THE PROTECTOR.

INTRODUCTION.

THERE are great crises in the history of man, in which the sovereignty of God over kings and people, however it may be hidden for a time from the eyes of the multitude, is manifested with such demonstrations of power as to excite the conviction of even the most incredulous. While favouring breezes bear the ship smoothly over the wide ocean, the crew and passengers, careless and inattentive, forget the arm of God, and perhaps indulge in blasphemy. But when "the Lord commandeth and raiseth the stormy 66 wind," when the billows dash over the vessel,-when the sails are torn away and the masts are broken,—when these thoughtless people "mount up to the heaven, and go "down again to the depths,"......then the Almighty appears to them in the midst of the storm:-All eyes behold Him; all hearts tremble before Him; and the most impious, falling on their knees, cry to Him from the bottom of their souls. When men will not hear the "still small voice" in which Jehovah ordinarily addresses them, then, to use the language of Scripture," He passes by in a great and "strong wind, rending the mountains and breaking the "rocks in pieces."

Of all the events which diversify human history, there is none in which mankind more readily acknowledge the intervention of the Deity than in the revolutions of empires, -the setting up and pulling down of kings. These great changes are usually attended by circumstances so unex

pected and appalling, that the eyes of the blindest are opened.

Such events happened in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, when an attempt was made to revive the papal power. In every country this enemy, under the direction of the Jesuits, was rising from beneath the heavy blows inflicted on it by the Reformation. It possessed one spiritual head, which gave unity to its movements; and to support it, a stirring and fanatical power, Spain, was devoted to its interests, and ready to give it "her seat and great authority." (Rev. xiii. 2.) Thus the Papacy was recovering a great part of the ground it had lost in Germany, France, the Low Countries, Spain, and even in Italy.

It was imagined that if Rome could possibly succeed in reconquering England, her cause would be gained and her triumph secured throughout the world; the fruits of the Reformation would be for ever lost: and Great Britain and Europe, peopled anew with priests, Jesuits, and monks, would sink as low as Spain has sunk.

The fearful commotions and sanguinary conflicts which shook the British isles in the middle of the seventeenth century, were in the main a direct struggle against Popery. They were like the shakings and shuddering of the earth, in a country threatened with conflagration by subterranean fires. If a traveller in self-defence slays a highway robber, the responsibility of bloodshed does not rest on him. In ordinary times his hand would have been pure from its stain. War is war, and calls, alas! for blood. In the days of Louis XIV. and of the Stuarts it was a real battle that Popery was fighting against the British islands.

In our days, Rome is striving to re-enter England by means of certain teachers: then-it was through her kings. It was the misfortune and the crime of the Stuarts to have rallied around Rome, and to have desired to range their subjects under the same banner. Charles I. was the victim of this attempt; for Popery ever destroys both the princes and the people who espouse it. Of this truth the Stuarts and the Bourbons are memorable examples.

Strong measures, no doubt, were employed to save

England from the danger with which it was threatened. But so formidable a disease could not be averted, except by the most active remedies. Royalty was overthrown; and yet royalty possessed-as it does still-the respect of this nation. A republic was established; and yet a republic in so vast an empire is a madman's dream. Episcopacy was abolished; and yet this is the form of the Church which the nation prefers. The blood of a king was shed; and yet the inspired Preacher saith, Curse not the king (x. 20). But all these things were accomplished, because the counsel of God had determined beforehand that they should be done (Acts iv. 28); and thus the prophecy was fulfilled, which saith, I gave thee a king in mine anger, and took him away in my wrath. (Hosea xiii. 11.)

If England should desire in the present day, as her princes desired in the seventeenth century, to restore Popery;-if the number of those unfaithful ministers, who abjure the Gospel for the Pope, should multiply in her bosom; if that superstitious madness should spread to their congregations;-if the heads of the Church should continue to slumber, and, instead of rescuing their flocks, allow them to proceed towards the wolf that is waiting to dévour them;—if the government, not satisfied with granting liberty to Popery, should encourage it still farther by endowing its seminaries, paying its priests, building its churches, and restoring throughout Great Britain the power of the Roman bishop......then would England probably be convulsed by a crisis, different, it might be, from that which startled the reign of Charles, but not the less formidable. Again the earth would quake; again would it open to pour forth devouring flames. On this account the study of that remarkable era, in which the first contest took place, was never more necessary than in the present day.

In glancing over those times, however, we must make a distinction between acts and men. There are acts which we are bound openly and vehemently to condemn; but we should proceed too far were we to throw upon individuals the responsibility of the results. Does it not sometimes happen in the course of ages that circumstances occur so calculated to shake the mind, that dazzled, stunned, and

blinded men can no longer see their way, and are mere instruments in the hand of God to punish and to save?

Such is the idea put forth by an eminent writer, equally great as an historian and a statesman, when treating of this epoch: "The time had now come when good and "evil, salvation and peril, were so obscurely confounded " and intermixed, that the firmest minds, incapable of dis"entangling them, had become mere instruments in the "hand of Providence, who alternately chastises kings by "their people, and people by their kings."*

But why should we endeavour to blacken the character of those whom God has employed in His work? Is it improper in this instance, more than on other occasions, to entertain respect for those minds which remain sincere, even when they are misguided, and are doing what they believe to be right, and to be the will of the King of kings? From the beginning of the seventeenth century England was on a steep declivity, which she seemed inevitably doomed to descend, and be carried by it into the gulf of Popery. The blood of the Stuarts was mingled with the blood of the Guises. What the Bourbons were effecting in France, the sons and descendants of Queen Mary, older veterans than they in Roman fanaticism, considered themselves called upon to accomplish on a larger scale on the other side of the Channel. Of a truth those unfortunate princes cannot all be placed in the same rank; but there is visible in them a constant progression towards the Church of Rome. Charles I. (1625) was more averse from the Word of God, and more inclined to tradition and hierarchy, than James I. (1603); Charles II. (1660) more so than Charles I.; and James the Second went far beyond his predecessors. This progression has all the strictness of a mathematical law.

The despotic counter-revolution attempted by the two last Stuarts demonstrates the necessity of the democratic revolution which it pretended to combat. It plainly showed that, in the eighteen years between 1642 and 1660, the English nation had not risen up against mere phantoms. Charles II.—who, as his mother Henrietta Maria declared

* Guizot, Hist. de la Révolution d'Angleterre, i. 278.

to Louis XIV., " had abjured the heresy of his education, " and was reconciled to the Church of Rome;"*-Charles II. composing a treatise to prove that there could be but one Church of Christ upon earth, and that that was the Church of Rome; Charles II. acknowledging to his brother, the Duke of York, that he also was attracted to the mother-church;-Charles II. sounding his ministers on their intentions with regard to Popery, and prepared to follow the duke's advice by a plain and public declaration of Romanism, if he had not been checked by the prudent counsel of Louis XIV.;-Charles II. refusing on his deathbed the sacrament from the Protestant bishop of Bath— replying to his brother, who proposed in a whisper to send him a Romish priest, "Do so, for the love of God!"confessing to the missionary Huddlestone, declaring his wish to become reconciled to the Roman Church, and receiving from him absolution, the host, and even extreme unction-these most assuredly were not phantoms.

James II., his successor, declaring to the French ambassador, immediately after his accession, that the English, though they knew it not, were Roman-catholics, and that it would be easy to induce them to make a public declaration of their faith;-James II. hearing mass in the Queen's chapel with open doors on the first Sunday of his reign;James II., in contemptuous defiance of the laws, filling his army with Roman-catholic officers; and when Protestant clergymen went over to the Church of Rome, giving them dispensations to continue in the receipt of their stipends, and even in the administration of their cures ;-a great number of Roman churches rising, even in the metropolis; -a Jesuit school opened without any attempt at concealment;-Roman-catholic peers admitted into the privycouncil, and along with them Father Petre, a covetous and fanatical Jesuit, who possessed the king's most intimate confidence ;-Roman-catholic bishops in full activity in England;-Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving a popish president;-seven Anglican bishops who had protested

* See a letter from Pell, English minister in Switzerland, to Secretary Thurloe, dated 8 May 1656, in Dr Vaughan's Protectorate, i. 402. London, 1839.

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