body,
and remained there stedfastly, through all the dangers and vicissitudes
of three and thirty troubled years. Though constantly engaged in
theological controversy with Deists, Jews, Socinians, Presbyterians,
Papists, and Quakers, he found time to be one of the most voluminous
political writers of his age. Of all the nonjuring clergy he was the
best qualified to discuss constitutional questions. For, before he had
taken orders, he had resided long in the Temple, and had been studying
English history and law, while most of the other chiefs of the schism
had been poring over the Acts of Chalcedon, or seeking for wisdom in the
Targurn of Onkelos, [469] In 1689, however, Leslie was almost unknown
in England. Among the divines who incurred suspension on the first
of August in that year, the highest in popular estimation was without
dispute Doctor William Sherlock. Perhaps no simple presbyter of the
Church of England has ever possessed a greater authority over his
brethren than belonged to Sherlock at the time of the Revolution. He
was not of the first rank among his contemporaries as a scholar, as a
preacher, as a writer on theology, or as a writer on politics: but in
all the four characters he had distinguished himself. The perspicuity
and liveliness of his style have been praised by Prior and Addison. The
facility and assiduity with which he wrote are sufficiently proved by
the bulk and the dates of his works. There were indeed among the clergy
men of brighter genius and men of wider attainments: but during a long
period there was none who more completely represented the order, none
who, on all subjects, spoke more precisely the sense of the Anglican
priesthood, without any taint of Latitudinarianism, of Puritanism, or of
Popery. He had, in the days of the Exclusion Bill, when the power of
the dissenters was very great in Parliament and in the country, written
strongly against the sin of nonconformity. When the Rye House Plot was
detected, he had zealously defended by tongue and pen the doctrine of
nonresistance. His services to the cause of episcopacy and monarchy were
so highly valued that he was made master of the Temple. A pension was
also bestowed on him by Charles: but that pension James soon took away;
for Sherlock, though he held himself bound to pay passive obedience to
the civil power, held himself equally bound to combat religious errors,
and was the keenest and most laborious of that host of controversialists