which scattered his assailants. It did more. The shock loosened his vessel; the rising tide floated her, and carried her past the boom. At the very moment of his triumph, he was shot through the head. But Derry was saved. By ten o'clock, both ships were at the quay, " to the inexpressible joy and transport of our distressed garrison, for we only reckoned upon two days' life, and had only nine lean horses left, and among us all one pint of meal to each man. The siege was practically over. On the 31st of July 1689, the enemy decamped, and the cause of the Revolution was saved in Ireland.

CHAPTER XI

1688-1900

Changed character of the romance of religion: the Psalms in the lives of religious leaders-Baxter, Law, John Wesley, Charles Wesley, William Wilberforce, Keble, Manning, Newman, Thomas Arnold, Julius Hare, Neander, Charles Kingsley, Stanley, Chalmers, Irving; the Psalms in the lives of men of science-Locke, Humboldt, Maine de Biran, Sir W. Hamilton, Sir James Simpson, Romanes; the Psalms in literature-Addison, Cowper, Boswell, Scott, Byron, Hogg, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Fitzgerald, Ruskin, Carlyle.

THE first seventy years of the eighteenth century lie like a plain between two ranges of hills. Behind it rise the picturesque highlands, in which the theology of the Middle Ages had fought every inch of ground with Protestantism, and where the voluptuous sensibility of the Cavalier had crossed swords with the stern morality of the Puritan. Before it loom the volcanic heights of the French revolutionary era, destined to be the scene of new conflicts, where once more, without thought of compromise or acquiescence, opposing principles contended for absolute victory. Between the mountain ranges extends the plain of the eighteenth century, rich and fertile, but deficient in many of the virtues which flourish best on more barren soils and in more bracing air.

England under the last two Stuarts had retained the heat of a life-and-death struggle, though the fire was already burning low. Men acted, thought, spoke, and wrote with something of the romance and passion of their ancestors. At least they preserved the grand manner, if they had lost the high-toned sentiment which was its impulse. But in the age of Anne, and still more under the House of Hanover, the temperature was chilled. Society banished enthusiasm

from politics, philosophy, literature, religion, and took its ease. In politics-loyalty gave place to expediency, divine right to constitutional monarchy. In philosophy-reason and experience dethroned faith and tradition; the thought of Locke, clear, sensible, and practical, reigned supreme. In literature passion, spontaneity, imagination were succeeded by the finish, taste, restraint, and intellectual fancy of an impulse which had lost the fervour of youth.

In religion, the change was equally conspicuous. Alarmed at the results of Catholic zeal or Puritan fervour, society invoked the aid of the established religion to control extravagance, to restrain vehemence, and strengthen order. Never was the Church, in a sense, more popular. Never was Christianity more ably defended; but it was on the ground of human reasonableness alone. Its most powerful champions fought with the weapons of their assailants, and rejected the aid of all that was miraculous, mysterious, supernatural. Cold and rational, they endeavoured to argue men into goodness, appealed to a system of rewards and punishments, ignored the power of the heart or the imagination. The result was disastrous. Religion grew formal, full of propriety, drowsy, prosperous. Its authority was put forward with cautious regard to the probability of its acceptance. Seeming to distrust itself, it was regarded as something which could be ignored, not as something which imperatively demanded to be either obeyed or condemned. The devotional cast of mind, the enthusiasm, the mystery, the prophetic vision, the martyr's passion, were left behind in the natural sanctuaries of the mountains. Nothing remained but a religion of the plains-low-lying, level, utilitarian, prosaic.

During the last half of the eighteenth century, the dying embers of religious fervour were fanned into flame by the Methodists and the Evangelicals. Meanwhile new forces were coming into play which gave fresh impulse and direction to every form of national life. Industrial development was advancing with rapidity. Science shook off its dilettantism, and became a power. As the nineteenth century advanced, the mental attitude of inquirers grew to be scientific. The supremacy of theology was challenged; the claim of authority

sifted or denied. Out of the shock of the collision emerged the religious parties in the Church as we know them to-day. Bitterly opposed as they were, and are, in love of the Psalter they were united. Under new impulses, the romance of religion revived, though in an altered form. It has not disappeared, nor even diminished; but it has changed in character. It has passed from without to within, from action to thought, from deeds to emotions. It has become, for that reason, less adapted for pictorial treatment. The Psalms, as of old, still nerve men and women to suffer, to dare, to endure. But, on the stage of history, the opportunity of witnessing for the faith grows rarer as the world becomes more tolerant or more indifferent to diversity of opinion. Religious tragedies are still played on every side of us, and in our midst. If they could be revealed, they would have the special interest of familiar conditions and contemporary circumstances. They would come closer to us than scenes of martyrdom. But modern tragedies of religion are, for the most part, withdrawn from observation, enacted in the privacy of home rather than on the public stage. Their scene is the human heart, or the human brain. The rack, the dungeon, the scaffold, are all there. But the torture is the chill agony of doubt, the iron grip of remorseless logic, the keen analysis of searching introspection, the desperate effort to hold or regain cherished beliefs, to shake off the gradual deadening of senses once susceptible to holy impressions, to resist the creeping numbness of nerves formerly responsive to sacred influences. To the vanquished, come the solitude, the void, the darkness of lost creeds; to the victors, belong the peace and triumph of a faith that has withstood the test. The scene is less dramatic, less picturesque. But the trial is not less fiery than the stake. Who can say that the drawn-out agony of those who have succumbed does not exceed the pains of those who, upheld by triumphant confidence in their cause, have endured the most exquisite tortures of the body? Who, on the other hand, will assert that the peace and joy of those, whose faith withstands the trial, may not equal the most ecstatic vision of his risen Lord that ever gladdened the straining eyes of the Christian martyr at the moment of his supremest anguish?

It is well that the choice of subjects is thus, in one sense, narrowed, at the moment when the multifarious activities of modern life widen the field so indefinitely that selection, necessarily arbitrary, must now appear capricious. History may illustrate something of the debt, which, during the last two centuries, men and women have owed to the Psalms. The mystery of existence forces itself upon our attention. The eternal questions of whence? and why? and whither? have never been more insistent, rolling in upon us like the monotonous surges of the inarticulate sea. With tense nerves and strained senses, men and women ask, what is life, and what is death. No sound of answer comes, except the echo of their own voices reverberating through a cavernous void; and happy are they who, turning in their weariness to the Psalter, find that its words wrap them round like a folding sense which brings them peace. Of all this vast sum of human experience, history takes no account. For every recorded incident, there are millions of cases, unknown beyond the secret chambers of the heart, in which the Psalms have restored the faith, lifted the despair, revived the hopes, steeled the courage, bound up the wounds of the struggling, suffering hosts of humanity.

On the lives of leaders in the various religious movements which mark the period, may be traced the influence of the Psalms.

Here are the words, "And call upon His name, and declare His works among the people (Ps. cv., verse 1), which are inscribed upon the pulpit at Kidderminster, once occupied by Richard Baxter (1615-92), one of the first and greatest of Noncomformist divines, the eloquent preacher, the voluminous theological writer, patient alike under the lifelong pains of disease and thirty years of almost incessant persecution. A man whose personal holiness was never disputed by his bitterest opponents, and a model parish priest, he so transformed Kidderminster, that on the Lord's day there was no disorder to be seen in the streets; but you might hear a hundred families singing psalms, and repeating sermons as you passed through them." The use of the Psalms by his parishioners at Kidderminster might well have been the fruit of Baxter's special influence; some may even