tives he was afraid of George, "for his going after new lights." The young man could afford to smile in himself at such fears, knowing that the Lord had opened in him the desire and, in part, the perception of a better way.*

Nothing had occurred as yet to embitter the relations between them; but Fox, in introducing Stephens' name into his Journal, adds this pointed note: "This priest afterwards became my great persecutor." It would seem as if Fox was utterly unable to forget, however much he may have forgiven, that scene in the churchyard at Drayton which we have described. He had been insulted in the midst of his kith and kin, made a butt and laughing-stock above the graves of his forefathers; and though the Spirit triumphed by him in the end, he could by no means efface the memory of the riotous and unholy work which preceded. At least this is the explanation to which we are compelled to resort in accounting for his strong language respecting Stephens. For the rector of Drayton was at once too generous and too just a man to be his enemy. None of his reported dealings with Fox will bear out the charge of persecution. The nearest approach to such a spirit was in his conduct at Market Bosworth. Surprised at the appearance of George Fox during a lecture in the parish church, “he raged much," on his old parishioner attempting to speak to him and to the congregation, and told them the young man was mad, and bade people not hear him. Now here is not persecution, so much as the self-defence of a preacher, whose prerogative is attacked in the very midst of its lawful exercise. It is true that a minister's lightest words were regarded at that time with a reverence so exceptional, and were likely, in the circumstances, to apply so potent a stimulus to the passions of the crowd, that it was Stephens' duty to be over-careful of the effect of what he said. Yet, with every admiration for the boldness of Fox, and a belief in the frequent necessity of the course he was constrained to take, we feel that there is no great room for either wonder or blame, when we read that at Market Bosworth the people, stirred up by the exciting scene, rose and bundled Fox with his companions out of the church and out of the town, and flung stones at them as they went, without, however, doing

* Journal of George Fox, I. 51-53.

them much hurt. Nor can we be very much surprised that Stephens should be overheard to say of George Fox to his patron, Colonel Purefey, "that there was never such a plant bred in England." Even on the occasion of the Drayton uproar in 1654, Stephens' opening of the dispute was studiously moderate and fair. "Neighbours," said he, “this is the business; George Fox is come to the light of the sun, and now he thinks to put out my starlight."

It is all the more necessary to depict Nathaniel Stephens' attitude towards George Fox in its true colours, because not only is that attitude typical to some extent of the relations existing between Quaker and Puritan through all the Commonwealth-time, but Stephens seems to have conducted himself in trying circumstances with a generosity which was superior to the prejudices of his class. He did not, we may feel certain, any more than George Fox, ever forget that afternoon's work at Drayton. But he seems to have forgiven the discomfiture of his party, and to have henceforth let the Quakers alone, interfering with them neither by word nor by deed. Joseph Smith has admitted him to the ranks of adverse writers, doubtless remembering the epithet of persecutor applied to him by Fox. As an author, however, he has certainly done nothing to deserve this collocation.

The earliest of his works, which does not seem known to our compiler (probably because the source of his information was Dr. Williams' Library, which does not contain it), is entitled, A Precept for the Baptism of Infants, out of the New Testament, and partly against the Cavils of Mr. Everard in his late Treatise entitled Baby-baptism routed, &c. This was published in 1651, and is strictly what it professes to be, a defence of infant baptism on scriptural grounds. It was replied to, among other controversial works on the same side, by John Tombes, "the Coryphæus of Anabaptism," in his Anti-podobaptism, 1652. His remaining works, which are two in number, are duly catalogued in the Bibliotheca Anti-Quakeriana; but they have no right to appear there. The first of them is a Calculation of the Name of the Beast, and kindred apocalyptic matters. It won the high praise of Matthew Poole, who has adopted its method of

* Journal of George Fox, I. 70.

interpretation in his Synopsis Criticorum; and it will bear reading at the present time for the good sense, candour and practical spirit which abound in it. The author discards at the outset the idea that the "Name" of the Beast is to be sought in any special combination of letters and syllables. He construes it to denote the Headship of an alien power, opposed to the dominion of Christ. The "Mark" of the Beast is "the publick owning of subjection to this Headship;" and so on of the remaining particulars of this muchabused prophecy. The arguments by which he arrives at his positions are remarkable for their admixture of plain common sense with curiously scholastic trains of thought, and a singular array of forgotten authorities.

The main interest of the book, however, lies in its references to contemporary difficulties, and seventeenth-century forms of alienation from the only true spiritual dominion, the headship of Jesus Christ. Among others whom he thinks in danger of straying from the fold, he exhorts "them who amongst us have departed from ordinances and from Scriptures, and are now for extraordinary revelations." Here was a direct opportunity of indulging in an attack upon the Friends, if he had been so disposed. But he refrains. Nay, he does more. That he may not be supposed guilty of covert allusions, he thus names and sets them aside from the path of his argument: "I will not make mention of that sect which goeth under the name of the Quakers; what they are, and who they are, God knows: I do desire to contain myself in such things as I have some experience of."* And then he goes on to mention by name, and affectionately to expostulate with some of his old friends the Anabaptists, on their tendency to slight all forms, and their endeavour to extinguish all book-learning. This is not in the tenor of a persecutor's style. Nor, again, is his reference to the Catholic Church, an institution which almost every Protestant expositor of the Apocalypse considers himself specially commissioned to revile. "Though the friends and followers of the Church of Rome," he admits, "are the greatest enemies that we have, yet nevertheless had we the heart of Christ, and did we see the greatness of their sin and the grievousness of the wrath to come, we would have

* Plain and Easie Calculation, 1656, p. 267.

tender affections towards them, we would mourn over them with many tears."* Equally catholic in temper is Nathaniel Stephens' last work, a treatise on Original Sin, 1658, though it bears testimony to the soundness of his Calvinism, and makes strenuous fight against the Arminianism of Jeremy Taylor, and the Universalism of Robert Everard, the Anabaptist.

It is pleasantest to think of him, ere we part company, not as buckling on his armour of controversy, or even as explicating the mysteries of the Apocalypse, but as penning these excellent words of the Postscript to his Plain and Easie Calculation, words which Fox might have penned just as readily and truthfully as Stephens: "My purpose is not to speak anything to please or to displease any party: neither can I tell how any party will be pleased with me: it may be I shall displease all. However, I do desire to please mine own Conscience, in delivering that which I conceive to be a truth of God."+ Who can doubt that the conviction of having fulfilled to the utmost the spirit of these words, had power to lighten the old man's fourteen dreary years of lameness and poverty, at Stoke Golding, after his ejection? When a friend knocked at his cottage door, and he could not rise from his chair, nor his blind wife find her way to the latch, "Come in," said he in his cheerful voice, "to the abode of the blind and the lame!" But it was the Church which thought it could dispense with the services of such men as he, that was the abode of the blind and the lame.

We cannot pity the fate of true heroes of conscience, who have proved themselves by their sacrifices. Believing as we do that the spirit of self-sacrifice is one, in spite of the accidents of time and opinion which alienate the mind and love of its exemplifiers, we rejoice to think that, amidst his privations and sufferings, there was room in the old Puritan's heart for an echo of those immortal words which form the dying testimony of poor James Nayler: "There is a Spirit which I feel, that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or Ibid. p. 304.

* Plain and Easie Calculation, p. 5.

It sees to the

whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. end of all temptations: as it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thoughts to any other: if it be betrayed, it bears it; for its ground and spring is the Mercies and Forgiveness of God.... In God alone it can rejoice though none else regard it, or can own its life. . . . I found it alone, being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate places in the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection and eternal holy life." And here we take our leave of Foe and Friend.

ALX. GORDON.

III.-THE DATE OF THE ETHNOLOGICAL TABLE OF GENESIS.

THIS "critically extremely hard chapter," as Dr. Schrader calls it, has been variously portioned out among the several authors of the Book of Genesis, and has accordingly been assigned to the most different dates. Hupfeld and Tuch ascribe the composition of it to the Jehovist; Ilgen, Gramberg, Knobel and Ewald, to the Elohist; while Schrader refers it to his Theocratic Narrator (the Second Elohist of other writers), with the exception of vv. 8-12, 18 b., 21 and 25, which were interpolated by the Prophetic Narrator or Jehovist. Colenso, on the other hand, reverses this; assigning the main bulk of the chapter to the Jehovist, but giving vv. 8-12 to the Deuteronomist Redactor. Indeed, it is quite clear that these verses belong to a later hand than does the chief part of the matter in which they are embedded. Apart from philological considerations, if they are omitted exactly 70 names are left-the sacred number of the nations of the world, to which the Bishop of Natal suggests Deut. xxxii. 8 may contain a reference-while the insertion of them not only breaks the context, disagrees with the account of the genealogy of Cush in the preceding verse, and cannot be harmonized with the origin of Asshur given in v. 22, but is also the sole instance of an individual, and not a tribe or district, being mentioned throughout the chapter. Böhmer's opinion, therefore, that only v. 8 b., together with the phrases, "the brother of Japhet the elder"