him why he did not worship the God of heaven. The old man told him that he worshipped the fire only, and acknowledged no other God. At which answer Abraham grew so zealously angry that he thrust the old man out of his tent, and exposed him to all the evils of the night, and an unguarded condition. When the old man was gone, God called to Abraham, and asked him where the stranger was. He replied, I thrust him away because he did not worship thee. God answered him, I have suffered him these hundred years, although he dishonored me; and couldst not thou endure him one night?

Upon this, saith the story, Abraham fetched him back again, and gave him hospitable entertainment and wise instruction. Go thou and do likewise, and thy charity will be rewarded by the God of Abraham.

DR. ISAAC BARROW.

INDUSTRY.

Industry doth not consist merely in action, for that is incessant in all persons, our mind being a restless thing, never abiding in a total cessation from thought or design; being like a ship in the sea, if not steered to some good purpose by reason, yet tossed by the waves of fancy, or driven by the winds of temptation some whither.) But the direction of our mind to some good end, without roving or flinching, in a straight and steady course, drawing after it our active powers in execution thereof, doth constitute industry.

RICHARD BAXTER.

From a NARRATIVE OF MEMORABLE PASSAGES OF HIS LIFE AND TIMES.

I now see more good and more evil in all men than heretofore I did. I see that good men are not so good as I once thought they were, but have more imperfections; and that nearer approach and fuller trial doth make the best appear more weak and faulty than their admirers at a distance think. And I find that few are so bad as either malicious enemies or censorious separating professors do imagine. In some, indeed, I find that human nature is corrupted into a greater likeness to devils than I once thought any on earth had been. But even in the wicked, usually there is more for grace to make advantage of, and more to testify for God and holiness, than I once believed there had been.

JOHN BUNYAN.

From PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.

Now, I saw in my dream that these two men went in at the gate; and lo, as they entered, they were transfigured, and they had raiment put on that shone like gold. There were also that met them with harps and crowns, and gave to them the harps to praise withal, and the crowns in token of honor. Then I heard in my dream that all the bells in the city rang again for joy, and that it was said unto them, "Enter ye into the joy of your Lord." I also heard the men themselves, that they sang with a loud voice, saying, "Blessing, honor, and glory, and power be to Him that sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb, forever and ever."

Now, just as the gates were opened to let in the men, I looked in after them, and behold the city shone like the sun; the streets, also, were paved with gold, and in them walked many men with crowns on their heads, palms in their hands, and golden harps, to sing praises withal.

There were also of them that had wings, and they answered one another without intermission, saying, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord." And after that they shut up the gates; which when I had seen, I wished myself among them.

Now, while I was gazing upon all these things, I turned my head to look back, and saw Ignorance coming up to the river side; but he soon got over, and that without half the difficulty which the other two men met with. For it happened that there was then in that place one VainHope, a ferryman, that with his boat helped him over; so he, as the other, I saw, did ascend the hill, to come up to the gate, only he came alone; neither did any man meet him with the least encouragement. When he was coming up to the gate, he looked up to the writing that was above, and then began to knock, supposing that entrance should have been quickly administered to him; but he was asked by the men that looked over the top of the gate, Whence come you, and what would you have? He answered, "I have eat and drank in the presence of the King, and he has taught in our streets." Then they asked for his certificate, that they might go in and show it to the King; so he fumbled in his bosom for one, and found none. Then said they, You have none ! but the man answered never a word. So they told the King, but he would not come down to see him, but commanded the two shining ones that conducted Christian and Hopeful to the city to go out and take Ignorance, and bind him hand and foot, and have him away. Then they took him up, and carried him through the air to the door that I saw on

the side of the hill, and put him in there. Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction. "So I awoke, and behold it was a dream."

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

From THE URN BURIAL.

In a field of Old Walsingham, not many months past, were digged up between forty and fifty urns, deposited in a dry and sandy soil, not a yard deep, not far from one another: not all strictly of one figure, but most answering these described; some containing two pounds of bones, distinguishable in skulls, ribs, jaws, thigh-bones, and teeth, with fresh impressions of their combustion; besides, the extraneous substances, like pieces of small boxes, or combs handsomely wrought, handles of small brass instruments, brazen nippers, and in one some kind of opal. That these were the urns of Romans, from the common custom and place where they were found, is no obscure conjecture. What time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarianism, not to be resolved by man, not easily, perhaps, by spirits, except we consult the provincial guardians or tutelary observators. Had they made as good provision for their names, as they have done for their relics, they had not so grossly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. . . .

There is nothing strictly immortal but immortality. Whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end. But the sufficiency of Christian immortality frustrates all earthly glory, and the quality of either state after death makes a folly of posthumous memory.

Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave; solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal lustre.

From VULGAR ERRORS.

Ice is only water congealed by the frigidity of the air, whereby it acquireth no new form, but rather a consistence or determination of its diffluency, and emitteth not its essence, but condition of fluidity. Neither doth there anything properly conglaciate but water, or watery humidity, for the determination of quicksilver is properly fixation, that of milk coagulation, and that of oil and unctuous bodies only incrassation.

SYLLABUS.

The Commonwealth of England continued from 1649 to 1660.

With the accession of the Stuarts the liberty of the people was threatened.

Resistance to royal aggression brought on civil war.

Milton was called upon to direct the sentiments of the new republic.

His own interests were abandoned; and he devoted himself to the liberty of England.

Love of liberty and truth were the guiding principles of his life.
Milton's life may be divided into three parts.

1st. The period of his Early Poems, when he wrote Hymn to the Nativity, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Arcades, Comus, Lycidas.

2d. The period of his Prose Works, principal of which were Reformation touching Church Discipline, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, a tractate on Education, Areopagitica, First Defence of the People of England, Second Defence of the People of England. This period embraced the twenty years between 1640-1660.

3d. The period of his Later Poems, in which he wrote Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.

He was totally blind during the last period.

He was seven years in writing Paradise Lost.

The two other Puritan poets were George Wither and Andrew Marvell. The Cavalier poets were Cowley, Waller, Davenant, Butler.

Ralph Cudworth controverted the doctrine of Hobbes.

In Theology the principal writers of the Church of England were Jeremy Taylor, Chillingworth, Barrow.

Prominent Non-conformists were Baxter, Bunyan, George Fox.

The influence of the Bible was paramount in the Puritan literature. Clarendon's History of the Rebellion was the greatest historical work. Fuller's Worthies was the greatest biographical work.

Sir Thomas Browne was an original writer and thinker.

His chief works were Urn Burial, Religio Medici, and Vulgar Errors. Izaak Walton is called "the Father of Angling."

His enjoyment of nature may be compared to Chaucer's.

His works are The Complete Angler, Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Dr. Robert Sanderson. James Harrington wrote Oceana, a political romance.

14

W

THE RESTORATION.

1660-1700.

ITH the restoration of the Stuarts, and absolute monarchy,

a reactionary tide set in. The Puritan restraint removed. it was like the breaking away of a mighty dam, when the pentup torrent dashes headlong in its wild career, bearing everything before it in indiscriminate ruin. The tide of feeling and action that now overran the Puritan landmarks was not an angry torrent, but as impetuous and much more dangerous because alluring in its aspect. It was the mad rush of licentious pleasures. The sober livery of the Puritan was exchanged for the flaunting robes of the reveller.

It was the age of Louis XIV. in France-brilliant, witty, licentious. Charles II., in his exile, had been a guest in the court of Louis, and an apt scholar in the unlawful pleasures that marked French society at that time. Restored to the throne of England he tried to introduce into his own all the gayeties of the French court. The English character, by nature, is thoughtful and serious, the reverse of the French, so that the adoption of the manners of that lively nation set but ill upon the plain, blunt Englishman. Carried away, however, in the tide of unlawful pleasures, he could not see that, in the eyes of other nations, he was making of himself a mere mountebank to be jeered at and despised.

Through all this abandonment to gayety and so-called pleas