how does he clothe it?

"All God's prophecies are thy histories; whatsoever he hath promised others, he hath done in his purpose for thee; and all God's histories are thy prophecies; all that he hath done. for others, he owes thee." Does he seek to press upon our hearts the blessings of Christ's nativity? Mark his manner: "The kingdom of heaven was but a reversion to the patriarchs, and it is no more to us two lives, two comings of Christ, before they could come to their state; Christ must come first in the flesh, and he must come again to judgment. To us, and in our case, one of these lives is spent; Christ is come in the flesh; and therefore, as the earth is warmer an hour after the sun sets, than it was an hour before the sun arose, so let our faith and zeal be warmer now after Christ's departing out of the world, than theirs was before his coming into it."2 Is a man negligent of the task

which he is called to fulfil, and of the talents which he ought to lay out? "He that stands in a place, and does not the duty of that place, is but a statue in that place, and but a statue without an inscription; posterity shall not know him, nor read who he was."3

Or take an example of doctrine beautifully illustrated and applied. He is showing the dreadful impiety of pleading the decree of God, in extenuation of the wickedness of man. "No man can assign a reason in the sun, why his body casts

1 Sermon cvii. 2 Sermon clxv. 3 Sermon clxvi.

a shadow; why all the place round about him is illuminated by the sun, the reason is in the sun; but of his shadow there is no other reason but the grossness of his own body; why there is any beam of light, any spark of life in my soul, he that is the Lord of light and life, and would not have me die in darkness, is the only cause; but of the shadow of death wherein I sit, there is no cause but my own corruption. And this is the cause why I do sin; why I should sin, there is none at all.”1 One more

instance may be given, rather for its verbal happiness and familiar truth than for any brilliancy of sentiment. "You cannot have a better debtor, a better paymaster than Christ Jesus; for all your entails and all your perpetuities do not so nail, so hoop in, so rivet an estate in your posterity, as to make the Son of God your son too, and to give Christ Jesus a child's part with the rest of your children." For a specimen of ingenious argument and subtlety of deduction, not often equalled, his interpretation of Ezekiel (xxxiv. 19) may be consulted.3

But the glory of Donne resides in the earnest rapture with which he proclaims the freedom, the universality of human redemption through the blood of Jesus Christ. The shadow of the Cross stretches over the entire circle of his eloquence and learning. "No man violates the power of the Father, the

1 Sermon cxxxviii.

2 Sermon clv., at Paul's Cross, 1622.

3 Sermon cv.

wisdom of the Son, the goodness of the Holy Ghost, so much as he who thinks himself out of their reach, or the latitude of their working."

James the First was a learned monarch, and Donne was his favourite preacher. Perhaps some of his conceits grew out of the favour of the patron. There is one circumstance, connected with the ecclesiastical history of that reign, which furnishes a curious and emphatic commentary upon the adulation, which the most devoted and holy men were not ashamed to offer to the king. From the time when James ascended the throne, until Laud prevailed upon Charles the First to alter the custom, "it was the fashion that at whatever time in the service the king might enter, prayers were broken off, the anthem began, and the preacher went into the pulpit."2

Coleridge divided our elder theological writers into three classes 1. Apostolic, or Pauline; 2. Patristic; 3. Papal. Latimer and Ridley would exemplify the first; Andrewes and Donne, the second; while, according to the theory of Coleridge, Bishop Taylor would stand in the front of the third. He is inclined to mark two great divisions, two eras, in the doctrines of the English church; the first extending from Ridley to Field, or from the time of Edward VI. to the closing years of James I.; the second, commencing with that period, and ending with Bull and Stillingfleet. He finds the

1 Sermon cxx.

2 Robertson. How to Conform to the Liturgy, p. 133.

peculiar excellences of the earlier class, in their deep and practical view of the mystery of redemption, regarded in the relation of man to the act and the Author, and including, therefore, what are called the inchoative states of regeneration and saving Grace; while the latter class are thought to have possessed a clearer perception of the nature and necessity of redemption, in the relation of God to man; and especially of the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity, and the Unity in Trinity, which appears in their writings with unmutilated majesty. The last circumstance may be chiefly ascribed to the publication of the famous treatise of Bishop Bull, in 1685.

CHAPTER V.

I. Jeremy Taylor; his autobiography and letters destroyed; compared with Berkeley.-II. His birth; related to the martyr Taylor.-III. Sent to Cambridge grammar-school; removed to Caius College. IV. Bonney's outline of University education at the beginning of the 17th century; Milton's view of it; its true character.-V. Becomes a Fellow of Caius; and is patronized by Laud.VI. Election to All Souls', and presentation to Uppingham; his marriage; interesting letter to his brother-inlaw.-VII. Dark days; is deprived of his living by the parliament; his successor described.-VIII. Attends the army as one of the king's chaplains; his military phraseology noticed.

ORREGGIO is said to be the only great

painter of Italy, who left no authenticated portrait of himself; of the still more interesting delineations of the mind, which autobiography supplies, literature possesses few specimens. Those whom we admire the most, we generally know the least; and if we hope to discover any lineaments of Shakspere, or Spenser, they must be sought in their works. It might have once been expected that Taylor would have escaped the general destiny of genius. His lineal descendant, William Todd Jones, among the rich materials he had collected for a history of his celebrated ancestor, enumerated