be the attempt to fathom the depths of eternity, or to measure the infinitude of space.

But no such mystery rests on the introduction of evil into our world. The information here is both authoritative and distinct. "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin." Let us, then, endeavour briefly, yet succinctly, to trace the history of a transaction which has entailed upon us a sinful and mortal nature, with all its woes.

(To be concluded in our next number.)

THE BICENTENARY OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW'S DAY, 1662.
(Concluded.)

ON any controverted point, we must hear both sides in order to be sure of arriving at a just conclusion. In this spirit, we have both listened to, and read, a lecture by the Rev. Joseph Bardsley, M.A., Superintendent of the London Diocesan Home Mission, on "The Nonconformist Commemoration of St. Bartholomew's Day, 1662." This lecture was delivered in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, to three thousand persons. It has since been delivered at Cambridge and other important places, and appears to be accepted by Churchmen as a sufficient vindication of the Act of Uniformity. In this important lecture it is stated-First, that the two thousand Nonconformist ministers were not ejected from the Church, but left it of their own accord. This is true in one sense, and it is their highest honour. They might have remained by subscribing as others did. They went out, at the sacrifice of the dearest earthly interests, because conscience was dearer still. The Act of Uniformity was intentionally so framed as to "make them knaves if they conformed." They went out because they could not violate conscience; but were they the less ejected because the pressure was put upon conscience rather than upon their bodies and their families? Mr. B. then proceeds to "reply to the charge of intolerance and persecution sought to be fastened upon the Church of England;' and, in doing this, makes the following astonishing assertion-" If the Church of England chastised Nonconformists with whips, they chastised her with scorpions; if she beat them with few stripes, they beat her with many; 'for,' as Walker says, 'the sufferings and the trials of the two thousand Nonconformists were but as a flea-bite in comparison with the sufferings of the six thousand or seven thousand under Cromwell.'"* Now, not to dwell on the cruelties of Laud and others, we have already shown, on the testimony of Baxter-who was by no means favourable to Cromwell-"that six to one, if not many more, of these clergymen, were proved insufficient or scandalous, or especially guilty of drunkenness and swearing;" and Fuller, an eminent Churchman of that time, says, "The offences of some of these men were so disgraceful as not to bear repeating-'crying to Heaven for justice." They were doubtless the men whom Milton intended to describe when bewailing the death of Lycidas :

"Such as, for their bellies' sake, Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold;

* Dr. Vaughan, however, has conclusively shown, that only from eighteen hundred to two thousand were sequestered in about twenty years.

Of other care they little reckoning make,
Than how to scramble at the shearer's feast,
And shove away the worthy bidden guest.

Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the least
That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs.

What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs

Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.

The hungry sheep look up and are not fed,

But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread."

Now, the removal of such men from its ministry was one of the
greatest blessings which could be conferred upon the Church;
and an
evangelical clergyman like Mr. Bardsley ought so to have regarded it,
as he doubtless would have done if he had been speaking in the
interests of religion instead of an Establishment. Even after being
removed, however, one-fifth of their previous income was reserved to
the sequestered clergy; whilst the Act of Uniformity took effect at a
time which involved the loss of the year's income, which was almost
becoming due, to the ministers who could not conform. Whilst
there were doubtless cases of individual hardship amongst those
removed by the Triers-whilst some good men undoubtedly suffered
with the many bad ones-still the case, on the whole, is that of a
number of men removed from a ministry for which they were proved
to be unfit, and not of the systematic, life-long persecution for con-
scientiousness and ministerial zeal to which we have shown that the
Nonconformist ministers, including such men as Baxter, Philip
Henry, and Alleine, were subjected. Yet, in the face of these facts,
and in opposition to the whole history of the time, Mr. Bardsley is
publishing through the land, that "if the Church chastised with
whips, the Nonconformists chastised the Church with scorpions!"
A great part of the lecture is devoted to showing that it is incon-
sistent for Dissenters to commemorate the event of St. Bartholomew's
Day at all-a topic to which we shall shortly again refer. In speaking
of church-rates, Mr. B. says, that "those Dissenters who allow their
spoons and tables, knives and forks, and beds to be taken, rather than
pay church-rates, know that they are so acting with a view to bring
discredit on the church-rate system." He defends the system which
takes the spoons, tables, and beds from conscientious Dissenters, in the
following original manner :-" Dissenters state that, in seeking to get
rid of church-rates, they are agitating for liberty against tyranny.
Our reply is, Your agitation is tyranny against liberty. And why
so? Because you are robbing a majority of a parish of their rights
and privileges. The majority of a parish have a right to levy a rate
to lay a bridge over a river; a rate to mend highways, or to provide
a public library: they have the right and privilege to do this, and the
agitation is an attempt to rob the people of a privilege which the
constitution has given them from time immemorial." (The privilege of
making my neighbour pay for my religion whether he approves it or
not!) "It is an agitation, I repeat, of tyranny against liberty, and
not of liberty against tyranny." To this view, it is sufficient to reply,
that it condemns freedom of opinion, denies to society the means of
progress, would stereotype the worst institutions and abuses, and that

it is by acting in opposition to it that all reforms and improvements in society are effected. The only prominent points besides in this celebrated lecture are, a defence of Church property; claiming for the Church the credit of educating in her day-schools eighty per cent. of the population; an attempt to correct the Census of 1851, by claiming as Church people all those who attend neither church nor chapel; an intimation that the "fair sex" generally in the country feel "that the marriage knot would not be securely tied unless it were done by the ministers of the good old Church of England;"* and a sneer at the Voluntary principle, as starving the ministers dependent upon it. It explains neither the history of the Act of Uniformity nor the reasons for it, nor the effects it has produced. It contains no argument, except the tu quoque one, "You are blacker than we are which, if it were as true as it is certainly false, would not prove that black is white. As a defence of the Act of Uniformity and the persecutions by which it was followed up, this lecture is entirely worthless; as not containing one word of regret for all the sufferings which that Act and those persecutions occasioned, it lacks sympathy; and it is valuable only as showing how even evangelical ministers in the Establishment cling to the principle of intolerance-how a bad system warps the views and benumbs the feelings of even good men-and how necessary it is to maintain that liberty of conscience which has been so dearly bought.

The late gifted and fine-spirited Archdeacon Hare bears a different testimony to that of Mr. Bardsley. "A strange voice," he says, "passed through England-a voice which spake of unity; but it was soon stifled by the tumultuous cries of opposite parties clamouring in rivalry for uniformity. Ere long all hope was blasted by that second, most disastrous, most tyrannical, and schismatical Act of Uniformity, the authors of which, it is plain, were not seeking unity, but division. How grievous was the wound to the Church at that time! How grievous is it still to this day in its enduring effects! Two thousand ministers, comprising the chief part-it seems scarcely questionable--of the most faithful and zealous in the land, were silenced in one day; were severed in one day from their flocks; were cast, in one day, out of our Church, for the sake of maintaining uniformity! . . Verily, when I think of that calamitous and unprincipled Act, of the men by whom it was enacted-Charles II. and the aristocracy of his reign-and of the men against whom it was enacted, it seems almost like a prologue to the profligacy and infidelity that followed closely upon it. On that our English Bartholomew's Day-the eye wandered over England, and in every fifth parish saw the people scattered abroad as sheep that had no shepherd. We thus had almost cast out the doctrine of the Crucified from the pale of our Church."

This reminds us of a volume of Puseyite poetry published some years since, in which the author, the Rev. Neale, puts the above-named opinion into the mouth of a poor woman who has been married at church, as follows

"And I scarcely think, whatever

You Dissenters choose to say,
That she's an honest woman
That weds another way!"

The style and the sentiment are quite worthy of each other.

:

The only other witness we shall call is Canon Miller, of Birmingham, who seems displeased with Dissenters for commemorating this event-speaking of the commemoration as an unnecessary fuss. Now we should scarcely have expected him to use such a term as this, since he has himself lately written of this event in a very different spirit. In his preface to the Works of Thomas Goodwin, Vol. I. of "Nichol's Series of Puritan Divines," he speaks as follows :"On the expulsion of the Puritans, on St. Bartholomew's Day, in 1662, under the disastrous and suicidal Act of Uniformity, they carried with them the spiritual light of the Church of England ;' and, 'in the course of ninety years, the nation had descended to a state of irreligion which we now contemplate with feelings of dismay.' It was the opinion of those who lived in these evil days, that had it not been for a small body of respectable clergymen who had been educated among the Puritans, and of whom Wilkins, Patrick, and Tillotson were the leaders, every trace of godliness would have been clean put out, and the land reduced to universal and avowed atheism. Indeed, the writings and sermons of the Church of England divines of this period confirm these statements. They are evidently addressed to hearers to whom it was necessary to prove, not merely the providence, but the very being of a God-not only the soul's immortality, but the soul's existence. Their pains are chiefly spent, not in defending any particular creed or system of doctrine, for they appear to have thought all points of doctrine beyond the attainment of the age. They take up the people of England where heathenism might have left them a thousand years before; they teach the first elements of natural religion, and descant upon the nature of virtue-its present recompense, and the arguments in favour of a state of retribution, after the manner of Socrates and Plato. It is seldom that they rise beyond moral and didactic instructions. Theology languished, and spiritual religion became nearly unknown, and a few great and good men handed down to one another the practice and the traditions of a piety which was almost extinct. The restoration of civil liberty brought with it no return of spiritual life within the Church of England. At length, one of the most cautious of English writers, as well as the most profound of English divines,* seventy years after the ejection of the Nonconformists, pourtrays the character of the age in those memorable words, in which he tells us that it had come, he knew not how, to be taken for granted by too many, that Christianity was not so much a subject of inquiry, as that it was now at length discovered to be fictitious! How far these opinions had infected the nation and its educated classes, we may infer from the circumstance, that he devoted his life to that wonderful book in which he proves, by the argument from analogy, that religion deserves at least a candid hearing!" This quotation, from Marsden's "Later Puritans," is given by Canon Miller as expressive of his own views, and surely nothing more severely condemnatory of the Act of Uniformity could be uttered. On the testimony of Church writers themselves, it had well-nigh extinguished the spiritual light of the land. How truly this was the case is seen, when we remember the

* Bishop Butler.

opposition which came, even from within the Church itself, when that light was re-kindled by the Wesleys and their fellowlabourers.

We now proceed to point out two or three lessons suggested by this subject. The first of these-a very obvious one-is that of thankfulness to God for the times in which we live; that we are not under the tyranny of a Charles or James, but under the benign sway of our own Victoria, and in the enjoyment of a measure of religious liberty of which the Nonconformists of those days could not have dreamed. The sacrifice made by the two thousand ejected ministers has doubtless had its influence in bringing about this result. It is true that their views on the subject of toleration were not of the most advanced order. "The shell," to use Bunyan's simile, "was yet on their heads." They were not separatists in principle, nor were the true doctrines as to religious liberty first propounded by them. This honour belongs to the founders of the Independent body. Lord King, himself of the Established Church, in his Life of Locke, says, "By the Independent divines, who were his instructors, Locke was taught those principles of religious liberty which they were the first to disclose to the world. As for toleration, or any true notion of religious liberty, or any general freedom of conscience, we owe them not in the least degree to what is called the Church of England. On the contrary, we owe all these to the Independents in the time of the Commonwealth, and to Locke, their most illustrious and enlightened disciple." It was on this ground that Dr. Hamilton uttered the words which are being so eagerly quoted at present by the defenders of the Church :-"It" (the St. Bartholomew ejectment) "is no portion of our chronicle," &c. Our Church friends, however, omit to give the doctor's meaning. It is, that the Independents had more decided views, and an earlier dissenting history. They omit, also, to quote his expressions of sympathy. In the same discourse he says, "Bartholomew day was a great illustration of principle, and conscience, and disinterestedness. . . Never was there a more transcendent spectacle ! Their distant spires receded from their eye. Their grey hairs braved the storm. Their conscience was their all. Oh, my country! What a parricide was thine! What contests didst thou prepare for thyself! What delays hast thou set, by that deed, to thy destinies! How slowly art thou recovering from that wound! Let that day be darkness; let it not be joined unto the days of the years; let it not come into the number of the months!" But whilst such was his view of the persecutions under which they suffered, he knew that their sufferings helped to clear their perceptions on the subject of religious liberty. They were now in a position to look at this great subject in a new light. Their example and influence were a great power in society. The struggle for freedom of conscience, in which they took so distinguished a part, was perpetuated by their successors; toleration was at length obtained, and we are now far advanced towards the full attainment of that precious birthright of every man-liberty to judge and act for himself in all matters of faith and worship, without being liable to any civil disabilities or penalties whatever. If at this day we sit in security beneath the outspreading branches of the glorious tree of religious liberty, we surely owe something of gratitude, not