A Set of Rogues
CHAPTER I. _Of my companions and our adversities, and in particular from our getting into the stocks at Tottenham Cross to our being robbed at Edmonton._ There being no plays to be acted at the "Red Bull," because of the Plague, and the players all cast adrift for want of employment, certain of us, to wit, Jack Dawson and his daughter Moll, Ned Herring, and myself, clubbed our monies together to buy a store of dresses, painted cloths, and the like, with a cart and horse to carry them, and thus provided set forth to travel the country and turn an honest penny, in those parts where the terror of pestilence had not yet turned men's stomachs against the pleasures of life. And here, at our setting out, let me show what kind of company we were. First, then, for our master, Jack Dawson, who on no occasion was to be given a second place; he was a hale, jolly fellow, who would eat a pound of beef for his breakfast (when he could get it), and make nothing of half a gallon of ale therewith,--a very masterful man, but kindly withal, and pleasant to
intimacy of her relation to God,--Mary of Nazareth. The vocabulary of
love and reverence has exhausted itself in the attempt to express our
estimate of her. The literature of Mariology is immense. And no one who
has at all entered into the meaning of the Incarnation, of what is
involved in eternal God taking human flesh, can wonder at this. Here at
the crisis of the divine redeeming action, when the crowning mystery
which angels desire to look into is being accomplished, we find the
figure of a village maiden of Israel as the surprising instrument of the
advent of God. We wonder: and we instinctively feel, that as all the
other steps and instruments in God's redemption of man had from the
beginning been carefully prepared, so shall we find preparation here. We
understand that as God could not come in the flesh at any time, but only
when the "fulness of time" had come; so He could not come of any woman,
but only of such an one as He had prepared to be the instrument of His
Incarnation.
It is involved in the very intimacy of the relation which exists
between our Lord and His blessed Mother that she should be unique in the
human race. We feel that we are right in saying that the Incarnation
which waited for the preparation of the world socially and spiritually,
must also be thought of as waiting for the coming of the woman who would
so completely surrender herself to the divine will that in her obedience
could be founded the antidote to the disobedience which was founded in
Eve. The race waited for the coming of the new mother who should be the
instrument in the abolishing of the evil of which the first mother was
the instrument. And from the very beginning of the thought of the Church
CHAPTER I. _Of my companions and our adversities, and in particular from our getting into the stocks at Tottenham Cross to our being robbed at Edmonton._ There being no plays to be acted at the "Red Bull," because of the Plague, and the players all cast adrift for want of employment, certain of us, to wit, Jack Dawson and his daughter Moll, Ned Herring, and myself, clubbed our monies together to buy a store of dresses, painted cloths, and the like, with a cart and horse to carry them, and thus provided set forth to travel the country and turn an honest penny, in those parts where the terror of pestilence had not yet turned men's stomachs against the pleasures of life. And here, at our setting out, let me show what kind of company we were. First, then, for our master, Jack Dawson, who on no occasion was to be given a second place; he was a hale, jolly fellow, who would eat a pound of beef for his breakfast (when he could get it), and make nothing of half a gallon of ale therewith,--a very masterful man, but kindly withal, and pleasant to