CHAPTER XXII.
We have completed the circle of theological schools. Many illustrations of religious character and experience growing out of the principles now explained, or rather, in some cases, producing sympathy with them, have been already exhibited. To give completeness to the task I have undertaken, it is desirable that there should be added some other biographical illustrations, and that they should be brought together in immediate connection with the forms of opinion to which they belong.
I may again begin with the Anglicans, and as the examples of the class hitherto have been clerical, I shall now select examples from the laity.
ISAAK WALTON.
Isaak Walton deserves to be taken first. Disliking “the active Romanists,” averse, perhaps still more, to the “restless Nonconformists,” he would rank himself as “one of the passive and peaceable Protestants;” but the Anglican tincture of his Protestantism is visible in the whole of his writings. Without giving to the world any theological treatise, or entering into any ecclesiastical controversy, he has diffused his religious sentiments with singular sweetness and purity over his works, so as to leave no doubt respecting their distinctive colour. How far the influence of his parentage and education might contribute to the formation of his character we do not know; but no doubt the natural bent of his mind, his taste for quiet contemplation, his reverence for antiquity, his disposition to submit to authority, his faculty of imagination, and his taste for music, had prepared him for those paths of faith and worship in which, through a long life, he loved to walk. In addition to this, we should remember his early, as well as his later friendships, with certain distinguished members of the Anglican communion.
In his Elegy on Dr. Donne, he exclaims—
“Oh do not call
Grief back by thinking on his funeral,
Forget he loved me—
Forget his powerful preaching, and forget
I am his convert:”—
words which indicate the writer’s spiritual obligation to that eminent orator. Walton’s marriage with his first wife brought him into “happy affinity” with the descendants of Archbishop Cranmer; and to this circumstance is attributed the origin of Walton’s Life of Hooker. The marriage with his second wife—half-sister to Bishop Ken—placed him, in his latter days, upon intimate terms with that holy prelate. Morley, Sanderson, and King were amongst his endeared associates.
Walton’s Lives give us glimpses of himself: for he is one of those artists who introduce their own portrait in a corner of their pictures. Of all his heroes, Bishop Sanderson was the man respecting whom he knew most; and, at the close of his memoir, Walton touchingly reveals his own spiritual aspiration:—“’Tis now too late to wish that my life may be like his, for I am in the eighty-fifth year of my age; but I humbly beseech Almighty God, that my death may; and do as earnestly beg of every reader to say, Amen.—‘Blessed is the man in whose spirit there is no guile.’” (Psalm xxxii. 2.)
His Complete Angler, or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, is a mirror of his life. His moral and religious sympathies are seen gleaming over his pages from beginning to end; and as the revelation of an inner life, the first part by himself should be compared with the second part by Cotton; we see at once that he was not born to be a reformer, that he was not one of those who can grapple with falsehood and corruption, and that if all had resembled him, England’s destiny would have been humiliating indeed,—we feel that in his case absence from any active part in the controversies of his time, can be regarded neither as a virtue nor as a vice, neither as censurable nor as admirable, but simply as the operation of a natural tendency.
Being what he was, he loved the quiet nooks and corners of human experience and interest, and in every place manifested purity, gentleness, meekness, and charity; as he wandered along the banks of the Lea, or sat in the fishing house beside the Dove, Scripture thoughts, like flowers, bright and sweet, entwined about the trellis-work of his cherished recreations; sacred thoughts, of the quaintest kind, gathered round his rod, and his fish-hooks, and that “most honest, ingenuous, quiet, and harmless art of angling.” “Evil communications, which corrupt good manners,” filled him with sadness. “Such discourse,” he observes, in one of his walks, “as we heard last night, it infects others, the very boys will learn to talk and swear as they heard mine host, and another of the company that shall be nameless; I am sorry the other is a gentleman, for less religion will not save their souls than a beggar’s; I think more will be required at the last great day.” He counted every misery he missed a new mercy, was thankful for health, competence, and a quiet conscience, and dwelt, with sympathetic joy, on the character of the meek man who has no “turbulent, repining, or vexatious thoughts,” who possesses what he has “with such a quietness as makes his very dreams pleasing both to God and himself.” “When,” he says in another place, “I would beget content, and increase confidence in the power, and wisdom, and providence of Almighty God, I will walk the meadows of some gliding stream, and there contemplate the lilies that take no care, and those very many other various little living creatures, that are not only created, but fed, man knows not how, by the goodness of the God of nature, and therefore trust in Him. This is my purpose, and so ‘let everything that hath breath praise the Lord;’ and let the blessing of St. Peter’s Master be with mine.”
Walton, at his death—amidst the great frost of 1683—could not but enter that world of perfect harmony to which his thoughts and desires had so often ascended as he listened to the nightingale. “He that at midnight, when the very labourer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have very often, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say; Lord, what music hast thou provided for the saints in Heaven, when thou affordest bad men such music on earth?” We now turn to another and somewhat different type of the same school.
JOHN EVELYN.
John Evelyn lost his mother when he had reached his fifteenth year; and her beautiful memory, as of one “whose constitution inclined to a religious melancholy, or pious sadness,” seemed to have remained with him all his days, giving that plaintiveness to his piety, which, as a richly-coloured thread, appears interwoven with the brightest joys of his calm yet active life. He records her death with reverential affection, and how she summoned her children around her, and expressed herself in a manner so heavenly, with instructions so pious and Christian, as made them strangely sensible of the extraordinary loss then becoming imminent:—after which, she gave to each a ring, with her blessing. Evelyn lost his father at twenty-one; and again he minutely relates the tale of his sorrow, how, at night, they followed the mourning hearse to the church at Wotton, where, after a sermon and funeral oration by the minister, the ashes of the husband were mingled with those of the wife. “Thus,” he adds, “we were bereft of both our parents, in a period when we[574] most of all stood in need of their counsel and assistance, especially myself, of a raw, vain, uncertain, and very unwary inclination; but so it pleased God to make trial of my conduct in a conjuncture of the greatest and most prodigious hazard that ever the youth of England saw; and, if I did not, amidst all this, impeach my liberty nor my virtue with the rest who made shipwreck of both, it was more the infinite goodness and mercy of God, than the least providence or discretion of mine own, who now thought of nothing but the pursuit of vanity, and the confused imaginations of young men.”[575]
JOHN EVELYN.
The mercy of Providence, the truths of Christianity, and the grace of the Holy Spirit, kept him amidst his extensive travels, amidst his intercourse with men of different countries and classes, and especially amidst the temptations of fashionable society at a period when such as frequented courts were commonly addicted to vice. Notwithstanding the great moral peril to which Evelyn stood exposed, he preserved a pure mind and a virtuous reputation. He loved the Episcopal Church of England with a jealous affection,—finding in her liturgy what was congenial with his spiritual taste; deriving nourishment for his spiritual sensibilities from the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper administered according to her ritual; and, in short, living in the culture of those habits which are distinctive of Anglican piety. He did not, indeed, refuse to attend his parish church during the Commonwealth, and to hear a Presbyterian or Independent minister; but this proceeded from prudence rather than from sympathy. Evelyn’s Catholic feeling shrank from Puritanism; his charity leaned towards Roman Catholics. It is with regard to such that he says:—“For the rest we must commit to Providence the success of times and mitigation of proselytical fervours, having for my own particular a very great charity for all who sincerely adore the blessed Jesus, our common and dear Saviour, as being full of hope that God (however the present zeal of some, and the scandals taken by others at the instant [present] affliction of the Church of England may transport them), will at last compassionate our infirmities, clarify our judgments, and make abatement for our ignorances, superstructures, passions, and errors of corrupt times and interests, of which the Romish persuasion can no way acquit herself, whatever the present prosperity and secular polity may pretend. But God will make all things manifest in His own time, only let us possess ourselves in patience and charity. This will cover a multitude of imperfections.”[576]
Like other persons of his cast of sentiment, like the nuns at Gidding eulogized by Isaak Walton and condemned by the Puritans, like the Anglican sisterhoods of the present day, Evelyn had a liking for a semi-monastic life; and in the year 1659, when affairs were unsettled in England, he proposed to Robert Boyle, an elaborate plan for an establishment of this description. There was to be a house erected in the midst of a tall wood, and “opposite to the house, towards the wood, should be erected a pretty chapel; and at equal distances, even within the flanking walls of the square, six apartments or cells for the members of the society, and not contiguous to the pavilion; each whereof should contain a small bedchamber, an outward room, a closet, and a private garden, somewhat after the manner of the Carthusians.”[577] There was to be maintained at the public charge a “chaplain well qualified.” There were to be prayers in the chapel morning and evening; and a weekly fast and communion once every fortnight or month at least, with divers arrangements for study and recreations. The scheme came to nothing, but it shows the bent of its author’s inclinations. Whatever may be thought of them, one impression only can be justly derived from reading on the white marble, covering his tomb, in Wotton Church, the record of his death:—“He fell asleep the 27th day of February, 170⅚, being the 86th year of his age, in full hope of a glorious resurrection, through faith in Jesus Christ. Living in an age of extraordinary events and revolutions, he learnt (as himself asserted) this truth—which, pursuant to his intention, is here declared—‘That all is vanity which is not honest, and that there is no solid wisdom but in real piety.’”[578]
JOHN EVELYN.
The cast of Evelyn’s religion is further illustrated in that of his friend Margaret Blagge,[579] afterwards the wife of Sidney Godolphin. When he heard some distinguished persons speaking of her, he fancied she was “some airy thing that had more wit than discretion.” But, making a visit to Whitehall with his wife, he fell in with the youthful maid of honour, and “admired her temperance, and took especial notice, that, however wide or indifferent the subject of their discourse was amongst the rest, she would always direct it to some religious conclusion, and so temper and season her replies, as showed a gracious heart, and that she had a mind wholly taken up with heavenly thoughts.” Their acquaintance was ratified by a quaint solemnity; after a formal solicitation, that he would look upon her thenceforth as his child, she took a sheet of paper, upon which Evelyn had been carelessly sketching the shape of an altar, and wrote these words: “Be this a symbol of inviolable friendship: Margaret Blagge, 16th October, 1672;” and underneath, “For my brother E——.” Something of romance is visible in the singular attachment which this girl formed for her amiable and pious friend; and it issued in his guiding her affairs, in his increasing her wisdom, and in his ripening her piety. Never at home amidst the gaieties of Whitehall, Margaret, after seven years’ experience, felt that she could no longer endure living at Court, and therefore earnestly sought, and at length, with difficulty, obtained Royal permission to retire. On a Sunday night, after most of the company were departed, Evelyn waited on her down to her chamber, which she had no sooner entered, than falling on her knees, she blessed God, as for a signal deliverance: “She was come,” she said, “out of Egypt, and was now in the way to the land of promise.” Tears trickled down her cheeks, “like the dew of flowers, making a lovely grief,” as she parted from one of the ladies who had a spirit kindred to her own. She found a home with Lady Berkeley, and what she especially sought, time for meditation and prayer; indeed the love of seclusion so increased, that she manifested a strong tinge of asceticism. Evelyn, in this respect more sober-minded, availed himself of his influence, and with success, to persuade her to renounce a celibate life, to which she seemed strongly disposed; and she came to see that union with a virtuous and religious person, would tend rather to promote than to retard her spiritual progress. Accordingly, she was married privately in the Temple Church, on the 16th of May, being Ascension Day, “both the blessed pair receiving the Holy Sacrament, and consecrating the solemnity with a double mystery;”[580] but, in a letter written shortly after, she showed what continued to be the main bent of her mind. “I have this day,” she says, addressing Evelyn, “thought your thoughts, wished I dare say your wishes, which were, that I might every day sit looser and looser to the things of this world; discerning as every day I do, the folly and vanity of it; how short all its pleasures, how trifling all its recreations, how false most of its friendships, how transitory everything in it; and on the contrary, how sweet the service of God, how delightful the meditating on His Word, how pleasant the conversation of the faithful, and, above all, how charming prayer, how glorious our hopes, how gracious our God is to all His children, how gentle His corrections, and how frequently, by the first invitations of His Spirit, He calls us from our low designs to those great and noble ones of serving Him, and attaining eternal happiness.”[581]
MARGARET GODOLPHIN.
Margaret Godolphin became an exemplary matron. She instructed her servants, she cultivated domestic religion, she breathed towards everybody a kind considerate spirit, and with all this condescension as a mistress, she blended the utmost devotion and tenderness as a wife. She also assisted the poor, and in the spirit of Elizabeth Fry, visited the hospital and the prison: and Evelyn could produce a list of above thirty, restrained for debts in several prisons, which she paid and compounded for at once; and another list of no fewer than twenty-three poor creatures whom she clad at one time. She employed “most part of Lent in working for poor people, cutting out and making waistcoats and other necessary coverings, which she constantly distributed amongst them, like another Dorcas, spending much of her time, and no little of her money, in relieving, visiting, and inquiring of them out. And whilst she was thus busy with her needle, she would commonly have one or other read by her, through which means and a happy memory, she had almost the whole Scriptures by heart, and was so versed in Dr. Hammond’s Annotations and other practical books, controversies, and cases, as might have stocked some who pass for no small Divines: not to mention sundry Divine penitential and other hymns, breathing of a spirit of holiness, and such as showed the tenderness of her heart, and wonderful love to God.”[582]
Within a few days after the birth of her only child, she expired, September 9, 1678, in the twenty-fifth year of her age, and she lies buried in the church of Breague, in Cornwall: her tomb reminding us of the pillar over Rachel’s grave.
As in the Court of Arcadius, we meet with the pious Olympias in contrast with the Empress Eudoxia, and her ladies,—so, in the Court of Charles II., we discover a Margaret Godolphin in contrast with a Castelmaine and a Gwynn.
SIR MATTHEW HALE.
There are, in every age, Christians whom it would be difficult to connect with one particular school of theological sentiment, because they have sympathies with all good men, and do not adopt the peculiarities of any class. Such a person was Sir Matthew Hale. No ecclesiastical history of the period—unless written upon some miserable sectarian principle—could be considered complete which did not include a reference to so eminently excellent a man. His parents dying when he was very young, he became dependent for his education upon a relative who was a Puritan minister, and this circumstance may account for some points in his character which present a rather Puritanical appearance. After being addicted to the gaieties of youth, he was, whilst at Oxford, converted, in heart and life, as the result, partly at least, of an affecting circumstance which occurred at a convivial meeting when he was present. A boon-companion fell down in a state of death-like insensibility, when Hale, overwhelmed with remorse and pity, retired into another room, and, prostrating himself before God, asked forgiveness for his own sins, and interceded earnestly for the restoration of his friend. A sudden spiritual crisis like that, when the soul is suddenly fused, and poured into a new mould, is sure to be remembered afterwards, and to influence all subsequent religious feeling. As it has been justly said, a man no more forgets the moral deliverance it involves, than he forgets an escape from shipwreck,[583] and therefore Hale’s conversion gave a marked evangelical impress to his subsequent experience. He glorified the riches of Divine grace, and delighted “in studying the Mystery of Christ.” He found in God an overflowing fulness which fills up the intensest gaspings and outgoings of the soul, a fulness which continues to eternity, ever increasing gratitude, adoration, and love. Throughout a course of remarkable diligence in business, this illustrious Judge manifested no less fervour of spirit. Prayer “gave a tincture of devotion” to his secular employments—it was “a Christian chemistry converting those acts which are materially natural and civil, into acts truly and formally religious, whereby all life is rendered interpretatively a service to Almighty God.” It was a sun which “gave light in the midst of darkness, a fortress that kept safe in the greatest danger, that never could be taken unless self-betrayed,”—a “Goshen to, and within itself, when the rest of the world, without and round about a man, is like an Egypt for plagues and darkness.” “To lose this,” Hale went on to say, “is, like Samson, to lose the lock wherein next to God our strength lieth.” Such expressions as these have a Puritanical sound in the ears of many, and there are other things noticeable in his memoirs in harmony with such expressions:—for it is stated, as very probable, that he took the Solemn League and Covenant, it is certain that he did not approve of the rigours of the Act of Uniformity, and he severely condemned the conduct of many of the clergy. He had also the deepest reverence for the Sabbath, he cherished an intense aversion to Romanism, he cultivated, with great respect, a friendship with Richard Baxter—to whom he acknowledged himself under great theological obligations—and, if we may mention so minute a circumstance, which however is significant—“in common prayer, he behaved himself as others, saving that to avoid the differencing of the Gospels from the Epistles, and the bowing at the name of Jesus, from the names Christ, Saviour, God, &c., he would use some equality in his gestures and stand up at the reading of all God’s Word alike.” These facts separate him from the Anglo-Catholic division of the Church of England, yet they are not sufficient to identify him with the fully developed, and sharply defined Puritan party. For he did not use such religious language in conversation, as satisfied them—they considered him too reticent on spiritual subjects;—and, as Baxter says, those that took no men for religious, who frequented not private meetings, regarded him simply, as “an excellently righteous man.” Baxter himself seems to have wished, that Hale had been a little more communicative on spiritual matters, instead of confining himself in conversation to what is philosophical in religion. The Divine remarks, respecting the Judge:—“At last I understood that his averseness to hypocrisy made him purposely conceal the most of such of his practical thoughts and works as the world now findeth by his Contemplations and other writings.” In some respects, Sir Matthew sympathized with the Latitudinarian school—for, like them, he believed, “that true religion consisteth in great plain necessary things, the life of faith and hope, the love of God and man, an humble self-denying mind, with mortification of worldly affection—and that the calamity of the Church, and withering of religion hath come from proud and busy men’s additions, that cannot give peace to themselves and others by living in love and quietness on this Christian simplicity of faith and practice, but vex and turmoil the Church with these needless and hurtful superfluities.”[584] Nor did he believe in any divinely authorized form of ecclesiastical government; although he greatly preferred, on grounds of expediency, the Episcopalian polity to any other. Yet these points of affinity do not justify us in numbering him with the Latitudinarians any more than with the Puritans, because there was in him more of evangelical sentiment, more of attachment to dogmatic truth, and more of spiritual fervour, than belonged to the former description of thinkers. He counted amongst his religious friends, the High Churchman, Seth Ward, Bishop of Salisbury, as well as the Broad Churchman, Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, and the Low Churchman, Richard Baxter, who refused to be a Bishop at all. It suggests rebuke to all bigoted partizans, to remember that a layman of the latter half of the seventeenth century most renowned for his wisdom, justice, charity and piety, was one of whom it is equally true that he can be claimed by no particular party, and yet can be claimed by all single-minded Christians.
HENRY MORE.
It is little more than a nominal departure from the purpose of selecting lay examples in this chapter, to introduce Dr. Henry More, as another distinctive type of the spiritual life of the period—inasmuch as he was a clergyman in little more than name, and constantly eschewed public office. For after being appointed to a stall at Gloucester, he quickly resigned it to another person, and a deanery, a provostship, and two bishoprics he successively refused. Retirement and study were his delight. He has been commonly numbered amongst the members of the Cambridge school, but he—and there were others of that school more or less like him—ought to be regarded as a most decided Mystic. As an Eton boy, when wandering in the quaint old quadrangle, or in the beautiful playing fields, with his head on one side, and kicking the stones with his feet, he had, he says, a deep consciousness of the Divine presence; and believed that no deed, or word, or thought could be hidden from the Invisible yet All-seeing One. He early conceived an antipathy to Calvinism, in which he had been educated, and plunged himself, to use his own words, “head over ears” into the study of philosophy. He forsook Aristotle for Plato, and found a most congenial teacher in John Tauler, whose deep spiritual thoughts he drank in with avidity.
He was a philosopher, a friend of Cudworth, and a correspondent with Descartes. Imagination largely influenced his opinions, and in his enthusiastic reveries,—under the influence of which, he seemed unconscious of the outer world, and fancied himself to be living in a trance,—he conceived that he possessed an ethereal body, which “exhaled the perfume of violets.” Yet, Mystic as he was, he could criticise other Mystics, and find just the same fault with them, which others of a different turn of mind would find with him.
More says of Jacob Behmen:—He, “I conceive is to be reckoned in the number of those whose imaginative faculty has the pre-eminence above the rational: and though he was an holy and good man, his natural complexion, notwithstanding, was not destroyed, but retained its property still; and therefore his imagination, being very busy about Divine things, he could not, without a miracle, fail of becoming an enthusiast.”
It is further curious to couple with this, More’s opinion of the Quakers:—“To tell you my opinion of that sect which are called Quakers, though I must allow that there may be some amongst them good and sincere-hearted men, and it may be nearer to the purity of Christianity for the life and power of it than many others; yet, I am well assured, that the generality of them are prodigiously melancholy, and some few perhaps possessed with the devil.”[585]
As his philosophy is poetical so his poetry is philosophical; and his Psychozoia, or Life of the Soul, puzzles, if it does not weary its readers: yet it leaves the impression that he “believed the magic wonders which he sung;” and it has been well compared to a grotto, “whose gloomy labyrinths we might be curious to explore, for the strange and mystic associations they excite.”[586]
His philosophy and his poetry touched his religion, and he was wont to speak in language very different from that of the Anglican on the one hand, and from that of the Puritan on the other. “The oracle of God,” he remarked, “is not to be heard but in His Holy Temple, that is to say in a good and holy man thoroughly sanctified.” “This or such like rhapsodies,” he observes, relative to his Dialogues, “do I often sing to myself in the silent night, or betimes in the morning, at break of day, subjoining always, that of our Saviour, as a suitable Epiphonema to all, ‘Abraham saw my day afar, and rejoiced at it.’ At this window, I take breath, while I am choked and stifled with the crowd, and stench of the daily wickedness of this present evil world; and am almost wearied out with the tediousness and irksomeness of this my earthly pilgrimage.”[587] More felt deeply the sins and sorrows which he could not remove, yet a strain of holy peace ran through such melancholy; and it was doubtless from experience that he exclaimed—“Even the most miserable objects in this present life cannot divest him (the good man) of his happiness, but rather modify it, the sweetness of his spirit being melted into a kindly compassion in the behalf of others, whom, if he be able to help, it is a greater accession to his joy; and if he cannot, the being conscious to himself of so sincere a compassion, and so harmonious and suitable to the present state of things, carries along with it some degree of pleasure, like mournful notes of music, exquisitely well fitted to the sadness of the ditty.”[588] Yet More’s life was not all sentiment; he was charitable to the needy, and “his chamber door was an hospital.”
His death was like his life, holy, peaceful, happy; and even in his last hours, he could not help expressing his Christian hope in philosophical language—uttering the beautiful words of Cicero, which come so near the Gospel, “O præclarum illum diem,” &c., and declaring that he was going to join that blessed company, with whom, in a quarter of an hour, he would be as familiar as if he had known them for years.[589]
SIR THOMAS BROWNE.
Our notice of the phases of religious life in the Church of England would be defective, did we omit all reference to a distinguished, but eccentric individual, who has left his mark upon our religious literature. Eccentricity is sometimes the main distinction of a man’s religious life, and even in such cases there may be no room to doubt the genuineness of personal piety; but in the instance to which we now refer, there were distinguishing qualities of another and a worthier nature. Sir Thomas Browne was charged with being a Quaker, on what ground it is difficult to say; and a Roman Catholic, although the Pope honoured his Religio Medici with a place in the Index Expurgatorius; and an atheist, whilst all his writings bear witness to his reverence for the Divine Being.
Dr. Johnson has vindicated the character of this remarkable person by referring to passages in which he says, that he was of the belief taught by our Saviour, disseminated by the Apostles, authorized by the fathers, and confirmed by the martyrs; that though paradoxical in philosophy, he loved in Divinity to keep the beaten road, and pleased himself with the idea; that he had no taint of heresy, schism, or error.[590] But a more satisfactory vindication is supplied in his memorable resolutions, never to let a day pass “without calling upon God in a solemn formed prayer seven times within the compass thereof,” after the example of David and Daniel; always to magnify God, in the night, on his “dark bed when he could not sleep,” and to pray in all places where privacy invited—in any house, highway, or street; to know no street or passage in the City of Norwich, where he lived, which might not witness that he remembered God and his Saviour in it; never to miss the sacrament upon the accustomed days; to intercede for his patients, for the minister after preaching, and for all people in tempestuous weather, lightning and thunder, that God would have mercy upon their souls, bodies, and goods; and “upon sight of beautiful persons, to bless God in His creatures, to pray for the beauty of their souls, and to enrich them with inward graces to be answerable unto the outward; upon sight of deformed persons, to send them inward graces, and enrich their souls, and give them the beauty of the resurrection.”[591] A dash of eccentricity is obvious in these his pious regulations for the government of life, such as might be expected in the author of the Hydriotaphia and the Garden of Cyrus; but there is no reason whatever to question their perfect sincerity, or to suspect his affection towards the Church of England—with respect to which he said that he was a sworn subject to her faith, subscribing unto her Articles, and endeavouring to observe her constitutions.[592]
SIR THOMAS BROWNE.
We notice with deep regret an absence in his writings of all reference to certain important evangelical doctrines, and only a slight allusion to others. Besides this grave omission, we find a positive statement of opinions generally pronounced to be heterodox, namely, that the soul sleeps with the body until the last day, that the damned will at last be released from torture, and that prayers may be offered for the dead; and these opinions he implies he had entertained himself, but he insists in his own characteristic style, that he never maintained them with pertinacity; that without the addition of new fuel, “they went out insensibly of themselves;” and that they were not heresies in him, but bare errors, and single lapses of the understanding, without a joint depravity of the will. “Those,” he remarks, “have not only depraved understandings, but diseased affections, which cannot enjoy a singularity without a heresy, or be the author of an opinion, without they be of a sect also.”[593] Browne entertained comprehensive and liberal views of the extent of salvation, saying, that though “the bridge is narrow, the passage strait unto life—yet those who do confine the Church of God either to particular nations, Churches, or families, have made it far narrower than our Saviour ever meant it.” “There must be therefore more than one St. Peter. Particular Churches and sects usurp the gates of heaven, and turn the key against each other, and thus we go to heaven against each other’s wills, conceits, and opinions, and, with as much uncharity as ignorance, do err, I fear, in points not only of our own, but one another’s salvation.” He professes a consciousness of there being, not only in philosophy, but in Divinity, “sturdy doubts and boisterous objections, wherewith the unhappiness of our knowledge too nearly acquainted us;” and declares that, after having in his earlier years, “read all the books against religion, he was in the latter part of his life, averse from controversies.”[594]
We dismiss the character of Sir Thomas Browne by quoting the following passage, with which he concludes his Religio Medici, and which taken alone is sufficient to show the devoutness of the man’s spirit:—“Bless me in this life with but the peace of my conscience, command of my affections, the love of Thyself, and my dearest friends, and I shall be happy enough to pity Cæsar! These are, O Lord, the humble desires of my most reasonable ambition, and all I dare call happiness on earth, wherein I set no rule or limit to Thy hand or providence. Dispose of me according to the wisdom of Thy pleasure. Thy will be done, though in my own undoing.”[595]
COUNTESS OF WARWICK.
The Countess Dowager of Warwick—seventh daughter of Richard, first Earl of Cork—died in 1678, and remained in the Church of England to the close of her life. Her education, her conversion, her abstinence, her inward beauty, her love to souls, her family government, together with her justice and prudence, have been duly celebrated by Samuel Clarke, in his Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons; and her Diary, extensively circulated of late years, has made this lady very widely known. “She was neither of Paul, or of Apollos, or of Cephas, but only of Christ. Her name was Christian, and her surname Catholic. She had a large and unconfined soul, not hemmed in or pounded up within the circle of any man’s name.” She bountifully relieved both Conformist and Nonconformist ministers; but she “very inoffensively regularly and devoutly observed the orders of the Church of England, in its liturgy and public service, which she failed not to attend twice a day, with exemplary reverence. Yet was she far from placing religion in ritual observances.”[596]
“She needed neither borrowed shades, nor reflexious lights, to set her off, being personally great in all natural endowments and accomplishments of soul and body, wisdom, beauty, favour, and virtue. Great by her tongue, for never woman used one better, speaking so gracefully, promptly, discreetly, pertinently, holily, that I have often admired the edifying words that proceeded from her mouth. Great by her pen, as you may (ex pede Herculem) discover by that little taste of it, the world hath been happy in, the hasty fruit of one or two interrupted hours after supper, which she professed to me, with a little regret, when she was surprised with its sliding into the world without her knowledge, or allowance, and wholly beside her expectation. Great, by being the greatest mistress and promotress, not to say the foundress and inventress of a new science—the art of obliging; in which she attained that sovereign perfection, that she reigned over all their hearts with whom she did converse. Great in her nobleness of living and hospitality. Great in the unparalleled sincerity of constant, faithful, condescending friendship, and for that law of kindness which dwelt in her lips and heart. Great in her dexterity of management. Great in her quick apprehension of the difficulties of her affairs, and where the stress and pinch lay, to untie the knot, and loose and ease them. Great in the conquest of herself. Great in a thousand things beside, which the world admires as such: but she despised them all, and counted them but loss and dung in comparison of the fear of God, and the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus.”[597]
Before concluding this review of different forms assumed by personal religion in the national Church, at least one word is due to a remarkable instance of conversion, in the case of the Earl of Rochester, whose deep repentance and Christian faith, after a career of reckless vice, have been made familiar to the world through the memoir of him written by Bishop Burnet. Nor should Ley, Earl of Marlborough, less known to posterity, be entirely overlooked; for, after having contemned religion, he was “brought to a different sense of things, upon real conviction, even in full health, some time before he was killed in the sea-fight at Southold Bay, 1665.”[598] Neither can I omit all notice of that quiet, unobtrusive piety which in those days adorned some in the higher walks of life; for example, “the Lord Crew,” of whom, in a contemporary diary, it is said,—“Friday, December 12th, 1679. The Lord Crew died, who had been very eminent in his age for holiness and charity; and at, and in his death, for useful and suitable instructions to those about him, and for well-grounded peace, and solid comfort for himself.”[599] Much of the religion in the Church of England, however, bore a very different impress. Many were of the same type as William Cavendish, the loyal Marquis of Newcastle, of whom Clarendon says: “He loved monarchy, as it was the foundation and support of his own greatness; and the Church, as it was well constituted for the splendour and security of the Crown; and religion, as it cherished and maintained that order and obedience that was necessary to both; without any other passion for the particular opinions which were grown up in it, and distinguished it into parties, than as he detested whatsoever was like to disturb the public peace.”[600]
THEOLOGICAL DIVERGENCES.
These notices of persons, all of them members of the Church of England, present great differences of character. As amongst the Divines described in a former chapter, we observed, in connection with their maintenance of the established Episcopal order and government, their use of the same formularies, and their subscription to the same standards of faith, a wide divergence of theological belief, and the indications of a considerable diversity of religious sentiment; so amongst the laity, as might be expected from the circumstance of no subscription being exacted in their case, we discover a still greater divergence of belief, and a still greater variety of sentiment. Not to speak here of that deep inner life, existent in the Church of Christ under various outward forms, to which I shall refer hereafter, I may observe now that the only manifest resemblance amongst those who have just been indicated, consisted in the uniformity of their worship, and in their submission to the same kind of Church government. The High Church, the Low Church, and the Broad Church of the nineteenth century find their historical parallels in the seventeenth, although by no means in the same measure of development; and if legal questions touching Church matters were not raised at that time as they are at present, the same radical differences between one section and another existed then as now.