introduced on the subject of popular education, or against such infamous laws as those which taxed the poor man's bread? Clearly it must be seen by every body that occasion will arise when it is the duty of the minister to leave his ordinary line of action, and throw the whole weight of his influence into popular movements for the attainment of important political objects. It is necessary, however, for him to be reminded that if he be ever dabbling in politics, or mixing with political agitation, he will receive injury in his own religious character, and inflict injury upon the cause of religion. Let him also be reminded that when constrained by a sense of duty to enter the arena of political agitation, he should beware of getting involved in the meshes of political partisanship. A minister ought never to be a party man, either in ecclesiastical or political matters. Above all things, let him remember that he is a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ, that his great business is to promote the religious culture of men, and that everything else must be kept in subordination to religion.

ART. V.-SIR HARRY VANE.

N the small parish of Hadlow, in the county of Kent, England, and on some unnoted day of the year 1612, Harry Vane was born. It was two hundred and fifty years ago; yet so eventful was the age he lived in, and so did he identify himself with those principles which never die, that even now his birth has almost its first freshness. He was born to be the statesman of a cause. In his own language, often repeated, in the language of Milton and of Algernon Sydney likewise, in the familiar converse of that whole company who struck for the English Commonwealth, it was called The Cause, The good Cause,―The glorious Cause.

Born to be the statesman of that cause, he must be trained for it. It is well for him to begin his training early. But well or ill, it will begin. He is born in no mummy age. If there are any seeds of great actions within those swaddling bands they will not lie there long. The boy will soon be out in a sun, and air, and soil, where, if he is a statesman, he must grow into one fast. Politics is the air, and sun, and soil of the age, and of his father's life. Sir Henry Vane, the elder, had been knighted the year before, and was elected to Parliament two years after his son's birth. The family, in both branches, inherited rank, wealth, and public life. We may be sure that in such a household, the great events, which were passing, would not pass in silence.

Even in this time of our civil war, we can afford to print the successive volumes of the most beautiful edition of the life and

works of Bacon. But when Harry Vane was a boy of six years, Bacon was rising into his greatest fame; three years after he had fallen into his disgrace. The guilty love and ruin of Somerset, and the rapid rise of Buckingham at Court, were filling all men's ears. Sir Walter Raleigh also, after a career which even now reads like a romance, had been, by Jaines's command, beheaded. James himself was doing his worst-and this execution of Raleigh was a part of his worst-to get the Spanish Infanta as the wife of the Prince Charles. For this, to the grief and shame of his subjects, he was neglecting the Protestant interests on the continent. That Anglican saint, William Laud, was fast climbing into influence; busy just now at Oxford, ferreting out the Puritans, and reporting their delinquencies at high quarters. The Puritans, in the increasing vigour of church conformity, and in the increasing light, doubtless, of the Bible of King James, were organizing in conventicles, as Separatists, and Baptists, and Independents; were emigrating to Holland. When Vane was in his eighth year, that little company of them were sailing in the Mayflower to their December home on Plymouth bay. By the time that he was ready to be sent to a public school, the lines had begun to be distinctly drawn between the court and the country parties of England. If we can reason from the experiences of American boys of to-day to those of English boys of two centuries ago, it is not unlikely that young Vane had chosen, ere he entered his teens, his party. Was it the party of the king and his father, or the party of the English people? It is too early to ask. We shall need to advance to the second stage of his training before we can find an answer.

He was under court influences at home, we have seen; he could hardly have been under them at school. His memoirs tell us little definitely, of his school or college life. He was placed in one of those schools, of which we have all read in Tom Brown, as boiling with gay life, we should hope then, as now. It was at Westminster. The master's name could not have been improved if Dickens had christened it—it was Lambert Osbaldeston. He was

a famous teacher. Whether he was a Puritan at the time we do not know. But for a letter which he wrote to Lord Keeper Williams, about eight years afterwards, he got himself, and the Lord Keeper, too, into trouble. The letter shows that the old master would not have been likely to make his scholars honour Laud too much. For he refers to him as "the little vermin," "the urchin," the "hocus pocus." The punishment inflicted in this case, because of this private letter found in Williams' house, will show the "iron rule." Williams, being already in the tower, was fined £8,000 for receiving the letter, and Osbaldeston, for writing it, was fined £5,000, deprived of his office; and sentenced to have his ears tacked to the pillory in the presence of his scholars. Vane's preparation for

statesmanship in the cause did not lose anything, we may safely warrant, under his first master. We know also that among Vane's own mates at this school were Thomas Scott and Arthur Hazlerig, both of them ardent Republicans, and one of them a regicide judge.

But whatever the influence of his master may have been; however, up to this time, his natural or acquired sympathies may have swayed him, one event in his life settled the matter decisively. He became a Puritan Christian. "God," he says, "was pleased to lay the foundation of repentance, for the bringing me home to himself, revealing His Son in me." In minds which suppose that politics means place-hunting, and that a religious man is somebody who is suspended, like Mohammed's coffin, between heaven and earth, not touching either, it may seem singular to say that Harry Vane's conversion determined him to his political career. But there are minds which, despite all that is seen in California or at Washington, can still define politics to be the noble science and art of government. And among the first things a Puritan learns to pray for are liberty and country. Vane received that religion which regenerates and spiritualizes life, if ever a man received it. But the loadstone that drew his soul to God, did not spirit his body away from the earth. Nay, he believed that the God who was drawing all his affections, was Himself, just now, at least, especially in England. If he would find him whom his soul loved, he must find him there. For politics in England then had to do with the question whether there should be Liberty or Laudism in Church and State. On which side of such a contest a true statesman ought to be, on which side the Moral Governor himself was, could not be a matter of doubt to Vane. Up to this time he had been fond of good fellowship, and lived the life of a gentleman's jolly son. Henceforth life became a serious and responsible work. The events that were passing, the problems which the roused heart of England was bent on solving, were to be more than a gentleman's pastime.

Sir Henry Vane, utterly out of sympathy with this change in his son, and thinking, perhaps, that it was only a boy's conversion, which could be turned about again at Oxford-a famous place for perversions-had him entered as a gentleman commoner at Magdalen College. Laud's power was very great at Oxford then. During Vane's residence there, three members of the University, one of them from his own college, were tried before the king, and expelled, for attacking the Laudian Arminianism then becoming prevalent in the English church, and two masters of colleges were severely reprimanded. Vane never liked persecution for opinion's sake, and we may be certain that these transactions had no tendency to dispose the young Puritan toward the court. Besides, the

sympathies of collegians are always against authority in favour of freedom. The German universities of 1848 were the hot beds of revolution. The colleges of New England and of New England's foster states of the West have furnished some of the hottest blood yet registered in this warm civil season which is on us. So Harry Vane came forth from Oxford unpurged of his pestilent Puritanism. He had even declined to take the oath of allegiance and supremacy. Milton, though four years older, had already twice taken the same oath at Cambridge without scruples. But this son of a Privy Councillor could not say ex animo, that the king was the supreme governor of the realm, that the Book of Common Prayer contained nothing contrary to the Word of God, and that the book of Articles was agreeable to that word. He had not learned oathtaking in the school of the seven "Essays and Reviews."

Departing from his scholastic retreat without his degrees, he visits the continent, passes through France, and spends some time. at Genoa. Travel on the continent was then, as it is to-day, the fashionable method of completing education. The fast young gentlemen especially loved the dissolute morals and art of Papal Italy. But Genoa drew Vane's heart. The home of Calvin determined the steps of his pilgrimage. The republican government at Leyden challenged his admiration. The young traveller returned, says his enemy Clarendon, full of prejudice and bitterness against the church, both against the form of government and the Liturgy. His father, comptroller of the king's household, and full of ambitious views for himself and family, was as bitterly disappointed. The youth was left alone with Charles; he was closeted with his old master's "little vermin," Laud; but it was useless. The boy's conversion had not worn off.

What was before him now? He had had the usual training. He is to have an unusual one before he enters upon his great career for the cause. Hs is allowed to go to America. At the early age of twenty-three he arrived in Boston. He had not a little to learn yet, and the Massachusetts colony was a wonderful school. It was indeed a small affair in 1635. After seven years could more than 3,000 people have been living in its log cabins ? One of our modern gold colonies in a single year would surpass it many times in population and in wealth. But not in virtue, not in that constructive power which creates institutions, not in its ultimate influence upon human progress. It is easy at our advance of general information to criticise sharply certain narrow notions of our fathers. But that colony can teach the America of to-day as much as the America of to-day can teach it. The germ of the only thorough Republicanism that can live long in the world, a Republicanism founded on a pure religion and an enforced universal education, was there. Vane found, what the earth nowhere else

could show, a community, in which the votes of the majority of the whole people decided, under the Lord Christ, all questions, both in Church and State. In the coming increase of the Independent churches and the Independent party in England, during the civil war, the churches of this colony were to furnish the models, and their ministers were to furnish the weapons of argument. We are familiar with the reactionary influence of America upon Europe on politics in later days. But it has been fitly remarked, in a footnote of Palfrey's worthy volumes, that the story has never been told us of the part which the Massachusetts colony played in favour of English liberty within the first twenty years of its settlement. It was a select Providence which brought our young statesman to these shores to take his novitiate.

But no young man of his rank, manners, nobleness of carriage, and, shall we say it, of his long hair, could expect to enter that colony without learning that it is difficult for any zealous and persecuted body of men to be thoroughly liberal, when they have become comparatively strong. Those men had not come to be liberal to others, but to be free themselves.

Vane was sincerely a Puritan, and theologically a Calvinist like themselves. He joined at once the church at Boston. He entered with relish into the signal privileges of hearing the pure gospel which he loved. He was honoured with the election of governor of the colony in a year after his arrival. But he belonged to one of the marked types of thinking men: he loved the mystical element; he had real, though no formal affinities with those who, a few years later, under the name of Quakers, were exalting the Spirit of God within us above that dry logical use of the letter which killeth. It fell to his first experience as a practical statesman to have to deal with the first brisk controversy of New England theology. This region has had many a hard one since. But the one which Mrs. Anne Hutchinson kindled convulsed the little canoe of state. The young governor, with one of his pastors, took the woman's side.

The prime point disputed was this-Is a man Christ's man because he exhibits the outward doings of a disciple, or because Christ's Spirit gives him direct witness in his feelings? The Biblical doctrine blends both reasons in one. Anne Hutchinson pushed the inward witness into contempt of the outward. Doubtless, the ministers who opposed her, seemed, in the ardour of argument, to push the outward into contempt of the inward. The result, however, proved that the ministers were really sounder than the woman, or at least than her disciples. The only two ministers of the colony who supported her, both afterwards confessed themselves wrong. But for the time they worked with her, and so did Vane. Having the power the majority abused it. They failed to