THE NONJURORS.

H. P. K SKIPTON

On June 29th, 1688, the English nation went wild with delight at the release from custody of the Seven Bishops who resisted the attempt of a Papist King to force an illegal declaration upon the English Church. Events moved rapidly, as we all know; the Papist King fled and left his throne vacant, to be occupied, at the request of the Estates of the Realm, by his son-in-law, William, Prince of Orange One of the first acts of the new Ring and his Government was to impose a strongly-worded Oath of allegiance upon the clergy and all officials of the State The clergy, who were perfectly willing in general to accept the changes as inevitable, were not inclined to perjure themselves by taking an Oath in direct contradiction to that which they had already taken to King James, and which, moreover, obliged them to contradict in set terms that doctrine of Passive Obedience (which they called the Doctrine of the Cross). But the new King was obdurate, and five of the original Seven Bishops, with the Archbishop of Canterbury at their head, were driven from their cures to end their days in poverty; and with them went some four hundred clergy and an unknown number of laity. This was in August 1690. In 1688 the protesting Bishops had really incurred little risk of injury; in 1690 they were beggared, and knew the fate that awaited them. But in the latter case there was no popular demonstration, and they suffered for the most part in silence. It is the story of the movement thus initiated with which we are concerned. It is one of the biggest things to the credit of our Church, and it is certain that it has influenced her development much more than is generally realized.

The later story of the Church in England divides itself, after the formative period subsequent to the Reformation - its earlier history to the separation from Rome does not concern us here - into what seem a splendid trilogy. During the formative period the battle was waged as to whether Christianity in these islands should, like the Protestant movement on the Continent, cut itself definitely loose from Catholic tradition as embodied in the maintenance of episcopally-transmitted Orders, or whether it should claim its tie with the Catholic Church of all time by retaining the ministry which has come down from Apostolic times if not from,the Apostles themselves. Fortunately, the English Church decided definitely to maintain the essentials of Catholicism, taking up the position which she has ever since occupied; proclaiming on the one hand that "the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England" and on the other stiffly declining to forgo her right to be regarded as a true portion of the Church Catholic and an inheritor of its Apostolic ministry. Between these boundary lines considerable latitude of opinion has always been permitted, but beyond them loyal Churchmen must not stray. The year 1604, when Bancroft became Archbishop of Canterbury, was the close of,the formative period.

"The glories of the English Church ran in a parallel line with the glories of the English State. In the very year of the Spanish Armada, Bancroft had publicly asserted the exclusive claims of Episcopacy. Five years later, premising that `the Church of England, so refourmed by her Highnesse, is presently at this day the most Apostolike and flourishing Church simply that is in all Christendome,' he attacks the Nonconformists [of his day] in the most trenchant manner."

Worthies of All Souls ,
by Professor Montagu Burrows, 1874

With him were ranged Bishop Andrewes and other notable Churchmen. This is what came to be called Prelacy - you will remember how the divisions were marked by the Puritan minister in Scott's Peveril, when he prayed to be delivered from "Popery, Prelacy, and Peveril of the Peak." Thenceforward, as previously, our Church has never demanded re-ordination from clergy regularly ordained in the Roman or Orthodox Churches as a condition of admission to our ministry; while ministers of Protestant bodies have been required to accept regular ordination - sometimes conditionally - before being admitted to the ministry of our Church How strongly the Nonconformists felt the distinction between Prelacy and Protestantism is shown by an entry in the minutes of an ancient meeting-house in Connecticut: "On this day John Smith renounced Christianity, having become an Episcopalian." On the other hand, Scottish Presbyterians, holding as strongly as ourselves the principle of the necessity of valid Orders, declined a few years since to admit an ex-Wesleyan minister to their ministry without re-ordination, thereby raising a considerable storm, and so far justifying Milton's gibe - " New presbyter is but old priest writ large."

Each period of our Trilogy was marked by a fierce persecution, and by the final victory of the persecuted body. The first period I should define as that of Laud and Little Gidding, and as extending from 1604 to 1662, the year of the latest Revision of the Prayer-book, when the Laudian teaching was generally accepted, both officially and in practice. The next period, from 1662 to 1698 is that with which we are immediately concerned, and I should name it after the Nonjurors. Theirs was first a sharp and cruel persecution, and subsequently contemptuous neglect; but they won, inasmuch as they vindicated the faith for which they stood and handed. on the depositum (for which Ken accepted responsibility) intact to their successors, the Tractarians. The Tractarian movement which is still in progress, furnishes the third part of our Trilogy, and may be dated from the death of William Cartwright the last effective Bishop of the Nonjurors, in 1798. It has had its share of persecution as we all know, and it has so far won, if the fact that every church in England bears its impress is any sign of victory.

Though the denouement of the Nonjuring secession did not take place until 1690, the events which led up to it began much earlier, and for various reasons the year 1662 may be said to mark the turning-point During their enforced exile on the Continent, when the Prayer-Book was proscribed in England and its ministers persecuted and made to flee for their lives, the English clergy had interested themselves a good deal in liturgical studies, which bore fruit on their return in Cosin's energetic plea for the restoration of Eucharistic vestments (which he held to be authorized by the Ornaments Rubric), and in such views as those which Burnet attributes contemptuously to Bishop Peter Gunning -

"he was for conforming in all things to the rules of the primitive Church, particularly in praying for the dead; in the use of oil, with many other rituals: he formed many in Cambridge upon his own notions, who have carried them perhaps farther than he intended."

Burnet. My Own times, vol.1, p.200

This was very much the line of thought continued subsequently by the Nonjurors. The revision of the Prayer-Book in 1662 was, as you know, not acceptable to the Puritan party, and they arranged for a dramatic demonstration on St. Bartholomew's Day when it was to come into use. A few lines from Clarendon, who heartily disapproved of the deprivation of the Puritan clergy, though, as the King's Minister, he had to put it into force, may act as a mild corrective to the legends still current on the subject:-

"When they saw that they were to expect and undergo the worst, they agreed upon a method to be observed by them in leaving and parting with their pulpits: and the last Sunday they were to preach, they endeavoured to infuse murmur, jealousy, and sedition, into the hearts of their several auditories. . . And all those sermons they called their farewell sermons and caused to be printed together, with every one of the preachers' pictures before their sermons. . . When the time was expired, better men were put into their churches, though with much murmuring of some of their parishes for a time. . . which drew the like clamour upon them by those who had hearkened to their advice in continuing their obstinacy in confidence of a dispensation; whereas otherwise they would have conformed, as very many of their party did. And many of the other who were cozened by them, and so lost the livings they had, made all the haste they could to make themselves capable of getting others, by as full subscriptions and conformity as the Act of Uniformity required. And the greatest of them, after some time. . . subscribed to those very declarations, which they had urged as the greatest motives to their nonconformity. And the number was very small, and of very weak and inconsiderable men, that continued refractory, and received no charge in the Church. . ."

Clarendon, Life, edition 1827, vol. 22, pp. 150-152

Before leaving this subject, we may note that one of these individuals who afterwards conformed was Kidder, the "latitudinarian traditour," who replaced Ken at Bath and Wells when Ken was deprived as a Nonjuror.

At this time the men who were destined to lead the Nonjuring secession were beginning to come to the front. William Sancroft (1617 to 1693) was a Fellow of his College, and was reckoned a scholar of some distinction; he was one of the first to recognize the poetic genius of Milton, and he is believed to have been the author of a brilliant satirical pamphlet, Fur Predestinatus, which greatly exasperated the Puritans in the heyday of their power by reducing to an absurdity their favourite doctrine of predestination. Having some money at his command, he aided Cosin and other churchmen during their exile, and after the Restoration be rose rapidly, being elected Master of Emmanuel, and in quick succession appointed Dean of York and Dean of St Paul's - which last he was largely instrumental in rebuilding after the Great Fire - and in 1678 he became Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a Laudian churchman, of saintly character and very highly esteemed by his contemporaries, and as the famous lines of Dryden, a Romanist, remain to show:-

"Zadok the priest, whom, shunning Pow'r and Place,

His lowly mind advanc'd to David's Grace."

He was no bigot, either; he had cast about for some scheme of comprehension which might enable Dissenters to rejoin the Church without sacrifice of principle on their side or hers; he was looked up to as a true leader by his suffragans and clergy; and there could be no question of his having acted, as he claimed long afterwards, "in the integrity of my heart, indeed in the great integrity of my heart " Burnet is contemptuous of him and terms him "peevish," and Macaulay with less excuse repeats the ignoble epithet; but the weight of contemporary evidence is against them both. He lies buried at his native place, Fressingfield in Suffolk, whither he betook himself after his deprivation, with the fine inscription upon his tomb:-

"WILLIAM SANCROFT, borne in this parish, afterwards by the same Providence of God, Archbishop of Canterbury, and at last deprived of all that he could not keep with a good conscience, returned hither to end his life where he began it, and professeth here at the foot of his tomb that as naked he came forth, so naked he must return. the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed by the name of the Lord."

Time will not permit to deal at length with other outstanding personalities of the first Nonjurors. William Lloyd, Bishop of Norwich, was Sancroft's right-hand man; he was highly esteemed in his Diocese, and I stumbled not long since upon a testimony to the stiffness of his orthodoxy. Dr. John Mapletoft, the great-nephew of Nicholas Ferrar, when thinking of entering Holy Orders in 1682, was troubled by some doubts regarding the Athanasian Creed. He consulted Dr. Simon Patrick, who was sympathetic, but warned him not to seek Ordination from Lloyd (then Bishop of Peterborough), as he was very "stiff" upon such matters. Of Bishop Frampton of Gloucester a charming contemporary biography is extant, but out of print - he was a man of great ability, a traveller (having been a Chaplain in the pay of the Levant Company at Aleppo), a fine linguist, a noble preacher, an efficient and absolutely fearless Bishop, who stood up to Kings and country gentlemen with equal aplomb. Turner, Bishop of Ely, was a fearless, but not very judicious, enthusiast; Bishop Ken's name is still a household word among us, and not among Churchmen only - an entirely saintly, fearless, and lovable man, one of those of whom the world was not worthy.

February 1st 1690, was the latest day allowed for the taking of the obnoxious oaths, and during the months that followed the Nonjurors, as they were now called, were turned adrift, and their places filled up. The question will always be asked: Was not their conduct quixotic, unpatriotic, foolish? The circumstances were, no doubt, exceptional, and a case might be stated for disregarding their earlier oath of allegiance to King James. Burnet, their most severe judge, cheerfully cast his own earlier professions to the winds, and could not for the life of him understand why anybody else should be more scrupulous - to which it can only be replied that his attitude might be human, but was hardly conclusive as an argument. One prefers to ask: What would have been said of the Church if all her Bishops and clergy had followed Burnet's lead, and put aside the doctrines which they had preached for years at the moment when it became dangerous to act up to them? Surely we should never have got rid of the stigma of time-serving and insincerity which such a course would have fixed upon us! The conduct of the Nonjurors may have amounted to what Johnson strikingly termed "the perverseness of integrity," but it earned for them also the high commendation which occurs in the same essay, that of being "wise and virtuous men, who at that time of discord and debate consulted conscience, whether well or ill informed, more than interest." If for no other reason than this, the Church may well be proud of these strong sons of hers who preferred the answer of a clear conscience to worldly prosperity and honour. But there was another important consideration. In 1662, as we know, there was a flamboyant secession of Dissenters, upon which Calamy and others founded the legend of 2,000 martyrs, which still flourishes in Dissenting circles. The world was told that these men gave up everything for conscience' sake, and as the statement has been repeated several times, the world has continued to believe it, on the principle that "what I tell you three times is true." Now the time had come when the Church was faced by a similar challenge in grim earnest. What would have happened had she refused that challenge, or had she accepted it in the theatrical spirit of the "Two Thousand? Quietly and with dignity our martyrs bowed to what they could not resist and retired into obscure poverty varied by persecution. Only one of their leaders, Thomas Sherlock, repented and turned back and received the wages of his apostasy, but that he could hardly have enjoyed them much, certainly not if he had the slightest regard to the storm which he provoked.

For the most part the Nonjurors were content to keep themselves quiet and aloof, though their influence upon the Church and Church opinion was very great. They were accused of being Jacobites, and some of them really were so, but the charge was more false than true. The rank and file of the conforming clergy were in strong sympathy with them, and took the oaths with sullen distaste. Many of the Nonjuring clergy had, it is to he feared, plunged lightly into a trial which was beyond their strength, and some of them did their cause little credit; but when the Nonjuring leaders - Ken, Frampton, Kettlewell, and others - set about collecting a fund to relieve their distress, the Government summoned the leaders before the Privy Council to answer for this unheard-of course. When Frampton came to London on his summons, his old friend Compton, Bishop of London, offered him hospitality, but the Government persisted in ordering him into confinement. It is quite likely that it was Compton's fidelity to his old friend that cost him the prize of the Primacy, which he and all the world thought to be awaiting him. At all events, no better reason for his supersession has been suggested. On the whole, though some individual cases of misconduct gave grounds for scandalous tales about the Nonjuring rank and file, these stories have been greatly exaggerated, and did time permit it would be easy to tell of acts of heroism and unobtrusive piety to set beside them. An immediate result of the deprivals was that William had six sees to fill up, and in the first two years of his reign he presented to fifteen sees in all; in nearly every case the new man was a Latitudinarian, and, to put it quite mildly, easy going, so that the condition of the Church at large rapidly deteriorated, and the lofty standards of the Nonjurors appeared proportionately offensive. That was the plea of Mr. Liveloose: "I never could endure him, for he would always be condemning my way." Accordingly mud-throwing was the order of the day until the death of William, and the Nonjurors had to bear it as best they might, while the cathedrals merited in an ever-increasing measure the description which some years ago a London preacher applied to them: "asylums for amiable gentlemen with indistinct convictions."

Meanwhile the English clergy were not the only Nonjurors. The Church in Scotland fared but ill at the hands of the new King and his friends. At the time of the Revolution Bishop Rose, of the Scottish Church, was in London, and was accorded an audience of the Prince of Orange, having already been told by Compton that the Prince fully realized that in Scotland "the great body of nobility and gentry are for Episcopacy." The Prince demanded a promise that the Scottish Church would support his cause, to which the Bishop replied: "Sir, I will serve you as far as law, reason; or conscience shall allow me." The Prince turned on his heel without a word, and the Bishop returned to Scotland with a heavy heart. Six weeks later, on Christmas Day, the famous "rabblings" by the Presbyterians took place. Many witnesses might be quoted, but the testimony of a hostile one, Burnet, will suffice:

"The Presbyterians generally broke in upon the Episcopal clergy with great insolence and much cruelty; they carried them about their parishes in a mock procession; they tore their gowns, and drove them from their churches and houses."

Burnet, My Own Times, vol. iv, p.444

And there was much worse besides. Contemporary and later Dissenting writers (with the honourable exception of Defoe) prefer to pass over this business very lightly, but it produced a marked effect upon English opinion, with important results. The Scottish Convention demanded from the King that Presbyterianism should replace Episcopacy in Scotland, and the King agreed without demur. About the same time, probably upon hearing of the doings in Scotland, the Dissenters of Massachusetts "rabbled" the Church clergy at Boston in like manner; but here order was restored, and the King and Queen sent Eucharistic vessels and altar linen and contributions to the stipends of the maltreated clergy to make good their losses. Nothing, however, was done either to protect and compensate the Scottish clergy, and it is not surprising that for the next half-century or more they were Jacobites to a man. For a hundred years to come they were kept under a heavy load of disabilities and penalties, and it is only within living memory that the last of these have been removed. Of the Scottish Church it must be said that all its Bishops and 300 of its clergy definitely became Nonjurors, and that the few clergy who conformed were soon driven out by their crude and bigoted masters.

The effect of these doings in England was to quicken sympathy with the Nonjurors and greatly to increase their influence, and Convocation met in November, 1689, in a very unaccommodating temper. The Lower House opposed the Bishops at every point: they would have nothing of any scheme of Comprehension for Dissenters; they made it clear that they would not accept the proposals for the revision of the Prayer Book; they objected to the application of the term "Protestant" to the Anglican Church, and generally showed themselves intractable. The Nonjurors were, perhaps, the latest folk to write the English of the Prayer Book, and it is easy to imagine with what vigour they would have handled the precious production which was offered by the Latitudinarian Bishops in its place. Very few of the Williamite divines were scholars, and none of them were liturgiologists, and the result of their labours was on a par with the paraphrase which one of their number, Bishop Patrick, had put forth of the beautiful words in the Song of Solomon:-

"I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved, that ye tell him that I am sick of love."

The " improved " version runs thus:-

"So I turned myself to those of my neighbours and familiar acquaintance who were awakened by my cries to come and see what the matter was; and conjured them, as they would answer it to God that if they met with my beloved they would let him know - What shall I say? - What shall I desire you to tell him but that I do not enjoy myself now that I want his company, nor can be well till I recover his love again?"

Quoted by Macaulay, History chap. xiv, note.

It is certain that if either this or the Comprehension scheme had been passed, the ranks of the Nonjurors would have been largely reinforced; and Burnet lived to realize that the action of Convocation was, even from his point of view, an unmixed blessing.

It soon became clear that other things besides the Oaths were at stake. The new Bishops were of the type who - I think that the classic phrase was coined about this time - "took the 'nots' out of the Commandments and transferred them to the Creeds". Disputes began to arise about such cardinal doctrines as that of the Trinity, and as time went on the "broad-minded" clergy began to omit the recitation of the Athanasian Creed, the second and third petitions in the Litany, and even the Doxology, until the Bishop of London felt obliged to call his diocese officially to order. Samuel Butler has a bitter "character" of a Latitudinarian, in the course of which is the following:-

"He does not greatly care to live within the pale of the Church, but had rather have the Church live within his pale. he believes the way to heaven is never the better for being strait, and if it could be made wider it would be much more convenient."

Samuel Butler, Characters and Some Passages from Notebooks, edited by A.R. Waller, 1908, p.77

Ken expressed doubts as to whether the new Bishops were sound as to the depositum of the faith, and it was soon determined to create a Nonjuring succession of prelates who could be so trusted until better times. Frampton disapproved and stood apart; Ken at first disapproved also, but was persuaded by Lloyd: and on February 24th, 1694, George Hickes, late Dean of Worcester, and Thomas Wagstaffe, the deprived Vicar of St. Margaret's, Rood Lane, were consecrated suffragan Bishops of Thetford and Ipswich respectively by Bishops Lloyd, Turner and White. So began a succession of remarkable prelates, nearly all of them distinguished above their fellows for scholarship and piety - a succession difficult to justify upon technical grounds, but one which, in an age of indifference and unbelief in high places, acted as a salutary tonic upon the Church, and enabled "the remnant" (as they called themselves) to retain, and at the proper time hand over untarnished, the depositum of which it had undertaken the custody when the evil days were coming upon the Church.

Let me pause for a moment in my narrative to direct attention to one or two of these very unusual Bishops. Hickes (the deprived Dean of Worcester) was already famous as a scholar and divine, and Wagstaffe had just produced anonymously Letter from Suffolk, which embodied a touching narrative of Sancroft's last hours. Like many other Nonjurors, he practised medicine for a living. The next three consecrations, which took place in June, 1713, were of Jeremy Collier, Samuel Hawes, and Nathanael Spinckes, the last two undistinguished save for piety and rather more than average scholarship, the former a fiery writer and moralist who, single-handed and from a hiding-place, reformed the whole temper of the English stage I quote in this regard one of Macaulay's stirring sentences:-

"It is inspiriting to see how gallantly the solitary outlaw advances to attack enemies, formidable separately, and, it might have been thought, irresistible when combined, distributes his swashing blows right and left among Wycherly, Congreve, and Vanbrugh, treads the wretched D'Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet, and strikes with all his strength full at the towering crest of Dryden."

Macaulay, Essays, "The Comic Dramatists
of the Restoration"

The next two consecrations were of Henry Gandy and Thomas Brett, the latter among the greatest of English liturgiologists, whose Ancient Liturgies is still valuable, and whose "New Communion Office" compiled for the Usagers party among the Nonjurors, marks the last expression of the genius which produced the Prayer Book. During the period of separation between the Usagers and Non-Usagers the latter party consecrated among others Dr. Ralph Taylor, the only English clergyman treated with civility at St. Germains; John Talbot, the first English Bishop in America; and Richard Rawlinson, famous as a scholar and antiquary; while the irregular succession that followed the reunion included such men of mark as Roger Laurence (the close friend of Dr. Wheatley), Thomas Deacon, and William Cartwright. All these men exercised considerable influence upon contemporary thought and action in the Establishment, and constantly came to the rescue when vital points of faith and doctrine were threatened by the Latitudinarian party.

Henceforward, although the successive Oaths ordered by the Government - the Abjuration Oath and the Oath of allegiance to Queen Anne especially - brought about fresh secessions from the Establishment to the ranks of the Nonjurors, the point at issue was really the preservation of the depositum of the Faith, and the study and imitation of primitive models - or what were then believed to be such - as the best means to that end. This line of study, although the conclusions arrived at were not invariably sound, created a body of scholarship which stood the Church generally in good stead, and has left her a heritage of works of devotion as well as of learning that the world will not willingly let die. It is not generally remembered that William Law, the author of The Serious Call and other works of the same kind, besides not a few in defence of the Faith, was a Nonjuror; Charles Leslie, the brilliant Ulster clergyman and son of an Irish bishop, of whom Dr. Johnson observed, "Leslie was a reasoner, and a reasoner who was not to be reasoned against" - his theological works and controversial pamphlets are still excellent reading, and profoundly affected contemporary thought; Denis Granville, the keen and chivalrous Dean of Durham, son of the famous Cavalier leader, who gave up everything for King James and was repaid with ingratitude. Among laymen we note that to a Nonjuror, John Byrom, we owe the famous hymn, "Christians awake, salute the happy morn." Henry Dodwell, also an Irishman, was another powerful, if somewhat unbalanced and eccentric, scholar and writer of the Nonjuring side - it is usual to laugh at his speculations, but they could be fairly paralleled from St. Augustine's City of God; while only to mention such names as Robert Nelson (of Festivals and Fasts fame), Hearne and Baker, the Bonwickes and the Bowdlers, is to recall some of the brightest lights of the Church in England.

Three other particular incidents remain to be noticed - and some of the results which flowed from them - firstly, the Correspondence with the Orthodox Patriarchs; secondly the Usages Controversy and the temporary schism that it caused; and thirdly, the Consecration of Seabury. But before dealing with these it may be observed in passing that of the rank and file of the lay element of the Nonjurors we really know very little. Laymen, as a rule, were not called upon to subscribe to the Oaths, so that the majority of them were not in the technical sense Nonjurors at all. But that laymen were associated with them in considerable numbers is shown from the number of Nonjuring chapels or oratories of which some record exists; Bishop Nicholson says that there were fifty in London alone, and we know the localities of at least thirteen of these; while there were certainly others at Cambridge, Salisbury, Manchester, and Shrewsbury. When Dr. Welton's chapel in Goodman's Fields was raided, there was a congregation of about two hundred persons. The second Lord Clarendon was a Nonjuror, and the Earl of Winchelsea had a Nonjuring Bishop, Samuel Hawes, for his Chaplain at Eastwell; while Lady Coventry, one of the Thanet family, was a warm supporter of two distinguished Nonjurors, Frampton and Ralph Taylor. Many Nonjuring laymen would attend their parish churches, but marked their sentiments by standing at the State Prayers and in other ways which were understood. Samuel Pepys took up with the Nonjurors in later life, and was attended by a Nonjuring clergyman on his deathbed; he must have travelled some distance from the standpoint of the famous diaries before he reached that goal! To say, then, that the Nonjuring clergy were preachers without congregations seems absurd. Here may be mentioned, though with some approach to irrelevance, a rather touching instance of Nonjuring piety recorded by Richard Rawlinson. A Nonjuring clergyman, Moses Soame, rector of Broughton, near Kettering, retired to Little Catworth, in Hunts, where -

"- he built a small chapel, resolving to dedicate the remainder of his days to the service of God in this place, in which chapel he performed the daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer for many years together for all the remaining part of his life. he also therein, both morning and evening, every day throughout the year, administered the Holy Communion to his family, and to as many others of the neighbourhood as would come to partake of it - the Cup in alder wine, which answered the purpose as he thought, since his circumstances would not allow him to purchase other wine for such constant use."

The ruins of this chapel were standing until a few years ago; it is worth noting that Little Catworth is close to Little Gidding, whence the Nonjurors drew much of their inspiration.

The Correspondence with the Orthodox Patriarchs has been treated with needless superciliousness by Mr. Williams on the Anglican side, and Dr. Adrian Fortescue from the Romanist standpoint. It was the beginning of a definite movement for intercommunion as distinguished from mere friendliness, which already existed, with the Orthodox Church of the East; and we, who live in a time when formal intercommunion is by no means outside the range of possibility, should be the last to throw stones at the pioneers of that movement. To put it briefly, advantage was taken of the presence in this country of one Arsenius, Metropolitan of Thebais, to open a correspondence between the Nonjuring body and the Orthodox Patriarchs, and neither side being particularly well informed regarding the tenets of the other, it led nowhither; it ceased at the death of Peter the Great, who was decidedly in favour of intercommunion between the Anglican and Russian Orthodox Churches. The first letter was mainly the work of Jeremy Collier; Thomas Brett, who had only recently joined the Nonjurors, standing aside on the advice of Roger Laurence, who asserted that the Greeks were more bigoted than the Romanists, and advised him to have nothing to do with the business. Five years passed before a reply was received, during which Brett had made a thorough study of the points at issue, and of liturgiology in general and he then stepped well-equipped into the breach, with the result that the second letter, despatched in 1722, was a great deal better informed than the first. In 1725 Archbishop Wake wrote to the Greek Patriarchs denouncing the Nonjurors as schismatics, and the death of Peter the Great in the same year practically ended the matter - another reason was that the Nonjurors were too poor to pay the cost of transmitting any further letters. Also they were by this time divided by the Usages controversy, and could no longer speak as a united body.

The question of what came to be called the Usages had always been before the Church in England since the Restoration, as a result of the quickened interest in liturgiology, to which reference has already been made. These were deduced from primitive observances, and consisted of four points: the use of the Mixed Chalice, Prayers for the Faithful Departed, the Epiklesis or Invocation of the Holy Ghost as an essential in the Consecration of the Eucharistic Elements, the Oblation of the Elements as Symbols of our Lord's Body and Blood. These were recognized by Edward VI's First Prayer Book, but were blurred or expunged in that of Queen Elizabeth, and also in that of 1662. Expert opinion of the day agreed that these points were indispensable to a valid Eucharist; in July, 1716, the question of altering the Liturgy for Nonjurors was seriously discussed, and a split ensued between those who favoured and those who withstood the changes. Dr Brett, who largely, perhaps principally, was instrumental in compiling the "New Communion Office," which the Usagers first used on Easter Day, 1718, while the non-Usagers kept to the old Office. At the head of the Usagers stood Jeremy Collier, with Brett to support him; the leader of the other side was Charles Leslie, who argued forcibly that though as "Usagers" they might be right, as "Essentialists" they were certainly wrong. Until a few years ago the end of the controversy was wrapped in obscurity, but in 1909 Archdeacon Hutton discovered in the Library of St. John's College, Oxford, an "Instrument of Union," dated April 17th, 1732, by which the Usagers practically conceded Leslie's point that the Usages, so far as they were not covered by the Prayer Book Office, were not essential, though eminently desirable. The Epiklesis was recognized as being implicit in the existing Prayer of Consecration, and the Oblation in the offering of the Elements upon the altar as well as in the Prayer of Consecration. Upon this understanding the use of the New Communion Office was discontinued and the general use of the Old Office resumed by the united body. The reconciliation was brought about by the honesty and self-abnegation of a single transparently honest seeker after truth, Thomas Brett, who cheerfully laid aside in the common interest his own noble Office, the last English office worthy to be ranked with the Prayer Book, to which as a matter of consistent liturgiology it is in many respects superior, as soon as he was convinced of the validity of the earlier Office. And it is worth noting, as Archdeacon Hutton has pointed out, that the terms of this instrument show the real identity of view which existed between the Nonjurors of 1732 and the Tractarians of a century later.

The Consecration of Seabury in 1784 was the work of the Scottish Nonjurors, who had drifted somewhat apart from their brethren in England; with whom during the first generation they were closely allied in thought and action, especially during the Usages controversy. Seabury was duly elected to the See of Connecticut and sent to England to seek consecration. The English Bishops demurred, and Seabury began to think of turning to the Danish Church for consecration. Fortunately, however, at this time he met Mr. Routh, afterwards famous as the President of Magdalen, who warned him that the Danish succession was unsound, and Bishop Lowth confirmed this view. Routh counselled Seabury to turn to the Scottish Church, which he did, with results that we all know. The English Nonjurors had by that time dwindled into a very small body, but this did not prevent their Bishop, William Cartwright writing to offer his services, and incidentally to explain their position. In his letter occurred this remarkable sentence:-

"We assume and acknowledge only the character and title of Bishops of the Orthodox British Church, or of the Primitive Catholic Church in Britain, which is now reduced to a small remnant; but yet such as I trust in God will so preserve the depositum that it will again revive and flourish when men have sufficiently wearied themselves in the labyrinths of error and innovation."

This sentence, may be regarded as the swan-song of the Nonjurors, the last explicit declaration of their aims and motives. Cartwright died fourteen years later, and received the Communion from the Vicar of Shrewsbury on his deathbed, thus practically closing the schism - if it was ever rightly called such. By that time the movement which crystallised into Tractarianism had really been launched from Ireland by Alexander Knox and Bishop Jebb - the latter closely connected with a leading Nonjuring family and the owner of several volumes of Nonjuring papers and correspondence once belonging to Dr Bratt. Time does not permit a discussion of the links which bound the Nonjuring school to the Tractarians on the one hand and to the Little Gidding folk on the other, as well as to the High Churchmen (as they had come to be called) of their own day. What has been presented is a meagre outline which requires much filling in, and not a little qualification, but it will suffice to convey some sense of their achievement and what the Church of to-day owes to these forgotten scholars and saints.

To these men their individual repute was a matter of no consequence. "Men may come and men may go," as Bishop Lightfoot once said: "individual lives float down like straws on the surface of the waters till they are lost in the ocean of eternity; but the broad, mighty, rolling stream of the Church itself - the River of God - flows on for ever and ever." A more secular writer, George Eliot, has reminded us that "the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs." So it is with the Nonjurors. Sunday by Sunday, as the writer stands in his place in the choir of Beckenham Parish Church, hard by the forgotten grave of one of the most remarkable of their number, Roger Laurence, he seems to see them, men of spare aspect, humorous and kindly, but with countenances set and unflinching, poorly clad and little regarded of the world about them, and he reminds himself that but for them the noble services in which we rejoice would probably have been unknown and unimagined, and the Church of to-day something wholly different. To say that they made no mistakes and that none of their mistakes were serious would be absurd. But because they were faithful to their consciences in a small matter they were entrusted with a higher charge, which they kept with equal fidelity, and for this the Church is deeply in their debt, and their reputation deserves to stand high. What secular historians regard as their failure was, in fact, a splendid success.