by the solemnity of death, that of divine purpose controlling both life and death. The protagonist is in truth not Samson but Jehovah. The great combatant, pre-eminent in strength and valour, the champion of his people, chosen of God for a high purpose, has fallen. Through no merit of his own but as an act of free grace the divine gift of strength had been conferred upon him; all that was demanded was that he should keep a secret entrusted to him; in that test he had failed. He had forgotten his loyalty to God in a woman's lap, when nothing was required save the passive obedience of silence. As the consequence of that dereliction the Hebrew patriot and hero is reduced to blind servitude at the mill in Gaza, oppressed above all by the sense of his own unfaithfulness and of heaven's desertion, a man who is not "in the list of them that hope." Old Manoa with his uninspired reason and good-will, hoping to obtain his son's ransom and vainly dreaming that his eyesight may be restored, can bring him no true help. Dalila, a mist of frauds, Harapha, a storm of brute force, serve him only by rousing his spirit from supine despair to indignant passion. Yet help there is for Samson, but his help can be from God alone. He has failed in the test of passive obedience; there is also obedience of an active kind: will he fail in this? Pleasure he was unable to resist; will he be able to confront pain and death? A second test of obedience is proposed to determine the issue of his life. When he is summoned to appear before the Philistine lords at their profane festival, Samson at first refuses "I will not come." But presently sudden promptings stir within his mind, and he is aware that these promptings are from God: I begin to feel In this final test Samson will not fail; even to his own destruction he follows out the divine promptings. And therefore after the hideous noise, the shouting, the universal groan, destruction and ruin at the utmost point, there follows deep peace of mind, a peace as pure as it is profound. Samson lies a ruin of manhood, but at the last the will of God has been loyally fulfilled, and through obedience he has obtained God's enfranchisement of death: Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Not through Manoa's prudent diplomacy but through one act of heroic obedience, the blind and dejected captive has passed from servitude to freedom. Critics have lamented that Milton did not embody his political experience in epic or in drama; "the epic of liberty, virtue, and religion, which he had it in him to write, remained unwritten." It seems at first sight as if his prose writings, devoted to the cause of freedom, and his poems were separated by a gulf that is wide and deep. But is this really the case? Or were not the prose pamphlets an attempt to give an application in detail to the one great principle which inspires masque and epic and drama? When Milton was a poet he could soar with no middle flight; he could occupy himself with none of the secondary truths which regulate conduct private or public. One primary truth filled all his mind-acceptance of the divine rule, submission to the divine mandate; heroic patience in accepting the will of God, heroic energy in making the will of God prevail; entire obedience, and, through obedience, freedom. VII AN ANGLICAN AND A PURITAN EIRENICON JEREMY TAYLOR: BAXTER I A FUNERAL panegyric is not and cannot be a complete criticism; but true sorrow may be keen-sighted for the characteristic virtue of a mind and life. No better word, when allowance has been made for the occasion, has been spoken of Jeremy Taylor than that found in the sermon preached a few days after his death by his friend and follower Dean Rust, himself a writer of some distinction, whose affinities were with the school of the Cambridge Platonists. Taylor was not a great or original thinker; he was not always as wise as he was learned; the spirit of authority sometimes overbore with him the spirit of conciliation. "He was not unseen," says Rust, "in the subtleties and spinosities of the schools, and upon occasion could make them serve his purpose." It was not always an advantage to Taylor that he delayed among these subtleties and spinosities, and the panegyrist adds with a half apologetic touch: "Yet, I believe, he thought many of them very near akin to the famous knight of La Mancha, and would make sport sometimes with the romantic sophistry, and fantastic adventures of school errantry." We may remain unconvinced when Rust ascribes to his friend "the profoundness of a philosopher, the sagacity of a prophet, the reason of an angel." But when he speaks of the natural ardour of Taylor's temperament, the opulence of his endowment, the harmonious richness of his genius, and when he adds that this ardour and these great gifts were directed towards piety, we feel that he has found the centre, and said a final word: "Nature had befriended him much in his constitution; for he was a person of a most sweet and obliging humour, of great candour and ingenuousness; . . . his soul was made up of harmony; . . . all his words and his very tone and cadences were unusually musical. But that which most of all captivated and ravished his hearers was the gaiety and richness of his fancy; for he had much in him of that natural enthusiasm which inspires all great poets and orators; and there was a generous ferment in his blood and spirits, that forcibly excited his imagination, and raised it to such a degree of luxuriancy as nothing but the greatness of his wit and judgment could have kept within due bounds." The truth could hardly be better told. And Rust adds elsewhere in his éloge: "His humility was coupled with extraordinary piety; and, I believe, he spent the greatest part of his time in heaven; his solemn hours of prayer took up a considerable portion of his life; and we are not to doubt but he had learned of St Paul to pray continually; and that occasional ejaculations, and frequent aspirations, and emigrations of his soul after God, made up the best part of his |