hand, completed and immovable, and the demand, on the other hand, for a more thorough reformation that should carry the National Church and the national Christianity back to the original purity portrayed in the Scriptures. On one side were the court, and those who were called "the court clergy." On the other side were the PURITANS, so named from their demand for purity in the worship of God and in the administration of Christ's ordinances. As in many a similar conflict, the line of division was not very sharply drawn between the parties. There were Puritans more or less decided in their opinions, and more or less resolute in word and deed; but, at first, there was no Puritan party acting in concert under acknowledged leaders.

Such was the origin of Puritanism in England, and such was its position three hundred years ago, when Elizabeth was queen. It was not, nor did it intend to be, a secession or separation from the National Church. It must not be thought that the Puritans were "Dissenters" in the modern meaning of that word. They were not Congregationalists in their theory of the church; nor, at first, were they even Presbyterians. Certainly the great body of them, in the earliest stages of the conflict, had not arrived at the conclusion that diocesan episcopacy must be got rid of. At first the most advanced of them were only "Nonconformists," deviating from some of the prescribed regulations in the performance of public worship. As Christian Englishmen, they were, according to the theory which I have called Nationalism, members of the Church of England; and what they desired was not liberty to withdraw from that National Church and to organize what would now be called a distinct "denomination;" nor was it merely liberty in the National Church to worship according to their own idea of Christian simplicity and purity-though, doubtless, many of them would have been contented with that. What they desired was reformation of the National Church itself by national authority.

While the conflict was in its earliest stage, the episcopal

element in the constitution of the ecclesiastical establishment seems not to have been seriously called in question. On the contrary, it was conceded by those who desired more reformation that the king might lawfully appoint officers to superintend and govern the clergy, and those superintendents, though called bishops, were regarded as deriving their authority from the king. Puritanism first appeared in the form of a protest against certain ceremonies and vestments which were required by law in the celebration of public worship. The Act of Uniformity, in the first year of the reign of Elizabeth, established the Book of Common Prayer as the only form for the worship of God by any religious assembly; and every minister deviating from the directions printed in that book (called "rubrics," because originally printed with red ink) was liable to severe penalties. Some of those directions required the use of certain ceremonies which were regarded by the more advanced Protestants as teaching or sanctioning an unchristian and pernicious superstition. The sign of the cross in baptism, the use of a ring in marriage, and kneeling to partake of the Lord's Supper, were particularly objected to on that ground. But, most of all, some of the vestments required to be worn by ministers in the prescribed worship were protested against. Nobody found fault with the scholar's gown which the clergy wore in preaching. On all sides, that was admitted to be a becoming dress for those who served as teachers in the church, and something of the kind was universal in the Protestant churches of other countries. But the priestly surplice, which the minister must wear when administering sacraments or performing "divine service," was associated in all minds with the superstitions which Protestants abhorred, and which the Reformation had undertaken to abolish. It was a sign that the official who wore it was not merely a recognized minister of the Gospel, but a veritable priest with supernatural functions. Every body knew that the wearing of it was required out of deference to popular superstition. To the ignorant peo

ple, who were disposed to hanker after the old ideas, it had as real a meaning as the "wearing of the green" has now to Irish Fenians. To earnest Protestants it had the same sort of meaning which the gray uniform of the "Confederates in the late war had to the "boys in blue" who were fighting for the Union. The controversy about ceremonies and vestments, in the reign of Elizabeth, was essentially the same with the Ritualistic agitation in the reign of Victoria -an agitation which shakes the Church of England to-day, and is not wholly unfelt in the United States. After so many ages of philosophic sneering at the Puritans for their scrupulousness about such matters as the cut and color of a prescribed garment, all parties in the English establishment are now compelled to confess that questions about things indifferent in themselves-as, for example, whether the French flag shall be white or tricolor-may acquire a signif icance which shall make them worth dying for. That conflict three hundred years ago was the same in principle with the conflict now; for behind the sacerdotal millinery and frippery, behind the significant and pompous ceremonies, there stood then, as there stands now, a body of anti-evangelical and really antichristian doctrine-another Gospel, which is really no Gospel at all-another theory than that of Paul and of Jesus Christ concerning the way to be saved.

Conscience, in conscientious men, when it has been roused to declare itself, is an obstinate thing. The conscience of the Puritans, and especially of the Puritans among the clergy, did declare itself against the symbols of superstition; and so numerous were those who, in one point or another, refused to conform, and so eminent were they for fidelity and ability in their ministry and for learning, that for a while their nonconformity was connived at by the ecclesiastical authorities, and the more because many of the bishops were in sympathy with that party. But in a few years after the accession of Elizabeth (1565), when such ecclesiastical reformation had been made as she chose to tolerate, a royal procla

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. 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 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