been questioned. The authority of all traditions, of papal bulls and briefs, encyclicals and epistles, and of decrees of councils, was done away with; and the austere principle announced that neither symbol, nor vestment, nor ceremony, nor bowing at a name, nor kneeling at an emblem, should be borne with, unless it was set forth in the word of God. A more complete reform was demanded; and the friends of the established liturgy expressed in the prayerbook itself a wish for its furtherance. The churchmen desired to differ from the ancient forms as little as possible, and readily adopted the use of things indifferent; the Puritans could not sever themselves too widely from the Roman usages.

Of the insurrections in the reign of Edward, all but one sprung from the oppression of the landlords. England accepted the reformation; though the want of good preachers impeded the training of the people in its principles. There was no agreement among the bishops on doctrine or discipline. Many parishes were the property of the nobles; many ecclesiastics, some even of those who affected to be evangelical, were pluralists, and left their numerous parishes to the care of those who would serve at the lowest price, even though sometimes they could not read English. Lay proprietors, who had taken the lands of the monasteries, saved themselves from paying pensions to dispossessed monks by setting them, however ignorant or unfit, over many parishes. preached for years.

In some a sermon had not been

1553.

July 6.

In this state of public worship throughout the land, Mary came to the throne; and, by her zeal to restore the old religion, she became the chief instrument in establishing the new. The people are swayed more by their emotions than by processes of dialectics; and, where two parties appear before them, the majority is most readily roused for that one which appeals to the heart. Mary offended English nationality by taking the king of Spain for her husband; and, while the statesmen of Edward's time had not been able to reach the country by preachers, she startled the dwellers in every parish in England by the fires which

she lighted at Gloucester and Oxford and Smithfield, where prelates and ministers, and men and women of the most exemplary lives, bore witness among the blazing fagots to the truth of the reformed religion, by displaying the highest qualities that give dignity to human nature. Rogers and Hooper, the first martyrs of Protestant England, were Puritans. And it was observed that Puritans never sought by concessions to escape the flames. For them, compromise was itself apostasy. The offer of pardon could not induce Hooper to waver, nor the pains of a lingering death impair his fortitude. He suffered by a very slow fire, and died as quietly as a child in his bed.

A large part of the English clergy went back to their submission to the see of Rome; while others adhered to the Reformation from conviction, many of whom had, in their wives and children, given hostages for fidelity. Among the multitudes who hurried into foreign lands, one party aimed at renewing abroad the forms of discipline which had been sanctioned in the reign of Edward; the Puritans endeavored to sweeten their exile by completely emancipating themselves from all offensive ceremonies. The sojourning in Frankfort was at first embittered by angry divisions; but time softened the asperities of controversy; and a reconciliation was prepared by concessions to the Puritans. For the abode on the continent was well adapted to strengthen the influence of the stricter sect. While the companions of their flight had, with the most bitter intolerance, been rejected by Denmark and Northern Germany, the English received in Switzerland the kindest welcome; their love for the rigorous austerity of a spiritual worship was confirmed; and some of them enjoyed in Geneva the instructions and the friendship of Calvin.

1558.

On the death of Mary, the Puritan exiles returned Nov. 17. to England, with still stronger antipathies to the forms of worship and the vestures, which they now repelled as associated with the cruelties of Roman intolerance at home, and which were disused in the churches of Switzerland. The pledges which had been given at Frankfort and Geneva, to promote further reforms, were redeemed. But

the controversy was modified by the personal character of the English sovereign.

The younger daughter of Henry VIII. had at her father's court, until her fourteenth year, conformed like him to the rites of the Roman church. Less than twelve years had passed since his death. For two or three of those years, she had made use of Cranmer's first Book of Common Prayer; but hardly knew the second, which was introduced only a few weeks before her brother's death. No one ever ascribed to her any inward experience of the influences of religion. During the reign of her sister Mary, she had conformed to the Catholic Church without a scruple. At the age of twenty-four restored to freedom by accession to the throne, her first words were that she would "do as her father did;" and, like her father, she never called herself a Protestant, but a Catholic except in subordination to the pope. She respected the symbols of the "Catholic faith," and loved magnificence in worship. She publicly thanked one of her chaplains, who had asserted the real presence. She vehemently desired to retain in her private chapel images, the crucifix, and tapers; she was inclined to offer prayers to the Virgin; she favored the invocation of saints. She so far required the celibacy of the clergy that, during her reign, their marriages took place only by connivance.

Neither the influence of early education nor the love of authority would permit Elizabeth to cherish and imitate the reformed churches of the continent, which had risen in defiance of all ordinary powers of the world, and which could justify their existence only on a strong claim to natural liberty.

On this young woman devolved the choice of the Book of Common Prayer, as it seemed, for the two or three millions who then formed the people of England; but, in truth, for very many in countries collectively more than twice as large as all Europe. Her choice was for the first service-book of her brother: yielding to the immense weight of a Puritan opposition, which was as yet unbalanced by an episcopal section in the church, she consented to that of 1553, but the prayer against the tyranny of the bishop of Rome was left

out; the sign of the cross in baptism was restored; the minister was sometimes denominated the priest; the table was sometimes called the altar; and the rubric, which scouted the belief in the objective real presence of Christ in the eucharist as gross idolatry, was discarded. English historians have excused these concessions in the liturgy, as making it light for Roman Catholics to stay in the Anglican church; but they were better suited "to introduce and countenance such opinions and ceremonies as are fittest for accommodation with popery, to increase and maintain ignorance among the people," and to lead to a conspiracy between the crown and the mitre for throwing down the liberties of England from their foundation. From the moment of the accession of Elizabeth, the pope rendered all the proffered allurements nugatory, by denying her right to the English throne, and summoning her to submit her pretensions to his decision. And yet Elizabeth obstinately held that the Puritans were more perilous than the Romanists, in whom she saw friends to monarchy, if not to the person of the monarch. She long desired to establish the national religion mid-way between sectarian licentiousness and Roman supremacy; and, after her policy in religion was once declared, the pride of authority would brook no opposition.

When rigorous orders for enforcing conformity were first issued, the Puritans were rather excited to defiance than intimidated. Of the London ministers, about thirty refused subscription, and men began to speak openly of a secession from the church; "not for hatred to the estates of the church of England, but for love to a better." At length, a separate congregation was formed; immediately the government was alarmed; and the leading men of the congregation, and several women, were sent to Bridewell for a year.

1567. June.

While the personal influence of the queen crushed every movement of the house of commons towards satisfying the scruples of the Puritans by reforms in the service-book, it chanced otherwise with her aversion to the abstract articles of religion. In January, 1652, the convocation of the Anglican clergy, in whom the spirit of the Reformation then pre

1571.

vailed, having compressed the forty-two articles of Cranmer and Edward VI. into thirty-eight, adopted and subscribed them; and, except for the opposition of the queen and her council, they would have been confirmed by parliament. When, four years later, a Puritan house of commons voted to impose them on the clergy, Elizabeth, at the instance of the English Catholics, and after a long consultation with the ambassador of Spain, used her influence to suppress a debate on the bill in the house of lords. But, in the year after there had been nailed to the door of the bishop of London the bull in which the pope, Pius V., denied her right to the English throne and excommunicated every English Catholic who should remain loyal to her, at a time when he was trying to get her put out of the way by assassins, though she still quelled every movement toward changes in the liturgy, she dared not refuse assent to an act which required subscription to the so called thirty-nine articles, as an indispensable condition for the tenure of a benefice in the church of England. From that time forward, while conformity to the common prayer was alone required of the laity, every clergyman of the church of England wrote himself a believer "that justification is by faith, that Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation, and that transubstantiation is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions." In this manner, Calvinism was intrenched in the citadel of the Anglican church. "By the adoption of the thirty-nine articles," say English Catholics, "the seal was set to the Reformation in England; a new church was built on the ruins of the old."

Within the church of England, there necessarily developed itself an irreconcilable division. 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, and