Excerpt from Two Biographies of William Bedell: Bishop of Kilmore, With a Selection of His Letters and an Unpublished Treatise Controversies of the seventeenth century, we must feel, I think, that the men who took part in them were sincere. Theological definitions and dogmatic refinements which have now for most only an academic interest, were to them matters of life and death. Questions of Church Government, long ago settled, or at any rate indefinitely postponed, loomed so large in the eyes of the men of that time, that they became a chief element in the storm which was soon to overwhelm for a while both throne and Church; and the stern reality of the struggle does something to excuse the violent tone of much of the controversial writing of the day. The subject of these memoirs lived to see the storm begin in Scotland though not its final outburst in England: he was a witness of the evils in their acutest form which caused Ireland to be the scene of an outbreak that did much to precipitate the upheaval in England. Through all his life he had been busily engaged in trying to find a means of reconciling contending views in Theology. His standpoint was that of the Student and Scholar, always hoping against hope that some solution might be found which would satisfy all reasonable men. But there comes a period in controversy when reason and compromise cease to be of avail. Thus it happened that before he had been many months in his grave all the laborious arguments. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.