theirs he
has become a reincarnation of their ideas and a new voice for their
message.

His public career, in the England of the first two Stuarts, was a
stormy one. He was Rector of St. Martin-in-the-Field. In the early
stage of his preaching he felt called upon to oppose the "Spanish
Marriage" as "the great sin of matching with idolaters," and he
underwent a series of imprisonments for his attacks upon this precious
scheme of King James, who wittily suggested changing his name from Dr.
Everard ["Ever-out"] to "Dr. Never-out." Some time before his fiftieth
year--the date cannot be exactly fixed--he reached {240} his new and
deeper insight, and henceforth became the bearer of a message which
seemed to him and to his friends like the reopening of the treasury of
the Gospels, and in this new light he felt ashamed of the barren period
of his life when he walked in "the ignorance of litteral knowledge,"
when he was "a bare, literal, University preacher," as he himself says,
and had not found "the marrow and the true Word of God."[4] The great
change which cleaves his public career into two well-defined parts is
impressively indicated by his friend and disciple, Rapha Harford, in
his "Dedicatory Epistle" to the Sermons and in his preface "to the
Reader," though he nowhere gives any light upon the events and
influences which initiated the transformation. "In a special and
extraordinary manner God appeared to him in his latter days," Harford
says, "and after that, he desired nothing more than to bring others to
see what he saw and to enjoy what he enjoyed."[5] He was, we are told,
"a man of presence and of princely behaviour" and was known "as a good
philosopher, few or none exceeding him," "endowed with skill and depth
of learning," but after his new experience, when he "came to know
himself," and to "know Jesus Christ and the Scriptures _experimentally_
rather than grammatically, literally or academically," he came to
esteem lightly "notions and speculation," "letter-learning" and
"University-knowledge," and he "_centred his spirit_ on union and
communion with God" and turned his supreme interest from "forms,
externals and generals" to the cultivation of "the inner man," and to
"acting more than talking."[6]

His new way of preaching--vivid, concrete, touched with subtle humour,
grounded in experience and filling old texts with new meaning--appealed
powerfully to the common people and to an elect few of the more high