CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Revised

THE time is now past when the period from the death of Queen Anne down to the end of the eighteenth century, if not to the beginning of the Oxford Movement, was regarded as practically a blank page in English estimate. Church history. It has at last been recognised that a period which produced such clergymen as Joseph Butler and Daniel Waterland, William Law and Samuel Horsley, and such lay churchmen as Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, William Wilberforce and William Stevens, must have been at any rate a period worth studying. It is true that a lover of the English Church cannot study it without a blush. It is a period, for instance, of lethargy instead of activity, of worldliness instead of spirituality, of self-seeking instead of self-denial, of grossness instead of refinement. There was a grovelling instead of a noble conception of the nature and function of the Church as a Christian society, an ignoring instead of a conscientious and worthy carrying out of the plain system of the Church, work neglected instead of work well done. All this meets him at every turn.

General char

acteristics.

But there is another side to the picture. The enemies of the faith from all quarters were fairly grappled with and fairly vanquished by its defenders. Never, perhaps, Apologetics. during the whole course of English Church history was the victory in such contests so obviously on the Christian şide. If the general type of character was, on the one hand, coarse and gross, it was, on the other hand, manly and robust ; moreover, if the majority were "of the earth, earthy," the

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minority afforded some of the noblest specimens of the Christian character the world has ever seen; and finally, the history is, as a whole, the history of a rise, not of a fall; of a rise so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, so slow that when we come to the end of the period we do not seem to have risen very much above the level from which we started, but still distinctly a rise. The study of it, therefore, is encouraging, and not depressing. We close the page with a sure conviction that better times were at hand. And the event proved that this was in fact the case.

Ecclesiastical

If it is true that the "eighteenth century is the best period from which to begin the study of contemporary English history," to no department of our history does this history. saying apply more forcibly than to that of the English Church. That sober and somewhat inelastic spirit which to this day forms alike the strength and weakness of the Englishman is really a survival of the spirit which found its expression in the abhorrence of what used

to be called “enthusiasm,” and which must still be A transition reckoned with in the introduction of any innovaperiod. tion either in Church or in State, and especially in the Church. It did not exist to anything like the same extent before the eighteenth century, which this volume covers; and so by making a leap, say, from the Caroline to the Oxford divines, we miss the clue which guides us to a right understanding of many a problem in later Church history. The feeling which stigmatised Bishop Butler as "a papist because he put up a cross of white marble above the altar in his palace chapel at Bristol, where it remained until it was destroyed with the chapel and palace during the Reform riots in 1831; and because he dwelt on the importance of "external religion"; and which dubbed Bishop Beilby Porteus a Methodist" because he strove to revive the observance of Good Friday, has by no means died out. A prosaic element was introduced into English theology in the eighteenth century, and it has continued prosaic ever since. To this very day the writings of such men as Henry More, John Smith, William Law, in his later stage, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, apart from his poetry, and others who represent the Platonic as distinguished from the Aristotelian type of

mind, the mystical as distinguished from the practical temperament, have never been popular in England. But it was not so before the Georgian era. There is a tenderness, a delicacy about the theology of the seventeenth century which is wholly wanting in that of the eighteenth, and has hardly yet been restored in that of the twentieth.

Fundamental

discussed.

Again, great questions were discussed in the eighteenth century much more fully than they were in earlier periods. Underlying all such questions as, Did Christ leave one representative on earth? or, in other words, questions Should the whole Church be in subjection to one external authority? which was the root of the Papal Controversy; What is the true interpretation of Holy Scripture in such and such matters? which the one question between the Anglicans and the Presbyterians-the questions in dispute in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-were the deeper questions, What were the true nature and character of our Blessed Saviour? which lay at the root of the Arian, Socinian, and Unitarian Controversies; and, What was the true character of the Holy Scriptures as a revelation from God? which was at the root of the great Deistic Controversy. These vital questions were not thoroughly threshed out until the period with which this volume deals, and for that reason alone it would be an important epoch.

the work.

The subject is one which lends itself more readily to the essay-like than to the historical or chronological mode of treatment, and it will be observed that most writers upon it have adopted that method. Neither the volumes Method of of W. E. H. Lecky, nor those of Sir Leslie Stephen, nor those of C. J. Abbey and his colleague (Canon Overton) can conscientiously be called narrative history; and Archdeacon Perry frankly owns that he is compelled to make an exception to his general rule in treating this portion of Church history, because "the history of the Church of England during the eighteenth century cannot well be written in the way of a chronicle preserving an exact order in the sequence of events. The external and political history of the Church has but little connexion with its internal and more real history, and to relate both of these together is liable to produce confusion."

The drawback to this method is that it is apt to produce

essays or papers which may form material for history rather than history itself; and the readers of a series which is called "A History of the English Church” naturally expect to find narrative history in it. It is purposed in the present volume to make a sort of compromise by dividing the eighty-six years into four well-defined periods, and then to treat of subjects within those periods rather than to attempt a formal chronicle. Since the average length of each period will be less than a quarter of a century, the consecutive order which a reader is entitled to expect in anything that calls itself a history will, perhaps, be sufficiently presented by such a method.

First Period.

I. The First Period embraces twenty-four years, from the accession of George I. in 1714 to the "conversion" of John Wesley in 1738, in other words, to the beginning of the Evangelical revival. This is obviously the proper date with which to begin a new period. For not only was the Evangelical revival, from one point of view, by far the most important feature in the religious history of the eighteenth century, but it marks a change from what was an appeal mainly to the head to what was an appeal mainly to the heart, from the intellectual to the emotional. Both appeals are necessary, and they came in the order named. The Evangelical revival could never have been the force it was unless it had been preceded by the work which was done most effectually by those who placed Christianity upon a thoroughly firm intellectual basis. Such men as Butler and Waterland and Conybeare and Law not only paved the way for the Wesleys and Whitefield, for Newton, Venn, and Cecil, but rendered their mission possible; and as the former group could never have done the work of the latter, so neither could the latter have ever done the work of the former. The one set lacked the fire of energy, the other intellectual equipment. Scant justice has been done to the splendid array of writings in defence of Christianity which appeared between 1714 and 1738. They embraced, among others, Daniel Waterland's Vindication of Christ's Divinity (1719), Second Vindication of Christ's Divinity (1723), Further Vindication of Christ's Divinity (1724), his Case of Arian Subscription (1721), and Supplement (1722), and his Imbortance of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity asserted (1734);

Its literature.

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I

INTRODUCTION

5

Joseph Butler's Fifteen Sermons preached at the Rolls Chapel (1726), and the Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736); Thomas Sherlock's Use and Intent of Prophecy (1725), and his Tryal of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1729); John Conybeare's Defence of Revealed Religion (1732); George Berkeley's Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732); William Law's Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor (1717), his Case of Reason, or Natural Religion fairly and fully stated (1731); and the First Part of William Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses (1737). It may be doubted whether, in the whole course of the long history of the Church England, from the close of the seventh to the beginning of the twentieth century, any single quarter of a cent woould be found in which so many first-class works of the e hest kind on controversial divinity, or what would now be called Apologetics, were written.

The First Period includes the Bangorian Controversy, ending in the virtual silencing of Convocation, the later stages of the Non-Juror Controversy, the Jacobite Controversy, ending with the trial and banishment of Bishop Atterbury, the greater part of the Trinitarian, Arian, and Deistic Controversies, the very interesting correspondence of Archbishop Wake with the Gallican Church and of the Non-Jurors with the Greek Church, and the curious relation of Queen Caroline to the Church. It is certainly fraught with interest, though, alas! much of it is a melancholy interest, for we shall have to trace the rapid decay of practical activity and of spirituality, the falling off both in the number and in the attractiveness of church services, the alienation between the higher and the lower clergy, and the baneful operation of State influence upon the Church.

Period.

II. The Second Period, from 1738 to 1760, includes the rise and early history of the Methodist movement, which entered upon a new phase in 1760, when the Sacraments began to be administered in Methodist The Second chapels. It is, however, the men, who were all professedly churchmen, and the general stirring up of the dry bones which they caused, rather than the Methodist, as distinguished from the Evangelical movement, which fall