eagerly throng to the coast, under the protection of the council; and, in fact, adventurers were delayed, through fear of infringing the rights of a powerful company. While the

English monopolists were wrangling about their exclu1621. sive possessions, the first permanent colony on the soil

of New England was established without the knowledge of the corporation, and without the aid of King James.

In Germany, the Reformation sprung not from the superior authority of the sovereign, but from a peasant-born man of the people, and aimed at a regeneration both in morals and doctrine. When Martin Luther proclaimed that justification is by faith alone, superstition was at one blow cut up by the roots. The supernatural charm which hung over the orders whose members or whose chief had, time out of mind, usurped the exclusive right to absolve from sin and to interpose themselves between man and God, was dissolved. Every man became his own priest, and was directly in the hands of the Almighty, with no other mediator than the Eternal Wisdom, with no absolution for evil deeds but by repentance and a new life. There could be no higher expression of the liberty of the individual over against his fellow-men. The claim of right to the freedom of private judgment is a feeble and partial statement in comparison; for it declares the individual man under God alone, not the keeper of his judgment only, but independent of pope, bishop, priest, and all others of his kind, the keeper of his reason, affections, conscience, and character; in a word, of his whole being, now and hereafter. Therefore it is that, in an age when political questions were enounced in theological forms, justification by faith alone was the inscription on the gate through which the more advanced of the human race were to pass to freedom.

The Reformation in England — an event which had been long and gradually prepared among its people by the widely accepted teachings of Wycliffe; among its scholars, by the revival of letters, the presence, the personal influence, and the writings of Erasmus, and the liberal discourses of preachers trained in the new learning; among the courtiers, by the frequent resistance of English kings to the usurpations of

ecclesiastical jurisdiction-was abruptly introduced by a passionate and overbearing monarch, acting in conjunction with his parliament to withdraw the authority of the crown of England from all subjection to an alien pontiff.

In the history of the English constitution, this measure of definitive resistance to the pope was memorable as the beginning of the real greatness of the house of commons; and when Clement VII. excommunicated the king, and Paul III. invited Catholic Europe to reduce all his subjects who supported him to poverty and bondage, it was in the commons that he found countervailing support. But there was no thought of a radical reform in morals; nor did any one mighty creative mind, like that of Luther or Calvin, infuse into the people a new spiritual life. So far was the freedom of private inquiry from being recognised as a 1534. right, that even the means of forming a judgment on religious subjects was denied. The act of supremacy, which severed the English nation from the Roman Nov. 4. see, was but "the manumitting and enfranchising of the regal dignity from the recognition of a foreign superior." It did not aim at enfranchising the English church, far less the English people or the English mind. The king of England became the pope in his own dominions; and heresy was still accounted the foulest of crimes. The right of correcting errors of religious faith became, by the suffrage of parliament, a branch of the royal prerogative; and, as active minds among the people were continually proposing new schemes of doctrine, a statute, alike arrogant in its pretensions and atrocious in its menaces, was, after great opposition in parliament, enacted "for abolishing diversity of opinions." Almost all the Roman. Catholic doctrines were asserted, except the supremacy of the bishop of Rome. The pope could praise Henry VIII. for orthodoxy, while he excommunicated him for disobedience. He commended to the wavering emperor the English sovereign as a model for soundness of belief, and anathematized him only for contumacy. It was Henry's pride to defy the authority of the Roman bishop, and yet to enforce the doctrines of the Roman church. He was as tenacious of

1539.

his reputation for Catholic orthodoxy as of his claim to spiritual dominion. He disdained submission, and he detested heresy.

Nor was Henry VIII. slow to sustain his new prerogatives. According to ancient usage, no sentence of death, awarded by the ecclesiastical courts, could be carried into effect until a writ had been obtained from the king. The regulation had been adopted in a spirit of mercy, securing to the temporal authorities the power of restraining persecution. The heretic might appeal from the atrocity of the priest to the mercy of the prince. But what hope remained, when the two authorities were united; and the law, which had been enacted as a protection of the subject, became the instrument of tyranny! No virtue, no eminence, conferred security. Not the forms of worship merely, but the minds of men, were declared subordinate to the government; faith, not less than ceremony, was to vary with the acts of parliament. Death was denounced against the Catholic who denied the king's supremacy, and the Protestant who doubted his creed. Had Luther been an Englishman, he might have perished by fire. In the latter part of his life, Henry revoked the general permission of reading the Scriptures, and limited the privilege to merchants and nobles. He always adhered to his old religion, and died in the Roman rather than in the Protestant faith. The environs of the court displayed no resistance to the capricious monarch; a subservient parliament yielded him absolute authority in religion; but the awakened intelligence of a great nation could not be terrified into a passive lethargy; and, even though it sometimes faltered in its progress along untried paths, steadily demanded the emancipation of the public mind.

Jan. 28.

The people were still accustomed to the Catholic 1547. forms of worship and of belief, when, in January, 1547, the accession of the boy Edward VI., England's only Puritan king, opened the way to changes within its church. The reform had made great advances among the French and among the Swiss. Both Luther and Calvin brought the individual into immediate relation with God;

but Calvin, under a more stern and militant form of doctrine, lifted the individual above pope and prelate, and priest and presbyter, above Catholic Church and national church and general synod, above indulgences, remissions, and absolutions from fellow-mortals, and brought him into the immediate dependence on God, whose eternal, irreversible choice is made by himself alone, not arbitrarily, but according to his own highest wisdom and justice. Luther spared the altar, and hesitated to deny totally the real presence; Calvin, with superior dialectics, accepted as a commemoration and a seal the rite which the Catholics revered as a sacrifice. Luther favored magnificence in public worship, as an aid to devotion; Calvin, the guide of republics, avoided in their churches all appeals to the senses, as a peril to pure religion. Luther condemned the Roman Church for its immorality; Calvin, for its idolatry. Luther exposed the folly of superstition, ridiculed the hair shirt and the scourge, the purchased indulgence, and dearly bought, worthless masses for the dead; Calvin shrunk from their criminality with impatient horror. Luther permitted the cross and the taper, pictures and images, as things of indifference; Calvin demanded a spiritual worship in its utmost purity. Luther left the organization of the church to princes and governments; Calvin reformed doctrine, ritual, and practice; and, by establishing ruling elders in each church and an elective synod, he secured to his polity a representative character, which combined authority with popular rights. Both Luther and Calvin insisted that, for each one, there is and can be no other priest than himself; and, as a consequence, both agreed in the parity of the clergy. Both were of one mind, that, should pious laymen choose one of their number to be their minister, "the man so chosen would be as truly a priest as if all the bishops in the world had consecrated him."

1647.

In the regency which was established during the minority of Edward, the reforming party had the majority. Calvin made an appeal to Somerset, the protector; and, burning with zeal to include the whole people of England in a perfect unity with the reformers of the continent,

he urged Cranmer to call together pious and rational men, educated in the school of God, to meet and agree upon one uniform confession of Christian doctrine, according to the rule of Scripture. "As for me," he said, "if I can be made use of, I will sail through ten seas to bring this about."

In the first year of the new reign, Peter Martyr and another from the continent were summoned to Oxford. The Book of Homilies, which held forth the doctrine of justification by faith, prepared by Cranmer in the year 1547, laid the foundation for further reform; and in the next appeared Cranmer's first Book of the Common Prayer, in which, however, there lurked many superstitions. Bucer, who, in 1549, was called to Cambridge, complained of the backwardness of "the reformation." "Do not abate your speed, because you approach the goal," wrote Calvin to Cranmer. "By too much delay, the harvest-time will pass by, and the cold of a perpetual winter set in. The more age weighs on you, the more swiftly ought you to press on, lest your conscience reproach you for your tardiness, should you go from the world while things still lie in confusion." The tendency of the governing mind appeared from the appointment, in 1551, of John Knox as a royal chaplain. Cranmer especially desired to come to an agreement with the reformed church on the eucharist; and, on that subject, his liturgy of 1552 adopted the teaching of Calvin; the priest became a minister, the altar a table, the bread and wine a commemoration. The sign of the cross in baptism, auricular confession, the use of consecrated oil, prayers for the dead, were abolished. "The Anglican liturgy," wrote Calvin of this revised Book of Common Prayer, "wants the purity which was to have been wished for, yet its fooleries can be borne with."

The forty-two articles of religion digested by Cran1553. mer, and promulgated by royal authority, set forth the creed of the evangelical church as that of all England. In the growing abhorrence of superstition, the inquisitive mind, especially in the cities, asked for greater simplicity in the vestments of ministers and in the forms of devotion. Not a rite remained of which the fitness had not