A SPEECH* BY DR. BENTLEY, ARCHDEACON OF ELY,† TO THE CLERGY OF THAT DIOCESE, At his Visitation held in Cambridge, December 11th,‡ 1716. MY REVEREND BRETHREN OF THE CLERGY, In a season so very severe, and on the shortest days of the year, when it wants an apology for even calling you together, it would be a double fault to detain you with a long and tedious charge. I shall only, therefore, in a few words, congratulate you and myself upon the happy change in public affairs since my last visitation. The face of things [* "Dr. George Hickes, the deprived dean of Worcester, who was regarded as the head of the Nonjuring clergy, being lately dead, the publication of his papers revealed the intentions of his party respecting the church, whenever the Stuart line should be restored. They held that all the conforming clergy were schismatic; and pronounced the invalidity of orders conferred by the bishops made by usurping monarchs; consequently all baptisms performed by those schismatic divines were deemed to be illegal; and it was resolved that neither one nor the other should be acknowledged, until the parties had received fresh ordination or fresh baptism from the hands of their own part of the church, which had never bowed the knee to Baal. The tendency of these purposes was obvious, and it was important that they should be generally known. On this ground, Dr. Bentley, as Archdeacon of Ely, summoned the clergy of that diocese, among whom were believed to be many Jacobites, to a visitation in the unusual and inconvenient month of December." - Monk's Life of Bentley, vol. i. p. 426.-D.] [† Bentley was collated to the archdeaconry of Ely in June, 1701.-D.] It In giving the date December 11, I follow Dr. Monk; see Life of Bentley, vol. i. p. 427: The St. James's Evening Post, and Oldmixon's History of England, sequel to the Reigns of the Stuarts, (where this charge is quoted with the highest commendation, p. 629,) make the date " December 13."-D.] was at that time very cloudy and melancholy; an open rebellion broken out in the bowels of the land: but at present, by the blessing of God, it has recovered its former countenance and air. So that henceforth, under the fortitude, wisdom, and clemency of our most gracious sovereign King George, by his mild victories at home, and his prudent alliances abroad, we may surely presage and promise, as now commenced and flowing on, a most prosperous age to Great Britain. And in this pleasing prospect, we of the clergy have particular reason to rejoice above our fellow-subjects of the laity, when we patiently consider the deplorable condition of the ministers of our church, had the fortune of the sword fallen out contrary, and had a popish pretender been placed on the throne. I need not now paint to you what horrid scenes were prepared for us, had we once lain at the feet of our popish enemies abroad: a church (as it has long been managed) whose very mercies are cruel, whose promises are all deceits, whose riches and power (the two grand aims of their polity) are our own certain beggary and slavery. On this, I say, I need not now expatiate, having lately done it in a sermon,* which since our last meeting I had the honour to preach before this learned University. But what I would now remark to you, is the usage that was intended us by the once pretended members of our own church, who (in the apostle's style) went out from us, but were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us. These, by the hasty publication of some posthumous writings of their superiors,† have discovered how kindly they would have used their brethren of the clergy, even those that were most tender to them, and perhaps contributed to their subsistence, had their pretended prince been once settled secure in the monarchy. [* See the Sermon upon Popery, p. 241.-D.] Every one of us clergymen present, whose age does not date his orders before the Revolution, and, except a small handful, the whole complex of the English clergy (for even our seniors were to be brought in guilty by a secondary fetch), must have disclaimed and renounced his present orders, and the younger and major part of us their very baptism; unless we chose to incur the nominal crime of schism, and the real penalty of deprivation. We must have owned, and publicly professed, that the highest exercises of our ministerial function have been all along invalid and null, nay, sinful and abominable to God; that consequently all church-preferments, possessed by any of us under such incapacity, were usurped, forfeited, and actually void; not dignities only and parochial livings, but all those masterships and fellowships of both Universities, which statutably (as most of them do) require holy orders. These preferments, if continued to any of us, whether by favour or neglect, must have been humbly accepted by us as a new presentation and gift: and whom of us they would have continued in the priestly office, by absolution, confirmation, or re-ordination (words equivalent in real effect), would have lain entirely at their judgment and good will; that is, if our preferment was of good value, and an agreeable morsel to our masters, we must either have descended to some poorer benefice in the church, or to the common condition and station of a layman. This pious and charitable scheme was ready prepared for us all, whenever they should have power to put it in execution; and to justify or colour it, such new doctrines, such absurd positions were hammered and forged, as sap and undermine the main foundations of Christianity; as make the very charter of man's salvation precarious and uncertain; as would render the whole visible church a mere office of heraldry; as were all adapted to secular and political views, with a spirit truly Machiavellian and Jesuitical. This last will clearly appear, if we recollect the progress of their artifices for the space of some years past. The first step was a pretended attack upon the dissenters; the inva lidity of lay-baptism; though in this point the dissenters were of all men the least concerned, the Calvinian doctrine being more strict and rigorous against lay-baptism than either the primitive church's or our own. Why, then, against the dissenters? But the hook lay hid and out of sight, in the inference or second proposition: Lay-baptism is invalid; but the dissenting ministers are mere laymen, for want of episcopal orders; therefore they cannot efficaciously baptise. Thus a Calvinian position, untaught by our church, was craftily assumed, asserted, and espoused, on purpose to unchristen all the Calvinists themselves, and with them the much greater part of the whole Reformation: horrible to speak or think! But the authors and first broachers of it had a politic aim in't; 'twas directly levelled at the Protestant succession, against the illustrious House of Hanover, which by this wonderful doctrine was to be wholly excluded out of the church of Christ; and their tacit consequence was ready and plain, that of two evils, 'twas better to have a papist on the throne than a pagan. This unchristening assertion, so false, so injurious to God and man, quite contrary to the good old doctrine of our reformed ancestors in England, and calculated by its contrivers merely for worldly ends and the Pretender's service, was delivered out and retailed with zeal, as a most important point of faith and salvation. And too many of our younger clergy, well-meaning men, and quite ignorant of the drift of it, preached strenuously the new opinion; drawn in by the specious bait of adding dignity and prerogative to their own episcopal orders. But see now the second step of our politic theologues. They kept in reserve a distinction, to be produced at a proper juncture, that reduced and sunk us all, even those that had laboured for them, and proclaimed the highest necessity of episcopal orders and clerical baptism, to as low a condition as the very Calvinists themselves. For episcopal orders, which we thought ourselves possessed of, were, in their secret sense, within a very narrow compass, being proper to such only as had received their ordination from the hands of the deprived bishops or their clandestine successors: so that every one of us were in an instant to be voted mere laymen, and the junior part of us to be on the self-same level with the unbaptised Indians, to be left (without some kind help) to the uncovenanted mercies of God. Thus the first position was minted to restore their pretended prince; and the second, when that restoration was got, to get into their own hands all the rich preferments of England. Without doubt this last doctrine was to be carefully suppressed and concealed, till the occasion was ripe for it; and in the meantime their deluded assistants were to be soothed and cajoled with ambiguous words about the promised grandeur and splendour of the English church. But the modellers and projectors of this scheme happening to die, their inferiors, out of a blind veneration for their invaluable remains, were so providentially infatuated as to print and publish them quite out of season, while they still wanted the help of those whom they designed to make dupes of, while their Pretender's affairs were in the utmost desperation. This certainly, or nothing can, will open the eyes of every clergyman amongst us, even of those whom these managers had decoyed either into a compassionate sense of their sufferings, or a kind opinion of their cause, or an indifference about the great event. And from henceforth every one of us must needs esteem and congratulate the establishment of the monarchy in the same royal race that now possesses it (the only Protestant blood of the renowned family of the Stuarts) as the sole security of his religion, his Christian liberty, his preferment, his very profession: since he finds that on both hands he was marked but* for a sacrifice; on the one to his implacable adversaries the Romans abroad, on the other to his ambitious and prevaricating brethren at home. [⚫ qy.—" out?"-D.] |