highest wisdom and justice. Luther spared the altar, and hesitated to deny totally the real presence; Calvin, with superior dialectics, accepted as a commemoration and a seal the rites which the Catholics revered as a sacrifice. Luther favored magnificence in public worship, as an aid to devotion; Calvin, the guide of republics, avoided in their churches all appeals to the senses, as a peril to pure religion. Luther condemned the Roman church for its immorality; Calvin, for its idolatry. Luther exposed the folly of superstition, ridiculed the hair shirt and the scourge, the purchased indulgence, and dearly bought, worthless masses for the dead; Calvin shrunk from their criminality with impatient horror. Luther permitted the cross and the taper, pictures and images, as things of indifference; Calvin demanded a spiritual worship in its utmost purity. Luther, not from his own choice but from the overruling necessities of his position, left the organization of the church to princes and governments; Calvin reformed doctrine, ritual, and practice; and, by establishing ruling elders in each church and an elective synod, he secured to his polity a representative character, which combined authority with popular rights. Both Luther and Calvin insisted that, for each one, there is and can be no other priest than himself; and, as a consequence, both agreed in the parity of the clergy. Both were of one mind that, should pious laymen choose one of their number to be their minister, "the man so chosen would be as truly a priest as if all the bishops in the world had consecrated him."

In the regency which was established in 1547, during the minority of Edward, the reforming party had the majority. Calvin made an appeal to Somerset, the protector; and, burning with zeal to include the whole people of England in a perfect unity with the reformers of the continent, he urged Cranmer to call together pious and rational men, educated in the school of God, to meet and agree upon one uniform confession of Christian doctrine, according to the rule of scripture. "As for me," he said, "if I can be made use of, I will sail through ten seas to bring this about."

In the first year of the new reign, Peter Martyr and another from the continent were summoned to Oxford. The Book of

Homilies, which held forth the doctrine of justification by faith, prepared by Cranmer in the year 1547, laid the foundation for further reform; and in the next appeared Cranmer's first Book of the Common Prayer, in which, however, there lurked many superstitions. Bucer, who, in 1549, was called to Cambridge, complained of the backwardness of "the reformation." "Do not abate your speed, because you approach the goal," wrote Calvin to Cranmer. "By too much delay the harvest-time will pass by, and the cold of a perpetual winter set in. The more age weighs on you, the more swiftly ought you to press on, lest your conscience reproach you for your tardiness, should you go from the world while things still lie in confusion." The tendency of the governing mind appeared from the appointment, in 1551, of John Knox, as a royal chaplain. Cranmer especially desired to come to an agreement with the reformed church on the eucharist; and, on that subject, his liturgy of 1552 adopted the teaching of Calvin; the priest became a minister, the altar a table, the bread and wine a commemoration. Exorcism in the rite of baptism, auricular confession, the use of consecrated oil, prayers for the dead, were abolished. "The Anglican liturgy," wrote Calvin of this revised Book of Common Prayer, "wants the purity which was to have been wished for, yet its fooleries can be borne with."

The forty-two articles of religion digested by Cranmer, and, in 1553, promulgated by royal authority, set forth the creed of the evangelical church as that of all England. In the growing abhorrence of superstition, the inquisitive mind, especially in the cities, asked for greater simplicity in the vestments of ministers and in the forms of devotion. Not a rite remained of which the fitness was not questioned. The authority of all traditions, of papal bulls and briefs, encyclicals and epistles, and of decrees of councils, was done away with; and the austere principle announced that neither symbol, nor vestment, nor ceremony, nor bowing at a name, nor kneeling at an emblem, should be endured, unless it was set forth in the word of God. The churchmen desired to differ from the ancient forms as little as possible, and readily adopted the use of things indifferent; the Puritans could not sever themselves

too widely from the Roman usages. A more complete reform was demanded; and the friends of the established liturgy expressed in the prayer-book itself a wish for its furtherance.

Of the insurrections in the reign of Edward, all but one sprung from the oppression of the landlords. England accepted the reformation, though the want of good preachers impeded the training of the people in its principles. There was no agreement among the bishops on doctrine or discipline. Many parishes were the property of the nobles; many ecclesiastics, some even of those who affected to be evangelical, were pluralists, and left their parochial duties to those who would serve at the lowest price, even though sometimes they could not read English. Lay proprietors, who had taken the lands of the monasteries, saved themselves from paying pensions to dispossessed monks by setting them, however ignorant or unfit, over parishes. In some a sermon had not been preached for years.

In this state of public worship throughout the land, Mary, in July, ascended the throne, and, by her zeal to restore the old religion, became the chief instrument in establishing the new. The people are swayed more by their emotions than by dialectics; and, where two parties appear before them, the majority is most readily roused for that one which appeals to the heart. Mary offended English nationality by taking the king of Spain for her husband; and, while the statesmen of Edward's time had not been able to reach the country by preachers, she startled the dwellers in every parish in England by the fires which she lighted at Gloucester and Oxford and Smithfield, where prelates and ministers, and men and women of the most exemplary lives, bore witness among blazing fagots to the truth of the reformed religion by displaying the highest qualities that give dignity to human nature. Rogers and Hooper, the first martyrs of Protestant England, were Puritans. And it was observed that Puritans never sought by concessions to escape the flames. For them, compromise was itself apostasy. The offer of pardon could not induce Hooper to waver, nor the pains of a lingering death impair his fortitude. He suffered by a very slow fire, and died as quietly as a child in his bed.

A large part of the English clergy went back to their submission to the see of Rome, while others adhered to the reformation from conviction, many of whom had, in their wives and children, given hostages for fidelity. Among the multitudes who hurried into foreign lands, one party aimed at renewing abroad the forms of discipline which had been sanctioned in the reign of Edward; the Puritans endeavored to sweeten their exile by completely emancipating themselves from all offensive ceremonies. The sojourning in Frankfort was at first imbittered by angry divisions; but time softened the asperities of controversy, and a reconciliation was prepared by concessions to the stricter sect, of which the abode on the continent was well adapted to strengthen the influence. While the Puritans who fled to Denmark and Northern Germany were rejected with the most bitter intolerance, those of them who repaired to Switzerland received the kindest welcome; their love for the rigorous austerity of a spiritual worship was confirmed; and some of them enjoyed the instructions and the friendship of Calvin. Alike at Frankfort and Geneva, they gave each other pledges to promote further reforms.

On the death of Mary, after a reign of hardly five and a half years, the Puritan exiles returned to England with still stronger antipathies to the forms of worship and the vestures, which had been disused in the churches of Switzerland, and which they now repelled as associated with the cruelties of Roman intolerance at home. But the controversy was modified by the personal character of the English sovereign.

The younger daughter of Henry VIII. had at her father's court, until her fourteenth year, conformed like him to the rites of the Roman church. Less than twelve years had passed since his death. For two or three of those years she had made use of Cranmer's first Book of Common Prayer; but hardly knew the second, which was introduced only a few weeks before her brother's death. No one ever ascribed to her any inward experience of the influences of religion. During the reign of her sister Mary, she had conformed to the Catholic church without a scruple. At the age of twentyfour, restored to freedom by accession to the throne, her first

words were that she would "do as her father did ;" and, like her father, she never called herself a Protestant, but a Catholic except in subordination to the pope. She respected the symbols of the "Catholic faith," and loved magnificence in worship. She publicly thanked one of her chaplains, who had asserted the real presence. She vehemently desired to retain in her private chapel images, the crucifix, and tapers; she was inclined to offer prayers to the Virgin; she favored the invocation of saints. She so far required the celibacy of the clergy that, during her reign, their marriages took place only by connivance. Neither the influence of early education nor the love of authority would permit Elizabeth to imitate the reformed churches of the continent, which had risen in defiance of all ordinary powers of the world, and which could justify their existence only by a strong claim to natural liberty.

On this young woman, in November, 1558, devolved the choice of the Book of Common Prayer, as it seemed, for the two or three millions who then formed the people of England; but, in truth, for very many in countries collectively more than twice as large as all Europe. Her choice was for the first service-book of her brother; yielding to the immense weight of a Puritan opposition, which was as yet unbalanced by an episcopal section in the church, she consented to that of 1553; but the prayer against the tyranny of the bishop of Rome was left out, the sign of the cross in baptism was restored, the minister was sometimes denominated the priest, the table was sometimes called the altar, and the rubric, which scouted the belief in the objective real presence of Christ in the eucharist as gross idolatry, was discarded. She long desired to establish the national religion midway between sectarian licentiousness and Roman supremacy; and, after her policy in religion was once declared, the pride of authority would brook no opposition.

When rigorous orders for enforcing conformity were first issued, the Puritans were rather excited to defiance than intimidated. Of the London ministers, about thirty refused subscription, and men began to speak openly of a secession from the church; "not for hatred to the estates of the church of

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