СНАРТЕК Х.

THEOLOGICAL WRITERS OF THE CIVIL WAR AND THE COMMONWEALTH.

§ 1. Theological Writers. JOHN HALES and WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH. § 2. SIR THOMAS BROWNE. § 3. THOMAS FULLER. § 4. JEREMY TAYLOR. His Life. § 5. His Liberty of Prophesying and other works. § 6. His style compared with Spenser. § 7. RICHARD BAXTER. The Quakers: Fox, PENN, and BARCLAY.

§ 1. THE Civil War, which led to the temporary overthrow of the ancient monarchy of England, was in many respects a religious as well as a political contest. It was a struggle for liberty of faith at least as much as for liberty of civil government. The prose literature of this time, therefore, as well as of a period extending considerably beyond it, exhibits a strong religious or theological character. The blood of martyrs, it has been said, is the seed of the Church; and the alternate triumphs and persecutions, through which passed both the Anglican Church and the multiplicity of rival sects which now arose, naturally developed to the highest degree both the intellectual powers and the Christian energies of their adherents. The most glorious outburst of theological eloquence which the Church of England has exhibited, in the writings of Jeremy Taylor, Barrow, and the other great Anglican Fathers, was responded to by the appearance, in the ranks of the sectaries, of many remarkable men, some hardly inferior in learning and genius to the leaders whose doctrines they opposed, while others, with a ruder yet more burning enthusiasm, were the founders of dissenting communions, as in the case of the Quakers.

JOHN HALES (1584-1656), surnamed "the ever-memorable John Hales," was a man who enjoyed among his contemporaries an immense reputation for the vastness of his learning and the acuteness of his wit. He was born in 1584, and in the earlier part of his life had acquired, by travel and diplomatic service in foreign countries, a vast amount not only of literary knowledge, but practical acquaintance with men and affairs: he afterwards retired to the learned obscurity of a fellowship of Eton College, where he passed the sad and dangerous years filled with civil contention. During part of this time his writings and opinions rendered him so obnoxious to the dominant party that a price was set upon his head, and he was obliged to hide, being at the same time reduced to the extremest privations. He for some time subsisted by the sale of his books. He died in 1656, and left behind him the reputation of one of the most solid and yet acutest intellects that his country had produced. The greater part of his writings are controversial, treating on the politico-religious questions that then agitated

men's minds. He had been present at the Synod of Dort, and has given an interesting account of the questions debated in that assembly. While attending its sittings as an agent for the English Church he was converted from the Calvinistic opinions he had hitherto held to those of the Episcopalian divines. Both in his controversial writings and in his sermons he exhibits a fine example of that rich yet chastened eloquence which characterizes the great English divines of the seventeenth century, and which was carried to the highest pitch of gorgeous magnificence by Taylor and of majestic grandeur by Barrow.

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH (1602-1644), also an eminent defender of Protestantism against the Church of Rome, was converted to the Roman Catholic faith while studying at Oxford, and went to the Jesuits' College at Douay. But he subsequently returned to Oxford, renounced his new faith, and published in 1637 his celebrated work against Catholicism, entitled The Religion of the Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation, in reply to a treatise by a Jesuit, named Knott, who had maintained that unrepenting Protestants could not be saved. "In the long parenthetical periods," observes Mr. Hallam, "as in those of other old English writers, in his copiousness, which is never empty or tautological, there is an inartificial eloquence springing from strength of intellect and sincerity of feeling that cannot fail to impress the reader. But his chief excellence is the close reasoning which avoids every danger. ous admission, and yields to no ambiguousness of language. He perceived and maintained with great courage, considering the times in which he wrote and the temper of those whom he was not unwilling to keep as friends, his favorite tenet, that all things necessary to be believed are clearly laid down in Scripture. . . . In later times his book obtained a high reputation; he was called the immortal Chillingworth; he was the favorite of all the moderate and the latitudinarian writers, of Tillotson, Locke, and Warburton."

§ 2. The writings of SIR THOMAS BROWNE (1605-1682), though not exclusively theological, belong, chronologically as well as by their style and manner, to this department. Both as a man and a writer this is one of the most peculiar and eccentric of our great prose-authors; and the task of giving a clear appreciation of him is unusually difficult. He was an exceedingly learned man, and passed the greater part of his life in practising physic in the ancient city of Norwich. It should be remembered that the great provincial towns at that time had not been degraded to that insignificance to which the modern facility of intercourse has reduced them in relation to the Metropolis: they were then so many little capitals, possessing their society, their commercial activity, and their local physiognomy, and had not yet been swallowed up by the monster London. Browne was born in 1605, and his life was unusually prolonged, as he died in 1682. His writings are of a most miscellaneous character, ranging from observations on natural science to the most arduous subtleties of moral and metaphysical speculation. Among the most popular of his works are the treatise entitled Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Burial, and the Essays on Vulgar Errors, which bear

the name of Pseudoxia Epidemica. The first of these treatises was suggested by the digging up in Norfolk of some Roraan funeral urns, and the other is an attempt to overthrow many of the common superstitions and erroneous notions on various subjects. But a mere specification of the subject will altogether fail to give an idea of Browne's strange but fascinating writings. They are the frank and undisguised outpourings of one of the most original minds that ever existed. With the openness and discursive simplicity of Montaigne, they combine immense and recondite reading: at every step the author starts some extraordinary theory, which he illustrates by analogies so singular and unexpected that they produce upon the reader a mingled feeling of amusement and surprise, and all this in a style absolutely bristling with quaint Latinisms, which in another writer would be pedantic, but in Browne were the natural garb of his thought. His diction is stiff with scholastic terms, like the chasuble of some mediæval prelate, thick-set with pearl and ruby. The contrast between the simplicity of Browne's character and the out-of-the-way learning and odd caprices of theory in which he is perpetually indulging, makes him one of the most amusing of writers; and he very frequently rises to a sombre and touching eloquence. Though deeply religious in sentiment he is sometimes apparently sceptical, and his sudden turns of thought and strange comparisons keep the attention of the reader continually awake. He stands almost alone in his passion for pursuing an idea through every conceivable manifestation; and his ingenuity on such occasions is absolutely portentous. For instance, in a treatise on the Quincunx he finds quincunxes on the earth, in the waters, and in the heavens, nay, in the very intellectual constitution of the soul. He has a particular tendency to dwell on the dark mysteries of time and of the universe, and makes us thrill with the solemnity with which he suggests the nothingness of mortal life, and the insignificance of human interests when compared to the immeasurable ages that lie before and behind us. In all Sir Thomas Browne's works an intimate companionship is established between the writer and the reader; but the book in which he ostensibly proposes to communicate his own personal opinions and feelings most unreservedly, is the Religio Medici, a species of Confession of Faith. In this he by no means confines himself to theological matters, but takes the reader into his confidence in the same artless and undisguised manner as the immortal Montaigne. The images and illustrations with which his writings are crowded, produce upon the reader the same effect as the familiar yet mysterious forms that make up an Egyptian hieroglyphic: they have the same fantastic oddity, the same quaint stiffness in their attitude and combination, and impress the mind with the same air of solemn significance and outlandish remoteness from the ordinary objects of our contemplation.

§ 3. THOMAS FULLER (1608-1661) is another great and attractive prose-writer of this period, and has in some respects a kind of intellectual resemblance to Browne. Unlike him, however, he passed a very active life, having taken a not unprominent part in the Great Civil

War, in which he embraced the cause of the royalists. He was born in 1608, and survived till 1661, and it is said was to have been rewarded for his services with a bishopric, had the intention of the restored court not been defeated by his death. He studied first at Queen's and afterwards at Sidney College, Cambridge, and, entering the Church, rendered himself conspicuous in the pulpit. In the course of time he was nominated preacher at the Savoy in London, and in 1642, just at the outbreak of the Civil War, offended the Parliament by a sermon delivered at Westminster, in which he advised reconciliation with the King, who had left his capital and was on the eve of declaring war against his subjects. Fuller after this joined Charles at Oxford, and is said to have displeased the court party by a degree of moderation which they called lukewarmness. Having thus excited the dissatisfaction of both factions, we may, I think, fairly attribute to reasonable and moderate views the double unpopularity of Fuller. During the war he was attached, as chaplain, to the army commanded by Sir Ralph Hopton, in the West of England; and he took a distinguished part in the famous defence of Basing House, when the Parliamentary army under Sir William Waller was forced to abandon that siege. During his campaigning Fuller industriously collected the materials for his most popular work, the Worthies of England and Wales, which, however, was not published until after the author's death. This, more than his Church History, is the production with which posterity has generally associated the name of Fuller; but his Sermons frequently exhibit those singular peculiarities of style which render him one of the most remarkable writers of his age. His writings are eminently amusing, not only from the multiplicity of curious and anecdotic details which they contain, but from the odd and yet frequently profound reflections suggested by those details. The Worthies contain biographical notices of eminent Englishmen, as connected with the different counties, and furnish an inexhaustible treasure of curious stories and observations: but whatever the subject Fuller treats, he places it in such a number of new and unexpected lights, and introduces in illustration of it such a number of ingenious remarks, that the attention of the reader is incessantly kept alive. He was a man of a pleasant and jovial as well as an ingenious turn of mind: there is no sourness or asceticism in his way of thinking; flashes of fancy are made to light up the gravest and most unattractive subjects, and, as frequently happens in men of a lively turn, the sparkle of his wit is warmed by a glow of sympathy and tenderness. His learning was very extensive and very minute, and he drew from out-of-the-way and neglected corners of reading illustrations which give the mind a pleasant shock of novelty. One great source of his picturesqueness is his frequent use of antithesis; and, in his works, antithesis is not what it frequently becomes in other authors, as in Samuel Johnson for example, a bare opposition of words, but it is the juxtaposition of apparently discordant ideas, from whose sudden contact there flashes forth the spark of wit or the embodiment of some original conception. The shock of his antithetical oppositions is like

the action of the galvanic battery-creative. He has been accused of levity in intermingling ludicrous images with serious matter, but these images are the reflex of his own cheerful, ingenious, and amiable nature; and though their oddity may sometimes excite a smile, it is a smile which is never incompatible with serious feeling. He is said to have possessed an almost supernatural quickness of memory, yet he has given many excellent precepts guarding against the abuse of this faculty, and in the same way he has shown that wit and ingenuity may be rendered compatible with lofty morality and deep feeling. In a word, he was essentially a wise and learned humorist, with not less singularity of genius than Sir Thomas Browne, and with less than that strange writer's abstract indifference to ordinary human interests. § 4. But by far the greatest theological writer of the Anglican Church at this period was JEREMY TAYLOR (1613-1667). He was of good but decayed family, his father having exercised the humble calling of a barber at Cambridge, where his illustrious son was born in 1613. The boy received a sound education at the Grammar-School founded by Perse, then recently opened in that town, and afterwards studied at Caius College, where his talents and learning soon made him conspicuous. He took holy orders at an unusually early age, and is said to have attracted by his youthful eloquence, and by his "graceful and pleasant air,” the notice of Archbishop Laud, the celebrated Primate and Minister, to whose narrow-minded bigotry and tyrannical indifference to the state of religious opinion among his countrymen so much of the confusion of those days is to be ascribed. Laud, who was struck with Taylor's merits at a sermon preached by the latter, made the young priest one of his chaplains, and procured for him a fellowship in All Souls' College, Oxford. His career during the Civil War bears some semblance to that of Fuller, but he stood higher in the favor of the Cavaliers and the Court. He served, as chaplain, in the Royalist army, and was taken prisoner in 1644 at the action fought under the walls of Cardigan Castle; but he confesses that on this occasion, as well as on several others when he fell into the power of the triumphant party of the Parliament, he was treated with generosity and indulgence. Such traits of mutual forbearance, during the heat of civil strife, are honorable to both parties, and as refreshing as they are rare. Our great national struggle, however, offered many instances of such noble magnanimity. The King's cause growing desperate, Taylor at last retired from it, and Charles, on taking leave of him, made him a present of his watch. Taylor then placed himself under the protection of his friend Lord Carbery, and resided for some time at the seat of Golden Grove, belonging to that nobleman, in Carmarthenshire. Taylor was twice married; first to Phoebe Langdale, who died early, and afterwards to Joanna Bridges, a natural daughter of Charles I., with whom he received some fortune. He was unhappy in his children, his two sons having been notorious for their profligacy, and he had the sorrow of surviving them both. During part of the time which he passed in retirement, Taylor kept a school in Wales, and continued to take an