were so called had then nothing in common with the furious enthusiasts to whom the appellation was first given, except an opinion perfectly inoffensive to society, that the religious ceremony of baptism should, like other sacred rites, be limited to those who had reached an age when they might possibly comprehend its meaning. The visionary was confounded with the criminal. The pacific opponent of infant baptism was regarded as inheriting the atrocity of the anabaptists of Munster; and therefore excluded from that indulgence which began to be felt towards other protestants. In the further progress of injustice, the odium, though not the punishment, extended to all the reformed. The effects of this immigration of foreigners were various. All protestants were inflamed by a more bitter animosity against the persecutors of their brethren. The mixture of many men of obnoxious opinions, and of some of ambiguous character, among the refugees, contributed to that disfavour with the church of England in which foreign protestants were held for a century and a half. The far greater number of the fugitives were followers of Calvin, who, feeling as well as knowing that the seat of religion was the heart, desired a more purely spiritual worship, delivered from those outward ceremonies which, in their opinion, did not so much promote as they debased and perverted devotion. The ardent affection which marked the piety of these men was not friendly to rites and forms, which they considered as having been too much used towards human creatures to be a fit mode of manifesting our reverence for God. On this occasion, and about this time, arose into more notice the party called puritans, from their professed purpose of purifying the church from those remains of Roman catholic discipline and worship which the moderation of the earlier reformers had respected. They disliked rather than at first rejected episcopal superiority; but they more decisively blamed the use of the cross in baptism, of the ring in marriage, of instrumental or hired music in public worship, and of sacer dotal vestments, polluted in their eyes by Romish adoption; they objected to episcopal courts, and to the repetitions and responses of the liturgy; they protested against the lessons appointed to be read from the apocryphal books, which the catholics retained as a portion of the Vulgate, but of which it is not known that there ever was a Hebrew original. These scruples borrowed that vast power which they afterwards exercised, and which now appears so disproportioned to their intrinsic importance, from the disposition awakened by the reformation to receive nothing on merely human authority; and to bring every true Christian into that state of constant intercourse with the Supreme Mind, which allows no authority and little peculiar sacredness in priests, and is displeased with the outward badges of their high pretensions. The devotional spirit of these extreme reformers was offended by those who appeared to them to claim a right of standing between them and their God; and their jealousy was naturally fixed on bishops, on whom splendour and opulence had stamped a worldly character, and whose jurisdiction maintained order and discipline in the adverse army. Those called bishops in the reformed churches they charged with peculiar inconsistencies; because, having visibly no warrant from the New Testament, they confessedly derived authority through the channel of the church of Rome, which they at the same time taught to be a body of idolaters. The protestants, inconsistently with the spirit of their doctrines, but advantageously to their policy as a faction, made war principally against the external symbols of the ancient religion; a course, perhaps, rendered inevitable by the direction in which the passions of the multitude never fail to run. But the cross and the surplice were assailed as the ensigns of a ritual and dictatorial system, against which a more pure and lofty spirit struggled among the puritans, long before those who were impelled by it became conscious of its true nature. Puritanism had appeared under Edward VI. Its numbers were recruited, and their zeal inflamed, by the return of so many exiles from the seats of Calvinism in Switzerland at the moment of the queen's accession. The governments of England, however inclined by humanity and prudence to indulge a scrupulous conscience, were not exempt from the common error of their age, - that obedience was as much due to the supreme power in matters of religion as in the civil relations of life. Some circumstances peculiar to the situation of Elizabeth contributed to an exercise of that supposed right against puritans, which may perhaps not improperly be called the first civil war between protestants. That princess was now at the head of the protestant party, and certainly foresaw that the catholics were on the brink of a fearful struggle with the reformers. She dreaded a division in the protestant camp. Dissenters from a protestant establishment were regarded as mutineers who were likely to be deserters. They were peculiarly obnoxious, because they seemed to justify the adverse party in branding the reformation as the parent of endless confusion. To Elizabeth, as the ruler of the most powerful of the reformed states, whose honour and authority were identified with the safety of the reformation, seemed more especially to belong a power of maintaining union among protestants, who, even united, would still continue to be the weaker of the parties about to take the field against each other. * The puritans were powerful in council and at court. Bedford, Warwick, and Leicester, Cecil, Walsingham, and Knollys, were friendly to their cause. In the lower house of convocation, in 1562, a proposition to modify "the usages" (the name given to the practices alleged to be papal) was rejected by the least of possible majorities, being only fifty-nine to fifty-eight; and those who were somewhat inferior in numbers appear to have been of more weight, if considered either as men of learning, or as numbering among them nearly all the voluntary exiles for religion.+ Grindall hesitated about 1822. - Neale's Hist. of Nonconformists, vol. i. chap. iv. p. 166. edit. Lond + Strype, Annals, c. xxix. "Those," says the annalist," who were for stripping the church of her rites and ceremonies were such as had lately conformity; honest George Fox protested against it. Jewell, then celebrated as the champion of the church, spoke harshly against the usages, and assigned the queen's inflexible adherence to them as his motive for acquiescence. Elizabeth, who had a queen's jealousy of power, and a woman's passion for splendour, became so much incensed by resistance, that she proceeded to extremities which ended in a lasting separation of the puritans from the church. The publications which issued from the ecclesiastical opposition were forbidden by decrees of the court of star-chamber. Proclamations were issued against the printers, and even readers, of books unlicensed by the ordinary. Jewell refused to license an apology by one of the accused, saying, - "I am afraid of printers; their tyranny is terrible.” After several deprivations and depositions by the commissioners who executed the queen's authority as ruler of the church,after a strong manifestation of the aversion of the youth of Cambridge from impositions on conscience by human jurisdiction, a meeting of about 100 persons was, on the 10th of June, 1567, entered by the officers of justice, who apprehended fourteen of them, and brought them before the privy council, on charges of absence from their parish church, and of having used a form of worship different from that enjoined by lawful authority. Several of them who refused to submit were imprisoned, but soon released: thus began, in England, the persecution of protestants by their fellow dissenters from the church of Rome. The principle of intolerance was affirmed by deeds as well as by words. The minor machinery of persecution was put together and set up,-nay, it was brought into activity ; a pernicious example little excused by the limited extent of its immediate mischief. No English blood had for ten years been shed on the lived abroad in the reformed churches of Geneva, Switzerland, or Germany." * Strype, Ann. vol. i. part ii. chap. lii. p. 272. + Strype's Parker, chap. xvi. scaffold or in the field for a public quarrel, whether political or religious. In this important respect, that period forms a happy contrast with the ten years which preceded. It is probable that no great country could for centuries have boasted the like felicity. The close of the year 1569 was, unfortunately, distinguished by a revolt, which partook both of a civil and of a theological nature. This was the famous insurrection of Percy, earl of Northumberland, and Neville, earl of Westmoreland, whose domains stretched along the line of the northern border, and whose ungovernable but bold followers, inured to conflict, and trained in the surprises and stratagems of border warfare, placed these lords among the most powerful and independent of the English barons. They were adherents of the ancient religion, which retained its ascendant in the remote provinces; so much, that we learn from sir Ralph Sadler" that there were not then ten gentlemen in the north who approved the queen's measures relating to the church."* They were encouraged to revolt by the measures of the catholic states, and doubtless excited to it by express assurances of effectual succour from abroad. Philip II. broke through his frozen reserve when he rebuked the duke of Alva for speaking in friendly terms of England, which the king called " lost and undone realm." † "The case, says sir Nicholas Throgmorton, " is not as in time past, when powerful neighbours contended for superiority. Now, when the general design is to exterminate all nations dissenting with them in religion (as is most apparent), what will become of us if the profession of the like faith with ourselves be utterly destroyed in Flanders and France?”+ In 1568 Cecil had demanded redress for the detention of English vessels by Spain; and notified to the Spanish ambassadors that preparations were made for resisting these wrongs by arms. In July sir Henry Norris, at Paris, received secret information of designs *Sadler, ii. 55. Letter to Cecil, December 6. 1569. a +"Perdido y acabado Reyno." Note from Harrington, secretary of le. gation at Madrid. Haynes, 472. Throgmorton to Cecil. Haynes, 471. |