in the pulpit for moving the affections.’  His letters, of which several remain, written to Ken, Lloyd, and Sancroft, about the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, give the idea of a man of unaffected humility and simple piety, of a happy, kindly disposition, and full of spirit and innocent mirth.  Though he could not take the oaths, he regularly communicated at the parish church.[15] Controversy he abhorred; it seemed to him, he said to Kettlewell, as if the one thing needful were scarcely heard, amidst the din and clashings of pros and cons, and he wished the men of war, the disputants, would follow his friend’s example, and beat their swords and spears into ploughshares and pruning hooks.[16]

John Kettlewell died in 1695, to Nelson’s great loss, for he was indeed a bosom friend.  Nelson had unreservedly entrusted him with his schemes for doing good, his literary projects, his spiritual perplexities, and ’the nicest and most difficult emergencies of his life; such an opinion had he of his wisdom, as well as of his integrity.’[17] More than once, observes Dr. Lee, he said how much gratitude he owed to Kettlewell for his good influence, sometimes in animating him to stand out boldly in the cause of religion, sometimes in concerting with him schemes of benevolence, sometimes in suggesting what he could best write in the service of the Church.  They planned out together the ’Companion for the Festivals and Fasts;’ they encouraged one another in that gentler mode of conducting controversy which must have seemed like mere weakness to many of the inflamed partisans of the period.  Nelson proposed to preserve the memory of his friend in a biography.  He carefully collected materials for the purpose, and though he had not leisure to carry out his design, was of great assistance to Francis Lee in the life which was eventually written.[18]

Bishop Ken used to speak of Kettlewell in terms of the highest reverence and esteem.  In a letter to Nelson, acknowledging the receipt of some of Kettlewell’s sermons, which his correspondent had lately edited, he calls their author ’as saintlike a man as ever I knew;’[19] and when, in 1696, he was summoned before the Privy Council to give account for a pastoral letter drawn up by the nonjuring bishops on behalf of the deprived clergy, he spoke of it as having been first proposed by ’Mr. Kettlewell, that holy man who is now with God.’[20] There can be no doubt he well merited the admiration of his friends.  Perhaps the most beautiful element in his character was his perfect guilelessness and transparent truth.  Almost his last words, addressed to his nephew, were ’not to tell a lie, no, not to save a world, not to save your King nor yourself.’[21] He had lived fully up to the spirit of this rule.  Anything like show and pretence, political shifts and evasions, dissimulations for the sake of safety or under an idea of doing good—­’acting,’ as he expressed it, ’deceitfully for God, and