1810.

.-14.

Here I must add a passage, concerning which I am in doubt whether it reflected more on the sincerity, or on the understanding of the English Ambassador.  The breach between the Pope and the Republic was brought very near a crisis, &c.

These pages contain a weak and unhandsome attack on Wotton, who doubtless had discovered that the presentation of the Premonition previously to the reconciliation as publicly completed, but after it had been privately agreed on, between the Court of Rome and the Senate of Venice, would embarrass the latter:  whereas, delivered as it was, it shewed the King’s and his minister’s zeal for Protestantism, and yet supplied the Venetians with an answer not disrespectful to the king.  Besides, what is there in Wotton’s whole life (a man so disinterested, and who retired from all his embassies so poor) to justify the remotest suspicion of his insincerity?  What can this word mean less or other than that Sir H. W. was either a crypt-Papist, or had received a bribe from the Romish party?  Horrid accusations! ­Burnet was notoriously rash and credulous; but I remember no other instance in which his zeal for the Reformation joined with his credulity has misled him into so gross a calumny.  It is not to be believed, that Bedell gave any authority to such an aspersion of his old and faithful friend and patron, further than that he had related the fact, and that he and the minister differed in opinion as to the prudence of the measure recommended.  How laxly too the story is narrated!  The exact date of the recommendation by Father Paul and the divines should have been given; ­then the date of the public annunciation of the reconciliation between the Pope and Venetian Republic; and lastly the day on which Wotton did present the book; ­for even this Burnet leaves uncertain.

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It is true he never returned and changed his religion himself, but his son came from Spain into Ireland, when Bedell was promoted to the Bishopric of Kilmore there, and told him, that his father commanded him to thank him for the pains he was at in writing it.  He said, it was almost always lying open before him, and that he had heard him say, “He was resolved to save one.”  And it seems he instructed his son in the true religion, for he declared himself a Protestant on his coming over.

Southey has given me a bad character of this son of the unhappy convert to the Romish Church.  He became, it seems, a spy on the Roman Catholics, availing himself of his father’s character among them, a crime which would indeed render his testimony null and more than null; it would be a presumption of the contrary.  It is clear from his letters to Bedell that the convert was a very weak man.  I owe to him, however, a complete confirmation of my old persuasion concerning Bishop Hall, whom from my first perusal of his works I have always considered as one of the blots (alas! there are too many) of the biography of the Church of England; a self-conceited, coarse-minded, persecuting, vulgar priest, and (by way of ‘anti-climax’) one of the first corrupters of and epigrammatizers of our English prose style.  It is not true, that Sir Thomas Brown was the prototype of Dr. Johnson, who imitated him only as far as Sir T. B. resembles the majority of his predecessors; that is, in the pedantic preference of Latin derivations to Saxon words of the very same force.  In the balance and construction of his periods Dr. Johnson has followed Hall, as any intelligent reader will discover by an attentive comparison.

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Yea, will some man say, “But that which marreth all is the opinion of merit and satisfaction.”  Indeed that is the School doctrine, but the conscience enlightened to know itself, will easily act that part of the Publican, ’who smote his breast, and said, God be merciful to me a sinner’.

Alas! so far from this being the case with ninety nine out of one hundred in Spain, Italy, Sicily, and Roman Catholic Germany, it is the Gospel tenets that are the true School doctrine, that is confined to books and closets of the learned among them.

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And the like may be conceived here, since, especially, the idolatry practised under the obedience of mystical Babylon is rather in false and will-worship of the true God, and rather commended as profitable than enjoined as absolutely necessary, and the corruptions there maintained are rather in a superfluous addition than retraction in any thing necessary to salvation.

This good man’s charity jarring with his love and tender recollections of Father Paul, Fulgentio, and the Venetian divines, has led him to a far, far too palliative statement of Roman idolatry.  Not what the Pope has yet ventured to thunder forth from his Anti-Sinai, but what he and his satellites, the Regulars, enforce to the preclusion of all true worship, in the actual practice, life-long, of an immense majority in Spain, Italy, Bavaria, Austria, &c. &c. ­this must determine the point.  What they are themselves, ­not what they would persuade Protestants is their essentials or Faith, ­this is the main thing.

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I answer, under correction of better judgments, they have the ministry of reconciliation by the communion which is given at their Ordination, being the same which our Saviour left in his Church: ­’whose sins ye remit, they are remitted, whose sins ye retain, they are retained’.

Could Bishop Bedell believe that the mere will of a priest could have any effect on the everlasting weal or woe of a Christian!  Even to the immediate disciples and Apostles could the text (if indeed it have reference to sins in our sense at all,) mean more than this, ­Whenever you discover, by the spirit of knowledge which I will send unto you, repentance and faith, you shall declare remission of sins; and the sins shall be remitted;-and where the contrary exists, your declaration of exclusion from bliss shall be fulfilled?  Did Christ say, that true repentance and actual faith would not save a soul, unless the priest’s verbal remission was superadded?

‘In fine.’

If it were in my power I would have this book printed in a convenient form, and distributed through every house, at least, through every village and parish throughout the kingdom.  A volume of thought and of moral feelings, the offspring of thought, crowd upon me, as I review the different parts of this admirable man’s life and creed.  Only compare his conduct to James Wadsworth (probably some ancestral relative of my honoured friend, William Wordsworth:  for the same name in Yorkshire, from whence his father came, is pronounced Wadsworth) with that of the far, far too highly rated, Bishop Hall; his letter to Hall tenderly blaming his (Hall’s) bitterness to an old friend mistaken, and then his letter to that friend defending Hall!  What a picture of goodness!  I confess, in all Ecclesiastical History I have read of no man so spotless, though of hundreds in which the biographers have painted them as masters of perfection:  but the moral tact soon feels the truth.

“October 12, 1788.  Begged of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary to take my salvation on herself, and obtain it for Saint Hyacinthe’s sake; to whom she has promised to grant any thing, or never to refuse any thing begged for his sake.”

It would be very interesting to know how far the feeling expressed in this artless effusion coexisted with a faith in the atonement and mediation of the one Lord Jesus Christ. ­Ed.]