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THE apostle Paul laboured abundantly for the conversion of the Gentiles, but his heart's desire and prayer to God was for the salvation of the Jews. Of kindred feeling, though of subordinate character, is the peculiar interest we feel in the progress of religion among our own countrymen, but which is quite compatible with the most enlarged desire of the spread of the gospel in distant lands; and the biographies of those godly men who laid the foundations of our own church, and into whose labours we have providentially entered, must and ought to be regarded with particular attention, however curiosity, as a merely natural feeling, may be excited by the accounts of foreign Reformers.

So long as the English church continues to hold the form of sound words, will the memory of Hugh Latimer be reverenced. This eminent divine was descended of mean but honest parents at Thurcaston, near Mount Sorrel, in Leicestershire, where his father was a respectable farmer, who by industry and frugality brought up in a decent manner his only son and six daughters, on means, of which the bare mention relaxes into a smile the lips of the modern reader. In one of his court sermons, in the reign of Edward VI. inveighing against the nobility and gentry for their want of sympathy with their inferiors, SEPT. 1826.

and contrasting the state of the little farmers and peasantry some time before with their present necessities, he tells the audience, in his familiar manner, that upon a farm of four pounds a year, his father tilled as much land as would support six labourers; that he had stocked it with a hundred sheep and thirty cows; that he found the king a man and horse, himself remembering to have buckled on his father's harness when he went to Blackheath; that he gave his daughters five pounds each on their marriage, that he lived hospitably among his neighbours, and was not backward in his alms to the poor! "And all this he did of the said

farm. Whereas he who now hath it pays sixteen pounds by the year or more, and is not able to do any thing for his prince, for himself, nor for his children, or give a cup of drink to the poor." This is a curious piece of incidental statistics, drawn from the discourses of a Worcester prelate, who was not however a political preacher, but a faithful interpreter of the divine word. *

He was born in 1470, and being sent to the grammar-school, made

*Camden says that Latimer signifies an interpreter between the English and Welch. (Britannia, p. 598.)-It is most probable that the Bishop's ancestors were vassals of the ancient barons of Latimer,

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such proficiency, that he was early designed for an ecclesiastic. In his fifteenth year he was entered at Christ's College, Cambridge, where at the usual time he took his degrees in arts, and as soon as he was ordained, distinguished himself by his opposition to the reformed doctrines, which began to be entertained by certain members of the university. He was sincere and devout, though too much of the light that was in him was darkness; and while he highly valued the material symbol of salvation, or the silver cross which it was his office to carry in procession, he had but an imperfect notion of the exceeding preciousness of the true cross, or of the real nature of that which every believer is called to bear. *

He was so indignant at the Reformers, that he seldom lost an opportunity of inveighing against them. He even held them in such horror, that he thought they were the supporters of that Antichrist, whose appearance was to precede the coming of the Son of Man, and conjectured that the day of judgment was at hand. Impiety (he said) was gaining ground apace; and what lengths may not men be expected to run, when they begin to question even the infallibility of the Pope?"-If any enlightened theologians read lectures in the schools, and particularly Stafford, a divinity-lecturer who inclined much to protestantism, Latimer, in the excess of his zeal to hinder the increase of heterodoxy, did all in his power to prevent the students from attending. When he commenced Bachelor in Divinity, he employed his public exercise in refuting the positions of Melancthon, whom he treated with great severity," for his impious innovations (as he termed them) in religion." This was so late as the year 1515, when he was forty-five;

* Warner's Eccl. Hist. of England, vol. ii. p. 380.-Fox, Acts and Mon. vol. ii. P. 211. et seq.

and he afterwards alluded to the circumstance, in his warm manner, in his first sermon before the Duchess of Suffolk. 66 Master

Bilney, or rather Saint Bilney, that suffered death for God's word's sake, the same Bilney was the instrument whereby God called me to knowledge. For I may thank him, next to God, for that knowledge that I have in the word of God: for I was as obstinate a papist as any was in England; insomuch, that when I should be made Bachelor of Divinity, my whole oration went against Philip Melancthon, and against his opinions. Bilney heard me at that time, and perceived that I was zealous without knowledge, and came to me afterwards in my study, and desired me, for God's sake, to hear his confession. I did so; and I learned more than afore in many years. So from that time forward I began to smell the word of God, and forsake the school-doctors and such fooleries."

It was not however till several years after this remarkable interview with Bilney, who, as fellow of Trinity Hall, had frequent opportunities of edifying other clergymen by his conversation, that Hugh Latimer became so well acquainted with evangelical truth, as to be able to develope in their beautiful proportions the different doctrines of the grace of God. He then became as zealous a protestant, as he had been a romanist. His discourses had a character of their own. They abounded with striking anecdote, acute remark, and fearless application, while he allowed himself considerable latitude in wandering from his text. He was assiduous in private exhortation, and wherever he went, pressed the necessity of faith and holiness, in opposition to those outward performances, which were then esteemed the very essentials of religion. A behaviour of this kind was immediately taken notice of; Cambridge watched with

jealousy every approximation of her sons to those theological statements, which had originally sprouted in England, and after being transplanted to Germany, had been brought back with improved fibre ; and Latimer soon found himself surrounded with enemies. The first important opposition he experienced was occasioned by a course of sermons preached before the University during the Christmas holidays, in which he spoke his sentiments with great freedom on the usages of the Romish church, and particularly reprobated the custom of locking up the scriptures from the common people. Into the writings of the Old and New Testament he himself made diligent search, that he might be furnished with scriptural arguments against the prevailing corruptions; knowing that a simple declaration from the word of God was superior to mere scholastic argument, and preferring as a spiritual champion to visit God's armoury when he wanted a new weapon, to "going down to sharpen his coulter or his mattock at the forges of the Philistines."

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protested against the abominable custom of saying mass in an unknown tongue, and contended for the inalienable right of the laity, and even the illiterate, to have the Bible printed in their own language, and put into their hands.

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In 1527, this extraordinary man preached a sermon on cards, from the question of the priests to the Baptist, "Who art thou? These words were part of the gospel appointed for the day, and he suited his address rather to the season than the text; for it was the Sunday before Christmas, and he declaimed on the frivolities and abuses which marked that sacred festival. His popularity as a preacher still increasing, Dr. Buckingham, prior of the Blackfriars, undertook to oppose him in the pulpit, and with much pomp and prolixity, showed the dangerous tendency of his opinions; and par

ticularly laid open the ill effects which would ensue if his proposal were acceded to, of translating the scriptures into English for general distribution. "If that heresy prevail, we shall soon see an end of every thing useful among us. The ploughman, reading that if he put his hand to the plough, and should happen to look back, he would be unfit for the kingdom of God, would soon lay aside his labour ! The baker likewise, reading that a little leaven will corrupt his lump, would give us very insipid bread! The simple man also, finding himself commanded to pluck out his eyes, in a few years we should have the nation full of blind beggars!!!" Latimer could not but smile at this ingenious reasoning; which would appear to be a libel on the sixteenth century, had we not witnessed some arguments, too much assimilated in spirit, used in the nineteenth by warm controversialists. He promised however to reply to this solemn trifling on the following Sabbath; and this announcement caused the university church to be crowded. Just before the sermon began, the prior entered with his cowl about his shoulders, and took his seat with an air of importance in front of the pulpit. Latimer, with great gravity, recapitulated the learned doctor's arguments, placed them in the strongest light, and then rallied them with so much genuine wit and pleasantry, as to make his adversary appear highly ridiculous. He then, with great address, appealed to the people; noticed the low esteem in which their spiritual guides affected to hold their understandings; and repelling the unworthy insinuations, wished his honest countrymen might only have the use of the scripture, till they showed themselves such absurd interpreters as the prior had represented. He concluded with some useful remarks on scripture metaphors. "A figurative manner of speech is common to all languages."