must have pasture, which pasture if they lack the rest must needs fail them: and pasture they cannot have, if the land be taken in, and en

closed from them." *

Another time, to put his hearers on their guard against hasty judgments, he relates that, having entered the gaol at Cambridge to exhort the prisoners, he found a woman accused of having killed her child, who would make no confession :

"Which denying gave us occasion to search for the matter, and so we did. And at the length we found that her husband loved her not; and therefore he sought means to make her out of the way. The matter was thus: a child of hers had been sick by the space of a year, and so decayed as it were in a consump tion. At the length it died in harvest-time. She went to her neighbours and other friends to desire their help, to prepare the child to the burial: but there was nobody at home; every man was in the field. The woman, in an heaviness and trouble of spirit, went, and being herHer husband coming home, not having great self alone, prepared the child to the burial love towards her, accused her of the murder; and so she was taken and brought to Cam bridge. But as far forth as I could learn

plies it to his contemporaries, to his audience, at times to the judges who are there" in velvet cotes," who will not hear the poor, who give but a dog's hearing to such a woman in a twelvemonth, and who leave another poor woman in the Fleet, refusing to accept bail;* at times to the king's officers, whose thefts he enumerates, whom he sets between hell and restitution, and of whom he obtains, nay extorts, pound for pound, the stolen money. From abstract iniquity he proceeds always to special abuse; for it is abuse which cries out and demands, not a discourser, but a champion. With him theology holds but a secondary place; before all, practice: the true offence against God in his eyes is a bad action; the true service, the suppression of bad deeds. And see by what paths he reaches this. No grand words, no show of style, no exhibition of dialectics. He relates his life, the lives of others, giving dates, numbers, places; he abounds in anecdotes, little obvious circumstances, fit to enter the imag-through earnest inquisition, I thought in my ination and arouse the recollections of each hearer. He is familiar, at times humorous, and always so precise, so impressed with real events and particularities of English life, that we might glean from his sermons an almost complete description of the manners of his age and country. To reprove the great, who appropriate common lands by their enclosures, he details the needs of the peasant, without the least care for conventional proprieties; he is not working now for conventionalities, but to produce convictions:

"A plough land must have sheep; yea, they must have sheep to dung their ground for bearing of corn; for if they have no sheep to help to fat the ground, they shall have but bare corn and thin. They must have swine for their food, to make their veneries or bacon of: their bacon is their venison, for they shall now have bangum tuum, if they get any other venison; to that bacon is their necessary meat to feed on, ich they may not lack. They must have other cattle as horses to draw their plough, and for carriage of things to the markets; and kine for their milk and cheese, which they must live upon and pay their rents. These cattle

*Latimer's Seven Sermons before Edward VI., ed. Edward Arber, 1869. Second sermon, pp. 73 and 74.

Latimer's Sermons. Fifth sermon, ed. Arber, p. 147.

In

conscience the woman was not guilty, all the circumstances well considered. Immediately after this I was called to preach before the king, which was my first sermon that I made sor; when his majesty, after the sermon was before his majesty, and it was done at Winddone, did most familiarly talk with me in the gallery. Now, when I saw my time, I kneeled down before his majesty, opening the whole matter; and afterwards most humbly desired his majesty to pardon that woman. For I thought in my conscience she was not guilty; else I would not for all the world sue for a murderer. The king most graciously heard my humble request, insomuch that I had a pardon ready for her at my return homeward. the mean season that same woman was deliv. ered of a child in the tower at Cambridge, whose godfather I was, and Mistress Cheke was godmother. But all that time I hid my pardon, and told her nothing of it, only exhorting her to confess the truth. At the length the time came when she looked to suffer: I came, as I was wont to do, to instruct her; she made great moan to me, and most earnestly required me that I would find the means that she might be purified before her suffering; for she thought she should have been damned, if she should suf fer without purification. So we travailed with this woman till we brought her to a good trade; and at the length shewed her the king's pardon, and let her go.'

"This tale I told you by this occasion, that though some women be very unnatural, and forget their children, yet when we hear any.

body so report, we should not be too hasty in whilst they make martyrs. All the Delieving the tale, but rather suspend our judg-writings of the time, and all the com

ments till we know the truth."*

mentaries which may be added to them When a man preaches thus, he is are weak compared to the actions believed; we are sure that he is not which, one after the other, shone forth reciting a lesson; we feel that he has at that time from learned and unlearn seen, that he draws his moral not from ed, down to the most simple and ign: books, but from facts; that his coun- rant. In three years, under Mary, nearsels come from the sold basis whence ly three hundred persons, men, women. every thing ought to come,-I mean old and young, some all but children, from manifold and personal experience. allowed themselves to be burned alive Many a time have I listened to popular rather than to abjure. The all-power. rators, who address the pocket, and ful idea of God, and of the faith due prove their talent by the money they to Him, made them resist all the prohave collected; it is thus that they tests of nature, and all the trembling of hold forth, with circumstantial, recent, the flesh., "No one will be crowned," proximate exariples, with conversa- said one of them, "but they who fight tional turns of speech, setting aside like men; and he who endures to the great arguments and fine language. end shall be saved." Doctor Rogers Imagine the ascendency of the Scrip- was burned first, in presence of his wife tures enlarged upon in such words; to and ten children, one at the breast. He what strata of the people it could de- had not been told beforehand, and was scend, what a hold it had upon sailors, sleeping soundly. The wife of the keeper workmen, servants! Consider, again, of Newgate woke him, and told him how the authority of these words is that he must burn that day. "Then," doubled by the courage, independence, said he," I need not truss my points.' integrity, unassailable and recognized In the midst of the flames he did not virtue of him who utters them. He seem to suffer. "His children stood spoke the truth to the king, unmasked by consoling him, in such a way that he robbers, incurred all kind of hate, re-looked as if they were conducting him signed his see rather than sign any to a merry marriage.' A young man thing against his conscience, and at of nineteen, William Hunter, appren eighty years, under Mary, refusing to ticed to a silk-weaver, was exhorted by recant, after two years of prison and his parents to persevere to the end :waiting-and what waiting! he was led to the stake. His companion, Ridley, slept the night before as calmly, we are told, as ever he did in his life; and when ready to be chained to the post, said aloud, "O heavenly Father, I give Thee most hearty thanks, for that Thou hast called me to be a professor of 'Thee even unto death." Latimer in his turn, when they brought the lighted faggots, cried, "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man: we shall this day light such a candle by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." He then bathed his hands in the flames, and resigning his soul to God, he expired

"In the mean time William's tather and mother came to him, and desired heartily of God that he might continue to the end in that good way which he had begun : and his mother said to him, that she was glad that ever she was so happy to bear such a child, which could ang in his heart to lose his life for Christ's name's sake.

"Then William said to his mother,' For my

little pain which I shall suffer, which is but a
short braid, Christ hath promised me, mother
(said he), a crown of joy: may you not be glad
With that his mother
of that, mother?"
kneeled down on her knees, saying, 'I pray
God strengthen thee, my son, to the end; yea,
I think thee as well-bestowed as any child tha
ever I bare.'

"Then Wiliam Hunter plucked up hi gown, and stepped over the parlour groundse., and went forward cheerfully; the sheriff's ser vant taking him by one arm, and I his brother by another. And thus going in the way, he met

He had judged rightly: it is by this supreme trial that a creed proves its *Noailles, the French (ard Catholic) Amstrength and gains its adherents; tor-bassador. John Fox, History of the Acts and tures are a sort of propaganda as well Monuments of the Church, ed. Townsend, 1843 as a testimony, and make converts 8 vols., vi. 612, says: "His wife and children, being eleven in number, and ten able to go, * Latimer's Sermons, ed. Corrie, First Ser- and one sucking on her breast, met him by the mon on the Lord's Prayer i. 335. way as he went towards Smithfield."-Ti

with his father according to his dream, and he | spake to his son weeping, and saying, "God be with thee, son William; and William said, God be with you, good father, and be of good comfort; for I hope we shall meet again, when we shall be merry.' His father said, I hope so, William ;' and so departed. So William went to the place where the stake stood, even according to his dream, where all things were very unready. Then William took a wet broomfaggot, and kneeled down thereon, and read the Efty-first Psalm, till he came to these words,

'The sacrifice of God is a contrite spirit; a conrite and a broken heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.'

common sap,-one above, the other attitudes.
beneath: one respected, flourishing,
shooting forth in the open air; he other
despised, half buried in the ground,
trodden under foot by those who would
crush it: both living, the Anglican as
well as the Puritan, the one in spite of
the effort made to destroy it, the other
in spite of the care taken to develop

it.

All this was very free

very loose, very far from our mod ern decency. But pass over youthfui bluster; take man in his great moments, in prison, in danger, or indeed when old age arrives, when he has come to judge of life; take him, above all, in the country, on his estate, far from any town, in the church of the village where he is lord; or again, The court has its religion, like the when he is alone in the evening, at his country-a sincere and winning religion. table, listening to the prayer offered Amid the Pagan poetry which up to up by his chaplain, having no books the Revolution always had the ear of but some big folio of dramas, well dog'sthe world, we find gradually piercing eared by his pages, and his prayer-book through and rising higher a grave and and Bible; you may then understand grand idea which sent its roots to the how the new religion tightens its hold depth of the public mind. Many poets, on these imaginative and serious minds. Drayton, Davies, Cowley, Giles Fletch- It does not shock them by a narrow er, Quarles, Crashaw, wrote sacred rigor; it does not fetter the flight of histories, pious or moral verses, noble their mind; it does not attempt to extinstanzas on death and the immortality guish the buoyant flame of their fancy; of the soul, on the frailty of things it does not proscribe the beautiful: it human, and on the supreme providence preserves more than any reformed in which alone man finds the support church the noble pomp of the ancien of his weakness and the consolation of worship, and rolls under the domes of is sufferings. In the greatest prose its cathedrals the rich modulations, the writers, Bacon, Burton, Sir Thomas majestic harmonies of its grave, organ Browne, Raleigh, we see spring up the led music. It is its characteristic not to fruits of veneration, thoughts about the be in opposition to the world, but, on obscure beyond; in short, faith and the contrary, to draw it nearer to itself, prayer. Several prayers written by by bringing itself nearer to it. By its Bacon are amongst the finest known; secular condition as well as by its exand the courtier Raleigh, whilst writing ternal worship, it is embraced by and of the fall of empires, and how the it embraces it: its head is the Queen, barbarous nations had destroyed this it is a part of the Constitution, it sends grand and magnificent Roman Empire, its dignitaries to the House of Lords; ended his book with the ideas and it suffers its priests to marry; its benetone of a Bossuet.* Picture Saint fices are in the nomination of great Paul's in London, and the fashionable families; its chief members are the people who used to meet there; the younger sons of these same families: gentlemen who noisily made the row-by all these channels it imbibes the e's of their spurs resound on entering, looked around and carried on conversation during service, who swore by God's eyes, God's eyelids, who amongst the vaults and chapels showed off thei- beribboned shoes, their chains, scaves, satin doublets, velvet cloaks, their braggadocio manners and stage

"O eloquent, just, and mightie Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawne together all the farre stretched greatnesse, all the pride, crueltie, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet."

spirit of the age. In its hands, therefore, reformation cannot become hostile to science, to poetry, to the liberal ideas of the Renaissance. Nay, in the nobles of Elizabeth and James I.. as in the cavaliers of Charles I., it tolerates artistic tastes, philosophical curiosity, the ways of the world, and the sentiment of the beautiful. The alliance is so strong, that, under Cromwell, the ecclesiastics in a mass were dismissed for their king's sake, and the cavaliers died wholesale for the Church. The two societies mutually touch and are confounded together. If several poets are pious, several ecclesiastics are