LECTURE II. THE REV. ALFRED G. MORTIMER, D.D., ASCENDENCY OF ERASTIANISM AND LATITUDINARIANISM. * THE period of history which has been assigned for my lecture seems to me to be one of the saddest in the history of the English Church, and to many people, one of the most uninteresting; yet it has its importance as being the seed time in which was sown among the wheat those tares which were to bring forth such evil fruit in the next century, the time in which there entered into Christ's Body, the Church, some of that poison which even now is circulating in her veins, hampering and hindering her work, and paralyzing her life. The period of which I am to speak, the reigns of James II., William and Mary, and Anne, was a time of the introduction of new forces, which, while they were not so striking as the forces of the Reformation period, were scarcely less pow *This lecture, which was not delivered from MSS., is reproduced from a corrected stenographic report. erful factors in producing that disastrous state of things with which the Church of England had to grapple fifty years ago. The period is long, the events many, and therefore without further preamble I will proceed with my lecture, first briefly to sketch the principal events of the period, then to draw your attention to some of the results which came from those events. James II., who came to the throne of England in 1685, was a Roman Catholic. At his accession he promised to protect and support the Church of England, stating that he regarded it as the bulwark of his throne, and so it was in a peculiar way, because but for the recognition of the hereditary divine right of kings by the Church, James II. would never have come to the throne. His policy at once gave the lie to his promise, it was all through his reign to affect the deepest concern for Dissenters, to exercise clemency and tolerance toward them, merely as an excuse for gaining the most tremendous concessions for the Roman Catholics. He at once restored the Mass with all the Roman Rites in the Chapel Royal, and at his coronation, for the first time in English History, the celebration of the Holy Eucharist was omitted by his orders. His first attempt to break his promise to the Church was his assertion of the right of dispens ing penal laws in certain cases, and using this right in order to retain in the army Roman Catholic officers. The right was challenged at once, and the king succeeded in having it tried before a packed court, and it was decided in his favor. Immediately on gaining this decision he proceeded to fill the civil, military, and even the ecclesiastical offices with Roman Catholics, four Roman Catholic peers, and Petre, the Vice Provincial of the English Jesuits, were at once sworn into the Privy Council, John Massey, a Roman Catholic layman, was made Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and Samuel Parker, a man with Roman proclivities, was made Bishop of Oxford. Obadiah Walker, who verted to Rome, was allowed to celebrate the Roman Mass in the Chapel of New College, of which he was Master, and three Roman Catholic Bishops were received as Bishops "in partibus.” The result was a storm of indignation, and if James had not been possessed of more than usual obstinacy and dulness, he must have awakened to a sense of the rashness of his acts. The pulpits of London rang with denunciations of Romanism, and although the king had forbidden all controversial preaching, Dr. Sharp, the Rector of St. Giles, and afterward Archbishop of York, preached a striking sermon against the growth of Romanism in England. James ordered Comp ton, Bishop of London, to suspend him, but the Bishop refused to do so until Sharp had been properly tried and condemned. James had instituted a new Court, the Court of High Commission, with Jefferies as President, and summoned the Bishop to be tried by that Court. He was suspended during the whole of this reign. The next great step, the next salient event, was two years after, in 1687, when James dared to go still further in putting forth on his own authority the Declaration of Indulgence, which was the absolute toleration of all religions in his dominions, and the dispensing all penal laws against Non-conformists. It was only a transparent device for filling all offices with Roman Catholics, but let me say in passing that while speaking of this Declaration of Indulgence in this manner, I do not for a moment wish to express any opinion against tolerance in the present day, but then it was claiming a power most dangerous and continually protested against by the Parliament of England. James, then, put forth this Declaration, that there was to be absolute toleration and equality; the result was that it produced strong indignation in the Church, and the greatest rejoicings among the Dissenters, with the exception of a few of the nobler ones among them, as Baxter, Bunyan, Howe, and Kiffin, who saw through this device, and pointed out to their |