Esq., who made the discovery by examining the books in the office of the Chamberlain of London; and it is fortunate that it then took place, as the records have been since burnt. “Upon examining the parish register, no entry can be found of his baptism; which is not surprising, as his parents were Nonconformists, and there can be little doubt that the rite was performed by their own minister, whose religion excluded him from the use of that document. This pastor of their choice was the Rev. Samuel Annesley, LL.D., a distinguished Presbyterian divine, who was ejected from the living of Cripplegate, and afterwards preached as a Nonconformist, at a meeting-house in Little St. Helen's, Bishopsgate Street. At that place, which was licenced for religious worship in 1672, the parents of De Foe attended their favourite minister; and there can be no doubt that they introduced their son Daniel to the same religious connexion. Under the guidance of so able an instructor, the mind of De Foe was formed to an early love of religion; and his attachment to the cause of Nonconformity, was probably heightened by the vexations to which its professors were exposed during the season of his youth. Although we have no direct evidence that he was himself a participator in those sufferings, yet it is not improbable that his parents were in the number of those who took joyfully the spoiling of their goods, that they might maintain the peace of their consciences, and have a title to a better inheritance. It is at least certain, that their pastor, and some of his flock were thus roughly handled. Of Dr. Annesley's worth, both as a minister and a Christian, De Foe long entertained an affectionate remembrance; and he has drawn his character at length in the form of an elegy, which may be found in the collection of his writings In the following lines he identifies himself with the Doc tor's congregation, ton Green, then kept by the Rev. Charles Morton. On the nature and mode of conducting these institutions at the time, Mr. Wilson has some sensible remarks, and an extract or two from some of De Foe's pamphlets, which the reader will be pleased to see. Although the tutors in these seminaries were in general men of learning and abilities, yet, it is not to be pretended that the advantages they afforded were at all equal to those of the public universities. Amongst their defects, may be mentioned the want of public libraries, and of suitable authority for the preservation of discipline. Upon these and other inconveniences, De Foe has some sensible remarks in a work not commonly known, in which he expresses himself with great freedom, but invokes a candid judgment for the Dissenters upon account of their political oppression. 'Tis evident,' says he, the great imperfection of our academies is want of conversation: this, the public universities enjoy; our's cannot. If a man pores upon his book, and despises the advantages of conversation, he always comes out a pedant, a mere scholar, rough and unfit for any thing out of the walls of his college. Conversation polishes the gentleman; acquaints him with men and with words; lets him into the polite part of language; gives him style, accent, delicacy, and taste of expression; and when he comes to appear in public, he preaches as he discourses, easy, free, plain, unaffected, and untainted with force, stiffness, formality, affected hard words, and all the ridiculous part of a learned pedant, which is, being interpreted, a school fop. Whilst on the other hand, from our schools we have abundance of instances of men that come away masters of science, critics in the Greek and Hebrew, perfect in languages, and perfectly ignorant, if that term may "His native candour, his familiar style, be allowed, of their mother-tongue.' Which did so oft his hearers' hours beguile, Charmed us with godliness; and while he spake, We lov'd the doctrine for the preacher's sake; While he informed us what those doctrines meant By dint of practice more than argument."" De Foe was educated at the 6 "In animadverting upon the defects of private academies, our author notices another particular, in which he considers the mode of tuition to be reprehensible. Many of the tutors in our academies,' says he, 'I do not say all, because I knew some of another opinion, being careful to keep the knowledge of the tongues, tie down their pupils so exactly, and limit them so strictly to perform every exercise, and to have all their readings in Latin or in Greek, that, at the end of the severest term of study, they come out unacquainted with Eng lish, though that is the tongue in which all their gifts are to shine. The usefulness and excellency of the languages is no way run down in this observation; but preaching the gospel, which is the end of our study, is done in English, and it seems absurd to the last degree, that all the time should be spent in the languages which it is to be fetched from, and none in the language it is to be delivered in.' To this error our author attributes it, that so many learned, and otherwise excellent ministers, preach away all their hearers, while a jingling, noisy boy, that has a good stock in his face, and a dysentery of the tongue, though he has little or nothing in his head, shall run away with the whole town. It is true,' he goes on to observe, 'the head is the main thing that a tutor is to see furnished; but the tongue must be tuned, or he'll make no music with the voice. Acceptable words, a good diction, a grave, yet polite and easy style, are most valuable things in a minister, and without which, his learning cannot exert itself.' "From some of the defects above enumerated, De Foe makes an exception in favour of Mr. Morton's seminary. There was some years ago,' says he, a private academy of the Dissenters, not far from London, the master or tutor of which read all his lectures, gave all his systems, whether of philosophy or divinity, in English, and had all his declaimings and dissertations in the same tongue. And though the scholars from that place were not destitute in the languages, yet it is observed of them, they were by this made masters of the English tongue, and more of them excelled in that particular, than of any school at that time. Here were produced of ministers, Mr.Timothy Cruso, Mr. Hannot, of Yar mouth, Mr. Nathaniel Taylor, Mr. Owen, and several others; and of another kind, poets, Samuel Wesley, Daniel De Foe, and two or three of your Western martyrs, that, had they lived, would have been extraordinary men of their kind; viz., Kitt. Battersby, young Jenkyns, Hewling, and many more.""- pp. 20 22. De Foe, though he got a good education, was brought up to trade by his parents. He commenced it in the hosiery line, but does not appear to have been successful. He probably loved to read and write books more than to sell stockings; and accordingly he seems chiefly to have lived by his wits, and is known to us almost entirely by his writings. Of these, from their vast number and variety, we can give no regular notice; and as Mr. Wilson has, with great taste and ingenuity, interwoven his account of them with a very full view of the political and civil events of the period, detached extracts can hardly do justice to the subject. The "History of the Origin of the Occasional Conformity Controversy," is curious. "When the Act of Uniformity, which passed shortly after the Restoration of King Charles II., had divided the nation into the two religious parties of Conformists and Nonconformists, it was found that a considerable body of the citizens of London adhered to the latter, and contributed towards the erection of places for worship apart from the establishment. As many of them had acquired fortunes by trade, they naturally took their station in society, and were selected by their fellow-citizens to fill the leading offices in the corporation. Even in the austere reign of Charles II., when injustice was pushed to such an extreme as to compel the citizens to declare, They could not trade with their neighbours one day, and send them to gaol the next;' at that time, some of them obtained the civic gown, and found their way into Parliament. These honours they acquired in greater number in the following reign, it being the policy of King James to raise them into notice, in order to mortify the leaders of the dominant religion. In the year of the Revolution, Sir John Shorter, one of their number, filled the office of chief magistrate; and dying during his mayoralty, his place was supplied by Sir John Eyles, who was of the same religious persuasion. A few years afterwards, the same dignity was conferred upon Sir Humphrey Edwin, also a Presbyterian, who was elected Lord Mayor, September 29, 1697, and, with a single exception, filled his situation to the satisfaction of all parties. "Up to this period, occasional conformity had been practised by Dissenters, who accepted official employments with the legal qualification, without much offence to either party. During his dicated the practice in his own condi ct; mayoralty, Sir Humphrey Edwin vinby attending upon one part of the Sun day at church, and upon the other part at his usual place of worship amongst the Dissenters. His conduct in this respect would, probably, have passed with as little notice as that of his predecessors, had he not, upon one occasion, carried the regalia of his office to Pinners' Hall Meeting-house. This imprudent step, rendered so by the political situation of the Dissenters, and which the judicious amongst them by no means approved, raised a very unnecessary clamour in the high-church party, some of whom resented it with vulgar malignity. more "But whatever impropriety there was in this proceeding of the Lord Mayor, as creating a needless jealousy at a time when the passions of men were strongly fermented by bigotry; yet, the conduct of his clerical reprovers was equally in bad taste. One of them, a young clergyman from Cambridge, but exalted to the dignity of the scarf, as domestic chaplain to a nobleman, had the honour to preach before the same Lord Mayor at St. Paul's; when he seized the opportunity to display his ill-timed zeal against the worship of the Nonconformists. For his want of judgment in offering this public affront to a Presbyterian chief magistrate, he met with a proper reproof, in a clever pamphlet which came speedily to a second edition, and is entitled "A Rowland for an Oliver; or a sharp rebuke to a saucy Levite. In answer to a Sermon preached by Edward Oliver, M.A., before Sir Humphrey Edwin, late Lord Mayor of London, at St. Paul's Cathedral, on Sunday, October 22, 1698. By a Lover of Unity.' "Whilst indignities were offered to the chief magistrate from the pulpit, by the classical tongues of the clergy, it is no wonder that their example was imitated by the lower orders, who hawked libels upon him about the streets, in the shape of ballads and lampoons. The novel circumstance of his carrying the insignia of office to a 'conventicle,' was also made the subject of much merriment by the wits of the day. One of them published 6 A Dialogue betwixt Jack and Will, concerning the Lord Mayor's going to meeting-houses, with the sword carried before him. 1697.' 4to. Swift, in his Tale of a Tub,' satirizes the toleration of Dissenters under the notion of Jack's tatters coming into fashion, both in court and city; and the idea of Jack's getting upon a great horse, and eating custard, is intended for Sir Humphrey Edwin, the Presbyterian chief magistrate. In the early edition of that singular book, there is a good graphical illustration of the subject. It may be recollected, that before the invention of the state-coach, it was customary for the Lord Mayor to appear in city processions upon a statehorse; also, that custard was a standing dish at a Lord Mayor's feast. To the former of these circumstances De Foe alludes in his poem entitled' Reformation of Manners :' "To ride the city horse, and wear the chain.' "The question arising out of the foregoing circumstance, was treated by De Foe with appropriate gravity. His publication bore the title of An Inquiry into the occasional Conformity of Dissenters in Cases of Preferment: with a Preface to the Lord Mayor, occasioned by his carrying the Sword to a Conventicle. London: printed Anno Dom. 1697' 4to. pp. 28. In this work, the author appears before us in the character of an acute casuist. Assuming as a principle, that Dissenters in his day continued to separate from the Established Church from the same motive that actuated the early Puritans, that is, to obtain a greater purity of worship; he argues that the fast and loose game of religion, which was then played by too many, will not admit of any satisfactory excuse."pp. 269-273. De Foe was a staunch opponent of this apparently trimming system of occasional conformity, and contributed not a little to prevent its progress among the Dissenters. We wish we could extract his reasonings on the subject, as they are not uncalled for even yet. But for these, we must refer to the work itself. Though not in the precise order of time with the passage above quoted, we must make room in our present number for one extract more. It refers to the reign of James II., to the conduct of the Dissenters towards the church, and the return which they experienced from it. The facts ought not to be forgotten, though we are called to forgive the parties who inflicted snch unmerited wrongs. But ignorant and dastardly must be the spirit of that Dissenter, who, indebted for all his comforts and privileges to those principles for which his forefathers suffered and bled, undervalues their importance, or compromises them to a spurious charity, or a fallacious notion, that the time has either passed away, or is not yet come, when they should be con. tended for. "Of the moderation of the Dissenters in this reign, De Foe has given a fine exemplification in the case of Jeremiah White, who had been chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, and is well known for his courtship of the Protector's daughter, afterwards the Lady Faulconberg. Mr. White had been at some pains to collect a minute account of the sufferings of the Dissenters after the Restoration, and the depredations committed upon them by the church party. He had prepared lists of their ministers and others who had suffered imprisonment, distinguishing those who died or were starved in gaol; with an account of the fines levied by execution upon their estates; and a melancholy history,' observes De Foe, 'it would have made.' To expose this narrative to the public view, he was strongly solicited by the court, and tempted by the offer of a large reward; it being well understood that so terrible an exposure would leave an indelible blot upon the character of the English church, and thereby facilitate its downfall. Mr. White had too much generosity to embrace the opportunity for such a triumph: He scorned the temptation, rejected the rewards, and told them he would not so far assist them to pull down the church. In short, he refused either to publish his memoranda, or so much as to show them the collections he had made, or to give them the least opportunity to do it themselves; and this purely as he saw the design of the party, which, as a fellow-protestant, as well as a Dissenter, he had more sense, honour, and Christianity than to join in.' The forbearance of this gentleman was the more exemplary, for, as De Foe observes, The Dissenters are but men, made of the same flesh and blood, and subject to like passions with their brethren; and a sense of their former treatment might be expected to furnish them with a handle for laying the matter before the world; especially considering the recency of the facts, which thousands of witnesses were ready to attest; besides the guilt in the adverse party, ready to join with the accusation, and impose silence upon the persons.' De Foe, addressing the Episcopal Church, goes on to say, I need not appeal to but appeal to those most reverend memMr. Jeremy White for the truth of this; bers of your assembly, who with others lately dead, gave Mr. White public thanks for his Christian and unexammember it whenever they should have pled moderation, and promised to reopportunity to make returns of the like charity to the Dissenters.' If we may believe Oldmixon, Mr. White had collected the names of sixty thousand persons who were prosecuted upon a religious account, from the Restoration to the Revolution, five thousand of whom died in prison; and he is said to have told Lord Dorset, that King James offered him a thousand guineas for the manuscript, which was probably destroyed, as it has never been heard of since. "It is now natural to make some inquiry into the return made by churchmen for this kindness of the Dissenters; and here our author will continue to help us out. When the Church of England found herself in this danger,' adds De Foe, what did she do? She turns about to the Dissenters, talks of peace and union, forbearance and love: infinite sermons flow from the pulpit on the healing subject of peace: she treats the Dissenters with terms of brotherhood, friendship, charity, and Christian love; talks to them of some few differences, some doubtful and indifferent matters in which they may differ, and yet maintain charity as Christians, and peace as Englishmen. And what's the occasion of all this? What brought the church to this temper? Why truly, popery was upon the throne, a high-commission court was erected, Magdalen College made a beginning of the church's ruin; and this brought these gentlemen to their senses.' It would have been well if this conciliatory language had been continued in the days of prosperity, as it might have afforded some test of its sincerity. A political religion, however, yields much the same fruits under every profession; and these are always of a poisonous nature. So it was in the present instance. De Foe, contrasting their behaviour at this time with their conduct afterwards, says, Those who care to look back but a few years to the times of the late King James, may find a time when some of those very gentlemen who now cry out loudest of the danger of the church from Protestant Dissenters, were the forwardest to cry up peace and union, pressing the Dissenters to forget unkindnesses, and come into a general league against the danger that threatened them. These very men, who are now so hot for occasional bills, for suppressing the Dissen. ters' academies and schools, excluding them from places, and the like; that are for crushing their hopes, and bringing them into unheard of bondage; these are they who were for giving the Dissenters liberty, and treating them as friends. Then it was, our brethren the Dissenters, and our brethren that differ from us in some matters, and the like. But now, these parsons have forgot that they were clerks; their fears of ecclesiastical commissions and invasions are over; and they have forgotten the vows of their distress."- pp. 132-134. (To be continued.) ON THE AFFINITY BETWEEN UNITARIANISM AND INFIDELITY. THE bare title of the following essay will, no doubt, prove startling, even to some who entertain a very bad opinion of Unitarianism. And both the title and the contents are planned, not to shock the candour of any, but to excite the curiosity of all upon a question of vital and universal importance. Comparatively few are familiar with the Unitarian system, as a whole, notwithstanding the number of books and pamphlets which have been published by its advocates, to explain and defend it. The host of pamphlets so industriously circulated for this purpose, do not exhibit a full or a fair view of the system, because, not being intended to inform or to confirm actual Unitarians in their creed, but to win over Trinitarians to it, they either suppress some of its true features entirely, or soften the aspect of them all, that they may not appear repul sive at first sight. Lectures and sermons likewise present only a partial view of the system, because the decorum, if not the sacredness, of the pulpit, during divine worship, imposes a check upon ribaldry, and on unhallowed freedoms with the word of God. This, I am aware, is not always the case; but in general the sermons which issue from the press, have a certain cast of piety about them, calculated to prevent the suspicions of all who do not read the SO critical and controversial works of Unitarian writers. It is, however, in those, not in sermons nor in tracts, that the genius of the system is developed, in all its powers of effrontery and profanity, in all its sceptical tastes and tendencies. While only moral duties and immortal hopes form their subjects, Unitarian writers maintain a becoming solemnity; but when a strong argument, founded upon a stubborn text, is to be evaded or overthrown, then the true spirit of the system betrays itself, and breathes forth a devouring fire of criticism and ridicule, before which the language and legitimacy of Scripture are consumed like stubble. Nothing is either too forced, or too fanciful, to be employed, whenever it is necessary to neu. tralize and explain away the authenticity and meaning of inconvenient texts: and so many texts are found to be inconvenient to Unitarianism, that hosts of such criticisms and quibbles have been called forth during the controversy. Now, were these base stratagems and bold outrages upon the word of God, collected from even the modern books in which they lie scattered, and singly; were they arranged under their respective characters, and then embodied in one view, they would stagger, if not shock, sober Unitarians themselves; but insulated, or mixed up with Greek, as they |