the law." But he never for a moment included episcopacy in his censure of certain bishops. Of the order he said in the same speech, "I do not believe them to be jure divino, but neither do I believe them to be injuria humana. I neither consider them as necessary nor as unlawful, but as convenient or inconvenient." He was confident that the House would "not think fit to abolish upon a few days' debate an order which hath lasted (as appears by story) in most churches from Christ to Calvin, or in an instant change the whole face of the Church, like the scene of a masque." His second speech is in thorough keeping with the first. He repudiates the necessity of episcopacy, while insisting on its expediency. Its grounds, he said, were ancient, general, and uncontradicted in the first and best times; episcopacy had agreed very well with the constitution of the laws and the disposition of the people; and Englishmen had lived very happily and gloriously under that form of government. But he expresses, at the same time, his dread of the encroachments of ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and mentions the jus divinum only to protest against it. It was a saying of his, that "those who hated bishops, hated them worse than the devil; and they who loved them, did not love them so well as their dinner." He himself had no hatred either of his dinner or of bishops; but he loved neither so well as liberty and truth. He resisted their extravagant pretensions as firmly as Hampden or Pym; and he thought ecclesiastical courts quite unlike the seventh heaven.

No satisfactory biography of Falkland has as yet been written; and this for obvious reasons. The material is not very abundant; and most persons who are tempted to begin the search are disappointed with the nature of the material which they find. The advocates of the Long Parliament as opposed to the king, the admirers of Hampden, Pym, or Cromwell, are not attracted by a decided royalist who died fighting in the king's army, and has even been suspected (though, we believe, without a shadow of reason) of being privy to the king's attempt to seize the five members. Those, on the other hand, who approach Falkland from Clarendon's point of view, expecting to find in him a stanch advocate for all that is generally meant by "Church and King," if they weigh the facts of his life fairly, will probably feel themselves disappointed. We all know the sad unbuttoned man, negligent of his person and careless of his life, abrupt in manner and conversation, and grown into a perfect habit of uncheerfulness, who, when sitting among his friends, would, after deep silence and frequent sighs, with a shrill and sad accent, ingeminate the words Peace, peace. But we must not judge of his life by its closing days, by the opinions of his later companions, or by the sentiments of his friend and

panegyrist. The quick little man, full of spirit and learning, at once a soldier and a scholar, nice in dress, sharp in retort, epigrammatic in diction; imprisoned in the Fleet in boyhood for some outbreak of youthful passion, and not without some suspicion of gallantry even at the time of his death; fond of freedom, and watchful against the encroachment of authority; loving learning much, but reason more; taking the king's side actively, but not with the spirit of one who thinks that his cause is wholly good and must conquer; a Christian, rather than a churchman; very outspoken against bishops and episcopal abuses; and accused, with however little reason, of Socinianism, can scarcely, at the distance of two hundred years, gain the hearty attachment of conservative students who admire the Caroline divines. Were he alive now, and a member for the University of Oxford, his seat would be as insecure as that of Mr. Gladstone. Cautious men would scarcely account him "safe;" and suspicious men would breathe some hint of heresy. His house at Great Tew was indeed "a college in a purer air;" but it had no touch of a cloister. Intellectually, as well as physically, its atmosphere was very different from that of St. John's at Oxford.

But the burden of the civil war lay far more heavily on Falkland than the part which he played in theological controversy. To this he was partly attracted by his intellectual activity, and partly forced by the circumstances of his family. His mother was a Romanist; his two younger brothers, while yet children, were stolen from his house and carried beyond seas, that they might be brought up in the same belief; and his two sisters, as Clarendon says, anticipating a modern term, were "perverted." It is not surprising that under these circumstances he took up his pen and attacked the papal infallibility. But his attack is that of a chivalrous combatant who wishes to defeat his adversary, but not to disgrace him unfairly, or to ply him with reproachful words as auxiliaries or substitutes for better weapons. "I have ever thought," he says, "that there should be as little bitterness in a treatise of controversy as in a love-letter; and that the contrary way was both void of Christian charity and human wisdom, as serving only to fright away the game, and make the adversaries unwilling to receive instruction from him, from whom they have received injuries." "I desire," he elsewhere says, "that recrimination may not be used; for though it be true that Calvin hath done it, and the Church of England a little (which is a little too much),-for negare manifesta non audeo, et excusare immodica non possum,—yet she, confessing she may err, is not so chargeable with any fault as those which pretend they cannot, and so will be sure never to mend it."

And he reckons among the chief causes which make so many leave the Church of Rome, "this opinion of damning so many, and this custom of burning so many, this breeding up of those, who knew nothing else in any point of religion, yet to be in a readiness to say, To the fire with him, to hell with him; as Polybius says of a certain furious faction of an army of several nations, and consequently of several languages, óvoν тò pîμa τοῦτο συνίεσαν, βάλλε—they all joined only in understanding this word, throw at him."

It is not easy to estimate with exactness the literary obligations of Chillingworth to Falkland. He used his library, and had the advantage of his conversation; perhaps, as has been asserted, he availed himself directly of his learning. For Chillingworth had not the reputation of being a very learned man. It is said of him that he did not study much, but that when he did, he did much in little time. Yet he was not exactly the man to take his learning at secondhand, while he was just the person whose learning was liable to be underrated. Falkland wrote easily, like the gentlemen of his day; did not trouble himself much about the structure of his sentences, and admitted at once a classical allusion, or a Greek quotation, if it came ready to his hand. But Chillingworth was a disputant by profession, and looked warily to his tools. He used, we are told, to walk much in Trinity College gardens, keeping, as he walked, a sharp look-out for some unhappy victim whom he might entangle and baffle with his logic. Like most effective arguers, he trusted little to abstruse research, and much to retort and homely illustration. He threw off the old scholastic armour entirely, and relied on a rapier and his own bare arm. Indeed, that skill in intellectual fence which was the strength of the controversialist was the weakness of the man. On one occasion, we know, being worsted by a Jesuit controversialist, and convinced by experience that he was not infallible, he inferred too hastily that the Church of Rome was. But he gained little satisfaction from his half-year's communion with that Church, and his very brief sojourn among the Jesuits at Douay. It is said, indeed, that he did not find himself sufficiently well treated among the Jesuits; that they made him porter, to try his temper and exercise his obedience, and that he could not stand the test. And this is probable enough; for Chillingworth was hasty, impetuous, excitable; and the Church of Rome is quite wise in driving from itself the quickest wits, if they cannot be thoroughly broken to harness. A little contemplative leisure, in a position in which he could not conveniently find an opponent with whom he could argue, may have combined with letters from his friends. in England to convince him that there were two sides to Roman

infallibility, as to most questions, and that on the side which he had not hitherto explored there was a precipice of huge and fatal assumptions. So he came back to England and to Protestantism, to argue still, but to use argument more wisely than before. Once, perhaps, he argued for the sake of argument; now, he argued for the sake of truth. As to truth, he found, like most persons who endeavour to discover it mainly by force of reasoning, that it was much more easy to discover where it was not than where it was. He never persuaded himself that, in returning to Oxford and to the Church of England, he came back to another but a smaller Rome, which claimed the right to suppress inquiry and to silence conscience. His restless, sceptical mind had doubts about many things, and about the Church of England among the number. There were points of her formularies which he found great difficulty in assenting to; and as a controversialist he defended, not his own Church, but Protestantism in general. Seeing, as he did, plainly, and with his own eyes, popes against popes, councils against councils, some fathers against others, and the same fathers against themselves; having searched for interpretations of holy Scripture, delivered by tradition from the Apostles, and having found few or none, he discovered no certainty but of holy Scripture only for any considerate man to build on. In believing holy Scripture to contain all necessary truth, and in this belief only, he found, as he avowed, rest for the sole of his foot. And, therefore, ignoring alike for the time the doctrine of Luther and Calvin and Melancthon, the Confessions of Augsburg and Geneva, the Catechism of Heidelberg and the Articles of the Church of England, he declared the Bible, and the Bible only, to be the religion of Protestants.

The Religion of Protestants a safe Way to Salvation was published at the close of 1637. Laud was then in the full swing of his power. In the June of that year Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick had been sentenced in the Star-Chamber, and had lost their ears. In July Laud's old rival, Williams bishop of Lincoln, had been censured in the Star-Chamber, fined 8000l., imprisoned at the king's pleasure, and suspended by the king's commission. In August a royal proclamation had declared that processes might issue out of the ccclesiastical court in the names of the bishops; and that a patent under the great seal was not necessary for the keeping of the said ecclesiastical courts, or for the enabling of citations, suspensions, excommunications, and other censures of the Church. Resistance to the liturgy was beginning in Scotland, and an anonymous libeller had fixed his libel on the south gate of St. Paul's, declaring that the Church of England was a candle

in the snuff, going out in a stench; but the Archbishop of Canterbury kept his candlestick conspicuously on high, and trimmed the snuff with sharp scissors. His feelings with regard to the foreign Protestant churches were a matter of common notoriety. A few years before, he had endeavoured to force the English factories in Holland, Hamburg, and elsewhere into exact conformity with the English liturgy. He had effectually discouraged the attendance of the English ambassador at Paris at the Huguenot church at Charenton. He had robbed the French, Dutch, and Walloon churches in London, Norwich, and Canterbury of that free use of their own discipline. which had been wisely granted to them by former kings and tolerated by former archbishops. Not even his close and intimate relations with the king and the royal family could induce him to allow a draft of the royal letters patent on behalf of the banished ministers of the Palatinate to pass unchallenged, in which it was asserted that the religion of the Palatine ministers was true, and the same with our own. It might well have seemed a bold thing in Chillingworth to publish his pronounced opinions in the face of one whose strong hierarchical ideas were backed by the unflinching exercise of arbitrary power. A divine without preferment, and with the stigma of recent Romanism clinging to his name, he made common cause with Huguenot and Calvinist in England and abroad, when the archbishop had recently oppressed and discouraged them. Poor Bishop Hall, only two years later, was severely criticised by Laud for not being strong enough on behalf of bishops in a book whose very title proclaimed "the Divine Right of Episcopacy;" yet Chillingworth was connecting the Church of England with bodies which held episcopacy to be contrary to the law of God. Laud was strong for the value of tradition as an interpreter of holy Scripture: Chillingworth's watchword is "the Bible only." Laud was adding forms to the liturgy in England, and endeavouring to enforce its use in Scotland: Chillingworth had not only scruples as to some of its contents, but would gladly have seen some new form of worshiping God proposed, which was taken wholly out of Scripture. But in this, as in so many other cases, things as they were differed widely from what we might have expected. Laud was throughout the patron of Chillingworth: it was to Laud that Chillingworth ascribed his reconversion to the Church of England; it was Laud whom, two years before the publication of his book, he had feared to offend by declining Church preferment; it was to examiners appointed by Laud that Chillingworth submitted his book for approbation before it was published. Such are the facts, strange as they may seem at first; facts which can be adequately explained