shared the same ideas, which were regarded with highest approval by Dr. Edmund Calamy, a divine who distinguished himself by his violent diatribes against King Charles I, and who when, at the Restoration, he was invited to preach before the King, caused a good deal of scandal by refusing to wear a surplice, and shortly, flouting all attempts at reconciliation, exhibited himself so obstinate an agitator that Dr. Sheldon, Bishop of London, was obliged forcibly to restrain his heterodoxy. That an extremist of this school should have fostered the crusade of Hopkins very clearly demonstrates the bitter creed of those concerned. There is one important point which must not here be passed over, and the full significance of which will be very apparent, to wit although Matthew Hopkins was undoubtedly a man of no small energy and of considerable force of character, possessing indeed a personality to be reckoned with, as his career clearly shows, yet his religious proclivities are nowhere protruded or even emphasized in circumstances which might well have been thought to have been most favourable to the exhibition of an unusual pietism and sanctimoniousness, which it is quite certain his fellow enthusiastists of the same kidney would have deployed and exaggerated on every possible occasion. It seems strange that it is possible to find a good word to say of Matthew Hopkins, but it is only fair to notice that although he was a humbug, he was not at any rate a canting humbug. The explanation of this probably lies in the fact that he was too soulless even to make a pretence of religious zeal when such hypocrisy would not any better play his game nor put another penny in his pocket. His position was that of the
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