answer your earnest and honest desire of greater help than I afford you, and help me yet to amend it towards you. But though my soul be faulty and dull, and my strength of nature fail, be sure that He will be a thousand-fold better to thee, even here, than such crooked, feeble, useless things as is thy R. B." This faithful wife was taken from him in the year 1681, and the last nine years of his life were unlighted by the soft glow of her devotion. He might have had worldly advancement had he been willing to sacrifice his convictions; but, just as he refused compliance in 1662 with the "Act of Uniformity," which compelled all ministers to use and subscribe to the prayer-book, and to be ordained by a bishop, so when five-and-twenty years later James II. sought to aid the Roman Catholics by publishing the "Act of Indulgence" for them and Protestant Nonconformists alike, Baxter refused to join with the Roman Catholics in a position which would have weakened the English Church. He stood alone throughout his life, a brave patient champion of moderate worship, unable because of the constant changes in high places to do all of which he was capable, but never relaxing his efforts, until death claimed him after a hard life of seventy-five years. He had been severe in his writings, especially in his later days, towards his opponents, but of this he repented before his death. "Every sour or cross provoking word which I gave them maketh me almost unreconcilable with myself, and tells me how repentance brought some of old to pray to the dead whom they had wronged, to forgive them in the hurry of their passion." Of his keen language in controversy he writes: "I repent of it, and wish all over-sharp passages were expunged from my writings, and ask forgiveness of God and man." His happiest years had been spent as incumbent of the parish church of Kidderminster, and it is right that his statue should now stand there, outside the churchyard, at the head of the long steep street up which he climbed so often to preach the word of God. CHAPTER IX GEORGE HERBERT, AND LORD FALKLAND THERE were no years in the history of England which produced so great a number of religious thinkers as the troubled times between the reigns of James I. and James II. In Laud we have the great Archbishop of the Anglican Church: in Bunyan, one whose spiritual insight lifted him above all forms and ceremonies into the pure heavenly atmosphere of his own Delectable Mountains: in Juxon and Jeremy Taylor we have an English and an Irish Bishop, each struggling honestly with the difficulties that beset his position: Fox represents the enthusiastic founder of a new sect, seeking after righteousness, and Baxter the wise and noble leader of the moderate Presbyterians. But the picture of the clergy of the day would be incomplete without one more figure, that of the ideal country parson, as he would love to be remembered, the "holy George Herbert." There was nothing in the circumstances of his birth to foreshadow what his life would be. He was the son of noble parents, Sir Richard and Lady Herbert, and was born on the 3rd of April 1593, in Montgomery Castle, Shropshire. He had three sisters and six brothers, of whom the eldest was Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and George himself was the fifth son. His father died when he was only four years old, but his wise and gracious mother did all in her power to supply the place of both parents to her children; and there seemed a special bond of sympathy and affection between her and the little son George, who spent his childhood "in sweet content," according to Izaak Walton, "under the eye and care of his prudent mother." He, and two of his brothers, learned with the family chaplain in their early days, according to the fashion of the time in noble households, and when he was twelve years old he was sent to Westminster School. There his unusual charm of nature and disposition was at once perceived, and "the beauties of his pretty behaviour and wit shined and became so eminent and lovely in this his innocent age that he seemed to be marked out for piety, and to become the care of heaven and of a particular good angel to guard and guide him.” This "care of heaven" never left him, from the days of his blameless boyhood through the tempta |