aunted brothels and gambling houses, he at least avoided
conventicles. If he never spoke without uttering ribaldry and
blasphemy, he made some amends by his eagerness to send Baxter and
Howe to gaol for preaching and praying. Thus the clergy, for a time,
made war on schism with so much vigour that they had little leisure to
make war on vice."

"Charles the Second wished merely to be a King who could draw without
limit on the treasury for the gratification of his private tastes, who
could hire with wealth and honours persons capable of assisting him
to kill the time, and who, even when the state was brought by
maladministration to the depths of humiliation and to the brink of
ruin, could still exclude unwelcome truth from the purlieus of his
own seraglio, and refuse to see and hear whatever might disturb his
luxurious repose. Later in life, the ill-bred familiarity of the
Scottish divines had given him a distaste for Presbyterian discipline,
while the heats and animosities between the members of the Established
Church and the Nonconformists, with which his reign commenced, made
him think indifferently of both. His religion was that of a young
prince in his warm blood, whose inquiries were applied more to
discover arguments against belief than in its favour."

"The wits about the Court, who found employment in laughing at
Scripture, delighted in turning to ridicule what the preachers said in
their sermons before him, and in this way induced him to look upon the
clergy as a body of men who had compounded a religion for their own
advantage. So strongly did this feeling take root in him that he at
length resigned himself to sleep at sermon-time--not even South or
Barrow having the art to keep him awake. In one of these half-hours
of sleep, when in Chapel, he is known to have missed, doubtless with
regret, the gentle reproof of South to Lauderdale during a general
somnolency:--'My lord, my lord, you snore so loud you will wake the
King.'"

"He was altogether in favour of extempore preaching, and was unwilling
to listen to the delivery of a written sermon." (Indeed, if we had
more people like him in this day, we would hear far more of the gospel
and far less of politics and jokes which so demoralize the pulpit and
take away all sacredness. The King was right, as all mankind will
agree, in his idea of preaching.) "Patrick excused himself from a
chaplaincy, 'finding it very difficult to get a sermon without book.'
On one occ