Alexander Gordon

“ Hutton has been called 'the English Franklin;' but while Hutton and Franklin have some native qualities in common, Hutton as much excels Franklin in geniality as he is Franklin's inferior in grasp of mind. His topographical works are well written, and their information is good. His personal narratives form a graphic record of a life of great industry, and abound in clear and sensible judgments on men and things. ”

“ Doddridge carried out his own ideal with great fidelity and with conspicuous success, doing more than any man in the 18th century to obliterate old party lines, and to unite nonconformists on a common religious ground. ”

“ De Morgan admits (Budget of Paradoxes) that, though not a ‘rational,’ Fox was certainly a ‘national’ man. Marsden has done more justice to the intellectual merit of Fox's doctrine of the inner light, which ‘rested upon one idea, the greatest that can penetrate the mind of man: God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and truth’ (Hist. of the Later Puritans, 1872, p. 240) . There can be no question of the healthiness and strength of his moral fibre. It is remarkable that Wesley, who was acquainted with Barclay's ‘Apology,’ never mentions Fox. ”

“ To estimate his labours aright would be the work of a company of experts. His learning was for use; and his topics were suggested by the controversies of his age, which he was resolved to probe to their roots in the ground of history. He told Evelyn (21 Aug. 1655) ‘how great the loss of time was to study much the eastern languages; that, excepting Hebrew, there was little fruit to be gathered of exceeding labour ... the Arabic itself had little considerable.’ His genius as a scholar was shown in his eye for original sources, and this on all subjects that he touched. ”

“ Lawrence died on 1 Oct., and Fordyce became sole pastor. He preached only on Sunday afternoons, the morning lecturer being Thomas Toller, Lawrence's son-in-law.
Fordyce's eloquence soon drew crowds to Monkwell Street. He had the natural advantages of a dignified presence and a piercing eye; his delivery and gestures were studied with great care. His topics were didactic, but he freed them from dryness by his powers of imagination and a polish and pomp of his style which satisfied cultured tastes. He forsook generalities, and dealt with the ethics of actual life. ”

“ Ussher's ‘certificate’ of the state of the diocese (28 May 1622) is a most minute and interesting document (Elrington, app. v.) . There was no cathedral and no chapter; the clergy met in synod, but the great majority of the parish churches were ruinous; yet Elrington considers the diocese ‘at that time the best arranged and most civilised part of Ireland.’ Ussher made endeavours to win the Roman catholics by his sermons, preaching in the session-house when he could not induce them to enter the church. ”

“ He composed aloud, while taking his daily walks, and committed the finished discourse to paper at great speed, in excruciatingly fine crowquill penmanship, with more attention to weight of diction than to grace of style. ”

“ Farindon's reputation rests upon a hundred and thirty sermons, of which thirty-one were published by himself, in a volume dedicated to Robinson, his patron, the remainder by his executors, John Millington and John Powney (son of an old servant of Hales) . At the university he had been ‘a noted preacher’ (Walker) , and his discourses, though more remarkable for force of style than polish of manner, will always be valued for their grasp of learning and strength of thought. ”

“ Firmin began business as a girdler and mercer. His shop was at Three Kings Court, in Lombard Street; he had a garden at Hoxton, in which he took great delight. Slender as were his means he contrived to keep a table for his friends, especially ministers. His frank hospitality brought him (after 1655) into relations with such men as Whitchcote, Worthington, Wilkins, Fowler, and Tillotson. In this way, somewhat earlier, he became acquainted with Biddle, whose influence on Firmin's philanthropic spirit was important. ”

“ He would have them disciplined inwardly on the presbyterian plan, the worshippers delegating their spiritual government to an oligarchy of pastors and elders, power of excommunication being reserved to 'the whole congregation itself.' But he would subject no congregation to any ecclesiastical jurisdiction save 'that which is within itself.' To prevent as far as possible the action of the state from being warped by ecclesiastical control, he would enact that no clergyman should hold any office of civil authority. ”

“ As a layman Gough criticises the dissenting ministry on two grounds: they humour the prejudices of their people, and ‘they worship God for twenty minutes and dictate to men for sixty.’ The dissenters, he complains, are ignorant of their own principles, and hence discourage free inquiry. ”

“ His rational temper made him the opponent of seekers and quakers, and gave him some affinity with the Cambridge Platonists. He rejected the distinction allowed by Acontius, between tolerance of error in fundamentals and in other points. Error in fundamentals may be innocent. Toleration he bases on the difficulty of arriving at truth. He would have men 'call more for light and less for fire from heaven' (epistle in Satan's Stratagems, 1648) . Even the denial of the Holy Trinity he will not treat as a 'damnable heresy,' for orthodoxy is a doctrine of inference. ”

“ While in London Henderson laid before Charles a plan for subsidising the Scottish universities from the bishops' rents. The office of rector of Edinburgh university had been revived in his favour (January 1640) by the town council, and he was annually re-elected till his death. His exertions in behalf of the education of his country, both in its colleges and parochial schools, were great and successful. He introduced at Edinburgh the teaching of Hebrew, and the system of honour classes known as ‘circles.’ For the colleges he secured a monopoly in the teaching of Greek and logic. ”

“ He is the champion of the divine sovereignty, both as excluding from the physical world the operation of any other invisible agents, and as authorising the production of ‘new phænomena’ which remove ‘the inconveniences of governing by fixed and general laws.’ Farmer maintains that the proof of the divinity of a doctrine is the fact that its enunciation has been followed by a miracle. Farmer's positions were eagerly adopted by the rationalising section of dissenters ”

“ Cradock drew up his reasons for believing that the oath referred simply to lectures in order to a degree. All the early nonconformist tutors lectured in Latin. Cradock's lectures were compilations, the systematic arrangement being his own; each student was expected to transcribe them. Calamy speaks very highly of the moral effect of Cradock's discipline, which was wise and friendly, and not too severe. The tutor was a pleasant and genial man, who enlivened his conversation with a spice of humour. ”

“ Gilling, who was a scholarly and genial divine, kept a flourishing boarding-school at Newton Abbot, and got into trouble during the reign of Anne for doing so without the bishop's license. He was more than once obliged to abscond to prevent arrest, the last occasion being in 1712, when (in a disguise) he accompanied Fox to London. In ecclesiastical politics he was for a consolidation of the dissenting interest, and was an active member of the Exeter assembly, formed in 1691 as a union of presbyterians and independents on the London model. ”

“ For these and similar hits, his uncle, a Roman catholic, ‘dashed his name out of his last will.’ Owen's epigrams, which exhibit what Wood calls ‘an ingenious liberty of joking,’ won great popularity, and retained it longer abroad than at home. He deals freely in anagrams, puns, and the like, and at best is an imitator of Martial; but he will always be read with interest for his contemporary allusions and his sprightly good sense. ”

“ He does not contend that the soul is inherently immortal, but simply that it possesses a ‘capacity of immortality.’ His view of the resurrection was adopted by John Cameron (1724–1799) [q. v.]
Fleming was an unwearied writer of argumentative and combative pamphlets, the greater part of them being anonymous. His political brochures, in defence of civil liberty and against the Jacobites, church establishments, and the toleration of popery, are tart enough. Against the theological writers of his time, high and low, he entered the field with confident vigour. ”

“ Efforts were being made by the nonconformists of the north to secure the educational advantages offered for a short time by the Durham College. William Pell, who had been a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a tutor at Durham, declined to start an academical institution, holding himself precluded by his graduation oath from resuming collegiate lectures outside the ancient universities. Application was then successfully made to Frankland, who was not hindered by the same scruple. Nonconformist tutors usually understood the oath as referring to prelections in order to a degree. ”

“ In 1732 the assembly passed an act to regulate the election to vacant churches in cases where patrons had failed to present. This act, which ignored the right of popular choice, was pushed through in a somewhat unconstitutional way, and Erskine initiated a protest against it, which the assembly refused to receive. Preaching in the following October as outgoing moderator of synod, on ‘the stone rejected by the builders,’ Erskine inveighed against the act as of no ‘divine authority.’ After three days' debate the synod, by a majority of six, passed a vote of censure on the sermon. ”

“ At a conference convened for the purpose, Williams urged his brethren to discountenance any arbitrary power of dispensation, which would afford relief by ‘measures destructive of the liberties of their country.’ He carried the meeting with him, and fixed the policy of his party. The revolution of 1688 had no more earnest champion, and, though he never sought prominence as a public man, his accurate knowledge of men was of much service to William III in dealing with Irish affairs. ”

“ Lavington drew up the formula of orthodoxy adopted (by a majority of more than two to one) in September 1718 by the Exeter assembly of divines (including the presbyterian and congregationalist ministers of Devon and Cornwall) , viz.: 'that there is but one living and true God; and that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are the one God.' For thirty-five years an adhesion to this formulary, or its equivalent, was the condition of license or ordination by the Exeter assembly. ”

“ On 26 June 1634 the long-pending dispute between the sees of Armagh and Dublin, for the primacy of all Ireland, was decided by Strafford in favour of Armagh (Ussher's paper on the controversy is printed in Elrington's Life, App. vi.) . Ussher preached at the opening of the Irish parliament on 14 July. In the Irish convocation, which met simultaneously, the main question was that of the adoption of the Anglican articles and canons. ”

“ Gouge took the covenant without scruple, and was desirous that the presbyterian organisation should be fully established. At the first meeting of the provincial assembly of London (3 May 1647) he was chosen prolocutor, and opened the assembly with a sermon at Blackfriars. He was regarded as ‘the father of the London ministers.’ In politics he played no part, but in common with most presbyterians he was monarchical in principle, and shrank from the king's trial as a breach of the covenant as well as of the constitution. ”

“ At the age of ninety he could easily repeat a hundred lines at any given place from his favourite classic authors. The hackneyed stories of his jokes relate chiefly to his three wives, whom he called ‘the world, the flesh, and the devil;’ to one of them he explained the difference between exportation and transportation by saying, ‘If you were exported I should be transported.’ He preached on the last Sunday of his life, smoking his pipe in the vestry before sermon as usual, and died suddenly in his chair on 29 May 1768, aged 92, or, according to another account, 94 years. ”

“ His most distinguished scholar was Priestley, who says that Ashworth took ‘the orthodox side of every question’ in theology and philosophy, the sub-tutor, Samuel Clark, ‘that of heresy.’ Doddridge's plan of referring to authors on all sides of every question, and requiring his students to give an account of them, was faithfully pursued by his successors, with the result of much independence of judgment. ”

“ Fludd is best remembered for his connection with the fraternity of the rosy cross, a society so obscure that its very existence has been denied. It was introduced to the public in 1614 by an anonymous work in German, best known as the ‘Fama Fraternitatis,’ which promised a ‘universal and general reformation of the whole world’ through the ‘Orden des Rosenkreuzes.’ This publication, which Gottfried Arnold regards as an elaborate skit on the part of Johann Valentin Andreas (1586–1654) , ascribed the foundation of the fraternity to one Christian Rosenkreuz, in the fifteenth century. ”

“ With Baxter, he believed that the benefit of Christ's death extended to all mankind. He agreed with Baxter in objecting to lay elders as church governors. He was one of the divines who took part in the written discussion on episcopacy (September–November 1648) in the Isle of Wight, intended to influence Charles I, and would have gone further in concession to ‘the conscience of the king,’ but that, as he explained to Baxter, ‘parliament tied them up.’ With Charles's religious character and ability in argument he was much impressed ”