1656 or the beginning of 1657 Tillotson left college to be tutor at Ford Abbey, Devonshire, to the son of Edmund Prideaux, who was then Cromwell's Attorney-General. At the Restoration, Tillotson had been ordained, and acted with the Presbyterians, but he submitted to the Act of Uniformity. Tillotson was curate at Cheshunt from 1661 to 1672, with which office he held others, including that of preacher at Lincoln's Inn. To this he was elected in November, 1663, and he liked it so well that he made Lincoln's Inn his head-quarters. He took great

JOHN TILLOTSON. (From the Portrait before his Works: 1701.)

pains with his sermons, endeavouring to make them. clear and unaffected in their style and reasoning. Several of his early sermons, like that of 1664, on "The Wisdom of being Religious," which he enlarged before publication into a small treatise, were directed against the growing tendency to Atheism. Under Charles II., Tillotson became Dean of Canterbury, and chaplain to the king, who did not like him. Dean Tillotson warmly supported the bill for the exclusion of the Duke of York, yet both he and his friend Gilbert Burnet sought to persuade Lord William Russell, before his execution, to acknowledge the unlawfulness of resistance to authority, and as Lord Russell's chaplain, Mr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards put it, "to bequeath a legacy of slavery to his country." But Tillotson recovered ground, and became a trusted friend of Lady Russell. At the Revolution this is the reference to political events in his Thanksgiving-Sermon, on a text from Ezra ix. 13, 14:"And after all that is come upon us for our evil deeds, and for our great trespass, seeing that Thou our God hast punished us less than our iniquities deserve, and hast given us such deliverance as this; should we again break thy commandments, and join in affinity with the people of these abominations, wouldst not Thou be angry with us till Thou hadst consumed us, so that there should be no remnant nor escaping?"

THE GREAT DELIVERANCE OF 1688. The case in the text doth very much resemble ours. Ani that in three respects. God hath sent great judgments apa us for our evil deeds and for our great trespasses: He hath punished us less than our iniquities have deserved, and bri given us a very great and wonderful deliverance.

1. God hath inflicted great judgments upon us for our evl deeds, and for our great trespasses. Great judgments, b for the quality, and for the continuance of them. It sha suffice only to mention those which are of a more and date. Scarce hath any nation been more calamitous than th of ours, both in respect of the invasions and conquests a foreigners, and of our own civil and intestine divisions. For times we have been conquered; by the Romans, Sures Danes, and Normans. And our intestine divisions have Els wise been great and of long continuance. Witness the Barc Wars, and that long and cruel contest between the two Houses of York and Lancaster.

But to come nearer to our own times, what fearful jels ments and calamities of war, and pestilence, and fire, hare many of us seen? and how close did they follow one another! What terrible havoc did the sword make amongst us ir many years? And this not the sword of a foreign ey, but a civil war; the mischiefs whereof were all terminsted upon ourselves, and have given deep wounds, and left broad scars upon the most considerable families in the nation.

. . . Alta sedent civilis vulnera dextra. This war was drawn out to a great length, and had tragical end, in the murder of an excellent king; and in the banishment of his children into a strange country, whaty they were exposed to the arts and practices of those of another religion; the mischievous consequences whereof we ha ever since sadly laboured under, and do feel them at this day. And when God was pleased in great mercy at last to p an end to the miserable distractions and confusions of almos twenty years, by the happy restoration of the royal family, and our ancient government; which seemed to promise to a lasting settlement, and all the felicities we could wish: t how soon was this bright and glorious morning overcast, by the restless and black designs of that sure and invetent enemy of ours, the Church of Rome, for the restoring of ther religion amongst us. And there was too much encourage ment given to this design, by those who had power in th hands, and had brought home with them a secret good to it.

For this great trespass, and for our many other sins, G-d was angry with us, and sent among us the most ra pestilence that ever was known in this nation, which in t space of eight or nine months swept away near a third pet of the inhabitants of this vast and populous city, and of th suburbs thereof; besides a great many thousands mere = several parts of the nation. But we did not return to the Lord, nor seek Him for all this.

And therefore the very next year after, God sent a tem and devouring fire, which in less than three days' time s the greatest part of this great city in ashes. And there is tr

1 Lucan's "Pharsalia," bk. i., line 32

"Nor thou, fierce Pyrrhus, nor the Punic bands, This waste have made; no sword could reach so far: Deep pierce the wounds received in civil war." (May's "Lacas Tillotson, quoting from memory, wrote "manent" for "adest." The plague of 1665: in which year there were 97,206 teni the City of London within the Bills of Mortality; and of 68,596 were of persons who died of the plague, besides many of s no account was given by the parish clerks, and who were pr buried.

much reason to believe that the enemy did this: that perpetual and implacable enemy of the peace and happiness of this nation.1

And even since the time of that dreadful calamity, which is now above twenty years agone, we have been in a continual fear of the cruel designs of that party, which had hitherto been incessantly working underground, but now began to show themselves more openly; and especially since a prince of that religion succeeded to the crown, our eyes have been ready to fail us for fear, and for looking after those dreadful things that were coming upon us, and seemed to be even at the door. A fear which this nation could easily have rid itself of, because they that caused it were but a handful in comparison of us, and could have done nothing without a foreign force and assistance; had not the principles of humanity, and of our religion too, restrained us from violence and cruelty, and from everything which had the appearance of undutifulness to the government which the providence of God had set over us. An instance of the like patience, under the like provocations, for so long a time, and after such visible and open attempts upon them, when they had the laws so plainly on their side, I challenge any nation or church in the world, from the very foundation of it, to produce. Insomuch, that if God had not put it into the hearts of our kind neighbours, and of that incomparable prince who laid and conducted that great design with so much skill and secrecy, to have appeared so seasonably for our rescue, our patience had infallibly, without a miracle, been our ruin. And I am sure if our enemies had ever had the like opportunity in their hands, and had over-balanced us in numbers but half so much as we did them, they would never have let it slip; but would long since have extirpated us utterly, and have "made the remembrance of us to have ceased from among men."

And now if you ask me, for what sins more especially God hath sent all these judgments upon us? it will not, I think, become us to be very particular and positive in such determinations. Thus much is certain, that we have all sinned and contributed to these judgments; every one hath had some hand, more or less, in pulling down this vengeance upon the nation. But we are all too apt to remove the meritorious cause of God's judgments as far as we can from ourselves and our own party, and upon any slight pretence to lay it upon others.

Yet I will venture to instance in one or two things which may probably enough have had a more particular and immediate hand in drawing down the judgments of God upon us.

Our horrible contempt of religion on the one hand, by our infidelity and profaneness; and our shameful abuse of it on the other, by our gross hypocrisy, and sheltering great wickedness and immoralities under the cloak and profession of religion.

And then, great dissensions and divisions, great uncharitableness and bitterness of spirit among those of the same religion; so that almost from the beginning of our happy Reformation the enemy had sown these tares, and by the unwearied malice and arts of the Church of Rome, the seeds of dissension were scattered very early amongst us; and a sour humour had been fermenting in the body of the nation, both upon account of religion and civil interests, for a long time before things broke out into a civil war.

1 The report was that the Roman Catholics had plotted to burn London. Pope expressed his indignation at this in his reference to the inscription on the Monument, cut in 1681, erased under James II., re-cut under William III., and finally erased in 1831.

"Where London's column, pointing at the skies,
Like a tall bully lifts the head and lies."

("On the Use of Riches.")

And more particularly yet; that which is called the great trespass here in the text, their joining "in affinity with the people of these abominations," by whom they had been detained in a long captivity, this, I say, seems to have had, both from the nature of the thing, and the just judgment of God, no small influence upon a great part of the miseries and calamities which have befallen us. For had it not been for the countenance which Popery had by the marriages and alliances of our princes, for two or three generations together, with those of that religion, it had not probably had a continuance among us to this day. Which will, I hope, now be a good warning to those who have the authority to do it, to make effectual provision by law for the prevention of the like inconvenience and mischief in this nation for ever.

2. Another parallel between our case and that in the text is, that God hath punished us less than our iniquities did deserve. And this acknowledgment we have as much reason to make for ourselves, as Ezra had to do it in behalf of the Jews; "Thou our God hast punished us less than our iniquities deserve." Thou, our God, hast punished us; there is the reason of so much mercy and mitigation. It is God, and not man, with whom we have to do; and therefore it is that we, the children of men, are not consumed. And it is our God likewise, to whom we have a more peculiar relation, and with whom, by virtue of our profession of Christianity, we are in covenant. "Thou our God hast punished us less than our iniquities deserve." He might justly have poured forth all His wrath, and have made His jealousy to have smoked against us, and have blotted out the remembrance of us from under heaven: He might have given us up to the will of our enemies, and into the hands of those whose tender mercies are cruelty: He might have brought us into the net which they had spread for us, and have laid a terrible load of affliction upon our loins, and suffered insolent men to ride over our heads, and them that hated us with a perfect hatred to have had the rule over us: but He was graciously pleased to remember mercy in the midst of judgment, and to repent Himself for His servants, when He saw that their power was gone, and that things were come to that extremity, that we were in all human probability utterly unable to have wrought out our own deliverance.

3. The last parallel between our case and that in the text is the great and wonderful deliverance which God hath wrought for us. And whilst I am speaking of this, "God is my witness, whom I serve in the Gospel of His Son," that I do not say one word upon this occasion in flattery to men, but in true thankfulness to Almighty God, and constrained thereto from a just sense of His great mercy to us all, in this marvellous deliverance, in this mighty salvation which He wrought for us. So that we may say with Ezra, "Since Thou our God hast given us such a deliverance as this:" se great that we know not how to compare it with anything but itself. God hath given us this deliverance. And therefore, "Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but to Thy name be the praise." For Thou knowest, and we are all conscious to ourselves, that we did nowise deserve it; but quite the contrary. God hath given it, and it ought to be so much the welcomer to us, for coming from such a hand. "It is the Lord's doing," and therefore ought to be the more "marvellous in our eyes." It is a deliverance full of mercy, and I had almost said, full of miracle. The finger of God was visibly in it; and there are plain signatures and characters upon it, of a more immediate divinity interposition. And if we will not wisely consider the Lord's doings, we have reason to stand in awe of the threatenings of His: "Because they regard not the works of the Lord, nor the operation of His hands, He shall destroy them, and not build them up.”

in the separate church, that of Thetford. Before the end of the century all proceedings against Dr. Hickes were stayed, out of respect to his position as a scholar. He died in 1715.

Another of the non-jurors, an earnest and energetic writer, was Jeremy Collier, born in 1650, and educated in Ipswich school and at Caius College, Cambridge. He had a rectory in Suffolk, and was lecturer at Gray's Inn before he got into trouble by his opposition to the Revolution. He died outlawed in 1726. At the close of the century Jeremy Collier led an attack upon the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage, and this controversy continued for two or three years. Jeremy Collier also wrote some good "Moral Essays" and an Ecclesiastical History. William Penn, born in 1644, son of an admiral, and educated at Christchurch, Oxford, had suffered persecution in his earlier life for turning Quaker, and wrote in prison at the age of twenty-five "No Cross no Crown." In 1670 he inherited his father's estate, and in 1681 obtained a grant of New Netherlands, thenceforward called Pennsylvania. In 1694 Penn published "A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People called Quakers," and there was published in the same year the "Journal of George Fox," the founder of their brotherhood, who died in 1690. Penn died in 1718.

Locke became one of the Fellows of the Royal Society, and in 1673 he was Secretary to a Commission of the Board of Trade over which Shaftesbury was President. He was with Shaftesbury when Charles II. was seeking his life, and afterwards went to Holland. Shaftesbury died in 1683, but Locke remained at Amsterdam, and for a time at Rotterdam, in close association with Philip Van Limborch, Jean le Clerc, and other leaders of the Church of the Remonstrants, which had been established by Jacob Harmensen (Arminius).1 He was writing upon "Toleration" at the time of the English Revolution, and returned to England in the ship that brought the Princess Mary. He then published his "Essay concerning Human Understanding," and his "Two Treatises of Government," in which he laid down the principles of the Revolution. In 1691 Locke, whose health was very delicate, found a pleasant home at Oates, in Essex, the residence of Sir Francis Masham and his wife. Lady Masham had been known to Locke some years before as his friend Dr. Cudworth's only daughter Damaris. In 1693 he published "Some Thoughts concerning Education," which had a great and wholesome influence upon home-life in England, while his wisdom and honesty were made serviceable to the state. The later writings of Locke, until his death in 1704, were chiefly religious. In 1695 he published a treatise on "The Reasonableness of Christianity "this drew its evidence chiefly from the Gospel narrative; and his last work came of an endeavour to ground his faith also upon study of the Epistles of St. Paul-" An Essay for the Understanding of St. Paul's Epistles by consulting St. Paul himself."

In the first year of the Revolution John Locke drew up for himself and some of his friends these

John Locke was nearly of the same age as Dryden, John Dryden having been born in August, 1631, nd John Locke in August, 1632. Locke was born t Wrington, in Somersetshire; his father served in he Parliamentary wars under Colonel Popham, by whose advice the boy was sent to Westminster School. From Westminster he passed, in 1651, to Christchurch, Oxford, where he felt the impulse hen given to scientific research by Bacon's philoophy. He made medicine his study, and by accident vas brought into close friendly relation to Lord Ashley, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury. In 1668

RULES FOR A SOCIETY OF PACIFIC CHRISTIANS.

1. We think nothing necessary to be known or believed for salvation, but what God hath revealed.

2. We therefore embrace all those who, in sincerity, receive the word of truth revealed in the Scripture, and obey the light which enlightens every man that comes into the world.

3. We judge no man in meats, or drinks, or habits, or days, or any other outward observances, but leave every one to his freedom in the use of those outward things which he thinks can most contribute to build up the inward man in righteousness, holiness, and the true love of God and his neighbour, in Christ Jesus.

4. If any one find any doctrinal parts of Scripture difficult to be understood, we recommend him-1st, The study of the Scriptures in humility and singleness of heart; 2nd, Prayer to the Father of lights to enlighten him; 3rd, Obedience to what is already revealed to him, remembering that the practice of what we do know is the surest way to more knowledge; our infallible guide having told us, "If any man will do the will of him that sent me, he shall know of the doctrine." 4th, We leave him to the advice and assistance of those whom he thinks best able to instruct him; no men or society of men having any authority to impose their opinions or interpretations on any other, the meanest

1 See Note 1, page 263.

Christian, since, in matters of religion, every man must know and believe and give an account for himself.

5. We hold it to be an indispensable duty for all Christians to maintain love and charity in the diversity of contrary opinions by which charity we do not mean an empty sound, but an effectual forbearance and goodwill, carrying men to a communion, friendship, and mutual assistance one of another, in outward as well as spiritual things; and by debarring all magistrates from making use of their authority, much less their sword (which was put into their hands only against evil-doers), in matters of faith or worship.

6. Since the Christian religion we profess is not a notional science, to furnish speculation to the brain or discourse to the tongue, but a rule of righteousness to influence our lives, Christ having given Himself "to redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a people zealous of good works," we profess the only business of our public assemblies to be to exhort, thereunto laying aside all controversy and speculative questions, instruct and encourage one another in the duties of a good life, which is acknowledged to be the great business of true religion, and to pray God for the assistance of His Spirit for the enlightening our understanding and subduing our corruptions, that so we may return unto Him a reasonable and acceptable service, and show our faith by our works, proposing to ourselves and others the example of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, as the great pattern for our imitation.

7. One alone being our Master, even Christ, we acknowledge no masters of our assembly; but if any man in the spirit of love, peace, and meekness, has a word of exhortation, we hear him.

8. Nothing being so oppressive, or having proved so fatal to unity, love, and charity, the first great characteristical duties of Christianity, as men's fondness of their own opinions, and their endeavours to set them up, and have them followed, instead of the gospel of peace; to prevent those seeds of dissension and division, and maintain unity in the difference of opinions which we know cannot be avoided -if any one appear contentious, abounding in his own sense rather than in love, and desirous to draw followers after himself, with destruction or opposition to others, we judge him not to have learnt Christ as he ought, and therefore not fit to be a teacher of others.

9. Decency and order in our assemblies being directed, as they ought, to edification, can need but very few and plain rules. Time and place of meeting being settled, if anything else need regulation, the assembly itself, or four of the ancientest, soberest, and discreetest of the brethren, chosen for that occasion, shall regulate it.

10. From every brother that, after admonition, walketh disorderly, we withdraw ourselves.

11. We each of us think it our duty to propagate the doctrine and practice of universal goodwill and obedience in all places, and on all occasions, as God shall give us opportunity.

Gilbert Burnet was born at Edinburgh in 1643; and educated at Aberdeen; he studied also for a few months in Oxford and Cambridge, worked at Hebrew in Holland, and in 1665, at the age of twenty-two, became Divinity Professor in Glasgow. He was a hard worker, rose at four in the morning to his studies, and continued the practice until it was forbidden by the infirmities of age. His life was troubled by church dissensions and the strife of politics, in which he gave offence by opposition to in

tolerance and despotism. Burnet was preacher at the Rolls Chapel when he began, with aid from Robert Boyle, his "History of the Reformation." He caused the dissolute Earl of Rochester to die a Christian, and was by his friend Lord Russell when he died on the scaffold. Then Burnet was deprived of his preachership, and was abroad till he returned to England with William of Orange as his chaplain. In the next year he was made Bishop of Salisbury. His ability, industry, and warmth of feeling had made him a foremost man of his party. He could not avoid judging others as a partisan, and from partisans upon the other side he has suffered many a harsh judgment. As bishop, Burnet lived in his diocese, and paid close attention to its duties. He died in 1715, leaving evidence of his ability and industry and of his living interest in the great controversies of his time, not only in his "History of the Reformation of the Church of England," but also in a "History of his own Times," that is full of important detail, although bitterly ridiculed by Pope and Swift. It ends with the year 1713, and there is added to it an Address to Posterity, written in 1708, when Burnet thought that he was near the end of his labour. It closes with the following words on the

STUDY AND PRACTICE OF RELIGION.1

I will conclude this whole Address to Posterity with that, which is the most important of all other things, and which alone will carry every thing else along with it; which is to recommend, in the most solemn and serious manner, the Study and Practice of Religion to all sorts of Men, as that which is both the Light of the World, and the Salt of the Earth. Nothing does so open our Faculties, and compose and direct the whole Man, as an inward Sense of God, of his Authority over us, of the Laws he has set us, of his Eye ever upon us, of his hearing our Prayers, assisting our Endeavours, watching over our concerns, and of his being to judge and to reward or punish us in another State, according to what we do in this: Nothing will give a Man such a Detestation of Sin, and such a Sense of the Goodness of God, and of our Obligations to Holiness, as a right Understanding and a firm Belief of the Christian Religion: Nothing can give a Man so calm a Peace within, and such a firm Security against all Fears and Dangers without, as the Belief of a kind and wise Providence, and of a future State. An Integrity of Heart gives a Man a Courage, and a Confidence that cannot be shaken: A Man is sure that, by living according to the Rules of Religion, he becomes the wisest, the best and happiest Creature, that he is capable of being: Honest Industry, the employing his Time well, and a constant Sobriety, an undefiled Purity and Chastity, with a quiet Serenity, are the best Preservers of Life and Health: So that, take a Man as a single Individual, Religion is his Guard, his Perfection, his Beauty, and his Glory: This will make him the Light of the World, shining brightly, and enlightening many round about him.

Then take a Man as a Piece of Mankind, as a Citizen of the World, or of any particular State, Religion is indeed then the Salt of the Earth: For it makes every Man to be to all the rest of the World, whatsoever any one can with

1 This passage is printed as in the first edition (1724), reproducing capitals, italics, spelling, punctuation, &c., that it may serve for specimen of English as it was written early in the eighteenth century.