broad light of returning peace. Religion of this kind is sublime; but surely, unless with our theories we have shut out the Most High from His universe, it is not absurd, it is not extravagant. And can any

thing be more wise and beautiful, more excellently removed from godlessness on the one hand, and morbid introspection, self-worshipping pietism, or fanatical frenzy, on the other, than the religion which pervades Mrs Hutchinson's memoir of her husband? Grant that the Colonel, as she pourtrays him, is an ideal Puritan, a saint crowned with the halo of glorious feminine love: must it not, on any showing, have been a noble party to which either Hutchinson or his wife belonged? "In the head of all his virtues," writes the high Puritan dame, "I shall set that which was the head and spring of them all, his Christianity for this alone is the true royal blood that runs through the whole body of virtue, and every pretender to that glorious family, who hath no tincture of it, is an imposter and a spurious brat. This is that sacred fountain which baptiseth all the Gentile virtues, that so immortalize the names of Cicero, Plutarch, Seneca, and all the old philosophers; herein they are regenerated and take a new name and nature; digged up in the wilderness of nature, and dipped in this living spring, they are planted and flourish in the paradise of God. By Christianity I intend that universal habit of grace which is wrought in a soul by the regenerating Spirit of God, whereby the whole creature is resigned up into the Divine will

and love, and all its actions designed to the obedience and glory of its Maker." Such was the Christianity of the Puritans. Ever in the great Taskmaster's eye. We see them in the manor-houses of that old time, a stately, polite, religious people; not austere, yet not frivolous. Their theory of life was that man's chief end is not to amuse or to be amused, not to create or experience sensation, but to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.

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They loved England with a glowing, a haughty affection. Herein lay another notable difference between the Puritans of England and the revolutionists of France. To these last old France had become horrible; their soul's wish was to raze it to its foundations. But the Puritans stood up against Laud and Strafford, because they were binding new chains round the form of their beloved England. Whoever," says the Puritan Mrs. Hutchinson, "considers England, will find it no small favour of God to have been made one of its natives, both upon spiritual and outward accounts. The happiness of the soil and air contribute all things that are necessary to the use or delight of man's life. The celebrated glory of this isle's inhabitants ever since they received a mention in history, confers some honour upon every one of her children, with an obligation to continue in that magnanimity and virtue, which hath famed this island, and raised her head in glory higher than the great kingdoms of the neighbouring continent....... Better laws and a happier constitution of government no nation ever enjoyed, it

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being a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, with sufficient fences against the pest of every one of these forms, tyranny, faction, and confusion; yet,"-here the brave lady explains how even in such a state a patriot might have to draw sword,-" yet is it not possible for man to devise such just and excellent bounds as will keep in wild ambition, when princes' flatterers encourage that beast to break his fence, which it hath often done, with miserable consequences both to the prince and people; but could never in any age so tread down popular liberty, but that it rose again with renewed vigour, till at length it trod on those that trampled it before."

Such were the sentiments of the Puritan patriots of England at the commencement of the Long Parliament. A large proportion of the party were persons of high breeding, of noble culture, of refined intelligence; in morals pure, in faith earnest, in devotion sincere. Many of them were of the aristocracy; the body of the party consisted of country gentlemen and the most substantial portion of the middle class. They dreamed not of overturning the monarchy or destroying the Church, but were resolute to maintain the freedom of their country, to rescue the Church from the thraldom of Laud, and to carry on that work of further reformation within her pale which had been contemplated by the first English Reformers.

Conjecture as to what might have occurred, if the circumstances which combine with men's dispositions to work out the results of history had been different, is

generally futile; but it seems as probable as any event which did not take place can be said to be, that, but for a few untoward circumstances, the Long Parliament might, in its earliest sessions, have reformed the Church more satisfactorily either than Cromwell or than Charles II. The Commonwealth swept away the whole framework of Episcopacy, and ordained the discontinuance of the Book of Common Prayer; the Act of Nonconformity not only re-established Episcopacy, but laid clergymen under more searching tests of Conformity than those of Laud himself: the dispositions of Churchmen, when the sittings of the Long Parliament commenced, were favourable to a mean between these extremes. The proscription of Calvinism might have ceased; the adoption of certain ceremonies might have been left to the will of pastors and congregations; liberty of prayer beyond the letter of the liturgy might have been conceded; and presbyters might have been associated with bishops. in the exercise of Church discipline. These reforms, with perhaps the addition of the exclusion of bishops from the Upper House, would have met with no serious opposition from Episcopalians of the school of Usher, and would have satisfied almost the entire Puritan party. In point of fact, the Puritans in the Church of England, the Puritans who loved the Church, clung to the Church, and desired no more than that the Church would reconcile them to herself, by granting them such liberty as might enable them to dwell in her courts, had only in solitary

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instances demanded more than this. thorough-going Presbyterians in England, who objected on conscientious grounds to even a modified Episcopacy; there were thorough-going Independents who maintained the Divine right of congregations only: but those who could not conscientiously conform to a Church, retaining an Episcopalian framework, and tolerating, though not enjoining, the ceremonies, were in 1641 in a minority in England.

The self-will, however, and unmanly vehemence of Charles, urging him to that fatal "arrest of the five members," and the horror, alarm, and suspicion created by the Irish rebellion, hurried a resolute but constitutional opposition into revolution. Hampden, and other leaders of the Puritans, who had made common cause with the Scots on their first advance into England, knew that the triumph of Charles would be their destruction. The Puritans of the middle and lower classes were agitated with fears of massacre. The breach, therefore, which, in 1640 or 1641, might have been closed, had in 1642 become irreparable; and the quarrel was referred to the arbitrament of the sword. A beneficent and harmonious settlement became thus, for that century, impossible; and the Puritans gained only the melancholy assurance that spiritual reformation could not be effected in the battle-field. "We have spiritual weapons," said a Puritan who saw the conflict from beginning to end, "given us for spiritual combats, and