its pitiless Inquisition and inhuman autos da fe; France with its black Bartholomew slaughter of 70,000 Protestants,1 its dragonades, &c. But not less terrible has been the penalty. It is possible by such drastic doings practically to kill out the enlightened conscience of a kingdom, and thus leave it like a rudderless vessel, the sport of the billows and the victim of the storm. Nations cannot escape from the law embodied in the inspired words, "They sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." The Reformation forces dominate the civilized world to-day. In the sixteenth century the unsaintly hand of Henry VIII. had struck the Pope from the apex of the ecclesiastical pyramid in England, and elevated his own portly person to the sacred altitude instead. But, while he thus arbitrarily gave to England a new Pope, and despoiled the pampered and polluted monasteries, he neither sought to change the doctrines of the Church nor to reform her government. He was, indeed, as ready as any of his predecessors, princely or papal, had been to burn or behead those who ventured, for instance, to deny the doctrine of transubstantiation, or to challenge his own absolute supremacy. Archbishop Cranmer-learned and cultured, inconstant and vacillating, endowed with a marvellous genius for compromise-whose fame was lit into lasting lustre by his hard martyr fate, did, and did well, what was possible to unite ecclesiastically the reform which, like the king's, was political, not doctrinal, with that which was distinctly doctrinal and scriptural,--what had recently declared itself at Court, with what for many generations had been making its way throughout the kingdom.

1 Perefixe, Archbishop of Paris, says 100,000; Sully, a Protestant, 70,000; De Thou, a Roman Catholic, 30,000; Lapopilinière, a Protestant who returned to the Roman Church, 29,000 ('Memoirs of Admiral Colligny'). The one sprang out of the assumption of a new function by the monarch, the other from a vitalizing faith that possessed the people. The one, acting from a potent and despotic will, downward, meant simply a transference of ecclesiastical allegiance; the other, pulsating from the hearts of the people, outward and upward, meant the moral and spiritual transformation of character and life. The former was what we may pretty accurately call Anglican Popery or Anglicized Romanism, which has borne ever since, and is bearing now, abundant fruit "after its kind"; the latter was English Puritanism, which, though for the most part outside the National Church, has extended the limits, and deepened and broadened the citizen rights and liberties, of the British Empire, and greatly enlarged the spiritual dominion of Christ.

This Puritanism-the simply Protestant element at that time within the Church of England-made rapid strides during the brief reign of Henry's son and successor, Edward VI. Images were removed from the churches; the Latin language was discarded, and the services conducted in the English tongue; auricular confession was discontinued; the sacramental cup was given to lay communicants; the "Bloody Statute" of the late king was repealed, its first article enacted that whoever denied the doctrine of transubstantiation should be declared a heretic, and burned without opportunity of abjuration; a new service-book was prepared by Cranmer, Ridley, and others, and ordered to be used,the "First Prayer-book of Edward VI."; and the clergy were allowed to marry. The prelatic polity of the Church, however, remained intact; and the mass of the clergy accepted the changes, and continued within her pale. If the papal head had been struck from the English hierarchy,

the trunk remained. Although, therefore, very imperfectly reformed-the least reformed, indeed, of all the Reformation Churches-yet it was at this period that the English Establishment first took rank amongst the Reformed and Protestant Churches of Europe. But Edward was followed by Mary. The old regime was re-established. Her reign, with such prelatic agents as Gardiner and Bonner, proved as dark and desolating, cruel and blood-stained, as Edward's had been bright and hopeful, Protestant and progressive.

Mary died in 1558. Elizabeth succeeded, and with her accession Protestantism regained the supremacy. By Elizabeth's first Parliament the Book of Common Prayer was ordered to be read in all the churches; the Thirty-nine Articles were fixed as embodying the national faith; and the queen was declared to be the head of the Church. It is a striking proof of the ecclesiastical demoralisation of that period, that of the 9000 clergymen who ministered in English parishes under Mary, only about 200 resigned rather than adopt the altered order of things under Elizabeth. They appear to have been willing to accept Popery or Protestantism at the bidding of the monarch, provided they were allowed to hold their livings. It was a singularly baneful and humiliating condition of things.

After an illustrious reign of nearly forty-five years, Elizabeth was succeeded by James I. in 1603. Coming to the English throne from the Northern Kingdom, which was both Puritan and Presbyterian, and whose Church even he declared to be "the purest Kirk under the sun," the English Puritans hoped, very reasonably, for countenance and aid from the

1 See M'Crie's Story of the Scottish Church,' p. 82.

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king in their desire to complete, or at least advance, the work of reformation in the yet very imperfectly reformed National Church. They humbly and hopefully approached him. Confident in his own learning and wisdom, and professedly with a view to unite Prelatists and Puritans in a comprehensive Church, James held a great conference at Hampton Court. The astute bishops, however, had accurately gauged the pedantic monarch. Whitgift did not hesitate to say to him "that the king spake by the special assistance of God's spirit;" while Bancroft, kneeling, “protested his heart melted with joy that almighty God had given them such a king as since Christ's time had not been!" The noble Puritan representatives, while strong and unshaken in argument, could not compete with this method of persuasion. The flattery prevailed. The Prelates triumphed-not, however, by the force of their arguments, but by the fulsomeness of their adulation.

In England the faith of the Church, the form of her government, and the order of her services continued to be manipulated, and with awful sanctions, arbitrarily imposed for the most part by kings and courtiers, without any formal reference whatever to the advancing intelligence and just rights of the Christian people themselves. Yet the highest interests of every individual citizen were involved, and the Church was called "Protestant" and "Reformed." With advancing Biblical knowledge, this state of things caused growing dissatisfaction. The Puritans believed they had a remedy: its worth had been proved by the other Reformed Churches. They simply sought to bring the English Church, as such, openly and avowedly to the rock of Scripture, to find safe and common standing-ground there. That, their

Bibles had taught them, was the right foundation. There, they wished their Church to rest. In this, however much circumstances might be against them, they were unquestionably right. It clashed, however, with the cherished notions of the Stuarts. They would be supreme. Charles I., as a man, was of a higher type than his father. But unfortunately, he had inherited an enhanced conception of even his father's doctrine of absolute monarchic rule by right divine. He accordingly disliked both Parliaments and Puritans. At that time, fortunately for the nation, they were closely akin, and interlaced one with the other. Both impinged on the current notions of regal absolutism. Parliaments had the bounden charge, at all hazards, to maintain the native civil rights and liberties of England, without. The Puritans stood also for the native rights and liberties of the sacred realm of conscience, within. Both were imperilled. Wentworth1 with his drastic and despotic policy of " thorough"-the despot's sword ruthlessly supreme in the State-and Archbishop Laud, with his relentless “thorough and thorough "the despot's cruel mutilations and chains on the fair form of the Church-by the agency of the odious Star Chamber, aimed at the destruction of both. Fines, imprisonments, whippings, ear-cropping, nose-slitting, face-branding, death itself, were their most potent arguments. Liberty, civil and religious alike, north and south, was being crushed and broken. It was the Puritanism of England and Scotland that saved the liberties of the two kingdoms in that evil hour.

Quem deus vult perdere prius dementat. Laud, not satisfied