With these views the nonconformists in the church continued their resistance to the imposition of the enactments, and of other matters; while the advocates for unbroken uniformity were no less zealous in their endeavours to enforce them. To aid the latter in this work of coercing the conscience, a tribunal unknown to the constitution, and contrary to its spirit, was erected, called "The High Court of Commission," of which Mr. Macaulay gives the following account. "The tribunal afforded no protection to the subject against the civil and ecclesiastical tyranny of that period. [Charles I.] The judges of the common law holding their situations during the pleasure of the King, were scandalously obsequious. Yet, obsequious as they were, they were less ready and efficient instruments of arbitrary power than a class of courts, the memory of which, after the lapse of two centuries, is still held in just abhorrence by the nation. Foremost among these courts in power and in infamy, were the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, the former a political, the latter a religious inquisition. Neither of them was a part of the old constitution of England. The Star Chamber had been re-modelled, and the High Commission created by the Tudors." The High Commission was set up by Elizabeth, and consisted of a tribunal composed of both clerical and lay members, and vested with extensive powers to take cognizance of heresy, and to summon, try, and punish heretics. Permitted to examine by interrogation, and to dispense with the law of evidence, it was emphatically what the historian just alluded to has called it, "The English Inquisition."

The terrors of this infamous outrage upon English liberty were all brought to bear upon the Puritans; and though they had friends in both houses of parliament,

and even in her Majesty's privy council, it was of no avail; vested with such powers, the bishops were too strong for the recusants, and trod them down with the iron heel of oppression. That the Puritans were not few or inconsiderable may be learnt from the fact that the principal persons for learning and piety in the university of Cambridge, not only opposed the severities now so generally practised against them, but refused themselves to conform. The fellows and scholars of St. John's College, to the number of nearly three hundred, threw away their surplices with one consent; and many in the other colleges did the same. But it was all in vain; one archbishop after another, with nearly the whole bench, determined to crush and extirpate the spirit of nonconformity. Clergymen were supended and deprived of their benefices; churches were shut up; the rites of worship were in many places discontinued, for want of ministers to conduct them. It is computed that a fourth part of the clergy were suspended as Puritans. Among the men thus silenced was the venerable Miles Coverdale, the translator and first printer of the Bible in the English language, who was driven from his flock and obliged to relinquish his benefice.

The Puritans finding at length that they could enjoy no services in the church which their consciences approved, determined to separate from it. This was considered by their persecutors to unite the crimes of schism against the church and rebellion against the state. Upon the discovery of one of these congregations, in the year 1567, in London, a fierce persecution commenced, and no less than fifty or sixty persons were imprisoned for the crime of separate worship. This called out the celebrated Thomas Cartwright, of Cambridge, one of the most accomplished men and most elegant Latin scholars

of his time, who, himself a Puritan, became their ароlogist, and appealed to the parliament on their behalf, which produced a controversy between him and Dr. Whitgift, that exalted the advocate for conformity to the see of Canterbury, and drove the champion for nonconformity into exile.*

No relief could be obtained from Parliament, and therefore conformity or persecution was left for the choice of the Puritans. Very many chose the latter, and bitter was the cup they had to drink. Mr. Brook, in his history of the Puritans, has given us a list of several hundreds of these illustrious confessors, whose heroism, whose sufferings, and whose virtues reflect as much disgrace upon their persecutors, as they do honour upon themselves. Multitudes were imprisoned, of whom many died in jail; some were beheaded; and some were burnt alive in Smithfield.

Sometime about the middle of the reign of Elizabeth lived Robert Brown, a clergyman by education and office, and a kinsman to the great Lord Treasurer Burleigh. This man had come to the belief that in church government, neither episcopacy, nor presbyterianism, was the polity laid down in the New Testament, but independency, a system which makes each church complete in itself, and competent to the management of its own affairs, without any controul whatever from without. He was a man of great ardour and zeal in the promulgation of his own opinions, for such they were, believing that he who knows truth should spread it. Being a preacher of ready, earnest, and impassioned utterance, he drew crowds to hear him first at Cambridge, and afterwards at Norwich. It was not likely

* A memoir of this distinguished Puritan was published two or three years ago by the late Rev. B. Brook,

such a zealot would escape the notice of the prelates. He became the object of a relentless persecution, but both his zeal and his sufferings made many converts. He endured persecution with the most dogged obstinacy, if not with the most exemplary patience, and even boasted that he had been committed to more than thirty prisons. At length he fled for safety to Middleburgh in Zealand, where he first instituted a church after his own model—then quarrelled with it—and then left it. Such is the versatility of man, that on his return to England he reconciled himself to the church he had so vehemently opposed, and by which he had been so virulently persecuted, and became again a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England. "He lived," says Dr. Vaughan, from whom this account is taken, "to an extreme old age, but the last forty years of his life were the years of a sorry worldling, and his death is said to have been brought on by one of those fits of passion and self-will to which he was liable. The story of this unhappy man is instructive. He was one of a class-a zealot in religion without being religious. His hatred of some real or supposed Christian abuses, was presumed to be evidence of his own Christian character; but while doing so much to mend the religion of other men, it was ere long to be manifest that he had no religion of his own. PASSIONATE OPPOSITION TO ERROR IS NOT THE SUREST WAY TO TRUTH. Piety is self-government in its highest form. It is the Christian profession which must regenerate Christian institutions."

"Brown's opinions outlived his apostacy and his life, and were embraced by men whose character for piety was the opposite of his own, but who were naturally anxious not to be known by a name so dishonourable and so detestable. But their enemies were but too

happy in such an opportunity of rendering them odious, and therefore they fixed the stigma upon them, and independency became identified with all that was extravagant, fickle, and base in the career of Robert Brown, an association as just as it would be to identify the Church of England with all that was licentious, tyrannical, and murderous in the character of its founder, the eighth Henry."

At length Elizabeth departed to give an account of her administration to a higher tribunal. It has been said that, "as to her religion, she abjured nothing in Popery but submission to a higher authority than her own, and was no further a Protestant that was necessary to make herself a pope. She had images, a crucifix, and lighted candles in her own chapel; and when her chaplain preached against the sign of the cross, she called out to him to desist from that ungodly digression, and to go on with his text. As an enemy to preaching, she scarcely ever heard a sermon, and used to say, one or two preachers in a county were enough. The exercises which were most calculated to form a useful ministry she suppressed, and broke the heart of Grindall, the best primate that England has known. That such an idolater of her own prerogative should hate the Puritans was natural, for they were not the courtly men who could join the priests of the day to call her goddess. A life spent in defiance of the genuine spirit of religion, was closed without its consolations, while the gloom which hung over her latter days was aggravated by seeing her courtiers turn to worship James the rising sun."*

There is enough, and in the estimation of some, more than enough of severe justice in these remarks, * Bogue and Bennett's History of Dissenters.