cried so mightily up, though it hath not a good liking in me, though I had tried by twice or three times reading to bring myself to think it witty.'

At the theatre:

· October 5.-To King's house; and there, going in, met with Knipp, and she took us up into the tireing-rooms: and to the woman's shift, where Nell was dressing herself, and was all unready, and is very pretty, prettier than I thought. And into the sceneroom, and there sat down, and she gave us fruit: and here I read the questions to Knipp, while she answered me through all her part of Flora Figarys, which was acted to-day. But, Lord to see how they're both painted would make a man mad, and did make me loath them; and what base company of men comes among them, and how lewdly they talk!

Makes a great speech at the Bar of the House:

March 5, 1668.-All my fellow-officers, and all the world that was within hearing, did congratulate me, and cry up my speech as the best thing they ever heard. . . . My Lord Barkeley did cry me up for what they had heard of it; and others, Parliamentmen there, about the King, did say that they never heard such a speech in their lives delivered in that manner. . . . Everybody that saw me almost came to me, as Joseph Williamson and others, with such eulogies as cannot be expressed. From thence I went to Westminster Hall, where I met Mr. G. Montagu, who came to me and kissed me, and told me that he had often heretofore kissed my hands, but now he would kiss my lips; protesting that I was another Cicero, and said, all the world said the same of me.'

This, it is true, is not literature, if we insist on finish, imagery, or sentiment; but we may accept it on other ground. How far above price were so minute and living a picture of the age of Bede, or of earlier and later ages that appear only in the haze of general descriptions, dates, numbers, and results!

Baxter, an eminent dissenter, a great sufferer, yet a voluminous writer, and an indefatigable pastor, is the author of a wellknown manual of devotion,-The Saint's Everlasting Rest. It is like the Puritan fervent, masculine, solid, direct, unadorned, unpolished. Rarely has a book, in its day, aided so many souls to rise in spiritual flights, or to keep the heights which they were competent to gain. However, Milton and Bunyan exceptedthe glory of Puritanism is not in its literary remains, but in its moral results. Only once, in this period, does it attain eloquence, and beauty, and then by accident, in The Pilgrim's Progress, the work of an inspired tinker, a birth of passionate feeling in a time of self-conscious art.

History.-Turning to the historical field, we find several industrious collectors of materials, the most prominent of whom are Dugdale, Rymer, and Wood. Fuller's well-known Worthies contains sketches of about eighteen hundred individuals. Of compositions original, systematic, and dispassionate, there is a

complete dearth. The most deserving are Clarendon's Great Rebellion, Burnet's Own Times, and his Reformation. The first, a Royalist, is a professed apologist of one side. His style, often prolix, is on the whole manly; with sometimes a majesty and beauty hitherto unknown. The chief merit of the second is liveliness and perspicuity. His style, though careless and familiar, partakes fairly of the improvements of his time.

The advancing spirit of scepticism was purging history of its falsehoods. We have traced its progress from poetic narration; and ere long we shall see it pass into philosophical interpretation, look beneath the surface of events for the springs of action, search under facts for principles, becoming more humane and democratic as it becomes more critical and just. It is important to understand well the significance of this tendency; for if the historical method advances, it is because general knowledge advances; if the way of contemplating the past is different, it is because the way of contemplating the present is different. Each is a phase of the same vast movement.

Theology. The spirit which Bacon carried into philosophy, Cromwell into politics, and Chillingworth into theology, now culminated in open revolt. Belief in a God, coupled with disbelief in a written revelation, became frequent. Lord Herbert, brother of the saintly poet, may be considered the founder of the English school of deists. All religions are by him reduced to one, which is sufficient, he maintains, for all the wants of mankind. This universal system consists of five articles:

1. That there is one supreme God.

2. That He is to be worshipped.

3. That piety and virtue are the principal part of His worship.

4. That man should repent of sin, and that if he does so, God will pardon it.

5. That there are rewards for the good, and punishments for the evil, partly in this life, and partly in the next.

In that political and religious reaction which followed the Cromwellian period, Deism arose in its extreme forms, frequently allied with the democratic, sometimes with the revolutionary, tendencies of the nation. Hobbes, however, the greatest living

anti-Christian writer, was a servile advocate of royalty and of the right of the state to coerce individual opinions: 'Thought is free, but when it comes to confession of faith, the private reason must submit to the public, that is to say, to God's lieutenant.' He acknowledges the being of God, but denies that we know any more of Him than that He exists:

By the visible things of this world and their admirable order, a man may conceive there is a cause of them, which men call God, and yet not have an idea or image of Him in his mind. And they that make little inquiry into the natural causes of things are inclined to feign several kinds of powers invisible, and to stand in awe of their own imaginations. And this fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion.'

He also denies free-will; asserts the materiality of the soul, and teaches that the belief in a future state is merely 'a belief grounded on other men's saying that they knew it supernaturally, or that they knew those, that knew them, that knew others, that knew it supernaturally.' He cuts with remorseless knife at the very heart of the general faith. To say God hath spoken to man in a dream, is no more than to say man dreamed that God hath spoken to him.' 'To say one hath seen a vision or heard a voice, is to say he hath dreamed between sleeping and waking.' These statements, one and all, are but applications of his metaphysical theory, which, in connection with its results, will be considered in its proper place.

The common ferment bred an astonishing irruption of deists, Shaftesbury, Toland, Tindal, Mandeville, Bolingbroke; but, from Hobbes downward, Deism grew more and more materialistic and sensual. As might be expected, its career was transient. Fifty years after the Revolution, it was drowned in forgetfulness. For the system which it proposed to abolish, it could offer, in its highest type, no substitute but lofty and dissolving speculation, impotent at least in that stage of civilization-to supply motives and means for right conduct.

--

Free-thinkers roused antagonists: leaders of experimental science, as Boyle and Newton; illustrious scholars, as Bentley and Clarke; popular wits, as Addison and Swift; profound philosophers, as Cudworth and Locke. Apologies, refutations, expositions abounded and multiplied. The character of theological literature, however, had changed. In all this discussion, quotations are comparatively rare. Christians no longer combated by

authority, but by argument. An incessant reference to proof had indisposed the public to receive the traditions that had once enslaved their fathers. It is observable, too, that the progress of Arminianism, as opposed to Calvinism, was changing the face of the English Church. This was displayed among those who, about the epoch of the Restoration, were commonly known as Latitudinarians, distinguished from High Churchmen by their strong aversion to every compromise with Popery,- and from most Puritans as well, by their opposition to dogma, by their insistence upon rightness of life rather than correctness of opinion, by their advocacy of tolerance and comprehension as the basis of Christian unity. The questions most freely discussed or illustrated by divines were 'The Bible the only rule of faith,' and 'Salvation by God's free mercy through Christ.'

In Scotland, the stronghold of Presbyterianism, induction was unknown, bigotry was undiminished, secular interests were neg lected, preaching was harsh and gloomy. The misery of man, the anger of the Deity, the power and presence of Satan, the agonies of hell, were still the constant themes of the pulpit. The preacher delighted to freeze the blood of his hearers with hideous imagery. Boiling oil, burning brimstone, scalding lead,' says one. 'A river of fire and brimstone broader than the earth,' says another. Tongue, lungs, and liver, bones and all, shall boil and fry in a torturing fire,' says a third. There is no end of such language: 'Oh! the screeches and yels that will be in hell.' 'While wormas are sporting with thy bones, the devils shall make pastime of thy paines.' There are two thousand of you here to-day, but I am sure fourscore of you will not be saved.'' In the absence of scientific knowledge, and of that rationalistic spirit which was liberalizing and enlightening thought elsewhere, all phenomena were referred to the arbitrary will of a passionate and sanguinary God. As long as this continued, as long as religious feelings were chiefly associated with the abnormal and capricious, attention would chiefly concentrate upon disasters, and devotion would be chiefly connected with storm and pestilence, famine and death. These, regarded as penal inflictions, would give a congenial hue to all parts of belief, whose central ideas would be misery, cruelty, and terror. But when habits of

1 In consequence three persons are said to have dispatched themselves in despair.

investigation acquire the ascendancy, calamities are seen to be the result of general laws, terrorism diminishes, attention is directed chiefly to the evidences of superintending care, the Divine presence is associated with order, and theology wears a more beneficent aspect. This, on the whole, is precisely the change that had been going on in England from the early part of the century. The fact suggests, what must be obvious to every careful student of ideas,—that all theology is progressive: Christianity lives because it is developed. Every age must produce its own doctrines, adapted to its peculiar condition and wants. Those of the present can be retraced to the successive points of time when, one after the other, they reached a definite form. Patristic-Scholastic-Reformative-modern Evangelical-this is the line of advance and the order of growth. The gems alone are unmodified, the eternal verities, the same to-day, yesterday, and forever.

Ethics. Two classes of tendencies, two complexions or styles of mind, contend for empire in the individual and society,- the one holding of animal force, the other of genius; the one of the understanding, the other of the soul; the one deficient in sympathy, the other warm and expansive; the one all buzz and din, the other all infinitude and paradise; the one hating ideas and clinging to a corporeal civilization, the other looking abroad into universality and suggesting the presence of the invisible gods; the one insisting on sensuous facts as the solid finality, the other on Thought and Will as the primal reality, from which as an unsounded centre flow sensuous facts perpetually outward, and of which they are but a manifold symbol. These are the Materialists and the Idealists of the world. The former think more of the beast than of the seraph in man. The only interests they appreciate are such as are palpable, and can be touched, measured, and weighed. If they survey the rules of conduct, or seek to discover the principles which underlie them, they make much of a good stomach, of strong limbs, of the five senses, and reach the conclusion that the universal motive of every act is the desire of pleasIn their analysis of moral phenomena, unable to ascend higher than their own level, they stop at self-love. This is precisely what now took place at the birth of moral science. Nor, under the conditions, is it at all surprising. It was natural that

ure.