think it beneath him to serve God, and to be useful to the benefit and advantage of men. Let us remember the Son of God, a person of the highest quality and extraction that ever was, who spent Himself wholly in this blessed work of doing good; toiled and laboured in it as if it had been for His life; submitted to all the circumstances of meanness, to all the degrees of contempt, to all kind of hardship and sufferings, for the benefit and salvation of men,-sweat drops of blood, and at last poured it forth in full streams, to save us from eternal misery and ruin. And is any of us better than the Son of God, the heir of all things, and the elder brother of us all?' Shall any of us after this think ourselves too good to be employed in that work which God Himself disdained not to do when He appeared in the likeness and nature of men? If we would esteem things rightly and according to reason, the true privilege and advantage of greatness is, to be able to do more good than others; and in this the majesty and felicity of God Himself doth chiefly consist, in His ready and forward inclination, and in His infinite power and ability to do good. The creation of the world was a great and glorious design; but this God only calls His work. But to preserve and support the creatures which He hath made; to bless them and to do them good; to govern them by wise laws, and to conduct them to that happiness which he designed for them, this is His rest, His perpetual Sabbath, His great delight and satisfaction to all eternity. To do good is our duty and our business; but it is likewise the greatest pleasure and recreation, that which refresheth the heart of God and man.

Sermon before King Charles. Works, Sermon ccxii.

128. John Howe, 1630-1705. (Handbook, par. 386.) One of the profoundest theologians of any age. The following extract has been greatly admired.

The Temple in Ruins.

That God hath withdrawn himself, and left this his temple desolate, we have many sad and plain proofs before us. The stately ruins are visible to every eye, that bear in their front (yet extant) this doleful inscription-Here God once dwelt.' Enough appears of the admirable frame and structure of the soul of man, to show the divine presence did some time reside in it;

X

more than enough of vicious deformity, to proclaim he is now retired and gone. The lamps are extinct, the altar overturned; the light and love are now vanished, which did the one shine with so heavenly brightness, the other burn with so pious fervour; the golden candlestick is displaced, and thrown away as a useless thing, to make room for the throne of the prince of darkness; the sacred incense, which sent rolling up in clouds its rich perfumes, is exchanged for a poisonous, hellish vapour, and here is, 'instead of a sweet savour, a stench.' The comely order of this house is turned all into confusion; the beauties of holiness' into noisome impurities; the house of prayer into a den of thieves,' and that of the worst and most horrid kind; for every lust is a thief, and every theft sacrilege: continual rapine and robbery are committed upon holy things. The noble powers which were designed and dedicated to divine contemplation and delight, are alienated to the service of the most despicable idols, and employed unto vilest intuitions and embraces; to behold and admire lying vanities to indulge and cherish lust and wickedness. What! have not the enemies done wickedly in the sanctuary? How have they broken down the carved work thereof, and that too with axes and hammers, the noise whereof was not to be heard in building, much less in the demolishing this sacred frame! Look upon the fragment of that curious sculpture which once adorned the palace of that great king; the relics of common notions; the lively prints of some undefaced truth; the fair ideas of things; the yet legible precepts that relate to practice. Behold! with what accuracy the broken pieces show these to have been -engraven by the finger of God, and how they now lie torn and scattered, one in this dark corner, another in that, buried in heaps of dirt and rubbish! There is not now a system, an entire table of coherent truths to be found, or a frame of holiness, but some shivered parcels. And if any, with great toil and labour, apply themselves to draw out here one piece, and there another, and set them together, they serve rather to show how exquisite the divine workmanship was in the original composition, than for present use to the excellent purposes for which the whole was first designed. Some pieces agree, and own one another; but how soon are our inquiries and endeavours nonplussed and superseded! How many attempts have been made, since that fearful fall and ruin of this fabric, to compose again the truths of so

many several kinds into their distinct orders, and make up frames of science, or useful knowledge; and after so many ages, nothing is finished in any one kind! Sometimes truths are misplaced, and what belongs to one kind is transferred to another, where it will not fitly match: sometimes falsehood inserted, which shatters or disturbs the whole frame. And what is with much fruitless pains done by one hand, is dashed in pieces by another; and it is the work of a following age to sweep away the fine-spun cobwebs of a former. And those truths which are of greatest use, though not most out of sight, are least regarded: their tendency and design are overlooked; or they are so loosened and torn off, that they cannot be wrought in, so as to take hold of the soul, but hover as faint, ineffectual notions that signify nothing. Its very fundamental powers are shaken and disjointed, and their order towards one another confounded and broken: so that what is judged considerable is not considered, what is recommended as eligible and lovely is not loved and chosen. Yea, the truth which is after godliness is not so much disbelieved, as hated, held in unrighteousness; and shines as too feeble a light in that malignant darkness which comprehends it not. You come, amidst all this confusion, as into the ruined palace of some great prince, in which you see here the fragments of a noble pillar, there the shattered pieces of some curious imagery, and all lying neglected and useless among heaps of dirt. He that invites you to take a view of the soul of man, gives you but such another prospect, and doth but say to you, Behold the desolation;' all things rude and waste. So that should there be any pretence to the divine presence, it might be said, 'If God be here, why is it thus?' The faded glory, the darkness, the disorder, the impurity, the decayed state, in all respects, of this temple, too plainly show the great Inhabitant is gone. The Living Temple, pl. ii. chap. iv.

Dedicatory Letter to Hon. Robert Boyle.

The veneration I have long had for your name could not permit me to apprehend less obligation than that of a law, in your recommending to me this subject: for within the whole compass of intellectual employment and affairs, none but who are so unhappy as not at all to know you, would dispute your right to prescribe and give law. And taking a nearer view of

the province you have assigned me, I must esteem it alike both disingenuous and undutiful, wholly to have refused it. For the less you could think it possible to me to perform in it, the more I might perceive of kindness allaying the authority of the imposition; and have the apprehension the more obvious to me that you rather designed in it mine own advantage, than that you reckoned the cause could receive any by my undertaking it.

The doubt I well know was mentioned by you as other men's, and not your own; whose clear mind, and diligent enquiry, leave you little liable to be encumbered with greater difficulties. Wherefore that I so soon divert from you, and no more allow these papers to express any regard unto you, till the shutting of the discourse, is only a seeming disrespect or indecorum, put in the stead of a real one. For after you have given them the countenance, as to be let it understood you gave the first rise and occasion to the business and design of them, I had little reason to slur that stamp put upon them, by adding to their (enough other) faults, that of making them guilty of so great a misdeameanour and impertinency, as to continue a discourse of this length, to one that hath so little leisure or occasion to attend to anything that can be said by them.

On the Reconcilableness of God's Prescience, etc.

129. John Dryden, 1631-1700. (Handbook, pars. 107, 179, 271, 404.)

The earliest English critic of any great authority, and the founder of a school of poetry. Dr. Johnson praises his remarks on Shakespeare as a perpetual model of encomiastic criticism; 'exact without minuteness, and lofty without exaggeration.' His Annus Mirabilis, commemorating the Dutch War and the Fire of London, was the first piece that exhibited his poetic genius. The most vigorous satire in our language is his Absalom and Achitophel.

Chaucer.

As he is the father of English poetry, so I hold him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians held Homer, or the Romans Virgil: he is a perpetual fountain of good sense: learned in all sciences; and, therefore, speaks properly on all subjects: as he knew what to say, so he knows also when to leave off; a continence which is practised by few writers. and scarcely by any of

the ancients, excepting Virgil and Horace. Chaucer followed nature everywhere; but was never so bold as to go beyond her. The verse of Chaucer, I confess, is not harmonions to us; but it is like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus commends, it was suited to the ears of his time; they who lived with him, and some time after him, thought it musical; and it continues so even in our judgment, if compared with the numbers of Lidgate and Gower, his contemporaries: there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect. It is true, I cannot go so far as he who published the last edition of him; for he would make us believe the fault is in our ears, and that there were really ten syllables in a verse where we find but nine; but this opinion is not worth confuting; it is so gross and obvious an error, that common sense, which is a rule in everything but matters of faith and revelation, must convince the reader, that equality of numbers in every verse, which we call heroic, was either not known or not always practised in Chaucer's age. It were an easy matter to produce some thousands of his verses which are lame for want of half a foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no pronunciation can make otherwise. We can only say, that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at the first. We must be children before we grow men. There was an Ennius, and in process of time a Lucilius and a Lucretius, before Virgil and Horace; even after Chaucer, there was a Spencer, a Harrington, a Fairfax, before Waller and Denham were in being; and our numbers were in their nonage till these last appeared.

Chaucer must have been a man of a most wonderful comprehensive nature, because, as it has been truly observed of him, he has taken into the compass of his 'Canterbury Tales' the various manners and humours (as we now call them) of the whole English nation in his age. Not a single character has escaped him. All his pilgrims are severally distinguished from each other; and, not only in their inclinations, but in their physiognomies and persons. Baptista Porta could not have described their natures better than by the marks which the poet gives them. The matter and manner of their tales, and of their telling, are so suited to their

The reader will find the metrical system of Chaucer discussed in almost every edition of that poet's works.

b A famous Neapolitan philosopher of the sixteenth century, much distin guished for the study of physiognomy.