hands, but is slothful, and careth not what manner of man he taketh, or else is covetous and will have it himself, and hire a Sir John Lack-Latin, which shall say service so that the people shall be nothing edified ;--no doubt that patron shall make answer before God for not doing of his duty."-Latimer.

The poets, too, of that and the succeeding age, touched frequently upon this evil.

The pedant minister and serving clarke,

The ten-pound, base, frize-jerkin hireling,
The farmer's chaplain with his quarter-marke,
The twenty-noble curate, and the thing

Call'd elder; all these gallants needs will bring
All reverend titles into deadly hate,
Their godly calling, and my high estate."

Storer's Wolsey, p. 63.

Thus also George Wither in his prosing strains :

"We rob the church.

Men seek not to impropriate a part

Unto themselves, but they can find in heart
To engross up all; which vile presumption

Hath brought church livings to a strange consumption.
And if this strong disease do not abate,
"Twill be the poorest member in the state.

"No marvel, though, instead of learned preachers,
We have been pestered with such simple teachers,
Such poor, mute, tongue-tied readers, as scarce know
Whether that God made Adam first or no:
Thence it proceeds, and there's the cause that place
And office at this time incurs disgrace;
For men of judgments or good dispositions
Scorn to be tied to any base conditions,
Like to our hungry pedants, who'll engage
Their souls for any curtailed vicarage.

I say there's none of knowledge, wit or merit,
But such as are of a most servile spirit,
That will so wrong the Church as to presume
Some poor half-demi-parsonage to assume
In name of all;-no, they had rather quite
Be put beside the same than wrong God's right.

"Well, they must entertain such pedants then,
Fitter to feed swine than the souls of men;
But patrons think such best; for there's no fear
They will speak any thing they loath to hear;
They may run foolishly to their damnation
Without reproof or any disturbation;
To let them see their vice they may be bold,
And yet not stand in doubt to be controll'd.
Those in their houses may keep private schools,
And either serve for jesters or for fools:
And will suppose that they are highly graced
Be they but at their patron's table placed;
And there if they be call'd but priests in scoff,
Straightly they duck down, and all their caps come off."
Wither's Presumption.

NOTE XXX. Page 274.

Means for assisting poor Scholars diminished.

"It would pity a man's heart to hear that I hear of the state of Cambridge; what it is in Oxford I cannot tell. There be few that study divinity, but so many as of necessity must furnish the Colleges; for their livings be so small, and victuals so dear, that they tarry not there, but go every where to seek livings, and so they go about. Now there be a few gentlemen, and they study a little divinity. Alas, what is that? It will come to pass that we shall have nothing but a little English divinity, that will bring the realm into a very barbarousness, and utter decay of learning. It is not that, I wis, that will keep out the supremacy of the Pope at Rome. There be none now but great men's sons in Colleges, and their fathers look not to have them preachers; so every way this office of preaching is pinched at.”—Latimer.

"The Devil hath caused also, through this monstrous kind of covetousness, patrons to sell their benefices; yea more, he gets him to the University, and causeth great men and esquires to send their sons thither, and put out poor scholars that should be divines; for their parents intend not that they should be preachers, but that they may have a show of learning."-Latimer.

NOTE XXXI. Page 273.

Conforming Clergy at the Reformation.

"Here were a goodly place to speak against our clergymen which go so gallant now-a-days. I hear say that some of them wear velvet shoes and slippers; such fellows are more meet to dance the morris-dance than to be admitted to preach. I pray God mend such worldly fellows; for else they be not meet to be preachers."—Latimer.

Sir William Barlowe has a remarkable passage upon this subject in his "Dialoge describing the originall Ground of these Lutheran Faccions and many of their Abuses;" perhaps the most sensible treatise which was written on that side of the question, and certainly one of the most

curious.

"Among a thousand freers none go better appareled then an other. But now unto the other syde, these that runne away from them unto these Lutherans, they go, I say, disguysed strangelye from that they were before, in gaye jagged cotes, and cut and scotched hosen, verye syghtly forsothe, but yet not very semelye for such folke as they were and shoulde be: and thys apparell change they dayly, from fashion to fashion, every day worse then other, their new-fangled foly and theyr wanton pryde never content nor satisfyed.-I demaunded ones of a certayn companion of these sectes which had bene of a strayt religion before, why his garments were nowe so sumptuouse, all to pounced with gardes and jagges lyke a rutter of the launce knyghtes. He answered to me that he dyd it in contempt of hypocrisy. Why,' quoth I, 'doth not God hate pryde, the mother of hypocrisye, as well as hypocrysye it selfe? Wherto he made no dyrect answer agayne: but in excusynge hys faut he sayde that God pryneypally accepted the mekeness of the hart, and inward Christen maners, which I beleve were so inward in hym that seldome he shewed any of them outwardly."

NOTE XXXII. P. 275.

Ignorance of the Country Clergy.

"Sad the times in the beginning of Queen Elizabeth," says Fuller, "when the clergy were commanded to read the chapters over once or twice by themselves, that so they might be the better enabled to read them distinctly in the congregation."-Fuller's Triple Reconciler, p. 82.

NOTE XXXIII. P. 276.

Clergy of Charles the First's Age.

"Let me say," (says Mossom, in his Apology on the Behalf of the Sequestered Clergy,) and 'tis beyond any man's gainsaying the learnedst clergy that ever England had, was that sequestered; their works do witness it to the whole world. And as for their godliness, if the tree may be known by its fruits, these here pleaded for have given testimony beyond exception."

"There were men of great piety and great learning among the Puritan clergy also. But it is not less certain that in the necessary consequences of such a revolution, some of the men who rose into notice and power were such as are thus, with his wonted felicity, described by South:

"Amongst those of the late reforming age, all learning was utterly cried down. So that with them the best preachers were such as could not read, and the ablest divines such as could not write. In all their preachments they so highly pretended to the spirit, that they could hardly so much as spell the letter. To be blind was with them the proper qualification of a spiritual guide; and to be book-learned, as they called it, and to be irreligious, were almost terms convertible. None were thought fit for the ministry but tradesmen and mechanics, because none else were allowed to have the spirit. Those only were accounted like St. Paul, who could work with their hands, and in a literal sense drive the nail home, and be able to make a pulpit before they preached in it."-South's Sermons, Vol. iii. p. 449.

NOTE XXXIV. P. 276.

The Sequestered Clergy.

"In these times," says Lilly, "many worthy ministers lost their livings, or benefices, for not complying with the Directory. Had you seen (O noble Esquire) what pitiful idiots were preferred into sequestrated church benefices, you would have been grieved in your soul; but when they came before the classes of divines, could those simpletons but only say they were converted by hearing such a sermon of that godly man Hugh Peters, Stephen Marshall, or any of that gang, he was presently admitted."-History of his own Life, quoted in Mr. Gifford's notes to

Ben Jonson.

"The rector of Fittleworth, in Sussex, was dispossessed of his living for Sabbath breaking;-the fact which was proved against him being, that as he was stepping over a stile one Sunday, the button of his breeches came off, and he got a tailor in the neighbourhood presently to sew it on again."-Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy, part ii. p. 275.

NOTE XXXV. Page 278.

Many who sacrificed their scruples to their Convenience.

"Let me," says South, "utter a great, but sad truth; a truth not so fit to be spoke, as to be sighed out by every true son and lover of the church, viz. that the wounds, which the church of England now bleeds by, she received in the house of her friends, (if they may be called so,) viz. her treacherous undermining friends, and that most of the nonconformity to her, and separation from her, together with a contempt of her excellent constitutions, have proceeded from nothing more, than from the false, partial, half-conformity of too many of her ministers. The surplice sometimes worn, and oftener laid aside; the liturgy so read, and mangled in the reading, as if they were ashamed of it; the divine service so curtailed, as if the people were to have but the tenths of it from the priest, for the tenths he had received from them. The clerical habit neglected by such in orders as frequently travel the road clothed like farmers or graziers, to the unspeakable shame and scandal of their profession; the holy sacrament indecently and slovenly administered; the furniture of the altar abused and embezzelled; and the Table of the Lord profaned. These, and the like vile passages have made some schismaticks, and confirmed others; and in a word, have made so many nonconformists to the church, by their conforming to their minister.

"It was an observation and saying of a judicious prelate, that of all the sorts of enemies which our church had, there was none so deadly, so pernicious, and likely to prove so fatal to it, as the conforming Puritan. It was a great truth, and not very many years after ratified by direful experience. For if you would have the conforming Puritan described to you, as to what he is :

"He is one who lives by the altar, and turns his back upon it; one, who catches at the preferments of the church, but hates the discipline and orders of it; one, who practices conformity, as Papists take oaths and tests, that is, with an inward abhorrence of what he does for the present, and a resolution to act quite contrary, when occasion serves: one who, during his conformity, will be sure to be known by such a distinguishing badge, as shall point him out to, and secure his credit with, the dissenting brotherhood: one who still declines reading the churchservice, himself, leaving that work to curates or readers, thereby to keep up a profitable interest with thriving seditious tradesmen, and groaning, ignorant, but rich widows; one who, in the midst of his conformity, thinks of a turn of state, which may draw on one in the church too; and accordingly is very careful to behave himself so as not to over-shoot his game, but to stand right and fair in case a wished for change should bring fanaticism again into fashion; which it is more than possible that he secretly desires, and does the utmost he can to promote and bring

about.

"These, and the like, are the principles which act and govern the conforming Puritan: who in a word is nothing else but ambition, avarice, and hypocrisy, serving all the real interests of schism and faction in the church's livery. And therefore if there be any one who has the front to own himself a minister of our church, to whom the foregoing character may be justly applied, (as I fear there are but too many,) howsoever such an one may for some time sooth up and flatter himself in his detestable dissimulation; yet when he shall hear of such and such of his neighbours, his parishioners, or acquaintance, gone over from the church to conventicles, of several turned Quakers, and of others fallen off to Popery; and lastly when the noise of those national dangers and disturbances, which are every day threatening us, shall ring about his ears,

let him then lay his hand upon his false heart, and with all seriousness of remorse accusing himself to God and his own conscience, say, I am the person, who by my conforming by halves, and by my treacherous prevaricating with the duty of my profession, so sacredly promised, and so solemnly sworn to, have brought a reproach upon the purest and best constituted church in the Christian world; it is I, who by slighting and slumbering over holy service and sacraments, have scandalized and cast a stumbling-block before all the neighbourhood, to the great danger of their souls; I who have been the occasion of this man's faction, that man's Quakerism, and another's Popery; and thereby, to the utmost of my power, contributed to those dismal convulsions which have so terribly shook and weakened both church and state. Let such a mocker of God and man, I say, take his share of all this horrid guilt; for both heaven and earth will lay it at his door, as the general result of his actions; it is all absolutely his own, and will stick faster and closer to him, than to be thrown off and laid aside by him as easily as his surplice."-Vol, v. p. 486.

NOTE XXXVI. Page 296.

These effects were public and undeniable.

"O!" says good old Thomas Adams, "how hard and obdurate is the heart of man, till the rain of the Gospel falls on it! Is the heart covetous? no tears from distressed eyes can melt a penny out of it. Is it malicious? no supplications can beg forbearance of the least wrong. Is it given to drunkenness? you may melt his body into a dropsy, before his heart into sobriety. Is it ambitious? you may as well treat with Lucifer about humiliation. Is it factious? a quire of angels cannot sing him into peace. No means on earth can soften the heart; whether you anoint it with the supple balms of entreaties; or thunder against it the bolts of menaces; or beat it with the hammer of mortal blows. Behold God showers this rain of the Gospel from Heaven, and it is suddenly softened. One sermon may prick him to the heart. One drop of a Saviour's blood, distilled on it by the Spirit, in the preaching of the word, melts him like wax. The drunkard is made sober, the adulterer chaste; Zaccheus merciful, and raging Paul as tame as a lamb." Adams's Divine Herball, p. 16.

NOTE XXXVII. Page 302.

Dialogue between Wesley and Zinzendorf.

THIS curious dialogue must be given in the original.

Z. Cur religionem tuam mutâsti?

W. Nescio me religionem meam mutâsse Cur id sentis? Quis hoc tibi retulit?

Z. Planè tu. Id ex epistolâ tuâ ad nos video. Ibi, religione, quam apud nos professus es, relictâ, novam profiteris.

W. Qui sic? Non intelligo.

Z. Imò, istic dicis, verè Christianos non esse miseros peccatores. Falsissimum. Optimi hominum ad mortem usque miserabilissimi sunt peccatores. Siqui aliud dicunt, vel penitùs impostores sunt, vel diabolicè seducti. Nostros fratres meliora docentes impugnâsti. Et pacem volentibus, eam denegâsti. W. Nondum intelligo quid velis.

Z. Ego, cum ex Georgià ad me scripsisti, te dilexi plurimum. Tum corde simplicem, te agnovi. Iterum scripsisti. Agnovi corde simplicem, sed turbatis ideis. Ad nos venisti. Ideæ tuæ tum magis turbatæ erant et confuse. In AnVOL. I.

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