Towards the close of the seventeenth century, (1691,) Congregationalism had a shade thrown over it, by the Agreement then effected between the Presbyterians and the Independents. This had nearly proved fatal to both the former in England is well nigh extinguished, and can never rise again. The state of religion and of religious parties during the last half-century, was unfavourable to the development of Congregational principles. Evangelical religion took another type-Methodism availed itself of its liberty, without joining its standard-the missionary enterprize sprung up as the natural offspring of the new impetus thus given to Christian piety and zeal, and Independency was for a season thrown into abeyance by the fraternizing spirit which aimed to merge all denominational distinctions in the cause of their common Christianity. Experience had not then proved that the amalgamation of churches neither furthers their prosperity nor extends their usefulness-that the world must be illumined by many orbs, each complete in itself, and all moving in harmony, and at distances where they cannot interfere with each other; rather than by their conglomeration into one heterogene

ous mass.

The fundamental principle of the London Missionary Society was a benevolent conception; but the bodies it attracted would not cohere— one after another dropped away to form a society of its own. The Congregationalists were left, almost alone, to sustain and wield one of the mightiest engines of usefulness, which the spiritual necessities of the world have called into existence.

The formation of the Congregational Union was the result of this and other concurring and favourable circumstances. The sun that shone upon Independency that day was more auspicious than that which shone on the hero of Austerlitz. Every succeeding year proves that, under God, its prosperity depends upon the piety, wisdom, unanimity, and zeal of its members. Congregationalism is the purest, because the simplest type through which Christianity can put forth her spiritual energies. It is the robe which best becomes her-the visible manifestation of a kingdom which is not of this world. The author of "the Book of the Denominations" observes-"As primitive discipline, a popular union of fraternal freedom, is one extreme, and the papal system of unmixed despotism is the other, among the innumerable lines that are between the two, the nearest to one extreme are the most pure; the nearest to the other are the most corrupt." If this be true, then is Independency most accordant with the primitive discipline. For to Independency or Congregationalism can alone be applied the definition of Henry Jacob, which Mr. Hanbury has appropriately adopted as the motto to his first volume-"Where each ordinary congregation giveth their free consent in their own government, there certainly each congregation is an entire and independent body politic, and endued with power immediately under and from Christ, as every proper church is, and ought to

be." It is no trifling recommendation of these volumes, that the Committee of the Congregational Union have appended to them an advertisement, of which the following is an extract :

"The Committee of the Congregational Union of England and Wales have zealously promoted the publication of these Historical Memorials of the Independent Churches, in which the writings of the early witnesses for the distinctive polity of our denomination are rescued from present neglect and future oblivion. In affording encouragement and aid to this interesting but laborious work, the Committee have been influenced solely by ardent zeal for those great principles, which the fathers of our denomination deduced with so much care from the Holy Scriptures; and which cannot be more effectually recommended than by the erudition, the ability, and the piety, conspicuous in the works of these primitive confessors of the doctrine and the discipline still cherished by the Congregational body."

These "Historical Memorials" are far too important to be dismissed with a cursory notice. They convey so much information which can be obtained from no other source accessible to one reader in a million; they teach us how our principles acquired ascendancy; they correct false history; wipe away from our denomination undeserved reproaches. and bitter calumnies; they warn while they instruct; and, with regard to the errors and heresies which have divided and distracted the churches of the Reformation, they show us that there is nothing new under the sun. There were millenarians who predicted centuries ago the speedy advent of Christ, to set up his personal reign upon earth; and there were fanatics who could have taught the Plymouth Brethren the dogmas they call doctrines, and the absurdities which they regard as original revelations.

Mr. Hanbury's introductory chapter contains a dissertation on terms and principles. The Puritans were not Independents, any more than were many of the ejected Nonconformist ministers of a later age. They adhered to the church till intolerance compelled some of them to leave it, while the endurance and compliances of others, in order to remain in it, are sad indications of human weakness and infirmity. In the year 1584, subscription was universally enforced upon all the ministers, in three articles

"First, of the queen's majesty's sovereign authority over all persons, &c.; second, that the Book of Common Prayer, and of ordaining bishops, priests, and deacons, contains in it nothing contrary to the word of God, &c.; third, to allow and approve all the articles of religion agreed upon by the archbishops and bishops, &c. in 1562, and to believe all therein contained to be agreeable to God. When, in the visitations and public meetings, the ministers were called to subscribe, they offered very freely and willingly to subscribe to the first article, of her majesty's most lawful authority; and for the other two, they refused to do any further than by law they were bound; namely, according to the statute made for that purpose, Anno 13 Eliz. Hereupon many in divers shires were suspended from the execution of their ministry, and some deprived. And, great division arose in the church-the one suing for reformation, and to be eased of such burdens; and the other urging very strictly

the former things, and punishing such as would not be conformable. Then came there forth a new cloud of writing, and men's affections waxing hot and drawing to the worse, it was a very common name to all these ministers to be called Puritans;' as men which made conscience of many things, which the reverend fathers and many learned men affirmed to be lawful!"

"In all this time there was much preaching in the universities about non-residents and unpreaching ministers; and there should you see a plain division, one sort called 'Youths,' and the other sort, which took not such liberty, were called 'Precisians.' And this is grown both in the university, and in the country, town, and city, that whoso feareth an oath, or is an ordinary resorter to sermons, earnest against excess, riot, popery, or any disorder, they are called in the university Precisians,' and in other places Puritans.'"

The author of this account, himself a Puritan, thus introduces his notice of the first Independents—"The Brownists took offence against both sides; and made a temerarious and wicked separation."

Of Robert Browne, who distinguished himself among the early Independents, and was by many deemed their founder, Mr. Hanbury has given a brief, yet satisfactory account. He suffered persecution, and would have suffered more severely, had he not been secretly befriended by the Lord Treasurer Burghley, to whom he was related. The character of Browne deteriorated as he advanced in life, and the clergy of that day, and their successors in our own, have delighted to exhibit him as a man profligate and unprincipled. Whatever he was, after all his delinquencies he was received into the bosom of mother church, and died a beneficed priest! Thus, as Mr. Hanbury well remarks—" He left to the church of England, the ample legacy of his shame. All that was discreditable in him, Independents remit to his ultimate patrons; the good alone that has followed his career, they shrink not from applauding and adopting."

Browne held some of the principles of Presbyterianism. The work written by Browne, while he was pastor of the Independent church in Zealand, (Walcheren,) to which place he fled as an asylum from the persecution of the bishops, and the running title of which is—“ A book which showeth the life and manners of all true Christians," proves that, in the very earliest stages of the Reformation, the scriptural principles of the Congregational churches began to be developed.

The third chapter, the subject of which is "The origin of Barrowists, of Barrowe and Greenwood," is painfully interesting. The persecuted church scarcely furnishes two nobler instances of principle tested by suffering, and triumphing amidst the flames of martyrdom, than these victims of a Protestant priesthood. How is it that all priests are persecutors? and that they delight to immolate the innocent and the good? The sacrifice, to gratify their zest for blood, must be the very contrast of themselves. This would be strange, if it were not a moral necessity, that the persecutors and their victims should be the worst and the best of men. Barrowe and Green

wood were not contented with separation from a corrupt and an apostate church; while they justified their own act of secession, they exposed and held up to the wonder and indignation of mankind, the hierarchy they had abandoned-a bloated thing of luxury, pride, and cruelty, of which Archbishop Whitgift was then the living impersonation. "What is that man?" said Barrowe, pointing to him, addressing his creature, the Lord Chancellor Hatton. "He is a monster! a miserable compound; I know not what to make of him; he is neither ecclesiastical nor civil, even that second beast spoken of in the Revelation."

How severely these fathers of Independency handled the church by law established, appears from the following document drawn up by Sir George Paull, "comptroller of his grace's household," that is, the "household" of the archbishop of whom such gentle mention has been made

"Henry Barrowe, gentleman, and John Greenwood, clerk, were convented before the high commissioners for causes ecclesiastical, in November, 1587, (1586,) for their schismatical and seditious opinions, namely, that our church is no church, or at least no true church; yielding these reasons, that the worship of the English church is flat idolatry; that we admit into our church persons unsanctified; that our preachers have no lawful (scriptural) calling; that our government (discipline) is ungodly; that no bishop or preacher preacheth Christ sincerely and truly; that the people of every parish ought to choose their bishop; and, that every elder, though he be no doctor or pastor, is a bishop; that all the Precise (Puritans) which refuse the ceremonies of the church, and yet preach in the same church, strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, and are close hypocrites, and walk in a left-handed policy; that all which make catechisms, or teach and expound printed and written catechisms, are idle shepherds; that the child of ungodly parents ought not to be baptized; that set prayer is blasphemous."

This may be considered to contain the substance of the indictment against the parties, brought by the advocates of the law-established church, upheld by that mystery of iniquity, the Court of High Commission. To this indictment, these intrepid men, in the face of imprisonment and death, had again and again to plead. "Much of the matter of this bill," said Barrowe, in his reply to Whitgift, "is true; but the form is false." Four months after, certain other articles of inquiry were put to him, when he gave these

answers:

"The Lord's Prayer is in my opinion rather a summary than an enjoined form; and not finding it used by the apostles, I think it may not be constantly used. In the word of God, I find no authority given to any men to impose liturgies or forms of prayer upon the church; and it is, therefore, high presumption to impose them. In my opinion the Common Prayer is idolatrous, superstitious, and popish. As the sacraments of the Church of England are publicly administered, they are not true sacraments. As the decrees and canons of the church are so numerous, I cannot judge of all; but many of the laws of the Church of England and the ecclesiastical courts and governors are unlawful and anti-christian. Such as have been baptized in the Church N. S. VOL. VI.

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of England are not baptized according to the institution of Christ; yet they may not need it again. As it is now formed, the Church of England is not the true church of Christ; yet there are many excellent Christians in it. The queen is supreme gover. nor of the whole land, and over the church bodies and goods; but may not make any other laws for the church of Christ than he hath left in his word. I cannot see it lawful for any prince to alter the least part of the judicial law of Moses, without doing injury to the moral law and opposing the will of God. No private persons may reform the state, [the question related to the church,] if any prince neglect it, but they ought to abstain from all unlawful things commanded by the prince. The government of the church of Christ belongeth not to the ungodly, but every particular church ought to have an eldership."

Presbytery is the word in the question. "Who," Mr. Hanbury pertinently asks, "shall successfully impugn the general correctness of these opinions?" and he as justly replies:

"Surely no one who enjoys the religious and civil freedom and the protection which the altered condition of circumstances has secured to us, will have so much hardhood as even to attempt such a design. The principles involved in Barrowe's opinions are evidently fatal to the very existence of the hierarchy,' which say they are apostles and are not;' and although the struggle has been maintained for ages, those principles are producing, by discussion alone, that final mighty result which shall remove every stumbling-block, though, from the blackness of the iniquity, every trace may not be obliterated of what the 'man of sin' has any way superinduced into Christ's own church! For this other men laboured, and we are entered into their labours' It behoves us, therefore, to promote, by all rational and scriptural means, with honesty and simplicity, 'in the sight of all men,' the same righteous cause, leaving it to him to 'restrain the wrath of man,' which was permitted to fall on Barrowe, that he might seal his testimony, like 'righteous Abel,' with his blood."

We must allow space for the last scene of this tragedy, in which Protestant priests were the actors, and which, with hundreds of others similar in atrocity, reflects deep and everlasting disgrace on the Church of England, whose most busy prelate in the nineteenth century is only beginning to open his eyes to the conviction, that "the positive enforcement of religious duties by penalties is a mistake."*

In a letter written by Barrowe, in the time between his condemnation and execution, addressed to an "honourable lady and countess of his kindred," we have the following affecting recital :

"For books,' he tells her ladyship, 'written more than three years since, after well near six years' imprisonment sustained at their hands, have these prelates, by their vehement suggestions and accusations, caused us to be indicted, arraigned, and condemned.' Then, showing the wilful perversions and wicked injustice of each article or count in the whole indictment-the matters being merely ecclesiastical, controverted between this clergy and us;' he adds, but these answers, or whatever else I could say or allege, prevailed nothing; no doubt through the prelates' former instigations and malicious instigations, so that I, with my four other brethren, were, the twenty-third of the third month, (March, 1592-3,) condemned, and adjudged to suffer death as felons.'

* Answer to a question from the committee of the House of Commons, by the Bishop of London, July 27th, 1832.