THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SAMUEL WESLEY. CHAPTER I. TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO-1640-1665. SAMUEL WESLEY was born a little more than two hundred years ago; and a brief review of the state of the nation and of the Church at that period will be useful in illustrating some parts of his history. From March 1629 to April 1640, the houses of legislature had not assembled; never in English history had there been an intervai of eleven years between one parliament and another. Charles I. had systematically attempted to make himself a despot, and to reduce the parliament to a nullity. To make bad things worse, Archbishop Laud, in the year 1640, convened Convocation, which ordered that every clergyman should instruct his parishioners once a quarter, in the divine right. of kings, and the damnable sin of resistance to authority. By the divine right of kings was meant, that the Supreme Being regarded hereditary monarchy, as opposed to other forms of government, with peculiar favour; that the rule of succession, in order of primogeniture, was a divine institution anterior to the Christian, and even to the Mosaic dispensation; that no human power, not even that of the whole legislature, could deprive the legitimate prince of his rights; and that the laws by which, in England and in A other countries, the prerogative was limited, were to be regarded merely as concessions, which the sovereign had freely made, and which he might at his pleasure resume. By the same ecclesiastical parliament, all clergymen and all graduates in the universities were required to take an oath, that everything necessary for salvation was contained in the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England, as distinguished from Presbyterianism and Papistry; and they were also required to swear that they would not consent to any alteration of the government of the Church, by archbishops, bishops, priests, and deacons. Those refusing to take such oaths were threatened with heavy penalties. This assumption of ecclesiastical power, on the part of Convocation, was most offensively absurd. The nation for years had been divided both in politics and religion; and it was not to be expected that such decrees could be issued without provoking resistance and creating trouble. Hence, in the same year, and in the year following, we find a crowd of events which exerted a most powerful influence on the subsequent history of the nation. The House of Commons, which, after an interval of eleven years, was again brought together, appointed a grand committee of the whole house to inquire into the scandalous immoralities of the clergy. Above two thousand cases were presented, and the work of cleansing the Augean stable became so heavy, that the grand committee had to divide itself into four or five sub-committees, called White's, Corbett's, Harlow's, and Dearing's committees, after the chairman of each. An act also was passed by the House of Commons, that the clergy should not be magistrates, neither should officiate as judges in civil courts. Lord Strafford-eloquent and bold, but imperious and cruel, Charles's most trusted counsellor, and one whose object it had been to make his royal master as absolute a monarch as any in Europe-was arrested, tried, and beheaded. The Star Chamber and the High Commission courts, the former a political, the latter a religious inquisition, were abolished. Thirteen bishops were impeached by the Lower House of Parliament, Archbishop Laud being one of them. The London apprentices began their riots. Two hundred thousand Protestant men, women, and children, were massacred in Ireland, and thousands more had to flee to England, naked and famished, to obtain subsistence. The papistical butchers, not satisfied with this, proceeded to threaten that, when they had wreaked their vengeance on the handful left in Ireland, they would come to England, and inflict upon the Protestants there the same barbarities. It was impossible for such events to happen without public feeling being excited to the highest pitch. The parliament was aroused; the country rose to arms; and the civil wars commenced. The Commons passed a resolution that they would never consent to any toleration of the popish religion, either in Ireland or any other part of his majesty's dominions; and another bill was passed excluding bishops from the House of Lords. From this date, the Church of England, if not entirely demolished, may be regarded as a ruin. In 1642, a committee was appointed by the House of Commons to inquire "what malignant clergymen had benefices in and about London, which benefices, being sequestered, might be supplied by others, who should receive their profits;" and in the year following, the "Scandalous Committee" of 1640, and the "Plundering Committee" of 1642, (as the royalists called them,) were empowered to act in concert; and, by their united efforts, the Church was wellnigh cleared both of the clergymen who were immoral, and of those whose opinions did not harmonise with the opinions generally entertained by parliament. Many left their cures, and took sanctuary in the king's armies; others were put under confinement in Lambeth, Winchester, and Ely; and about twenty were imprisoned beneath deck in ships on the river Thames, no friend being allowed to come near them. Several pious and worthy bishops and other clergymen, who desired to live peaceably without joining either side, had their estates and livings sequestered, and their houses and goods plundered, and were themselves reduced to live upon the fifths, a small pension from parliament. Among these may be mentioned, Archbishop Usher, Bishops Morton and Hall, and the no less renowned Jeremy Taylor, who, driven from his living at Uppingham, retired into Wales, and, while supporting himself and his family by teaching a school, there composed some of the greatest of his immortal works. For the space of about two years, the country might be said to be without any established form of worship. The clergy were left to read the liturgy, or not to read it, as they pleased, and to use equal discretion as to wearing the canonical habits, or the Geneva cloak. The ecclesiastical polity of the realm was in total confusion. Episcopacy was the form of government prescribed by the old law of the land, which was not repealed; but the form of government prescribed by parliamentary ordinance was presbyterian; and yet, neither the old law, nor the parliamentary ordinance, was practically in force. The Church actually established may be described as an irregular body, made up of a few presbyteries, and of many independent congregations, all held down and held together by the authority of government. Cathedral worship was almost everywhere abolished, and many of the sacred edifices themselves defaced and injured. By the parliamentary ordinance of 1643, clergymen, both bad and good, were ejected from their benefices by thousands; altars and stone tables in churches were destroyed; candlesticks, tapers, and basins standing upon communion tables were unsparingly removed; and all crosses, crucifixes, images, and superstitious pictures and paintings demolished. Churches and sepulchres, fine works of art and curious remains of antiquity, met with the same ruthless treatment. In Chichester Cathedral, the rabble, meeting with the portrait of King Edward VI., picked out its eyes, because Edward had established the Book of Common Prayer. In Canterbury Cathedral, where they found the arras-hangings, representing the history of Christ, they swore they would stab the picture of our Saviour, and rip up its bowels, which they did accordingly; while at the south gate, they discharged forty muskets at a carved figure of Christ, and rejoiced exceedingly when they hit it on the head or face. At Lichfield, they stabled their horses in the body of the church, polluted the orchestra, baptized a calf at the baptismal font, and hunted a cat with hounds every day throughout the windings of the sacred edifice. While such proceedings were taking place in cathedrals and churches, parliament was passing sharp laws against betting, and enacting that adultery should be punished with death. Public amusements, from masques in the mansions of the great, down to wrestling and grinning matches on village greens, were vigorously attacked. All the May-poles in England were ordered to be hewn down. Play-houses were to be dismantled, the spectators fined, and the actors whipped at the cart's tail. Magistrates dispersed festive meetings, and put fiddlers in the stocks. The zeal of the soldiers was still more formidable, for in every village where they happened to appear, there was an end of dancing, bell-ringing, and hockey. |