Spanish lady of high rank, and the sister of a cardinal, received his doctrine, zealously promoted the evangelical faith, and, when persecution drove her from Naples, she fled to Zurich, and finally settled in the Valtelline in order to maintain the liberty of conscience. The gifted Vittoria Colonna, an admired poetess, was no unaffected listener. Folengo, the prior of Monte Cassino, noted the effects of the revival of the Gospel, and said: "We behold a most extraordinary spectacle; we see women, who seem naturally more prone to vanity than to serious reflection, men untutored, and soldiers, so moved by the truth that, if any thing is heard about a holy life, it generally comes from them. Indeed, this is the golden age! Throughout my native Campania there is no preacher so learned but that he would become wiser and holier from converse with such women."

Julio de Milano, a professor of theology, carried the truth with him through various persecutions, printed a volume of sermons, and fled to the Grisons, where he founded a church, preached to it thirty years, and laid the foundation of several other churches in that region. Marc Antonio Flaminio, the poet, exercised a pious influence among literary men. Caserta and Carnesecchi were among the noble martyrs; among the charges against such men was their having read and circulated the writings of Valdés, and that kindred spirit, Aonio Paleano. The heroic Marquis of Vico, Galeazzo Caraccioli, forsook his honors, estates, and family (who refused to accompany him), and went into exile for the love and liberty of the Gospel. He was received at Geneva with the warm affection of Calvin, who did so much to make Geneva the refuge for troops of exiles driven out of Italy and France on account of their faith.

Valdés had no more eminent disciple than Peter Martyr Vermiglio, who was still preaching at Naples when his instructor died. With him was Cusano, formerly his fellow-student at Padua, where they had spent whole nights in mastering the Greek language and reading the Greek Testament. This Peter Martyr is intimately connected with the history of the Reformation in Italy, France, Switzerland, and especially England. His influence at Oxford and with the several English bishops who labored for reform-Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer,

Hooper, and Jewel-cannot be estimated. No small part of

it

may be traced to Valdés, who has been called the spiritual father of this "master-spirit in Israel, the arch-counsellor of the recognized founders of the English Church."

It has been said that Valdés, as a reformer, entered less than almost any other man of his time into the battle of the hierarchies. His aim was not so much to destroy error as to build up truth. He was not a controversialist, nor a speculative theologian. Without discarding the Roman Church, he seems to have quietly retired from her communion. He looked far above the mere ritual. Concerning the prevalent abuse of ecclesiastical rites he said: "Outward ceremonies breed inward vices." He could have sympathized in the remark of Calvin: "Little will be made of ceremonies in the Day of Judgment." Certain quietists of our age have made him one of their models, and kept him aloof from the Christian church and her ordinances. This must be owing to a perversion of a few of his rather unguarded sayings: e. g., "A Christian's proper study should be in his own book. I call my mind my book. In this are contained my opinions, both true and false. In this I discover my confidence and my diffidence, my faith and my unbelief, my hope and my negligence, my charity and my enmity." But he did not mean that a pious life consisted largely in mere inward contemplation. For he goes on to say: "When I wish to know whether my opinions in the Christian faith are false or true, I compare them with the doctrines held by those holy men who wrote the Sacred Scriptures. Reading the holy faith of those Christians of the primitive church, who were acknowledged to be justified and sanctified in and by Christ, I know my own faith and my unbelief, and pray God that he will increase my faith. . . . In this manner Holy Scripture serves me the better to study my own book, and to understand it." After all, his greatest book was the Bible. He certainly differed from most of the modern Quakers in his views of its authority and the fulness of its light for the human soul.

...

He died at Naples, about middle age, in 1540, and there was a long remembrance of his spare body, fair and pleasing countenance, retiring disposition, courteous manners, gentle

and winning speech, benevolent heart, vigorous mind, clear logic, happy wit, devoted piety, and unblemished life. His circle of learners felt lonely in the world after he was gone. One of them, Bonfadio, thus wrote to Camesecchi: "Would that we were now with that happy company! I hear you sigh for it. Yet where shall we go, now that Signor Valdés is dead? This has truly been a great loss for us and the world, for Signor Valdés was one of the rare men of Europe, and those writings he has left us on the Epistles of Paul and the Psalms of David most amply show it. With a particle of his soul he governed his frail and spare body: with the larger part he was always raised in the contemplation of truth and of divine things."

The writings of Valdés were not likely to escape the searching eye of the Inquisition in his native country. There, one of his own relatives, Fernando de Valdés, archbishop of Seville, was Grand Inquisitor. It was he who put the whole code of the Spanish Inquisition into the form in which those terrible laws have existed to this day. The contrast between the two men was but a type of what existed in that age. Juan Valdés, without using his tongue as the lash upon persecutors, or noisily declaiming against intolerance, was the earnest advocate of true, religious liberty.

Although "actions speak louder than words," the fame and influence of a few men rest mainly upon their conversations. Samuel Johnson and Coleridge were great talkers. They had great things to say. No one talks too much whose utterances are timely, wise, and weighty. The ancients, without a press to crowd its issues upon them, were not shallow thinkers; they talked and remembered, we read and forget. In an age when the decline of right manly conversation is lamented, it may be well to notice that Juan Valdés was a great talker, and that his influence was by no means wasted in the air. His words were deeds. Mr. Ticknor, in his History of Spanish Literature, mentions him as "a person who enjoys the distinction of being one of the first Spaniards that embraced the opinions of the Reformation, and the very first who made an effort to spread them." The day may be coming when his long-hidden writings will hold in Spain the place which they deserved more than three hundred years ago.

ART. IV. The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, from the Coming of Julius Caesar into the Island, in the sixtieth year before the Incarnation of Christ, till the year of our Lord 731. By the VENERABLE BEDE. Carefully revised and corrected from the translation of Mr. Stephens. By Rev. J. A. GILES, LL. D. London: 1840.

THERE are special reasons why English and American scholars should be acquainted with the history of the ancient British and Anglo-Saxon churches, for here were our own ancestorsthe fathers and mothers from whom we are lineally descended. Could we trace our lineage backward, from forty to fifty generations, we should find our progenitors either among the rude savages who so sternly resisted the invasion of their country by Julius Cæsar, or among the ruder and fiercer Saxons who conquered the ancient Britons in the fifth century.

The individual to whom we are chiefly indebted for what we know of the first introduction of Christianity into Britain and of its re-introduction, when it had been subverted by the Saxon invasion, is the Venerable Bede.* He is as much the father of English church history as Eusebius is of church history in general.

Bede was born, A. D. 672, in the vicinity of Durham, in a village now called Farrow, near the mouth of the Tyne. Having early lost both his parents, he was placed, by his relatives, in a monastery at Weremouth, where he was educated with much strictness, and became in youth, it is hoped, a child of God. He was afterward removed to a monastery at Jurrow, where he spent the remainder of his life. These monasteries were of the order of the Benedictines, which, in their earliest and purest times, were useful institutions. The monks lived abstemiously, and divided their waking hours between study, devotion, and labor. Many of them were employed in transcribing books; and we are indebted to them for much

* Gildas, surnamed the Wise, was the most ancient British historian. He is supposed to have died at Bangor (Wales), about the year 590. His only complete work now extant is Epistola de Excidio et Castigatione Ordinis Ecclesias tici, in which he graphically depicts and mourns over the ruin of his country by the Saxous. He is often referred to by Bede.

The

that we know of ancient sacred and classical literature. labor performed by them was agriculture, gardening, and the various mechanical trades, by which means they made their lands productive, and supplied, in a great measure, their own personal wants.

From his earliest years Bede was a diligent student, and he soon came to be regarded as the most learned man of his time. He was well skilled in the Greek and Hebrew languages, while the Latin, in which most of his works are written, was to him as his mother-tongue. He was ordained deacon in the nineteenth, and presbyter in the thirtieth year of his to higher promotion he did not aspire.

age; and

Bede never knew what it was to be idle. He gave himself to the study of the Scriptures, to the instruction of young men, and to the preparation of numerous literary and religious works. He wrote on most of the branches of knowledge at that time cultivated in Europe. His fame soon spread beyond the bounds of England, and was celebrated in the surrounding countries. He was invited by Pope Sergius to visit Rome, but the great world had no charms for him. He preferred the routine and seclusion of monastic life, and it does not appear that he ever wandered far from his cell.

The works of Bede have been published in eight folio volumes, consisting of commentaries on nearly the whole Bible, numerous homilies and letters, and a great number of tracts. But his most valuable work, and that by which he is now chiefly known, is his "Ecclesiastical History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the year 731"-only four years previous to his death. This work was undertaken at the special request of Ceolwulph, one of the Saxon kings, to whom it was dedicated, and in whose dominions Bede's monastery was placed. He spent many years in collecting materials for his history, which he gathered from the lives and letters of particular persons, from the annals of convents, and from such chronicles as had been written before his time. He died, at the age of sixty-three, of an affection of the lungs, attended with great difficulty of respiration. His last work was a translation of "John's Gospel" into English. Only a short time before his death, his amanuensis said to him: "My