aid lordships.

And this is all we know of that lively "Whitsun Morris" at Willenhall
Fair in the year of grace 1498. It all reads like a delightful chapter
in the vein of Shakespeare's Dogberry and Verges; and it will be noted
that the priests are among the captains or ringleaders in this Sunday
revelling.

* * * * *

After the Reformation came the Puritans, who severely discountenanced all
Sunday revelry. And so the lampoon of their enemies ran:--

There dwells a people on the earth
That reckons true religion treason,
That makes sad war on holy mirth,
Count madness zeal and nonsense reason;
That think no freedom but in slavery,
That makes lyes truth, religion, knavery;
That rob and cheat with "yea" and "nay,"
Riddle me, riddle me, who are they?

Yet, when religious differencies had brought on civil war, it had to be
confessed of this Puritan people (so says Sir Francis Doyle in "The
Cavalier"):--

That though they snuffled psalms, to give
The rebel dogs their due,
When the roaring shot poured thick and hot
They were stalwart men and true.

And so the mighty struggle for liberty of conscience against the
pretensions of a dominant Church had proceeded for over century, when we
find the incumbency of Willenhall held by the Rev. Thomas Badland.

Thomas Badland was born in 1643, matriculated at Pembroke College,
Oxford, 1650, and took his B.A. degree, 1653. He was one of the noble
band of ministers who relinquished their livings on August 24th, 1662,
rather than conform to the requirements of the Act of Uniformity, passed
on the Restoration of Charles II.

On his ejectment from Willenhall, this conscientious Puritan divine
returned to his native city, Worcester, where "he formed a distinct
congregation of Christians, who assembled for worship in a small room" at
the bottom of Fish Street. His family was an old one in Worcester, the
name Badland occurring in a charter of James I.

According to Noake's "Worcester Sects," he was minister of that
congregation for 35 years; but before his death the Declaration of
Indulgence by James II. was made (1687), and immediately thereupon Mr.
Badland's church was regularly constituted by the adoption of the
Covenants of church membership which had been drawn by Richard Baxter--he
was a personal friend of the eminent divine--in terms sufficiently
general to include almost all denomina