V

RELIGION IN GREAT BRITAIN AND AMERICA FROM 1689 TO 1815

Eph. ii. 18: For through Him we both have access in one Spirit unto the Father.

'WHAT I have done, I have done in the integrity of my heart.'1 These words, repeated by Archbishop Sancroft on his death-bed, might be called the motto not only of his own life, but that of a great majority of the Nonjurors. They believed that they would have violated their oath of allegiance to James II if they had taken the oaths imposed by the Government of William III. Sancroft himself had been an exemplary bishop. And it is strange that a good man like Bishop Burnet should, even in the heat of political antagonism, have misunderstood him so culpably. For Sancroft was both learned and active in well-doing; he had firmly defended the liberties of the Church and the nation; a devout member of the school of Andrewes and Laud, he had written with wonderful delicacy of those whom he calls 'our brethren the Protestant Dissenters'; munificent in his liberality, he had himself lived in such frugal simplicity that when he was uncanonically deprived of his great position he could say, 'Well, I can live on fifty pounds a year'. If he and those who followed him were mistaken and quixotic, they have left to us the great example of men who preferred what they knew to be poverty to what they believed to be perjury, and consulted conscience, whether well or ill informed, rather than comfort. Nine English bishops and

1 George D'Oyly, Life of William Sancroft, vol. ii, p. 62 (John Murray, London, 1821). D'Oyly effectually demolishes Burnet's caricature of Sancroft,

about four hundred priests retired from their posts quietly and with dignity.

For a time the Nonjurors had fifty chapels in London alone, and they made a vain attempt to secure union with the Eastern Orthodox Church. But their numbers steadily dwindled until they became extinct in the early years of the nineteenth century. The decline was inevitable. For whatever men might think of the House of Hanover, it was impossible for those who had not taken any oath of allegiance to the House of Stuart to feel exactly as the first Nonjurors felt towards the Prince of Orange, the author of the treacherous massacre of Glencoe, equally detested for his frigidity and his favouritism. But though they dwindled, the Nonjurors left behind them a long roll of names that ought not to perish. In addition to the holy and courageous Bishop Ken, there were John Kettlewell and Robert Nelson the devotional writers, Thomas Hearne the famous antiquary, Richard Rawlinson, the bishop who bequeathed to St. John's College his heart and his worldly treasure,1 and William Law, the brilliant writer and practical mystic.

The secession of the Nonjurors weakened the intellect and the piety of the Church of England; but it was some fifty years before the effect of that secession could be measured. The Church was still able to rear such bishops as Thomas Wilson (1663-1755), a true father in God to the Manx people, and Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham. Two great religious societies, that for the Propagation of the Gospel and that for Promoting Christian Knowledge, had recently been founded. Smaller societies for upholding a godly life existed in many parishes and drew numerous adherents

1 Dr. Richard Rawlinson died in 1755. His heart reposes in a marble urn in a niche in the small chapel on the north side of the sanctuary of the college chapel. The words Ubi thesaurus, ibi cor are painted below the urn. As a singular instance of academic gratitude, it may be noted that in the next century (? in 1843) the top of the monument was badly broken and perforated with a gas pipe. It was not restored until 1919.

from the lower middle and the working classes. Imposing churches were still erected. Religious books were widely read. Fasts as well as festivals were by many strictly observed. Private confession to a priest, though voluntary, was often practised. And we might have been much impressed if we had entered one of the London churches in the time of Queen Anne, let us say on a Christmas morning, the church unheated and bitterly cold, but fragrant with rosemary and bay, thronged with people at seven o'clock in the morning or at twelve, all fasting except the sick or luxurious, the small altar with its marble top covered with choice velvet and the costliest silver candle-sticks and vessels, the citizens in fine brown cloth and ladies in blue brocade, in some cases not merely kneeling but prostrating themselves and smiting their breasts as they drew near to the richly carved altar rails, murmuring the Agnus Dei and placing their hands in the form of a cross to receive the body of the Lord.

It was not the weakness but the strength of the Church that provoked the hatred of anti-Christian writers and a keen criticism of traditional beliefs, a criticism which exercised itself even within the borders of the Church.

The quest for a new Gospel and a Christ different from the Christ of the creeds was no new adventure even in the time of Queen Anne and George I. But it was pursued with an eagerness and with a learning that would surprise many of the readers of our current ecclesiastical magazines. What were the limitations of our Lord's knowledge during His ministry, and do those limitations militate against the doctrine of His Deity; how, if at all, can we attribute to Him any pre-existence; did He work miracles; can a theory of the Atonement be constructed that will avoid the conception of a vicarious sacrifice; can the doctrine of the Trinity, if true at all, be so restated as to remove all

mystery; is it quite right for a minister of religion to repeat in church, and subscribe out of church, the creeds which he does not believe?1 Such were among the problems of two hundred years ago. And the two systems known as Deism and Arianism, though opposed to each other, united in answering these questions in a tone of revolt against the Christian faith.

The revolt of the Deists was open and aggressive. We cannot call it organized: both in England and on the Continent the Deists fought singly, and if they formed groups, they did not form a party. Their work was essentially destructive, whether directed against the truth of the Pentateuch or the truth that the prophecies of the Old Testament are fulfilled in Christ, or the truth of His miracles. They ignored or directly impugned the unique value of the Holy Scriptures and some questioned even the immortality of the human soul. But they held that there is a God, and that God and duty can be known by 'the Religion of Nature'. It was their belief that God has given a moral law to man, and that this law is simply a circumstance of our actual existence, plain to every man in the world alike, and that a natural religion is superior to any revealed in the Bible and the Church.

This belief was connected with another and less prejudiced movement of ideas.

In the first half of the eighteenth century men were gaining a crude but increasing knowledge of non-Christian religions. One proof of this can be found in the great work on 'Religious Ceremonies', with copper-plates by Picart,2

1 For this, see Waterland's treatises on 'Arian Subscription' in W. Van Mildert's edition of his Works, vol. ii, pp. 281 ff. (Oxford, 1823). Those gentlemen make no scruple of subscribing to our Church's forms; it is their avowed principle that they may lawfully do it in their own sense agreeably to what they call Scripture.'

2 The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the several Nations of the known World, written originally in French, was published in a fuller form in English (Nicholas Prevost, London, 1731).

in which attempts are made to describe and illustrate all the religions of the world. The illustrations of the ceremonies of the Roman Catholics and of the Jews are peculiarly accurate and artistic, those of the Japanese and other distant races are at least the work of a very ingenious imagination. The tone of the book is more sceptical than religious, but it shows an awakening interest in the variety and unity of religious beliefs. More serious was the work of certain Jesuit authors who laid stress upon the natural good qualities of the heathen races among whom they laboured, not excluding even the American Indians. In spite of the hideous sufferings inflicted upon some members of their order by the Iroquois, we find them painting optimistic pictures of noble savages whose simple life they believed to be untainted by the corruption of civilization. In this way they quite unwittingly put an argument at the disposal of the enemies of Christianity. And so behind all the differences between Protestant and Catholic, Jew and Christian, the Bible and the Vedas, men were invited to recognize a natural religion, the happy mean between the coarseness of atheism and the artfulness of priestcraft.

Of the English Deists it is probable that the Platonic Earl of Shaftesbury and the licentious Viscount Bolingbroke did not greatly injure the religious life of their contemporaries. But the influence exercised by Toland's Christianity not Mysterious and Tindal's Christianity as old as the Creation was rapid and serious. Both these writers had been for part of their lives Roman Catholics and both assumed the mask of Christian language while denying all mystery in religion. Toland's own religion seems to have been a Pantheistic form of Unitarianism. He visited Hanover and sowed the seeds of unbelief in the soil of a decaying Lutheranism, seed which bore abundant fruit. Indeed the coincidences between English Deism and the modern Rationalism and Liberalism of Germany are highly significant. Toland and Morgan