Oxford and Cambridge. Then it was that on account of the popish ignorance and incapacity of the clergy, and as the best substitute for a preaching ministry, the first book of homilies was published to be read in the churches, and a copy deposited with every parish priest. Then it was that the images were ordered to be removed from places of worship; and the order went forth that every church should within three months be provided with a Bible. Then it was that the old Latin forms of public worship were collated, revised, expurgated, and translated in to English. Then it was that one great and noisome abomination of the ancient or popish Christianity, was swept away by legalizing the marriage of the clergy. Then it was that the reformation of the church was continually regarded, not as a work completed and incapable of advancement, but as a work in progress, to be carried on from one degree of purity to anoth er. These six years of the reign of Edward VI. are the years in which the foundation was laid for whatever of real Protestantism pertains to the church of England as by law established.

On the accession of Mary, when the reforming prelates and statesmen found their own engine of the king's supremacy turned against themselves, it was soon manifest that the measures of the preceding reign had not been ineffectual; and the three hundred victims, of all ranks, from the aged primate of all England to the simple peasant and the little child, who were burned at the stake as martyrs to the reformed faith, "lighted such a candle in England as shall never be put out." Yet the facility with which almost the entire nation was turned back from the religion of Edward and Cranmer to the religion of Mary and Bonner-the pliable ness of Parliament to repeal all the reforming laws of the two preceding

reigns, and to re-enact those old bloody statutes which brought the martyrs to the stake, showed too plainly how little progress had then been made in that reformation of the people without which all refor mation of doctrines and of forms is of no worth. On one point, however, the Queen found her subjects less flexible. The very act repealing all laws against the see of Rome, could not be carried without a proviso that the plunder of the monasteries and bishoprics, which Henry had so profusely distributed among his courtiers, and by which he had made the reformation so acceptable to them, should remain undisturbed with those who then possessed it. The Queen indeed gave back all of that property which was still in possession of the sovereign, and testified her zeal by repairing old monasteries and erecting new ones; but when it was proposed in Parliament that the abbey lands should be restored by law to the uses from which they had been alienated, the English temper was up in a moment; and even in that obsequious assembly there were those who significantly laid their hands on their swords, and said they knew how to defend their own property. Had the Queen, or rather had the Pope her master, been wise enough to abandon the claim on the alienated property of the church, and to confirm that property to the actual possessors, trusting to the power of su perstition and of priestcraft to make up all losses, the cruelties which have gained for Mary so unhappy a preeminence in English history, would have been far more effectual toward suppressing the Protestant party. But while the alienation remained unsanctioned by the Pope, all that property, amounting to perhaps a fifth part of the rental of the kingdom, was a "vested interest" against the establishment of popery.

It was the security which the reformation gave to the tenure of so

large an amount of property, together with the personal unpopularity of Mary, gloomy, bigoted, austere, better qualified for an abbess than a queen, which, more than any general conviction of the truth of the reformed doctrine, made the accession of Elizabeth so acceptable to the majority of the nation. Elizabeth's title to the throne being exclusively Protestant, and depending on an act of Parliament empowering her father to settle the succession by his will, she could not but adopt the Protestant policy, especially as in the person of her cousin Mary of Scotland there was a Popish pretender to the crown. Accordingly, in a few months, the laws relating to the ecclesiastical establishment were restored nearly as they stood at the death of Edward VI. The great difference was not that in a few things the service book was made less exceptionable to the adherents of the old superstition; nor was it that the taste of the "head of the church" affected all sorts of pomp and stately ceremony. The great difference lay rather in that pregnant fact, that the reformation as Edward left it was a reformation in full progress, a reformation carried as far as the exigencies of those times would allow, and to be carried farther when the times should be more propitious; whereas the reformation as restored by Elizabeth was a reformation already completed, a reformation sealed and hallowed by the blood of the martyrs, and never to be called in question without the guilt, at least of" temerity." From that time the church of England has been, in the estimation of all her true disciples, not infallible, for that would not be Protestant, but alalways and perfectly in the right, theoretically fallible, but in fact nev. er erring, a church "without spot or wrinkle or any such thing."

In the circumstances and method of the English reformation, we see the elements of that strife in relation

to religious affairs, which agitated England from the days of Elizabeth to the revolution of 1688. On the one hand, the ecclesiastical establishment was so constituted as to be, far more than the aristocracy, the great support and bulwark of the throne; its patronage being, for the most part, directly or indirectly at the king's disposal; its bishop barons, with their power over the inferior clergy, and with their votes in the house of lords, being his creatures; and all the highest honors of the national church, with whatever influence such honors can have on opinion or action, being absolutely at his disposal. On the other hand, there was among the people, and had been from the days of Wycliffe, a leaven of that true Protestantism which bids every man read the Scriptures for himself, and teaches every man that he is to be saved, not by the mediation of the church or of its priesthood, but by the grace of God in Christ freely pardoning his sin and forming his soul anew. this remnant of Lollardism, and to the influence which Wycliffe and his followers had left upon the popular mind, the reformation in the days of Henry, and still more in the days of Edward, gave impulse and development. Thus while the church, considered as a political institution, was reformed into so complete a dependence on the king, a reformation of another kind was going on among the people. New spiritual ideas-ideas which are the germ of popular liberty and of boundless activity and improvement, began to spread rapidly. Especially in the reign of Edward VI, when Bucer at Cambridge, and Peter Martyr at Oxford, were the authorized teachers of theology, forming the opinions and character of the young clergy-an arrangement not unlike what might he seen now in England if Merle D'Aubigné were placed at the head of theological instruction in one of those universities, and

To

Tholuck or Neander in the other the principles of a true and thorough reformation took root in the universities; and thence were propagated, as the men educated under such an influence went abroad to their various employments in church or state. The towns, essentially republican in their constitution, showed from the first a decided aptitude for the reception of the new opinions.

The two reformations-the one proceeding from the king, and the other proceeding from the peoplewere for a while prevented from coming into active collision, by the presence of an enemy equally dreaded by each. Yet even in the reign of Edward VI, there was an omen of a coming controversy when the excellent Hooper refused to be consecrated bishop in the "Aaronical habits," as they were styled, and was consequently imprisoned till he consented to a compromise, and accordingly made his appearance in his prelatical character "like a new player on the stage," his upper garment a long scarlet chimere down to the feet, and under that a white linen rochet "that covered all his shoulders, and a four-square cap upon his head." The disgust which Hooper, with his thoroughly Protestant tastes, must have felt in being compelled to make this mountebank appearance even once or twice, and the sympathy which all of his way of thinking must have felt with him in his imprisonment and in the degradation of his coerced conformity, might have shown to wise men what was to be expected when the reformation should be less in danger from any dissension among the enemies of Rome. In the reign of Mary, "the troubles at Frankfort," where a little congregation of fugitives from England had adopted, instead of the book of common prayer, modes of worship more in accordance with the usages of the Protestants around them, till new comers made a schism among them by insisting on the

prayer-book as the very thing for which their brethren in England were then suffering martyrdom, were a demonstration of the opposing tendencies which needed only time for growth, and opportunity for development, to agitate all England. Of the eight hundred fugitives, lay and clerical, who during that bloody reign found refuge in Geneva, and in other cities where the reformation after the Swiss model had prevailed, only a few came home without the earnest desire of seeing the ecclesiastical order of their native country carried back, much farther than Edward's counselors had ventured, toward a primitive simplicity. The disappointment to which they were doomed under Elizabeth, had no tendency to make them satisfied, and did little to prevent their views from spreading among the most religious portion of the people. The Puritans began to be a distinct party as soon as the exiles returned. The supreme head of the church of England, Queen Elizabeth, was determined that all the forms and circumstances of worship throughout the kingdom, should be exactly ac cording to her ideas of dignity and decorum. The prayers prepared and set forth in the service book, and no others, were to be offered in all churches. The clergy, according to their degrees and functions, were not only to be distinguished by their dress, like the soldiers and officers of a military establishment, but were to wear the same vestments which had been worn by the popish clergy of old, and which in the popular mind were inseparably associated with the old superstition. The communion table in every church was to stand, not as might please the taste of the congregation, or of the officiating minister, but as the Queen's injunctions had directed. Several of the bishops were at first much inclined to Puritan opinions, or at least to a reasonable and Christian moderation. Desiring to see

the people instructed and made better by the preaching of the Gospel, they were slow in adopting those measures which tended to perpetuate the reign of popular ignorance by silencing the most intelligent and conscientious, as well as the most zealous and popular of the preaching clergy. Could those bishops have exercised, at that time, their own judgment, many of the objectionable ceremonies and vestments would have been dispensed with. But the queen was inflexible, and her power over the church as its head brought the bishops, after a while, to a zeal for "the ceremonies and the habits" to which some of them, at the beginning, were strangers.

The great personal popularity of Elizabeth as a sovereign, the energy of her administration in the hands of such statesmen as Cecil and Burleigh, the eclat attendant on the repulse of the Spanish invasion, and her good sense in avoiding all col lision with the established forms of the English constitution as it then was, enabled her to carry her people along with her in what she did, and in what she refused to do for ecclesiastical reformation. Thus under her long reign, the religious differences among her Protestant subjects, though continually becoming deeper and more ominous, never assumed such a form as to disturb the peace or check the prosperity of the kingdom. No equal period since the Norman conquest, had been more brilliant or more prosperous. But that very prosperity was preparing the way for revolutions. The aristocracy, enriched by the spoils of the suppressed monastic institutions, were gradually recovering something of their ancient weight in the nation. Commerce and the arts were giving increased importance to the towns. The middling class between the sluggish peasantry and the proud nobility-that great class embodying so much of indus

try, skill, enterprise, and so rapidly acquiring both knowledge and wealth, was beginning gradually to feel its strength. A philosophic and enlightened mind might have foreseen that the balance of powers in the state must ere long be re-adjusted, either gradually or suddenly, either peacefully or violently.

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When James I. came to throne, the constitution of the church of England had been arranged long enough to produce its legitimate results. The bishops and other dig. nitaries had learned their dependence on the sovereign, and generally were no longer tainted with any suspicion of Puritanism. Strange would it have been, if a church which had made them peers of the realm, and had placed their order nearest to the throne, and which gave them pomp, equipage, revenues and palaces, such as princes might envy, had seemed to them to require farther reformation. The church, as an establishment, had become the ally of the court. And thus, if for no other reason, it came to pass that the Parliament, and especially the house of commons, representing the public sentiment of the towns and of those smaller landholders who had little connection with the court, naturally favored the Puritan demand for a farther reformation. Even during the reign of Elizabeth, the house of commons had repeatedly manifested a disposition to interfere with the affairs of the church, much farther than agreed with the Queen's inclinations. And when James, in his blustering and insolent way, began to promulgate and to put in practice his preposterous claim of a divine right to govern with absolute power, a right superior to all laws and inalienable by any compact, and it grew evident to all thoughtful men that a great struggle for the ancient liberties of England was approaching, and that the royal prerogative which was so fast overshadowing

the laws must be bounded by new and more effectual limitations, the Puritans who demanded a reform in the church, and the patriotic party who withstood the usurpations of the court, became more and more identified.

There is a connection, deeper than Cranmer or Jewel ever suspected, between Romish forms and institutions on the one hand, and Romish doctrine on the other. In the latter part of the reign of James, when the influence of Laud began to be ascendant, the true doctrines of the reformation began to be industriously obscured and discountenanced; and a doctrine more consonant with the idea of a priesthood and of justification by some other process, besides a simple and undivided reliance on Christ's intercession, became the doctrine of the church as allied with the court. From this time, popish innovations began to be a distinct theme of complaint on the part of the Puritans. And in proportion as men were convinced, that under the existing system the doctrine of the church was going back, not only from the mark to which Latimer and Ridley attained, but even from the standard of the Elizabethan reformation, they naturally reasoned about the church, as they were already reasoning unconsciously about the state, that some new reform was needed; men, who sincerely believed and loved the Gospel, the doctrine of salvation by the grace of God, could not but feel that adequate security against a return of the whole body of popish doctrines, must be found in some new and more thorough reformation. And then, as if on purpose to make Puritanism as powerful and formidable as possible, and to blend all voices of dissatisfaction against usurpation in the state or superstition in the church, into one swelling chorus of complaint and threatening, the court, and the church as swayed by the

court, began to stigmatize with the name of Puritans, not only those who were zealous against the habits and the ceremonies, but all who opposed the introduction of Arminianism, all who desired to see the Lord's day kept holy, all who were dissatisfied with an ignorant and scandalous clergy, and all who were alarmed at the outrageous principles on which the government of the kingdom was conducted.

The reformation in Scotland had been from the beginning a movement of the people. It was an insurrection and revolution. There, as in England, the reforming nobles had grasped in one way and another a great portion of the wealth, with which the priestcraft of the clergy and the superstition of the laity had been for ages enriching the church. Not only had the monasteries been dissolved, but the sees of the bishops had been despoiled, and the bishops reduced to mere nullities, though the office had not yet been formally abolished by law. Scotland was in effect, though not in form, a Presbyterian kingdom, from the moment in which the reformation triumphed there. And when the kings of Scotland became by inheritance possessors of the throne of England, the Scotch, in their jealousy lest their country might become a mere dependency of the greater and more powerful kingdom, were more zealous than ever for their own ecclesiastical institutions as distinguished from the loftier hierarchy and the more or nate worship of the English church. The measures of James and of his son and successor, Charles I, both of whom were bent on gradually carrying the Scotch reformation backward into a conformity with England, irritated the religious sympathies of the northern kingdom, and made not only the enlightened and devout, but the masses, cling to their particular type of Protest. antism, as the badge and the very