Congregational History, 1700-1800

AFTER the revolution of 1688, liberal Churchmen expected that Nonconformity would quietly subside. It was not thought decorous to disturb the last days of the venerable survivors of the quietus of ejectment of 1662; but when in the course ity. of nature they had passed away, the most tolerant of the bishops saw reason why the pulpits left vacant by them should again be occupied.

Nonconform

The impolicy of coercion was freely admitted, but it was supposed that a slight modification in the Church services would be sufficient to bring the weak and erratic Dissenting brethren within the national fold. "To mollify them, we have tried Church censures," they said, "and penal laws, and inflicted them with a severity perhaps beyond what we can justify, but only to heighten our own divisions, and increase the divisions we endeavoured to remove. The only remedy left us is to remove the exceptional passages in our Liturgy, and those ceremonies in our worship to which they cannot conform with us, and to follow the steps which the State, by the Act of Toleration, has gone before us in, to reconcile them

to us; for they are now no more in our power to force them to a conformity with us than we are in theirs."*

William III. (a thorough Erastian) was entirely of this mind. His ecclesiastical advisers assured him that the whole matter of Dissent, with careful management, might be pleasantly arranged. "The Presbyterians especially," said Bishop Burnet, "and the Independents, will one day come into the Church of England themselves. Their old teachers, Baxter, Bates, Owen, and the rest of their great men, are gone." +

Calamy, when a student of Oxford, waited to see if alterations would be made in the public settlement he could fall in with without doing violence to or disturbing his mind and conscience. To introduce a Bill for Comprehension was soon, however, found to be impracticable. Meanwhile, notwithstanding the flexibility of some, the descendants of the "old teachers" cherished their memory, and held fast their principles. The tears that fell upon the bier of the last of the Puritans were not those of hopeless sorrow for vanquished leaders in a cause henceforth to be abandoned, but with sincere and keen regret was mingled the sacred determination to grasp more firmly the banner to be "displayed because of the truth."

JOHN CROMPTON, the nephew of Oliver Heywood, in a letter of condolence to his widow (Aug. 2, 1702), says: "God is raising up new ones to fill up the room and places of those more experienced ones that are gone. God Almighty make us as diligent and faith

* Printed Letter to Convocation. + Memorial to the Princess Sophia.

ful in our Master's work and glory, and the good of souls, as they were.' THOMAS WHITAKER, at the funeral of Joseph Lister, of Kipping, said: "When the godly perish, when the upright, and exemplary, and useful are taken away, what a vacancy do they leave! The world is but insipidness without them. What remains for us to do but to get our loins girt and lights burning!"

The young gownsman who sauntered in Christ Church meadows, dreaming of the settle- Hoadley and ment that might bring back days like Calamy. those in which his grandfather, the Elder Calamy, preached before Parliament at Saint Margaret's, or in Westminster Abbey, was rudely challenged by Hoadley to account for acting as a Nonconformist teacher. Admit," he said, with unconscious insolence, “that some of your people might suffer loss, or be wounded in feeling, by your self-imposed silence. Are the people fit judges of your duty, and directors of your practice ? " "I think myself obliged to declare to you," he added, with rising haughtiness, "that the provision made for you in the Church of England is what you ought to be very thankful to Almighty God for. Remember that you are to regard. the peace of the Church as well as your own humours and fancies." + Volumes had been written to justify the necessity for separation on the ground of the slender pasture provided by the Anglican shepherds. A plea of that kind Hoadley treated with the utmost scorn. "Supposing it is true," he said, "that there are sundry ministers in the Established Church

Additional MSS., 4275, 41.

+ Hoadley's "Reasonableness of Conformity," part ii.,

p. 19.

insufficient—that is, ignorant, and not able to teach and instruct the people-I say that is not sufficient reason for the people to forsake the Church of England, and betake themselves to the help of a separate ministry, and form themselves into Churches distinct from it. And if it be not sufficient reason for the people to do this, you ought not in conscience to encourage them in doing it; and therefore this cannot be a sufficient justification of your public ministrations.* The people have no necessity of departing from the most insufficient ministry you can easily find.t The Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, are constantly part of their entertainment on the Lord's-day."

Calamy, neither convinced by the logic nor silenced by the rebuke of his proud antagonist, put a few questions to him.

"Are not ignorance," he asked, "profaneness, and simony (things of which we find some of the reverend bishops have freely taken notice of in their several charges to their clergy), much more dangerous both to religion and the ministry than a separation of qualified persons to that office by inferior ministers ?

"Is it not a visible benefit to any parish to have a Dissenting minister open a meeting in it, where, instead of one hasty sermon in a week or fortnight, the parishioners shall have from that time forward, besides the labours of such an assistant in public and private, also two well-studied sermons every Lord's-day in the public Church? Will God, in the

* Hoadley's "Reasonableness of Conformity," part ii., p. 36.
+ Ibid., p. 38.

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