CHAPTER XXI.
One by one in the reign of our third William the fathers of the old Dissent passed away. They just saw the morning of religious liberty, they just touched the border of the land of promise, they dwelt under its vines and fig-trees for a very little while, and then died in peace.
Philip Henry expired in the summer of 1696. A few candidates for the ministry, who had in private academies gone through what they termed a University course, were permitted to reside at Broad Oak, and to listen to the instructions of its master. “You come to me,” he would say, “as Naaman did to Elisha, expecting that I should do this and the other thing for you, and, alas! I can but say as he did: ‘Go wash in Jordan.’ Go study the Scriptures. I profess to teach no other learning but Scripture learning.”
Philip Henry reminds us of John Bunyan’s pilgrims in the land of Beulah, as we read the following passage, written not long before his death: “Methinks it is strange that it should be your lot and mine to abide so long on earth by the stuff, when so many of our friends are dividing the spoil above, but God will have it so; and to be willing to live in obedience to His holy will is as true an act of grace, as to be willing to die when He calls, especially when life is labour and sorrow. But when it is labour and joy, service to His name, and some measure of success and comfort in serving Him, when it is to stop a gap and stem a tide, it is to be rejoiced in—it is heaven upon earth.”
NONCONFORMISTS.
The shadow of death in mid-winter enveloped another scarcely less famous Puritan home. Samuel Annesley, an older man than Philip Henry by twelve years, with a ministerial history which ran far back into the troubles of the Commonwealth and Civil Wars, continued to preach in Little St. Helen’s to a congregation of wealthy citizens, amongst whom might be seen Daniel De Foe,[529] sometimes the eccentric John Dunton, and at an earlier time the almost equally eccentric Samuel Wesley, the two latter being married to two of Annesley’s daughters. Of a hardy constitution, still more indurated by severe personal habits, Annesley could bear the greatest cold without hat, gloves, or fire. He drank little besides water, and to the day of his death could read small print without spectacles.[530] The pastor’s family was large, for Dr. Manton, baptizing one of them, asked how many children he had. Annesley returned for answer, that he believed it was two dozen or a quarter of a hundred; “this reckoning children by dozens,” says Dunton, “was a thing so very uncommon, that I have heard Dr. Annesley mention it with a special remark.” He to the last retained great influence amongst the Presbyterians, having, “the care of all the churches on his mind, and being a great support of Dissenting ministers and of the Morning Lecture.” He entered his pulpit for the last time, saying, “I must work while it is day,” and died with ecstatic exclamations on his lips: “I have no doubt nor shadow of doubt—all is clear between God and my soul. He chains up Satan; he cannot trouble me. Come, dear Jesus! the nearer the more precious, and the more welcome. What manner of love is this to a poor worm! I cannot express a thousandth part of what praise is due to Thee! We know what we do when we aim at praising God for His mercies! It is but little I can give, but, Lord, help me to give Thee my all. I will die praising Thee, and rejoice that there are others that can praise Thee better. I shall be satisfied with Thy likeness! satisfied! satisfied! Oh, my dearest Jesus, I come!” The old register of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, for December, 1696, has this entry: “Samuel Annesley was buried the seventh day, from Spittle Yard.”[531]
1688–1702.
Nathaniel Vincent, when the Revolution brought him rest from spies, informers, and constables, quietly went on with his work in St. Thomas’s, Southwark, amidst the Presbyterian congregation which he had gathered; but an unhappy division before his death gave him trouble—sixty members breaking off to join another church, but no blame attached to him for this. If the eulogium pronounced by his friends be true, “he scarcely entered into any company, but he was like a box of precious ointment, and left some sweet perfume from his heavenly discourse.” Vincent’s end was sudden and premature; he had only leisure to exclaim: “I find I am dying. Lord! Lord! Lord! have mercy on my family and my congregation.” His age was but fifty-three.[532]
NONCONFORMISTS.
Dr. William Bates, a close friend of Archbishop Tillotson, retained his popularity and his renown for “silver-tongued” eloquence beyond the Revolution of 1688. As one of the preachers at Salters’ Hall after the establishment of the New Lecture there in 1694, although an old man of seventy-four, he preached to a thronged assembly; but he lived in the village of Hackney, where he ministered to a Presbyterian congregation in Mare Street.[533] Howe’s estimate of Bates’ character has been quoted in a former volume; it is sufficient here to add the following words by the same writer: “God took him, even kissed away his soul, as hath been said of those great favourites of heaven, did let him die without being sick, vouchsafed him that great privilege—which a good man would choose before many—not to outlive serviceableness. To live till one be weary of the world, not till the world be weary of him—thus he prayed wisely, thus God answered graciously.”[534] He died in July, 1699.
1688–1702.
John Howe survived his friend about five years. It appears from his allusion to “the great lights of the National Church,” how his affections lingered around those who were its ornaments, and passages occurring in his answer to De Foe, indicate Howe’s increasing tenderness towards the Church of England in his last days. He had always been a moderate Dissenter, but his moderation assumes broader dimensions than ever in that publication—the effect, I apprehend, partly of natural tenderness and partly of unpleasant circumstances. He had, from the very constitution of his mind, what many great and good men have not—a burning thirst for union, for a large fellowship of souls on earth preparatory to the final gathering of the purified and perfected. This passion increased in Howe the nearer he approached the world of light and love. He longed, as his days ebbed away, to embrace within his fellowship the good and wise of all parties; consequently lines of distinction between church and church, between sect and sect, became in his eyes paler and paler. And I cannot help seeing that the disputes amongst Nonconformist ministers in London—the unhappy divisions arising out of the Crisp controversy—vexed him exceedingly, and loosened a little the bonds which had bound him to the Independent body. A moderate Congregationalist in earlier life, he appears latterly to have sympathized most with Presbyterians. The church in Silver Street, of which he took the pastoral charge, was Presbyterian. The Salters’ Hall Lecture, with which he identified himself, was Presbyterian. Presbyterians were less opposed to the Established Church than were Independents; the latter felt no wish for comprehension, the former did; and in that wish, which the impossibility of its gratification could not quench, John Howe to the last deeply shared.
NONCONFORMISTS.
In his latter days he largely experienced the joys of religion. He seemed at that period to attain a more ethereal purity of soul, a more sublime elevation of mind, and a more seraphic glow of devotion. The ancients believed that the nearer men approach the hour of death the more divine they become, and the more piercing is their insight into the mysteries of futurity. Howe, under the influence of a divine enthusiasm, certainly appeared during the last year of his life as if the veil of flesh had been parted, and his free spirit had found a pathway which “the vulture’s eye hath never seen.” It is related that on one occasion, at the Lord’s-table, his soul was suffused with such rapture that the communicants thought his physical strength would have sunk under the weight of his preternatural emotions. And another instance of overpowering delight about the same time, is recorded by himself in a Latin note found on the blank leaf of his study Bible. After notice of a peculiarly beautiful and refreshing dream which he had some years before, he adds: “But what of the same kind I sensibly felt through the admirable bounty of my God, and the most pleasant comforting influence of the Holy Spirit, on October 22nd, 1704, far surpassed the most expressive words my thoughts can suggest. I then experienced an inexpressibly pleasant melting of heart, tears gushing out of mine eyes for joy that God should shed abroad His love abundantly through the hearts of men, and that for this very purpose mine own should be so signally possessed of and by His blessed Spirit.” One trembles at criticizing such a phenomenon, and at attempting to resolve it all into a delirium of excitement. Who that has ever mused on the nature of the human mind, on the mystery of that unseen world which presses close around it, on the piety of such a man as Howe, and on the special love which God bears to those whom he makes so like Himself, would dare to speak lightly of such an incident?
1688–1702.
Howe spent some of his closing days in the composition of a work On Patience in Expectation of Future Blessedness, expressive of his own religious experience; and it shows that such were his thoughts of heaven, such his desire to depart, that he had to practice an unwonted form of self-denial to reconcile himself to continuance in a world which so many are loth to leave. Friends conversed with him to the last, and the visit of one of them deserves special notice. Richard Cromwell called upon him in his last illness, but the words they interchanged have died away, save an indistinct echo lingering in a brief sentence by Calamy: “There was a great deal of serious discourse between them; tears were freely shed on both sides, and the parting was very solemn, as I have been informed by one that was present on the occasion.”[535]
As a proof that Howe needed patience of an unusual kind, I may mention that he said to his wife: “Though he thought he loved her as well as it was fit for one creature to love another; yet if it were put to his choice, whether to die that moment, or to live that night, and the living that night would secure the continuance of his life for seven years to come, he would choose to die that moment.” In the same spirit he remarked to an attendant one morning, after being relieved from the intense sufferings of the previous night: “He was for feeling that he was alive, though most willing to die, and lay the ‘clog of mortality aside.’” When his son, a physician, was lancing his leg to diminish his sufferings, Howe inquired what he was doing, and observed: “I am not afraid of dying, but I am afraid of pain.” Indeed, he had a peculiar sensitiveness with regard to physical agony, which seems to have been constitutional. All but joy soon afterwards terminated, for, on the 2nd of April, 1705, his spirit entered those regions of repose which he had long so fervently desired to reach.
NONCONFORMISTS.
The passing away of the old Puritans could not but produce a great effect. When the last of the Apostles left the world, those who remained in the line of succession—so far as Apostles could have any proper successors—would fail to reach the level of experience, character, and influence which their predecessors occupied. And when the last of the Protestant Reformers died, there would be a falling off in the ardour and force which marked the religious leaders of the next generation. And so, without equalizing Apostles, Reformers, and Puritans, we may say of the last, that when they were all gone—though their cause remained in the hands of men who had learned their lessons—the fire no longer burned with the glowing heat it had done before. There might be more breadth of view, there might be advancement in some respects, but there remained not the same force which had operated so mightily at an earlier period. Puritanism, as a creed, as a discipline, as a form of worship, as a religious sentiment, remained; but much of its original inspiration passed away.
Another circumstance may be noticed. The Puritans of the Commonwealth had in early life mingled socially with Anglicans. They had sat on the same forms at school, had lived under the same college roof, had preached in the same places of worship. Owen, Baxter, and Howe had all shared more or less with Churchmen in the same modes of life before the severance of 1662. Those who followed them were for the most part wholly separated from the Establishment, from its universities, its pulpits, its society, its courtesies, its atmosphere. Hence arose a personal estrangement between two great parties, in some respects more mischievous in its results than any of the controversies previously waged.
1688–1702.
There have been influences at work in Society which rarely arrest the attention of historians, because hidden in the obscure depths of common life; and yet they have had a potency of effect, beyond even some prominent events which come out as landmarks in the past. I am inclined to ascribe to the social separation of Churchmen from Nonconformists, which opened in the middle of the seventeenth century, and gaped so wide at the close—much of that mutual suspicion, and that tendency to attribute bad motives to those of a different opinion, which still prevent, more or less, a candid and charitable consideration of each others’ arguments. Friendly intercourse is a moral discipline which affects our intellectual nature, and, by softening the asperities of temper, prepares a man to meet his fellow man with less of that prejudice so common to all, which blinds one person to phases of truth discerned by another.