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It may appear to some, that the doctrine of angels was an alien subject to Puritan theologians, but the writer of a suggestive paper on 'The Ministry of Angels' (Expositor, series 1, vol. viii. p. 410) shows that it was a topic on which the old Puritan divines liked to expatiate. matter of the intervention of angels we should be on our guard against two extremes-the unthinking credulity, which says it must be so, and the vulgar incredulity, which pronounces it cannot be so, and confine ourselves to it may

be so.

Are the angels of whom Scripture speaks, it has been asked, real personalities, or personifications recording the impression which outward objects stamped upon the minds of the old Hebrew psalmists and prophets? Some have supposed that what we see working around us are not mere blind forces of nature, but beings to whom natural phenomena are a veil concealing their operations. In the words of a devout and eloquent writer of our own times: Every breath of air and ray of light and heat, every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes of those whose faces see God in heaven.' This view in fact assumes that the whole mechanism of the universe is ordinarily carried on by the administration of angels. It is a theory which has its difficulties and goes. beyond what is revealed in Scripture, but it is not such an absurdity as it appears to those who walk by sight and not by faith, and who with the old Sadducees assert that there is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit.' Reason is not contradicted by the supposition that there are other created spiritual intelligences in the universe besides man, or in the belief in the existence of rational beings in other planets. Why should it be thought impossible to believe that there are beings who minister to the unseen Lord of the whole earth, and who are interested in the well-doing of men? Man has never been able to persuade himself that the whole world beyond his ken is peopled only with physical forces, which act blindly and care nothing for him. It is not well to set this instinctive faith at naught, but rather to inquire whether its manifold mistakes and false apprehensions may not conceal some precious truths hereafter to be revealed.

It may be that in another world all the scattered elements of our instinctive religious faith will appear in all their balanced fullness. And so the poet's words may come true in another sense than what he intended them, and we shall find that—

'With the morn those angel faces smile

Which we have lov'd long since and lost awhile.'

The Depulation of Angels was followed by Messiah's Splendour, or the Glimpsed Glory of a Beauteous Christian, 4to, London, 1649.—Divine Optics, or a treatise of the eye, discovering the vices and virtues thereof, and also how that organ may be tuned, 8vo, London, 1655.-Vox Coeli, or philosophical, historical, and theological observations of thunder, with a more general view of God's wonderful works, 8vo, London, 1658, in which year Dingley also published a sermon on Job xxvi. 14, in 8vo. In some of these numerous works Dingley came into collision with the people called Quakers.' The Puritans, after they had laid low the Church of England and placed the Prayer Book on their index of prohibited books, had to contend with new antagonists. The Owens, and Baxters, and Goodwins, in all their pride of place and station were deeply mortified by this insurrection against their authority. George Fox, a strange young man, who knew no book but his Bible, who could scarcely write, and who stood up clad in a leather jerkin, announced himself as the great Reformer and prophet of the age. This extraordinary man retaliated upon Dingley by animadverting on his doctrines, as Wood says, in his Great mystery of the Great Whore unfolded, &c., London, 1659.

At that date the pen fell from the hand of the busy writer, for in the beginning of 1659 Robert Dingley died at his peaceful rectory-house. On a stone in the chancel of Brighstone Church is this inscription: Heare lyeth ye body of Mr. Robert Dingley, minister of this place, 2d son of Sir John Dingley, Kt., who dyed in ye 40th year of his age, on ye 12th of January, 1659.'

According to Oglander (Memoirs, pp. 93, 94) one of Dingley's sisters "maryed Mr. Barnabye Leygh, ye brother of Sir John Leygh, whoe dwelt at Wellowe neare Thorley." Another sister "maryed John Earlsman of Calberon."

Dingley appears to have been a good specimen of the more learned Puritans. He had none of the lofty eloquence of his brother Fellow of Magdalen College-John Howe-the greatest, according to Robert Hall, of the Puritan divines. Dingley's style, to judge from the Deputation of Angels, is academic and correct, full of endless subdivisions which make it cumbersome, yet at the same time distinguished by calmness and self-possession. He was a Presbyterian. The course of the old English Presbyterians has been very different to that of their brethren in Scotland. The great body of modern Presbyterians in England hold a theological creed very alien to that of the framers of the Westminster Confession. The fall of Puritan Presbyterianism in England coincides with the date of Dingley's death. It did not survive the death of Cromwell, inclined though the Lord Protector was to the party of the 'Sectaries,' as the Presbyterians called their opponents. Presbyterianism was in great measure based upon the theology of the Westminster Confession, as practically set forth in the Scotch League and Covenant with its sectarian technicalities. According to this theory Englishmen were the Lord's people-a people dedicated to Him by a solemn covenant, and whose end as a nation was to carry out His will. A grand and fertile idea, spoiled by fatal prosperity. Under that most trying of all tests the Puritan ideal failed. What was grotesque, narrow, and unreal in that element which Puritanism has contributed to the formation of the character of Englishmen must be made manifest through its success, if in no other way. Puritanism, divested of its fierce intolerance, has left precious legacies behind it; but if Church and State are ever to be secure, according to the vision of Hooker, Bacon, and Burke, only two different aspects of one and the same body, that result will not take the shape in which the old Puritans tried to mould their strong convictions. Nothing in this world comes back in the same form in which it previously existed. The Puritanism of Dingley and his associates will never be revived.

Febuary 15, 1890.

SIR HENRY VANE A PRISONER IN

CARISBROOKE CASTLE, a.d. 1655.

To the kindness of the Rector of Brighstone I am indebted for the following extract from the diary of that model country gentleman, John Evelyn, who, born in 1620, died at the family estate of Wootton, full of years and honour, in 1706.

1655, Sep. 14th. Now was old Sir Henry Vane sent to Carisbrooke Castle in Wight, for a foolish book he published; the Protector fortifying himself exceedingly, and sending many to prison.'

I had seen it stated that Sir Henry Vane was imprisoned by Cromwell in Carisbrooke Castle, but till Mr. Heygate communicated the notice in Evelyn's valuable diary I was not aware upon what authority the fact of Vane's imprisonment rested.

It adds to the many associations which surround our Island fortress, to call to mind that in 'Carisbrooke's narrow case' one of the strongest opponents of Charles I shared for a time, seven years after the death of the royal captive, the same lot as the unhappy King. Most people only know Vane as the man from whom Cromwell prayed to be delivered. His memory deserves a better fate than the words which have given his name so wide a currency. Few of his contemporaries were his intellectual superiors. The main interest of his character lies in the fact that he represents a not uncommon type of mind in the present day. He was a man of a singularly pure, gentle, and generous spirit, and cherished an enthusiastic, though misty belief in God and human nature. He points the moral of the loss which a man sustains from not having fixed and settled creed. He put his hand to many enterprises, and scarcely one of them succeeded. He lived and died, so far as human judgement can see, without bringing the world one step nearer to that New Jerusalem descending from heaven, which formed one of the chief of those articles of belief which he framed for himself, and yet he went down to the grave full of faith and hope, and firmly expecting the swift and certain triumph of

the strange opinions which he had adopted. His intellectual powers were weakened by his vagueness of thought and want of the power of adapting means to ends. He was deficient in that saving sense of humour which might have restrained this tendency to a kind of glorified verbosity, grotesque sentimentalisms, and unintelligible theological millenarian dreams, which marred his work and discredited his reputation for sagacity and his great abilities.

Henry Vane was born in 1612 at his father's seat of Hadlow Manor in Kent, 'kindly for hops' and much covered with spreading oaks and broad hedge-rows. The year in which Vane entered the world was that on which Prince Henry, the eldest son of James I, died. Henry, who died when he was only eighteen, had showed at that early age Puritan leanings to such an extent that the rhyme,

'Henry the Eighth pulled down the abbots and cells,

But Henry the Ninth shall pull down bishops and bells,'

was common on the lips of those who desired to complete what they considered the reformation of the National Church.

Henry Vane was sent to Westminster School, which had been founded by the munificence of Queen Elizabeth in 1560, and here he shared the hardships and roughness of the dormitory life of that famous school till he was sixteen. From Westminster he entered as a gentleman-commoner of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, but old Anthony à Wood says that when he should have matriculated as member of the University, and taken the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, he quitted his gown, put on a cloak, and studied, notwithstanding, for some time in that hall. The boy is father to the man. In this aversion to academic regulations is a prophecy of his future restlessness and impulsiveness. Clarendon records that Vane did not live with great exactness' at the University, although he was under the care of a very worthy tutor.' The loyalist historian can hardly mean to imply that Vane, like other young men of rank and fortune at all times, made a residence at Oxford merely an opportunity for amusing himself, for such an insinuation is contradicted by other trustworthy evidence. In the closing

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