heart of the nation; but in truth no mind can measure, no language describe, the extent of our obligations to the costly virtues of our ancestors. Every year that we live, their names ought to be dearer to us; for every year we see more clearly that but for the sternness of the stuff with which they builded, our state ere this would have gone to decay. It may be that the battle of religious freedom which they fought in one of the most discouraging periods of religious tyranny, will have to be fought over again: for new elements have come in, of which they never dreamed, or from which they thought themselves and their posterity had escaped for ever. Their example may yet be a light to us in the

perils of the conflict.

Character, sometimes, is like the simplicity of the atmosphere, which men breathe without attempting to analyse. How noble is the work, when a set of men, thinking simply of God and duty, can create a moral atmosphere for their race, with neither the pretence, nor even the consciousness, of doing so, but simply in obedience to the in-working law of a holy nature, struggling up to God! When the earthly vessel appointed for such precious elements is returned to him who made it, the light it held can shine abroad without injury to that humility and unconsciousness. If a star, said a devout poet of that age, Henry Vaughan,

If a star were confined even into a tomb,

Her captive flame must needs burn there,

But when the hand that lock'd her up gave room,
She'd shine through all the sphere.

Much of the world's history has been as a tomb to the world's true lights. Instead of setting them in candlesticks, the masters of our ceremonies have put them under bushels, to make theatrical displays of their own lying transparencies. But an end is coming to such historical despotism.

Indeed, the virtues of our ancestors, and of the whole crowd of "slain witnesses," and the encompassing bright cloud in Heaven, are like great buried forests of timber of a former age, that, while generation after generation walk over them and go to the dead, change into mines of mineral riches, and then, when opened, supply the world with fuel. We are working those mines now. Our fires are kept burning by the deep, inexhaustible material. It is a curious and most instructive process in what may be called our moral geology, to go down and examine the circumstances in which this wonderful deposit for future ages was made.

From the close of the reign of Mary in England, and the return of the English exiles from Germany and Switzerland, there was a fermentation of thoughts, principles, prejudices, opinions, and feelings going on in England, of which little or nothing is to be

seen in ordinary history. In a history like Hume's, for example, which maintained so long an absolute despotism and monopoly of representation, we see little of what is passing among the common classes, or of movements in the heart of the people. Sometimes the word fanaticism occurs in his pages; it seems to indicate some temporary monstrosity shooting up to impede the calm, royal course of affairs; a snag, as it were, on which the theory of unreserved submission to hierarchical and political supremacy had touched for a moment; or, as if, on the smooth ocean, you had seen the fin of a shark come out from the surface, warning you of the monsters that lie in wait beneath. Sometimes a form like Wentworth's is seen rising like a veiled prophet from the shades, as Samuel's ghost suddenly confronting Saul, asserting, amidst a cowering assembly in parliament, the freedom of a representative of the people; but it seems a strange apparition, out of place, and struck down instantly at the touch of the Queen's prerogative. The mighty working of principles, thoughts, feelings, opinions, knowledge, and religious and political convictions, of which these things are both the indication and the consequence, could never be known from Hume's pages. Nevertheless, sometimes he is forced into a declaration which, rightly pondered, reveals a world of things of which there is no detail or suggestion; as, for example, the famous declaration attributing the whole freedom of the English constitution to the English Puritans. This sentence is as if a great mountain had risen, or a volcano had broken forth in the midst of the sea, so little does he prepare the mind for it, or recognise, or suffer to be seen, its connexions or its foundations. The word fanaticism, in such a history, is a majestic word. And if you watch narrowly, you may conjecture, even from that history alone, something of the truth concealed under it, but falsified by it, and of the commotion of religious and popular principles and power, which was soon to shatter the crust of despotism into a thousand pieces.

The administration of Elizabeth was indeed a despotism, the restrictions of which upon the liberty of thought and speech, had it not been for the indomitable spirit of religious freedom awakened among the people, must have been fatal. Her own character is one of the very worst ever recorded in history. If the moral could stand out as fully personified as the physical, it would make a more deformed image of ugliness than the decrepitude of the witch-hags in the Fairy Queen. Her utmost efforts could not destroy the inflexible religious principle, which still grew, in defiance of her despotism, nor suppress its demonstrations. And never was there such a sight in the world as that of these noble religious men, trampled beneath her government, and yet upholding it, racked, tormented, torn, by the ecclesiastical engines which she set in motion, and laboring in the very fire for

their principles, and yet manifesting the purest patriotism. If a right hand was cut off for penning words of remonstrance against Elizabeth's religious despotism, with the left hand the man would swing his hat in the air, shouting, God Save the Queen! Never was there such a sight in the world as this conflict. A great portion of the literature of Elizabeth's reign grew up in the midst of it, and no small part was the production of leaders in it.

The Puritans were men who had had the dross of Popery burned out of them, and a temper inwrought, which would not again endure its superstitions. But in passing from Mary's reign to Elizabeth's, they only went out from one fire into another, and they found the fires of Protestantism not more tender to the flesh than those of Popery. Mary, in addition to her other cruelties, had contemplated the establishment of the Inquisition in England, for all Protestants. Elizabeth did really establish an Inquisition for Nonconformists. The most despotic writers admit that scarcely any feature of the Romish Inquisition was wanting in the Star Chamber and Court of High Commission. The Spanish Armada, therefore, which came prepared to set up the Inquisition in due form, would have brought no novelty; the machinery was already at work in England; the powers of the Armada would only have enlarged its sphere, and kindled its fires impartially for all. Elizabeth was her tyrant father's counterpart in female form, without her father's careless prodigality or quickness of impulse. She was eminently the Protestant Persecutor. In the fifth year of her reign, it was made death to deny her supremacy. In the twenty-third year of her reign it was made death to withdraw any persons from the established religion, or to be so persuaded or withdrawn. From 1581 to 1603, not less than one hundred and twenty Romish priests were put to death for exercising their sacerdotal functions. The plea of State necessity, or security against treason and conspiracy, is insufficient for such cruelties, and detestable in itself. These cases were as clear instances of religious intolerance as the persecution of the Anabaptists and Puritans. Two of the former were burned at an early period of Elizabeth's reign, by the same dreadful writ, issued by the Papists in 1401, and renewed almost word for word by Elizabeth. The venerable Fox, the martyrologist, did all in his power to dissuade her from such intolerance and cruelty. He wrote her an admirable letter of remonstrance, being desirous, as Fuller wrote of him in his Church History, that the Papists might enjoy as their monopoly the cruelty of burning condemned persons, but in vain. Much information, solemnly and sadly instructive in regard to the cruelties of Elizabeth's reign, may be found collected in the tenth of Professor Smyth's Lectures on Modern History, edited in this country by Professor Jared Sparks.

The true liberty of conscience was, as yet, neither understood nor permitted, by any party whatever. The Reformation, as Mr. Neal most justly remarked, was "limited to the conceptions and ideas of those who were in power. Such as held sentiments or pursued inquiries different from their model, so far from being allowed to propose their opinions, or to hold separate assemblies for religious worship agreeably to their own view of things, were stigmatized as heretics, and pursued unto death." In the Church of Scotland the Reformers made the reading of the mass punishable with death. In the Church of England the Reformers made the rejection of the Established Prayer Book and Communion punishable by death. In the Church of Geneva the Reformers made the heresy of Servetus punishable by death. So it went on. When the Reformers were driven out of England by Popish intolerance, the Lutherans of Germany persecuted even them, because they denied consubstantiation! Luther himself would have excommunicated, and probably, if he had had the power, would have violently persecuted the great and good Zuingle for differing from him on this point. Perhaps not one individual in that age understood religious liberty. The true idea of it, preparatory to its practice, was working out through the whole reign of Elizabeth; but it was discovered and saved in England and in Europe only so as by fire.

The Reformers themselves seemed at times under an infatuation almost diabolical, an intense ambition and selfishness of power which was amazing, in contending which party should keep the discovered light of God exclusively in their own shrines or vessels, under their own dominion, permitting none to draw but from their own urns. Instead of uniting all their energies of benevolence and learning at once, to give to the people the running streams from those living fountains that had just been unsealed, the hydra-headed monsters of superstition that kept guard over them being slain, they went to work building enclosed conduits or reservoirs, under lock and key, so that no man could come freely to drink; nay, if any man found a hidden spring that would burst up outside the conduits, and drank thereof with his family, and gave thereof to his neighbors, they shut him up in prison, or even put him to death! It was religious and civil despotism in the Romish world that had taught them this lesson, and it was hard to unlearn it. It had been enacted in the end of Henry's reign, that all books contrary to the doctrine set forth or to be set forth by the King, should be abolished. No person should sing or rhyme contrary to the said doctrine. The genius. of music and poetry was muzzled and put under police, to make utterance only as taught by authority. This was Popery, and might have been expected. But the next reign was the Reformation.

Now then, in the next reign, even that of the gentle, saintly Edward, it was enacted in regard to the book of the order of divine worship, published by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other learned divines, that such of the clergy as officiated in any other manner, or refused to perform divine service exactly according to it, should have all the Church preferments taken from them, and be imprisoned for life. Writing or printing against this service book was to be punished likewise by fines and imprisonment for life. So it went on. The transfer of the Pope's supremacy to the crown of England was an immeasurable addition both to Henry's and Elizabeth's despotism. Under that alone could arise the Court of High Commission in 1559; and with this coincided the despotic act of uniformity, compelling all men in the kingdom to worship exactly alike; the fatal mistake of the Reformers, showing that they knew, as yet, little, if anything, of religious liberty. By such measures, the kingdom was for more than eighty years a scene of persecution, and the people were long excluded from anything like a free and general enjoyment of the benefits of the Reformation.

The Exodus of our Pilgrim Fathers from that ecclesiastical and political bondage, under which they had been suffering in England, singularly resembles the departure of the Israelites from beneath the hand of their task-masters in Egypt. Both these movements were the commencement of new dispensations, in which God took the instruments for his work as by violence, out of an old hierarchy. It has almost always been characteristic of the materials of such dispensations, that God's instruments in them have been inclined to remain in the old hierarchical form. God himself has forced them from it by his providence. The disciples of our Lord, when the New Testament Church was to be formed, would all, if possible, have remained in the Jewish dispensation, and preserved its form. They were violently broken away from it. Luther and his coadjutors would have remained in the Church of the papacy ;-they were compelled to quit it. The Puritan Reformers in England would have remained in the Church of the Prelacy. But God did not suffer it; his purposes could not thus have been accomplished. Had they succeeded in getting the ecclesiastical establishment of England ordered according to their minds, they would never have learned the great lesson of liberty. They would have oppressed those, who differed from themselves. They would never have learned the true freedom of the Church in a sole and entire dependence upon God. This was a truth that had been so entirely lost sight of, so beaten down and destroyed from men's minds, that when it came up anew, with anything of its primitive glory, it seemed a heresy. Wherever the ground has