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Kettlewell has already enlisted some gallant champions who will blow the gospel-trumpet, although they were to be served up to supper the same evening, I wish the object to be carried out at once " "Beautiful!" said my poor father with a groan; "where the devil could the money be raised? You won't realize now for a bullock what, in war-time, you would get for a calf.
But, Jurors or Nonjurors, the very best men of the old High Church party certainly exhibited a strong bearing towards the faults of exclusiveness and ecclesiasticism. It was a serious loss to the English Church to be deprived of the services of such men as Ken and Kettlewell, but it would have been a great misfortune to it to have been represented only by men of their sentiments.
Though he could not take the oaths, he regularly communicated at the parish church. Controversy he abhorred; it seemed to him, he said to Kettlewell, as if the one thing needful were scarcely heard, amidst the din and clashings of pros and cons, and he wished the men of war, the disputants, would follow his friend's example, and beat their swords and spears into ploughshares and pruning hooks.
Two better men than Kettlewell and Dodwell are nowhere to be found, and as for vigorous writing, where is Charles Leslie to be matched? So long as the deprived fathers continued to live, the schism for complete schism it was between 'the faithful remnant of the Church of England' and the Established Church was on firm ground. But what was to happen when the last Bishop died?
The case would be quite reversed, if multitudes of steady, old-fashioned Churchmen, disgusted by concessions and innovations which they abhorred and regarded as mere badges of a party triumph, came to look upon the communion of Ken and Kettlewell and Nelson as alone representing that Church of their forefathers to which they had given their attachment.
The saintly John Kettlewell, in his tractate, Christianity: a Doctrine of the Cross, or Passive Obedience under any Pretended Invasion of Legal Rights and Liberties , makes this perfectly plain; and when Ken came to compose his famous will, wherein he declared that he died in the Communion of the Church of England, 'as it adheres to the doctrine of the Cross, the good Bishop did not mean what many a pious soul in later days has been edified by thinking he did mean, the doctrine of the Atonement, but that of passive obedience, which was the Non-Juror's cross.
The High Churchmen no longer had Lake and Kettlewell, but Bull and Beveridge, Sharp, and Ken, and Nelson were still living, and held in high honour. This latter party had been rent asunder by the nonjuring schism.
It is remarkable that both these men had seen much of Lord Russell, and that both, though differing from him in political opinions, and strongly disapproving the part which he had taken in the Whig plot, had thought highly of his character, and had been sincere mourners for his death. He had sent to Kettlewell an affectionate message from the scaffold in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
Henderson mentioned Kenn and Kettlewell; but some objections were made: at last he said, 'But, Sir, what do you think of Leslie? JOHNSON. 'Charles Leslie I had forgotten. Leslie was a reasoner, and a reasoner who was not to be reasoned against. BOSWELL. For the effect of Law's 'Parenetick Divinity' on Johnson, see ante, i. 68.
They were good men in a very high sense of the word, earnestly religious, bent upon a conscientious fulfilment of their duties, and centres, in their several spheres, of active Christian labours. Ken, Nelson, and Kettlewell, among Nonjurors Bull, Beveridge, and Sharp, among those who accepted the change of dynasty are names deservedly held in special honour by English Churchmen.
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