lencing and ejection, they would quickly know by other means, and how much the judgment of the English bishops did differ from theirs about the labors and persons of such as we.

"About this time, I thought meet to debate the case with some learned and moderate ejected ministers of London, about communicating sometimes at the parish churches in the sacrament; for they that came to common prayer, came not yet to the sacrament. They desired me to bring in my judgment and reasons in writing, which being debated, they were all of my mind in the main, that it is lawful and a duty where greater accidents preponderate not. But they all concurred unanimously in this, that if we did communicate at all in the parish churches, the sufferings of the Independents, and those Presbyterians that could not communicate there, would certainly be very much increased; which now were somewhat moderated by our concurrence with them. I thought the case very hard on both sides; that we, who were so much censured by them for going somewhat further than they, must yet omit that which else must be our duty, merely to abate their sufferings who censure us: but I resolved to forbear with them awhile, rather than any Christian should suffer by occasion of an action of mine, seeing God will have mercy, and not sacrifice; and no duty is a duty at all times."

He thus concludes his memorials of the year 1665. The reader will be struck, as the writer of the present work is, that the year in which he writes this page, 1828, the prayer of Baxter has been answered respecting the Corporation Act; and that for the first time during one hundred and sixty-three years, it can be said that the Protestant Dissenters of England are in possession of common rights and privileges with their fellow subjects of the established church. After such a delay in the discharge of justice, let no man be sanguine in his expectations of speedy change. After the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, under all the circumstances in which it has been accomplished, let no man despair.

War

"And now, after the breaches on the churches, the ejection of the ministers, and impenitency under all, wars and plague and danger of famine began at once on us. with the Hollanders, which yet continueth; and the dryest winter, spring, and summer, that ever man alive knew, or our forefathers mention of late ages: so that the grounds were burnt like the highways, where the cattle should have fed. The meadow grounds where I lived, bare but four loads of hay, which before bare forty; the plague hath seized on the famousest and most excellent city of Christendom, and at this time nearly 8,300 die of all diseases in a week. It hath scattered and consumed the inhabitants; multitudes being dead and fled. The

calamities and cries of the diseased and impoverished, are not to be conceived by those that are absent from them. Every man is a terror to his neighbor and himself: and God, for our sins, is a terror to us all. O! how is London, the place which God hath honored with his Gospel above all places of the earth, laid low in horrors, and wasted almost to desolation by the wrath of that God, whom England hath contemned! A Godhating generation are consumed in their sins, and the righteous are also taken away as from greater evils yet to come. Yet, under all these desolations, the wicked are hardened, and cast all on the fanatics; the true dividing fanatics and sectaries are not yet humbled for former miscarriages, but cast all on the prelates and imposers; and the ignorant vulgar are stupid, and know not what use to make of any thing they feel. But thousands of the sober, prudent, faithful servants of the Lord are mourning in secret, and waiting for his salvation; in humility and hope they are staying themselves on God, and expecting what he will do with them. From London the plague is spread through many counties, especially next London, where few places, especially corporations, are free: which makes me oft groan, and wish that London, and all the corporations of England, would review the Corporation Act, and their own acts, and speedily repent.

"Leaving most of my family at Acton, compassed about with the plague, at the writing of this, through the mercy of my dear God, and Father in Christ, I am hitherto in safety and comfort in the house of my dearly beloved and honored friend, Mr. Richard Hampden, of Hampden, in Buckinghamshire, the true heir of his famous father's sincerity, piety, and devotedness to God; whose person and family the Lord preserve; honor them that honor him, and be their everlasting rest and portion.'

CHAPTER IX. 1665-1670.

The Plague of London-Preaching of some of the Nonconformists-The Five-Mile Act-The Fire of London-Benevolence of Ashurst and Gouge-The Fire advantageous to the Preaching of the Silenced Ministers-Conformist Clergy-More Talk about Liberty of Conscience-The Latitudinarians-Fall of Clarendon-The Duke of Buckingham-Sir Orlando Bridgman-Preaching of the Nonconformists connived at-Fresh Discussions about a Comprehension-Dr. Creighton-Ministers imprisoned-Address to the KingNonconformists attacked from the Press-Baxter's Character of Judge Hale-Dr. RivesBaxter sent to Prison-Advised to apply for a Habeas Corpus-Demands it from the Court of Common Pleas-Behavior of the Judges-Discharged-Removes to Totteridge-His Works during this period-Correspondence with Owen.

In the end of the preceding chapter, we left Baxter at Hampden, moralizing on the desolation of London, during the raging of the plague. Of that fearful calamity, and also of the fire,

(0) Life, part ii. p. 448.

which followed soon after, he has left some additional notices, as well as of the influence of these events on the trials or enlargement of the Nonconformists.

"The number that died in London, he informs us, beside all the rest of the land, was about a hundred thousand, reckoning the Quakers, and others, that were never put in the bills of mortality.

"The richer sort removing out of the city, the greatest blow fell on the poor. At first so few of the more religious sort were taken away that, according to the mode of too many such, they began to be puffed up, and boast of the great difference which God did make; but quickly after they all fell alike. Yet not many pious ministers were taken away. I remember only three, who were all of my acquaintance.

"It is scarcely possible for people who live in a time of health and security, to apprehend the dreadful nature of that pestilence. How fearful people were thirty or forty, if not a hundred miles from London, of any thing they bought from mercers' or drapers' shops, or of goods that were brought to them; or of any person who came to their houses! How they would shut their doors against their friends; and if a man passed over the fields, how one would avoid another as we did in the time of the wars; how every man was a terror to another! P Oh, how sinfully unthankful are we for our quiet societies, habitations, and health!

"Not far from the place where I sojourned, at Mrs. Fleetwood's, three ministers of extraordinary worth were together in one house, Mr. Clarkson, Mr. Samuel Cradock, and Mr. Terry, men of singular judgment, piety, and moderation. The plague came into the house where they were, and one person dying of it, caused many, that they knew not of, earnestly to pray for their deliverance; and it pleased God that no other person died.

"One great benefit the plague brought to the city, it occasioned the silenced ministers more openly and laboriously to preach the Gospel, to the exceeding comfort and profit of the people; insomuch, that to this day the freedom of preaching, which this

(p) Among the places which the plague visited at a distance, was the village of Loughborough, in the county of Leicester; it there entered the house of the Rev. Samuel Shaw, the ejected minister of Long Whatton. He buried two of his children, two friends, and a servant, who had died of the distemper. Both his wife and himself were attacked, but mercifully escaped. His house was shut up for three months, none being permitted to enter it; so that he had to attend the sick himself, and afterwards to bury them in his own garden. It was in those circumstances he produced that beautiful and impressive little volume, 'The Welcome to the Plague." It was originally a sermon, preached to his own family, and affords an admirable illustra tion of the power and blessedness of true religion. If the reader has not seen this little work, or another of Shaw's, 'Immanuel; or, a Discovery of True Religion,' I beg to recommend them to his attention, as among the finest specimens of the Nonconformist school of theology. The author died in 1696.-See the Memoir prefixed to

Immanuel.

occasioned, can not by the daily guards of soldiers nor by the imprisonment of multitudes be restrained. The ministers that were silenced for Nonconformity, had ever since 1662 done their work very privately and to a few: not so much through their timorousness, as their loathness to offend the king, and in hope that their forbearance might procure them some liberty, and through some timorousness of the people that would hear them. When the plague grew hot, most of the conformable ministers fled, and left their flocks in the time of their extremity; whereupon divers Nonconformists, pitying the dying and distressed people, who had none to call the impenitent to repentance, or to help men to prepare for another world, or to comfort them in their terrors, when about ten thousand died in a week, resolved that no obedience to the laws of mortal men whatsoever, could justify them in neglecting men's souls and bodies in such extremities. They, therefore, resolved to stay with the people, and to go into the forsaken pulpits, though prohibited, and to preach to the poor people before they died; also to visit the sick and get what relief they could for the poor, especially those that were shut up.

"Those who set upon this work were, Mr. Thomas Vincent, late minister in Milk-street, with some strangers that came thither after they were silenced; as Mr. Chester, Mr. Janeway, Mr. Turner, Mr. Grimes, Mr. Franklin, and some others. Often those heard them one day, who were sick the next, and quickly dead. The face of death did so awaken both the preachers and the hearers, that preachers exceeded themselves in lively, fervent preaching, and the people crowded constantly to hear them. All was done with great seriousness, so that through the blessing of God, abundance were converted from their carelessness, impenitency, and youthful lusts and vanities; and religion took such a hold on many hearts, as could never afterwards be loosed."

(q) Vincent published in 1667, a work, entitled 'God's Terrible Voice in the City by Plague and Fire,' founded on these two awful calamities, both of which he had witnessed. He remained in the city, preaching with great fervor and effect during the whole time of the plague. It came into the house in which he resided, and took off three persons, but he escaped alive. The name of such a man, and of those who acted with him, deserve to be preserved in an imperishable record. He died at Hoxton, in 1671-Calamy, ii. 32.

(r) 'De Foe's Journal of the Plague Year,' though written as a fiction, but yet no fiction, gives the best account of this tremendous calamity which we have. It is only to be regretted that what is fact and what is fiction, are so mingled together that it is impossible to separate them. While the description is not more terrible than the reality, and many of the narratives are probably descriptive of real occurrences, the book cannot be used as authority. There are some affecting notices of it in the 'Diary of Pepys;' and several letters are given by Ellis in the fourth volume of his second series of 'Original Letters, illustrative of English History,' relative to it. They are by the Rev. Stephen Bing and Dr. Tillotson, and addressed to Dr. Sancroft, then dean of St Paul's. It appears from them that the Bishop of London threatened those of his clergy who had deserted their flocks, in consequence of the plague, that if they did not return to their charges speedily, he would put others in their places.

"Whilst God was consuming the people by these judgments, and the Nonconformists were laboring to save men's souls, the parliament, which sat at Oxford, whither the king removed from the danger of the plague, was busy with an act of confinement to make the silenced ministers' case incomparably harder than it was before, by putting upon them a certain oath, which if they refused, they must not come, except on the road, within five miles of any city, or of any corporation, or any place that sendeth burgesses to the parliament; or of any place wherever they had been ministers, or had preached since the Act of Oblivion. So little did the sense of God's terrible judgments, or of the necessities of many hundred thousand ignorant souls, or the groans of the poor people for the teaching which they had lost, or the fear of the great and final reckoning, affect the hearts of the prelatists, or stop them in their way. The chief promoters of this among the clergy were said to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Dr. Seth Ward, the bishop of Salisbury. One of the greatest adversaries of it in the Lord's House, was the Earl of Southampton, lord treasurer of England, a man who had ever adhered to the king, but understood the interest of his country and of humanity. It is, without contradiction, reported that he said no honest man would take that oath." The lord chancellor Hyde, also, and the rest of the leaders of that mind and way, promoted it, and easily procured it to pass the houses, notwithstanding all that was said against it.

"By this act, the case of the ministers was made so hard, that many thought themselves obliged to break it, not only by the necessity of their office, but by a natural impossibility of keeping it, unless they should murder themselves and their families." t

The oath imposed on them by the act was as follows:

"I, A. B., do swear that it is not lawful, upon any pretence whatsoever, to take arms against the king; and that I do abhor that traitorous position of taking arms by his authority against his person, or against those that are commissioned by him, in pursuance of such commission: and that I will not, at any time, endeavor any alteration of the government, either in church or state." "

We are at a loss which most to be astonished at-the impiety, the folly, or the cruelty of the men who could impose this oath.

(s) Burnet tells us, Southampton spoke vehemently against the bill, and said "he could take no such oath himself; how firm soever he had always been to the church, as things were managed he did not know but he himself might see cause to endeavor an alteration."-Own Times, vol. i. p. 329. Southampton was a very able man, exemplary in private life, and of invincible integrity in his public conduct. He died in 1667.