mind, with a bland temper and winning manners, could have enabled him to gain and keep, in spite of faults eminently unsoldierlike, the good-will of his soldiers.*

KEN, BISHOP OF BATH AND WELLS.

KEN, who, both in intellectual and in moral qualities, ranked highest among the non-juring prelates, hesitated long. There were few clergymen who could have submitted to the new government with a better grace. For, in the times when non-resistance and passive obedience were the favorite themes of his brethren, he had scarcely ever alluded to politics in the pulpit. He owned that the arguments in favor of swearing were very strong. He went, indeed, so far as to say, that his scruples would be completely removed if he could be convinced that James had entered into engagements for ceding Ireland to the French King. It is evident, therefore, that the difference between Ken and the Whigs was not a difference of principle. He thought, with them, that misgovernment carried to a certain point, justified a transfer of allegiance, and doubted only whether the misgovernment of James had been carried quite to that point. Nay, the good Bishop actually began to prepare a pastoral letter explaining his reasons for taking the oaths. But, before it was finished, he received information which convinced him that Ireland had not been made over to France: doubts came thick upon him: he threw his unfinished letter into the fire, and implored his less scrupulous friends not to urge him further. He was sure, he said, that they had acted uprightly: he was glad that they could do with a clear conscience what he shrank from doing: he felt the force of their reasoning: he was all but persuaded; and he was afraid to listen longer lest he should be quite persuaded: for, if he should comply, and his misgivings should afterwards return, he should be the most miserable of men. Not for wealth, not for a palace, not for a peerage, would he run the smallest risk of ever feeling the torments of remorse. It is a curious fact that, of the seven non-juring prelates, the only one whose name carries with it much weight was on

See the Dear Bargain, a Jacobite pamphlet clandestinely printed in 1690. "I have not patience," says the writer, "after this wretch (Marlborough) to mention any other. All are innocent comparatively, even Kirke himself.

the point of swearing, and was prevented from doing so, as he himself acknowledged, not by the force of reason, but by a morbid scrupulosity which he did not advise others to imitate.*

Among the priests who refused the oaths, were some men eminent in the learned world, as grammarians, chronologists, canonists, and antiquaries, and a very few who were distinguished by wit and eloquence: but scarcely one can be named who was qualified to discuss any large question of morals or politics, scarcely one whose writings do not indicate either extreme feebleness or extreme flightiness of mind. Those who distrust the judgment of a Whig on this point, will probably allow some weight to the opinion which was expressed, many years after the Revolution, by a philosopher of whom the Tories are justly proud. Johnson, after passing in review the celebrated divines who had thought it sinful to swear allegiance to William the Third and George the First, pronounced that, in the whole body of nonjurors, there was one, and one only, who could reason.†

* See Turner's Letter to Sancroft, dated on Ascension Day, 1689. The original is among the Tanner MSS. in the Bodleian Library. But the letter will be found, with much other curious matter, in the Life of Ken, by a Layman, lately pub lished. See also the Life of Kettlewell, iii. 95; and Ken's letter to Burnet, dated Oct. 5, 1689, in Hawkins's Life of Ken. "I am sure," Lady Russell wrote to Dr. Fitzwilliam, "the Bishop of Bath and Wells excited others to comply, when he could not bring himself to do so, but rejoiced when others did." Ken declared that he had advised nobody to take the oaths, and that his practice had been to remit those who asked his advice to their own studies and prayers. Lady Russell's assertion and Ken's denial will be found to come nearly to the same thing, when we make those allowances which ought to be made for situation and feeling, even in weighing the testimony of the most veracious witnesses. Ken, having at last determined to cast in his lot with the non-jurors, naturally tried to vindicate his consistency as far as he honestly could. Lady Russell, wishing to induce her friend to take the oaths, naturally made as much of Ken's disposition to compliance as she honestly could. She went too far in using the word “excited." On the other hand, it is clear that Ken, by remitting those who consulted him to their own studies and prayers, gave them to understand that, in his opinion, the oath was lawful to those who, after a serious inquiry, thought it lawful. If people had asked him whether they might lawfully commit perjury or adultery, he would assuredly have told them, not to consider the point maturely, and to implore the divine direction, but to abstain on peril of their souls.

† See the conversation of June 9, 1784, in Boswell's Life of Johnson, and the note. Boswell, with his usual absurdity, is sure that Johnson could not have recollected "that the seven bishops, so justly celebrated for their magnanimous resistance to arbitrary power, were yet non-jurors; only five of the seven were nonjurors; and anybody but Boswell would have known that a man may resist arbitrary power, and yet not be a good reasoner. Nay, the resistance which Sancroft and the other nonjuring bishops offered to arbitrary power, while they coutinued to hold the doctrine of non-resistance, is the most decisive proof that they were incapable of reason. It must be remembered that they were prepared to take the whole kingly power from James and to bestow it on William, with the title of Regent. Their scruple was merely about the word King.

I am surprised that Johnson should have pronounced William Law no reasoner. Law did indeed fall into great errors; but they were errors against which logic affords no security. In mere dialectical skill he had very few superiors. That he was more than once victorious over Hoadley no candid Whig will deny. But Law did not belong to the generation with which I have now to do.

CHARLES LESLIE.

THE nonjuror in whose favor Johnson made this excep tion, was Charles Leslie. Leslie had, before the Revolution, been Chancellor of the Diocese of Connor in Ireland. He had been forward in opposition to Tyrconnel; had, as a justice of the peace for Monaghan, refused to acknowledge a papist as Sheriff of that county; and had been so courageous as to send some officers of the Irish army to prison for ma rauding. But the doctrine of non-resistance, such as it had been taught by Anglican divines in the days of the Rye House plot, was immovably fixed in his mind. When the state of Ulster became such that a Protestant who remained there could hardly avoid being either a rebel or a martyr, Leslie fled to London. His abilities and his connections were such that he might easily have obtained high preferment in the Church of England. But he took his place in the front rank of the Jacobite body, and remained there steadfastly, through all the dangers and vicissitudes of three and thirty troubled years. Though constantly engaged in theological controversy with Deists, Jews, Socinians, Presbyterians, Papists, and Quakers, he found time to be one of the most voluminous political writers of his age. Of all the nonjuring clergy, he was the best qualified to discuss constitutional questions. For, before he had taken orders, he had resided long in the Temple, and had beef studying English History and law, while most of the other chiefs of the schism had been poring over the Acts of Chalcedon, or seeking for wisdom in the Targum of Onkelos.*

In 1689, however, Leslie was almost unknown in England.

DR. WILLIAM SHERLOCK.

AMONG the divines who incurred suspension on the first of August in that year, the highest in popular estimation was without dispute Doctor William Sherlock. Perhaps no • Ware's History of the Writers of Ireland, continued by Harris.

single presbyter of the Church of England has ever possessed a greater authority over his brethren than belonged to Sherlock at the time of the Revolution. He was not of the first rank among his contemporaries as a scholar, as a preacher, as a writer on theology, or as a writer on politics; but in all the four characters he had distinguished himself. The perspicuity and liveliness of his style have been praised by Prior and Addison. The facility and assiduity with which he wrote are sufficiently proved by the bulk and the dates of his works. There were indeed among the clergy men of brighter genius and men of wider attainments: but during a long period there was none who more completely represented the order, none who, on all subjects, spoke more precisely the sense of the Anglican priesthood, without any taint of Latitudinarianism, of Puritanism, or of Popery. He had, in the days of the Exclusion Bill, when the power of the dissenters was very great in Parliament and in the country, written strongly against the sin of nonconformity. When the Rye House Plot was detected, he had zealously defended, by tongue and pen, the doctrine of non-resistance. His services to the cause of episcopacy and monarchy were so highly valued, that he was made master of the Temple. A pension was also bestowed on him by Charles: but that pension James soon took away; for Sherlock, though he held himself bound to pay passive obedience to the civil power, held himself equally bound to combat religious errors, and was the keenest and most laborious of that host of controversialists who, in the day of peril, manfully defended the Protestant faith. In little more than two years he published sixteen treatises, some of them large books, against the high pretensions of Rome. Not content with the easy victories which he gained over such feeble antagonists as those who were quartered at Clerkenwell and the Savoy, he had the courage to measure his strength with no less a champion than Bossuet, and came out of the conflict without discredit. Nevertheless, Sherlock still continued to maintain that no oppression could justify Christians in resisting the kingly authority. When the Convention was about to meet, he strongly recommended, in a tract which was considered as the manifesto of a large part of the clergy, that James should be invited to return on such conditions as might secure the laws and religion of the nation.* The vote which placed William and Mary on the throne filled

⚫ Letter to a member of the Convention, 1689.

Sherlock with sorrow and anger. He is said to have exclaimed, that if the Convention was determined on a Revolution, the clergy would find forty thousand good Churchmen to effect a restoration.* Against the new oaths he gave his opinion plainly and warmly. He declared himself at a loss to understand how any honest man could doubt that, by the powers that be, St. Paul meant legitimate powers and no others. No name was in 1689 cited by the Jacobites so proudly and fondly as that of Sherlock. Before the end of 1690, that name excited very different feelings.

Sherlock took the oaths, and speedily published, in justification of his conduct, a pamphlet entitled, The Case of Allegiance to Sovereign Powers Stated. The sensation produced by this work was immense. Dryden's Hind and Panther had not raised so great an uproar. Halifax's Letter to a Dissenter had not called forth so many answers. The replies to the Doctor, the vindications of the Doctor, the pasquinades on the Doctor, would fill a library. The clamor redoubled when it was known that the convert had not only been reappointed Master of the Temple, but had accepted the Deanery of St. Paul's which had become va cant in consequence of the deprivation of Sancroft and the promotion of Tillotson. The rage of the nonjurors amounted almost to frenzy. Was it not enough, they asked, to desert the true and pure Church, in this her hour of sorrow and peril, without also slandering her? It was easy to understand why a greedy, cowardly hypocrite, should refuse to take the oaths to the usurper as long as it seemed probable that the rightful King would be restored, and should make haste to swear after the battle of the Boyne. Such tergiversation in times of civil discord was nothing new. What was new was that the turn-coat should try to throw his own guilt and shame on the Church of England, and should proclaim that she had taught him to turn against the weak who were in the right, and to cringe to the powerful who were in the wrong. Had such indeed been her doctrine or her practice in evil days? Had she abandoned her Royal Martyr in the prison or on the scaffold? Had she enjoined her children to pay obedience to the Rump or to the Protector? Yet was the government of the Rump or of the Protector less entitled to be called a settled government than the government of William and Mary? Had not the battle of Worcester been as great a blow to the hopes of

* Johnson's Notes on the Phoenix Edition of Burnet's Pastoral Letter, 1692.