St. Chrysostom's judgment upon it (having loosed the pains of death) is, that when Christ came out of the grave, death itself was delivered from pain and anxiety —
. Death knew it held him captive whom it ought not to have seized upon, and therefore it suffered torments like a woman in travail till it had given him up again. Thus he. But the Scripture elsewhere testifies, that death was put to sorrow because it had lost its sting, rather than released from sorrow by our Saviour's resurrection.
Most noticeable! See the influence of the surrounding myriotheism in the
dea Mors!
Ib.
Let any competent judge read Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams, and then these Sermons, and so measure the stultifying, nugifying effect of a blind and uncritical study of the Fathers, and the exclusive prepossession in favor of their authority in the minds of many of our Church dignitaries in the reign of Charles I.
Hacket's Life of Lord Keeper Williams[5]
Prudence installed as virtue, instead of being employed as one of her indispensable handmaids, and the products of this exemplified and illustrated in the life of Archbishop Williams, as a work, I could warmly recommend to my dearest Hartley. Williams was a man bred up to the determination of being righteous, both honorably striving and selfishly ambitious, but all within the bounds and permission of the law, the reigning system of casuistry; in short, an egotist in morals, and a worldling in impulses and motives. And yet by pride and by innate nobleness of nature munificent and benevolent, with all the negative virtues of temperance, chastity, and the like, — take this man on his road to his own worldly aggrandizement. Winding his way through a grove of powerful rogues, by flattery, professions of devoted attachment, and by actual and zealous as well as able services, and at length becoming in fact nearly as great a knave as the knaves (Duke of Buckingham for example) whose favor and support he had been conciliating, — till at last in some dilemma, some strait between conscience and fear, and increased confidence in his own political strength, he opposes or hesitates to further some too foolish or wicked project of his patron knave, or affronts his pride by counselling a different course (not a less wicked, but one more profitable and conducive to his Grace's elevation);-and then is
floored