Page:History of England (Macaulay) Vol 3.djvu/403

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almost superstitious reverence for the authority of the Fathers.^[1]

To precedents drawn from later and more corrupt times little respect was due. But, even in the history of later and more corrupt times, the nonjurors could not easily find any precedent that would serve their purpose. In our own country many Kings, who had not the hereditary right, had filled the throne but it had never been thought inconsistent with the duty of a Christian to be a true liegeman to such Kings. The usurpation of Henry the Fourth, the more odious usurpation of Richard the Third, had produced no schism in the Church. As soon as the usurper was firm in his seat, Bishops had done homage to him for their domains: Convocations had presented addresses to him, and granted him supplies; nor had any casuist ever pronounced that such submission to a prince in possession was deadly sin.^[2]

With the practice of the whole Christian world the authoritative teaching of the Church of England appeared to be in strict harmony. The Homily on Wilful Rebellion, a discourse which inculcates, in unmeasured terms, the duty of obeying rulers, speaks

↑ See the Answer of a Nonjuror to the Bishop of Sarum's challenge in the Appendix to the Life of Kettlewell. Among the Tanner MSS. in the Bodleian Library is a paper which, as Sancroft thought it worth preserving, I venture to quote. The writer, a strong nonjuror, after trying to evade, by many pitiable shifts the argument drawn by a more compliant divine from the practice of the primitive Church, proceeds thus: "Suppose the primitive Christians all along, from the time of the very Apostles, had been as regardless of their oaths by former princes as he suggests will he therefore say that their practice is to be a rule? Ill things have been done, and very generally abetted, by men of otherwise very orthodox principles." The argument from the practice of the primitive Christians is remarkably well put in a tract entitled The Doctrine of Nonresistance or Passive Obedience No Way concerned in the Controversies now depending between the Williamites and the Jacobites, by a Lay Gentleman, of the Communion of the Church of England, as by Law establish'd, 1689. The author of this tract was Edmund Bohun, whom I shall have occasion to mention hereafter.
↑ One of the most adulatory addresses ever voted by a Convocation was to Richard the Third. It will be found in Wilkins's Concilia. Dryden, in his fine rifacimento of one of the finest passages in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, represents the Good Parson as choosing to resign his benefice rather than acknowledge the Duke of Lancaster to be King of England. For this representation no warrant can be found in Chaucer's Poem, or any where else. Dryden wished to write something that would gall the clergy who had taken the oaths, and therefore attributed to a Roman Catholic priest of the fourteenth century a superstition which originated among the Anglican priests of the seventeenth century.

[1] See the Answer of a Nonjuror to the Bishop of Sarum's challenge in the Appendix to the Life of Kettlewell. Among the Tanner MSS. in the Bodleian Library is a paper which, as Sancroft thought it worth preserving, I venture to quote. The writer, a strong nonjuror, after trying to evade, by many pitiable shifts the argument drawn by a more compliant divine from the practice of the primitive Church, proceeds thus: "Suppose the primitive Christians all along, from the time of the very Apostles, had been as regardless of their oaths by former princes as he suggests will he therefore say that their practice is to be a rule? Ill things have been done, and very generally abetted, by men of otherwise very orthodox principles." The argument from the practice of the primitive Christians is remarkably well put in a tract entitled The Doctrine of Nonresistance or Passive Obedience No Way concerned in the Controversies now depending between the Williamites and the Jacobites, by a Lay Gentleman, of the Communion of the Church of England, as by Law establish'd, 1689. The author of this tract was Edmund Bohun, whom I shall have occasion to mention hereafter.

[2] One of the most adulatory addresses ever voted by a Convocation was to Richard the Third. It will be found in Wilkins's Concilia. Dryden, in his fine rifacimento of one of the finest passages in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, represents the Good Parson as choosing to resign his benefice rather than acknowledge the Duke of Lancaster to be King of England. For this representation no warrant can be found in Chaucer's Poem, or any where else. Dryden wished to write something that would gall the clergy who had taken the oaths, and therefore attributed to a Roman Catholic priest of the fourteenth century a superstition which originated among the Anglican priests of the seventeenth century.

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