Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." On the other hand, Heathenism in all its forms, and not less the Levitical Judaism, identified religion with national laws and institutions, to which the worship and outward reverence of individuals were expected to conform. Beyond the recognition of these national religions, the boasted toleration of the Romans never extended. The rights of the individual conscience were overlooked, and seem hardly to have been suspected. In this reverence or disregard for personal convictions of religious truth, and in a practice corresponding to it, we discover an essential distinction between the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of Heathenism.

But the vast machinery of the ancient superstition remained, when the superstition itself was professedly renounced; and Christianity, already imbued with sacerdotal tendencies, slid into its abandoned forms and usurped its abdicated functions, and from them contracted not a little of the spirit by which they were infected. It cannot perhaps be denied, that in the confusion which attended the destruction of the old civilisation, the restoration of priestly authority was unavoidable, and even necessary to reorganize the scattered elements of society. For ages the forms of Heathenism lay heavy on the mind of Europe, and only here and there the faint pulsations of a true Christian life were perceptible.

This subjugation of the independence of conscience was not however effected without a struggle, which never entirely ceased. The last vestiges of the Donatist schism in North Africa, which was in principle a resistance to the advancing encroachments of episcopal domination, (1) were hardly swept away in the tide of Saracenic conquest, when in the centuries immediately following the age of Charlemagne, fresh elements of religious excitement and ecclesiastical reform, which had long been silently fermenting, began to circulate actively in Europe, and, cherished by sectaries of various name but kindred principle-Waldenses, Catnari,a Albigenses-amid the valleys of Piedmont, along the shores of the Mediterranean, and in the rising cities of the Rhine, drew within their influence the young life and blossoming poetry (2) of an awakening civilisation, and prepared the mind of Europe for more extensive change. All these sects were distinguished by a spiritual and enthusiastic conception of Christianity, an aversion to the hierarchy, and a denial of the claims of the priesthood-but, above all, by a profound reverence for the Scriptures, of which several versions were current among them, and which they appealed to, as a standing witness against the corruptions of the Church, and a faithful record of the spirit' and principles of the primitive Gospel. This struggle

a Puritans.

between sacerdotal usurpation and the unextinguished sense of spiritual rights, runs through the whole of Christian history, from the first establishment of episcopal jurisdiction in the third and fourth centuries, down to the times of Wycliffe, Huss, and Luther. It is, in truth, the prolongation of the original conflict between the principle of Heathenism and the principle of Christianity; nor has it yet reached its termination.

The religious history of England exhibits only another form of this vital struggle, modified by our insular position and by our national character and institutions. The struggle with us differs from that on the continent, in being mainly a domestic and national struggle-not directed, as in Germany and France (except for a short time and to a limited extent), against a foreign power seated beyond the Alps, but involving a conflict of elements within the limits of our own nationality. In Germany and France a similar contest did indeed spring up; but in the former country, it was practically settled by the Treaty of Westphalia (3) -in the latter, violently crushed by the despotic bigotry of Louis XIV.: whereas in England the dispute has been prolonged, with little change in the aims and principles of the parties, to the present day. This circumstance constitutes, I apprehend, the peculiarity of our religious history.

For two centuries after the Conquest, our do

mestic history is distinguished rather by the strife of races than by a contention of principles and classes. Some have extolled Becket as a protector of the people against Norman oppression; but he was a thorough churchman in his heart. It is difficult to believe in the pure humanity of his intentions; and if he put himself at the head of the suffering Saxon population, and so acquired the reputation of a martyr in their cause-it was in the spirit of a priestly demagogue, to sustain more effectually the pretensions of the Church against the Crown. Towards the close of the Plantagenet line, in the course of the fourteenth century, under the advancing civilisation of the long and brilliant reign of Edward III., the discussion of the rights of classes, and of the various social and religious questions connected with them, began to supersede the blind and passionate animosity which had once separated the Norman and Saxon races; and it was now first, that the spirit of ecclesiastical reform, in unison with kindred movements on the continent, assumed an earnest and practical character. It is probable indeed, that the pride of Norman descent still predominated in the minds of the great feudal lords and of the higher clergy-prelates and mitred abbots who sat with them in Parliament; while a Saxon love of freedom and a yearning after independence harboured in the bosoms of the commonalty: but

these different feelings were becoming the characteristic of classes-the expression of conflicting principles rather than of national antipathies. In the insurrectionary movements under Richard II., we find priests among the leaders of the populace, and reverenced as their ministers-a proof of the readiness of the people to blend the expression of their wrongs with the sentiments of religion, and of their susceptibility of better influences, had such been offered them. These movements were almost wholly political, produced by intolerable oppression and terminated in no important result. The reformation attempted by Wycliffe originated in purer and more elevated motives; and with him the history of English Puritanism properly begins.

Some one word is wanted to express, through its entire course of continuous development, that principle of resistance to the hierarchy which pervades our religious history from the middle of the fourteenth century to the present time. To avoid periphrasis, the term Puritanism, though strictly applicable to only one period, may be adopted, as conveniently embracing the religious movements which preceded and prepared the revolutions of that period, and the modified but analogous effects which followed them. The history of religious parties in England falls, in fact, of itself, into three great and plainly-distinguished periods: