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.

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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 wor ship 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

Church should be made up of national churches mutually independent? Was it his plan that in every nation the Cæsar or other sovereign, if baptized, should be supreme over the church also? If not, what was his intention when he sent forth his disciples to convert all nations? Nonconformists, were holding conventicles in private rooms, with the doors shut for fear of informers and persecutors; but in what capacity or character were they thus assembled ? What was the relation of such assemblies, and what the relation of the queen's National Church to the true church of Christ in England?

Such questionings among the Puritans gave origin to another party aiming at a more radical reformation. The men of the new party, instead of remaining in the Church of England to reform it, boldly withdrew themselves from that ecclesiastico-political organization, denouncing that and all other so-called national churches as institutions unknown to the law and mind of Christ. The idea of separation, in some sort, from the State Church, in order to regain the simplicity of Christian institutions, must have occurred to many minds, before any attempt was made to propound a theory of separation and to embody it in organized churches. Every act of nonconforming worship by Lollards before the Reformation, or by Protestants in that bloody restoration of Romanism which filled up the five years between the death of Edward VI. and the accession of Elizabeth, was, practically, though not in theory, an assertion of religious liberty. On the part of the worshipers, every such act implied, logically if not consciously, a denial of any right in the civil power to prescribe by law what they should believe and profess concerning God, or in what forms they should wor ship. But ordinarily the protests against what remained of superstition in the National Church were not protests against the theory of Nationalism; and the private meetings of Nonconformists for the enjoyment of a purer worship were nothing more than a practical appeal to a higher law

with which the lower law was in conflict, but which ought to be recognized and enforced by the legislative authority of England. Even when congregations were organized, as they seem to have been in some instances, to meet statedly for worship according to the Scriptures, using the Geneva Service-book instead of the Book of Common Prayer, it does not appear, save in one obscure instance, that they regarded themselves as any thing else than provisional congregations of oppressed Christians in the Church of England, separating not so much from the National Church as from its disorders and corruptions, till "the reliques of Antichrist" should be swept away by act of Parliament.

Documents, without date, not long ago discovered in the State Paper Office of the English government, show that, as early perhaps as the tenth year in the reign of Elizabeth (1567), there was a congregation calling itself "the Privye Church in London," and describing itself as "a poor congregation whom God hath separated from the churches of England and from the mingled and false worshiping therein used." It was a church professing that its members, “by the strength and working of the Almighty, our Lord Jesus Christ, have set their hands and hearts to the pure, unmingled, and sincere worshiping of God according to his blessed and glorious word... abolishing and abhorring all inventions. and traditions of men." It held its Lord's-day and its weekday meetings. "So as God giveth strength," said they," we do serve the Lord every Sabbath-day in houses, and on the fourth day in the week we come together weekly to use prayer and exercise discipline on them which do deserve it, by the strength and sure warrant of the Lord's good word." It was a persecuted church. "This secret and disguised Antichrist," said they, "to wit, this canon law with the branches and maintainers "--in other words, the ecclesiastical courts and the queen's Hign Commission-" have by long imprisonment pined and killed the Lord's servants, as our minister Richard Fitz, Thomas Rowland, deacon . . . and besides them