biographer, scarcely any book on the Hebrew language was sent to the press without being first submitted to him for revision; and in spite of his modest disclaimer, his Concio ad Clerum, written in 1761 for the opening of Convocation but not delivered, shows plainly that he was an excellent Latin scholar; whilst his sermons, of which no less then one hundred and forty have been published, and his charges, show that he had a good command of his mother tongue as well as a robust, manly, sensible mind. clearly shows his mind than the Concio. cussed the position of Convocation. The

Nothing more In it he disSynod is a part

of the ancient constitution of the realm, no less The Concio. than the Houses of Lords and Commons; and though its action be suspended, it nowise ceases to exist. It had done good work in the past; and its future services, when opportunity should arise, must not be lightly prejudged. Meanwhile, it was a stately meeting of Church representatives met for prayer and mutual counsel and its testification of loyalty. Although he was well aware that the constitution of the Church was mutilated without its Convocation, he deprecated precipitate action. He would willingly wait till controverted subjects could be debated in a calmer spirit. Meanwhile, if they could not construct canons, they must seek by word and example to instil obedience to the canon of Holy Scripture. If they could not fulminate anathemas against the lukewarm, they must endeavour all the more to confute them by their arguments.

Naturally Secker was brought much more into contact with the Court and with political life than any of the other five prelates with whom we have been dealing. In his earlier years, as Bishop of Oxford, his standing at Court with the Queen and the Prince of Wales (but not with George II., who hated him) was high. As Rector of St. James's, Piccadilly, he baptized all the children of the Prince of Wales except two, and the Prince was very fond of him and bestowed on him several marks of favour. Secker did not attend the Prince's Court after the unfortunate rupture between George II. and his son, and it is supposed that he incurred the displeasure of the King because of his failure as an intermediary between the King and the

Secker and the Court.

VIII

SECKER AND POLITICS

123

Prince of Wales. Whatever the cause, the King did not speak to him for a good many years, and both in his reign and in that of George III., his grandson, for Frederick, Prince of Wales, died in 1751, he was consulted by the throne much less than any archbishop had been for many a long year before. There were those who thought that this should have been resented; but Secker simply answered that "he had as sharp a sense of the indignity as any one could have, but he was very unwilling to break altogether with the Court, for then he was certain he could prevail in nothing; he might now be able to carry some points for the good of the Church." He baptized, married, and crowned George III., who seems to have liked him, and he might, perhaps, have been more at the young King's Court, if it had not been for ill-health.

His action in the House of Lords was characterised by the same peaceful determination to do what he thought was right and to do all the good he could, and for the most part he took the right side. Thus in 1743 he led the bishops in their opposition to the Spirituous Liquors Bill, on the ground that they should "not sacrifice for ways and means the health, the industry, and the lives of the people." We find him also supporting a Bill to make provision for the widows and children of the ministers of the Church of Secker and politics. Scotland. On the Bill of 1748 for disarming the Highlanders, he spoke against that part of it which refused toleration to all Scottish episcopal orders that had not been conferred or confirmed by an English or Irish bishop. And later, in 1753 and 1754, he stood out for toleration on the question of repealing the Act for the naturalisation of Jews; and advocated very strongly, as against the dissenters here and the New England colonists, the sending out of one or more duly consecrated bishops to the episcopalians in the New England settlements.

The bishops

The six bishops whose lives have been sketched in these two chapters were certainly the leading men in the Church during our period. Moreover, they were the six with whom Methodism, which was beyond all doubt and the burning question of the day, came most into contact. The reader will understand that they would not have much sympathy with the movement, though they honestly

Methodism.

endeavoured to do justice to it, as no one owned more generously than its great leader himself. There is not one of the six of whom John Wesley has not a kind word to say. Of course, they disagreed with the line he took, as he disagreed with the line they took, but it was left to lesser men to speak and write of them as if they were "fighting against God." They were as honest in their convictions as the Methodists themselves were. The Methodist divergence from the Church is the more to be regretted, because the Methodists were essentially reformers, and these good bishops were painfully conscious that the Church needed a revival of spiritual life. Never indeed did it need such a revival more than in their times, for it reached its nadir between the years embraced in this period, 1738-1760.

AUTHORITIES. Some account of Bishop Benson is given in Bishop Beilby Porteus's Life of Secker affixed to the six-volume edition of Secker's Works. On Bishop Butler add to authorities previously cited the Life by Bartlett, and the excellent account of his times, works, and opinions in the Life by W. A. Spooner. Butler's Correspondence with Dr. Samuel Clarke is given in full in Dean Bernard's edition. William Morley Egglestone, in his Stanhope Memorials of Bishop Butler (1878), has brought together many curious and interesting details concerning Butler's tenure of the Durham living. The summary of Secker's Concio is taken from Abbey's English Church and its Bishops.

CHAPTER IX

BISHOP WILSON

It is a great relief to churchmen to turn for a while from the state of things described in the previous chapters, in which we cannot fully sympathise with any of the religious parties, to a little island diocese in which a wholly different view meets the eye; and as the man who was the life and soul as well as the chief pastor of the see passed away towards the close of the period now before us, this seems the proper place in which to consider him. Need it be said that the diocese is that of Sodor and Man, and the man the apostolic Thomas Wilson (1663-1755). His Wilson. history has been written many times by different pens and from different points of view. A brief account of these Lives will be found at the end of this chapter.

Thomas

Bishop Wilson was one of those men who in their writings are themselves, and his writings therefore are essential to a full knowledge of the man. As we read the Maxims, the Sacra Privata, the Sermons, we read the man. The Sermons are perhaps the most persuasive, and therefore the best of his day, better than those of Sherlock and Secker, the most admired preachers of his later life; better than those of Atterbury and Smalridge, the most admired in his earlier years. There are a quaint simplicity and homeliness, a tenderness combined with great thoughtfulness, a thorough manliness, an intense earnestness without the faintest tincture of affectation, which render them, and indeed all his writings, most fascinating. His conception of Christianity was fundamentally masculine. He was most essentially a preacher to

and a writer for men; and though there is always great tenderness exhibited, yet it is as far as may be from maudlin sentimentality. Sentiment indeed he had, and that of the purest kind; but there was no sentimentality about him or his works. Possibly admiration of the man may lead us to exaggerate the merits of the writer, for he was a higher type of man than any of the preachers with whom he has just been compared. For the reader no less than for the hearerTruth from his lips prevails with double sway.

And as Church history should surely be a history of goodness rather than of badness, it may not be regarded as inappropriate to linger fondly at some little length upon his unique character and career, or rather upon the later part of it; for at the date at which the present volume opens he was already at the close of the middle stage of life. When George I. began to reign, Thomas Wilson had been Bishop of Sodor and Man for sixteen years, and had already shown that the prevailing faults of his day were in him conspicuous by their absence. He was born at Burton, in Cheshire, and probably that natural instinct of piety which he seems to have possessed was hereditary on his mother's side, for his mother Early life. was sister of Richard Sherlock, Rector of Winwick, one of the exemplary parish priests of the seventeenth century. At any rate, he clearly owed much to his uncle Sherlock; for, having received his early education at the King's School, Chester, he went, as his uncle had gone before him, to Trinity College, Dublin. It is curious that the best clergyman of his day does not appear to have been originally intended for a clergyman at all. He first devoted himself to medicine, until he was persuaded by a fellow-student, Michael Hewetson, to turn his thoughts to a clerical life. Having taken his degree, he was ordained deacon by Dr. William Moreton, Bishop of Kildare, in 1686, and became curate to his uncle at Winwick, having charge of an outlying chapelry. There could be no better trainer for a young clergyman, and Wilson spent the first five years of his ministerial life under his care. He then became domestic chaplain to the ninth Earl of Derby, as his uncle had been to the eighth earl, tutor to his eldest son, and master