"Tout est dit et l'on vient trop tard depuis plus de sept mille ans qu'il y a des hommes, et
qui pensent." Translation: Everything has been said: and those come too late who come
after men have existed and thought for seven thousand years and more.

CHARACTERES DE LA BRUYÈRE.

"We prophesy in part."- ST. PAUL.

"Yet these were, when no man did them know,
Yet have from wisest ages hidden beene;
And later times things more unknown shall show.
Why, then, should witlesse man so much misweene
That nothing is, but that which he hath seene?
What if within the moone's fayre, shining spheare,
What if in every other starre unseene,
Of other worldes he happily should heare?
He wonder would much more."

FAIRIE QUEENE.

BOSTON:

PHILLIPS, SAMPSON AND COMPANY.

1859.

L

?

HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY

1868, 61.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1858, by

PHILLIPS, SAMPSON AND COMPANY,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

PREFACE.

THE author has been disinclined, perhaps more and longer than he ought, to add anything to the materials of religious controversy. These materials have proved rather combustible; and no one who values his peace, or the commandment of charity, would willingly stir up the acrimony and fierceness which many have deemed so legitimate in religion. Religious controversy has, in all ages, partaken of such a character as to render the study of religion, when anything new was to be learned, the most uninviting of all others. Opposition, detraction, the dungeon, and even the fires of the stake, have presented themselves before the hardy adventurer who has, obeying his conscience and the word of God, opened a new leaf of the word of life to a perishing world.

The intelligent reader of much that is called church history must be convinced that a spirit very different in intelligence and goodness from that which inspired the divine word has presided over a great part of