The case was undoubted. It came to the Bishop’s knowledge. To conceal the fact would have been to connive at the sin, to make it known to endanger the culprit’s life. Indeed, to conceal it was no longer possible, and to stifle the charge was felt to be a scandal to religion. Under these circumstances, Lloyd, Bishop of Norwich, asked the Archbishop whether, by a judicial monition, he might not require the offender to abstain from clerical functions till he could purge himself from the terrible accusation brought against him.
The Canon law, he said, did not deal with the offence in question, and he felt himself in much difficulty as to the course of proceeding. As capital punishment might follow conviction, the Bishop feared lest it should prove a causa sanguinis—an affair with which he wished to have nothing to do. The common tactics of defence were adopted by the accused. He appealed to the Archdeacon, with the view of gaining time, and by such means he cunningly slipped entirely out of the hands of the Consistory at Norwich; but the Bishop comforted himself by hoping that the criminal would meet with justice at Doctors’ Commons.
On the 30th of August, 1689, when Lloyd had been himself suspended, he wrote to Sancroft, saying, “It is too late for me now to meddle further in the matter.”[406]
After the Revolution, we meet with a case in which moral discipline was exercised by Patrick, Bishop of Ely. The Incumbent of Great Eversden had, by intemperance, drowned his reason and scandalized his profession. Grieved at what he heard, the Bishop required him to preach two penitential sermons, one in each of the churches where he officiated, from the words, “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper; but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.” He did so, and concluded with the words: “You see, beloved, what a black indictment I have here drawn up against myself, wherein I have not been favourable or partial to my fatal miscarriages, but have dissected and ripped up my many enormous crimes, and exposed them to public view. I beseech you not to be too censorious and uncharitable, since I have passed so severe a censure upon myself.”[407]
WORSHIP.
A passing remark is required touching the manner of worship. Nothing like what is now called Ritualism had then any existence. Things continued much as they were before. No coloured vestments were worn by Anglicans either within or without the Establishment, nor were there any attempts at extraordinary ornamentation of either altars or churches. Æsthetic culture, apart from distinctive ecclesiastical opinions, may powerfully affect psalmody, and other accompaniments of devotion, as well as the structure and adornment of the House of God; but the reign of William was not at all an age in which such culture prevailed. Some religious people have a keen sense of propriety as to outward observances; others have none. It matters not to them, though the adoration of the High and Lofty One be marked by slovenliness of arrangement and irreverence of behaviour. There were many persons of this kind amongst Clergy and laity during the last ten, as there had been during the previous fifty years of the seventeenth century.
The use of the surplice in the pulpit, now a common practice with almost all sections in the Established Church, was within our own recollection very rare, and when first prominently introduced, produced excitement and confusion. It seems to have been a novelty in the reign of William III. “Yesterday,” says the writer of a letter in 1696, “I saw in Low Leighton Church, that which to my remembrance I never did see in a church in England but once, and that is a minister preach in a surplice for Mr. Harrison (whereas other ministers on Fast-days do not so much as wear any surplice), he, by way of supererogation, preached in his. The sight did stir up in me more of pity than anger to see the folly of the man; but if he preach in a fool’s coat we will go and hear him.”[408]
Low Leighton (or Leyton), it will be remembered, was the parish in which John Strype fulfilled his ministry, and therefore it was in the pulpit of that distinguished ecclesiologist, that the writer of the extract beheld the phenomenon which startled him out of his propriety; if the surplice was worn by the Incumbent, or with his sanction, the circumstance would indicate that he regarded the usage as canonical, however it might have fallen into abeyance.
Amongst the Lambeth archives is a very long letter by Edmund Bowerman, Vicar of Codrington, who gives a curious account of his parish, of the extreme ignorance and irreligion of the people, and of their desecration of the church. They played cards on the communion-table, and when they met to choose churchwardens, sat with their hats on, smoking and drinking—the clerk gravely saying, with a pipe in his mouth, that such had been the practice for the last sixty years. Not ten persons in the place had ever received the Sacrament; one used to take it by himself in brown bread and small beer.[409]
An important change took place in the psalmody of the Church of England. The archaic version of the Psalms, by Sternhold and Hopkins, kept possession in cathedral and parish congregations until the middle of the reign of William III. Attempts had been made at improving the versification. A Century of Select Psalms, in verse, for the use of the Charterhouse, by Dr. Patrick, appeared in 1679. Richard Goodridge followed him by a similar effort in 1682. Dr. Simon Ford, not to mention others, attempted something of the same kind in 1688. But a more successful enterprise was accomplished by Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate, who, in 1695, published a tentative Essay, and in 1696 a Complete New Version, differing from such as they themselves had previously prepared. This version, afterwards so popular, did not escape criticism; but was most determinately opposed by Dr. Beveridge, who preferred the old rhymes of the Reformation to any modern rendering of the Songs of David. His course of argument, if it had any force, would be fatal to any attempt at improving scripture translations of all kinds.[410]