was being put, to dispense with engrossment, he arose. He berated the members like a very scold. Vane, attempting to speak, was denounced as a juggler. The armed men were called. They were ordered to pull the Speaker from his seat. Oliver bade them all begone. As the members passed by him, he singled them out by opprobrious names. Vane said aloud, "This is not honest." Cromwell stopped a moment, as if to think of some epithet against him also. None came. All he could do was to break out in the memorable words, "Sir Harry Vane, Sir Harry Vane, the Lord deliver me from Sir Harry Vane !"

He was not to be delivered from him. Oliver and twelve others were soon named a Council of State. Vane was invited to participate in this reign of the saints. He is reported as making answer that he was "willing to defer his share till he got to heaven." During the Lord Protectorship, 1653-58, he was for the most part in the quiet of his congenial studies in politics and theology. He published several treatises written in an admirable spirit of Christian Philosophy. One bears the title, "Retired Man's Meditations." Another is in the quietest vein, upon the "Love of God and Union with God." But once, though not desirous of factious opposition to the existing government, he felt himself invited to speak a word for the "Old Cause." Kingly prerogative, under the name of Protectorate, was not a whit more fragrant to him. Cromwell had appointed a fast "for applying to the Lord to discover the Achan, who had so long obstructed the settlement of these distracted kingdoms." Vane wrote what he called "A Healing Question," full of love to the same good cause. Hear him say of it: "It hath the same goodness in it as ever; and is, or ought to be, as much in the hearts of all good people that have adhered to it; it is not less to be valued now, than when neither blood nor treasure were thought too dear to carry it out and hold it up from sinking; and hath the same Omnipotent God, whose great name is concerned in it as well as his people's outward safety and welfare." The young school boy's conversion has not worn away yet! He gently intimates that the Achan is now in power! He proceeds to propose that a Convention be called to form a Fundamental Constitution. He thus heralded the day when a more successful statesman than he, George Washington, should secure what Cromwell did nota Constitutional Republic. For publishing this "Healing Question," he was arraigned before Cromwell's Council of State, ordered to give bonds in £8,000 to do nothing to the prejudice of the present government. He declined to give such bonds and was committed to prison in Carisbrook Castle, on the Isle of Wight, in the very prison where Charles I. had been confined when Vane was a commissioner to treat with him. He was released in about three months. Cromwell meanwhile, it is said, was encouraging vexa

tious suits against his estates. He was told the proceedings should be stopped, if he would support the government. He would not. He had given himself to the cause; he would not betray it.

Oliver the Great died in 1658, and the crowded events of the two following years are included in another period of Vane's statesmanship. In Richard's Parliament, though in two places where he was elected he was refused confirmation, he finally took his seat. The Parliament was packed with creatures in the Cromwell interest. The number of Republicans was only forty in a house of three hundred and ten members. Vane was the head of this minority. He had been the head of one before. He managed his old cause with more than the old vigour. His frequent speeches are wonderfully unanswerable. From first to last he resisted the recognition of the "single person" and his House of Lords. Nobody could meet him. Even in this packed Parliament Richard had no adequate support against Vane's influence. Richard left. The divisions in the army rendered its influence no longer safe for the Republican cause. The Republican army which Vane had so adroitly brought into power had been corrupted by the house of Cromwell. Little could now be done. That little, during these months of faction, Vane tried to do in the old interest. Among the very last of his acts in Legislative Committee was the draft of a bill for the settlement of government. The first provision is for a Fundamental Constitution. The two articles which he would have imbedded in that constitution are, first, "That it is destructive to admit any earthly king to the legislative and executive power over this nation:" second, "that the supreme power is not entrusted to the people's trustees to erect matters of faith and worship, so as to exercise compulsion therein." The Puritan boy, New England governor, and statesman of the Commonwealth, has proved faithful yet. Two years more are coming of new trial. Will he endure the fresh tests? He will.

On the 29th of May, 1660, Charles II. was restored by General Monk, of the army. He promised indemnity. He excepted, however, all those who had taken part in the death of the king. Vane had taken no part in that death. But he had taken no part in the Restoration either. The House of Lords moved to except Vane. The Commons opposed. On mutual conference they agreed to except him, with the proposal that the two houses should petition the king to spare his life. The king received the petition and granted the request. But Vane was kept imprisoned. On one of the Scilly islands, thirty miles from the mainland, separated from family and friends, was the prisoner's home. He wrote here of " ment," "religion," "life," "death," "friends," "enemies." There are grand, and beautiful, and sustaining thoughts on every page of these writings, It must have buoyed up his spirit to think

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them and to write them. There have been those who have spoken and written nobler things for liberty. In active career they had nobility. But they could not suffer well. Their prison was only a dungeon. Their sickness or death make us blush for human frailty, But Vane was greater now than ever. His lonely place of confinement supplies him with images with which to express noblest thoughts. Do storms beat about it? he consoles himself that though the storm that comes will be terrible, yet some are safest in storms." Does he look about upon his prison, and forward into the event which lies beyond? he thinks "death brings us out of a dark dungeon, through the crannies whereof our sight of light is but weak and small, and brings us into an open liberty, an estate of light and life unveiled and perpetual."

The king and his chancellor had, after two years, got their evidence together, and it was resolved to bring the statesman to his trial. The grand jury indicted him as a "false traitor.” false traitor." He was refused the benefit of counsel. Six eminent lawyers were engaged for the prosecution. He was asked to plead to the indictment. He states many convincing reasons why he could not, and closes his legal argument with a declaration of his Christian faith, and of his purity of conscience in the whole matter of his public life. The court promised him that if he would plead, he should have counsel. He reluctantly consents, and pleads guilty.

Four days later he was brought to court. He asked for his promised counsel, and the insolent judges told him they would be his counsel. The evidences of his public acts against the king were adduced. Vane was called upon for his defence. He commenced a long, elaborate, and eloquent argument of constitutional law. He explained that he had no evidence, because he had not been supplied with his indictment, and knew nothing of the charges upon which he was to be tried. Moreover, he had been a close prisoner. By law-suits brought maliciously during his imprisonment, his estates had come into heavy debt, so that his family could not furnish him any assistance. They retired to their room, and in half an hour brought him in guilty. He returned to his cell in the Tower with a lighter heart and a cheerful and thankful flow of spirits. He had been afraid he should not do justice to the good old cause; afraid lest he should seem to speak for himself rather than for it. His fears were over; he had defended himself only by defending it.

It was now Charles's duty to fulfil his pledge to the Houses, and remit the sentence that was to be pronounced. But Vane's advocacy of the cause at his trial was reported to Charles, Charles wrote to his Chancellor-" Certainly he is too dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the way.'

On the 11th of June, Vane was in court to receive his sentence, Had he anything to say? The judges supposed not. They were mistaken. Vane was determined that these judges should be put

in their true light before the world. He claimed his right to have the indictment read in Latin (the custom of the courts), so that he could take advantage of verbal exceptions. A sharp debate followed; he prevailed. He next claimed counsel to make exceptions according to law. He made the court distinctly refuse it. He offered now a bill of exceptions, which he had prepared himself, and demanded that the judges should sign it. He showed that they were obliged by law to sign it. They refused. He insisted on their refusing, one by one, in so many words. He next requested the reading of the king's promise to the Parliament to save his life. They disputed about it, but his claim was allowed. Then he quietly remarked that there were certain questions which must be settled before sentence could be passed. He began to state them. The judges grew desperately impatient and excited. Vane, however, went on, closed, folded up his papers, and appealed from that tribunal to the highest and last. The sentence of death was passed, and his execution fixed to Saturday, June 14th, 1662. At the hour of midnight, June 13th, the sheriff brought the warrant for execution. Vane said there was no dismalness in it. He slept quietly four hours. Early in the morning, his wife, children, and friends, were assembled in his prison: he prayed a remarkable for them. At the appointed hour he told the sheriff that he was ready. The sled was brought. "Any way," he said, " for I long to be at home, and to be dissolved and to be with Christ, which is best of all." The people thronging the windows and high places, blessed him. Why should they not, was it not for their cause? The prisoner ascended the scaffold and stood cheerfully and nobly before the people. He essayed a brief statement of his case, but the trumpeters drowned his voice. He knelt down in a prayer. At its close he added, “I bless the Lord that I have not deserted the righteous cause for which I suffer." He laid his head on the block, and in an instant was no more.

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Harry Vane died in the glowing and prophetic expectation that his cause could not die. Nay, he even saw it as in the very morning of its triumph. "There have been," he says, "garments rolled in blood, in which Thou didst own Thy servants; though through the spirit of hypocrisy and apostasy these nations have been thought unworthy to enjoy the fruits of deliverance. Thou hast, therefore, another day of decision yet to come."

It was coming: on the same year that he died, 2,000 ministers of his Puritan faith, renounced their livings for the same Cause. A few years later, William Russell and Algernon Sidney paid it the tribute of their lives. But a quarter of a century went by quickly and then came the Revolution of 1688, and the utter ruin of the House of Stuart. Since that epoch, the struggle for the more perfect toleration of religion, for the more complete and equitable

representation of the people, has gone on, winning slowly its triumphs. Where it has not won the field, it has at least shown more and more transparently that it is the one noble and righteous struggle of the nation, and all phases of the struggle show, as certainly the present phases of it do, that there can be no perfect ideal solution of it, until the church is severed from the State, and the State comes into the power of the people, and the people are leavened thoroughly with that Puritan religion which submits to the one Moral Governor and Redeemer of the world, and that Puritan education which makes all the people equal learners in this great school of God. Till this solution is reached, there will have to be many another "day of decision" on the same old battle field.

In one of those writings which now seem veritable prophecies, Vane had expressed his belief that America would be the last field the Good Cause was to be tried on. It was tried, by men, too, who had drunken deep at the fountains opened in that elder conflict. Our fathers of the Revolution drew their inspiration and their arguments from the wells of the English Commonwealth. The party of statesmen who sympathised with America in 1776, drew from the same sources. And to-day it will be found that the heart of England which has any true beating with our American heart, got its blood, physical or spiritual, from the Revolutionary men of 1640. It has been the ominous fortune of the leaders in our Rebellion to claim to represent the cavaliers of two centuries since. Their desperate coadjutors at the North have thought it good policy to abjure the New England States in their schemes of reconstruction on similar grounds. Must it be so? Is this old contest of Puritans and Cavaliers to have its "other day of decision" here? We trust not. But if so, welcome be the stigma of the Puritan name if we may be the heirs of its splendid history! Be ours the heir-looms of the statesmanship of Milton and Vane, and of the steady, pious, invincible courage of Cromwell and Blake; and ours the prestige of Marston Moor, Naseby, Dunbar, and Worcester.

And yet this sketch of Vane's career, as well as all careful reading of political history, may tone down empty exhilaration. For liberty is seen to be no easy, nor sudden, nor, alas! permanent attainment. It is not gained by any one night of watching or day of toil. It has never been won except at cost of most precious lives. And often, when it seemed just within reach, the hand of treachery or of ambition has stricken it down. But it remains, nevertheless, the Cause, the Good Cause. And it has ever been the instinct of men, even when themselves the most faithless and unworthy, to build the tombs of the martyrs and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous. Surely it will be our impulse, who have not forsworn the principles of Sir Harry Vane, to cherish, in these times of civil war, his saintly memory.-The New Englander.