THE NONJURORS.•

THE moving history of the Nonjurors and Nonabjurors is one that can to-day be studied with sympathy and interest, and

without prejudice. There are few more pathetic stories of loyalty to principles than that of the " deprived Fathers " who refused to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary in 1689, and of their followers and successors. It shines through the selfishness, the self-interest, the corruption and materialism of the eighteenth century like a little candle in a naughty world.

Wrong-headed and absurd as the movement, especially in its latter pathetic developments, such as the attempted union with the Eastern Church, seems to us in many ways to have been, yet its very foolishness had an aspect of spiritual sublimity that did much to preserve spiritual life in the nation during a period of peculiar grossness.

Canon Overton, in a volume marked by accuracy, care- fulness, and kindly sympathy, tells once again in an easy conversational style the old story in the light of some new evidence, though some important material, including, we think, Sancroft's posthumous papers, has not been fully drawn upon. Those who read it will find the story of the Nonjurors told in full biographical detail and with notable fairness. It is a strange story. By a statute of 1688 (1 W. & M., c. 8, s. 7) it was enacted that if any Archbishop or Bishop or any other beneficed person neglected or refused to take the oaths appointed by the Act before August 1st, 1689, he was to be suspended for six months from that date ; and if within the six months the oaths were not taken, " then

he or they shall be ipso facto deprived, and are hereby adjudged to be deprived of his and their Offices, Bene- fices, Dignities, and Promotions Ecclesiastical." The next

section applied the same principle to the masters, heads, and fellows of any colleges or schools. Among those who conscientiously refused to take the oaths on the ground that they had already sworn to be faithful to James IL, " his heirs and lawful successors," were William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury ; Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely ; John Lake, Bishop of Chichester ; William Thomas, Bishop of Worcester ; Thomas White, Bishop of Peterborough ; Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells ; William Lloyd, Bishop of Norwich; Robert Frampton, Bishop of Gloucester ; and Thomas Cartwright, Bishop of Chester. Cartwright cannot be reckoned among the Nonjurors, not only because he did not live to be deprived, but also because his deprivation was certain for personal causes in any case. Thomas and Lake also died before deprivation, but they were Nonjurors in will. Of these " deprived Fathers," five —Sancroft, Turner, Lake, White, and Ken—had been among " the seven Bishops " imprisoned in the Tower in June, 1688.

Lloyd, Bishop of Norwich, one of the " deprived Fathers," had only by an accident not accompanied the seven to prison. Now he and Frampton, Bishop of Gloucester, took the place of the Bishops of St. Asaph and Bristol, and so " the sacred number seven" still measured the spiritual force that resisted temporal force. With the exception of the two last-named Bishops, Canon Overton tells us, " the bishops who effectually resisted King James in the time of his power were the very same men who stood by him in his adversity, suffering, for the first, imprisonment, and for the second the loss of all their worldly goods and prospects. And, so far from there being any inconsistency between their conduct on the one occasion and on the other, it was exactly the same principle which actuated them on both, and exactly the same moral courage and supreme reverence for conscience on both which enabled them to carry that principle into action." This fact appears, indeed, to have been well recognised in 1689 by many earnest thinkers, and it is put well by a tract- writer—not quoted, we think, by Canon Overton—who in that year endeavoured by force of reasoning to bring Sancroft and his Bishops back to the path of reasonableness. The tract is entitled "A Letter to a Bishop concerning the present Settlement, and the New Oaths." The writer declares :—

" It is not without great injustice that some of those gentlemen who have put pen to paper in defence of the new oaths, take the liberty of charging these bishops as if their present dissatisfactions did spring from pride, interest, humour, obstinacy, or a fear of The Nonjurors : their Lires, Principles, and Writings. By J. H. Overton, D.D., Rector of Gumley and Canon of Lincoln. London ; Smith, Elder, and Co. 116s.] having their wings clipt in this new settlement ; I am confident that they which charge any of these things upon these venerable and excellent men, do not know them, and they write as if they had never heard anything of them before this unhappy rupture. Undoubtedly they who could go to a jail, and were ready to be ruined in their estates, and to sacrifice themselves for the two best things in the world, the Church of England, and the laws of the land, do deserve no such character. I am persuaded that what their lordships, and many others with them, do in this respect, proceeds purely from conscience, and that if themselves were so happy, or others for them, to satisfy their consciences about the present settlement, and the new oaths, they would as heartily comply with the present settlement, and act in it, as any other of their majesties subjects."

The writer—Thomas Comber, Dean of Durham—then pro- ceeded to argue that James II. by " a voluntary withdrawing

himself out of the kingdom" had released all oaths, as in the case of the Emperor Charles V. and Queen Christiana of Sweden ; and that obedience due to a King may arise through a throne being left empty or by a lawful conquest. Transference of allegiance in such cases has the sanction of Scripture. But the Nonjuring Bishops had passed out of the region of logic. Only a few men like William Sherlock—that " wandering Levite," as he is called in a tract that " a London apprentice of the Church of England" launched at him for taking the oaths in 1690—had the courage to turn back. Moreover, sterner laws tended to

stiffen the conscience of the Nonjurors. An Act of 1696 (7 & 8 Will. III., c. 27) rendered persons refusing the oaths liable to the penalties inflicted on Popish recusants, while an Act passed in 1701 (1 Anne, c. 22) required an

abjuration of allegiance to " James III." This was followed by the Act of 1714 (1 Geo. I., Stat. 2, c. 13) imposing a similar Oath of Abjuration. The Nonjurors and Nonabjurors heeded the weight of punitive legislation as little as they heeded the dictates of reason. The doctrine of passive obedience to those who had the divine right to reign rendered, apart from all oaths, the recognition of William of Orange and his successors impossible ; while the fact that the Church was a spiritual society which existed independently of the

State made a breach with the State a necessity when by the vie major of an Act of Parliament the Nonjuring Bishops

were ejected in 1697. " Their determination to render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's, even if they had to sacrifice every earthly advantage to do so, was balanced," says Canon Overton, " by a still stronger determination to render unto God the things that were God's.."' The Bishops in their proposals to James IL on the landing of William (see the tract, " An account of the late proposals of the Archbishop of Canterbury, with some other bishops, to his Majesty," not quoted in this volume) did all that seemed to them possible. The position seems to the modern mind, which sees in kingship an institution of political convenience based upon the Act of Settlement, maddeningly absurd. We are told in this book that " the Nonjurors must be judged by the standard of the seventeenth, not that of the twentieth century. Brought up in the Church principles of the earlier period, they could not comply without manifestly setting those principles at defiance." But this is not alto- gether so. The position of the Nonjuring Bishops on the point of deprivation by Act of Parliament was one that belongs to all ages. It had occurred in earlier ages and will occur again. It is the tragedy that inevitably arises when two ancient institutions at their point of juncture are found to disagree in principle. William rightly, from the Constitutional point of

view, removed the Bishops for refusing to take the oaths a allegiance to his temporal power; the Bishops rightly, from the spiritual point of view, refused to take the oaths because

they were enforced by temporal penalties that purported to• interfere with the spiritual life of the Church. Here lay all the elements of tragedy. The rupture was inevitable. The Bishops, "about four hundred beneficed clergy, a few un- beneficed, and a sprinkling of the laity " severed their connec- tion with the State.

It was almost one hundred and thirty years before the severance ended by the gradual and almost unconscious- coalescence of the two branches of the Church of England. When the Sees of the deprived Bishops were filled up, the• Fathers determined to continue the succession of what they believed to be the only true Church of England. On Feb- ruary 24th, 1694, George Hickes (1642-1715) and Thomas Wagstaffe (1645-1712) were consecrated as suffragan Bishops

in the manner prescribed in the Act of Henry VIII. On the death of Wagstaffe the only Bishop left was Hickes, for by that date all the " deprived Fathers " had passed away. On June 3rd, 1713, Hickes, with the aid of Bishops Archibald Camp- bell and James Gadderar, of the Scottish Church, consecrated Nathanael Spinckes, Jeremy Collier, and Samuel Hawes to be " Bishops at large." After the death of Dr. Hickes in 1715 Thomas Brett (1667-1743) and Henry Gandy (1649-1734) were consecrated as Bishops on St. Paul's Day, 1715-16. Suddenly the Usages Controversy broke out. Bishops Collier and Brett desired to introduce the First Prayer-book of King Edward VI., or at any rate a " primitive " liturgy, thus sanctioning the four " usages " of the mixed chalice, prayers for the faithful departed, prayers for the descent of the Holy Ghost on the Consecrated Elements, and the Oblatory Prayer. Spinckes stoutly maintained the existing Liturgy. After a struggle of thirteen years the two parties united "on the Usagers' terms about 1731, in which year Timothy Mawman was consecrated by three bishops, two of whom were Usagers and one a Non-Usager." The Non- jurors never, however, recovered the split in their ranks. Time, moreover, was against them, and though Gordon, their last Bishop of the regular succession, was to the date of his death in 1779 a sound and thoroughgoing Jacobite, the Stuart cause and the Nonjurist Church by that date were both practically dead. Gordon transferred the remnant of his people to the Scottish Bishops, and there, strictly speaking, the movement died. We have no space here to deal with the two irregular successions springing from consecrations by one Bishop only. The second of these really ended with the death of Bishop William Cartwright at Shrewsbury on October 14th, 1799, though the last two Bishops were Thomas Garnett, con- secrated by Cartwright in 1795, and Charles Booth, who died in Ireland in 1805. Nonjurist congregations are said to have met in the West of England until 1815. Further information on this point would be of much interest. Bishop Cartwright having formally abandoned the Jacobite position, and having recognised the Established Church, the rift within the lute was at last closed.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the significance of a movement that attracted to itself so much of what was best— best in spirituality, best in self-sacrifice, best in learning—of the England of the eighteenth century. We can afford to neglect the petty scandalous charges which Dr. Johnson and others brought against the party, but it may be admitted that Nonjurors often contained their souls in bitterness. It is said that a Nonjuror priest preached a funeral sermon for Queen Mary IL, from the text, " Take up this cursed woman and bury her, for she is a King's daughter,"—his King's daughter.