Lord's Prayer-funeral sermons only excepted. And that those preachers be most encouraged and approved of who spend the afternoon's exercise in the examination of children in their catechism [i. e. not in preaching sermons at all], which is the most ancient and laudable custom of teaching in the Church of England.

"3. That no preacher, of what title soever, under the degree of a Bishop or Dean at the least, do from henceforth presume to preach in any popular auditory the deep points of Predestination, Election, Reprobation, or of the Universality, Efficacy, Resistibility, or Irresistibility of God's grace; but leave these themes rather to be handled by learned men, and that moderately and modestly, by way of use and application, rather than by way of positive doctrines; being fitter for the schools than for simple auditories.

"4. That no preacher, of what title or denomination soever [i. e. not even a Bishop], shall presume, in any auditory within this kingdom, to declare, limit, or bound out, by way of positive doctrine, in any lecture or sermon, the power, prerogative, and jurisdiction, authority or duty, of sovereign princes, or otherwise meddle with matters of State, than as, etc.

"5. That no preacher, of what title or denomination soever, shall presume causelessly, or without invitation from the text, to fall into bitter invectives and undecent railing speeches against the persons of either Papists or Puritans." * *1

The effect of these injunctions may be easily conceived. Here was a King, whose sovereign method for preserving the peace of the Church was that of abridging the liberty of preaching! Scripture itself had declared all Scripture to be profitable; but here human authority had ventured to declare what Scriptures were profitable and what not, what doctrines were to be expounded and worked into the human soul, and what left dormant in the sealed Bible! Such were the complaints of the Puritans and of the Calvinistic part of the clergy generally the paraphrase in that age of our more general claim of the right of free thought and a free press. True, the injunctions were two-edged, and, as they cut down high Calvinistic preaching on the one hand, so they cut down Arminian or Popish counter-preaching on the other. But the impartiality, it was said, was more apparent than real. The liberty which was abrogated was one for which the Calvinistic ministers cared more than their opponents. To the Calvinistic preachers, or at least to many of them, it was a matter of conscience to propound at full length, and without any abatement, the doctrines of election, predestination, justification by faith and not by works. These were to them the deep points of the Gospel, with which-O, yes! they were metaphysical, for had they not a virtue to pierce hearts obdu

1 Rushworth, I 64. 65.

rate to all weapons of mere natural reason? From the very natur of the other system of Divinity, however, as well as from the circumstances of the time, it was of less vital concern to the opponents of Calvinism to press their interpretations of the "five points," unless by way of controversy. Hence, towards the end of James's reign (1622-25), arose a new distinction of names among the English clergy, superseding to some extent the traditional distinction into Prelatists and Puritans. On the one hand, those of the prelatic or hierarchical party, who were most easy under the recent policy of the Court with respect to the Catholics, were denounced as Arminians and semi-Papists; and, on the other hand, the new name of "Doctrinal Puritans" was invented as a term of reproach for those who, though not accused of disaffection to the forms of the Church, held high Calvinistic views, and shared in the popular alarm at the concessions to Rome and to continental Popery.

It is at this point that a man appears prominently on the stage. who was to supersede Williams in the government of the Church, and whose life was to be identified in a very memorable manner for the next twenty years with the civil and ecclesiastical history of England. This was William Laud, as yet only bishop of the poor Welsh diocese of St. David's, but already noted as an ecclesiastic in whom, more than in any other, the spirit of the new Anglican antiCalvinism was incarnate.

Laud was nine years older than Williams, having been born at Reading in 1573. His rise in the Church had been much more slow and difficult than that of the aspiring Welshman. Elected a scholar of St. John's College, Oxford, in 1590, he became a Fellow of the College in 1593, and took his M. A. degree in 1598; "at which time," says Wood, "he was esteemed by those that knew him a very forward, confident, and zealous person." He was of very small stature, and was known, therefore, to the wits of the University, as "parva Laus," or "little Laud." He became deacon in 1600, priest in 1601, held a Divinity lectureship in his College in the following year, and in 1604 was one of the Proctors of the University of Oxford. In the same year he became chaplain to the Earl of Devonshire. In 1607, being by that time B. D., he became vicar of Stanford in Northamptonshire; in 1608 he had the advowson of North Kilworth in Leicestershire given him; in the same year, being then D. D., he became chaplain to Neile, Bishop of Rochester, in order to be near whom he exchanged the advowson of North Kilworth for that of West Tilbury in Essex; and in 1610, on being presented by Neile to the rectory of Cuckstone in Kent,

he resigned his fellowship. His connection with Oxford, however, was almost immediately renewed by his election in 1611, though not without much opposition, to the presidency of St. John's; in which office he remained for ten years-becoming in that time, chiefly through the influence of Neile, who had been transferred to the see of Lincoln, successively chaplain to the King, Prebendary of Bugden in Lincoln, Archdeacon of Huntington, Dean of Gloucester, Rector of Ibstock in Leicestershire, and Prebendary of Westminster. "In some sort," says Fuller, "he had thus served in all the offices of the Church from a common soldier upwards," and so had "acquired an experimental knowledge of the conditions of all such persons as were at last to be subject to his authority." And yet he "bare no great stream," but flowed on in a kind of sombre privacy, "taking more notice of the world than the world did of him." Those who knew him best do not seem to have liked him, or to have been able to make out exactly what he was driving at. "I would I knew," says Hall, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, "where to find you: to-day you are with the Romanists, to-morrow with us; our adversaries think you ours, and we theirs; your conscience finds you with both and neither: how long will you halt in this indifferency?" To the same effect, but with more hostility, spoke Dr. Robert Abbot, brother of Archbishop Abbot, and King's Divinity Professor at Oxford, who, in a sermon publicly preached at the University in the year 1614, made the President of St. John's the object of a direct attack. "Men," he said, "under pretence of truth and preaching against the Puritans, strike at the heart and root of faith and religion now established among us," saving their credit as churchmen by this zeal against the Puritans, but in the meantime revealing their Popish tendencies by speaking nothing against the Papists; "or, if they do at any time speak against the Papists, they do but beat a little upon the bush, and that softly too, for fear of troubling or disquieting the birds that are in it." Laud, who himself reports these passages of the sermon to his patron Neile, says that he "was fain to sit patiently and hear himself thus abused almost an hour together, being pointed at as he sat." He adds that the whole University was talking of the affair, and that his friends were telling him his credit would be gone if he did not answer Abbot in his own style; "nevertheless," he says, "in a business of this kind, I will not be swayed from a patient course." " Archbishop Abbot, in his memoir of his own experiences

1 Church Hist.; Book X. p. 90, and Book XI. p. 216.

2 Quoted by Neal; History of the Puritans, II. 152.

3 Rushworth, I. 62.

left for the instruction of posterity, is not less severe on Laud than his brother was to Laud's face. "His life in Oxford," says the Archbishop, "was to pick quarrels with the lectures of the public readers, and to advertise them to the then Bishop of Durham [i. e. to Neile, transferred from Lincoln to Durham in 1617], that he might fill the ears of King James with discontents against the honest men that took pains in their places and settled the truth, which he called Puritanism, on their auditors. He made it his work to see what books were in the press, and to look over Epistles Dedicatory, and Prefaces to the Reader, to see what faults might be found." This, it is to be remembered, is the testimony of a man who had reason to regard Laud as his chief enemy, and whom, on the other hand, Laud mentions in his Diary as already, in 1611, his enemy, and the "original cause of all his troubles." But even Laud's biographer, Heylin, admits that it was thought dangerous at Oxford to be much in his company; and there is abundant evidence that, from the first, Laud had that habit of ferreting out the faults of his fellow-clergymen, and reporting them privately in higher quarters, or otherwise registering them, which the unfriendly Archbishop attributes to him, and which, with all allowance for any overstrained sense of canonical duty as obliging to such work, men of no party are accustomed to think compatible with a wholesome or generous nature. The truth is, what with nature and what with education, Laud had, from his earliest connection with the Church, resolved on a patient course, from which he never deviated. He might be an enigma to others, who saw that, without belonging to Rome, he was a little over the frontier of the Church of England on that side from which the Vatican was visible; but he was perfectly clear and sure in himself. "I have ever," he said afterwards," since I understood ought in Divinity, kept one constant tenor in this my profession, without variation or shifting from one opinion to another for any worldly ends." What that "tenor" was he proceeds to explain. "Of all diseases," he says, "I have ever hated a palsy in religion, well knowing that too often a dead palsy ends that disease in the fearful forgetfulness of God and his judgments. Ever since I came in place I labored nothing more than that the external public worship of God, too much slighted in most parts of the kingdom, might be preserved, and that with as much decency and uniformity as might be; being still of opinion that unity cannot long continue in the Church where uniformity is shut out at the church door. And I evidently saw that the public neglect of God's service in the outward face of it, and the nasty

1 Rushworth I. 440.

2 On his trial. 1643; see Wharton's Land. n. 224.

lying of many places dedicated to that service, had almost cast a damp upon the true and inward worship of God; which, while we live in the body, needs external helps, and all little enough to keep it in any vigor." From the first, according to this account, Laud had made up his mind in favor of a punctual conformity throughout the Church, to be enforced by law and canon, and also in favor of a ceremonial of worship in which advantage should be taken of every external aid of architecture, decoration, furniture, gesture, or costume, either actually at the time allowed in the Church of England, or for which there was good precedent in more ancient ritual. So far, he was from the first predetermined against the Puritans to a degree peculiarly intense. But his anti-Puritanism involved more than the mere passion for uniformity and fondness for ceremonial. He was one of those, he tells us, who believed in the "divine Apostolical right" of Episcopacy, and who, therefore, could not recognize as a true portion of the Catholic Church of Christ any community or set of men who pretended to have emancipated themselves from bishops. "There can be no Church without diocesan bishops," he had said in 1603; and again, in 1614, "The Presbyterians are as bad as the Papists." In the tenacity with which he held to this doctrine, and the persistency with which in his own mind he urged it to its consequences as regarded the Anglican Church in itself, and in its relations to other Churches, he seems to have been singular even among his prelatic English contemporaries. He seems also to have carried farther than any of them the notion of the superior value of public worship over preaching in the ordinary service of the Church. In all this, too, he was a predetermined anti-Puritan. But perhaps that which gave his anti-Puritanism its peculiar color was the ingredient of doctrinal antipathy which he infused into it. That he held Popish tenets in theology is not true to the extent that was asserted by his adversaries. His belief in the divine right of Episcopacy led him to regard the Church of Rome as a true Church, which judgment he could not extend to the "conventicles" of Protestant sectaries; he also reverenced the antiquity of the Romish Church, and liked parts of its ritual; but he thought it a true Church with such "gross corruptions," as well in doctrine as in practice, that much purgation of it would be necessary before the Anglican Church could reünite with it, and that, as it was, everything should be done to prevent it from obtaining converts in England. At the same time, his estimate of the doctrinal differences which separated the two Churches was decidedly under the mark of general English opinion; and, on one or two doctrines, such as those of the Eucharist and of Justification, his interpretation of the Articles of the