That was the sort of thing that the primate and his like-minded bishops, sought to impose on men as 'SOLEMNITY !' That 'mounte- bank holiness' (it is Sir Philip Sidney's word of scorn) -vvas to be its translation of the grand old ' Beauty of Holiness,' (1 Chron. xvi. 29 ; Ps. xxix. 2, and xcvi. 9).* It is no light occasion that
* 'Beauty of lioliness.' The vehement words of John Milton, stern as Jeremiah. a few year later, are memorable, and may not be passed by : — ' Now for their de- meanour within the church, how have they disfigur'd and defac't that more than angelick brightnes, the unclouded serenity of Christian religion, with the dark over- casting of superstitious coaps and flaminical vestures. . . . Tell me. ye priests, where- fore this gold, wherefore these roabs and surplices, over the gospel ? Is our religion guilty of the first trespasse, and hath need of cloathing to cover her nakednesse? What does this else but cast an ignominey upon the perfection of Christ's ministery by seeking to adorn it with that which was the poor remedy of our shame ? Believe it, wondrous doctors, all corporeal resemblances of inward holinesse and beauty are noio past.' (The Keason of Church Government, B. II. ch. ii. p. 154. Mitford's Milton. Prose Works, vol. i. Pickering.) Elsewhere, denouncing the ' chaff of over-dated ceremonies,' he thus describes the Laudian ' prelaty :' — ' They began to draw down all the divine intercourse betwixt God and the soul, yea, the very shape of God himself, into an exterior and bodily form, urgently pretending a necessity and obligement of joining the body in a formal reverence and worship circumscribed : they hallowed it, they fumed it, they sprinkled it, they bedecked it, not in robes of
kvi MEMOIR OF EICHAED SIBBES, D.D.
calls for one's judgment of another in so awful and sacred a thing as his religion, however it may be darkened by super- stition, or lightened by the fires of the wildest fanaticism. De- plorable, therefore, as this mummery may be to us, we may not pronounce that it was an unreal, much less that it was* a farcical thing to its chief actor. Such a soul as his, so small, so narrow, may have found channel deep enough for its reve- rence in such return upon an effete ritualism. We may agree with Macaulay's epithet of ' imbecile,' but not with the Puritan's angry charge of 'hypocrite.' But when one realises that prison, fine, the knife, the shears, persecution to the death, were the award of every honest soul that refused to regard as the 'Beauty of Holiness' such exaggerations of even popery, it is hard to withhold an anathema, ringing as Paul's, on the memory of him who devised, and of the craven bishops who cravenly enforced them. There the spider-soul sat, in its craft, spreading out its net-work over broad England, and by its Harsnets and Curies, Mountagus and Buckridges, Bancrofts and Wrens, and Main- warings, united in a brotherhood of evil, sought to entrap all who held to the divine simplicity of the New Testament. The secret threads, revealed by the tears of the persecuted, as by the morning dew is revealed the drop-spangled and else concealed web of the open-air spider, thrilled news up to the hand that grasped all, and forth the fiat went. * Within a single year, at this period,' says Neal, ' many lecturers were put down, and such as preached against Arminianism or the new ceremonies were suspended and silenced, among whom were the Bev. Mr John Rogers of Dedham, Mr Daniel Rogers of Wethersfield, Mr Hooker of Chelmsford, Mr White of Knightsbridge, Mr Archer, Mr William Martin, Mr Edwards, Mr Jones, Mr Dod, Mr Hildersam, Mr Ward, Mr Saunders, Mr James Gardiner, Mr Foxley, and many others.' *
We have the burning words of Prynne, that at a ' later day,' in the day of his humiliation, the primate had to meet. Thus forcibly is the charge put — nor was it ever touched : —
' As ho thus preferred Popish and Arminian clergymen to the chief eccle-
pure innoconcy, but of pure linen, with other deformed and fantastic dresses, in palls and mitres, gold and gewgaws, fetched from Aaron's old wardrobe or the flamen's vestry ; then was the priest sent to con his motions and his postures, his liturgies and lurries, till tlie soul, by this means of overbodying herself, given up to fleshly delights, bated her wing apace downwards.' In our own day, one has cha- racterised the same phenomenon, as presented by Tractarianism, which, indeed, was the harvest of the baleful seed sown by liaud, as ' a thing of flexions and genuflexions, postures and impostures, with a dash of man-millinery.'
* nist. of Puritans, Vol. i. p. 589, &c. (ed., 3 vols. 8vo, 1837.)
MEMOIR OF RICHARD SIBBES, D,D. Irvii
siastical preferments in our church, so, on the contrar}', (foUo^ving the counsel of Cautzen, the Mogonutive Jesuit, in his poHtics, see ' Look about you'), he discountenanced, suspended, silenced, suppressed, censured, imprisoned, persecuted most of the prime, orthodox, diligent preaching ministers of the realm, and forced many of them to fly into America, Hol- land, and other foreign places, to avoid his fury, only for opposing his popish innovations, and expressing their fears of the change of our religion. Not to trouble you with any forementioned instances of Mr Peter Smart, Mr Henry Burton, Mr Snelling, and others, we shall instance in some