nineteen years; chiefly devoting his studies to Aristotle, the languages, and school-divinity.

It was his happiness to become acquainted very early in life with Celsus Maximian, count of Martinengo; who, from being like Zanchy, a bigoted papist by education, became afterwards a burning and shining light in the reformed church. Of our author's intimacy with this excellent nobleman, and its blessed effects, himself gives us the following account:* "I left Italy for the gos pel's sake; to which I was not a little animated by the example of count Maximian, a learned and pious personage, and my most dear brother in the Lord. We had lived together under one roof, and in a state of the strictest religious friendship for the greater part of sixteen years; being both of us Canons Regular, of nearly the same age and standing, unisons in temper and disposition, pursuing the same course of studies, and which was better still, joint hearers of Peter Martyr, when that apostolic man publicly expounded St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and gave private lectures on the Psalms to us his monks." From this memorable period we are evidently to date the era of Zanchy's awakening to a true sight and experimental sense of divine things. His friend, the count, and the learned Tremellius, were also converted about the same time, under the ministry of Martyr.

Zanchii Epist. ad Lantgrav. Operum. Tom. vii. part. 1.

col. 4.

This happy change being effected, our author's studies began to run in a new channel. "The count," says he, "and myself betook ourselves to a diligent reading of the Holy Scriptures; to which we joined a perusal of the best of the fathers, and particularly St. Austin. For some years we went on thus in private, and in public we preached the gospel as far as we were able in its purity. The count, whose gifts and graces were abundantly superior to mine, preached with much greater enlargement of spirit, and freedom of utterance than I could ever pretend to: it was therefore, no wonder that he found himself constrained to fly his country before I was. The territory of the Grisons was his immediate place of retreat; from whence removing soon after, he settled at Geneva, where he commenced the first pastor of the protestant Italian church in that city. Having faithfully executed this sacred office for some years, he at length comfortably fell asleep in Christ," A. D. 1558, after having, on his death-bed, commended the oversight of his flock to the great Calvin.

It was in the year 1550, that Peter Martyr himself was obliged to quit Italy; where he could no longer preach, nor even stay with safety. Toward the latter end of the same year, eighteen of his disciples were forced to follow their master from their native land; of which number Zanchy

Zanch. ut supra.

was one. Being thus a refugee, or, as himself used to express it," delivered from his Babylon. ish captivity," he went into Grisony, where he continued upwards of eight months; and then to Geneva, where after a stay of near a twelvemonth, he received an invitation to England, (upon the recommendation of Peter Martyr, then in this kingdom,) to fill a divinity professorship here; I suppose at Oxford, where Martyr had been for some time settled. Zanchy embraced the offer and began his journey, but was detained on his way by a counter invitation to Strasburgh, where the divinity chair had been lately vacated by the death of the excellent Caspar Hedio.

Zanchy was fixed at Strasburgh, A. D. 1553, and taught there almost eleven years; but not without some uneasiness to himself, occasioned by the malicious opposition of several, who persecuted him for much the same reason that Cain hated righteous Abel, 1 John iii. 12. Matters however went on tolerably during the life-time of Sturmius, who was then at the head of the university, and Zanchius's fast friend. At Strasburgh it was, that he presented the famous declaration of his faith concerning Predestination, Final Perseverance and the Lord's Supper. He gave it in to the Senate, October 22, 1562. Of this admirable performance, (i. e. of that part of it which respects the first of these points) the reader may form some judgment by the following translation.

In proportion as the old senators and divines died off, one by one, Zanchy's situation at Strasburgh, grew more and more uncomfortable. Matters at length came to that height, that he was required to subscribe to the Augsburgh confession, on pain of losing his professorship. After mature deliberation, he did indeed subscribe; but with this declared restriction, modo orthodoxe intelligatur. Notwithstanding the express limitation with which he fettered his subscription, still this great and good man seems, for peace sake, to have granted too much concerning the manner of Christ's presence in the Lord's supper; as appears by the first of the three theses, maintained by him at this time: 1. Verum Christi corpus, pro nobis traditum; & verum ejus sanguinem, in peccatorum nostrorum remissionem effusum; in Cana vere manducari & bibi. Though the other two positions do effectually explain his meaning: 2. Verum id, non ore, & dentibus corporis, sed vera fide. 3. Ideoque, a solis fidelibus. I shall here beg leave to interpose one question naturally arising from the subject. What good purpose do the imposition and the multiplication of unnecessary subscriptions, to forms of human composition tend to promote? It is a fence far too low to keep out men of little or no principle; and too high, sometimes, for men of real integrity to surmount. It often opens a door of ready admission to the abandoned; who, ostrich like, care not what they swallow, so they can but make subscription a bridge to secular

interest and, for the truly honest, it frequently either quite excludes them from a sphere of action, wherein they might be eminently useful, or obliges them to testify their assent in such terms, and with such open professed restrictions, as render subscription a mere nothing.

Not content with Zanchy's concessions, several of the Strasburgh bigots* persisted in raising a controversial dust. They tendered accusations against him, of errors in point of doctrine; particularly for his supposed heterodoxy concerning the nature of the Lord's supper; his denial of the ubiquity of Christ's natural body, and his protesting against the lawfulness of images, &c. Nay, they even went so far, as to charge him with unsound opinions concerning predestination and the perseverance of the truly regenerate; so early did some of Luther's pretended disciples, after the death of that glorious reformer (and he had not been dead at this time above fifteen years,) begin to fall off from the doctrines he taught, though they still had the effrontery to call themselves by his name!

* Particularly John Marbach, a native of Schawben, or Swabia; a turbulent, unsteady theologist; pedantic and abusive; a weak but fiery disputer, who delighted to live in the smoke of contention and virulent debate. He was, among the rest of his good qualities, excessively loquacious; which made Luther say of him, on a very public occasion, Ori hujus Suevi "This talkative Swa-. nunquam araneæ poterunt telas texere; bian need not be afraid of spiders; for he keeps his lips in such constant motion, that no spider will ever be able to weave a cobweb on his mouth."