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"The spirit first, and then the flesh," he would say. To put the latter before the former was a falsehood, and therefore a frightful danger, being at the root of all declensions in the Church, and making ever-recurring earthquakes and persecutions and repentances and reformations needful.
"However," added Lady Glistonbury, "I am not so sanguine as to consider this as any thing but a respite from ruin; I am not so credulous as to believe in sudden reformations; nor, despicable as you and my lord do me the honour to think my understanding am I to be made the dupe of a little deceitful fondling!"
Some reformations of individuals as well as nations have followed upon years of effort, toil, and suffering: others have been materially accelerated by the use of the axe.
Wars and revolutions are the healing crises in the life of nations. Heresies and reformations are the crises of religion. In strikes, riots and panics, we recognize the crises of commercial life. Staid old Mother Earth herself has in the hoary past repeatedly changed the configurations of her continents and oceans by great cataclysms or geological crises.
What few reformations were effected were very partial, leaving the more enormous immoralities as shameless and defiant as ever, up to the very day of abolition; demonstrating the utter impotence of all attempts to purify the streams while the fountain is poison. 3d. That the abolition of slavery gave the death blow to open vice, overgrown and emboldened as it had become.
In certain periods, too, they feel in their domestic policy inconveniencies and grievances, which beget an eager impatience; and they apprehend reformations and new establishments, from which they have sanguine hopes of national happiness. In early ages, every art is imperfect, and susceptible of many improvements.
And though in places some were put to death for refusing to worship the image of the beast that lifeless professors had set up, yet there were from time to time reformations that resurrected many people to life in Christ.
If upon one science, then upon all, if upon science, then upon, art, if upon art and science, then upon every branch of social economy, upon every organ of civilization, his reformations and advances are equally due; due as to all, if due as to any. To move in one direction, is constructively to undertake for all.
When he was walking in the ruins of St. Andrews and some one asked where John Knox was buried, he broke out "I hope in the highway. I have been looking at his reformations." And he wished a dangerous steeple not to be taken down, "for," said he, "it may fall on some of the posterity of John Knox: and no great matter!"
They prayed that "civil liberty and freedome be forthwith granted to all truly English, equall to the rest of their countrymen, as in all plantations is accustomed to be done, and as all free-borne enjoy in our native country.... Further that none of the English nation ... be banished unlesse they break the known lawes of England.... We therefore humbly intreat you, in whose hands it is to help ... for the glory of God ... to give liberty to the members of the churches of England not scandalous in their lives ... to be taken into your congregations, and to enjoy with you all those liberties and ordinances Christ hath purchased for them, and into whose name they are baptized... or otherwise to grant liberty to settle themselves here in a church way according to the best reformations of England and Scotland.
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