a distance which levels all petty jealousies. Whatever the correctness in some respects of the judgment passed upon the eighteenth century-and I have tried to show at length why its creed should strike us as irretrievably effete-the general condemnation is far too sweeping. Many of the clergy, as of other classes, were undoubtedly worldly and timeserving, and some of the noisy controversialists of the time suggest little confidence in their honesty or their depth of feeling. But I do not feel certain that we could mention in the first half of the nineteenth century three bishops whose characters make upon us a greater impression of purity and devotion than those of Berkeley, Butler, and Wi'son; I doubt whether amongst those of less dignity we should find men more honest and manly than Clarke, or with a finer glow of devotional sentiment than William Law; and if the dissenters, freed from persecution, could no longer boast of Baxters and Bunyans, it is impossible to think without sincere respect of the honourable and laborious lives of such men as Watts, Doddridge, and Lardner, by whom the chances of preferment were voluntarily rejected for conscientious reasons. Wesley is generally represented as having been the first man to struggle against the indolent frigidity which had stolen over the Church. The statement, as we shall see, was true enough; but it is also true that, during the first half of the century, there were many religious leaders, whose devotion has not been exceeded in more recent times. I have already had occasion to mention incidentally some of the eminent men just noticed. Butler stands by himself as a thinker, and Berkeley is, of course, chiefly remarkable in literature as a metaphysician; Law was admirable as a controversialist, though he was something more than a mere controversialist; Lardner devoted his whole life to composing a refutation of Deism; and I have already described Clarke sufficiently as the typical rationalist of the time.

63. Wilson, Watts, Doddridge, and Law, who are chiefly remarkable as devotional writers, occupy positions of varying importance in relation to the contemporary speculation. Of the first three it may be said that they represent rather the survival of old methods of thought than any fresh development. Wilson, the Apostolic,' was a man of the

old sacerdotal type, full of simplicity, tenderness, devotion, and with a sincere belief, inoffensive because alloyed by no tincture of pride or ambition, in the sacred privileges of the Church. Amongst his scattered reflections there are many of much beauty in expression as in sentiment. They imply a theology of that type of which à-Kempis is the permanent representative; less ascetic, inasmuch as Wilson had the good fortune to be a married man instead of a monk; and, of course, less vivid, as he was one born out of due time. His superstitions—for he is superstitious-no more provoke anger than the simple fancies of a child; and we honour him as we should honour all men whose life and thoughts were in perfect harmony, and guided by noble motives. To read him is to love him; he helps us recognise the fact that many of the thoughts which supported his noble nature in its journey through life may be applicable in a different costume to the sorrows and trials which also change their form rather than their character; but we see with equal clearness that he has little or nothing to say upon the speculative difficulties of the time. He may be passed over with the remark that his example proves conclusively that a genuine Christian theologian in the most characteristic sense of the term might still be found under the reign of George II. in the Isle of Man.

64. Watts and, in a less degree, Doddridge, are to the dissenters of the preceding generation what Wilson was to its best Anglican divines. The name of Watts, associated with certain hymns still dear to infancy, has contracted a faint flavour of the ludicrous, though other poems of greater pretensions are still preserved in the lower strata of literature. The hymns, indeed, of Watts, Doddridge, and the Wesleys, whatever their literary merit, have been popular enough to show that they are not inadequate expressions of a strong religious sentiment. It is said that for many years 50,000 copies of Watts's Psalms and Hymns' were annually printed; and if there be any truth in the commonplace about songs and laws, Watts's influence must have been greater than that of many legislators, and, indeed, many more distinguished writers. But such an influence is too intangible in its nature to be easily measured. Watts, however, was a VOL. II.

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voluminous writer in prose. The last thirty-six years of his long life was passed in valetudinary retirement in the family of a London merchant and his widow. In this retreat he wrote nearly all those works which-as a biographer says1— 'have immortalised his name as a divine, poet, and philosopher.' The philosophy and the divinity, however, would appear to have been chiefly buoyed above utter oblivion by the poems. His philosophy was the expression of a desire to preserve part of Descartes' theory about the soul, whilst accepting Newton's physical philosophy, and a good deal of Locke's metaphysics. Such a crude amalgam could have no great value in itself, and occasionally he descends to mere childishness, as in some remarks upon the awkwardness of a complete resurrection of the body of a dropsical patient.3 We need not trouble ourselves with such speculations, nor with his views about the Trinity, which seem to have shown traces of the Unitarian tendencies of the next generation. In his doctrinal writings there are signs of the diffuse sentimentalism which not unfrequently accompanies a feeble constitution.* We may grant to his biographer that there is not an expression in his sermons 'that could raise the faintest blush upon the cheek of modesty, or irritate the risibility of the most puerile,' The more positive merits discovered by the same admirer will, perhaps, hardly keep the modern reader from somnolency. The sermons, however, show something of the old unction. They appeal strongly to the inward witness of the spirit, with a comparative indifference to the ordinary evidential argument. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he addresses the heart rather than the intellect; and in his hands Christianity is not emasculated Deism, but a declaration to man of the means by which God pleases to work a supernatural change in human nature. The emotional current is still running strongly, though combined with a rather heterogeneous collection of speculative opinions.

5

65. Doddridge, the admiring friend of Watts, exercised a considerable influence as the master of a dissenting academy, 1 See notice in Chalmers's Biog. Dic.'

2 See Philosophical Essays,' vol. viii. of Works.

Watts's Works, viii. 422.

E.g. Watts, i. 182, where he apologises for the warmth of his colouring.

• Ib. i.

p. xiii.

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 2 Ib. iv. 218.

1 Doddridge's Works, iv. 216.

In Phillimore's Life of Lyttelton' there are some curious letters. • Doddridge, v. 542.

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,2 we are not in presence of a seer 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.