9
Cotton Mather (b.1663). But all these are Middleton's near contemporaries! Here we will also find
Bunyan the Baptist (b.1628), Puritans John Flavel ,John Howe (b. 1630), and John Owen (b.1616).
Episcopal bishops are here as well: William Beveridge of St. Asaph's (b. 1638), Robert Leighton of
Glasgow (b.1611), Joseph Hall of Norwich (b.1574), John Davenant of Salisbury (b. 1570) and George
Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury (b.1562) with his predecessor John Whitgift (b. 1530).
Foreign Protestants both modern (James Saurin of France, Herman Witsius of Holland, the
German Spener, and John Jacob Ulrich of Switzerland) and ancient ( Zanchius, Piscator, Musculus, Farel,
Calvin, Beza, Melanchthon and Luther) are all in this gallery. So are the Marian martyrs Cranmer, Latimer
and Ridley and those of the era of Mary's father, Henry VIII: Frith, Tyndale and Bilney. But Middleton is
not done: his gallery contains pre-Reformers Wycliffe, Huss and Jerome of Prague. The reader who is
reminded of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563) will have sized up the matter rightly for Middleton has
had that Elizabethan work clearly in mind as he has done his own sketch work.
32
It may be well argued that Middleton, like his near-contemporary chronicler Augustus Toplady
33
,
wrote ecclesiastical history as a "man in arms", attempting to give legitimacy to the evangelical
movement of the 18
th
century against church officials who derided the movement as "enthusiast". Very
well. It can be granted also that such writing does not meet the standards of critical history writing. But
what is under discussion here is really only the line of vision pursued by such writers. They were
successionists. The same may be said of the historical writing of Victorian bishop John Charles Ryle.
What was he meaning when in his Christian Leaders of the Last Century
34
he termed Whitefield and the
Wesleys "the reformers of the last century" and the movement they led the "great English Reformation of
the eighteenth century"? When we observe that Ryle wrote polemically, aiming to discredit the
burgeoning Tractarian movement by associating its formalism with the torpor the awakening of the
31
I have utilized the 1816 edition of Middleton's work in 4 volumes; (London, W. Baynes).
32
Middleton, Biographica Evangelica Vol. I, iii
33
Toplady's contributon to polemical history, Historic Proof of the Doctrinal Calvinism of the Church of England
(1774) was written primarily to discredit the doctrinal emphasis of the Wesleyan movement. It covered much of the
same Anglican terrain as had the more eirenic Middleton.
34
(London, Thomas Nelson, 1885). Pp. 21,22.