Aspects of Kentish Local History

has fled away: Religion is nowhere, only her counterfeit remains among men, who pursue shadows and abandon piety.
   The priest's duty is to proclaim the heavenly mysteries, and to teach others his own faith. Yet everywhere suspicion is rife, the son hostile to his father, the husband to his wife. The priesthood arrogate divine powers, yet impart to their people one interpretation of scripture while they reserve another for themselves. From the pulpit they proclaim the imminent return of the Creator of Heaven and Earth to destroy His whole creation; happy, they cry, he who prepares for Christ's appearing; but in their secret hearts they regard this universe as indestructible, and ridicule the Lord's coming as a thief; their reason sees no impending change in the heavens but a constant ordering of sun, moon and stars.
   Much of their own teaching they regard as mere fable; they despise lay-hearers for the lack of reasoning power; they preach the vanity of riches but covet their gift at the altar and call this a sacred hunger. Useless to search for religion among the priests, where all is pride and deceit. At length it occurs to the poet to pursue his quest within London walls. He hastens thither, asking everybody for his Spouse. At length he discovers her torn fragments; the citizens (fathers of the sects) stand round weeping; Good Directory alone honours her funeral, while she is buried in an unnamed grave. "Farewell Religion,

Farewell, I said", concludes the poem; "Until Charles comes thy resurrection cannot be looked for."

II

   The Hypocritae Finis contains a word-portrait of the Puritan minister; he who walks with head bent looking earthwards, utters long sighs, puffs out long prayers through his nostrils, wears cropped hair with a supercilious smile; pretends a pious soul behind a face like a mask, and under a lamb-like exterior conceals the wild beast. The volume closes with the author's fervent prayer for peace:

        "Et veniat, veniat, veniat (Christo auspice) noster
        Carolus, et Deus ille meus, quem semper amabo."

This strikes the modern reader as a courageous aspiration at that date for one who claimed to be a neutral; his friends admired his independence of mind, although Henry complained that his aim in writing the poems was misunderstood.
   The chief interest of the book is the stress it lays on the rationalizing tendency of the churchmanship which Puritan "hypocrisy" of a less intellectual cast superseded. At the Restoration Henry seems to have considered republishing the volume, and consulted Dr. Thomas Tullie, Principal of St. Edmund Hall, where his nephew, James Oxinden, was