1698.] THE EAST INDIA COMPANY. 203 The old East India Company had offered to advance seven hundred thousand pounds, at four per cent. The necessities of the time made the offer of the highest sum most acceptable. The Whigs carried the New Company against the Tories, who supported the Old Company. The favoured adventurers were to be called "the English Company." The body which had been chartered by queen Elizabeth, and called "the London Company," was to cease trading in three years. But the Old Company had obtained territorial possessions of small extent, and had now made an important acquisition by the purchase of Calcutta, where they had built a stronghold, known as Fort William. The New Company had provided in this Bill for the charge of sending ambassadors from the Crown to the potentates of the East. They proposed that the king should now send an ambassador extraordinary to the Great Mogul, in whose dominions the original traders had their chief factories and settlements, to desire his favour for the New Company. Sir William Norris, member for Liverpool, accordingly set forth with ample allowance for 204 STATUTE AGAINST SOCINIANS. [1698. his dignity. But Aurungzebe was not propitiated by the professions of the. representative of the merchants who came to rival those to whom he had already granted his sublime protection. The ambassador was unable to contend against the prescriptive privileges which had been bestowed upon Englishmen a century before, and which had been confirmed by the successors of Jehangir. The great "Alemgir," or Alemgir," or "Conqueror of the World," ordered the ambassador to depart from Agra. The discomfited envoy had no choice but to obey, and he died on his way home. In four more years the rival Companies were united.* From that period we may date the gradual extension of the power of the one East India Company, which was ultimately to win for England an empire in Hindustan far more extensive than that of the Mogul conquerors in the height of their grandeur. In his speech on the opening of Parliament the king said, "I esteem it one of the greatest advantages of the peace that I shall now have leisure to rectify such corruptions or abuses as may have crept into any part of the administration during the war; and effectually to discourage profaneness and immorality." Two months after, the Commons went up with an Address to the king, praying that he would issue his proclamation commanding all magistrates to put in execution the laws against such profaneness and immorality; and they added a request that he would take measures "for suppressing all pernicious books and pamphlets, which contain in them impious doctrines against the Holy Trinity, and other fundamental articles of our faith." As the king intimated in his answer, that it was necessary to make some more effectual provision for suppressing the pernicious books and pamphlets to which the Address alluded, an Act was passed, by which it was provided that if any person who had been educated in the Christian religion, or had made profession of the same, should by writing, printing, or teaching, deny the Holy Trinity, or deny the Christian religion to be true, or the Holy Scriptures to be of divine authority, he should, for the first offence be disqualified for any office; for the second, be rendered incapable of bringing any action, of purchasing lands, or of being guardian, executor, or legatee. He was moreover to be subject to three years' imprisonment. That portion of the Statute which related to persons denying the doctrine of the Trinity was repealed by the Act of 53 George III. The law of 1698, with this exception, still remains unrepealed or unmodified. But it is perfectly clear that any attempt to enforce it would be wholly opposed to the spirit of this age,-not that we are less earnest in religious feeling than the generation that passed this Statute, but that we have learnt that opinions are not to be put down by indictments, as long as they are not disgustingly obtruded upon society as an insult to its decencies. In the attack made by the Act of William upon "blasphemous and impious opinions" regarding the doctrine of the Trinity, the difficulty, if not impossibility, was involved of so accurately measuring the difference between orthodoxy and heterodoxy as to enable plain men to decide upon points upon which divines themselves were disputing. Thomas Firmin, a London citizen, was one of the leading advocates of the popular schemes of that day, "for setting the poor to work," that is, by providing the labour out of a common public stock which could not be provided by * See ante, vol. iii. p. 346. +9 Gul. III. c. 35 (c. 32 in the common printed editions.) 1698.] REFORMATION OF MANNERS. 205 commercial enterprise, and thus increasing production without reference to the demand of the consumers, or making more poor by underselling the producers who were previously in the market. Firmin was, however, a man of real benevolence, and though his schemes upon any large scale would be impracticable, his exertions rescued many poor children from idleness and starvation. "He was in great esteem," says Burnet, "for promoting many charitable designs; for looking after the poor of the city and setting them to work; for raising great sums for schools and hospitals, and indeed for charities of all sorts, public and private." This practical Christian was the friend of Tillotson; "he was called a Socinian, but was really an Arian." He was as diligent in propagating his theological tenets as in his less questionable labours. According to Burnet, those who were at work to undermine the government" raised a great outcry against Socinianism, and gave it out that it was likely to overrun all; for archbishop Tillotson and some of the bishops had lived in great friendship with Mr. Firmin, whose charitable temper they thought it became them to encourage." The Clergy themselves came to dispute amongst themselves, and thus to be divided by their adversaries into "real and nominal Trinitarians." The spirit of controversy that was again called forth" made the bishops move the king to set out injunctions, requir ing them to see to the repressing of error and heresy, with all possible zeal, more particularly in the fundamental articles of the Christian faith: and to watch against and hinder the use of new terms or new explanations in these matters. This put a stop to these debates, as Mr. Firmin's death put a stop to the printing and spreading of Socinian books." * How far the Statute which immediately followed Mr. Firmin's death was conducive to the repression of infidelity, may be sufficiently estimated by its progress in the next two reigns, when the test of wit and wisdom, of refinement and taste, was to be a free-thinker after the fashion of Shaftesbury or Bolingbroke. The Socinian books might have vanished; but the profaneness and immorality, which could not so readily be touched by Act of Parliament, had to be combated by an organization very peculiar to this country. The principle of Association was to come to the aid of the government. Societies for the Reformation of Manners had for some time been in activity. They originated with the Puritans. They were encouraged by Dissenters after the Revolution; and they gradually embraced men of various modes of worship. Their business was to lay informations before the magistrates, of swearers, drunkards, sabbath-breakers, and other offenders, and to appropriate that portion of the fines which were earned by common informers, to purposes of charity. The objection which ever was, and ever will be, against the most honest exertions of such Societies is that they are not impartial in their visitations. Defoe indignantly attacked the unequal distribution of punishment "in the commonwealth of vice," and boldly said, "till the nobility, gentry, justices of the peace, and clergy, will be pleased either to reform their own manners, or find out some method and power impartially to punish themselves when guilty, we humbly crave leave to object against setting any poor man in the stocks, or sending him to the house of correction for * Burnet, "Own Time," vol. iv. p. 382. 206 SOCIETIES FOR RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION. (1698. immoralities, as the most unjust and unequal way of proceeding in the world." * Whatever were the immoralities of the upper classes,-whatever was the laxity of some of the clergy, there was a spirit growing up which is the best proof of an extending sense of Christian obligation. When the influential members of a community have come to recognize the duty of association, for objects of benevolence of a wider range than their own parish, town, county, or kingdom, there is a principle stirring within them which, if not exaggerated into false enthusiasm, will make them more regardful even of the wants at their own doors. Such an Association was that of the "Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge;" such was the "Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts;" both established about this period. These Societies were chiefly created and brought into a condition of practical utility by the efforts of one man. A Society had been formed in 1649 under an Act of the Parliament of the Commonwealth, "for the promoting and propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England." It subsisted till after the Restoration; but in that period-one of the decline of genuine Christianity-it fell into disuse. Thomas Bray, a native of Shropshire, born in 1656, was educated at Hart Hall, Oxford. Whilst he held the benefice of Sheldon he published a very useful work, "Catechetical Lectures." The Governor and Assembly of the Colony of Maryland, having established a legal maintenance for ministers of the church, Dr. Bray was appointed a Commissary, or general Superintendent. One of his first labours, after selecting proper persons to be sent, was to provide Libraries for their use. Another of his valuable designs was to establish lending Libraries in England and Wales for the use of the clergy. He was truly the founder of those Parochial Libraries, established by Act of Parliament in 1708, which, if they had been carried forward with corresponding energy, would have tended to dissipate some of that ignorance amongst the people generally which it has been a main object in our own time to remove. To this admirable man was mainly owing the establishment of the two great and venerable Societies which still maintain their utility in connexion with the Church of England. With a clergy even more zealous and united than the churchmen of the end of the seventeenth century-a clergy learned, logical, argumentative, but rarely touching the hearts of their hearers-the counteracting influences to such a Society as that for promoting Christian Knowledge were very great. Not the least of these opposing influences was the licentiousness of the Stage. In 1697, Sunderland, as Lord Chamberlain, had issued an order to prevent the profaneness and immorality of the acted drama. In 1699, the Master of the Revels represented that the actors did not leave out such profane and indecent expressions as he had ordered to be omitted. The king therefore issued his command that nothing hereafter should be acted contrary to religion and good manners. How this command was obeyed let Congreve, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh inform us. The Master of the Revels might refuse "to license any plays containing irreligious or immoral expressions," as he was commanded; but the Master of the Revels "The Poor Man's Plea against all the Proclamations, or Acts of Parliament, for Reformation." * 1698.] LICENTIOUSNESS OF THE STAGE. 207 probably made no attempt to remonstrate against performances in which the phraseology might be tolerably decent, but of which the whole structure of the action was to represent chastity as the thin disguise of scheming women, and the pursuit of adultery as the proper business of refined gentlemen ; to make the sober citizen the butt of the profligates who invaded his domestic hearth; to exhibit the triumphs of intellect in the schemes of venal lacqueys to aid the intrigues of their masters, and of odious waiting-maids to surround their mistresses with opportunities of temptation. Was this a true picture of Society? We believe not. None of these writers, with all their wit and vivacity, ever looked beyond the periwigs and point laces, the stomachers and towering caps, that they saw in the side boxes. The great middle class was wholly unknown to them-that class which, although it had cast aside some of those severities of puritanism which confounded innocent gaiety with vice, was not inclined to adopt the principle inculcated by the dramatists that stupidity and decency were inseparable. There was an earnest public in England that disliked the Stage because it was corrupting. Defoe was of this number, and he wrote against the drama with little of his usual discrimi nation. Jeremy Collier took a bolder course, and smote down the individual writers who made plays "the greatest debauchers of the nation," as Burnet says. He had even Dryden at his feet, when the great poet acknowledges, "In many things he has taxed me justly. . . . It becomes not me to draw my pen in defence of a bad cause, when I have so often drawn it for a good one." Dryden maintains, however, that Fletcher's "Custom of the Country" is more offensive than any of the plays then acted. "Are the times," he asks, so much more reformed now, than they were five and twenty years ago?"* Unquestionably they were more reformed. But the morality of the age of the Restoration still tainted the Stage of the Revolution. Charles the Second brought to England the manners of the Court of France in the days of its worst profligacy. Since then, the Court of France had grown devout and decent. Burnet says, "It is a shame to our nation and religion to see the stage so reformed in France, and so polluted still in England." The Court of William and Mary, in its seclusion at Kensington, had little influence upon the world of fashion; and thus there was no perceptible effect upon manners in the decorous example of the highest in the land. Burnet was pretty right in his antithesis-" The stage is the great corrupter of the town, and the bad people of the town have been the chief corrupters of the stage." The Court of Louis the Fourteenth was now to be brought into intimate acquaintance with the Court of William the Third. As the Parliament had interfered to prevent the king of England emulating, even for purposes of national defence, the great armies of the king of France, William, with a pardonable ostentation, resolved that his ambassador to Versailles should not go without the trappings of a magnificent royalty. He could scarcely afford this most expensive outlay, especially as five days before Portland, the ambassador, set forth with his sumptuous retinue on this friendly mission, Whitehall had been burnt down. The Banqueting House was saved with * Preface to the "Fables." +Ibid. "Own Time," vol. vi. p. 263. |