How little thought he that God had there, in his old
and glorious school of trial, his "hidden ones," like Bunyan, whose
serene testimony was yet to shine forth victorious over wrong and
neglect, and reproach and ridicule, eclipsing so many contemporary
celebrities, and giving to the homes and the sanctuaries of every
land inhabited by an English race, one of the names "men will not
willingly let die." How little could gilded and callous favorites of
the palace have dreamed that their Acts of Uniformity and Five-mile
Acts, and the like legislation of ecclesiastical proscription, were
but rearing for the best men of the age, in the prisons where they
had been immured, a Patmos, serene though stern, where the sufferer
withdrew from man to commune with the King of kings. There the
prisoned student was receiving for the churches new lessons of
surpassing beauty and potency; and the confessor, pillaged by
informers and bullied by judges, and lamented in his own stricken
household and desolate home, but only derided by his godless
sovereign and heartless courtiers, yet often found himself
compensated for every loss, when, like an earlier witness for the
gospel of the Cross, enwrapped "IN THE SPIRIT, ON THE LORD'S DAY."
Such were the schools where Non-conformist piety received its
temper, its edge, and its lustre.
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