with a burning conviction that the old system was full of great errors and abuses which must be reformed at all hazards, but passively, and under the force of a habit of subordination. The law which compelled their celibacy having been taken away, they had generally become married men; and their lawful wives and children-lawful while the Ref ormation lasted-were hostages for their fidelity to the Protestant establishment. At first, and for a long time, the parochial clergy were generally of this description, for how could it be otherwise? Their tendency as a body was to keep the Reformation stationary by their dead weight, and to perpetuate in the Reformed Church of England the relig ious ideas in which they had been educated before the change. They were likely to feel that the Reformation had gone far enough; and when they looked upon the churches no longer smoking and fragrant with incense, nor gorgeous with the gold and gems of the altar; when they saw pictures and statues, before which the faithful once kneeled in worship, borne away, and the holiest relics cast out as unclean things; still more, when they saw some old monastic building desolate and falling into ruin; most of all, when they looked upon some stately pile where, in the good old times, grave abbots had given alms to the poor, and had dispensed due hospitality to pilgrims and to princes, now possessed by some sacrilegious lord, masque and revel and the noise of boisterous banquets succeeding to the chanted prayers of men devoted to religion-it would not be strange if they felt that the Reformation had already been carried too far.

Here was one great party in the National Church, which, having submitted to the new arrangements without much of a revolutionary spirit, looked toward the past with a feeling akin to regret. But on the other hand, the ecclesiastical establishment had received into itself a very different sort of men wide-awake men, who were not merely reformed by an order from the King in Council or by an act of Parliament, but were reformers in their own persons-men whose

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radicals

ideas of reformation had come to them by tradition from Wycliffe, or by communication and sympathy with reformers on the Continent-men whose quarrel with Rome was not on the question of ecclesiastical supremacy merely, but on the whole system of religion-men whose protest against the pope, instead of being careful and measured, was uttered as in words of fire, and who were ready to die for their testimony. These were the movement party-the the destructives- if any choose to call them by such names. With them, or with many of them, ref ormation, even to the destruction of every thing which they regarded as idolatrous or popish, was a passion. Their sympathies were with the people more than with the court; they were fitted for influence with the people; and therefore, when the government would thoroughly bring off the people from the old ways, it called these men to its aid; and some of them-such as the plain-dealing Latimer, Fox, the author of the "Book of Martyrs," the sturdy and scrupulous Hooper, and even (at one time) that intractable Scotchman, John Knox--were placed in stations of honor and wide influence. While the Reformation was going forward, men of this quality were in their element; but when its progress was arrested, and the government had resolved that it should go no farther, they were disappointed and dissatisfied. So long as the permanency of the changes which the government had undertaken to introduce was not yet sure, and fiery spirits were needed to carry the work forward, these men were necessary to the government, and were therefore in favor; but when the business of reforming was no longer in hand, and the objects which sovereign and courtiers had in view were felt to be well enough secured, such men were no longer in alliance with the court. Gradually they fell back to their original position among the people as reformers on their own

account.

Then began that age-long conflict in the Church of England between the government Protestantism, on the one

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 su perintend 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. 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