Amongst all the heroes of his day there was none with a more serene courage than ‘little Ken,’ who would not receive Charles’s mistress at his house—‘No, not for his kingdom’—and thus won his bishopric in as unlikely and as creditable a fashion as ever bishopric was earned. After that one is not surprised to find him, as one of the seven bishops, saying to James II, ‘We have two duties to perform, our duty to God and our duty to your Majesty. We honour you, but we fear God.’ Nor need we wonder that, notwithstanding his resistance of James’s illegal demands, he could not bring himself to take the oath of allegiance to William of Orange. Ken always had that infirmity of noble souls, ‘a weakness for the weaker side.’ As Dean Plumptre well says, ‘If he was in doubt it was safer, in quite another sense than that in which others counted safety, to take the losing and not the winning side.’ Ken was deprived in 1791, and the bishopric was offered to Beveridge, then Archdeacon of Colchestor. Had Ken been translated to heaven, or to Canterbury, Beveridge would have accepted the preferment with delight, for he had no nonjuring scruples and wished to be a bishop. But he too was a saint, and not unworthy to be Ken’s successor; so he would not take the place from which Ken had been thrust out, and waited thirteen years for ‘preferment,’ becoming Bishop of St. Asaph in 1704. When Ken left the episcopal palace, Lord Weymouth honoured his own magnificent mansion of Longleat by welcoming Ken to its hospitable shelter, as Sir Thomas Abney, in widely different circumstances, made the great Nonconformist hymn-writer his guest twenty-five years later. Longleat was Ken’s home for twenty years. There he died, after long and acute suffering, soothed by the writing of hymns, and by the thought that they would be sung on earth while he praised God in heaven. ’Twill heighten even the joys of heaven to know That in my verse the saints hymn God below.[69] Ken’s hymns, as we now sing them, are selected from the thirty-seven verses of the originals, which were intended in the first place for the scholars of his old school—Winchester. As in most other cases, the popular selection is amply justified. The hymns abbreviated are much more serviceable alike for public and private devotion than if they were transferred _in extenso_ to our hymn-books. Like Sternhold, Herbert, and Watts, Ken was a musician, and loved to accompany himself on the lute or organ. The morning hymn, which consists of fourteen verses, falls into three sections, addressed (1) to the soul, (2) to the angels, (3) to God. In the evening hymn two verses are addressed to the guardian angel. The following verses from the morning hymn are not usually found in modern hymnals— Influenced by the Light Divine, Let thy own light in good works shine: Reflect all Heaven’s propitious ways, In ardent love, and cheerful praise.