Rouen and La Rochelle? One sentence of Drelincourt’s letter (addressed to Pastor Stouppe), fully represents the advice which the pastors offered:— “God entrusts at this day your Presbyterians, the gentlemen now in power, with the honour and reputation of our churches. For, if without the intervening of any foreign power, they recal this Prince, and set him in his throne, they acquire to themselves and to their posterity an immortal glory, and stop their mouths for ever who charge us falsely as enemies to royalty.”
Raimond Gaches’ letter was addressed to the Reverend Richard Baxter, at the suggestion of their mutual friend, Anna Mackenzie, Countess of Balcarres. He too gave Charles a good character, but also argued on the opposite supposition thus:— “Some, whether really or counterfeitly, are dissatisfied as to his constancy to the true religion, and allege that it concerns the Church very much that he, who is to rule others, should excel them in godliness. I will not answer (which truly may be said) that it belongs not to us to inquire into the Prince’s religion. Be he what he will (if his power be otherwise lawful, and the right of reigning belongs unto him), obedience in civil matters must be performed to the king, and other matters must be committed unto divine providence.” Baxter objected to this and the other letters, not because they advocated monarchical principles, but because they seemed to urge the hurrying on of the restoration of the son of the late king to the throne of England, without any consideration of the personal safety of the Presbyterian ministers in England; and all to procure the good humour of the King of France towards the Protestants of France. Not only the Presbyterians, but all good men soon regretted that the Restoration took place with so little deliberation.
Part of a correspondence is preserved between Pastor Du Bosc and Dr. Brevint, in which the former pleads for fair dealing with the Presbyterians on the part of Episcopalians, while the latter wishes Du Bosc to believe that the English Presbyterians would make no concessions. The fact was, the Episcopal was the immoveable party. The Presbyterians expressed their willingness to accept Archbishop Usher’s modified form of episcopacy; and by such yielding on their side, they emboldened the Bishops and the High Church party to be unyielding as to the sacramental ceremonials, and as to the scruples concerning the Apocrypha, and objections to words and sentences in the English Book of Common Prayer.
A few approving letters from French pasteurs to such prelatical clergymen as Brevint and Durel having been printed in England, the English Nonconformists rejoined in a small volume entitled:— “Apologie des Puritains d’Angleterre à Messieurs les Pasteurs et Anciens des Eglises Reformées en France.”[1] Its conclusion was argumentatively and convincingly arrived at, and was to this effect, that the Huguenot letter-writers had little information as to recent English Church History, and that panegyrics on the Church-Government of the Restoration were the reverse of complimentary to the entirely different procedure of the Protestant Consistories and Synods of France. “M. du Bosc (says the Apologie, page 148) ne comprend pas bien ce que c’est de l’Episcopât d’Angleterre s’il le prend pour un Episcopât moderé.”
On several occasions a few of the French divines showed a tendency to be rather too liberal in their laudatory letters to the dignified clergy of England. The plea that they believed prelatical and liturgical principles to be consistent with genuine faith and piety, was surely an insufficient reason for inditing epistles which were sure to be used against their own most hearty friends in England, namely, the Puritan party. Under the restored monarch of the Stewart family, the days of Laud had been revived. The governing policy was to make the Church of England distasteful to Puritans, to compel them, as conscientious men, to be dissenters, and then to treat their dissent as a crime. Every circumstance in the penal laws and proceedings against Puritan nonconformists proved this — circumstances of which foreign correspondents must have been ignorant, if they really intended to condole with the Right Reverend Bench of King Charles’ Church Establishment as the injured party in the strife.
In the Appendix to Stillingfleet’s “Unreasonableness of Separation,” there are three letters from foreign divines to a Lord Bishop, which seem to be answers to some theoretical questions ingeniously (if not ensnaringly) framed by his lordship.
The first letter is from Professor Le Moyne (dated at Leyden, 3d September 1680), who, after combatting the man of straw “that a man cannot be saved in the Church of England,” supposes, on the ground that the Thirty-Nine Articles are sound, that the ritual and offices of the subscribers must also be essentially pure and
- ↑ It was published at Geneva in 1663; this rare volume was drawn up by the Rev. Thomas Hall, B.D., of King’s Norton, Worcestershire, who died in 1665.
