in the days when the right of dissenters to teach schools was still exposed to some legal difficulties. His position is best defined in a tract contributed in 1730 to a controversy about the 'most probable means of reviving the dissenting interest.' The difficulty, which increased as the century went on, was already sensible. The dissenters, no longer forced into unity by serious external pressure, were showing symptoms of approaching disruption. The more educated classes among them -steeped in traditions of intellectual liberty, and not confined by definite tests were ripening for Unitarianism. Rationalism was sapping the old dogmatic stringency. The more ignorant classes were complaining of the diminished fervour of their spiritual guides. Latitudinarian demonstrations' flew above their heads, and they were lapsing into indifference, or ready to welcome the fresh impulse of Wesley. The first nucleus of the Methodists which was formed in 1729 might have suggested a better solution of the difficulty than that which satisfied Doddridge, and Doddridge's contemporary difficulties show what was the field provided for their energy. The general spirit of his advice was that the dissenting minister should try to please everybody. His antagonist seems to have hinted at the propriety of a separation between the bigots and the persons of 'generous sentiments.'' Doddridge wished the minister to become all things to all men.'2 That was rather too markedly the leading principle of his own life. The eminent dissenter was on friendly terms with the established clergy, and corresponded with bishops; he had relations with Wesley and the Methodists; he was a spiritual adviser of Lyttelton, and of the converted rake Colonel Gardiner ; and his academy, once, at any rate, was honoured by the presence of a duke's nephew. Such intimacies, cultivated by the dissenting schoolmaster in a country town, indicated considerable powers of attraction. His life was honourable, independent, and laborious; but we may, perhaps, surmise, without injustice to a good man, that his emotions were rather facile, and that his temptation was to err on the side of complacency. There is a want in his writings of that 1 Doddridge's Works, iv. 216. 2 Ib. iv. 218. 3 In Phillimore's Life of Lyttelton' there are some curious letters. firmness which is produced by the bracing air of more vigorous times; they show a tendency to flabbiness, and the enthusiasm has but a hollow ring. 66. His chief work, the 'Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul,' is an exhortation to a change of life, conceived in what would now be called the evangelical spirit, but apparently tempered by a dread of the rational critic. His energy is restrained by unseen chains. Whilst insisting on the value of conversion, he has an eye to the possible charge of 'enthusiasm.' Christianity is more than an intellectual change, but it is still-as he maintains against Dodwell— 'founded on argument.' We are to break with the world, but not too decisively; for it may be necessary to indulge ourselves in the elegancies and delights of life,' for the good of trade and the poor. There is much dwelling upon the horrors of hell-fire; but we feel that he is lashing a jaded imagination rather than overpowered by an awful vision. When, in one of his sermons, he comforts the parents of the damned by the reflection that in the next world they will be without their natural affections, we are not in presence of a scer oppressed, like Jonathan Edwards, by his tremendous faith, but of an ingenious special pleader too much pleased with a neat argument to realise its atrocity. His dogmas have passed from the stage of intuitive conviction to that of orthodox positions capable of logical defence. It would be unfair to regard Doddridge as in any degree insincere. The zeal is a reflection, though a faint reflection, from the older Puritans; and if the fire no longer communicates much heat, it produces amongst the respectable the sensation of a good comfortable glow. His favourite author seems to have been Leighton, of whose works he published an edition, and the choice is creditable to his insight. Of his most ambitious work, 'The Family Expositor,' a dilution of the Gospels and St. Paul's Epistles into five volumes quarto, it can only be said that it consists of words, words, words.' 67. Towards the middle of the century the decay of the old schools of theology was becoming complete. Watts died in 1748; Doddridge in 1751; the good Bishop Wilson died in his ninety-third year in 1755. A new religious impulse 'Doddridge, i. 444. 2 Ib. ii. 179. was beginning to exhibit its strength, though regarded with intense dislike and suspicion by the whole body of the orthodox, and heartily despised by the philosophers and men of the world. Wesleyanism is, in many respects, by far the most important phenomenon of the century. Here I have only to enquire what were the intellectual aspects of the movement, so far as they are reflected in the writings of its most eminent men. Wesley himself appears to have been influenced at the most critical period of his life by three great writers, Thomas à-Kempis, Jeremy Taylor, and Law. If the two former were the greatest men, Law had the indefinite advantage of still being alive. The Imitation of Christ' has influenced more minds than any book outside the sacred canon; but for that reason we could not discover from its contents what was its special aptitude to Wesley. A similar remark may be made in a degree of Taylor's 'Holy Living and Dying.' It was Law who, alone of living writers, materially influenced Wesley's mind; and gave to universal principles that special form which rendered them suitable at the moment. From him and the Moravians came the external impulses which chiefly affected Wesley; and the fact would be enough to give an interest to Law's writings. But he is himself a man of remarkable power and originality, and, indeed, very superior as a thinker to his more active disciple. I have already noticed his controversial eminence. It remains to study the writings by which he exercised his chief influence upon the time. 68. The name of William Law will recall to most readers a passage in Gibbon's Autobiography. The cynical historian is thought to have shown little insight into the loftier motives of the earlier Christians. Yet he spoke with affectionate tenderness of the man who, aimost alone amongst his contemporaries, might stand for a primitive Christian come to revisit a strangely altered world. 'In our family,' says ་ Gibbon, he left the reputation of a worthy and pious man who believed all he professed, and practised all that he enjoined.' Gibbon's respect for the purity and tenderness of Law's character is mixed with admiration for his intellectual vigour. As a controversialist, according to Gibbon, he showed himself, at least, the equal of the Whig champion, Hoadly; and in his practical writings, his fervid emotion is seconded by a power of satire displayed in portraits not unworthy of the pen of La Bruyère.' Were it not for his mysticism, he 'might be ranked with the most agreeable and ingenious writers of the times;' and even a philosopher must allow that he exposes with equal sincerity and truth the strange contradiction which exists between the faith and practice of the Christian world.' ture. 69. Gibbon's Autobiography is a very delightful specimen of one of the most generally delightful of all forms of literaNobody ever laid bare his own character with more felicity; and there is something curiously dramatic in the contrast between the two men thus brought into momentary contrast. Gibbon is as perfect an incarnation of the worldly thinkers of the eighteenth century, with their placid contempt for all the higher spiritual influences, as Law of the counteracting forces which were gradually stirring beneath the surface of society. The life of the teacher is as characteristic as his writings. The son of a country grocer, he had obtained a fellowship at Emmanuel in 1711, and became an ardent High Churchman. He seems to have been suspended from his degree for a tripos speech, in which he defended, amongst other things, the objectionable doctrine that the sun shone when it was eclipsed. The eclipsing body, of course, was the parliamentary monarchy, which intercepted the rays of divine right. At any rate, he refused to take the oaths enforced upon the accession of George I., and thus became one of the second generation of nonjurors. After having thus sacrificed all worldly prospects for a crotchet or a creed, he became the tutor of Gibbon's father, and when his pupil was grown up, remained for some years an inmate of the family. There, though apparently respected by all its members, he found types of the great division between the Church and the world. Two of the portraits in the 'Call,' which represent the worldly and the converted woman, are said by Gibbon to stand for his two aunts. Hester Gibbon, the Miranda of the 'Call,' was to the end of a long life Law's 1 If, that is, I am right in identifying him with a 'Mr. Laws,' mentioned in Hearne's Diary, as quoted in Mr. Christopher Wordsworth's interesting book on University Life in the Eighteenth Century' (see pp. 40, 231). spiritual support. Catherine, the 'Flavia,' married a man of fortune, and her daughter, afterwards Lady Eliot, grievously offended her pious aunt Hester by an intimacy with the Mallets-Mallet being that 'beggarly Scotchman' who, according to Johnson, fired off Bolingbroke's blunderbuss against religion and morality for half-a-crown. A curious correspondence is preserved between this lady and her aunt :— If this were the last sentence I should speak,' says the spirited young woman, 'these would be my words, that the aspersion' (that is, Miss Gibbon's aspersion on the Mallets) 'is as false as heaven is true;' and Miss Gibbon replied to her rebellious niece in a letter animated with such holy unction, that Law substituted a more courteous document. Talk not of gratitude to infidel friends,' says this softened version; 'their friendship is of no better a nature than that which kindly gave thirty pieces of silver to Judas, and both you and your unhappy uncle' (the historian's father) 'sooner or later must find that falseness, baseness, and hypocrisy make the whole heart and spirit of every blasphemer of Jesus Christ. It would be less a pain to me, or to your deceased friends, whom I have mentioned, to see you attending a dung-cart for the sake of bread, than riding in a coach of your own crowded with beloved infidels.' It does not exactly appear how the niece received this vigorous bit of plain speaking, or what Miss Gibbon thought in after years of a certain pair of chapters in a celebrated History. Gibbon, at any rate, could write to her affectionately in her old age. She died in 1790 at the age of eighty-six, and two years earlier she received a letter from the historian, touching with tenderness on the old lady's prejudices. Your good wishes and advice,' he says, 'will not, I trust, be thrown away on a barren soil; and, whatever you may have been told of my opinions, I can assure you with truth that I consider religion as the best guide of youth, and the best support of old age, and that I firmly believe 1 In a book called 'Memorials of Mr. Law,' privately printed, which consists, for the most part, of an exposition of the doctrines of Jacob Behmen, drawn chiefly from the MSS. of a disciple, unfortunately preserved in the British Museum for the bewilderment of ordinary intellects. The author, however, fearing, not irrationally, that his readers may weary of the theosophical quagmires through which they are dragged, inserts a gigantic footnote from p. 334 to p. 628, in which are imbedded a few facts about Law's life and a good many letters. |