f
our Lord or any other, without the sanction of a divine
commandment."--_"Prose Works" (Bohn), pp. 70, 71._

Again Milton wrote, in a manuscript which his publishers at the time
feared to print:

"If we under the gospel are to regulate the time of our public
worship by the prescriptions of the decalogue, it will surely
be far safer to observe the seventh day, according to the
express commandment of God, than on the authority of mere human
conjecture to adopt the first."--_Cox, "Sabbath Literature,"
Vol. II, p. 54._

While kings and poets and ecclesiastics discussed, here and there
believers began to follow the plain Word of God and Christ's example in
Sabbath keeping.

"Loved Not Their Lives unto the Death"

In 1618 John Traske and his wife, of London, were condemned for keeping
the Sabbath of the Lord, the man being whipped from Westminster to the
old Fleet Prison, near Ludgate Circus. Both were imprisoned. Mr. Traske
recanted under the pressure, after a year, but Mrs. Traske, a gifted
school-teacher, was given grace to hold out for sixteen years,--for a
time in Maiden Lane prison, and then in the Gate House, by
Westminster,--dying in prison for the word of the Lord. An estimable
woman she was, says one old chronicler, save for this "whimsy" of hers,
that she would keep the seventh day. All that she asked of men, on her
prison deathbed, was that she might be buried "in the fields."

By 1661 Sabbath keepers in London had further increased. In that year
John James was minister to a considerable congregation, meeting in East
London, off the Whitechapel Road. As part of the stern proceedings
against dissenting sects after the restoration of the monarchy, he was
arrested and condemned to death on "Tyburn Tree." His wife knelt at the
feet of King Charles II as he came out of St. James's Palace one day,
and pleaded for her husband's life; but the king scornfully rejected her
plea, and said that the man should hang. Bogue says:

"For once the king remembered his promise, and Mr. James was
sent to join the noble army of martyrs."--_"History of
Dissenters," Vol. I, p. 155._

Nothing daunted, the number of Sabbath keepers increased. In a letter by
Edward Stennet (between 1668 and 1670), it is stated.

"Here in England are about nine or ten churches that keep the
Sabbath, besides many scattered disciples, who have been
eminently preserved in this