITION TO THE REVIVAL - - - - - -
Lapy Seiina, CounTEss OF HUNTINGDON - - -
CHARLES WESLEY
- - - - - - - -
WeEs.LEy's DEATH BED - - - - - - = (278 Great Bust or LorD SHAFTESBURY - - - -
SHAFTESBURY MEMORIAL (ERos MONUMENT), PICCADILLY
Circus, LonpDoN ee - - - - -
Some GREAT CHRISTIAN LaBour LEADERS - - -
_FounpErs oF CREATIVE MoveEMENTS - - - -
ViraL BuILDERS IN THE NEw WORLD _ - - -
PREFACE WHEN, a dozen years ago, I concluded my Doctorate researches in social history at the University of London, I had been driven to conclusions far different from those held five years earlier, at the beginning of that research, and far different also from certain basic assumptions common to most historians, whether general, political or economic.
I was forced by pressure of much evidence to the conclusion that the democratic and cultural heritage of the modern English-speaking world is much more 2 spiritual than a political or an economic achievement ; that the positive impact of the French Revolution and its philosophy upon British and American developments has been vastly over-rated, or unduly taken for granted ; and that the much-neglected and oft-lampooned Evangelical Revival, which began with Wesley among the outcast masses, was the true
- nursing-mother of the spirit and character values that have created and sustained Free Institutions throughout the Englishspeaking world.
Twelve years of further study and research have but deepened and strengthened these convictions.
books, Lord Shaftesbury and Social-Industrial Progress, and Dr. Barnardo : Physician, Pioneer,
Prophet, are segmentary studies within this vast orbit of moral and spiritual influence.
To understand the epic victories of Shaftesbury, '' the British Abraham Lincoln," or of Barnardo,
"the Emancipator of the Outcast Child," aside from the permeating influence of the Evangelical Revival, which inspired and nurtured their characters and crusades, is utterly impossible.
Exactly the same is true of the character and achievements of Wilberforce, Howard, Raikes, Carey, Asbury, Ryerson, Lincoln,
Harriet Beecher-Stowe, Florence Nightingale, Frances Willard, General Booth, Keir Hardie, President Wilson, and a hundred other vital leaders in an unparalleled spiritual succession of mighty emancipating movements.
Such men and their causes were the spiritual progeny of the purging Baptism of Fire mediated by that matchless practical prophet, John Wesley.
In 1932, I had the memorable privilege of a lecture tour for Canadian clubs, colleges and societies, from Atlantic to
PREFACE Pacific, across Canada.
Following this, a group of prominent Canadians conceived 'the plan of creating a modest Historical
Research Fund, which would enable me to return to England and complete the whole cycle of research within which my
Shaftesbury and Barnardo books are but limited and particular studies.
Some two hundred subscribers supported this fund.
My sincerest thanks are due to them all; for without their practical help, the researches for this wider study could never have been achieved.
The Research Fund was raised on the anticipation of three years labour ; the study has commanded more than five years of the most arduous toil ; and, at a critical juncture, the gracious interest of the Right Hon. R. B. Bennett enabled the task to be carried, unbroken, to its conclusion.
Concerning the plan of the book, I expect criticism ; some readers certainly will think Part I too long and detailed.
I believe, however, the plan adopted best fits the subject.
This is not merely a life of Wesley ; it is the history of an epochal movement, of which Wesley was the master-figure.
That movement, indeed, represents a water-shed in Anglo-Saxon history ; and to appraise the intensity and sweep of its repercussions, we must first see clearly its incredible social and moral backgrounds, then proceed to the origin and evolution of the movement itself, and finally examine the fruitage of its maturity in different spheres of cultural attainment on different continents ; hence the three parts.
The title, England:
Before and After Wesley, suggests the water-shed significance of the great Spiritual Awakening to Britain.
Its impact, however, upon the United States and upon various parts of the British Empire has been not less pronounced.
In this year, therefore, which marks both the Bicentenary of Wesley's Conversion and the Quatercentenary of the Open English Bible—a year with much demonstration of militarism and paganism around us—it surely behoves the English-speaking peoples to study seriously the debt of their free and voluntary institutions to this peerless
Revival of vital, practical Christianity. Such a study this book has attempted.
% * * * * My thanks, in the preparation of this volume, are due to Professor Fred Tracy, L.L.D.; the Very Reverend Dr. George
Pidgeon, first Moderator of the United Church of Canada ; Dr. Charles J. Bready, of the United States ; and Dr. Donald
Soper, all of whom have read the completed book in manuscript.
For cheerful assistance in specialised aspects of the
PREFACE
work, I thank Mr. Sydney Walton, Dr. Benjamin Gregory, Mr.
Edmund Lamplough, Dr. Thomas P. Potter, Rev. Percy Boyling, Dr. Frank Murray, and Dr. M. Dorothy George.
Nor should I omit my indebtedness to the various officials in different departments of the British Museum, or to the secretaries of several societies, both English and American, who have rendered ungrudging assistance.
But, above all, my gratitude goes out to the patience and encouragement, the assistance and criticism, of Ruth, my wife, who has supported me at every turn.
My book, Lord Shaftesbury, contains a long and organised Bibliography '(pages 415-435).
That, together with the numerous foot-notes in this study, will sufficiently indicate the source materials upon which I here have drawn.
J. WESLEY BREADY.
94, Tressillian Road
BROCKLEY, S. E. 4;
Lonpon, ENGLAND.
May, 1938.
PART
BEFORE THE SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
CHAPTER I
TRIPLE TRAGEDIES
Tue foundation of democracy is the sense of spiritual independence, which nerves the individual to stand alone against the powers of this world, and in England, where squire and parson, lifting arrogant eyebrows at the insolence of the lower orders, combined to crush popular agitation, as a menace at once to society and to the Church, it is probable that democracy owes more to Nonconformity than to any other single movement."
Proressor R. H. Tawney, D.Lirr.
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. p. 272.
GHA PTER
TRIPLE TRAGEDIES
In 1738, the year of Wesley's " conversion," Bishop Berkeley in his Discourse. Addressed to Magistrates and Men in Authority, declared that morality and religion in Britain had collapsed
"to a degree that has never been known in any Christian country."
'"' Our prospect," he averred, "is very terrible and the symptoms grow worse from day to day."
The accumulating torrent of evil, '' which threatens a general inundation and destruction of these realms," Berkeley attributed chiefly to "the irreligion and bad example of those
. styled the better sort."
Then, pleading with all State officials to mend their ways and consider well the future of their country, he continued : 'The youth born and brought up in wicked times without any bias to good from early principle, or instilled opinion, when they grow ripe, must be monsters indeed.
And it is to be feared that the age of monsters is not far off.''4
Berkeley's place in history is that of philosopher rather than moralist.
He disliked both enthusiasm and exaggeration ; he was accustomed to weigh well the purport of his words: and in 1738 his influence was at its height.
If, however, his fears seem extreme and we turn to the writings and records of his contemporaries, a host might be cited to the same end.
Wittingly or unwittingly, and from vastly different angles, Fielding, Defoe, Swift, Bolingbroke, Pope, Steele, Gay, Addison,
Butler, Sterne, Walpole and Johnson offer evidence of the moral and spiritual eclipse with which the earlier half of the eighteenth century was seriously threatened.
Historians, too, of widely divergent schools, on this particular issue are singularly agreed.
Examine Lecky, Stephen, Ranke, Macaulay, Rogers, Green, Overton, Abbey, Robertson, Trevelyan, Halévy and Temperley, and it will be found that none would seriously dispute either the justification for, or the relative accuracy of, Bishop Berkeley's verdict.
The fact then of a phenomenal social and moral degeneracy at this period is indisputable.
The manifold causes of that 1 George Berkeley, op. cit., p. 4if.
ENGLAND: .BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
degeneracy, though interrelated, are more elusive: three nevertheless, being unmistakable, are of vital importance to the unfolding of our subject.
(7) The Anti-Puritan Purge First among these three causes was the anti-Puritan '' Code of Persecution '! passed between 1661 and 1665.
Charles II in his Declaration, signed at Breda before his return to England, had promised a general amnesty, including liberty to '' tender consciences."
'The ensuing carnival of triumphant royalism, however, swept all before it.
In April, 1661, the King's coronation was solemnised amidst scenes of wild excitement and elaborate pomp.
Adroitly, too, a General Election was staged almost to synchronise with the coronation pageant, thus exploiting its exuberant and flamboyant passions.
Hence the Cavalier Parliament, now overwhelmingly elected, consisted chiefly of '' hot Royalists and hot Churchmen,"' whose dominant idea of religion was a revengeful, aggressive hatred of everything even savouring of Commonwealth association or influence.
Already the bodies of Cromwell, Bradshaw and Ireton had been torn from their graves and gibbeted at Tyburn.
The Solemn League and Covenant was burned by the common hangman in Westminster Hall.
More than a dozen " regicides " were executed and large numbers of prominent Puritans were cast into gaol, while the royalist squires, lawyers and bishops, not to be outdone even by the mob spirit which they had stimulated, proceeded by legislative enactment to exterminate, root, stem and branch, the '"' monstrous heresy" from every department of the nation's life.
The first legislative thrust in the Cavalier '' purge" was directed toward municipalities and was designed to kill all
Puritan influence in the sphere of legislation ; for the members of municipal bodies controlled the election of Members of Parliament.
By the Corporation Act (1661),? all holders of municipal office had to swear a solemn oath that they would not "' on any pretext whatever," take up arms against, or resist, the King.
They had to repudiate the Solemn League and Covenant 1 J. R. Green, History of England, Vol. III, p. 375.
213 Chas. II, St. 2, cap. 1.
All the statutes of Chas. II are dated as though he had immediately succeeded his father.
On this point, G. M.
Trevelyan (History of England, p. 446), quaintly notes:
'' Lawyers pretended, after their fashion, that Chas. II was King from the moment of his father's death."
TRIPLE
TRAGEDIES
aI and to pronounce it an illegal document, while also they had to receive the Sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England.
The Corporation Act, however, was but a prelude to the really deadly assault.
The Act of Uniformity, the Conventicle Act and the Five Mile Act stabbed at the very heart of Puritan religion, Puritan ideals, Puritan education and Puritan culture.
Taken _together, they represent perhaps the most nefarious and most thoroughly un-British legislation ever placed on the Statute Books of England.
In preparation for the Act of Uniformity (1662) the Prayer Book was revised by Convocation in an anti-Puritan direction to the extent of several hundred alterations.1
Then, the stage being set, every clergyman and schoolmaster, by the clauses of this Act, had to " declare his unfeigned assent and consent to the use of all things in the said book contained and prescribed, in these words and in no other."
One clause of the oath weags >)" 1 (A:
B ) do declare that it is not lawful upon any pretence whatever to take arms against the King...
And that I will conform to the Liturgy of the Church of England, as it is now by law established."
He had to repudiate, and pronounce illegal, the Solemn League and Covenant and to pledge himself not to seek to make any change in the Constitution of Church or State.
And so through twenty-nine quarto pages this stupid, vindictive Act blusters on, even stipulating that the nation was to act toward any who refused to subscribe,
though the person or persons so offending, or neglecting, were dead."'?
The immediate result of this Act was that nearly 2,000 rectors and vicars, whose consciences were not subservient to the dictates of State, were turned adrift from their livings without compensation? : among whom were such eminent pastors and scholars as Baxter, Howe, and Calamy.
Among them, too, were Dr. Samuel Annesley and John Wesley, the grandfathers, and Dr. Bartholomew Wesley, a great-grandfather, of the famous eighteenth century evangelists.
This expulsion represented one-fifth of the entire English 1 Warner and Marten, Ground Work of British History (Part II, p. 410) place the number at six hundred.
2 14 Chas. II, cap. 4 (a).
It is significant that the Statutes of the Realm, as published during Charles II's reign, simply leave a blank for all Commonwealth legislation.
'These contemporary publications may be examined in the State Papers Room of the British Museum Library.
8 Tt must, of course, be remembered that about an equal number of " Laudian clergy " had been ejected during the Puritan era.
See G. M.
Trevelyan, History of England, pp. 417-18.
ENGLAND:
BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
clergy : "' Men whose zeal and labour had diffused throughout the country a greater appearance of piety and religion than it had ever displayed before."!
The famous historian, J. R.
Green (himself an Anglican clergyman), says of this expulsion :
""No such sweeping: alteration in the religious aspect of the Church had ever been seen before .
. the rectors and vicars who were driven out were the most learned and most active of their order.
. Itwas the definite expulsion of a great party which from the time of the Reformation had played the most active and popular part in the life of the Church."
'' The Church of England," says Green, "' stood from that moment isolated and alone among the Churches of the Christian world
. it sank into immobility .
. With the expulsion of the Puritan clergy all change, all efforts after reform, all natural development, suddenly stopped.'"?
But the 2,000 expelled pastors were not the kind of shepherds who forsake their flock when the wolf raids the fold.
Most of them were compelled at once to seek new means of livelihood ; nevertheless they continued to meet with their people in private houses and there to conduct worship according to the dictates of conscience.
This "' audacity? was answered by the Cortventicle Act (1664) which "' punished with fine, imprisonment and transportation on a third offence, all persons who met in greater numbers than five" for any act of Dissenting worship.
Transportation at this time moreover might well mean literal slavery ; for in 1685, following Monmouth's Rebellion, the 800 victims sentenced by Judge Jeffreys, under James II, to transportation were "' presented to various courtiers, who sold them to slavery in the West Indian plantations.'
Then, in 1665, came the Great Plague which mowed down in London alone 100,000 citizens—one in five of all her population.
This ghastly visitation was enough to strike terror into the stoutest hearts.
Parliament was hustled off to Oxford and large numbers of London clergymen, joining the popular exodus, fled the city for country air, thus forsaking their flocks and leaving them without religious rites.
Expelled Puritan divines forthwith stepped into the gap, ministering to the sick, burying the dead and consoling, as best they could, the mourners of deceased loved ones.
Not a few went further: believing 1 J. R. Green, op. cit., Vol. III, p. 362; Leopold Von Ranke, History of England, Vol. III, p. 375ff.
2 Green, Vol. III, p. 361ff.
For some remarkable social reforms initiated by the Commonwealth, see Property : Its Duties and Rights (composite authorship), pp. 143-46.
' Warner and Marten, op. cit., Part II, p. 416.
TRIPLE
TRAGEDIES
that, at such a time, the Spiritual Law superseded all State enactments, they entered the Churches whence they had been expelled and conducted services for their quondam parishioners.!
The fear and fury now " roused by the revival of a foe that seemed to have been crushed," registered itself in the Five
Mile Act (1665)—the crowning infamy of the Anti-Puritan Code.
This Act presented a re-hashed and _ highly-spiced statement of the bitterest clauses in the foregoing legislation ; and, on the expelled clergymen refusing to subscribe—as apparently all did—they "were forbidden under penalty of £40 and six months imprisonment, to approach within five miles of any corporate town, or borough, or of any parish in which they had previously taught or preached."?
The Act was applied to schoolmasters as well as clergymen.
Hence, torn and tortured by persecution, Puritanism was almost completely severed from its spiritual and cultural roots.
Not for twenty-five years, till the passing of the Toleration Act by William and Mary, did Protestant Dissenters enjoy even the semblance of corporate liberty ; and even then the measure granted them was small.?
Remembering that for a considerable period more than 4,000 Quakers and Baptists—to say, nothing of Presbyterians, Independents, etc.—were in gaol through the fury of this Anti-Puritan Purge, is it surprising that in a later and more industrialised age, Puritan Dissenters often carried the doctrines and dogmas of laissez-faire too far ?4
Professor G. M. Trevelyan, commenting on the results of this Code of Persecution, points out that Puritans were not only
excluded from the Universities and from their natural share in social and political influence," but were actually " driven out of polite society."'
The loss inflicted by this Code upon '' Puritan Culture,' Professor Trevelyan thinks,
'' was never completely made good."® Puritans, for a generation, were as Babylonian Captives in their native land.
The spirit of the whole Cavalier Purge is reflected by the fact that even Milton, for a time, was hurled into prison.
Dire _ difficulty was experienced in procuring publication for Paradise 1 Political History of England, Vol. VIII, p. 69f. (Richard Lodge, L.L.D.) ;
Green, Vol. III, p. 375.
2 Dr. Lodge, op. cit., Vol. VIII, p. 70.
3 William & Mary, St. 1, cap. 18.
Even still, marriages were only legal when performed by a clergyman of the State Church.
See, too, Elie Halévy, A History of the English People in 1815, p. 3524 A special Act was passed against Quakers, and the Licensing Act (1662) was designed to muzzle the Puritan press.
'The Quakers' religious aversion to all oaths made them specially-marked victims of such repressive legislation.
> Trevelyan's History of England, p. 450f.
ENGLAND: BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
Lost : it was ordered to be burned by the common hangman ; and Milton, finally reduced to a state of penury that compelled him to sell his library, could get but £5 for the copyright of the immortal Puritan epic.
Such was the outcome of Charles II's promise of "' liberty to tender consciences " in the Declaration at Breda.
A century later, John Wesley, on reading Wodrow's History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, wrote:
'' It would transcend belief, but that the vouchers are too authentic to admit of any exception.
O what a blessed Governor was that good-natured man, so called, King Charles the Second!
Bloody Mary was a lamb, a mere dove, in comparison of him!"
Admittedly Charles II was not directly responsible for this persecuting purge.
A pensioner of France, he had his own secret, sinister schemes in hand, which partly were thwarted by the AntiPuritan
Code.
Nevertheless mercy to Protestant Dissenters held no place in his ultimate plans, and the unparalleled licentiousness of his Court put all purity and virtue to rout.?
(a) The Expulsion of Non-JFurors The second tragedy takes us to the years 1689 and 1690.
It was not pregnant with such fatal consequences as was the Code of Persecution ; nevertheless it left behind it a cruel scar, not to be healed till several generations had passed.
Though James II had ingloriously fled the country, the whole Jacobite party contended that the Crown "could not be forfeited'? ; and among the most vehement spokesmen of that party was a group of ultra-High Church clergy who claimed that James IT was still '' the Lord's Anointed " and therefore that William III's title to the throne was " pretended."
Among these ecclesiastics, moreover, were several prominent bishops and many zealous " old Catholic" priests.
William's position at best was difficult.
He wanted to grant liberty of worship to the oppressed Puritan Dissenters, and so offered to excuse the National clergy from taking the Oath of Allegiance, if the Church dignitaries would agree to the abolition of the Persecuting
Code.
To both hierarchy and squirearchy, however, this proposal smacked of treason.
The Oath accordingly was administered, though to make it less objectionable the words
1 John Wesley's Fournal, entry of January 11th, 1768.
2 In his Short History (p. 608) Green says:
'In mere love of what was vile, in contempt of virtue and disbelief in purity or honesty, the King himself stood ahead of any of his subjects."
TRIPLE
TRAGEDIES
rightful and lawful," as previously applied to the sovereign, were omitted.
The upshot of it all, was that eight prelates and over 400 clergy of the extreme right wing refused to subscribe.
Hence on August Ist, 1689, they were suspended ; and on February 1st, 1690, all were deprived of their livings.?
Among these Won-Furors—as the new outcasts were styled— were such courageous leaders as Sancroft, the Primate, and such saintly souls as Bishop Ken, the hymn writer, while, on the accession of George I, they were joined by the famous mystic, William Law.
Among them, too, were the chief exponents of the patristic, sacramental and old Catholic conception of the Church, as distinguished from the Protestant, prophetic and more directly New Testament conception.
In brief, 400 spiritual sons of Laud suffered in 1690, for conscience sake, the same fate as the 2,000 spiritual sons of Luther suffered in 16622: and the latter expulsion, like the former, bore poisoned fruit.
With this second tragedy the Church found herself shorn of both left and right wings.
Zealous priest and flaming prophet were now cut off.
The '' moderate,"'
"' reasonable'? men, the time-servers, self-seekers and pluralists—these all were left : but the wings of faith were gone.
Had the " National " Church studied how best to extinguish all spiritual fire within the realm and to crush all crusading initiative, she could have devised no better plan than these two tragic expulsions.
The ability to quarrel was stimulated ; the ability to aspire was stultified.
A quaint instance of the deep-rooted feelings associated with the Nonjuring expulsion was later to manifest itself in the Wesley parsonage at Epworth.
Though a moderate High Churchman, Rev. Samuel Wesley (John's father) in family devotions prayed regularly and fervently for William III, as King.
Shortly before William's decease, however, he discovered to his dismay that Susannah, his wife, was not saying '' Amen "' to these particular petitions.
Taxing her for the reason, out came the truth.
The daughter of Dr. Samuel Annesley—that expelled Puritan, often styled "' the St. Paul of Nonconformity "
—was now at heart a Non-Juror. Unrepentently she asserted that William at best was regent—not King.
Samuel Wesley consequently left the house in a huff.
He would not share the bed and board of a "' disloyal'? wife, and for some months, apparently, they lived apart ; then, conveniently, William died
1 Willaim & Mary, cap. 8.
2C, J. Abbey and J. H. Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I, p. 3 and p. 58f.
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (Non-Jurors).
ENGLAND:
BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
and with the accession of Anne, the Epworth parsonage was again harmonious.
Jacobitism, the " Divine Right of Kings "' and the Nonjuring expulsion, divided many parsonages besides that of Epworth.
The Succession issue, in fact, divided the nation.
(iii) The Suppression' of Convocation The third tragedy is so closely associated with the second that it might almost be said to have sprung from it.
Yet it can only be understood in its relation to a broad stream of influences flowing down from Commonwealth days.
From the Restoration to the Revolution of 1688, Squirearchy and Hierarchy dominated the national outlook.
'' Church and King " was the watchword of the ruling oligarchy.
Prince, priest and politician believed that the Civil War and the Commonwealth had demolished the Constitutional framework of the country ; so they set about to rebuild it according to their hearts' desire, taking due pains that their own interests, together with those of the classes and orders they represented, were not overlooked.
'' Divine Right of Kings'? was an assumption inherent in all this new programme.
But the shameless personal conduct and profligate Court of Charles II, through twenty-five disappointing years, were not easy to reconcile with any Christian conception of " Divinity.""
Moreover, it was not pleasant for the '' Highest"?
Churchmen! to recall that Charles II, as Father of his Country and Sovereign Head of the National Church, had, on his death-bed, blessed the kneeling prelates and a little later, in fear of the Last Enemy, had
""smuggled "' into his chamber a Roman Catholic priest, at whose hands he secretly received the Last Rites.
When, therefore, James II, after the "' Bloody Assize," by treating the Judges of the realm as his puppets, by violating the rights of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, by dissolving
Parliament and preparing to '' pack' a new one, by planning openly to re-establish Roman Catholicism as the National religion, and by overriding the Constitution, asserted seriously and imperiously the " Divine Right" of his kingship, grave misgivings were expressed in unexpected quarters.
The episode of the Seven Bishops defying the King's second Declaration of 1" High Churchmen " at this time, indicated a high view of the authority of the State Church in politics and society, support of Divine Right of Kings, and a strong antipathy to both Dissenters and Romanists.
'' Low Churchmen "' meant " broad,"
" liberal,"
'' latitudinarian,'" and had no Evangelical significance.
(G. M. Trevelyan, op. cit., p. 453.)
TRIPLE
TFRAGEDILES
Indulgence, and drawing up a protest against it, gave warning that the "' Divine Right " prerogative could be carried too far, and that '' Passive Obedience " had its limitations, even among the High Church clergy.
Hence when William of Orange was invited to come over " to save the Constitution of Church and State," many High Churchmen and squires acquiesced in his plans ; and not a few supported his efforts.
But to the thoroughgoing traditionalist, whether peer or priest, William and Mary were regents, not sovereigns ; for by his doctrine "' the Crown could not be forfeited."'
Loyalty therefore to William, even from the beginning, in Tory quarters, was halting and cold; but when in 1689 he granted the barest toleration of worship to such Nonconformists as would subscribe to a specified thirty of the Thirty-nine Articles, the resentment of hot-headed reactionaries was all agog.
Their fury against Puritanism was stronger than their fear of Rome.
Then, too, the Non-Jurors, as a body, were firebrands.
True, Ken and some others conducted themselves without malice and with much charity.
But such proved the exception.
The zeal of most of the Nonjuring party soon turned sour and expressed itself in Jacobite plotting and scheming.
'To Non-Jurors as a group the National Church, on their expulsion, was '' schismatic " and her prayers "immoral."
They alone could bestow Apostolic Orders, and through their Sacraments alone, flowed Divine
Grace.
After Mary's death, too, William's position became increasingly difficult, and during the latter years of his reign '' continual plots' were hatched against his life.
Anne owed her accession to " the Revolution Settlement " ; but at heart she was a sentimental reactionary, with a warm attachment to the " Divine Right" theory.
During the whole of her reign the strife of parties, political and ecclesiastical, was violent? ; but during its latter part the national cauldron seethed ; and in the raging animosities engendered, a series of co-related events gathered such momentum as to make the third tragedy inevitable.
In November, 1709, Dr. Henry Sacheverell, a High Churchman of little judgment and less charity, was invited to preach in St. Paul's Cathedral.
With venomous rancour he assailed both the Revolution Settlement and the Toleration Act, whilst
1 Dictionary of National Biography (William III) ; | Chambers's Biog.
Dict. ; Traill's William III.
2 Cf. Daniel Defoe's satire, Shortest Way with Dissenters (1703), which won for him a spell in the pillory.
ENGLAND:. BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
Dissenters he depicted as little better than wily serpents.
'" We must watch," urged Sacheverell, " against these crafty, faithless and insidious persons, who can creep to our altars and partake of our Sacraments, that they may be qualified more secretly and powerfully to. undermine us." 1
The Whigs, already unpopular, instead of letting Sacheverell stew in his own broth, decided to impeach him before the bar of the Lords; and by so doing, made mob heroes of him and the ultra-High Church party behind him.
God save the Church and the Doctor," cried a half-drunken mob around his carriage en route to Westminster, pausing now and then "to wreck a meetinghouse "' and to knock down all who refused to shout, '* Sacheverell and High Church."
In the wake of the '' Sacheverell Riots " the Tories were hurled to power and, new fuel being added to already raging fires, the cauldron, now boiling, was soon to overflow.
In 1711 came the nefarious Occasional Conformity Act with its bitter persecution and fierce fines upon Dissenters.2
In 1714 followed the Schism Acts, striking at the Educational institutions of Nonconformity by '' forbidding anyone to teach without a bishop's license.""
Meanwhile, too, numerous Jacobite schemes were hatching underground.
Queen Anne, the Duke of Ormonde, Bolingbroke and the Duke of Buckinghamshire, to say nothing ofa large fry of politicians, squires and Non-Jurors, were working " double-shift ' to secure the succession of the " Pretender.""
But all ended in the old story of " the best laid schemes 0' mice and men."' The arch-intriguer Bolingbroke, despite his brilliance, over-reached himself.
He had just succeeded in shelving Harley, his one-time Tory colleague, when the Queen died—too soon for the realisation of his schemes.
"The Earl of Oxford (Harley) was removed on Tuesday, the Queen died on Sunday!" moaned Bolingbroke to Swift:
"What a world is this, and how does Fortune banter us ! "? 3
Had Anne lived even a month longer, the moulds of succeeding English history might have assumed a different shape.'
In 1714, George I, a stranger to the British people and knowing not a word of English, was peacefully crowned King.
His * Abbey and Overton, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 370f.
The purpose of this Act was to stop Nonconformists from receiving fe Sacrament in the Church of England and then worshipping in Meeting ouses.
* Swift's Correspondence (letter, August 3rd, 1714).
"See G. M. Trevelyan, England under Queen Anne (the Plan of the Protestant Succession), Chap. XVII and Epilogue ; also W. E. H. Lecky,
Hist. of England in Eighteenth Century, Vol. I, p. 161ff.
TRIPLE
TRAGEDIES
coronation dealt a deadly blow to the " Divine Right " tradition.
Political idolatry was now increasingly transferred from the Sovereign to the Constitution.
But the Jacobites were in no mood to accept defeat.
In 1715 came the Old Pretender's Rebellion, and the year following appeared the posthumous publication, Constitution of the Church of England and the Nature and Consequences of Schism, by the bitter Nonjuring bishop, George
Hickes, in which with pontifical infallibility he excommunicated all and sundry, save Non-Jurors.
Hereon the versatile latitudinarian, Bishop Hoadly, entered the fray.
His Preservative against the Principles and Practices of Non-Jurors was a speedy and able reply not only to Hickes, but to all hierarchical assumptions.
A little later (1717) Hoadly preached before the King his famous and provocative sermon, Nature of the Kingdom, or Church, of Christ, wherein he claimed that Christ had not delegated
His authority to any ecclesiastical system, and that the spiritual, Invisible Church was the only true representative of Jesus Christ.
The fat was now completely in the fire.
The ensuing Bangorian Controversy soon broke into side-issues ; the Lower House of Convocation literally howled for the official censure of Hoadly, and much odium theologicum was loudly expressed.
Whereupon the Whig politicians, having their own axe to grind, and glad of a plausible excuse to silence High Church politics, called upon the King to prorogue Convocation by Royal
Writ.
The request was granted ; the prorogation really spelled suppression : not till the middle of the nineteenth century was
Convocation again permitted to transact business.* The Triple Tragedies were now complete.
Not only was the '"' National ?? Church shorn of left-wing prophet and right-wing priest, even her vocal organs were torn from her.
And the famous Queen Anne's Bounty, which meanwhile had greatly augmented her endowments and income,' was destined to swell the loathsome system of pluralities and sinecures which so grossly vulgarised and paganised the eighteenth-century Church.
These Triple Tragedies, with their co-related events, contributed lamentably to the moral and spiritual stagnation which Bishop Berkeley, in the year of Wesley's conversion, so deeply deplored.
In that same year (1738), Dr. Thomas Secker, then Bishop of Oxford and soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury,
1 Encyclopedia Britannica (' Convocation," '' Bangorian Controversy "') ; Ency. of Rel. and Ethics ('' Convocation '').
2 For an acute analysis of the meaning of Queen Anne's Bounty, see Nathaniel Micklem, K.C., A Note on the Disestablishment of the Welsh
Church.
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AFTER WESLEY
complained that " Christianity is now railed at and ridiculed with very little reserve, and the teachers of it without any at all..." +
But neither Secker nor any other Primate of his century seems to have fathomed the underlying causes of that ridicule ; and certainly none gave any vigorous lead towards the rekindling of spiritual life.
1 Abbey and Overton, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 20.
GHAPTER II
DEISM AND
ITS AFTERMATH
Thus God and Nature formed the general frame, And bade self-love and social be the same.
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee ; All chance, direction, which thou can'st not see ;
All discord, harmony, not understood ; All partial evil, Universal Good ; One truth is clear—whatever is, is right."
Pope's Essay on Man (1733) "To make society happy, it is necessary that great numbers should be wretched as well as poor."
BERNARD MANDEVILLE, The Fable of the Bees (1723) p194.
CHAPTER II
DEISM AND ITS AFTERMATH
ANTHONY CoOL ins, author of Priestcraft in Perfection and Discourse on Free-thinking, on being asked why, holding such deistical opinions, he sent his servants to Church, answered:
'"' That they may neither rob nor murder me!"'?
Lord Bolingbroke, a confirmed Deist, considered Christianity "'a fable,' yet he held that ''a statesman ought to profess the Doctrines of the Church of England.'"'?
Sir Leslie Stephen in his English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, referring to the later Deistic period, says :
Scepticism, widely diffused through the upper classes, was of the indolent variety, implying a perfect willingness that the churches should survive though the Faith should perish.''® It is more than a coincidence that following the Restoration and the "Triple Tragedies," a soulless, superficial Deism, emerging gradually into open scepticism, came increasingly to dominate the mental outlook of potentates in Church and State.
Nor was it till after the dawn of the nineteenth century that this influence was completely dethroned.
(i) The Origin and Trend of Deism On the earliest manifestations of the Deistic outlook, as exhibited in Lord Herbert of Cherbury's De Veritate and De
Religione Gentilium, this treatise need not pause.
Neither need we examine the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, tutor to Charles II: for great as was the influence of his materialistic rationalism, with its uncompromising reduction of religion to a department of state and its cool pronouncement of the "sovereign power " as "' absolute and irresponsible,' Hobbes's position was but indirectly related to Deism.
Paradoxically, it was the sincere, if latitudinarian, Christian, John Locke, who 1 Mark Pattison, Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750
(in Essays and Reviews, p. 301).
; ; 2 Chambers's Biog. Dict. ; Dict. of Nat. Biog.
SaVOle la pA3/7'5e
34.
ENGLAND: BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
opened the door to popular Deistical speculation.
In 1795 appeared Locke's famous thesis, Reasonableness of Christianity, destined to be the chief text of Christian apologetics for almost a century.
The following year came John Toland's Christianity © not Mysterious, the first popular Deistic treatise—based obviously on Locke, but pointing unmistakably toward the uncompromising scepticism of David Hume.
Locke, an eloquent apostle of religious toleration, was actuated by a sincere and laudable desire to free Christianity of all encumbrances and restore it to its '' original simplicity": a task which he thought could be achieved by mental clarification alone.
His only creed would be the acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah ; and pure reason he would make the touchstone of all religious solutions.
But this to Locke did not mean the denial of revelation, which he considered a natural, harmonious and necessary expansion of human reason.
" Reason," taught Locke, '' is natural revelation whereby the eternal Father of light and fountain of all knowledge, communicates to mankind that portion of truth which He has laid within the reach of their natural faculties: revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God immediately, which reason vouches the truth of, by the testimony and proofs it gives, that they came from God."+ Locke's position, therefore, like that of Archbishop Tillotson, may be defined as one of '"' supernatural rationalism.'
Religious questions he divided into three categories, those above reason, contrary to reason, and according to reason.2, 'Toland, Locke's young Irish disciple, pushed still further the natural, rational position, and minimised the supernatural.
'To him Locke's category '' above reason "' was quite superfluous, and all matters appertaining to religion, morals or life in general, were either 'according to" or "contrary to"? reason.
'Toland did not actually deny "' revelation"? ; but to him nothing was above the comprehension of the natural man; nothing was too profound for the human intellect to penetrate. The spiritual sense, therefore, of mystery, awe, reverence and gratitude was dulled.
Reason was isolated and deified.
'Toland was a herald of that genus of " rational "' knowledge which, parting company with modesty, imagined it could lay bare all the secrets of heaven and earth.
Anthony Collins, with his contempt for the "' vagaries of priests'? and his pert assertions regarding the perfection of 1 John Locke, Essay on Human Understanding, Bk. IV, chap. xix (4).
See also his Reasonableness of Christianity, p. 257fi.
» 2 Essay... Bk. IV, chap. xvii (23).
3 Principal A.
C McGiffert, Protestant Thought Before Kant, p. 202.
DEISM AND ITS
AFTERMATH
natural religion," carried the Deistic position beyond Toland.
He took the stand that '' unless the Bible prophecies can be proven to have been literally fulfilled," then Christianity is false ; but '' they have not been so proven," he argued ; " therefore Christianity zs false.''+
Thomas Woolston, the most scurrilous of Deistic writers, in his six Discourses on the Miracles of Christ (1727-29), maintained that the Gospel narratives taken literally, were a "tissue of absurdities.» The miracles of Jesus, he contended, were in most cases "' foolish, trivial, contradictory, absurd, unworthy of a divinely appointed teacher, and characteristic rather of a sorcerer or wizard.'
With coarse wit, and jibing satire, he sneered not only at the works and teaching, but also at the character, of Christ.?
Then in 1730 appeared Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation, a work soon acclaimed as "the Deists' Bible."
This book, being more sober and restrained, represents a higher level of argument than that of Collins or Woolston, and at certain points marks a definite contribution to thought.
So trenchantly, for instance, does Tindal assert the moral evil of ecclesiastical systems demanding, in the name of religion, the acceptance of dogmas and the performance of rites in themselves morally indifferent, that in places his words recall the chastening and withering indictments of certain Old Testament prophets. The avowed purpose therefore of Tindal's work was to free '' pure and natural religion," itself a "' perfect,"'
" unalterable" thing, of all obscuring accretions and thus liberate society from the deception and tyranny of " priestcraft.??
His thesis, on its face, seemed both plausible and laudable ; but the assumptions on which it was based were colossal.
As his title implied, he assumed that everything genuine in Christianity was derived directly from natural religion and consequently had existed from the time of Creation ; the obvious deduction, therefore, was that traditional and organised
Christianity was at best superfluous, while at worst it represented a conglomeration of intolerable superstitions and _bigotries.
He assumed, too, that mankind, at all times and in all places, were for religious purposes exactly the same, for human nature he pronounced " unchangeable " ; while again he assumed that the Moral Code was a static and definite "' natural law " planted equally and universally in the native reason of all peoples alike.
1 Sir Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I; p. 216.
2 Woolston was fined and imprisoned for blasphemy.
3 Matthew Tindal. op. cit., chaps. vi and xiii.
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Tindal prated very solemnly about rationality, morality, benevolence, universal love and the like,1 but the logic of his thesis forced the conclusion that everything is natural, that God is nature, and that, therefore, whatever is, is right.
This last deduction, moreover, was smugly expressed both by Pope and Bolingbroke, while even Burke, who sneered at the Deists, and scoffingly asked, '' Whoever reads them now?" came at times dangerously close to this soulless and morally paralysing fatalism.?
(ii) Controversial Victory Masks Spiritual Defeat The published answers to the Deists by contemporary theologians are to be numbered in hundreds; and if metaphysical acuteness, classical scholarship and poignant phraseology had decided the issue, the Divines easily won the debate.
Sir Leslie Stephen, himself a rationalist, describes the theologians as " finished scholars" refuting mere "' dabblers in letters "' ; while the Deists, in general, he depicts as a '' ragged regiment, whose whole ammunition of learning was but a trifle when compared with the abundant stores of a single light of orthodoxy."?
Again, in 'speculative ability," says Stephen, "' most of the Deists were as children by the side of their ablest antagonists."
Many critics would endorse Stephen's verdict ; yet even if the result was as sweeping as he and others suggest, it represented but a barren victory.
The Christian apologists, with one or two exceptions, met the Deists on their own ground,
" natural religion,"' and fought them with their own weapon, "' reason" : but natural religion soon proved to be slippery ground, and reason a two-edged sword.
Collins, exposing himself to the stinging satire of Dean Swift, was so overwhelmed by the contempt poured upon him that he found it expedient to retire to Holland till the storm had passed ; yet this onslaught upon Collins was but symptomatic of the superficial brilliance and the lack of vital faith which characterised the whole Deistic controversy.
The central target of Collins's attack was the '' vagaries of priests" ; Swift astutely turned the tables not only upon the transparent vanity and shallowness of Collins himself, but upon the follies and foibles of mankind in general: and Swift's attack was incomparably the more devastating.
Throughout the whole controversy however, there is apparent an insistent urge to be
1 Matthew Tindal, pp. 22, 58f., 253.
2 Sir Leslie Stephen, op. cit., I, p. 182ff. ; McGiffert, op. cit., chap. x.
3 Stephen, I, p. 87.
DEISM AND ITS
AFTERMATH
rational, scintillating, brilliant ; Deist and apologist alike, would exhibit the clarity of his reason and breadth of his mind: but their clarity was the clarity of ice, and their breadth the breadth of shallowness; it all smacked of undergraduate bombast.
'' Let that which is written in the New Testament be tried by that which is the touchstone of all religions,' wrote Dean
Humphrey in 1748.
'I mean the religion of nature and reason which God has written in the hearts of every one of us from first Creation: and if it varies from it in any particular, if it prescribes any one thing which may in the minutest circumstances thereof be contrary to its righteousness, I will then acknowledge this to be an argument against us, strong enough to overthrow the whole cause, and make all things else that can be said of it totally ineffectual for its support.'
Bishop Gibson, in his Second Pastoral Letter (1730) said:
''It is universally acknowledged that revelation itself is to stand or fall by the test of reason."
Among the' " giants"? who led the fray against Deism were Clarke, Conybeare, Bentley, Warburton, Berkeley, Law and Butler.
The most popular theological apologetic was that of Conybeare, namely that " natural religion is true and good as far as it goes'? ; but mankind needs " more light than can be gained from it"; hence revelation was ordained " to supplement it."2
Bishop Warburton, trained as a lawyer, not infrequently '' justified the Deity " by proving (most rationally) that His conduct was conformable to the provisions of the British Constitution ; while the law of Nature, like that of England, he assumed to embody the perfection of wisdom.
For the gymnastic feats of his pious, patriotic logic, he was rewarded with the popular jibe:
'' There is but one God, and Warburton is His Attorney-General."
Law, revolting both against Deism and the current apologetics of his brethren, was in a category by himself.
His reverent, mystic spirit was nauseated equally by the crass assumptions of natural religion and the flaunted pride of human reason.
More acute than the earlier apologists, he saw and pointed out that natural religion and natural events are themselves beset with difficulties and veiled in mystery quite as impenetrable as direct Revelation, which he believed to be the inspiring source of all true morality, virtue and happiness.
The influence too of Law's Serious Call 1 Dean Humphrey's, Letter to Deists.
2 See John Conybeare, Defence of Revealed Religion, etc. (1732).
3 Stephen, I, p. 361.
4 William Law, Case of Reason or Natural Religion fairly and fully Stated (1731), pp. 60, 66, 101, 103.
ENGLAND:
BEFORE
AND AFTER WESLEY
to a Devout and Holy Life (1729) was later to be reflected in the lives of the Wesleys, Dr. Samuel Johnson and other famous men.
But the most celebrated of the apologists was Bishop Butler, whose defence was that of a rationalist Christian influenced conspicuously by the teaching of Law.
He accepts the position that '' Christianity is a republication of Natural Religion "' and asserts that "if in revelation there be found any passage, the seeming meaning of which is contrary to natural religion, we may most certainly conclude such seeming meaning not to be the real one."!
Butler, however, was chiefly concerned for the defence of revelation, and his persistent method of argument was to throw the burden of proof back upon the Deists themselves.
He, with them, accepted the primary postulates of natural religion ; but he demonstrated conclusively that the difficulties in the way of proving those postulates were just as great as in the case of revealed religion.
If therefore the difficulties and mysteries of natural religion did not prevent belief in Divine creation and providence, why, he insistently asked, should the difficulties enshrouding revealed religion be permitted to kill faith in revelation?
Butler thus provided a final rejoinder to the a priori conclusion of Tindal that natural religion is itself a "' complete and perfect whole,' to which "nothing can be added by revelation."
But his grounds, for the most part, are prudential and negative.
Exposing the marked limitations of rational demonstration, he would have men walk "as if" the postulates of Christianity were true.
Reason, he frankly declares, " the only faculty we have wherewith to judge concerning anything, even revelation itself," and repeatedly he returns to the defensive position that the arguments commonly raised against revelation would apply equally to justify the conclusion " that the constitution of Nature is contradictory to wisdom, justice or goodness."
Butler's argument therefore was a sword cutting both ways at once.
It laid low the assumptions of Deism ; but it did so at the cost of the larger religious issue, by clearing the ground for a sceptical attack on all religion, natural and revealed.
As Locke, the Christian philosopher, unwittingly became the forerunner of popular Deism, so Butler, the Christian apologist, unwittingly became the forerunner of open scepticism.
Butler has been compared with Pascal; both were noble, aspiring souls; but both had too much doubt and too little
1 See Pattison, op. cit., p. 295.
Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736), part II, chap. iii; part I, chap. vii.
DEISM AND ITS
AFTERMATH
faith to be great leaders of men.!
Professor A. C. McGiffert, writing as an avowed Modernist, concludes his able survey on "Rationalism in England" with the following significant verdict : '' That religious faith and devotion still survived and flourished was due, not to the apologists, but to altogether different influences, of which the Great Evangelical Revival was the most important.''?
(iii) Religion in a Strait-Facket With the intellectual swing from Deism and " natural religion " to avowed scepticism we are not here directly concerned.
Both the philosophical scepticism of Hume and the historical scepticism of Gibbon had great vogue, wielding immense power in intellectual circles, especially among the ruling cliques.
Moreover the encyclopeadists and philosophers of France, stimulated first by English Deism, turned increasingly sceptical and exercised a strong reflex impact over all the fashionable set in Britain.
But both Deism and the swing towards scepticism were closely related to preceding history.
A National Church with vocal organs extracted and with right and left wings so clipped as to fetter the flight of Faith, could only bicker with the Deists and sceptics; it could give them no vital demonstration of the living and transcendent power of practical, spiritual Christianity.
Increasingly, therefore, theology became as deistic as the Deists; reason, first hailed as a defence for Faith, came finally to be acclaimed as a substitute, while the religious impulse, squeezed officially into a strait-jacket, came to be regarded as a sort of spiritual police—politicians imagining that a religion thus committed to inaction " could retain sufficient power to be useful without being troublesome."
Hence a bird born for the open sky was cruelly caged, its spirit was crushed, and its heavenly song was stilled.
Deism, at best, was but a hybrid philosophy and a frigid religion.
Starting with a semi-pantheistic conception of the universe, it gradually bowed God to the outer fringes of the stage of life, thus preparing the way for scepticism to push
Him off.
Fetish words and catch phrases exercised for a time an hypnotic charm, but sophisticated talk about " Reason,"
" Nature," '' Moderation," '" Rational Progress "' and a perfect, 1 Stephen, I, p. 307.
2A. C. McGiffert, Protestant Thought before Kant, p. 243.
3 Stephen, II, p. 415.
ENGLAND:
BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
unchangeable " Natural Religion" had no sustaining meat for the human soul.
The curse of eighteenth century intellectualism was not its common sense, but its lack of anything more dynamic.
Its metaphysical diety was too cold, too abstract, to excite real zeal in its worshippers, and the unmistakable tendency of Deism was to plunge its adherents into an inflated "' optimism " contradicted by the most obvious facts of life.1
Deism accordingly merged into rationalism, rationalism into scepticism, and scepticism into cynicism.
In all the smart circles and among a large proportion of the "' Intelligentsia,"
Mandeville's Fable of the Bees (1723) was, for decades, more read than the Bible ; yet Mandeville blatantly affirms that " private vices are public benefits," and that '' every species of virtue is at bottom some form of gross selfishness,' more or less modified, or masked.
True, Mandeville could not properly be classed as a Deist, but his pert, polished paganism was of a piece with the tinsel smartness and underlying cynicism of the Deistic era.
Sincerity was at a discount ; superficial brilliance at a premium.
Moral expediency ruled the souls of men ; and many a Deistsceptic like Bolingbroke—whom Lord Morley pronounces " the prince of political charlatans "*—recognising the social value of " decorum and respectability," defended organised Christianity as a highly convenient " varnish."
A unifying, integrating, inspiring religion was the crying need of the day ; but the mental and spiritual mood of the privileged classes was such that they could not recognise it, even if its power were manifested before their eyes.
The general trend of Deism may be briefly summarised.
Religion came to be looked upon chiefly as a matter for intellectual discussion and as such became in large measure the preserve of doctrinaires, with the result that soon in high places it exhibited all the pedanticism so characteristic of that familiar species of art and poetry produced chiefly for critics.
Spontaneity, enthusiasm, spiritual experience were chilled and numbed ; prayer, as the lyrical outburst of the soul to its
Maker, was dubbed fanaticism, while cold reason was pronounced the all-sufficient guide of life.
The reflex of all this upon the bone and marrow of practical religion, became increasingly apparent.
The metaphysical Deity was finally resolved into a bundle of barren abstractions ; the Bible, which to the early
Reformers and Puritans was the " chart and compass of Life,"' the Book of Books, came to be regarded simply as a_book, and 1 Stephen, I, p. 183.
* See Dr. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 207.
DETSM AND ITS
AFTERMATH
often a despised book; while Jesus Christ, far from being acclaimed as the incarnate revelation of God and Saviour of men, was reduced to the level of a mere ethical teacher—and a misleading one.
The New Testament, it was conceded, contained a certain nucleus of natural religion; but this, it was argued, was so obscured by " fanatical' accretions regarding the person of Christ, as to render it practically useless.
As for Christian doctrine and the Christian Church, arguments first forged against Rome were now re-shaped and sharpened to apply against Revelation.
Orthodox Christianity was pronounced a repository of intolerable superstition, and the Church the nursing-mother of all manner of error ; yet so shallow, so insincere, was all this scepticism, that many a Deist (like Collins and Bolingbroke) desired to retain the Church as a necessary social institution.
With Christian Faith thus undermined, Christian morality was attacked at its roots.
The Fatherhood of God being denied, the Brotherhood of Man was robbed of its most fructifying inspiration.
Admittedly Addison, Steele, Swift, Fielding, Johnson, Goldsmith, Hogarth, Garrick and others might, in their various spheres, preach certain aspects of Christian morality, but that teaching represented chiefly a '"' carry-over," either from Puritan or from Catholic sources.
The heart of Christian morality had been stabbed.
Whatever the world thinks," wrote Bishop Berkeley in Siris (1744), "" he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman."!
Berkeley, as a practical man, was addressing the " thriving earthworms" of his day; for Hallam's Constitutional History, referring to this very period— the thirty years following the Treaty of Utrecht (1713)— pronounces it materially "the most prosperous season that England had ever experienced."
'Stomach well alive, soul extinct," is Carlyle's verdict on the era in question, while Mark
Pattison says:
'' The historian of moral and religious progress . is under necessity of depicting the same period as one of decay of religion, licentiousness of morals, public corruption, profaneness of language—' a day of rebuke and blasphemy.' ""?
Beneath the polished surface of deistic rationalism, the springs of spiritual life were running dry : and the Church, having no impelling Faith or guiding philosophy of her own, degenerated
1 George Berkeley, Siris, p. 350.
2 Essays and Reviews, p. 279.
ENGLAND: BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
not only into a confessed branch of the Civil Service, but into a public sounding-board, which re-echoed the glib phraseology of the new and heady "sciences "' of Political Arithmetic and Natural Philosophy.
CHAPTER III ~
BLIND GUIDES
'Tue Church of England was at its nadir during the reigns of the first two Georges, and during the early years of George III.
Convocation remained silenced, and ecclesiastical preferments, invariably made to serve political ends, were regarded by clergy and laity alike as little more than desirable offices.
Bishoprics and deaneries were solicited from the Prime Minister of the day with unblushing importunity."
Sir CHaryes Petrie, The Four Georges, P235:
"If gold ruste, what shall iren doo?"
Cuaucer, " Prologue" to Canterbury Tales (line 500).
CHAPTER, I13
BLIND GUIDES
NowHeEreE, perhaps, are the sorry effects of the " Triple Tragedies '' and the reign of Deism more unmistakably or more accurately mirrored than in the succession of eighteenth century
Archbishops of Canterbury who, as Primates of all England, directed the destiny of the National Church.
For during no other century of English history have those commissioned as, and purporting to be, the Apostolic Fathers and Chief Shepherds of the Fold of Christ, represented so materialistic an outlook, or so low a standard of spiritual discernment, as characterised the lives of the eighteenth century Primates.
A running review of these ecclesiastical pilots, is essential to an understanding of the wider issues our study involves.
(i) The Eighteenth Century Primates Thomas Tenison, Primate from 1694 to 1715, who crowned both Anne and George I, was a pronounced political partisan and "a favourite at Court."
John Potter (1737-47), Primate at the time of Wesley's '"' conversion" and during the earliest pioneering period of the great Evangelical Revival, is described by A. W. Rowden, K.C., in his detailed treatise, Primates of the Four Georges, as "' stilted and starchy."
Though the possessor of some scholarship, he failed utterly to understand the needs of his age or to read the signs of the times ; he loathed the new manifestation of "religious enthusiasm"? among the " lower orders of society," but true to the current fashion of the " ruling class," into which he (a draper's son) had been lifted, he left behind him £90,000 which he had " saved out of the Church "
—a sum equal to at least £200,000 to-day.* Potter's successor, Thomas Herring (1747-57), was " less worthy than he." John
Moore (1783-1805), Primate when Wesley felt compelled to take the epochal step of ordaining Dr. Coke to superintend the 1 A. W. Rowden, K.C., op. cit. p. 167f.
ENGLAND: BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
rapidly growing " Societies' in America, and also during the vital years of the French Revolution, was a confirmed " placehunter," the most sordid ecclesiastical nepotist of his nepotic century.
Frederick Cornwallis (1768-83), Primate during the whole period of the American Revolutionary War, was seventh son of the fourth Lord Cornwallis ; he also was brother to the first Earl Cornwallis and uncle to the first Marquis—the second in command of British troops against the American colonists.
On the evidence of Ganon Perry, in his History of the English Church, Archbishop Cornwallis "' appears to have had no Churchmanlike scruples, and was simply of the character of a great nobleman about the Court."'
Matthew Hutton (1757-58), a constant victim of gout, on attaining the apple of his eye, expresses with characteristic fawning his gratitude to Lord Newcastle, " who brought me into the view of the world and has led me by the hand to what I am now arrived at."
Dr. Pyle, a royal chaplain, in a letter written in 1758, says Hutton "died in time for his character; for he was grown covetous and imperious to excess.
He left £50,000 which he had saved out of the Church in twelve years, and not one penny to any good use or public charity.''?
By the most charitable judgment that can be based on Christian standards, only two eighteenth century Primates were even half-worthy of their sacred office.
These were William Wake (1716-37) and Thomas Secker (1758-68).
The latter a kindly, scholarly, hard-working prelate awakened sufficiently to the needs of his age to warn his clergy that they were losing much ground by "not preaching in a manner sufficiently Evangelical"; but he himself was too much victimised by the frigid rationalism dominating
" superior " society, to offer any real guidance along the road of deliverance.
Wake, whom Mr. Rowden considers the most worthy of eighteenth century Primates (or rather the least unworthy) was a man of some gifts ; but it is significant that, in later life, he spent much time in preparing a treatise on the Antiquity,
Honour and Estate of the Name and F amily of Wake, wherein he strove to establish for his family a " royal affinity."3
Paradoxically, though, by the middle of the century, a mighty movement was stirring in the deeps beneath, though hundreds of humble parsons and thousands of twice-born laymen were now entering into a new realisation of the power of spiritual,
1 Rowden, of. cit., p. 236f.
Edmund Pyle, Memoirs of a Royal Chaplain, 1729-1763 (edited by A. Hartshorne), p. 305.
3 Rowden, p. rf.
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practical Christianity, yet so firm and so stubborn was the grip of political, materialistic and rationalistic influences on the highest offices of the National Church, and so bitter the resentment against the rising tide of " religious enthusiasm," that it was reserved to the latter decades of Wesley's crusade to experience the lowest degradation to which the Primacy fell.
Cornwallis and Moore therefore must be recalled as personal witnesses ; and from their own mouths must they be judged.
A glimpse at the'sinister manner in which Cornwallis mounted to the highest ecclesiastical office, is revealed in parts of his correspondence.
On September 26th, 1759, as Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, he wrote to Lord Newcastle, then
Prime Minister, thus :
"' Having been informed that the Bishop of Worcester is in such a bad state of health, that in all likelihood he cannot hold out much longer ;
I hope your Grace will pardon my troubling you with this, barely to mention, without importuning, that a removal to that see would of all others be most agreeable to me.
"Your Grace's most obliged and most obedient humble servant, Fred. Lich. and Cov.'
In 1765 the Bishopric of Salisbury fell vacant.
It was a desirable see and Cornwallis was pulling strings to secure it for himself; but when in 1766 the King announced appointments, Salisbury was given to another, although Cornwallis was granted the Deanery of St. Paul's.
Newcastle wrote congratulations to Cornwallis and the latter, answering, expressed unbridled rancour that the former had not sufficiently pulled political and ecclesiastical ropes in his favour :
"You say you are much rejoiced at my having accepted the Deanery of St. Paul's.
For what reason I know not.
As for myself, I have no joy in it; I am not fond of expedients.
Had the recommendation to it come from your Grace by way of atonement, I should have rejected the Deanery.
After the hard treatment I had met with, I could not with honour have accepted it.
It is by no means a preferment either agreeable or suitable to me.
It would have been kind of your Grace not to have kept me so long in suspense, with regard to the Bishopric of Salisbury.
Had you told me it was a real promise, it would at least have mitigated the severity of the disappointment.
You say it is the only instance (the manuscript is here underlined) but several years ago you gave Worcester to the Bishop of Gloucester.
Surely, my Lord, the disregard then showed to me may be allowed to have given just cause of some dissatisfaction ..
. not only to me but to my family and friends.
It certainly did.
You begged forgiveness ; it was immediately granted, and the hardship forgotten.
The late unfortunate circumstance brought it back to my mind...'
1 Newcastle Papers, Addl. MSS., Brit. Mus., 32,896, £122:
2 Newcastle Papers, Addl. MSS., Brit. Mus., 32,976, f. 458ff.
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From here the tone of the letter changes and the crouching, fawning spirit, ever angling for future preferments, is exhibited to its close.
Cornwallis married a " great lady,"' prominent in the " highest social life'? ; he made himself a conspicuous character at Court, and, on the first vacancy following the writing of these letters, was appointed Primate of England.
Soon, however, Lambeth Palace was the scene of such notorious "' routs and feastings ' that Lady Huntingdon, after an ineffectual appeal to Cornwallis and his Lady, lodged a protest with the King and Queen.
The result was that George III, on investigation, wrote to Cornwallis in no uncertain terms :
""My coop Lorp PRELATE, "T would not delay giving you notification of the grief and concern with which my breast was affected at receiving authentic information that routs had made their way into your Palace.
At the same time I must signify to you my sentiments on the subject, which hold these levities and vain dissipations as utterly inexpedient, if not unlawful, to pass in a residence for many years devoted to divine studies, religious retirement, and the extensive exercise of charity and benevolence sat ata "From the dissatisfaction with which you must perceive I behold these improprieties—not to speak in harder terms—and on still more pious principles, I trust you will suppress them immediately, so that I may not have occasion to show any further marks of my displeasure, or to interpose in a different manner.
""May God take your Grace into His Almighty protection.
"T remain, my Lord Primate, "Your gracious friend, "ce G. R72 Archbishop Moore, if possible, was even more crassly selfseeking than Cornwallis.
Having married, as his second wife, a sister of Lord Auckland, and now commanding influence in high places, he begins to reckon on the material advantages of a bishopric, as compared with certain preferments already in his grasp, some of which might have to be dropped.
How much already in possession must be given up?" he asks:
"There are bishoprics and bishoprics—small, middling and pretty good—what is the net gain on such a change ? ''2
Writing to his influential brother-in-law in 1772, when climbing rapidly the social ladder, he says:
'' Lord North must understand I will not be a bishop, unless he contrives that I live with some degree of comfort, I mean with such an income as may } See W. C. Sydney, England and the English in the Eighteenth Century,
Vol. II, p. 337; Dr. A. D. Belden, George Whitefield, the Awakener, PP. 55-56 (this book has misprinted George II for George III); and Ryle's Life and Times of Lady Huntingdon.
The " routs and balls " complained of were held even on Sundays.
* Rowden, p. 350.
THE FAT PLURALIST AND HIS LEAN CURATES
(From Genileman's Magazine, 1772—by courtesy of British Museum).
Note two Churches tucked under left arm: fatted pigs and poultry (tithes); wheel running over Thirty-Nine Articles: rents in curates' gowns
: es ODT Sate Pte '
enable me to support my station."!
Again, in 1775, he writes to Lord Auckland in words which recall Cornwallis's correspondence with Newcastle:
'It is thought the Bishop of Rochester can last but a very short time; if the Duke of Marlborough will move on this occasion, it will at least bring me forward."?
On another occasion, with unconscious irony, he writes: 'The more I know of the world, the less
I expect of personal satisfaction in entering into the bustle aisit. :* ; On April 26th, 1783, the very day of his appointment as Primate, and fourteen days before he was enthroned at Canterbury, we find Moore corresponding regarding high preferment for his brother-in-law, and on April 28th, twelve days before he was actually installed as Head of the Church, he writes :
"In the meantime should Dr. Stinton drop, his preferment, in the gift of the Archbishop, will I fear be in hazard
. what interests my feelings is that the preferment would at once reach the utmost wishes of my sister's husband, J. Cantaur.''¢
Having shown such solicitude for his sister's husband, it is not surprising that Moore used his authority as Primate to secure well-feathered nests for his five sons, three of whom he made Joint Registrars of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, and the other two Joint Registrars of the Vicar-General's
One of these sons, for more than fifty years, was the recipient of an average annual income from the Church of "not less than £12,000."
Moore's own Archiepiscopal revenue averaged £11,000 a year, the equivalent of some £25,000 to-day.
It surely is a sorry commentary on the Church's government, that each of these preferment-hunters received from the ecclesiastical treasury more than a thousand times the customary stipend of the self-sacrificing missionary teacher, who, taking his life in his hands, went as a servant of Christ to minister to the Indians in the wilds of North America.'
1 Auckland Correspondence, Addl. MSS, Brit. Mus., 34,412, f. 281.
2 [bid., 34,412, f. 292.
Moore had once been a tutor to the Marlborough family.
3 Tbid., 34,412, f. 298.
4 Addl. MSS., Brit. Mus., 34,419, f. 185.
> Rowden, p. 378.
8 Ibid., p. 378.
7 See eighteenth century reports of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. | They show that many of these missionaries were paid only £10 a year, and few as high as £30.
'The author examined these Reports in Lambeth Palace Library (i.e. the Archbishop of Canterbury's Library).
ENGLAND:. BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
(ii) Lesser Prelates and Their Outlook '"' Archbishops of the eighteenth century," says Rowden, "were great potentates, if not princes.
A coach and six horses, a private state barge on the Thames, with its liveried crew, properly belonged to such a dignitary."1
Primates, however, had no monopoly of this carnal, pompous spirit ; in one way or another the wealthier bishops and deans succeeded in keeping the pace set by their Spiritual Heads.
Even Overton points out that Bishop Hurd, nicknamed the "' Beauty of Holiness," a prelate who not unnaturally could see nothing but " folly and fanatical madness"? in the Evangelical Revival, always travelled from his palace to his cathedral, a bare quarter-mile,
'in his episcopal coach with his servants in full dress liveries ; and when he used to go from Worcester to Bristol Hot Wells, he never moved without a train of twelve servants."?
Following the current fashion, too, he left behind him an account of his '' Life," nearly a quarter of which is given to describing a visit of the King (George III) to his palace.
Jonathan Trelawny, Bishop of Winchester, who died in 1721, used to "excuse himself for his much swearing by saying he swore as a baronet, and not as a bishop."?
Thackeray recalls that in the reign of George II. Lady Yarmouth, a Court favourite, was instrumental in having a certain clergyman made a bishop because he bet her £5,000 he would not be one ; and the lady collected the debt.
Bishop Watson, himself playing the réle of gentleman farmer, declares that bishoprics "' are often given to the flattering dependents and unlearned younger branches of noble families," and adds:
'' I saw the generality of bishops bartering their independence and the dignity of their order for the chance of a translation, and polluting Gospel humility by the pride of prelacy."® Bishop Newton's Autobiography is a mirror of self-seeking ; and Dr. Johnson, who in his Dictionary had defined a pension as "' pay given to a street hireling for treason to his country," though meanwhile a pensioner himself, admitted frankly that "no man can now be a bishop for his learning and piety."
'"' His only chance of promotion," said 1 Op. cit., p. 378.
2 Abbey and Overton: English Church in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. II, jek Riss 3 Rowden, p. 75.
4W.M. Thackeray, The Four Georges; see Works of Thackeray (1882) Vol. X, p. 315f.
5 Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Watson, by himself, I, p. 116.
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Johnson, "is being connected with someone who has parliamentary interest."
Yet, perversely, Johnson justified this condition.
The Government 'in these days," having " too little power," he argued, must make all appointments in its own support ; "it cannot reward merit ''?
Nor could it neglect proud family influence.
Certain correspondence between Bishop Cornwallis, nephew of our lordly Primate, and the Younger Pitt, as Prime Minister, is here illuminating.
In June, 1791, Cornwallis wrote:
" After the various instances of neglect and contempt, which Lord Cornwallis and I have experienced, not only in violation of repeated assurances, but of the strongest ties, it is impossible that I should not feel the late disappointment very deeply.
"' With respect to the proposal concerning Salisbury, I have no hesitation in saying that the see of Salisbury cannot be in any respect an object to me.
The only agreement which promises an accommodation in my favour is the promotion of the Bishop of Lincoln to Salisbury, which would enable you to confer the Deanery of St. Paul's upon me.
"'T have the honour to be, &c., «J. Lichfield & Coventry.'
Like his uncle, this '' high born' Bishop would " persuade " the Prime Minister to juggle other bishops about that he might gain his coveted preferments.
It is passing humorous, too, that this peevish prelate is here spurning the see of Salisbury, which his uncle, the Primate, had coveted, and is coveting the Deanery of St. Paul's, which the uncle had spurned.
Were these blueblooded prelates being whimsical to exhibit their breeding ?
Pitt's reply, in any case, is refreshing.
Writing from Downing Street the following day, he was both tense and terse :
"* My Lord:
"On my return to town this afternoon I found your Lordship's letter.
I am willing to hope that on further consideration, and on recalling all the circumstances, there are parts of that letter which you would yourself wish never to have written.
; "My respect for your Lordship's situation and my regard for Lord Cornwallis, prevent my saying more than that until that letter is recalled your Lordship makes any further intercourse between you and me impossible.
'7 have the honour to be, &c., "OW, Pitt.?22
On receipt of Pitt's reply, Cornwallis revealed a diplomatic 1 Boswell's Life of ¥ohnson, Vol. V, p. 298f.
2 Earl Stanhope, Life of Pitt, Vol. Il, p. 128.
3 [bid
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'6 capacity for "' repentance."
That same day, June 11th, he wrote :
"" Under the very great disappointment which I have felt upon the last occasion, I am much concerned that I was induced to make use of expressions in my letter to you of which I have since repented, and which upon consideration, I beg leave to retract, and I hope they will make no unfavourable impression upon your mind.
"Whatever may be your thoughts regarding the subject matter of the letter, I trust you will havé the candour to pardon those parts of it which may appear to be wanting in due and proper respect to you, and believe me to have the honour to be, &c., "J. Lichfield & Coventry.'
Pitt answered expressing " great satisfaction in being able to dismiss from mind any impression occasioned by a paragraph in the former letter."?
But the Cornwallis connection was too influential to be ignored, even by Pitt ; so two months later Bishop Cornwallis was named Dean of Windsor, and in February, 1794, was given the rich deanery of Durham.
(iii) "' How to Organise a Chaos!"
With men of this ilk occupying key posts in the National Church it is not surprising that much of the "' Persecuting Code " remained on the Statute Books to the end of the eighteenth century, and after.
By the Uniformity and Test Acts all persons holding state office, civil or military, had fo "receive the Sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England."
Hence, Dr. Price's taunt that the Holy Communion was made "'a qualification of rakes and atheists for civil office," and Cowper's scathing couplet :
"To make the symbols of atoning grace, An office-key, a pick-lock to a place.'
In 1772 both Houses of Parliament witnessed historic debates on the attempted repeal of these enactments.
A bishop had just depicted Dissenting ministers as "' men of close ambition," when Lord Chatham (the Elder Pitt) entered the lists :
"The Dissenting ministers are represented as 'men of close ambition.'
So they are, my Lords ; and their ambition is to keep close to the college 1 Earl Stanhope, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 130.
2 [bid., p. 130.
* Richard Price, Love of Country, p. 36.
* See Social England, Vol. V, p. 230ff.
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of fishermen, not of cardinals; and to the doctrine of inspired apostles, not to the decrees of interested and aspiring bishops.
They contend for a Scriptural creed and a Scriptural worship.
We have a Calvinistic creed, a Popish liturgy and an Arminian clergy.
The Reformation has opened the Scriptures to all. So let not the bishops shut them again.
Laws in support of ecclesiastical power are pleaded for, which it would shock humanity to execute.
It is said that religious sects have done great mischief when they are not kept under restraint ; but history affords no proof that sects have ever been mischievous, when they were not oppressed and persecuted by the-ruling Church."* That year (1772) a Repeal Bill was passed by the Commons, but owing to fierce opposition by the Episcopal Bench, it was thrown out by the Lords.
Britain, in the eighteenth century, was ruled by a landed gentry, which, as Disraeli pointed out, was almost as exclusive as the infamous "' Venetian oligarchy."
'' A few family clans," writes C. H. K. Marten, 'composed the governing classes of the period.
. In one Cabinet half the members were Dukes, and in another there was only one commoner.
This land-owning oligarchy 'encircled and enchained the throne,' dominated the House of Lords, and possessed enormous influence in the House of Commons."?
'To this régime," affirms Rowden, '"' the Church, alas! was no exception.
If a scion of a great family had no taste for war or diplomacy, the Church should provide for him.
It was avowedly a department of State.
Any idea of an organisation of spiritual forces, and of its officers as those who should develop, promote and guide those forces, was wholly wanting, alike in the givers and recipients of Church patronage.
Learning in a bishop had been known to give trouble ; zeal was highly dangerous.''® This decadence of Church leadership was, however, by no means absolute.
Butler, Berkeley, Atterbury, Sherlock and Warburton were high-minded bishops of initiative and ability.
But the cumulative effects of the Puritan and Nonjuring expulsions, of the suppression of Convocation, of the political domination of the Church, and of the ascendency of Deistic rationalism, were such as to make the prelates of the latter half of the century even less vital and less worthy than those of the former half.
Thus seeds sown in the later part of the seventeenth century, bore certain of their bitterest fruits in the later part of the 1 See Dr. Richard Price, Discourse on Love of Country, pp. 67-68, for a discussion of this matter.
The increasing safeguard of Nonconformists and Catholics alike, was that some enlightened statesmen, such as Chatham, far from enforcing the Uniformity and Test Acts did all they could to make them inoperative and ridiculous.
. f 2 Warner and Marten, Groundwork of English History, Vol. II, pp. 479-80.
3 Op. cit., p. 311.
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eighteenth century. Few prelates of this latter period are even remembered to-day.
Perhaps the best known of its ecclesiastics, inside the hierarchical succession of preferment, are Paley and Malthus, two men who admittedly have often been cruelly caricatured.
Yet Shelley epitomised the reaction of thousands when he declared that he would "' rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to heaven with Paley and Malthus."'!
Among the élite coterie of Church rulers prophetic, regenerative teaching was practically dead.
Far from preparing the way for the advent of Democracy, which already was knocking at the door, the hierarchical dignitaries were content to chant platitudes and to write pamphlets instructing 'the poor "
(the whole labouring populace) that it was their high privilege "' cheerfully to perform their various duties " in " those stations of life in which it had pleased God to place them."?
As for the Industrial Revolution, which was already changing catastrophically the face of England, these
'' blind guides '"? were as insensitive to its challenge as though it were taking place on the soil of an unknown hemisphere ; while the Evangelical
Revival, now bearing to the outcast multitude the Christian message of hope, fellowship, sobriety and salvation, they lashed and lampooned with venomous spleen.
Rarely, in modern times, has an assuming, usurping ecclesiastical caste merited more completly the indictment of Jesus Christ : '' Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.'
Oxford University, the chief training centre for those in line of ecclesiastical preferment, sank during this century of "' moderation and reason," to its lowest ebb of scholarship.
During the earlier half of the century it was the chief seed bed of Jacobite plotting ; after the accession of George III (1760) it was the primary nursery of the bluest Toryism.
Southey, who went to Oxford " with a view to Orders," learned there '"'two things, to row and to swim."
So "to save his soul" he left " the place."
Gibbon, referring to his Oxford days as " fourteen idle and unprofitable months," says his tutor " remembered he had a salary to draw, but forgot he had duties to perform."
And Cambridge, apparently, was little, if any, better than Oxford.
Professor D. A. Winstanley, Vice-Master of Trinity College, * Prometheus Unbound, Preface, p. 15.
As Professor Tawney points out, '' almost all below the nobility, gentry and freeholders,"' by the curious current phraseology, were designated the poor."
See his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 189.
* St. Matthew xxiii, 13.
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Cambridge, in his recent book, Unreformed Cambridge, says :
The University of Cambridge in the eighteenth century has been convicted of violating its Statutes, misusing its endowments, and neglecting its obligations.
It is impossible to dispute the substantial justice of this verdict."
Professor G. M.
Trevelyan, too, commenting on the academic life of the times points out that : " Universities could sell degrees without holding examinations or giving instruction."
'' Whatever is, is right—if 't can show a charter," was the practical creed of the whole prevailing hierarchy of vested interests.1.
And few vested interests were more assumingly complacent than the ancient and Church-dominated Universities, which mistook the formal dissection of " political and philosophical corpses " for scholarship.
The most obvious marks of the hierarchical degradation manifested themselves mainly in the sphere of patronage, sinecures and pluralities.
What "rotten » and * pocket " boroughs were to the Parliamentary government of the time, that and more were patronage, sinecures and pluralities, with their accompanying non-residence, to the Ecclesiastical government ; but with this difference : whereas Parliamentary corruption could at least be debated in the House of Commons and exposed by the Opposition, ecclesiastical corruption battened under cover ; for Convocation, where those evils should have been debated and exposed, being suppressed, the coterie of prelates who ruled the National Church became themselves the worst culprits. Many parishes accordingly had no shepherd of souls ; and whereas Primates and prelates lived much like princes, and many a hard-drinking, fox-hunting parson with family and political influence "' swallowed more livings than he could chew," the vast majority of the humbler clergy were half-starving on from £20 to £60 a year.
Fielding, in his famous creation, Parson Adams (1742), depicts a pious, capable clergyman, who at the age of fifty, with a wife and six children, was
"provided with the handsome income of £23 a year.''?
Goldsmith's father was one of many eighteenth century parsons "¢ passing rich on £40 a year » . and Samuel Wesley, the father of John and Charles, a capable, thrifty, hard-working priest, was for months detained in gaol for debts contracted in purchasing the barest necessities of life.
Richard Bentley, answering Collins's complaint as to the national expense of the clergy, pointed out that Parliamentary accounts proved that 6,000
1 Trevelyan's History of England (fifth imp. 1927), P506.
2 Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, p. 25.
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clergymen had an average annual income of less than £50 a year, and later Sydney Smith says:
'Six thousand of your clergy—the greater part of your whole number—had, at a middle rate, one with another, not £50 a year."!
The average income, therefore, of the century's Primates, to say nothing of certain arch-pluralists, was more than two hundred times that of the average income of the humbler half of all the national clergy.
Little wonder that Jeremy Bentham, in his Church of Englandism, has a chapter on "' How to Organise a Chaos!"
Neither, in the light of stubborn facts, can one doubt the essential accuracy of Dean Swift's satire on those scaling the dizzy heights of ecclesiastical preferment.
Portraying one prelate '"' mounting fast toward the top of the ecclesiastical ladder, without the merit of a single virtue,' Swift says:
'' He treated all his inferiors in the clergy with a sanctified pride ; he had neither eyes nor ears for the faults of the rich; ... he was never sensible of the least corruption in courts, parliaments or ministers, but made the most favourable construction of all possible proceedings ; and power, in whatever hands or whatever party, was always sure of his most charitable opinion.''?
This good cleric, too, " could be soberly drunk, at the expense of others, with college ale, and at such times he was always most devout " ; he was in the habit of " dropping in his own halfcrown among the collection and taking it out when he disposed of the money" ;_ he " paid his curates punctually at the lowest salary and partly out of the communion money, but he gave them good advice in abundance.''?
Archdeacon Blackburne, in 1754, describes the English clergy as "with few exceptions," men ' whose lives and ordinary occupations are most foreign to their profession"; he also speaks of his countrymen as " the most ignorant common people that are to be found in any Protestant, if not in any Christian, country."
And Thackeray, portraying the Court life of George IT, says :
'No wonder the clergy were corrupt and indifferent amidst this indifference and corruption.
No wonder that the sceptics multiplied and morals degenerated so far as they depended on the influence of such a * Sydney Smith, Remarks etc., Part II (40).
Smith, for twenty years, served a Yorkshire parish which, prior to his coming, for more than a century, had no resident clergyman.
* Jonathan Swift, Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I, p. 296
(Temple Scott edition).
8 Ibid., pp. 295-06.
Rowden, op. cit., p. 247; C. J. Abbey, The English Church and its Heese 1700-1800 (two vols.) throws much light on the subject of this chapter.
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King.
No wonder that Whitefield cried out in the wilderness, that Wesley quitted the insulted temple to pray on the hillside.
I look with reverence on those men at that time.
Which is the sublimer spectacle—the good John Wesley surrounded by his congregation of miners at the pit's mouth, or the Queen's chaplains, mumbling through their morning office in the ante-room, under the picture of the great Venus, with the door opened into the adjoining chamber, where the Queen is dressing, talking scandal
. or uttering sneers ...?
I say I am scared as I look around at this society—at this King, at these courtiers, at these politicians, at these bishops—at this flaunting vice and levity.
Whereabouts in this court is the honest man?
Where is the pure person one may like?
'The air stifles one with its sickly perfumes."
(iv) Pride Precludes Fellowship Nevertheless, before the death of George II (1760), indeed by the middle of the century, new influences were astir yet destined to baptise with spiritual power this pagan and unregenerate century.
Even prior to 1750 such Evangelical clergymen as Grimshaw, Hervey, Walker, Adam and Romaine had caught the Revival fire and already were radiating its light, its warmth, its fellowship and its inspiration.
Before the close of the eighteenth century, the Evangelical zealots within the National Church included a truly historic band of veterans of the Cross, among whom were such varied and remarkable characters as the Venns, Berridge, Fletcher, Newton, the Milner brothers, Robinson, Wilson, Cecil, Scott, Biddulph and Simeon. And the character of the service they rendered is typified in the life of the almost forgotten Thomas Jones.
Driven at first from parish to parish because of his hated " enthusiasm," at length, under Simeon's influence, he was given the curacy of the village of Creaton, Northamptonshire, at £25 a year.
In that unpromising hamlet of forty-six houses Jones laboured without any preferment for forty-three years, and never was he promoted beyond the rectorship of the said parish.
Yet from that humble base this despised zealot transformed the surrounding community, and threw out influences which affected the nation ; he was a founder of Sunday Schools,
'"' Dame-Schools," Sick Clubs, and Clothing Clubs ; with the profits from his devotional books, published both in English and Welsh, he built six almshouses for aged widows ; through the efforts of the Creaton Clerical Education Society, which he founded, he enabled fifty Evangelical laymen to enter the Ministry ; and during the first eighteen years of its work,
1W. M. Thackeray, The Four Georges (lecture on George II); see Works, Vol. X, pp. 315-16.
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the Society for Poor Pious Clergymen, which also he created, distributed more than £35,000; while besides all this, he established a post-Easter spiritual Retreat to which for prayer, Bible-study, fellowship and consultation earnest clergymen from several surrounding counties annually repaired.
As for '' Church " laymen, who.before the end of the century were torch-bearers in the Evangelical ranks, they include characters who will be remembered as long as English, or indeed humanitarian, history endures.
Among them were William Wilberforce, the Parliamentary and national leader of the mighty Crusade against the slave trade, and Zachary
Macaulay, the Governor of the famous colony of emancipated slaves at Sierra Leone.
Among them, too, were Lord Teignmouth, who for five years was Governor-General of India,
John and Henry Thornton, the philanthropic bankers, William Cowper, the leading poet of his age, Robert Raikes, of Sunday
School fame, Charles Grant, Chairman of the East India Company, and not least Lord Dartmouth, Colonial Secretary, whose conversion was commemorated by Cowper in the memorable lines :
"" We boast some rich ones whom the Gospel sways, And one who wears a coronet and prays."
Among women who already had risen to high influence and rendered mighty service was that amazing and much maligned leader, Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, who without stint consecrated her time, fortune and genius to the Revival's work ; whilst Hannah More, the most widely read literary woman of her century, both by her writings and her philanthropic achievements, was now exercising an influence accurately described as *"" nation-wide."'
Nor should it be forgotten that Hannah Ball's unobtrusive Sunday School labours preceded those of Raikes by eleven years.
Before the close of the century, too, certain remarkable fruits of the Revival were unmistakable.
Nonconformity, turning from a frigid Unitarianism, was gradually assimilating power by contact with the Movement it first had reviled ; everywhere it was manifesting new faith, vision and vigour.2.
Groups of Anglicans, moveover, both clergymen and laymen, for the first time since 1662, were working harmoniously in a score of *"* common causes "' with Dissenters, as "' their brethren in Christ."?
R. Balleine, A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England, pp. 122-23.
Dr. R. W. Dale's History of Congregationalism for a poignant study of this subject.
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Already the pioneer Missionary Societies of Protestantism had sprung up and Evangelical zealots were sacrificing to send their bearers of '' glad tidings" to all quarters of the globe.
Evangelical '' outriders"' were now scouring the wilds of North America, bringing deep meaning and significance to the pioneer's task, and organising scattered, lonely settlers into religious communities.
Howard and other Christian zealots had modified the barbarities of the prison system and challenged the vicicus penal code.
The Sunday School movement, the Lancastrian School Society and the Religious Tract Society were laying the rude foundations of popular education.
Still more significant, the crusade destined to achieve " the noblest triumph of modern history ? was now probing the soul of England as never had a moral or social issue probed it before ; and both the inspiration and the leadership of that crusade were born of the Evangelical
Revival.
The famous historian, Dr. J. H. Overton, a High Churchman, writes:
"It was not only Evangelicals, but Evangelicalism that abolished the slave trade."*
The same was true of the later phase of this struggle, for finally the Revival's influence killed the institution of slavery throughout the British
Empire and emancipated all British slaves.
Yet, incredible as is the fact, to the end of the eighteenth century, and for more than a decade into the nineteenth, the Religious Awakening that saved the soul of England had not a single representative on the Episcopal Bench.
Among all the fallacies of popular belief none is more rampant than the universal delusion, circulated even by scholars and historians, that the dawning years of the nineteenth century saw the National Church in the control of Evangelicals.?
The reason for this delusion is too obvious for argument ; Evangelicalism, by common consent, within and without the National
Church, represented the only virile, creative religion of the period ; but a delusion it remains, for until the second decade of the nineteenth century Evangelicals, as such, were all but unrepresented in the higher Councils of the Church.
And when, in the belated year of Waterloo (1815), they were represented by their first bishop, Dr. Ryder of Gloucester, he was the brother of a Cabinet Minister.?
Nevertheless, despite Ryder's ability, high character and family influence, Archbishop
Sutton, the blue-blooded Primate who succeeded Moore, and 1J. H. Overton, The English Church of the Nineteenth Century, p. 77.
2 Lecky, Macaulay, Ranke, Green, Overton, Abbey and Hammond, as well as most Anglo-Catholic historians, have tended to propagate this plausible delusion.
3 Dr. W. L. Mathieson English Church Reform, 1815-1840, pp. 3-15.
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like Moore "' died rich," flew into an uproar on the appointment and tried to prevent Ryder's installation; while the Dean and Chapter of Gloucester strove to exclude him from the Cathedral pulpit, and crowds flocked
"' to see this great curiosity, a religious: bishop.''!
The expulsion of six Evangelical students from St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, in 1768, for their religious zeal, was but indicative of the attitude of the higher Church officials to the Revival.
St. Mary Magdalene Church, the only Evangelical centre at Oxford, was "' put out of bounds"? for all undergraduates ;
Trinity, Simeon's Church at Cambridge, was long the scene of the most incredible persecutions,? and until 1788, when Isaac
Milner, a brilliant mathematician, was made President of Queen's College, Cambridge, Evangelicals experienced the greatest difficulty in finding either Oxford or Cambridge Colleges which would so much as admit their candidates for Holy Orders.
Even at the close of the century, Evangelicals in Greater London were "' excluded from all but three of the livings."® And were it not for the numerous " proprietary Chapels" built by consecrated laymen; for the many Lectureships to which, despite the bishops, parishioners could elect clergymen ; and for various Evangelical trust-funds raised to "' purchase spheres of work," while ecclesiastical dignitaries continued to pile up pluralities, the professional " Judaisers"? might indeed have succeeded in freezing the Revival heralds completely outside the National Church.
For seventeen years, in the teeth of the bitterest official opposition, was the benign, scholarly William Romaine, by his lectureship in St. Dunstan's, Fleet Street, stirring the soul of London, before he was granted any other permanent appointment ; and when at last he was made the rector of a Blackfriars parish, it was because the parishioners there enjoyed the right of electing their own clergy.
Even " as late as 1824," the saintly Charles Simeon, '' was blackballed when he was proposed as a member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.''5
Yet Lord Macaulay, who graduated from Cambridge in 1822, in a letter years afterwards to his sister, wrote:
" If you knew what Simeon's authority and influence were, and how they *G. R. Balleine, op. cit., pp. 192-3.
Professor N. Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century (1935) makes clear that the prevailing conception of a bishop was that of a high State official.
* Ibid., pp. 124-5, 129-31.
3 [bid., p. 63.
"Simeon said, of his Trust:
'' Others purchase income, I purchase spheres of work."
5 Balleine, op. cit., p. 181.
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extended from Cambridge to the most remote corners of England, you would allow that his real sway in the Church was far greater than that of any Primate."!
That "sway" however was entirely among despised "' enthusiasts."
Mathieson in his close study, English Church Reform 1815-1840, points out that, even as late as 1810, Evangelical clergymen, dubbed '* Church-Methodists," were officially considered a * pestilence."? Old fashioned High Churchmen
(ie., ultraNational Churchmen) commonly designated Dissenting Chapels, "Synagogues of Satan'; yet Evangelicals within " the Church " they considered " far more obnoxious than Nonconformists," and during the opening years of the nineteenth century it was a real " test of courage"' for any clergyman to join the Church Missionary Society, lest he lose ecclesiastical caste.¢ Low Churchmen (Latitudinarians) were just as intolerant of the Revival influence, as were Highchurchmen.
What the early Christian evangelists were to the scribes and pharisees of Judaism, that were the apostles of Evangelicalism to both the * High and Dry" and " Low and Slow " officials of the National Church.
As "old and recognised "' factions they might continue to squabble with each other, but they united to exorcise the loathsome spectre of '' Methodism."
Again, it is continuously asserted, or assumed, that, (1) ere the dawn of the Oxford Movement (1833), when Keble launched his famous attack on all Liberalism, ecclesiastical and political,®
Evangelicalism already had experienced a period of domination in the Courts of the National Church, and that, (2) it now was decadent or dead.
The latter assumption is refuted from the mouth of Keble himself, who, in 1828, deplored " the amazing rate at which ' Puritanism' seems to be getting all over the Kingdom " ;* the former assumption is at variance with the stubborn fact that up to the beginning of the Tractarian Movement, the total number of Evangelical bishops yet appointed numbered only three.?
Eleven years after Ryder was made a bishop, Charles Sumner was appointed to the see of Llandaff, in Wales, and the following year translated to Winchester ; while in 1828 John Bird Sumner, his elder brother, was made bishop of Chester, and in 1848 was elevated to the Archbishopric
1 See Sir G. O. Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, chap. I.
2 Op. cit., p. 6.
3 Mathieson, op. cit., p. 11.
4 Ibid., pp. 12-14.
5 See John Keble's Oxford Sermon, National Apostasy.
6 Mathieson, pp. 15-16.
? Balleine, p. 209.
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of Canterbury, in which office he forsook the whole tradition of the Primate's pomp and state.
Criticised for walking to the House of Lords and thus abandoning the gorgeous official coach with its " outriders and attendants with drawn swords,"
Archbishop Sumner replied : " I cannot imagine that a greater reproach could be cast on the Church than to suppose that it allowed its dignity to interfere with its usefulness."
As for the numerical following of the Evangelicals within the State Church during the early years of the Oxford Movement, it is suggested by the most characteristic representative of the old Low Church school.
Sydney Smith, of Edinburgh Review fame, always smart, often shallow, and sometimes stupid, speaks of turning aside from attacking "' the nasty and numerous vermin of Methodism " to exterminate the "' pragmatical, perpendicular, Puseyite prigs.'
As for Episcopal representation of Evangelicalism, Ryder and the Sumner brothers as yet continued alone.
Indeed the fact is that until Lord Shaftesbury, from 1856 till 1865, appointed the much maligned " Palmerston Bishops,"? Evangelicalism had less than a tithe of its proportionate representation on the Episcopal Bench: nevertheless because a bare half of Shaftesbury's numerous nominations went to avowed Evangelicals, "The Good Earl" was violently attacked as a rabid partisan making "' wicked appointments.''®
With withering sarcasm, D'Alembert, the famous mathematician and one of Diderot's foremost editors of the Encyclopédie, depicting the pre-Revolution France of his day, wrote:
'" The highest offices in the Church and State resemble a pyramid, whose top is accessible to only two sorts of animals, eagles and reptiles."
This aphorism, coined to describe Catholic F rance,® was thought by many on the British side of the Channel equally
1 Balleine, p. 196.
?"T am a very lucky man," wrote Palmerston, '' luckier than most Ministers.
I have no sons, grandsons or nephews to stuff into the Church ; .. +I can do what I think right."
He left appointments entirely to Shaftesbury, who accordingly was dubbed " the Bishop-maker."'
See E. Hodder's Life of Shaftesbury, pp. 197-99, also Bready's Lord Shaftesbury and Social-Industrial Progress, p. 44.
° Life of Bishop Wilberforce, by his son, Vol. III, p. 84..
G. R. Balleine, op. cit., pp. 265-68, gives an illuminating analysis of the " Shaftesbury appointments."
*" Abbey and Overton, of. cit., Vol. II, p. 23.
Prior to the French Revolution the Archbishop of Narbonne, conspicuous in a society remarkable for "high living and loose thinking," had an ecclesiastical income of £40,000 a year;
116 French Prelates had stipends between £7,000 and £10,000 a year, " often increased by pluralities and sinecures."
Yet some French curés had but £10 a year.
See J.
Holland Rose, D.Litt., Christianity and the French Revolution (published in Christ and Civilisation), p, 418ff.
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applicable to Protestant England, where it was quoted even by a bishop.
Certainly it contained enough truth to bite.
John Wesley by blood was partly Irish ;_ by instinct, temperament and outlook he was singularly English ; nevertheless clannish Presbyterian Scotland, as later will appear, first recognised his world greatness by beginning as early as 1772 to bestow upon him the freedom of certain of her cities and corporations, while still earlier she had begun inviting him to preach in College, and other prominent, Kirks.
In England the 'Blind Guides? showed a different front.
Though Wesley, as an Anglican priest, did everything reasonably possible to keep his rapidly increasing Societies within the National Church, and though during the last two or three decades of his long life he was recognised by the common people as a national character
—even indeed as a national " institution "'—yet never was he invited to preach in any English cathedral, much less in Canterbury, Westminster Abbey or St. Paul's.
The English episcopate of the eighteenth century, though still purporting to be the exclusive mediators of Apostolic Grace, by the pride, arrogance and venality of their lives, and by compromising Christianity to the idolatry of wealth, class, " reason "? and Constitution, caused the light that was in them to turn to darkness : and how great was that darkness is nowhere more clearly revealed than in the fact that these solemnly ordained ecclesiastical '' guides" failed utterly to recognise either the importance or the majesty of the most selfless, most heroic, and most truly amazing life's work ever spent for the salvation of England or, through England, of the world.
The episcopal bench of Wesley's day, with but few and notable exceptions, was spiritually unbaptised.
SLAVE-TRADING ON AFRICAN COAST, AND
SECTION OF SLAVE SHIP (By courtesy of AntiSlavery Society) 1. Note sale and branding of Negroes: and whipping them into boat; also slave-ship in background (iop)
2. Africans packed on ship, "like books on a shelf."
Chained together at wrists and ankles (bottom)
CHAPTER IV
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*' Kings are gods but once removed.
It hence appears No court but Heaven's can trie them by their peers, So that for Charles the Good to have been tryed
And cast by mortal votes was Deicide."
See Monumentum Regale (Select Epitaphs and Poems on Charles I, 1649) and Vaticinium Votiwum.
" Or all birds the eagle alone has seemed to wise men the type of royalty (i.e. nationalism)—not beautiful, not musical, not fit for food, but carnivorous, greedy, hateful to all,' the curse of all; and, with its great powers of doing harm, surpassing them in its desire of doing it."
Erasmus, Adagia (1515).
CHAPTER IV
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JoserH Appison, in the early years of the eighteenth century, drew an amusing sketch of a certain innkeeper who, " lacking time to go to Church himself," had nonetheless '' swelled his body to a prodigious size and worked up his complexion to a standing crimson by his zeal for the prosperity of the Church."
This pious publican, too, had given tangible proof of his devotion to the Establishment by "' heading a mob at the pulling down of two or three meeting-houses'"' ; but as to the content of his Faith, Addison vows:
'"' He had learned a great deal of politics, but not one word of religion from the parson of the parish ; and had scarce any other notion of religion but that it consisted in hating Presbyterians."'1
'Thackeray, in the perspective of a century's distance, examined the sermons of the humorous and popular Lawrence Sterne and declared that they contained "' not a single Christian sentiment."?
These judgments seem harsh ; but a perusal of hundreds of eighteenthcentury sermons preached by ecclesiastics in the recognised
succession of preferment,"' especially up to the sixth and even seventh decades, will dispel all doubt that they are rooted in truth.
From the Restoration (1660) till the year
special *' Martyrdom" and " Restoration"' sermons were preached annually both before the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and also in parish Churches throughout the country.
The former, delivered each year on January 30th, were designed to call the nation "' in fasting and mourning " to commemorate
1 Freeholder, No. 22, March sth (1716-17).
2 See Sermons of the Rev. Mr. Yorick (1760); also Sterne's Sermons (1765).
In his essay, Sterne and Goldsmith, Thackeray says:
"There is not a page in Sterne's writing but has something that were better away, a latent corruption—a hint, as of an impure presence."
(Thackeray's Works, Vol. X, p. 569.) Coleridge says:
"' Sterne cannot'be too severely censured for .
. using the best dispositions of our nature as the panders and condiments for the basest."'
(Literary Remains, Vol. I, p. 142).
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the "' Sacrifice of the Blessed Martyr, Charles I''; the latter (May 29th) were to lead the people in '' Thanksgiving for the Restoration of the King and the Royal Family."
Occasionally these January 30th and May '29th homilies were unitedly referred to as "Commemoration Sermons"; and generally both were of the nature of Cavalier '"' patriotic effusions," foreign alike to charity and grace.
(i) Martyrdom and Restoration Sermons Samuel Asplin, M.A., preaching on May g2oth, 1715, in the parish Church of St. Mary, Woolwich, said:
With the Restoration the true religion, our Redeemer, is raised from the grave, almost by the same miracle, when it was dead and buried in anarchy, hypocrisy and enthusiasm."?
This reverend gentleman was following a genteel fashion in comparing the restoration of the profligate Charles II, with the resurrection of Jesus Christ ;1 but by way of excuse for the well-known sensuality of Charles and his Court the preacher proceeds :
As often as I read over the miserable scene of things in those days of Cromwellism, villainy and ravage ; when hell itself had broken loose and confusion had so long time obtained dominion over us... I say when I reflect upon this dismal state of things, I cannot but wonder at the temper of the good old
Royalists, when God, by a miraculous turn of Providence, restored them to peace and Kingly Government, that instead of committing less extravagances, they had not (like nature out of a starved condition feeding upon plenty) even surfeited themselves in an excess of joy."*
Further on, Asplin continues thus :
"" I believe there is something so sacred in the Divine Right of Kings and in their legal accession to their respective thrones
(by the legality of their succession, I mean by God and their birthright) that there are some invisible irradiations and streams flowing from their persons that strike both the upper and lower part of mankind with a religious obedience to them and a more than common veneration.''?
As for this divine's description of Oliver Cromwell, it reveals * The death of Charles I, too, was repeatedly connected with the crucifixion of Christ.
'The University of Oxford caused two similar pictures to be painted, the one representing the death of Christ, the other the death of Charles.
An account of the sufferings of each was placed below, and they were hung in corresponding places in the Bodleian Library."
(W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I, p. 67.) ? Rev. Samuel Asplin, M.A., Restoration Sermon, Ma th 3 Ibid., p. 13.
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the type of preaching then approved and rewarded.
He speaks of "' that execrable monster Cromwell" rearing " his Babel scheme of Government and tyrannising over everything that looked like loyalty and conscience, and conformity to the best
Church and King in the world."
"To the Royalist Martyr," declares our Cavalier oracle, "'a King not to be matched for excellencies .
. there succeeded a wild kind of Atheism, under the veil of purity, reformation and fanatic rage ; while tinkers, cobblers and draymen became lords over God's inheritance."?
Asplin would have argued himself blue in the face to prove his Apostolic Succession, through the fishermen of Galilee, to the Carpenter of Nazareth; but the mere suggestion that tinkers, cobblers and draymen could be soulful, responsible men, drove him mad.
By this King-worshipping sycophant, Cromwell and all his colleagues are dismissed as "that hypocritical brood of infernal vipers."?
"' Upon my soul," concludes this harangue, '"'I believe .
. it was only for the sake of the old persecuted Royalists, who had suffered a great sight of afflictions, that God delivered these sinful nations from a twenty years tyranny and rebellion.''*
On January gist, 1703, Dr. White Kennett (later Bishop of Peterborough) preached in the Church of St. Botolph, Aldgate, on the subject A Compassionate Inquiry into the Causes of the Civil
War.
His sermon opens:
" The evil of this day, which we now deplore in Fasting and Mourning, was an unnatural
Civil War, that overturned the best Constitution in the world, that made our whole Island an Aceldama, a Field of Blood, and through heaps of rapine and slaughter, proceeded to the deplorable death of the Martyr of this day, one of the most virtuous and most religious of our English Princes."
Following the correct style, he extols '' our Happy Constitution,"' denounces the " hypocrisy and fanaticism "' of the Puritans, and castigates the Commonwealth leaders as '"' Men of Craft '—"' dreadful dissemblers with God and Heaven.'4
On January goth, 1705, in the Church of St. Margaret, Westminster, Kennett preached the Martyrdom Sermon before the House of Commons.
The Commonwealth era he depicts as striving to " turn the world upside down" ; Queen Anne he describes as " Our Sovereign
Lady ... the manifester of God to us for Good"; while concerning the Majesty and glory of the * Royal Martyr," he concludes:
'' But should I attempt to enumerate his virtues 1 Rev. Samuel Asplin, M.A., Restoration Sermon, May 2oth, 1715, p. 16.
2 Asplin, op. cit., p. 15.
3 Tbid., p. 18.
; > 'i 4 Bishop White Kennett, op. cit. (dated '' 1703'), pp. 1, 24, 27.
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and recommend his example, the time would fail... 'He was the worthiest Gentleman, the best Master, the best Friend, the best Husband, the best Father, the best Christian, that the age in which he lived produced.'"!
There being however depths below depths, this good Doctor was vehemently criticised as not sufficiently appreciative of 'the glorious Martyr, Charles I.'?2
On May goth, 1717, Dr. Andrew Snape, preaching before the House of Commons, used language characteristic of scores of the printed '' Restoration Sermons.'
The trial and execution of Charles I he pronounced the '' murder of the best of Kings " and the " overturning of the best of Constitutions " ; while as for any semblance of Democracy, political or social, his loathing is complete.
"Surely there is no bondage so irksome," he exclaims, "no chains that feel so weighty, or gall so sorely, as those which are imposed by one's equals or inferiors ; which was the case in those rebellious times, when the vilest of people had thrust themselves into the highest stations and, with a full swing of violence and oppression, lorded it over their superiors.''?
The Bishop of Chester, preaching before the House of Lords, in 1714, concludes his sermon by pointing the moral:
" It is likewise our duty, as good subjects, to put a favourable construction upon the actions of our Prince, and never to give way to suspicions, contrary to a settled character and solemn declarations."4
The famous Bishop Atterbury, preaching before Queen Anne, refers to the Restoration of Charles II as " reducing us from confusion and rage to order and friendliness, and making us a nation at unity in itself; lovely at home and terrible abroad."
Dr. Thomas Rymer, preaching before the House of Commons (1733) concludes his address by striking a note appallingly common to the preaching of the ruling ecclesiastics of the time:
'It is to be hoped that we shall endeavour to preserve the blessings we enjoy, by submitting in our several stations, to the Powers under which we live.'*
It was this emphasis on submission "in our several stations," to '" Godappointed superiors"' that retained for the National Church the support of many who, caring nothing for Christianity, desired nevertheless the maximum protection of all vested - epee Martyrdom Sermon before House of Commons (dated 170% "'), p. 26.
* See White against Kennett .
. with a letter to the Doctor on his last Jan. 30 Sermon (Anonymous), 1704. ce * Andrew Snape, Restoration Sermon, 1717, p. 4.
* Francis Gastrel Restoration Sermon, 1714.
Printed in a volume of selected Restoration Sermons ( 1661-1758).
* Ibid. (Thomas Rymer, p. 16).
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pe interests, and who looked upon the clergy as faithful watchdogs and dependable police corps ; but it was this emphasis, too, that finally alienated so completely from '" the Church " the respect and allegiance of the working multitude.
Bishop Lavington, the sworn foe of '' Methodism" and " enthusiasm,"' preaching on May 29th, 1747, in Westminster
Abbey, before the House of Lords, propounded the thesis that "' God is a despotic, arbitrary King," and in the process of his sermon attacked the " King-Killing doctrine of dominion founded in grace," all the while inferring that King-Killing and God-Killing are synonymous terms.!
Cromwell, he pronounces, the " mock-protector," who gaining power by "a daring spirit and profound hypocrisy, waded through the blackest crimes of perjury, oppression and treason
. through rivers of blood and blood royal."?
Then " interpreting " history in a manner no doubt pleasing to most of the Lords,
Lavington proceeds:
Consider if you can without abhorrence and indignation, the Lord's anointed barbarously murdered, yourselves turned off as useless and dangerous ; and supreme authority usurped by a scant remnant of the Commons, supported by the guards of hypocrisy and enthusiasm."
While turning anon to another well-beaten trail, the good bishop, after panegyrising "'the best Constitution under heaven," concludes by assuring his lordly hearers that it is the duty of all good subjects "' to make the King's sacred life and reign as easy and comfortable as they can.''* Continually the same note is struck ; ''the King's sacred life'? becomes a monotonous chant in nearly all Commemoration sermons: the axiomatic Christian principle of '"' the sacredness of all human life'? is completely forgotten.
The Common People apparently were to rejoice that their Prince vicariously, and by " Divine appointment," enjoyed "ease and comfort"? on their behalf, while they sweated for meagre subsistence.
Even Bishop Warburton, who, despite his egotism and Constitution-worship, was a man of independence and courage, joins the general chorus.
In his Martyrdom Sermon before the Lords (1760) he dismisses the Commonwealth period as "that disgraceful epoch in our story"? when the subjects 1 A popular poem ran :
" Kings are gods but once removed ..
So that for Charles the Good to have been tryed And cast by mortal votes was Deicide."
(See Lecky, I, p. 65.) 2 George Lavington (Bishop of Exeter), A Restoration Sermon (1747),
Pp. 13.
3 [bid., p. 26.
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the protection of their common Sovereign and invaded and insulted his imperial crown."!
Swift rehashes the same perennial jingo.
In a typical January 30th sermon, he does obeisance before "' that excellent King and blessed martyr,
Charles I,? who rather chose to die on the scaffold, than betray the liberties of his people, wherewith God and the laws had entrusted him."* Dr. Barnardiston, preaching to the Commons in 1766, says:
"' We are governed by a Prince, who in imitation of his royal Ancestors is a nursing Father to his people.''4
Dr. George Stinson, two years later, addressing the same venerable body, calls the Commonwealth era " a fit of frenzy," and urges 'dutiful submission to authority."'
Dr. Lowth, Bishop of Oxford, preaching the Martyrdom Sermon in Westminster Abbey before the Lords (1767) used a much worn text ; '' My son fear thou the Lord and the King ; and meddle not with them that are given to change."
The occasion afforded him opportunity for a veiled stab at the Evangelical Revival,
" the dotage and frenzy of false religion."'
'' It is no uncommon thing with modern enthusiasts," asserted Bishop Lowth, " to ascribe the works of Beelzebub to the operation of the Holy
Spirit of God."> Advancing to matters of State, Lowth lauded the " firmness and stability " the "' beauty and perfection " to which the Constitution had now attained and called upon the Legislature "' to repress the spirit of licentiousness and outrage which so much prevails among the people."
The chords again are familiar; it was common for the highest ecclesiastics to appeal in one breath for the suppression of all opposition to oligarchic Government in Church and State, as " licentiousness and outrage," while, in the next, they besought the people to fall down in obeisance before '' our excellent Constitution, both civil and religious."
In Westminster Abbey, on January 30th, 1764, Bishop Newton of Bristol, preaching the Martyrdom Sermon before the House of Lords, took as his text : '' Let your moderation be known to all men" ; and assuring his hearers that " the Lord will judge and punish for nothing more surely than the want of moderation," he proceeded to instruct their lordships that '' Moderation
* William Warburton, Martyrdom Sermon (1760), p. 2.
Lecky quotes a writer at the time of the Sacheverell agitation who says : '' I may be positive at Westminster Abbey where I heard one sermon of repentance, faith and renewing of the Holy Ghost, I heard three of the other, and it is hard to say whether Jesus Christ or King Charles were oftenest mentioned and magnified."
(Op. cit., Vol. I, p. 67.
* Jonathan Swift, Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. II, p. 190.
* A Martyrdom Sermon, pp. 23-24.
5 Robert Lowth, Martyrdom Sermon (1767), pp. 9-10.
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is not even righteous overmuch."?
Of this same genial bishop Sir Leslie Stephen says that his " intimacies with great men "' enabled him "to worm himself into the high places of the Church."?
Certainly Newton's Autobiography proves that on questions of preferment and pluralities he was by no means so squeamish about observing the necessity for '* moderation "' as on questions of " righteousness.""
'To Bishop Newton moderation in righteousness was a cardinal article in the correct code of religious manners, and "' enthusiasm " the unpardonable sin; but in the sphere of self-seeking preferment, Newton conveniently forgot all about moderation.
This tolerant, ** moderate "' prelate suppressed the attempt to build a Catholic
Mass-House " in Bristol; and '' Methodism"? which dared to approach the denizens of the unwashed underworld and teach them they had souls, he lampooned as "'a bastard kind of popery."'
Newton, like most of the hierarchy of his day, prided himself that he lived in a classical, royalist society, far above the foolish enthusiasms and loathsome "' immoderations "' of the vulgar menial herd.
(ii) Influence of the Revolution of 1688 But cringing, assuming and insincere as is the tenor of most eighteenth century Commemoration Sermons, those preached prior to the Revolution of 1688 (the prelude to eighteenth century history) are worse; indeed in pre-Revolution discourses the '' creeping sycophant" appears par excellence.
The reason is that large numbers of Jacobite clergy regarded William of Orange only as regent, not King ; hence, though by no means converted from their idolatry of King-worship, they were dissatisfied with their new idol.
The result was that whereas the " Divine Right of Kings " doctrine lost considerable of its former glamour, a pronounced deification of the Constitution made it a formidable rival in the Temple of State.
The subservience of the hierarchy to the "' power of State " accordingly was little, if any, abated by the Revolution and the ensuing
Bill of Rights, but the unpopularity of William III among large numbers of influential clergy, caused a marked change
1'This sermon is bound with others in a volume of Martyrdom Sermons (1757-1770).
See Bishop Thomas Newton's Sermon, p. 9.
2 English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I, p. 227.
8 Autobiography of Dr. Thomas Newton, Bishop of Bristol, throws much light on the ruling ecclesiastics of the time.
See also Abbey and Overton, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 11.
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in the interpretation of the power of State.
To many clergymen who previously had been flaming exponents of the " Divine Right of Kings," the regal Divinity was now shared by, and in some cases wholly transferred to, the Constitution.
The Revolution of 1688,.then, meant that the Constitution was admitted into the very '' Holy of Holies,'' alongside the King.
Both now were primary idols, contending for supremacy in the 'Temple of State.
The Revolution therefore by no means dispelled the subservience ecclesiastical dignitaries were ever ready to pay the State, which then represented a government of the people, for the privileged, by the ruling class; it did however considerably curtail their King-worshipping idolatry.
On May 2oth, 1685, Dr. William Sherlock, '"' Master of the Temple and Chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty," preaching the Restoration sermon in St. Margaret's, Westminster, '' before the Honourable House of Commons," used the text
"' Blessed art thou, O land, when thy King is a son of nobles."!
And forthwith he proceeded to elaborate three points:
(1) that Kingship is the government most in harmony with the Will of God, (2) that a king should be a son of nobles, (3) that kingship should be hereditary.
'' With what surprising joy," Sherlock breaks out, "' we beheld our banished Prince return again to his throne ; who brought back with him our laws, our liberties and our religion ; that is brought England into England again, which was banished with its Prince, without changing its place and climate."?
To this royal Chaplain, the Prince apparently was England.
Panegyrising Charles II as " that beloved and admired Prince who gave the first lustre and glory to his day," he reminds the House of Commons that the Gay Monarch has
"left the memory of his Princely virtues to adorn the records of time"; while again he describes this royal debauchee, whose rule responsible historians have pronounced " the worst reign in English history,''? as '' the Great Charles."
Of Charles I Dr. Sherlock says: 'I know of no Prince, in any age, under whom an obedient and governable people might have lived more happily than under our late martyred sovereign."4
But the climax of cringing subservience is reached in the conclusion of this royal Chaplain's oration, where tacitly he admits that the National Church is the bond-slave of the King.
"For Princes must value obedience and subjection," cries Sherlock, "' as they do their Crowns.
To this we owe our * Dr. W. Sherlock, Restoration Sermon, (1685), Det.
* [bid., p. 2.
5 See article on Charles II in Chambers's Biographical Dictionary.
* Sherlock, op. cit., p. 29.
PULP. D'S) sP ROA NED
present security and protection of the Church of ENGLAND ; for if there were nothing else to be liked in it, yet the generous
Prince could not but like and reward its Loyalty ; and it would seem very harsh for any Prince to desire that Religion should be turned out of the Church, which secures him in the quiet possession of his Throne?
. It is a Church of ENGLANDloyalty I persuade you to; this our King approves, commends, relies on... a loyalty without reserve. ... There is no such lasting and immovable loyalty as that of the Church of
ENGLAND." ?
Dr. Sherlock, however, was one of many Commemoration preachers who not only accepted, but frankly advocated, the policy that the National Church was a Government instrument, designed to propogate subservience to the Crown and unquestioning submission to State authority.
In view of the discourses already reviewed, it is hardly surprising to discover that the vast majority of Martyrdom and Restoration Sermons were preached from Old Testament texts.
One volume of "Restoration Sermons," for instance, continuing down to 1758, contains twenty-two sermons; and only two were from New Testament texts.
The reason is apparent ; most of these harangues could never have been preached from New Testament texts.
Indeed one may spend months in perusing these Commemoration sermons, especially those of the earlier period, and find never a glimmer of the courage of a Nathan or an Amos, or the faith of a St. Peter or St. Paul.
Even Abbey and Overton point out that:
'' Notably on such days as January goth, and May 29th, the High Church Clergy were eager to improve the occasion by venting the most violent abuse upon their political adversaries."* Nor, in this regard, were High Churchmen a peculiar people.
(iii) History ad la Mode Upon the contortion of History by these memorial sermons we need not dwell.
That "Spotless Saint'? and '"' Blessed Martyr," Charles I, continually idolised in these sentimental raptures as "' the worthiest gentleman," " the best friend"? and 1 These words suggest that Sherlock knew well that James II, who had just succeeded to the throne, was an aggressive Roman Catholic, though
" Head " of the National Church.
2 Ibid., pp. 30-31.
Little wonder that Bentham wrote of '' The Church of Englandism."
3 English Church in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. II, p. 43.
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"the best Christian'? his age produced,! has left many selfportraits of his perfidy.
"'I am not without hope," he wrote coolly, *' that I shall be able to draw either the Presbyterians or the Independents to side with me for extirpating one another, so that I shall really be King again."?
No mention is made in these discourses of Charles's guilt in violating the " Sacred
Constitution " ; neither is any pity expressed for the thousands of courageous citizens who perished in the Civil War which he, not Parliament, began.
Charles I undoubtedly was possessed of certain chivalrous, romantic virtues: but are Gardiner, Ranke, Hallam, Macaulay, Carlyle and many other historians all mistaken in concluding that the "' grand trouble " with the First Charles Stuart was that he " would not keep faith with any man or institution on earth.'
As for "that execrable monster, Cromwell,' his famous despatch from Dunbar to Parliament contains, surely, more practical religion than scores of Commemoration Sermons rolled together.
'"' Relieve the oppressed," urged Cromwell, "hear the groans of poor prisoners.
Be pleased to reform the abuses of all professions ; and if there be any that make many poor to make a few rich, that suits not the Commonwealth.''4
Concerning the " tinkers, cobblers and draymen "' of Commonwealth days—' that hypocritical brood of infernal vipers,"' those '' dreadful dissemblers with God and Heaven ''— J. R.
Green, an historian still to be reckoned with, says:
'' For the last two hundred years England has been doing little more than carrying out in a slow and tentative way the scheme of political and religious reform which the Army proposed at the close of the Civil War"; while also he concludes:
'' The whole history of English progress since the Restoration, on its moral and spiritual sides, has been the history of Puritanism.''®
In a sermon preached before Charles II at Breda (1649), the preacher declared that, '' Among all the martyrs that followed Christ into heaven bearing his cross never was there one who expressed so great conformity with our Saviour in His sufferings "' as Charles I.
In 1702, Dr. Binckes, preaching before the Lower House of Convocation, went so far as to argue that the execution of Charles I, at several points, '' transcended in enormity the murder of Christ."
(Lecky, Vol. I, pp. 64-67.) 'The New Testament Scripture Lesson accompanying Martyrdom Sermons, was commonly the narrative of the sufferings of Christ.
* See J. R. Green, Short History of the English People, p. 564.
M. Trevelyan, too, says that Charles I "was by temperament incapable of coming to an honest agreement and abiding by it."
(History of England, p. 419.) "See Property : Its Duties and Its Rights (composite authorship), pp.
143-46 ; also see Green, op. cit., p. 577.
5 Green, op. cit., pp. 565, 604.
PULPITS PROFANED oy] The fact, too, that the shameless Charles II could be lauded from the most historic pulpits in the land as "The Great
Charles * and as "' that beloved and admired Prince," who had "left the memory of his Princely virtues to adorn the records of time," suggests the degree to which the dead hand of Restoration debauchery loomed as a sinister shadow over later decades.
The deification of the Restoration and of Charles the Second's Kingship tended directly to idealise the fickle, dashing, voluptuous and godless mode of life '' the Gay Monarch" flaunted before the nation.
That sovereign's libertinism in fact established, or confirmed, the fashionable social criteria of the young
"squirearchy "; while a st-idied, persistent, revengeful abhorrence of "the Saints" and all their " puritan hypocrisy," tended to put virtue and sobriety, faith and reform, to rout.
The National Church, moreover, being an arm of Government, and being officered almost exclusively by scions of privileged, autocratic families, lent itself all too freely to this general stream of Restoration influence, and, for more than a century, the annual Martyrdom and Restoration sermons afforded unique vehicles for its expression.
CHAPTER V
"THE BETTER TEACHING
"' Wuat is it that so greatly discredits the dispensations of Providence, but that state of misery to which the bulk of mankind is condemned in order to support the few in the full tide of wantonness and riot ? "
Bisoop WARBURTON, Sermons on Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion.
(1753) Vol. 1, p. 104.
"THOUGH it may be a wise or virtuous poor man hath more right to our esteem than a fortunate knave or fool ; yet, for as much as in outward rank or condition God hath preferred the latter, he hath the right of precedence and of outward respect and observance.
This is a duty so incumbent upon all, that our Church hath thought proper to teach it in her first rudiments of Christianity ; when the children are taught to order themselves lowly and reverently to all their betters.'
The Whole Duty of Man (Anonymous) p. 293: first published in 1658, and long used as a religious handbook alongside the Prayer Book.
Ss Wee ee
CHAPTER V
THE BETTER TEACHING
For folly and flattery, for vindictiveness and idolatry, the Martyrdom and Restoration sermons are in a class by themselves.
Their very origin committed them to violently partisan, if not ludicrous, panegyrics and anathemas.
It therefore would be erroneous to infer that these '' Commemoration "' sermons, preached annually before Royalty and the Houses of Lords and Commons, as well as throughout the nation, illustrate the only type of eighteenth century sermon within the Established Church.
It would, moreover, be unfair to conclude that they are representative of "the Church" as a whole.
Their historical value lies rather in the fact that they show both the kind of doctrine the overshadowing oligarchy expected the National clergy to preach and the servile way in which highly placed ecclesiastics fulfilled that expectation; while also they reveal the paralysing influence of the Restoration spirit of revenge upon " the Age of Enlightenment."
It is with some relief therefore that we turn to survey the better pulpit teachings of the same period.
If the Martyrdom and Restoration sermons represent the most servile and most pagan of the Church's eighteenth century preaching, the benevolent and philanthropic sermons, including those in support of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, . the Charity Schools, the Hospitals and later the Sunday School movement, represent perhaps the most courageous and most
Christian.
(i) The Higher Strains Bishop Hough, preaching a Charity Sermon in 1712, spoke poignantly on some of the social evils of his day.
Riches," he cried, "can put evil for good and good for evil."
Again, he averred that in so far as men " take from the rich the fashion of their lives and manners as much as their clothes, and deportment," the rich must "' stand accountable to God not only for their own faults, but for as many as have sinned by their example."
In conclusion, Hough, far from exhorting his 1 John Hough (Charity Sermons, 1712-1715), pp. 11-14.
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congregation to an acceptance of the " Divine Right of Kings," the sanctity of the Constitution and the religious duty of submission to authority, urged upon them their duty to " feed the hungry, clothe the naked, relieve the distressed, support the feeble, enlarge the prisoner, instruct the ignorant and educate the helpless orphan."
Incidentally also he pointed out that during the year 1711 the old hospitals of St. Bartholomew and St. Thomas had rendered curative care to over 5,000 "* wounded, sick and maimed soldiers and seamen."?
Bishop Atterbury, delivering a Charity Sermon in 1723 was refreshingly direct.
" Our Saviour," he reminded his hearers, "is represented everywhere in Scripture as the special patron of the poor and afflicted, and as laying their interests to heart, as it were more nearly than others of his members.'
Atterbury's application too, was fearless and uncompromising :
"' Hear and tremble all ye who have this world's goods, and see your brother have need and shut up your bowels of compassion from him."
Then he pressed home the duty, " to relieve the helpless poor, to make sturdy vagrants relieve themselves ; to hinder idle hands from becoming mischievous to the commonwealth ; nay, to employ them so that they may be of public service ; to restore limbs to the wounded ; health to the sick, and reason to the distracted : to educate children in an honest, pious and laborious manner, and by that means to sow the good seed of which perhaps another age and another race of men may bear the benefit.''?
In 1740 Dean Swift, preaching on " Mutual Subjection,"' said:
man ought to look upon the advantages of life, such as riches, honour, power and the like as his property, but merely as a trust which God hath deposited with him, to be employed for the use of his brethren; and God will certainly punish the breach of that trust, although the laws of man will not, or indeed cannot."4
"You cannot," declared Swift, "envy your neighbour's strength, if he maketh use of it to defend your life or carry your burden ; you cannot envy his wisdom if he gives you good counsel; nor his riches if he supplies your wants ; nor his greatness if he employs it to your protection."
Furthermore, he reminded " those whose riches serve them only as a spur to avarice, or an instrument to their lust," that '"' God seeth all and will treat them as stewards."'5
? John Hough (Charity Sermons, 1712-1715), p. 18.
These were victims of the War of the Spanish Succession concluded by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.
* Bishop Francis Atterbury, Sermons, p. 176ff.
* Jonathan Swift, Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. II, p. 116.
5 [bid., p. 117.
THE BETTER
_ TEACHING
Bishop Warburton, preaching a Fast Sermon in 1745, when the Pretender's army was in England, expostulated:
The epidemic evils of every powerful community, in its decline, are luxury and avarice; which by an unnatural mixture are incessantly begetting one another even in the same breast.
By these means the national wealth becomes in part exhausted ; and which is almost as bad, in part unequally distributed; and the personal vigour of the people is either enervated by opulence, misemployed, or debased by sordid and inactive poverty.
. These are the epidemic evils which fill private families with unnatural quarrels, infest courts of justice with chicane ; and distract the councils of Government with faction
—faction which scruples no shape however venerable, no name, however. sacred, to draw the deluded people to second her private and corrupt purposes, masked over with pious zeal for religion and disinterested love of country."1
Again, in 1753, Warburton asks:
'' What is it that so greatly discredits the dispensations of Providence, but that state of misery to which the bulk of mankind is condemned in order to support the few in the full tide of wantonness and riot?"
Nor would he countenance any divorce between charity and piety.
'' Many" he protested, *' assume to themselves great merit in loving God, while they treat their brothers with contempt and cruelty.
But what says the Apostle in my text?
Provoked at their hypocrisy, he strips off the mask and brands them with the odious name of liars."
Whatever were Warburton's sins—and he was far from a saint—he was no puppet of party or class.
The soulless plutocrat he could not abide.
'' So much excess of corruption," he warned, " hath unblessed riches brought their possessors, that some can make that very sordidness itself, that miserable clothing of poverty, a subject for their scorn and ridicule.
So that whether it be for want of those advantages of mind and person, which their poverty disabled them from possessing, or whether it be from that poverty itself, they are sure never to escape the inhumanity of unfeeling wealth."*
William Law, too, boldly taught that, "' the honours which a King can give are literally no more than the toys with which a nurse amuses a child.''4
Or if we proceed toward the latter end of the century and examine the sermons of Robert Lucas, a Church pioneer of the 1 William Warburton, Fast Sermon (1745).
2 Warburton, Sermons on Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion, Vol. I, p. 104.
3 Thid., pp. 83, 95.
4 See Stephen, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 397.
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Sunday School movement, we catch some glimpse of the new / passion for the education of the poor.
When powerful vested interests opposed the Sunday School crusade as " educating children above their station" and " unfitting them for their
God-appointed tasks," he nobly championed its aims.
" Away with those selfish notions,' admonished Lucas, " which would repress the generous struggle of the poor man's mind after information and instruction, which would bar the gates of knowledge to him nor suffer one ray to enliven the gloom that surrounds him."
"The general mass of the people," he complained, "still remain overwhelmed in a sort of hereditary ignorance and sloth.
. The lamp of reason is scarcely alive in them."!
' While the sun," he expatiated, ' sheds its benign influence with equal kindness upon the cottages of the poor and the mansions of the affluent, the latter uncharitably would deny the former any part in that better radiance by which their own lives are illumined."?
But to the student of social and religious problems the most revealing aspect of Lucas's
Sermons on Sunday Schools is their reiterated references to the fears and stock-arguments of his opponents.
"In ignorance the poor were born, and in ignorance let them remain," was a rejoinder confronting him at every turn.
"It is impolitic,"' continually argued his detractors, "to give these children knowledge ; it will but unfit them for their respective stations, make them bad labourers and mechanics, and raise them above their order in the community.''® (ii) Discordant Notes But although these sermons are typical of the most courageous and most Christian preaching within the National Church of the eighteenth century, almost invariably they contain notes which cancel the bolder aspects of their own teaching.
Despite Dean Swift's refreshing emphasis on stewardship—a rare note in the National Church of his day—he concludes the said sermon by resorting to the pious delusions of his age.
" The practice of this duty of being subject one to another," he contends, "' would make us rest contented in the several stations of life, wherein God hath thought fit to place us."4
Again, in his sermon, The Poor Man's Contentment, we have an admirable 1 Robert Lucas, B.D., Three Sermons on Sunday Schools (in Lambeth
Palace Library), pp. 15-18.
2 Ibid., p. 78.
8 Ibid., p. 79.
" Swift, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 117.
DRED BE TOLER
LEA GHING
illustration of the abrupt terseness and dictatorial manner of most of Swift's preaching.
''I shall therefore show," he says, "first that the poor do enjoy many temporal blessings not common to the rich and great, and likewise that the rich and great are subject to many temporal evils not common to the poor."!
Sir Walter Scott described the Dean's preaching with high charity when he said:
'" Swift tears the bandages from the wounds like a hasty surgeon in a crowded hospital, and applies the incision knife and caustic with salutary but rough and untamed severity."
Bishop Warburton too, for all his forcefulness and audacity, gives characteristic expression to the most patent enigma of his time.
After his broadside upon the heartless avarice and luxury at the top of society and the sordid, degrading poverty at the bottom, he begs the whole question by resorting to the Christless conscience-soother that the yawning gulfs between the social classes are divinely ordained.
'These different stations in society were marked out and disposed of, "' he avers, "' by the peculiar ordinance of Providence "' ; , ce while again, he refers to the poor as "' those whom Providence has thrown beneath us, on the distressful stage of human lite.'
Even the great and good Bishop Berkeley, in his powerful sermon before magistrates, takes for granted the Providential origin of a caste-privileged society and accepts for the National
Church the police réle of being its guardian and protector.
" And if religion," pleads Berkeley, '"'in all Governments be necessary, yet it seemeth to be more especially so in monarchies ; for as much as the frugal manners and more equal fortunes of republics do not so much inflame men's appetites, or afford such power or temptation to mischief, as the high estates and great wealth of nobles under a King."* To find Berkeley appealing to magistrates to support religion as a bulwark to those class divisions which he himself maintained,
"' inflame men's appetites"? and "afford such power or temptation to mischief," is a trenchant commentary on the social assumptions of his era.4
1 Swift, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 204.
2 Warburton, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 96, 91.
3 George Berkeley, Address to Magistrates, etc., p. 24.
4In the eighteenth century, says Dr. R. H. Tawney, "it is almost superfluous to examine the teaching of the Church of England as to social ethics .
. except by a few eccentrics, the very conception of the Church as an independent moral authority, whose standards may be in sharp antithesis to social conventions, has been abandoned.
(Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, pp. 188-9.) In the latter part of the century, however. this stagnation was being sternly challenged.
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Lucas, too, despite his passion for the education of the poor, reverts repeatedly to the inevitable strain that an all-wise Deity had ordained the prevailing social order.
'' Because Providence," he pleads, "' has thought good to place some in a helpless and forlorn situation, shall we deny them the consolation of knowing from the operation of their own minds, that they are reasonable creatures?'
Or again:
" But truly it is a strange idea (adopted however by some) which supposes that knowledge, arising out of a decent and Christian-like education, indisposes the poor for their respective callings.''} The mesmerism cast by the Feudalistic exclusiveness of a classdivided society held even Lucas in its toils.
'' The acquisition of knowledge," he argues, '' cannot injure or change the texture of that society ; its principal effect will be to stimulate the other classes to increase theirs in due proportion.""
But he meets his critics still further : '' The objectors need be under no fears lest, by the operation of these schools, there should be no dregs in the community, no bottom class to do the labour and drudgery of the public."?
He even refers to " such employments as Providence has unalterably allotted to the lowest orders of the state," and hints that the privileged classes should support the Church's Sunday Schools as a sort of social insurance.
" Their force is employed," he points out, "to correct and control those parts of the community, which have been accustomed most to disturb its peace and tranquillity.''?
The reasons for this perennial class emphasis, which degraded Providence into a Chief of Police utilising the National clergy as His special constabulary to keep the populace in their "appointed stations," is not difficult to trace.
With the "Puritan Rebellion " the National Church, as an hierarchical institution, had suffered something approaching the same fate as befell Royalty and the Nobility ; consequently the whole
Cavalier party, in Church and State, were determined above all else that if again they achieved power, from henceforth and forevermore " tinkers, cobblers and draymen"' should be taught their proper places and kept in them.
. Restoration legislation, with its " Anti-Puritan Code," was therefore but one means of achieving this end, and that the crudest.4
The subtler means was religious propaganda and dogma; and this began to appear during Commonwealth days.
Various hand- ? Robert Lucas, Three Sermons on Sunday Schools, pp. 1 ReL7e 2 [bid., p. 80.
8 Tbid., p. 72f.
"See Chapter I (i).
THE BETTER TEACHING
books from time to time were published, purporting to interpret their religious duties to the different classes of society ; but in the year of Cromwell's death (1658) there appeared a manual which, quickly superseding all others, held for nearly a century an undisputed place alongside the Prayer Book as a practical
Church guide to social conduct and duty.
This anonymous volume, based largely on Mediaeval precedent and tradition, and for generations preached on and quoted from National pulpits all over the realm, was entitled The Whole
Duty of Man.
Admittedly it contained many excellent Christian precepts and much skilful ethical casuistry.
"He that is unjust,' it taught, "' for greediness of gain is like to multiply more acts of this sin (covetousness) than he that is so by malice.
. The covetous man hath as many objects of his vice as there be things in the world he counts valuable."1
Or again :
"The very necessities of the oppressed,"' it emphasised, "' are the means of his oppression ; thus it is in the case of extortion and griping usury: a man is in extreme want of money, and this gives opportunity to the extortioner to wrest unconscionably from him ; to which the poor man is forced to yield to supply his present wants.
And thus it is also with exacting landlords, who, when their poor tenants know not how to provide themselves elsewhere, rack and screw them beyond the worth of the thing."?
The book also taught squarely that in all cases of oppression " the sin is greater in proportion to the helplessness of the victim," so that "' the oppression of widows and the fatherless is the worst."
But despite this and much other pungent teaching to the same end, The Whole Duty of Man reverts ever and anon to its underlying theme that rigid class divisions were divinely ordained, and that all good subjects must faithfully perform their duties in those particular stations of life wherein it has pleased God to place them.
Thus, for instance, after laying down the chief duties of servants as "' obedience, faithfulness, silence and diligence,"* it smugly depicts the rights of wealth and birth as follows:
'' Therefore, as titular dignities entitle men to outward respect and observance, so also does wealth and large possessions ; for when God bestows on one man a larger fortune and possession than on another, he does thereby prefer and advance him to a higher sphere and condition : and when God hath set him above us, it is just and fit that we
1 Whole Duty of Man, laid down in a plain and familiar way for the use of all, p. 240.
(Anon.) :
2 Ibid., p. 241.
3 Jbid., p. 216.
ENGLAND: BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
should rise and give that place to him which is God's appointment."
'' Though it may be," continues the Text, "' a wise or virtuous poor man hath more right to our esteem than a fortunate knave or fool; yet, forasmuch as in outward rank or condition God hath preferred the latter, he hath the right of precedence and of outward respect and observance.
This is a duty so incumbent upon all, that our Church hath thought proper to teach it in her first rudiments of Christianity ; when the children are taught to order themselves lowly and reverently to all their betters.''} Prior to his ' conversion,". in the days of his sacerdotal rigidity, Wesley had held this religious manual in the highest esteem as an invaluable guide in all matters of conscience and duty.
But is it surprising that after his " spiritual emancipation," when the pure light of God had flooded his soul, when the tattered robes of legalism had fallen from him and he had experienced the ecstasy of being "clothed upon" by the wondrous mantle of the spirit, when, too, his Faith no longer being that of a servant but that of a son, he knew himself commissioned by the Father of Truth to proclaim Liberty through Christ to all the children of men—is it surprising that after his
" New Birth " he cast aside The Whole Duty of Man as a pedantic, if not hypocritical, heap of scribal and _ legalistic verbiage, which, precluding the centrality of Gospel Grace, obscured and even nullified the Brotherhood of Man?
Is it surprising either that Whitefield revolted equally against its teaching, ? or that William Cowper, the chief literary spokesman of the Evangelical Revival, characterised this text of religious etiquette as "a repository of self-righteousness and pharisaical lumber "? ?
The National Church, nevertheless, till late in the eighteenth century, continued to hold it dear ; and like the annual pulpit effusions on Martyrdom and Restoration days, it helps to explain the rigid class consciousness which, overleaping even the bitterest internal factions, so peculiarly characterised the privileged and assuming oligarchies in Church and State.
(ii1) Dr. Price's Famous Discourse With the Nonconformist preaching of the century we are not here especially concerned.
A passing exception, however, must be made in the case of Dr. Richard Price's sermon on 1 Whole Duty of Man, p. 293.
Whitefield said of the author of this manual that he "< knew no more about Christianity than Mohammed."
(See Balleine, pp. 74-75.)
THE BETTER TEACHING
Love of Country, in 1789, which drew forth Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution; for Price's sermon illustrates in marked degree both the explosive spirit of "' Nonconformity,'' with its passion for independence, and the rapidly spreading Evangelical
enthusiasm," which by that date was mightily influencing many leading minds, even in quarters which would have indignantly repudiated the debt.
The ostensible purpose of Price's sermon was the celebration of England's " bloodless Revolution of 1688" ; its real purpose was the celebration of the storming of the Bastille and the application of France's
"March for Liberty"? to English affairs.
"' Why,' asked Price, "' are the nations of the world so patient under despotism ? Why do they crouch to tyrants and submit to be treated as though they were a herd of cattle?
Is it not because they are kept in darkness and want knowledge?
Enlighten them and you will elevate them.
Show them they are men, and they will act like men."
Price's eyes were but half focused on the old tyranny in France when he cried :
'' Most Governments in the world to-day are contrivances for enabling the few to oppress the many "' ;! one eye was slyly casting toward
* the Happy Constitution in Church and State."
"'Tgnorance,"' stormed Price, "is the parent of bigotry, intolerance, persecution and slavery....It has _ oftener happened that men have been too passive than too unruly, and the rebellion of Kings against their people has been more common, and done more mischief, than the rebellion of people against their Kings."
Then, recalling the recent Public Address to George III, on his recovery from a severe illness and temporary insanity, Price continued:
" We have appeared more like a herd crawling at the feet of a master than like enlightened and manly citizens, rejoicing with a beloved sovereign, but at the same time conscious that he derives all his consequence from themselves."
'' A King," contended this Nonconformist 'Divine, "is no more than the first servant of the public, created by it, maintained by it, and responsible to it.
. The majesty applied to him is by no means his own majesty but the majesty of the people," and "forgetting this is to be like ancient heathens, who after fabricating blocks of wood and stone fell down and worshipped them."?
Price furthermore laid down what he believed to be three basic rights of all free peoples :
(1) "Liberty of conscience," (2) '"' The right to resist power when abused," (3) '' The right to choose our governors ; to 1 Richard Price, D.D., L.L.D., F.R.S., Discourse on Love of Country, p. 12.
® Ibid., pp. 22-24.
go ENGLAND:
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cashier them for misconduct ; and to frame a Government for ourselves.'
He implored his hearers to " detest " the '' odious doctrines of passive obedience, non-resistance and divine right of Kings,' protesting that these doctrines had left them "wretched slaves"?t: then, after an adroit attack upon the Corporation and Test Acts as suppressers of liberty, and a rapier thrust at " that separation of private from public virtue, which some think to be possible,"? he lashed the prevailing accumulation of "luxury, avarice, vice and venality " which could merit '"' only God's displeasure.''®
Price's conclusion reflects that first great flare of liberty with which the French Revolution, in its initial, idealistic stages, inspired liberal English thought.
'I have lived," cried the preacher, "' to see the rights of men better understood than ever ; and nations panting for liberty, which seemed to have lost the idea of it."
He rejoiced " to see an arbitrary King surrendering to his subjects... the Dominion of Kings changed for the Dominion of laws, and the Dominion of priests giving way to the Dominion of reason and conscience."
Then, in peroration, he burst into unrestrained exultation:
' Behold kingdoms starting from sleep, breaking their fetters and claiming justice from their oppressors!
. Behold the light you have struck out after setting America free, reflected in France, and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes and warms and illumines Europe! ... Take warning, all ye supporters of slavish governments and slavish hierarchies !
Call no more reformation, innovation.''§ (iv) Contemporary and Succeeding Verdicts
Having now striven, by the examination of primary sources, to illustrate in some measure both the most craven and the most courageous preaching of the century, as well as to recapture certain ever-recurrent emphases, it only remains to examine representative secondary sources and present briefly the verdicts of typical contemporaries and reputable later authorities.
Very early in the reign of George III, Sir William Blackstone, the eminent jurist and author of the celebrated Commentaries on the Laws of England, had the curiosity to go from Church to ? Richard Price, Discourse on Love of Country, pp. 34-35.
2 Ibid., p. 43.
® Price, op. cit., pp. 46-47.
See P. A. Brown, French Revolution in English History, Chapters I-III.
5 Price, op. cit., pp. 49-50.
THE BETTERS TEACHING g!I Church and hear every clergyman of note in London.
His reaction to all these sermons was that he " did not hear a single discourse which had more Christianity in it than the writings
of Cicero," and that "it would have been impossible for him to discover from what he heard whether its preacher were a follower of Confucius, of Mohammed, or of Christ.'?!
Blackstone's judgment may appear caustic; for certainly by the accession of George III the moral and spiritual life of England was already improving.
But if his "' clergymen of note" meant those most popular in the exclusive social circles wherein he himself moved, his verdict was not inaccurate, for the cleansing came not through the upper, but through the lower and middle classes ; and for long it was bitterly opposed by the ruling hierarchy.
As early as 1709 Bishop Horsley, in his Charge to the Diocese of St. David's, complained : '' We make no other use of the high commission we bear than to come abroad one day in seven, dressed in solemn looks and the external garbs of holiness, to be the apes of Epictetus."
Even the free-thinking, freeliving and arch-scheming Bolingbroke had sufficient appreciation of the gulf between real Christianity and its current official expression, to provoke him once to cry sneeringly to a group of clergymen:
'"' Let me seriously tell you that the greatest miracle in the world is the subsistence of Christianity and its continued preservation as a religion, when the preaching of it is committed to the care of such un-Christian men as you."
Again, as even icebergs may thaw, we find the bloodless, metaphysical Paley admitting that the Church " was setting up a kind of philosophical morality, detached from religion and independent of its influence, which may be cultivated, it is said, without Christianity as well as with it, and which, if cultivated, renders religion and religious institutions superfluous."?
But even when the ice in Paley's frog-like veins was half-thawed, his Providence remained a giant Magistrate, who, having allocated the various "' social stations," guarded jealously the rights of the privileged and interpreted austerely the duties of the dispossessed.
Paley was peculiarly typical of his class when he asked : '' What does the labouring man's child require but innocence and industry?"
Moreover he was greatly perturbed that the poor did not " rest 1 Abbey and Overton, English Church in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. II,
37.
4 Pee A. D. Belden, George Whitefield, p. 56.
3 W. Paley, Works, Vol. VII.
(Charge 7.) :
4 See Paley's Reasons for Contentment addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public.
ENGLAND:
BEFORE
AND AFTER WESLEY
contentedly " in, and continually give thanks for, the winsome simplicity of their lot of '' innocence and industry '—which, being interpreted, meant generally a life of abysmal ignorance and ceaseless toil.+ An anonymous "' Church "' convert to *' Methodism," writing in 1753, a sort of apologia, declared that "' many of the Church sermons of the day were in an unknown tongue to the common man.'?
Most preachers, he protested, seemed to care very little what effect their preaching had on their audiences.
Rules, not convictions, were their great guides."?
This same soberminded contemporary deplored the " uniform tone and unmeaning countenance which are the fashionable distinctions of our most applauded preachers" ; he objected that " sinners are not to be convicted by philosophical dissertations,'? and asked:
'Are such feeble attacks upon the strongholds of Satan ever like to dispossess him of his dominion, confirmed perhaps by a reign of half a century?
. That Leviathan laughs even at the shaking of the Gospel spear in the hands of those who know so little how to use it. Much less will he be terrified by Heathen moralists, or quaint maxims extracted from Seneca or Epictetus."4
This critic here put his finger on a pregnant truth.
The ruling class of 1753, both political and religious, lived its life in an atmosphere of pagan culture, with Pericles and Plato as their guides : but under the influence of the Christian Revival, started by Wesley and Whitefield, the lower and middle classes were soon to live their lives in an atmosphere of religious aspiration with St. Paul and St. John as their guides, and the Bible as their Charter of Liberty.
Defoe, early in the century, complained that " the pulpit is daily profaned with invectives instead of sermons.">
Whitefield was scarcely started on his life-crusade when everywhere he was attacked by Church officials because he preached the incompleteness of the formal rite of Baptism as a regenerative power, and insisted upon "new birth.'* This Scriptural emphasis indeed was so obnoxious to Officialdom that soon
Whitefield was precluded from preaching even in prisons, and the Bishop of Gloucester gave characteristic expression to * Dr. George's researches (op. cit., Chap. IV. and Appendix VI) show that in the eighteenth century the wives of the working classes were commonly ' expected to contribute to family earnings."
* Tracts Relating to Methodists, p. 14.
2 bid., po 25.
" Tbid., p. 35.
* Daniel Defoe, Review, ii, p. 194.
J. S. Simon, Revival of Religion in Eighteenth Century England, p. 1 56f.
THE BETTER TEACHING
prevalent ecclesiastical repugnance when he sneered:
'" But is it not mere enthusiasm or fanaticism to speak of new birth ! ''1
And the Bishop of Gloucester was not the only prelate of his day whose ministry had never brought him into contact with a "changed " life.
Memorable, too, is Wesley's caustic jibe :
So we are forbidden to go to Newgate, for fear of making them (the inmates) wicked ; and to Bedlam for fear of driving them mad."?
Dr. Johnson, as Boswell abundantly shows, was a vehement supporter of the Established Order in Church and State, yet, complaining of the frigid ineffectiveness of much
Church preaching in his day, he declared:
'' We have no sermons addressed to the passions (emotions) that are good for anything' ;* and despite the much pulpit haranguing on '"' patriotism,' Johnson once cried:
" Patriotism, Sir, is the last refuge of the scoundrel ! "
Sir Leslie Stephen, rather too sweepingly, classifies the general run of eighteenth century sermons as "' dull, duller and dullest.''4
Mark Pattison, with more charity, reserves his censure for the hard-drinking, fox-hunting and pluralist parsons, who, " careless of dispensing the bread of life to their flocks,"' and "' trafficking in the souls of men by receiving money for discharging the pastoral offices in parishes where they do not so much as look on the faces of the people more than once a year," preached only a "carnal and soul-benumbing morality."®
Overton, the standard authority on Anglican Church History in the eighteenth century, surveying the moral and spiritual life of the nation, is emphatic in his belief that "a gradual but distinct alteration for the better may be traced in the latter part of the century."® This gradual improvement is certainly not so apparent in the characteristic preaching of the National
Church as in certain other directions; but here,. too, it is traceable.
Even the Martyrdom and Restoration sermons, in the closing decades of the century, grew less objectionable ; the violent, irresponsible ranting against Cromwell and Puritanism, and the white-washing of Charles II, were no longer quite palatable: and finally some Commemoration preachers, even before the Commons and the Lords, half-apologised for 1 Tracts Relating to Methodists, p. 14.
2 Yournal, February 22nd, 1750.
See, too, Augustine Birrell's Appreciation of Wesley's fournal, prefaced to Parker's abridged edition, pp. xxiii and xxiv.
(Birrell's quotation is obviously from memory and is scarcely accurate.) 8 See Abbey and Overton, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 38f.
4 English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. II, p. 337.
5 See Essays and Reviews, p. 349.
$ Abbey and Overton, II, p. 55ff.
ENGLAND:
BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY the brand of " patriotism'? the Martyrdom and Restoration
Days were designed to propagate.
(v) Art without Soul But however great was the improvement as the century wore towards its close, it may confidently be said that, for at least five or six decades, paltroons and pedants, time-servers and sycophants, pluralists and place-hunters revelled almost unrestrained in the heyday of their theological and ecclesiastical opportunism ; while faithful, consecrated parsons—and there were still many who had not bowed the knee to Baal—were left crying in the wilderness.
Place and preferment were not for them: they were outside the pale of the fashionable and family cliques representing the Apostolical Succession of the period.
Deism, with its naturalistic fatalism; the new "science" of " Political Arithmetic," with its ' enlightened self-interest ''1; and Pagan Culture, with its background of slavery ; along with King and Constitution worship, were all strangely wrapped together in the correct preaching of the National Church: and Providence, a personification of '"' the Natural Order,'' was called in to ordain and bless this frigid, half-baked and non-digestible conglomeration, which the Age of Reason had so brilliantly devised.
The orthodox preacher of the middle Hanoverian period protested vehemently against the "superstition" of Romanists on the one hand and the ** fanaticism'? of Nonconformists and Evangelicals on the other: then the '' moderation of our Happy Establishment," with great assurance, he lauded to the skies.?
Yet despite the stilted artificiality which passed for '' moderation and reason,"' many of these approved sermons were, in a manner, '' works of art."
'Theory and speculation, dogma and adage, metaphor and rhetoric, technique and polish all contributed to the élite preacher's stock-in-trade.
Not a few of the applauded sermons indeed were " artful"? to a degree.
But therein lay their damnation ; if as smooth and polished as marble, they at heart were as cold and dead as marble : they were too artful to convey life and warmth to the souls of men.
Professor R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of conclusively that the new " Political Arithmetic," with its gospel of " enlightened self-interest," had come to maturity before the close of the' seventeenth century.
See Chaps. III and IV.
Adam Smith finally gave it classic expression in 1776, Capitalism, proves 2 Abbey and Overton, I, p. 38.
THE BETTER TEACHING
Little of the approved preaching of the eighteenth century ever passed through the crucible of personal experience.
A ° large percentage of the acclaimed sermons are best described as metaphysical essays or moralising dissertations.
Preachers, lacking the authority of any consuming conviction, and devoid of living communion with the glorified Christ, fell back on ' theories, dogmas, formalities, rules and precepts, with the result that finally they were little more than the washed-out retailers of threadbare platitudes.
Their sermons offered no redemption from inward sin, no deliverance from outward wretchedness—no dynamic for social reform.
The Faith, vision, sincerity and sacrifice which alone can lead great causes and inspire great crusades was gone; gone, too, was the sense of the imminence of God and the stewardship of man.
Gone, in fact, was every unifying harmony, every comprehensive synthesis, which enriches and sustains the soul!: and all that was left in high places was a religion of manners, of patriotism, of moderation, of Nature-prattle and of Class-duty.
From the days of Walpole the practical Whig doctrine was : '' Let parsons quarrel about the creeds, so long as they support the police.''?
But most parsons, whether Whigs or Tories, went further and assumed the functions of an order of spiritual police, hundreds of them becoming local magistrates as well.
Little wonder that with Potters and Herrings, Cornwallises and Moores as Primates, the complaint was noised abroad that the State Church was apostate, and that its guides revered the bag of Judas more than the Cross of Christ.
Little wonder either with Asplins and Kennetts, Lavingtons and Paleys profaning the sacred pulpit by the basest of flattery for royalty, and the smuggest lectures on manners and contentment for the poor, that the toiling multitude came to regard the National
Church as paralytic, if not parasitic.
Little wonder, too, that the rapidly increasing industrial population came to account the parish clergy among the most merciless of all the forces of reaction and subjugation.
If the working man attended the Established Church, his recognised place was the rough, rude bench in the gloomiest corners of the edifice, and his prescribed spiritual diet, instruction on how to order himself ''lowly and _ reverently"' before his '" betters,"
1 See chap. X (" The Principle of Coherence in Philosophy and Religion "') of Professor F. 'Tracy's Broken Lights (1935.).
Dr. Tracy's conclusion is that religion should afford '' the supreme synthesis in which all lesser syntheses are bound together into a coherent whole."
2 Stephen, II, p. 151.
ENGLAND:
BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
'' worshipping,' amidst sumptuous cushions and carpets, in locked pews.
Of what inspiration then was this religious pedantry to the miner in the bowels of the earth, to the mechanic amidst the grime and sweat of the workshop, or to the foundryman daily facing an inferno of flame?
Did it bring to his life meaning, power, purpose or poise?
Labourers who revolted dumbly against their "seeming heritage'? of hoarded weariness and poverty, resented a religion that invoked them, in the name of Nature or Providence, to do obeisance before those whose "obvious heritage '? was hoarded privilege and wealth.
Fire from Heaven was needed to melt these icebergs of human pride and transform them into refreshing streams, meet to revive a parched land.
Such fire, moreover, in the form of a mighty spiritual Baptism, already was at hand; but that Baptism of Fire the " Age of Reason "' loathed.
1 During a Church service Bishop J. B. Sumner once sent for a blacksmith "' to take off the locks " from certain pews.
He asked the congregation to "sing a hymn " while the blacksmith performed his task.
(Balleine, op. cit., pp. 195-96.)
CHAPTER VI
SLAVE-TRADING AND BUBBLE FINANCE
"To be sold at the Exchange Coffee House, in Water Street, this day, the 12th instant, September, at 1 o'clock precisely, eleven negroes imported by the Angola."
Liverpool Advertiser, September 12th, 1766.
Alley became a roaring Hell-porch of insane and dishonest speculators."
(1720.) Str C. GRAnT ROBERTSON, England under the Hanoverians, p. 39.
CHAPTER VI
SLAVE-TRADING AND BUBBLE FINANCE
NowuerE, perhaps, is the Zeitgeist of the earlier half of eighteenth century Britain more clearly reflected than in the popular acclaim which greeted the Asiento clauses of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), by which England wrung from Spain and France the virtual monopoly of the slave trade, at the same time contracting to supply to the Spanish West Indies alone 144,000 negroes within thirty years.1
Nowhere, on the other hand, is the marked change of Zeitgeist, which within a century had swept silently over England, more unmistakably registered than in the clauses of the Treaties of Vienna and of Paris (1814-15), which anathematised the whole slave traffic and committed
British policy and British diplomacy to nothing short of its worldoverthrow.?
That amazing reversal of outlook, moreover, was much more immediately connected with the things of the heart and the spirit than the modern vogue for economic, materialistic, political and " scientific' interpretations—which commonly calls itself
Social history—would have us believe.
It was the outward manifestation of an inward experience ; and that inward experience, in turn, was the product of a quickened conscience, a moralised will and a humanised heart, which an intervening spiritual awakening had wrought.
The soul of England, despite her many grievous and lingering sins, had now been transfigured.
But meanwhile facts compel us to dwell on less pleasant themes.
(i) Nature and Proportions of Slave Traffic The demoralising impact of the slave trade on the economic and social life of eighteenth century England, is a subject which has strangely escaped the investigations of most recent historians.
Upon the origin of this modern traffic in human blood, following 1 Sir John Harris, A Century of Emancipation (1933), p6..
2 Dr. W. J. Warner, The Wesleyan Movement in the Industrial Revolution, p. 239; Professor Elie Halévy, History of the English People in 1815, pp,
400-401,
I00 ENGLAND:
BEFORE
AND AFTER WESLEY
the development of the New World and the exploration of the West Coast of Africa, we need not pause.
Portugal and Spain were the initial offenders in reviving this nefarious commerce ; but the "sea-dogs"' of Elizabethan England could not long resist the lure of its proffered gold. Nor indeed could Elizabeth herself.
For, though expressing a formal, flimsy concern that "' the negroes should not be taken away to labour against their will," she lent Admiral Sir John Hawkins her own ship, Jesus, of Liibeck, for his second slave voyage and, on his return from that highly lucrative expedition, received him at Court.}
Stuart policy, after the Restoration, made the slave traffic a recognised and regular avenue of England's high seas commerce, and members of the Royal Household scrupled not to share in its sordid gains.
But it was not till the ' winning " of the Asiento concessions, in 1713, that Britain assumed the dominant rdle in the slave trading '' business.''
From that business she extracted fabulous wealth ; but for such wealth she paid a ghastly price.
It is doubtful indeed if any single Treaty agreement in modern history—Versailles possibly excepted
—injected more economic and social poison into the British body politic than did those stipulations of Utrecht which acquired for England the lion's share of this inhuman traffic.
Lecky speaks of "the immense accession of guilty wealth acquired through the Asiento treaty" ;? and that this accession carried within itself its own Nemesis is indisputable.
The spirit of cupidity which it bred and fed, the cheapening of all human life which it engendered and the vulgarisation of all labour which it implied, branded and cursed the economic and the political life of the century.
The all-embracing character of the tentacles which the slave trade coiled about the nation may be imagined when it is recalled that " no less a statesman than the elder Pitt made its development a main object of his policy.'
In our industrial age it has quite become the fashion to speak of "white-slavery,"
"'child-slavery,"
"' industrial-slavery,"'
"" wage-slavery " and the like, and to suggest that the evils of the factory system and the industrial era were quite as bad as if not worse than, those associated with negro-slavery.
J. ie and Barbara Hammond, for instance, especially in their Town Labourer, have repeatedly thrown out this suggestion, while William Cobbett and other of his radical contemporaries were merciless in their attacks upon Wilberforce on the same score
But such deductions lose the perspective of historical truth.
' Harris, op. cti., p. 6.
* Lecky, Vol. I, p. 122.
3 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 504.
SLAVE-TRADING AND BUBBLE FINANCE
IO!
The slave trade, with its concomitant evils, was the root cause and nursing mother of the worst industrial and commercial evils that grew up both around it and beside it.1_
To procure crews for slave-ships the wiles of crimps, decoys and sharks were widely employed.
Here a tenant or a lodger was lured into debt and finally was offered the alternative of prison or service on a slave-ship ; there a sturdy youth was induced to run up a drink bill in a gin shop, and soon was presented with the same option.
'The diabolical ingenuity of slave-ship crimps, who contracted with "' slaving "' captains for a supply of seamen, forms a sordid chapter in base cunning.
And as for the procuring of slaves on the African coast, intoxication, tribal warfare, arson, rapine and plunder were all part of the traffic's stock-in-trade.
Annually scores of African villages were razed to the ground and, as Wilberforce pointed out in Parliament, cases were proved where British ships bombarded '' West Coast " towns for no other purpose than to force them "to lower the price of slaves.'
The barbarities practised on many slave ships were enough to chill one's blood.
The Annual Register, in 1762, carries this first hand report:
''On Friday the men slaves being very sullen and unruly, having had no sustenance of any kind for forty-eight hours except a dram, we put one half of the strongest of them in irons.
On Saturday and Sunday all hands, night and day could scarce keep the ship clear, and were constantly under arms.
On Monday morning many of the slaves had got out of irons, and were attempting to break up the gratings; and the seamen not daring to go down the hold to clear our pumps, we were obliged, for the preservation of our lives, to kill fifty of the ringleaders and stoutest of them.
It is impossible to describe the misery the poor slaves underwent, having had no fresh water for five days.
Their dismal cries and shrieks, and most frightful looks, added a great deal to our misfortune ; four of them were found dead, and one drowned herself in the hold.''4
1 Dr. R. H. Tawney (op. cit., p. 269) says of the '' economics of employment " and the accompanying harsh exploitation of workmen in the century immediately preceding the "' industrial revolution " and the factory system, that they have ''no modern parallel except in the behaviour of the less reputable of white colonists towards coloured labour."
2 Thos. Clarkson, History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Vol. I, p. 294.
See, too, Dr. M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, p. 312, and W. C. Sydney, England and the English in the Eighteenth Century,
Vol. I, p.
; ts AB aotscce Coupland's William Wilberforce, p. 163.
Wilberforce gave the names in Parliament of six ships so used.
4 Ann. Reg., 1762, p. 118.
ENGLAND: BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
Clarkson's diagram of a slave-ship shows that the male negroes '"'in chains'? were packed almost as close together as "' rows of books on shelves.'"?
And, incredible as it seems, a case was discovered as late as 1788 in which thirty-four female slaves were crammed for sleeping quarters into a hole in a ship
"measuring only g feet 4 inches in length, 4 feet 8 inches main breadth, and 2 feet 7 inches in height."!
Slave-ship captains indeed reckoned on an average death toll in " middle-passage "' of at least ten per cent.
The Memoirs of Gilbert Wakefield record the case of a slave-ship reduced to great scarcity of water.
The captain "caused the hand-cuffed blacks to be brought one by one out of the dungeon on to the deck,"' whence they were "' pitched overboard to the number of 130."2
Wakefield also recounts the conduct of a Liverpool captain, who finding a negro mother fretting over her ailing infant, '' snatched the child from her arms, knocked its head against the side of the ship, and threw it into the sea.'''
As for the numbers of negroes transported from Africa during the eighteenth century, it is extremely difficult to acquire accurate information; but it is certain that the total runs into millions, while the processes of tribal warfare, capture, transportation, suicide, acclimatisation and early "discipline "' account for the death of perhaps equal numbers.
Horace Walpole, writing to Sir Horace Mann, on February 25th, 1750, says:
"We, the British Senate, that temple of liberty and bulwark of Protestant Christianity, have this fortnight been pondering methods to make more effectual that horrid traffic of selling negroes.
It has appeared to us that six and forty thousand of these wretches are sold every year to our plantations alone® .. ."5
During the first quarter of the year preceding the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, 136 Liverpool ships were engaged exclusively in the African slave trade, and Baines, the historian of Liverpool, places their tonnage as "about a twelfth part of that which entered the port" ; while
See Sir Walter Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 61 (quoted from Ann. Reg., 1788).
2 Sydney, Vol. I, p. 352.
' See Roberts's Memoirs of Hannah More, Vol. I, p. 25.
" Bancroft's History of the United States (1885 ed.) claims that by 1776 the British had supplied to the French, Spanish and English colonies of the New World no less than three million African slaves.
Vol. III, pp.
411-12.
See, too, Dr. J. B. Botsford, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, p. 332.
About one-tenth of these were supplied between 1680 and 1700.
° Horace Walpole's Letters (Cunningham ed.), Vol. II, p. 197.
David Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, Vol. III, p. 403, gives the same number.
SLAVE-TRADING
AND BUBBLE FINANCE
many other ships, not ranked as " slavers,"' conducted a partial business in human chattels.
Indeed, so titanic became the proportions of this '' business" that, during the thirteen years beginning with 1783, it has been estimated that some 814,000 slaves were conveyed from Africa to the New World plantations, and the vast majority were transported in British ships.+
Before the days of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Britain, inspired by a mighty moral and spiritual crusade, already had purged her slavery scroll throughout the Empire, and even United States slavery meantime was being subjected to poignant and humanising criticism from many quarters throughout America ; but during the first half of the eighteenth century both the slave trade and the " Institution" of slavery prosecuted their foul work with comparative impunity—traders, captains and planters having practically the power of life and death over their human
"< possessions."
When the modern slave trade was started it was actually urged that slaves would soon better their lot by being brought into contact with Christian teaching and influence, but this was the sheerest hypocrisy.
Most slaves received no religious instruction whatever ; few were baptised, and almost none were permitted the privilege of marriage.
Even as late, indeed, as Fowell Buxton's crusade, chains and manacles were not uncommon.
A certain gentleman from Mauritius, for instance, once assured Buxton that, "the blacks were the happiest people in the whole world," and appealing to his wife, said:
'Now, my dear, you saw Mr. T.'s slaves.
Do tell Mr. Buxton how happy they looked."
" Well, yes,"' replied the good spouse, '' they were very happy, I'm sure, only I used to think it so odd to see the black cooks chained to the fireplaces -*
(ii) Actual Slavery on English Soul As early as the first quarter of the eighteenth century some of the reflexes of the slave traffic were leaving a marked impression on English life.
Numerous planters, having made fortunes out of " the Institution '—then complacently described as " the great pillar and support of the British plantation trade in North America '—returned to England, bought large estates,
1 Baines's History of Liverpool, p. 719.
See, too, 'ley 183 188 Muir, History of Liverpool, p. 193f.
'The figure here quoted may be too high.
Wilberforce, who always accepted a conservative figure, in his famous Twelve Propositions (1789) says : '' The number of slaves annually carried from the coast of Africa in British vessels is about thirty-eight thousand."
2 Sir John Harris, A Century of Emancipation, p. 5.
ENGLAND:
BEFORE
AND AFTER WESLEY
and brought over negro slaves as their servants and menials.
But more: being covetous of social and political power, and prepared to pay handsomely for both, they soon entered the market as bidders for '"' pocket' and "' rotten' borough seats in Parliament, with the result that finally the price of marketable constituencies rose from around £1,000 to even £5,000.1_ Meanwhile, however, a new and highly paradoxical problem confronted them, and only temporarily could their political and financial power solve it in their favour.
Slaves being human, they were not long on English soil till they sensed the normal Englishman's passion for liberty ; and having but tasted of that exhilarating cup, desertions began to ensue.
These, moreover, were encouraged by the rumour spread among them that if only they could be baptised they would be legally free; and sympathetic clergymen could generally be found who secretly would perform that office.
So great therefore became the problem of absconding slaves that in 1729 gentlemen planters, retired in England, petitioned both the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General of the day (Yorke and Talbot) for an opinion upon the legal status of slaves on English soil.
The judgment was to the effect " that no slave coming into the British Isles from the West Indies became Sree, and that baptism had no power whatever to absolve them of their condttion."*?
This judgment so emboldened the English slave owners that forthwith they began publicly to advertise for run-away slaves, offering -handsome rewards for their apprehension, and threatening in the name of the Laws of England any who sheltered them.
The net result was that slavery on English soil substantially increased, as also did the wily schemes of the slave owners' crimps and touts, who always were on the trail for "easy gain."
Indeed, in 1765 we find Blackstone, though striving simultaneously to ride both the horses of liberty and slavery, pronouncing in his Commentaries the owner's property right to the life labours of his negro-slaves, in England.
'' And now it is laid down," says Blackstone, '' that a slave or negro, the instant he lands in England, becomes a free man, that is, the law will protect him in the enjoyment of his person and _his property.
Yet with respect to any right the master may have 1 See Lord Chesterfield's letter to his son (Dec., 1767), in which he says the " borough jobber "' to whom he offered £2,500 for a seat, " laughed at" his bid, and said the East and West Indian planters " had secured them all" at from £3,000 to £5,000.
(The letter is quoted in J. W. Jeudwine's Religion, Commerce, Liberty, Pp. 219.) * Sydney, I., p. 351.
See, too, Dr. George, op. cit., p. 361 (note 76).
SLAVE-TRADING AND BUBBLE FINANCE
lawfully acquired to the perpetual service of John or Thomas, . this will remain exactly in the same state of subjection for life, which every apprentice submits to for a space of seven years and sometimes for a longer term
. and whatever service the heathen negro owed of right to his American master . .. the same (whatever it is) he is bound to render when brought to England and made a Christian."!
Blackstone, moreover, explicitly told Granville Sharp, when fighting for the liberty of the maltreated slave, Jonathan Strong, that the "legal rights of the slave owner" over his human property existed " in England."?
And so the legal interpretation stood until in 1772 Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, in the famous Somersett case, having failed to effect a compromise,' reluctantly ruled that "slavery is not tenable in England," and that "' as soon as any slave sets foot upon English soil he becomes free."
This verdict, supported in 1778 by a large majority of the Lords of Session, put a peremptory stop to the bringing of slaves to England ; but meanwhile, on Lord Mansfield's own admission, there were already between 14,000 and 15,000 slaves in the country, and open slave sales had actually taken place in England.
The Liverpool Advertiser (September 12th, 1766), for instance, carries this notice:
"To be sold at the Exchange Coffee House, in Water Street, this day, the 12th instant, September, at 1 o'clock precisely, eleven negroes imported by the Angola."'
Hence, contrary to popular belief, it is no fable to say that modern slavery was not unknown on English soil.®
(iii) Kidnapping, "' Bound Labour" and Transportation The concomitant and subsidiary evils of slavery, however, were perhaps even more devastating to the social and economic life of eighteenth century Britain than the accursed " Institution "' itself.
The name of these associated evils is Legion, and their exhaustive examination would itself fill a volume ; certain of them, nevertheless, dare not wholly be overlooked.
Kidnapping in its various forms, for instance, reached the proportion of a very considerable business ; and for many decades it was
1 Sir Wm. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69) Vol. I, p. 423.
} 2 See Professor Coupland's William Wilberforce, p. 81f.
3 Sir C. Grant Robertson, England under the Hanoverians, p. 351.
4 Dr. George, op. cit., p. 134.
6 See Granville Sharp's The Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery in England,
106 ENGLAND:
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AND AFTER WESLEY
winked at, if not encouraged, in high places.
The East India Company got a large percentage of its sailors through the guile or treachery of the same sort of crimps, decoys and kidnappers as supplied crews for slave ships.
In London these nefarious agents, working in bands, seduced lusty youths into questionable quarters, and there entrapping them, spirited them off to " lock-up " houses and other secret detention dens "' until they could be sold into the hands of Bengal ship captains."
The appalling death rate, moreover, among these East India crews often exceeded the death rate prevailing among " slaver "' crews.
But far wider flung was the kidnappers' net for white workers to sell through " contractors' to planters in America.
Early in the Restoration period the kidnapper, or " spiriter"' of children and young persons to sell as workers (virtual slaves) on American plantations, was becoming a social pestilence.
In 1671 an affidavit was sworn against a certain William Thiene, '' who in one year spirited away 840' ; while three years earlier there were simultaneously three ships in the Thames on which "spirited " children had been embarked, and " though the parents see their children in the ships, without money they will not let them have them."?
But in the eighteenth century with the further growth of the slave trade came a corresponding revival in the whole kidnapping, or spiriting, trade.
Its victims were chiefly young persons and children of working age, and in plying its wiles it was no respecter of sex.
It is clear," says Dr. M. Dorothy George in this connection, " that all sorts of villainies were practised.
For instance, the captain of a ship trading to Jamaica would visit the Clerkenwell House of Correction, ply with drink the girls who had been imprisoned as disorderly and invite them to go to the West Indies."*
Then, in their intoxicated condition, he would have the " volunteers " spirited off to be sold into perhaps seven or ten years of plantation labour without pay.
Generally, however, the means of appropriation were more direct.
The kidnapping of Elizabeth Brickleband in 1775 is a case in point.
This girl of seventeen was decoyed from her mother's house to an "office," and thence spirited on board the brig Nancy and sold at Baltimore.
Her mother, by sheer persistence, had the " office-keepers "
* Sydney, I, p. 353.
2 Cal. of State Papers, Colonial, Addenda, 1574-1674, p. 521.
Ibid., 1661-68, p. 555.
Dr. George, op. cit., p. 142 and p. 363 (note 98).
Stuart social policy at this time was to discourage the growth of London by encouraging the vilest cellar and attic dwellings for the poor.
Hence, not being wanted in London, the poor had very little legal protection either for themselves or their children.
3 Op. cit., p. 143 and p. 363 (note 101).
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FINANCE
(a man and wife) brought to trial, and in the evidence it was revealed that the "' sponging-house'' run by these infamous characters was a drag-net by means of which "near a hundred "' similar victims had been caught.!
J. W. Jeudwine, in his book, Religion, Commerce, Liberty, 16831793, speaks of "' the immense numbers exported by the kidnapping trade both on the coast of Scotland and Ireland for the 'indented' labour of the planters."?
This is an aspect of eighteenth century social history which has been much \
neglected ; but beyond doubt the "' kidnapping trade" threw out multifarious tentacles along the coast of Scotland and Ireland, whence it commanded: an even more voluminous commerce than from England and Wales.
Dr. George refers to "' the days when the kidnapping of children for the plantations was general" ;* but being commonly regarded as the most daring branch of the gigantic smuggling business of the time, its movements were necessarily kept secret, thus making accurate contemporary evidence very hard to come by.
Certain it is that the whole " spiriting"' trade was a closely related and secret auxiliary to the slave traffic, but as the negro slave trade was legal and the kidnapping trade illegal, the latter resorted to every possible artifice to cover its tracks: and the fact that its victims belonged chiefly to the ignorant, poverty-stricken and often rum-sodden classes, who could afford no litigation, makes the veil of mystery surrounding this " spiriting"' traffic the more inscrutable.
Nor was the government in this matter inclined to be over-inquisitive.
Its own Press Gangs were birds of a feather.
It was resorting to similar devices to rid itself of many prisoners and of such felons as had escaped the gallows ; and directly or indirectly, it was dependent upon the same ruthless set of contractors, touts and crimps for the execution of its own 'Transportation' schemes.
In the last analysis, too, many of the " retired " planters from the West and East Indies were almost as immediately implicated in the kidnapping traffic as in the slave traffic; yet these "gentlemen," as we have seen, outbidding all comers in the purchase of rotten-borough seats in Parliament, had acquired substantial influence in Government circles.
; ; Of the "' bound servants,' who during the eighteenth century 1 George, p. 146.
2 Jeudwine, op. cit., p. 206.
3M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, p. 230.
4 Kidnapping was also resorted to as a means of disposing of persons who "knew too much" regarding certain crimes, or who blocked the avenues of avarice among the unscrupulous.
ENGLAND: 'BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
were sent to the American plantations—chiefly Maryland and Virginia—there were three clearly distinguishable kinds, (1) "indented" workers, (2) ' redemptioners 7 Or = Inees willers," (3) convicts.
The indented workers entered into a written contract with the master of their ship to serve for a fixed terms of years—generally four, though varying from two to seven—in return for their passage.1
Redemptioners were promised a stated length of time after landing wherein to find masters willing to advance their passage money and so " redeem them," it being agreed that if they failed in this the captain reserved the right to dispose of them after the manner of indentured servants.
But the truth is that they were lured to the tobacco and cotton plantations under false pretences.
Despite alluring assurances, it was next to impossible for them to find masters willing at once to advance " redemption money," and the ship captains, well knowing this, rarely let them land until conditions of semi-slavery were saddled upon them.?
W. Eddis, the surveyor of customs at Annapolis, describing in 1770 the condition of these redemptioners, said:
'" The situation of the ' free willer ' is, in almost every instance, more to be lamented than either that of the convict of the indented servant ; being attended with circumstances of greater deception and cruelty."
The negro, contended Eddis, '"' being a property for life," was often better treated than "' the miserable
European, over whom the inflexible planter exercises an inflexible severity.""
Exceptions he was prepared to admit ; but especially of the Maryland "indented servant'? and '' redemptioner,"'
Eddis affirmed that "' they groan beneath a worse than Egyptian bondage.''8
As for the transportation and sale of convicts, this procedure was regularised by an Act passed within five years of Britain's acquiring the lion's share of the slave trade ; and from then
(1718) till the outbreak of the American Revolution (1776), when Franklin and other Colonials protested vehemently against 'the dumping upon the New World of the outcasts of the Old," it continued in close relation with the slave trading and kidnapping traflics.
The Act in question' legalised and encouraged a system whereby contractors, assuming responsibility for convicted prisoners, at their own expense shipped them to the 1 George, op. cit., p. 146.
Passage at this time often took two or three months.
Hence the excuse for extortionate charges.
Captains, of course, knew from experience that if '' redemptioners "' were allowed to land, some would run away, and thus avoid any payment for passage.
° W. Eddis, Letters from America, pp. 67-8.
4 4 George I, c. 11.
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AND BUBBLE FINANCE
American plantations, where "by selling them, usually at auction, to the tobacco planters, for the term of their sentences,"'! they acquired handsome profits.
The voyage death-rate among these convicts, owing largely to prison-contracted diseases, seems to have equalled, if not surpassed, that of negro slave ships.
"The mortality we met with in our last ship,'' reported one contractor, "' if repeated in this, will so surfeit us, that we shall never take another."
A different contractor estimated that over '' an average of seven years he lost a seventh of his cargo." And the lists of three convict ships "' belonging to 1740 or 1741," show that one carried 153 convicts, 61 of whom died on the voyage ; the second had 108, of whom 37 died at sea ; the third carried only 50, and of these 15 died on the voyage.?
Figures concerning the proportions of the traffic in '' bound labour," though incomplete, are suggestive.
In 1774 the numbers of '' indented servants and redemptioners,"' registered as sailing from London alone, are 1,124 for Maryland, 548 for Virginia,
456 for Philadelphia and 66 for Georgia, Carolina and Jamaica.* Statistics concerning transported convicts are, for obvious reasons, more complete and more easily ascertained.
'' From 1769 to 1776 the yearly number of felons transported averaged g60," of whom exactly a quarter were women ;' and the sentences of most convicts ranged between seven and fourteen years, while a few were " for life."
To realise how very thin was the partition which separated all this '' bound " and convict labour from the actual " Institution " of slavery, certain incontrovertible facts must be constantly in mind.
The indentured labourer was sent chiefly to slave areas ; on arrival he was advertised for sale for the period of his indenture ;* frequently he worked alongside, and partook of the same lash and the same food, as the negro slave; at many points his legal protection was no whit better than that of the black chattel; during the period of his subjection he could be bought, sold or trucked about at the master's will ; and nearly always he laboured under the bitter handicap that the planter assumed he was "white trash," deserving the roughest handling and fit only for exploitation.
The master, too, having only a temporary property in his labour, had less economic interest in protecting his health and well-being than
1J. L. and B. Hammond, " Poverty, Crime, Philanthropy " (Johnson's England, I, p. 322).
2 Sir Walter Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century, p. 557.
5 George, op. cit., p. 145.
4 Hammond, op. cit., p. 322.
5 J. Boucher, A View of the Causes .
. of the American Revolution, p. 183.
'ENGLAND:
BEFORE
AND AFTER WESLEY
if he were a lifelong slave, of substantial capital value.
And as for transported women, their lot frequently was more pitiable than that of men.
Both numerous and malignant were the economic and political corruptions which, during most of the eighteenth century, attacked the social life of Britain and her expanding Empire ; but most devastating of them all, by far, was the slave traffic, with its odious retinue of derivative and attendant evils.
That traffic bequeathed to America the social perversions later to issue in a ghastly Civil War; it bequeathed to England—the chief financial and political source of its expansion—a regiment of social and economic ills, which soon, on a vast stage, were to manifest themselves in the cruel exploitations of the Industrial
Revolution.
Indeed upon whatever it touched the slave traffic left the marks of the beast; and the fact that those marks were often concealed, and not infrequently unsuspected, made them none the less real and none the less vicious in their effects.
(iv) South Sea Company and Lesser Bubbles On the surface it might seem that the slave trade had no peculiar relation to that mad financial hoax historically remembered as the "South Sea Bubble"; yet both undoubtedly were children of the same " Zevtgeist," for the unrestrained cupidity of the elder brother, the slave trader, influenced perniciously the wild blood of the younger brother, the stockjobbing gambler.
In 1711, in an atmosphere thick with mystery and intrigue, there had been established by Robert Harley, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, a chartered trading corporation, halfcommercial, half-political, known as the South Sea Company.
In return for certain semi-chimerical commercial concessions in the South American slave-trading and slave-labour areas, this concern was to relieve the Government of some £10,000,000 of specified public debts, chiefly Naval, which had been funded for the purpose.
The trading concessions of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) increased interest in the scheme.
By 1720 the Company's stock was selling at a substantial premium ; so, influenced by the temporary magic of that swashbuckling
Scottish adventurer, John Law, who through the " high finance " of his Mississippi Company was now deluding the sovereign and robbing the people of France, the English Ministry entered
SLAVE-TRADING
AND BUBBLE FINANCE
III into a shady agreement with the South Sea Company for a vast extension of its joint-stock business.
Nor was the project difficult to foist upon the public.
Seven years of comparative monopoly in the South Seas slave trade had already brought the country huge accessions of guilty gain.
Wildly exaggerated stories, too, of the fabulous wealth brought to England in Elizabeth's reign by the expeditions of Drake and Hawkins, were noised everywhere and avidly consumed.
A spirit of reckless gambling pervaded the air.
Meanwhile also the black arts of Law's "' paper finance" had caused the stock of France's Mississippi Company to rise to 1,200 per cent. ; and why should British finance be less "' modern "' or less astute than that of France?
Nevertheless, before the scheme could be hatched, " fictitious stock of £574,000 " had to be distributed to itching palms; the recipients of these gratuities including
"the Earl of Sunderland, Mr. Secretary Craggs, Mr. Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the King's German mistresses,"' and certain influential Members of Parliament.'
In February, 1720, a grandiose plan, '' too complicated to be generally understood,"® was brought forward in Parliament.
By its provisions, the South Sea Company was to be wholly re-organised and its privileges immensely enhanced; while, in return for extended scope, it was not only to free the Government of tens of millions of funded National Debt, but also to pay it the equivalent of £7,500,000 by way of appreciation of the monopoly "bargain" conferred upon it.
Despite the repeated warnings of Walpole, whose saving grace was his business sense, this wild Bill passed unimpeded through Parliament, and on April 7th received the Royal Assent.
So forthwith was begun the gentle art of '"' bubbling the nation."4
And as bubbles are short-lived, the Company's business required haste.
Romantic tales, studiously and stealthily circulated, caused the South Sea Stock immediately to rise, but scarcely fast enough to suit the Company's ends.
Hence Sir John Blunt, a director, let loose a rumour to the effect that Gibraltar and Port Mahon were to be exchanged for rich gold mines in Peru, and that British trade in the South Seas was to be " protected and 1 Law's chequered continental career began in 1694, when, having killed
" Beau " Wilson in a duel, he thought fit to flee from London.
Before initiating his famous " Mississippi Scheme," he had "' won and lost vast sums in gambling and speculation."
2 J. W. Jeudwine, op. cit., pp. 89-90.
3 Lecky, I, p. 323.
4T. Wright, Caricature History of the Four Georges, (1898), p. 42.
I1I2
ENGLAND:. BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
enlarged."!
The desired effect was produced.
At once the directors opened to the public a subscription " for two millions at £300 for the £100."
It was heavily over-subscribed and immediately began to sell at a premium.
The accumulating snowball had now started rolling and deep clouds of delusion were long to obscure the burning light of truth, which alone could melt it away.
On April goth the Company offered a second subscription for '"'a million at £400."
It, too, was immediately snapped up; and the multitude of subscribers, representing all classes, became boosters of the wondrous Company which " could turn stones to gold."
A mania had now possessed the nation: thousands sold property or pawned heirlooms to gamble in the Company's stock ; *Change Alley, literally "' blocked with desks and clerks," became "a roaring
Hell-porch of insane and dishonest speculators.'"?
"" While some build castles in the air, Directors build them in the seas ; Subscribers plainly see them there, For fools will see as wise men please."'*
By the end of May, £100 stock stood at £890 ; and the Company, by a premature dividend, by circulating the " news " that the next half-yearly dividend would be go per cent., and that for many years it could not be less than 50 per cent. per annum, floated third and fourth issues at £1,000 for £100 shares.
Nevertheless, even the fourth issue was oversubscribed ; and when, in midsummer, prices in "Change Alley and Threadneedle Street reached their peak, South Sea stock sold at £1,060.
Meanwhile, however, the gambling frenzy was not confining itself to South Sea stock, and Exchange Alley had many a competing '' Hell-porch."
The Political State of Great Britain gives a list of one hundred and four mushroom companies which, basking in the glory of the Great Bubble, were, during July, offering their alluring stocks to the gullible public.
The nature of some of these companies is both amusing and revealing.
Among them are concerns for ''a wheel of perpetual motion,"
"'the assurance of seamen's wages,''4 "' insuring and increasing children's fortunes," "' improving malt liquors," "' the extraction of silver from lead,"
"' the importation of great jackasses from + Jeudwine, op. cit., p. 87 ; Lecky, I, 323.
* Sir C. Grant Robertson, England Under the Hanoverians, p. 39.
' Swift, The South Sea Project.
4 The Royal Navy, at this period, made it a regular policy to keep sailors' pay ae a year in arrears.
Hence if they deserted they lost the wages ue to them.
ON THE ROAD TO TYBURN (Hogarth) ; Note speciators' gallery on right; the gallows: sale of gin below gallery: child trampled down: woman selling "Death Speeches"; and Methodist preacher in Death Cart with victim and coffin
SLAVE-TRADING
AND BUBBLE FINANCE
Spain," "the breeding of silkworms in Chelsea Park," and "trading in human hair."
A clergyman proposed a company to "discover the land of Ophir and monopolise its gold and silver."
One projector, claiming to have control of a marvellous invention, "later to be disclosed," offered £100. shares for two guineas.
In a single day his bag was full of gold; and by nightfall he was on the Continent, never to be heard of again.'
His marvellous invention had indeed worked !
The ever-growing array of lesser swindles aroused the jealousy and wrath of " the great Company " ; so, on August 18th, the South Sea directors "sued out writs of scire facias"? against certain of the minor frauds.* This action precipitated their own destruction.
The explosion of the smaller bubbles, instead of diverting suspicion, reflected all too clearly the substance of the greater swindle.
Pressure rapidly was becoming tense : to seeing eyes it already was clear that the Great Bubble must soon burst.
Shortly prior to the legal actions of the South Sea Company, the "' paper value" of the various bubble stocks was estimated at "about £500,000,000"—more than twice the value of all the houses and lands in Great Britain.
Before the year closed, it seemed that their only remaining substance was the taste of dust and ashes in the mouth of a disillusioned but unchastened people.
In September appeared the famous " South Sea Ballad," soon to be sung up and down the streets of London.
With humorous satire it jeered the "airy millions" and " scraps of paper " wherein the nation was trusting, at the same time mocking the Company which, "like the gods, turns nothing into all things," and predicting, at the end of the mad carnival, much
"hanging " and " drowning."
"Our South Sea ships have golden shrouds, They bring us wealth, 'tis granted ; But lodge their treasure in the clouds, To hide it till it's wanted.'
In November came tidings from Paris that Law, deserted by the Regent, had fled the country with vast stores of loot.
In December, on the assembling of Parliament, the South Sea directors were ordered to produce all their accounts.
Pandemonium ensued.
Knight, treasurer of the Company, escaped to the Continent with most of the incriminating documents,
1 For the record of these wild schemes, see The South Sea Bubble, Anonymous (second edition, 1825).
2 'T. Wright, op. cit., p. 48 ; Jeudwine, op. cit., p. 88.
* For the whole of this ballad see Wright, op. cit., pp. 49-51.
1I4 ENGLAND:
BEFORE AND AFTER WESLEY
and the Government seemed impotent to effect his return.
Craggs, Secretary of State, committed suicide.
The preliminary bribes of £574,000 were soon discovered, and the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer forced to resign.
The great, glittering bubble had burst.
There is a gulf where thousands fell, Here all the bold adventurers came ; A narrow sound, though deep in hell ; 'Change Alley ' is the dreadful name."
Many who had developed habits of profligate luxury now found themselves beggars, in an age when friendships were frail and sentiments cold.
'Behold a poor, dejected wretch, Who kept a South Sea coach of late, And now is glad to humbly catch A penny at the prison gate."
So furious was the cry for vengeance that it was " seriously proposed" by Lord Molesworth in Parliament, "to tie the directors up in sacks and throw them into the Thames."
Professor R. H. Tawney has left a memorable account of certain of the sixteenth century infamies of the famous Fugger bankers, whom, despite their pious trappings of orthodox Catholicism, he depicts as the economic counterpart of the political morality typified by Machiavelli's Prince.2
Yet, '*"compared with the men who engineered the South Sea Bubble,"' says Dr. 'Tawney, '"' the Fuggers had been innocents.'
The year 1720 is still remembered as that of the most colossal and dramatic financial swindle in British history.
As its last days ebbed away it seemed that South Sea stock, which a few months before had sold at 1060 per cent., was utterly worthless.
Nor of the multitudes once in opulence, who now faced the new year in destitution, were all guilty of stockgambling. The collapse of this financial Tower of Babel buried many of the innocent along with the guilty ; for hundreds of honest businesses were ruined through the bankruptcy of their stock-plunging debtors.
With the fall of the great Company, however, Walpole's hour of opportunity had struck.
Very fortunately for him, he had quarrelled with his Whig colleagues in 1717, and being out of office, had criticised mercilessly the ? Warner and Marten, Groundwork of Brit. Hist., Part II, p. 489.
® Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, pp. 78-9.
3 [bid., p. 191.
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I15 South Sea schemes.
This did not prevent him from gambling privately in the stocks and, by selling at an opportune time, making "a good thing" for himself ; but that was reckoned his own affair.
Now, by general acclaim, he was summoned to the helm of State ; and nowhere was the rough genius of this coarse, cynical, drunken, but good-natured and capable man— whose education at Eton and Cambridge had been designed to fit him "'for the Church''1—more aptly displayed, than in his handling of the South Sea Débacle.
Realising that, in such circumstances, a statesman's primal duty was to restore public confidence, he opposed resolutely the cry for blind vengeance; and knowing that the State was as deeply involved as the Company, he set himself with despatch to salvage whatever of the tangled wreckage remained.
Immediate confiscation of the Company's property would, he knew, not only have defeated the victims' interests, but also have involved the Government in another panic.
Most of the directors' private property, however, he did confiscate, and this realised £2,000,000.?2
Wisely, too, he released the Company from the £7,500,000 they had agreed to pay the State; and when finally all salvaged assets were pooled, he was able to pay thirty-three per cent. of its face value to all holders of South
Sea stock.
This was far more than sufferers in the hour of their blank despair had dared to hope for; hence Walpole began his domination of twenty-one years hailed as a financial wizard, if not a national deliverer.
But when the great Sir Robert revealed himself (and that was soon) it was obvious that his own financial principles were scarcely higher than those of the South
Sea hoaxers, whom he had so scathingly condemned.
For all his sagacity, his tolerance and his love of peace, Walpole, perhaps as much as either the slave traffic or the South Sea
Bubble, was an expression of the spirit of his time.
In a great age, with a great Faith, he might have been a great man: in the England of 1721 to 1742 he came perilously close to being a great charlatan. meWecky. 1) .pie324:
* Gibbon's grandfather was one of the directors.
'' Out of an estate worth no more than £60,000," he had to disgorge £50,000.
(Sir W.
Besant, op. cit., p. 8.) * Robertson, op. cit., p. 40f ; Lecky, I, p. 324ff.
CHAPTER VII
POLITICS, PENAL CODE AND PRISONS
"As each faction supplanted the other, they arranged the shift by providing the retiring official with a pension or a title or both.
Their use of the revenues of the country to fill their own pockets is too large a subject for any one volume."
J. W. JEUDWINE,
Religion, Commerce, Liberty, 1683-1795, p. 185.
"The Criminals pass through the streets in carts, dressed in their best clothes, with white gloves and nosegays, ifit be the season.
Those that die merrily, or that don't at least show any great fear of death, are said to die like gentlemen ; and to merit this encomium most of them die like beasts, without any concern, or like fools, having no other view than to divert the crowd."
Moura tt's Letters on the English Nation (about 1730), p. 42.
"I visited one in Marshalsea prison, a nursery of all manner of wickedness.
O shame to man, that there should be such a place, such a picture of hell upon or tig) are gd Joun WESLEY's Journal (February 3rd, 1753).