making it felony to disturb the order which they had established.

Maryland, like Virginia, at the epoch of the restoration, was in full possession of liberty, by the practical exercise of the sovereignty of the people. Like Virginia, it had so nearly completed its institutions that, till the epoch of its final separation from England, it hardly made any further advances toward freedom and independence.

Men love liberty, even if it be turbulent, and the colony had increased, and flourished, and grown rich, in spite of domestic dissensions. Its population, in 1660, is variously estimated at twelve thousand and at eight thousand; the latter number is probably nearer the truth. The country was dear to its inhabitants. There they desired to spend the remnant of their lives-there to make their graves.

CHAPTER XI.

PRELATES AND PURITANS.

THE settlement of New England was a result of implacable differences between Protestant dissenters in England and the established Anglican church.

Who will venture to measure the consequences of actions by the humility or the remoteness of their origin? The Power which enchains the destinies of states, overruling the decisions of sovereigns and the forethought of statesmen, often deduces the greatest events from the least considered causes. A Genoese adventurer, discovering America, changed the commerce of the world; an obscure German, inventing the printing-press, rendered possible the universal diffusion of ever-increasing intelligence; an Augustine monk, denouncing indulgences, introduced a schism in religion which changed the foundations of European politics; a young French refugee, skilled alike in theology and civil law, in the duties of magistrates and the dialectics of religious controversy, entering the republic of Geneva, and conforming its ecclesiastical discipline to the principles of republican simplicity, established a party of which Englishmen became members, and New England the asylum.

In Germany, the reformation, which aimed at the regeneration of the world in doctrine and in morals, sprung from the son of a miner of the peasant class-from Martin Luther-of whom Leibnitz says: "This is he who, in later times, taught the human race hope and free thought." Trained in the school of Paul of Tarsus through the African Augustine, Luther insisted that no man can impersonate or transmit the authority of God; that power over souls belongs to no order;

that clergy and laity are of one condition; that "any Christian can remit sins just as well as a priest;" that "ordination by a bishop is no better than an election;" that "the priest is but the holder of an office," "the pope but our school-fellow;" and, collecting all in one great formulary, he declared: "Justification is by faith, by faith alone." Every man must work out his own salvation; no other, "not priest, nor bishop, nor pope -no, nor all the prophets "- -can serve for the direct connection of the reason of the individual with the infinite and eternal intelligence.

The principle of justification by faith alone brought with it the freedom of individual thought and conscience against authority. "If fire," said Luther, "is the right cure for heresy, then the fagot-burners are the most learned doctors on earth; nor need we study any more; he that has brute force on his side may burn his adversary at the stake.” “I will preach, speak, write the truth, but will force it on no one, for faith must be accepted willingly, and without compulsion."

To the question whether the people may judge for themselves what to believe, Luther answers: "All bishops that take the right of judgment of doctrine from the sheep are certainly to be held as wolves; Christ gives the right of judgment to the scholars and to the sheep; St. Paul will have no proposition accepted till it has been proved and recognised as good by the congregation that hears it."

And should "the pastor," "the minister of the word," be called, inducted, and deposed by the congregation? "Princes and lords," said Luther, "cannot with any color refuse them the right." This he enforced on "the emperor and Christian nobles of the German nation." This he upheld when it was put forward by the peasants of Suabia.

The reformation in England-an event which had been long and gradually prepared among its people by the widely accepted teachings of Wycliffe; among its scholars by the revival of letters, the presence, the personal influence, and the writings of Erasmus, and the liberal discourses of preachers trained in the new learning; among the courtiers by the frequent resistance of English kings to the usurpations of ecclesiastical jurisdiction-was abruptly introduced by a passionate

and overbearing monarch, acting in conjunction with his parliament to emancipate the crown of England from all subjection to an alien pontiff.

In the history of the English constitution, this measure of definitive resistance to the pope was memorable as the beginning of the real greatness of the house of commons; and when Clement VII. excommunicated the king, and Paul III. invited Catholic Europe to reduce all his subjects who supported him to poverty and bondage, it was in the commons that the crown found countervailing support. But there was no thought of a radical reform in morals; nor did any one mighty creative mind, like that of Luther or Calvin, infuse into the people a new spiritual life. So far was the freedom of private inquiry from being recognised as a right, that even the means of forming a judgment on religious subjects was denied. The act of supremacy, which, on the fourth of November, 1534, severed the English nation from the Roman see, was but “the manumitting and enfranchising of the regal dignity from the recognition of a foreign superior." It did not aim at enfranchising the English church, far less the English people or the English mind. The king of England became the pope in his own dominions; and heresy was still accounted the foulest of crimes. The right of correcting errors of religious faith became, by the suffrage of parliament, a branch of the royal prerogative; and, in 1539, as active minds among the people were continually proposing new schemes of doctrine, a statute was, after great opposition in parliament, enacted "for abolishing diversity of opinions." Almost all the Roman Catholic doctrines were asserted, except the supremacy of the bishop of Rome. The pope could praise Henry VIII. for orthodoxy, while he excommunicated him for disobedience. He commended to the wavering emperor the English sovereign as a model for soundness of belief, and anathematized him only for contumacy. It was Henry's pride to defy the authority of the Roman bishop, and yet to enforce the doctrines of the Roman church. He was as tenacious of his reputation for Catholic orthodoxy as of his claim to spiritual dominion. He disdained submission, and he detested heresy.

Nor was Henry VIII. slow to sustain his new prerogatives.

According to ancient usage, no sentence of death, awarded by the ecclesiastical courts, could be carried into effect until a writ had been obtained from the king. The regulation had been adopted in a spirit of mercy, securing to the temporal authorities the power of restraining persecution. The heretic might appeal from the atrocity of the priest to the mercy of the prince. But what hope remained when the two authorities were united, and the law, which had been enacted as a protection of the subject, became the instrument of tyranny! No virtue, no eminence, conferred security. Not the forms of worship merely, but the minds of men, were declared subordinate to the government; faith, not less than ceremony, was to vary with the acts of parliament. Death was denounced against the Catholic who denied the king's supremacy, and the Protestant who doubted his creed. Had Luther been an Englishman, he might have perished by fire. In the latter part of his life, Henry revoked the general permission of reading the scriptures, and limited the privilege to merchants and nobles. He always adhered to his old religion, and died in the Roman rather than in the Protestant faith. The environs of the court displayed no resistance to the capricious monarch; parliament yielded him absolute authority in religion; but the awakened intelligence of a great nation could not be terrified into a passive lethargy; and, even though it sometimes faltered in its progress, steadily demanded the emancipation of the public mind.

The people were still accustomed to the Catholic forms of worship and of belief, when, in January, 1547, the accession of the boy Edward VI., England's only Puritan king, opened the way to changes within its church. The reform had made great advances among the French and among the Swiss. Both Luther and Calvin brought the individual into immediate relation with God; but Calvin, under a militant form of doctrine, lifted the individual above pope and prelate, and priest and presbyter, above Catholic church and national church and general synod, above indulgences, remissions, and absolutions from fellow-mortals, and brought him into the immediate dependence on God, whose eternal, irreversible decree is made by himself alone, not arbitrarily, but according to his own