English literature -- History and criticism; Literature -- Anecdotes; Litterateurs
of their livings; but this was, however, a happier fate than what has
often occurred in these contests for the security of political power.
This _ejection_ was not like the expulsion of the Moriscoes, the best
and most useful subjects of Spain, which was a human sacrifice of half a
million of men, and the proscription of many Jews from that land of
Catholicism; or the massacre of thousands of Huguenots, and the
expulsion of more than a hundred thousand by Louis the Fourteenth from
France. The presbyterian divines were not driven from their fatherland,
and compelled to learn another language than their mother-tongue.
Destitute as divines, they were suffered to remain as citizens; and the
result was remarkable. These divines could not disrobe themselves of
their learning and their piety, while several of them were compelled to
become tradesmen: among these the learned Samuel Chandler, whose
literary productions are numerous, kept a bookseller's shop in the
Poultry.
Hard as this event proved in its result, it was, however, pleaded, that
"It was but like for like." And that the history of "the like" might not
be curtailed in the telling, opposed to Calamy's chronicle of the two
thousand ejected ministers stands another, in folio magnitude, of the
same sort of chronicle of the clergy of the Church of England, with a
title by no means less pathetic.
This is Walker's "Attempt towards recovering an Account of the Clergy of
the Church of England who were sequestered, harassed, &c., in the late
Times." Walker is himself astonished at the size of his volume, the
number of his sufferers, and the variety of the sufferings. "Shall the
church," says he, "not have the liberty to preserve the history of her
sufferings, as well as the _separation_ to set forth an account of
theirs? Can Dr. Calamy be acquitted for publishing the history of the
_Bartholomew sufferers_, if I am condemned for writing that of the
_sequestered loyalists_?" He allows that "the number of the ejected
amounts to two thousand," and there were no less than "seven or eight
thousand of the episcopal clergy imprisoned, banished, and sent a
starving," &c. &c.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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