the tears of holy joy roll down your cheek, as often as you anticipate that day when you will sin no more?

And then "to see Jesus!" "To be for ever with the Lord!" What a prospect is this! True, it is seldom clear and bright to human eye. Yet the shades of night do sometimes disappear, and the clouds and gloominess that usually hang over the intervening valley, as if chased away by the light of the resurrection morn, retire; and reveal to the suffering saint as to Stephen, "the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God." It is enough; "for ever with the Lord." No more pain, no more care, no more tears, no more sin, no more death! "For ever with the Lord!"

Suppose the Christian, then, to be a man of sorrows; suppose him to have trials peculiar to himself; has he not also corresponding and peculiar joys? If his afflictions abound, do not his consolations superabound? Is there not in these ulterior hopes, resting as they do on that covenant which is ordered in all things and sure,—which is ratified by the blood of Jesus, a mighty power to calm, to solace, to satisfy the mind? Let not your soul be cast down or disquieted within you. Look not only on the painful and severe. Exercise a lively faith in these Divine realities. Believe in God and in his Christ, so shall your troubles cease, and you shall say, as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing!"

THE RISE OF NONCONFORMITY ANTERIOR TO THE
EJECTMENT, A.D. 1662.

MR. EDITOR,-All that belongs to the ejected ministers of 1662, to their character, and to their history, is most interesting. Let them be held in everlasting remembrance! Bartholomew-day is their era. But it is not that of Independents. You must pardon me, therefore, in adverting to a serious error committed by your able essayist for August. He says, that "two thousand clergymen were expelled from the Church of England, and thus became, under God, the fathers and founders of Protestant Nonconformity." Surely he must know that Protestant Nonconformity was long anterior. During the Marian persecutions, our churches in Suffolk and Essex were violently harassed, and ruthlessly crushed. From the church in Islington, Rough and Simpson were dragged to the stake of Smithfield. Our real "fathers and founders" are the Separatists, the anti-establishment standard-bearers, the voluntaries to be traced in the reign of Henry the Seventh, until they were more fully indicated in the times of Elizabeth and James. In contradistinction from Presbyterians, they were always called "the Dissenting Brethren." Historic truth is surely worth the

investigation. But I am the more jealous of this confusedness of statement. The ejected, or more honourable would be the epithet, the seceding ministers were generally favourable to the civil incorporation of Christianity, and not very averse to prelacy. Their yoke was made too heavy, and they went forth. We received them with much forbearance. Many came over to us altogether in opinion and in alliance. Others never officiated publicly again in any community. The larger number held to a theoretic Presbyterianism, which they either could not or would not practically enforce. How often are we now subjected to rebuke by the citation of this example! "Independents have surrendered the principles of their forefathers! The men of 1662, their fathers and founders,' declined not state patronage and support. They reluctantly withdrew. But their degenerate descendants repudiate both." All this is very just,—at least, if the pedigree be sound, we have mightily diverged. But they are not "our fathers and founders." They merely brought an accession to us. We boast a higher and a purer line. Our heraldry quarters no symbol of this world, or of its kingdoms. The fathers to whom we give reverence were martyrs unto the death. They died to confirm their testimony against all civil interference in religion. It was not a quiet, exclusive article with them: it was their stand and profession. Bartholomew-day is a day of illustrious witnesses: let it be recorded, kept, celebrated,-but it is a day-late, not foremost,-secondary, not transcendent, mixed, not cloudless,-in the progress of Protestant Nonconformity.

As for myself, I wish to avoid all the modern types and organisations of Dissent. I read the sayings of the first Separatists. I turn to Robinson and Ainsworth, Thacker and Penry, Barrowe and Greenwood. Their dissent is mine. It may sometimes happen that I fall in with a brother who dreams that he is far beyond me in his lights and liberal advances. On a little comparison, I find him much in the rear of my prototypes. I make no boast of having always held the principles which are now applauded by some, and decried by others, as new. I may say that I never learned any other. They were taught my childhood. My only pain is, when beloved friends, cradled in Independency, labour argument to prove what were from the first our elementary principles, and as discoveries, attempt to give them an aspect of novelty. Sound theology and pristine Nonconformity admit of nothing new.

Leeds.

R. W. H.

MEMORABLE DAYS IN SEPTEMBER.

Sept. 1, 1553. John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, examined before Queen Mary and her council, and committed to the Fleet Prison.

2, 1666. The Great Fire of London broke out.

3, 1651. The Battle of Worcester, in which the forces of Charles II. were

routed by Oliver Cromwell.

3, 1658. Oliver Cromwell died.

3, 1759. The Jesuits expelled from Portugal.

4, 1574. Thomas Gataker born.

7, 1833. Mrs. Hannah More died.

8, 1500. Peter Martyr, the Florentine Reformer, and professor of divinity at Oxford, born.

8, 1720. The plague broke out at Marseilles, and swept away eighteen thousand human beings.

9, 1675. Dr. Lazarus Seaman, ejected by the Act of Uniformity, in 1662,

died.

12 & 14, 1661. The bodies of several Commonwealth leaders taken from Westminster Abbey.

,, 13, 1565. William Farel, the Swiss Reformer, died.

13, 1759. General Wolfe killed in the Battle of Quebec.

14, 1812. The Russians set fire to Moscow, previous to Buonaparte's taking possession of the city.

,, 16, 1519. John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's, and founder of St. Paul's school, died.

16, 1657. Philip Henry ordained to the ministry.

,, 17, 1585. King Henry IV. of France received absolution from Pope Clement VIII.

19, 1555. Robert Glover burnt at Coventry.

,, 20, 1749. Charter issued by the Elector of Saxony, empowering the "United

Brethren" to form settlements in any part of the Saxon dominions, and conceding to them full liberty of conscience.

,, 21, 1558. The Emperor Charles V. died.

,, 21, 1688. Colonel Gardiner born.

,, 21, 1745. Colonel Gardiner killed at Preston Pans.

,, 22, 1795. The London Missionary Society formed, after a sermon by Dr.

Haweis.

23, 1415. Jerome of Prague abjured the evangelical doctrine at Constance.

23, 1771. John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, died.

,, 24, 1640. Charles I. convoked the Long Parliament.

25, 1643. The "Solemn League and Covenant" subscribed.

,, 27, 1590. Pope Urban VII. died at Rome, after a pontificate of twelve days.

,, 27, 1660. Vincent de Paul died.

,, 27, 1681. Disputation of Philip Henry, James Owen, and Jonathan Roberts,

with Lloyd, Bishop of St. Asaph, and Henry Dodwell, in the Town Hall at Oswestry.

27, 1729. Great Fire at Constantinople, in which seven thousand persons

perished.

29, 1560. Gustavus Vasa died.

,, 29, 1613. The New River completed.

30, 1554. Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer cited by Cardinal Pole.

,, 30, 1770. George Whitefield died.

Although our present list is a long one, it would have been easy to lengthen it, especially if we had noticed some remarkable battles which have been fought in the month. But though battles have their moral, they hardly fall within our scope; and though some of those which have been fought in September,-as that of Poictiers, for instance, which was fought on the 19th,—are considered highly honourable to British valour, we are not studious of such honour. We long for the time when, according to God's promise, men "shall beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning-hooks," when "nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." The battles noticed in our list are all of them, on some account or other, especially memorable. Those of Worcester and Preston Pans were civil conflicts, the bitterest and most hateful of all. On the anniversary of the former, Cromwell, the victor, died. In the latter, Colonel Gardiner, whose remarkable conversion and life are so well known through Dr. Doddridge's memoir, was butchered by a Highlander within sight of his own dwelling-house, and on the anniversary of his birth. But the horrors of war reached their climax in the Russian campaign of 1812, after the burning of Moscow. The history of that campaign, as narrated by Count Ségur, is a history of suffering to which we can imagine no parallel. The reverses and miseries of the grand army' in their retreat far exceed the grasp, not only of language but imagination; and they were risked and endured to gratify the insatiate ambition of a selfish, cruel, and perfidious tyrant, whom the world has delighted to honour, because he was a successful brigand on a large scale. What gratitude do we not owe to Him who has so long kept war at a distance from our shores, and how zealously should we labour and pray for the setting up of the kingdom of the Prince of Peace!

Providence also speaks this month in the form of pestilence and fire. The most memorable to us of the occasions mentioned in our list is the destruction of the city of London by fire in 1666. This has been graphically described by Evelyn and Pepys, who witnessed the conflagration. A short account of it, mainly derived from theirs, was given in the Penny Magazine for August 31st, 1833. It was also described in a book, entitled "God's terrible Voice in the City by Plague and by Fire," written by Thomas Vincent, who had been ejected from St. Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, in 1662, but devoted himself, during the plague, at the imminent hazard of his life, to the conversion and instruction of his perishing fellow-citizens.* Evelyn's

* In the paper of the "Penny Magazine" just noticed, Thomas Vincent is described, possibly by mistake, as though he were the incumbent of St. Mary Magdalen at the time. But whether so described by oversight or design, it is not right

description of the scene which he beheld from Bankside, on the second day of the fire, is extremely moving. The flames had, by this time, possession of the whole of Gracechurch Street and Lombard Street, with

to overlook the zeal and intrepidity with which, in the face of the law, he discharged his ministry, on the occasion mentioned above. He was, on the breaking out of the plague, assistant to Mr. Doolittle, in his academy at Islington, who used many arguments and entreaties to dissuade him from his purpose, but without sucThe reader will find some details relating to this matter in Palmer's Nonconformists' Memorial, vol. i. pp. 155, 156, second edition. The case is thus stated by Vincent himself, in his work above-mentioned:

cess.

"Now some ministers (formerly put out of their places, who did abide in the city when most of the ministers in place were fled, and gone from the people as well as from the disease, into the countries) seeing the people crowd so fast into the grave and eternity, who seemed to cry as they went for spiritual physicians, and perceiving the churches to be open, and finding pamphlets flung about the streets of pulpits to be let, they judged that the law of God and nature did now dispense with, yea, command their preaching in public places, though the law of man (as it is supposed in ordinary cases) did forbid them to do it. Surely, if there had been a law that none should practise physic in the city, but such as were licensed by the College of Physicians, and most of those, when there was the greatest need of them, should in the time of the plague have retired into the country, and other physicians, who had as good skill in physic, and no licence, should have staid amongst the sick, none would have judged it to have been a breach of law, in such an extraordinary case, to endeavour by their practice, though without a licence, to save the lives of those who by good care and physic were capable of a cure; and they could hardly have freed themselves from the guilt of murder of many bodies, if for a nicety of law, in such a case of necessity, they should have neglected to administer physic. The case was the same with the unlicensed ministers, who stayed, when so many of the licensed ones were gone; and as the need of souls was greater than the need of bodies (the sickness of the one being more universal and dangerous than the sickness of the other, and the saving or losing of the soul being so far beyond the preservation or death of the body,) so the obligation upon ministers was stronger, and the motive to preach greater; and for them to have incurred the guilt of soulmurder, by their neglect to administer soul-physic, would have been more heinous and unanswerable. That they were called by the Lord into public, I suppose few of any seriousness will deny, when the Lord did so eminently own them in giving many seals of their ministry unto them."

As the absence of any very particular dates in the history of the plague prevents our including that impressive and memorable visitation in our list of notices, we shall avail ourselves of this note to give a representation of some of its moral results. We shall do this in the words of Vincent, whose narrative, as above quoted, continues as follows:

"Now they are preaching, and every sermon was with them as if they were preaching their last. Old Time seemed now to stand at the head of the pulpit, with its great scythe, saying with a hoarse voice, Work while it is called To-day,—at night I will mow thee down. Grim Death seems to stand at the side of the pulpit, with his sharp arrows, saying, Do thou shoot God's arrows, and I will shoot mine.

"Ministers now had awakening calls to seriousness and fervour in their ministerial work. To preach on the side and brink of the pit into which thousands were tumbling--to pray under such near views of eternity-might be a means to stir up the spirit more than ordinary.