England com a single presbyter is never called a bishop. The text is ex- CHAP. VII. plained on the supposition that Titus was Archbishop or Metropolitan of Crete. He was to consecrate a bishop for every city in the island, and to govern these bishops as his suffragans. The Apostles in this way gave grace to their successors, and that grace has come down to us, even as the oil on Aaron's beard flowed down to the skirt of his garment. The model of Church government was set up at Crete, and Sancroft addressed the Presbyterians in the words of St. Paul, when there was danger of shipwreck, 'Sirs, ye should not have parted from Crete,' and so 'have gained harm and disgrace.' The modern Titus was Archbishop Juxon, who was consecrating a whole province of bishops at once. We have, now, Crete in England. Crete and Both islands are a kind of trigon betwixt three points or pared. promontories. Both are called by ancient writers the happy islands,' and both were called 'white,' because on one side they were bounded by cliffs of chalk,-' Candia a candidis, as Albion ab albis rupibus.' The parallel is curious, but, like most parallels strictly followed out, it borders on burlesque. St. Paul quoted a poet, who said that the Cretans were always liars. A prophet he was, Sancroft adds, and prophesied of this present age that it might see its face and blush.' The English nation, but lately, had slandered the Lord's anointed.' They had accused the brethren and the fathers, that they might devour men more righteous than themselves. Pliny says, that there was no poisonous animal in Crete,' and Solinus adds, that it had no serpents; but he should have excepted the inhabitants, who were evil beasts,' and not only evil, but 'venomous.' In this, too, we resemble Crete. We have vipers that have eaten out the bowels of their common mother. Grotius says, that the Cretans were a mutinous and seditious people, and it were to be wished that in this the English nation had not been like them. We have also had a 'Cretan labyrinth,' -an endless maze of errors and heresies; and, in the labyrinth, an hideous monster, a Minotaur semibovemque virum, semivirumque bovem, Rome and Geneva, Cracovia, ay, and Mecca too.' But now we have a Theseus to slay the monster, and an Ariadne to lend the clue. We have the restoration 6 CHAP. VII, of the Apostolic government, the 'Cretan model,' a Metropolitan with a whole province of bishops. This sermon was preached when Sancroft was comparatively a young man. Its style is antiquated and its ideas exploded. He had inherited more of the past than the leading divines who were of his age; and but for the great events that happened during his Primacy, he would have been passed by as the most insignificant of the Reformed Archbishops of Canterbury. His refusing to take the oaths to William might have been pardoned, but no man now approves of his conduct in separating from the communion of the Church of England, and taking steps to perpetuate the schism of the Nonjurors. Yet a man who, for conscience' sake, could give up the revenues of the See of Canterbury, and live contentedly in obscurity on fifty pounds a year, is deserving of admiration, whatever his weaknesses may have been. When there was danger of Roman Catholicism being introduced by stealth into England, Sancroft counselled a friendly alliance with Nonconformists. He instructed the clergy to have a very tender regard for alliance with Protestant Dissenters; they were, upon occasions, offered, to visit them at their houses, and receive them kindly at their own, and treat them fairly whenever they meet them, discoursing calmly and civilly with them, persuading them, if it may be, to a full compliance with the Church, or at least, that, whereunto we have already attained we may walk by the same rule and mind the same thing.' Sancroft recommends a friendly Noncon formists. Bishop Ken. Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells, is the best known of the Nonjuring bishops. He is one of the few men who, belonging to one party, have yet preserved the esteem of all parties. Ken's intellect was not great, but like some narrow streams, it was pure and beautiful. A few successful lines in two hymns, among volumes of very poor verses, have almost done for him what the Elegy in a Country Churchyard has done for Thomas Gray. By these lines he is remembered by many who have forgotten or never knowu that he was a Nonjuror. But the cause of the Nonjurors does not gain much from Ken. He was the last to decide on the refusal of the oath, and the first to deplore the schism which followed. Macaulay has shown that the difference between Ken and the Whigs was not a difference of prin- CHAP. VII. ciple. He would have given allegiance to William, if it had been true, as it was reported, that James had ceded Ireland to the French king. So that Ken recognised a point where resistance was a duty. In a letter to Dr. Hickes, in 1700,* he earnestly recommended the other Nonjurors to resign their canonical claims and communicate in public offices with the Church. The ground on which he advised this was that the peace of the Church should supersede all ecclesiastical canons, which at best were only of human authority. Churchman. Ken, however, belonged entirely to the narrow Church A narrow party which embraced the Nonjurors. The Latitudinarians, as they were called, were in his judgment scarcely Christians. They were regarded as men who had betrayed their baptismal faith.† Bishop Burnet was a mere traducer of the Church. But, like all really devout High Churchmen, Ken was a zealous advocate for keeping 'holy the Sabbath day.' The day of rest, under the gospel, was delivered, he said, from Jewish rigour, but not from the piety of the Jewish Sabbath. He kept to the 'real presence' in the Eucharist, in the sense described by Dryden, when he wrote, 'Nonsense never can be understood.' Ken had piety, firmness of character,‡ and, what is better than either orthodox or even rational theology, he had a living faith in righteousness. There is,' he says, in one of his sermons, 'nothing stable but virtue; nothing that can keep us steady in all revolutions but the love of God; and when the worldly wise men and the mighty fail by their own weakness, or moulder by the decays of time, or wear out of fashion, or are overwhelmed by a deluge of envy, or are blown away by the breath of God's displeasure, or when the world of its own accord frowns and forsakes them and their name and memory perish, the man that loves God is still the same; God whom he loves is still the same; with • Prose Works, p. 49. ↑ Prose Works, p. 67. When Charles II. asked the use of Ken's prebendal residence at Win chester for Nell Gwynne, Ken an- His sermon on Daniel. CHAP. VII. Him is no variableness or shadow of turning.'* In a funeral sermon on Lady Mainard, there is a charming picture of a devout woman whose piety was of Ken's own type. In the celebrated sermon on Daniel, preached at Whitehall, Ken has sketched the character and conduct of Daniel in words which are generally regarded as applicable to himself. The text is 'O Daniel, a man greatly beloved.' The Hebrew youth had kept himself uncorrupted by the luxury or religion of the king. He was afraid to break the law of his own religion in eating the meat offered to Bel. He refused to obey the decree which forbade him to ask a petition from any god or man except from the king. For Daniel, personally, it was grievous to offend Darius, who had been to him a gracious and indulgent master. When his duty to God and obedience to his king stood in competition, though it was an inexpressible grief to the good man that ever there should be such a competition, he obeyed God.'+ Bishop Answers 'Naked Truth.' Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely, published several occasional sermons and some tracts. The most important of the latter was an answer to Bishop Croft, called 'Animadversions on Naked Truth.' It was written several years before Turner was a bishop and published without his name. Bishop Croft's book was also anonymous. Turner did not know against whom he was writing. The author of 'Naked Truth' is not spoken of in the most courteous language. His Christianity is regarded as defective, and his faith in God's 'Vicegerent,' Charles II., as not what it ought to be. The argument of 'Naked Truth' was directed against the multitude of creeds and impositions that were now made necessary to salvation. Bishop Croft pointed to the simplicity of faith, as described in the New Testament. Philip spent but a short time in catechizing the Ethiopian eunuch. He only required the confession that Jesus is the Christ, and then he proceeded to baptism. Turner's answer is that which would be given by any orthodox advocate of the creeds in the present day. The subsequent creeds are only Prose Works, p. 171. † An incorrect account of this sermon was carried to the king. Ken was summoned to appear before James, when he was charged with preaching against him. Ken answered that if his majesty had not neglected his duty of being present, his enemies would not have had this opportunity of accusing him. amplified forms of the doctrines expressed in the Apostles' CHAP. VII. Creed. As new heresies arose, new and more decisive definitions of the faith had to be made. The Apostles' Creed is admitted to contain all that is necessary to salvation, on the ground that it contains the substance of all the other creeds. A description of the Thirty-nine Articles is taken from Bishop Laney. They are called 'Articles of Peace,' but not in the sense of comprehending men of different views. Neither are they new articles of faith. They are articles which are to express the opinions of all the clergy in certain controversies. That they are not articles of faith is supposed to be proved from the fact that subscription is not required from the laity. The brevity of the creed of the Ethiopian eunuch is dis- Disputes the puted. He may have had longer instruction, and he may Christian brevity of the have learned more than appears from the narrative. His creed. confession was that Jesus is the Christ, but surely, Turner says, he had learned of the third Person in the Trinity. Philip's baptism must have embraced more than the baptism of those who did not know whether there be any Holy Ghost. The formula of baptism in the name of the Trinity must itself have taught him more than the mere sonship of Christ. The immersion in the water was a lesson of dying unto sin, and the emersion, of a life unto righteousness. Socinians, yea Mahometans, believe that Jesus is the Christ. The confession of Philip must therefore have included more than the words seem to imply. It must have been equivalent to that of Peter, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.' And in this case, it was the rock on which Christ built His Church. To the plea that we should always express doctrine in Scripture language, Turner makes the very sensible answer that we cannot. If the things taught in the Scriptures are to be taken up by the human intellect, they must be expressed in such words as the human mind can invent to express them. Though Bishop Croft was on the Liberal side, his argument evidently supposed some special virtue in the words of Scripture over ordinary human speech. Turner, unconscious probably of the whole bearing of what he maintained, said that we could not escape making deductions or inferences |