Following the English Reformation, popery was often likened to a dragon or hydra; but by the early eighteenth century Church of England divines seemed satisfied that, doctrinally, gifted polemicists such as Edward Stillingfleet had slain it. Moreover, by the 1730s Dissent was in disarray and appeared in decline. Yet within the bosom of the established Church lay a serpent which, though largely slumbering, periodically uncoiled: a serpent of doubt about the Church's own doctrines and, principally, its adherence to the doctrine of the Trinity.
The Scriptures themselves gave no direct sanction to Trinitarian belief. The one possible warrant in the King James Bible, 1 John 5: 7, had been rejected as a spurious interpolation by such intellectual colossi as Richard Bentley (notably in his 1717 praelection as Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge), Edward Gibbon and Richard Porson.Footnote 1 Trinitarianism could appear a suspicious and unjustifiable reconciling of Christian theology and Greek philosophy. The most unequivocal statement of the doctrine was the Athanasian Creed (whose date and authorship were, and remain, the subject of scholarly debate).Footnote 2 Besides its dogmatic assertion of ‘the Unity in Trinity, and the Trinity in Unity’, the Creed contained anathemas insisting that, without belief in ‘the Catholick Faith’, including Trinitarianism, a soul ‘shall perish everlastingly’, in ‘everlasting fire’. The Athanasian Creed was an integral part of the Church of England's doctrine and liturgy: the eighth of the Thirty-Nine Articles proclaimed that it and the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds ‘ought thoroughly to be received and believed: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of holy Scripture’, and in 1662 the Book of Common Prayer decreed that the Athanasian Creed should be said at morning prayer on thirteen days each year, including Christmas Day, Epiphany, Easter Sunday, Ascension Day, Whit Sunday and, naturally, Trinity Sunday. Subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles and their Trinitarianism was required for matriculation at Oxford and graduation at Cambridge, and, for the clergy, upon nomination to a benefice. Unitarianism was outlawed under the Blasphemy Act of 1698 and ‘any person . . . deny[ing] in his Preaching or Writeing the Doctrine of the Blessed Trinity’ was ineligible for the benefits of the 1689 Toleration Act.Footnote 3
Eighteenth-century Dissenters were beset by grave theological doubts, and Arianism and Socinianism split Dissenting ministers and congregations.Footnote 4 The divisions were spotlighted at Salters’ Hall in 1719 by London ministers’ debates on adherence to Trinitarianism; within a century, most Presbyterians and many General Baptists had embraced Unitarianism.Footnote 5 But doubts about Trinitarian doctrine, with, particularly, their obvious implications for belief in Christ's divinity, had the potential to create discord among Anglicans too. The open anti-Trinitarianism of William Whiston, the successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge to Newton (whose own radical and heretical theology had been largely kept veiled),Footnote 6 cost him his chair in 1710. In 1714, Convocation threatened to prosecute the illustrious Samuel Clarke, rector of St James's, Piccadilly, for the publication of his neo-Arian The Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity (1712). Ninety years later, it was a minor clergyman's considerable anti-Trinitarian doubts which produced first a cause célèbre and then a test case for the Church of England's authorities.
Jewish Prophecy: Stone's Sermon of 1806
On 8 July 1806, Francis Stone, rector of Cold Norton in Essex, preached a sermon, which he later published, at nearby Danbury. The occasion was the visitation of the archdeacon of Essex, William Gretton, and the sermon, spluttered the Pittite cleric Edward Nares, proved ‘most extraordinary . . . entirely in abuse of the Creeds, and articles of the establish'd Church’.Footnote 7 The sermon was lucidly argued, learned (though not ostentatiously so), eloquent – and explosive. Its premise was that Christian Scripture concerning Christ should match Old Testament prophecies perfectly: when it did not, either the former was spurious or the latter misapplied. Using this touchstone, Stone concluded that Christ, although God's ‘great messenger’,Footnote 8 was just a man (the prophecies had foretold nothing more), and that the Virgin Birth was a myth and the first two chapters of Matthew's Gospel forgeries.Footnote 9 How, Stone asked, was ‘plain, pure, primitive christianity . . . absorbed in the monstrous figments and incredible errors of men’?Footnote 10 For him, and those like him, the answer was clear: through ‘the interpolations and misinterpretations of . . . [genuine Christian Scripture] by the perverse disputing Christian sophists of the Platonic school of Alexandria’.Footnote 11 By aligning Plato's doctrines (necessarily corrupted) and Christian theology, those sophists had concocted the Arian Trinity, which soon ‘swell[ed] . . . into that monster of error and absurdity, the Athanasian trinity in unity’ (‘that most senseless doctrine of human invention’).Footnote 12 Furthermore, Stone assailed the doctrine of the atonement as a ‘disgusting impossibility’.Footnote 13 It was necessary, he maintained, for the Church to renounce these errors which constituted the principal barriers to Christianity's acceptance by pagans, deists, Jews and Mahometans;Footnote 14 for, after their various conversions ‘“shall the earth be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea”’, and ‘the beautiful economy of the several divine dispensations, the patriarchal, the Mosaic, and the Christian, be completely developed'.Footnote 15
The Development of Stone's Theology and the Response to the Sermon of 1806
Commenting on Stone's behaviour in a letter of December 1807, Hannah Lindsey, writing for her husband, the great Unitarian Theophilus Lindsey, described Stone as ‘a conscientious (tho’ too hasty man)’.Footnote 16 Too hasty? Stone was an old man when he preached his sermon: as he said in it, ‘it is improbable, that, at my advanced period of life, an eligible opportunity similar to the present, should [again] occur, to bear my public testimony against . . . corruptions of Christian doctrine’.Footnote 17 But, as he reminded those present, he had proclaimed his anti-Trinitarianism – though less fully and forcefully – over thirty-five years before.Footnote 18 In 1768, two years after the publication of Francis Blackburne's Confessional, which attacked compulsory subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, Stone had published, anonymously, A Short and Seasonable Application to the Public, In Behalf of a Respectful Address to the Parliament, to Procure a Legal Redress of Notorious, Religious Grievances. In it, he maintained that the Athanasian Creed was unsupported by Scripture and that it, together with Athanasian forms of worship, defiled the Church's liturgy.Footnote 19 Moreover, he asserted, subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles was a burden to the scrupulous, and one which grew ever heavier as rational explanations of the Scriptures dispelled error.Footnote 20 Stone advocated replacing subscription to the articles with a simple assent to the Scriptures, with a renunciation of popery and Jacobitism.Footnote 21 He urged ‘unitarian believers of weight, whether laity or clergy’ to petition Parliament to this end, and wanted a society, to include Dissenters, formed in London for ‘the extirpation of Athanasianism’.Footnote 22 Indeed, a clerical society was established at the Feathers Tavern in the Strand in 1771, and a petition to Parliament produced for the abolition of compulsory subscription. Stone became the society's chairman and was one of the few Oxford graduates to support the petition strongly; in addition, he apparently secured the signatures of many Essex clergymen: they comprised thirty-one of some two hundred clerical signatories.Footnote 23 The House of Commons rejected the petition in February 1772 by 217 to 71,Footnote 24 and thereafter nine signatories seceded from the Church; Lindsey left his living in 1773, and his friend John Disney did likewise in 1782. Yet Stone kept his benefice. That was not dishonourable: he wanted to remove, from within, ‘every gross church-corruption in doctrine, discipline, and worship’,Footnote 25 the stance of Blackburne himself.Footnote 26 Thus, in the debate over the visitation sermon, Stone provocatively described himself as a ‘Unitarian Christian Minister in the Church of England'.Footnote 27 But was that a chimera, the term an oxymoron? Could Stone be permitted to retain his living?
Besides the Short and Seasonable Application, Stone presented his ideas more fully in 1783 in A Call to the Jews: By a Friend to the Jews. Although again published anonymously – Stone did not affirm his authorship until 1806Footnote 28 – Lindsey and his circle easily identified the writer.Footnote 29 The work detailed Stone's considerable doubts about key orthodox – not only for the established Church – doctrines. The book cast doubt on ‘the absurd hypothesis of the miraculous conception of Christ Jesus, in the womb of a virgin’: the Old Testament had not prophesied that, and the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke contained differing accounts of the journeyings of Mary and Joseph at Christ's birth.Footnote 30 Christ was Joseph's son, an ‘absolutely good man’, exceptional because he lived a ‘literally sinless life’.Footnote 31 Stone ridiculed ‘that incomprehensible arch-mystery of human invention, the Athanasian trinity in unity’: God was not ‘a fanciful tripartite Divinity’, ‘three divine beings jumbled together’.Footnote 32 It was vital to dispel ‘the thick black mist, raised by human systems of divinity’, and to expunge the ‘absurd dogma of the Christian Platonists’.Footnote 33 Interpolations and forgeries in the Scriptures had to be exposed and rejected.Footnote 34 Once this had been done, the Jews, recognizing that the uncorrupted Christian Scriptures entirely accorded with the Old Testament prophecies, would convert to Christianity. Stone, displaying a bizarre egotism or megalomania,Footnote 35 even declared his willingness to lead them back to Israel, a fantasy which he seemingly shared with the asinine Lord George Gordon.Footnote 36
By comparison with Stone's 1806 sermon, this earlier publication remained relatively unknown; but the storm raised by the sermon was ferocious. The Orthodox Churchman's Magazine and Review was appalled by it: Stone, this ‘miserable Revolter’, ‘this nauseous gangrene’, ‘this hoary veteran in blasphemy and heresy’, was both ‘impudent and dishonest’.Footnote 37 His sermon was a ‘superlatively heretical and blasphemous composition’, poisonous and contagious, and seemed ‘to strike at the very fundamental articles of our Religion’.Footnote 38 The ‘shameless outrageousness of the offence’ merited exemplary punishment.Footnote 39 Edward Nares soon produced a response, and, although he endeavoured to refute Stone's theology carefully and sustainedly, he could not resist invective. The sermon inspired in him ‘extreme disgust’; its derision of orthodox doctrine was wanton, insolent and weak; and its language was sometimes ‘barbarously low and vulgar’.Footnote 40 One wonders if Stone, though highly intelligent and gifted, had failed to anticipate the furore because he had so long associated with heterodox clerics. Educated at the Charterhouse, for most of his years there its master was the Arian Nicholas Mann.Footnote 41 After a period at University College, Oxford, Stone became curate to his uncle, Henry Taylor, Arian controversialist and rector of Crawley, Hampshire.Footnote 42 Appointed curate of Worth in Sussex two years later, he enjoyed close friendships with two nearby Arian clergymen, John Bristed and William Hopkins.Footnote 43 By 1783, he was associated with Theophilus Lindsey's Essex Street Unitarian congregation.Footnote 44 Yet, given his 1806 discourse's occasion and provocative wording, it is difficult to believe that Stone did not intend to shock and anger his hearers and subsequent readers. During the sermon, Archdeacon Gretton confessed himself ‘so surprized and shocked that had he not considered it his Duty to stay . . . he would have left the Church’.Footnote 45 Another clergyman, ‘being extremely disgusted', stormed out.Footnote 46 One warning Stone ignored was the case of Edward Evanson, vicar of Tewkesbury, whose heterodox opinions, as he knew, strongly resembled his own, and who, having openly proclaimed them, felt pressured into resigning his living in 1778.Footnote 47 Nares ominously argued that ‘any Jew, Turk, infidel, or heretic, might as safely and as reasonably minister in the Church of England' as Stone.Footnote 48
Reaping the Whirlwind: Stone and the Church Courts
On 10 April 1807, Stone received a citation, summoning him to the bishop of London's consistory court.Footnote 49 He was charged, under twenty-one heads, with preaching and publishing doctrines that were directly contrary or repugnant to the ‘Articles of Religion as by Law established'.Footnote 50 His case was heard in May 1808, when he defended his stance fiercely. He also published an open letter to the bishop, Beilby Porteus, avowedly seeking ‘the greatest publicity possible’ because the prosecution wanted the proceedings conducted in ‘the greatest privacy’, ‘in a small private parlour’.Footnote 51 In his Letter, like a skilled tactician determined not to quit secure ground, he reminded Porteus that he had promised at ordination to teach only ‘that, which . . . [he was] persuaded . . . [might] be concluded and proved by the Scripture’ – a fact, he added, that could not ‘be too often repeated'.Footnote 52 Since subscription predated ordination, the latter rescinded acceptance of the Thirty-Nine Articles.Footnote 53 Following ordination, he was obliged to ‘drive away all erroneous and strange doctrines’, and the Church, he declared, had no authority to impose human interpretations of the Scriptures or override his conscience.Footnote 54 Moreover, he maintained, the sixth of the Thirty-Nine Articles, with its stress on the principle of sola scriptura, entirely supported his stance.Footnote 55 Stone restated such arguments in a tauntingly titled pamphlet, An Unitarian Christian Minister's Plea for Adherence to the Church of England (1808). Bravely, to his enemies’ fury, he republished the visitation sermon, writing ‘a most obnoxious preface’ for the second edition.Footnote 56 By 1809, four editions had appeared. His efforts availed him nothing. The evidence against him was solid, the offences proved, and his arguments dismissed. When Stone last attended the court, it found that he ‘still . . . persist[ed] in and . . . [had] not revoked his . . . Error’.Footnote 57 He was accordingly condemned, and Bishop Porteus deprived him of his living, worth £300 per annum.Footnote 58
Stone now appealed to the Court of Arches, which re-examined his case minutely: the manuscript records run to 1,844 pages.Footnote 59 The theology of the sermon was anatomized and the statements of some who were at Danbury demonstrate the discourse's impact: after time had lapsed, witnesses could well remember the most disturbing assertions.Footnote 60 Other depositions proved that Stone had published the sermon.Footnote 61 Unsurprisingly, the Court of Arches upheld the consistory court's sentence. Lastly, Stone sent a petition to George III, but was told in June 1809 that the king ‘was not Pleased to give any Commands respecting it’.Footnote 62
After the Deprivation
Stone was now a sad, if somewhat perplexing, figure. He had apparently written his memoirs, but failed to publish them.Footnote 63 Few (excepting Unitarians) were, it seems, interested, and he probably failed to raise the necessary subscription. He was ruined financially and, from Michaelmas 1810, was confined as a debtor within the rules of King's Bench prison. After his first wife's death and ‘when rather advanced in life’, he had married his cook, who had borne him ‘numerous . . . children’.Footnote 64 By the annus horribilis 1808, he had nine – two more had not survived – and another was born subsequently, though he listed only eight in his will, made in February 1813.Footnote 65 Humiliatingly, his son-in-law, an army captain, was now the mainstay of the whole family.Footnote 66 ‘The family is in deep distress’, wrote one sympathizer, and ‘the poor old man is incapable of doing any thing to extricate them out of their difficulties.’Footnote 67 The Unitarians were dismayed by the ‘persecution’, whose sole object, Lindsey thought, was to beggar a wretched man; and they raised a subscription giving Stone £100 a year, although he remained a member of the Church of England.Footnote 68 Even Nares – who was, admittedly, prone to self-deception – expressed pity, saying he had meant Stone no harm.Footnote 69 Stone died in November 1813.
Politics and Personality
Stone's 1806 sermon was the antithesis of a tract for the times. For most of the eighteenth century, Latitudinarians in the Church of England, heirs and continuators of Locke and Tillotson, questioned constricting dogma and old, perhaps obsolete, theological formulae; often the Athanasian Creed was a target. They interpreted antiquated articles of religion liberally, hoping for doctrinal and liturgical reform grounded on painstaking biblical study and rational argument; and shunned sacerdotalism and surviving vestiges of ‘superstition’ in the Church. Among them were bishops, including Benjamin Hoadly, Edmund Law, Jonathan Shipley and Richard Watson, and powerful theologians, such as Francis Blackburne and William Paley.Footnote 70 Yet from the 1780s, the appeal of Latitudinarian thinking was diminishing, and the advancement of Latitudinarian clerics checked. The French Revolution powerfully promoted conservatism in the Church. Stone's sermon was studded with Latitudinarian vocabulary: ‘plain sense’, ‘dispassionate’, ‘impartial', ‘candour’, ‘superstitious error’, ‘truly rational', ‘a free, dispassionate, impartial investigation’:Footnote 71 wording which, as Nancy Uhlar Murray demonstrated, had largely disappeared by 1806 from the writings of those liberal churchmen who had welcomed the Revolution in 1789.Footnote 72 Furthermore, Stone's politics were comparably suspect in the 1790s and 1800s. Stone was a long-standing Whig. Following George II's death, he had composed a poem praising the late king, the duke of Cumberland and ‘the Glories of the Brunswic [sic] Line’.Footnote 73 His Whiggism shaded into radicalism. In 1776, he published A New, Easy, and Expeditious Method of Discharging the National Debt, advocating the appropriation of the Church's property (for the state's use); the removal of bishops from the House of Lords and, indeed, the abolition of bishops and other ecclesiastical dignitaries; and the introduction of a standard clerical stipend (£200 per annum).Footnote 74 In 1789, he published his Political Reformation, on a Large Scale, proposing the separation of the executive and legislature; universal male suffrage (excluding civil and judicial office-holders); Catholic emancipation; the creation of new constituencies, all with roughly equal populations; annual Parliaments; the payment of MPs; provisions for combating corruption; and much else besides.Footnote 75 He also wanted the abolition of the slave trade and slavery.Footnote 76 Also in 1789, Stone praised the French Revolution as ‘a glorious struggle for . . . [the French nation's] recovery of the natural equal rights of men’,Footnote 77 and in 1792 he produced a lengthy and forceful riposte to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.Footnote 78 Small wonder that some of his enemies thought him a clerical Tom Paine.Footnote 79
Stone's fate was not only determined by the times but also by his goading personality. Doubts about doctrine and pride in his powerful intellect combined to spawn an utter conviction of his rightness and a liking for combat. ‘I glory in exposing . . . [nonsense] to contempt and ridicule’, he declared in his 1806 sermon, and he likened the Feathers Tavern petitioners to the Marian martyrs.Footnote 80 Later, he would claim that his ‘Christian fortitude’ was equal to St Paul's ‘apostolic boldness’ and Luther's ‘intrepid spirit’.Footnote 81 Arrogance begat dislike. An exasperated reviewer of Political Reformation ridiculed his pretensions and hinted at his eccentricity.Footnote 82 A ‘very vain old man’, The British Critic snorted.Footnote 83 Stone's difficult personality was long-standing. As a young curate in Hampshire, he had exhibited an ‘insolent’, near-ungovernable temper; a ‘most provokingly haughty’ and contemptuous demeanour when riled; a ‘self-conceited' manner; ‘Weakness, Obstinacy, & Perverseness of Conduct, as Never Met in one Character’.Footnote 84 In a society lubricated by patronage, such traits were highly damaging. There was also an alienating theatricality about his behaviour, smacking of the fraudulent. When the consistory court's sentence was pronounced, Stone ‘cast up his eyes to Heaven, and exclaimed, “God's will be done”’.Footnote 85 For a period after losing his living, he went to Bath, where he met Joseph Hunter, the Presbyterian minister and antiquary. Hunter recorded that Stone was not well received among the Dissenters, who felt he lacked the ‘Sobriety of Mind' of Disney and Lindsey.Footnote 86 Disney, indeed, called Stone a scaramouch, and Hunter observed that ‘there was about him something to justify’ this, adding that there ‘was nothing of the gravity of the Confessor about him’.Footnote 87 Even his intellectual claims excited suspicion. When Stone told Hunter that he was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, the latter was, it seems, inclined to disbelieve him.Footnote 88 But it was true; and, only a year before his death, Stone published a collection of documents in the Society's periodical, Archaeologia.Footnote 89
Conclusions
If an increasingly conservative era and Stone's problematical personality wrought his ruin, that ruin was none the less avoidable. Stone insisted that, from his ordination, he was ‘absolutely required . . . to lay before the people mine Unitarian Christian principles’, and never to withhold them ‘from the lower classes of the community’.Footnote 90 But that was hogwash. Others sharing his doubts, including William Hopkins, unobtrusively adapted the Church's services to their beliefs, omitting those parts they rejected;Footnote 91 had Stone done likewise, prosecution would have been improbable. Besides, he was non-resident: instituted to Cold Norton in May 1765, his visitation return the next year states that he did not live there for reasons of health.Footnote 92 He resided in London, and in 1783 Lindsey noted ‘he never does any duty now as Minister of the Ch. of E.’Footnote 93 In his stead, Stone employed curates (a strategy which Christopher Wyvill, who signed the Feathers Tavern petition, also adopted),Footnote 94 and they presumably conformed to the liturgy. His unprovoked challenge to his ecclesiastical superiors in 1806, and his subsequent refusal to retract satisfactorily, were principled but foolhardy. Thomas Belsham, from 1805 minister at the Essex Street chapel, disapproved of Stone's ‘whole conduct’, and repeatedly castigated his imprudence: in his eyes, Stone had ‘solicited & provoked' the ‘persecution’.Footnote 95
Stone's test case demonstrated that an uncompromising and vocal ‘Unitarian Christian Minister’ was intolerable within the Church of England. That said, for the established Church, Stone's memory – especially given his family's suffering – was an embarrassment. And Stone's doubts about the authenticity of some Scripture passages also alienated or alarmed those heterodox Dissenters who upheld the Bible's authenticity and scrupulously sought to validate their Unitarianism from the Scriptures.Footnote 96 Stone was best forgotten.Footnote 97 Revealingly, when the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was produced, his 1897 Dictionary of National Biography entry was merely revised: his career, it was deemed, failed to merit extensive re-examination.Footnote 98
Yet the manifold doubts which Stone expressed soon resurfaced after his death. Most broadly, his doubts about the authenticity of parts of the gospels anticipated the ‘higher criticism’ which emerged later in the nineteenth century, and that higher criticism proved destructive of the Bible-based Unitarianism of men like Lindsey. Within the Church of England, Stone's concerns were given voice by new generations of theologians. One of great distinction in the 1830s was Renn Dickson Hampden, Fellow of Oriel, Bampton Lecturer in 1832 and, from 1836, Oxford's Regius Professor of Divinity: how different from a maverick Essex rector. ‘The Apostles’ Creed', contended Hampden, ‘states nothing but facts. The transition is immense from this to the scholastic speculations involved in the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds.’Footnote 99 Dogmatic statements were human deductions from Scripture, not (necessarily) Christian truths. Hampden's doubts, like Stone's, were productive of clear reasoning. Regarding the Church's Articles and ‘in particular . . . the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, as they stand in our Ritual, or are adopted into our Articles’, Hampden argued, if ‘it be admitted that the notions on which their several expressions are founded, are both unphilosophical and unscriptural; it must be remembered, that they do not impress those notions on the Faith of the Christian, as matters of affirmative belief’.Footnote 100 Accordingly, he advocated the abolition of Oxford's subscription at matriculation.
In 1865, a general ‘assent’ was substituted for clerical subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles.Footnote 101 Then came the full Victorian controversy over the Athanasian Creed. The Royal Commission on Ritual, appointed in 1867, issued its final report in 1870 and recommended the creed's retention. By contrast, Archbishop Tait wished to discontinue its use and Dean Stanley to relax it: stances deplored in turn by E. B. Pusey and Canon Liddon. Its place in the Church's worship was hotly debated in Convocation: if it were not to be omitted, should it be retranslated, or its anathemas’ force moderated by some explanatory formula? However, the Lower House rejected any change, and none was effected, although a declaration on the creed's content was constructed. Partial adjustment came in the Revised 1928 Prayer Book, with a new translation, permission for the omission of the anathemas and the making of the recitation optional.Footnote 102 In the twentieth century, the Church of England silently but overwhelmingly abandoned the use of the Athanasian Creed.Footnote 103
In the mid-1930s, the influential Dick Sheppard, then a canon of St Paul's, threatened to throw himself from the Whispering Gallery during the saying of the Athanasian Creed.Footnote 104 He did not follow that imprudent course, but, in his lifetime, the creed was plainly withering on the vine. Had Francis Stone appreciated that quieta non movere was sometimes a wise strategy, not necessarily dishonourable, the likelihood would have been a satisfactory old age with his young family, and the avoidance of a snap petrifaction of Anglican doctrine which halted, albeit temporarily, fundamental thinking in the Church: the very opposite of his intended achievement.Footnote 105 Piecemeal modifications, omissions, compromises, fudges were the most viable, if imperfect, salves for the (ultimately irresolvable) doctrinal doubts which so vexed Stone. But, as Lindsey observed, he was ‘too hasty’ a man for those.
