active part in the religious controversies of the day. The opinions he expressed were naturally distasteful to the dominant party, and on at least three occasion subjected him to imprisonment and sequestrations at the hands of the Government. In 1658, for example, he was for a short time incarcerated in the Tower, and on his liberation migrated to Ireland, where he performed the pastoral functions at Lisburn. On the Restoration his services and sacrifices were rewarded with the Bishopric of Down and Connor, and during the short time he held that preferment he exhibited the brightest qualities that can adorn the episcopal dignity. He died at Lisburn of a fever, in 1667, and left behind him a high reputation for courtesy, charity, and zeal - all the virtues of a Christian Bishop.

§ 5. Taylor's works are very numerous and varied in subject: I will content myself with mentioning the principal, and then endeavor to give a general appreciation of his genius. In the controversial department his best known work is the treatise On the Liberty of Prophesying, which must be understood to refer to the general profession of religious principles and the right of all Christians to toleration in the exercise of their worship. This book is the first complete and systematic defence of the great principle of religious toleration; and in it Taylor shows how contrary it is, not only to the spirit of Christianity but even to the true interests of Government, to interfere with the profession and practice of religious sects. Of course, the argument, though of universal application, was intended by Taylor to secure indulgence for what had once been the dominant Church of England, but which was now proscribed and persecuted by the rampant violence of the sectarians. An Apology for Fixed and Set Forms of Worship was an elaborate defence of the noble ritual of the Anglican Church. Among his works of a disciplinary and practical tendency I may mention his Life of Christ, the Great Exemplar, in which the details scattered through the Evangelists and the Fathers are co-ordinated in a continuous narrative. But the most popular of Taylor's writings are the two admirable treatises On the Rule and Exercise of Holy Living, and On the Rule and Exercise of Holy Dying, which mutually correspond to and complete each other, and which form an Institute of Christian life and conduct, adapted to every conceivable circumstance and relation of human existence. This devotional work has enjoyed in England a popularity somewhat similar to that of the Imitation of Jesus Christ among Catholics; a popularity it deserves for a similar eloquence and unction. The least admirable of his numerous writings, and the only one in which he derogated from his usual tone of courtesy and fairness, was his Ductor Dubitantium, a treatise of questions of casuistry. His Sermons are very numerous, and are among the most eloquent, learned, and powerful that the whole range of Protestantnay, the whole range of Christian literature has produced. As in his character, so in his writings, Taylor is the ideal of an Anglican pastor. Our Church itself being a middle term or compromise between the gorgeous formalism of Catholicism and the narrow fanaticism of

Calvinistic theology, so our great ecclesiastic writers exhibit the union of consummate learning with practical simplicity and fervor.

§ 6. Taylor's style, though occasionally overcharged with erudition and marked by that abuse of quotation which disfigures a great deal of the prose of that age, is uniformly magnificent. The materials are drawn from the whole range of profane as well as sacred literature, and are fused together into a rich and gorgeous unity by the fire of an unequalled imagination. No prose is more melodious than that of this great writer; his periods, though often immeasurably long, and evolving, in a series of subordinate clauses and illustrations, a train of images and comparisons, one springing out of another, roll on with a soft yet mighty swell, which has often something of the enchantment of verse. He has been called by the critic Jeffrey, "the most Shakspearian of our great divines;" but it would be more appropriate to compare him with Spenser. He has the same pictorial fancy, the same voluptuous and languishing harmony; but if he can in any respect be likened to Shakspeare, it is firstly in the vividness of intellect which leads him to follow, digressively, the numberless secondary ideas that spring up as he writes, and often lead him apparently far away from his point of departure, and, secondly, the preference he shows for drawing his illustrations from the simplest and most familiar objects, from the opening rose, the infant streamlet, "the little rings and wanton tendrils of the vine," the morning song of the soaring lark, or the "fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood." Like Shakspeare, too, he knows how to paint the terrible and the sublime no less than the tender and the affecting; and his description of the horrors of the Judgment-Day is no less powerful than his exquisite portraiture of married love. Nevertheless, with Spenser's sweetness he has occasionally something of the luscious and enervate languor of Spenser's style. He had studied the Fathers so intensely that he had become infected with something of that lavish and Oriental imagery which many of those great writers exhibited - many of whom, it should be remembered, were Orientals, not only in their style, but in their origin. Taking his personal character and his writings together, Jeremy Taylor may be called the English Fénélon; but in venturing to make this parallel, we must not forget that each of these excellent writers and admirable men possessed the characteristic features of his respective country: if Fénélon's productions, like those of Taylor's, are distinguished by their sweetness, that sweetness is allied in the former to the reat, clear, precise expression which the French literature derives not only from the classical origin of the language, but from the antique writers who have always been set up as models for French imitation; while Jeremy Taylor, with a sweetness not inferior, owes that quality to the same rich and poetic susceptibility to natural beauty that gives such ■ matchless coloring to the English poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

§ 7. Having thus given a rapid sketch of some of the great figures whose genius adorned the Church, it may complete our view of the

religious aspect of that time to mention some of the more remarkable men who appeared in the opposing party. The greatest names among the latter class - Milton and Bunyan - will be discussed in subsequent chapters; but a few words may now be added respecting the excellent Baxter and the fanatical founder of the sect of the Quakers, George Fox, together with his more cultivated, yet not less earnest, follower William Penn, and Barclay, who defended with the arms of learning and argument a system originally founded by half-frantic enthusiasm. RICHARD BAXTER (1615–1691) was during nearly the whole of his long life the victim of unrelenting persecution. Few authors have been so prolific as he; the multitude of his tracts and religious works almost defies computation. He was the consistent and unconquerable defender of the right of religious liberty; and in those evil days when James II. endeavored forcibly to re-establish the Roman Catholic religion in England, Baxter was exposed to all the virulence and brutality of the infamous Jeffries and his worse than inquisitorial tribunal. He was a man of vast learning, the purest piety, and the most indefatigable industry. In prison, in extreme poverty, chased like a hunted beast, suffering from a weak constitution and a painful and incurable disease, this meek yet unconquerable spirit still fought his fight, pouring forth book after book in favor of free worship, and opposing the quiet sufferance of a primitive martyr to the rage and tyranny of the persecutor. His works, which have little to recommend them to a modern reader but the truly evangelical spirit of toleration which they breathe, are little known in the present day, with the exception of the Saints' Everlasting Rest, and A Call to the Unconverted.

GEORGE FOX (1624-1690), the founder of the Quaker sect, was a man born in the humblest rank of life in 1624, and so completely without education that his numerous writings are filled with unintelligible gibberish, and in many instances, even after having been revised and put in order by disciples possessed of education, it is hardly possible, through the mist of ungrammatical and incoherent declamation, to make out the drift of the author's argument. The life of Fox was like that of many other ignorant enthusiasts; believing himself the object of a special supernatural call from God, he retired from human companionship, and lived for some time in a hollow tree, clothed in a leathern dress which he had made with his own hands. Wandering about the country to preach his doctrines, the principal of which were a denial of all titles of respect, and a kind of quietism combined with hostility not only to all formal clerical functions and establishments, but even to all institutions of government, he met with constant and furious persecution at the hands of the clergy, the country magistrates, and the rabble, whose manners were, of course, much more brutal than in the present day. He has left curious records of his own adventures, and in particular of two interviews with Cromwell, upon whose mind the earnestness and incerity of the poor Quaker seemed to have produced an impression honorable to the goodness of the Protector's heart. Fox's claims to the gift of prophecy and to the power of detecting

witches bear witness at once to his ignorance and simplicity, and to the universal prevalence of gross superstition; but we cannot deny to him the praise of ardent faith, deep, if unenlightened, benevolence, and a truly Christian spirit of patience under insults and injuries.

WILLIAM PENN (1644-1718), the founder of the colony of Pennsylvania, played a very active and not always very honorable part at the court of James II. when that prince, under a transparent pretext of zeal for religious liberty, was endeavoring, by giving privileges to the dissenting and nonconformist sects, to shake the power and influence of the Protestant Church, and thus to pave the way for the execution of his darling scheme, the re-establishment of Romanism in England. Penn was a man of good birth and academical education, but early adopted the doctrines of the Quakers. His name will ever be respectable for the benevolence and wisdom he exhibited in founding that colony which was afterwards destined to become a wealthy and enlightened state, and in the excellent and humane precepts he gave for the conduct of relations between the first settlers and the Indian aborigines. The sect of Quakers has always been conspicuous for peaceable behavior, practical good sense, and much acuteness in worldly matters. Their principles forbidding them to take any part in warfare, and excluding them from almost all occupations but those of trade and commerce, they have generally been thriving and rich, and their numbers being small they have been able to carry out those excellent and well-considered plans for mutual help and support which have made their charitable institutions the admiration of all philanthropists.

ROBERT BARCLAY (1648–1690) was a Scottish country-gentleman of considerable attainments, who published a systematic defence of the doctrines of the sect founded by the rude zeal of Fox. His celebrated Apology for the Quakers was published, originally in Latin, in 1676.

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NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.