Critical History of the Puritans concluded.—
of the Perplexing Contradictions in their Political Character, and why they were at once the Advocates, and the Adversaries, of Civil and Religious Freedom.

RAPIN, although a foreigner, had been conversant with our language and our country.  He had the sagacity to detect an obscure and indefinable line which seemed to separate these Puritans among themselves ;  and without taking the most comprehensive view of such important actors in our history, he drew this result, that there were, as he calls them, religious Puritans and state Puritans.

A recent French writer of our history, as a foreigner, is at a loss to adjust the contradictory statements, and the opposite results he found among our own writers, in regard to our Puritans.  He is himself struck by men whose piety was so seriously occupied by the most frivolous objects, yet who maintained their cause by the magnanimity of their heroic sufferings.  He perceived that this extraordinary race eagerly rejected all “superstitions” with the very spirit of superstition itself.  He is delighted at their aspirations after freedom, but he is startled at their open avowal of intolerance.  In truth, the history of the Puritans, as connected with the religion and the government of England, is a history peculiar to ourselves ;  nor is it for the foreigner to comprehend, what even the natives themselves have frequently been at a loss to define.

Honest Fuller, in his Church History, felt a peculiar tenderness in the adoption of the very term Puritan, as being a name subject to several senses ;  much like the modern term Evangelical ;  it was ridiculous and odious in profane mouths, yet often applicable to persons who laboured for a life pure and holy.  To prevent exceptions, he requests his reader to recollect that, should the name casually slip from his pen, he is only to understand by it, Non-conformist.  However he divides them into two classes, the mild and moderate, and the fierce arid fiery.^[1] Fuller’s difficulty existed ere he wrote ;  thirty years before an honest Irish divine writing to Archbishop Usher that “some crafty Papists safely railed at ministers for propagating that damnable heresy of Puritanism ;  which word, though not understood was however known to be odious to his Majesty” (James the First.)  To silence these railers he suggests having a petition to the King to define a Puritan ;  and should his Majesty not be at leisure, to appoint some good man to do it for him.^[2] Such was the extensive infamy of the odious term Puritan that it was flung about to any adverse party, or obnoxious person.  It was not always applied to the enemies of Episcopacy, or of Monarchy, but to persons of rigid morals, who were solely occupied by their private affairs, and neither hostile to Bishops nor to Kings.  An intelligent contemporary said “The Papist, we see, hates all kinds of Puritans ;  the Hierarchist another ;  the Court sycophant another ;  the sensual libertine another.  All hate a Puritan, and under the same name hate a different thing.”^[3] The writer makes this remarkable observation.  “Judaism appeared to Puritans mere superstition ;  Christianity seemed to the Jews gross blasphemy ;  and now amongst Christians, Protestantism is nothing else but heresy, and amongst Protestants, zeal is misnamed Puritanism.”^[4]

Amidst this diversity of opinions and principles, the history of the Puritans would offer to each historian, as his party inclined him, a theme for eulogy and triumph, or a subject for satire and obloquy.  Heylin in his “History of the Presbyterians” blackens them as so many political devils ;  these were “the fierce and fiery” of Fuller ;  and Neal in his History of the Puritans blanches them into a sweet and almond whiteness, embracing not only the mild and the moderate, but even the fierce and the fiery.

The extreme perplexity of Monsieur Guizot, to whom we have alluded ;  interests by the frankness of his confession, where his philosophical candour, at variance with his political inclinations, seems to have thrown some embarrassment into his style.

“In respect,” says Monsieur Guizot, “to the fanatical Puritans, the religious enthusiasts whom Mr. Hallam has judged, I think, with a little ill-humour,” or as he afterwards says “with a coldness rather inclining to irony” — “I shall perhaps have some trouble to say exactly what I think.  In my opinion, and in despite of so much impure alloy, their cause was the good one, and it was that cause whose defeat would have been a defeat, whose triumph prepared a triumph, for reason and humanity.  At the same time the general character of this party shocks and repulses one.  I have no taste for that passion so arid and sombre, and for those minds so narrowed and stubborn, who have no feelings in common with mankind ;  their bilious enthusiasm disfigures man, as I think, and shrinks him into so diminutive a size, that in viewing his sincerity and his moral energy they lose much of their greatness.  These Puritans however were sincere, energetic, devoted to their faith and their cause, though their sentiments are so little attractive, and their opinions raise our contempt.  They first rose up against tyranny.  We may not like them, but we must speak of them with esteem, and we may yield them our gratitude, if we cannot our sympathy.”

It is evident that Monsieur Guizot has reflected much deeper on the Puritans ;  than Rapin ;  but I would not decide whether they fare better in his hands, than in Mr. Hallam’s “coldness rather inclining to irony.”

A modern critic of a loftier mood writes of these Saints with a saintly spirit.  In this debate of mortal Puritanism, we shall find, that Heaven itself is evoked, and the genius of the modern critic comes

“ In a celestial panoply, all armed.”

Never before, for Neal in the creeping and slumbrous style of his history has “no thoughts that breathe,” were the Puritans so solemnly inaugurated in an apotheosis of Puritanism.  To me is left the ungracious task of developing mere human truths where beatitude is placed before us.

The modern critic has discovered that “the Puritan was made up of two different men ;  the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion ;  the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious.”  In this dual man, one was he who would dash into pieces the idolatry of painted glass, break down antique crosses of rare workmanship and burn witches-the other was he who would “set his foot on the neck of kings,” and, so we are told, “went on through the world like Sir Artegale’s iron man Talus with his flail crushing and trampling down.”  These Puritans “looked with contempt on the rich and the eloquent, on every nobleman and every priest.”  Yet they themselves were “rich and eloquent;” rich in bishops’ lands, and eloquent in a seven-hours’ sermon.^[5] They were also “noblemen and priests” in their own seraphic way, for “they were nobles by the right of an earlier creation and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.”  If their biblical names were not “registered at the Heralds’-college, they were recorded in the Book of Life” wherein the elect could read no other names than their own.  Whenever they met a splendid train of menials “they were haughty, that a legion of ministering angels had charge over them”;  and “they scorned palaces” for “houses not made with hands.”  Haughty truly, for more pride lurked under their black velvet scull-cap tipped with white satin, with their mortified look and their screwed-up visage, than under the mitre of a majestic primate.  We are told that “if they were led to pursue unwise ends, they never chose unwise means.”  That these novel citizens of the world should have been men of such deep sense and such happy fortune, is indeed saying a great deal—because that they were apt to fall into frenzies, is not denied.  The more exalted Puritan of the two which formed the one, is described.  “He heard the lyres of angels or the tempting whispers of fiends.  He caught a gleam of the beatific vision, or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire !”

The fairy tales of the Countess D’Anois, that charming writer of innocent inventions, do not equal the daring genius of the modern Critic.  The indomitable being whom we have now to delineate, was yet unheard of in history or in fiction.  “The very meanest of them was a being to whose fate a mysterious and terrible importance belonged ;  on whose slighest action the spirits of light and darkness looked with anxious interest, and who had been destined before heaven and earth were created.”^[6] Such were the men for “whose sake empires had risen, and flourished, and decayed.”  These were they who were appointed, according to one of their often bellowed positions, “to bind kings in chains and their nobles with links of iron,” and “to tread the wine-press of the wrath of God till the blood rose to the bridle-reins.”  This Puritan, or this Covenanter, “like Vane thought himself intrusted with the sceptre of the millennial year;  like Fleetwood he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God hid his face from him: but when he took his seat in the hall of debate or in the field of battle,” he was no longer the Puritan, but spoke and acted as men speak and act who call their intolerance “a regeneration,” and immolate their fellowbeings as “a sweet sacrifice.”  These were the Independents, the Jacobins of England—and the Covenanters of Scotland, of whom one of their chiefs, the Lord of Wariston, when he saw the Scotch army advancing and the English Parliament voting monies for the Evangelical Host, exclaimed, that “the business is going on in God’s old way !”

It must be confessed that if the Modern Critic be a great poet in history, we cannot discover an equal knowledge of history in his poetry.  It hardly became a philosopher, even in such a playful effusion of his imagination, to eulogise, so seriously, barbarism, intolerance, and madness.

An important historical enigma remains to be solved.  How did it happen that “the good cause,” as Monsieur Guizot terms it, was the cause of these Energumenes ? I may be allowed to employ a term which Monsieur Guizot would not disapprove.  How came the great interests of mankind, the cause of civil freedom, to originate with zealots who had no feelings in common with mankind ? An explanation of this point clears up all the ambiguity of their character, and reconciles the discordant opinions of our historians.

When we say that the age of Charles the First was a religious age, we might more accurately style it, a Protestant age.  The terror of Romanism propelled Protestantism.  The Catholic policy was prevalent in Europe, and the Reformed party, everywhere, for their support, looked to our insular kingdom.  With the cause of the Reformation that of civil liberty became accidentally connected;  I say accidentally, for certainly, it was not necessarily so, as is usually considered.  In freeing us from the yoke of Rome, if Geneva at the same time fettered us with one equally heavy, however altered might be the form, it cannot be said, that we advanced in the purest principles of civil rights.  Kings might be rejected as well as Popes, and yet the people might not be more free.  The Democracy of Calvin was inquisitorial, — and yet to establish this novel despotism, it became absolutely necessary, at first, to adopt the most enlarged principles of civil freedom.  The nation had to struggle for its independence, ere it could proclaim its Presbytery, and its “discipline.”

It was necessary then for the cause in which the Puritan, or the Presbyter^[7] were really engaged, to subvert the Government;  and although perhaps the arbitrary measures to which the Government had often recourse, were in great part produced by this very opposition, still absolute power and arbitrary rule were at length suppressed, by the self-devotion of these energetic characters.

Even in the great Revolution of Scotland, though carried on by fanatical zealots, the principles of political liberty were combined with its progress;  before they could become Presbyters, I repeat, it was first necessary to establish their national independence.  Their civil, thus became inseparable from their religious liberty.  Though we may treat their real object with indifference, and conclude that whether a Church be governed by Episcopacy and Convocations, or by a Presbytery and Synods, as of all national objects, the most unimportant, yet by such miserable means, great ends were pursued;  and in the struggle of ecclesiastical predominance, civil liberty was mediately, enlarged and strengthened.  To the English Constitution were transferred some of its most wholesome correctives—the abrogation of the High Commission Court and the Star-Chamber;  the prohibition of arbitrary proclamations;  and the institution of Triennial Parliaments.^[8] The discovery of these great advancements in our political acquisitions, advanced by these gloomy fanatics, occasioned to our historians so many perplexing opinions and contradictory notions.

But if the principle of civil freedom were announced to us in the progress of this Revolution, the great actors themselves, Puritans or Presbyters, were certainly the irreconcilable enemies to that popular liberty which they advocated.  In their grasp of power they showed that nothing was more alien to the designs of their democracy than the freedom of mankind.  The arbitrary will of the single tyrant;  the excesses of the prerogative;  seem light when compared with their more intolerant, more arbitrary, and more absolute power.  When Presbytery was our Lord, even those who had endured the tortures of persecution, and raised such sharp outcries for their freedom, had hardly tasted of the Circaæn cup of dominion, ere they were transformed into the bestial brood of political tyranny.  It was curious to see Prynne now vindicating the very doctrines under which he had himself so signally suffered, for he invested the Executive even with that power of inflicting death on its Non-conformists.  So the Covenanter Baillie held every man to be worse than fool or knave who disputed the ,jus divinum of Presbytery, and expresses a wish to have such hanged;  as he would have hanged those who asserted the divine institution of the Bishops ! This warm Presbyter when provoked by Seldera’s Erastian principles which placed the Government of the Church under the civil magistrate, in rage called this more philosophical state of religion, “an insolent absurdity !” The passive obedience of ,jure divino, the rigid conformity against which they had fought, were now insisted on for themselves.  Toleration which had been a common cause with all the sectaries, and which they had so often pathetically claimed, was now condemned for its “sinfulness.”  The very persons who had so long murmured at the tyranny of the Licensers, when themselves were paramount, at once extinguished the liberty of the press, by reviving the odious office, and condemning every anti presbyterial volume to penal fires.  Toleration now seemed to their eyes a hydra, and one of these high-flyers, in ludicrous rage, called out against “a cursed intolerable toleration.”  For these facts no sophistry can apologise, and no statement can alter them.  Thus these spurious advocates for civil freedom, for which their character has been exalted in our history, were, in truth, its most irreconcilable enemies.

Another obscure point in the history of the Puritans requires elucidation.  The Presbyterians have always asserted that it was not them who dragged the Sovereign to the block.  They would have been satisfied to have lapped the blood of the venerable Archbishop.  The Presbyters, after dislodging the Episcopalians, had arrived at their “Land of Promise”;  and while they fattened on the Bishops’ lands, they would have reposed like fed lions.  They were not hostile to monarchy;  and the monstrous libels which issued from the school of Leighton and Prynne, never impugn the regal authority;  never touch on the abstract points of civil freedom;  never handle the nice points of the prerogative;  never breathe a murmur against forced loans, which probably did not grievously affect this class.  Many of these libellers doubtless would have submitted to death ere they would have touched irreverently a hair of the head of “the Lord’s Anointed.”  The doctrine of the divine and indefeasible right of Monarchy, entered into their creed, since on that was grafted their own Presbytery.  These were “the mild and moderate” Puritans of Fuller;  yet in striking at “the root and branch” extirpation of the Ecclesiastical government of England, their spirit was not less terrible, than that of “the State Puritans,” as Rapin calls those, who were intent on republicanising England.

The Presbyterians had nursed under their wing the monster which at length devoured them.  This was the party who called themselves “the Independents”;  it was a splinter sect from the block of “Brownism.”  The Brownists were the most furious children of Non-conformity.  The curious history of these parties is instructive ;  but it is not the opinions sane or insane, of sectarians, which we are seeking, in our pursuit of the history of man.

The earliest Non-conformists, not without reluctance, had dissented from an uniformity with the Anglican Church;  they still kept within its pale, dreading nothing more than schism.  They were indeed prepossessed with a strange notion that the Church discipline was to be found in the rude and simple practices of the Apostolic times, when no national church existed, and no form of Ecclesiastical Government was prescribed.  This was the first stage of mild Puritanism.  The second was the intestine war with the Bishops, or “the Lordly Prelates,” as the Mar-prelates called them.  The severities adopted by the Government and the Church, to suppress these public disturbers, or to reconcile them to the religious forms, established by Act of Parliament, only produced that reaction which inflames the incompliant to obstinacy.  Renouncing all communion with their mother-church, which they now assumed was no true church, these rigid separatists formed a third state of Puritanism, founded by one Robert Brown, who became so formidable as to leave his name to a sect.

This Robert Brown was a fierce hot-brained man, who counted his triumphs by the thirty-two prisons in which he had been incarcerated;  and in some of them, “he could not see his hand at noon-day.”  His relationship to Lord Burleigh had often thrown a protecting shield over his furious doings.  In that day when all parties were insisting on “the true Religion,” Brown announced that he would found “a perfect Church without a fault.”  He was one of those who would exclaim “Stand farther off;  I am holier than Thou !” His friends stood aghast at their new prophet, and referred him with his new revelations to the Martyrologist John Fox.  The old man exclaimed that they had sent him a madman, and thrusting Brown out of doors, predicted that this Neophyte of Ecclesiastical insurrection would surely prove a fire-brand in God’s church.  The new apostle journeyed about the country, like other self-elected missionaries.  Preaching and persecution however seemed to interfere with each other, and as was then the mode, Brown and his congregation shipped themselves off for Middleburgh.  The Hollanders were the only people in Europe whose policy had been contrived to accord with all the modes of faith among the religionists.  One might be curious to learn, how that new government came to adopt such an enlightened toleration ;  for the Calvinistic individuals who formed that government, were themselves intolerant.  The reverse has also sometimes occurred;  in Switzerland, we are told, the Swiss themselves are very tolerant, and their government very much the reverse.

In Holland, Brown modelled his democratical church, without suffering the indignity of being driven into a saw-pit, to hide himself and his auditors.  When once this perfect church of rigid separatists was raised, it fell like a child’s house of cards, for the separatists separated among themselves, calling one another very ill names, and telling tales which “the Scorners” would not forget.^[9] Brown in his latter days seems gladly to have escaped from his own church ;  and returned to Northamptonshire, where all the while he had kept his parsonage, paid a curate, and took the tithes.  It is doubtful whether he returned to his wife;  the object too frequently of his irascible piety.  When Father Brown was reproved for beating his wife, which he honestly acknowledged no man ought to do, he scholastically distinguished that he did not beat Mrs. Brown as his wife, but as a cursed old woman.  He died perfectly in character;  proud, poor, and passionate;  at the age of eighty he struck a tax-collector for demanding a parish rate;  beloved by no one, and too decrepit to walk to prison, the stubborn apostle of Brownism was flung on a feather-bed into a cart, and died in a passion in the county gaol.

The Brownists in Holland began to excommunicate one another, often from private pique;  till at length sons cursed their fathers, and brothers their brothers, in a clash, whether the governing power were to rest with the Eldership, or in the Church ? Many seceded from their “perfect Church,” but never from its democracy.  This “perfect Church” proved to be a hot-bed of all dissensions, still persisting that “the new Creature” may find perfection attainable in this life, amidst all the branglings and heart-burnings of their unsettled heads and meaner passions.  Some modern sages indulge reveries on the perfectibility of man, but saints advance beyond, to perfection itself.

It was one of “the perfections” of these Brownists, that they would not be bound by any of their opinions, or come to any agreement;  one of them insisted that the last thing he wrote, only should be taken for his present judgment;  it therefore became doubtful whether he ever had any “present judgment”;  or whether he would hold on Tuesday morning the tenet of Monday night.

A Brownist, of calmer dispositions, shook off the very name, considering it as “a brand for the making its professors odious to the Christian world.  This man was the founder of ‘Independency’.”

This alluring title was assumed from its grand principle that every single community or congregation, was independent of any other.  They presumed, as their first position, that equals have no power over equals.  The clergy and the laity mingled together, in this democracy, allowing of no superiority.  In this rude principle of equality we detect that germ of anarchy, the equality of mankind, which so long after, was as little understood.  But in the surprising history of mankind, for sometimes we are surprised by unexpected results, and observe the follies of man often terminating in wisdom, in this tenet of a mean sect, originated the blessing of toleration.  The arbitrary Presbyterians persevered in their hostility to liberty of conscience, while the Independents were its earliest advocates, from their aversion to the establishment of any predominant power.

Few in number, and poverty-stricken, to part with one another seemed a relief.  Those who could, transported themselves, as adventurers, from the shores of Holland to the wilds of America, where they founded New Plymouth.  Others ventured to steal homewards.  During twenty years these latter shifted from house to house in their humble circle, but the eye, and sometimes the arm of Laud was upon them.  As yet they were only Religionists, and of what stamp we may judge by one of their distinguished pastors, called “the famous Mr. Canne.”  On his principle that no human inventions were to be permitted in divine worship, Mr. Canne furiously cut out of his Bible, the contents of the chapters, the titles of the leaves, and left his fluttering Bible without binding or covers.  This saint might however have been reminded that the holy scriptures could never have existed without the aid of human inventions, in the parchment of the manuscript, and the print and paper of the book.  Another pastor, of not inferior fame, was a cobbler of the name of How.  Neal the Independent describes the cobbler as a man of learning, when the contrary is the fact.  This saint published a revelation of his, in a treatise on “The sufficiency of the Spirit,” to show that all human learning is dangerous and hurtful.  This was the independency of Ignorance, and which a few years after, led to a design, or a motion in the House of Commons to shut up the Universities and to burn our records ! The cobbler’s fame, and the danger in which the two Universities stood from his awl, inspired one of the flock to pun in a quaint epigram.

“ Cambridge and Oxford may their glory now
Veil to a Cobbler, if they knew but How !”

Amidst the disturbances of 1640, the Independents first made their public appearance in Deadman’s place, Southwark ! They petitioned Parliament, piteously craving the liberty of subsistence, “be it the poorest and the meanest in the land.”  They asked only for a single church.  We seem to be chronicling the miserable annals of a Tabernacle in a blind alleyyet these men were to be, as they carne to call themselves, “the Keepers of the Liberties of England !” or as the Presbyterian Clement Walker retorted on them, “the Gaolers.”

These humble creatures, too feeble to stand alone, lurked among the Presbyterians, earnestly co-operating till they gathered strength by concert.  The principles of civil and religious freedom were in their system, but these were cautiously explained, or were wholly concealed.  For them one great cause was always advancing, while the Presbyterians were striking at one-half the Monarchy in the ruins of the Hierarchy.  The Presbyterians were willing to have a King of their own, a covenanting King, but the Independents thundered out the secret they had kept for several years—that there was to be no King on earth ! The Independents were always found among “the fierce and fiery Puritans” of Fuller.  Their professed independency while they had their fortune to make, wore a mask of universal brotherhood, and accommodated itself to all mankind.

The Independents were themselves adventurers in the State, but their prospects opened as they cleared their way by the work of demolition.  Every change in the State was an approach to a Revolution.  The lands of the Church, the estates of the nobility, and of our ancient families;  offices in the Government, commands in the army—all the spoils of the nation lay before them.  What leading spirits would not enlist under their banner ? The needy broken man who knew not how to live;  the libertine who would live under lawless laws;  he who feared to be questioned, and he who had been questioned: every malcontent now found a party—and it came to this, that the very refuse of the people, leaving their hammers, and their thimbles, their lasts, and their barrels, pushing on their fortune, became some of the Independent Members of the House of Commons, and held those Scriptural debates which were the mockery of Europe ! Clement Walker, a stiff Presbyterian and their great adversary, characterises the Independent as “a composition of Jew, Christian, and Turk.”  Such a motley and desperate faction were more to be dreaded for the decision which would hasten extremities, reckless of all means, than for their number;  they were but limbs and members of a body wanting a working brain and a guiding hand.  These at length they found in the tremendous genius of Cromwell.

This daring and rising faction scornfully glanced at the moderation of the Monarchical Puritans of England, and viewed with abhorrence among some of the Presbyterians the remains of a tenderness for the rights and the person of the King.  Equally hostile to the Aristocracy, as to the Monarchy ;  to the Presbytery as to the Episcopacy ;  they insisted on that universal freedom, which long fascinated mankind till at length these Independents lost their name in acquiring another more significant, and are known in history as “The Levellers” of England and “the Jacobins” of France.  Even the victories of the Parliamentary armies imparted little satisfaction, while their chiefs seemed half-royalist, and half-repentant of their conquests.  It was this faction which dreaded nothing so much as a peace between the King and the Parliament.  The true genius of Independency broke out in Cromwell.  By a stroke of political adroitness, the Self-denying Ordinance new modelled the army, and every officer became an Independent.  Smiling at the weakness of Charles the First, who would have arrested five members, the heads of a faction, his novel intrepidity emptied all the Commons of England in one morning.

In their political character, the Independents form a parallel with the Jacobins of France;  this may not appear on the first view, since the Independents clouded themselves over in their mystical religion, and the Jacobins seem to have had no religion.  But this circumstance, in the language of logicians, is a mere accident, or mode which may be taken away, without altering the nature of the subject.  The Psalmsinging and preaching of the officers in the Independent army, and the metaphysical rhodomontades of universal liberty of the Jacobins, were only different means, but not different designs.  Cromwell himself printed a sermon: in the French Revolution he would have jargonized like Marat, or Hebert, in some “Ami du Peuple.”  They moved by the same impulse;  the prelude of every desperate act with the military saints was “to seek the Lord” and sword and pistol;  as with the Atheistic crew it was to offer peace to every people whom they had prepared to conquer.  It has been thought that the English Revolutionists were not as sanguinary as the French ;  I believe they proposed more massacres than they executed ;  there was one, of all the Royalists and Presbyterians, in the true Marat style of taking two hundred thousand heads off at one stroke.  The sale of Englishmen as slaves to America was worse than the deportations to Cayenne.  The parallel might be run much further.  It is enough here to show that English Independency was the forerunner of French Jacobinism.  The democratic anarchy of “these Saints of the first grass” as the admirable Wit of their day calls them, was precisely the same, for they

“ Agreed in nothing but to abolish
Subvert, extirpate, and demolish.
—————— and hate
Dependency on Church and State,
And scorn to have the moderatest stints
Prescribed to their peremptory hints,
But left at large to make their best on
Without being called to account or question.”^[10]

Such were the different classes of the Puritans.  The profound politicians, among the Patriots, as Pym and Hampden, had allied themselves to the Religionists.  The factions at first amalgamated, for each seemed to assist the other, and while the contest was doubtful, their zeal, as their labours, was in common.  Religion, under the most religious of Monarchs, was the ostensible motive, by which the Patriots moved the people.  All the nation was thrown into a delirium of terror, and their confused heads, some few years after, exhibited a dreadful reaction when vulgar Atheism and insane blasphemy raged among the multitude.  When on one occasion it was observed, that the affairs of religion seemed not so desperate that they should wholly engross their days, Pym replied that they must not abate their ardour for the true religion, that being the most certain end to obtain their purpose and maintain their influence.  So true is the observation of Hume, that “the King soon found by fatal experience that this engine of religion, which with so little necessity was introduced into politics, under more fortunate management was played with the most terrible success against him.”

That both these parties, or factions, the Religionists and the Patriots, the one having only in view the abolition of the Hierarchy, which was not the object of many of the Patriots, and the other, a revolution in the Government, which was not the design of the Religionists, should, acting on distinct principles, with little sympathy for each other, and secretly aiming at two opposite objects in the state, have coalesced with such perfect unity as to have melted down into one party, and by a strange subtility in the management of their own peculiar interests, and above all by a mutual sacrifice of their own principles, have aided each other in their separate designs, and finally conspired together to overthrow the Monarchy and the Hierarchy, was in its own day a result as mysterious as it was awful.  It was a state of national affairs on which no theorist had ever yet speculated, or even imagined;  and it still serves as a theme for political science, where a new path is opened for us, untracked in the experience of a thousand years.

So gradually matured was the vast design of these mighty factions in the state, so extraordinary the human agents and their sufferings, and so complete the accomplishment of their views, that every representative part of the established Government was immolated in the presence of a barbarous and a sorrowing people.  The great Minister, faithful to his Sovereign, perished in the decapitation of Strafford ;  the Episcopacy was cut off by the axe which struck the venerable Laud;  and Sovereignty itself disappeared when the head of the Monarch fell from the block.

Thus the Patriot—the Puritan—and the Anti-monarchist—had each their sanguinary triumph !

1 Fuller’s Church History, ix. 76.

2 Parr’s Life of Usher. Letters.

3 “ A Discourse concerning Puritans,” 1641.  I have not discovered the writer of this able tract, who affects not to be, what some would call a Puritan.  At all events, we learn from this “the mistakes, abuse, and misapplication of that name.” 57.

4 Ibid. 4.

5 Many singular specimens might be produced.  Mr. Vynes said in his prayer, “O Lord, thou hast never given us a victory this long while, for all our frequent fastings.  What dost thou mean, O Lord ! to fling us in a ditch and there leave us ?”  Mr. Evans thus expostulates — “O Lord ! wilt thou take a chair and sit amongst the House of Peers ? And when, O God ! wilt thou vote amongst the Honourable House of Commons who are so zealous of thine honour ?”  Another exclaimed, “O God, many are the hands that are lift up against us, but thare is one God, it is thou thyself, O Father ! who dost us more mischief than they all.”  Mr. Cradock cried out, “O Lord, do not thou stand neuter, but take one side that we may see which it is that is thy cause.”  Another, “Lord, thou bast been good one year, yea, Lord, thou hast been good to us two years;  Lord ! thou hast been good to us fourscore years, but, Lord, thou art wanting in one thing !”  A pamphlet entitled “Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence” will amply supply the reader with the saintly effusions of these men ;  these men of whom our Modern Critic tells us that “if they were unacquainted with the works of philosophers and poets they were deeply read in the oracles of God !”  Was balderdash ever inspired by “the oracles of God ?”  I dare not quote passages from the master-seer of the Covenanters, Samuel Rutherford, from their offensive lubricity and rank obscenity.  Yet we are to be told that such vulgar spirits, “instead of catching occasional glimpses of the Deity through an obscuring veil,” by which the writer indicates the decent services of religion and the accessories of devotion, “aspired to commune with him face to face.”  — We have seen their style !

6 Edinburgh Review, xlii. 337.

7 The inveterate controversy about Episcopus and Presbyter, after all, may resolve itself into a mere change of terms, and depends on our translation of the Greek term overseers of the religious community.  Knox introduced the official title of “Superintendents”;  it was truly a war of words.
    It is curious that the Spaniards seem to be the only nation who really have preserved the term Presbyter, in its purity, as appears by Cobarruvias’s Tesoro de la Langua Castellana.
    “ Presbitero, vulgarmente vale el Sacerdote clerigo de Missa Latine Presbyter, à Gæmco, Senese, Princeps, Legatus ;  y porque se presupone que ban de ser hombres de Edad, de canas y seso.  Presbyterato, Sacerdocio, dignidad de Sacerdote.”

8 Laing, iii. 209.

9 One Deacon, of Mr. Johnson’s party, describes another of Mr. Robinson’s with his company as “Noddy Nabalites, dogged Doegs, fair-faced Pharisees, shameless Shimeis, malicious Machiavelians.”  Thus saints of this class, even to the present day, scold and pun scripturally.

10 Hudibras, part iii. co. ii. v. 606.