veneration for Tyndale could prompt was made by his friend Poyntz, and the British merchants at Antwerp, to obtain the liberation of their beloved pastor; but in vain! Poyntz journeyed backwards and forwards between London and Antwerp, and exerted all the influence he possessed with Lord Cromwell in procuring favourable letters from him to the authorities at Antwerp, till at length the Popish party, fearing Tyndale would escape, managed the arrest of his devoted friend Poyntz, and threw him into prison, who, finding his life was in imminent danger, broke out of his prison by night and escaped. Tyndale's imprisonment lasted nearly two years; his amiable and pious conduct obtained for him every indulgence that could be allowed to a prisoner, which enabled him to carry on a sharp controversy with the professors at the neighbouring University of Louvain. The termination of his invaluable life drew nigh, and having exhorted others to constancy, he was now to practise the fiery lesson! The formalities of a trial were gone through, and he was condemned by virtue of a decree made at Augsburg against what they pleased to call heresy. In September, 1536, he suffered the dreadful sentence. While he calmly viewed the dread preparations, his heart mourned over England, and he cried out at the stake-"Lord open the King of England's eyes!" He was then strangled, and long ere his body was reduced to ashes, his soul was with "the redeemed ones" who had "washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb!"

We would conclude this notice in the eloquent words of Dr. Wylie, viz. :-" It was under Wycliffe that English liberty had its beginnings. It is not the political constitution which has come out of the Magna Charta of King John and the Barons, but the Moral Constitution which came out of that Divine Magna

Charta that Wycliffe and Tyndale gave her in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which has been the sheet-anchor of England. The English Bible wrote, not merely upon the page of the Statute Book but upon the hearts of the people of England, the two great commandments, Fear God!''Honour the King! These two sum up the whole duty of nations, and on these two hang the prosperity of States. There is no mysterious or latent virtue in our political constitution which, as some seem to think, like a good genius protects us. The real secret of England's greatness is her permeation at the very dawn of her history with the principles of order and liberty, by means of the English Bible, and the capacity for freedom thereby created. This has permitted the development, by equal stages, of our love for freedom, and our submission to law, of our political constitution, and our national genius, of our power and our self-control; the two sets of qualities fitting into one another, and growing into a well-compacted fabric of political and moral power unexampled on earth! If nowhere else is seen a similar structure, so stable and so lofty, it is because nowhere else has a similar basis been found for it. It was Wycliffe and Tyndale who laid that basis"! WILLIAM ALLEN.

7

JUAN DE VALDES' LETTER TO JULIA GONZAGA

UPON SICKNESS.

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH MS. BY JOHN T. BETTS.

THE readers of the Friends' Examiner have presented to them in this letter, upon "Sickness," one of a series of letters addressed by Juán de Valdés to Julia Gonzaga, of which the Spanish originals have recently been discovered among the thousands of anonymous manuscripts deposited in the Palatine library at Vienna.

These manuscripts were catalogued, in six thousand folio columns, by that poet, scholar and bibliophile, Michael Denis, who was appointed principal librarian of the Imperial library, at Vienna, in the year 1791. His biographer says of him, that he did not rest satisfied with the mere careful guardianship of the literary treasures confided to him, but he sought to make them known, and to show to youth and to scholars how to turn them to account.

It is due to Michael Denis's industry and sagacity in supplying short initiatory extracts from manuscripts by way of clue to recognition, that our greatest living Valdesian scholar and author, Dr. Edward Boehmer, has just discovered: 1st. Valdés Commentary upon the Gospel of Matthew, thought by the late Benjamin Wiffen to have been irrecoverably lost, but which is now being printed in Madrid, by the Religious Tract Society. 2nd. Valdés' version of the Psalms; his translation into Spanish from the Hebrew; his Commentary upon the first Book of the five into which the Hebrews divided the Psalms--Psalms i. to xli.,

with a very valuable preface.* 3rd. Thirty-nine of Valdés' CX Divine Considerations; being the only known originals in Spanish. 4th. The seven letters (Doctor Boehmer calls them doctrinal letters), of which the following letter on Sickness is a specimen. 5th. The tract, intitled "The mode to be observed in teaching and preaching the fundamentals of the Christian religion," likewise the only known Spanish original.

Those who delight in Valdés' Christian teaching, and in his style, will rejoice in these newly-discovered works of his. They are radiant with his characteristically bold statements of divine truth, and are illustrated by his unrivalled similes.

The Emperor of Germany has just released Dr. Boehmer from all his professional duties at the University of Strasburg, to which he was attached as Professor of the Romance Languages,† and has constituted him an Emeritus Professor, in order that he may go on with his researches and publication of the works of Valdés and other Spanish Reformers: the notices of which, so far as we English are concerned, Dr. Boehmer embodies in the Bibliotheca Wiffeniana, of which he is just about to publish the second volume.

That the public may know what subjects are treated in the seven letters, of which the following, on Sickness, is one, I have subjoined their titles: one on Temptations;-one on God's particular Providence ;one on the Government of God;-one entitled Three ways of knowing God;-one on the image and like

* Don Fernando Brunet, of San Sebastian, Benjamin Wiffen's friend and correspondent, is publishing Valdés' version of the Psalms and the XXXIX Divine Considerations, in Spanish, at bis own expense.

The Romance Languages-Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Provençal, French, and others-are modern dialects of the Latin. (See George Cornewall Lewis's Essay on the Romance Languages. Oxford: Talboys. 1835.)

ness of God in Christ and in the Saint; and one showing with "what purpose a Christian should go to the most holy Communion."

They would from their character form an appropriate supplement to the next edition of Valdés' CX Divine Considerations: they are unedited: they have never been published in any language. Dr. Boehmer asked me to turn them into English, and I have done so. Dr. Boehmer suggests that they would bind up well with my English translation of the five Italian tracts of Valdés which he discovered in 1869, and I purpose doing so. I have ready for publication my English translation of Valdés' Commentaries upon the Epistle to the Romans and upon the First Epistle to the Corinthians: they teem with matter for Christian edification.

Pembury, February 24th, 1880.

JOHN T. BETTS.

JUAN DE VALDES' LETTER TO JULIA GONZAGA. “Counsels how not to be painfully affected in Sickness.”

"Your sickness holds me in the greatest solicitude; for, as I am unable to see you, I do not know whether you bear it as a child of this world, or as a child of God. Being in this uncertainty, although I greatly confide in your piety, I desire to relieve myself by this letter; recalling to your memory some things of which it appears to me you may stand in need now that you are in pain, and which, if you believe me, it will be well for you to revive in your memory frequently during the day; for, occupied about them, you will do two things you will not allow an imagination to present itself to your mind that is contrary to piety; and thus