was developed. The power of the bishop, which was for some years looked upon as only administrative, began to be considered as intermediary; and the attempt was made to reconcile the regenerating power of an ordained prelacy to faith in the direct dealing of God with each individual soul. The one party claimed for the bishops an unbroken sacred succession from apostolic times; the other sought a perfect unity with the reformers of the continent. Both parties avoided separation or schism; both strove for mastery in the church of the whole nation; and each of the two, fast anchored within that church, engaged in a contest for the exclusive direction of the public worship.

But, besides these parties contending for lordship over the religion of the whole land, there rose up a class of Independents, who desired liberty to separate from the church of England, and institute social worship according to their own consciences, and employ each individual mind in discovering "truth in the word of God." The reformation had begun in England with the monarch, had extended among the nobility, had been developed under the guidance of a hierarchy, and had but slowly penetrated the masses. The party of the independents was plebeian in its origin, and carried the principle of intellectual enfranchisement from authority into the houses of the common people. Its adherents were "neither gentry nor beggars." They desired freedom to worship God in congregations of their own.

It had long been held perilous for a Christian prince to grant a liberty that one of his subjects should use a religion against the conscience of the prince; and Bacon said: "The permission of the exercise of more religions than one is a dangerous indulgence." It was determined at once to crush this principle of voluntary union by every terror of the law. Among the clergymen who inclined to it were Copping, Thacker, and Robert Browne. By Freke, as bishop of Norwich, the two former were cast into the common jail of Bury St. Edmunds. From the prison of Norwich, Browne was released, through the influence of his kinsman, the lord treasurer, Burleigh. In 1582, he escaped to the Netherlands, gathered a church at Middleburg from among English exiles, and

printed three tracts in exposition of his belief. In substance, his writings contain two seminal ideas: first, if the prince, or magistrate under the prince, do refuse or defer to reform the church, the people may without their consent sever themselves from the national church, and for themselves individually undertake a reformation without tarrying for any; and, secondly, a church may be gathered by a number of believers coming together under a willing covenant made among themselves without civil authority.

Both these propositions Luther had approved, as in themselves thoroughly right; but the English prelacy pursued them with merciless severity. Copping and Thacker, accused of assisting to spread the book of Robert Browne, were transferred to the secular power, and, under the interpretation of the law by the lord chief justice of England, were hanged for the felony of sedition. Browne, by submitting himself to the established order and government in the church, obtained a benefice, which he enjoyed till he became fourscore years of age. The principles, of which the adoption had alone given him distinction, lay deeply rooted in the religious thought of the country, and did not suffer from his apostasy.

From this time there was a division among the Puritans. The very great majority of them continued their connection with the national church, which they hoped one day to model according to their own convictions; the minority, separating from it, looked for the life of religion in the liberty of the conscience of the individual.

The party of the outright separatists having been pursued till they seemed to be wholly rooted out, the queen pressed on to the graver conflict with the Puritan churchmen. "In truth, Elizabeth and James were personally the great support of the high church interest; it had few real friends among her counsellors." In vain did the best statesmen favor moderation: the queen was impatient of nonconformity, as the nursery of disobedience and rebellion. At a time when the readiest mode of reaching the minds of the common people was through the pulpit, and when the preachers would often speak with homely energy on all the events of the day, the claim of the Puritans to the "liberty of prophesying" was

similar to the modern demand of the liberty of the press; and threatened not only to disturb the uniformity of the national worship but to impair the royal authority.

The learned Grindal, who during the reign of Mary lived in exile, and, after her death, hesitated about accepting a mitre from dislike to what he regarded as the mummery of consecration, early in 1576 was advanced to the see of Canterbury. At the head of the English clergy, he gave an example of reluctance to prosecute. But he, whom Bacon calls "one of the greatest and rarest prelates of his time," brought down upon himself the petulance of Elizabeth by his refusal to suppress the liberty of prophesying, was suspended, and, when blind and broken-hearted, was ordered to resign. Nothing but his death, in 1583, saved him from being superseded by Whitgift.

The accession of Whitgift, on the twenty-third of September, 1583, marks the epoch of extreme and consistent rigor in the public councils; for the new archbishop was sincerely attached to the English church, and, from a regard to religion, enforced the conformity which the queen desired as the support of her power. He was a strict disciplinarian, and wished to govern the clergy of the realm as he would rule the members of a college. Subscriptions were required to points which before had been eluded; the kingdom rung with complaints for deprivation; the most learned and diligent of the ministry were driven from their places; and those who were introduced to read the liturgy were so ignorant that few of them could preach. Did men listen to their deprived pastors in the recesses of forests or in tabernacles, the offence, if discovered, was visited by fines and imprisonment.

The first statute of Queen Elizabeth, enacting her supremacy, gave her authority to erect a commission for causes ecclesiastical. On the first of July, 1584, a new form was given. to this court. Forty-four commissioners, twelve of whom were bishops, had roving powers, as arbitrary as those of the Spanish inquisitors, to search after heretical opinions, seditious books, absences from the established divine worship, errors, heresies, and schisms. The primary model of the court was the inquisition itself, its English germ a commission granted

by Mary to certain bishops and others to inquire after all heresies. All suspected persons might be called before them; and men were obliged to answer, on oath, every question proposed, either against others or against themselves. In vain did the sufferers murmur; in vain did parliament disapprove the commission, which was alike illegal and arbitrary; in vain did Burleigh remonstrate against a system so intolerant that "the inquisitors of Spain used not so many questions to trap their preys." The archbishop would have deemed forbearance a weakness; and the queen was ready to interpret any freedom in religion as the treasonable denial of her supremacy or the felony of sedition.

The institution of this ecclesiastical court stands out in high relief as one of the great crimes against civilization, and admits of no extenuation or apology except by recrimination. It has its like in the bull of Leo X. against Luther; in the advice of Calvin to the English reformers; in the blind zeal of the Puritans of that day, who, like Cartwright, taught that "heretykes oughte to be put to deathe nowe, that uppon repentance ther oughte not to followe any pardon of deathe, that the magistrates which punish murther and are lose in punishing the breaches of the first table, begynne at the wronge end;" and, finally, in the act of the Presbyterian Long Parliament imposing capital punishment upon various religious opinions. Luther alone has the glory of "forbidding to fight for the gospel with violence and death."

The party thus persecuted were the most efficient opponents of popery. "The Puritans," said Burleigh, "are oversqueamish and nice, yet their careful catechising and diligent preaching lessen and diminish the papistical numbers." But for the Puritans, the old religion would have retained the affections of the multitude. If Elizabeth reformed the court, the ministers, whom she persecuted, reformed the commons. In Scotland, where they prevailed, they, by their system of schools, lifted the nation far above any other in Europe, excepting, perhaps, some cantons of Switzerland. That the English people became Protestant is due to the Puritans. How, then, could the party be subdued? The spirit of these brave and conscientious men could not be broken. The

queen gave her orders to the archbishop of Canterbury, "that no man should be suffered to decline, either on the left or on the right hand, from the drawn line limited by authority, and by her laws and injunctions." The vehemence of persecution, which comprehended one third of all the ecclesiastics of England, roused the sufferers to struggle fiercely for selfprotecting and avenging power in the state, and, through the state, in the national church.

Meantime, the party of the Independents, or Brownists as they were scornfully called, shading into that of the Puritans, were pursued into their hiding-places with relentless fury. Yet, in all their sorrows, they manifested the sincerest love for their native country, and their religious zeal made them devoted to the queen, whom Rome and the Spaniards had forced, against her will, to become the leading prince of the Protestant world.

In November, 1592, "this humble petition of her highness's faithful subjects, falsely called Brownists," was addressed to the privy council: "Whereas, we, her majesty's natural-born subjects, true and loyal, now lying, many of us, in other countries, as men exiled her highness's dominions; and the rest, which remain within her grace's land, greatly distressed through imprisonment and other great troubles, sustained only for some matters of conscience, in which our most lamentable estate we cannot in that measure perform the duty of subjects as we desire; and, also, whereas means is now offered for our being in a foreign and far country which lieth to the west from hence, in the province of Canada, where by the providence of the Almighty, and her majesty's most gracious favor, we may not only worship God as we are in conscience persuaded by his word, but also do unto her majesty and our country great good service, and in time also greatly annoy that bloody and persecuting Spaniard about the bay of Mexico-our most humble suit is that it may please your honors to be a means unto her excellent majesty, that with her most gracious favor and protection we may peaceably depart thither, and there remaining to be accounted her majesty's faithful and loving subjects, to whom we owe all duty and obedience in the Lord, promising hereby and taking