of view, paltriness of aim, and general paralysis of effort began to characterize the religious life of the ministry; while languor, decay, and dissolution supervened over the congregations. Not that this was universal, or that there were no exemplary specimens remaining of orthodox Presbyterian ministers and Churches. A concrete illustration of the state of things will, perhaps, throw more light on the situation than any amount of general disquisition. We select the case of NEEDHAM, in Surrey, where the old Presbyterian meeting, which had been presided over for forty years (1662-1702) by the ejected divine JOHN FAIRFAX, found a worthy successor to him in the equally orthodox and Evangelical JOHN MEADOWS, who was the son of another of the ejected1 and who was ordained at Needham (or Barking) in 1702. After a long pastorate here of fifty-six years, Mr. Meadows died, in 1757, at the age of eighty. Two years before his death he received the afterwards famous Priestley as colleague and successor, on the recommendation of Dr. Ashworth, his tutor at Daventry, who knew Priestley's heterodox tendencies. This introduced a disturbing element which clouded the close of the good old Evangelical Presbyterian minister's life. We are told that,

"The congregation, by a majority, if not decidedly in favour of the orthodox views preached by their old pastors, Fairfax and Meadows, were at least against any open controverting of them. They were about 100

1 THE SUFFOLK BARTHOLOMEANS. A Memoir of the Ministerial and Domestic History of John Meadows, A.M. (formerly Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, ejected in 1662 from the Rectory of Ousden in Suffolk), by the late Edgar Taylor, F.S.A., one of his descendants. London: Pickering, 1840 (4 Unitarian volume). In Norwich the families of Taylor, Martineau, Meadows, and others were intermarried, as was not uncustomary elsewhere, with the old Presbyterian households in different centres.

2 How strongly Evangelical this Presbyterian minister, Mr. Meadows, continued, may be seen from a long paper of nine paragraphs which he left as his dying testimony. The first runs thus :-"I die in faith as I have lived, believing the Divine authority of the Old and New Testaments, and in the faith of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in which I have been baptized myself and have baptized others, and believing a state of rewards, retribution, and punishment at the end of this life." And he closes thus after the nine paragraphs: "Lastly, O Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit. Lord Jesus, receive my spirit when it shall depart from its body. Amen."

Mr. Meadows retained also high and stiff Presbyterian views of ordination, and would not join with the other Dissenting brethren in their loose way of doing it in his neighbourhood. (Memoir of Meadows, ut supra, pp. 108-110.) Priestley in his Memoirs speaks of the ministers round about Needham being Arian.

1

in number and had received assistance both from the Presbyterian and Independent London Funds; but they abandoned the latter on Priestley's recommendation, though he allows many of them were opposed to his doctrinal views, as was also the old minister. Priestley left in 1758 (the year after Mr. Meadows' death), after being there only three years. Mr. Meadows having been a man of independent fortune, the congregation could ill discharge the burden of a successor's support; and after lingering for a while in orthodox hands, the meeting-place, which had been built in 1715, was closed, and the Presbyterian congregation finally ceased in 1775."2

The congregation at Needham, like many other struggling "causes," had been in the habit of taking aid from both the Presbyterian and Independent Funds. Priestley, however, that he might not be hampered by any external interference with his "opinions," broke off connection with both Funds; and as his hearers became fewer, he began to eke out his living by secular teaching and lecturing. With such speculative

It will be remembered that the Presbyterians had a Fund in London in 1691, and that the Congregationalists, after the rupture with them in 1694, created a separate Fund of their own in 1695, to aid the poorer ministers and to help in training students for the ministry. After a time both of these Fund-Boards cooperated in many ways with each other, till the serious doctrinal divergencies arose, as in the Academy at Carmarthen in 1757, when the Congregational Board withdrew and established a Welsh Academy of their own. Both the Funds were administered on very broad Dissenting grounds; Independent ministers receiving from the Presbyterian Board, and vice versa, for many years; as may be gathered from the following letter of complaint, dated so far on as the 4th of February, 1771, from the Managers of the PRESBYTERIAN Fund" to "the Rev. and worthy Gentlemen, Managers of the CONGREGATIONAL Fund."

"GENTLEMEN,-The Managers of the Presbyterian Fund for poor Dissenting Ministers have received a letter addressed to them and signed by several ministers of respectable character in Lancashire and Cheshire, setting forth, that while those of the Independent Denomination in those counties have annual allowances from both Funds, such as are of the Presbyterian Denomination are debarred from sharing any advantages from yours. By which means, while they suffer for principle and conscience, their congregations labour under great disadvantages. The above affair calls for our serious attention. But we cannot suffer ourselves to proceed hastily in it, or without first laying it before our brethren of the Congregational Board; and desiring a friendly conference with them upon the subject of this complaint."

2 Memoir of Meadows, pp. 106, 107. It was re-opened, years afterwards, in 1793, by a new congregation, on Independent principles; and, after being enlarged, it was rebuilt, in 1837, by the Independents with the aid of public subscription.

3 Dr. Joseph Priestley, who was to exercise such sinister influence on the name Presbyterian, was by birth and education an Independent. Born in 1733, at the Yorkshire village of Birstal Fielding, where his father was a woollen manufacturer, and taught the Assembly's Shorter Catechism by his mother, he gave early token of his fluctuating views by becoming an avowed and pugnacious Arminian while yet a youth; and at Daventry Academy, under Dr. Doddridge's successors, he threw aside the doctrines of the Trinity and the Atonement.

proclivities as his, Priestley naturally preferred the more liberal administrative ways of the Presbyterian meeting-houses; and, at the end of three years, in 1758, he was thankful to accept an invitation from the Presbyterian "meeting" at Nantwich, small as it was, and composed, like other of these old English Presbyterian interests even then, chiefly of travelling Scotchmen, as he tells us in his "Memoirs." Then, after three more years, he accepted the post of classical tutor in the recently-founded Academy at Warrington. The two most menacing features for Lancashire Presbyterianism at that time were, the quick change in temper and morals, as well as in politics, that seized upon Manchester and other Puritan districts when the drunken and dissolute cry of "Church and King" became the fashion; and the rapid deterioration that went on through the prevalence of bitter and barren theological controversies consequent on the establishment of the Academy at Warrington in 1759, which increasingly became a hotbed of heterodox speculation and activity. Dr. John Taylor of Norwich was the first professor, both in divinity and classics; and on his death, in 1761, he was succeeded by his classical assistant, who had also been Doddridge's pupil and assistant, John Aikin, D.D. (father of John Aikin, M.D., and Miss Aikin, who became Mrs. Barbauld, and grandfather of Miss Lucy Aikin, all three so eminent in literature); while Gilbert Wakefield, Priestley, Dr. Enfield, and others who had been under Doddridge and Dr. Caleb Ashworth, were tutors, either on the lay or divinity side of the Institution. Between 1759 and 1786, when it was dissolved, 393 pupils had been enrolled; some of them became curiously eminent afterwards, like Ralph Eddowes of Chester, the chief Unitarian in America of his day; Dr. Estlin of Bristol, one of the early Universalists; Malthus, the political-economy enthusiast; Forster, the naturalist, who accompanied Captain Cook; Lord Ennismore; and George, last Lord Willoughby of Parham, with representatives of Presbytero-Unitarian names like Rigby, Martineau, and Taylor of Norwich; Heywood, Yates, Potter of Manchester, Roscoe of Liverpool, Gaskell of Wakefield, Shore of Sheffield, and Wedgewood of Etruria. When Priestley left

Warrington, in 1767, after a tutorship of six years, during which he had written and experimented much, so as to have been brought into friendship with Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Price, and had received the degree of LL.D. from Edinburgh, and entered the Royal Society, he removed to the leading Presbyterian pulpit, Leeds. There the famous Letter on the Logos, which had been kept by Dr. Lardner in his desk for twenty years, finally fixed and confirmed Priestley in Unitarianism.

II.

DECAY AND LAPSING OF PRESBYTERIAN AND OTHER

DISSENTING CHARGES.

WITH growing doctrinal laxity and spiritual indifferentism among Presbyterians, there came a corresponding stagnation and exhaustion both in numbers and resources. Outward decay attended the inward decline. It was not the mere lapse in doctrine, but the far more fatal symptom of spiritual declension accompanying it that wrought the mischief. Doctrinal faithlessness was partly the result of the prevailing spiritual deadness and partly the fruitful cause of it, the two things acting and reacting on each other with a malign fatality. Not that these evil symptoms were confined to the Presbyterians. They affected all denominations; but, for the reasons already given, they permanently and most seriously rested with blighting influence on Presbyterian interests. The very wealth and liberality of the earlier Presbyterians now operated to the disadvantage of many Churches they had founded. Heterodox congregations among the Independents died out; but the endowments among the Presbyterians kept many of them alive, and helped to perpetuate the sinister application of the Presbyterian name. While numerous Independent and Presbyterian congregations of a heterodox kind were becoming extinct,1 many Presbyterian charges of a like obnoxious kind were enabled to hold out, where the adherents by themselves could not have maintained a minister. Such endowed places and the Arianizing ministers were naturally drawn to one another; and thus many Arian and Socinian ministers, like Priestley and Belsham, who were brought up as Independents, became

1 A melancholy feeling creeps over the mind of the reader from time to time, as he turns the pages of Walter Wilson's four volumes of The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches and Meeting-houses in London, Westminster, and Southwark, at the constant recurrence of the word "Extinct," applied with painful and impartial frequency to Presbyterian and Independent places of worship alike, throughout the metropolis, during last century.