in Manchester to his Friend, concerning a Notorious Blasphemer who died in despair."

Satisfactory, however, as the act of toleration was regarded by the whigs and moderate churchmen,-Papists and tories, who had long considered the dissenters as their natural enemies, excited such a popular outcry against it, as was calculated to lead to riot or insurrection. The manifestation of this spirit obtained the prompt attention of the Earl of Warrington, who was called upon to interfere, not only from being one of the Lords of his Majesty's privy council, but as holding the distinguished office of lord-lieutenant of the county of Chester. This nobleman had ever maintained a kind regard towards his late father's Presbyterian associates, to the omission of no opportunity afforded him in which he could mitigate their sufferings. In a speech, therefore, to the grand jury at Chester, held on the 13th of April 1692, he denounced the fomenting divisions among Protestants, as a deceit designed to serve some special purpose; being to gull the nation into Popery and slavery. "The laws against the dissenters," he added, "have ever been stretched and executed beyond their genuine and natural intent or construction; several laws have been put into execution against them, which were plainly and directly made for other purposes, by which the laws themselves have suffered violence; while more diligence and care has been employed to punish people for non-conformity, than to reform their lives and manners." The Earl then represented the act of indulgence as a prudent, necessary, and pious work; and recommended to the jury as their duty, if they found any who spake to the disadvantage of the ordinance, to present them as disaffected to the government, and as sowers of the seeds of division in the state.

After this threat was held out, the tumultuous spirit which was beginning to break forth in Cheshire and Lancashire appears to have subsided, and the Protestant dissenters were every where allowed to meet together in tranquillity.

5. Dr Wroe's Sermon preached at Bowden, in Cheshire, upon the occasion of the Funeral of the Right Honourable Henry Earl of Warrington, January 1694.

Shortly after this event the counties of Cheshire and Lancashire suffered an irreparable loss in the death of the nobleman, who had so long successfully engaged in the defence of the Protestant religion and civil liberties of his country. The Earl of Warrington survived his amiable consort scarcely three years. Upon the occasion of his funeral, Dr Wroe paid his last tribute of respect and admira

tion to the virtues of his patron; from which discourse the following passage is selected as another bright display of the warden's eloquence in the pulpit :

Dr Wroe argued upon this solemn occasion, first, That there were two different and opposite states allotted to men after death: THE TREE MAY FALL TOWARD THE SOUTH, OR Toward the NortH. Secondly, That the righteousness of men's lives hath a natural tendency to happiness, as their wickedness hath to misery; that it is from a principle of nature that the tree lies where it falls; and that virtue and vice have a no less natural inclination and direct tendency to happiness or misery, to rewards or punishments. And, thirdly, That there is no middle state after death; no change of condition, or altering it for the better; THE TREE MUST FALL SOUTH, OR NORTH, AND WHERE IT FALLS IT MUST LIE; THERE IT SHALL BE.

"But I leave," he continued, "these delightful raptures to the enlargement of your private meditations; and having raised them where faith carries them, I must call back your present thoughts to more pensive reflections, since Providence hath administered an occasion of sorrowful remembrance. For alas, THE TREE IS FALLEN ; (as indeed what can withstand death's inevitable stroke :) a tree which, had God so pleased, might have stood and flourished much longer but now, like that in Nebuchadnezzer's dream, it has received the sentence of the Watcher, and of the Holy One from Heaven, who hath cried, HEW DOWN THE Tree, and cut OFF HIS BRANCHES ; SHAKE Off his leaves, and scatteR HIS FRUIT!"

After this most striking exordium, the warden expatiated upon the public and private virtues of his illustrious friend. "His honour," he added, "was the jewel he most highly prized, which he could not be tempted to forfeit or prostitute; and I doubt not to affirm, that his conscience was the rule and measure of it, which two, when joined together, render a man truly great, honourable, and noble. For men to pretend honour without conscience, is to sacrifice to an idol of their own setting up; but when honour is guided by conscience, it becomes sacred and venerable. Such, I am confident, was this noble Lord's sense and estimate of his honour, which spirited him with that freedom of endeavouring equity and justice, as well in matters of lesser concern among equals and inferiors, as in that higher station, where persons of noble rank give counsel and sentence in matters of moment, and cases of grand importance.

"But to come closer to my subject, with which I must hasten, lest I injure your patience; and this I should hazard, were I to trace him through all his commendable qualities, and praise-worthy accomplishments.

"I leave it to his servants and domestics, who best know him, to proclaim him the best of masters, and honour his memory, as they ought, with a due testimony of his freedom, affability, and kindness to all that were dependants or retainers to him. It is a part of the imperfection of this state, that we learn the value of most things more by the loss than the enjoyment of them; which will be verified doubtless, in them who have lost an indulgent master, a courteous patron, an obliging benefactor.

"I appeal to all the neighbourhood, and as many as had the honour or opportunity to resort to Dunham, for the greatness of his hospitality, his generous reception, and obliging entertainment; a quality, I must needs say, the less to be wondered at in him, since it has been so long hereditary to that family, that it now pleads prescription, and is become an usage immemorial:-May it remain and be continued as a mark of honour to that noble house, and the lasting character of its posterity!

"I appeal to his country, for his courage and resolution to venture himself for the good of it, when he thought it in apparent danger; and leave the world to judge of the hazard he underwent to his person, estate, and family, and all that was near and dear to him.

"That love to his country, which was remarkable in all the parts of his life, appeared very particularly at the time when he was to be tried for imputed treason. For when there seemed need of the advice of many of the best lawyers, to help him to fence against the arts of the counsel employed against him, he absolutely refused the assistance of any lawyer who had been blemished with any accession to the calamities of the times.

Indeed, his own wonderful defence of himself superseded the use of any lawyer at his trial; and I may appeal to written evidence for his ability in speaking and managing that cause, (of the highest nature and concern that could befal him, which often confounds men's intellect), when he defended himself to the great joy and satisfaction of his friends, the envy and surprise of his enemies, and the wonder, if not astonishment, of all that heard him. Yet did he not, in all this, sacrifice to his own net, or ascribe the success of his release and deliverance to his own wit and policy, to his parts and management, but GAVE THE GLOry to God, and paid the annual tribute of praise and thanksgiving to him for it, by setting apart that day as a day of grateful memorial, which he solemnly and religiously observed with his family every fourteenth day of this month of January ;-this very day, which now, by the providence of the All-wise Disposer, is become the day of his obsequies, as if prophetically chosen for a remarkable vicissitude, that what was

before a day of jubilee, must now be written in black letters, and made a day of sadness and mourning, and so become doubly observable to his honourable posterity. "His gratitude to God was rightly accompanied with charity to men, and he solemnized that day, not only with prayers and praises, and other offices of devotion to God, but also at the same time clothed and fed twenty-seven poor people, according to the number of peers that acquitted him, that he might increase his own rejoicing and gratitude with the joy and refreshment of the poor and indigent. "But his charity was far from being confined to an annual distribution. He was sensible that the divine bounty is repeated and continued daily;—and so ought we too to extend our charity, which is the quit-rent we pay for all our receipts. God needs none of our gifts, yet he has obliged us to make suitable returns and acknowledgments, and has withal appointed his receivers, and passed his word as an acquittance, that what is given to the poor is lent to the Lord. We are all but stewards, and the more we have received, the more we have to account for. This, Religion taught him; and meeting with a generous soul and bountiful disposition, opened his hand wide, and made his charity large and extensive. Almost every day was a dole-day at his door; but particularly every Friday in the year, when a larger distribution was made to the poor and necessitous. I think I need not call upon them to attest the truth of it, which we may read in their tears and lamentations for him.

"You have heard in these severals, that the tree, which I said was fallen, whilst it stood and flourished brought forth choice and pleasant fruit, and was what Eve fancied of the tree in paradise, good for fruit, pleasant to the eye, and a tree to be desired. But since such desires are now become vain and unprofitable, and the tree must lie where it has fallen, let me refresh your depressed spirits with the fair, blooming hopes of a yet tender, but well-promising plant out of the same noble stock, and sum up our hopes in affectionate wishes, that he may thrive and grow up to the same maturity of worth and merit, and not only flourish in the seat, but inherit the virtues of his progenitors, and transmit them to a lasting succession of posterity. AMEN.”

Such was the truly eloquent discourse preached on this affecting occasion by the pious warden of Manchester. The prayers of a righteous man never ascend to heaven in vain. The illustrious family for whom such earnest supplications were offered, continue to maintain in their public and private conduct, those virtues which confer upon nobility its true value and lustre. '

y

y This sermon was printed under the following title: A Sermon at the Funeral of the Right

6. The Trial of certain of the Jacobite Conspirators at Manchester, 4. D. 1694. As this trial is only in part connected with the ecclesiastical history of Manchester, a brief outline of it is sufficient.

After the hopes of the jacobites of Lancashire had been frustrated by the strong muster of men upon Bowden Downs under the late Earl of Warrington, and still farther by the disastrous battle of the Boyne, little more than the disposition remained to take up arms in the cause of James. The orange party, notwithstanding, being exceedingly prone to suspicion, thought very differently. The greatest bribes were therefore held out to discovery. Accordingly, several instruments in the late conspiracy hired themselves for the use of the crown, all of whom were men of desperate character and of the most abandoned principles. Lunt, the chief spy, had been a highwayman; while another had been a common thief, who still retained the marks of having been burnt in the hand. It is, however, but too often the case, that if spies do not find a plot ripening to their wish, their first object, with the view of giving satisfaction to their employers, is to get one up themselves and this was the case in the present instance.

The jacobites had an early intimation of what was meditated against them, and prepared to meet the designs of their enemies by an ingenious counterplot, the successful management of which appears to have been due to Mr Roger Dickenson of Manchester. Mr Dickenson, by gaining over to his purpose one of the suborned spies named Taafe, discovered that the marshaller of them was Lunt, who was no farther known to the conspirators than that five years ago he had, from necessity, been employed by James as a desperate character and upon a desperate expedition, to cross the Irish channel for the purpose of delivering commissions to the Lancashire gentry. He likewise found, that as Lunt had been but once or twice in the actual company of the conspirators, having been instantly dispatched to purchase arms for them in London, and to recruit in the same place for Irish Papists, he was not able to identify any one of the gentleman whom he was bribed to convict of high treason. To this false and infamous witness, therefore, Mr Dickenson, under disguise, addressed himself; begging, on the recommendation of Taafe, to be admitted for a stipulated pay in the number of his Honourable Henry Earl of Warrington, Baron Delamere of Dunham-Massy, Lord-Lieutenant of the County Palatine of Chester, and one of the Lords of their Majesties' most Honourable Privy-Council. Preached at Bowden in Cheshire, by Richard Wroe, D. D. and Warden of Christ's College in Manchester. London: Printed for A. and J. Churchill, at the Black Swan in Paternoster Row, MDCXCIV.