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£ s of England and Scotland into a situation where resistance became identified with self-preservation . All wise statesmen had seen the necessity of making ( and had made , where they could ) allowances for the singular position in which the political character of the English Church Establishment necessarily placed many of the most ardent friends of the cause of reformalion . There is little doubt but that a small portion of reasonable and welltimed concession would have prevented the havoc which ensued , and have disarmed those factions which persecution excited into uncontrollable
hostility . Clarendon ' s testimony on the two grand topics of political and religious treason , on which all our author ' s theories are built , is surely an authority which ( using his own canon of historical evidence ) Vie will find it hard to resist . It seems difficult to deny that the subject had some reason for alarm , when he found himself attacked on all hands by illegal " logic , which left no man any thing which he might call his own . " " Could it be imagined , " '
observes the same historian , " that those men would meet again in a free convention of Parliament without a sharp and severe expostulation and inquisition into their own right , and the power that had imposed upon that right ? " "In other words , " adds his commentator , Warburton , another good authority for Mr . Lawson , " the people long bore with patience a tyrannical invasion of their rights . " At all events , down to the end of the three first Parliaments of Charles , ( which embrace the period of some of
Laud ' s most energetic proceedings , ) Clarendon ' s authority deprives Laud of a i that justification on which his biographer ' s whole case rests . He expressly states that though there were " several distempered speeches of particular persons not fit for the reverence due to his Majesty , " yet that he <• ' does not know any formed act of either House ( for neither the remonstrance nor votes of the last day were such ) that was not agreeable to the wisdom and justice of great courts upon those extraordinary occasions . And whoever considers the acts of power and injustice in the intervals of Parliament , will not be much scandalized at the warmth and vivacity of
those meetings . " Referring to the same class of authorities , Mr . Lawson might spare the indiscriminate abuse with which he equally \ ilifies atone time the mere Caivinist in doctrine , at another the Precisian in discipline , and with which he raves over poor Weal and the equally unfortunate Bogue and Bennett . Lord Clarendon ' 9 testimony ( and surely Mr . Lawson at least will not repudiate it ) is , that when Laud ' s power began , < - the general temper and humour of the
kingdom was little inclined to the Papist , and still less to the Puritan . The church was not repined at , nor the least inclination to alter ihe government and discipline thereof , or to change the doctrine . Nor was there at that time any considerable number of persons of any valuable condition throughout the kingdom who did wish either , and the cause of so prodigious a change in so few years after was visible from the effects . " This cause he is compelled to admit was the passionate and imprudent conduct of the
primate . Our author makes little of the distinction ( which is necessary to a right estimate of the then existing state of opinion ) between the doctrinal Puritans , whose opinions , it is clear , might have been and were held by many , without any objection to the discipline of the church , and the Disciplinarians , many of whom mig ht and did wish for reforms , without objection either to the doctrines or the general constitution of the church . Laud ' s system drove all
Untitled Article
TSi / e and Tunes of Archbishop Lautt . 373
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1829, page 373, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2573/page/5/
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