These are, therefore, the actions of life, because they are the seeds of immortality. That day in which we have done some excellent thing, we may as truly reckon to be added to our life, as were the fifteen years to the days of Hezekiah.

4. THE MIRACLES OF THE DIVINE MERCY. (FROM "SERMONS PREACHED AT GOLDEN GROVE," PUBLISHED IN 1651.) GOD hath given his laws to rule us, his word to instruct us, his Spirit to guide us, his angels to protect us, his ministers to exhort us. He revealed all our duty, and he hath concealed whatsoever can hinder us; he hath affrighted our follies with fear of death, and engaged our watchfulness by its secret coming. He hath exercised our faith by keeping private the state of souls departed, and yet hath confirmed our faith by a promise of a resurrection, and entertained our hope by some general significations of the state of interval. His mercies make contemptible means instrumental to great purposes, and a small herb the remedy of the greatest diseases. He impedes the devil's rage, and infatuates his counsels; he diverts his malice, and defeats his purposes; he binds him in the chain of darkness, and gives him no power over the children of light; he suffers him to walk in solitary places, and yet fetters him that he cannot disturb the sleep of a child. He hath given him mighty power, and yet a young maiden that resists him shall make him flee away; he hath given him a vast knowledge, and yet an ignorant man can confute him with the twelve articles of his creed; he gave him power over the winds, and made him prince of the air, and yet the breath of a holy prayer can drive him as far as the utmost sea. This is that great principle of all the felicity we hope for, and of all the means thither (thereto), and of all the skill and all the strength we have to use those means. He hath made great variety of conditions, and yet hath made all necessary, and all mutual1 helpers; and by some instruments, and in some respects, they are all equal

(1) Mutual, common. These words are often confounded, though representing perfectly distinct notions. Mutual is fr. Lat. mutuum, a loan procured by exchange, also a reciprocity or exchange of good offices; so mutua vulnera are wounds which each inflicts on the other. A. and B. are mutual friends, if they love one another; A., B., and C. may also be mutual friends if each loves both the others; but if A. and C. both love B., but not each other, then B. is not the mutual friend of A. and C., but their common friend. "Mutual helpers" above seems perfectly correct.

in order to felicity, to content, and final and intermedial (intermediate) satisfactions. He gave us part of our reward in hand, that he might enable us to work for more; he taught the world arts for use, arts for entertainment of all our faculties and all our dispositions; he gives eternal gifts for temporal se vices, and gives us whatsoever we want for asking, and commands us to ask, and threatens us if we will not ask, and punishes us for refusing to be happy.

5. THE DISCIPLINE OF ADVERSITY.

(FROM THE SAME WORK.)

No man is more miserable1 (more to be pitied) than he that hath no adversity. That man is not tried whether he be good or bad, and God never crowns those "vertues" which are only faculties and dispositions; but every act of virtue is an ingredient into (an element of) reward. And we see many children fairly planted (settled in their habits), whose parts of nature (natural faculties) were never dressed by art, nor called from the furrows of their first possibilities by discipline and institution (instruction), and they dwell for ever in ignorance, and converse with beasts; and yet, if they had been dressed (trained, et right) by discipline, [they] might have stood at the chairs of princes, or spoken parables amongst the rulers of cities. Our vertues are but in the seed, when the grace of God comes upon us first; but this grace must be thrown into broken furrows, and must "twice feel the cold and twice feel the heat," and be “softned" with storms and showers, and then it will arise into fruitfulness and harvests (the fruitfulness of the harvest). And what is there in the world to distinguish "vertues" from dishonours (disgraces), or the valour of Cæsar from the softness of the Egyptian eunuchs; or that can make anything remarkable (meritorious), but the labour and the danger, the

(1) Miserable, fr. Lat. miserabilis, to be pitied, and therefore in a wretched condition. We use the word both subjectively, as it is called, that is, from the individual's own point of view, or objectively, from the opinions of others respecting him. Its used above evidently in the second sense. The man is to be pitied by others. as lacking the advantages arising from discipline, but he is not consciously miserable, inasmuch as he has had no adversity.

(2) Heat:

"Illa seges votis respondet avari

Agricolæ, bis quæ solem, bis frigora sensit."—Virgil, Georg. i.

pain and the difficulty? "Vertue" could not be anything but sensuality if it were the entertainment of our senses and fond (foolish) desires; and Apicius' had been (would have been) the noblest of all the Romans if feeding a great appetite and despising the severities of temperance had been the work and proper employment of a wise man. But otherwise (than by God's plan) do fathers, and otherwise do mothers handle their children. These (the mothers) soften them with kisses and imperfect noises (cooings), with the pap and breast-milk of soft endearments; they rescue them from tutors, and snatch them from discipline; they desire to keep them fat and warm, and their feet dry and their bellies full; and then the children govern, and cry, and prove fools, and troublesome, so long as the feminine republic does endure. But fathers, because they design to have their children wise and valiant, apt for counsel or for arms (for political or military life), send them to severe governments (put them under strict regimen), and tie them to study, to hard labour, and afflictive contingencies. They rejoice when the bold boy strikes a lion with his hunting-spear, and shrinks not when the beast comes to affright his early (youthful) courage. Softness is for slaves and beasts, for minstrels and useless persons, for such who (as) cannot ascend higher than the state of a fair ox, or a servant entertained (kept) for vainer offices. But the man that designs his son for nobler employments-to honours and to triumphs, to consular dignities and presidencies of "councels "-loves to see him pale with study or panting with labour, hardened with sufferings or eminent by dangers; and so God dresses (prepares) us for heaven. He loves to see us struggling with a disease, and resisting the devil and contesting against the weaknesses of nature, and against hope to believe in hope, resigning our selves" to "Gods" will, praying him to choose for us, and dying in all things but faith and its blessed consequents (consequences, reward), and the danger and the resistance shall endear the office (shall give value to the duty). For so have I known the boisterous north wind pass "thorow" the yielding air, which opened its bosom and appeased its violence by entertaining it with easy compliance in all the regions of its reception. But when the same breath of heaven hath been checked with the stiffness of a tower or the united strength of a wood, it grew mighty and dwelt there (accumulated its force there), and made the highest branches stoop, and make a smooth path for

(1) Apicius, a noted Roman epicure.

M

it on the top of all its (the wood's) glories. So is sickness, and so is the grace of God. When sickness hath made the difficulty (.e. has offered the resistance), then God's grace hath made a triumph, and by doubling its power hath created new proportions of a reward (i.e. has made the ultimate happiness greater than it would have been without the trial and the suffering), and then shows its biggest glory when it has the greatest difficulty to master, the greatest weakness to support, the most busy temptations to contest (contend) with. For so God loves that his strength should be seen in our weakness and our danger. Happy is that state of life in which our services to God are the dearest and the most expensive.

6. THE PRAYER OF A GOOD MAN.

(FROM SECOND SERIES OF "SERMONS PREACHED AT GOLDEN GROVE," PUBLISHED IN 1653.)

PRAYER is the peace of our spirit, the stillness of our thoughts, the evenness 1 of recollection, the seat of meditation, the rest of our cares, and the calm of our tempest; prayer is the issue of a quiet mind, of untroubled thoughts, it is the daughter of charity, and the sister of meekness; and he that prays to God with an angry, that is, with a troubled and discomposed spirit, is like him that retires into a battle to meditate, and sets up his closet in the out-quarters of an army, and chooses a frontier garrison to be wise in. Anger is a perfect alienation of the mind from prayer, and therefore is contrary to that attention which presents our prayers in a right line to God. For so have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes (hoping) to get to heaven and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest than it could recover by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings; till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing as if it had learned music and motion from an angel as he passed sometimes through the air about his ministries here below; so is the prayer of a good man.

(1) Erenness, quiet composure. Taylor, in another passage, speaks of "the evenness of a wise Christian."

JOHN MILTON.'

1. EFFECTS OF THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. (FROM "OF REFORMATION IN ENGLAND," PUBLISHED IN 1641.)

WHEN I recal to mind at last, after so many dark ages, wherein the huge overshadowing train of error had almost swept all the stars out of the firmament of the Church, how the bright and blissful reformation, by divine power, "strook" through the black and settled night of "ignoraunce" and antichristian tyranny, "me thinks" a "soveraigne" and reviving joy must needs rush into the bosom of him that reads or hears, and the sweet odour of the returning Gospel imbathe his soul with the fragrancy of heaven. Then was the sacred Bible brought out of the dusty corners where "prophane" falsehood and neglect had thrown it, the schools opened, divine and

(1) "The polemical writings of Milton contain several bursts of his splendid imagination and grandeur of soul. . . . An absence of idiomatic grace, and an use of harsh inversions violating the rules of the language, distinguish, in general, the [prose] writings of Milton, and require, in order to compensate them, such high beauties as will sometimes occur."— Hailam's Literature of Europe, iii. 151. Hallam also says, that Milton's "intermixture of familiar with learned phraseology is unpleasing, his structure (construction) is affectedly elaborate, and he seldom reaches any harmony."

If by harmony (here incorrectly used) is meant the musical flow of language, accomplishing by artful rhythmical pulses, a result in which both ear and mind are appealed to and satisfied, or those grand cadences which mark the close of a highly-wrought passage, and exhibit the spirit of the writer descending from its elevation with appropriate swoop to earth, then it is the opinion of some that Milton not seldom "reaches harmony." The very first extract illustrates this— "Methinks a sovereign," &c. And many such will be found. At the same time, it must be allowed that Milton's prose style often appears to disadvantage when compared with Hobbes's and Cowley's. It is sometimes stiff and stilted, moving with difficulty and oppressive to the reader; but, on the other hand, how often suggestive and pregnant, forcible and brilliant, and when by its motion onward it has gained an impetus, with what a stately march it sweeps along!

As Milton attached considerable importance to spelling, and adopted what was in some respects a system of his own more words than usual will be marked with inverted commas in the extracts from his writings, so as to show the exact form adopted in the original copies, published under his direction.

(2) Soveraigne, i.e. overpowering and overinastering, as when we talk of a "sovereign" remedy. This word is frequently used by Milton in his subsequent works, particularly in " Paradise Lost," and spelt "sovran."