My consolation is that it seems to me much the same in the Holy Scriptures. We call Genesis sacred history; and what is it, chiefly, but a story of family life? What is Exodus but a record of national deliverances? What are the Chronicles and Kings but histories of wars and sieges, interspersed with pathetic family stories? What, indeed, are the gospels themselves but the record, not of creeds or ecclesiastical conflicts, but of a life, the Life, coming in contact with every form of sickness, and sin, and sorrow in this our common everyday human life? What would the gospels be with nothing but the Sabbaths and the synagogues, and the Sanhedrim, and the Scribes and Pharisees left in them? With the widow's only son left out of them, and the ruler's little daughter, and the woman who was a sinner, and the five thousand fed on the grassy slopes of Galilee, and the one young man who departed sorrowful 'for he had great possessions?' Would it have been more truly Church history for being the less human history? The Bible history seems to me to be a history of all human life in relation to God. The sins of the Bible are terribly manifest, secular sins; injustice, impurity, covetousness, cruelty. Its virtues are simple homely, positive virtues; truth, uprightness, kindness, mercy, gratitude, courage, gentleness; such sins and virtues as make the weal or woe of nations and of homes. Ordinary ecclesiastical history seems to me too often a record of secular struggles for consecrated things, and names, and places, and of selfish strivings for which shall be greatest. The sins it blames, too often mere transgressions of rules, mistakes as to religious terms, neglect of the tithe of mint, anise, and cummin. The virtues it commends, alas! too often negative renunciations of certain indulgences, scruples as to certain observances, fasting twice in the week; things which, done or undone, leave the heart the same. But underneath all this a Church history like that of the Bible is being silently lived on earth, is being silently written in heaven. Little glimpses of it we see here from time to time. What will it be when we see it all? All through that summer the country was astir with the enlistings for the king and the Parliament. These began about April. On the 23d of February, Queen Henrietta Maria had embarked at Dover for the Low Countries, with the Princess Mary and the crown jewels.