Читать книгу Dæmonologia Sacra; or, A Treatise of Satan's Temptations. In Three Parts онлайн

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It needeth not that in a necessarily brief Memoir such as this we should enter on the merits of the national change of Church ‘Polity’ which gave supremacy for the time to Presbytery over Prelacy. The materials for judgment lie in fulness in every worthy Ecclesiastical History of England; and the whole story has just been re-written with fine candour and attractiveness by Mr Stoughton.28 Presbyterianism in England during the Commonwealth can hold its own,—lustrous as it is with the names of Edmund Calamy and Bates and Manton, Richard Baxter and William Jenkyn and Thomas Watson, Samuel Clark and Thomas Wilson of Maidstone, and Thomas Hall of King’s Norton,—selecting a few, urban and rural, almost at random.

Suffice it to recall that, outside of the more ambitious organisation of London,—whose unpublished ‘Memorial’ lies all but unknown in Sion College Library,29—there were various voluntary Associations which took a semi-Presbyterian mould, in the counties of Chester, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Dorset, Wilts, Worcestershire, and others. These Associations embraced the ‘clergymen,’ and ‘ministers’ or ‘pastors,’ and laymen belonging to the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians, and the Independents, and sought to combine the presidency of the first with the union and co-operation of the second, and the freedom of the third; in short, a federated rather than organic oneness. Subordinating everything else, was an intense yearning after nearness to all who loved the one Lord Jesus, and heroic as devout endeavours for ‘discipline,’ so as to vitalise and Christianise ‘the masses.’ It is pathetic to read of the days and nights of these good men’s Fasting and Prayer ‘unto the breaking of the light,’ for one another’s Parishes and Charges. Their ideal was lofty, their own practice beautiful, their success marked in changing the face of erewhile godless and heathen-dark communities. What Richard Baxter was in Worcestershire, Richard Gilpin was in Cumberland and Westmoreland; and as the author of ‘The Saint’s Everlasting Rest’ was chosen to draw up the ‘Agreement’ for his county, so the author of ‘Dæmonologia Sacra’ was selected to execute the same office for Cumberland and Westmoreland. The ‘Agreement,’—of which the title-page will be found in the list at the close of our Memoir, must be studied by all who would master the problems of the period. It is comprehensive, without being general or vague; decisive in dogma, but not uncharitable; high in aim, but most practical; earnest, but not fanatic; stern to offences, but hopeful and tender toward offenders; richly scriptural, but also, and because of it, most human, all a-glow with wide sympathies, and unutterably wistful in its appeals for oblivion on all lesser matters, so as to set a firm front to the evils and passions, the divisions and heart-burnings, the rivalries and recriminations, of the time. The whole is perfumed, so to speak, with prayer. If it was a Utopia, it was a grander and more celestial one than ever More or Bacon imagined; nor while it lasted was it a mere paper Agreement. For years through all the Counties enumerated the ‘good men and true’ made their ‘gatherings’ so many centres of light and love; and their Parishes were as spiritual Goshens amid the national formalism and barrenness.