approaches, the impregnable situation of our liberty and safety that laughed such weak enginry to scorn, such poor drifts to make a national war of a surplice-brabble, a tippet-scuffle, and engage the unattainted honour of English Knighthood to unfurl the streaming. Red-cross, or to rear the horrid standard of those fatal guly Dragons, for so unworthy a purpose as to force upon their fellow-subjects that which themselves are weary of, the skeleton of a mass-book. Nor must the patience, the fortitude, the firm obedience of the nobles and people of Scotland, striving against manifold provocations, nor must their sincere and moderate proceedings hitherto, be unremembered to the shameful conviction of all their detractors."—Ibid. The Petitions of the Universities in favour of Episcopacy and Cathedral Establishments. "Would you know what the Remonstrance of these men would have, what their Petition implies? They entreat us that we would not be weary of those unsupportable grievances that our shoulders have hitherto cracked under; they beseech us that we would think them fit to be our Justices of the Peace, our Lords, our highest officers of State, though they come furnished with no more experience than they have learnt between the Cook and the Manciple, or more profoundly at the College Audit or the Regent House, or, to come to their deepest insight, at their Patron's table; they would request us to endure still the rustling of their silken cassocks, and that we would burst our midriffs rather than laugh to see them under sail in all their lawn and sarcenet, their shrouds and tackle, with a geometrical rhomboides upon their heads; they would bear us in hand that we must of duty still appear before them once a year in Jerusalem like good circumcised males and females, to be taxed by the poll, to be sconced our head-money, our twopences, in their chandlerly shopbook of Easter."-Ibid. Nearness to the Apostles no Guarantee against Stupidity. "What fidelity his [Irenaeus's] relations had in general we cannot sooner learn than by Eusebius; who, near the end of his Third Book, speaking of Papias, a very ancient writer-one that had heard St. John, and was known to many that had seen and been acquainted with others of the Apostles, but, being of a shallow wit, and not understanding those traditions which he received, filled his writings with many new doctrines and fabulous conceits-he tells us there that divers ecclesiastical men, and Irenæus among the rest, while they looked at his antiquity, became infected with his errors. Now, if Irenæus were so rash as to take unexamined opinions from an author of so small capacity when he was a man, we should be more rash ourselves to rely upon those observations which he made when he was a boy. And this may be a sufficient reason to us why we need no longer muse at the spreading of many idle traditions so soon after the Apostles, whilst such as this Papias had the throwing them about, and the inconsiderate zeal of the next age, that heeded more the person than the doctrine, had the gathering them up. Wherever a man who had been any way conversant with the Apostles was to be found, thither flew all the inquisitive ears; the exercise of right instructing was changed into the curiosity of impertinent fabling; where the mind was to be edified with solid doctrine, there the fancy was soothed with solemn stories; with less fervency was studied what Saint Paul or Saint John had written than was listened to one that could say, 'Here he taught, here he stood, this was his stature, and thus he went habited; and O happy this house that harboured him, and that cold stone whereon he rested, this village where he wrought such a miracle, and that pavement bedewed with the warm effusion of his last blood, that spouted up into eternal roses to crown his martyrdom!' Thus, while all their thoughts were poured out upon circumstances, and the gazing after such men as had been at table with the Apostles (many of which Christ hath professed, yea though they had cast out devils in his name, he will not know at the last day), by this means they lost their time, and truanted on the fundamental grounds of saving knowledge, as was seen shortly by their writings."-Of Prelat. Episcop. The English Liturgy and Extempore Prayer. "Edward the Sixth, as Hayward hath written in his Story [The Life and Raigne of King Edward VI., by Sir John Hayward, 1599], will tell you, upon the word of a King, that the order of the Service, and the use thereof in the English tongue, is no other than the old Service was, and the same words in English which were in Latin, except a few things omitted, so fond that it had been a shame to have heard them in English. These are his words; whereby we are left uncertain who the author was, but certain that part of the work was esteemed so absurd by the translators thereof as was to be ashamed of in English. 'O, but the martyrs were the refiners of it;' for that only is left you to say. Admit they were; they could not refine a scorpion into a fish, though they had drawn it and rinsed it with never so cleanly cookery; which made them fall at variance among themselves about the use either of it or the ceremonies belonging to it.. As for the words, it is more to be feared that the same continually should make them careless or sleepy than that variety on the same known subject should distract. Variety (as both Music and Rhetoric teacheth us) erects and rouses an auditory, like the masterful running over many chords and divisions; whereas, if men should ever be thumbing the drone of one plain-song, it would be a dull opiate to the most wakeful attention. . . . A minister that cannot be trusted to pray in his own words, without being chewed to, and fescued [directed as if by a fescue, or schoolmaster's pointer] to a formal injunction of his rote-lesson, should as little be trusted to preach-besides the vain babble of praying over the same things immediately again; for there is a large difference in the repetition of some pathetical ejaculation, raised out of the sudden earnestness and vigour of the inflamed soul (such was that of Christ in the Garden), from the continual rehearsal of our daily orisons; which if a man shall kneel down in a morning and say over, and presently in another part of the room kneel down again and in other words ask but still for the same things, as it were out of an inventory, I cannot see how he will escape that heathenish battology of multiplying words which Christ himself, that has the putting up of our prayers, told us would not be agreeable to Heaven.”—Animadversions. Ordination. "As for Ordination, what is it but the laying on of hands, an outward sign or symbol of admission? It creates nothing, it confers nothing. It is the inward calling of God that makes a minister, and his own painful study and diligence that manures and improves his ministerial gifts. In the primitive times, many before ever they had received ordination from the Apostles had done the Church noble service-as Apollos and others. It is but an orderly form of receiving a man already fitted, and committing to him a particular charge." -Ibid. A Prayer. "O, if we freeze at noon after their early thaw [of the English at the time of the Reformation], let us fear that the Sun for ever hide himself, and turn his orient steps from our ungrateful horizon, justly condemned to be eternally benighted. Which dreadful judgment, O thou the everbegotten Light, and perfect Image of the Father, intercede may never come upon us-as we trust thou hast. For thou hast opened our difficult and sad times, and given us an unexpected breathing after our long oppressions; thou hast done justice upon those that tyrannized over us, while some men wavered, and admired a vain shadow of wisdom in a tongue nothing slow to utter guile. .. Who is there that cannot trace thee now in thy beamy walk through the midst of thy sanctuary, amidst those golden candlesticks which have long suffered a dimness amongst us through the violence of those that had seized them and were more taken with the mention of their gold than of their starry light? . . . Come, therefore, O thou that hast the seven stars in thy right hand; appoint thy chosen priests, according to their orders and courses of old, to minister before thee, and duly to dress and pour out the consecrated oil into thy holy and ever-burning lamps. Thou hast sent out the spirit of prayer upon thy servants over all the land to this effect, and stirred up their vows as the sound of many waters about thy Throne. Every one can say that now certainly thou hast visited this land, and bast not forgotten the utmost corners of the earth, in a time when men had thought that thou wast gone up from us to the farthest end of the Heavens, and hadst left to do marvellously among the sons of these last ages, O, perfect and accomplish thy glorious acts; for men may leave their works unfinished, but thou art a God; thy nature is perfection. Shouldst thou bring us thus far onward from Egypt to destroy us in this wilderness, though we deserve, yet thy great name would suffer in the rejoicing of thine enemies, and the deluded hope of all thy servants. When thou hast settled peace in the Church, and righteous judgment in the Kingdom, then shall all thy saints address their voices of joy and triumph to thee, standing on the shore of that Red Sea into which our enemies had almost driven us. And he that now for haste snatches up a plain ungarnished present as a thank-offering to thee, which could not be deferred in regard of thy so many late deliverances wrought for us one upon another, may then perhaps take up a harp and sing thee an elaborate Song to Generations. In that day it shall no more be said as in scorn, 'This or that was never held so till this present age,' when men have better learnt that the times and seasons pass along under thy feet, to go and come at thy bidding. And, as thou didst dignify our fathers' days with many revelations above all the foregoing ages since thou tookst the flesh, so thou canst vouchsafe to us (though unworthy) as large a portion of thy Spirit as thou pleasest. For who shall prejudice thy all-governing will, seeing the power of thy grace is not passed away with the primitive times, as fond and faithless men imagine, but thy kingdom is now at hand, and thou standing at the door. Come forth out of thy royal chambers, O Prince of all the Kings of the Earth; put on the visible robes of thy imperial Majesty; take up that unlimited sceptre which thy Almighty Father hath bequeathed thee; for now the voice of thy Bride calls thee, and all creatures sigh to be renewed."-Ibid. CHAPTER V. IMPEACHMENT OF THIRTEEN BISHOPS PREPARATIONS FOR A RECESS SIX WEEKS OF LULL, AND VIEW OF THE STATE OF THE rejection by the Lords of the Bill of the Commons for the exclusion of Bishops from Parliament was still the great topic of public interest in England (July 1641). What would the Commons do? IMPEACHMENT OF THIRTEEN BISHOPS. The policy of the Commons was peculiar. Forsaking for the moment the Root-and-Branch Bill which had been introduced by Deering, and allowing that Bill to hang in the imagination of the public, as a mere proposition for the future, in contrast with Bishop Williams's draft of a Limited Episcopacy Bill proposed in the Lords, they turned all their energy into a course of action for immediately clearing the way. This consisted in the impeachment of as many of the existing Bishops as possible on personal charges. If they had failed to abolish the Episcopal Bench in the House of Lords by a direct legislative measure, they had the means at least of thinning that Bench by putting on trial a good many of its occupants for past offences." Again and again had the subject of the Convocation of 1640 and its illegal canons been discussed in Parliament, by the Lords as well as by the Commons. Not only had resolutions" been passed as early as December declaring the Canons void, |