so closely together that no dog should run between them, an arrangement which can hardly fail of commending itself to the unprejudiced mind. His zeal for pulpit cushions will seem a little strange to the admirers of the antependium of the present day. Other matters of greater importance, however, had claimed his episcopal care. No lecture had been held at Ipswich since Mr. Ward's suspension, which evil might have been avoided by letting that worthy divine alone. Catechizing had fallen through, and, worse than all, half the churches in the town were unserved. Hence had come a commission under Clement Corbet, Doctor of Laws, the Bishop's Vicar-General, and others, a riot, the hustling of the commissioners, and a bill of the Attorney-General against the bailiffs, burgesses, commonalty of Ipswich, William Cage, Esq., and twenty-one others. The rioters proclaimed that the Bishop's own conduct had led to the churches being unserved, and that they had never been at such a pass since Queen Mary's days. It was feverheat. From high words they soon came to blows. Jonathan Skynner, a learned and conformable minister, being peaceably in the streets, was set upon by Philip Coatnell and others, struck with a cudgel, and threatened with a drawn knife, besides being called drunken parson, base knave, etc., by Thurston Ashley, who challenged him to fight. It was alleged that the authorities were cognizant of all this, and that Cage in particular, who lived close to Bishop Wren's house, was aware that the house had been entered riotously, and Thomas Kiddermaster, Stephen Sheppard, Richard Holland, and divers of his lordship's servants, had been beaten and wounded; and yet, so far from any notice being taken of these unlawful deeds, there had been open encouragement and secret counsel given to the rabble. This kind of thing had brought about a remarkably unchristian and uncharitable feeling, and when such men as Cage on the one hand, and Sir Robert Crane on the other, met at Westminster, there would be no lack of mutual re

crimination. Compliments would pass from one to the other in full-flavoured provincial dialect, not always comprehensible when the disputants came from distant shires; and the fuel being collected in abundance, and the flame already prepared to be applied to it, the grand conflagration came as a matter of course. It is time to lessen, if it may be, the reverence felt for the men of that day. They were in a measure victims to wicked sentiments beyond their control, but to some extent controllable had there been a desire to control them. But as to great virtues and remarkable godliness on either side, those may conscientiously believe in them that really find them, and do not unconsciously fabricate them. The wholesale destruction of peace and goodwill receives but a slender compensation in the occasional blaze o. some noble scene.

'It is well,' says the present Bishop of Peterborough,1 'to abandon all illusions about the sixteenth century. There were strong men; there were powerful minds; but there was a dearth of beautiful characters. A time of revolt and upheaval is a time of one-sided energy, of moral uncertainty, of hardness, of unsound argument, of imperfect self-control, of vacillation, of self-seeking. It is difficult in such a time to find heroes, to discover a man whom we can unreservedly admire. The Church of Rome had fortified itself against attack by the Inquisition, and by the passionate zeal of the Society of Jesus, which soon degenerated into unprincipled intrigue. Calvin raised against it a massive system, which bound together the members of his community by an overpowering sense of their direct dependence on God through His particular election of each individual soul. Beside these two great systems all else seemed inconclusive, poor, feeble, and doomed to failure. Yet where in either of them was there place for the aspirations of the devout scholar, of the man who reverenced liberty, who believed in progressive

1 Lecture delivered at All Hallows, Barking, on Laud's position in the history of the Church of England, January 10, 1895.

enlightenment, who longed for an intelligent order of things in which the Christian consciousness should seek for spiritual truth? It was not merely by accident that the great scholar Isaac Casaubon ended his days in England, made happy by the society of Andrewes. It is significant of the temper of the times that the Puritans. pelted him with stones in the street when they found that he was not a partisan on their side. Still, despite this, Casaubon, with his vast learning and his wide experience of the Continent, found peace for his soul in England, which he called "the isle of the blessed." In it, despite all drawbacks, still lingered a reverence for knowledge, a love of truth, and a sense of the problems of the future.'

Few counties had been more remarkable for beautiful carving than Suffolk, and the churches of the county will long bear the marks of the commission acting by the authority of the Long Parliament, for the defacing, demolishing, and quite taking away of all images, altars, or tables turned altar-wise, crucifixes, superstitious pictures, monuments, and reliques of idolatry, out of all churches and chapels.' The Earl of Manchester received his commission as General of the Associated Eastern Counties in 1642, and William Dowsing of Laxfield, one of the visitors employed for this purpose in the following two years, has left his diary behind him. It is worth inquiry whether he was descended from the man of the same name and village who burned Noyes in Mary's reign. The diary is a witness to the ignorance and conceit of that class of Puritan. Everything appeared superstitious to his narrow, ill-informed mind. The memorials of martyrs of the best-attested records, who had witnessed for the faith in fire and under the edge of the knife when Decius or Diocletian wore the imperial purple, had to perish because silly people in the Middle Ages had invested them with miraculous qualities. Because a bushel of St. Apollonia's teeth (or, as some of our Roman friends say, teeth which had acquired the healing influence by contact with St. Apollonia's teeth) had been

found in England at the Reformation, the very memorial of the pious old woman of Alexandria, whose teeth had been beaten out with a club, must perish. The wonder was that a picture in a family Bible, a title-page woodcut, an engraved capital letter, was allowed to remain. The Saviour's monogram was thought to be the 'Jesuit's badge.' How Dowsing found 1,000 superstitious pictures at Clare,' and, by a strange coincidence, the same number at King's College, Cambridge, through which last, happily, he did not throw brickbats, and the rest of his acts, may be found in his own diary. It is really a blessing not to have room for the doings of this portentous clown, of whom the bitterest Puritan of the present day is probably ashamed.

Next comes the commission to inquire about 'scandalous ministers.' It was a cruel choice of a day that the Earl of Manchester made (St. Matthias, February 24, 1643) for the appointment of these committees for Lincolnshire, Huntingdon, Essex, and Hertfordshire, though probably he did not notice it. The Suffolk committee followed on March 12. The examples of the Star Chamber and High Commission were followed in all the iniquity of their procedure, and surpassed by bringing into every district the vile office of an informer. New Presbyter was but Old Priest writ large.' Let any man with the merest suspicion of love for civil and religious liberty, whether he be Conformist, Nonconformist, believer or unbeliever, read the accusations made, and if again he calls the Long Parliament 'passionate lovers of liberty,' language will have lost its meaning. They wanted liberty for themselves and coercion for others, and to these ends they worked as eagerly as the most rigorous of the bishops, and far more effectually. A list, by no means perfect, of the ejected is to be found in Walker's 'Sufferings of the Clergy,' from which a few particulars are extracted: Aggas, Rector of Rushbrook, afterwards got his livelihood (such as it was) by his fiddle; Alcock, Rector of Brettenham, spoke lightly of the Parliament and declaimed earnestly against the rebellion; Ambler, Vicar of

Wenhaston, refused to take the Covenant or assist in the rebellion; Dr. John Crofts, Rector of Barnham and West Stow, had nothing besides this alleged against him; Dalton, Rector of Dalham, was first driven by the troopers from his parish, and then had his living sequestrated for deserting his cure; Keeble of Ringshall, in addition to remarks about cobblers and tinkers in the pulpit, had in his house pamphlets against the Parliament, but none for it; Mayor of Finningham ridiculed Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston, saying that all the speech he made was, 'Sirs, shut the doors, lest wee get cold'; Jeremiah Raven, of Chattisham and Blakenham, was a pluralist, malignant, Arminian, superstitious, and popishly affected. As though these crimes were too few, he was also an ale-househaunter. Dr. Robert Warren, of Long Melford, was turned out, according to Walker's belief, as early as the latter end of August, 1641, when he was plundered of five very good horses and his household furniture. His case is therefore not to be charged on the Earl of Manchester. Among his offences was the revival of the use of the sanctus-bell, an instrument which was incapable of propagating Arminianism or any other 'ism' contrary to Long Parliament theology. As he was returning home after being forced out of his pulpit, one of the party beat a frying-pan before him in derision, saying, 'This is your saints' bell.' As to the accusations about false doctrine, considering the source from which they are derived, they clearly cannot be assumed to be well grounded. Neither, again, can they fairly be dismissed as baseless. Nothing but such knowledge as is impossible for us can enable us to estimate the value of these charges. The same consideration affects the charges of immorality. Among the many cases, few are more remarkable than that of James Buck, B.D., Vicar of Stradbroke, of whom Walker gives the following account:

'About the beginning of the Rebellion, when he had been Vicar here upwards of Twenty Years, he was seized and carried Prisoner to Ipswich Jayl; in which Durance he was for a time allowed part of the Profits of his