spent a thousand widow of Sir Benjamin Bowes, of Barnard Castle, who thousand pounds annually in maintaining preachers whom she selected and sent into districts devoid of gospel-teaching. In 1627, a scheme was originated, and a common fund raised by subscription in London, to maintain lecturers in populous places similarly bereft. This was well supported, and extended to the buying-up of advowsons for the same object; but Archbishop Laud considered the scheme as too favourable to the growth of Puritanism, and got an information filed and decree pronounced by the Court of Exchequer, cancelling the association, confiscating by forfeiture to the Crown the impropriations already purchased, and fining the trustees personally. We get a beautiful sketch of Herbert at Bemerton :— his service twice a day in the chapel of his parsonage ; his congregation made up of gentlemen from the neighbourhood, as well as his own parishioners; the husbandmen in the fields around letting their ploughs rest when they heard Mr. Herbert's bell ring to prayers, that they might offer their devotions with him, aud then return to the plough. Scarcely less beautiful is the picture of the poet-priest on his deathbed, delivering to his friend the MS. of his volume, now called "The Temple, "-saying,-"Sir, pray deliver this little book to my brother Farrer; and tell him he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus, my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom. Desire him to read it; and then if he think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul, let it be made public: if not, let him burn it, for I and it are less than the least of God's mercies." On the day of his death, he said to another friend,-"My dear friend, I am sorry I have nothing to present to my merciful God but sin and misery: but the first is pardoned, and a few hours will put a period to the latter." His friend took occasion to remind him of his many acts of mercy; to which he made answer,-"They be good works if they be sprinkled with the blood of Christ, and not otherwise." He died realizing his own sweet utterance,— "Who goeth in the way which Christ has gone, Perhaps my God, though He be far before, The most outlandish parts of England were now being penetrated by evangelical labour. What Bernard Gilpin and Rothwell had done in the North of England, Bagshaw did for the Peak of Derbyshire, Vavasour Powel and Hugh Owen for Wales, Machin in the moorlands of Staffordshire, Tregoss in Cornwall. In 1625 was the commencement of a revival in the West of Scotland, which illuminated a large district, and originated piety in some who conferred signal benefit on the Church in years long afterwards.† In the early part of King Charles's reign, there was at Wotton, in Gloucestershire, a gathering of young persons, * The Temple, lxii. † See Gillies, vol. i., p. 306. who used to meet for religious instruction. Joseph Woodward, a graduate of Oxford, master of the free school at Wotton, joined the society, and became eminent at Dursley for his evangelical labours. As he went to church, the people would be waiting at the streetdoors of their houses, and fell into procession, so as to accompany the good man, whom they had begun with reviling, and ended with loving. He died before the Act of Uniformity. To this period, too, belongs the nursing of John Eliot, that great apostolic spirit who was to become the admiration of future ages as the pioneer of mission-work among the heathen. In 1628, Thomas Hooker, a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and lecturer at Chelmsford, had been worried out of the ministry by Laud, and was keeping a school at Little Baddow, in Essex. He was joined by a young Essex man, also a Cambridge scholar, named Eliot, who came to be his assistant, and who writes-"To this place was I called through the infinite riches of God's mercy in Christ Jesus to my poor soul; for here the Lord said unto my dead soul, Live! live and through the grace of God I do live, and I shall live for ever!" Eliot followed his master to North America, where, moved by the lamentable condition of the Indian tribes, he wrote a tractate entitled "The Daybreaking of the Gospel," and took other effective means of drawing public attention to the subject of their evangelization, acquired their language, and thenceforward devoted all his long life to the work of preaching the Gospel as an itinerant missionary of the Cross. He scorned the notion that either the Red skin, or the Negro, lay under any inherent disqualification for the Gospel, and he soon produced ample proofs of its triumphs over all the barriers of race and country. The fire which sustained the heroic evangelist amidst the forests of the New World, was first kindled under the Laudean persecutions in Old England. The home missionary spirit is, at the same time, thus indicated by Sibbes, in 1633 :-" And if it were possible, it were to be wished, that there were set up some lights in all the dark corners of the kingdom, that might shine to those people that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death." * There were at the time, a great number of godly preachers, both among those who had been deprived by the late Queen's injunction, and those who had escaped these trials. The "Book of Sports," with its surrounding circumstances, was never accepted by the people generally in lieu of religion. Family and personal piety was observed and honoured, laborious evangelical ministers valued and followed. The student of history who will be satisfied with the records of the quiet lives of hard-working ministers, or who will be interested in the kindling of religious feeling in a family or neighbourhood, may still discover much material in the biographies of good men who finished their course in the first half of the seventeenth century, before the political troubles came to a crisis.† Such men were Baines, Stock, Roth *The Saint's Safety in Evil Times. See Clarke's Lives; Gillies' Historical Collections. well, Herbert (famous in another field also), Bolton, Taylor, Sibbes, and others. Rothwell, in the beginning of his career, was a clergyman without any true sense of religion. What follows will give a picture of the times :— "I shall set it down as I remember I heard him speak it. He was playing at bowls amongst some Papists and vain gentlemen, upon a Saturday, somewhere about Rochdale in Lancashire. There comes into the green to him one Mr. Midgley, a grave and godly minister of Rochdale, whose praise is great in the Gospel, though far inferior to Rothwel in parts and learning. He took him aside, and fell into a large commendation of him: at length told him what pity it was that such a man as he should be a companion to Papists, and that upon a Saturday, when he should be preparing for the Sabbath. Mr. Rothwel slighted his words, and checked him for his meddling. The good old man left him, went home, and prayed privately for him. Mr. Rothwel, when he was retired from that company, could not rest, Mr. Midgley's words stuck so deep in his thoughts. The next day he went to Rochdale church to hear Mr. Midgley, where it pleased God to bless that ordinance so, as Mr. Rothwel was by that sermon brought home to Christ. He came after sermon to Mr. Midgley, thanked him for his reproof, and besought his direction and prayers; for he was in a miserable condition, as being in a natural state. He lay for a time under the spirit of bondage, 'till afterwards, and by Mr. Midgley's hands, he received the spirit of adoption; wherewith he was so sealed, that in the after part of his P |