ROBERT NELSON, HIS FRIENDS, AND CHURCH PRINCIPLES.
High Churchmanship, as it was commonly understood in Queen Anne's reign,
did not possess many attractive features. Its nobler and more spiritual
elements were sadly obscured amid the angry strife of party warfare, and
all that was hard, or worldly, or intolerant in it was thrust into
exaggerated prominence. Indeed, the very terms 'High' and 'Low' Church
must have become odious in the ears of good men who heard them bandied
to and fro like the merest watchwords of political faction. It is a
relief to turn from the noise and virulence with which so-called Church
principles were contested in Parliament and Convocation, in lampoons and
pamphlets, in taverns and coffee-houses, from Harley and Bolingbroke,
from Swift, Atterbury, and Sacheverell, to a set of High Churchmen,
belonging rather to the former than to the existing generation, whose
names were not mixed up with these contentions, and whose pure and
primitive piety did honour to the Church which had nurtured such
faithful and worthy sons. If, at the opening of the eighteenth century,
the English Church derived its chief lustre from the eminent qualities
of some of the Broad Church bishops, it must not be forgotten that it
was also adorned with the virtues of men of a very different order of
thought, as represented by Ken and Nelson, Bull and Beveridge. Some of
them, it is true, had been unable to take the oaths to the recently
established Government, and were therefore, as by a kind of accident,
excluded, if not from the services, at all events from the ministry of
the National Church. But none as yet ventured to deny that, saving the
question of political allegiance, they were thoroughly loyal alike to
its doctrine and its order.
It is proposed in this chapter to make Robert Nelson the central figure,
and to group around him some of the most distinguished of his Juror and
Nonjuror friends. A special charm lingers around the memory of Bishop
Ken, but his name can scarcely be made prominent in any sketch which
deals only with the eighteenth century. He lived indeed through its
first decade, but his active life was over before it began. Nelson, on
the other hand, though he survived him by only four years, took an
active part throughout Queen Anne's reign in every scheme of Church
enterprise. He was a link, too, between those who accepted and those who
declined the oaths. Even as a member of the Nonjuring communion he was
intimately associated with many leading Churchmen of the Establishment;
and when, to his great gratification, he felt that he could again with
an easy conscience attend the services of his parish church, the
ever-widening gap that had begun to open was in his case no hindrance to
familiar intercourse with his old Nonjuring friends.
Greatly as Robert Nelson was respected and admired by his
contemporaries, no complete record of his life was published until the
present century. His friend Dr. Francis Lee, author of the 'Life of
Kettlewell,' had taken the work on hand, but was prevented by death from
carrying it out. There are now, however, three or four biographies of
him, especially the full and interesting memoir published in 1860 by Mr.
Secretan. It is needless, therefore, to go over ground which has already
been completely traversed; a few notes only of the chief dates and
incidents of his life may be sufficient to introduce the subject.
Robert Nelson was born in 1656. In his early boyhood he was at St.
Paul's School, but the greater part of his education was received under
the guidance of Mr. Bull, afterwards Bishop of St. Davids, by whose life
and teaching he was profoundly influenced. The biography of his
distinguished tutor occupied the labour of his last years, and was no
doubt a grateful offering to the memory of a man to whom he owed many of
his best impressions. About 1679 he went to London, where he became
intimate with Tillotson, then Dean of Canterbury. In later years this
intimacy was somewhat interrupted by great divergence of views on
theological and ecclesiastical subjects; but a strong feeling of mutual
respect remained, and, in his last illness, Tillotson was nursed by his
friend with the most affectionate love, and died in his arms. In 1680
Nelson went to France with Halley, his old schoolfellow and fellow
member of the Royal Society, and during their journey watched with his
friend the celebrated comet which bears Halley's name. While in Paris he
received the offer of a place in Charles II.'s Court, but took the
advice of Tillotson, who said he should be glad 'if England were so
happy as that the Court might be a fit place for him to live in.'[1] He
therefore declined the offer, and travelled on to Rome, where he made
the acquaintance of Lady Theophila Lucy and married her the next year.
It was no light trouble to him that on their return to London she avowed
herself a Romanist. Cardinal Howard at Rome, and Bossuet at Paris, had
gained her over to their faith, and with the ardour of a proselyte she
even entered, on the Roman side, into the great controversy of the day.
Robert Nelson himself was entirely unaffected by the current which just
at this time seemed to have set in in favour of Rome. He maintained,
indeed, a cordial friendship with Bossuet, but was not shaken by his
arguments, and in 1688 published, as his first work, a treatise against
transubstantiation. Though controversy was little to his taste, these
were times when men of earnest conviction could scarcely avoid engaging
in it.[2] Nelson valued the name of Protestant next only to that of
Catholic, and was therefore drawn almost necessarily into taking some
part in the last great dispute with Rome.[3] But polemics would be
deprived of their gall of bitterness if combatants joined in the strife
with as much charity and generosity of feeling as he did.[4]
From the first Nelson felt himself unable to transfer his allegiance to
the new Government. The only question in his mind was whether he could
consistently join in Church services in which public prayers were
offered in behalf of a prince whose claims he utterly repudiated. He
consulted Archbishop Tillotson on the point; and his old friend answered
with all candour that if his opinions were so decided that he was verily
persuaded such a prayer was sinful, there could be no doubt as to what
he should do. Upon this he at once joined the Nonjuring communion. He
remained in it for nearly twenty years, on terms of cordial intimacy
with most of its chief leaders. When, however, in 1709, Lloyd, the
deprived Bishop of Norwich, died, Nelson wrote to Ken, now the sole
survivor of the Nonjuring bishops, and asked whether he claimed his
allegiance to him as his rightful spiritual father. As regards the State
prayers, time had modified his views. He retained his Jacobite
principles, but considered that non-concurrence in certain petitions in
the service did not necessitate a prolonged breach of Church unity. Ken,
who had welcomed the accession of his friend Hooper to the see of Bath
and Wells, and who no longer subscribed himself under his old episcopal
title, gave a glad consent, for he also longed to see the schism healed.
Nelson accordingly, with Dodwell and other moderate Nonjurors, rejoined
the communion of the National Church.
It is much to Robert Nelson's honour that in an age of strong party
animosities he never suffered his political predilections to stand in
the way of union for any benevolent purpose. He had taken an active
interest in the religious associations of young men which sprang up in
London and other towns and villages about 1678, a time when the zeal of
many attached members of the Church of England was quickened by the
dangers which were besetting it. A few years later, when 'Societies for
the Reformation of Manners' were formed, to check the immorality and
profaneness which was gaining alarming ground, he gave his hearty
co-operation both to Churchmen and Dissenters in a movement which he
held essential to the welfare of the country. Although a Jacobite and
Nonjuror, he was enrolled, with not a few of the most distinguished
Churchmen of the day, among the earliest members of the Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge at its formation in 1699; and long before
his re-entering into the Established communion we find him not only a
constant attendant, but sometimes chairman at its weekly meetings. He
took a leading part in the organisation of the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, in 1701, and sat at its
board in friendly conference with Burnet and many another whose very
names were odious to his Nonjuring friends. And great as his
disappointment must have been at the frustration of Jacobite hopes in
the quiet accession of George I., the interest and honourable pride
which he felt in the London charity schools so far triumphed over his
political prejudices that he found pleasure in marshalling four thousand
of the children to witness the new sovereign's entry, and to greet him
with the psalm which bids the King rejoice in the strength of the Lord
and be exceeding glad in His salvation.
In such works as these--to which must be added his labours as a
commissioner in 1710 for the erection of new churches in London, his
efforts for the promotion of parochial and circulating clerical
libraries throughout the kingdom, for advancing Christian teaching in
grammar schools, for improving prisons, for giving help to French
Protestants in London and Eastern Christians in Armenia--Robert Nelson
found abundant scope for the beneficent energies of his public life. The
undertakings he carried out were but a few of the projects which engaged
his thoughts. If we cast our eyes over the proposed institutions which
he commended to the notice of the influential and the rich, it is
surprising to see in how many directions he anticipated the
philanthropical ideas of the age in which we live. Ophthalmic and
consumptive hospitals, and hospitals for the incurable; ragged schools;
penitentiaries; homes for destitute infants; associations of gentlewomen
for charitable and religious purposes; theological, training, and
missionary colleges; houses for temporary religious retirement and
retreat--such were some of the designs which, had he lived a few years
longer, he would certainly have attempted to carry into execution.[5]
He was no less active with his pen in efforts aimed at infusing an
earnest spirit of practical piety, and bringing home to men's thoughts
an appreciative feeling of the value of Church ordinances. He published
his 'Practice of True Devotion' in 1698, an excellent work, which
attracted little attention when it first came out, but reached at least
its twenty-second edition before the next century was completed. His
treatise on the 'Christian Sacrifice' appeared in 1706, his 'Life of
Bishop Bull' in 1713; but it is by his 'Festivals and Fasts' that his
name has been made familiar to every succeeding generation of Churchmen.
Its catechetical form, and the somewhat formal composure of its style,
did not strike past readers as defects. It certainly was in high favour
among English Churchmen generally. Dr. Johnson said of it in 1776 that
he understood it to have the greatest sale of any book ever printed in
England except the Bible.[6] In the first four years and a half after
its issue from the press more than 10,000 copies were printed.[7]
Robert Nelson died in the January of 1715, a man so universally esteemed
that it would be probably impossible to find his name connected in any
writer with a single word of disparagement. It would be folly to speak
of one thus distinguished by singular personal qualities as if he were,
to any great extent, representative of a class. If the Church of England
had been adorned during Queen Anne's reign by many such men, it could
never have been said of it that it failed to take advantage of the
signal opportunities then placed within its reach. Yet his views on all
Church questions, and many of the characteristic features of his
character, were shared by many of his friends both in the Established
Church and among the Nonjurors. He survived almost all of them, so that
with him the type seemed nearly to pass away for a length of time, as if
the spiritual atmosphere of the eighteenth century were uncongenial to
it. His younger acquaintances in the Nonjuring body, however sincere and
generous in temperament, were men of a different order. It was but
natural that, as the schism became more pronounced and Jacobite hopes
more desperate, the Church views of a dwindling minority should become
continually narrower, and lose more and more of those larger sympathies
which can scarcely be altogether absent in any section of a great
national Church.
First in order among Nelson's friends--not in intimacy, but in the
affectionate honour with which he always remembered him--must be
mentioned Bishop Ken. He was living in retirement at Longleat; but
Nelson must have frequently met him at the house of their common friend
Mr. Cherry of Shottisbrooke,[8] and they occasionally corresponded.
Nelson may have been the more practical, Ken the more meditative. The
one was still in the full vigour of his benevolent activity while the
other was waiting for rest, and soothing with sacred song the pains
which told of coming dissolution. In his own words, to 'contemplate,
hymn, love, joy, obey,' was the tranquil task which chiefly remained for
him on earth. But they were congenial in their whole tone of thought.
Their views on the disputed questions of the day very nearly coincided.
Nelson, as might be expected of a layman who throughout his life had
seen much of good men of all opinions, was the more tolerant; but both
were kindly and charitable towards those from whom they most differed,
and both were attached with such deep loyalty of love to the Church in
whose bosom they had been nurtured that they desired nothing more than
to see what they believed to be its genuine principles fully carried
out, and could neither sympathise with nor understand religious feelings
which looked elsewhere for satisfaction. Both were unaffectedly devout,
without the least tinge of moroseness or gloom. Nelson specially
delighted in Ken's morning, evening, and midnight hymns. He entreated
his readers to charge their memory with them. 'The daily repeating of
them will make you perfect in them, and the good fruit of them will
abide with you all your days.'[9] He subjoined them to his 'Practice of
True Devotion;' and Samuel Wesley tells us that he personally knew how
much he delighted in them. It was with these that--
He oft, when night with holy hymns was worn,
Prevented prime and wak'd the rising morn.[10]
He has made use of many of Ken's prayers, together with some from
Taylor, Kettlewell, and Hickes, in his 'Companion for the Festivals and
Fasts.' There is an intensity and effusion of spirit in them, in which
his own more studied compositions are somewhat wanting.
Among the other Nonjuring bishops Nelson was acquainted with, but not
very intimately, were Bancroft and Frampton. The former he loved and
admired; and spoke very highly of his learning and wisdom, his prudent
zeal for the honour of God, his piety and self-denying integrity.[11]
The little weaknesses and gentle intolerances of the good old man were
not such as he would censure, nor would he be altogether out of sympathy
with them. Bishop Frampton was in a manner an hereditary friend. He had
gone out to Aleppo as a young man, half a century before, in capacity of
chaplain of the Levant Company, at the urgent recommendation of John
Nelson, father of Robert,[12] who had the highest opinion of his merits.
From his cottage at Standish in Gloucestershire, where he had retired
after his deprivation, he occasionally wrote to Robert Nelson, and must
have often heard of him from John Kettlewell, the intimate and very
valued friend of both. He was a man who could not fail to be
esteemed[13] and loved by all who had the privilege of his acquaintance.
He had been a preacher of great fame, whom people crowded to hear. Pepys
said of him that 'he preached most like an apostle that he ever heard
man;'[14] and Evelyn, noting in his diary that he had been to hear him,
calls him 'a pious and holy man, excellent in the pulpit for moving the
affections.' His letters, of which several remain, written to Ken,
Lloyd, and Sancroft, about the end of the seventeenth and the beginning
of the eighteenth centuries, give the idea of a man of unaffected
humility and simple piety, of a happy, kindly disposition, and full of
spirit and innocent mirth. Though he could not take the oaths, he
regularly communicated at the parish church.[15] Controversy he
abhorred; it seemed to him, he said to Kettlewell, as if the one thing
needful were scarcely heard, amidst the din and clashings of _pros_ and
_cons_, and he wished the men of war, the disputants, would follow his
friend's example, and beat their swords and spears into ploughshares and
pruning hooks.[16]
John Kettlewell died in 1695, to Nelson's great loss, for he was indeed
a bosom friend. Nelson had unreservedly entrusted him with his schemes
for doing good, his literary projects, his spiritual perplexities, and
'the nicest and most difficult emergencies of his life; such an opinion
had he of his wisdom, as well as of his integrity.'[17] More than once,
observes Dr. Lee, he said how much gratitude he owed to Kettlewell for
his good influence, sometimes in animating him to stand out boldly in
the cause of religion, sometimes in concerting with him schemes of
benevolence, sometimes in suggesting what he could best write in the
service of the Church. They planned out together the 'Companion for the
Festivals and Fasts;' they encouraged one another in that gentler mode
of conducting controversy which must have seemed like mere weakness to
many of the inflamed partisans of the period. Nelson proposed to
preserve the memory of his friend in a biography. He carefully collected
materials for the purpose, and though he had not leisure to carry out
his design, was of great assistance to Francis Lee in the life which was
eventually written.[18]
Bishop Ken used to speak of Kettlewell in terms of the highest reverence
and esteem. In a letter to Nelson, acknowledging the receipt of some of
Kettlewell's sermons, which his correspondent had lately edited, he
calls their author 'as saintlike a man as ever I knew;'[19] and when, in
1696, he was summoned before the Privy Council to give account for a
pastoral letter drawn up by the nonjuring bishops on behalf of the
deprived clergy, he spoke of it as having been first proposed by 'Mr.
Kettlewell, that holy man who is now with God.'[20] There can be no
doubt he well merited the admiration of his friends. Perhaps the most
beautiful element in his character was his perfect guilelessness and
transparent truth. Almost his last words, addressed to his nephew, were
'not to tell a lie, no, not to save a world, not to save your King nor
yourself.'[21] He had lived fully up to the spirit of this rule.
Anything like show and pretence, political shifts and evasions,
dissimulations for the sake of safety or under an idea of doing
good--'acting,' as he expressed it, 'deceitfully for God, and breaking
religion to preserve religion,' were things he would never in the
smallest degree condescend to. In no case would he allow that a jocose
or conventional departure from accuracy was justifiable, and even if a
nonjuring friend, under the displeasure, as might often be, of
Government, assumed a disguise, he was uneasy and annoyed, and declined
to call him by his fictitious name.[22] Happily, perhaps, for his peace
of mind, his steady purpose 'to follow truth wherever he might find
it,'[23] without respect of persons or fear of consequences, though it
led to a sacrifice, contentedly, and even joyfully borne, of worldly
means, led him no tittle astray from the ancient paths of orthodoxy.
Like most High Churchmen of his day, he held most exaggerated views as
to the duty of passive obedience, a doctrine which he held to be vitally
connected with the whole spirit of Christian religion. He sorely
lamented 'the great and grievous breach' caused by the nonjuring
separation,[24] and earnestly trusted that a time of healing and reunion
might speedily arrive; and though he adhered staunchly to the communion
of the deprived bishops, whom he held to be the only rightful fathers of
the Church, and believed that there alone he could find 'orthodox and
holy ministrations,'[25] he never for an instant supposed that he
separated himself thereby from the Church of England, in which, he said
in his dying declaration, 'as he had lived and ministered, so he still
continued firm in its faith, worship, and communion.'[26] Such was
Kettlewell, a thorough type of the very best of the Nonjurors, a man so
kindly and large-hearted in many ways, and so open to conviction, that
the term bigoted would be harshly applied to him, but whose ideas ran
strongly and deeply in a narrow channel. He lived a life unspotted from
the world; nor was there any purer and more fervent spirit in the list
of those whose active services were lost to the Church of England by the
new oath of allegiance.
Henry Dodwell was another of Robert Nelson's most esteemed friends.
After the loss of his Camdenian Professorship of History, he lived among
his nonjuring acquaintances at Shottisbrooke, immersed in abstruse
studies. His profound learning--for he was acknowledged to be one of the
most learned men in Europe[27]--especially his thorough familiarity with
all precedents drawn from patristic antiquity, made him a great
authority in the perplexities which from time to time divided the
Nonjurors. It was mainly to him that Nelson owed his return to the
established Communion. Dodwell had been very ardent against the oaths;
when he conceived the possibility of Ken's accepting them, he had
written him a long letter of anxious remonstrance; he had written
another letter of indignant concern to Sherlock, on news of his
intended compliance.[28] But his special standing point was based upon
the argument that it was schism of the worst order to side with bishops
who had been intruded by mere lay authority into sees which had other
rightful occupiers. When, therefore, this hindrance no longer existed,
he was of opinion that political differences, however great, should be
no bar to Church Communion, and that the State prayers were no
insurmountable difficulty. Nelson gladly agreed, and the bells of
Shottisbrooke rang merrily when he and Dodwell, and the other Nonjurors
resident in that place, returned to the parish church.[29]
Dodwell is a well-known example of the extravagances of opinion, into
which a student may be led, who, in perfect seclusion from the world,
follows up his views unguided by practical considerations. Greatly as
his friends respected his judgment on all points of precedent and
authority, they readily allowed he had more of the innocency of the dove
than the wisdom of the serpent.[30] His faculties were in fact
over-burdened with the weight of his learning, and his published works,
which followed one another in quick succession, contained
eccentricities, strange to the verge of madness. A layman himself, he
held views as to the dignities and power of the priesthood, of which the
'Tatler'[31] might well say that Rome herself had never forged such
chains for the consciences of the laity as he would have imposed.
Starting upon an assumption, common to him with many whose general
theological opinions he was most averse to, that the Divine counsels
were wholly beyond the sphere of human faculties, and unimpeded
therefore by any consideration of reason in his inferences from
Scripture and primitive antiquity, he advanced a variety of startling
theories, which created some dismay among his friends, and gave endless
opportunity to his opponents. Much that he has written sounds far more
like a grave caricature of high sacerdotalism, after the manner of De
Foe's satires on intolerance, than the sober conviction of an earnest
man.[32] It is needless to dwell on crotchets for which, as Dr. Hunt
properly observes, nobody was responsible but himself.[33] Ken, who had
great respect for him--'the excellent' Mr. Dodwell, as he calls
him--remarked of his strange ideas on the immortality of the soul, that
he built high on feeble foundations, and would not have many proselytes
to his hypotheses.[34] The same might be said of much else that he
wrote on theological subjects. As for nonjuring principles, he was so
wedded to them that he could see nothing but deadly schism outside the
fold over which 'our late invalidly deprived fathers' presided. It only,
as orthodox and unschismatic, 'was entitled to have its communions and
excommunications ratified in heaven.'[35] No wonder he longed to see
union restored, that so he might die in peace.[36]
With the ever understood proviso that they could not fall in with many
of his views, Nelson and most of his friends loved Mr. Dodwell and were
proud of him. They admired his great learning, his fervent and ascetic
piety, his deep attachment to the doctrine and usages of the English
Church, and many attractive features in personal character. 'He was a
faithful and sincere friend,' says Hearne, 'very charitable to the poor
(notwithstanding the narrowness of his fortune), free and open in his
discourse and conversation (which he always managed without the least
personal reflection), courteous and affable to all people, facetious
upon all proper occasions, and ever ready to give his counsel and
advice, and extremely communicative of his great knowledge.'[37]
Although a man of retiring habits and much personal humility, he was
bold as a lion when occasion demanded, and never hesitated to sacrifice
interest of any kind to his sincere, but often strangely contracted
ideas of truth and duty. It was his lot to suffer loss of goods under
either king, James II. and William. Under the former he not only lost
the rent of his Irish estates,[38] but had his name[39] on the murderous
act of attainder to which James, to his great disgrace, attached his
signature in 1689. Under the latter he was deprived of his preferment in
Oxford, and under a harsher rule might have incurred yet graver
penalties. 'He has set his heart,' said William of him, 'on being a
martyr, and I have set mine on disappointing him.'[40] He died at
Shottisbrooke in 1711.
After Kettlewell's death, no one was so intimate with Robert Nelson as
Dr. George Hickes. They lived near together[41] in Ormond Street, and
for the last eleven years of Nelson's life met almost daily. In forming
any estimate of Hickes's character, the warm-hearted esteem with which
Nelson regarded him[42] should not be lost sight of. Whatever were his
faults, he must have possessed many high qualities to have thus
completely won the heart of so good a man. The feeling was fully
reciprocated; and those who knew with what intensity of blind zeal
Hickes attached himself to the interests of his party, must have been
surprised that this intimacy was not interrupted even by his sore
disappointment at Nelson's defection from the nonjuring communion. In
Hickes there was nothing of the calm and tempered judgment which ruled
in Nelson's mind. From the day that he vacated his deanery, and fixed up
his indignant protest in Worcester Cathedral,[43] he threw his heart and
soul into the nonjuring cause. Unity might be a blessing, and schism a
disaster; but it is doubtful whether he would have made the smallest
concession in order to attain the one, or avoid the other. Even Bishop
Ken said of him that he showed zeal to make the schism incurable.[44] A
good man, and a scholar of rare erudition, he possessed nevertheless the
true temper of a bigot. In middle life he had been brought into close
acquaintance with the fanatic extravagances of Scotch Covenanters, his
aversion to which might seem to have taught him, not the excellence of a
more temperate spirit, but the desirability of rushing toward similar
extremes in an opposite direction. He delighted in controversy in
proportion to its heat, and too often his pen was dipped in gall, when
he directed the acuteness and learning which none denied to him against
any who swerved, this way or that, from the narrow path of dogma and
discipline which had been marked with his own approval. Tillotson was
'an atheist,'[45] freethinkers were 'the first-born sons of Satan,' the
Established Church was 'fallen into mortal schism,'[46] Ken, for
thinking of reunion, was 'a half-hearted wheedler,'[47] Roman Catholics
were 'as gross idolaters as Egyptian worshippers of leeks,'[48]
Nonconformists were 'fanatics,' Quakers were 'blasphemers.'[49] From the
peaceful researches, on which he built a lasting name, in Anglo-Saxon
and Scandinavian antiquities, he returned each time with renewed zest to
polemical disputes, and found relaxation in the strife of words. It was
no promising omen for the future of the nonjuring party, that the Court
of St. Germains should have appointed him and Wagstaffe first bishops of
that Communion. The consecration was kept for several years a close
secret, and Robert Nelson himself may probably have been ignorant[50] of
the high dignity to which 'my neighbour the Dean' had attained.
One other of Nelson's nonjuring friends must be mentioned. Francis Lee,
a physician, had been a Fellow of St. John's, Oxford, but was deprived
for declining the oaths. At the end of the seventeenth century, after
travelling abroad, he joined[51] one of those societies of mystics which
at that time abounded throughout Europe. A long correspondence with
Dodwell ensued, and convinced at last that he had been in error, he not
only left the brotherhood and its presiding 'prophetess' (it appears to
have been a society of a somewhat fanatical order), but published in
1709, under the title of 'A History of Montanism, by a Lay Gentleman,' a
work directed against fanaticism in general. He writes it in the tone of
one who has lately recovered from a sort of mental fever which may break
out in anyone, and sometimes becomes epidemic, inflaming and throwing
into disorder certain obscure impulses which are common to all human
nature.[52] He became intimate with Nelson, and subscribes one of his
letters to him, 'To the best of friends, from the most affectionate of
friends.'[53] He helped him in his devotional publications; took in
hand, at his instigation, and from materials which Nelson and Hickes had
collected, the life of Kettlewell; and took an active part in furthering
the benevolent schemes in which his friend was so deeply interested. It
was he who suggested[54] to him the founding of charity schools after
the model of the far-famed orphanage and other educational institutions
lately established by Francke and Spener at Halle, the centre of German
pietism. In other ways we see favourable traces of his earlier mystical
associations. He had been cured of fanaticism; but the higher element,
the exalted vein of spiritual feeling, remained, and perceptibly
communicated itself to Nelson, whose last work--a preface to Lee's
edition of Thomas a Kempis--is far more in harmony with the general tone
of mystical thought than any of his former writings. During the last few
months of Nelson's life, they were much together. One of the very last
incidents in his life was a drive with Lee in the park, when they
watched the sun 'burst from behind a cloud, and accepted it for an
emblem of the eternal brightness that should shortly break upon
him.'[55]
Nelson was more or less intimate with several other Nonjurors; such as
were Francis Cherry, of Shottisbrooke, a generous and popular country
gentleman, whose house was always a hospitable refuge for Nonjurors and
Jacobites;[56] Brokesby, Mr. Cherry's chaplain, author of the 'Life of
Dodwell,' and of a history of the Primitive Church, to whom Nelson owed
much valuable help in his 'Festivals and Fasts;' Jeremy Collier, whom
Macaulay ranks first among the Nonjurors in ability; Nathanael
Spinckes,[57] afterwards raised to the shadowy honours and duties of the
nonjuring episcopate, Nelson's trustee for the money bequeathed by him
to assist the deprived clergy; and lastly, Charles Leslie, an ardent and
accomplished controversialist, whom Dr. Johnson excepted from his dictum
that no Nonjuror could reason.[58] It may be added here, that when
Pepys, author of the well-known 'Diary,' cast about in 1703, the last
year of his life, for a spiritual adviser among the nonjuring clergy,
Robert Nelson was the one among his acquaintances to whom he naturally
turned for information.
The decision of many a conscientious man hung wavering for a long time
on the balance as he debated whether or not he could accept the new oath
of allegiance. Friends, whose opinions on public matters and on Church
questions were almost identical, might on this point very easily arrive
at different determinations. But the resolve once made, those who took
different courses often became widely separated. Many acquaintances,
many friendships were broken off by the divergence. Some of the more
rigid Nonjurors, headed by Bancroft himself, went so far as to refuse
all Church communion with those among their late brethren who had
incurred the sin of compliance; and it was plainly impossible to be on
any terms of intimacy with one who could be welcomed back into the
company of the faithful only as 'a true penitent for the sin of
schism.'[59] There were some, on the other hand, who were fully aware of
the difficulties that beset the question, and had not a word or thought
of condemnation for those who did not share in the scruples they
themselves felt. They could not take the oath, but neither did they make
it any cause of severance, or discontinue their attendance at the public
prayers. But for the most part even those Nonjurors who held no extreme
views fell gradually into a set of their own, with its own ideas, hopes,
prejudices, and sympathies. They could scarcely help making a great
principle of right or wrong of that for which most of them had
sacrificed so much. It was intolerable, after loss of home and property
in the cause, as they believed, of truth and duty, to be called factious
separatists, authors of needless schism. Hence, in very self-defence,
they were driven to attach all possible weight to the reasons which had
placed them, loyal Churchmen as they were, in a Nonconformist position,
to rally round their own standard, and to strive to the utmost of their
power to show that it was they, and not their opponents, not the Jurors
but the Nonjurors, who were the truest and most faithful sons of the
Anglican Church. Under such circumstances, the gap grew ever wider which
had sprung up between themselves and those who had not scrupled at the
oath. Even between such friends as Ken and Bull, Nelson and Tillotson, a
temporary estrangement was occasioned. But Robert Nelson was not of a
nature to allow minor differences, however much exaggerated in
importance, to stand long in the way of friendship or works of Christian
usefulness. He lived chiefly in a nonjuring circle; but even during the
years when he wholly absented himself from parochial worship, he was on
friendly and even intimate terms with many leading members of the
establishment, and their active co-operator in every scheme for
extending its beneficial influences.
First in honour among his conforming friends stood Bishop Bull, his old
tutor and warm friend, to whom he always acknowledged a deep debt of
gratitude. Three years after his death Nelson published his life and
works, shortening, it is said, his own days by the too assiduous labour
which he bestowed upon the task. But it was a work of love which he was
exceedingly anxious to accomplish. In the preface, after recording his
high admiration of his late friend's merits, he solemnly ends with the
words, 'beseeching God to enable me to finish what I begin in His name,
and dedicate it to His honour and glory.'[60]
Both in his lifetime and afterwards, Bull has always been held in
deserved repute as one of the most illustrious names in the roll of
English bishops. Nelson called him 'a consummate divine,' and by no
means stood alone in his opinion. Those who attach a high value to
original and comprehensive thought will scarcely consider him entitled
to such an epithet. He was a man of great piety, sound judgment, and
extensive learning, but not of the grasp and power which signally
influences a generation, and leaves a mark in the history of religious
progress. He loved the Church of England with that earnestness of
affection which in the seventeenth century specially characterised
those who remembered its prostration, and had shared its depressed
fortunes. Dr. Skinner, ejected Bishop of Oxford, had admitted him into
orders at the early age of twenty-one. The Canon, he said, could not be
strictly observed in such times of difficulty and distress. They were
not days when the Church could afford to wait for the services of so
zealous and able an advocate. He proved an effective champion, against
all its real and presumed adversaries--Puritans and Nonconformists,
Roman Catholics, Latitudinarians and Socinians. An acute
controversialist, skilled in the critical knowledge of Scripture,
thoroughly versed in the annals of primitive antiquity, he was an
opponent not lightly to be challenged. A devoted adherent of the English
Church, scrupulously observant of all its rites and usages, and
convinced as of 'a certain and evident truth that the Church of England
is in her doctrine, discipline, and worship, most agreeable to the
primitive and apostolical institution,'[61] his only idea of improvement
and reform in Church matters was to remove distinct abuses, and to
restore ancient discipline. Yet he was not so completely the High
Churchman as to be unable to appreciate and enter to some extent into
the minds of those who within his own Church had adopted opposite views.
He used to speak, for example, with the greatest respect of Dr. Conant,
a distinguished Churchman of Puritan views, who had been his rector at
Exeter College, and whose instructions and advice had made, he said,
very deep impression on him.[62] So, on the other hand, although a
strenuous opponent of Rome, he did not fail to discriminate and do
justice to what was Catholic and true in her system. And it tells
favourably for his candour, that while he defended Trinitarian doctrine
with unequalled force and learning, he should have had to defend himself
against a charge of Arian tendencies,[63] simply because he did not
withhold authorities which showed that the primitive fathers did not
always express very defined views upon the subject. His most notable and
unique distinction consisted in the thanks he received, through Bossuet,
from the whole Gallican Church, for his defence of the Nicene faith; his
most practical service to religion was the energetic protest of his
'Harmonia Apostolica' in favour of a healthy and fruitful faith in
opposition to the Antinomian doctrines of arbitrary grace which, at the
time when he published his 'Apostolic Harmony,' had become most widely
prevalent in England.
Bull had been ordained at twenty-one; he was consecrated, in 1705,
Bishop of St. Davids, at the almost equally exceptional age of seventy.
He succeeded a bad man who had been expelled from his see for glaring
simony; and it was felt, not without justice, that the cause of religion
and the honour of the Episcopate would gain more by the elevation of a
man of the high repute in which Bull was universally held, than it would
lose by the growing infirmities of his old age. He accepted the dignity
with hesitation, in hopes that his son, the Archdeacon of Llandaff, who
however died before him, would be able greatly to assist him in the
discharge of his duties. But as he was determined that if he could not
be as active as he would wish, he would at all events reside strictly in
his diocese, he saw little or no more of his friend Nelson, of whom he
had said that 'he scarce knew any one in the world for whom he had
greater respect and love.'[64] During the first four years of the
century there had been a frequent correspondence between them on the
subject of his controversy with Bossuet, with whom Nelson had long been
in the habit of interchanging friendly courtesies. The Bishop of Meaux
had written, in 1700, to Nelson, expressing admiration of Bull's work on
the Trinity, and wonder as to what he meant by the term 'Catholic,' and
why it was that, having such respect for primitive antiquity, he
remained nevertheless separated from the unity of Rome. Bull wrote in
answer his 'Corruptions of the Church of Rome,' and sent the manuscript
of it to Nelson in 1704. It did not, however, reach Bossuet, who died
that year. Bishop Bull followed him in 1709.
Nelson was well acquainted, though scarcely intimate, with Bishop
Beveridge, Bull's contemporary at St. Asaph. The two prelates were men
of much the same stamp. Both were divines of great theological learning;
but while Bull's great talents were chiefly conspicuous in his
controversial and argumentative works, Beveridge was chiefly eminent as
a student and devotional writer. His 'Private Thoughts on Religion and
Christian Life,' and his papers on 'Public Prayer' and 'Frequent
Communions,' have always maintained a high reputation. Like Bull, he was
profoundly read in the history of the primitive Church, but possessed an
accomplishment which his brother bishop had not, in his understanding of
several oriental languages. Like him, he had been an active and
experienced parish clergyman, and, like him, he was attached almost to
excess to a strict and rigid observance of the appointed order of the
English Church. It was to him that Dean Tillotson addressed the often
quoted words, 'Doctor, Doctor, Charity is above rubrics.'[65] Yet it
must not be inferred therefore, that he was stiffly set against all
change. In a sermon preached before Convocation at their very important
meeting of 1689, he had remarked of ecclesiastical laws other than those
which are fundamental and eternal, 'that they ought not indeed to be
altered without grave reasons; but that such reasons were not at that
moment wanting. To unite a scattered flock in one fold under one
shepherd, to remove stumbling-blocks from the path of the weak, to
reconcile hearts long estranged, to restore spiritual discipline to its
primitive vigour, to place the best and purest of Christian societies on
a base broad enough to stand against all the attacks of earth and
hell--these were objects which might well justify some modification, not
of Catholic institutions, but of national and provincial usages.'[66]
Beveridge was one of the bishops for whom the moderate Nonjurors had
much regard. In most respects he was of their school of thought; and
although, like Wilson of Sodor and Man, and Hooper of Bath and Wells, he
had no scruple, for his own part, to take the oath of allegiance to
William and Mary, he fully understood the reasonings of those who had.
He greatly doubted the legality and right of appointing new bishops to
sees not canonically vacant, so that when he was nominated in the place
of Ken, he after some deliberation declined the office. He and Nelson
saw a good deal of each other. They were both constant attendants at the
weekly meetings of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, an
association which Beveridge zealously promoted,[67] and to which he left
the greater part of his property. The minutes of the society refer to
private consultations between him and Nelson for arranging about a
popular edition in Welsh of the Prayer-book, and to the bishop
distributing largely in his diocese a translation of Nelson's tract on
Confirmation. They also frequently met at the committees of the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel. In his 'Life of Bull' Nelson speaks
in terms of much admiration for Beveridge, whom he calls 'a pattern of
true primitive piety.' He praises his plain and affecting sermons; and
says that 'he had a way of gaining people's hearts and touching their
consciences which bore some resemblance to the apostolical age,' and
that he could mention many 'who owed the change of their lives, under
God, to his instructions.'[68] Like Bull and Ken, the latter of whom
was born in the same year with him, his life belongs chiefly to the
history of the preceding century, for he died in 1707; his short
episcopal career however lay, as was the case with Bull, only in the
first decade of the eighteenth.
Sharp, Archbishop of York, must by no means be omitted from the list of
Robert Nelson's friends, the more so as he was mainly instrumental in
overcoming the scruples which for many years had deterred Nelson from
the communion of the national Church. 'It was impossible,' writes the
Archbishop's son, 'that such religious men, who were so intimate with
each other, and spent many hours together in private conversation,
should not frequently discuss the reasons that divided them in Church
communion.'[69] Sharp's diary shows that early in 1710 they had many
interviews on the subject. His arguments prevailed; and he records with
satisfaction that on Easter Day that year his friend, for the first time
since the Revolution, received the Communion at his hands. The
Archbishop was well fitted to act this part of a conciliator. In the
first place, Nelson held him in high esteem as a man of learning, piety,
and discernment, 'who fills one of the archiepiscopal thrones with that
universal applause which is due to his distinguishing merit.'[70] This
general satisfaction which had attended his promotion qualified him the
more for a peacemaker in the Church. At a time when party spirit was
more than usually vehement, it was his rare lot to possess in a high
degree the respect and confidence of men of all opinions. From his
earliest youth he had learnt to appreciate high Christian worth under
varied forms. His father had been a fervent Puritan, his mother a
strenuous Royalist; and he speaks with equal gratitude of the deep
impressions left upon his mind by the grave piety of the one, and of the
admiration instilled into him by the other of the proscribed Liturgy of
the English Church. He went up to Cambridge a Calvinist; he learnt a
larger, a happier, and no less spiritual theology under the teaching of
More and Cudworth. His studies then took a wide range. He delighted in
imaginative literature, especially in Greek poetry, became very fairly
versed in Hebrew and the interpretation of the Old Testament, took much
pleasure in botany and chemistry, and was at once fascinated with the
Newtonian philosophy. He was also an accomplished antiquary. At a later
period, as rector of St. Giles in the Fields, and Friday lecturer at St.
Lawrence Jewry, he gained much fame as one of the most persuasive and
affecting preachers of his age. Tillotson and Clagett were his most
intimate friends; and among his acquaintances were Stillingfleet,
Patrick, Beveridge, Cradock, Whichcot, Calamy, Scot, Sherlock, Wake, and
Cave, including all that eminent circle of London clergy who were at
that time the distinguishing ornament of the English Church, and who
constantly met at one another's houses to confer on the religious and
ecclesiastical questions of the day. There was perhaps no one eminent
divine, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth
century, who had so much in sympathy with men of either section of the
English Church. He was claimed by the Tories and High Churchmen; and no
doubt, on the majority of subjects his views agreed with theirs,
particularly in the latter part of his life. But his opinions were very
frequently modified by a more liberal training and by more generous and
considerate ideas than were common among them. He voted with them
against occasional Conformity, protested against any enfeebling of the
Test Acts, and took, it must be acknowledged, a far from tolerant line
generally in the debates of 1704-9 relating to the liberties of
Dissenters. On the other hand, he indignantly resented the unworthy
attempt of the more extreme Tories to force the occasional Conformity
Act through the House of Lords by 'tacking' it to a money bill. He
expressed the utmost displeasure against anything like bitterness and
invective; he had been warmly in favour of a moderate comprehension of
Dissenters, had voted that Tillotson should be prolocutor when the
scheme was submitted to Convocation, and had himself taken part of the
responsibility of revision. As in 1675 he had somewhat unadvisedly
accepted, in the discussion with Nonconformists, the co-operation of
Dodwell, so, in 1707, he bestowed much praise on Hickes' answer to
Tindal (sent to him by Nelson) on behalf of the rights of the Christian
priesthood. But Dodwell's Book of Schism maintained much more exclusive
sentiments than Sharp's sermon on Conscience, of which it was
professedly a defence; nor could the Archbishop by any means coincide in
the more immoderate opinions of the hot-tempered nonjuring Dean. And so
far from agreeing with Hickes and Dodwell, who would acknowledge none
other than Episcopal Churches, he said that if he were abroad he should
communicate with the foreign Reformed Churches wherever he happened to
be.[71] On many points of doctrine he was a High Churchman; he entirely
agreed, for example, with Nelson and the Nonjurors in general, in
regretting the omission in King Edward's second Prayer-book of the
prayer of oblation.[72] He bestowed much pains in maintaining the
dignity and efficiency of his cathedral;[73] but, with a curious
intermixture of Puritan feeling, told one of his Nonconformist
correspondents that he did not much approve of musical services, and
would be glad if the law would permit an alteration.[74] In regard of
the questions specially at issue with the Nonjurors, he heartily
assented for his own part to the principles of the Revolution,
maintaining 'for a certain truth that as the law makes the king, so the
same law extends or limits or transfers our obedience and
allegiance.'[75] This being the case, it may at first appear
unintelligible that an ardent nonjuring champion of passive obedience
and non-resistance should assert that 'by none are these truly Catholic
doctrines more openly avowed than by the present excellent metropolitan
of York.'[76] But Dodwell was correct. Archbishop Sharp, with perfect
consistency, combined with Whig politics the favourite High Church tenet
of the Jacobean era. He strenuously maintained the duty of passive
obedience, not however to the sovereign monarch, but to the sovereign
law.[77] At the same time he felt much sympathy with the Nonjurors, and
was sometimes accused of Jacobitism because he would not drop his
acquaintance with them, nor disguise his pity for the sacrifices in
which their principles involved them. When a choice was given him of two
or three of the sees vacated by the deprivation of the nonjuring
bishops, he declined the offer. He would not allow that there had been
any real unlawfulness or irregularity in their dispossession, but as a
matter of personal feeling he disliked the idea of accepting promotion
under such circumstances. Although therefore, in many ways, he differed
much in opinion from the Nonjurors, he possessed in a great degree their
attachment and respect. Robert Nelson was neither the only one of them
with whom he was on terms of cordial friendship, nor was he by any means
the only one whom he persuaded to return to the Established Communion.
Bishop Smalridge of Bristol should be referred to, however briefly, in
connection with the truly worthy man who is the main subject of this
paper. He was constantly associated with Nelson in his various works of
charity, especially in forwarding missionary undertakings, in assisting
Dr. Bray's projects of parochial lending libraries, and as a royal
commissioner with him for the increase of church accommodation. Nelson
bequeathed to him his Madonna by Correggio 'as a small testimony of that
great value and respect I bear to his lordship;'[78] and to his
accomplished pen is owing the very beautiful Latin epitaph placed to his
friend's memory in St. George the Martyr's, Queen Square.[79] Under the
name of 'Favonius,' he is spoken of in the 'Tatler' in the warmest
language of admiring respect, as a very humane and good man, of
well-tempered zeal and touching eloquence, and 'abounding with that sort
of virtue and knowledge which makes religion beautiful.'[80] Bishop
Newton has also spoken very highly of him, and adds that he was a man of
much gravity and dignity and of great complacency and sweetness of
manner. In reference to this last feature of his character, it was said
of him, when he succeeded Atterbury as Dean of Carlisle, that he carried
the bucket to extinguish the fires which the other had kindled. His
political sympathies, however, accorded with those of Atterbury, and
brought him into close relation with the Nonjurors. Although he had
submitted to the new Constitution, he was a thorough Jacobite in
feeling. His Thirtieth of January sermons were sometimes marked with an
extravagance of expression[81] foreign to his usual manner; and he and
Atterbury, with whom he had recently edited Lord Clarendon's History,
were the only bishops who refused to sign the declaration of abhorrence
of the Rebellion of 1715.[82]
Smalridge and Nelson had a mutual friend,[83] whom they both highly
valued, in Dr. Ernest Grabe, a Prussian of remarkable character and
great erudition, who had settled in England under the especial favour of
King William. Dissatisfied as to the validity of Lutheran orders, he had
at first turned his thoughts to Rome, not unaware that he should find in
that Church many departures from the simplicity of the early faith, but
feeling that it possessed at all events that primitive constitution
which he had learnt to consider essential. He was just about to take
this step, when he met with Spener, the eminent leader of the German
Pietists, to whom he communicated his difficulties, and who pointed out
to him the Church of England as a communion likely to meet his wants. He
came to this country[84] at the end of the seventeenth century, received
a royal pension, took priest's orders, and continued with indefatigable
labour his patristic studies. It became the great project of his life to
maintain a close communication between the English and Lutheran
Churches,[85] to bring about in Prussia a restoration of episcopacy, and
to introduce there a liturgy composed upon the English model. It cannot
be said that the general course of theological thought in England was at
this time very congenial to his aspirations; but his great learning and
the earnest sincerity of his ideas were widely appreciated, and within a
somewhat confined circle of High Churchmen and Nonjurors he was
cordially welcomed, and his services highly valued. He pushed his
conformity to what he considered the usages of the Primitive Church to
the verge of eccentricity. Yet 'indeed,' says Kennet, without any
sympathy in his practices, but with a kindly smile, 'his piety and our
charity may cover all this.'[86]
Dr. Thomas Bray may stand as a fit representative of another class of
Nelson's friends and associates. So far from agreeing with Nelson in his
Nonjuring sentiments, the prospect of the constitutional change had
kindled in him enthusiastic expectations. 'Good Dr. Bray,' remarks
Whiston, 'had said how happy and religious the nation would become when
the House of Hanover came, and was very indignant when Mr. Mason said
that matters would not be mended.'[87] He accepted a living which had
been vacated by a Nonjuring clergyman, but spent alike his clerical and
private means in the benevolent and Christian hearted schemes to which
the greater part of his life was dedicated.[88] It is not the purpose of
this chapter to discuss the missionary and other philanthropical
activities which at the close of the seventeenth and the opening of the
eighteenth centuries resulted in the formation of the Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts, and other kindred associations. It may be
sufficient here to repeat the warm-hearted encomium of his fellow
labourer in this noble work:--'I am sure he has been one of the greatest
instruments for propagating Christian knowledge this age has produced.
The libraries abroad, our society (the S.P.C.K.), and the Corporation
(the S.P.G.), are owing to his unwearied solicitations.'[89] In
organising the American Church, in plans for civilising and
christianising the Indians, in establishing libraries for the use of
missionaries and the poorer clergy in the colonies, on shipboard, in
seaport towns, and in the secluded parishes of England and Wales, in
translations of the Liturgy and other devotional books, in the
reformation of prisons, in measures taken for the better suppression of
crime and profligacy,--Bray and Nelson, with General Oglethorpe and
other active coadjutors, helped one another with all their heart. They
met in the board-room of the two great societies, in one another's
houses, and sometimes they may have talked over their projects with
Bishop Ken at the seat of their generous supporter, Lord Weymouth.[90]
The names of many other men, more or less eminent in their day for piety
or learning, might be added to the list of those who possessed and
valued Robert Nelson's friendship; among them may be mentioned--Dr. John
Mapletoft, with whom he maintained a close correspondence for no less
than forty years: a man who had travelled much and learnt many
languages, a celebrated physician, and afterwards, when he took orders,
an accomplished London preacher; Francis Gastrell, Bishop of Chester,
Mapletoft's son-in-law;[91] Sir Richard Blackmore, another physician of
note, and, like Mapletoft, most zealous in all plans for doing good, but
whose unlucky taste for writing dull verses brought down upon him the
unmerciful castigation of the wits; John Johnson of Cranbrook, with
whose writings on the Eucharistic Sacrifice Nelson most warmly
sympathised; Edmund Halley, the mathematician, his school playmate and
life-long friend; Ralph Thoresby, an antiquarian of high repute, a
moderate Dissenter in earlier life, a thoughtful and earnest Churchman
in later years, but who throughout life maintained warm and intimate
relations with many leading members of either communion; Dr. Charlett,
Master of University College, Oxford; Dr. Cave, the well-known writer of
early Church History, to whose literary help he was frequently indebted;
John Evelyn; Samuel, father of John and Charles Wesley, whose verses,
written on the fly-leaf of his copy of the 'Festivals and Fasts,'
commemorative of his attachment to Nelson and of his reverence for his
virtues, used to be prefixed to some editions of his friend's works; nor
should the list be closed without the addition of the name of the
eminent Gallican bishop Bossuet, with whom he had become acquainted in
France, and had kept up the interesting correspondence already noticed
in connection with Bishop Bull.
The group composed of Nelson and his friends, of whom he had many, and
never lost one, would be pleasant to contemplate, if for no other
reason, yet as the picture of a set of earnest men, united in common
attachment to one central figure, varying much on some points of
opinion, but each endeavouring to live worthily of the Christian faith.
From one point of view the features of dissimilarity among his friends
are more interesting than those of resemblance. A Churchman, with whom
Jurors and Nonjurors met on terms of equal cordiality, who was intimate
alike with Tillotson and Hickes--whose love for Ken was nowise
incompatible with much esteem for Kidder, the 'uncanonical usurper' of
his see--and who consulted for the advancement of Christian knowledge as
readily with Burnet, Patrick, and Fowler, as with Bull, Beveridge, and
Sharp--represents a sort of character which every national Church ought
to produce in abundance, but which stands out in grateful relief from
the contentions which embittered the first years of the century and the
spiritual dulness which set in soon afterwards.
Yet, though Robert Nelson had too warm a heart to sacrifice the
friendship of a good man to any difference of opinion, and too hearty a
zeal in good works to let his personal predilections stand in the way of
them, he belonged very distinctively to the High Church party. Some of
his best and most prominent characteristics did not connect him with one
more than with another section of the Church. The philanthropical
activity, which did so much to preserve him from narrowness and
intolerance, was, as Tillotson has observed, one of the most redeeming
features of the period in which he lived;[92] the genial serenity of his
religion is like the spirit that breathed in Addison. But all his deeper
sympathies were with the High Churchmen and Nonjurors--men who had been
brought up in that spirit of profound attachment to Anglo-Catholic
theology and feeling which was prominent among Church of England divines
in the age that preceded the Commonwealth.
The Church party of which, at the beginning of the eighteenth century,
Nelson and his friends were worthy representatives, was rapidly losing
strength. Soon after his death it had almost ceased to exist as a
visible and united power. The general tone of feeling in Church matters
became so unfavourable to its continued vigour, that it gradually
dwindled away. Not that there was no longer a High Church, and even a
strong High Church party. There has been no period in the history of the
Reformed English Church in which the three leading varieties of opinion,
so familiar to us at the present day, may not be distinctly traced. The
eighteenth century is certainly no exception; from its first to its last
year so-called High Churchmen were abundant everywhere, especially among
the clergy. But they would scarcely have been recognised as such by
Nelson, or by those with whom he chiefly sympathised. The type became
altered, and not for the better. A change had already set in before the
seventeenth century closed; and when in quick succession Bull and
Beveridge, Ken and Nelson, passed away, there were no new men who could
exactly supply their places. The High Churchmen who belonged more
distinctly to Queen Anne's reign, and those of the succeeding Georgian
era, lacked some of the higher qualities of the preceding generations.
They numbered many worthy, excellent men, but there was no longer the
same depth of feeling, the same fervour, the same spirit of willing
self-denial, the same constant reference to a supposed higher standard
of primitive usage. Their High Churchmanship took rather the form of an
ecclesiastical toryism, persuaded more than ever of the unique
excellence of the English Church, its divinely constituted government,
and its high, if not exclusive title to purity and orthodoxy of
doctrine. The whole party shared, in fact, to a very great extent in the
spiritual dulness which fell like a blight upon the religious life of
the country at large. A secondary, but still an important difference,
consisted in the change effected by the Revolution in the relation
between the Church and the Crown. The harsh revulsion of sentiment,
however beneficial in its ultimate consequences, could not fail to
detract for the time from that peculiar tone of semi-religious loyalty
which in previous generations had been at once the weakness and the
glory of the English Church.
The nonjuring separation was a serious and long-lasting loss to the
Church of England; a loss corresponding in kind, if not in degree, to
what it might have endured, if by a different turn of political and
ecclesiastical circumstances, the most zealous members of the section
headed by Tillotson and Burnet had been ejected from its fold. It is the
distinguishing merit of the English Church that, to a greater extent
probably than any other religious body, it is at once Catholic and
Protestant, and that without any formal assumption of reconciling the
respective claims of authority and private judgment, it admits a wide
field for the latter, without ceasing to attach veneration and deference
to primitive antiquity and to long established order. It is most true
that 'the Church herself is greater, wider, older than any of the
parties within her;'[93] but it is no less certain, that when a leading
party becomes enfeebled in character and influence, as it was by the
defection to the Nonjurors of so many learned and self-sacrificing High
Churchmen, the diminution of vital energy in the whole body is likely to
be far more than proportionate to the number of the seceders, or even to
their individual weight.
Judged by modern feeling, there might seem no very apparent reason why
the Nonjurors should have belonged nearly, if not quite exclusively, to
the same general school of theological thought. In our own days, the
nature of a man's Churchmanship is no key whatever to his opinions upon
matters which trench on politics. High sacramental theories, or profound
reverence for Church tradition and ancient usage, or decided views as to
the exclusive rights of an episcopally ordained ministry, are almost as
likely to be combined with liberal, or even with democratic politics, as
with the most staunch conservative opinions. No one imagines that any
possible change of constitutional government would greatly affect the
general bias, whatever it might be, of ecclesiastical thought. But the
Nonjurors were all High Churchmen, and that in a much better sense of
that word than when, in Queen Anne's time, Tory and High Church were in
popular language convertible terms. And though they were not by any
means the sole representatives of the older High Church spirit--for some
who were deeply imbued with it took the oath of allegiance with perfect
conscientiousness, and without the least demur--yet in them it was
chiefly embodied. Professor Blunt remarks with much truth, that to a
great extent they carried away with them that regard for primitive
times, which with them was destined by degrees almost to expire.[94] If
the Nonjurors were nearly allied with the Jacobites on the one side,
they were also the main supporters of religious opinions which were in
no way related with one dynasty of sovereigns rather than with another,
but which have always formed a very important element of English Church
history, and could not pass for the time into comparative oblivion
without a corresponding loss.
The doctrines of non-resistance and passive obedience, in defence of
which so much was once written, and so many sacrifices endured, are no
longer heard of. It is difficult now to realise with what passionate
fervour of conviction these obsolete theories were once maintained by
many Englishmen as a vital portion, not only of their political, but of
their religious creed. Lord Chancellor Somers, whose able treatise upon
the Rights of Kings brought to bear against the Nonjurors a vast array
of arguments from Reason, Scripture, History, and Law, remarked in it
that there were some divines of the Church of England who instilled
notions of absolute power, passive obedience, and non-resistance, as
essential points of religion, doctrines necessary to salvation.[95] Put
in this extreme form, the belief might have been repudiated; but
undoubtedly passages may be quoted in great abundance from nonjuring and
other writers which, literally understood, bear no other construction.
At all events, sentiments scarcely less uncompromising were continually
held, not by mere sycophants and courtiers, but by many whose opinions
were adorned by noble Christian lives, willing self-sacrifice, and
undaunted resolution. Good Bishop Lake of Chichester said on his
death-bed that 'he looked upon the great doctrine of passive obedience
as the distinguishing character of the Church of England,'[96] and that
it was a doctrine for which he hoped he could lay down his life. Bishop
Thomas of Worcester, who died the same year, expressed the same belief
and the same hope. Robert Nelson spoke of it as the good and wholesome
doctrine of the Church of England, 'wherein she has gloried as her
special characteristic.... Papists and Presbyterians have both been
tardy on these points, and I wish the practice of some in the Church of
England had been more blameless,'[97] but he was sure that it had been
the doctrine of the primitive Christians, and that it was very plainly
avowed both by the Church and State of England. Sancroft vehemently
reproved 'the apostacy of the National Church'[98] in departing from
this point of faith. Even Tillotson and Burnet[99] were at one time no
less decided about it. The former urged it upon Lord Russell as 'the
declared doctrine of all Protestant Churches,' and that the contrary was
'a very great and dangerous mistake,' and that if not a sin of
ignorance, 'it will appear of a much more heinous nature, as in truth it
is, and calls for a very particular and deep repentance.'[100] Just
about the time when the new oath of allegiance was imposed, the doctrine
of non-resistance received the very aid it most needed, in the invention
of a new term admirably adapted to inspire a warmer feeling of religious
enthusiasm in those who were preparing to suffer in its cause. The
expression appears to have originated with Kettlewell, who had strongly
felt the force of an objection which had been raised to Bishop Lake's
declaration. It had been said that to call this or that doctrine the
distinguishing characteristic of a particular Church was so far forth to
separate it from the Church Catholic. Kettlewell saw at once that this
argument wounded High Churchmen in the very point where they were most
sensitive, and for the future preferred to speak of non-resistance as
characteristically 'a Doctrine of the Cross.'[101] The epithet was
quickly adopted, and no doubt was frequently a source of consolation to
Nonjurors. At other times it might have conveyed a painful sense of
disproportion in its application to what, from another point of view,
was a mere political revolution. But with them passive obedience and
divine right had been raised to the level of a great religious principle
for which they were well content to be confessors. It must have added
much to the moral strength of the nonjuring separation. Argument or
ridicule would not make much impression upon men who had always this to
fall back upon, that 'non-resistance is after all too much a doctrine of
the Cross, not to meet with great opposition from the prejudices and
passions of men. Flesh and blood and corrupt reason will set up the
great law of self-preservation against it, and find a thousand
absurdities and contradictions in it.'[102] How thoroughly Kettlewell's
term was adopted, and how deeply the feeling which it represented was
cherished by the saintliest of the High Churchmen of that age, is
nowhere more remarkably instanced than in some very famous words of
Bishop Ken. In that often quoted passage of his will where he professed
the faith in which he died, the closing words refer to the Church of
England 'as it stands distinguished from all Papal and Puritan
innovations, and as it adheres to the doctrine of the Cross.' The
special interpretation to be placed upon the final clause somewhat jars
upon the ear, although not without interest in illustrating the strong
religious principle which forbade the transfer of his political
allegiance. Dr. Lee, who had excellent opportunities of knowing, says,
'there cannot remain any manner of doubt'[103] that Ken used the
expression with particular reference to the sense in which his friend
Kettlewell had used it.
When once the Hanoverian succession was established, the doctrine of a
divine right of kings, with the theories consequent upon, it, passed
gradually away; and many writers, forgetting that it was once a
generally received dogma in Parliament as in Convocation, in the laws
as much as in the homilies, have sought to attach to the Church of
England the odium of servility and obsequiousness for its old adherence
to it. But as the tenet died not without honour, dignified in many
instances by high Christian feeling, and noble sacrifice of worldly
interest, so also it had gained much of its early strength in one of the
most important principles of the Reformation. When England rejected the
Papacy, the Church, as in the old English days before the Conquest,
gathered round its sovereign as the emblem and as the centre of its
national independence. Only the tie was a personal one; much in the same
way as the Pope had been far more than an embodied symbol of Church
authority. The sovereign represented the people, but no one then spoke
of 'sovereignty residing in the whole body of the people,'[104] or
dreamt of asserting that the supremacy of the King was a fiction,
meaning only the supremacy of the three estates.[105] So it long
continued, especially in the Church. Ecclesiastical is ever wont to lag
somewhat in the rear of political improvement. In the State, the
personal supremacy of the sovereign, though a very strong reality in the
hands of the Tudors, had been tutored into a moderately close conformity
with the wishes of the popular representatives. In the Church, the same
process was going on, but it was a far more gradual one; and the spirit
of loyal deference which long remained unaltered in the one, gained
increasing strength in the other. Upon the reaction which succeeded
after the Commonwealth, the Church, as it had been ever faithful to the
royal fortunes in their time of reverse, shared to the full in the
effusion with which the nation in general greeted the return of
monarchy, and was more than ever dazzled by the 'divinity which hedges
round a King.' But under James II., the Church had cause to feel the
perils of arbitrary power as keenly, or even more keenly than the nation
in its civil capacity. By a remarkable leading of events, the foremost
of the High Church bishops found themselves, amid the acclamations of
the multitude, in the very van of a resistance which was indeed in a
sense passive, but which plainly paved the way to active resistance on
the part of others, and which, as they must themselves have felt,
strained to the utmost that doctrine of passive obedience which was
still dear to them as ever. Some even of the most earnest champions of
the divine right of kings were at last compelled to imagine
circumstances under which the tenet would cease to be tenable. What if
James should propose to hand over Ireland to France as the price of help
against his own people? Ken, it is said, acknowledged that under such a
contingency he should feel wholly released from his allegiance.