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arrangements. But the new party under Bancroft was strenuously pushing forward and securing Court favour. Diocesan episcopacy, upheld as of Divine right, was connected with ideas of priesthood and sacramental grace. Those preten

sions were springing up which have ever since been the watchwords of Anglicanism as distinct from Protestantism, and by which the Church of Bancroft was widely separated in temper, views, and aims from the Church of Cranmer. Hatred of the Puritans at home and estrangement from the Reformed Churches abroad, went hand-in-hand. The English Prelates were no longer the friends and correspondents of foreign Presbyters. No longer acting on the defensive and apologizing for the peculiarities of the English Reformation, they began now to extol these very peculiarities as of the essence of the Church. Bancroft's primacy lasted however for only six years; and when George Abbot succeeded him, in 1610, a very decided change or even reversal of administration was witnessed. Clarendon complains that Abbot "did not think so ill of the Presbyterian discipline as he ought to have done." As Grindal stood to Parker, so Abbot did to Bancroft ; and during his ten years of primacy there was considerable relaxation in the prelatic system. Strange that James should have elevated Abbot to such high office. But it was in keeping with the many inconsistencies of his reign. In 1605, the Gunpowder Plot inflamed him against the Papists; but in order to promote the "Spanish Match," he became most gracious towards his Roman Catholic subjects. For a time he was a vehement Calvinist; and not content with displaying polemic zeal as an author, he commissioned Church of England representatives to the Calvinistic Synod of Dort; but on finding

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1 Abbot once preached before the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and was publicly thanked for "his excellent sermon," even though on a mission from King James to undermine the very freedom" of her assemblies. If his mission contributed to the overthrow of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and if in reward for his services on this oceasion he was made Archbishop of Canterbury, we are no less assured that "his semi-puritanical principles and moderate administration were a principal cause of the ruin of the hierarchy and triumph of Presbytery in England."-M'Crie's Life of Melville, vol. ii. p. 240. Heylin's Hist. of Presbyterians, p. 283, and Clarendon's History, vol. i. pp. 88, 89.

2 Called by the States General of Holland, 1618-19, to settle, if possible, the doctrinal controversy that had arisen under the name of Arminianism. The deputies

how Puritanism and Calvinism were associated together in curbing his arbitrary prerogative, he latterly gave fullest countenance to the opposite school. And so, when he died, in 1625, the breach was wider than ever between the Calvinistic Puritans, who had rallied under Abbot's primacy, and the new school of Arminian Anglicans, who had become passionately devoted to the royal prerogative and the defence of the Divine right of kings.

sent from England by King James with the approval of Archbishop Abbot, were men of such position in the Church as Bishop Carleton, Davenant, Hall, Ward, and Goad. With the Lambeth Articles, so distinctively Calvinistic or Augustinian, in their hands, they took an active part in the proceedings of the Synod, which presented the remarkable phenomenon of a humble Dutch Presbyterian minister presiding over an Anglican Bishop and other dignitaries, who acted as simple members of Synod, and who acquiesced in its unanimous condemnation of the distinctive Arminian positions. That the Church of England was decisively Calvinistic down to the days of Archbishop Laud, does not admit of doubt; and Toplady's treatise on the Historic Proofs of the Doctrinal Calvinism of the Church of England is unanswerable. The first formal treatise on the Thirty-nine Articles, by Thomas Rogers, under the title The Catholic Doctrine of the Church of England, never dreams of anything but the Calvinistic interpretation. Laud and Montague, with the other Arminianizers, were the real innovators. Bishop Carleton's Examination of Montague's Appeal amply reveals this, as does also the recent Camden Society's issue of the Register of Visitors of Oxford University, with its able and candid Introduction. See Prof. Mitchell's Westminster Assembly, Lecture X., for a succinct history of doctrine in the English Church.

II.

THE LAUDIAN AND ABSOLUTIST REVOLUTION—

OR NEW SOIL FOR PRESBYTERIAN GROWTH. 1625-1637.

WHEN Charles I. came to the throne, in 1625, he found the treasury exhausted, the legislature full of suspicion, the country dissatisfied, and the Church still torn with internal dissensions. His position was one of no ordinary difficulty; and great wisdom alone could cope with the tangled state of affairs as left by his father. Alas! whatever his private excellences, Charles was rendered seriously unfit for the hazards of the situation by reason of his own narrow-minded obstinacy of judgment, his miserable habit of dissimulation, and those inherited notions of high personal prerogative and Divine right, about which he was inflexible. His incompetency is significantly enough indicated by his having summoned and angrily dismissed three successive Parliaments in the first four years of his reign, and then determining to dispense with Parliaments altogether, as long as possible. But we have to do with matters ecclesiastical-the most difficult, perhaps, of all he had to face. Charles I. was born in Scotland in 1600, and having been baptized in the Presbyterian Church, was placed for a time, in boyhood, under a Presbyterian tutor. This was all, however, that was Presbyterian about him, having early become attached to a system which was more congenial to his tastes and which ministered more successfully to his aims. He had just married on his accession, Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry IV. of France, and sister of the reigning King Louis XIII., a woman of great beauty and cleverness, but too fond of intermeddling, and withal a most devoted adherent of the Church of Rome, which made her suspected among the people.

But if Charles, as a constitutional monarch, had an evil genius in his Queen, he was yet more unfortunate in his chosen

1 1625, 1626, 1629.

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counsellors, Buckingham and Laud, whose elevation boded no good to the peace and stability of either Church or State. William Laud was a man of irreproachable life, undoubted learning, irrepressible energy, and daring courage, not to say rashness. With a refined subtlety of intellect and mystic enthusiasms, he had little depth of spiritual nature, less insight into men and things, and, least of all, sympathy with others. Narrow-minded and bigoted to the last degree, Laud had early in life adopted High Church principles in their most extreme form. In 1604, at the age of thirty-one, when taking his Bachelor of Divinity degree at Oxford, he gave strong expression to his conviction that there could be no true Church without diocesan Bishops, and afterwards stoutly contended that Presbyterianism was worse even than Popery." At Oxford he kept everything in ferment; and when the University rang with doctrinal and ecclesiastical disputes (there being still a band of "Genevans" occupying college posts), he helped to procure from King James one of those royal proclamations which the defenders of "the prerogative" contended should have the force of law, and the design of which was to promote and enjoin patristic and mediæval studies, so as to weaken the hold of Calvinistic and Scriptural instructions hitherto prevailing. The persistently innovating spirit of the man may be gathered from his action on becoming Dean of Gloucester. He insisted on having the Communion-table fixed altar-wise against the east wall, and began the practice of bowing to it. The Bishop was the learned Hebrew scholar, Dr. Miles Smith, who was one of the two final revisers of the 1611 Bible, and the writer of the long and able, but too little known, prefatory essay on the translation. The Bishop never entered his cathedral again, so keenly did he resent the startling novelties.

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Laud's rise at Court was hindered not only by the Archbishop and Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, but by the shrewd suspicions of James himself. "He hath a restless spirit," said the King, "and cannot see when matters are well, but loves to toss and change and to bring things to a pitch of reformation floating in his own brain." And when Laud had gained the heart of Prince Charles and the royal favourite, Buckingham, so that

they urged the King to raise him to the episcopal bench as Bishop of St. David's, in 1621, the facile monarch is reported. to have said, "Take him to you then, but on my soul you will repent it." James's death, in 1625, opened the way for Laud's promotion, and he was at once made Clerk of the Closet to the new King, and in 1626 was raised to the see of Bath and Wells. The following year, 1627, witnessed a singular proceeding. So long ago as 1618 (nine years before this) Archbishop Abbot, being on a visit to Lord Zouch in Hampshire, had the misfortune by a stray arrow to kill a keeper accidentally; and the melancholy event cast a deep gloom over his mind. No blame was attachable to him, and he made every possible reparation to the man's widow and family. But because the uncourtly and puritanic Archbishop stood in the way of the extreme Anglican party, it was resolved to supersede him, and to use the old casual homicide as a pretext. And so he was sequestered for some years, while his functions were transferred, in 1627, to a commission of five bishops, Laud being one; and from the time of his becoming Bishop of London in 1628, he was in the ascendant till 1633, when he succeeded to the primacy itself, and began to rule all with high-handed procedure.1 The extreme Anglican party,-now thoroughly consolidated under his leadership,-was in his eyes the Church; and he carried out his policy accordingly.

We shall entirely misconceive the subsequent course of events if we fail to realize that his was the innovating and revolutionary spirit in the Church, with a fixed determination to carry all before it, in an exclusive, bitter, and persecuting temper. Unity of ceremonial in Church service and implicit

1 Laud's high-handed procedure may be judged from the fact that no sooner had he become Archbishop (1633) than he resolved on the extinction of the FOREIGN CHURCHES IN ENGLAND, which had hitherto preserved many of their Presbyterian usages and liberties. Whatever interferences they had suffered already from time to time, were now cast wholly into the shade.-Rushworth, ii. 272. Further references in STRYPE's Cranmer, p. 336; Grindal, p. 61; and Annals, vol. i. p. 172; vol. iv. p. 538; also Heylin's Laud, p. 235. For the interesting history of the exiles, the reader may consult Burn's Churches of the Strangers; Kershaw's Protestants from France in their English homes; Smiles' Huguenots in England; and above all, The Refugees and their Descendants in Great Britain and Ireland," by Rev. D. C. A. Agnew, whose valuable collections of Huguenot Literature are now deposited in the Library of the College of the Presbyterian Church of England.

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