No wonder therefore, reverend Sir, that it hath gladdened the hearts of many, and afforded matter of uncommon joy and thanksgiving to the Father of mercies and God of all consolation, to hear, that for some time past there hath been a more than common religious concern and zeal for promoting their own and others salvation, among some of the sons of the Prophets. What a pleasing prospect hath hereby been opened of a future blessing to the rising generation! A blessing, which we well hoped, would be not less salutary and beneficial to the moral, than the new cruse of salt was to part of the natural world, which the Prophet Elisha, when complaint was made that the water was naught and the ground barren, cast into the spring of waters, with a “thus saith the Lord, there shall not be from thence, any more dearth or barren land: so the waters were healed unto this day.”
But alas! how is this general joy damped, and the pleasing prospect almost totally eclipsed, by a late melancholy scene exhibited in that very place, from whence, as from a fountain, many of their preachers frequently and expresly pray, that pure streams may for ever flow, to water the city of the living God? You need not be told, reverend Sir, what place I mean: it was the famous university of Oxford. Nor need I mention the scene exhibited; it was a tribunal, a visitatorial tribunal, erected in Edmund-Hall; six pious students, who promised to be the salt of the earth, and lights of the world, entire friends to the doctrines and liturgy of our church, by a citation previously fixed upon the college door, were summoned to appear before this tribunal. They did appear; and, as some were pleased to term it, were tried, convicted, and to close the scene, in the chapel of the same hall, consecrated and set apart for nobler purposes, had the sentence of expulsion publicly read and pronounced against them.
So severe a sentence, in an age when almost every kind of proper discipline is held with so lax a rein, hath naturally excited a curiosity in all that have heard of it, to inquire, of what notable crime these delinquents may have been guilty, to deserve such uncommonly rigorous treatment. But how will their curiosity be turned into indignation, when they are told, that they were thus rigorously handled for doing no evil at all, and that “no fault could be found in them, save in the law of their God?”
It is true indeed, one article of impeachment was, “that some of them were of trades before they entered into the university.” But what evil or crime worthy of expulsion can there be in that? To be called from any, though the meanest mechanic employ, to the study of the liberal arts, where a natural genius hath been given, was never yet looked upon as a reproach to, or diminution of, any great and public character whatsoever. Profane history affords us a variety of examples of the greatest heroes, who have been fetched even from the plough, to command armies, and who performed the greatest exploits for their country’s good. And if we examine sacred history, we shall find, that even David, after he was anointed king, looked back with sweet complacence to the rock from whence he was hewn, and is not ashamed to leave it upon record, that “God took him away from the sheep-folds, as he was following the ewes great with young ones;” and as though he loved to repeat it, “he took him, (says he) that he might feed Jacob his people, and Israel his inheritance.”
But why speak I of David? When Jesus of Nazareth, David’s Lord, and David’s King, had for his reputed father a carpenter, and in all probability, as it was a common proverb among the Jews, that “he who did not teach his son a trade, taught him to be a thief;” he worked at the trade of a carpenter himself? For this, indeed, he was reproached and maligned; “Is not this, said they, the carpenter’s son? Nay, is not this the carpenter?” But who were those maligners? The greatest enemies to the power of godliness which the world ever saw, the Scribes and Pharisees; that “generation of vipers,” as John the Baptist calls them, who upon every occasion were spitting out their venom, and shooting forth their arrows, even bitter words, against that Son of man, even that Son of God, who, to display his sovereignty, and confound the wisdom of the worldly wise, chose poor fishermen to be his Apostles; and whose chief of the Apostles, though bred up at the feet of Gamaliel, both before and after his call to the apostleship, laboured with his own hands, and worked at the trade of a tent-maker.
If from such exalted and more distant, we descend to more modern and inferior characters, we shall find, that very late, not to say our present times, furnish us with instances of some, even of our dignitaries, who have been called from trades that tended to help and feed the body, not only to higher employs of a spiritual nature, but even to preside over those that are entrusted with the cure of souls. And who knows but some of these young students, though originally mechanics, if they had been suffered to have pursued their studies, might have either climbed after them to some preferment in the church, or been advanced to some office in that university from which they are now expelled? One of the present reverend and worthy Proctors, we are told, was formerly a Lieutenant in the army; and as such a military employ was no impediment to his being a minister or Proctor, it may be presumed, that being formerly of trades could have been no just impediment to these young men becoming, in process of time, true gospel ministers and good soldiers of Jesus Christ.
Their being accustomed to prayer, whether with or without a form, I humbly apprehend, would by no means disqualify them for the private or public discharge of any part of their ministerial function. “In that day, that gospel-day, (these last days wherein we live) saith the great God, I will pour out a Spirit of grace and a Spirit of supplication upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem.” And the Apostle Paul speaks of it as the common privilege of all believers, that “the Holy Spirit helps their infirmities, and maketh intercession for them with groanings which cannot be uttered.” Forms of prayer, certainly, have their use; and take it altogether, our English liturgy is, without doubt, one of the most excellent established forms of public prayer in the world: but then, as no form, in the very nature of the thing, can possibly suit every particular case, it is to be feared that many must never pray, at least for the particular things they most stand in need of, if they are so to be tied up to their forms, that they cannot vary from them, or use free prayer at all.
The great Bishop Wilkins therefore wisely wrote an excellent treatise on the benefit and importance of this kind of prayer: and could our university-youth be trained up to use proper extempore prayer, both before and after sermon; in the opinion of all good judges, it would be as commendable, as that strange custom of putting off our auditories with what is called the bidding prayer; in which there is not one petition for a blessing upon the following sermon, and scarce any thing mentioned, but what hath been prayed for over and over again, in the preceding common service of our church.
But supposing such liberty should be denied in public, as, blessed be God it is not, surely we may be allowed, at least it cannot be deemed sinful, to use free prayer in our secret, or private social exercises of devotion. If so, what sinners, what great sinners must they have been, who prayed, and that too out of necessity, in an extempore way, before any forms of prayer were or could be printed or heard of? The prayers we read of in scripture, the prayers which opened and shut heaven, the effectual, fervent, energetic prayers of those righteous and holy men of old, which availed so much with God, were all of an extempore nature. And I am apt to believe, if not only our students and ministers, but private christians, were born from above, and taught of God, as those wrestlers with God were, they would not want forms of prayer, though we have such a variety of them, any more than they did.
The sick, the lame, the blind, the lepers that came to our Lord for healing, wanted no book to teach them how to express their wants. Though some were only poor beggars, and others, as the self-righteous Scribes and Pharisees superciliously chose to term them, “Gentile dogs,” yet, conscious of their wants, and having a heart-felt sense of their distress, “out of the abundance of their hearts their mouths spake;” and the compassionate Emmanuel, who came to heal our sicknesses and bear our infirmities, sent them away with a “Go in peace, thy faith hath made thee whole: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.”