then kings have ceased to be a terror, no man is in peril of being dragged from his home to be tortured and robbed in Star-chambers and High Commission Courts, at the pleasure of the prince and his parasites; and if we are illgoverned we have only ourselves to thank for it. Such is the debt of everlasting gratitude that we owe to the great men of the commonwealth, and to none more than to Oliver Cromwell, the dictator.

RELIGION.

During the reign of James, and during that of Charles, so long as he might be said to reign, the great endeavour was, both in England and Scotland, to maintain the episcopal hierarchy, and to put down popery and puritanism. In this James succeeded to a considerable extent on the surface. He restored and strengthened episcopacy in Scotland, actually engrafted it on a presbyterian church, and it lasted his time. In England he carried his episcopalianism with a high hand. Dissent there yet, for the most part, was not visible, or lay half-concealed under the form of non-conformity; no great actual separation from the established church having taken place till his archbishop Bancroft forced this outward avowal and practical secession by his new book of canons, in 1604, the very year after James came to the English throne. These canons enjoined the ceremonies objected to by the nonconformists-bowing at the name of Jesus, kneeling at the sacrament, wearing the surplices, &c. These being enforced with rigour by Bancroft, in about six years no fewer than three hundred ministers were deprived or silenced. Here, then, commenced actual and public dissent, for the nonconformists being no longer able to exercise their spiritual functions in the established church, they and their congregations separated, and opened their own chapels, or conventicles, as they were called; and James and Charles continued to fine and persecute the papists on the one hand, and the dissenters on the other, till the resistance to Charles's liturgy in Scotland in 1636 and till the rebellion in England relieved both countries from the tyranny of royalty and episcopacy. In Scotland, indeed, the imposition of the canons of the episcopal church had not led to actual separation, but to these private meetings for worship after the people's own heart, in private houses and on moors and mountains, which, after the renewed persecutions of the restoration, became so prevalent amongst the covenanters. These practices commenced after the introduction of a liturgy by James in 1616, and were still more extended after the introduction of his "Five Articles" in 1621, and all the cruelties of fines, banishments, and imprisonments were put in force against

them.

of the Spanish inquisition presents more horrors than were perpetrated by those high priests in the name of religion. The catholics accuse Charles of having put to death ten of their clergymen in the early part of his reign, for the exercise of their religion.

But what was not less extraordinary was the fact, that whilst these cruelties were committed, because men would not conform to mere ceremonies, the most extensive and deepseated heresy in doctrine crept into the church, and some of these very persecuting prelates were the heresiarchs. Though James took so violent and remorseless a part in persecuting the Arminian Vorstius, on his appointment to the professorship of divinity at Leyden, in 1611, and sent four English and one Scotch divine to the synod of Dort, in 1618, to assist in establishing the Five Points of Calvinistic faith-namely, absolute predestination; the limitation of the benefits of the death of Christ to the elect only; the necessity of justifying grace; the bondage of the human will and the perseverance of the saints-and never left the pursuit of Vorstius till he had ruined him; yet the doctrine of Arminius, that of free will, crept into his own church, and prevailed to a great extent, unnoticed by him, amongst the bishops and dignitaries. In fact, so long as the outward form and ceremony were maintained, little quest was made after doctrine. Laud, whilst he was persecuting the really orthodox in opinion with the frenzy of an inquisitor, was himself a thorough-going and undisguised Arminian, at the same time that he was a very catholic in pomp and parade of ceremony. In fact, in him and his adherents blazed forth that pseudo-catholicism which has revived again in our day under the name of Puseyism.

"The new bishops," says Neal, the puritan historian, "admitted the church of Rome to be a true church, and the pope the first bishop of Christendom. They declared for the lawfulness of images in churches, for the real presence, and that the doctrine of transubstantiation was a school nicety. They pleaded for confession to a priest, for sacerdotal absolution, and the proper merit of good works. They claimed an uninterrupted succession of episcopal character from the apostles through the church of Rome, which obliged them to maintain the validity of her ordinations when they denied the validity of those of foreign protestants. Further, they began to imitate the church of Rome in her gaudy ceremonies, in the rich furniture of their chapels, and the pomp of their worship. They complimented the Roman catholic priests with their dignitary titles, and spent all their zeal in studying how to compromise matters with Rome, whilst they turned their backs upon the old protestant doctrines of the reformation, and were remarkably negligent in preaching, or instructing the people in Christian knowledge.”

In England the church, encouraged by the crown, acted with a high and rigorous hand so long as royalty was in the When the church was struck down with the monarchy, ascendant. We have described the deeds of the tyrannic the religious parties in the ascendant were the presbyterians prelates of the Anglican church in these reigns, their Star- and independents, besides a large mass of anabaptists and chamber and High Commission Court atrocities, their im- fifth-monarchy men; all were of the Calvinistic creed, and prisonments, their torturings and brandings for conscience' might have coalesced well enough on doctrinal points, but sake. Their terrible treatment of Leighton, Prynne, Bast-differed greatly as to modes of church government. Had the wick, Benton, and numbers of others. There was an ascent of prelatical evil through Parker, Whitgift, and Bancroft, to Laud, who completed the climax. No period

presbyterians succeeded in securing the supreme power, the nation would only have exchanged one religious despotism for another, for they were as intolerant of all other creeds and par

TO 1660.]

RISE OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS.

ties as the episcopalians themselves. Cromwell and his independents saved this nation from the gloomy asceticism, which in Scotland had established a right on the part of the ministers to exercise the most unheard of interference in the private habits of individuals and families, a watchfulness, a surveillance over all the motives, opinions, tastes, and wishes of every soul in their flocks, which not even the practice of confession amongst the catholics could exceed in pressure as a priestly yoke. The anabaptists and fifth-monarchy men were ultrarepublicans. The former were the crude material of the modern English baptists, who gradually moulded their opinions and practices into very much the same character as those of the independents, except as it regarded their distinctive tenet of baptism itself. The fifth-monarchy men held that as there had been four great monarchies, the Assyrian, the Persian under Cyrus, the Greek and the Roman, the fifth and last was to be that of Christ, who had promised to come and reign on earth. They were, therefore, for establishing this fifth-monarchy at once; their government was to be a theocracy, the people being only under their God. These zealots, believing in a grand truth, had only antedated the millennium by an indefinite time, and long before the world was ripe for it. Some of Cromwell's generals, Harrison especially, were enthusiastic fifth-monarchy men, and had to be held, and with difficulty, in check.

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of a state establishment, and under Cromwell accepted office in one. The Friends not only proclaimed the doctrine that all state establishments of Christianity are unscriptural, but that they violate the political rights of the subject; they therefore denounced all usurpation of human lordship over conscience; all hireling teachers of a state creed, tithes, church rates, and every ecclesiastical demand whatever. To George Fox we owe this bold and manly system, this sudden leap from the chains of long spiritual slavery, into the full freedom of the gospel law-a man to whom there has never yet been done full justice beyond the pale of his own society, and whom we have recently seen attacked by lord Macaulay with an animus extraordinary in a descendant of this society. Macaulay has represented Fox as half an idiot, but it would be far better for the world if it had more such idiots. It would be enough to set aside this splenetic opinion of a writer who has taken every opportunity to vilify the great men of Quakerism, to place against his opinion that of some great thinkers of our own country and time. Coleridge, from whom so many modern celebrities have drawn what is original in their philosophy, Emerson and Carlyle included, says, "There exist folios on the human understanding and the nature of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if, in the whole huge volume, there could be found as much fulness of heart and intellect as burst forth in many a simple page of George Fox." Carlyle says, "This man, the first of the Quakers, and by trade a shoemaker, was one of those to whom, under ruder form, the divine idea of the universe is pleased to manifest itself; and across all the hills of ignorance and earthly degradation, shine through, in unspeakable awfulness, unspeakable beauty on their souls; who, therefore, are rightly accounted prophets, God - possessed. Mountains of incumbrance, higher than Etna, had been

But the strong hand and sense of Cromwell, so long as he lived, had enabled him to maintain a free church, in which all men of real Christian faith and feeling were permitted to officiate, except insubordinate episcopalians and catholics. Moderate episcopalians, who could conscientiously hold livings, were not expelled, so that they were of religious lives, and did not interfere with the existing government even, says Cromwell, a few anabaptists were in it. To papists the liberality of Cromwell never reached; he considered them, with the rest of his age, as belonging to the mother of super-heaped over that spirit; but it was a spirit, and would not stition, and objectionable as the avowed adherents of a foreign and hostile power. Though the protector was on the whole averse to persecution, yet the fines on recusants were diligently levied, and the presbyterians, perhaps for the most part without his knowledge, persecuted other religionists under the commonwealth-a fact amply demonstrated by the history of the Society of Friends, for during the commonwealth arose that singular people.

The doctrines and conduct of the Friends, or, as they were soon denominated, the Quakers, marked another epoch of that age in the advance towards the true understanding of Christianity, and the acquirement of its freedom. We have seen, that notwithstanding all that the nonconformists had suffered, notwithstanding all the great minds and noble hearts which had appeared among them, they had not yet come to perceive the full and true liberty of Christ. They objected to certain ceremonies and habits, and certain religious opinions, but they did not object at all to the establishment of a state religion,—many of them not even to the episcopal hierarchy, but were a part of it. The independents had made the nearest approach to the apprehension of perfect freedom; they had adopted and acted upon the opinion, that every congregation is independent of all others, and that no minister of the gospel possesses any jurisdiction over another; but they still admitted the right

be buried there. That Leicester shoeshop, had men known it, was a higher place than Vatican or Loretto shrine. Stitch away, thou noble Fox! every prick of that little instrument is pricking into the heart of slavery and worldworship and the mammon god. Thy elbows jerk in strong swimmer strokes, bearing thee into lands of true liberty. Were the work done, there would be in broad Europe one free man, and thou art he."

The opinions of great men, English and American, might be numerously added, but they are the fruits by which we must recognise the tree; and from no religious reformer has the modern world received, and is receiving, more substantial benefit in weaning it from forms and task-masters to spiritual freedom. The awl of Fox still goes on pricking into the heart of slavery, world-worship, and the mammon god. I do not intend to exempt him from the charge of a certain degree of fanaticism-both he and his adherents were not altogether free from it; but the theory of his religious belief comprehended the ideal of all religious freedom. And this arose in part from that want of education which the outward-tending mind of Macaulay has seen only as a defect. Free from every educational dogma, he became struck with the importance of religion, and taking the Bible with him into the fields, he there carefully studied it, and soon discovered the true nature of this beneficent dis

TO 1660.]

THE RELIGIOUS BELIEF OF THE FRIENDS.

879

pensation-that Christianity is a thing so spiritual, so around him, and from every class of society, clergy, soldiers, entirely a gift of God to every man that is born, that no magistrates, gentlemen, and men of the general mass, that other man in the shape of king, bishop, or priest, has a his system would bring down upon him and his followers right to come between this divine gift and the human soul; the unmitigated vengeance of the persecuting hierarchy. consequently, no state religion, no state priest, no state His was no partially reforming system; it did not object to compulsion for their support, can be justified; consequently, this or that dogma, this or that ceremony in the state all tithes, church rates, Easter offerings, and such things religion, but it assailed, root and branch, state religion are anti-Christian, and to be resisted by every constitutional itself. It was a system peculiarly odious to priests, because means. He saw clearly that Christianity proclaimed the it was an entirely disinterested one, for it went even to

civil freedom of every rational creature; it enjoined obedience to good government, but discountenanced by its very benevolence and its celestial maxim-"Do to others as ye would be done to "--all tyranny and slavery. On the same grounds he was thoroughly satisfied of the nature of that most fatal of infatuations-war.

Whatever his sagacious mind once embraced as truth, he had the integrity and boldness to proclaim everywhere. He advanced into the presence of princes, and declared it there with the same ease and freedom as amongst his own peers. It may well be imagined, that when numbers began to flock

declare that nothing should be received for preaching, where it could be at all dispensed with, nothing in any case without the consent of the people. The state clergy saw, that if it succeeded, priestcraft was gone for ever: royalty, on its restoration, saw that it would lop off the right arm of despotism-craft paid to preach the divine right of kings, and passive obedience of the people. But Fox and his friends were prepared to speak, write, and suffer for it. He himself traversed a great part of the kingdom, visited America and Holland, holding immense meetings in the open air, and addressed many letters to various princes and

people in power on its behalf. Barclay delineated its webs of school and state sophistry from them, and to recall features in his celebrated "Apology for the true Christian the conviction of man to them in all their simple and subDivinity." Penn wrote boldly for it, and spoke boldly for lime beauty. The puritans in general had made little proit, too, on his trials, especially that with William Mead at gress in the comprehension of religious freedom; what they the Old Bailey, an account of which has often been re- claimed themselves they were ready to withhold from others. printed, as a splendid instance of the vindication of trial by Cromwell and the independents made a great advance, yet jury. Anthony Pearson, who had been a justice of the withheld this liberty from catholics and episcopalians; but peace, published his "Great Case of Tithes," in which all Fox demonstrated that the liberty of the Gospel was the the evils and anti-Christianity of the tithe system were equal birthright of all men. All these religious reformers duly exposed. Thomas Lawson wrote, "A Mite in the were ready to permit or become themselves a state church. Treasury," and "The Call, Work, and Wages of the Fox reminded them that the " Kingdom of Christ was not Ministers of Christ and of Antichrist," two most spirited of this world;" that when they had rendered to Cæsar the and able expositions of political religion. Elwood wrote his things that are Cæsar's, civil support and obedience, they interesting life, abounding with scenes of imprisonment and must render to God the things which are God's, the rights patient endurance for his principles. Besse compiled, from of conscience, and the independence of his church. For all official documents of the Society of Friends, a work of ever- the civilising and angelising influences of religion-resistlasting condemnation to the priests of the church of England; ance to slavery, oppression, war, priestcraft, world-worship, and Sewell wrote the "History of the Society" at large, a and mammon-worship—which are the divine and eternal work declared by Charles Lamb to be worth all other eccle- essence of the Gospel, the philosophy and the theology of siastical history put together. In these and other works George Fox asserted the independence and universality, they asserted those great principles of religious freedom now and these principles, now adopted into nearly all creeds, so generally adopted, and for these they suffered. Seeing are silently but perceptibly at work to leaven the whole clearly how a royal religion disturbed and oppressed the mass of society, and in the course of ages to throw down real church of Christ, how it neutralised all its benign doc-every tyranny, every cruelty, every abomination, on every trines, they determined, cost what it would, to hold no side of the globe.

communion with it. They would neither marry at its altars, nor bury in its soil, and for this their dead were torn out of their graves by the parish priests and their minions; and they were not only heavily fined and imprisoned for marrying at their own chapels, but their children were declared illegitimate. At Nottingham, in 1661, an attempt was made by a public trial to disinherit some orphans on this ground, but the worthy old judge Archer brought Adam and Eve as precedents, and declared that their taking each other in marriage in the presence of God was valid, and if those children were illegitimate, then we were all so. On this singular decision the marriages of Friends were recognised and made legal. But had it been otherwise, such was the sturdy firmness of the Friends, that they would have suffered loss of both property, liberty, and life, to the last man, sooner than concede an iota to this unjust system; and the whole fury of the executive power was let loose upon them. They were given up a prey to vindictive parsons, and ignorant, priest-ridden justices of the peace, and to the whole greedy rabble of informers, constables, and the lowest refuse of society.

The history of their full extent of persecutions belongs to a later period; but the rise and principles of this society demand a notice in the religious history of this period as one of the most important events of any age. Those principles-their effect, or field of influence-are not to be measured by the limited growth of the society which first promulgated them. Like many other bodies out of which great principles have sprung, it has become, as it were, fossilised, retaining the form, and even the reverence of the original body; but the principles themselves are the principles of Christianity, coextensive with the universe in their action on spiritual life. It was the mission of Fox to liberate them from the conventional forms in which outward and worldly motives had imprisoned them, to sweep away all the cob

PROGRESS OF THE ARTS, MANUFACTURES, AND

COMMERCE.

In the reigns of James and Charles this country neither maintained the reputation of our navy acquired under Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, nor made great progress in foreign commerce. The character of James was too timid for maritime or any other war, and when he was forced into action it was only to show his weakness. He put to death the greatest naval captain of his time, Raleigh, who, if well employed by him, might have made him as much respected at sea as was Elizabeth. Yet he built ten ships of war, and for some years spent thirty-six thousand pounds a year on the navy. The largest ship which had yet been built in England was built by him, which, however, was only fourteen hundred tons. As for commerce, he was too much engaged in theological disputations, in persecu · tion of papists, wrangling with his parliaments, and following his hawks and hounds, to think of it, and consequently there were every fresh session grievous complaints of the decay of trade. The Dutch were fast engrossing both the commerce and the carrying trade of this country. During this reign they traded to England with six hundred ships, and the English traded to Holland with sixty.

The naval affairs of Charles were quite as inglorious as those of his father. As James beheaded the best admiral of England, Charles chose for his the very worst in Europe, and the disgrace of Buckingham's expedition to the Isle of Rhé was the consequence. Charles's contests with his parliaments, which terminated only with his life, destroyed all chance of his promotion of our naval ascendency, and of the cultivation of commerce. All this was wonderfully changed by the vigorous spirits of the commonwealth. The victories of Blake, by which the naval greatness of Holland and Spain were almost annihilated, raised the reputation of the