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for whatever were the faults of Elizabeth, and they were neither few nor small, she was still the main prop and pillar of Protestantism, as viewed in its national form among the kingdoms of Europe. This was felt and acknowledged by the Puritans whom she persecuted, who, even in the depths of the prisons to which she had sent them, prayed, and with no simulated fervour, that she might be kept from the dagger of the assassin, that rebellion might be put down under her feet, and that her arms might be victorious by sea and land. "One of the most stubborn of the stubborn sect," [thus harshly does Macaulay speak of them,] immediately after one of his hands had been lopped off by the executioner, for an offence into which he had been hurried by his intemperate zeal, waved his hat with the hand which was still left him, and shouted "God save the Queen."* The Puritan historian Neal, confirms this by his own testimony, for after censuring her cruelty to the sect to which he belonged, concludes thus, "However, notwithstanding all these blemishes, Queen Elizabeth stands upon record as a wise and politic princess for delivering her kingdom from the difficulties in which it was involved at her accession, for preserving the Protestant Reformation against the potent attempts of the Pope, the Emperor, and the King of Spain abroad, and the Queen of Scots and her Popish subjects at home. She was the glory of the age in which she lived, and will be the admiration of posterity."

One thing, it is evident from these extracts, the Puritans had learned, and that is, the hardest of all the lessons of Christianity, and the one most rarely practised, the duty of returning good for evil, of blessing them that curse us, and praying for them who despiteHistory of the Puritans, Part I. cap. viii,

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fully use us, even as our Lord has instructed us to do. The men who, in the dark vaults to which their sovereign had committed them, for no crime but that which she herself had committed during the reign of her Popish sister, worshipping God according to the dictates of their conscience, could lift up to heaven their prayers for her protection—and of whom one was found who, when his hand was chopped off by a royal edict for his zeal against the state-religion, waved his hat with the other, and invoked the blessing of heaven upon his persecutor, proved themselves worthy of better treatment from their sovereign, than to be hunted down as heretics; and from the historian who has alluded to their virtues, than to be stigmatised as a "stubborn sect." The Puritans had their faults, but these have been exaggerated not only by their enemies, but even by others who were neither insensible to their virtues, nor backward in many things to admit their claims. Mr. Macaulay has not been wanting in eulogy, though it is by no means impassioned, on the better parts of their character, but he has not been sparing of the darker colours with which he has painted, and far too deeply shaded, their failings. Speaking of them in an after page of his history, he says, "The persecution which they had undergone had been severe enough to irritate, but not severe enough to destroy. They had not been tamed into submission, but baited into savageness and stubbornness. After the fashion of oppressed sects, they mistook their vindictive feelings for emotions of piety, encouraged in themselves by reading and meditation a disposition to brood over their wrongs, and when they had worked themselves up into hating their enemies, imagined they were only hating the enemies of heaven." But is this the way to speak of men who

were worn out with persecution, and into whose soul the iron had entered? Is it borne out by the testimony of the facts he had already recorded? Does this com

port with the prayers going up from the prisons of the incarcerated confessors for their persecutors? and with the "God save the Queen" from the man who had lost his hand? They had no doubt a measure of fanaticism; they did certainly in some cases study the pages of the Old Testament, and draw inferences from the theocracy as others have done since, which that unique polity was never intended to furnish, and when in adversity they forgot to profit by their own experience—but still they never in the days of their suffering imitated the savageness of wild beasts baited into ferocity by the attacks of their persecutors.

JAMES I. had been educated in Presbyterian principles, and the English prelates dreaded in him what they called "the Scotch mist:" yet the nonconformists cherished the hope that from that mist would emerge the sun of their liberties, or distil the refreshing rain of religious principles. The sequel of this dark and dreary chapter of our history dissipated the fears of the one, and equally disappointed the hopes of the other. James had all the bigotry of Elizabeth, without her genius to throw a lurid glare on the dark thunder cloud. Before he left Scotland, he said to the Presbyterians of that country, I thank God that I am king of the sincerest kirk in the world; sincerer than the kirk of England, whose service is an ill-said mass; it wants nothing of the mass but its lifting," meaning the elevation of the host. "Put not your confidence in princes," said the Psalmist; and alas! that the chronicles of royalty should furnish such ground for the caution. At the very time the hypocrite was uttering these words, he

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was carrying on a correspondence with the English nobles and bishops, and promising to continue the liturgy, which he derided as an ill-said mass." From such a monarch and head of the English church, the Puritans when they knew, and they very soon did know, his hypocrisy, could expect but little in the way of relief to their consciences or mitigation of their sufferings. They were not slow to appeal to his wisdom and his clemency, of neither of which could he boast a very large share. To save appearances, he appointed a conference at Hampton Court between the two parties of the High Church and the Puritans, which consisted of eight bishops and as many deans on the one side, and of four advocates for nonconformity on the other. These were to discuss the points of difference between the two, to see if any concessions could be made by either party. The only good, and it is a mighty one, which resulted from this conference was our present English version of the Scriptures; for when Dr. Reynolds, one of the Puritan divines, requested, in the name of his brethren, that this work might be undertaken, as the Bible then extant was a very imperfect translation, the King, in opposition to the opinion of the Bishop of London, approved of the proposal, and a committee of divines was appointed to undertake the momentous work. No fault whatever can be found with the instructions given to them for their undertaking, and indeed almost all the wisdom which James ever displayed centred in this affair. The translation, as a whole, is a glorious achievement, though it sufficiently evinces by some of its renderings that it was the work of episcopalians exclusively.

The condition of the Puritans gained little improvement during the reign of this royal pedant. Bancroft,

Archbishop of Canterbury, persecuted them with such merciless severity, that a contemporary writer informs us that in one year three hundred ministers were suspended, deprived, excommunicated, imprisoned, or forced to leave the country.

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JAMES followed Elizabeth to the bar of God, to account, as she had been compelled to do, for cruelties towards the servants of the Lord, and was succeeded by his unhappy son, CHARLES I. This ill-fated monarch inherited the combined errors and prejudices of the Tudors and of his father, the first of the Stuarts. soon evinced that with far greater personal respectability than his father, and far less of foolish pedantry, he had all his contracted views, arbitrary principles, and high church prepossessions. It was very early discovered, that the opponents of the state-worship had little to expect from one who, though not a Papist, liked a Papist far better than a Puritan. He was a zealous episcopalian in religion, and a despot in politics.

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a conscience sensitive in little things, but obtuse on the great cardinal virtues of truth and justice, he was prepared to play the part of a persecutor towards those who differed from him either in civil or sacred matters. In Archbishop Laud, who was his evil genius, he found a man to foster his worst qualities as a king and head of the church. Every thing now looked as if an attempt were to be made, if not to reunite the English Church to the Romish See, to bring it into as near a conformity to it as possible, in Arminian doctrine and Popish ritual. The Puritans beheld all this with alarm and dismay, and some few ventured to protest against it. Dr. Alexander Leighton, father of that Archbishop, who, in his commentary upon Peter, gave to the world the sweetest exposition ever written by an uninspired pen, for daring

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