A LIFE OF JOHN COSIN.•
'Sus debt that the Church of England owes to John Cosin, great as it is, has never been recognized by the tribute of a popular biography. And this is the more wonderful since the circumstances of his life were so various, and in themselves so interesting. The secretary first of the scholarly Bishop Overall, and then of the rich Bishop Neils, he profited from each master, after his kind. From the former he learned "to know good authors," and to the end of his life retained respect for the opinions of " that rare and excellent man," " my lord and master "; from the latter be gained his first entrance, as Prebendary, into the Cathedral Church at Durham. There he played the part, as afterwards at Peterbouse when he became Master, of introducer of the Laudian ceremonial, and incurred the displeasure of another Prebendary, Peter Smart, who not only preached against him, as "our young Apollo, who repaireth the Quire, and sets it out gayly with strange Babylonish ornaments," but indicted him at the Assizes, and when this failed, before the House of Commons. During the Commonwealth be was in attendance upon Queen Henrietta Maria in Paris, and performed the invaluable service of restraining from the Roman Church the many impor- tant people who assembled at the English Court. For ' his pains he was left to the chance of starvation. At the Restoration he was rewarded with the bishopric of Durham, and had the opportunity of performing the greatest service of his life to his beloved Church, in the revision of the Book of Common Prayer. To his liturgical knowledge and skill the Prayer Book owes, there can be no doubt, the most of what was best in the additions it then received ; such as the exquisite collect for Easter Even, and those more magnificently rhetorical ones for the third Sunday in Advent and the sixth Sunday after Epiphany. From his Collection of Private Devotions, a little manual compiled by him in 1627, in order that the Protestant ladies of the Queen's Court might " appear as devout, and be so too" (to quote Evelyn's words), as the "new-come-overFrench ladies," the Revisers took his fine version of "Veni Creator," " Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire," which wee placed by the side of the older version in the Ordinal, and has found its way into all hymn-books. (The lines in the same Book of Devotions beginning, "Let not the sluggish sleep," which Mr. Osmond attributes to Cosin, come from Byrd's Psalms.) But these definite and appreciable contribu- tions to the Prayer Book, as we know it, represent a very small part of the influence exercised over the revision by Cosin's pre-eminent learning and sound instinct.
While welcoming, then, Mr. Osmond's volume as an attempt to vepay a debt long overdue, and recognizing the very great pains he has spent upon his task, we cannot pronounce the result to be satisfactory. Mr. Osmond is not content to give us a picture of Cosin as he was; he must be always praising or
'blieming him, according as he comes up to, or falls short of, 'the standard of modern Anglicanism as Mr. Osmond himself understands it. In consequence, what he has given us is not a biography, but a polemical tract; and we can never feel sure, when his own personal interests are concerned, that Cosin's views are fully and accurately given. Take, for example, a very material point in regard to the interpretation of the Ornaments rubric. Mr. Osmond says:-
"Cosin had, in his ' Considerations,' urged the advisability of
• A Lis of John Costa, Bishop of Durham. By P. H. Osmond. London: A. M. Moveny. Las. ed. nat.] specifying the particular 'ornaments used in the second year of King Edward, that there might be no difference about them.' Wren had also recommended that a list should be set down in express words, without these uncertainties which breed nothing but debate and scorn.' They had accordingly drafted the rubric, exactly as we have it now, but with the additional clause 'That is . to say. . . Obviously the intention was that the row of points should be filled up with a list of the ornaments ordered under the rubric eosin's opinion as to what those ornaments were will be fully considered in a subsequent chapter, when a general survey of his views will be attempted."
The subsequent chapter contains extracts from Cosin's notes upon the meaning of the rubric, which are generally in the sense that the rubric prescribes the vestments of Edward's First Prayer Book. But in neither place does Mr. Osmond mention the fact that, in Cosin's corrected copy from which he quotes, the "row of points" is actually filled up by the words "a surplice, &c." Parker says :"The words 'a surplice' have been written in with darker ink than the rest, and so at a different time." Clearly it was the bounden duty of any one who undertook to discuss Cosin's view of the rubric not to suppress this fact, however he may interpret it. If he believes the handwriting not to be eosin's, he should have said so; though neither Parker nor Ornsby (who first printed these notes in his edition of Cosin's Correspondence for the Surtees Society) expresses any doubt of the fact.
Mr. Osmond's way of treating Cosin's view of the relations between the English Church and the Protestant Churches of Europe is not more satisfactory. After -stating that his "conciliatory attitude towards the reformed bodies abroad distressed some of his friends," whom he does not name, "and would be endorsed to-day by very few Churchmen, who are in sympathy with his general churchmatiship," which is not to the point, he sums up as follows :— "Cosin was not, indeed, the only theologian in those difficult times to take this irregular line about the ministry of the Reformed Churches abroad. But it is manifest that, apart from being ill-informed as to his facts and misled by his devotion to Overall's memory, be was prejudiced by an avowed anxiety to support the Protestant party, and still more, perhaps, by a sense of exasperation against the Papists, who had bitterly attacked him from the moment of his arrival in Paris."
"Cosin was not, indeed, the only theologian " ! Indeed he was not. Can Mr. Osmond be unaware that Coain's attitude was the regular attitude of the English Church P But in a volume of such pretension as this it was incumbent upon the author to set out the facts clearly and fully, if not dispas- sionately, so that the reader might have some chance of understanding the mind of the age on this matter. But Mr. Osmond bas preferred to write a party pamphlet. We have not. space to follow Mr. Osmond in his attack upon Cosin for truckling to the King, a charge entirely unsupported by evidence; or to discuss the low view he takes in many points of his personal character. A specially gross instance is the unwarrantable charge he makes against him of "disin- genuous boastfulness" on his own tombstone. We must content ourselves with transcribing one peerless sentence in which he apologizes for his hero's defence of the remarriage of the innocent party in a divorce suit, a defence which represented Cosin's strong conviction and which he pub- lished:- " Learned and orthodox theologians of our own time have agreed with Cosin's contention that remarriage should not be forbidden to the innocent party to a divorce ; but very probably, if he had been living to-day, he would have supported those who would forbid a remarriage with the rites of the Church, since a civil marriage is so easily obtainable—a solution of the difficulty which could not then have occurred to him."
Previous page
