duty imposed upon them on oath became too universal to be regarded as a fault at all. When, in 1761, a churchwarden of one of the London parishes published a notice that his oath required him to present, after due admonition, such persons as would not attend public service, and that as an honest man he should feel bound to act in accordance with his oath, his action was looked upon as little more than an amusing eccentricity. There was plenty of authority even in very high places for the demoralising notion that oaths on such and similar cases were practically nothing but empty words. Baron Price, for example, had just been giving a charge to a grand jury, in which he bade them in conformity with their oath present all such as impugned the Church's doctrine of the Trinity. But being informed that Whiston was in court, he told him that what he had said was but a form; he was reading Whiston's works, and was no judge of heresy.2 A government cannot be too careful in removing such official oaths as impose duties which have become inexpedient, impracticable, or obsolete.

Before leaving the subject of discipline, a few remarks may be made upon Church opinion in the last century as to the pastoral duty of receiving, in some cases, confessions and pronouncing absolution. It was not, however, a question which attracted much attention during any part of the period. That some of the Nonjurors held views on this point more accordant with the practice of the Roman than of our own Church, is well known. The conduct of Collier and his friends was especially reprobated when, in 1696, they attended on the scaffold the convicted Jacobites, Sir J. Friend and Sir W. Perkins, and pronounced, with laying on of hands, the most solemn form of absolution. A declaration in reproof of it was issued by the archbishops and ten of the bishops.3 The elder Dodwell's sentiments were quite those of Collier. He wrote one or two treatises on confession and absolution, and is said to have been personally much consulted as a skilful casuist.4 Robert Nelson was a man far more disposed than were many of his Nonjuring friends to keep 1 J. P. Malcolm's Manners of London, i. 339.

2 Whiston's Memoirs, 1749, 226.

Lathbury's History of the Nonjurors, 168.

4

Brokesby's Life of Dodwell, 73, 520.

strictly within the acknowledged constitution of the English Church; but he was quite inclined to advise fuller use than many would think desirable of the recommendation in the exhortation to the Communion. One of his many schemes was to have theological colleges for candidates for holy orders. It should be part of their instruction, he said, 'how to receive clinical confessions,' and lectures should be given, in which 'particular cases of conscience might be clearly stated, and such general rules laid down as might be able to assist them in giving satisfaction to all those that repair to them.'1 Casuistry has become, in our time, an altogether ill-famed word associated with priestly pretensions and a certain tampering with truth. In the eighteenth century, although not much studied, there appears to have been a less suspicious recognition of it as a science of great importance to all who desire to study or instruct the conscience, and to be sagacious ductores dubitantium. Sanderson, in a somewhat earlier age, had owed no little of his repute to his skill in this department of Morals and Pastoral Theology. In the period now before us, Fleetwood is spoken of as one who was 'much consulted in wounds of conscience,' because of the fine vein of casuistry' shown in the special talent he possessed of solving difficulties which 'gave disturbance to weak and honest minds.' And of Berriman, who died in 1749, it was observed that in solving doubts and directing consciences, he showed his skill in casuistry, notwithstanding the too general neglect in our congregations to afford opportunities of exercising it.'3 The word is used with a no less perfect freedom from any invidious signification in a treatise upon 'The Qualifications and Duties of a Minister of the Gospel,' published in 1795 by John Napleton, Canon of Hereford and Chaplain to the bishop of that diocese. In general, it may be said of the period under review that in the total absence of any systematic effort to develop anything like a confessional in the English Church, and of any popular disquietude consequent therefrom, there was no disposition either to doubt the ex

3

1 R. Nelson's Life of Bull, 16-18, and his Letters in Nichol's Lit. Anee. iv. 212. 2 Fleetwood's Works, Pref. viii-ix.

4

a H. B. Wilson's Hist. of Merchant Taylors, ii. 1075.

J. Napleton's Advice to a Student on the Qualif. &c. 18.

pedience of the advice given in the exhortation of the Communion Service, or to think slightingly of the special qualifications which make a minister of God's word discreet in counselling those who resort to him in such cases. Few more sensible words could be found as to the teaching of the English Church on this subject, than some which occur in Tillotson's 159th sermon. Nor can it be doubted, that in this, as in a multitude of other matters, he both led and represented the opinion of his own and the subsequent age.

There remains one important subject connected with religious worship. It has been remarked by Mr. Jeaffreson, that, in spite of local demonstrations in rural parishes, the English Sunday of the eighteenth century was in most of its social characteristics closely identical with that of the Commonwealth period. The strongly marked division of opinion which had prevailed on this point during the reign of Elizabeth and Charles I. no longer existed. Formerly, Anglicans and Puritans had taken for the most part thoroughly opposite views, and the question had been controverted with much vehemence, and often with much bitterness. Happily for England, the Puritan view, in all its broader and more general features, had won peaceful possession of the ground. The harsher and more rigid observances with which many sectarians had overburdened the holy day, were kept up by some of the denominations, but could not be maintained in the National Church. In fact, their concession was the price of conquest. Anglican divines, and the great and influential body of laymen who were in accord with them, would never have acquiesced in prescriptions and prohibitions which were tenable, if tenable at all, only upon the assumption of a Sabbatarianism which they did not pretend to hold. But the Puritan Sunday, in all its principal characteristics, remained firmly established, and was as warmly supported by High Churchmen as by any who belonged to an opposite party. The writer already referred to has aptly observed that several of Robert Nelson's remarks upon the proper observance of Sunday would have been derided, eighty or a hundred years previously, as Puritanical cant by men Tillotson's Works, vii. 268-70.

VOL. II.

2 J. C. Jeaffreson, B. of the Clergy, ii. 139.

LL

whose legitimate successors most warmly applauded what he wrote.1 No one whose opinion had any authority, desired, after Charles II.'s time, to revive the Book of Sports,' or regretted the abolition of Sunday wakes. Amid all the laxity of the Restoration period-amid the partial triumph of Laudean ideas which marked the reign of Queen Anne-amid the indifference and sluggishness in religious matters which soon afterwards set in-reverence for the sanctity of the Lord's Day, and a fixed purpose that its general character of sedate quietness should not be broken into, grew, though it was but gradually, among almost all classes, into a tradition which was respected even by those who had very little care for other ordinances of religion.

Such, undoubtedly, was the predominant feeling of the eighteenth century; and it is difficult to overestimate its value in the support it gave to religion in times when such aid was more than ordinarily needed. Yet amid this general agreement there was a very considerable diversity of opinion. It was a point on which Churchmen were sometimes taunted for their want of unanimity. The strict Sabbatarianism which had taken root in Scotland, and which, even at the time of the American outbreak, was retained with almost undiminished force in parts of New England,2 was not very popular in this country. Most Dissenters-not excepting those who, like Doddridge, were on many points in close sympathy with English Churchmen-commonly spoke of Sunday as the Sabbath. Yet they did not, as a rule, hold the austere views of the stiffer Puritans. Nor could there be a much stronger or (as might be thought) a more obvious protest against that opinion, than one very unintentionally made by those among the Baptists who maintained the observance of the Saturday Sabbath. Still, not among Nonconformists only, but also in the National Church, there were many who were very strict Sabbatarians. The opinion, however, of the mass of the people was formed, in a manner

1 J. C. Jeaffreson, B. of the Clergy, ii. 140. Lord Mahon's Hist. of England, chap. 43.

It is Sabbath night, and yet I could not omit writing.'-Corresp. and Diary of Ph. Doddridge, iii. 57. Caleb Fleming, a Baptist of Unitarian views, wrote against the perpetual obligation of the Sabbath.-J. Hunt's Rel. Thought in Engl. iii. 249. • Whiston's Memoirs, ii. 471.

thoroughly characteristic of the English mind, by a sort of compromise between the two modes of regarding the day. They heard the Fourth Commandment read in Church, and learnt it in the Catechism, and drew no particular distinction between it and the rest of the Decalogue. They did not dispute the general identity of the Jewish and the Christian day of rest. This idea preponderated. But none the less it was made to fit in with different memories of a weekly festival of the Christian Church. Until some of the leaders in the Wesleyan and Evangelical movements gave a fresh impulse to decided Sabbatarian opinion, there was no section of English Churchmen among whom the day of rest was commonly called by its Jewish name.

The majority of Church writers-at all events for the first fifty or sixty years of the century-were distinctly non-Sabbatarians. Robert Nelson's words so exactly expressed the ordinary opinion of devout Churchmen on the subject that they may be quoted: 'Q. In what sense may the Lord's day be called the Sabbath? A. In that we rest on that day from the works of our ordinary callings, and dedicate it to the service of God, whose service is perfect freedom. But by Scripture, antiquity, and all ecclesiastical writers, it is constantly appropriated to Saturday, the day of the Jews' Sabbath, and but of late years used to signify the Lord's day. So that though the charge of Judaism, upon those that use it in a Christian sense, appears too severe, yet upon many respects it might be expedient but sparingly to distinguish the day of the Christian worship by the name of the Sabbath.'1 In the seventeenth century, Chillingworth, the Champion of Protestantism,' as he was often called, had been unable for some time to subscribe on two grounds-one being the damnatory sentences in the Athanasian Creed; the other, the position of the Fourth Commandment in the Communion Service. He was not sure whether the prayer that follows it did not stamp it as being, in the opinion of the English Church, a law of God, appertaining to Christians; and this he thought was false and unlawful. There was something of the same feeling with most leading Churchmen during the first half of the period

1 R. Nelson's Festivals and Fasts, "The Lord's Day.'

2 Chillingworth to Sheldon, quoted in Whiston's Hist. Mem. of S. Clarke, ed. 1748, 94.