threatened the entire re-establishment of the Roman church on the continent, and while Spanish armadas were fitting out against England with the avowed intention of crushing the new religion, the adherents of the reformation could not afford the luxury of a quarrel among themselves. But when the danger was passed-when the protestants were victorious on the continent, and all fear of a foreign invader was dissipated, the spirit of dissent found a voice; and henceforth the Puritan party, the pioneer dissenters, appear upon the stage of English history.

The Puritans were not at first a distinct sect. They were devoted members of the Anglican church; and their aim was to give the church more of a radical, antiCatholic character than suited the schemes of those who were in more immediate alliance with the government. They complained at first of the ceremonial. The episcopal habit, the surplice, the corner-cap, and the tippet were popish, and had been the instruments of superstition. They were badges of idolatry. They were the print and mark of the odious beast of Rome. It had been well if the church could have been satisfied with merely declining to yield to these complaints. Archbishop Parker, at the time the head of the ecclesiastical body, has the credit of instigating the measures which, by seeking to enforce the episcopal habits on the Puritans, had the very natural effect of driving them into a position still more hostile. From mere opposition to the ceremonial, the Puritan members of the church proceeded to attack its discipline. The spirit of dissent now denies the church the exclusive right to ordination and discipline, and puts forth the obnoxious proposition, that the people should choose their own pastor, without dictation or interference at the hands of the ecclesiastical body. Saints' days, Lent, and stated fasts are next denounced; then the practice of kneeling at the Lord's Supper, and bowing at the name of Jesus. The disaffection spread over the kingdom; and a bill was brought into the lower-house of parliament to abolish the bulk of the episcopal rites and ceremonies, and also for rejecting some of the ThirtyNine Articles.

The strength of the opposition appears in the fact, that

the bill, so far as regards the ceremonies, received a majority of votes. The arbitrary power of the govern ment appears, however, in the further fact, that on hearing of the queen's displeasure, the whole matter was dropped. Then came an admonition to the parliament, in which the Puritan leaders took various exceptions to the church service. One particular was against the praying that "all men may be saved." Another particular was a complaint that Psalms were "tossed in most places like tennis balls." Cathedrals were called popish dens."

As yet, however, the Puritan party had not become a distinct religious organization. Its opposition to the cere monies and the discipline was not of a nature either to invite or compel its withdrawal from the Anglican church. It was soon, however, to take its position as a non-conformist body. The source whence the bulk of doctrines and rites had been derived, compelled the devotees of the church-system to make constant appeals to antiquity; and this necessity very naturally fostered Catholic tendencies in the expounding of the articles of religion. religion. To counteract such tendencies, the Puritans insisted on affixing to the articles a particular interpretation-an interpretation which should give the creed a more radical and marked departure from the Romish rites and dogmas.

9 We must here give a quotation from this singular document, in which the spirit and peculiar phraseology, no less than the measures of the Puritans, are quite conspicuous. "We should be long to tell your honors of Cathedral churches, the dens aforesaid of all loitering lubbers, where Master Canons, and Vice-Master Canons, Master Prebendaries the greater, Master Petty Canon, or Canon the lesser, Master Chancellor of the church, Master Treasurer, or otherwise called Judas the purse-bearer, the chief chorister, singing-men (special favorers of religion), squeaking choristers, organ-players, gospellers, pistellers, pensioners, sextons, vergers, &c., live in great idleness, and have their abiding. If you would know whence all these came, we can easily answer you, that they came from the pope, as out of the Trojan horse's belly, to the destruction of God's kingdom." Soames' Elizabethan Religious History.

The principal advocate of this "admonition,"-by some thought to be its writer,was Thomas Cartwright, a great name in the history of Puritanism in England. He had been forced to flee during the ascendency of Mary; and as an exile at Geneva, the centre of the Calvinistic principles, or continental Puritanism, he imbibed the spirit, and became versed in the doctrines, which, on his return to England, made him a venerated leader of the Puritans.

To such an interpretation, however, the leading churchmen would not submit; and then the schism was brought to a crisis. What was intended as an interpretation, be came the nucleus of a new creed; the Puritans, who had only complained of the ceremonial and discipline, now directed their warfare against the doctrines of the Anglican creed; and henceforth they appear in English history as a distinct ecclesiastical body, without the communion of the Anglican establishment. And now appears an anomalous state of parties indeed. The Puritans broke away from the church of England, because this church did not go sufficiently far in its opposition to the Catholics; and because of this separation they became fellowsufferers with the Catholics as schismatics and heretics, and with them were made to bear the pains and penalties annexed to the acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, the statutes forbidding the use of any other than the English liturgy, and imposing a fine for non-attendance on the regular Sunday church-service! A remarkable illustration indeed of the adage, "that extremes meet!" We need but add that Elizabeth was as relentless in her warfare against the Puritans, as against the Catholics; in her arbitrary measures to compel uniformity, she favored one party no more than another. The Puritans denounced her as popish; the Catholics denounced her as a rebel against the true church. She punished both Puritans and Catholics as schismatics.

In our aim to be somewhat minute in sketching the origin, completion, and final establishment of the Anglican church, we have reserved no space for particulars touching its succeeding history. We shall therefore indulge. in but few remarks, and these of a very general character, with reference to its course, position, influence, and character, during that portion of English history succeeding the reign of Elizabeth. The essential identification of the Church with the State-in the vital particular that the fortune of the one was the fortune of the other-properly dates with the accession of the Prince of Orange as William the Third, at the close of the English revolution in 1688. The eighty-five years from the death of Elizabeth to the time of William, constituted a checkered period in

the experience of the ecclesiastical polity. With the memorable and very considerable 'exceptions of the time of the Long Parliament and the Protectorate of Cromwell, the church managed to keep in the ascendency throughout these exciting years. But all this while it had two unrelenting foes, the Catholics and the Puritans, which arrayed against it two essentially distinct methods of attack. The Catholic opposition was covert, deceptive, artful; it bribed the sovereign, it infected the bishops, it mystified statesmen, it duped large masses of the people. It was under such influences, that the articles of doctrine and ceremony were made to receive an interpretation which brought them nearer and nearer the essentials of the popish system; while the ecclesiastics were led to assume for the Anglican church powers and prerogatives which fell little short of a claim to infallibility-prerogatives which had never entered the minds of the framers of the creed. In the pretensions of the famous Archbishop Laud-the remorseless tool and sycophant of the perfidious Charles the First-the English church was Catholic in almost every thing except the name. And here we may state, that the great Puseyite schism of the present day, which so seriously threatens to bring the Episcopal church back to the doctrines and practices of Rome, is merely a resuscitation, after the lapse of about two centuries, of the doctrines and interpretations of Laud and his coadjutors in the seventeenth century; and it is a remarkable and significant fact, that Pusey, Newman, and other High-churchmen of the present day, in defending such dogmas as Baptismal Regeneration, the Real Presence, Eucharistic Sacrifice, Tradition, Church Authority, and Apostolical Succession-the cardinal points of what is technically called "Puseyism"-do not, as it would seem they must, make their appeal to Roman bishops and popes, but to that class of dignitaries in the English church of the seventeenth century, of whom Laud was the leader and type. There have in fact always been two parties in the church-one party striving to bring the establishment to greater accordance with Romanism, the other party striving in the opposite direction. And no sooner had the severe measures of Elizabeth thrown the Puritans out of the ecclesiastical communion, than the

new and extravagant pretensions of such prelates as Laud, started up a new spirit of dissent, to fill the vacuum which the secession of the Puritan body had produced. The opposing pretensions of the High-church party, and the Low-church party, of which so much is said and written in our day, are integral in the very life and constitution of the Anglican establishment; and in the absence of any outward pressure of conformity, they have characterized the whole history of the church from the days of Henry the Eighth down to the present hour.

The Puritan opposition to the church was wholly dissimilar to the perfidious and artful measures of the Catholic. The Puritans were bold, defiant, harsh in temper, rude in manners, and, for most part, we must believe carnest and sincere. The allies of the church were the sovereign and the nobility; the stronghold of the Puritans was the house of commons. The history of the Puritan parliaments is rich in details;we can but name its drift and issue, the maintenance of popular rights against the arbitrary will of the king-the establishment of constitutional monarchy in the person of William the Third, which form of government has proved the archetype of all the free governments which have since been established on the globe.

We have much to be grateful for in the aggregate result of the ascendency of the English church; but a faithful scrutiny into the particulars of its whole history discovers many practices for which it must ever deserve the censure of mankind. With the exception of the noble firmness and Christian heroism of the Seven Bishops-the particulars whereof are familiar to every reader of Macaulay-who withstood, and in the end triumphed over, the tryannical measures of James the Second, the almost uniform practice of the ecclesiastical order has been to coincide with and sanction the schemes of the English monarchs, without regard to the moral or political bearings of such a courss. It was perhaps obliged to humor the brutal tyranny of Henry the Eighth; it was submissive to the imperious will and oppressive measures of Elizabeth; it encouraged the puerile yet detestable notion of the "divine right of kings," which came from the pedantic brain of James the First; it seconded the