4 to England: an invitation which he the more readily accepted, as his congregation at Elbing was now broken up, in consequence of the failure of its commercial proceedings. To England, therefore, Dury went, and was well received, not only by Archbishop Abbot, which, from the character of the man, we might have expected, but also by Laud, who then filled the chair of London. It was agreed that he should return to Germany, should see Gustavus Adolphus, and should concert such measures as might seem advisable to that monarch and to the other Protestant princes. Our divine, nothing loath, accepted the mission, and had his first interview with the king of Sweden at Würtzberg, in 1631. Gustavus, at this moment, was the dictator of Protestant Europe; the battle of Leipsic had laid Germany at his feet; Protestants and Reformers hastened to pour in their forces to his assistance; while the cruel sack and destruction of Magdeburg, by Tilly, stirred up a warm feeling of execration against the Catholic leaders. Such, then, was Gustavus when Dury, fortified with a letter of recommendation signed by thirty-eight English divines, presented himself at the court. The king heard him with interest, and offered to furnish him with letters patent, recommending his person and his design to all the Protestant princes. The negotiator, however, had, singularly enough, some objection against receiving such a document from any but an ecclesiastical authority; he asked leave to decline it for the present; and all that was settled was a recommendation to the divines of the various sects to prepare the way by their sermons for a general peace. Having thus made a beginning with the Lutherans, Dury thought it expedient to try his success among the Calvinists; he therefore visited in order Hanau, the Palatinate, the Duchy of Zweibrücken, and the Wetterau. Whether it were the interest which Dury had excited, or whether the Lutherans and Calvinists felt that their only hope of success lay in union, can hardly be determined; but on the 3d of March in this same year, a colloquy between the Protestants and the Reformed had been held at Leipsic. The fairest professions were made on either side. The Confession of Augsburg was perused and reperused; but no substantial step was taken. The conference, however, served to furnish our pacificator with another, among the many documents which he always carried about with him. But, in the meantime, the fortunes of his great patron had changed. Schiller tells the story in brief: 1 An account of this Synod is given by Sagittarius in his Introduction to Ecclesiastical History, vol. ii. p. 1588. political sermons of his having enraged the Government, he thought it prudent to fly into Holland, became a pastor at Leyden, and there spent the rest of his life. Here our hero was educated, embraced independent views, and, in 1628, settled as pastor to the English factory at Elbing, in Prussia. It was the period of that tremendous struggle between the Reformation and the Church of Rome, which, after promising to render the former triumphant throughout Europe, concluded by driving it back in all quarters, by cooping it up in countries with which, at the commencement of the century, it would have disdained to be satisfied, and by causing its great antagonist to make efforts which recalled her former struggle with the Emperors of the world, and to send forth saints who might rival the Gregories and the Leos of her earlier days. Sweden and Austria, the never-conquered king' and Oxenstiern on the one side, Wallenstein and Tilly on the other, fought out, so far as human arms were concerned, the contest. At that time Elbing formed part of the dominions of Gustavus Adolphus, and was the residence of Dr. Godeman, one of his privy counsellors. This person contracted an intimate friendship with Dury, and was the first to suggest to him that whoever should be able to bring to pass a general inter-communion throughout Protestant Christendom would indeed deserve the blessing of the peacemakers. This was the utmost pitch to which the imagination of the Swedish privy counsellor soared; it was that, also, which occupied the greater part of the life of Dury. For the second phase of these tendencies to reconciliation, that, namely, which included Rome in the general peace, had its rise, as we shall sec, in George Calixtus, and did not occupy the mind of his predecessor till nearly the conclusion of his life. Dury instantly caught at the idea, and offered to devote himself to the work, if he could see any hope of being enabled to carry forward his scheme. It chanced that, at this period, Sir Thomas Rowe (whose history is so intimately mixed up with that of the celebrated patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucar) was sent ambassador extraordinary to Gustavus, and happened to take Elbing on his way back to England. He heard of the plan from Dury, communicated it to the Chancellor Oxenstiern -perhaps, on the whole, the greatest man whom Sweden ever produced-and agreed with him in thinking that both Gustavus. and Charles I. should render all the support that might lie in their power for so excellent an object. On his return to England, Sir Thomas communicated the proposals to several of his friends, by whom they were much relished; but by none more so than by the Lord Chancellor. This was in 1630; and by the advice of those interested in the matter, Dury was invited to England: an invitation which he the more readily accepted, as his congregation at Elbing was now broken up, in consequence of the failure of its commercial proceedings. To England, therefore, Dury went, and was well received, not only by Archbishop Abbot, which, from the character of the man, we might have expected, but also by Laud, who then filled the chair of London. It was agreed that he should return to Germany, should see Gustavus Adolphus, and should concert such measures as might seem advisable to that monarch and to the other Protestant princes. Our divine, nothing loath, accepted the mission, and had his first interview with the king of Sweden at Würtzberg, in 1631. Gustavus, at this moment, was the dictator of Protestant Europe; the battle of Leipsic had laid Germany at his feet; Protestants and Reformers hastened to pour in their forces to his assistance; while the cruel sack and destruction of Magdeburg, by Tilly, stirred up a warm feeling of execration against the Catholic leaders. Such, then, was Gustavus when Dury, fortified with a letter of recommendation signed by thirty-eight English divines, presented himself at the court. The king heard him with interest, and offered to furnish him with letters patent, recommending his person and his design to all the Protestant princes. The negotiator, however, had, singularly enough, some objection against receiving such a document from any but an ecclesiastical authority; he asked leave to decline it for the present; and all that was settled was a recommendation to the divines of the various sects to prepare the way by their sermons for a general peace. Having thus made a beginning with the Lutherans, Dury thought it expedient to try his success among the Calvinists; he therefore visited in order Hanau, the Palatinate, the Duchy of Zweibrücken, and the Wetterau. Whether it were the interest which Dury had excited, or whether the Lutherans and Calvinists felt that their only hope of success lay in union, can hardly be determined; but on the 3d of March in this same year, a colloquy between the Protestants and the Reformed had been held at Leipsic. The fairest professions were made on either side. The Confession of Augsburg was perused and reperused; but no substantial step was taken. The conference, however, served to furnish our pacificator with another, among the many documents which he always carried about with him. But, in the meantime, the fortunes of his great patron had changed. Schiller tells the story in brief:-- 1 An account of this Synod is given by Sagittarius in his Introduction to Ecclesiastical History, vol. ii. p. 1588. Bohemia was deliver'd from the Saxons, The Swede's career of conquest check'd. These lands Hither invoked, as round one magic circle, With Gustavus, on that 6th of November, 1632, fell Protestant ascendancy; and the Schwedenstein, which marks his resting-place on the field of Lützen, may also be regarded as the boundary-stone which proclaims, Thus far shalt thou go, but no further,' to the conquests of Lutheranism. It was in the Wetterau that Dury heard of the great event; and he thence wrote to Abbot and to Laud, acquainting them with what he had already performed, pledging himself to more extended efforts, and imploring further assistance. He thence went to a general meeting of Protestant states at Heilebron, in company with Sir Robert Anstruther, who was to represent England in the assembly. By this time, considerable interest was felt throughout Europe; friends to the cause sprang up everywhere; the most distinguished were the Swiss, John Millet, the Frenchman, Anne Coligny, Paul Ferrius, of Metz, and John Matthiæ, Lutheran Bishop of Strengnås. Some of the legates at Frankfort had brought divines who promised to render all assistance; such were Dunner from Sweden, and Tettelbach from Frankfort. Our hero, who by this time repented of not having accepted the offer made by Gustavus, applied to Oxenstiern for a similar circular. The chancellor was more wary than the king, and declined setting his hand to any such document; he joined, however, with the other ambassadors in signing a more general paper, importing their wish for peace, their recognition of Dury's labours, and the esteem they felt for his character. They also promised to bring to a meeting of the States, which was to be held at Erfurt in the following spring, a divine or two from their respective kingdoms; and, in the meantime, to propose to their several communions the following questions:-1. Whether the acts of the Conference at Leipsic, in so far as they were agreeable to the Confession of Augsburg, might not be received by all? 2. Whether the disagreements existing between Lutherans and Reformed might be reconciled, yes, or no? If yes, how? If no, were the discrepancies such as necessarily to imply a schism between the two communions? With these documents, and a portmanteau full of other communications, especially from Paris, Geneva, and Metz, our pacifi cator, finding that nothing was likely to occur in Germany during the winter, took his way through Holland, calling on the chief pastor of every town through which he travelled, for the purpose of disseminating his own views, and arrived in England in the autumn of 1633. Here he found the face of affairs somewhat changed; Abbot was dead, and Laud had succeeded him at Canterbury. He, however, received Dury in a friendly manner, wrote him a courteous letter which has been printed by Benzelius, asked him to dinner at Lambeth, observed that he should have taken him for a German-by this time, according to every one's testimony, he spoke German more fluently than English-and finally inquired whether he were in orders, and if so, by whom they had been conferred? If we may believe Dury, he had been for several years under some scruple' with respect to the validity of independent Ordination; and if so, his expressions on the subject probably influenced the Archbishop in his favour. We say if so, because here, for the first time, the shifts and manœuvres which procured for Dury the titles of the double-faced Didymus,' the treacherous Ambidexter,' and other the like unsavoury appellations, begin to manifest themselves. The fact seems to be that he did not intentionally deceive; but, fully persuaded himself of the utter unimportance of all disputes about Church polity, and even about matters of faith not expressly laid down in the Apostles' Creed, and penetrated with a sense of the supreme importance peace, he sacrificed not only rites and ceremonies, but weighty points of doctrine, sometimes asserting them, sometimes denying them, with an ease which seemed to those who did not regard the question from precisely his point of view, the grossest duplicity. His was not a candid mind; and though it would be difficult, and perhaps impossible, in any of his numerous works (we ourselves have seen more than twenty), to convict him of a deliberate falsehood through all the tangled skein of events which he relates, yet it must be confessed that he clips, and smooths down, and rounds off, and omits what was conveniently omitted, and exaggerates what it was expedient to exaggerate,-all, be it observed, in furtherance of his mission,till some part of his history assumes a very different aspect, as related by him, from that which it bears in the accounts of his biographers. of 6 But we are keeping our hero and the Archbishop waiting. 'By all means,' said the latter, consult Master Bray; he will give you full satisfaction on these points.' Bray, principally · This is his constant assertion throughout The Unchanged and Single-hearted Peacemaker;' and as the statement could hardly have been calculated to procure him favour at the time when it was made, it may probably be true. |