The Press. — London, England, 1858-08-07 00:00:00

752 which the removal of the abuses of the sanctuary at White. friars (Alsatia ), and the Mint, may be mentioned; who taised his voice against the cruelties of slavery, devised schemes fur the amelioration of the poor, and continually urged that woman, so formed by nature to elevate man, should be raised from the depths of ignorance, which was her lot in most cases ; the wan who tried so many fields of literature, and gained distinction in them all ; he who, honourable, single•hearted, tierce in the day of battle, was worthy the regard and confidence of England's last great king, William 111.—was Daniel 1)e Foe, gentleman! The author of " Robinson Crusoe" was "an " instrument in the hands of Providence for the "preservation of our national religion " ! More could not have been said of King William. " A " feather would have turned the balance in favour "of Romanism." Ridiculous ! If the " Noncon formists" saved Protestantism (according to Mr. Jeaffreson), it is singular that an ungrateful country in a century and a half never discovered that fact. These " Nonconformists " also " laboured in consolidating the sister countries." We do not think that our good Scotch friends will be likely to • admit that their beloved Caledonia was " consolidated " by the " Noncon formists" of England, and the Protestants of Ireland are not apt to forget that the conspiracy of the " United Irishmen," in 1798, was " con solidated " with the help of several " Noncon formists" in Ulster. Similar extravagances are to be found throughout. Thus, in the sketch of Richardson, Mr. Jeaffre son writes : From the age of Shakspeare down to Fielding, how few writers are there, out of the ranks of Puritanism, we should mourn for if their works were all destroyed! We are not sure that we fully comprehend Mr. Jeaffreson's meaning in this extraordinary para graph. If what he meant is that no writer who did not appreciate women is worth preservation, that opinion would consign even Milton to obscu rity. If he did not mean this, we should be glad to know what the ground is upon which he con siders that Jeremy Taylor, Collier, Barrow, South, Clarendon, Halifax, Temple, Lovelace, Suckling, Herrick, Waller, Dryden, Cowley, Pope, Addison, Steele, Swift—the whole phalanx of the Augustine age—deserve to be swept from our shelves? But this cant about "non-appreciation of women " is, from any point of view, unworthy a man of Mr. Jeaffreson's sense. Did not Gay, Steele, and Pope appreciate women ? It is an author of this order who presumes to write of Sir Walter Scott in a carping and contemptuous manner, while he bepraises Thackeray and Dickens in the most fulsome style ! Comins from the printing-press of a firm so identified with novels, the critical character of such a work as this before us demands the severest examination ; and if we return to it, we shall do so from a regard to the impor tance, not of these ill-written volumes, but of the interesting subject of which they so inade quately treat. (To be continued.) The Scholar and the Trooper; or, Oxford during the Great Rebellion. By the Rev. W. E. Heygate, M.A. London : Parkers. Tins is an entertaining little sketch of the Civil Wars from the Royalist point of view. Almost every scene of that great drama has its own peculiar interest ; on both sides vigour and virtue abounded, and the characters of men were stripped of the disguises which they wear in quiet times by the unprecedented circumstances in which they were placed. It has been said. " Happy is the people whose history is dull," and indeed the safe political principle of standing on the ancient paths is more justly acceptable to the statesman than to the novelist. It is more inte resting to contemplate men " working something new," however rash the enterprize may be, than to watch them patiently treading, with imagina tion chastened and judgment matured, in the footsteps of those who have gone before. Charles was handsomer and more refined:than Cromwell, his fortunes excite greater sympathy, but the racy singularity of Cromwell is more interesting to the student of human nature. Charles is a character for Racine ; Shakespeare would have revelled in the delineation of Cromwell. Mr. Ileygate, as an artist, bears the stamp of Racine rather than that of Shakespeare. His imagination leads him to quiet scenes. Ile runs no risk of falling into extravagance, but he is of being betrayed into eon- sometimes in danger HE PRESS, AUGUST 7, 1858. ventionality. He has a clerical or even a womanly terror of anything improper. A tame domestic genius, he avoids with a just instinct the camps of Cavalier and Roundhead, the abodes of a too reckless chivalry and a too self sufficient liberty of thought ; among divines and casuists of Oxford, and :in the study of a theo logical student, his timorous imagination can repose unscared. Nor is the scene, though so tranquil in the midst of a stirring strife, without its own peculiar interest. Learned and pious men are here, hud dled together like a flock of sheep in a thunder storm. They have casuistical distinctions of unprecedented subtlety; they have infinite pa tristic learning; they know all the decisions of councils, the speculations of schoolmen, the systems of Reformers. This erudition has been digested with profound meditation; it is no lifeless mass of information, for it is salted with honesty and the most earnest piety. Yet it is powerless in the time of trial ; it has no exorcism for the spirit which has risen to frighten it in the midst of its books. Doubtless a most instructive scene, if only its meaning be rightly understood ! Mr. Heygate acknowledges that there was " a want of adaptation" in the Church at this time. The following passage will at once put the reader in possession of his conception of the theological aspect of the times : Oxford was full of divines. The seventeenth century is the bright as well as dark epoch of the Church of England, during Ine existence between the Reformation and the present times; blight with the revival of eccle- siastical learning and of Catholic doctrines, but dark with the hostile errors and passions which the Church seemed more able to convict by argument, than to mitigate or remove by her influence. There was a want of adapta- tion in her—not to the times, which is cowardice ; but to the wants of the tunes, which is wisdom and charity. This is apparent enough in the cumbrous and unpopular style of the orthodox sermons, strangely contrasting as it does with the easy and amusing shallowness of many modern discourses. Certainly judging from their remains, it would seem that the orthodox clergy were not cal culated to cope with a popular movement, nor tc influence the middle classes amongst whom it prevailed. They cared too much for their matter and too little fcr their auditors ; and being somewhat dry and hard in their teaching, they played into the hands of the more popular Puritan or Independent. Analyze a seventeenth century sermon, and you are delighted with its ingenuity, instructed by its accuracy, and informed by its abundance or matter; but listen to it, and you are asleep in two minutes. E contr., listen to many popular preachers, and you will neither grow weary nor asleep ; but analyze what they have said, and nothing is left. All is liquid. You may put in your test, but you precipitate nothing. This account, we think, is just in the main. Certainly a sermon of the seventeenth century is very dull ; certainly most modern sermons are very shallow. But we consider Mr. Heygate's reproof of the divines of the reign of Charles to be far too mild. Ile seems to think that it was inconvenient indeed that their sermons should be unintelligible to the million, but at the same time that it was rather an honour than a disgrace to the preacher himself. It is certainly the first merit of a preacher to understand his subject ; but has Mr. Heygate measured the arrogance, the unchristian want of sympathy with his audience which must exist in that preacher who can continue Sunday after Sunday to deliver sermons which he knows or may easily know to be beyond their comprehension ? If this was the ordinary character of the sermons of the Church of England at that time, our sentence must be that the Church had forgotten her func tions, and deserved her fate. The preacher might be scientifically accurate, but he was not " doing the work of an Evangelist," and the sentence of the poet upon him would deserve to be affirmed : that scarce themselves know how to hold A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the least That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs 1 The hungry sheep look up and are nut fed, But swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw, ltot inwardly and foul contagion spread: Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace and nothing said : But that two•handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. It is not only true that the good sermons of that age were above the comprehension of the people ; these good sermons were the rare exception. The country at large was miserably ill-provided with clergy. From the first the English Re formation had been infected with secularity. The last years of Elizabeth's reign had fostered this spirit, and James did not mend the matter. Baxter's account of the state of things in Shrop- shire when he was a boy will give us a England under the most learned ministry ever had :—" In High Ercall, there " readers in the course of six years; " ignorant, and two of them immoral " Eaton-Constantine there was " eighty years of age, Sir William " never preached; yet he had " twenty miles apart from each " sight failing, he repeated the prayers " book ; but to read the lessons he , " common labourer one year, a tailor " and, at last, his own son, the " player and gamester in all the count " and supplied one of his places. " miles round were nearly a dozen more "of the same description; poor " readers, and most of them of dissoli The same authority, not by any means able to Cromwell, will give us a different of the effects of the rebellion upon we derive from Isaac Walton. These words :—" I do not believe that ever " so able and faithful a ministry f " nation as it hath this day, and I " nations on earth, if any, have the " I am the change is so great within " years that it is one of the greatest " ever I had in the world to behold " congregations are now plainly and " taught that lived then in great obscurit " many able faithful men are there " county in comparison of what were " graciously hath God prospered " many that were little children in " of the late troubles, so that they " the most of their seniors ! How , " would I have gone twenty years ago " have heard one of those ancient " divines whose congregations are " thin and their parts esteemed mean " of the notable improvement of their We believe that no man of that free from party-spirit as Richard certainly no man more eminently himselfthe merits of both religious schools, ing the learn►ng of Saunderson togetl popular eloquence of Bunyan. " more satisfied with Mr. Heygate's explanation the decay of religion after the Restore with his conception of the Church undr first Stuarts. He makes Hammond I seem to foresee a terrible falling away zeal when this war is over, end how it may which is good and rightly applied is the li but misdirected zeal depraves and exhausts the door for unbelief. There are some Court who are weary of the very name think nothing worth contending for but woi prosperity. Rely upon it there will be a re excitement as from an overbent bow, and there is no right and no wrong, no truth hood—in a word, indifference and unbelief place of a zeal not according to knowledge. This, no doubt, is the ordinary matter ; yet it seems to require a explanation and qualification before accepted. The metaphor of the o' implies that the relaxation ensued excessive tension had been ; in other the same persons who had begun zeal ended in scepticism. This may been true in some cases ; some Antinomians have become infidels. But it would - prove that the zeal of the Puritan whole declined after the Restoration. bitter repugnance to all religious zeal in those who had never experienced in the Court and amongst the Ca , Ilobbism gained ground, and mi relaxed. Nor was it by any deca in the conquered party that the Puritanism gradually grew obsoi, country, but simply through the silencing ministers for a period of thirty years. not invariably true that persecution object. The Reformation was crushed in Spain and Italy, and in the same • Puritan spirit was, if not destroyed ? sleep in England by the silence ford upon the eloquence which had been • it awake. We have been compelled to defenc., against the uncompromising partizans Ileygate. To him the state of Puritanism superseded appears, as Walton, a golden age of tranquil contemplation, a peaceful time, when re us a sampl e o f ministry it h as there w ere four IFS ; a ll of then moral men. At a a r ea d er of Lmit° withoutgers, who ad two livingtch oth er. Hi s prayers 3 he employed a tailor another; the best t 8 ag e . mntry, got ord ers R. Within a few m more ministers poor ignorant lissolute lives." ty means favour- , different notion Non religion than These arc his !ver England had 7 since it was a d I fear that few the like. Sure thin these twelve greatest joys that old it. How many 7 and frequently t obscurity ! How there now in a were then ! How ed the studies of in the beginning they now cloud low many miles rs ago and less to ncient reverend are now grown mean by reason their juniors!" that age was so and Baxter, and tly combined in s schools, possess- ogether with the I. We are not s explanation of Restoration than th under the two and say : may from re'igious may. Zeal for that he life of religion; tausts it, and opens me now about the ime of religion, and it worldly ease and a recoil from this , and men will ssy ruth and no false- belief will take the .dge. ry view of the a great deal of )efore it can be se overbent bow sued where the )they words, that ;un in excessive ay possibly have kntinomians may 'mild be hard to r itan party as a s t o ration. The s zeal sprang up :need it. It was Cavaliers that I morality was r decay of zeal he principles of obsolete in the silencing of their )7 • ears For it is ution fails of its crushed by force same manner the eyed, yet put to forcibly imposed cen use d to keep find Puritanism tizanship of Mr. h w hic [ uil and learn ed w hen the uncor - a ir' s t t h o in o gs ld Isaac ;;