200 LIFE OF RICHARD BARTER. disputing way than ever, believing that it tempteth men to bend their wits to defend their errors, and oppose the truth, and hinder - eth usually their information." " That which 1 named before, on the by, is grown one of my great diseases ; I have lost much of that zeal which I had topropa- gate any truths to others, save the mere fundamentals." "I am ready to think that people should quickly understand all in a few words ; and if they cannot, lazilyto despair of them, and leave them to themselves. I.know the more that this is sinful in me,because it is partly so in other things, even about the faults of my servants or other inferiors ; ifthree or four timeswarning dono good to them, I am much tempted to despairof them, turn them away, and leave them to themselves. "I mention all these distempers. that my faults may be awarning to others to take heed, as they call on myself forrepentance and watchfulness. O Lord ! for the merits, and sacrifice, and interces- sion of Christ, be merciful to me, a sinner, and forgive my known and unknown sins ! "* It might have been supposed that so great: a national calamity as "the plague in London," which in a fewmonths swept to the grave one hundred thousand people in that city alone, would have brought the rulers of the nation, in church and state, to another temper. But as the monarch, while the pestilence was desolating his kingdom, was the same lustful and profligate wretch that he ever had been ; sothe prelates and their partisans, amid the terrors of that visitation, were as intent as ever on the oppression and ex- tirpation of those whom they hated and feared as Puritans. "Theministers that were silenced for nonconformity, had ever, since 1662, done their work very privately and to a few : " But "when the plague grew hot, most of the conformable ministers fledand left their flocks in the timeof their extremity ; whereupon divers nonconformists, pitying the dying and distressed people, who had none to call the impenitent to repentance, or to help men to prepare for another world, or to comfort them in their terrors, when about ten thousand died,in a week, resolved that no obedi- ence to the laws of mortal men whatsoever could justify them in neglecting men's souls and bodies in such extremities." " There- fore, they resolved to stay with the people, and to go into the for- saken pulpits, though prohibited, and to preach to the poor people before they died ; also to visit the sick, and get what relief they could for the poor, especially those that were shut up. The face of death did so awaken both the preachers and the hearers, that the preachers exceeded themselves in lively and fervent preach- '" Narrative, Part I. pp. 124, 138.
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