down, onewhile stretching their arms upwards to catch their Saviour coming down, others extending them forward to meet His embraces; a third, with a sudden turn, pretends to grasp Him; and a fourth clapping their hands for joy they had Him; with several other antic postures, which made me think that Bedlam itself was but a faint image of their spiritual frenzies. All this while they were singing as loud as their throats would give them leave, till they were quite spent and looked black in the face." Fanaticism, more insane than ever possessed any of the Roundhead preachers in Oliver Cromwell's camp, thus raged in the person of an episcopal clergyman under William III. Country folks crowded about his house, his barn, and his garden; hundreds more are said to have venerated his character and believed in his prophecies. The story affords an instance of the wild enthusiasm which it is in the power of extravagant visionaries to excite, even in an age commonly considered as rationalistic and cold.2

It is very remarkable, in casting one's eye over these sketches, to notice the absence of the old Puritan party. Hall, of Oxford, as already noticed, was the only Divine of that class on the Bishops' Bench; and amongst names

1 An impartial account of Mr. John Mason, p. 8.

2 The following account of an eccentric clergyman, who died just after the Revolution, occurs in the Lansdowne MSS., Kennet Coll., 987. 116. The person referred to is Joseph Crowther, of whom Walker gives some account in his Sufferings of the Clergy, and Wood in his Athene Oxonienses.

"I remember him esteemed at Oxford a very severe disputant, and very tenacious of the rules of logic.

He would often moderate in the public disputation in his own hall; but so fierce and passionate, that if the opponent made a false syllogism, or the respondent a wrong answer, he bid the next that sat by them kick their shins, and it became a proverb, kick shins Crowther.' He was extremely hated at Tredington (Diocese of Worcester), for his stiff contending with the people; they obliged him to keep a boar—he got a black one to spite them. The black pigs were called Crowthers."

of repute belonging to the rest of the Clergy, not one of the same kind can be produced. I do not deny that there may be clerical publications of the period marked by Puritan divinity; I only say that the celebrated authors were of another description.

Vigorous and commanding Puritanic thought, such as moved the religious intellect of England a generation or two earlier, for a time quite died out in the Establishment. Low Churchmanship had been of the Puritan type. Montague, Laud, and the like, found their opponents in Calvinistic clergymen. Now Low Churchmanship took what some would call a rationalistic form; at any rate its advocates were inspired by a philosophical theology, rather than by the institutes of Calvin, or the genius of Geneva. Sancroft and Hicks found their opposites in Tillotson and Burnet. The Act of Uniformity had clearly done its work, and shut or kept out teachers akin to Calamy and Marshall. Their theological spirit, their distinctive evangelical teaching, disappears, so far as the Established Church is concerned, like the stream of Arethusa, and flows underground for a considerable space, to burst out once more in a strong current, a century afterwards.

A

CHAPTER XIV.

TTEMPTS were not wanting on the part of some

of the Bishops to maintain ecclesiastical discipline. There are papers amongst the Tanner MSS. which indicate what went on amidst the throes of the Revolution, in the diocese of Norwich, before the ejectment of Bishop Lloyd. John Gibbs, Rector of Gissing, had been a convert to the Church of Rome; but on the 14th of November, nine days after the landing of the Prince of Orange, when Protestant East Anglicans would be exulting at the advent of the Deliverer, this recusant is referred to as wishing to be reconciled with the Church of his fathers; and a report is given of the sermon which he preached on the occasion. A little while afterwards an instance occurs of clerical immorality, and of that kind of trouble which has often disturbed episcopal peace a Norwich rector was accused of "lewdness," amounting to a capital crime.

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

1 Tanner MSS., xxviii. 248, 274.

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." 1

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

1 Tanner MSS., xxvii. 11, 78.

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.”1

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. Esthetic 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

1 Patrick's Works, ix. 546.