But soon there came a change. High Gallicanism shivered at the vulgar touch of lay concert. A lay preacher was no better than a Jansenist; a Jansenist, no better than a Hugue

Rome was appealed to for aid; but Rome, with her usual comprehensiveness as to instrumentality, refused to interfere. But the Sorbonne became hoarse in its cries for a monopoly ; the Church, it was declared, was in danger; the world, ever ready to throw itself against religious earnestness, united in the appeal; Louis XIV., who thought Jansenism, lay or ordained, was not only ungenteel and inelegant, but disloyal, interposed his royal commands; and at last, Jesuitism, hating its old rival to the end, and yet to the end insidious and subtle, wrung from the numbed hand of Clement XI. that fatal bull Unigenitus which threats and menaces had failed to extort, but which was yielded by the exhausted pontiff rather in paralysis than in consent. But what was the effect? The Gallican Church from that moment sank. Her freedom was extinguished by the very edict that gave to the dominant sect of her priesthood absolute monopoly, and exclusive power. No more did great and true voices thunder from her pulpits. Nowhere was the keen edge of wit, and the powerful arm of argument, to be found among her defenders. She had now no opponents to controvert: she therefore needed no learning for controversy. There were no lustrous bodies around her; it was not necessary that her priesthood should keep their own lamps lit in order to prevent their people from straying into wrong folds. There were no keen eyes to discover gaps, no gentle though potent voice to advise of dangers; it was not necessary, therefore, that gaps should be filled or dangers forestalled. "She felt herself," said Robert Hall, when speaking of the Gallican Church after the bull Unigenitus had finished what the revocation of the edict of Nantes had begun, "at liberty to become as ignorant, as secular, as irreligious as she pleased; and amidst the silence and darkness she had created around her, she drew the curtains and retired to rest. The accession of numbers she gained by suppressing her opponents, was like the small extension of length a body acquires by death; the feeble remains of life were extinguished, and she lay a putrid

corpse, a public nuisance, filling the air with pestilential exhalations." Soon in those halls where once flashed the eye of the eagle of Meaux, was heard the crisp, scoffing laugh of Voltaire, and then the blasphemous yell of Marat.

stance.

Let us see, however, how the same prescription has worked upon the Anglican Church; and we begin with a notable inOf all the Anglican clergy the Non-jurors held the most arbitrary views of sacerdotal prerogative. Of all the Anglican clergy the Non-jurors were the most exclusive in their notions of clerical dignity. If they would not, as Sidney Smith said, roast a Dissenter, they would at least sweep by him as a thing not be to received in familiar association. The laity were in no sense to be aught but catechumens-to learn but not to teach. How was it with the Non-jurors? Dr. Johnson, himself strongly attached to them by political and ecclesiastical sympathy, tells us, when speaking of Fenton, who was a Non-juror, "that he never suffered himself to be reduced, like too many of the same sect, to mean acts and dishonorable shifts." Afterwards, when Cibber, in adapting the Tartuffe to the English stage, made the hypocrite in that comedy a Non-juror, the great moralist declared the character "very applicable." In the life of Kettlewell, himself a Nonjuror, we find, on the authority of Hickes and Nelson, leaders of the same school, the statement that "Mr. Kettlewell was also very sensible that some of his brethren spent too much of their time in places of concourse and news, by depending for their subsistence upon those whom they there got acquainted with." The Non-jurors were preachers without hearers, as long as they preached at all. It was not that their schism was not disinterested, and impelled by a noble enthusiasm. It was not that they did not, at the time of the schism, include some saintly and highly cultivated men. Such were Ken, whom the Catholic Church will always regard as one of her purest and brightest lights; Archbishop Sancroft, Bishops Turner, Lake, and Lloyd, whom she will cherish among her bravest confessors; Leslie, as one of the most acute and subtle of her apologists; Collier, as the most effective and fearless critic and literary reformer of his times; and Dodwell and Hicks, as

among her most erudite scholars. But here we must stop. These eminent men, whatever may have been the exclusiveness of their creed, had acquired their culture on a broad and liberal basis. Some of them had sat in Parliament. All of them had gladly, in the hour of their troubles, accepted layhelp even in controversies. Several had united with James II. in the belief that there should be a liberal comprehension of Roman Catholics and of Dissenters. In the great camp of the Revolution, where so many strange elements were combined on both sides, the Non-juror chieftains found themselves warmed by other watch-fires than their own. Though they did not perhaps admit it, their hearts were quickened and their intellects sharpened by the genial intercourse, and the no less genial rivalry, with others not of their own specific cast and creed. It was otherwise with their successors. The Non-jurors of the second generation retired in introverted isolation from religious communion with either laymen, establishmentarians, or dissenters. Those whom an imaginary prerogative lifts above the correction and discipline of society; above its chastening culture, its inspiring stimulants, its genial sympathies, are apt to topple over, and fall below the level on whose surface they have no foothold. So it was with the later Non-jurors. They had every motive to sustain them. They had a legiti mate succession. They had the distinction of martyrdom without its extermination. They had a true and pure creed, and a faultless liturgy. They had the enthusiasm of a splendid, and in many respects just cause. Certainly, as to the mere question of establishmentarianism, there was no choice between themselves and their Erastian opponents. But what became of them? Compare them with the Huguenots. The English martyrs loitered, in easy and unfruitful indolence about their old haunts; the French toiled with their own hands, and taught as they toiled. The former had the liberty of speech opened to them, but spoke to emptied rooms; the latter were gagged, were mutilated, were proscribed; but in the forest, in the upper chamber, in the cave, found, illiterate as they were, eager auditors coming under cover of night, and almost under the royal guns, for miles and miles, forming,

when they assembled, one compact, living heart. Both had America spread out for their free efforts; the former were followed by a few broken-down gentlemen of Jacobite creed and morals, and have themselves been described to us, as idle, arrogant, and inefficient; the latter carried with them thousands of faithful and pious artisans to the marches of Brandenburg, to the crowded lanes of London, to the shores of Virginia, of NewYork, and South-Carolina. With such odds in favor of the Non-jurors, I can attribute this difference in results to but one cause. The Huguenot ministers were of the people, felt with them, spoke their vernacular, and heard the same mother's tongue speaking back to their own hearts; and thus, through the action and counter-action of preacher and hearer, of teacher with teacher, promoted and extended pervasive, life-controlling, heart-subduing theology. But the Non-juror first inflicted on his flock the mischiefs of a monopoly as to others, and then suffered the results of a monopoly as to self.

Let us, however, glance back again to English Church history, to see whether there are any periods in which the existence of an active lay evangelizing element will enable us to judge in what way that element acts upon the ordained ministry. Now, I pass the remarkable era which witnessed the introduction of Methodism, and the revival of the Church of England. It has been observed that during John Wesley's life, the Methodist preachers claimed to exercise their gifts merely as lay-members of the National Church. I leave these, however, to notice, how in this period of resuscitation of religion within as well as without the Church, an earnest, faithful, preaching laity, stood side by side with a body of clergymen than whom there have never been any more zealous, more able, more loved, and more honored. Those were the days when Wilberforce, Thornton, Charles Grant, Zachary Macaulay, Sir Richard Hill, stood side by side with Cecil, John Newton, Fletcher, Romaine, Scott, and Wilson.

But I go from this, a period too well known to need more than a passing touch, to that which has already been noticed as in one sense the darkest in our Church history. I am willing to seek here for the illustration of the working of lay evange

lization, as we have already done for that of lay spiritual depression and inactivity. In those days the clergy fell into two great classes.* The social condition of the first of these has been already noticed. They were mostly found in the rural districts, and, with a few exceptions, were Jacobites in politics and Non-jurors in every thing but schism. They fell within the class so sadly described by Swift as the table-companions of the butler, and of the upper servants, but at the same time as the bitter and uncompromising pursuers of Dissenters. The social wrongs that many of these men suffered from the Puritans, were undoubtedly great; but this should never lead us to excuse the narrow severity and professional superciliousness by which these wrongs were avenged. The brutal squire who liked nothing better than to bait a lay or dissenting preacher, was whetted on by one who was at once an humble and obsequious companion at home, and a political agent to keep up a High Tory feeling at the hustings. It is true that there were many acting polemically with this class, who were not involved in the same social humiliations. But still, taking the class altogether, they were of one opinion as to clerical prerogative; and as such, on this general test, they comprehended at least a majority of the then clergy. Now, what did they do? I will not ask how far did they plant the Church-for that has been already answered. Nor will I ask what effect their exclusiveness of pretension as teachers had upon their social position, for that has been just noticed. But how did these men, who claimed to be the sole organs through which religion could speak, prepare themselves for their awful responsibility? What effect did the conviction of the exclusive possession of this

*Macaulay notices this distinction. After describing the degradation of the rural clergy in language even stronger than that of Swift and Southey, he says: Assuredly there was at that time no lack in the English Church, of ministers distinguished by abilities and learning. But it is to be observed that these ministers were not scattered among the rural population. They were brought together at a few places where the means of acquiring knowledge were abundant, and where the opportunities of vigorous intellectual exercise were frequent." (Hist. Eng. 229.) In other words, it was a circumjacent non-professional religious atmosphere that elevated, and the want of it that depressed.