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 Nothing but his death, in 1583, saved him from being superseded by Whitgift.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

God to record, who searcheth the hearts of all people, that, wheresoever we become, we will, by the grace of God, live and die faithful to her highness and this land of our nativity."

The prayer was unheeded. No one at court in that day would suffer Independents to live in peace in England or plant a colony. "As for those which we call Brownists," wrote Bacon, in 1592, "being, when they were at the most, a very small number of very silly and base people, here and there in corners dispersed, they are now, thanks to God, by the good remedies that have been used, suppressed and worn ont; so that there is scarce any news of them." Yet, in the next year, it was said by Raleigh, in parliament, that there were in England twenty thousand of those who frequented conventicles. It was proposed to banish them, as the Moors had been banished from Spain. To root out the sect which was become the depository of the principles of reform, an act of parliament of 1593 ordered those who for a month should be absent from the English service to be interrogated as to their belief, and menaced obstinate non-conformists with exile or with death. For the moment, under the ruthless policy of Whitgift and the queen, John Greenwood and Henry Barrow, both educated in the university at Cambridge, the former a regularly ordained minister, the latter for some years a member of Gray's Inn, London, after an imprisonment of about seven years, were selected by Whitgift for execution. Burleigh interposed and "gave the archbishop sound taxing words, and he used some speech with the queen, but was not seconded by any." Under the gallows at Tyburn, with the ropes about their necks, they prayed for England and England's queen; and so, on an April morning, were hanged for dissent.

John Penry, a Welshman, who had taken his first degree at Cambridge, and had become master of arts at Oxford, a man of faultless life, a preacher of the gospel to the Welsh, was convicted at Westminster Hall of the same seditiousness. "In the earnest desire I had to see the gospel in my native country," so he wrote to Lord Burleigh, "I might well, as I confess in my published writings, forget my own danger; but my loyalty to my prince did I never forget. And, being

now to end my days before I am come to the one half of my years in the likely course of nature, I leave unto such of my countrymen as the Lord is to raise after me the accomplishing of that work which, in the calling of my country unto the knowledge of Christ's blessed gospel, I began." His protestation after sentence was referred to the judges, who reported him guilty of separation from the church of England, and of "the justification of Barrow and Greenwood as holy martyrs." Archbishop Whitgift was the first to affix his name to the death warrant; and, on the seventh of June, 1593, just as the sun was going down toward the west, one of the purest men of England, exemplarily faithful to his country and to its prince, suffered martyrdom on the gallows.

"Take my poor desolate widow and my mess of fatherless and friendless orphans with you into exile; you shall yet find days of peace and rest, if you continue faithful," was one of the last messages of Penry to a company of believers in London. whom banishment, with the loss of goods, was likely to betide. Francis Johnson, being arraigned, pleaded that "the great charter of England granteth that the church of Christ shall be free, and have all her liberties inviolable;" but, after a close imprisonment in jail for more than a year, he was sentenced to abjure the realm. He it was who gathered the exiled Southwark church in Amsterdam, where it continued as an example for a century.