ch the discourses of Jesus and the epistles of Paul
have come down to us. They baptized their children by the names, not of
Christian saints, but of Hebrew patriarchs and warriors. In defiance
of the express and reiterated declarations of Luther and Calvin, they
turned the weekly festival by which the Church had, from the primitive
times, commemorated the resurrection of her Lord, into a Jewish Sabbath.
They sought for principles of jurisprudence in the Mosaic law, and for
precedents to guide their ordinary conduct in the books of Judges
and Kings. Their thoughts and discourse ran much on acts which were
assuredly not recorded as examples for our imitation. The prophet who
hewed in pieces a captive king, the rebel general who gave the blood of
a queen to the dogs, the matron who, in defiance of plighted faith, and
of the laws of eastern hospitality, drove the nail into the brain of the
fugitive ally who had just fed at her board, and who was sleeping under
the shadow of her tent, were proposed as models to Christians suffering
under the tyranny of princes and prelates. Morals and manners were
subjected to a code resembling that of the synagogue, when the synagogue
was in its worst state. The dress, the deportment, the language, the
studies, the amusements of the rigid sect were regulated on principles
not unlike those of the Pharisees who, proud of their washed hands and
broad phylacteries, taunted the Redeemer as a sabbath-breaker and a
winebibber. It was a sin to hang garlands on a Maypole, to drink a
friend's health, to fly a hawk, to hunt a stag, to play at chess, to
wear love-locks, to put starch into a ruff, to touch the virginals,
to read the Fairy Queen. Rules such as these, rules which would have
appeared insupportable to the free and joyous spirit of Luther, and
contemptible to the serene and philosophical intellect of Zwingle, threw
over all life a more than monastic gloom. The learning and eloquence by
which the great Reformers had been eminently distinguished, and to which
they had been, in no small measure, indebted for their success, were
regarded by the new school of Protestants with suspicion, if not with
aversion. Some precisians had scruples about teaching the Latin grammar,
because the names of Mars, Bacchus, and Apollo occurred in it. The
fine arts were all but proscribed. The solemn peal of the organ was
superstitious. The light music of Ben Jonson's masques was dissolute.
Half the fine paintings in