4.D 1656.]

HARRINGTON'S OCEANA.

611

of a Commonwealth are the people; these the Lord Archon and his Council divided into freemen or citizens, and servants. The servants were not to share in the government until able to live of themselves. The citizens were divided into youths (from eighteen to thirty) and elders; also, according to their means, into horse and foot; and, according to their habitations, into parishes, hundreds, and tribes. A thousand surveyors, each with a district assigned to him, “being every one furnish'd with a convenient proportion of urns, balls, and balloting-boxes (in the use whereof they had been formerly exercised), and now arriving each at his respective parishes, began with the people by teaching them their first lesson, which was the ballot; and though they found them in the beginning somewhat froward, as at toys, with which (while they were in expectation of greater matters from a Council of Legislators) they conceived themselves to be abused, they came within awhile to think them pretty sport, and at length such as might very soberly be used in good earnest." Then followed an account of the machinery of balloting each parish for deputies, only the elders being the electors; of balloting also for the new pastor by the elders of the congregation in every parish church, with provision saving the rights of all Dissenters; and for the election of justices and high constables, captains and ensigns, coroners and jurymen, by ballot, among deputies of the parishes, and so throughout; "the ballot of Venice, as it is fitted by several alterations, to be the constant and only way of giving suffrage in this Commonwealth." The method of voting by ballot in the national Senate was illustrated by a picture. The full scheme of a Commonwealth was worked out in the "Oceana" with much detail. Harrington's manuscript was seized and carried to Whitehall, but pleasantly recovered by appeal to Cromwell through his daughter Lady Claypole, and published in 1656, inscribed "to His Highness, the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland." Like all books that represented the activity of independent thought on the great questions of the day, Harrington's "Oceana" produced pamphlets in attack and in defence. Its chief opponents were Dr. Henry Ferne, afterwards Bishop of Chester, and Matthew Wren, one of the votaries of experimental science, out of whose meetings the Royal Society was presently to spring, and of whom Harrington said they had "an excellent faculty of magnifying a Flea and diminishing a Commonwealth." Partly to

the opinions of Hobbes and partly to those of Harrington, Richard Baxter opposed his "Holy Commonwealth." Harrington published an abridgment of his political scheme in 1659, as The Art of Lawgiving; and established, in the latter days of the Commonwealth, a club called the Rota, which met at the "Turk's Head," kept by one Miles, in the New Palace Yard, Westminster, and sat round an oval table, with a passage cut in the middle of it by which Miles delivered his coffee. The Rota discussed principles of government, and voted by ballot. Its ballot-box was the first seen in England. Milton's old pupil, Cyriac Skinner, was one of the members of this Club, which was named from a doctrine of its supporters, that in the chief legislative body a third part of the members should rote out by ballot every year and be incapable for three years of re-election; by which principle of rotation Parliament would be completely renewed every ninth year. Magistrates also were to be chosen for only three years, and, of course, by ballot.

13. Richard Baxter, in his Holy Commonwealth; or, Political Aphorisms, opening the true Principles of Government, opposed his title to the heathenish Commonwealth of other theorists, and pleaded the cause of Monarchy. Baxter was born in 1615, at High Ercall, by the Wrekin, in Shropshire. After living ten years there with his grandfather, he went to Eaton Constantine, to his father, who had become very devout after loss of much of his estate by gambling. Richard Baxter's chief place of education was the free school at Wroxeter. From Wroxeter he went to be the one pupil of Mr. Wicksteed, chaplain of Ludlow Castle (ch. viii. § 53); then he taught in Wroxeter school for a few months, had cough with spitting of blood, and began the systematic study of theology. "My faults," said Baxter, "are no disgrace to any University, for I was of none; I have little but what I had out of books and inconsiderable helps of country tutors. Weakness and pain helped me to study how to die; that set me on studying how to live." In 1638 Baxter became head master of a free school just founded at Dudley, took orders, went to Bridgenorth, and was forced by Laud's Church policy into Nonconformity. In 1640 he settled in Kidderminster, whence he was driven after two years by Royalist opposition. His life and his thoughts were unsettled by the Civil War. He signed the Covenant, and afterwards repented. He was with the army of the Parliament as military Chaplain, and found there that "the most frequent and vehement

To A.D. 1653.]

RICHARD BAXTER. JOHN HOWE.

613

disputes were for liberty of conscience, as they called it—that is, that the civil magistrate had nothing to do to determine matters of religion by constraint and restraint." He battled against their opinions, and was unpopular, but towards the close of the Civil Wars Baxter had a severe illness, and it was during this illness that he wrote his Saints' Everlasting Rest, first published in 1650. Under the Commonwealth, Baxter was opposed to Cromwell, argued privately with him on his position in the State, and, as we have seen, supported Monarchy in the political discussions of the day.

John Howe, Cromwell's chaplain, was fifteen years younger than Baxter. He was born in 1630, at Loughborough, where his father was minister of the parish. When John Howe was about three years old, his father was suspended and condemned to fine, imprisonment, and recantation by the High Commission Court, for opposing "The Book of Sports," which offended Puritans by encouraging Sunday afternoon amusements, and for praying in his church "that God would preserve the prince in the true religion, which there was cause to fear." King James I.'s Declaration to his subjects concerning lawful sports to be used on Sundays was published in 1618, and professed to have originated in the desire to take away a hindrance to the conversion of Roman Catholics by checking the Puritans in their endeavour to repress "lawfull recreation and exercise upon the Sundayes afternoone, after the ending of all diuine seruice." Charles I. re-issued this declaration in 1633, with an added command for the observance of wakes. The reprint of James's proclamation with the ratification of Charles added was that "Book of Sports" which Howe's father was punished for opposing. He escaped to Ireland, and was there till 1641, when he returned with his boy, and settled in Lancashire. In 1647, John Howe, aged seventeen, entered Christ's College, Cambridge, as a sizar. He took his degree of B.A. at Cambridge, and was at Oxford in the first years of the Commonwealth. He formed there his own system of theology, became M.A. in 1652, was ordained, and became, at two-and-twenty, pastor at Great Torrington, in Devonshire. The energy with which in these days the religious life of England was animating the great social changes may be illustrated by Howe's work for his flock on any one of the frequent fast-days. He began with them at nine a.m., prayed during a quarter of an hour for blessing upon the day's work, then read and explained a chapter for three-quarters of an hour, then prayed for

an hour, then preached for an hour and prayed again for half an hour, then retired for a quarter of an hour's refreshment-the people singing all the while-returned to his pulpit, prayed for another hour, preached for another hour, and finished at four p.m., with one half-hour more of prayer, doing it all singly, and with his whole soul in it all. In 1654 Howe married the daughter of an elder minister. In 1656 he happened to be in London on a Sunday, and went, out of curiosity, to Whitehall Chapel, to see the Lord Protector and his family. But the Lord Protector saw also the young divine in his clerical dress; sent for him after service, and asked him to preach on the following Sunday. He preached, was asked to preach again, and was at last urged by Cromwell to stay by him as his domestic chaplain. He took that office, and was made also lecturer at St. Margaret's, Westminster, the parish church of the House of Commons. In three months he was writing from Whitehall to Baxter, for counsel as to those duties of which it would be most useful for him to remind the rulers, and he was supporting at head-quarters a plan of Baxter's for producing a more open fellowship among Christians of hitherto contending sects. Zealous and fearless enough to preach before Cromwell against a point of the Protector's own faith, Howe was thoroughly tolerant. When Thomas Fuller had to satisfy the Triers-a board for examining ministers before they were inducted to a charge-he was hard pressed upon a particular point, and said to Howe, good-humouredly, "You may observe, sir, that I am a pretty corpulent man, and I have to go through a passage that is very strait; be so kind as to give me a shove and help me through." Howe got him through. John Howe was Cromwell's chaplain to the last, and remained in the same office during the nine months' rule of the Protector's son, Richard. The best of his many books, The Living Temple, appeared in two parts, in 1676 and 1702. Howe lived till 1705.

14. Thomas Fuller (ch. viii. § 59), who married, in 1654, a sister of Lord Baltinglasse, wrote during the Commonwealth his Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650), an account of Palestine and its people, illustrative of Scripture; his Abel Redivivus (1651), being "Lives and Deaths of the Modern Divines, written by several able and learned men ;" and (in 1656), in folio, The Church History of Britain, from the Birth of Christ to 1648, which was not the less a piece of sound, well-studied work for being quaint in style, good-humoured, and witty

Jeremy Taylor (ch. viii. § 70) published, in 1649, The

TO A.D. 1658.] BAXTER. FULLER. JEREMY TAYLOK.

615

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" (the second, for the "Winter Half-year," followed in 1653) of A Course of Sermons for all the Sundaies in the Year. His friend, Lady Carbery, died in October, 1650, and Taylor preached her funeral sermon with the tender piety of friendship, Jeremy Taylor, when he wrote verse, 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 Letanies fitted to the Dayes of the Week: also, Festival Hymns, according to the Manner of the Ancient Church. Jeremy Taylor was imprisoned twice during the Commonwealth, and brought down on himself a controversy upon original sin, by his Unum Necessarium; or, The Doctrine and Practice of Repentance. In 1656 he lost two children by smallpox and fever, and had only one son left of the family by his second marriage. In 1657 he published a Discourse on the Measures and Offices of Friendship, addressed to Mrs. Catherine Philips, with whom we shall meet again as the first Englishwoman who earned good fame as a poetess. At this time Jeremy Taylor was preaching in London, and had John Evelyn among his friends. Lord Conway, who had a residence at Portmore, offered him the post of alternate lecturer at Lisburn, nine miles from his house. Taylor accepted it, and went to Ireland in the summer of 1658. Even then he was not left wholly in peace; "for," he wrote, "a Presbyterian and a madman have informed against me as a dangerous man to their religion, and for using the sign of the cross in baptism." He was taken to Dublin, but obtained easy acquittal.

15. John Bunyan was born in 1628, the son of a poor tinker, at Elstow, in Bedfordshire. He was sent to a free school for the poor, and then worked with his father. As a youth of