[176] See Johnson's English Canons, Oxford Edit., ii. 325.
[177] Coleridge's remark is worth remembering in connection with the Presbyterian endeavours after discipline: "With regard to the discipline attempted by the Antiprelatic Episcopalian (?) clergy, let it not be forgotten that the Church of England has solemnly expressed and recorded her regret that the evil of the times had prevented its establishment, and bequeaths the undertaking as a sacred trust to a more gracious age.—Notes on Southey's Life of Wesley, i. 199. But is discipline a possible thing in a State-established Church.
Keble, in his Life of Wilson, Bishop of Sodor and Man, speaks of the "nation's general hatred of ecclesiastical discipline;" and after giving an account of the ecclesiastical courts in the Isle of Man, says: It was a reality there "for years after it had come to be a shadow in the whole Anglican Church elsewhere," p. 140. He justly remarks that the Manx code implies faith on the part of the people. Some of the laws are curious enough, (see i. 204), and present a chapter in ecclesiastical history worth studying. The sanction and enforcement of such a scheme by the civil power is utterly opposed to the principle of toleration.
[178] See accounts of this church in Strype's Stow, i. 583. Stow mentions as hung up in the cloisters a gigantic shank-bone of a man.
[179] Account of the Ejected, p. 5.
[180] A copy of this is entered in the MS. volume of minutes of the London Synod, Sion College Library.
[181] Strype's Stow, i. 381.
[182] Howe's Works, vi. 298.
[183] Clarke's Lives, preface, p. 8.
[184] See Howe's Funeral Sermon (Works, vi. 349), in which he speaks of Vink as endowed with singular parts.