The Age of Dryden

Robert South (1633-1716).

Robert South, on the whole perhaps the greatest preacher of his age, was born in 1633, and educated at Westminster and Christ Church. He is accused by Antony Wood, the principal authority for his life, of having been a time-server, who sided successively with the Independents, the Presbyterians, and the Church of England in the days of their power. Wood seems, however, to have had some private grievance against him; and if South was really at the same time so pliant and so able, it seems strange that he should have attained no higher preferment than stalls at Christ Church and Westminster. Quarrelsome he certainly was, and he entered into a most acrimonious controversy with Sherlock, which it required a royal proclamation to compose. He died in 1716.

John Tillotson (1630-1694).

Unlike South’s, the character of John Tillotson is no matter for controversy. With the possible exception of Archbishop Herring,11 he was the most amiable man that ever filled the see of Canterbury, and was pronounced by the discerning and experienced William III. the best friend he had ever had and the best man he had ever known. To the meekness of the pastor Tillotson added the qualities of the statesman, and happy was it for the Church of England that such a man could be found to fill the primacy at such a time. As a master of oratory he is greatly inferior in eloquence to both Barrow and South, but historically is more important than either, for Addison was influenced by him, and his discourses long gave the tone to the English pulpit, affording the almost universally accepted model throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century.

Of these three great preachers South is certainly the greatest as respects eloquence and energy of diction. Almost every sentence is striking, and at the same time in perfect good taste. By so much, however, as he surpasses his rivals in purely literary qualities, does he fall below them in others even more essential to the preacher. His judgment is often greatly at fault, he commits himself to plainly untenable propositions, and enforces them with the confidence of one displaying self-evident truths. After a few experiences of this kind the reader begins to look upon him as a rhetorician, and to prefer the more cautious, but still vivid and vigorous ratiocination of Barrow; or the ‘sweet reasonableness’ of Tillotson, inferior to Barrow, as he to South, in the gifts of the consummate orator, but more truly persuasive in the gentleness of his expostulation and his transparent candour.

Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester (1635-1699), though a fine preacher, is less remembered in this capacity than for his unsuccessful controversy with Locke and his Origines Sacrae, a work of great learning in defence of the Church of England, which Coleridge in his Notes on Books emphatically prefers to the corresponding labours of Chillingworth. Coleridge was naturally prejudiced in favour of the antagonist of Locke, whose graces of mind and person, however, are attested by a dispassionate witness, Pepys.

Theology, apart from eloquence, is hardly entitled to a place in literary history; yet some of the theologians of the period were too illustrious to be passed over without mention. John Pearson, Bishop of Chester (1612-1686), ranks among the Fathers of the Church of England by his standard work on the Creed. ‘Pearson’s very dust,’ says Bentley, ‘is gold.’ Barrow’s great controversial treatise has been mentioned. George Bull, Bishop of St. David’s (1634-1710), achieved even more, for he extorted the thanks of the clergy of France by his Nicaenae Fidei Defensio (1685), written in Latin, but afterwards translated into English. The author’s object was to prove the orthodoxy of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, which had been disputed by several Protestant divines; the cost of publication was borne by the munificent Bishop Fell. The French prelates further paid Bull the equivocal compliment of wondering why in the world so excellent a man did not join the Church of Rome. Talis cum sis, utinam noster esses. Bull expounded his difficulties in a treatise on the corruptions of that church, the most popular of his works at home, but which, being written in English, failed to vindicate his position in the eyes of the Frenchmen. Next to these giants of learning may be named a very dissimilar person, Richard Baxter (1615-1691), whom moderate men had designated for a bishopric at the Restoration, but whom the Bartholomew’s Day of 1662 made a Nonconformist. He wrote one hundred and sixty-eight books, two of which have survived, A Call to the Unconverted and The Saints’ Everlasting Rest. The latter Professor Minto calls ‘a volume of pious thoughts that have a peculiar interest when we view them as the aspirations of an infirm man turning wearily from the distractions of a time utterly out of joint.’ The writings of George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, mostly belong to a previous period; but the No Cross, no Crown of William Penn (1644-1718) falls within Restoration literature. A far more important work is the Apology of Robert Barclay (1648-1690). This remarkable book, which has been recommended by bishops to theological students as the best available for many purposes, is the standard exposition of Quakerism, and undoubtedly ranks among the classics of its period. Mr. Leslie Stephen describes it as ‘one of the most impressive theological writings of the century: grave, logical, and often marked by the eloquence of lofty moral convictions.’ ‘The St. Paul of the Quakers,’ says Coleridge of the author. Barclay, the descendant of an old Scotch family, became a Quaker in 1667, following the example of his father. He underwent some persecution, but was in the main shielded by the favour of James II. His works were collected by Penn in 1692.

Two devotional writings of the age, besides Baxter’s, obtained sufficient currency to merit a place in the history of literature. The Whole Duty of Man, first published in 1658, is an excellent representative of the sobriety and sound sense characteristic of the Church of England. At the same time it must be confessed that it has more reason than unction, and seeks rather to menace and upbraid than to allure men into the religious life. At the present day it would be pronounced grievously deficient in fervour, servile in its political teachings, and too exclusive in its appeals to prudential and self-interested motives; but its adaptation to a positive and prosaic age was sufficiently evinced by a circulation enormous for the period. The authorship is involved in mystery: it is usually attributed to Archbishop Sterne or Lady Pakington; but Sterne can hardly have had time to write the seven other treatises ascribed, apparently with good ground, to the same author; and it is clearly not the composition of a woman. Evelyn attributes it on the authority of Archbishop Tenison to a Dr. Chaplin, of University College, Oxford, who cannot be traced. Lately Mr. Dobie, in the Academy, has ascribed it and its companions on strong grounds to Richard Allestree, Provost of Eton, an intimate friend of Bishop Fell. The Bishop appears to have copied some of them in his own hand, and certainly was acquainted with the authorship. The most important of the other works ascribed to the writer of The Whole Duty of Man are The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety, The Gentleman and Ladies’ Calling, and The Government of the Tongue.

Another work of edification, which almost rivalled the popularity of The Whole Duty of Man, was the Practical Discourse concerning Death (1689), by William Sherlock (1641-1707), Master of the Temple and Dean of St. Paul’s, the divine whose tergiversations respecting the oath of allegiance to William and Mary are so amusingly detailed by Macaulay. It is a model of clear and forcible writing, but on the lowest plane of unspiritual selfishness. ‘How unreasonable is it for us to trouble ourselves about this world longer than we are like to continue in it!’ exclaims Sherlock, with the air of one apologizing for enunciating a truism.

John Ray (1628-1705).

Natural theology had a representative of much higher moral calibre than professional theology found in Sherlock in John Ray (1628-1705). Ray, a Cambridge man, prevented by scruples from ministering in the Church of England after the fatal legislation of 1662, but substantially accepting her doctrines, was the first English naturalist of eminence, and wrote chiefly in Latin, but composed his treatise on The Wisdom of God in the Creation in his mother-tongue. The anthropomorphism of this earnest, lucid, and ingenious book, the prototype of Paley’s, is a defect hardly to be avoided in an age when the Deity was almost universally conceived as an artificer; and yet Ray comes very near indeed to the conception of a power immanent in Nature. His style is limpid and persuasive; his reasoning cogent; his good sense is apparent in his discussion of spontaneous generation and the stories related in its support, although the caution and modesty of his temper sometimes incline him to defer too much to authority. He has no mercy, for example, on frogs rained from the sky, but will not, in the face of the testimony of eye-witnesses, carry scepticism to the point of disputing that they may have been occasionally found immured in the middle of stones.

Ray’s teleology had allies in Derham (1657-1735), an observant naturalist and author of Astro-Theology, and in the Hon. Robert Boyle, the best of men in disposition, and an admirable natural philosopher, but feeble and diffuse as a natural theologian.

Thomas Burnet (1635? -1715).

Thomas Burnet, Master of the Charter House, is the reverse of Boyle in most respects; a visionary as natural theologian and natural philosopher, but the only writer of his day, the great preachers excepted, who attained to sublimity in prose. A Cambridge man and a pupil of Tillotson, Burnet was elected Master of the Charter House in 1685, and signalized himself by his courage in resisting James II.’s attempted intrusion of Roman Catholics into the foundation. He became Clerk of the Closet to William III., which post he was obliged to resign from the freedom of his criticism of the Mosaic narrative, but retained his mastership unmolested to his death. He left behind him two theological works in Latin, privately printed, but soon afterwards published, De Fide et officiis Christianorum and De Statu mortuorum et resurgentium, in which he carried the liberty of speculation very far. The book on which his fame rests, The Sacred Theory of the Earth, was also originally composed in Latin, to which circumstance it is probably indebted for much of its exceptional dignity of style. It was intended by the author as sober natural philosophy, but to a scientific age appears a poetical vision of the former immersion and future conflagration of the earth, justly compared by Mr. Gosse to the gorgeous apocalyptic imaginings of Danby and Martin. According to Burnet the earth was originally an egg both in shape and smoothness, enclosing the waters in an ‘antediluvian abyss.’ At the universal deluge the earth sank into this internal cavity. Upon the subsidence of the waters the land partly emerged in the confused shapes into which it had been tumbled by the crash, partly remained beneath the sea. The argument is very ingenious and entertaining, and instructive also, for it exhibits to perfection two of the most ordinary causes of fallacy, the assuming imaginary data as unquestionable premises and the enthusiast’s adoption of sublimity as the standard of truth. Burnet’s mind was the mind of a poet; he had just enough science to misguide him, and more than enough learning to gloss over the vagaries of his science. He is quite as much at home in expounding the catastrophe of the future, the final conflagration, as the watery catastrophe of which he believes the traces to be visible everywhere around him. At the same time he has a strong affinity to the rationalizing divines, even more visible in his strictly theological writings, and would not for the world propound anything of whose reasonableness he has not first convinced himself. As a writer he stands high, combining the splendour and melody of a former age with the ease and lucidity of his own. The following is a fair average specimen of his picturesque imagination and impassioned diction:

‘Thus the Flood came to its height; and ’tis not easy to represent to ourselves this strange scene of things, when the Deluge was in its fury and extremity; when the earth was broken and swallowed up in the abyss, whose raging waters rose higher than the mountains, and filled the air with broken waves, with an universal mist, and with thick darkness, so as nature seemed to be in a second chaos; and upon this chaos rid the distrest Ark, that bore the small remains of mankind. No sea was ever so tumultuous, as this, nor is there anything in present nature to be compared with the disorder of these waters; all the poetry, and all the hyperboles that are used in the description of storms and raging seas, were literally true in this, if not beneath it. The Ark was really carried to the tops of the highest mountains, and into the places of the clouds, and thrown down again into the deepest gulfs; and to this very state of the Deluge and of the Ark, which was a type of the Church in this world, David seems to have alluded in the name of the Church, Psalm xlii. 7, Abyss calls upon abyss at the noise of thy cataracts or waterspouts; all thy waves and billows have gone over me. It was no doubt an extraordinary and miraculous providence, that could make a vessel, so ill manned, live upon such a sea; that kept it from being dashed against the hills, or overwhelmed in the deeps. That abyss which had devoured and swallowed up whole forests of woods, cities, and provinces, nay the whole earth, when it had conquered all, and triumphed over all, could not destroy this single ship. I remember in the story of the Argonautics, Dion. Argonaut. l. i., v. 47, when Jason set out to fetch the Golden Fleece, the poet saith, all the gods that day looked down from Heaven to view the ship, and the nymphs stood upon the mountain-tops to see the noble youth of Thessaly pulling at the oars; we may with more reason suppose the good angels to have looked down upon this ship of Noah’s; and that not out of curiosity, as idle spectators, but with a passionate concern for its safety and deliverance. A ship, whose cargo was no less than a whole world; that carried the fortune and hopes of all posterity, and if this had perished, the earth for any thing we know had been nothing but a desert, a great ruin, a dead heap of rubbish, from the Deluge to the conflagration. But death and hell, the grave, and destruction have their bounds. We may entertain ourselves with the consideration of the face of the Deluge, and of the broken and drowned earth, in this scheme, with the floating Ark, and the guardian angels.’

The most eminent natural theologian of the time after Ray, and one who would have surpassed Ray in importance if his labours in this department had been more than a brief episode in a busy career, was Richard Bentley, whose power of destructive criticism in other fields proved how formidable a champion he could be on the negative side of any question. Bentley’s massive intelligence, however, aptitude for broad commonsense views, and impatience of niceties and subtleties, entirely qualified him to embrace and expound the form in which natural theology commended itself to the vast majority of the thinkers of his day. He dealt solely with the materialism of Hobbes, ‘there may be some Spinosists beyond seas,’ he says, but to him de non existentibus, et de non apparentibus, eadem est ratio. The questions and the answers of a Goethe would have been equally unintelligible to him; if Newman would certainly have thought him shallow, he would as certainly have thought Newman whimsical. He must be judged from the standpoint of his own day, and from this his argument, delivered as the Boyle lecture for 1691 and 1692, must be pronounced a splendid and cogent piece of reasoning. It is particularly remarkable for its absolute reliance on the doctrines of Newton’s Principia, when Newton had hardly a disciple out of England.

CHAPTER XIII.

BUNYAN AND OTHER WRITERS OF FICTION

John Bunyan (1628-1688).

So great an endowment is genius, that neither the effect produced nor the fame achieved by all the eloquent and learned divines of Charles II.’s age can be for an instant compared to the achievement of a poor and almost illiterate mechanic, whom Macaulay classes with Milton as one of the only two men of that period – he might have excepted Thomas Burnet – to whom had been vouchsafed any considerable measure of imagination. John Bunyan, the one man who has attained to write a successful prose allegory on a large scale, and to infuse true emotion into an exercise of ingenuity, and who probably owed less to study and training than any other of the great authors of the modern world, was born at Elstow, a village in the neighbourhood of Bedford, in November, 1628. He is usually described as a ‘tinker,’ but, as he was not an itinerant, ‘brazier’ would be a more correct appellation. The trade was his father’s, who was also a very small freeholder. Bunyan probably received some instruction at Bedford grammar school, and his narrative of his boyhood shows that he must have had considerable knowledge of the Bible, which impressed his imaginative temper more than he knew at the time. According to his own account he was wild and profane in his youth, but nothing very definite can be extracted from these self-accusations, and it would rather appear that it was only for a short time that he could even be described as careless. In 1644, partly perhaps from grief at the death of his mother and dissatisfaction with his father’s speedy re-marriage, he enlisted into the army, doubtless the Parliamentary force, though he strangely or prudently leaves the point uncertain. About the end of 1648 he married, and through the influence of his wife, whose name he does not tell us, and by the aid of two religious books which she brought him among her scanty possessions, he accomplished what he afterwards came to consider a merely outward reformation. The attempt to subjugate the inward man involved him for several years in the most distressing spiritual conflicts, described with extreme power in his Grace Abounding. They conducted him eventually to peace, and into the Baptist congregation of Mr. Gifford, who had been helpful to him. In 1655 he became a preacher, and in the following year produced his first book, Some Gospel Truths Opened, to which was prefixed a recommendatory letter by John Burton, who says, ‘This man is not chosen out of an earthly, but out of the heavenly university.’

In 1660 the revival under the Restoration government of obsolete enactments against conventicles, with no endeavour to discriminate between seditious conspirators like the Fifth Monarchy men and harmless worshippers like the Baptists, compelled the reluctant Bedford magistrates to arrest and imprison Bunyan as an unlicensed preacher. He might have escaped, or have obtained release by a trifling submission, but with the spirit of a Christian martyr he disdained either course, and abode contentedly in prison for nearly twelve years. His captivity in the commodious county gaol was by no means oppressive; indeed, in the first part of it he enjoyed a large measure of liberty, afterwards withdrawn. He supported himself by making tagged laces, as well as by the publication of some books, of which Grace Abounding (1666) is the most important. The first part of Pilgrim’s Progress was also written in prison, but, as Bunyan’s best biographer, Dr. John Brown, almost proves, during a second and comparatively brief confinement in 1676. In 1672 Bunyan published his Defence of Justification by Faith, a coarse and violent attack on the Design of Christianity, by Dr., afterwards Bishop Fowler, one of the most tolerant divines of the age, but who was provoked to reply with almost equal acrimony. In the same year Charles II.’s merciful but entirely illegal suspension of all statutes against Papists and Nonconformists liberated Bunyan, who even obtained a licence to preach, and became stated minister of the Baptist congregation at Bedford, then meeting in a barn in an orchard. Notwithstanding some few molestations, of which the second imprisonment in 1675-76 was the chief, the remainder of his life was in general tranquil and prosperous. The first part of Pilgrim’s Progress appeared in 1678, and, though not half-a-dozen copies of it are now known to exist, immediately attained the highest popularity. Edition followed edition, the first two or three with remarkable additions and improvements. Bunyan frequently visited London, where he became a popular preacher; his influence was courted, though unsuccessfully, by the government itself, and in 1688, the year of his death, he had become in some sort chaplain to the Lord Mayor, ‘an Anabaptist, a very odd ignorant person,’ says Evelyn. His principal works in the interval had been: The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, 1680; The Holy War, 1682; the second part of the Pilgrim’s Progress, 1684; The Jerusalem Sinner Saved, 1688. His death, on August 31st, 1688, took place in London, and was occasioned by cold contracted on a journey which he had undertaken to reconcile a father with his son.

Of Bunyan’s character there can be but one opinion, he was a truly Apostolic man. As no one’s diction is more forcible, unadulterated Saxon, so no life has better expressed the sturdy, sterling virtues of the Englishman. A wider culture would have enriched both his mind and his writings, but with the probable result of turning a remarkable man into an ordinary one. His good sense and his humility are illustrated by a charming anecdote. ‘Ah, Mr. Bunyan,’ said a grateful hearer, ‘that was a sweet sermon!’ ‘You need not tell me that,’ replied Bunyan, ‘the devil whispered it to me before I was well out of the pulpit.’

It is unnecessary to dwell at any great length upon the characteristics of so famous and universally known a book as Pilgrim’s Progress. Though professedly a vision, and treating of spiritual things, it ranks with Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels as one of the great realistic books of the English language. All three are examples of the possibility of rendering scenes wholly imaginary, and in fact impossible, truer to the apprehension than experience itself by the narrator’s own air of absolute conviction, and by unswerving fidelity to truth of detail. In Bunyan’s case the triumph is the more remarkable, as his personages are not even imaginary men and women, but mere embodiments of moral or theological qualities. Yet Faithful and Hopeful are as real as Crusoe and Friday. Before he began to write he must have realized what he wished to describe with a vividness only conceivable by regarding it as an outward expression of his own spiritual experience. He had himself been Christian and Faithful and the captive in Doubting Castle; he had gazed on Vanity Fair, and passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The fact that his allegory is in truth an autobiography explains what Macaulay calls the characteristic peculiarity of Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘it is the only work of its kind which possesses a strong human interest. Other allegories only amuse the fancy. The allegory of Bunyan has been read by many thousands with tears.’ Elsewhere he says, ‘Pilgrim’s Progress is perhaps the only book about which, after the lapse of a hundred years, the educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common people.’ It may be added that Pilgrim’s Progress, unlike other celebrated works, is a bona fide and unmistakable allegory. Don Quixote may have a much deeper purpose than that of satirizing chivalric romances, but not one reader in a hundred cares to fathom it. Spenser undoubtedly intended to shadow forth Elizabeth in Gloriana; but the perception of the poet’s purpose contributes nothing to the enjoyment of his poem. In Bunyan, however, the allegory is the book, too plain to be overlooked by the most careless reader; and all the minor allegories that combine to enrich the main action are equally apparent for what they are, and yet the obvious invention has all the force of reality. ‘Bunyan,’ says Macaulay, ‘is almost the only writer who ever gave to the abstract the interest of the concrete. In the works of many celebrated authors men are mere personifications. The mind of Bunyan, on the other hand, was so imaginative that personifications, when he dealt with them, became men. A dialogue between two qualities, in his dream, has more dramatic effect than a dialogue between two human beings in most plays.’ Macaulay proceeds to compare Bunyan in this particular with Shelley, and the comparison is just; but it is surprising that neither he nor Mr. Froude should have dwelt on Bunyan’s deeper affinity to a great predecessor of whom he assuredly never read a line – Dante. Dante’s personifications, indeed, are feeble compared to Bunyan’s; it is doubtful whether some of them are even intended as such. The might of his imagination, however, like Bunyan’s, is shown in his power of reconciling us to its wildest flights by the intensity of his realism; and the chief distinction is that while Bunyan’s materials are necessarily drawn from the only worlds he knew, the narrow and prosaic world of Bedford and the sublime world of the Bible, Dante disposed of all his age could give in philosophy, political life, human learning, the influence of art and the scrutiny of nature. Bunyan is hence a very contracted and terrestrial Dante, but so far as he goes he is a true Dante; he cannot soar with his great predecessor, but if Dante had succeeded him he would not have disdained to have built upon his massive groundwork. Both suffer from the inevitable progress of mankind beyond the conceptions which in their day were accepted as matters of course. Dante’s Inferno now seems rather grotesque than terrible. Christian’s forsaking his kindred in the City of Destruction, which to Bunyan appeared a duty, now seems selfishness. That the fame of both should have survived such profound modifications of belief is one of the most striking evidences of their greatness. One great advantage Bunyan possessed: the Bible had prepared the way for him. There is probably no other such instance of the assimilation of one literature by another as the domestication of the Bible in England. The Greek and Hebrew authors of the Scriptures were better known to the public that Bunyan principally addressed than the majority of their own writers, and he had no need, like other men of original genius, to painfully create the taste by which he was ultimately to be judged. From the first Pilgrim’s Progress took rank as a classic; well might Dr. Arnold call it ‘a complete reflection of Scripture.’ Its chief blemish, the somewhat prosaic and self-seeking character of its piety, harmonized entirely with the current teaching of the pulpit, and offered no stumbling-block to a generation which had not so much as heard of ‘other-worldliness.’ Its popularity soon received the usual attestation of piracies, spurious continuations, and imitations in all languages. The question whether Bunyan was indebted for his allegory to any predecessor is hardly worth discussing. Some general resemblance must necessarily exist between books treating of pilgrimages, and here the resemblance is no more than general. The second part was published in 1684. Its inferiority to the first part is universally admitted, but is less than is usually entailed by the endeavour to append an artificial supplement to an inspired book. Many passages are fully worthy of the first part, and as a whole it abounds with life and variety.