were already 70,000 persons, scattered all over Germany, who recognised his episcopal authority, and that that number was constantly increasing. The Government, too, was very friendly to him; and so many Christians were entitled to receive support for their ministry. Of course, political feeling had, no doubt, something to do with the movement, but he firmly believed it to be an essentially spiritual one.

As the bishop seemed to assume, in all he said in this connection, that the principle of what we call in this country "concurrent endowment," was self-evidently reasonable, I asked if the Jansenists' ministers were sustained by the Dutch Government.

"Certainly," he said; whenever they can show that there is a congregation of worshippers, and the need of State help, that help is given."

"And the Roman Catholics, are they treated in the same manner?"

"Yes."

"In reference to them, how are they now governed? I observe that, for a century and a half at any rate, they did not restore the hierarchy which was broken up by your opposition to the Jesuits. Is Holland still directed by vicars apostolic ?"

"No. For a long time it was so, but in the reign of William I. the Pope approached the Government of the time, and asked its concurrence in the appointment of Roman bishops to the old sees. The Prime Minister objected, saying, that there were Bishops of Utrecht and Haarlem already (meaning the Jansenist bishops); and that to put two cocks into the same nest would be to provoke a fight;' but he at the same time expressed his willingness to approve the erection of entirely new Catholic bishoprics; such as those, for example, of Amsterdam or Leyden. This offer, however, did not suit the notions of the Vatican; and it preferred to wait for a better day. That came in the reign of the third William; and now we have two Archbishops of Utrecht, two of Haarlem, and two of Deventer."

There was just one other question which I took it upon me to put in a deliberate way, apologising, at the same time, for the liberty I took in submitting it in so explicit a form.

"What answer," I asked, "would he, as a Jansenist, give to a sinner who came to him in a state of anxiety of mind, seeking to know the way of salvation?"

"I would say to him," he answered at once,"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and confess your sins."

Some to whom I have mentioned this reply, since coming home, have asked me in what sense the confession of sins was understood-hinting that what was meant was confession to a priest, with a view to sacerdotal absolution. But I have no reason, but the contrary, to think that this was the sense of the bishop's words. His language was translated to me by the Dutch interpreter, and I give the ipsissima verba

which he used; but I have no doubt in my own mind at all that the reply is to be taken in its evangelical signification,-"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, confessing your sins."

He

Some desultory talk followed about England. seemed interested in the appointment of a successor to the Bishop of Winchester; and was curious to know what the "fellow" of a college was. But nothing occurred further that seems worthy of special record. And I may only add that I bade him farewell with a feeling of sincere respect, being convinced that personally he is a man of undoubted earnestness; and that, as an ecclesiastic, he represents a cause which is not merely venerable by reason of its historical associations, but in the highest degree interesting, on account of the service it promises to render to the cause of Protestantism.

They

In concluding, I may remark that the history of Jansenism supplies lessons which Old Catholicism would be wise to study. Why has that interesting community of which we have been speaking shrunk to its present dimensions? It is because it has insisted on retaining in its constitution what tended to make its protest against Romanism feckless and ineffective. For one thing, it started with a bitter and unreasoning prejudice against the Churches of the Reformation. Jansen himself speaks of Protestants as being no better than Turks; and says, that "they had much more reason to congratulate themselves on the mercy of princes, than to complain of their severities, which, as the vilest of heretics, they richly deserved." habituated themselves, also, from age to age, to think of Rome as their Mother Church, from whose hearth, indeed, they had been unjustly banished, but to whose bosom they hoped, by-and-by, to be restored. Then, though they have an open Bible, and maintain the doctrines of grace, they mixed up with their evangelism so much of the sacerdotal system, that the good must have been almost neutralized by the evil. The Mass still held a central place in their worship-it was matter of life or death to them to have a validly ordained priesthood; and over all fell that tremendous shadow of "The Church," under cover of which Ritualism is now doing its best to Romanise the Church of England. Occupying the position it did, Jansenism has all along been fighting a losing battle with the Papacy. Rome had always a great backing. All the currents were in its favour; while the Jansenists themselves played into its hands, by trying to maintain the family likeness. No wonder, then, that the result was, that Rome became greater and greater, and Jansenism ever less and less. And that will be the issue of Old Catholicism also, if it does not come to show a bolder and a freer spirit. As long as it retains its pervasive sacerdotalism, Rome will continue to mark it as its own. It may run an independent course for a time, and that time will be longer or shorter in proportion to the strength of the current which is now driving them

from the centre; but the string is not broken, and the strain recalling them will by-and-by begin. We see how the thing is now working in England, where three centuries ago the revulsion from Rome was far more intense than that which in our day is leading men to hold congresses at Constance or Cologne. And unless matters mend, we may reasonably dread that the German Reformation will prove a movement in a circle. Our only hope lies in the opening up of the Scriptures to the people, and in the increased attention that is being

given to them, and also in the emancipating effects of Roman arrogance and presumption. We have seen how recent events have told in the way of opening the eyes of a Jansenist bishop to the true character of the Papacy, and we may indulge the expectation that with the recoil from Ultramontanism there may come a wakening up out of the delusion entirely, and a resolution to build their Church directly, and not sentimentally, on the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone.

F the two thousand nonconforming clergy who in the year 1662 abandoned their livings rather than perjure their consciences, none was more conspicuous for learning and piety, for zeal and suffering, than Richard Baxter. Indeed, no nobler nature sprang from that stormy age which produced a Cromwell and a Hampden, a Marvell and a Milton. But never was more heroic soul enshrined in a frailer tabernacle, or assailed by ruder gusts of fortune. His life was one long martyrdom of disease and fiery agonies of pain. His physical infirmities were aggravated by unremitting toil and study, and by cruel persecution and imprisonment. But the tree that wrestles with the storm upon the wind-swept height acquires a firmer fibre and a sturdier growth than that which nestles in the sheltered vale. So the stern Puritan nature, buffeting with the blasts of adversity, developed a strength of moral fibre, an unfaltering will, and dauntless daring, that a blander atmosphere might have enervated or destroyed. The study of that heroic life cannot fail to quicken noble impulses and in-. spire a lofty purpose even in an age of luxury and selfindulgence.

On the 12th of November 1615 was born, in the pleasant village of Rowton, Shropshire, the child who was to influence so largely the religious destiny of his own and of future times. His father was a substantial yeoman, who cherished the fear of God in a period of general spiritual declension. King James's "Book of Sports" seemed almost to enforce the desecration of the Sabbath; and Baxter complained that in his youth the family "could not on the Lord's-day either read a chapter, or pray, or sing a psalm, or catechise or instruct a servant, but with the noise of the pipe and tabor, and the shoutings in the street, continually in our ears. Sometimes the morris-dancers would come into the church in all their linen, and scarfs, and antique dresses, with morris-bells jingling at their legs; and as soon as common prayer was read, did haste out presently to their play again.”

His early instructors in secular knowledge were a stage-player and an attorney's clerk, who had succes

sively assumed the functions of curate of the parish. But the religious teachings of his godly sire, and the study of the family Bible, which was all his library, save some pedlars' ballads and tracts, and a few borrowed books, were the most important elements in the formation of his character. From his sixteenth to his nineteenth year he attended the Wroxeter grammar-school, where he acquired a fluent though uncritical use of Latin, and a partial knowledge of Greek. Few glimpses of his boyhood occur, although he tells us that he was addicted to orchard-robbing and to the inordinate use of fruit, which he believed induced his subsequent physical infirmities. His constitution was further usdermined by an attack of small-pox, which left behind symptoms of acute phthisis.

Shortly after attaining his twentieth year Baxter was induced to try his fortunes at Court. Thither he accordingly repaired, fortified with a letter to the Master of the Revels. The frivolous amusements and fashionable follies of Whitehall, however, proved distasteful to his naturally serious disposition, and within a month he returned to his quiet and studious life at Rowton. “I had quickly enough of the Court," he says, "when I saw a stage-play instead of a sermon on the Lord's-day in the afternoon, and saw what course was there in fashion." From the seriousness of his deportment he early acquired the name of Precision and Puritan; but though at first nettled at the sneer, he soon learned to regard as an honour an epithet which was daily heaped by the worst upon the best of men.

But mere sobriety of life could not satisfy the demands of an awakened conscience. A severe illness soon brought him to the borders of the grave. Deep convictions took hold upon his mind. His soul was shaken with fearful questionings. Dark forms of unbelief assailed him,-doubts of the future life, of the credibility of the Scripture, of the very existence of God. The very foundations of faith seemed to be destroyed. But he bravely wrestled with his doubts. He boldly confronted his spiritual difficulties, and he came off victorious, but not without receiving in the conflict mental scars, which he bore to his dying day. His convictions

were inwrought into the fibre of his being. His faith henceforth was founded upon a Rock.

At the age of twenty-three he was ordained, and became the curate to a clergyman at Bridgenorth. Two years after, he was appointed to the cure of souls at Kidderminster, and entered with enthusiasm upon his parochial duties. His earnest ministrations and sedulous pastoral care disturbed the spiritual apathy of the town, and soon wrought a wonderful improvement in the manners of the people. Nor was he less mindful of the ills of the body than of the maladies of the soul. For years he practised among them the healing art, till, finding the tax upon his time too great, he secured the residence of a professional physician.

The times were full of portents. The political atmosphere was surcharged with elements which must ere long produce an explosion. In the oppressive lull, like that before a storm, could be heard the far-off mutterings of the thunder about to burst over the astonished nation. Society was to be plunged almost into chaos by the violence of the shock. The Puritans, from being a religious sect, were gradually becoming a political power. Oppression and persecution only confirmed them in their principles. They were gradually attracting to themselves the noblest spirits of the realm,-those who loved God and loved liberty.

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Baxter's religious sympathies were almost entirely with the Puritans, but he was loyal to his sovereign. The storm burst in his immediate neighbourhood. The iconoclastic zeal of the Roundhead soldiery attacked some lingering relics of Popery in the Kidderminster church; a riot with the townspeople ensued. Baxter, as a man of peace, retired to Coventry as a city of refuge -till the return of quiet times. "We kept to our own principles," he says; we were unfeignedly for King and Parliament." Invited by Cromwell to become chaplain of the troops at Cambridge, he declined; but afterward visiting the Parliamentary army, he found, as he conceived, much theological error in its ranks, and accepted the chaplaincy of Whalley's regiment, as affording an opportunity of converting the Anabaptists and Levellers to the orthodox faith.* Askilled polemic, he challenged his adversaries to a public discussion. The theological tournament took place at Amersham church, in Buckinghamshire. "I took the readingpew," says Baxter, "and Pitchford's cornet and troopers took the gallery; and I alone disputed against them from morning until almost night." He sought a nobler antagonist in the person of the General himself; but Cromwell, he complains with some bitterness, "would not dispute with me at all." But he witnessed other and direr conflicts than these; and after many a bloody skirmish, ministered to the bodily and ghostly necessities of the wounded and the dying. He was also pres

* Edwards, a writer of the period, in his “Gangraena," or Collection of Errors, enumerates sixteen prevailing varieties of heresy, and quotes one hundred and seventy-six erroneous passages from current theological literature.

ent at the sieges of Bridgewater, Exeter, Bristol, and Worcester, ever striving to mitigate the horrors of war, and to promote the spirit of peace and good-will.

Compelled by ill health to leave the army, he returned to his beloved flock at Kidderminster, and gave to the world the undying legacy of his "Saint's Rest" and "Call to the Unconverted;" written, he tells us, "in the midst of continual languishing and medicine......by a man with one foot in the grave, between the living and the dead." The one seems like a blissful anticipation of that heaven in whose very precincts he walked; the other is almost like a call from the other world, so frail was the tenure of his life when it was uttered, but echoing through the ages in many a strange land and foreign tongue.* It has aroused multitudes from their fatal slumber, and led them to the everlasting rest.

Baxter was no sycophant of the great. He fearlessly declared, even before Cromwell, his abhorrence of the execution of the King, and of the usurpation of the Protector. Invited to preach at Court, he boldly declaimed in the presence of the great captain against the sin of maintaining schism for his own political ends. With a candour no less than his own, and in honourable testimony to his work, and to the value placed upon his esteem, Cromwell sought to convince him of the integrity of his purpose and justice of his acts. But the Puritan Royalist was faithful to the memory of his slain king. He left the Court, where advancement awaited him, and consecrated his wealth of learning and eloquence to the humble poor of Kidderminster, rejoicing in their simple joys, sympathizing with their homely sorrows, warning every man and teaching every man as in the sight of God.

Baxter sympathized strongly with the exiled sovereign, and preached the thanksgiving sermon at St. Paul's on Monk's declaration for the king. On the Restoration he accepted a royal chaplaincy, and in conscientious discharge of the duties of his office he preached a twohours sermon of solemn admonition, ungraced by courtly phrase or compliment before the yawning monarch. He was jealous of the interests of religion, and in a personal interview with Charles, to use the words of Neal, "honest Mr. Baxter told his majesty that the interest of the late usurpers with the people arose from the encouragement they had given religion; and he hoped the king would not undo, but rather go beyond, the good which Cromwell or any other had done."

Invited to present a plan of ecclesiastical reformation, he framed one on the basis of Archbishop Usher's "Reduction of Episcopacy;" but his comprehensive and moderate scheme was rejected. Notwithstanding the specious promises of the royal Declaration, the perfidy

* During Baxter's life as many as twenty thousand copies of the "Call to the Unconverted" were sold in a year-a vast number for that period. It was translated by Eliot into the Indian dialect, for the use of the American savages. It has since been translated into most of the languages of Europe, and multiplied almost beyond computation.

beard. His nose was thin and prominent, his eyes were sunken and restless. Tufts of long hair escaped from beneath his close Geneva skull-cap. Broad bands and a black gown complete his portrait.

Margaret Charlton was scarce twenty years of age, well-born and beautiful, endowed with gifts of wit and fortune. But Love is lord of all; and these two apparently diverse natures were drawn together by an irresistible attraction. The Puritan divine had been the maiden's counsellor, her guide and friend; and mutual esteem deepened into intense and undying affection. For nineteen years, in bonds and imprisonment, in suffering and sorrow, in penury and persecution, the winsome presence of the loving wife soothed the pain, inspired the hope, and cheered the heart of the heroic husband, whose every toil and trial she nobly shared. | The witlings of Whitehall did not fail to make merry and bandy jests-not over-refined-concerning these strange espousals; and some even of Baxter's friends sighed over the weakness of the venerable divine. "The king's marriage was scarce more talked of than mine," he says. But the well-nigh score of happy wedded years he passed are the best justification of this seemingly ill-matched union. There was nothing mercenary in his love, nor was it the mere impulse of passion. He renounced the wealth his wife would have brought, and stipulated for the absolute command of his time, too precious and precarious to be spent in idle dalliance.

PART II.

After his ejection Baxter preached, as occasion offered, in town and country. In one London parish, he writes, were 40,000, and in another, St. Martin's, 60,000 persons, with no church to go to. He felt that the vows of God were upon him, and he might not hold his peace. His heart yearned over these people as sheep having no shepherd; and in spite of prohibition and punishment he ministered, as he had opportunity, to their necessities. During this period occurred the awful events of the Plague and Fire of London, like the judgments of the Almighty upon a perverse nation. Yet persecution raged with intense fury. A High Church pulpiteer, in a sermon before the House of Commons, told them that "the Nonconformists ought not to be tolerated, but to be cured by vengeance." He urged them "to set fire to the fagot, to teach them by scourges or scorpions, and to open their eyes with gall.”

Baxter was several times imprisoned for his public ministrations, for privately preaching to his neighbours, for having more than the statutory number of family prayers, and for similar heinous offences. If but five persons came in where he was praying, it could be construed into a breach of the law. So weary, he writes, was he of guarding his doors against vile informers who came to distrain his goods for preaching, that he was forced to leave his house, sell his goods, and part with his beloved books. For twelve years, he complains, the

latter, which he prized most of all his possessions, were stored in a rented room at Kidderminster, eaten with worms and rats, while he was a fugitive from place to place, and now he was forced to lose them for ever. But with pious resignation he adds, "I was near the end both of that work and life which needeth books, and so I easily let go all. Naked came I into the world, and naked must I go out."

He was once arrested in his sick-bed for coming within five miles of a corporation contrary to the statute; and all his goods, even to the bed beneath him, were distrained on warrants to the amount of £195 for preaching five sermons. As he was dragged to prison he was met by a physician, who made oath before a justice that his removal was at the peril of his life; so he was allowed to return to his rifled home. On one occasion, finding him locked in his study, the officers, in order to starve him out, placed six men on guard at the door, to whom he had to surrender next day. Had his friends not become his surety, contrary to his wish, to the amount of £400, he must have died in prison, “as many excellent persons did about this time," naïvely remarks his biographer. Although he enjoyed the friendship and esteem of Lord Chief-Justice Hale, of whom he wrote an interesting Life, yet even his influence was powerless to resist the persecutions of the Government. If he might but have the liberty that every beggar had, of travelling from town to town, he somewhat bitterly remarked, so that he could go up to London and correct the sheets of his books in press, he would consider it a boon. "I am weary of the noise of contentious revilers," he plaintively writes, "and have often had thoughts to go into a foreign land, if I could find anywhere I might have a healthful air and quietness, that I might live and die in peace. When I sit in a corner and meddle with nobody, and hope the world will forget that I am alive, court, city, and country is still filled with clamours against me; and when a preacher wants preferment, his way is to preach or write a book against the Nonconformists, and me by name."

But perhaps his most scurrilous treatment was his arraignment before the brutal Jeffreys, Lord ChiefJustice of England-the disgrace of the British bench, and the original of Bunyan's Lord Hategood--for his alleged seditious reflections on Episcopacy, in his Paraphrase of the New Testament, written for the use of the poor. The Latin indictment sets forth that "Richard Baxter, a seditious and factious person, of a depraved, impious, and unquiet mind, and of a turbulent disposition and conversation, has falsely, unlawfully, unjustly, factiously, seditiously, and impiously, made, composed, and written a certain false, seditious, libellous, factious, and impious book ;" and proceeds by garbled extracts and false constructions to bring it within the penalties of the law.

The partisan judge, of the brazen forehead and the venomous tongue, the mere tool of tyranny, surpassed