Nelson was well acquainted, though scarcely intimate, with Bishop Beveridge, Bull’s contemporary at St. Asaph.  The two prelates were men of much the same stamp.  Both were divines of great theological learning; but while Bull’s great talents were chiefly conspicuous in his controversial and argumentative works, Beveridge was chiefly eminent as a student and devotional writer.  His ’Private Thoughts on Religion and Christian Life,’ and his papers on ‘Public Prayer’ and ’Frequent Communions,’ have always maintained a high reputation.  Like Bull, he was profoundly read in the history of the primitive Church, but possessed an accomplishment which his brother bishop had not, in his understanding of several oriental languages.  Like him, he had been an active and experienced parish clergyman, and, like him, he was attached almost to excess to a strict and rigid observance of the appointed order of the English Church.  It was to him that Dean Tillotson addressed the often quoted words, ’Doctor, Doctor, Charity is above rubrics.’[65] Yet it must not be inferred therefore, that he was stiffly set against all change.  In a sermon preached before Convocation at their very important meeting of 1689, he had remarked of ecclesiastical laws other than those which are fundamental and eternal, ’that they ought not indeed to be altered without grave reasons; but that such reasons were not at that moment wanting.  To unite a scattered flock in one fold under one shepherd, to remove stumbling-blocks from the path of the weak, to reconcile hearts long estranged, to restore spiritual discipline to its primitive vigour, to place the best and purest of Christian societies on a base broad enough to stand against all the attacks of earth and hell—­these were objects which might well justify some modification, not of Catholic institutions, but of national and provincial usages.’[66]

Beveridge was one of the bishops for whom the moderate Nonjurors had much regard.  In most respects he was of their school of thought; and although, like Wilson of Sodor and Man, and Hooper of Bath and Wells, he had no scruple, for his own part, to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary, he fully understood the reasonings of those who had.  He greatly doubted the legality and right of appointing new bishops to sees not canonically vacant, so that when he was nominated in the place of Ken, he after some deliberation declined the office.  He and Nelson saw a good deal of each other.  They were both constant attendants at the weekly meetings of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, an association which Beveridge zealously promoted,[67] and to which he left the greater part of his property.  The minutes of the society refer to private consultations between him and Nelson for arranging about a popular edition in Welsh of the Prayer-book, and to the bishop distributing largely in his diocese a translation of Nelson’s tract on Confirmation.  They also frequently met at