The head of the Low-Church party was the king. He had been bred a Presbyterian; he was, from rational conviction, a Latitudinarian; and personal ambition, as well as higher motives, prompted him to act as mediator among the Protestant sects. He was bent on effecting three great reforms in the laws touching ecclesiastical matters. 1. To obtain for Dissenters permission to celebrate their worship in freedom and security. 2. To make such changes in the Anglican ritual and polity, as, without offending those to whom that ritual and polity were dear, might conciliate the moderate Nonconformists. 3. To throw open civil offices to Protestants without distinction of sect. The first of these only was attainable. He came too late for the second, and too early for the third.[[90]]
While the preceding events were happening in England, other events of great importance took place in Scotland. There Episcopacy was abolished, being a great and insupportable grievance to the nation, and contrary to the inclinations of the generality of the people. An act was also passed, in 1690, ordaining that all Presbyterian ministers yet alive, who had been thrust from their charges since 1661, or banished for not conforming to Prelacy, should forthwith be restored to their churches, their manses, and their glebes; and, by another act passed on the 7th of June, in the same year, parliament ratified and established the Westminster Confession of Faith, as the public and avowed confession of the Scottish Church; and restored the government of the Church by kirk-sessions, presbyteries, provincial synods, and general assemblies.
Such were the opposite effects of the Revolution upon the National Church in the two ends of the island,—in England consolidating and confirming the established Episcopacy,—in Scotland sweeping it utterly away, and in its place re-erecting the old abolished edifice of presbytery on broader and deeper foundations than ever.
The position in which the Revolution placed the generality of Protestant Dissenters has been explained in the account given of the Toleration Act, which was the only measure passed in their favour. From the benefits of this act the Roman Catholics and the Socinians were excluded; and, in 1699, the former were placed under greater restrictions than ever. It was then enacted by parliament,—1. That a reward of a hundred pounds should be paid to every person who should apprehend any Popish bishop, priest, or Jesuit, and prosecute him to conviction, for saying mass, or exercising any other part of his office, within these realms. 2. That the priest so convicted should be adjudged to perpetual imprisonment. 3. That the keeping of a school by any Papist should be punished by the same penalty. 4. That every person, educated in the Popish religion, or professing the same, who, within six months after attaining the age of eighteen, should not take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and also subscribe the declaration against transubstantiation, the invocation of saints, and the sacrifice of the mass, should be incapable of inheriting, or taking by descent, any lands, tenements, or hereditaments; and that the next of kin, being a Protestant, should inherit the estates of which the Roman Catholic was thus deprived. 5. That all Papists should be incapable of purchasing any lands, either in their own names or in those of any other persons.[[91]]
This was a monstrous Act of Parliament; but when we take into consideration the sneaking perfidy, coarse brutalities, and bloodthirsty cruelties practised by Papists during late years in Ireland, in Scotland, and even in England itself,—when we remember that Papists in foreign lands were concocting dark intrigues against the British throne and British nation, recently rescued from the tyranny of papal domination,—and when we remember further, that, as lately as the year 1692, De Grandval, a captain of French dragoons, instigated by the Popish King James, had entered into a conspiracy against the life of King William, and had been shot for his intended assassination,—and that, in 1696, there had been another more widely ramified Popish plot for the same infernal purpose, which resulted in three of the conspirators being executed at Tyburn,—we are prepared to understand why Papists were excluded from the benefits of the Toleration Act, and why they were made the subjects of the legalised persecution of the act of 1699, “for the further preventing of the growth of Popery.” Abstractedly considered, the act was monstrous, and merits reprobation; but severe maladies sometimes need severe remedies to effect their cure.
Our space forbids any further review of ecclesiastical affairs during William and Mary’s reign; and we must now content ourselves with miscellaneous notices of this eventful period in English history.
In 1690 occurred the death of a man whose name, despite his almost insane eccentricities, will always occupy a place in English Church annals. More than forty years had elapsed, says Macaulay, since George Fox had begun to see visions and to cast out devils. He was then a youth of pure morals and grave deportment, with a perverse temper, with the education of a labouring man, and with an intellect in the most unhappy of all states; that is to say, too much disordered for liberty, and not sufficiently disordered for bedlam. At the time, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists were refuting and reviling each other. He applied in vain for spiritual direction and consolation. One jolly old clergyman told him to smoke tobacco and to sing psalms; another counselled him to go and lose some blood. After some time, he came to the conclusion that no human being was competent to instruct him in divine things; and that the truth had been communicated to himself by direct inspiration from Heaven. He argued that, as the confusion of languages began at Babel, and that, as the persecutors of Christ put on the cross an inscription in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the knowledge of languages, and more especially of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, must be useless to a Christian minister. One of the most precious truths revealed to this new apostle was, that it was falsehood and adulation to use the second person plural instead of the second person singular. To say good morning or good evening was highly reprehensible, for the phrases evidently imported that God had made bad mornings and bad evenings. To talk of the month of March was to worship Mars; and to talk of Monday was to pay idolatrous homage to the moon. A Christian was bound to face death itself rather than touch his hat to the greatest of mankind. Bowing was considered as the effect of Satanical influence, for the woman in the gospel, while she had a spirit of infirmity, was bowed together, and ceased to bow as soon as divine power had liberated her from the tyranny of the evil one.
Fox long wandered from place to place, teaching this strange theology, shaking like an aspen leaf in his paroxysms of fanatical excitement, forcing his way into churches which he nicknamed steeple-houses, interrupting prayers and sermons with clamour and scurrility, and pestering rectors and justices with epistles much resembling burlesques of those sublime odes in which the Hebrew prophets foretold the calamities of Babylon and Tyre. He soon acquired great notoriety by these religious feats. His strange face, his nasal chant, his immovable hat, and his leather breeches, were known all over the country. He was repeatedly imprisoned and set in the stocks, sometimes justly, for disturbing the public worship of congregations; sometimes unjustly, for merely talking nonsense. He soon gathered round him a body of disciples, some of whom went beyond himself in absurdity. He also made some converts, as Barclay and Penn, to whom he was immeasurably inferior in everything, except the energy of his convictions. By these converts his rude doctrines were polished into a form somewhat less shocking to good sense and good taste. His gibberish was translated into English; and his system so much improved that he himself might have been excused if he had hardly known it. To the last his disciples professed profound reverence for him; and his crazy epistles were received and read in Quaker meetings all over the country. This founder of the Quaker sect died in 1690.[[92]]
As already intimated in a previous chapter, Samuel Wesley, like Macaulay, had no great liking for the Quakers. The following article, taken from the Athenian Oracle, vol. i. p. 331, in which the Quakers and Papists are compared, will tend to show his opinions concerning a sect which were much more numerous about two hundred years ago than they are at present, and whose views and vagaries then were much more wild than happily they are now:—
“Both Quakers and Papists are so bad that they can hardly be called Christian. In many things they are near akin. The Quakers, ever since their rise, have been looked upon as the Jesuit by-blows. The Quakers deny the plenary satisfaction of Christ, and rest on their own merits; so do the Papists. They rail at our ministers, and deny their legal call or ordination; so do the Papists. They pretend to a greater strictness and singularity of life than other people; so do several orders among the Papists. Then, for fanaticism and enthusiasm, they are most admirably matched. But, to consider them asunder—The Papist holds more than he ought to do, and therefore all the articles of the Christian faith: but the Quaker much less, for the Quakers all deny the Christian sacraments, and we wonder how they have a face to pretend to what they never had, Christianity, when they were never christened. They are indeed a compendium of almost all sorts of heresies: for they not only deny the merits of Christ, with the Papists, but even His satisfaction and divinity, being at best no better than mere Arians. Nay, there have been some of them who, as far as we can understand them, deny our Saviour’s manhood, and turn angels, spirits, heaven, and hell into mean and jejune allegories. All of them, to a man, whom we ever met with, deny the Scriptures to be the Word of God, and most of them deny any resurrection of the body. For these reasons, we think, as a bad Christian is better than none, so a Papist is better than a Quaker.”[[93]]