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rest. There are few stories of its kind more touching than that of the men of the Mayflower.' That they might worship God as they saw fit, that they might be free to obey the Divine voice which spoke to their souls, the pilgrim fathers braved the perils of the deep and faced the dangers of an unexplored continent.

The United States of to-day are the direct result of that Puritan migration, a migration, let us never forget, conceived and carried through in a deep and earnest religious spirit. But it is sorry work to hide the blots, and I will not slur over the tremendous errors of these Independent settlers. They had sacrificed much for liberty, but the freedom which they had purchased so dearly for themselves they refused to extend to others. No sooner was the colony established than they began a war of extermination upon the native Indians. There are in history few incidents so treacherous and so atrocious as the Puritan massacre of the Pequod tribe; it involved the disappearance of a nation from among the family of mankind. Among themselves, too, arose a want of forbearance which they were bound by their principles to deprecate. They proscribed the Prayer Book and imprisoned and banished

two men who were found to make use of it. They expelled from the colony one who held that worship should be entirely free, and that each might choose his own form. They whipped with twenty stripes' a female Quaker who had come from London to America to tell the secret of George Fox to the Independents of Massachusetts. They executed another woman and two men for the similar offence of belonging to the Society of Friends. Indeed, so bitter and so bigoted did they become, that their fellow-religionists at home sent across the Atlantic earnest and sorrowful messages of remonstrance. These are, of course, serious defacements, but in the two and a half centuries which have since gone by the descendants of those early Puritan settlers have splendidly redeemed the past by a precious and unchequered history of charitable dealing and tolerant laws.

Let us see what had meanwhile become of the Independents who had stayed behind. The reign of James I. and the earlier years of Charles I.'s rule saw in England a resolute attempt to go back from the work of the Reformation. In its wider aim it failed, but the English Prayer Book of to-day shows undoubted traces of that era of reaction. During this period the Independents.

were silenced, and it was not until the beginning of the Long Parliament, when many of them had returned from America, that they again began to attract attention. But there was rising now a more formidable enemy to them than the Church had ever been. It would take long to tell how, on the death of Charles I. and the establishment of the Commonwealth, the Episcopal Church had to go its way; how the two rival bodies engaged in a fierce and merciless conflict in their respective efforts to take its place; how, though Parliament repeatedly voted in favour of Presbyterianism, the people insisted upon their right to separate congregations; how, in the end, the Independents carried the supremacy. Clearly understand the issue. The bishops had been expelled from their sees, and there was a revolt against every semblance of the system which they represented. The country wanted a new religious organisation, and the question was as to what form it should take. The Presbyterian plan was the plan of government by presbyteries and adhesion to a settled code of doctrine; the Independent system was the system of distinct congregations, each determining its own articles of faith and its own arrangements of worship. Milton, who had in his day looked at things from

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the Presbyterian standpoint, saw at last that 'new presbyter was but old priest writ large,' and the nation saw the same. It was a conflict between dogma and liberalism, between submission and freedom, and the country made its choice. byterianism retreated to Scotland, where it still finds a congenial home; the Independents remained in England to sow the further seeds of that religious liberty which for so long it has been their pride and privilege to guard. Never was England greater, never was its moral tone higher, never were its clergy more devoted, never were the laity more religious, than in the time of the Commonwealth under the Independent system of church government. But it was not to last; it fell with the political conditions which had rendered its existence possible. The death of Cromwell was the death of Puritanism, and with the accession of Charles II. came the inevitable revulsion. Episcopacy was again established, and the outward features of religious life were completely changed. Puritanism had made its mistakes, and it was now to smart for them. Its fault had been that it had eliminated all joy and pleasure and brightness from human existence. It had forgotten that there is a poetical, a lively,

'It was superstitious to

nay, a merry side to life. keep Christmas or to deck the house with ivy or holly. It was superstitious to dance round the village maypole. It was flat Popery to eat a mincepie.' The theatre was the snare of Satan. And so 'all that was best and noblest in Puritanism was whirled away with its pettiness and its tyranny in the current of a nation's hate.' This was not all. On St. Bartholomew's Day, 1662, two thousand English rectors and vicars were expelled from their benefices, because, having accepted their offices during the Independent interregnum, they refused now to receive episcopal re-ordination and to conform to the new ecclesiastical conditions. It was a terrible punishment, but it was bravely borne. The records of those farewell sermons, some of them delivered almost within sound of this sanctuary in which we are worshipping to-night, have come down to us, and nothing can exceed the genuine sincerity of their tone. My beloved,' said the rector of All Hallows, Lombard Street, I come not here to throw firebrands. I condemn no man. I believe there be many do as conscientiously subscribe as deny to subscribe. I protest, in the fear of God, I cannot subscribe ; perhaps it is because I have not that light that

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