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 CLAYTON. 477 and it was apprehended he would be deprived of his bene- fice. His lordship however, and the other bishops and ministers, were relieved from all further trouble in so un- pleasant, an affair by the hand of death, Feb. 26, 1758. The disease was nervous fever, and the agitation of mind under which he was thrown when a prosecution com- menced against him, proved the cause of his death. When informed of the prosecution, he consulted an eminent lawyer on the subject, and asked him if he supposed he should lose his bishopric. The answer was, " My lord, I believe you will." “Sir," he replied, " you have given me a stroke I shall never get the better of" It has been asserted, that, after the bishop had delivered his speech in the house of lords, he said "That his mind was eased of a load which bad long been upon it, and that he now enjoyed a heartfelt pleasure, to which he had been a stranger for above twenty years before." This story, if true, and his lordship's fature conduct, are decidedly in- consistent; and, indeed, it is impossible to view in a favourable light the behaviour of the bishop and his pre- cedent conduct. If he had been truly conscientious in the zeal he had shewn for the tenets which be had em- braced, it ill became him to shrink from the consequences of avowing them. The pecuniary loss of the revenues of his bishopric for the few remaining years in which he had any probability of living, ought not to have weighed much in any circumstances; and surely none at all with one who was possessed of so ample a private fortune. And to suffer for conscience sake, to a man thoroughly sincere in the principles he professes, ought to be viewed as his glory and his crown. Without, therefore, entering at all into the merits of the doctrines he advanced, we shall only remark, that the man who launches out into the storms of religious controversy, ought to be prepared to meet the buffettings of the waves; he must expect the warm at- tacks of his opponents, and particularly so, if the tenets he advances be in opposition to those to which he has sworn his belief; and miserable must be his feelings if he is not