as having been first proposed by 'Mr.
Kettlewell, that holy man who is now with God.'[20] There can be no
doubt he well merited the admiration of his friends. Perhaps the most
beautiful element in his character was his perfect guilelessness and
transparent truth. Almost his last words, addressed to his nephew, were
'not to tell a lie, no, not to save a world, not to save your King nor
yourself.'[21] He had lived fully up to the spirit of this rule.
Anything like show and pretence, political shifts and evasions,
dissimulations for the sake of safety or under an idea of doing
good--'acting,' as he expressed it, 'deceitfully for God, and breaking
religion to preserve religion,' were things he would never in the
smallest degree condescend to. In no case would he allow that a jocose
or conventional departure from accuracy was justifiable, and even if a
nonjuring friend, under the displeasure, as might often be, of
Government, assumed a disguise, he was uneasy and annoyed, and declined
to call him by his fictitious name.[22] Happily, perhaps, for his peace
of mind, his steady purpose 'to follow truth wherever he might find
it,'[23] without respect of persons or fear of consequences, though it
led to a sacrifice, contentedly, and even joyfully borne, of worldly
means, led him no tittle astray from the ancient paths of orthodoxy.
Like most High Churchmen of his day, he held most exaggerated views as
to the duty of passive obedience, a doctrine which he held to be vitally
connected with the whole spirit of Christian religion. He sorely
lamented 'the great and grievous breach' caused by the nonjuring
separation,[24] and earnestly trusted that a time of healing and reunion
might speedily arrive; and though he adhered staunchly to the communion
of the deprived bishops, whom he held to be the only rightful fathers of
the Church, and believed that there alone he could find 'orthodox and
holy ministrations,'[25] he never for an instant supposed that he
separated himself thereby from the Church of England, in which, he said
in his dying declaration, 'as he had lived and ministered, so he still
continued firm in its faith, worship, and communion.'[26] Such was
Kettlewell, a thorough type of the very best of the Nonjurors, a man so
kindly and large-hearted in many ways, and so open to conviction, that
the term bigoted would be harshly applied to him, but whose ideas ran
strongly and deeply in a narrow channel. He lived a life unspotted fr