Fox long wandered from place to place, teaching this strange theology, shaking like an aspen leaf in his paroxysms of fanatical excitement, forcing his way into churches which he nicknamed steeple-houses, interrupting prayers and sermons with clamour and scurrility, and pestering rectors and justices with epistles much resembling burlesques of those sublime odes in which the Hebrew prophets foretold the calamities of Babylon and Tyre. He soon acquired great notoriety by these religious feats. His strange face, his nasal chant, his immovable hat, and his leather breeches, were known all over the country. He was repeatedly imprisoned and set in the stocks, sometimes justly, for disturbing the public worship of congregations; sometimes unjustly, for merely talking nonsense. He soon gathered round him a body of disciples, some of whom went beyond himself in absurdity. He also made some converts, as Barclay and Penn, to whom he was immeasurably inferior in everything, except the energy of his convictions. By these converts his rude doctrines were polished into a form somewhat less shocking to good sense and good taste. His gibberish was translated into English; and his system so much improved that he himself might have been excused if he had hardly known it. To the last his disciples professed profound reverence for him; and his crazy epistles were received and read in Quaker meetings all over the country. This founder of the Quaker sect died in 1690.*

As already intimated in a previous chapter, Samuel Wesley, like Macaulay, had no great liking for the Quakers. The following article, taken from the Athenian Oracle, vol. i. p. 331, in which the Quakers and Papists are compared, will tend to show his opinions concerning a sect which were much more numerous about two hundred years ago than they are at present, and whose views and vagaries then were much more wild than happily they

are now:

"Both Quakers and Papists are so bad that they can hardly be called Christian. In many things they are near akin. The Quakers, ever since their rise, have been looked upon as the Jesuit by-blows. The Quakers deny the plenary satisfaction of Christ, and rest on their own merits; so do the Papists. They rail at our ministers, and deny their legal call or ordination; so do the Papists. They pretend to a greater strictness and singuMacaulay.

larity of life than other people; so do several orders among the Papists. Then, for fanaticism and enthusiasm, they are most admirably matched. But, to consider them asunder-The Papist holds more than he ought to do, and therefore all the articles of the Christian faith: but the Quaker much less, for the Quakers all deny the Christian sacraments, and we wonder how they have a face to pretend to what they never had, Christianity, when they were never christened. They are indeed a compendium of almost all sorts of heresies: for they not only deny the merits of Christ, with the Papists, but even His satisfaction and divinity, being at best no better than mere Arians. Nay, there have been some of them who, as far as we can understand them, deny our Saviour's manhood, and turn angels, spirits, heaven, and hell into mean and jejune allegories. All of them, to a man, whom we ever met with, deny the Scriptures to be the Word of God, and most of them deny any resurrection of the body. For these reasons, we think, as a bad Christian is better than none, so a Papist is better than a Quaker."*

This may seem a caricatured description of the Quakers' religion, but it must be borne in mind that in 1690 that religion was not the systematised and inoffensive thing that it is in 1865.

Of all the members of the Low-Church party, in the reign of William and Mary, Tillotson stood the highest in general estimation. He was the son of a clothier, and was born at Sowerby Bridge, in Yorkshire, in 1630. His first sermon was preached at the morning exercise in Cripplegate, in 1661. Thirty years afterwards he was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury, in the Church of St Mary le Bow. The congregation was the most splendid that had been seen in any place of worship since William and Mary's coronation. The crowds that lined the streets greeted the new primate with loud applauses; but the applauses of his friends could not drown the roar of execration which the Jacobites and High-Church party set up against him. According to them, he was a thief, who had entered not by the door, but had climbed

* In the fourth volume of the Athenian Oracle Wesley vindicates his charges against the Quakers by quotations from their writings, and sums up the matter thus:- " Quakerism is a compendium of all heresies, some of which we shall name-Pharisees, Sadducees, Ebionites, Gnostics, Eucratites, Marcionites, Cainites, Manichees, Jacobites, Acephalae, Tritheites, Adamites, Helcecaites, Marcocites, Colorbalites, Sabellians, Samosatenians, Macedonians, Arians, Donatists, Priscillians-cum multis aliis," (p. 366.)

over the fences. He was an Arian, a Socinian, a Deist, an Atheist. He had never been christened, for his parents were Anabaptists. He had lost their religion when a boy, and he had never found another. In ribald lampoons he was nicknamed "Undipped John." The parish register of his baptism was produced in vain. This storm of obloquy, which he had to face for the first time at more than sixty years of age, was too much for him. His spirits declined, his health gave way, and in 1695 he died, and Samuel Wesley, his sincere and warm admirer, wrote and published his elegy.

Tillotson was sincere, frank, and humble; of kind and tender affection, bountiful in his charities, and forgiving of injuries. After his death, there was found a bundle of bitter libels which had been published against him, on which he had written with his own hand, "I forgive the authors of these books, and I pray God that He also may forgive them." His public principles were philanthropic, tolerant, and liberal. William and Mary reposed an entire confidence in his prudence, moderation, and integrity. In some points he was, perhaps, too compliant, and was led into some inconsistencies; but the times were difficult, and his intentions were always good. While he was in a private station of life, he always laid aside two-tenths of his income for charitable uses; and when he died, his debts could not have been paid if the king had not remitted his first fruits. As a preacher, he was thought, by his contemporaries, to have surpassed all rivals, living or dead. Posterity has reversed this judgment. Yet Tillotson still keeps his place as a legitimate English classic. His highest flights were indeed far below those of Taylor, of Barrow, and of South; but his oratory was more correct and equable than theirs. No quaint conceits, no pedantic quotations from Talmudists and Scoliasts, no mean images, buffoon stories, or scurrilous invectives, ever marred the effect of his grave and temperate discourses. His style is not brilliant, but it is pure and transparently clear. is always serious, and always good. His sermons were published in three volumes folio. Addison considered them as a standard of the purity of the English language; and Dryden acknowledged that, if he had any talent for English prose, it was derived from frequent perusal of Tillotson's writings.

He

In 1694, on December 28, Queen Mary died, and Samuel Wesley composed and published a poem eulogising her character.

Being seized with smallpox, Mary gave orders that every lady of the bed-chamber, every maid of honour, nay, every menial servant, who had not had the smallpox, should instantly leave the house. She locked herself up during a short time in her closet, burned some papers, and arranged others, and then calmly awaited her decease. William remained night and day by her bedside; and a few moments before she expired he was removed, almost insensible, from the sick-chamber. The public sorrow at her death was great and general. When the Commons next met they sat for a time in profound silence. The number of sad faces in the street struck every observer. On the Sunday which followed her death, her virtues were celebrated in almost every parish church of the capital, and in almost every great meetinghouse of the Nonconformists. The funeral was the saddest and most august that Westminster had ever seen. The two Houses, with their maces, followed the hearse; the Lords, robed in scarlet and ermine; the Commons in long black mantles. No preceding sovereign had ever been attended to the grave by a parliament; for, till then, the parliament had always expired with the sovereign. The whole magistracy of the city swelled the procession. The banners of England and France, Scotland, and Ireland, were carried by great nobles before the corpse. The pall was borne by the chiefs of the illustrious houses of Howard, Seymour, Grey, and Stanley. On the gorgeous coffin of purple and gold were laid the crown and sceptre of the realm. The day was well suited to such a ceremony. The sky was dark and troubled. The nave, choir, and transept of the abbey were in a blaze with with innumerable wax-lights. The body was deposited under a sumptuous canopy in the centre of the church, while the primate preached; and throughout the whole ceremony the distant booming of cannon was heard every minute from the batteries of the Tower.*

As long as Queen Mary lived, William left the management of the affairs of the English Church wholly in her hands, and her chief confidant and counsellor was Archbishop Tillotson.

Whatever was Mary's character and conduct as a daughter and a sister, she was certainly the most devoted and exemplary of royal wives. Though, in accordance with the atrocious practice of sovereigns, her husband kept a mistress in the palace, yet

* Macaulay.

she had the good sense to submit to his commanding intellect. John Wesley says, she "was in her person tall and well-proportioned, with an oval visage, lively eyes, agreeable features, a mild aspect, and an air of dignity. Her apprehension was clear, her memory tenacious, and her judgment solid. She was a zealous Protestant, scrupulously exact in all the duties of dévotion, of an even temper, and of a calm and mild conversation." She was excellently qualified to be the head of the English court. She was English by birth, and English also in her tastes and feelings. Her face was handsome, her port majestic, her temper sweet and lively, her manners affable and graceful. Her understanding, though very imperfectly cultivated, was quick. Feminine wit sparkled in her conversation; and her letters were so well expressed that they deserved to be well spelt. She took much pleasure in the lighter kinds of literature, and did something towards bringing books into fashion among ladies of quality. The stainless purity of her private life, and the strict attention which she paid to her religious duties, were the more respectable, because she was singularly free from censoriousness, and discouraged scandal as much as vice. Her charities were munificent and judicious, and though she made no ostentatious display of them, it was known that she retrenched from her own state in order to relieve Protestants whom persecution had driven from France and Ireland, and who were starving in the garrets of London.*

The reign of William, her husband, extended to the year 1702. During the thirteen years that William wore the crown, the Bank of England was founded; the East India Company was reorganised; and the plantations or settlements of America and the West Indies so steadily increased, that, before his death, they employed not less than five hundred sail of ships. Sir Godfrey Kneller and Sir Peter Lely were the chief portrait-painters of the day; Purcell was the chief musician; and Sir Isaac Newton was shedding a glory over his age and country by his sublime scientific discoveries. The higher kinds of literature were at a discount for want of court patronage. Dryden, fallen on what to him were evil days and evil tongues, and forced in his old age to write for bread, with less rest for his wearied head and hand than they had ever had before, now produced some of his most laborious and also some of his happiest works; and Lee, the dramatic poet, dis

• Macaulay.