It Reformation, in the friends of Erasmus, such as Dean Colet and Sir Thomas More. It found its most impressive oracle in the mouth of Richard Hooker. sprang into new life under the fostering care of the noblest and most attractive of all characters that figure in our great civil wars. Under the auspices of Lord Falkland, in the lovely vale of Great Tew, described in one of the most pathetic passages of Clarendon's life, were gathered together Hales and Chillingworth, and all that was most philosophic in moderation and most natural and simple in religion, from the neighbouring University of Oxford. The charming essay of Matthew Arnold is alone sufficient to glorify the name of Lord Falkland as rising above what Chillingworth called the Pharisees on one side, and the Publicans on the other, of his own age and as appealing to the best wants of our own. Sir Matthew Hale would alone suffice to hand on the sacred torch across the Commonwealth; and after the Restoration the succession was carried on by a yet more illustrious group in the sister University of Cambridge -the Platonists' the 'Men of Latitude,' as they are put before us in the pages of Burnet, whose pedestrian style and homely common sense are warmed with a divine enthusiasm, as he describes the effect produced upon him by Tillotson, Cudworth, Whichcote, Henry More, John Smith, and Worthington. That succession has never entirely failed; and its very existence for so The connection of Sir Matthew Hale with the Latitudinarian school is not mentioned by Principal Tulloch, but is well brought out by Dr. Stoughton (Ecclesiastical History of Restoration, ii. 478-481). See also his striking quotations from Faringdon, ii. 339–341. long a period is a pledge that the Church of England is capable of supporting and sending forth those who, from a wider point of view, and from a more generous appreciation of the excellences of contending sects, can afford to allow each one of them a place in the Divine economy of the Church, and in the national fabric of the English religious commonwealth. The Inde pendents. This volume proposes briefly to enumerate the ideas or characteristic qualities which the Nonconformist branches of the Church may, when viewed in this larger national aspect, be regarded as having contributed to the general good. The Independents have almost from their first origin stood forward as the champions, at a time when such championship within the Church itself was sorely needed, of civil liberty and freedom of conscience. Their hold on English history is also beyond question. One name at least they have furnished to it of transcendent importance-the Protector, Oliver Cromwell. The Baptists vindicated, in ways and forms peculiar to themselves, the essential value of the purity The Bapand moral excellence of the Christian Church as the only characteristics which will avail to render its ministrations efficacious. The refusal to administer the Sacraments indiscriminately, the maintenance of a severe interior discipline which divides the Church from the congregation, although condemned in the judgment of a higher Christianity, even amongst the Nonconformists themselves, as altogether misleading and artificial, yet may, if regarded only as one form of Christian life amongst many, keep before the conscience of the country a perpetual testimony to the fact, which members of tists. kers. large traditional communities are apt to forget, that the outward does not carry with it the inward, and that the multitudinous mass is only to be regenerated by the grains of a revivifying salt amongst the chosen few. They also have furnished one name at least to English literature which Lord Macaulay has not hesitated to place side by side with Milton: The seventeenth century,' he says, 'produced only two works of surpassing genius; one was the "Paradise Lost," the other was The Qua- Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." The Quakers or Friends, as was remarked long ago even by Voltaire, stand in one respect honourably distinguished amongst all Christian sects, namely, in that they place before. themselves as the main object of their existence, not the propagation of any peculiar opinion or the maintenance of any peculiar form, but the moral regeneration of humanity. The protest against the terrible evils of war and of slavery, the testimony in behalf of simplicity of speech and living-these were to them what the quarrels for or against the surplice, for or against this or that theory respecting the eucharistic elements, have been in the other Churches both of Catholic and Protestant Christendom. And of all the founders of the States in the New World the one whose name, in spite of the darker clouds that have occasionally passed over it, has come down to us with the widest lustre, is the Quaker, The Uni- William Penn. The Unitarians have had the rare merit of sustaining, at great odds and amidst all manner of social disadvantages, the spirit of free inquiry and critical tarians. 1 I may refer to an admirable article on the Friends both in England and America, written in French, the work of an accomplished English lady. discernment, which in the other nonconforming communities was hardly developed at all, and which in the Church itself needed constant replenishment. What there is of narrowness in their body is felt by their own most distinguished leaders as much as by others. 'In devotional literature and religious thought,' says the most refined and venerable of their ministers,' 'I find nothing of ours that does not pale before Augustin, Tauler, and Pascal; and in the poetry of the Church it is the Latin and German hymns, or the lines of Charles Wesley or of Keble, that fasten on my memory, and make all else seem poor and cold.' But, however much the exaggerations or the meagreness of their theological schemes have aroused a repulsion in the more devotional or the more dogmatic sections of Christian society, it must always be remembered that they have kept in check exaggerations and contractions at least as mischievous as any which are found amongst themselves. 'It was,' says a great German Catholic theologian,2 'the rude and mechanical Calvinistic conception of the Atonement, and the opposing of the Divine Persons like parties in a lawsuit, which by a natural reaction turned the Puritan theologians and preachers of the eighteenth century into Unitarians.' They, too, have names which redeem their sect from the obscurity to which otherwise it seems to have been doomed. They included at least on their borders Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke in England, and in America they have produced the one theologian of the English-speaking races (till quite 1 The Rev. James Martineau's Letter on the Unitarian Position. The Wesleyans. recent times) whose fame has pervaded the Continent― William Channing. The Wesleyans, perhaps, amongst all these bodies are those who have least claim to be considered as an element separate from the Church itself. No extenuations or explanations of his later disciples can remove the overwhelming impression left by the repeated declarations of their founder, that not only would he himself never desert the Church of his fathers, but that continuance with it and attachment to it were the essential conditions of the prosperity and progress of his followers. What they contributed to the development of Christianity in England-the Christianity equally of the Church itself and of all Nonconformist branches-was the growth of a religious zeal, the encouragement of a religious energy, which broke through the calm repose-often the apathetic indifference-that pervaded all sections of English life at the beginning of the last century. And this revival, with all its distortions and extravagances, was not confined, like most of the other influences of which we have spoken, to England and America, but penetrated to the continental Churches, and produced among the Protestants of France, Switzerland, and Germany a revival of warmth and zeal, if also at times of bigotry and narrowness, of which the effects are still visible. The one historical figure of the Wesleyan Society is not any accidental or exceptional member of its body, as in the other Nonconformist sections, but is the character of the founder himself. Robert Brown, the founder of the Independents; John Spilsbury,' the founder of the Baptists; John Biddle, the Cramp's Baptist History, p. 288. 1 |