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Life
Bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh; author of S. Paul’s Confession of Faith, or a Brief Account of his Religion: a sermon preach’d at St. Warbroughs [sic for Werburgh] Church in Dublin 22 Mar 1684/85 (Dublin: Joseph Ray 1685).
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Commentary
W. E. H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Cabinet Edn. 1892; 1913): ‘Of pure politics there was very little. Independently of the division between Protestants and Catholics, there was the conflict between the High Church part and the Nonconformists. Among the Protestants of Ireland, soon after the REvolution, and especially in the reign of Queen Anne, there were a considerable number of High [Anglican] Churchmen whose opinions in a few cases verged upon Jacobitism. Dodwell, who was one of the most learned and most fantastic, and Leslie, who was one of the most acute and disputateous of the Nonjurors, were both Irishmen, educated in Trinity College, and [William] Sheridan, the Bishop of Kilmore, threw in his lot with the same sect. Berkeley, though neither a Jacobite nor a Nonjuror, maintined the doctrine of passive obedience hardly less emphatically than Filmer. The systematic preference of Englishmen to irishmen in ecclesiastical, legal, and political patronage was naturally felt with particular keeness by the educated men of the University, and its prevailing spirity in consequence was usually hostile to the Government. Boulter hated it, and described it as a seminary of Jacobitism, and there is reason to believe that there was some ground of the imputation. [...]’ ([Ch. II] pp.422-23.)
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Notes
Raymond Gillespie cites William Sheridan, St Paul’s Confession of Faith; or, A Brief Account of His Religion (Dublin 1630 [sic]) in ‘Reading the Bible in Seventeenth Century Ireland’, The Experience of Reading: Irish Historical Perspectives, ed. Bernadette Cunningham & Máire Kennedy (Dublin: Rare Books Group of Library Assoc. of Ireland & Econ. & Social Hist. Soc. of Ireland 1999),
pp.10-38.
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