It laid hold on thousands, not only by simple methods of religious worship which commended themselves to the plain understanding, and the unsophisticated taste of Anglo-Saxon people,--but by its emphatic exhibition of the truths of Christianity as a redemptive system, full of the love of God to sinful men, commending itself to humble and sorrow-stricken hearts. In the Gospel of Christ, which Puritanism prominently exhibited as adapted to the wants of mankind, lay the secret of its greatest success, and the key to its noblest results. As a spiritual power it had been strong under Elizabeth and the Stuarts; but its conflicts in war, its entrance into the Court, its elevation to the throne, defaced somewhat its spiritual beauty, and impaired in a measure its spiritual force. The most favourable aspects of Puritanism are not found in the history of the Civil Wars, and of the Commonwealth. As with Christianity in general--as with Protestantism at large, so with the system now under consideration. Not in the palace of Constantine do we discover the best specimens of Gospel piety; not in the Courts of English and German sovereigns do we see the workings of the Reformed Faith to most advantage; and not at Whitehall must we watch for the fairest visions of Puritan life. Our religion, in its best forms, is no doubt essentially a genial social power, healing, constructive, conservative--such we believe it will prove itself to be in the Church of the future--but in the Church of the past, it has shown itself purest and strongest when contending against opposition, when passing through scenes of suffering, when grappling with the evils of society, and when informing and animating individual souls. Persecution has been to piety what the furnace is to the potter's clay; it has burnt in, it has brought out, its richest colours. The Huguenots appear to much greater advantage in the defeats which they endured than in the victories which they won; the peasantry in their cottages are more to be admired than the nobles in their chateaux. The history of successful battles fought, or of courageous resistance made by the French Protestants; and the story of Henry of Navarre and his Courtiers even before his reconciliation with Rome; read not so well as does the record of men of the same class who were burnt at the stake, or who were sent to the galleys, or who were exiled from their country. So also the chief moral charm of Puritanism is found, not in the successes of statesmen and soldiers; not in Pym's debates and majorities; not in Cromwell's charges and laurels; but in the deaths of Barrow and Greenwood, and in the tortures of Leighton and Burton; and, if we may anticipate, in the ejection, the wanderings and the imprisonment of Howe, and Heywood, and Baxter. On the same principle the quiet, earnest, and exemplary lives of the middle-class Puritans did more than anything else, at the commencement of the Civil Wars to give ascendancy