CHAPTER XVIII. I. The eloquence of the church at the close of the 17th and during the 18th century; Tillotson.-II. Chillingworth and Cudworth.-III. Sancroft and the Nonjurors; Jeremy Collier.-IV. Beveridge and Sherlock.-V. Burnet.— VI. Character of Atterbury.—VII. Changes of public taste and opinion. - VIII. Warburton, Clarke, Seed, Blair, Paley.-IX. Conclusion. A NEW style of pulpit eloquence began in Tillotson. Warburton-with a daring obliviousness of Pearson-called him the first city divine who talked rationally and wrote purely. Surviving Taylor twenty-seven years, and beholding all his descending lustre, he made no effort to catch any of his lights. He found more available materials in Barrow. Burnet ascribed to him the art of preserving the majesty of things under the simplicity of words. And it is not only curious, but instructive, to observe the rapidity and extent of his success. His most illustrious predecessors were lost in his shade. Addison used his name to give emphasis to a panegyric of style; and Dryden attributed his own vigour to the study of his works; a confession that excited the wonder of Gray, who admired the prose of the poet almost as much as the verse. Nor was his reputation confined to his own country. Maury received him into his gallery as the first of English orators; and one of the noblest passages he wrote "If God were not a necessary Being, He might almost seem to be made for the use and benefit of men," was plundered and melted down by Voltaire into a single line "Si Dieu n'existait, il faudroit l'inventer."1 He is most happy where he simplifies Barrow; for his manner has little symmetry or grace; he said, that to carve a beautiful image requires much art and dexterity, and his chisel has left few specimens of their application. Certainly, we do not recognise in him the characteristics of Dryden;the employment of the simplest language with dignity, and the most adorned with ease. His doctrinal opinions have been severely handled; but his toleration was chiefly confined to a liberty of discretion in small matters. He generally appears in a group of writers, of whom the names, more than the works, are familiar to modern ears Chillingworth, Cudworth, and Whichcot. Chillingworth, indeed, died in the boyhood of Tillotson, and might, perhaps, more justly have claimed a niche in a former chapter; but the chain of intellectual relationship unites them. Remarkable, es 1 Sir James Mackintosh, who pointed out the plagiarism suggested Tillotson's original in the second chapter of Ciceros' Treatise, De Natura Deorum. pecially for the acuteness of his reasoning faculties, he possessed ample erudition, and knew how to set both on fire with occasional flames of a rough but impressive eloquence; striking the reader more forcibly, because it is unexpected. A fine image seems to disengage itself from his intricate paragraphs, like a shape of beauty winding through the dark walks and twisted trees of an old garden. Cudworth, with less lucidness of argument, resembled him in amplitude of observation. Leibnitz discovered in the Intellectual System,' great learning, but small reflection; and the quaint remark of Goodman may often be remembered with advantage, in the 17th century, as well as in our own; that, while reading only lifts us to the level of an author, meditation sets us upon his shoulders, and enables us to see further than he ever saw or could see. There is reason to regret that Cudworth did not bequeath to us less philosophy and more sermons. His discourse on the true nature of our Lord's Supper is composed with great massiveness and grandeur of language,— " Choice words and measured phrase, above the reach Of ordinary men, a stately speech." The life of Sancroft, upon whose fall Tillotson rose, forms a poetical episode in our church history. The author is shone upon by the man. Driven from his house at Lambeth, and unable to find an abiding place in London, he retired to a remote village to lay his white head on a cottage pillow; leaving behind him for a vindication and an epitaph, "In the great integrity of my heart, I did it." Ken occupies a larger space in our literature. The slight remains of his pulpit exercises correspond with the simpleness and pathos of his rhymes, and contain a few passages of higher excellence. But of all the band that Sancroft led into poverty, Jeremy Collier, in a literary sense, is the most remarkable. An historian, learned and dignified; an essayist, combining with some of Montaigne's sprightliness, the reflective attitude of Bacon; and a controversialist, who whipped Vanbrugh into decency, and made the pen tremble in the hand of Dryden. The fierceness of the bigot sometimes inflames the piety of the Christian; but the temper of his genius was not unlovely. He was descended from the old family of intellect, of which the 17th century beheld the decay, if not the extinction. The true children of those fathers, in all their majesty of stature and bloom of feature, we are not soon to behold. What has been said of the coming of a second Shakspere is also applicable to a second Hooker. "Like the dew of the early morning, darkness must once more envelope the earth, before we can gaze on it again." The Nonjuring secession produced very important effects upon our theological literature. The fertility of the field remained, after the stream had flowed back into its accustomed channel. The antiquities and ritual of the Church were henceforward to be objects of research and interest; and the elaborate investigations of modern scholars are the fruit of seed then scattered by poor and despised husbandmen, who did not take their hands from the plough, because the lines had fallen to them in rough places. Their biography is not brilliant; it makes no vehement appeal to our passions of astonishment or grief; and wants the elevation of the epic, not less than the pathos of the dramatic in history. struggles awake little of the sympathy that swells our hearts at the heroic deeds of the Reformation, or the suffering victims of Cromwell. But the sacrifices of principle have always in them something of a divine nature. Their Beveridge contributed to the good work of enabling men to give a reason for the faith that was in them. His sincere homeliness was well calculated for impression. According to Nelson, he had a way of touching the consciences of his hearers, that seemed to revive the spirit of the apostolic age. Even more than Tillotson, he must have been instrumental in revolutionising the pulpit. If much was lost of splendour and variety, much also was gained in harmony and fitness. The virtues of the Gospel were illustrated by it. The chips of Seneca, and all his dry bundles of rhetoric, were swept aside. keys of Peter no more "A christen'd Jove adorn, Nor Pan to Moses lends his pagan horn." The His sermons upon St. John, i. 29, and Psalm cxxii. 1, are excellent specimens of a manner which, instead |