ecclesiastical, and not all that. If any one should take the pains to examine in like manner the civil history intermixed therewith, it may be feared that not a few errors and defects may be discovered in that part of it."

Now Burnett felt that his antagonist's name stood too high in repute in the learned world to be disregarded, however he may have disgraced it on this occasion. Accordingly, he noticed Wharton's strictures in a letter addressed to the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. And if, after the perusal of this epistle, any will deny him the character of a candid and high-principled man, actuated in the composition of his history by one uniform and constant spirit of moral and religious truth, and that he was urged to this vindication of it by nothing so much as that honest indignation against imputed guilt, which is the last thing extinguishable in a virtuous mind; we shall set them down as incapable of appreciating the dignity and independence of conscious integrity, and as chargeable with the most disingenuous misrepresentation. But the bishop shall speak for himself; for those relations are commonly of most value, as Dr. Johnson justly observes, "in which the writer tells his own story."

"As to the charge of falsehood that comes over so often, 'tis plain, by his frequent repeating of it, that he intended it should stick, I can and do affirm it to my knowledge, I did not willingly mistake or misrepresent, nor so much as suppress any one particular relating to that great transaction. If I was called upon to say this with the greatest solemnities of religion, upon oath, or at the sacrament, I am sure I could do it with a good conscience, I have also sent for Mr. Angus, of St. Dunstan, who was then my amanuensis, not having leisure and opportunities at present to enter into the detail of small matters, and have asked him if he can imagine how there can be so many mistakes about dates in the transcribing of the records; for this author scarce allows one of them to be true, and therefore he thinks better credit is due to the history; and that the records will be of little value if once there appears just reason to suspect the care or the fidelity of the transcriber; and assures he the reader that of those dates which he has examined, he has found near as many to be false as true.' Mr. Angus was amazed at this, and said he was ready to take his oath upon it that, though he himself used his utmost diligence to examine every paper that he copied out, yet I was never satisfied with that, but examined all over again myself; so that I may sincerely say what I once writ on a very solemn occasion, at the making of my will, when I went out of England, that I writ that work with the same fidelity as I should

give an evidence upon oath in a court of judicature. If a man is to write memoirs he must keep close to his vouchers; but where he writes an history of such consequence, and that was transacted long before his own time, and that it is visible that many of the most valuable papers relating to it are lost, but that enough remains to give him a right view of the whole and a clue to guide him in it, he may certainly find many hints of things which, since he cannot lay them before his readers as historical facts, he may and ought to suggest them as probabilities; and he who forms a true character of a man from his secret prayers, can frame judgments and see likelihoods that could never come in the way of one who only reads his work, but does not dwell so long upon it, nor turn it so much in his thoughts as himself has done; and yet offering of these may be necessary, since they may be of use to let his reader see further than he would do without them. Only I wish that, when he writes next, he may do it in a better spirit and in a decenter style. He who knows so much cannot judge so ill as not to see that the attacking a man's reputation, but especially a bishop, in so great a point as that of his truth and fidelity, upon success of which all his labour, and the credit of his whole life and ministry, does depend, is not a slight thing, and is not to be attempted unless one is very well assured that what he objects is not only just in itself, but that it is incumbent on him to do it. The fame of a man is a most valuable thing; and the rules of charity, and against detraction and slander, are delivered in such weighty strains in the New Testament, that it is no small matter to make so bold with them."

The other formidable opponent to whom we have alluded was the fierce and implacable nonjuror, Jeremy Collier. His Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain has deservedly obtained for him a high literary reputation. Too much praise cannot be bestowed on his indefatigable labour in procuring the large mass of documents and authorities from which he made his digest. But his Romanizing, high-church principles, weaken the effect of his narrative. The second volume of this performance, under the guise of history, is so purely controversial that, in fairness, we may say, with Burnett, that," it is an artful attempt, from the beginning to the end of it, to palliate the corruptions of popery, to blacken the character of those confessors and martyrs who never slackened their glorious efforts till they had procured its overthrow, and to vilify and insult the names of Edward and Elizabeth, not hesitating even to accuse the latter of being the author of more mischief to her church than her sister Mary." Collier, indeed, had all the qualifications of a

VOL. IX., NO. XXVI,

26

first-rate controvertist; he was learned, acute, and pertinacious, quick to suspect and still quicker to condemn, fearless to assert and slow to retract,* and bent upon hunting down his prey in every form with the staunchness of a bloodhound. But, presuming to write before he had read to any other purpose than to adopt every historical evidence which favoured his own conclusions, the consequence is that, although his objections are delivered with an air of triumph and confidence, as if unanswerable, they really are so brittle as to fall to pieces upon the first handling. It would be tedious to examine all the particular facts which he would contradict, but we will notice a few, in order to prove that his articles of impeachment are productive of no other effect than that of setting Burnett's fidelity and accuracy in a more conspicuous light.

The first place in which Collier overshoots the mark is, an alleged mistake as to a matter of fact. Burnett had asserted that parents teaching the Lord's prayer, the ten commandments, and the creed in the vulgar tongue, was crime enough to bring them to the stake. And for this piece of information, we are told by Collier that "Burnett quotes no other authority than the martyrologist Fox, who only authenticates what he affirms by the testimony of one Mother Hall." But if we turn to the pages of that venerable writer, who so diligently laboured in collecting records of ecclesiastical antiquity, it will there be found that Bishop Longland is transcribed to prove that several were delated for teaching and learning

As a proof of this assertion, take the following passage from a pamphlet entitled A Specimen of the Gross Errors in the second volume of Mr. Collier's "Ecclesiastical History,” being a vindication of the right reverend and learned Dr. Gilbert Burnett, late Bishop of Sarum, from the several reflections made on him and his History of the Reformation, in the several places as it is noted in a late advertisement in the Evening Post, p. 42. "In order to show that Burnett is a falsifier of history, and not to be credited in any thing, he (Collier) writes that the two first editions of the Ordinal made in King Edward's reign, printed with privilege by Grafton and Whitchurch, have none of the different rites mentioned by this gentleman. That these were the two first editions he now owns himself convinced; but still he can't or wo'nt believe his lordship that the first Ordinal printed by Richard Grafton, the king's printer, in the month of March, 1549, cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum, had any of the different rites mentioned by his lordship, till, by the favour of a gentleman uncommonly well furnished with curiosities of the press, that he had got a sight of, and he then says that, upon perusal, he finds the Bible laid upon the bishop's neck, the pastoral staff put in his hand, and the chalice, with bread in it for the priest, some of the consecrating and ordinary ceremonies; but not the least attempt to recal his censure, or to ask pardon for his partial and unreasonable mistrust of the bishop."

the ten commandments, pater noster, ave Maria, and the creed, in English; and were forced to abjure their doing so, to save their liberty. Now surely this abjuration were unnecessary, if their learning the ten commandments in English involved in itself no crime. Collier does not presume to assert that any authorized translation of the decalogue into English then existed. True it is, that the Evangelic or Gospel Doctor-for that was the distinguished appellation given to the renowned John Wiclif by his contemporaries-had appeared as a glorious benefactor to his spe.ies, by translating the Bible into our vernacular idiom ;t yet the Scriptures, thus opened by him, were only to become again a fountain sealed and a spring shut up, since, by a constitution of Archbishop Arundel, prefaced by the declaration that it is a perilous thing, as St. Jerome testifieth, to translate the text of Holy Scripture from one idiom into another, it was enacted and ordained that thenceforth no one should translate any text of Sacred Scripture, by his own authority, into the English or any other tongue, in the way of book, tract, or treatise; and that no publication of this sort composed in the time of John Wiclif, or since, or thereafter, to be composed, should be read, either in part or in whole, either in public or in private, under the pain of the greater excommunication, until such translation should be approved by the diocesan of the place, or, if the matter should require it, by a provincial council: every one who should act in con

• Mr. Baber, in the prefatory memoir to his valuable reprint of our proto-reformer's Translation of the New Testament, informs us that his name has been spelt in sixteen different ways. One of his recent biographers, Mr. Vaughan, chooses the name of de Wycliff, which he derives from the village where he was born, in the northern district of Yorkshire; and he adds, that, in documents prior to that cited by Mr. Baber, y appears, in almost every instance, in the first syllable, and ff in the second. Mr. Le Bass, however, in his powerfully written volume of the life of this great teacher of the truth, deems it "expedient to adopt that orthography of the name which has the smallest number of letters," and, therefore, after this high authority, much as it may offend some antiquarian eyes, we write the name as above.

+ We learn from Sir Thomas More "that the whole byble was, long before Wiclif's days, by virtuous and well-learned men, translated into the English tong, and by good and godly people, with devotion and soberness, wel and reverently red."-Dialog. iii, p. 14. But of these versions, could any of them be read at this day in our churches; as that of Wiclif's might, and even his translation, from an excessive desire to render it strictly literal, is frequently obscure to those who are not conversant with the idiom of the latin. Upon this point, see Lewis's Life of Wiclif, p. 121; and History of English Translations, by the same author, p. 22.

tradiction to this order to be punished as an abettor of heresy and error. The persecutions which followed this decree of the convocation held at St. Paul's in 1408, are strikingly attested by the various episcopal registers. But such was the gross spiritual ignorance of the British population in those days that the pontificate, however it might be shorn of its pristine strength, still wielded the sword of dominion with such force and severity, that it was beyond the reach of a man gifted with powers short of omnipotence to diffuse any thing like a spirit of general disaffection to its edicts.

As to what Collier adds respecting the tenets of Wiclif and the Lollards being similar, there is historical proof that this is not the fact. It may be conceded that the said Archbishop Arundel, in reference to the spread of his doctrines, affirms that "Oxford was as a vine that brought forth wild and sour grapes, which, being eaten by the fathers, the teeth of the children were set on edge; so that the whole province of Canterbury was tainted with novel and damnable Lollardism, to the intolerable and notorious scandal of the university." It may also be stated that the most inveterate of his adversaries, Henry Knighton, fathers upon Wiclif this maxim: that civil magistrates forfeited the right to govern by the commission of any mortal sin. But calumny and invective, at all times, are wretched substitutes for historical truth; and truth it is, that a sentiment so absurd, and so injurious to the good order of society, never formed a part of that learned and enlightened man's political or religious creed, whatever may have been the opinions of his poor priests or travelling preachers. Rash and unguarded as may have been some of the expressions of the precursors of the Reformation, yet it is a thing not credible that the university seal should have been affixed to a document declaratory of "the great learning and good life of John

That many opinions which he lays down and defends would receive the welcome support of the most orthodox protestant, there can be no question. But candour obliges us, at the same time, to observe, that some of the notions of this illustrious man, if taken in their full import and bearing, tend to an undue disparagement of the church and of the civil power. For example, that tythes were mere alms-that oaths were unlawful-that church endowments in perpetuity may be resumed by the patron, or sovereign-that dominion, or the right to property, was founded in grace, or the persons being in the acceptance of God. These dangerous novelties, this excess of ardour for sweeping innovations, which would break down all the fences of subordination, evidently betray more of the puritan spirit, than of the sober reformer, whose plan of action is accommodated to the real state of man. The several opinions of Wiclif, collected from his works, are to be found in Baber's life of him, p. 32.