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TRIUMPH OF THE BISHOPS.

bishops were in ecstasies. Bancroft fell on his knees, and blessed God for sending them such a king as since Christ's time had not been seen; and Whitgift and the courtiers declared that undoubtedly his Majesty spake by the special assistance of God's Spirit." The mean, pedantic, narrow-minded buffoon retired amidst the applause which of all others was dearest to his heart-that of an approved master in the mazes of theological controversy. "I peppered them soundly," he cried in an ecstasy of conceit; "they fled me from argument to argument like schoolboys." The Bishops were swollen with the insolence of triumph; the Puritans filled with indignation and despair.

From this period they appear to have given up all hope of effecting a reform in the Church, and although many yet entertained conscientious scruples against leaving her communion, a largely increasing number became separatists. The two parties henceforth diverged more widely in their principles, and the antagonism between them became envenomed. The cruel severity with which the Court party enforced conformity or punished separation, their evident tendency to approach nearer to the Romish ceremonies rather than recede further from them, their laxity of doctrine, and their desecration and violation of the Sabbath, tended to increase the aversion of the Puritans to constituted authority, to deepen their peculiar enthusiasm, and cast a still gloomier shade over their already austere demeanour.

In politics no less than religion the two parties continued to recede still further from each other. The Church clung more closely to the monarchy, and lending her whole influence to maintain its ascendency, identified herself with the cause of arbitrary power. The Puritans, on the other hand, became the advocates of civil, no less than religious liberty. They fell in, no less from conviction than from personal hostility to the adherents of the prerogative, with that rising party of patriots, who were bent upon resisting the encroachments of tyranny, and eventually

hurled it into the dust. The first, tenaciously conservative, after many shocks and vicissitudes still forms an integral part of the institutions of Great Britain. The last, republican in their tendencies, dissatisfied with the restrictions imposed upon them at home, carried their theories of government to the shores of the New World, and laid the foundations of a mighty commonwealth, which retains to this day deep and indelible traces of the parentage from which it sprung.

Nor in manners and deportment did there exist a less irreconcilable hostility. Under the Catholic system, the common people had been accustomed to manly sports and exercises, and to rustic games-some of which, indeed, such as bear-baiting, were at that day, though cruel, equally the favourites of all classes of society, as is the bull-fight in Spain at the present day. Many of the High Church party either winked at these things, as popular tastes which could not be immediately eradicated, or openly encouraged them in opposition to the Puritans. The very name of Puritan, on the other hand, had been contemptuously bestowed on the rising sect, from their pretensions to superior sanctity of life. Undoubtedly they regarded, and with no small reason, the popular tastes and amusements as being both low and brutalizing in their tendency, and inconsistent with the seriousness of a professing Christian. But in opposing them, they went unfortunately to the very opposite extreme. In the severe, but hardly overstrained language of Macaulay," the dress, the deportment, the language, the studies, the amusements of the rigid sect were regulated on principles resembling those of the Pharisees, who, proud of their washed hands and broad phylacteries, taunted the Redeemer as a Sabbath-breaker and a wine-bibber. It was a sin to hang garlands on a maypole, to drink a friend's health, to fly a hawk, to hunt a stag, to play at chess, to wear lovelocks, to put starch into a ruff, to touch the virginals, to read the Faerie Queen. Rules such as these rules which would have appeared insup

portable to the free and joyous spirit of Luther, and contemptible to the serene and philosophical intellect of Zwingle-threw over all life a more than monastic gloom. . . . In defiance of the express and reiterated declarations of Luther and Calvin, they turned the weekly festival by which the Church had, from the primitive times, commemorated the resurrection of her Lord, into a Jewish Sabbath."

In returning from a visit to Scotland, where he was no less annoyed at the stubborn obstinacy of the Presbyterians than disgusted with the strictness of these Sabbatical observances, James, in passing through Lancashire, where the Catholics were and still are very numerous, received many petitions against this growing strictness of the Puritans as regards the Sabbath, which, it was affirmed, drove men to popery and the alehouse, where "they censured in their cups his Majesty's proceedings in Church and State." Accordingly, no sooner had the king reached London than, calling in the assistance of sundry bishops, he concocted his famous "Book of Sports," in which, with his vaunted sagacity, he set himself to discriminate those legitimate pastimes in which his good subjects were authorized and enjoined to indulge after divine service, from those proper only to be used for the rest of the week. Running, vaulting, archery and athletic sports were allowed, but bear or bull-baiting forbidden. Although Archbishop Abbot was known to be opposed, both from principle and policy, to the measure, his Majesty also insisted that the clergy should read the ordinance from their pulpits. It was regarded by the Puritans as a trap cunningly set to catch them. Such as from conscientious motives refused to comply were brought before the High Commission. Court, and punished for their contumacy.

At length an increasing number of the Puritans, who, so long as they entertained a hope of remodelling the Church after their own fashion, had conformed to, if not approved of, its general form of government, that hope being no longer possible, began

RISE OF THE INDEPENDENTS.

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to question its very framework, and boldly to deny all Episcopal jurisdiction and State influence as alike antichristian and pernicious. By degrees they attained clearer conceptions of religious liberty, terminating at last in what is now known as the voluntary system, or Independency. According to these new views, any congregation of believers freely associating together constituted a separate church, having the liberty to choose its own pastor or bishop, (for to this sense they restricted the meaning of the latter office,) appoint their own officers, and perform all the functions of self-government, with an absolute independence of all foreign control, whether ecclesiastical or civil. This system was originally called Brownism, after Robert Browne, a Puritan minister, by whom it was originated, or, at all events, chiefly promulgated.

He was a man of high family, related to Lord Treasurer Burleigh, and chaplain to the Duke of Norfolk. Like others of his brethren, he had at first confined his views to what he deemed the reformation of the National Church; but failing in this object, bitterly inveighed against it both from the pulpit and press. His high connexions saved him from the extreme penalty which his fiery temper and daring zeal would in all probability have brought upon him; but he was, nevertheless, a mark for persecution, and had, it is said, been in no less than thirty-two prisons, in some of which he could not see his hand at noonday. Flying at length to Holland, he became pastor of a Separatist congregation,. with whom, however, he speedily quarrelled, and, returning to England, closed at length his erratic and troubled career by renouncing his nonconformity, and accepting a benefice in the Establishment he had laboured to destroy.

Whatever might have been the motive of this recantation, it is not to be wondered at that Browne should have been deemed a renegade by his party, and that they should have earnestly repudiated all connexion with him. But though his memory

24

ORIGIN OF THE PILGRIM MOVEMENT.

was consigned to ignominy, the principles founded by him were cherished more warmly than ever. The tyranny of the bishops, anxious to weed out this novel and dangerous doctrine, served only to give it the deeper root. Congregations were secretly gathered together in the northern counties, and able and learned Puritan ministers who had embraced the new principles were chosen to preside over them.

Connected with this part of our subject the following notices, most obligingly communicated by the Rev. John Waddington (pastor of the Southwark church), and who has been long and successfully engaged in these inquiries, with a view to publication, will be read with considerable interest.

"The origin of the Pilgrim movement when traced to its various tributary springs, so long concealed, will be found richly to repay the utmost amount of care and diligence that can be devoted to the inquiry.

"The Mayflower was the result of a lengthened course of conscientious sacrifice and endurance for scriptural principles, commencing with the earliest days of the reformation in England. A Christian society, composed of artisans, whose names can be given from authentic documents, met, near the close of the sixteenth century, in the house of Roger Rippon, in Southwark, to spend their Sabbaths in the mutual exposition of the word of God, just as Thomas Man assembled with his brethren for the same purpose on the banks of the Thames, at the beginning of that century. Francis Johnson became the pastor of this little company, in 1592. The martyrs Henry Barrow, John Greenwood, and John Penry, were closely identified with him, and contributed much by their writings to its confirmation. At one time, when the majority of the members were in bonds, the church, by the connivance of the jailor, held its meetings for the reception of new members within the walls of the prison.

"Contemporaneously with this separatist church in the south of England a similar Christian association assembled in secret on