Cartwright, Travers, Fulk, and others, were no less disposed to adhere to the advice.

Two striking inconsistencies in Elizabeth's ecclesiastical procedure arrest our attention. First: "It may seem strange," to use Heylin's words (History of Presbyterians, lib. viii. sec. 12), "that Queen Elizabeth should carry such a hard hand on her English Puritans, as well by severe laws as by terrible executions, . . . and yet protect and countenance the PRESBYTERIANS in all places else." Doubtless he is right in attributing it to her being forced to sustain the Presbyterian cause in Holland and Scotland, owing to what he calls "that great monster in nature, Reasons of State."

The Second capricious inconsistency is this:-Men like Cartwright were forced to flee to the Continent at the very time and for the very cause that French refugees and others were fleeing from the Continent and were being received and protected in England! Elizabeth granted privileges of worship and discipline to foreigners, which she would not allow to her own subjects who were free-born Englishmen! On condition that they chose the Bishop of London and his successors as their Superintendents, she not only on her accession promised to the Dutch, German, and French strangers to confirm their charter and restore their buildings, so that they were reinstated, the Dutch in Austin Friars and the French in their Threadneedle-street edifice; but when the persecutions in France and the Netherlands, during 1567 and 1568, drove thousands of Protestants, chiefly Presbyterians, to England, so that the Churches of the Foreigners were greatly increased in London and Southwark, Norwich, Colchester, Canterbury, Sandwich, Maidstone, Southampton, and elsewhere, she allowed them their own mode of Presbyterian worship and discipline. But, when sundry English Nonconformists sought to join their ranks, the Queen and Council required "that they should not receive into their Communion any of this realm that offered to join with them, and leave the customs and practice of their native country, lest the Queen should be moved to banish them out of the kingdom." So

1

1 Neal's Puritans, vol. i. p. 325, under year 1573. Strype's Parker, p. 334, and Strype's Annals, p. 284.

strangely jealous was authority in those times, and so singularly were religious forms deemed matters of geographical limitation!

THE PRESBYTERIANS INSIDE THE CHURCH.

The question of Presbyterial government for the Church of England had been formally raised and agitated as early as 1570. Within a few years of the origin of the words "Puritan" and "Precisian," we find the term "Presbytery" coming into use. In a letter by Sandys to Bullinger1 of this date, we find the worthy Bishop giving a sketch of the young party, not without lively apprehensions of the ultimate consequences :-"New orators," he says, 66 are rising up from among us-foolish young men who despise authority and admit of no superior. They are seeking the complete overthrow and uprooting of the whole of our ecclesiastical polity, and striving to shape out for us I know not what new platform of a Church. . . . That you may be the better acquainted with the whole matter, accept this summary of the question at issue, reduced under certain heads:

"I. The civil magistrate has no authority in ecclesiastical matters; he is only a member of the Church, the government of which ought to be committed to the clergy.

"II. The Church of Christ admits of no other government but that by Presbyteries, viz. by the minister, elders, and deacons.

"III. The names and authorities of Archbishops, Archdeacons, Deans, Chancellors, Commissaries, and other titles and dignities of like kind, should be altogether removed from the Church of Christ.

"IV. Each parish should have its own Presbytery.

"V. The choice of ministers of necessity belongs to the people.

"VI. The goods, possessions, lands, revenues, titles, honours, authorities, and all other things relating either to bishops or cathedrals, and which now of right belong to them, should be taken away forthwith and for

ever.

"VII. No one should be allowed to preach who is not a pastor of some congregation; and he ought to preach to his own flock exclusively, and nowhere else.

"VIII. The infants of Papists are not to be baptized.

"IX. The judicial laws of Moses are binding upon Christian princes, and they ought not in the slightest degree to depart from them."

Allowing for some natural misapprehensions regarding a

1 Zurich Letters, i. pp. 294, 295.

party whose views were not yet clearly formulated and defined, this statement may be accepted in a general way as a rough draft of what was aimed at by the central body of the Puritans. It was expressed in another epitomized form by the distinguished Dr. Thomas Sampson (who had already experienced the two extremes-the offer of the bishopric of Norwich, which he refused because he could not take the prescribed oaths; and deprivation and actual imprisonment with his friend Dr. Humphrey, President of Magdalen College, for refusing conformity to the ceremonies), in his letter to Lord Treasurer Burleigh, a little later :—

“MY LORD,—Though the doctrine of the Gospel is preached in the Church of England, the government of the Church, as appointed in the Gospel, is still wanting. The doctrine and the government, as appointed by Christ, are both good and are to be joined together and not separated. It is a deformity to see a Church, professing the Gospel of Christ, governed by those canons and customs by which Antichrist ruleth his synagogue. Martin Bucer wrote a book to King Edward upon this subject, entitled De Regno Christi. There you will see what is wanting of the Kingdom of Christ in the Church of England. My Lord, I beseech you to read this faithful and brief epitome of the book which I have sent you, and I beseech you to lay it to heart. It is the cause of Jesus Christ and His Church, and very much concerneth the souls of men. Use your utmost endeavours, that, as Christ teacheth us in the Church of England, he may also rule us and govern us, even by the laws of His Kingdom. Help, my Lord, in this good work. You cannot employ your authority in a

better cause."

This question of the government or polity of the Church was now pressing itself more and more on many learned and thinking minds, in proportion as conformity was being rigorously enforced. A man like the pious and earnest scholar, ANDREW KINGSMILL, who so deeply impressed his contemporaries with a sense of his many rare qualities, retired to Geneva, and afterwards to Lausanne, to study the subject carefully and watch the working of Presbyterian methods in the best Reformed Churches; but his valuable life was cut short in its early prime in 1570. The Presbyterian theory was also

1 Strype's Annals, ii. pp. 365–367.

2 Wood's Athenæ Oxon. i. p. 126; Strype's Parker, p. 157.

being widely received and taught at this time by many eminent divines, who were, however, content to live under an Episcopacy, so long as it was reasonably exercised and not urged as an indispensable in Church organization. The views of Thomas Becon, who had been Cranmer's chaplain, and still held good preferment, were widely entertained among all classes of clergy:

"What difference is there," he asks, "between a Bishop and a spiritual Minister? None at all. Their office is one; their authority and power is one; and therefore St. Paul calleth the spiritual ministers sometimes Bishops, sometimes Elders, sometimes Pastors, sometimes Teachers. What is Bishop in English? An overseer or superintendent, as Paul said to the Bishops or Elders of Ephesus, 'Take heed unto yourselves, and to the flock over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers."1

1 Becon's Catechism, in his Works, Parker Library edit. Indeed, when one gets behind the mere Index of the Parker Library, it is not difficult to see that Becon was far from being singular in holding these Presbyterian views. Thus, e.g., Dr. Wm. Fulke, in his Defence of Bible Translations (Parker Society edit. p. 255-the book was published in 1582 against the Papist Martin), says: "And where you say, we have no Elders permitted in England,' it is false; for those that are commonly called Bishops, Ministers, or Priests among us be such Elders' as the Scripture commendeth to us. And although we have not such a Consistory of Elders of Government as they had in the Primitive Church and many Churches at this day have, yet have we also Elders of Government to exercise discipline as Archbishops and Bishops, with their Chancellors, Archdeacons, Commissaries and officials, in whom if any defect be, we wish it may be reformed according to the Word of God." Presbyterians, as the Reforming party within the Church, were ready to submit to many things they could not approve, in hope they might improve, or at any rate not wax worse. But at last, after great and aggravated provocations, they proceeded to deal with lordly Prelacy as it had itself dealt with the Papacy, cast it off entirely as a usurpation and corruption.

The

II.

THE PRESBYTERIAN LEADER.

GREAT principles always tend to crystallize around some great name. A struggling party gathers to some prominent expounder of its views, and he becomes its leader. The young Presbyterian Disciplinarians in the Church found a fitting representative in Thomas Cartwright, confessedly a very able, learned, and eloquent man, with a force of character, honesty of purpose, and manly piety equal to his intellectual endow

ments.

"In the months which followed the suppression of the Northern Rebellion," says Froude, "the peace of Cambridge was troubled with the apparition of a man of genius. THOMAS CARTWRIGHT,1 now [1570] about thirty-five years old, had entered St. John's in 1550. He left the University during the Marian persecution, and kept terms as a law student in London. He returned on the accession of Elizabeth, became a Fellow, and continued in residence till the vestment controversy of 1564."

From this time Presbytero-Puritanism became a living force in England. Born in Hertfordshire about 1535, and matriculating at Cambridge, St. John's College, in 1550, from his earliest

1 Froude's Hist. of England, ix. ch. 55, pp. 343–348. There is a Life of Cartwright by Brook, and another prefixed to Hanbury's edition of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, 1830. The first sketch of him with a portrait is in Clarke's Lives, 1651.

* Marsden, Early Puritans, pp. 71–81. In recording his own estimate, this author calls him "a man of high attainments, fervent zeal, and unwearied resolution, devoting himself to suffering and disgrace in the long endeavour to achieve, as he thought, a second and better Reformation. Such examples deserve to be recorded for the reverence of future ages." He further declares him "one of the few men whose life and personal character still interest posterity after a lapse of three hundred years," though, as he adds, "angry writers have not yet ceased by turns to defend and assail his memory," or to fight over "the reputation of this great Puritan Divine." A novel mode of maltreatment has been adopted by the Rev. John Henry Blunt, M.A., who, though writing a History of the Reformation of the Church of England, from 1547 to 1662, devotes one sentence to Cartwright and omits the name from the index altogether.