mation was issued demanding a strict conformity. In the city of London, thirty-seven out of ninety-eight beneficed clergymen refused to make the promise which was required of them, and were immediately excluded from the performance of their ministry.1 A company of Puritans who ventured to meet for worship in their own way (1567), found that there were penalties for the nonconforming laity as well as for nonconforming clergymen. Their meeting was broken up, and a large number of them were imprisoned to study in their confinement the principles of church order.2 In all parts of England there were similar proceedings.

Not many years passed before the conflict entered on another stage of its progress, and new questions were opened between the Puritans and those who ruled the ecclesiastical establishment. The rigorous enforcement of the Act of Uniformity by bishops on laity as well as clergy, and the forcible suppression of the private assemblies in which nonconformists ventured to meet for social worship, had an effect which a little knowledge of human nature might have anticipated. Puritans, instead of being convinced by such arguments, began to consider whether the system of ecclesiastical government which was so conservative of superstitious vestments and ceremonies ought not to be more radically reformed. Thomas Cartwright, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge, a man of great celebrity for learning and eloquence, began (1570) to discuss. in his lectures the theory of church government as given in the Scriptures; and he did not hesitate to say in what particulars the actual arrangements for the government of the Church of England were widely divergent from the most ancient examples, and especially from the authoritative precedents and principles of the New Testament. Still holding the vicious theory that an independent Christian nation is an independent Christian church, he aimed at nothing more

1

1 Neal, i., 98, 99.

2 Ibid., p. 108, 109.

than a complete reformation by the government; but the system which he would have the queen and Parliament establish in England was essentially that of Geneva and of Scotland. Thenceforward the Puritans, as a party, looked for something more than the removal of a few obnoxious ceremonies, and the privilege of officiating in a black gown instead of a white surplice. Thenceforward they would be satisfied with nothing less than an entire revision and reconstruction of the ecclesiastical establishment. Under Cartwright's influence, English Puritanism became, essentially, in its ideas and aspirations, Presbyterianism like that of Holland or of Scotland.

To describe the progress of that controversy in the Church of England would be aside from our purpose. It was a long and bitter controversy. On one side there was power, on the other side there was the obstinacy of conscience. On one side was the queen, with the splendor of her court and government, with her inborn love of pomp as well as of power, with her imperious will, and with her unbounded popularity as a princess whose right to the throne, and even the legitimacy of her birth, were identified with Protestantism. On the other side was the people's abhorrence of the pope and all his works-the English "no-popery," which had been long growing, especially among the middle-class people, and which had gained both extension and intensity from the vividly remembered atrocities in the reign of Mary. On one side were some good men and learned, conservative by nature and by training, who thankfully accepted as much of reformation as the queen would give them, and quietly waited for more, with many other men, not so good nor so learned, whose feeling was that the queen had already done quite enough, and even more than enough, in the way of church reformation. On the other side there was no less of learning, and much more of earnest religious feeling. On one side was the fixed purpose of Elizabeth Tudor, and (after a while) of the prelates who depended on her favor, to extin

guish the nonconforming and reforming party by deprivation and silencing, by exorbitant fines, by confinement in loathsome and pestilential prisons. On the other side there was the invisible yet invincible might of those who suffer for conscience' sake.

On both sides it was held that the bishop of Rome had no rightful authority in England. On both sides there was a fatal error-fatal to liberty, and fatal in the end to godliness-the error of supposing that Christian England, being an independent nation, was therefore an independent church -the Church of England. Both held a fatal error in assuming that there must be a national church, one and indivisible, and that the reformation of the church could be wrought only by the legislative and executive sovereignty of the nation.

Something better than Puritanism was necessary to liberty, and to the restoration of simple and primitive Christianity.

CHAPTER V.

REFORMATION WITHOUT TARRYING FOR ANY.

WHAT Puritanism demanded was an ecclesiastical reformation to be made by the national authority. Queen Elizabeth and the Parliament, as having full legislative power in England, were to revise the established forms of public worship and purge out all idolatrous symbols and superstitious ceremonies. The laws concerning uniformity were to be changed, not in the interest of liberty or of "broad-church" principles, but in the interest of primitive purity and simplicity. The entire constitution of ecclesiastical government, which had really undergone no change except by putting the queen into the pope's place, was to be taken down and reconstructed. The reforming party, in its study of the Scriptures, had learned that archbishops and archdeacons were not known to the apostles; that the bishops mentioned in the New Testament were cficers of local churches only, and not rulers over many churches in one diocese; that the so-called ecclesiastical courts, with their fines and imprisonments [pro salute animarum] for the health of the souls of nonconformists and other offenders, bore no resemblance to the arrangements instituted by the apostles for the primitive churches. Therefore the Puritans demanded that all these things, and more of the same sort, should be set right by the national authority, inasmuch as the English nation itself, baptized and Protestant, was the Church of England. No withdrawal from the National Church was to be thought of, for that would be schism.

When Puritan clergymen officiated without the surplice, or baptized without the sign of the cross, or pronounced the nuptial benediction on bride and bridegroom who had been

married without a ring, or administered the Lord's Supper to communicants who received it without kneeling, they did not consider themselves as seceding from the National Church, but only as disregarding, in deference to the supreme authority of Christ, certain regulations which, being made in derogation of his law, were without force in his church, and ought to be disregarded at all hazards. When, after being silenced and deprived of their livings for their nonconformity, they met with their friends in private assemblies for worship, they had no intention of organizing another church outside of the Church of England, but, as members of the National Church, they insisted on obeying God rather than men. So in these days, the Old-Catholic clergy and laity in Germany do not regard themselves as seceding from the Catholic, nor from the Roman Catholic Church. It is as Catholics and not Protestants that they reject the authority of the Vatican Council, and maintain that the sentences of excommunication hurled against them by a not infallible pope are invalid.

But under oppression men sometimes get new light. As the urging of conformity to an obnoxious ritual led Thomas Cartwright and others to investigate the theory of church government, and to demand a warrant from the Scriptures for the system of diocesan episcopacy, so, under the discipline of impoverishing fines and tedious imprisonments, some of the sufferers began to doubt whether the exceptional institution called the Church of England-having Elizabeth Tudor as its supreme ruler on earth, to whom every minister of God's word was responsible for his preaching and for all his spiritual administrations-was really a church of Christ in any legitimate meaning of that phrase. The more they studied the New Testament, the less they could find bearing a resemblance to that or any other National Church. Questions were beginning to emerge which had not yet been fairly considered. Did the apostles institute any national church? Did Christ intend that his Catholic