men of Puritan sympathies. Yet it served its end. A number of editions were rapidly issued, and there can be no doubt that it did much to confirm the attachment of many to the Church of their fathers.

In several books of the time we have a picture of a famous household trained on these lines. At Great Tew, some sixteen miles from Oxford, there gathered a literary Falkland, and theological society of famous wits.

Lord

Lucius

Carey, Viscount Falkland, the son of the clever spendthrift who had been Lord-Deputy of Ireland and the eccentric Eliza, daughter of Chief Baron Tanfield, had sold the Burford property, which came to him from his grandfather, and settled on his father's property at Tew. Himself a scholar and wit, his friends were wits and scholars too; but gradually the theological interest came to predominate. was a great admirer of Donne, whom he eulogised as

The voice of truth,

God's conduit-pipe for grace, Who chose him for

His extraordinary ambassador.

He

His house, says Aubrey, was like a college full of learned men. Among them were Chillingworth, "his most intimate and beloved favourite," Earle, Eglionby, Hammond, and Sheldon; "nor," in the phrase of Clarendon, "did the lord of the house know of their coming and going, nor who were in his house, till he came to dinner or supper, where all still met; otherwise, there was no troublesome ceremony or constraint to forbid men to come to the house, or to make them weary of staying there; so that many came thither to study in a better air, finding all the books they could desire in his library, and all the persons together whose company they could wish and not find in any other society. Here Mr. Chillingworth wrote, and formed and modelled his excellent book against the learned Jesuit, Mr. Nott, after frequent debates upon the most important particulars." The letters of Falkland's wife, Lettice Morison, show her to have and his wife. been one of the most saintly women of the age. Devout, obedient and simple in her religion, following the rules of the Church in prayer and fast and thanksgiving with pious regularity, she found the spiritual experiences of the saints.

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CATHOLIC AND PURITAN IDEALS

119

reproduced in her life, their penitence, their dryness, their infinite consolations. The particulars of her life which her chaplain, Dr. John Duncan, added to the letters when they were printed in 1648, give a remarkable picture of holiness. They describe the employments of a great lady who watched over the poor and sick of her estates, who treated her servants as friends, and whose plans for education and charity went far beyond the ideas of her time. Such lives, it is plain, could still be lived peacefully in the country, though the land resounded with the clash of arms. It was in such a household that Chillingworth framed his tolerant defence of “the Religion of Protestants"; there that he solemnly re-affirmed his belief (which modern writers have again doubted) in "the doctrine of the Trinity, the deity of our Saviour, and all other supernatural verities revealed in Holy Scripture"; and it was there that, in converse with learned men and with a saintly wife, Falkland confirmed the faith which led him to take up the sword for Church and King.

ideals and

Puritans.

It was the aim of the school to which men such as Falkland and Hammond and Cosin belonged to make clear the appeal of the Church to every side of life, the claim Contrast of religion to rule over all that belonged to the between these interest of mankind. Therein lay one of the that of the greatest of the contrasts between the Puritan and the man of the school of Laud. To the former life must be lived ever in the Great Taskmaster's eye, and the task that He set seemed to involve an elimination of much that was innocent and healthy. Puritanism grew in sternness. Music as well as dancing, the old-fashioned English amusements of wrestling and archery, as well as the brutal sports of bull- and bear-baiting, were excluded from their view of what was lawful to a Christian. Because they were virtuous there should be no more cakes and ale. But theirs, strained and uncharitable though it often became, was a needed protest against luxury, idleness, and ungodly ways. The general

relaxation of morals which followed the Reformation had left its disastrous fruits in carelessness and recklessness among all classes. And there was a grandeur about the stern Calvinistic creed, with all its contrast to the fundamental conceptions of Christianity, which gave a bracing influence to English re

ligious life. The thought that all men, apart from any action of their own, were predestinate of God to glory or destruction, "quia voluit," had an immense power over strong and valiant hearts. The voice of God seemed perpetually to call the elect to new acts of service and of vengeance on His enemies. The lot was cast, and the elect, saved without a whisper of their own, must, by every noble inspiration of their souls, give themselves to the work of God without distraction from any human call. To those who sang with Herbert and prayed with Cosin life had a different aspect. The world was full of the beauty and goodness of God. He willed all men to repent and to come to the knowledge of the truth. Art, music, poetry, were His gifts, to be consecrated to His service; the riches of life, on every side, were His. Nothing that was man's, save only sin, was alien from His love. And as the holy mysteries which He had ordained were instituted to link heaven to earth, so the worshipper must consecrate every beauty of nature as well as every thought of his own heart to the Trinity of Love and Power from Whom all blessings flowed.

How narrow, when we read the intimate details of the daily life of those days, when we compare Herbert and the Ferrars with the Hutchinsons and Mary Rich, seems the division between the two parties, at least in spiritual things. But men who feel most deeply have often fought about trifles. The House of Commons, when it turned to discuss theology, was stirred by the most childish gossip. When Cromwell first raised his voice it was because, in 1629, he remembered that Dr. Beard had told him that Bishop Neile had ordered him, in 1617, not to controvert a preacher who had approved some tenets of Popery." The preacher was Dr. Alablaster, whom Herrick exalted in his verse. "Men's minds," says Fuller of this time, "were exasperated with such small occasions as otherwise might have been passed over and no notice taken thereof." It is not hard for us now, when the stern simplicity of the Calvinist creed has lost its power, to discern how close, but for it, the pious spirits of both parties were to each other and to God.

66

AUTHORITIES. State Papers, Domestic; the Tanner MSS.; Cosin's Correspondence (Surtees Society); Wren, Parentalia; Aubrey, Brief Lives,

VII CHURCH AND CLERGY BEFORE CIVIL WAR 121

(ed. Andrew Clark); George Herbert, The Temple, and A Priest to the Temple; Works of the writers mentioned in the text; The Visitation Articles of different bishops; Two Lives of Farrar, edited by Professor Mayor, 1855; Life of Donne, by Edmund Gosse, with important criticisms by H. C. Beeching, in the Cornhill Magazine, 1900, and The Athenæum; The Story Books of Little Gidding; Hacket's Scrinia Reserata (Life of Williams); The Returnes of Spiritual Comfort and Grief in a Devout Soul (Lettice, Lady Falkland), 1648; Prynne, Canterburie's Doome; A View of the Ancient and Present State of the Churches of Door, Home-Lacy, and Hampstead, Gibson, 1727; A Laudian Church, G. M'W. Rushforth, Guardian, March 5, 1902; C. Fell Smith, Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick; M. E. Palgrave, Mary, Countess of Warwick; Churchwardens' Accounts of St. Mary's, Reading (Garry) Reading, 1893; Churchwardens' Accounts of St. Edmund and St. Thomas, Sarum, Wilts Records Society, 1896; Laud, Works; Diary of John Rous, Incumbent of Santon Downham, 1625-42, Camden Society, 1856.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHURCH IN THE CIVIL WARS

The war

THE last hope of peace had fled from political as well as religious life. On the 22nd of August 1642 the king's standard was raised at Nottingham. Charles issued begun. a lengthy declaration as a manifesto, in which he said "that nothing but the preservation of the true Protestant religion, invaded by Brownism, Anabaptism, and Libertinism, the safety of our person threatened and conspired against by rebellion and treason, the law of the land and liberty of the subject oppressed and almost destroyed by an usurped, unlimited, arbitrary power, and the freedom, privilege, and dignity of Parliament by force and tumults, could make us put off our long-loved robe of peace, and take up defensive arms." These words, however inadequately they accounted for the origin of the civil war, found an echo in many hearts, and many felt what Walton said in after years: "When I look back upon the ruin of families, the bloodshed, the decay of common honesty, and how the former piety and plain dealing of this now sinful nation is turned into cruelty and cunning; when I consider that, I praise God that He prevented me from being of that party which helped to bring in the Covenant and those sad confusions that followed it.”

In a war of creeds the ecclesiastical machinery naturally demands attention, and the religious life of the New Model must also be considered. Both armies had chaplains. In the king's, each regiment was thus provided, many of those employed being clergy who had been driven from their livings, Fuller and Pearson among

Religion in the armies.