Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/275

A.D. 1709.] two sermons preached and published by Dr. Henry Sacheverel, rector of St. Saviour's, in Southwark. The first of these sermons had been preached, on the 15th of August, at the assizes at Derby, before the judge and sheriff. The second had been preached, on the 5th of November, before the lord mayor and corporation in St. Paul's cathedral. In both these sermons he had made an attack, if not avowedly on the government, on the principles on which the throne and the whole government were established. He professed the most entire doctrines of non-resistance and passive obedience, which, at the same time that they made him appear incapable, if he had the power, of overturning any government, set him to entirely sap and undermine the government and title of the queen, by representing the resistance which had been made to the encroachments of the Stuarts, and especially to James II., as perfectly impious and treasonable, contrary to all the laws of God and the political institutions of men. He reprobated the revolution and all that flowed from it; and thus, pretending to passive obedience, he was, in the fullest sense, preaching resistance and a counter-revolution. Whilst crying non-resistance, he was, as far as in him lay, arming all those who were hostilely inclined to overturn the throne of Anne, as built only on rebellion and on maxims subversive of the divine right of kings. In his second sermon, which he called "Perils from False Brethren," he preached flamingly against the danger to the church; danger from the false and democratic bishops who had been put in by the usurper William of Orange; danger from the dissenters, whom he had by law tolerated, and made powerful in the state and against the true church.

The reader must bear in mind that, as parliament had been rent by the violent contentions of the two truculent factions of whig and tory, each professing high principles of patriotism, protestantism, and liberty, but both thinking far more of the possession of power and the damaging of each other than of the real business and benefit of the country, so the church had been equally made the arena of the like unseemly struggles by the parties of high and low church—the whigs and tories of the hierarchy. The high church, essentially tory, were bent on re-establishing all the dogmas and ceremonies of a very partially-reformed Romanism—all the high-handed principles of Laud and of Sancroft; principles of despotism in church and state; of absolute submission to kings in political matters, to bishops and archbishops in ecclesiastical ones. They looked with implacable hostility on the more liberal, or, as they were termed, low churchmen introduced to the prelatical bench, and to a great number of other dignities and livings; on the freedom of religious faith and civil action conceded to dissenters, and which they had sought through parliament with all pertinacity to extinguish by the occasional conformity bill. These were the topics, this the animus which had raged year after year in the convocation; which had arrayed the lower against the upper house, where sate the bishops of the revolution, and which had become so rabid, so blinded by party zeal, so lost to all sense of decency and decorum, before a public wondering more and more as the odium theologicum increased, asking itself more and more amazedly,

that the queen had been compelled to desire the primate to cease to call the convocation together.

In these disgraceful quarrels of convocation Dr. Sacheverel had virulently distinguished himself; and, in now giving a more wide and popular vent to his combative propensities, he, in fact, beat the drum-ecclesiastic to all the host of similarly militant clergy throughout the country. With such a jubilant avidity was this war-note responded to by high church clergy, high church zealots of all sorts, and the tories ready to rush to the assault on any promising occasion, that no less than forty thousand copies of these sermons are said to have been sold. "Nothing," says Dr. Johnson, "ever sold like it, except 'The Whole Duty of Man.'"

It has been asserted that Sacheverel was a man of no ability either as a preacher or a writer; that he was a man of an insignificant family, and so ignorant that the gownsmen of Oxford, whilst they fêted him there soon after the notoriety which he had won by these sermons and the events which followed, were amazed at it, and heartily despised him. On the other hand, high church writers have cried him up as a man of sound classical acquirements, of a handsome and commanding person, and of a wonderfully vivid and exciting eloquence. The reality appears to lie, as usual, betwixt the two extreme statements. His printed sermons certainly are marvellously heavy and long-winded, and would seem rather calculated to send people to sleep than to rouse them as they did. But we often find men who have a certain power of delivery which gives to a discourse a fascination which only vanishes on reading the same in print. There is a zeal and warmth, a piquant and persuasive manner and tone, which for the time give a wondrous charm to very commonplace matter; and when these are exerted to influence a temperament already feverish, the effect is beyond imagination. A little spark, it is commonly said, can create a great flame; but when the spark falls into a powder magazine, the effect is an explosion. The public mind at this moment was, through the exertions of the tories and the indefatigable cries of The church in danger! become very gunpowdery, and Sacheverel had artfully dragged in still more popular elements of excitement, which were taken up and flung amongst the people by the artifices and exertions of the tory faction. The introduction of the poor Palatines had been industriously represented, as we have stated, as a means to pull down the wages of the English labourers and artisans, and to overrun this country with a pauper swarm of foreigners in place of our own genuinely English population. The cry on this subject worked wonderfully, and the populace of London rose in a desperate frenzy, ready to exterminate foreigners, to destroy the chapels and houses of dissenters, and to clamour, according to the lesson given them, for the church and the queen.

The reverend tool by which the extraordinary ebullition and the extraordinary effects which were produced were raised, was not, however, quite so despicable a man, so far as qualifications went, as historians are inclined to represent him. He was of an old and highly respectable county family of Derbyshire. He had himself a good estate at Callow in that county, which was bequeathed to him by his kinsman, George Sacheverel; and his descendants in the female line, the Sacheverel-Sitwells of Stainsby, a few miles