VIII. The oxen scarcely quit the yoke, for the winter crops must now be sown, and the compassionate farmer throws a pint of oats into their every feed. But, busy as we are, to-day is holiday. It is the 15th October, and the herds return from the mountain. A great music of cowbells awoke us at five in the morning; one hears a tramp of feet, and the loud greetings of the herdsmen whom the whole village turns out to welcome; the cows utter long "moos" of excitement and delight; in their midst we see a rustic cart or chariot piled high with great cheeses-each cow of the herd ought to have produced at least three of these huge moons of fifty kilos during the five months of the Estivade. Without a word from the herdsman, the beasts stop at Langeac's farm and turn into the pastures they left in May, "mooing" and frolicking for joy despite the fatigue of the night's long march. Happier still are the herdsmen. The master-vacher tosses his baby in the air; the little pâtre has found his mother; the herdsmen are talking eagerly in a knot of relatives and friends. What joy to see the valley, and the last bright asters in the gardens, and the apples red and gold in the orchard-trees! How large and cheerful the grey-stone houses look after the wind-shaken buron on the mountain-top! Not to-night (for all of them will sleep), but for many a night after, towards midnight, a whisper will be heard in Langeac's orchard; a group of shadowy forms moves under the apple-branches. One might suppose a sudden wind in the trees, for plop! plop! fall the ripe fruit on the soft grass beneath. But the wary farmer shutter knows what to expect; a screams on its hinges, a window opens, and there, in the yellow light of the candle, is Farmer Langeac in his shirtsleeves. The herdboys scurry away, swiftly and silently, with bulging pockets. For my part, out of compassion, I leave them one tree, not the bestbut they prefer them hard as iron. IX. All Saints is at hand! The winds turn sharp and keen. Now any night the snow may fall and end the labors of the farm until it first, uncertainly, begins to melt in March. Como jious lo cenre uno cato, Nostro bielho Oubergno s'ocato "Like a cat in the warm ashes of the hearth, at All Saints and sometimes sooner still, our old Auvergne snuggles down in a soft quilt of snow." Adieu! lark and swallow. Poor cicada, perish in thy frozen hole! No more flowers, no more birds, save the great croaking crows that flap across the milk-white fields. Winter is here! The daily round has narrowed its circle. A path is cut from the door to the gate, another to stable and drinking-trough, where the unfrozen fountain plashes over a fringe of icicles. The walls of snow glitter and melt not in the sunniest noon. The farm-kitchen is now the centre of all works and days. The huge hearth-place is a cavern of warmth and glow. Soon after three the hilltop intercepts the sun; a little later, the beasts being milked and fed, masters and men sit assembled round the fire. From the ceiling hangs the three-beaked Roman lamp, but the flames, leaping from the beech-trunk on the fire-dogs, give a cheerier light. The farm hands, cutting a bough of cherry or beech, renew the handles of their scythes, mend their tools, or knock a fresh set of nails in their sabots. The women twirl their distaffs and spinning-wheels or sew their seam; on a corner of the table, Urbain, the elder son, who has been to the Regiment, reads last week's local paper; Touènou, the little pâtre, sprawls in the blaze and pulls the tail of the cat; comfortably ensconced on the cushioned settle, the old gaffer of eighty tells many a story of local tradition, or repeats for the hundredth time his famous account of a journey to Limoges in 1840, or makes the shadows creepier with tales about the Drac. A little after six the supper is spread; a porringer of soup, followed by the bacon, the sheep's trotters and the cabbage which gave it flavor; a nugget of cheese. By seven, a neighbor or so has strolled in to share the veillée. The farmer throws a handful or two of chestnuts to roast in the embers, and The Contemporary Review. sets, mayhap, on the table half a bottle of red wine. And the stories and the gossip begin again till the log, burned through, falls with a crash from the fire-dogs and sends up a fountain of sparks. The cricket sings shrill, but hark! without the snow-blast or Ecir sings more shrilly yet. The clock strikes half-past eight. Master and men arise and bid each other goodnight. The neighbors light their lanterns and don their heavy mantles; the cowherd goes to seek his warm bed in the cow-stable. The door, opened an instant for their egress, reveals the gusty moon-shot night and the vast expanse, dazzling and yet dim, of endless snow-a polar landscape, inhospitable and sad. Mary Duclaux. OUTWARD BOUND. Dear Earth, near Earth, the day that made us men, The Hearth that glowed O Mother, must we bid farewell to thee? Fast dawns the last dawn, and what shall comfort then The lonely hearts that roam the outer sea? Gray wakes the daybreak, the shivering sails are set, To misty deeps The channel sweeps O Mother, think on us who think on thee! Earth-home, birth-home, with love remember yet The sons in exile on the Eternal sea. Henry Newbolt. THE NON-JURORS.* To any one blessed or cursed with an ironical humor the troublesome history of the Church of England since the Reformation cannot fail to be an endless source of delight. It really is exciting. Just a little more of Calvin and of Beza, half-a-dozen words here, or Cranmer's pencil put through a single phrase elsewhere; the merest "quantum suff" more of the men "that allowed no Eucharistic sacrifice," and away must have gone beyond recall the possibility of the Laudian revival and all that still appertains thereunto. We must have lost the "primitive" men, the Kens, the Wilsons, the Knox's, the Kebles, the Puseys. the other hand, but for the unfaltering language of the Articles, the hearty tone of the Homilies, and the agreeable readiness of both sides to curse the Italian impudence of the Bishop of Rome and all his "detestable enormi On ties," our Anglican Church History could never have been enriched with the names or sweetened by the memories of the Romaines, the Flavels, the Venns, the Simeons, and of many thousand unnamed saints who finished their course in the fervent faith of Evangelicalism. But on what a thread it has always hung! An ill-considered Act of Parliament, an amendment hastily accepted by a pestered layman at midnight, a decision in a Court of Law, a Bishop's charge, a passage in an early Father, an ancient heresy restudied, and off to Rome goes a Newman or a Manning, whilst a Baptist Noel finds his less romantic refuge in Protestant Dissent. Schism is for ever in the air. Disruption a lively possibility. It has always been a ticklish business belong 1. "A History of the ". Non-Jurors. By Thomas Lathbury. London: Pickering, 1845. ing to the Church of England, unless you can muster up enough courage to be a frank Erastian, and on the rare occasions when you attend your parish church handle the Book of Common Prayer with all the reverence due to a schedule to an Act of Parliament. Among the many noticeable humors of the present situation is the tone adopted by an average Churchman like Canon Overton to the Non-Jurors. When the late Mr. Lathbury published his admirable History of the Non-Jurors, he had to prepare himself for a very different public of Churchmen and Churchwomen than will turn over Canon Overton's agreeable pages. In 1845 the average Churchman after he had conquered the serious initial difficulty of comprehending the Non-Juror's position was only too apt to consider him a fool for his pains. "It has been the custom," wrote Mr. Lathbury, "to speak of the Non-Jurors as a set of unreasonable men, and should I succeed in any measure in correcting those erroneous impressions I shall feel that my labor has not been in vain." But in 1902, as Canon Overton is ready enough to perceive, "their position is a little better understood." The well nigh "fools" are all but "confessors." The early history of the Non-Jurors is as fascinating and as fruitful as their later history is dull, melancholy, and disappointing. Nobody will deny that the bishops, clergy, and laity of the Church of England who refused to take the oaths to William and Mary and George the First, when tendered to them, were amply justified in the Court of Conscience. They were ridiculed by the Balfours of the day for their supersensitiveness; but what were they to do? If they took the oaths, they apostatized from the faith they had once professed. Before the Revolution it was the falth of all High Churchmen-part of the depositum they had to guard-that the doctrine of non-resistance and passive obedience was Gospel truth, primitive doctrine, and a chief "characteristic" of the Anglican Church. The saintly John Kettlewell, in his Tractate, "Christianity, a Doctrine of the Cross, or Passive Obedience under any Pretended Invasion of Legal Rights and Liberties" (1696), makes this perfectly plain, and when Ken came to compose his famous will wherein he declared that he died in the Communion of the Church of England, "as it adheres to the doctrine of the Cross," the good bishop did not mean what many a pious soul in later days has been edified by thinking he did mean, the doctrine of the Atonement, but that of passive obedience, which was the Non-Jurors cross. It is sad to think a doctrine dear to so many saintly men, maintained with an erudition so vast and exemplified by sacrifices so great, should have disappeared in the vortex of present day conflict. It may some day reappear in Convocation. Kettlewell, who was a precise writer and accurate thinker, defined sovereignty as supremacy. "Kings," he said, "can be no longer sovereigns, but subjects, if they have any superiors," and he points out with much acumen, considering his data, that the best security under a sovereign "which sovereignty allows" is that the Kings and Ministers are accountable and liable for breach of law as well as others. Kettlewell, had he lived long enough, might have come to transfer his idea of sovereignty to Kings, Lords, and Commons speaking through an Act of Parliament, and if so, he would have urged active obe dience to its enactments, were they not contrary to conscience, and passive obedience if they were SO contrary. Therefore, were he alive to-day, and did he think it contrary to conscience (as he easily might) to pay a schoolrate for the support of Kenyon-Slaney schools, he would not draw a cheque for the amount, but neither would be punch the bailiff's head who came to seize his furniture. Kettlewell's treatise is well worth reading. Its last paragraph is most spirited. There could be no doubt about it. The High Church party were bound hand and foot to the doctrine of the Cross-i. e., passive obedience to the Lord's Anointed. Whoever else might actively resist or forsake the King, they could not without apostacy. But the Revolution of 1688 was not content to pierce the High Churchmen through one hand. Not only did the Revolution require the Church to forswear its King, but to see its spiritual fathers deprived and intruders set in their places without even the semblance of any spiritual authority. If it was hard to have James the Second a fugitive in foreign lands and Dutch William in Whitehall, it was perhaps even hardto see Sancroft expelled from Lambeth, and the Erastian and latitudinarian, Tillotson, who was prepared to sacrifice even episcopacy for peace, usurping the title of Archbishop of Canterbury. After all, no man, not even a Churchman, can serve two masters. The loyalty of a High Churchman to the Throne is always subject to his loyalty to the Church, but at the Revolution he was wounded in both houses. er When Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, and established what was then unblushingly called "the new religion," the whole Anglican Hierarchy, with the paltry exception of the Bishop of Llandaff, refused the oaths of supremacy, and were superseded. In a little more than a hundred years the Protestant Bench was bombarded with a heart-searching oath-this time of allegiance. Opinion was divided; the point was not so clear as in 1567. The Archbishop of York, and his brethren of London, Lincoln, Bristol, Winchester, Rochester, Llandaff and St. Asaph, Carlisle and St. David's, swore to bear true allegiance to their Majesties King William and Queen Mary. Dr. Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of Bath and Wells, Ely, Gloucester, Norwich, Peterborough, Worcester, Chichester, and Chester refused to swear anything of the kind, and were, consequently, in pursuance of the terms of an Act of Parliament, and of an Act of Parliament only, deprived of their ecclesiastical preferments. They thus became the first Non-Jurors, and were long, except two who died before actual sentence of exclusion, affectionately known and piously venerated in all High Church homes as "the Deprived Fathers." Who can doubt that they were right, holding the faith they did? Yet Englishmen do not take kindly to martyrdom, and some of them were strangely puzzled. The excellent Ken, who, like Keble, was an Englishman first and a Catholic afterwards (in other words, no true Catholic at all), when told that James was ready to give Ireland to France, as nearly as possible conformed, so angry was he with the Lord's Anointed; and even the fiery Leslie, one of our most agreeable writers, was always ready to forgive those pious, peaceful souls who thought it no sin, though great sorrow, to com: ply with the demands of Cæsar, but still retained their old Church and King principles. Leslie reserved his wrath for the Tillotsons and the Tenisons and the Burnets, who first, to use his own words, swallowed "the morsels of usurpation" and then dressed them up "with all the gaudy and ridiculous flourishes that an Apostate eloquence can put upon them." It is impossible, I hope, to doubt that many living High Churchmen who have lately shown so much zeal and activity in driving a bargain with the State for the use of schools (largely built with public money) for the education of poor children of all denominations would, had they (to our great loss) been alive in 1688 have become adherents of the Non-Juring cause, preferring Sancroft to Tillotson, and the Stuart to the Dutchman. I feel sure about Lord Halifax, not so sure about Lord Hugh Cecil. As for our bishops, I cannot even guess what they would have done, except that I am certain they would not all have done the same thing. included The early Non-Jurors among their number a very large proportion of holy, learned, and primitiveminded men. At least 400 of the general body of the clergy refused the oaths and accepted for themselves and those dependent on them lives of the uttermost poverty and entire seclusion. They were from the beginning an unpopular body. They were not Puritans, they were not Deists, they were not Presbyterians, they would not go to their parish churches; and yet they vehemently objected to being called Papists. What troublesome people! Five of the deprived fathers, including the Primate, had known what it was, when they defied their Sovereign, to be the idols of the mob; but when they adhered to his fallen cause they were deprived of their sees, and sent packing from their palaces without a single growl of popular discontent. Oblivion was their portion even as it was of their Roman Catholic predecessor's at the time of their Reformation. The Archbishop of Canterbury, when turned out of Lambeth by legal pro |