Chapter THE FIRST: Rise and Development of Puritanism

I.

[Sidenote: Love of display in Elizabeth's time.]

[Sidenote: Note 1.]

[Sidenote: Machyn's Diary, 324, note.]

Not religious disputants only, but the world in general, exaggerated the importance of vestments and ceremonies in the reign of Elizabeth. The love of formality and display that characterized the Renascence was then at its height. It was a time of pomps and royal progresses. Great historic characters went about dressed like performers in a show. Some of the queen's gowns were adorned with jewels on every available inch of space. These bespangled robes were draped over vast farthingales, which spread out like tables on which her arms might rest, and her appearance when thus attired has been compared to that of an Oriental idol. Her courtiers and statesmen were equally fond of dazzling the spectator. Ralegh wore a pendent jewel on his hat feather, and the value of the gems on his shoes was estimated at six thousand six hundred pieces of gold. The love of pomp was not confined to the court; every nobleman and country gentleman kept his house filled with idle serving men, the sons of neighboring gentlemen or yeomen, whose use was to "grace the halls" of their patron by their attendance and to give dignity to his hospitality. High sheriffs and other officials performed their functions with thirty or forty men in livery at their heels, even borrowing the retainers of their friends to lend state to their office. Edward VI set out upon a progress in 1551 with a train of four thousand mounted men. These were noblemen and gentlemen with their retainers. He was obliged to dismiss all but a hundred and fifty of this vast army of display lest it should "eat up the country." The gorgeous progresses of Elizabeth are too well known to need description. A painting of the time shows her to us in the act of making a friendly call on her cousin-german, Lord Hunsdon. She is sitting under a canopy, and is borne on the shoulders of men and attended by a brilliant train of lords and ladies on foot. It was truer in the days of Shakespeare than it has been since that "all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

[Sidenote: The age of the drama.]

A passionate love of the theater was inevitable in such a time. The best poetry then took a dramatic form; even history was taught from the stage; and satire and polemics felt the attraction and were often put into imaginary dialogues. It was Shakespeare's good fortune that he happened to live among a people fond of show and in an age dramatic as well as poetic to its very core. Genius is nourished by sympathy, and supremely great performance is rendered possible only by the rare coincidence of the great man and a fitting environment.

[Sidenote: Display in dress.]

[Sidenote: Peckard's Life of Ferrar.]

[Sidenote: Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, _passim_.]

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

Dress signified more to the men of the time of Elizabeth and James than it is easy for us moderns to imagine. Greatness declared itself by external display. The son of a rich merchant when he returned from his travels decked himself in gorgeous apparel, and formally made his appearance on the Exchange like a butterfly newly emerged. It was thus that his parents brought the young man out in the world. A sum equal in purchasing power to several thousand dollars in our time is said to have been spent on one pair of trunk hose. Men of the lowest ranks, desirous of appearing more than they were, impoverished themselves in buying expensive hats and hose; and it is recorded that women suffering for the necessaries of life sometimes contrived to adorn themselves with velvet. For the very reason that so much importance was attached to dress, laws were made to repress inappropriate display in people of lower rank. Even the severe Puritan moralists did not object to the pomp of the great, but to the extravagant imitation of it by those who had no right to such ostentation. It was with difficulty that men could conceive of greatness without display. To refuse a bishop his vestments was to abate something of his lofty rank.

II.

[Sidenote: Observance of ceremonies.]

[Sidenote: Compare _supra_, p. 41.]

[Sidenote: Strachey, in Purchas, iv, 17-54.]

[Sidenote: De la Warr's letter, in Strachey's Virginia, p. xxix.]

Along with a love for external show went a scrupulous observance of decorous and often pompous ceremonies. Englishmen in the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth century never omitted to observe proper formality, no matter how dire the emergency. One may see this exemplified by reverting to some of the earliest events in American history. When Gates arrived at Jamestown near the close of the "starving time," he found only the gaunt ghosts of men clamoring to be taken from the scene of so many horrible miseries. Instead of giving immediate attention to the sufferings of the people, he caused the little church bell to be rung. Such of the inhabitants as could drag themselves out of their huts repaired once more to the now ruined and unfrequented church with its roof of sedge and earth supported by timbers set in crotches. Here the newly arrived chaplain offered a sorrowful prayer, and then George Percy, the retiring governor, delivered up his authority to Sir Thomas Gates, who thus found himself in due and proper form installed governor of death, famine, and desperation. When Gates abandoned the wrecked town with his starving company he fired a "peale of small shott," in order not to be wanting in respect for a royal fort; and when De la Warr arrived, a few days later, he made his landing with still greater pomp than that of Gates. There was a flourish of trumpets on shipboard before he struck sail in front of Jamestown. A gentleman of his party bore the colors of the governor before him. The governor's first act when he set foot on American soil was to fall on his knees and offer a long, silent prayer, which was probably sincere though theatrical, after the manner of the age. He rose at length and marched up into the ruined town. As he passed into the stockade by the water gate, which was shabbily off its hinges, the color bearer dropped down before him and allowed the colors to fall at the feet of his lordship, who proceeded to the tumble-down chapel, under the earthen roof of which the authority over the colony was duly transferred to his hands with such solemnities as were thought proper. Whenever Lord De la Warr went to church at Jamestown he was attended by the councilors, captains, and gentlemen, and guarded by fifty men with halberds, wearing De la Warr's livery of showy red cloaks. The governor's seat was a chair covered with green velvet. It was in the choir of the now reconstructed little church, and a velvet cushion lay on the table before him to enable him to worship his Maker in a manner becoming the dignity of a great lord over a howling wilderness. More than a quarter of the able-bodied men in Virginia were needed to get the governor to church and back again aboard the ship where he dwelt.

[Sidenote: Formality at Plymouth.]

[Sidenote: De Rasieres's letter, 2d N. Y. Hist. Coll., ii, 352.]

Even at a later date in the rather hungry little Pilgrim colony at Plymouth almost as much ceremony was observed, though the people were extreme Puritans without rank. At beat of drum on Sunday morning the men came to Captain Standish's door with their cloaks on, each bearing a musket or matchlock. They proceeded to church three abreast, led by a sergeant. In the rear walked the governor, in a long robe. On his right was Elder Brewster, wearing a cloak. On the governor's left was Captain Miles Standish, who also wore a cloak and side arms, and carried a small cane as a sort of baton of authority perhaps. Thus "they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him."

[Sidenote: Puritanism an outgrowth of the time.]

It was only in an age such as this that resistance to the celebration of rites and the observance of forms could be made a capital article of faith by the Puritan, and later by the Quaker. The wearing of a surplice, the propriety of doffing the hat on certain occasions, was a matter for scruple and violent debate, for the grave consideration of the lawgiver and magistrate, and for severe penalties.

III.

[Sidenote: Origin of the Puritan movement.]

[Sidenote: Fuller's Ch. Hist., book v, sec. iv, 27, 28.]

[Sidenote: 1536.]

In the brief Protestant reign of Edward VI there were those who objected to "the vestments," and one may even find what were afterward called Puritan opinions condemned among current errors in the twenty-eighth year of Henry VIII; but Puritanism--as a party protest against pomp and ceremonialism in religious worship--had its origin in the persecution of Queen Mary's time. The English Protestants who fled from that fiery ordeal found refuge chiefly in Protestant cities of the Continent. Strasburg, Frankfort, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva were the places to which these English exiles mainly resorted. Zurich and Strasburg became cities of refuge for many of those who were to become leaders of the Anglican or Conservative party, while others who tended to what were afterward called Puritan views went sooner or later to Geneva, where Calvin was the dominant influence.

[Sidenote: A. D. 1553.]

[Sidenote: The English exiles.]

In the cities in which they found safety the exiles organized English churches. More remarkable religious communities were never gathered into single congregations. Five bishops and five deans of the English Church, and more than fifty eminent doctors of divinity, with younger men who were destined to play a leading part in the future, were comprised in these little churches. Such communities soon became centers of animated discussion and debate.

[Sidenote: Outbreak of dissension.]

During the preceding reign of King Edward VI, English Protestantism had been forced into many compromises within itself. No form of religious life can become national without exacting of its advocates of differing shades of opinion many sacrifices for the sake of unity; but now that the leaders of English Protestantism were in exile they found themselves in a measure freed from motives of policy and with leisure to develop and apply their theories. A passion for the ideal thus suddenly unchained easily becomes rampant. There sprang up swiftly a dispute between the church in Strasburg and the church in Frankfort on matters of government. The reformatory spirit is rarely conciliatory, and in its excess and overflow it is wont to be pragmatic and impertinent. Some of the reformers of Strasburg felt bound to go over to Frankfort and re-reform the reformed English church there; and the little English community in Frankfort was soon torn asunder between the followers of Richard Cox and those of John Knox--the same who was afterward so famous in the Scottish reformation.

[Sidenote: Character of the debates at Frankfort.]

This dispute in Frankfort between the Coxans and the Knoxans, as they were called, had all the characteristics that render church quarrels odious. One finds in it the bitterness of slanderous violence--the little deceptions and unmanly treacheries that characterize such debates and disclose the sorry threadbareness of human saintship even in exiles and martyrs for conscience' sake. But, petty as were these squabbles at Frankfort, they produced results of the first magnitude. Small things change the whole course of history when they lie near the fountain head of a great current. From the conflicting factions in the church of the exiles at Frankfort were evolved the opposing parties that were to give character to English Protestantism, and to modify profoundly the history of England and as profoundly the history of the United States.

[Sidenote: The rise of the two great parties.]

[Sidenote: Note 3.]

In the contentions of the English at Frankfort, resulting now in the exiling from the city of one beaten minority and now in the departure of another, and in the driving away of one leading disputant after another, there appeared at length the features of the two great parties of English Protestantism face to face for the first time. One of these parties tried to hold all of antique ritual that the Protestant conscience could be made to bear, insisted upon the superior authority of the clergy, and sought to disturb as little as possible the ancient order of the English church. On the other hand, in the rapid changes produced by the Frankfort contentions, the tendency of the ultra wing of the Protestants to the notion of a local and independent church and to a democratic church government was already apparent. Even the peculiarity of two ministers presiding over one church, which was cherished later in New England, appeared among the English at Frankfort and Geneva at this time.

[Sidenote: A purified ritual.]

[Sidenote: Note 4.]

While attempting to mediate between the parties at Frankfort, Calvin expressed his preference for a ritual of greater purity than that established by the English Prayer Book of King Edward's time. Extreme Protestants rallied round this ideal of a liturgy purified of human tradition. It was some years later, after the Frankfort church had been dissolved and the exiles had returned to England, that this party came to be known by the name of Puritan--that is, a party not so much bent on purity of conduct as on purifying Protestant worship from mediæval forms.

[Sidenote: Return of the exilies, 1558.]

After the death of Mary and the accession of Elizabeth the English Protestants returned to their own country. The two great parties that were to divide the English church had already begun to crystallize. Those who had settled at Strasburg and Zurich came back hoping to re-establish the Anglican Church on the conservative basis of the Prayer Book of Edward VI. Those who returned from Basel and Geneva had caught the spirit of the Calvinistic churches, and wished to push the reformation to a more logical extreme; while the Frankfort church, or what remained of it, had been storm-driven well-nigh to a theory of congregational independence in church government.

[Sidenote: Results.]

The petty squabbles of the English exiles, transplanted to England, grew into bitter feuds and brought forth persecutions and political struggles. The settlement of New England, the battles of Marston Moor and Naseby, the temporary overthrow of the English monarchy, the growth of non-conformity, the modification of the English Constitution and of all English life, were germinally present in the differences between the exiles at Zurich and those at Geneva, and in the squabbles of Cox and Knox, of Whithead and Horne at Frankfort-on-the-Main about gowns and litanies and the authority of the priest. It is not often that a great historical movement can be traced through a single rill to its rise at the fountain head.

IV.

[Sidenote: The Puritan debate.]

[Sidenote: Certayne Qvestions concerning silk or vvool in the high priest's ephod, 1605.]

The theological debates that fill so large a place in the history of the first half of the sixteenth century in Europe were mainly concerned with speculative dogmas. However futile controversies may seem that seek to reduce to formulas the relations between God and man, they have at least a topical dignity. But the debates about ceremonies and vestments which the exiles brought back to England from the Continent, and which held first place there during the reign of Elizabeth and James, were bitter without being serious. A life-and-death struggle concerning the wearing of "white surplices" or the making of the sign of the cross in baptism can not but seem frivolous to the modern mind. Learned scholars like Broughton and Ainsworth thought it not beneath them to write tractates discussing the material of which the ephod of a Jewish high priest was made. It was learnedly demonstrated that the ephod was of silk, and there were sober essays on the linsey-woolsey side of that controversy. To the fine-spun mind of that time the character of the Jewish ephod was thought to settle the propriety of the Christian surplice. To the modern reader the whole debate about vestments and liturgies would be amusing if it were not so tedious. It is necessary to steady one's judgment of that age by remembering that deeper things sometimes lay concealed under these disputes regarding the contemptible mint and cumin of ecclesiasticism. Puritanism at its rise was an effort to escape from formalism, the outgrowth of an aspiration for greater spirituality in worship; but it gradually passed into an opposite formalism as rigid as that from which it had escaped.

[Sidenote: Uniformity not possible.]

It was in vain that Elizabeth tried to compel uniformity. The difference between the radical and the conservative is constitutional, and is manifest in every period of agitation. Neither the mediation of moderate men nor the compulsion of authority can bring these two sempiternal divisions of the human race into agreement. The conservative English churchman limited his Protestantism to the rejection of the pope's authority, and to certain moderate reforms in church government and ritual. He shuddered with alarm at every proposal to reconstruct religious institutions which were moss-grown with ancient sentiment. The extreme Puritan, on the other hand, went about his work in the spirit of a Jehu. He saved all his reverence for the precepts of the Bible, now becoming common in the vulgar tongue. He applied biblical phraseology to the affairs of life in a way that would have been impossible had he possessed any sense of humor. He felt himself impelled by the call of God to carry out in England the changes that had taken place in the Calvinistic churches of the Continent, and to go even further. He would have no surplices, no sign of the cross, no liturgy, no church holy days. Away with these rags of Antichrist, was his cry. Let us get back to the simplicity of the primitive ages. The Anglican, on the other hand, felt himself an Englishman above all, and without a stately liturgy, great bishops in square caps and lawn sleeves, Christmas feasts, solemn Good Fridays, and joyous Easters, there would have remained for him no merry England.

V.

[Sidenote: Growth of party spirit.]

The party line between Anglican and Puritan was not at once sharply drawn. It was only after debates growing ever more acrimonious, after persecutions and numberless exasperations, that the parties in the Church of England fell into well-defined and hostile camps. If there had been some relaxation of the requirements of uniformity, if a conciliatory policy had been pursued by the government, the ultimate division might have been postponed until party spirit had cooled; but in that day blows took the place of words, and words had the force of blows. The queen herself could write to a bishop who scrupled to do what she desired, "By God, I will unfrock you!" and moderation in debate was not to be expected from lesser folk.

[Sidenote: Puritanism the party of opposition.]

[Sidenote: Note 5.]

When the reformer has warmed to his work he looks about him for new abuses to fall upon. The dominant discontent of any age is prone to spread its wings over other grievances, and feebler movements seek shelter from the strong. Puritanism no doubt gathered momentum from the widespread agrarian and industrial disturbance in this and the preceding reigns. The profit from sheep-raising had induced many manor lords to inclose the wastes on which the peasants had pastured their cattle for ages. The humble copy-hold tenant, having no longer grass for his cows or mast for his pigs, was driven to distress by agricultural progress. In some cases even the common fields, cultivated in allotments from ancient times by the members of the village communities, first as serfs and later as tenants, were turned into sheepwalks, and hamlets of tenants' cottages were torn down to make room for more profitable occupants of the soil. The worst offenders were the greedy courtiers who had secured the estates of the English monasteries. Workmen ruined by the dissolution of the guilds were added to the ranks of the unhappy. All the discontent begotten of these transitions from mediæval life tended to strengthen the leading opposition--and that leading opposition was Puritanism.

VI.

[Sidenote: Widening the field of protest.]

Puritanism also progressively widened its field of protest. Beliefs that Protestants rejected were symbolized by the vestments of bishop and clergy. Advanced Protestants insisted that the shadows should be banished with the substance, that the symbol should disappear with the dogma. We have seen that in Frankfort the inchoate Puritan party wished to abolish the litany and purge the service book of all the remains of the old religion. This controversy raged in England, and the Puritan side did not at first lack support even among the bishops. But Elizabeth, the real founder of Anglicanism, molded the church to her will, putting down Catholics and Puritans with a hard hand. The more advanced of the party came at length to believe that all "stinted" prayers "read out of a book" were contrary to the purity and simplicity of Christian worship. The hostility of the bishops to that which the Puritans believed to be the cause of God no doubt helped to convince the persecuted party that the episcopal office itself was contrary to Scripture.

[Sidenote: Puritanism becomes dogmatic.]

[Sidenote: Note 6.]

Most of the Puritans of Elizabeth's time, under the lead of the great Cartwright, became Presbyterian in theory and sought to assimilate the Church of England to the Calvinistic churches of the Continent, holding that theirs was the very order prescribed by the apostles. Another but much smaller division of the Puritans tended toward independency, finding in the New Testament a system different from that of Cartwright. Both the Presbyterians and those who held to local church government wished to see their own system established by law. Neither faction thought of tolerating Anglican practices if the Anglicans could be put down. The notion of a state church with prescribed forms of worship enforced by law was too deeply imbedded in the English mind to be easily got rid of, and the spirit of persecution pervaded every party, Catholic or Protestant. Every one was sure that divine authority was on his side, and that human authority ought to be.

VII.

[Sidenote: Anglicanism becomes dogmatic.]

A corresponding change began to take place in the Episcopal party. The earlier defenders of Elizabeth's establishment argued, somewhat as Hooker did later, that the "practice of the apostles" was not an "invariable rule or law to succeeding ages, because they acted according to the circumstances of the church in its infant and persecuted state." Episcopal government they held to be allowable, and maintained the attitude of prudent men who justify their compromise with history and the exigency of the time, and advocate, above all, submission to civil authority. But the tendency of party division is to push both sides to more positive ground. There arose in the last years of Elizabeth a school of High-churchmen led by Bancroft, afterward primate, who turned away from Hooker's moderation and assumed a more aggressive attitude. Like the Presbyterians and the Independents and the Catholics, these in turn maintained that their favorite system of church economy was warranted by divine authority, and that all others were excluded.

[Sidenote: Failure of Elizabeth's policy.]

When the High-church leaders had reached the dogmatic assertion of apostolic succession and a divinely appointed episcopal form of government as essentials of a Christian church, the fissure between the two ecclesiastical parties in England was complete. Each had settled itself upon a supposed divine authority; each regarded the other as teaching a theory contrary to the divine plan. Elizabeth's policy of repression had produced a certain organic uniformity, but the civil war of the seventeenth century was its ultimate result.

VIII.

[Sidenote: Bitterness of the debate.]

The controversy between the two Protestant parties naturally grew more bitter as time went on. The silencing of ministers, the Fleet Prison, the inquisitorial Ecclesiastical Commission, and other such unanswerable arguments did not sweeten the temper of the Puritans. The bitterness of the controversy reached its greatest intensity in 1588, when there appeared a succession of anonymous tracts, most of them signed Martin Marprelate. They seem to have been written mainly by the same hand, but their authorship has been a matter of debate to this day.

[Sidenote: The Marprelate tracts.]

[Sidenote: 1588.]

[Sidenote: The Marprelate tracts in Lenox Library.]

The sensation produced by these violent assaults is hardly conceivable now. There were no newspapers then, and there was but little popular literature. Here were little books printed no one knew where, written by no one knew whom, concerning a religious controversy of universal interest. They were couched in the phrase of the street, in the very slang and cant of the populace, and were violent and abusive, sometimes descending to sheer blackguardism. Marprelate went gunning for large game; his deadliest abuse he let fly as from a blunderbuss at the very heads of the English church. The Dean of Salisbury he calls "Doctor of Diviltrie and Deane of Sarum." It was the first time in the history of polemics that any one had addressed a high dignitary of the church with such irreverent titles as "You grosse beaste!" "You block, you!" Sometimes Martin bends his knees with mock reverence, as when he calls the clergy "right poysond, persecuting and terrible priests." He blurts out epithets against "the sinful, the unlawful, the broken, the unnatural, false, and bastardly governours of the church; to wit, archbishops and bishops"; and addresses them as "you enemies to the state, you traytors to God and his worde, you Mar-prince, Mar-land, Mar-magestrate, Mar-church, and Mar-commonwealth." The spice of the books, that which gave them their popularity, was doubtless their rollicking impudence. "Wo--ho, now, Brother London!" he cries to the Bishop of London. "Go to, you Asse!" is a kind of kennel eloquence relished by the populace. Martin seems even to giggle and sneer and hiss in type in such expressions as "tse, tse, tse."

[Sidenote: An Admonition to the People of England, p. 25.]

The little books went everywhere. The Bishop of Winchester sadly confessed that these "slanderous pamphlets, freshe from the presse," were "in men's hands and bosoms commonly." The queen and courtiers read them, and students had nothing better to laugh at. Who will not stop in the street to hear one clown rail cleverly at another? But to see the bishops collectively and the primate and others severally put into a pillory and pelted in this daring fashion by a man who knew that his life would pay the forfeit for his libel if he could by any means be discovered, was livelier sport than bull-baiting.

[Sidenote: Nugæ Antiquæ, ii, 89, 90.]

Dr. Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, replied to the first pamphlet somewhat ponderously, as became a bishop who feels that the proprieties forbid his being too interesting. Marprelate wanted nothing better than a bishop for an antagonist; and while the whole constabulary force of the kingdom was hunting him for his life, the nimble Martin was chuckling over the excitement made by a new tract of his, headed with the well-known street cry of a tub-mender, which played derisively on Bishop Cooper's name, "Hay any worke for Cooper?" This tract professed to be "printed in Europe not farre from some of the Bounsing priestes." In this paper Martin shows to what depth a religious debate in Elizabeth's time could descend; he stoops to make the bishop ridiculous by twitting him with the infidelity of his wife, a scandal which the unfortunate prelate had treated with "Socratical and philosophical patience."

[Sidenote: Lenox Collection, N. Y. Pub. Library.]

[Sidenote: Comp. Bacon's An Advertisement touching Controversies, etc.]

There were not wanting many imitators of Martin's grossness on the other side of the controversy, who were just as libelous but for the most part less clever. One of the tracts in reply was called An Almond for a Parrat. The author says he had heard that Martin was dead, or, as he expressed it, "that your grout-headed holinesse had turned uppe your heeles like a tired jade in a medow and snorted out your sorrowefull soule, like a mesled hogge on a mucke-hille." This is beastly without being vivacious. While the press and the stage were occupied with coarse retorts on Martinism, there appeared tracts in favor of peace. There are other evidences of the existence of a moderate party that lamented the excesses of both sides in this debate.

IX.

[Sidenote: Advance of Puritan opinions.]

Puritanism was evolutionary from the beginning. Its earlier disputes about vestments and litanies grew by degrees to a rejection of all liturgies as idolatrous. Even the reading of the Bible as a part of the service came at last to be reprehended by extremists, and the repetition of the Lord's Prayer was thought dangerously liturgical. The advanced Puritans sought to exclude from Christian worship everything pleasing to the æsthetic sense, confounding bareness with simplicity. Compromises continued to be made inside the church, but in the ultimate ideal of Puritan worship there remained, besides the sermon, nothing but long extemporary prayers and the singing by the untrained voices of the congregation of literal versions of the Hebrew Psalms--doggerel verse in cobblestone meters.

X.

[Sidenote: Opposition to May-poles.]

[Sidenote: 1549.]

[Sidenote: Rushworth, Pt. III, vol. ii, 749. A. D. 1644.]

In its early stages Puritanism was a crusade against idolatry, and drew its inspiration in this, as in nearly everything else, from the Old Testament. To the word "idolatry" it gave an inclusiveness not found in the Jewish Scriptures, and puzzling to a mind accustomed to modern ways of thinking. There was hardly any set observance of the church in which constructive idolatry did not lie concealed. All holy days except Sunday were abhorred as things that bore the mark of the Beast. Even in the reign of Edward VI, long before the name of Puritanism was known, the May-poles round which English people made merry once a year were denounced as idols in a sermon preached at Paul's Cross by Sir Stephen--the "Sir" being a polite prefix to a clergyman's name. This Stephen, curate of St. Catherine Cree, was a forerunner of Puritanism, who sometimes defiantly preached from an elm tree in the chuchyard and read the service standing on a tomb on the north side of the church. He wanted the saintly names of churches and the heathen names of days of the week changed, so keen was his scent for idolatry. The parish of St. Andrew Undershaft had received its distinctive name from a very tall May-pole that overtopped the church steeple. This pole was erected annually, and it rested from one May to another on hooks under the eaves of a row of houses and stalls. In the newborn Protestant zeal against idols Sir Stephen denounced especially the lofty shaft of St. Andrew. The people in their rage took it from the hooks and sawed it in pieces, and its sections were appropriated by the several householders who had given it shelter and who presently heaped its parts upon one great bonfire. Puritanism kept up its Don Quixote battle against May-poles until there was hardly one standing to seduce the people to idolatry. When the Puritan party came into power, nearly a hundred years after the days of Sir Stephen of St. Catherine Cree, one of its earliest laws ordered that all May-poles--"an heathenish vanity generally abused to superstition and wickedness"--be taken down.

XI.

[Sidenote: Austerity in morals.]

From denouncing constructive idolatry in organ music, litanies, and May-poles, the transition to attack on the more real and substantial evils in ordinary conduct was inevitable. History has many examples of this pervasiveness of scrupulosity. The Puritan conscience had been let loose to tear in pieces the remnants of old superstitions. It was certain to break over into the field of conduct. Having set out to reform the church, it took the world by the way.

[Sidenote: Pickering's ed., p. 172.]

As early as 1583 Philip Stubbes, a Puritan lawyer, issued his hot little book, The Anatomie of Abuses. It deals with the immoralities and extravagances of the time. Stubbes repeats the early Puritan objection to the May-pole: it is a "stinckyng idol," he declares, which the people bring from the woods, "followyng it with greate devotion." And when they have set it up they "leape and daunce aboute it, as the heathen people did at the dedication of their idolles." But Stubbes takes a step forward and objects to the all-night May frolics on account of their immorality. He says, "I have heard it credibly reported by men of great gravitie, credite and reputation, that of fourtie, three score, or a hundred maides goyng to the woods over night, there have scarcely the third parte of them returned home againe undefiled." As men of "great gravitie, credite and reputation" were not likely to know the facts in this case, some of the immorality with which Stubbes charges the young people may have been as fanciful as the heathenism attributed to them. Imputed unrighteousness was a part of the Puritan system. He denounces the wild excesses in dress and the other follies of the time with a lack of a sense of proportion which already foreshadows later Puritanism.

This secondary development of Puritanism by which its energies were turned toward the regulation of conduct, as the disputes of the Reformation period lost their violence, gave to the name Puritan a new and higher sense. It is a phase of its history more important than all its primary contentions over gowns and liturgies and hierarchies, or its later debates about the five points of Calvinism and a sabbatical Sunday. One may easily forget its austerity and extravagance, for by the reform of manners this movement made the English race its debtor. In no succeeding reaction have English morals reverted to the ante-Puritan level. It is only by the religious ferments infused successively by new sects and movements, of preaching friars, Lollards, Puritans, Quakers, Methodists, Salvationists, that the great unleavened mass of men is rendered gradually less sodden.

XII.

[Sidenote: Puritan decline.]

[Sidenote: _Supra_, page 115.]

[Sidenote: Rogers's Pref. to the 39 Articles.]

The last years of Elizabeth's long reign were years of apparent Puritan decline. The old bugbear of popery was receding into the past, and a new generation had come on the stage that had no memory of the struggles of the reigns of Henry and Edward and Mary. The danger from the Armada had brought English patriotism to the point of fusion. Even the persecuted Catholics rallied to the support of the queen against Philip. The government of Elizabeth rose to the zenith of its popularity on the overthrow of the Armada. It was just at this inopportune moment, when the nation had come to feel that the England of Elizabeth was the greatest England the ages had known, that there came forth from a small coterie of the oppressed ultra-Puritans the Martin Marprelate tracts. However effective these may have been at first in making the bishops ridiculous, there followed a swift reaction. The Puritans were dubbed Martinists, and henceforth had to bear the odium of the boisterous vulgarity and libelous exaggeration of the Marprelate lampoons. The queen's government, stronger now than ever in the affection of the people, put in force severe ecclesiastical measures against nonconformists in the church, and sent Brownists, or Separatists, to die by the score in loathsome prisons. Half a dozen of their leaders were dispatched by the shorter road of the gallows. The long reign of the queen had by this time discouraged those who hoped for a change of policy at her death. Hooker's masterful and delightful prose, informed by a spirit of winning moderation, was arrayed on the side of the Anglicans by the publication of parts of his Ecclesiastical Polity in 1594 and 1597. But Puritanism suffered most from the persistence of Archbishop Whitgift and others in efforts to suppress all nonconformity in the church. These champions of Anglicanism, in the swaggering words of one of them, "defended the prelacy, stood for the power of the state, put the new doctors to the foil, profligated the elders, set upon the presbytery, and so battered the new discipline as hitherto they could never nor hereafter shall ever fortify and repair the decay thereof." The presbyteries which Cartwright and his friends had formed within the Church of England were swept out utterly by the archbishop's broom. The Puritan movement which had begun almost simultaneously with Elizabeth's reign seemed to be doomed to languish and die with the old queen who had been its resolute and lifelong antagonist.

XIII.

[Sidenote: Seeking a positive ground.]

[Sidenote: Note 7.]

For the first thirty years or more of its existence Puritanism was mainly a bundle of negations, and no bundle of mere negations is a sufficient reason for maintaining a party. No vestments, no ceremonies, no bishops, were effective cries in the hot Reformation period. But the new generation had ceased to abhor these left-overs of Romanism. Bishops, gowns, prayer books, had become Protestant to most of the people by association. To find additional reasons for differing from Anglican opponents was a party necessity. The new debates which sprang up in the last years of the sixteenth century were not deliberately planned by the Puritans, as some of their opponents asserted. They came by a process of evolution. But a period of temporary decline in a movement of this sort hastens its natural unfolding. The leaders are forced to seek the advantage of such new issues as offer when the old ones fail. In the last years of Elizabeth, Puritanism was molting, not dying.

XIV.

[Sidenote: The Puritan Sabbath.]

The great reformers of the sixteenth century had sought to strip from the Christianity of their time what they deemed the second-hand garments of Judaism. Along with the theory of a priesthood they declared also against a doctrine known in the church at least from the fifth century, that the fourth commandment enforced on Christians the keeping sacred in some sense of Sundays and other church holy days. Luther maintained that a commandment to keep the Sabbath "literally understood does not apply to Christians, for it is entirely outward, like other ordinances of the Old Testament." He thought a festival day important for rest and for attending religious worship; but with characteristic oppugnancy he says: "If anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day's sake, ... then I order you to dance on it, and feast on it, to do anything that shall remove this encroachment on Christian liberty." The Augsburg Confession makes a similar statement of the Protestant position. Calvin considered the fourth commandment binding on Christians only in a sense mystical and highly Calvinistic. It signified that "we should rest from our own works" under the Christian dispensation. He even suggested that some other day of the week might be chosen as a day of rest and worship at Geneva for an exhibition of Christian liberty in this regard. His practice was conformed to his theory. It is incidentally related that when John Knox once visited the Genevan reformer on Sunday, he found him playing at bowls. Knox was not more a sabbatarian than Calvin.

XV.

[Sidenote: Rise of the strict Sabbath.]

[Sidenote: Note 8.]

[Sidenote: Compare Marsden's Early Puritans (1850) page 242, where Becon's Catechism and Coverdale are quoted.]

[Sidenote: Robert's Social Hist. of the Southern Counties, p. 239.]

[Sidenote: Note 9.]

Writers on this subject have generally agreed in dating the rise of the Puritan Sabbath from the appearance, in 1595, of Dr. Bownd's book on The Sabbath of the Old and of the New Testament. But the doctrine of the strict keeping of Sunday may be traced farther back. In truth, the difference between the English and the Continental Sunday dates from the Reformation. The protests of Luther and Calvin go to show that Sunday had in the church before the Reformation, theoretically if not in practice, the sanctity of a church feast. The English Reformation was conservative, like all other English revolutions. English reformers retained the Catholic Sunday, as they did the vestments and national hierarchy of the old church. Thomas Hancock has been styled "the Luther of the southwest of England." He was the great preacher of Poole in the days of Edward VI. That he, like other English reformers, did not agree with Luther in rejecting the obligation to rest on Sunday is shown by the record, for the voice of Poole was the voice of Hancock. About 1550 the juries in the Admiralty Court of Poole were charged to inquire into Sunday fishing; and so advanced was the premature Puritanism of Edward's time that even the leaving of nets in the sea over Sunday was to be investigated. Here was a strictness unknown in Catholic times.

XVI.

[Sidenote: _Supra_, page 16.]

[Sidenote: Early English Text Society Reprint, 106, 107, 108.]

The word Sabbath does not occur in these early entries. But in the troubles among the Marian exiles at Frankfort, where so many other traits of Puritanism first came above the horizon, it is significant that one finds Sunday called the Sabbath. Sabbath as applied to Sunday occurs first in literature, perhaps, in 1573, and then it is considered necessary to explain it. Bullein's Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, a work of considerable popularity, first appeared as early as 1564. In the edition of 1573 there was inserted a new passage not found in the earlier issue. Mendax is relating incredible tales of travel in lands unknown, after the manner of David Ingram and other returned adventurers. Up to this point all is pure lying merely for the fun of the thing, or perhaps to ridicule the exaggerations of travelers. But the interpolated passage is not of a piece with the old garment into which it is patched. It is less grotesque and humorous, and it smacks of incipient Puritanism in several flavors. It treats first of all of the "Kepyng of the Saboth Daie," "whiche is the seventh daie, that is sondaie," in the imaginary city of "Nodnol," an anagram of London. The gates are shut, and nobody is allowed to "goe, neither ride forth of the Citie duryng that daie, except it be after the euenyng praier; then to walke honestlie into the sweete fieldes, and at every gate in the time of service there are warders." "What so ever hee be he muste kepe hollie the Sabboth daie, and come to the churche both man, woman, young and olde." "There were no people walking abroad in the service tyme; no, not a Dogge or catte in the streate, neither any Taverne doore open that daie, nor wine bibbyng in them, but onely almose, fasting and praier." This is perhaps the oldest extant statement of an early Puritan ideal of Sabbath-keeping.

XVII.

[Sidenote: Cox's Literature of the Sabbath Question, _sub anno_.]

[Sidenote: Robert's Southern Counties, pp. 238, 239.]

[Sidenote: 1583.]

[Sidenote: 1588.]

Scruples regarding recreations on Sunday come distinctly into view in the title of a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1576. In 1580 the magistrates of London secured from the queen a prohibition of the performance of plays within the limits of the city on Sundays. In other municipalities--Brighton, Yarmouth, and Lyme--ordinances were made about this time against such offenses as the prosecution on Sunday of the herring fisheries, cloth working, and other labors, and even against the Sunday practice of archery, formerly thought a patriotic exercise. There are other evidences of a movement, especially in the south of England, in favor of a stricter Sabbath in these and the following years. Stubbes does not fail to denounce "heathnicall exercises upon the Sabbaoth day, which the Lorde would have consecrated to holy uses." The Puritan mode of Sabbath-keeping already existed among the chosen few. "The Sabboth daie of some is well observed," says Stubbes, "namely, in hearing the blessed worde of God read, preached, and interpreted; in private and publique praiers; in reading of godly psalmes; in celebrating the sacraments; and in collecting for the poore and indigent, which are the true uses and endes whereto the Sabbaoth was ordained." He records the opposite belief of his opponents that Sunday was ordained "onely to use what kinde of exercises they thinke good themselves." In practice this was the rule of the English people at large. These opposite opinions come into view when Martin Marprelate a few years later berates the Bishop of London for playing at bowls on Sunday.

XVIII.

[Sidenote: Bownd on the Sabbath.]

[Sidenote: 1595.]

[Sidenote: 1592.]

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

Dr. Bownd's book on The Sabbath of the Old and the New Testament, which, if we may believe its opponents, was nearly ten years "in the hammering," was the outcome of a sentiment already rising among the Puritans, and not wholly confined to that party. It was preceded by a little work of Richard Greenham which seems to have been circulated for some years in manuscript after a fashion of that time, and to have had at first more influence on practice than Bownd's formal treatise. Greenham was Bownd's stepfather, and his work was the parent of Bownd's, which is distinctly more extreme. But Dr. Bownd's book is none the less memorable as a point of departure, because in it the opinions on this subject which have since prevailed so generally in all English-speaking lands "were for the first time broadly and prominently asserted in Christendom"; at least, they were here first systematically propounded and defended. Bownd held that the fourth commandment is partly moral, in the phrase of the casuists. He shifted the obligation to the first day of the week by arguments now familiar, and he laid down rules for the observance of the day. Honest recreations and lawful delights he flatly forbids on Sundays, but he rather obsequiously makes some allowance for the "feasts of noblemen and great personages on this day." People of rank do not wholly escape him, however, for he points a moral with the story of a nobleman whose child was born with a face like that of a dog, because the father had hunted on the Lord's Day. He allows the ringing of only one bell to call the people to church on Sunday. Chimes were quite too pleasing to accord with a severe Sabbath.

XIX.

[Sidenote: Spread of Bownd's opinions.]

[Sidenote: Cartwright's Admonition to Parliament, 1572.]

[Sidenote: Robert's Southern Counties, pp. 37, 38.]

Such rigor fell in with the passion of that age for formal observance and with the exigent temper of the Puritans by whom Bownd's views were rapidly and universally accepted. The stricter divines might well be glad of a new lever for reforming the old English Sunday, which was devoted, out of service time, to outdoor games, to the brutally cruel sports of bull and bear baiting, to merry morris-dances, in which the performers were gayly decked and hung with jingling bells in different keys, as well as to coarse farces called interludes, which were played on stages under booths and sometimes in the churches. As an austere reaction against frivolity, Puritanism pushed Sabbath-keeping to its extreme, reprobating even the most innocent and domestic recreations, and changing a day of rest and refreshment into one of alternate periods of application to religious devotion and of scrupulous vacuity. Bownd's rather ultra propositions were carried yet further when reproduced by high-strung preachers. It is said that some of these declared that the ringing of more than one bell to call people to church on the Sabbath was as great a sin as murder, adultery, or parricide. The lack of a sense of proportion is the specific distinction of the zealot and the polemic. This lack was not peculiar to the Puritans, however. Joseph Hall, afterward a well-known bishop, could address men so worthy as John Robinson and his colleague in such words as these: "Your souls shall find too late ... that even whoredoms and murders shall abide an easier answer than separation." Perhaps one may rather say that a lack of the sense of proportion in morals was a trait of that age, an age of zealots and polemics.

XX.

[Sidenote: Prevalence of the strict Sabbath.]

[Sidenote: Fuller's Ch. Hist. of Britain, book ix, sect. viii, 20, 21.]

In such a time Dr. Bownd's book easily captivated the religious public, and there arose a passion for a stricter Sabbath. According to Fuller, the Lord's Day, especially in towns, "began to be precisely kept, people becoming a law to themselves, forbearing such sports as yet by statute permitted; yea, many rejoicing at their own restraint herein. On this day the stoutest fencer laid down the buckler; the most skillful archer unbent the bow, counting all shooting beside the mark; May-games and morris-dancers grew out of request; and good reason that bells should be silenced from jingling about men's legs, if their very ringing in steeples were adjudged unlawful." Some learned scholars were impressed by Bownd's argument, and others who did not agree with his conclusions thought it best not to gainsay them, "because they tended to the manifest advance of religion." And indeed the new zeal for Sabbath-keeping must have incidentally promoted morals and good order in so licentious an age.

[Sidenote: Opposition to Bownd.]

[Sidenote: Fuller's Church History, book ix, sect. viii, 21.]

[Sidenote: Note 11.]

But a violent opposition quickly arose. Some opposed the book as "galling men's necks with a Jewish yoke against the liberty of Christians," and many of the clergy of the new high-church type resented the doctrine of a Christian Sabbath, asserting that it put "an unequal lustre on the Sunday on set purpose to eclipse all other holy days to the derogation of the authority of the church." There were those who asserted that the "brethren," as they styled them, had brought forth Bownd's book, intending by this "attack from an odd corner" to retrieve lost ground. The manifest advantage to Puritanism from the shifting of the ground of debate, aroused Archbishop Whitgift. In 1599 he made the tactical mistake of ordering the book called in, and in 1600 Chief-Justice Popham forbade the reprinting of it. The price of the work was doubled at once, and it was everywhere sought for, books being "more called on when called in," as Fuller says. When it could not be had in print, it was transcribed by enthusiastic admirers and circulated "from friend to friend" in manuscript. As soon as Whitgift's "head was laid," a new and enlarged edition was published.

[Sidenote: Note 12.]

[Sidenote: 1611.]

[Sidenote: Note 13.]

The theory of a Sunday-Sabbath, which from the first was not confined to the Puritans, permeated English and American thought and life. But from that time forward the Puritans made rigid Sabbath-keeping the very mark and password of the faithful. From England the theory spread northward to Scotland, where it found a congenial soil. The strict observance of Sunday was embodied in those Laws, Divine, Moral, and Martial, under which Sir Thomas Dale oppressed Virginia, years before the earliest Puritan migration carried it to the coast of New England. On that coast Bownd's Sabbath took on its deepest hue, becoming at last as grievous an evil, perhaps, as the frivolity it had supplanted.

XXI.

[Sidenote: Effect on Puritanism.]

The Puritans protesting against Hebraism in vestments, in priesthood, in liturgy, and in festivals, fell headlong into the Pharisaism of the rigid Sabbath. History records many similar phenomena. To escape from the spirit of one's age is difficult for an individual, impossible perhaps for a sect or party. Nevertheless, the Sabbath agitation had given a new impulse to the Puritan movement--had, indeed, given it a positive party cry, and had furnished it with a visible badge of superior sanctity.

[Sidenote: The new Puritanism.]

The Calvinistic controversy which broke out almost simultaneously with that about the Sabbath and prevailed throughout the reign of James I, added yet one more issue, by making Puritanism the party of a stern and conservative orthodoxy, as opposed to the newer Arminianism which spread so quickly among the High-Church clergy. From all these fresh developments Puritanism gained in power and compactness, if it lost something of simplicity and spirituality. Standing for ultra-Protestantism, for good morals, for an ascetic Sabbath, for a high dogmatic orthodoxy, Puritanism could not but win the allegiance of the mass of the English people, and especially of the middle class. It was this new, compact, austere, dogmatic, self-confident Puritanism, when it had become a political as well as a religious movement, that obliterated Laud and Charles and set up the Commonwealth. And in studying the evolution of this later Puritanism we have been present at the shaping of New England in Old England.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 99.]

Evelyn's Diary, pp. 4, 5; date, 1634: "My father was appointed Sheriff for Surrey and Sussex before they were disjoyned. He had 116 servants in liverys, every one livery'd in greene sattin doublets. Divers gentlemen and persons of quality waited on him in the same garbe and habit, which at that time (when 30 or 40 was the usual retinue of a High Sheriff) was esteem'd a great matter.... He could not refuse the civility of his friends and relations who voluntarily came themselves, or sent in their servants." Compare Chamberlain's remarks about Sir George Yeardley, whom he styles "a mean fellow," and says that the king had knighted him when he was appointed Governor of Virginia, "which hath set him up so high that he flaunts it up and down the streets in extraordinary bravery with fourteen or fifteen fair liveries after him." Domestic Correspondence, James I, No. 110, Calendar, p. 598. The propriety of keeping so many idle serving men is sharply called in question in a tract entitled Cyuile and Vncyuile Life, 1579, and an effort is made to prove the dignity of a serving man's position, while its decline is confessed in A Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Servingmen, 1598. Both of these tracts are reprinted in Inedited Tracts, etc., Roxburghe Library, 1868. The serving man was not a menial. He rendered personal services to his master or to guests, he could carve on occasion, and as a successor to the military retainers of an earlier time he was ready to fight in any of his master's quarrels; but his principal use was to lend dignity to the mansion and to amuse the master or his guests with conversation during lonely hours in the country house. Among the first Jamestown emigrants were some of these retainers, as we have seen.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 100.]

The Anatomie of Abuses, by Philip Stubbes, 1583, Pickering's reprint, pages 16, 17: "It is lawfull for the nobilitie, the gentrie and magisterie to weare riche attire, euery one in their callyng. The nobility and gentrie to innoble, garnish, and set forth birthes, dignities, and estates. The magisterie to dignifie their callynges.... But now there is suche a confuse mingle mangle of apparell, and suche preposterous excesse thereof, as euery one is permitted to flaunt it out in what apparell he lusteth himself, or can get by any kinde of meanes. So that it is very hard to know who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who is not; for you shal haue those which are neither of the nobilitie, gentilitie nor yeomanrie ... go daiely in silkes, veluettes, satens, damaskes, taffaties and suche like; notwithstanding that they be bothe base by birthe, meane by estate, and seruile by callyng. And this I compte a greate confusion, and a generall disorder in a Christian common wealth."

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 106.]

A Brieff Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frankfort, 1564, is the primary authority. It is almost beyond doubt that Whittingham, Dean of Durham, a participant in the troubles, wrote the book. The Frankfort struggles have been discussed recently in Mr. Hinds's The Making of the England of Elizabeth, but, like all writers on the subject, Hinds is obliged to depend almost solely on Whittingham's account. The several volumes of letters from the archives of Zurich, published by the Parker Society, give a good insight into the forces at work in the English Reformation. See, for example, in the volume entitled Original Letters, 1537-1558, that of Thomas Sampson to Calvin, dated Strasburgh, February 23, 1555, which shows the Puritan movement half fledged at this early date when Calvin's authoritative advice is invoked. "The flame is lighted up with increased vehemence amongst us English. For a strong controversy has arisen, while some desire the book of reformation of the Church of England to be set aside altogether, others only deem some things in it objectionable, such as kneeling at the Lord's Supper, the linen surplice, and other matters of this kind; but the rest of it, namely, the prayers, scripture lessons and the form of the administration of baptism and the Lord's Supper they wish to be retained."

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 106.]

There are many and conflicting accounts of the origin of the name. In the Narragansett Club Publications, ii, 197-199, there is an interesting statement of some of these by the editor of Cotton's Answer to Roger Williams, in a note.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 111.]

That the Puritans early made common cause with the suffering tenantry is not a matter of conjecture. Philip Stubbes, in 1583, in the Anatomie of Abuses, pp. 126, 127, writes: "They take in and inclose commons, moores, heathes, and other common pastures, where out the poore commonaltie, were wont to haue all their forrage and feedyng for their cattell, and (whiche is more) corne for themselves to liue vpon; all which are now in most places taken from them, by these greedie puttockes to the great impouerishyng and vtter beggeryng of many whole townes and parishes.... For these inclosures bee the causes why riche men eate vpp poore men, as beastes dooe eate grasse." One might cite recent economic writers on the effect of inclosures, but the conservative laments of the antiquary Aubrey, in his Introduction to the Survey of Wiltshire, written about 1663, give us a nearer and more picturesque, if less philosophical, view. He says: "Destroying of Manours began Temp. Hen. VIII., but now common; whereby the mean People live lawless, no body to govern them, they care for no body, having no Dependance on any Body. By this Method, and by the Selling of the Church-Lands, is the Ballance of the Government quite alter'd and put into the Hands of the common People." Writing from what he had heard from his grandfather, he says: "Anciently the Leghs i. e. Pastures were noble large Grounds.... So likewise in his Remembrance was all between Kington St. Michael and Dracot-Ferne common Fields. Then were a world of labouring People maintained by the Plough.... There were no Rates for the Poor in my Grandfather's Days ... the Church-ale at Whitsuntide did the Business.... Since the Reformation and Inclosures aforesaid these Parts have swarm'd with poor People. The Parish of Caln pays to the Poor 500£ _per annum_.... Inclosures are for the private, not for the publick Good. For a Shepherd and his Dog, or a Milk-Maid, can manage Meadow-Land, that upon arable, employ'd the Hands of several Scores of Labourers." Miscellanies on Several Curious Subjects, now first published, etc., 1723, pp. 30-33. It will fall within the province of another volume of this series to treat of the systems of landholding brought from England, and I shall not go further into the subject of inclosures here. A portion of the agricultural population seemed superfluous in consequence of inclosures, and colonization was promoted as a means of ridding the country of the excess of its population.

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 112.]

In the matter of Church government Puritanism passed through three different periods. In the reign of Elizabeth the Church-Puritan was mainly Presbyterian under Cartwright's lead. But there was even then a current that set toward Independency. Separatism was the outward manifestation of this tendency, and according to Ralegh's estimate, cited in the text, there were about twenty thousand declared Separatists in England in 1593. After the suppression of the presbyteries within the Church in the last years of Elizabeth, and the crushing out of the Separatists by rigorous persecutions, questions of the particular form of Church government fell into abeyance among the Puritans for about forty years. "Indiscriminate anti-prelacy was the prevailing mood of the English people," says Masson, "and the distinction between Presbyterianism and Independency was yet caviare to the general." Life of Milton, ii, 590. Richard Baxter, the Puritan divine (as quoted by Masson), confesses in 1641 that until that year he had never thought what Presbytery or Independency was, or ever spoke with a man who seemed to know it. See also Hanbury's Memorials, ii, 69. Writers on this period do not seem to recognize the fact that the two views were in some rivalry among the early Puritans, and that the theory of the independence of the local church seems to have been at least foreshadowed in the opinions at Frankfort. But there was a long generation in which these differences among the Puritans were forgotten in their life-and-death conflict with the Episcopal party. Then, as Puritanism came into power, the example of other Protestant European countries drew England toward Presbyterianism, while the voice of New England came from over the sea pleading for Congregationalism.

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 123.]

A letter of Sandys, afterward Archbishop of York, to Bullinger, quoted by Marsden, Early Puritans, 57, shows that though Puritanism by 1573 had become something other than it was at Frankfort, it was still mainly negative. Sandys writes: "New orators are rising up from among us; foolish young men who despise authority and admit of no superior. They are seeking the complete overthrow and uprooting of the whole of our ecclesiastical polity; and striving to shape out for us I know not what new platform of a church." He gives a summary under nine heads. The assertion that each parish should have its own "presbytery" and choose its own minister, and that the judicial laws of Moses were binding, are the only positive ones. No authority of the magistrate in ecclesiastical matters, no government of the Church except by ministers, elders, and deacons, the taking away of all titles, dignities, lands, and revenues of bishops, etc., from the Church, the allowing of no ministers but actual pastors, the refusal of baptism to the children of papists, fill the rest of this summary. One misses from this skeleton the insistence on Sabbath-keeping, church-going, "ordinances," and ascetic austerity in morals that afterward became distinctive traits of the party.

[Sidenote: Note 8, page 125.]

Augustine and other early doctors of the Church held to a Sunday-Sabbath in the fifth century, basing it largely on grounds that now seem mystical. Compare Coxe on Sabbath Laws and Sabbath Duties, 284, note, and Cook's Historical and General View of Christianity, ii, 301, cited by Coxe. The question was variously treated during the middle ages, St. Thomas Aquinas and other schoolmen taking the prevalent modern view that the fourth commandment was partly moral and partly ceremonial. There is a curious story, for which I do not know the original authority, of Eustachius, Abbot of Hay, in the thirteenth century, who on his return from the Holy Land preached from city to city against buying and selling on Sundays and saints' days. He had with him a copy of a document dropped from heaven and found on the altar of St. Simon, on Mount Golgotha. This paper threatened that if the command were disobeyed it should rain stones and wood and hot water in the night, and, as if such showers were not enough, wild beasts were to devour the Sabbath-breakers. That there was a difference of opinion in that age is shown by the fact that Roger Bacon, later in the thirteenth century, thought it worth while to assert that Christians should work and hold fairs on Sunday, while Saturday was the proper day for rest. He showed no document from heaven, but, like a true philosopher of that time, the learned friar appealed to arguments drawn from astrology. Hearne's Remains, ii, 177, cites Mirandula. Legislation by Parliament regarding Sunday observance was rare before the Reformation. A statute of 28 Edward III incidentally excepts Sunday from the days on which wool may be shorn, and one of 27 Henry VI forbids the keeping of fairs and markets on Sundays, Good Fridays, and principal festivals except four Sundays in harvest. In 4 Edward IV a statute was passed forbidding the sale of shoes on Sundays and certain festivals.

[Sidenote: Note 9, page 125.]

In the "Injunctions by King Edward VI," 1547, Bishop Sparrow's Collection, edition of 1671, p. 8, there is a remarkable statement of what may be called the Edwardean view of Sunday as distinguished from the opinions and practice that had come down from times preceding the Reformation: "God is more offended than pleased, more dishonoured than honoured upon the holy-day because of idleness, pride, drunkenness," etc. The religious and moral duties to which the "holy-day," as it is called, should be strictly devoted are there specified. But, true to the position of compromise, halfwayness, and one might add paradox, which the English Reformation took from the beginning, there is added in the same paragraph the following: "Yet notwithstanding all Parsons, Vicars, and Curates, shall teach and declare unto their Parishioners, that they may with a safe and quiet conscience, in the time of Harvest, labour upon the holy and festival days and save that thing which God hath sent. And if for any scrupulosity, or grudge of conscience, men should superstitiously abstain from working upon those days, that then they should grievously offend and displease God." See also "Thacte made for thabrogacion of certayne holy-dayes," in the reign of Henry VIII, 1536, in the same black-letter collection, p. 167. In this act "Sabboth-day" occurs, but apparently with reference to the Jewish Sabbath only. "Sonday" is used for Sunday.

[Sidenote: Note 10, page 129.]

Dr. Bownd's Sabathum Veteris et Novi Testamenti is exceedingly rare. There is a copy in the Prince Collection of the Boston Public Library. It is the only one in this country, so far as I can learn. I am under obligations in several matters to Cox's Literature of the Sabbath Question, to the same author's Sabbath Laws and Sabbath Duties, and to Hessey's Bampton Lectures for 1860.

[Sidenote: Note 11, page 131.]

It is Thomas Rogers, the earliest opponent of the doctrine of Greenham and Bownd, who sees a deep-laid plot in the publication of their books. "What the brethren wanted in strength they had in wiliness," he says. "For while these worthies of our church were employing their engines and forces partly in defending the present government ecclesiastical, partly in assaulting the presbytery and new discipline, even at that very instant the brethren ... abandoned quite the bulwarks which they had raised and gave out were impregnable: suffering us to beat them down, without any or very small resistance, and yet not careless of affairs, left not the wars for all that, but from an odd corner, and after a new fashion which we little thought of (such was their cunning), set upon us afresh again by dispersing in printed books (which for ten years' space before they had been in hammering among themselves to make them complete) their Sabbath speculations and presbyterian (that is more than kingly or popely) directions for the observance of the Lord's Day." Preface to Thirty-nine Articles, paragraph 20. He also says, with some wit, "They set up a new idol, their Saint Sabbath."

[Sidenote: Note 12, page 132.]

The doctrine of a strict Sabbath appears to have made no impression in Scotland until the seventeenth century was well advanced. In the printed Burgh Records of Aberdeen from 1570 to 1625 there is no sabbatarian legislation in the proper sense; but there are efforts to compel the people to suspend buying and selling fish and flesh in the market, the playing of outdoor games and ninepins, and the selling of liquors during sermon time only. Take as an example the following ordinance--as curious for its language as its subject--dated 4th October, 1598, twenty-four years after Knox's death:

"Item, The prouest, bailleis, and counsall ratefeis and approves the statute maid obefoir, bering that na mercatt, nather of fische nor flesche salbe on the Sabboth day in tyme cumming, in tyme of sermone, vnder the pane of confiscatioun of the same; and lykvayes ratefeis the statute maid aganis the playeris in the linkis, and at the kyillis, during the time of the sermones; ... and that na tavernar sell nor went any wyne nor aill in tyme cumming in tyme of sermone, ather on the Sabboth day or vlk dayes, under the pane of ane vnlaw of fourtie s., to be vpliftit of the contravenar als oft as they be convict."

[Sidenote: Note 13, page 132.]

New England Puritanism took a position more ultra even than that of Bownd. Thomas Shepard, of Cambridge, Mass., developed from some Sermons on the Subject a work with the title, Theses Sabbaticæ, or the Doctrine of the Sabbath. After a considerable circulation in manuscript among New England students of divinity, it was printed at London in 1650 by request of all the elders of New England. From the time of Augustine the prevailing theory of advocates of a Sunday-Sabbath has been that the fourth commandment is partly moral, partly ceremonial; but Shepard, who does not stick at small logical or historical difficulties, will have it wholly moral, by which means he avoids any option regarding the day. The rest of the Sabbath, according to this authoritative New England treatise, is to be as strict as it ever was under Jewish law, and is to be rigidly enforced on the unwilling by parents and magistrates. In the spirit of a thoroughpaced literalist Shepard argues through fifty pages that the Sabbath begins in the evening. He admits that only "servile labour" is forbidden, but he reasons that as "sports and pastimes" are ordained "to whet on worldly labour," they therefore partake of its servile character and are not tolerable on the Sabbath. It appears from his preface that there were Puritans in his time who denied the sabbatical character of Sunday and spiritualized the commandment.