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ecclesiastical reform. As to Archbishop Usher's model of ' government,' replied the bishops, we decline it as not con'sistent with his other learned discourses on the original of Episcopacy and of metropolitans, nor with the King's supremacy ' in causes ecclesiastical.' ' Had you read Gerson, Bucer, Par'ker, Baynes, Salmasius, Blondel, &c.,' rejoined Baxter, you ' would have seen just reason given for our dissent from the ' ecclesiastical hierarchy as established in England. You would ' easily grant that dioceses are too great, if you had ever con' scionably tried the task which Dr Hammond describeth as the 'bishop's work, or had ever believed Ignatius' and others' ancient 'descriptions of a bishop's church.' Whither this war of words was tending, no bystander could doubt. To maintain the splendour and the powers of Episcopacy, to yield nothing, and yet to avoid the appearance of a direct breach of the royal word, was so glaringly the object of the Court, that wilful blindness only could fail to penetrate the transparent veil of The Declaration' framed by Clarendon with all the astuteness of his profession, and accepted by the Presbyterians with the eagerness of expiring hope. Baxter was not so deceived. In common with the other heads of his party, he judged the faith of Charles an inadequate security, and refused the proffered mitre of Hereford as an insidious bribe.

There were abundant reasons for this distrust. Thanks for his gracious purposes in favour of the Nonconformists had been presented to the head of the Church by the House of Commons, who immediately afterwards, at the instance of his Majesty's Secretary of State, rejected the very measure which had kindled their gratitude. Three months had scarcely passed since the declaration had issued, when an Order in Council proclaimed the illegality of all religious meetings held without the walls of the parochial churches. The Book of Common Prayer and the Statute Book were daily cementing their alliance, the one enlarged by a supplication for 'grace carefully and studiously to imitate the ' example of the blessed saint and martyr' who had now attained the honours of canonization; the other requiring the of fices of all corporate and port towns 'to take the sacrament of 'the Lord's Supper;' and to swear ' that it is not lawful, upon any pretence whatsoever, to take arms against the King,' or against those commissioned by him.'

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Amidst these Parliamentary thunders were opened the conferences of the Savoy, which were to reduce to a definite meaning the declarations of Breda and of Whitehall. It was the scene of Baxter's triumph and defeat-the triumph of his promptitude, subtlety, and boundless resource the defeat of the last

hope he was permitted to indulge, of peace to himself or to the Church of which he was then the brightest ornament. The tactics of popular assemblies form a system of licensed deceit ; and their conventional morality tolerates the avowal of the skill by which the antagonist party has been overreached, and even an open exultation in the success of such contrivances. To embarrass the Presbyterians by the course of the discussion, to invent plausible pretexts for delay, and to guide the controversy to an impotent, if not a ludicrous close, were the scarcely concealed objects of the Episcopalians. Opposed to these by the feebler party were the contrivances by which weakness usually seeks to evade the difficulties it cannot stem, and the captiousness which few can restrain when overborne by the superior force of numbers or of authority.

Whoever has seen a Parliament, may easily imagine a Synod. Baxter was the leader of an unpopular opposition, the Charles Fox of the Savoy, of which Morley was the William Pitt, and Gunning the Henry Dundas. To review the Book of Common Prayer, and to advise and consult upon the 'same, and the several objections and exceptions which shall be ' raised against the same,' was the task assigned by Charles to twelve bishops, nine doctors of divinity, and twenty-one Presbyterian divines. Exalted by the acclamation of the whole Episcopalian party to the head of all human writings, not without some doubts whether it should not rather class with those of the sacred canon, the Book of Common Prayer was pronounced by the bishops, at the opening of the conferences, to be exempt from any errors which they could detect, and incapable of any improvements which they could suggest. They could not therefore advance to the encounter until their antagonists should have unrolled the long catalogue of their hostile criticisms and projected amendments. From such a challenge it was not in Baxter's nature to shrink, though warned by his associates of the motives by which it was dictated, and of the dangers to which it would lead. Bishop Sheldon,' says Burnet, 'saw well enough • what the effect would be of obliging them to make all their ' demands at once, that the number would raise a mighty outery 'against them as a people that could never be satisfied.' In fourteen days Baxter had prepared a new liturgy. In a few more he had completed his objections to the former rubric, with an humble petition for peace and indulgence. Fast and thick flew over the field the missiles of theological theses before the closer conflict of oral debate. This was waged in high dialectic latitudes. Take the following example :-' That command' (we quote the Episcopalian proponitur) which enjoins only an act ' in itself lawful, and no other act whereby an unjust penalty is ' enjoined, or any circumstance whence directly or per accidens any sin is consequent, which the commander ought to provide ' against, hath in it all things requisite to the lawfulness of a ' command, and particularly cannot be charged with enjoining an 'act per accidens unlawful, nor of commanding an act under an * unjust penalty.' As an Indian listens to the war-cry of a hostile tribe, Baxter heard the announcement of this heretical doctrine, and plunged headlong into the fight. Pouring forth his boundless stores of metaphysical, moral, and scholastic speculation, he alternately plunged and soared beyond the reach of ordinary vision distinguished and qualified, quoted and subtilized, till his voice was drowned 'in noise and confusion, and high reflections on his ' dark and cloudy imagination.' Bishop Sanderson, the Moderator, adjudged the palm of victory to his opponent.

Baxter and

Gunning' (the words are Burnet's)' spent several days in lo'gical arguing, to the diversion of the town, who looked upon ' them as a couple of fencers, engaged in a dispute that could not 'be brought to any end.' It had, however, reached the only end which the King and his advisers had ever contemplated. An apology had been made for the breach of the royal promise. Henceforth the Presbyterians might be denounced as men whom reason could not convince, and who were therefore justly given up to the coercion of penal laws. To cast on them a still deeper shade of contumacy, some few trifling changes were made in the Rubric by the Convocation. The Church was required to celebrate the martyrdom of the first Charles, and the restoration of the second, that'most religious and gracious King,' (the last an epithet with which in the same sentence the monarch was complimented and the Deity invoked;) and, as if still more certainly to exclude from her pale those who had sued in vain for entrance, Bel and the Dragon, and other worthies of the Apocrypha, were now called to take their stations in her weekly services.

Had Charles been permitted to follow the dictates of his own easy nature, or of his religious predilections, he would (though for precisely opposite reasons) have emulated the zeal of Cromwell for liberty of conscience. He would gladly have secured that freedom to his Roman Catholic subjects; and would still more gladly have relieved himself from the trouble of persecuting the Protestant Dissenters. But the time was still unripe for such hazardous experiments. At the dictation of Clarendon, he was made to assure his Parliament that he was 'as much ' in love with the Book of Common Prayer as they could wish, ' and had prejudices enough against those who did not love it.' Within two years from his return, the depth and sincerity of this affection were attested by the imprisonment of more than four thousand Quakers, and by the promulgation of the Act of Uniformity. Among the two thousand clergymen whom this law excluded from the Church, Baxter was on every account the most conspicuous. He had refused the bishoprick of Hereford, and the united interest of Charles and Clarendon had been exerted in vain (so with most elaborate hypocrisy it was pretended) to recover for him a curacy at Kidderminster. He for ever quitted that scene of his apostolic labours; and, in the fortyseventh year of his age, bowed down with bodily infirmities, was driven from his home and his weeping congregation, to pass the remainder of his life in lothsome jails or precarious hidingplaces; there to achieve, in penury and almost ceaseless pain, works without a parallel in the history of English theological literature, for their extent, or their prodigality of mental re

sources.

Solitude was not amongst the aggravations of his lot. Margaret Charlton was a lady of gentle birth, rich in the gifts of nature and of fortune. She dwelt in her mother's house at Kidderminster, where both parent and child found in Baxter their teacher and spiritual guide. 'In her youth, pride and ro'mances, and company suitable thereto, did take her up.' But sickness came, and he ministered to her anxieties; and health returned, and he led the thanksgiving of the congregation; and there were mental conflicts in which he sustained her, and works of mercy in which he directed her, and notes were made of his sermons, and passages were transcribed from his consolatory letters, and gradually-but who needs to be told the result? Margaret was no ordinary woman. Her 'strangely vivid wit' is celebrated by the admirable John Howe; and her widowed husband, in 'The breviate of her life,' has drawn a portrait the original of which it would have been criminal not to love. Timid, gentle, and reserved, and nursed amidst all the luxuries of her age, her heart was the abode of affections so intense, and of a fortitude so enduring, that her meek spirit, impatient of one selfish wish, progressively acquired all the heroism of benevo lence, and seemed at length incapable of one selfish fear. In prison, in sickness, in evil report, in every form of danger and fatigue, she was still with unabated cheerfulness at the side of him to whom she had pledged her conjugal faith; -prompting him to the discharge of every duty, calming the asperities of his temper, his associate in unnumbered acts of philanthropy, embellishing his humble home by the little arts with which a cultivated mind imparts its own gracefulness to the meanest dwelling-place; and during the nineteen years of their union joining

with him in one unbroken strain of filial affiance to the Divine mercy, and of a grateful adoration for the Divine goodness. Her tastes and habits had been moulded into a perfect conformity to his. He celebrates her Catholic charity to the opponents of their religious opinions, and her inflexible adherence to her own; her high esteem of the active and passive virtues of the Christian life, as contrasted with a barren orthodoxy; her noble disinterestedness, her skill in casuistry, her love of music, and her medicinal arts. Peace be to the verses which he poured out not to extol but to animate her devotion. If Margaret was wooed in strains over which Sacharissa would have slumbered, Baxter's uncouth rhymes have a charm which Waller's lyrics cannot boast -the charm of purity, and reverence, and truth. The Eloise of Abelard, and the Eloise of Rousseau, revealing but too accurately one of the dark chambers of the human heart, have poisoned the imagination, and rendered it difficult to conceive of such ties as those which first drew together the souls of the Nonconformist minister and his pupil; - he approaching his fiftieth and she scarcely past her twentieth year; he stricken with penury, disease, and persecution, and she in the enjoyment of affluence and of the world's alluring smiles. It was not in the reign of Charles the Second, that wit or will were wanting to ridicule, or to upbraid such espousals. Grave men sighed over the weakness of the venerable divine; and gay men disported themselves with so effective an incident in the tragicomedy of life. Much had the great moralist written upon the benefits of clerical celibacy, for, ' when he said so, he thought that he should die a bachelor.' Something he wrote as follows, in defence of his altered opinions: - The unsuitableness of our age, and my former known purposes against mar'riage and against the conveniency of ministers' marriage, who 'have no sort of necessity, made our marriage the matter of ' much talk;' but he most judiciously proceeds, 'the true open'ing of her case and mine, and the many strange occurrences ' which brought it to pass, would take away the wonder of her ' friends and mine that knew us, and the notice of it would much ' conduce to the understanding of some other passages of our ' lives. Yet wise friends, by whom I am advised, think it ' better to omit such personal particularities at this time. Both ' in her case and in mine there was much extraordinary, which ' it doth not much concern the world to be acquainted with.' Under this apology, it veiled the fact that Margaret herself first felt, or first betrayed the truth, that a sublunary affection had blended itself with their devotional feelings; and that she encouraged him to claim that place in her heart which the holiest

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