principles of legislation and wisdom, that whatsoever Religion and Society have no future state for their support, must be supported by an extraordinary Providence. Moses, skilled in all that legislation and wisdom, instituted the Jewish Religion and Society, without a future state for its support. Therefore, Moses who taught, believed likewise, that this Religion and Society was supported by an extraordinary Providence."

Warburton makes this a peg upon which to hang all sorts of information of the most heterogeneous kind. Only the first part appeared during our period, in 1737. A second part came out in 1741. But the stupendous work was never finished. As a monument of varied learning it is unique, and is one more instance of the intellectual stores in which the Church was peculiarly rich at this time. Dr. Johnson said of Warburton and his genius: "The table is always full, sir. He brings things from the north and the south, and from every quarter. In his Divine Legation you are always entertained. He carries you round and round, without carrying you forward to the point; but then you have no wish to be carried forward. . . . Warburton is, perhaps, the last man who has written with a mind full of reading and reflection."

Such were the main answers to the Deist writers, and if like the Deist writings most of them have perished or are forgotten, yet the residuum, the Analogy, is pure gold tried by the fire of over a hundred and fifty years.

AUTHORITIES.-In addition to the works cited at the end of the last chapter and in the text, consult Overton's Life and Opinions of William Law, Non-Juror and Mystic; Dean Bernard's edition of Bishop Butler's Works, with Introduction and Notes, 2 vols. (English Theological Library); W. E. Gladstone's Studies subsidiary to Butler, and the expansion of Butler's treatment of his subject in Bishop Barry's Manifold Witness, and Dr. Eagar's Butler's Analogy and Modern Thought; the Life of Zachary Pearce, by himself. Berkeley is best read in Professor Fraser's edition of the Works, and a full account of the Alciphron will be found in Fraser's Berkeley in the "Philosophical Classics" Series, to which indebtedness is gratefully acknowledged. Mandeville should be read with the Introduction by F. D. Maurice. See also William Law on The Fable of the Bees. An interesting application of Warburton's famous syllogism will be found in T. W. Fowle's Divine Legation of Christ. The New Analogy, by the same author, writing under the guise of" Cellanius," is worth studying.

CHAPTER V

JACOBITES AND NON-JURORS THE BEGINNINGS OF
SPIRITUAL REVIVAL

WHILE the Church was thus rich in intellectual stores, in other, and not less valuable, stores it was very poor, and seemed to be growing poorer and poorer every day. On its moral and spiritual side, from which naturally springs practical work, it seemed as if a creeping paralysis were coming over it. One cause of this was what was called the Dynastic Controversy. It is provoking to think that a The political question should have been one of the chief Controversy. causes of its moral and spiritual decay. "If, as my lady says, all outward establishments are Babel, so is this establishment. Let it stand for me. I neither set it up, nor

Dynastic

pull it down. But let you and I build the City of God," wrote John Wesley to Charles, who asked him a question about the Church establishment. Of what real consequence to the Church ought it to have been whether a George or a James, neither of whom had the slightest sympathy with it, was sitting on the throne? There were two factors, both having their roots in the history of the past, which made this question important from a Church point of view, and which explain the attitude of both leaders and people towards it. Many remembered that the Church had not fared well under the rule of James II., and conjectured, with a fair show of probability, that another Stewart king would be sure to follow the same policy, and to attack the Church as James II. had attacked it. England had not lost by any means her dread of popery, and was not prepared to see the authority of Rome again

feeling.

asserted, and aided by the throne itself. The strong feeling against any such attempt had already been clearly manifested in the first election after the King's accession. Anti-Roman A Whig tract (1714) entitled English Advice to Frenchmen had stated the issue very plainly: “If you would lose your Protestant king, your religion, and your liberties, if you would have the Pretender, the Mass, and the wooden shoes, send his good friends, the Tories, to represent you. Can you imagine that one bred up by the most bigoted and tyrannical even of all Popish courts, and altogether a most bitter enemy to our religion and nation, would not, were it in his power, establish Popery, not out of conscience, but out of revenge for the treatment he has met with from the Protestant Church of England ?" James's popery had cost him his throne, and men saw clearly that the Protestant succession was necessary to the purity and the liberties of the English Church.

On the other hand, the populace dreaded, perhaps, even more a return to Puritanism, and it was this which made the

feeling.

cry of "High Church" still a popular cry. The Anti-Puritan Roundhead was a much more objectionable person than the Cavalier in the eyes of the ordinary Englishman, and particularly in those of the ordinary Londoner, and a Stewart upon the throne might be preferable, even though he were a papist, to the churches filled with Puritan preachers and the interrupted rites of the Cromwellian interregnum. So that this question of James or George was not only a fruitful source of discord, which is never conducive to Christianity, but directly diverted the Church from its proper work, and that in various ways.

The

In the first place, it produced what may be called a class difference among the clergy which was fatal to that harmony without which little true work can be done. Superior and inferior great mass of the inferior clergy were in their heart clergy. of hearts in favour of James the Pretender, while the dignitaries, as in duty bound, were in favour of George as chief representative of the power that promoted, as well as being de facto king; and for this they had scriptural authority. Of the two Universities, in which all the clergy had been trained, Oxford especially, and Cambridge to a

V

THE NON-JURORS

59

greater extent than is commonly supposed, were honeycombed with Jacobitism, and the result was a growing alienation between the higher and the lower clergy. Nor was this all. Besides those who were Jacobites at heart, there were those who were Jacobites by open avowal; and these, again, were of two classes. First of all, there were the Non-Jurors, who were churchmen to the backbone

The

in the spiritual sense of the term, but who were Non-Jurors. temporarily alienated from the national establishment. Their alienation was intensified greatly by the accession of the House of Hanover. It had seemed in a fair way of being healed when Queen Anne was reigning, but from the beginning of the Georgian era all hopes of their reconciliation disappeared. It is true that the party was not numerically large, but it contained within its ranks some of the very ablest and some also of the saintliest churchmen in the kingdom. Such men as Robert Nelson, Jeremy Collier, Nathaniel Spinckes, William Law, Charles Leslie, Thomas Baker, Thomas Brett, and dozens of lesser men were not plentiful in any Church in any age. And the worst of it was that they carried with them that element of the recognition of the principle of continuity, which was so grievously and glaringly lacking, that element which linked the Church of the Georgian era with the Church of the Primitive Fathers of the first three centuries. It was by one of this body that the first note of alarm was sounded which awoke the Church from her lethargy, as we shall see presently.

The Jacobites.

A distinction must be drawn between the Non-Jurors and the Jacobites. Of course, there were many who were both, but, on the other hand, many of the best of the Non-Jurors were not in any active sense of the term Jacobites, and many of the most active of the Jacobites were not Non-Jurors. These last, indeed, disliked the Non-Jurors, whose more consistent position, involving as it did the sacrifice of all that flesh holds dear, was a perpetual reproach. The Jacobites, however, who swallowed the oath, defended their conduct, not altogether unreasonably, on the ground that the whole question of sovereign power now turned not, as it ought to have done, upon hereditary right, but upon parliamentary settlement; and as Parliament settled,

It was not,

so Parliament could unsettle the arrangement. therefore, wise or right to act the part of Achilles sulking in his tent for the loss of Briseis and leaving Agamemnon to have it all his own way, as the Non-Jurors did, but to fight the battle where alone it could be fought; and for that purpose it was necessary to take the oath. Among these men by far the most distinguished, in fact, their recognised leader, was Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster.

Atterbury.

Francis Atterbury (1662-1732) had been a very prominent churchman long before the accession of King George. Indeed, by far the greater part of his busy public Francis life belongs to the period treated of in an earlier volume of this work. He was one of Queen Anne's episcopal appointments, being made Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster (in those days the two offices often went together) in 1713. He made no secret of his wish that the Queen should be succeeded by her brother James. And whether or no the story be true that on her demise he offered to head a procession in his lawn sleeves to proclaim King James III. at Charing Cross, there is little doubt that he was extremely disappointed at the peaceful accession of George I., did all in his power to thwart the new Government, and thought that he could do so the more effectually by taking than by refusing the new oath. He had a very high reputation both as a preacher and as a parliamentary orator. Whatever else Atterbury was, he was a most staunch and consistent English churchman, being as much opposed to Romanism on the one hand as to Latitudinarianism on the other. He did not despair that King James III., as he called him, might still be won over to a better faith than that in which he had been brought up, while he did utterly despair of any good to the Church under King George I., the Whig politicians, and the Latitudinarian clergy with whom the new King had entirely identified himself. Almost all the other bishops in the House of Lords took the opposite side; all the more reason, therefore, so he thought, that he should stand as a sort of Athanasius contra mundum, to fight the battle.

It is necessary to lay stress upon this point, because