1688–1702.
By the Corporation Act, everyone holding a municipal office was required to receive the Lord’s Supper in the Church of England. Sir John Shorter, a Presbyterian, had by such conformity qualified himself to act as Lord Mayor of the city of London in the reign of James II., and two distinguished Dissenters in the following reign occupied the same civic post and adopted the same policy. Sir Humphrey Edwin was Lord Mayor in 1697, and, dressed in a gown of crimson velvet, carried the city sword before William, as, on his return from the Continent, he passed through London with the customary pomp of a public procession. He not only conformed at certain times during his mayoralty, but he also, on one occasion when he attended Divine Service at Pinners’ Hall Meeting-house, caused the civic paraphernalia to be carried before him. I am not aware whether any other Lord Mayor did this. Sir Humphrey Edwin might be said to bring the State over to Nonconformity, as at other times, when he knelt at the altars of the Establishment, he brought Nonconformity over to the State. At all events, his conduct subjected him to annoying criticism. He was attacked by a clergyman who preached before the Corporation in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Ballads and lampoons, caricaturing what he had done, were hawked about the streets, and Swift, in his Tale of the Tub, satirized Sir Humphrey in his well-known reference to Jack’s tatters coming into fashion, and his getting upon a great horse and eating custard. Tragical exclamations were uttered in High Church circles, and in a publication of later date it is declared, that “to the great reproach of the laws, and of the city magistracy,” the Mayor “carried the sword with him to a nasty conventicle, that was kept in one of the City Halls, which horrid crime one of his own party defended by giving this arrogant reason for it, that by the Act of Parliament by which they have their liberty, their religion was as much established as ours.”[515] The Lord Mayor’s proceeding did not meet with the approbation of his co-religionists. They felt the injustice of the attacks which it had occasioned; it seemed to them inconsistent and arrogant for Churchmen to speak in the way they did of a religion which had the same object of worship, the same rule of faith and life, and the same end and aim as their own; yet they saw that Sir Humphrey’s conduct had been such as naturally to lead to misapprehension and to produce annoyance. Calamy lamented that “this measure drew unhappy consequences after it, both in this reign and in that which succeeded.”[516]
NONCONFORMISTS.
Sir Thomas Abney, a Presbyterian, became Lord Mayor of London in the year 1701. Prior to that date he had favoured occasional Conformity. When in office he attended church. This occasioned a controversy between two Nonconformists, who regarded the conduct of Abney and Edwin from different points of view.
Daniel De Foe, who had been educated in Mr. Morton’s academy with a view to becoming a Presbyterian minister, and then found the study of politics and the pursuits of literature more congenial to his taste, distinguished himself by a firm attachment to Nonconformist principles, and carried them out to an extreme extent. He had written about half a dozen clever pamphlets in about fifteen years, and was on the point of commencing that career as an author which made him so notorious among contemporaries, so popular with posterity, when, in 1697, he published anonymously an Enquiry into the Occasional Conformity of Dissenters. In his own trenchant style, with vigorous Anglo-Saxon idioms, employed after a rasping fashion, he declared that none but Protestants halt between God and Baal; none but Christians of an amphibious nature could believe one way, and worship another.
In the year of Sir Thomas Abney’s mayoralty, De Foe republished his Enquiry, and prefixed to it a preface addressed to John Howe. John Howe was Sir Thomas’s pastor, and addressing him, De Foe demanded that Howe should declare to the world, whether the practice of alternate communion was allowed either by his congregation, or by Dissenters in general. The practice, he said, should be defended if defensible, otherwise “the world must believe that Dissenters do allow themselves to practice what they cannot defend.”
1688–1702.
Howe being dragged before the public, referred to his own moderate views in points of difference between Conformists and Nonconformists, but denied having advised Sir Thomas as to his conduct; he declined to enter upon the question, and only contended that occasional conformity to one communion, if a fault, should not exclude a person from habitual fellowship with another. De Foe had taken up occasional Conformity as a qualification for holding office, and had shown that so regarded it is incapable of vindication; but Howe regarded the question generally, and proved that a person who, apart from worldly motives, communes with one church on particular occasions, and with another church on common occasions, does nothing which impeaches his conscientiousness or destroys his consistency.
The author’s calm temper becomes ruffled towards the close, when he alludes to the “stingy and narrow spirit” of his opponent, and to his seeking to impose upon the world a false impression of the English Puritans. He declared that in 1662 “most of the considerable ejected London ministers met and agreed to hold occasional communion with the now re-established Church, not quitting their own ministry or declining the exercise of it as they could have opportunity.”[517]
De Foe replied, vindicating his own character, and animadverting upon Howe’s want of zeal. The latter having reluctantly taken part in this business, could not be induced to say another word. The spirit of Howe had greatly the advantage over the temper of De Foe; nothing but one-sided partizanship could induce any man to charge the advocate of occasional communion with disloyalty to Nonconformist principles.