ARCHBISHOP TILLOTSON—A STUDY IN HISTORICAL PARALLELS.

[COMMUNICATED.] THE life of Archbishop Tillotson covers one of those great turning-points in our national history when power was Passing from a feudal aristocracy to the commercial classes and when the breach between both was widened by doubts of the old Faith raised by the new discoveries of Science. By King William's day the great names of Copernicus, Bacon, Galileo, Pascal, Kepler, Harvey, Newton had revolutionized the stand- point of the old theology, and men were sore puzzled how to reconcile the apparent discord between Reason and Revelation. Popery and Infidelity at once seized their opportunity. And the Church was thrown back on herself to fight the cause not of Party but of Truth. It is hi the attempt to confront this double

danger of Superstition and Scepticism that the Church of those days recalls in so many ways a comparison with our own.

And not least in the person of her Primate. When Tennyson introduced Archbishop Tait to Queen Victoria he remarked that he was about to introduce the wisest Archbishop the English Church had had since Tillotson. The comparison was a fortunate one. Both Archbishops were men of the North and bred in ecclesiastical traditions outside the Church—for which both were all their life long harried with fictitious doubts about their Baptism or their Confirmation ! Both were destined to confront the quarrels raised by the High Church party, Tillotson becoming the reluctant opponent of Sancroft and the Nonjurors, Tait of Newman and the Tractarians. Both were Broad Churchmen of the most orthodox school, who aimed at comprehending the Nonconformists in a revision of the Prayer Book which would have entailed the loss of the Athanasian Creed. And both lived in an age described by Tillotson himself as one " engaged in unravelling almost all the received principles both of Religion and Reason." It was an age in which, according to the authors of the Cambridge Modern History, " the opinion of educated men was coming round to toleration," to satisfy which the Broad Church School provided " statesmen " rather than Christian theologians, " men whose minds were emancipated from theo- logical prepossessions," and " whose chief characteristic was sobriety of judgment."

It was to this School that both Tillotson and Tait belonged. The keynote of their message was the equal danger of Superstition and Scepticism. Hence they were never quiet in their constant invective against the Church of Rome. Both regarded with equal aversion that hero of the Mediaevalists and Tractarians, Thomas a Becket. Tait publicly described him in Canterbury Cathedral as a "semi-pagan," and Tillotson as " one whose pride might vie with Lucifer's." In theological matters—as became men of action rather than of thought, who were statesmen rather than theologians—Tait, like Tillotson, affronted the Nonconfor- mist conscience by looser views than those usually accepted on the inspiration of the Bible, especially with regard to the earlier chapters of Genesis. In the Old Testament they both recognised a historic development in the times of God's revelation. And in the New Testament Tait would probably have held with Tillotson that " we do not think it necessary to believe that every argument used by our Saviour and His apostles is absolutely and in itself conclusive of the matter in debate " (Sermons, vol. i. 23). It is incidentally interesting to note that both were made Deans before becoming Archbishops and that both, on being nominated to the highest post, nobly offered to retire in favour of a High Church rival—Tillotson of the nonjuring San- croft, Tait of Samuel Wilberforce. And in that high post both grew so weary of the opposition which their dominating person- alities encountered that they would have gladly resigned but for the personal wishes of their respective Sovereigns. To this day the memory of their name acts, among High and Low Church- men alike, as a bone of contention. High Churchmen still. regard both as Erastians. And Whitefield probably expressed the sentiments of fanatics of the Low Church party when he announced that Tillotson knew no more of the Gospel than Mahomet. A sermon of Tait's at Tunbridge Wells was in the same spirit criticised as no better than what could have been preached by Virgil.

The parallel baween Tait and Tillotson is all the more remark- able in that, as Dean Lake has pointed out, Tait's " special hero in the English Church was for long, perhaps always, Archbishop Tillotson " (Life of Tait, i. 139). It is rare in history when such parallels occur. It is still more rare when they can be consciously carried out. Yet like situations. may naturally be expected to produce like personalities for their control. A modern Plutarch would be of use to us to-day if he could present us with more parallel portraits arranged in pairs—say of Augrus• tine and Calvin, Luther and Athanasius, Erasmus and Voltaire, Newman and Pascal, Cromwell and Bismarck, Burke and Demosthenes, Caesar and Napoleon, Rousseau and Tolstoy, Dickens and Fielding, Boccaccio and Balzac. Credulity, said Coleridge, is but incredulity looked at from behind. And the via media of the English Church will always tend to arouse precisely that two-fold antagonism from Rome and Atheism which the philosophy of the Middle Path is eminently calculated to call forth.

It is chiefly by his Sermons that the memory of Tillotson is preserved. No other preacher in England has since attained the fame of being a classic in his lifetime. Wesley found that his Sermons were read in every village in England. They still adorn the libraries of the English clergy, and will he read when Liddon and Spurgeon and Robertson are forgotten. They are part of the original endowment of the English language. Their style created the prose of Dryden and through Dryden the parliamentary language of Charles James Fox.

Their signal merits are not far to seek. At a transition period in our nation's history when England was shaken by contending factions there arose a mind of singular earnestness, real learning and cool calculating knowledge of the world which put forth all its powers in order to present the truths of revelation in the language of the average educated man. Tillotson possessed by nature commanding gifts of expression. He belonged to no party. He was the servant of Truth. He studied not men but man. He aimed at no consistency in his theological views but what the common sense of the text or the occasion demanded. He was thus able with happy inconsistency to speak of " the glorious Revolution " under William III., of the " murder of an excellent King " in Charles I., and of " the happy Restoration " under Charles U. (Sermons, i. 32). If he sometimes spoke like a Calvinist on " the pangs of the new birth," or at others seemed to dispute (like a Socinian) the hereditary character of Original Sin ; or if he confused, like the Romanists, Justification with a faith made perfect by good works and charity ; or if he dismissed the intricacies of the Trinitarian controversy as a conceit " con- founded and entangled in the cobwebs and niceties of the Schools " (Sermons, ii. 70) ; or if he held with the moderns that all our religion was sufficiently embraced in the Apostles' Creed as explained by the first four General Councils (Sermons, i. 27) ; yet at other times he boldly asserted with the orthodox Catholics that Christ was God and that the two Sacraments were necessary means of present grace ; while with Calvinists he regularly asserted that the torments of Hell were eternal, and agreed with the Lutherans that Christ's death " not only expiated the guilt of sin and pacified conscience by making plenary satisfaction to the • Divine Justice but also condemned sin because the impartial Justice of God did so severely punish it in His own Son when he appeared in the person of a sinner" (Sermons, ii. 85).

But the prevailing quality of these sermons is their Good Sense. Tillotson reminds his sceptical hearers that the being of God requires other kinds of proof than those of mathematicalevidence, and that if all things were made by Chance then Chance for the first time and the last has shown a remarkable amount of wisdom in the ordering and contriving. Of Heaven he says that the dispositions that we carry out of this life we shall retain in the next. " A pen is always writing and making a faithful record of all the passages of our lives." We do all things for eternity and every action of this life will have a good or bad influence upon our everlasting state." No liar can afford to be a lazy man, for the first lie will require at least another to keep it in counten- ance. Sin he describes as involving for the Christian two difficulties : indisposition from within and opposition from without. In a very modern way he regards the times of the heathen as a preparation for Christ's first and second comings ; and he looks forward to the day when the light of the Gospel shall yet be displayed in the conversion of India, China and Japan (Sermons, iii. 139).

It is on the subject of Superstition and Scepticism that he unfolds his powers at their best. Transubstantiation he describes as a downright impudence against the plain meaning of Scripture and all the sense and reason of mankind "It is an absurdity of that monstrous and massive weight that would make the very pillars of St. Peter's crack and requires more volumes to make good than would fill the Vatican." The catch-question

of the Romanist : " Where was your religion before Luther ?" was of the same kind the heathen must have put to the Jews under Moses " Where was your religion before Abraham?"

Reason, he averred, was the handmaid and not the enemy of Religion. " Abraham's faith is famous because, notwithstanding

objections to the contrary, he did not blindly break through them nor wink hard at them, but looked them in the face." His own age he regarded as the worst that ever was and ripe for judgment.

Business men he warned of the spiritual and intellectual atrophy

that went with an exclusive desire for gain (Sermons, i. 36). Men in Society he warned of their insincerity in bandying hollow compliments—so much so that " our language is running into a lie" (Sermons, ii. 1). Yet even here his good sense did not desert him. We carry our rewards and penalties with us into the world to come. There will be cooler degrees of Hell for the less blame-worthy 1 Such is the pith of the 264 Sermons that are part of our national inheritance. The orator himself was a man of middle height with florid countenance and heavy jowl. So great was the interest when he preached that men would stand rather than vacate the only opportunity they could get to hear him. Yet, as with all our greatest pulpit-orators, the sermons were read from full shorthand notes deciphered by his wife before they were published to the world—the booksellers offering for the MS. copy the astonishing sum (as Macaulay truly says) of 2,500 guineas. He was pre-eminently the Chrysostom of the pulpit. And these Sermons everywhere betray the breadth and candour and liberality and inconsistency of Cinysostom's type of mind, not least exemplified by his love of expounding " the Bible and the Bible only" from a standpoint rather Greek than Latin, rather objective than subjective, more Arminian than Augustinian. Like Chrysostom, he was fond of citing the very words of the Greek Testament, correcting the common translation as he goes. And, while he heartily defended the reality of miracles, he was fond of quoting Chrysostom's reason for their early discon. tinuance in the Church. ra6rqs ri r atAgaxlas oken &frac. (" Our religion no longer stands in need of this kind of support.") Such is the language of Reason as well as of Revelation.

Next week the Pan-Anglican Lambeth Conference of some 300 Bishops meets. This Conference owes much of its original initiative to Archbishop Tait. His Diary for the year of its inauguration (1867) records the characteristic entry : " I thought the Homeward tendency more dangerous for our clergy than the tending towards Free thought." That is precisely the attitude of mind that Tillotson would have adopted. In presence of the Anglo-Catholic Congress, headed by the irresponsible and obscurantist Bishop of Zanzibar and supported by " forty Masses " (presumably " offered with intention " of disturbing the home Episcopate and the Government), we may well be thankful that the course of its proceedings will be guided by a son-in-law of Tait. In hoc signo vines.

A. H. T. CLARKE.