XVIII. JOHN TILLOTSON. 1630-1694. JOHN TILLOTSON was the son of a clothier at Sowerby in Yorkshire. He was born in October, 1630, and educated at Clare Hall, Cambridge. At the Restoration he became Chaplain to Charles II, Dean of Canterbury in 1672, and Archbishop of that see in 1691, holding the Deanery of St. Paul's for a brief period prior to his appointment to this highest dignity of the Church. After the Revolution of 1688 he was admitted to a high degree of confidence in the counsels of William III. Tillotson's father was a zealous Calvinist, and his son's first impressions and early education among the Puritans had connected him with the Presbyterians; when he gradually receded from their principles, and at last, on the deprivation of Sancroft for refusing to take the oaths to the new government, succeeded him as Archbishop of Canterbury, he became the object of the attacks of the nonjurors. But the discretion of his conduct and his exemplary life gained him general esteem and confidence. His indifference to money was such that, on his death in 1694, his debts could not have been paid by his widow, had not the King forgiven his first-fruits. The copyright of his Sermons, which produced £2500, was the only provision which remained for his widow, a niece of Oliver Cromwell, to whom he had been married for upwards of thirty years. Tillotson ranks among the foremost of the latitudinarian divines, and his reputation as a preacher was very high among his contemporaries. He left three folio volumes of sermons, but his general style, though highly commended both by Dryden and Addison, seems to us in the present day frigid, and familiar, in comparison with the luxuriant style of the preachers of the preceding generation, or even with South and Barrow. He was, if not the first, the best example of the perspicuous and popular preaching which came in after the Restoration, in contradistinction to the style of learned allusion which stamps the Caroline divines. 1. The Uncertainty of Earthly Happiness. BUT, setting aside these, and the like melancholy considerations, when we are in the health and vigour of our age, when our blood is warm, and our spirits quick, and the humours of our body not yet turned and soured by great disappointments, and grievous losses of our estates, or nearest friends and relations, by a long course of afflictions, by many cross events and calamitous accidents; yet we are continually liable to all these, and the perpetual fear and danger of them is no small trouble and uneasiness to our minds, and does, in a great measure, rob us of the comfort, and eat out the pleasure and sweetness of all our enjoyments; and, by degrees, the evils we fear overtake us; and as one affliction and trouble goes off, another succeeds in the place of it, like Job's messengers, whose bad tidings and reports of calamitous accidents came so thick upon him, that they overtook one another. If we have a plentiful fortune, we are apt to abuse it to intemperance and luxury, and this naturally breeds bodily pains and diseases, which take away all the comfort and enjoyment of a great estate. If we have health, it may be we are afflicted with losses or deprived of friends, or crossed in our interests and designs, and one thing or other happens to impede or interrupt the contentment and happiness of our lives. Sometimes an unexpected storm, or some other sudden calamity, sweepeth away, in an instant, all that which with so much industry and care we have been gathering many years. Or if an estate stand firm, our children are taken away, to whose comfort and advantage all the pains and endeavours of our lives were devoted. Or if none of these happen (as it is very rare to escape most, or some of them), yet for a demonstration to us that God intended this world to be uneasy, to convince us that a perfect state of happiness is not to be had here below, we often see in experience that those who seem to be in a condition as happy as this world can put them into, by the greatest accommodations towards it, are yet as far or farther from happiness as those who are destitute of most of those things wherein the greatest felicity of this world is thought to consist. Many times it so happens, that they who have all the furniture and requisites, all the materials and ingredients of a worldly felicity at their command, and in their power, yet have not the skill and ability out of all these to frame a happy condition of life to themselves. They have health, and friends, and reputation, and estate in abundance, and all outward accommodations that heart can wish; and yet, in the midst of all these circumstances of outward felicity, they are uneasy in their minds, and, as the wise man expresseth it, in their sufficiency they are in straits, and are, as it were, surfeited even with happiness itself, and do so fantastically and unaccountably nauseate the good condition they are in, that though they want nothing to make them happy, yet they cannot think themselves so; though they have nothing in the world to molest and disgust them, yet they can make a shift to create as much trouble to themselves out of nothing, as they who have the real and substantial causes of discontent.—Sermon, Good Men Strangers and Sojourners upon Earth. 2. The Dignity of Man. CONSIDER him in himself, as compounded of soul and body. Consider man in his outward and worse part, and you shall find that to be admirable, even to astonishment; in respect of which the Psalmist cries out (Psal. cxxxix. 14), 'I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.' The frame of our bodies is so curiously wrought, and every part of it so full of miracle, that Galen (who was otherwise backward enough to the belief of a God), when he had anatomized man's body, and carefully surveyed the frame of it, viewed the fitness and usefulness of every part of it, and the many several intentions of every little vein, and bone, and muscle, and the beauty of the whole; he fell into a pang of devotion, and wrote a hymn to his Creator. And those excellent books of his, De Usu Partium, 'of the usefulness and convenient contrivance of every part of the body,' are a most exact demonstration of the Divine wisdom, which appears in the make of our body; of which books, Gassendus saith, the whole work is writ with a kind of enthusiasm. The wisdom of God, in the frame of our bodies, very much appears by a curious consideration of the several parts of it; but that requiring a very accurate skill in anatomy, I choose rather wholly to forbear it, than by my unskilfulness to be injurious to the Divine wisdom. But this domicilium corporis, 'the house of our body,' though it be indeed a curious piece, yet it is nothing to the noble inhabitant that dwells in it. The cabinet, though it be exquisitely wrought, and very rich; yet it comes infinitely short in value of the jewel, that is hid and laid up in it. How does the glorious faculty of reason and understanding exalt us above the rest of the creatures! Nature hath not made that particular provision for man, which it hath made for other creatures, because it hath provided for him in general, in giving him a mind and reason. Man is not born clothed, nor armed with any considerable weapon for defence; but he hath reason and understanding to provide these things for himself; and this alone excels all the advantages of other creatures: he can keep himself warmer and safer; he can foresee dangers, and provide against them; he can provide weapons that are better than horns, and teeth, and paws, and, by the advantage of his reason, is too hard for all other creatures, and can defend himself against their violence. If we consider the mind of man yet nearer, how many arguments of divinity are there in it! That there should be at once in our understandings distinct comprehensions of such variety of objects; that it should pass in its thoughts from heaven to earth in a moment, and retain the memory of things past, and take a prospect of the future, and look forward as far as eternity! Because we are familiar to ourselves, we cannot be strange and wonderful to ourselves; but the great miracle of the world is the mind of man, and the contrivance of it an eminent instance of God's wisdom. Consider man with relation to the universe, and you shall find the wisdom of God doth appear, in that all things are made so useful for man, who was designed to be the chief inhabitant of this visible world, the guest whom God designed principally to entertain in this house which he built. Not that we are to think, that God hath so made |