Francis Rous was born in Cornwall in 1579. He graduated B.A. at Oxford in 1597 and at the University of Leyden in 1599. He entered the Middle Temple in 1601, with the prospect of a legal and public career before him, but soon withdrew and retired to Cornwall, where in a quiet country retreat he became absorbed in theological studies. His later writings show an intimate acquaintance with the great Church Fathers, especially with St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and the two Gregorys, and with the mystics, especially with the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Bernard, Thomas a Kempis, and John Tauler. He was intensely Puritan in temper and sympathies in his earlier period of life, and much of his writing at this stage was for the purpose of promoting the increase of a deeper and more adequate reform in the Church. He translated the Psalms into "English Meeter," and his version was approved by the Westminster Assembly, authorized for use by Parliament, and adopted by the estates in Scotland, "whose Psalms," Carlyle says, "the Northern Kirks still sing."[2] He was a member of Charles I.'s first and second Parliaments, and again of the Short Parliament and of {268} the Long Parliament. He was also a member of the Little Parliament, often called "Barebones Parliament," of which he was Speaker, and of the Parliaments of 1654 and of 1656, and he was, too, a member of Oliver's Council of State. He was one of many thoughtful men of the time who passed with the rapid development of affairs from the Presbyterian position to Independency, and he served on the Committee for the propagation of the Gospel which framed a congregational plan for Church government. He was a voluminous writer, but his type of Christianity can be seen sufficiently in his three little books: _Mystical Marriage_ (1635), _The Heavenly Academy_ (1638), and _The Great Oracle_ (1641).[3] He, again, like so many before him, influenced by Plato as well as by the New Testament and Christian writers, made the discovery that there is something divine in the soul of man, and that this "something divine" in man is always within hail of an inner world of divine splendour. "I was first breathed forth from heaven," he says, "and came from God in my creation. I am divine and heavenly in my original, in my essence, in my character. . . . I am a spirit, though a low one, and God is a Spirit, even the highest one, and God is the fountaine of this spirit [of mine]."[4]