Volume Iii Part 38 (2/2)
The liberty which every one now a.s.sumed of delivering his own opinions, led to acts so execrable, that I can find no parallel for them except in the mad times of the French Revolution. Some maintained that there existed no distinction between moral good and moral evil; and that every man's actions were prompted by the Creator. Prost.i.tution was professed as a religious act; a glazier was declared to be a prophet, and the woman he cohabited with was said to be ready to lie in of the Messiah.
A man married his father's wife. Murders of the most extraordinary nature were occurring; one woman crucified her mother; another, in imitation of Abraham, sacrificed her child; we hear, too, of parricides.
Amidst the slaughters of civil wars, spoil and blood had accustomed the people to contemplate the most horrible scenes. One madman of the many, we find drinking a health on his knees, in the midst of a town, ”to the devil! that it might be said that his family should not be extinct without doing some infamous act.” A Scotchman, one Alexander Agnew, commonly called ”Jock of broad Scotland,” whom one cannot call an atheist, for he does not seem to deny the existence of the Creator, nor a future state, had a shrewdness of local humour in his strange notions.
Omitting some offensive things, others as strange may exhibit the state to which the reaction of an hypocritical system of religion had driven the common people. ”Jock of broad Scotland” said he was nothing in G.o.d's common, for G.o.d had given him nothing; he was no more obliged to G.o.d than to the devil; for G.o.d was very greedy. Neither G.o.d nor the devil gave the fruits of the ground; the wives of the country gave him his meat. When asked wherein he believed, he answered, ”He believed in white meal, water, and salt. Christ was not G.o.d; for he came into the world after it was made, and died as other men.” He declared that ”he did not know whether G.o.d or the devil had the greatest power; but he thought the devil was the greatest. When I die, let G.o.d and the devil strive for my soul, and let him that is strongest take it.” He no doubt had been taught by the presbytery to mock religious rites; and when desired to give G.o.d thanks for his meat, he said, ”Take a sackful of prayers to the mill and grind them, and take your breakfast of them.” To others he said, ”I will give you a two-pence, to pray until a boll of meal, and one stone of b.u.t.ter, fall from heaven through the house rigging (roof) to you.” When bread and cheese were laid on the ground by him, he said, ”If I leave this, I will long cry to G.o.d before he give it me again.” To others he said, ”Take a bannock, and break it in two, and lay down one half thereof, and you will long pray to G.o.d before he will put the other half to it again!” He seems to have been an anti-trinitarian. He said he received everything from nature, which had ever reigned and ever would.
He would not conform to any religious system, nor name the three Persons,--”At all these things I have long shaken my cap,” he said.
”Jock of broad Scotland” seems to have been one of those who imagine that G.o.d should have furnished them with bannocks ready baked.
The extravagant fervour then working in the minds of the people is marked by the story told by Clement Walker of the soldier who entered a church with a lantern and a candle burning in it, and in the other hand four candles not lighted. He said he came to deliver his message from G.o.d, and show it by these types of candles. Driven into the churchyard, and the wind blowing strong, he could not kindle his candles, and the new prophet was awkwardly compelled to conclude his five denouncements, abolis.h.i.+ng the Sabbath, t.i.thes, ministers, magistrates, and, at last, the Bible itself, without putting out each candle, as he could not kindle them; observing, however, each time--”And here I should put out the first light, but the wind is so high that I cannot kindle it.”
A perfect scene of the effects which the state of irreligious society produced among the lower orders I am enabled to give from the ma.n.u.script life of John Shaw, vicar of Rotherham; with a little tediousness, but with infinite _navete_, he relates what happened to himself. This honest divine was puritanically inclined, but there can be no exaggeration in these unvarnished facts. He tells a remarkable story of the state of religious knowledge in Lancas.h.i.+re, at a place called Cartmel: some of the people appeared desirous of religious instruction, declaring that they were without any minister, and had entirely neglected every religious rite, and therefore pressed him to quit his situation at Lymm for a short period. He may now tell his own story.
”I found a very large s.p.a.cious church, scarce any seats in it; a people very ignorant, and yet willing to learn; so as I had frequently some thousands of hearers, I catechised in season and out of season. The churches were so thronged at nine in the morning, that I had much ado to get to the pulpit. One day, an old man about sixty, sensible enough in other things, and living in the parish of Cartmel, coming to me on some business, I told him that he belonged to my care and charge, and I desired to be informed of his knowledge in religion. I asked him how many G.o.ds there were? He said he knew not.
I informing him, asked again how he thought to be saved? He answered he could not tell. Yet thought that was a harder question than the other. I told him that the way to salvation was by Jesus Christ, G.o.d-man, who as he was man shed his blood for us on the cross, &c.
Oh, sir, said he, I think I heard of that man you speak of once in a play at Kendall, called Corpus-Christ's play,[282] where there was a man on a tree and blood run down, &c. And afterwards he professed he could not remember that he ever heard of salvation by Jesus, but in that play.”
The scenes pa.s.sing in the metropolis, as well as in the country, are opened to us in one of the chronicling poems of George Withers. Our sensible rhymer wrote in November, 1652, ”a Darke Lanthorne” on the present subject.
After noticing that G.o.d, to mortify us, had sent preachers from the ”shop-board and the plough,”
----Such as we seem justly to contemn, As making truths abhorred, which come from them;
he seems, however, inclined to think that these self-taught ”Teachers and Prophets” in their darkness might hold a certain light within them:
----Children, fools, Women, and madmen, we do often meet Preaching, and threatening judgments in the street, Yea by strange actions, postures, tones, and cries, Themselves they offer to our ears and eyes As signs unto this nation.---- They act as men in ecstacies have done---- Striving their cloudy visions to declare, Till they have lost the notions which they had, And want but few degrees of being mad.[283]
Such is the picture of the folly and of the wickedness, which, after having been preceded by the piety of a religious age, were succeeded by a dominion of hypocritical sanct.i.ty, and then closed in all the horrors of immorality and impiety. The parliament at length issued one of their ordinances for ”punis.h.i.+ng blasphemous and execrable opinions,” and this was enforced with greater power than the slighted proclamations of James and Charles; but the curious wording is a comment on our present subject. The preamble notices that ”men and women had lately discovered _monstrous opinions_, even such as tended to _the dissolution of human society, and have abused, and turned into licentiousness, the liberty given in matters of religion_.” It punishes any person not distempered in his brains, who shall maintain any mere creature to be G.o.d; or that all acts of unrighteousness are not forbidden in the Scriptures; or that G.o.d approves of them; or that there is no real difference between moral good and evil, &c.
To this disordered state was the public mind reduced, for this proclamation was only describing what was pa.s.sing among the people! The view of this subject embraces more than one point, which I leave for the meditation of the politician, as well as the religionist.
FOOTNOTES:
[277] ”The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age;” by Samuel Clarke. Folio, 1683. A rare volume, with curious portraits.
[278] Alexander Ross's laborious ”View of all Religions” may also be consulted with advantage by those who would study this subject.
[279] ”The Hypocrite Discovered and Cured,” by Sam. Torshall, 4to.
1644.
[280] There is a pamphlet which records a strange fact. ”News from Powles: or the new Reformation of the army, with a true Relation of a Colt that was foaled in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, in London, and how it was publiquely baptised, and the name (because a bald colt) was called Baal-Rex!” 1649. The water they sprinkled from the soldier's helmet on this occasion is described. The same occurred elsewhere. See Foulis's History of the Plots, &c., of our pretended Saints. These men, who baptized horses and pigs in the name of the Trinity, sang psalms when they marched. One cannot easily comprehend the nature of fanaticism, except when we learn that they refused to pay rents!
[281] That curious compilation by Bruno Ryves, published in 1646, with the t.i.tle ”Mercurius Rusticus, or the countrie's complaint of the barbarous outrages committed by the sectaries of this late flouris.h.i.+ng kingdom,” furnishes a fearful detail of ”sacrileges, profanations, and plunderings committed in the cathedrall churches.”
[282] The festival of Corpus Christi, held on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday, was the period chosen in old times for the performances of miracle-plays by the clergy, or the guilds of various towns; for an account of them see vol. i. p. 352-362.
[283] There is a little ”Treatise of Humilitie, published by E.D.--Parson, sequestered”--1654; in which, while enforcing the virtue which his book defends, he with much _navete_ gives a strong opinion of his oppressors. ”We acknowledge the justice and mercy of the Lord in punis.h.i.+ng us, so we take notice of his wisdom in choosing such instruments to punish us, _men of mean and low rank, and of common parts and abilities_. By these he doth admonish all the honourable, valiant, learned, and wise men of this nation; and as it were write our sin, in the character of our punishment; and in _the low condition_ of these instruments of his anger and displeasure, the rod of his wrath, he would abate and punish our great pride.”
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