done after the return of Aylmer;* but the action of this prelate in the succeeding year tells what he thought of such complaints as those which came up from the factious Puritans of his diocese.

Thomas Carew, a minister of Hatfield, in the county of Essex, had angered the bishop by informing him that in his county," within the compass of sixteen miles, were twenty-two non-resident ministers, and thirty who were insufficient for their office and of scandalous lives, while at the same time there were nineteen who were silenced for refusing subscription." In 1585, he was hauled up before the High Commission. A clergyman who would thus criticise the action of his superiors must naturally belong to the suspected party, and for such men the famous interrogatories had been prepared by Whitgift. Being offered the oath preliminary to his examination, he, as many others did before and after him, refused to take it, on the ground that under the law of England from the time of Magna Charta no man could be compelled to criminate himself. For this contempt he was committed to prison without bail, and the bishop sent down another minister to take his place.

The patron of the living objected to this interference with his legal rights, and declined to recognize the new incumbent. He, too, was sent to prison, and the bishop remained master of the field. Very soon, however, Mr. Carew's successor was detected in adultery, and the parishioners presented a request for his removal and the reinstatement of their former clergyman. Aylmer replied that "for all the livings he had he would not

* Hopkins, ii. 436.

RELIGIOUS FORMS MORE IMPORTANT THAN MORALITY 479

deprive a poor man of his living for the fact of adultery."*

This incident, occurring in the centre of English civilization, furnishes a suggestive illustration of the conflict which was going on within the English Church. On the one side stood a people asking for religious teaching; on the other, a hierarchy discouraging all such teaching, and telling the nation that even morality was of no importance when compared with forms and ceremonies. The Puritans, as developed in later days, have been often reviled and ridiculed for attempting to find a rule of life in what they regarded as the law of God laid down in the Old Testament. Few persons to-day will hold them blameworthy for believing that obedience to the Decalogue was of more vital importance than the wearing of a surplice or the use of the cross in baptism.

Here, for the present, we may leave this class of nonconformists. We have seen a little of the mode in which Elizabeth and her prelates dealt with these men, who then alone went by the name of Puritans-men who had no thought of leaving the Established Church, but who for nearly thirty years had been struggling for some liberty of worship under the protection of the law. Time and again they had appealed to Parliament for redress, and time and again bold members had stood up in the House of Commons to plead their cause, only to be sent to the Tower for calling in question the spiritual supremacy of the crown. Still, the repressive measures of the government were comparatively mild until Whitgift came upon the scene. He told Burghley, in 1584, that "not severity, but lenity, hath bred this

* Brook's "Lives of the Puritans," ii. 166, citing MSS. Register, pp. 653, 654; Hopkins, iii. 33.

schism in the Church,"* and he evidently expected that a different policy would heal the breach. Perhaps he was right; perhaps, too, if he had been dealing only with Englishmen, undisturbed by any foreign influence, his policy of repression by fine and imprisonment, which was carried on systematically throughout the kingdom, might have proved effectual, and England might have been purged of Puritanism.

But for some years England had not been left to herself to work out her problems alone, as in preceding centuries. We have seen how the Catholics from the Continent were affecting one part of the community, inculcating a spirit of resistance to authority little known before among the middle classes. On the Protestant side there was also a direct foreign influence at work, which was even more powerful, although little noticed by historians. In the next chapter we shall see something of its character; and, later on, something of its results in the development of a new class of reformers very different from the early Puritans.

*Strype's "Whitgift," p. 172.

CHAPTER X

ENGLISH PURITANISM

INFLUENCE FROM THE NETHERLANDS, 1558-1585

THUS far, in considering the foreign influences which affected the Puritanism of England during the early days of Elizabeth, we have confined our view mainly to the theological stream which flowed directly from the great fountain-head of Calvinism at Geneva. This stream colored all the theology of the island, and so every writer who has treated of this period has been compelled to recognize its presence. But creeds are only lifeless words. The metaphysical doctrines which the Marian exiles brought back from Switzerland, unlike discoveries in science or the arts, were in themselves of little value. Posterity owes to these men a great debt of gratitude for their devotion to what they considered truth. Many of them, in addition to their theological teachings, did a noble work in trying to reform the morals of their native land. But, unless outside influences had reinforced their efforts, the labors of these early reformers would have passed away, and left but a faint impression. Certain it is, that the wave of Protestantism which came into England with the accession of Elizabeth affords no adequate explanation of the course of subsequent events, which were even more remarkable in the State than in the Church.

Nothing in the development of English Puritanism is

more suggestive than the change which came over its character in the space of a comparatively few years. In its early days it dwelt among the learned, and to a considerable extent among the powerful and wealthy; in the next century, it had shifted its abode almost entirely to the dwellings of the middle classes and the poor. In this particular, the movement was somewhat peculiar. Early Christianity began at the bottom and worked upwards, so have most religious revivals since that time.* Such has been the growth of the Quakers, the Baptists, and the more modern Methodists. But Puritanism in | England began at the top and worked downwards. For years after Elizabeth ascended the throne, some of the most prominent statesmen, many of the most learned bishops, and almost all of the most distinguished divines, were Reformers or Puritans, who, even if they outwardly conformed, yet advocated changes in the discipline and ceremonial of the establishment. These men, and others like them, laid down the doctrines of the Anglican Church on lines so strictly Calvinistic that John Knox, or even Calvin himself, could have found little in them of which to disapprove.

But in a few years all this was changed. During the reign of Elizabeth's immediate successor the old Calvinistic theology fell into disfavor; under Charles I. it was entirely repudiated by the ambitious divines of the Church who sought high preferment.+ Meantime, the men who wished to reform the discipline or service of the Church were no longer found among the magnates

*I do not now speak of the so-called religious movements, which were really political, as was much of the Protestantism in France and the Lutheranism of Germany.

Macaulay, i. 74; Buckle, Amer. ed., 1864, i. 611.