remedy. His principles were not such as to free him CHAP. III. from this inconvenient control by prompting him to reject it altogether. State authority may become to him an almost intolerable burden, but still he must be a state churchman. But the question naturally came-If the state may err, and if petition and expostulation against its errors shall be fruitless, does not separate and independent action then become both a right and a duty? Conscientious men soon began to answer this question in the affirmative. The origin of such ideas in our history is commonly attributed to a clergyman named Robert Brown, who was kinsman to the great Cecil, her majesty's secretary of state. But it is certain, that before Brown entered upon his apostleship, there was a church in London which owed its origin to such thinking. To Brown, however, belongs the honour of being the first man in English history to avow the great principle of religious liberty in the form in which we now hold it. Personally, Brown was not a man to bring much credit to any principle or to any party. His sufferings on account of his opinions, and of the freedom with which he acted upon them, were such, during a great part of his life, as to oblige us to regard him as conscientious. But he was a man of a restless and violent temper; and though he left many followers, the leaders among the Separatists who succeeded him would not acknowledge themselves his disciples. Nor does it appear that those later Separatists retained Brown's principle concerning the severance of churches from all relation to the state in the explicit and absolute form in which he had announced it.

But Thacker, Copping, Barrow, Greenwood, and Penry are the names of men who said-When the magis

BOOK I. trate commands what is unchristian, it becomes Christian men not to obey, but to follow the law of their conscience, wholly irrespective of the law of the state. Even these men often lament that state authority is not exercised in the support of faith and order, according to their view of such matters, and seem to imply that submission to such rule would be a duty. But to no such rule as was then prevalent would they submit. They all became practically, and to a great extent theoretically, Congregationalists or Independents, and would acknowledge no external authority incompatible with the measure of self-government inseparable from churches of that order.

It was in vain that these men avowed their loyalty, and their readiness to submit in all civil matters to the civil power. They did not submit to that power as an authority in religion. They would not be bound by it. In common with the Puritan, they accepted the doctrine of the English church, but they claimed the liberty to reject all things in its polity and worship which in their judgment were not accordant with Scripture. They were reminded that to resist the ecclesiastical supremacy of the crown was as truly sedition as to resist its civil supremacy; that the authority of the sovereign in both relations came from the same source, and rested on the same foundations. But whatever name might be given to such disobedience, it was a part of the religion of these persons to affirm, that in regard to religious matters the magistrate was not the ultimate judge. On such questions the final authority was the individual conscience and the Creator. The sentence passed on these men, as proper to persons holding and avowing such opinions, was, that they should die-be hanged! To

lay claim to the liberty which our laws have long since CHAP.III. ceded to our whole people, was to incur that heavy forfeiture-to die as the highwayman or the midnight murderer dies!

Barrow was a gentleman of Gray's Inn. Thacker, Copping, and Greenwood were ministers. Penry was a native of Wales, had studied in Cambridge, graduated in Oxford, and is admitted by his enemies to have been a young man of sound mental culture, and of deep religious feeling. It is quite true that Barrow and Penry showed themselves to be men of a warm temper, and that they sometimes expressed themselves, in print and otherwise, in strong and irreverent language towards the ruling clergy. But strong protest is often all that is left to the weak when opposed to the strong. The ideas enunciated by these men did not die. Sectaries multiplied rapidly in the face of all this terror. Sir Walter Raleigh declared in Parliament, towards the close of Elizabeth's reign, that the religionists of this order in Norfolk and in parts about London, were not less than twenty thousand. Such, the reader will mark, were the early experiences of Congregationalism in English history.*

involved in

It is not difficult to understand how rulers in Church Principles and State have come to attach so much importance this controto religious conformity. Obedience in that form is versy. interpreted as a confession that not merely the outward, but the inward-the will, should be subject to the sway of those authorities. This was evidently the light in which such submission was viewed both by Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. Hence no form of their power was really

Strype's Annals, iv. 246-251. Whitgift, ii. 42-50, 175-193. Waddington's Congregational Martyrs and Life of Penry.

BOOK I.

The divine right of conscience

The crucifix and the altar

so precious to them as the supremacy with which they
were invested in respect to conscience. To resist them
in their proceedings with regard to religion was to wound
them in the most sensitive part of their nature. Eliza-
beth, moreover, though no doubt bound to Protestantism
by conviction as well as by circumstances, was a lady
with some dangerous tastes.
lights retained in her chapel, betrayed a sympathy with
the
pomp and symbolism of the Roman worship which
her brother Edward, and the reformers generally in his
time, would have looked upon with surprise and appre-
hension. But steady as was her determination to assert
her supremacy in this department of rule, the very
circumstances which had given her so much power had
subjected that supremacy to some strong and special limi-
tations. She possessed the freedom of a Protestant sove-
reign, but she was never allowed to forget that she could
be strong only through the loyalty of a Protestant people.
She might flatter herself that she spoke and acted by a
divine right; but she was to feel that the opponents of
her policy could take the same ground.

pope, and the di- should be the head of the church.

vine right of kings.

According to the conscience of the Romanist, it was the command of God that the and not the queen, According to the conscience of the Puritan, if it was the will of Christ that there should be a union between the state and the church, it was no less clearly His will that the state should show all reverence toward the liberties of the church. According to the conscience of the Independent also, it became him to assert, that his faith and worship were to be determined by his own judgment as to the will of God in relation to such matters, and not by injunctions coming to him from any earthly poten

tate. In all these cases there was a principle of divided CHAP. III. allegiance. In all, if there were things which were to be given to Cæsar, there were also things which were to be given only to God. There were seasons in which the queen would gladly have coerced all these parties, so as to have rendered them powerless; but together, they made up nearly her whole people. To have crushed them would have been to have left herself without subjects. Among all these delinquents, the Independents must have been, according to the feeling of Elizabeth, the most delinquent. The Catholic who resisted her will in favour of his ancient church; and the Puritan who did so in favour of his limited scheme of freedom, must have been, in her view, modest men, compared with the man who presumed to oppose his private judgment to the sovereign wisdom of the state, and of her majesty as its head. Apart from this doctrine concerning the divine right of conscience, the doctrine concerning the divine right of kings in our history would have had the field very largely to itself. The Puritan, both in the pulpit and in the senate, was to place the curb that was needed on the power of Elizabeth, and was to have his mission in that form when the sceptre passed from the Tudors to the Stuarts.

The religion of the Romanist in that age was the religion of secrecy. The priest moved abroad in every sort of disguise. His rites were administered in concealed apartments, and under the cover of the night, where no eye could see, no ear could listen. The loss of all things, even of life itself, was the hazard incurred by the practice of the most sacred observances of that church. Religion in such circumstances often became a religion of intense passion, of endless intrigue, of bitter disloyalty, and of