fall from Christ and to serve Antichrist." These were bold words. Some of them, indeed, might be called rash, and, as we shall see, furnished a weapon for his adversaries at a future day; but there was no quailing in the heart of him who uttered them, and the sting of them after all was in their truth. From Amersham he went up to London, where on the 19th of July he was a witness of the great outburst of popular enthusiasm with which Mary was welcomed to the throne; but he could not share in the wild delight of the multitude, for as he tells us himself, "in London, in more places than one, when fires of joy and riotous banqueting were at the proclamation of Mary," his tongue was vehement in declaring his forebodings of the storm which was so soon to break. On the 26th of July he wrote to Mrs. Bowes from Carlisle, and again on the 25th of September we find him writing to her on his return to London from Kent, where he seems to have been labouring for some weeks. The dates indicate that he was both "in labours abundant" and "in journeyings often," and show that he had little reason to {67} upbraid himself, as in one of his writings referring to this time he does, for "allowing the love of friends and carnal affection for some men more than others to allure him to make more residence in one place than another, thus having more respect to the pleasure of a few than to the necessity of many, and not sufficiently considering how many hungry souls were in other places to whom none took pains to break and distribute the bread of life." But he was ere long to be "in peril" as well as labour. From the first he had augured nothing but evil from the accession of Mary, and it is to his honour that with such misgivings in his heart, he was at this very time in the habit of using in the pulpit a prayer of singular beauty and comprehensiveness, in which we find this petition: "Illuminate the heart of our Sovereign Lady Queen Mary with pregnant gifts of the Holy Ghost, and influence the hearts of her council with Thy true fear and love." As the months rolled round, however, it became only too apparent that England would no longer be a safe place for him. The door of opportunity which Edward had opened was speedily closed by Mary. In August, indeed, she issued a proclamation giving toleration to all meanwhile, forbidding her Protestant and Catholic subjects to interrupt each other's services, yet prohibiting all preaching on either side without licence from herself. But in November, under the influence of the violent reaction which had set in, and in obedience to the opinion of the people, three-fourths of whom were still attached to the old religion, the {68} Commons, by a vote of 350 to 80, enacted that from the 20th December following there should be no other form of service in the churches but what had been used in the last year of Henry the Eighth, and leaving it free to all up till that date to use either of the books appointed by