Cornish Characters and Strange Events

by S. Baring-Gould

Then followed clauses providing that a clergyman might wear the surplice or not as he thought fit; it left the sign of the cross optional in baptism; and provided that the Eucharist need not be received kneeling. The concluding clause was drawn in the form of a petition; it was proposed that the two Houses should request the King and the Queen to issue a commission empowering thirty divines of the Church of England to revise the liturgy, the canons, and the constitution of the ecclesiastical courts, and to recommend such alterations as might seem to them desirable.

But this Bill roused serious opposition. It was felt by all who had any respect and feeling for the Church, as one in all times from the Apostolic period, who regarded her claim to maintain the same faith, the same Apostolic constitution and the same sacraments, as from the earliest age of the Church, that this Comprehension Bill if it became law must of necessity alienate them from such a body—drenched with Protestantism, till scarcely a tinge of the old wine of Catholicism remained in her; and would leave them no other course open than to shake off the dust of their feet against her and join the Church of Rome, or the Church of the Nonjurors. Most of the bishops who had taken the oaths to William and Mary were placed on the Commission; and with them were joined twenty priests of note. Of these twenty, Tillotson was the most important as expressing the mind and wishes of the King. He was a latitudinarian, without a spark of feeling for historic Christianity. With him went Stillingfleet, Dean of S. Paul's, Sharp, Dean of Norwich, Patrick, Dean of Peterborough, Tenison, Rector of S. Martin's, and Fowler. But conspicuous on the other side were Aldrich, Dean of Christ Church, and Jane, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford.

Early in October, 1689, the commissioners assembled in the Jerusalem Chamber. But hardly had they met before Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, started up and denied that the Commission was legal. There was a sharp altercation, violent words were flung about, and Sprat, Jane, and Aldrich withdrew. The strength of the Catholic party was broken, and the rest agreed to sanction nearly all the changes advocated by those who desired to entirely alter the character of the Church.

"They had before them," Burnet tells us, "all the exceptions that either the Puritans before the war, or the Nonconformists since the Restoration, had made to any part of the Church service; they had also many propositions and advices that had been offered, at several times, by many of our bishops and divines upon those heads; matters were well considered and freely and calmly debated; and all digested into an entire correction of everything that seemed liable to any just objection." To guide them, as Burnet admits in his Triennial Visitation Charge of 1704, they were furnished with a great collection of the books and papers in which the Dissenters had at different times set forth their demands. The Commission was prepared to surrender everything. The chanting of psalms, even in cathedrals, was to be done away with. The lessons from the Apocrypha were to be abolished. The Saints' days omitted from the Calendar, the form of absolution altered, remission of sins to be removed from it "as not very intelligible." The cross in baptism, the use of god-parents, the wearing of the surplice were to be optional. Episcopal ordination was not to be required of the Ministry. Kneeling to receive the Holy Communion was left to the choice of the Communicant; the collects, as too concise, were to be blown out with pious bombast.

It is possible that, as Calamy asserts, such alterations as these would have brought over two-thirds of the English Dissenters to the Established Church; but it is certain that it would have driven two-thirds of the members of the Church, lay and clerical, out of her, as having forfeited her claim to be a branch of the Catholic Church, and they would probably have swelled the ranks of the Nonjurors, and made of that communion a body that would have really represented the Church in England.

Owing to the secession of the Nonjurors, sees and benefices had been filled with men who were in sympathy with the views of Tillotson and Burnet, or who were only solicitous to live in the smiles of William. Little resistance, if any, was to be expected from the episcopal bench.

When the Commission had concluded its labours, writs were issued summoning the Convocation of the Province of Canterbury. The clergy were in a ferment throughout England. They thought that the heritage of faith was going to be taken from them. The Toleration Act had removed the disabilities of the Dissenters; they might build their conventicles and preach what and when they liked; why, then, open the doors of the Church to admit them as a flood to swamp the faithful?

When the Declaration of Toleration had been issued by James II, in 1687, removing all disabilities from the Dissenters, on the sole understanding that they should abstain from attacking the Churches of Rome and England, their preachers found that they had nothing to say. They preferred to be under disabilities rather than give up assaults on the Scarlet Woman, Babylon, the Beast, and Prelacy, its shadow.

When Convocation was elected, it became evident to all that the bulk of the priests were against all watering down of the formulas of the Church, her faith, her ritual. The most important office in Convocation was that of Prolocutor of the Lower House. The Prolocutor was to be chosen by the members; Tillotson was proposed by the Protestant party as one whom the King delighted to honour, and who it was well known would be appointed to the Archbishopric of Canterbury when vacant.

On November 20th, Convocation met in Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster. "Compton was in the chair. On the right and left those suffragans of Canterbury who had taken the oath were ranged in gorgeous vestments of scarlet and miniver. Below the table was assembled the crowd of presbyters. Beveridge preached a Latin sermon, in which he warmly eulogized the existing system, and yet declared himself favourable to a moderate reform." In a word, he blew hot and cold with the same breath.