protect me, I will stay till the storm be overpassed.

"In short, when Vane, Lambert, Hesilrige cannot live in safety, I cannot live at all. If I had been in England, I should have expected a lodging with them; or, though they may be the first as being more eminent, I must expect to follow their example in suffering as I have been their companion in acting." After spending many years in Italy and France, Sidney returned to England to fall a victim to an unjust trial, leaving his eloquent writings and his heroic example to his countrymen.

When Ludlow found that resistance to the restoration was hopeless, he took refuge in Switzerland along with John Lisle, the husband of Alice Lisle, the lady who was put to death for harbouring a fugitive after Monmouth's rebellion. Lisle was murdered by royalist assassins, and several attempts were made upon the life of Ludlow, but without success. Though repeatedly asked, he had refused to engage in the desperate plots of the Wildmans and Fergusons against the Stuarts; but when the news of the Revolution of 1688 reached the shores of the Lake of Geneva, Ludlow regarded it as the triumph of the cause to which he had been so honest and steady a friend.

He was invited by some powerful members of the Whig party to return to England; but it would appear that the horror with which the regicides were regarded had increased during the twenty-eight years, when no man dared say a word in their excuse. was brought to the notice of parliament by some Tory member that one of the regicides had appeared

It

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openly in London, and whatever the Whigs may have thought on the matter, they had not the courage to defend him. Some days elapsed before a warrant could be issued against him, and the Puritan soldier had time to escape from England and to return to the republican state which had sheltered him so long. He died in the seventy-third year of his age. We have seen his grave in the church of St Martin, overlooking the little town of Vevey, and the quiet blue waters of the Leman Lake, surrounded by the mountains on which he must often have gazed. On the church wall there is an inscription in which his widow records his courage in battle, his mercy to the vanquished, his love of liberty, and hatred of arbitrary power. Beside him lies Andrew Broughton, who

read the sentence of death on Charles I.

CHAPTER XXIV

Vane's Theological Views and Writings

WHILE Oliver Cromwell took up the uneasy burden of the state, Henry Vane retired to Raby Castle and gave his mind to those theological reveries which so strikingly contrast with his firm grasp of administrative details and the clearness of his political insight. Yet, in the deeply religious tone of those days, it is no more surprising that a practical politician should have written an abstruse treatise on theology than that, in our days, a cabinet minister should write a book on the Homeric poems, or on the foundations of belief. In the spring of 1655 Vane published a quarto volume of 440 pages entitled, A Retired Man's Meditations or the Mysterie and Power of Godlinesse. One feature of Vane's writings is their entire subjectivity. One may turn over page after page without finding any trace of the personality of the author or political allusions which might mark when the book was written.

In the last chapter of the Meditations Vane proclaims his faith in the near coming of a real theocracy on earth. This belief, which was shared by many of his contemporaries,' amongst others by John

1 Bishop Hacket in his Memoirs of the Life of Archbishop Williams, tells us of a very religious family in Huntingdonshire who kept a sentinel at all hours and seasons to expect the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.

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Wilton, was founded on the Apocalypse "as interpreted in several volumes lately made extant, the chief of which was the commentary of Mede, Clavis Apocalyptica. Vane tells us that "the general prospect thereof has been given into my faith in some small glimpses (a vague claim of special inspiration) as well as from the inward and outward works of God, in a patient and humble expectation of the clearer and more certain description thereof, as the things themselves are drawing on, which Christ in His times will fully show, by the brightness of His own coming, unto which the children of light and of this day are exhorted to be hastening, as that which is hastening upon them, that so it may not overtake them as a thief in the night at unawares." To ensure the security of this new paradise the devil should be bound and sealed up in the bottomless pit and totally unable to deceive and beguile the nations.

"Christ would then appear in an incorruptible immortal state of spirit, soul, and body, to reign with the glorified saints. All shall obey Him either voluntarily or by compulsion; every tongue shall confess Him, every knee shall bow to Him. Christ will quicken whom He will, calling whom He pleases out of their very graves, whether spiritual or literal." As to the general state of the world which was to follow this new reign of religion and morals, Vane does not say any more than that it shall be a glorious, pure, incorrupt state unto the whole creation, which shall then keep a holy Sabbath and rest unto the Lord, a seventh time of the time of the world's continuance; in which there shall be no sowing of the field nor pruning of the vineyard, nor exacting any labour from

the creature, but what in a voluntary sense it shall perform by way of homage and worship unto Christ, for the use of His saints during the thousand years, who are yet in their corruptible body, expecting their great change.

As in this new world Christ will reign both as a natural and temporal sovereign, it might be expected that the dignity of the saints would be increased. Vane speaks of a general assembly of the first-born who should administer the accomplishment of God's promise as to making good the reward which righteousness is to receive even in this life. This general assembly is to have the power of the keys; what they bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and what they loose in earth shall be loosed in heaven. They are to have the power of church censures to hardened offenders, and of condemning them to everlasting destruction from the presence of God. The power of the sword is also committed to them. we see the dream of a heavenly Geneva, in which a general assembly has the full powers of an ecclesiastical and civil court, backed by the irresistible might of a living Christ.

Here

The saints are to have the perfect use of the natural senses of their mind and body; they shall hold forth the law of righteousness and the obedience thereof unto which natural men in those days shall be required to conform; natural men shall be under the influence of a ministry and magistracy brought forth in the highest and utmost perfection and purity that can be enjoyed on earth, managed by the person of Christ Himself and the whole assembly of the first-born.