A curious incident in the annals of Minehead in days of old is that of the furious onslaught of the Church upon an unfortunate lad, a native of the place, who, sailing in a ship afterwards captured by Turkish pirates, was taken prisoner, and his life spared on condition that he embraced the Mohammedan religion. The desirability of life, and the practical certainty of this youthful sailor that one religion was as good as another, when a choice was offered between death and the acceptance of a new creed, may perhaps be readily understood. But the youth’s refusal to add himself to the noble army of martyrs outraged the susceptibilities of the flatulent divines of the period, who, when he at last returned home and told his story, made so great an affair of it that nothing would properly serve the occasion but a public recantation of error. We may, therefore, vividly picture to ourselves that scene in Minehead church on Sunday, March 16th, 1627, when the more or less penitent, but certainly very frightened and astonished, lad was had in front of the pulpit, before the whole congregation, and, standing there in the Turkish breeches in which he had returned home, made to listen to the windy discourse of the Reverend Mr. Edward Kellet, who preached the sermon afterwards printed under the title of _A Return from Argier_. We may presume “Algiers” to be meant; but early seventeenth-century folk were more than a little uncertain in these matters. The central, harrowing fact of this occasion was, however, the length of that homily, which fills seventy-eight closely printed pages, and must therefore have occupied considerably over an hour in delivery. This is the manner of it, as set forth by the printer and published and sold in Paternoster Row for the edification of the godly: “A Return from Argier: A Sermon preached at Minhead, in the County of Somerset, the 16th of March, 1627, the re-admission of a Relapsed Christian into our Church. By Edward Kellet, Doctor of Divinity.” For the benefit of purchasers in London and elsewhere, who were not acquainted with the circumstances, the following explanation was made to preface the sermon:—