a

Far more comfort it were for us (so small Jent Protestant sects are not absolutely Is the jcy we take in these strifes) to labour under the same yoke, as men that look for the true, at least they are free from all imsame eternal reward of their labours, to be con- piety and from all error damnable in joined with you in bands of indissoluble love | itself, or destructive of salvation and amity, to live as if our persons being Thus is developed a new school of many, our souls were but one, rather than in such dismembered sort to spend our few and polemics, a theology, a solid and rawretched days in a tedious prosecuting of tional apologetics, rigorous in its arwearise me contentions.'

guments, capable of expansion, corIn fact, the conclusions of the great- ing independence of personal judgment

firmed by science, and which, authoriz. si theologians are for such harmony: at the same time with the intervention abandoning an oppressive practice of the natural reason, leaves religion they grasp a liberal spirit. If by its within reach of the world and the espolitical structure the English Church

tablishments of the past struggling is persecuting, by its doctrinal struc

with the future. ture it is tolerant; it needs the reason of the laity too much to refuse it lib; these, a prose-poet, gifted with an imag

A writer of genius appears amongst erty; it lives in a world too cultivated ination like Spenser and Shakspeare, and thoughtful to proscribe, thought -Jeremy Taylor, who, from the bent and culture John Hales, its most of his mind as well as from circumeminent doctor, declared several times that he would renounce the Church of stances, was destined to present the al

liance of the Renaissance with the Ref. England to-morrow if she insisted on ormation, and to carry into the pulpit the doctrine that other Christians

A would be damned ; and that men be the ornate style of the court. lieve other people to be damned only and admired by men of fashion for his

preacher at St. Paul's, appreciated when they desire them to be so.* It was he again, a theologian, a preben- youthful and fresh beauty and his dary, who advises men to trust to graceful bearing, as also for his splenthemselves alone in religious matters;

did diction; patronized and promoted to leave nothii ; to authority, or an.

by Archbishop Laud, he wrote for the tiquity, or the majority ; to use their king a defence of episcopacy; became own reason in believing, as they use taken, ruined, twice imprisoned by the

chaplain to the king's army; was “their own legs in walking;” to act and be men in mind as well as in the

Parliamentarians; married a natural rest; and to regard as cowardly and daughter of Charles I.; then, after impious the borrowing of docbrine and the Restoration, was loaded with hop sloth of thought. So Chillingworth, a

ors; became a bishop, member of the notably militant and loyal mind, the Privy Council, and vice-chancellor cl most exact, the most penetrating, and the university of Dublin. In every the most convincing of controversial- passage of his life, fortunate or other. ists, first Protestant, then Catholic, wise, private or public, we see that he then Protestant again and forever, has the spirit of the cavaliers and courtiers,

is an Anglican, a royalist, imbued with the courage to say that these great not with their vices. On the contrary, changes, wrought in himself, and by there was never a better or more up himself, through study and research, are, of all his actions, those which sat: right man, more zealous in his duties, isfy him most. He maintains that

more tolerant by principle; so that, eason alone applied to Scripture preserving a Christian gravity and has no claim in it; that nothing is classical erudition, and its liberal pught to persuade men ; that authority purity, he received from the Renais

sance only its rich imagination, its more against religion than to force religion ; that the great principle of the spirit. Put he had these gifts entire, Reformation is liberty of conscience; and original of the men of the world,

as they existed in the most brilliant and that if the doctrines of the differ- in Sir Fhilip Sidney, Lord Bacon, Sir church in England. See also Ecc. Pol. i. Thomas Browne, with the graces, book iü. 461-481.

See the same doctrines in splendors, refinements which are char Jeremy Taylor, Liberty of Prophen ing, 1647 acteristic of these sensitive: and crea

# Clarendon.

a

tive geniuses, and yet with the redun- Aower, firework after fi: ework, so that dancies, singularities, incongruities in the brightness becomes misty with cvitable in an age when excess of spirit sparks, and the sight ends in a haze. prevented the soundness of taste. On the other hand, and just by virtud Like all these writers, like Montaigne, of this same turn of mind, Taylor he was imbued with classic antiquity; imagines objects, not vaguely and feein the pulpit he quotes Greek and Lat- bly, by some indistinct general concepin anecdotes, passages from Seneca, tion, but precisely, entire, as they are, verses of Lucretius and Euripides, and with their visible color, their proper this side by side with texts from the form, the multitude of true and partic Bible, from the Gospels, and the Fa. ular details which distinguish them it. thers. Cant was not yet in vogue; the their species. He is not acquainted two great_sources of teaching, Chris- with them by hearsay; he has seen tian and Pagan, ran side by side; they them. Better, he sees them now and were collected in the same vessel, with makes them to be seen. Read the folout imagining that the wisdom of rea- lowing extract, and say if it does not son and nature could mar the wisdom seem to have been copied from a hosof faith and revelation. Fancy these pital, or from a field of battle : strange sermons, in which the two eru.

“And what can we complain of the weakditions, Hellenic and Evangelic, flow ness of our strengths, or the pressures of distogether with their texts, and each text eases, when we see a poor soldier stand in a in its own language ; in which, to prove and his cold apt to be relieved only by the

breach almost starved with cold and hunger, that fathers are often unfortunate in

eats of anger, a fever, or a fired musket, and cheir children, the author brings for his hunger slacked by a greater pain and a ward one after the other, Chabrias, huge fear? This man shall stand in his arms Germanicus, Marcus Aurelius, Hor- and faint, weary and watchful, and at night

aud wounds, patiens luminis atque solis, pale tensius, Quintus Fabius Maximus, shall have a bullet pulled out of his flesh, and Scipio Africanus, Moses, and Samuel; shivers from his bones, and endure his mouth where, in the form of comparisons and to be sewed up from a violent rent to its own

dimensions; and all this for a man whom he illustrations is heaped up the spoil of never saw, or, if he did, was not noted by him; histories, and authorities on botany, but one that shall condemn him to the Kallows astronomy, zoology, which the cycló if he runs away from all this misery." ** pædias and scientific fancies at that This is the advantage of a full imagtime poured into the brain. Taylor ination over ordinary reason. It pro will relate to you the history of the duces in a lump twenty or thirty ideas, bears of Pannonia, which, when wound- and as many images, exhausting the ed, will press the iron deeper home; subject which the other only outlines or of the apples of Sodom, which are and sketches. There are a thousand beautiful to the gaze, but full within circumstances and shades in every of rottenness and worms;

and many event; and they are all grasped in others of the same kind. For it was a living words like these :characteristic of men of this age and

“ For so have I seen the little purls of a school, not to possess a mind swept, spring sweat through the bottom of a bank, and levelled, regulated, laid out in straight intenerate the stubborn pavement, till it hath paths, like the seventeenth century made it fit for the impression of a child's foot ; writers in France, and like the gardens of a misty morning, till it had opened its way

and it was despised, like the descending pearls at Versailles, but full, and crowded and made a stream large enough to carry away with circumstantial facts, complete the ruins of the undermined strand, and to in dramatic scenes, little colored pictures, despised drops were grown into an artificial

vade the neighbouring gardens ; but then the pellmell and badly dusted; so that, river, and an intolerable mischief. So are the lost in confusion and dust, the modern first entrances of sin, stopped with the antispectator cries out at their pedantry dotes of a hearty prayer, and checked into and coarseness. Metaphors swarm

sobriety by the eye of a reverend man, or the

counsels of a single sermon; but when such one above the other jumbled, block- beginnings are neglected, and our religion hath ing each other's path, as in Shak- not in it so much philosophy as to think an. speare. We think to follow one, and a second begins, then a third cutting into

Jeremy Taylor's Works, ed. Eden, 1849

a

thing evil as long as we can endure it, they choked in a white neckerchief, with a grow up to ulcers and pestilential evils: they prayer-book in his nand. We confound destroy the soul by their abode, why at their first entry might have been killed with the piety with decency, propriety, perma. pressure of a little Enger." +

nent and perfect regularity. We pro.

scribe to a man of faith all candid All extremes meet in that imagina- speech, all bold gesture, all fire and tion. The cavaliers who heard him,dash in word or act; we are shocked found, as in Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, the crude copy of the most laughter which shook his mightv

by Luther's rude words, the bursts of coarse and unclean truth, and the Light music of the most graceful and his plain and free speaking, the auda

paunch, his rages uke a working-man. airy fancies; the smell and horrors of cious familiarity with which he treats a dissecting room, and all on a sudden Christ and the Deity.* We do not the freshress and cheerfulness of smiling dawn ; the hateful detail of lepro- recklessness are precisely signs of en.

perceive that these freedoms and this sy, its white spots, its inner rotten- tire belief, that warm and immoderate ness; and then this lovely picture of a conviction is too sure of itself to be !ark, rising amid the early perfumes of tied down to an irreproachable style, the fields :-

that impulsive religion consists not of “ For so have I seen a lark rising from his punctilios but of enotions. It is a bed of grass, and soaring upwards, singing as poem, the greatest of all, a poem be, he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and climb lieved in ; this is why these men found above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind, it at the end of their poesy : the way and his motion made irregular and inconstant, of looking at the world, adopted by descending more at every breath of the tem, Shakspeare and all the tragic poets pest, than it could recover by the vibration and frequent weighing of his wings, till the little led to it; another step, and

Jacques creature was forced to sit down and pant, and Hamlet, would be there. That vası stay till the storm was over ; and then it made obscurity, that black unexplored ocean, a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if the unknown country," which they it had learned music and motion from an angel, as he passed sometimes through the air, about saw on the verge of our sad life, who his ministries here below. So is the prayer of knows whether it is not bounded by a good man." I

another shore ? The troubled notion And he continues with the charm, of the shadowy beyond is national, sometimes with the very words, of and this is why the national renaisShakspeare. In the preacher, as well sance at this time became Christian. as in the poet, as well as in all the When Taylor speaks of death he only cavaliers and all the artists of the time, takes up and works out a thought the imagination is so full, that it reaches which Shakspeare had already sketchthe real, even to its filth, and the ideal ed: as far as its heaven.

“All the succession of time, all the changes How could true religious sentiment in nature, all the varieties of light and darkthus accommodate itself to such a frank ness, the thousand thousands of accidents in

the world, and every contingency to every and worldly gait? This, however, is man, and to every creature, doth preach our what it has done; and more--the lat. funeral sermon, and calls us to look and see ter has generated the former. With how the old sexton Time throws up the earth, Taylor, as well as with the others, bold and digs a grave where we must lay vur sins o

our sorrows, and sow our bodies, till they rise poetry leads to profound faith. If this again in a fair or in an intolerable eternity.” Jliance astonishes us to-day, it is be- For beside this final death, which cause in this respect people have swallows us whole, there are partial grown pedantic.

We take a formal deaths which devour us piecemeal : man for a religious man. We are content to see him stiff in his black coat, p. 30: When Jesus Christ was born, he doubt

* Luther's Table Talk, ed. Hazlitt, No. 187

less cried and wept like other children, and his * Sermon xvi., Of Growth in Sin.

mother tended him as other mothers te-nd their "We have already opened up this dung- children. As he grew up he was subn issive to hill covered with snow, which was indeed on his parents, and waited on them, and carried the outside white as the spots of leprosy." his supposed father's dinner to him; and when

Golden Grove Sermins : V. “The Return he came back, Mary no doubt often said, Prayer.”

“My dear little Jesus, where hast thou been ?"

ܪ

“ Every revolution which the sun makes Thus these powerful words roll on, about the world, divides between life and sublime as an organ motett; this unideath ; and death possesses both those porcons by the next morrow; and we are dead to versal crushing out of human vanities a. nose months which we have already lived, has the funeral grandeur of a tragedy , and we shall never live them over again and piety in this instance proceeds

fren: still God makes little periods of our age. First we change our world, when we come from the eloquence, and genius leads to faith. womb to feel the warmth of the sun. Then we All the powers and all the tenderness sleep 2:d enter into the image of death, in of the soul are moved. It is not a cold whic: state we are unconcerned in all the rigorist who speaks; it is a man, a changes of the world: and if our mothers or our nurses die, or a wild boar destroy our vine- moved man, with senses and a heart, yards, or our king be sick, we regard it not, who has become a Christian not by but during that state are as disinterest as if our mortification, but by the development eyes were ked with the clay that weeps in of his whole being : the bowels of the earth. At the end of seven years our teeth fall and die before us, repre- “ Reckon but from the sprightfulness of senting a formal prologue to the tragedy; and will every seven years it is odds but we shall mouth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes of finish the last scene: and when pature, or fexture of the joints of five and trenty, to the

childhood, from the vigorousness and strong chance, or vice, takes our body in pieces, hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathweakening some parts and loosing others, we someness and horror of a three days' burial, taste the grave and the solemnities of our own

and we shall perceive the distance to be very funerals, first in those parts that ministered to great and very strange. But so have I seen a vice, and next in them that served for orna. ment, and in a short time even they that served and at first it was fair as the morning, and full

rose newly springing from the clefts of its head, for necessity become useless, and entangled with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece ; but like the wheels of a broken clock Baldness is when a ruder breath had ed open its virgin but a dressing to our funerals, the proper orna, modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and ment of mourning, and of a person entered unripe retirements, it began to put on darkvery far into the regions and possession of ness, and to decline to softness and the symp, death : and we have many more of the same

toms of a sickly age ; it bowed the head, and signification ; gray hairs, rotten teeth,. dim broke its stalk, and at night having lost some eyes, trembling joints, short breath, stiff limbs, of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell

into the wrinkled skin, short memory, decayed appetite. portion of weeds and outworn faces. The same Every day's necessity calls for a reparation of is the portion of every man and every woman, that portion which death fed on all night, when

the heritage of worms and serpents, rottenness we lay in his lap and slept in his outer cham- and cold dishonour, and our beauty so changed, bers.' The very spirits of a man prey upon the that our acquaintance quickly knew us not ; daily portion of bread and flesh, and every and that change mingled with so much horror, meal is a rescue from one death, and lays up or else meets so with our fears and weak disfor another; and while we think a thought, we coursings, that they who six hours ago tended die ; and the clock strikes, and reckons on our

upon us either with charitable or ambitious portion of eternity: we form our words with services, cannot without some regret stay in the breath of our nostrils, we have the less to the room alone where the body lies stripped of

for
every word we speak." *

its life and honour. I have read of a fair young Beyond all these destructions Other German gentleman who living often refused to destructions are at work; chance friends' desire by giving way that after a few

bę pictured, but put off the importunity of his mows, us down as well as nature, and days' burial they might send a painter to his we are the prey of accident as well as vault, and if they saw cause for it draw the im

age of his death unto the life: they did so, and of necessity :

found his face half eaten, and his midriff and “ Thus nature calls us to meditate of death backbone full of serpents; and so he stands by those things which are the instruments of pictured among his armed ancestors. So does acting it: and God by all the variety of His the fairest beauty change, and it will be as bad providence makes us see death every where, in with you as me; and then what servants shall all variety of circumstances, and dressed up for

we have to wait upon us in the grave? what all the sancics, and the expectation of every cleanse away the moist and unwholesome cloud

friends to visit us? what officious people to single person.t And how many teeming mothers have rejoiced over their swelling reflected upon our faces from the sides of the wombs, and pleased themselves in becoming

weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers the chanrels of blessing to a family, and the for our funeral.” * midwife hath quickly bound their heads ard feet and carried them forth to burial? I

Brought hither, like Hamlet to the You can go no whither but you tread upon a burying-ground, amid the skulls which dead man's bones." ;

he recognizes, and under the oppres

sion of the death which he touches, * Holy Dying, ed. Eden, ch. i. sec. i. p. 267. man needs but a slight effort to see s 1 lbid. 267

live upon

new world arise in his heart. HIC seeks No culture here, ng phi-osophy, no the remedy of his sadness in the idea sentiment of harmoniuus and pagan of eternal justice, and implores it with beauty. Conscience alone spoke, and a breadth of words which makes the its restlessness had become a terror. prayer a hymn in prose, as beautiful The sons of the shopkeeper, of the as a work of art :

farmer, who read the Bible in the barn “ Eternal God, Almighty Fath. :r of men and

or the counting-house, amid the barrels angels, by whose care and providence I am or the wool-bags, did not take matters preserved and blessed, comf rted and assisted, as a handsome cavalier bred up in the

humbly beg of Thee to pardon the sins and old mythology, and refined by an elegant follies of this day, the weakness of my services, Italian education. and the strengths of my passions, the rashness

They took them of my words, and the vanity and evil of my ac- tragically, sternly examined themselves, siens. O just and dear God, how long shall I pricked their hearts with their scruples, carless my sins, and pray against them, and filled their imaginations with the ven. yefall under them? O let it be so no more ; le: me never return to the follies of which I am geance of God and the terrors of the ashamed, which bring sorrow and death, and Bible. A gloomy epic, terrible and Thy displeasure, worse than death. Give me grand as the Edda, was fermenting in a command over my inclinations and a perfect their melancholy imaginations. The hatred of sin, and a love to Thee above all the desires of this world. Be pleased to bless and steeped themselves in texts of Saint preserve me this night from all sin and all vion Paul, in the thundering menaces of the lence of chance, and the malice of the spirits of prophets; ihey burdened their minds darkness: watch over me in my sleep; and with the pitiless doctrines of Calvin ; whether I sleep or wake, let me be Thy servant. Be Thou first and last in all my thoughts, they admitted that the majority of men and the guide and continual assistance of all were predestined to eternal damna. my actions. Preserve my body,, pardon the tion: * many believed that this multi sin of my soul, and sanctify my spirit. Let me tude were criminal before their birth; uways live holily and soberly, and when I die that God willed, foresaw, provided for receive my soul into Thy hands." *

their ruin; that He designed their pun

ishment from all eternity ; that He crea V.

ted them simply to give them up to it. This was, however, but an imperfected creature, free grace, God's sheer

Nothing but grace can save the wretchReformation, and the official religion favor, which He only grants to a few, was too closely bound up with the and which He distributes not according world to undertake to cleanse it thor to the struggles and works of men, but oughly: if it repressed the excesses according to the arbitrary, choice of of vice, it did not attack its source; His single and absolute will. We are and the paganism of the Renaissance, children of wrath,” plague-stricken, following its bent, already under James and condemned from our birth; and I. issued in the corruption, orgie, dis- wherever we look in all the expanse of gusting, and drunken habits, provok- heaven, we find but thunderbolts flash ing and gross sensuality, which sub- ing to destroy us. Fancy, if you can sequently under the Restoration stank the effects of such an idea on solitary like a sewer in the sun. But under and morose minds, such as this race neath the established Protestantism and climate generates. Several per, was propagated the forbidden Protes sons thought themselves damned, and tantism: the yeomen were settling their went groaning about the streets; others faith like the gentlemen, and already hardly ever slept. They were beside the Puritans made headway under the themselves, always imagining that they Anglicans.

felt the hand of God or the claw of the • The Golden Grove.

devil upon them. An extraordinary + See in Beaumont and Fletcher's Thierry power, immense means of action, were and Theodoret the characters of Bawder, suddenly opened up in the soul, and Protalyce, and Brunhalt. In The Custom of the Country, by the same authors, several there was no barrier in the moral life scenes represent the inside of an infamous house, -- a frequent thing, by the way, in the dramas of that time; but here the boarders in