without thinking of another “old weak man for vengeance laid aside”—of Laud in the day of his power pulling off his hat and thanking God for the inhuman sentence that had been passed upon the already wasted victim[135]—of the miserable den to which the mangled man was committed for life after that sentence had been executed in all its multiplication and precision of barbarity—then calling to mind the words of our Saviour, They that take the sword shall perish with the sword, and Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy. It was not mercy alone that was violated by these acts—but law and justice; and if he who instigated and rejoiced in them received neither justice nor mercy in his turn, is he worthy of the sacred name of Martyr? May we not say that the vengeance which fell upon this persecutor was the Lord’s vengeance, even if it came to pass by evil instruments, and fell upon a head already bowed down, and in some respects a noble one? Can the glory and honour of meeting death with firmness,—nay even with “sublime” piety, cast its beams backward and bathe in one pure luminous flood a life darkened with such deep shadows, as those that chequer the sunshine of Laud’s career?—the parts really brightened with the light of heaven? Plainness, sincerity, integrity, learning, munificence to a cause[136]—can virtues like these outweigh or neutralize such faults of head, heart, and temper, as lie to the charge of this Bishop in the church of Christ? As well might we set the cold bright morning dews, that rest on the stony crown of Vesuvius, against the burning lava that bursts from its crater, and expect them to quench the fire or reduce it to a moderate heat. Some abatement must be made from the guilt of his violences from consideration of the times; but to subtract the whole on that account, or even to make light of it, is surely too much to make moral good and evil dependent on circumstance. What? Have Arundel, Bonner, Gardiner little or nothing to answer for? Was there ever yet a persecutor that persecuted from mere speculative inhumanity? Even through Clarendon’s account we may discern, I think, that Laud’s private passions, in part at least, engaged him in the cause of Intolerance. He had been exasperated, before he attained power, by Puritan molestations and oppositions,—he became the persecutor of Puritans after he attained it; as schoolboys that have been tormented while they were in a low form, torment in their turn when they get into a high one,—not their tormentors but unfortunates who represent them to their imagination. An eminently good and wise man is above his times, if not in all, yet in many things; but Laud was the very impersonation of his times—the impersonated spirit of his age and his party. (Compare his over ceremonious consecration of St. Catherine’s Church, gloated over by Hume, with Archdeacon Hare’s remarks on his neglect of his diocese, in The Mission of the Comforter.) They who are of that party still, who would still swathe religion by way of supporting it, and dizen by way of dressing it, and gaze with fond regretful admiration upon the giant forms of Spiritual Despotism and Exaggerated Externalism, as they loom shadowy and magnificent through the vapoury vista of ages, to them no wonder that he is a giant too. And there are others, far above that or any other party, who in their love and zeal for the Church, abstract the how and the why of Laud’s public warfare, and see him abstractedly as the Champion of the Church of England. “God knows my heart,” says Mr. Coleridge, (in a marginal note on Mr. Southey’s article on the History of Dissenters, in the Quarterly Review of October 1813,) “how bitterly I abhor all intolerance, how deeply I pity the actors when there is reason to suppose them deluded; but is it not clear that this theatrical scene of Laud’s death, who was the victim of almost national indignation, is not to be compared with ‘bloody sentences’ in the coolness of secure power? As well might you palliate the horrible atrocities of the Inquisition, every one of which might be justified on the same grounds that Southey has here defended Laud, by detailing the vengeance taken on some of the Inquisitors.” I do not see that here my honoured Uncle defends the Primate: he says, “We are not the apologists of Laud; in some things he was erroneous, in some imprudent, in others culpable. Evil, which upon the great scale is ever made conducive to good, produces evil to those by whom it comes.” And how wise and beautiful is this sentiment a little further on! “It especially behoves the historian to inculcate charity, and take part with the oppressed, whoever may have been the oppressors.”
As some excuse for my Father’s expression, “theatrical scene,” I allege that sentence of Laud’s; “Never did man put off mortality with a better courage, nor look upon his bloody and malicious enemies with more Christian charity.” My Father adds: “I know well how imprudent and unworldly these my opinions are. The Dissenters will give me no thanks, because I prefer and extol the present Church of England, and the partizans of the Church will calumniate me, because I condemn particular members, and regret particular æras, of the former Church of England. Would that Southey had written the whole of his review in the spirit of this beautiful page.” (Page 102.) In that very interesting collection of meditative Sonnets by the late Sir Aubrey de Vere is one upon Laud, against which I ventured to write, “If anything done in the name of principle must needs be righteous, then the tortures and long languishing of Leighton are no impeachment of Laud’s righteousness.” There was a second edition of the Aids in 1831, a fifth in 1843.
The little work On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the Idea of each, first appeared in 1830, and went into a second edition in the same year. It is now joined with the Lay Sermons in one volume. To the Church and State are appended Notes on Taylor’s History of Enthusiasm, and A Dialogue between Demosius and Mystes.
[Letter 214. To Allsop
March 20th, 1825.
My dearest Friend,
I should have answered your last but for three causes: first, that I had proofs to correct and a passage of great nicety to add, neither of which could be deferred without injustice to the Publishers, and the breach of a definite promise on my part; second, that I was almost incapacitated from thinking of and doing anything as it ought to be done by poor Mrs. G.’s restless and interrogating anxieties, which in the first instance put the whole working Hive of my Thoughts in a whirl and a bur; and then, when I see her care-worn countenance, and reflect on the state of her health (and it is difficult to say which of the two, ill-health or habitual anxiety, is more cause and more effect), a sharp fit of the Heart-ache follows.
But enough of this Subject. I ought to be ashamed of myself for troubling you with it; you have enough frets and frictions of your own. And so I proceed to the third cause, which is that (how far imputable to the mood of mind I was in, I cannot say) I did not understand your letter.
Is there any definite service, or any chance of any definite service, great or small, that I can do or promote, or expedite, by coming to town? If there be, let me have a line or a monosyllable Yes, and mention the time. I would have set off and taken the chance without asking the question, but that I have so many irons in the fire at this present moment,—1, my Preface; 2, my Essay; 3, a Work prepared for the press by my Hebrew Friend,[137] in which I am greatly interested, morally and crumenically, though not like the Modern Descendants of Heber, one of a crumenimulga Natio, i.e. a purse-milking set; and 4, Revisal, etc., for a friend only less near than yourself.
Mr. Chance, I take it for granted, has written to you. My opinion is, that he will be a valuable man, not only generally, but especially to that which alone concerns me—your comfort and happiness. He is a self-satisfied man, but of the very kindest and best sort. Prosperous in all his concerns, and with peace in his own conscience and family, I regard such vainness but as the overflow of humanity. I do not like him the better for it; but I should not like him the better without it. Meantime he is active, shrewd, a thorough man of business; sanguine I should think, both by constitution and habitual success: and, under any sudden emergency, I think that Mr. Chance, not so deeply interested, and yet (such is his nature) with equal liveliness in feeling, would be a comfort to you.