Although not compiling memoirs of these sufferers, yet to interest the reader, as well as illustrate the circumstances and sentiments of Episcopalians during the Commonwealth, we venture to notice certain passages in Bramhall's writings, which were composed by him during the period of his exile. In his "Just Vindication of the Church of England," printed at London (1654), the author (who wrote in Holland) complains of the Episcopalians having to suffer so much for their principles--"being chased as vagabonds into the merciless world to beg relief of strangers." Then, comparing the conduct of Papists abroad and at home during an earlier period with the conduct of English Churchmen of his own day towards indigent brethren, he charges the latter with neglecting to manifest sympathy and help. Foreign princes and their own countrymen of the same communion had founded colleges in other lands for Roman Catholics who were driven from England; and the age before the civil wars had been as fruitful in works of Protestant piety and charity as any age preceding it since the conversion of Britain. Hence, although foreign assistance could not be hoped for, yet a larger supply from home might have been expected, inasmuch as English Episcopalians then were much more numerous than English Catholics had been at the period referred to. "Hath the sword," he goes on to ask, "devoured up all the charitable Obadiahs in our land?" or, is there no man that lays "the affliction of Joseph to heart?" A great lack of love and zeal amongst brethren of the same faith in England alone could justify these interrogations--for Bramhall laments no want of ability in his friends to succour the wanderers, but only a want of will. The exiled Prelate could only cast himself and his companions upon the help of Heaven. "God, that maintained His people in the wilderness without the ordinary supply of food or raiment, will not desert us until 'He turn our captivity as the rivers in the south.' Where human help faileth, Divine begins."[326]
Turning to Bramhall's "Vindication of himself and the Episcopal clergy from the Presbyterian charge of Popery,"--a book written about the year 1659, though not published till 1672[327]--in reply to Baxter's "Treatise of the Grotian Religion," we find in it a defence of the conduct of Episcopalians in the days of their prosperity. Baxter had complained of the persecutions inflicted by them upon the Puritans. According to him, in some places, it had been much more dangerous for a minister to preach a lecture once or twice on the lord's Day, or to expound the Catechism, than it had been never to preach at all. Bramhall replies: "If preachers shall not content themselves to sow the wheat over again, but shall sow tares above the wheat; if they shall seek to introduce new doctrines, new disciplines, and new forms of worship, by popular sermons, different from and destructive to those which are established by law, who can blame the magistrates, political and ecclesiastical, if they begin to look about them? A seditious orator is dangerous everywhere, but nowhere more than in the pulpit. Then blame not magistrates, if they punish seditious or schismatical preachers more than one who is no preacher. All laws, and all prudent magistrates, regard public dangers more than particular defects."[328] The Bishop did not see that he employed a two-edged sword, and that while aiming a blow at his adversary, he ran the risk of receiving, through counter-thrusts, a wound from the back stroke of his own weapon. If to preach doctrines contrary to those which were established by law deserved chastisement from the magistrate--if such preaching was seditious preaching, then the Commonwealth Government was justified in depriving and silencing Episcopalian ministers. Bramhall vindicated his own party in having done the very same sort of thing which he now complained of as unrighteous when done by his opponents. It is plain enough that both parties were in the wrong, and that each furnished the other with a miserable pretext for revengeful injustice. And when the same writer, comparing Nonconformist with Episcopal sufferers, quietly says: the former suffered for faction, and the latter for faith,[329] and so concludes the subject,--everybody must smile to see how he assumes as settled the very point which was in dispute. His opponents could just as easily say that they were faithful, and that he and his brethren were factious. It is the old story--as old as human nature, and as modern as this morning's newspaper.