gious freedom, is now putting forth its claims with unwonted boldness, and in the most exclusive and supercilious form;-denouncing us and our Puritan Fathers as rebels and schismatics; our churches as no churches; our ministers as sons of Korah Dathan and Abiram; and all people who do not submit to some Prelatical Hierarchy, as out of the pale of Gospel grace, and given over, like heathen, to the uncovenanted mercies of God.

The principles of our fathers are the principles of truth and freedom as important now as they were in the days of primitive Puritanism. They are to be maintained,-if either religious truth or religious freedom is worthy to be maintained among men. The conflicts of principle at the present day are simply the old conflicts revived. He who would find the matters now in debate, most fully set forth, and most amply as well as most ably discussed, has only to review the productions of those ancient times. The system now known as OXFORDISM, or PUSEYISM, which many advocates of Prelacy affect to regard as one of "THE NOVELTIES WHICh disturb our peace,' "*—is in reality no new thing: it is nothing more nor less than that compound of Arminianism and Popery into which the English Church was fast declining in the days of " the judicious Hooker;" which had attained its maturity, and begun to develope its fruits under the auspices of the persecuting Laud; and which was again rife and rampant in the days of Queen Anne and George I. It is indeed the genuine Episcopacy of the English Church in its palmiest days, as finally fixed and established under Queen Elizabeth; and thereunto agree the Offices, though not the Articles of the English Establishment. If there is any difference between the system of those days and modern Puseyism, it is not in fundamental principles, but mainly in the more eager reaching forth of Puseyism towards Rome; and in the more loving tones of endearment, in which its advocates hail as a true Sister, and even as a Mother, that "MYSTERY OF BABYLON THE GREAT," which the early British Reformers, as well as the Puritans and the Bible, abhorred as the "Mother of harLOTS, AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH."

Some have conceived of the old Puritans as ignorant, turbulent, bigoted fanatics. Others have conceived of them as men of lofty attachment to principle, but of narrow and intolerant views: men of truth and daring; men who feared God, and who had tasted deeply of the powers of the world to come,but unsocial, all made up of sternness and gloom; men whose austere minds were never unbent in hilarity, and whose countenances were never lighted up by a smile. Those who thus conceive of them have formed their conceptions not from the

• The Pamphlets of Bishop Hopkins.

true likeness but from a caricature. Of this no one needs anything more to convince him, than to take up what writings are left us of John Robinson, the Pastor of the Pilgrim Church; of Cotton, of Owen; or to take the journals of Bradford, or Winthrop; or the works of John Howe, the favorite chaplain of Oliver Cromwell: that Howe, from whose works Robert Hall declared that he had learned more than from any other man. These are not the productions of ignorant illiberal men. Such is not the food that ignorance, or fanaticism, or bigotry feeds upon.

By novelists and historians the Puritans have been grossly caricatured. How easily such caricatures, and even direct falsehoods, spread and gain credence, may be readily understood from the errors which we have seen spreading, even in New England, concerning the early history of our fathers. How many people in these United States, and even here in our midst, confidently believe that the famous code entitled "The Blue Laws of Connecticut" once had a place among the statutes of this colony? Yet our fathers knew nothing about them. They are a sheer fabrication, for which the world is indebted to "Peters' History of Connecticut," the work of an Episcopal clergyman of this colony, who, in the beginning of the Revolution, sided with the enemies of his country, and fled from the indignation of his neighbors to England; where he employed his time in writing a history, so full of gross falsehoods, that the greatest charity can imagine nothing better in its defence than to suppose it was not intended to be believed. Yet there were men in New Haven, who, as late as the year 1829, published an edition of that work, "with such affirmation in the preface, as would lead all who are without other sources of information, to believe that what it contains, is irrefragable truth."*

To this caricature of the Puritans, no one has contributed more effectually than the historian Hume. He spares no pains to stigmatize them as "zealots," whose "principles" appear "frivolous," and whose "habits" were "ridiculous." Yet Hume is compelled to declare,-what the course of history would have developed, even had he not declared it,-that "the precious spark of liberty had been kindled by the Puritans alone," and that it is to them that "the English owe the whole freedom of their constitution." With regard to the particular events,-the secondary causes, which introduced the principles of freedom into the British Constitution, to which, in spite of the boasted Magna Charta of King John, freedom was an entire stranger up to the dynasty of the Stuarts,-with regard to these secondary causes, Hume is a competent judge. But Hume was a cold-blooded

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*See Kingsley's Historical Discourse, at the two hundredth anniversary of the settlement of New Haven. Haven

infidel; peculiarly bitter against Christianity in its evangelical and spiritual form. To judge of the principles of evangelical religion as distinguished from a religion of superstitious forms and splendid rituals, Hume was not competent. He could never appreciate the motives of the Puritans. He could not see how the principle of Justification by faith alone, by bringing every soul for himself directly to God, with no reliance on Priestly interventions, while it made every man feel his responsibilities, made him also aware of his rights; and taught him to shake off the despotism of a priesthood whose claims to divine authority rested in sheer falsehood. He could not see how this discovery and vindication of the right to religious freedom, naturally led to the discovery of man's inalienable civil rights, and gave him the spirit to maintain them. He could not appreciate the principle that wrought in the Puritans; and hence, in his view, their activity was turbulence, their firmness wilfulness, their zeal for the fundamental principles of the oracles of God was fanaticism. Hume saw not what they saw,-freedom, purity, truth, the vindication of the religious and civil rights of man, as the end of their labors aud the reward of their perseverance.

From Hume's sketch of the Reformation, and his delineation of the character of the Puritans, it is most evident, that except the incidental bearing upon civil laws and popular freedom, he saw no difference between the superstitions of Popery, and the Reformed religion. With him religion was but an establishment: the creation of popular ignorance and credulity: an engine of the government, to be moulded by the civil power into such a form as to render it most subservient to purposes of state. Hence he praises the "slow steps by which the reformation was conducted in England;" he extols that human policy by which "the fabric of the hierarchy was maintained entire ; and the ancient" (viz. the Papal) "liturgy was preserved, so far as consistent with the new principles:" and by which "many ceremonies become venerable from age, and preceding use, were retained." With him, the only question is that of human expediency. Whether the principles of the Gospel be preserved in their purity; whether impositions inconsistent with the Gospel be laid aside; whether the Church of God shall be severed from the domination of mere worldly politicians; whether the Gospel and its ordinances, given by the toils and blood of the Son of God, shall be left as he gave them, pure and simple, with power to secure the great ends for which they were given, rather than so perverted and disguised as to lull men into a false security;—these are matters for which Hume cares not, and concerning which he makes no inquiry. Concerning the Reformation itself, he rejoices that "the new religion, by mitigating the genius of the ancient

superstition, and rendering it more compatible with the peace and interests of society, had preserved that happy medium which wise men have always sought, and which the people have so seldom been able to maintain." Hence, in the Puritans, he sees little else save the turbulent zeal of ignorant and misguided fanatics; breaking the public peace; disturbing the established order; shaking the foundations of civil government; and going to the dungeon or into banishment, in their mad rage against, what he styles, "inoffensive observances, surplices, corner caps, and tippets." If from such a mingling of the elements there comes out the fair product of human liberty, Hume acknowledges the fact, but he accords not to the Puritans the praise. Deep and overwhelming as was the mass of superstitions with which the Papal Beast had loaded Christianity during the accumulating corruptions of a thousand years of darkness, Hume rejoices that so little was changed; and he ascribes it to "the spirit of contradiction to the Romanists, taking place in this one instance only universally in England, that the altar was removed from the wall, placed in the middle of the church, and was thenceforward denominated the communion table." It did not occur to Hume, or he considered it too trifling to notice, that the Popish altar was a place where the Priest pretended to offer up a propitiatory sacrifice; and that when the eyes of men were opened to this horrid corruption, which in effect made void the one only and all sufficient sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ, it was demanded, of course, that the altar should be removed: since the Gospel now knows no Priest nor altar nor sacrifice. The simplest lessons as well as the fundamental principles of the Gospel demanded that the Priest should be turned into a simple minister; the altar into a communion table; the sacrifice of the mass, into simple bread and wine; the symbols, not the substance, of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was on this principle, that when the communion table was afterwards turned again into an altar and placed against the wall,-for the minister once more to seem to act the part of a priest, officiating, with sacerdotal interventions before the altar, with his back to the people,-it was throughout England deemed the symbol of a virtual abandonment of the fundamental doctrine of the Reformation, and a virtual return to popery. Yet so far is Hume from caring for or comprehending the deep principle involved, that he regrets the change from the Romish forms, and can ascribe the turning of the altar into a communion table to no other cause than "the spirit of contradiction to the Romanists!" How poorly is such a man qualified to judge of the principles of the Puritans! How lamentable that his opinions on these subjects should enstamp themselves on so

As for

many minds; and form, with scarcely a question of their accuracy, the prevailing sentiments of a large portion of the world! With regard to the true source of English liberty, however, the testimony of Hume is largely corroborated and unquestionable. Says Lord King," By the independent divines, who were his instructors, Locke was taught those principles of liberty, which they were THE FIRST TO DISCLOSE TO the world. toleration, or any true notion of religious liberty, or any general freedom of conscience, we owe them not in the least degree to what is called the Church of England. On the contrary, we owe all these to the INDEPENDENTS in the time of the Commonwealth, and to Locke, their most illustrious and enlightened disciple." Lord Brougham speaks also of the Independents, as "a body of men to be held in lasting veneration, for the unshaken fortitude with which, at all times, they have maintained their attachment to civil liberty; men to whose ancestors England will ever acknowledge a boundless debt of gratitude, as long as freedom is prized among us; for," he continues, "I fearlessly confess it, they, with whatever ridicule some may visit their excesses, or with whatever blame others; they, with the zeal of martyrs, and with the purity of early Christians, the skill and courage of the most renowned warriors, obtained for England the free constitution which she enjoys."

The Puritans have been blamed as contending for frivolous matters; because the occasions in which these contests originated, were such matters as the imposition of an ecclesiastical habit, a surplice, a tippet, kneeling at communion, or the use of the ring in marriage. But how seldom can the value of a principle be measured by the occasion which calls it into debate? Should one now attempt to stigmatize the patriots of the American Revolution as turbulent fanatics, because they took the field, suffered their sons to be slaughtered, their land to be wasted and filled with smoking ruins, and all for a paltry three-penny tax on a pound of tea; how inadequate such a representation! How deceptive; how entirely removed from the truth! Years of oppression had preceded. Multiplied wrongs had been inflicted. The tax on tea was a trifle; the principle involved was of untold importance to the welfare of millions yet unborn, and to the liberties of the world. It was no quarrel of avariće or ill-blood on the part of our fathers; but a war of principle; whose result has put forward the dial of human freedom centuries in advance of the progress of ordinary times.

Such was the cause of the Puritans. They had suffered grievous and indescribable wrongs. The world had groaned under a spiritual bondage and groped in spiritual darkness, through the want of a few FIRST PRINCIPLES; whose loss or un