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

selves with the belief that the church described in Scripture was invisible, consisting not of members who professed the same creed, but of the true followers of Christ in all ages and nations; that this kingdom of the Messiah was inaccessible to the wicked, and independent of the frail and dangerous aid of human institutions. Connected with this doctrine was an opinion that this heavenly reign was to be one day realised upon earth, as some of the more sober believed, by the gradual diffusion of christian virtue; or as others more boldly imagined, by stupendous revolutions, which were to pave the way for the visible monarchy of the Messiah, and in the establishment of which they were themselves destined to perform a glorious part, for which they were to be fitted by the apostolic gifts of miraculously healing distempers, and of speaking languages which they had not the natural means to acquire. * The most extravagant of these sects taught "the sinless purity of true christians; that among them there must be a community of possessions; that such a happy state neither allowed ministers in the church nor required magistrates in the state." They rejected oaths, condemned war, and represented infant baptism as a device of the devil. Many of this body of sects, including probably some of the wildest, had sought refuge in England. Among the most noted was "the family of love +," who professed their principle to be, that religion consisted in love towards God and man; that to cultivate this disposition they read the Scriptures and other writings tending to inspire it. They are said to have complied with the catholic worship where it was established, softening its abuses by allegorical interpretation, and professing to adopt from it only that benevolence which is the living principle of religion.

Their strong preference of a pure mind above the best outward conduct subjected them to the insinuation of holding immoral doctrines, which was openly charged on other branches of the same race. "The family of

* Mosheim, cent. xvi. sect. 3. part 2.

+ Strype's Annals, iii. 556, &c.

the mount" held all things in common, denied the propriety of prayer and the resurrection of the dead, and they questioned even whether there was a heaven or a hell. As these sectaries travelled through mysticism, so "the family of the essentialists," founded by Mrs. Dunbar, a woman of Scotland, were worked up 'by their conceit of having perfectly purified their souls into an universal system of immorality, holding all outward actions to be absolutely indifferent to the pure in heart. "No man sinneth," said one of them; "whatever is done God does it all."* Speculative absurdities may endure for ages; but errors immediately leading to the destruction of society are generally dissipated by an application of the test of experience.

On Easter day 1575, a congregation of Dutch anabaptists were surprised at Aldgate, of whom twentyseven were committed to prison. On the 27th of April a commission was granted to the bishop of London, assisted by civilians and judges, “to confer with the accused, and to proceed judicially if the case so required.” † Four of them, having recanted their doctrines, were released, after bearing lighted faggots in their hands. From the matters which they were required to abjure,— "that Christ had not taken flesh of the Virgin Mary, that infants ought not to be baptized, that a Christian ought neither to be a magistrate nor to bear the sword, nor to take an oath," - it should seem that though the intelligible part of their doctrines were unreasonable and inconvenient, yet they were not tainted with the worst errors of their kindred sects. Two men (at least) and ten women were convicted, of whom one woman was persuaded to forsake her opinions, eight were banished, two were condemned to be burnt, and probably in the greater part of the remaining cases the court was content with the infliction of corporal punishment. Two men,

*Strype, ubi supra, 562.

Privy Council Books, April 27th, May 20th, June 26th, 1575.

Corporal punishment is within the scope of the commissioners, as appears from Privy Council Book, 20.; and the supposition hazarded in the text reconciles the jarring statements of numbers by Stowe and Heylin, the earliest authorities.

more conscientious, or more courageous than their brethren, refused to buy their lives by uttering a solemn lie. For this crime they were condemned to be burnt alive in Smithfield. It would not have promoted the purposes of any party to encumber themselves with the defence of miserable men doomed to destruction alike by the prejudices of the vulgar, and by the policy of the powerful, whom the queen was taught to consider as indispensable victims, lest she might be reproached with sparing rebels against God, while she punished traitors against her own earthly and perishable crown.

One man alone, happily above the suspicion that his tolerant spirit arose from religious lukewarmness, had the courageous humanity to embrace the cause of a weak and odious band, full of foreign and obscure heretics, whose gross errors he himself regarded perhaps with more than reasonable abhorrence. This man, worthy to be holden in everlasting remembrance for one of the most rare acts of human virtue, was John Fox, a puritan, the historian of the English martyrs, whom Elizabeth, in spite of his nonconformity, was wont to call by the affectionate and reverential appellation of "my father Fox." The only trial of his influence over her which he made was a letter to her, distinguished by the classical latinity, of which he was no mean master, on behalf of these wretched anabaptists, in which, after bewailing the necessity of breaking the silence which he had hitherto observed towards her *, and declaring his abhorrence of the impious and destructive errors of these sectaries, he implores her in the name of Christ not to re-kindle the flames of Smithfield, which under her happy administration had for seventeen years been cold. "I have no favour for heretics; but I am a man, and would spare the life of man. To roast the living bodies of unhappy men, erring rather from blindness of judgment than from the impulse of will, in fire and flames, of which the fierceness is fed by the pitch and brimstone poured over them, is a Romish abomination, which if it * Heylin, book ix. 104., where the original was probably first printed.