employment of his time. Two years afterwards he concluded with the Bible. But that the honour of every invention may be disputed, Sanctus Pagninus's Bible, printed at Lyons in 1527, seems to have led the way to these convenient divisions; Stephens however improved on Pagninus's mode of paragraphical marks and marginal verses; and our present "chapter and verse," more numerous and more commodiously numbered, were the project of this learned printer, to recommend his edition of the Bible; trade and learning were once combined! Whether in this arrangement any disturbance of the continuity of the text has followed, is a subject not fitted for my inquiry.

VIEW OF A PARTICULAR PERIOD OF THE STATE OF RELIGION IN OUR CIVIL WARS.

LOOKING Over the manuscript diary of Sir Symonds D'Ewes, I was struck by a picture of the domestic religious life which at that period was prevalent among families. Sir Symonds was a sober antiquary, heated with no fanaticism, yet I discovered in his diary that he was a visionary in his constitution, macerating his body by private fasts, and spiritualising in search of secret signs. These ascetic penances were afterwards succeeded in the nation, by an era of hypocritical sanctity; and we may trace this last stage of insanity and of immorality, closing with impiety. This would be a dreadful picture of religion, if for a moment we supposed that it were religion; that consolatory power which has its source in our feelings, and according to the derivation of its expressive term, binds men together. With us it was

sectarism, whose origin and causes we shall not now touch on, which broke out into so many monstrous shapes, when every pretended reformer was guided by his own peculiar fancies: we have lived to prove that folly and wickedness are rarely obsolete.

The age of Sir Symonds D'Ewes, who lived through the times of Charles the First, was religious; for the character of this monarch had all the seriousness and piety not found in the bonhommie, and careless indecorums of his father, whose manners of the Scottish court were moulded on the gaieties of the French, from the ancient intercourse of the French and Scottish governments. But this religious age of Charles the First presents a strange contrast with the licentiousness which subsequently prevailed among the people: there seems to be a secret connexion between a religious and an irreligious period: the levity of popular feeling is driven to and fro by its reaction; when man has been once taught to contemn his mere humanity, his abstract fancies open a secret by-path to his presumed salvation; he wanders till he is lost-he trembles till he dotes in melancholy-he raves till truth itself is no longer immutable. The transition to a very opposite state is equally rapid and vehement. Such is the history of man when his religion is founded on misdirected feelings, and such too is the reaction so constantly operating in all human affairs.

The writer of this diary did not belong to those nonconformists who arranged themselves in hostility to the established religion and political government of our country. A private gentleman and a phlegmatic anti

quary, Sir Symonds withal was a zealous Church-ofEngland protestant. Yet amidst the mystical allusions of an age of religious controversies, we see these close in the scenes we are about to open, and find this quiet gentleman tormenting himself and his lady, by watching for "certain evident marks and signs of an assurance for, a better life;" with I know not how many distinct sorts of "Graces."

I give an extract from the manuscript diary.

"I spent this day chiefly in private fasting, prayer, and other religious exercises. This was the first time that I ever practised this duty, having always before declined it, by reason of the papists' superstitious abuses of it. I had partaken formerly of public fasts, but never knew the use and benefit of the same duty performed alone in secret, or with others of mine own family in private. In these particulars, I had my knowledge much enlarged by the religious converse I enjoyed at Albury-Lodge, for there also I shortly after entered upon framing an evidence of marks and signs for my assurance of a better life.

"I found much benefit of my secret fasting, from a learned discourse on fasting by Mr. Henry Mason, and observed his rule, that Christians ought to sit sometimes apart for their ordinary humiliation and fasting, and so intend to continue the same course as long as my health will permit me. Yet did I vary the times and duration of my fasting. At first, before I had finished the marks and signs of my assurance of a better life, which scrutiny and search cost me some three-score days of fasting, I performed it sometimes twice in the space of five weeks, then once each month, or a little sooner or later, and then also I sometimes ended the duties of the day, and took some little food about three of the clock in the afternoon. But for divers years last past, I constantly abstained from all food the whole day. I fasted till supper-time, about six in the evening, and spent ordinarily about eight or nine hours in the performance of religious duties; one part of which was prayer and confession of sins, to which end I wrote down a catalogue of all my known sins, orderly. These were all sins of

infirmity; for, through God's grace, I was so far from allowing myself in the practice and commission of any actual sin, as I durst not take upon me any controversial sins, as usury, carding, dicing, mixt dancing, and the like, because I was in mine own judgment persuaded they were unlawful. Till I had finished my assurance first in English and afterwards in Latin, with a large and an elaborate preface in Latin also to it; I spent a great part of the day at that work, &c.

"Saturday, December 1, 1627, I devoted to my usual course of secret fasting, and drew divers signs of my assurance of a better life, from the grace of repentance, having before gone through the graces of knowledge, faith, hope, love, zeal, patience, humility, and joy; and drawing several marks from them on like days of humiliation for the greater part. My dear wife beginning also to draw most certain signs of her own future happiness after death from several graces.

"January 19, 1628.-Saturday I spent in secret humiliation and fastings, and finished my whole assurance to a better life, consisting of THREE SCORE and FOUR SIGNS, or marks drawn from several graces. I made some small alterations in those signs afterwards; and when I turned them into the Latin tongue, I enriched the margent with further proofs and authorities. I found much comfort and reposedness of spirit from them, which shows the devilish sophisms of the papists, anabaptists, and pseudo-Lutherans, and profane atheistical men, who say that assurance brings forth presumption, and a careless wicked life. True, when men pretend to the end, and not use the means.

"My wife joined with me in a private day of fasting, and drew several signs and marks by MY help and assistance, for her assurance to a better life.

This was an era of religious diaries, particularly among the non-conformists; but they were, as we see, used by others. Of the Countess of Warwick, who died in 1678, we are told that "She kept a diary, and took counsel with two persons, whom she called her soul's friends.” She called prayers heart's ease, for such she found them. "Her own lord, knowing her hours of prayers, once conveyed a godly minister into a secret place within

hearing, who, being a man very able to judge, much admired her humble fervency; for in praying she prayed; but when she did not with an audible voice, her sighs and groans might be heard at a good distance from the closet." We are not surprised to discover this practice of religious diaries among the more puritanic sort: what they were we may gather from this description of one. Mr. John Janeway "kept a diary, in which he wrote down every evening what the frame of his spirit had been all that day; he took notice what incomes he had, what profit he received in his spiritual traffic; what returns came from that far country; what answers of prayer, what deadness and flatness of spirit," &c. And so we find of Mr. John Carter, that " He kept a daybook and cast up his accounts with God every day *.” To such worldly notions had they humiliated the spirit of religion and this style, and this mode of religion, has long been continued among us, even among men of superior acquisitions; as witness the "Spiritual Diary and Soliloquies" of a learned physician within our own times, Dr. Rutty, which is a great curiosity of the kind.

Such was the domestic state of many well-meaning families they were rejecting with the utmost abhorrence every resemblance to what they called the idolatry of Rome, while, in fact, the gloom of the monastic cell was settling over the houses of these melancholy puritans. Private fasts were more than ever practised; and a lady said to be eminent for her genius and learning,

* The Lives of sundry eminent Persons in this later Age; by Samuel Clarke. Folio, 1683. A rare volume, with curious portraits.