Ib. p. 191.
About this time died my dear friend Mr. Thomas Gouge, of whose life
you may see a little in Mr. Clark's last book of Lives:--a wonder of
sincere industry in works of charity. It would make a volume to recite
at large the charity he used to his poor parishioners at Sepulchre's,
before he was ejected and silenced for non-conformity, &c.
I cannot express how much it grieves me, that our Clergy should still
think it fit and expedient to defend the measures of the High Churchmen
from Laud to Sheldon, and to speak of the ejected ministers, Calamy,
Baxter, Gouge, Howe, and others, as schismatics, factionists, fanatics,
or Pharisees:--thus to flatter some half-dozen dead Bishops, wantonly
depriving our present Church of the authority of perhaps the largest
collective number of learned and zealous, discreet and holy, ministers
that one age and one Church was ever blest with; and whose authority in
every considerable point is in favor of our Church, and against the
present Dissenters from it. And this seems the more impolitic, when it
must be clear to every student of the history of these times, that the
unmanly cruelties inflicted on Baxter and others were, as Bishops Ward,
Stillingfleet, and others saw at the time, part of the Popish scheme of
the Cabal, to trick the Bishops and dignified Clergy into rendering
themselves and the established Church odious to the public by laws, the
execution of which the King, the Duke, Arlington, and the Popish priests
directed towards the very last man that the Bishops themselves (the
great majority at least) would have molested.
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