8 
called. Mr. Crooke was much troubled with these ‘ Dissenters,” 
“silly seduced ones who were carried away with a spirit of 
giddiness,”* and who with all his endeavours and affectionate 
essays he failed to reclaim. Advancing age rendered him less 
able than formerly to cope with this new trouble. He now often 
suffered from lowness of spirits, and imagining the approach of 
death several times preached his own funeral sermon. He also 
took a dislike to hearing himself praised or his parish highly 
spoken of, for the reason that he feared the then state of things 
would not last. 
Unable to check the increasing influence of these “silly seduced 
ones,” and being pledged against toleration, he joined in 1648, 
five-and-forty others, ministers of the Gospel in the county of 
Somerset, “brethren and companions in tribulation and in the 
kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ,” in an Attestation sent 
up to the Parliament; in which he declared himself “ deeply 
sensible of and heartily sorrowful for the high innovation” of 
the errors, heresies, and toleration of the times, and the slighting 
and vilifying that Solemn League and Covenant, which had laid 
upon him the “greatest ingagement and endeavours for their 
extirpation.”* 
This was his last public act, but he continued to study and to 
preach as long as his strength enabled him. He constantly 
preached, if at all in health, three times a week, and when 
illness came upon him, and his physician told him if he would 
preach more seldom he would live the longer, he answered, 
“Alas! if I may not labour I cannot live, what good will life do 
me if I be hindered from the end of living.”+ His last sickness, 
which caused him much suffering, and was full of “biting pains,” 
he bore with patience, and died after forty-seven years’ residence 
at Wrington, on the 25th December, 1649, aged seventy-five all 
but,one month, leaving a widow, but no family surviving. 
~ * Attestation of the Ministers of Somerset, -&c;~~ 
+ A Collection of Lives, &c, 
