both in good and evil; great piety and great wickedness; great freedom and great tyranny and oppression. Under Cromwell there was great liberty and prosperity; under the Charleses there was great oppression and disgrace. Bunyan's life, continuing from 1628 to 1688, embraces the most revolutionary and stirring period in English history. There pass before the mind within this period the oppressive reign of Charles First; the characters of Laud and Strafford; the star chamber, and the king's tyrannical men, courts, and measures; the noble defence of liberty in the house of Commons; Hampden and Pym; the war between the King and Parliament; the king's defeat, and death upon the scaffold; the glorious protectorate of Cromwell, few years, but grand and prosperous, a freedom and prosperity united, such as England had never known; then comes the hasty, unconditional restoration of a Prince who cared for nothing but his own pleasure, the dissolute, tyrannical reign of Charles Second, one of the most promising, lying, unprincipled, worthless, selfish, corrupted and corrupting kings that ever sat upon the throne of England; in the terribly severe language of the Edinburgh Review, a king, "who superseded the reign of the saints by the reign of strumpets; who was crowned in his youth with the Covenant in his hand, and died with the Host sticking in his throat, after a life spent in dawdling suspense between Hobbism and Popery"; a king and a reign, of which one of the grand climacterics in wickedness embraced the royal murders of the noble patriots Russell and Algernon Sydney; immortal be their names, and honored ever be

their memories; a reign the very beginning of of which, threw John Bunyan into prison, and produced a Bartholomew's day to thousands of the conscientious ministers of the Church of England.

The king's reign from the time of the restoration, began in contempt of all religion, and continued in debauchery and drunkenness. Even those persons who may have taken their views of the history of this period simply from the pages of Hume, may, if they will look narrowly, gather so much as this. "Agreeable to the present prosperity of public affairs," says Hume, "was the universal joy and festivity diffused throughout the nation. The melancholy austerity of the fanatics fell into discredit, together with their principles. The royalists, who had ever affected a contrary disposition, found in their recent success new motives for mirth and gayety; and it now belonged to them to give repute and fashion to their manners. From past experience it had sufficiently appeared that gravity was very distinct from wisdom, formality from virtue, and hypocrisy from religion. The king himself, who bore a strong propensity to pleasure, served, by his powerful and engaging example, to banish those sour and malignant humors, which had hitherto engendered such confusion. And though the just bounds were undoubtedly passed, when once returned from their former extreme, yet was the public happy in exchanging vices, pernicious to society, for disorders, hurtful chiefly to the individuals themselves who were guilty of them."

This means simply that the nation, under the example of the king and the royalists, having thrown

off the vices and vicious restraints of gravity, formality and hypocrisy, so generally pernicious to society, became almost entirely abandoned to the more individual "disorders" of profligacy and sensual licentiousness. They were happy in exchanging "those sour and malignant humors" for the more luscious and generous qualities of sin. The restoration, says Bishop Burnet, brought with it the throwing off the very professions of virtue and piety; and all ended in entertainments and drunkenness, which overran the three kingdoms.

As the reign began so it continued; and it was a period, when just such men, as God had been preparing in the case of Bunyan, were most needed; just such men also, as he had ready in Baxter, Owen, Howe, and a multitude of others, perhaps quite equal in piety, though not so distinguished as these. So was fulfilled the great principle, that when the Enemy cometh in like a flood, then the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him.

As to the measures of this reign for the destruction of religious liberty, with which more especially we are now concerned, it opened with what is called the Corporation Act, by which, in defiance of all the king's previous stipulations, all persons, whose religious principles constrained them conscientiously to refuse conformity to the established Episcopal Church, were at once expelled and excluded from every branch of the magistracy, and rendered incapable of serving their country in the meanest civil offices.

Next followed the memorable statute against the Society of Friends, by which upwards of four thou