CHAPTER VII.

FIRST HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: RELIGIOUS, PHILOSOPHICAL, AND POLITICAL WRITERS.

1. Owen Feltham.-2. Henry More.-3. Richard Sibbes.-4. Jeremy Taylor.-5. William Prynne.-6. Peter Heylin.-7. William Chillingworth.-8. Philip Hunton; Sir Robert Filmer.-9. John Gauden. - 10. John Milton.

1. THE religious mind of England had in the days of James I. and of Charles I., as always, manifold expression. There were many readers of the "Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political," published about 1628, by Owen Feltham, a man of middle-class ability, with a religious mind, who was maintained in the household of the Earl of Thomond. His Resolves are one hundred and forty-six essays on moral and religious themes, the writing of a quiet churchman, who paid little attention to the rising controversies of his day.

2. Henry More represented Platonism. He was born in 1614, at Grantham, in Lincolnshire, educated at Eton and Christ Church, Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship. He abandoned Calvinism, was influenced by Tauler's "Theologia Germanica," and fed his spiritual aspirations with writings of Plato and the Neoplatonists, Plotinus and Iamblichus, and Platonists of Italy at the time of the revival of scholarship. Henry More was for a time tutor in noble families, obtained a prebend at Gloucester, but soon resigned it in favor of a friend. Content with a small competence, he declined preferment, and sought to live up to his own ideal as a Christian Platonist. He lived on through the reign of Charles II., and died in 1687, aged seventy-three. The Platonism which had been a living influence upon Europe at the close of the fifteenth century had its last representative in Henry More. In 1642 he published "vzdia Platonica; or, a Platonical Song of the Soul," in four books;

with prefaces and interpretations, published in 1647, as "Philosophicall Poems." The first book, "Psychozoia" (the Life of the Soul), contained a "Christiano-Platonicall display of life." The Immortality of the Soul was the theme of the second part, "Psychathanasia," annexed to which was a metrical " Essay upon the Infinity of Worlds out of Platonick Principles." The third book contained "A Confutation of the Sleep of the Soul, after Death," and was called "Antipsychopannychia," with an Appendix on The Præ-existency of the Soul." Then came "Antimonopsychia," or the fourth part of the "Song of the Soul," containing a confutation of the Unity of Souls; whereunto is annexed a paraphrase upon Apollo's answer concerning Plotinus's soul departed this life. This poem was throughout written in the Spenserian stanza, with imitation also of Spenser's English. The books were divided into cantos, and each canto headed in Spenser's manner. Thus, the first canto of Book I. is headed:

"Struck with the sense of God's good will,

The immortality

Of souls I sing; praise with my quill

Plato's philosophy."

But there is no better reason why it should not have been all written in prose, than the evidence it gives that Platonism came as poetry to Henry More, although he was not himself a great poet. He also published, with a dedication to Cudworth, the Hebrew Professor at Cambridge, his "Conjectura Cabbalistica," a triple interpretation of the three first chapters of Genesis, with a "Defence" of it. The Jewish Cabala was conceived to be a traditional doctrine or exposition of the Pentateuch, which Moses received from the mouth of God while he was on the mount with him. Henry More's book expounded “a threefold Cabala," which was, he said, "the dictate of the free reason of my mind, heedfully considering the written text of Moses, and carefully canvassing the expositions of such interpreters as are ordinarily to be had upon him." The threefold division of his Cabala" was into literal, philosophic, and moral. More wrote also against atheism, and on theological topics.

3. Intense religious feeling, Puritan in tone, was expressed in the ser

mons and books of Richard Sibbes (born in 1577), who was master of Catherine Hall when Milton was at Cambridge, and a frequent preacher in the university. Of the two great English universities, Cambridge was the stronghold of the Puritans. Sermons by Sibbes were published as his "Saints' Cordials," in 1629. To his "Bruised Reede and Smoking Flax," in which other sermons were collected, Baxter said that he owed his conversion. Richard Sibbes died in 1635.

4. Jeremy Taylor was born at Cambridge, in August, 1613, the son of a barber, who, according to one account, sent him, when three years old, to a free school then just founded by Dr. Stephen Perse. At thirteen, Jeremy Taylor left this school to enter Caius College as a sizar, or poor scholar. He had proceeded to the degree of B.A., and been ordained, by the time he was twenty-one. A college friend then asked young Taylor to preach for him at St. Paul's. He had, like Milton, outward as well as inward beauty, and a poet's mind. Archbishop Laud heard of his sermons, called him to preach at Lambeth, and became his friend. Laud having more patronage and influence at Oxford than at Cambridge, Taylor was incorporated there, and the archbishop procured for him a fellowship of All Souls, by using his sole authority as Visitor of the College to overrule the statutes which required that candidates should be of three years' standing in the university. Laud also made the young divine his chaplain; and in March, 1638, obtained for him the rectory of Uppingham, in Rutlandshire. One year later, in May, 1639, Taylor was married. Three years afterwards his youngest son died, in May, 1642, and his wife died shortly afterwards. He was left with two infant sons, at the time when the breach between the king and Commons had become irreparable. Then he was made one of the king's chaplains, and joined the king; perhaps when, in August, the latter was on his way to hoist the royal standard at Nottingham. In October, 1642, the Parliament resolved on sequestration of the livings of the loyal clergy. Jeremy Taylor, like Herrick and others, was deprived. The indecisive battle of Edge Hill was fought in the same month. In November, the king marched upon London; there was a fight at Brentford. The Londoners mustered their trained bands. It was the occasion of Milton's sonnet, "When the

Assault was Intended to the City." But the Royalists retired, and at the end of November the king was at winter-quarters in Oxford. There Jeremy Taylor published his "Episcopacy Asserted," and was rewarded, at the age of twenty-nine, with the degree of Doctor of Divinity. On the 26th of January, 1643, Parliament passed a bill for the utter abolition of Episcopacy. Early in 1644, Jeremy Taylor was a chaplain with the royal army in Wales. He was imprisoned for a time, after the defeat at Cardigan; then married a Welsh lady, Joanna Bridges, who had some property at Llangadock, in Carmarthenshire; and with two companions - William Nicholson, afterwards Bishop of Gloucester, and William Wyatt, afterwards a Prebendary of Lincoln - Jeremy Taylor kept a school, Newton Hall, in Carmarthenshire, at Llanvihangel Aberbythyrch. In this Welsh village Taylor wrote his best works, and first, in 1647, his "Liberty of Prophesying," a plea for freedom to all in the interpretation of the Bible, with one simple standard of external authority, the Apostles' Creed. In this book Jeremy Taylor showed, of course, the natural bent of his mind towards authority in Church and State. He would have a church of every country contained within its political boundaries, and allowed the ruler more power to secure uniformity than would be practically consistent with his theory; but this represents only the form of thought which was as natural to him as his different form of thought to Milton. It was warmed in Jeremy Taylor with true fervor of devotion, and brought home to the sympathies of men by a pure spirit of Christian charity. The mischiefs of prevailing discord came, he said, "not from this, that all men are not of one mind, for that is neither necessary nor possible, but that every opinion is made an article of faith, every article is a ground of quarrel, every quarrel makes a faction, every faction is zealous, and all zeal pretends for God, and whatsoever is for God cannot be too much. We by this time are come to that pass, we think we love not God except we hate our brother."

And these were the last words in the book: "I end with a story which I find in the Jews' books. When Abraham sat at his tent-door, according to his custom, waiting to entertain strangers, he espied an old

man stooping and leaning on his staff, weary with age and travail, coming towards him, who was an hundred years of age; he received him kindly, washed his feet, provided supper, caused him to sit down; but observing that the old man ate and prayed not, nor begged for a blessing on his meat, he asked him why he did not worship the God of heaven. The old man told him that he worshipped the fire only, and acknowledged no other god; at which answer Abraham grew so zealously angry that he thrust the old man out of his tent, and exposed him to all the evils of the night and an unguarded condition. When the old man was gone, God called to Abraham, and asked him where the stranger He replied, 'I thrust him away because he did not worship thee.' God answered him, 'I have suffered him these hundred years, although he dishonored me; and couldst not thou endure him one night, when he gave thee no trouble?' Upon this, saith the story, Abraham fetched him back again, and gave him hospitable entertainment and wise instruction. 'Go thou and do likewise,' and thy charity will be rewarded by the God of Abraham."

was.

In 1649, he published "The Great Exemplar of Sanctity and Holy Life, according to the Christian Institution, described in the History of the Life and Death of Christ;" in 1650, his "Holy Living," with "Prayers for our Rulers," altered afterwards to "Prayers for the King;" in 1651, his "Holy Dying;" and the first volume for the "Summer Half-year" of "A Course of Sermons for all the Sundays in the Year." His friend, Lady Carbery, died in October, 1650, and Taylor preached her funeral sermon with the tender piety of friendship. When he wrote verse, he failed as a poet. He was no master in that form of expression; but natural grace of mind, with a fine culture, liveliness of fancy, the unaffected purity of his own standard of life upon earth, and, in the midst of all the tumult of the time, "the strange evenness and untroubled passage" with which he was himself, as he said of Lady Carbery, sliding towards his ocean of God and of infinity with a certain and silent motion, has filled his prose with the true poetry of life. In 1655 he applied the name of Lord Carbery's house to a book of devotion, "The Golden Grove; or, a Manual of Daily Prayers and Litanies fitted to the Days of the Week: also, Festival Hymns, according to the Manner of the Ancient Church." He was imprisoned twice during the Commonwealth, and brought down on himself