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was a very fire-brand of persecution, and to shew the tender. mercies of his future reign, he published an edict the first week that he came into office, ordering that all preaching, catechising, and praying in any private family, where any are present besides the family, be utterly extinguished.' This is genuine AntiChrist; the hatred of private devotion began with Constantine, and continues in full vigor in the minds of all Priests of all Established Churches down to this day: they will have no praying and preaching done out of their own work-shop; they must bedaub every thing with their approbation. In his primary visitation, Whitgift suspended two hundred and thirty-three Clergymen, for not subscribing to some articles of his own invention; and extraordinary misery did he cause in the minds of many other worthy ministers, who, in order to preserve their starving families, complied with his measures against their conscience. The ill effects of these rigorous persecutions soon became visible to the whole nation, and the extreme scandal of seeing an infant Church launch out into such hateful measures of oppression and cruelty, aroused the attention of the Queen's Council, who seem heartily, though ineffectually, to have condemned the tyranny of the Bishops. In a letter which was written by the Lords of the Council, to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, they say 'that they had heard of sundry complaints out of divers 'counties, of proceedings against a great number of eccle'siastical persons, some deprived and some suspended by their 'Lordships' Officers and Chancellors; that of late they had 'heard of great numbers of zealous and learned preachers sus'pended from their cures in the county of Essex, and that there 6 was no preaching, prayers, or sacraments in most of the vacant 6 places; that in some few of them, persons neither of learning nor good name are appointed, and that in other places of the country, great numbers of the parsons that occupy cures, are notoriously unfit, most for lack of learning, many chargeable 'with great and enormous faults, as drunkenness, filthiness of life, gaming at cards, haunting of ale-houses; against whom they (the Council) could hear of no proceedings from the Bishops, 'but that they were quietly suffered.' This is a faithful picture of many a diocese in these days, the profligate, fox-hunting, card-playing, dissipated Parsons are considered orthodox and innocent, whilst the laborious and religious Curates are often hunted out of the diocese as Calvinists, or silenced as schismatics.

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But the fury of the Clergy went on increasing; they could not be satisfied with the solitary confinement of their prisoners in dungeons without fire or lights, where very many pious Ministers perished from cold and starvation, they must imbrue their hands

in the blood of their Protestant Brethren, as we shall presently see. It appears that sixteen persons* perished in Newgate within five years, from the severity of their sufferings; and it should be remembered that every one of these persons had been sent to gaol by the Bishops for refusing to wear the pontifical dresses, or declining to come to Church. Their imprisonment was intended to last for life, and in no instance was mercy shown to these unhappy dissenters. Nothing short of blood, however, would satiate the Prelates: two Ministers of the Brownist persuasion, (which we now call the Independent Connexion) were condemned and put to death for writing against the Prayer Book. The names of these martyrs were Elias Thacker and John Copping. It was acknowledged on all hands that they were sound in all the doctrinal articles of the Church of England, and were also men of exemplary piety. A Mr. Wilsford was condemned to death with them, but he was pardoned on recanting.t Mr. Udal, another eminent Non-conformist Minister, was tried and condemned to death for writing against the Clergy: he died in prison before the sentence was carried into execution. Before his trial came on he was sent to the GateHouse Prison by the Bishop of London, where he was kept close prisoner without pen, ink, or paper, for half a year; no one was allowed to speak to him all that time, except the prisoners in gaol. He was tried for publishing a certain book in which was the following sentence: Who can, without blushing, deny you (the Bishops) to be the cause of all ungodliness? forasmuch 6 as your government gives liberty for a man to be any thing but 6 a sound Christian: it is more free in these days to be a Papist, or a wicked man, than what we should be; I could live twenty years as such in England, and it may be in a Bishop's house, ' and not molested: so true it is that you care for nothing but the 'maintenance of your dignities, be it to the damnation of your 'souls and infinite millions more.' These were the words selected in his indictment. He was condemned to be executed as a felon. Mr. Barrowe, a gentleman of Gray's Inn, and the Rev. Messrs. Greenwood and Penry, were also hanged for writing against the Church of England, or for refusing to acknowledge the Prayer Book. With Barrowe and Greenwood, Saxio Bellot, gentleman, Daniel Pludley, girdler, and Robert Bowle, fishmonger, were brought up to trial; all were found guilty and condemned to death, but Barrowe and Greenwood, being Clergymen, were selected for

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Among those who perished in prison was Mr. Roger Rippon, who dying in Newgate, his fellow-prisoners put this inscription on his coffin: This is the corpse of Roger Rippon, a servant of Christ, and her Majesty's faithful subject; who is the last of sixteen or seventeen which that great enemy of God, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his High Commissioners, have murdered in Newgate within these "five years, manifestly for the testimony of Jesus. His soul is now with the Lord, and his blood cries for vengeance, &c. &c.'

† See Lingard's History of England, viii. 163.

vengeance. They were hanged at Tyburn. The Rev. Mr. Penry, a Welsh Clergyman, was a victim well pleasing to the Bishops; he had sorely vexed the Prelates with sharp writings for some time, but had retired to Scotland, and so escaped the search of the Archbishop's spies; till venturing to London, he was seized, brought to trial, and executed without delay. He was hanged the fourth day after sentence was passed.

Thus did these barbarous Priests persecute the children of God, and kick against the pricks, in their vain endeavours to destroy Christ out of the land, and set up AntiChrist instead. They had their full swing of power uncontrolled; they had all the force of the secular arm on their side, with wealth and dignities to their heart's content; they had liberty to imprison, levy fines, banish, or put to death, without any control. The gaols were filled with victims of their cruelty; multitudes of pious families were constrained to quit the kingdom and settle in foreign countries; and still greater multitudes that remained, were reduced to beggary and starvation by the relentless persecutions of the Established Church. But all this power, and wealth, and violence did them no good; God was not on their side, and in spite of the unbridled fury of the Priests, Dissent went on increasing, so that at the beginning of the next reign there were fifteen hundred Dissenting Ministers preaching to large congregations and zealous followers, whilst the Established Church was sinking daily in the opinion of the nation, becoming more corrupt, more cruel, more irreligious, more violently opposed to the Gospel, and more thoroughly hated and despised by all good men. This, however, is a just judgment on all wicked and ignorant Clergymen; a judgment which they never can avert, that however great and powerful they may be in the opinion of the world, they must be doomed to preach to empty Churches when they do not preach the Gospel; for the Gospel of Christ crucified, faithfully taught as the sole remedy for wounded consciences, is so exactly the medicine suited for corrupt human nature, that in spite of every external advantage on the other side, the people will flock in multitudes to find peace for their souls where peace may be found; whilst the dull, sapless, irreligious prosings of the high church party, whose sermons have not half the life and morality of the writings of Seneca and Epictetus, are doomed to be delivered to their congregations of ceremonious formalists.

In tracing the bloody footsteps of the Church of England, I shall pause but a short time on the reigns of James I. and his son Charles I.; though in fact the tyranny and insolence of the

* Neale's Puritans, i. 463,

Clergy went on gradually increasing towards the extreme point of absolute despotism, till the long Parliament obeyed the universal wish of the nation, by rooting out the intolerable nuisance from the land.

In the reign of Charles I. flourished, till he was beheaded, that pattern of all English Priests, according to the universal opinion of the modern high church party, Archbishop Laud. It is astonishing that our Clergy should have singled out this wicked Prelate for their idol; nevertheless owing to his violence, tyranny, love of pompous rituals, manifest tendency to idolatry, excessive attachment to secular dominion, determination to give the principal offices of state to Parsons, and bitter hatred of Dissenters, he is now considered as the great luminary and glorious martyr of the English hierarchy. Archbishop Laud

No slight cause of their attachment to him, is his vigorous introduction of the Armenian doctrines into the Church of England, for till his time the Calvinistic view of Christianity, as established by our first Reformers, had prevailed without dispute. Since the days of Laud the high church party have been gradually approaching to the dogmas of Arminius, which they have latterly fully embraced. There is, in fact, a tendency to liberal' or popular sentiments in the old Calvinistic divines, little suited to the atmosphere of our courtly religion of the State; the divines of the school of Arminius are remarkable for their political servility, a fact which it is impossible to deny, whilst the Calvinistic teachers have never lost the healthful freedom of the Reformation. The cause of this metaphysical phoenomenon is not obvious, its existence, however, cannot be denied; for though exceptions may be found in both parties, yet generally speaking, Calvinists are liberals, and Arminians serviles. John Wesley, a bright and shining light of the Gospel, and a messenger of God to this benighted country, was, however, in politics, deplorably of the Laudean school, and his congregations have generally followed in the same path. The congregations of the Independents are remarkable for their patriotism. Archbishop Laud hated the Reformation both in its politics and religion. By his own authority he undertook to alter the collect for the Royal Family, in the prayer book, expunging these words: O God, who art the Father of the elect, and of their seed, &c.' The glaring Calvinism of this prayer he could not tolerate. How high was the strain of Calvinism in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when the Church of England was in its infancy, may be seen in the famous Lambeth Articles, which were prepared by the authority of Archbishop Whitgift, Dr. Flecher, Bishop of London, Dr. R. Vaughan, Bishop of Bristol, Dr. Trindal, Dean of Ely, Dr. Whitacre, Regius Professor of Divinity, and several of the leading divines of the University of Cambridge. The Archbishop of York approved and signed them; and the Vice-Chancellor, and Heads of Houses, thanked the Primate for having perfected them.

LAMBETH ARTICLES.

1. God from eternity hath predestined certain men unto life; certain men he has reprobated. 2. The moving or efficient cause of predestination unto life, is not the foresight of faith, or of perseverance, or of good works, or of any thing that is in the person predestinated; but only the good-will and pleasure of God. 3. There is predetermined a certain number of the predestinate, which can neither be augmented nor diminished. 4. Those who are not predestinate to salvation, shall be necessarily damned for their sins. 5. A true, living, and justifying faith, and the Spirit of God justifying, is not extinguished, falleth not away, it vanisheth not away in the elect either totally or finally. 6. A man truly faithful; that is, such an one who is endued with a justifying faith; is certain with the full assurance of faith, of the remission of his sins, and of his everlasting salvation by Christ. 7. Saving grace is not given, is not granted, is not communicated to all men, by which they may be saved if they will. 8. No man can come unto Christ, unless it be given unto him, and unless the Father shall draw him, and all men are not drawn by the Father that they may come to the Son. 9. It is not in the will or power of every one to be saved.' It would be a curious thing to place these old divines of our Church opposite to the modern fashionable Bishops, and hear them settle the orthodoxy of these grave subjects.

G

*

may be looked on as the Thomas á Becket of our Establishment, the Primate who lost his life in endeavouring to increase the powers of the Clergy to the maximum of their wishes. To go through a record of his freaks of arbitrary power would far ex ceed the limits of this discourse, they are to be seen in all the historians of the reign of Charles I. who are constrained to admit that this Church fever of the Primate and King caused the ruin both of crown and mitre. The folly of Laud was quite a match for his cruelty, for besides the fines and imprisonments, suspensions and excommunications, the cutting off ears, the slitting of noses, branding with hot irons on the forehead, and all the other means resorted to for reducing the Puritans to silence, he had a most childish rage for furnishing churches with all the trappings of heathen ornaments, which he carried to an extreme that can only be believed by those who are raging with the same fever now; for the disease of religious upholstery has lately broken out with redoubled violence amongst our Clergy. The Church of England fell with this fanatical Prelate; was abolished by act of Parliament; and was not restored till the death of Oliver Cromwell brought back Charles II. to reign in the kingdom of his ancestors. But the days of its humiliation had taught it no meekness, it came into power again with its tusks whetted for vengeance, and the Clergy were determined to show the nation that an established Priesthood must of necessity be tyrannical, avaricious, and cruel. The profligacy of the Court of Charles II. is well known, and the Clergy partook in the corrupt example set them by their abandoned Monarch. The nation seemed stupified with the change from a republic to a monarchy, and all excesses from Church or King were tolerated with wonderful apathy. It is said that the Bishops and Chapters of Cathedrals raised† a million and a half by fines in the renewal of their leases, a prodigious sum for those days, though not at all to be equalled to the enormous

* Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton, for writing against the Church of England, were condemned in the Star Chamber, contrary to law, to stand two hours in the pillory, to suffer the loss of both their ears, to pay each of them a fine of £5000. and to be imprisoned for life. Their departure from London, and the whole progress of their journey to their severel gaols, bore the appearance of a triumphal procession, so deeply did the people pity their misfortunes. The Archbishop punished all he could lay his hands on for shewing the prisoners hospitality, some he fined to the amount of £500. £300. or £250. others he excommunicated, and compelled them to beg pardon publicly in the Cathedrals. Dr. Alexander Leighton, father of the celebrated Archbishop Leighton, for writing against the Church of England, was fined £10,000.; degraged from his ministry, put in the pillory at Westminster, whipped publicly, suffered the loss of one ear, had one side of his nose slit, and was branded on his cheeks with a hot iron, with the letters SS, for sower of sedition: he was then carried back to prison, and after a few days again put in the pillory, again whipped, lost his other ear, had the other side of his nose slit, and was condemned to be imprisoned for life! Bishop Laud pulled off his cap in the Star Chamber, and gave God thanks whilst this merciless sentence was read. The unhappy man, after a ten years imprisonment, was released by the Long Parliament. Burnet's History of his

† See Secret History of Charles II. vol. i. p. 350-4, own Times, i. 271. Neale's Puritans, ii, 270,

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