votes, as they are now called; for which service they were rewarded with no less than 500l. a-piece. About the same time also Nye was employed by the same masters to get subscriptions from the apprentices in London, &c. against a personal treaty with the king, while the citizens of that metropolis were petitioning for one. In April of the next year, he was employed, as well as Marshall and Joseph Caryl, by the Independents, to invite the secluded members to sit in the house again; but without success. In 1653, he was appointed one of the triers for the approbation of public preachers; in which office he not only procured his son to be clerk, but, with the assistance of his father-in-law, obtained for himself the living of St. Bartholomew, Exchange, worth 400l. a-year. In 1654, he was joined with Dr. Lazarus Seaman, Samuel Clark, Richard Vines, Obadiah Sedgwick, Joseph Caryl, &c. as an assistant to the commissioners appointed by parliament to eject such as were then called scandalous and ignorant ministers' and school-masters in the city of London. After Charles the Second's restoration, in 1660, he was ejected from the living of St. Bartholomew, Exchange; and it was even debated by the healing parliament, for several hours together, whether he, John Goodwin, and Hugh Peters, should be excepted for life: but the result was, that if Philip Nye, clerk, should, after the 1st of September, in the same year 1660, accept, or exercise, any office, ecclesiastical, civil, or military, he should, to all intents and purposes in law, stand as if he had been totally excepted for life.

He died in the parish of St. Michael, Cornhill, London, in Sept. 27, 1672, and was buried in the upper vault of the said church. Wood represents him to have been a dangerous and seditious person, a politic pulpit-driver of independency, an insatiable esurient after riches, and what not, to raise a family, and to heap up wealth; and his friends, while they give him the praise of considerable learning and abilities, allow that he engaged more in politics than became his profession. Calamy says but little in favour of his character. His works were, 1. "A Letter from Scotland, to his Brethren in England, concerning his

1 These were, 1. To acknowledge the war raised against him to be just. 2. To abolish episcopacy. 3. To settle the power of the militia in persons no

minated by the two houses. 4. To sacrifice all those that had adhered to him.

success of affairs there," 1643. Stephen Marshall's name is also subscribed to it. 2. "Exhortation to the taking of the Solemn League and Covenant, &c." 1643. 3. "The excellency and lawfulness of the Solemn League and Covenant," 1660, 2nd edit. 4. 4. "Apologetical Narration, sub.、 mitted to the honourable Houses of Parliament," 1643. To this there came out an answer, entitled "An Anatomy of Independency," 1644. 5. "An Epistolary Discourse about Toleration," 1644. 6. "The Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven and Power thereof," &c. 1664. 7. "Mr. An thony Sadler examined," &c. by our author's son, assisted by his father, 1654. 8. "The Principles of Faith presented by Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, &c. to the Committee of Parliament for Religion," &c. 1654. 9. "Beams of former Light," &c. 1660. 10. "Case of great and present Use," 1677. 11. "The Lawfulness of the Oath of Supremacy and Power of the King in Ecclesiastical Affairs, with queen Elizabeth's admonition," &c. 1683. It was then reprinted, and, being printed again in 1687, was dedicated by Henry Nye, our author's son, to James II. 12. "Vindication of Dissenters," &c. printed with the preceding, in 1683. 13. "Some account of the Nature, Constitution, and Power, of Ecclesiastical Courts," printed also with the former, in 1683, and other tracts. 1

NYSSENUS, GREGORY. See GREGORY.

! Ath. Ox. vol. II.-Calamy.-Wilson's Hist. of Dissenting Churches.

O.

OATES (TITUS), a very singular character, who flou

rished in the seventeenth century, was born about 1619. He was the son of Samuel Oates *, a popular preacher among the baptists, and a fierce bigot. His son was educated at Merchant Taylors' school, from whence he removed to Cambridge. When he left the university, he obtained orders in the church of England, though in his youth he had been a member of a baptist church in Virginia-street, Ratcliffe Highway, and even officiated some time as assistant to his father; he afterwards officiated as a curate in Kent and Sussex. In 1677, after residing some time in the duke of Norfolk's family, he became a convert to the church of Rome, and entered himself a member of the society of Jesuits, with a view, as he professed, to betray them. Accordingly, he appeared as the chief informer in what was called the popish plot, or a plot, as he pretended to prove, that was promoted for the destruction of the protestant religion in England, by pope Innocent XI.; cardinal Howard; John Paul de Oliva, general of the Jesuits at Rome; De Corduba, provincial of the Jesuits in New Castille; by the Jesuits and seminary priests in England; the lords Petre, Powis, Bellasis, Arundel of Wardour, Stafford, and other persons of quality, several of whom were tried, and executed, chiefly on this man's evidence; while public opinion was for a time very strongly in his favour. For this service he received a pension of 1200l. per annum, was lodged in Whitehall, and protected by the guards; but scarcely had king James ascended the

* There was another Samuel Oates or Otes, of Norfolk, who was of Corpus Christi college, Cambridge, and rector of Marsham and South Keppes, in his native county. He died in the early part of the seventeenth century, leav

ing "An Explanation of the General Epistle of St. Jude," which was published by his son Samuel, in 1633, fol.; but it does not appear that he was related to Oates the baptist.

throne, when he took ample revenge of the sufferings which his information had occasioned to the monarch's friends he was thrown into prison, and tried for perjury with respect to what he had asserted as to that plot. Being convicted, he was sentenced to stand in the pillory five times a year during his life, to be whipt from Aldgate to Newgate, and from thence to Tyburn; which sentence, says Neal, was exercised with a severity unknown to the English nation. "The impudence of the man," says the historian Hume, "supported itself under the conviction; and his courage under the punishment. He made solemu appeals to heaven, and protestations of the veracity of his testimony. Though the whipping was so cruel that it was evidently the intention of the court to put him to death by that punishment, yet he was enabled by the care of his friends to recover, and he lived to king William's reign, when a pension of 400l. a year was settled upon him. A considerable number of persons adhered to him in his distresses, and regarded him as a martyr to the protestant cause." He was unquestionably a very infamous character, and those who regard the pretended popish plot as a mere fiction, say that he contrived it out of revenge to the Je suits, who had expelled him from their body. After having left the whole body of dissenters for thirty years, he applied to be admitted again into the communion of the baptists, having first returned to the church of England, and continued a member of it sixteen years. In 1698, or 1699, he was restored to his place among the baptists, from whence he was excluded in a few months as a disor derly person and a hypocrite: he died in 1705. He is described by Granger as a man "of cunning, mere effrontery, and the most consummate falsehood." And Hume describes him as "the most infamous of mankind; that in early life he had been chaplain to colonel Pride; was afterwards chaplain on board the fleet, whence he had been ignominiously dismissed on complaint of some unnatural practices; that he then became a convert to the Catholics; but that he afterwards boasted that his conversion was a mere pretence, in order to get into their secrets and to betray them." It is certain that his character appears to have been always such as ought to have made his evidence be received with great caution; yet the success of his discoveries, and the credit given to him by the nation, by the parliament, by the courts of law, &c. and the favour

to which he was restored after the revolution, are circumstances which require to be carefully weighed before we can pronounce the whole of his evidence a fiction, and all whom he accused innocent.'

He

OBERLIN (JEREMIAH JAMES), an eminent classical scholar, editor, and antiquary, the son of a schoolmaster of Strasburgh, was born in that city Aug. 7, 1735. entered the university in 1750, and applied with great assiduity to the usual studies, but his particular attention was directed to the lectures of the celebrated Schoepflin, who was so well pleased with his ardour for instruction, that be permitted him the use of his excellent library, and his cabinet of antiquities, and there he imbibed that taste for investigating the monuments of ancient times, which became the ruling passion of his life. In 1757 he afforded the first indication of this, by sustaining a thesis on the ancient rites in burial, "Dissertatio philologica de veterum ritu condiendi mortuos." During three subsequent years he studied theology, but apparently rather as a philologer than a divine; and when Dr. Kennicott was endeavouring to procure the variations of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament from all Europe, Oberlin collated for him four manuscripts in the library of the university of Strasburgh, of which he afterwards, in his "Miscellanea Literaria Argentoratensia," published a description with specimens. In 1755 he became assistant to his father in the school which he taught at Strasburgh, and afterwards succeeded him in that situation, but his ambition was a professorship in the university, which, however, notwithstanding his growing reputation, he did not obtain for many years.

In the mean time, in 1763, he was appointed librarian to the university, a post highly agreeable to him on account of the advantages it afforded him in his literary pursuits, although it augmented his labours. In the same year permission was granted him of opening a public course of lectures on Latin style, and at length, in 1770, he was nominated adjunct to M. Loranz, in the chair of Latin eloquence. In this station he not only continued the lecture just mentioned, but opened courses on antiquities, ancient geography, diplomatics, &c. which were attended by considerable audiences. For the use of his pupils he published some valuable primæ lineæ of these sciences, which were

1 Hume's Hist.-Collier and Echard.-Wilson's Hist. of Merchant Taylors' School. Crosby's Hist. of the Baptists.-Burnet's Own Times.