Huge spheres, so fast each after other roll’d,
E’en boundless space their ruins scarce will hold.”
With all due deference to eccentric John Dunton, we submit that such lines are far from being “intolerably dull.” They were too hastily written to have the polished rotundity of poets like Young and Pope; but, notwithstanding this, they are full of poetic fire. The reader, who is in search of poetic thoughts rather than poetic sounds, will find himself amply recompensed by a careful reading of Wesley’s “Life of Christ.” We can hardly praise the poem so highly as it is praised by Nahum Tate; but, at the same, we maintain that, for learning, energy of thought, vivid imagination, picturesque phrases, and forceful language in general, it is immeasurably superior to scores of other poems, which, by accident, have been vastly more popular than it has been. Men brand Samuel Wesley’s poetry without reading it. This is, in the highest degree, unfair. In the name of a great and much injured man, we protest against it; and respectfully request that, for the sake of his memory, and their own benefit, they would give his poems a careful and candid perusal.
In the second volume of the Athenian Oracle, p. 37, the question is asked, What books of poetry would you advise one that is young to read? In the answer, after recommending David’s Psalms, and the poems of Cowley, Herbert, Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, Tasso, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Dr Donne, and Dryden, it is quietly but significantly added, “and, if you have patience, Wesley’s Life of Christ.” Reader, the advice is worth taking, though it was probably given by Wesley himself.
CHAPTER IX.
WILLIAM AND MARY’S REIGN—1689–1702.
William and Mary were declared King and Queen of England on the 12th of February 1689. Their reign is marked by great events—such as the siege of Londonderry, Lord Dundee’s insurrection in Scotland, the battle of the Boyne, the surrender of Limerick, the massacre of Glencoe, and the war with France; but we purposely pass over all civil and military transactions, and confine our attention to ecclesiastical and literary affairs, with which Samuel Wesley, as a clergyman and as an author, was more closely connected.
One of the first acts of William, after his accession to the throne, was to give orders that, in his private chapel, the service should be said instead of sung. This alteration was warranted by the rubric, and yet it caused among the High Church and half-popish party a great amount of murmuring.
Another of his early acts strangely enough occasioned much excitement. Touching for the scrofula was a practice which had come down from the darkest of the dark ages, and William dared to sneer at it. It had been sanctioned by high ecclesiastical authority, but even that did not deter the bold monarch from treating it with contempt. Charles II., in the course of his reign, touched near one hundred thousand persons. In 1682, only seven years before the commencement of the reign of William, he performed the royal rite not fewer than eight thousand five hundred times. Two years later, in 1684, the throng of scrofulous persons was such that six or seven of the sick were trampled to death. King James, two or three years after, touched eight hundred persons, in the choir of Chester Cathedral. The days for touching were fixed by the Privy Council, and were solemnly notified by the clergy in all the parish churches of the realm. When the appointed time came, several divines, in full canonicals, stood round the canopy of state, the surgeon of the royal household introduced the sick, a passage from 16th chapter of Mark was read, after which one of the sick was brought to the all-healing monarch. His Majesty stroked the ulcers and swellings, and hung round the patient’s neck a white riband, to which was fastened a gold coin. The other sufferers were then led up in succession, and as each was touched the chaplain repeated the incantation, “They shall lay their hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” Then came the epistle, prayers, antiphonies, and a benediction. Such was the ceremony of touching for the cure of the king’s evil. The expense of this ceremony, in the shape of coins put round the sufferers’ necks, was little less than £10,000 a-year. The whole affair was a huge piece of costly and superstitious foolery, ending in no beneficial results whatever. We dare to assert this, notwithstanding the solemn assurance of one of the surgeons of King Charles II., that the gift of healing was communicated by the unction administered at the coronation, and that the cures were so numerous, and sometimes so rapid, that they could not be attributed to any natural cause whatever.
King William had too much sense to be duped, and too much honesty to bear a part in what he knew to be an imposture.[[79]] “It is a silly superstition,” said he, when he heard that, at the close of Lent, his palace was besieged by a crowd of sick persons: “give the poor creatures some money and send them away.” Only on one single occasion was he successfully importuned to lay his hand on a patient’s sores. “God give you better health,” he said, “and more sense!” What was the result of this abandonment[abandonment] of royal practice? The parents of scrofulous children cried out against William’s cruelty. Bigots lifted up their hands and eyes at his impiety. Jacobites sarcastically praised him for not presuming to arrogate to himself a power which belonged only to legitimate sovereigns. And even some of his own friends thought he acted unwisely in treating with such marked contempt a superstition which had so strong a hold on the vulgar mind. But William was not to be moved, and was accordingly set down by many High Churchmen as an infidel, or at least a Puritan.
As soon as William and Mary ascended the throne of England the new oath of allegiance was tendered. It was conceived in the simplest form, the words “rightful and lawful sovereigns” being, upon mature deliberation, omitted. Notwithstanding this modification, several members, both of the House of Lords and the House of Commons, refused to take it. Among these were the Earls of Clarendon, Lichfield, and Exeter, and likewise seven bishops, including five who had been sent to the Tower for refusing obedience to the mandates of James. The spiritual lords who refused the oath of allegiance to William and Mary were Sancroft, the primate, Turner, Bishop of Ely, Lake, of Chichester, Ken, of Bath, White, of Peterborough, Thomas, of Worcester, and Frampton, of Gloucester. Above four hundred of the clergy, including some of the highest distinction, followed the example set by Sancroft and the six bishops, and thus began the schism of the Nonjurors,—a term which became as prominent as that of Nonconformists had been under the last two Stuarts.