from His high watch-tower in the heavens, discerning the crooked ways of perverse and cruel men, hath hitherto maimed and infatuated all their inventions, and deluded their great wizards with a delusion fit for fools and children: had God been so minded, he could have sent a spirit of mutiny amongst us, as He did between Abimelech and the Sechemites, to have. made our funerals; but He, when we least deserved, sent out a gentle gale and message of peace from the wings of those His cherubims that fan His mercy seat. "Go on both hand in hand, O nations, never to be disunited; be the praise and the heroic song of all posterity; merit this, but seek only virtue, not to extend your limits (for what needs to win a fading triumphant laurel out of the tears of wretched men ?); but to settle the pure worship of God in His church and justice in the state: then shall the hardest difficulties smooth out themselves before ye; envy shall sink to hell, craft and malice be confounded, whether it be homebred mischief or outlandish cunning: yea, other nations will then covet to serve ye, for lordship and victory are but the pages of justice and virtue ; join your invincible might to do worthy and god-like deeds; and then he that seeks to break your union, a cleaving curse be his inheritance to all generations.” "If the sacred and dreadful works of holy discipline, censure, penance, excommunication, and abso lution, where no profane thing ought to have access, nothing to be assistant but sage and Christianly admonition, brotherly love, flaming charity and zeal; and then, according to the effects, paternal sorrow, or paternal joy, mild severity, melting compassion: if such divine ministeries as these, wherein the angel of the church represents the person of Christ Jesus, must lie prostitute to sordid fees, and not pass to and fro between our Saviour, that of free grace redeemed us, and the submissive penitent, without the truckage of perishing coin, then have the Babylonish merchants of souls just excuse." "This most mild, though withal dreadful and inviolable prerogative of Christ's diadem, excommunication, serves for nothing but to prog and pander for fees. But in the evangelical and reformed use of this sacred censure no such prostitution, no such Iscariotical drifts are to be doubted, as that spiritual doom and sentence should invade worldly possession, which is the rightful lot and portion even of the wickedest men, as frankly bestowed upon them by the all-dispensing bounty as rain and sunshine. No, no; it seeks not to bereave or destroy the body; it seeks to save the soul by humbling the body, not by imprisonment or pecuniary mulct, much less by stripes, or bonds, or disinheritance, but by fatherly admonishment and Christian rebuke, to cast it into godly sorrow, whose end is joy, and ingenuous bashfulness to sin: if that cannot be wrought, then as a tender mother takes her child and holds it over the pit with scaring words, that it may learn to fear where danger is; so doth excommunication as dearly and as freely, without money, use her wholesome and saving terrors; she is instant, she beseeches, by all the dear and sweet promises of salvation she entices and woos; by all the threatenings and thunders of the law, and rejected gospel, she charges and adjures: this is all her armoury, her munition, her artillery; then she awaits with long sufferance, and yet ardent zeal. In brief, there is no act in all the errand of God's ministers to mankind wherein passes more lover-like contestation between Christ and the soul of a regenerate man lapsing, than before, and in, and after the sentence of excommunication. As for the fogging proctorage of money, with such an eye as struck Gehazi with leprosy and Simon Magus with a curse, so does she look, and so threaten her fiery whip against that banking den of thieves that dare thus baffle, and buy, and sell the awful and majestic wrinkles of her brow. He that is rightly and apostolically sped with her invisible arrow, if he can be at peace in his own soul, and not smell within him the brimstone of hell, may have fair leave to tell all his bags over undiminished of the least farthing, may eat his dainties, drink his wine, use his delights, enjoy his lands and liberties, not the least skin raised, not the least hair misplaced, for all that excommunication has done much more may a king enjoy his rights and prerogatives undeflowered, untouched, and be as absolute and complete a king as all his royalties and revenues can make him. But let us not for fear of a scarecrow, or else through hatred to be reformed, stand hankering and politizing, when God with spread hands testifies to us, and points us out the way to our peace." We will conclude our selections from this remarkable first prose composition of Milton with its truly magnificent peroration. "O, sir, I do now feel myself inwrapped on a sudden into those mazes and labyrinths of dreadful and hideous thoughts, that which way to get out, or which way to end, I know not, unless I turn mine eyes, and with your help lift up my hands to that eternal and propitious throne, where nothing is readier than grace and refuge to the distresses of mortal suppliants: and it were a shame to leave these serious thoughts less piously than the heathen were wont to conclude their graver discourses. “Thou, therefore, that sittest in light and glory unapproachable, parent of angels and men! next, Thee I implore, omnipotent King, Redeemer of that lost remnant whose nature Thou didst assume, ineffable and everlasting Love! and Thou, the third subsistence of divine infinitude, illumining Spirit, the joy and solace of created things! one Tripersonal Godhead! look upon this Thy poor and almost spent and expiring church, leave her not thus a prey to these unfortunate wolves that wait and think long till they devour Thy tender flock; these wild boars that have broken into Thy vineyard, and left the fruit of their polluting hoofs on the souls of Thy servants. O let them not bring about their designs, that stand now at the entrance of the bottomless pit, expecting the watchword to open, and let out those dreadful locusts and scorpions, to re-involve us in that pitchy cloud of infernal darkness, where we shall never more see the sun of Thy truth again, never hope for the cheerful dawn, never more hear the bird of morning sing. Be moved with pity at the afflicted state of this our shaken monarchy, that now lies labouring under her throes, and struggling against the grudges of more dreaded calamities. "O Thou, that, after the impetuous rage of five bloody inundations, and the succeeding sword of intestine war, soaking the land in her own gore, didst pity the sad and ceaseless revolution of our swift and thick coming sorrows; when we were quite breathless, of Thy free grace didst motion peace, and terms of covenant with us; and having first well-nigh freed us from anti-Christian thraldom, didst build up this Britannic empire to a glorious and enviable height, with all her daughter islands about her; stay us in this felicity, |