be obtained with safety to the permanent well-being of mankind. It must, however, be allowed, that it would be unjust to impute the heaviest blame to an European government of the sixteenth century for not reaching that elevation of justice to which scarcely any state in the nineteenth seems to aspire.

Another cruel act was passed in the same session against emigrants who had left the realm without the queen's licence, subjecting their personal estate for ever, and their landed estates during their lives, to be confiscated, unless they returned within six months of proclamation made to that effect; on the alleged ground that 66 they carry with them great sums of money to be spent among strangers," besides employing it in the relief of traitors, and carrying on abroad their own treasonable projects.* Enactments of this sort, or of the like barbarity, not thought beneath the standard of the time when they were adopted, still dishonour most codes; and in the present case may be regarded as examples of that bungling tyranny which punishes the innocent to make sure of including all the guilty; as well as of that refined cruelty which, after rendering home odious, perhaps insupportable, pursues, with unrelenting rage, such of its victims as fly to foreign lands.

The puritans, hitherto only a powerful and zealous party within the pale of the church, now meditated a separation from the religious establishment. The disputes continued to hinge on the vestments, and on other usages supposed to be superstitious, which formed a part of the established worship. The eminent divines of this party, at the head of whom was Cartwright, professor of theology at Cambridge, seem to have been content with a connivance at their conscientious noncompliance with the directions of the liturgy; and though they considered a parity among pastors to be more purely apostolic than the rank and power of prelates, they were not unwilling to wait in peace for the

13 Eliz. c. iii.

progress of a more perfect reformation. They were more especially ready to subscribe all the doctrinal articles of the church; praying exemption from those only which related to discipline. Perhaps men SO ardent and of so much conscious honesty as the puritans would not long have contained themselves within those boundaries of moderation which were likely in time to be looked on with an evil eye, as compromises of conscience with convenience. The experiment of lenity was, however, not made. Cartwright was deprived of his professorship.

An act* was passed, subjecting all clergymen, not having received orders according to the formularies of Edward or Elizabeth, to deprivation, unless they subscribed all the articles, and read publicly in their parish churches the certificate of a bishop, bearing testimony that they had fulfilled that condition; without regard to a possession of, perhaps, thirteen years, and with no small disrepect towards the protestant churches, from whom the greatest part of the incumbents thus expelled, by a law substantially retrospective, had received holy orders.

From the beginning of 1567+ puritan congregations had been dispersed, and their members apprehended, on the ground that they were unlawful assemblies. It appears to have been the immediate consequences of the laws of the session of 1571, and of the spirit in which they were now administered, that a formal separation from the episcopal church was deemed necessary to the puritans. The order or presbytery of Wandsworth, comprehending a small number of neighbouring ministers, were secretly assembled: shunning the animadversions of the law, and formed on the republican equality of the Calvinistic churches, in preference to the limited and impoverished episcopacy which many of them had seen among the Lutherans of Germany and Scandinavia.

13 Eliz. c. xii.

Strype, Life of Parker, i. 480. Nov. 20. 1572. Neale's History of Puritans, i. 243. Fuller, Church History, book ix. p. 103.

The zealous protestants, who in the beginning of the reformation were called gospellers, in derision of their throwing open the New Testament to the ignorant, were now variously called puritans, or precisians, in ridicule of their affectation of purity in belief and practice. The reformers every where diffused the practice of constant preaching,—one of the means of conversion which they had most successfully employed. Elizabeth was disposed to bring back the liberty of preaching within boundaries more near those to which it was confined in catholic times. She caused a book of homilies to be composed, in order that it might be substituted by the clergy for compositions of their own. She considered the clergy as divided into two classes. The one consisted of those who had been hastily admitted to orders in a moment of need, and whom the catholics contemptuously called the "ignorant mess Johns of Elizabeth." The other was composed of the learned zealots, many of whom were puritanically affected. Elizabeth thought that the indiscretion of the latter, and the ignorance of the former, rendered them equally unfit to be trusted with the formidable power of frequently addressing mixed multitudes from a place of authority on subjects calculated to stir up the strongest emotions, of which a multitude is susceptible. The expedients which were resorted to in order to supply the defects of inexperience and unskilfulness in the preachers, however they might answer their purpose, did not abate the jealousy with which a watchful government eyed the multiplication of opportunities of popular address.

It had become a practice for the ministers of a district to hold meetings in the church of a large town, which received the name of lectures, from being often expositions of passages of Scripture, of prophesyings, in the original sense of that word in which it denoted speaking in public; of exercises, because they gave the young preachers the habit of speaking with ease, clearness, and order. Hence, also, they were obliged to prepare themselves by adequate study for the discussion of the mean

ing of difficult passages in the presence of very numerous

audiences. In no long time laymen began to take a part; the hierarchy was questioned, and doctrines deemed heretical were heard. Confusion often prevailed; and the assembly proceeded from wrangling to violence. The puritans were not so lukewarm as to be deterred by petty and worldly inconveniences, which they flattered themselves that they should in the end conquer. They became the leaders of these religious associations, which added strength to the queen's apprehension of the power of popular orators over numerous meetings.

The severities against puritans seem to have partly arisen from the affectation of impartiality, which led the government to balance the rigour against catholics, rendered necessary to the public safety, by the punishment of the opposite class of offenders against the ecclesiastical laws. It happened, also, that the appearances of danger from the continental catholics recruited the number and inflamed the zeal of the party most hostile to Rome, and stimulated them to a stronger opposition against the English church, which had, in their opinion, retained so much of the pretensions of the common enemy. The puritans were neither daunted by authority nor deterred by examples of severity. Cartwright supported them with great power of logic and composition, while Johnson, the chaplain of sir Nicholas Bacon, and Brown, the founder of the sect afterwards called Independents, brought them an accession, which indicated their progress among the higher classes. Lord Leicester, whether instigated by ambitious hopes, which disposed him to pay court to the Dutch Calvinists, or considering the English catholics as peculiarly hostile to him, patronised the party of extreme protestants, certainly with no inducement from pure manners or religious enthusiasm. Elizabeth was mortified by the apparent success of the exulting prophecies of the catholics, who had foretold that the breach in the unity of the church would lead to universal anarchy, as well as incensed at the mutiny of so large a portion of her fol

lowers; and she believed, like all her contemporaries, that the formation of new bodies in the church without her permission was as flagrant rebellion as the establishment of courts and officers of justice unauthorised by her would be. The excesses of the continental catholics, which were generally followed by hostility against their brethren, sometimes led to measures of rigour against the ultra-reformers, in order to check the scandal of protestant disunion; and sometimes to considerable relaxation from the necessity of a coalition with the most zealous anti-catholics to save the common cause of the reformation from imminent danger.

The English nation was now divided into three theological and political parties; the churchmen, who considered the ecclesiastical revolution as already sufficient; the puritans, who sought a more perfect reformation by agitating the minds of the people; and the catholics, who, supported by all the great powers of the continent, did not despair of re-establishing the ancient church by another revolution. These sects constituted the parties of Elizabeth's reign. The whole nation were classed under these subdivisions. A considerable body of the ancient church adhered to the catholic religion, a still larger proportion favoured the catholics. The strength of the puritans lay in great towns, the scenes of bold discussion, and the favourite dwelling of prevalent innovations. The queen's preference for the churchmen was inevitable. She disfavoured the puritans, not only for disputing her authority, but, as in her judgment, distracting the protestant party. The season for open war against the catholics was fast approaching.

The members of these three persuasions agreed in their abhorrence of anabaptists; a name under which were then confounded the frantic rabble who revolted in Saxony in 1521, the sanguinary banditti who reigned at Munster in 1533, with the variety of sects, some of ancient though of unascertained origin, which were roused from their wintry torpor by the heat of the reformation. As early, perhaps, as the days of the Vaudois and of Wicliff, some small bodies of Christians consoled them