fourteen families between them for private catechising and conference. . . . His whole afternoons on Mondays and Tuesdays were this way employed. Every first Wednesday of the month he had a meeting for parish discipline; and every first Thursday of the month was a meeting held of neighbouring ministers for discipline and disputation; in which disputations he was generally moderator, taking pains to prepare a written determination of the question to be debated.'

That the pulpit oratory of the Commonwealth period was acceptable to the congregations we know from records of the delight which the people found in listening to the discourses of their preachers: that the best of it was of a high order of ecclesiastical eloquence we learn from the printed sermons of Baxter, Fuller, Howe, and other eminent divines who were silenced at the Restoration, or continued to be popular preachers under episcopal government. But the Cavaliers of the seventeenth and the high churchmen of the following century, delighted to exaggerate the grotesque extravagance of a few indiscreet pulpiteers of the puritan churches, and to represent that they were fair specimens of the puritan school. Dr. Walker tells with glee and derision, 'There was a sermon licensed and printed in 1645, in which is this triumph: “Oh, give thanks unto the Lord, for he is gracious, and his mercy endureth for ever; who remembered us at Nazeby, for his mercy endureth for ever; who remembered us in Pembrokeshire, for his mercy, &c.; who remembered us at Lincoln, for his mercy, &c.; who remembered us at Bristol, for his mercy, &c." "Honourable patriots, Christ is gone out with his triumphing army, conquering and to conquer: and if you want arms, or money, or horse for their accommodation, God is the great Landlord of Heaven and earth. Art thou then God's tenants? and dost owe Him knight's service and plough service: and doth He want thine horse and shall He not have it?" saith Mr. Teesdale to the Commons.'

In the same spirit describing the oratory of the typical assembly-man, Sir John Birkenhead wrote: To do him right, commonly he wears a pair of good lungs, whereby he turns the church into a belfry for his clapper makes such a din, that ye cannot hear the cymbals for the tinkling. If his pulpit be

large, he walks his round, and speaks as from a garrison; his own neck is palisaded with a ruff. When he first enters his prayer before sermon, he winks and gasps, and gasps and winks, as if he prepared to preach in another world. He seems in a slumber, then in a dream, then rambles awhile, at last he sounds forth, and then throws so much dirt and nonsense towards heaven, as he durst not offer to a member of parliament. Now, because Scripture bids him not to curse the king in his thought, he does it in his pulpit, by word of mouth; though Heaven strike him dumb in the act, as it did Hill at Cambridge, who, while he prayed, "Depose him, O Lord, who would depose us," was made the dumb devil.'

CHAPTER VII.

IF

EPISCOPALIANS UNDER THE PROTECTOR.

F the number of the clergy ejected by the Parliamentary Committees be computed at fifteen hundred, I am disposed to think it would not be greatly understated. Computed at anything over two thousand it would be exaggerated. The great majority of the Commonwealth ministers were divines who, like Baxter, had received ordination from the bishops; and of this large body of episcopally ordained clergy an overwhelming majority were strongly attached to prelatic rule, and, throughout the period of its abeyance, longed for its revival no less fervently than the Catholic party in Edward the Sixth's priesthood longed for the re-establishment of the Papal doctrines and system. Of the clergy who entered the sacred ministry between the abolition of Prelacy and its re-establishment after the Restoration, under the ascendancy of the Assemblers or the subsequent regime of the triers, many, like Bishop Bull and Bishop Stillingfleet, in addition to the credentials openly conferred upon them, received clandestine ordination from the ejected prelates, who continued, after their deposition, to discharge privately the functions of the Episco

*

*Here' (i. e. at Sutton), says Stillingfleet's biographer (1735), therefore, he first took upon him the charge of a parish, and which ought not to be forgotten, he did not climb up by the way of those days of confusion and disorder, but entered at the right door by means of episcopal ordination. For he had well considered who they were that our Saviour had commissioned to ordain labourers for His vineyard, as he professes himself (Pref. to his Ordination Sermon at St. Peter's) he even thus received episcopal orders, and followed the directions of an excellent bishop of our church, the truly pious and reverend Dr. Brownrigg, the ejected bishop of Exon. For by him it was that Mr. Stillingfleet was separated to the work of the ministry.'

pacy for the benefit of the depressed church, and the satisfaction of the cavalier nobility and gentry. As to the number of the young clergy who thus received Episcopal ordination in secret violation of law, which they regarded as in no way binding on themselves, it is impossible either to speak positively or make any plausible conjecture; but it certainly was not small in the earlier days of the Commonwealth, before the ranks of the dispossessed prelates had been reduced by death, and whilst the bishops retained the bodily vigour and zeal requisite for so painful and hazardous a performance of their duty.

On the termination of the civil contest, when Parliament had re-established discipline in the universities, and had no immediate cause to fear the oppositon of the Royalists, there was no disposition on the part of the authorities to deal harshly with the Episcopalians. Those of the clergy who had been shut up in jails or floating prisons were liberated; and no fresh steps were taken to apprehend or harass the divines who had exerted themselves conspicuously in the king's behalf. Like the ministers ejected in 1662, the dispossessed clergy bestirred themselves to make the best of adverse circumstances. Many of them found entertainment in the houses of the Cavalier aristocracy and gentry, and repaid the hospitality of their patrons by acting as private chaplains, tutors, secretaries, land-stewards. The former dignitaries of disestablished cathedrals and deprived incumbents were secured from absolute penury by the small and often irregularly-paid pensions allotted to them by Parliament, but they usually had other means of subsistence, apart from the contributions of the wealthy laymen of their party. The expelled bishops in many cases received allowances from the public purse. Some of the silenced hierarchy applied for the means of maintaining their families to agriculture, commerce, petty trade; others became authors by profession and political agents in the paid service of employers plotting for the restoration of monarchy. But a considerable proportion of the scandalous, or so-called scandalous, divines, after losing their preferments, endured privations on which, even at this distance of time, it is impossible to reflect without lively regret. The most luckless of them died the slow death of the starvation which is not called starvation; and their widows and children were left to swell

that mass of clerical misery which resulted in our modern system of Life Assurance.

No long time elapsed after the Parliamentary visitation of Oxford, ere a considerable proportion of the expelled Royalist clergy and scholars returned to the university; where, under the government of the Puritans, learning and discipline flourished, to the keen chagrin of the Cavaliers, in a manner that contrasted strongly against their decay during Charles's reign. The number of students steadily increased, and their general zeal for learning bore fruits which even Clarendon was compelled to recognise. It might,' he says, after noticing the Parliamentary visitation of Oxford, reasonably be concluded, that this wild and barbarous depopulation would extirpate all that learning, religion, and loyalty, which had so eminently flourished there; and that the succeeding ill-husbandry and unskilful cultivation would have made it fruitful in Ignorance, Profanation, Atheism, and Rebellion; but, by God's wonderful blessing, the goodness and richness of that soil could not be made barren by all that stupidity and ignorance. It choaked the weeds, and would not suffer the poisonous seeds, which were sown with industry enough, to spring up; but after several tyrannical governments, mutually succeeding each other, and with the same malice and perverseness endeavoured to extinguish all good literature and allegiance, it yielded a harvest of extraordinary good and sound knowledge in all parts of learning; and many who were wickedly introduced, applied themselves to the study of good learning, and the practice of virtue, and had inclination to that duty and obedience which they had never been taught; so that when it pleased God to bring King Charles II. back to the throne, he found that university (not to undervalue the other, which had nobly likewise rejected the ill infusions which had been industriously poured into it) abounding in excellent learning, and devoted to duty and obedience, little inferior to what it was before its desolation; which is a lively instance of God's mercy and purpose, for ever so to provide for his church, that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.'

Whilst learning flourished in the universities under the Commonwealth, the Cavalier clergy and scholars found shelter in those ancient seminaries of the Church; but it was at Oxford