With these he combined a curious mixture of shyness and nervousness, which may probably account for his constitutional indolence, for his not writing more, and indeed not doing more outside his own special spheres in behalf of the cause which he unquestionably had very near at heart. He was a great figure (great in every sense of the word) in the background, rather than a prominent leader of the Evangelicals, but in his own way he was unique.

If this were a history of the Evangelical movement, many other good clergymen who identified themselves with it— such as Thomas Robinson of Leicester; William Richardson of York; Moses Browne, Vicar of Olney, where Newton and Scott were curates; Stillingfleet of Hotham, at whose rectory Joseph Milner wrote a great part of his Church History; Henry Foster, the coadjutor of Romaine and the great friend of Cecil-would have to be mentioned. But these hardly reach the first rank, and there are others who did reach that rank afterwards, but had not reached it when the eighteenth century closed. As, therefore, the Evangelical movement in this volume only forms part of a larger subject, the line must be drawn, and we must pass on from the clergy to the laity who helped on the movement.

AUTHORITIES.-The sources for the Calvinistic controversy are to be sought, first of all, in the letters between George Whitefield and John Wesley; see Whitefield's Letters and Gledstone's Life of Whitefield, pp. 200-242 passim. Cf. The Christian Observer, October 1857, p. 696, Review of The Coronet and the Cross, by Rev. A. H. Mew; Hervey's Theron and Aspasio, with John Wesley's remarks thereon and Hervey's reply, all published in 1755; Minutes of the Conference of 1770; Fletcher's Checks to Antinomianism and Toplady's More Work for John Wesley (Works, v. 363, sqq.). Henry Venn and the Venn family generally are dealt with in an exhaustive and masterly manner in a work recently written by Dr. John Venn, the President of Gonville and Caius, The Venn Family Annals (Macmillan, 1904), a model of the way in which family history should be written. See also The Memoir of Henry Venn prefixed to the R. T.S. edition of The Complete Duty of Man. John Newton's Narrative and his Letters to a Wife throw most light on his life and character; they are in his Works, with a Memoir by Cecil. For Thomas Scott see Life by J. Scott, 1822. Cecil is best studied in the Remains, edited by Joseph Pratt. Isaac Milner wrote the Life of Joseph Milner, 1814. For Isaac Milner see Dict. Nat. Biog. The letters of John Newton to Lord Dartmouth will be found in the Dartmouth Letters, Historical MSS. Commission, vol. iii. appendix, part i. The whole collection of these letters should be consulted.

CHAPTER XIII

MINOR CURRENTS UP TO 1789

NOTHING shows more strikingly the crying need of a revival of religion in the dreary days of the first two Georges than the absence of the names of laymen who took any practical interest, or were at all active in Church work. In this respect Robert Nelson, Robert Boyle, John Kyrle, Lord Weymouth, Lord Digby, Peter Barnville, and many other active churchmen had no immediate successors. The Evangelical movement, among other causes, certainly tended to reawaken in laymen an interest in Christian effort, and the briefest sketch of it would be imperfect if it did not give prominence to the part in it taken by pious laymen. The first, in point of date, is one who has been already mentioned in connexion with John Newton. John Thornton (1720-1790) was a merchant prince who looked upon his money as being literally a talent to be devoted to his Divine Master's use. He was one of the first leading laymen who cast in his lot with the Evangelicals, then a very small body. His father lived on Clapham Common, and he himself lived long enough to see the nucleus formed of that little knot of good men commonly known as the "Clapham Sect."

John Thornton.

John Thornton's services to Christianity and philanthropy generally and to the Evangelical party cannot be better described than in the language of his accomplished friend, Richard Cecil, in the following passage: "He purchased advowsons and presentations with a a view to place in parishes the most enlightened, active, and useful

He

ministers. He employed the extensive commerce in which he was engaged as a powerful instrument for conveying immense quantities of Bibles, Prayer Books, and the most useful publications to every place visited by our trade. printed, at his sole expense, large editions of the latter for that purpose, and it may be safely affirmed that there is scarcely a part of the known world, where such books could be introduced, which did not feel the salutary influence of this single individual. He was a philanthropist on the largest scale, the friend of man under all his wants. Instances might be mentioned of it, were it proper to particularise, which would surprise those who did not know Mr. Thornton. They were so much out of ordinary course and expectation, that I know some who felt it their duty to inquire of him whether the sum they had received was sent by his intention or by mistake. To this may be added, that the manner of presenting his gifts was as delicate and concealed as the measure was large. Besides this constant course of private donations, there was scarcely a public charity, or occasion of relief to the ignorant or necessitous, which did not meet with his distinguished support. His only question was, May the miseries of men in any measure be removed or alleviated? Nor was he merely distinguished by stretching out a liberal hand; his benevolent heart was so intent on doing good, that he was ever inventing or promoting plans for its diffusion at home or abroad."

His splendid munificence is commemorated in verse as well as in prose. The poet Cowper, who knew well what he had done at Olney, in his poem on "Charity," thus commemorates him by name :

Some men make gain a fountain, whence proceeds

A stream of liberal and heroic deeds,

The swell of pity, not to be confined

Within the scanty limits of the mind,

Disdains the bank, and throws the golden sands,

A rich deposit, on the bord'ring lands:

These have an ear for His paternal call,

Who makes some rich for the supply of all,

God's gift with pleasure in His praise employ,

And Thornton is familiar with the joy.

Henry Thornton (1760-1815), the second son of John

XIII

THE CLAPHAM SECT

Henry

199

Thornton, became not only as rich, but also as munificent a man as his father, holding the same religious views, and becoming one of the leading members of the Thornton. Clapham Sect. Before his marriage in 1796, he used to give away six-sevenths of his large income, reserving only one-seventh for his own use. When he had children he could not, of course, be so lavish, but he still gave two-thirds of his income away. He allowed Hannah More no less than £600 a year for her schools, and his other benefactions were on the same grand scale. For five or six years, when they were both unmarried, he and William Wilberforce shared a house at Battersea Rise on Clapham Common, but his history hardly belongs to our present period, for it was in the last decade of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century that he was most prominent. The same may be said of William Wilberforce (17591833), who did not join the Evangelical party until 1787, when he had for some time been under the influence of Isaac Milner. Although, therefore, he stands Wilberforce. first among the Evangelical laity, it will be better

William

to postpone the notice of him until the next period, to which, so far as it falls within the eighteenth century at all, his life as an Evangelical properly belongs.

William

Cowper.

William Cowper (1731-1800) is another layman who, in one sense, did more for the Evangelical cause than any other man, lay or cleric. Of course the services he rendered were exclusively in writing, for the shy recluse of Olney and Weston Underwood was the last to enter in any other way into the fray. Cowper wished emphatically to be regarded as a religious poet. "What there is of a religious cast in the volume," he says in the preface to The Task, "I have thrown towards the end of it, for two reasons: first, that I might not revolt the reader at his entrance; and secondly, that my best impressions might be made last. Were I to write as many volumes as Lope de Vega or Voltaire, not one of them would be without this tincture. If the world like it not, so much the worse for them. I make all the concessions I can, that I may please them; but I will not please them at the expense of conscience." That he also showed his power as a satirist and humourist is true; but

then are not some of his best touches of satire and humour directly connected with his Evangelical opinions? It must always be remembered that it was an essential part of Evangelicalism proper to promote practical reformation, especially of the clergy, quite as much as to inculcate its peculiar doctrines. Indeed, the two things were, to the Evangelical mind, one and the same regarded from different points of view. Such passages, therefore, as the following would be to them Evangelicalism pure and simple :—

Would I describe a preacher, such as Paul,
Were he on earth, would hear, approve, and own,
Paul should himself direct me. I would trace
His master-strokes, and draw from his design.

Behold the picture! Is it like?-Like whom?
The things that mount the rostrum with a skip
And then skip down again; pronounce a text;
Cry-hem; and reading what they never wrote
Just fifteen minutes, huddle up their work,

And with a well-bred whisper close the scene!
The Time-Piece.

Methodism, under which comprehensive term the whole of the Evangelical revival was by many in the eighteenth century included, was from its outset accused of driving people mad. When Whitefield preached his first sermon on June 27, 1736, at St. Mary-de-Crypt, Gloucester, a complaint was made to the bishop that fifteen persons had been driven mad, to which the shrewd prelate, the excellent Bishop Benson, only replied that he hoped the madness might not be forgotten before another Sunday. John Wesley rather gloried in the charge, and the later Methodists and Evangelicals had to bear it and were not ashamed of it. Now Cowper undoubtedly at times suffered from And he was also as un

Cowper's melancholy madness.

madness.

doubtedly, in the eighteenth-century sense of the term, a Methodist." It is enough to remember that he was more or less mentally afflicted long before he became a specially religious man, and that it was the morbid introspection which the Evangelicals encouraged which led to his religious poems being of a subjective rather than of an objective character.

But it must never be forgotten that his