Dr. Tillotson wrote the noble Lord, just before his execution, a letter condemning all resistance to power. This Calamy regards as a flagrant proof that the greatest and the best of men (his admiration of Tillotson, the originator of the Comprehension scheme, is often expressed,) have their weaknesses. A relation of Tillotson's refused to keep up a correspondence with him, because, in his after-advancement, he did not publicly recant, and disclaim this then unfashionable doctrine. A frank and public recantation, in Calamy's opinion, to prevent farther mischief, was a debt due to the world. Lord Russell's death was a heavy stroke upon the noble Bedford family-" a family," he adds, "remarkable for adhering to the true, civil, and religious interests of England, from the time of the Reformation:" he does not, of course, even allude to the civil interests of this noble family for thus adhering to the religious ones. "Though the loss of the eldest branch of this family," he continues, "in a way and manner so affecting, must be owned a very dark and melancholy providence; yet many have thought this Lord's father's matching with the Lady Ann, daughter of the famous Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, (which Earl was such a prodigy of wickedness in the reign of King James I.,) when he might have had his choice of any lady almost in the kingdom, might somewhat help to account for it!"

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"At the death of Charles, and his brother's accession, few tears," says Burnet, were shed, nor were there any shouts of joy for the present King." -"Never did I see," replies Calamy, "so universal a concern as was visible on all men's countenances at that time. I was present upon the spot, at the proclaiming of King James, at the upper end of Wood-street, Cheapside, which is one of the places where proclamation is usually made upon such occasions, and my heart ached within me at the acclamations made upon that occasion, which, as far as I could observe, were very general. And it is to me a good evidence," he sweepingly concludes, "that all the histories that fall into our hands are to be read with caution, to observe that Bishop Burnet positively affirms it was a heavy solemnity; a dead silence followed it through the streets. Whereas I, who was at that time actually present, can bear witness to the contrary. The Bishop, indeed, who was then abroad, might easily be misinformed; but methinks he should not have been so positive, in a matter of that nature, when he was at a distance.” Calamy was now fourteen.

James, on his accession, had given the most prompt and solemn assurance to the Council, that, though of a different religion, he would carefully preserve the Government in Church and State, as established by law. "This," observes Burnet, "gave great contentment, and the pulpits were full of it, and of thanksgivings for it. The common phrase was--we have now the word of a King, and a word never yet broken." Calamy confirms this, from an earwitness, a person of character and worth. "Sharp, afterwards Archbishop of York, was preaching at St. Lawrence Jewry, where he so far forget himself," says Calamy," as to use an expression to this purpose- As to our religion, we have the word of a King, which, with reverence be it spoken, is as sacred as my text." Sharp was one of the first to experience the royal displeasure, and discover the brittleness of the security.

Young Calamy's school-education was chiefly at Merchant Tailors', and with a private teacher in Suffolk. At eighteen, he was sent to Utrecht for academical instruction. It does not appear why he did not go to Cambridge, where his father and grandfather had been educated, and where an uncle had recently been a distinguished tutor at Catherine Hall, and a maternal relation was then Vice-provost of King's, and where subscription was not demanded on matriculation, as at Oxford. At Utrecht, one of his fellow-students was Lord Spencer, the son of the first Earl of Sunderland-a connexion which, in the reigns of Anne and George I. facilitated his occasional introduction with addresses to the Court. After spending two years in the close pursuit of his studies, and making the tour of the country, he returned in 1691 to England; and shortly after took up his residence at Oxford, not of course as an academical student-that, without subscription, was impracticable---but

for the advantage of reading in the Bodleian. He took with him letters of recommendation from Grævius, professor of history and eloquence at Utrecht, a well-known scholar, to seve.al leading persons at Oxford, by whom he was kindly received and liberally treated. The required permission was readily granted on the easy, but somewhat whimsical condition of taking one of Dr. Hyde's catalogues of the library at his own price, and paying somewhat to the under library-keeper. The dissenting minister at Oxford, at this time, was Dr. Joshua Oldfield, who was then in his prime. With this gentleman, Calamy naturally became acquainted, he had, indeed, met with him before, -and was very much with him. Oldfield had but a small congregation, and very little encouragement in all the pains he took. He had little conversation with the scholars, nor did he affect it: for which Calamy, who had already the interests of Dissent close to his heart, with more resolution, and firmer nerves to promote them, was inclined to blame him. "Had he been less shy," he says, " and more free in conversing with them, it would have been better." Of this he was the more convinced, when being persuaded to accompany him occasionally to the coffee-house, he entered freely into talk with such scholars as he there accidentally met, and they frankly confessed he had a great deal more in him than they had imagined. Calamy himself associated with the Oxford men with the utmost freedom, and was, on all occasions, treated by them with all imaginable civility. He listened to their sermons, attended their public lectures and exercises, and mixed on equal and easy terms with the young men-some of whom would occasionally banter him for consorting with such a despicable and unsocial sort of people as the Nonconformists; but he firmly resisted their smiles and their wiles, and never failed to express his hearty respect and esteem for the real worth of the party.

Conformity, however, or Nonconformity, was now the question to be finally settled, and Oxford seemed, of all others, the place for determining that solemn and important point. It formed, apparently, the necessary counterpoise to all his early and family prejudices; for Dissenters there were generally run down, and ill spoken of." The Scriptures, the Fathers, Church history, Chillingworth, Hooker, Taylor,-these were the authorities appealed to by the Church party; and familiar as he must be supposed to be already with the arguments of nonconformity, an examination of the authorities of its opponents, for the purpose of honourable decision, seemed the fair and natural course. Accordingly, to work he seriously set-the result none of his friends could doubt. The study of the New Testament appeared to him to show decisively the plain worship of the Dissenters more consistent with its spirit than the pompous style of the Church; and Church history proved, beyond all manner of contradiction, that, in proportion as power and ceremony increased, piety and humility declined in every society of Christians. The fathers, especially Ignatius, only strengthened the previous impression. Dodwell, after his fashion, said, the Presbyterians only questioned the authenticity of the Epistles of Ignatius "out of interest;" but Calamy thought the reproach might be more correctly retorted upon the Episcopalians. This retort, however, must have been flung more for the sake of smartness than truth; for his sober conclusion was, that the said Ignatius actually favoured the Presbyterians. It is true, Ignatius talks loftily of the power of the Bishop; for instance, he who does any thing without the privity of the Bishop, worships the Devil; but the question is, what was meant by the Bishop; and notwithstanding all his "high flights and strong figures,” the perusal convinced Calamy, Ignatius meant nothing beyond a pastoral or parochial episcopacy-an authority, that is, over laymen, rather than over priests; and that was, after all, the point with Calamy and his brethren; for Presbyterian teachers, no more than Episcopalians, wish to be confined in their control over laymen. That dioceses and parishes, however, were nearly if not quite synonymous, in the early ages, was still farther evident from the facts, that in that small part of Africa which belonged to Christians, St. Austin reckons nine hundred bishops; and so late as the twelfth century, Baro

nius finds one thousand in Armenia. The truth is, probably, that priests and deacons were, in those days, only curates and assistants, and bishops alone, in our modern phrase, incumbents.

Turning, then, to the moderns-the reader must not smile; he must remember the question was then a very grave one, and especially with Calamy, and only now not so to us, because, in our attention to still graver matters, we are grown indifferent to it—Chillingworth, champion as he is of Church establishments, confirmed him in his previous conclusions at every step. "If," says Chillingworth, "a church, supposed to want nothing necessary, require me to profess, against my conscience, that I believe some error, though never so small and innocent, which I do not believe, and will not allow me her communion but upon this condition; in this case the Church, for requiring this condition, is schismatical, and not I for separating from the Church." These sentiments, and a multitude of others of a similar tendency, appeared to Calamy to go far to justify "moderate nonconformity." Hooker, the judicious Hooker, in Calamy's judgment, almost played booty Though arguing strenuously for the beauty and completeness of the Church of England, Calamy caught him commending Calvin for establishing a presbytery at Geneva, and even questioning the divine right of episcopacy; and though setting out with the broadest principles, yet in the course of his discussion making such distinctions, and granting such concessions, that he rose from the book more unwilling than ever to fall in with the national worship, from the very weakness of the reasons produced by so celebrated a supporter of it. If Hooker's book failed, Taylor's "Ductor Dubitantium" was not likely to do any thing but confirm his previous alienation; and the fact is, generally, when Church writers argue against Dissenters, they insensibly adopt the tone of the Catholics against themselves: what in their own case they treated with contempt, they enforced without mercy in that of others, and so, of course, are liable to have their own arguments flung in their own faces. They dwell much upon the authority of the Church, and authority in religion Calamy confesses he never could relish, and the more he considered it, the more exposed he found it to irrefragable objections. Charles, he thinks, was quite right, when he told Burnet that he and his brethren made much of the authority of the Church in their disputes with the Dissenters, and then took it all away when they dealt with the Papists. The authority of one church, and the infallibility of the other, seemed to Calamy scarcely distinguishable. Even Archbishop Leighton was known to be uneasy at hearing the Church of England called the best constituted church in the world: as to doctrine, worship, and the main part of its government, he thought it was; but as to the administration, both with respect to the ecclesiastical courts and the pastoral care, he looked on it as the most corrupt in the world; and he seems to have thought pretty much the same of his own, for he threw away his mitre, and refused to have any thing more to do with church power.

To Nonconformity, then, Calamy finally adhered; and now, on the earnest persuasion of Oldfield, began to preach at Oxford and the neighbourhood. This decisive step, however, did not break up his intercourse with his University friends-he was even still on friendly terms with Henry Dodwell, the most uncompromising advocate of Church authority her annals record. He had been professor of modern history, of which appointment he was deprived for refusing to take the oaths to William and Mary, but still continued to reside at Oxford. One of his ultra-notions, which he enforced in his writings with great earnestness, was that the soul was naturally mortal, and immortality conferred on it at baptism, by the gift of God through the hands of one set of regularly ordained clergy. So extravagant a pretension seems to have impaired his authority even with the Church, who of course must prefer the prudent to the imprudent for her advocates. Calamy sought his society for the sake of his "great reading." His account of a man who once made a great noise in the world is worth quoting.

"I soon discovered," he says, " his usual time of being at he coffee-house, and

would often contrive to be there, that I might have his company. Nothing pleased him better than to have a question proposed to him, upon a difficulty in chronology, a piece of history, either civil or ecclesiastical, or about ancient customs. Upon the starting any thing of this kind, he would pour out a flood of learning, with great freedom. I carefully forbore contradicting him, which he could not bear from any one, and this made him the more free and open in conversing with me. I have come into a room where he has been sitting at a table with academics belonging to several different colleges, who took pleasure in disputing with him, contradicting and thwarting him, and he has left them all and applied to me while sitting at a table by myself; and he was no sooner come than he would ask me if I had any question to propose to him, with which I usually took care not to be unprovided. He would on a sudden, and off hand, make returns that would sometimes be very surprising, though not always equally satisfactory. In order to the proof of a point that he laid stress upon, he used to lay down a chain of principles, and if they were all granted him, his proof would be good: but if any one link in the chain failed, his whole scheme came to nothing. He was no great reasoner, nor at all remarkable for his management of an argument, nor have I met with any one less able to bear being contradicted," &c.

Calamy now came to town, and after refusing an invitation to Bristol, and another place or two, fixed as an assistant to Mr. Sylvester in the City. He was shortly after ordained, according to the Presbyterian form, but not without some difficulty. Public ordination had ceased to be practised among the Dissenters since the Act of Uniformity; but Calamy, conceiving publicity would tend to forward the interests of Dissent, insisted upon a public ordination. The leading men, many of them, declined to make themselves thus conspicuous, and others stipulated for subscription to terms and articles. But Calamy, and some young friends with him, persisted in demanding a free ordination, as ministers of the Catholic Church of Christ, stating expressly to those concerned, that if any narrow, confining, cramping notions were intermixed in the management, he would drop the matter, and take the liberty to withdraw, even though the work of the day were begun, or considerably advanced. This resolute expression of his sentiments put others upon their mettle, and they carried their point.

Baxter's well-known Narrative of his Life and Times was published by Mr. Sylvester, his friend and executor, whilst Calamy was his assistant. For some time Sylvester had been prevented by engagements from attending to the publication, and he was not very willing to let any body help him, or even see the papers. Calamy-a man, we see, not easily diverted from his purpose-at last persuaded him to let him look them over; and finding several passages, which appeared to him likely to do more harm than good, he was urgent with Sylvester, who was left with discretionary powers, to cut them out. But he, according to Calamy, had a sort of superstitious scruple about making any alteration. Unluckily-unluckily, we say, for all such interference we hold to be abominable; let every man answer for his own offences -Calamy's importunity prevailed. Sylvester himself, Calamy found, was highly commended in the MS. and by dint of the argumentum ad modestiam, getting his concurrence to omit this eulogium, he had less difficulty in seducing him to consent to other erasures. These consisted, according to Calamy, of reflections on persons and families of distinction, which would be offensive, though the matters related were true enough. A dream also of Baxter's, and some things relating to his bodily disorders and physical management of himself, and some other things that were too mean, the publication of which would expose him (Sylvester) to censure. But the great difficulty Calamy had was with respect to Dr. Owen, upon whom there were several reflections.

"Some of these," he adds, " after frequent debates, he did allow me to blot out, and I did it, cheerfully, with my own hand. But, as to the main reflection on him, with regard to the affair of Wallingford House, (the deposition of Richard Cromwell) and his concern in it, on which Mr. Baxter laid a considerable stress, and which Mr. Sylvester had often heard him discourse of with great freedom, he would not by any means give his consent to have them left out."

The contents prefixed to Baxter's narrative, and the index, were of Calamy's drawing up, for which pains, he says, the booksellers presented him with a copy-Liberal!

This life of Baxter, thus depurated nearly to his own taste, Calamy moreover, abridged and published, a few years after, (1702,) while still in connection with Sylvester in the City, adding to it a list of the ministers ejected by the Act of Uniformity, with some account of each, and the reasons they gave for their conduct, both with respect to Nonconformity and occasional compliance, and bringing down the History of Nonconformity to 1691. On the occasion of Queen Anne's accession, the Dissenters of the three denominations, as they are termed-the Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists-for the first time joined in an "address at Court." Very soon after this event, Calamy succeeded Mr. Alsopp in the Westminster congregation, a station which naturally gave him considerable influence among his brethren; and from this time he was very conspicuous, especially in getting up addresses of loyalty on all occasions that could be seized upon for such a purpose. Calamy now also distinguished himself by his "Defence of Moderate Conformity," and was intensely occupied, through much of this reign, in mustering and marshalling the Dissenting forces to resist the bill, introduced session after session, for putting an end to occasional conformity, which, however the High Church strengthening daily under the Queen's auspices-was finally carried in 1712. Tenison warmly defended the principle of occasional conformity-conduct which, looking coolly as we now do upon the question, seems marvellous in a man remarkable in his day for piety, sincerity, and intelligence. The principle could only lead to quibbling and jesuitry, and was itself an act of the same character. The Test was at first, undoubtedly, directed professedly against the Catholic, but it was seen to be applicable likewise to the Dissenter, and the party who advocated it were equally (or, if not equally, the difference is not worth calculating) hostile to both, and were glad to sweep both in the same net. The Dissenter, if he could compromise and descend to occasional conformity, might very well have stretched his cheveril conscience a little farther to complete conformity, and made no more ado. Occasional compliances only gave a handle to opponents for opprobrium -to ridicule their pretences to conscientious scruples, and charge them with factious opposition. It was found they could conform for special purposes, and that where worldly interests were concerned.

The Church party, advancing now with rapid strides, finally, a few weeks only before the Queen's death, carried the Schism Act, in spite of all the stirring and bustle of the Dissenters, among whom Calamy was still conspicuous, and making use of all his court influence. By this atrocious act, Dissenters teaching schools, except for reading, writing, and cyphering, were liable to three months' imprisonment; and every schoolmaster allowed by the act under these restrictions was to take the test, and if afterwards present at a conventicle, to be incapacitated and imprisoned. Still greater severity was intended, but the active opposition the bill met with was something of a check. A bill to disfranchise them was actually in preparation; and had the Queen lived and her party still prevailed, as it was obviously likely to do, would probably have passed the next session.

But the very day, the first of August-that glorious first of August— that most signal day, which ought never to be forgotten, as Dr. Benson, in a sermon preached at Salters' Hall, some years after, described it-the very day on which the recent act came into operation, the Queen died; and the accession of the Hanover family gave an instant pledge of a change of system. Nearly one hundred Dissenting ministers went up with an address of congratulation, and were graciously received. They were all clad with the black Geneva cloak, similar to that used at funerals. A nobleman asked, "What have we here?-a funeral?”—“ No, my Lord," cried the well-known Tommy Bradbury, "a resurrection!”

The Schism Act was not, however, formally repealed for some years, but it was never carried into execution. Nor were the general hopes and pro