57 "THE PREDESTINATED THIEF." MISTAKEN Conjectures respecting the authorship of anonymous books, and the errors which have thence arisen with regard to personal character, and even to facts of general interest, would form a curious chapter of literary history, were any person of competent ability to undertake the task of writing it. To one somewhat remarkable case of this kind I request permission to invite a brief attention. In the year 1651 a Latin tract was published in London, under the title of Fur Prædestinatus,-"The Predestinated Thief." It professes to be a Dialogue between a Minister and a culprit who is to be executed the next day. The Minister attempts to bring the offender to repentance, that he may be prepared for the death that awaits him; but he fails to make any impression upon the man whose salvation he is anxious to promote. The convict enters into a detail as to his past conduct, and confesses that his life has been one uninterrupted course of profligacy and irreligion. He was trained in the belief of the doctrine of absolute predestination, as it is laid down in the Institutes of Calvin. He is therefore fully persuaded that every human being is from eternity appointed either to endless happiness, or to endless misery, by an unalterable decree of God; that such a decree has passed with respect to himself; that no act of his can at all alter his destiny, or change that which is absolutely determined; that, although his conduct has been bad, it was unavoidable, since the decree which determines the final state of every man determines the course of his life; that other men have been saved who went as great lengths in wickedness as he has done; and that such is the amount of sin which is connected with the best actions of the best of men in this world, that there is, in fact, little difference between the heirs of heaven and the heirs of hell. He is therefore self-complacent, and hopes for the best. The Minister assents to the doctrine of absolute predestination, as it is stated by the felon, but endeavours to evade the conclusion that is deduced from it. The "thief," however, produces quotation after quotation from the writings of predestinarian divines, to prove that he is correct both in his premises and deductions; so that the Minister appears to great disadvantage in the argument. At length the jailer interposes, and tells the Minister that, if he have no better doctrine to advance, he will do well to retire. The Minister deems himself fully competent to manage the debate, and threatens the jailer with dismission from his office, on account of his impertinent interference. The jailer, however, is inflexible, and fairly turns the Minister out of the prison, hoping to obtain some more appropriate instruction for the victim of law, who is on the verge of eternity, and yet hardened through sin and error. This tract, as might be supposed, excited considerable attention at the time, the doctrine of absolute predestination being then extensively taught in England by the Puritan Ministers, who had to a great extent supplanted the Episcopal Clergy, and obtained possession of the parish-churches. As the author of the tract had withheld his name, conjecture endeavoured to supply the place of authentic information. Mr. George Kendall, one of the most distinguished theological polemics of that age, published in Latin an answer to the tract, assenting to the doctrine which the "thief" asserted, but denying the practical conclusions that are here deduced from it. Kendall confesses his inability to ascertain the author of the tract. Some persons, he says, deemed it the production of an English Prelate. But this he doubted; thinking, rather, that it had either a Dutch or an Italian origin: that is, he suspected the writer to be either a Romanist, or a disciple of Arminius in Holland. In the year 1658, twelve months after the publication of Kendall's reply, an English translation of this tract appeared, and was reprinted at the beginning of the following century; when another answer to it was also published, from the pen of F. Gailhard, who confesses that he knew not the author of the tract, but suspected Dr. Thomas Pierce to be the man.* Pierce was an Episcopal Clergyman of great learning, who held the living of Brington, in Northamptonshire, in the time of the Commonwealth, and was appointed Dean of Salisbury at the Restoration. He was an acute disputant, and wrote largely against Calvin's doctrine of absolute and irrespective decrees.-In favour of his conjecture respecting this very able man, Gailhard offers no proof whatever. After the lapse of about fifty years more, Dr. Thomas Birch published his Life of Archbishop Tillotson, in which he mentions the Fur Prædestinatus, and states that it was written by Dr. William Sancroft, assisted by Mr. George Davenport, and another person, whose name he does not specify.+-Sancroft was elevated to the see of Canterbury in the year 1678, and deposed at the time of the Revolution, which took place ten years afterwards.-Birch's statement, it will be observed, was put forth a hundred years after the publication of the tract in London, when Sancroft and his personal friends were all dead; and it was put forth without any reference whatever to either documentary or oral authority. The only ascertainable ground of the statement appears to be, that on the title-page of the tract are the words, Impensis F. G. Typis G. D. Francis Gayer and George Davenport were known to be friends of Sancroft; but if the letters F. G. and G. D. be really intended to identify these men with the tract, it will follow that one of them bore the expense of publishing it, and that the other was the printer, but not that they were the writers of it. Nor does it follow that Sancroft had any concern with it whatever. In the year 1753, when the second edition of Tillotson's Life was published, Dr. Salter, Prebendary of Norwich, sent forth, in an improved * D'Oyly's Life of Sancroft, vol. i., pp. 70, 71. Edit. 1821. + Birch's Life of Tillotson, p. 148. Edit. 1753. * form, the "aphorisms" of Dr. Whichcote, and annexed to them some of Whichcote's Letters, in the preface to which he says that Sancroft was the writer of the "Predestinated Thief;" but, as in the case of Dr. Birch, from whom it is probable that he copied the account, he gives no authority for the assertion. It appears, then, that although two answers to this tract were written, one by Kendall in Latin, only six years after the tract had appeared in London, and the other by Gailhard, in 1703, the author of the tract was confessedly unknown. Then, after the lapse of fifty years more, two learned men claim to speak with authority on the mysterious subject: yet they are not agreed; for one of them alleges that the tract was written by Sancroft and two of his friends; the other, that it was written by Sancroft himself; and neither of them refers to any authority for his statement. Another English version of this tract appeared in the year 1814, said to have been made by Dr. Nichol, the Dean of Middleham, who gives no opinion respecting the author. Indeed, after the positive statements of Birch and Salter, assigning the authorship to Sancroft, it does not appear that any doubts have been expressed on this subject, which was previously regarded as a great mystery. People seem to have considered it as an admitted fact that Sancroft was the writer. The "Biographia Britannica," and the "Biographical Dictionary" of George Chalmers, accordingly, assign it to Sancroft; and, following what had now become a popular tradition, Dr. D'Oyly, in his Life of the Archbishop, published in the year 1821, takes it for granted that his Grace was the writer of the tract. He therefore gives an elaborate account of it in his narrative, and inserts the whole of it in the appendix to his second volume. At the same time he praises Sancroft in the strongest terms for writing so seasonable and excellent an antidote to what he conceives to be dangerous error. Dr. D'Oyly is followed by Lord Macaulay, in his popular " History of England;" who, taking an opposite view of the tract itself, pronounces a severe censure upon Sancroft, as its assumed author. The noble historian thus pours forth his wrath upon the defunct Archbishop :-" He had, from his youth up, been at war with the Nonconformists, and had repeatedly assailed them with unjust and unchristian asperity. His principal work was a hideous caricature of the Calvinistic theology." This "hideous caricature" he states in a note to be the Fur Prædestinatus. † The facts of the case then are these:-For fifty years the authorship of the "Predestinated Thief" was a matter of mere conjecture. It was assigned to a nameless Prelate, an Italian Priest, a Dutch Arminian, and to Dr. Thomas Pierce; yet, after all, it was confessed that the author was unknown. When fifty years more had passed away, Dr. Birch said it was the joint production of three men, of whom Sancroft was one. At the same period Dr. Salter said it was written by Sancroft himself. Then, at + History of England, vol. iii., p. 129. Edit. 1858. * Page xxxv. the end of another hundred years, all doubt on the subject vanishes. Dr. D'Oyly and Lord Macaulay not only ascribe it to Sancroft, but make it the basis of their remarks upon his character. One of them describes it as an effective and seasonable rebuke to notorious error, and praises Sancroft as a wise and faithful man, who stood forth in defence of injured truth; the other declares it to be "a hideous caricature," the product of "unjust and unchristian asperity" in a man sustaining the office of a Christian Bishop. Thus, at the end of two centuries, a matter which no one could determine during the first fifty years of this period becomes an historic fact, which nobody questions, though not a ray of evidence has been brought to bear upon it! The truth, however, is, that this ascertained fact is a mere dream. The high eulogium of D'Oyly and the unmeasured censure of the noble lord are alike inapplicable, so far as Sancroft and the "Predestinated Thief" are concerned. The Archbishop has no title to the praises which Dr. D'Oyly has lavished upon him as a writer against Calvinistic predestination; and with respect to the authorship of what is alleged to be "a hideous caricature," he is as innocent as Lord Macaulay himself. We have direct proof that the tract in question is of Dutch origin, and was in circulation before Sancroft was well able to write his own name. It is one of the many books that were published in Holland after the death of Arminius, and about the time of the Synod of Dort, when the United Provinces were convulsed with the predestinarian controversy, which in its progress is well known to have assumed a political character. Gerard Brandt, himself a Dutchman, and one of the most careful and accurate of historians, speaks of this tract as being well known among his countrymen in the year 1623, when Sancroft was only six years old. In his account of Henry Slatius, who acquired a melancholy notoriety at that period, Brandt says, “He was counted to be the author of the 'Predestinated Thief.'"* The tract, indeed, contains in itself decisive evidence that it was not written against the English Nonconformists, but against the predestinarians of the Netherlands. The "thief," for instance, who is personated there, is made to say that he is a native of Holland; he describes one of the Dutch Universities as tainted with heresy, and the other he speaks of as destitute of discipline, and characterized by flagrant immorality. To escape these evils, he is sent from Holland to Geneva, where he completes his education. The authors whom the "thief" is made to quote, in support of the tenet of absolute predestination, are mostly Dutch Clergymen and Professors. They are upwards of forty in number; but only one of these authors is an Englishman,-William Perkins, who died many years before Sancroft was born; but who had acquired a European reputation, by the publication of most of his principal works in Latin. We would appeal, then, to the * Brandt's History of the Reformation in the Low Countries, vol. iv., p. 539. Edit. 1723. common sense of any person, whether Sancroft, or any man of ordinary understanding, intending to expose the theological teaching of the English Nonconformists, during the Commonwealth, would select a Dutchman as the victim whom their sermons and writings had led into a course of speculative and practical Antinomianism?—whether he would prefer his heaviest charges against the Dutch Universities? and whether he would select Dutch Clergymen as the expositors of the Nonconformist doctrines; when the same doctrines were embodied in books of every size which were daily emanating from the English press? Why should Sancroft, if he were the author of the tract in question, quote a number of Dutch writers, some of whose names have scarcely ever been heard of in England either before or since, and preserve a perfect silence respecting the writings of his own English contemporaries,-Twiss, Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Kendall, with their Nonconforming brethren generally,-where the tenet of absolute predestination is unequivocally expressed? The "Predestinated Thief," both in his history, and the authors whose doctrine he affirms, bears not an English but a thoroughly Dutch character. How could the English Nonconformists be blamed for the profligacy of a Dutchman, who had never set his foot upon English ground, and whose teachers were "Bogardus of Haerlem, Buschop of Utrecht, Damman of Zutphen, Homnius of Leyden, Triglandius of Amsterdam," &c., &c., &c.? In further proof of the fact for which we are contending, let me add, that a copy of the "Predestinated Thief," in the Dutch language, now lies before me, the property of Mr. James Nichols, the learned translator of Arminius's Works. It has indeed no date; but it is in black letter, bound in old vellum, and has every appearance of having been printed about the time to which Brandt refers. An engraving on the title of the book represents the "thief" as looking through the grates of his prison, while the Dutch Clergyman in his cloak occupies a chair, pressing the forefinger of his right hand against his left thumb, as if he were attempting to settle some difficult question in the metaphysics of his theology; while the jailer, in the costume of his country, stands by, with two large keys in his hands, listening to the "colloquy sublime," between the felon and his spiritual adviser, who "reason high Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate; Additional evidence of the foreign authorship of the "Predestinated Thief" we have in the fact, that with the copy of the tract in Dutch, now before me, there is bound up, in the same language, a Counter Dialogue between the "thief" and a Remonstrant Minister; the Arminian jailer having obtained for the Antinomian culprit the services of a man who teaches him, not out of the volumes of predestinarian divines, but out of the holy Scriptures; endeavouring by means of inspired precepts and |