Bisschop's Bench: Contours of Arminian Conformity in the Church of England, C.1674-1742

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"In 1668, having for three years toiled in ministry at St Paul's, Covent Garden, following the great plague outbreak of 1665, the future bishop of Chichester and of Ely, Simon Patrick, published an anonymous work entitled, A Friendly Debate Betwixt a Conformist and a Non-Conformist. While many conformist ministers had fled the city rather than endure the epidemic in their posts, Patrick had stayed, watching as nonconformists streamed to London to tend its deserted flocks. Patrick thus had the rare distinction of standing nose-to-nose with nonconformists on the moral high ground, at a juncture of acute importance for the restored Church. He could not have failed to grasp, therefore, that A Friendly Debate, stamped as it was by its political and ecclesiological moment, served an apologetic purpose. Bearing the imprimatur of Thomas Tomkyns, chaplain and episcopal licenser to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon, and touting its anonymous author's moral credentials-Patrick billed himself as "A Lover of [the City], and of pure Religion"-the more cynical sort of reader would have had difficulty regarding the work as anything other than an attempt to reassert the pastoral integrity of the Church by undermining the moral luster of its rivals. To that end, Patrick took as the centerpiece of his argument the depiction of nonconformists as sophistic, "Calvinian" dogmatists, who sought to obscure plain Christian doctrine in favor of speculative subtleties, thereby betraying "the religion of Jesus Christ" for "a great many words and phrases." Developing the de rigueur Restoration diatribe against interregnum "Calvinism," Patrick opined that nonconformists "were much in love with new-minted words, in which they thought there were great mysteries concealed," with the result that they "heaped up one [expression] upon another... till none knew what Christianity was"--