beyond their masters. Such were the Essentialists, followers of one Mrs. Dunbar, a Scotch woman, and the Family of the Mount, whose founder was a clergyman, named Etchard, minister of Darsham, in Suffolk.* The sectarians complained of being misrepresented and slandered by the preachers of the day, but some of them seem to have laid themselves very open to such crimination as follows: : "As for the erroneous heretics, not to speak of all, let us add somewhat of the most pestilent Family of Love. . . . . In speaking of the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ, these men, as fools flying one extremity run post haste unto the contrary extremity; and therefore these wretches, imagining to themselves a spiritual Christ, are as much to be maliced as the papists are to be pitied. For, after popery, yet some cause was given of rejoicing, in that the truth of history was left unto us; but these fellows, under a colour of not being ceremonial, but altogether desiring to be spiritual, take away all from us, and yet most deceitfully will seem to grant all. If ye demand anything of Christ-his birth; they will grant it. If ye ask whether he was born of the seed of David, and of the Virgin Mary, they will confess it; but as understanding it after this allegory, for that Mary, as they say, signifieth doctrine; David the beloved service: so that this is their judgment of Christ, his birth, that he was born of the doctrine of the service of love. In like manner they will grant the resurrection of Christ, his death, and his burial, but in this sense-that Christ suffereth in our suffocated nature, and is crucified when sin dieth in us, and when they suffer for the doctrine of love; and that after they have suffered, and begun to be illuminated, then Christ riseth again in them; and lastly, when the light of nature getteth some clearer light of judgment, then Christ is ready to come to judgment. Thus, a number having refused the Antichristian pope, are fallen into the hands of Antichristian atheists, and having eschewed the dregs of popery, have wallowed most filthily in the mire of heresy."+ It is easy to see how such principles might be made to suit the emergencies of persecution. A modern infidel, alluding to Galileo's denial of his discoveries and the theory he had raised upon them, observes that he was right, for the truths of science need no hecatombs; the family seem to have extended this principle to the truths of revelation. They maintained, "That men need not openly be of any religion whereby they may endanger themselves. That it is good Christendom to lie, swear, and forswear, to say and unsay to any, saving such as be of the same family, with whom they must use all plainness, and keep their mysteries secret from all others to themselves. These men may do anything to avoid affliction, and they have scripture for that purpose: "Your bodies are the temple of the Holy Ghost; you may not suffer God's temples to be touched.' "‡ Dyos thus notices the sect in question :— * Str. An. II. i., 562. † Greenham, 16th Sermon. 6 "Touching the family of love, I say this, the devil transformeth himself into an angel of light, therefore it is no great marvel that this family, being indeed a family of Satan, should transform themselves into a family of light, a family of love; God is light, God is love. Chrysostom saith, Heretici omnia habent in similitudine'-heretics have all things in resemblance or likeness. This family is not a family of true love. It is a family of blasphemy, a family of falsehood, a family of pride, a family of idolatry, a family of ignorance and folly, a family of malice, and, to be short, a family of all vice and villany; for proof I refer you to the books, or rather Babels, of H. N., whom they name the true prophet of God, whereas he is a false and lying prophet."* Perkins alludes to them with equal severity,calling them "libertines, who being (as they say) deified, are so carried by the Holy Ghost, that they cannot sin; no, though they should commit fornication."+ And another preacher remarks how surprisingly they multiplied, "especially in those cities and towns populous where the word of God is most diligently preached." The most finished sectarians of the age, however, were probably the Brownists. Collier calls theirs "the first schism in form which appeared in England;" and the accounts of their founder are sufficiently curious. Robert Brown was himself a man of family, and while studying at Bennet College, Cambridge, imbibed the doctrines of Cartwright. He first preached at Norwich, in 1581, where, having brought a small number of the inhabitants to his views, he formed them into a sect, and refused to join any other congregation in public worship. He soon improved upon Cartwright's platform, and in 1582 published his "Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for Any." His influence through his relations was considerable, and on some slight concession he obtained preferment in Northamptonshire; he died in the gaol of Northampton, aged upwards of eighty. "He had," says Fuller, "a wife with whom he never lived, and a church in which he never preached." He boasted that he had been committed to thirty-two prisons, in some of which he could not see his hand at noon day.§ Greenham thus cautions his congregation against Brownism :"And yet here we must beware of their hasty zeal who will not stick to charge the children of God to be without zeal if presently and abruptly they rush not into open reprehension of men that are mighty in authority, as though no regard of place, time, and persons were to be had; which opinion many, by weakness of judgment, defending, find neither fruit in others', nor comfort in their own consciences when they do admonish in that presumptuous manner."|| Hudson probably alludes to this sect in the following passage:"It is the manner of some to turn with the spider's breath the sweet juice of flowers into poison; to seek knots in rushes where all * John Dyos, PC. 1579, p. 62. Perkins on Jude, p. 502, vol. iii. Samuel Cottesford, 1591. VOL. XXIV.-July, 1843. C things are plain and smooth, to stumble at every straw that stoppeth the course of their eager spirit; to break the bonds of peace, and so to single and sever themselves by themselves. Well, we are here told it is no new or strange thing; it is the manner of some; it hath been, it will be, and therefore we are not greatly moved therewith. It is the manner of some, and therefore being thus armed and forewarned thereof, we may the better avoid and withstand the like proceedings."* The contemplation of such divisions as these awakened something like anxiety among the most lax of churchmen, in whose writings exhortations to unity now and then occur, and expositions of the guilt of schism. Perkins says, "It is a great sin for a man to separate himself from the assemblies of God's people; because, first, it is a flying from God and his presence, whose face every one is commanded to seek, seeing he presenteth himself in the word and sacraments; and wheresoever two or three are assembled in his name, &c. Secondly, it is a contempt of God's ordinance, which, whosoever despiseth, despiseth God himself. Thirdly, out of the Catholic church. is no salvation; the saying is true; Whosoever will not have the church for his mother shall not have God for his father. Fourthly, the congregation of God's people upon earth are the suburbs and gates of the kingdom of heaven; whosoever, therefore, shutteth the gates of this kingdom of grace against himself here, shall never enter into the gates of the kingdom of glory hereafter."+ This reads well, but the views of episcopacy, as set forth by the preachers, were generally so low and obscure that it is not easy to see upon what single circumstance any man could make out the charge of schism against another who devised his own religion without reference to any existing church. If the Elizabethan bishops were scorned and rebelled against by their clergy, they had often no one to blame for it but themselves; if their flocks wandered from their folds, too many of them had laid aside the pastoral staff which should reclaim them, and not claiming fearlessly their apostolic succession; nay, sometimes regarding it as a thing they blushed to own, no wonder that the power they wished to exercise was treated as usurpation. At an ordination at Manchester, in 1582, Bishop Downham appointed one Simon Harward to preach to the candidates. In this discourse he assured them that "the privileges and superiorities which bishops have above other ministers are rather granted by men for maintaining better order and quietness in commonwealths than challenged by the office of their ministry." And he proceeds to defend the consecration of the first Elizabethan bishops, although "they had no imposition of hands, but only of popish priests, which are no true seignory;" "that although many bishops in England, Scotland, and Denmark, had succeeded popish priests, it was but in succession of the chair and place, for in doctrine they only succeeded Jesus Christ;" and as we are forced to allow the baptism of Romanists, so must we allow their imposition of hands, and admit that the first Anglican bishops" had, after a sort, an ordinary vocation-as they call vocation.' PC. S., by J. Hudson, 1584. † Perkins, vol. iii. It was time for some reaction to take place which should produce a set of men who, distinguishing things that differ, and emancipated from the hero worship of the Reformers, should revive right views of the unity, while maintaining the purity, of the church. Traces are not wanting of the gradual formation of such a party-the necessary sequel to an age of spiritual licence. The following extract is taken from a sermon on Jude by William Perkins. It was one of a course of three score and six, preached at Cambridge, near the close of the sixteenth century. The same sentiments have probably been heard in the pulpits of both universities more recently: "It were to be wished that some of our students, even of divinity, had not a spice of this sin of Corah; for within this six or seven years divers have addicted themselves to study popish writers and monkish discourses, despising, in the meantime, the writings of those famous instruments and clear lights whom the Lord raised up for the raising and restoring of true religion, such as Luther, Calvin, Bucer, Beza, Martyr, &c.; which argueth that their minds are alienated from the sincerity of the truth, because the writings of these (soundest expositors of the Scriptures, raised since the apostles) are not savoury unto them: yea, some can revile these worthy lights themselves, which is a spice of Corah his sin.' * These extracts have run to a considerable length, and yet have but imperfectly exhibited the process by which the church of England was debased almost as soon as she was revived by the Reformation, and paid dearly, though not too dearly, for the truths recovered and the errors put away. Perhaps, however, they throw some light on the steps by which inroads were made on her constitution. First, Precisians, imagining every caprice of their own essential to the purity of the gospel, neither spared the feelings nor heeded the consciences of their brethren, who relinquished reluctantly any figment of the faith in which they had been brought up; then these same papists, or at least, their children, (their daughters, it would seem, more numerously than their sons,) gradually ceased to attend their parish churches, where, notwithstanding the precautions of Archbishop Parker and the government, nothing was omitted which could irritate and insult them. The extreme Puritans having thus expelled them from the temples of their fathers, the same restlessness prevented their remaining themselves, and, too late, they went off in various forms of separation. Then moderate and learned men took alarm; was there no mean, they inquired; was everything touched by popery defiled? and a study of popish books and the position the students would be forced into by having to defend their own views of catholic unity, would both bias their minds and affect their moderation towards others. Such was the party of Laud and his adherents; a party not generated by the influence of one, but the result of a course of enlarged study upon many. The ignorant thought them papists in disguise, and the wicked said so, until popular fury seized their primate as a victim, and added another martyr to the noble army in heaven. Perkins' Works, vol. iii. p. 553. SACRED ART IN ENGLAND-THE EXHIBITIONS. WHETHER the representation of scenes and persons described in scripture or remote history can be regarded as a legitimate employment of the painter's fancy must be reserved as a question worthy of debate. The pictures of such events and characters must always convey an impression more or less remote from the truth, and thus it is possible they may inflict a certain amount of moral injury. This is especially the case where figures of the Divine Persons are delineated-figures which, if correct, would demand a reverence allied to worship; but being as they are, provoke an approach, when ill executed, to irreverence, when tolerably successful, to idolatry. All this, however, we will just for the present forget. We will assume that the aim of a picture is attained if it leaves such an impression as the mind would receive from reading the transaction it represents in a susceptible mood, and say, with Sir Joshua Reynolds, that real facts must be suppressed rather than allow that impression to be interfered with. Assuming then, for awhile, the character of artists, and carrying as little theology with us, as the least that will interpret the language of the easel, it may be interesting to examine the condition of sacred art as indicated by the pictures of that class at present exhibited by British artists. And of them it may be said, in one word, that they seem less numerous than they were last year, thus shewing a decline in the demand for such works. Yet several of the designs are of that ambitious character which proves that nothing but opportunity is wanting to produce a very respectable school of historical painting in London. At the same time there is a sort of picture which, professing to emanate from holy scripture, is as essentially secular as any can be with a sacred name. Who conversant with the London exhibitions in past years does not remember three naked colossal warriors engaged 'n deadly combat, Academy figures of high merit, from the atelier of Etty? And who on earth would have guessed that in them he beheld Benaiah slaying the two lion-like men of Moab? Another, which, if distance has not lent enchantment to the recollection, equalled in colouring and personal loveliness the best works of the same master-a group of girls dancing before an admiring company: this was supposed to represent the sons of God beholding the beauty of the daughters of men. In cases of this kind the picture seems to have been first composed, and the name found afterwards. Similar instances are not wanting in the present year: a group of youthful beauty gorgeously attired, and playing upon lyres, is denominated Jephtha's daughter; the last day of mourning. The clearness of the atmosphere, the finish of every part, and a good deal of technical merit, cannot atone for the utter incongruity of the whole composition. Surely no one would guess its intention without assistance; indeed, it must be acknowledged that of those productions in which correct drawing and powerful conception, fine colouring, and freedom of touch, combine to extort the homage which taste pays evermore to genius, very few will fall within the range of the present observations. He who last year exhibited that admirable and heart-stirring canvas, "Christ Weeping over Jerusalem," has now a small picture |