William of Orange fell from his horse as he was riding in the neighbourhood of Hampton Court, and broke his collar-bone. Removed to Kensington, he was seized with shivering fits, and it soon appeared death was approaching. The Earl of Portland states, “that when he was once encouraging him, from the good state his affairs were in both home and abroad, to take more heart, the King answered him, that he knew death was that which he had looked at on all occasions without any terror; sometimes he would have been glad to have been delivered out of all his troubles, but he confessed now he saw another scene, and could wish to live a little longer. He died with a clear and full presence of mind, and in a wonderful tranquillity. Those who knew it was his rule all his life long to hide the impressions that religion made on him, as much as possible, did not wonder at his silence in his last minutes; but they lamented it much, they knew what a handle it would give to censure and obloquy.”[361] Early on Sunday, January the 8th, he received “the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, with great devotion, from the hands of the Archbishop of Canterbury”[362]—about 8 o’clock he was a corpse. Round his neck a black ribbon was discovered with a gold ring, and a lock of Queen Mary’s hair.
1702.
WILLIAM III.
The moral conduct of the King had not been in accordance with his religious professions. Burnet, who honestly gives his impressions of William’s character, says in a few words, “He had no vice but of one sort, in which he was very cautious and secret”—a statement which, whilst it presents a contrast to James and Charles, who were barefaced in their sensualities, admits the fact of William’s being addicted to vicious indulgence, of which concealment neither expiated nor diminished the guilt. It is not a little surprising that so many good men, both Churchmen and Dissenters, who could not have been indifferent to the interests of morality, should have lauded, as they did, the Hero of the Revolution, both living and dead, as if he had been the very ideal of virtue and piety. Yet Burnet, who was disposed to take the most favourable view of his character, cannot be charged with exaggeration when he informs us, that “he believed the truth of the Christian religion very firmly, and he expressed a horror at atheism and blasphemy, and though there was much of both in his Court, yet it was always denied to him, and kept out of his sight. He was most exemplary, decent, and devout in the public exercises of the worship of God—only on week days he came too seldom to them. He was an attentive hearer of sermons,[363] and was constant in his private prayers and in reading the Scriptures; and when he spoke of religious matters, which he did not often, it was with a becoming gravity. He was much possessed with the belief of absolute decrees: he said to me, he adhered to these, because he did not see how the belief of Providence could be maintained upon any other supposition. His indifference as to the forms of Church government, and his being zealous for toleration, together with his cold behaviour towards the Clergy, gave them generally very ill impressions of him.”[364] The effect of frigid manners, felt by the nation at large, was deepened in the case of high Churchmen, by William’s well-known Presbyterian predilections, and his dislike to what is meant by Anglo-Catholicism. As we have seen, during the life of Mary, he left the exercise of his prerogative in reference to ecclesiastical matters in her hands, and after her death meddled with them in the smallest possible degree, so that he never could be said to have exerted any direct influence in the government of the Church.[365] But, indirectly, by the Revolution itself, and by the Act of Toleration which followed, and was promoted by him, he changed the position of the Establishment altogether, and opened up to the Episcopal Church a new career, in which conciliation instead of persecution could alone prove its permanent safeguard, and a secret of prosperity. The first monarch on the throne of these realms who loved a constitutional system of religious liberty, William not only won the affection of Dissenters, as he might be naturally expected to do, but by his wise and equitable policy in this respect, laid the whole kingdom and posterity under obligations which have never yet been fully acknowledged.
CHAPTER XIII.
The most distinguished divines who sat upon the Episcopal Bench in the reign of William III., were more or less imbued with what were called Latitudinarian sentiments.
Tillotson and Tenison who did so much, especially the latter of them, by force of character, as well as prominence of position, towards keeping the Church in subordination to the State, have already occupied a considerable space in this History. Next to them, Burnet was most distinguished, and he also has received repeated notice as an ecclesiastical statesman; it should be added, that he was no less a diligent diocesan and a laborious divine. His treatise on Pastoral Care expresses the spiritual anxieties of a good minister of Jesus Christ: his Histories are pervaded by a spirit of Erastianism, as described by some; by a tone of liberality, as denoted by others; and his Exposition of the XXXIX Articles, in like manner, is both condemned as latitudinarian, and commended as comprehensive.
BISHOPS.
No work gives me so favourable an opinion of Burnet as his Four Discourses, delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Sarum.[366] For learning, earnestness, and ability, they deserve a higher place in theological literature than they have ever won. In them he exhibits the evidences of the Christian religion with considerable vigour of thought, and for the age in which he wrote, with much originality. His dissertation on the Divinity and death of Christ exhibit the orthodox Creed, as to the Godhead and Atonement of the Lord, together with a view of Justification by Faith, very similar to that inculcated in the writings of Bull. The authority of the Church he discusses as an enlightened Protestant, and demolishes the arguments of the Papists; giving, as he proceeds, some valuable hints on the history of religious opinions, and dealing with the dogma of infallibility in a way which is singularly curious, looked at in the light of the recent Ecumenical Council. The obligation to continue in the communion of the Church of England is exhibited, from his own point of view, in a temperate spirit.
1688–1702.