Prefatory note.

Samuel Parker, author of the “Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity, and of the Power of the Magistrate in Matters of Religion,” to which Owen supplied the following answer, was a noted character in his day. When a student in Wadham College, Oxford, he was a Puritan of the strictest fashion; but as worldly advancement was his ruling motive, he changed his views, and recommended himself to the Court by his abject subserviency to its arbitrary measures. He was made Bishop of Oxford in 1686, and when the Fellows of Magdalen College distinguished themselves by their magnanimous resistance to the encroachment on their privileges attempted by the Crown, and Hough, who had obtained their almost unanimous suffrages to the vacant office of President, had been forcibly ejected, Parker was thrust, upon them, as a fit tool for promoting the despotic and popish views of James II. It was natural that such a man should harbour the deepest malice against Nonconformists, — a malice in which the usual rancour of apostasy mingled as an ingredient of especial bitterness.

We refer to the Life of Owen, vol. i., p. 88, for an account of the controversy to which Parker’s book gave rise, and for a just appreciation of the merits of Owen’s work in reply to it. Besides Owen’s work, several anonymous answers to Parker appeared, under such titles as the following:— “Insolence and Impudence Triumphant; Envy and Fury Enthroned; The Mirror of Malice and Madness,” etc., 1670; “Toleration Discussed in Two Dialogues,” 1670; “Animadversions on a New Book entitled Ecclesiastical Polity,” 1670; and, “A Free Inquiry into the Causes of that very great Esteem the Nonconformists are in with their Followers,” 1673.

Parker in 1671 replied to Owen, in “A Defense and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Polity,” and in a preface to Bishop Bramhall’s “Vindication of the Episcopal Clergy,” written in a characteristic strain of mingled ribaldry and bombast. In 1672, Marvell published his famous “Rehearsal Transprosed.” Marvell was immediately assailed in a host of pamphlets:— “The Transproser Rehearsed;” “Rosemary and Bayes;” “Gregory Father Greybeard with his Vizor off;” “A Common-place Book out of the Rehearsal Transprosed;” “S’too him Bayes,” etc. Parker’s own pamphlet in reply to him bore the title, “A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed, in a Discourse to its Author.”

The genius of Marvell, however, carried all before him in the second part of his work, published in 1673. The title of it, with the exception of an oath prefixed to the threat quoted in it, is subjoined, as an illustration of the intensity of feeling excited by the dispute, and of the dread which the friends of Parker entertained for the keen weapons of the puritan wit:— “The Rehearsal Transprosed, the second part: occasioned by two letters; the first printed by a nameless author, entitled ‘A Reproof,’ etc.; the second left for me at a friend’s house, dated November 3, 1673, subscribed ‘J. G.,’ and concluding with these words, ‘If thou darest to print any lie or libel against Dr Parker, … I will cut thy throat.’” Marvell, undeterred by these profane threats and ravings, dealt such a blow to his main opponent as made him the laughing-stock of every circle, and compelled him for a time to hide his shame in rural obscurity.

Owen in the following work confines himself to a refutation of the slavish and extravagant notions respecting magistratical authority and the royal prerogative which the minion of the Court had not shrunk from propounding. The work is a complete magazine of sound argumentation on such questions as the power of the magistrate, the rights of conscience, and the iniquity of persecution. If Marvell had the credit of silencing Parker in a torrent of caustic ridicule, which, though not untainted with the coarseness of the age, has rendered his “Rehearsal” a source of interest and amusement to many who, taking no interest in ecclesiastical disputes, have been drawn to the perusal of it simply by its literary merit, still we may claim for Owen the praise of establishing, on a basis of able argument, the rights and privileges of which such abettors of arbitrary power as Parker sought to deprive their countrymen. Owen writes in that spirit of calm self-possession and dignity which never under any provocations deserted him, and, compared with the “Rehearsal Transprosed,” his treatise will be accounted dull. Frequently, however, he brightens and relieves the tenor of his reasonings by strokes of effective sarcasm, which it may be questioned if even the genius of Marvell has surpassed. Parker’s views are ludicrously reduced to an absurdity by the supposition of an edict for the settlement of religion, drawn up according to his own principles, and almost in his own words. See page 382. And again, after showing that Parker virtually claimed for the civil magistrate an authority which God only possesses over the conscience, Owen alludes to the preposterous argument that the magistrate should now inflict penalties for errors in religion, in room of what the excommunicated suffered in the days of the apostles at the hands of the devil, p. 406. This work,”’ he remarks, in a sally of exquisite humour, “the devil now ceasing to attend unto, he would have the magistrate to take upon him to supply his place and office, by punishments of his own appointment and infliction: and so at last, to be sure of giving him full measure, he hath ascribed two extremes unto him about religion, — namely to act the part of God and the devil!” For an estimate of the more solid qualities and general merits of the following work, the reader is again commended to the critique on it, in the “Life of Owen.” — Ed.