Church should be made up of national churches mutually independent? Was it his plan that in every nation the Casar 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 worship. 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

a great multitude. . . whose good cause and faithful testimony-though we should cease to groan and cry unto our God to redress such wrongs and cruel handlings of his poor members-the very walls of the prisons about this city (as the Gate-house, Bridewell, the Counters, the King's Bench, the Marshalsea, the White Lion) would testify God's anger kindled against this land for such injustice."1

That “secret and disguised Antichrist" complained of by the sufferers was an important element in the ecclesiastical government of England, and was every where present to suppress both separation from the Established Church and nonconformity within the church. What was it?

All persons within the realm of England were under the government of the Church of England, and were therefore subject to the judicial authority of the bishops in their several dioceses. That authority was exercised in ecclesiastical or "spiritual" courts. Lowest of these was the Archdeacon's Court, which was held, in the absence of the archdeacon, by a judge appointed as his substitute, and called his official. Next was the Consistory Court of the diocese, held in the cathedral, the bishop's chancellor or commissary presiding as judge. The Court of Arches, in London, was that to which appeals were brought from the consistory courts in the several dioceses in the province of Canterbury, there being a similar court for appeals in the province of York. The judge in each of these courts was supposed to represent the "spiritual" authority of the archbishop; and the final appeal was from these archiepiscopal courts to the supreme head of the ecclesiastical establishment, namely, to a Court of Delegates, or commissioners, appointed by the sovereign to represent that supremacy over the Church of England which had been wrested from the pope. Other ecclesiastical courts there were—some of them mere shops for the sale of "dispensations, licenses, faculties, and other remnants of the

1 Waddington, “Congregational History,” p. 742–745.

papal extortions"-but no description of them is necessary

here.

All these courts, except the last, were from ancient times, and were spared by the conservative genius of the English Reformation. But that Reformation itself had created another tribunal higher, more powerful, and more terrible than all the rest. By the Act of Supremacy, which stands first among the statutes of the reign of Elizabeth, and which finally separated the ecclesiastical establishment of England from the see of Rome, the queen was empowered to establish what was afterward known as the "High Commission for Causes Ecclesiastical." Her commissioners, "being natural-born subjects," but otherwise appointed at her absolute discretion as "supreme governor" of the Church of England, were authorized "to use, occupy, and exercise, under her, all manner of jurisdiction, privileges, and pre-eminences touching any spiritual or ecclesiastical jurisdiction within the realms of England and Ireland." By that authority, they were "to visit, reform, redress, order, correct, and amend all errors, heresies, schisms, abuses, contempts, offenses, and enormities whatsoever." As reconstituted, with some unimportant changes, in the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth (1584), the High Commission consisted of forty-four commissioners. Twelve of these were bishops, several were members of the Privy Council, others were clergymen or laymen of lower degree. The commissioners-or any three of them, one being a bishop--were empowered to make inquiry concerning "all heretical opinions, seditious books, contempts, conspiracies, false rumors or talks, slanderous words and sayings;" to punish all persons willfully "absent from church or divine service established by law;" to "visit and reform all errors, heresies, and schisms," and to do many other like things. They were empowered "to call before them all persons suspected" of ecclesiastical offenses, to examine them on their oaths, though (or rather, in order that) in their answers they might criminate themselves, and to punish them,

if refractory, by excommunication (a terrible penalty in English law), by fines at discretion, and by unlimited imprisonment. All "sheriffs, justices, and other officers,” were to be at their command for the purpose of apprehending or causing to be apprehended any persons whom they might require to be brought before them. This terrible enginery for the enforcement of worship and of religious opinion was employed not in London only-the chief seat of the High Commission--but throughout the realm wherever one of the twelve bishops and two of the other commissioners might choose to hold a commission court. Proceeding, like other ecclesiastical courts, against offenders and suspected persons according to the methods of the canon and civil law, the High Commission for Causes Ecclesiastical might well be called the English Inquisition.

That we may see clearly in what school the more advanced and uncompromising Puritans were studying, and what means were employed to give them right views of church polity, we must look at some instances of individual experience.

The old town of Bury St. Edmunds, in the county of Suf folk, is in the diocese of the Bishop of Norwich. Of that diocese, John Parkhurst, a Puritan Conformist, had been bishop from the time of the restoration of Protestantism by Elizabeth. His ideal of reformation was the ecclesiastical order which he saw at Zurich when he found refuge there from the persecution under Mary. Being himself a diligent preacher, he had been much more intent on having the Gospel intelligently preached in every parish than on persecuting those preachers who were more scrupulous than he about the ceremonies and the vestments. Consequently the diocese, at his death (1574), was greatly infested with Puritanism.2 His successor, Edmund Freke, was of another sort, and was a

The queen's patent appointing the High Commissioners, as the court was reconstituted, Jan. 7, 1583-4, may be read in Neal, i., 160, note.