Dominican, Tetzel, provoked it, the Augustinian, Luther, preached it. Says Mr. Hardwick:1

Immediately after the promulgation of the Edict of Worms, we find a host of itinerant friars, Dominicans, Augustinians, and, most of all, perhaps, Franciscans, ardently declaiming in the cause of Luther; the only effect of their expulsion from one town or village being to scatter seeds of Protestantism in many others, far and wide.

But the Reformation suppressed them in half of Europe; and yet at the beginning of the eighteenth century the Franciscans had seven thousand convents, with one hundred and fifteen thousand friars. In 1862, they report three thousand six hundred houses, with fifty thousand members. Other causes have diminished the Dominicans in numbers and influence. By the Reformation they lost like the Franciscans. The Inquisition was a stain upon them. And after the Reformation they were replaced by the Jesuits. Thirty years ago, Lacordaire brought back for a time the old glory of Dominican preaching, and tried to revive the order in France; and it is said to be increasing. In 1862 it reports three hundred and sixty houses, with four thousand members. But the doom of decline, which overtook these as well as other monastic institutions with the coming of an age so different from that in which they were born, is not likely to be reversed. They have already long survived their vocation and any good use. The manners no less than the religion, the political economy as well as the Gospel, the whole tone and tendency of our civilization are against beggary; and no poetry can gild it, and no piety can sanctify it. If in our education, and our religion there are eleemosynary features which suggest mendicancy, they are more likely to be eliminated than continued.

And yet who can say that the reaction will not come, 1 Church History, i. 79.

and that religion, falling under bondage to money, and interpreting the Gospel by Adam Smith rather than by St. Paul or St. Francis, will not, for its very salvation, again renounce all things for the sake of likeness to its Divine Leader, who had not where to lay his head? If it is to be a minister to human want and misery, it will have to adapt itself to the poor and the wretched. It is the lesson of hope we learn, as we go back into that thirteenth century into which our story has led, that religion has its reserves waiting for their hour; that the Church has in her bosom latent powers of self-restoration and new conquest; that in the time of danger God has his elect spirits, nobly touched to noble issues; and when the need is greatest, the hour and the man, the preacher and the hearer, the new truth and the waiting faith, the crying necessity and the reserved help, the rescue, the renewal, the reformation, the better method, the profounder thought, the medicine for a thousand evils, the drill into an artesian well, the Benedict, the Francis, the Luther, the Wesley, the Loyola come, and come unexpectedly, as if dropped out of heaven.

There is a lesson, too, of the power there is in preaching, if you will, no matter what you call it, in the word of man to man, of a poor, self-renouncing man, with the fire of God in his soul; in these spiritual democrats, who wanted no ritual, who went barefoot, and asked nothing but men's ears; who fell back on that original ordinance which precedes all others, the first of sacraments, the thing which Jesus did, which Paul did, which every orator does according to his occasions, the speech of man to man, the preaching of such truth as is given to such hearers as are given, and which helped make the friars the power they were. Printing will not displace it; civilization will not outgrow it. Religion will always need it, and always use it, and never in vain.

ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR.1

SOME books have a natural longevity. They are not of a merely temporary or local use, but have a vitality and enduring power in them which carries them beyond the time in which they are born. They live and keep their hold in virtue of a truth in them over which change and time have no power. But most books are written for

their day, and expire with it. They have their use for a season; but the world soon gets beyond them. Their office is finished, and they are left behind, dropped out of the living thoughts and present uses of men, and at length out of their memories. The dead literature of the world

not only the useless which is known to antiquaries, but that which is absolutely dead and vanished forever — it is almost fearful to contemplate. It contained the purest efficacy and extraction of living intellects; but not a trace of it is left. And that which has managed to survive has much of it only the dried, preserved life of the mummy, and is kept for antiquarian curiosity rather than for any real human service. And yet many of these books have an historical value beyond their intrinsic worth, so that they come to resurrection, and a new though limited use on this account. Such resurrections have become quite common of late years, with the multiplication of historical students and the increased vigor given to historical inquiry. A large number of works belonging to the initial periods of American history have been recovered from 1 Published in the Baptist Quarterly, vol. vi.

Publications of the Narraganset Club, volumes i.-iv. Providence, R. I., 1866-1870.

oblivion. Some, like the manuscript of Bradford's "History of Plymouth," have been recovered after long disappearance.1 Some, of excessive rarity, whose existence depended on the preservation of a single copy, have been reproduced in sufficient number to make them accessible to all historical students, and perhaps to insure them against any future extinction. The more important works, like Winthrop's "New England," Morton's "Memorial," and later Bradford's "Plymouth," with such documents as were gathered up in Rev. Alexander Young's "Chronicles of the Pilgrims and of Massachusetts Bay," and the Colonial Records of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, have been followed by the exact reprint of some of the rarest tracts and volumes, such as Mourt's "Relation," Lechford's "Plain Dealing," Wood's "New England's Prospect," and Johnson's "Wonder-working Providence." To these are to be added the "Publications of the Narraganset Club," of which four large and handsome volumes have already appeared. The club has undertaken to issue a literal reprint of the works of Roger Williams, reproducing the minutest errors of the press,

1 "This inestimable book, after being lost for nearly ninety years, was found in 1855, in the Episcopal library at Fulbam, and has since, through the kindness of the late Bishop of London, been published by the Massachusetts Historical Society. The manuscript was known to have been used by Morton, Prince, and Hutchinson in the composition of their works. What was its fate after Hutchinson's publication of his second volume, in 1767, remained unknown. In 1849 Bishop Wilberforce, in his History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, referred to a "manuscript history of the Plantation of Plymouth in the Fulham library." The identity of the quotations from it with language preserved by Morton and Prince led to the belief that it was Bradford's lost history, which on examination it proved to be. When Prince used it in 1736 it belonged to the library kept in the tower of the Old South Church, in Boston. In 1775 that church was occupied as a riding-school for the British cavalry; and then it was, probably, that the book was taken away and carried to England."-Palfrey, History of New England, i. 136.

the ipsissima verba of the original edition. All his ex tant works, except three, have already appeared, carefully edited, together with one of John Cotton's intimately connected with them.

It is proposed to give some account of these works, and a review of Williams as an author. Writing books was not his profession, was rather the accident of a very busy life. His great work was the Providence Plantation. Having founded Rhode Island on a principle which, then first incorporated into a civil polity, has been ever since working its way into the law of all civilized states, he needs and could take little additional honor from any performances of his pen. By this he would be known to the last syllable of recorded time, though his books had sunk into Lethe and disappeared, as until quite recently seemed likely to be their fate. It is nearly two hundred years since his last work, written when he was beyond threescore and ten, was printed. It is not probable that any large number of copies of either was published. The first edition of one of them was burned by the public executioner. They were all, with a single exception, printed in England, where the interest in them could not long continue. But a few copies strayed across the sea; and so the doom of neglect, and then of destruction, which comes upon all printed matter which has not present and perpetual interest, soon overtook them. Of one no copy has so far been found. Two others are supposed not to have been printed, certainly have never been found. Another has been discovered only within a few years. And of any one of them probably there were not more than five copies on this side of the Atlantic. The one published latest, and in Boston, is quite as rare as any. Exposed to such risks of total loss, and inaccessible to general readers and even to scholars, their republication is a valuable service. And because even the republication is in few hands, being limited in the last volume to one hundred and seventy copies, some account of them may be of similar service.