To this came back the following:
“Your profession of ‘seeking the truth’ is very popular, and I do not wonder to find it so often in all your writings; but then there is such a thing as ‘ever learning, and not being able to come to the knowledge of the truth.’ And it is pity, after you have been more than thirty years a teacher of others, you are yet to learn the first principles of the oracles of God. What will our hearers think of us when we succeed the greatest men of our last age in nothing else but their pulpits? Is there no certainty in the words of truth? Was Dr. Owen’s church to be taught another Jesus, that the Son and Holy Spirit were only two powers in the Divine nature? Shall the men who planted and watered so happy a part of the vineyard have all their labours rendered in vain? Shall a fountain in the same place send forth sweet water and bitter? What need is there of a charge?”[33]
On the whole, it is well to refer to this controversy. It is a painful, important item in Watts’ life, and brings out very clearly how singularly he was removed from irritable passions, and it sadly reveals how impossible it seems even for the most gentle natures to escape the venom and the vileness of the “perils of false brethren.”
Bradbury unquestionably was firmly attached to evangelical truth, so far as he knew it, and his discourses in the two volumes called “The Mystery of Godliness, Considered in Sixty-one Sermons,” are certainly interesting, suggestive, and even admirable specimens of preaching; but, we have said, he was chiefly known as a political preacher. His printed discourses contain few intimations of that wit which was a favourite weapon with him in the pulpit, and of which we have some indications in the sermon entitled “The Ass and the Serpent,” a comparison between the tribes of Issachar and Dan in their regard for civil liberty—a sermon, like all those in the volume which contains it, devoted to rousing the spirit of the times in which he lived. Regularly as the fifth of November came round, he commemorated the day in a sermon, and afterwards adjourned with his friends to dine at a tavern, where, it is said, he always sung the national song, “The Roast Beef of Old England;” there, no doubt, jest and joke passed round pretty freely, for, as we have intimated, he had a sprightly wit and a copious flow of eloquence. Watts gently remonstrated with him for these displays, to which he replied in his vehement and peppery style. George Whitefield, at a later period, more strongly remonstrated with him on his conduct in this particular, but not apparently with much effect. It is said that upon the death of Queen Anne, an incident to which we have already referred, he took for his text on the occasion of her funeral sermon, “Go, see now this cursed woman and bury her, for she is a king’s daughter.” The story is exceedingly likely, for he belonged to a race of men not indisposed to misuse Scripture after that unbecoming fashion; and we may surely say, notwithstanding the ominous shadows which brooded over the closing years of a reign commenced with so much promise, the anecdote, even the possibility that it may be true, testifies to the cruel coarseness, the low profane jocularity, and ungrateful injustice of the man. He was a hearty politician, to whom all refinements of speech or sentiment were unknown, and, right or wrong, he plunged on in a reckless kind of fashion. He adopted as his motto, Pro Christo et patriâ, For Christ and my country. Charity may be permitted to hope that he, at any rate, thought the motto did not unworthily represent the man, if sometimes in his conduct he seems somewhat unworthily to represent the motto. And while Watts was pursuing his studies in scholarly seclusion, never knowing the happiness of robust health, and, although a firm Nonconformist, on good terms with bishops and ministers of the Church of England, and ministers and members of many communions of Christians, Bradbury mixed with freedom with the moving parties in the City, and was ever ready to lift up his voice loudly about all the political circumstances of the passing hours. Thus the two men, although ministers of the same order, within a very short distance of each other, were in their sympathies wide apart; they desired, indeed, the same great ends, but the roads they took to their attainment were widely different. It is still singular and unaccountable, but for the personal motives we have assigned above, that Bradbury should have expressed himself with so much bitterness and hostility concerning his old friend, whose principles, neither in religion nor politics, could ever have been at any very great remove from his own; but so it is, that amidst the multitude of friends that honoured and esteemed Watts highly for his work’s sake, we find Bradbury standing aside like a very Shimei pouring upon him his perpetually reiterated torrent of contempt, obloquy, and scorn, and no motive appears but the dangerous one which influences three-fourths of all the evil and hatred in the world; jealousy of a rank for which he was unfit, and genius to which he could not attain. On the whole, it may be said of Bradbury, in the language of an old English poet, he was “like a pair of snuffers, he snips the filth in other men, and retains it in himself;” it could not be said of him “the snuffers were of pure gold.” As Archbishop Abbott says of Jonah, in his sermons on the prophet: “Some drams and grains of gold appear in him and his action, but dross is there by pounds; little wine, but store of water; some wheat, but chaff enough.”
CHAPTER XI.
His Times.
Take the life of almost any man who has stood in any relation to the thought and intelligence of his times, in any period of English history, and it is interesting to regard him by the light of the events flowing on around him. Watts was almost a literary solitary; he cannot be referred to as greatly influencing the times in which he lived, but an outline of his life is incomplete if we give no reference to the events of his time. From the last years of the reign of Charles II. to the closing years of George II. constitutes the era of Watts. Every age seems eminently important to its actors—sometimes even to spectators—and yet that age stands out with singular distinctness. How different the times of Watts’ birth and those of his death: the infant in the arms of a weeping mother, beneath the bars of the dungeon of the imprisoned Nonconformist, and the old man, that same infant, passing away, with the great Methodist movement rising into activity over the whole nation. A little room, scarcely tolerated in Southampton, where a few persecuted Nonconformists assembled together, and large chapels, capable of holding thousands, rising amidst the far-off wastes of Northern Yorkshire and Western Cornwall, and a sudden burst of religious vitality finding vent in hymns and meetings over the whole country.
If the change in the aspect of religious life was remarkable, not less remarkable was the change, or rather perhaps we ought to say the changes, which had been brought about in the political. The period of Watts’ childhood was the most ominous, unhappy, and unsettled in English story; men knew not what to expect, they knew not whither they were drifting. Those were the days of the great Monmouth Rebellion and Jeffreys’ “Bloody Assize;” the days of the execution of Algernon Sidney and Lord William Russell, the days of Titus Oates. The mind of England was full of plots, and the fear and the shadow of plots, succeeded by internal discords, and a disunited front to possible external foes. Well has it been said, “It was high time that James should go; it was time that William should come.”