— I fli CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO J 4. ZV-£* CO. ESSAYS HISTORICAL AND THEOLOGICAL BY J. B. MOZLEY D.D. LATE CANON OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I. THIRD EDITION LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. AND NEW YORK : i 5 EAST i6th STREET 1892 TO THE REV. JOHN WORDSWORTH, M.A. CANON OF ROCHESTER THE VALUED FRIEND OF LATER YEARS WHOSE NAME THE AUTHOR WOULD HAVE GLADLY SEEN THUS CONNECTED WITH HIS OWN 2Hjese "fcJoIunus ARE GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED. l-AOK CONTENTS OF VOL. I. Introduction, . . . xi LOED STEAFFOED. His birth — Parentage — Education — State of the nation at the commencement of his career — His politics — His general character — His opposition to Buckingham, and to a demand of a contribution from the Crown — The impetu- osity of his temper — Pym — Made Lieutenant of Ireland — Calls an Irish Parliament — Poyning's Act — Lords of the Pale — Opens the session — His care of the Church — Laud — Irish Church campaign — His quarrel with the Earl of Cork — The Thirty-nine Articles substituted for those of Lambeth — Assails the aristocracy — Commission of Planta- tions — Proceedings in Galway — Intrepid behaviour of young Ormond — The linen trade established — Reform of the Customs — The Mint — Strafford's untiring energy and capacity for business — Case of Lord Mountnorris, and of the Chancellor Loftus — The King's distrust — Lord Clanricarde's case — Strafford is refused promotion in the peerage — Eevisits England — Struggle between the Church and Puritanism — His measures of defence — Placed at the head of the army — Further proceedings stayed by the King — Strafford is arraigned — Imprisoned — The trial — The bill of attainder — Mr. Hallam's defence of the bill— Strafford's execution, . . . • -1 viii Contents. ARCHBISHOP LAUD. PAGE Biographies of Laud — Heylin's Life — Birth, infancy, and edu- cation of Laud — Enters Oxford — State of the University — Reynolds — Prevalence of Calvinism — Laud's ordination — His collisions with the University — His degree of B.D. — Sermon — Sermon on Shrove Tuesday — Abbot — Lord President of St. John's — The connection of the ecclesiastic with the Churchman — Church and State — Laud attends the Court — Laud and Buckingham — Laud a politician — The Parliament — Williams and Abbot — Abbot's fall and death — Laud's ecclesiastical rise — Bishop of St. David's, Bath and Wells, London, Canterbury — Laud the minister — The Court — His Oxford entertainment — His Lambeth life — His esoteric life — His penitence, devotion, prayers, and inner religion — His patronage of religion — Ferrar — Little Gidding — Laud's culminating point — Montague — Laud's sermon to the second Parliament — Laud's ecclesi- astical reforms — The Puritans — Their doctrine, discipline — Laud's hatred of Calvinism — Royal instructions — De- claration on the Thirty-nine Articles — Patronage — Cere- monial — Injunctions about the altar — The Sabbatarian question — Book of Sports — Compulsion — Laud's treatment of officials — Economical reforms — Restoration of St. Paul's — Strafford's viceregal ty — The Scotch Church — The Church theory — Rise of the clergy, of discipline, of im- proved theology, and literature — Puritan libels — Their effect on Laud — Laud's administration of Oxford, of the Treasury — Laud and Strafford — Comprehensiveness of Laud's character — Laud a priest — His impatience — Clarendon — Laud and Clarendon — Evil influences — The Parliament — The Tower — The Great Rebellion — The Westminster Assembly — Laud's trial — His speech on the scaffold — His execution — Laud's visionary pursuit — His successes, . . . . . .106 Contents. ix CARLYLE'S CEOMWELL. PAGE Carlyle's idea of heroism — Its moral result — Old notion of a hero — Discordant with Mr. Carlyle's contrast between the ideas of strength and beauty — Mr. Carlyle's estimate of Puritanism — His method of reform — Mr. Carlyle not master of his own mind — His inconsistencies — His cant against cant — Puritanism — Cromwell commences his career — Forms his men — Divine agency — Cromwell's humility — His avenues to power — His subtlety — Crom- well contrives the King's death — Mr. Carlyle's reflections on the King's murder — Cromwell's Irish war— His Scotch war — Cromwell and the Parliament — Cromwell Lord Protector — His keenness in business — His management of parties — His speeches — The offer of the Crown — Character of his Protectorate — Was Cromwell a hypocrite? — Mr. Carlyle's theory — Objections to it — Cromwell's ambition — His fanaticism — General estimate of Cromwell's char- acter, ....... 229 LUTHER. Opposite views of Luther — D'Aubigne's Biography, Audin's, Michelet's — Luther's practical character — His melancholy — His aspirations — Human helplessness — Tendency of moral goodness — Sense of imperfection — Application to Luther — The dogma of man's natural depravity — Its ap- plication to imputation — Practical view of this doctrine — Lutheran view of justification — Faith, extra-moral — Catholic doctrine of faith — Its incompatibility with Luther's view — Completion of Luther's system — Luther's life — Character of the age — The indulgences — Luther a Reformer — His history — Position of Luther — The war with Rome — His coarse vituperation — His constitutional bias — Luther's theory of individual priesthood — Luther creates a new society — Excesses of the Reform movement x Contents. PA.01 — Its doctrinal extravagances — Especially on the Eucha- rist — The Epistle of St. James — Luther's license with respect to marriage — Hare's Apology for Luther — This Apology examined — Luther's morbid temper — Failure of the Reformation oppresses Luther — Effects of Luther's works on Germany — Luther's private life — His nationality — Practical consequences — Recapitulation, . .321 Note, . . . . . . . .439 INTRODUCTION. In presenting the reader with the following reprints of articles and papers, selected on different grounds from the work of thirty years of a busy though retired life, some words may be allowed on the habits and growth of a mind whose full powers have only recently been recognised by the world. It is not in place here to dwell on the literary merits of their author — of these the public are the judge, — but on one particular point light may be thrown by the knowledge and experience of personal intimacy. Perhaps one characteristic of Dr. Mozley's style will be universally acknowledged — his strong grasp of the views he advocates, and the tenacity of his hold of them. Probably nothing tells so much on a reader who recognises an able mind at work as this fidelity to lead- ing ideas. This tenacity of hold makes all the difference, it would sometimes appear, between a writer of weight and another of equal and perhaps more versatile powers, who, for no evident reason, fails in this effect. A ready pen and quick apprehension may seem to embrace the whole bearings of a subject, and be able to place it before other minds with a clearness and force which leave nothing to be desired; but something is wanting which time explains, when the views thus ably argued are seen to have been a recent acquirement, and to have only had their turn in the writer's mind. If xii Introduction. they have been "taken up," if they succeed other opinions, opposed in principle or distinct in kind, whatever the ap- parent force of present conviction, they will not have lasting weight with the reader. They will only affect him as they affect, and in the degree they affect, and retain their hold on the writer himself. It may be said that no one impresses other minds more deeply and lastingly than as he is himself impressed. There can be no doubt that the impression of Dr. Mozley's published works has been a strong one ; an impression re- cognised and telling. And those who have known their author from childhood, who can follow his course from the first dawn of thought, think they see the reason of this in the mastery of certain leading ideas over his own mind ; in the extraordinary degree in which the same subjects of thought, however inevitably varied in external aspect, have occupied him. His was a life singularly one in the unbroken course of its interests ; that is to say, the interests which occupied him always evinced the same strain of thought. He viewed them according to the impulses and habits of the age in which they were entertained, whether eager sensitive boyhood, keen vigorous youth, or philosophical manhood ; but they never relaxed their hold ; they were never forgotten, never super- seded by other interests. The great truths of faith were pursued in the dawn of life with all the animation and glad confidence of the morning ; when manhood followed with its checks and disappointments, its calls to self-reliance and independence, they were the constant occupation of time and thought; in the full maturity of his powers they were maintained and vindicated with a proportionate force of con- viction ; when the blow fell they were still the stay, the resource, the comfort, the natural home of mind and hope. Introduction. xiii Memory in other directions might slip and waver, but the strong grasp of the great leading principles which had guided thought never lost its hold. This strength of hold was indeed a characteristic of tem- perament as well as of thought ; what he desired he desired with intensity. His childish longing for home, expressed to his mother in one of his schoolboy letters, reminds the reader of Cowper's line — "With what intense desire he wants his home ! " "When I think of you at the present time, all seated by the fire, so homely and comfortably, my spirits do seem to fail me ; but I think a letter from you would set them up in a great degree, and you are in the habit of writing. I don't think it would be much trouble to you just to sit down when it may be convenient to you and write me a few hues. I don't want to hear any news ; it is not that that I want, but there is something in a letter from home that would cheer me." Born at Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, September 15,1813, he had been sent early to Grantham, — a school which, it has been observed, has had the good fortune to turn out many good men, including Sir Isaac Newton. But school had no compensations for his early boyhood. Its pleasures were not to his mind. He was no lover of games. " Thinking was part of his diversion," and home was in his mind the home of thought as well as of the affections. For his opinions were as strong as his feelings at this early age. His eldest sister (who died young), in her journal, after reporting her little brother's judgment against rhymes as " only invented to hide bad poetry — blank verse so much more noble" — writes : " There is mostly a good deal of justice in his observations, yet the decided, unqualified, and determined way in which he expresses them makes them xiv Introduction. appear amusingly extravagant." Every record of him shows him in the same character. This word " noble " explains the effect upon his earliest thought of what was great and impres- sive. Human greatness, what was striking and noble in charac- ter and career, caught his infant ear, and stimulated thought and expectation. He had early glimpses into the meaning of things, and recognised the greatness of ideas under their symbols. Thus his imagination was visibly kindled by the spectacle of a court of justice. It was the idea of judgment — of the judge, not the prisoner, — that told upon him as a (jhild, with a force of which some of his later works bear the trace. And it may be said that the controversial spirit showed itself equally early, as it certainly prevailed in him to the last. This spirit woke in him in the nursery. The all- pervading controversy of the day fell on listening ears, and he was found disputing, as the advocate of Free-will, with his excellent nurse, whom he considered to be led away by the sophisms of a popular curate. 1 From a child — and as the eighth of a large family, it is no inconsiderable testimony to emphasis and force of character — his notions, his likes and dislikes, impressed themselves on the memory of those about him. His manner and neat diction secured attention to the "gentlemanly small boy," as, at four years old, a quaint bachelor friend defined him. Spirited, sensitive, refined, serene in air, but impetuous on occasion, not helpful with his hands, and willing to be waited on ; and, as one memory recalls him, " with noble bearing and generous look," he made his impression 1 " It ought to be mentioned," writes a correspondent, " that for many- years, indeed from about the first year James was taken to church, he had to hear every Sunday Calvinistic sermons framed on the Simeonite mode], and that, contrary to the usual habit of boys, he listened to the sermon and bottled up his objections." Introdtiction. xv on his own little world, and was indeed a child of remarkable grace and promise. As in character the child was father of the man, so we find the same subjects of thought possessing a natural attraction. Thus from school, in a letter, asking at the same time for a volume of Bacon, he writes (cet. thirteen) to his mother : " I have gone into Lucretius, a book full of odd opinions and deistical notions. In short, he is called the deistical poet; but as many of his opinions have long ago been refuted, you need be in no fear of my getting them into my head, especially as many of them seem to me absurd." Later on (at fifteen) the turn for controversy developed in the nursery was called into keener exercise as defender of the Creeds against the cavils of his sisters' mathematical master — a thinker in his turn, of the school of Dr. Erasmus Darwin (who founded a Philosophical Society in Derby), and no incon- siderable opponent, — one who has his marked representative in the thought of our day, but whose questionings fell powerless on the ears of a childish audience, proud of, and implicitly relying on, the young champion of orthodoxy, so ready with his arguments, so confident of his ground. On account of the then declining state of Grantham School, he had been removed from it, and on report of the rising reputation of Eugby, his father applied for his admission there, a destination prevented by Dr. Arnold's rule to receive no boy after the age of fifteen. His first acquaintance with Oxford had been made before this. As his brother (the Rev. T. M.) writes to a local journal in correction of a mistake, — " At the age of thir- teen I brought him up to Oxford to try for a scholarship at Corpus, when his age and boyish looks were fatal to him. His translation in verse from Homer at that age would, I xvi Introduction. think, justify the opinion I then had of his powers." There are those who remember him, as he first made his appearance in his brother's rooms, a little fellow in a jacket, which had to be exchanged for " laps " before the examination. And the letter which tells of his failure reports that he was called in by the President and Fellows, who told him they had been much pleased with his examination, that he had passed second best, and would certainly have been chosen but for his extreme youth. 1 After an interval of private tuition at home he was admitted at seventeen (Oct. 1830) into Oriel College, of which his brother was Fellow. There his admiration and sympathy were at once awakened by the circle of his brother's friends, amongst whom were the leading thinkers of the University, by whom he was most kindly received, first for his brother's sake, and soon for his own. Whatever effect this extension of his interests might have on his degree, it had undoubtedly a very powerful in- fluence in enlarging and developing his mind. Thus from his first entrance upon College life grave topics, as his home letters testify, occupied him ; but under circum- stances of peculiar attraction. He was especially open to the sweet flattery of admission to the thought of those he most looked up to, expressed in the gay, careless undress of familiar intercourse. In November 1832 he writes of Hurrell Froude's approaching departure on the journey since recorded in the Apologia : — " Froude is obliged, contrary to his inclination, to give up the idea of going to Egypt. This must be a great disappointment to him, as old relics of superstition are what, above all other things, 1 Candidates were admitted for examination at Corpus at an exception- ally early age. It will be remembered that Keble won his scholarship at fourteen and eight months. In the present case it happened that immediate residence would be necessary, which, of course, was out of the question. Introduction. xvii he delights in. He does not care so much for classical remains as those of Greece or Italy." ..." Froude is growing stronger and stronger in his sentiments every day, and cuts about him on all sides. It is extremely fine to hear him talk. The aristocracy of the country at present are the chief objects of his dislike and vituperation. And he decidedly sets himself up against the modern character of the gentleman, and thinks that the Church will eventually depend for its support, as it always did in its most influential time, on the very poorest classes of the country." [The letter going on to give the heads of 'Newman's' last Sunday's sermon.] "Excuse for sin on the ground of necessity, in which he attacked the modern idea of the irresistible march of society." Of the attraction of his youthful manner many chance private testimonies remain. The brightness and humour, the gaiety and hope of youth, brought to enliven subjects that more commonly occupy graver and older men, made to many an unusual combination ; and with it there was, — what all who knew him must have felt a marked characteristic through life, — a genuine deference for the opinion of others ; arising out of his habit of estimating persons by his own private measure, apt to be a favourable one, rather than by their received place or standing, whether in the world's judgment or their own. He expected to find the people he met with worth listening to and perhaps therefore found them so ; for there is no greater stimulus to thought than the perception that the thought w r ili have its fair chance with the hearer. One whimsical testi- mony to these social qualities is met with, as given by a family friend, a clergyman of high cultivation and refinement, who had striven to impart these gifts to a long succession of private pupils. "Mr. W.," writes his wife, "has enjoyed himself very much, and ever and anon has soliloquised after this fashion : ' Astonishing !' ' What is astonishing V ' Why, that I should like the company of a young man ; but this one just suits me ; I am never tired of him, never wish him away.' " M.E.-L] & xviii Introduction. A chance testimony of a contemporary in undergraduate days tells of an effect produced, — " he suffered nothing evil to come near him." This would, in his case, be the natural effect of an inherent refinement and purity rather than of conscious action on others. A love of protest was not part of him. No one had less the impulse to tell people of their faults ; he rarely did it himself, he did not take kindly to the practice in others. Thus, telling of an interchange of home truths between two acquaint- ances of equal candour and strength of views, he writes : " You see we are getting very plain-spoken here. I suppose telling people of their faults in a serious way ought not by right to offend one's taste, and yet it is such an inroad on the system of manners in which one has been brought up that it is difficult to recon- cile one's-self to it." To reprove well is indeed a great and invaluable gift; it may be that he was without it, but the impulse often proceeds from a narrow view both of evil and its counteracting influences, on the vain idea that a word can set so much wrong right. The largeness of view that was a charac- teristic of his, the same principle which kept him in maturer life from sudden and hasty action at every call of danger to the faith, may have told also on his closer intercourse with mankind. From a boy he could be contemptuous enough on what was low in tastes or propensities ; a contempt sometimes expressed with a severity of youthful scorn which gave an early foretaste of his vigour of style ; but his humility preserved him from harsh judg- ments on social intercourse in its more trifling phases; a humility assisted, as time went on, by penetration. Thus he reflects (1837): "I suppose by rights one ought to shake one's head and look grave at this style of thing, only that experience tells one that the follies of the wise and the follies of the foolish are not at such an immense distance from each other after all. Introduction. xix Not that I mean to rank myself among the wise — on the contrary." Some passages from home letters (1833), written at the age of nineteen, show how much his thoughts were engaged in the state of feeling that issued in " the Movement." People were reading Lamennais' L'Avenir, and his Tory feeling shows itself in a tone of suspicion : — " What do you think," he asks, " of the Democratical High Church school 1 . . . I have no doubt their views will before long assume a greater prominence than most people are at present aware. Of course one must regard them as extremely dangerous. How can one answer for the result when we introduce into people's minds totally new notions, notions of power, however well attached they may have been to the Church when altogether excluded from the political world, and naturally accustomed to consider themselves as mere subjects, governed without any reference to their own will ? I don't exactly know what Froude [who had recently returned from his tour] thinks of these notions he has imported from France. In fact, he does not know himself, and he says, moreover, that there is no necessity for us in this country to form any judgment upon them. ... I would not set down everything that Froude says for his deliberate opinion, for he really hates the present state of things so excessively that any change would be a relief to him." Again, in describing the Commemoration of 1833, he tells of Keble's oration as Professor of Poetry, which, " instead of being, as it generally is, a stupid harangue about sub- jects of no interest, was a splendid panegyric on ' Gulielmus Laud, Episcopus et Martyr ; ' of course referring, as the occasion required, only to his conduct in the University, and not to his political or ecclesiastical character, — not but that the two latter points came in incidentally pretty often. . . . The conclusion was a very magni- ficent one : ' As soon as ever the University forsakes its old course, and gives itself up to the influence of the world at large, or to the insane pride of an intellectual philosophy, it is all over with its dignity and its religion.' This given in a rolling Latin sentence, accompanied with six-syllabled epithets, two or three at a time, sounded very splendid, and was loudly cheered in the gallery. The whole oration was very fairly attended to, a most extraordinary occurrence, and the good sentiments, whenever they came in a tangible form, met with due encouragement. . , . Froude is stay- xx Introduction. ing up, and I see a great deal of him. He is now sending a very interesting Thomas a Becket to the British Magazine .... Eose rather hesitates at present in receiving Froude's ferocious article, alleging that the argument on which he supposes the union between Church and State to have been hitherto supported, the one given in Hooker, is not, practically speaking, the one on which it has stood in the minds of men for a long time. Hooker's defence of the union goes entirely on the supposition of the Church and State being the same body in different relations. This is manifestly not the case now. . . . Froude is most enthusiastic in his plans, and says, ' What fun it is living in times like these ! how could one now go back to the times of old Tory humbug 1 ' Newman has not come back ; this is the time of long calms in the Mediterranean. . . . Wilson, the Boden Professor, delivered his first lecture a fortnight ago, a very interesting one — the Sanscrit quotations most amusing." A few days after he writes : — "July 4, 1833. — That was rather a rash promise of mine to write again in a few days. Two or three days being now past, I find I have nothing to tell you but the old story over again, which, perhaps, you may be rather tired of by this time, for I think it has composed the substance of all my letters for the last three months, viz., Church and State, and the British Magazine and Froude and Newman, and French and Boman Catholics. ... I learnt one piece of news from Miss N., on good authority, as every piece of news has since the foundation of the world, that Keble was going to marry. What will the monks and the misogamists say to this? Froude told me the other day that Keble used to think marriage a suitable state for parish priests, but he seemed to think that these stirring times must have driven such quiet notions out of his head long ago. He is perpetually sneering at W. for his tergiversation in a kind of mixed strain of pity and sarcasm. Whether Keble's example will soften down his sternness or not, I don't know. It is impossible to talk with Froude without com- mitting one's-self on such subjects as these, so that by and by I expect the tergiversants will be a considerable party." It is felt that such lively one-sided records scarcely do justice to the depth and intensity of Hurrell Froude's character ; these will be found dwelt upon in one of the following papers. But in reading of these enthusiastic and daring sayings, it must be remembered that life was to him a bounded prospect, that he lived with a doom hanging over him, and had to act as it Introduction. xxi were in haste, and condense his thought into epigram. None who have ever seen him can wonder at the devo- tion of his friends. A year or two later than the date of letters from which these quotations are taken, it chanced to the present writer to be a witness of his return to Ox- ford, — for the moment a surprise, — from his last search after health at Barbadoes; a scene of welcome not to be for- gotten ; mingled, as the joy evidently was, by secret misgiving and dismay, at the attenuated form and features, from which illness could not remove the fine grace of outline and keen play of expression. The next day he took his part in a public con- test, with a sort of passionate zest at rinding himself once more among friends and opponents. It was probably one of the last scenes of the kind in which he could take a part. Of the im- pression he made on all who came within the sphere of his attractions, a few words in a letter of some months' later date, written by one not given to the melting mood, bears evidence : " Who can refrain from tears at the thought of that bright and beautiful Fronde ! He is not expected to last long." It will be understood that Hurrell Froude's was not the only leading mind by whom " young Mozley " (one distinction by which he was then known) was influenced. The power of " New- man" over the minds of younger men who enjoyed the privilege of his intimacy is a fact of history. Every letter of this period shows some trace of it. Some letters bear immediately on passages in the Apologia, in amusing and interesting con- firmation of states of mind and opinion described there. A keen critic of style always, " J. H. N.'s" style strikes him in the letters from abroad which are read before him — " This [a view on the Italian character] is what Newman tells Christie in a letter, at the reception of which I was fortunate xxii Introduction enough to be present, and so heard the contents read. He has written between forty and fifty letters since he went out. They are really exquisite in their way. They are evidently written as fast as his pen can go ; yet, if he spent whole days about them they could not be more beautiful compositions than they are." And in another letter, 1834 : — "Newman's pamphlet on suffragans will be out immediately, [t is astonishing the speed with which he composes, and that when he has a dozen other things hanging on his mind at the same time. It is certainly a good illustration of Eose's maxim, ' that those who have most to do are the fittest persons to take in hand any new work.' ' A letter, July 1833, records the return home : — " Newman has at last returned from his long travels ; he is looking very well. That he does look well is rather strange, as he was very dangerously ill for a long time in Sicily. ... I drank tea with Newman last night. Keble comes up to-morrow to preach the assize sermon. An assize sermon is essentially a conservative one, so I don't know how he'll manage." This is the sermon recorded in the Apologia, where the writer, after speaking of his arrival at his mother's house, concludes the chapter — " This was on a Tuesday. The following Sunday, July 1 4th, Mr. Keble preached the assize sermon in the University pulpit. It was published under the title of ' National Apostasy.' I have ever considered and kept that day as the start of the religious movement of 1833." The notice of the same event in the letters before us gives the impression of the time : — "July 30, 1833. — I send you a copj r of Keble's assize sermon, preached a fortnight ago. I'm sorry I did not hear it myself. The church at assize sermons is always as full as it can hold, from people who go not to hear the sermon, but to see the judges' wigs. And unfortunately I went rather late, not thinking but that I should find the undergraduates' gallery tolerably empty as usual ; but a cloud of feathery and bonneted female intruders had occupied the whole. I am the more sorry I did not hear it, as I cannot help thinking it a kind of exordium of a great revolution — shall I call it 1 — coming on, whether rapidly or slowly we cannot Introduction. xxiii tell, but at any rate most surely. It is the first regular remon- strance against the measures of the infidel party here, the first decided and pointed protest from a minister of the Church in his proper and peculiar station. All the articles and letters and reviews of the British Magazine are very well in their way, but they don't come as from authority; and though the authors of them are clergymen, yet, when writing for the public at large, they are no more than laymen and private persons. This is a solemn ecclesiastical censure. Different opinions have, of course, been given of it by different people. Some of the barristers of the Tory side thought is too strong, especially as one of the judges, Gurney, either was or had been a dissenter. This is certainly carrying the principle of politeness rather too far. If all offensive topics are to be avoided in a sermon, some people may choose to think virtue and sin invidious distinctions, and certainly religion a most offensive topic. Pusey of Christ Church, a person of excellent principles, thinks some passages rather too pointed, from what reason I don't exactly know. It seems to be as gentle as could be, consistent with the principles professed in it. The preface is rather more piquant, especially the concluding sentence. The Bill being actually past the second reading [the Bill for the suppression of ten Irish Bishoprics], I suppose he felt himself more at liberty to speak out. One thing is naturally suggested by the advice toward the end of the sermon, which, next to those private duties which belong to us at all times, makes the duty of standing by the Church, and publicly supporting it, the most important that we have in these days. There is nothing like talking for really forcing ideas on people's minds ; and this sermon is something tangible to begin upon, and one may accommodate one's-self exactly to the standard of excellence which the person one talks with may have, and either call it very clever, or very good, or very pious, or very sharp, or very abusive, just as the occasion requires ; but talking somehow or other is the most efficacious means. People are caught by mere words — I mean not only silly people, but really it is natural for all to think that of importance which they hear much of, and very difficult to avoid thinking it right too. Froude is now taking, not a walking but, a talking tour." *e> The way in which, what was soon to be, a great name is here introduced will excite a smile till it is recollected that the writer is an undergraduate to whom the name of " Pusey " was so far little more than a name. After taking his degree he spent some time with other young men reading divinity xxiv Introduction. under Dr. Pusey's hospitable roof, a period of which the letters before us contain interesting memorials. To return to the one just quoted; it reports how his reading, for which he was staying up during the " Long," was getting on : — " I am reading very fairly as far as number of hours go, though I find I get on very slowly. Newman has offered me any assist- ance he can give, which is very kind of him, but it would be hard to come down upon him with all his present engagements hanging upon him." Almost immediately upon the assize sermon followed the first numbers of the " Tracts for the Times." Their authorship, their subject, their style, and the various opinions expressed on them, are discussed with critical intelligence. On the question, e.g., of committees, we read — " Many cooks spoil the broth. People should remember that there is an important question, which cannot but considerably affect the usefulness of the most prudent and wisely-balanced pub- lication, i.e. whether it will be read or not. A question has been raised whether all the tracts that come out in the Society's cause ought not to be the productions of a committee, or at any rate should be submitted to their alteration. Newman is against the thing on the very obvious principle that intense stupidity cannot fail to be the principal quality of publications sent out under such circumstances." He hears of the success of the tracts in being read and exciting interest. "lam almost tempted," he writes, " to go down and witness it with my own eyes, and leave my reading and examination to fish for itself. I am almost afraid to hint to you how exceedingly slowly I get on in the last-mentioned matters. I only do it to prevent expectation." That his mind was thus diverted from that exclusive atten- tion to the work of reading necessary for high honours is no matter of regret, since it was being exercised in the field more congenial to his peculiar powers; but it is scarcely necessary, Introduction. xxv under the circumstances of the case, to attribute his Third to any singularity of mental constitution and late development of the intellect. One study under any circumstances must have shared his interests with the application of thought to a direct immediate object, — study of character. It was an instinct with him to speculate on the character of all with whom he came in con- tact : one that made him feel the interest of sympathy with the great masters of fiction. Not that this was apparently a conscious exercise with him, still less a power of which he made any display, but he could not be taken by sur- prise. Whether it was a public character, or one with whom he had been brought into ever so slight personal relations, he would always be found with some view more distinct and complex than is common where observation has not been quickened by direct personal interest — a view unfold- ing itself naturally to himself, as well as his hearers, as his impressions put themselves into words. A letter of sympathy naturally with him fell into an analysis of character ; thus his condolence took the form of all others most interesting to the mourner. Persons were surprised to find, in one whose opportunities had been few and not intimate, an estimate of qualities which answered to their life-long experience; and hidden graces detected which they supposed only known to the familiar home circle. This habit of insight, of looking beyond the outside, of judging men by their qualities and characteristics rather than by such manifestations of themselves as circumstances had a large share in, was not compatible with partisanship; nor was he by nature made to be either the follower or the leader of a party. It was not possible, it was not to be xxvi Introduction. desired, that under the circumstances of his early College career he should do otherwise than feel and act as one of a party. To be brought into the intimate society of men intellectually and morally formed for influence, and gifted with all the personal qualities which naturally engage affection and reverence, to understand them, to realise the privilege of admis- sion to such intimacy, and to prefer it to intercourse with men of his own standing, necessarily made him feel one of a school, and enjoy the sense of alliance with it ; but it was these peculiar and overmastering circumstances, — we may add also the prevalence of party spirit as a feature of the times, — rather than his tempera- ment, which brought it about. 1 The deepest thinkers, the most devoted men, the most loveable companions, felt strongly one way ; he threw himself into the stream of their thought. And of this influence the earlier articles now republished bear some trace ; though all are strongly marked by what was lastingly characteristic of himself. But all the time there was an inner strain of thought, an independent mode of viewing things, more peculiarly his own than any teaching of a school. The work most characteristic of him was solitary work, to be thought over and dwelt upon in silence ; and independent of intercourse with even a congenial mind. Sympathy indeed was valued and gratefully acknowledged, but it was not neces- sary. So soon as he could not follow his hitherto leader, he fell back on a constitutional bias — on the workings of a mind that had its inner court, testing questions by its own laws of investigation. Thus thrown upon himself, those who knew 1 On this point a friend of the author's writes : " As to partisanship, I think that, in the higher sense of the word, he had a great deal of the loyalty and the singleness of purpose of a partisan for a great cause. When there was any University row going on, he was the soul and hackbone of any movement determined on. Of course this altered much in late years." Introduction. xxvii him best saw how natural was the modification of view on certain points which had been regarded as distinctive of the party to which he had been allied by so many ties. When his sympathy went most unhesitatingly with this party, his thought, when left to its own working, slid naturally into a channel more congenial to the turn of his intellect. Thus, as an example of his warm sympathy with the movement, we give an opening sentence of the following letter, dated Dec. 5, 1836, which however, it will be seen, digresses to other subjects : — " We are getting stronger and stronger every day. What do you think of S. becoming an Apostolical 1 ? 1 The worst of it is, that he has been ' other things ' before, so one does not know how far to think satisfactorily of his conversion. Only it is a sure sign of a party growing when it draws in all sorts of people. As things advance changes of opinion show more for the party and less for the individuals. I expect to see the time when being an Apostolical will not exempt a person in the least from being a cox comb. Only think, when the system finds its way into the heart of Cambridge, when the Trinity Common-room engrafts Apostolical upon German views ! We are destined, I think, to see curious combinations as the tide of affairs advances. Miss G., by the way, has been inspired by the idea of writing something to aid the cause. But this is a secret. I hear H. is meditating something of the kind. I like the scheme very much, and quite envy her the work. Not that it is at all in my line, only that one takes a fancy to everything rather than one's own particular work. We shall beat Miss Martineau out and out. At any rate we shall not first describe a beautiful landscape, and forthwith upon it introduce two archbishops and an archdeacon arguing on the Apostolical Succes- sion, which is the course she would have pursued. . . . Pusey has been laid up with a cold lately, and unable to deliver his lectures. He is giving a course of lectures on Prophecy, in which he brings in quite new views of interpretation from the Fathers. We are not gone very far as yet, being at present on the text, ' The man is become as one of us.' To me the lectures are impressive, not so much from the particular views which they give, as from the general idea they leave on the mind of there being so much more in the words of Scripture than one at all thought of before. . . . C. 1 A title of the day — happily short-lived. xxviii Introduction. has come up and gone down again. He is really doing no good at all in the way he is going on now — posting up and down the country without object or interest. His mind never settles to any- thing. There is really something valuable in the mere principle of permanence j when a man can fix himself in a certain place for a certain time ; Avhich is a kind of excellence that even matter itself aspires to and attains successfully." Naturally his letters told of what was passing, and of what was interesting in the events and doings around him ; but his conversation at the same time was more intimately himself, and showed a mind pursuing its own topics in its own way, very much in the vein of his later years. To support this view by slight hasty records written by inexperienced hands needs apology, but contemporary statements are more to be relied on than most memories. The leaves of a sister's note-book tell of a home visit paid while the same public interests were occupy- ing him : — " Talked with J. B. M. He is one of the most agreeable people to talk with I know anywhere ; so much sincerity, clearness of head, good sense, good nature, and humour ; and also some of that deference for the person talked with that he admires so much in Froude." Again : " Talk with J. B. M. His theory that really great men are less guided by what is called free-will than common minds — they seem rather to follow an impulse beyond them- selves." Again : " He talked of Coleridge and his uncandid use of Jeremy Taylor in the Aids to Eeflection. From thence we wandered to the old Greek philosophers, especially Plato. We agreed that some first-rate men ought to translate his and simi- lar works, that ladies, who have all a little leaning towards the elevated and abstract, should gain some glimpse of that world Introdtiction. xxix so far beyond their reach. But no doubt a translation would destroy half the merit and more than half the charm." Again : " From poetry and some of Wordsworth's views of a previous existence, went to the art of reading poetry and read- ing in general. Good and bad readers. Keble not a good one. He an exception to what appears a general rule of mind showing itself externally by voice, by different tastes and arts, such as music, etc. From Keble to Froude : the pecu- liarity of his mind — his power of grappling with an idea, a single naked idea. Whether ideas can exist in the mind neither expressed by words nor pictures ; agreed that they could, hence such words of the poets as ' brooding,' ' glimpses,' ' consciousness,' etc. etc. A passage from Fronde's diary [not then published] where he describes his inability to enter into the meaning of the Psalm he was reading, in spite of the most intense effort, till Merton bell sounded, when the whole full meaning broke in upon him. From Froude to Coleridge, his notion of belief as an effort of the mind and the will, his apparent want of apprehension of a simple and intuitive faith." Again : " Mr. S. called in the evening for Butler's Analogy, J. B. M. having had an argumentative walk with him in the afternoon, At night had a long abstruse conversation about Butler's views, and Hume's, and men of science." Then follows a criticism. A caller had given opportunity for lively controversy, and he had disappointed expectation and said very little, not having apparently the same faith in disputation at three-and-twenty as he had shown at fifteen. One question here touched upon, how ideas may exist in the mind, was one which bears very closely on his own habits of thought, which to those who had opportunity of observation xxx Introduction. answered exactly to this word " brooding," — a quiet waiting, an extraordinary patience and stillness of expectation. With no personal allusion this state is eloquently described in the conclusion of the "Augustinian Doctrine" as that of great analytical minds : — " The natural activity of the human mind, so opposed to the passive attitude ordinarily, puts up with it at certain intervals for the sake of rest, and enjoys it. But difficulty with passiveness is uncongenial. We want always, when we are at work, to feel our- selves in pi'ogress, in action, advancing step after step ; and the attitude of standing still in thought, though it be for an important result, though it be consciously only a waiting in readiness to catch some idea when it may turn up, is, for the time that it is such a waiting, and previous to its reward, a painful void and hol- lowness of the mind. But such is the attitude which is required for true analytical thought, or the mind's examination of itself. For the ideas which are the contents of that inward world, wandering in and out of darkness, emerging for an instant and then lost again, and carried about to and fro in the vast obscure, are too subtle and elusive to be subject-matter of regular and active pursuit ; but must be waited and watched for, with strength suspended and sus- tained in readiness to catch and fasten on them when they come within reach, but the exertion being that of suspended and sus- tained rather than of active and employed strength." — {Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination, p. 316.) After the death of Froude, his time was much occupied in editing and arranging the Becket papers, which form volume ii. of the second part of Froude's Remains, left in an unfinished state by their author : the greater part of the large letter being his own. His first original paper appeared in the British Critic of October 1838, " Palgrave's Truths and Fictions of the Middle Ages." It tells no little for the glare of notice and criticism under which the parcy wrote, that this first effort should be commented upon in the University pulpit, as the following- letter (Nov. 5, 1838) tells :— " What do you think of my article having been alluded to in a Introduction. xxxi sort of way from the University pulpit ] It is absurd enough, but so it is ; only very slightly, but enough to recognise the allusion. Mr. Gresley (the author of a book on Preaching) stuck up for the phrase ' ready-made apparatus ' [Dr. Chalmers had spoken of the Church of England's ready-made apparatus of churches and parishes], as though it had been too hardly handled. We ought to unite, he said, the lofty and the 'practical parts of our system. I quite agree with him, but Dr. Chalmers separated them, and that in the broadest and coarsest way. R, who was behind me, de- clared he just saw the tips of ears turning red. I confess to a temporary suffusion, but it was only for a moment. There were not half a dozen persons in church who knew either the article itself, or that I had written it, so I might have spared myself even that piece of consciousness." We cannot quote the concluding word without observing on the singular absence of self-consciousness as a characteristic. Writing home, where every detail would have been read with interest and indulgence, there is scarcely another example of such personal allusion. From this time his pen was never idle. The list of writ- ings at the end of these volumes is a chronological record of the nature of his studies, the bent of his mind, and his course of thought. It is to be regretted that the articles selected do not do justice to his extensive knowledge of our great theo- logians. One interesting article in the British Critic (October 1842), on the Development of the Church in the Seventeenth Century, with its comprehensive and telling extracts from the divines of that period, was felt, from the very length and number of these extracts, to be unsuited for reproduction among the author's own proper work. It was to provide an organ and support to the Anglican party in the Church, when the British Critic, came to an end, that he became joint-editor of the Christian Remembrancer, in which appeared so many of the papers reprinted in these volumes. We can hardly believe of a character so full of life, so keenly xxxii Introduction. interested in men and things, that it was without ambition — which often exists as a latent quality where all action seems to work in distinct contradiction to it — but with him it was held in check by counterbalancing impressions. The pen was in his case the only natural instrument by which to make him- self widely knowu. The mere want of power of voice for in- tercourse with numbers, the hopelessness of securing in large social gatherings that fair field for the expression of thought which a searching quality of tone, and volume of sound give, drove him to the domestic circle, the tete-a-tete, the privacy of his study, for saying what he had to say. 1 But also that com- mon form of ambition, a craving for influence, did not weigh much with him; he was not impelled by the necessity of in- doctrinating others with his views. In an early article on Dr. Arnold (1844) he contrasts two classes of mind in this respect : — " There is a great difference between first-class minds," he writes, " on this point. Some have no natural taste or liking for the particular office of influencing minds. Their hearts and in- tellects expand within themselves, spread over the earth, sea, and air of speculation, and pervade all metaphysical nature, before they definitely take irp the notion of impressing their views on any one being but thems.- ives. The pleasure of getting their views received, seeing them take, and watching their entrance into other minds, is one which they do not feel or appreciate. It is just the reverse with another class : with them the very process of expansion in their own minds takes the form of communication with other minds, and they have no sooner a view at all than they want to see it out and abroad and doing its work. The very life of an opinion, even an inward one, is connected in their idea with an external power, and the internal and the external go on together." 1 Many can bear witness to his felicitous powers of talk under favouring conditions. Thus a friend writes : " Of the brightness, the wit, the conver- sational power, throwing himself into the minds of those he was speaking with, too much cannot be said. We spent one winter in Brighton, and he used to walk over from Shoreham, and he and my husband talked together as no other two men could do."— See In Mcmorlam, vol. ii. Introduction. xxxiii It is easy here to see with which class the writer's own feelings sympathise. The task of refuting what he believed to be error in an encounter with one mind in stiff argument, was a greater stimulus to him than the hope of carrying numbers along with him. If there was ambition it was of a higher flight than the quality that deliberately works towards its ends. He wrote in hopes of accomplishing a public purpose, but the mere pleasure of seeing and feeling himself the instrument of effect- ing that purpose did not influence him. Nothing would have made him choose a popular theme because it was popular. Eeaders of the Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination must perceive what a mine of his most characteristic thought the volume is; it was clearly written under the impulse of a strongly felt line of argument. " I have been dragging on," he writes to a friend, "through my opus since I last wrote, and now it is, I am glad to say, near a conclusion. The book, I confess, is not what would popularly be called interesting, but if it establishes a point I shall be quite satisfied." He had a view to put forward, whether it was popular or the reverse. Much the same may be said of the Review of the Baptismal Controversy. His aim was, indeed, to reconcile two parties in the Church into a mutual toleration of each other within her pale, which implies a certain desire to meet the reader's prejudices and smooth difficulties ; but the number of his readers was not a question either in setting out on his task or in carrying it through. A letter acknowledging a presenta- tion copy has come to light, which probably reflects the state of mind of the reading public of the day, while it does justice to the earnestness of the author : — " Thank you much for the volume which the post brings me M.E.-I.] c xxxiv Introduction. this morning. I am glad that you assume me to take interest in such questions, and I assure you this one is still in the list of subjects which I think I could retire upon when bidding adieu to the world. I am not, however, capable of either long or close attention to any such subject. All I can do will be to dip into the volume as a swallow dips into a pool. It is of no use what- ever, I know, trying to change the current of a full and eager mind when it is once on a theme ; but I am sorry for your sake that this is not one of the subjects of the day. No doubt there are good people who earnestly desire to have their minds cleared on this point, whether there be a controversy about it or not ; but they are as few as they that served God in the days of Elijah." It must be noted of him that he was exceedingly jealous of himself on the score of originality. Most men either take for granted this quality in themselves, or do not inquire into the question ; but it was a point on which he was from the first keenly watchful. After his ordination for Deacon's orders in 1838, he writes of his two first sermons : — " One has accustomed one's-self to a certain style of thought and mode of looking at things so long that one really cannot get out of it, and to write a good plain homely sermon [i.e. one intelligible to a village congregation] would be a most unnatural exercise for me. I confess I imitate Newman, not purposely, but I cannot help it. I am not ambitious of being ranked among the servile cattle (servum pecus imitatoruni), but one must follow in the track which has been laid down for one. So just as young Evangelicals preach evangelically, though they hardly know their own system more than they do any other, so I forsooth must preach in Newman's way with the same relation to him that the Oxford Newdigate has to Pope." The habit of writing soon made him feel his own master, but still his self-criticism was keen. What was written for an occasion he did not expect to last beyond the occasion. He was advised more than once by friends to republish certain articles of lasting interest — as is being done now, — but the idea did not attract him, and the request of a publisher to undertake the work was declined, seemingly as a matter of course. Even in the case of the University Sermons, which have since received Introduction. xxxv so warm a welcome ; though pressed from time to time by those who knew their value to collect them into a volume, whether from that easiness and absence of hurry which characterised him in transactions of the sort, or perhaps expecting to add to their number, he put the question aside. Unprompted, it was one of his first acts, after realising the nature of his illness, to put them in train for publication. But though the thought of name and credit were never strong impulses towards action, his pen was from the first an active and telling instrument in all the stirring times that succeeded the period (1834) of his degree ; his whole interest and energies were engrossed by his share in them, and he soon became a recognised influence. Under the great shock of 1845 his hold on his own line of thought never relaxed, it kept him still in his place, a support to those who wavered or saw others waver. And even when, later on, he seemed to stand aloof from the line of his friends and party, we may observe a fixed reliance on the original stand-point, the first principles which directed his earliest conscious acts of thought and reflection. It was part of the nature here attributed to him that the Church of his childhood should maintain a lasting hold on his obedience. His sympathies were all with the theory which claimed for her a high origin, which connected her with antiquity, and traced her formularies to a far-off ancestry. Everything that could subserve her weight, dignity, and catholicity were congenial to him, but he had never any temptation, on the ground of louder pretensions to these distinctions, to transfer his allegiance to another communion. It was never for one moment a question with him. However deep his early-formed reverence for the leader of the movement, and unbounded his recognition of his intellectual power, his natural independence of judgment, xxxvi Introduction. indeed the very make of his mind, held him where he was. Late in his life he speculated on the controversial temper with an evident though unacknowledged sense of experience. He did not appear to estimate it over highly, further than as he considered it now to be rare. The contrary temperament was dealt with tenderly — the one that really needs the agreement of those around it, that has a sense of discomfort and privation without it, that must act with others ; but the true con- troversial spirit, that which, strong in the feeling of possession, of a firm hold of its own view, rises with opposition or neglect, which can stand alone, ready as it were for all comers, this was the temper that, as he denned it, his nature evidently responded to. At the time when his hopes and spirits were lowest these qualities asserted themselves with the force of a revelation of himself to himself. In a letter (November 1844) he writes : — "Things look dark and dreary just now; there is a general set upon us from all quarters, Conservative and Eadical. The press never was so malignant." But at the end he writes : — " For my own part, I feel that to be giving way to melancholy or disgust at the present state of things would be giving myself airs. I have no right to do it. Moreover, all movements have their dark times, and this may be one of them. With respect to J. H. N., all I know about him is that he has been regularly down about things for the last year or two, and that he has expressed doubts about the catholicity of the English Churcb. I don't know any more about it. He is hardly ever in Oxford now." Such private notices give an added weight of sincerity to his public expressions in the same key. In an article in the Christian Remembrancer, April 1845 — " Eecent Proceedings at Oxford," on the sudden uncalled-for revival of the attack on Number 90 — we read : — Introduction. ■ xxxvii " We have only to do with the fact we are speaking of, that Mr. Newman yielded to the cry against him, and that the University has lost him ever since. Of this retirement and of this seclusion those may complain perhaps who felt the sweetness of his presence; those who saw and heard him, who enjoyed his teaching, had his model before them, and identified Oxford with him. Those may compMn of his retirement. It is a loss and pain to them ; and one for which they are inclined to accuse even him who makes the loss ; who first gave a stay and then took it away when habit had adopted and appropriated it. They may complain, but not those who sent him away, who did not like his voice to be heard, and thought his simple presence an evil. He has done their bidding, and they should have been content. The grief has fallen upon others, who feel a vacuum that can hardly be filled up again, and are deprived of a support and source of strength which had worked itself into their very minds. They have now to go on and give the Church those services and labours with resoluteness more than cheerfulness, and which strength of spirit more than animation inspires. Never mind ! The task of acting for themselves they must not evade because it is unpleasant. It is the very trial which they are called on to undergo. The course of a religious movement was never meant by Providence to be one overflowing with consolations and helps. Those who have been in it with those helps must adhere to it without, and face the hard as well as the smiling aspects of the country. Let it be a call to greater self-sacrifices, more entire disinterestedness and stricter devotion ; to an abandonment of every private object and fragment of feeling that is not in the one stern ecclesiastical channel, and to a literal spread and diffusion of the heart over the Church which they would preserve." Such vows commit a man to more than he foresees or can foresee, till the occasion tests his sincerity ; and the needs of con- troversy show him how few there are, — how often one only out of however large a seeming choice, — to do a painful and difficult task that has to be done. In his early manhood we have seen him resisting melancholy as " a giving himself airs ; " but after his illness, taking a drive towards Littlemore, which his com- panion was regarding as an object of interest, he said, It was all very well for light-hearted people to look at the place as full of interesting associations ; to him it only represented a xxxviii Introduction. dreary chasm, a period of gloom and melancholy from which his memory evidently shrank. Little has been said here of his University course. The letter from his brother already quoted contains the following- brief summary of it : — "He was admitted (October 1830) into Oriel College, where he made many life friendships. Shortly after taking his degree he obtained the Chancellor's prize for an English essay on 'The Influence of Ancient Oracles on Public and Private Life,' which I have always thought a very mature work for a youth of twenty- one, and certainly very interesting. My brother resided at Oxford for some years, studying under the direction of Dr. Pusey and Mr. J. H. New- man, doing some hard work in translation and compilation, and showing from the first much independence of judgment. He tried for a Fellowship of Oriel, and was not elected ; I can only suppose because I was Fellow, and there was a reasonable ob- jection to brothers in a small community, of which only a third or a quarter might be resident." He was elected Fellow of Magdalen in 1840, where he resided till 1856, when, on his marriage, he accepted the living of Old Shoreham. On Mr. Gladstone's recommendation, and by his first act of patronage, he was presented to a canonry of Worcester in 1869. Two years after, in 1871, on the same recommendation, he was made Regius Professor of Divinity, when, by the operation of the A.ct separating the living of Ewelme from the Chair of Divinity, he was enabled to retain the living of Old Shoreham." It has not been possible to hold strictly to the intention with which these preliminary pages started, of confining notices and records of the author to the period when he was little known beyond those connected with him by the ties of home and the natural intimacies of his education and training. In Introduction. xxxix looking back upon a life, the beginning and the end are seen in too close relation to allow of such distinct treatment ; but such was the intention. It was felt that boyhood and youth throw a light upon the thought and the work of manhood, and that in this case his early powers were in marked promise of their later development. Those who knew him early are grateful beyond others for the just, keen, and most tender appreciation shown in the following remarkable estimate of character, as seen from another point of view. To this paper it has been permitted to give a greater permanence than the medium of its first publication could insure. Such a memorial, in itself, and apart from its testimony, is felt to be a praise and an honour. Dr. Mozley, the Eegius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, died last Friday (January 4, 1878), at his living of Old Shore- ham. He had been ill for more than two years : one of those terrible blows which so often fall on men who have devoted themselves to hard work and severe thought incapacitated him for the labour of which his previous life had been full. He rallied from it so as to enter into all his former interests. His great gift of equableness of mind and calmness of temper pre- vented the disturbance which so great a shock to the course of life might have given to many. He hoped for some restoration of strength and power, though it might be long in coming. Condemned to an invalid's caution and quiet, he yet to a certain degree turned his thoughts to his natural pursuits, and his days passed tranquilly and happily. He even brought himself to give his ordinary course of lectures in the October term of 1876. But the effort was too much, and probably told hurtfully on him. At any rate, after that, improvement flagged, xl Introduction. and when he left Oxford after the term he never returned to it. All through last year, in spite of a rally in the summer at Malvern, strength was sinking. Still there was little distress. He enjoyed, as he had always done, the presence and conversa- tion of his friends. He looked forward to Christmas with an eagerness which now seems to have had meaning. He had the undisturbed happiness of the Christmas festival. There was no reason for expecting any sudden change. But two days afterwards the blow fell again. A few days of apparent un- consciousness followed, and then he passed away, peacefully and without suffering. We have lost in him, in the very ripeness and fulness of his powers, one of the most remarkable thinkers and writers of our time. What was remarkable in him was the ultimate triumph, the clear, admitted triumph, of the real genius and power that was in him, over the comparatively slow growth of the subsidiary and secondary faculties on which every writer must depend for the ability to develop his ideas and to say what he would. The world of readers, certainly some of its most competent representatives, were fairly taken by surprise by the volume of University sermons carried through the press since his illness began, by the affectionate care of a near rela- tive. We found that we had among us a man who could handle deep moral and religious themes with the steady eye and large grasp of Butler, and with a richness of imaginative illustration to which Butler can lay no claim. Those sermons were the natural unforced fruit of a mental self- discipline of more than forty years, as resolute, as undismayed by difficulty, as unintermitting, as was ever exercised by a man who was determined to make full proof of the talents committed to him. Those who are able to carry their knowledge of him so far back Introduction. xli as forty years ago, can remember then the continual contrast between the originality, the solidity, the reach of his thought, the strong, bold snatches at unperceived truth that marked him, the obstinate pertinacity with which he struggled to get at the core of a subject, and, on the other hand, the way in which his thoughts often baffled both his tongue and his pen, the imperfect, unsatisfying, ill-proportioned expression of what he wanted to say, his unappeasable fastidiousness about the words or the structure which he required, and for which no ordinary allowance of time was sufficient. He, like other re- markable men of the same time, took but low honours in the Oxford schools. The story goes that in the examination for the Oriel Fellowship he produced for an essay a fragment of a dozen lines, but a dozen lines which no other man in the examination could have written. Never did any man start with a less promising outfit of fluency and facility of language, or of the power of readily disentangling and ordering his thoughts. But he knew that he had much to say, and those who knew him best, and they were capable judges, fully recog- nised it too. No man was ever less daunted by difficulties either in himself or in things. No man was ever more calm and patient in waiting for the time of ripening and strength. No man less spared trouble, or acknowledged more uncom- plainingly the necessity of toil which made no show. No man cared so much about a perpetual and severe self-education, or cared so little about all the hard and heavy work which he did in secret being in any way apparent except in its indirect results on his own mind. Oxford was unusually brilliant in his undergraduate and bachelor days, and among these brilliant contemporaries he made no figure, and was lost. Outsiders knew not what a fire of energy, resolution, and poetic enthu- xlii Introduction. siasm burned under that mask of unready speech and imper- turbable calmness. Some of those even who began to find out that he could write still doubted his power of clear and steady thinking. His mind was one which needed time. But with time, and the diligent, conscientious, untiring self-training and self-correction, in which he never relaxed to the last, came the growth and the surprises of an expanding intellect, which went on proving itself singularly rich, versatile, subtle, strong. With time came eloquence, popular writing, hard argument, original learning. His literary career began with a vigorous Oxford prize essay on the Ancient Oracles, in which was curiously shadowed forth his characteristic position afterwards towards questions relating to the evidence and theory of religion, which had not then assumed the gravity and practical importance belonging to them in later years. It was the beginning of a career in which brain and pen were never idle, and never flagged, till mortal illness stopped their exercise. And what brain and pen had grown to, through that long course of most diversified employment in the service of religion, is finally visible, as we have said, in those works to which he had hardly the time to give the finishing touches, before the noble and matured intellect which they revealed was released from its earthly task-work. His early occupation was almost entirely in the periodical literature of the Church movement with which he was so closely connected. He was the intimate friend of most of its chiefs ; and when, after he had missed a Fellowship at his own College, Oriel, Dr. Routh, the President of Magdalen, with his keen eye for real ability, brought him to Magdalen, he settled down at Oxford, to turn the leisure of his Fellowship to full account. The British Critic was then at the height of its vigour and Introduction . x 1 i i i brilliancy : he naturally found a place among its writers ; in the company of those ardent and powerful minds which made it the expression of their ideas and hopes, his own took fire ; and an article of singular eloquence and pathos on Lord Strafford (April 1843), revealed both its richness and daring. He had lighted on work to which his gifts were adapted ; and he applied himself to it, not as a pastime or occasional effort, but with the conscientious seriousness of one who has an aim and purpose in what he does. "When the British Critic fell in the great crash of the party of which it was the organ, he at once looked out for something to supply its place for that Anglican section of the party which refused to give up faith in the Catholic character of the Church of England, and hope for its future. Calm, intrepid, patient, independent, combining in a remarkable degree deep and loyal affection with a jealous assertion of his own rights of judgment and confidence in his own strong- common sense, he was less moved than most of his friends by the reverses and disasters of those days. In conjunction with the late Mr. W. Scott of Hoxton he set up the new form of the Christian Remembrancer ; for ten years he threw his whole force into it ; and his articles, such as those on Laud, Luther, and the Book of Job, showed alike his versatility and command of resources and the increasing depth and power of his thought. He was one of those who in anxious days had most to do with founding the Guardian, and to his co-operation and indefati- gable assistance much of its early success was due. But all the while he was leading a student's life at Oxford. He was a reader, and a reader with a purpose. He had perhaps an equal dislike for mere showiness — for looseness of thought and for a slovenly, and, to use his own common expression, dauby style of writing ; and for mere erudition without an object, pointless xliv Introduction. and unable to make itself of use. He was impatient amid the loud words and strong assertions of controversy, that " people would not think." His repeated criticism on imposing and popular theories was that their arguments disclosed a want of previous "underground work." And by unstinted "underground work " he prepared himself for any important task — by hard, silent, severe thinking and self- questioning, and laborious research wherever its testing was needed — " underground work " of which his friends might occasionally by chance discover some signs in conversation or correspondence, but for which he took no credit, and of which little indication was given except in the firmness and precision of his reasoning. The Gorham decision, with the debates which followed it, was perhaps the turning-point of his life. More than anything that had yet happened, it threw him on his own independent thoughts, and brought him face to face with them. He found himself in agreement with the predestinarianism of St. Augus- tine : and in the expression of doctrine, which was the watch- word of his party, he found himself at issue with them. He threw himself with characteristic ardour and patient labour into the task of reconciling the Christian tradition about bap- tism with the theology of what is called Calvinism, with the metaphysics of Jonathan Edwards. The three volumes which followed one another on these questions he himself valued beyond anything that he did, as examples of true and hard thinking, and of clear, nervous, cogent argument. But they separated him distinctly, on this important point at least, from his party. Whether he, or any one else, could succeed in what he undertook, is perhaps doubtful. But there can be no doubt that the effort and stress which these investigations put upon his powers greatly added to their strength, range, and freedom. Introduction. xlv He stood very much alone as a theologian. With the Evan- gelicals, though he respected them, and readily acted with them, he never quite sympathised in their general spirit and tone. He gradually approximated in some important points to their theological language ; but in his mouth it had a larger meaning. His friendships, his main interests, his political tendencies, were still with the party from which he had par- tially, yet, so far, very formally, separated himself. He never could cease to be a Churchman, and, in a very real sense, a High Churchman. He fought very hard to preserve the Church character of University institutions from the revolution which has almost overwhelmed them. But the developments of his old party were not to his taste. And he found no other with which to ally himself. The long exercise of writing and of controversy had percep- tibly affected his style of composition. It had worked clear of a good deal of luxuriant ornament. His mode of statement had become simpler, more orderly, better proportioned ; there was greater ease in it, and greater perspicuity. His character- istic power had strengthened of enforcing an idea or an aspect of a subject by presenting it again and again in an inex- haustible variety of forms, urged with the repeated force of a battering-ram. He had learned severity and repression towards himself; he had learned in writing to economise feeling, imagination, poetry. And he had increased greatly his original gift of rising through words to things, and of realising vividly, boldly, and justly what he was dealing with, whether it was a phenomenon or a difficulty, or an objection, or a deep and fundamental truth. Thus furnished, he came from contro- versies within the Church to the great issues raised by modern scepticism and unbelief as to all religion. As might be ex- xlvi Introduction. pected, he recognised to the full their inexpressible gravity. He had no patience for the petty playing with the fringes and details of vast questions, which satisfies so many of the half- believing half-unbelieving professors of a Christianity of their own devisiDg. He placed before himself distinctly, before his reason, and not less before his imagination, what the infidel argument had to say for itself in its most serious and most dangerous bearing, and addressed himself to meet it in its full weight. Whatever may be thought of the argument of the Bampton Lectures on Miracles, it cannot be denied that they lifted the discussion to the level which it ought to occupy ; the ablest of his opponents have acknowledged the living grasp which he had of the question ; and when they have dwelt on his unfamiliarity with the facts of science, they have really evaded the force of his appeal to that reason on which science itself must rest. His earnestness and his power gave a new interest to the argument ; he equally impressed Professor Tyndall and the unceremonious disputants of the National Reformer. In 1871 Mr. Gladstone, who had given him the first prefer- ment which he had to offer, a Canonry at Worcester in 1869, recommended him for the Eegius Professorship of Divinity at Oxford. It was filling that great chair with a man who, among the many distinguished Professors of secular learning in the University, was not unworthy to rank with the ablest of them as the representative of Christian Theology. He wanted but one qualification — the faculty of popular teaching. The younger men listened to his lectures without knowing, many of them, the unusual excellence of what they heard. But if the younger men missed it, it was not missed by older men, more able to measure originality and power, and to judge what he laid Introduction. xlvii before them. He became a teacher of teachers : he discussed with a class of tutors the graver difficulties preseuted by the thought of the time : and a specimen of these lectures has been preserved to us in the last published of his volumes, a volume which he could not himself revise, on the moral diffi- culties of the Old Testament, " the Euling Ideas," as he called it, " in Early Ages." His place, too, as Professor, was in the University pulpit. How he taught there the volume of sermons which so astonished the world, sufficiently shows; though it seems that many of those who heard the sermons preached hardly appreciated them adequately till they read them in print. And so has ended a very noble and pure life ; a life of hard labour and high thinking, and frank and healthy enjoyment — enjoyment, thankful and unsuspicious, of nature, of travel, of art, of famous places and beautiful scenes, of music, of the love and companionship of friends. It was a disinterested and unselfish life, without ambition, yet not without satisfaction at receiving the recognition or the reward which he had not thought of claiming. In these respects, all was very natural and genuine and real. And this is all the more remarkable, because the admiration of greatness was with him a sort of passion. He required it, and was not content without it, in ideas, in arguments, in character, in actions, in his own gifts and benefits and sympathies. It was to a certain extent the cause of occasional inequality and one-sidedness. In the face of large considerations, in reasoning or in practical matters, he did not always take due account of smaller ones, or of what appeared such to him. He had a keen and constant sense of the vast wonderfulness of the familiar things of life and the world — the great strangeness of its good, the great strangeness of its evil. No one, without such a sense, could have written xlviii Introduction. his article on the Book of Job, or his sermons on the Pharisees, and on the " Keversal of Human Judgments." He had a pro- found trust in the argumentative force in itself of a great and just conception, such as the idea of Design, on which he wrote a remarkable paper in the Quarterly Review. The feeling of scorn came out strongly in him at any attempt to juggle away what is clear, or to escape by logical subtleties from any broad principle of common sense and reason. And with his large general views there always mingles an effort to exhibit and test them in the individual and the concrete, after the manner of great dramatists and novelists. No one had a livelier sense of the absurd ; no one dwelt with more amusement on the oddnesses and incongruities of men's conduct and condition. And few men with such strong and sacred convictions have set themselves more carefully to cultivate the difficult virtue of justice. The marks of his large-heartedness and height of character come out in his writings. Those who knew him personally will remember the sweetness, the affectionateness, the modesty, the generosity, which, behind an outside that to strangers might seem impassive, his friends always found. A singular mixture of persistent eagerness which would not be denied, with constant calmness and even-mindedness, pervaded his daily life. With great capacity for disapproval, and for strong and contemptuous indignation, few people have seen him lose his temper ; indeed, to show temper was a fault which he did not easily excuse. His patience, his uncomplaining and un- shaken cheerfulness, his habitual serenity, his unalarmed trust in God, his considerateness for his friends and warm sympathy with their interests, were never more signally shown than in the trials and downward progress of his last illness. I. LORD STRAFFORD.* (April 1843.) We have no fear of opening, in the present article, on what our readers will consider a stale or threadbare subject. It is with pleasure we observe, that if ever the decies repetita placcbit has applied to any portion of history, it does to the times of the Great Bebellion, and antecedent to them. It may be, that that was the last break-up of the old system in Church and State ; of the hierarchical pretensions in the one, of the feudal and chivalrous in the other. It may be, again, that times of danger and commotion are most favourable for great and noble manifestations of human character. It may be, that when men die for their principles they are supposed to have something to say for themselves, and that, with peculiar signifi- cancy, they being dead yet speak. The deaths of such men are great facts, which, amid the shadows and uncertainties of history, posterity lays hold of, recognises, and feels as beacons in her troubled and stormy atmosphere. Look to the end, says the moralist ; the historian says the same ; and as the orator placed the essence of his art in action, action, action, just so, between a nation and her great man, — the end, the end, the martyr-consummation, concentrating the energies of a life in one grancl blow, is the appeal which staggers and over- comes her, which vibrates through her frame for ages. Facts like these are the arms and engines of history, her two-handed swords and battle-axes, her sledge-hammers and her battering- * Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopcedia, vol. 2 : Eminent British Statesmen. By John Forster, Esq. London, 1836. M.E.-T.] A 2 Lord Strafford. rams, that beat down prejudices, crush subtleties, level the pasteboard argument into a high-road for her truths. These and these only can meet the inextinguishable appetite in human nature for the distinct, the definite, and positive, in truth or error as it may be ; that aching void which clamours for supply, and which the teacher, political or religious, must somehow fill, or must give way. No cause can prevail, no principle conquer, without them ; a system that has not these must crumble and die. Happy and glorious that high-born regal line, who from the foundation of the world have one and one been singled out for this especial office, who in evil and stormy days, when the flood was coming in, have filled the frightful gap up with themselves, and given to justice and truth the testimony of their being. More, far more than recompensed are they for what the hand of violence and the tongue of calumny inflicted during their brief sojourn, if enabled to bequeath to the cause for which they fought the .splendid patronage of a name ; if history adopts them for her own ; if around their footsteps linger the fascinations of poetry, and upon their brow sits honour, crowned sole monarch of the universal earth. We need go no further for reasons why the names of Laud, Charles, and Strafford still maintain that interest in the public mind, which even their appearance in the picture-gallery and the shop-window shows them to possess. It is a fact in the trade, we believe, that the demand for engravings of Charles has almost drained the stocks of the dealers in the metropolis and other places ; and the artist at the elder University has recently supplied casts of the three heads for lack of older memorials. We are disposed to connect these and many other symptoms with the general longing which has begun to be felt for a deeper ethics and religion than what the last century supplied to us ; and not aspiring to the research of those generous travellers who have lately threaded with such skill the forest gloom of mediaeval antiquity, shall content ourselves with a nearer and more cognate age, over which, notwithstanding a tremendous revolution, the shadow of former things still brooded — an age in which Shakespeare wrote and Strafford Lord Strafford. 3 acted ; and without further preface shall beg to renew the reader's acquaintance with one, in spite of alloy and extrava- gance, a genuine great man, a statesman and a hero of whom we may be proud. Thomas Wentworth was born in London, April 1593, of an ancient and knightly family, that had been seated at Went- worth- Wodehouse, in the county of York, ever since the Conquest. The paternal line had gradually absorbed into it many of the first families of the north. Wentworth repre- sented, as the eldest son, the ancient blood of the Wodehouses, Houghtons, Fitzwilliamses, Gascoignes, and alliances with the noble houses of Clifford, De Spencer, Darcy, Quincy, Ferrars, Beaumont, Grantmesnil, Peveril, and finally, through Margaret, grandmother of Henry vil, mounted up to the Lancasters and Plantagenets. Though his whole political career was one continued fight with the aristocracy, no feudal baron, prince of the empire, or lord of the isles, had ever more of the genuine aristocrat. The feudal relation of the lord to the tenant of the soil was just to his taste ; nor was he without pride in the regal part of his pedigree, and the corner of his escutcheon which bore the three lions. The compliment might have been returned : nee wibellem feroees progenerant aquiloe eolumtam — often a deceptive proverb — was not balked in his case ; and a heathen poet might have drawn, in old epic style, crusading Richard in the Elysian fields, and the seer directing his eye through the vista of ages to the unborn shade of the last of the Plantagenets. Difficult it might have been to persuade the royal fighter that parliaments were as awkward bodies as armies of Saracens, and orders of council as hard weapons as two-handed swords. But doubtless convinced of this, the shade of Coeur de Lion would have stalked the prouder over the plains of asphodel, as his eye caught the vision of the second " Lion " (so nicknamed) of the Plantagenet stock. Of his youthful days we know little. He early attained proficiency in the fashionable accomplishments of the day, and on the ample Wentworth manors imbibed that taste for field sports, especially hawking and fishing, which he always re- tained. To the last he was a keen sportsman; and thought 4 Lord Strafford. himself too happy if from the toil and cares of his Irish ad- ministration, he could only escape for a week or two at a time to Cosha, his " park of parks," in Wicklow county, and hawk or fish for hours ankle-deep in mud and wet. His corre- spondence with Laud at some of these seasons contains an amusing mixture of political, ecclesiastical, and sporting in- telligence. Presents of dried fish, of the Lord Deputy's catching, went up for the Lent table at Croydon, but the announcement of the intended generosity mingles with a lament over the " decay of hawks and martins in Ireland," which deficiency he consoles himself he shall be able to supply by establishing woods for their especial protection. Neverthe- less there is an imperfection attending on human schemes, sporting as well as other : if the martins are encouraged, the "pheasants must look well to themselves:" meantime the Archbishop shall have all the martin skins that can be pro- cured either for love or money. Laud keeps up the pleasantry — is duly grateful for the fish, but entreats him to send no more hung beef from the Yorkshire larder ; the last having been positively too tough to eat. Strafford apologises, but will not give up the merits of his hung beef; no, the beef of Wentworth-Wodehouse was not to be despised ; he was cer- tain, if the General Assembly (the Scotch were just invading) once got a taste, their mouths would water for it ever after, and there would be no getting them out of the country. Such is the playful cover under which he disguises the feeling for his ancestral home and the scene of his youth. Strafford had in a remarkable degree that habit of mind which, if not peculiar to English statesmen, may still be called highly English, which subordinates entirely to the original of the private the aftergrowth of the public man ; disdaining the pomp which identifies the man with the station. With the same mixture of pride and humility with which Warren Hastings left his native Daylesford with the noble ambition of being its squire, conquered India in the interval, and became squire of Daylesford, he ever in the thick of public life clung to his Yorkshire associations, and to the circle of his home — to others, what the world had made him — to himself, himself, Lord Strafford. 5 Wentworth of Wodehouse. And when he tore himself from their endearments, to embark for the last time for Ireland, and enter on the wind-up scene of his life, it was the parting con- solation with which he braced his mind, " / shall leave behind me as a truth never to be forgotten, the full and perfect remerrir brance of my being." The field sports and other kindred reminiscences of Went- worth- Wodehouse were thus not without their more serious effect on Strafford's character. Meantime a solid education was going on in Latin, French, and the best English authors. From his early days he paid great attention to his English style, and in writing common notes and letters would take pains to do them well. Nor when he entered at a very early age at St. John's College, Cambridge, was he at all backward in appreciating the advantages and the pleasures of a place of learning. On leaving the college he travelled abroad with a. tutor, Mr. Greenwood, a member of the sister University. For both college and tutor he retained ever after the warmest affection. In the Strafford correspondence with Laud we glance over a variety of facetious challenges to one another upon their rival St. Johns, and their respective " Johnnisms." "What means this Johnnism of yours?" is the laugh of the Primate at a puritanical slip of his friend's pen — " What means this Johnnism of yours, — till the rights of the pastors be a little more settled ? You learned this from old Alvye or Billy Nelson ? Well, I see the errors of your breeding will stick by you ; pastors and elders and all will come in if I let you alone." Greenwood remained his intimate and constant adviser till he left for Ireland, whither Wentworth endeavoured to bring him, but could not prevail upon him to leave his cure. Though separated, however, they kept up an affectionate correspond- ence. Greenwood was confided with all plans and secrets of the family, and " one who, on a good occasion, would not deny his life to you," did the Lord Deputy, with heartfelt gravity of gratitude, subscribe himself to his old tutor. His University education and continental travels completed, introduced him a scholar and a cavalier into political and fashionable life. He had a tall and graceful person, which, 6 Lord Strafford. even when bowed by years of sickness, retained its symmetry, and aristocratical features, not handsome, but full of dignity and command. A head of thick dark hair, which he wore short, and a singular complexion, at once " pallid " and " manly black," like polished armour, heightened the Strafford physiognomy. The cares of State and his terrible illnesses added a ruggedness he had not naturally ; and his enemies, in allusion to the savage character which they were so fond of attributing to him, discovered a likeness in his face to the lion. Strafford had a disgust for this resemblance, which an assumed carelessness and a " never mind, konis fades fades hominis," as the proverb says, ill concealed. After all, to look like a lion is not to look like a fool, a knave, or a coward ; but he could not bear the imputation which it implied. One article of beauty he had on the highest authority — a pair of delicate white hands, pro- nounced by Queen Henrietta Maria to be " the finest in the world." When with all the advantages of connection, wealth, talent, and education, Sir Thomas Wentworth (for he had succeeded to the baronetcy) found himself at the age of twenty fairly launched into London life, the possessor of a paternal estate of six thousand a year — an immense income in those days— representative of his native county in Parlia- ment, and husband of the eldest daughter of the Earl of Cumberland : but far from aiming at the character of a public man, he does not seem even to have regarded his education as finished. He continued it, only with the differences that dis- tinguish the grown-up person's from the boy's tasks. There is something highly significant in that year after year's patient attendance on the proceedings of the Star-Chamber, which commenced from this time. The Star- Chamber in those days, besides being the highest in point of rank and of ultimate appeal, had the most comprehensive and miscellaneous routine of business of any court in the kingdom. A crowd of causes, civil, political, ecclesiastical, fiscal, daily rolled in ; a mixed and parti-coloured body of judges, bishops, lawyers, secretaries of state, and lords of the household presided. The names of Bacon and Coke, Carr and Buckingham, Abbot and Laud, Lord Strafford. 7 Weston and Coventry, reigned during this period. Seven long- years did Strafford devote to this attendance ; and, out of this rich and intricate scene, the great facts of law, politics, and human nature gradually submitted themselves to his observa- tion, formed into groups, fixed into rules, subsided into prin- ciples. His private exercises were of the same practical character. He would often compose speeches on subjects on which some distinguished specimen of rhetoric or argument was extant, and afterwards compare his own with the classical model, noting accurately the different points in which his came short of it, — a practice, by the way, highly illustrative of his general habit of mind. He was always a severe judge of his own per- formances, of whatever kind, great or small, and would have criticised his whole career of statesmanship, from its opening to its close, with the same candour and coolness with which he saw the defects of half a morning's task at composition. General literature, poetry, and the fine arts, came in as a relief to his severer tasks. Chaucer and Donne were his favourite poets ; the metaphysical or internal character of Donne's pieces, so descriptive of a struggling, melancholy, uneasy mind, seems to have constituted their charm. He was fond too of the pastoral poetry of the classics. In his letters we come across various traits of a taste for painting and architecture ; and he enjoyed the acquaintance of the two illustrious masters of those arts, Inigo Jones and Vandyck, which he found time to cultivate, even in the very thick of his Irish administration. It should not be forgotten that the Parliaments of which he was throughout this period a member were as exciting and alarming ones as England had yet seen. The first entered into the famous contest with James about the royal imposts on mer- chandise ; the second impeached Bacon and Middlesex, and was dismissed in anger after the celebrated " Protestation," for which Sir Edward Coke, Pym, and Selden were imprisoned, and others of its most distinguished members banished on the King's service to Ireland. The romantic journey of Prince Charles to the Spanish Court, the rupture with Spain in con- sequence, and Buckingham's transient gleam of popularity, 8 Lord Strafford. gave it additional interest and animation. Throughout these movements, which extended over a period of ten years, we look in vain for any speech of Strafford's in the journals of the House. He was active as a country gentleman, and paid the greatest attention to his duties as Custos Rotulorum, which he was glad to do for practice and county feeling's sake ; but on the great theatre of the world he was silent — contented appa- rently to bide his time, to work under ground till he came up naturally to the surface, and mounted by the force of events to the position for which nature intended him. The movement which did eventually lift him to this posi- tion is a part of his life which has been much canvassed, but of which neither the facts nor the motives have been fairly given. The ordinary statement is, that having been through- out his parliamentary career a member and leader of the democratical party, he all at once went over to the Court, and accepted office. This is not true. Strafford was always a royalist, which King James showed his sense of by giving him a high appointment in his own county. He was moreover silent throughout the period mentioned, the speeches that have been attributed to him being spoken by a different person of the same name — a Mr. Thomas Wentworth, representative for Oxford. True however it is, that after a long career of silence we find him suddenly, in the Parliament of 1628, at the head of a party with whom he never acted before, and never after. Ten years of suspense and neutrality, a momentary alliance with the republicans, and then war with them to the knife — this requires explanation, but is not to be explained upon the ordinary ground of political inconsistency and self-interested ambition. The nation was at that time in a transition state, divided between the two great principles of authority and liberty, monarchical and popular power. The former, however, was in possession of the field, and had a right to consider itself the legal constitutional principle, if the precedents and the sanc- tions of a thousand years are to go for anything. Whereas now the throne is the formal, the parliament the real, part of the constitution, in those days the throne was the reality, Lord Strafford. 9 and parliament the form : monarchy, not of the limited and ambiguous, but bona fide character, was the constitutional government of the country up to the time of the Eebellion triumphing over and ipso facto deadening and nullifying whatever of charter or document was technically opposed to it. "We know not what is to constitute legitimacy, what is to be considered as establishing a principle in politics, and authorising any form of government whatever, if it is not the uniform practice of centuries. Facts constitute in time prescription, and surely in matters of State prescription is everything ; we are not contending against those who think a strict monarchy in itself unnatural and immoral. A long course of acknow- ledged and admitted acts of power, a standard formed, a tone and a feeling created and sustained, a certain impregnation of the whole political atmosphere — in a word, the action of uniform precedent — settles and establishes that monarchy, or that democracy, as it may be, which it favours. People are not slow in admitting its virtue in the one case, and why should they deny it in the other? Antiquarians may refer us to Saxon Witenagemots, and talk of a theory of liberty which was never obliterated in our national charters ; we ask simply what was the matter of fact with respect to the government of the country — we want to know not what was on parchment, but what was done. The grave historian who informs us that monarchical precedents "had /or centuries thwarted the opera- tion and obscured the light of our/ree constitution" answers us most satisfactorily if he will only allow us to separate his fact front his mode of stating it, Monarchy was the working principle of the State in those clays ; and it is miserable trifling, and standing upon a play of words, to assert the identity of an assembly of burgesses who met compulsorily, and were dismissed gladly, because it called itself a parliament, with the Parliament of the present day — to antedate English liberty five hundred years, and pare down the monarchy of Edward the Eirst to the model of De Lolme upon the Constitution. The monarchical principle was indeed gradually weakening and sinking under the Stewarts, and the popular one rising into strength, reinforced by a formidable ally in the spirit of i o L ord Strafford. religious fanaticism. The old line of kings gone, the Stewarts unfortunately flagged just in the very talents which were necessary for the times : they could interest and attract, but had none of the iron of rule in their constitution. And their appointments of ministers did not supply their own deficiency: Carr, a mere spoilt child, shamed his royal employer in the eyes of the world, and Buckingham, gallant, generous, and not without address, governed the King and left the nation to itself. Still, the old monarchy had even now possession of the field, had descent and precedent on its side. The constitution of 1688, now the law of the land, was as yet the intruder and innovator, just beginning to lift its head, and peep above ground : its successful establishment since cannot antedate its rights : nay, that middle system had hardly peeped ; the con- test was, as its issue under Cromwell proved, between monarchy and republicanism. It was the right and it was the duty of any loyal subject of the day who hated revolution, of any one who, upon whatever theory, chose to prefer absolutism to a mixed polity, to defend if he could the monarchy of the Plan- tagenets and Tudors, and drive the popular spirit into its hole again. And if these were Strafford's politics, they mingled at the same time with far higher and more ethical ideas of the monarchical position than ever Plantagenet or Tudor had realised. No advocate for the domination of brute force, or an oriental despotism, wanton, indolent, and luxurious, he wished to establish simply an effective monarchy — one that would do- its work — look after the people in real earnest, and feel itself responsible for their physical, moral, and religious improve- ment. If he thought that such a government, strong and self- confident in conscious purity and greatness, would be invincible against pressure from below, let it be so ; and let it he called a despotism : it was a despotism perfectly consistent with popular assemblies and popular rights, because it undertook to carry the nation along with it, to make the popular mind con- form itself, and bow all hearts to its legitimate and well-earned supremacy. The concordant will of sovereign and people combined absolutism and democracy in one system. But of this further on. Lord Strafford. 1 1 Strafford had just the head and arm necessary for such a project; he knew it, and he had the wish naturally accom- panying such knowledge. The gatherings of a long course of labour and observation, moulded into statesmanlike form within his mind, longed for their practical development and trial ; and that right arm, which was to subdue Ireland, hung heavy and listless by his side. He longed to try the bow which favourite after favourite, and courtier after courtier, had tried and could not bend. Nor, if we may trust a certain indefinable importance which had grown up about him (strangely enough, considering his parliamentary inertia), had such an idea escaped others ; or the determined neglect of effort and display prevented the rise of a political reputation, which marked him out in- evitably for State employment. There was one great obstacle however : Buckingham was then the only avenue to office : and the whole soul, moral and political, of Strafford nau- seated the thought of accepting office as the proUcje, of Buck- ingham. Strafford's character — we discern it immediately — ran into what may be called poetical excess on the article of proper pride and independence. In the political and social depart- ment alike, while some are for ever pushing and others for ever insinuating themselves, while obtrusive minds force, and amiable ones coquet with the embraces of society ; a man here and there is all self-respect, will not part with one jot of secret honour, will not stifle a whisper of internal law, will not be enticed from the home within, will not move from be- neath the high, o'erhanging, overawing shadow of himself. Strongly as Strafford felt his vocation for government, he would rather have died in inactivity, obscurity, and oblivion, than have lowered himself by the process of admission to it, were it only the ordinary obsequiousness which is thought legitimate by the courtier. It went utterly against his nature to make advances, to beg and ask for what he wanted, to force an alliance which w r as not offered, or incur obligations where he had not sympathy and respect. He made no difference between an enemy and no-friend : and would perish, hp said, before he " borrowed his being" from either. 1 2 Lord Strafford. On the other hand, the favourite would have his supremacy duly recognised by all aspirants to office ; he would be courted, and on Strafford's withholding this attention, formed a dislike for him, assumed the Court bully, and commenced a series of irritating personal attacks. Sir John Savile's notorious in- competency had originally vacated the post of Custos Eotulo- rum, which Strafford now held : Buckingham chose to believe that Savile had been unfairly ousted, and proposed his rein- statement. His opponent's address, however, foiled him. Strafford made out his case so clearly that the minister was obliged to sound a retreat, which he did in that showy, hand- some way which so became him, with many courteous bows and apologies. He even went so far as to give the obstinate man an opportunity of recovering his ground and getting into favour. A most amicable message reached Strafford, the drift of which could not be mistaken ; which as much as said, Do court me, do beg me to befriend you, do be humble and put yourself under my patronage ; do make me your channel to the royal presence ; I will give you employment and make a great man of you. A polite but guarded answer was returned, that Strafford was ready to pay the Duke all the attention and deference which he could as " an honest man and a gentleman." The concession, such as it was, was to appear- ance taken well, and the haughty antagonists shook hands at the meeting of the Parliament at Oxford. But the peace was a hollow one, and the very next act of the minister was to prick him for Sheriff, to disqualify him for sitting in the ensuing Parliament. Wentworth was urged by the popular party to follow the example of Sir Edward Coke, Sir Francis Seymour, and Sir Robert Phillips, in pushing his election notwithstanding. But, though indignant in the extreme, the advice of his father-in-law, Lord Clare, prevailed ; he decided that the King's service took precedence above that of Parlia- ment, quietly took the sheriffdom, and entered into the routine of county business. The apologetic Buckingham immediately disclaimed having had any concern with the act, declaring that he was in Holland at the time ; nevertheless a still harder blow followed. As Strafford was presiding over a full meeting Lord Strafford. 1 3 of his county, a writ was put into his hand, once more dis- missing him from the post of Custos Eotulorum. The insult in the face of day was too much for a choleric temper, and produced an instantaneous and vehement appeal from Strafford to the feelings of the meeting :— " My Lords and Gentlemen, — I have here, even as I sit, received his Majesty's writ for putting me out of the Custoship I held in the commission of peace, which shall hy me be dutifully and cheer- fully obeyed : yet I could wish they who succeed me had forborne this time this service — a place, in sooth, ill-chosen, a stage ill pre- pared for venting such poor vain insulting humour. Nevertheless, since they will needs thus weakly breathe upon me a seeming dis- grace in the public face of the county, I shall crave leave to wipe it away as openly, as easily ; seeing I desire not to overlive the opinion of an honest man among you, which in the course of the world we see others regard too little. " Shortly then, I have for divers years served the last King, of ever-blessed memory, his Majesty that now is, and this county, in the commissions of Oyer and Terminer, that of the peace and counsel. 1 have been employed from hence in Parliament, as oft as most men of my age, and now attend, albeit unworthy, as Sheriff. Throughout I am ready, under the great goodness of God, yet with all humility and modesty, to justify myself in spite of any detraction or calumny, even upon the price of my life, never to have declined forth from the open and plain ways of loyalty and truth toward their Majesties, never to have falsified in a tittle the general trust of my county, never to have injured or overborne the meanest particular, under the disguised mask of justice or power. " Therefore shame be from henceforth to them that deserve it, for I am well assured now to enjoy a lightsome quiet as formerly. The world may well think I knew the way which would have kept my place : I confess, indeed, it would have been too dear a purchase, and so I leave it." The Eubicon once crossed, open hostilities alone remained for either party. Strafford was soon visited by a privy seal demanding a contribution to Government ; he refused it, and was imprisoned in the Marshalsea, and afterwards at Deptford. These proceedings infuriated him. His contempt was un- bounded for the whole class of courtiers ; even when in the very height of office he could never bring himself to speak of 14 Lord Strafford. them but as " Court vermin," the pests and plagues of the com- munity ; and to be ridden over by their intrigues would have been an unpardonable political dishonour in his eyes, com- pared to which the ignominious fate of being kicked to death by spiders was no hyperbole. Political views conspired with the sense of honour. He had always disliked, and stood taciturnly aloof from, the policy of the Stewart ministries ; he now found himself singled out as the victim and butt of this very policy. The statesman and the individual were agreed : he wished to give Buckingham a blow, and was in no humour to be scrupulous in what company he gave it. Misery makes strange bed-fellows : the House was divided between the Court and the opposition ; he had for a time a common object with the anti-Buckingham side, and he was a man who, if he acted in earnest, could not well help taking the lead. In fine, the Parliament of 1628 presents us with the curious and astonishing spectacle of the fierce royalist Strafford taking the field at the head of the " Prynnes, the Pyms, and the Bens," against the King's government. The effect was instantaneous and triumphant. Hardly had the silent and sullen man shown himself in his new character, and uttered a fiery speech or two. than the Court gave way ; whether they saw, as the poet says, the flame upon his helmet, or heard the Achillean shout, Buckingham and his clique fell fiat before him, and Strafford walked over them into office an unpledged politician and an independent man. We do not however strictly justify the whole of Strafford's part in this contest. Quick and stormy, a smoke, a flash, and then all over — it must be regarded as one of those rough pro- ceedings into which great men have been sometimes carried, even by an excess of an honourable and lofty principle. It should be considered that the enmity of self-respect is not the enmity of malice, and may be intense and energetic without being selfish. Because a man will not court you, you perse- cute and bully him — what follows ? he is only ten times more resolved against unbending ; nay, more, to fortify himself against weakness he assumes the aggressive, and the fear of being a dastard turns him into a foe : a patriot Coriolanus Lord Strajford. 15 brings down the Volsci upon Borne, and a royalist Strafford marches " the Pyms, the Prynnes, and the Bens " upon an inconsiderate and ostracising Court. He was made successively a Viscount, Lord President of the North, and Deputy of Ireland, not without murmurs of surprise and dissatisfaction, which once or twice took an ominous form. A trifling anecdote indicates what many felt. At his installation as Viscount, which took place with great pomp and ceremony at Whitehall, his emblazoned descent from the blood- royal attracted notice ; and Lord Powis vented his spleen thus briefly, " Dammy, if ever he comes to be King of England, I will turn rebel." With deference to his Lordship's valour, we think he would have thought a second time about it. Another story is more of the sober earnest character. On the eve of Strafford's elevation, he and Pym casually met at Greenwich, when, after a short conversation on public affairs, they separated with these memorable words addressed by Pym to Strafford, " You are going to leave tts, but I will never leave you while your head is ttpon your shoulders." Strafford needed no such warning to impress him with a sense of his danger. The favourite oath which marked the Lord Deputy's communication of an inflexible resolve, " on peril of my life," to which upon notable occasions he added, " and that of my children," tells a tale. If the advantage of a minister's post is to be measured by the scope it gives for his talents, no more fortunate department could have fallen to Strafford than Ireland. The country presented at that time, in most awkward combination, the diffi- culties of a civilised and an uncivilised State. Under King- James, who prided himself, not undeservedly, upon his atten- tion to her, English law had superseded, to a great extent, the power of the old chieftains ; the natives had been brought down from their mountains, and the establishment of the Scotch in Ulster, and of English plantations in various parts, had given a move to agriculture, and encouraged more settled and industrious habits in the people. On the other hand, the looseness of the monarchical reins, in the Stewart hand, had in- creased the difficulties of government. The Irish, while they 1 6 Lord Strafford. had not been untaught all their barbarism, had also imbibed notions of political liberty which they had not before ; and the new Scotch population, as Strafford proved to his cost, were a set of subjects that no government could congratulate itself upon. The power of the chieftains had been succeeded by the license of a disorderly nobility, who, if they could not con- trol their inferiors as they had before, had no notion of being controlled themselves ; corruption had crept into every depart- ment of the public service ; justice was feebly and partially administered ; an ill-disciplined and ill-provided army preyed upon the substance of the common people ; monopolists swallowed up one source of revenue, the nobility who had possessed themselves of the crown lands, the other. Church property was in as bad case, devoured wholesale by the nobility, and the wretched remnant seized, in the shape of commendams and fraudulent wasting fines, by a covetous puritanical episco- pate and higher clergy. In Church and State alike, from the council board, the judicial bench, and the episcopal chair down- wards, every man, high and low, was engaged in the noble employment of feathering his own nest ; and Ireland was one Augean stable of corruption. Such were the chaotic materials out of which Strafford undertook to evolve his darling project of a regeneration of the monarchy. In July 1633 he arrived in Dublin, settled himself in his post, made new arrangements in the viceregal court and household, sounded the people about him, tried his strength in various encounters with individual noblemen ; and after he had thus felt his way, and got information enough, decided on his great plan. Before the monarchy could raise its head and do anything for the country, one thing was absolutely and indispensably necessary : its means and resources must be increased — in other words, the King must have money. Good and evil have fought for this ally since the foundation of the world : the highest contests of the middle ages assumed the form of a mercantile strife, and from ideas that spanned the universe and pierced the sky, leaped by a step to money. Strafford's monarchy, grand and sacred source of good, sovereignty of Loi'd Strafford. 1 7 virtue, empire in the clouds, wanted money ; and how to replenish the royal purse was the all-absorbing question. The difficulty under which the dynasty of the Stewarts had writhed, Strafford had a notion he could settle, and proposed a bold move for the purpose — an Irish Parliament. Of all the projects that could be thought of for extricating the monarchy out of its difficulties, the most repulsive, the most alarming, and the most nauseous, to a Stewart, was that of a parliament. A menagerie of wild beasts let loose, an army of locusts, monsters from the vasty deep, Goths, Huns, and Tartars, were but faint symbols of the terrible political image which an assembly of his faithful subjects presented to him. Parliaments were intrinsically odious, unmanageable things ; time after time had they been dismissed, till it seemed part of their constitution to be so dealt with ; a dogmatic catena con- demned them ; they were King James's five hundred tyrants ; Charles's "hydras cunning and malicious," and "cats that grew cursed with age ; " three had recently been dismissed in succession ; and the King had quietly made up his mind to go on without them. " Do manage without a parliament — any- thing in the wide world but a parliament," was the almost supplicating language of the English Cabinet to Strafford, on his first broaching the thought. Nevertheless, Strafford saw that he must have, a parliament — that, odious as was the encounter, it must be tried. Parliaments there had always been; they were ingrained in the English constitution — its working constitution — and it was absurd to think of doing without them. Facts could not be unmade by being not seen, by shut- ting your eyes to them, by turning your back upon them. A parliament therefore must be held. More than this : he aspired to making a parliament not only an engine of supplies, a mere necessary evil, but a positive gain, and addition of strength to the royalty. The general feebleness of the Stewart governments may be reduced almost to one defect — they did not face the nation ; the nation looked them in the face, steadily, resolutely, and — fearful symptom of a falling cause — they did not return the look, but shrank from its eye. Discomfited in Parliament, M.E.-I.] b 1 8 Lord Strafford. they consoled themselves at home with theories of the regal power ; and a most miserable contrast was of course the result, of a royalty potent in theory, inefficient in practice. " / make both law and gospel," said King James, and did not uphold his omnipotence with his little finger. Amidst high- sounding definitions of sovereignty, the privy seals came tremblingly forth, afraid of the light of day, and scraped up money by hole-and-corner methods, by forced loans and bene- volences, from the private subject. This was not the method of the Lancasters and Plantagenets : no theorisers, but prac- tical men, they boldly rode forth upon their royalty, and the nation, like a generous steed, exulted in the strong hand of its rider. "What did such men care for parliaments ?" thought Strafford. A regular Plantagenet, he said, " Meet your parlia- ment, catch the wolfs eye first ; he will retire if you confront him. Let this be the test : if you can stand it, you are not merely saved, but raised, lifted up sky-high ; if you cannot, your monarchy is good for nothing." " I did always," were his words on the scaffold, for which he has been charged with hypocrisy with no sort of reason, — " I did always think parlia- ments to be the happy constitution of the kingdom and nation, and the best means, under God, to make this King and his people happy." A Parliament accordingly was summoned. There was one part of the constitution of an Irish Parlia- ment, which made it much easier of management than an English one. By an Act passed in the reign of Henry VII. commonly known by the name of " Poyning's Act," the Houses could only debate on those propositions which the Lord Deputy or Council put before them. Strafford, we need hardly say, strongly appreciated the merits of this Statute ; but, strange as it may appear, its very monarchical character made the home government afraid to stand upon it : it seemed to be too much of a privilege to claim in such times ; and what took away from the perilousness of a session once begun, required greater courage in the first instance to seize and take ad- vantage of. Moreover, a sort of legal haze had gathered about the Act ; an historical interpretation was claimed for it in contradistinction to the letter by the popular party, and Lor a Strafford. 19 King James, it was said, had introduced subsequently to it the Magna Charta into Ireland, one corollary from which great document was freedom of debate. Strafford insisted on the letter, and with a side sneer at King James's administration for not "understanding the rules of government," snatched the Statute from the scissors of Mr. Attorney- General and the lawyers, who were preparing to cut and pare it down to modern shape, and safely deposited the precious document in his cabinet, in the most honoured compartment of Irish records. So far, so good — Poyning's Act was gained ; but this very Act brought him, as a very first step, into contact with a minor legislative assembly, in the shape of the Irish Council, who were to be taken into his deliberations upon the subject of the propositions to be made to Parliament. The class of official men in Ireland, owing to the distance and laxity of the home government, as well as a succession of indifferent Lord Deputies, had become anything but a safe and honourable set of advisers. Their general practice was to get round the Lord Deputy on his arrival, coax and flatter him into a course of negligence, or some precipitate or rapacious act, after which they hung in terrorem over him, and, with his ex- posure in their power, followed their own devices in security. Strafford soon discovered their character, and looked about him with very like the caution and distrust which the vicinity of pickpockets excites. " God deliver me," he says, " from this ill sort of men, and give me grace to see into their designs." The Council was composed of various noblemen and high officers of State, one of whom, the Chancellor, as second in the country permanently, considered his post not at all inferior to the changing office of Lord Deputy. The whole body, grown enormously insolent and untractable, put the Lord Deputy virtually at defiance, dictated to, harassed, and bullied him. Strafford had, very early on his arrival, taken pains to teach these officials their proper place. One order, procured from the King, forbade any member of the Council sitting covered in the Lord Deputy's presence ; by another, they were not allowed to speak to one another at the Council board, but obliged to address every word to the Lord Deputy. Discipline still more 20 Lord Strafford. humbling to the stomachs of these great men was added, ex dbundanti, by Strafford himself. The most punctual and busi- ness-like man in the empire when he chose, he assembled his Council, and kept them for hours waiting, " attending on his leisure." Thus tamed and brought into something like train- ing, they had also been augmented by two friends of his own, Sir George Kadcliffe and Sir Christopher Wandesford. Strongly averse as he was to the interference of official counsellors, no man living had more respect than Strafford for advisers of his own choosing. Years of uninterrupted friendship, during which he had habitually, and, on all occasions, public and pri- vate, consulted them, had proved the ability and affection of these two. He brought them with him to Ireland, and they formed his Cabinet, and never left his side. They three met every day, debated on whatever question was coming on, argued pro and con., discussed circumstances and probable con- sequences, and thoroughly sifted it before bringing it into public. He was threatened with more plagues, in the shape of councils and official advisers, even than the Irish Council board. A certain body existed, known by the name of the " Lords of the Pale," of whose privileges it was difficult at that time to say what they exactly were, and how far they had grown obsolete and been superseded by political changes. The body existed, however, and claimed to be consulted upon the opening of Parliament ; and it numbered many noblemen among its members, the weight of whose family names was a respectable addition to the more venerable but less ascertain- able claims of the body. The representative of the Pale on this occasion was the Earl of Fingal, a somewhat empty-headed nobleman, who, on the strength of being a leader or tool of the disaffected party, assumed the man of importance, and gave himself consequential airs. He waited in due form and cere- mony, for and in the behalf of the Pale, on the Lord Deputy — had heard a report that there was to be a parliament ; was anxious to know the truth of the matter, as in that case their Lordships of the Pale would prepare themselves for deliberation as to the course to be pursued upon so critical an occasion ; Lord Strafford. 2 1 their Lordships of the Pale were exceedingly desirous to pro- mote the good of their country, and their Lordships of the Pale thought their advice and counsel highly necessary for that end. — All this, says Strafford, in a grave, electorate kind of way. Strafford had a variety of modes of answer, according to the merits of cases and individuals ; but for one he had a great partiality — the round answer — a phrase of very frequent occur- rence in his despatches. The answer to the representative of the Pale was, it may be readily supposed, a very round one indeed : "As he was the mouth which came to open for them all, I thought fit to close it as soon as I could!' The Earl of Fingal was simply informed that his question was ignorant, imperti- nent, and presumptuous, and the claims of himself and col- leagues utterly contemptible ; and his Lordship retired from the presence-chamber, himself " a little out of countenance," and the Pale wholly extinguished. The important meeting of the Council board still remained. Strafford's proposition to Parliament was simply a demand of six subsidies of thirty thousand each ; and he sent in that proposition for discussion at the board, purposely keeping away himself, that he might elicit the more freely their real senti- ments, but ready to interpose on the first symptom of matters going wrong. That symptom very soon appeared. We have mentioned some Stewart mistakes of government ; the bargaining policy, a descent from high ground, and ipso facto confession of weakness, was one. King James had gone on, throughout his reign, buying and selling with his Parlia- ment, piecing offer and demand together. I will give this if you will give that — so much prerogative for so many pounds sterling — till the royalty and the nation seemed at last exhi- biting themselves as two market-women at a stall, bating and cheapening and cheating each other. The blunder still went on ; and the Council had hardly laid their wise heads together before they made it. They spread the annual payment of the subsidies over a year and a half, and then coupled even this diminished demand with a monopoly and a pardon bill, as a quid pro quo to the popular party to buy off the opposition But Strafford was at hand, and waiting in his cabinet. Infor- 2 2 Lord Strafford. mation reached him from Radcliffe and Wandesford of the turn things were taking ; his mind in a moment fastened on the weak point, and before the discussion could proceed fur- ther, the Lord Deputy was in propria persona at the head of the Council board, giving his sage counsellors as rough a set down as ever set of erring politicians received. Did they imagine that the King would degrade himself by such wretched, paltry shifts ? No, no ; my great master, and my gracious master, and my royal master, and my sovereign master, would act very differently. "Like all other wise and great princes, his Majesty expected to be trusted ; he would not in any case admit of conditions, or be proceeded withal as by way of bargain or contract ; he would be provided for as the head, and care for his people as members ; as a gracious and good king, but still according to the order of reason, nature, and conscience — himself, his people after- wards. They had begun altogether at the wrong end, thus consulting what would please the people in a parliament, when it would better become a privy council to consider what might please the King, and induce him to call one." Think no more, he continues, of your monopoly bills, of your par- liament pardons — " Poor shallow expedients ! The King has no fancy for them. It is far below my great master to feed his people with shadows or empty pretences. If the noble and real favours of a gracious and wise King will not carry it, he will do without your money, and expect with patience the honour that will attend him, the repentance that will fall upon yourselves in the conclusion." Full of his own majestic illimitable idea of the monarchy, Strafford went on, and poured forth the whole of his royalist soul upon the assembled Council. He rose from eloquence to poetry ; the beams of light and truth were invoked upon the demon of suspicion — "that spirit of the air that walked in darkness between king and people ;" and from the midst of a magnificent labyrinth of sentences, and an overshadowing cloud of imagery, the board was informed that in case they and Parliament refused to accept the Lord Deputy's view, he should forthwith put himself at the head of his Majesty's army, L ord Sh 'ajfoi d. -j and there persuade them fully that his Majesty had reason on his side ; the puissant Straffordian oath — on peril of my life and that of my children — followed the threat. " Annuit, et totum nutu tremefecit Olympum." The Council was fairly taken aback and overwhelmed by this portentous display of energy ; the proposition of the six subsidies passed free from all degrading appendages, and no wills or councils intervened now between Strafford and his Parliament. One thing more he thought proper to attend to, because he would lose no chance of success — the ceremonial de- partment. He resolved to have the most stately and gorgeous ceremonial of a Parliament that had ever been known in Ireland. On Strafford's first arrival he found everything connected with Court etiquette in the lowest possible state of neglect. A melee of all ranks used the viceregal castle in club-house fashion, parading galleries, swinging doors, and making them- selves free everywhere. Strafford showed his acuteness in making it one of his first acts to correct this disorder — when change would be less invidious than afterwards, and would come as a simple order from the King, without any appearance of personal pride on the Deputy's part. " I crave such a direc- tion from his Majesty," he says, " that they may know it to be his pleasure : otherwise I shall be well content it may be spared, having in truth no such vanity in myself as to be delighted with any of these observances." Nevertheless he sent, with his letter, as accurate a table of etiquette for the King's approval as the most rigid master of the ceremonies could desire. Noblemen were admitted on days of meeting to the presence-chamber ; the drawing-chamber was assigned to the untitled class below them, who were not however allowed to bring in their servants ; the gallery to the members of the Council. The audacity of the gentlemen-ushers, who had been in the habit of following their masters the Lord Chancellor and the Treasurer, into the Lord Deputy's presence, was re pressed, and they were enjoined to stop at the gallery door ; the purse-bearer, who had ambitiously mixed himself with the councillors in the gallery, received the same direction ; and 24 Lord Strafford. the Lord Chancellor, it was added, ought not to be too proud to carry his own purse in the Lord Deputy's presence. Policy and feeling combined produced these arrangements. Strafford's awful ideas of the monarchy coloured everything down to a king's little finger with majesty. If the King wrote a letter, it was his "sacred pen" that officiated; if he went from one place to another, it was his " blessed journey." And as the representation and reflection of royalty, he regarded himself as raised far above nobility ; he taught the proudest of Irish lords to feel their " immense distance," and hide their diminished heads before the shadow of a king. He had a natural, even a simple love of pomp and ceremony, and, but for a strong intellect, would have been bombastic ; as it was, nobody was less so. " I am naturally modest," he says of him- self, with real simplicity, " and extremely unwilling to be held supercilious and imperious among them" — and his social habits formed a sufficient contrast to his haughtiness as Viceroy. He was fond of conversation, and shone in it, espe- cially in the entertaining department ; and, whenever he could spare the time, after supper walked off his friends into his cabinet, where he smoked and told good stories, of which he had a copious supply, or at Christmas-time played at Primero and Mayo, at which he was an adept. At his 'public table he was very conscientious in playing the don on one point. It was always splendidly provided, though he partook but sparingly of it himself ; but he allowed no toasts, except on solemn days the King, Queen, and Prince, in order to mark his discountenance of the habits of drinking then universal in Ireland. As the great day of the opening of Parliament drew near, vast pains were taken to collect all the information on the ceremonials which had been observed on such occasions ; tables of forms and precedence were ransacked, solemn rolls and parchments reproduced from the dust of ages, and heraldry, with her inspiring insignia and mystic antique glare, sum- moned to the scene. On July 14, 1634, with the sound of trumpets and wave of banners, a magnificent procession moved to the Parliament House, through the streets of Dublin, such Lord Strafford. 25 as Ireland, it was said, had never seen before — her whole aristocracy ranged according to exact order of rank and date of patent — knights and squires, dukes, earls, and barons, in their robes, bishops and archbishops in their rochets, privy councillors and ministers of State with all the badges of office. The courts of law were emptied of their judges and Serjeants ; heralds, pur- suivants, and troops filled up the interstices, and serjeants-at- arms, with naked swords, flanked ; the long line wound up with Strafford himself, who marched surrounded with all the paraphernalia of viceregal pomp, Lord Brabazon bearing his train, Lord Ormond the sword, Lord Kilmore the cap. The procession halted at the great entrance of St. Patrick's, where the chapter and choir met them, and with the Archbishops of Cashel and Tuam, headed them into the Cathedral, singing the Te Deum, and after service and a sermon from the Primate, Strafford opened the session. Step by step all had succeeded hitherto, and Strafford determined not to be wanting to himself at the wind-up scene. Summoning every nerve and muscle, and straining every joint, for a last effort, he threw down the gauntlet, declared in a speech of unshrinking swing and power his full resolution, and dashed the royalty in the face of the Irish Parliament. " And albeit," he continues, after a general sketch of affairs, — "Albeit his Majesty need insist upon no other argument to bow you to his just desires, but his own personal merit, and those sovereign duties you owe him for his justice and protection, in comparison whereof I confess indeed all that can be said is far subordinate, yet you will admit me, that sees how much the whole frame of this commonwealth, by a close consent of parts, is like to settle or suffer with the good or bad success of this present meet- ing, as a person that hath no end but uprightly to dispense my master's justice amongst you, without acceptance of persons ; nor expects, hopes for no other reward, than through the monuments and testimonies I trust I shall be able to leave behind me, to be acknowledged when I am gone, by you and your children, a true lover of your country, — give me leave, I say, as a person thus qualified, thus affected, to tell you plainly, that if you do not per- fectly and cheerfully conform yourselves to fulfil his Majesty's desires, you render yourselves to all equal minds the most unwise, the most unthankful, the most unpardonable people in the world. 26 Lord Strafford. " For lay your hands upon your hearts, and tell me if ever the desires of a mighty and powerful king were so moderate, so modest, — taking, asking nothing for himself, but all for you. His Majesty hath contracted a vast debt merely in the service of this crown, and now wishes you to ease him of the burden. His Majesty issueth all he hath willingly for your protection and safety — nay, hath entered into a new charge of seven thousand pounds a year for safeguarding your coast. His Majesty and his royal father have had but one subsidy from you, where England hath given them thirty subsidies ; and can you be so indulgent to your- selves as to be persuaded you must ever be exempt 1 If it should be so, certainly the stars were more propitious to you than to any other conquered nation under heaven. No, no ; let no such narrow, inward considerations possess you, but roundly and cheer- fully apply yourselves to the contentment of his Majesty after your long peace. . . . " Suffer no poor suspicions or jealousies to vitiate your judg- ment. Take heed of private meetings and consults in your chambers. Here is the proper place. His Majesty expects not to find you muttering and mutinying in corners. I am commanded to carry a wakeful eye over these private and secret conventicles ; therefore it behoves you to look to it. . . . " Finally," he concludes, " I wish you a right judgment in all things, yet let me not prove a Cassandra among you — to speak truth, and not be believed. However, speak truth I will, were I to become your enemy for it. Remember, therefore, that I tell you, you may easily make or mar this Parliament. If you proceed with respect, without laying clogs or conditions upon the King, as wise men and good subjects ought to do, you shall infallibly set up this Parliament eminent to posterity, as the very basis and foundation of the greatest happiness and prosperity that ever befell this nation. But if you meet a great King with narrow circum- scribed hearts, if you will needs be wise and cautious above the moon, remember again, I tell you, you shall never be able to cast your mists before the eyes of a discerning King ; you shall be found out ; your sons shall wish they had been the children of more believ- ing parents ; and in a time when you look not for it, when it shall be too late for you to help, the sad repentance of an unadvised breach shall be yours — lasting honour shall be my master's." The speech, delivered with rude fiery vehemence of action and tremendous force of lungs, fairly overcame the House. Without staying to balance arguments or examine motives, they were thoroughly taken aback and surprised by a voice Lord Strafford. 27 which made their ears ring again, and the old walls re- verberate, and they instinctively reasoned that a man who had such lungs at such a time was not to be trifled with. No barbarian leader indeed, Thracian or Caucasian, could have hit upon a more aboriginal theory of power, a nearer approach to elemental government, before chaos was reduced to order. And the Irish lords, descendants of the chieftains, staring in mute wonder at their magnificent Norman Viceroy — one man singly confronting and beating a nation — was indeed a scene of old Plantagenet fire, .a wild autumnal lighting up of the monarchy before its sun set. The six subsidies, a larger sup- ply than an Irish Parliament had ever given, were passed whole, without opposition. " My lords and gentlemen " would not have been extremely pleased could they have overlooked Strafford's shoulder, as he penned a paragraph to Laud shortly after : " "Well spoken it is, good or bad. I cannot tell whether ; but whatever it was, I spake it not betwixt my teeth, but so loud and heartily that I protest unto you I was faint ivithal at the time, and the vjorse for it for two or three days after. It makes no matter ; for this way I was assured they should have sound at least, with how little weight soever it should be attended. And the success was answerable ; for had it been low and mildly delivered, I might perchance have gotten from them, ' It was pretty well/ whereas this way filling one of their senses with noise, and amusing the rest with earnestness and vehemence, they swear (yet forgive them, they know not what they say) it was the best spoken they ever heard in their lives. Let Cottington crack me that nut now." The last allusion carries a train of melancholy with it. The height of Strafford's success was the moment which brought peering from its hole that Court envy which pursued him to his dying day. Even now the canker had begun ; a too sensitive mind, a body worn by illness, depressed though they did not sour him. He felt himself okiycxpovtos, and talked of old age and grey hairs : " In good earnest, I should wax exceeding melancholy were it not for two little girls that come now and then to play with me." The following December witnessed another equally success- 28 Lord Strafford. ful session of Parliament ; and simultaneously with it, an Irish Convocation met for the discussion of a most funda- mental point, which called all Strafford's zeal and activity as a Churchman into requisition. The Church had been the very first and earliest care of the Lord Deputy on his entrance into office. It needed reform full as much as the State, and it appealed more forcibly, because more directly, to his religion. Strafford's was essentially a religious mind ; he regarded himself as on a mission for the cause of good against evil, as all heroic minds since the founda- tion of the world have done, as even in our own day, with all his miserable alloy, did Nelson feel in his battles with an atheistical power. It was the fight of the Church of England against Puri- tanism — a complex fight. The Puritan was a compound of the democrat and the fanatic, his mind the visionary seat of a religious republic, and the scene of a grotesque imagery of drum and pulpit, sword and Genevan gown. He looked onward through fields of blood to the battle of Armageddon, the new empire of the " saints," and crown and mitre trampled under foot. The Eoyalist had as deeply-felt a theory, on the other side, of Church and King. The hierarchical system, which had co-existed with the nation from the first, was embraced in his idea of the national life ; and to puritanise the Church in- volved a sort of death or metempsychosis of the nation. A theory, real as the solid earth in its day, now past. Alas ! one age has a mode of linking and associating which another has not, and time after time the cubical verity, the primordial ideal atom, betrays its joining and comes undone. The two sides were on the eve of gathering their embattled fronts : Strafford, imaginative, intense, in the Eoyalist view seemed destined and marked out for the antagonist of the fighting visionary on his way to Armageddon, and his Irish mission bound him both to purge a puritanising and to fortify a despoiled Church for the approaching struggle. But he had, moreover, on this subject an intimate friend and guide, to whom he owed the strength of his convictions, and whose suggestions wholly ruled him. Lord Strafford. 29 Amid the crowd of intriguing, bustling, short-headed states- men that thronged the Court of the Stewarts, Strafford had observed one man with &view — who had taken his line, and who kept to it with an unwearying and dogged pertinacity, from which no human power could divert him. A continual resi- dent at Court through a most busy period, Archbishop Laud had maintained, amidst the business levities and distractions of such an atmosphere, one grave uniform imperturbable course, which only waited now for Buckingham's death to raise him, a simple King's chaplain to begin with, to the Premiership. Strafford's observations at the Star Chamber had impressed him with a vast respect for the future Primate ; on the other hand, Laud's critical and experienced eye observed in his admirer the statesman whom it was of the utmost consequence to engage for the Church's cause. It was his policy to lay hold of and indoctrinate such men ; he had gained an influence even over the light-hearted Buckingham ; and now that more difficult times were approaching, he was not sorry to see within his reach a politician of a new and more serious school. The connection thus begun on public grounds cemented into the closest and tenderest private friendship. Though most different men — it is almost absurd to compare them — they had many points in common : the same union of an irritable and sensitive with a most affectionate temper ; the same untiring patience, the same indomitable courage. The subtle Hamilton well described their two kinds of courage, when, on the meeting of Charles's last Parliament, he warned the King of the approaching fate of his two ministers, because the "one would be too great to fear, and the other too bold to fly." The feeling of a common cause and common danger strengthened their intimacy as time went on : there is no basis for private friendship like the public one — like union in a great cause, where there are no differences of opinion about it ; and Laud and Strafford had none. On all the questions that came on in Church and State they felt absolutely alike, and reflected like two mirrors each other's views. Higher feelings mingled with those of affection. The mind of Strafford, naturally formed for reverence, honoured the Church in the person of 30 Lord Strafford. its Primate : the Archbishop's " Salutem in Christo " met its response; and "your son," and " my ghostly father" and "the glory of that obedience which I have set apart for you" expressed the deeper regard of the Churchman towards his spiritual superior. Laud accepted the submission with a smile. "Well, you have given me the freedom ; I will make use of it ; and as long as you shall retain the obedience of a son, I will take upon me to be your ghostly father. If, therefore, from hence- forward I take upon me to command, lay down your sword for the time, and know your duty." The Irish Church campaign opens with a series of irregular encounters between Strafford, with Laud at his back, and a variety of earls, barons, knights, bishops, archbishops, deans, and dignitaries of all kinds, lay and ecclesiastical, to get back sundry Church spoils into their possession. There is a mixture of seriousness and fun in the correspondence of the two on these opening transactions ; both in high spirits at the new prospect in Church and State, and Strafford getting his hand in, and taking no small pleasure in the exercise. He had in a remarkable degree what Bishop Butler calls "indignation at public vice ; " a case of oppression roused all the knight-errant in his breast ; he was famed in his county as the protector and avenger of the poorer class, and the poor Irish Church, appeal- ing to his justice from the extortion and sacrilege of the great, was just the object to rouse him. " I foresee," he says of Church spoliation, " this is so universal a disease, that I shall incur a number of men's displeasures of the best rank among them. But were I not better lose these for God Almighty's sake than lose Him for theirs ? So you see I shall quickly have as few friends as may be." Thus excited, the Primate and Lord Deputy begin hallooing and answering one another across the Channel, like voice and echo — Arcades amho et cantare pares, et respondere parati. Backwards and forwards goes the watchword " Thorough," the symbol of political force and vigour — a heathen reader would imagine it some Ossianic deity from its extraordinary personality; and in rapid suc- cession pass and repass the names of " my Lord Cork " and " my Lord Antrim," " my Lord Clanricard " and " Sir Daniel Lord Strafford. 31 O'Brien," and "Sir Henry Lynch," and then my lords the bishops, his grace of Cashel, their lordships of Down, Cork, Waterford, Killala. " The Church cormorants ! * says Laud ; " they are fed so full upon it that they are fallen into a fever." " Have at the ravens," replies Strafford ; "if I spare a man of them, let no man ever spare me." " Your lordship is a good physician," writes back Laud ; " no physic better than a vomit, if given in time, and you have taken a judicious course to administer one so early to my Lord of Cork. Join Sir T. Fitz Edmonds to the rest of his fellows, and make him vomit up Cloyne." " I shall trounce a bishop or two in the Castle Chamber," writes Strafford ; " the Bishop of Killala — I warmed his old sides, — the Bishop of Down, the Dean of Londonderry, etc. etc." " 'Twill be a brave example," is Laud's reply ; " he deserves it plentifully." " I have a nice set of charges against a friend of yours, a St. John's man," writes Strafford, and is answered, "If but half of them are true, make an example of him : keep the bishops from their sacrilegious alienations ; turn the chief offenders out of their bishoprics ; 'twill do more good to Ireland than anything that hath been there these twenty years." " Go on," wrote the Primate in the midst of these fights with the nobility and hierarchy (Strafford's sympathy unbosomed all the fire in his breast), — " Go on, my Lord ; I must needs say this is thorough indeed; you have deciphered my note well— thorough and thorough. Oh that I were where I might do so too ! go on a God's name." The "Lady Mora," the personification of the half-and-half moderate system on which the English Cabinet went, fares but ill : " The Lady Mora as heavy as lead." "My lady commends her to you, and would make more haste, but stays to accommodate private ends." And then another " thorough and thorough," re-echoed by a " thorough and throughout" assures the two correspondents of their mutual courage and fidelity. By dint of a continued fight with the aristocracy, Strafford actually contrived during his administration to increase the property of the Church thirty thousand a year — an incredible sum for that day. Other more important cares however 32 Lord Strafford. accompanied the pecuniary one. The churches were in shame- ful repair ; the service in many omitted altogether, and in none performed creditably ; the surplice and other externals getting into general disuse. The clergy were a disorderly class, grossly ignorant, and steeped in puritanical prejudices. The miserable poverty of benefices excuses in a measure their in- ordinate pluralities : sixteen livings were hardly felt by the Archbishop of Cashel, and it was reckoned that in some cases six hardly furnished the parochial priest with clothes. Laud consented to put off a stringent law against this abuse, on the assurance of Strafford that it was simply impossible to enforce it as things were. " Indeed, my Lord," replies the Primate, excusing himself, " I knew it was bad, very bad in Ireland, but that it was so stark naught I did not believe. Stay the time you must." Under Strafford's administration these corruptions met an unsparing and vigorous correction. Pluralities, though they could not be taken away, were restrained ; the introduction of English scholars gave a move to learning ; Laud, much against his will made Chancellor of the University of Dublin, presided over an improved system of clerical education ; and a party of theologians, of which Bramhall was the head, occupied itself zealously in the dissemination of High Church views. Vestments and church externals were enforced, the fabrics repaired, and Strafford had even determined on King's letters-patent foi rebuilding all the cathedrals in Ireland. A trivial anecdote shows the spirit of his restorations. The Earl of Cork had three years before erected a large family monument at the very east end of St. Patrick's, in the absence of the altar, which in those Puritan times had been made to travel down toward the body of the church. As it entirely blocked up all return of the altar, Strafford, at Laud's sugges- tion, insisted on its removal to some other place. The Earl of Cork felt his family pride offended, and did not understand these new ecclesiastical pretensions. He urged that the chapter had consented to its erection, and that three years had passed without any objection being made ; and lastly, appealed to Laud's consideration on the ground of his own good character L ord Strafford. 3 3 and charities. Laud, in. reply, was happy to hear that he spent the money he had robbed the Church of so well, but insisted on the removal of the monument. The Earl wrote up to his friends in the Administration, told the Lord Keeper that the tomb contained " the bones of a Weston," and, after stirring up all his interest, appealed to the King in council. Charles refused to interpose ; and the Earl, much to Strafford's amuse- ment, transported his monument in packages out of the church, in too high dudgeon to remove it to any other part of the building. " The Earl of Cork's tomb is now quite removed," he tells Laud ; " how he means to dispose of it I know not : but up it is put in boxes, as if it were marchpanes and banqueting stuffs going down to the christening of my young master in the country. The wall is closed again, and as soon as it is dry it shall be decently adorned." It was natural that the Earl of Cork should complain when even Archbishop Usher allowed his chapel at Drogheda to remain without an altar. Strafford, on visiting this place, in the course of his peregrinations through Ireland, expressed his disgust at the sight of such an irregularity in an archiepiscopal chapel, and communicated the fact to Laud — " no lowing there, I warrant you." But the root of the disorder under which the Irish Church laboured lay deeper than the above reforms could touch : she had all along an incubus upon her most vital part. The Articles of Lambeth, an exhibition of pure unmitigated Calvin- ism, and a production of an era of the English Church when the views of the foreign reformers still triumphed over the greater part of our episcopate, formed her confession of faith. Such a creed poisoned the rjdos of the Church at the very source, and was a puritanising element in her constitution, which would infallibly absorb and conquer her if not extracted in time. It was necessary to reform the doctrine of the Irish Church, if any other reforms were to be availing ; and it was determined accordingly to abolish the Lambeth Confession, and impose the English Articles in its place. The Primate Usher was taken into the plan. He was a divine of a mediocre school, half-Puritan, half- Church man, and felt secretly against the change ; but overawed by Laud's and M.E.-I.] c 34 Lord Strafford. Strafford's determination, consented to be the instrument of carrying it. Not a hint was then allowed to escape to awaken the alarm of the clergy, and the design only transpired on the day of Convocation. Convocation met, and everything went wrong : Usher was deficient either in heart or tact, and the Irish clergy were not to be surprised. A committee of the lower house entered the Lambeth Articles in their book, to be imposed under anathema. Strafford, wholly occupied with the work of an agitating session, had not had a moment to spare for Convocation, which he trusted to Usher entirely, and only heard of the failure of the scheme when it appeared too late to interfere. It was not, how- ever, too late for him : in high wrath he sent instantaneously for the chairman of the committee, Dean Anclrewes, " that reverend clerk," and proceeded to rate him mercilessly. " I told him certainly not a Dean of Limerick, but an Ananias had sat in the chair of that committee : however sure I was Ananias had been there in spirit, if not in the body, with all the fraternities and conventicles of Amsterdam ; and that I was ashamed and scandalised at the proceeding above measure." The whole action of the committee was suspended, Andrewes marched off home and forbidden to communicate with them, and the members of the committee and several of the bishops peremptorily summoned to the castle the next morning, when Strafford renewed his rebuke. " I publicly told them how unlike clergymen that ought canonical obedience to their superiors, they had proceeded in their committee ; how unheard a part it was for a few petty clerks to presume to make articles of faith without the privity or consent of State or bishop ; what a spirit of Brownism and contradiction I observed in their deliberandums, as if they purposed at once to take all government and order forth of the Church. But these heady arrogant com\ses, they must know, I was not to endure ; nor if they were disposed to be frantic in this dead and cold season of the year would I suffer them to be mad in Convocation or in their pulpits." In fine, the English Articles were com- manded to be put again, yes or no, to Convocation ; no delibera- tion ; not a word allowed ; simply yes or no. The committee L ord Straff o rd. 3 5 were indignant, and murmurs escaped from a free synod ; Strafford was threatened with resistance, and Usher in alarm came to tell him the measure could not pass against so strong a feeling. Strafford replied that he knew how to manage such matters better than Usher ; in short, the question of the Articles was put, and carried unanimously. " There is nothing I am liker to hear of than this" is Straf- ford's pithy comment to Laud upon what he had done. " I am not ignorant that my stirring herein will be strangely reported and censured on that side ; and how I shall be able to sustain myself against your Prynnes, Pyms, and Bens, with the rest of that generation of odd names and natures, the Lord knows. Sure I am, I have gone herein with an upright heart, to prevent a breach, seeming at least, between the Churches of England and Ireland. Yet in regard I have been acting out of my sphere, I beseech your lordship to take me so far into your care, as that you procure me a letter from his Majesty, either of allowance of what I have done, or of my absolution, if I have gone too far. If it stand ivith your mind that the Articles of Ireland be by a canon enjoined to be received, I will undertake they shall be more thankful unto you for them upon their next than they would have been this meeting of Convocation" Straf- ford was not out in his apprehensions ; the act was a strong and decided blow to Puritanism, and armed all the prejudices of the age against him. The question of doctrine carried, that of discipline naturally followed. A new body of canons was carried at the same time with the Thirty-nine Articles, which on some points spoke out more strongly than the canons of the English Church ; among others, on the practice of confession. The leaven soon began to work, and the Irish Church to show symptoms of alarm. Croxton, Strafford's chaplain, one of the High -Church circle alluded to above, took an open, perhaps an indiscreet and too early, advantage of it. The Primate Usher and various dignitaries looked black ; Laud himself was afraid that the zealous chaplain had rather exceeded his commission, and acted prematurely, and was making up his mind to the necessity of allowing him to be snubbed, when Strafford, declaring in 36 Lord Strafford. favour of auricular confession as the doctrine of the Church, and the practice of her good and holy men, threw his shield over him. Though sympathising, however, with the more spiritual and internal department of discipline, he naturally took the external to come more under his province. To enforce, religious unity by Church discipline and to invigorate Church discipline by the secular arm was his maxim — with one excep- tion, however, in which his gentleness and moderation con- trasts somewhat singularly with the line of the popular party of that day. Even his strong views of conformity held back from the notion of forcing the Irish Church in its then state upon the Eoman Catholics ; he even relieved them from the tax of twelvepence per head which had been levied upon recusants. Let us reform our own Church first, was his dictum, and then push it— but do not oblige men to change their religious system before you have a good one to offer in its place. He was not so considerate to the Presbyterians, with whom he kept up a constant fight on the subject of uniformity. There were not many bishops who acted with him, but those who did were warmly supported : the authority of the bishops' courts was upheld, even in their contests with men of station, and their excommunications backed with sheriffs' writs. But these efforts required systematising and putting on a firmer basis, and Strafford entertained a project for invigorating Church authority in Ireland, which, had there been time to realise it, would have made a most sensible change in the position of the Church in that country. Pure Church authority, exercised by the Church in her own name, and by her own judges, independent of all State alloy, there was none then, as there has been none since. A great revolution of opinion had subjected and tied the Church to State interference, and the only question with High- Churchmen for that time, as practical reformers, was, how to get the State on the side of the Church, — an end which seemed most likely to be accomplished by throwing their whole weight into that side of the scale, that power in the State, which favoured her pretensions. The common law had inherited a strong Erastian bias from the precedents of the Reformation era, which put it Lord Strafford. 37 in opposition to such claims ; the law courts persisted in re- vising and thwarting the sentences of the courts ecclesiastical, and a deadly feud between the common lawyers and the ecclesiastics was the result. " The Church/' said Laud, com- plaining bitterly of their interference, " is so bound up in the forms of the common law, that it is not possible for me or for any man to do that good which he would or is bound to do. For your lordship (Strafford) sees, no man clearer, that they who have gotten so much power in and over the Church will not let go their hold ; they have indeed fangs with a witness, whatsoever I was once said in a passion to have." The royalty was the Church's refuge from the common law and the Erastian spirit of the day. In the High Commission Court and Star-Chamber she spoke through the Prince's mouth, and, we may add, with effect ; she made herself odious by her bold rebukes of the vices of the higher classes. Whatever persons may say, those courts, mixed and anomalous as they were, asserted an ecclesiastical discipline which really told ; we wish we could say the same of any other ecclesiastical tribunal since the Reformation. The Church's line thus necessarily set up the Royalty versus the Common Law ; and Strafford sympathised entirely with it. "I know no reason," he tells Laud, " but you may as well rule the common lawyers in England, as I poor beagle do here ; and yet that I do and will do in all that concerns my master at the peril of my head. I am confident that the King being pleased to set himself in this business is able by his wisdom and ministers to carry any just and honourable action through all imaginable opposition, for real there can be none ; that to start aside for such panic fears, fantastic apparitions as a Prynne or an Elliot shall set up, were the meanest folly in the whole world ; that the debts of the Crown being taken off, you may govern as you please — and that it is a downright peccatum ex te Israel as ever was if this be not effected with speed and ease." The result of such views was a resolution to establish a High Commission Court in Dublin, to exercise supreme authority in Irish ecclesiastical matters. It was never fulfilled, probably be- cause he thought he could for the present act quite as advan- 38 Lord Strafford. tageously for the Irish Church by himself; and it simply remains a record of his intention, which we want in order to complete consistently the plan of his government. Church and State had now taken a fresh start ; the Church had risen a great step above Puritanism within and oppression without ; the monarchy had faced — nay, out- faced — the nation. What a strong arm had begun a strong arm must carry through, and the cause which rested upon the lofty but in- tangible support of a commanding mind must be kept up by the same influence, ever advancing, never flagging. With something of the spirit of that exemplar of chivalry, cited by Don Quixote, who ran tilt singly at an army of twenty thou- sand Saracens, or of the Runic demigod who annually hacked the Jotuns or Giants in their winter quarters, Strafford proceeded to cut his way through the proud aristocracy of Ireland. A grand project for the increase of the King's revenue and of the national resources had been long working in his mind, the recovery, viz., of a portion of the royal lands, and the establishing agricultural colonies from England upon them Side by side with the rise of the monarchy went national improvement (we take the word in its modern and mercantile sense) in Strafford's view : to separate them would be simply not understanding the administration of one who, in addition to beingroyalist and bigot, was as ardent and scheming a political economist as was ever a Pitt or a Huskisson, a Macculloch or Ricardo. Landed property at this time throughout Ireland was generally in an unsettled state, having so frequently in recent periods of rebellion and anarchy changed hands ; the royal lands especially. Tracts extending over the whole province of Con- naught and other large districts, were held under an ambiguous and obscure title, disputed between the Crown and the occu- pants. To take one instance : the whole province of Con- naught had lapsed by confiscation to the Crown in the reign of Henry in., who granted it to the family of De Burgh, from which, by the marriage of Ann de Burgh into the House of York, it ultimately returned to the Crown in the reign of Edward iv. The Irish Parliament in the reign of Henry Lord Strafford. 39 vii. confirmed the Crown in the right, and a Commission appointed by Queen Elizabeth made a composition with the occupants for an annual rent-charge in lieu of the old fees. An interval of confusion and rebellion succeeded ; and an ignorant body of commissioners, in the 13th of James 1., cheated into the belief that Queen Elizabeth's arrangement, instead of being merely an exchange of a regular for an irregular rent, had been a cession of the Crown right of property altogether, accepted the farce of a surrender of the lands to the Crown from the occupants, in pretended humiliation for never having paid the rent- charge, and then reinstated them in the ownership. Strafford denied the legality of the whole trans- action, on the ground that there could be neither surrender nor restitution of a title which had never been possessed. The occupants themselves confessed their difficulties, and the late Parliament had petitioned for some general measure to estab- lish defective titles. Nothing is clearer, we think, than that the Crown had been defrauded ; at the same time, no remedy could be applied which would not both appear and be severe. It was one of those cases in which either way there was a something to get over ; either great injustice to be tolerated, or an unscrupulous strength of arm exerted against it. Straf- ford chose the latter alternative ; and the issue of the late session had established his authority sufficiently to warrant his commencing without delay. A Commission of Plantations, composed of the Lord Deputy and some members of the Council, proceeded to take the round of the province of Connaught. The occasion first brought Strafford into contact with the body of gentry and commonalty, and sharply tested his view of managing the Irish temper — * good words " for some, " sound knocks on the knuckles" for others. They collected a grand jury in each county, and proceeded to claim a ratification of the rights of the Crown. The gentlemen on being empanelled were informed that the case before them was irresistible, and that no doubt could exist in the minds of reasonable men upon it. His Majesty was in fact " indifferent whether they found for him or no," inasmuch as an ordinary writ from the Court of 40 Lord Strafford. Exchequer, which had only to be moved for by the Attorney- General, would instantly give him the benefit of the law ; but out of his high and princely consideration for his subjects he wished to deal thus openly, and satisfy them by proof. " And there I left them," says Strafford, " to chant together, as they call it, over their evidence." The counties of Ros- common, Sligo, and Mayo instantly found a title for the King ; and Strafford, who always proportioned his civility to the loyalty and submission of the parties, was all sweetness and grace, and much bowing and smiling passed between him and the good people of Roscommon. But Galway presented a different front to the Commission. The Lord President of this county was Lord St. Albans and Clanricarde, with whom Strafford had already come into col- lision on the question of Church lauds ; indeed, the suit was pending against him at the very time in the Castle Chamber. As proprietor of half the county, he had a preponderance there, which in connection with his office amounted to a species of sovereignty ; and he was the head of a numerous and powerful cla* — everybody in Galway was a Bourke, or next to one. The Sheriff knew whom he was amongst, and packed a jury accord- ingly ; and Donellan, the Earl's steward, had made all arrange- ments while the Commission were on progress to them. The whole county on Strafford's entrie bristled with opposition, and on the day of the court opening, long before the verdict, Lord Glanmorris, nephew of Clanricarde, openly exulted, and only wished that Galway had come first in the list of counties, that its example might have invigorated the others. The Bourkes displayed the utmost contempt for the formalities cf court. Another of the Earl's nephews, "Richard Bourke of Derri- machloglin," impudently pulled a juror by the sleeve whom Strafford was in the act of addressing, and prevented him from attending. The result of course corresponded. Donellan, who was among the jury, dictated the verdict, the rest obeyed order. Strafford's measures on this announcement were prompt, vigorous, and complete. The jurymen were summoned to the Castle Chamber to answer for their contumacy; the Sheriff Lord Strafford. 41 was fined a thousand pounds for packing the jury, the squire of Derrimachloglin five hundred. Proclamation was made in the King's name, inviting all subjects to acknowledge his Majesty's undoubted rights. The county was cleared of the Clanricarde retainers, and the strong forts of Gal way and Athonry garrisoned with the King's troops. Galway thus left in military occupation, the Commission moved off to the other scenes of its labours. Eventually the county was obliged to submit. Those M 7 ho would not obey the proclamation lost, some a third, others a half, of their estates, and the King's title was enforced by writ of exchequer. The Earl died not long after, his party declared of a broken heart in consequence of these proceedings, "at the age" — Strafford not unreasonably put in — " of seventy." The Commission, on leaving Galway, proceeded through Munster with great expedition and success. Strafford ex- perienced here, as he had in Roscommon, the advantage of a popular manner applied to the proper persons. At the last session of Parliament, a young peer had entered the house with his sword, contrary to the express order of Strafford, who knew the temperament of the Irish enough to dislike trusting them with weapons. The sergeant-at-arms requested to have it, and was told that if he had it he should have it through his body. Strafford sent for the daring youth, and proceeded to interrogate him fiercely. The young peer answered him with equal spirit, and pointed to the clause in the King's writ which summoned him to Parliament — " cinctum cum gladio," or " cum cincturd gladii" This was just the behaviour to take Strafford : he conceived an affection for young Ormond on the spot, made trial of him, gave him promotion, and took him into his confidence. The Ormonds possessed an extensive and princely domain in Munster, and their name ranked with the noblest in Ireland. The King's title labouring under some difficulties here, the young head of the family came immediately to the rescue, and he and Strafford together carried the point gallantly. The Lord Deputy acknowledged with warm grati- tude in his despatches home the service of the young noble- man, afterwards the great Ormond, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. 42 Lord Strafford. By the successful progress of this Commission a large quan- tity of land — the occupiers being generally glad to compound with a fourth part— returned into the King's possession, and Strafford proceeded to turn it to its designation. He had carved out a wearisome task for himself. The transplanting and settlement of English colonists was a slow, heavy business, a continual drain upon him all the time he was in Ireland. He had his heart, however, thoroughly in the work, and watched over his infant colonies with an almost parental anxiety. The infusion of English enterprise and activity into Ireland was a favourite object, which he cleaved to to the last, in spite of Irish prejudice and the feeble support of the English Cabinet ; and the plantations of Galway had made considerable advance before his departure. The commerce and trade of Ireland came no less under his reforming eye, and remarkable was the metamorphosis which they underwent. Before Strafford's time the country had no manufactures, except an inferior coarse woollen one, on a poor, meagre scale. Alive to this great deficiency, he had even before his arrival planned and matured in his head the remedy for it : it was at Chester, amid the noise and hurry of his first embarkation for Dublin, that he penned the important despatch which originated Irish manufactures. His line was bold. The woollen manufacture, though tempting as a foundation ready to hand to build upon, he fore- saw would never succeed, as it would bring England and Ire- land into competition. England at present inclraped Irish wools : he would not deprive her of the advantage, and benefit one portion of the kingdom at the expense of another. Con- sequently a new line must be fixed upon. The Irish women were good spinners, the Irish a fine soil for growing flax ; he resolved upon, and got the King's approval for, a linen trade. So new an undertaking required an extraordinary start to set it going, and commend it to Irish enterprise. The best recommendation was example. Strafford set up a manufactory of his own, and became in propria persond the founder of the illustrious order of Irish millowners. Six looms, with work- men for them from the Low Countries, procured through Sir Lord Strafford. 43 William Bos well, the English agent, were the humble com- mencement of the scheme ; yet no sooner did Strafford see his little mill at work than his sanguine spirit leapt to the result. "We shall beat," he said, "the Hollander and the French twenty per cent." The cool audacity of the prophecy is amusingly characteristic of the man. Never mind how ex- tensive, how systematised, how long established, the two master linen trades of the world must retire and hide their diminished heads before "me and my six looms." His imagination made magicians of his half-dozen Flemings, endowed these six looms with miraculous energy, and saw by anticipation a busy world of labour — mills, bales, and warehouses issue from their rest- less and prolific frames. The following year he purchased a thousand pounds' worth of flax-seed, and enlarged the scale of his exertions. " It will be the greatest enriching of this kingdom that ever befell it," he writes to Boswell, and the event has corresponded. Schemes of equal boldness for the foreign trade of the country have not, amid European fluctuations, had the same permanence. The great maritime power of the world at that time was Spain : large and splendidly equipped fleets annually set out from her ports to her possessions in South America and the West Indies ; the lucrative trade of victualling them was at present enjoyed by the Hamburg merchants. Ireland abounded just in the very articles necessary for it — meat, butter, salt fish : droves of cattle even in that day left its rich pastures for English consumption. Strafford formed the scheme of robbing Hamburg of her victualling trade, and entered into treaty with Seignior Nicholhaldie, one of his Catholic Majesty's provivadors at Hamburg, for its transference to Ireland. Nicholhaldie was favourable, and one point only remained to be attended to — an important one. England was in no good odour with the Spanish nation, the Spanish nation still less with England. For the latter prejudice, connected as it was with the puritanical feeling, Strafford entertained sufficient contempt ; the former, should it take the turn of im- peding the regularity of his Catholic Majesty's payments for Irish produce, was regarded with more respect. He took in 44 Lord Strafford. Seignior Nicholhaldie himself as a partner and sharer of the profits, thus securing the Irish a faithful paymaster ; in fact, making them, as he said, "their own paymasters." The whole arrangement was concluded before Nicholhaldie had set foot in Ireland. But Strafford's chef-d'oeuvre in the department of com- merce was the complete reform of the customs — immediately a revenue measure only, ultimately a general commercial one. The customs of Ireland, before Strafford's time, were farmed almost exclusively by two ladies of the English Court, the Duchess of Buckingham and Lady Carlisle. They produced just £12,000 per annum, and the Irish Council assured Strafford positively and dogmatically, that they could not be made to produce more, and insisted, as people obstinately do, on the absolute perfection and finality of a palpable and grossly bad arrangement. The ladies were difficult also to manage, and could not be overruled with Strafford's usual high hand. Some situations inspire peculiar pertinacity on pecuniary matters ; and a fashionable dowager, who has her town establishment and rounds of parties to provide for, watches her source of income with the vigilance of a half-pay officer and the dexterity of a hackney-coachman. They knew the value of their patent to Strafford, and stuck out for high com- pensation. At last, after much respectful solicitation, and much backwards and forwards debate, a capital interest in one of the new Crown estates, and a bribe of £8000, purchased Lady Carlisle's patent ; and ample equivalents prevailed upon the Duchess of Buckingham. O Strafford, now master of the customs, put them up to com- petition at an enormously advanced rent. From £9500 a year, the Duchess of Buckingham's share was raised to a rent of £15,500, the payment of five-eighths of the annual proceeds to the King, and a fine of £8000 besides. But competitors were not so easy to find ; an increased rent could only be met by an increased impost, which stood a chance of defeating itself by lowering the consumption of the article. The under- taking was felt to be a risk. Two men, Henshaw and Williams, came forward, but Henshaw died, and Williams then with- Lord Strafford. 4 5 drew, contenting himself with pressing Sir Arthur Ingram to take his place. Sir Arthur Ingram demanded security ; no security was better than the partnership of the Lord Deputy himself ; Strafford saw the necessity of giving it in order to prevent the scheme from falling, and, as he had before turned manufacturer, headed the new revenue-farming speculation. It turned out eventually profitable, and Strafford was of course accused of self-interested motives. He gave the manly, straightforward answer, that he had made the venture, and had a right to the success ; nor is there the shadow of a ground for attributing to him any other intention in the matter than a strictly public-spirited one. From the immutable £12,000, the customs thus rose quickly to £40,000, with every prospect of continual increase as old farms fell in. The tobacco farm of £200 a year expiring, was put up for £7000, to rise in a certain time to £12,000 a year, and was taken, when every one else declined, by Strafford himself. An augmented revenue was not allowed to end with itself : Strafford's aim was by means of a revenue to enlarge com- merce ; by means of an enlarged commerce to increase revenue ; to allow what was collected out of the nation to transpire through the nation again, and thence recall it with interest into the treasury. The national resources would thus pass and repass through a fructifying, expanding process, and a healthy ebb and flow of commercial life be produced. A mint was the most effectual security for this appropria- tion of the revenue, converting it at once into Irish coin for circulation through the country. The scarcity of money was severely felt in Ireland, and Strafford, before completing his negotiations for the Spanish trade, had bargained with the English Cabinet for the establishment of a mint to convert its profits into specie, to stay in the country, instead of going up straight for absorption in the English treasury. A con- stant fight went on between Strafford and the home govern- ment on this point. On every increase of revenue the English treasury instinctively opened its jaws for the precious morsel ; greediness was indeed an excusable fault in its sad 46 Lord Strafford. necessities ; but Strafford was obstinate. ' Do not be in a hurry/ lie said ; • allow us the money for the present : Ireland wants specie ; it is necessary for her commerce, she cannot get on without it : only wait, and you will be repaid ten times over in the customs that an improved commerce will bring you ; but do not by eagerly catching at the seed forestall the harvest.' The home government sent for the rents of the Londonderry land, and Strafford refused to part with them ; the home government sent a second time, and received not the money, but a lecture on political economy instead. The spare corner of a despatch ejaculated "specie," and the merits of specie were again and again dinned into their ears. What is so striking in Strafford's statesmanship is its rest- less saliency, elasticity, fecundity. Spring and impulse its very state, the bent bow abhorred quiescence ; design ad- vanced beyond itself, and sight saw further than the object. One thought was the parent of another ; hint swelled into form and dimension ; scheme developed scheme ; and his administration shows like a good composition in which thought flows and expands freely, producing a harmonious whole. Equally striking is his love of detail — no taste from a mere hobby with him, but an accuracy of the whole eye. The acute glance split at once the smooth surface into lines and sections, details pricked their way upwards, and the vague teemed with minute life under his eye, as animalcules multiply under the sunbeam. A Court ceremonial, a table of revenue, a valuation of a Crown estate, statistics, estimates of wools, wines, tobacco, soap, tallow — anything — had each the charm of a hobby for him; producing the accurate sum, the neat official report. Your hobby and your details are what give the relish and wed the man to his task : secret of depth and in- tensity, source of glow and richness, from the temple of truth down to the workshop, from the laboratory to the farm-yard — retort and crucible inspire the philosopher ; bright harness- hook and bell the rustic waggoner. Ireland was Strafford's hobby — a work and creation he felt to be his own, as it rose out of chaos into shape before him ; he felt parentally Lord Strafford. 47 towards his child, and acted the nurse hanging with minute attentions about her charge. A universal hobby puts a man in a philanthropic but not very easy position. Business increased in a cubic ratio upon Strafford, one day's work was the seed of many more, and Ire- land with her Parliament, law, revenue, manufactures, com- merce, Church, clergy, university, spun like a top round and round in his brain, till the constant whirl would have dizzied any other head than his own. He worked like a horse, like a steam-engine, and he had his triumph. The feeling of getting things done became an intense pleasure, and the long laborious report goes off with an ecstatic jump of his pen : " Deo gratias (to Laud) ; for I am now at the end of all your letters. quantam croivda, quantam pressa, profccto fere meliavi pingue meum — Ignoramus's own words, coming piping hot from West- minster Hall ; you make no such Latin in Oxford." Strafford's great experiment had now been tried, and suc- ceeded ; and in one part of the dominions, at any rate, a lazy, timorous government had become an effective and bold one. His great theory and bean-idiot of a popular monarchy, a monarchy that did its work and looked after the people, was in a measure fulfilled, and his government was grateful to the mass. He liked the Irish, notwithstanding some sharp dicta ; and the Irish took to the Lord Deputy's bold, frank carriage, which set off the bona fide attention to their interests. The people cheered him as he went his progress on the plantation scheme, because, said Strafford, they were better off than they had been for ages, and felt the leniency of the royal arm, com- pared with " the ojDpression of their petty imperious lords." There was, unfortunately, another class — the oligarchy — whom Strafford had deprived of their long and misused sway. They caballed, whispered, threatened, and poisoned the public mind with rumour and misrepresentation to an extent which no government that valued its own safety could over- look. Strafford resolved to make an example of the first man upon whom any overt act could be fixed ; and if the claims of expediency and justice were ever completely united, they were in the man who was eventually pitched upon. Of mean 48 Lord Strafford. condition to begin with, which he had advanced by low industry and servile arts, to an ample fortune, a title, and a seat in the Privy Council, Lord Mountnorris had played with impunity towards a succession of governments, with which he was con- nected, the part of hypocrite, scoundrel, and traitor. Delibe- rately and systematically he got hold of the Deputy on his arrival, crept into his confidence, corrupted his integrity, wheedled preferment out of him during his administration, and then accused him on his retirement. He had done so toward Lord Chichester, Lord Grandison, and Lord Falkland ; and even Clarendon, who is far from an admirer of Strafford, and allows him no higher motives than those of individual self- protection in this affair, admits that "either the Deputy of Ireland must destroy my Lord Mountnorris, whilst he con- tinued in his office, or else my Lord Mountnorris must destroy the Deputy as soon as his commission was determined." Two trifling but characteristic occurrences form the introduction of the story. On a review day in Dublin, Strafford, inspecting his troop, observed an officer named Annesly out of his place, disordering the ranks, and rebuked him. Annesly, on the Lord Deputy's back being turned, gave vent to some insolent, jeering expres- sions, which were heard. Strafford, not a man to be insulted, especially upon military ground, rode back, and, in the sight of the whole field, quietly laying his cane upon Annesly 's shoulders, without striking him, informed the petulant officer, that upon any such demonstration occurring again, he should " lay him on the pate." The Thersites was cowed, and the act of con- tempt served the purpose of a more formal punishment. But Mr. Annesly was once more destined to come in con- tact with the Lord Deputy's cane. Attending upon him as gentleman- in- waiting, he let a stool fall upon his foot, his gouty foot, and Strafford, in a moment of irritation from the pain, struck him. While the affair was fresh, and circulating rapidly, Lord Mountnorris happened to meet a large party at the table of Lord Chancellor Loftus, a kindred spirit with himself, and mortal enemy of Strafford, A number of military men were present, whose feelings would be naturally excitable Lord Strafford. 49 on the subject of the harsh or contemptuous treatment of a comrade. The troops had not yet dispersed from their late meeting, and still crowded Dublin ; an inflammatory innuendo would spread as soon as uttered, and take effect in a hundred circles. It was in such a scene and circumstances that Lord Mountnorris chose to say, alluding to Annesly letting the stool fall, that perhaps it was done in revenge for that public affront that my Lord Deputy had done him personally ; but he had a brother who would not take such a revenge,— ■" who would not have taken such a blow," is Clarendon's reading." This speech was an overt act ; and Strafford, resolved upon producing a sensation, brought down the whole pomp and terror of the law upon the speaker. Mountnorris, as an officer in the army, came under military law ; the articles of war punished with death any one guilty of " words likely to breed mutiny in the army;" a court-martial met, the words were proved, and Mountnorris was condemned to die. The whole proceeding was a solemn farce, meant to strike terror into the Irish disaffected. Pomp and bombast produced an impression upon the Irish ; Strafford made plentiful use of it during his administration, and now wished to try what a bristling, moustachioed tribunal, with the aid of nodding plume and dazzling breastplate and the clang of trumpets could do. That he never, from the first, had the smallest idea of putting Mountnorris to death, or of doing him the least bodily harm, is quite certain ; and it is a simple blunder and misunder- standing upon such a supposition to ground, as people do, a solemn charge of barbarity. All the advantage that was taken of the sanguinary sentence was to put Mountnorris into temporary confinement, from which he w r as liberated simply with the loss of office. The proceeding humbled him consider- ably ; and when Strafford, to prove that he had never enter- tained personal animosity, but only wished on public grounds for his disconnection with the Government, offered to give up a suit pending against him in the Star-Chamber, Mountnorris acknowledged the generosity with much apparent warmth. And the whole affair would have passed off with the news of the day, if Pym and his associates had not revived it. M.E.-1.] r> 5 their lives failed to do, and survives — as may Strafford's still — to inspire some statesman of a future age, who, with a country like his to save from moral barrenness and declension, will know how to accommodate an example to an altered state of things, and embody its glorious spirit in a living form. Strafford is a true Shakespearian character, containing all the elements of high perfection, only coloured by a secular and political atmosphere ; belonging to the world although above it. The human mind appears but in its commencement here, gives large promise and shows mighty powers, spreads its roots, and lays its foundations ; but looking up from the rich foliage and minareted tower, a cloud intercepts our view, and throws us back musing and melancholy upon an imperfect unfinished state of being. And yet why may not the hopeful and loving eye surmount in some sort the mist, and anticipate the finish and completion ? The elemental gas, the occult fire, the fluid trickling from its mournful cell, blue clayey lair, and sooty mineral, and cold granite lied, produce this world in which we live and breathe. Earth's lower empire issues in her upper, and as the unsightly riches of her labyrinthal womb encounter the magic touch of day, they spring into new being, a living- glorious scene : tree, herb, and flower, and balmy breeze and summer skies, the painter's landscape and the poet's dream. Even so in the progress of moral life, of human character. Lord Strafford. 105 Mighty spirits appear and rush across the field ; they follow their mysterious providential call, they take their side; and when the immortal principle has hurst forth in zeal for some heroic sacred cause, and manifested to men and angels what they are, they die, and lofty virtue calls aloud to heaven for its spiritual and native development. We wander here amid the shadowy beginnings of moral life, the rough essences, the aboriginal shapes, the ghost-like forerunnings of the immortal ; we see the giant masses that sustain the higher world, but that is all; we witness but the strife of subter- ranean elements, and hear the hollow gust and hidden torrents' roar. But patience, and a brighter day will come, which shall mould chaotic humanity into form — a day of refining, purifying metamorphose, when virtue shall hardly recognise her former self. The statesman's, warrior's, poet's, student's, ardent course, his longings, impulses, emotions, flights, extravagances, all the generous stirrings of heart and rustling rushing movements 'ipon this earthly stage, are prophecies of a life, and point straight heavenwards. The heroic is but the foundation of the spiritual ; and the antagonism and mortal strife over, freed nature shall enjoy her holiday and calm, goodness claim her paradisal being, and the wild scene of greatness and power melt into fragrance, melody, and love. II. ARCHBISHOP LAUD.* (1845-) Befoee entering on our subject we will venture a pre- liminary remark. None of the regular modern lives (we are not speaking, of course, of the Autobiography at the head of our list) appear to do full justice to Archbishop Laud. We do not mean that they are not eulogistic enough, and defective in favourable intention to him — by no means. Benevolence in a biographer, however, is not always synonymous with genuineness. What we want to see in a biography is the man himself, and not the biographer's affection for him. Bene volence does really great injustice often in this way, when it least intends it. A friendly portrait is very apt to be a weak one. We are so tender about our hero ; we will not let him come out, but keep him indoors like a sickly child. And the more complex and irregular the kind of character, the greater the risk of its suffering in this way. The biographer is too friendly to be bold ; he will not confront traits in his hero that do not prima facie promise well ; he avoids rough parts, and goes by the dark corners, instead of going into them, and seeing where they lead him. One set of features preoccupies his field : he is afraid of any interference. The effect of a favourite trait is threatened by an apparent contrary to it lurking in another part of the character; he stops the rising antagonism from coming to the surface. The conse- * 1. The Autobiography of Dr. William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury^ and Martyr ; collected from his Remains. Oxford, 1839. 2. Archbishop Laud's Devotions. Oxford. 3. Archbishop Laud's Speeches on the Liturgy. Oxford. Archdts/iop Laud. 107 quence is one weak phenomenon instead of two strong- ones ; for the probability is, that the two opposite ele- ments of character would have been positively improved and heightened, instead of being nullified, by the antagonism ; and that each would have been the better for the opposition of the other. It is hardly paradoxical to say, that a friendly hand is almost as capable of being disadvantageous to a portrait as a hostile one. The effect of the one touch is favourable but mawkish, of the other malignant but real. We have to go to the enemy for colours which the friend will not give us. And perhaps the joint production of both parties is a more really interesting likeness, after all, to an eye that can embrace and combine them, than the purely and exclu- sively friendly one. Laud is regarded too generally in the one light of a zealous champion of forms and ceremonies, an uncompromising advo- cate of rubrical uniformity. He was certainly this ; but he was a great many other things too ; and in the department of character additions tell more than simply arithmetically ; they enlarge, elevate, alter the whole nature of a man. The political department, e.g. in Laud, throws depth on the ecclesiastical, and each benefits the other. But the biographer is afraid of the politician. The combination of bishop and politician has a worldly look, and seems to give an advantage to Puritans. The politician is accordingly put in the background : the pious upholder of vestments and the Church-service is presented to us. The age catches the character, and expresses it in its own way ; and the stickler for obsolete forms, the obstinate old zealot about trifles, becomes the one popular figure of Laud. We must pay our tribute, however, to the contemporary historian, to the vivid, amusing, clever Heylin. Heylin was _>ne of those persons whom Laud picked up in the course of his administration (as he did many others), and set to work in the Church cause. He wrote books and pamphlets when Laud wanted them, and supplied the Archbishop with uni- versity and clerical information. It was Laud's character to be most good-natured and familiar with his subordinates — with any who worked under him, and did what he told them ; io8 Archbishop Land. and Heylin thoroughly enjoyed and relished his good graces. There is an amusing under- stream of self-congratulation throughout his biography, at his participation of the great man's patronage. He seems to have been occasionally told secrets and let behind the scenes — a matter of great pride to him. He communicates the information, with a kind of sly, invisible smirk in the background, and a nudge under the table to the reader — to remind him of the Archbishop's clever- ness, not forgetting the biographer's. The former would not have been particularly obliged, on one or two occasions, for the candid display of his strategics, and bits of necessary state- craft, in his devoted admirer's pages. Heylin gives us his own account of his first reception by Laud ; and it is very significant of the relationship of the two. The flattering attentions of the Metropolitan and Premier to the " poor Oxford scholar " — that is to say, a fellow of Magdalen, as Heylin was — were quite enough to win a person of his temperament ; and the courteous arts of the great man and the pleased sensations of the little man are equally characteristic. " Being kept to his chamber at the time with lameness, I had," says Heylin, "both the happiness of being taken into his special knowledge of me, and the opportunity of a longer conference than I should otherwise have expected. I went to present my service to him, as he was preparing for this journey, and was appointed to attend him the same day sevennight, when I might presume on his return. Coming precisely at the time, I heard, of his mischance, and that he kept himself to his chamber ; but order had been left among his servants that if I came, he should be made acquainted with it ; which being done accordingly, I was brought into his chamber, where I found him sitting on a chair, with his lame leg resting on a pillow. Commanding that nobody should come and interrupt him till he called for them, he caused me to sit down by him, inquired first into the course of my studies, which he well approved of, exhorting me to hold myself in that moderate course in which he found me. He fell afterwards to discourse of some passages in Oxford in which I was specially concerned, and told me thereupon the Archbishop Laud. 109 story of such opposition as had been made against him in the University by Archbishop Abbot and others, and encouraged me not to shrink, if I had already, and should hereafter find the like. I was with him thus, remotis arlitris, almost two hours. It grew almost 1 2 of the clock, and then he knocked for his servants to come to him. He dined that day in his ordinary dining-room, which was the first time he had done so since his mishap. He caused me to tarry dinner with him, and used me with no small respect, which was much noticed by some gentlemen (Elphinstone, one his Majesty's cupbearers, being one of the company) who dined that day with him. A passage, I confess, not pertinent to my present story, but such as I have good precedent for from Philip de Comines, who telleth us impertinently of the time of his leaving the Duke of Burgundy's service to betake himself to the employments of King Louis xi." Heylin's biography, however, only gives one side of the Archbishop ; it exhibits the shrewd tactician, the active indefatigable man of business, the spirited Church champion. Heylin realises acutely the religious politics and party aspects of the times ; he catches phrases, watchwords, party notes : a cant term, a piece of abuse that he has treasured up, lets you into the whole feeling of the time being, like a newspaper. Laud, the ecclesiastical combatant and schemer, figures in strong colours throughout ; but we are not let into the inner and deeper part of his character : the homo . interior was not in Heylin's line. We read through his book and have barely a glimpse of a whole inward sphere of thought and feeling in which Laud's mind was moving all the time. We go to another document for this : the Diary reveals a different man from what the active scene presented ; and a fresh and rather opposite field of character appears. Heylin's portrait has a new colour thrown upon it by the connection ; we look on the stirring features with another eye when we have seen the quiescent ones ; the bustle of State and Church politics covers an interior of depth and feeling ; the courtier, statesman, and man of the world kneels before the cross ; and we gain a different idea of him altogether. 1 10 Archbishop Laud. William Laud was born at Beading in 1573. His father was a clothier of that town. His mother's family had rather more pretensions, and boasted a City knighthood in the person of Sir William Webb, a Lord Mayor of London, and a Salter by trade, Laud's maternal uncle. The Puritans did not forget this fact of a mercantile origin in his days of power, and ornamented it with very circumstantial additions. He was born " of poor and obscure parents in a cottage," was Prynne's account ; he " was born between the stocks and the cage," says the Scots' Scout. "A courtier," he adds, "one clay chanced to speak thereof, whereupon his Grace removed them thence, and pulled down his father's thatched house, and built a fair one in the place ; " — a gratuitous and rather ungracious mode of stating the simple fact that Laud built and endowed an almshouse in his native town. The subject of his birth was a prolific one ; and "libel after libel," as he said, " raked him out of the dung- hill." Even with his long and intimate experience of the power of puritanical language, Laud was sometimes horrified with the intensity of abuse which poured in upon him on the subject of his origin. Heylin found him one day walking in his garden at Lambeth, looking " troubled " — disgusted, in modern language. Laud showed him one of these virulent papers ; he pleaded guilty to the fact " of not having the good fortune to be born a gentleman ; " — " yet he thanked God he had been born of honest parents, who lived in a plentiful condition, employed many poor people in their way, and left a good report behind them." " And therefore," continues Heylin, " begin- ning to clear up his countenance, I told him as presently as I durst, that Pope Sixtus the Fifth, as stout a Pope as ever wore the triple crown, but a poor man's son, did use familiarly to say, in contempt of such libels as frequently were made against him, that he was domo natus illustri, because the sunbeams, passing through the broken walls and ragged roof, illustrated every corner of that homely cottage in which he was born — with which facetiousness of that Pope (so applicable to the present occasion) he seemed very well pleased." We doubt whether Heylin's precise case in point would have operated as a consolation to a very marked aspiration after high birth, but Archbishop Laud. 1 1 1 Laud's disgust was occasioned by the animus of his libellers, and not bv the fact of his own origin. " In my infancy," says the Diary, " I was in danger of death by sickness." Laud carried with him from his birth one of those constitutions which are always ailing, and never failing. He had never good health for long together; and his fierce attacks of illness brought him sometimes to death's door, leaving him, however, as strong for work again as ever, as soon as they were passed. A creaking gate lasts ; weakness and iron often go together in the bodily constitution. There are different kinds of health : rude and full ; slender and wiry ; in- doors health, and out-of-doors health; reading health, and hunt- ing health ; the healths capacitating respectively for mental and for bodily work. Laud had the weakly kind of health eminently ; a vigorous, obstinate, indoors constitution. His ailings, except when they broke out violently, seem only to have operated as a sort of unconscious stimulus and mental mustard-plaster, perpetually keeping him up to his work — his internal Puritans. He went to the school of his native town, and had the benefit of a disciplinarian hand over him. " After a wonderful preservation in his infancy," we are told, " from a very sore fit of sickness, he had a happy education in his childhood under a very severe schoolmaster." He was appreciated, however, for his master " frequently said to him, that he hoped he would remember Beading School when he became a great man." One of the prognostics, it is curious to notice, was his "dreams:" the boy had " strange dreams ; " the religious grotesquenesses, superstitions, or whatever critics may call them, of the Diary, seem to have been born with him. We will add that he must have been exceedingly clever to have made the recital of them tell so much in his favour. There is no subject-matter that tasks human power more to make interesting. We have no disrespect for the thing itself, for the dream per se, for the world of sight, sound, and action that sleep introduces us into : nevertheless nature herself yawns, and the face of social life lengthens into despondency, as soon as ever the public com- munication of a dream commences — as soon as ever the preparatory note and prelude is heard — " What do you think F 1 1 2 Archbishop Laud. dreamed of last night ? " A inau's dream interests himself because it is his own — a plain intimation of reason that it is meant for his own peculiar enjoyment. However, the little Laud had, it appears, very striking dreams ; and his school- master saw mind in them. Genuine nature gives a character wherever she is the originator ; and the native productions of a soil have a charm about them. We like Laud's dreams for being born with him. He seems to have a right to them ; and their shadowy fragmentary character shows an imaginative element in his mind, and points back to a more vivid childish prototype. He appears, in his school- days, to have been what is called a regular sharp boy : and his " witty speeches, generous spirit, great apprehensions, and notable perform- ances," raised people's expectations about him. At sixteen he went up to Oxford, and entered at St. John's College ; became a scholar the next year, and four years after- wards fellow. " He was at that time," we are informed by Wood, "esteemed by all who knew him (being little in stature), a very forward, confident, and zealous person ; " a not un- natural line of character for a young man to fall into, who had great talents, great earnestness, a strong religious bias, and a considerable disgust for the tone of opinion which surrounded him. The religious atmosphere of the University at this time was, as is well known, Calvinistic in the extreme. The de- veloped Preformation theology was predominant there. The divinity professorships were in the hands of strong Calvinists ; and the Genevan doctrines were the regular authorised teaching and standard of the place. First in power in the Univer- sity was Dr. Lawrence Humphrey, President of Magdalen College, and Eegius Professor of Divinity ; a disciple of Zwinglius, and a correspondent of Calvin. " The best that could be said of him," says Heylin, " by one who commonly speaks well of that party [the historian Puller], was, that he was a moderate and conscientious nonconformist." He was, however, a clever man, a fluent lecturer, and master of a good Latin style. The Divinity Schools were his great field ; and his lectures, which consisted of strong expositions of all the Archbishop Laitd. 1 1 o Calvinistic tenets, and fierce denunciations of the Pope, moulded the theology of the University students. " He sowed in the Divinity Schools," as we are told, " such seeds of Calvinism, and laboured to create in the younger men such a strong hate against the Papists, as if nothing but divine truths were to be found in the one, and nothing but abominations to be seen in the other." His college felt its head : Magdalen " was stocked with a generation of nonconformists," and became a con- spicuous nursery and hot-bed of Calvinism. A change has passed over the face of that society since these religious movements. The uncongenial effervescence, under a happier influence, subsided, and has not returned ; and Lawrence Humphrey, were he to visit the scene of his labours again, would have to mourn over his lapsed college ; the rigours of Puritanism no longer predominant within its walls ; the five points untouched ; and a fellow of Magdalen not ipso facto a supralapsarian. The Calvinistic party had aid from the political world. Humphrey had a warm coadjutor, indeed, in the Lady Margaret Professor ; but as if this was not staff enough for the work, — as if these two, says Heylin, " did not make the distance wide enough between the Churches, a new T lecture must needs be founded." New theological lectures were the Protestantising machinery of those times, as they have been since. The government of the day favoured the Calvinistic side. Walsing- ham, the Secretary of State, and the Earl of Leicester, Chan- cellor of the University, both lent a ready ear to the suggestions of Humphrey and his school ; and Oxford Puritanism was in close and intimate alliance with political power at headquarters. Walsingham is described by our historian as " a man of great political ability, an extreme hater of the Popes and Church of Rome, and no less favourable unto those of the Puritan faction." Doctor John Rainolds, President of Corpus Christi College, a learned and rigorous Puritan, stood high in Walsingham's good graces ; he was appointed to the new lectureship, and joined the other official disseminators of the Calvinistic doctrines in the University. The coalition engendered a great feeling of security and M.E.-I.] h 1 14 Archbishop Laud. strength in the party. A party feels itself strong that has a back to lean against ; that has reinforcements to call in when it wants them. Confidence is seated in a background ; and the mind of the partisan expands with self-complacency and hope as it feels the remoter and more exoteric circle of sympathy and assistance. " Our friends in the government " — " our Parliamentary supporters" — "our friends in the country" — and " our friends in town," are indefinite sources of self-gratu latory strength to a side, and the sure aid at a distance has double weight at home. Parties under such circumstances grow easy, boastful, and contemptuous ; they ride over the field, clear their way unscrupulously, vote opposition to be ipso facto absurd, urge the territorial right, implant themselves in the soil, engraft their own system and character, feel at home, and cover the ground. The Calvinistic party at Oxford enjoyed their alliance with the political world, and nipped all opposition to them in the bud, by simple weight and impetus. They had it all their own way : those who thought differently from them kept their own opinions to themselves, rather than face the storm of censure and vituperation which they would have encountered by expressing them. Heylin mentions two names of Fellows of colleges as the only public, open, orthodox *mes existing in the place at this time. There doubtless was jnother school all the while in embryo, but it was only an embryo one. It had not courage to come out or voice to make itself heard. It wanted a leader and mouthpiece, somebody to bring it out and make it speak, elicit its powers, encourage its efforts, and mould it into shape and compactness. Oxford was only a sample of the rest of the country. The Reformation in this country ended in showing itself a decidedly Calvinistic movement. The theology of our native reformers, where it did not run spontaneously in this direction (as it did not in some), was too weak to resist its irruptions ; and Calvin and the foreign reformers stepped in almost as soon as the movement had begun, threw their whole impetus into it, and turned it their own way. A movement shows itself in its fruits : the Eeformation produced Calvinism : Calvinism was its immediate offspring, its genuine matter-of-fact expansion. Archbishop Laud. 115 The divines that the Eeformation directly produced, its actual disciples and sons, were everywhere of this school; and the Calvinistic foliage sprouted with all the freedom and exuberance of nature. Laud commenced his course in this state of University theology ; and had to push his way through this adverse system. He fought at a disadvantage. He did not start with Laudian station and authority : far from it ; he had authority regularly against him, and stood a simple individual, and Fellow of a college, against the whole official stream of academical opinion, against the favourite and cardinal doctrines of vice- chancellors, heads of houses, and divinity professors. Laud's ultimate historical position is so prominent in our minds, that we hardly think of him in his previous humbler one ; as if he had never not been an Archbishop, and been born, on the principle of Minerva's leap out of Jupiter's head, in full-blown metropolitan maturity and canonicals. The Caroline Court and the Eegale appear born with him. We picture him the man of pomp and station to begin with ; with all the paraphernalia of ecclesiastical power ready-made to his hands, and leave him only the easy task of laying down the law and punishing the rebel, bringing down the terrors of suspension on the non- conformist and of the pillory on the libeller. It was very dif- ferent in fact : Laud certainly made full use of his powers, both ecclesiastical and secular, when he got them ; but it was a long time before he got them. He was long all but alone, and had an up-hill course. Dignitaries condemned, acquaintances avoided, even friends suspected him : he endured a humiliating discipline and a severe succession of rubs. He laid his own groundwork, and created his own authoritativeness ; we see the result, and forget the process which led to it ; we antedate the man of power, and give him what he made himself before he made it. He appears before us, in short, in the first instance, as an innovator upon the dominant and authorised theology of the day. A High- Churchman of the " old school " can now appeal to his sanction and name ; but Laud was not one of an " old school" himself; there was no "old school" of High-Church- n6 Archbishop Land. manship for him to belong to ; the " established school " of the Church was then Calvinistic ; Calvinism was the theology of the Church dignitary, the Bishop, the Dean, the College Head. The maintainer of another system had to assume the character which thinks for itself, and will not follow the lead ; a free, independent, and original one. Laud's High-Churchmanship was no more made to his hand than his archiepiscopate. It did not come to him in the natural course of his education, as the teaching of the day, as the regular, established, proper, decorous, and respectable orthodox system. His orthodoxy raised itself, was the growth of his own mind in opposition to the prevailing system, and had to be maintained by the force of his own judgment and taste against a whole uncongenial and hostile state of contemporary theology. Laud was ordained in 1601 by Young, Bishop of Rochester. The bishop "found his study raised above the system and opinions of the age, upon the noble foundation of the Fathers, Councils, and the ecclesiastical historians, and presaged that, if he lived, he would be an instrument of restoring the Church from the narrow and private principles of modern times." A series of collisions, accordingly, with the University authorities marks the first period of Laud's theological career. They began upon a tender point. The authorised theology of the Oxford schools denied all definite visibility to the Church through the middle ages. The Pope was Antichrist ; Romish orders were the mark of the beast ; the Church of England was entirely separated from all connection with her medieval exist- ence ; and the very idea of deriving her authority from a Romish fountain-head savoured of simple pollution, instead of the dignity of antiquity, to the post- Reformation theologians of that day. The visibility of the Church took a leap from the age of the Apostles to that of the Berengarians ; from the Berengarians it passed to the Albigenses ; from the Albigenses to the Wick- liffites ; from the Wicklimtes to the Hussites ; from the Hussites to the congregations of Luther and Calvin ; and from them to the English Reformed Church. The English Church was made to rest on a succession of doctrine purely ; the torch of "gospel light" had been caught and passed on by scattered Archbishop Laud. 117 bodies of true believers, one after another, till it lit np the flame of the Eeformation : that was the Church's warrant, and the succession of orders was simply beside the mark. Abbot, the future puritanical Archbishop, was then Master of Uni- versity College, and Vice- Chancellor, a double-dyed Calvinist, and an advocate of this theory especially. When Archbishop, he wrote a treatise in support of it. Laud, in an academical exercise which he delivered shortly after his ordination, main- tained the formal ecclesiastical ground, and claimed a regular legitimate existence for the medieval English Church. He placed the authority of the present Church upon that basis, and traced its orders and genealogy, through the Eoman Catholic hierarchy, up to the apostles and the primitive Church. The exercise gave great offence. Abbot saw with jealousy the start of a young theological antagonist, and seems to have presaged instinctively the course of the future rival, who was to be per- petually treading on his heels : — "He thought it a great dero- gation to his parts and credit, that any man should dare to maintain the contrary of his opinion, and thereupon conceived a strong grudge against Laud, which no tract of time could either abolish or diminish." His degree of Bachelor of Divinity was the next occasion which brought him out. His exercises in the schools main- tained the necessity of Episcopacy, and the doctrine of baptis- mal regeneration. Both were unpopular doctrines at Oxford. A clamour was raised against him : he was accused of creating discord between the English and the other Eeformed Churches. The doctrine of baptismal regeneration was doubly odious, too, defended in the language of Bellarmine. It was thought an insult to a Protestant University for one of its members to be publicly quoting Bellarmine, and borrowing his arguments from a Eoman Catholic controversialist. The common- sense answer was, that if the arguments were good, it did not signify where they came from. A sermon delivered the next year (1606), in the pulpit of St. Mary's, the contents of which we are not informed of, brought down upon him a vehement attack from Dr. Henry Airay, Vice-Chancellor and Provost of Queen's, a pupil of the n8 Archbishop Laud. reformer Bernard Gilpin, a person of great repute for gravity, learning, and sanctity in the puritanical party, and the popu- lar author of a treatise " against bowing at the name of Jesus." Some passages in the sermon appeared " superstitionem ponti- ficiam sapere" and Dr. Airay cited Laud to answer in his court. The trial went on for some weeks, and made a stir in the theological world. Laud showed great ability, spirit, and acuteness ; parried his opponents dexterously, and got clear off at last, without any process of retractation or apology to go through. It is a pity we are entirely deprived of the details of a scene so highly characteristic. Laud had his first taste here of a theological trial ; his last was when he appeared at the bar of the House of Lords. His quickness, steadiness, and vivacity carried him through the academical ordeal, and the terrors of Dr. Henry Airay's tribunal. The Oxford Vice- Chancellor's court had no bill of attainder to fall back upon when a troublesome adversary had foiled it ; the Lords were better provided, and could help themselves to ready-made law when the statute-book failed. An antagonist is not disliked the less for gaining a victory, or making an escape. Laud was regarded more and more as a dangerous man : Abbot grew more bitter and splenetic every day. Dark rumours were set afloat ; and suspicion was rife. People were afraid of him, and afraid of being seen with him. " It was a heresy," was Laud's own account, " to speak to him, and a suspicion of heresy to salute him as he walked in the street." It was dangerous to be seen in his company. Friends even began to be perplexed and suspicious of the formal ecclesiastical bearing in his theology ; to think him going too far, to profess not to understand him, not to penetrate his mixture of views, or get behind his veil. He had a character for subtlety and ambiguity ; for not telling people what he was, or where he was going. He lived under a cloud. The reports against him reached the sister University ; and Hall, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, writes to him : " I would I knew where to find you ; then I could tell you how to take direct arms, where- as now I must pore and conjecture. To-day you are in the tents of the Komanists, to-morrow in ours, the next day be- Archbishop Land. 119 tween both, against both. Our adversaries think you ours, we theirs ; your conscience finds you with both, and neither : I natter you not. This of yours is the worst of all tempers. How long will you halt in this indifferency ? Resolve one day, and know at last what you do hold, and what you do not. Cast off either your wings or your teeth, and, loathing this bat- like nature, be either a bird or a beast. To die wavering or uncertain, yourself will grant fearful. If you must settle, when begin you ? If you must begin, why not now ? God crieth with Jehu, ' Who is on my side, who ? ' Look out at your window to Him, and in a resolute courage cast down the Jezebel that hath bewitched you.' Good Bishop Hall is ob- viously sorely puzzled with him ; he sees in him a change upon the established system of the day, and, what is more alarming still, something of a departure from Bishop Hall; and he does not know what to think of it. A few years passed and found matters not improved. Laud preached on a Shrove-Tuesday a sermon reflecting on some of the Puritan doctrines. Dr. Abbot, brother of the Archbishop, and Divinity Professor, was Vice-Chancellor. He bottled up his indignation all Lent, and on Easter Sunday burst out ; and from the University pulpit at St. Peter's, delivered a strain of theological invective sufficiently open and pointed. Laud was not present on that occasion, but the discourse was re- delivered, according to custom, on the following Sunday, at St. Mary's ; and to avoid the appearance of being absent through fear, he went, and sat under his castigator. There was no attempt at disguise on the part of the preacher, and all eyes were fixed on Laud as the following interrogatories were addressed to him from the pulpit: "Might not Christ say, What art thou ? Romish or English, Papist or Protestant ? Or what art thou ? a mongrel, composed of both ; a Protestant by ordination, a Papist in point of free-will, inherent righteous- ness, and the like. A Protestant in receiving the Sacrament ; a Papist in the doctrine of the Sacrament. What ! do you think there are two heavens ? If there be, get you to the other, and place yourself there, for unto this where I am ye shall not come." The preacher added a spirited description lio Archbishop Laud. of Laud's party or set. " Some," he continued, alluding to the latter, " are partly Eomish, partly English, as occasion serves them, that a man might say, noster es an adversariorum ? who, under pretence of truth, and preaching against the Puritans, strike at the heart and root of the religion now established among us. They cannot plead that they are accounted Papists because they speak against the Puritans, but, because being indeed Papists, they speak nothing against them. If they do at any time speak against the Papists, they do but beat a little about the bush, and that but softly too, for fear of waking and disquieting the birds that are in it : they speak nothing but that wherein one Papist will speak against another, as against equivocation, the Pope's temporal power, and the like, and perhaps some of their blasphemous speeches ; but in the points of free-will, justification, concupiscence being a sin after baptism, inherent righteousness, and certainty of salvation, the Papists beyond the seas can say they are wholly theirs ; and the recusants at home make their boast of them. In all things they keep themselves so near the brink, that upon occasion they may step over to them." " I came time enough," said Laud, writing to his friend Bishop Neil, shortly after, "to be at the rehearsal of this sermon, upon much persuasion, where I was fain to sit patiently, and hear myself abused almost an hour together, being pointed at as I sat. For this present I would fain have taken no notice of it, but that the whole University did apply it to me ; and my own friends tell me I shall sink my credit if I answer not Dr. Abbot in his own. Nevertheless, in a business of this kind, I will not be swayed from a patient course." Perfect coolness and good temper marked Laud's academical career throughout. The theological tribunal and the pulpit ; rumour, suspicion, and black looks ; vice-chancel- lors, heads of houses, and divinity professors were all at him ; they put themselves into agitation, but not him. Dignitaries were jealous of the junior ; Calvinists were disgusted at the theologian ; but the junior and the theologian himself was quite calm. Laud pursued his own line, kept his object before him, and went quietly on, never giving way an Archbishop Laud. 121 inch, but never at the same time troubling himself to re- taliate. Attacks and invectives simply spent themselves in the air, as far as he was concerned, and were without practical effect. His mode of aggression showed the same temper, was firm and continuous, taking advantage of opportunities ; bold when there was a blow to be hit ; but ordinarily quiet, and work- ing under rather than above ground. He seems to have gone on the rule of keeping as much out of scrapes as he could , consistently with his public line : and to get into one was an instantaneous call upon all the faculties of his mind to the rescue ; an evoker of all his cleverness and ready wit to get him out of it again. An exercise for a degree, a sermon at St. Mary's, was turned to account, and made a theological weapon. He takes up some definite Church doctrine — epi- scopacy, baptismal regeneration, or whatever it may be, and puts it strongly forward. If he is called to account for it, still the thing is done : an inquisition on the sermon, an attack from the pulpit, cannot prevent that fact ; the coast is soon clear, and he is quiet again, and resumes his ordinary course. It is remarkable that no charge of violence or hot-headedness appears against him through this period. His enemy, Abbot, accuses him of cunning and underhand work, but not of any violence ; the former is, of course, the charge made, where the latter cannot be. Ten years of this course had passed, when the Presidency of St. John's became vacant by the promotion of Buckridge to the see of Eochester. Laud had been working his way, and been gaining influence — over his own college especially. He stood for the Presidency ; and the whole zeal and activity of the puritanical party were instantly called into play to oppose him. Abbot was indefatigable ; the University dignitaries were immediately in communication with the Government, and the Chancellor Ellesmere received private notices of Laud being a dangerous man, and having " papistical" leanings, and of the necessity of keeping him " out of any place of govern- ment in the University." Ellesmere was gained ; Ellesmere had possession of the King's ear, and Laud's election seemed to be fairly done for, before a single vote in St. John's had 122 Archbishop Latid. been taken. Laud was himself disabled at the time from doing anything, being laid up with one of his illnesses in London, and too weak to attempt a journey, or even to write a single line to his friends on the subject. However, the voting- came on, and he had a majority. It is a proof of the extra- ordinary excitement which the election had created, that one of the Fellows at this very moment snatched the paper con- taining the votes out of the hands of the college officer, and tore it in pieces. The evidence of the election was thus dis- posed of, and Laud's opponents appealed to the Crown, and pushed for an absolutely royal appointment, quashing all the college votes. Laud had an intercessor with James, however, in the person of Bishop Neil of Durham. The appeal came before James in person ; he heard both parties for the space of three hours, and concluded by declaring Laud President of St. John's. The day of the decision was August 29, "the clay of the decollation of St. John Baptist," adds the Diary. Laud was a great observer of all coincidences of days, and did not pass over the coincidence of his being declared President of St. John's on St. John's Day. Placed at the head of his college, he instantly adopted the amiable line ; forgave and tranquillised, and threw oil upon the angry waters. He was particularly affectionate to the Fellow who had torn up the scrutiny paper. College propriety demanded, of course, some judicial notice of such a disorderly proceeding, and a solemn tribunal sat upon the offender. But authority was satisfied with showing itself, and then graciously descended from the judicial chair, and embraced the criminal. He was a clever man, and capable of being useful. Laud took him into favour, and paid him great attention. He afterwards made him his chaplain, gave him preferment, and married him to his niece ; and finally raised him to the very Presidency which had been the subject of all the commotion. " To the other Fellows," continues Heylin, " who had opposed him in his election, he always showed a fair and equal counten- ance, hoping to gain them by degrees ; but if he found any to be intractable, not easily to be gained by favours, he would A rchbishop Laud. 123 find some handsome way or other to remove them out of college, that others, not engaged upon either side, might suc- ceed in their places. Notwithstanding all this care, the faction still held up against him, the younger fry inclining to the same side which had been taken by their tutors." Persever- ance, however, won the field at last. We now quit the Oxford scene for a more expansive one, and Laud's real life begins. He steps out of the threshold. A college headship does not ordinarily figure as the starting- point ; it is more commonly the harbour than the port of exit, and rewards exertions oftener than stimulates them ; it does not often send either a political or ecclesiastical adventurer into the world. It did in his case. Laud did not feel the satisfying influences of station. The common tendency of minds to rest upon their oars, and repose at the first stage of their progress — to erect the templet serena on the very first elevated spot — to think they have done enough as soon as they have done anything at all — to enjoy dignified ease — to give up growth and abandon themselves to efflorescence, was not his failing. The President of St John's immediately set out for a terra incognita, and entered upon a wholly new sphere of exer- tion, and line of life. At home in one department, Laud was instantly a beginner in another ; and the labourer and drudge on the large political field was more to his taste than the University dignitary. His career in Oxford had done what he wanted — drawn him out, given him an experience, exercised his talent, and shown in what direction it lay. He could now apply what he had got to a fresh sphere, and the University tactician grew into the Church's statesman. Laud is our last specimen of a very dominant class once — the class of statesmen-ecclesiastic. The character is not a popular one at the present day ; and we do not know whether, in the present state of society, such a union of positions is natural or desirable. In ages of the Church's power, the Church is naturally more political than she is in her ages of weakness. Genuine ecclesiastical influence, imbibed, and felt, and acting over society, forms a suitable atmosphere for an ecclesiastical statesman, when another state of opinion does 124 A rc h bishop L and. not. In the middle ages, temporal power was actually put into the Church's hands by the world. The world liked to have its statesmen priests, and priests accordingly became its statesmen. The combination was a natural phenomenon of the day, as much as feudalism and chivalry ; particular classes were jealous of the Church, but the state of opinion, as a whole, put power — political, temporal power — into her hands. She found herself in possession of it ; she could not help exerting a vast overwhelming influence with respect to all sorts of sub- jects, ecclesiastical and secular, upon the public mind. She was a spiritual society indeed, but she was also an actual living and human one, in intimate contact with the world ; and her exertion and interference in the social system was called for and expected. With power de facto lodged in her, she was responsible for what became of it, and her natural course was to administer it herself, instead of letting it get into worse hands. The case is different when the Church is weak ; the effort would be artificial. She does not strain after power, and snatch it eagerly out of the world's hands ; she does not care for it on her own account ; and therefore, if the world does not voluntarily give it her, she does not seek for it. She ad- ministers it if she has it, but she does not want to have it, if people do not want to give it. She does not accept it from reluctant hands, or legislate for a jealous and mistrusting age. Laud, in his day, just saw the last remaining vestiges of the old system : the vitality gone, the case still partially existing. The form of the old idea of the statesman-ecclesi- astic survived. The age rested under the last shadow of the medieval empire ; and the times in which bishops were set at the political helm, and the Stapledons, the Wykehams, and the Waynfletes of the day were our Lord High Chancellors and Lord High Treasurers, had still a faint reflection in the position which even the post-Eeformation prelates occupied in the English Court, the seats in the privy council, the employment on the foreign embassy. A class of higher clergy were a good deal about Court, and took their share in public matters ; not as interlopers in the scene, but as if they were at home, and in their natural place : public opinion maintained them there. Archbishop Land. 125 Minds have their favourite aspects in which they realise particular truths : Laud realised the Church's greatness under this one. A mixture of motives riveted Laud's eye in this direction. He had caught the particular medieval idea of the the Church's position, as a political estate, an heiress, by a divine nobility of birth, to the world's honours and elevations. The half-conscious idea ran in his thoughts perpetually ; and incidental acts and expressions show the image in his mind — the form of a Church which haunted him — a sacerdotal political form of a Church in power, her orders nobility, her prelates pillars of the State. He saw dignity and grandeur upon her, a splendid ritual, grave munificence and hospitality, the stamp of venerable power on her brow, and profound homage bending the knee to her. A genuine hierarchical taste vented itself in the medieval combination, and the priestly idea took the heightening feudal colour and political expression of itself. It is a mistake to charge him with ambition : the feeling was totally different from ambition. A sense of a particular voca- tion, and the natural tendency of a set of tastes to get scope and exercise, carried him toward the position of statesman- ecclesiastic ; but the position had its charm as the expression of an idea, and not as the gratification of a personal aim. His own elevation put his own theory into execution, and he realised the exaltation of his Church in that of himself. He had every bit as much pleasure in putting Juxon into the office of Lord Treasurer, or Archbishop Spottiswoode into the Scotch Chancellorship, as he had in any public preferment of his own. His track was to be recognised everywhere by the elevation of the Church and clergy. The feeling amounted to a species of poetry in him : the poetical element in his mind took the ecclesiastical form, and pictured the revival of the Church's greatness and splendour. "The Church has been low these hundred years, but I hope it will flourish again in another hundred," was a saying of his remembered against him at his trial. A fancy and a fond dream it may have been : the age was not in keeping with the aim, and it was cut short — still it was a disinterested dream, if it was one ; and he turned it into a most effective stimulus, and invigorated himself by it. 126 Archbishop Laud. Whether true or not, it was a useful one. He seems to have doubted it, mistrusted it himself ; still there it was — it stood before him, and he followed it. It was something to follow at any rate, something to have before him ; it appeared, it shone : the phantom was majestic, even if it was a phantom. It led him on through stage after stage of his work : a medieval glow terminated the dark laborious vista ; and the plodder's slow subterranean passage had an inward poetry to illuminate and relieve it. The poetical feeling did not at all supersede the strict utilitarian one. The Regale was the great centre of power in that day, both in Church and State ; the Court the very first and most necessary instrument for the objects of the Church- reformer. He was obliged to work his way at Court, to get any of the practical acting power of the nation into his hands. A hundred other things he ought to be perhaps, but a courtier he must be ; he must gain access to the great political lever, if he was to put a finger on the ecclesiastical. The ins and outs of Court were an essential part of his experience, and the whole order of things went to domiciliate him first at the focus of the nation, in order to obtain any spread of his influence over the general surface. Laud wanted to gain some ground on which he could work upon the nation ; he wanted ways and means, facilities, sources of weight, and a whole machinery for producing effects. He fixed his eye on the Court as offering such resources, such machinery. A natural turn for the exer- cise of power, for tactics, and managing — so strong a taste in a mind that feels itself to have it — sympathised with this object ; and the whole political element in Laud's character mingled with the enthusiastic in taking him to a yet unex- plored mine of influence and labour — the Court. James had just ascended the English throne, when Laud made his first entrance into Court, in the capacity of King's chaplain — a situation which his patron, Bishop Neil, procured for him, very soon after his election to the Presidency of St. John's. The Stewarts brought with them a very different character to the throne, and to the English Eegale, from that of the Tudor Elizabeth — a much less imperial and a much more Archbishop Land. 1.27 amiable one ; better tendencies and less firmness ; a temper weak and difficult to keep up to the mark when raised there, but very accessible to influence in the first instance. Elizabeth, made up as she was of caprices and humours, kept up the great family trait with an iron uniformity : hated the Puritans, but ground down the Church, and with all her High-Church whims was the very reverse of the character that is subject to Church influence. The Stewart character was open to this influence. Fresh charged with a highly unfavourable experience of Purit- anism in Scotland, and without the deep-set Erastian pride of the Plantagenets in their nature to stiffen them against the Church at starting, they were open ground, and invited culti- vation. Laud gave it. He elicited the favourable traits, fastened their predilections, and marked out their line. The great monarchical families of European history seem to have all had their peculiar stamp of character u^on them : a Plan- tagenet is great ; a Bourbon is magnificent ; a Romanoff is poli- tical and adventurous. A more passive character and gentler interest attaches to the name of Stewart ; but an interest it is. With all the faults and all the weaknesses of the individuals, enough remains to throw a grace over the dynasty and race. Erom the Scotch Mary and her grandson Charles, the victims of a cruel English policy, to the very last of the exiles ; history sets them before our eyes in a broken and scattered, but still fascinating colour. The Stewart power ever befriended the Church ; and they were the Church's sons when they might have been her foes and oppressors. The pride which is the guilt of the kings of the earth did not belong to their character ; their Eegale was a religious one ; the haughty world frowned upon such half kings, such children in policy, such weak infantine Church dupes. Yet the secret inward Church spell would operate, its very forebodings fascinated and led them on ; they hovered around their destiny till it seized them. In an evil hour they left the very communion they had nurtured, condemned themselves to melancholy exile, and the Church of England to a reaction of weakness and sterility. They shone like an autumnal sun upon her, and were born for the elevation of our Church and for her depression. 128 Archbishop Laud. Laud now divided his time between Oxford and the Court r and was penetrating into the upper sphere, while he kept his position in the lower. His progress at Court was slow, tedious, and trying ; he made no way whatever for a long time. Three years had passed and found him only King's chaplain still. The black Oxford cloud had followed him, and the pressure of Abbot's archiepiscopate kept him under, and would not let him see daylight. At the end of three years, with nothing done and nothing promising, he made up his mind to withdraw from the scene, and return to his simple Oxford headship. How- ever, he told Bishop Neil of his intention ; Neil remonstrated ; he stayed on, and gave the experiment another trial. Three or four years cleared the prospect a little, and an opening was made : James took notice of him. In 1616 he accompanied James into Scotland. He stood by James's side, and heard pedantic speeches from the Scotch Universities, and listened to James's puns. The King was in capital humour, enjoyed the technicalities and pomps of a progress, made jokes on the Scotch professors' names, and argued points of ritual. Years ago Laud had seen James on his favourite stage. The King's manor at Woodstock brought him into the University region ; he " graciously received the Vice- Chancellor of Oxon., together with the doctors, proctors, and heads of houses, at his manor of Woodstock." The invitation was returned, and the King on his part " accepted a solemn invitation from the University, and performed in all manner of scholastic exercises, divinity, law, physic, and philosophy ; in all of which he showed himself of such great abilities, that he might have governed in those chairs as well as all or any of his three professors." Times had changed certainly on a more recent visit of royalty to the place ; and George iv. did not adopt his erudite pre- decessor's model; whether frightened by a more formidable show of scholastic criticism and power, in the divinity professors of the present day than the latter had to encounter, or for any other reason, we cannot say. James's was a harmless and simple style of affectation after all : it showed itself frankly, and had no concealments. He liked theology, and he liked mulled wine : he liked both for his own amusement and as Archbishop Laud. 129 pleasing cordials and recreations. He was of the nature oi a pnss-in-boots, and carried a flattering consciousness of the regal cothurnus about with him. The grace of the Stewart character took a leap from the mother to the grandson, and passed over the personage in the middle. A more comfortable life than that of either gave him the balance for the loss in a shape which he particularly appreciated ; and he was amply compensated for a rather ungainly and ridiculous mediocrity of character by not having to fight, and not being beheaded. On the present occasion he was quite himself, and Laud had the benefit of his royal self-complacency. James, with the usual awkwardness, which always made him choose the most offensive form of speech for a suggestion, told the Scotch divines that " he had brought some English theologians to enlighten their minds." Laud wedged his passage further and further through the dense mass, and found himself at last approaching some- thing like a centre, and penetrating within the inner circle, in which stood the great man himself — the wielder of Court power, the dispenser of Court favours — Buckingham. A proximity once begun became rapidly closer, till the two fairly met, and Laud and Buckingham made a coalition. The connection of Laud and Buckingham is one of those odd juxtapositions, which people ordinarily account for by supposing an inconsistency in one or both of the parties in it. We do not think this necessary, at the same time fully recognising its striking, pungent, and comic grotesqueness. Laud and Buckingham, the grave Oxford scholar and the light- hearted "Favourite," — the very plume of Court chivalry, and bright flourish of silk mantle and rapier and white feather, dashing manner, frankness, ease, swordsmanship, duelling, and dancing; and the stiff-set ecclesiastical figure, the physiognomy in the square cap, side by side, is certainly a picture ! Buck- ingham is an odd companion and intimate for Laud, it is true ; but then it is also true that men will form strange friendships when they have a public object in view. The public mau, purely political or ecclesiastical, is forced upon a different class of connections from what he would have had in private M.E.-I.] 1 130 Archbishop Laud. life ; his very vocation brings liim across the person, whoever he may be, who is the key to certain means and resources, the medium of approach to the particular position he wants. He finds him necessary ; he makes himself convenient. The bargain is struck, and we have a political friendship formed ; so far a political one only. However, once brought into con- nection with him, upon whatever ground, the man is seen, the man is known : if he has fine qualities, they are recognised ; and the mere fact of his company places him in a favourable relation to you. Much intercourse between two persons, how- ever it may have originated, if it only as a matter of fact takes place, must have its consequences : and if parties do not get to hate each other, they naturally get to like each other. Mutual convenience produces mutual heart. These mixed relations are in fact the commonest ones in the world, and persons are every day forming the private friendship upon the public. An ecclesiastical object brought Laud into contact with Bucking- ham, but being brought into contact with him, he saw, knew, and liked him. There was a great deal to like in Buckingham. Spoilt child of a Court as he was, his mind had a generosity, openness, and transparency of its own. Clarendon mentions his entire " want of dissimulation." To have much to do with persons of wholly different mould from yourself is no enviable situation. However Laud may have taken to the work, and got himself to like men, — and Buckingham he really was fond of, — the friendship was a crea- tion of his own out of incongruous material, and was a work of mental art and labour. Endurance, vigilance, and self-com- mand were implied in it. Charles, Strafford, and others, are not to be named with Buckingham ; but they are instances of the same power in Laud ; of wholly differently stamped minds from his own, which one after another he got hold of. An ordi- nary temper does not like the exertion : it throws off another as soon as ever a symptom of incongeniality arises, and will not bear the burden of an external mind. The vicinity of difference is a yoke, and only another self is comfortable. A larger sympathy is more under discipline and command ; is patient of barriers, and allows whole tracts of difference within its scope Archbishop Laud. 1 3 1 and domain. It sees through exteriors, surmounts obstacles, and bears the presence of the uncongenial feature for the sake of the congenial one by its side. It would be injustice to Laud and Buckingham's friendship not to mention one point in it. The priest and the politician were joined in the knot which bound the two ; and Laud was Buckingham's confessor. The commotions and intrigues of the Court arena and the life diplomatical, which bore the great noble and the ecclesiastic along together, covered a deeper relation. A politician of the present day may think the com- bination a grotesque one, but it never seems to have entered either into Laud's or Buckingham's head to think it so. The same cabinet walls heard them scheme and heard them talk religion ; and the two statesmen dropped from the political atti- tude without effort, whenever they chose it, into that of the religious pupil and teacher. Laud, at the proper moment, put off the politician and put on the divine, and was grave and spiritual with the gay splendid Duke. " Whitsunday, June 9," says the Diary, " the Marquis of Buckingham was pleased to enter upon a nearer respect unto me, the particulars whereof are not for paper." "June 15, I become C. to my Lord of Buck- ingham." " Confessor," says Heylin. The modern biographer of Laud does not like "confessor," and makes C. stand for " chaplain ; " but it obviously means confessor : the whole context interprets it so ; and Laud, Bishop of Bath and Wells, as he was then, could hardly become a domestic chaplain to a nobleman. " On the morrow after," it follows, " being Trinity Sunday, the Marquis having thus prepared himself, received the Sacrament at Greenwich." In the midst of the turmoil of politics we catch a glimpse of Buckingham on a sick-bed, and Laud by his side. " He was extreme impatient of his fits till Laud came to visit him, by whom he was so charmed and sweetened, that at first he endured his fits with patience, and by that patience did so break their heats and violence, that at last they left him." Laud improved the occasion, and made Buckingham take in a considerable share of theology. He was made to understand distinctions — to see the doctrinal differences between the Puritans and the Church. 132 A rchbishop Laud. " The Duke had a desire to learn the heads of doctrinal Puritan- ism, and he served him in it." The Treasury was desperately empty, and a project was on foot to alienate the lands of the Charterhouse for the maintenance of the army. Laud dis- suaded Buckingham from it. The notices in the Diary let us into a department altogether behind the scenes, and odd mysterious fragments come across us. " Jan. 1 1 . — My Lord of Buckingham and I in the inner chamber at York House. Quod est Deus Salvator noster Jesus Christus;" a Sunday-night talk on the supernatural world : " The discourse which my Lord Duke had with me about witches and astrologers." Bucking- ham was a mixture. The man of gaiety and Court license had a religious element in his character, and was deeply attached to a devout mother. The Eoman Catholics tried to turn the family stream into their own Church. Laud kept the Duchess back a long time, and brought her back once, but she slipped his hold at last. The Duke was near following his mother. The prayers in the Breviate, "pro Duce Buckinghamioe " show the religious interest which Laud took in him. He seems to have had a pleasure in eliciting what religion there was in the naturally generous but wild soil, to have wished to make his fascinating scholar as good a boy as might be, to have had a quiet power over him, and been able to calm, soothe, and attract the wayward mind of the princely child. The alliance of Laud and Buckingham once struck up, Laud was always at his side, was his adviser and assister ; helped him through the scrape, supplied his place by the royal ear when he was gone, kept up his influence, and prevented rivals starting. Ciphers and mysterious signs passed between them, and an invisible cabinet enclosed the pair. Laud did not do anything by halves, and once a politician, he threw himself into the character. He entered deep into Court struggles ; into diplomacy, domestic and foreign ; watched Par- liament, and watched the King. He got a good share of the Duke's odium ; and the affair of the Spanish match and the expedition of Charles and Buckingham into Spain brought popular feeling upon him. James's policy then was to please the Pope, who was to grant the dispensation for the match. Archbishop Laud. 133 The English recusants were consequently let off their fines, and the expressions of the royal controversialist on the point of the Pope being Antichrist were explained — he had only made the assertion argumentatively. The relief and the explanation were attributed to Laud, and the Spanish journey was reported to be a stratagem to convert the Prince to Popery. The Crown was in perpetual want of money, and a war or other extraordinary event made national loans necessary. Laud, as the term was, " tuned the pulpits," a practice of Elizabethan origin, and the clergy received their instructions to lay before their congregations the hard case of "our dear uncle the King of Denmark, just brought iuto great straits by General Tilly," who would be exceedingly obliged to them for liberal contri- butions to his cause, in which they were so extremely inter- ested. The German Emperor was made the bugbear, and a break-up of the balance of power, and a German march over the Continent, were predicted to the auditors if his present designs on Denmark succeeded ; " for if the Emperor of Austria once get Germany, he will be able, though he had no gold from India, to supply the necessity of those wars, and to hinder all trade and traffic of the greatest staple commodities of this kingdom — cloth and wool — and so make them of little or no value." The majority of auditors would probably feel their connection with Denmark but feebly, but the last appeal would at any rate tell on the imagination. The secret ramifications of political life now begin to spread, and his feelers extend over the ground, touch here and there, and find out this man and the other. Connections widen underground, and a mysterious world of acquaintance forms, and we explore with him the parts behind the scenes of the political stage. Alphabetical personages appear in the pages of his Diary, E. B., and C. D., A. H., and S. and T., with whom he has interviews, private engagements, compacts, pledges given and taken, and an issue awaited. A taste for the Eleusinian chambers and hidden strata of statesmanship is a characteristic of Laud, and his course to the last is perpetually dipping under, or retiring behind a screen, or sounding some depth, or following some cavernous winding. He and the unknown 1 3 4 A rchbishop L atid. X. Y. or Z. are seen in an obscure corner of the stage, standing together in mysterious attitude ; and what they are talking about nobody knows, but it seems to be on some matter of deep interest to themselves, and signs and looks pass, and their faces have a serious expression ; and they seem sometimes as if they could not understand one another, and parted in displeasure. " My unfortunatenesses with T., with S. S., M. S. ;" " 111 hap with E.;" or, "There I first knew what F. H. thought of me." The balance is long trembling with K. B. : " May 29. — My meeting and settling upon express terms with K. B., in the gallery at Greenwich, in which business God bless me :" " Jan. 1. — My being with K. B. this day, in the afternoon, troubled me much. God send me a good issue out of it." There is a change, and " K. B. and I came unexpectedly to a clearer declaration of ourselves, which God bless ; " and then a relapse : " K. B. and I meet — the lowest ebb that ever I saw. I go away much troubled." Another meeting, and "All settled well again ; " another, and " An absolute settlement between me and K. B." He notes down when he first saw a man, and when he begins to know him, and when he knows him better ; and the mystic scale of sympathy has every line marked. These encounters spring up everywhere, and he is in contact with half the alphabet at once, with the ubiquity of a ghost — " hie et ubique," would Hamlet have said, " a worthy pioneer — rest, rest, perturbed spirit." He lives in a prolific world of occult life, and individual influences and conjunctions ; and a diplo- matic astrology spreads its filmy web over the scene. Laud stood fast by Buckingham in his Parliamentary battles, made him an able adviser, and, it is said, wrote his speeches. In the Parliament of 1626, both Houses, Commons and Lords, were combined against him : the Earl of Bristol attacked him in the Upper House, the whole regiment of lawyers in the Lower. " Glanville, Herbert, Selden, Pym, Wansford, and Sherland managed the case : the prologue was made by Sir Dudley Digges, the epilogue by Sir John Eliot." He was accused of engrossing offices, buying the places of Lord Admiral and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and of not guarding the seas when he had got them ; of " staying the Archbishop Laud. 135 St. Peter of Newhaven, and the East India fleet, and lending the Vantguard to the French at the siege of Eochelle ; of selling honours and offices, procuring honours to his kinsfolk ; of diminishing the revenues of the Crown ; and, lastly, ap- plying physic to King James in the time of his sickness." Buckingham's answer to this curious House of Commons mixture of charges was cautious, temperate, and humble ; strong in denying all particular facts, but balancing the denial with general professions of humility, and acknowledgments of deficiency. " He acknowledged how easy a thing it was to him in his younger years, and inexperienced, to fall into thousands of errors. But still he hoped the fear of God, his sincerity in the true religion established in the Church of England (though accompanied with many weaknesses and imperfections, which he is not ashamed humbly and heartily to confess), his care- fulness not willingly to offend so good and gracious a master, and his love and duty to his country, had restrained and pre- served him from running into any heinous misdemeanours and crimes. For his own part, he both hoped, and would daily pray, that for the future he might so watch over all his actions, both public and private, as not to give cause of just offence to any person." Buckingham's new appearance in the penitential character astonished people not a little ; the line of defence had not the look of being wholly a self-suggested one, and the sagacious immediately detected Laud's hand under- neath. The speech, however, answered its purpose, and gained and softened many. " The answer of the Duke," says a con- temporary, " was so inlaid with modesty and humility, that it became a new grievance to his adversaries, and was like to have a powerful influence toward the conversion of many who expected a defence of another and more disdainful spirit." Two envious eyes, meantime, were fixed on the alliance ; and Laud, cabineted with Buckingham, was an intolerable eyesore to the old Oxford enemy, Abbot, and the Lord Keeper AVilliams. " There he sits," says Abbot, " privately whole hours with Buckingham, feeding his humours with malice and spite." Abbot w T as the disgusted Puritan. Williams, calm and serpen- tine, writhed under the feelings of a supplanted rival. 136 Archbishop Land. Williams bad long felt Laud in his way ; on one occasion especially, when Abbot's unfortunate shot in Lord Zouch's park at Brainsall seemed to open a road to the Primacy. Abbot became by that act " a man of blood," and fell under canonical disabilities. James, who enjoyed a theme of canonical disputation, instituted with promptness a Commis- sion, composed of bishops, judges, and doctors of laws, to sit on the offender ; and while the unfortunate criminal retired to melancholy solitude in his native town, Guildford, a variety of opinions were given. Sir Edward Coke looked on the matter with a lawyer's eye. On the question being pro- pounded, "Whether a bishop might lawfully hunt in his own, or in any other park ? " (in which point lay the greatest pinch of the present difficulty), that most profound lawyer returned this answer thereunto, viz. : " That by the law a bishop at his death was to leave his pack of dogs (by the French called Morte de chicns in some old records) to be dis- posed of by the King at his will and pleasure. And if the King was to have the dogs when the bishop died, there was no question to be made, but that the bishop might make use of them when he was alive." Williams most characteristically wished to be lenient, but also wished for the Primacy, to which he looked forward on the first vacancy ; and his letter was a model of significant ambiguity : " I wish with all my heart his Majesty would be as merciful as ever he was in his life ; but yet I hold it my duty to let his Majesty know, that his Majesty is fallen upon a matter of great advice and delibera- tion. To add affliction unto the afflicted is against the King's nature : to leave viriim sanguineum, a man of blood, primate and patriarch of all his churches, is a thing that sounds very harsh in the old councils and canons of the Church. The Papists will not spare to descant upon the one and the other. I leave the knot for his Majesty's deep wisdom to advise and resolve upon." Laud and Bishop Andrewes thought Williams much the more formidable person of the two, and kept Abbot in his see to prevent Williams getting it. Cool and keen, absolutely unprincipled, and as slippery as an eel, Laud had a sort of dread of Williams, as of some subtle, Archbishop Land. 137 malicious animal. He did not show it ; but in his Diary Williams's evil eye seems to pursue him. " Oct. 3, Friday. — I was with my Lord Keeper ; he was very jealous of L. B.'s favour." "Dec. 14. — Tuesday night I did dream that the Lord Keeper was dead ; that I passed by one of his men that was about a monument for him. This dream did trouble me." " Dec. 27, St. John's Day. — I was with my Lord of Buckingham. I found that all went not right with my Lord Keeper." " Jan. 25. — It was Sunday. I was alone, and languishing with I know not what sadness. I was much concerned with the envy and undeserved hatred borne to me by the Lord Keeper. I took into my hands the Greek Testament, that I might read the portion of the day. I lighted upon the thirteenth chapter to the Hebrews, wherein that of David, Psalm lvi., occurred to me, then grieving and fearing : The Lord is my helper ; I will not fear what man can do unto me. I thought an example was set to me, and who is not safe under that shield ? Pro- tect me, Lord my God ! " " Feb. 1 8, Wednesday. — My Lord of Buckingham told me of the reconciliation and submission of my Lord Keeper, and that it was confessed unto him his favour to me was the chief cause. Invidia quo tendis ? etc. At ille de novo fcedus pepigit." Williams now lay in wait, and Laud had to watch him narrowly. He made some attempts at undermining Buckingham, during the Spanish journey, which were failures : Laud, says Heylin, " was not asleep." He was nearer success on the next occasion. The Parliament of 1625 wanted to make an example of some great official — the fashionable Parliamentary game then : Cranfield had been tried the Parliament before ; Bacon, the one before that. Williams now seemed a proper person to take in hand : he emulated Wolsey almost as a pluralist, being Lord Keeper, Bishop of Lincoln, and Dean of Westminster, besides livings and prebendal stalls. He managed most artfully to convert his own danger into a gratification of his spleen. Parliament were more particular about their sport than about the object of it : he recommended them Buckingham. The humility of the ground assigned was impressive : the great Duke " was a more noble prey, and fitter for such mighty hunters than a silly priest." Par- 138 Archbishop Laud. liament took the hint, and " the great game was no sooner started, but they followed it with such an outcry, that the noise thereof came presently to his Majesty's ears." Indeed, they were only torn from their prey by a dissolution. Abbot meantime was surly and angry, called names, op- posed for opposition's sake, and had his revenge as long as he could by keeping Laud out of the High Commission. The royal subsidies fell with disproportionate weight on the poorer clergy, and Laud had a scheme of relieving them ; and Buck- ingham, as the representative of the State, agreed to it. The plan aimed at nothing more than this, and was no party effort whatever ; even Williams concurring in it. Laud took it to Abbot for his approval, and was roughly asked, " What he had to do to make any suit for the Church ? that never any bishop attempted the like before, and that nobody would have done it but himself ; that he had given the Church such a wound in speaking to any Lord of the laity about it, as he would never make whole again." He replied, very quietly, " that he thought he had done a very good office for the Church, and so did his betters too : that if his Grace thought otherwise he was sorry he had offended ; but that he hoped he had done it out of a good mind, and for the support of many poor vicars abroad in the country ; and, therefore, that his error might be pardonable, if it were an error." Abbot played the churl, and Laud's disciplined courtesy and humility always put him in the wrong, and unseated him. . Laud's line towards opponents was the quiet effective one ; not hurried or importunate, catching at advantages, leaping to success. At Oxford and at Court the same, one strong but quiet course ; temper, vigilance, and perseverance, put aside obstacles, and cleared the road to power. Adversaries found themselves gradually displaced without the violence of an assault, and a moving influence insensibly elbowed and sidled them out of the field. The union of Buckingham and Laud was a nucleus of strength, creating a widening circle and atmosphere of its own around it. With his hold upon the centre, he was necessarily from his position the rising man. Williams bit at his heels, lay in ambuscade, crouched, and Archbishop Laud. 139 made his spring ; he was suffered to go on opposing, impeding, and undermining, till his efforts became open, and he had fairly revealed himself : a disgrace at Court then ensued, and he retired to his diocese. Abbot growled morosely from his palace at Lambeth at the growing power, but he could only show his temper, and could do nothing. A cloud was upon him, and his name was tarnished. He retired savagely before the advancing power, scowling and muttering as he went ; shut himself up in his palace with Calvinist chaplains, and secre- taries, and gathered the disaffected around him. Midnight conclaves and a sepulchral focus and glare of Calvinism lit up the gloomy interior of Lambeth. " Towards his death," says Heylin, " he was not only discontented himself, but his house was the rendezvous of all the malcontents in Church and State ;" adding, " that he turned midnight into noonday by constant keeping of candles lighted in his chamber and study ; as also that such visitants as repaired unto him called themselves Nicodemites, because of their secret coming to him by night." An uncomfortable inauspicious shade covers the character of the puritanical Archbishop, and he moves off the scene like a magician to his fastness, or a wild animal to its den. The Keeper's ghost gibbered through his silent halls. The dark vapour gathered itself up and withdrew reluctantly from the uncongenial sky. His death removed an evil eye from the scene, and Laud saw the career of one of his great opponents out ; but he had not seen the last of Williams. Meantime Laud had been the ecclesiastic, had risen to one post after another, the Deanery of Gloucester, the Bishopric of St. David's, Bath and Wells, and London, successively ; and been active in Church restorations, and in the fiscal and other external departments of Church administration. As Dean of Gloucester he gave a specimen of what he wanted to do in Church external worship, and mortally offended the Bishop, Dr. Miles Smith, the great Hebrician, and one of the Bible translators, who " protested unto the Dean and some of the prebends, that if such innovations were brought into that cathedral, he would never come more within those walls ; which promise or protestation he is said to have made good, and 140 Archbishop Land. not to have come within that church to his dying day." The Bishop was certainly "a man of great pertinacity " if he kept his word — "the alteration being made in the decline of the year 1616, his palace standing near the walls of that cathedral, and he not dying till the year 1624, which was eight years after." His episcopal journeys in his Welsh diocese do not appear to have had the advantage of the comfortable smoothness of modern roads. " August 24, Wednesday. — The festival of St. Bartholomew. I came safely (thanks be to God) to my own house at Aberguille, although my coach had been twice that day overturned between Abermarkes and my house. The first time I was in it, but the second time it was empty." His new chapel at Abergwilly comes in, in the Diary. His active ecclesiastical eye, meantime, was carried up and down, and everywhere over the kingdom ; and from the public centre where he lived, he suggested plans of church improvements, and threw out hints, acted much in the capacity of Archbishop, in Abbot's retirement, and was, in fact, virtual Archbishop before he actually succeeded to the place. Laud was in a position now to rise to the top, at the first regular opening, and the head which had long guided in the background only waited for the call of circumstances to place it in the front. A melancholy opening arrived : the Duke of Buckingham's assassination at Portsmouth made a successor necessary; and Laud was called to the head of affairs, and became the chief adviser of royalty, or, in the language of the present day, Prime Minister. The metropolitan throne became vacant by Abbot's death. Laud succeeded, as a matter of course, and the salutation of " My Lord's Grace of Canterbury" was his next greeting from the royal lips. Minor honours flowed in thick. The Chancellorship of Oxford had fallen vacant : Laud succeeded, as a matter of course ; circumstances pointed him out. The Chancellorship of Dublin fell vacant : Laud succeeded ; circumstances pointed him out. Circum- stances pointed him out for posts of power and influence as soon as they fell in. He had made himself necessary, and things could not go on without him. The official development was the natural result of what he had gone through ; the Archbishop Laud. \\\ evolution of the bud, the necessary expansion of the force and spring that had been collecting. Laud began to smile at his own official ubiquity, and only reluctantly yielded to Straf- ford's urgency in accepting the last post. "I think you have a plot to see," he writes, " whether I will be Universalis Epi- scopus, that you and your brethren may take occasion to call me Antichrist." He is amused with Strafford's assuming stiffness to him, and treating him as a great man. " So you are not well enough acquainted with Lambeth," he writes. Strafford on his elevation, like a true gentleman, refrained from the ordinary freedom and humour with which he corresponded with Laud, and waited to be invited before he resumed it. Laud rallies him on the subject, " You are afraid that some sour ghost walks there — you have not given me one word of your wonted recreation." Laud now had to act the minister, to entertain kings and nobles, and gather a Court scene about him. The stream of public visitors poured in and out of his doors — " foribus domus alta superbis Mane salutantum totis vomit sedibus undaui." The levee and the interview, the arrival of messengers and the announcements of important news, foreign and domestic, men-at-arms and horsemen, enlivened and disturbed the inte- rior of Lambeth. He had to wink at some lighter departments of Court life. He lived in a Court of masques and theatricals and gay formalities ; they were the order of the day, and had succeeded to the tournament and field of arms. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Milton's Comus, poetry and sentiment- ality, sense and nonsense, assumed the masquerading form; and eclogues and bucolics were the vents of courtly humour and taste ; princesses figured as shepherdesses, and dukes and barons as herdsmen. Laud was supposed especially to en- courage these frivolities by his Puritan assailants, and called sharply to account for it. The " professors " throughout the country set upon him, and reprimanded him for carnality of mind and love of the world. Prynne's Histrio-Mastix came out, and a most furious piece of vituperation indeed it was, dragging King and Court, the Queen and her ladies of honour, 143 Archbishop Laud. before the bar as shocking and notorious profligates. The four Inns of court took the matter up, and determined to show that Prynne did not represent them on this point. " The gentlemen of the four societies presented their Majesties with a pompous and magnificent masque, to let them see that Prynne's leaven had not soured them all, and that they were not poisoned with the same infection." The exhibition " gave such contentment to his sacred Majesty that he desired them to make a repre- sentation of it to the city of London." The masque accord- ingly was repeated, " to the delight of the people," and the principle of masques was triumphantly vindicated, and carried public opinion with it. Laud stood up for them on a utilitarian view. He had been used to them, he said, at St. John's, and could assert that the dramatic exercises were of use to the young men, strengthened the memory, "trained them in the art of speaking, and taught them confidence." As Chancellor of Oxford, an especial act of magnificence devolved upon him. In 1636 he had to go down to Oxford with his retinue of fifty horse, and entertain the King, Queen, and Court, in his academical domain, which he did with a sumptuousness and splendour that made a sensation. Heylin's description is written with go'dt : — " He invited the King and the Queen, the Prince Elector and his brother, to an academical entertainment on the 29th of August, being the anniversary day on which the Presidentship of St. John's College was adjudged to him by King James. The time being come and the University put in a posture for that royal visit, their Majesties were first received, with an eloquent speech, as they passed by the House, being directly in their way from Woodstock to Christ Church, not without great honour to the college that the Lord Archbishop, the Lord Treasurer, the Chancellor, the Vice- Chancellor, and one of the Proctors should be at that time of the same foundation. At Christ Church his Majesty was entertained with another oration by Strode, the University orator, the University presenting his Majesty with a fair and costly pair of gloves (as their custom was), the Queen with a fair English Bible, the Prince Elector with Hooker's books of Ecclesiastical Polity, his brother Eupert Archbishop Land. 143 with Caesar's Commentaries in English, illustrated by the learned explanations and discourses of Sir Clement Edmonds. His Majesty was lodged in Christ Church in the great hall (one of the goodliest in the world). He was entertained, together with the Queen, the two Princes, and the rest of the Court, with an English comedy, but such as had more of the philosopher than the poet in it, called the ' Passions Calmed/ or the ' Settling of the Floating Islands.' On the morrow morning, being Tuesday, he began with a sermon, preached before him in that cathedral from these words of St. Luke — ' Blessed is the king that cometh in the name of the Lord.'" [Whoever the preacher was we do not exactly commend his text. These texts were too much the fashion then.] " The sermon being ended, the Archbishop as Chancellor of the Uni- versity calls a convocation, in which he admits the Prince Elector, his brother Prince Eupert, and many of the chiefs of the nobility, to the degree of Master of Arts, and that being done, attends the King and Queen to St. John's College, where in the new gallery of his own building he entertains the King and Queen, the two Princes, with all the lords and ladies of the Court, at a stately and magnificent dinner, the King and Queen sitting at one table at the north end of the room, the two Princes, with the lords and ladies, at a long table, reaching almost from one end to the other, at which all the gallantry and beauty of the kingdom seemed to meet. After dinner, he entertained his principal guests with a pleasant comedy, pre- sented in the public hall, and that being done, attends them back again to Christ Church, where they were feasted after supper with another comedy called the 'Eoyal Slave,' the interludes represented with as much variety of scenes and motions as the great wit of Inigo Jones (surveyor- general of his Majesty's works, and excellently well skilled in setting out a court masque to the best advantage) could extend unto. It was the day of St. Felix (as himself observeth), and all things went happily. On Wednesday, the next morning, the Court removed, his Majesty going that same night to Winchester, and the Archbishop the same day entertaining all the heads of houses at a solemn feast, order being given at his departure 144 Archbishop Laud. that the three comedies should be acted again, for the content and satisfaction of the University." The affair was successful. Laud was a good manager, inter- nally grumbling, however, at the great bore and trouble it was r and truly happy when it was over — well over. " I will not detain you," writes Strafford at the time, " as you are busied with small matters at Oxford." " Tis most true," replies Laud, with the feeling of a recent experience, " the matters are small in themselves, but to me they have been great. I am most heartily glad they are over." But though masques and entertainments were not exactly in Laud's line, he had, as a genuine patron of learning and litera- ture, a common ground with a well-informed Court and an accomplished and literary monarch. The Stewart Court was clever and intellectual. Charles was a connoisseur in art and a scientific man, liked chemistry, had his laboratory, and experi- mentalised. The gallery at Whitehall bade fair to be the first in Europe. The King was himself an artist, and handled the brush, and his artistical friendship with Eubens and Vandyck spread an atmosphere of taste around it. The Court was the sphere of natural philosophy, elegance, literature, and art. Laud was no judge of pictures, like his friend Strafford or Charles, but he had thoroughly imbibed the literary tone of the day in his own line. He found out men of learning, encouraged the growth of recondite information, collected manuscripts and coins, sent out Pocock to the East. He enriched the library at Oxford with Hebrew, Arabian, Persian, Turkish, Tiussian, Armenian, Chinese, Greek, Italian, French, Latin, and Old English manuscripts. He endowed a professorship of Arabic, and annexed a canonry to the professorship of Hebrew, and an- other canonry to the public oratorship, as a stimulus to the art of rhetoric. He procured for the Universities the privilege of printing Bibles, which had hitherto been engrossed by the King's stationers. He set the Oxford press going on a more systematic plan, and set up a Greek press in London. His idea of a University was an enlarged one, a place of generate studium, a general field of learning and science ; and his mind went upon the large basis of encouraging and appreciating all Archbishop Land. 145 departments and all sorts of men, even where he had no acquaintance of his own with the subject. Laud's Court line, indeed, and liberal view of society occa- sionally brings men to Lambeth that make us rather stare. Court wits of a brilliant, but rather lax, stamp found their way there, and Lord Conway seems to have had a particular penchant for the Archbishop. The mixed external connection with men of the world was carried on a large scale, and he was ready for anybody that came. And a great many did come, and Court jokers carried themselves and their jokes to Lambeth, and jostled with the men of business and secretaries. All made a whole together, and went into his reservoir. An esoteric life accompanied the public one in Laud. It is the peculiar calling of some devotional minds to be able to throw themselves into the character of the able man of the world, as a distinct phase of mind which does not affect its real internal state. The medieval prelates were politicians because they were Churchmen, and the ascent to power and the atmosphere of a Court did not interfere with true sacerdotal sanctity. Laud's devotional character was of the peculiarly ecclesiastical mould — formal and systematic, simple and penitential. The Bible in his study, with the five wounds of Christ upon the binding, the gift of a religious lady, which was brought up against him at his trial ; his feeling for the crucifix ; his chapels, oratories, consecration of churches and altars, sacramental chalices ; his bowings, prostrations before the altar ; his constant references to saints' days ; his almsgiving, fasting, canonical hours of devotion ; his prejudice for clerical celibacy — show that peculiar religious shape of mind. " Seven times a day do I praise Thee, be- cause of Thy righteous judgments." The seven hours of the Church were his hours of prayer, and gave constantly recurring short respites and pauses to his life of intense activity. His first act as a parish priest was to apportion an annual allowance from the living to twelve poor men. The poor of Reading were especially in his thoughts. "Jan. 1," we read in the Diary, " The way to do the town of Reading good for their poor, which may be compassed by God's blessing upon me, though my M.E.-I.] K 146 Archbishop Laud. wealth be small, and I hope God will bless me in it, because it was His own motion in me ; for this way never came into my thoughts (though I had much beaten them about) till this night as I was at my prayers. Amen, Lord." The poor at Lambeth fed upon his charity, and assembled in hundreds to take their farewell of him when he was summoned to his trial. There is an appearance of simple interest in his poor flock there, in the way in which he casually notices the " great wind at Lambeth,* and how " many of the poor watermen at Lambeth had their boats tumbled up and down, and broken in pieces." The Lent fast was specially observed in the household at Lambeth, and the Lords of the High Commission heard his regrets that the " merit of fasting " had so died away in the country. A deeply penitential tone appears in his religious memo- randa. The memory of one ecclesiastical offence that he had committed at a very early part of his life stuck to him to the last, and the day on which he had, contrary to the Church's canons, married Lord Mountjoy to the divorced Lady Rich (St. Stephen's Day), was observed as an annual day of fasting and humiliation. Lord Mountjoy had fallen deeply in love with that lady, when her family compelled her to marry Lord Eich ; and the result was unfaithfulness on her part, and a divorce. Laud was a young clergyman then. He yielded to urgent entreaties and married the guilty pair. Prynne, who could not understand the strong language of self-condemnation which a sensitive conscience is apt to use before God in prayer or in private memoranda, thought that some horrible, unutterable crime was alluded to in the expressions of guilt and anguish with which Laud referred to this act. " My cross about the Earl of Devon's marriage, Dec. 26, 1605. Die Jovis. — Dens mens, respice servum tuum et miserere mei secundum viscera misericordice tuce" — it is his Latin prayer — "I am become a scandal to Thy name, serving my own ambition, others' sins. Others persuaded, but my own conscience loudly forbade me. Let not this marriage divorce my soul from Thy bosom. Ah ! how much better had I suffered martyrdom with Thy proto- martyr upon his commemoration day, than done the pleasure of too faithless, careless friends. I promised myself darkness in Archbishop Land. 147 my crime, but lo ; it flew out ; I became more open than the daylight. So didst Thou choose, of Thy undeserved mercy to me, to fill my face with shame, that I might learn to seek Thy name. Even to this day, after so often repeated prayers, and sorrow and confusion of soul, again and again poured out before Thee, my sin weighs heavily." The prayer goes on to allude to another sin " which, on the very same day of the year, I fell into, not made humble or cautious enough by the first. I am not stoned for my sins, but stoned by them. Now raise me up again, that I die no more, but live, and, living, rejoice in Thee." Some particular sin marks two other days in his book of devo- tions. " Julii 28, 1617. Die Luna?," and below is added, "Et Martii G, 1641. I wandered out of my way from Thee into a foul and strange path. Thou madest me see both my folly and my weakness." Dangers and accidents which happened gave him the idea that he had committed some sins of which God was reminding him ; that he had not been living strictly enough, and that these were calls to greater strictness and severity with himself. " St. John's College on fire under the staircase in the chaplain's chamber, by the library. Sept. 26 and July 28, days of observation to me. misericors Paler, quo me vertam ? I who, going out and coming in, have sinned against Thee. Abii cum prodigo prodigies in longinqicam re- gionem. Dissipavi substantiam meam, tuann luxuriose. Then first I felt all spent, and me meet only for the companionship of swines. Yet did not even that unclean life, and famine of Thy grace, make me think of returning. Returned from an in- auspicious journey, lo ! now, Thy judgments, Lord, pursue me. The fire catches the roof under which I dwell. The Lord heard, and was wroth : so the fire was kindled in Jacob, and there came up heavy displeasure against Israel. For my wickedness, I doubt not, conflagration threatened my college and me ; for while I was intent on extinguishing the fire, I had very near risk of being extinguished by it. But lo ! Thy mercy, Lord, snatched me by a miracle out of the flame ; for while a friendly hand by me pulled me by force away, the spot where else I was going to put my foot burst out with the flame ; the stairs sank, and I should have gone with them. peccata mea, 148 Archbishop Laud. nunquam satis defienda ! misericordia tua, Domine, nun- quam satis praidicanda ! pcenitentia nunquam mihi magis necessaria ! Gratia tua, Domine, humillime et jugiter im- ploranda ! I rise, Lord and Father, I come : with slow and feeble step I come, I confess to Thee. Make me what Thou wilt, but only Thine ; and as the terror of that instant did, so let its memory ever burn out the dregs and refuse of my sins, and be within me a fire of charity and devotion, naming up with flames of love to Thee." " Feb. 5, 1628 [he broke a sinew on a journey], die Martis tendonem fregi, et iter." The Latin prayer explains. He has the Augustinian way of putting the account of his accidents in the form of addresses to God. " Domine Misericors, Thy blessed name be glorified. As I was travelling with the King upon duty, forgetful of Thee and human acci- dents, and full of self-confidence, I trod upon treacherous earth and broke my sinew. I was lifted into a carriage and taken to Hampton. My nerves felt excruciating torture. I should have certainly fallen into a raging fever, had not an efflux of blood relieved me. I laboured under great weakness, and walked lame for two years. I feel some infirmity still ; but immortal thanks to Thee, most blessed Trinity, Thou didst restore me the per- fect use of my feet, and strengthened my goings. Direct them now, Lord, in the way of Thy commandments, that I halt not between the world and Thee. I will run the way of Thy testi- monies, when Thou hast set my heart at liberty. Defer not, I pray, my heart's liberty, my foot's establishment in Thy righteousness." There is something in his dreams which looks the same way. Fragmentary, queer, and grotesque as they are, they have a simple sweetness in them at times which makes them look like signs of the man ; they breathe an amiableness of heart, unfold a quiet devotional scenery, and have an ethical air about them. It is rather an indulgent sentiment, but we are inclined to say that good dreams are much truer signs of a man than bad dreams are ; that the one do not tell against him in at all the same proportion in which the other tell in his favour. "We think good people may have bad dreams, be in a passion, and behave themselves extravagantly and outrageously in their sleep ; but that bad people cannot well have good ones. There Archbishop Laud, 149 ure certain ideas and forms of feeling which come out in dreams, which cannot come out there if the mind itself has them not in the first instance ; moral scenes which the mind could not enter into and appreciate even in sleep, unless it had an internal taste for them. Dreams indeed, to quote Laud's own dictum, " are not in the power of him that hath them, but in the unruliness of the fancy, which in broken sleep wanders which way it pleases, and shapes what it pleases ; " but they may at the same time be unconscious indications of character, the more genuine even for being so. The favoured sleeper sees forms and countenances before him in winning attitudes and expressions, friendly faces of living or departed, figures smiling or beckoning, standing, or leaning, or passing by, or in quiet domestic circle, or in garden group around him ; — visitors they seem from a calmer world, yet not sepulchral but genial ones ; he feels at home, he looks around him, or goes up to one and then another with modest curiosity ; he follows the moving imagery, and imbibes the dream's pictorial solaces and calm. True, these dreamy creations come of themselves, and he did not raise them, yet they had their origin within and not out of himself, and the mind has a property in them, if it owns and ratifies them in its waking state. The spontaneous scenery and interior world which sleep lights up are then its own, and memory appropriates them. The mind dwells afterwards on what it saw, the gentle look and glance serene, and marvellous expression that drew the eye towards it, and touched an inner spring and finer chord, and called up new and fragrant sensa- tions in the admiring, dreaming mind. We say an affectionate and devotional character appears in Laud's dreams. We mean that if we dropped suddenly upon them anywhere, and knew nothing of the person, Ave should say he was a good man — kind and tender-hearted, concerned for those who were connected with him, and were about him. He has his relations, friends, and servants, in his thoughts, and he sees them in his dreams. Friends smile and foes frown upon him in his dreams ; and the new friendship and lately formed connection with E. B., C. D., and the rest of his mysteri- ous alphabet, is going on well or ill. In either case he dreams 150 Archbishop Land. about them; and sees the cheering or the saddening look. Dreams are part of his society— vents to his mind, his journal- confidants. They express some deep religious state of mind. — * Sunday night. My dream of my blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. One of the most comfortable passages I ever had in my life " — or some vague melancholy one — " I dreamed of the burial of I know not whom, and that I stood by the grave. I awaked sad." His father and mother appear to him. " Epi phany-eve. — In the night I dreamed that my mother, long since dead, stood by my bed, and. drawing aside the clothes a little, looked pleasantly upon me ; and that I was glad to see her with so merry an aspect. She then showed me a certain old man, long since deceased, whom, when alive, I both knew and loved. He seemed to lie upon the ground, merry enough, but with a wrinkled countenance. His name was Grove. While I was prepariug to salute him I awoke." " Jan. 24, Friday.— At night I dreamed that my father (who died forty-six years ago) came to me, ancl to my thinking he was as well and cheerful as ever I saw him. He asked me what I did here ? And after some speech I asked him how long he would stay with me ? He answered that he would stay till he had me away with him. I am not moved with dreams, yet I thought fit to remember this." His old friend King James appears : " I saw him only passing by swiftly. He was of a plea- sant and serene countenance. In passing he saw me, beckoned to me, smiled, and was immediately withdrawn from my sight." We encounter the suspicions and apprehensions of public life : " Dr. Theodore Prince admonished me concerning Ma. 3, and that he was unfaithful to me, and discovered all he knew, and that I should take heed of him and trust him no more " — and its cheerful side : " Toward the morning I dreamed that L. M. St. came to me the next day, and showed me all the kindness I could ask." It follows : " L. M. St. did come to me, and was very kind to me the next day." The dream was ful- filled, but he adds, " Somniis tamcn haud multum fido." A dream about an old servant has a remarkable coincidence attending it : " This morning, between four and five of the clock, lying at Hampton Court, I dreamed that I was going out in haste, and that when I had come to my outer chamber, Archbishop Laud. 151 there was my servant Will. Pennel, in the same riding-suit which he had on, on that day sevennight at Hampton Court with me. Methought I wondered to see him (for I left him sick at home), and asked him how he did, and what he made there. And that he answered me, he came to receive my blessing ; and with that fell on his knees. That herewith I prayed over him, and therewith awaked." It follows : " When I was up, I told this to them of my chamber, and added that I should find Pennel dead or dying. My coach came ; and when I came home I found him past sense, and giving up the' ghost. So my prayers, as they have frequently before, commended him to God." Laud's kind of parental relation for those under him, and feeling for old acquaintances and old servants, and all about him, is a great feature in him ; and we see when — "my ancient friend, Mr. Pearshall," dies, and when "Mr. Adam Forbes, my ancient, loving, and faithful servant and steward, who had served me full forty-two years, died, to my great loss and grief ; " and when " my ancient friend E. E. came and performed great kindnesses to me, which I can never forget." And the conversion of Kenelm Digby to Eome is annoying to him on account of the fact, but especially because he never told Laud of his intention beforehand, whose old friendship had a right to know it. Or we turn to his patronage of religious minds, and anxiety to secure the benefit of their services to the Church — and see him the ordainer of Nicholas Ferrar and George Herbert ; putting Jeremy Taylor into All-Souls ; promoting Cosin and others. He met Herbert at Wilton House, who had been oscillating in his mind long between the Court and the priest- hood. A conversation with Laud had the immediate effect of sending for the tailor from Salisbury to cut him out a canonical suit. Cosin's Hours of Devotion for the Court ladies was an attempt to supply the regularity of devotional exer- cises of the Eoman Catholic ladies about Henrietta Maria, and so take away a religious scandal from the English Court. His patronage of the Eerrar family, and the devotional establishment at Little Gidding, was marked. We know pretty well what would be thought of such a religious retreat now ; a 152 Archbishop Laud. domestic monastery of the strictest rule, where the whole Psalter was recited every twenty- four hours, and prayer never stopped night or day. Nicholas Ferrar slept on bearskin on the boards, in a loose frieze gown, rose always at midnight, and watched in his oratory three nights of the week. We do not want to make invidious comparisons, but would not men in station now be found to look rather coldly upon such a place ? and among the mass what suspicions, black looks, ominous gestures, and shakes of the head would arise on the subject ! People would be divided between the hypothesis of superstition and insanity to account for the phenomenon : King and Court would not, of course, know of its existence. Imagine, indeed, the royal suite now going out of their way to see such a place — "The King and the Prince, the Palsgrave, the Duke of Lennox, and divers other nobles staying a morning there" — visiting chapel and hall, and looking into all the corners. The younger members of the Court were not quite so grave as their seniors. The "young lords went into the buttery, and there found apple-pies and cheese-cakes, and came out with pieces in their hands, laughing, to the Prince; and — 'Sir, will your Highness taste ? ' Charles, especially, admired the old poor widows' alms-houses, and their clean wainscoted well-rubbed rooms — " God's blessing upon the founders of it " — and turning to the Palsgrave, " Time was you would have thought such a lodging not amiss." The Palsgrave entirely assented. A nice speech accompanied the five gold pieces he then took out of his pocket, for the benefit of the poor widows, — " It is all I have, else they should have more" [these he had won the night before of the Palsgrave, at cards at Huntingdon, says the document] ; " tell them to pray for me." After walking and talking, his Majesty finds the evening closing in. " It grows late, the sun is going down — we must away." So " their horses were brought to the door. The King mounting, those of the family, men and women, all kneeled down, and heartily prayed God to bless and defend him from his enemies." He took off his hat, " Pray, pray, for my speedy return again," he said, and then rode away. Laud patronised Little Giclding, and showed great affection to young Nicholas Ferrar, who came up to Court with presents Archbishop Laud. 153 <£ the home- manufactured volumes of the Gidding press and binding-shop. Annual compliments of this kind passed be- tween Charles and the Ferrars ; as soon as he had one book, he was so pleased with it that he insisted on having another. The " purple velvet, gilt," the " green velvet, gilt," the " great broad strings, edged with gold lace, and curiously bound," were highly appreciated; and "glorious," "diamonds," "jewels," " precious stones," " crystals," came thick from the royal mouth, as the ornature was inspected. He read the books (one was "A Harmony of the Gospels;" another of the "Kings and Chronicles") and made marginal notes. Young Nicholas came up to London on one of these occasions of a presentation, and went straight, as he had directions to do, to " My Lord of Canterbury." Conducted into the Archbishop's presence, he ■' knelt down, craved his blessing, and kissed his hand." " My Lord embraced him very lovingly, took him up, and after some salutes," had the book shown him, and was enchanted. Nicholas had to prepare himself for presentation to the King next day. Next day, Maundy-Thursday, the Archbishop led his young proUgd into a room where the King stood by the fire, with many nobles attending him. " What, have you brought with you those rarities and jewels you told me of ? " " Yes, here is the young gentleman and his works." The Archbishop led him by the hand up to the King ; the box was opened, and the whole party were full of admiration. The book was the " Gospel of our Lord and Blessed Saviour Jesus Christ, in eight several languages ; " all the undivided learning of young Ferrar himself. Charles was astonished, asked the youth's age, and resolved on the spot to send him to Oxford at his own expense. " But what a pity," said Charles, when the youth had Tetired, " was that impediment in his tongue ! " Laud did not think so ; for if the young gentleman had had the full use of his natural tongue, the chance was he would not have gained so many written ones. Lord Holland recommended pebbles ; Charles had tried pebbles himself, and found they did no good , he should learn to sing, and would find singing a good cure. The same envoy brought a book for Prince Charles too ; the pretty pictures made a great sensation. " Will you not make 154 Archbishop Lmid. me such another fine book ? " said the little Duke of York — "do." Certainly his Grace " should have one without fail." " But how long will it be before I have it ? " " Very soon." " Yes, but how long will that be? tell the ladies at Gidding to be quick." Young Ferrar was then introduced at the Court table, and dined with " divers young lords, the Duke of Buckingham, and others." The Archbishop, at parting the next day, informed him of the King's good intentions, and filled his young mind with a grand object for his Oxford career. " The King would have this work of the New Testament in twenty-four languages," and Nicholas Ferrar was to be the editor of the grand polyglot, and to have all the help of the learning of the nation at his com- mand. " The youth, kneeling down, took the Archbishop by the hand, and kissed it. The Archbishop took him up in his arms, and laid his hand upon his cheek, and earnestly besought God Almighty to bless him, and increase all graces in him, and fit him every day more and more for an instrument of his glory here upon earth, and a saint in heaven. God bless you ! God bless you ! I have told your father what is to be done for you after the holidays. God will provide for you better than your father can. God bless you and keep you." Young Ferrar was cut off before he fulfilled the Archbishop's predic- tions. A premature intellect had undermined his health, and he died not long after this scene. We must return to our subject. Laud, now Archbishop and Premier, and in the full swing of official magnificence, had no thought of the otium cum dignitate in his head. Thirty years of hard continuous work at Oxford and at Court had cemented him ; he was too old to change; he had cast his own mould, and it was a good hard one. The regions of damask, vel- vet, and crimson glow — the incensed rich air of station — the "violets, blue and full-blown roses," and soft encircling pomp and cushioned ease, embraced a very tough insensible material in him. The sterling, wiry mind went on working in its own hole, stuck to its objects, pushed for results, and saw, in the ramifications of office, simply channels of employment, and nothing more. The pure, unalloyed, practical view excluded the idle, self-important one. Laud was sixty-two when he was Archbishop Land. 155 made Archbishop, and he was then in the very thick of the struggle, and had the world before him. Still further and further, — further from the Archbishop than from the President of St. John's, fled the inward consummation and the prcemium virtutis, the elysium of the official mind, the blushing and the blossoming, the state when cares are pleasures and duties treats, and the happy conscience and the satisfied taste expand over their department of genial exertion and dignity ; and the choice nest warms under the maternal wing, and the sunbeams glitter on the garden-plot. happy indescribable state of ministerial, parliamentary, judicial, magisterial, episcopal, archidiaconal, collegiate, parochial efflorescence ; union of peace, plenty, and virtue, oil and perfume of the soul, development of life, and climax of man ! and ill-fated being he who does not contrive to get admittance within your sacred enclosure, especially if he has been so presumptuous as to decline it ! The wide ocean rages outside of you, clouds lower, and restless illimitableness distresses the eye. And triple brass for him, " who can love to hear the winds roar, and calmly gaze on floating monsters, and a swollen sea, and those dreadful rocks, the Acroceraunia." Melancholy forebodings sounded in Laud's ear as he entered upon his archiepiscopal course, and a determination to go through with everything mingled with a kind of gloom and hopelessness as to how it would all end. " My Lord," is his answer to Strafford's congratulations, " I thank you heartily for your kind wishes to me, that God would send me many and many happy days where I am now to be : Amen. I can do little for myself, if I cannot say so. But truly, my Lord, I look for neither : not for many, for I am in years, and have had a troublesome life ; not for happy, for I have no hope to do the good I desire. And besides, I doubt I shall never be able to hold my health there one year ; for instead of all the jolting which I have had over the stones between London- house and Whitehall, which was almost daily, I shall now have no exercise, but slide over in a barge to the Court and Star Chamber. And in truth, my Lord, I speak seriously : I have had a heaviness hanging over me ever since I was nominated to the place, and I can give myself no account of it, unless it 156 Archbishop Laud. proceed from an apprehension that there is more expected from me than the craziness of these times will Q-ive me leave to do." " Methinks I see a cloud arising, and threatening the Church of England ; God, of His mercy, dissipate it," was the notice of his Diary years ago, as soon as the House of Commons war with Montague began. With the reader's permission we will go back an interval, and take him to the scene. The theolo- gical war had begun some time before, upon the national field ; and a series of collisions between Laud and the House of Commons ushered in the contest, which afterwards overwhelmed Church and State. It is curious to see the first stages of a great struggle. Mr. Richard Montague was a Fellow of Eton College, and Prebendary of Windsor, an able and a learned man. The acuteness, point, and clearness which his controversial writings show, give him, notwithstanding a too unchastised form in which he clothes them, an undoubted rank as a man of talent. Some Jesuits had found their way into his parish, with a tract against the English Church — " A new Gag for an old Gospel." Montague answered it by showing that the doctrines of the English Church were much higher than the assailants had given her credit for, and issued the " Gagger." The "G agger" came under the criticism of other eyes than those of Jesuits, and its statement of Church of England doctrines irritated the Puritanical party, who saw in them simple unqualified Popery ; and Montague was threatened with an arraignment before a most formidable theological tribunal. This tribunal was the House of Commons. We do not at this day regard the honourable House as much of a theological body, nor does it consider itself so. It was different then. The House of Commons was a Calvinistic body then — not Calvinists individually, perhaps not one-tenth part of them, or caring enough about it — but a Calvinistic body. Bodies come to act under certain influences as bodies. Corporations, boards, commissions, parliaments, admit some active element into them which gradually rises, and gets itself looked up to, sets the standard, and lays down the law. Bodies subject themselves to a ruling spirit, which, even where it is not felt, Archbishop Laud. 157 is deferred to among its members as a matter of course ; and the aggregate, as such, takes that line, and seems to have a character and soul of its own independent of its individual parts. The House of Commons, as a body, adopted Puritanism : in adopting Puritanism, it adopted the popular, the vigorous, the ambitious religious principle of the day. The House of Commons represented the political element in the nation, and was then making its first approaches to that gigantic power to which it has since attained — that supremacy of earth and human will which has stamped the sad though magnificent career of English politics. It represented the State pure with its natural instinctive antipathy to Church power, and it saw in Puritanism the instrument for crushing- it. With that sharpness of instinct with which a political movement catches at the convenient stepping-stone for its own objects, the House of Commons threw itself into the Puritani- cal mould, and became Calvinistic on the same principle on which it is now latitudinarian. It gathered into it the strength, passion, and impulse of the nation, and became the centre and rallying-point of a new and intense world of feeling and power that had risen up. It became a regularly theological assembly. That "lower depth" of hypocrisy, by which the powers of earth actually contrive to believe their own religious adoption, and fondle the base instrument, was attained to. It discussed doctrines, prosed, preached, and exhorted, and displayed all manner of unction. It was the Exeter Hall of the present clay, and the " godly " M.P. threw up his eyes at the very mention of Popery, and congratulated himself and the rest of the " godly " honourable House that they were not members of Antichrist. Sympathetic compliments passed between the " godly " House and the " godly " out of the House ; and there were pious diplomatic connections with nonconformist minis- ters. The House believed in predestination. The House was powerful on the subject of free grace. The House loved the pure Gospel. The House grieved for the hardness of the human heart and the opposition of the natural man to truth. The House was severe on the worldliness of prelates. The House was a religious prig of the first order. Heylin has his 1 58 Archbishop Laud. laugh, and facetiously attributes these pretensions to the im- pression which their session in the Divinity School at Oxford made on them : — " The Divinity School was prepared for the House of Commons, and a chair made for the Speaker in or near the place in which his Majesty's Professor of Divinity did usually read his public lecture and moderate in all public disputations. And this first put them into conceit that the determining of all points of controversy did belong to them. As Vibius Bufus, in the story, having married Tully's widow, and bought Caesar's chair, conceived he was then in a way to gain the eloquence of the one and the power of the other. For after that we find no Parliament without a committee of reli- gion, and no committee of religion but what did think itself sufficiently instructed to manage the greatest controversies of divinity which were brought before them." Yates and Ward, two Puritanical lecturers at Ipswich, sent information about Montague to the House. James was then on the throne. Montague, in alarm, appealed to the Crown, and was protected ; and published, in consequence of this appeal, his " Appcllo Ccesarem," which repeated in a stronger form the statements of the first book. The first Parliament of Charles met, and immediately sum- moned the audacious offender. " He was brought to the bar of the House, and the Speaker declared to him the pleasure of the House." They deferred the censure, but in the interim committed him to the " sergeant's ward," and made him find bail to the amount of two thousand pounds. Charles was very indignant at this stretch of power over one of his own chap- lains ; Laud engaged Buckingham in the cause, and a formal letter from himself and two other Bishops, Eochester and Ox- ford, laid down the Church law on the subject. They pro- tested against the assumption of ecclesiastical power by Parlia- ment, and declared that Convocation was the only theological tribunal to which the Church would or could submit. The letter, however, was very moderate, claimed some doctrines as necessary, and demanded a latitude for others. " The opinions which troubled many men in the late book of Mr. Montague were some of them such as were expressly the resolved doc- Archbishop Land. 159 trines of the Church of England ; some of them such as were fit only for schools, and to be left at liberty for learned men, so that they keep themselves peaceable, and distract not the Church. They did not intend to make men subscribe the school opinions ; they only did not want to be intimidated themselves into abandoning the doctrines of the Church." The Commons saw a stand made against them, and showed their teeth. When the next motion for supplies came on, they were so deep in spiritual subjects that no answer could be got out of them on the sublunary one. Charles urged his " press- ing occasions, the necessities of the fleet, the eyes of the con- federates that were fixed on him." The House, in return, told him of the growth of Popery, expressed their fears, and humbly offered their assistance in checking it. Charles's second Parliament opened with a sermon from Laud on unity. " How may unity be preserved in Church and State ? How ? I will tell you. Would you keep the State in unity ? Take heed of breaking the peace of the Church. The peace of the State depends much upon it; for, divide Christ in the hearts of men, or divide the minds of men about their hopes of salvation in Christ, and tell me what unity there will be ? " Other prey was in scent, however, now, and Montague, superseded by Buckingham, was " kept cold " till the next Parliament, when the attack was renewed with increased vigour. Charles was frightened, and thought it safest to end the matter bv calling in the obnoxious book. The concession gave offence to the Church party, and was thought a " bending of religion to policy." But Laud made it up to Montague the next opportunity. The latter had a fellow-sufferer in the person of a Dr. Mainwaring, who had been actually brought to his knees before the mighty tribunal, and been imprisoned, fined, and suspended ; his sermon burnt, and himself especially incapacitated from holding any further ecclesiastical preferment. Laud made Montague and Main- waring respectively Bishops of Chichester and St. David's. And the two victims marched under the very face of the Lower House to their episcopal seat in the Lords. To come to the main scene of our history. Laud, in com- 160 Archbishop Land. plete and undisputed possession of the Kegale, now applied its full powers to effect an ecclesiastical reformation in the country, and wielded with unsparing energy the secular weapon in his hands. The puritanical preachers in the Church now overran the ground like a host, and spread their doctrines with all the zeal and license of preaching friars of Protestantism. There were more quiet intellectual specimens of them, of whom Baxter was the head, who half despised their brethren ; but the mass was a vulgar disorderly one. They were the mendicant orders of the Eeformation, with a strong mixture of the hedge-priest in their constitution, and were the genuine successors of the Lollards and Wycliffites of Archbishop Courtenay's day. Their whole proceedings take us back to that prototype. The parochial pulpits did not supply them with a sufficient theatre, though they had their share of them : they instituted lecture- ships. Companies and corporations all over the country were persuaded to found lectureships, and give revenues for addi- tional sermons on the Sunday or week-days, once, twice, or thrice in the week. Their ingenuity in multiplying these opportunities was prodigious. A lecture once instituted became, when they liked, " a running lecture," i.e. was not confined to one place, but ran from parish to parish. Special fasts were appointed by the authority of the lecturer, or curate, for this or that alleged reason, in neighbourhoods. These fasts were pure excuses for sermons, and were principally devoted to the castigation of the sins of prelates, and especially the Arch- bishop himself. The audience fasted by feasting their ears. Lectures and fasts were the sores and troubles of High Church bishops in their dioceses; they had to exert themselves to extinguish fasts as often as they sprung up, and prohibit the right of the public fasting. One would imagine that fasting- was a great popular sin of the day. " His lordship of Peter- borough certifies that he hath suppressed a seditious lecture at Eipon, and divers monthly lectures, with a fast and a moderator (like that which they called prophesying in Queen Elizabeth's time), as also the Ptunning Lecture, so called because the lec- turer went from village to village, and at the end of the week Archbishop Laud. 161 proclaimed where they should hear him next, that his disciples might follow. They say this lecture was ordained to illumi- nate the dark corners of that diocese." Their style of preaching- was coarse to a degree that could hardly be credited now, and which absolutely prevents us from making quotations. Un- scrupulous illustrations, any expression which came to hand, if it was only strong enough, anything for effect, made their language about our Saviour amount sometimes to blasphemy, and miserably lowered the Bible doctrines. They preached in Genevan cloaks often, and did not even wear the gown. The class was an English shape of the Scotch Covenanters and Cameronians, forward, rude, and undisciplined, full of angry enthusiasm, and breathing in their spiritual declamations the spirit of war and the carnal knife — of the holster and pistols and jack-boots. The watchword of the " sword of the Lord and of Gideon " was in embryo in their discourses, and uncon- trollable confidence and self-will carried them along. They represented a grotesque religious mixture, which the world perhaps will never see again, in that particular mould and manifestation. Boundless types of the ridiculous, they con- trived to unite a temporary intensity of life and power with their absurdities. They were real persons, realities, not shams, writes an admirer. They were realities, beyond a doubt, but in a sense which utterly excludes from the meaning of the word " reality " the sublime, the great, or the interesting. The animal creation, for example, with all its ferocities and humours, is real, and men and mammalia are both real. But the reality of the one nature is human, of the other — animal. The Puritans had reality ; but that they were ridiculous is a simple fact, of which the elemental perception of that principle in our nature is at once the test. They abounded and sprung up with a luxuriant and prolific impetus all over the Church now. Ordination was not limited then by its present rules. Men were ordained with or without cures. Gentlemen of any rank, who chose to afford one, had a chaplain, or person so called, in his house. " All persons," says Heylin, " were left at liberty to keep as many as they would, and as long as they pleased, without any control. Nor (when this liberty was restricted M.E.-I.] L 1 62 Archbishop Laud. were the chaplains better pleased than their masters were. For having lived upon hard commons, and perhaps under some smart discipline in their halls and colleges, they thought they had spent their studies to good purpose by finding- ease and a full belly in these gentlemen's houses, from whom there was possibly some preferment also." The un- manageable theological mass thus sprung up had found their way into schools, among other places, and their notions in- terfered with common education. And Laud complains that " the precisian would read nothing but divinity to his pupils — no, not so much as the grammar rules; unless Mars and Bacchus, Apollo, Pol, and iEdipol were blotted out." The doctrine of the school was strong predestinarianism, and they stood upon the language of the seventeenth Article, as the proof that the Church spoke with them. The fact that the seventeenth Article comes almost word for word from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, and that neither could well be Calvinists, could not reach congregations who knew nothing of the history of doctrinal language. The Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, with all its concomitant views of original sin, the atonement, and justification by faith, was put forward as the teaching of the Reformed Church. There is something in the Calvinistic predestinarian or fatalist view which wonderfully harmonises with a low and fallen religion. It has been the favourite article of heretical bodies from the first. It benumbs the aspiring will, and reduces all Christians to a level ; stops up the fountain-head of good works, excuses the aim at graces and perfections, and insinuates the flattering belief that the aim is even sinful, and not intended in God's scheme. It supplants humility, the very basis of the Chris- tian character ; by taking away the real reason for it, voluntary sin, it makes humility unnecessary and out of place. If a man could not help doing wrong, why be humbled for it ? Proud nature knows that, refuses to appropriate its sin, and turns fatalist. " I had rather," says Augustine, speaking of himself, in his Manichean days, " that Thy incommutable sub- stance erred by necessity than my own mutable one by will ; and sin was derived by immutable law from heaven, that man Archbishop Laud. 163 might be free from it, and remain proud rottenness and flesh and blood." Man tries to escape from the fact of voluntary sin, but the Church will not let him. She pursues him with the fact of his free-will, drives him into a corner, and points the sharp sword at his conscience. Free-will is the one sore point with sinful nature ; and is the starting-point of a whole different religious system from that of natural man — the spiritual ethics of Catholicism. Calvinism and Arminianism were the two names which the Puritans gave to the two sides on this question. The advocates of free-will were called Arminians, though they disclaimed and in fact had nothing to do with Arminius himself. The name was given them by their opponents. Laud's school urged simply the Church doctrine of free-will against the Calvinistic view, and the controversy on the subject of free-will and predestination filled the Church, became the great doctrinal controversy of the day, and was carried on by sermons and books and pamphlets, and all the modes of agitation common in theological war. The Puritan was Calvinist, and the Church- man Arminian. There were exceptions to the division in many cases, such as Davenant and Usher, who held a certain modifica- tion of Calvinism in doctrine, while they were Churchmen in dis- cipline. But the two sides, as a whole, divided on this subject. Laud's object was a doctrinal clearance ; the subjugation of the Calvinistic spirit in the Eeformed Church of England. The restoration of Church ceremonial and external worship was not so much his object as this doctrinal one. The Church was overrun with heresy, for we cannot call the Puritanical movement of the seventeenth century by any other name ; and he was bent on expelling it, on the view that nothing could be made of the Church till it was got rid of. He was a doctrinal reformer. Grievous experience had taught him the nature of the Calvinistic school; and he had suffered under the pressure. The two Abbots, and Vice-Chancellor Airay, and the theological tribunal, and the Oxford contests with the heads of the party, made their im- pression. He was now in power, and it was his turn to act. Laud had no sooner gained his position in the Church than two successive sets of royal instructions made their appearance. 164 Archbishop Laud. hying down stringent rules for curtailing the number of lecturers, and cramping their pulpit displays. The prolific source of the class was stopped up, and common gentle- men were forbidden private chaplains in their houses. The lecturer had the whole ecclesiastical weight tied to him from the time he went into the church to the time he came out. The Church service before the lecture, the surplice, the communion service from the altar in the morning, were all hung like weights upon his performance. " If you preach, you must pray," he was told. He found himself under a legal ceremonial burden. He rushed impetuously into the extempore prayer before the sermon, and the bidding prayer instantly filled up the gap. The sermon itself was brought into confinement, and barren was the model of the discourse to which the Puri- tan imagination was directed. The injunctions proceed : " I. That no preacher under the degree and calling of a bishop, or dean of a cathedral or collegiate church (and they upon the King's days only and set festivals), do take occasion, by the expounding of any text of Scripture whatever, to fall into any set discourse or commonplace, otherwise than by opening the coherence and division of his text. II. That no parson, vicar, curate, or lecturer, shall preach any sermon or collation here- after in the afternoon, but upon some parts of the Catechism or the Lord's Prayer. III." — continues the document, with growing- impetus and rising displeasure, as it approaches the great point, — "That no preacher of what title whatsoever, under the degree of bishop or dean at the least, do from henceforth pre- sume to preach in any popular auditory the deep points of predestination, election, reprobation, or of the universality, efficacity, resistibility, or irresistibility of God's grace." The animus of the document could have been given in two words — no sermons. Sermons were the unmanageable -articles, the essential agents of mischief; and how to cut and pare them down, and put them into strait-waistcoats, and into the stocks, and take out their tongues, and make them say nothing, and mean nothing, and be nothing, was the question. The instructions, of course, created large disgust. Country gentlemen thought themselves insulted. It was rumoured that Archbishop Laud. 165 "nothing less was aimed at than a total suppression of the Divine ordinance of preaching ;" and at the least, " a dreadful diminution in the number of sermons was anticipated ;" and " as for spending the afternoon in teaching the Church Cate- chism," the preacher felt much of the indescribable contempt for the task that Dugald Dalgetty had for bows and arrows. " It was a work fitter for a pedagogue than a preaching minister, who was ordained to provide strong meats for men, and not such milk for babes." It was a strange look-out, indeed, if he Avho had dived into the very arcana of predestinarianism, if the advanced Gospellist was now to expound the Catechism. The execution of the injunctions led to fresh collisions. The preachers did expound the Catechism ; they took a text out of it, and preached a full-length sermon. The bishop of the diocese had to keep watch. The royal declaration about the Thirty-nine Articles, still appended to our Prayer-Book, was the decisive step, however, taken with respect to the doctrinal question at issue. The meaning of the Articles was fought for ; the declaration rescued them vi et armis from the Calvinistic sense, and said positively they are not Calvinistic, and they shall not be Calvinistic ; we forbid you drawing any inference of your own from them. You shall take the words — the words as they stand — as much of the words as you please — but not one iota of meaning shall you give them. It is no use, the royal document seems to say, disputing with you ; you are too much for us with your indomitable tongues ; suffice it to say that it shall be so ; we will have no commenting. " We will that all further curious search be laid aside. No man hereafter shall draw the Articles aside any way. No man shall put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal grammatical sense." The declaration was perfectly understood by the Calvinists, and pronounced to come " from the depths of Satan," and to be " a Jesuitical plan to subvert the Gospel." Under pretence of stopping both sides, it tongue-tied them. Even Bishop Davenant had to be called to order for disobedience ; and a strong Calvinistic ser- mon from him in the royal chapel the Sunday after in defiance 1 66 Archbishop Laud. of it brought him before the High Commission. At the same time the wording of the document was almost too impartial. The Calvinistic sense was destroyed, but all other senses were stopped at the same time too. No side being allowed to attach its own meaning to them, all meanings were taken away, and Calvinism was removed by a process which cleared the whole ground to achieve its removal, and henceforth a grammatical sense, without a theological meaning, was the subtle abstraction to which the significancy of the Articles was reduced, according to this declaration. Such were the weapons of the day. There is something curious in a contest between two kinds of strength. The naturalist seeks for the spectacle in the animal world; the historical eye sees it in the annals of parties and movements. Puritanism felt the saliency and impetuosity of a new heretical principle, Laud the pertinacity of an old ecclesiastical one. He had not the young power of the age with him, and he must use what power he had. Puritanism came up, like the seed from the dragon's teeth, everywhere ; Laud could simply put his foot on it. It turned, and doubled, and fled from him, in Protean fashion, and he followed it. It evaded one law, and another was made. He kept it under, while its prolific vitality threatened to burst the pressure every moment and overwhelm him. Keep it under, check, block it, was all he could do, and that he did do without fail. Bold impetus found its match, and the coarse vigour and teeming animal life of heresy never made the coercer shrink or flag. The contest of the two sides for Church patronage was another form of the same combat. The matter was one of vital importance, and affected the prospective strength of each party strongly. The Puritans had their project — a great scheme, viz. for buying in lay impropriations. A common fund was raised for buying in such impropriations as were in lay hands, and a regular corporation formed. " Twelve persons, clergymen, citizens, and lawyers — their names, Googe, Offspring, Sibbs, and Davenport, ministers ; Eyre, Brown, White, and Sherland, lawyers ; Gearing, Davis, Horwood, and Bridges, citizens ; with Rowland Heylin, alderman of London, a thirteenth man, to give Archbishop Land. 167 the casting vote" — formed the committee of management. Emissaries were despatched through all parts of the country to collect money. Heylin, our biographer, first discovered the real drift of the design, which one or two discourses of the nominees of the body sufficiently demonstrated. " It then pleased the president of his college, being then vice-chancellor, to appoint him to preach the Advent sermon at St. Mary's," to which, it appears, there was a great concourse in those days. He took for his text, " But while men slept, the enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way ; " and an expose, of the plan followed. " A general consternation," he says, " showed itself in the looks of his auditors," — the Puritan portion of them. He was charged with having been set upon the task by " a higher power ;" and " honest, well-meaning men thought it a pity to discourage such a pious work " as the feoffment. A Puritan meeting was held that night, and came to the resolu- tion of taking legal and all other proceedings against the preacher. Heylin put his sermon and the whole affair in Laud's hands, " who thereupon entered it in the memorandum at the end of his Breviate, — viz. ' to overthrow the feoffment, dangerous both to Church and State, going under the specious practice of buying in impropriations.' " " The feoffees came to their doom in the Exchequer " in the course of a few months. Laud had his own schemes, in the meantime, going on for the same object. The same impropriations were in his eye too ; and at the very time of this discovery he was holding consultations with Charles about a method of getting back the lay patronage within the Church into the Church's hands again. All openings to patronage were watched. Cottington, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Coventry, the Privy Seal, had a dispute " about the disposal of such benefices as belonged to the King in the minority of his wards." Coventry claimed his share, Cottington would not let him have it. While the two are fighting, " Laud ends the difference by taking all unto himself." He urged upon his Majesty " that many had served as chaplains in his Majesty's ships, who should have some reward given them for their services past. It was cold venturing upon such hot services without some hope of reward. 1 68 Archbishop Laud. He takes occasion, therefore, to inform his Majesty, that till this controversy be decided, he might do well to take these livings unto his own disposal. Which proposition being approved, his Majesty committed the said benefices unto his (the Archbishop's) disposal." The acquisition was gained without much ill-will, for " Cottington was not at all displeased at the designation — as being more willing that a third man should carry off the prize from both, than to be overtopped in his own jurisdiction. And the Archbishop by this accession of power, as he increased the number of his dependants, so gained the opportunity of supplying the Church with regular conformable men ; which served him for a counterbalance against the multitude of lecturers established in so many places, especially by the feoffees for impropriations." The higher preferments of the Church began now to fall into his hands, and he filled them up with his own men. Corbet, " one of his fellow-sufferers in the University," he raised to the see of Norwich ; the younger Bancroft to the see of Oxford ; Neile, from Winchester to the Archbishopric of York ; Juxon, to the clerkship of the closet ; LyndselL to Peterborough ; Wren, in course of time, to Hereford. A catena of such preferments was brought up against Laud at his trial. We come to another great department of reform. A miserable neglect of the externals of worship, and an aspect of coldness, irreverence, and disorder, were now disgracing the celebration of the Church services, and deforming the fabrics. Churches, with their communion-tables drawn out towards the body of the church, the chancels becoming rapidly shut up with pews, the decay of all ornament, and the positive dirt and defilement in them, were made into conventicles rather than churches. Laud took the work fairly in hand. Some cathedrals and churches, in different parts, where he had influence, had already begun a reform ; and the cathedrals of Gloucester, St. Paul's, and Worcester under Mainwaring, and others, had revived in part their ancient splendour, and the forms and outward gestures of Catholic worship. Hangings, palls, fronts, and rich plate vessels enriched the altar. The canons bowed towards the altar, and bowed at the name of Archbishop Land. i69 Jesus. At St. Mary's Church, Oxford, the doctors and scholars began to do the same ; and college chapels began to show the rising spirit. Laud had a great taste for Church ceremonial, and his feeling- was in the movement. The combination of the man of business and statesman, the practical character with the love of Church ritual, is striking. We draw aside the veil of political life, and find the Archbishop before his chapel-altar, consecrating his communion-plate. A person, — an informer afterwards against him, — happens to stray into the chapel at Lambeth one morning, and " sees him bow and wear a cope, then consecrate the vessels, and use part of Solomon's dedication prayer." " No fault," says Laud at his trial, " in any of these ; these inanimate things are holy, in that they are deputed to the service of God : there is an absolute holiness of God and a relative holiness of the creature." " If there is no dedication of these things to God, there's neither thing nor place holy, and thus no sacrilege : no difference between churches and common houses, between ' holy tables ' and ordinary tables. But I would have no man deceive himself : sacrilege is a grievous thing. ' Thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege?'"" The whole turn and expression of his mind, and his zeal on the subject, show more underneath these measures than the cold ground of mere external decency and Church respectability. Certain forms of speaking which he and his school made use of are indeed open to this interpretation. But it should be remembered that the public and forensic ground is not necessarily the real ground in the individual himself. When Laud summoned nonconformists into his court for not attend- ing to Church ceremonial, he would not argue with them on its beauty or sublimity ; he would simply say, This is the rule of the Church, and you must obey it. Because however he makes use of an inferior forensic ground, we need not there- fore tie him to it exclusively. It may perfectly co- exist with the higher one ; and his language and acts show this higher ground decidedly. The restoration of the ceremony of church consecrations was one of Laud's revivals. The ceremony had stopped since 1 70 Archbishop Laud. the Keformation ; and the regular view was, says Heylin, " that the continued series of Divine duties in a place set apart for that purpose doth sufficiently consecrate a place." "In Sidney College, Cambridge," he adds, " the old dormitory of the Franciscans (on the site of which friary the said college was built), was, after some years, trimmed and fitted, and without any formal consecration converted into a house of prayer ; though formerly, in the opinion of those who allowed thereof, it could have been no better than a den of thieves." " The chapel of Emmanuel College, though built at the same time with the rest of the house, was never consecrated." Laud's consecrations of St. Catherine Creed and St. Giles's-in-the- Fields, performed with high formality and pomp, revived the old idea which had lain dead, and made a sensation which gave a stimulus to the Church. She heard herself addressed in sublime tones which were new to her, and learned to apply high language to herself. " Lift up your heads, ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in." But Laud's whole movement about Church externals soon converged to a point, and gathered round the altar. " The altar," were his words, " is the greatest place of God's residence upon earth, greater than the pulpit, for there 'tis Hoc est corpus meum, This is my body ; but in the other it is, at most, but Hoc est verbum meum, This is my word." Here the cere- monial question became a doctrinal one. The disposition of the communion-table in our churches, then removed from the east end, and brought without rails or screen into an almost congregational position in the church, was an ocular contradic- tion to all high doctrine on the subject of the Eucharist ; a practical denial of the mystery of the Eeal Presence and the Sacrifice. It was a bar to all sound preaching on that head, to have the whole interior of a church giving the lie to the doctrine. The communion-table was used for all sorts of purposes. " Churchwardens kept their accounts upon it ; parishioners despatched parish business at it ; schoolmasters taught the boys to write at it ; boys had their hats, satchels, and books upon it ; men sat and leant irreverently against it at sermon-time ; A rchbishop Lmid. 1 7 1 glaziers knocked it full of nail-holes." Laud applied his attentions to the holy table, made that his object, and directed his reforms to it. He wished to do one particular thing — to bring out fairly, and put in its proper position, the Lord's table; to raise it from a table into an altar. It was a great point to obtain, and quite worth setting to work about ; he applied himself singly and vigorously to it. In gaining this he gained a centre, about which a hundred other things were collected. His injunctions about the communion-table were very simple, and even moderate, and confined themselves to this one object. They enjoined placing the communion-table at the east end, close to the wall ; rails were enjoined to separate it fairly from the congregation ; it was to be three steps above the chancel floor, and pews in the chancel that obstructed the sight of it from the body of the church were to be pulled down. This was enough to vindicate the essential character of the holy table, and here the command stopped. Principle and not ornament was the object. In cathedrals and places where ornament could be got and could be afforded, it was attended to. The scene of a magnificent church interior required it, in order to keep the altar on a par with the rest of the fabric. But in ordinary cases the simple naked change of position was all aimed at, and for the rest he was content with neces- sary decency. We must confess we are literally unable to discover that exorbitance in Laud's line about Church externals that some have affected to find. His injunctions have a very moderate tone, aim at realities, and keep to the point. An order in Council, dated Whitehall, November 3, 1633, settled the question for him, in the case of St. Gregory's Church, near St. Paul's, in the City, where the change of position had been made. The decision made a noise at the time, and gave him the ground he wanted. An archiepiscopal visitation, commenced immediately after his elevation, enforced a set of instructions on the subject, and Brent, the vicar-general, made a progress through the provinces. He did not encounter more opposition than that of churchwardens here and there, till he came to the diocese of Lincoln. Here the old enemy, Williams, was on the alert. As soon 7^ Archbishop Land. as ever the order of St. Gregory appeared, lie turned the communion-tables in his diocese that happened to be at the east end, back again, raised a cry of " more capacity to receive communicants, greater audibleness of the minister's voice," etc., and received Laud with a regular organised opposition. He ingratiated himself forthwith, in a marked way, and with all the arts of humbug, of which he was master, with the noncon- formist ministers — " insomuch that, meeting in the Arch- deaconry of Buckingham with one Dr. Bret, a very grave and reverend man, but one who was supposed to incline that way, he embraced him in his episcopal arms, with these words of St. Augustine, Quamvis Episcopus major est presbytero, Augustinus tamen minor est Hieronymo ; intimating thereby, to the great commendation of his modesty, among those of that faction, that Bret was as much greater than Williams as the bishop was above a priest." The vicar-general began with laying his sus- pension upon the bishop and all his six archdeacons. Williams pleaded an exemption from the visitorial power by virtue of certain Papal Bulls. The question was tried before Council, and decided against him ; and the vicar -general then went through the diocese. As soon as his back was turned, Williams began a counter visitation, and not daring to disobey the whole injunction, adopted the rails without the position, and railed the holy table round in the middle of the chancel. Williams, disgraced at Court, had retired to his diocese some years before ; " having given up the seal," says Heylin, " but supposed to have taken the purse with him." He lived in great style in his see, and nobody knew where his money came from. Laud soon found him, however, doing as much mischief in the country as he did at Court. He set up as patron of the Puritans, had before now come out in print as an antagonist on the communion-table question, and was a rising centre of Church disaffection in the country. " He used all the wit and malice he could," says Clarendon, " to awake the people to a jealousy of these innovations." It was simple pure political malice in him ; about the question itself he did not care a straw. He actually had a highly ornamented altar in his own private chapel and cathedral. Laud tried hard and Archbisfwp Laud. i j$ long unsuccessfully to oust him out of his see. Williams laid himself open by some betrayal of Council secrets to his Puritan friends. He was instantly brought before the Star-Chamber, but by delays and technicalities kept the court at bay for a period of ten years. Strafford, to oblige Laud, tried his hand at him, but found it easier to master Ireland than to get the upper hand of Williams. He was obliged to leave hold of him and go to his Irish government. In 1637 Williams at last received his sentence, was suspended, and put in prison. He supplicated hard for pardon, and offered to give up his bishopric altogether. He was offered an Irish one, as, under Strafford, a safe place to keep him in. The offer was declined. " He did not like to go where he should fall into the hands of a man who once in seven months would find out some old statute or other for cutting off his head." He continued in the Tower for three years, " during which time he never went into the chapel of the Tower to attend Divine service, or hear the sermon, or receive the sacrament." The great religious contest had, meantime, its offshoots. The Sabbatarian question was one. The Church had taken one view of the Sunday from the first ages ; Puritanism had pro- mulgated another : the one made it a Church feast ; the other a Judaical fast. A good deal was involved in the distinction. A whole Church halo gathers round the ecclesiastical Sunday ; it appeals for the original choice of the day itself to the Church ; it represents the Church system and round of fast and festival, and typifies the high chastised spiritual joy of Catholicism. Puritanism feels itself excluded, and rejects the ecclesiastical festival. There is a spirit in the Church Sunday that particu- larly harmonises with Church feeling, and a spirit in the Puri- tan Sabbath that particularly harmonises with Puritanism. The consecration of joy by Church sanctions, Church times and seasons, and the being under obligation, as it were, to the Church for your mirth, is a true part of Catholic feeling, and particularly not of Puritan. The question came out now in the dress of the day. In 1618, King James, on his return from his Scotch progress, issued the first " P>ook of Sports." His motive was, his royal 1 74 Archbishop Laud. compassion for the melancholy dulness of the poor population on the Sunday. He lifted up his royal eyes, as he returned through Yorkshire and Lancashire, and saw everything look dull on the Sunday. He thought the Church of England had a very forbidding aspect to the numerous Eoman Catholics of those districts. The Church was injured, and the poor were deprived of their proper holiday. He issued a book of rules for Sunday amusements and festivities. The rules prescribed innocent merry games and exercises, and aimed, with a good spirit and intention, at providing the poor with proper recrea- tion, while it at the same time prevented them from running into extravagance or brutality. They were to play, they were to go to church too. " For his good people's lawful recreation, his Majesty's pleasure was, that, after the end of Divine service, his good people be not disturbed, letted, or discouraged from any lawful recreation, such as dancing, either men or women ; archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation ; nor from having of May-games, Whitsun-ales, morice-dances, and the setting up of May-poles, or other sports, therewith used ; so that the same be had in due and convenient time, without impediment or neglect of Divine service. And that women shall have leave to carry rushes into the church, for the decorating of it according to their old custom. But withal, his Majesty doth here account still as pro- hibited all unlawful games, as bear and bull baitings, etc. etc. All offensive weapons are prohibited to be carried or used in the said times of recreation. And the present recreations are forbidden to any who, though conform in religion, are not present in the church at the service of God, before going to the said recreations." The attempt was a good one, and was likely to have considerable effect on the poor, in the way of attaching them to the Church. The clergy argued, " that they preserved the memorial of the dedication of the several churches, composed differences by mediation and meeting of friends, increased love and amity by feasts of charity, and the relief and comfort of the poor, by opening the rich men's houses." A great set was made at these games from high and low Archbishop Laiid. 175 Puritan quarters. Besides the ordinary attacks from the Puritan press, judges and magisterial and corporation benches assumed a precisian look, and were shocked. Puritanism had a certain magnetic influence throughout these times over some opulent official classes in the country. The municipal authorities, and magistrates in high-backed chairs, exhibited the school in its decent, comfortable, and respectable form. The respectable Puritan country gentleman saw from the windows of his mansion the poor people enjoying themselves, in their rough way, and saw them, very likely, sometimes go too far. The respectable Puritan gentleman was annoyed ; the Somersetshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire magistracy, were of opinion that these " feast-days, church-ales, wakes, and revels," did the people harm, and interfered with order and gravity, made a disagreeable noise, and disturbed their own respectable after-dinner repose. Chief Baron Walter and Baron Denham issued their orders at the Devonshire assizes for the suppression of all "revels, church- ales, clerk-ales," and the like. The course of suppression went on, and Puritan authorities were gradually putting down the Church feasts. Chief- Justice Eichardson went down to the Somersetshire assizes with judges' orders to this effect in his pocket, which he issued, backed by the grand jury ; and with them an injunc- tion to all the clergy of the county to publish them in their churches, and see them put into effect. Laud now stepped in. He summoned Richardson to answer for " an encroachment upon the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, in imposing upon men in holy orders the publishing of warrants and commands from the secular judges." The King commanded Eichardson to revoke the order. Eichardson disobeyed, and reissued it in a more peremptory form than before : complaints came up from the county ; and the bishop, with seventy-two of his clergy, certified, "under their signs-manual, that on the feast-days (wakes), (which commonly fell on the Sunday), the service of God was more soberly performed, and the Church better frequented, both forenoon and afternoon, than upon any Sunday in the year ; and that the people desired the continuance of them." Eichardson was cited again to the Council-table, ij6 Archbishop Laud. and Laud gave him a lecture, which effectually silenced him. He came out of the Council-room in tears, and perfectly over- whelmed — "choked," he declared, "with a pair of lawn sleeves." The London civic authorities displayed the same pompous scrupulosity ; and Lord Mayors Dunbar and Eaynton were the terror of the London inferior population on the Sunday. Self-complacent zeal is provocative of a set-down. An old apple- woman triumphed over their Lordships : the civic officers had assaulted her upon Church ground, and shoved her out of St. Paul's churchyard. Laud rebuked the Lord Mayor for his pains, and told him to keep upon his own territory. There was a class, it is not to be denied, that Laud rather liked setting down. Self-important official men were highly obnoxious to snubs from him. He had something of a relish for the process. When any one particularly catches it, it is a great chance if he is not a person of dignity ; some gentleman who had probably never had his set-down before, and who, upon the ordinary equilibrium of nature, must be supposed to have rather wanted it. His spirit insensibly rose when one of these gentlemen made his appearance : and the " big " man had his lesson which a little man escaped. The Council-room exhibited a curious mixture often on this head. Some poor insignificant man or other has the whole room arguing witli him, trying to persuade him out of his error, and treating him with really flattering attention. " One Brabourn, a poor schoolmaster in the diocese of Norfolk," is converted by the affability of the Council. He had written on the Sabbatarian side, and been audacious enough to dedicate his book to his Majesty : " Brabourn being therefore called into court, his error was so learnedly confuted by the bishops and other judicious divines then present, that he began to stagger in his opinion." Their Lordships following up the argumentative victory, " admonished him in a grave and fatherly way to sub- mit himself to a conference with such grave and learned men as should be appointed thereunto : to which he cheerfully con- sented, and found such benefit of that meeting, that, by God's blessing, he became a convert to the orthodoxal doctrine of the Church of England concerning the Sabbath, or Lord's day." A rch bishop L a nd. i 7 7 The fiscal and economical department of the Church came under Laud's eye, as well as the doctrinal and ceremonial. It wanted looking after not a little. " He saw the Church was decaying," says Heylin, " both in power and patrimony : her patrimony dilapidated by the avarice of several bishops, in making havoc of the woods to enrich themselves ; and more often so in making up their grants and leases to the utmost term, after they had been nominated to some other bishopric, to the great wrong of their successors. Her power he found diminished, partly by the bishops themselves, in leaving their dioceses unregarded, and living together about Westminster, to be in a more ready way for the next preferment." It is not, we believe, saying anything needlessly severe of the class of bishops the Eeformation had put into the English sees, that whether or not the doctrines of the Church may have been benefited by them, they certainly did not benefit her property. A great number were systematic depredators. The system went on regularly in Laud's time : the bishops lived in London and sucked the Church lands dry. Indulgent kindness to his own order was no failing of Laud's. While the bishops were living comfortably round their London focus, a sudden royal decree came out, worded in an extremely business-like style, exactly to the purpose : " Charles Rex. I. That the Lords the Bishops be commanded to their several sees, there to keep resid- ence ; excepting those which are in necessary attendance at Court." The document proceeded to other items in the way of business — no reflection intended : " II. That none of them reside upon his land or lease that he hath purchased, nor in his town residence, if he hold any, but in one of his episcopal houses — and that he waste not the woods thereof." And after going through a series of points which they were to attend to in their dioceses, it winds up with a recurrence to the subject of estates and woods : " IX. That no bishop shall, from the day of his nomination (to another see), presume to make any lease for three lives, or one-and-twenty years, or current lease, or any other way renew any estate, or cut any wood or timber, but merely to receive the rents due, and then quit the place. For we think it hateful that any man's leaving his bishopric M.E.-I.] M 178 Archbishop Land. should almost undo his successor." The effect of this order was to scatter the episcopal nucleus at Westminster forthwith, and send their reluctant and grumbling lordships down to diocesan exile. " The poorer bishops," says Heylin, " were as much troubled as the others, and thought it the worst kind of banishment to be confined into the country ; complaining privately that now the Court bishops had served their own turns upon the King, they cared not what miseries their poor brethren were exposed to." The order respecting the woods and leases was no more popular with them, and they thought it very unfair "that they could not make the best of their time, but were required to be good husbands for another man, who was to enjoy the place when they were to leave." The deans and chapters do not get off any better. Infor- mation comes to Laud (he is always receiving information of one sort or other) " that the deans and prebends of such and such churches had enriched themselves, their wives and chil- dren, by taking great fines for turning leases of twenty-one years into leases for lives, leaving their successors destitute," as well as depriving the Church of a hold over a numerous class of gentry and yeomanry, occupiers of the lands, — " All which his Majesty, taking into his princely consideration, caused letters under the royal signature to be sent to all the deans and chapters of this kingdom respectively, calling and commanding them, upon pain of his utmost displeasure, that they presumed not to let any lease belonging to their church into lives." And " whereas some deans of cathedrals are cor- porations of themselves, no dean is to presume from henceforth (after his being translated) to renew any lease either unto lives or years : his Majesty having well observed that at such times of remove many men care not what or how they let their estates, to the prejudice of the Church and their succes- sors." The royal experience is certainly not complimentary to the morals of the Church dignitaries of that period. Laud was a remorseless pursuer of jobbers — Church jobbers espe- cially. It is part of the disinterested public man's nature and instinct, which was strong in him. He brought them out of their holes with remarkable sang froid, bishops and arch- Archbishop Land. 179 bishops, deans and canons and all. The exceedingly small respect which these distinguished officials meet with under such circumstances is almost entertaining. Practice soon becomes familiar, and England and Ireland were full of the game. In Ireland all attempt at appearances is given up under the pressing emergency, and the pursuit becomes a perfect halloo and field-day after these offenders. They are caught like so many animals. Strafford has to "trounce" them, to chastise them, " warm them " in his castle chamber — to " give my Lord of Cashell a little of his Irish physic." The only difficulty was what to do with them, what to make of them. To drive them up and down, and shove them like cattle, what did it do after all ? That was the material they were made of. The only practical aim was to tie their hands, and get the Church revenues away from them. " Look you to the bishops," is Laud's summary of ecclesiastical advice to his friend. Strafford, as President of the North, carried Laud's arrangements into effect in his northern domain. And " make an example of that unworthy Dean " of York is an incidental notice we come across. Laud's care and consideration for the poorer clergy, in the matter of property, was as conspicuous as his severity to the upper. All taxes were laid with the greatest attention to the diminishing ratio of poverty. He instituted a new scale of taxation to effect this object. He relieved them in ship-money collections. At the Scotch war, when money was wanted urgently, no " poor curates or stipendiaries " were to be made to give. The London clergy were cheated out of the value of their dues : the charge was laid upon the rent, and the owners of houses paid only nominal rent, and had large fines instead ; the clergy got nothing. " Aldermen, who do not use to dwell in sheds and cottages, could be charged with no more than twenty shillings a whole year's tythe." The clergy, by the alteration of religion, had lost the advantages of obits, mor- tuaries, obventions, and were miserably off. The Court of Exchequer, in James's reign, gave them relief for some time ; but the City purse prevailed at last in litigation. Laud took the matter up, and constructed a fair valuation. I So Archbishop Laud. Schemes for the general advantage of the Church go on. In the Diary we have reference to what looks very like Charles's known intention of restoring Church land in the royal possession. " March 20, Sunday. — His Majesty put his great conscience to me about all, which I afterwards answered. God bless him in it." The restoration of St. Paul's Cathedral was a favourite object. He stirred up all the available sources of money for it in the kingdom. A hundred pounds a year his own con- tribution — the effects of intestate persons, that portion of them which " it was proper to give to pious uses " — voluntary contributions all over the country, among the clergy especially, raised a considerable sum soon. This was a hobby of Laud's, and he was insatiable in wanting money for it. He never cast eyes on merchant, tradesman, or any substantial man, but he thought he ought to give something to St. Paul's. Every pocket was looked at, and the fertility of his mind was un- wearied in catching every opening where money peeped. His hobby got him, in fact, into scrapes, which came up against him at his trial ; and he paid for his perpetual Argus-eyed vigilance. A brewer at Lambeth is the complainant now. Laud was walking in his garden with Attorney-General Noy, when a great cloud of smoke from a neighbouring chimney almost suffocated them both. Noy said he should have the nuisance removed. Laud said he would not interfere with an honest man's trade, and did not mind the smoke. However, Noy, in returning home, calls on the man, and threatens him. The man comes to Laud : a bright thought strikes the latter, that this is an opportunity for getting something for St. Paul's. The man is told that his chimney is undoubtedly a nuisance, and that he ought to give St. Paul's £20 in atonement for it. The man offers £10 ; Laud refuses to bargain, and sends him off; but the chimney was left to its fate, and fell under a blast from Attorney- General ISToy. But we must expand Laud's ecclesiastical domain, and see him in Ireland and Scotland. The work was going on under him in both these countries at the same time that it was in England. Archbishop Latid. 181 Laud, at the commencement of his career, found three dis- tinct Churches in England, Scotland, and Ireland, differing from each other in articles and liturgy ; all in confusion, and each going on in a way of its own. The Irish Church main- tained the Lambeth Articles, and was Calvinised at the very centre. The Scotch Church was a complete chaos and unformed body, simply retaining the Episcopacy, without any other external marks of a Church. It had no liturgy, and the bishops were little more than moderators of Presbyterian Synods and General Assemblies. It was miserably poor, and a slight attempt in the Episcopal College to recover a modicum of the old tithes had brought down upon them the enmity of a whole turbulent and rapacious nobility. Three weak, dis- ordered, disunited Churches made up the ecclesiastical system of the kingdom. Laud's was a centralising, consolidating mind. He did not philosophise on the subject of Church unity, or enter upon the field of Church metaphysics. He was a practical man, and had his work before him. He used the instrument of unity which the state of things provided for him, and aimed at the production of an efficient unity upon the Anglican domain. He wanted uniformity of worship — some good com- mon basis for the whole ecclesiastical affairs of the country to go upon. He had the centralising powers of the Crown in his hands ; he brought the Churches together, and made a whole of them. He was most fortunate in Strafford to carry out his plans in Ireland. He and Strafford had taken to each other wonder- fully, and were friends together against the world if it was necessary. They thoroughly understood and trusted each other ; and the political friendship had grown into the deepest mutual affection. Strafford did what he was wanted to do in Ireland with his own peculiar despatch. Convocation was summoned in course of time, and told to give up the Lambeth Articles, and take the English ones. They remonstrated strongly ; but the Viceroy's spirit was too much for them. The Articles were carried ; the Canons were carried. Scholars were sent over from England, and the University of Dublin 1 82 Archbishop Laud. was made to receive a nucleus of Church theology for in- doctrinating afresh the Irish Church. And Laud, as Chan- cellor of Dublin, had also his own personal position and influence in the country. He was less fortunate in his agent for the Scotch Church. Lord Traquair had been made what he was entirely by Laud, who raised him from being a simple Scotch laird to an earl- dom, and the place of Lord Treasurer of Scotland. He pitched on him, in one of his journeys to Scotland, as his confidant and manager for the Scotch Church. Lord Traquair owed everything to Laud, and was under every tie of personal gratitude to him that one man could be to another. But acute eyes are deceived occasionally. Laud was wrong in his man. Lord Traquair played false. He sustained the Scotch charac- ter of that day, undermined his patron, and " communicated his secret instructions to the opposite party." Laud depended on him for knowing the proper times at which to introduce particular changes ; and he recommended purposely wrong ones, and delayed the Church manifestations till the opposite side had quite marshalled their strength to meet them. The whole business of the Scotch Church was an unfortu- nate one from the first, and had a fate accompanying it ; and yet there was no want of caution and forethought in the management of it. The ecclesiastical movement was made to proceed as cautiously and gradually as could be. Laud's first journey into Scotland with James produced no immediate step, and simply gave the Scotch the fact of the English Liturgy performed, for the occasion, in the royal chapel at Holyrood. An interval of some years followed, and another royal progress, for Charles's Scotch coronation, left behind it as its fruit the regular performance of the Liturgy in Holyrood Chapel ; but only in Holyrood as yet. That fact was left to make its im- pression on the Scotch mind, and gradually accustom them to the idea. A book of canons came next. And it was twenty years after Laud's first Scotch visit when the real experiment of a Liturgy and Ritual was at last tried upon the nation. A higher school of doctrine, and a centre of Church feeling, was meantime forming in the episcopal body there. The old Archbishop Laud. 183 bishopric of Edinburgh was revived, and was given to Forbes, a man of deep learning and ascetic life. The Scotch epi- scopacy rose in tone, and began to wish for a higher ritual, in some parts, than the English book offered, especially a new Communion Service, to embody the doctrine of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. Laud did not encourage them at all ; whether from real caution, or whether he only adopted a manner, we can hardly say. He used to say, however, he had not encouraged them, that they had acted independently, and so on. " If you really wish for it, and are in earnest among yourselves, have it," he seems to have said ; " I cannot go farther in my position than recommend the English book ; you are Scotch bishops, and have a right to your own book." A committee of Scotch bishops, Spottiswoode, Eoss, and Forbes, sat in Edinburgh, arranging the Scotch book. Laud took the deepest interest in the new Communion Service, and superintended the sheets through the press. And " inasmuch as no reformation in doctrine or discipline can be made perfect at once in any Church/' one of the newly-imposed canons left an opening for further alterations, and pronounced that it should be " lawful for the Kirk of Scotland at any time to make remonstrances to his Majesty," etc. The canon, and some words he said about it, figured against him afterwards. " Because this canon holds the door open to more innovation," says the accuser at his trial, " he writes to the prelate of Eoss, his prime agent in all this work, of his great gladness that this ' canon did stand behind a curtain,' and his great desire that this canon might be printed freely, as one that was to be most useful." " Vain accusation," answers Laud ; " I expressly brought in the royal authority ; I forbade all innovation of private men, lay or cleric. I said the canon stood behind a curtain, and I said true ; it would not be thoroughly understood by every man." It is evident that the Scotch bishops took hints easily, and followed up Laud's line just in the way a man likes his own line to be followed — as a spontaneous self- suggested one. He had an influence over them which he had not over the English bishops generally. They gathered round him when he ap- peared in Scotland; and popular jealousy called them his 184 Archbishop Laud. tools, and said they anticipated his wishes before he expressed them. Scotland and Ireland were thus growing into system and solidity under his hand, in doctrine and discipline and external resources. A tremendous open struggle with the Irish aristo- cracy ended in the addition of thirty thousand a year to the Irish Church. The more suitable method of bargaining was resorted to with the Scotch nobles ; and the abbey lands of Arbroath, Kelso, and others, restored by the Marquis of Hamilton and Earl of Roxburgh to the Church, procured these noblemen some Court favours in exchange. Laud had confused and rough materials to work upon, and lie did a great deal to work them up in the way he did. He did consolidate as he professed to do, and the effect of that consolidation, in spite of intervening storms which have encroached on it, remains in part to this day. The consolida- tion survives, however, its original spirit. He could not perpetuate a friendly monarchy ; the Protean power assumed another aspect, and the English Church became secular and latitudinarian under that very power which Laud elevated in order to make her Catholic. For his own day, however — he did not go into futurity — for his own day, he provided the English Church with what it never had before, and has never had since — an efficient govern- ment. The secret of his efficiency was that he governed the Church himself, and allowed no other bishop in the country at all to interfere with him. There is a plausible colour in the charge of his enemies that he made himself the English Pope ; at least he certainly rather roughly used the absolute theory of diocesan independence. He exercised over the Episcopacy of the three kingdoms the most consummate dictatorship, and it never occurs to him to let a bishop have his own way in his diocese. It seems at first sight natural that an Archbishop of Dublin should look after the churches in his own city ; but Laud takes them off his hands. He is at home in every diocese in the three kingdoms. With the deepest reverence for the office, the man — the concrete bishop — never once seems to have come before his imagination in any other aspect Archbishop Laud. 185 than as a person who was to be told to do things, and to be made to do them if necessary. For the Episcopacy of the day, with the exception, almost solely, of his own appointments, he entertains a very respectable quantum of contempt. He orders them about, drills them like common soldiers. " Eight foot, left foot — very well; here are his Majesty's orders for you, which you will be pleased immediately to execute. I have had nothing to do with making them myself — nothing at all. I assume no power whatever over you ; but I know his Majesty is very determined on these points. Your Lordships have been idling about London lately ; you must go down to your ■dioceses all of you immediately. And when you are there, I will send my vicar-general to look after you." The belief that bishops wanted looking after quite as much as other people is very deep in him, and from the centre of the Eegale he forms them into one body round him. Annual statements go up from each diocese to headquarters, and are inspected in business-like way. Whatever may be thought of it, the fact cannot be denied that this is a government. The theory of the day with respect to Church-government came in, — forced uniformity ; Puritans, recusants, all brought into the system ; no fragments allowed, and all made one tight whole. The lawfulness of using force for religious purposes was a long-standing theory in the world which had not then dis- appeared ; and all sides made use of the secular arm, when they could get it, as a matter of course. The law, however, under a Laud and Charles shows certainly a slight bias in its balance, and is a good deal more stringent with the Puritans than the Roman Catholics. The fines on the recusants grew lighter and lighter throughout Charles's reign, till at last an easy composition set them almost free. And a most strange and marked departure from the severities of Elizabeth's, and even of James's, reign took place. A word or two on Laud's use of the Eegale, which has been going on all this time. We have said he used it as an engine for the good of the Church, to raise her and not to secularise her. This is simply a question of fact, to be determined by historical reference. A man's motive and spirit and object in 1 86 Archbishop Laud. a particular line, is simply an individual internal fact about that person, to be determined by evidence, as all other facts are. No extent whatever of general objectionableness in the principle of the Eegale can decide this particular fact against Laud : no a 'priori view as to the Eegale itself can decide Laud's motive in adopting it. If persons, after a candid examination of the facts of history, come to the conclusion that Laud used the Eegale for the purpose of depressing and lowering the Church's sacerdotal ground, that is quite a fair line of argu- ment, though we do not think any candid mind whatever, of any side or party, could come to that decision. But the fact cannot be predetermined upon general grounds. Laud stretched the Eegale to the full, and made it do everything ; he stopped short of nothing that he thought he could do by it, — this is one fact. The animus, ecclesiastical or secularising, is another fact. We do not think that the English Eegale, but Parliament, was the secularising State element in the nation in Laud's day. Where does the political worldly power and animus of the nation reside now ? Where has it resided since the revolution of 1688 but in Parliament ? The Parliament was rising rapidly to this position then. Every nation has the secularising State element, the anti-Church principle — the world residing in it in some part or other of it : but it is a question of fact for the historical eye to determine in what particular part of a nation, at a particular period, that animus does reside. We believe that the Plantagenets loere the genuine representatives of the national power and pride in their day, and that therefore the State element resided in the English Eegale then. The swing of Henry viii.'s monarchy was simple nationalism, and nothing else : the nation delighted in it. The State element in Prussia and Eussia evidently resides now in the Prussian and Russian monarchy, because those monarchies are the focuses respectively of the national power in those countries. But if anything is clear in English history, the fact is clear that Parliament was this growing national power in the Stewart times, and that that power had left the monarchy then and passed into the mass. And the modern English monarchy is simply the reflection of Parliament, and shares its spirit. Archbishop Laud. 187 A Churchman has one rule 011 this subject. Wherever that public carnal power of the world-pure resides, whether iu king or people, the few or the many, with it the Church wrestles. There is our antagonist. Where royalty is against the Church, and the people for her, the Churchman sides with the people ; and where the people are against the Church, and royalty for her, the Churchman sides with the king. There is no unfair- ness or slipperiness here, for the line is a plain open one. Show us the " world," anywhere, and we are bound to withstand it : wherever it is, at top or at bottom, in earth or sky, con- centrated in one, or diffused in a mass, that " power of the air " is what we fight against. The Church is our home. If any power loves the Church, we love it ; if not, we do not. Nothing can show more closely that Laud's school was not exalting the Eegale as such, than the marked anti-Eegale line in which it issued at last. The Nonjuring school, who wrote vehemently against the Eegale, were legitimate successors of the Laudian one. The truth was, that under William in. the Eegale was against them, and under Charles 1. with them. That made the difference, and a very great difference it is — what is called in ordinary affairs all the difference. We must look historically upon these things to be able to judge. To return to our history. The effects of Laud's ecclesiastical administration were soon seen. One of the most prominent was the rise of the clergy. " The clergy were much debased," he said ; " but it had heretofore been otherwise ; and he hoped to see it so again." Laud exalted his order, and the elevation of the clergy — the priesthood — to power, came more and more out, like a favourite idea, as his career advanced. He left behind him, on returning from Charles's Scotch coronation, Archbishop Spottiswoode Chancellor of Scotland, and the Bishop of Eoss privy councillor. A greater step was the appoint- ment of Juxon to the office of Lord High Treasurer. The staff was put into his hands with great pomp and circumstance, and he was conducted in state from London House to West- minster, the Archbishop riding by his side, and a cavalcade of noblemen and gentlemen following. " March 6, Sunday," says the Diary, " William Juxon, Lord Bishop of London, made 188 Archbishop Laud. Lord High Treasurer of England. No Churchman had it since Henry vn.'s time. I pray God bless him to carry it so that the Church may have honour, and the King and State service and contentment by it. And now if the Church will not hold themselves up, under God, I can do no more." The passage is characteristic, because his mind is so obviously going back, unconsciously, to the medieval period of the Church for its image, and congratulating itself on the partial, evanescent restoration of it, which now passes like a dream before him ; and does not so much inspirit him as a reality as soothe him as a picture. He " can do no more ; " the Church may fall, after all, but its image gratifies him. The ceremonial of Charles's coronation was made to express the same idea. The priesthood encircled the King. The Church delivered the crown into the Prince's hands ; she addressed him, as she crowned him : " Stand, and hold fast from henceforth the place to which you have been heir by the succession of your fathers, being now delivered unto you by the authority of God, and by the hands of us and all the bishops and servants of God. And as you see the clergy to come nearer the altar than others, so remember that in place convenient you give them greater honour ; that the Mediator of God and man may establish you in the kingly throne, to be the mediator between the clergy and the laity, that you may reign for ever with Jesus Christ, the Kin^ of kino's and Lord of lords." The form of alliance which makes the Church succumb to the State is Erastian ; the form which makes it guide the State is not. Laud put power into the hands of the clergy, as being clergy. This is the very opposite of Erastianism. The modern German Church and State idea brings the Church into the world by secularising her ; absorbs her into the State first, and when she has become the State, lets her act. It is a per- fectly different, distinct, opposite idea, which gives power to the priesthood, as such, and recognises the sacerdotal element per se in its combination with the political. Laud's partiality for his order was generous. The tempta- tion in the higher ranks of clergy is generally just the reverse — to think more of the laity than of their own brethren, and Archbishop Laud. 189 identify themselves with the influential secular world. Mere sacerdotal rank is despised, because it is not earthly rank, anct is used only as a stepping-stone to it. Laud's predecessor was a remarkable contrast to him here, and exhibited all that leaning to secular rank which has so characterised the puri- tanical religious school. Abbot " non amavit gentem nostram" says Heylin : " he favoured the laity above the clergy in all cases which were brought before him ; he forsook the birds of his own feather, to fly with others." A country gentleman had only to make his complaint against a clergyman, and Abbot was all ear to him. He abandoned the old archiepiscopal hospitalities at Canterbury to Church tenants and poor, which all his predecessors had kept up, and feasted the Kentish gentry at Lambeth instead ; and " Westminster Hall, St. Paul's Church, and the Eoyal Exchange" (the rendezvous of the day), were visited by his servants, with tickets of invitation in their hands, to catch the men of quality they saw about. Laud gave himself small concern on this head. " He did court persons too little," says Clarendon. People complained that he went to the other extreme, and that " out of a dislike to that popu- larity which was too much affected by his predecessor, he was carried on so far as to fail in many necessary civilities to the nobility and gentry, by which he might have obliged them, and indeed himself." A "reserved and unplausible humour" was attributed to him ; and one of the Kentish gentlemen, whom Abbot had feasted, and he had not, was observed to " throw the first dirt at him " in Parliament when his troubles came. He made nobles and gentry frown, the clergy look up : and great men were alarmed and annoyed as " they did ob- serve the inferior clergy took more upon them than they were wont, and did not live towards their neighbours of quality, or their patrons themselves, with that civility and condescension they used to do ; which disposed them likewise to withdrawing their countenance and good-neighbourhood from them." The rise of an ecclesiastical discipline began to be felt. It made its appearance under a parti-coloured secular garb, but still the ecclesiastical animus was seen underneath and hated as such. The High Commission Court, with all its lay lords 190 Archbishop Laud. and privy councillors, worked by the arcliiepiscopal head, showed an animus. It attacked the immoralities of the nobles with boldness ; and the fault charged upon law, that it catches the small offenders and lets the great ones through, was not seen there. " He intended the discipline of the Church," says Clarendon, " should be felt as well as spoken of ; and that it should be applied to the greatest and most splendid transgressor, as well as to the punishment of smaller offences and meaner offenders ; and therefore called for and cherished the discovery of those who were not careful to cover their own iniquities, thinking they were above the reach of other men or their power and will to chastise. Persons of honour and great quality at the Court, and of the country, were every day cited into the High Commission Court upon the fame of their incon- tinence or other scandal in their lives, and were there prose- cuted to their shame and punishment," and complained of what they called "the insolent triumph upon their degree and quality, and levelling them with the common people." Laud was working a dangerous weapon for himself, and the resent- ment of an offended nobility retaliated fearfully upon him at his trial. " They never forgot " these acts, and " watched for revenge." English, Irish, Scotch nobles, he had come into contact with them all. The Church sentence and rebuke, the Church lands got back, the Church an obstacle and sore point in some way, were remembered. The strength of the nobles and the pride which accompanies strength had been growing apace as royalty was declining. " The grandees of the Puritan faction," says Heylin, " after the first heats were over in Queen Elizabeth's time, carried on their work for thirty years together like moles underground, not casting up any earth before them till they had made so strong a party in the House of Commons that they could do anything." And a still larger class, " who loved the established government of the Church, and the exercise of religion as it was used, and desired not a change in either, and did not dislike the order and decency which they saw mended, yet liked not any novelties, and entertained jealousies " (how descriptive of the Conservatives of the day !), were sore about the whole movement. It is the national char- Archbishop. Laud. 1 9 1 acter over again. How aptly does the whole of Clarendon's account— the more so from his own sympathies with the class he mentions — apply, mutatis mutandis, to our present move- ments ! The instinctive, vague, antagonistic sensation which the English mind feels on the first symptoms of the Church moving and showing life seems to be hereditary in us. The greater honour to him who did not shrink from encountering it. It should ever be remembered, as a piece of historical justice to Laud, that his was a contest with the great of this world ; that the honourer and cherisher of his poor clerical brethren, brought the high noble before the bar, rebuked his vices, or made him refund his spoils, and fought the Church battles with him. A new theological race of clergy had sprung up under Laud's administration. The tone of the clerical body was altered ; and a theological school, which was a mere handful when he commenced life at Oxford, had spread over the coun- try in all directions. Oxford itself, from being a focus of Calvinism, had come round, and hardly knew its new reflection in the theology of Jeremy Taylor and Hammond. A Puritan remnant remained, and perambulated their old haunts, but they felt their occupation of the place gone, and saw another stan- dard on the ascendant, a new genius loci penetrating the air. The crowds of clergy whom the Rebellion and directory threw out of their places show the strong growth that had been going on in the Church at large, and the change of Church of Eng- land theology that a few years had brought about. Laud was popular with the inferior clergy, though not much so with his brethren on the bench. He stood up for their rights, watched their interests, saw that they were not ill-used ; was courteous to them when they came personally across him ; would take great pains, by private talking and arguing, to convert any of them from puritanical tendencies. The bias of his mind was toward the inferior clergy — the direct open Puritan, of course, excepted. It is a natural tendency of a centre toward the mass ; and the mass returns the compliment. The mass gathers round its centre, and rejoices in a good strong hold on the middle of it, in feeling something beyond the adjacent boundary 192 Archbishop Laud. and local defence. Laud was an immovable personal centre of the Churchmanship in the nation. They knew they could trust him ; that they could lean upon him, and that he would not give way. His was an absolute, pertinacious, real substance, formed and hardened in a perpetual life of action and responsi- bility, risk, and trial. Whatever there was of him was solid stone ; a mind, by undergoing a certain ordeal, mineralises, and turns into hard transparent crystal, into an adamantine occu- pant of the bodily frame. There he stood in the middle, and concentrated singly the hardness of the mass. The clergy were proud of him, and took their cue from him, and called him high-sounding names, and addresses and eulogiums adopted the " Sanctitas tua," and the " Summus Poniifex," and the " Arc- angelus," and " Quo rediornon stat regula." " The meanest title of them," he says, " far too much applied to my person and un- worthiness." " High language for such an unworthy person ;" " absolute hyperbole," but well meant, only a way of express- ing " that I deserved well of them ;" " effusions from a luxuri- ant pen that ran upon these phrases." Laud was not inattentive to public opinion. With all his use of power, he made use of the press as well ; argued in print, and answered what came out on the Puritan side. Heylin's Antidotum. Lincolniense answered Williams's attack on the communion-table question. The Scotch Liturgy was followed immediately by an Apology ; Bishop Hall wrote his Divine Right of Episcopacy to counteract the rising Scotch Presby- terian influence before the invasion. The state of the religious press in general, apart from the peculiar points of controversy, was attended to, and the rise of Socinian principles in the books of the day had created his alarm. Hales of Eton wrote a latitudinarian treatise, in which he carried out the right of private judgment to its full development, and, in short, quite forestalled the liberal theory of the present day. Laud sent for him, and they argued together the whole morning. The hour for dinner broke off the discussion. Heylin tells us it had a great effect upon Hales, who told him (Heylin) that his opinions had been much changed by it. Mr. Hallam does not believe Heylin here. We can only say that Heylin asserts it Archbishop Laud. 193 as a fact, and that there is no reason why it should not be true. The school of Hoadley and the eighteenth century had its seed in the English Church even now, which favouring circumstances afterwards brought out. And even direct Socinian books had, in the confusion of religious war, crept in to a formidable extent. Laud weeded the press of them. We have attempted something of an outline of Laud's career. He acted boldly, and he paid for it. He had his endurance taxed considerably : the attacks which poured in upon him from all sides throughout were, in multitudinous vehemence, equal to what any public man in this world ever experienced. The fact that Prynne's ears were cut off by an order of Star Chamber, is considered by many to have been an ample internal satisfaction to him for his whole personal experience from this quarter. Without defending cutting off ears, and the punish- ments of the day, it is only fair to say that Prynne was not punished as an assailant of Laud, but as a simple criminal. His abuse of the Eoyal Majesty and the King's ministers was a simple crime then, just as stealing was, and he was punished for it. The Puritans had an unrivalled command of vituperative phraseology and fertility in calling names, which found a full vent in this channel. Libels sprang up out of the ground as thick as snakes in Oriental herbage. They found their way to Laud's closet, study, dining-room, bedroom. His very office of Press-censorship brought them under his eyes, and the writers had the satisfaction of knowing, that if even their pro- duction was stopped, Laud had seen it, and had had his own suspended effigy brought to his own windows. And, indeed, these portraitures were no pleasing objects even for closet- inspection. Laud's library -table concentrated under his eye, in camera- obscura reflection, the bitterness and hostilities of a whole excited world without. The titles of Prynne's Quench- Coal, and News from Ipswich, Bastwick's Flagellum Epi- scoporum Latialium, ; the Histrio-Mastix, and one or two others, have just survived out of a vast ephemeral ocean of pamphlets. A grotesque irony and an unmeasured hyperbole alternate ; fierce grins and dreadful foulness ; " Arch-piety, M.E.-I. N 194 Archbishop Laud. Arch-charity, Arch-wolf, Arch-agent for the devil, Beelzebub himself become Archbishop, the devil's most triumphant arch to adorn his victories, is a specimen of the more witty and polished style of vituperation. These pamphlets stuck at nothing, raked up stories, abused him for his birth, or ridiculed his size, or called him dirt, or filth, or poison ; were simple nonsense and trash, except for the animus of dreadful enmity which all this grotesqueness expressed. Odd people and monomaniacs became the strays and waifs of the popular feeling, and took a fancy for attacking Laud. " One Boyer, a felon just broke out of prison, grossly abused him to his face, accusing him of high treason." " One Greene, a poor decayed printer (for whom Laud had got a pension of five pounds a year from the Company of Stationers), adventured into the Court of St. James's with a great sword by his side, desperately swearing that if the King would not do him justice with the Archbishop, he would take another course with him." One Lady Davies "scatters a prophecy against him." This lady " had the reputation of a ' cunning woman ' among the common people, and she prophesies of the Archbishop, that he should live but two days after the fifth of November. She is brought before the High Commission. The woman had grown so mad that she fancied the spirit of the prophet Daniel had been infused into her body. And this she grounded on an anagram which she made on her name, viz., Eleanor Davies, — Reveal, Daniel. Much pains was taken by the Court to dispossess her of this spirit, but all would not do, till Lamb, the Dean of Arches, shot her through and through with an arrow borrowed from her own quiver. For while the bishops and divines were reasoning the point with her out of Holy Scripture, he took a pen in his hand, and hit upon this excellent anagram, viz., Dame Eleanor Davies, — Never so mad a ladie. ' Madam,' said he, ' I see you build much on anagrams, and I have found out one which I hope will fit you.' He read it aloud, which brought the grave Court to such laughter, and the woman to such confusion, that she grew either wiser, or was less regarded afterwards." A wild, furious world of enemies, had much more formidable ones above them ; and violence and vulgarity had Archbishop Land. 195 their main sting in the black looks of great men enjoying the scene. After all, it is not pleasant to be really hated by any man ; it is not pleasant to be abused. A vulgar fellow abuses you in the streets ; he may be as vulgar as the dirt ; still there is the fact — you are abused ; and the words physically touch you, as it were, and there is defilement. Laud's was a peculiarly sensitive mind, acutely realising this metaphysical dirt and foulness, and feeling that it swal- lowed something nasty in the process of abuse. No quantity of experience familiarised him to it. A crowd of faces, and eyes staring, mouths railing at him, as if he were some monster, are pictured in his mind. He has a dislike to be stared at. He " stays at Lambeth till the evening, to avoid the gazing of the people." The sensation of " being gazed at," as if a gaze was a sort of tangible nuisance inflicted, and a low intrusion, comes out, unconsciously, often ; reminding one almost of the feeling of children against being looked at. And "being railed at," "jeered" (he dreams of courtiers jeering him), was a sort of reality in the same way ; a material plastering, as it were, of so much offensive substance upon him. He " endures " a mob's railing by the pure power of mental prayer at the time, as if it were a regular sustained passive contact with literal external evil. We mean that he could not bear these demonstrations of hatred : i.e. could bear but never without deeply feeling them. Laud had that particular framework of mind which domi- ciliates and harbours all hostile phenomena. A curious mix- ture of innocence and self-complacency makes some persons never see when they are treated ill. The fact glances off from them without making any impression, and does not gain an entrance into their imperturbable easy good-nature. An- other class of mind is a magazine of hostile matter, a military depot. A shadowy archetype of war resides within them, and readily admits the phenomena from without — a word, a look, a sign, a gesture of another ; and they are the theatre of a per- petual invisible strife ; and metaphysical forces and strategies, ambuscades, surprises, retreats, the arrow from a corner, and a terra incognita of foes, compose the dark background of the 196 Archbishop Land. interior mental scene. The mind carries on a perpetual unconscious reference to some Protean enemy, here or there or everywhere : it talks to itself of enemies, prays against them ; longs for deliverance from its enemies. There is a religious form of this habit of mind. The Psalms are full of the men- tion of the enemy. " The ungodly bend the bow, and make ready their arrows within the quiver, that they may privily shoot at them which are true of heart." The " soul is among lions:" " the enemy" persecutes her, lays snares for her, speaks evil of her : she goeth heavily, and " would flee as a bird unto the hill, while the enemy oppresseth her." Laud's devotions are peculiarly indicative of this state of mind. Their characteristic tone almost makes them unfit for ordinary use ; the individual so pervades them. He is labour- ing under a pressure, engaged in a hard unpromising struggle, surrounded by enemies and persons who wish him evil, with the snare and the pit open for him, and he prays against them. All sides think themselves in the right, and yet there is a quietness and depth in the Church's confidence in the rightness of her side, which her opponents want. The most perfect tranquil assurance that he is fighting against the enemies of God appears in Laud's devotions ; and a career of simple religious sincerity, doing what it thinks its mere duty and work, is their substratum. He expresses his weariness and his longings in the prayer of St. Augustine : " Long time, Lord, have I struggled against heresies, and am almost wearied. Come, Lord Jesus, mightiest Warrior, Prince of the host of the Lord, Conqueror of the devil and the world : take arms and shield, and rise up and help me." " Tempore adverso " — " Auxilium" — "Deliverance" — appear at the margin of the prayers. " Deal with me, God, according to Thy name, for sweet is Thy mercy. deliver me, for I am helpless and poor, and my heart is wounded within me." " Mine eyes are ever looking unto Thee, Lord ; pluck my feet out of the net." " I deal with the thing that is lawful and right, give me not over unto mine oppressors : " " let the proud do me no wrong." " I have heard the blasphemy of the multitude, and fear is on every side." " Thou hast fed me with the bread of tears, and Archbishop Laud. 197 given me plenteousness of tears to drink." " I am become a very strife unto my neighbours, and mine enemies laugh me to scorn." " Gracious Father, the life of man is a warfare upon earth ; be present with me in the services of my calling. That which I cannot foresee, I beseech Thee prevent ; that Avhich I cannot withstand, I beseech Thee master; that which I do not fear, I beseech Thee unmask and frustrate. Especially, Lord, bless and preserve me at this time from M. N., that I may glorify Thee for this deliverance also." A religious pleasure which a mind has, that feels itself to be genuine and trans- parent, in the appeal to the heart within — the communion with the (j)i\7) ^rvxy, and turning to her for society, love, and re- pose ; the confidence and clear air within, appear in Laud. We must go back again to Laud as a statesman. Side by side with the ecclesiastical administration, a host of other duties devolved upon him in the State department. The University of Oxford lay half-way between the two. He was no nominal Chancellor there ; it got a real head to look after it when it chose him. An interval of twenty years found Laud in a rather curiously different position there from what he started with ; and the once hit at and preached at Fellow of St. John's was ruling the University with a high hand from his library at Lambeth. " I pray," is his first letter to the Vice- Chancellor after his appointment, " call the Heads of Colleges and Halls together, together with the Proctors, and with my love remembered to them all, let them know I am welcomed unto my Chancellorship with many complaints from very great men." The " outward and visible form of the University," he hears, " is utterly decayed, so that strangers that come have hardly any mark by which they know it is a University." He proceeds immediately to the revival of proper academical " Formalities," in the " Schools, Convocation, Con- gregation houses, Latin sermons." " Put the tables of statute observance on St. Mary's doors," he concludes, " and proceed to the execution of them." Letter after letter gave his directions about the discipline of the place, down to the minutest details. " And I pray you," he writes, " see that none of the youth be suffered to go in boots and spurs, or to wear their hair in- 198 Archbishop Laud. decently long, or with a lock in the present fashion, or with slashed doublets, or in any light or garish colours. And if noblemen will have their sons court it too soon, the fault shall be theirs, not mine." He will allow no " riding-school, or suffer the scholars to fall into the old humour of going up and down in boots and spurs, and then having this excuse ready, that they are going to the riding-house." " And for Mr. Crofts, and his great horses, he may carry them back if he pleases, as he brought them." " I pray give Mr. Crofts thanks fairly for his good intentions, but he must not stay." " And farther, I would have you speak with the Principal of Brasenose, that he would command their cellar to be better looked to — [he is writing about having more orderly disputations] — that no strong and unruly argument be drawn from that topic place." Academical disputations, times of morning and evening College prayer, the revival of the Holy Communion at the beginning of term, instructions as to Church-reverence, succeed one an- other. The procuratorial cycle was his remedy for the disorders then attending the public election of the Proctors ; and the Laudian statute-book, together with alterations, laboriously abridged and arranged, bears witness to the chaotic mass to which a period of neglect had reduced the University statutes. The Commission of the Treasury, in 1635, brought a wholly new and complicated department of State-business upon him. An interval of some time had released him partially from political business, and allowed him to devote himself more exclusively to the Church ; but the discovery of frauds in the Treasury again brought him into the thick of it. He determined to see that department put to rights. He, Coventry, Cottington, and the great State-officers, constituted the Com- mission. His brother-statesmen were not at all obliged to him for his public spirit and threatened reforms, and thwarted him with considerable malice. " His old friend Windebank forsook him in the matter," says the Diary, " and joined with the Lord Cottington, which put him to the exercise of a great deal of patience." "For your Spaniard [to Strafford], and the gravity which he learned there, while he went to buy pigeons, hath Archbishop Laud. 199 tempted my old friend the Secretary from me, and is become his man. So I have need to look to myself." Cottington (the Spaniard) was no friend of Laud's at any time ; and Clarendon tells of his taking in Laud on one occasion, by a story of the King, a great lover of the sport, going to turn some royal farms into a hunting chase. It was a lie of Cottington's, and Laud gave the King a warm lecture upon his extravagance for nothing, except that his Majesty was amused at the mistake. Cottington seems to have intended something more serious. Laud had a whole set of half-enemies about him at Court, and his and Strafford's alliance was an object of fear and jealousy to the myrmidons of that sphere. Laud, at sixty-two, set to work thoroughly to get up Treasury business. An anecdote illustrates his official sway. The great battle in the financial department then was between the public service and private men, — the interests of a class of farmers and monopolists and the interests of the royal ex- chequer ; and the mercantile world suffered grievously by these jobs. " There was a merchant of the greatest reputation (Daniel Harvey), who having a country house within the distance of a few miles from Croydon, and understanding the whole business of trade more exactly than most men, was always very welcome to the Archbishop, who used to ask him many questions about such matters. Upon an accidental discourse between them, what encouragement merchants ought to receive who brought a great trade into the kingdom, Mr. Harvey mentioned the discouragements they had received in the late times by the rigour of the Earl of Portland, in matters that related nothing to the King's service, but to the profit of private men." A long story follows : — " Lord Portland, the Treasurer, compelled the merchants to land their fine goods, silks and linens, at Customhouse Quay ; whereas they had always been free to ship or unship such goods at what wharf they would choose for their convenience." But the Customhouse Quay belonged to private wharfingers, who had secured Lord Portland's interest ; and, to the prejudice of the trade of the country, public convenience gave way to a job. The Archbishop heard the story " with 200 Archbishop Laud. great indignation." A general petition of the trade, and the assistance of " Mr. Hyde," afterwards Lord Clarendon, rectified the abuse. " The Archbishop," says Clarendon, " laid down one prin- ciple for himself, which he believed would much advance the King's service — that the King's duties being provided for, and cheerfully paid, the merchants should receive all the countenance and protection from the King that they could expect. He was careful that what accrued of burden to the subject should redound to the benefit of the Crown, and not enrich projectors at the charge of the people. This vigilance and inclination in the Archbishop opened the door to the admission of any merchants or others to him, who gave him information of this kind ; and who being ready to pay anything to the King, desired only protection from private oppressors." Laud carried on the Commission of the Treasury for a year, and got acquainted with all the holes and corners of the office , " the mysteries and secrets of it, the honest advantages which the Lord Treasurers had for enriching themselves (to the value of seven thousand pounds a year, and upwards), as I" (we quote Heylin) "have heard from his own mouth, without de- frauding the King or abusing the subject." "He had observed that divers Treasurers, of late years, had raised themselves from very mean and private fortunes to the titles and estates of earls ;" and he determined to have a Treasurer who would " not play such a game" — a man "who had no family to raise, no wife and children to provide for." Bishop Juxon did not disappoint his patron ; and the honourable testimony of an enemy, Lord Falkland, declared in Parliament, "that in an unexpected place and power he expressed an equal moderation and humility, being neither ambitious before nor proud after, either of the crosier or the staff." He conducted the business of the Treasurership with great ability, and gave universal satis- faction. The appointment of Strafford to Ireland brought a whole flood of public business upon him from that quarter. Strafford's scheming prolific mind made him its medium and advocate at headquarters, and he had to get up the whole multitudinous Archbishop Land. 201 arrangements of the Irish administration in order to put them in shape and favourable aspect before Charles and the govern- ment at home. In the midst of enemies, Irish and English, Court treacheries and coolnesses, Strafford depended solely upon Laud, and no one other support. If Laud had failed him, he must have gone. They were mutually necessary for each other's plans ; and while Strafford worked hard for Laud in Ireland, Laud worked hard for Strafford at home ; and with the financial department in England upon him, threw himself into the whole sea of Irish finance as well, and entered into all Strafford's new plans of revenue, customs, colonisations, fisheries, abolitions of farms, jobs, monopolies, linen-manufactories, articles for taxa- tion, patents and patentees, coinage, money-circulation, subsi- dies, parliamentary management, military security, viceroy ceremonial and etiquette, and the world of questions which issued out of Strafford's creative administration. A curious mixture of Church and State, with all their respective ramifi- cations, — deaneries, bishoprics, stalls, tithes, commendams, plu- ralities, alienations, frauds, restoration of Church spoils, legal prosecution of the spoilers, buying in impropriations, convo- cation, articles, canons, Calvinism, University education, the Provost and the Primate, and their disputes, Bramhall, Lesly, Bedell, Usher — with tobacco and tallow, and Cottington and Court, etc. etc., meets our eye. " I am aweary," he says at the beginning of a letter ; and " I am aweary," he says at the end of a letter. " I am heartily aweary," — " and I was never so busy as I am at this present." And " now I have done with your long letters;" and "let me not have your long letters again just now." Sympathy, cheerfulness, and affection, however, appear in every letter ; quiet advice, occasionally, as from an older, though not so brilliant a head ; numerous hits and nicknames ; sly raillery sometimes upon his correspondent himself. Strafford's high spirit, sensitiveness, enthusiastic aspirings, internal dis- gusts, he quite enters into and tries to calm. " All able, and all hearty, and all running one way, and none caring for any ends so that the King be served." — Strafford. " By your Lord- ship's leave, a branch of Plato's commonwealth which flourishes 202 Archbishop Laud. at this day nowhere but in Utopia." — Laud. A side hit at Strafford's oratorical propensities, and dashing way of doing things : " Everybody liked your carriage and discourse to the Council, but thought it too long, and that too much strength was put into it. But you see what it is to he an able speaker." A hint given about Strafford's prosecutions, that they were doing him harm : " Some persons whisper against your pro- ceedings in Ireland as being over-full of personal prosecutions, and instance Lord Wilmot, Lord St. Albans, etc. I know that you have a great deal more resolution in you than to decline any service for the barking of discontented persons ; and yet, my Lord, if you could find a way to do all these services and decline these storms, it would be excellent well thought on. I pray your Lordship to pardon me this freedom, which I brought with me into your friendship." Soothings of his Court dis- appointments and sense of Charles's neglect come in : "You know the workings of a court," and " these things cannot be helped," and "a king is prevented by circumstances from appreciating his good servants as he ought ;" and " to reward aright is not in every governor's skill and good fortune." Entire weariness of business has a burst occasionally, and a good hearty laugh in the middle of a letter — the subject, Strafford's gout, on which he strings a good-natured hit at his friend's imperious tendencies : " I see you conceal your infir- mities, for your brother tells me you have the gout, but there's not a word of it in your letter. This 'tis to write with your fingers, and not with your toes : had you been to write with these, I should have heard some complaints, or discovered it by your manner of writing. I promise you, you can make haste that can get the gout so soon ; I thought you had been contented to stay till you had been nearer threescore first ; 'tis no such lovely companion, and I know you would be glad to be rid of it. Well now, there's work for Dr. Williams ; and I know if he had not been so near you, you would have sent to me for my counsel, who have more skill in these things than you are aware of. And though he be there, I'll venture to prescribe for you. Take heed of applying any medicine to it that may beat it back, but draw it out into public as much as Archbishop Laud. 203 you cau ; and while you have so good an advantage, follow it ; use your power in both houses, make an Act of Parliament against it ; that if ever it comes to lay hold of you again, espe- cially when you are busy in the King's service, it shall incur your high displeasure, and be expelled the castle, so soon as ever you are rid of it, and not return again, under pain of being endured there against your will. Indeed, I much marvel how it durst venture upon you in Parliament- time, and verily think it would hardly have been so bold had it not had the suffrages of some mutineers in the house." In going through Laud's whole career we are struck not so much witli its vigour after all, as with its magnitude and com- prehensiveness. Some characters strike immediately, others progressively. Crescit eundo applies remarkably to some men: the circle widens, the space unfolds within them. A narrow opening conducts into the interior, and a want of room is felt at first ; a moving boundary of dusk and twilight walls you in, and seems to threaten a standstill every minute. The scene enlarges with exploring, avenues thicken, and paths diverge ; a forest tract insensibly appears. The cathedral area and dimensions disappoint the eye at first, but the ground expands with stepping, and the idea of size and vastness comes gradually, as an impression produced upon the internal sense, an intel- lectual shadow upon the mind. Physical force acts either by quick blow or slow pressure. Power, greatness, talent, either concentrate themselves in particular strokes, or cover the ground by steady advance and uniform expansion. Laud's was a large mind. We mean that largeness, capacity, dimension was its particular characteristic, as distinguished from other kinds of greatness. Scripture talks about " largeness of heart, even as the sand which is on the sea-shore." His accessible - ness, affability, openness, and all those features of the genuine public character, presence of mind, attention always ready, ear alive and willing to be engaged by any new-comer, and absorbing quietly the visitor and his information, the man and his facts together ; his powers of db extra sympathy, his com- prehensive friendships and alliances, varied tastes, love of learning, wide, liberal patronage, and the whole fertile and 204 Archbishop Laud. diversified industry of his mind brought to hear on the one object of the Church — all this ground grows upon one. Church and Court, and all their ramifications — Scotch Church, Irish Church, discipline, doctrine, Strafford, the Universities, the Treasurership — grow upon one. An idea of extent comes upon one — an idea which we are afraid has suggested itself to our readers already — and one mind's arch seems to cover a good space. The variety of the scene mingles indeed with a sort of haze and gloom below, with underground toil and pressure, and the secret chamber and the private meeting and mysterious cells and corners. Shades come over the scene, and the air- waves with dreamy hues, and the purple and the gold, the Court splendour and Episcopal throne, gleam through rolling vapour and subtle intersection, and we are in an intricate complex interior, a labyrinth and subterranean domain of mind. Homer has devoted one of his poems to a description of the union of the political character with feeling and nature. Accomplished statesmanship, art, and penetration, subtlety, fertility, experience, mark pre-eminently the hero of the Odyssey. He knows human nature, human ways, and is con- versant with courts and cities, — IIoWoov 8' dvOpcoiTcov tSev aarea /ecu voov eyvco" men and minds are his sphere ; he is acquainted with man, has traversed the human world, and come into genuine contact with the race. He shows its re- sults in a temper of courtesy, moderation, endurance ; he has suffered much, and is ready to suffer more. Simplest heart and affectionateness unite with political talent, and the sweet- ness of home and kindred follows the subtle practical mind over the earth, overpowering it with purest longings and devo- tion. The image of flourishing, peaceful Ithaca is always before his mind, and crowns the journey's end; he feeds on past reminiscences, and lives on the hope of seeing the past once more present. The Odyssean type is peculiarly illustra- tive of Laud's mind — human life, the world, mankind its sphere ; men and minds, minds and men ; man en masse, and man the individual, — his formidable numbers, and his still more formid- able units, — the subject-matter of his labour, endurance, man- Archbishop Laud. 205 agement, experience, skill. Solid experience, ethical skill — whoever really possesses it — most sobering, intoning, moulding to the mind ; fruit of self-discipline, height of mental accom- plishment and art, which is all but virtue ! His long journey through courts and cities pursued a bright image of the Church, a visionary Ithaca, which fled further and further from him as he seemed to approach it, till a black cloud stood at last in its place and disclosed a scaffold. Laud was a genuine priest — the priest in the political atmosphere. That love of his order, that partiality for priestly celibacy, show the priest. Some over-free speeches of his on the point of celibacy got him into a scrape, and people were getting alarmed, when he suddenly displayed himself in a very marked way at the marriage of one of his chaplains, and quieted suspicion. We see a corner of that priestly mixture of subtlety and humility in him ; that mode of managing which is popu- larly accused of being imperious and underhand at the same time. We describe it by what the superficial popular accuser calls it, for the sake of convenience, without pausing to say what it really is, which would take us too much time. There is an observable tendency in him perpetually to dis- claim his own influence, and throw the originating character upon others. He acts under a shield, and has an influence in motion about him, which he set moving in the first instance, but just does not do the thing itself. And a peculiar subtlety of mind enables him to say in the case of things that he certainly exceedingly wished to be done, and certainly had a great deal to do with, that somehow or other he did not do them. The Eegale and the High Court of Commission are his great Ajacian shield in the first instance ; and although it was perfectly well known that he did everything that was done there, he keeps up the form of an amusing ostentatious humility throughout, in a jealous reference of everything to the Board, of whose per- fect independence and mere voluntary motion he tolerates no suspicion. He is even exceedingly concerned at some of their acts on particular occasions, especially so in the case of his great opponent the Lord Keeper Williams. Five several times does he go down on his knees to the King to beg for leniency 206 Archbishop Laud. to the Lord Keeper, but his Majesty is resolute, inexorable to entreaty ; the Lord Keeper goes to the wall. It is a singular fact that a certain shade of intricacy and subtlety does hover around a particular class of characters, and that most unques- tionably high and disinterested men exhibit themselves in a colour which to the mass must inevitably have the look of simple deceit. We hit against the corners of a casuistical world, and catch a puzzling glimpse of a very shadowy inter- sected interior. An internal distinction enables Laud to be first the rigorous prosecutor, and then the compassionate inter- cessor, and separates what his evidence does from what he him- self does against Williams. The evidence is indeed too strong for the intercession, but he canuot help certain facts telling. He lets the trial and the case have their own full swing, but he stands outside of it, and has his own attitude for himself. A man with a good substratum of power finds that other persons do things for him, and sees his own wishes carried out in advance, and operates as a kind of invisible spring to a circle of action around him. The High Commission Court was in the unconscious habit of obedience to Laud, while Laud was modestly declining even the exercise of his own vote at times, whenever he might be considered a personally interested party. Laud had nothing to do with the Scotch Liturgy, and he had nothing to do with theological books that came out. The Scotch bishops did one thing, his chaplains did another, the High Commission another, the King another. He only does nothing at all, and sees all the world in motion, he himself unaccount- ably quiescent. His examination at his trial is a perfect specimen of this species of casuistry ; it proceeds on the theory that he has a right to say what the opposite side cannot legally prove against him ; that he has a right to the advantages of a position to say — that is true as far as you are concerned, you have no right to question me further than the bare outside goes ; I give you the outside, and take it, and make what you can out of it. What mixes oddly, however, with this cautious, subtle habit of mind is the impatience and irritableness which is charged to him. We do not believe all that is said of him Archbishop Laud. 207 here, but he does seem never to have got over a natural defect he had in the shape of an excessive and morbid sensitiveness. He could often calm it, and often not, and perpetually struggled with it. A hard experience never endowed him with absolute political temper and coolness, and a bad voice and some defect of manner did him injustice on this head. Nature does not allow some people to express themselves truly, but refracts what they do through some angular or rough medium. We are referring here principally to Clarendon's account of Laud. A word about Clarendon. We can trust Clarendon's de- scription of one of the regular class of statesmen and men of the world ; he draws it exactly, but he does not appreciate higher characters, and makes mistakes. He sets down Laud as a precipitate, headstrong person, when the truth simply is that he does not enter into ends and objects he was contend- ing for, and thinks that unimportant which Laud thought important. The charge of precipitancy over and over again, indeed, is simply a criticism on ends, and not on means, and only expresses a difference as to first principles between the critic and the person he judges. Strafford, in the same way, he obviously does not in the least understand, and is as unfair to him as possible, simply from not understanding him. With all deference to Clarendon's greatness in his own department of mind, he has much narrowness and pedantry. Clarendon patronises Laud rather amusingly. He admires the " splendour of his piety," and feels grateful for his patron- age and the business he got him as a lawyer in early life. We hear how Mr. Hyde " first came to be known to the Archbishop, who ever afterwards used him very kindly, and spoke well of him on all occasions, and took particular notice of him when he came as counsel in any causes depending at the Council board, insomuch that Mr. Hyde (who well knew how to culti- vate these advantages) was used with more countenance by all the judges in Westminster Hall, and the eminent practisers, than was usually given to men of his years ; so that he grew every day in practice, of which he had as much as he desired." The young lawyer, in return for the Archbishop's patronage, gives him the benefit of his good advice, and a lecture. " The 2o8 Archbishop Laud. greatest want the Archbishop had was of a true friend, who would seasonably tell him of his infirmities." Mr. Hyde sup- plies that deficiency. Mr. Hyde's free expostulation with the Archbishop : — " He found the Archbishop early walking in the garden, who re- ceived him, according to his custom, very graciously, and con- tinuing his walk, asked him, ' What good news from the country?' To which he answered there was none good; the people were universally discontented, and (which troubled him most) that many people spoke extreme ill of his Grace as the cause of all that was amiss. He replied that he was sorry for it ; he knew he did not deserve it, and that he must not give over serving the King and the Church to please the people. Mr. Hyde told him he thought he need not lessen his zeal for either, and that it grieved him to find persons of the best con- ditions, and who loved both King and Church, exceedingly indevoted to him, complaining of his manner of treating them when they had occasion to resort to him, and then named two persons of the most interest and credit in Wiltshire who had that summer attended the Council board ; that all the Lords present used them with great courtesy, and that he alone spake sharply to them ; and one of them, supposing that somebody had done him ill offices, went the next morning to Lambeth to present service to him, and to discover, if he could, what mis- representation had been made of him ; that after he had attended very long he was admitted to speak with his Grace, who scarce hearing him, sharply answered him that ' he had no time for compliments,' which put the other much out of coun- tenance ; and that this kind of behaviour was the discourse of all companies of persons of quality. " He (Laud) heard the relation very patiently and atten- tively, and discoursed over every particular with all imaginable condescension ; and said, with evident show of trouble, that ' he was very unfortunate to be so ill understood, that he meant very well, that by an imperfection of nature, which he said often troubled him, he might deliver the resolution of the Council in such a tone and with a sharpness of voice that made men believe he was angry when there was no such thing. Archbishop Laud. 209 That he did well remember that one of them (who was a person of honour) came afterwards to him, at a time when he was shut up about an affair of importance which required his full thoughts, but that as soon as he heard of the others being without, he sent for him, himself going into the next room, and received him very kindly, as he thought ; and supposing that he came about business, asked what his business was, and the other answering that he had no business, but continuing his address with some ceremony, he had indeed said that he had no time for compliments, but he did not think he went out of the room in that manner.' " He was well contented to hear Mr. Hyde reply very freely on the subject," who said, " He observed that the gentlemen had too much reason for the report they made, and he did not wonder they had been much troubled with his carriage toward them ; that he did exceedingly wish that he would more reserve his passion, and that he would treat persons of honour and quality and interest in their country with more courtesy and condescension. He said, smiling, that he could only undertake for his heart ; that he had very good meaning ; for his tongue, he could not undertake that he should not some- times speak more hastily and sharply than he should do (which oftentimes he was sorry and reprehended himself for), and in a tone which might be liable to misinterpretation with them who were not well acquainted with him. After this free discourse Mr. Hyde ever found himself more graciously received by him, and treated with more familiarity, upon which he always con- cluded that if the Archbishop had had any true friend who could in proper seasons have dealt frankly with him, he would not only have received it very well, but have profited by it." Mr. Hyde is obviously a very sagacious adviser, and Mr. Hyde is very well satisfied with the impression which his lecture makes on the Archbishop — an impression, however, we will venture to say, which would not have been produced quite to the extent to which it was if the Archbishop had not fixed his eye on Mr. Hyde as a person who might be made consider- able use of some day, and felt that one avenue to Mr. Hyde's affections was to listen patiently to an edifying prose from M.E.-I.] O 2io Archbishop Laud. him. The young barrister judicially lecturing the Archbishop, and the Archbishop's acquiescence in the censure, the mixture of genuine humility and eye cast downwards, with the side glance of the statesman, is a characteristic scene. Large, subtle, knotty mind, that from your deep corner wielded a Court, and caught its great men, one after another, and made them know and feel you individually, through an outward unkind mould of nature, and turned them to your purpose ! The man of the world with the sensitiveness of a child ; the courtly animus struggling through physical defects of manner ; caution, fire ; acuteness, simplicity : Laud's char- acter is a whole, though a complex one. We are approaching the end of Laud's career. The rejection of the Liturgy in Scotland, and the whole scene accompanying it — a raging crowd, a bishop assaulted in the very church, and obliged to escape for his life ; a conspiracy of nobles, and the Solemn League and Covenant erected by scheming heads upon the passions of the mob, had a fatal appearance. The watch- word raised, the nucleus formed, hundreds flocked in. A resentful nobility, whose pride Laud had offended, joined them in England, and secret communications were established between the two countries. Nobles, gentry, and great men of all kinds, the Democrats and the Conservatives of the day, both of them — all who disliked the Church and Church power, chimed in openly and secretly, either with their opposition or their half-support; preachers assumed fresh impetus ; pulpits were rostrums, congregations mobs; and a whole world was in motion against Laud, Strafford, and the Church Cabinet. There is something remarkable in the way in which Laud's animation seems to grow as he gets older. A reverse process to the usual one tamed his spirit in the first part of his life, and raised it in the latter : and we are surprised, when we come to the Strafford correspondence, and see the fire that there is in him. " Haughty and fiery," according to Whitlock • nice sweet lady's man, according to good Mrs. Maxwell, in whose husband's house he lodged before his trial ; a striking mixture of both features compose the old man. The year 1640, which ushered in the Scotch Eebellion, and concluded Archbishop Laud. 2 1 1 with his own imprisonment in the Tower, found him as active and as ubiquitous as in any year of his life. As one of the triumviri with Strafford and Hamilton, which had the Scotch war committed to them, he had business and anxiety enough in that quarter. Not one fragment of his other business gives way, not one sign of remissness or nagging, not a falter- ing step or a failing look appear. He is all alive, and acts with the full vigour and spirit of his whole career, till his career itself stops ; till he comes to a dead wall, and is locked up in the house of the Black Eod. From the cabinet of Scotch business proceed letters to the University of Oxford about putting down the Westminster Supper, and a scolding letter to the Vice-Chancellor for not " suppressing taverns and ale- houses." Mr. Bagshawe, of the Middle Temple, who gives authority to the Courts in Westminster over the " Courts Christian," has a summary stop given to his lectures, and " away goes Bagshawe out of town, accompanied with forty or fifty horse, who seemed to be of the same faction and affections." Convocation meets in the very thick of the storm, and con tinues its meeting after the dissolution of Parliament; and the isolated ecclesiastical body daring to show its ecclesiastical unparliamentary existence, draws the whole jealousy of the nation upon it; and the House sits with the Middlesex train- bands to guard it from the fury of the mob. Canons pass, and a series of discussions go on. Bishop Hall's Episcopacy, written for the Scotch emergency, comes under his review, and he suggests the line and ground to take. All his departments and activities go on. Laud was not deficient in the prophetic instinct. He had known long ago which way things were going ; and the cloud which he saw gathering over the English Church at Bishop Montague's trial had never left his eye. A singular presenti- ment of his own fate appears even years before, in one oi those strange and vague movements of his mind in the Diary, where it occurs to him that he is always coming into contact with St. John Baptist's Day. " Of no ill omen, I hope. While I was intent at prayer, I know not how, it came strongly into my mind." The close of his course comes now ushered in with 212 Archbishop Land. dreams, and he dreams that he sees his father, and asks his father how long he should stay ; and that his father made this answer, that he should stay till he had him along with him. He comes into his study, and sees his picture " fallen on the floor, and lying flat on its face." Melancholy, and activity under it ; the power of ever acting before a blank and ambi- guity, of throwing himself into the process as such, and filling space, are characteristic of Laud. A man's career is an existence in itself, a solid portion cut out of the world of human mind and will : it lives apart from what results of it, and has a realm of its own, which no fate can interfere with, in all the space between its beginning and its end. Parliament met on the 3d of November 1640. "A letter was wrote to the Archbishop, advertising that the Parliament of Henry vin., which destroyed the privileges of the clergy, and dissolved the abbeys and religious houses, was begun on the 3d of November, and therefore that, for good luck's sake, he would move the King to respite the first sitting of it for a day or two longer." However, it met on the unlucky day. On the 18th of December, Hollis, after a vehement debate on the Canons of the late Convocation, which were declared to be " against the King's prerogative, and the fundamental laws of the realm," impeached him in the name of the Commons of England of treason. He was committed to the charge of Maxwell, the Usher of the Black Eod, and remained ten weeks in his house ; Mrs. Maxwell charmed with him, and " talking of him to her gossips." From Maxwell's he was removed to the Tower, amidst a " railing rabble," who accompanied him to the very gates. Mobs had been rife lately, and springing up at a moment's warning ; they had attacked Lambeth, had torn up the seats of the High Commission Court at St. Paul's. Laud was now under the special surveillance of a mixed mob of Brownists, Anabaptists, and " London apprentices," who invariably accom- panied him to and from the Tower, saw him enter "Westminster Hall for his day's trial, and saw him safe in the Tower gates again ; and an impertinent, staring, multitudinous eye seemed always upon him : a specimen of an unwelcome, uncongenial Archbishop Laud. 213 companionship, which almost reminds one of some of the poet's punishments in the infernal regions — those curious inflictions which are made expressly to fit the individuals themselves. The Danaidse had their buckets, and Sisyphus his large stone, and Laud his mob. Libels and ballads against him were sung up and down the streets, with pictures of him in a cage, and " fastened to a post by a chain." They enlivened taverns and alehouses ; and the " drunkards made songs upon me," he says ; " God of His mercy forgive the misguided people." The Tower had its own internal persecutors ; and preachers in the chapel soothed his misfortunes with the special applica- tion of the text to him, " Curse ye Meroz, saith the angel of the Lord." One Mr. Joslyn preached, " with a vehemence becom- ing Bedlam : the women and the boys stood up in the church to see how I would bear it. I humbly thank God for my patience." Puritan ministers came to call on him, and ask him " whether he had repented ;" Mr. Wells, a New England minister, boisterously demanding of him whether he had not repented of once upon a time suspending him (Mr. Wells) in particular. " I knew him not till he told me he was suspended by me, when I was Bishop of London, and he then a minister in Essex. I told him if he were suspended it was doubtless according to law. Then upon a little further speech, I recalled the man to my remembrance, and what care I took at London then to recall him from some of his turbulent ways, but all in vain ; and now he inferred, out of the good words I then gave him, that I suspended him against my conscience." The death of Strafford deprived him of his greatest friend — the only person who had fully sympathised and acted with him. Laud felt the blow, and knew he stood entirely alone in the world when he was gone. Hopelessness and separation, and certainty of never coming together again, are a different thing from a friend's death after all. Laud was perfectly un- manned by Strafford's death. They were not allowed to see one another in the Tower : but Strafford sent to the Lieutenant the night before his execution, to ask for leave that once. It was refused. " Then ask the Archbishop," he said, " to lend 214 A rchbishop L aud. me his prayers this night, and give me his blessing when I go abroad to-morrow, and be at his window, that by my last farewell I may give him thanks for this, and all other his former favours." Laud replied that he could promise the first, but could not answer for the second ; " he feared his weakness and passion would not lend him eyes to behold his last de- parture." He made the attempt however, and did come up to his window the next morning, where Strafford stood waiting for him on his way to execution ; but could not do more than just lift up his hands in the attitude of blessing, and fainted. The heroic character of Strafford, for all the cautions, and softeners, and bits of humour with which Laud attacks him on it in his letters, was deeply loved ; and his fondness for it shows itself in his very hits and laughs at it. He gave up all hope for himself from this time, and expected his end as a matter of time, adding, " that he hoped, by God's assistance, and his own innocency, that when he came to his own execution, which he daily longed for, the world would perceive that he had been more sensible of Lord Strafford's loss than he was of his own." A characteristic sensitiveness makes him half find fault with himself for his emotions, and for the appearance " of effeminacy and unbecoming weakness " there was in " sinking down in that maimer." The Great Rebellion was now set in ; both sides were in arms ; and Laud heard, from his confinement in the midst of the enemy's camp, the distant news of engagements in the North. Under the new sway of Parliament, he saw one rapid ending of all he had done. Parliament was in possession of headquarters in the metropolis, and was changing things fast. He saw, one by one, every piece of ecclesiastical reform dis- placed again, Calvinism and Presbyterianism triumphant, and the work of a life apparently come to nothing. He could only sit patiently in his prison, and hear of one act of subversion after another. The House of Commons managed the Church : Williams, in full sunshine again, went about with a train of bishops, flattered and flattering, and the oracle of Parliament : and a committee of twelve met in his lodgings, and planned alterations in the Liturgy. Mobs shouting " No bishops ! No Archbishop Laud. 2 1 5 bishops ! " paraded the streets. Parliament echoed the cry, and passed a bill depriving the bishops of their votes in the House of Lords. " That struck proud Canterbury to the heart," somebody said. The churches and cathedrals suffered miser- able profanation from the Puritan troops. Westminster Abbey was assaulted by a London crowd, and had to be stoutly de- fended by the " scholars ; " and the hatred of the Church, which his administration had for years with difficulty kept under, broke loose everywhere, and made up for its past confine- ment. In 1643 a motley mixture of Lords, Commons, and ministers, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Independent, sat under the name of the Westminster Assembly; and from within the Abbey walls, where they held their sitting, issued the Directory. A bargain was struck with the Scotch Covenanters (whose assist- ance to stem the Eoyal successes in the North became necessary), through the medium of Gillespie, Henderson, and other leading ministers. The Covenanting interest got, in return for its aid, a representation in the Assembly, with a prospect of a share of the bishoprics and Church spoil ; and a confederacy of Scotch and English, and a compact for the religious uniformity of both countries, were cemented with the pledge that Laud should be brought to trial. A long, tedious, and exhausting ordeal was now to be undergone before he could be allowed to die. He entered on it with a vigour and spirit equal to that of any period of his administration; and the mind accustomed to energy was literally unable to do anything feebly. His acuteness simulates the full power of hope : and an inherent habit of self-supporting action, and independence of expectation, bears him along. A theory of what he should do for the sake of the look to the world at large, and a sensitive fear of seeming to give way, and discredit, his cause, comes in ; the feeling which enters into the expres- sion we have just quoted of his after Strafford's death, which enters much into his prayers, the nervousness of a religious mind, as if it were wrong to be weak before the enemy, and allow him a too easy triumph and exaltation, — "lest he be too proud." 216 Archbishop Laud. The trial began in November 1643, and went on to the October of the next year ; and it brought the whole of a long public life, and an administration in Church and State, under review, from the proceedings in High Commission and Star Chamber down to the most casual words which dropped from him. The tribunal assumed a theological character, and questioned him about his language respecting the altar, the priesthood, the consecrated elements ; about his alterations in churches, Church ceremonies, pictures, images, crucifixes, painted windows; the books he had on his table ; the pictures he had on his walls ; his private conversations ; expressions let fall about the Church ; his hopes and fears ; his theological friends ; his dis- posal of patronage, and men whom he had given bishoprics and deaneries and King's-ehaplainships to. One article is remarkable, which charges him with designs upon the power of the Crown, and wishing to deprive the Crown of its great prerogative of Church control. The Court shows its animus : it has no objection to Crown prerogative, if it will only ally itself with them ; the Church is what it dis- likes, and what it fears. For the powers of the Crown, as of State against Church, they are ready to stand up ; they will retain, with scrupulous jealousy, every prerogative of it that goes in that direction ; they are loyal men then, and can talk of desire to support the Crown, and established power, and dislike of innovation. " He hath traitorously assumed to him- self," says Article VI, " a papal and tyrannical power, both in ecclesiastical and temporal matters, over his Majesty's subjects in the realm of England, to the disinherison of the Crown, dishonour of his Majesty, and derogation of supreme authority in ecclesiastical matters. And the said Archbishop claims the King's ecclesiastical jurisdiction, as incident to his Episcopal and Archiepiscopal office in this kingdom, and doth deny the same to be derived from the Crown of England ; which he hath accordingly exercised to the high contempt of his Eoyal Majesty, and to the destruction of divers of the King's liege people in their persons and estates." The innovation of bishops sending out their citations in their own names, and not in the King's, Archbishop Land. 217 is pitched upon in this view. A jealousy for Crown, as a theoretical State power, and a hatred of the practical line it had taken, put them into the hypocritical position of actually elevating Charles's royal prerogative above what he wanted it to be himself. You shall have power against the Church, they say : we shall not let you give it up. It is not your own, but the national power delegated to you for that very object. Use it as the nation wants you, throw yourself into the national secular animus, and you may be as great as you please. We do not object to your royalty as such ; but if it is made an engine for bringing the Church down upon us, we turn re- publicans. The examination then went into the very smallest matters of mere business that Laud had transacted in his public offices. A man in office is certain to do a number of things every day that displease some person or other : to please one is to dis- please another : and if at any given time the doors were thrown open for all the grumblers, and the call given for all who had memories to rub them up, and recollect what grievances they had ever suffered from or thought they owed to him, the chance is there would be a largish muster. Goldsmiths come and com- plain of having been removed from their scattered residences to Lombard Street and Cheapside. Soap-boilers think they were hardly used on one or two occasions in the case of King's proclamations. The " Tonnage and Poundage " business comes up. Ship-money, "coat and conduct money," come up again; the monarchy was in a strait in these days to get money. You pulled my house down, says one man ; you refused me compen- sation, says another ; you made me pay taxes, and you made me pay tithes, are urged from two other quarters ; you called me Sirrah once, says a gentleman. Laud explains. The house belonged to St. Paul's Chapter, and was pulled down in the improvements there. The compensation was an absurd claim. The tithes were the lawful property of the Church, the taxes of the King. With respect to the " Sirrah," he really cannot remember either that he did or did not call Mr. Vassal " Sirrah ; " he only knows that his constant habit is to call •gentlemen of Mr. Vassal's dignity " Sir." 2 1 8 A re lib is hop Land. It is marvellous into what pettiness of detail the trial goes. Everything is fished up from the bottom, and collected from every corner ; and everything is treason ; and Laud was put into the humiliating position of having to stand up, and foren- sically guard every little thing he had ever done — to say, This is not judicial evidence ; as a legal court you cannot listen to such stories as these; only bring them to the test of legal evidence, and they disappear. He did this with wonderful acuteness. One after another the touchstone revealed the frivolity of the charge, and the legal air was cleared. " And what if they are true ? " went side by side with this process. " What do they come to ? "What am I charged with ? Be it so, that I was very angry with one Samuel Sherman, of Dedham, in Essex ; that I should say Dedham was a maritime town ; and that when the sum demanded of him was named, I should say, ' a proper sum.' Here is no proof but Sherman, and he in his own cause, and his censure was laid upon him by the Council table, and not by me. But let it be ever so true, here is no treason, but against Dedham or Sherman, that 1 can dis- cover." The examination went deeper still. Every corner of Lam- beth was searched for papers — his library seized and examined, and Prynne, with a Parliamentary warrant in his hand, prowled about the archiepiscopal rooms. Laud was alone all the while, and in the position of a man undergoing a painful operation ; a diary is part of a man's self : his was in Prynne's hands, undergoing keen inspections, with marginal comments and interpretations, and interpolations in the text added at will, with the view of a good forensic exhibition. He did not know what unpleasant disclosure of his most private thoughts might be every moment made. It was just the very species of pain — that feeling of " shame," which he was so singularly alive to. Prynne pursued him to the Tower, to his prison, to his bedroom. Prynne, with a lighted candle in his hand, appeared in the dead of the night in his bedroom, when he was in bed ; and Laud awoke and saw him picking his pockets of papers. He carried off his book of devotions away with him : Laud in vain telling him that there was nothing for Parliament to see there Archbishop Laud. 219 but only the addresses of his soul to God. He was laid bare, and all brought into the full vulgar light of a civil court. " My being in this place," is his final address to the Court, "recalls to my memory that which I long since read in Seneca : to have to defend one's-self in a court, even if one is acquitted, is a torment ; it is not a grief only, it is no less than a torment : — My Lords, it is no less than a torment for me to appear in this place." " Wit and eloquence," — we are quoting Prynne's admission, — " the good orator, the subtle disputant," — a " full, gallant, and pithy defence, which spake as much as it was possible for the wit of man to invent," showed Laud's resources under this mental pain. Bit by bit the whole mass of evidence against him crumbled away, and left the Court powerless in point of law. Strafford's precedent had been nullified by a special in- sulating act, confining it to the sole and single case of Strafford himself. A second single precedent, and one positively for the last time, had now to be instituted ; and a new special bill of attainder was passed for Laud. " On the 6th of January, 1 six peers, and it was strange to find so many in the English peerage, — to wit, Philip Earl of Pembroke, Henry Earl of Kent, William Earl of Salisbury, Oliver Earl of Bolingbroke, Dudley Lord North, and William Lord Gray of Wark, all of them Presbyterians, condemned the Archbishop to be hung on the 10th of January next. On the same day with this unrighteous sentence, Parliament abolished the Book of Common Prayer. "The manner of his death troubled the good Archbishop not a little ; and with a deeply Christian magnanimity and largeness of heart, whatever some poor, unworthy minds have thought or said about it, he was not above petitioning his enemies, that, considering he was a bishop in the Church, he might die by beheading rather than by the gibbet. Which request the Commons at first violently refused, but did after- wards assent unto. " The passing of the ordinance being signified to him by the then Lieutenant of the Tower, he heard it with so even and 1 We quote the account at the end of the Autobiography. 22 o Archbishop Laud. so smooth a temper as showed he neither was ashamed to live nor afraid to die. The time between the sentence and execu- tion he spent in prayers and applications to the Lord his God ; having obtained, though not without some difficulty, his chap- lain, Dr. Sterne, who afterwards sat in the chair of York, to attend upon him. His chaplains, Drs. Hey wood and Martin, he much wished might be with him. But it seems it was too much for him to ask. So instead, two violent Presbyterians, Marshall and Palmer, were ordered by Parliament to give him religious consolations, which consolations his Grace quietly declined. Indeed, little preparation was needed to receive that blow, which could not but be welcome, because long- expected. For so well was he studied in the art of dying, especially in the last and strictest part of his imprisonment, that by continual fastings, watchings, prayers, and such like acts of Christian humiliation, his flesh was rarefied into spirit, and the whole man fitted for eternal glories. " On the evening of the 9th, Sheriff Chambers of London brought the warrant for his execution. In preparation to so sad a work, he betook himself to his own, and desired also the prayers of others, and particularly of Dr. Holdsworth, fellow- prisoner in that place for a year and a half; though all that time there had not been the least converse betwixt them. This evening before his passover, the night before the dismal combat betwixt him and death, after he had refreshed his spirits with a moderate supper, he betook himself unto his rest, and slept very soundly till the time came in which his servants were appointed to attend his rising. A most assured sign of a soul prepared. "The 10th of January came, on which the Archbishop com- pleted his life of seventy- one years thirteen weeks and four days. His death was the more remarkable in falling on St. William's Day, as if it did design him to an equal place in the English calendar with that which William, Archbishop of Bourges, had obtained in the French ; who (being as great a zealot in his time against the spreading and increase of the Albigenses as Laud was thought to be against those of the Puritan faction and the Scottish Covenanters) hath ever Archbishop Laud. 221 since been honoured as a saint and confessor in the Gallican Church. " In the morning he was early at his prayers, at which he continued till Pennington, Lieutenant of the Tower, and other public officers, came to conduct him to the scaffold, which he ascended with so brave a courage, such a cheerful countenance, as if he had mounted rather to behold a triumph than be made a sacrifice ; and came not there to die but be translated. And though some rude and uncivil people reviled him, as he passed along, with opprobrious language, as loath to let him go to the grave in peace, yet it never discomposed his thoughts nor disturbed his patience. For he had profited so well in the school of Christ, that ' when he was reviled, he reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not, but committed his cause to Him that judgeth righteously.' " And as he did not fear the frowns so neither did he covet the applause of the people ; and therefore rather chose to read what he had to speak than to affect the ostentation either oi memory or wit in that dreadful agony ; whether with greater magnanimity than prudence can hardly be said. And here it folio weth from the copy, presented very solemnly by Dr. Sterne to his sorrowing master, the good King Charles, at Oxford. " The Archbishop s Speech upon the Scaffold. " Good People, — This is an uncomfortable time to preach ; yet 1 shall begin with a text of Scripture, Hebrews xii. 2 : ' Let us run with patience the race which is set before us : looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, Who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God/ " I have been long in my race ; and how I have looked to Jesus, the Author and Finisher of my faith, He best knows. I am now come to the end of my race ; and here I find the Cross, a death of shame. But the shame must be despised, or no coming to the right hand of God. Jesus despised the shame for me, and God forbid but that I should despise the shame for Him. 222 Archbishop Laud. " I am going apace, as you see, towards the Bed Sea, and my feet are now upon the very brink of it ; an argument, I hope, that God is bringing me into the Land of Promise ; for that was the way through which He led His people. " But before they came to it, He instituted a passover for them. A lamb it was, but it must be eaten with sour herbs. I shall obey, and labour to digest the sour herbs as well as the lamb. And I shall remember it is the Lord's passover. I shall not think of the herbs, nor be angry with the hand that gathereth them ; but look up only to Him who instituted that, and governs these : for men can have no more power over me than what is given them from above. " I am not in love with this passage through the Eed Sea, for I have the weakness and infirmities of flesh and blood plenti- fully in me. And I have prayed with my Saviour, Ut transiret calix iste, that this cup of red wine might pass from me. But if not, God's will, not mine, be done. And I shall most willingly drink of this cup, as deep as He pleases, and enter into this sea, yea, and pass through it, in the way that He shall lead me. . . . " And as for this people, they are at this day miserably mis- led : God of His mercy open their eyes that they may see the right way. For at this day the blind lead the blind ; and if they go on, both will certainly fall into the ditch. . . . "And though I am not only the first Archbishop, but the first man that ever died by an Ordinance in Parliament, yet some of my predecessors have gone this way, though not by this means : for Elphegus was hurried away and lost his head by the Danes ; Simon Sudbury in the fury of Wat Tyler and his fellows. Before these, St. John Baptist had his head danced off by a lewd woman ; and St. Cyprian, Archbishop ol Carthage, submitted his head to a persecuting sword. Many examples, great and good ; and they teach me patience. For I hope my cause in heaven will look of another dye than the colour that is put upon \t here. "And some comfort it is to me, not only that I go the way of these great men in their several generations ; but also that my charge, as foul as it is made, looks like that of the Jews Archbishop Laud. 22 o against St. Paul ; for he was accused for-the law and the temple, i.e. religion ; and like that of St. Stephen, for breaking the ordi- nances which Moses gave, i.e. law and religion, the holy place and the temple. " But you will say, Do I then compare myself with the in- tegrity of St. Paul and St. Stephen ? No ; far be that from me. I only raise a comfort to myself, that these great saints and servants of God were laid at in their times, as I am now." And after disclaiming ever having had an intention of in- troducing arbitrary power into the constitution, or the Papacy into the Church, and declaring that he had belonged, in heart and soul, always to the Church of England, and never looked beyond her, and simply aimed at her improvement and resto- ration, " I do therefore," lie ends, " here, in the presence of God and His holy angels, take it upon my death, that I never en- deavoured the subversion either of law or religion. And I desire you all to remember this protest of mine for my innocency in this, and from all treasons whatsoever. " But I have done. I forgive all the world, all and every of those bitter enemies which have persecuted me ; and humbly desire to be forgiven of God first, and then of every man. And so I heartily desire you to join in prayer with me. " eternal God and merciful Father, look down upon me in mercy, in the riches and fulness of all Thy mercies. Look upon me, but not till Thou hast nailed my sins to the Cross of Christ, not till Thou hast bathed me in the blood of Christ, not till I have hid myself in the wounds of Christ; that so the punishment due unto my sins may pass over me. And since Thou art pleased to try me to the uttermost, 1 most humbly beseech Thee, give me now in this great instant, full patience, proportionable comfort, and a heart ready to die for Thine honour, the King's happiness, and this Church's preservation. And my zeal to these (far from arrogancy be it spoken) is all the sin (human frailty excepted, and all the incidents thereto) which is yet known to me in this particular, for which I come now to suffer ; I say, in this particular of treason. But other- wise, my sins are many and great ; Lord, pardon them all, and those especially (whatever they are) which have drawn down 224 Archbishop Laud. this present judgment upon me. And when Thou hast given me strength to bear it, do with me as seems best in Thine own eyes. Amen." After saying the Lord's Prayer, he " rose, and gave his papers to Dr. Sterne, his chaplain, who went with him to his martyrdom, saying, ' Doctor, I give you this, that you may show it to your fellow-chaplains, that they may see how I went out of the world ; and God's blessing and mercy be upon you and them.' Then turning to a person named Hinde, whom he perceived busy writing the words of his address, he said, ' Friend, I beseech you hear me. I cannot say I have spoken every word as it is in my paper, but I have gone very near it, to help my memory as well as I could, but I beseech you, let me have no wrong done me ;' intimating that he ought not to publish an imperfect copy. ' Sir/ replied Hinde, ' you shall not. If I do so, let it fall upon my own head. I pray God have mercy upon your soul.' ' I thank you,' he answered ; ' I did not speak with any jealousy as if you would do so, but only, as a poor man goim; out of the world, it is not possible for me to keep to the words of my paper, and a phrase might do me wrong.' An intense, indescribable weariness of life appears in all Laud's last days, and deepens as the end approaches. He is absorbed in it. A long- sustained period of hopeless mental exertion left him fixed and riveted on the one idea of an end, as if he were under some dominant constraining emotion. " He now applied himself to the fatal block, as to the haven of his rest. But finding the way full of people who had placed themselves upon the theatre to behold the tragedy, he said, ' I thought there would have been an empty scaffold, that I might have had room to die. I beseech you, let me have an end of this misery, for I have endured it long.' Hereupon room was made for him to die. While he was preparing him- self for the axe, he said, ' I will put off my doublet, and God's will be done. I am willing to go out of the world ; no man can be more willing to send me out than I am willing to be gone.' " But there were broad chinks between the boards of the scaffold ; and he saw that some people were got under the very Archbishop Land. 225 place where the block was seated. So he desired either that the people might be removed, or dust brought to fill up the crevices, lest, said he, ' my innocent blood should fall upon the heads of the people.' " The holy Martyr was now ready for death, and very calmly waiting for his crown. It was like a scene out of primitive times. His face was fresh and ruddy, and of a cheerful countenance. But there stood, to look on and rail, one Sir John Clotworthy, an Irishman, and follower of the Earl of Warwick. He was a violent and wrong-headed man, an enthusiast, and very furious as a demagogue. Being irri- tated that the revilings of the people moved not the strong quiet of the holy Martyr, or sharpened him into any show of passion, ' he would needs put in and try what he could do with his sponge and vinegar.' So he propounded questions to him, not as if to learn, but rudely and out of ill-nature, and to expose him to his associates. ' What,' asked he, ' is the com- fortablest saying which a dying man would have in his mouth?' To which the holy Martyr with very much meekness answered, ' Cupio dissolvi et esse cum Ghristo.' ' That is a good desire,' said the other, ' but there must be a foundation for that divine assurance.' ' No man can express it,' replied the Martyr ; ' it is to be found within.' The busy man still pursued him, and said, " It is founded upon a word, nevertheless, and that word should be known.' ' That word,' said the Martyr, ' is the knowledge of Jesus Christ, and that alone.' But he saw that this was but an indecent interruption, and that there would be no end to the trouble, and so he turned away from him to the executioner, as the gentler and discreeter person ; and, putting some money into his hand, without the least dis- temper or change of countenance, he said, ' Here, honest friend, God forgive thee, and do thine office upon me in mercy.' Then did he go upon his knees, and the executioner said that he should give a sign for the blow to come ; to which he answered, ' I will, but first let me fit myself.' " He then knelt down for his last open prayer — short, but so expressive of his state of mind. A world of enemies had been long wishing him away ; self-defence had been hitherto a duty, M E.-l.] P 226 Archbishop Land. but now that they had fairly their own way, and got their ends, he was satisfied, ready to relieve them of his presence. He did not want to stay. Life is weariness ; death is rest. " ' Lord, I am coming as fast as I can. I know I must pass through the shadow of death before I can come to see Thee. But it is but mvbbra mortis, a mere shadow of death, a little darkness upon nature ; but Thou by Thy merits and passion hast broken through the jaws of death. So, Lord, receive my soul, and have mere} 7 upon me ; and bless this kingdom with peace and plenty, and with brotherly love and charity, that there may not be this effusion of Christian blood amongst them for Jesus Christ His sake, if it be Thy will.' " Then he bowed his head upon the block, ' down, as upon a bed,' and prayed silently awhile. No man heard what it was he prayed in that last prayer. After that he said out loud, ' Lord, receive my soul ;' which was the sign to the executioner, and at one blow he was beheaded." Laud's is an instance of a great career founded upon a dream ; a great, practical, powerful, political mind, that pursued a visionary object. The high feudal idea of Church greatness which led him through his course was an impracticable, unreal one, in the great revolution of society which had taken place. When the Church has once lost her hold upon the mass, and fallen from her power, she must be restored from below and not from above. She has to begin from the bottom again, and must be raised by the slow advance and gradual inoculation of the mass. She must rise again by a popular movement, and by influences and efforts upon the open area and level. Laud's movement was not a popular one, and we know not whether it could have been made so. The age was set one way, and he took perhaps the only engine there was for him. But to erect a high medieval prelacy and priestly power upon such a puritanised basis as the Church then presented, was, in strict ordo naturce, beginning at the wrong end. We are criticising the movement, and not the man. The man is dependent on his age, and must take what weapon comes to hand. It was better doing something than nothing ; using an awkward and inaccurate instrument than none at all. Great men upon their Archbishop Laud. 227 historical stage — it is not, we hope, a morbid sentiment to utter — are objects of compassion. The worldly machinery and the state of things they are in force them upon incon- gruities, and allow them only some one crooked weapon, some one angular posture, some one effective elbow thrust. Their own minds even become appropriated and naturalised by the sphere they work in, and see that one mode of acting only and no other. It remains for some clearer day to determine what minds really are in themselves, and what is the genuine in- trinsic man apart from hodiernal influences and moulding. Such a question would only take us wandering now into the shadowy region of moral metaphysics. Let us not be misunderstood, however. Laud's career was not unpractical because its aim was visionary ; not ineffective because it did not hit its own favourite mark. It had most important practical effects upon the English Church. The medieval philosophy made real physical discoveries in its dreams, and the searcher after the philosopher's stone was a real scientific man and chemist through that ideal medium. Laud's immediate acts and aims were most practical, and a great practical rise in the English Church was the effect of his career. He stopped her just in time, as she was rapidly going- down hill, and he saved all the Catholicism which the reign of Genevan influence had left her. There is no mistaking the tendencies of that period. That we have our Prayer-Book, our altar, even our Episcopacy itself, we may, humanly speak- ing, thank Laud. The holy table in all our churches, altar- wise at the east end, is a visible memorial of Laud which none can escape. It was not so before his time : it is not necessarily so by the actual rubric of our Church at this moment. That our Articles have not a Genevan sense tied to them, and are not an intolerable burden to the Church, is owing to Laud. He rescued them from the fast tightening Calvinistic grasp, and left them, by his prefixed " Declaration," open. Laud saved the English Church. That any one of Catholic pre- dilections can belong to the English Church is owing, so far as we can see, to Laud. He saw the good element that was in her, elicited, fostered, and nurtured it ; brought the incipient 228 Archbishop Laud. Church school to size aud shape, and left it spreading over the Church, and setting the standard. Let us be historically just. Let the dead have their due. Let us acknowledge facts, and allow their true stamp and authorship to remain upon them. The English Church in her Catholic aspect is a memorial of Laud. There is a reproach, however, in the shape of praise from which we are anxious to rescue him — the praise of a class who know next to nothing about him, and simply regard him as the patron of Church opulence and comfort, of easy posts of dignity and the Establishment system. It is too obvious a thing to say that this class would very soon have found him a disagreeable master. A small experience of the actual man would have modified their commendation. The dead cannot help themselves here, and persons who have not one single sympathy with Laud's self-devotion, deep priestly feeling, love of Church doctrine or discipline, and who, if they had lived in that day, would not have stirred a finger to save the Church from sinking into a Presbyterian establishment, can now safely eulogise him, and smoothly thank him for the official powers which they enjoy from him, and which they employ against that very Catholic spirit in the Church which they were originally instituted to defend. However, we observe this sort of praise dying away, as parties get to under- stand themselves and each other better ; and should anything which we have said tend at all to hasten its departure, we shall feel it no subject of regret. Ill CARLYLE'S OLIVER CROMWELL.* (April 1846.) Mk. Carlyle at last presents to us, invested with the dignity of circumstance and detail, his great man. Up to this time he has given us touches rather than portraits, and has spread himself over a heterogeneous field of heroism rather than exhibited a hero. Now we have the hero in person. Cromwell is the great man on whom Mr. Carlyle has alighted, and whom he holds up as the exemplar of true greatness to the English mind. His unsteady gyrations have at last found a centre ; his magnificent whirl round the universe has at last assumed locality, and Cromwell is the point of attraction. A philosophy, by condensing itself in one instance, sometimes gains in effectiveness. A rationale of heroism was not likeiy to tell much on English minds, which appealed to Mahomet, Odin, Dante, Knox, Luther, Eousseau, Dr. Johnson, and Vol- taire, as one grand united specimen of it, and which seemed to demand a complete mental suicide and decomposition in the recipient previous to its reception. Cromwell has, at any rate, the advantage of being one man, and of being an Englishman. He shows some English features; he appeals to some party associations. His cause has its admirers, and warm ones. Mr. Carlyle so far enjoys a nearer vicinity to common sense. His philosophy, not less dreamy and unquiet in itself, occupies more solid and more national ground ; its new and embodied shape claims for it some fresh attention, and his example re- minds us of his theory of heroism. * Oliver CromwelPs Letters and Speeches: with Elucidations. By Thomas Carlyle. London, 1846. 230 Carlyle s Cromwell. Before we proceed, then, to the contents of these volumes, we have something to say about the writer as a philosopher and teacher. Mr. Carlyle is the patron of revolutionary heroes. He admires heroes ; he prefers the revolutionary field for their display. He lives in this mixed atmosphere of thought ; he selects this mixed standard of character. He appears before us in two aspects, which we shall successively notice — as a preacher of hero-worship, and of national regeneration and reform. Mr. Carlyle's idea of the hero is a simple one. He lays down as essential one great characteristic, and one only. That characteristic is power. The hero is a person who energises on some large scale ; penetrates, makes his way, impresses, moves, and leads. He exhibits muscle and nerve, is great in inward resources and activities, and is able to defend and assail, to repel and conquer, to save and to destroy. He does this either by the intellect or by the sword, and is either statesman, warrior, or author, as may be. As the Stoic's hero was the wise man, the " sapiens et rex," Mr. Carlyle's is the strong man, the " king, conning, or able man." His might makes his right. His own power and impetus are his Bible and creed. He pro- duces effects, and he sees them ; he believes in his own right arm, and he need believe in little else. Such is Mr. Carlyle's hero of force. Whether or not upon other recognised princi- ples and other established standards his favourite may deserve to be canonised, or may deserve to be hung, he does not inquire. He may be a St. Bernard or he may be a Mirabeau. Voltaire and Eousseau, Dante and Dr. Johnson, are all literary heroes, because all produced great literary results. Mahomet, the medieval Churchmen, Knox, and Luther, are all religious heroes, because all produced great religious results. The hero, as " king," " priest," and " prophet," shows his strength, manifests an energetic impulse which carries him through; and that strength and impulse are in themselves evidences of his heroism. The moral result of such a view is obvious. A great ulti- mate standard is erected beyond the sphere and limits of morality ; an ulterior law is discovered superseding the imme- Carlyles Cromwell. 231 diate and contiguous distinctions of right and wrong. You see a great man whom you want to praise, but cannot consistently with moral considerations ; he is either bloodthirsty, or rapa- cious, or dissolute, or tyrannical. As you cannot then do it on a natural, you do it on an esoteric ground ; you pass by the moral basis, and you take the heroic. The heroic depresses and obscures the moral region, and secondary succumbs by natural law to final truth. Heroism becomes the common ground on which good and evil meet. Mr. Carlyle's philosophy creates a point of sight, at which those two seem to lose their distinction and present one common nature. An ulterior unity absorbs the immediate division between them, and viewed in their source and essential life, both seem to act together, do the same work, and do it equally well, equally gloriously. We lift up a veil; we remove a surface. We look through the apparent into the real, elementary, and fundamental ; and in a lower depth of reality and truth we see the mighty antagonisms of established morality joined in one root, and existing in an essential aboriginal identity. There, instead of good and evil dividing the world, the one grandeval element of Power exists alone, the substance of which those are the two subsequent aspects, shadows, and representatives. A naked monarchy of force includes all causes, all effects within it ; and we see the one essence into which all action, feeling, thought is re- solvable. Let not Mr. Carlyle imagine that because he makes much in his own way of a " sense of difference between right and wrong," and talks of it " filling all time and space," and " body- ing forth heaven and hell," and being the grand feature of those " puritan, old Christian ages — the element which stamps them us heroic ;" that because he talks of " the silences, the eternities, the life everlasting and the death everlasting," that his view really embraces what is understood by the difference between right and wrong. The sense of right and wrong takes its place with him amongst the other powerful instincts in nature which stimulate and rouse, lead to action, and produce effects. " Morality," he says, " what we call the moral quality of a man, is but another side of the one vital force wherebv he is and 232 Carlyles Cromwell. works." It is the source from which a great number of mag- nificent movements upon the surface of this globe have issued. The moral " sense " is a great fact in the world ; it is a grand, hidden, impelling principle, existing in the mind of the human race, and acting with majestic effectiveness, mysterious depth, and ghostly terror upon it. But this " sense " has no reality in Mr. Carlyle's system, of which it is the counterpart ; it re- fers to no absolute law, and appeals to no eternal standard in the Divine Mind. The Divine Mind, if we are taken thither at all, only appears to reflect in this philosophy the impulse, emotion, will, perception, regular or irregular, of the human ; we are sent from God to men again, and the "sense" of right and wrong, thrown back upon itself, goes on for ever a " sense " without its object, a perception of nothing, an introverted eye. The sense of right makes right ; what every man thinks right is right, because he thinks it. The wild, uncertain, irregular impression in men's souls rolls on and tosses like the ocean ; morality follows nature's passion and humour, and reflects all the sinuosities and extravagances of man's will. Words mean what they mean in the philosophy in which they are used. A religious man talks of a God, so does the Pantheist ; but the religious man means his God, and the Pantheist his. In the same way, a Pantheist can talk of good and evil, and of right and wrong, just as the religious man can ; but then they are his good and evil, and his right and wrong. They are shadows, subjective things, without existence out of the man's self. His light and wrong only exist in the idea of them in the human mind, and multiply and vary with the varying forms of that mind. Future reward and punishment undergo the same dis- solving process. The day of judgment, heaven and hell, are part of the moral idea; they are the enlivening, illustrating, pictorial ingredient in the idea. They reside within the idea, as a meaning resides within a word. The two worlds of futurity have a praBsential existence, as imagery within the mind, and simply exhibit the moral notion itself in scenic shape. And the anticipation of them as real future states is regarded as a pre- sent impression, influencing and felt in present time. In this way pantheism can take up any language and thought, even Carlyle s Cromwell. 233 the most religious : in the act of adopting it unsubstantiates them ; it coils round them like a serpent, and makes them in- ternal to itself; it imbeds them in its own idealism, and pre- sents them to the world again as parts of a new whole, and impregnated with a new and wholly subjective reality. We have stated Mr. Carlyle's heroic note. Now, " hero " is a word which has its own meaning, like other words ; though no dictionary may have exactly and summarily defined it. Its meaning ma}' be gathered from the language of poetry, legend, and history ; from current phraseology, ancient and modern. And we have to say, in limine, that Mr. Carlyle has not taken this meaning, but invented a totally different one of his own. Without at all wishing to impose a classical type of heroism, as such, upon modern times, we must nevertheless assert the fact that that type has taken deep possession of the world's imagination ; has formed the view of the poet, age after age, and run through epic, play, and romance. Ancient epic and modern tragedy display the same essential hero, clothed in different costumes. And from this original, universal type, Mr. Carlyle has wholly departed. According to the old authentic poetical type, a hero is a person who, in some special and marked way, shows, under a surface of outward activity and adventure, — that of the military life especially, — a soul superior to and not belonging to this world. The latter is the final and consummating characteristic ; the one to which all the rest tend and aspire. What taste is to the elegant man, and generosity to the noble man, and courage to the brave man, that the unearthly spirit was to the hero. The magnanimity, generosity, ardour, and refinement of ordinary virtue were transcendentalised in him ; a pure unalloyed nobility ran through him, like a vein celestial, and he had a soul akin to the supernatural. His birth typified it, and he was a demigod, and claimed, on one or other side, divine parentage. This pure and high nature, however, revealed itself through the turmoil and contention of the earthly field, and the hero had, consequently, appended to n*is celestial refinement and nobility, human force. One whole side of the picture exhibits him exerting this. 234 Carlyles Cromwell. He appears on the field of battle, and in the wild forest; fighting with men, and fighting with beasts ; he penetrates the awful cavern ; he sails on his voyage of discovery over the wide sea; the glitter of armour, the shout, the noise of trumpets, and cloud of dust, surround him. Yet even in this rude and tumultuous part of the scene, where naked power and gross earth seem to dominate, the hero was not wholly earthly, and simply strong. He pursued, on the field of battle and adven- ture, something which lay beyond it. The objects which the visible scene supplied served to draw him out, and gave him material to energise upon ; but he used them, and did not rest upon them ; they were instrumental to him, and not final ; they represented something above themselves, which he was really pursuing, while he was pursuing them. Higher aims and longings floated vaguely and unconsciously before him. The glory which swam before his eyes, and led him after it, was not his own selfish greatness, but a greatness out of him- self. It was not the tangible, material thing that could be taken hold of and grasped, that could be enjoyed, and make him feel satisfied as if he had a meal ; it mocked him, like the air ; it dazzled and fascinated, but refused to be caught ; it was a light from another sun, and a sample of the Olympian day, which had been sent down here to tempt and elevate him. On another side of the picture, however, the unearthly spirit comes out, more undisturbed and unalloyed ; and in serener, purer air, apart from the noisy strife, and trial of strength, the hero showed clearly what his true nature was, and what he tended to. We see him retiring from the public scene, to feed on his own thoughts and muse on things divine. He showed that he did not belong to this world, by being able to go willingly out of it ; and that he was not wedded to tumult and collision, as low, aspiring minds are, by being able to leave them. He gave another and yet more certain sign of his nature. He offered the best and truest evidence that he was not made for this world in the fact that he was born to suffer in it. Sometimes a long, laborious, unrecompensed life, some- times a premature death, was allotted him. Fate had set its hand upon him. He knew it, he felt he was o\iyoxpovio<; ) and Carlyle s Cromwell. 235 soon to pass away, and leave all behind him. This life was his outside, even while he had it : the world was not his own, even while he was in it ; the vivid consciousness of its transi- ency deprived him of that property and basis in it which the majority feel, and abstracted the joyous sensation of life and feeling of home from his earthly residence. An original un- congeniality with earth, again, issued by a natural law, in discord and collision with it afterwards ; and as life went along, it developed its first jar. The hero came into awkward contact with his fellow-men, was suspected, feared, disliked, and wronged. Half-envied, half- despised, he was an obnoxious person to the great ; he was sent out of the princely council, and told he was nobody. He was made to feel himself a stranger, isolated and alone. He wandered forth, and, leaving the field of emulation and glory, conversed with mute nature He saw earth and air, rocks and deserts, around him, or ' To the shore of the old sea he betook Himself alone, and, casting forth upon the purple sea His wet eyes, and his hands to heaven,' advanced his sad plea to ears divine : — Mijrep, iirei yS ereKes ye fj.ivvv6d8iov irep iovra, TifiTjv TTep pot ocpeXkev 'OAv/x7Tios eyyvakit-ai, Zevs vyj/ij3pefj.tTr]s, vvv S' ovte \xe rvrduv eriaev. He fulfilled, in this attitude and these trials, his original type. He did not mix well with the world, because he did not belong- to it. A soul is happy in the place for which it is born : if it disagrees with that place, it is not born for it. The super- natural element found itself in a material mass, and was not at home in it ; and uneasiness and melancholy resulted from the soul's lodgement in a lower world than that which it aspired to. He had another mark of his nature, besides his sufferings, and that was — his consolations. His fate, once submitted and bowed to by the hero, the gods did not leave their son to him- self, or refuse him the consolation which they made him need. If he supplicated all nature to feel for him, and invoked " the air divine, and winds, and the eternal rivers, and ocean's count- 236 Carlyle's Cromwell. less smiles, and the all-nourishing earth, and the all-seeing sun/ to see what had been done to him, and sympathise with his wrongs, he did not call in vain. For him the air breathed, the winds whispered, the rivers flowed, the ocean rolled ; the melodies of earth and sky were, all for him ; he understood and he imbibed them ; he listened and heard, in nature's stirs and sounds, things higher than nature, and her words had a mean- ing to him which they had not to others. They were sweet, significant, and sympathetic : he aided them by his own skill ; and, as he sat on the sea-shore, the music of his lyre blended with the music of the waves, to soothe and calm his spirits. Nature in ministering to the favourite of the gods, threw aside her veil, and showed another world behind her, and super- natural forms approaching him, with tender and compassionate looks. The caves of ocean heard his sighs, and all the bright nymphs came up, and flocked around him ; and the goddess of the sea heard, as she " Sat with her old sire in his deeps, and instantly appeared Up from the grey sea like a cloud ; sat by his side, and said, ' Why weeps my son ? W hat grieves thee ? ' " He was a sufferer for deeds of goodness in wilder, more de- solate, more savage scenes. He was manacled, chained, fastened with iron to the rock ; he was upbraided and reviled by the demons who were the executioners of his sentence, and then left alone with earth and air, barren desert and Caucasian soli- tude around him. Yet even here the sweet springs opened ; consolations that were never thought of came from their depths and hiding-places ; and from the far-off ocean, again, a sound is heard, a rustling in the air; and while he fears something- dreadful, and begins to shudder, a serene voice says softly in his ear, — " Be not afraid ; the nymphs of Ocean are we. We heard the iron sound : it rung through our caves. And we made bold, and shook off maiden modesty, and came to comfort you." In this way the hero's character and position disclose, throughout, the unearthly type on which he is formed. The rage invincible, the lion-grasp, the war with men and beasts, are not what make him heroic ; he might have all these, and still Carlyles Cromwell. 237 only be an animal monster and prodigy, a beast more powerful and dreadful than other beasts. What makes him heroic is a certain fine element, a supernatural vein ; a nature which does not mix with the common human mass, but cuts clean and dis- tinct, like some pure metal, through it. Force may give the foreground of the view, the strong shadows which throw out the character and set it off by contrast; but it is not that character itself. This does not supply the charm, the poetry, the interest. The interest comes from the hero's rest rather than his motion ; from the blow he feels rather than the one he strikes ; from himself, and not from his successes ; from that part of his character which is out of the world, and not from that part which is in it. And in proportion as the great men whom history brings before us have this character, in proportion as they rise above the greatness of strength and suc- cess, and show that they lived, throughout their career, in a higher atmosphere of feeling than this world's stimulants can create, in that degree they are heroic; in that degree, though they may be mixtures and startling ones, they come within the poetical definition. Wholly departing, then, from this type of the heroic, the philosophy before us has set up another standard, and another man ; and while the hero of poetry fundamentally does not be- long to this world, Mr. Carlyle's fundamentally does. His hero is an actual portion of the world, part of the vis naturae, of this present system, an offspring of that power of motion, good, bad, or indifferent, in mental nature, which influences, controls, pro- duces. He belongs to the universe of action, as a plant does to that of vegetation ; and he grows out of the world's vigour, sap, and vitality. The hero of poetry has his strength as an appendage, Mr. Carlyle's has it as his essence. Power, in the shape of penetrating intellect, or daring ardour, or strong right hand, constitutes him. The instanced hero may, or may not, have other qualities : the generalised one has this only. And the residuum which is left, after abstracting distinctions from Mahomet, the medieval Churchmen, and Cromwell, Johnson and Voltaire, Eousseau and Dante, presents power, and power pure, as the common heroism of all. Mr. Carlyle's hero is a 238 Carlyles Cromwell. pantheistic creation. The world, from beginning to end, is in a state of motion ; that motion indicates a force ; that force is the world's soul and animating principle. An anima mundi deity is thus made, who becomes the source of greatness and inspiration. In proportion as minds are in communication with that universal Force, and derive strength and energy from it, in that proportion they are necessarily divine men, demigods, and heroes. As impersonations of the world's life and reality, they are emanations of its god ; and they deserve the worship of all real, hearty, and genuine minds. The hero of poetry, and that of Mr. Carlyle's philosophy, are both godlike, both divinely born, possess both a kind of divinity, according to the respec- tive systems to which they belong. But the one is a moral, the other a physical creation ; the one is the hero of religion and the other of pantheism. In ethical language, one of these theories chooses strength, the other beauty, as its standard. A coarse and, at the same time, a narrow and confined view of character, is the result of the pantheistic choice. Mr. Carlyle looks out for one noisy, tumultuous, obtrusive faculty; one that comes out and marches upon the open area of the world, and astonishes us by its feats ; but which has debased as much as it has ennobled man, and which has disfigured quite as much as it has moulded him. He takes the faculty of moving and acting as such, and overlooks its coarseness in its power, its materialism in its big- ness, its hardness and poverty internal for the largeness of its outward field. He commits himself to one part of human nature, and that an inferior part. He goes off upon a swing ; he is carried away by an eccentric oblique impetus, and throws himself into a grotesque, monstrous, and one-eyed philosophy. He connects in his mind always form with shadow, chaos with reality. He likes the real, and therefore he likes the chaotic too ; and thinks it so much clear gain, in point of greatness, when the world goes back from order, symmetry, and law, to rude and aboriginal power again. The region of beauty in human nature his eye catches, and no more. He sees there is one, but he does not enter into it, or allow himself that rest and serenity of mind in which he could imbibe its scenery and Carlyles Cromwell. 239 forms. He sees the beautiful as a fact in the moral world, but he does not give it its place. He sees fine feelings, tendernesses, and sensibilities in it, but they are evanescences, and miDgle immediately with, and are absorbed in, the dominant mass of materialism and physical greatness. The poet made beauty the dominant quality ; he gave it the supremacy ; he gave it the divine, immortal seat in man's nature, and raised, it to the " templa serena." And in doing so, he took a larger view. He saw all that there was in human nature, all its powers, talents, gifts, capabilities ; its strength and its versatility ; though he subordinated them all to the standard of the /cakov, and made a true and inward moral grace of character the result towards which all in human nature should work and tend. He did more justice to human nature than the philosophy before us does, and would not allow the tranquil and calm, and, to some eyes, poor and feeble features of it, to be shoved aside or buried. The physical and poetical standards of heroism thus take their respective lines. The one is latitudinarian and omni- genous. It views all greatness, good and bad, in one common aspect, collects all on one common ground, and assembles a whole world of mixed and heterogeneous power upon its area. The poetical standard selects and forms a school. Its line runs, like a marble vein, over the world of history ; and it hands down, in an irregular, but perceptible descent of minds from the first — through ages ancient and modern, and in classical, chivalrous, and other shapes — its sacred and pure gift. A char- acter almost indefinable, but very distinct to the eye, old and traditionary, yet always young, and never obsolete, marks this heroic descent and succession. Mr. Carlyle may raise a mighty Babel of greatness, and rend the air with the bray of discor- dant instruments, the clang of brass, and noises from the stupendous throat of his hundred-headed world. Poetry will reject the unseemly din, and retire to her own domain. All sound is not music : all power is not heroism. She tunes and tempers her greatness, and makes it musical. Her note is clear and fine, a unity, and not a chaos of sound ; she patronises one essential spirit, and one only, in her great men. And if 240 Carlyles Cromwell. asked what right she has to her exclusive standard, and why she admits some greatness, and rejects other, from her heroic ground ? her answer is easy. She has a right to her view, just as any philosophy has to its view. She forms her standard of a hero ; and in her opinion no one is such who does not answer to it. She has, moreover, established her own sense of the word ; and literature receives it with that sense attached to it. She has possessed herself of a domain, and she must decide and rule upon it. If asked, therefore, what our test of heroism is, we answer simply, the poetical one. That greatness which is the legitimate object of poetical praise is an heroic one ; that which is not, is not. If some great men are poetical characters, and others are not, the latter must take the consequences of the distinction ; but hero is a poetical term, and none but poetical characters have a right to it. Whoever can think Knox, Crom- well, and Voltaire poetical characters, to him they are heroes ; but he must decide the question whether they are or not through the medium of poetry. An obvious corollary results from the comparison we have been drawing. Mr. Carlyle is guilty of an express abuse of language, in applying the epithet heroic to that discordant jumble of human talents and qualities to which he has applied it. He has a perfect right, as a philosopher, to create his great man, and to create him on what principle he pleases ; but he has no right to give him a name, which has already its owner, and to pillage an old-established system of thought of its lawful and hereditary property. He has no right to adorn his naked originalities with the seizures of intellectual violence. He has no right to divide a word from its legitimate and authentic use ; that to which the voice of poetry, and the expressed sentiment of mankind through successive ages, have bound it ; and attach it, endowed with a new meaning, to a new and hostile theory. His great man of force is what he is to the eye of fact ; but to the eye of language he is, unquestionably, no more a hero than he is an angel. He is not the person whom the ascertained feeling of the human race regards as heroic. We shall indulge in no indignation at the pollution of a sacred name, or complain of a touch because it vulgarises and desecrates. We shall Carlyle s Cromwell. 241 assert here the simple right of property, which established thought has in its own words ; and deny the right of a new philosophy to seize and appropriate them. We turn to another side of Mr. Carlyle's teaching. The Puritan movement figures in these volumes as a great heroic outbreak, a semi- divine manifestation of power and life, a great birth, a magnificent eruption from the deep reservoir of spiritual nature. But one special and pressing reason, over and above that which their peculiar character furnishes, attaches Mr. Carlyle to it. The Puritans were revolutionary heroes. They upset an existing system. They were a class of political and religious reformers. He thinks the exemplar a useful one for these times ; and his Puritanism, in one aspect, is a repetition of his " French Eevolution " and " Chartism." He says, the world is now dried up, barren, dead ; there is no reality, no life. Quackeries, shows, formula?, superficial semblances, shadows, chimeras dominate. " All England stands wringing its hands, asking itself, nigh desperate, What farther ? Eeform Bill proves a failure; Benthamese Radicalism, the gospel of 1 enlightened selfishness,' dies out, or dwindles into five-point Chartism. What next are we to hope or try ? Five-point Charter, Free Trade ; Church Extension, Sli ding-Scale ; what, in Heaven's name, are w T e next to attempt ? The case is pressing, and one of the most complicated in the world. Never had God's message to pierce thicker integuments into heavier ears." In this state of things he grasps and puts before us a strong revolutionary character, and an age of stir and upset. The world wants new blood. He gives it. He offers living- strong reality. He conjures up a revolutionary scene, and bids us imbibe strength and ardour from the sight. And these volumes proceed, in part, from the writer's desire for a large social and political renovation. One or two words then on our author as a reformer. We quite agree with Mr. Carlyle in thinking that the world wants amendment. There are few ages in which it has not wanted it. But we must question whether he has adopted the proper mode of administering the chastisement and executing the change. The process of teaching is not suitably conducted by railing M.E.-I.] Q 242 Carlyles Cromwell. and sneering, flinging irony and gibes about, inventing epithets and calling names. What end can be answered by that per- petual, inexhaustible vituperation, which cares not for shape, limit, temper, or dignity, so that it be vituperation ; so that it only feels its spirit up, its mouth open, and the words going forth ? What solemn impression can be created by that storm and hurly-burly of nicknames which Mr. Carlyle raises ? What can such a lesson principally do, but make men stare ? What age was ever awed or subdued by the most original and viva- cious discharges of hisses and groans ? And how is the present one to be expected to listen with much reverence to one raging tongue, and one hoarse throat interminably going, reproaching it with quackeries, shams, shadows, forms, chimeras, semblances, cants, hearsays, lies, basenesses, falsehoods, delu- sions, impostures, nightmares, Mammonisms, Dilettantisms, Midas-eared philosophers, double-barrelled Aristocracies, cash- payments, Laissez-faires, egotisms, blockheadisms, flunkeyisms, dastardisms, lacquered sumptuosities, belauded sophistries, serpent graciosities, confusions, opacities, asphyxias, vacuities, phantasm agorisms, phantasms, nether darknesses, abyss, chaos, and night ? " Our poor English existence," with " its formulae and pulpetries, its lath and plaster hat, seven feet high upon wheels, perambulating the streets;" — with "its Bobus and Company, Pugshott and Company, black and white surplices, Controversies, Mammon and Shotbelt Gospels, sham woven cloth, and Dillettanti legislations, devils-dust, withered flimsi- nesses, godless basenesses, deaf dead infinite injustices, accursed ironbellies of Phalaris bulls," is not likely to be benefited by an instruction which assumes such a shape, tone, and manner. The world, whether a sham or a real one, whether good, bad, or indifferent, is going along the street to its daily work, and on turning a corner sees a man mounted on a tub, making faces at it. The world looks for an instant on the tortuous, wild, attitudinising figure, on the open mouth and straining throat, says, Strange man ! and goes on again. And it would be diffi- cult to deny the right of the world to do so. It does so often enough when it has no right; but here it has this vantage-ground. He will say, perhaps, that this is merely his style, and that Carlyles Cromwell. 243 he has real meaning underneath it ; and he will charge with unreality the attachment of an importance to style and form. But style and form are important. They are an expression of the man : we cannot separate the external from the internal, the expression from the idea : we want both. A religious teacher cannot, as such, either paint his face or stripe his legs ; the difference would be a purely external one, but his congre- gation would not listen to him with such an outside. The consciousness of a real vocation to reform an age should fix seriousness on every feature, should mould and temper, subdue and chasten, the whole man. A work upon the mind is a weight upon it; it should show itself as such. Is not this what a man feels on giving the least serious advice to one fellow- creature ? the mere approach of face to face, and eye to eye, foi one moment, with a person whom he is really advising, en- genders, as if by some mesmeric impulse, a seriousness which communicates itself to the whole air. He feels he is doing a grave thing. Really felt, this consciousness is as effective an internal check as any in the whole department of morals ; it makes a man necessarily curb and tame the whole expression of himself, and it impresses upon him the fact that he is not his own master ; that he is not to do what he likes, and has not the right to run into indefinite expansion and vigour. The task ol influencing modifies even innocent mental liberty, and prunes even natural luxuriance and life. People have a right to expect that one who comes to reform and teach them should carry some external marks of a master about him, and show the authoritativeness of self-control. If he is run away with, he is not the man to lead. Mr. Carlyle's philosophy will tell him that the form is part of the thing. Measure, law, limitation, run through all nature, though stiffness and formality do not. They are not to be despised with impunity. The word is part of the meaning, the author's style is part of his mind. And especially is form essential for a man in dealing with his fellow- men. If a writer thinks that, provided thought only have strength and originality, it has a right to be chaotic, he is mistaken. He must reduce his chaos into form. He must do justice to himself, he must express his own thoughts as those 244 Carlyle's Cromwell, thoughts themselves deserve to be expressed. A reformer ought not to be a jabberer : we respect Mr. Carlyle's genius, but he undoubtedly prates. He appears to think that genius will carry down everything. It will not. Genius requires a mind to take care of it, as any other gift does. A man should know how to use his own genius : if he does not, he is just like some precocious child, who with deep thoughts, and metaphysical shadows haunting him, is appended to them rather than they to him ; and who possesses his own ideas, only as a basin does water, by containing them. Ideas seem to come out of a for- ward child upon a physical principle : they are drawn out of him as if by an electric process, and the receptacle of them is not their master. With equal truth, the full-grown man some- times shows a genius of which he is nearly as little the master, though in another way : a genius which pulls him after it, and does what it likes, which bounds, leaps, and dashes on at will, and commits itself to a combination of force and chance ; a genius which does not bend us before the man, but has its separable value, as an intellectual material by itself. We make use of it as we would of any valuable rough ore from the mine, and extract what we like out of it. This is the general use made of Mr. Carlyle. He provides in great force a certain deep aboriginal class of ideas, and persons go to him for them ; but they give their own application and use to what they take ; they do not accept *he thinker's ; they use his thought as they would so much raw material ; they treat his mind as a quarry ; and the strong, vigorous, chaotic head is more their servant than their master. What adds to the unfavourable impression produced by Mr. Carlyle's mode of teaching, is the fact that we are totally unable to discover what it is which he teaches. He teaches reality ; but what is reality ? A man is no more the gainer for being told simply that he must be exceedingly real, than for being told simply that he must be exceedingly wise. You tell a person ten times over that he must be wise. Is he to knit his brows, to be grave, to begin to generalise ? What is he to do in consequence of that recommendation ? So when you tell him in ten successive sentences to be a reality : what is he to Carlyle s Cromwell. 245 do ? Is he to shake himself ? Is he to look determined and irresistible ? The real difficulty lies in saying what is con- tained in reality, and here Mr. Carlyle gives us no informa- tion. According to him we are real by not being formulae, and we avoid being formulae by being real. If the perplexed inquirer demands a little more light, he is told to converse with the abysses. If he is still dissatisfied, he is advised to plunge into the eternities. It is not, however, a needlessly severe com- ment upon such explanations to say that they rather require light than bestow it. Mr. Carlyle instructs by simple epithets ; but how will a population of valets and a world of flunkeys be extricated from their misery by being simply made acquainted with their name ? And what idea will it convey to an ordi- nary tradesman, farmer, or country gentleman, to tell him he is a sham ? He will not understand why he is one ; much less how he is to cease to be one. He is informed of a crowd of semblances and shadows which surround him, but he has been accustomed to regard the world as solid, and he feels easy on the subject. If he starts with thinking Mr. Carlyle a false alarmist, he is not likely to have his impression undone, for Mr. Carlyle gives no reasons and enters into no details. He is told he is a sham ; and that he ought to be a substance ; and that is all which our author's moral philosophy tells him. He must digest that lesson at his leisure, and make out of it what he can. Mr. Carlyle's Eeality is a magnificent abstraction ; it refuses to be caught and grasped, and will give no account of itself for the satisfaction of sublunary and practical curiosity. It wages an eternal war with shadows : it is a disperser of phantoms ; lies flee before it ; formulae shudder at its approach. That is all we know of its nature and its characteristics. It carries on a great aerial battle nobody knows where ; and teaches with sublime infallibility nobody knows what. Moreover, so far as Mr. Carlyle allows a faint notion of his meaning to escape on this subject, he appears to contradict himself, and to praise under the name of reality two states of mind which are diametrically opposed to each other. In drawing his picture of former heroic ages he insists upon the intense reality of belief which they respectively exhibit. He 246 Carlyle s Cromwell. makes the stern and undonbting faith which each had in a definite religion to be the heroic element in them ; and he rejoices in the exclusive, fierce, unwavering, enthusiastic, and persecuting zeal of Mahometan, Catholic, and Puritan. But what he recommends to the modern aspirant to heroism is to uelieve in no definite religion at all. He places himself in a position ah extra to all religions : he wishes his followers to do the same. His image of a modern intellectual hero makes him a universalist and a philosophical spectator ; a contemplator of phenomena, a despiser of creeds ; an acceptor of all religions, and believer in none. He praises furious faith in one age and fastidious scepticism in another. He lays down dogmatic pre- mises, and draws an infidel conclusion. The believing and disbelieving are certainly two contrary moral states of mind ; and we do not understand how both can be praised at once. The results upon the world, too, must be wholly different. Does Mr. Carlyle suppose that an ambiguous neutrality of mind can produce the same powerful and striking results upon the human mass that undoubting conviction can ? that a faith which is diffused over all religions is as strong as that which is concentrated in one ? and that scepticism can be as enthusi- astic and effective as belief ? If he does, we do not envy his knowledge of human nature. Latitudinarianism may have its charms as a philosophy, but, Mr. Carlyle may depend upon it, it never has been, and never will be, a worker. The systems that have done work in the world have been systems of fixed belief. He contradicts his own facts and overthrows his own test of power when he commends a philosophical balance and neutrality He cannot have intellectual fastidiousness and enthusiastic ardour in one system ; and common sense rejects his grotesque, ridiculous, and centaurian image of an evangel- ising sceptic and Epicurean prophet and reformer. Mr. Carlyle then should know that there may be such a thing as talking unreally of unreality, and canting against cant. He talks against all mankind for not acting ; but we do not hear that he himself has ever done anything but the former. He has at his tongue's end a set of words. He repeats them ad nauseam. He sits in his own chair and Carlyle's Cromwell. 247 talks. What more suitable occupation could he pursue, if he were himself a sham ? We do not want to throw a slight on all talking, for some or other form of the process is necessary if a man wants to communicate his ideas to others. But the talk of a reforming philosopher ought certainly to approve itself as the issue of an ethical, and not a mere feverish, industry, and ought to rise above the gratification of mental power. If he simply goes on upon his swing, vents his phraseological exuberance and imagination, and indulges in one endless chaotic repetition of some favourite ideas, his genius and originality will not of themselves save him from suspicion, and the onus of showing cause why he should not be considered a talker rests upon him. Mr. Carlyle's philosophy has detained us longer than we intended. We now come to the contents of the present volumes. These put before us, in the first instance, as we said above, with much rude power and vividness, a general type of heroism, which the author considers the Puritan movement to display. Puritan heroism forms the general ground of the book, and supplies the mould out of which the individual hero and chief exemplar issues. As revolutionary heroes then, strong enthusiasts, upsetters of old systems and established shows, and introducers of forcible realities, — Mr. Carlyle throws all the grandeur and sublime mysticism which his peculiar phraseology can com- mand upon the Puritans. He talks of their " armed appeal to the invisible God of heaven," of " heroic Puritanism," " awful Puritanism," of the " eternal melodies " which flowed, the " eternal soul of things " which spake, in them. The " abysses, the black chaotic whirlwinds," produced them ; and " the dark element, the mother of the lightnings and the splendours," was their mother also. They were in sympathy with the depths, and they were projected from the eternities. They were pro- phets, priests, and kings. The " flame-gilt heaven's messenger taught men to know God, G>eout afterwards, by solicitation, representation, and even denunciation from the Cornmonwealth's-men and many officers of the army, he decided to attend some better season and opportunity in the business, and refused at this time." We have to remark on Mr. Cartyle's mode of treating this transaction. He is obliged fairly to give up his hero in it, and laugh at him. But he will not say that he is laughing. His usual tone about Cromwell goes on : only he laughs too. And the biographer, equally tender to himself and to his hero, en- deavours to save his own credit for shrewdness and his hero's greatness too by a critical addition made but not acknowledged. A most grotesque mixture is the result. He exposes Cromwell, and shields him at once ; applauds and sneers : takes care to show that he sees through him, and worships him as if he were quite innocent of seeing anything all the time. This is not straightforward. When a biographer is obliged to alter his Condyles Cromwell. 301 tone, he ought to do it avowedly, and give his reason. The laugh at and adoration of the same person at the same time compose a hollow compound, the discordant ingredients in which must be detected immediately by a reader's taste. And transcendental admiration and sympathy have a palpably and obtrusively uncongenial accompaniment in such a running comment as Mr. Carlyle's — a broken stream of slang which appears to be proceeding from a wild -beast show keeper, showing off the peculiarities and eccentricities of his favourite animal with more of hilarity than reverence : a comment which gives us at intervals critical announcements, such as " clearing his throat to get under way," " Sentence breaks down," "His Highness is plunging in deep brakes and im- broglios ;" ironical laughter — " Draw me out," " I understood I was the young lady," " The young lady will and she will not;" "Young lady now flings a little weight into the other scale:" adoration and encouragement going on all the while, "ah!" "well!" "yes, your Highness!" "Hear his Highness!" "Poor Sovereign man !" Such is the picture which Cromwell's Protectorate presents : a picture of a powerful and subtle mind at a stand-still, unable to subdue the material it had to subdue. Cromwell could not bring the nation into order : it got the better of him ; it would go on in its own way. That he would have been an efficient governor, if he could once have got the country with him, we do not doubt : but he could not do that. He was a successful governor prospectively, and hypothetically, not actually. Given the national position, he would carry it out ; but he could not get the position. His administration, as it was, was successful as an executive, and as an executive only : where he had his own way he managed well ; he mastered the mechanism of govern- ment, but he could not get possession of men's hearts or minds. The sphere of national sympathy was one above him. He had formed his own powerful army clique ; he gained the executive of the country by means of that clique ; and once in possession of the executive he ruled by its simple force. This was a won- derful exhibition of strength ; but an exhibition of strength it was : he could force, he could not win men. His Protectorate 302 Carlyle s Cromwell. thus presents a succession of acts of summary but impotent despotism. He could do nothing with his constitutionalising Parliaments but dissolve them ; and that had no effect beyond the moment. He dissolved, he reassembled, he dissolved, he reassembled again : all in vain. He had the physical power of motion, and that was all : and he could transfer bodies out of the house, but could not control minds in it. The stiff repub- licanism of the army, which he half led and half bowed to, was equally unmanageable. Old comrades could not bear him, and would not be coaxed. The fierce Fifth-Monarchy spirit was equally unmanageable. Cromwell benefited largely by his middle and comprehensive policy ; and he suffered too. If he had got some hold over all parties, he had entire hold over none : and if he had forestalled antagonists he had weakened friends. He was nobody's idol. He had committed himself to no party, and no party loved him : and the deference which each side paid to a power resulting from a connection with all sides, was a cold and reluctant one. Moreover, the loyalty oi the nation at large had been only buried by late events, and not extinguished; the Royalist party was strong, though dor- mant, in the country; and the body of "Neutrals and those who had deserted the cause," as Cromwell calls those who had become tired of the rebellion and wanted the old family back again, was so great, that it was necessary by the enactment of stringent "qualifications" to exclude them positively from all share in the representation of the country, and keep them down by literal Act of Parliament. A freely chosen Parlia- ment, one sent up by a constituency to which no excluding " qualifications " were applied, the Protector boldly confesses in one of his speeches, " would have delivered their cause into the hands of those who had deserted them, and were as neuters ;" would have set a Royalist party "in the saddle;" would have caused " all the power to come into the hands of those who had very little affection" for him; and "delivered the liberties of the nation into the hands of those who had never fought for them." He confessed, i.e. that the nation at large, if it had been allowed to speak for itself, would have decided against the Revolutionists ; that it had to be fairly coerced into Carlyles Cromivell. 303 its new liberties ; and that if it could, it would have sent up a Royalist Parliament. The nation had to be coerced then, and it was coerced. An iron insulated executive kept the country- down by its official machinery and its standing army : it al- lowed neither Parliament nor people to speak ; and existed by pure force amid a nation which it could not convert or reconcile. It had an artificial position which was sure to go when Crom- well went. So far from the Restoration being an artificial movement, its postponement was artificial. The nation was ready and waiting ; and slid into it naturally as soon as Crom- well had gone, but he stopped it now. The will which had forced a rebellious position upon the nation sustained it against the nation, and by one huge continuous effort kept off the inevitable reaction. But it was an effort, and it was a struggle with the natural course of events. Cromwell's government was one working against the grain ; a succession of jars, collisions, sudden checks, and dead locks ; gagging all wills, gaining none ; silencing opponents, and not establishing itself. The reader has now a rough outline of Cromwell's career before him ; it remains to draw the conclusion from it, and form a judgment of the man. We are aware we have anticipated this judgment in remarks that we have at times made. It is quite impossible indeed for any one who uses the recognised historical language about Cromwell not to judge him in the act of describing him ; for history has passed its sentence. Never- theless we wish to regard the facts before us as much as pos- sible as simple data, and no more. Mr. Carlyle has a very simple answer to the question, whether Cromwell was a hypocrite or not; one much more simple, in our opinion, than acute. He has the most un- bounded, impetuous, jubilant confidence in him ; he enjoys the undisturbed luxury of infantine security and primeval faith, with respect to his biographical subject-matter. Whatever Cromwell does is great, pure, splendid ; if Cromwell does it that is enough : it springs from the depths and the eternities : not a breath must be heard, not a look endured, against it. Whatever Cromwell has done, is doing, or may be about to do, 304 Carlyle s Cromivell. must all be submissively swallowed ; and the reader must have a positive belief in him, as if he were some divine principle out of which nothing but what was admirable could proceed. Whatever shape it assumes, the divine reality is the same ; and all the issues of the ever-involving problem simply present themselves to be admitted, upon a law of mathematical neces- sity. The biographer attends obsequiously on his hero, and changes as he changes. When Cromwell thought a thing, it was right; when he ceases to think it, it is not right. Mr. Carlyle has an unqualified contempt for ceremonial so long as Cromwell is a plain republican ; but when Cromwell has state coaches, life-guards, lacqueys, and pages, Mr. Carlyle has then a word to say for " due ceremonial and decent observance." A dirty shirt was heroic when Cromwell wore one : a gold hat- band and velvet are not unheroic when Cromwell becomes a neat dresser. Revolutionism was exalted when Cromwell was empty; when Cromwell is satisfied, revolution has done enough. He is fierce and destructive with Cromwell : he talks very respectable conservatism with Cromwell too. The Calvinistic fury of army independency was heroic, while it was raising Cromwell ; but when Cromwell has to turn from his elevation upon his elevators, and put his Calvinistic friends in jail, Mr. Carlyle performs the office of constable upon them. The re- ligious enthusiasm of a former stage is the " Anabaptist Sans- culottism" of a later; and the "lightning and splendour" of the army preacher becomes fuliginous, sooty, and smoky as soon as it darts upon the Protector. He does not explain these variations : the one fact of Cromwell explains all. With an overbearing and somewhat childish exultation he brandishes his fact ; he thrusts his idol on our captured worship ; he glories in a bravo demonstration of force, and rides triumphantly in the wake of the great man to whom he has appended him- self. He attaches himself to his hero like an affectionate but unreasoning animal. And Cromwell's dog, if the Lord Pro- tector kept such a companion, never looked in his face more wistfully, or licked his hands more confidingly, or gambolled about him more exuberantly, than his biographer in mind does. He will hear no inferences, believe no facts, against his hero : Carlyles Cromwell. 305 * he will not say why he will not hear and why he will not believe. He has no reason. He is contented, he rejoices, he is delighted at having none. He is proud of being unreasonable, and having the 0. C. instinct pure and unalloyed within him. Such is Mr. Carlyle's treatment of the question of Cromwell's character. Further, he does this upon a principle. He has a theory on the subject of great men, the benefit of which he appears to allow to all who can claim that character. He says we have no right to be suspicious. " The vulpine sharpness which considers itself to be knowledge, and detects, is mis- taken." Great men must be trusted. It is ungenerous to suppose that they act upon inferior motives. For example : Cromwell is generally thought to have been influenced by a love of power; and there are signs about him to common eyes positively demonstrative of that motive. Mr. Carlyle takes immediately the high ground with this suspicion, and asks, with lofty simplicity, how such a man as Cromwell could love power ? Flunkeys and valets love power in- deed, but Cromwell had far too deep, too genuine a mind to care for so poor a thing. " Your Cromwell, what good could it do him to be noticed by noisy crowds of people ? God, his maker, already noticed him. He, Cromwell, was already there ; no notice could make him other than he already was. Till his hair was grown grey, and life from the down-hill slope was all soon to be limited, not infinite but finite, and all a measurable matter how it went — he had been content to plough the ground and read his Bible. He, in his old days, could not support it any longer without selling himself to falsehood, that he might ride in gilt carriages to Whitehall, and have clerks with gilt papers haunting him, ' Decide this, decide that,' which in utmost sorrow of heart no man can perfectly decide ! What could gilt carriages do for this man ? From of old was there not in his life a weight of meaning, a terror and a splendour, as of heaven itself ? His existence there as a man, set him beyond the need of gilding. Death, judgment, and eternity : these already lay as the back- ground of whatsoever he thought, or did. All his life lay M.E.-I.] u 306 Carlyles Cromwell. "begirt, as in a sea of nameless thoughts, which no speech of a mortal could name. God's Word, as the puritan prophets of that time had read it : this was great, and all else was little to him. To call such a man ' ambitious,' to figure him as the prurient windbag above described, seems to be the poorest solecism. Such a man will say, ' Keep your gilt carriages and huzzaing mobs, keep your red-tape clerks, your influentialities, your important businesses. Leave me alone, leave me alone ; there is too much life in me already.' " . . . " Power ? Love of power ? " he asks, in another place ; " does ' power ' mean the faculty of giving places, of having newspaper paragraphs, of being waited on by sycophants ? To ride in gilt coaches, escorted by the flunkeyisms and most sweet voices, — I assure thee, it is not the Heaven of all, but only of many ! Some born kings I myself have known, of stout natural limbs, who, in shoes of moderately good fit, found quiet walking handier ; and crowned themselves almost too sufficiently, by putting on their own private hat, with some spoken or speechless, ' God enable me to be king of what lies under this ! For eternities lie under it, and Infinitudes, — and Heaven also and Hell. And it is as big as the Universe, this Kingdom ; and I am to con- quer it, or be for ever conquered by it, now while it is called to-day.' " Mr. Carlyle seems, from the tenor of these passages, to suppose that great men like in the first instance governing themselves : that they derive their principal and most genial satisfaction from that employment ; preferring it to the con- quest of cities, and to the vulgar grasp of political or terri- torial power : that, however, in great emergencies, and when the cries of distressed human nature are heard, imploring their interference, they are sometimes induced to exchange that edifying and delightful work for a more ordinary and material one ; and that then reluctantly tearing themselves from the concerns of their internal empire, they are seen heading- armies and presiding over administrations. Under this happy conviction, the desire to go beneath the surface of a great man's professions and language is put down as " vulpine." The " vulpine intellect " is requested to absent itself from this Carlyles Cromwell. 307 department of observation. Greatness is not allowed to be probed. And a large and generous, admiring swallow, and confiding instinct, supersede the operation of caution, inquiry, and discernment. A tendency to this view, though not carried so far as Mr. Carlyle carries it, is observable in a popular line of thought among us. There is a reaction from a cold age, and cynical schools, to a more generous and enthusiastic philosophy. An admiration of greatness is, so to speak, fashionable. It is con- sidered to give the proper point of view from which to look at human nature and character ; and a great man, who has an historical position, meets with a very liberal and sympathetic reception. Is he a great man ? is the question asked ; and, if he is, without positively negativing other considerations, there is a disposition to stop short there, and be content with that aspect of him. And greatness of the powerful and bold stamp, particularly if its power and boldness have an enthusiastic look, has become an especial favourite. Much pleasure is felt in this admiration, and the mind of the admirer seems to itself to be enlarging and expanding in sympathy with its object. Though the fact does not necessarily follow, the sensation is produced ; and it is a stimulating and grateful one. The dis- position to deal on generous and unconfined terms with Genius is thus naturally encouraged, and the heroic sympathy ad- vances on a principle of internal progress and development. The mind wishes to be in harmony with the grand and the lofty, the large and the able, the splendid and the terrible, in the world of character ; and in this congenial spirit embraces the phenomena of majesty, power, and genius, on their broad and ocular ground. It likes all strong developments of character : it takes to all forms of enthusiasm. An idea in fashion becomes, by an intelligible process, more or less unconsciously pedantic, and a too simple affection for great- ness parades its favourite; and becomes unsuspicious, confiding, jubilant, and rather wearisome, on a theory somewhat like Mr. Carlyle's. With this theory, then, of our author's, we cannot agree. A man who enters upon the field of character, dispossessed of 308 Carlyles Cromwell. the element of suspicion, holds a very simple, indeed, but a somewhat hazardous philosophy. Nor unless great men are examined do we see hope of attaining to much satisfactory knowledge of them ; for their characters are not always of crystalline transparency. Does Mr. Carlyle know, or does he forget, that he is addressing this appeal of his to a world endowed with conscience, perception, experience, and very familiarly acquainted with the material of which its great man's virtue is often made ? Do the developments of human character offer in his opinion no field for suspicion because they are wonderful ? And is there no such thing as evil working underneath a veil, and embodying itself in per- plexing and delusive as well as plain, in great as well as little, forms ? If common sense were not against such a view, Christianity would be. A Christian is bound by his very creed to suspect evil, and cannot release himself. What is his situation ? He belongs to a world in which everything is fair-spoken and goes on under a guise of purity, and he knows for a positive truth that it is rotten to the core and impregnated with evil every- where. His religion has brought evil to light in a way in which it never was before ; it has shown its depth, subtlety, ubiquity ; and a revelation, full of mercy on the one hand, is terrible in its exposure of the world's real state on the other. The Gospel fastens the sense of evil upon the mind ; a Christian is enlightened, hardened, sharpened, as to evil ; he sees it where others do not ; his instinct is divinely strengthened : his eye is supernaturally keen ; he has a spiritual insight, and senses exercised to discern ; he has been made partaker of the wisdom of Him " who knew what was in man ; " and has been tempered by that word which " is sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." Evil would escape his eye, but it cannot ; it lurks in its hole, and he pursues it ; it rolls itself in its folds, and he uncovers it ; he drags it out to light, and shames it, in himself and in others, before the sun. Talk to others about " trusting in Carlyles CromweU. 309 man," and tell others to suspect nothing, and " detect " nothing ; he is not to be so persuaded. Let those be deceived who think it glorious to be : his Bible condemns a " fool." He discredits his name and his creed if evil imposes on him. He owns the doctrine of original sin. That doctrine puts him necessarily on his guard against appearances, sustains his apprehension under perplexity, and prepares him for recognis- ing anywhere what he knows to be everywhere. In contrast with that tasteless generosity which likes the mixture of good and evil, he consolidates, by a keen process of discernment and separation, — ever dividing the real from the unreal, the hard from the soft, in moral nature, — a true, pure, impenetrable, and immortal good. Mr. Carlyle's semi-paganism has not this keen perception of evil ; he does not see it as Christianity has revealed it, and therefore he does not understand its ways. Pagan genius has richness and fertility; Christian common sense is acute. The clear hardness of the spiritual faculty cuts through the medium which stops the earthly one. The pagan mind exposes itself in the department of character. With all its rush and gushing strength, it has a soft and weak attitude towards evil ; it is not shrewd, and allows itself to be imposed on and blinded by a veil of material sublimity and expansion. When Mr. Carlyle, then, shelters such a career as Cromwell's under an indefinite irresponsible grandeur, and forbids all little men who have not subverted constitutions the presumption of inspecting him, when he throws a colossal greatness in our teeth to shame suspicion and put inquiry out of countenance, the argumentum ad verecundiam speaks very ineffectually either to common-sense or Christianity. They are familiar with that veil of hypocrisy under which human nature covers itself. " The history of all ages, and all countries," says Bishop Butler, " will show what has been really going forward over the face of the earth to have been very different from what has been always pretended." Conventional form and usage politely attribute absolute disinterestedness to all members of the social body. At public meetings where speeches are made, and public dinners where toasts are drunk, an apotheosis of human nature goes 310 Carlyles Cromwell. on ; large rooms are supposed to be crowned with virtue, and an unimpeachable magnanimity is assigned to persons in general. Society has current dicta about itself. There are standing allusions to virtue, which everybody supposes to be true, and everybody knows to be false. All political men, as such, suppose themselves to act from pure patriotism, generosity, and public spirit, in the career they pursue, and to regard as trifling the personal advantages of fame or station which accompany it. And these conventional illusions take an extravagant leap, and reach a climax of audacity in a revolu- tionary movement. There the successful man clutches a world as his prize, and claims transcendental generosity as his motive. He did not care for power or importance ; he did not want station or dignity ; the throne, the chair of state, came of them- selves, and he had them because he could not help having them ; but they were wholly external to his mind, and did not touch the simplicity of his motives. Thus the very largeness of the object protects the designer, and earth's pride, because it comes as one great whole, passes off as disinterestedness. Greatness does not care for itself, according to the world's conventional, and Mr. Carlyle's real, sentimentalism. But everybody knows that it does, and it is absurd to deny it. Nor will common-sense again yield for a moment to that puffy or that mawkish bombast which on the behalf of great men is always ready to come forward and despise "baubles," and " trifles," and " glitter," " show," and " toys." Genius does not value baubles, is the watchword. But genius does value them. Genius relishes them extremely, and it does so on a natural and necessary principle. Let it be granted that a great worldly genius does at first pursue a greatness of a more ideal nature, and goes through fire and strife for an abstraction. An idea, however, may be just as selfish as a solidity. If his idea be so, it will embody itself sooner or later, in an outward form suit- able to its temper : and it will then have to betake itself to baubles. Baubles are the legitimate development and expres- sion of that idea of greatness on which a worldly genius dwells ; if power as such is relished, its images please. The great man's mind is itself the vivifying principle and soul of the Carlyles Cromwell. 311 sphere of pomp and circumstance which it has gathered around it, and a whole world of state expresses the swell and expansion of the internal and imaginative self. Nice distinc- tions are irrelevant ; if a certain greatness is relished, its soul and its body, essence and circumstance, power, baubles, and all, are swallowed ; — all make one, and one highly-relished whole. We can raise a smile without a difficulty at the world's little great man, but are we quite sure that the reason why we cannot smile at the great one is, that he does not deserve it, and not rather that we are not high enough to do it ? The burden of earth lies heavy upon us ; this vast overshadowing system oppresses the clear spirit in our minds, clogs its vision, and chokes its liveliness. We let ourselves be overpowered, and sink underneath the vastness of space and the majesty of matter. The ambition that advances on a large scale is altered not in quantity only, but even in quality, to us, by the large- ness of its field of action ; intellectual power intimately mingles with and protects the moral weakness ; and the latter is not despised on account of its companion. We see the weakness, however, still, the essential littleness, the look to self, going on underneath these great activities, and mixing with this subtle intellectual world. W T e see the earthly genius, soothed and titillated by the materialism of power, its sensualities and machinery of flattery ; we see intellect ming- ling with flesh, loving the world's paint and varnish, and embracing its own kindred dust and rottenness. Cromwell's wonderful shadowy mind was an ambitious one. He pursued power with a keen eye, through fields of blood and struggles of diplomacy ; he " slew a man " to get it, and he relished it when he got it. He had the deep excitement of the pursuit, and the superficial one of the enjoyment : and the cold, iron, ascetic abstraction that led him on unwearied through his years of fighting and gloom, embodied itself, in the day of triumph and attainment, in the Protectorate. It then took to itself, naturally, a secular form of pomp and grandeur, and effloresced in anterooms and audiences, life-guards and gentle- men-in- waiting, lacqueys, pages, and state -coaches. Guilty greatness became more respectable, but more vulgar, and fed 312 Carlyles Cromwell. upon solid terrene things ; nor did the constant struggle necessary to keep up the position negative the satisfaction of the position itself. Was it the aspiring wish of a religious enthusiast, or the respectable taste of the founder of a dynasty, that made him deliberately impose an entirely incapable son, only because he was his heir, as his successor on the nation ? Was there spiritual ardour, or secularity, there ? Did he wish to establish the reign of justice, or to establish a family ? What reason was there for leaving a son he knew was not fit to govern as his successor, but the common secular wish which human nature has to create hereditary property and to build a house ? Cromwell threw himself into the revolutionary temper when he had his way to make : he threw himself into the conservative temper when he had made it : he threw him- self into the enthusiastic, he threw himself into the dis- creet state of mind. Certainly, every day, as he went on, made him more conservative ; and had he lived, and had entirely his way, we doubt not, in time he would have reconstructed the sober erection of legitimacy, of which he wanted to change the occupancy rather than the basis. Judg- ing from the tendencies he exhibited, he would have adopted, as indeed he actually did, much of the same policy which the present King of the French carries on. On the first decent and prudent opportunity, and as soon as the scruples of the army had abated, he would have got the crown. His sons would have been princes of the blood-royal, with York and Kent dukedoms ; his daughters princesses. He would have allied himself with those European houses who had no objection to the misalliance, and he would have overlooked a little stain of Popery, provided it discoloured some royal blood. He would have had no objection to a house of lords ; none to an estab- lished church ; none to a quiet and submissive episcopacy. He would have restored Church and King; only that the Church would have been Tillotson's and not Laud's, and the King would have been Cromwell and not Charles. These arrangements w T ould have furnished much satisfaction in the management and the results ; and, in due time, King Oliver I. would have left the crown to King Richard iv. Carlyles Cromwell. 313 With respect to Mr. Carlyle's argument that Cromwell could not have had an ambitious temper because he was forty before he began his career, we do not see at all the force of it. Human character sometimes develops itself earlier and some- times later ; nor can any inference be drawn from the previous non-appearance of a symptom against its subsequent appear- ance. The affections of the human body are latent often for a considerable portion of a life ; they then come out of their latent state, and appear in sensible form. It is the same with those of the mind. And it would be as absurd to argue that ambition could not operate at a later period, because it did not at an earlier, as it would be to assert that a man could not have a liver complaint at fifty, because he had not one at forty. The difficulty, moreover, if it is one, is not confined to instances alone in which evil is the subject-matter ; but to cases good, bad, and indifferent equally. All persons, of whatever char- acter, who have pursued a great line, and done a great work, have begun them at some time or other of their lives ; and this has been sometimes earlier and sometimes later. Sylla was forty before he entered on his ambitious career, till which time he had been little more than a literary lounger and a dissipated man of fashion in the Roman circles. Hildebrand's age was bordering on forty before he entered on his career, considered by many an ambitious one, till which time he had been a monk, fasting and praying, in the monastery of Clugni. Crom- well also was forty before he entered on his career, and had been till that time principally farming at St. Ives. On the other hand, Ceesar began his course early ; Alexander was only thirty-two when he had finished his ; Pompey was saluted Impcrator at twenty-three ; Charles v. was great at nineteen ; and Mr. Pitt was Prime Minister at twenty-five. This differ- ence sometimes can be accounted for by outward circumstances, and sometimes cannot. There is no reason to be given why Hildebrand or why Sylla could not have begun their great courses earlier ; but we are not perplexed by the fact that they did not, and do not consider the late public appearance of their characters to negative them when they do appear. And, after all, circumstances more or less explain the fact in 3H Carlyles Cromwell. Cromwell's case. Had lie chosen to come forward irregularly and prematurely, he might doubtless have done so sooner. But he seems to have only followed the natural course of events in choosing his time ; he seems, like many others, to have only delayed acting because he waited for an opportunity, and not from any inherent disposition to quiet. He spoke, and created a sensation within the walls of Parliament at the age of twenty-nine. He did not speak in Parliament again for ten years, because there was no Parliament to speak in. But he procured his return to the very next that was held ; and the year 1640 saw him fairly embarked on his career. Against such a view as this, the appearances of sincerity and reality which Cromwell shows may be appealed to ; and it may be said these evidently are not a mere outside ; these feelings and emotions are really felt by the man ; he was there- fore in earnest, and could not have been interested or selfish. Mr. Carlyle on this subject has one, and one only, very superficial argument, which he hacks to the end of the chapter. He says Cromwell was not a stage actor, a street impostor, therefore he was a sincere and disinterested man. But there is no occasion whatever to take this alternative. Will it be admitted that a deep mind can be hypocritical as well as a shallow one ? If it is, it follows that more than one kind of hypocrisy will exist in the world. A deep mind must, by its own nature, live in deeper water than a shallow one. It cannot bear simple superficiality ; its very machinery must be as native, and its very art as akin to instinct as it can be ; its source of action must be as subterranean and its design as un- conscious as it is possible. Some minds can have real sensa- tions, and consciously direct them, curb or spur being used, as occasion requires ; the intellectual faculty in them can use the material which pathetic nature supplies ; and the man himself be half in and half out of his own feelings. There is a power of keeping the inward eye shut or open ; of seeing and not seeing at once ; of raising instinct upon purpose, and sustaining nature upon art. The brazen hypocrisy which simply falsifies, and says what it does not think, can hardly, ipso facto, be the hypocrisy of a deep mind. A coarse impudent outside tells Carlyle s Cromwell. 315 its tale, and persuades nobody that is worth persuading. The secret of impressing is being impressed ; the power of feeling makes others feel ; and what is assumed effectually must be assumed within. The old question of the compatibility of imposture with enthusiasm may now be considered settled. The world does not go on living for nothing ; human nature gets to know itself better, as human nature is longer before its own eye. The laws of matter and of mind become more under- stood as the world goes on ; and what was a strange fragmentary phenomenon one day is the chartered and systematised one of the next. A fact, very wonderful in its nature, has ceased to offer any difficulty, as a fact. The combination of enthusiasm and selfishness may have been strange once, but it is no longer so now ; it is a thing seen, known, and counted on. It is an observed thing, and it has taken its place among the other facts belonging to the natural history of the human mind. The diseases of the human body are strange wild phenomena when they first make their appearance in the world ; but they become, in course of time, subjects of ordinary observation, and of scientific treatment and analysis. It is the same with the department of the human mind. Curious complex develop- ments appear in it ; they puzzle the world at first, and are not understood ; but afterwards they become recognised classified facts, and come under scientific examination. The experience of the world, indeed, like that of legal courts, has attained such a formal certainty here that, on that very account, its view is now considered obsolete by some ; and promiscuous enthusiasm has become the idol of a new philosophy. But this will not do. The subtle combinations in human character, when once ob- served, keep their place as facts ; just as the discoveries of astronomy and chemistry do. And therefore it may be con- sidered certain, now, that hypocrisy may exist in a deep mind ; that, if it does, it will be a deep kind of hypocrisy ; and that a deep kind of hypocrisy will be original and versatile, and naturally combine with the feeling, sentiment, emotion, and whole pathetic nature of the man. But Cromwell was not only an enthusiast, but a religious enthusiast. He had the religious sense strongly. Religious 1 1 6 Cai'lyles Cromwell. thoughts ran through his mind ; religious shadows and images haunted him ; religious feelings mingled with his whole career. And what if they did? The religious sense, viewed as the simple apprehension of a spiritual world, is in itself no pre- servative whatever against moral obliquity. The term religion stands for two distinct things. It both stands for the ethical thing so called, i.e. a proper state of religious habits and affec- tions ; and also stands for the intellectual or metaphysical thing so called, i.e. the sense of, or belief in, the fact of a spiritual and invisible world. Spirituality and invisibility are not in themselves ethical but metaphysical ideas ; and the sense of a world spiritual is no more an ethical sense in itself than the sight of a world visible is. As supplying then an ethical, and as supplying a simply spiritual, world to our minds, as making us act and feel in a particular way, and as impressing upon us with more or less intensity and liveliness the fact of the invisible, religion has a very different character and power. A spiritual world, over and above this visible one, is a most important addition to our idea of the universe, and enlarges our mental prospect ; but it does not of itself touch our moral nature. It leaves us, on that head, where it finds us. The moral effect of a spiritual world upon us depends entirely upon what we make that world to be, and what we make that world to be depends upon our own ethical standard and per- ceptions. The Mahometan, the Scandinavian, the Indian paradises were all invisible worlds to their believers, but they did not improve their morality, because they were themselves the creations of it. The world invisible is the enlargement of the internal world of our own minds ; it carries out the feelings and wishes which our own moral nature has previously formed, and is appealed to as the partisan or patron of that cause, good or bad, to which our state of mind has committed us. The savage sees his ow T n passion for revenge represented on the Almighty throne ; revenge is his honour and duty, and the spiritual world sympathises with him in it. And the Puritan had his invisible world too, fighting with him and around him ; he had his deliverances, mercies, providences, and dispensations. He talked and thought much about invisible tilings. But that Carlyles Cromwell. 317 was neither one thing nor another in itself ; he talked and he thought much about his own invisible. We must not confound the ever so lively cognisance of spirituality and simple invisi- bility with ethical religion, as if a man must be ethically re- ligious who has much of the notion of invisibility in his head. He may have a perpetual notion in his head of a world invisible ; it may always be hovering over him, overshadowing him, run- ning in his thoughts, without interference with his ethical standard, or any check to his will. The invisible world which attended Cromwell on his course was not a world which interfered with his designs or chastened or corrected his motives. It was a world which was the partisan of Puritanism, whatever Puritanism did ; and therefore, as a Puritan, it necessarily never came into collision with him ; it not only let him do what he liked, but urged him vehemently to do it, and covered him with praises for it when it was done. Still less did he come into collision with it as a man of the world and statesman. In that region his subtlety could half believe and half use its instigations ; and keep him within it, and without it ; sustaining it, and sustained by it. A deep political aim penetrated through this spiritual atmosphere; the mercurial world flattered the mind that controlled it ; and his religion mingled Proteus-like with dark political plot and selfish labyrinthal diplomacy. Cromwell had a natural turn for the invisible ; he thought of the invisible till he died ; but the cloudy arch only canopied a field of human aim and will. It is not every religion that can subdue earth ; an inferior religion is led captive, and attaches herself to earth's train, continuing all the time a sort of religion. There is the high and the low spiritual. The low spiritual mixes very well with the earthly, and produces an ambitious, ominous, preaching and plotting, cloudily fanatic, and solidly terrene soul of a Lord General and Protector. To bring these remarks then to a head. The hypocrites of the New Testament, says Bishop Butler, are sometimes called so " not all upon account of any insincerity towards men, but merely upon account of their insincerity towards God, and their own consciences. For they were not men," he adds, " who, * 1 8 Carlyle s Cromwell. o without any belief at all of religion, put on the appearance of it only in order to deceive the world : on the contrary, they believed their religion, and were zealous in it. But their religion which they believed and were zealous in, was in its nature hypocritical ; for it was the form, not the reality ; it allowed them in immoral practices, and, indeed, was itself in some respects immoral By some force, some energy of delusion they believed a lie." Such is the example to which that great philosophic mind goes to illustrate the religion of the consummators of the Great Rebellion. He compares them with the Pharisees : and he applies to them, with severe and considerate precision, the same name which the Bible gives to those enemies of our Lord, in the same sense in which the Bible applies it. He says of their consummating act — and let the sentence be attended to, for though a very short, it is a very weighty one — " No age can show an example of hypocrisy parallel to this." Butler is not a person to judge of any events or any men, upon mere party feeling or off-hand presump- tion. He is not a man who says strong or sharp things when they are not called for ; who wishes to sting, and aims at point, and scatters censure heedlessly : he is no vulgar satirist, no hasty judge. If ever mortal mind enjoyed a freedom from the common hurries and confusions which attend human opinion, it was his ; if ever man was truly great as a thinker, calm, considerate, imperturbable, sublimely dispassionate, it was he. And the sermon on the Great Rebellion, to which we are referring, exemplifies this temper. He does not take there the simple popular view of Puritanism ; he enters esoterically into its character, comes into real solid mental contact with it, and turns it over as a form of religion in his thoughts before he speaks of its public acts. Moreover, he was not likely, as a man of general information, to be ignorant of its history ; certainly the most unlikely man that ever lived to be ignorant of it if he wrote about it. He thus does justice and allows full weight to the religious professions of the Puritan leaders ; he thinks them religious men in a sense. And upon a review of history, conducted in harmony with his own deep contemplative knowledge of the operations of man's mind and will, he decides Carlyles Cromwell. 319 that their religion was in its nature hypocritical, and their zeal an immoral one. Begging therefore to confront Mr. Carlyle with Butler, we feel ourselves under the authority of so great a religious and philosophical name, simply performing an act of judicial morality, in applying to Cromwell the name of hypocrite. 1 The character of Cromwell is a vast and wonderful, but an uninteresting, unlovely one. He appeared first before us in this sketch, as the regicide, the one man at whose door the mur- der of Charles lay. The eye as it analysed events and disen- gaged realities from their cumbrous foreground, saw Charles and Cromwell standing alone in that scene. A mercurial subtlety then accompanied an audacious self-will ; and Cromwell to the historical eye is one soluble whole, spreading everywhere like water in the political world, coming up everywhere, insinuating himself into all interests, all parties. With a perpetual flux and. reflux he flows from, he absorbs into, his own centre. He is the genius, the anima mundi of the Great Rebellion ; he pervades its movements, shapes its course ; he inhabits it ; he is its god ; and the ubiquity of a deep mind occupies and sways the vast tumultuous world of matter and will. But Cromwell exhibits this character without those fine additions and sets- off, which, though not redeeming it (a thing impossible), have sometimes thrown a pictorial and refining light upon it, in the case of other men. Subtlety and blood have not seldom con- trived to be fascinating ; and the great though guilty mind has won a tragic interest and raised a morbid sympathy. Cromwell's does not. He had subtlety without refinement ; he was a coarse man. The inbred grace of humanity, which a mysterious providence sometimes allows in this mixed world to adorn evil, was not granted to him. We see not the form divine of either body or mind ; that noble, outward cast of feeling and shape of soul, which sometimes cover the evil man, are wanting. He does not attract, or tempt, or win us. He appeals to no forbidden human sympathies, which will often move and stir within us, even when we feel we should suppress them. We do not see our nature even externally represented 1 See note at end of volume. 320 Condyles Cromwell. in him ; he does not look like man divine ; he raises no regret that he was not what he was ; or recall us to any fancied original, over whose stains and pollutions we are ready to weep. We have no weak sighs, no longings, no supposings over him. The powerful movements, the cavernous involutions of his vast mind, seem almost like the operations of some mighty bestial intellect, which appears upon earth to domineer over weaker humanity, and master a higher nature than its own. We see the huge, ponderous strength, as if of some prodigious and un- earthly animal. We see a coarse, and not a high strength. We do not bow to it. The dragon of old romance is great in his way, but his scales repel us ; we look in wonder at him, but we do not touch ; he is mighty, but he is unseemly ; he is tremendous, but he is vile. Human nature stands disarmed and weak before him ; but still feels that after all she is lofty and he is low ; she is human and he bestial. The intellectual developments of fallen manhood do not always raise it. Natural subtlety is often animal-like. Coarse intellect is akin to matter. Brute genius appeared very early in the world, and received its sentence : " On thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life." It has deceived and triumphed over man at times from the beginning, and will do so to the end. But it is essentially low, notwithstanding its successes ; its mysterious powers do not exalt it ; and it pre- serves its family relationship to the dust of the earth and to the beasts of the field. True, high, and consoling thought it is, not strange, however elevating, but the familiar philosophy of every religious mind, — that the weakest, most helpless, most ignorant goodness has by the most absolute right of simple essence, by the mere fact that it is itself, a superiority royal, and fixed as fate, over such greatness ; that it looks down from the height ineffable of another nature, from the heaven, and the heaven of heavens upon it : that innocence, if really such, is the imperial quality, and must enjoy an ultimate dominion ; that strength and majesty, eternal height, and tranquillity, belong by nature to it ; and that to it the prophecy is spoken, " Upon •the lion and adder shalt thou go ; the young lion and the dragon shalt thou tread under thy feet." IV. LUTHER.* (Jan. 1848.) The life and character of Luther have been brought lather conspicuously before public attention of late years. The taste for the striking and powerful forms of character which has been so general among us lately, pervading the most different schools of sentiment and doctrine, has contributed to this. The movement of opinion respecting the Eeformation has also con- tributed. The special mixture of character which Luther exhibits has kept alive the discussions about him when once begun. He is peculiarly a man whom persons both like to attack and like to defend. To his advocates belongs the un- doubted fact that he was a great man ; to his opponents the very awkward question, whether he was a saint. He was very amiable ; he was very virulent. He was frank and simple ; he was crafty and double. He was not vain; he was self- willed and overbearing. He liked power ; he was indifferent to station. He had an ardent faith ; he showed germs of rationalism. Few characters have exposed themselves more to the attacks of adversaries, or more engaged the sympathies of -::• I. The Life of Luther, written by Himself ; collected and arranged by M. Michelet, Member of the Institute, Author of the History of France, etc. Translated by William Hazlitt, Esq., of the Middle Temple, Barrister-at-Law. London, 1846. 2. Histoire de la Vie, des Ecrits, et des Doctrines de Martin Luther. Par M. Audin, Membre des Academies Royales de Lyon, Turin, etc. Paris, 1845. 3. The Mission of the Comforter ; and other Sermons, with Notes. By Julius Charles Hare, M.A., Archdeacon of Lewes, Rector of Hurstmonceaux, and late Fellow of Trinif" College. London and Cambridge, 1846. m.e.-i.] X 2,2 2 Luther. friends. His admirers are indeed fond of him ; fonder, per- haps, for the very fact that he has left himself so open to attack as he has. They think it an unfairness in Fate to Luther, or in Luther to himself, for which they are bound in justice to compensate. Should he suffer for the temper which always made him show himself off to the worst ? And should the fault, which his own frankness and carelessness about him- self have put into our possession, not rather commend him the more to the generous judge? Three biographies of Luther have appeared within the last few years ; one by a friend, another by an enemy, and a third by a neutral. D'Aubigne°s biograph}' — for the first half of his History of the Eeformation may be so called — has the merit of a good deal of information, and a lively and pointed style, but is the thorough-going work of a partisan. The writer is always colouring, and will let nothing speak for itself. His comments do not occupy particular positions and collect themselves into main groups, but are constant and ever recurring. The over quantity of detail in the narrative — a fault on its own account — is a worse fault, as being so prolific of comment, for the smallest detail seldom wants its appendage. If the historian has no remark to make, the preacher has ; and the reader, harassed with an endless reiteration of small reflections and officious instructions, retaliates by regarding M. d'Aubigne' as a writer a good deal more copious than weighty. His omissions in the line of fact are nearly as large, moreover, as his additions in the way of comment. He leaves out whole portions of Luther's character, or but faintly alludes to them. His aim is to assimi- late Luther's ethical and religious mould as much as possible to that of an evangelical preacher of the present day. Luther does not gain by his biographer's tenderness on this head, and the same process which cuts off the irregularities narrows the expanse and tames the freedom of character. M. Audin has, as might be expected, inserted a good many of the touches which M. d'Aubigne" s pencil left out. Nor, though highly relishing his task, has he performed it ill-tem- peredly. His unfairness is not a malicious one ; he delights in the amiable tasks of the favourist, and extols all his friends Lut her. 2> 2 o with innocent audacity, the notorious Tetzel among the rest ; but he is not harsh and vituperative to opponents. He only gives, however, the more active and fiery parts of the Eeformer's character, and not the whole of it, and describes Luther's ex- ternal career better than Luther himself. M. Michelet's Life hardly professes to be more than a crude and straggling performance, its composition having been the amusement of the writer during an illness. It consists princi- pally of passages strung together from the table-talk, and those parts of Luther's writings where the Keformer speaks of him- self. M. Michelet stands idly by and gives the reader no assistance. An admiration of Luther's greatness, sympathy with his genial flow of spirits, and amusement at his faults and extravagances, compose, as far as we can see, the feeling of the impartial biographer toward his hero, and the sceptic seems to gaze with quiet pleasure upon the medley which the reli- gious leader, saint, and prophet of so many millions of Chris- tians exhibits. The mode in which Luther is introduced to our notice in the pages of national history creates an impression of him as primarily a practical, rather than a doctrinal, reformer. He comes before us suddenly as the opponent of some great prac- tical abuses in the Church ; we connect him, in the first in- stance, with the resistance to indulgences. We thus picture a doctrinal movement as arising in process of time out of a prac- tical one, and Luther appears one of those rough, energetic minds which, only alive at first to the palpable and tangible, gradually advance to the department of opinion and belief. This is undoubtedly true of the multitudes whom Luther moved. They were moved in the first instance by the gross practical abuses in the Church, and those supplied that groundwork to the reforming movement, without which it could not have advanced at all. But it is not true of Luther. If there are two classes of influential men in the world, great practical men, and men who propagate ideas, Luther belonged in the first in- stance to the latter. His mind was full of an idea, and he wished to propagate it. National history brings us across him for the first time engaged in a particular practical movement, 324 Luther. but his biography shows that the doctrinal was then already begun and in progress. The process by which leading ideas are arrived at is gene- rally that of doubt and perplexity. A particular class of minds feels strongly the difficulties which surround the whole sub- ject of morality and religion. Some have one difficulty, and some another. They dwell upon the obstacles to their internal peace with an intensity natural or morbid as may be, and after they have brooded long enough they hit on a solution. This solution is then the idea which occupies and fills their minds. They have felt a want, and they have relieved it ; they have put their question, and had their answer ; they have been in suspense, and now are settled. They prize the new conviction because it succeeds to so much indefiniteness and void. The search has enhanced the discovery, the toil the reward, and the offspring of mental troubles is loved as an only child. The idea which has destroyed a difficulty is a victorious champion on which the mind reposes ever after, and to which it refers all of system, adjustment, and completeness it has attained to. Luther had a natural character, which made him strongly alive to difficulties ; that is to say, a character which partook largely of melancholy. Dante, Cromwell, Dr. Johnson, Cow- per, Rousseau, Lord Byron, Shelley, are instances of men who, in their different ways, high or low, religious or sceptical, un- couth or refined, were melancholy men. Luther was one of this class of men. He had a mind intently self-contemplative and profoundly unquiet, which, except the strongest active occupations diverted it, preyed upon itself, scrutinised its own faith, feelings, fears, and hopes, pried into the mysteries of its own nature, and provoked internal dissatisfactions and struggles. Luther speaks of his great scenes of trial as being through- out life internal. His agonies, his temptations, his colloquies with himself or with Satan, the tenderest controversy and the most formidable disputant, were always within him. He had just that disposition on which particular difficulties, and the ideas which seem to solve them, lay remarkable hold. The opening circumstances of Luther's life were not calcu- lated to discourage or tame such a disposition. The calm of a Luther. 325 restless spirit is activity ; and quiet unsettles and agitates it. The retirement and dulness of the Augustine monastery at Wittenberg threw him the more upon himself and his own thoughts. The particular circumstances of his entrance into monastic life were also trying. A stroke of lightning which killed his bosom friend by his side, according to some writers, though others make the thunderstorm and the death of Alexis two different events, inspired him with sudden terror. A lively, joyous temperament was also most alive to calls ; and possessed a power of forming sudden strong resolutions. He was able, in a moment, to change the prospects of a life ; a vow uttered on the spot dedicated him to monasticism ; and the accomplished, philosophical, literary academician, the favourite of fellow- students who enjoyed his humour, and of scientific professors who predicted his greatness, called his friends together, enjoyed an evening of brilliant conversation and music, and the next morning knocked at the gate of the Augustine monastery, which closed after him. But the young devotee was not made a monk by the change. The constant interruptions of formal prayer were irksome to him ; he did not stomach the household monastic tasks he was set to, — tasks, indeed, needlessly humili- ating and offensive ; and, if intended to correct the fastidiousness of his previous education, arguing a blundering, however well- meaning, discipline in the monastery. Luther felt himself, in addition to the ordinary confinements and privations of a monastic life, to be among inferior and unsympathising minds ; alone, suspected, and ill-used. There was another and more direct cause which led to reli - gious melancholy and difficulties. Luther had ardent aspira- tions after the perfect and saintly character. There is not the smallest reason for doubting, not only his sincerity, but his strength of will, and readiness to endure the greatest self-denial and mortification in pursuit of that character. But, impatient of regular discipline and routine, the more simple and external motive of obedience for leading a holy life was supplied in his case by a motive of another stamp. He had, what has been a frequent feature, though never a very sound one, in reli- gionists, an active, not to say fidgety, desire for a state of ^26 Luther o conscious and palpable peace of mind. He was ambitious of inward satisfaction, the sensation of spiritual completeness. His devotion was based upon a direct aim at this result. He pursued it vehemently by ascetic means. He fasted, prayed, watched long and rigorously. " Often on returning to his cell he knelt at the foot of the bed, and remained there until day- break." His asceticism, mingling with the internal fever and tumult of his mind, gave him an unnatural strength ; and he relates that " once for a whole fortnight he neither ate, drank, nor slept." His health gave way before such severities : from being fresh and plump he became pale and emaciated, and was brought almost to death's door. One little fact shows the remarkable union of great irregularity in religion with a morbid aim at perfectness. He would omit his daily breviary prayers for long periods ; then, when his conscience smote him, he would make good the default with literal exactness, and scrupu- lously go through, in one continuous act, the precise amount of devotions he had omitted. That is to say, he was not satisfied with the feeling of having done something to atone for his fault; he wanted the feeling of having annihilated the fault itself, and put himself exactly into his original state as he stood before it was committed. In this way Luther went on, seeking with all the eagerness of direct effort an absolutely clear con- science. The pursuit, of course, did not succeed. A clear conscience was always further off the further he pursued it ; and at the close of each stage of his devotional course he was as discontented with himself as when he began. " At the foot of the altar, his hands clasped, his eyes full of tears," he prayed for peace, and found none. " One morning, the door of his cell not being open as usual, the brethren became alarmed ; they knocked, and there was no reply. The door was burst in, and Fra Martin was found stretched on the ground, in a state of ecstasy, scarcely breathing, and well-nigh dead." At the sight of the Holy Sacrament borne in a procession, "he perspired at every pore, and thought he should die of fear." Vexed, wearied, harassed, and faint, his mind fell a prey to a formidable diffi- culty to which its labours and aspirations had introduced it. There is one apparent grievance attaching to our moral Luther. 327 nature, which all who cultivate that nature with any degree of strictness must in a degree experience. It is connected with the operations of conscience. However we might be led before- hand, by considerations of the general nature of moral good- ness, to expect that goodness would produce internal satisfaction and self-approval, we find that, as a matter of experience, it fails to produce this. .Conscience does not allow of such sensations. Good acts leave the soul as they found it, uneasy and discontented with itself, and under a sense of sin, even as regards the performance of those very acts themselves. Within the world of experience good acts disappoint. They do not accomplish their natural end, and fulfil their essential promise. Moral beings yearn for self-approval : they feel the absence of it as a void and a pain : they are told to act virtuously, and that they will have it ; but they do act virtuously, and self- approval does not come. Virtue seems to stand them in no stead, and do them no service here : they might as well be vicious. The greatest sinner, the greatest saint, are equidistant from the goal where the mind rests in satisfaction with itself. All approach to that point labours under some inherent contra- diction : all progress is a standstill : all impetus and deter- mination spend themselves within the circles of a mathematical necessity : the eager will shoots forward, but the laws of the moral world are firm, and unseen impossibility makes its appearance in results. The defect is not one resulting from the degree of their virtue : no tendency in the universal quality, to meet the craving for such self- approval, appears. The tendency is the other way, and with the growth in goodness srows the sense of sin. One law fulfilled shows a thousand neglected ; and virtue, as it really advances, recedes more and more, in our own contemplation of it, into the position of one weak and poor particle struggling amid a mass of evil in the character. Moral advancement, as a natural consequence, destroys the sense of merit, and produces that of sin ; and thus, as a natural consequence, it seems to defeat itself. This unkindly effect of goodness, moreover, if it is such, is not kept out of sight in Scripture, but put prominently forward, and suggested to us. For real goodness is in many passages 328 Luther, there actually and in the most marked way tested, by its pro- ducing just the contradictory impression to that of goodness, in the individual's own conscience. Indeed, so determinately is this contradictory consequence attached to and made the natural consequence of the state of goodness, that by a strong figure of speech the holy text sometimes puts the consequence of the state for the state itself, and speaks of righteousness as if it were sin ; just as it, on the other hand, speaks of sin as if it were righteousness. And a whole line of expression meets us from which one would at first sight suppose that sinners were actual favourites of God as such ; and that, on the contrary, the righteous were not at all pleasing to Him. There is a coldness in the remarks about the righteous, as if God were angry with them because, persisting in their original integrity, they did not give Him the opportunity of exercising His sovereign free grace and pity toward them : sinners, on the other hand, are dearly loved, because they give Him this opportunity ; they have His affections, on the principle which prevails in the sphere of ordinary human feeling, that " pity is akin to love ; " whereas those who are independent of us, and ask nothing from us, we do not care for. " They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick." " I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." " There is joy in the presence of the angels of God, over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance." " Her sins, which are many, are forgiven her, for she loved much : but to whom little is forgiven the same loveth little : " thus the parable of the lost sheep ; the parable of the lost piece of money ; the parable of the lost son. All these parables create at first sight the impression of it being an actual advantage to be lost and to be a sinner, something to be coveted and sought after with all our might. The reader naturally immediately thinks that he had much rather be the sheep that was lost than one of those that had never gone astray ; and had much rather be the son who had wandered, and was greeted on his return with such an overflow of affection, than the son who had never wandered, and had no such greeting. Now it, of course, is absurd to suppose that actual sin is pleasing to God, actual Luther. 329 righteousness not pleasing to Him ; indeed, we know from the context that the " righteous " to whom our Lord alludes were actually the most wicked of mankind, viz., the Pharisees who crucified Him, — men who could only be righteous in the sense of being righteous in their own eyes. The feeling of being sinful and the feeling of being righteous, then, are, under the expressions sin and righteousness, the real things which God respectively praises and blames. Still the language is very remarkable, as fixing in such a direct and summary way this contradictory effect upon goodness. In the Gospel self-approval appears as something signally unfit for the creature • enormous, abominable, and contra Deum. It appears as the mark of the beast, the sign, where it exists, that the soul has departed from God, and relapsed into its own vile, dead, and selfish nature. There is a happiness, indeed, which belongs to conscious merit, soberly expecting its reward in the course of nature, of which the whole-day's labourer waiting for his wages is the exemplar ; and uninstructed reason fixes on that as the happiness of the saint. But the Gospel, in describing the joy of the rewarded saint, has recourse to a very different type. It refers us to those inde- scribable emotions which seize the mind upon any sudden rescue from evil, which it has no right to expect. The parables of the lost piece of money, and the lost sheep, and the lost son, all appeal to this type of joy; and intimate the great superiority of the pleasures of this type to those of the former, as having, from the very nature of the case, so much more liveliness and depth in them ; the sensations of possession and safety necessarily having an acme and intensity after loss and danger which they could not have had before. For the reward of goodness, then, the Gospel gives us a pleasure of this type ; that is to say, it gives not the peace of self-approval but the joy of pardon : the most accepted man has, by some mystery, most sins forgiven, and his happiness lies in that forgiveness. Philosophy of old dreamed, indeed, of the happiness of conscious virtue ; and the "memory of a well-spent life" filled its disciples with serene thoughts, and bade them look for the rewards of self- discipline in the act of self-contemplation. The wise man looked within himself and was satisfied ; the world without was wild, but he 33° Luther. was tranquil, balanced, and perfect. He had always a retro- spect which consoled, and a conscience which supported him. He had done well, and was recompensed ; he had worked, and he had his wages ; and he received his reward with the dignity and self-possession which belongs to one who enjoys a right. Self- approval was the prcemium virtutis of ancient philosophy. Most natural ambition. But how roughly did Christianity break these morning slumbers of the wise and good ! " Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." The dream was dispelled, and man awoke to real life and facts; he was shown himself, and saw what he had never seen before — a feeble will, effort always short, struggle ending in self-contempt, and virtue never got, but always to be attained. The mystery of conscience was revealed ; and he discovered that he had done nothing, had secured no standing ground. From the yawning pit he reached forth a hand as he was sinking ; it was caught, and he was saved. Then followed a pleasure, in comparison with which all that his philosophy had offered him was nothing — the pleasure of rescue. The Gospel destroyed one set of satisfactions, but re- placed them with a higher. For the calmness and repose of self-approval, there was the intense, quick, miraculous delight of pardon ; for human satisfaction there was superhuman, and for the order of nature the mystery of grace. The inevitable tendency of human goodness, then, being to produce the sense of sin, it is to be remarked next, that such sense of sin is not the same with the common ordinary feeling so called, that is, with remorse and a bad conscience. A good action produces a sense of sin indeed, and a bad action does ; but it would be absurd to say, that the feeling in the mind after performing a good action was exactly the same with the feeling after performing a bad one. In the one case the con- science is displeased with the action as simply bad ; in the other case it is displeased with it because it falls short of absolute good. That sense of sin which grows with advance in goodness is less properly the sense of sin than the sense of imperfection. The sense of imperfection is a feeling quite strong enough for the occasion, quite sufficient, that is, to Luther. 331 explain and account for the class of painful and humiliating sensations which have to be accounted for ; for imperfection is quasi sin, and affects the mind in a way somewhat similar and cognate to that in which actual sin does. The sense of it is galling, painful, humiliating, just as the sense of sin is. Let any one examine, by a reference to his own feelings and ex- perience, what the peculiar effect of imperfection upon the mind is. Its effect is to spoil anything done as an object of regard and contemplation. Nor is this the case in morals only, but in art, science, literature. It is so much the constitution of the human mind to seek finish and completeness, that any falling short of that is a disappointment which it cannot get over. The end is the test of true being ; and things only really are, when they are finished, — are perfect. The work which falls short of that point is only an embryo of a work : and, the vertex of perfection once conceived in the mind, all below is confused, chaotic, formless. Take any artistic creation of our minds — a book, a drawing, a building, a mechanical contrivance — we were absolutely pleased with it so long as we thought it perfect, that is to say, so long as we did not realise any definite falling short in it. But let a definite falling short be once seen, and let us once have in our mind a clear image of the work more perfect than we have made it, and that complacency goes. As an object of contemplation our work is marred, it offends us, and we eject it from our thoughts, and think no more of it than we can help. We betake ourselves to the future indeed, and to that hope which happily no experience can ever defeat, that the next thing we do will be satisfactory ; but the thing done is defaced, the past is taken from us. Such is the law of a nature which aspires to perfection. The point rises higher and higher, throwing disaster and defeat upon all below it. It is the same in morals : an action is in morals what a work of art, or a com- position, is in art and literature. Take any action, or course of action, however conscientious, nay, heroic ; it ceases to be an object of satisfactory contemplation as soon as ever the mind realises a definite better, which it could and ought to have been. Thus, suppose an extraordinary act in one of the religious departments of prayer, fasting, or charity. An ascetic wor- 33 2 Luther. shipper stays on his knees for hours ; he stays till his mind is painfully wearied and exhausted. But free will is strong, and could keep him there longer if he exerted it sufficiently. Nevertheless the desire for relief prevails, and he rises, either to recreate or to rest himself. Now certainly he has performed a religious act of some difficulty, and might so far feel self- approval ; but then arises the uncomfortable consciousness that he has wilfully curtailed it. The act immediately loses its wholeness, and the wilful stopping short is more annoying than the advance up to that point is satisfactory. The sin of not having done more, spoils the goodness of having done so much ; indulged frailty and infirmity vex and occupy the conscience, and the consequence is, that he has more of the feeling of sin than if he had never done the act to begin with. It would be the same in any other religious department. Imagine this sense of imperfection deepening and enlarging, eating into the core of every good act, and spoiling and defacing in proportion to the extent of that material which virtuous effort supplies it to deface ; and we have before us the progress of that peculiar sense of sin which grows with the advance in goodness. Imperfection, then, being the cause of that sense of sin which accompanies good works, the view which we take of such good works, in consequence of such sinfulness attaching to them, depends on the view we take of imperfection. Now there is one view of imperfection, which, fully recognising the faultiness and defectiveness which must attach to every im- perfect production as such, and even allowing the rigid defini- tion of true existence to be perfection, still leaves an imperfect production a something, and does not wholly annihilate it. With respect to the subject before us, such a view refuses to pronounce of the goodness of man's works, that because it is imperfect, it is therefore no goodness at all, and to deprive it of all cognisableness. According to it, there are in the con- stitution of things approaches and tendencies as well as completions. These works are not nothing, because they are not all ; nor because they are infinitely distant from infinite goodness are they reduced to an equality with absolute station- ariness. Space is infinite, and yet there is a difference between Luther. 33 o a yard and a mile. Time is infinite, and yet an hour is longer than a minute. On a line which travels from a given goal into infinity one may proceed no way at all, another a short way, another a longer way. The merest reaching forward of the human soul towards goodness is a moral something; approaches are cognisable, measureable, appreciable things. In the confessed absence of the absolute attribute, an inferior and subordinate goodness is thus saved for human works, and something of, or belonging to, the nature of goodness is left in them. And this view of imperfection is the one which the conscience itself takes. That displeasure at defect and shortcoming, however real and however disturbing, which grows with advance in goodness, is not after all unaccompanied with another and a pleasing kind of consciousness. Though it is a part of truth to call conscience insatiable and self-con- demning, it is not the whole of it. If it condemns on one side, it justifies on another. It censures and it commends in one and the same act of reflection. The human soul is such a marvellous, many-sided, and intricate creation, that no one line of observation can do it justice or represent it fairly. Peace and disappointment mingle, and tempered oppositions compose the soul's, as they do the body's, health. Rising satisfaction feels the drawback ; and, on the other hand, even in the lowest abasements and self-condemnations of a true saint, there is a latent confidence arising out of his own works. If conscience accuses too harshly, conscience itself is judged for doing so, and a higher conscience steps in. " If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart." " Yea, I judge not mine own self." Though conscience will not let us feed on its satisfactions, it gives us a taste of them, and allows something which is, and is not, self-approval. Thus it is absurd to say that a good life is to produce no consolatory and joyful reflections whatever in the retrospect. " I have fought a good fight," says St. Paul, " I have kept the faith ; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness." The same Scripture which so sternly rebukes a proud self-approval, directs us, nevertheless, to a certain state of mind which it calls a " conscience void of offence," and allows the true-hearted 334 Luther. and honest soul, amid the reproach of an ungodly world, to vindicate itself, and find consolation in the consciousness of its own truth and integrity. " I have not dwelt with vain persons, neither have I had fellowship with the deceitful." " I have loved the habitation of thine house." " I have had as great delight in the way of thy testimonies as in all manner of riches." " turn from me shame and rebuke, for I have kept thy testimonies." " I have chosen the way of truth, and thy judgments have I laid before me." " Thy statutes have been my songs." " I am wiser than the aged, because I keep thy commandments." But Luther had thrown himself into a temper of mind which was not favourable to taking such a via media in the estimation of good works. A too ambitious and direct pursuit of spiritual satisfaction, — a too great longing for the palpable and the apprehensible in religion, had over-stimulated and unbalanced him. A morbid eagerness for some extreme and perfect state of self-approval and conscious elevation, and an irregular and headstrong asceticism pursued for its attainment, presented him unprepared for meeting disappointment ; and the result was, that when that disappointment came, as it infallibly must come sooner or later, and when, after an excited pursuit, the impossibility of the object at last broke upon him, and he found that self-approval ever fled, and perfection never came, he felt the vehement impulse immediately of a disappointed man to insist on the very contrary extreme. To an impetuous nature the favourite alternative is all or none : the work half done annoys, and there is a pleasure in effacing it altogether. As Luther could not find a wholly approving conscience, he would have a simply condemning one ; and as good works could not be perfect, he would not have them to be good works at all. A rigid definition of goodness, as perfect goodness, annihilated at one stroke all goodness below that point, because it was below it ; converting it, as if in revenge; into absolute evil. That sense of sin which obedience created, and which increased in proportion to obedience, was in Luther's retaliatory disgust confounded with sin itself ; and the law, in theological language, made productive of sin only. L ut her. 335 Such was the conclusion to which Luther came ; its first effect was to make him turn round with fierceness and hostility upon the whole system of things which maintained such a balk, to a degree that the character of the Deity himself seemed at stake with him. " Ego ipse offendebar" are his words, " ut optarem nunquam me esse creatum kominem." "I was indig- nant, and gave silent utterance to murmuring, if not altogether to blasphemy. I said to myself, Is it not then enough that wretched sinners, already damned for original sin, should be overwhelmed with so many miseries by the decrees of the Decalogue, but God must add further misery to misery by His Gospel, menacing us even there with His justice and anger ?" He addressed God in the language of offended Job : " Thou art my enemy without cause." " Jerome, and other fathers, had trials — those of the flesh ; Augustine and Ambrose had trials — those of the persecuting sword ; but mine were far worse, they came from the angel of Satan, who strikes with the fist." There is nothing vituperative or disparaging of Luther, in saying that he had, in his intellectual nature, — suppressed, indeed, by a powerful though irregular faith, — an element of that sensitive and rebellious temperament which has made men before now atheists. Lucretius saw a great difficulty in the unsatisfying nature of religion, i.e. conscience, which he accused of filling the mind with horror and self-condemnation, instead of peace : — " Quas caput a coeli regionibus ostendebat Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans." He thought this must be wrong, and therefore denied the truth of religion altogether. Shelley's atheism was connected with difficulties in the same department : his whole nature rebelled against what appeared to him to be the issue of the moral process in the human soul : — " And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse, Which, from the links of the great chain of things, To every thought within the mind of man Sway and drag heavily, and each one reels Under the load towards the pit of death ; Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate, And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood." 33 6 Luther. The more simple portion of mankind see difficulties only as facts, and not as difficulties ; every stoppage is only their natu- ral resting-place, their minds exactly fit in with facts, and feel no pressure. But others cannot see a difficulty without seeing its bearing ; a subtle thread connects it immediately with their central faith, the responsibility is thrown back upon the foun- dation, and the whole system to which it attaches feels the challenge. All the world sees the existence of evil, but there is every shade of perception of it as a difficulty, from that temper of mind which does not see it as a difficulty at all, to that of those with whom it shakes the very throne of God Himself. Luther, who now saw a difficulty of nature in the artificial and exaggerated strength, which a theory of his own had given it, felt the effect of his own work ; and that state of absolute evil in man which a gratuitously rigid definition of goodness had imposed, agitated and puzzled him. He pictured miserable man vainly fighting with a stern and inexorable impossibility, which excluded him from ever attaining that chief good to the pursuit of which his nature impelled him ; and the whole construction of the human soul, which imposed toil and agony and rewarded with self- contempt, was a scandal. The in- satiableness of the law, the law of conscience, was a grievance in the constitution of things : " The more you try to fulfil it, the more you will transgress it." " You accumulate law upon law, and all issues but in miserable self-torture and pain. Una lex gignit alias decern — one law begets ten more, till they mount up to infinity." " The stone of Sisyphus ever rolls, the vessel of the Danaides never fills." With a Manichean inten- sity he insisted upon the absolute evil of all visible and per- ceptible nature. The sun was darkness, and the moon refused to give her light, and the stars of heaven were extinguished. " In man and in the devil spiritual things were extinct." A fierce hatred of the world rose up, of this whole visible system of things, as so much pure evil — " a world of dread and ruin, of sin, and anger, and judgment, where is nothing celestial, nothing divine ; which is nothing else but the kingdom of the devil, a flood of death, hell, sin, and all evils oppressing quaking, miser- able man." " Do what thou wilt, tu es in hoc seculo nequam, Luther. 337 thou art in this wicked world, this world which is darkness, not is in darkness, but is darkness itself." Luther's language after he had arrived at his explanation of this evil, shows how it must have worked upon him before. Throughout his writings there come up continually traces of a state of mind which had seen something really wrong, and to be complained of, in the constitution of things ; and his forms of expression edge with a venturesome nicety upon, without actually touching, the justice of the Deity. In his book De Servo Arbitrio a fatalist line of thought brings him into contact with this awful subject, and he describes the Deity as "though not making sin," yet, as if it were the next thing to it, " not ceasing to make and multiply natures vitiated by sin, natures from which He has withdrawn His Spirit." 1 The expression has the effect of bringing the Divine mind into some kind of vicinity to the production of evil, and throwing a responsibility upon it on that head ; as if, though God did not create the principle of evil in the first instance, He voluntarily concreted it, and gave it that teeming and multitudinous life which it has in the existence of innu- merable individual evil beings. Nor does Luther disguise the peculiar trial to his faith which this department of speculation brings : " hie fidei summits gradus credere justum qui sua volun- tate nos necessario damnabiles facit." Such passionate and semi-sceptical thoughts cleared away, but only to leave Luther confronting, in their place, a most grave difficulty of Christian doctrine ; for, upon the dogma of the absolute evil of man's goodness, a great difficulty immedi- ately arises with respect to the doctrine of justification. How was man ever to be justified, and become acceptable to God, being, as he was, simply evil ? The fundamental teaching of natural religion is, that man must recommend himself to God by some or other goodness, bona fide belonging to him : indeed, such a truth is no more than a mode of stating what natural religion is. The fundamental teaching of the Church Catholic has been the same : that is to say, the Church has always ad- 1 "Licet enim Deus peccatum non faciat, tamen naturam peccato, sub- tracts Spiritu, vitiatam, non cessat formare et multiplicare, tanquam si Faber ex ligno corrupto statuas faciat. Ita qualis est natura, tales fiunt homines, Deo creante etformante illosex. natura tali." — DeServ.Arb., Op. vol. ii. p. 459. m.e.-i.] Y 1 "■> 38 L.uther. mitted good works into a regular place in the process of man's justification. But the Church has been enabled to do this from the circumstance that she has never annihilated the goodness of human works on account of their imperfection. She has all along taken a practical common-sense ground on this subject, and has not allowed experimental disappointments of conscience, or speculative difficulties respecting infinity and perfection, to depreciate good works in her eyes. She has never been extreme and exigeant, or let her divines insist on some impossible perfection, in order that they may reduce all actions beneath it to a level. She has been ever moderate, gentle, and discreet, making allowances, and admitting approximations. The Church has therefore been enabled to maintain, with respect to man's justification, all the teaching of natural religion, and the whole language of reason; such as, that all who do their duty ac- cording to their light please God in their degree; that the least effort, be it only sincere, is acceptable; that all which, upon fair consideration, we pronounce to be good, or to partake of goodness, or to have something or other to do with good- ness, in human conduct, all which is morally pleasing and commendable, is in its measure pleasing to God, and tends to make the doer pleasing to Him. But Luther annihilated all goodness in the first instance because it was imperfect; — he was, therefore, deprived of goodness as the means of justifica- tion ; and therefore he had the difficulty to solve, how man could be justified at all. Such was the climax of a long series of mental perplexities and troubles. One great absorbing difficulty brought them to a head — a human soul which was absolutely evil, and which could not, therefore, according to any existing method, be justified. His difficulty now in clear and definite shape before him, Luther had to find a solution for it. He found one in the doctrine of Imputation. To compensate for his total denial of actual goodness in man, he threw himself upon the idea of an imputed goodness ; intensifying and pushing out the im- puted exactly to the amount which his denial of the actual required. The act of imputation, considered in the abstract, Luther. 339 is of an extreme, simple, and arbitrary character, depending wholly on the imputer, and not at all on the person imputed to, and conferring the imputed thing or quality wholly irre- spectively of conditions. As received and entertained, how- ever, in the Church at large, this idea of imputation comes before us qualified by the conditions which natural religion imposes ; and as natural religion does not allow of the notion that perfect righteousness can be imputed by God to men who have done nothing whatever but evil, the imputation which the Church teaches becomes necessarily a conditional act, depend- ent on the character of the person to whom the imputation is made. But Luther insisted on giving imputation the whole unqualified force of the abstract idea ; that is to say, he pushed it out to the extent of its being absolute, and irrespective of the character of the person the subject of it. The one idea of imputation thus entirely met the difficulty which he had to meet ; for, whereas his difficulty was that man had no good- ness by means of which to be justified, here was a method of justification which required no goodness whatever in him. Here was the principle pronounced — and it was quite a new one in the Christian world, — that the goodness of the person had nothing whatever to do with his being accounted good by God. Here was the moral quality or character in man alto- gether separated from his justification, declared to be alien and irrelevant, null and void with reference to it. " The law was abolished, the whole law, moral as well as ceremonial," and had no place or existence in the scheme of reconciliation. Luther had answered his question, how man was to be justi- fied ; and the difficulty of absolute evil on man's part had a complete and triumphant solution in the doctrine of absolute imputation on God's. We have stated the fundamental point in Luther's system; but, in order to have a fuller idea of it, it will be proper to go a little further, and see it in its working. The righteousness of man, then, being a simply imputed one, in contrast with an actual state of absolute sin, the next step in the Lutheran system was to say that man individually appropriated that righteousness to himself, or was individually 340 Luther. justified, when the idea of that imputed righteousness wholly expelled and effaced the sense of that actual sin. To achieve this transmutation was the triumph of Christianity in Luther's view, and he dwells and enlarges on it with untiring enthu- siasm. On the one side indeed, was the world actual and cognisable declared to be wholly evil ; human nature with its moral affections, tastes, and power of will, was so much mere flesh, the flesh which the Gnostic hated and anathematised ; evil, rotten, and hostile to God. The very construction of human nature was against attaining goodness ; goodness being always the further off the more it was pursued. Evil was evil, and issued such ; and man " was under the elements of this world," and could not escape from its bondage. Such was the world actual and cognisable according to Luther. But his next step is, to tell us that with that world we have nothing to do ; that all this evil is absolutely irrelevant, and that the perfect righteousness of Christ is, by imputation, our real state and condition all the time. This righteousness was indeed wholly external to us, wholly removed from our nature, con- science, life, and being ; was in no sense an attribute of our- selves ; we looked within and did not see it ; our spiritual perception itself did not see it; it did not appear; it was nowhere. Still it was ours ; we had it ; we were perfectly righteous with the perfect righteousness of Christ. Intra con- scientiam Didbolus: extra conscientiam Deus. Luther insists particularly on the fact of this total separation between our life and consciousness and this righteousness, and also upon the total irrelevancy of that fact. " Thou, brother, wishest to have visible righteousness ; that is, thou wishest to feel righteous- ness as thou feelest sin ; this cannot be. Thy justice must transcend the sense of sin, and make thee believe that thou art righteous in God's sight. Thy justice is not visible, is not sensible, but to be revealed in its own time. Thou must not judge, then, according to the sense of sin, which terrifies and disturbs thee, but according to the promise of faith whereby Christ is promised to thee, who is thy perfect and eternal righteousness." " Thou sayest, I do not perceive that I have righteousness ; thou must not perceive, but believe that thou Luther. 341 hast righteousness." With tremendous energy he inculcates unceasingly this doctrine ; that, as far as any moral existence, i.e. any moral evidences of existence in our hearts and minds, are concerned, we are not to think of them, with reference to this righteousness ; that it has nothing to do with our moral nature, but that it does exist truly and absolutely nevertheless, and is our own. This is the great truth upon which we are to live. The believer has to think himself to be perfectly right- eous, though he sees himself to be perfectly wicked. And this explains a phraseology to which we come in Luther's writings, and which at first considerably perplexes us. For after all this picture of the unmixed evil and sin with which our con- science is ever upbraiding us, Luther is often, and earnestly, impressing upon us this particular distinction with respect to sin ; that, though it must be felt somehow and by some part of us, the conscience must not feel it. Of all our faculties, the conscience specially is restricted from feeling sin. Now such a phraseology is incomprehensible at first ; for it is something- like telling us that objects must be seen, but that of all the organs and senses of our nature, the eye must not see them ; or that sounds must be heard, but that of all our senses and per- ceptions, the ear must not hear them. Conscience is that faculty of which the particular function is to distinguish right and wrong, and convict us of sin if we have committed sin ; and therefore if sin is felt at all, conscience must be the part which feels it. Upon examination, however, we see that this is only a strong form of speech for expressing the fact that the consciousness of internal sin must be absorbed and extin- guished in the higher conviction of external righteousness. To express this, the conscience is described as itself becoming changed into this higher conviction ; its nature inverted, it is imperatively required to be conscious of that of which it is not conscious, and not conscious of that of which it is conscious. Sin must not reign in the conscience, but be content with tor- turing the body ; that is to say, the body which cannot feel it may feel it ; the conscience which can must not. The language is equivalent to saying that sin may be perceived as a fact, but not as sin. It is the peculiar function of conscience to perceive 342 JLutker. it as sin, therefore conscience must not be allowed to entertain the perception of it at all ; but a certain lower perception in our nature can see it as a fact, without being in the least troubled at it ; and within the sphere of such perceptions it may be allowed to come. With the memento that man's right- eousness, as being sin, and the law as producing sin, have the same unfitness with sin, to be objects of conscience, such ap- pears to be the key to a large body of language we encounter in Luther. " Conscience has nothing to do with the law, with works, or with human righteousness." " The law must remain extra ccelum, i.e. extra cor et conscientiam." " Suffer the law to reign over thy body, not over thy conscience." " The law hath dominion over the flesh ; but if it wishes to occupy the con- science," etc. " The flesh should be subject to the law, remain in its sepulchre, and be vexed by the Egyptians; but the conscience must be free." "In the state let the severest obedience to the law be exacted" — i. e. because the state does not recognise sin as sin, but only as injurious to society, there- fore the state may be alive to sin — but not the conscience. " Let the conscience sleep joyfully in Christ, without the least sense of the law of sin and death." "When thy conscience is terrified with the law, and struggles with the judgment of God, then consult neither the law nor reason, but depend on grace alone, and the word of consolation. Then conduct thyself alto- gether as though thou hadst never heard of the law of God ; ascend into the darkness, where is the light neither of law nor reason, but the enigma of faith only, which certainly decrees that thou art saved in Christ, beyond and outside of the law. Beyond and above the light of law and reason doth the Gospel take us, into the darkness of faith where the law and reason have no business." " Where there is fear and the sense of sin, death, wrath, and judgment ; there there is nothing celestial, nothing divine." — " But drown thy conscience in the wounds, blood, death, and resurrection of Christ." "Let the piou? remember that in conscience they are free before God, from the curse of the law, though they are slaves to the law in the body." The Old Testament is allegorised on this principle ; and the conscience ascends with Isaac to the mount, the Luther. 343 burden of the law remains with the ass below; conscience ascends with Moses, the law descends with him to be dispensed to the people below. " Moses on the mount, when he speaks face to face with God, hath not, makes not, administers not. the law. But, having come down from the mountain he is a legislator, and governs the people with the law. In like man- ner let thy conscience be free from the law, but let thy body be subject to the law." " Let Moses remain on the earth, there let him be a doctor of the letter, an exacter of the law, a crucifier of sinners ; but for us, we have a new guest and a new house, — Christ has come ; and Moses, the old occupier, must depart and migrate elsewhere." The meaning is, under every form and turn of language, and there is not much variety even in that, exactly the same. Our conscience must be con- scious alone of that which it does not see in us — righteousness; totally unconscious of that which it alone does see in us — sin. Such are the two Lutheran worlds, or natures, of utter evi] and absolute good ; a perceptible and actual state of evil, an unperceived and imputed state of good ; whereof the latter must wholly annihilate in idea and feeling the former, in order for the individual to be justified. The " Law," and " Christ," for these are respectively their two names, are antagonist principles opposed to each other with the intensity and fierce- ness of the two principles in the Eastern Dualistic philosophies — " two contraries in irreconcilable war with each other ;" and the triumph is when the former is destroyed. The " Law" if horror, blackness, quaking, pallor, sadness, and despair; a " dungeon," a " hell," a " sepulchre," a " torturer," a " butcher ;" " whoever saith he loves it lies : that robber who loves his own dungeon raves." To this legislatorial principle " Christ " is the antagonistic. " Christus gigas potcntissimus sustulit legem!' Christ does not legislate, but kills law. He says to the " Law," Ego ligabo te, I will bind thee : Captivity, I will lead thee captive ; Satan, I am thy Satan ; I am the " Butcher of the butcher," and the " Devil to the devil." And now we come to the power by which the believer was enabled to attain this victory, and wholly supplant this sin by this righteousness ; that is to say, to the medium in the process 344 Luther. of individual justification. Though all moral conditions were rejected, some medium or other it was necessary to have by which an evil nature was to lay hold of, and appropriate to itself, a perfect righteousness ; as it could not be supposed that an evil being would become absolutely good in God's sight, without anything at all done on his side. The medium then laid down for this purpose was Faith. But it was faith of a particular character, which in connection with the system should be noticed. Faith, then, before it was allowed to occupy its position in the Lutheran process of justification, was carefully divested of all moral characteristics. There is a faith, which is in its very nature, akin to love or moral : but it was not this kind of faith which Luther made the medium between man and God in the act of justification. To have allowed any moral element in this medium, would have been to allow human goodness a place in the act of justification, which it was its first principle to avoid ; and, therefore, he jealously and accurately guarded his faith from such admixture. He again and again inculcates and presses the distinction that the faith which he means is not that faith which includes love ; that it is a faculty of apprehen- sion simply. " That faith which apprehends Christ, not that which includes love, justifies." " Faith is not ineffectual till joined by charity." He speaks of it as an insult to faith, and " making it an empty quality in the soul," to assert that it de- pended on the companionship of charity for its effect : — " as if," he says, " it could do nothing without charity; and when charity came, then was effectual, and then was justifying." " The apostle attributes the operation (in justification) to faith and not to love." " Perish the sophists with their accursed gloss, Fides formata charitate :" that "impious gloss," that "pestilent gloss." " It is by faith sole, not by faith perfected in love, that we are justified." " Faith may be concreted in works after we are justified, but it is faith abstract by which we are justi- fied." The faith, then, which was the medium of justification in Luther's system, was an extra- moral faith. It was, as far as we can apprehend its nature, which it is not easy to do, the pure abstract faculty of confidence, whereby the mind assures itself Luther. 345 of something of which it wants to be assured. As such, it is not untypical of Luther's temper ; and the reader who follows him through his career, or listens to his table-talk, or watches those symptoms of personal character which appear, as they often do, in his theological works, will catch many a trait and senti- ment, which may carry him back to his original dogma. The great cardinal virtue in Luther's eyes was confidence. He had a special admiration, an enthusiastic affection for that particular faculty of mind, which makes a man inwardly strong and self-supporting. In the description of Adam before the Fall, in his Commentary on Genesis, he gives us his beau-ideal of a man, and strength and self-confidence enter remarkably into it. Adam shows something of the Herculean model. Thus Luther dwells with animation upon his dominion over the beasts. He describes a character, bearing no slight resemblance to what in modern language we call a master-mind ; one endowed with a mysterious power, marvellous self-respect, and instinctive command over others' wills and movements. Man in his primitive state is the dominus terras, lord of the earth, not by labour, art, and cruelty, but by an innate power and will, to which the whole creation unconsciously bows ; and he has this power, because he is true to himself, and feels no distrust within. But with the fall this inward confidence goes, and all is altered : he shakes like a leaf, is full of terror and alarm, and starts even at the sound of God's approach. Then the beasts shake off their yoke, the earth becomes stubborn and disorderly, and cunning, toil, and misery succeed to artless and majestic power. The Lutheran Adam is a superior creation to the Calvinistic Adam of Milton : but it is impossible not to see in the character the ruling taste in Luther's mind for the simple faculty of confidence as the source of strength and happiness. On the contrary, distrust as to our condition, and where we stand, and how God regards us — the least apprehension, fear, and doubt, are simple misery and meanness with him. " What is more miserable than uncertainty ? " he asks again and again, as if Nature herself revolted from it : — that monster of " uncer- tainty," that " pest of uncertainty," " which makes whatsoever thou thinkest, speakest, doest, sin." How could a man be easy 346 Luther. with such a disease upon him ? How could he worship, how could he serve God the least ? And all those texts of Scrip- ture, which describe the confidence of the good and the fear of the wicked, — " The wicked flee when no man pursueth ;" " the wicked are like a troubled sea ;" " there is no peace for the wicked ;" " the righteous are bold as a lion ;" " he that doeth evil hateth the light ;" " whatsoever is not of faith is sin ;" " the just shall live by faith," — were interpreted in this particular sense. The faith which was the medium in Luther's process of justification was thus a pure and abstract faculty of confidence which was efficacious in and out of itself. Believe that you are absolved, and you are absolved — was his teaching as a priest before he broke from the Church ; never mind whether you deserve absolution or no. He that believes is better than he that deserves. Always be sure that you are pleasing to God ; if you are sure you are, you are. Feel yourself safe ; if you feel safe, you are safe. On the contrary, if you doubt about it, you are condemned, because you are self- condemned. You are not in the image of God then, but in the image of the devil. Eecollect yourself ; make an effort ; believe ; be " cer- tainly resolved that you are in favour with God." You are then a son of God and a saint, strong, perfect, and triumphant ; you go forth like the sun in the heaven, and rejoice like a giaut refreshed with wine. You have conquered the world, the flesh, and the devil, and have trodden hell and darkness under foot. But this confidence, whatever apparent strength it might attain to, wanted, from the very hypothesis on which Luther's system was built, that reality and basis which Catholic faith has. All faith is, indeed, a sort of confidence ; but the confi- dence of Catholic faith has this remarkable characteristic, that it appeals to positive fact for its basis. Human nature is not, according to Catholic theology, though brought by an incom- prehensible mystery under a condition or state of evil, in a totally evil state. It still bears the stamp of its Divine original, has moral tastes and preferences, and a real power of performing acts of various degrees of moral goodness ; has memorials of past and pledges of future perfection. Catholic Luther. 347 faith, then, with respect to the unseen world, rests upon the actual facts of the seen. Proceeding upon data, it is a faith allied to reason, and not a blind faith. Man has some good in him, therefore he may one day Joe better, and an ultimate state of acceptableness in God's sight is made credible to him by the fact that he can make some approaches to such acceptableness now. It is for the same cause a faith allied to hope. For it is the peculiar characteristic of the faculty of hope to enlarge and advance upon fact as distinct from doing without fact alto- gether ; existing fact given, hope can proceed upon it inde- finitely ; but some ground of fact it must have. The phrase »f " hoping against hope" does not suppose the total absence of all such ground, but only the reduction of it to the smallest imaginable quantum. Sailors wrecked in the middle of the sea hope for the sight of a sail, in proportion as they know their situation to be in some general line of navigation, know the traffic on that line to be considerable, know the time of the year to be the customary one for that traffic, and other like data ; if they have no data at all for hope, they cannot legitimately hope. So far as faith and hope can be viewed as distinguished from each other, faith takes the negative, and hope the positive side ; faith exerts her particular powers in opposing those appearances which are hostile ; hope hers in enlarging those appearances which are friendly. Catholic- faith, then, as it has existing fact to proceed upon, is a faith allied to hope ; nay, so intimately allied, that hope practically precedes faith in the act of belief ; and we believe because we hope, rather than hope because we believe ; we see an actual ground, however small ; hope expands this, and not till then we have faith. Allied thus to hope and reason, Catholic faith is emphati- cally a natural kind of faith. It is not violent or forced ; it has only to believe in the future expansion and perfection of that which it now sees. The Christian sees tendencies, and he has to believe in issues ; he sees approaches, and he has to believe in fulfilments ; he sees a foundation, and he infers a superstructure ; he rises by a reasonable ascent from earth to heaven : the visible world contains the elements of the iu- 348 Luther. visible ; the kingdom of nature opens by a gradual process into that of grace. The very smallest act of our moral nature connects him by anticipation with the " glory which shall be revealed in him." Though he cannot say, " It is finished," he can say, " It is begun ; " and in that visible beginning has a solid substratum for the most inspiring belief. Thus, when the great philosopher of our own Church undertook the task of convincing an infidel age of the truth of religion, the line he adopted was that of calling its attention to present visible facts. He told men that they were moral beings, born with the love of virtue and hatred of vice, endowed with generous affections, and with the power of doing virtuous actions — a power which could be indefinitely increased by habit and self- discipline ; and he proved, next, that this goodness was more or less rewarded. There were then tendencies, he said, which pointed of themselves to some ultimate completion. That which religion taught us did exist to a certain extent now ; and, therefore, might exist to a much greater extent hereafter. That is to say, his was a philosophy of hope ; it saw in the midst of the wildness and disorder of this present scene some facts which bore in one direction, and hope took up those facts and enlarged them into a system. But Luther had no present facts to appeal to according to his system. He had no tendencies and no approaches. And, therefore, though he recognised an unseen world of absolute good, and — in distinction from making evil of the essence of humanity, or irrevocably fixing and perpetuating it in us — pointed to a time when we should be perfectly righteous, and could say Justitia tibi parata est in ccelo, " in a future life thou shalt be cleansed from all sin, cleared of all concupiscence, be pure as the sun, and have perfect love ;" this unseen world was deprived of all medium to connect it with the seen one, and, therefore, deprived of that evidence which constitutes the legitimate claim to our faith. Of two worlds, of absolute evil and absolute good diametrically opposed, he placed us in the one, and told us to believe in the other. But the natural ques- tion immediately arises, Why should we ? No system of evidences, either in the religious or in any other department, Luther. 349 can dispense with that primary law of all argument — how can we reason but from what we know ? Let any basis of fact, however small, be allowed us, and we can build in definitely upon it ; but if we have no fact at all, we have nothing to build upon. The faith of Lutheran theology was thus excluded, by the very fundamental principles of that theology, from the reasonable and natural type. The act of faith became rather one of mental power, by which a person, from pure force of will, made himself believe in what there was no ground to believe, than one of natural conviction. It was faith deprived of its membership with the other portions of our spiritual nature ; faith without hope, as it was faith without love. Excluded from a reasonable and natural character, it was compelled to assume a fanatical one ; faith became assurance. The task of the Christian was to work himself up by strong effort to the belief that he himself was personally saved, was a child of God, was in a state of justification. If the believer asked why, or how, he was to believe, he was told again, Believe ; make yourself believe ; believe somehow or other. He was urged with arguments enough, addressed to his mere will and sense of personal advantage; was threatened and promised; was told he would be intolerably wretched if he did not believe so, unutterably happy if he did ; but ground of reason there was none. Assurance thus left to assure itself as it could, became an anxious, struggling, and fluctuating gift. It rose and it fell with the state of the spirits, and even state of the body. It was at any moment liable to be upset, and when upset the will had to make another effort to regain it. These struggles, or " agonies," occupy a prominent place in the practical or devotional department of Luther's theological system. They are appealed to as the tests of the genuineness and reality of the Christian's belief. Has he been tempted to doubt and despair of his salvation, and has he had to make the most tremendous internal efforts to recover his certainty of it? these are the tokens which a loving but chastising Father sent him of good-will and favour. They were the trials to prove him, and stimulants to raise him to a higher degree of assur- ance than ever. The same reason which gave Luther's faith a 35° £uther. fanatical, gave it a personal and individual character too. Genuine faith, as it rests on a large external ground, is wide and social in its object, looks forward to the final issue of this whole system of things, the ultimate triumph of virtue over vice, to the great Day of Judgment and the restitution of all things. But Luther's faith, as it narrowed its basis, narrowed its object too. Withdrawing from the wide ground of reason and nature, the unsupported faith of mere will — choosing to believe because it wished to do so — as it derived all its strength from the individual, interested itself about the indi- vidual only ; and faith became, in its whole scope and direc- tion, personal. Such is that whole system which, amongst ourselves, goes under the name of Calvinism. It is, of course, wrong, histori- cally speaking, to call Luther a Calvinist, because Luther preceded Calvin, and was the original discoverer of that set of ideas which Calvin only compacted and systematised. But, amongst ourselves, in consequence of our acquaintance having lain more with the Genevan than the German branch of the Reformation, these ideas are associated with the name of Calvin, and, therefore, amongst us, Luther's theology may be designated as Calvinism. No greater contrast, indeed, than that between the personal characters of the German and the Genevan Reformer can be well imagined, and the types of character they have handed down to their respective schools are widely distinct, but their theology is essentially the same. To return to the point at which we diverged. Luther had now found the solution of his difficulty, and was satisfied. He had encountered a tormenting puzzle, and had now the answer. How could man fulfil the law, was the puzzle. By simple im- putation, was the answer. The whole difficulties attending the adherence of evil to our nature were now explained to Luther. The mystery of Conscience was solved. He had got his evprj/ca. He dwelt upon it, now that he had got it, with deep and un- tiring relish ; he handled it and embraced it with perpetual mental fondness. He felt like a person possessed of a great secret, for which the whole world had been struggling from its creation, and never yet attained. He felt as Newton might Luther. 351 feel when he had discovered the principle of gravitation, or as Harvey might feel when he had discovered the circulation of the blood, or as one of the elder sages might have felt had he discovered the elixir vitce, or the principle of alchemical trans- mutation. He felt as one of those great philosophers of the ancient world might have felt when he discovered some great moral principle which explained the phenomena of human life, and disclosed the secret of human happiness, like Pythagoras when he discovered Number, or Zeno when he discovered Fate, or Epicurus when he discovered Chance. Every one who has found out a riddle, or put a Chinese puzzle together, or solved a problem in geometry, knows the peculiar satisfaction which attends the climax of solution — a satisfaction which is of course deeper in proportion to the depth and interest of the difficulty. Luther looked back with the feeling of a traveller at rest upon his past struggles and searchings. " Can you tell me how to fulfil the law ?" was the question he asked now, as if the diffi- culty itself were pleasing, because he felt in possession of the key to it. What is that impossible thing called righteous- ness which has tortured the human mind from the foundation of the world ? Square that circle if you can. Find that irov weak here, and Luther had only to ask his question in order to manifest and bring out that weakness. He retired from the disputation with the appearance of a person who knows he has given a challenge which cannot be answered, and demanded a proof which cannot be given. It added to the strength of this negative position, that the other side were so wholly unprepared for encountering it ; the Papal monarchy was a first principle with Luther's opponents ; they had never reasoned, or thought it necessary to reason about it ; it stood on a par with Chris- tianity itself ; the fact had grown up with their growth, and was part of themselves ; their minds simply reflected an esta- blished system, and could not put themselves db extra to it. as argument requires. When they had brought Luther to deny the authority of the Pope, they went away pleased and tri- umphant, as if they had gained a plain reductio ad absurdum. But it was impossible that the excited intellect of a new school of thinkers should not see the absence of real argument on such a question. The abuses of private judgment have sometim *- Luther. 373 naturally warped the intellect in favour of the Papal claims, but the abuses of the Papacy then exposed it to the examination of a not only impartial, but unfriendly intellect. An unfriendly intellect was a rigid one, and demanded argumentative proof; and that proof not being forthcoming, an intellectual triumph was on the side of him who gave the challenge, and an intel- lectual defeat on theirs who had not answered it. The puzzler, the questioner, was the victorious party ; and Luther repre- sented immediately the intellect of the day, the spirit of inquiry and criticism, which, not content with existing facts, required an explanation of them, and went back to first prin- ciples. Of two parties who were combating, one examined, the other simply asserted, and aimed at silencing its opponent by that simple force of assertion : the sympathies of the intel- lectual spirit were enlisted in favour of the inquirer, and against his dogmatic silencer. Again, a religious reason operated in fixing Luther in his position. Whatever amount of religion there might be going on within the Roman Church of that day, and whatever aggre- gate of good and holy men there might be, actually and numerically, in her, this religion did not come to the top, and take its proper leading place. The Church, acting as a whole, and exhibiting herself, in her central government, through her officials and mouthpieces, in her managing and ruling parties, showed lamely, in a religious point of view, before the world. The profligacy of the ecclesiastics of the Roman Court itself was notorious : and the Bishops at large had managed to raise against themselves a strong popular charge of pride and luxury which it is impossible for the fairest reader of history to over- look. The particular men whom the Papal Court sent from time to time to confront Luther showed the defect ; they were clever, active, shrewd, and elegant men, who had mixed with courts, and who had taken part in the literary revival of the age. Cajetan was a serious, indeed, though an ordinary man ; but Miltitz, a sly convivial courtier ; Eck, a vain and bustling disputant ; Aleandro, the nuncio at the Diet of Worms, a literary star, whose life had passed in the thick of the attrac- tions, the display, and the laurels of the Renaissance. Cam- 374 Luther. peggio the lawyer, and others, were men simply cut out on the model of the world of their day : so were Prierias, Emser, Murner, and a whole class of second-rate controversialists. But Luther was obviously not a man of this mould; his was a powerfully and strikingly religious mind. Whether his religion were a true one or not, he had one ; he lived for its sake ; he was full of it ; it inspired, strengthened, and stimulated him, and made him what he was. He stood before men like a being from another world ; possessed of an intensity of religious belief and ardour to which ordinary men had nothing comparable ; and which the world gazed upon as it does upon any transcendental phenomenon. Out of the whole ecclesiastical corps of the day, not a man was to be found who could meet him on this ground. Everybody knows the great weight and influence of " signs " in the religious department ; people have always sought after signs, and always will. By signs we mean prominent facts or phenomena, which admit of being supposed to be tokens from above, and suggest that supposition to anxious minds. Such signs, though they depend wholly on supposition — more or less natural — and not at all on argument, for their weight, have still often far greater weight than any argument ; they belong to the present and the actual. The immediate manifestation of God's will by a sign is more attractive than that which takes place through the ordinary mediums. And under the head of signs come not only positively miraculous and unaccountable facts, but all striking facts whatever ; all appearances, or postures of affairs, which admit of having some or other particular signifi- cance attached to them by the mind. In this sense the absence of religion at the headquarters of the Church was a serious " sign " to a large class of religious minds in Luther's days. Luther, on the other hand, was a striking phenomenon of the religious class ; an instance of a man possessing, and communi- cating, the most powerful religious convictions. The religious reason thus came in, and Luther gained numbers on the ground that he seemed to have earnestness on his side, while the Church was worldly and secular. A marvellous combination of the worldly politician and deep religious enthusiast, Luther was confronted by the talent and tact of commonplace men, and he Luther. 375 rode over it easily and triumphantly. Legate after legate and diet after diet broke down before him ; they could do nothing ; he had it all his own way. He succeeded, for the plain reason that there was not in the whole of Christendom his match, and that the greater man, like the greater momentum, naturally prevails. What, indeed, must have been the prostration of the Church, when in the person of Pope Adrian she humbly, and almost on her knees, implored Erasmus for help against Luther ; and the lukewarm indiffereutist refused it with the remark, " I told you what was coming." The schism fairly consummated, Luther had now to be the champion and conductor of a declared reformation; to wage war with the Eoman Church, and to construct, superintend, and provide for the wants of his own. The war with Eome was the more easy department to him of the two. The necessity of self-restraint over, and the policy which had hitherto demanded more or less of disguise, now positively directing the most full and broad exposure of the Papacy ; such an exposure as would soil and defile the prestige of ages, and accustom men to despise and trample on what they had hitherto reverenced ; he had only to give full swing to his feeling, and let himself be carried away by the force of an at once deliberate and wild impetuosity. The controversial tone of Luther is known. It must be allowed even by his admirers that he flooded the earth with his abuse. As a con- troversialist he was literally and wholly without decorum, conscience, taste, or fear. He did not know what it was to hesitate, to waver, upon an epithet or a gibe. There is no appearance in his style of his ever having once in the whole of his controversial career said to himself — Shall I say this or not? He said whatever he liked. He consulted strength alone. If that was to be bought, he refused no price. He was unscrupulously gross and foul-mouthed in his more solid vituperation; in his lighter banter there was that extremity of insolence which we notice in the derision of a sharp aud low crowd at a hustings, choosing exactly, in their battery upon an obnoxious candidate, the terms and the style the most offensive to his self-respect. A royal and majestic dignitary 376 Luther. (Henry vm. of England) engages in theological controversy with Luther, and is thus answered : " The Lord Henry, not by the grace of God, King of England, has written in Latin against my treatise. There are some who believe that this pamphlet of the King's did not emanate from the King's own pen ; but whether Henry wrote, or Hal, or the devil in hell, is nothing to the point. He who lies is a liar. My own notion about the matter is, that Henry gave out an ell or two of coarse cloth, and that then this pituitous Thomist, Lee, the follower of the Thomist herd, who in his presumption wrote against Erasmus, took scissors and made a cope of it. If a King of England spits his impudent lies in my face, I have a right in my turn to throw them back down his own throat. If he blasphemes my sacred doctrines, if he casts his filth at the throne of my Monarch, my Christ, he need not be astonished at my defiling in like manner his royal diadem, and proclaiming him, King of England though he be, a liar and a rascal. . . . He thought to himself, Luther is so hunted about, he will have no oppor- tunity of replying to me ; I need not fear to throw anything that comes first to hand in the poor monk's path. Ah ! ah ! my worthy Henry ! you've reckoned without your host in this matter ; you've had your say, and I'll have mine. You shall have truths that won't amuse you at all. I'll make you smart for your tricks. This excellent Henry accuses me of having written against the Pope out of personal hatred and ill-will ; of being snarlish and quarrelsome, backbiting, proud, and so conceited, that I think myself the only man of sense in the world ! I ask you, worthy Hal, what has my being conceited, snappish, and cross-grained, supposing I am so, to do with the question ? Is the Papacy free from blame, because I am open to it ? Is the King of England a wise man because I suppose him to be a fool ? Answer me that. . . . What most sur- prises me is not the ignorance of this Hal of England, not that he understands less about faith and works than a log of wood, but that the devil should trouble himself to make use of this man against me. King Henry justifies the proverb, 'Kings and princes are fools.' I shall say very little more about him at present, for I have the Bible to translate, and other important Luther. 377 matters to attend to ; on some future occasion, God willing, when I shall be more at leisure, I will reply at greater length to this royal driveller of lies and poison. ... I imagine that he set about his book by way of penance, for his conscience is ever smiting him for having stolen the crown of England, having made way for himself by murdering the last scion of the royal line. . . . Hal and the Pope have exactly the same legitimacy : the Pope stole his tiara, as the King his crown, and therefore it is that they are as thick together as two mules in harness." The rage of the great monarch on being addressed with such unbounded freedom is evidently before the writer's mind here, and acts as his amusement and his stimulus. It is not difficult to see that the writer of such a passage as this was capable of higher flights in the same department, — of stronger, deeper, more passionate, virulent abuse, when it was his humour. "Come on, pigs that you are, burn me if you dare! I am here to be seized upon," he addresses the Thomists. " My ashes shall pursue you after my death, though you throw them to all the winds, into all the seas. Pigs of Thomists ! do what you can. Luther will be the bear in your path, the lion in your way. He will pursue you wherever you go, he will present himself incessantly before you, will leave you not a moment's peace or truce, till he has broken your iron head and your brazen front." Luther always exerted the powers of a Comus towards his adversaries. " Their human countenance, The express resemblance of the gods, is changed Into some brutish form of wolf or bear, Or ounce, or tiger, hog, or bearded goat." A series of caricatures exhibited the Pope and his adherents under complex forms of brutishness, in which ass, calf, hog, ox, elephant, griffin, and fish all mingled. The " Pope-ass and the Monk-calf," and "the Papal Sow," were accompanied with explanations, that no part of the uncomplimentary symbolism might be lost. Nor, while Luther searched earth, air, sea, and sky for epithets, did he despise the commonest ; he had even a prevailing bias to them as being the strongest — to one espe- cially above all others — one invested, by universal consent, with 378 Luther. a kind of technical and legal precedence. Luther is unsparing in decking his opponents with long ears ; " They've got their ears too long by half, with their hihau ! hihau !" — (some critics had reflected on his Bible translation). " Tell them that Dr. Martin Luther abides by his translation, regarding a Papist and a jackass as one and the same thing." But his mere sallies, after all, do not give the true idea of Luther as a vituperator; it is the constant mingling of the vituperative with the subject, whatever it be, in hand — its in- corporation with his style — its unwearied and incessant flow, which astonishes ; the rush is sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker ; but the floodgates are always open, and invectives ever issuing from Luther's mouth. He is perfectly conscious of his own warmth, and, like a true clever man, has a rationale, for it. " I was bom," he says, " to meet parties and demons hand to hand on the field of battle ; therefore my writings are full of war and tempest. I am the rough pioneer who has to prepare the ways and level the road. But the master of arts, Philip (Melanchthon), advances calmly and gently ; he cultivates and he plants; he sows and he waters joyfully according to the gifts which God has made him." As he proceeds through the Epistle to the Galatians, he sees a strong resemblance in himself to St. Paul. The Apostle occasionally uses language of strong rebuke : " Est et nostra castigatio dura et stylus vehemens," adds Luther. The Apostle says, " I would they were cut off that trouble you." " Atrocia verba, horribilia fulmina" remarks Luther : " Paulus acerbissime perstringit, acerbe invehitur ;" "I, too, Martin Luther, contra Papam volo et debeo sanctd superbid superbire." He forgot that, in the first place, St. Paul uses very different language from that of Martin Luther ; and in the second, that he uses that language much less frequently than Martin Luther does his. The comparison overlooks entirely what is an important feature in the case, the question of quan- tity. St. Paul does not anathematise false prophets in every verse of his Epistles ; and an epithet of rebuke once in an Epistle is not a precedent for an epithet of abuse many times over in a page. The truth is, though such an explanation is no excuse, Luther. 379 faults of temper are the natural faults accompanying strong powers of action. Luther could not have done what he did if he had not been constitutionally endowed with powers of action in the most wonderful degree, and to possess these powers was to possess a never-failing stimulus to temper. Action of all kinds is connected with, and depends more or less on, the element of passion in the human mind. That necessary state of desire in the mind which all action supposes, in order to account for itself and explain its own origin, is of the nature of passion, and therefore, in literal truth, no human being can act at all without some passion in him to make him ; he cannot walk or talk, move hand or arm, bend joint or sinew, without it ; he cannot open the door or shut it, or step from one corner of the room to the other but by means of this element in his nature, and passion is the electric or magnetic power which sets everything within him in motion, and makes him the act- ing creature he is. Thus the charm of active bodilv exercises and feats of strength ; they satisfy a certain passion of action, as we may call it in our nature, and give it play and vent ; the process of climbing, leaping, running up-hill, gives a certain impetus and eagerness of mind, — which would otherwise be in painful restlessness in consequence of inaction, — its proper action and quietus. And on this principle we see the com- monest kind of action accompanied with passionate excesses, or what we call temper. Thus few people will remove any obstacle to their motion, a chair or stool or table, with exactly the degree of strength which is, and which they themselves know to be, sufficient to remove it. Some will instantaneously inflict the most extravagant superfluity of removal on the offending obstacle, and most persons will remove it more forcibly and farther off than is necessary, — not that it is of the smallest advantage to do so, but simply because the material comes into collision with their powers of action, and those powers are fundamentally connected with a species of irasci- bility. And though such general passion as lies at the bottom of all human action hardly deserves the name, and is an animal rather than a distinctly human impulse, the blind substratum rather than the thing itself, its quality rises with the quality 380 Luther. of the action with which it is connected till it becomes true human passion. Such passion, as connected with power of action, appears remarkably in the characters of the world's great men. It comes out, indeed, often in their case in forms so frightful and extreme that we cease to connect it with such general powers, and regard it as a distinct disease ; but it plainly is connected with these powers, and we see that, but for that natural strength of passion of which these horrible excesses were the corruptions and embrutements, these men never could have been the great men they were. The Sylla who decimated Athens because an Athenian wit had passed a joke on his physiognomy, and who on his deathbed saw Granius strangled before his eyes, was the Sylla of the Mithridatic and Social Wars, and the reformer of the Republic. He wrote his own epitaph correctly : " Here lies Sylla, who was never out- done in kindness by a friend or revenge by an enemy ;" that is to say, here lies a man of intense passions. Who cannot see a a connection between the future Napoleon and the boy who vomited with rage on hearing a reflection passed upon his native Corsica? The strong powers of command and arrange- ment which such men must have, to be what they are and bend minds and circumstances as they do, require passion to sustain them as a tree requires sap. Even our thinking powers require this support in a way, and the most purely intellectual processes, as soon as ever they become deep and difficult, can- not be carried on without a force of will which latent passion supplies. All things within and without seem to be ever try- ing to throw off the empire of mind over them ; events get out of control, ideas get out of control ; affairs will put themselves, as if from sheer malice, in the most inconvenient and awkward posture, everything happening when it ought not, and clashing with everything else ; thoughts fly off, disperse, and refuse to be brought to any head, and the mind has to bring all into order by means of a certain natural force of will or passion. "Luctantes ventos tempestatesque sonoras Imperio premifc." Even passion itself must be subdued by passion, and feel- ings, as they swell into excess, be put down by a forcible Luther. 381 antagonist will, which comes from the heart, and is in a sense passionate. All strong energetic action having such an internal accompaniment, the consequence is what was to be expected ; viz., that from the lowest up to the highest examples of energy, from the energetic man who fells timber or mows grass to the energetic man who rules a nation, as sure as we hear of energy, almost as surely we hear of temper. Industrious and cross, idle and good-tempered, is the housekeeper's experience of ser- vants. Eaise the dignity of the epithets, and the same experi- ence applies to higher agents in the world's .system. The energetic statesman, ecclesiastic, artist, merchant, poet, is ex- ceedingly apt to be a man of temper. The wide prevalence of the combination is of course no excuse for it, for it only shows that the passionate element in the human constitution tends to excess, and that where there is a strong temptation in a par- ticular direction the majority will yield to it. Christian prin- ciple suggests that where energy really interferes with Christian temper, the former should give way to the latter. It is of more importance to a man that his temper should be Christian, than that he should govern a party, a nation, a church, or a world. And if he finds himself embarked on a line which necessarily demands a too great amount of energy for him — if the multitude of his occupations, and the despatch with which he has to go through them, and the interruptions which harass, and the intensity of thought and action which .excites him, are too severe a trial to his gentleness and patience, and the result is that he becomes proud and overbearing, a charitable judge will make the proper allowance ; but it must still be remem- bered that he is responsible for the issue of his situation upon himself ; more especially since, in nine cases out of ten, he put himself into it. Luther had enormous activities, and had that strong passion which goes along with them, and he was lifted by himself, in connection with events, into a position which demanded the constant support which the whole strength of his nature could give. He had a whole cause to push, maintain, and support — a whole world to oppose. His strength carried him through his work, and he gave it in reward all the indulgence which it 382 Luther. could possibly demand. The war in which he was engaged was controversial, a war in which words and not swords carried the day. The strength of his nature consequently was de- veloped in the shape of words. His fertility and ready wit gave him peculiar command over this field. Nature gives horns to bulls and hoofs to horses ; to Luther she gave a tongue. The word always came immediately as it was wanted, and, impetus suffering no check, went on till strength had become coarseness, and coarseness indecency. Such a passionate tem- perament with such a ready weapon hit everybody that came within reach. There was quite enough for Luther, in the simple fact that a man was a theological antagonist, to provoke a strong epithet. The disgust which high-mindedness feels instantaneously toward anything which stands in its way, as if nothing visible or invisible, human or divine, had any right to oppose it, inflicted its contumely by instinct almost before it was aware of its own act : " Why do you oppose me ? — take that !" Frederick of Prussia carried a cane, with which he vented a perpetual supply of abstract and causeless indignation upon the backs of his officers. Luther, in addition to a tem- perament, had also a motive ; he was the leader of a cause. The storm of nature drove on with the directness of intention, and knocked down every obstacle in the one line of its own motion. The internal conduct and direction of his own movement was a more difficult and anxious task. It is easier to pull down than to build up in religion, to attack than to construct and maintain. Luther had a completely new ground, both doctrinal and ecclesiastical, to make ; he had a new doctrine, the Lutheran dogma of justification by faith, to propagate and transmit to posterity ; he had a new society to form, which was to be the keeper and transmitter of it. It was absolutely necessary to construct a whole new system, internal and ex- ternal, doctrinal and corporate ; that is to say, a new Church. To enable himself to construct a new Church, a theory in the first instance was necessary, and a new theory. And, accordingly, a formal theory is laid on Luther's works for this purpose — the theory now so familiar to us, viz., that every Luther. 3^3 baptized person is a priest. As a priesthood makes sacra- ments, and sacraments make a Church, this theory at once supplied Luther with the power of making a Church. Bap- tism was all he wanted, and baptism he had. Every baptized person could, as far as principle went, administer the sacra- ments, and perform all the offices of a priest. What members of the baptized body should perform such offices was, indeed, a grave question of external order; and the founder of a Church was obliged to secure order. He could only secure order by authority, and therefore he had to fix upon some authority. But the only authority he wanted was one for this external purpose ; and such an authority seemed ready made for him in the State. He made the State this authority, and the whole question was settled. This theory, however, seldom makes its appearance in formal shape in Luther's works, and is more commonly implied than expressed. It was practically the only kind of Church he could found, if he was to found one at all. The question was settled for him by circum- stances, and he let circumstances settle it for him ; he had kings on his side, and he had no bishops. The great doctrine he had to promulgate, in short, created its own Church, and sanctioned its own priesthood and sacraments. If it was true, there must be some way of preserving and transmitting it, and that way could be only the establishment of a Church. A society is the natural keeper of an idea, and Luther, full of the truth of his own idea of justification, of which he considered himself the all but inspired teacher, made a society in what way he could. The established channels of Ordination, the Episco- pacy, the Apostolical Succession, a whole system of external Church appointments which was coeval with Christianity, went for nothing, in comparison with the necessities of a new doc- trine demanding some mode of establishing and transmitting itself. If Luther had had an Episcopacy ready to hand, and ready to go along with him, he would not have rejected it ; but as he had not got it he did without it. The new Lutheran Church rose up because the Lutheran doctrine wanted it, and appealed to no other sanction or right. But Luther in establishing his new society, with its form of 384 Luther. worship, prayers, ceremonial, and whole external system, pro- ceeded with that caution and accommodating spirit which have been already noticed in him. His great maxim was that the doctrine would create its own proper worship and its own ex- ternals. He therefore gave himself no trouble to put down the actual ceremonial forms themselves which were established, and used no violence. Preach my doctrine, he said ; that will do more than any direct attack upon such things can do ; that must and will undermine all the established ceremonial and external system if it only continues to be preached ; that is worth all the force and battery in the world. Thus the mass went on, the same vestments continued to be used, the images still stood, and the whole interior of the church fabric remained as before. " You ask me for a form of celebrating mass," he writes to Spalatin ; " I entreat you to trouble me no more about these minutiae ; let the conscience be kept quite free on the subject. It is by no means a thing of such importance as that on its account we should chain down the spirit of liberty with additional rules, regulations, and traditions. We have enough of them and to spare." Later, i.e. in 1526, he writes: "The mass is celebrated with the accustomed rites, and in the same costume as formerly, the only difference is that we sing some hymns in German, and that the words of consecration are in German. Indeed, I should not have abolished the Latin mass at all, or have substituted the vernacular, had I not found myself compelled to do so." " If you have not already abolished the Latin mass," he writes to a minister, " do not abolish it, but merely introduce into it a few German hymns. If it be abolished, at all events retain the old order and costumes." The adoration of saints he would not forbid : " Let each follow his own interpretation of such matters. Truth and charity for- bid men to dispute, and also arbitrarily to condemn one another, for faith and charity hate sects and schisms. I would resolve the question of the adoration of God in the saints by saying that it is a thing entirely free and indifferent." On the sub- ject of relics he would only say, "I believe the whole collection of them has been already quite enough exhibited." Purgatory he thought "was very uncertain." Confession was "a good Luther. 385 thing." There was no harm in keeping festivals or going pil- grimages. " Ceremonies are not necessary to salvation/' he said, " yet they produce an effect upon rude and uncultivated minds." " I condemn no ceremony which is not contrary to the Gospel." "You are about to organise the Church at Konigs- berg," he writes to a pastor ; " I entreat you, in the name of Christ, to make as few changes as possible. You have in your neighbourhood several Episcopal towns, and it is not desirable that the ceremonies of our new Church should vary in any marked degree from the old ritual." Even with respect to monasteries and nunneries, for which he had such deep aver- sion, he took and countenanced no violent steps. Only volun- tary desertion was encouraged, and not that in all cases. " I would not advise persons advanced in age to quit the cloister, because returning helpless to the world they would necessarily become a charge to other people, and would scarcely meet in these uncharitable days with the care and attention to which their age is entitled. In the interior of the monastery they are a burden to no one, and, moreover, they are in a position to do a great deal in aid of the spiritual salvation of their neighbours, which, were they in the world, it would be difficult, nay, I will almost say, impossible for them to do." Of another case : " We should leave poor nuns like these to live on after their own fashion." Such was the cautious and dilatory line on which Luther had determined, and to which, notwithstanding the perpetual siege upon it, he adhered. Letters from pastors in all directions, indeed, pressed for immediate decisions on different points of faith and practice, and innumerable tender consciences revolted from this and that part of the established system of worship and ceremonial, of which each wanted an answer from him instantaneous, absolute, and on its own side. One and another pastor was for immediately abolishing either confession, or saint- worship, or images, or the reception of the sacrament in one kind, or pilgrimages, or festivals and fasts. But Luther maintained his qualified position, and adhered obstinately to ambiguities and negatives. He parried the questions, soothed and calmed the questioners, advised quiet- ness and delay, and ended with reiterating the favourite dictum, M.B.-I.] 2 B 386 Luther. that all would be certain to come right if the doctrine was preached. The magnanimous ease and repose of the great leader of the movement stands out strikingly amid the petty scruples and small activities of the inferior agents, and Luther submits to all these questionings with that half-kind, half- scornful condescension with which dignified persons submit to any bore which their position brings upon them. " The whole world pestered him," he said, "with questions;" but as people would not be satisfied if they had not answers of some kind, he sent them answers : — an amiable weakness deserved some indul- gence. As for himself, he wanted to put down nothing which his doctrine would allow to stand, and he would let the doctrine find out what could stand with it and what could not. He had no desire to interfere himself in the matter. An easy capacious liberalism objected to the dogmatic enforcement of fasts and feasts, vestments, images, and the like, but so long as they were left voluntary saw no harm in them. Dogmatism in rejecting and dogmatism in enforcing were both condemned, and the spirit of Luther's reformation was in some aspects a remarkable anticipation of that modern Germanism which is associated amongst ourselves with the name of Dr. Arnold. But Luther was compelled, like many other teachers, to see a favourite line of policy broken in upon, and however moderate and procrastinating his own views might be, a crowd of trouble- some followers were not to be wholly coerced. He had the pain of seeing, one after another, various tendencies in the Reformation prematurely brought out, and exhibited in exag- gerated shape, and with accompaniments of violence and horror, before the world. Carlstadt and the image-breakers of Wit- tenberg, Munzer and the fanatic revolutionist peasants of Thuringia, John of Leyden and the Anabaptists, diverted the Reformation from its regular and orderly course, and disgraced it by monstrous associations. Luther was in the benevolent confinement of the castle of Wartburg, where his friend the Elector Frederick had placed him after the Diet of Worms, when he heard of the iconoclast excesses of Carlstadt and his party at Wittenberg. In addi- tion to the evil itself of such excesses, the fact that a vain, Luther. 387 shallow, noisy man should be taking advantage of his absence to assume a lead, and gratify his own envy for his superior — for that motive was deep in Carlstadt's mind — provoked and roused him. He first wrote letters to the Wittenbergers: "You have rushed into your present proceedings, eyes shut, head down like a bull. Eeckon no longer on me ; I cast you off; I abjure you. You began without me; finish how you may." His letters producing no effect, he determined to see what his personal presence would do. The monastic gown laid aside, and the steel cuirass, long heavy sword, plumed casque, and spurs and boots of a man-at-arms assumed, he escaped from Wartburg, and suddenly, amidst a crowd of valets and a cloud of dust, as Lucas Cranach has painted him, made his appearance in the streets of Wittenberg. His next step was to enter the church (which, strewed with the frag- mentary blocks of the old statuary like a mason's shop, gave ocular witness to the late excesses), and ascend the pulpit. The Wittenbergers now en masse before him, he scolded them like boys. " Satan," he commenced, " has been busy in my absence, and sent you some of his prophets. He knows whom to send ; but you ought to know, too, that I am the only person you should listen to. Martin Luther is the first man of the Eeformation : others come after him ; he, therefore, should command, and you should obey. It is your lot. I am the man to whom God has revealed His word. I know Satan, and am not afraid of him ; I have hit him a blow which he will feel a long time." Carlstadt was in church during this discourse, but hid himself behind a pillar to avoid Luther's eye. He and his fellow-prophets, Munzer, Stubner, and others, made their retreat, and left Luther in possession of the field. In another quarter, the Peasant Sedition gave Luther much annoyance. The peasant population of Thuringia, of the Palatinate, of the dioceses of Mayence, Halberstadt, and Oden- wald, had long murmured under the weight of their servitude, and the various exactions and oppressions, petty and great, of the nobles. They took advantage now of the reforming move- ment to rise in arms and assert their rights. Under the 388 Luther. leadership of Gotz, " with the Iron Hand" and George Metzler, they assembled in the Black Forest, got possession of Mergen- theim, and compelled several counts, barons, and knights to join them. The subjects of the powerful Count of Hohenlohe were soon added ; the Count himself being compelled to sign a treaty with the insurgents for a hundred years. The town of Landau, and the environs of Heilbronn rose. The body got reinforcements daily, and town after town opened their gates to them. Agents from the main army dispersed through the several districts, received oaths of adhesion, and imposed tribute — the clergy of Mayence paying in a fortnight fifteen thousand gold florins. A mixture of religious and political fanaticism formed the basis of this revolutionary movement. The insurgents marched under the banner of a white cross, and to the music of the Marseillaise hymns of the day. As soon as their body was compacted, and scheme formed, a public statement, divided into the well-known Twelve Articles, set forth their grievances and their rights. They demanded the free election of their pastors, relief from various feudal exactions, and, last of all, release from slavery and villanage ; and they appealed to Luther to sanction and support their claims. Luther answered their appeal, and undertook the task of mediation. He published an Exhortation to Peace, in which he divided himself nearly equally between the two con- tending sides. He rebuked the nobles for their rapacity and oppression, and the peasants for their insubordination and licence. To the former he said : " It is quite clear that you have no one upon earth to thank for all this disorder but you yourselves, princes and lords ; — it is you and your crimes God is about to punish. If the peasants who are now attacking you are not the ministers of His will, others coming after them will be so. You may beat them, but you will be none the less vanquished ; you may crush them to the earth, but God will raise up others in their place : it is His pleasure to strike you, and He will strike you." To the latter he said : " Au- thority is unjust, but you are more in the wrong even than authority ; you who, not content with interdicting the Word of God, trample it under foot, and arrogate to yourselves the Luther. 389 power reserved to God alone." And he repelled, by Scripture arguments, their claim to release from villanage : " You wish to apply to the flesh the Christian liberty taught by the Gos- pel, but I would ask you, did not Abraham and the other patriarchs, as well as the prophets, keep bondmen ? St. Paul himself tells us, that the empire of this world cannot subsist without an inequality of persons." Thus far the position of the insurgents was a respectable one, and Luther gave them a modified support. But a body of insurgent peasants could not keep up its respectability long. It fell soon into the fanatical leadership of Munzer, and plunged into frightful atrocities. Under the watchword of " No quarter to idle men," they massacred all the nobles who fell into their hands ; in Franconia alone they pillaged and burned two hundred and ninety-three monasteries ; and their revolutionary theory, grown monstrous, demanded the universal levelling of social ranks. Luther saw immediately that he could not afford to mix up his cause with such a cause as theirs now was, and he threw them off with characteristic decision. " Miserable spirits of confusion ! no mercy, no toleration is due to the peasants ; on them should fall the wrath of God and of man ; the peasants are under the ban of God and of the Emperor, and may be treated as mad dogs." In the event, the peasants were massacred wholesale, Luther actually hounding on the nobles to the work. It is not surprising that Luther's conduct in this matter should have encountered criticism, and that the observation should be made, that he favoured the peasants at first and bitterly denounced them afterwards. While we see in his conduct here, however, the natural vehemence of his character, and unscrupulous summariness of his policy, we cannot, with M. Audin, accuse him of inconsistency. His favour to the peasants at first was favour coupled with advice. If they neglected his advice, the favour was not obliged to last. He told them to be moderate, and meet their masters half way : they took to massacring and levelling. As soon as he saw this, he had done with them. Had they put themselves under his guidance, he would have made use of them, and stood up 390 Luther. for them. But as they chose to be their own masters, and behave senselessly, he said, — Miscreants, you are injuring my cause, and I will rid myself of you as soon as possible. And, as Luther never did anything by halves, his form of throwing them off was — calling for their massacre. For this form he is responsible, but we see no inconsistency in the line of conduct. M. Audin regards Luther as a sympathiser with political fanaticism in the first instance, and, when he saw the results, then turning round upon the actors whom his sympathies had encouraged. But this was not the case. Luther never had any sympathy with levellers ; he gave no encouragement to the peasants to become political fanatics. He had strong sym- pathies with regular monarchical and aristocratic power ; and from the first he strongly advised the peasants, while they claimed freedom from particular oppressions and exactions, to submit quietly to remain in their established servile state. M. Audin makes two separate addresses of Luther's to the peasants, of which the popularly-toned one he dates before, the aristo- cratically-toned one after, the excesses of the peasant war ; and hence accuses Luther of changing sides with events ; but these two were not separate addresses, but only two parts of one and the same address, qualifying and balancing each other. But Luther's bitterest vexations were the doctrinal develop- ments which the Eeformation now began to show in some quarters. A hard sceptical materialist spirit, not content with the freedom from the law of works which he had achieved, began to empty and dry up the channels of grace. The Anabaptists under Carlstadt, and still more fanatical prophets than he, attacked the sacrament of Baptism ; the Swiss under Zwinglius, the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. The former denied infant-baptism, — a denial involving a rationalistic theory of that sacrament, and converting it into an imposing rite for impressing the mature intellect. The latter directly rational- ised away the mystery of the Eucharist, converting it into a simple memorial and symbol. Luther denounced these mani- festations, and, whenever he could, persecuted the movers. Carlstadt, already driven from Wittenberg, was soon again Luther. 391 driven from Orlamund, whither he had retired next ; and then soon driven from Jena, whither he had retired next. Luther drove him from place to place, and apparently forgetting that the unfortunate man, if he lived at all, must live somewhere, barricaded one town against his entrance just as he fastened the gates of another upon his departure. The issues of the prolific presses of Jena were stopped at the shop-door by the Elector's officers : " It was not to be endured," said Luther, " that Carlstadt and his people should be alone permitted to emancipate themselves from due submission to authorities." The author attempted to fix at Schweindorf, but Count Hennebers: instructed the town-council not to admit him for an hour. He was at last allowed the tether of two little villages near Wittenberg, where he and his wife lived by manual labour, one digging and the other crying cakes. One attempt to reassume the black gown then banished him from Saxony altogether, and he took refuge in Switzerland. " Fana- tici spiritus" — " Celestial prophets," were Luther's terms for all this tribe of theologians : whatever the particular subject in hand may be, at every turn in his controversial writings and commen- taries, the " fanatic spirits " get a lebuke. Disdain of the men never subdued his sense of their mischievousness ; and irony mixed with irritation in all his allusions to them. Seldom con- descending to argue, he asked them at once for the miracles by which they proved their new revelation, and not having this demand answered, dismissed them. In the well-known inter- view at which the two theologians defied each other, Carlstadt, always aping Luther, cannot meet the swing of Luther's careless contempt : he threatens, and Luther laughs. " I will write against you," says the former. " Write away," says the latter, " here is a florin for you, if you do it well." Luther's disputation with the corporation of Orlamund is in the same style. The burgomaster, accompanied by the magistrates, received Luther at the gate with compliments ; Luther barely saluted them with an inclination of the head. The burgomaster commenced an address, and Luther told him he had no time to hear him. They proceeded to the hall of conference, where all the people of the town were assembled in a state of the utmost 392 Luther. excitement. A man out of the crowd began to shout. " A prophet," says Luther, " by his voice ; I know them all ; your eyes, my friend, are like two hot coals, but they will not burn me." The first of the proposed arguments, of which the sub- ject was the lawfulness of images, then began, which ended thus : a cobbler of Orlamund loquitur : — " The text of Deutero- nomy is clear ; ' Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female — ' ' : Luther, " Go on." " And lest thou lift up thine eyes into heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, should be drawn to worship them." Luther, " So, then, you would take the sun and the moon out of the creation ?" Cobbler, " The sun and the moon were not made by us." Luther, " Well then, you condemn me, do you ? " Cobbler, " Certainly : you and all who do not preach God's word." Luther, mounting his carriage, "Farewell, then." All the corporation — "What, not one word with you on the Sacra- ments ? " Luther, " Eead my books." But the rising rationalistic view of the Lord's Supper was Luther's great trouble, as he surveyed the working of the Reformation ; and Zwinglius was the great thorn in his side. In him he saw an undeniably able rival ; stern, strong, and hard as a flint ; who threatened to wrench the Reformation out of his grasp, carry it in another direction from that in M'hich it had started, and infuse a different spirit into it from that which its original author had given. The strong faith and reverence which Luther always pro- fessed with respect to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, the pertinacity with which he clung to the idea of mystery and grace in connection with it, the awe in which he stood of the inspired words of institution, and constant vindication of their obvious and full meaning for them, form a remarkable, and at first sight not very intelligible contrast with his perfectly free- and-easy treatment of Scripture when he comes across it on another great subject. On the subject of the Lord's Supper the sacred text chained and overpowered him : he professed that lie could not get over the words, " This is my body," " This is my blood," and dare not trifle with them. They confronted Luthet . 393 him on the page of Scripture, and he submitted to them. He said he had tried to get over them, but found he could not ; that they had stood in his way, and that he would have been too glad to have explained them away, if he had not on approaching them, found them too strong for him ; that the tempter had especially assailed him on this point, and had not moved him. " I confess," he says, " that if any had shown me five years ago, that, in the holy sacrament there is nothing but bread and wine, he would have rendered me a great service. I had at that time powerful temptations assailing me ; I turned and twisted about ; I struggled fiercely with my own thoughts ; I should have been most joyful to have extricated myself from the doubts and difficulties which surrounded me. I saw well that if I could have made up my mind on that point, I should inflict a most terrible blow on Papism. But, upon this matter, I am chained up in a prison I cannot quit : the text is too powerful ; nothing I have ever heard has lessened its effects upon my mind." Such was Luther's scrupulousness with respect to the text of Scripture on this subject, his adherence to obvious signification, and dislike of explanation. But it was very different when he had to support his doctrine of justification b}' faith and the non- necessity of works. There was no liberty then which he was not ready to take with the sacred text. He found the New Testament in every page appealing to a law which he declared the New Testament had abolished ; and he explained Scripture away on as large and wholesale a scale as the extent of the obstacles demanded. He laid down a distinction between being in the Gospel, and being part of the Gospel. The Gospel had precepts in it which were not part of it, but only appendages to it. " Quae prsecepta in Evangelio inveniuntur, ista non sunt Evangelium, sed expositiones legis et appendices Evangelii." The Gospel contained precepts just as it contained miracles, not as essential to its system, but only as an accidental accompaniment of its institution. " Non est proprium Christi officium, propter quod praecipue venit in mundum, docere legem, sed accidentale. Cujusmodi erat et hoc quod sanabat infirmos, excitabat mortuos, benefaciebat indignos, consolabatur afnictos. Ea quidem 394 Luther. gloriosa et diviua opera et beneficia sunt, sed non propria Christi." x Luther like an expert chemist thus analysed the rude material of the Gospel, and discriminated between what was substantial in it, and what was not ; what was genuine Gospel, and what was the old law, introduced, but not incorporated. When pushed another step in the argument, and asked to account for the introduction of the law, if it was not part of the system, he had a further explanation ready. There was, he confessed, a whole legal machinery in the Gospel ; good works being commanded, and reward and punishment being made dependent on the performance ; but this machinery was only a contrivance on the part of the Gospel to expose ultimately, with so much greater force, the emptiness of works. It was said, indeed, if you do the work, you will have the reward ; but that "if" was not a promissory, but a defying one: its- meaning was, you will not do the work, and you will not deserve the reward ; you will find that your labour is vain, and your work nothing. "The what, and the how, of the reward," says Luther, " are not the question ; the question is whether you can do the thing for which the reward is offered." " Homo proscepto impossibili monetur, ut videat suam impoten- tiam." In this way the whole system of law and precept which confronts us on the very surface of Scripture, was re- duced, by a method of esoteric interpretation, into a mere husk and outside ; the external fabric of the deeper truth that there was no law. The surface was for the natural man, the truth was for the believer. The Gospel language was only a pious fraud, and the issue showed the real meaning ; just as when in some puzzle or piece of legerdemain the reality turns out to be the very contrary of the phenomenon. Having up to a certain point contented himself with ex- 1 It will be observed that the argument here is not stated strongly- enough for Luther's conclusion ; for it is not enough for proving that pre- cepts are not a substantial part of the Gospel, to say that they are not propria, i.e. the peculiar and exclusive characteristic of it. Nobody asserts that the law is the peculiar characteristic of the new dispensation ; all that is maintained is, that the law goes on under it, as well as under the old one, and is not done away with. Luther's non-propria, then, must be strength- ened into a stronger epithet, and be understood to mean not essential to, as well as not peculiar to it, if the argument is to be consistent. Luther. 395 plaining away Scripture, Luther now advanced further, and pro- ceeded to disown Scripture. The Epistle of St. James, though opposing no insurmountable difficulties to the free interpreter, — as what language does ? — was still a very difficult epistle to surmount : it was questionable whether the violence which would be necessary for its explanation would be greater than that of rejecting the epistle altogether ; and Luther, hesitating a good deal between the two methods of dealing with it, inclines on the whole to the latter. He gives his view in his preface to the Epistles of St. James and St. Jude : 1 - — " 1. This Epistle of St. James, though it is rejected by the ancients, I praise and hold to be good, because it advances not any human doctrine, and urges strongly the law of God. But to give my own opinion of it, without prejudice to any other man's, I con- sider it to be the production of no apostle, and this is my judg- ment : " 2. In the first place, because directly contrary to St. Paul and to all the rest of the Scripture, it ascribes righteousness to works, and says : Abraham was justified by his works, when he had offered his son ; while St. Paul (Eom. iv. 2, 3) teaches, on the contrary, that Abraham without works was justified by his faith only, and proves from Moses (Gen. xv. 6) that justification to have been before he had offered his son. Now, even though it were possible to bolster up this Epistle, and find some gloss for such justification by works, still it cannot be defended in this, that in ch. ii. 23, it quotes the aforesaid passage from Moses (Gen. xv. 6), which speaks of Abra- ham's faith only, and not of his works, and is so quoted by St. Paul (Rom. iv. 3) as referring to works. Therefore this error is conclusive that it is the work of no apostle. " 3. In the second place, because, while he professes to be teach- ing Christian people, he never once thinks, in all the length of that his instruction, of the Passion, the Resurrection, or the Spirit of Christ. He names Christ, indeed, now and then ; but he teaches not about him, but speaks only of a general faith in God. For the duty of a true apostle is to preach of the Passion, and Resurrec- tion, and Office of Christ, and to lay the foundation of that same faith : as He Himself says, John xv. 27, Ye shall bear witness of me. And herein all the holy books that are truly such do agree, that they all with one accord preach and urge Christ. And this is the 1 Luther's Works, ed. Walch, Halle, a.d. 1744, vol. xiv. p. 149 ; Preface to the Epistles of St. James and St. Jude. 396 Luther. true touch-stone wherewith to convict all books, the seeing whether they urge Christ or no ; since all the Scripture points to Christ (Rom. iii. 21), and St. Paul will know nothing but Christ (1 Cor. ii. 2). Whatsoever teaches not Christ, that is not apostolical, even though St. Peter or St. Paul taught it. On the other hand, whatever preaches Christ, that is apostolical, though it were Judas, Ananias, Pilate, and Herod's work. " 4. But this James does nothing more than insist on the law and its works, and rings the changes upon them to such excess, that it gives me the impression he must have been some good pious man, who had got hold of some sentences from the disciples of the apostles, and so put them on paper. Or it may have been perhaps written from his preaching by some one else. He calls (ch. i. 25) the law a law of liberty, Avhile St. Paul, on the contrary, calls it a law of bondage, of wrath, of death, and of sin. (Gal. iii. 23, 24 j Rom. vii. 11, 23.) " 5. Besides he introduces texts from St. Peter (1 Pet. iv. 8), Charity cover eth a midtitude of sins ; and (ch. v. 1 6), Humble yourselves under the hand of God ; also (ch. iv. 5) a text from St. Paul (Gal. v. 1 7), The spirit lusteth to envy. Moreover, its spuriousness appears plainly from this, that while St. James in point of chronology was slain by Herod at Jerusalem before Peter, this author must have lived long after St. Peter and St. Paul. " 6. Upon the whole, he undertakes to put down all those who trusted to faith without works, and he is unequal to his task : he seeks to effect that by inculcation of the law which the apostles effect by incentives to love. For these reasons I cannot place him among the genuine canonical books ; still neither do I gainsay any man to place and value this book as he may list : for otherwise there are in it many good sentences." This concluding paragraph runs in the edition of 1522 thus : — " Upon the whole, he undertakes to put down those who trusted to faith only without works, and he is in spirit, under- standing, and language, unequal to his task. He wrests Scripture, and what is more, contradicts Paul and all the Scriptures, seeking to effect by inculcation of the law that which the apostles effect by incentives to love. For these reasons I will not have him in my Bible in the list of the true canonical books ; still neither do I gainsay any man to place and value this book as he may list : for otherwise there are in it many good sentences. One man by him- self is nobody in worldly matters ; how, then, shall this writer, Luther. 397 who is but one and alone, dare contradict Paul and all the other Scriptures 1 " x 1 The preface which we have given is the Preface to the particular Epis- tles of St. James and St. Jude. This is a different and distinct preface from the Preface to the New Testament in general, which comes first of all. In this latter-mentioned Preface occurs the opprobrious epithet of the " epistle of straw," by which Luther designated the Epistle of St. James, and for which Archdeacon Hare gives the following apology : " All sorts of persons com- plain that Luther called it an Epistle of straw ; and perhaps the loudest in this complaint are those to whom the whole Bible is little else than a book of straw. The expression, so far as I have been able to discover, occurs only in a part of the Preface to the German New Testament published in 1522, printed by Walch, in vol. xiv. p. 105, and was omitted in the editions sub- sequent to 1524. Luther in pointing out, for the instruction of those who were unused to the reading of the Bible, which books in the New Testament are of the greatest importance, says, as many have said before and since, that the Gospel of St. John is to be valued far above the other three, and con- cludes thus : ' St. John's Gospel, and his first Epistle, the Epistles of St. Paul, especially those to the Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, and St. Peter's first Epistle, — these are the books which set Christ before you, and teach you everything necessary and salutary for you to know, even though you were never to hear or see any other book or doctrine. Therefore the Epistle of St. James is quite an epistle of straw by the side of these ; for it has no true evangelical character.' Now, doubtless, if these books were to be severed from the rest of Scripture, it would be much as if you were to cut away the roots and trunk of a tree, and to fancy that the upper branches would still continue hanging in the air, putting forth leaves, and bearing fruit. On the other hand it should be observed that the expression applied to the Epistle of St. James is not used positively, but relatively, in com- parison with those books of the New Testament in which the special doctrines of the Gospel are brought forward more fully and explicitly. It was probably suggested by what St. Paul says in 1 Cor. iii. 12 ; and, as I have often had occasion to remark, Luther's words are not to be weighed in a jeweller's scales. Besides, we must take into account that, while he is quite right in denying the specially evangelical character of this Epistle, it had been turned by those who exaggerated and perverted its meaning into the main prop of those very errors concerning faith and justification, which it was his peculiar mission to overthrow. Even in the quietest controversy we well know how difficult it is to measure all our thoughts and words, not to exaggerate what favours our own side, not to depreciate what supports our adversary. Who, then, will make a man an offender for a word, uttered in the stress of such a conflict, the most awful perhaps ever waged by man, inasmuch as it was not only against an external power which kept the hearts and minds of half Christendom in abject bondage, and answered an argument w r ith a sentence of excommunication and an auto dafe, but also in the first instance against the force of his own inveterate habits and prepossessions, nay, of a faith which he had himself long held earnestly and submissively before he detected its fallacy. Nor should it be forgotten that Luther omitted the offensive expression in the later editions of his New Testament." — Hare's Mission of the Comforter, pp. 814-816. Of this apology of Archdeacon Hare's we have nothing to say, except that it is perhaps as good a one as could be made. The truth is, no apology can be made for such language. Impetuosity and provocation cannot justify 39 S Luther. The specimen of Luther's scrupulousness with respect to Scripture, and the specimen of his unscrupulousness now before us, suggest many obvious pieces of criticism ; but we shall only the contemptuous treatment of an inspired book of Scripture, nor should Archdeacon Hare suppose that, by accounting for such an act, he goes any way to excuse it. Some or other impulse or motive accounts for every wrong act, but the act is not at all excused in consequence. We will add, that whatever may have become of the offensive epithet, " epistle of straw," in subsequent editions (and if Luther left it out, let the omission be taken into account), the Preface which we have quoted appears in Walch's edition of Luther's works (1744), without any sign whatever of abandonment by its author, or any intimation of its belonging only to a prior edition of Luther's works, as distinct from a later one. The Preface, therefore, we have given, represents Luther's permanent opinions with respect to the Epistle of St. James. Luther is generally defended from the sin of his attacks on the canon of Scripture on the ground that he modified his views afterward. But the modifications were comparatively slight, and never amounted to retractations. There were four Epistles of which he denied the inspiration — the Second Epistle of St. Peter, the Epistles of St. James and St. Jude, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, to which must be added the Book of Revelation. In the case of each of these, the reasons he assigns are sometimes very frivolous, and always simple opinions of his own upon the doctrine and style of the Epistle or Book he rejects. He sits in criticism upon Scripture, and if he thinks an Epistle evangelical, admits it ; if not, rejects it. The text chap. x. ver. 26 of the Epistle to the Hebrews — " If we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins" — offended him, and influenced him in his rejection of the Epistle. He also did not like to think that Esau " found no place for repentance," and that influenced him. The Revelation, again, was too full of visions in his opinion, it was "through and through with figures;" he did not like this, and thought an apostle would not prophesy in such a way. Again, the writer of the Book of Revelation seemed to him to threaten too severely all those who " shall add unto," or " shall take away from the words of the book," "whereas," observes Luther with easy levity, "nobody knows what is in this book." "Let each man," he says, "judge of this book according to the light that is in him, and by his own particular perceptions. I do not desire to impose my opinion respecting it upon any one. I say simply that which I think of it myself. I look upon the Revelation of St. John to be neither apostolic nor prophetic." Again of the same book: "Many of the Fathers of the Church rejected this book, consequently every man is at liberty to treat it according to the dictates of his own mind. For my part, one single reason has determined me in the judgment I have come to respect- ing it, which is, that Christ is neither adored in it nor taught in it such as we know Him." In all these cases Walch is anxious to bring out all he can to prove that Luther changed his mind afterward, but he does not profess to show more than that his style is here and there subdued. Luther never altered the substance of his view, or admitted any of these regularly into the canon again, though in the case of the Book of Revelation, he cancelled the whole of his old preface and substituted a new one. He continued to reject all for himself, only saying that he did not wish to interfere with any other person's acceptance of them. Luther. 399 ask here, Why was he so scrupulous in oue case, so un- scrupulous in another? Luther's modes of proceeding seldom require very nice criticism to explain. He was very scrupulous with respect to Scripture when it interposed against another man's dogma ; very unscrupulous with respect to it when it interfered with his own. Justification without works was his own dogma; the Sacramentarian view of the Lord's Supper was Zwinglius's. Luther had his own great absorbing idea ; he was prepared to push that out at all risk, and Scripture text and Scripture canon gave way before it. But he cared mar- vellously little about other men's new ideas, and thought it rather an impertinence that they should have them at all. He was then magisterial, and assumed the chair of the doctor ecclesice. He took the bold originator severely to task, con- fronted him with the Scripture letter, protested against all liberties, was angry, scandalised, and shocked. It is but justice to add that Luther had, independently of this consideration, small sympathies with such a view as Zwinglius's. Luther hated formality in religion, but he had no objection to mystery. His whole view against works was antagonistic to form and rule, precision and positiveness in duties. But with mystery he had sympathies ; his love of the supernatural in the region of common life, his ghost and fairy lore, the very grotesque- nesses into which his supernaturalism ran, showed a mind possessed of the sense of mystery. The Swiss development of the Beformation, cold, hard, dry, and materialistic, repelled and disgusted him ; he denounced its distinctive doctrine as a gratuitous and audacious innovation, and he proceeded to call Zwinglius names : " What a fellow is this Zwinglius ! ignorant as a block, of grammar, and logic, and every other science." " Zwinglius I regard as having drawn upon himself the just hatred of all good men by his daring and criminal manner of treating the word of God." With Zwinglius Bucer went aloncr : " I know too well the wickedness of Bucer. . . . Christ guard thee, poor Luther, surrounded as thou art with these wild beasts, these vipers, lionesses, and panthers, far more in danger than was Daniel in the lions' den." There was another subject on which the Beformation began 4oo Luther. to show uncomfortable signs, and threaten dangerous develop- ments ; we allude to the subject of marriage. On this subject, indeed, Luther had himself established large premisses for licence to appeal to. Luther had a fundamental view with respect to marriage, conceived, as many other of his views were, in the spirit of one- sided and impatient contradiction to established ideas. That the abuses of the monastic system were great, and that force and tyranny in those ages drove numbers of both sexes into monasteries and convents, who were not at all fitted for the life, and who were deprived by such an incarceration of that deve- lopment, moral and intellectual, of themselves which God had intended for them, nobody can fairly doubt. The story of the nun in i" Promessi Sposi is only a specimen of what went on, on a large scale. There was a general wide-spread griev- ance ; and it was a plain fact that the Divine institution of marriage was unlawfully interfered with by human systems. To expose such a grievance, and obtain a remedy for it, was in itself a legitimate task for any one to undertake. But Luther undertook it in that extravagant and excessive spirit in which he undertook every other work. He opposed a practical griev- ance in one direction by an extreme theory in another, and set up a code which was new to the Christian world. He seems to have regarded himself as under a special prophetical com- mission to revive the original matrimonial charter given to the human race ; and he set about his work with the spirit with which a political revolutionist goes back to his theory of the social compact. He overlooked the qualifications, cautions, and exceptions with which to us, under the Christian dispen- sation, this charter comes down accompanied ; and that whole department of Christian precept, which, however much abused, was in itself a Divine modification, interpreting the original law to us, just as subsequent judgments interpret original statutes in civil courts, was entirely thrown over to make way for a naked reassertion of the original law itself. With his usual decision and point, Luther threw himself upon the origi- nal command in the 28th verse of the 1st chapter of Genesis : "Crescite et multiplicamini." In this sentence he saw the whole Lttther. 401 of the Divine law, advice, and recommendation on the subject of marriage collected. Here, he said, is a universal command or statute, under the action of which the whole human race comes. It is quite evident, therefore, that everybody is in- tended to marry, and that everybody should marry. Nobody has a right to resist the law of God, and oppose himself to the original act of creation. To this universal law, indeed, Luther did admit, nominally, exceptions ; he was obliged nominally to allow the force of the text in the 19th chapter of St. Matthew; but he loaded the text with such restrictions, and compelled everybody, who stood upon it, to give such demonstrable reasons that he was of the particular class which the text singled out, that practically his theory amounted to a universal and essen- tial obligation. In accordance with this new speculative movement, society was, with respect to the general rules and regulations of marriage, thrown back upon the Old Testament code, as distinguished from the subsequent legislation of the New. The temper of a sterner and purer dispensation dis- regarded, the forbidden degrees were largely thrown open. Luther countenanced even more flagrant violations of the Christian code, and his Sermon de Matrimonio, delivered at Wittenberg in the year 1522, gives licenses from which the natural conscience of a heathen and a savage would recoil. Without dwelling, however, on these special extravagances, it is sufficient to remark, that the whole of the matrimonial question was stirred up from its basis again; and that, ar. established system of Christian growth removed, the field was opened anew for the indefinite play of speculation and practice. There was an open area ; a new code was invited, and the original statute, " Crescite et multiplicamini," was the axiom appealed to. That such a theoretical movement on the subject of mar- riage should produce some awkward practical fruits was not surprising. So fierce and naked an appeal to original rights was likely to set men speculating very freely and largely as to what their rights were. It was not surprising if, amid the clearance of established ideas, a certain Elector Philip of Hesse began to imagine that there would be no great harm in bavin"- M.E.-I.] 2 c 4-02 Luther. two wives. The appeal bad been made to tbe old dispensation, and under the old dispensation a plurality of wives was allowed. Philip described his case as a very strong one, and supplicated earnestly. Now it is obvious that as soon as a demand like this was, in an actual individual case, urged upon Luther, he had no solid ground on which to oppose it. Luther could not, upon his principles, say at once that it was wrong for a Christian to marry a second wife, nor did he ever. He was asked the question more than once, and always pointedly refused to say that such an act was absolutely wrong. Thus he writes to an inquirer : " To your first question, whether a man may have more than one woman to wife, my answer is this : Unbelievers may do what they please ; but Christian freedom is to be regulated according to love, so that everything should be determined with a view to our neighbour's good, where no necessity or sin against faith or conscience prevents us. Now however every one seeks that freedom, which will serve and profit himself, without regard to his neighbour's benefit or edification ; although St. Paul says, ' All things are lawful to me, but all things are not expedient : only use not your liberty for an occasion to the flesh.' Again, though the ancients had many wives, Christians are not to act after such an ex- ample, because there is no necessity, nor edification, nor special word of God commanding this ; and such great scandal and trouble might come from it. Therefore do not esteem the Christian as more free, unless there be some command of God with regard to such freedom." In this answer he discourages the liberty of taking more than one wife, as fraught with scandal, and not serving to edification ; he advises persons to do with one wife, but he cannot absolutely command them. As the Elector said : " Lutherus scribit, se bigamiam non sua- dere." He dissuades as a counsellor and friend, he cannot and wishes not to do more. On the demand of the Landgrave then reaching them, this was the line which Luther's and Melanch- thon's answer adopted. They dissuaded him from the contem- plated step, and told him of the scandal which would arise from it if known ; but admitted at the same time that if he Luther. 403 insisted upon it, they could not forbid it. The letter, which bears the names of Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, Melander, Corvinus, Adam, Leningus, Winteferte, from beginning to end alternates from one to the other of these two points, and finally grants the permission required. 1 1 " With regard to the question of which Master Bucer spoke with us, firstly, this is our opinion. Your Grace knows and understands this yourself that it is a very different thing to make a general law, and in a particular case to use a dispensation, out of weighty reasons, and yet according to Divine permission ; for against God no dispensation has force. Now we can- not advise that it be openly introduced, and thus made a law, that each be allowed to have more than one wife. But should anything of this get into print, your Grace may conceive that this would be understood and adopted as a general law, whence much scandal and trouble would ensue. Therefore this is by no means to be adopted ; and we pray your Grace to consider how grievous it would be, if it were charged upon any one that he had introduced this law in the German nation, whence endless trouble in all marriages might be feared. As to what may be said against this, that what is right before God should be altogether allowed, this is true in a measure. If God has commanded it, or it is a necessary thing, it is true ; but if it is not com- manded nor necessary, other circumstances should be taken into account. Thus with regard to this question : God instituted marriage so that it was to be the union of two persons alone, and not of more. . . . " In certain cases, however, a dispensation may be used, — as if a person taken captive in a foreign land should marry there, and on gaining his freedom should bring his wife with him, — or if long-continued sickness should supply a cause, as has been held at times with regard to lepers, — if in such cases a man takes another wife with the counsel of his pastor, not to introduce a law, but as a matter of necessity, such a man we could not condemn. Since then it is one thing to introduce a law and another to use a dispensation, we humbly entreat your Grace to consider, first, that care should in every way be taken that this matter be not brought publicly before the world as a law which everybody may follow. Next, since it is to be no law, but merely a dispensation, let your Grace also consider the scandal, namely, that the enemies of the gospel would cry out that we are like the Anabaptists, who take several wives at once, and that the Evangelicals seek the liberty of taking as many wives as they please, according to the practice in Turkey. Again, what princes do gets abroad much farther than what is done by private persons. Again, if private persons hear of such an example in their lords, they desire that the like should be allowed to them ; as we see how easily a practice spreads. . . . "Therefore let your Grace, in consideration of all these causes, the offence, the other cares and labours, and the weakness of body, weigh this matter well. Be also pleased to consider that God has given your Grace fair young princes and princesses with this consort, and be content with her, as many others must have patience under their marriage, to avoid offence. For that we should excite or urge your Grace to an offensive innovation is far from our mind. For your country and others might reproach us on account thereof, which would be intolerable to us, because we are commanded in God's word to regulate marriage and all human matters according to their first divine institution, and so far as possible, to keep them therein, and to 404 Luther. Now this act of Luther's does not appear one which wi need hesitate to judge. It is the act of deliberately permitting a Christian to have two wives, and thus deliberately violating the Christian code with respect to marriage. Marriage is by original institution monogamy ; departure from that institution was allowed afterward, in condescension to man's weakness and hardness of heart ; but Christianity reverted to it, and en- forced it as an inviolable law ; l and of this law Luther delibe- rately sanctioned the transgression. Nevertheless, as Arch- deacon Hare has attempted an apology for this act of Luther's, it is due to him to see what he has to say. Archdeacon Hare then sums up his apology thus : " Such is the amount of Luther's sin, or rather error, — for sin I dare not call it, — in this affair, in which the voice of the world, ever ready to believe evil of great and good men, has so severely condemned him, without investigation of the facts, although the motives imputed to him are wholly repugnant to those which governed his conduct through life. He did not compromise any professed principles, as the reviewer accuses him of doing; he did not avert whatever may offend any one. Such, too, is now the way of the world, that people like to throw all the blame upon the preachers, if anything un- pleasant falls out ; and men's hearts, among high and low, are unsteady ; and all sorts of things are to be feared. But if your Grace do not quit your unchaste life, for that you write that this is not possible, we would rather that your Grace stood in better case before God, and lived with a good con- science, for your Grace's happiness and the good of your country and people. If, however, your Grace should at length resolve to take another wife, we think that this should be kept secret, as was said above of the dispensation ; namely, that your Grace and the lady, with some confidential persons, should know your Grace's mind and conscience through confession. From this no particular rumour or scandal would arise ; for it is not unusual for princes to have concubines ; and although all the people would not know what the circumstances were, the intelligent would be able to guess them, and would be better pleased with such a quiet way of life, than with adultery and other wild and licentious courses. Nor are we to heed everything that people say, provided our consciences stand right. Thus far, and this we deem light. For that which is permitted concerning marriage in the law of Moses is not forbidden in the Gospel." — Hare's Mission of the Comforter, pp. 831- 834. 1 However the question of casuistry, with respect to the two wives of p heathen, brought with him at his conversion into the Christian Church, may be disposed of, the decision will not at all affect the inviolability of the law of monogamy with respect to Christians. The act of bigamy, there, is a heathen act, and, therefore, however ex post facto dealt with, no precedeut whatever for the act in a Christian. Luther. 405 inculcate polygamy, as the pamphleteer charges him with doing. But inasmuch as he could not discover any direct, absolute prohibition of polygamy in the New Testament, while it was practised by the patriarchs, and recognised in the law, he did not deem himself warranted in condemning it absolutely, when there appeared in special cases to be a strong necessity, either with a view to some great national object, or for the relief of a troubled conscience. Here it behoves us to bear in mind, on the one hand, what importance Luther attached, as all his writings witness, to this high ministerial office of relieving troubled consciences ; and it may mitigate our condemnation of his error, — which after all was an error on the right side, its purpose being to substitute a hallowed union for unhallowed license."— Pp. 857, 858. Now this defence holds good against one particular inference which has been drawn from Luther's act. Sir William Hamil- ton appears to us hard upon Luther in charging him with a wish to promulgate polygamy ; and in regarding this act as only the sanction, in a particular instance, of a practice which he desired at heart to establish generally. The whole language of the answer to the Landgrave shows that the liberty allowed him was only allowed as a dispensation, and that the permit- ting authority was reluctant even to grant that ; it indicated men feeling themselves under a difficulty ; afraid of their own reputation if they gave leave, afraid of the Landgrave if they refused it ; unable to reject polygamy as wrong in principle, and yet shrinking from it when threatened with the fact. But whatever becomes of Sir W. Hamilton's view, the act still remains to be excused — the act of allowing a particular person to have two wives. And what does the apologist say here ? The substance of his apology is little more than a statement of the offence ; Luther, he says, could not prohibit polygamy in an individual instance, because he did not think the Gospel abso- lutely prohibited polygamy. But the fact that Luther did not think so is Luther's offence. Nobody could blame him for acting upon a view, if he had a true view ; the charge is against his view to begin with ; the view he held that polygamy was consistent with Christianity. The subordinate defences, sug- 406 Luther. gested to take off from the edge of the offence, and " mitigate our condemnation," are hardly more fortunate. " Luther," the apologist tells us, " attached great importance to the high ministerial office of relieving troubled consciences," and in this particular case acted on that motive. Now it is difficult to see how the conscience of the Landgrave of Hesse can, except by a very lax use of the term, be put under the class of what are called " troubled consciences." The Landgrave said, " If you do not allow me to have another wife, I shall only take the same liberty under another shape, and therefore you may as well allow me." The matter of trouble to the Landgrave's con- science was not a past sin of which he wanted to repent, but a future sin which he intended to commit, if he had not a par- ticular license given him. If to give such license for such a cause be called " giving relief to a troubled conscience," we see no reason why a license to break the whole of the ten com- mandments may not be given to persons upon their certifying beforehand that they intend to break them whether they have the license or no ; and why such general license should be re- fused the title of a general relief to troubled consciences. The validity of such an excuse entirely depends on the previous question, whether an act of polygamy is absolutely wrong or no in a Christian ? If not in itself wrong, however inexpedient the general adoption might be, it is subject-matter of dispensa- tion, and a considerate spiritual guide may allow it in a par- ticular case, in order to preserve a person from committing what is wrong. But if an act of polygamy is absolutely wrong in a Christian, to allow it in order to save him from doing what is wrong, is as bad reasoning as it is loose morality. A man who cannot submit to the law of monogamy may or may not be a tolerable heathen, but he is not a Christian, and has no right to belong to the Church of Christ upon earth. And to accommo- date Christian law to him, in order that it may be said that he does not break Christian law, is to injure Christianity, and to do him no good. Indeed, the reason why the permission was given, which in Archdeacon Hare's opinion so mitigates the offence of giving it, appears to us strongly to aggravate it. For what was the ground of the permission? Was it one of Luther. 407 those eccentric and unlooked-for reasons which occur once or twice in the world in the course of a century? No; the Landgrave urged no reason but what a thousand men in every city of Christendom might urge the next day. His one and sole reason was that his present wife was a disagreeable person, and that he wanted another; he gave no grounds but that of simple desire on his part that the indulgence should be allowed. Differing from Sir William Hamilton, in the view that Luther wished to promote general polygamy, we must yet say that the fact of the permission of a particular case of it, on such a ground as this, was a precedent for the wudest spread of it; for what was there to stop the operation of a precedent which admitted simple strong desire as a sufficient reason ? Whatever Luther wished, his act was a generally unsettling one, and capable of bearing the largest and most systematic results in the way of innovation. Nor can we admit, again, a comparison, which the apologist institutes between the conduct of a divine who sanctions an act of polygamy, and that of one who connives at licentious- ness ; a comparison which he decides in favour of the former. However much to blame Luther was, — says Archdeacon Hare, — he was not so much to blame as Bossuet ; for Bossuet con- nived at much greater immorality in Louis xiv. than Luther sanctioned in Philip of Hesse. But there is a fallacy in this reasoning ; for were it granted that Louis xiv.'s immorality was worse than that of Philip of Hesse, and that Bossuet con- nived at it, the act of sanctioning is a different genus of offence altogether from the act of connivance ; and to sanction a less crime is much worse than to connive at a greater. If a person commits a wrong act, and another does not rebuke him for it, the latter is guilty of not asserting the truth ; but if he sanctions the same, or a much smaller offence in him, he asserts an un- truth, and calls that right which is not right. If Bossuet con- nived, he acted wrong, but he only committed himself ; Luther, in sanctioning, committed Christianity. Still less do we see any mitigation of Luther's act, in the confidence, spirit, and self-possession with which he took the disclosure of it, when that was made : — 408 Luther. " However severely," says Archdeacon Hare, " we may blame Luther for these errors of judgment, for his allowing himself to be influenced in such a matter by misericordia and humanissima facilitas, still when the secret is disclosed, when the scandal gets wind, how does the heroic grandeur of his character, the might of his invin- cible faith, rise out of the trial ! The rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon his house : but it stood fast, because it was founded upon a Rock." • •••••• " In a beautiful letter, written in the following month of June 1540, to Melanchthon, who was grievously oppressed by the scandal occasioned when the Landgrave, in opposition to their counsel, let his second marriage be known, Luther thus reminds him of the principles which had guided them in their opinion. [We omit the quotation.] In this time of trouble Luther's heroic faith shines forth still more brightly from its contrast with Melanchthon's weak- ness. The latter was quite crushed, and brought to the very verge of death. Luther, on the other hand, feels strong as ever from his unshaken trust in his Heavenly Supporter. ' Quare frustra nos occidimus ' (he says in the letter just quoted, to Melanchthon), ' aut tristitia impedimus cognitionem victoris illius omnium mortium et tristitiarum 1 Qui enim vicit Diabolum, et judicavit principem hujus mundi, nonne et cum eo judicavit et vicit hoc scandalum ] Nam si etiam hoc prsesens scandalum desinat, dabit deinde alias, et forte majores turbas scandalorum, quas, si vivimus, in eodem tarn en victore vincemus, et ridebimus quoque. Nihil est malorum vel inferni de quo ille non dixerit et voluerit sese intelligi, Ego vici mundum, conjidite. — Valeat Satan; propter ipsum nee moereamus, nee tristemur : in Christo autem Domino Isetemur et exultemus : ipse deducet in nihilum omnes inimicos nostras. Nondum sumus in Davidis exemplo, cujus causa longe desperatior fuit, nee tamen cecidit : nee ista causa cadet. Cur ergo te maceras, cum finalis causa stet certe, id est, victoria Christi, etsi formalis et media nonnihil deformetur isto scandalo 1 — Nos, qui te sincere amamus, diligenter et efficaciter orabimus. Vale in Christo, et noli timere nee solicitari. Omnem solicitudinem in eum projicias, qui vult esse pro nobis solicitus, idque credi jussit et exigit. — Stabit illud : Ego vici mundum : et vos vivetis quia Ego vivo. Iterum vale, et sis lsetus et quietus, oro, sicut petimus, imo sicut proecipit Dominus.' This is the man whom the reviewer audaciously charges with a ' skulking compromise of all professed principle,' and with violat- ing the Gospel, ' trembling only at discovery.' " The reluctance to have the matter known, it is plain, was un- mixed with any personal consideration in Luther ; though it was L uther. 409 otherwise with Melanchthon, whose utter abashment on this occasion shows how thoroughly Luther understood his character, Avhen he said to him years before, Pecca fortiter. It was just after this last letter of Luther's, that Melanchthon, as he tells Camerarius in the words just cited, was at the very point of death, and was restored to life in an almost miraculous manner, as it seemed, by the in- tensely fervent prayers, and the energetic friendly comfort and friendly rebukes of Luther. When Luther, who had been sent for on account of Melanchthon's dangerous illness, arrived, he found, the historian tells us, ' that his eyes were sunk, his senses gone, his speech stopped, his hearing closed, his face fallen in and hollow, and, as Luther said, fades erat Hippocratica. He knew nobody, ate and drank nothing. When Luther saw him thus disfigured, he was frightened above measure, and said to his companions, " God forfend ! how has the devil defaced this Organon • " He then turned forthwith to the window, and prayed fervently to God. "Then," said Luther, " our Lord God could not but hear me ; for I threw my sack before his door, and wearied his ears with all his promises of hearing prayers, which I could repeat out of Holy Writ ; so that He could not but hear me if I were ever to trust in his promises." Hereupon he grasped Philip by the hand : *' Bono animo esto, Philippe j non morieris. Although God has reason to slay, yet He Avilleth not the death of a sinner, but that he should be converted and live. He has pleasure in life, not in death. If God called and received the very greatest sinners that ever were upon earth, Adam and Eve, again into favour, much less will He reject thee, my Philip, or let thee perish in sin and despair. Therefore give no place to the spirit of sorrow, and be not thine own murderer ; but trust in the Lord, who can slay and make alive again." For Luther well knew the burthen of his heart and con- science. Being thus taken hold of and addressed, Philip began to draw breath again, but could not say anything for a good while. Then he turned his face straight upon Luther, and began to beg him for God's sake not to detain him any longer ; that he was now on a good journey ; that he should let him go ; that nothing better could befall him. "By no means, Philip," said Luther; "thou must serve our Lord God yet longer." Thus Philip by degrees became more cheerful, and let Luther order him something to eat ; n.nd Luther brought it himself to him, but Philip refused it. Then Luther forced him with these threats, saying : " Hark, Philip, thou must eat, or I excommunicate thee." With these words he was overpowered, so that he ate a very little ; and thus by degrees he gained strength again.' See the account cited by Bretschneider in his edition of Melanchthon, iv. p. xvii. I enter into these 4-io Luther. details of Luther's conduct connected with this affair, because it has often been represented as utterly disgraceful and destructive of his moral character ; whereas on this, as on every other occasion, the best vindication of him is the truth. The more one knows of him, the grander he becomes, the more, too, he wins not merely reverence, but love." The power of mind which this passage discloses in Luther is, we admit, very great, and it stands out, unquestionably, in strong relief, by the side of the feebleness of Melanchthon. But it is a question whether, under such circumstances, Melanch- thon's feebleness is not a more creditable state of mind than Luther's power. The power which Luther shows is the power of putting a good face upon a bad business, and braving out an awkward step once taken. He says to himself, It cannot be helped now, we must make the best of it ; and he does make the best of it, and carries off the act with a swing. Such a power shows a strong, forcible character ; but before it is put forward as a defence of that act which elicited it, it ought to be carefully distinguished from that quality which, in common parlance, bears an unfavourable name. Luther was a great man ; but the assurance of a great man must no more be admitted to atone for a wrong act than that of a little man. In judging of this act of Luther's, it is indeed difficult to dis- tinguish how much of it belonged to speculative audacity, and how much to moral laxity. The subject of marriage, so far as it suggested questions for the intellect to decide upon, was an intellectual subject ; and Luther approached it in that inde- pendent and audacious spirit in which he approached other matters of doctrine. He had a pleasure in invading an occu- pied ground, in theorising where all had been considered settled ; in clearing away old ideas, and laying down new ones. So far his impulse was a speculative one, and part of the charge of moral laxity is drained off into that of intellectual presumption. But with the speculative impulse there mingles, too evidently, moral laxity also. The general tone of Luther with respect to the particular department of morality here alluded to, where not positively offensive, is free and easy, and unbecoming the severity of a Christian. The excuses of a L tit her. 411 temper rudely frank, of a ready tongue always saying what came uppermost, and of an argumentative/iww always pushing him to coarseness as a form of strength, might be excuses for defective strictness and delicacy on such a subject, were the defects those of language only : but the defects in Luther's case are more than these. It is not that he uses that coarseness of language which might be attributed to the age rather than to the individual ; but he discloses mental levity and mental laxity on this subject. He plainly wants those severe ideas in relation to it which as a Christian he ought to have. With such an unfavourable context in Luther's general language to fall back upon, 011 the subject of the act now before us, we cannot but express our deep and sincere regret that Archdeacon Hare should have undertaken the defence of such an act. He has conceived an unbounded admiration for Luther, and, having conceived it, his generosity impels him to defend Luther at all hazards. But in such a case the maxim of being just before you are generous is well worthy of attention ; and an apologist, however enthusiastic, should never defend his author beyond the point where the defence does justice to himself. Some social and some doctrinal consequences of Luther's movement have now been exhibited ; and we see the great author of the Eeformation struggling at every step with dis- agreeable and ominous developments of his own act : coercing, recalling, denouncing, protesting ; assailed and assailing ; lamenting and persecuting ; harassed with awkward questions ; obliged to go further than he wanted to go ; and put in the position of a spectator of his own movement, anxiously and nervously watching results which were now, in a great degree, out of his hands. As events drove him more and more into this position, and he had more and more the pain of seeing consequences which he did not like, and yet could not help, taking place : as he had more and more to bear disgusts and feel weakness, he fell back considerably upon that melancholy in which he had commenced his career. Never for an instant flinching from the antagonistic or dogmatic side of his position, hurling mortal defiances on Rome to the last, and full of his own great fundamental doctrine, — he yet could not shake off 412 L uther. the inward sadness and vexation, which the ever rising facts of a general religious unsettlement, appealing to his eyes and ears, caused. And the melancholy of his character, so power- ful as a stimulus at the commencement of his career, was prolific of disgusts toward the close. Luther's melancholy is a feature in him, which there happens to be an especial call to notice, on account of some extraordin- ary and eccentric shapes which it at times assumed, and its connection with those grotesque scenes of supernaturalism which figure so prominently in some parts of his life. Luther had then what is called a natural and constitutional melancholy. There is a kind of melancholy, which we call natural and constitutional, which acts upon no discernible cause but simply because it exists, and is an original disposition of the mind, in connection with the bodily constitution. Again, there is a rational melancholy, which refers itself consciously to causes — more especially that great fundamental one, the existence of evil in the world : which is ever before it in the shape of one or other of its particular results, one or other painful, disgusting, or humiliating event. Both of these kinds of melancholy enter into the composition of what is called a melancholy tem- perament; and both of them are in principle suitable and becoming to such a creature as man, in such a world as the present one. Those partial obscurations of nature, and ebbings of the animal spirits, which constitute natural melancholy, so far from being in themselves mere awkwardnesses and inappro- priate interruptions, fall in harmoniously with a perishable state : they are natural anticipations of the final withdrawal of that gift of life which awaits all creatures here — fit tremblings of that which is one day to fall, and vanishings of that which is one day to expire. Thus the Psalmist pictures even the in- ferior creatures as sometimes feeling a cloud over their spirits, and suffering obscurations of their animal life — foreshadowing its final departure : " When thou hided thy face they are troubled: when Thou takest away their breath they die, and are turned again to their dust : " and the picture elevates and dignifies rather than lowers the inferior creatures in our eyes. That melancholy, also, which is the offspring of thought and percep- Luther. 413 tion, is becoming in its place ; and the total want of it argues an insensibility to certain obvious facts connected with this visible system. Luther's melancholy, then, is not in itself an unpleasing feature ; it rather appeals to our sympathies. We see him, in spite of his uproarious hilarity, and overflowing and successful energy of mind, not a happy man. Post equitem sedet atra cur a : he drives the chariot of the Eeformation with fury, but he has a lingering gloom at heart. Even his fury is partly a remedial one, indulged as a balance and quietus to a strong natural counter sadness. And his immoderate mirth and flow of spirits sit often but superficially upon him, covering and relieving an inwardly vexed and troubled mind, rather than representing a light one. But it is evident that melancholy, like other mental passions and affections, should be under the control of reason. The passion of anger is in itself a noble and lofty one, and yet is liable to run into coarseness and madness, unless it is checked by a higher principle. The melancholic tendencies of the human character, however deep and true a part of it, must in the same way be kept in check by a higher principle. Christian reason, i.e. faith, informs us that this whole system of things, notwith- standing the disturbing appearances in it, will finally issue in absolute good. Christian reason, therefore, forbids vague, irregu- lar, and licentious melancholy. From the ultimate height of a certain issue it controls the commotions and depressions, the dark- ness and troubles, of passionate and sensitive nature. It brings the melancholy of the human character into form and shape ; chastens, subdues, and refines it. Go over in succession the portraits of those great religious men upon whom the world has tried all its discouragements and disappointments, and see if in any one of them there appears a symptom of loose sub- mission to the involuntary depressions of nature. Melancholy, indeed, appears, but it is a melancholy of perfect form and mould ; tranquil, grave, and self-possessed, as if a sculptor had modelled it. You see this distinctive fact, that in their case the mind was above its own melancholy, looked down calmly upon it as an inferior part of itself; kept it under, and reduced it to order and law. You see that, conversing and living in 414 Luther. heart with the One Eternal substance of Good, they were not liable to be unsettled and confounded at the appearances of evil. But Luther could not check 01 control his melancholic tem- perament ; and it consequently rose into morbid excesses, got the upper hand, and became oppressive and overwhelming. He describes himself as suffering often horrible fits of despair. Nay, he even incorporated these loose and degrading prostra- tions into his system, and tested the religious advancement of the believer by them. Does he feel occasionally desperate, all ground of faith gone, and the world, the flesh, and the devil triumphant ? — if so, he is a child of God ; if not, he is without his proper Christian evidences and tokens. Such melancholy as this was a loose disordered one — a mere cowering before the principle of evil ; for nobody can despair, even of his own per- sonal salvation, without a slavish succumbing for the time to evil, as if it had, in his own case at any rate, a necessary domination. Luther indeed could not control his melancholy, because he did not discipline himself. The first thing which a man of a melancholic temperament ought to do, if he wants to keep that temperament in order, is to practise some self-dis- cipline. Many great men have had exactly the same constitu- tion as Luther, and have controlled it by this means. But Luther did not discipline himself; his life was egregiously defective on that head. He vented his humours unscrupulously, used his tongue, immoderately, ate and drank freely, and did generally what he liked. With many generous and noble gifts, he was not a self- disciplinarian ; and he suffered for it. If the antagonist to melancholy is hope, we have the word of an apostle for the truth, that this hope can only come by experi- ence, and that this experience can only come by practice. It is impossible that a man can have real substantial hope, i.e. belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil, who does not feel and experience that triumph to some extent in himself. How can we reason but from what we know ? One who is conquering evil in himself has actually working within him a portion of that very victorious spirit itself which is to conquer universal evil ; and, believing in the expansion of what he actually feels, he has hope. But if a man lets himself run wild, Luther. 415 or lie fallow, this sensible ground of hope is gone ; and he will be liable to fall into melancholy. Hope and practice act and react upon each other : hope is a stimulus to practice ; practice is the foundation of hope. On the other hand, a lax habit of mind protrudes an indefinite gloom before it, and license is compensated for by melancholy. But Luther's habit became worse than morbid. The reader may qualify it as he likes, but there is a truth contained in a summary dictum with respect to a particular class of minds ; — that they cannot be melancholy without being mad. Crom- well's melancholy ran into eccentricities and monkey tricks : " starting from his bed in the dead of the night, and troubled strangely with ' phansies about the cross ' of Huntingdon, he would, after an interval, suddenly plunge into fantastic shapes of merriment," It seems invidious to allude to the amiable Cowper; at the same time he is an instance of a person in whom a melancholy madness seems to have had its full swing, and to have encountered no counteracting power in his mind. The religion of the Church does appear to have a power of shaping and ordering the melancholy of the human mind, while inferior religions too often let it grow into more or less of in- sanity. Luther alludes in his Table-talk to temptations he had felt to commit suicide : " Sometimes when I have had a knife in my hand, terrible thoughts have come upon me." His melancholy revelled in a coarse supernaturalism, and sum- moned grotesque phantoms from the lower world. He spoke of one being as constantly near him, not in the sense in which he is near all men, as mankind's great tempter, but in some extraordinary and local way. It is needless to introduce here the well-known stories which describe Luther's intimate and continual intercourse with the devil; many of them are not fit for these pages, and anybody who has the curiosity may read them collected, with the greatest attention to his conveni- ence, in the sixth chapter of the book of M. Michelet's Life. It is enough to say that Luther speaks of a repeated local and sensible presence of the devil, manifesting himself by sight, words, and even by touch. We speak of his language. How far such language may be metaphorical sometimes, notwith- 4i6 Luther. standing its simple and matter-of-fact surface, we will not undertake to determine. Luther sometimes alludes to the ordinary operations of nature as those of the devil, and ex- presses in words a personal presence of that being where, from the nature of the case, he could hardly really mean it. " One day, when there was a great storm abroad, Luther said : ' 'Tis the devil who does this ; the winds are nothing else but good and bad spirits. Hark ! how the devil is puffing and blowing.' " So iu another instance, an ordinary accident is attributed to the personal agency of the devil, simply because it is an awk- ward one, and because he seems to consider that all awkward events proceed from the devil, as the evil principle. As he was uniting Duke Philip of Pomerania and the«Elector's sister, in the middle of the marriage ceremony the nuptial ring escaped from his hold. He was seized with temporary alarm, but soon recovering himself exclaimed : " Hark ye, devil, this is no affair of mine ! 'tis all lost time for thee." Every thing or person, in short, which offended Luther was the devil in Luther's eyes : — To Carlstadt, " I know thee, devil of mine." To the Anabaptists, " Well, good devil, what next ?" The use of the name was a vent for his irritability, and answered for him a purpose very analogous to that which it answers among the vulgar. It was a form of swearing ; though differing widely from ordinary swearing in being significant, and con- nected with a general view. He had a strong sense of abstract evil ; he retaliated on all offensive matter by referring it im- mediately to this evil ; and a religious philosophy mixed with the temper of common vituperation. Such passages as these suggest a doubt how far Luther's relation of any sensible acts and presence of Satan is real or metaphorical. His language admits sometimes of a simply vituperative, sometimes of a simply imaginative, meaning, while the surface is a matter-of- fact one ; and Luther betrays a prophetic sympathy with that peculiarly German line of thought which, spreading personality on the largest scale throughout nature, and making individuals of winds, trees, and brooks, leaves the reader in doubt all the time whether the personality which the story intends is a real or practical one. On the other hand, he evidently held with Lather. 417 great pertinacity to the old popular legends of sensible Satanic agency, and his allusions have generally a matter-of-fact tone which it is difficult to explain away. He describes himself, then, as in this close and intimate intercourse with the devil ; the devil presses him with arguments, draws him out of rooms, forces him out of bed, and throws him into perspirations. " I know the devil thoroughly well : he has often had very hard hold ofmc, but he has been obliged to let me go at last : he has over and over again pressed me so close that I hardly knew whether I was alive or dead." These attacks aimed at his faith ; they " threw him sometimes into such despair that he did not know whether there was a God, and had great doubts of the Lord Jesus Christ ;" and he referred to them afterwards as " agonies," with the same pride with which a soldier refers to his battles. The celebrated midnight disputation with the devil at the castle of Wartburg. which need not be more than alluded to here, was one of these. In that interview the accuser threw in his teeth all his compliances with the established superstitions during his days of ignorance, and especially his celebration of the mass ; and a long argument against the mass is put into the devil's mouth. We wall take this opportunity of correcting a mistake of M. Audin and some others with respect to this argument. M. Audin regards it as a genuine theological argument on the part of the devil, carried on with the object of disproving the doctrine of the mass ; and makes it a confession on Luther's part that he and the devil agreed together in opinion. It is impossible, of course, that Luther could mean this ; because, in such a confession he would be ipso facto confessing himself in the wrong with respect to his theology, and this, it is unnecessary to say, he never did. The devil in this interview does not argue as a theologian but as an accuser ; nor is the conclusion of the erroneousness of the mass his object, but the proof, through that conclusion, of Luther's sin in having celebrated it. An offence must be proved to be such before the offender is convicted in consequence : and the devil argues for the sinfulness of the mass as he would for that of any moral offence, not in order to express a theological view in the one case, or a moral view in the other, but in order to M.K.-l.] 2 D 4 1 8 L utker. compass a conviction of a man. The function of accuser is always the principal one assigned to Satan by Luther : the devil "is always placing before his eyes the law, sin, and death, and makes use of this triad to torment him," "Est mirabilis artifex aggravandi peccahcm ; " " he goes on with the old story, accusing him of sin ;" and in this capacity of accuser he visited Luther at Wartburg. Upon those personal conflicts with Satan, and the character of Christian trials which Luther attributes to them, one re- mark is to be made. That is unquestionably an absurd and dangerous view which in any degree tends to divert attention from the substantial trials of substantial life to an eccentric and indescribable class of trials. The great trials of life are of one substantial class : " Every man is tempted," says St. James, " when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed." The medium of ordinary nature is the medium through which our trial comes ; and the temptations of life lie in the every-day lusts, appetites, and passions which we carry about with us in our own bodies and minds. If any view of Christian warfare draws us away from these, as the great, difficult, and arduous trials of life, there is no necessity to ask another question ; the view must be absurd. But Luther's view goes far to produce this result. He has a certain class of irregular and unintelli- gible, not to say ridiculous, trials, which he sets up as the great ones of Christian life ; far above the ordinary ones, of which he speaks quite slightingly in comparison: "The temptation of the flesh is a small matter, but God defend us from the great temptations which touch upon eternity ; when we are beaten about among them, we know not whether God is the devil or the devil God :" that is to say, he asserts that these irregular and eccentric " agonies " we are speaking of, these sensible personal assaults of Satan producing fright and perspiration, are much more serious and important trials than the tempta- tions of the flesh. A more absurd and debasing view of human trial could not well be conceived. The devil is indeed, as we know from Scripture, our great enemy. But that mighty and dreadful being, to whom, of all the fallen creatures of God, the wisdom of the serpent first belonged, knows better than to Luther. 419 assail the human race by the mere frightening and overwhelm- ing power of a real and direct presence. He assails us through that machinery of the flesh and the world by which we are surrounded, and through that medium gets access to the real substantial man. To appear and to frighten is child's-play; power which acts formidably acts through a medium. The world's great tempter made a common local assailant of, loses his dreadful character, and becomes as the legendary stories, and as the style of Luther's own remarks upon him abundantly indicates, a laughing-stock. The weight of invisibility taken off, the human mind is at ease, and can amuse itself, and joke at his expense. This constant intercourse with a sensible Satan, and the elevation of this form of temptation above the substantial and natural ones, have their fruits in Luther's life. While he was attending to the trials which made him perspire, he neglected those which made him rage and vilify ; and the temptations of the flesh, of which he thought so slightingly, in some degree vindicated their position. Of the melancholic habit of Luther's mind, thus rough, grotesque, unshaped, undisciplined, there was another and an important development. To one system or theory undisci- plined melancholy generally goes to satisfy and quiet itself; and that is fatalism- The theory of fatalism has this peculiar attraction, that by one single simple idea, which occupies no more space than a needle's point in the mind, it accounts for all things that ever were or can be, the whole medley of this visible system — the one idea, viz. of " must." As an artificial goal to the intellect, the fatalist theory is eminently great and satisfying. Luther was a fatalist ; that is to say, he was an extreme predestinarian. Not a believer in simple blind fate, he persisted in carrying out the one truth of God's foreknowledge into all its logical consequences without qualification from other truths. He took his stand on the idea of Deity, and argued thus. The idea of Deity implies absolute and omni- potent predestination ; free will is contrary to predestination, therefore free will is contrary to the idea of Deity. He first defined free will as licentious, and insulting to the Divine pre- rogative, and then condemned it as such. To allow man free 420 Luther. will and mastery over his own actions was to give the Deity . nothing to do but to stand by an idle spectator of the world's course, waiting for a chance issue ; to convert him into an " idolum Fortunce" a god like Homer's, who was absent from his government because he had gone to dine with the Ethiopians. This was impossible, therefore man could not have free will and mastery over his own actions. 1 He then carried his theory through the opposition of facts and the repugnancy of nature. Allowing the phenomenon of free will, he explained it as being a phenomenon only, and not a reality. We are not dragged by the neck, he says, to do things which we hate; we do voluntarily that which we will to do, but that very will is a necessary will, and not a free one. 2 There is not seldom in Luther's air, action, language, that which, when once our attention has caught it, carries us back to these ideas of fatalism. A careless ease, an abandon, a species of indifference, as if not he but some external power were acting, appears. Eetrospects of life have generally, in- deed, something of a dreamy tone about them, and yet that 1 " Liberum arbitrium nemini nisi soli Deo convenit. Arbitrium fortassis homini aliquod recte attribuis, sed liberum arbitrium tribuere in rebus divinis nimium est. Quod liberi arbitrii vox omnium aurium judicio proprie id dicitur, quod potest et facit erga Deum quajcunque libuerit, nulla lege, nullo imperio cohibitum. Neque enim servum dixeris liberum qui sub imperii) domini agit : quanto minus hominem vel Angelum recte liberum dicimus, qui sub imperio plenissimo Dei (ut peccatum et mortem taceam) sic degunt, ut nee momento consistere suis viribus possint." — Oper. vol. ii. p. 442. Again — " Nee patimur neque recipimus mediocritatem illam, quam nobis consulit bono, lit credo, ammo ; scilicet ut libero arbitrio perpusillum concedamus, quo facilius pugnantia Scripturse et incommoda prsedicta tollantur. Nam ista mediocritate nibil est causa? consultuni neque quidquam profectum. . . . Ideo ad extrema eundum est, ut totum negetur liberum arbitrium, et omnia ad Deum referantur." — Oper. vol. i. p. 475. 2 " Necessario dico, non coacte sed necessitate immutabilitatis. Non violenter, velut raptus obtorto collo, nolens facit malum, sed sponte et libente voluntate facit. Verum hanc libeutiam non potest suis viribus omit- tere, coercere, aut mutare, sed pergit volendo et libendo." — De Serv. Arbit., Oper. vol. ii. p. 434. " Quid ad me si liberum arbitrium non cogatur sed volenter faciat quod facit? Sufficit mihi quod concedis necessario fore, ut volenter faciat, nee aliter habere se queat, si Deus ita praescierit." — Oper. vol. ii. p. 463. The concession alluded to is the " necessitas consequential," or the predestination on God's part, which Erasmus of course allowed, but balanced by denying the " necessitas consequentise," i.e. denying subsequent slavery of will on man's part. Luther takes his concession without the counterbalance to it. Luther. 421 tone in Luther's attracts our attention : " My father went to Mansfeldt, and became a miner there. It was there I was born. That I was afterwards to become bachelor of arts, doctor of divinity, and what not, was assuredly not written in the stars, at least not to ordinary readers. How I astonished everybody when I turned monk ! and again when I exchanged the brown cap for another. These things greatly vexed my father ; nay, made him quite ill for a time. After that I got pulling the Pope about by the hair of his head ; I married a runaway nun ; I had children by her. Who saw these things in the stars? Who would have told any one beforehand they were to happen ?" Again, it is often difficult to discriminate between what is positive energy, and what is a negative abandonment of himself to a swing. Much of the actual strength of his style, for instance, seems to come from carelessness to what he says, and his vigour to have much to do with the absence of an internal check. The prodigious ease and freedom with which he made his observations upon men and things is that almost of an irresponsible person. His summary treatment of Scripture, bestowed with such an air of negligence, suggests the same remark. When he criticises the Epistle of St. James in the passage quoted above, and decides that it contains many excel- lent remarks, and that its author was doubtless a worthy man, though antiquated in his opinions, — that he, Luther, did not consider him inspired, but had no objection to any one else considering him so who chose, — we can almost suppose him dreaming, so little does he seem to realise the shock he is giving to Christian faith. Luther's career, with all its activities, betrays some features of the dream, and he seems to move with a self- moving order of events. Thus he marries his Catharine Bora rather as if he were dreaming. He seems hardly to know why he marries ; no strong attachment to her, no call to mar- riage generally, induces him. The step lowered him in his own estimation. No theory could make the marriage of a monk and a nun not ignominious ; no theory could make it necessary for Luther to marry at all. To the apostle of a great religious movement, who had lived forty years of his life without marry- ing, the pleasures of a domestic life could not be necessary ; 422 Luther. and lie had plenty to do without encumbering himself with its cares. Fate, however, brought them together ; she came in his way, and he married her, feeling all the time the deep blow to his self-respect. He would fain have converted the humilia- tion into a matter of spiritual congratulation, and believed that " devils wept and angels smiled " over it ; but an injured self- respect disturbed him, and did not leave him easy even in the midst of the charms and affections of wife and home. " Medio de fonte leporum Surgit aniari aliquid, quod in ipsis floribus angat." The stars were unusually brilliant one evening when he and Catharine were walking in the garden. " What a brilliant light !" said Luther, as he looked upward ; " but it burns not for us." "And why are we to be excluded from the kingdom of heaven?" asked Catharine. "Perhaps," said Luther, with a sigh, " because we left our convents." Catharine — " Shall we return then ?" Luther — " It is too late to do that." To the consolatory side, theu, of this melancholy and fatalist temper, Luther betook himself, as the Reformation, getting in its spread more and more out of his hands, cast up its various, ugly, and shapeless developments. He went on repeating to himself — " It must be ; this is the way of the world, this is what was to be expected." He reposed disdainfully in the general maxim of the unvarying ingratitude of human nature to all its benefactors, temporal and spiritual. Here had he been working all his life for the very persons who were now throwing him off, and setting up their own mongrel and vile fancies. He had suffered as well as worked ; he had gone through all the dark, subterranean, preparatory gloom by which a great movement is ushered in, and borne the weight of innu- merable internal struggles, temptations, and depressions, and now men, who had done nothing but enjoy the fruits, claimed the credit and usurped the authority. Audaculi! Fine boasters and braggers now that the result was obtained ; how would they have gone through the task of obtaining it ? What mental agonies had they had ; those tokens of the Spirit, those only sure evidences of God's proving and chastening love ? They could enjoy day and sunshine well enough, but had they felt Luther. 423 the horrors of the night ? However, ingratitude was the pro- perty of human nature. " The world did not deserve to have anything done for it by men of heart and conscience." Even his domestic distresses assumed the shape of results of this universal law. One of his sons was a disobedient boy. " He almost killed me once, and ever since I have lost all my strength of body. Thanks to him, I now thoroughly understand that passage where St. Paul speaks of children who kill their parents, not by the sword, but by disobedience. Such children seldom live long, and are never happy. ... Oh God ! how wicked is this world ! how monstrous the times in which we live ! These are the times of which Christ said, When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth 1 Happy they who died ere these days came upon the world !" The days were come to which the prophecy — " My Spirit shall not always strive with men " — pointed ; the last punishment which God through the mouthy of the holy patriarchs threatened M r as now in execu- tion, and Germany was specially feeling it. " See how Satan hasteneth and busieth himself; what troops of sects he hath raised against us ! and what is to happen when I die ? What hosts of Sacramentaries, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Ser- vetians, Campanistas, and heretics of all kinds will arise V He questioned even whether the Bible itself would long keep its hold. "There was commencing in the world a weariness of the word of God — a sign of ill promise. One of these days some new books would be started in competition, and the Bible be despised, slighted, pushed into a corner, and thrown under the table." He thought, as persons have often done when events have disturbed them and hopes have been disappointed, that the end of the world was approaching. " In December last the whole heavens were seen on fire above the Church of Bres- lau, and another day there were witnessed in the same place two circles of fire, one within the other, and in the centre of them a blazing pillar. These signs announce, it is my firm opinion, the approach of the last day. The empire is falling, kings are falling, princes are falling, the whole world totters, and, like a great house about to tumble down, manifests its coming destruction by wide gaps and crevices on its surface. 424 Luther. This will infallibly happen, and ere long." " The hour of mid- night approaches, when the cry will be heard, Behold, the Bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet Him." Under the vexation, annoyance, and sense of ill-usage which the medley of earthly events produces in those who have taken a prominent part in them, the mind often takes refuge in the idea of an end. It retaliates on its own discomforts by a keen realising of the absolute ultimate cessation of that system of things which produces them ; and brings in the future to annihilate the present. That which will once be quite certainly over, seems substantially over now, and to exist only by acci- dent, and not in the nature of tilings. The consolatory powers of this idea are to a certain extent, indeed, sanctioned by Scrip- ture ; and the prophetical parts of the Old Testament, and almost all parts of the New, direct us in some way to them. The idea of an end again suggests the idea of that end shortly approaching : we realise the certainty of it by imagining its vicinity. Thus, from the beginning of Christianity downwards, the pious notion has ever more or less prevailed in the Church that the end of the world was shortly approaching, and even Apostles seem to have entertained it. Among the primitive Christians it was general ; in every age of the Church any alarming posture of affairs, any general calamity, political, ecclesiastical, or physical, has been sufficient to elicit it, and we see the tendency even in our own times. Luther took refuge, then, in this idea : but he did so morbidly and angrily. He embraced it in the spirit of a person who felt an actual private interest, and private pique gratified by its accomplish- ment. A great movement of his own was producing many bad i ffects, and promising many worse : and he was disappointed, and he was apprehensive. There is something remarkable in the way in which Luther seems not to have been able to throw himself confidently upon the good part of human nature, for taking in and carrying out his system as he wished. Some founders of systems have been able to do this ; they have said to themselves : This system will do its work well; many will abuse it, but, on the whole, the good part of human nature will be in alliance with it, and carry it out with substantial Luther. 425 success. Luther had no solid good part of human nature to depend on in this way ; his theory made of man a broken reed only, and he could not trust him for doing anything like justice to his ideas. He had no pledge for events, and saw wildness and disorder before him. A general gloom as to the future thus hung over the latter part of his life. First, he dis- trusted it, and secondly, he cut it short. Insecure as to the ultimate issues of a great movement, the actual contents of the womb of time, the rising attitude of human thought ; alarmed at symptoms, repelled by facts, he relieved his prospect by closing it up. He placed a dead wall before his eyes, and saw nothing beyond it. He fixed his imagination on an end, and wound up the hopeless disorders of a hopeless scene in an immediate day of judgment. In this sketch of Luther's character and career we have omitted, or but incidentally alluded to, one striking side of him, and attended to the deeper rather than to the lighter features. We have seen him as a religious enthusiast, with the natural melancholy and the profound emotions which attach to such a character : and we have seen him as a practical man, — a shrewd, energetic, and statesmanlike leader and reformer. Another and a lighter part of him yet remains ; but it falls so naturally under the concluding head of this article, to which we are now approaching, that we shall not interrupt the order of our remarks to introduce it previously. One not unimportant inquiry then comes in, as a natural appendage or conclusion to this article, and that is, What consequences Luther has left behind him of his own peculiar religious mould, and how far he has managed to impress him- self upon posterity : what ethical effects (for to go into all the effects would be too large an inquiry for our limits) survive of so wonderful a religious phenomenon ? First then we turn to the nation to which Luther belonged, and to which his labours were devoted, and ask how far Luther has impressed himself upon that nation, and left his own type visible in it. Turning to that nation we certainly see a pecu- liar type of character. The resident in Germany sends home his description of it : German literature and German poetry in 426 Luther. a great degree bear their own witness to it. We see first, as a feature in the German character, a deep genial appreciation of the social and cheerful side of human life. The German is warm and hearty, full of lively feelings and affections, and most powerfully susceptible of that happiness which proceeds from their gratification. He enters into social and family life with a poetical enthusiasm, and endows the affections of nature with peculiar life and intensity. A peculiar appreciation of nature herself is also apparent in him. The German descriptive poet forms with the beauty and splendour, the life and fertility, of nature, an intimacy, and derives from them an enjoyment which no poet except himself, or one who has caught his spirit, does. He feels nature mingling with his soul, and conversing with him ; he gives her an almost personal life. Trees, herbs, and flowers, the winds and waves, the storm and sunshine, the clouds and sky, black forest and fertile field, mountain and plain, valley and rock, and all the animal life which inhabits them, speak and hold communion with him as if they were in- telligent things. But with this genial and overflowing apprecia- tion of nature, animate and inanimate, the world physical and social, there mingles a subtle spirit which ensnares and corrupts. The forms of feeling are too luxuriant to be solid, and too expanded to be safe. The love of all natural things, matter or mind, needs reserve to keep it pure and healthy ; and a cautious policy is as necessary in the world of feeling as it is in that of action. Wisdom speaks one language here — Hold back ; dis- trust : " Know thyself," and be sure that all is sound before the valve is opened. Caution is an actual part of true feeling, a substantial ingredient in its nature ; as in chemistry one gas often enters into the composition of another. Those sacred poets of the old pagan world who sang the praises of atSw? taught this lesson : they taught that there was something in human nature higher than mere feeling, a holy monitor to whom all affection was meant to bow, and absolutely commit itself for training and fashioning. This lesson old pagan philosophy, though with the repulsive and daring exaggeration incident to human thinking, taught; when stoic and cynic warned men of their feelings, as if they were mere perturbations Luther. 427 and diseases. The social feeling of the German overleaps this caution ; and the popular fiction which describes German life betrays the fault. The social interior exhibited there is one in which the affections of nature luxuriate and exceed : there is a flood of mutual devotion ; minds are wrapped up in each other, with an apparent forgetfulness that there are other people in the world beside themselves ; an elysian self-importance per- vades the scene, and we are merged into a central whirlpool of interest and emotion. Such a luxuriance is too great to stand ; the scene approaches too nearly to the sensual ; head and heart swim ; and finally one infallible symptom of disease appears in the shape of one prevailing fault to which all point as the blot on German social life. Too wildly and fiercely intent on a legitimate happiness, feeling runs into illegitimate, and finds the law of fidelity too tight a chain. Undisciplined love wanders restlessly ; and self-indulgent fancy unsettles the stableness, and stains the sanctity of domestic life. The Ger- man appreciation of nature equally overleaps this caution ; and if it has the merits of an overflowing enthusiasm, plunges deep into the dangers too. The poet adores a perishing external surface as if it were the substance ; he falls before the rock or mountain as if it were a god ; he breathes into nature a kind of personal divinity; he loves and thanks devoutly his mother-earth for her luxuriance and beauty, her tenderness and care : he idolises the creature, and holds communion with a pantheistic deity and universal soul. The whole German development of feeling, poetical and social, amidst all that is deep and sympathetic in it, thus shows one great defect, In the love of nature and of man alike, one principle, for which the Greek language has a conse- crated name, is sadly overborne. Another and a looser spirit appears, the same of which we see the still more obvious fruits in the direct department of theology; the same which has explained away inspiration, reduced the Bible to legend, dis- solved the Christian creed, and left a void for the human mind to fill up at its will. Emptied of the preserving element of atS