INTRODUCTORY SKETCH

FEW drops of Celtic fire and fancy trickled in John Owen's veins. Few at least trickled through into his prose. Yet, as his name implies, he was of Welsh extraction, although this counted for less in his case than in that of Cromwell. A branch of the Owen family had been for some time resident in Oxfordshire, where John Owen's grandfather and father held successive rectorships in the English Church; but his main connection with the Principality seems to have lain in the fact that the expenses of his education were partially defrayed by a wealthy Welsh uncle.

The second son of the family, he was born at Stadham, a village near the Thames and within sight of the Chiltern Hills, in 1616. It is less relevant to note that this as the year that robbed the world of Shakespere, Beaumont,[1] Hakluyt, and Cervantes, than to recollect that in this year Laud left Oxford for the deanery of Gloucester, where he started his innovations and reforms, while a certain undergraduate came up to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, who twelve years later, as Owen entered Oxford, took his seat in the third parliament of Charles as member for Huntingdon. Milton and Fuller had been born in 1608, Clarendon and Sir Matthew Hale in 1609, Whichcote and Lord Falkland in 1610, Cartwright, Harrington, and Leighton in 1611, Pearson, Crashaw, and Calovius in 1612, Cleveland, George Gillespie, and Jeremy Taylor in 1613, More in 1614, and Sir John Denham, like Baxter, in 1615. Such, with Quenstedt (1617-1688), Voetius (1589-1678), Heidegger (1633-1698), and Cocceius (1603-1669) in Germany, were some of Owen's great coevals. He was still in his cradle when Cudworth and John Smith, the Cambridge Platonists, first saw the light. To Marvell he was senior by four years, to Pascal by seven, to Fox by eight, to Witsius by ten, and to Bossuet and Molinos by eleven. Bunyan was his junior by twelve years; Locke, Wren, Pepys, and Spinoza, by sixteen. In the year of his birth the first Independent congregation is said to have been founded in Southwark. He was a child of two when the Synod of Dort[2] started to formulate Calvinism against the inroads of the Arminian reaction, and when the Thirty Years' War broke out. In his tenth year Bacon and Bishop Andrewes died.

He was a home-bred youth, trained in the quiet of such 'a parsonage in Oxfordshire,' perhaps, as that on which Wordsworth spent a sonnet. He never travelled on the Continent. He never studied at a public school or at any foreign university. His primary schooling was got a the famous academy of Edward Sylvester in Oxford, where Chillingworth had been a pupil, and at the mature age of twelve,[3] in the same year that Chillingworth got his fellowship at Trinity, Owen was considered fit to enter Queen's College as an undergraduate, an instance of precocity which is not quite unparalleled in the records of the period, so far as England is concerned. The most aristocratic class of students at Christ Church are said to have opened their connection with the university at an almost equally tender age. Donne went to the University of Oxford when he was eleven. Bishop Hall entered Cambridge when he was fifteen, as did Fuller and Jeremy Taylor at the age of thirteen, and in 1667 John Evelyn placed his son at Trinity College, Oxford, 'not as yet thirteen years old. He was newly out of long coates.'[4] Philip Henry, that M'Cheyne of the seventeenth century, who entered Christ Church in his seventeenth year (1647), always maintained that one reason of his failure to profit adequately by Oxford was that he went to the university too young. But Owen expressed no regret upon the matter. His college course proved him to be ambitious, athletic, and a reading man—no common blend of traits. He was distinguished by two healthy passions, for music, particularly bell-ringing, the diversion that so engrossed young Bunyan. But these were merely fringes to what was, in his case, as in Hooker's and Milton’s, a life of close and hard study. He was a lad of parts, and the academic ambition evidently woke early in his breast, till in his ardour he frequently did without more than four hours' sleep at night.[5] This did not cost him, as it cost Newman two centuries later in the Oxford schools, the distinctions he had merited. But it sapped his health in later years. 'There are many sordid tragedies in the life of the student, above all if he be poor, or drunken, or both; but nothing more moves a wise man's pity than the case of the lad who is in too much hurry to be learned.' So Stevenson, who never was in such a parlous haste. The passage occurs in his College Memories, where he points his sentence with a pitiful instance of this tragedy, and then concludes: 'We have all by our bedsides the box of the Merchant Abudah, thank God, securely enough shut; but when a young man sacrifices sleep to labour, let him have a care, for he is playing with the lock.' Owen played with the lock, and, like his older ally, Milton, he paid for his presumption.

At the same time his subsequent regrets were less for physical mischief than for spiritual injury. Owen judged himself severely on this point. Looking back on his university career from the mature standpoint of the Christian ministry, he seemed to detect strange fire upon the altars lit by his mental ardour. The aspiration of the undergraduate looked unhallowed, and he was accustomed in later days to deplore the strong hopes of a distinguished clerical career which had been his leading motive at Queen's College. Probably self-condemnation of this kind is to be read in the light of Bunyan's similar words, in which he upbraids himself for his moral sins and faults of youth. Owen's addiction to study saved him at any rate from the shallow conception of the ministry against which Milton had just flamed out too severely in his own University of Cambridge, where he found that most of the Anglican curates 'flutter off, all unfledged, into theology, having gotten of philology or of philosophy scarce so much as a smattering. And for theology they are content with just what is enough to enable them to patch up a paltry sermon.' In Earle’s Microcosmographic (published in 1628), section 2, there is witty sketch of these raw preachers. Owen's Oxford preparation was of no such flimsy material. Questions of divinity no doubt were in the air; but no man becomes a scholar by merely breathing such an air, and Owen grew into a scholar. What he regretted was not the knowledge amassed but the motives which prompted his labours. He was making himself during these days and nights of study. But he was making himself for himself, and it was this selfishness, veneered with clericalism, which he subsequently had the grace to bemoan, as he penitently confessed what his contemporary Donne also terms 'the worst voluptuousness, and hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning and languages'—especially, we may add, when the end in view is personal advancement in the ministry, the latter being viewed as a career rather than as a crusade. Owen was not alone in such conscientious scruples. It is curious to find his life-long adversary, Richard Baxter, in sackcloth for the same error. God's dealings with him, he confesses, 'destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame, which was the sin of my childhood. I had a desire before to have attained the highest academical degrees and reputation of learning, and to have chosen out my studies accordingly; but sickness and solicitousness for my doubting soul did shame away all these thoughts as fooleries and children's plays.’ The one thing not to be regretted in these Oxford studies is the incentive, by no means common in the Oxford of his day, leading Owen to sink those mines of classical research, patristic knowledge, and scholastic learning, which in later years yielded him at every stage so rich and timely a return. He graduated B.A. in June 11, 1632, and M.A. on April 27, 1635, while his D.D. was conferred in his absence and against his will on December 23, 1653. It was only out of respect and gratitude that he used the last-named title, so he avers, though he would not go the length of scholars like Carlostadt and Melanchthon in refusing such degrees as poor unchristian distinctions. 'As for the title of reverend,' he adds in later years, 'I have very little valued it, ever since I have considered the saying of Luther: nunquam periclitatur religio nisi inter reverendissimos.

Reverend or not, however, he was intended for the Church. His secret hopes of clerical promotion and prestige were rather dashed, and certainly directed into an unexpected channel in 1637, by 'a little man in lawn sleeves . . . sometimes named in a vein of pleasant wit his Little Grace, not on account of his little stature alone.' 'This little, red-faced man, with the querulous voice, small chin, and horse-shoe mouth,’ or, as a brother bishop very lovingly described him, 'this little meddling hocus-pocus,' came down to purge the university from the bitter root of Calvinism. Ill it fared with those who failed to see the need of such a purge.

It was not Laud's first attempt upon the university, where Puritanism had not as strong a footing as in the town. In 1631 he had been foiled in a similarly indiscreet crusade by the majority of Convocation, although Charles had promptly reinforced his ally by issuing orders from Woodstock that the recalcitrants were to be expelled or deposed from their positions. Laud bided his time. Every year added to the strength of his influence with the Court and Church. In 1628 he secured for himself the bishopric of London. In 1633 he became Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1630 he had already succeeded the Earl of Pembroke as Chancellor of Oxford. And in 1636 the Laudian statues were at last under way.

Ten years later, in a sermon before Parliament, Owen explained the rigid and unsympathetic standpoint from which he had viewed these innovations of 'the later hierarchists.' To him they represented incipient and insidious Romanism. 'In worship, their paintings, crossings, crucifixes, bowings, cringings, altars, tapers, wafers, organs, anthems, litany, rails, images, copes, vestments—what were they but Roman varnish, an Italian dress for our devotion, to draw on conformity with that enemy of the Lord Jesus?' As for the doctrinal aberrations, the ius divinum of Episcopacy, auricular confession, and so forth—'what were they but helps to Sancta Clara, to make all our articles of religion speak good Roman Catholic?' Sancta Clara was one of the leading Jesuit agents, who (as Panzani’s Memoirs show) haunted Oxford, not without success. Among the residents whom he sounded was Jeremy Taylor. In his case the manoeuvre failed, but there was too good ground elsewhere within the Church and Court for suspecting Romanist intrigues and gains.

Fortunately it is impossible at this time of day to speak of Laud as that vehement quartette, Macaulay, Buckle, Hallam, and Carlyle, spoke harshly in last century. The man's personal character has been rehabilitated past any fear of reversal. Justice has been done to his love of learning, the invaluable services rendered by his firmness to the cause of university discipline and Church order, the timeliness of his protest against the overbearing dogmatism and rigidity of ultra-Puritan theology, and the sincere convictions which must be allowed to have actuated his cause as statesman and as churchman. His piety, though tinged with superstition,[6] is unquestionable, although it seems seldom to have exercised any obvious control of his public actions during the earlier period of his career. As an ecclesiastical statesman, he showed a mundane ability. But he was complacent, petty, and un-teachable. Like Strafford and Charles, his partners in the misguided and misguiding triumvirate of the period, Laud is an instance of how a man's policy may be fatally inferior to his personal aims and virtues.

But when it comes to be a question of which party was right in the struggle, or rather, of which was less doctrinaire and impracticable; when the motives and arguments of both are analysed in order to discern, excrescences and extravagances apart, which had a firmer grasp of the really central things in religion; then it is one outcome of the newer historic sense that the scale dips in favour of the Puritans at this period. No doubt it was of great moment to restore a decent service in the various churches (as any one will admit, e.g. who reads the account of St. Paul's in Earle’s Microcosmographic, section 41), and to insist upon some uniform and comely ritual being maintained. Laud's opponents—and in this respect Owen cannot be wholly be cleared from blame—were often inexcusable in the extreme position they adopted. They too frequently identified, or seemed to identify, spirituality with what verged upon irreverence; they, or at least the sectaries, bordered on an atomistic, eclectic sort of religion of Moi; they tended also to make purity of worship equivalent to a barren, joyless, unimpressive rite, consisting mainly if not entirely of mere preaching. There was an undue affectation of scorn for material aids to spiritual worship, an obliviousness to the place of symbolism in ritual and of music and architecture in churches, with an unfounded suspicion of ceremonies in themselves. There was a real indifference to the historic continuity of Christianity. But this extreme was in large measure due to the extreme presented by Laud and his party, who saw no guarantee for the continuity or well-being of the Church except in the episcopate and an eclectic ritual. There more one studies the prelate's life and writings,[7] the more one is disposed upon the whole to agree with the substance of Gardiner’s verdict that his underlying assumption was 'that the human mind could only be purified by submission to a certain external order.'[8] Nothing lay nearer to his soul than the wholesome apostolic principle that God is not the author of confusion but of peace, as in all churches of the saints, and therefore that all things should be done decently and in order. He forgot where such injunctions came in. He forgot that directions for the observance of rubrics and the like come only with grace and effect from a man who has first made it clear that his primary concern is to preach Christ and him crucified, and that the most excellent way of the Christian life and ministry is the way of charity. Here lay one secret of the Puritan's suspicion of the archbishop. That he was trying to rule England by religion and for religion hardly entered the popular mind. He failed to impress the English people with a sense that his stringent reforms were the outcome a genuinely spiritual passion, that his plea for institutions and rites as guarantees of historic Christianity did justice to the living spirit of Christ, and that his regulations for worship were really intended to safeguard the profounder interests of religion, instead of either stifling or supplanting them. Doubtless this connection was present to his own mind. The 'radiant, adorn'd’ exterior of his Anglicanism was meant to cover 'a hidden ground of thought and of austerity within.’ But he bound the Church to the State in a fashion that tainted the former with the autocratic temper of the Stuarts, and with methods which were absolutist or 'thorough' (to use his favourite word) rather than conciliatory or statesmanlike—to say nothing of Christian—until the Puritans at least saw merely the external imposition of rites, more or less minor and objectionable, dissociated from any Christian zeal or consideration for what they properly felt to be the first and lasting and supreme things of the Gospel. The militant Puritans are blamed, and often blamed with justice, for their attempt to rule Christianity in England on principles drawn from Judges and Joshua. But their error was hardly more tragic than that of the Laudian attempt to galvanise Leviticus. 'It is true,' said the archbishop, 'the inward worship of the heart is the great service of God, and no service acceptable without it; but the external worship of God in His Church is the great witness to the world that our heart stands right in that service of God. . . . Now, no external action in the world can be uniform without some ceremonies; and these in religion, the ancienter they be the better, so that they may fit time and place. Too many overburden the service of God, and too few leave it naked. And scarce anything hath hurt religion more in these broken times than an opinion in too many men, that because Rome hath thrust some unnecessary and many superstitious ceremonies upon the Church, therefore the Reformation must have none at all; not considering therewhile that ceremonies are the hedge that fence the substance of religion from all the indignities which profaneness and sacrilege too commonly put upon it. And a great weakness it is, not to see the strength which ceremonies—things weak enough in themselves, God knows—add even to religion itself.' Golden words! Too golden perhaps for the iron age in which they were uttered, and certainly too golden for the man who uttered them. They did not represent the practical impression made by Laud upon the great majority of the Puritans, and for this tragic misjudgement of his aims, which led to the deplorable conflict that tore England subsequently, he more than they must be censured. Prudence, said Ignatius Loyola once to a superior, prudence is a virtue of those in command. It devolves on persons in the seat of responsibility to set the course, to determine the issues presented to the popular judgment, and to display the right line wisely. In the world of action this is as essential, if subsequent misconceptions are to be avoided, as it is to state a question properly in the world of theory and debate. But Laud was one of those rules who fail to recognise that among a ruler's virtues prudence—prudence involving thoughtfulness, consideration, and judgement—is to be counted. This blindness was one of the main reasons of his unfitness for his position—an unfitness on which the open-minded historian May pounces as the secret of all the trouble. For even in aiming at some just, wise end, such as the correction of abuses in preaching due to the ultra-puritanic insistence on divine decrees, predestination, and so forth, his methods were quite faulty. They were marked by a dictatorial overbearing spirit, which was partly constitutional, partly the outcome of his co-operation with Charles and Strafford. And to this was due in some degree his great unpopularity, not among the Puritans alone by any means. But even his ends were not always to be justified. To promote uniformity in the Church by insisting on such trifles or exotic practices as bowing to the Lord's table, or the exact position of the altar in a church, to say nothing of sports on Sunday afternoon, auricular confession, invocation of the saints, etc., was to court disaster and disruption at the hands of any persons of Puritan tradition, to say nothing of an independent conscience. And behind these innovations, behind vestments, crucifixes, and the like, it was suspected (and who can say unfairly?), even by level-headed men like Owen, that there lay, not a simple craving for any richer worship, or even an intelligible desire on the part of the hierarchy for uniformity, but a policy which would sift the dogmatic basis of the Church of England. Lord Falkland's speech in Parliament is, by itself, proof positive of this suspicion. Many factors, ecclesiastical and political, as he remarked, contributed to the deep fear of Papist intrigue[9] felt in England at this period, with regard to the Church and the State alike. The air was charged with suspicions. The Protestant cause seemed imperilled by the influence of the Queen, and the repeated manoeuvres of the Jesuits in Ireland and in England itself. A serried array of facts and forces confronted sympathisers with the Reformation. And Laud's sacerdotal reaction, ill-timed, ill-founded, and ill-managed, brought matters to a climax. As far back as 1622, in dedicating his Via Media to the King, Bishop Hall foresaw a storm breaking on the Church 'which shall not only drench our plumes but shake our peace.' What drove the clouds up the sky during the next two decades, bearing 'a core of thunder and the seeds of hail,’ was, more than anything else, the varied set of circumstances, thanks to which, as Canon Henson observes, 'by the accession of Charles I. Patriotism was suspicious of, and Puritanism hostile to, the national Church.' In Ipswich, for example, one pious and popular minister was imprisoned for some years. Had he not committed the very heinous crime of speaking disapprovingly of the prayer-book? It was this kind of thing that helped to awaken the English people to the issues and real spirit of the ecclesiastics.

It is important to grasp the bearings of this policy of Laud in order to understand how signally it affected a young Puritan graduate like Owen. Both then and throughout his lifetime, he opposed the Laudian principle, in any shape or quarter, and that upon the twofold ground of spiritual worship and liberty of conscience. One has to keep this in mind, as one reads some of his later works on liturgies and ceremonies, in which the argument sounds nowadays curiously verbal, parochial, and remote. Owen's quarrel throughout was not with the doctrine of the Church of England as laid down in her articles or in the early councils of the Church. He did not even take the offence at her Episcopal organisation as such, although his bias against Episcopacy was certainly unfortunate. What roused him was the violence done to freedom of conscience by her ecclesiastical policy, the tendency towards externalism and superstition, and the far-reaching innovations in doctrine which these external changes, however innocent their appearance, seemed to harbinger. Laud's triumph was very brief, no doubt. His day ended in a sombre crash of all that he had sought to build. He over-reached himself for the moment. But his policy was taken up by lesser men with greater powers and opportunities at the Restoration and in the afternoon Owen had to enter the same lists of battle as in the morning of his career. Various readings are possible of passages in his career bearing on Church government; but he never altered, or saw cause to alter, the loyal conviction of his early days, that Laudianism was a menace and a discord in any Christian Church that aimed to be more than a sect, even though that sect were established by the State and episcopal in principle. Not that he failed to feel the august nature of the Church of Christ, or that he was quite oblivious of the importance attaching to its history and persistency. Only, like a true Calvinist and Protestant, he found the august, enduring element of Christianity less in its faith and fellowship, less in its earthly polity than in the scheme of human destiny which it reflected, and in the relationship between the Divine authority and the moral career of men upon God's earth. Such an aspect, while it does not cover all the phenomena of the case, certainly embraces some which are not merely real but supreme. Puritanism as a moral force, however, was what Laud, Charles, and Strafford never seriously tried to understand, much less to manage or conciliate. The facts stared them in the face. At home the Puritan party in the Church was winning sympathisers far beyond the circle of those whose religion consisted mainly of an antipathy to bishops or to the Papists. More ominous still was the steady flow of emigration towards New England, which Herbert's couplet echoed. Fifteen hundred people, despairing of their Church at home as an asylum for faith and conscience, had sailed in 1630, and by 1638 nearly twenty times that number had followed. They sought, like David (Ps. lv. 6), the wings of a dove, i.e. in Owen’s words 'a ship to sail to a foreign nation' out of the turmoil. Laud and his knot of statesmen marked such phenomena with a sullen resentment. But they learned nothing from them, save to treat the elements of Puritanism as alien to their neo-Catholic notion of the Church. And this was one central source of England’s sorrow between 1630 and 1645. On the principle of the Florentine Cosimo, that you cannot rule a state by means of paternosters, politicians often ridicule what they are pleased, not always unfairly, to call the narrow and visionary views of Christian ministers upon issues of the day. But the question of incompetence has another aspect. There is a reverse side to the medal. To a student of history it is obvious, past all demonstration, that many of the most gratuitous and tragic mistakes in national policy have flowed from statesmen choosing to ignore or undervalue some religious factor in the situation with which they were set to deal. Their motives may have been comparatively free from any reproach of ambition or petty malice. But the damning fact remains that their private virtues and not unworthy aims have been counterbalanced by an inability or a cavalier dislike to grasp all the elements of their problem, assigning each its proper value in the scale of magnitude. Strafford thought that Hampden and his party should be 'whipped into their right senses.' Laud and the episcopal faction docked the ears and slit the noses of scurrilous, recalcitrant dissenters. Du bist mein, denn ich bin gross und du bist klien. Stripped of accidentals, it really came to that. It was a policy which, in the clear, calm light of history, seems even more criminal on the score of its fatuity than detestable on the grounds of its cruelty.[10] 'In religious matters,' said Amiel once, 'it is holiness which gives authority. What all religious, poetical, pure, and tender souls are least able to pardon is the diminution or degradation of their ideal. We must never rouse an ideal against us.’ And again, ‘An ideal is only replaced by satisfying the conditions of the old with some advantages over.' That goes, I admit, nearly to the root of the Puritans’ own failure. They were not all like the worthy Mr. John Dod whom Fuller praises. They too raised against them a religious ideal—that of many devout Anglicans, who could not have their souls satisfied with any form of worship that excluded the noble, devout Book of Common Prayer, a number of ancient ceremonies, and the grave, lovely liturgy of the English Church. It was a Puritan who wrote of 'storied windows richly dight, casting a dim religious light'; yet neither Presbyterianism nor Independency, least of all the former, did any manner of justice to this semi-sensuous, symbolic ideal of worship, and the narrowness of their judgement and generosity was one of the causes which contributed to their deposition. But the point is that the same failure was committed earlier and more ominously by Laud. Practically, so far as ordinary people could judge—for the judgement was not that of the sectaries alone—it was authority which invested most things with holiness in the archbishop's mind. The Puritans were religious, up to their lights; they had an ideal of worship, which was not yet perhaps incompatible at most points with the essential features of the settlement for which Laud was working, though it tended to forget the things that were lovely in its devotion to those that were honourable, pure, and just. Only, Laud roused this ideal against him. His policy promised no satisfaction or even safeguard for their ideal, and as the initiative and authority for the moment rested with the archbishop, he must carry the greater share of the blame for much of the strife that followed—for the alienation of the national Church from the body of the people, for the oppression that made wise men often mad and obstructive, and for the permanent loss to the Church of certain more or less powerful and reasonable forces in the nation which made for conscience in the exercise and statement of Christianity.

Owen's estimate of the Laudian party and policy laid stress upon three points, apart from the Romanising tendency of the archbishop. His first objected to the pretentious ignorance of most of the clergy. 'Taking advantage of vulgar esteem, they make out as though they had engrossed a monopoly of learning,’ which beguiled ordinary people into the belief 'that all was not only law but gospel too which they broached.' Owen insists they were sciolists, ‘especially in respect of any solid knowledge in divinity or antiquity’; and, partisan as he was, he was both competent to speak on such a subject and frank to admit scholarship even in those from whom he differed. Nor is his indictment unsupported at this point. Sacerdotalism is ever independent of serious brainwork. His second count is the familiar one that the high Episcopal party deliberately subordinated the interests of morality to those of ecclesiastical obedience. 'For were a man a drunkard, a swearer, a Sabbath-breaker, an unclean person, so he were no Puritan[11] and had money—patet atri janua Ditis, the Episcopal heaven was open for them all. Now this was a dangerous and destructive qualification which, I believe, is not professedly found in any part amongst us.' Baxter’s account of his own early environment tallies with this to the life, and May agrees. The final charge is that of employing civil authority to enforce ecclesiastical censure. 'To me the sword of error never cuts dangerously but when it is managed with such a hand.’ Such were the thoughts seething in Owen’s mind, and in the minds of many outside Oxford, at this momentous period. In the year that he entered college, Buckingham had been assassinated, and the Petition of Right presented. Before he left, Sir John Eliot had perished in the Tower, Hampden had been brought to trial, and the struggle for civil liberty had merged in the wider struggle for religious freedom and Protestant security.

Owen seems to have taken his side without much hesitation. It is hardly accurate to argue that Laud's intolerance made him a Puritan, just as Presbyterian intolerance afterwards turned him, like Milton, into an Independent. He was Puritan by training. 'My father,’ he writes, 'was a Nonconformist all his days, and a painful labourer in the vineyard of the Lord.’ Probably the crisis precipitated by Laud’s interference at Oxford did little more than ripen seeds of Puritan conviction which had been lying in this mind since boyhood. At any rate he made the wrench. Four or five years earlier, ‘perceiving that tyranny had invaded in the Church,' Milton had definitely abandoned the object of taking orders in favour of a literary career, and was now busy with Comus and Lycidas. In the former there is a far from oblique allusion to the Laudian seductions. In the latter 'the author by occasion foretells the ruine of our corrupted Clergie then in their height.’[12] But his Oxford contemporary remained by the Church, though he abjured the Laudians; turning from his academic ambitions in 1637, he found a temporary shelter and occupation as chaplain in two successive county families. He had already taken orders at Oxford, and this further step was not uncommon among Puritan clergymen, who thus obtained both house-room and influence over children and young persons. It was owing to the number of domestic chaplains belonging to their party that the Presbyterians secured something of their subsequent following among the nobility and gentry of the land. Laud could abolish lecturers; but even his autocratic hand could not pull a private chaplain out of a nobleman's house.

Meantime, however, the breach between the king and the Parliament widened steadily. The tale of bricks was doubled, and the deliverer was at hand; but before the Puritans won their freedom under Cromwell, hard times were in store, and Owen did not escape the rough weather of the age. His second patron, Lord Lovelace, sided with the Royalists. Once more the youth was thrown adrift upon the world, and this time he had the further pain of learning that his Royalist uncle in Wales, who had hitherto defrayed the expenses of his education, had now disinherited him for his Puritan bias.

To these material anxieties a spiritual crisis now fell to be added. A man may take his line on a question of religious principle and yet be far from clear on what may be termed the definitely spiritual motives of such an action. Adherence to a religious party does not mean a vital sense of personal religion. So it evidently was with Owen. As Dr. Church remarked, in one fair sentence from that review of Carlyle's Cromwell which all lovers of the Dean would cheerfully forget, 'The strange and perplexed phenomena of Puritan character are not to be explained by riding wild and one-eyed though them.’ No rough-and-ready explanation can be offered of this crisis in John Owen’s life. All we know is that, as his biographer Asty tells the tale, he had gone to reside in London, and that he was still suffering from mental depression, which had set in before he left the university. One Sabbath morning he sallied out with a cousin to hear the famous Dr. Calamy preach in Aldermanbury chapel, where as many as sixty coaches often stopped to set down the gentry. To his disappointment it was a stranger who entered the pulpit. Instead of the popular preacher, some brother from the country was to hold forth. Many of the congregation streamed out in search of better fare, and Owen's cousin prepared to follow suit. But the young Oxonian was too tired. He sat still and listened to a sermon upon Matthew viii. 26 ('Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?’). It was plain, but it was the word for him. The preacher chanced to deal with the very problem of unbelief which had been haunting Owen for weeks past, and the upshot was that the latter left the chapel in the light and liberty of Christ.

He never could ascertain who the preacher was. We should regret this the less if he had given any hint as to the cause or cure of his trouble. Disappointed ambition, it was said, had made a saint of that proud young scholar who had died some years before at Bemerton. So much, indeed, George Herbert has himself betrayed. But self-revelation was not Owen's way, either then or afterwards. It was an age of memoirs, religious and political; yet Owen left no autobiography, and there was no Walton to do for him what was done for Hooker, Sanderson, and Donne. Hardly any of his letters have been preserved, whilst even in the course of his writings, where in self-defence or explanation he now and then is forced to lift the veil of dignified reserve, the glimpses are but casual. With a sort of Miltonic reticence, Owen never trusts himself to his readers. There is very little of the confidential or communicative about his mind. He was intensely self-reliant. He learned from few living men, and leaned on none. He had no close friend. Hence his private life and feelings remain for the most part a mystery still. All that can be traced is little more than the outward stages of his career and the successive definitions of his opinion upon questions of the day. Secretum meum mihi, as Francis of Assisi murmured: my secret is my own. It was not that Owen's nature was secretive or that he lived a lonely life. The reserve was constitutional, and to it is due the comparative obscurity that besets the currents and the initial crisis of his religious life. All that is certain is that he knew nothing of the secret struggle between faith and the passions of doubt and self-will that lacerated Bunyan, or even of the subtler, chronic conflict between sceptical instincts and faith in the unseen which marked a man like Baxter. Owen evidently did not believe with ease. But when he did believe, his faith was not exposed to any prolonged series of oscillations, a feature in which he resembled George Fox. His mind was neither restless nor speculative, and the sole crisis in his personal religion, so far as we are aware, ended as he left the London chapel on that Sabbath morning.

I

Queen's College, according to Fuller, was noted for its metaphysicians. Owen’s mind was stamped by this time, and his enforced leisure enabled him now to publish, in 1642, his first work, a strident and scholastic 'display of Arminianism,’ marked by the logical, artificial argumentation fostered in the Aristotelian discipline of Oxford. The Arminian controversy was in the air.[13] The tenets of Arminius were being pushed in England by Laud and his school, till at a later date bishop Morley's witticism upon what the Arminians held began to be truth and fact. Meanwhile the system, as Owen declared, 'became backed with the powerful arguments of praise and preferment, and quickly prevailed to beat poor naked Truth into a corner.’ Poor naked truth meant to Owen Calvinism, and Calvinism of the stiffest breed. It was Calvinism, too, not simply or chiefly as a ratification of democratic principles, but as a religious system. His views on Church government altered more than once, within certain limits, in course of his career, but on Calvinism he never wavered. The youthful confidence with which, in this volume, he flings his gauntlet into the balconies of Arminianism only stiffened, as the years advanced, into a convinced, if not convincing, maintenance of Calvinism's supremacy against all comers, especially against the softening tendencies nicknamed Arminian. Otherwise, the volume is distinguished by a vicious (in both senses of the word) attack upon free-will, and by phrases like 'that Pontic vermin, Marcion,’ in the exact spirit of Tertullian. The universities had for years been developing the satiric temper in litterateurs, and satire slipped easily into polemic. Surely it had been by way of sad prophecy as well as of strong protest that three years earlier a certain provost of Eton had left orders for the plain marble slab over his grave to be inscribed with words in Latin 'which may be Englished this: Here lies the first author of this sentence—THE ITCH OF DISPUTATION WILL PROVE THE SCAB OF THE CHURCH.' Walton is not sure if Wotton’s claim to the authorship of this sentence can be made out. But he has no doubt that the epitaph is 'a useful caution unto us of this nation.’

It was a caution which Owen, among others, would not and could not altogether heed. Controversy was the first park into which he stepped as an author; it was a park of artillery, and he continued in its pale, with little or no intermission, almost to the end of his literary career. This was due partly to the exigencies of the age, partly to his own abilities and temperament. On him as Calvinist, Protestant, and Independent, devolved generally the task of stating positively the case for his party, as each successive issue rose. While many of his books are thus polemical in form, their aims and contents nevertheless are in a sense constructive. Personalities are not conspicuous, and certainly not characteristic—judged by the standard of the age. As a rule, too, he never sought debate, although, when actually drawn into it, he may have felt, like Erastus, that such discussions often clarify the mind, as they certainly denote a firm grasp of principle and an absence of intellectual flabbiness. Besides, the polemical spirit was not confined to English religion, nor to religion at all. It was chronic and contemporary in most departments of intellectual activity. Mark Pattison traces it to the vehement onslaught of the Jesuits on Scaliger, and in Owen's day mentiris impudentissime was heard north and south of the English Channel, from Port-Royal no less that from the Puritans, since the reaction against authority and tradition, voiced so powerfully by Milton, naturally brought with it an alert, uncomfortable questioning of the old positions which was not unaccompanied by a nervous, inflated vehemence on both sides. Be that as it may, convictions had to be defended somehow. Principles of faith and practice were no longer accepted as a yoke; and, as Buckle admits, Owen was among the foremost men of the day who had mental vigour and outlook enough to meet the situation with its demands and difficulties. In his great speech on religion during the Parliament of 1629, Sir John Eliot told the members, 'There is a ceremony used in the Eastern churches of standing at the repetition of the creed to testify their purpose to maintain it, and as some had it, not only with their bodies upright but with their swords drawn. Give me leave to call that a custom very commendable.' John Owen comes before us as an author, first of all, ready to live and die in defence of what he deemed his creed. He was no academic recluse, for all his scholarship. Nor when he fought was it for his own hand. When we have said that, we have given the good side of the activity which opened with this pugnacious blow at the Arminians.

The work brought Owen himself both praise and preferment. It was dedicated to the ten earls, ten bishops, and ten barons, who, as 'the Committee for Religion,' had been appointed by the House of Lords, in 1640, to scrutinise the recent innovations in the Protestant religion of England. As a mark of recognition to the young scholar for his timely aid in the good cause, the committee not only printed his book, but had him presently appointed to the small living of Fordham on Essex. This enabled him to marry a Miss Rooke. As little is known of his first wife as of Jeremy Taylor’s or of Milton’s second spouse, except that he had eleven children by her. All died young, except one daughter. The work of his parish, neglected during his predecessors term of office, seems to have engrossed all his time, for, beyond some parochial catechisms, the sole literary output of these years at Fordham was a little book on The Duties of Pastors and People Distinguished (1643). The standpoint, like the constitution of Owen's congregation, is Presbyterian, and the argument is indicated in a sentence of the preface which refers to the contemporary habit of running to extremes upon the subject of the Christian ministry, 'as though there was no habitable earth between the valley (I had almost said the pit)[14] of democratical confusion and the precipitous rock of hierarchical tyranny.’ Owen’s cautious conclusion is that 'the sacred calling may retain its ancient dignity, though the people of God be not deprived of their Christian liberty,' and he ends by quoting, á propos of ‘the learned Rutherford,’[15] an Act of the Scottish General Assembly to that effect in 1641. Such sane, moderate counsel was sorely needed, though one is unable to discover whether Owen’s plea told upon the nation. It reads well, but it seems convincing rather than impressive.

In 1646 he had the honour of preaching before the Long Parliament. Whatever may be thought of his eulogium upon that body, his public spirit is unexceptional. Owen cultivated no pleached garden of fastidious refinement. He was neither an anaemic pietist nor a denominational Essene. Preaching from Acts xvi. 9, he took occasion in this fine, frank sermon to recall to the triumphant Parliament, now that the royalist armies had been scattered, the dominant religious question of the struggle. Wisely he saw that Puritanism needed to return upon itself. 'The glory of God was of late by many degrees departing from the temple in our land. That was gone to the threshold, yea to the mount.' Now that the field of war is clear, the religious aim of the war must not be overlooked or subordinated. 'The God of heaven grant that the same mind be in you still, in every particular member of this honourable assembly, in the whole nation, especially in the magistracy and ministry of it; that we be not like the boatman, look one way and row another, cry “Gospel” and mean the other thing, “Lord, Lord”, and advance our own ends.’ 'Some say, this war has made a discovery of England's strength, what it is able to do. I think so also. Not what armies it can raise against men, but with what armies of prayers and tears it is able to deal with God.’ Well then, he concludes with a practical turn of application, think of Wales and other districts throughout England. 'Doth not Wales cry, and the north cry, yea and the west cry, “Come and help us. We are yet in a worse bondage than any by your means we have been delivered from. If you leave us thus, all your protection will but yield us a more free and jovial passage to the chambers of death.”' Owen had, of course, a hereditary interest in the Royalist principality, which explains why he singled it out in his appeal. But the three years’ Bill for the propagation of the gospel in Wales did not pass till February 1650.[16]

By this time Owen was settled in his second charge, at Coggeshall, a few miles distant from his former parish. The outward change corresponded to an inward. In the preface to his Country Essay he confesses, 'For my part I know no Church government in the world already established amongst any set of men, of the truth and necessity whereof I am convinced in all particulars; especially if I may take their practice to be the best interpreter of their maxims.' The reference is obvious. It was not merely that the committee of Parliament had occasioned considerable injustice and hardship to the Episcopalian clergy in deposing them out of deference to public safety and popular resentment. The subsequent Presbyterian regime showed further that in taking precautions against religious anarchy and sedition, the dominant part leant to an arbitrary and rigid constructive policy. In Owen’s judgement the latter menaced liberty of conscience, and Owen was one of the rare spirits who had a passion for toleration when he was in power no less than when he was in a minority. This drew him nearer than ever to the Independents. In 1644 Robinson's Liberty of Conscience, William’s Bloody Tenet of Persecution, and the Areopagitica all poured out on England. Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying (written, it must never be forgotten, not after but before the Restoration) followed three years later, and Samuel Rutherford’s bitter Presbyterian attack upon it showed how widely its generous lessons had yet to be conned. But after 1644 the practical enforcement of such toleration as England enjoyed was mainly due to the rising influence of the Independents. It is true, no doubt, that what appear to be harsh and narrow regulations of the Presbyterians meant in several cases really the relaxation of sterner injunctions previously laid down by the Anglicans, as Dr. A. F. Mitchell very forcibly pleads (in his Westminster Assembly, 1883, pp. 206-211, 491-496). Nor were even the Independents advocates of complete toleration. They paid toll to the limitations of their age; but they were in advance of all other parties in that age, and thus drew themselves men of Owen's generous and tolerant disposition. As a matter of fact, the acquisition of influence by the Independents at this epoch was due to the harmony of their principles not merely with the democratic temper of the Commonwealth—though the Independents were not on principle or unanimously anti-monarchical—but with the craving for liberty which the Presbyterians were plainly unprepared, like their Episcopalian predecessors, to satisfy. The Independents were pre-eminent not simply in their theoretical extension of toleration, but in the lengths to which they were ready to carry it in practice. Thus their power shot up, as was almost inevitable, under the pressure of the somewhat exotic and arbitrary Presbyterian settlement in 1646. The latter was never thoroughly carried out. Local attempts as a rule ended in a deadlock or compromise. But even the limited extent of the jurisdiction which it secured, alarmed many men of very various shades of opinion, who, like Owen, saw no immediate foothold for toleration except on congregational principles. Toleration, no doubt, was worked out subsequently by other hands, including those of Chillingworth and Locke, into a dominant policy, for ultimately, which Owen did not live to experience, was bestowed by descendents of the very Cavaliers and Presbyterians who had once been most bitterly opposed to Cromwell. But to the latter, as a champion of toleration, belongs the credit of having been in advance even of the Independents, whilst they are entitled to the lesser yet honourable praise of having had insight and generosity enough to pick out the path along which the future of religious reform was to be attained in England.

Such was the position of affairs during Owen's first ministry at Fordham. There he had been a Presbyterian. But, as he frankly admits in chap. ii. of his Vindication of the Treatise on Schism (1657), his original Presbyterianism was due rather to an imperfect acquaintance with the congregational standpoint and to the influence of his environment than to any reasoned conviction; fuller and more impartial inquiry, added to his practical experience of the Presbyterian system in its spirit and working, led him to make a change. As in the case of Goodwin and Philip Nye, the most influential book for Owen proved to be Cotton's Doctrine of the Church. 'And indeed,’ he gravely warns his readers, in one the rare passages where you can imagine a grim smile playing on the writer’s lips, 'this was of impartial examining all things by the Word, comparing causes with causes and things with things, laying aside all prejudice respect unto persons or present traditions, is a course that I would admonish all to beware of who would avoid the danger of being made Independents.’ Hitherto the latter party had been a mere cloudlet on the horizon. But there were signs of the sky changing. For all its nominal position of authority,[17] which was due in no small degree to a not unjustified fear of Papal intrigue[18] and a distrust of Episcopacy as any safeguard, Presbyterianism was sorely bested by the Erastian element in Parliament, the lukewarmness or hostility of the common people, and the growth of Independency in the army. These difficulties stiffened its intolerance of toleration,[19] the result being that, as Barclay observes, 'the more spiritually minded Christians even among the Puritans were now rapidly passing over to the Independents and Baptists, and the formation of Independent churches is one of the great features of the period' (Religious Societies of the Commonwealth, p. 117). When Owen was appointed (August 18, 1646) to Coggeshall, he had already been in touch with the Presbyterian system in Essex, where there were fourteen 'classes’ (see Shaw, ii. 374 f.). At Coggeshall there was a Presbyterian minister named Mr. Samms or Sammes. But Owen had by this time had his eyes opened. Henceforth he is to be reckoned among Independents, and the official Puritanism of the Presbyterians knew him no more.

His new sphere was a large, hearty congregation in a town noted for its woollen trade. A large proportion of the settlers in New England came from Essex, and one reason of the local trenchant Puritanism was that the district had been sought out by those desirable aliens, the Flemish tradesmen who had fled from Bruges under the Papal persecution. The Independents derived from Holland instead of Scotland, and their tendency was to refuse to admit the right of civil magistrates to enforce or safeguard or control religious belief. Such, within certain limits, was their usual line of policy. To Owen and many others the intolerance of the Presbyterian party was growing intolerable. As they felt—and no one voiced their views more fiercely than Milton, although Owen never followed him into the ranks of sectaries—Laud's tyranny had only been exchanged for another; 'new presbyter was but old priest writ large,’ and they were now resolved to erase such writing from the country. In his Country Essay for the Practice of Church Government, Owen expressed this feeling of antagonism to the imposition of any one system of Church government or doctrine, accompanied by threats of civil penalties in the event of a refusal. 'Conformity once more is grown the touchstone. Dissent is the only crime.’ But Owen would have none of this Procrustean ecclesiasticism, even at the hands of a Puritan sect. No more than his Cambridge ally would he submit to the ‘classic[20] hierarchy' of the Presbyterians. 'Let what pretences you please be produced, or colours flourished, I should be very unwilling to pronounce the sentence of blood in the case of heresy.’ ‘I believe that upon search it will appear that error hath not been advanced by anything in the world so much as by usurping a power for its suppression.’ Or, as he frankly told the House of Commons in a sermon three years later (the sermon which won for him the trust and regard of that lover of toleration, Oliver Cromwell), 'Every age has its peculiar work, hath its peculiar light. . . . Plainly the peculiar light of this generation is that discovery which the Lord hath made to his people of the mystery of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny.'

Owen’s adoption of Congregational principles did not, however, affect his theological position. In 1647 he published another attack on the Arminians, as did Samuel Rutherford in 1649. Owen’s volume was entitled, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, and was dedicated to the Earl of Warwick, admiral of the Parliament’s fleet, who had presented Owen to his second living. The work, as Orme admits, contains far too much minute reasoning on the debtor and creditor hypothesis. Owing to this and other flaws, it brought Baxter out of his tent, and the two combatants engaged in a more or less friendly series of combats over the various issues of the day, which lasted intermittently throughout their lifetime. Owen had not, like Baxter, taken the step of leaving his congregation for a time in order to act as a chaplain to the Parliamentary forces, as men like Jeremy Taylor, Fuller, and Pearson were doing to the royal troops. But a wave of war suddenly splashed into his quiet parish. The Royalist rising at Colchester, where a last stand was made for the king, brought Lord Fairfax to besiege that town; so that, as the headquarters of the Parliamentary troops were at Coggeshall, Owen was at last thrown into close contact with the army and the drenching realities of warfare during the seventy-six days of the siege. The dreadful spell of it seems to penetrate even the sermons he preached after the town fell. In these the heady music of battle blends rather inharmoniously with the gospel preached from so hot a text as Habakkuk iii. 1-9. It is not simply that Owen enters no protest against the execution of Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle. He may have felt on that as Fairfax felt (see the latter's defence in Firth’s Stuart Tracts, pp. 362 f.). But the tone of exultation sounds too martial in a sentence like this: 'The lovingkindness of God to his Church is seen, as in a glass, in the blood of their persecutors.’ Still, if Owen, in the vein of Mucklewrath, neither deplores the need for war nor expresses much abhorrence of its cruelties, he acknowledges in battles the God of battles, and that in a far less passionate manner than Marshall[21] or Hugh Peters. Throughout the sermon passages of a deeply religious tone occur amid the stern joy of victory, and the preacher closes on this note: 'If we rejoice for being delivered from them who could have killed the body, what unspeakable rejoicing is there in that mercy whereby we are freed from the wrath to come! Let this possess your thoughts. Let this fill your souls. Let this be your haven from all former storms. And here strike I sail, in this to abide with you and all the saints of God for ever.' Such is the music of Owen’s sermon, accurate as usual, but rough. He had the violin and the bow, but little or no rosin.

In dedicating the published sermons to Fairfax, with whom he had come to be intimately acquainted during the long siege, Owen regards the Colchester rising as a last effort on the part of the exasperated Cavaliers. 'The weary ox treadeth hard. Dying bites are often desperate. Half-ruined Carthage did more perplex Rome than when it was entire. Hydra’s heads[22] in the fable were increased by their loss.’ A few months later, the execution of Charles at Whitehall at once scotched the serpent and extinguished the last sparks of effective resistance among the Cavaliers. On the next day Owen was summoned to preach before the House of Commons. His prominent position as a theologian, and his friendship with men like the Earl of Warwick and Lord Fairfax, had brought him to the very front of public affairs, apart from the fact that he was an Independent—and the Independents were becoming rapidly a power, or rather the power, in the army. His text upon this delicate occasion was Jeremiah xv. 19-20, the sermon being entitled, 'Righteous zeal encouraged by Divine protection.' The Commons thanked him for it, and requested him to publish it. Which he did, bravely appending a few pages on 'toleration and the duty of the magistrate about religion,’ where he reiterated plea after plea for toleration of a variety of opinions in the interest of religion, while he carefully defined the sense in which magistrates are bound to care for religion in the country.[23] The discourse is, for the most part, studiously general.[24] There is no expression of Owen’s personal opinion on the transaction of the previous day, which may be taken as Delphic ambiguity or religious moderation, according to the reader’s standpoint. Nor is there even a trace of any hesitation or embarrassment such as was felt by many of the more sober and cautious Puritans, including Fairfax himself. Probably Owen had no such feeling. The fact of his agreeing to preach at all under the circumstances speaks for itself. Yet allusions are not awanting in the sermon itself which indicate the trend of the preacher's mind. 'When kings command unrighteous things, and people suit them with willing compliance, none doubts but the destruction of them both is just and righteous.’ Or again, 'Men that under God deliver a kingdom may have the kingdom’s curses for their pains. . . . Let not upright hearts sink because they meet with thankless men’ (see Samson Agonistes, 268-276). Owen betrays here a sense of the unpopularity of the previous day’s deed in certain quarters. But in all likelihood he shared the view of Cromwell, Milton, and the regicides, that Charles’s death was a disagreeable necessity, an act of war or of self-defence,[25] that peace and Puritanism were endangered so long as the shifty monarch was alive, and that Old Testament precedents justified them on the religious side in taking a step dictated by an imperious political situation. Trust not in princes. Unlike Strafford, the Puritans learned this lesson before it was too late, but few of them could foresee that the effect produced by Charles's 'decollation’ throughout the country would turn out to be one of the forces of reaction during the following decade. Owen at any rate did not go the length of Goodwin, or Milton, or Colonel Hutchinson, in openly justifying the king’s beheadal. Like them he was evidently covered by the Act of Indemnity in 1661, for there is no record of his arrest on any retrospective charge such as proved fatal to Harrison and Sir Henry Vane. But I cannot see how this subsequent immunity, or indeed how anything in the sermon itself, suggest that timidity or time-serving upon the preacher’s part, for which he has been censured right and left.

'Here is neither haste, nor hate, nor anger,' peal the Trumpets, 'Pardon for the penitence or pity for his fall. 'It is the King !'—inexorable Trumpets— (Trumpets round the scaffold at the dawning by Whitehall).

In Owen's sermon we catch an echo of these 'inexorable trumpets.’ The stern sense of justice, and of a divine justice over yesterday’s proceedings, seems to thrill the preacher’s mind whenever he comes near to the event.

Three months later Owen once more preached before the Parliament, this time on Hebrews xii. 27. It was one of his most notable and historical sermons, entitled, 'The Shaking and Translating of Heaven and Earth,’ a vigorous[26] plea for thoroughness and sincerity of religion in high places of authority, now that the Papal power had been upset. ‘Give the Lord Jesus a throne in your hearts, or it will not at all be to your advantage that he hath a throne and kingdom in the world.’ ‘You are the grains which, in the sifting of the nation, have been kept from falling to the ground. Are you not the residue of all the chariots of England? Oh that in you might appear the reality of the kingdom of Jesus Christ, which hath been so long pretended by others!' The sermon brought Owen the thanks of Parliament. But it brought him a still more lasting benefit. On the day following he chanced to call on his friend Lord Fairfax. There he met Cromwell, who had listened to the sermon on the previous day with immense admiration. Going up to the tall, grave Puritan in Fairfax’s garden the general laid his hand upon the preacher’s shoulder and remarked, 'Sir, you are a person I must be acquainted with.’ 'That,’ answered Owen, ‘will be much more to my advantage than yours.’ ‘We shall soon see that,’ said Cromwell pleasantly. He was on the point of starting for Ireland, and neither Owen nor from his ‘poor, numerous, provoking’ congregation at Coggeshall would the dictator take any denial of his request that the former should accompany him in order to settle the University of Dublin. Cromwell wanted a chaplain. He needed a scholar, a preacher in sympathy with the views of the Independents in the army, and a man whose piety was accompanied with a statesmanlike view of the situation. These qualities he detected in the minister of Coggeshall, and from the hour of that interview in the London garden Cromwell and Owen worked together for nearly ten years in a close friendship. It is only one of several illustrations which might be grouped round Burnet's estimate of the Protector. 'What he showed his good understanding in was his seeking out capable and worthy men for all employments.’ 'He sought out men for places,’ Thurloe writes, ‘and not places for men’; indeed no small part of Oliver’s success was due to this impartial and penetrating judgment of men. As Dryden afterwards allowed, it furnished him with subordinates who seldom failed or fooled him:-

For from all tempers he could service draw; The worth of each, with its alloy, he knew.

Owen’s work in Ireland lasted little more than six months, and it was mainly confined to Dublin. While Oliver stormed up and down the country with guns and drums and wounds, writing one of the reddest pages in the story of the Emerald Isle, his chaplain was preaching in the capital as well as investigating the disordered affairs of the local university. 'I would,' he told the English Parliament in a sermon[27] preached after his return, 'I would there were for the present one gospel preacher for every walled town in the English possession in Ireland. The land mourneth, and the people perish for want of knowledge. Many run to and fro, but it is on other designs; knowledge is not increased.’ ‘The tears and cries of the inhabitants of Dublin after the manifestations of Christ are ever in my view. If they were in the dark and loved to have it so, it might sometimes close a door upon the bowels of our compassion. But they cry out of their darkness and are ready to follow every one whosoever, to have a candle.’ Sectaries and Papists swarmed across, as Owen knew. He was therefore concerned, with the same public spirit as moved him some years earlier to plead for Wales, to bring the religious needs of Ireland before the House of Commons. As a result of this, fresh provisions were made for the support of six preachers, as well as for the endowment of Trinity College, Dublin, although the reorganisation of the latter was not effected till in 1661 Jeremy Taylor came over and reduced disorder to some kind of harmony before he went off to combat the recalcitrant Presbyterian majority in his own diocese.

By this time Owen had succeed Goodwin[28] (now president of Magdalen College, Oxford) as one of the two regular preachers to the council of the Commonwealth, of which John Milton was the secretary. He drew a salary of £200 for this, and had lodgings in Whitehall. But once more Cromwell bore him off, this time to Scotland, and, with Caryll, he had to follow the general in the summer of 1650 on his northern campaign. Two of his sermons, one preached at Berwick and the other in Edinburgh (where he spent some six months or so), were published shortly afterwards, with a dedication to the Lord General; but neither they nor the scanty, unsure items of tradition throw much light on Owen's experiences across the Border, except to indicate that the preacher, like the general, met his match among the argumentative, determined clergy of the Scottish Church. It has sometimes been thought that Owen wrote one or two of Cromwell’s Scotch despatches for him. For this I cannot find the evidence is at all adequate. The hypothesis is plausible enough, but it loses sight of the fact that similarity of phraseology is not equivalent to identity of authorship, and that there was an argot of Puritanism prevalent in the circles in which both Oliver and Owen moved. Any one who chose could, for example, match phrase after phrase from Cromwell’s Declaration to the Irish people with sentences from Owen’s writings.

Cromwell’s success in Scotland and Ireland, with the flight of Charles to Breda, now left the Commonwealth more leisure to settle its internal affairs. One of these was the question of education and the universities. According to Mr. Firth, whose word carries further than almost any other scholar's on the men and motives of this period, Cromwell personally was far more interested in the reorganisation of the universities than in primary or secondary education. He certainly attached supreme value to an educated ministry. There was a fanatical party of the Puritans, however, who had no sympathy with learning[29] in any shape or form, and to whom the universities seemed a fit subject for spoliation rather than for reform. Of such was Kendal, who, according to the Gangraena, 'preach’d against human learning as flesh, and that the universities were of the devil.’ To counteract their tactics, Cromwell and some others, like Prynne and Selden, carried through a proposal to settle the university of Oxford; for while Cambridge, partly owing to the Cromwellian influence, had been fairly true to the Parliament, Oxford during the greater part of the Civil War had remained with right goodwill, on the part of gown though not of town, the headquarters of Charles, his Court, and his army. The strain of the war had impoverished its resources, and the presence of the Court had demoralised its undergraduates. The whole atmosphere of the place had been unfavourable to the interests of study and learning. War and revelry[30] alike had dissipated scholarship, as well as morality and money. And even since 1648, when the twenty-four Parliamentary visitors, including the irritating Cheynell and Prynne, had purged it of Malignants and established the university upon a Puritan basis by enforcing the Covenant on the university officials, the forces of insubordination and the weight of debt had prevented much solid work from being accomplished. So much may be gleaned from the pages of Neale and Walker, for all their differences. Reynolds had been dean of Christ Church and vice-chancellor since 1648. But Reynolds was a Presbyterian, and the Presbyterians were rapidly losing touch and influence with the dominant part in the Commonwealth. Cromwell, with Caveto as his counsellor, had already chosen an instrument of university reform. As chancellor of the university, he had Owen installed in both of Reynold's offices. The deanery, after being refused by Caryll, fell to him in the spring of 1657; the vice-chancellorship came in the autumn of the following year. Caryll then succeeded him as a preacher to the council, and the first period of Owen’s career lay definitely behind him. The Essex minister became the Oxford don.

II

Owen was obviously and sincerely reluctant to enter on an academic career, nor did he escape censure from various quarters for undertaking his Oxford duties. But Cromwell, as usual, was pertinacious. Owen yielded to his persuasions, and the success of the new regime at Oxford amply justified Oliver’s insight and confidence.

Internal anarchy had reduced the university to a slack state of discipline, but Owen soon made it plain that he would stand no nonsense. One student of Trinity, for example, overstepped the bounds of decency as terrae filius. His comrades sided with him and repelled the university officials who tried to arrest him. Then Owen interposed. 'I will not see authority trampled on in this manner,' he declared. But as warnings were of no avail, he stepped down and by physical force personally haled off the astonished undergraduate to prison amid the consternation of the audience. Contrast this vignette with that drawn by Evelyn in 1669. That worthy man had gone to receive his honorary degree at Oxford, and lo! 'the terrae filius (the universities Buffoone) entertain’d the auditorie with a tedious, abusive, sarcastical rhapsodie, most unbecoming the gravity of the universitie. . . . ‘Twas rather licentious lyeing and railing than genuine and noble witt. In my life I was never witnesse of so shamefull entertainment.’ He complained of it afterwards to the vice-chancellor and some heads of houses, ‘who were perfectly asham’d of it and resolv’d to take care of it in future.’ Owen’s methods were much more prompt than those of the laxer Restoration, as even that sour and delving antiquarian Wood admits. And, whatever else was defective, the religious training of the undergraduates did not suffer in the hands of the Puritan dons. There was plenty of preaching, and plenty of catechising. It was not the fault of Owen and his colleagues if all the students did not turn out like Penn, Alleine, and Boyle, straight plants within the grove.

With regard to scholarship, Owen appears to have infused a fresh spirit of thoroughness into many members of the teaching staff and undergraduates. Even Clarendon allows grudgingly the 'harvest of extraordinary good and sound knowledge in all parts of learning' under the Puritan regime, although for 'under’ he would angrily and perplexedly put ‘despite’. The educational traditions of the place, however, appear to have remained unaltered. When young Locke entered Christ Church in 1652, he found himself delivered to the grooves of Aristotelianism, which were not ‘ringing grooves of change’ by any means. Students were committed, he wrote plaintively, to a course of ‘verbal disputations’ in dialectic and the logic of the schools. As he subsequently told Le Clerc, ‘the philosophy then known at Oxford was the Peripatetic, perplexed with obscure terms and useless questions.’ The Discours sur la Méthode had now been circulated for nearly fifteen, but the Cartesian protest against Aristotelianism affected Cambridge earlier than Oxford. In the Scotch universities a similar revolt, on more practical lines, against the tyranny of the Stagirite had been effected already, thanks in large measure to the influence of Andrew Melville (see Mr. R. S. Rait's study in the English Historical Review, 1899, pp. 250-260). But, whilst Owen was alive to the danger of undue philosophising in theology, he seems to have accepted the prevailing curriculum as his educational discipline without any protest or question. Some of his subordinates certainly needed no caution against Aristotelianism. Of any such distemper they were serenely innocent. A number of the Presbyterian tutors were comparatively illiterate, unworthy of being dons alongside of men like Prideaux, Pococke, Lloyd, and Samuel Clarke; and as moral earnestness covers few intellectual sins in the academic realm, one can imagine the state of matters in a college ruled by members of the tribe of that Independent chaplain, Mr. Dell, whom Baxter notices so caustically. 'He neither understood himself nor was understood by others any further than to be one who took Reason, Sound Doctrine, Order and Concord to be the intolerable Maladies of Church and State, because they were the greatest strangers to his Mind.'

Few incidents of Owen’s career at Oxford have come down to us. With Philip Nye, he unmasked the popular astrologer, William Lilly, who complains that the vice-chancellor had 'sharp invectives’ against him in his sermon. This is entirely possible. Owen preached repeatedly, and he never beat the air if he could help it. Even after his deposition, when ‘St. Mary’s pulpit was cleansed of him and Goodwin’ (to resume Wood’s genial phrase), ‘he set up a lecture at another church,’ to inculcate orthodox Calvinism. A less honourable reminiscence is his connection with the bench of Oxford justices who had two Quakeresses whipped for fanatical disturbance of the peace.

Owen’s toleration, however, was usually unspotted, judged by the standards of his age. Most people, as he once shrewdly remarked, are advocates of liberty when they are out of power. Toleration is the plea of a harried minority for room and right to breathe. That and little more.[31] When the tide turns, the victors generally cease to exercise the virtue for which they begged as vanquished. Yet he himself, like a true Independent, was tolerant in the hour and place of authority. It is to his honour that he managed to temper zeal with toleration in his academic reign at Oxford (see Professor Burrow's edition of the Register of Parliamentary Visitors, pp. 353 f.). He must have connived, at least, at the maintenance of an Anglican service conducted by John Fell[32] and others, in Beam Hall, opposite Merton, where young Ken was among the auditors. He interfered chivalrously and successfully on behalf of Pococke, the distinguished professor of Arabic, who was in danger at one time of losing his living at Childrey, while at Christ Church it would seem as if the Anglican chaplain had been actually permitted to remain on in the college.[33] John Evelyn, on his visit to Oxford in 1654, heard Dr. French preach in St. Mary’s 'on Matt. Xii. 42, advising the students to search after true wisdom, not to be had in the books of philosophers but in the Scriptures alone. In the afternoon the famous Independent, Dr. Owen, perstringing Episcopacy.’ 'Perstringing' is Evelyn’s favourite term for polemical preaching among the Episcopalians and their opponents. But elsewhere in the Diary Evelyn shows that the Puritan sway at Oxford cannot have been by any means iconoclastic or extreme at every point. He notices that the graduation formalities, ‘ancient ceremonies and institutions,’ were ‘as yet not wholly abolished,’ whilst the chapel of the New College was in ‘its ancient garb, notwithstanding the scrupulositie of the times.’ He found the double organ still at Magdalen chapel, ‘which was likewise in pontifical order, the altar onely, I think, turn’d tablewise.’ These incidental rays of evidence light up Oxford under Owen’s rule sufficiently to let us see that the dominant Puritanism was very far from being rabid or sour or bare, once the Presbyterian commission lapsed in 1652. A share of the credit for this tolerant government, so far as such toleration was not merely politic or inevitable, must fall to the vice-chancellor, although Evelyn prefers to assign the honour of it in large measure to Dr. Wilkins, who married a sister of Cromwell. He was one of those who guarded the university against the iconoclasm of the wilder sectaries. But it was to the scholarly and soldierly Fairfax, Owen's friend, that the Bodleian had owed its preservation in 1646 as well as some subsequent contributions of books.[34]

Antony Wood, who commonly mixed pique and imagination on his palette when he sketched a Puritan, asserts that 'instead of being a grace example to the university, Owen scorned all familiarity . . . by going about in quirpo like a young scholar, with powdered hair, snakebone bandstrings [or bandstrings with very large tassels], lawn band, a large set of ribbons, pointed, at his knees, and Spanish leather boots, with large tops, and his hat mostly cock’d.’ All of which probably means that the Puritan did not affect the same fastidious gravity or clerical attire as his pompous predecessors. Wood’s caricature (for it is little better) is at variance with the contemporary portrait of Owen, as a tall, grave man, with large brow and nose, and arrayed in all the dignity and robes of office, which hangs in the Christ Church common-room.[35] It is to Dr. Goodwin, president of Magdalen (where, by the way, John Howe was a chaplain at this period), and not to Owen, that the other highly coloured account of the Spectator (No. 494) applies, where Addison tells a diverting story of some youth applying for admission to a certain college in Oxford presided over by a famous Independent minister. The lad had to wait for a while in a 'long gallery which was darkened at Noonday, and had only a single Candle burning in it.' He was then ushered solemnly into a chamber hung with black and lit by a single taper, 'till at length the Head of the College came out to him, from an inner Room, with half a dozen Night Caps upon his Head, and a religious Horror in his countenance.’ Goodwin, we learn, did wear some extraordinary headgear, which earned him the sobriquet of ‘Nine-caps.’ The cross-examination related to personal religion, instead of to Latin and Greek, and it was ‘summed up with one short question, Whether he was prepared for death?’ Whereupon the youth fled, never to return. The eighteenth century had neither the means nor the inclination to inquire into the truth that underlay this excellent fooling, and a modern reader enjoys it with pretty much the same good-humoured scepticism as is awakened in the background of his historical conscience when he turns to Scott’s portraits of the Roundheads in Woodstock, or of the Covenanters in Old Mortality. No doubt the Puritans' reign over Oxford was an experiment. At Cambridge a more receptive attitude was taken towards culture, thanks to the sway of men like Whichcote and his school. But few members of the party at Oxford had enough scholarship and mental flexibility to render the experiment either the basis of a permanent discipline or even a conspicuous success while it lasted. Both Locke and Milton were dissatisfied, for various reasons. Fanaticism must have crept in through the broken walls of culture, and no personal example or precept upon Owen’s part could avail to mould his heterogeneous subordinates or fellow-dons.[36] The latter were neither Platonists nor Plotinists, like their Cambridge rivals. Yet the notion of academic Puritanism at Oxford as little better than an attempt to force education and culture into the leaden moulds of Calvinistic theology, is a myth which, like that of the Puritans as essentially a sour, illiterate and stubborn race of Intransigentists, seems to die hard beneath the sun. Lay the hands of historical research upon it, however, and it crumbles into dust. The Progress of Learning, for example, is but a set of partisan rhymes. Sir John Denham is as much or as little an impartial witness as Prynne upon the other side.

But Owen's indefatigable spirit pushed out to exercise and express itself beyond the limits of the university. He contributed to literature, and he took part in the wider life of politics and of ecclesiastical enterprise.

Apart from his university orations, couched in rhetorical Latin, which are little better than the ordinary run of such by-products, the vice-chancellor issued in 1653 a Latin scholastic treatise, dedicated to Cromwell. Its topic is the divine Justice, and in its pages the views of Twisse and Rutherford, amongst others, are ponderously attacked. The thesis of the treatise is the Calvinistic position that God could not forgive sin without an atonement. The book failed to please even some of Owen’s party, and Baxter as usual bustled into the friendly controversy that ensued. One living point of interest to the modern reader is the curious parallel between the famous stately lines in Paradise Lost (Book iii. 374 f.) and some sentences in Owen's preface, where he exclaims that 'As every divine truth has a peculiar majesty and reverence belonging unto it, which debars from the spiritual knowledge of it (as it is in Christ) the ignorant and unstable . . . so those points which dwell in more intimate recesses, and approach nearer its immense fountain, the “Father of lights,” darting brighter rays, by their excess of light present a confounding darkness to the minds of the greatest men. . . . For what we call darkness in divine things is nothing else than their celestial glory and splendour striking on our feeble eyes, the rays of which we are unable in this evanescent life to bear.’ Taken as a whole, however, the book is far from radiant. Even its very darkness is not divine. Of Owen’s great contemporary, painting at this moment in the Holy City, it has been said that 'one would suppose he had never seen scarlet in a morning cloud, nor a storm burst on the Apennines,’ and this quiet formal temper of Claude corresponds in one sense to the unrelieved monotony which pervades most pages in the Justitia of Owen. The volume is a representative of Owen's elaborate, intellectual statements of the Christian faith from a rigid Calvinistic standpoint, characterised by precision, symmetry, and architectural skill, rather than by sustained feeling; it illustrates, in fact, the strength and the defects of that passion for logical deduction which chiselled much of the best Puritan work upon its theoretical and practical sides alike. The seventeenth century, said Renan, had no taste for anything except what could be expressed with the appearance of certainty. What evidence can be found to justify this sweeping statement, as it applies to England, must be drawn largely from the argosies of Puritan theology. Principal Tulloch, who rightly groups Owen and Howe and Baxter as the three theologians of English Puritanism, remarks that the spiritual world appeared to the first named to be moulded on a rigid outline. 'He is of all theologians, scarcely excepting Calvin himself, the most consistent, definite, and exhaustive, on his own assumptions. A bolder and more unflinching theorist never trod the way of those sublime revelations that slope through darkness up to God.'[37] This precision lent all the impressiveness of unity to his dogmatic system, but it handicapped him in two ways. In controversy he would deduce from some principle of his opponents all the logical issues which he himself ruthlessly inferred from their position; then he would turn round sharply to attribute these to all those who differed from him on the original premises. Hence flowed, perhaps unconsciously, a wide stream of the unfairness and irrelevance which marked his endless controversies. Hence, too, the barrenness which marked a score of these debates. He was keener in following up a logical process than in understanding the varied factors which enter a man’s mind as it seeks to relate itself to some general principles. He failed to allow for the wind, and thus his sheer powers of ratiocination often played him false, when he had to deal with less logical but equally acute and earnest minds. It was the same, in one sense, even with his devotional writings. He forgot that a merely notional theology can become as real a barrier between the soul and God as any sacerdotalism. In a treatise, for instance, like that upon Communion with God (1657), the mapping, synthetic instinct is indulged to a degree that renders whole pages utterly unreal, and lays it fairly open, not to Antony Wood's Saducean verdict, but to Dr. Rigg’s description of it as a 'piece of wire-drawn mysticism,’ though the mysticism is by no means that of an enthusiast like Antoinette Bourignon (1616-1680), Owen’s foreign contemporary. As is usual, the main argument embraces passages occasionally of more abiding value, such as that, for example, in which Owen plays off the Quaker and the rationalist or ritualist against one another. Once, he says, it was to be 'ordinances without the Spirit,’ now men ‘cry up a spirit without and against ordinances.’ Once it was ‘a ministry without the Spirit, now a spirit without the ministry. Then the reading of the Word might suffice, without either preaching or praying by the Spirit; now the Spirit is enough, without reading or praying by the Spirit; now the Spirit is enough, without reading or studying the Word at all.’ Owen is never abler than when opposing fanatical extremes. His sagacity and dialectic incisiveness come out best in positive statements of the via media. Unfortunately these very statements are often illustrations of that minute scrupulosity in theory and speculation which a reformer like Prynne exemplified in the Puritan sphere of action. And, judged from the standpoint of personal religion, they seem decidedly defective. You seldom find dew lying after a night of high wind, said Tennyson. In Owen's treatises upon theology the winds are usually up, with the result that the drops of morning dew upon the tangled, thorny undergrowths are apt to be sadly rare.

Such was the general type of theology taught at Oxford between 1650 and 1660 by 'the two Atlasses and patriarchs of Independency,’ John Owen and Thomas Goodwin. Their differences ran up into a vital unity. Genuine religion is like a coral-reef; its rise depends upon the presence of two conditions—comparative warmth and clearness. When the water is too cold, or when it contains a sediment of mud, reef-corals will not thrive. So with essential Christianity. Both ardour and intelligence are needful for its perfect work. In the seventeenth century the Puritanism of these Oxford teachers was really stronger in warmth than in clearness, whilst the Cambridge Platonists, with their gracious and noble rationalism, inclined to lucidity of thought and width of sympathy rather than to fervour of desire and ardent passion.[38] Yet it is no disparagement to the latter to recognise in their rivals at Oxford a sensitiveness to the essential and characteristic features of the New Testament, which almost atones for their occasional obscurity and obscurantism. To the rising spirit of free inquiry they showed an inconsequential aversion. Owen dubbed it outright an 'Arian and Socinian poison.' Even the spirit of the age which was moving men like Louis Capellus and Amyraldus made no impression on the vice-chancellor of Oxford. Neither he nor his were numbered among the followers of John Cameron of Saumur. Yet, on the other hand, in the vanguard of the English Calvinists, Owen displays comparatively little of that undue predilection for the Old Testament which often threw practical Puritanism out of gear, owing to the obvious fascination exercised by the Jewish Scriptures on men who sought a model for the moral and civil government of a nation. Owen’s interests are in the New Testament. In this and (as we shall see) in his supreme passion for Jesus Christ, he stands apart not merely from many of his own party but from the rational theologians who were the glory of Cambridge in the seventeenth century.

In ancient warfare a man at arms was not a unit. The term denoted not a single warrior, but a soldier attended by at least two of a retinue. Similarly a polemical treatise on theology in the seventeenth century commonly carried in its ample train appendages of more or less relevance. Owen's Doctrine of the Saints’ Perseverance is a case in point. It is followed by no fewer than four digressions, and in the preface we drop into a rather irrelevant but able discussion of the Ignatian epistles, whose authenticity then occupied the minds of many scholars. The book itself, written in 1654, and dedicated to Cromwell, has an innocuous title. But it was a fighting pamphlet.

The grey-haired saint may fail at last, The surest guide a wanderer prove; Death only binds us fast To the bright shore of love.

So Keble sang in later days, and so many a Christian held in Owen’s day, when as now there were those who did not care to go beyond the words, I would. . . and ye would not. But the Puritan vice-chancellor would have none of this hesitating, modest outlook on the prospects of the Christian man. Once saved, saved for ever; such was the theory which was championed by Owen, the Scotch Confession of Faith, Halyburton, Boston, and the rest of the Calvinists’ far-flung battle line, who contended that to admit the possibility of a Christian becoming a castaway was to discredit the power of God and upset the doctrine of predestination. Consequently Owen's volume is sustained effort to explain, defend, and apply the thesis that the elect Christian cannot finally fall away from grace. The book was struck out of a controversy[39] with Goodwin, the saw of which (to use Owen’s own metaphor) was drawn to and fro for years after that powerful Independent theologian had issued his Redemption Redeemed. Owen’s contribution is solid but stolid, and is characterised by marks of haste in writing. Another controversial work, the Vindiciae Evangelicae, which is more of a unity, was produced at the instance of the Council of State, and devoted to the Socinian errors of poor Biddle, who figures so pathetically in the days of Cromwell. Over him the thunder of the captains and the shouting raged for many a month. Owen and eleven other ministers had protested to Parliament against the publication of the Racovian Catechism in London during 1652. The whole edition of this work, which Milton as censor of the press had passed, was ultimately burned, and now the vice-chancellor gives an elaborate exposure of what he and his party deemed to be the insidious mischief wrought by all such continental notions, including even those of Grotius in his valuable annotations to the New Testament. It is a lifeless, loveless wrangle. But Owen had now become in some aspects for the inflexibility Calvinistic party of the Puritans what his younger contemporary, Pierre Nicole, became for the school of Port-Royal, the erudite doctor of their faith. Fortunately his Oxford writings were not to close with such jarring productions. In 1656 he issued a treatise on personal religion, entitled, On the Mortification of Sin in Believers, which was won the praise and gratitude of many before and after Wilberforce. It is the essence or expansion of some university sermons on Romans viii. 13, and it remains one of the permanent contributions of Puritan theology to the introspective analysis of the human soul. If Owen cannot phrase, he can probe. His scrutiny is relentless. But it is perhaps owing to the length rather than to the line of the treatise that its pages occasionally resemble a process of pulling the flower of piety to pieces, counting the streaks upon its petals, or tearing up the roots to watch its secret growth.

Then, as if to balance such a keen dissection and investigation of the Christian life, he published in 1657 another volume based either on his sermons at Coggeshall or on some university sermons, entitled, Of Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The book had been promised for six years, but university duties had delayed its preparation. It is devotional monograph on the 'soul-conquering and endearing' aspects of religion, and these still gleam with a fitful radiance through the scholastic network of definition to which I have already alluded. Its arguments, one is hardly astonished to find, gave rise to the well-known 'communion controversy’ some twenty years after the date of its publication. Owen’s works, like Newman’s, were commonly the result of some other man’s work making an impact on his own mind, or an attack upon his creed. They bore the stamp of the sentinel or the man-at-arms, who aspired to be a champion as well as a subject of his captain Christ. For, abstruse as they seem to modern eyes, such treatises were hurtling sturdy strokes in the seventeenth century, delivered by men who, like Owen and Goodwin at any rate, fought a good fight with thrust and parry, for all their heavy panoply of scholastic phrase and category. Few cleaner strokes in this warfare were delivered than Owen’s treatise on Schism, which also appeared in 1657. The spirit and standpoint of the essay are nearly unexceptionable. It is religious and it is readable. One has not to say of it as of some of its companion works: the arguments seem square and sound in the lamplight of logic, but will they stand the sunlight of experience?

Finally, in 1658, a fresh volume appeared, based on some other university sermons, and entitled, Of Temptation. It is one of Owen's gravest and most searching contributions to the religious material medica of his age. In the spirit of George Fox, he spares neither his own party nor their opponents. 'Whereas we have by Providence shifted places with the men of the world, we have by sin shifted spirits with them also. We are like a plantation of men carried into a foreign country. In a short space they degenerate from the manners of the people from whence they come, and fall into that of the country whereunto they are brought, as if there were something in the soil and the air that transformed them. Give me leave a little to follow my similitude. He that should see the prevailing party of these nations, many of those in rule, power, favour, with all their adherents, and remember that they were a colony of Puritans—whose habitation was 'in a low place,’ as the prophet speaks of the city of God—translated by a high hand to the mountains they now possess, cannot but wonder how soon they have forgot the customs, manners, ways of their own old people, and are cast into the mould of them that went before them in the places whereunto they are translated. I speak of us all, especially of those who are amongst the lowest of the people, where perhaps this iniquity doth most abound. What were those before us that we are not? What did they that we do not? Prosperity hath slain the foolish and wounded the wise.' Owen’s mind was not constitutionally sanguine. The unreliability of human nature, within as well as without the Church, seems to have haunted his wakeful, wistful soul, and none warned the Puritans more faithfully in the day of their power against that subtle moral corruption which is betrayed by the appearance of these vultures—presumptuousness, Pharisaism, and the inquisitorial temper in the atmosphere of conduct. He was as jealous for the discipline as for the dogma of his creed. 'O that the doctrine of the Gospel,’ he once cried, 'might make way for the discipline of the Gospel, without which it will be a very skeleton.’ Few apter illustrations can be found of the temper which he sought to inculcate, and which was shared by many of the better Puritans, than those lines from a contemporary pamphlet (‘An Honest Discoverie’), published in London during 1655:--

Ask men now, ‘What shall be next?’ The folks have many minds; Few can expound this knotty text, So various are their minds.

But this is very plain: All, all will shortly down, Returning to their dust again, And One shall wear the crown.

Oh, people, do not mind, Nor talk of transient things; The God eternal seek to find With strong, immortal wings.

It matters not at all How this short world doth go; For every one must stand or fall In endless joy or woe.

To this cardinal, spiritual attitude, it was Owen's aim to recall his fellows amid the anarchy and chaos of the sects,[40] who were in danger of losing their high, common calling in semi-political intrigues or ecclesiastical rivalries. Popularity, in short, had threatened the purity of Puritanism. A decline had set in, and the two symptoms of decay which Owen found in his diagnosis of the age were presumption and the inquisitorial temper of tyranny, the phylloxera to which the vine of Puritanism, in the heyday of its bloom, was inevitably liable. The latter showed itself in undue absorption in the 'transient things’ of secular position and aggrandisement, as well as in the attempt to enforce uniformity upon all and sundry. The former is analysed by Owen into its two forms of Pharisaism and Antinomianism. The Pharisee finds material for complacency no matter where he looks. The past shows him a tale of error and mistakes on the part of his fathers. But all he does is to plume himself on the fact that he would not have acted thus had it been his lot to live in these sad, bad ages. The present reveals the publican among his fellow-worshippers, and again the sweet serene sense of superiority asserts itself. No doubt the doctrine of predestination helped to foster this fatal germ of spiritual arrogance, and certainly the germ too often developed into Antinomian indifference. Long before Tartufe and Hudibras, Owen and others had marked the incipient danger of pride or hypocrisy in the Puritan temper, a worm which found the fruit of morals and discipline on far wider branches than those of Presbyterianism. From his rooms in Oxford, as afterwards from the meadows of Stadham, Owen spoke out as a watchman to his own people, much in the terms of the pamphlet I have just quoted. Only, he never was guilty of swinging into millenarian fancies in the reaction against the secularisation of religion. Repeatedly he betrays the feeling that he was living in the latter days, but nothing is more characteristic of his sanity than his outspoken repudiation, for religious as well as for political reasons, of those who set their hearts and hopes on some fifth monarchy of Christ of some millennium at hand. In one sense it mattered a great deal to Owen 'how this short world doth go,' since it was God’s world at the worst, requiring the duty and public conscience of God’s people so long as it held together even in the straits and shallows.

John Hill Burton once observed that great historians had usually been men who were full of dealings with the world. It would be something more substantial that a mere paradox to apply this remark to great theologians, and Owen would form a case in point.[41] Though immersed in academic duties and in literary pursuits—'perspiring ink at every pore,’ as people said of his fashionable and copious contemporary, Mlle. De Scudéry—he could not be spared from the councils of the Commonwealth. In 1652 he was elected a commissioner for licensing translations of the Bible, besides being one of the council appointed to confer upon the state and prospects of Protestantism in Ireland, as well as on the advisability of despatching ‘able and godly persons’ to that uneasy island. In 1654 he was chairman of a Committee upon Scottish Church Affairs, while in the autumn of 1652 he had already preached a very straight sermon to the Parliament on a day of humiliation during the hazardous naval war with Holland. 'You take counsel,' he told the members, ‘with your own hearts. You advise with one another—hearken unto men under a repute of wisdom; and all this doth but increase your trouble. You do but more and more entangle and disquiet your own spirits. God stands by and says, “I am wise also,” and little notice is taken of him. We think we are grown wise ourselves, and do not remember we never prospered but only when we went to God, and told him plainly we knew not what to do.’ One of the main sources of the chaos into which the Commonwealth was drifting at this period was the religious unsettlement of the country, and Owen had put his hand to a movement for consolidation at the command of Cromwell. The original scheme laid before Parliament, a scheme for which the vice-chancellor was in all probability responsible, provided for a national church surrounded by bodies of tolerated dissent—the latter, of course, excluding the papal religion (see Masson’s Milton, iv. Pp. 390, 566 f.). The question inevitably rose, What are those essential principles of Christianity outside of which dissent cannot be tolerated? How were the Government to define 'those who profess faith in Jesus Christ’? This was the rock on which the project was ultimately wrecked. Owen and his supporters did indeed draw up a list of fifteen or sixteen fundamentals, which were probably impracticable rather than unfair. Reviewing this 'foundation of the Established Church conceived in the mind of John Owen, and reduced to practical shape' in 1654, Gardiner is able to sum up his estimate with the remark that, ‘with the exception of the condemnation of the use of Common Prayer, the scheme was in the highest degree broad and generous, and it is well to remember that those who strove to revive the use of the Common Prayer were a political as well as an ecclesiastical party.’ Nevertheless these definitions, practical and theoretical, failed to win universal assent. They seemed too stiff and too dogmatic. Many Puritans like Milton dreaded the ‘secular chains’ threatened by such framers of a religious constitution, whilst others like Baxter demurred to the whole business. It is a ticklish business, said Richard, to draw up fundamentals. Cromwell, no doubt, held more liberal views, and his ‘adhesion to the general doctrine of liberty of conscience’ is properly pronounced 'perhaps the noblest element in his whole mental equipment’ (see Morley’s Cromwell, pp. 381 f.). But we can only conjecture what might have transpired if the Protector, or even the vice-chancellor, had carried the day. As it was, more pressing questions swept Parliament aside from the religious settlement. No steps were taken in the meantime along the path of comprehension or reform, although in 1654 Cromwell set to work a commission of Triers, 'the acknowledged Flower of spiritual England at that time,' whose business it was to inquire, as the Protector put it, for ‘the grace of God in a minister, as not foolishly nor senselessly,’ but charitably; i.e. to ensure that ministers of the Gospel were moral and religious men. Episcopalians were excluded from holding office—they still hankered after Charles II.; but no theological test was applied. Owen had a seat upon this board of thirty-eight, and in the same year he allowed himself to be elected M.P. for Oxford. On the score of his clerical orders, however, the election was declared void.

Sermons before Parliament and long consultations with Cromwell upon affairs of the State filled up the public side of Owen’s life during these years. Once he took the field at the head of a university troop,[42] to quell some Royalist insurrection in Wiltshire, riding, as his detractors afterwards put it, 'with white powder in his hair and black powder in his pocket.’ Later on he had to indignantly deny that he had received a commission from Oliver to wear a sword. But certainly, to the scandalising of some pious folk, he wore pistols, which he was evidently prepared to use if need be. Otherwise his services to the State were quite pacific. His advice is sought on the treatment of Quakers and the admission of Jews. He is found at Cromwell's side by Fox, though not to the latter’s satisfaction. He is deep in the general’s confidence on questions of policy and politics, like 'Cromwell’s Ahitophel,’ as the Royalists pleasantly muttered, and in an Act passed for the settlement of lands in Ireland upon statesmen who had deserved well of the country, Owen’s name is included among the recipients.

A change came about 1657. By joining Desborough and Fleetword in the movement which bravely, if not wisely, checked the offer of the crown to Cromwell,[43] Owen forfeited much of his favour at Court, and when Richard succeeded his father in the chancellorship of Oxford University, the vice-chancellor lost his position. Conant, the Presbyterian rector of Exeter College, reigned in Owen’s stead. But the final tie that bound him to his university was not snapped till 1659, when the Parliament, under the influence of the brief Presbyterian reaction in 1659-1660, reinstated Dr. Reynolds in the deanery of Christ Church. Meantime Owen took a prominent part in the Savoy Conference of 1658, at which an attempt was made to formulate the doctrinal position of the Independents or Congregationalists. He was far less happily and honourably employed in attacking Walton’s splendid edition of the Polyglot Bible. Owen's dogmatic idea of the Bible[44] could not tolerate the suggestion that the Scriptures did not lie before the English reader absolutely pure and entire, as in their original languages, and he actually took Matt. v. 18 to mean that the modern Bible had been preserved externally intact throughout the ages. Walton’s collection of various readings gave the deathblow to this delusion, but the Puritan theologian could not or would not recognise the untenable character of his position, and the controversy ended with all the honours of argument on Walton’s side. It is an incident on which admirers of Puritan religion do not care to linger. Owen in the rôle of Uzzah is a rare and painful spectacle. Luckily he had not the Episcopal power so unhappily wielded by Bossuet against Simon’s Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament, a translation of which Dryden welcomed in 1682.

More damage to his reputation was done, however, by another course of action at this period. For Owen slipped in politics as well as in scholarship. Cromwell’s death had once more thrown the State into a whirlpool of confused passions and eddying counterplots, and Owen, who had come to distrust Oliver’s strength, now distrusted Richard’s weakness. Ultimately he threw himself into what is known as the Wallingford House Conspiracy, which was organised by Desborough, Fleetwood, and others, to depose Richard in favour of 'the good old cause,' i.e. a republic. Owen did not spare himself at this crisis. He opened the meeting at Wallingford House on April 5 with prayer, and preached at the subsequent resuscitation of Oliver’s Long Parliament. Like Milton with his pen, Owen with his tongue[45] advocated this measure as the sole available safeguard of the State against the Presbyterians on the one hand and the Royalist Episcopalians on the other. It was a short-sighted policy. The Rump was soon roasted, and it is matter of history how the adroit, impenetrable intrigues of Monk were able, thanks to the weary dissatisfaction of the nation, to draw Charles back from Breda to his father’s throne.

At a subsequent period, when justly but too severely[46] censured for his conduct at this period, Owen denied that he had had any hand in the disposition of Richard Cromwell. Strictly speaking, this was true, and it is hard to determine exactly how far he was implicated in the business. But his whole indirect influence was thrown into the scale against the continuation of the Protectorate, and the general public had no doubt whatever of his aims and opinions in the crisis. The Wallingford House Plot remains, in fact, a stain on Owen’s judgement, if not upon his character, like the youthful one of Laud in condoning the marriage of his patron, Lord Devon, with the divorcée, Penelope Devereux, Sidney's Stella. Laud repented of his fault. Whether Owen did of his, we are not aware. As Baxter keenly protests, some time later, the Independents who were responsible for the crisis were not always repentant. 'The poor Church of Christ, the sober, sound, religious Part, are like Christ that was crucified between two Malefactors; the prophane and formal Persecutors on one hand, and the Fanatick dividing Sectary on the other hand, have in all Ages been grinding the spiritual Seed, as the Corn is ground between the Millstones: And though their Sins have ruined themselves and us, and silenced so many hundred Ministers, and scattered the Flocks and made us the Hatred and Scorn of the ungodly World, and a by Word and Desolation in the Earth; yet there are few of them that lament their Sin, but justify themselves and their Misdoings, and the penitent Malefactor is yet unknown to us.’ In part this censure is but too well deserved. What the republicans and the sectaries expected to gain by re-establishing the Rump, it is hard to see. Their policy divided Puritan England against itself. A monarchical reaction set in, and finally the Presbyterians sided with the Royalists. When the choice lay between the Stuarts and the army, many people not unnaturally preferred the former expedient to a succession of military despots elected by a body resembling the praetorian guards in the later Roman empire. Charles, too, was full of facile promises at Breda. He played the farce of godliness and sanctity with consummate address, until it seemed, even to shrewd men like Philip Henry, Fox, and Baxter, quite a reasonable hope that on his return he would emulate his father's personal virtues, see fairplay between the Episcopalians and Presbyterians in England, and inaugurate an era of general religious comprehension, with bulwarks against the Papacy. As for the Independents, they sided as a party either with the Rump or with the doctrinaire republicans. The initiative had passed out of their hands with the practical supersession of the Cromwellian cohorts.

III

If Owen and his party had altogether failed to gauge the state of feeling in the country, the Puritans who had promoted or welcomed the restoration of King Charles were made ere long to feel how tragically they had misconstrued that monarch’s character as well as the new temper of the Cavaliers and Anglicans. Any presentiments which were at first stifled were soon justified up to the hilt. The Restoration proved a right uncomfortable providence for the Puritans as well as for the Roman Catholics. It was little better, in some aspects, than a prolonged outrage of the moral sense. 'Impatient of the protestant heresy in all its forms,’ to quote Sir James Stephen’s pleasant phrase, 'and of Christianity itself in all its precepts,’ Charles took a line of domestic policy which makes his reign as deplorable reading for a Christian conscience as, in foreign politics, it appears to modern patriotism. Only, there was one difference between them. While his disgraceful intrigues with France, political and religious, had to be partially concealed, his treatment of all religionists outside the English church, ‘unprincipled' in both senses of the term, could be managed more openly. Here he had not to dread exposure any more than in his reiterated breaches of the seventh commandment. The breaker of oaths had to exercise more caution than the voluptuary or the absolutist. Not till the day of his death did the Anglican church discover that their head had been hoodwinking them all his lifetime. For Charles needed the support of the English church, and he was clever enough to out-general the clergy to suit his royal manoeuvres. The Puritan, however, lay at his mercy. He was seldom of any use to Charles, and therefore had no standing rights in the merry monarch’s eyes. The brief glimpses of toleration enjoyed by Nonconformists during his reign were usually due either to the politic feeling which made even Charles see that the Cavaliers’ animosity was a political menace, or to the really genuine aversion to bloodshed and violence which actuated his lazy conscience, or to the fact that he could not attempt to extend toleration to the Papists without unintentionally benefiting Protestant dissenters at the same time.

The latter soon learned what they had to expect. The day of great political ideals had set, and the age revolved round much more mundane interests. The Cavaliers returned with a thirst for retaliation which rendered concessions out of the question. Old provocations were recalled. The mind and face of the time grew hard. Resentment breathed on every side. Feeling against Puritanism, political and religious, vindictive or conscientious, ran so high that it was hardly possible for a broad and statesmanlike view of the situation to be taken by any responsible politician, least of all by an ecclesiastical layman like Clarendon. Scott has happily caught this temper in the earlier chapters of Peveril of the Peak (see the note to chapter x.). For while Charles, to his credit, tried to mitigate the rancour of the Cavaliers, the constitution of the Parliament which met in 1661 proved that spite against the Puritans must be gratified at almost any cost, in religion if not in politics. The political extravagances of the Fifth Monarchy party, and fanatical ebullitions like Venner's plot, lent a colour of self-protection to this cause of arbitrary procedure and civil violence. Men like Major Bridgenorth were selected as representatives of the Puritans, and their plotting was made the pretext for penal statutes of inexcusable extremity and hardship, inflicted indiscriminately on the Presbyterians who had joined the Episcopal coalition for the king’s recall, and upon the Independents who had stood aloof.

Nor could any interposition be looked for from the Church. If Charles personally was too indolent and good-natured to be a persecutor, it was otherwise with his clergy. That bitter and sectarian dignitary, Sheldon, was at the head of affairs, a man whose moral courage and financial liberality only throw into relief the rancorous spirit which dominated his conduct towards the Papists and Nonconformists. Coleridge’s cutting verdict upon him is really less severe than the remark of Burnet, that 'his sense of religion was not much, if any at all; for he used to speak of it [i.e. religion] as the Engine of State, which gained him credit with the king as a wise and honest clergyman.’ The worst that need be said of him probably is that he was a churchman first and a Christian afterwards, and that the 'afterwards’ meant sometimes a woful interval. This was the creature who now governed the English church, and who rebuked the king for venturing to propose fair treatment for the Nonconformists. There were noble and generous spirits, no doubt, among the clergy. But a Pearson was less common that a Ward in the seats of the mighty. Men of Earle's stamp were more rare than those of Cosin’s. Officially the church either drifted with the tide of popular exasperation against the Nonconformists, or initiated vindictive measures on her own account. As Canon Overton argues very fairly, in his ingenious defence of the Anglicans (Life in the English Church, 1660-1714, pp. 343 f.), it was the Conformists who were most cruel, and the rise of Sancroft undoubtedly relaxed to some degree the drastic policy of Sheldon. But by that time the mischief was done. The Anglicans, forgetting that to fear God and honour the king are apostolic precepts, only when preceded by honour all men, love the brotherhood, had the Act of Uniformity passed in 1662, the Conventicle Act in 1664, and the Five Mile Act in 1665. Any protest against these came not from the clergy, but from the better laity. The first, as Dr. Martineau points out, was an Act of schism, driving an irrevocable wedge into English Christianity. Historians have been perplexed in the main as to the proper adjective to select for it, but by a happy unanimity they seem to have agreed upon 'iniquitous.’ Inspired by a departmental view of English Christianity, it compelled all clergymen, on pain of deprivation, to declare their 'unfeigned assent and consent to all and everything contained and prescribed in and by’ the Book of Common Prayer! This had the effect it was perhaps intended to produce. As a result of the infringement of conscience which it threatened, nearly two thousand Puritans bravely went into the wilderness on August 24, 1662, which by chance or by the irony of history was the anniversary of St. Bartholomew's Day. The breach was tragic and deplorable. In one sense the persecution was part of the retribution which fell upon the Puritans for their extrusion of the Anglican clergy fifteen years before. They reaped as they had sowed. But in another sense it represented a voluntary choice; as we now see, it witnessed to their wisdom as well as to their integrity. With that spiritual instinct which is often a surer guide of conduct at a crisis than any elaborate or reasoned set of motives, the vast majority of the Puritans declined to throw in their lot with the triumphant Episcopalians in order to form a comprehensive Church in which they saw no guarantee that the chosen, chainless principles of their faith and liberty would be respected. The Anglican dementia was powerful. But, fortunately for England, the Puritans kept their heads.

Nor were the deposed ministers permitted even to worship in their own way. Corporation Act had cut the roots of Presbyterian influence municipally, but the Coventicle Act, based on a dread of seditious gatherings, prohibited all religious meetings outside the pale of the Episcopal Church, on pain of fine, imprisonment,[47] and transportation. This left scope for all manner of local injustice. It encourages informers, and by its practical working seemed a contrivance for actually goading people into disobedience or disloyalty. Finally, by what has been termed 'perhaps the meanest and most spiteful of all the persecuting edicts that ever received the sanction of an English sovereign' (Dr. Hodgkin)—although the blame and shame of it fall most heavily on the Church and Parliament—no Nonconformist minister or teacher was permitted to come within five miles of any town or borough, or of any place where he had formerly officiated. 'No honest man would take that oath,’ said Lord Southampton in the House of Lords. He did not add, as posterity has added, the corollary that no honest man would have suggested or enforced it. Sheldon and the Church-party, however, were determined to mow down all Protestant dissent. Opposition and protest were overborne, and the measure passed into law. Tam saeva et infesta virtutibus tempora.

Such was the England in which Owen spent the third and last period of his life, nine years in Essex and nearly nine in Oxford being followed by twenty-three in domestic semi-exile. James VI. once spoke of ‘this salmond-like instinct of ours’ which prompts a man to revisit his early haunts. Owen had followed such an instinct on his retirement from the university. He settled down at Stadham, where he had purchased a small estate, and where, in his seclusion, he preached still to a few people as occasion offered, and pursued his studies. He was in the prime of life. His mental faculties were at their zenith. Yet no occupation offered. The Oath of Uniformity, of course, he would not take, but as the various persecuting Acts were occasionally relaxed, he seized advantage of every opportunity to engage in preaching to the common people. Unlike Bunyan and Fox, he escaped arrest and imprisonment, although his escapes were often narrow. The fact was, Owen's intellectual eminence had won him high respect among the upper classes, while he numbered among his personal friends several members of the aristocracy, including Sir John Treves, secretary of State to the Cabal, Earl Berkeley, and Lord Wharton (on whom see Carlyle’s Cromwell, letter lxviii.). The informers found it safer and more profitable to swoop at lower game.

His preaching during these years was naturally tinged with an indignant melancholy. Puritanism was riding out the storm, and to Owen’s eye it looked as if the secular reaction was sweeping away before it every anchorage of morals and religion which the Puritans held dear. The estimate, as we now see, was exaggerated. Though the official air of the Court was what Keats once called 'an officinal atmosphere,’ outside London a real religious life was thriving, and morals were not yet at a discount either in the provinces or even far outside Whitehall. 'God knows,’ said honest Clarendon to his master, ‘neither the Fabricii nor the Camilli can be found’ at Court. Spoken previous to the Restoration, these words only gained in truth as the years passed on. Nevertheless it is absurd to generalise from the Court to the country, although even a sympathetic survey of the latter gives no great cause for optimism. Superficially it would seem as if much of the religion of the land lay at the mercy of visionaries, theological disputants, and apostates from morals or Protestantism.

One looks on God, and then with eyes struck blind Brings a confusing rumour to mankind; And others listen, and no work can do Till they have got that God defined anew; And in the darkness some have fallen, as fell To baser gods the folk of Israel.

But there were still families like the Verneys, the Evelyns, and the Harleys, while, beyond question, a great body of devout Christian people in all the churches and in all classes stood aloof from extravagances of conduct and opinion, although as usual these normal folk do not emerge above the surface of history. Even the rising group of the Quakers had a part to play in the religious evolution of the age. Their protest, couched frequently in censorious language, now as ever told against the intellectual rigidity of Calvinism and the ceremonial externalism which marked Episcopal as it had marked Presbyterian worship. But the ferment of this protest was not popular, and to Owen's mind it seemed 'a confusing rumour’ of divine things, threatening to evaporate the organisation of Christianity and to compromise the value of the Bible. Hence on all sides the Independent theologian was harassed. He saw but scanty patches of green grass around him. Towards the Anglican he had to keep on the defensive, when his principles of Church government or of Calvinism were attacked. Towards the Quaker, who deemed him an over-exact definer of religion, he turned a face of vigilant suspicion. Towards the Romanist his attitude was that of acrid antagonism, an attitude shared for the nonce by all the Anglicans.

If divinity be, as Bacon judged, 'the haven and Sabbath of man’s contemplation,’ it was generally far from being a waveless haven or a calm Sabbath for the theologians of the seventeenth century. In 1662 Owen had put into his hands for a few days, ‘by an honourable person,’ the Roman Catholic work entitled Fiat Lux, a subtle and ingenious book which had been published in the previous year by a Franciscan monk, John Vincent Cane. Since fear and hate of Popery were the sole unifying principle in the religious politics of that day, Owen, as well as a well-known protagonist in theology, was requested to answer Cane,[48] and if the ‘person of honour’ was (as most suppose) Lord Clarendon, it is a striking tribute to the wide and sincere esteem in which Owen, for all his Nonconformity, was held. Nothing loth to engage in the fray, he struck in with a true-blue Protestant reply, followed later by a vindication of his arguments or animadversions, which makes one or two good points, in a curiously modern vein of thought. Thus, in answer to the plea that outside Rome all is confusion, he retorts that the differences among Protestants are not greater than those among Romanists. 'The imputation of the errors and miscarriages of the Socinians and Quakers unto Protestancy is of no other nature than that of Pagans of old charging the follies and abominations of the Gnostics and Valentinians on Christians.' And as for Protestants, 'what evils, I wonder, are to be found amongst them, as to divisions, that are not conspicuous to all in the Papacy? The princes and nations of their profession are, or have been, engaged in mortal feuds and wars one against another, all the world over. Their divines write as stiffly against one another as men can do. . . . All public libraries and private studies of learned men abound with them: their invectives, apologies, accusations, charges, underminings of one another, are part of the weekly news of these days. . . . I profess I wonder, whilst their own house is so visibly on fire, that they can find leisure to scold at others for not quenching theirs.’ This was, no doubt, an effective tu quoque in the days when the Jesuits and Jansenists were biting each other on the other side of the Channel. But Owen goes deeper still. ‘Nor,’ he adds, ‘is the remaining agreement that they boast of one jot better than either their own dissensions or ours. It is not union or agreement amongst men absolutely that is to be valued. Simeon and Levi never did worse than when they agreed best.’ As for the time-honoured plea that all differences would be remedied by submission to the Roman discipline, Owen here makes grim, short work of Father Cane. 'This I know, that a return to Rome will not do it, unless, when we come hither, we can learn to behave ourselves better than those who are there already. And there is indeed no party of men in the world but can give as good security of ending our differences as the Romanists. If we would all turn Quakers it would end our disputes; and that is all that is provided for us if we will turn Papists. This is the language of every party (and, for my part, I think they believe what they say)—“Come over to us, and we shall all agree.” Only the Romanists are likely to obtain least credit as to this matter among most men, because they cannot agree among themselves, and are as unfit to umpire the differences of other men as Philip of Macedon was to quiet Greece, whilst he, his wife and children, were together by the ears at home.'

The excellence and popularity of this polemic[49] won Owen the warm praise of Clarendon, who assured him that he 'deserved the best of any English Protestant of late years,’ and offered him preferment in the Church of England, if he would conform. He little knew his man. Neither the sunshine of favour nor the storm of persecution could divert the Puritan from his chosen path of religious liberty or woo him from the guidance of conscience, as he conceived it. Like Baxter, who refused an offer from the Earl of Lauderdale of any academic or ecclesiastical position he chose in Scotland, Owen put aside Clarendon’s bait, and also a tempting invitation from the freer country of America to be minister of a Congregational church in Boston. For reasons which it is no longer possible to fathom, he remained at home, after some hesitation. He had subsequently to decline similar overtures from academic bodies in Holland, and, it is said, even from the American Harvard.

Meantime the great plague and the great fire, which devastated London, gave a breathing-space to the Nonconformists. To the credit of Sheldon and the bishop of London, it must be allowed that they stood staunchly at their posts during the pestilence. Nor were they wholly unsupported by their clergy. But the rank and file of the latter were by no means so heroic, and as Von Ranke argues, it was the proscribed Puritans who came to the front with spiritual and temporal offices, until the plague was stayed. Since the fire threw everything afresh into confusion, the dissenters now ventured to hold their meetings more openly in the metropolis, and of the Independents, Owen ('who had before kept far off,' says his opponent, Baxter), Nye, and Goodwin took advantage of the respite. Their audiences were considerable. For reasons of shame or policy, the authorities forbore meantime to prohibit the citizens from attending worship in these meetings, when most of the churches were burned down or deserted. Hence Owen and his friends 'were by the King’s favour connived at,[50] so that people went openly to hear them without fear.’ ‘Some,’ adds Baxter (Reliquiae Baxterianae, part iii. Sect. 57), with his wonted shrewdness of insight, ‘some imputed this to the King’s own inclination to liberty of conscience; some to the Duke of Buckingham’s prevalency; some to the Papists’ interest, who were for liberty of conscience for their own interest. . . . But whatever else was the secret cause, it is evident that the great visible cause was the burning of London, and the want of churches for the people to meet in; it being at the first a thing too gross to forbid an undone people all publick worshipping of God with too great rigour. And if they had been so forbidden, poverty had left them so little to lose as would have made them desperately go on. Therefore some thought all this was, to make necessity seem a favour.’

Owen’s pen had not lain idle during these days of change. In a series of tracts or brief anonymous manifestoes he had been copiously and forcibly pleading the rights of conscience and the due of toleration[51] on behalf of the dissenters. He was also responsible for a 'Discourse concerning Liturgies and their Imposition,' which is not particularly convincing, and for a catechism which led to some abortive attempts, on the part of Baxter and himself, to promote the union of the Independents and the Presbyterians. The worthy Baxter was, perhaps, more frank than wise in his approaches to John Owen. He was acute rather than diplomatic. 'I resolved,’ he writes, ‘to try once more with Dr. Owen. And though all our business with each other had been contradiction, I thought it my duty without any thoughts of former things to go to him and be a seeker of peace: which he seemed to take well. . . . I told him that I must deal freely with him; that when I thought of what he had done formerly [what of Baxter’s resolve to forget “former things”?], I was much afraid lest one that had been so great a breaker, would not be made an instrument in healing; but in other respects I thought him the fittest man in England for this work . . . and that a book which he had lately written (a catechism for Independency) offensive to others, was my chief motive to make this motion to him.’ Owen, however, seems to have resented Baxter’s suspicion of his good faith in the matter of Christian unity, while Baxter, for his part, could not see his way to go beyond the Bible and the Creed as standards of the faith. It was futile, he argued, to stop at any one council as the final standard of orthodoxy. And thus, in spite of interviews and correspondence, the project slowly faded.

The year 1668 saw a rich harvest from John Owen's pen, in his searching, introspective treatise on Indwelling Sin,[52] his exposition of the 130th Psalm, and the first volume of his elaborate edition of the Epistle to the Hebrews.[53] The exposition of the psalm is a wonderful book. Really it forms a long, fertile series of discourses on the forth verse of the psalm, which had once proved a spring of light and consolation to Owen himself when under deep depression. The massive and scholarly commentary on Hebrews occupied four volumes, the last of which was published posthumously in 1684, while other two volumes appeared at regular intervals of six years after the issue of the first, a witness not merely to Owen’s capacity as a textualist, but to his unremitting powers of work amid the distractions and discouragements of an age, when, as he remarks, the blustering wind and clouds might have deterred a theologian from attempting to sow or even reap. In a preface to the first volume, he indicates a certain sense of fear in case his work might seem unseasonable. 'We live in times,’ he allows, 'that are fortified against the use of discourses of this nature, especially such as are so long and bulky. The world, and the minds of men therein, are filled with disorder and confusion; and the most are at their wits’ end with looking after the things that are come and coming on the earth. They have enough to do in hearing, telling, and reading real or pretended news of public affairs, so as to divert them from engaging their time and industry in the perusal and study of such discourses. Besides, there is not any thing in this now published to condite [i.e. recommend] it unto the palate of the present age—in personal contests and reflections, in pleading for and against any party of men or especial way in the profession of religion. Only the fundamental truths of the Gospel are occasionally contended for. These and the like considerations might possibly, in the judgement of some, have shut up this whole discourse in darkness, upon the account of its being unseasonable.' But Owen’s edition of Hebrews, which was in the front rank of scholarship in its own day, is much more than a series of learned tomes, for the temper of reaction combated in the epistle was singularly akin to the temper of the Restoration as viewed from a Puritan study. A fear and awe ever lay for Owen in the question: How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation? Many pages of his work on Hebrews are still unsuperseded for their conscience of the gravity which attends a profession of Christianity by the individual or by the Church, and it is this sense which vitalises passage after passage in the exposition. The lane is often narrow and dusty. But there are roses here and there upon the hedgerows, and occasionally a prospect of far spaces as the lane winds and rises. For what accompanies Owen in his exposition is a growing impression of human sin and love divine, like that which throbs in Herbert’s verses on The Agonie, and the sections of his great commentary that reach and hold us are informed by one or other of these spacious truths. Otherwise, it shares with several other of the author’s treatises the condemnation of Robert Hall, who acutely remarked that Owen as a reasoner was illogical. 'He most always takes for granted what he ought to prove, while he is always proving what he ought to take for granted.’

The red god of debate was still abroad, however, and next year Owen stepped from these calm, cool fields into the inflammable tract of controversy, with a reply, entitled Truth and Innocence Vindicated, to Samuel Parker's virulent and telling book on Ecclesiastical Polity, which practically banned toleration in any shape. Parker had been a Puritan. He was now household chaplain to Archbishop Sheldon, and lost no chance of blackguarding his former associates with a cleverness of the Hurrell Froude order—the cleverness which, as the son of Sirach observes, 'maketh bitterness to abound.’ ‘He writeth the most scornfully and rashly and profanely and cruelly against the Nonconformists of any man that ever yet assaulted them (that I have heard of). And in a fluent, fervent, ingenious style of natural rhetoric, poureth out floods of odious reproaches.’ Thus far Baxter, whom Owen in vain urged to reply. In despair he wrote an answer himself which greatly increased his renown among the Nonconformists; it is thorough, religious, and informed with just enough personal feeling to give it swing and push. Other anonymous replies appeared.[54] But Parker’s answer (in 1670) settled waspishly on Owen’s past record. Unable to meet the Puritan’s arguments with any success, the renegade pounced on personalities. His methods were not overscrupulous, and his victory was not difficult. As Baxter admits, Owen’s connection with the Wallingford House movement and his anti-monarchical sermons handicapped him seriously in defending Nonconformists from the charge of being politically suspect. 'And so I fear,’ says Baxter, ‘his unfitness for this work was a general injury to the Nonconformists.’ Fortunately Andrew Marvell, M.P. for Hull, eventually entered the lists, and, like a Puritan Ulrich von Hutten, used banter and satire to discomfit the Episcopalian man-at-arms, to the general amusement of the public. Solvuntur tabulae risu. For once the laughers had a patent of right. And for once the Puritans had satire on their side.

Of Owen's other works[55] at this busy time, his very popular essay On the Trinity (1669), which I frankly allow is stone rather than loadstone, was written in a few hours, whilst his book on Christian Love and Peace, a positive justification of the Independents and their religious attitude, appeared in 1672, when Nonconformists were allowed, in the teeth of bitter opposition from the Cavalier Parliament, to have their gatherings licensed for public worship. This abatement of the grinding persecution which had hitherto prevailed, was entirely due to Charles, for the King was probably politic enough to see the gain of posing, at no expense, as the patron of liberty in London. The Nonconformists seized their brief, golden chance. Their popularity in the capital increased, and before long the Presbyterians and Independents especially had established a weekly lectureship at Princes’ Hall in Broad Street, where Owen and Baxter were among the distinguished preachers for some years. Owen further officiated to a small congregation in Leadenhall Street, with which that of Caryll was soon amalgamated after the latter’s demise, and the standing of the preacher drew round him many distinguished people not merely from the Puritans, but also from the Episcopal nobility.[56] To the notes taken by one of these, Sir John Hartopp, we owe several of Owen’s posthumous discourses. It was about this time (1669) also that Owen had drawn up a strong remonstrance which was forwarded by the English Independents to their American brethren, protesting against the persecuting spirit shown by the latter. Little or no immediate effect was produced, however. The lesson of Cowper's Nightingale and Glow-worm has been slowly and reluctantly learned, and even the better spirits of the seventeenth century had but commenced to spell it out.

The bulk of the dissenters in Owen’s congregation and elsewhere, however, were tradesmen or merchants. 'They are mostly of that sort and condition of men in the commonwealth on whose industry and endeavours, in their several ways and callings, the trade and wealth of the nation do much depend.’[57] The charge of sedition brought against their meetings was generally little more than frivolous, but it was often made a pretext for wanton interference with the liberty of the subject, and thus there is little or no doubt, as Von Ranke argues, that by a process of reaction 'the political springs of action co-operated’ in the Nonconformists’ resistance to the oaths and acts of Charles, since the struggle still was wider than a conflict between the devoutness of Puritanism and the dignity of ceremonialism. In any case political liberty, no less than a religious conscience, was imperilled by an oath, e.g., which insisted that under no circumstances whatsoever was it lawful to take up arms against the king and his ministers. To Puritan Protestants of the middle classes, who knew the Duke of York’s religion and the thinly disguised intrigues of Papal priests at Whitehall, it seemed a plain duty to reject at all hazards any demand like this, that opened the floodgates dangerously wide to Romanism. Affirming their loyalty, they therefore refused compliance with the Church of England, which in their view had forfeited her vantage-ground against the Italian heresy and seized unfair means of securing her position with the Court and against the Puritans. Politics and theology were still inextricably intertwined, although the issues had altered since the Restoration; but the Puritan's interest in politics sprang from his passion for personal liberty in religion and for the security of Protestantism in England. It is to be wondered at that he was alarmed and resolute, when a man of Stillingfleet’s calibre could openly avow that the Church and the monarch, like the twins of Hippocrates, rose and fell together? As Owen and his friends felt, such Erastianism was an outrage alike on faith and common sense.

A breathing-space, we have seen, was won for the dissenters. But it had been brief. The unrelaxed enmity of the Parliament and the bishops overbore Charles’s indulgent temper towards the Puritans; Buckingham’s protection of the Presbyterians proved unavailing, and licences were withdrawn. Once more the storm broke upon Owen and his fellows. But while the penal laws were vigorously enforced, and informers encouraged to ferret out the Nonconformists, somehow, owing possibly to his repute and worth, Owen still escaped comparatively scathless; as with Cyprian so with him, non enim ipse tormentis sed tormenta ipsi defuerunt. He was even able to exert his good offices with some statesmen in favour of his brethren, during the cruelty and confusion of these years. One of these brethren was the tinker Bunyan; and it would appear from Asty that Owen’s efforts were successful in procuring his release from prison. It is well known how ardently Owen admired John Bunyan’s preaching, perhaps with the noble envy felt by an academic nature in the ministry for the power of an evangelist or a popular preacher to speak effectively upon religion to the common people. Charles II. once asked him, in wonder, 'how a courtly man such as he was could sit and listen to an illiterate tinker.' 'May it please your Majesty,’ said Owen, ‘could I possess that tinker’s abilities for preaching, I would most gladly relinquish all my learning.’ To any one outside the cool zone of piety in which Southey spent his blameless days, there will not seem anything in this reply which is discreditable to Owen’s judgement. The tale is obviously authentic, one fresh proof that a man’s greatness is visible in his admirations as well as, ay sometimes more than, in his antipathies. Owen standing reverently in the crowd round Bunyan is not a less noble figure than Owen falling with the weapons of his logic upon Goodwin, Walton, or Socinus.

Yet he himself had considerable power and influence as a preacher, although his sermons had nothing of the vogue enjoyed by those of Travers, Taylor, Cartwright, or Tillotson. Persuasiveness is said to have been his dominant characteristic in the pulpit, where he had ‘a graceful behaviour,’ and he also possessed, as several of his printed sermons help to show, a winning eloquence, with great command of language. These sermons, it must be remembered, were not preached exactly as they now stand. They were written out afterwards, in part from memory, and more than once even Owen’s theological treatises were actually worked up thus from materials originally prepared for the pulpit, especially for St. Mary’s at Oxford. His technical volumes often swarm with classical and patristic citations. But his sermons, prolix as they read, are almost as destitute of such meretricious adornments, as were those of Philip Henry. For the contemporary love[58] of a display of learning in the pulpit, which marks the leading preachers of the age, like Boussuet and Laud, Owen seems to have had as much sympathy as Savonarola had for the pseudo-classical orations of the Florentine clergy, while in one or two places he follows Thomas Fuller and Goodwin in openly scorning the religious foppery and far-fetched conceits of the 'Marinism'[59] which had soaked through Italian poetry into the English pulpit, till it became what euphuism had become in literature, an affectation and a discord. The feeling of contempt for what was merely pretty led him probably too far into a simplicity that is bare and dull for the most part. His compositions, as Dr. Johnson said of St. Andrews Castle, seem 'built with more attention to security than pleasure.’ He is sometimes recondite and archaic, if not pedantic, in his treatment of even the simplest issues in Christianity, so much so that one is tempted to think of Baxter’s frank verdict on one of his own books: ‘All is but briefly done (the Heads being many) without any life or ornament of stile.’ Yet, for all his tedious digressions and cumbrous terminology, Owen is sincere. If pedantry is beside the purpose of a living faith, it is less irrelevant and nauseous than preciosity; and while Owen may be wooden, he is never windy, and he never preaches with detestable cleverness. When Owen is at a sermon, he is bent on business. In writing sermons, even more than in composing treatises of theology, he is too much alive to great and grave issues to let fancy diver his mind. Like Shakespeare’s Ulysses, he prefers dusty gold to dust a little gilt. Still, as Fuller once said, a sermon is the better for similitudes as windows, whilst arguments serve as pillars of the edifice. And Owen’s solid sermons are badly furnished with the former.

As preacher and theologians, he still occupied a prominent position which was recognised beyond the circle of his own sect. When the declaration of Indulgence was issued in 1672, he was chosen to voice the gratitude felt by the London Nonconformists to his Majesty, and throughout this period he was in fairly close contact with statesmen like the Earls of Anglesea and Orrey. He also stood before princes in his day. In 1674 the Duke of York sent for him at Tunbridge Wells and had a long interview with him, whilst Charles had private audiences with him in London, and once gave him a thousand guineas for distribution among the poor after the London fire.

Meantime the Roman controversy assumed fresh forms of menace to the Church and State. The milk-white hind was displaying some curiously venomous traits in her disposition. Maddened partly by their persistent ill-treatment, the Romanists in England were turning to some political design, which may be roughly detected under all the hysterical and shameful exaggerations of the later Popish plot; for on this point, at any rate, I cannot see that either Father Gerard or Mr. Andrew Lang has been able to set aside Mr. Pollock's thesis. As the Duke of York, too, was a pervert, English feeling rose in a panic at the thought of the crown falling to a Romanist, and that swarthy rake and traitor Charles was shrewdly suspected of toying with a plot to reintroduce Tudor absolutism on the basis of Romanism, by making England an appanage of France. This dread of Popery felt by the nation explains most of its vagaries during the latter half of the seventeenth century. It helps to explain both the persecution and the compulsory toleration of Protestant dissenters, for now the Episcopal Church saw in the latter a source of weakness to the organisation which in their mind was the firm dyke against the Roman sea, and now (though less frequently) the sense of a common peril drove Anglican and Puritan together in a loose league against the common foe. It helps also to explain the rise of popular suspicion which finally flashed out in 1678, and for which Charles must be held ultimately responsible. As Dr. Osmund Airy wisely judges, the king mishandled the people. 'By surrender to the Parliament during the session, and evasion of his surrender during recess; by acceding to savage laws against the Catholics, while he welcomed them at Whitehall and gave them commissions in his regiments; by his alternate alliances, first with the Protestant Republic against the aggression of Catholic France, and then with France against the Republic; by his Popish mistresses, his Popish Queen, his Popish heir—himself nominally Protestant king of a Protestant country . . . Charles had brought this “sober nation” into a state of nervous irritation in which they were ready to lose all self-control' (Charles II., pp. 180 f., 330 f.).

In the 'world’s debate’ which accompanied the French controversy of 1664 f., Owen in England was found fighting during 1679-1682 especially, and even earlier, alongside Anglicans like Barrow, Tillotson, and Taylor, though he was sensible enough to see that no mere learned refutation of Papal errors would suffice, and that penal restrictions were quite a peevish defence. His contribution to the defence is positive, not negative; religious, not ecclesiastical. ‘We may cry Popery, Popery, as we please,’ but it is unavailing if Protestantism does not mean a positive establishment of personal religion in the common people. This, says Owen, is the best bulwark of Christianity against error. He says it in his treatise on Apostasy (1676), a mournful[60] and indignant analysis of contemporary religion in the period of reaction under Charles II., which is in reality an exposition of Heb. vi. 4-6, flung off in the course of his studies on that epistle. In its second chapter there is an interesting allusion, one of several indeed, to people who were becoming perverts not to Rome, but to the equally heinous creed of Islam. 'I myself knew one, yea was conversant with him, and assisting of him in the concerns of his soul, who in the Indies turned Mohammedan, was actually initiated by circumcision into their superstition, and lived in its outward practice a year or two; who yet was sincerely recovered unto repentance and died in the faith of the Son of God.’ The reference is not isolated. Laud, it is well known, took a keen interest in the cases of captives who perverted to Islam, and actually compiled a rigid 'Form of Penance and Reconciliation of Apostates from the Christian Religion to Turcism.' Fuller, too, has his fling at Islam as evidently a real topic of contemporary interest and danger. He is astonished at the ground it gains on Christianity. ‘For what is it but the scum of Judaism and paganism sod together, and here and there strewed over with a spice of Christianity.’ And so on. It is to him ‘a pretty quoere whether Turks or Tarters be easier convertible to the Christian religion,’ but after due consideration he decides in favour of the latter. Islam’s political power in Europe had not been long ruined. The memories of it were fresh. Still Turkish pirates were a danger to mariners, and Islam’s creed was but too sadly familiar to many a prisoned sailor.

‘I was helped by Owen on the Spirit,’ writes Boston at the end of 1728. ‘That book of Owen’s was laid to my hand, for an use I knew not till I had it.’ The volume in question had been in circulation for over fifty years. It was in 1677 and 1678 that Owen found leisure to issue the first two parts of a monumental treatise on the Holy Spirit, which is designed as a defence of that doctrine (see below on Eph. vi. 24) against the indifference of the current theology towards it, the deprecation of it by the Socinians, and its exaggeration by the Quakers and mystics, like Barclay, with their 'internal light.’ Against the first two classes of opponents Owen inveighs, though it is quite unfair, as he ironically admits, to call them ‘rational divines.’ Let their plaintive demurrer be accepted by all means, for the charge, the reproach is undeserved. ‘So far as I can discern, it is as Hierom was beaten by an angel for being a Ciceronian (in the judgement of some) very undeservedly.' Still, the bulk of Owen’s writing on this subject is less vivid; it is sound reasoning as a rule, but terribly prolix, and its interest is mainly, if not entirely, historical. The book has dignity, coherence, and unity; but it lives by its oases of devotional refreshment. The topic seems to have been in the air when Owen wrote. We know, for example, that, besides Goodwin, John Howe lectured in London, during 1677 and 1678, upon the person and the office of the Holy Spirit. It was one issue against Quakerism.

Even more abstruse was his contemporary book on The Doctrine of Justification, issued in 1677. It is voluminous and unpersuasive. Most of its arguments have been superseded, but there is a notable spirit of conciliatoriness in the preface. 'I lay more weight on the steady direction of one soul in this inquiry, than on disappointing the objections of twenty wrangling or fiery disputers.’ And again: ‘I have somewhat else to do than to cast away any part of the small remainder of my life in that kind of controversial writings which good men bewail and wise men deride.’ Owen had had a plentiful amount of black language poured upon him in his day, and one libel by a Gloucestershire rector he had formally to answer, in an open letter to Sir Thomas Overbury. He had been termed 'a person of such rank complexion that he would have vy’d with Mahomet himself both for boldness and imposture’; ‘’the dunghill is his only magazine, and calumny his only weapon,’ said Parker once. Which is no more than the ordinary sort of detraction to which any public man is exposed, especially if at certain periods of his career he has taken a resolute and unpopular stand in politics or religion. But, even aside from this, Owen had been ever a fighter in theology. As Joan of Arc had her little battle-axe and crucifix, so Owen had his pen sharpened for attack and for devotion. On him, as one of the most competent of living Calvinists, comers in a period both of wholesome and unwholesome reaction, and although he did his work satisfactorily to those who looked to him for a vindication of their belief, an inevitable result of it all was to lend an unduly polemical tone to his earlier writings, while even after one discounts so much as is chargeable to the form and pressure of that turbulent age, the impression of heat and hardness is not removed. It must be at once added that his contemporaries were seldom offended at what repels a modern mind. As things went, Owen bore a fair and cleanly reputation for a controversialist.[61] Yet about this period a healing temper is more visible in his language. 'How soft and peaceable his spirit was for many of his last years,' says Matthew Sylvester. He was not old, as age goes; not much more than sixty. But he was becoming more concerned than ever in the positive grounds of agreement between English Christians. Owen was mellowing. ‘In what I have to offer on this subject,’ he writes (and the italics are his own), 'I shall not in the least depart from the ancient doctrine of the Church of England;[62] yea, I have no design but to declare and vindicate it, as God shall enable.’ ‘As far as it is possible for me, I shall avoid the concerning of myself at present in these differences [among learned, sober, and orthodox persons as to justification]; for unto what purpose is it to contend about them, whilst the substance of the doctrine itself is openly opposed and rejected? Why should we debate about the order and beautifying of the rooms in a house, whilst fire is set unto the whole?’

A recent critic of Matthew Arnold’s poetry has called attention to the poet’s favourite method of rounding off a piece of verse with soothing, reconciling lines. Probably Arnold caught this device from the Hellenic drama, where many a tragedy sweeps to its close in a quiet phrase or comment, as if to draw off the mind from the sheer pain and strife of what precedes. In this sense, Owen’s literary career resembles such a poem, for it runs full and deep and quiet, with gathered waters, towards the end.

For many a league The shorn and parcell’d Oxus strains along Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles— Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain—cradle in Pamere, A foil’d circuitous wanderer—till at last The long’d-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge and shine upon the Aral Sea.

It was not that Owen's hold of principle or interest in great issues was relaxed, for he still engages warmly in the Romish controversy, as we have seen, and plunges into a controversy with Stillingworth upon the nature of the Church, in order to counteract the reactionary tendencies abroad in Anglicanism, as well as to elucidate the Nonconformist theory of the Church. Yet even here, as in his Union among Protestants, an ironical spirit dominates the argument. Apart from the Lord’s Supper, no question has so sharply divided Christendom as that of Christian unity. Owen had his oar in this as well, and whatever be thought of his arguments as a practical solution, his spirit is unexceptional. English religion in the seventeenth century was a sea of questions, ecclesiastical as well as spiritual. None rowed up and down in it more strenuously than John Owen, but few are less liable to the charge of having made undue commotion or splashed vaingloriously.

Nor was it that his outward circumstances won him any halcyon interval. The closing years of his life fell amid black, worry times for Nonconformists. After the Oxford Parliament of 1681 the popular feeling turned again, while the ruling powers remained, like the Philistine lords, 'wondrous harsh, contemptuous, proud, set on revenge and spite.’ The Stuart dynasty was to be England’s shield and glory, and sharp measures were called for against the Nonconformists, who shared with the Catholics the honour of being the scapegoats of that age.[63] 'The old valour and swaggerings of the Cavaliers seemed to be revived again,’ says Burnet, and ‘the clergy on this occasion carried matters higher still. They cried up the Duke’s succession, as if a Popish king had been a special blessing of Providence, and gave themselves a loose against Nonconformists as if there was no other danger from that quarter.' In addition to the permanent ill-usage and vexations to which they were subjected, the Puritans came under suspicion for the Rye-House Plot. No charge was too absurd to be credited, and Owen, who had retired in ill-health to his property at Ealing, did not escape the blast. Lord Wharton, one of his hearers, managed chivalrously to protect him at Woburn for a while, and he fared better in some ways than many of his brethren. But no protection could ward off public woes and private griefs. His sons all died before him, while in 1676 he had lost his wife, although shortly afterwards he married the young, wealthy widow of Thomas D’Oyley, a neighbouring proprietor in Oxfordshire. In 1668 he had inherited a legacy from a rich relative, Martyn Owen, who had been a London brewer, so that with this and his private savings he never felt the pinch of poverty, as did most of his fellow-ministers. Both at Kensington and Ealing he had a house of his own, and kept a private carriage. But disease was upon him, and his closing years were punctuated by paroxysms of severe physical distress. As he wrote in his last volume, ministers of the Gospel experience as a rule some increase of trouble as old age overtakes them—trouble in their bodies and in their affairs—and that at the very time 'when they look for nothing less, but are ready to say with Job, “We shall die in our nest.” . . . And oftentimes both persecutions and public dangers do befall them at the same season.’

It was amid such conditions that Owen drew in his thoughts to the eternal central things, and penned his three classical treatises on Christologia, The Grace and Duty of being Spiritually Minded (1681), and Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ. In the preface to the second of these works, he remarks that the state of public affairs engrosses the thoughts and almost absorbs the conversation of his contemporaries, 'for the world at present is in a mighty hurry, and being in many places cast off from all foundations of steadfastness, it makes the minds of men giddy with its revolutions, or disorderly in the expectations of them.'[64] His design is to set up the value and pre-eminence of the spiritual mind in such a crisis, just as in the other books he aims to vindicate the glory and majesty of God in Christ amid the chilling currents of formality within the Church. ‘Of all the evils which I have seen in the days of my pilgrimage, now drawing to their close, there is none so grievous as the public contempt of the principal mysteries of the Gospel among them that are called Christians. Religion, in the profession of some men, is withered in its vital principles, weakened in its nerves and sinews; but thought to be put off with outward gaiety and bravery.’ Nevertheless, in his own phrase, ‘that gigantic spectre, It is everywhere spoken against,’ did not deter him from his work or path. A resolute spirit drove his pen across the paper, and if he died before all his last works were published, it was not before he had set out the cardinal ideas of his mind in ripe and ample outline, well defined and all astir with candour.

Apart from toleration and schism, the two subjects which may be said to have moved him to his highest reach of power are these: first, the infirmity of the human heart, as it aspires and twists in the moral passage and discipline of this life; and secondly, the splendour, the bliss, the pre-eminence of Jesus. The contemporary passion for dissecting character, which prompted the numerous character-studies of the age, was congenial to Owen. Introspective analysis of the soul draws out all his strength. Like many of the leading Puritans, and on a more religious level than Earle or Overbury or Fuller, he is a master in the art of this warfare with motives, passions, instincts, and over several of his best works on personal religion we might inscribe the motto: For we are not ignorant of Satan's stratagems. The behaviour of the soul in presence of temptation seems an open book to him. But, at the opposite pole of rapture and adoration, one feels under the stiff buckram folds of a scholastic Calvinism the throbbings of a devout, simple passion for the God whom he knew and served in Christ—a passion which, for one thing, preserved his study of sin from becoming a morbid and moaning preoccupation with some lower force which was able usually to outgeneral the soul.

Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera.

Pagan as they are, one is tempted now and then to apply these wonderful lines from his favourite Vergilian eclogues to the Owen who comes before us in several passages of elevation and rapt wonder as the sovereign grace of God breaks upon his mind.

In radiant wonder at heaven’s gate he stands, and lo Beneath his feet the stars and clouds pass far below.

Owen’s incessant argument is that mundane temptations lose their charm and force as the soul rises to the height of its calling and redemption. Adoration is to him the surest ethical safeguard. For once he would have said 'Amen’ to Baxter, as the minister of Kidderminster wrote: 'When my belief of things Eternal and of the Scripture is most clear and firm, all goeth accordingly in my soul, and all Temptations to sinful Compliance, Worldliness, or Flesh-pleasing do signifie worse to me than an invitation to the stocks or Bedlam.’

For ‘eternal things’ Owen, in these later years at least, would have probably written ‘Christ.’ And here we come upon the saving and shining quality in Owen’s treatises upon theology, viz. his profound sense of the place occupied by Christ in Christianity, together with an intuitive suspicion of all theories, ecclesiastical or dogmatic, which threatened to compromise the unique value of Jesus. His exaggerated opposition to the Arminians rests ultimately on a fear lest the redeeming grace of God in Christ should be rendered less central for the faith. His polemic against the Socinians, which repeatedly errs by defect or excess, turns on the same question of Christ's person as the one source of revelation and redemption. Even his rejection of Episcopacy and ecclesiastical tyranny runs back, as in the case of his antagonism to the Scottish Presbyterians, to the conviction that the Church owed loyalty to Christ alone as her spiritual head and king. But the full passion of Owen’s mind upon this matter streams out as he turns to develop what may be termed the personal and religious aspect of Christ’s relation to the Christian. This is present to him from the outset, indeed, for the feeling of Christ’s majesty and mystery gives proportion to his earlier works, and occasionally breaks up through their stereotyped, technical disquisitions. But only his closing volumes on the Spirit and the person of Christ do justice to this principle; this awe and wonder which he felt before the glory of Jesus; this instinct for the magnificence and unspeakable worth of salvation as the one reality that endures amid the shows and shadows of the world. 'Young man,’ said Owen once to a religious inquirer, 'in what manner do you think to go to God?’ ‘Through the mediator, sir.’ ‘That is easily said,’ replied the Puritan, ‘but I assure you it is another thing to go to God through the mediator than many who make use of the expression are aware of. I myself preached Christ some years, when I had but very little, if any, experimental acquaintance with access to God through Christ.’ The personal revelation of this truth in his own experience perhaps made him all the more eager and competent to enforce it in his writings, and many a passage attests the strength of his conviction on this point, of Christianity. ‘O blessed Jesus,’ he ejaculates at one point, ‘how much better were it not to be than to be without thee—never to be born than not to die in thee!' And again: ‘The most superstitious love to Christ—that is, love acted in ways tainted with superstition—is better than none at all.’ ‘If Christ be not God, farewell to Christianity—as to the mystery, the glory, the truth, the efficacy of it! Let a refined heathenism be established in its room.’

Such passages are all the more remarkable and impressive as they are the expression of a cool, strong intellect, which was not characterised by anything of the feminine, mystical warmth pervading men like Samuel Rutherford or the contemporary school of French religionists like François de Sales and Fénelon. Owen’s note is logical rather than imaginative. He thrills a reader not by spontaneous emotion, but by a bare, honest, penetrating sort of urgency. Even in his conception of Jesus, it is not, as with Jeremy Taylor, the romantic historical aspect which captures him, much less anything of the contemporary quietistic spirit, but the massive sense of Christ in his place and person as the centre of God’s redeeming work for man and in man. It is Christ the redeemer of God’s elect, not Christ the Bridegroom of the soul or church, who appeals to Owen. 'The sense of our substantial union as men with Christ, and of this union with the Father, sometimes comes to one with overpowering conviction, not of delight such as a Santa Theresa or Fénelon may have felt, but of its stern, hard, scientific reality.’ Few sentences happen to do so much justice to Owen’s view of Christ as this from a letter of Maurice to R. H. Hutton, except that the gusts of fervour which start up in the Puritan’s pages are comparatively infrequent, not through any uncordial or rigid temperament, as in the case of Maurice, but through the severe control exercised by reasoning or intellectualism over Owen's religious tenets. He is not so much thrilled into rapture as awed into a devout, glad reverence by the contemplation of the exalted Christ. When he holds by that, he is strong and convincing as a religious writer. Where his weakness creeps in, is through the tendency to make faith an intellectual assent or a mental grasp of religious truth—a tendency of which he was well aware, but against which he did not always strive successfully. Yet even in his more scholastic moods, it is still the authority of Christ which forms for Owen the axis of man’s relationship to God.

On the scroll over an engraving of Owen, done from a portrait taken during his lifetime, these words have been inscribed: Quaeramus superna. If this is to be taken as a motto for his mind and career, it must be taken in the full Pauline context. In the words of the Benedictine de Cressy (an historical figure of the seventeenth century), whom Mr. Shorthouse has introduced in John Inglesant, 'Paul did not desire spiritual insight; he wanted Jesus.’ Owen too sought the things that are above, but the spiritual world on which he set his mind was intelligible and impressive through the person of Christ (see below, on Ephesians iv. 21). It was not lofty conceptions or ideal aspirations or moral enterprise that captivated either Owen or Paul before him. To seek the things that are above would scarcely, by itself, have differentiated the great Puritan from men like Whichcote or the other Cambridge Platonists, any more than it would have distinguished Wesley from Bishop Butler, or—for the matter of that—St. Paul from Seneca and Epictetus. Owen distinctive note comes in here—where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God; for the spiritual world to him represented not the hard, cold heights of a moral order, not even Alpine virtues, or some vague, ethereal mysticism, much less the orb of an invertebrate religiosity, but a vital, personal tie to the risen and reigning Christ, and it was under the spell and impulse of this devotion to Christ that Owen did nearly all his most permanent, if not his most characteristic, work in theology. What he covets and counsels is the interpretation of the religious life through the Spirit of an indwelling God, who is at the same time authoritative and supreme over the soul of man. The interpretation meant that Christ was far more than an illustration of faith. He was its source and guide. This is the keynote to a large section of Owen's theology, especially upon the Holy Spirit, the glory of Christ, and the necessity of pardon as an element of reality in the love of God and in the moral discipline of men who are confronted with the lower world of sin.[65] This survival of baseness in a man cannot be mastered, according to Owen, apart from a profound connection based on the sense of personal debt to Him for a redeeming bond which none but the Son of God himself could have created. And the same positive, personal tie enables a man to face the unknown future world, to meet the fear of death as well as the pride of life. Beyond, it is not a blank. Christ is there, and wherever Christ is, there must be a home and welcome for his people. Owen’s simplicity of statement and absence of speculation upon heaven are very noticeable. To him it practically means the eternal presence of Christ with his redeemed, all the value and relief of the things that are above centring for him in their relation to Christ’s person and undying glory.

An instinct or intuition of this kind is far more than an idiosyncrasy or the transient exaltation of highly charged feeling. The passages which I have had room to cite below, under the colophons of 'Morality,’ 'Present-day Religion,’ ‘Religious Literature,’ and ‘Christ and other Masters,’ e.g., represents an attitude which has not indeed a monopoly of Christian wisdom, but which certainly belongs to the proper focus for appreciating the central and permanent element of Christianity as a personal, historic, and redemptive faith. One is often struck and sometimes surprised at the repugnance felt by evangelical religion throughout the history of the Church for terms like ‘morality,’ ‘virtue,’ and the like, a repugnance often expressed by men of hardy intellect and same emotions. Yet unguarded and extravagant as such expressions have occasionally been (though Owen's language is very studiously wise), surely a sound instinct prompted the suspicion.

What signifies their barren shine Of moral powers and reason?

Ideal is no more an adequate term for what Christ is to the Christian than is virtue a description of our attitude towards him. And in a survey of Owen’s writings one feels more and more that one of his vital merits is the insistence with which he is ever recalling his readers to the proper proportion and order of things. Life is determined by what men count best, rather than by what they admit to be good. What they put first stamps their character. Now Christ is at once the standard and source of faith in Owen’s system of theology, and the regnant consciousness of this still lends some point and freshness to many of his long, languid pages. Let us run . . . looking away to Jesus, is the reiterated principle of Owen’s ethic. If forms perhaps the feature which invests him with a direct message for our own day. In this ‘scientific’ age, when the first condition of accurate work in any department is to weigh all the facts and assign to them their relative importance, it gives one pause to find religious treatises of considerable size and value appearing, in which the origin and varieties of saintliness and religious experience are elaborately discussed, or in which demi-semi-philosophic arguments are advanced against or for the Christian religion, often without the least reference to what is the norm and source of that religion, viz., the consciousness of Jesus Christ. The creative element is ignored or underestimated. The paramount factor is in its wrong place, if it is mentioned at all, and little or no attempt is made to do justice to that personal life which is the centre of Christianity, the normal and dynamic type of our religion. Owen has his own faults as a theologian, some of which are egregious, and most of which are obvious. But however uncouth, opaque, and sterile his expressions and definitions may be now and then, his gaze is never deflected from the unique and essential vocation of Christ. Owen generally makes one feel that when Christ is despised and rejected, the despising comes first in the order of experience. Outward rejection is preceded, on his view of things, by an inner repudiation of Christ, a repudiation which may take the form of a quiet theory no less than of a disinclination to admit the moral control of Jesus. For Christ is despised whenever the sense of human debt to him is slackened, or when he is relegated to the position of one who is but a brilliant and primitive illustration of the religion which bears his name. Thus there is scope repeatedly for that loyal revolt of the evangelical spirit which prompted Dr. John Duncan's aphorism: 'It is the great glory of God’s revelation that is has changed our abstracts into concretes . . . the infinite love into the personal Christ.’ Whenever Owen is most true to this fundamental principle, and he is often true to it, he is nearly at his best. He dilates on it. He returns to it. He often puts soul and passion into it. And the most satisfying parts of his theology to some of us will always be, not his weariful theories of Christ’s two natures or of the atonement, but the underlying conviction that there must be and there is an atonement, define it as you may, that Christ mediates our relationship to God, and that the things above will remain comparatively inaccessible and unimpressive for the average conscience till we learn with Paul to add—where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Owen is one of the few writers on Christology who have the rare power of making their readers feel that Christ is their great contemporary, and the overwhelming sense of this partially compensates for that indubitable lack of any historical feeling for the Jesus of Galilee, which leads him, even in writing upon the epistle to the Hebrews, to be more interested in the priesthood of Melchizedek than in the human experience of our Lord.

Such were the chief topics that engrossed John Owen in his latter years. In a letter dictated on the day before his death, he evinces at the same time that fine sense of public duty which blended, as the brave, dying prayers of men like Laud and Hampden show, with the genuine piety of the greater Puritans and their opponents. It was observed by those who attended Oliver Cromwell at his end, that 'a public spirit to God’s cause did breathe in him—as in his lifetime, so now to his very last.’ His last prayer, as given by Carlyle, bears this out, and among his final ejaculations we find this cry: ‘I would be willing to live to be farther serviceable to God and his people; but my work is done. Yet God will be with his people.' John Owen shared the temper of his former friend and leader.[66] 'I am leaving the ship of the Church in a storm; but whilst the great Pilot is in it, the loss of a poor under-rower will be inconsiderable.’

Able to trust his Church to God,[67] he had also faith enough to trust himself. On the morning of his death, when a friend called to tell him that his Meditations on the Glory of Christ had begun to pass through the press, the old man exclaimed: ‘I am glad to hear it. But the long-wished-for day is come at last, in which I shall see that glory in another manner than I have ever done, or was capable of doing, in this world.’ It was the anniversary of St. Bartholomew’s massacre, and ere night fell, he was dead. Twenty-one years ago Owen had joined the company of heroic ministers who on that day had given up houses and lands for conscience’ sake, and now, in his sixty-seventh year, prematurely worn out by toil and pain, he went to receive that part of the reward which cannot be handed over upon this side of the grave. A few moments before the end, he turned to say: ‘I am going to Him whom my soul has loved, or rather who has loved me with an everlasting love—which is the whole ground of all my consolation. The passage is very irksome and wearisome.’ But he is near the end of the passage now. After its bright speed of vigorous service, and its long course of strain and fret amid the rocks and bogs of the Restoration period, his life streams out at last, resistless and unresisting, to where

His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil.

For the Lamb is the light thereof. And there the wicked cease from troubling; there the weary be at rest.

Footnotes

[1] Another Beaumont was born in this year, the well-known Cambridge don and divine, who is credited with having composed one of the lengthiest poems in the language, viz. the allegorical Psyche. He was a fit contemporary of Owen the voluminous.

[2] See Cunningham's Historical Theology, ii. pp. 379 f.

[3] Sir Thomas Browne, who had been at Pembroke College (1623-1627), was now practising in Oxfordshire, but Ireton was still at Trinity (he had entered it in 1626). Milton, More, and Jeremy Taylor meanwhile were beside 'the reedy Cam,’ and Charles Diodati had left Oxford in the year of Owen’s matriculation. During his last years as an undergraduate Lovelace and Sir John Denham came up to run their gay course at the university; and as the Oxford Puritan was leaving college for conscience’ sake, a young Cambridge cleric was, by Laud’s influence, elected Fellow of All Souls, Oxford. But we have no record of any intercourse between Jeremy Taylor and John Owen.

[4] See also the preface to his version of Chrysostom’s tractate on education, and the diary on May 13, 1661. He himself entered Balliol in 1637, the year in which Owen left the university. The extraordinary precocity of his son Richard is noted in his diary for January 27, 1658, and elsewhere (on July 6, 1679) he describes the prodigious attainments of a child aged eleven. Cowley’s precocity is equally amazing, and when James VI. Visited Edinburgh Castle in 1617 a Scotch laddie of nine welcomed him with 'ane Hebrew speech’!

[5] Boswell’s report of a similar intemperance in Sir Matthew Hale’s life is well known.

[6] One of Buckle’s cardinal and luminous arguments in dealing with this period is that, for all their fanaticism, the Puritans were not specifically superstitious. This needs some qualification, but I would direct any readers who are still in what we may call the pre-Gardiner state of mind upon the Puritans, to the educative and delightful researches on pp. 64-102 of Mr. J. L. Sanford’s Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion. It is a strange comment on Laud’s sense of righteousness that while he scrupled to receive consecration from the hand of Archbishop Abbot, who by a mischance had shot a keeper when out hunting, he nevertheless, by a turn of character which reminds one of Robespierre, incurred the guilt of blood quite cheerfully in his own pastoral dealings with the Puritans.

[7] At his trial Laud is reported to have protested—'This I will say with S. Gregory Nazianzen, “I never laboured for peace to the wrong and detriment of Christian verity,” nor I hope ever shall.' The words, spoken with reference to his attitude towards Rome, were probably quite sincere. All that need be said by way of comment is that while they reflect his conscientious aim they are at variance with his practice, and that in any case his conception of Christian verity required serious revision and expansion.

[8] The historian’s final estimate (vii. 125 f.) is that Laud was a prosaic, self-sufficient leader, whose main interests were not truth but peace, dominated by ‘an exaggerated estimate of the importance of external influence over the mind.’ Laud was ‘a lawyer in a rochet, and that not a lawyer of the highest sort’ (p. 250).

[9] A bull was issued by the Pope, and intercepted by the English authorities, assuring the Catholics that those who fell fighting for Charles would be canonised. Owen, it is to be noted, did not enter the fray with the Romanists till after the Restoration. His antagonists till then were of his own household, Socinians, Erastians, Levellers, and Arminians.

[10] 'We know Satan’s trade what it is—to accuse the brethren. As men are called after their profession, one a lawyer, another a physician, so is he the accuser of the brethren. Now surely, if ever he set up a shop on earth to practise his trade in, it was our High Commission Court, as of late employed.’ Owen wrote this in 1644.

[11] ‘Puritan’ is not yet, of course, equivalent to dissenter. It denotes not the member of a party but the sympathiser with a reforming, spiritual tendency of the Protestantism which was encountered by Anglican semi-Romanism. Its moral aspect is vividly sketched in the extracts from contemporary literature quoted by Dr. A. F. Mitchell in his Westminster Assembly (1883), pp. 477-479: e.g. ‘His whole life he [the Puritan] accounted a warfare, wherein Christ was his captain, his arms prayer and tears, the cross his banner, and his word vincit qui patitur.' Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson’s definition of the Puritan is well known, and in Mr. C. H. Firth’s Stuart Tracts (pp. xiv, 233 f.), a contemporary, though slightly earlier, description is exhumed. Mr. Sanford avers that 'it is not too much to say that’ of the two—some exceptions apart—it is the Puritan and not the Cavalier gentlemen who ‘would be appreciated and sympathised with by modern society.’

[12] ‘The heroes of the time were all non-Episcopalian. At the crisis of the conflict for truth and liberty the cause of God owed nothing to the bishops’ (Henson’s Studies in Eng. Religion in the 17th Century, p. 92).

[13] Samuel Rutherford, e.g., had also won his theological spurs, in 1636, by an attack on Arminianism. Burnet declares that, in the case of the Scotch clergy at least, ‘books of controversy with Papists, but more especially with Arminians, were the height of their study.’ See Hallam’s Constit. History (10th ed.), i. pp. 400 f.

[14] How deep and muddy the pit was, may be gathered from the Presbyterian Edwards’s Gangraena, whose onset on the sectaries is nearly as intemperate as the ill-regulated fanatics whom its pages gibbet. These ranters, familists, seekers, Quakers, and the like, were but the frothy crest of the great wave of spiritual intensity that was sweeping across England; but it was not always easy for even respectable Christian people, Episcopal or Puritan, to bear patiently the crudity and censoriousness which fell with a salt splash on deeply cherished institutions and beliefs.

[15] Rutherford’s Lex Rex and his book on the 'Due right of presbyteries’ did not appear till 1644, while his volume on ‘The Divine right of Church government’ was not issued till 1646; but he had been in London since 1643 as one of the Scots Commissioners. Since the famous petition against Episcopacy in 1640, a hoarse, hot war of debates and pamphlets had been waged over the question of church-polity, in which Milton had vehemently advocated the root-and-branch policy of dealing with the bishops. The feeling against the Anglican Episcopacy was not confined to the Puritans, as the Commons debates prove, nor was it a passion of recent origin. The point in controversy was, whether to end or mend Episcopacy; the opposition to it naturally sprang from various causes and rose to various heights.

[16] For later legislation, see Dr. W. A. Shaw's History of the English Church under the Commonwealth, ii. pp. 228 f.

[17] 'The Presbyterians,’ as one student of the period observes (R. S. Brooke, in Dublin Univ. Magazine, 1859, p. 581), ‘were now at the top of the tree among the apples.’

[18] The Laudian manoeuvres and the horrible massacre of the Protestants in Ireland (1641) combined to open the eyes of the Scotch and English Protestants to the need of making common cause against the Roman faith. It was this sense of peril, rather than any vital or permanent harmony, which led the English to admit the Solemn League and Covenant.

[19] The Puritans, however, did not eject the Episcopalians with quite the same regard as the latter did their opponents, when the wheel turned in 1660. The Parliament of 1643 instituted charitable relief for the families of ejected Royalist clergymen. The arrears of their tithes were allowed them, and sometimes the parsonage was left to them, if not an actual proportion of the tithes themselves (Shaw, ii. 191 f.)

[20] i.e. composed of ‘classes’ or presbyteries. See Dr. W. A. Shaw’s English Church under the Commonwealth, ii. pp. 29 f., 112 f., 365 f.

[21] In 1643 this gospeller thundered to the Commons that 'in vain are the promises of God in your mouths, unless a two-edged sword is in your hand.’ And worse might be cited.

[22] Milton hits upon the same metaphor in his sonnet, ‘On the Lord General Fairfax, at the siege of Colchester,’ and the general himself employs it in another connection (op. cit., p. 357).

[23] Gardiner points out the remarkable similarities between this appendix, warning civil magistrates off spiritual religion as such, and the Agreement of the People, which had been recently presented to Parliament by the officers of the army (History of the Commonw. And Protect., ii. pp. 25 f.). See his discussion of Owen’s mind on toleration (ibid.., pp. 30 f. ).

[24] ‘To those that cry, Give me a king, God can give him in his anger; and from those that cry, Take him away, he can take him away in his wrath.'

[25] When bishop Warburton angrily, 'By all the laws he had left the English people.’ Horace Walpole, who loved to pose as a republican, thought this retort a fine and final sentence on the whole business.

[26] His reading of the contemporary political confusion at home and abroad is that it is a process of Providence designed to purge the Governments of their antichristian cement or mortar, viz. the Papal faith. ‘The time shall come wherein the earth shall disclose her slain, and not the simplest heretic (as they were counted) shall have his blood unrevenged.’ It is the temper of Rev. vi., and indeed the whole sermon breathes the stern spirit of that book.

[27] Asty holds this sermon was preached before Owen’s visit to Ireland. But the internal evidence is against him. I agree with Orme that the references are too vivid to be explained except on the ground of personal experience and eyesight. See below, under the colophon of ‘Ireland’.

[28] In the minute of Parliament for June 8, 1649, a vote of thanks is passed to Goodwin and Owen for their semons on the previous day, and it is referred to the committee of Oxford to prefer both of them 'to be heads of colleges in that university.’ For some reason or another, Owen’s promotion was delayed.

[29] Their protest against mere intellectualism was valid and timely, but it easily and often shot up into an extravagant repudiation of learning as essentially adverse to spiritual health, or as—to use a Baptist preacher’s phrase—‘the smoke of the bottomless pit.’ The seeds of this fungus were sown in Protestantism as early as the Reformation. See Conan Doyle’s romance of Micah Clarke (Note A).

[30] The Somers Tracts contain pungent evidences of the gaieties, but a pleasant, if emasculated, account will be found in the ninth chapter of John Inglesant. The martial pursuits are sketched in Jeaffreson’s Annals of Oxford, ii. pp. 54 f.

[31] The Liberty of Prophesying was not written after the Restoration. Then Dromore showed another sight—of the good Taylor.

[32] Fell afterwards became bishop of Oxford and dean of Christ Church himself. His titles to fame are twofold. First, the epigram in which his unpopularity is embalmed; and secondly, his servile expulsion of Locke from Christ Church for having contributed (in 1654) two sets of verses to a volume edited by Owen in praise of Cromwell. Owen's own contribution is quite colourless, as is that of Philip Henry.

[33] See the volume on Christ Church (1900, pp. 70 f) in the series of Oxford College histories. The author, Mr. H. L. Thompson, describes Owen as 'a man of fine presence and high authority,’ who was ‘a learned man and a patron of learning, and showed wise tolerance in his government of Oxford.’ See too Mr. H. A. Wilson’s history of Magdalen, ch. Xii. Young South, we know, insisted on his right to use the prayer-book during his undergraduate course, and he was let alone. Owen seldom issued precepts to leviathan to come ashore.

[34] Further instances of Fairfax’s culture and literary interests are given in Dr. David Murray’s Black Book of Paisley (1885), pp. 57-59.

[35] See pp. 69 f. of Mr. Thompson’s history on this point. One Anglican contemporary frankly allowed that Owen’s 'liberal, graceful, and courteous demeanour speak him certainly (whatsoever he be else) one that is more a gentleman than most in the clergy.’ Both Bastwick and Milton’s ‘shallow’ Edwards scoff at the fashionable dress of the Independents, who appear to have been noted in seventeenth-century England for their fine apparel and general frankness of behaviour, as opposed to the sourer sectaries.

[36] Locke’s sarcastic reflections on the toleration of the sectaries may echo his experience as an undergraduate no less than his observation of public affairs. He found, he declares, that selfish ends were often served by loud professions of liberty for the people. The liberty he himself desiderated was ‘not a liberty for ambitious men to pull down well-framed constitutions, that out of the ruins they may build themselves fortunes—not a liberty to be Christians so as not to be subjects.’

[37] English Puritanism and its Leaders, pp. 282 f. One is sometimes tempted, in reading seventeenth-century theology, to think of Thorold Rogers's dictum on political economy. If Puritan polemic was not discredited by its ‘traditional disregard for facts,’ except in so far as its outlook on human nature was scarcely wide enough, it certainly ‘strangled itself with definitions’ now and then.

[38] See Dr. Stoughton’s Ecclesiastical History of England (1867), ii. pp. 284-5, on the way in which the Oxford men, for all their weaknesses, 'dwelt largely and emphatically . . . upon what makes the New Testament a book of life and joy to conscience-stricken men.’

[39] Fur Praedestinatus, the Latin Arminian manifesto, had appeared in 1651. Owen’s book on perseverance closes his activity in the Arminian controversy, just as the Vindiciae form his last blow in the Socinian. He never did justice to the Arminian emphasis on several elements of the gospel which Calvinism either neglected or warped out of place.

[40] A succinct account is given in Masson’s Milton, v. pp. 16 f., of the sectaries who swarmed and bit like ephemeridae in the pool of contemporary English religion.

[41] Or, as M. Fustel de Coulanges has said of the saints in the sixth and seventh centuries: 'Ils n’ont pas vécu en recluse et loin du monde. Ils furent, au contraire, sauf quelques exceptions, fort mêlés à la vie du monde. Plusieurs se signalèrent comme administrateurs et homes d’état. Ainsi une vie de saint . . . est presque toujours la vie d’un homme qui s’est occupé des affairs publiques et a été en relations incessantes avec les rois et les grans de la terre.’ (La Monarchie franque, pp. 11-12). This applies especially to the post-Reformation saints of Protestantism, and in this sense men like Owen were as true to one side of the saintly life as Nicolas Ferrar was to another.

[42] Another dean of Christ Church, who was also bishop of Oxford, headed the undergraduates in 1685 during the preparations to repel Monmouth. John Fell, in this at least, followed in the footsteps of John Owen.

[43] See Von. Ranke's lucid statement in his History of England (E. tr.), iii. Pp. 173-184. Owen passed through all the phases traversed by Milton in his career. Only, he never became an Oliverian. To be a man of the Commonwealth was his final position as a politician, and he ended with the doctrinaire republicanism which opposed Cromwell’s bid for royalty.

[44] In his useful History of Religious Thought in England, Mr. Hunt rather hastily declared that 'the deity which John Owen worshipped was a Being who had no attributes of goodness, as men judge of goodness’ (i. p. 256). This opinion melts in the course of a first-hand acquaintance with all the Puritan’s writings. But it is nearer the mark to state, with the same critic, that ‘the main pillars of Owen’s theology were—that the Bible is a book written immediately by God, therefore whatever it seems to say should be received, however it may be opposed to the reason of man or the light of conscience. This involves two things: one, a belief that the Bible everywhere and in everything is infallible, and another, that the only use of reason is to find out what the Bible contains’ (i. 257 f.). The latter position was shared by some Anglicans. In the preface to his Religio Laici Dryden affirms, e.g., that to apprehend the Scriptures 'to be the word of God is all our reason has to do.’ The latter’s well-known lines (295-300) are the best practical answer to Owen’s fears about the unsettling tendency of Walton’s Polyglot.

[45] He had also charge of raising a troop to defend Oxford. But his chief efforts lay in diplomacy, and were directed to the design of winning over Monk to the Independents.

[46] Among the scandals which gathered round him, was a rumour that he had promised the dying Cromwell life and length of days from the Lord. Owen found it necessary to explicitly deny this and some other tales, in an open letter to Sir Thomas Overbury, entitled Reflections on a Slanderous Libel. ‘I saw him not in his sickness,' the Puritan protests, ‘nor in some long time before.’

[47] Among the inspiring and touching details given in Barclay’s volume (pp. 474 f.), which deals with the persecution of the Quakers, it is noted that when adults were put in prison their children kept up the meeting, despite insults and whippings from the police. George Whitehead, with humorous prudence, always put his nightcap in his pocket when he attended a service, the probability being that he might have to spend the night in gaol. Bunyan, Fox, and Baxter have made the pitiful sufferings of the other dissenters a classic page in the struggle for religious liberty, and the agony of the Scots Covenanters at this period is cut even more deeply in the national memory.

[48] Owen would exclude Romanists from toleration on religious, not on political, grounds. His charge against them was blasphemy and idolatry; like Bunyan, he was ready to forgive Charles and the Government almost anything for proving a bulwark against the antichrist of Popery. Even Locke thought it fair, as a means of self-defence, to deny toleration to intolerant people, atheists and Romanists.

[49] There was some difficulty about getting it licensed, as the bishops took umbrage at Owen’s rejection of Peter’s visit to Rome, and at his omission of 'St.’ before Paul and the apostles!

[50] Pepys corroborates this, and observe later on (Sept. 4, 1668), à propos of an anti-Puritan play, 'the business of abusing the Puritans begins to grow stale and of no use, they being the people that at last will be found the wisest.’

[51] Locke’s youthful essay On Toleration appears to have been written about this time (1666), but Owen’s arguments for toleration are, of course, less prudential than his former student’s, and his ideal is not so much one comprehensive Church as permission for dissenters to live side by side with the central body. Locke’s posthumous Defence of Nonconformity, displaying the same catholic generosity of mind, was called forth by Stillingfleet's outburst in 1680, and his famous Epistola de Tolerantia came out in 1685 (see Canon Henson’s educative and candid chapter, pp. 211-265). On his debt to Owen, see Fox Bourne’s Life of Locke, vol. i. pp. 72-76.

[52] Rabbi Duncan used to advise his students at the end of the session: ‘Read, gentleman, John Owen on Indwelling Sin, but prepare yourselves for the scalpel’ (see colloquia Peripatetica, p. 20). Owen was more afraid of the worldly holy than of the wholly worldly in the Church, and his severest strokes are reserved for those ‘walking and talking skeletons in religion,’ of the tribe of By-ends and Ignorance.

[53] Hebrews was a favourite book for prelections in that age. Owen’s work was only the climax of an English series which had included expositions by David Dickson (1635), Dr. William Jones (1636), Dr. Lushington (1640), Bishop Downhame (1640), Dr. Gouge (1655), and George Lawson (1662). It had the honour of being rendered into Dutch in 1733.

[54] The skirmish is excellently described in Hunt’s Religious Thought in England, vol. Ii. pp. 11f., and in Masson’s Milton, vol. vi. pp. 700 f. Burnet dubs Parker ‘a man full of satirical vivacity, but of no judgement, little virtue, and, as to religion, rather impious.’ He is not an engaging figure among the Anglicans.

[55] In Aubrey’s Brief Lives (ed. By Dr. A. Clark, 1898), i. 85, there is an epitaph said to have been written by Owen upon Edward Bagshaw, a former student of Christ Church, who died in 1671 after being imprisoned for refusing to take the oath of allegiance. As a minister of the Gospel, he 'received from God faith to embrace it, courage to defend it, and patience to suffer for it,’ while eventually he 'took sanctuary by the will of God in eternal rest.’

[56] When he died, his funeral was attended by over sixty noblemen in their carriages, besides many other mourners.

[57] Owen’s Plea for Indulgence and Liberty of Conscience (1667). Towards the end he states the case of the dissenters thus. ‘What are we, that we should complain of any whom God is pleased to stir up and use for our exercise and trial? We desire in patience and silence to bear his indignation, against whom we have sinned. . . . In the meantime it is our duty to live peaceably with all men in a conscientious subjection unto that authority which he hath set over us.' This resembles the tempor of Milton’s Samson.

[58] Pepys was properly disgusted with one divine who preached, after the fire in 1666, upon London being reduced from a large folio to a duodecimo-tertio.

[59] It was not confined to scholars. Erudite displays seem to have been rather relished in unexpected quarters, and it is amusing to find that when that learned Orientalist, Pocock, endeavoured to speak simply to his village congregation at Childrey, the latter remonstrated, on the score that their minister was ‘no Latiner.’

[60] He candidly allows in one place (ch. v.) that ‘the lives of the common sort of Protestants are no better than those of the Papists, nor are theirs to be compared with those of some of the Mohammedans.’ This in the course of an argument that it is unfair to judge a religion always by the rank and file of its adherents.

[61] It wrung even from Antony Wood the frank admission that he was ‘one of the genteel and fairest writers who have appeared against the Church of England, as handling his adversaries with far more civil, decent, and temperate language than many of his fiery brethren, and by confining himself wholly to the cause without the unbecoming mixture of personal slanders and reflections.’ Owen had a lofty contempt for personalities. 'Downright dirty railing,’ he once wrote, 'is beneath the genius of the times, and by common consent condemned to the bear-garden and Billingsgate.’

[62] In his vigorous ‘Letter concerning Excommunication,’ he incidentally declares, in explaining the nature of the people called ‘Dissenters,’ that ‘there is nothing determined by the ancient councils to belong unto Christian faith which they disbelieve. . . . They own the doctrine of the Church of England as established by law, in nothing receding from it; nor have they any novel or uncatholic opinion of their own.’ See the passages cited below under the colophon of ‘The Genuine Catholicism.'

[63] Shortly before his death, some parts of his writings were amongst the books publicly burned at Oxford. It was the last honour done him by his old university.

[64] Historical allusions are so infrequently in John Owen, that one feels bound to note the reference to Halley’s comet of 1682, that ‘ensign of God’s supernal host which at present hangs over us.’

[65] For a slightly different aspect of this truth, see Mr. Hale White’s remarkable essay on ‘Principles’ at the close of Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance (especially the last paragraph on the need of a personal basis for religion).

[66] There is another striking coincidence between the sentence of Owen (quoted below) upon the love of Christ, and Cromwell’s whisper: ‘I think I am the poorest wretch that lives. But I love God, or rather am beloved of God.’

[67] A hundred and eleven years earlier Knox had told Johnston of Elphinstone on the final Sabbath of his life: ‘I have been these two nights in meditation on the troubled Church of God, the spouse of Jesus Christ, despised of the world, but precious in His sight. I have called to God for her, and have committed her to her head, Jesus Christ.’

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