enforcement of provisions that were not yet altogether a dead letter. But whatever might be the case in regard of the clergy, the canons of the Church were not binding upon the laity, except so far as their regulations were embodied, or at least accepted, in common law; and there was no disposition in the country at large to give them any greater weight than they were clearly entitled to. It was often a matter of great difficulty to maintain even that measure of corrective discipline the right of which the law of England did undoubtedly guarantee to the Church. Forms were kept up, but there was little spirit and power in them.' Censures might be legally and rightfully passed which could not always be duly executed.' Yet throughout the whole of the eighteenth century Church discipline was in some respects a much greater reality than it is in our own day. No doubt in its later years the difference lay more in possibilities than in actual fact; so that the alterations in the law of excommunication made by the Act of 1813, exceedingly important as they were to persons who had come under censure of the ecclesiastical courts, had no very visible or direct bearing upon the English Church in general. Excommunication had been for some time becoming more than ever an unfamiliar word, limited almost entirely to the use of law courts. When, therefore, various obsolete practices relating to it were swept away and its consequences rendered less formidable, it is probable that few but lawyers were cognisant of any change. But in the first half of the last century, amid a number of complaints that notorious vice so continually escaped the formal censure of the Church, it is also evident that presentments and excommunications were far from uncommon, and that even open penance was not an excessive rarity. Episcopal instructions on the subject are frequent. Thus Archbishop Sharp requests his clergy to be very careful of anything like persecution; but where they cannot reform habitual delinquents, such as drunkards, profane persons, neglecters of God's worship, &c., by softer means, to take measures that they be presented. He would then do all he could before proceeding to excommunication. When that sentence had been actually denounced he allowed the clergy I W. Gardner's Faithful Pastor, 1745, 4. 2 The Character of a Churchman, 1690; Somers Tracts, ix. 178. man to absolve the offender in sickness, when penitent, without the formal absolution under the Court Seal. Com mutation for penances he did not approve of, but would sometimes allow them on the advice of the minister of the parish; the commutation to be entirely applied to Church uses and as notoriously as the offence had been. The public good was to be the rule.1 Secker's instructions to the clergy of Oxford in 1753 are still more full, though he prefaces them by the acknowledgment that he is 'perfectly sensible that both immorality and religion are grown almost beyond the reach of ecclesiastical power, which, having been in former times unwarrantably extended, hath been very unjustly cramped and weakened many ways.' 2 Five years later, in his first Canterbury Charge, Secker speaks much less confidently on this subject. Wickedness, he said, of almost every kind, had made dreadful progress, but ecclesiastical authority was 'not only too much hindered, but too much despised to do almost anything to any purpose. In the small degree that it could be exerted usefully he trusted it would be.' ' He expressed himself to the same effect and still more regretfully in his last written production, his 'Concio coram synodo' in 1761.1 Fleetwood reminded the clergy and churchwardens that they were to present not only for flagitious conduct, but also for non-attendance at worship, for neglecting to send children. or servants to be catechized, for not paying Church rates, and for public teaching without licence.5 While a system of Church discipline carried out by presentments and excommunications was still, more or less effectually, in force, commutation of penance was very properly a matter for grave and careful consideration. It was obvious that laxity on such a point might fairly lay the Church open to a reproach, which Dissenters did not fail to make, of 'indulgences for sale.' One of William III.'s injunctions of 1695 was that 'no commutation of penance be made but by the express order of the bishop, and that the commutation be applied only to pious and charitable uses." Early in Queen 1 Life of Archbishop Sharp, i. 209–13. 2 Secker's Eight Charges, 166-72. • Id. 370. • Id. 239. 5 Fleetwood's Works, 472, 474, 479. • T. Lewis, Danger of the Church Estab. &c. 1720. ' G. G. Perry's Hist. of the Ch. of E. iii. 100. Anne's reign, in consequence of abuses which existed, the subject was debated in Convocation, and some stringent resolutions passed, by which it was hoped that commutations, where allowed, might be rendered perfectly unexceptionable.' In fact, most Churchmen who desired to keep some hold upon the system of discipline, which was, as it were, melting away in their hands, would heartily have echoed the wish of John Johnson that it should be exercised on the strict condition of no money being paid by rich or poor. To the mind of lawyers, on the other hand, there was little weight or substance in the reproach against the Church that 'persons of rank and figure generally find means to evade the article of shame by commutation of penances.' A money payment in place of other penalty was a thing of daily occurrence in all law courts. Some lay chancellors, we are told, wished to do away with penance altogether, and to substitute a regular system of fines payable to the public purse. The poet Wordsworth has said that one of his earliest remembrances was the going to church one week-day to see a woman doing penance in a white sheet, and the disappointment of not getting a penny, which he had been told was given to all lookers-on. This must have been a very rare event at that date-about 1777.6 Early in the century this sort of ecclesiastical pillory was somewhat more common. But it was evidently quite unfrequent even then. Pope's parish clerk is made to speak of it as distinctly an event. This, which was called 'solemn penance,' as contrasted with that lesser form which might consist only of confession and satisfaction, was an ordeal which sounds like a strange anachronism in times so near our own. Bishop Hildesley thus describes it in the Isle of Man, where it was enforced upon certain delinquents far more generally than elsewhere. 2 Gibson's Codex, 1046, quoted in Burn's Eccl. Law, Art. Penance.' J. Johnson, Vade Mecum, ii. § cvii. 3 R. Seagrave's True Protestant, 1751, 30. 4 J. Johnson, Vade Mecum, ii. cvii. Memoirs of W. Wordsworth, by Christoph. Wordsworth, 1851, 8. The So also in the South of England, between 1799 and 1803. The two women she took most notice of in the parish were the last persons who ever did penance at Hurstmonceaux, having both to stand in a white sheet in the Churchyard; so that people said, "There are Mrs. Hare Naylor's friends doing penance.' A. J. C. Hare's Memorials of a Quiet Life, i. 143. manner of doing penance is primitive and edifying. The penitent, clothed in a white sheet, &c., is brought into the church immediately before the Litany, and there continues till the sermon is ended; after which, and a proper exhortation, the congregation are desired to pray for him in a form prescribed for the purpose.' This having been done, so soon as it could be certified to the bishop that his repentance was believed to be sincere, he might be received back again, 'by a very solemn form,' into the peace of the Church.' In England generally the ceremony was in all respects the same, except that no regular form existed for the readmission of penitents. Jones of Alconbury, in the 'Free and Candid Disquisitions' (1749), spoke of the need of a recognised office for this. purpose. That which was commonly used had no authority, and was very imperfect. A form also for excommunication. was also, he thought, a definite want of the English Church. For want of some such solemnity, excommunication was very deficient in impressiveness, not at all understood by the people in general, and less dreaded than should be, as signifying for the most part nothing more than the loss of a little money.3 This might seem a proper place to say something more upon the very remarkable system of Church discipline carried out in the Isle of Man by Bishop Wilson. It was, however, too exceptional in its character, and too restricted by local circumstances and geographical limits, to form any integral part of English Church history in the last century. His work attracted some attention and admiration in England, and though, by the very nature of the case, there was no possibility of its being imitated on the mainland, all Churchmen were proud of a bishop in whom such saintly simplicity was united with such power of government and such extraordinary personal influence. The people, we are told, of the island 'were so thoroughly persuaded of his receiving a large portion of God's blessing, that they seldom began harvest till he did, and if he passed along by the field would leave their work to ask his blessing.' Even when he came to Warrington, his great repute had preceded him, and crowds of people 4 1 Hildesley's History of the Isle of Man, in Cruttwell's Life of Wilson, 371. flocked round him to beg a blessing from the saintly man. An ardent Churchman, he was nevertheless of a broad and tolerant spirit. Dissenters in the island gladly received the Communion from him; and though he gave them liberty to sit or stand at the receiving of the Sacrament, did not make use of the concession. The Quakers, of whom there were a few, visited, loved, and respected him. Even the Roman Catholics not unfrequently attended his sermons and his prayers. Queen Caroline highly venerated him, and would gladly have given him an English bishopric, if he could have been induced to accept it. 'Cardinal Fleury wanted much to see him, and sent over on purpose to enquire after his health, his age, and the date of his consecration, as they were the two oldest bishops, and he believed the poorest, in Europe; at the same time inviting him to France. The Bishop sent the Cardinal an answer which gave him so high an opinion of him that he obtained an order that no French privateer should ravage the Isle of Man.' 1 ... 1 John Newton said, in 1781-only too truly that the multiplicity of oaths had made perjury a national sin. Now that Church discipline had become almost a fiction, the oaths imposed upon churchwardens and sidesmen were as indefensible as any. 'The duties,' said a writer in ISO1, 'to which nevertheless they are most solemnly bound, would require a zeal, a contempt of danger, and a superiority to all worldly considerations which the fervour of the primitive Christians could scarcely have produced. . . . Whoever will take the trouble to examine the articles of enquiry which are presented to them on admission to their office, if he be a man of the world, will smile at the absurdity of exacting the performance of moral impossibilities; if he be a Christian, he will be grieved that oaths should be so profaned as to be treated as mere unmeaning forms. Even at the beginning of the century, we find Dean Prideaux complaining (as indeed many others did) that in parishes where the contrary was most notorious, churchwardens would give in their presentments as if all were right. But as time went on, this remissness in a Crutwell's Wilson, 226. 2 Sermon of Feb. 21, 1781; J. Newton's Works, 827. 8 Considerations on the Present State of Religion, 1801, 42. In 1705, Life and Letters of Humphrey Prideaux, 1747, 100. |