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commanders and privy councillors. PARKER of Canterbury, if, according to our view, too rigid in enforcing observances to which, personally, he attached little importance, was a man of learning, and zealous for its interests. Many of the manuscripts which were dispersed in the breaking up of conventual libraries were redeemed from destruction by his alertness and liberality; and in the publication of the Chronicles of Matthew Paris, and Ælfric's Homily on Transubstantiation, he shewed the value of antiquarian erudition for polemical purposes. But a still greater boon was bestowed on his contemporaries, in the shape of that amended English translation of the Scriptures, on the basis of Cranmer's, executed under his auspices, and published in 1568, and which, amongst members of the Church of England, was the standard Bible till superseded by the present authorised version in 1611. GRINDAL of London, who eventually succeeded Parker in the primacy, through his piety and meekness of spirit was so far biassed in favour of the Puritans that he incurred the royal displeasure; his see was put under sequestration, and at last, when old and blind, he was deprived of his episcopate, and died in retirement. But the two theologians of that epoch whose names now outshine their coevals, are JEWEL of Salisbury, and SANDYS, first Bishop of Worcester, and finally Archbishop of York. Jewel, raised to the bench early in life, combined the fervour of the popular preacher with the solid judgment and accurate erudition of the ripe divine; and a sermon which he preached at Paul's Cross in 1559, and afterwards repeated at court, produced an immense sensation. In this sermon he specified twenty-seven points of doctrine held by the Church of Rome, and offered to become a Papist if any one could produce sufficient evidence that any one of these was held in the primitive Church for the first six hundred years after Christ. This challenge was followed by an able and elaborate "Apology for the Church of England," which was so highly esteemed, that

in 1562 it received the high sanction of Convocation, and was recommended to ministers and members of the Church as a sufficient exposition and defence of its principles. A few sentences from the close of the celebrated "Challenge" will shew the spirit with which the most learned prelate in England could declaim to the crowd of horsemen and footmen who pressed round the stone pulpit at the heart of old London. The text is 1 Cor. xi. 30, and the subject is

The Lord's Supper and the Mass.

"O that St Paul were now alive and saw the behaviour and order of the priest at their mass! Think ye that he would take it and account it for the Lord's Supper? When he had espied but one fault in the holy communion amongst the Corinthians, straightway he rebuked them, and called them back to Christ's institution. This,' saith he, 'I received of the Lord, and the same I gave over unto you.'

"But if he saw the disorder that we have seen, would he not be moved as much against us now, as he was sometime against the Corinthians? Would he not pull us back to the institution of Christ, as he did them? Would he not say unto us, Did I ever teach you to minister the holy communion in a strange language? Did I ever teach you to receive the communion privately to yourselves alone, and so to disdain and despise your brethren? Did I ever teach you to minister the communion to the people in one kind? Did I ever teach you to say mass, or to receive the sacrament for the people? Did I ever teach you the idle follies of your canon? Did I ever teach you to offer up the Son of God unto his Father? Did I ever teach you any other propitiatory sacrifice for sin, than that Christ once offered upon the cross? Did I ever teach you to minister the Lord's Supper wherein the people should do nothing else but look upon and behold your doings, without any kind

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of knowledge or comfort? Did I ever teach you to lift the sacrament over your head? Did I ever teach the people to fall down thereunto, and to worship they knew not what? Be these the things that I delivered unto you? Be these the things that I received of the Lord?

"And if there be any here that have had or yet have any good opinion of the mass, I beseech you, for God's sake, even as you tender your own salvation, suffer not yourselves wilfully to be led away, run not blindly to your own confusion. Think with yourselves, it was not for nought that so many of your brethren rather suffered themselves to die, and to abide all manner of extremity and cruelty, than they would be partakers of that thing that you reckon to be so holy. Let their death, let their ashes, let their blood, that was so abundantly shed before your eyes, somewhat prevail with you, and move you. Be not ruled by your wilful affections. Ye have a good zeal and mind towards God; have it according unto the knowledge of God. The Jews had a zeal of God, and yet they crucified the Son of God. Search the Scriptures; there shall ye find everlasting life. There shall ye learn to judge yourselves and your own doings, that ye be not judged of the Lord. ever it happen you to be present again at the mass, think but thus with yourselves-What make I here? What profit have I of my doings? I hear nothing. I understand nothing: I am taught nothing: I receive nothing. Christ bade me eat; I eat nothing: Christ bade me drink; I drink nothing. Is this the institution of Christ? Is this the Lord's Supper? Is this the right use of the holy mysteries? Is this it that Paul delivered unto me? Is this it that Paul received of the Lord? Let us say but thus unto ourselves, and, no doubt, God of his mercy will open our hearts; we shall see our errors, and content ourselves to be ordered by the wisdom of God to do that God will have us to do: to believe that God will have us to believe to worship that God will have us to worship.

H

If

So shall we have comfort of the holy mysteries: so shall we receive the fruits of Christ's death: so shall we be partakers of Christ's body and blood: so shall Christ truly dwell in us, and we in him: so shall all error be taken from us: so shall we join all together in God's truth so shall we all be able with one heart and one spirit to know and to glorify the only, the true, and the living God, and his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ; to whom both, with the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, for ever and ever. Amen."

Sandys has neither the polemical prowess nor the declamatory force and fervour of the great apologist; but his discourses have some of the best merits which sermons can possess. They are plain, direct, and practical; and they are extremely interesting. Sandys "excels all his contemporaries in the transparency of his diction. His stream of thought may not be broad or deep, but the eye can always look down into the channel, and ascertain the quality and value of the deposit. Marmontel's eulogy of Massillon may be transferred to Sandys. Few sentences require a second perusal. His periods rarely wind into what have been called the semicolon paragraphs of Taylor; and never jingle with those chimes of metre which Atterbury so earnestly admonished his son to avoid. . . His sermons teach all that he intended, and in the manner he preferred. They abound in practical admonitions; their interpretation of holy truth is plain; and their polemical tone, though often sharp, is unembittered by the venom of his antagonists."

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Be Sober.

"Be sober in diet. Nature is contented with a little; but where sobriety wanteth, nothing is enough. The body must have sufficient, lest it faint in the midst of necessary duties; Willmott's "Jeremy Taylor," p. 44.

*

but beware of gluttony and drunkenness. And Christ saith, 'Take ye heed, overload not your hearts with these burthens of excess. Be not drunken with wine. These lessons are fit for England, where ancient sobriety hath given place to superfluity-where many such rich men are as fare daintily day by day. God grant their end be not like his, who, riotously wasting here the creatures of God, wanted afterwards a drop of water when he would gladly have had it! John Baptist was content with a simple diet-Christ with very slender fare; but there are of us, I fear me, whose god is their belly, and whose felicity is meat and drink. Our excess this way is intolerable and abominable; we strive to equal almost Vitellius, who had served unto him at one feast two thousand fishes and seven thousand birds; and Heliogabalus, that monster of the world, who at one supper was served with six hundred ostriches. There is no bird that flieth, no fish that swimmeth, no beast that moveth, which is not buried in our bellies. This excess is an enemy both to wealth and health: it hath cut off much housekeeping, and brought many men to extreme beggary; and as many great diseases are cured by abstinence, so fulness hath been the cause of sundry strange and unwonted sicknesses. Aurelian the emperor did never send for physician in time of his sickness, but cured himself only by thin diet. And as immoderate feeding doth much hurt to the body, so it is more noisome to the mind. For as the ground, if it receive too much rain, is not watered, but drowned, and turneth into mire, which is neither fit for tillage nor for yielding of fruit, so our flesh, over-watered with wine, is not fit to admit the spiritual plough, or to bring forth the celestial fruits of righteousness. The herbs that grow about it will be loathsome and stinking weeds, as brawling, chiding, blasphemy, slander, perjury, hatred, manslaughter, and such like bad works of drunkenness and darkness. Are not these unsavoury fruits enough to make us abhor the tree? A drunken body is not a man, but a