till it had been fully proved in that assembly by what right the epithet appertained to him or to his office." Yet of this opinion

who bas perused Bishop Burnet's sermons on public occasions, as well as some of his other productions, will be inclined on this point to address him in the language of scripture, "Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" For there are fewer traces of any thing that resembles fawning or flattery in Laud than in Burnet. 1 shall embrace another opportunity to shew the difference between the influence which Laud exerted over the Duke of Buckingham, and that which was exercised by Archbishop Abbot. At his entrance on a court-life, Laud found no great statesman like Lord Burleigh, in Queen Elizabeth's days, when the Lambeth Articles were abrogated, who could apprize his sovereign of the injurious tendency of rigid predestinarian prin ciples when pushed to their obvious consequences. He soon discovered that the Duke of Buckingham, a nobleman of some talents, possessed such an ascendancy over king James the First and his royal son, as is usually accounted the power of a strong mind upon one that is weaker; and as the royal favourite was the common attraction of all parties for their own private benefit, and was consequently a man of no fixed principles or consistent con duct, Bishop Laud resolved to win him over to the public benefit of the Church, which was then in a suffering and abject condition. The reader has already seen the manner in which Laud prevailed with some men of eminence in the literary world, when he was desirous through them to promote the interests of his royal master; and he was equally successful in attaching to the service of the Church and of the State the Duke of Buckingham, and afterwards the Earl of Strafford. The felicitous results of that particular enterprize, which with the others is in proof of his great abilities, offended those men in power, who had accounted the Duke a creature of their own, that was enlisted in their service and entirely devoted to their interests. Any man of competent literary acquirements, who would engage in such a labour, might produce abundance of proofs from the correspondence of the Calvinists themselves, that nearly all the contumely and opposition encoun tered by Laud during life, arose from the powerful court-influence that he gained in favour of the doctrines of General Redemption, which, though explicitly recognized and taught in the public formularies of the church, were objects of supreme aversion to those who were then entrusted with the chief management of affairs ecclesiastical. Yet in effecting these desirable purposes, Bishop Laud was never betrayed into any mean action or servile compliance that was unbefitting either a gentleman, a christian, or a bishop; but this cannot be said, with truth, concerning those who have been among the most acrimonious of his censurers. His intimacy with the Duke was of the greatest personal service to that nobleman. It rendered him a more considerate and prudent man, and consequently a more efficient member of his Majesty's Council; and it has been well observed of the Duke," if he had lived a few years longer, to have seen through the temptations of greatness, he might have proved as great a pillar of this State as any that went before him."-The firmness of mind and self-devotion, that were throughout life eminently conspicuous in the Archbishop, have been well described by Dr. Heylin, who, after shewing the desolating effects of the prevalence of Calvinism in Oxford, gives the following account of the liberal course of Laud's studies at the University in 1598" But Laud, being forged and hammered on a better anvil, would not be wrought on by the times, or captivate his understanding to the names of men, how great soever they appeared in the eyes of others. Nor would he run precipitately into common opinions, (for common opinions many times are but common errors,) as Calderinus is reported to have gone to mass, because he would not break company with the rest of his friends. His studies in divinity he had founded on the Holy Scriptures, according to the glosses and interpretations of the ancient fathers; for doing which he had the countenance and direction of a canon made in Convocation, Anno 1571, by which it was appointed, "That, ' in interpreting the scriptures, they were to raise no other doctrines from

the Archbishop has, by several of his ignorant accusers, been depicted as the first and chief patron. The injustice of such an

them than what had been collected thence by the ancient fathers, and other godly bishops of the primitive times. And laying to this line the established doctrines and determinations of the Church of England, it was no hard matter to him to discern how much the church had deviated from her self, or most men rather from the church, in those latter times; how palpably the articles had been wrested from the literal and grammatical sense, to fit them to the sense of particular persons; how a different construction had been put upon them, from that which was the true and genuine meaning of the men that framed them, and the authority which confirmed them; and finally, that it would be a work of much glory, but of much more merit, to bring her back again to her native principles. But then withal, it was as easy to discern how desperate an attempt it must needs appear for a single man, unseconded, and not well befriended, to oppose himself against an army; how vain a thing to strive against so strong a stream, and cross the current of the times; that the disease by long neglect was grown so natural and habitual, that more mischief might be feared from the medicine, than from the malady; that he must needs expose himself to many censures and reproaches, and possibly to some danger also, by the undertaking. But these last considerations, being weighed in the scale of the sanctuary, appeared so light, that he was resolved to try his fortune in the work, and to leave the issue thereof unto God, by whom Paul's planting and Apollo's watering do receive increase."-From these and other brief notices it will be perceived, that even the most culpable parts of Laud's conduct admit of great palliation, if not of complete defence; and his frequent and candid acknowledgments of the impetuosity of his natural disposition, notwithstanding Bishop Burnet's insinuation to the contrary, (653,) shew him in an amiable light and prove him to have been an upright moral character, and most exemplary in all his private relations, but especially in his secret intercourse with God as his Father and his Judge, through Christ his Intercessor and Atoning Sacrifice. In the judgment of all charitable persons he will be acquitted of many grievous charges, if he be allowed to plead his own cause, as he did in Sept. 1643, when he replied to some accusations, “that the words charged upon him at the Council-table and elsewhere, might well have been spared; that no ill effect did follow on them; and that they were innocently though suddenly spoken,-which, he hoped, might, without involving him in the crime or guilt of treason, proceed from a man of such a hasty and uncircumspect humour as himself, made so, as well by nature as by the multiplicity of vexations which were put upon him, &c. Grant me, indeed, but one small and not unreasonable concession, similar to that which in our days is demanded for the personal obliquities of every republican demagogue or petty Independent pastor under the Commonwealth,-allow me to plead a consideration of the aspect of the times, the peculiar difficulties of his situation, and the inflamed state of parties, and will undertake to prove, that Laud's patriotism was in reality purer and more disinterested, than that of any of his Calvinistic cotemporaries, who had an opportunity of displaying the genuineness of their patriotism in their public actions.

But these observations are merely personal. When, however, we briefly advert to the general proposition at the commencement of this note in reference to the great body of English Arminians, we shall find it to be still less teaable, than when it is applied to Laud and Juxon. In Appendix M, it will be shewn, that the Arminians had strong reasons for appealing to the Articles and other Formularies of the Church of England, in support of the doctrines of General Redemption; and the remark quoted from Phillips in page 676, will appear very correct: “Nothing can be called the doctrine of the Church, that is not so declared by the whole clergy, lawfully assembled in Convocation." By such a "lawful assemblage," the Predestination to life, which restrains itself to "a few particular persons without any respect to their faith in Christ or to Christ's sufferings and death for them," has never yet been declared to be the doctrine of the Church; or that "the few particular

assumption will be rendered apparent by a reference to Balcanqual's Latin Journal of the proceedings of that Synod, and to

persons, thus predestinated to life eternal, shall by an irresistible grace be brought to God, and by the infallible conduct of the Holy Spirit be preserved from falling away from grace and favour." But " a lawful Convocation of the Clergy" has avowed, at the close of the Seventeenth Article," that we must receive God's promises in such wise as they be generally set forth to us in Holy Scripture; and that, in all our doings, that will of God is to be followed which we have expressly declared to us in the word of God." How inconsistent such a "declaration" is with the habitude of Calvinism, I have shewn in various parts of this volume, but more particularly in pages 432 and 668. By comparing those two notes together, the reader will discern, that the Calvinists considered the Articles of the Church of England not to be sufficiently explicit on unconditional election and reprobation, and consequently to require emendation in that point as well as in others; and that, though the most exasperated of his enemies could never accuse Archbishop Laud of any desire or endeavour to amend the DOCTRINES of the Church, however loud and bitter might be their complaints about his reputed innovations with regard to CEREMONIES, yet they could never forgive his attempt to give a greater prominence to the last clause of the Seventeenth Article, which prominence he virtually gave, nearly in the very expressions of that clause, in the King's Declaration of 1628, quoted in page 668. In the Life of Laud, Dr. Heylin says, “Nothing better proves the doctrine of the Church, in the points of Election and Reprobation, than the Church itself, by holding forth—the universal redemption of all mankind by the death of Christ,-the free co-operation of the will of man with the grace of God, in the chief acts of his conversion,-the possibility of falling into grievous sins, into God's displeasure, and consequently from the grace received: All which are utterly destructive of Calvin's doctrine in this point." The Doctor then proceeds to confirm all these Arminian tenets, by apposite quotations from the Articles and Public Liturgy, which it is unnecessary here to repeat, as others of a similar description will afterwards be given. The men who had such strong-holds as these in the established Articles and Liturgy, under which they might with perfect congruity shelter themselves and their scriptural sentiments, were under no necessity whatever of deriving their reputed Arminianism from Holland; for the benign doctrines of General Redemption were constituent parts of the Creed of the National Church of England long before the birth of Arminius. Some of her admirable and unaltered Arminian features are exhibited in the following sketch from Dr. HAMMOND's very eloquent PARENESIS or Seasonable Exhortation to all true sons of the Church of England, which he wrote in 1656, after Cromwell had issued his severe and tyrannical interdict against the Episcopal clergy: (page 419) When the characters or discriminative marks of the English Reformation are two:-ONE, the conforming all our doctrines to the Primitive Antiquity, receiving all genuine Apostolical traditions for our rule, both in matters of faith and government :-THE OTHER, in uniting that fair and beautiful pair of FAITH and WORKS in the same degree of necessity and conditionality both to our justification and salvation, and to all the good works of justice and mercy of which the Romanist speaks, adjoining that other most eminent one of humility, attributing NOTHING TO OURSELVES When we have done all, but ALL TO THE GLORY OF THE MERCY AND GRACE OF GOD, purchased for us by Christ;-it is but just, that they who have walked unworthy of such guides and rules as these, who have lived so contrary to our profession, should at length be deprived of both, not only to have our two staves broken, BEAUTY and BANDS,' the symbols of order and unity, (Hosea iii, 4,) both which have now for some years taken their leaves of us, but even to have the whole fabric demolished, the house to follow the pillars' fate, and so to be left; and to abide without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim,' deprived of all our ornaments, left uaked and bare, when we had misused our beauty unto wantonness."-The conclusion of this affecting passage will convey much

the trimming conduct of King James, whose extreme predilection for Popery has been already recorded and blamed. (See

instruction to the attentive reader, in addition to the purpose for which it has been quoted.

Though the immense advantages of a Confession and Rubric of such a catholic amplitude as that of the National Church have been ascertained on more than one great crisis in the ecclesiastical history of this country; yet those advantages were never more conspicuously displayed than when the attempt was made by Laud and his able co-adjutors to revive Arminianism. This scriptural system, under a different name, had been professed by many of the Martyrs in queen Mary's days; and had been publicly taught both from the Chair and the Pulpit during the reign of queen Elizabeth, who by the advice of Lord Burleigh withheld her royal sanction from the Lambeth Articles, which had been surreptitiously and cunningly framed with the avowed design of discountenancing the spreading doctrines of General Redemption. The pragmatical conduct of king James in the affair of the Synod of Dort, and his subsequent endeavours to maintain some degree of consistency by an awkward and evidently reluctant encouragement of Calvinism, gave an alarming preponderance to that rigid system of Predestination, and rendered it a work of extreme difficulty on the part of those to whom the care of the established religion was afterwards consigued, to induce the members of the Church to recur to some of its first principles, which, through disuse, had become inefficacious and nearly obsolete. The succeeding long period of peace and plenty, which is described with classic simplicity by Lord Clarendon in page 309, assisted in fixing the yoke of Calvinism upon the necks of Englishmen. For the soothing doctrine of eternal irrespective election is flattering to the pride of man, and always succeeds when it is artfully applied to a people immersed in luxury, who seldom delight to hear much concerning works of mercy and justice, of self-denial and cross-bearing. St. Augustine was one of the first of the Ancient Christian Fathers who speculated deeply on the unrevealed will of heaven' with regard to the eternal destinies of individuals; and though several modern authors, who have written with much confidence on this subject, make no distinction between the Predestinarian opinions of that Father and those of Calvin, yet all who have compared them together will not require to be told, that the latter held far more rigid and fatal tenets than any which had been taught by St. Augustine or his immediate successors. As Calvin outstripped this Father, so on some points connected with this unrevealed sort of Predestination Beza outstripped Calvin; on others Zanchy transcended Beza; and the climax was completed by a regular gradation upwards, through Perkins, Piscator, Gomarus, and Lubbertus, to Maccovius, Archer and Twisse.-The most learned and ingenuous of these individuals confessed, that their Predestinarian opinions were beyond what was written in the Holy Scriptures, and received no countenance from the Ancient Fathers who lived prior to the age of Augustine. This principle of defection both from the SCRIPTURES and from the Fathers was of very dangerous tendency, especially in a Church that acknowledged the FORMER as the sole unadulterated fountain of its faith, and the latter as the only conduit which conveyed the pellucid waters in refreshing purity. Its baneful effects may be traced in the Church of England, from the Dispersion under the persecuting Mary down to the commencement of the reign of King James, before the tenets of Arminius as such were promulgated in England: For it will be found, that, with very few exceptions, the most violent Puritans and the greatest sticklers against the prescribed ceremonies, during that period, were always the highest Predestinarians; and that their best and most successful opponents were generally learned and pious individuals, who were as conspicuous for their attachment to the doctrines of General Redemption as to the decent rites and observances of the Ancients. The very principle which impelled men to speculate on matters which were not among the revealed verities of heaven, induced them at the same time to give the reins to their imaginations in inventing modes of worship different from those which were

page 557.) This important fact was studiously concealed in that age, by those whose party prejudices were concerned in it's

enjoined by public authority. That this principle was inherent in the system of Calvinism itself, and not a bare creature of circumstances, is proved by the immense diversity of predestinarian schemes, as well as new forms of devotion, which were produced in Great Britain during the Interregnum, though the Confession of Faith fabricated by the Westminster Assembly of Divines was highly Calvinistic. This fact admits of further and stronger proof from the conduct of foreign churches, some of whose Confessions of Faith were more decided in favour of rigid predestination than that of England; yet in those very churches, whose Calvinism was of the most refined description, many writers arose who indulged in diversified fancies concerning the modes and procedure of the Divine Decrees, beyond both the letter and the spirit of their different Confessions. That the same foreign writers on Predestination did not as universally as the speculative Calvinists in England busy themselves in framing new modes of worship as well as of faith, is easily accounted for when it is recollected, that the Predestinarian churches to which they belonged were under the Presbyterian form of government, and that in several of those countries this propensity to innovation was discountenanced and forbidden by the civil magistrate. But in other countries, as in the United Provinces and some of the minor German States, in which a toleration of religion was admitted, this innovating principle displayed itself as amply as in England during the Protectorate. The reader will not require me to point out to him the practical difference, in both these respects, between the Calvinistic parties whom I have designated in this paragraph on the one part, and the moderate Lutherans throughout Europe and those who were accounted the chief patrons of Arminianism in this country on the other part: For, the two latter, even when they enjoyed opportunities for innovation, were evidently under the restraint of the purer, more social, and uniform spirit of their Creeds, and in consequence meddled not with those who were given to change either in Church or State.

The existence of this principle of innovation among the Calvinists will solve the phenomenon, that all the English Arminians were in that age members of the Episcopal Church, and that not a single congregation of them was to be discovered among the numerous sects that had then separated from the ecclesiastical establishment. This remarkable phenomenon is seen to have been purely accidental; and the English Arminians did not forsake the cause of civil liberty," but many of them thought they contributed best to its security when they became "assertors of the prerogative royal." After the period of the Synod of Dort, when every doctrine or practice that connected itself with General Redemption became unpopular, and more particularly after Archbishop Laud had attained to some influence in the government, the public profession of Arminianism, instead of being (as it has generally been depicted) "the direct road to fame and honour," resembled in most instances the early profession of Christianity itself, in being an actual choosing of obloquy, disgrace, and a living species of martyrdom. When Laud first attempted to direct the attention of the elergy to the neglected tenets of their own church on the subject of Generat Redemption, at least three-fourths of the right reverend occupiers of the Episcopal Bench were decided Calvinists; and their ranks had not been so greatly thinned by death, in the fifteen succceding years, as many persons have imagined. Indeed, the greatest single creation of Bishops that took place at any subsequent period of that age consisted entirely of Calvinists, as will be shewn in the second volume. How unenviable the condition of Arminian clergymen must have been in those dioceses over which a Bishop of Calvinistic sentiments presided, may easily be conceived. But their condition was not desirable, even in those Bishoprics in which their opinions received countenance and support from their ecclesiastical superiors: For though those superiors were very naturally inclined to bestow their patronage on such as co-incided with them in sentiment, yet they were scarcely