d except the Bible.[6] In the first four years and a half after
its issue from the press more than 10,000 copies were printed.[7]

Robert Nelson died in the January of 1715, a man so universally esteemed
that it would be probably impossible to find his name connected in any
writer with a single word of disparagement. It would be folly to speak
of one thus distinguished by singular personal qualities as if he were,
to any great extent, representative of a class. If the Church of England
had been adorned during Queen Anne's reign by many such men, it could
never have been said of it that it failed to take advantage of the
signal opportunities then placed within its reach. Yet his views on all
Church questions, and many of the characteristic features of his
character, were shared by many of his friends both in the Established
Church and among the Nonjurors. He survived almost all of them, so that
with him the type seemed nearly to pass away for a length of time, as if
the spiritual atmosphere of the eighteenth century were uncongenial to
it. His younger acquaintances in the Nonjuring body, however sincere and
generous in temperament, were men of a different order. It was but
natural that, as the schism became more pronounced and Jacobite hopes
more desperate, the Church views of a dwindling minority should become
continually narrower, and lose more and more of those larger sympathies
which can scarcely be altogether absent in any section of a great
national Church.

First in order among Nelson's friends--not in intimacy, but in the
affectionate honour with which he always remembered him--must be
mentioned Bishop Ken. He was living in retirement at Longleat; but
Nelson must have frequently met him at the house of their common friend
Mr. Cherry of Shottisbrooke,[8] and they occasionally corresponded.
Nelson may have been the more practical, Ken the more meditative. The
one was still in the full vigour of his benevolent activity while the
other was waiting for rest, and soothing with sacred song the pains
which told of coming dissolution. In his own words, to 'contemplate,
hymn, love, joy, obey,' was the tranquil task which chiefly remained for
him on earth. But they were congenial in their whole tone of thought.
Their views on the disputed questions of the day very nearly coincided.
Nelson, as might be expected of a layman who throughout his life had
seen much of good men of all opinions, was the more tolerant; but both
wer