No reader who has any fixed theological opinions can examine the Church systems of that age without feeling sympathy with some one of them, mingled with disapprobation in reference to the rest. The theologian is constrained to take a side as he studies this deeply-exciting history. A passionless neutrality is absolutely impossible. At the same time, a student is chargeable with injustice who does not carefully strive to ascertain the defects of his own party; and he also is wanting in charity if he be not ever ready to acknowledge the moral and spiritual excellencies of persons, whose opinions were different from those which he himself entertains. When all modifying influences have been conscientiously analyzed by the catholic-hearted reader of ecclesiastical history, he will rejoice in believing that the centre of Christian life is not in creeds, polities, and forms, but in One Divine Redeemer; and that Herbert and Fuller, Hammond and Baxter, Taylor and Howe, and the whole company of faithful souls, a few of whose names have occurred in these volumes, were looking to one and the same Christ for holiness and peace. Pictures are drawn of the religion and morals of the Commonwealth mostly of two kinds; rose-coloured, glowing with brightest tints; or dark and gloomy, crossed with still deeper shades. Spiritual prosperity and little else is to be seen in the first; hypocrisy and vice alone are visible in the second. Party spirit is betrayed in each of these styles of historical, or rather fictitious art; yet neither serves its object. For, if there was so much prosperity as is sometimes represented, how superficial, how slightly-rooted it must have been, seeing the Restoration of Charles II. swept it almost all away; and if there was so much of hypocrisy and vice as some declare, it is but just to ask them, who were the chief hypocrites but the people who afterwards threw off the mask? Who must have been the most vicious in secret but those who sinned so very openly when restraint was gone? The fact is, that neither extreme receives support from a calm review of facts. [Sidenote: _State of Religion._]