The next morning, having, as he thought, been warned by a dream to do so,

he went to the Bishop's house at Cleave, near Gloucester. Confronting

the Bishop in his own hall, he told him that he had come to know why he

was hunting after him with his bailiffs, and why he was his adversary.

"The King is your adversary," said the Bishop; "you have broken the

King's law." Roberts ventured to deny the justice of the law. "What!"

cried the Bishop, "do such men as you find fault with the laws?" "Yes,"

replied the other, stoutly; "and I tell thee plainly to thy face, it is

high time wiser men were chosen, to make better laws."

The discourse turning upon the Book of Common Prayer, Roberts asked the

Bishop if the sin of idolatry did not consist in worshipping the work of

men's hands. The Bishop admitted it, as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar's

image.

"Then," said Roberts, "whose hands made your Prayer Book? It could not

make itself."

"Do you compare our Prayer Book to Nebuchadnezzar's image?" cried the

Bishop.

"Yes," returned Roberts, "that was his image; this is thine. I no more

dare bow to thy Common-Prayer Book than the Three Children to

Nebuchadnezzar's image."

"Yours is a strange upstart religion," said the Bishop.

Roberts told him it was older than his by several hundred years. At this

claim of antiquity the prelate was greatly amused, and told Roberts that

if he would make out his case, he should speed the better for it.

"Let me ask thee," said Roberts, "where thy religion was in Oliver's

days, when thy Common-Prayer Book was as little regarded as an old

almanac, and your priests, with a few honest exceptions, turned with the

tide, and if Oliver had put mass in their mouths would have conformed to

it for the sake of their bellies."

"What would you have us do?" asked the Bishop. "Would you have had

Oliver cut our throats?"

"No," said Roberts; "but what sort of religion was that which you were

afraid to venture your throats for?"

The Bishop interrupted him to say, that in Oliver's days he had never

owned any other religion than his own, although he did not dare to openly

maintain it as he then did.

"Well," continued Roberts, "if thou didst not think thy religion worth

venturing thy throat for then, I desire thee to consider that it is not

worth the cutting of other men's throats now for not conforming to it."

"You are right," responded the frank Bishop. "I hope we shall have a

care how we cut men's throats."

The following colloquy throws some light on the condition and character

of the rural clergy at this period, and goes far to confirm the

statements of Macaulay, which many have supposed exaggerated. Baxter's

early religious teachers were more exceptionable than even the maudlin

mummer whom Roberts speaks of, one of them being "the excellentest stage-

player in all the country, and a good gamester and goodfellow, who,

having received Holy Orders, forged the like for a neighbor's son, who on

the strength of that title officiated at the desk and altar; and after

him came an attorney's clerk, who had tippled himself into so great

poverty that he had no other way to live than to preach."

J. ROBERTS. I was bred up under a Common-Prayer Priest; and a poor

drunken old Man he was. Sometimes he was so drunk he could not say his

Prayers, and at best he could but say them; though I think he was by far

a better Man than he that is Priest there now.

BISHOP. Who is your Minister now?

J. ROBERTS. My Minister is Christ Jesus, the Minister of the everlasting

Covenant; but the present Priest of the Parish is George Bull.

BISHOP. Do you say that drunken old Man was better than Mr. Bull? I

tell you, I account Mr. Bull as sound, able, and orthodox a Divine as any

we have among us.

J. ROBERT. I am sorry for that; for if he be one of the best of you, I

believe the Lord will not suffer you long; for he is a proud, ambitious,

ungodly Man: he hath often sued me at Law, and brought his Servants to

swear against me wrongfully. His Servants themselves have confessed to

my Servants, that I might have their Ears; for their Master made them

drunk, and then told them they were set down in the List as Witnesses

against me, and they must swear to it: And so they did, and brought

treble Damages. They likewise owned they took Tithes from my Servants,

threshed them out, and sold them for their Master. They have also

several Times took my Cattle out of my Grounds, drove them to Fairs and

Markets, and sold them, without giving me any Account.

BISHOP. I do assure you I will inform Mr. Bull of what you say.

J. ROBERTS. Very well. And if thou pleasest to send for me to face him,

I shall make much more appear to his Face than I'll say behind his Back.

After much more discourse, Roberts told the Bishop that if it would do

him any good to have him in jail, he would voluntarily go and deliver

himself up to the keeper of Gloucester Castle. The good-natured prelate

relented at this, and said he should not be molested or injured, and

further manifested his good will by ordering refreshments. One of the

Bishop's friends who was present was highly offended by the freedom of

Roberts with his Lordship, and undertook to rebuke him, but was so

readily answered that he flew into a rage. "If all the Quakers in

England," said he, "are not hanged in a month's time, I 'll be hanged for

them." "Prithee, friend," quoth Roberts, "remember and be as good as thy

word!"

Good old Bishop Nicholson, it would seem, really liked his incorrigible

Quaker neighbor, and could enjoy heartily his wit and humor, even when

exercised at the expense of his own ecclesiastical dignity. He admired

his blunt honesty and courage. Surrounded by flatterers and self-

seekers, he found satisfaction in the company and conversation of one

who, setting aside all conventionalisms, saw only in my Lord Bishop a

poor fellow-probationer, and addressed him on terms of conscious

equality. The indulgence which he extended to him naturally enough

provoked many of the inferior clergy, who had been sorely annoyed by the

sturdy Dissenter's irreverent witticisms and unsparing ridicule. Vicar

Bull, of Siddington, and Priest Careless, of Cirencester, in particular,

urged the Bishop to deal sharply with him. The former accused him of

dealing in the Black Art, and filled the Bishop's ear with certain

marvellous stories of his preternatural sagacity and discernment in

discovering cattle which were lost. The Bishop took occasion to inquire

into these stories; and was told by Roberts that, except in a single

instance, the discoveries were the result of his acquaintance with the

habits of animals and his knowledge of the localities where they were

lost. The circumstance alluded to, as an exception, will be best related

in his own words.

"I had a poor Neighbor, who had a Wife and six Children, and whom the

chief men about us permitted to keep six or seven Cows upon the Waste,

which were the principal Support of the Family, and preserved them from

becoming chargeable to the Parish. One very stormy night the Cattle were

left in the Yard as usual, but could not be found in the morning. The

Man and his Sons had sought them to no purpose; and, after they had been

lost four days, his Wife came to me, and, in a great deal of grief,

cried, 'O Lord! Master Hayward, we are undone! My Husband and I must go

a begging in our old age! We have lost all our Cows. My Husband and the

Boys have been round the country, and can hear nothing of them. I'll

down on my bare knees, if you'll stand our Friend!' I desired she would

not be in such an agony, and told her she should not down on her knees to

me; but I would gladly help them in what I could. 'I know,' said she,

'you are a good Man, and God will hear your Prayers.' I desire thee,

said I, to be still and quiet in thy mind; perhaps thy Husband or Sons

may hear of them to-day; if not, let thy Husband get a horse, and come to

me to-morrow morning as soon as he will; and I think, if it please God,

to go with him to seek then. The Woman seemed transported with joy,

crying, 'Then we shall have our Cows again.' Her Faith being so strong,

brought the greater Exercise on me, with strong cries to the Lord, that

he would be pleased to make me instrumental in his Hand, for the help of

the poor Family. In the Morning early comes the old Man. In the Name of

God, says he, which way shall we go to seek them? I, being deeply

concerned in my Mind, did not answer him till he had thrice repeated it;

and then I answered, In the Name of God, I would go to seek them; and

said (before I was well aware) we will go to Malmsbury, and at the Horse-

Fair we shall find them. When I had spoken the Words, I was much

troubled lest they should not prove true. It was very early, and the

first Man we saw, I asked him if he had seen any stray Milch Cows

thereabouts. What manner of Cattle are they? said he. And the old Man

describing their Mark and Number, he told us there were some stood

chewing their Cuds in the Horse-Fair; but thinking they belonged to some

in the Neighborhood, he did not take particular Notice of them. When we

came to the Place, the old Man found them to be his; but suffered his

Transports of Joy to rise so high, that I was ashamed of his behavior;

for he fell a hallooing, and threw up his Montier Cap in the Air several

times, till he raised the Neighbors out of their Beds to see what was the

Matter. 'O!' said he, 'I had lost my Cows four or five days ago, and

thought I should never see them again; and this honest Neighbor of mine

told me this Morning, by his own Fire's Side, nine Miles off, that here

I should find them, and here I have them!' Then up goes his Cap again.

I begged of the poor Man to be quiet, and take his Cows home, and be

thankful; as indeed I was, being reverently bowed in my Spirit before the

Lord, in that he was pleased to put the words of Truth into my mouth.

And the Man drove his Cattle home, to the great Joy of his Family."

Not long after the interview with the Bishop at his own palace, which has

been related, that dignitary, with the Lord Chancellor, in their coaches,

and about twenty clergymen on horseback, made a call at the humble

dwelling of Roberts, on their way to Tedbury, where the Bishop was to

hold a Visitation. "I could not go out of the country without seeing

you," said the prelate, as the farmer came to his coach door and pressed

him to alight.

"John," asked Priest Evans, the Bishop's kinsman, "is your house free to

entertain such men as we are?"

"Yes, George," said Roberts; "I entertain honest men, and sometimes

others."

"My Lord," said Evans, turning to the Bishop, "John's friends are the

honest men, and we are the others."

The Bishop told Roberts that they could not then alight, but would gladly

drink with him; whereupon the good wife brought out her best beer.

"I commend you, John," quoth the Bishop, as he paused from his hearty

draught; "you keep a cup of good beer in your house. I have not drank

any that has pleased me better since I left home." The cup passed next

to the Chancellor, and finally came to Priest Bull, who thrust it aside,

declaring that it was full of hops and heresy. As to hops, Roberts

replied, he could not say, but as for heresy, he bade the priest take

note that the Lord Bishop had drank of it, and had found no heresy in the

cup.

The Bishop leaned over his coach door and whispered: "John, I advise you

to take care you don't offend against the higher Powers. I have heard

great complaints against you, that you are the Ringleader of the Quakers

in this Country; and that, if you are not suppressed, all will signify

nothing. Therefore, pray, John, take care, for the future, you don't

offend any more."

"I like thy Counsel very well," answered Roberts, "and intend to take it.

But thou knowest God is the higher Power; and you mortal Men, however

advanced in this World, are but the lower Power; and it is only because I

endeavor to be obedient to the will of the higher Powers, that the lower

Powers are angry with me. But I hope, with the assistance of God, to

take thy Counsel, and be subject to the higher Powers, let the lower

Powers do with me as it may please God to suffer them."

The Bishop then said he would like to talk with him further, and

requested him to meet him at Tedbury the next day. At the time

appointed, Roberts went to the inn where the Bishop lodged, and was

invited to dine with him. After dinner was over, the prelate told him

that he must go to church, and leave off holding conventicles at his

house, of which great complaint was made. This he flatly refused to do;

and the Bishop, losing patience, ordered the constable to be sent for.

Roberts told him that if, after coming to his house under the guise of

friendship, he should betray him and send him to prison, he, who had

hitherto commended him for his moderation, would put his name in print,

and cause it to stink before all sober people. It was the priests, he

told him, who set him on; but, instead of hearkening to them, he should

commend them to some honest vocation, and not suffer them to rob their

honest neighbors, and feed on the fruits of other men's toil, like

caterpillars.

"Whom do you call caterpillars?" cried Priest Rich, of North Surrey.

"We farmers," said Roberts, "call those so who live on other men's

fields, and by the sweat of other men's brows; and if thou dost so, thou

mayst be one of them."

This reply so enraged the Bishop's attendants that they could only be

appeased by an order for the constable to take him to jail. In fact,

there was some ground for complaint of a lack of courtesy on the part of

the blunt farmer; and the Christian virtue of forbearance, even in

Bishops, has its limits.

The constable, obeying the summons, came to the inn, at the door of which

the landlady met him. "What do you here!" cried the good woman, "when

honest John is going to be sent to prison? Here, come along with me."

The constable, nothing loath, followed her into a private room, where she

concealed him. Word was sent to the Bishop, that the constable was not

to be found; and the prelate, telling Roberts he could send him to jail

in the afternoon, dismissed him until evening. At the hour appointed,

the latter waited upon the Bishop, and found with him only one priest and

a lay gentleman. The priest begged the Bishop to be allowed to discourse

with the prisoner; and, leave being granted, he began by telling Roberts

that the knowledge of the Scriptures had made him mad, and that it was a

great pity he had ever seen them.

"Thou art an unworthy man," said the Quaker, "and I 'll not dispute with

thee. If the knowledge of the Scriptures has made me mad, the knowledge

of the sack-pot hath almost made thee mad; and if we two madmen should

dispute about religion, we should make mad work of it."

"An 't please you, my Lord," said the scandalized priest, "he says I 'm

drunk."

The Bishop asked Roberts to repeat his words; and, instead of

reprimanding him, as the priest expected, was so much amused that he held

up his hands and laughed; whereupon the offended inferior took a hasty

leave. The Bishop, who was evidently glad to be rid of him, now turned

to Roberts, and complained that he had dealt hardly with him, in telling

him, before so many gentlemen, that he had sought to betray him by

professions of friendship, in order to send him to prison; and that,

if he had not done as he did, people would have reported him as an

encourager of the Quakers. "But now, John," said the good prelate, "I'll

burn the warrant against you before your face." "You know, Mr. Burnet,"

he continued, addressing his attendant, "that a Ring of Bells may be made

of excellent metal, but they may be out of tune; so we may say of John:

he is a man of as good metal as I ever met with, but quite out of tune."

"Thou mayst well say so," quoth Roberts, "for I can't tune after thy

pipe."

The inferior clergy were by no means so lenient as the Bishop. They

regarded Roberts as the ringleader of Dissent, an impracticable,

obstinate, contumacious heretic, not only refusing to pay them tithes

himself, but encouraging others to the same course. Hence, they thought

it necessary to visit upon him the full rigor of the law. His crops were

taken from his field, and his cattle from his yard. He was often

committed to the jail, where, on one occasion, he was kept, with many

others, for a long time, through the malice of the jailer, who refused to

put the names of his prisoners in the Calendar, that they might have a

hearing. But the spirit of the old Commonwealth's man remained

steadfast. When Justice George, at the Ram in Cirencester, told him he

must conform, and go to church, or suffer the penalty of the law, he

replied that he had heard indeed that some were formerly whipped out of

the Temple, but he had never heard of any being whipped in. The Justice,

pointing, through the open window of the inn, at the church tower, asked

him what that was. "Thou mayst call it a daw-house," answered the

incorrigible Quaker. "Dost thou not see how the jackdaws flock about

it?"

Sometimes it happened that the clergyman was also a magistrate, and

united in his own person the authority of the State and the zeal of the

Church. Justice Parsons, of Gloucester, was a functionary of this sort.

He wielded the sword of the Spirit on the Sabbath against Dissenters, and

on week days belabored them with the arm of flesh and the constable's

staff. At one time he had between forty and fifty of them locked up in

Gloucester Castle, among them Roberts and his sons, on the charge of

attending conventicles. But the troublesome prisoners baffled his

vigilance, and turned their prison into a meeting-house, and held their

conventicles in defiance of him. The Reverend Justice pounced upon them

on one occasion, with his attendants. An old, gray-haired man, formerly

a strolling fencing-master, was preaching when he came in. The Justice

laid hold of him by his white locks, and strove to pull him down, but the

tall fencing-raster stood firm and spoke on; he then tried to gag him,

but failed in that also. He demanded the names of the prisoners, but no

one answered him. A voice (we fancy it was that of our old friend

Roberts) called out: "The Devil must be hard put to it to have his

drudgery done, when the Priests must leave their pulpits to turn

informers against poor prisoners." The Justice obtained a list of the

names of the prisoners, made out on their commitment, and, taking it for

granted that all were still present, issued warrants for the collection

of fines by levies upon their estates. Among the names was that of a

poor widow, who had been discharged, and was living, at the time the

clerical magistrate swore she was at the meeting, twenty miles distant

from the prison.

Soon after this event, our old friend fell sick. He had been discharged

from prison, but his sons were still confined. The eldest had leave,

however, to attend him in his illness, and he bears his testimony that

the Lord was pleased to favor his father with His living presence in his

last moments. In keeping with the sturdy Non-conformist's life, he was

interred at the foot of his own orchard, in Siddington, a spot he had

selected for a burial-ground long before, where neither the foot of a

priest nor the shadow of a steeple-house could rest upon his grave.

In closing our notice of this pleasant old narrative, we may remark that

the light it sheds upon the antagonistic religious parties of the time is

calculated to dissipate prejudices and correct misapprehensions, common

alike to Churchmen and Dissenters. The genial humor, sound sense, and

sterling virtues of the Quaker farmer should teach the one class that

poor James Nayler, in his craziness and folly, was not a fair

representative of his sect; while the kind nature, the hearty

appreciation of goodness, and the generosity and candor of Bishop

Nicholson should convince the other class that a prelate is not

necessarily, and by virtue of his mitre, a Laud or a Bonner. The

Dissenters of the seventeenth century may well be forgiven for the

asperity of their language; men whose ears had been cropped because they

would not recognize Charles I. as a blessed martyr, and his scandalous

son as the head of the Church, could scarcely be expected to make

discriminations, or suggest palliating circumstances, favorable to any

class of their adversaries. To use the homely but apt simile of

McFingal,

"The will's confirmed by treatment horrid,

As hides grow harder when they're curried."

They were wronged, and they told the world of it. Unlike Shakespeare's

cardinal, they did not die without a sign. They branded, by their fierce

epithets, the foreheads of their persecutors more deeply than the

sheriff's hot iron did their own. If they lost their ears, they enjoyed

the satisfaction of making those of their oppressors tingle. Knowing

their persecutors to be in the wrong, they did not always inquire whether

they themselves had been entirely right, and had done no unrequired works

of supererogation by the way of "testimony" against their neighbors' mode

cf worship. And so from pillory and whipping-post, from prison and

scaffold, they sent forth their wail and execration, their miserere and

anathema, and the sound thereof has reached down to our day. May it

never wholly die away until, the world over, the forcing of conscience is

regarded as a crime against humanity and a usurpation of God's

prerogative. But abhorring, as we must, persecution under whatever

pretext it is employed, we are not, therefore, to conclude that all

persecutors were bad and unfeeling men. Many of their severities, upon

which we now look back with horror, were, beyond a question, the result

of an intense anxiety for the well-being of immortal souls, endangered by

the poison which, in their view, heresy was casting into the waters of

life. Coleridge, in one of the moods of a mind which traversed in

imagination the vast circle of human experience, reaches this point in

his Table-Talk. "It would require," says he, "stronger arguments than

any I have seen to convince me that men in authority have not a right,

involved in an imperative duty, to deter those under their control from

teaching or countenancing doctrines which they believe to be damnable,

and even to punish with death those who violate such prohibition." It

would not be very difficult for us to imagine a tender-hearted Inquisitor

of this stamp, stifling his weak compassion for the shrieking wretch

under bodily torment by his strong pity for souls in danger of perdition

from the sufferer's heresy. We all know with what satisfaction the

gentle-spirited Melanethon heard of the burning of Servetus, and with

what zeal he defended it. The truth is, the notion that an intellectual

recognition of certain dogmas is the essential condition of salvation

lies at the bottom of all intolerance in matters of religion. Under this

impression, men are too apt to forget that the great end of Christianity

is love, and that charity is its crowning virtue; they overlook the

beautiful significance of the parable of the heretic Samaritan and the

orthodox Pharisee: and thus, by suffering their speculative opinions of

the next world to make them uncharitable and cruel in this, they are

really the worse for them, even admitting them to be true.

SAMUEL HOPKINS.

Three quarters of a century ago, the name of Samuel Hopkins was as

familiar as a household word throughout New England. It was a spell

wherewith to raise at once a storm of theological controversy. The

venerable minister who bore it had his thousands of ardent young

disciples, as well as defenders and followers of mature age and

acknowledged talent; a hundred pulpits propagated the dogmas which he had

engrafted on the stock of Calvinism. Nor did he lack numerous and

powerful antagonists. The sledge ecclesiastic, with more or less effect,

was unceasingly plied upon the strong-linked chain of argument which he

slowly and painfully elaborated in the seclusion of his parish. The

press groaned under large volumes of theological, metaphysical, and

psychological disquisition, the very thought of which is now "a weariness

to the flesh;" in rapid succession pamphlet encountered pamphlet, horned,

beaked, and sharp of talon, grappling with each other in mid-air, like

Milton's angels. That loud controversy, the sound whereof went over

Christendom, awakening responses from beyond the Atlantic, has now died

away; its watchwords no longer stir the blood of belligerent sermonizers;

its very terms and definitions have well-nigh become obsolete and

unintelligible. The hands which wrote and the tongues which spoke in

that day are now all cold and silent; even Emmons, the brave old

intellectual athlete of Franklin, now sleeps with his fathers,--the last

of the giants. Their fame is still in all the churches; effeminate

clerical dandyism still affects to do homage to their memories; the

earnest young theologian, exploring with awe the mountainous debris of

their controversial lore, ponders over the colossal thoughts entombed

therein, as he would over the gigantic fossils of an early creation, and

endeavors in vain to recall to the skeleton abstractions before him the

warm and vigorous life wherewith they were once clothed; but

Hopkinsianism, as a distinct and living school of philosophy, theology,

and metaphysics, no longer exists. It has no living oracles left; and

its memory survives only in the doctrinal treatises of the elder and

younger Edwards, Hopkins, Bellamy, and Emmons.

It is no part of our present purpose to discuss the merits of the system

in question. Indeed, looking at the great controversy which divided New

England Calvinism in the eighteenth century, from a point of view which

secures our impartiality and freedom from prejudice, we find it

exceedingly difficult to get a precise idea of what was actually at

issue. To our poor comprehension, much of the dispute hinges upon names

rather than things; on the manner of reaching conclusions quite as much

as upon the conclusions themselves. Its origin may be traced to the

great religious awakening of the middle of the past century, when the

dogmas of the Calvinistic faith were subjected to the inquiry of acute

and earnest minds, roused up from the incurious ease and passive

indifference of nominal orthodoxy. Without intending it, it broke down

some of the barriers which separated Arminianism and Calvinism; its

product, Hopkinsianism, while it pushed the doctrine of the Genevan

reformer on the subject of the Divine decrees and agency to that extreme

point where it well-nigh loses itself in Pantheism, held at the same time

that guilt could not be hereditary; that man, being responsible for his

sinful acts, and not for his sinful nature, can only be justified by a

personal holiness, consisting not so much in legal obedience as in that

disinterested benevolence which prefers the glory of God and the welfare

of universal being above the happiness of self. It had the merit,

whatever it may be, of reducing the doctrines of the Reformation to an

ingenious and scholastic form of theology; of bringing them boldly to the

test of reason and philosophy. Its leading advocates were not mere

heartless reasoners and closet speculators. They taught that sin was

selfishness, and holiness self-denying benevolence, and they endeavored

to practise accordingly. Their lives recommended their doctrines. They

were bold and faithful in the discharge of what they regarded as duty.

In the midst of slave-holders, and in an age of comparative darkness on

the subject of human rights, Hopkins and the younger Edwards lifted up

their voices for the slave. And twelve years ago, when Abolitionism was

everywhere spoken against, and the whole land was convulsed with mobs to

suppress it, the venerable Emmons, burdened with the weight of ninety

years, made a journey to New York, to attend a meeting of the Anti-

Slavery Society. Let those who condemn the creed of these men see to

it that they do not fall behind them in practical righteousness and

faithfulness to the convictions of duty.

Samuel Hopkins, who gave his name to the religious system in question,

was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1721. In his fifteenth year he

was placed under the care of a neighboring clergyman, preparatory for

college, which he entered about a year after. In 1740, the celebrated

Whitefield visited New Haven, and awakened there, as elsewhere, serious

inquiry on religious subjects. He was followed the succeeding spring by

Gilbert Tennent, the New Jersey revivalist, a stirring and powerful

preacher. A great change took place in the college. All the phenomena

which President Edwards has described in his account of the Northampton

awakening were reproduced among the students. The excellent David

Brainard, then a member of the college, visited Hopkins in his apartment,

and, by a few plain and earnest words, convinced him that he was a

stranger to vital Christianity. In his autobiographical sketch, he

describes in simple and affecting language the dark and desolate state of

his mind at this period, and the particular exercise which finally

afforded him some degree of relief, and which he afterwards appears to

have regarded as his conversion from spiritual death to life. When he

first heard Tennent, regarding him as the greatest as well as the best of

men, he made up his mind to study theology with him; but just before the

commencement at which he was to take his degree, the elder Edwards

preached at New Haven. Struck by the power of the great theologian, he

at once resolved to make him his spiritual father. In the winter

following, he left his father's house on horseback, on a journey of

eighty miles to Northampton. Arriving at the house of President Edwards,

he was disappointed by hearing that he was absent on a preaching tour.

But he was kindly received by the gifted and accomplished lady of the

mansion, and encouraged to remain during the winter. Still doubtful in

respect to his own spiritual state, he was, he says, "very gloomy, and

retired most of the time in his chamber." The kind heart of his amiable

hostess was touched by his evident affliction. After some days she came

to his chamber, and, with the gentleness and delicacy of a true woman,

inquired into the cause of his unhappiness. The young student disclosed

to her, without reserve, the state of his feelings and the extent of his

fears. "She told me," says the Doctor, "that she had had peculiar

exercises respecting me since I had been in the family; that she trusted

I should receive light and comfort, and doubted not that God intended yet

to do great things by me."

After pursuing his studies for some months with the Puritan philosopher,

young Hopkins commenced preaching, and, in 1743, was ordained at

Sheffield, (now Great Barrington') in the western part of Massachusetts.

There were at the time only about thirty families in the town. He says

it was a matter of great regret to him to be obliged to settle so far

from his spiritual guide and tutor but seven years after he was relieved

and gratified by the removal of Edwards to Stockbridge, as the Indian

missionary at that station, seven miles only from his own residence; and

for several years the great metaphysician and his favorite pupil enjoyed

the privilege of familiar intercourse with each other. The removal of

the former in 1758 to Princeton, New Jersey, and his death, which soon

followed, are mentioned in the diary of Hopkins as sore trials and

afflictive dispensations.

Obtaining a dismissal from his society in Great Barrington in 1769,

he was installed at Newport the next year, as minister of the first

Congregational church in that place. Newport, at this period, was, in

size, wealth, and commercial importance, the second town in New England.

It was the great slave mart of the North. Vessels loaded with stolen men

and women and children, consigned to its merchant princes, lay at its

wharves; immortal beings were sold daily in its market, like cattle at a

fair. The soul of Hopkins was moved by the appalling spectacle. A

strong conviction of the great wrong of slavery, and of its utter

incompatibility with the Christian profession, seized upon his mind.

While at Great Barrington, he had himself owned a slave, whom he had sold

on leaving the place, without compunction or suspicion in regard to the

rightfulness of the transaction. He now saw the origin of the system in

its true light; he heard the seamen engaged in the African trade tell of

the horrible scenes of fire and blood which they had witnessed, and in

which they had been actors; he saw the half-suffocated wretches brought

up from their noisome and narrow prison, their squalid countenances and

skeleton forms bearing fearful evidence of the suffering attendant upon

the transportation from their native homes. The demoralizing effects of

slaveholding everywhere forced themselves upon his attention, for the

evil had struck its roots deeply in the community, and there were few

families into which it had not penetrated. The right to deal in slaves,

and use them as articles of property, was questioned by no one; men of

all professions, clergymen and church-members, consulted only their

interest and convenience as to their purchase or sale. The magnitude of

the evil at first appalled him; he felt it to be his duty to condemn it,

but for a time even his strong spirit faltered and turned pale in

contemplation of the consequences to be apprehended from an attack upon

it. Slavery and slave-trading were at that time the principal source of

wealth to the island; his own church and congregation were personally

interested in the traffic; all were implicated in its guilt. He stood

alone, as it were, in its condemnation; with here and there an exception,

all Christendom maintained the rightfulness of slavery. No movement had

yet been made in England against the slave-trade; the decision of

Granville Sharp's Somerset case had not yet taken place. The Quakers,

even, had not at that time redeemed themselves from the opprobrium.

Under these circumstances, after a thorough examination of the subject,

he resolved, in the strength of the Lord, to take his stand openly and

decidedly on the side of humanity. He prepared a sermon for the purpose,

and for the first time from a pulpit of New England was heard an emphatic

testimony against the sin of slavery. In contrast with the unselfish and

disinterested benevolence which formed in his mind the essential element

of Christian holiness, he held up the act of reducing human beings to the

condition of brutes, to minister to the convenience, the luxury, and

lusts of the owner. He had expected bitter complaint and opposition from

his hearers, but was agreeably surprised to find that in most cases his

sermon only excited astonishment in their minds that they themselves had

never before looked at the subject in the light in which he presented it.

Steadily and faithfully pursuing the matter, he had the satisfaction to

carry with him his church, and obtain from it, in the midst of a

slaveholding and slavetrading community, a resolution every way worthy of

note in this day of cowardly compromise with the evil on the part of our

leading ecclesiastical bodies:--

"Resolved, That the slave-trade and the slavery of the Africans, as it

has existed among us, is a gross violation of the righteousness and

benevolence which are so much inculcated in the Gospel, and therefore we

will not tolerate it in this church."

There are few instances on record of moral heroism superior to that of

Samuel Hopkins, in thus rebuking slavery in the time and place of its

power. Honor to the true man ever, who takes his life in his hands, and,

at all hazards, speaks the word which is given him to utter, whether men

will hear or forbear, whether the end thereof is to be praise or censure,

gratitude or hatred. It well may be doubted whether on that Sabbath day

the angels of God, in their wide survey of His universe, looked upon a

nobler spectacle than that of the minister of Newport, rising up before

his slaveholding congregation, and demanding, in the name of the Highest,

the "deliverance of the captive, and the opening of prison doors to them

that were bound."

Dr. Hopkins did not confine his attention solely to slaveholding in his

own church and congregation. He entered into correspondence with the

early Abolitionists of Europe as well as his own country. He labored

with his brethren in the ministry to bring then to his own view of the

great wrong of holding men as slaves. In a visit to his early friend,

Dr. Bellamy, at Bethlehem, who was the owner of a slave, he pressed the

subject kindly but earnestly upon his attention. Dr. Bellamy urged the

usual arguments in favor of slavery. Dr. Hopkins refuted them in the

most successful manner, and called upon his friend to do an act of simple

justice, in giving immediate freedom to his slave. Dr. Bellamy, thus

hardly pressed, said that the slave was a most judicious and faithful

fellow; that, in the management of his farm, he could trust everything to

his discretion; that he treated him well, and he was so happy in his

service that he would refuse his freedom if it were offered him.

"Will you," said Hopkins, "consent to his liberation, if he really

desires it?"

"Yes, certainly," said Dr. Bellamy.

"Then let us try him," said his guest.

The slave was at work in an adjoining field, and at the call of his

master came promptly to receive his commands.

"Have you a good master?" inquired Hopkins.

"O yes; massa, he berry good."

"But are you happy in your present condition?" queried the Doctor.

"O yes, massa; berry happy."

Dr. Bellamy here could scarcely suppress his exultation at what he

supposed was a complete triumph over his anti-slavery brother. But the

pertinacious guest continued his queries.

"Would you not be more happy if you were free?"

"O yes, massa," exclaimed the negro, his dark face glowing with new life;

"berry much more happy!"

To the honor of Dr. Bellamy, he did not hesitate.

"You have your wish," he said to his servant. "From this moment you are

free."

Dr. Hopkins was a poor man, but one of his first acts, after becoming

convinced of the wrongfulness of slavery, was to appropriate the very sum

which, in the days of his ignorance, he had obtained as the price of his

slave to the benevolent purpose of educating some pious colored men in

the town of Newport, who were desirous of returning to their native

country as missionaries. In one instance he borrowed, on his own

responsibility, the sum requisite to secure the freedom of a slave in

whom he became interested. One of his theological pupils was Newport

Gardner, who, twenty years after the death of his kind patron, left

Boston as a missionary to Africa. He was a native African, and was held

by Captain Gardner, of Newport, who allowed him to labor for his own

benefit, whenever by extra diligence he could gain a little time for that

purpose. The poor fellow was in the habit of laying up his small

earnings on these occasions, in the faint hope of one day obtaining

thereby the freedom of himself and his family. But time passed on, and

the hoard of purchase-money still looked sadly small. He concluded to

try the efficacy of praying. Having gained a day for himself, by severe

labor, and communicating his plan only to Dr. Hopkins and two or three

other Christian friends, he shut himself up in his humble dwelling, and

spent the time in prayer for freedom. Towards the close of the day, his

master sent for him. He was told that this was his gained time, and that

he was engaged for himself. "No matter," returned the master, "I must

see him." Poor Newport reluctantly abandoned his supplications, and came

at his master's bidding, when, to his astonishment, instead of a

reprimand, he received a paper, signed by his master, declaring him and

his family from thenceforth free. He justly attributed this signal

blessing to the all-wise Disposer, who turns the hearts of men as the

rivers of water are turned; but it cannot be doubted that the labors and

arguments of Dr. Hopkins with his master were the human instrumentality

in effecting it.

In the year 1773, in connection with Dr. Ezra Stiles, he issued an appeal

to the Christian community in behalf of a society which he had been

instrumental in forming, for the purpose of educating missionaries for

Africa. In the desolate and benighted condition of that unhappy

continent he had become painfully interested, by conversing with the

slaves brought into Newport. Another appeal was made on the subject in

1776.

The war of the Revolution interrupted, for a time, the philanthropic

plans of Dr. Hopkins. The beautiful island on which he lived was at an

early period exposed to the exactions and devastations of the enemy. All

who could do so left it for the mainland. Its wharves were no longer

thronged with merchandise; its principal dwellings stood empty; the very

meeting houses were in a great measure abandoned. Dr. Hopkins, who had

taken the precaution, at the commencement of hostilities, to remove his

family to Great Barrington, remained himself until the year 1776, when

the British took possession of the island. During the period of its

occupation, he was employed in preaching to destitute congregations.

He spent the summer of 1777 at Newburyport, where his memory is still

cherished by the few of his hearers who survive. In the spring of 1780,

he returned to Newport. Everything had undergone a melancholy change.

The garden of New England lay desolate. His once prosperous and wealthy

church and congregation were now poor, dispirited, and, worst of all,

demoralized. His meeting-house had been used as a barrack for soldiers;

pulpit and pews had been destroyed; the very bell had been stolen.

Refusing, with his characteristic denial of self, a call to settle in a

more advantageous position, he sat himself down once more in the midst of

his reduced and impoverished parishioners, and, with no regular salary,

dependent entirely on such free-will offerings as from time to time were

made him, he remained with them until his death.

In 1776, Dr. Hopkins published his celebrated "Dialogue concerning the

Slavery of the Africans; showing it to be the Duty and Interest of the

American States to Emancipate all their Slaves." This he dedicated to

the Continental Congress, the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.

It was republished in 1785, by the New York Abolition Society, and was

widely circulated. A few years after, on coming unexpectedly into

possession of a few hundred dollars, he devoted immediately one hundred

of it to the society for ameliorating the condition of the Africans.

He continued to preach until he had reached his eighty-third year. His

last sermon was delivered on the 16th of the tenth month, 1803, and his

death took place in the twelfth month following. He died calmly, in the

steady faith of one who had long trusted all things in the hand of God.

"The language of my heart is," said he, "let God be glorified by all

things, and the best interest of His kingdom promoted, whatever becomes

of me or my interest." To a young friend, who visited him three days

before his death, he said, "I am feeble and cannot say much. I have said

all I can say. With my last words, I tell you, religion is the one thing

needful." "And now," he continued, affectionately pressing the hand of

his friend, "I am going to die, and I am glad of it." Many years before,

an agreement had been made between Dr. Hopkins and his old and tried

friend, Dr. Hart, of Connecticut, that when either was called home, the

survivor should preach the funeral sermon of the deceased. The venerable

Dr. Hart accordingly came, true to his promise, preaching at the funeral

from the words of Elisha, "My father, my father; the chariots of Israel,

and the horsemen thereof." In the burial-ground adjoining his meeting-

house lies all that was mortal of Samuel Hopkins.

One of Dr. Hopkins's habitual hearers, and who has borne grateful

testimony to the beauty and holiness of his life and conversation, was

William Ellery Channing. Widely as he afterwards diverged from the creed

of his early teacher, it contained at least one doctrine to the influence

of which the philanthropic devotion of his own life to the welfare of man

bears witness. He says, himself, that there always seemed to him

something very noble in the doctrine of disinterested benevolence, the

casting of self aside, and doing good, irrespective of personal

consequences, in this world or another, upon which Dr. Hopkins so

strongly insisted, as the all-essential condition of holiness.

How widely apart, as mere theologians, stood Hopkins and Channing! Yet

how harmonious their lives and practice! Both could forget the poor

interests of self, in view of eternal right and universal humanity. Both

could appreciate the saving truth, that love to God and His creation is

the fulfilling of the divine law. The idea of unselfish benevolence,

which they held in common, clothed with sweetness and beauty the stern

and repulsive features of the theology of Hopkins, and infused a sublime

spirit of self-sacrifice and a glowing humanity into the indecisive and

less robust faith of Charming. What is the lesson of this but that

Christianity consists rather in the affections than in the intellect;

that it is a life rather than a creed; and that they who diverge the

widest from each other in speculation upon its doctrines may, after all,

be found working side by side on the common ground of its practice.

We have chosen to speak of Dr. Hopkins as a philanthropist rather than as

a theologian. Let those who prefer to contemplate the narrow sectarian

rather than the universal man dwell upon his controversial works, and

extol the ingenuity and logical acumen with which he defended his own

dogmas and assailed those of others. We honor him, not as the founder of

a new sect, but as the friend of all mankind,--the generous defender of

the poor and oppressed. Great as unquestionably were his powers of

argument, his learning, and skill in the use of the weapons of theologic

warfare, these by no means constitute his highest title to respect and

reverence. As the product of an honest and earnest mind, his doctrinal

dissertations have at least the merit of sincerity. They were put forth

in behalf of what he regarded as truth; and the success which they met

with, while it called into exercise his profoundest gratitude, only

served to deepen the humility and self-abasement of their author. As the

utterance of what a good man believed and felt, as a part of the history

of a life remarkable for its consecration to apprehended duty, these

writings cannot be without interest even to those who dissent from their

arguments and deny their assumptions; but in the time now, we trust, near

at hand, when distracted and divided Christendom shall unite in a new

Evangelical union, in which orthodoxy in life and practice shall be

estimated above orthodoxy in theory, he will be honored as a good man,

rather than as a successful creed-maker; as a friend of the oppressed and

the fearless rebuker of popular sin rather than as the champion of a

protracted sectarian war. Even now his writings, so popular in their

day, are little known. The time may come when no pilgrim of sectarianism

shall visit his grave. But his memory shall live in the hearts of the

good and generous; the emancipated slave shall kneel over his ashes, and

bless God for the gift to humanity of a life so devoted to its welfare.

To him may be applied the language of one who, on the spot where he

labored and lay down to rest, while rejecting the doctrinal views of the

theologian, still cherishes the philanthropic spirit of the man:--

"He is not lost,--he hath not passed away

Clouds, earths, may pass, but stars shine calmly on;

And he who doth the will of God, for aye

Abideth, when the earth and heaven are gone.

"Alas that such a heart is in the grave!'

Thanks for the life that now shall never end!

Weep, and rejoice, thou terror-hunted slave,

That hast both lost and found so great a friend!"

RICHARD BAXTER.

The picture drawn by a late English historian of the infamous Jeffreys in

his judicial robes, sitting in judgment upon the venerable Richard

Baxter, brought before him to answer to an indictment, setting; forth

that the said "Richardus Baxter, persona seditiosa et factiosa pravae

mentis, impiae, inquietae, turbulent disposition et conversation; falso

illicte, injuste nequit factiose seditiose, et irreligiose, fecit,

composuit, scripsit quendam falsum, seditiosum, libellosum, factiosum et

irreligiosum librum," is so remarkable that the attention of the most

careless reader is at once arrested. Who was that old man, wasted with

disease and ghastly with the pallor of imprisonment, upon whom the foul-

mouthed buffoon in ermine exhausted his vocabulary of abuse and ridicule?

Who was Richardus Baxter?

The author of works so elaborate and profound as to frighten by their

very titles and ponderous folios the modern ecclesiastical student from

their perusal, his hold upon the present generation is limited to a few

practical treatises, which, from their very nature, can never become

obsolete. The _Call to the Unconverted_ and the _Saints' Everlasting

Rest_ belong to no time or sect. They speak the universal language of

the wants and desires of the human soul. They take hold of the awful

verities of life and death, righteousness and judgment to come. Through

them the suffering and hunted minister of Kidderminster has spoken in

warning, entreaty, and rebuke, or in tones of tenderest love and pity, to

the hearts of the generations which have succeeded him. His

controversial works, his confessions of faith, his learned disputations,

and his profound doctrinal treatises are no longer read. Their author

himself, towards the close of his life, anticipated, in respect to these

favorite productions, the children of his early zeal, labor, and

suffering, the judgment of posterity. "I perceive," he says, "that most

of the doctrinal controversies among Protestants are far more about

equivocal words than matter. Experience since the year 1643 to this year

1675 hath loudly called me to repent of my own prejudices, sidings, and

censurings of causes and persons not understood, and of all the

miscarriages of my ministry and life which have been thereby caused; and

to make it my chief work to call men that are within my bearing to more

peaceable thoughts, affections, and practices."

Richard Baxter was born at the village of Eton Constantine, in 1615. He

received from officiating curates of the little church such literary

instruction as could be given by men who had left the farmer's flail, the

tailor's thimble, and the service of strolling stage-players, to perform

church drudgery under the parish incumbent, who was old and well-nigh

blind. At the age of sixteen, he was sent to a school at Wroxeter, where

he spent three years, to little purpose, so far as a scientific education

was concerned. His teacher left him to himself mainly, and following the

bent of his mind, even at that early period, he abandoned the exact

sciences for the perusal of such controversial and metaphysical writings

of the schoolmen as his master's library afforded. The smattering of

Latin which he acquired only served in after years to deform his

treatises with barbarous, ill-adapted, and erroneous citations. "As to

myself," said he, in his letter written in old age to Anthony Wood, who

had inquired whether he was an Oxonian graduate, "my faults are no

disgrace to a university, for I was of none; I have but little but what I

had out of books and inconsiderable help of country divines. Weakness

and pain helped me to study how to die; that set me a-studying how to

live; and that on studying the doctrine from which I must fetch my

motives and comforts; beginning with necessities, I proceeded by degrees,

and am now going to see that for which I have lived and studied."

Of the first essays of the young theologian as a preacher of the

Established Church, his early sufferings from that complication of

diseases with which his whole life was tormented, of the still keener

afflictions of a mind whose entire outlook upon life and nature was

discolored and darkened by its disordered bodily medium, and of the

struggles between his Puritan temperament and his reverence for Episcopal

formulas, much might be profitably said, did the limits we have assigned

ourselves admit. Nor can we do more than briefly allude to the religious

doubts and difficulties which darkened and troubled his mind at an early

period.

He tells us at length in his Life how he struggled with these spiritual

infirmities and temptations. The future life, the immortality of the

soul, and the truth of the Scriptures were by turns questioned. "I

never," says he in a letter to Dr. More, inserted in the _Sadducisimus

Triumphatus_, "had so much ado to overcome a temptation as that to the

opinion of Averroes, that, as extinguished candles go all out in an

illuminated air, so separated souls go all into one common anima mundi,

and lose their individuation." With these and similar "temptations"

Baxter struggled long, earnestly, and in the end triumphantly. His

faith, when once established, remained unshaken to the last; and although

always solemn, reverential, and deeply serious, he was never the subject

of religious melancholy, or of that mournful depression of soul which

arises from despair of an interest in the mercy and paternal love of our

common Father.

The Great Revolution found him settled as a minister in Kidderminster,

under the sanction of a drunken vicar, who, yielding to the clamor of his

more sober parishioners, and his fear of their appeal to the Long

Parliament, then busy in its task of abating church nuisances, had agreed

to give him sixty pounds per year, in the place of a poor tippling

curate, notorious as a common railer and pothouse encumbrance.

As might have been expected, the sharp contrast which the earnest,

devotional spirit and painful strictness of Baxter presented to the

irreverent license and careless good humor of his predecessor by no means

commended him to the favor of a large class of his parishioners. Sabbath

merry-makers missed the rubicund face and maudlin jollity of their old

vicar; the ignorant and vicious disliked the new preacher's rigid

morality; the better informed revolted at his harsh doctrines, austere

life, and grave manner. Intense earnestness characterized all his

efforts. Contrasting human nature with the Infinite Purity and Holiness,

he was oppressed with the sense of the loathsomeness and deformity of

sin, and afflicted by the misery of his fellow-creatures separated from

the divine harmony. He tells us that at this period he preached the

terrors of the Law and the necessity of repentance, rather than the joys

and consolations of the Gospel, upon which he so loved to dwell in his

last years. He seems to have felt a necessity laid upon him to startle

men from false hope and security, and to call for holiness of life and

conformity to the divine will as the only ground of safety. Powerful and

impressive as are the appeals and expostulations contained in his written

works, they probably convey but a faint idea of the force and earnestness

of those which he poured forth from his pulpit. As he advanced in years,

these appeals were less frequently addressed to the fears of his

auditors, for he had learned to value a calm and consistent life of

practical goodness beyond any passionate exhibition of terrors, fervors,

and transports. Having witnessed, in an age of remarkable enthusiasm and

spiritual awakening, the ill effects of passional excitements and

religious melancholy, he endeavored to present cheerful views of

Christian life and duty, and made it a special object to repress morbid

imaginations and heal diseased consciences. Thus it came to pass that no

man of his day was more often applied to for counsel and relief by

persons laboring under mental depression than himself. He has left

behind him a very curious and not uninstructive discourse, which he

entitled The Cure of Melancholy, by Faith and Physick, in which he shows

a great degree of skill in his morbid mental anatomy. He had studied

medicine to some extent for the benefit of the poor of his parish, and

knew something of the intimate relations and sympathy of the body and

mind; he therefore did not hesitate to ascribe many of the spiritual

complaints of his applicants to disordered bodily functions, nor to

prescribe pills and powders in the place of Scripture texts. More than

thirty years after the commencement of his labors at Kidderminster he

thus writes: "I was troubled this year with multitudes of melancholy

persons from several places of the land; some of high quality, some of

low, some exquisitely learned, and some unlearned. I know not how it

came to pass, but if men fell melancholy I must hear from them or see

them, more than any physician I knew." He cautions against ascribing

melancholy phantasms and passions to the Holy Spirit, warns the young

against licentious imaginations and excitements, and ends by advising all

to take heed how they make of religion a matter of "fears, tears, and

scruples." "True religion," he remarks, "doth principally consist in

obedience, love, and joy."

At this early period of his ministry, however, he had all of Whitefield's

intensity and fervor, added to reasoning powers greatly transcending

those of the revivalist of the next century. Young in years, he was even

then old in bodily infirmity and mental experience. Believing himself

the victim of a mortal disease, he lived and preached in the constant

prospect of death. His memento mori was in his bed-chamber, and sat by

him at his frugal meal. The glory of the world was stained to his

vision. He was blind to the beauty of all its "pleasant pictures." No

monk of Mount Athos or silent Chartreuse, no anchorite of Indian

superstition, ever more completely mortified the flesh, or turned his

back more decidedly upon the "good things" of this life. A solemn and

funeral atmosphere surrounded him. He walked in the shadows of the

cypress, and literally "dwelt among the tombs." Tortured by incessant

pain, he wrestled against its attendant languor and debility, as a sinful

wasting of inestimable time; goaded himself to constant toil and

devotional exercise, and, to use his own words, "stirred up his sluggish

soul to speak to sinners with compassion, as a dying man to dying men."

Such entire consecration could not long be without its effect, even upon

the "vicious rabble," as Baxter calls them. His extraordinary

earnestness, self-forgetting concern for the spiritual welfare of others,

his rigid life of denial and sacrifice, if they failed of bringing men to

his feet as penitents, could not but awaken a feeling of reverence and

awe. In Kidderminster, as in most other parishes of the kingdom, there

were at this period pious, sober, prayerful people, diligent readers of

the Scriptures, who were derided by their neighbors as Puritans,

precisians, and hypocrites. These were naturally drawn towards the new

preacher, and he as naturally recognized them as "honest seekers of the

word and way of God." Intercourse with such men, and the perusal of the

writings of certain eminent Non-conformists, had the effect to abate, in

some degree, his strong attachment to the Episcopal formula and polity.

He began to doubt the rightfulness of making the sign of the cross in

baptism, and to hesitate about administering the sacrament to profane

swearers and tipplers.

But while Baxter, in the seclusion of his parish, was painfully weighing

the arguments for and against the wearing of surplices, the use of

marriage rings, and the prescribed gestures and genuflections of his

order, tithing with more or less scruple of conscience the mint and anise

and cummin of pulpit ceremonials, the weightier matters of the law,

freedom, justice, and truth were claiming the attention of Pym and

Hampden, Brook and Vane, in the Parliament House. The controversy

between King and Commons had reached the point where it could only be

decided by the dread arbitrament of battle. The somewhat equivocal

position of the Kidderminster preacher exposed him to the suspicion of

the adherents of the King and Bishops. The rabble, at that period

sympathizing with the party of license in morals and strictness in

ceremonials, insulted and mocked him, and finally drove him from his

parish.

On the memorable 23d of tenth month, 1642, he was invited to occupy a

friend's pulpit at Alcester.

While preaching, a low, dull, jarring roll, as of continuous thunder,

sounded in his ears. It was the cannon-fire of Edgehill, the prelude to

the stern battle-piece of revolution. On the morrow, Baxter hurried to

the scene of action. "I was desirous," he says, "to see the field. I

found the Earl of Essex keeping the ground, and the King's army facing

them on a hill about a mile off. There were about a thousand dead bodies

in the field between them." Turning from this ghastly survey, the

preacher mingled with the Parliamentary army, when, finding the surgeons

busy with the wounded, he very naturally sought occasion for the exercise

of his own vocation as a spiritual practitioner. He attached himself to

the army. So far as we can gather from his own memoirs and the testimony

of his contemporaries, he was not influenced to this step by any of the

political motives which actuated the Parliamentary leaders. He was no

revolutionist. He was as blind and unquestioning in his reverence for

the King's person and divine right, and as hearty in his hatred of

religious toleration and civil equality, as any of his clerical brethren

who officiated in a similar capacity in the ranks of Goring and Prince

Rupert. He seems only to have looked upon the soldiers as a new set of

parishioners, whom Providence had thrown in his way. The circumstances

of his situation left him little choice in the matter. "I had," he says,

"neither money nor friends. I knew not who would receive me in a place

of safety, nor had I anything to satisfy them for diet and

entertainment." He accepted an offer to live in the Governor's house at

Coventry, and preach to the soldiers of the garrison. Here his skill in

polemics was called into requisition, in an encounter with two New

England Antinomians, and a certain Anabaptist tailor who was making more

rents in the garrison's orthodoxy than he mended in their doublets and

breeches. Coventry seems at this time to have been the rendezvous of a

large body of clergymen, who, as Baxter says, were "for King and

Parliament,"--men who, in their desire for a more spiritual worship, most

unwillingly found themselves classed with the sentries whom they regarded

as troublers and heretics, not to be tolerated; who thought the King had

fallen into the hands of the Papists, and that Essex and Cromwell were

fighting to restore him; and who followed the Parliamentary forces to see

to it that they were kept sound in faith, and free from the heresy of

which the Court News-Book accused them. Of doing anything to overturn

the order of Church and State, or of promoting any radical change in the

social and political condition of the people, they had no intention

whatever. They looked at the events of the time, and upon their duties

in respect to them, not as politicians or reformers, but simply as

ecclesiastics and spiritual teachers, responsible to God for the

religious beliefs and practices of the people, rather than for their

temporal welfare and happiness. They were not the men who struck down

the solemn and imposing prelacy of England, and vindicated the divine

right of men to freedom by tossing the head of an anointed tyrant from

the scaffold at Whitehall. It was the so-called schismatics, ranters,

and levellers, the disputatious corporals and Anabaptist musketeers, the

dread and abhorrence alike of prelate and presbyter, who, under the lead

of Cromwell,

"Ruined the great work of time,

And cast the kingdoms old

Into another mould."

The Commonwealth was the work of the laity, the sturdy yeomanry and God-

fearing commoners of England.

The news of the fight of Naseby reaching Coventry, Baxter, who had

friends in the Parliamentary forces, wishing, as he says, to be assured

of their safety, passed over to the stricken field, and spent a night

with them. He was afflicted and confounded by the information which they

gave him, that the victorious army was full of hot-headed schemers and

levellers, who were against King and Church, prelacy and ritual, and who

were for a free Commonwealth and freedom of religious belief and worship.

He was appalled to find that the heresies of the Antinomians, Arminians,

and Anabaptists had made sadder breaches in the ranks of Cromwell than

the pikes of Jacob Astley, or the daggers of the roysterers who followed

the mad charge of Rupert. Hastening back to Coventry, he called together

his clerical brethren, and told them "the sad news of the corruption of

the army." After much painful consideration of the matter, it was deemed

best for Baxter to enter Cromwell's army, nominally as its chaplain, but

really as the special representative of orthodoxy in politics and

religion, against the democratic weavers and prophesying tailors who

troubled it. He joined Whalley's regiment, and followed it through many

a hot skirmish and siege. Personal fear was by no means one of Baxter's

characteristics, and he bore himself through all with the coolness of an

old campaigner. Intent upon his single object, he sat unmoved under the

hail of cannon-shot from the walls of Bristol, confronted the well-plied

culverins of Sherburne, charged side by side with Harrison upon Goring's

musketeers at Langford, and heard the exulting thanksgiving of that grim

enthusiast, when "with a loud voice he broke forth in praises of God, as

one in rapture;" and marched, Bible in hand, with Cromwell himself, to

the storming of Basing-House, so desperately defended by the Marquis of

Winchester. In truth, these storms of outward conflict were to him of

small moment. He was engaged in a sterner battle with spiritual

principalities and powers, struggling with Satan himself in the guise of

political levellers and Antinomian sowers of heresy. No antagonist was

too high and none too low for him. Distrusting Cromwell, he sought to

engage him in a discussion of certain points of abstract theology,

wherein his soundness seemed questionable; but the wary chief baffled off

the young disputant by tedious, unanswerable discourses about free grace,

which Baxter admits were not unsavory to others, although the speaker

himself had little understanding of the matter. At other times, he

repelled his sad-visaged chaplain with unwelcome jests and rough,

soldierly merriment; for he had "a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity as

another man hath when he hath taken a cup too much." Baxter says of him,

complainingly, "he would not dispute with me at all." But, in the midst

of such an army, he could not lack abundant opportunity for the exercise

of his peculiar powers of argumentation. At Amersham, he had a sort of

pitched battle with the contumacious soldiers. "When the public talking

day came," says he, "I took the reading-pew, and Pitchford's cornet and

troopers took the gallery. There did the leader of the Chesham men

begin, and afterwards Pitchford's soldiers set in; and I alone disputed

with them from morning until almost night; for I knew their trick, that

if I had gone out first, they would have prated what boasting words they

listed, and made the people believe that they had baffled me, or got the

best; therefore I stayed it out till they first rose and went away." As

usual in such cases, both parties claimed the victory. Baxter got thanks

only from the King's adherents; "Pitchford's troops and the leader of the

Chesham men" retired from their hard day's work, to enjoy the countenance

and favor of Cromwell, as men after his own heart, faithful to the Houses

and the Word, against kingcraft and prelacy.

Laughed at and held at arm's length by Cromwell, shunned by Harrison and

Berry and other chief officers, opposed on all points by shrewd, earnest

men, as ready for polemic controversy as for battle with the King's

malignants, and who set off against his theological and metaphysical

distinctions their own personal experiences and spiritual exercises, he

had little to encourage him in his arduous labors. Alone in such a

multitude, flushed with victory and glowing with religious enthusiasm,

he earnestly begged his brother ministers to come to his aid. "If the

army," said he, "had only ministers enough, who could have done such

little as I did, all their plot might have been broken, and King,

Parliament, and Religion might have been preserved." But no one

volunteered to assist him, and the "plot" of revolution went on.

After Worcester fight he returned to Coventry, to make his report to the

ministers assembled there. He told them of his labors and trials, of the

growth of heresy and levelling principles in the army, and of the evident

design of its leaders to pull down Church, King, and Ministers. He

assured them that the day was at hand when all who were true to the King,

Parliament, and Religion should come forth to oppose these leaders, and

draw away their soldiers from them. For himself, he was willing to go

back to the army, and labor there until the crisis of which he spoke had

arrived. "Whereupon," says he, "they all voted me to go yet longer."

Fortunately for the cause of civil and religious freedom, the great body

of the ministers, who disapproved of the ultraism of the victorious army,

and sympathized with the defeated King, lacked the courage and

devotedness of Baxter. Had they promptly seconded his efforts, although

the restoration of the King might have been impossible at that late

period, the horrors of civil war must have been greatly protracted. As

it was, they preferred to remain at home, and let Baxter have the benefit

of their prayers and good wishes. He returned to the army with the

settled purpose, of causing its defection from Cromwell; but, by one of

those dispensations which the latter used to call "births of Providence,"

he was stricken down with severe sickness. Baxter's own comments upon

this passage in his life are not without interest. He says, God

prevented his purposes in his last and chiefest opposition to the army;

that he intended to take off or seduce from their officers the regiment

with which he was connected, and then to have tried his persuasion upon

the others. He says he afterwards found that his sickness was a mercy to

himself, "for they were so strong and active, and I had been likely to

have had small success in the attempt, and to have lost my life among

them in their fury." He was right in this last conjecture; Oliver

Cromwell would have had no scruples in making an example of a plotting

priest; and "Pitchford's soldiers" might have been called upon to

silence, with their muskets, the tough disputant who was proof against

their tongues.

After a long and dubious illness, Baxter was so far restored as to be

able to go back to his old parish at Kidderminster. Here, under the

Protectorate of Cromwell, he remained in the full enjoyment of that

religious liberty which he still stoutly condemned in its application to

others.

He afterwards candidly admits, that, under the "Usurper," as he styles

Cromwell, "he had such liberty and advantage to preach the Gospel with

success, as he could not have under a King, to whom he had sworn and

performed true subjection and obedience." Yet this did not prevent him

from preaching and printing, "seasonably and moderately," against the

Protector. "I declared," said he, "Cromwell and his adherents to be

guilty of treason and rebellion, aggravated by perfidiousness and

hypocrisy. But yet I did not think it my duty to rave against him in the

pulpit, or to do this so unseasonably and imprudently as might irritate

him to mischief. And the rather, because, as he kept up his approbation

of a godly life in general, and of all that was good, except that which

the interest of his sinful cause engaged him to be against. So I

perceived that it was his design to do good in the main, and to promote

the Gospel and the interests of godliness more than any had done before

him."

Cromwell, if he heard of his diatribes against him, appears to have cared

little for them. Lords Warwick and Broghill, on one occasion, brought

him to preach before the Lord Protector. He seized the occasion to

preach against the sentries, to condemn all who countenanced them, and to

advocate the unity of the Church. Soon after, he was sent for by

Cromwell, who made "a long and tedious speech" in the presence of three

of his chief men, (one of whom, General Lambert, fell asleep the while,)

asserting that God had owned his government in a signal manner. Baxter

boldly replied to him, that he and his friends regarded the ancient

monarchy as a blessing, and not an evil, and begged to know how that

blessing was forfeited to England, and to whom that forfeiture was made.

Cromwell, with some heat, made answer that it was no forfeiture, but that

God had made the change. They afterwards held a long conference with

respect to freedom of conscience, Cromwell defending his liberal policy,

and Baxter opposing it. No one can read Baxter's own account of these

interviews, without being deeply impressed with the generous and

magnanimous spirit of the Lord Protector in tolerating the utmost freedom

of speech on the part of one who openly denounced him as a traitor and

usurper. Real greatness of mind could alone have risen above personal

resentment under such circumstances of peculiar aggravation.

In the death of the Protector, the treachery of Monk, and the restoration

of the King, Baxter and his Presbyterian friends believed that they saw

the hand of a merciful Providence preparing the way for the best good of

England and the Church. Always royalists, they had acted with the party

opposed to the King from necessity rather than choice. Considering all

that followed, one can scarcely avoid smiling over the extravagant

jubilations of the Presbyterian divines, on the return of the royal

debauchee to Whitehall. They hurried up to London with congratulations

of formidable length and papers of solemn advice and counsel, to all

which the careless monarch listened, with what patience he was master of.

Baxter was one of the first to present himself at Court, and it is

creditable to his heart rather than his judgment and discrimination that

he seized the occasion to offer a long address to the King, expressive of

his expectation that his Majesty would discountenance all sin and promote

godliness, support the true exercise of Church discipline and cherish and

hold up the hands of the faithful ministers of the Church. To all which

Charles II. "made as gracious an answer as we could expect," says Baxter,

"insomuch that old Mr. Ash burst out into tears of joy." Who doubts that

the profligate King avenged himself as soon as the backs of his unwelcome

visitors were fairly turned, by coarse jests and ribaldry, directed

against a class of men whom he despised and hated, but towards whom

reasons of policy dictated a show of civility and kindness?

There is reason to believe that Charles II., had he been able to effect

his purpose, would have gone beyond Cromwell himself in the matter of

religious toleration; in other words, he would have taken, in the outset

of his reign, the very steps which cost his successor his crown, and

procured the toleration of Catholics by a declaration of universal

freedom in religion. But he was not in a situation to brave the

opposition alike of Prelacy and Presbyterianism, and foiled in a scheme

to which he was prompted by that vague, superstitious predilection for

the Roman Catholic religion which at times struggled with his habitual

scepticism, his next object was to rid himself of the importunities of

sentries and the trouble of religious controversies by reestablishing the

liturgy, and bribing or enforcing conformity to it on the part of the

Presbyterians. The history of the successful execution of this purpose

is familiar to all the readers of the plausible pages of Clarendon on the

one side, or the complaining treatises of Neal and Calamy on the other.

Charles and his advisers triumphed, not so much through their own art,

dissimulation, and bad faith as through the blind bigotry, divided

counsels, and self-seeking of the Nonconformists. Seduction on one hand

and threats on the other, the bribe of bishoprics, hatred of Independents

and Quakers, and the terror of penal laws, broke the strength of

Presbyterianism.

Baxter's whole conduct, on this occasion, bears testimony to his honesty

and sincerity, while it shows him to have been too intolerant to secure

his own religious freedom at the price of toleration for Catholics,

Quakers, and Anabaptists; and too blind in his loyalty to perceive that

pure and undefiled Christianity had nothing to hope for from a scandalous

and depraved King, surrounded by scoffing, licentious courtiers and a

haughty, revengeful prelacy. To secure his influence, the Court offered

him the bishopric of Hereford. Superior to personal considerations, he

declined the honor; but somewhat inconsistently, in his zeal for the

interests of his party, he urged the elevation of at least three of his

Presbyterian friends to the Episcopal bench, to enforce that very liturgy

which they condemned. He was the chief speaker for the Presbyterians at

the famous Savoy Conference, summoned to advise and consult upon the Book

of Common Prayer. His antagonist was Dr. Gunning, ready, fluent, and

impassioned. "They spent," as Gilbert Burnet says, "several days in

logical arguing, to the diversion of the town, who looked upon them as a

couple of fencers, engaged in a discussion which could not be brought to

an end." In themselves considered, many of the points at issue seem

altogether too trivial for the zeal with which Baxter contested them,--

the form of a surplice, the wording of a prayer, kneeling at sacrament,

the sign of the cross, etc. With him, however, they were of momentous

interest and importance, as things unlawful in the worship of God. He

struggled desperately, but unavailingly. Presbyterianism, in its

eagerness for peace and union and a due share of State support, had

already made fatal concessions, and it was too late to stand upon non-

essentials. Baxter retired from the conference baffled and defeated,

amidst murmurs and jests. "If you had only been as fat as Dr. Manton,"

said Clarendon to him, "you would have done well."

The Act of Conformity, in which Charles II. and his counsellors gave the

lie to the liberal declarations of Breda and Whitehall, drove Baxter from

his sorrowing parishioners of Kidderminster, and added the evils of

poverty and persecution to the painful bodily infirmities under which he

was already bowed down. Yet his cup was not one of unalloyed bitterness,

and loving lips were prepared to drink it with him.

Among Baxter's old parishioners of Kidderminster was a widowed lady of

gentle birth, named Charlton, who, with her daughter Margaret, occupied a

house in his neighborhood. The daughter was a brilliant girl, of

"strangely vivid wit," and "in early youth," he tells us, "pride, and

romances, and company suitable thereunto, did take her up." But erelong,

Baxter, who acted in the double capacity of spiritual and temporal

physician, was sent for to visit her, on an occasion of sickness. He

ministered to her bodily and mental sufferings, and thus secured her

gratitude and confidence. On her recovery, under the influence of his

warnings and admonitions, the gay young girl became thoughtful and

serious, abandoned her light books and companions, and devoted herself to

the duties of a Christian profession. Baxter was her counsellor and

confidant. She disclosed to him all her doubts, trials, and temptations,

and he, in return, wrote her long letters of sympathy, consolation, and

encouragement. He began to feel such an unwonted interest in the moral

and spiritual growth of his young disciple, that, in his daily walks

among his parishioners, he found himself inevitably drawn towards her

mother's dwelling. In her presence, the habitual austerity of his manner

was softened; his cold, close heart warmed and expanded. He began to

repay her confidence with his own, disclosing to her all his plans of

benevolence, soliciting her services, and waiting, with deference, for

her judgment upon them. A change came over his habits of thought and his

literary tastes; the harsh, rude disputant, the tough, dry logician,

found himself addressing to his young friend epistles in verse on

doctrinal points and matters of casuistry; Westminster Catechism in

rhyme; the Solemn League and Covenant set to music. A miracle alone

could have made Baxter a poet; the cold, clear light of reason "paled the

ineffectual fires" of his imagination; all things presented themselves to

his vision "with hard outlines, colorless, and with no surrounding

atmosphere." That he did, nevertheless, write verses, so creditable as

to justify a judicious modern critic in their citation and approval, can

perhaps be accounted for only as one of the phenomena of that subtle and

transforming influence to which even his stern nature was unconsciously

yielding. Baxter was in love.

Never did the blind god try his archery on a more unpromising subject.

Baxter was nearly fifty years of age, and looked still older. His life

had been one long fast and penance. Even in youth he had never known a

schoolboy's love for cousin or playmate. He had resolutely closed up his

heart against emotions which he regarded as the allurements of time and

sense. He had made a merit of celibacy, and written and published

against the entanglement of godly ministers in matrimonial engagements

and family cares. It is questionable whether he now understood his own

case, or attributed to its right cause the peculiar interest which he

felt in Margaret Charlton. Left to himself, it is more than probable

that he might never have discovered the true nature of that interest, or

conjectured that anything whatever of earthly passion or sublunary

emotion had mingled with his spiritual Platonism. Commissioned and set

apart to preach repentance to dying men, penniless and homeless, worn

with bodily pain and mental toil, and treading, as he believed, on the

very margin of his grave, what had he to do with love? What power had he

to inspire that tender sentiment, the appropriate offspring only of

youth, and health, and beauty?

"Could any Beatrice see

A lover in such anchorite!"

But in the mean time a reciprocal feeling was gaining strength in the

heart of Margaret. To her grateful appreciation of the condescension of

a great and good man--grave, learned, and renowned--to her youth and

weakness, and to her enthusiastic admiration of his intellectual powers,

devoted to the highest and holiest objects, succeeded naturally enough

the tenderly suggestive pity of her woman's heart, as she thought of his

lonely home, his unshared sorrows, his lack of those sympathies and

kindnesses which make tolerable the hard journey of life. Did she not

owe to him, under God, the salvation of body and mind? Was he not her

truest and most faithful friend, entering with lively interest into all

her joys and sorrows? Had she not seen the cloud of his habitual sadness

broken by gleams of sunny warmth and cheerfulness, as they conversed

together? Could she do better than devote herself to the pleasing task

of making his life happier, of comforting him in seasons of pain and

weariness, encouraging him in his vast labors, and throwing over the cold

and hard austerities of his nature the warmth and light of domestic

affection? Pity, reverence, gratitude, and womanly tenderness, her

fervid imagination and the sympathies of a deeply religious nature,

combined to influence her decision. Disparity of age and condition

rendered it improbable that Baxter would ever venture to address her in

any other capacity than that of a friend and teacher; and it was left to

herself to give the first intimation of the possibility of a more

intimate relation.

It is easy to imagine with what mixed feelings of joy, surprise, and

perplexity Baxter must have received the delicate avowal. There was much

in the circumstances of the case to justify doubt, misgiving, and close

searchings of heart. He must have felt the painful contrast which that

fair girl in the bloom of her youth presented to the worn man of middle

years, whose very breath was suffering, and over whom death seemed always

impending. Keenly conscious of his infirmities of temper, he must have

feared for the happiness of a loving, gentle being, daily exposed to

their manifestations. From his well-known habit of consulting what he

regarded as the divine will in every important step of his life, there

can be no doubt that his decision was the result quite as much of a

prayerful and patient consideration of duty as of the promptings of his

heart. Richard Baxter was no impassioned Abelard; his pupil in the

school of his severe and self-denying piety was no Heloise; but what

their union lacked in romantic interest was compensated by its purity and

disinterestedness, and its sanction by all that can hallow human passion,

and harmonize the love of the created with the love and service of the

Creator.

Although summoned by a power which it would have been folly to resist,

the tough theologian did not surrender at discretion. "From the first

thoughts yet many changes and stoppages intervened, and long delays," he

tells us. The terms upon which he finally capitulated are perfectly in

keeping with his character. "She consented," he says, "to three

conditions of our marriage. 1st. That I should have nothing that before

our marriage was hers; that I, who wanted no earthly supplies, might not

seem to marry her from selfishness. 2d. That she would so alter her

affairs that I might be entangled in no lawsuits. 3d. That she should

expect none of my time which my ministerial work should require."

As was natural, the wits of the Court had their jokes upon this singular

marriage; and many of his best friends regretted it, when they called to

mind what he had written in favor of ministerial celibacy, at a time

when, as he says, "he thought to live and die a bachelor." But Baxter

had no reason to regret the inconsistency of his precept and example.

How much of the happiness of the next twenty years of his life resulted

from his union with a kind and affectionate woman he has himself

testified, in his simple and touching Breviate of the Life of the late

Mrs. Baxter. Her affections were so ardent that her husband confesses

his fear that he was unable to make an adequate return, and that she must

have been disappointed in him in consequence. He extols her pleasant

conversation, her active benevolence, her disposition to aid him in all

his labors, and her noble forgetfulness of self, in ministering to his

comfort, in sickness and imprisonment. "She was the meetest helper I

could have had in the world," is his language. "If I spoke harshly or

sharply, it offended her. If I carried it (as I am apt) with too much

negligence of ceremony or humble compliment to any, she would modestly

tell me of it. If my looks seemed not pleasant, she would have me amend

them (which my weak, pained state of body indisposed me to do)." He

admits she had her failings, but, taken as a whole, the Breviate is an

exalted eulogy.

His history from this time is marked by few incidents of a public

character. During that most disgraceful period in the annals of England,

the reign of the second Charles, his peculiar position exposed him to the

persecutions of prelacy and the taunts and abuse of the sentries,

standing as he did between these extremes, and pleading for a moderate

Episcopacy. He was between the upper millstone of High Church and the

nether one of Dissent. To use his own simile, he was like one who seeks

to fill with his hand a cleft in a log, and feels both sides close upon

him with pain. All parties and sects had, as they thought, grounds of

complaint against him. There was in him an almost childish simplicity of

purpose, a headlong earnestness and eagerness, which did not allow him to

consider how far a present act or opinion harmonized with what he had

already done or written. His greatest admirers admit his lack of

judgment, his inaptitude for the management of practical matters. His

utter incapacity to comprehend rightly the public men and measures of his

day is abundantly apparent; and the inconsistencies of his conduct and

his writings are too marked to need comment. He suffered persecution for

not conforming to some trifling matters of Church usage, while he

advocated the doctrine of passive obedience to the King or ruling power,

and the right of that power to enforce conformity. He wrote against

conformity while himself conforming; seceded from the Church, and yet

held stated communion with it; begged for the curacy of Kidderminster,

and declined the bishopric of Hereford. His writings were many of them

directly calculated to make Dissenters from the Establishment, but he was

invariably offended to find others practically influenced by them, and

quarrelled with his own converts to Dissent. The High Churchmen of

Oxford burned his Holy Commonwealth as seditious and revolutionary; while

Harrington and the republican club of Miles's Coffee House condemned it

for its hostility to democracy and its servile doctrine of obedience to

kings. He made noble pleas for liberty of conscience and bitterly

complained of his own suffering from Church courts, yet maintained the

necessity of enforcing conformity, and stoutly opposed the tolerant

doctrines of Penn and Milton. Never did a great and good man so entangle

himself with contradictions and inconsistencies. The witty and wicked

Sir Roger L'Estrange compiled from the irreconcilable portions of his

works a laughable Dialogue between Richard and Baxter. The Antinomians

found him guilty of Socinianism; and one noted controversialist undertook

to show, not without some degree of plausibility, that he was by turns a

Quaker and a Papist!

Although able to suspend his judgment and carefully weigh evidence, upon

matters which he regarded as proper subjects of debate and scrutiny, he

possessed the power to shut out and banish at will all doubt and

misgiving in respect to whatever tended to prove, illustrate, or enforce

his settled opinions and cherished doctrines. His credulity at times

seems boundless. Hating the Quakers, and prepared to believe all manner

of evil of them, he readily came to the conclusion that their leaders

were disguised Papists. He maintained that Lauderdale was a good and

pious man, in spite of atrocities in Scotland which entitle him to a

place with Claverhouse; and indorsed the character of the infamous

Dangerfield, the inventor of the Meal-tub Plot, as a worthy convert from

popish errors. To prove the existence of devils and spirits, he

collected the most absurd stories and old-wives' fables, of soldiers

scared from their posts at night by headless bears, of a young witch

pulling the hooks out of Mr. Emlen's breeches and swallowing them, of Mr.

Beacham's locomotive tobacco-pipe, and the Rev. Mr. Munn's jumping Bible,

and of a drunken man punished for his intemperance by being lifted off

his legs by an invisible hand! Cotton Mather's marvellous account of his

witch experiments in New England delighted him. He had it republished,

declaring that "he must be an obstinate Sadducee who doubted it."

The married life of Baxter, as might be inferred from the state of the

times, was an unsettled one. He first took a house at Moorfields, then

removed to Acton, where he enjoyed the conversation of his neighbor, Sir

Matthew Hale; from thence he found refuge in Rickmansworth, and after

that in divers other places. "The women have most of this trouble," he

remarks, "but my wife easily bore it all." When unable to preach, his

rapid pen was always busy. Huge folios of controversial and doctrinal

lore followed each other in quick succession. He assailed Popery and the

Establishment, Anabaptists, ultra Calvinists, Antinomians, Fifth Monarchy

men, and Quakers. His hatred of the latter was only modified by his

contempt. He railed rather than argued against the "miserable

creatures," as he styled them. They in turn answered him in like manner.

"The Quakers," he says, "in their shops, when I go along London streets,

say, 'Alas' poor man, thou art yet in darkness.' They have oft come to

the congregation, when I had liberty to preach Christ's Gospel, and cried

out against me as a deceiver of the people. They have followed me home,

crying out in the streets, 'The day of the Lord is coming, and thou shalt

perish as a deceiver.' They have stood in the market-place, and under my

window, year after year, crying to the people, 'Take heed of your

priests, they deceive your souls;' and if any one wore a lace or neat

clothing, they cried out to me, 'These are the fruits of your ministry.'"

At Rickmansworth, he found himself a neighbor of William Penn, whom he

calls "the captain of the Quakers." Ever ready for battle, Baxter

encountered him in a public discussion, with such fierceness and

bitterness as to force from that mild and amiable civilian the remark,

that he would rather be Socrates at the final judgment than Richard

Baxter. Both lived to know each other better, and to entertain

sentiments of mutual esteem. Baxter himself admits that the Quakers, by

their perseverance in holding their religious meetings in defiance of

penal laws, took upon themselves the burden of persecution which would

otherwise have fallen upon himself and his friends; and makes special

mention of the noble and successful plea of Penn before the Recorder's

Court in London, based on the fundamental liberties of Englishmen and the

rights of the Great Charter.

The intolerance of Baxter towards the Separatists was turned against him

whenever he appealed to the King and Parliament against the proscription

of himself and his friends. "They gathered," he complains, "out of mine

and other men's books all that we had said against liberty for Popery and

Quakers railing against ministers in open congregation, and applied it as

against the toleration of ourselves." It was in vain that he explained

that he was only in favor of a gentle coercion of dissent, a moderate

enforcement of conformity. His plan for dealing with sentries reminds

one of old Isaak Walton's direction to his piscatorial readers, to impale

the frog on the hook as gently as if they loved him.

While at Acton, he was complained of by Dr. Ryves, the rector, one of the

King's chaplains in ordinary, for holding religious services in his

family with more than five strangers present. He was cast into

Clerkenwell jail, whither his faithful wife followed him. On his

discharge, he sought refuge in the hamlet of Totteridge, where he wrote

and published that Paraphrase on the New Testament which was made the

ground of his prosecution and trial before Jeffreys.

On the 14th of the sixth month, 1681, he was called to endure the

greatest affliction of his life. His wife died on that day, after a

brief illness. She who had been his faithful friend, companion, and

nurse for twenty years was called away from him in the time of his

greatest need of her ministrations. He found consolation in dwelling on

her virtues and excellences in the Breviate of her life; "a paper

monument," he says, "erected by one who is following her even at the door

in some passion indeed of love and grief." In the preface to his

poetical pieces he alludes to her in terms of touching simplicity and

tenderness: "As these pieces were mostly written in various passions, so

passion hath now thrust them out into the world. God having taken away

the dear companion of the last nineteen years of my life, as her sorrows

and sufferings long ago gave being to some of these poems, for reasons,

which the world is not concerned to know; so my grief for her removal,

and the revival of the sense of former things, have prevailed upon me to

be passionate in the sight of all."

The circumstances of his trial before the judicial monster, Jeffreys, are

too well known to justify their detail in this sketch. He was sentenced

to pay a fine of five hundred marks. Seventy years of age, and reduced

to poverty by former persecutions, he was conveyed to the King's Bench

prison. Here for two years he lay a victim to intense bodily suffering.

When, through the influence of his old antagonist, Penn, he was restored

to freedom, he was already a dying man. But he came forth from prison as

he entered it, unsubdued in spirit.

Urged to sign a declaration of thanks to James II., his soul put on the

athletic habits of youth, and he stoutly refused to commend an act of

toleration which had given freedom not to himself alone, but to Papists

and sentries. Shaking off the dust of the Court from his feet, he

retired to a dwelling in Charter-House Square, near his friend

Sylvester's, and patiently awaited his deliverance. His death was quiet

and peaceful. "I have pain," he said to his friend Mather; "there is no

arguing against sense; but I have peace. I have peace." On being asked

how he did, he answered, in memorable words, "Almost well!"

He was buried in Christ Church, where the remains of his wife and her

mother had been placed. An immense concourse attended his funeral, of

all ranks and parties. Conformist and Non-conformist forgot the

bitterness of the controversialist, and remembered only the virtues and

the piety of the man. Looking back on his life of self-denial and

faithfulness to apprehended duty, the men who had persecuted him while

living wept over his grave. During the last few years of his life, the

severity of his controversial tone had been greatly softened; he lamented

his former lack of charity, the circle of his sympathies widened, his

social affections grew stronger with age, and love for his fellow-men

universally, and irrespective of religious differences, increased within

him. In his Narrative, written in the long, cool shadows of the evening

of life, he acknowledges with extraordinary candor this change in his

views and feelings. He confesses his imperfections as a writer and

public teacher.

"I wish," he says, "all over-sharp passages were expunged from my

writings, and I ask forgiveness of God and man." He tells us that

mankind appear more equal to him; the good are not so good as he once

thought, nor the bad so evil; and that in all there is more for grace to

make advantage of, and more to testify for God and holiness, than he once

believed. "I less admire," he continues, "gifts of utterance, and the

bare profession of religion, than I once did, and have now much more

charity for those who, by want of gifts, do make an obscurer profession."

He laments the effects of his constitutional irritability and impatience

upon his social intercourse and his domestic relations, and that his

bodily infirmities did not allow him a free expression of the tenderness

and love of his heart. Who does not feel the pathos and inconsolable

regret which dictated the following paragraph?

"When God forgiveth me, I cannot forgive myself, especially for my rash

words and deeds by which I have seemed injurious and less tender and kind

than I should have been to my near and dear relations, whose love

abundantly obliged me. When such are dead, though we never differed in

point of interest or any other matter, every sour or cross or provoking

word which I gave them maketh me almost irreconcilable to myself, and

tells me how repentance brought some of old to pray to the dead whom they

had wronged to forgive them, in the hurry of their passion."

His pride as a logician and skilful disputant abated in the latter and

better portion of his life he had more deference to the judgment of

others, and more distrust of his own. "You admire," said he to a

correspondent who had lauded his character, "one you do not know;

knowledge will cure your error." In his Narrative he writes: "I am much

more sensible than heretofore of the breadth and length and depth of the

radical, universal, odious sin of selfishness, and therefore have written

so much against it; and of the excellency and necessity of self-denial

and of a public mind, and of loving our neighbors as ourselves." Against

many difficulties and discouragements, both within himself and in his

outward circumstances, he strove to make his life and conversation an

expression of that Christian love whose root, as he has said with equal

truth and beauty, "is set

In humble self-denial, undertrod,

While flower and fruit are growing up to God."

Of the great mass of his writings, more voluminous than those of any

author of his time, it would ill become us to speak with confidence. We

are familiar only with some of the best of his practical works, and our

estimate of the vast and appalling series of his doctrinal, metaphysical

and controversial publications would be entitled to small weight, as the

result of very cursory examination. Many of them relate to obsolete

questions and issues, monumental of controversies long dead, and of

disputatious doctors otherwise forgotten. Yet, in respect to even these,

we feel justified in assenting to the opinion of one abundantly capable

of appreciating the character of Baxter as a writer. "What works of Mr.

Baxter shall I read?" asked Boswell of Dr. Johnson. "Read any of them,"

was the answer, "for they are all good." He has left upon all the

impress of his genius. Many of them contain sentiments which happily

find favor with few in our time: philosophical and psychological

disquisitions, which look oddly enough in the light of the intellectual

progress of nearly two centuries; dissertations upon evil spirits,

ghosts, and witches, which provoke smiles at the good man's credulity;

but everywhere we find unmistakable evidences of his sincerity and

earnest love of truth. He wrote under a solemn impression of duty,

allowing neither pain, nor weakness, nor the claims of friendship, nor

the social enjoyments of domestic affection, to interfere with his

sleepless intensity of purpose. He stipulated with his wife, before

marriage, that she should not expect him to relax, even for her society,

the severity of his labors. He could ill brook interruption, and

disliked the importunity of visitors. "We are afraid, sir, we break in

upon your time," said some of his callers to him upon one occasion. "To

be sure you do," was his answer. His seriousness seldom forsook him;

there is scarce a gleam of gayety in all his one hundred and sixty-eight

volumes. He seems to have relished, however, the wit of others,

especially when directed against what he looked upon as error. Marvell's

inimitable reply to the High-Church pretensions of Parker fairly overcame

his habitual gravity, and he several times alludes to it with marked

satisfaction; but, for himself, he had no heart for pleasentry. His

writings, like his sermons, were the earnest expostulations of a dying

man with dying men. He tells us of no other amusement or relaxation than

the singing of psalms. "Harmony and melody," said he, "are the pleasure

and elevation of my soul. It was not the least comfort that I had in the

converse of my late dear wife, that our first act in the morning and last

in bed at night was a psalm of praise."

It has been fashionable to speak of Baxter as a champion of civil and

religious freedom. He has little claim to such a reputation. He was the

stanch advocate of monarchy, and of the right and duty of the State to

enforce conformity to what he regarded as the essentials of religious

belief and practice. No one regards the prelates who went to the Tower,

under James II., on the ground of conscientious scruples against reading

the King's declaration of toleration to Dissenters, as martyrs in the

cause of universal religious freedom. Nor can Baxter, although he wrote

much against the coercion and silencing of godly ministers, and suffered

imprisonment himself for the sake of a good conscience, be looked upon in

the light of an intelligent and consistent confessor of liberty. He did

not deny the abstract right of ecclesiastical coercion, but complained of

its exercise upon himself and his friends as unwarranted and unjust.

One of the warmest admirers and ablest commentators of Baxter designates

the leading and peculiar trait of his character as unearthliness. In our

view, this was its radical defect. He had too little of humanity, he

felt too little of the attraction of this world, and lived too

exclusively in the spiritual and the unearthly, for a full and healthful

development of his nature as a man, or of the graces, charities, and

loves of the Christian. He undervalued the common blessings and joys of

life, and closed his eyes and ears against the beauty and harmony of

outward nature. Humanity, in itself considered, seemed of small moment

to him; "passing away" was written alike on its wrongs and its rights,

its pleasures and its pains; death would soon level all distinctions; and

the sorrows or the joys, the poverty or the riches, the slavery or the

liberty, of the brief day of its probation seemed of too little

consequence to engage his attention and sympathies. Hence, while he was

always ready to minister to temporal suffering wherever it came to his

notice, he made no efforts to remove its political or social causes.

In this respect he differed widely from some of his illustrious

contemporaries. Penn, while preaching up and down the land, and writing

theological folios and pamphlets, could yet urge the political rights of

Englishmen, mount the hustings for Algernon Sydney, and plead for

unlimited religious liberty; and Vane, while dreaming of a coming

millennium and reign of the saints, and busily occupied in defending his

Antinomian doctrines, could at the same time vindicate, with tongue and

pen, the cause of civil and religious freedom. But Baxter overlooked the

evils and oppressions which were around him, and forgot the necessities

and duties of the world of time and sense in his earnest aspirations

towards the world of spirits. It is by no means an uninstructive fact,

that with the lapse of years his zeal for proselytism, doctrinal

disputations, and the preaching of threats and terrors visibly declined,

while love for his fellow-men and catholic charity greatly increased, and

he was blessed with a clearer perception of the truth that God is best

served through His suffering children, and that love and reverence for

visible humanity is an indispensable condition of the appropriate worship

of the Unseen God.

But, in taking leave of Richard Baxter, our last words must not be those

of censure. Admiration and reverence become us rather. He was an honest

man. So far as we can judge, his motives were the highest and best which

can influence human action. He had faults and weaknesses, and committed

grave errors, but we are constrained to believe that the prayer with

which he closes his Saints' Rest and which we have chosen as the fitting

termination of our article, was the earnest aspiration of his life:--

"O merciful Father of Spirits! suffer not the soul of thy unworthy

servant to be a stranger to the joys which he describes to others, but

keep me while I remain on earth in daily breathing after thee, and in a

believing affectionate walking with thee! Let those who shall read these

pages not merely read the fruits of my studies, but the breathing of my

active hope and love; that if my heart were open to their view, they

might there read thy love most deeply engraven upon it with a beam from

the face of the Son of God; and not find vanity or lust or pride within

where the words of life appear without, that so these lines may not

witness against me, but, proceeding from the heart of the writer, be

effectual through thy grace upon the heart of the reader, and so be the

savor of life to both."

WILLIAM LEGGETT

"O Freedom! thou art not, as poets dream,

A fair young girl, with light and delicate limbs,

And wavy tresses, gushing from the cap

With which the Roman master crowned his slave,

When he took off the gyves. A bearded man,

Armed to the teeth, art thou; one mailed hand

Grasps the broad shield, and one the sword; thy brow,

Glorious in beauty though it be, is scarred

With tokens of old wars; thy massive limbs

Are strong with struggling. Power at thee has launched

His bolts, and with his lightnings smitten thee;

They could not quench the life thou hast from Heaven."

BRYANT.

WHEN the noblest woman in all France stood on the scaffold, just before

her execution, she is said to have turned towards the statue of Liberty,

--which, strangely enough, had been placed near the guillotine, as its

patron saint,--with the exclamation, "O Liberty! what crimes have been

committed in thy name!" It is with a feeling akin to that which prompted

this memorable exclamation of Madame Roland that the sincere lover of

human freedom and progress is often compelled to regard American

democracy.

For democracy, pure and impartial,--the self-government of the whole;

equal rights and privileges, irrespective of birth or complexion; the

morality of the Gospel of Christ applied to legislation; Christianity

reduced to practice, and showering the blessings of its impartial love

and equal protection upon all, like the rain and dews of heaven,--we have

the sincerest love and reverence. So far as our own government

approaches this standard--and, with all its faults, we believe it does so

more nearly than any other--it has our hearty and steadfast allegiance.

We complain of and protest against it only where, in its original

framework or actual administration, it departs from the democratic

principle. Holding, with Novalis, that the Christian religion is the

root of all democracy and the highest fact in the rights of man, we

regard the New Testament as the true political text-book; and believe

that, just in proportion as mankind receive its doctrines and precepts,

not merely as matters of faith and relating to another state of being,

but as practical rules, designed for the regulation of the present life

as well as the future, their institutions, social arrangements, and forms

of government will approximate to the democratic model. We believe in

the ultimate complete accomplishment of the mission of Him who came "to

preach deliverance to the captive, and the opening of prison doors to

them that are bound." We look forward to the universal dominion of His

benign humanity; and, turning from the strife and blood, the slavery, and

social and political wrongs of the past and present, anticipate the

realization in the distant future of that state when the song of the

angels at His advent shall be no longer a prophecy, but the jubilant

expression of a glorious reality,--"Glory to God in the highest! Peace

on earth, and good will to man!"

For the party in this country which has assumed the name of Democracy, as

a party, we have had, we confess, for some years past, very little

respect. It has advocated many salutary measures, tending to equalize the

advantages of trade and remove the evils of special legislation. But if

it has occasionally lopped some of the branches of the evil tree of

oppression, so far from striking at its root, it has suffered itself to

be made the instrument of nourishing and protecting it. It has allowed

itself to be called, by its Southern flatterers, "the natural ally of

slavery." It has spurned the petitions of the people in behalf of

freedom under its feet, in Congress and State legislatures. Nominally

the advocate of universal suffrage, it has wrested from the colored

citizens of Pennsylvania that right of citizenship which they had enjoyed

under a Constitution framed by Franklin and Rush. Perhaps the most

shameful exhibition of its spirit was made in the late Rhode Island

struggle, when the free suffrage convention, solemnly calling heaven and

earth to witness its readiness to encounter all the horrors of civil war,

in defence of the holy principle of equal and universal suffrage,

deliberately excluded colored Rhode Islanders from the privilege of

voting. In the Constitutional Conventions of Michigan and Iowa, the same

party declared all men equal, and then provided an exception to this rule

in the case of the colored inhabitants. Its course on the question of

excluding slavery from Texas is a matter of history, known and read of

all.

After such exhibitions of its practice, its professions have lost their

power. The cant of democracy upon the lips of men who are living down

its principles is, to an earnest mind, well nigh insufferable. Pertinent

were the queries of Eliphaz the Temanite, "Shall a man utter vain

knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind? Shall he reason with

unprofitable talk, or with speeches wherewith he can do no good?" Enough

of wearisome talk we have had about "progress," the rights of "the

masses," the "dignity of labor," and "extending the area of freedom"!

"Clear your mind of cant, sir," said Johnson to Boswell; and no better

advice could be now given to a class of our democratic politicians. Work

out your democracy; translate your words into deeds; away with your

sentimental generalizations, and come down to the practical details of

your duty as men and Christians. What avail your abstract theories, your

hopeless virginity of democracy, sacred from the violence of meanings?

A democracy which professes to hold, as by divine right, the doctrine of

human equality in its special keeping, and which at the same time gives

its direct countenance and support to the vilest system of oppression on

which the sun of heaven looks, has no better title to the name it

disgraces than the apostate Son of the Morning has to his old place in

heaven. We are using strong language, for we feel strongly on this

subject. Let those whose hypocrisy we condemn, and whose sins against

humanity we expose, remember that they are the publishers of their own

shame, and that they have gloried in their apostasy. There is a cutting

severity in the answer which Sophocles puts in the mouth of Electra, in

justification of her indignant rebuke of her wicked mother:--

"'Tis you that say it, not I

You do the unholy deeds which find rue words."

Yet in that party calling itself democratic we rejoice to recognize true,

generous, and thoroughly sincere men,--lovers of the word of democracy,

and doers of it also, honest and hearty in their worship of liberty, who

are still hoping that the antagonism which slavery presents to democracy

will be perceived by the people, in spite of the sophistry and appeals to

prejudice by which interested partisans have hitherto succeeded in

deceiving them. We believe with such that the mass of the democratic

voters of the free States are in reality friends of freedom, and hate

slavery in all its forms; and that, with a full understanding of the

matter, they could never consent to be sold to presidential aspirants, by

political speculators, in lots to suit purchasers, and warranted to be

useful in putting down free discussion, perpetuating oppression, and

strengthening the hands of modern feudalism. They are beginning already

to see that, under the process whereby men of easy virtue obtain offices

from the general government, as the reward of treachery to free

principles, the strength and vitality of the party are rapidly declining.

To them, at least, democracy means something more than collectorships,

consulates, and governmental contracts. For the sake of securing a

monopoly of these to a few selfish and heartless party managers, they are

not prepared to give up the distinctive principles of democracy, and

substitute in their place the doctrines of the Satanic school of

politics. They will not much longer consent to stand before the world as

the slavery party of the United States, especially when policy and

expediency, as well as principle, unite in recommending a position more

congenial to the purposes of their organization, the principles of the

fathers of their political faith, the spirit of the age, and the

obligations of Christianity.

The death-blow of slavery in this country will be given by the very power

upon which it has hitherto relied with so much confidence. Abused and

insulted Democracy will, erelong, shake off the loathsome burden under

which it is now staggering. In the language of the late Theodore

Sedgwiek, of Massachusetts, a consistent democrat of the old school:

"Slavery, in all its forms, is anti-democratic,--an old poison left in

the veins, fostering the worst principles of aristocracy, pride, and

aversion to labor; the natural enemy of the poor man, the laboring man,

the oppressed man. The question is, whether absolute dominion over any

creature in the image of man be a wholesome power in a free country;

whether this is a school in which to train the young republican mind;

whether slave blood and free blood can course healthily together in the

same body politic. Whatever may be present appearances, and by whatever

name party may choose to call things, this question must finally be

settled by the democracy of the country."

This prediction was made eight years ago, at a time when all the facts in

the case seemed against the probability of its truth, and when only here

and there the voice of an indignant freeman protested against the

exulting claims of the slave power upon the democracy as its "natural

ally." The signs of the times now warrant the hope of its fulfilment.

Over the hills of the East, and over the broad territory of the Empire

State, a new spirit is moving. Democracy, like Balaam upon Zophim, has

felt the divine _afflatus_, and is blessing that which it was summoned to

curse.

The present hopeful state of things is owing, in no slight degree, to the

self-sacrificing exertions of a few faithful and clear-sighted men,

foremost among whom was the late William Leggett; than whom no one has

labored more perseveringly, or, in the end, more successfully, to bring

the practice of American democracy into conformity with its professions.

William Leggett! Let our right hand forget its cunning, when that name

shall fail to awaken generous emotions and aspirations for a higher and

worthier manhood! True man and true democrat; faithful always to

Liberty, following wherever she led, whether the storm beat in his face

or on his back; unhesitatingly counting her enemies his own, whether in

the guise of Whig monopoly and selfish expediency, or democratic

servility north of Mason and Dixon's line towards democratic slaveholding

south of it; poor, yet incorruptible; dependent upon party favor, as a

party editor, yet risking all in condemnation of that party, when in the

wrong; a man of the people, yet never stooping to flatter the people's

prejudices,--he is the politician, of all others, whom we would hold up

to the admiration and imitation of the young men of our country. What

Fletcher of Saltoun is to Scotland, and the brave spirits of the old

Commonwealth time--

"Hands that penned

And tongues that uttered wisdom, better none

The later Sydney, Marvell, Harrington,

Young Vane, and others, who called Milton friend--"

are to England, should Leggett be to America. His character was formed

on these sturdy democratic models. Had he lived in their day, he would

have scraped with old Andrew Marvell the bare blade-bone of poverty, or

even laid his head on the block with Vane, rather than forego his

independent thought and speech.

Of the early life of William Leggett we have no very definite knowledge.

Born in moderate circumstances; at first a woodsman in the Western

wilderness, then a midshipman in the navy, then a denizen of New York;

exposed to sore hardships and perilous temptations, he worked his way by

the force of his genius to the honorable position of associate editor of

the Evening Post, the leading democratic journal of our great commercial

metropolis. Here he became early distinguished for his ultraism in

democracy. His whole soul revolted against oppression. He was for

liberty everywhere and in all things, in thought, in speech, in vote, in

religion, in government, and in trade; he was for throwing off all

restraints upon the right of suffrage; regarding all men as brethren, he

looked with disapprobation upon attempts to exclude foreigners from the

rights of citizenship; he was for entire freedom of commerce; he

denounced a national bank; he took the lead in opposition to the monopoly

of incorporated banks; he argued in favor of direct taxation, and

advocated a free post-office, or a system by which letters should be

transported, as goods and passengers now are, by private enterprise. In

all this he was thoroughly in earnest. That he often erred through

passion and prejudice cannot be doubted; but in no instance was he found

turning aside from the path which he believed to be the true one, from

merely selfish considerations. He was honest alike to himself and the

public. Every question which was thrown up before him by the waves of

political or moral agitation he measured by his standard of right and

truth, and condemned or advocated it in utter disregard of prevailing

opinions, of its effect upon his pecuniary interest, or of his standing

with his party. The vehemence of his passions sometimes betrayed him

into violence of language and injustice to his opponents; but he had that

rare and manly trait which enables its possessor, whenever he becomes

convinced of error, to make a prompt acknowledgment of the conviction.

In the summer of 1834, a series of mobs, directed against the

Abolitionists, who had organized a national society, with the city of New

York as its central point, followed each other in rapid succession. The

houses of the leading men in the society were sacked and pillaged;

meeting-houses broken into and defaced; and the unoffending colored

inhabitants of the city treated with the grossest indignity, and

subjected, in some instances, to shameful personal outrage. It was

emphatically a "Reign of Terror." The press of both political parties

and of the leading religious sects, by appeals to prejudice and passion,

and by studied misrepresentation of the designs and measures of the

Abolitionists, fanned the flame of excitement, until the fury of demons

possessed the misguided populace. To advocate emancipation, or defend

those who did so, in New York, at that period, was like preaching

democracy in Constantinople or religious toleration in Paris on the eve

of St. Bartholomew. Law was prostrated in the dust; to be suspected of

abolitionism was to incur a liability to an indefinite degree of insult

and indignity; and the few and hunted friends of the slave who in those

nights of terror laid their heads upon the pillow did so with the prayer

of the Psalmist on their lips, "Defend me from them that rise up against

me; save me from bloody men."