God, and every way worthy of love for his irreprovable life and conversation. This venerable man, who seems to have been the spiritual father of many of those who formed the Scrooby church, became their first pastor, and in 1608, as we shall see, went with them into exile to Amsterdam.1

We have already mentioned Clyfton's clerical neighbour Richard Bernard, the vicar of Worksop, who was one of the notable men of the Basset-Lawe Hundred, and who, as living only some eight miles south-east of Scrooby, came to be well known to the brethren there. Judging from a rather fine portrait of him which has come down to us, he was a noticeable man to meet in a country road or to listen to from the pulpit of a country church. After graduating at Cambridge he was, in 1598, presented to the living of Epworth in Lincolnshire, the birthplace of John Wesley and Alexander Kilham, where he began his literary career by publishing a quaint translation of Terence, and on June 19, 1601, he was instituted to the vicarage of Worksop. He is interesting to us as the man in controversy with whom John Robinson wrote the greatest work of his life, and interesting for his own sake, too, as a writer of more than ordinary versatility and genius. His book, entitled The Isle of Man, or the Legall Proceeding in Man-shire against Sin, shows him to have been an original allegorist long before John Bunyan took up his pen. Indeed, it is not possible to compare this work with Bunyan's Holy War, or the Losing and Taking again of Mansoul, without coming to the conclusion that the Great Dreamer had read the book and received many suggestions from it. Bernard, for example, tells us that in travelling through the Isle of Man he came to the county

1 He was later the author of A Plea for Infants and Elder People concerning their Baptism. Printed at Amsterdam, by Giles Thorp, 1610; also of An Advertisement concerning a Book lately published by C. Lawne and others against the English Exiled Church at Amsterdam, 1612.

towne called Soule.' This Soule's-towne is a place of great resort, a thorowfare never without travellers, and has four great streets: Sense Street, Thought Street, Word Street, and Deed Street, along which that pestilent thief Sin, with his Copemates, may often be found wandering. There is also a Common Inne n the place kupt by Mistress Heart, who lives there with one Old Man. This Inne is a well-accustomed house, for many pests, which are Satan's suggestions, take up their lodgings there. It has five doors, the five senses, for the guests to come in at, and these guests are well-waited upon, for Mistress Heart hath the eleven passions for her maids, and her man Will hath at his command the feet, the hands, and the tongue, who act as hostler, tapster, and chamberlaine. The book is in two parts; the first setting forth the search for, the attacking and imprisoning of Sin, the second narrating the trial, before the bar of Conscience, and a jury of the Virtues, of Old Man, Mistress Heart, Covetousness, and Idolatry. There is considerable resemblance between this second part and the trial of the Diabolonians, Atheism, Hard-heart, False-peace, No-truth, and Pitiless, decribed by Bunyan as taking place in Mansoul; and Bernard is almost as happy in hitting off some of his names as Bunyan himself.

Curiously enough, in this book he not only anticipated one Bedfordshire worthy, but also another who did honour to its county town-John Howard, the prison philanthropist. In the Epistle to the Reader, Bernard pleads on behalf of an 'unbegun worke' in the interest of the prisoners in the gaols of the kingdom. He says that the state of these prisoners is well known, and how their souls' safety is neglected; he urges, therefore, the appointment of prison chaplains. He pleads also for prison labour against the then existing system of wasteful and destructive idleness: 'If there should be means to set them on worke they might get somewhat for food and raiment.

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They might so prevent the miserable fruits of sloth; their minds would be imployed, their bodies be preserved in health, and not pine away.' Enforced labour would, he thinks, terrifie loose vagrants, lazie wanderers, and the idle route from turning theeves.' The prison is now, he says, 'a very picture of Hell, and (more is the pity), as the case now stands, is no less than a preparation thereto;' whereas if prisoners were treated as he suggests, they would, on their release, 'become through God's mercie more profitable members in the Common-Weale afterwards; whereas now they become twice more the children of Belial than they were before.'

The man who could say this a hundred and fifty years before John Howard published his Survey of the State of Prisons, was no commonplace observer, but one who looked at things with his own eyes and could think his own thoughts. That he was an earnest preacher of Christ's Gospel, as well as a social reformer before the days of social reform, may be gathered from another book of his entitled, The Faithfull Shepeard, or the Shepeard's Faithfulnesse. It is an appeal for an earnest ministry as the need of the times, and also serves as a study in Homiletics. He is severe on those among the gentry who think the ministry of the Gospel beneath the notice of their sons: 'Some of our states and gentrie wish their children anything; worldly lawyers, fraudulent merchants, killing physicians, bloody captains, idle, loose livers, swearing ruiĥians, walkers on Shooter's Hill, and coursers on Salisburic Plains, to maintain their riot, rather than as they call them-priests. And yet this state is magnified of God and man.' In charging young preachers he advises them not to venture into regions too high for them: 'Controversies require sharpness of wit and some cunning to find out Satan's sophistries. Young cockerills that begin but to crowe may not set upon the great cocks of the