Yet even the weaker part was seen Thus much may be quoted without offence to decency. NOTE XXII. Page 125. Assurance. Hymn 263. Baxter had none of this assurance. Good man, as he was, he knew himself far from perfection, and had his doubts and his fears. But it much increased his peace," says Calamy, "to find others in the like condition. He found his case had nothing singular, being called by the providence of God to the comforting of others who had the same complaints. While he answered their doubts, he answered his own, and the charity he was constrained to exercise towards them redounded to himself, and insensibly abated his disturbance. And yet after all he was glad of probability instead of undoubted certainty." The Franciscans have produced one of their revelations against this notion of assurance: it occurs in the life of Beata Margarita de Cortona, written with Franciscan fidelity by her confessor F. Juncta de Bevagna. The passage is part of a dialogue. "Et Dominus ad eam: Tu credis firmiter, et fateris, quod unus Deus in substantia sit, Pater et Filius, et Spiritus Sanctus? Et Margarita respondit; Sicut ego credo te unum in essentia et trinum in personis, ita donares mihi de promissis plenam securitatem. Et Dominus ad eam: Filia tu non es habitura dum vixeris, illam plenam, quam requiris cum lacrymis, securitatem, quousque locavero te in gloria regni mei. Et Margarita respondit; T'enuistisne, Domine, sanctos viros in his dubiis, in quibus tenetis me? Et Dominus ad eam; Sanctis mess in tormentis dedi fortitudinem securitatem vero plenam non habucrunt, nisi in patria.”—Acta Sanctorum. 22d. Feb. p. 821. NOTE XXIII. Page 128. Thomas Haliburton. Mr. Wesley was perhaps induced to pronounce so high and extravagant an eulogium upon the memoirs of this excellent man, by a description of his deliverance from temptation," which accorded perfectly with one of the leading doctrines of Methodism. "After describing a state of extreme mental anguish, Mr. Haliburton says, "I was quite overcome, neither able to fight nor flee, when the Lord passed by me, and made this time a time of love. I was, as I remember, at secret prayer when He discovered Himself to me; when He let me see that there are "forgiveness with Him, and mercy, and plenteous redemption."-Before this I knew the letter only, but now the words were spirit and life: a burning light by them shone into my mind, and gave me not merely some notional knowledge, but an experimental knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And vastly different this was from all the notions I had before had of the same truths. It shone from heaven: it was not a spark kindled by my own endeavours, but it shone suddenly about me: it came by a heavenly means, the Word: it opened heaven and discovered heavenly things? and its whole tendency was heavenward. It was a true light, giving true manifestations of the one God, the one Mediator between God and man, and a true view of my state with respect to God, not according to my foolish imaginations. It was a distinct and clear light, not only representing spiritual things, but manifesting them in their glory, and in their comely order. It set all things in their due line of subordination to God, and gave distinct views of their genuine tendency. It was a satisfying light; the soul absolutely rested upon the discovery it made; it was assured of them; it could not doubt if it saw, or if the things were so as it represented them. It was a quickening refreshing, healing light: it arose with healing in its wings. It was a powerful light: it dissipated that thick darkness which overspread my mind, and made all those frightful temptations that before tormented me, instantly flee before it. Lastly, it was a composing light: it did not, like a flash of lightning, fill the soul with fear and amazement, but it quieted my mind, and gave me the full and free use of all my faculties. I need not give a larger account of this light, for no words can give a notion of light to the blind: and he that has eyes (at least while he sees it) will need no words to describe it." This is a high mystic strain. But in the account of his death there are passages of the truest and finest feeling. When a long illness had well nigh done its work, he said, "I could not believe that I could have borne, and borne cheerfully, this rod so long. This is a miracle, pain without pain! Blessed be God that ever I was born. I have a father, a mother, and ten brothers and sisters in Heaven, and I shall be the eleventh! O blessed be the day that ever I was born!"-A few hours before he breathed his last, he said, "I was just thinking on the pleasant spot of earth I shall get to lie in beside Mr. Rutherford, Mr. Forrester, and Mr. Anderson. I shall come in as the little one among them, and I shall get my pleasant George in my hand, (a child who was gone before him,) and oh! we shall be a knot of bonny dust!" I hope there are but few readers whose hearts are in so diseased a state as not to feel and understand the beauty and the value of these extracts. NOTE XXIV. Page 156. Ravings of the persecuted Hugonots. One of the Camisards is said to have "declared that God had revealed to him that a temple of white marble, adorned with gold fillets, and the tables of the law written on it, would drop down from Heaven in the midst of the valley of St. Privet, for the comfort of the faithful inhabitants of the Upper Cevennes."-Hist. of the Camisards, 1709. Burnet says (vol. iv. p. 15.) they had many among them who seemed qualified in a very singular manner to be teachers of the rest. They had a great measure of zeal, without any learning; they scarce had any education at all. I spoke with the person who by the Queen's order sent one among them to know the state of their affairs. I read some of the letters which he brought from them, full of a sublime zeal and piety, expressing a courage and confidence that could not be daunted. One instance of this was, that they all agreed that if any of them was so wounded in an engagement with the enemy that he could not be brought off, he should be shot dead rather than be left alive to fall into the enemy's hands. He says also that a connivance at their own way of worship was offered them, but “they seemed resolved to accept of nothing less than the restoring their edicts to them." NOTE XXV. Page 150. The Druidical Superstition cherished in a later age. The Druids are spoken of in Irish hagiology as possessing great influence in Ireland in St. Patrick's time. Bad as this authority is, it may be trusted here:-but the reader may find proofs, as convincing as they are curious, of the long continuance of the superstition in Wales, in Mr. Davies's Mythology of the Druids. NOTE XXVI. Page 150. -Mos est Saxonicæ gentis, quod in nonnullis nobilium bonorumque hominum prædiis, non ecclesiam sed sanctæ crucis signum, Domino dicatum, cum magna honore almum, in alto erectum, ad commodam diurnæ orationis sedulitatem, solent habere. Hodoeporicon S. Willibaldi, apud Canisium, t. 2. p. 107. "The ancient course of the clergy's officiating only pro tempore in parochial churches, whilst they received maintenance from the cathedral church, continued in England till about the year 700. For Bede plainly intimates that at that time the Bishop and his clergy lived together and had all things common, as they had in the primitive church in the days of the apostles." NOTE XXVII. Page 150. Bingham, book 5. ch. 6. § 5. There is a most fantastic passage upon this subject in Hobbe's Leviathan, one of the last books in which any thing so whimsical might be expected. "From the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for Bishop Universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdome of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdome of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England, concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night; and if a man consider the originall of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive, that the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Romane empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof; for so did the Papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruines of that heathen power. "The language, also, which they use, both in the churches, and in their publique acts, being, Latine, which is not commonly used by any nation now in the world, what is it but the ghost of the old Romane language? "The fairies, in what nation soever they converse, have but one universal king, which some poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, Prince of dæmons. The ecclesiastiques, likewise, in whose dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one universall king, the Pope. "The ecclesiastiques are spirituall men and ghostly fathers. The fairies are spirits and ghosts. Fairies and ghosts inhabite darkness, solitudes, and graves. The ecclesiastiques walke in obscurity of doctrine, in monasteries, churches and church-yards. "The ecclesiastiques have their cathedrall churches; which, in what town soever they be erected, by virtue of holy water, and certain charmes called exorcises, have the power to make these townes and cities, that is to say, seats of empire. The fairies also have their enchanted castles, and certain gigantique ghosts, that domineer over the regions round about them. "The fairies are not to be seized on, and brought to answer for the hurt they do; so also the ecclesiastiques vanish away from the tribunals of civill justice. "The ecclesiastiques take from young men, the use of reason, by certain charmes compounded of metaphysiques, and miracles, and traditions, and abused Scripture, whereby they are good for nothing else, but to execute what they command them. The fairies likewise are said to take young children out of their cradles, and to change them into natural fools, which common people do therefore call elves, and are apt to mischief. "In what shop, or operatory, the fairies make their enchantment, the old wives have not determined. But the operatories of the clergy are well enough known to be the universities, that received their discipline from authority pontifical. "When the fairies are displeased with any body, they are said to send their elves, to pinch them. The ecclesiastiques, when they are displeased with any civil state, make also their elves, that is, superstitious, enchanted subjects, to pinch their princes, by preaching sedition: or one prince enchanted with promises, to pinch another. "The fairies marry not: but there be amongst them incubi, that have copulation with flesh and blood. The priests also marry not. "The ecclesiastiques take the cream of the land, by donations of ignorant men, that stand in awe of them, and by tythes: so also it is in the fable of fairies, that they enter into the dairies and feast upon the cream, which they skim from the milk. "What kind of money is current in the kingdome of fairies, is not recorded in the story. But the ecclesiastiques in their receipts accept of the same money that we doe; though when they are to make any payment, it is in canonizations, indulgencies, and masses. "To this, and such like resemblances between the Papacy and the kingdome of fairies, may be added this; that as the fairies have no existence, but in the fancies of ignorant people, rising from the traditions of old wives or old poets, so the spiritual power of the Pope, without the bounds of his own civil dominion, consisteth onely in the fear that seduced people stand in, of their excommunications upon hearing of false miracles, false traditions, and false interpretations of the Scripture. "It was not, therefore, a very difficult matter for Henry VIII. by his exorcismę; nor for Queen Elizabeth, by hers, to cast them out. But who knows that this spirit of Rome, now gone out, and walking by missions through the dry places of China, Japan, and the Indies, that yeild him little fruit, may not return, or rather an assembly of spirits worse than he enter, and inhabite this clean swept house, and make the end thereof worse than the beginning?" NOTE XXVIII. Page 153. Plunder of the Church at the Reformation. "My Lords and Masters, (says Latimer, in one of his sermons,) I say that all such proceedings, as far as I can perceive, do intend plainly to make the yeomanry slavery, and the clergy shavery. We of the clergy had too much, but this is taken away, and now we have too little. But for mine own part I have no cause to complain, for I thank God and the ing I have sufficient, and God is my judge, I came not to crave of any man any thing; but I know them that have too little. There lyVOL. I. 29 eth a great matter by these appropriations-great reformation is to be had in them. I know where is a great market town, with divers hamlets and inhabitants, where do rise yearly of their labours to the value of fifty pound; and the vicar that serveth (being so great a cure) hath but 12 or 14 marks by year; so that of this pension he is not able to buy him books, nor give his neighbours drink; and all the great gain goeth another way." "There are three Pees in a line of relation-Patrons, Priests, People. Two of these Pees are made lean to make one P fat. Priests have lean livings, People lean souls, to make Patrons have fat purses." Adams's Heaven and Earth reconciled, p. 17. Thomas Adams had as honest a love of quips, quirks, puns, punnets, and pundigrions, as Fuller the Worthy himself. As the old ballad says, he resembles Fuller also in the felicity of his language, and the lively feeling with which he frequently starts, as it were, upon the reader.-Upon this subject he often gives vent to his indig nation. "As for the ministers that have livings," he says, "they are scarce liveons, or enough to keep themselves and their families living; and for those that have none, they may make themselves merry with their learning if they have no money, for they that bought the patronages must needs sell the presentations; vendere jure potest, emerat ille prius: and then, if Balaam's ass hath but an audible voice, and a soluble purse, he shall be preferred before his master, were he ten prophets. If this weather hold, Julian need not send learning into exile, for no parent will be so irreligious as with great expenses to bring up his child at once to misery and sin. Oh think of this, if your impudence have left any blood of shame in your faces; cannot you spare out of all your riot some crumme of liberality to the poor needy and neglected gospel? Shall the Papists so outbid us, and in the view of their prodigality laugh our miserableness to scorn? Shall they twit us that our Our Father hath taken from the Church what their Pater Noster bestowed on it? Shall they bid us bate of our faith, and better our charity?" Adams's Heaven and Earth reconciled, p. 22. In another of his works he says, "They have raised church livings to four and five years' purchase; and it is to be feared they will shortly rack up presentative livings to as high a rate as they did their impropriations, when they would sell them. For they say few will give above sixteen years' purchase for an impropriate parsonage; and I have heard some rate the donation of a benefice they must give at ten years: what with the present money they must have, and with reservation of tythes, and such unconscionable tricks; as if there was no God in Heaven to see or punish it! Perhaps some will not take so much: but most will take some: enough to impoverish the Church: to enrich their own purses, to damn their souls. "One would think it was sacrilege enough to rob God of his main tythes; must they also trimme away the shreds? Must they needs shrink the old cloth (enough to apparel the Church) as the cheating taylor did to a dozen buttons? Having full gorged themselves with the parsonages, must they pick the bones of the vicarages too?-Well saith St. Augustine, multi in hac vita manducant, quod postea apud inferos digerunt: many devour that in this life, which they shall digest in Hell. "These are the Church briars, which (let alone) will at last bring as famous a Church as any Christendom hath to beggary. Politic men begin apace already to withhold their children from schools and universities. Any profession else better likes them, as knowing they may live well in whatsoever calling save in the ministry. The time was that Christ threw the buyers and sellers out of the Temple: but now the buyers and sellers have thrown him out of the Temple. Yea, they will throw the Church out of the Church, if they be not stayed." Adams's Divine Herball, p. 135, "The Rob Altar is a huge drinker. He loves, like Belshazzar, to drink only in the goblets of the Temple. Woe unto him; he carouses the wine he never sweat for, and keeps the poor minister thirsty. The tenth sheep is his diet: the tenth fleece (O 'tis a golden fleece, he thinks) is his drink: but the wool shall choke him. Some drink down whole churches and steeples; but the bells shall ring in their bellies." Adams's Divine Herball, p. 27. "What an unreasonable Devil is this!" says Latimer. "He provides a great while before hand for the time that is to come; he hath brought up now of late the most monstrous kind of covetousness that ever was heard of; he hath invented a fee-farming of benefices, and ali to delay the offices of preaching; insomuch that when any man hereafter shall have a benefice, he may go where he will for any house he shall have to dwell upon, or any glebe land to keep hospitality withall; but he must take up a chamber in an alehouse, and there sit and play at the tables all day."—Latimer. NOTE XXIX. Page 153. Cures given to any Person who could be found miserable enough to accept them. "I will not speak now of them, that being not content with lands and rents, do catch into their hands spiritual livings, as parsonages and such like, and that under the pretence to make provision for their houses. What hurt and damage this realm of England doth sustain by that devilish kind of provision for gentlemen's houses, knights' and lords' houses, they can tell best, that do travel in the countries, and see with their eyes great parishes and market towns, with innumerable others, to be utterly destitute of God's word, and that because that these greedy men have spoiled the livings, and gotten them into their hands and instead of a faithful and painful teacher, they hire a Sir John, who hath better skill at playing at tables, or in keeping of a garden, than in God's word; and he for a trifle doth serve the cure, and so help to bring the people of God in danger of their souls. And all those serve to accomplish the abominable pride of such gentlemen, which consume the goods of the people (which ought to have been bestowed upon a learned minister) in costly apparel, belly cheer, or in building of gorgeous houses." Augustin Bernher's Epistle Dedicatory, prefixed to Latimer's Sermons. "It is a great charge," says Latimer, "a great burthen before God to be a patron. For every patron, when he doth not diligently endeavour himself to place a good and godly man in his benefice which is in his hands, but is slothful, and careth not what manner of man he taketh, or else is covetous and will have it himself, and hire a Sir John Lack-Latin, which shall say service so that the people shall be nothing edified;-no doubt that patron shall make answer before God for not doing of his duty."-Latimer. * Leavings, not Livings, says the marginal note: The poets, too, of that and the succeeding age, touched frequently upon this evil. The ten-pound, base, frize-jerkin hireling, Call'd elder; all these gallants needs will bring Their godly calling and my high estate." Thus also George Wither in his prosing strains: "We rob the church. Men seek not to impropriate a part Storer's Wolsey, p. 63. Unto themselves, but they can find in heart To engross up all; which vile presumption Hath brought church livings to a strange consumption. "Twill be the poorest member in the state. "No marvel, though, instead of learned preachers, Thence it proceeds, and there's the cause that place For men of judgments or good dispositions I say there's none of knowledge, wit, or merit, That will so wrong the church as to presume "Well, they must entertain such pedants then, NOTE XXX. Page 154. Means for assisting poor Scholars diminished. "It would pity a man's heart to hear that I hear of the state of Cambridge; what it is in Oxford, I cannot tell. There be few that study divinity, but so many as of necessity must furnish the Colleges; for their livings be so small, and victuals so dear, that they tarry not there, but go every where to seek livings, and so they go about. Now there be a few gentlemen, and they study a little divinity. Alas, what is that? It will come to pass that we shall have nothing but a little English divinity, that will bring the realm into a very barbarousness, and utter decay of learning. It is not that, I wis, that will keep out the supremacy of the Pope at Rome. There be none now but great men's sons in Colleges, and their fathers look not to have them preachers; so every way this office of preaching is pinched at."-Latimer. "The Devil hath caused also, through this monstrous kind of covetousness, patrons to sell their benefices; yea more, he gets him to the University, and causeth great men and esquires to send their sons thither, and put out poor scholars that should be divines; for their parents intend not that they should be preachers, but that they may have a show of learning."-Latimer. NOTE XXXI. Page 154. Conforming Clergy at the Reformation. "Here were a goodly place to speak against our clergymen which go so gallant now-a-days. I hear say that some of them wear velvet shoes and slippers; such fellows are more meet to dance the morris-dance than to be admitted to preach. I pray God mend such worldly fellows; for else they be not meet to be preachers."-Latimer. Sir William Barlowe has a remarkable passage upon this subject in his "Dialoge describing the originall Ground of these Lutheran Faccions and many of their Abuses;" perhaps the most sensible treatise which was written on that side of the question, and certainly one of the most curious. "Among a thousand freers none go better appareled then an other. But now unto the other syde, these that runne away from them unto these Lutherans, they go, I say, disguysed strangelye from that they were before, in gaye jagged cotes, and cut and scotched hosen, verye syghtly forsothe, but yet not very semelye for such folke as they were and shoulde be: and thys apparell change they dayly, from fashion to fashion, every day worse then other, their new-fangled foly and theyr wanton pryde never content nor satisfyed.-I demaunded ones of a certayn companion of these sectes which had bene of a strayt religion before, why his garments were nowe so sumptuous, all to poun ced with gardes and jagges lyke a rutter of the launce knyghtes. He answered to me that he dyd it in contempt of hypocrisy. Why,' quoth I, doth not God hate pryde, the mother of hypocrisye, as well as hypocrysye it selfe? Wherto he made no dyrect answer agayne but in excusynge hys faut he sayde that God princypally accepted the mekeness of the hart, and inward Christen maners, which I beleve were so inward in bym that seldome he shewed any of them outwardly." NOTE XXXII. Page 155. Ignorance of the Country Clergy. "Sad the times in the beginning of Queen Elizabeth," says Fuller, "when the clergy were commanded to read the chapters over once or twice by themselves, that so they might be the better enabled to read them distinctly in the congregation."-Fuller's Triple Reconciler, p. 82. NOTE XXXIII. Page 155. Clergy of Charles the First's Age. "Let me say," (says Mossom, in his Apology on the Behalf of the Sequestered Clergy,)—" and 'tis beyond any inan's gainsaying,-the learnedst clergy that ever England had, was that sequestered; their works do witness it to the whole world. And as for their godliness, if the tree may be known by its fruits, these here pleaded for have given testimony beyond exception." "There were men of great piety and great learning among the Puritan clergy also. But it is not less certain that in the necessary consequences of such a revolution, some of the men who rose into notice and power were such as are thus, with his wonted felicity, described by South: "Amongst those of the late reforming age, all learning was utterly cried down. So that with them the best preachers were such as could not read, and the ablest divines such as could not write. la all their preachments they so highly pretended to the spirit, that they could hardly so much as spell the letter. To be blind was with them the proper qualification of a spiritual guide: and to be book-learned, as they called it, and to be irreligious, were almost terms convertible. None were thought fit for the ministry but tradesmen and mechanics, because none else were allowed to have the spirit. Those only were accounted like St. Paul, who could work with their hands, and in a literal sense drive the nail home, and be able to make a pulpit before they preached in it.”—South's Sermons, Vol. iii. p. 449. NOTE XXXIV. Page 156. The Sequestered Clergy. "In these times," says Lilly, " many worthy ministers lost their livings, or benefices, for not complying with the Directory. Had you seen (O noble Esquire) what pitiful idiots were preferred into sequestrated church benefices, you would have been grieved in your soul; but when they came before the classes of divines, could those simpletons but only say they were converted by hearing such a sermon of that godly man Hugh Peters, Stephen Marshal, or any of that gang, he was presently admitted."-History of his own Life, quoted in Mr. Gifford's notes to Ben Jonson. "The rector of Fittleworth, in Sussex, was dispossessed of his living for Sabbath breaking; the fact which was proved against him being, that as he was stepping over a stile one Sunday, the button of his breeches came off, and he got a tailor in the neighbourhood presently to sew it on again." Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy, part ii. p. 275. NOTE XXXV. Page 157. Many who sacrificed their scruples to their convenience. "Let me," says South, " utter a great, but sad truth; a truth not so fit to be spoke, as to be sigh ed out by every true son and lover of the church, viz. that the wounds, which the church of England now bleeds by, she received in the house of her friends, (if they may be called so,) viz. her treacherous undermining friends, and that most of the nonconformity to her, and separation from her, together with a contempt of her excellent constitutions, have proceeded from nothing more than from the false, partial, half-conformity of too many of her ministers. The surplice sometimes worn, and oftener laid aside; the liturgy so read, and mangled in the reading, as if they were ashamed of it; the divine service so curtailed, as if the people were to have but the tenths of it from the priest, for the tenths he had received from them. The clerical habit neglected by such in orders as frequently travel the road clothed like farmers or graziers, to the unspeakable shame and scandal of their profession; the holy sacrament indecently and slovenly administered; the furniture of the altar abused and embezzelled; and the Table of the Lord profaned. These, and the like vile passages, have made some schismaticks, and confirmed others; and in a word, have made so many nonconformists to the church, by their conforming to their minister. "It was an observation and saying of a judicious prelate, that of all the sorts of enemies which our church had, there was none so deadly, so pernicious, and likely to prove so fatal to it, as the conforming Puritan. It was a great truth, and not very many years after ratified by direful experience. For if you would have the conforming Puritan described to you, as to what he is: "He is one who lives by the altar, and turns his back upon it; one, who catches at the preferments of the church, but hates the discipline and orders of it; one, who practises conformity, as Papists take oaths and tests, that is, with an inward abhorrence of what he does for the present, and a resolution to act quite contrary, when occasion serves: one who, during his conformity, will be sure to be known by such a distinguishing badge, as shall point him out to, and secure his credit with, the dissenting brotherhood; one who still declines reading the church-service himself, leaving that work to curates or readers, thereby to keep up a profitable interest with thriving seditious tradesmen, and groaning, ignorant, but rich widows; one who, in the midst of his conformity, thinks of a turn of state, which may draw on one in the church too; and accordingly is very careful to behave himself so as not to over-shoot his game, but to stand right and fair in case a wished for change should bring fanaticism again into fashion; which it is more than possible that he secretly desires, and does the utmost he can to promote and bring about. "These, and the like, are the principles which act and govern the conforming Puritan; who in a word is nothing else but ambition, avarice, and hypocrisy, serving all the real interests of schism and faction in the church's livery. And therefore if there be any one who has the front to own himself a minister of our church, to whom the foregoing character may be justly applied, (as I fear there are but too many,) howsoever such an one may for some time sooth up and flatter himself in his detestable dissimulation; yet when he shall hear of such and such of his neighbours, his parishioners, or acquaintance, gone over from the church to conventicles, of several turned Quakers, and of others fallen off to Popery; and lastly when the noise of those national dangers and disturbances, which are every day threatening us, shall ring about his ears, let him then lay his hand upon his false heart, |