chapter is to show how the type of inward
and spiritual religion, which the Reformation in its kindling power
everywhere produced, finds expression in the writings of three men who
came to large public prominence in the period of the Commonwealth,
Francis Rous, Sir Harry Vane, and Peter Sterry.

I

Francis Rous was born in Cornwall in 1579. He graduated B.A. at Oxford
in 1597 and at the University of Leyden in 1599. He entered the Middle
Temple in 1601, with the prospect of a legal and public career before
him, but soon withdrew and retired to Cornwall, where in a quiet country
retreat he became absorbed in theological studies. His later writings
show an intimate acquaintance with the great Church Fathers, especially
with St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and the
two Gregorys, and with the mystics, especially with the writings of
Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Bernard, Thomas a Kempis, and John Tauler.
He was intensely Puritan in temper and sympathies in his earlier period
of life, and much of his writing at this stage was for the purpose of
promoting the increase of a deeper and more adequate reform in the
Church. He translated the Psalms into "English Meeter," and his version
was approved by the Westminster Assembly, authorized for use by
Parliament, and adopted by the estates in Scotland, "whose Psalms,"
Carlyle says, "the Northern Kirks still sing."[2]

He was a member of Charles I.'s first and second Parliaments, and again
of the Short Parliament and of {268} the Long Parliament. He was also a
member of the Little Parliament, often called "Barebones Parliament," of
which he was Speaker, and of the Parliaments of 1654 and of 1656, and he
was, too, a member of Oliver's Council of State. He was one of many
thoughtful men of the time who passed with the rapid development of
affairs from the Presbyterian position to Independency, and he served on
the Committee for the propagation of the Gospel which framed a
congregational plan for Church government. He was a voluminous writer,
but his type of Christianity can be seen sufficiently in his three little
books: _Mystical Marriage_ (1635), _The Heavenly Academy_ (1638), and
_The Great Oracle_ (1641).[3]

He, again, like so many before him, influenced by Plato as well as by the
New Testament and Christian writers, made the discovery that there is
something divine in the soul of man, and that this "something divine" in
man is always withi