things, in order to His glory, and the glory of your Commonwealth,-besides the benefit England shall feel thereby, you shall shine forth to other nations, who shall emulate the glory of such a pattern, and through the power of God turn-in to the like."

Hæ tibi erunt artes.

And since the instinct of beauty works indefatigably in man, other arts may be looked for in time to grow upon the foundation of a life of righteousness. Continental, if not English, critics have recognised the fact that a Puritan strain has entered into much that is most characteristic in our literature. It is present in the "Faerie Queene" as well as in "Samson Agonistes "; in the "Vision of Sin," the "Palace of Art," the "Idylls of the King"; in the poetry of the author of "Dipsychus " and the poetry of the author of "Christmas Eve and Easter Day"; in the prose of "Sartor Resartus." And though Matthew Arnold said hard things, and some of them not without good reason, of English Puritanism, the son of Thomas Arnold could not escape from an hereditary influence; the Hellenic tendency in his poetry is constantly checked and controlled by the Hebraic tendency as it had been accepted and modified by the English mind.

Fortunately for Puritan art in the seventeenth century there was a great body of literature which was regarded as sacred. Puritanism may have suspected the literature of Greece and Rome; it may have cast some scorn upon the glory of Mediæval art; but it venerated the Old and

the New Testaments. Not with a fully enlightened intelligence; not, certainly, in the way of modern criticism; but it found in the Bible a rule of life and a storehouse of ideas; it fed its passions with the passions of the Hebrew singers and prophets; its imagination adopted, the antique garb, not in the manner of mumming or disguising, but as proper for the uses of the day; it found in narrative and vision and parable a vehicle,) already sanctified, for the invisible; it carried the genius of the Scriptures into the very heart and soul of England.

The moral rigour and the anti-ceremonial spirit of Puritanism in their immediate effects were unfavourable to a generous development of art; in their indirect effects, quickening as they did the spiritual consciousness, bracing character in a period of relaxation, and intensifying the individual temper in matters of religion, they were not wholly unfavourable. In the second half of the seventeenth century, from amid the literature of moral licence, when the imagination of the time, outwardly graceful and humane, was inwardly gross

"To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds

Timorous and slothful"

rise those creations to which the Puritan spirit contributed "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regained," the "Pilgrim's Progress"; and, apart from the Puritan influence, such works are inexplicable. The great intellectual fact of the age was the scientific movement: it liberated the minds of men from the bondage of a narrow Scripturalism; but who shall say that the large part which England took in the scientific movement-itself a European rather than an English phenomenon-was not aided by

the habit of the loins girt and by the lit lamp, by the seriousness of spirit, now transferred from Scripture and the moral world to external nature, which Puritanism had encouraged and sustained ? In Newton and his fellow inquirers of the Royal Society the seriousness of the Protestant Reformation was reunited with the exploring intellect of the Renaissance.

In the appalling loss of a living authority which should declare infallible doctrine, it was fortunate that men could in some degree steady themselves by the support of the infallible written Word. Puritanism helped the Protestant Reformation, in its more extreme developments, to define itself both in its weakness and its strength. The entire ecclesiastical polity was to be modelled on the Scriptures ; some thinkers desired to model on Biblical example the entire polity of the State. When Milton would justify the deposition and condemnation of the King, he proves from Scripture that kings and magistrates hold their authority from the people: "David first made a covenant with the elders of Israel, and so was by them anointed king; Jehoida the priest, making Jehoash king, established a covenant between him and the people. When Roboam, at his coming to the crown, rejected those conditions which the Israelites brought him, they answer him, 'What portion have we in David, or inheritance in the son of Jesse? See to thine

own house, David.'" It was the unqualified reference of all forms of religious order and duty to Scripture that Hooker set himself to oppose and to correct. Every rite or ceremony, every garment worn, unless it could be justified by a precedent or a text of the

Bible, was condemned as unwarrantable. The persuasions of the Oxford and Cambridge Professors of Divinity, who happened to be two foreigners, Peter Martyr and Bucer, were needed to induce Hooper to wear his consecration robes; once he preached in the questionable garb, and never again. The ring in marriage, the cross at baptism, the posture at Holy Communion, the music of organ-pipes, were causes of serious doubts and scruples. Somewhat later the controversy turned chiefly upon matters of Church government and discipline; but still the central question was the same-Could this or that be justified by the authority of Scripture? Finally, in the reign of James I., when the Arminian High-churchmen became dominant in the Anglican communion, the questions grew of deeper import they concerned doctrine, which Hooker himself would have determined alone by the written Word.

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A new race of schoolmen-Protestant schoolmen of the Reformation arose. Elaborate systems of theology were constructed, and the substance of those of the school of Calvin may still be found operative in the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Longer and Shorter Catechisms. An admirable intellectual gymnastic they afford to a certain class of minds, and one who has mastered even his Shorter Catechism will have all the advantages (and the disadvantages) which attend a resolute effort to interpret the whole of things as a coherent scheme. The Holy Scriptures were, of course, accepted as the sole basis. of the faith. An attempt was made to define the

B

nature of God, to set forth His attributes; and the body of Calvinistic theology, with the precise plan of salvation, was exactly laid down. All was as definitely mapped out as the structure of the heavens in the Ptolemaic astronomy. That sense of awe and mystery derived from the Unknown and the Unknowable, in which some thinkers have found the essence of religion, was present only in a subordinate degree. Things the angels desire to look into might be boldly scrutinised by the theologian, for were they not revealed in the written Word ? The source of religious emotion was not the unknown but the known; and this was methodically arranged so as to present it with the utmost precision to the intellect. But in what had been ascertained were many things wonderful, many things capable of inspiring solemn awe, the brightest hope, the most overwhelming terror. God's eternal decree by which, for the manifestation of His glory, some men are predestined to everlasting life and others are foreordained to everlasting death, the creation of the world out of nothing, the constant, wise and holy providence of the Creator over His work, man's fall, God's covenant with the human race, the inheritance of sin, the mediation of Christ, the irresistible nature of grace, the effectual calling and final perseverance of the saints, the endless joy of heaven, the endless gnashing of teeth in hell— these were themes for passionate contemplation, sources of agony, sources of rapture. Undoubtedly the whole scheme of belief, if imposing on some a burden which they were not able to bear, was one which helped