cannot be contemplated by any churchman without indignation and affright, and gratitude to a merciful Providence, which ordered things otherwise. What they were shall be given in Mr. Hallam's words:"The Bill of Comprehension, proposed to parliament, went no further than to leave a few scrupled ceremonies at discretion, and to admit presbyterian ministers into the church without pronouncing [!!] on the invalidity of their former ordination;" (as if the recognizing them as ministers were not pronouncing!) Is it then the case that we have a second time risked the Succession? Surely we have escaped, as if by fire; and the thought of this, while it is frightful, is consolatory, in our present uncertainties. This good act the lower house of 1689 has done for us; and, while doing it, and attempting other services, its members gave the alarm that the Government was aiming at the suspension of convocation, and the Government party denied it. the event before us.

We have

Moreover, with all their faults and mistakes, they certainly had an enlarged view of the duties of an ecclesiastical synod; and grasped the principles, and aimed at wielding the powers, of the church with a vigour that the court bishops could not comprehend. The aspect of latitudinarianism and infidelity was very threatening; and they felt these principles of evil were to be met, not by mere controversy, not by individuals relying on what is called the force of reason, nor again by mere civil authority, but by the moral power of the church, whether as a body, or in its authorities, by bishops or convocations; by that high influence, in fact, which broke the power of paganism, and baffled the schools of philosophy. But so far from exercising this, they found the very heads of the church in terms of friendship with its. enemies. Firmin, the unitarian, was the friend of Tillotson and Fowler; and the writers of his party are recommended by Burnet for their "gravity" in the management of controversy, their temper, and judgment. Sherlock seemed extravagating towards tritheism, Clarke towards arianism, and Hoadley towards a legion of heresies. Even where orthodoxy was preserved, the depth and fervour of the Laudian. era was being supplanted by a cold, dry, and minute theology. A few years after the date under review, the bishops of the province of Canterbury were all but unanimous in favour of openly recognizing lay baptism; and were only stopped from declaring themselves synodically, by the lower house, and, as bishops, by the opposition of Sharp, Archbishop of York. Such was the better side, but on the worse, the prospect was fearful. The rationalism which has appeared in Germany seems in great measure to have originated in England at the period under consideration. Hickes, in 1707, speaks of the pamphlets of the day

"against making of creeds, and creed-makers who impose upon men articles of faith. These men of large minds and free thoughts will not have them confined and tied up to forms and summaries of belief......If they durst, they would write against Scripture-making, as you may perceive by the table-talk, which the reputed author of the Rights, and some other Grecians, had of them, at a dinner, the 29th of November last......They began with Balaam and his ass, and, with scorn and scurrility enough, asserted the ass to be the fittest of the two to see an angel, and to have divine inspirations and revelations......Then, for the prophets, they did God and

them the honour to compare them to the Camisars, and prophecy to deliriums in fevers, and told a story of a physician who cured a patient of his prophetical deliriums and was refused his reward. They also said, it was a disease proper, it may be, to certain places and constitutions, as agues, and......observed, that drunkenness and prophecy was the same thing...... The passing over the Red Sea, they said, was not miraculous, but natural....... The pillar of fire, they said, was some sort of artificial preparation in the nature of a phosphorus......Elijah's sacrifice, they said, was by artificial fire......The marriage in Cana was a merry-making; and He, meaning our Lord, made the water wine with spirit of wine."

Such being the state of things, the plans of the lower house have, at least, the merit of energy and boldness. They appointed, in 1700, committees for examining certain attacks upon Christianity; for inquiring into the causes of the corruption of manners, and the means of reformation; for making inquiries into seminaries set up in opposition to the Universities; for the means of promoting religion in the plantations, and among seamen; for introducing our liturgy to the notice of the French and other protestants, and for considering the grievances of ecclesiastical cognizances. They desired to restrain the licentiousness of the press, and the profaneness and immorality of the stage; to reform the church discipline, to hinder clandestine marriages, to remove the inconveniences in the mode of recovering church rates, and the legal difficulties which lay on the clergy as to the administration of the Lord's Supper. In short, they undertook, as was their duty, all those matters which have ever since either been neglected or taken up by improper parties, whether the parliament, the public press, or private societies. With some account of their attempts to proceed against irreligious and unsound publications, I shall close this paper and the history of their career.

In 1700, they presented an address to the upper house, on the subject of Toland's "Christianity not Mysterious," praying for their lordship's judgment on certain extracts they made from it. The bishops, upon taking advice of counsel, returned answer, agreeably to a former decision in 1689, that since the famous Act of Submission they could not censure judicially any such books without a licence from the king, "which they had not yet received." It was conceived a judgment on opinions was of the nature of a canon, as indirectly making doctrinal statements, and that thus the articles of the church would be liable to continual alteration and variation by successive decisions or precedents; that, though Coke had decided that the convocation is a court, nevertheless to judge matters without the king's leave was interfering with his prerogative, which the Act of Henry VIII. especially guarded; and that, in the great council of Clarendon, 1164, it was resolved, among other things, that no servant or dependant of the king could be excommunicated without his leave; and that, in case of appeals, the king had the right of final decision. At the same time it was admitted, that each bishop, in his own court, might proceed against exceptionable publications.

The lower house was obliged to acquiesce in this determination, but before long appeared before the bishops with an attack upon Burnet's Exposition of the Thirty-nine Articles, which, divers members of the episcopal bench having sanctioned the publication, was, in fact,

an attack upon those to whom they were appealing. The bishops referred their complaint to a committee of themselves, who reported, that the lower house had no power judicially to censure any book k; that they ought not to have entered upon the examination of the work of one of the bishops without acquainting the upper house; that they ought to have been specific in their accusations, which, from their form, were a mere vague defamation; that the Bishop of Sarum's History of the Reformation had been approved by parliament, and, with his other works, had done great service to the English church, and deserved the thanks of their lordships' house; and that it did not rest with the convocation to pass an opinion on private expositions on the thirty-nine articles.

In the summer of 1710 a change of ministry took place, and parliament was dissolved soon after. This was the consequence of Sacheverell's affair; and, of course, the accession of the Tories to power was favourable to the wishes of the lower house of convocation. The description given, in an address of the new commons to her majesty, of the retiring ministry, is curious; and, though beside my present purpose, I cannot help quoting it." These ministers framed to themselves wild and unwarrantable schemes of balancing parties, and, under a false pretence of temper and moderation, did really encourage faction, by discountenancing and depressing persons zealously affeeted to your majesty and to the church, and by extending their favour and patronage to men of licentious and impious principles, such as shake the very foundation of all government and religion,' However, they were now dismissed from the queen's councils, and one of the first effects of it was the grant of a licence to convocation to frame canons for the exigencies of the church. Two bishops, Compton and Hooper, both defenders of the privileges of the lower house, were delegated, in succession, to supply the place of the archbishop in his absence, and Atterbury was chosen prolocutor. The subjects assigned by the queen for discussion were, the state of religion, with reference to infidelity, heresy, and profaneness; the reform of the proceedings of the courts in the matter of excommunication; the preparing forms for the visitation of prisoners and convicts, and for admitting converts from popery and dissent, and restoring the lapsed; the establishment of rural deans; the providing terriers of glebes, tithes, &c.; and the prevention of clandestine marriages; on all which subjects committees were appointed in this and subsequent years, and delivered in reports. One important measure was actually passed in this convocation. A correspondence commenced between the commons and the lower house on the subject of the want of churches in the metropolis, which ended in a vote of the commons of 350,000l. for the erection of fifty additional ones, according to a scheme drawn out by Atterbury and the lower house. If that house had done no other service to the cause of religion than this, it would deserve to be kindly remembered by posterity, in spite of the temper which it displayed towards the bishops. On the other hand, it would not be fair to impute it to the latter, that no great measure had hitherto been carried in behalf of the church. In their reply to the lower house, in 1701, on the subject of

censuring Toland's book, they observe, "that there had been several obstructions and stumbling blocks laid in the way" of their shewing their zeal; and we can readily understand how Queen Anne's Tory ministry might be more ready to co-operate with the heads of the church, than a monarch of foreign birth and prepossessions.

Passing over these subjects, we are here more especially concerned with the conduct of the lower house, in consequence of the first of the recommendations given by the queen to examine the state of religion. They first drew up a report, in which they attributed the growth of irreligion chiefly to the encouragement given in the former reign to men of latitudinarian principles; but, the upper house objecting to what seemed like personalities, especially in what had gone by, the matter dropped. Next, the lower house proceeded to censure Whiston, whose heretical opinions had made great talk at the time; and, upon this, the question of the judiciary power of convocation revived, which was stirred in the case of Toland's publication,

Whiston had been expelled the University of Cambridge for arian. ism, in October, 1710; and the lower house of convocation addressed the bishops, praying for their lordships' opinion how they might best proceed in relation to him. They received the request graciously, and referred it to the archbishop. Tenison, in consequence, addressed to them a circular, explanatory of the state of the case. He observed, that there were three ways in which a person could be proceeded against whose writings called for censure:-by means of convocation; by archbishop's court of audience, in which his suffragans were assessors with him; or, thirdly, by means of the bishop's court to whose diocese the accused party belonged, on report of convocation. He considered the first method to be attended by serious difficulties: first, because the convocation was a court of final resort, which would interfere with an act of Elizabeth, vesting all ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the crown; next, because there had been no such proceeding for the last one hundred years, during which time an act had passed abolishing the high commission and all like courts hereafter; thirdly, because, in the statute annulling the writ "de hæretico comburendo," in Charles the Second's time, all established courts, and therefore that of convocation, were made to give way to episcopal jurisdiction; lastly, because the upper house, in 1689, had been advised by counsel to leave such matters to other courts. He ended by recommending an address to her majesty, praying her to refer the matter to the judges. This was done, and the judges were divided in opinion. Eight were in favour of the jurisdiction of the convocation in such matters as by the laws of the realm were declared to be heresy, on the ground that an appeal to the crown from all ecclesiastical courts was implied in the royal supremacy, whether expressly provided for in particular statute or not; so that the convocation might exercise its ancient and constitutional powers without incurring a breach of the act of Elizabeth. The other four judges considered that such judgments lay within the ordinary episcopal jurisdiction, and concurred in the apprehensions Tenison had expressed in his letter; however, they allowed that heretical tenets and opinions might be examined and condemned

in convocation, without convening the authors or maintainers of them. Such a public judgment was accordingly passed in convocation upon Whiston's work, and all Christian people were warned against it; it being thought prudent, in spite of the queen's encouragement to them to proceed judicially, to abstain from further measures.

In 1714, another lamentable occasion occurred for the lower house to exert itself in maintenance of the orthodox faith. Dr. Samuel Clarke having published his "Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity," a work especially adapted to harass and confuse sensitive minds, they presented an address to the bishops, praying them to take the matter into consideration; to which they added, at the bishops' request, a list of objectionable passages in the work, arranged under distinct heads. The upper house were unwilling to move in the matter, and professed themselves satisfied with a so-called submission, which Dr. Clarke was prevailed on (chiefly, it is said, by Smalridge,) to offer, in which, without retracting any position he had published, he shut up his sentiments in an ambiguous form of words, and proposed to keep silence for the future. The most natural submission would have been a subscription of the articles before the convocation; but Bishop Burnet had at that time great influence in the upper house, and I have been told by a very learned person (though he did not refer to his authority), that such was Burnet's relative regard for the church and his Whig friends, that he wrote to dissuade Archdeacon Welchman from answering Clarke, on the ground of the embarrassment which such a procedure would occasion to protestant politics. This agrees with what we know of the conduct of the Government in the matter, before the publication of the offensive work; when Godolphin and others of the queen's ministers sent Clarke a message, importing, "that the affairs of the public were with difficulty then kept in the hands of those who were at all for liberty; that it was, therefore, an unseasonable time for the publication of a book which would make a great noise and disturbance; and that, therefore, they desired him to forbear till a fitter opportunity should offer itself." Four years after the introduction of his name into the convocation, he ventured on altering the Doxologies in the Psalm Books used for singing in St. James's parish, which brought upon him the animadversion of the Bishop of London.

In 1714, George the First succeeded to the throne, and the final suspension of the convocation soon followed. George began his reign with an address to the archbishops and bishops on the subject of the great differences" which had arisen "among some of the clergy of the realm, about their ways of expressing themselves in their sermons and writings concerning the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity," and of the "unusual liberties which had been taken by several of the said clergy in intermeddling with the affairs of state and government, and the constitution of the realm;" and, accordingly, forbad them preaching either heterodoxy or politics, except "in defence of the regal supremacy." The next year the convocation was opened with a license to debate, being the third assembly which had been so favoured. This license was the result of a more liberal and enlarged policy