CHAPTER I.

INACTIVITY OF THE SCOTTISH AUXILIARIES--SPREAD OF INDEPENDENCY AND MULTIPLICATION OF SECTS--VISITATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE-- BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR--FORTNIGHT'S VACATION OF THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY (JULY 23-AUGUST 7, 1644).--PRINCIPLE OF TOLERATION AND STATE OF THE TOLERATION CONTROVERSY: SYNOPSIS OF ENGLISH SECTS AND SECTARIES IN 1644.- -RESUMPTION OF ASSEMBLY'S PROCEEDINGS: DENUNCIATION OF PICKED SECTARIES AND HERETICS--CROMWELL'S INTERFERENCE FOR INDEPENDENCY: ACCOMMODATION ORDER OF PARLIAMENT--PRESBYTERIAN SETTLEMENT VOTED--ESSEX BEATEN AND THE WAR FLAGGING: SELF-DENYING ORDINANCE AND NEW MODEL OF THE ARMY-- PARLIAMENTARY VENGEANCES.

The English Parliamentarians hoped great things from the Scottish auxiliary army. The Royalists, on the other hand, were both angry and alarmed. In anticipation, indeed, of the coming-in of the Scots, the King had ventured on a very questionable step. He had summoned what may be called an ANTI-PARLIAMENT to meet him at Oxford on the 22nd of January 1643-4, to consist of all members who had been expelled from the two Houses in Westminster, and all that might be willing, in the new crisis, to withdraw from those rebellious Houses. On the appointed day, accordingly, there had rallied round the King at Oxford 49 Peers and 141 Commoners; which was not a bad show against the 22 Peers and 280 Commoners who met on the same day in the two Houses at Westminster. But little else resulted from the convocation of the ANTI-PARLIAMENT. In fact, many who had gone to it had done so with a view to negotiations for peace. Such negotiations were at least talked of. In addition to vehement denunciations of the doings of the Parliament, there were some abortive attempts at friendly intercourse. All which having failed, the ANTI- PARLIAMENT was prorogued April 16, 1644, after having sat nearly three months. Parliaments, even when they were loyalist Parliaments, were not the agencies that Charles found pleasantest. He trusted rather to the arbitrament of the field.

INACTIVITY OF THE SCOTTISH AUXILIARY ARMY: SPREAD OF INDEPENDENCY IN ENGLAND: MULTIPLICATION OF SECTS.

No sudden blow was struck by the Scots. They had fastened themselves, in proper military fashion, on the north of England, and their presence there was useful; but that was all. It was a great disappointment to Baillie. He had expected that the appearance of his dear countrymen in England would put an end to the mere military "tig-tagging," as he had called it, of Essex and Waller, and quicken immediately the tramp of affairs. His belief all along had been that what was needed in England was an importation of Scottish impetuousness to animate the heavy English, and teach them the northern trick of carrying all things at the double with a hurrah and a yell. It was a sore affliction, therefore, to the good man that, from January 1643-4, on through February, March, April, May, and even June, the 21,000 Scots under Leslie should be in England, and yet be stirring so little. Instead of fighting their way southwards into the heart of the country, they were still squatting in the Northumbrian coal-region, and sticking there, not without some bad behaviour and disorder. Doubtless, it was all right in strategy, and Leslie knew what he was about; but oh, that it could have been otherwise! For of what use a great Scottish victory would have been at that time to the cause of Presbyterianism? Faster, more massively, more resistlessly than all the argumentations of Henderson, Gillespie, and Rutherford, aided by those of the Smectymnuans, with Vines, Palmer, Burges, and the rest of the English Presbyterians, such a victory would have crushed down the contentiousness of the Five Dissenting Brethren, and swept the propositions of complete Scottish Presbytery through the Westminster Assembly. Parliament, receiving these propositions, would have passed them with alacrity; and what could the English nation have done but acquiesce? But, alas! as things were! The Five Dissenting Brethren and the other "thraward wits" in the Assembly could still persevere in their struggle with the Presbyterian majority, debating every proposition that implied a surrender of Congregationalism, and conscious that in so impeding a Presbyterian settlement they were pleasing a growing body of their fellow-countrymen. What, though London was staunchly and all but universally Presbyterian? Throughout the country, and, above all, in the Army, the case was different. The inactivity of the Scots was affording time for the spirit of Independency to spread, and was giving rise to awkward questions. It began actually to be said of the Westminster Assembly, that it "did cry down the truth with votes, and was an Anti- Christian meeting which would erect a Presbytery worse than Bishops." In the Army especially such Anti-Presbyterian sentiments, and questionings of the infallibility of the Scots, had become rife. "The Independents have so managed matters," writes Baillie, April 26, "that of the officers and sojers in Manchester's army, certainly also in the General's (Essex's), and, as I hear, in Waller's likewise, more than two parts are for them, and these of the far most resolute and confident men for the Parliament party." As regarded Essex's army and Waller's, Baillie afterwards found reason to think that this was a great exaggeration; but it appears to have been true enough respecting Manchester's. By that time there was no doubt either who was at the head of these Army Independents. It was Cromwell--now no longer mere "Colonel Cromwell," but "Lieutenant- general Cromwell," second in command in the Associated Counties under Manchester. As early as April 2 Baillie speaks of him as "the great Independent." With such a man to look up to, and with patrons also in the two Houses of Parliament, little wonder that the Independents in the Army began to feel themselves strong, and to regard the drift of the Westminster Assembly and the Londoners towards an absolute Presbyterianism as a movement innocent enough while it consisted in talk only, but to be watched carefully and disowned in due time.

All might be retrieved, however! What hope there might yet be in a great Scottish success! With this idea Baillie still hugged himself. "We are exceeding sad and ashamed," he had written, April 19, "that our army, so much talked of, has done as yet nothing at all." But again, May 9, "We trust God will arise, and do something by our Scots army. We are afflicted that, after so long time, we have gotten no hit of our enemy; we hope God will put away that shame. Waller, Manchester, Fairfax, and all, gets victories; but Leslie, from whom all was expected, as yet has had his hands bound. God, we hope, will loose them, and send us matter of praise also." The victories of Waller, Manchester, and Fairfax, here referred to by Baillie, had been nothing very considerable--mere fights in their several districts, heard of at the time, but counting for little now in the history of the war; but they contrasted favourably with what could be told of the Scots. What was that? It was that they had summoned Newcastle to surrender, but had advanced beyond that town, leaving it untaken. When Baillie wrote the last-quoted passage, however, they were more hopefully astir. Fairfax, with his northern-English force, had joined them at Tadcaster in Yorkshire; the Earl of Manchester had been summoned northwards to add what strength he could bring from the Associated Counties; and the enterprise on which the three conjoined forces were to be engaged--the Scots, Fairfax's men, and Manchester's-- was the siege of York. It was a great business on all grounds; and on this amongst others, that the Marquis of Newcastle was shut up in the city. Might not the Scots retrieve their character in this business? It was Baillie's fervent prayer. But a dreadful doubt had occurred to him. What if the Scots, mixed as they now were with the English Parliamentarian soldiers before York, and in contact with the Independents among them under Manchester and Cromwell, should themselves catch the prevailing distemper? Writing, May 19, to his friend Mr. Blair, a chaplain in the Scottish army, Baillie gives him a warning hint on the subject. "We hear," he says, "that their horse and yours are conjoined, and that occasions may fall out wherein more of them may join to you. We all conceive that our silly simple lads are in great danger of being infected by their company; and, if that pest enter in our army, we fear it may spread." [Footnote: Baillie, Vol. II. from p. 128 to p. 197.]

Here there must come in an explanation:--The Army-Independency which was alarming the Presbyterians, and of which they regarded Cromwell as the head, was a thing of much larger dimensions, and much more composite nature, than the mild Independency of Messrs. Goodwin, Burroughs, Nye, Simpson, and Bridge, within the Westminster Assembly. The Independency of these five Divines consisted simply in their courageous assertion of the Congregationalist principle of church-organization in the midst of the overwhelming Presbyterianism around them, and in their claim that, should their reasonings for Congregationalism prove in vain, and should the Presbyterian system be established in England, there should be at all events "an indulgence" under that system, for themselves and their adherents, "in some lesser differences." The "lesser differences" for which they thus prospectively craved an indulgence had not been specifically stated; but it is pretty clear that they were not, to any great extent, differences of theological belief, but were rather those differences which would arise from the conscientious perseverance of a minority in Congregationalist practices after a Presbyterian rule had been established nationally. "You know that we do not differ from you in theological doctrines" is what the Five Dissenting Brethren virtually said to the Presbyterians; "your teaching is our teaching, and what you call errors we call errors: our difference lies wholly, or all but wholly, in the fact that _we_ hold every particular congregation of Christians to be a church within itself, whereas _you_ maintain the interconnectedness of congregations, and the right of courts of office- bearers from many congregations to review and control what passes within each: now, as you, being undoubtedly in the majority, are about to establish Presbytery in England, but as we cannot in conscience abandon our Congregationalism, could you not manage at least to allow in the new national system such a toleration of Congregationalist practices as would satisfy us, the minority, and prevent us from going again into exile?" Such was the Independency of the Dissenting Five in the Westminster Assembly. But, as we know, from our previous survey of the history of Independency in England, in Holland, and in America, the word "Independency" had come to have a much larger meaning than that in which it had originated. It had come to mean not merely the principle of Congregationalism, or the Independency of Congregations, but also all that had in fact arisen from the action of that principle, in England, Holland, or America, in the shape of miscellaneous dissent and heterodoxy. It had come to mean the Congregationalist principle _plus_ all its known or conceivable consequences. From policy it was in this wide sense that the Presbyterians had begun to use the term Independency. "You are certainly Independents," the Presbyterians of the Assembly virtually said to Messrs Goodwin, Burroughs, and the rest of the Five; "but you are the best specimens of a class of which the varieties are legion: were all Independency such as yours, and were Independency to end with you, we might see our way to such a toleration as you demand-- which, on personal grounds, we should like to do: but the principle of Congregationalism has already generated on the earth--in England, in Holland, and in America--opinions beyond yours, and some heresies at which even you stand aghast; and it is of these, as well as of you, that we are bound to think when we are asked to tolerate Independency." Now it was of this larger and more terrible Independency that the Presbyterians had begun to see signs in the Parliamentary Army and through England generally. In other words, sects and sectaries of all sorts and sizes had begun to be heard of--some only transmissions or re-manifestations of oddities of old English Puritanism, others importations from Holland and New England, and others products of the new ferment of the English mind caused by the Civil War itself. In especial, it was believed, _Anabaptists_ and _Antinomians_ had begun to abound. Now, though, in politeness, the Presbyterians were willing occasionally to distinguish between the orthodox Independents and the miscellaneous Sectaries, yet, as the Congregationalist principle, which was the essence of Independency, was credited with the mischief of having generated all the sects, and as it was for this Congregationalist principle that toleration was demanded, it was quite as common to huddle all the Sects and the orthodox Congregationalists together under the one name of Independents. Nor could the Congregationalists of the Assembly very well object to this. True, they might disown the errors and extravagancies of the sects, and declare that they themselves were as little in sympathy with them as the Presbyterians. They might also argue, as indeed they anxiously did, that due uniformity in the essentials of Christian belief and practice would be as easily maintained in a community organized ecclesiastically on the Congregationalist principle as in one organized in the Presbyterian mariner. Still, in arguing so, they must have had some latitude of view as to the amount of uniformity desirable. If every congregation were to be independent within itself, and if moreover congregations might be formed on the principle of elective affinities, or the concourse of like-minded atoms, it was difficult to see why Congregationalism should not be expected to evolve sects, and why therefore this progressive evolution of sects should not be accepted as a law of religious life. Had not the Five Independents of the Assembly avowed it as one of their principles that they would not be too sure that the opinions they now held would remain always unchanged? Reserving this liberty of going farther for themselves, how could they refuse toleration for those who had already gone farther? Claiming for themselves a toleration in all such differences as did not affect their character as good subjects, they could not but extend the benefit of the same plea to at least a proportion of the Sectaries. But to what proportion? Where was toleration to stop? At what point, in the course of religious dissent, did a man become a "bad subject?" To these questions no definite answers were given by the Five Dissentients of the Assembly; but they could not but entertain the questions. Hence their Independency, though mild and moderate so far as they were themselves concerned, was really in organic connexion with the larger Independency that had begun to manifest itself in the Army and elsewhere. "The Congregationalist principle and Liberty of Religious Difference to a certain extent," said the Independents of the Assembly. "Yes, Liberty of Religious Difference!" said the Army Independents, simplifying the formula.

Throughout the first half of 1644, therefore, we are to think of the Presbyterian majority in the Westminster Assembly as not only fighting against the Independency or Congregationalism proper which was represented within the walls of the Assembly by men whom they could not but respect, though complaining of their obstinacy, but also bent on saving England from that more lax or general Independency, nameable as Army-Independency, which they saw rife through the land, and which included toleration not merely of Congregationalism, but also of Anabaptism, Antinomianism, and other nondescript heresies. Baillie's groanings in spirit over the multiplication of the sectaries, and the growth of the Toleration notion, are positively affecting. "Sundry officers and soldiers in the army," he writes, April 2, "has fallen from their way [_i.e._ from Independency proper] to Antinomianism and Anabaptism." Again, later in the same month, "The number and evil humour of the Antinomians and Anabaptists doth increase;" and more fully, on the 19th, "They [the Independents] over all the land are making up a faction to their own way, the far most part whereof is fallen off to Anabaptism and Antinomianism: sundry also to worse, if worse needs be--the mortality of the soul, the denial of angels and devils; and cast off all sacraments; and many blasphemous things. All these are from New England." By May 9 he had begun to despair of the English altogether: "The humour of this people is very various and inclinable to singularities, to differ from all the world, and one from another, and shortly from themselves: no people had so much need of a Presbytery." According to Baillie, it was precisely owing to the absence of a well-organized Presbyterian system in England that all those wild growths of opinion had been possible; and, while they increased the difficulty of establishing Presbyterianism in England, they were the best demonstration of its necessity. Therefore, he would not despair. There was yet a faint hope that the Independent Divines in the Assembly might be made ashamed of the tag-rag of Anabaptists, Antinomians, and what not, that hung to their skirts, and so might be brought to an accommodation with the Presbyterians. But, failing that, the Presbyterians must stand firm, must face Independency and all its belongings both in Parliament and in the Army, and try at length to beat them down.--Of course, Baillie and his Scottish brethren were doing their best to assist the English Presbyterians in this labour. Anti- Toleration pamphlets had appeared, and more were in preparation. But help was particularly desired from the Reformed Churches abroad, and most particularly from Holland. Had not Holland nursed this very Independency which was troubling England, and was not the example of Holland the greatest argument with the Independents and others for a toleration of sects? Representing all this to his correspondent, William Spang, Scottish preacher at Campvere, Baillie urges him again and again to do what he can to get any eminent Dutch divines of his acquaintance to write treatises against Independency, Heresy, and Toleration. He names several such, as likely to do this great service if duly importuned. There could be no more helpful service to England--except one! Oh if there could yet be a great Scottish victory on English soil! _That_ would be worth all the pamphlets in the world! [Footnote: Baillie, II. 146, 157, 168, 177, 179, 181, 183-4, 191-2, 197, &c.--Several manifestoes against Independency, such as Baillie wanted, did come, in due time, from Divines in Holland and elsewhere on the Continent, and were much made of by the Presbyterians of the Assembly, and put in circulation through England.]

VISITATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE: BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR.

Notwithstanding all this anarchy of ecclesiastical opinion, the practical or political mastery of affairs remained in the hands of Parliament, and was firmly exercised by Parliament in a direction satisfactory to the Westminster Assembly as a whole. For, whatever might be the ultimate settlement between Independency and Presbyterianism, there was a certain general course of "Reformation" to which meanwhile all were pledged, Independents and Sectaries no less than Presbyterians; and on this course all could advance unanimously, even while battling with each other on the ecclesiastical questions which the Independents desired to keep open. For example, during those very months of 1644 in which Independency had been taking such increased dimensions, there had been fully executed that great Visitation and purgation of the University of Cambridge which had been entrusted to the Earl of Manchester by Parliamentary Ordinance in January.

The Earl, going to Cambridge in person in February 1643-4, with his two chaplains, Messrs. Ashe and Good, had been engaged in the work through the months of March and April, summoning refractory Heads of Colleges and Fellows before him, examining complaints against them, and putting them in most cases to the test of the Covenant. The result, when complete (which it was not till 1645), was the ejection, on one ground or another, of about one half of the _Fellows_ of the various Colleges of Cambridge collectively, and of eleven out of the sixteen _Heads of Houses_, and the appointment of persons of Parliamentarian principles to the places thus made vacant.--Of the crowd of those who were turned out of Cambridge _Fellowships_, and the crowd of those who were put in to succeed them, we can take no account in this History. Yet a process which presents us with the vision of about 150 rueful outgoers from comfortable livelihoods in one University, met at the doors by as many radiant comers-in, can have been no unimportant incident, even in a national revolution. What became of all the rueful outgoers is a question that might interest us yet. It interested Fuller ten years after the event. Even then he could give no other answer, he said, than that proverbial one which the survivors of Nicias's unfortunate expedition against the Sicilians used to give at Athens when they were asked about the fate of such or such a comrade who had never returned, [Greek: "E tethnæken hæ didaskei grammata"] "He is either dead or teaching a school somewhere." Schoolmastering, according to Fuller, was the refuge of most of the ejected Cambridge Fellows of 1644-5.--More conspicuous persons, and with resources that probably exempted them from the prospect of so painful a fate, were the ejected _Heads of Houses_. Most of these were ejected at once in March and April 1644; and, apart from our acquired interest in Cambridge University, there are reasons for remembering them individually, and noting those who came in their places:--Of the sixteen Heads of Houses, it is to be premised, one--Dr. Richard Love, of Bennet or Corpus Christi--was a member of the Assembly, and therefore all right; while four others managed, by taking the Covenant, or by other "wary compliance" during the Visitation, to stay in. Among these four, it does not surprise us to learn, was Dr. Thomas Bainbrigge of Christ's, Milton's old _durus magister_, with whom he had had that never-forgotten tiff in his under-graduateship (Vol. I. pp. 135-141); the others were Dr. Eden of Trinity Hall, Dr. Rainbow of Magdalen, and Dr. Batchcroft of Caius. The ejections were as follows:--

TRINITY COLLEGE:--Master ejected, Dr. THOMAS CUMBER (_ob._ 1654); Master put in, Mr. THOMAS HILL, one of the Assembly Divines.

ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE:--Master ejected, Dr. WILLIAM BEALE (died at Madrid, 1651); Master put in, Mr. JOHN ARROWSMITH, one of the Assembly Divines.

EMANUEL COLLEGE:--Master ejected, Dr. RICHARD HOLDSWORTH (_ob._ 1649); Master put in, Dr. ANTHONY TUCKNEY, one of the Assembly Divines.

QUEEN'S COLLEGE:--There was a complete sweep of this College, not a Fellow or Foundationer of any kind being left. President ejected, Dr. EDWARD MARTIN (survived the Restoration and was made Dean of Ely); President put in, Mr. HERBERT PALMER, one of the Assembly Divines.

CLARE HALL:--Master ejected, Dr. THOMAS PASKE (survived the Restoration and had his reward); Master put in, RALPH CUDWORTH, B.D., afterwards the celebrated author of the "Intellectual System." He was of Somersetshire birth, and, though now only 27 years of age, had acquired a high Cambridge reputation, as Fellow and Tutor of Emanuel College, where he had been educated.

PETERHOUSE:--Master ejected, Dr. JOHN COSINS (already under the ban of Parliament and a refugee in France: he survived the Restoration and became Bishop of Durham); Master put in, Mr. LAZARUS SEAMAN, one of the Assembly Divines.

PEMBROKE COLLEGE;--Master ejected, Dr. BENJAMIN LANEY (survived the Restoration and held several Bishoprics in succession); Master put in, Mr. RICHARD VINES, one of the Assembly Divines.

KING'S COLLEGE;--Provost ejected, Dr. SAMUEL COLLINS (see Vol. I. pp. 92, 93); Provost put in, Mr. BENJAMIN WHICHCOT, _ætat._ 34. He had been a Fellow of Emanuel College, and was a friend of Cudworth's. A peculiarity in his case was that he was dispensed from taking the Covenant on his appointment, and succeeded, by his interest with the ruling powers, in obtaining a like dispensation for most of the Fellows of the College. He survived the Restoration, conformed then, and is still remembered as one of the chiefs of the English Latitudinarians.

SIDNEY-SUSSEX COLLEGE:--Master ejected, Dr. SAMUEL WARD (see Vol. I. p. 95); Master put in, Mr. RICHARD MINSHULL, a Fellow of the College, regularly elected to the Mastership by the other Fellows. He survived the Restoration, conformed then, and retained the Mastership till his death.

JESUS COLLEGE:--Master ejected, Dr. RICHARD STERNE (great-grandfather of Laurence Sterne, the novelist). He was a strong Laudian and Royalist, and had already been in prison on that account. He lived in retirement till the Restoration; after which he was made successively Bishop of Chester, and (1664) Archbishop of York. Master put in, Mr. THOMAS YOUNG, one of the Assembly Divines, Milton's old preceptor, and the chief of the "Smectymnuans." It was a special compliment to Young that he, not an English University man at all, but a naturalized Scot, had been chosen for a Cambridge Mastership.

CATHERINE HALL:--Master ejected (not till 1645, however, and then on a fresh occasion), Dr. RALPH BROWNRIGGE, nominal Bishop of Exeter since 1642 (_ob._ 1659); Master put in, Mr. WILLIAM SPURSTOW, one of the Assembly Divines, and one of the "Smectymnuans." [Footnote: Authorities for this account of Manchester's Visitation of Cambridge and its results are Fuller's History of the University of Cambridge (edit 1340), pp. 233- 239, and Neal's Puritans, III. 107-119.]

Thus began, in 1644, a new era in the history of Cambridge University, which extended to the Restoration. Episcopalian principles were discharged out of the government of the University; and, under the five retained Masters and the eleven new ones, there was inaugurated a system of rule and teaching in accordance, more or less in the different Colleges, with the ascendant State-policy of the Puritans. With the exception of Cudworth, Whichcot, and Minshull, it will have been noted, all the newly-appointed Masters were members of the Westminster Assembly, and leading men among the Presbyterian majority of that body. They do not appear to have ceased attendance on the Assembly in consequence of their appointments, but only to have divided their time thenceforward as well as they could between the Assembly and Cambridge. It is also to be noted that some of them, including Thomas Young, retained their former livings along with their new Masterships. [Footnote: The following is a note furnished to Mr. David Laing by the Rev. John Struthers of Prestonpans, one of an acting Committee recently appointed by the Church of Scotland for transcribing and editing the original Minutes of the Westminster Assembly, preserved in Dr. William's Library, London:--"1643-4, March 15.--A letter read from the Earl of Manchester, stating that he cast out Drs. Beale, Cosins, Sterne, Martin, Laney, masters, from their Masterships in Cambridge University, and, subject to the Assembly's approval, nominated Mr. Palmer, Mr. Arrowsmith, Mr. Vines, Mr. Seaman, and Mr. Young in their places. The Assembly offered their congratulations, but desired that their brethren should meanwhile not be withdrawn from the Assembly." Mr. Struthers adds that, though Dr. Lightfoot, in his Notes of the Assembly, states that Mr. Vines and Mr. Young desired to be excused from the new appointments, there is no notice of any such declinature in the MS. minutes.--See _Biographical Notices of Thomas Young, S.T.D., Vicar of Stowmarket, Suffolk_, by Mr. David Laing (Edin. 1870), p. 39.--These accurate and valuable "Notices" of a man who figures so interestingly in Milton's Biography had not appeared till Vol. II. of this work was quite printed, or they might have saved me some research for that volume as well as for its predecessor. Prefixed to them Mr. Laing gives a portrait of Young, after a photograph taken from the original picture long preserved in the Vicarage of Stowmarket, but now in the possession of H. C. Mathew, Esq. of Felixstow, near Ipswich. The portrait represents Young with hair not at all of the short Puritan cut, but long, and flowing fully on both sides to his shoulders; and the face is really fine, with handsome features, and a rich and mild look. Another interesting insertion in Mr. Laing's little volume is a facsimile of Young's handwriting, from a Latin inscription in a presentation copy of his _Dies Dominica_, still extant. The hand is neat and careful; and, what is rather curious, it has a resemblance to Milton's.] There were similar instances of retention of livings among those appointed to Fellowships, and to other offices throughout the country under the patronage of the Parliament. The excuse was the dearth for the time of fully qualified ministers of the right Parliamentarian strain; but the fact did not escape comment. Was Plurality one of the very few institutions of Prelacy which Presbyterian godliness was willing to preserve?

Fresh from his energetic Visitation of Cambridge, the Earl of Manchester was away, as we have seen, in May 1644, with his Lieutenant-general, Cromwell, to add the force of the Associated Eastern Counties to the forces of the Scots and Fairfax, then about to besiege the Marquis of Newcastle in York. The joint forces, numbering some 25,000 men in all, were hopefully conducting the siege when the approach of Prince Rupert out of Lancashire, with a Royalist army of over 20,000, compelled them to raise it, in order to oppose him (June 30). He avoided them, relieved York, and then, having added the Marquis's garrison to his own force, risked all for a great victory. The result was the BATTLE OF MARSTON MOOR, about seven miles to the west of York, fought on the evening of July 2, 1644. It was "the bloodiest battle of the whole war," the number actually slain on the field on both sides in three hours being no fewer than 4,150. But of these by far the most were on the King's side, and the battle was a disastrous rout for that side, and a victory for the Parliamentarians incalculably greater than any they had yet had. Rupert, with a shred of his army, escaped southwards; the Marquis of Newcastle, making his way to the sea-coast, embarked for the Continent, with his two sons, his brother Sir Charles Cavendish, General King, Lord Fauconberg, the Earl of Carnwath, Bishop Bramhall, and about eighty other Royalists of distinction, and was no more seen in England till the Restoration. York surrendered to the victors, July 5; and, save that Newcastle and some other towns remained to be taken, the whole North of England was lost to the King and brought within the sway of Parliament. Seldom had there been such consequences from a battle of three hours. [Footnote: Clar. Hist. 490-492; Parl. Hist. III. 277, 278; Carlyle's Cromwell, I. 151-154; Markham's Fairfax, 151-178, for a detailed modern account.]

When the news of the battle reached London (July 5), there was nothing but joy. Within a few days, however, the joy passed into a question between the Independents and the Presbyterians, or at least the Scots among them. Which part of the conjoint army had behaved best in the battle, and to which general did the chief honours of the day belong? Glad would Baillie have been to welcome Marston Moor as at last that great success of the Scots for which he had been longing and praying. No such pleasure could he have. More and more, as detailed accounts of the battle arrived, it became clear that the Scots could claim only a little of the merit of the victory--that the mass of them had behaved rather ill; that the luck or the generalship of Field-marshal Leven had deserted him, and he had been carried far away in a ruck of fugitives; and that, in fact, with the exception of David Leslie, the Scottish Major-general, who really did good service, no Scot in command had shown much head, or been of any considerable use, at Marston Moor. But, worse and worse for Baillie's feelings, not only did it appear that the victory had been gained by the English of the joint army rather than by the Scottish contingent, but gradually the rumour was confirmed, which had been first borne to London on the wings of the wind, that the Englishman by whose conduct, if by that of any one man, the fate of the battle had been decided, was Lieutenant-general Cromwell. "The left wing, which I commanded, being our own horse, saving a few Scots in our rear, beat all the Prince's horse. God gave them as stubble to our swords. We charged their regiments of foot with our horse, and routed all we charged." These sentences of Cromwell's own, written on the third day after the battle in a letter to his brother-in-law, Colonel Valentine Walton, are his private statement of the truth which became public. In vain it was represented in London that Cromwell's paramount prowess in the battle was a fiction of himself and the Independents; in vain did the Presbyterians try to distribute the merit among Fairfax, David Leslie, and Major-general Crawford--another Scot, not in the Scottish contingent, but serving in Manchester's army as next in command under Cromwell, and already known as representing Presbyterianism in that army in opposition to Cromwell's Independency; in vain did this Crawford, when he came to London, asseverate that Cromwell, having been slightly wounded in the neck, had retired before the crisis, and that the real work in Cromwell's part of the battle had devolved on David Leslie and himself. It was a comfort to Baillie to believe all this; but London was persuaded otherwise. For London and for all England Cromwell stood forth as the hero of Marston Moor. The victory to which Baillie had looked forward as a triumph for Presbyterianism had been gained mainly by the "great Independent" of the English army, and went to the credit of Independency. [Footnote: Baillie, II. 201, 203-4, 209, and 211; Carlyle's Cromwell, I. 152-3 and 146-150; Fuller's Worthies, _Yorkshire_; Holles's Memoirs (1699), 15-17.]

Three weeks after the battle of Marston Moor (July 23, 1644) the Westminster Assembly, with permission of Parliament, adjourned for a fortnight's vacation. We will share this vacation, and make it the opportunity for some farther inquiry, on our own account, into the two subjects which were of paramount interest at that moment. They were the subjects, if I may so say, that had for some time past been chalked up on the black board for the consideration of all England, and to the discussion of which the Assembly and the Parliament were to address themselves with fresh fervour when the Assembly came together again after their vacation. These were:--

I. The Principle of Toleration.

II. The English Sects and Sectaries.

THE PRINCIPLE OF TOLERATION: STATE OF THE TOLERATION CONTROVERSY IN 1644.

The history of the modern idea of TOLERATION could be written completely only after a larger amount of minute and special research than I am able here to bestow on the subject. Who shall say in the heads of what stray and solitary men, scattered through Europe in the sixteenth century, _nantes rari in gurgite vasto_, some form of the idea, as a purely speculative conception, may have been lodged? Hallam finds it in the "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More (1480-1535), and in the harangues of the Chancellor l'Hospital of France (1505-1573); [Footnote: Hallam's Const. Hist. (10th edit.), T. 122, Note.] and there may have been others. But the history of the idea, as a practical or political notion, lies within a more precise range. Out of what within Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the practical form of the idea bred? Out of pain, out of suffering, out of persecution: not pain inflicted constantly on one and the same section of men, or on any two opposed sections alternately; but pain revolving, pain circulated, pain distributed till the whole round of the compass of sects had felt it in turn, and the only principle of its prevention gradually dawned on the common consciousness! In every persecuted cause, honestly conducted, there was a throe towards the birth of this great principle. Every persecuted cause claimed at least a toleration for itself from the established power; and so, by a kind of accumulation, the cause that had been last persecuted had more of a tendency to toleration in it, and became practically more tolerant, than the others. This, I think, might be proved. The Church of England was more tolerant than the Church of Rome, and Scottish Presbyterianism or Scottish Puritanism was more tolerant (though the reverse is usually asserted) than the Church of England prior to 1640. Not to the Church of England, however, nor to Scottish Presbyterianism, nor to English Puritanism at large, does the honour of the first perception of the full principle of Liberty of Conscience, and its first assertion in English speech, belong. That honour has to be assigned, I believe, to the Independents generally, and to the Baptists in particular.

The principle of religious liberty is almost logically bound up with the theory of the Independency of particular churches. Every particular church being a voluntary concourse of like-minded atoms, able to declare themselves converts or true Christians, it follows that the world, or civil society, whether called heathen or professedly Christian, is only the otherwise regulated medium or material in which these voluntary concourses or whirls take place. It follows that there must be large expanses or interspaces of the general material always unabsorbed into the voluntary concourses, and that for the secular power, which governs the general medium, to try to stimulate the concourses, or to bring all into them, or to control any part of the procedure of each or any of them, would be a mingling of elements that are incompatible, of necessary worldly order with the spiritual kingdom of Christ. And so it was maintained, against the Roman Catholics, and against the Confessions of all the various established Protestant Churches, that there could be, and ought to be, no Imperial or National Church. This being the principle of some of the early Protestant movements that went beyond Luther, Zuinglius, or Calvin, and perplexed these Reformers, little wonder that flashes of the fullest doctrine of Liberty of Conscience should be found among the records of those movements, whether on the Continent or in England.[Footnote: See notices of such flashes, among English Baptists of the reign of Henry VIII., and among the continental Anabaptists, in Mr. Edward Bean Underhill's "Historical Introduction" to the Reprint of Old Tracts on _Liberty of Conscience_ by the "Hanserd Knollys Society" (1846). Mr. Underhill writes as a zealous Baptist, but with judgment and research.] Little wonder, either, that the principle of Toleration should be discernible in the writings of Robert Brown, the father of the crude English Independency of Elizabeth's reign. [Footnote: Baillie (_Dissuasive_, Part I. 31) expressly makes it a reproach against Brown that he held the Toleration doctrine.]

But it is one thing to hold a principle vaguely or latently as implicated in a principle already avowed, and another thing to extricate the implied principle and kindle it, as on the top of a lighthouse, on its own account. It is found, accordingly, that the early English Separatists collectively were much slower in this matter than Brown himself had been. They wanted toleration for themselves, and perhaps a general mildness in the administration of religious affairs; but they could not rid themselves of the notion, held alike by all the established churches, whether Prelatic or Presbyterian, that it is the duty of the prince, or the civil power, in every state to promote true religion and suppress false. Passages which we have already had occasion to quote (Vol. II. 569, 570) from the writings of Barrowe, Greenwood, and even of the liberal Robinson, the father of Congregationalism proper, prove beyond all dispute that these chiefs of the Separatists and Semi-Separatists who followed Brown in the latter part of Elizabeth's reign and in the reign of James had not worked out Toleration into a perfect or definite tenet. They did want something that they called a Toleration; but it was a limited and ill-defined Toleration.--There was, however, _one_ body or band of Separatists in James's reign who had pushed farther ahead, and grasped the idea of Liberty of Conscience at its very utmost. Strangely enough, as it may seem at first sight, they were the Separatists of the most intense and schismatic type then known, the least conciliatory in their relations to other churches and communions. They were the poor and despised Anglo-Dutch Anabaptists who called John Smyth (Vol. II. 539,540) their leader. In a Confession, or Declaration of Faith, put forth in 1611 by the English Baptists in Amsterdam, just after the death of Smyth, this article occurs: "The magistrate is not to meddle with religion, or matters of conscience, nor compel men to this or that form of religion; because Christ is the King and Lawgiver of the Church and Conscience." It is believed that this is the first expression of the absolute principle of Liberty of Conscience in the public articles of any body of Christians. Contact with the Dutch Arminians may have helped Smyth's people to a perception of it; and it certainly did not please the English Pædobaptist Independents of Holland when it appeared among them. Robinson, for example, objected to it, as he was bound to do by the views of the civil magistrate's power which he maintained. He attributed the invention of such an article to the common inability of ignorant men to distinguish between the use of an ordinance and its abuse. In other words, he thought the remnant of Smyth's Baptists had been rather silly in leaping to the conclusion that, because there had been much abuse of the interference of the civil power in matters of religion, and it had led to all sorts of horrors, there was nothing left but to set up the principle of absolute non-interference.

The principle of the Anglo-Dutch Baptists, with the same exact difference between the Baptists and the rest of the Independents on the Toleration point, was imported into England. It is supposed that the person who had the chief hand in drawing up the Confession of the English Baptists of Amsterdam, after Smyth's death, was Smyth's successor in the Baptist ministry there, Thomas Helwisse (Vol. II. 540-544). Now, this Helwisse, returning to England shortly after 1611, drew round him, as we saw, the first congregation of General or Arminian Baptists in London; and this obscure Baptist congregation seems to have become the depositary for all England of the absolute principle of Liberty of Conscience expressed in the Amsterdam Confession, as distinct from the more stinted principle advocated by the general body of the Independents. Not only did Helwisse's folk differ from the Independents generally on the subject of Infant Baptism and Dipping; they differed also on the power of the magistrate in matters of belief and conscience. It was, in short, from their little dingy meeting-house, somewhere in Old London, that there flashed out, first in England, the absolute doctrine of Religious Liberty. "_Religious Peace: or, A Plea for Liberty of Conscience_" is the title of a little tract first printed in 1614, and presented to King James and the English Parliament, by "Leonard Busher, citizen of London." This Leonard Busher, there is reason to believe, was a member of Helwisse's congregation; and we learn from the tract itself that he was a poor man, labouring for his subsistence, who had had his share of persecution. He had probably been one of Smyth's Amsterdam flock who had returned with Helwisse. The tract is, certainly, the earliest known English publication in which full liberty of conscience is openly advocated. It cannot be read now without a throb. The style is simple and rather helpless; but one comes on some touching passages. Thus:--

"May it please your Majesty and Parliament to understand that by fire and sword to constrain princes and peoples to receive that one true religion of the Gospel is wholly against the mind and merciful law of Christ." "Persecution is a work well pleasing to all false prophets and bishops, but it is contrary to the mind of Christ, who came not to judge and destroy men's lives, but to save them. And, though some men and women believe not at the first hour, yet may they at the eleventh hour, if they be not persecuted to death before. And no king nor bishop can or is able to command faith. That is the gift of God, who worketh in us both the will and the deed of his own good pleasure. Set him not a day, therefore, in which, if his creature hear not and believe not, you will imprison and burn him.... As kings and bishops cannot command the wind, so they cannot command faith; and, as the wind bloweth where it listeth, so is every man that is born of the Spirit. You may force men to church against their consciences, but they will believe as they did before when they come there."

"Kings and magistrates are to rule temporal affairs by the swords of their temporal kingdoms, and bishops and ministers are to rule spiritual affairs by the word and Spirit of God, the sword of Christ's temporal kingdom, and not to intermeddle one with another's authority, office, and function."

"I read that Jews, Christians, and Turks are tolerated in Constantinople, and yet are peaceable, though so contrary the one to the other. If this be so, how much more ought Christians not to force one another to religion! And how much more ought Christians to tolerate Christians, whenas the Turks do tolerate them! Shall we be less merciful than the Turks? or shall we learn the Turks to persecute Christians? It is not only unmerciful, but unnatural and abominable, yea monstrous, for one Christian to vex and destroy another for difference and questions of religion."

Busher's tract of 1614 was not the only utterance in the same strain that came from Helwisse's conventicle of London Baptists. In 1615 there appeared in print "_Objections answered by way of Dialogue, wherein is proved, by the Law of God, by the Law of our Land, and by His Majesty's many testimonies, that no man ought to be persecuted for his Religion, so he testifie his allegeance by the oath appointed by Law._" The author, or one of the authors, of this Dialogue, which is even more explicit in some respects than Busher's tract, is pretty clearly ascertained to have been John Murton, Helwisse's assistant (Vol. II. 544,581). Helwisse himself is not heard of after 1614, and appears to have died about that time. But his Baptist congregation maintained itself in London side by side with Jacob's congregation of Independents, established in 1616 (Vol. II. 544). As if to signalize still farther the discrepancy of the two sets of Sectaries on the Toleration point, there was put forth, as we saw, in that very year, by Jacob and the Independents, a Confession of Faith, containing this article: "We believe that we, and all true visible churches, ought to be overseen and kept in good order and peace, and ought to be governed, under Christ, both supremely and also subordinately, by the civil magistrate; yea, in causes of religion, when need is."

The year 1616 was the year of Shakespeare's death. Who that has read his Sonnet LXVI. can doubt that he had carried in his mind while alive some profound and peculiar form of the idea of Toleration? In Bacon's brain, too, one may detect some smothered tenet of the kind; and even in the talk of the shambling King James himself there had been such occasional spurts about Liberty of Conscience that, though he had burnt two of his subjects for Arianism, Helwisse's poor people were fain, as we have just seen, to cite "His Majesty's many testimonies" for the Toleration they craved. And yet not to any such celebrity as the king, the philosopher, or the poet, had the task of vindicating for England the idea of Liberty of Conscience been practically appointed. To all intents and purposes that honour had fallen to two of the most extreme and despised sects of the Puritans. The despised Independents, or semi-Separatists of the school of Robinson and Jacob, and the still more despised Baptists, or thorough Separatists of the school of Smyth and Helwisse, were groping for the pearl between them; and, what is strangest at first sight, it was the more intensely Separatist of these two sects that was groping with most success. How is this to be explained? Partly it may have been that the Baptists were the sect that had been most persecuted--that they were the ultimate sect, in the English world, in respect of the necessary qualification of pain and suffering accumulated in their own experience, while the Hobinsonian Independents might rank as only the penultimate sect in this respect. But there is a deeper reason. Paradoxical as the statement may seem, there was a logical connexion between the extreme Separatism of the Baptists, the tightness and exclusiveness of their own terms of communion, and their passion for religious freedom, This requires elucidation:--It was on the subject of the Baptism of Infants that the ordinary Congregationalists and the Baptist Congregationalists most evidently stood aloof from each other. There had been vehement controversies between them on the subject. Independent congregations had ejected and excommunicated such of their members as had taken to the doctrine of Antipædobaptism; and Smyth's rigid Baptists, in turn, would not hold communion with Pædobaptist Independents. We are apt now to dwell on the narrow-mindedness, the unseemliness, of those bickerings of the two sects over the one doctrine on which they differed. It is to be observed, however, that even here they illustrated their faith in the principle which was the essence of their common Congregationalism: to wit, that the true security for sound faith and good government in the Church of Christ lay in the power lodged in every particular congregation of judging who were fit to belong to it, and of constant spiritual supervision of each of the members of it by all, so that the erring might be admonished, and the unfit ejected. It was the supreme virtue, the all- sufficient efficacy, of this power of merely spiritual censure, as it might be exercised by congregations or particular churches, each within itself, that both sects were continually trying to demonstrate to Prelatists and Presbyterians. Their very argument was that truth and piety would prosper best in a system of Church-government which trusted all to the vigilance of the members of every particular congregation over each other, their reasonings among themselves, their practice of mutual admonition, and, in last resort, their power of excommunicating the unworthy. Hence perhaps even the excess of the controversial activity of the two sects against each other, and the frequency of their mutual excommunications, are not without a favourable significance. Here, however, it was the Baptists, rather than the Independents collectively, that had pushed their theory of the all-sufficiency of congregational censure to its finest issue. To both sects the world or civil society presented itself as a medium in which there might be Christian vortices, concourses of true Christian souls, that should constitute, when numbered together and catalogued unerringly in the books of heaven, the Church or Kingdom of Jesus. To both sects it seemed a thing to be striven for that as much of civil society as possible should be brought into these vortices or concourses; nay, the aspiration of both was that the whole world should be Christianized. But, looking about them, they knew, in fact, that the vortices or concourses did and could involve but a small proportion of the society in which they occurred. They knew that there must be large tracts of unbelief, profanity, and false worship in every so-called Christian nation, left utterly unaffected by any of the true associations of Christ's real people; besides the huge wilderness of heathenism and idolatry lying all round in the dark lands of the world. It was on the platform of this contemplation that the Independents generally and the Baptist section of them had parted company. The Independents generally held that it was the duty of the civil power in a State to promote the formation of churches in that State, and to see, in some general way, that the churches formed were not wrong in doctrine or in practice. They held that the civil authority might lawfully compel all its subjects to some sort of hearing of the Gospel with a view to their belonging to churches or congregations, and might even assist the preacher by some whip of penalties on those who remained obstinate after a due amount of hearing. They held, in fact, that every State is bound to use its power towards Christianizing all its subjects, and may also institute missions for the propagation of true Christianity in idolatrous or heathen lands. To all this the Baptists, or some of their leaders, had learnt to oppose an emphatic "No." They held that the world, or civil society, and the Church of Christ, were distinct and immiscible. They held that the sword of the Temporal Power must never, under any circumstances, aid the sword of the Spirit. They held that the formation of churches in any State must be a process of the purest spontaneity. They held that, while every person in a civilized State is a subject of that State in all matters of civil order, it ought to be at the option of that person, and of those with whom he or she might voluntarily consort, to determine whether he or she should superadd to this general character of subject the farther character of being a Christian and a member of some particular church. The churches formed spontaneously in any State were to be self-subsisting associations of like-minded units, believing and worshiping, arid inflicting spiritual censures among themselves, without State-interference; and Christianity was to propagate itself throughout the world by its own spiritual might and the missionary zeal of apostolic individuals. [Footnote: Among my authorities for this sketch of the history of the idea of Toleration as far as 1616, I ought to mention Hanbury's _Historical Memorials relating to the Independents_, Vol. I., and more particularly Chapters XIII,--XV.; Fletcher's _History of Independency in England_ (1848), Vol. III., Chapters I. and II.; and the Reprint of Old Tracts on _Liberty of Conscience_ by the Hanserd Knollys (Baptist) Society, with the Introductory Notices there prefixed to Busher's tract and Murton's by Mr. Edward Bean Underhill.]

From 1616 onwards this Baptist form of the idea of Liberty of Conscience had been slumbering somewhere in the English heart. Even through the dreadful time of the Laudian terrorism it might be possible for research to discover half-stifled expressions of it. Other and less extreme forms of the Toleration idea, however, were making themselves heard. Holland had worked out the speculation, or was working it out, through the struggle of her own Arminians for equal rights with the prevailing Calvinists; and it was the singular honour of that country to have, at all events, been the first in Europe to exhibit something like a practical solution of the problem, by the refuge and freedom of worship it afforded to the religious outcasts of other nations. Then among the so-called Latitudinarian Divines of the Church of England--Hales, Chillingworth, and their associates--there is evidence of the growth, even while their friend Laud was in power, of an idea or sentiment of Toleration which might have made that Prelate pause and wonder. Not, of course, the Baptist idea; but one which might have had a greater chance practically in the then existing conditions of English life. Might there not be a Toleration _with_ an Established or State Church? While it might be the duty of the civil magistrate, or at least a State- convenience, to set up one Church as the Church of the nation, and so to afford to all the subjects the means of instruction in that theology and of participation in that worship which the State thought the best, might not State-interference with religion stop there, and might not those who refused to conform be permitted to hold their conventicles freely outside the Established Church, and to believe and worship in their own way? Some such idea of Toleration, but still with perplexing limitations as to the _amount_ of deviation that should be tolerated, was, I believe, the idea that had dawned on the minds of men like the loveable Hales and the hardy Chillingworth. It is much the sort of Toleration that accredits itself to the average British mind yet. But how greatly the history of the Church of England might have been altered had such a Toleration been then adopted by the Church itself! As it was, it remained the half- uttered _irenicon_ of a few speculative spirits. Nowhere on earth prior to 1640, unless it were in Holland, was Toleration in any effective form whatsoever anything more than the dream of a few poor persecuted sectaries or deep private thinkers. Less even than in the Church of England is there a trace of the idea in the Scottish Presbyterianism that had then re-established itself, or in the English Presbyterianism that longed to establish itself. Scottish Presbyterianism might indeed plead, and it did plead, that it was so satisfactory a system, kept the souls of its subjects in such a strong grip, and yet without needing to resort, except in extreme cases, to any very penal procedure, that wherever _it_ existed Toleration would be unnecessary, inasmuch as there would be preciously little error to tolerate. Personally, I believe, Henderson was as moderate and tolerant a man as any British ecclesiastic of his time. In no Church where he bore rule could there, by possibility, have been any approach to the tetchy repressiveness, or the callous indifference to suffering for the sake of conscience, that characterized the English Church-rule of Laud. But Henderson, though the best of the Presbyterians, was still, _par excellence,_ a Presbyterian; and therefore the Toleration that lay in his disposition had not translated itself into a theoretical principle. As for the English Presbyterians, what _they_ wanted was toleration for themselves, or the liberty of being in the English Church, or in England out of the Church, without conforming; or, if some of them went farther, what _they_ wanted was the substitution of Presbytery for Prelacy as the system established with the right to be intolerant. Finally, even in the New England colonies, where Congregationalism was the rule, there were not only spiritual censures and excommunications of heretics, but whippings, banishments, and other punishments of them, by the civil power. [Footnote: Hallam's account of the rise and progress of the Toleration idea in England (Hist, of Europe, 6th ed. II. 442, &c.) is very unsatisfactory. He actually makes Jeremy Taylor's "Liberty of Prophesying" (1647), the first substantial assertion of Liberty of Conscience in England--an injustice to a score or two of preceding champions of it, and to one or two entire corporate denominations.]

And so we arrive at 1640. Then, immediately after the meeting of the Long Parliament, Toleration rushed into the air. Everywhere the word "Toleration" was heard, and with all varieties of meanings. A certain boom of the general principle runs through Milton's Anti-Episcopal pamphlets, and through other pamphlets on the same side. But this is not all. The principle was expressly argued in certain pamphlets set forth in the interest of the Independents and the Sectaries generally, and it was argued so well that the Presbyterians caught the alarm, foresaw the coming battle between them and the Independents on this subject of Toleration, and declared themselves Anti-Tolerationists by anticipation. It was in May 1641, for example, that Henry Burton published his anonymous pamphlet called _The Protestation Protested_ (Vol. II. 591-2). The main purpose of the pamphlet was to propound Independency in its extreme Brownist form, as refusing any National or State Church whatever; but, on the supposition that this theory was too much in advance of the opinion of the time, and that some National Church must inevitably be set up, a toleration of dissent from that Church was prayed for. "The Parliament now being about a Reformation," wrote Burton, "what government shall be set up in this National Church, the Lord strengthen and direct the Parliament in so great and glorious a work. But let it be what it will, so as still a due respect be paid to those congregations and churches which desire an exemption, and liberty of enjoying Christ's ordinances in such purity as a National Church is not capable of." This is the Toleration principle as it had been transmitted among the Independents generally, or perhaps it is an advance on that. Such as it was, however, Burton's plea for Toleration roused vehement opposition. It was attacked ferociously, as we saw, by an anonymous Episcopal antagonist, believed to be Bishop Hall (Vol. II. p. 593). It was attacked also by Presbyterians, and notably by their champion, Mr. Thomas Edwards, in his maiden pamphlet called "_Reasons against the Independent Government of particular Congregations_" (Vol. II. p. 594). But Edwards did not go unpunished. His pamphlet drew upon him that thrashing from the lady-Brownist, Katharine Chidley, which the reader may remember (Vol. II. p. 595). This brave old lady's idea of Toleration outwent even Burton's, and corresponded more with that absolute idea of Toleration which had been worked out among the Baptists. For example, Edwards having upbraided the Independents with the fact that their Toleration principle had broken down even in their own Paradise of New England, what is Mrs. Chidley's answer? "If they have banished any out of their Patents that were neither disturbers of the peace of the land, nor the worship practised in the land, I am persuaded it was their weakness, and I hope they will never attempt to do the like." Clearly, from whomsoever in 1641 the Parliament and the people of England heard a stinted doctrine of Toleration, they heard the full doctrine from Mrs. Chidley. The Parliament, however, was very slow to be convinced. Petitions of Independent congregations for toleration to themselves were coolly received and neglected; the Presbyterians more and more saw the importance of making Anti-Toleration their rallying dogma; more and more the call to be wary against this insidious notion of Toleration rang through the pulpits of England and Scotland. [Footnote: Hanbury's _Historical Memorials relating to the Independents_, Vol. II. pp. 68-ll7; where ample extracts from the pamphlets mentioned in this paragraph are given. Fletcher gives a good selection of them in his _History of Independency_, Vol. III. Chap. VI.]

The debates in 1643 and 1644 between the five Independent or Dissenting Brethren of the Westminster Assembly and the Presbyterian majority of the Assembly brought on a new stage of the Toleration controversy. A notion which might be scorned or ridiculed while it was lurking in Anabaptist conventicles, or ventilated by a she-Brownist like Mrs. Chidley, or by poor old Mr. Burton of Friday Street, could compel a hearing when maintained by men so respectable as Messrs. Goodwin, Burroughs, Bridge, Simpson, and Nye, whom the Parliament itself had sent into the Assembly. The demand for Toleration which these men addressed to the Parliament in their famous _Apologetical Narration_ of January 1643-4 gave sudden dignity and precision to what till then had been vulgar and vague. It put the question in this form, "What amount of Nonconformity is to be allowed in the new Presbyterian Church which is to be the National Church of England?"; and it distinctly intimated that on the answer to this question it would depend whether the Apologists and their adherents could remain in England or should be driven again into exile. Care must be taken, however, not to credit the Apologists at this period with any notion of absolute or universal Toleration. They were far behind Mrs. Chidley or the old Baptists in their views. They were as yet but learners in the school of Toleration. Indulgence for _themselves_ "in some lesser differences," and perhaps also for some of the more reputable of the other sects in _their_ different "lesser differences," was the sum of their published demand. They too, no less than the Presbyterians, professed disgust at the extravagances of the Sectaries. It was not so much, therefore, the Toleration expressly claimed by the Five Dissenting Brethren for themselves, as the larger Toleration to which it would inevitably lead, that the Presbyterians continued to oppose and denounce. As far as the Five Brethren and other such respectable Dissentients were concerned, the Presbyterians would have stretched a point. They would have made arrangements. They would have patted the Five Dissenting Brethren on the back, and said, "It shall be made easy for _you_; we will yield all the accommodation _you_ can possibly need; only don't call it Toleration." The Dissenting Brethren were honest enough and clear-headed enough not to be content with this personal compliment. Nor, in fact, could the policy have been successful. For there were now champions of the larger Toleration with voices that resounded through the land and were heard over those of the Five Apologists. Precisely that middle of the year 1644 at which we have stopped in our narrative was the time when the principle of absolute Liberty of Conscience was proclaimed, for the benefit of all opinions whatsoever, in tones that could never more be silenced.

About the middle of 1644 there appeared in London at least three pamphlets or books in the same strain. One of these, "_The Compassionate Samaritan unbinding the Conscience_," need be remembered by its name only; but the other two must be associated with their authors. One bore the striking title "_The Bloudy Tenent_ [i. e. _Bloody Tenet] of Persecution for cause of Conscience, discussed in a Conference between Truth and Peace_," (pp. 247); the other bore, in its first edition, the simple title, "_M. S. to A.S._," and, in its second edition, in the same year, this fuller title "_A Reply of Two of the Brethren to A.S., &c.; with a Plea for Liberty of Conscience for the Apologists' Church-way, against the Cavils of the said A. S_." Though both were anonymous, the authors were known at the time. The author of the first was that Americanized Welshman, ROGER WILLIAMS, whose strange previous career, from his first arrival in New England in 1631, on to his settlement among the Narraganset Bay Indians in 1638, and his subsequent vagaries of opinion and of action, has already been sketched (Vol. II. 560-563, and 600-602). He had been over in England, it will be remembered, since June 1643, in the capacity of envoy or commissioner from the Rhode Island people, to obtain a charter for erecting Rhode Island and the adjacent Providence Plantation into a distinct and independent colony. He had been going about England a good deal, but had been mostly in London, in the society of the younger Vane, and in frequent contact with other leading men in Parliament and in the Westminster Assembly. The _Bloody Tenent_ was an expression, in printed form, of opinions he had been ventilating frankly enough in conversation, and was intended as a parting-gift to England before his return to America. The title must have at once attracted attention to it and given it an advantage over the other tract. The author of that other tract was our other well-known friend Mr. JOHN GOODWIN, Vicar of St. Stephen's, Coleman Street, whom the Presbyterians had put in their black books as an Arminian, Socinian, and what not (Vol. II. 582-584). Goodwill's piece may have been out first, for it is heard of as in circulation in May 1644, while Williams's book is not heard of, I think, till June or July. But, on all grounds, Williams deserves the priority. [Footnote: For statements in this paragraph authorities are-- _Apologetic Narration_ (1644); Hanbury's Historical Memorials, II. 341 _et seq._; Reprint of _The Bloody Tenent_ by the Hanserd Knollys Society (1848), with Mr. Underhill's "Biographical Introduction," pp. xxiii.-iv.; Jackson's _Life of John Goodwin_, p. 114 _et seq._; Baillie's Letters, II. 180,181, and 211, 212, and Commons Journals, Aug. 9, 1644.]

Well may the Americans be proud of Roger Williams. His _Bloody Tenent_ is of a piece with all his previous career. It is a rapid, hurried book, written, as it tells us, during the author's stay in England, "in change of rooms and corners, yea sometimes in variety of strange houses, sometimes in the fields in the midst of travel." One particularly notes the frequent "&c." in its sentences, as if much crowded on the writer's mind from moment to moment which he could indicate only by a contraction. But there is dash in the book, the keenest earnestness and evidence of a mind made up, and every now and then a mystic softness and richness of pity, yearning towards a voluptuous imagery like that of the Song of Solomon. The plan is straggling. First there is a list of twelve positions which the book proves, or heads under which its contents may be distributed. Then there is an address or dedication to "the Right Honourable Both Houses of the High Court of Parliament," followed by a separate address "To every Courteous Reader." Then there comes a copy of" Scriptures and Reasons written long since by a Witness of Jesus Christ, close prisoner in Newgate, against Persecution in cause of Conscience"--in fact, an extract from a tract on Liberty of Conscience by Murton, or some other London Baptist, in 1620. A copy of those Scriptures and Reasons against Persecution had, it seems, been submitted in 1635 to Mr. Cotton of Boston for his consideration; and Mr. Cotton had drawn up a Reply, defending from Scripture, past universal practice, and the authority of Calvin, Beza, and others of the Reformers, the right of the civil magistrate to prosecute and punish religious error. This Reply of Cotton's in favour of persecution is printed at length by Williams; and the first part of the real body of his own book consists of a Dialogue between Truth and Peace over the doctrine which so respectable a New England minister had thus espoused. When this Dialogue is over; there ensues a second Dialogue of Truth and Peace over another New England document in which the same "bloody tenet" of persecution had been defended-to wit a certain "Model of Church and Civil Power" drawn up by some New England ministers in concert, and in which Mr. Cotton had had a hand, though Mr. Richard Mather appears to have been the chief author. [Footnote: Some particulars in this description of the treatise are from Mr. Underhill's Introduction to the Hanserd Knolly's Society's Reprint of it, but the description in the main is from the _Bloody Treatment_ itself.]

The texture of Williams's treatise, it will be thus seen, is loose and composite. But a singular unity of purpose and spirit runs through it. Here is the opening of the first Dialogue:--

_Truth_. In what dark corner of the world, sweet Peace, are we two met? How hath this present evil world banished me from all the coasts and corners of it! And how hath the righteous God in judgment taken thee from the earth: Rev. vi. 4.

_Peace_. It is lamentably true, blessed Truth: the foundations of the world have long been out of course; the gates of Earth and Hell have conspired together to intercept our joyful meeting and our holy kisses. With what a wearied, tired wing have I flown over nations, kingdoms, cities, towns, to find out precious Truth!

_Truth_. The like inquiries in my flights and travels have I made for Peace, and still am told she hath left the Earth and fled to Heaven.

_Peace_. Dear Truth, what is the Earth but a dungeon of darkness, where Truth is not?

_Truth_. And what is the Peace thereof but a fleeting dream, thine ape and counterfeit?

_Peace_. Oh! where is the promise of the God of Heaven, that Righteousness and Peace shall kiss each other?

_Truth_. Patience, sweet Peace! These Heavens and Earth are growing old, and shall be changed like a garment: Psalm cii. They shall melt away, and be burnt up with all the works that are therein; and the Most High Eternal Creator shall gloriously create new Heavens and new Earth, wherein dwells righteousness: 2 Pet. iii. Our kisses then shall have their endless date of pure and sweetest joys. Till then both thou and I must hope, and wait, and bear the fury of the Dragon's wrath, whose monstrous lies and furies shall with himself be cast into the lake of fire, the second death: Rev. xx.

_Peace_. Most precious Truth, thou knowest we are both pursued and laid for. Mine heart is full of sighs, mine eyes with tears. Where can I better vent my full oppressed bosom than into thine, whose faithful lips may for these few hours revive my drooping, wandering spirits, and here begin to wipe tears from mine eyes, and the eyes of my dearest children.

_Truth_. Sweet daughter of the God of peace, begin.

And so Truth and Peace hold their long discourse, evolving very much that doctrine of the absolute Liberty of Conscience, as derivable from, or radically identical with, the idea of the utter distinctness of the Church of Christ from the world or civil society, which had been propounded first by the Brownists and Baptists, and had come down as a tradition from them. But it is evolved by Williams more boldly and passionately than by any before him. There is a fine union throughout of warmth of personal Christian feeling with intellectual resoluteness in accepting every possible consequence of his main principle. Here are a few phrases from the marginal summaries which give the substance of the Dialogue, page after page:--"The Church and civil State confusedly made all one"; "The civil magistrates bound to preserve the bodies of their subjects, and not to destroy them for conscience sake"; "The civil sword may make a nation of hypocrites and anti-Christians, but not one Christian"; "Evil is always evil, yet permission of it may in case be good"; "Christ Jesus the deepest politician that ever was, and yet he commands a toleration of anti-Christians"; "Seducing teachers, either Pagan, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-Christian, may yet be obedient subjects to the civil laws"; "Christ's lilies may flourish in his Church, notwithstanding the abundance of weeds in the world permitted"; "The absolute sufficiency of the sword of the Spirit"; "A National Church not instituted by Christ Jesus"; "The civil commonweal and the spiritual commonweal, the Church, not inconsistent, though independent the one on the other"; "Forcing of men to godliness or God's worship the greatest cause of breach of civil peace"; "Master of a family under the Gospel not charged to force all under him from their consciences to his"; "Few magistrates, few men, spiritually and Christianly good: yet divers sorts of goodness, natural, artificial, civil, &c."; "Persons may with less sin be forced to marry whom they cannot love than to worship where they cannot believe"; "Christ Jesus never appointed a maintenance of ministers from the unconverted and unbelieving: [but] they that compel men to hear compel men also to pay for their hearing and conversion"; "The civil power owes _three_ things to the true Church of Christ--(l) Approbation, (2) Submission [i.e. interpreted in the text to be personal submission of the civil magistrate to church-membership, if he himself believes], (3) Protection"; "The civil magistrate owes _two_ things to false worshippers--(1) Permission, (2) Protection."--Whoever has read this string of phrases possesses the marrow of Williams's treatise. At the end of it there is an interesting discussion of the question whether only church-members, or "godly persons in a particular church-estate," ought to be eligible to be magistrates. To Williams, who was a pure democrat in politics, and was founding the new State of Rhode Island on the basis of the equal suffrages of all the colonists, this was an important practical question. He decides it with great good sense, and clearly in the negative. Without denying that the appointment of godly persons to civil offices was a thing to be prayed for, and, wherever possible, peaceably endeavoured, he points out that the principle that only Christian persons should be entrusted with civil rule is practically preposterous. Five-sixths of the world had never heard of Christ, and yet there were lawful enough civil states in those parts of the world. Then, in a Christian monarchy, what a convulsion, what a throwing away of the benefits of hereditary succession, if it had to be inquired, whenever the throne became vacant, whether the next heir was of the right sort religiously. Finally, in any Christian colony or town, would it not be a turning of everything upside down, and a premium upon hypocrisy, to make church-membership a necessary qualification for magistracy, and so, when a magistrate lapsed into what was thought religious error, and had to be excommunicated by his church, to have to turn him out of his civil office also?

Williams, it is to be remembered, had held these views while he was yet only a Congregationalist generally, and before he had become a Baptist. Though he found them among the Baptists, therefore, he may be said to have recovered them for Independency at large, and to have been the first to impregnate modern "Independency" with them through and through. Nay, as he had himself gone out of the camp of the mere Baptist Congregationalists when he published his treatise,--as he had begun to question whether there was any true Visible Church in the world at all, any perfect pastorate in any nation, anything else under the sun of a Christian kind than a chance-medley of various preaching and effort into which God might sooner or later send new shafts of light and direction from heaven--in the view of all this, Williams has to be regarded as the father of a speculation that cannot be contained within the name of Independency, even at its broadest. If we were forced to adopt a modern designation for him, we should call him. the father of all that, since his time, has figured, anywhere in Great Britain, or in the United States, or in the British Colonies, under the name of _Voluntaryism_. This involves a restriction on the one hand. Since his time, there has been an abundance of speculation in the world as to the true duties and limits of the power of a State even in civil matters; and the prevailing effect of these speculations has been to hand over more and more of the care of human well-being and human destinies, in everything whatsoever, to the liberty of individuals, the pressure of their competing desires, and their powers of voluntary association, and so to reduce the function of the magistrate or any power of corporate rule to a thing becoming small by degrees and beautifully less. Of late, this tendency, victorious already in many matters, has tried to assert itself in the question of Education. It has been maintained that there should be no attention on the part of the State to the education of the citizens, but that, in the matter of learning to read and write and of all farther learning or mental training, the individuals horn into a community should be left to their hereditary chances, the discretion or kindness of those about them, and their own power of gradually finding out what they need, and buying it or begging it. Now with this direction of modern speculation the intentions of Roger Williams had nothing to do. He was a democrat in politics, and, as such, he might have gone on to new definitions of what, in secular matters, should be left to the individual, and what should be still regulated by the majority; but what these definitions would have been must be left to inference from the records of his farther political life in Rhode Island. Respecting Schools and Universities he did, indeed, hold that they were not to be regarded as the nurseries of a clergy, the appendages of a Church, or the depositaries and supports of any religious creed. "For any depending of the Church of Christ on such schools," he wrote, "I find not a tittle in the Testament of Christ Jesus." He would certainly, therefore, have been for no expenditure of public money on the _religious_ education of the young, and he would have been for the extraction of all theological teaching out of existing schools and universities. But he "honoured schools," he says," for tongues and arts," and I have found no trace in him of a notion that State support of schools and universities for such secular learning is illegitimate. His _Voluntaryism_, so far as it was declared, or, I believe, intended, was wholly Voluntaryism in the matter of Church and Religion. In that sphere, however, his Voluntaryism was absolute, and went as far as anything calling itself Voluntaryism that has since been heard of in the English- speaking world.

Williams's _Bloody Tenent_, as I have said, was his parting gift to the English nation before his return to America. It was out in June or July 1644; and in September of the same year Williams, after a stay of about fifteen months in and near London, was on his way back to New England. He had succeeded in the immediate object of his mission. For, during his stay in England, the management of the Colonies, till then in the hands of Commissioners under the Crown, was transferred (Nov. 2, 1643) to a Parliamentary Commission of Lords and Commoners, at the head of which was the Earl of Warwick as Lord High Admiral, and among the members of which were Lord Saye and Sele, Pym, the younger Vane, Sir Arthur Haselrig, and Oliver Cromwell. Before such Commissioners, with Vane as his personal friend. Williams had had little difficulty in making out his case; and he had obtained from them a Patent, dated March 14, 1643-4, associating "the towns of Providence, Portsmouth, and Newport," into one body-politic by the name of "the Incorporation of Providence Plantations in Narraganset Bay in New England." This Patent gave a _carte blanche_ to the colonists to settle their own form of government by voluntary consent, or vote, among themselves; and, having it in his pocket, Williams might hope, on his return to America, to set up, in the polity of Rhode Island and its adjacencies, such an example of complete civil democracy combined with absolute religious individualism as the world had never yet seen. The _Bloody Tenent_ might be left in England as an exposition of his theory in the sphere of Religion until this practical Transatlantic example of it should be ready! He had shrewdly taken care, however, to have the Patent in his pocket before issuing the _Bloody Tenent_. Had that book been out first, he might have had some difficulty in obtaining the Patent even from such Commissioners for the Colonies as he had to deal with. Possibly, however, they granted it with full knowledge of Williams, and were willing, through him, to try a bolder experiment in the American wilds than it was possible to promote or to announce in England. [Footnote: Palfrey's New England, I. 633-4, and II. 215; and Gammell's Life of Williams, 119, 120.]

While we have been so long with Roger Williams, his colleague in the Toleration heresy, John Goodwill, has been waiting. He was fifty-one years of age, or six or seven years older than Williams. Rather late in life, he had begun to find himself a much-abused man in London. For, though he had sided with the Parliamentarians zealously from the first, and had even, it appears, taken the Covenant, [Footnote: That Goodwin had taken the Covenant appears from words of his own in a tract of 1646 quoted in Fletcher's Hist, of Independency, IV. 47.] his theology was thought to be lax, [Footnote: The suspicion of Goodwin's Socinianism was as early as November 1613, when he got into trouble with the Assembly on that and other grounds (see Baillie's Letters, II. III, and Lightfoot's Notes, Nov. 8 and 9, 1643).] and the interpretation he was putting on the Covenant was not the common one. He thought that the oath to seek "reformation of religion" and to "endeavour to bring the Church of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity," did not necessarily imply acceptance of the Presbyterian system which the Assembly were bent upon bringing in. Therefore, when the Five Dissenting Brethren of the Assembly appealed to Parliament in their _Apologetical Narration_, they found a champion outside in Goodwin. His championship took the form of that answer to "A. S." (_i.e._ the Scotsman, Adam Steuart, author of the first printed attack on the _Apologetic Narration_) which we have mentioned as appearing with the brief title _M. S. to A. S._, and again, in a second edition, with the fuller title _A Reply of Two of the Brethren to A. S., &c.; with A Plea for Liberty of Conscience, &c_. As the second title implies, Goodwill had associates in the work; but it was principally his, and the part on Toleration wholly his. So far as the tract concerns itself with the question between Presbytery and Congregationalism, Goodwin avows himself a Congregationalist. And yet he was not at one in all points with the five Assembly-men. "I know I am looked upon," he afterwards wrote, "by reason partly of my writings, partly of my practice, as a man very deeply engaged for the Independents' cause against Presbytery. But the truth is, I am neither so whole for the former, nor yet against the latter, as I am, I believe, generally voted in the thoughts of men to be." [Footnote: Quoted, from the Preface to Goodwin's _Anapologesiastes Anapologias_, by Fletcher, IV. 46.] This was written in 1616; but even in 1644 he fought so much for his own hand that the Independents of the Assembly may have but half liked his partnership. His Toleration doctrine, at all events, though uttered in their behalf, was too strong doctrine even for them. Hear what Baillie writes to his friend Spang, at Campvere, in Holland, just after the appearance of Goodwin's tract for the Independents: "_M.S. against A.S._, is John Goodwin of Coleman Street: he names you expressly, and professes to censure the letter of Zeeland. He is a bitter enemy to Presbytery, and is openly for a full liberty of conscience of all sects, even Turks, Jews, Papists, and all to be more openly tolerate than with you [_i.e._ than even in Holland]." [Footnote: Baillie, II. 180, 181. Goodwin's mention of Spang, referred to by Baillie, is as follows:-- "There is a Scottish Church, of which one Spang is a very busy agent, at Trevere [Campvere]... whence the Letter [_i.e._ the Zeeland Letter in favour of Presbytery] came."] Baillie's representation of Goodwin's Toleration doctrine is fair enough. It is not so deep, so exceptionless, and so transcendentally reasoned as Roger Williams's; and indeed there was none of the sap and mystic richness of nature in Goodwin that we find in Williams, but chiefly clear courage, and strong cool sense. For most practical purposes, however, Goodwin's Toleration was thorough. He was for tolerating not merely the orthodox Congregationalists and such more heterodox sects as might be thought respectable, but all religions, sects, and schisms whatsoever, if only the professors of them were otherwise peaceable in the State. Not, of course, that they were not to be reasoned with and proved false publicly; or that heretics in congregations were not to be admonished, and, if obdurate, excommunicated; or that a whole church tainted with a great heresy ought not to be put under a ban by all other churches, and communion with it renounced. All this was assumed in the theory of Church-Independency which was common to Goodwin and Williams. True, Williams, now that he had passed beyond the Baptists and saw no true Church anywhere on earth, must have begun to doubt also the efficacy and validity of even spiritual censures, as exercised by the so-called churches, to regard as a mere agency of troublesome moonshine that incessant watchfulness of each other's errors on which Independency relied, and so to luxuriate in a mood of large charity, sighing over all, and hoping more from prayer and longing and pious well-doing all round than from censures and disputations. To Goodwin, on the other hand, troubled with no such visionary ideas, and fully convinced that a very good model of a Church had been set up in Coleman Street, the right and efficacy of disputation against error, and of ministerial vigilance against error in particular churches, seemed more important, or at least more worth insisting on in a public plea for Toleration. Williams and Goodwill did not differ theoretically, but only practically, over this item in the exposition of their doctrine. The sole difference, of theoretical import, was that Goodwin, in dwelling on the duty of disputation by Christian ministers against false religions and dangerous opinions in society round about them, and of vigilance against minor heresies in their own congregations, talked vaguely of a right on the part of the civil magistrate to admonish ministers in this respect should they be negligent or forgetful of their duty. This, as we know, would have grated on Williams. Perhaps, however, Goodwin, even here, was only throwing a sop to Cerberus. At all events, he comes out finally a thorough Tolerationist. Whatever minister or magistrate may do towards confuting and diminishing error, there is a point at which they must both stop. There is not to be a suppression of false religions, sects and schisms, by fining, imprisoning, disfranchising, banishment, death, or any civil punishment whatsoever; and, when it comes to that, they are all to be tolerated. [Footnote: Jackson's Life of Goodwin. pp. 110, 117; Hanbury's Memorials, II. 341- 365.]

We are now prepared to classify the various forms in which the Toleration Doctrine was urged on the English mind in the year 1644. There were three grades of the doctrine:--

I. _Absolute Liberty of Conscience, and No National Church, or State- interference with Religion, of any kind whatsoever._ This was, in fact, more than Toleration, and Toleration is hardly the fit name for it. The advocates of this idea were Roger Williams, perhaps the Baptists generally, also Burton in a certain way; but, above all, Roger Williams. He did not think there could be Liberty of Conscience, in the perfect and absolute sense, where there was a National Church, even if free dissent were allowed from that Church. For, by the establishment of a Church, he held, a substantial worldly premium was put on certain religious beliefs, and an advantage conferred on a portion of the community at the expense of all; and to be compelled to pay for, or even to acknowledge politically, a Church which one did not approve, was in itself inconsistent with true Liberty of Conscience, whatever freedom of nonconformity might be left to individuals. Accordingly, if Roger Williams, at that crisis, had been a statesman of England, instead of a mere commissioner from an infant colony in America, his advice would have been in this strain:--"It is agreed that the Episcopal or Prelatic Church, called hitherto the Reformed Church of England, is no longer to exist. That is settled; and the question is, What Church Reformation shall there now be? My answer is sweeping and simple. Let there be no National Church, no Church of England, at all, of any kind or form whatsoever. Let England henceforth be a civil State only, in which Christianity shall take care of itself, and all forms of Christianity and all other religions shall have equal rights to protection by the police. Confiscate for the use of the State all the existing revenues of the defunct Church and its belongings, giving such compensation for life- interests therein as may seem reasonable; but create no new Church, nor stump of a Church, round which new interests may gather. Do not even implicate the State so far in the future of Religion as to indicate to the subjects any form of Church as esteemed the best, or any range of option among Churches as presumably the safest. Leave the formation and the sustentation of Christ's Church in the English realm, and everywhere else, entirely to the unseen power of the Spirit, and the free action of those whom the Spirit may make its instruments."--For nothing like this was the Long Parliament, or any other legislature in the world, then prepared; and Williams knew it. But he had faith in the future of his speculation. In America, whither he was to carry it back, he hoped to be able to exhibit it in practice on a small scale in the new colony he was founding; and there could be no harm, he thought, in leaving the leaven to ferment in the denser society of England.

II. _Unlimited Toleration round an Established National Church._ So we may express a form of Tolerationism in which there was a concurrence of persons, and perhaps of bodies of persons, who yet differed from each other in the motives for their concurrence. Williams, of course, accepted this form of Tolerationism, as next best to his own absolute Voluntaryism, Individualism, and universal Liberty of Conscience. "If there is to be in England a National or State Church of some kind (which I think wrong, and so wrong that I will take no part in the debate what kind of National Church would be best, whether a Prelatic, Presbyterian, or any other), at least, when you have set up such a Church, let there be a perfect toleration for all subjects of the realm round about that Church, no compulsion on any of them to belong to that Church, no pains and penalties for any profession of belief or disbelief, or any form of worship or no-worship, out of that Church." These are not Williams's own words, but they exactly express his meaning; and, in fact, he intended his _Bloody Tenent_ to be a plea for toleration in this practical sense, if it should fail in winning people to his higher and more peculiar idea of real Liberty of Conscience. And a most eloquent plea it was. He insists again and again on the necessity that there should be no limits to the toleration of Religious Difference in a state. He argues expressly that not only orthodox or slightly heterodox dissenters should have the benefit of such toleration, but all kinds of dissentients without exception, Papists, Jews, Mohammedans, Pagans, or Infidels. He knew what a hard battle lie was fighting. "I confess I have little hope," he said, "till those flames are over, that this discourse against the doctrine of persecution for cause of conscience should pass current, I say not amongst the wolves and lions, but even amongst the sheep of Christ themselves. Yet, _liberavi animam meam_: I have not hid within my breast my soul's belief." He trusted, doubtless, that his treatise might have some effect, if not for its highest purpose, at least as a practical plea for unlimited toleration round the new National Church of England that was to be. And here most of the Baptists were in the same predicament with Williams. They would have preferred no National Church at all; but, as there was to be a National Church, they wanted the amplest toleration round it. Burton also was pretty nearly in the same category. He too doubted the lawfulness of a State Church of any kind, but was earnest that, if such must be established, it should not be coercive. He did not formally demand unlimited toleration, and indeed conceded something in words to the effect that in cases of "known heresy, or blasphemy, or idolatry," offenders would have to be "obnoxious to the Civil Power;" but I rather think that the concession was prudential, and that his heart did not go with it. I will retain him therefore among the Unlimited Tolerationists. Far outshining him in this class, however, was John Goodwin.--Well, but were the advocates of unlimited toleration in connexion with an Established Church exclusively persons who would have prevented the formation of such a Church if they could, or doubted its righteousness and propriety, and who only insisted on Toleration _with_ such a Church as a practical necessity to which they were driven? Were there no theorists in that time who positively desired an Established Church on its own account, and for the general good of the community, but who had worked out the conclusion that such a Church might consist, and ought to consist, with universal Religious Toleration, or the freest liberty of Nonconformity and Dissent? In view of the fact that this is the theory of Establishments evolved by some of the best ecclesiastical spirits in our own later times, the question is interesting. My researches do not enable me to give a very precise answer to it applicable to the exact year 1644. If there were such theorists, however, they were, I should say, among those wiser and younger sons of the Episcopal Church of England who would fain have preserved that Episcopal Church, but had privately made up their minds that Laud's basis for that Church was untenable, and that a very different basis must be substituted. One thinks of Chillingworth, Hales, and the rest of that "Latitudinarian" brotherhood; one thinks of Jeremy Taylor; one thinks of the candid Fuller; one thinks even of the Calvinistic Usher. Chillingworth had died at Chichester, Jan. 30, 1643-4, at the age of forty-one, an avowed Royalist, and indeed a Royalist prisoner-at-war, tended on his death-bed by Presbyterians. [Footnote: Wood's Ath. III. 93, 94; and Life of Chillingworth prefixed to the Oxford edition of his Works.] Whatever hardy cogitations had been in his mind, pointing to a revived Episcopal Church of England with an ample toleration within it and round about it, had gone prematurely to the grave. The others were still alive, also pronounced Royalists, and acting or suffering more or less on that side; and whatever thoughts they had in the direction under notice were irrelevant to their immediate duty and opportunities, and had to wait for utterance at a more convenient season. [Footnote: Yet there _had_ been one recent utterance of Hales relating to the idea of Toleration. It was in the form of _A Tract concerning Schism and Schismatics_, which he had prepared in 1636, partly for the use of his friend Chillingworth then engaged on his "Religion of Protestants," but which, in deference to Laud's private objections and remonstrances, he had kept unpublished. In 1642, when Laud was in prison and the state of things wholly changed, the Tract was brought out at the Oxford University Press. It is vague in its conception and expression; but that it is decidedly in favour of toleration and free inquiry will appear from the opening sentences: "Heresy and Schism, as they are in common use, are two theological [Greek: Mosmos], or scarecrows, which they who uphold a party in religion use to fright away such as, making inquiry into it, are ready to relinquish and oppose it if it appear either erroneous or suspicious. For, as Plutarch reports of a painter who, having unskilfully painted a cock, chased away all cocks and hens, that so the imperfection of his art might not appear by comparison with nature, so men, willing for ends to admit of no fancy but their own, endeavour to hinder an inquiry into it, by way of comparison of somewhat with it, peradventure truer, that so the deformity of their own might not appear." Wood's Ath. III. 413, 414, and Tract itself with letter to Laud, Vol. I. pp. 114-144 of "The Works of the ever memorable Mr. John Hales," Glasgow, 1765.] On the whole, however, I judge that any such thoughts in their minds (even in Jeremy Taylor's as yet) fell considerably short of the Unlimited Toleration advocated by Williams and John Goodwin, and, if they could have been ascertained and measured, would have referred their owners rather to the next category than to the present.

III. _A Limited Toleration round an Established National Church._ This would probably have sufficed the thoughtful Anglicans of whom we have just been speaking. Their ideal probably was a revived Episcopal Church of England, liberally constituted within itself, and with a toleration of all respectable forms of Dissent round about itself, but still with a right reserved for the Civil Power of preventing and punishing gross errors and schisms. We are more concerned, however, with another set of Limited Tolerationists, then much more conspicuous in England. They were those who had given up all thoughts of the retention of a Prelatic Establishment, and who indeed regarded the deliverance of England from such an Establishment as the noblest accomplished fact of the time. What they were anxious about was the nature of the new National Church, if any, that was to be substituted, and especially the degree of conformity to that Church that was to be required. The chief representatives of this state of feeling in its more moderate form were the Five Independent Divines of the Assembly, Messrs. Thomas Goodwin, Bridge, Nye, Simpson, and Burroughs. They were not, I think, distinctly adverse to a National Church on theoretical grounds, as Williams and Burton were; and probably what they would have liked best would have been a National Church on the Congregationalist principle, like that of New England. For, though Congregationalism and a National Establishment of Religion may seem radically a contradiction in terms, yet in fact the case had not been quite so in America. There may be a State Church without public endowments, or rather there may be endowments and privileges that are not pecuniary. The New England Church, though consisting of a few scores of congregations, mutually independent, self- supporting, and scattered stragglingly over an extensive territory, was really a kind of State Church collectively, inasmuch as the State required, by rule or by custom, membership of some congregation as a qualification for suffrage and office, and also kept some watch and control over the congregations, so as to be sure that none were formed of a very heretical kind, and that none already formed lapsed into decided heresy. How had Mr. Cotton of Boston, the great light of the New England Church, expounded its principle in respect of the power of the civil magistrate in matters of Religion? "We readily grant you," he had written, "liberty of conscience is to be granted to men that fear God indeed, as knowing they will not persist in heresy or turbulent schism when they are convinced in conscience of the sinfulness thereof. But the question is whether an heretic, after once or twice admonition, and so after conviction, or any other scandalous and heinous offender, may be tolerated, either in the Church without excommunication, or in the Commonwealth without such punishment as may preserve others from dangerous and damnable infection." [Footnote: From Cotton's Answer to the old Tract of "Scriptures and Reasons against Persecution" (see _antè_, p. 114). The Answer is printed by Williams in his _Bloody Tenent_: See Hanserd Knollys Society edition (1848), p. 30.]

Clearly, with such a principle, and with all the particulars of practice which it implied, the Congregationalist Church of New England was, after all, a State Church, and a pretty strict State Church too. Now, it was probably such a National Congregationalist Church, but with an allowance of toleration somewhat larger than Cotton's, that the Five Independents of the Assembly would have liked to see set up in England. That, however, being plainly out of the question, and the whole current of dominant opinion in Parliament and the Assembly being towards a Presbyterian settlement, what remained for the Five? In the first place, to delay the Presbyterian settlement as long as they could, and to criticise its programme at every stage so as to liberalize its provisions as much as possible; in the second place, to put in a plea for Toleration for Dissent under the settlement when it should be enacted. They had performed, and were performing, both duties. They were fighting the propositions of strict Presbytery inch by inch in the Assembly, if not with success, at least so as to impede progress; and in their _Apologetical Narration_ (Jan. 1643-4) they had lodged with Parliament and the country a demand for Toleration under the coming Presbytery. What they had thus expressed in print they had continued to express in speech and in every other possible way. They were, in a certain sense, the most marked Tolerationists of the time; Toleration was identified with them. And yet it was but a limited Toleration, a very limited Toleration, that they demanded. Indulgence for themselves in Congregationalist practices after Presbytery should be established, and indulgence for other respectable sects and persons in "lesser differences:" that was all. Nothing like Williams's or John Goodwill's toleration: no liberty, or at least none avowedly, for such glaring heresies as Antinomianism, Socinianism, and Arianism, not to mention open Infidelity. Here, I believe, they represented the mass of the ordinary Independents. Whatever more a few strong spirits among the Independents, and especially among the lay Independents, desired, the mass of them were content for the present to be Limited Tolerationists.

Such were the three forms of the Toleration Doctrine in England in 1644. They were of unequal strengths and confusedly mixed, but constituted together a powerful and growing force of opinion. And what was the opposition? ANTI-TOLERATION, OR ABSOLUTE AND ENTIRE CONFORMITY OF THE WHOLE NATION TO THE ONE ESTABLISHED CHURCH: this was the category of the opposition.

In this category, now that Prelacy was done with, and it was certain that the new National Church was to be on the Presbyterian model, the Presbyterians had succeeded the Laudians. As a body, the Presbyterians of 1644 and subsequent years were absolute Anti-Tolerationists. The proofs are so abundant, collectively they make such an ocean, that it passes comprehension how the contrary could ever have been asserted. From the first appearance of the Presbyterians in force after the opening of the Long Parliament, it was their anxiety to beat down the rising idea of Toleration; and, after the meeting of the Westminster Assembly, and the publication of the _Apologetical Narration_ of the Independents, the one aim of the Presbyterians was to tie Toleration round the neck of Independency, stuff the two struggling monsters into one sack, and sink them to the bottom of the sea. In all the Presbyterian literature of the time,--Baillie's Letters, Rutherford's and Gillespie's Tracts, the pamphlets of English Presbyterian Divines in the Assembly, the pamphlets of Prynne, Bastwick, and other miscellaneous Presbyterian controversialists out of the Assembly,--this antipathy to Toleration, limited or unlimited, this desire to pinion Independency and Toleration together in one common death, appears overwhelmingly. Out of scores of such Presbyterian manifestoes, let us select one, interesting to us for certain reasons apart.

Of all the Divines in London, not members of the Assembly, none had come to be better known for his Presbyterian acrimony than the veteran Mr. Thomas Edwards, of whose maiden pamphlet of 1641, called _Reasons against the Independent Government_, with Mrs. Chidley's Reply to the same, we have had occasion to take notice (_antè_, p. 110). The spirited verbosity, as we called it, of that pamphlet of Edwards had procured him a reputation among the Presbyterians, which he felt himself bound to justify by farther efforts. The appearance of the _Apologetical Narration_ of the Five Independents in Jan. 1643-4 gave him a famous opportunity. Various answers were at once or quickly published to that Independent manifesto--not only that by _A. S._ or Adam Steuart (_antè_, p. 25), but various others. When it became known, however, that Mr. Edwards also was preparing an Answer, it was expected to beat them all. There was a flutter of anticipation of it among the Presbyterians; but it was rather slow in coming. "There is a piece of 26 sheets, of Mr. Edwards, against the Apologetick Narration, near printed, which will paint that faction [the Independents] in clearer colours than yet they have appeared," writes Baillie, June 7, 1644; in a later letter, July 5, he says it is expected "within two or three days," but "excresced to near 40 sheets;" and it is not till Aug. 7 that he speaks of it as fairly out: "Mr. Edwards has written a splendid confutation of all the Independents' Apology." [Footnote: Baillie, II. 190, 201-2, and 215.] In fact, it appeared in the end of July, just at the time when the Assembly adjourned for their fortnight's vacation, and almost contemporaneously with John Goodwin's _M. S. to A. S._ and Williams's _Bloody Tenent_. Baillie's measure of "sheets" must have been different from ours, or he had been under some mistake; for the treatise, though long enough, consisted but of 367 small quarto pages, with this title: "_Antapologia: or, A Full Answer to the Apologetical Narration of Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, Mr. Simpson, Mr. Burroughs, Mr. Bridge, members of the Assembly of Divines. Wherein many of the controversies of these times are handled: viz. [&c.]. Humbly also submitted to the Honourable Houses of Parliament. By Thomas Edwards, Minister of the Gospel_." [Footnote: Hanbury's Memorials, II. 366. Mr. Hanbury gives a summary of the _Antapologia_ with extracts (366- 385); but I have before me the book itself in a reprint, of 1646, "by T.R. and E.M. for Ralph Smith, at the signe of the Bible in Cornhill neer the Royall Exchange." It consists of 259 pages of text, besides introductory epistle, and table of contents at the end.]

It was a most remarkable treatise, and ran through London at once. For the style, though slovenly, was fluent and popular, and Edwards, having plenty of time on his hands, and having a taste for personalities, had made minute inquiries into the antecedents of the Five Independents in Holland and in England, and had interwoven the results of these inquiries with his arguments against Independency itself. The Five, he tells us in a preliminary epistle, were among his personal acquaintances. "I can truly speak it," he says, "that this present _Antapologia_ is so far from being written out of any malice or ill-will to the Apologists that I love their persons and value them as brethren, yea some of them above brethren; and, besides that love I bear to them as saints, I have a personal love, and a particular love of friendship for some of them; and I can truly speak it, that I writ not this book, nor any part of it, out of any personal quarrel, old grudge, or former difference (for to this day there never was any such difference or unkindness passed between us); but I have writ it with much sorrow, unwillingness, and some kind of conflict." This explanation was certainly necessary; for Mr. Edwards does not spare his friends. He tells all he has found out about them; he quotes their conversations with himself; he gives them the lie direct, and appeals to their consciences whether he is not right in doing so. _They_ martyrs! _they_ poor exiles in Holland, and now whining to Parliament that they would have to go into exile again if Presbyterianism were established without a Toleration! Why, they had been in clover in Holland; they had been living there "in safety, plenty, pomp, and ease," leaving the genuine Puritans at home to fight it out with Prelacy; and, after the battle was won, they had slunk back to claim the rewards they had not earned, to become pets and "grandees" in English society, to secure good appointments and assume leading parts, and to be elected members of the venerable Westminster Assembly! They had not even had the courage to go to New England, though some of them had talked of doing so! And then their prate of this emigration to New England, which they had themselves declined, as the greatest undertaking for the sake of pure Religion, next to Abraham's migration out of his own country, that the world had ever seen! Why, the emigration to New England was no such great affair after all! There had been mixed motives in it; all New England would not make a twentieth part of London; it had but two or three Divines in it worth naming in the same breath with the worthies of Old England, and was on the whole but a kind of outlandish mess; the "Reformation in Church-government and worship" then going on in Old England would be a wonder "to all generations to come far beyond that of New England!" But in Holland, where the cowardly Apologists had preferred to stay, what had they been doing? Quarrelling among themselves, going into all kinds of conceits, anointing people with oil, and the like; respecting all which Edwards had obtained from Rotterdam and Arnheim a budget of information! Then that lie of the Apologists, that they had, since their return to England, been careful not to press their peculiar Congregationalist opinions, or endeavour to make a party, but had waited in patience to see what course affairs would take! Not press their peculiar opinions--not endeavour to make a party! Why, Mr. Edwards could aver (and cite dates, places, and witnesses to prove it) that they had been doing nothing else, since they came to England, than press their peculiar opinions and endeavour to make a party! "Suffer me to deal plainly with you: I am persuaded that, setting aside the Jesuits' acting for themselves and way, you Five have acted for yourselves and way, both by yourselves and by your instruments, both upon the stage and behind the curtain, considering circumstances and laying all things together, more than any five men have done in so short a time this sixty years. And, if it be not so, whence have come all these swarms and troops of Independents in Ministry, Armies, City, Country, Gentry, and amongst the Common People of all sorts, men, women, servants, children?"

So, on and on, Edwards goes, decidedly more readable than most pamphleteers of the time, because he writes with some spirit, and mixes a continual pepper of personalities with his arguments against the tenets of the Independents. With these arguments we shall not meddle. Their purpose was to hold up "a true glass to behold the faces of Presbytery and Independency in, with the beauty, order, strength, of the one, and the deformity, disorder, and weakness of the other." In other words, the pamphlet is a digest of everything that could be said against Independency and in favour of Presbyterianism. But the grand tenet of Presbyterianism in which Mr. Edwards revels with most delight, and which he exhibits as the distinguishing honour of that system, and its fitness beyond any other for grappling with the impiety of men in general and the disorderliness of that age in particular, is its uncompromising Anti- Toleration. Throughout the whole pamphlet there runs a vein of declamation to this effect; and at the close some twenty pages are expressly devoted to the subject, in connexion with that claim for a Limited Toleration which the Apologists had advanced. Eight Reasons are stated and expounded why there should not be even this Limited Toleration, why even Congregationalist opinions and practice should not be tolerated in England. It would be against the rule of Scripture as to the duty of the civil magistrate; it would be against the Solemn League and Covenant; it would be against the very nature of a national Reformation, for "a Reformation, and a Toleration are diametrically opposite;" it would be "against the judgment of the greatest lights in the Church, both ancient and modern;" it would be an invitation and temptation to error and "an occasion of many falling who otherwise never would;" &c. &c. Wherever Presbytery and strict Anti-Toleration had prevailed since the Reformation had there not been a marvellous orderliness and freedom from error and heresy? All over the map of Europe would it not be found that error and heresy had been rank precisely in proportion to the deviation of a country from Presbytery or to the relaxation of its grasp where it was nominally professed? What, in particular, had made Scotland the country it was, pure in faith, united in action, and with a Church "terrible as an army with banners"? What but Presbytery and Anti-Toleration? O then let Presbytery and Anti-Toleration reign in England as well! And, while they were proceeding to the great work of establishing Presbytery, let them beware of such an inconsistency as granting the least promise beforehand of a Toleration! On this point Mr. Edwards addresses the Parliament in his own name, telling them that Toleration is the device of the Devil. "I humbly beseech the Parliament," he says, "seriously to consider the depths of Satan in this design of a Toleration; how this is now his last plot and design, and by it would undermine and frustrate the whole work of Reformation intended. 'Tis his masterpiece for England; and, for effecting it, he comes and moves, not in Prelates and Bishops, not in furious Anabaptists, &c., but in holy men, excellent preachers; moderate and fair men, not for a toleration of heresies and gross opinions, but an 'allowance of a latitude to some lesser differences with peaceableness.' This is _Candidus ille Diabolus_ [that White Devil], as Luther speaks, and _meridianus Diabolus_ [mid-day Devil], as Johannes Gersonius and Beza express it, coming under the merits of much suffering and well-deserving, clad in the white garments of innocency and holiness. In a word, could the Devil effect a Toleration, he would think he had gained well by the Reformation and made a good exchange of the Hierarchy to have a Toleration for it. I am confident of it, upon serious thoughts, and long searching into this point of the evils and mischief of a Toleration, that, if the Devil had his choice whether the Hierarchy, Ceremonies, and Liturgy should be established in this kingdom, or a Toleration granted, he would choose and prefer a Toleration before them."

Did Mr. Thomas Edwards in all this represent the whole body of the Presbyterians of his time? I am afraid he did. In _his_ very sense, with the same vehemency, and to the same extent, they were all Anti- Tolerationists.

Was there no exception? Had no one Presbyterian of that day worked out, in the interest of Presbytery, a conclusion corresponding to that which we have seen reason to think some of the wiser Anglicans then within the Royalist lines were quietly working out in the interest of Episcopacy, in case Episcopacy should ever again have a chance? Was no one Presbyterian prepared to come forth with the proposal of a Toleration in England, either limited or unlimited, round an Established National Church on the Presbyterian model? That there may not have been some such person among those Erastian laymen who favoured Presbytery on the whole for general and political reasons, one would not assert positively. None such, however, is distinctly in historical view; and it is certain that among the real or dominant Presbyterians, the _jure divino_ Presbyterians, English or Scottish, there was no one upon whom the idea in question had clearly dawned or who dared to divulge it. Perhaps it was the belief in the absolute _jus divinum_ of Presbytery that made the idea impossible to them. Yet why should it have been impossible in consistency even with that belief? It may be _jure divino_ that the square on the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the sides, that he is a blockhead who believes otherwise, and that a permanent apparatus should be set up in every land for teaching this mathematical faith; and yet it may be equally _jure divino_ that no one shall be compelled to avail himself of that apparatus, or be punished for doubting or denying the proposition. But the Presbyterians of 1644 did not so refine or argue. They stood stoutly to the necessary identity of Presbyterianism and absolute Anti-Toleration. And so Presbyterianism missed the most magnificent opportunity she has had in her history. Had her offer to England been "Presbytery with a Toleration," who knows what a different shaping subsequent events might have assumed? What if Henderson, in whose natural disposition one sees more of room and aptitude for the idea than in that of any other Presbyterian leader, had actually become possessed with the idea and had proclaimed it? Would he have carried the mass of the Presbyterians with him? or would they have deposed him from the leadership? It is useless to inquire. The idea never occurred even to Henderson; and that it did not occur to him constituted his unfitness for leadership, out of Scotland, in the complex crisis which had at last arrived, and was the one weakness of his career near its close.

MULTIPLICATION OF HERESIES: SYNOPSIS OF ENGLISH SECTS AND SECTARIES IN 1644.

It was all very well, the Presbyterians argued, to propound the principle of Toleration in the abstract. Would its advocates be so good as to think of its operation in the concrete? The society of England was no longer composed merely of the traditional PAPISTS, PRELATISTS, PRESBYTERIANS, and CONGREGATIONALISTS or ORTHODOX INDEPENDENTS. Beyond these last, though sheltering themselves under the unfortunate principle of Church- Independency, there was now a vast chaos of SECTS and SECTARIES, some of them maintaining the most dangerous and damnable heresies and blasphemies! Would the Tolerationists, and especially the Limited Tolerationists, take a survey of this chaos, and consider how their principle of Toleration would work when applied to _its_ ghastly bulk and variety?

This matter, of the extraordinary multiplication of Sects and Heresies in England, had been in constant public discussion since the opening of the Long Parliament. It had figured constantly in messages and declarations of the King; who had first charged the fact of the sudden appearance and boldness of the Sects and Sectaries to the abrogation of his Kingly prerogative and Episcopal government by the Parliament, and had then attributed the origin of the Civil War to the lawless machinations of these same Sects and Sectaries. It had figured no less, though with very different interpretations and comments, in the proceedings and appeals of the Parliament. Now, however, the SECTS and SECTARIES had become the objects of a more purely scientific curiosity. Without a survey and study of _them_ as well as of the PAPISTS, the PRELATISTS, the PRESBYTERIANS, and the ORTHODOX INDEPENDENTS, there could, it was argued, be no complete Natural History of Religious Opinion in England in the year 1644. The Presbyterians, for reasons of their own, were earnest for such a survey and study; and they recommended it ironically to the Orthodox Independents in their character of Tolerationists. Not the less did the Presbyterians, with some Prelatists among them, undertake it themselves.- -Coming after these authorities, and availing myself of their inquiries, but with other authorities to aid me, and as much of fresh investigation, and of criticism of my authorities, as I can add, I shall attempt what, even for our own forgetful and self-engrossed time, ought to be a not uninteresting portion of the history of bygone English opinion.

This is a case in which the authorities should be mentioned formally at the outset. They are numerous. They include the Lords and Commons Journals, Lightfoot's Notes of the Assembly, Baillie's Letters, Pamphlets of the time _passim_, and even the Registers of the Stationers' Company. Certain particular publications, however (all of the year 1645 or the years immediately following), are of pre-eminent interest, as being attempts at a more or less complete survey of the huge medley or tumult of opinions on religious subjects that had by that time arisen in English society, with some classification of its elements.

The reader will remember Dr. DANIEL FEATLEY, Rector of Lambeth and Acton, the veteran Calvinist who had persisted in attending the Assembly in spite of his disapproval of the Covenant and his adhesion to the theory of a modified Episcopacy, but who had at length (Sept. 30, 1643) been ejected for misdemeanour. His misdemeanour had consisted in maintaining a correspondence with Usher, reflecting on the Assembly and the Parliament, and divulging secrets in the King's interest. For this he had not only been ejected from the Assembly by the Commons, and sequestered from his two livings, but also committed to custody in "the Lord Petre's house in Aldersgate Street," then used by Parliament as a prison for such culprits. To beguile his leisure here, he had occupied himself in revising his notes of a dispute he had held, in Oct. 1642, with a Conventicle of Anabaptists in Southwark, where he had knocked over a certain "Scotchman" and one or two other speakers for the Conventicle. But this revision of his notes of that debate had suggested various extensions and additions; so that, in fact, he had written in prison a complete exposure of Anabaptism. It was ready in January 1644-5, and was published with this title: "_The Dippers Dipt; or, The Anabaptists Duck'd and Plung'd over Head and Ears_," &c. It is a virulent tractate of about 186 pages, reciting the extravagances and enormities attributed to the German Anabaptists, and trying to involve the English Baptists in the odium of such an original, but containing also notices of the English Baptists themselves, and their varieties and ramifications. It became at once popular, and passed through several editions. [Footnote: Commons Journals, Sept. 30 and Oct 3, 1613; Wood's Athenæ, III. 156 _et seq._; and Featley's Epistle Dedicatory to his treatise. The copy of the treatise before me at present is one of the sixth edition, published in 1651, six years after the authors death. It contains a portrait of Featley by W. Marshall, and, among other illustrations, a coarse _ad captandum_ print by the same engraver, exhibiting the "dipping" of men and women naked together in a river.]

A well-known personage in London, of humbler pretensions than Featley, was a certain EPHRAIM PAGET (or PAGIT), commonly called "Old Father Ephraim," who had been parson of the church of St. Edmund in Lombard Street since 1601, and might therefore have seen, and been seen by, Shakespeare. Besides other trifles, he had published, in 1635, a book called "_Christianographia_" or a descriptive enumeration of the various sorts of Christians in the world out of the pale of the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps because he had thus acquired a fondness for the statistics of religious denominations, it occurred to him to write, by way of sequel, a "_Heresiography; or, A Description of the Hereticks and Sectaries of these latter times_." It was published in 1645, soon after Featley's book, from which it borrows hints and phrases. There is an Epistle Dedicatory to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London, very senile in its syntax and punctuation, and containing this touching appeal: "I have lived among you almost a jubilee, and seen your great care and provision to keep the city free from infection, in the shutting up the sick and in carrying them to your pest-houses, in setting warders to keep the whole from the sick, in making of fires and perfuming the streets, in resorting to your churches, in pouring out your prayers to Almighty God, with fasting and alms, to be propitious to you. The plague of Heresy is greater, and you are now in more danger than when you buried five thousand a week." Then, after an Epistle to the Reader, signed "Old Ephraim Pagit," there follows the body of the treatise in about 160 pages. The Anabaptists are taken first, and occupy 55 pages; but a great many other sects are subsequently described, some in a few pages, some in a single paragraph. There is an engraved title-page to the volume, containing small caricatures of six of the chief sorts of Sectaries--Anabaptism being represented by one plump naked fellow dipping another, much plumper, who is reluctantly stooping down on all fours. The book, like Featley's, seems to have sold rapidly. In the third edition of it, however, published in 1646, there is a postscript in which the poor old man tells us that it had cost him much trouble. The sectaries among his own parishioners had quarrelled with him on account of it, and refused to pay him his tithes; nay, as he walked in the streets, he was hooted at and reviled, and somebody had actually affirmed "Doctor Featley's devil to be transmigrated into Old Ephraim Paget." This seems to have cut him to the quick, though he avows his sense of inferiority in learning to the great Doctor. In short, we can see Father Ephraim as a good old silly body, of whom people made fun. [Footnote: Wood's Athenæ, III. 210 _et seq._; and Paget's own treatise.]

Another writer against the Sectaries was the inexhaustible WILLIAM PRYNNE,

That grand scripturient paper-spiller, That endless, needless, margin-filler, So strangely tossed from post to pillar.

There was, indeed, something preternatural in the persistent vitality and industry of this man. Only forty years of age when the Long Parliament released him from his second imprisonment and restored him to society, a ghoul-like creature with a scarred and mutilated face, hiding the loss of his twice-cropped ears under a woollen cowl or nightcap, and mostly sitting alone among his books and papers in his chamber in Lincoln's Inn, taking no regular meals, but occasionally munching bread and refreshing himself with ale, he had at once resumed his polemical habits and mixed himself up as a pamphleteer with all that was going on. As many as thirty fresh publications, to be added to the two-and-twenty or thereabouts already out in his name, had come from his pen between 1640 and 1645, bringing him through about one-fourth part of the series of some 200 books and pamphlets that were to form the long ink-track of his total life. In these recent pamphlets of his he had appeared as a strenuous Parliamentary Presbyterian, an advocate of the Scottish Presbyterianism which was being urged in the Assembly, but with more of Erastianism in his views than might have pleased most of his fellow-Presbyterians. No man more violent against Independency of all sorts, and the idea of Toleration. And so, after various other pamphlets against Independency in general, and this or that Independent in particular, there came from him, in July 1645, [Footnote: Date from my notes from Stationer's Registers.] a quarto of about 50 pages, with this title: "_A Fresh Discovery of some Prodigious new Wandering-Blazing-Stars and Firebrands, styling themselves New Lights, firing our Church and State into new Combustions._" The pamphlet was dedicated to Parliament; and its purpose was to exhibit all the monstrous things that lay in the bosom of what called itself Independency. Hence "Independency" is used by Prynne as a common name for all the varieties of Sectarians as well as for the Congregationalists proper; and his plan is to shock the public and rouse Parliament to action, by giving a collection of specimens, culled from pamphlets of the day, of the "scurrilous, scandalous, and seditious" views put forth, with impunity hitherto, by some of the "Anabaptistical Independent Sectaries and new-lighted Firebrands," Accordingly his tract contains a jumble of the most wild and extravagant sayings against the Assembly, the Scots, and the Parliament itself, that Prynne could pick out from the contemporary pamphlets of the Anabaptists and other Sectaries.[Footnote: Wood's Athenæ, III. 844 _et seq._; Aubrey's Lives (for a notice of Prynne's habits); and the _Fresh Discovery_ itself. The edition before me is the second, dated 1646, and swollen by added matter at the end to over 80 pages.]

Much cleverer and more spirited than Featley, old Ephraim Paget, or Prynne, as a describer and opponent of the Sectaries, was our friend, Mr. Thomas Edwards, of the _Antapologia_ (_antè_, pp. 130-135). That "splendid confutation" of Independency and Tolerationism had so increased Mr. Edwards's fame that the Presbyterians of London had erected a weekly lectureship for him at Christ Church in the heart of the City, that he might "handle these questions and nothing else before all that would come to hear." Thus encouraged, he ranged beyond Independency proper, and employed himself in collecting information respecting the English Sectaries generally; and in about eighteen months, or before the end of 1645, he had ready a treatise (his third in order) entitled "_Gangræna: or, a Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time_." This treatise, consisting of more than 60 pages, he dedicated to Parliament, in an Epistle of twelve pages, hinting at the remissness of Parliament in its dealings with the Sectaries up to that time, and reminding it of its duty. There is all Edwards's fluency of language in the pamphlet, and some real literary talent; so that not only was Edwards's _Gangræna_ a popular Presbyterian book at the time, but it is still valued by bibliographers and antiquarians. As it has come down to us, however, it is not a pamphlet merely, but a concretion of pamphlets. For it was enlarged by the author, in the course of 1646, to eight or nine times its original bulk, by the addition of a Second Part and then a Third Part, containing "New and Farther Discoveries" of the Sectaries, and their opinions and practices. This was because Mr. Edwards had solicited fresh information from all quarters, and it was poured in upon him superabundantly by Presbyterian correspondents. The First Part, as the skimming of the cream by Mr. Edwards himself, is perhaps the richest essentially. The others consist mainly of verifications and additional details, rumours, and anecdotes. Altogether, the Three Parts of Edwards's _Gangræna_ are a curious Presbyterian repertory of facts and scandals respecting the English Independents and Sectaries in and shortly after the year of Marston Moor. The impression which they leave of Mr. Edwards personally is that he was a fluent, rancorous, indefatigable, inquisitorial, and, on the whole, nasty, kind of Christian. [Footnote: Wood's Fasti, I. 413; Baillie's Letters, II. 180, 193, 201, 215, 251: and _Gangræna_ itself--the copy of which before me consists of the third edition of Parts I. and II. (1646) and the first edition of Part III, (1646) bound in two volumes.]

With Featley, Paget, Prynne, and Edwards, as authorities full of detail, though also full of prejudice on the subject of the English Sects and Sectaries of 1644, we may finally name Baillie. We name him now, however, not on account of his "Letters," but on account of two publications of his dealing expressly with this subject. One of these, published in November 1645, in a quarto of 252 pages, was his "_Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time: wherein the Tenets of the Principall Sects, especially of the Independents, are drawn together in one Map, for the most part in the words of their own Authors_;" the other, published in December 1646, in about 180 pages quarto, and intended as a Second Part of the "Dissuasive," was entitled "_Anabaptism, the True Fountain of Independency, Brownisme, Antinomy, &c_." In both publications, but especially in the former, we see Baillie's characteristic merits. He writes, of course, polemically and with strong Presbyterian prejudice; but in clearness of arrangement and statement he is greatly superior to either the senile Paget, or the fluent and credulous Edwards. His _Dissuasive_, indeed, is, in its way, a really instructive book.[Footnote: Both the _Dissuasive_ and its continuation were published in London (by "Samuel Gellebrand at the Brazen Serpent in Paul's Churchyard"), and dedicated to "The Right Honourable the Earle of Lauderdaile, Lord Metellane"--_i.e._ to Baillie's Scottish colleague in the Assembly, Lord Maitland, then become Earl of Lauderdale.]

The information from these and other sources may be summed up, from the Presbyterian point of view, under two headings, as follows:--

I. MISCELLANEOUS BLASPHEMIES AND ENTHUSIASMS.--The very air of England, it seemed, was full of such. There had broken loose a spirit of inquiry, a spirit of profanity and scoffing, and a spirit of religious ecstasy and dreaming; and the three spirits together were producing a perfect Babel of strange sayings, fancies, and speculations. From a catalogue of no fewer than 176 miscellaneous "errors, heresies, and blasphemies" collected by Edwards, and which he professes to give as nearly as possible in the very words in which they had been broached by their authors in print, or in public or private discourse, take the following samples:--

"That the Scriptures are a dead letter, and no more to be credited than the writings of men."

"That the holy writings and sayings of Moses and the Prophets, of Christ and his Apostles, and the proper names, persons, and things contained therein, are allegories."

"That the Scriptures of the Old Testament do not concern nor bind Christians" (in which belief, says Edwards, some Sectaries had ceased to read the Old Testament, or to bind it with the New).

"That right Reason is the rule of Faith."

"That God is the author not of those actions alone in and with which sin is, but of the very pravity, ataxy, atomy, irregularity, and sinfulness itself, which is in them."

"That the magistrate may not punish for blasphemies, nor for denying the Scriptures, nor For denying that there is a God."

"That the soul dies with the body, and all things shall have an end, but God only."

"That there is but one Person in the Divine Nature."

"That Jesus Christ is not very God: no otherwise may he be called the Son of God but as he was man."

"That we did look for great matters from one crucified at Jerusalem 1600 years ago, but that does us no good; it must be a Christ formed in us: Christ came into the world to live 32 years, and do nothing else that he [Thomas Webb, of London, ætat. 20] knew."

"That the Heathen who never heard of Christ by the Word have the Gospel, for every creature, as the sun, moon, and stars, preach the Gospel to men."

"That Christ shall come and live again upon the earth, and for a thousand years reign visibly as an earthly monarch over all the world."

"That the least truth is of more worth than Jesus Christ himself."

"That the Spirit of God dwells not nor works in any; it is but our conceits and mistakes to think so; 'tis no spirit that works but our own."

"That a man baptized with the Holy Ghost knows all things even as God knows all things; which point is a deep mystery and great ocean, where there is no casting anchor, nor sounding the bottom."

"That, if a man by the Spirit knew himself to be in the state of grace, though he did commit murder or drunkenness, God did see no sin in him."

"That the guilt of Adam's sin is imputed to no man."

"That the moral law is of no use at all to believers."

"That there ought to be no fasting days under the Gospel."

"That the soul of man is mortal as the soul of a beast, and dies with the body."

"That Heaven is empty of the Saints till the resurrection of the dead."

"That there is no resurrection at all of the bodies of men after this life, nor no Heaven nor Hell after this life, nor no Devils."

"That there shall be in the last day a resurrection from the dead of all the brute creatures, all beasts and birds that ever lived upon the earth."

"That many Christians in those days have more knowledge than the Apostles."

"That there ought to be in these times no making or building of churches, nor use of church-ordinances; but waiting for a church, being in a readiness upon all occasions to take knowledge of any passenger, of any opinion or tenet whatsoever: the Saints, as pilgrims, do wander as in a temple of smoke, not able to find Religion, and therefore should not plant it by gathering or building a pretended supposed House."

"That, in points of Religion, even in the Articles of Faith and principles of Religion, there's nothing certainly to be believed and built on; only that all men ought to have liberty of conscience and liberty of prophesying."

"That 'tis as lawful to baptize a cat, or a dog, or a chicken, as to baptize the infants of believers."

"That the calling and making of ministers are not _jure divino_, but a minister comes to be so as a merchant, bookseller, carter, and such like."

"That all settled certain maintenance for ministers of the Gospel is unlawful."

"That all days are alike to Christians, and they are bound no more to the observation of the Lord's day, or first day of the week, than of any other."

"That 'tis lawful for women to preach; and why should they not, having gifts as well as men?" ("And some of them," adds Edwards, "do actually preach, having great resort to them.")

"That there is no need of humane learning, nor of reading authors, for preachers; but all books and learning must go down: it comes from the want of the Spirit that men writ such great volumes."

"That 'tis unlawful to preach at all, sent or not sent, but only thus: a man may preach as a waiting disciple, _i.e._ Christians may not preach in a way of positive asserting and declaring things, but all they may do is to confer, reason together, and dispute out things."

"That all singing of Psalms is unlawful."

"That the gift of miracles is not ceased in these times."

"That all the earth is the Saints', and there ought to be a community of goods."

"That 'tis unlawful to fight at all, or to kill any man, yea to kill any of the creatures for our use, as a chicken, or on any other occasion." [Footnote: _Gangræna_, Part I. pp. 15-31.]

From this little enumeration it will be seen that we have not, even in the nineteenth century, advanced so far as perhaps we had thought beyond English notions of the seventeenth. But there must be added a recollection of the scurrilities against the Covenant, the Assembly as a body, its chief Presbyterian members, and the whole Scottish nation and its agents. These had not reached their height at the time with which we are at present concerned (Aug. 1644); so that the richest specimens of them have to be postponed. But already there were popular jokes about "Jack Presbyter" the "black coats" of the Assembly, and their four shillings a day each for doing what nobody wanted; and already a very rude phrase was in circulation, expressing the growing feeling among the English Independents and Sectaries that England might have managed her Reformation better without the aid of the Scots and their Covenant. Had England come to such a pass, it was asked, that it was necessary to set up a Synod in her, to be "guided by the Holy Ghost sent in a cloak-bag from Scotland"? The author of this profanity, according to Prynne, was a pamphleteer named Henry Robinson. It was, in fact, an old joke, originally applied to one of the Councils of the Catholic Church; and Robinson had stolen it. [Footnote: Prynne's _Fresh Discovery_, p.27 and p.9; and _Gangræna_, Part I. p.32]

II. RECOGNISED SECTS AND THEIR LEADERS.--In the general welter or anarchy of opinion there were, of course, vortices round particular centres, forming sects that either had, or might receive, definite names. Edwards, when systematizing his chaos of miscellaneous errors and blasphemies, apportions them among sixteen recognisable sorts of Sectaries; but old Ephraim Paget, who had preceded Edwards had been much more hazy. By jumbling the English Sectaries with all he could recollect of the German Sectaries of the Reformation and all he could hear of the Sects of New England, he had made his list of Sects and subdivisions of Sects mount up to two or three scores. Using Edwards and old Ephraim, with hints from Featley, Prynne, and Baillie, but trying to ascertain the facts for ourselves, we venture on the following synoptical view of English Sects and Sectaries in 1644-5:--

BAPTISTS, OR ANABAPTISTS:--These were by far the most numerous of the Sectaries. Their enemies (Featley, Paget, Edwards, Baillie, &c.) were fond of tracing them to the anarchical German Anabaptists of the Reformation; but they themselves claimed a higher origin. They maintained, as Baptists do still, that in the primitive or Apostolic Church the only baptism practised or heard of was that of adult believers, and that the form of the rite for such was immersion in water; and they maintained farther that the Baptism of Infants was one of those corruptions of Christianity against which there had been a continued protest by pure and forward spirits in different countries, in ages prior to Luther's Reformation, including some of the English Wycliffites, although the protest may have been repeated in a louder manner, and with wild admixtures, by the German Anabaptists who gave Luther so much trouble. Without going back, however, upon the Wycliffites, or even on the Anabaptists that were scattered through England in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, one may date the Baptists as we have now to do with them from the reign of James.----The first London congregation of _General Baptists_, or Baptists who favoured an Arminian theology, had been formed, as we have seen (Vol. II. p. 544), in 1611 out of the wrecks of John Smyth's English congregation of Amsterdam or Leyden, brought back into their native land by Smyth's successor Thomas Helwisse, assisted by John Murton. Although there are traces of this congregation for several years after that date, it seems to have melted away, or to have been crushed into extinction by the persecution of its members individually; so that the Baptists of whom we hear as existing in London, or dispersed through England, after the opening of the Long Parliament, appear to have been rather of the kind known as _Particular Baptists_, holding a Calvinistic theology, and generated out of the Independent congregations that had been established in London and elsewhere after Helwisse's and on different principles (Vol. II. pp. 544 and 585). In some of these congregations, including that taught by a certain very popular Samuel Howe, called "Cobbler Howe" from his trade, who died in prison and excommunicated some time before 1640, Pædobaptism appears to have become an open question, on which the members agreed to differ among themselves. On the whole, however, the tendency was to the secession of Antipædobaptists from congregations of ordinary Independents, and to the formation of the seceders into distinct societies. Thus we hear of a Baptist congregation in Wapping formed in 1633 by a John Spilsbury, with whom were afterwards associated William Kiffin and Thomas Wilson; of another formed in Crutched Friars in 1639 by Mr. Green, Paul Hobson, and Captain Spencer; and of a third, formed in Fleet Street, in 1640, by the afterwards famous Praise-God Barebone: these three congregations being all detachments from Henry Jacob's original Independent congregation of 1616 during the ministries of his successors, Lathorp and Henry Jessey. In spite of much persecution, continued even after the Long Parliament met, the Baptists of these congregations propagated their opinions with such zeal that by 1644 the sect had attained considerably larger dimensions. In that year they counted seven leading congregations in London, and forty-seven in the rest of England; besides which they had many adherents in the Army. Although all sorts of impieties were attributed to them on hearsay, they differed in reality from the Independents mainly on the one subject of Baptism. They objected to the baptism of infants, and they thought immersion, or dipping under water, the proper mode of baptism: except in these points, and what they might involve, they were substantially at one with the Congregationalists, This they made clear by the publication, in 1644, of a Confession of their Faith in 52 Articles--a document which, by its orthodoxy in all essential matters, seems to have shamed the more candid of their opponents. Even Featley was struck by it, and called it "a little ratsbane in a great quantity of sugar," and became somewhat more civil in consequence. It was signed for the seven Baptist congregations of London by these seven couples of persons--Thomas Gunn and John Mabbit; John Spilsbury and Samuel Richardson; Paul Hobson and Thomas Goare; Benjamin Cox and Thomas Kilcop; Thomas Munden and George Tipping; William Kiffin and Thomas Patience; Hanserd Knollys (Vol. II. 557 and 586) and Thomas Holmes. These fourteen, accordingly, with Praise- God Barebone, were in 1644 the Baptist leaders or chief Baptist preachers in London. We hear, however, of other Baptist preachers and pamphleteers --John Tombes, B.D. (accounted the most learned champion of the sect, and its intellectual head), Francis Cornwall, M.A., Henry Jessey, M.A. (a convert to baptism at last), William Dell, M.A., Henry Denne, Edward Barber, Vavasour Powell, John Sims, Andrew Wyke, Christopher Blackwood, Samuel Oates, &c. Several of these leading Baptists--such as Tombes, Cornwall, Jessey, Cox, and Denne--were University men, who had taken orders regularly; one or two, such as Patience and Knollys, had been preachers in New England; but some were laymen who had recently assumed the preaching office, or been called to it by congregations, on account of their natural gifts. The Presbyterians laid great stress on the illiteracy of some of the Baptist preachers and their mean origin. Barebone was a leather-seller in Fleet Street; and, according to Edwards or his informants, Paul Hobson was a tailor from Buckinghamshire, who had become a captain in the Parliamentary Army; Kiffin had been servant to a brewer; Oates was a young weaver; and so on. The information may be correct in some cases, but is to be received with general caution; as also Edwards's stories of the extravagant practices of the Baptists in their conventicles and at their river-dippings. Any story of the kind was welcome to Edwards, especially if it made a scandal out of some dipping of women-converts by a Baptist preacher. Baillie, who took more trouble in sifting his information, and who distinctly allows that the Anabaptists, like other people, ought to have the benefit of the principle "Let no error be charged upon any man which he truly disclaims," and that the errors of some of the sect ought not to be charged upon all, yet maintains that the Confession of the seven Baptist Churches of London was but an imperfect and ambiguous declaration of the opinions of the English Baptists. He attributes to them collectively the following tenets, in addition to those of mere Antipædobaptism and rigid Separatism:--"They put all church-power in the hand of the people;" "They give the power of preaching and celebrating the sacraments to any of their gifted members, out of all office;" "All churches must be demolished: they are glad of so large and public a preaching place as they can purchase, but of a steeple-house they must not hear;" "All tithes and all set stipends are unlawful; their preachers must work with their own hands, and may not go in black clothes." According to Baillie, also, the Baptists outwent even the Brownists in the power in church matters they gave to women. There were many women-preachers among them; of whom a Mrs. Attaway, "the mistress of all the she-preachers in Coleman Street," was the chief. [Footnote: Crosby's _History of the English Baptists_ (1738), Vol. I. pp. 215-382; Ivimey's _Baptists_, I. 113 _et seq._; Featley's _Dippers Dipt_, and _Animadversions on the Anabaptists' Confession_; _Gangræna passim_; Baillie's _Dissuasive_, Part II. p. 47 _et seq._; Neal's Puritans, III. 147-152, with Toulmin's Supplement to that Vol., 517-530. The Confession of the Baptists is given in Neal; Appendix to the whole work; also in Crosby, Appendix to Vol. I]

OLD BROWNISTS:--By this name may be called certain adherents of that vehement Independency, more extreme than mere Congregationalism, which had been propagated in Elizabeth's reign by Robert Brown himself. Brown's writings, we learn from Baillie, had totally disappeared in England; so that the so-called _Brownists_ can hardly have been his direct disciples, but must have been persons who had arrived at some of his opinions over again for themselves. Briefly, without being Baptists, they were more violent Separatists, more fierce in their rejection of the discipline, worship, and ordination of the Church of England than the Independents proper. Henry Burton, minister of Friday Street church, now between fifty and sixty years of age, was one of the chief of them, and his _Protestation Protested_ (Vol. II. 591-2) may be regarded as a manifesto of their views. Even the Independents of the Assembly disowned these views. Mr. Nye had said of the book that "there was in that book gross Brownism which he nor his brethren no way agreed with him in;" and Edwards had heard stories of queer goings-on in Mr. Burton's church, and his quarrel with "a butcher and some others of his church" about prophesying. Among the Brownists, besides Burton, Edwards names prominently "Katherine Chidley, an old Brownist, and her son, a young Brownist, a pragmatical fellow," who preached in London, and occasionally went on circuit into the country. Edwards characterizes Mrs. Chidley as "a brazen-faced audacious old woman;" but we know the motive. He had not forgotten the thrashing in print he had received from Mrs. Chidley in 1641 (Vol. II. 595). [Footnote: Paget's _Heresiography_, pp. 55-82 (a great deal about the Brownists; but with next to no real information); Edwards's _Gangræna_, Part I. pp. 62-64 and Part III. 242-248 (gossip about Burton); and Part III. 170, 171 (about Chidley); Baillie's Letters, II. 184 and 192; Hanbury's Historical Memorials, II. 108 _et seq._]

ANTINOMIANS:--The origin of this heresy is attributed to Luther contemporary and fellow townsman, John Agricola, of Eisleben in Saxony (1492-1566); but the Antinomians of New England, and their chief Mrs. Hutchinson, had recently been more heard of. The story of poor Mrs. Hutchinson, the chief of these New England Antinomians, has already been told by us (Vol. II.371-7), as far as to the beginning of 1643, when we left her, a widow with a family of children, including a married daughter and that daughter's husband, beyond the bounds of New England altogether, and seeking rest for her wearied mind, and a home for her little ones, in the Dutch plantations somewhere near what is now New York. The sad end has now to be told. The Indians and the Dutch of those parts were then at feud; and in September 1643, in an inroad of the Indians into the plantation where Mrs. Hutchinson was, she and all her family were murdered, with the exception of a little daughter eight years of age, who was carried into captivity among the Indians, and not recovered till four years afterwards. The news of this tragic end of Mrs. Hutchinson had been brought across the Atlantic, and had added to the interest of pious horror with which her previous career of heresy in Massachusetts had been heard of by the orthodox in England. Mrs. Hutchinson and her Antinomianism, in fact, were already the subjects of a dreadful popular myth. Here, for example, is old Father Ephraim's account of the New England Antinomians, as he had compiled it from information received direct from America:--"Some persons among those that went hence to New England being freighted with many loose and unsound opinions, which they durst not here, they there began to vent them ... working first upon women, traducing godly ministers to be and preach under Covenant of Works, dropping their baits by little and little and angling yet further when they saw them take, and fathering their opinions on those of the best quality in the country; and, by means of Mrs. Hutchinson's double weekly lecture at Boston, under pretence of repeating Mr. Cotton's sermons, these opinions were quickly dispersed before authority was aware." But at length, when the infant church in America had been thus "almost ruinated," the judgments of God overtook the prime fomenters of the heresy in a notorious manner. "As, first, Mistress Hutchinson, the Generalissimo, the high-priestess of the new religion, was delivered at one time of 30 monstrous births, or thereabouts, much about the number of her monstrous opinions; some were bigger, some less, none of them having human shape, but shaped like her opinions: Mistress Dyer also, another of the same crew, was delivered of a large--" [here follows a minute description of a feminine monster that would have made the fortune of any travelling showman, so complexly-horrible was its physiology]. Thus God punished those monstrous "wretches," But the civil authorities of New England, as we know, had punished them too. "God put it into the hearts of the civil magistrates to convent the chief leaders of them; and, after fruitless admonitions given, they proceeded to sentence: some they disfranchised, others they excommunicated, and some they banished. A seditious minister, one Mr. Wheelwright, was one, and Mrs. Hutchinson another; who, going to plant herself on an island, called Rhode Island, under the Dutch, where they could not agree, but were miserably divided into sundry sects, removed from thence to an island called _Hell- gate_ [_Hebgate_, according to Cotton Mather], where the Indians set upon her, and slew her and her daughter, and her daughter's husband, children, and family."--Notwithstanding this dreadful fate of the Antinomians in America, the heresy had broken out in England. Nothing was publicly said of the younger Sir Henry Vane in connexion with it; though, on his return from his Massachusetts governorship, he may have brought back in his speculative head some of the Hutchinsonian ideas. According to Paget, the first Antinomian in London had been "one Master John Eaton," who had been a scholar of his own (_i.e._ at Trinity College, Oxford), and was afterwards curate of a parish near Aldgate. In fact, as we learn from Wood, he became a minister in Suffolk, was "accounted by all the neighbouring ministers a grand Antinomian," and suffered trouble accordingly. But this Eaton had died in 1641, aged about 66, and leaving but an Antinomian book or two, including "_The Honeycomb of Free Justification_;" and the leading Antinomians were new men. One of them was Mr. John Saltmarsh, a Cambridge graduate, and minister in Kent, afterwards well-known as an, army-preacher and pamphleteer; another was "one Randall who preaches about Spittal Yard."--The nature of the Antinomian doctrines, "opening such a fair and easy way to heaven," made them very popular, it appears, in London and elsewhere. Many ran after their preachers, "crowding the churches and filling the doors and windows," for "Oh, it pleaseth people well," adds old Father Ephraim, "to have heaven and their lusts too." Notwithstanding this imputation, and illustrative scandals in Edwards, it really appears that Antinomianism took itself out in high mystic preaching of justification by faith, the doctrine of assurance, and the privileges of saintship. The wild phrases that came in such preaching were the chief offence. [Footnote: Cotton Mather's _Magnalia_, Book VII. p. 19; Palfrey's Hist. of New England, I. 609, Note; Paget, 105-118; Wood's Athenæ, III. 21 (for more about Eaton); _Gangræna_ in several places, for references to Saltmarsh and Randall. Baillie in his _Dissuasive_ (pp. 57-64) has much the same story as Paget about Mrs. Hutchinson and the New England Antinomians, and attributes the rise of that heresy to the evil influence of Independency.--The idiotic and disgusting myth of the monstrous _accouchements_ of the two Antinomian women seems to have found great favour with the orthodox: and it figures in many pious books of the time and afterwards. It seems actually to have originated in America, and to have been widely believed there, while Mrs. Hutchinson was alive; for Cotton Mather, repeating it, with the most abject good faith, and in great detail, as late as 1702 (_Magnalia_, VII. 20), quotes a letter of Mr. Thomas Hooker, to the effect that at the very time of one of the diabolic _accouchements_, Mrs. Dyer's (Oct. 17, 1637), the house in which her and his wife were sitting was violently shaken, as if by an earthquake, for the space of seven or eight minutes. Mather also avers that there was an investigation of the affair by the magistrates at the time.]

FAMILISTS:--Probably because there had been a continental sect of this name in the sixteenth century, founded by a David George of Delft, Edwards includes _Familists_ among his leading English sorts of Sectaries, and Paget devotes ten pages to them. Paget, however, admits that they were "so close and cunning that ye shall hardly ever find them out." If there really was such an English sect, their main principle probably was that every society of Christians should be a kind of family- party, jolly within itself in confidential love-feasts and exchanges of sentiment, and letting the general world and its creeds roar around unquestioned and unheeded. Baillie, however, in an incidental notice of Familism in the Second Part of his _Dissuasive_, gives a somewhat different account. It was, according to him, a wild development of Anabaptism, of which not a few once "counted zealous and gracious" were suspected--including "a great man, a peer of the land." It had a public representative in Mr. Randall, who had "for some years preached peaceably in the Spital" (already mentioned among the Antinomians), and of whom Baillie had heard that he entertained such ideas as these, though reserving them probably as esoteric mysteries for the highest class of the Family of Love--"that all the resurrection and glory which Scripture promises is past already, and no other coming of Christ to judgment, or life eternal, is to be expected than what presently in this earth the saints do enjoy; that the most clear historic passages of Scripture are mere allegories; that in all things, Angels, Devils, Men, Women, there is but one spirit and life, which absolutely and essentially is God; that nothing is everlasting but the life and essence of God which now is in all creatures;" &c. We should now call this a kind of Pantheism; but probably it was coupled with that disposition to privacy, and indifference to creeds and controversies, which has been mentioned as the peculiarity of Familism. Even the _Familists_, however, it seems, had their subdivisions. One John Hetherington, a box-maker, had been a kind of Familist, but had recanted. [Footnote: Paget, 92 102, and 137,138; _Gangræna_, Part I. 13; Baillie's _Dissuasive_ Part II. pp. 99-104]

MILLENARIES OR CHILIASTS:--"An Heresy," says old Father Ephraim, "frequent at this time. This sect look for a temporary [temporal] kingdom of Christ, that must begin presently and last 1,000 years. Of this opinion are many of our Apocalyptical men, that study more future events than their present only." This is substantially all we have from Paget. In fact, however, the Chiliasts or Millenarians were hardly a mere sect. The expectation of a Millennium near at hand was very prevalent, or was becoming very prevalent, among the English Divines of the Assembly itself. "Many of the Divines here," wrote Baillie, September 5, 1645, "not only Independents, but others, such as Twisse, Marshall, Palmer, and many more, are express Chiliasts." In his _Dissuasive_, however, where he devotes an entire chapter to this heresy of Chiliasm, he attributes the grosser form of the heresy chiefly to the Independents. A kind of Chiliasm or Millenarianism, he says, had been held by some former English Divines, including Joseph Meade; but it had been reserved for two Independents--"Mr. Archer and his colleague at Arnheim, T. G." (_i.e._ Thomas Goodwin)--to invent new dreams on the subject; and these had recently been adopted by Mr. Burroughs. The purport of their doctrine was that in the year 1650, or, at the furthest, 1695, Christ was to reappear in human form at Jerusalem, destroy the existing fabric of things in a conflagration, collect the scattered Jews, raise martyrs and saints from their graves, and begin his glorious reign of a thousand years. [Footnote: Paget, 136, 137; Baillie's Letters, II. 313, and _Dissuasive_, 224-252.]

SEEKERS:--"Many have wrangled so long about the Church that at last they have quite lost it, and go under the name of _Expecters_ and _Seekers_, and do deny that there is any Church, or any true minister, or any ordinances; some of them affirm the Church to be in the wilderness, and they are seeking for it there; others say that it is in the smoke of the Temple, and that they are groping for it there--where I leave them praying to God."--So far Old Ephraim; and what he says, combined with one of Edwards's miscellaneous blasphemies already quoted, enables us to fancy the _Seekers_. They were people, it seems, who had arrived at the conclusion that the Supernatural had never yet been featured forth to man in any propositions or symbols that could be accepted as adequate, and who were waiting, therefore, for a possible "Church of the Future;" content, meanwhile, to dwell in a Temple of smoke, or (for there is the alternative figure) to see visions of the Future Church in the smoke of the present Temple.--"Mr. Erbury, that lived in Wales," (but had come to London, and then settled in Ely, whence he made excursions,) and "one Walwyn, a dangerous man, a strong head," who laboured somewhere else, are mentioned by Edwards as men avowing themselves in this predicament. Baillie mentions also one Laurence Clarkson, who had passed from Anabaptism to Seekerism, and he speaks of Mrs. Attaway, the Baptist woman-preacher, and Mr. Saltmarsh, the Antinomian, as tending the same way.----But the chief of the _Seekers_, perhaps the original founder of the Sect, and certainly the bravest exponent of their principles, was a person with whom we are already acquainted. "One Mr. Williams," writes Baillie, June 7, 1644, "has drawn a great number after him to a singular Independency, denying any true Church in the world, and will have every man to serve God by himself alone, without any church at all. This man has made a great and bitter schism lately among the Independents." Again, on the 23rd of July, Baillie refers to the same person as "my good acquaintance Mr. Roger Williams, who says there is no church, no sacraments, no pastors, no church-officers or ordinance, in the world, nor has been since a few years after the Apostles." In short, the arch- representative of this new religion of Seekerism on both sides of the Atlantic was no other than our friend Roger Williams, the Tolerationist (Vol. II. 560-3, and _antè_, pp. 113-120). Through the variations of this man's external adventures we have seen the equally singular series of variations of his mental condition. First an intense Separatist, or Independent of the most resolute type, but conjoining with this Separatism a passion for the most absolute liberty of conscience and the entire dissociation of civil power from matters of religion, then a Baptist and excommunicated on that account by his former friends in America, he had latterly, in his solitude at Providence, outgone Baptism or any known form of Independency, and, still retaining his doctrine of the most absolute liberty of conscience, had worked himself into that state of dissatisfaction with all visible church-forms, and of yearning quest after unattainable truth, for which the name _Seekerism_ was invented by himself or others. Though he did not propose that preaching should be abandoned, he had gradually settled in a notion which he thus expresses: "In the poor small span of my life, I desired to have been a diligent and constant observer, and have been myself many ways engaged, in city, in country, in court, in schools, in universities, in churches, in Old and New England, and yet cannot, in the holy presence of God, bring in the result of a satisfying discovery that either the begetting ministry of the apostles or messengers to the nations, or the feeding and nourishing ministry of pastors and teachers, according to the first institution of the Lord Jesus, are yet restored or extant." It was while he was in this stage of his mental history that Williams came over on his flying visit to England in the matter of the new charter for the Rhode Island plantations. Some whiff of his strange opinions may have preceded him; but it must have been mainly by his intercourse with leading Londoners during his stay in England, which extended over more than a year (June 1643--Sept. 1644), that he diffused the interest in himself and his Seekerism which we certainly find existing in 1644. He can have been no stranger to the chief Divines of the Westminster Assembly. Baillie, we see, was on speaking terms with him; and it is curious to note in Baillie's and other references to him the same vein of personal liking for the man, running through amazement at his heresy, which characterized the criticisms of him by his New England opponents and excommunicants. Incidents of his visit, not less interesting now, were two publications of his in London, his "_Key into the Language of America_," published in 1643, and his _Bloody Tenent of Persecution_, published in 1644.--At least the name of the sect of "The Seekers," I may add, had struck Cromwell himself, and had some fascination for him, whether on its own account, or from his acquaintance with Williams. "Your sister Claypole," he wrote to his daughter Mrs. Ireton, some two years after our present date (Oct. 25,1646), "is, I trust in mercy, exercised with some perplexed thoughts. She sees her own vanity and carnal mind, bewailing it: she seeks after (as I hope also) what will satisfy. And thus to be a Seeker is to be of the best sect next after a Finder; and such an one shall every faithful humble Seeker be in the end. Happy Seeker, happy Finder!" [Footnote: Paget, 150; _Gangræna_, Part I. p. 24, and p. 38; _Dissuasive_, Part II. pp. 96, 97 and Notes; Baillie's Letters, II. 191-2 and 212; Gammell's _Life of Roger Williams_ (Boston, 1846), and Memoir of Williams, by Edward B. Underhill, prefixed to the republication of William's _Bloody Tenent of Persecution_, by the "Hanserd Knollys Society" (1848); Carlyle's Cromwell, I. 212.]

DIVORCERS:--"These I term _Divorcers_" says Old Ephraim, "that would be quit of their wives for slight occasions;" and he goes on to speak of MILTON as the representative of the sect. Featley had previously mentioned Milton's Divorce Tract as one of the proofs of the tendency of the age to Antinomianism, Familism, and general anarchy; and Edwards and Baillie followed in the same strain. Milton's Doctrine of Divorce, it thus appears, had attracted attention, and had perhaps gained some following. Among the six caricatures of notable sects on the title-page of Paget's _Heresiography_ is one of "THE DIVORCER"--_i.e._ a man, in an admonishing attitude, and without his hat, dismissing or pushing away his wife, who has her hat on, as if ready for a journey, and is putting her handkerchief to her eyes. We shall have more to say of Milton in this connexion. [Footnote: Paget, pp. 150, 151, p. 87, and Epistle Dedicatory, p. 4; Fentley's _Dippers Dipt_, Epistle Dedicatory, p. 3; Edward's _Gangræna_, Part I. p. 29.]

ANTI-SABBATARIANS, AND TRASKITES:--These sects, though distinct, may be named together. The _Anti-Sabbatarians_ were those who denied the obligation of any Lord's Day or Sabbath: they were pretty numerous, but were distributed through the other sects. The _Traskites_, on the other hand, denied the obligation of the Christian Sunday or Lord's Day, but maintained the perpetual obligation of the Jewish Sabbath on the seventh day of the week. They were the followers of one John Traske, a poor eccentric who had been well known to Paget, but was now dead, and remembered only for his heresy, for which he had been whipt, pilloried, and imprisoned, about 1618. His opinions had been revived more ably in certain treatises and discourses, published in 1628 and 1632, by Theophilus Brabourne, a Puritan minister in Norfolk. Both Brabourne and Traske had been obliged to recant their opinions and return to orthodoxy; and indeed Traske had done so in a Tract written against himself, though he again relapsed. Nevertheless the heresy had taken root, and one heard in 1644 of Traskites or Sabbatarians dispersed through England. The sect is continued still in the so-called "Seventh Day Baptists." [Footnote: Paget, pp. 138-141; with more accurate particulars in Cox's _Literature of the Sabbath Question_, I. 153-5, 157-8, and 162.]

SOUL-SLEEPERS OR MORTALISTS:--Such was the odd name given to a sect, or supposed sect, represented by the anonymous author of a, Tract called _Man's Mortality_. The Tract is now very scarce, if not utterly forgotten; but, as it made a great stir at the time, and as we shall hear of it and its author rather particularly again in connexion with Milton's life, I may here give some account of it from a copy which I have managed to see. The title in full is as follows: "Man's Mortallitie: or a Treatise wherein 'tis proved, both Theologically and Phylosophically, that whole Man (as a rationall creature) is a compound wholy mortall, contrary to that common distinction of Soule and Body; and that the present going of the Soule into Heaven or Hell is a meer fiction; and that at the Resurrection is the beginning of our immortallity, and then actual Condemnation and Salvation, and not before: With all doubtes and objections answered and resolved both by Scripture and Reason; discovering the multitude of Blasphemies and Absurdities that arise from the fancie of the Soule: Also divers other mysteries, as of Heaven, Hell, Christ's humane residence, the Extent of the Resurrection, the New Creation, &c.: opened and presented to the tryall of better judgments, By R. O. Amsterdam: Printed by John Canne, Anno Dom. 1643." In the British Museum copy, which is the one I have seen, the word "Amsterdam" is erased by the collector's pen, and "London" substituted, with the date "Jan. 19" added; whence I infer that, whatever Canne at Amsterdam had to do with the printing of the tract, it was virtually a London publication, and out in January, 1643-4. On the title-page is quoted the text Ecclesiastes