of the Restoration great divines and writers to re-establish the reputation for learning enjoyed by her in the times of Andrewes, Morton, and Hall. Indeed, no period in the history of that Church was so fruitful in great divines as that of the Restoration. The death of Henry Hammond, the great pillar of the Church of England during the troubles, has been mentioned as occurring just before the Restoration. But though he died thus prematurely, his works survived. His Practical Catechism is said to have done more than any other work in stemming the tide of vice and profanity which broke loose at this time. It was the work of one whom every cavalier venerated as the most determined upholder of the royal cause. It had been given by the martyred king as a dying gift to his son the Duke of Gloucester. His Parænesis, penned, as he tells us, "first in tears, and then in ink," showed how a good man could advocate Christian love even in the midst of the sorest provocations, and draw holy lessons from all the trials of the Church. His various controversial works were a mine of wealth to those who had to contend against the disappointed Nonconformists, and in his work on the New Testament he founded a new school of exposition. By their conventional interpretations the foreign reformers had done more to obscure Scripture than to explain it. Hammond discarded conventiona glosses, and endeavoured to ascertain the meaning of passages by investigating contemporary customs and facts, and by applying the rules of criticism to the diction, and he thus succeeded in a great measure in rescuing the exposition of Scripture out of the hands of Calvin and Beza. Hammond's friend, Robert Sanderson, possessed excellences as a divine of altogether a different character. He was admirable as a writer of English, in which Hammond was deficient, but less learned, less liberal in his views, and less emancipated from Protestant conventionalities. Hammond had succeeded in inducing Sanderson to abandon his original Calvinistic opinions, and in his sermons, some of which were published with a bold preface in the midst of the troubles, we have probably some of the very best in the English language. As a writer on casuistry, Sanderson also occupies the foremost place among English divines. King Charles I. is said himself to have translated his treatise De Juramenti Obligatione.1 In Jeremy Taylor we have a combination of the excellences of Hammond and Sanderson, together with a special power and vigour which are all his own. He is more diffusely learned, more strikingly eloquent, more full of the earnestness of devotion, than any other writer in the Eng1 Sanderson's casuistical treatises have lately been admirably edited in English by the Bishop of Lincoln.

1

In

lish language-perhaps, also, it is not too much to say than any writer in any language. He is perhaps best compared with the great Latin fathers Jerome and Augustine. It has been well said of him that "his conceptions and expressions belong to the loftiest and most sacred description of poetry, of which they only want what they cannot be said to need, the name and metrical arrangement." Taylor's treatise, called The Liberty of Prophesying, published during the rebellion period, was the first formal and direct assertion of the duty of toleration made by a member of the Church of England. The same liberal sentiments which animated his first great work, the Liberty of Prophesying, appeared also in Taylor's last great work, the Dissuasive from Popery. This is probably the most able work written by a member of the Church of England against the Church of Rome. And as Taylor excelled all other English divines in this field, so he is certainly before them all in the richness of his devotional thoughts, as brought out in the Great Exemplar and other writings, and in his metaphysical analysis, in the Ductor Dubitantium. As a casuist, however, he is not so safe as Sanderson, and the orthodoxy of his treatise on Repentance is no doubt questionable. Great learning was united in Taylor, with a rich, eloquent, and diffuse style. Isaac Barrow it is found in conjunction with a severe, exact, and unattractive style. Barrow has, perhaps, fewer blemishes than Taylor, but he has certainly fewer excellences. "He was not so extensively learned as Taylor," says Mr. Hallam, "but inferior even in that respect to hardly any one else." 2 These two writers may be placed, together with Richard Hooker, in the highest rank of English divines. Around them many more may be grouped. At Oxford Robert South was distinguished not only for learning, but for a vein of caustic wit and humour, which appears only thinly veiled, to suit the decencies of the occasion, in his famous sermons. Bishop Gunning was noted by Baxter among the bishops at the Savoy for his vast learning, and for the readiness with which he could meet every difficulty. His book on the Lent Fast bears out his reputation. Bishop Pearson, still more honourably mentioned by his opponent Baxter, as not only learned, but candid and tolerant, has given us a proof of his powers in his treatise on the Creed. George Bull, afterwards Bishop of St. David's, published in 1685 his great work called Defensio Fidei Nicænæ, a learned treatise in Latin, which establishes the antiquity of the Nicene faith as against the Arians.3 In 1672 Richard Cumberland pub

1 Heber's Life of Taylor, p. 249. 2 Literature of Europe, iii. 269. 3 For a subsequent work on the same subject, called Judicium Ecclesia Catholica, Bull received the thanks of the bishops of France in Synod assembled.

lished an able work on the Laws of Nature, and in 1678 Dr. Ralph Cudworth put forth his famous Intellectual System. These works, together with the well-known writings of John Locke, raise this period to a high rank in philosophy as well as in divinity-Thomas Hobbes, the atheistical philosopher, the advocate of absolutism and of mischievous theories in almost every department of thought, being the special object of their refutations. The Caroline divines, as they are often called, completed the work: begun by Laud and Montagu, and completely put to flight Calvinism from the higher theology of the Church of England. among Nonconformists this system had still powerful defenders.

But

§ 11. Among the Independents the most famous was John Owen, who had taken a leading part in religious history under Cromwell, had been Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, and the man in highest repute for learning of all the Independent doctors. His great work is a Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, which furnished a complete armoury of weapons against the Socinians, but its intolerable prolixity greatly impairs its value. Prolixity and verbosity were the great faults of the nonconforming divines of that age, and especially of Richard Baxter. He is said to have composed about one hundred and forty treatises, many of them of great length. He is probably now best remembered by a few of his devotional works. What may be called sensational or experimental divinity was carried to the highest point by Baxter. His Saints' Everlasting Rest, written when he was a very young man, is perhaps the best known, as it is also one of the most striking and able of his treatises.

§ 12. But though the Church of this period was aided by the fame and labours of the great divines above mentioned, there were, on the other hand, in the great body of the clergy, many causes prejudicial to her advance. A sudden and large demand had been made for men in holy orders at a time when the Universities were scantily furnished, and few suitable candidates were to be had. Many thus obtained orders who were unsuited for their holy calling. Sermons began to be in vogue full of stilted phrases and ridiculous tropes and metaphors.1 The Puritanical style had been to overload the sermon with Scripture; the modern fashion was to ignore Scripture and reason froin the nature of things. In spite of the grand examples of real pulpit eloquence given in the sermons of Taylor and Barrow, the essay style of sermon began to obtain popularity. This was well enough in the hands of Tillotson and such masters of the art, but it became ludicrous when attempted by the country clergy without sufficient knowledge and power for

1 Causes of the Contempt of the Clergy, p. 38, sq. Birch's Life of Tillotson, p. 20.

such compositions. Among the country clergy also an unedifying style of preaching was joined with a poverty and meanness of living which subjected the minister to the contempt of the thoughtless and the scoffer. Livings of twenty or thirty pounds a year were esteemed valuable pieces of preferment, and the holders of these miserable appointments could not have been far removed from the condition of the day labourer. That amidst the trials and struggles incident to an impoverished condition, some clergymen should have given cause of scandal is not to be wondered at. Nor were scandals confined to the lower clergy. A bishop was suspended by Archbishop Sancroft for immorality; 3 an archdeacon was convicted of simony. But in spite of these drawbacks it is incontestable that the Church of England made steady onward progress during the reign of Charles II.

§ 13. During the latter part of that period she was fortunate in her Primate. Juxon had been succeeded by Gilbert Sheldon in 1663, and after the severe political churchmanship of Sheldon there had come, as a welcome change, the earnest and devout churchmanship of William Sancroft, Dean of St. Paul's, who was elevated direct to the Primacy, January 27, 1678.

§ 14. The Church was restored in a fervour of popularity, and though this fervour passed away she continued popular during this reign. Nonconformist views, on the other hand, instead of making progress (as religious opinions subjected to persecution usually do), very greatly receded, and dwindled away. Considering the large number of Nonconformist ministers ejected in 1662, and the general saturnalia of opinion in the previous years, it is very wonderful to find such testimonies to the advance of the Church as the following:-The Diocese of Norwich had been one of the most Puritanical in England, but one of the Norfolk members declared in his place in Parliament that he "knew not of a family removed, nor trade altered, and in the country a general conformity which grows daily on the people. In Norwich are twenty thousand persons, and not twenty Dissenters.” 4 Dr. Sherlock, in his Test Act Vindicated, calculates that in 1676 all the Dissenters in England, including Papists, were in the proportion to members of the Church of England as one to twenty. The Church might now

1 Causes of the Contempt of the Clergy, p. 89. 2 Chamberlayne's Anglic Notitia, pp. 267-8.

p. 94.

Causes of Contempt, etc.

3 Wood, bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. A very long and wearisome litigation arose between him and the Primate.

4 Parliamentary History, iv. 418.

5 Calamy's Autobiography (ed. Rutt.), i. 80.

well have agreed to a policy of toleration and oblivion. was not to be until those who had been most forward in upholding absolutist principles were made to see by a practical proof to what those principles led, and until the Church which had defeated the exclusion policy was herself made to feel what a Romanist occupation of the throne really meant.

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.