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EDWARD STILLINGFLEET

[Edward Stillingfleet (1635-1699) was born at Cranbourne, in Dorsetshire, 17th April 1635. He was educated at the Grammar-Schools of Cranbourne and Ringwood, and in 1648 was entered at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a Fellowship in 1653. He then acted as tutor in the families, first, of Sir R. Burgoin, in Warwickshire, and then of the Hon. F. Pierrepoint, in Notts; and, having been privately ordained by Dr. Brownrigg, the deprived Bishop of Exeter, he was presented by Sir R. Burgoin to the rectory of Sutton. A few years later he became preacher at the Rolls Chapel, and in 1665 was presented by the Earl of Southampton to the rectory of St. Andrew's, Holborn. In 1668 he was nominated by King Charles II. Canon Residentiary of St. Paul's, and in 1670 became Dean of St. Paul's. He was also Prolocutor of the Lower House of the Convocation of Canterbury. In 1689 he was consecrated Bishop of Worcester, and on the death of Archbishop Tillotson, in 1694, was generally expected to succeed to the primacy, when Tenison was appointed. He died at Westminster 27th March 1699.]

As a writer of English prose Stillingfleet does not hold so high a place as might have been expected from the great reputation he enjoyed among his contemporaries. "The ablest young man to preach the Gospel since the Apostles," "the famous young Stillingfleet (Pepys), "the learnedest man of the age in all respects" (Burnet), "not advanced to the primacy, his great abilities having raised some enmity against him" (White Kennet)—such are the terms in which he was, not undeservedly, spoken of in his own days. The reasons of the decline of his popularity are not far to seek. In the first place, he was too precocious; some of his best-known works (The Irenicum, or a Weapon-Salve for Church Wounds, and Origines Sacra) were written when he was a very young man, and ought to have been reading, not writing. Then, again, his subjects were not always happily chosen. The "Irenicum" was composed with the laudable object of producing peace between the conflicting religious parties which were then engaged in fierce dispute. But a wider reading and maturer

judgment led him in later years to retract some of the positions he had there advanced. His famous controversy with Locke arose from a discussion of a second-rate Deistical book, Toland's Christianity not Mysterious, which was not worth the trouble taken about it by two such able men. And once more, in his Origines Britannica he contends for the theory that St. Paul introduced Christianity into Great Britain, with a confidence which the most competent modern critics will scarcely endorse. In fact he entered with a keen zest into all the theological and ecclesiastical controversies of his period. The Protestant Nonconformists, the Roman Catholics, the Socinians, the Deists, the Non-jurors, all employed his pen; the titles of his works, The Unreasonableness of Separation, A Rational Account of the Grounds of the Protestant Religion, A Discourse concerning the Unreasonableness of the New Separation (Non-jurors), A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity, tell their own tales. As he confined himself closely to the particular aspect of each question as it presented itself in his own day, his controversial writings have now little more than an historical interest. They differ in this respect from those of such writers as Waterland and Butler. Waterland's writings against the Arians and Socinians, and Butler's against the Deists, have a real value at the present day; but Stillingfleet's against his various adversaries, though nearly as able, have, from the cause above-mentioned, lost much of their value. He is seen at his best in his sermons, his charges, and his Origines Sacræ. His style is clear and nervous, and he had a lawyer-like mind, which enabled him to marshall his arguments with great force and precision. As a writer of good English he is still well worth reading; and therefore his name cannot be omitted in any notice of English Prose writers.

His collected works fill six folio volumes, including a Life by his son, the Rev. James Stillingfleet, Canon of Worcester (1710). A volume of his "Miscellaneous Works" was published in 1735.

J. H. OVERTON.

THE JUDGMENT OF FIRE

Look now upon me, you who so lately admired the greatness of my trade, the riches of my merchants, the number of my people, the conveniency of my churches, the multitude of my streets, and see what revolutions sin hath made in the earth. Look upon me,

and then tell me whether it be nothing to dally with heaven, to make a mock at sin, to slight the judgments of God, and abuse His mercies, and after all the attempts of heaven to reclaim a people from their sins, to remain still the same that ever they were? Was there no way to expiate your guilt but by my misery! Had the leprosy of your sins so fretted in my walls, that there was no cleansing them, but by the flames which consume them? Must I mourn in my dust and ashes for your iniquities, while you are so ready to return to the practice of them? Have I suffered so much by reason of them, and do you think to escape yourselves? Can you then look upon my ruins with hearts as hard and unconcerned as the stones which lie in them? If you have any kindness for me, or for yourselves; if you ever hope to see my breaches repaired, my beauty restored my glory advanced, look on London ruins and repent. Thus would she bid her inhabitants not to weep for her miseries, but for their own sins; for if never any sorrow was like to her sorrow, it is because never any sins were like to their sins. though they were only the sins of the city, which have brought this evil upon her, no, but as far as the judgment reaches, so great hath the compass of the sins been, which have provoked God to make her an example of his justice. And I fear the effects of London's calamity will be felt all the nation over. For, considering the present languishing condition of this nation, it will be no easy matter to recover the blood and spirits which have been lost by this fire. So that whether we consider the sadness of those circumstances which accompanied the rage of the fire, or those

VOL. III

Not as

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which respect the present miseries of the city, or the general influence those will have upon the nation, we cannot easily conceive what judgment could in so critical a time have befallen us, which had been more severe for the kind and nature of it, than this hath been.

(From Sermon after the Great Fire of London.)

FOOLS MAKE A MOCK AT SIN

Is the chair of scorners at last proved the only chair of infallibility? Must those be the standard of mankind, who seem to have little left of human nature but laughter and the shape of men ? Do they think that we are all become such fools to take scoffs for arguments, and raillery for demonstrations ? He knows nothing at all of goodness, that knows not that it is much more easy to laugh at it than to practise it; and it were worth the while to make a mock at sin, if the doing so would make nothing of it. But the nature of things does not vary with the humours of men; sin becomes not at all the less dangerous because men have so little wit to think it so; nor religion the less excellent and advantageous to the world, because the greatest enemies of that are so much to themselves too, that they have learnt to despise it. But although that scorns to be defended by such weapons whereby her enemies assault her (nothing more unbecoming the majesty of religion than to make itself cheap, by making others laugh), yet if they can but obtain so much of themselves to attend with patience to what is serious, there may be yet a possibility of persuading them, that no fools are so great as those who laugh themselves into misery, and none so certainly do so, as those who make a mock at sin.

(From Sermon preached before the King, 1667.)

KNOWLEDGE AND NAMES

If we take a view of man's knowledge as it respects his fellow creatures, we shall find these were so fully known to him on his first creation, that he needed not to go to school to the wide world to gather up his conceptions of them. For the right exercise of that dominion which he was instated in over the inferior

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