reviewer affects to deal with this statement. But how does he do it? It is thus :-'We hope that Dr. Vaughan, the next time 'he meets his friends the actuaries, will tell them of the allega'tion which certain contemporaries have made, that the greater 'part of the said 6,000 clergymen had little or nothing to eat during the interval in question. Perhaps they will inform him 'whether that circumstance would make any difference in the 'calculation of their probable vitality' (p. 245). If this language has any meaning, it must mean, that in this gentleman's estimation, six out of seven of the sequestered clergy who died between 1640 and 1660, died of starvation. Six out of seven! We hardly think Dr. Vaughan, or his friends the actuaries, will be much perplexed as to what to do with such a representation. A more gross libel upon the clergy and laity of the Church of England in those times has never been committed to writing. What a race of imbeciles must the sequestered clergy have been, that six out of seven of them should have been men content to die of starvation. We are constrained to ask also, What was that overwhelming majority of rich nobles and great landholders, who come into such prominence in the Parliament of 1661 about, to allow the ministers of their venerated and immaculate church to perish around them after this manner? Mr. Serjeant Charleton, in recommending to the approval of his Majesty, that cruel part of the Act of Uniformity which provided that no ejected minister should act as tutor, schoolmaster, or in any way as a teacher of youth, utters these words:

The reason of this addition was, in extending it so far as schoolmasters, in that the Commons observed the force of education was great, so as the Commons thought they ought to take care for the education of youth: for so many, he said, of the gentry and nobility found in the Long Parliament differing from the Church of England did (as was concerned) arise from this root.

He observed it was an oversight of the late usurped powers, that they took no care in this particular, whereby many young persons were wellseasoned in their judgments as to the King.'

So, as we know from other sources, the ordinance on this point issued by Cromwell, was never enforced, and the work of tuition, public and private, was left open to the sequestered clergy. Now, how fared it with the ejected ministers, who were so ruthlessly cut off from this means of subsistence, and whose friends were not so much the wealthy as the poor of the land? Matthew Henry tells us that his good father Philip Henry

'—knew, within a few miles round him, so many ministers turned out to the wide world, stripped of all their maintenance, and

· The Quarterly Review on the Bicentenary.

459

exposed to continued hardships, as, with their wives and children, most of them having numerous families, made up above a hundred, and though often reduced to wants and straits, yet were not forsaken, but were enabled to rejoice in the Lord, to whom the promise was fulfilled, "So shalt thou dwell in the land and verily thou shalt be fed.”—One observation he made not long before he died, when he had been young, and now was old, that though many of the ejected ministers were brought very low, had many children, were greatly harassed by persecution, and their friends generally poor and unable to support them; yet, in all his acquaintance, he never knew, nor could remember to have heard, of a Nonconformist minister in prison (for debt), or to be in debt.'-Life of Philip Henry (pp. 61, 62).

And yet we are to believe that the nobles and gentry of England, while fully at liberty to avail themselves of the tutorial services of their sequestered clergy, allowed them to starve, not by hundreds merely, but by thousands!* The truth is, Dr. Vaughan's statistical argument relative to the number of the sequestered clergy is not touched. It cannot be answered. It settles the question. No doubt some two thousand clergy were sequestered, but it is no less clear that in the course of the twenty years before 1660, great numbers of them had, by one

A writer in the London Review, the Methodist Quarterly for July, has dabbled with Dr. Vaughan's figures, and in a manner more absurd, if possible, than the writer in the old Quarterly. This critic insists that the greater part of the sequestrations did not take place when the Covenant was first published and enforced, but through many subsequent years; and by this fact, says the reviewer, the basis of the actuarial calculation is destroyed.' It is not in this gentleman's way, it seems, to understand, that the shorter the time between the date of a man's sequestration and the year 1660, the greater was the probability that he would be alive in 1660. The point accordingly which the writer is aiming to establish, in place of destroying the actuarial basis,' strengthens it. Further, strong partisan writers, like another sort of people, need have good memories. In the preceding page the writer is quite disposed that his readers should give credit to what he calls the notorious rumour' that White, the author of the Scandalous Century, and Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee, boasted of having sequestered 8,000 clergymen. Now White died in 1644, and to suppose, as this writer does, that the 'bulk' of sequestrations that took place belong to a series of years subsequent to that time, is to suppose that 8,000 clergymen were sequestered from somewhat more that 9,000 parishes by 1644, and that still the bulk of the sequestrations were left to come afterwards. This is beautiful! But critics are great and small, and some, we must suppose, are so great that, like the Great Napoleon, they are privileged not to believe in the impossible.

Seriously, if when Independents come into controversy, the organs and leaders of our older Methodism must take part against us, it is a pity they cannot manage to do so in a way to allow of our looking on their antagonism with some measure of respect. The intention of such writing as we find in the article in question is palpable enough; but the only harm it can do is harm to the parties from whom it comes. It is not long since the Methodists had their Centenary, and truly had the Independents been disposed to criticise what was done at that juncture, there was room enough. But we do not remember that any Congregationalist wrote one unfriendly line concerning it.

means or other, made their way back into the possession of

4. Of course, the Quarterly Review,' like the discriminating and candid multitude whose mouth-piece it has descended to become, is strong in asserting that, seeing we do not agree with the ejected of 1662 in everything, we ought not to presume that we are at one with them in anything. Our churches may have descended from them; we may have received our theological ideas from them, our religious life from them; the essence of our polity and discipline from them; and our resolve that in religion we will obey God rather than man from them; but all these ties of real spiritual relationship are nothing, unless we are prepared to hold a certain secular principle along with them, viz., that the ultimate authority in the Church should be the constable and the dragoon. But we are not to be driven from our proper ground as English Nonconformists by any such artifice. We are in the succession of the men of 1662. All that was vital with them is with us. The majority of them had learnt many things which their Puritan predecessors had not learnt, and we have come to see truth in a few things in which they did not see it. But the line has not been broken.† All down in our history as Protestants, the men demanding ecclesiastical reform have been one party, and the men resisting it another, and so it is now. Those who become Voluntary Churchmen in the place of State Churchmen, do not cease to be Nonconformists--they are both. We are not to be shut up to the one of those questions without the other. Men alive to both were among the sufferers in 1662. We protest against the proceedings of the haughty and perfidous oppressors of that day, not only because they drove Nonconformists from their pulpits, but because they doomed every minister of God elsewhere to silence or to a felon's lot in a common jail. We certainly hold that the Church of Christ should not be servant to the State, which means servant to the world; and if anything could bind us to this principle more strongly than ever, it would be the attempt now made to punish us for holding it, by denying, on this ground, our relation to the great reform party of past times. Yes, and if any

Scobell's 'Acts.' 279, 335-347, 365, 366.

+ Much is sometimes made of the fact that some of the places of worship occu pied by the ejected of 1662, afterwards passed into the hands of heterodox trustees. But it is carefully overlooked, that scarcely a place of that kind existed, from which an Evangelical party did not withdraw, and by erecting another sanctuary, and forming another church, perpetuated the Evangelical faith and feeling which had come to them from the men whose piety made them what they were on St. Bartholomew's Day. The change was in a wealthy few, not in the many. The latter were not to be changed, and took care to guard against the necessity of any second removal by bestowing better attention on their trust-deeds.

Epilogue on Affairs.

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thing could ensure that our Nonconformity in the time to come shall be no cold conventionalism, but spirit and life, it would be called forth by the flood of arrogance, mendacity, and insult which has broken loose upon us during the last few months.

But what next? Everything in the growing tendencies of things within the pale of the English Church disposes us to ask this question. We must confess we see no reason to expect that what shall be next will be an improvement on what is now. Everything, on the contrary, seems to say that matters will become worse, much worse, before they are better. The new licence to Rationalism will not have come in vain. The old fortress of Tractarianism will remain strong as ever. The scepticism of the clergy, from the press and the pulpit, will be bolder and more common. The sacerdotal superstition of the Romanizers will be carried further, and with less disguise. Meanwhile, the Evangelical party, in place of rising up against all this, demanding with the voice of its many thousand priests, that this shall not be, will care more about saving the Church than about her teaching; and will close their eyes against what is doing, or find excuses for letting it alone. So this party, at present the salt of the system, will gradually lose its savour. Its want of manliness and fidelity will become more and more palpable to observant and impartial men, and especially to Nonconformists. From all this Dissent-not only Nonconformist, but Anti-state-church Dissent-must gather strength, until society itself, at some favourable juncture in its affairs, shall learn to ask whether, if this be the best form in which the State-church principle can be carried out, the principle itself is not a mistake, or at least a principle which society with us has outgrown, and which had better be dispensed with.

EPILOGUE

ON

AFFAIRS.

FAITH in the progress of the race is a generous faith. It is commonly the faith of generous men. It comes from a disposition to look at the best in humanity, and to believe in it.

Perhaps, since the fall of the great republics of Greece and Rome,

nothing has happened in the history of mankind so truly depressing to the hope of such men as the present war in America.

From a time far back over the last half-century, the speculation has been that society was about to enter upon a new phase, to execrate war, to become homogeneous and one through the binding influence of industry and the arts of peace.

But in the wake of this current of public thought, we see a people, who, from their advanced and equalised intelligence, and liberty, and industry, and means of happiness, might have been expected to become the special evidence in favour of this hopeful doctrine, taking such a course as to seem to cast a bitter mockery over all such anticipations. One of the most industrious communities on earth has become the most reckless in regard to its commercial relations, and in wasting all the fruits of its skill in traffic and production. The most self-governed people in the world have become the most ill-governed. The land in which man has been recognised as man more fully than in any region of the earth during some two thousand years, is the land in which human suffering and human life now seem to be much what they were when at the disposal of the Pharaohs of Egypt or the kings of Babylonia or Assyria.

The world, it seems, was to see how a colossal republic may become a colossal Napoleon; how the former may become as ambitious as the latter, and fully as heedless in regard to the costs of its ambition.

It is a sad picture, but it may have its uses. After all, even this may be a link in the chain of progress. It may help to teach the world that material prosperity and civilization are not the same thing. It may tend to convince men that the roots of social order and of social peace do not lie in the accumulation of wealth, nor in the progress of science or art, but in the culture of the moral and religious nature of man. The great want in America lies there. Its intelligence has ministered to successful industry, and to much gratification of the lower kind, but it has not adequately discharged its higher mission. Mr. Buckle, we are told, has many admirers in America. We should have expected so much. But such persons may come to learn that the worship of the dexterous man is not the worship of the highest style of man, and that the nation given to that kind of worship is not in the way to greatness or to rest. In history, means of indulgence have become sources of decay, and even high art has often been a hectic flush betokening disease and not health.

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