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sense were not to be revolted by an arrangement which should have supported them out of the revenues of the church, and at the same time permitted them to declaim every Sunday from the pul

London and in the country, preached their farewell sermons on the Sunday immediately preceding the 24th of August. It is asserted by their own historians, that on that fatal day about two thousand of them resigned their livings in the national estab-pits of dissenting meeting-houses against the whole lishment. "The numbers, however," as Burnet observes, have been much controverted." This," he adds, "raised a grievous outcry over the nation, though it was less considered at that time than it would have been at any other." Baxter, he says, told him, that if the terms of the king's declaration -that called the Healing Declaration seems to be meant had been adhered to, he did not believe that above three hundred of the two thousand would have declined conforming.

No difference of opinion can be entertained as to either the inhumanity or the impolicy of this treatment of the Presbyterian clergy admitting their ejection from the church to have been expedient or indispensable, it is impossible not to wish that a course of more lenity and indulgence had been pursued in regard to them. At the same time it must be confessed that the case was one surrounded with difficulties. The different measure dealt out to the Episcopalian clergymen ejected in the time of the Commonwealth, to whom the parliament made a show of allowing a fifth part of their former livings for their support, has been often contrasted with the conduct of the opposite party at the Restoration; but not much can be founded upon that view of the matter. In the first place, the rights acquired by the Presbyterian clergy from a possession of a few years can not in fairness be considered the same with those that had belonged to the ancient clergy: at the era of the Restoration, indeed, the former were naturally enough regarded by the dominant party as no rights at all—as merely the temporary success of rebellion and robbery-a view which never could have been taken of the latter. Then, it is admitted on all hands, that the allowances which the parliament had professed to make to the ejected Episcopalian ministers were in many, perhaps in most, cases rather nominal than real. Walker, the historian of Independency, asserts that scarcely one in ten ever had them without trouble, and to the full value; and nothing is better attested than the severe suffering and oppression which many of these sequestrated clergymen underwent. The cominissioners of sequestration, in fact, were only empowered, not absolutely directed, to suffer them to retain a certain portion of their incomes, and that portion was not to be in all cases a fifth, as is commonly represented, but only never to exceed a fifth. It was to be granted, too, not to themselves, but to their wives and children, a mode of dealing which in other cases has been justly characterized as one of the most infernal refinements of an intolerant and persecuting policy. But the chief difficulty in the present case was how to pension the ejected Presbyterian clergymen upon any terms or conditions to which they would themselves have submitted. Of course, common decency and common 1 See the Ordinance in Scobell's Collection, part i., p. 49.

order of its worship and government. But would they have consented to forego the liberty of so lifting up a conscientious testimony in behalf of what they believed to be the cause of truth and pure religion? Would they have come under an engagement to cease from all exercise of their clerical functions for any pension? The Long Parliament made short work of this difficulty in the case of the Episcopalian clergy by absolutely prohibiting the ancient mode of worship: so long as the Presbyterians held sway, the open profession of episcopacy, in the face of the Solemn League and Covenant, was as much out of the question as the open profession of royalism; and even after Cromwell and the Independents obtained the ascendency, popery and prelacy, as we have seen, were specially exempted from the toleration granted to all other forms of Christianity.

On the whole, objectionable as was much in the spirit and manner of the proceeding, the complete extinction of Presbyterianism within the national church, which was the aim and effect of the Act of Uniformity, was probably in itself the wisest and most fortunate policy that could have been adopted in the circumstances. Had it not taken place, the struggle between the two hostile factions would not only have kept up a rent in the edifice of the establishment, extending from its summit to its base, and widening every day, but, after defeating for many years all the best purposes of a national church, would, there can hardly be a doubt, have resulted in a still more disastrous expulsion or subjugation of Presbyterianism than it now underwent. In truth, that religion appears to have no congeniality with the English mind and character. Extraordinary circumstances for a short time gave it a sort of feverish popularity; but, notwithstanding the learning, piety, and other high merits of many of the Presbyterian ministers who obtained possession of the church livings in the time of the Commonwealth, and even the strong attachment of their congregations to particular individuals among them, the country in general had evidently become disgusted with the dominion of the Directory and the Assembly of Divines long before the Restoration; and the tumultuous and universal joy which it showed when that event promised to put an end to the reign alike of Presbytery and of Independency sufficiently evinced how completely, by that time, it had got tired of both. When we think, too, of the ejection of the Presbyterian ministers, in 1662, by the Act of Uniformity, we ought not to forget that, even if they themselves had had the framing of the act, they would most certainly have made it such as to exclude the Independents and the Sectaries-nay, that they would only have forborne to attempt the exclusion of the Episcopalians, too, because they were not so strong as when they effected that object some years before. They

could, in truth, expect little forbearance from those to whom they would have shown none in the same circumstances whom in other times they had denounced as unfit to be suffered to live in the land, and had refused to tolerate in the most modest public observance of their form of worship, although now so willing and anxious, if they could have done so without an utter abandonment of character and decency, to remain associated with them in the same national church establishment, and to divide with them its loaves and fishes.

As in England, so also in Scotland, presbytery was put down at the Restoration, and the Episcopalian church reëstablished in more absolute supremacy than it had ever before enjoyed, in the manner that has been already fully detailed in the preceding chapter. In that part of the island, however, Presbyterianism had a hold over the popular mind which it never had acquired in Eng. land; and its extinction there, in consequence, instead of being carried by the national voice, was an act of mere force and violence done by the government against the almost unanimous wish of the country. It was an act which a native government, however anti-popular in its constitution and sympathies, never would have attempted; for, even with the nobility and higher classes in Scotland, the reestablishment of episcopacy was the reverse of being generally an object of desire, jealous as they were of a church in which they apprehended they would find a rival political power, without being attached to it by any of those bonds of habit and a common interest which had so long in England connected the church with the aristocracy. At the same time, Presbyterianism in Scotland had the whole field of popular display and excitement to itself: it continued to be almost the only form of Puritanism known there, notwithstanding the swarms of Sectaries that overrun the neighboring kingdom. But, in reality, Scotland was now become a mere province of England; and the government of the latter country was strong enough to bear down the opposition of all these adverse circumstances, and to set up episcopacy for a time in the north as well as in the south.

In Ireland, also, in which episcopacy had been abolished by the Long Parliament, it was now restored in the same manner as in England and Scotland. On the 17th of May, 1661, both Houses of the Irish parliament united in a declaration of their high esteem of episcopal government, and of the Book of Common Prayer, according to the use of the church of England. In that enslaved country, the change, which was indeed of little interest to the great body of the people, was managed, of course, without difficulty or opposition from any quarter.

The Presbyterians, Independents, and other sects conscientiously opposed to the episcopal office and the ancient ritual were only placed in their proper position by being thus excluded from an establishment founded on principles to which, whatever outward conformity they might affect, they

1 See ante, p. 663, et seq.

could give no cordial or genuine assent. Better for them, as well as for the national church, that both parties should stand out distinctly for what they were, and be openly divided-nay, if it must be, opposed-than that a formal, hollow union should have been patched up between them, which, after all, would have left the one only a lurking enemy or eating disease in the bosom of the other, so long as it lasted, aud which, that being the case, could hardly have lasted long. But, although disqualified by the principles which they conscientiously held for any real comprehension within the pale of the national church, the opponents of episcopacy and the Prayer Book were entitled to perfect freedom in the profession of their opinions and the observance of their own modes of worship out of that pale; and the policy of leaving them thus undisturbed would, on the part of the government and the now triumphant hierarchy, have been as wise as just and humane. Another course, unfortunately, was adopted, under the influence of various coöperating causes. First, and chiefly, the great doctrine of religious toleration was not in that age generally received or understood by any of the great bodies into which the religious world was divided: on the contrary, even those which had suffered most from persecution themselves still held it to be a sacred duty to employ coercion, whenever they had the power, for putting down what they considered to be error or heresy—that is, to persecute others. Juster views, indeed, had now made considerable progress among the Independents and some of the Sectaries, more especially the Quakers, disciplined as they had been by the struggle they had had to maintain, almost ever since their first appearance for the liberty of worshiping God according to their conscience; but, however far the speculations of some individuals among them may have gone, it may be questioned if any of the more considerable even of these bodies had as yet adopted the principle of toleration in its full integrity and comprehensiveness. The enlightened and intrepid mind of Milton would still have had the law to denounce and punish what he deemed the idolatry of the Romanists; and in this notion, there is little doubt, ninety-nine out of every hundred of the Protestant dissenters or Non-conformists of that day went along with him. The Independents, however, except for the few years during which they were placed in a false position by the admission of many of their clergymen under Cromwell to livings in the church, had had so far an advantage over the Presbyterians in learning this great lesson of toleration, inasmuch as they had never had their views upon the subject confused or biassed by looking to an establishment for themselves, the object for which the Presbyterians had all along struggled, as long as there was any hope of attaining it, as eagerly even as the Episcopalians. The utmost that the Independents had ever demanded, or that their principles allowed them to aspire after, was that there should be no established church at all. To such an arrangement as that the Presbyterians were wholly opposed, and would only have been

driven reluctantly to acquiesce in it, in the most of the gunpowder-plot in the beginning of that of adverse circumstances, as still preferable to the es- James, had been since deepened and diffused by a tablishment of any other sect than their own. It succession of influencing causes, which, diverse and was a principle with them that the state was in sometimes even contradictory as they may have been duty bound to maintain the supremacy of the true in their character and operation in other respects, church this general principle they clung to at had, by means of this very diversity and contradicleast as zealously as the Episcopalians; they only tion, coöperated here. First came the rise and differed from the Episcopalians on the question of spread of Puritanism; then the contest, at once rewhich was the true church. Both these great de- ligious and political, with the Arminianism and seminominations, therefore, as we have observed, were popery of the established church in the time of embarrassed and impeded in their acquisition of Charles I. and Laud, followed as it was by the comcorrect views on the subject of toleration by certain plete subjugation both of popery and prelacy under interests or views that did not trouble the vision of the Commonwealth; and then, last of all, the antithe Independents or the generality of the Secta-puritanical reaction which took place at the Resries; they had to acquire not merely the simple notion of religious freedom for themselves and all others, but the comparatively complex idea of perfect toleration or religious freedom for others combined with an establishment for themselves. They, as well as the other descriptions of dissenters, with whom they were now driven by their common sufferings in some degree to make common cause, were most cruelly persecuted by the reëstablished Episcopalian church throughout the reign of Charles II.; but there is no reason whatever to believe that, if the same power had been in their own hands that was then placed in that of their adversaries, they would have employed it at all more mildly. Persecution, or, as they designated it, the suppression and extirpation of error by force, if noth-hierarchy in the affections of the people from the ing else would do, was still their principle as much as it was that of the Episcopalians. It was, indeed, still the popular and national feeling; for, after all, nothing is more incontestible than that all the severe laws which were passed against non-conformity, between the Restoration and the Revolution, were in accordance with the sentiments of the great majority of all classes of the English popula

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toration, and its speedy combination, in consequence of the measures of the court, with what was at once a vehement anti-popish feeling and an almost equally strong enthusiasm in favor of the established church. For herein lay the great distinction between the state of things in the reign of Charles I. and their state in the reign of Charles II. in the former the established church made common cause with the court; in the latter it more wisely took up a position of its own. And every thing that fell out, from the Restoration to the Revolution, contributed to strengthen that position. The universal weariness and disgust with the gloom and severities of Puritanism, and the extravagances of the rampant sects, had laid a broad foundation for the restored

first, placed on which it was at least secure, for many years to come, from being again overthrown by either Presbytery or Independency. But the unpopularity of Puritanism did not make popular its extreme opposite, popery: if there had been any tendency to that result, the alliance formed with popery by the court would have effectually checked it. That alliance made popery as unpopular as Puritanism. Fortunately for the established church, it These laws, and the sufferings to which they sub- saw this, and took the course which interest, if not jected papists and Protestant dissenters alike, have also principle, pointed out in the circumstances. been necessarily detailed in the last chapter, in the Notwithstanding its habitual and characteristic gravgeneral history of the period, of which they consti-itation toward the court, and even abundance of tute a principal part; and it is, therefore, unneces- ultra-loyalty in the way of talk and profession, it sary to go over them again here. But it will be kept steadily aloof from coalescing with or countefound that, throughout the whole course of this leg-nancing the popery of the court, taking part in this islation, the House of Commons, the representative respect, not indeed noisily or violently, but yet subof the general voice of the community, constantly outran the court and the government-nay, repeatedly urged them forward, when they would have turned back, in the career of coercion and persecution. While the court, in fact, was inclined toward a tolerant policy by its secret regard for the Catholics, the parliament and the nation were hurried in the opposite direction, not only by their dread and hatred of popery, but also, to a considerable degree, by a dislike of Puritanism, Presbyterianism, Independency, sectarianism, and all kinds of Protestant dissent or non-conformity. The national hatred of popery was a feeling that, having been first excited by the great religious struggle of the preceding century, and having been fostered and strengthened by the whole course of events throughout the reign of Elizabeth, till it was inflamed to fury by the affair

stantially and firmly, with the most resolute section of the parliamentary and popular opposition. Dexterously availing itself of its peculiar facilities as a sort of midway or neutral religion, oscillating rather than fixed between the two extremes of popery and Puritanism, it now took care to keep sufficiently before the public eye its non-identity with the one as well as with the other. By the attitude which it thus assumed as the opponent instead of the ally of popery, the established church gathered around it, after the Restoration, an extent and warmth of popular attachment such as it had never before enjoyed. It was the refuge and cherished palladium at once of all who hated Puritanism and of all who dreaded popery-that is to say, of nearly the whole nation, including the great majority even of the Puritans and papists themselves; for it was one of

the main advantages of the position occupied by the | to the wall; in regard to each and all of these other established church, that, while standing dissociated from and opposed to each of these extreme parties, it yet secured to itself the support of both, each looking upon it as its strongest bulwark against the other. Had there been any apprehension of another inundation of Presbytery or Independency, the papists would undoubtedly have joined with the establishment in the endeavor to stem that torrent. As things actually went, the danger or fear was not of the return of Presbytery, but of the return of popery; and we have seen what took place. The established church took up its station in the van of what was as much a battle for the civil as for the religious liberties of the nation; and the whole country rallied around it. Equally without as within the walls of the House of Commons, all the great denominations of the Protestant dissenters, and more especially the Presbyterians-the most considerable of them all-forgot every thing but that aversion to popery which was common to them with the establishment-their differences with it alike as to discipline and as to doctrine-their old struggle with and triumph over it-their recent persecutions and sufferings under it-and willingly gave their consent to any laws, to any measures, by which the common foe might be crushed or cramped, nay, clamored in some instances for disabling and coercive enactments against the papists, although they themselves, the Protestant Non-conformists, should in some degree be disqualified along with them. All this, as we have said, placed the established church upon a rock of strength such as it had never stood upon since the Reformation. It was by far the most popular of the national institutions; the crown, the House of Lords, the House of Commons, would, any one of them, in an encounter with it, have gone

powers in the state, the tide of the popular favor ebbed and flowed during the whole of the reigns of the two last Stuarts as the established church stood affected or gave the signal. It is remarkable how much misgovernment in every other way, how long and various a course of despotism and oppression, the nation endured without being roused to any strenuous or general effort to right itself, till the church was attacked. The persecution of the Nonconformists. both in England and in Scotland, although in the latter country that was a war against the great body of the population, produced even there only some petty local revolts, the miserable efforts of utter bewilderment and despair, which the government crushed with a few squadrons of horse; the profligate and disgraceful misadministration of public affairs throughout the last twenty years of the reign of Charles, including the actual abrogation of the constitution by the extinction of parliamentary election, provoked nothing beyond some little temporary effervescence; the avowed Catholicism and arbitrary principles with which James began his reign called forth no general resistance, although two simultaneous foreign invasions gave the signal and led the way; even the atrocities of Judge Jeffreys, which made the land a shambles, and turned the law itself into the bloodiest of tyrannies, awoke only groans, and unuttered curses, and thoughts of revenge; but the imprisonment of the seven bishops at once brought about a revolution. Truly, the established church stood in a different position now from that which it occupied when the ten protesting bishops were sent to the Tower by the House of Lords in December, 1641, in the first scene of the long drama which was now arrived at its last.

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BOTHWELL BRIDGE, where the Scotch Covenanters were defeated, 22d June, 1679. From an Original Drawing.

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HISTORY OF THE CONSTITUTION, GOVERNMENT, AND LAWS.

HE restoration of the monarchy, in 1660, was held to be also the restoration of all the ancient laws down to the last act of parliament to which Charles I. had given his assent, in the usual form, immediately before his leaving London, in January, 1642.1 All the legislation of the successive parliaments 1 See ante, p. 257.-The last act passed by Charles I. was the 16 Car. I., cap. 37, entitled, "For the further advancement of an effectual

and governments that had subsisted since that date was considered to be annulled and swept away by the single fact of the return of the king. In truth, however, the republican legislation, which was thus suddenly all repealed at once, was much less considerable in amount, and also in importance, than would readily be suspected either from the number of years during which the ancient constitution of and speedy reduction of the Rebels in Ireland to the obedience of his Majesty and the Crown of England:" to which his assent was given 24th December, 1641. We do not know upon what principle the Record Commissioners, in their edition of the Statutes of the Realm, have, contrary to their uniform practice elsewhere, printed at full length among the public acts of this parliament the act for the attainder of the Earl of Strafford. the title of which they also afterward give a their list of private acts. Nor does it appear why they headed it "Chapter xxxviii." It received the royal assent on the 10th of May, 1641.

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