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471 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA 8ooia16ervioe

been an interregnum in the general provision made by society for its less fortunate members from the extinction of the religious orders to the passing of the first poor law, only partially filled by the custom of placing in the churches boxes for the receipt of alms for the poor. Instances also are recorded of poor men received into wealthier persons' households. Gradually benevolent private citizens came forward who were liberal in their bequests of property for maintaining schools and alms-houses. Perhaps the majority of the older towns of England contain grammar-schools dating their foundation to one of the Tudor sovereigns. It may be doubted whether, in many of these instances, the monarch for the time being had any real share in establishing them. Henry VIII.'s school at Coventry, for example, was so named in order to win his protection, but it was endowed by John Hales, a private citizen.

During the period which elapsed between the final severance from Rome and the accession of the House of Orange in 1688, the sympa-

3. Sporadic this of the benevolent discovered Efforts further scope in founding loan charities for Relief for assisting deserving tradesmen to of Reed. start in business, in dowries for por tionless maidens, in ransoming the Christian captives of the Mohammedan despots on the North African littoral, in providing work for the unemployed poor, and in gifts and bequests to ameliorate the lot of the sick and of debtors and other prisoners. The late Rev. B. Kirkman Gray, in his standard work A History of English Phi lanthropy (London, 1905), mentions " forty-six be quests for setting the poor on work between 1572 and 1692." The express injunctions contained in the Gospels had always given to the relief of the sick and of prisoners an especial sanction, and the frequently recurrent visitations of the plague and other epidemics, as well as the harshness of the criminal law, offered abundant opportunity. The Rev. J. Bamford, rector of St. Olaves, Southwark, was a shining example of fidelity to one's post. Dur ing the plague year of 1603, he incurred consider able unpopularity among his flock by urging on them the unfamiliar practise of isolating patients under proper guardianship, instead of thronging round them or deserting them as pity or panic got the upper hand. Another remarkable example is that of Nicholas Ferrar (q.v.). This gentleman, who in early life had been secretary to the Virginia Company, removed from London during the plague year of 1625, and collected round him at Little Gidding, a sequestered village in Huntingdonshire, a band of persons of both sexes numbering at one time, including his own family, as many as forty, into a kind of religious community having for its object joint prayer, almsgiving, and acts of personal charity, such as teaching school, preparing cordials, dressing wounds, and otherwise tending the sick.

Unfortunately, these efforts, however creditable to those who made them, were but sporadic, inadequate to the needs of the time, and of uncertain duration. The community of Little Gidding survived its founder's death only to be dispersed in the unquiet times of the Civil War. This last event,

by impoverishing the propertied classes, cut off a principal source of the flow of material charity,

although the Puritan majority in the 4. Legisla- Long Parliament are entitled to credit

tive and for passing enactments conceived in Other Relief the interest of the masses, such, for in-

Measures. stance, as those in relief of poor debtors

and for the reform of prison abuses. Dishonest trustees too often intercepted and misapplied the funds dedicated to endowments confided to their administration. Again, the philanthropist of the seventeenth century was handicapped at every turn by his want of practical knowledge. His art was in its infancy. The reserve of past experience on which he could draw was small. He had to make his own experiments, and to grope his way by the light of his own blunders., John Evelyn (d.1706), a stanch churchman of the period, was one of four commissioners appointed by Charles II. in 1664 to undertake the care of the sick, wounded, and prisoners in the then pending war with the Dutch. His own district took in the coastline of Kent and Sussex, and he seems to have extended his attention to the families of the slain, for he notes in his diary under date of May 16, 1665, " To London to consider of the poore orphans and widows made by this bloudy beginning." He reckoned the expenses of his mission at $5,000 a week and subsequently at double that sum, and had the greatest difficulty in extorting it from the government of the day, as may be judged from the following passage from a letter to the lord treasurer's secretary: "One fortnight has made me feele the utmost of miseries that can befall a person in my station and with my affections: To have 25,000 prisoners, and 1,500 sick and wounded men to take care of, without one peny of money, and above £2,000 ($10,000) indebted. It is true I am but newly acquainted with buisinesse . . . learning that at once which others get by degrees." He proceeds to speak of his desire of serving God " in anything which I hope He may accept, for I swears to you no other consideration should tempt me a second time to this trouble."

The closing years of the seventeenth century saw, as Kirkman Gray has pointed out, the extension of individual into corporate philanthropy. The leaders in this new departure included men like

Robert Nelson (d. 1715) who had made 5. Rise of the grand tour of France and Italy, for

Corporate the older countries of the continent Philan- were at that time somewhat in advance thropy. of the English in this respect. The in-

flux of Huguenot refugees consequent upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes also lent a stimulus to the movement. With Nelson was associated Anthony Horneck (d. 1697), a German settled in England who had taken orders in the Established Church. Evelyn describes him as " a most pathetic preacher, a person of a saint-like life." Both Nelson and Horneck were authors of numerous theological works. They joined in forming associations for the reformation of manners and morals which sprang up during the last quarter of the century as a reaction against the license prevalent during Charles the Second's reign. Nelson was one of the founders of the Society for Promoting