V. CHAS. I. A.D. 1646-8. its chiefest friends."* In a paper of proposals CHAPTER offered to the parliament in the name of fifteen regiments, the opinions of the army upon this point are expressed thus: "Matters of religion and God's worship are not at all entrusted to any human. power, because therein we cannot admit or exceed a tittle of what our consciences dictate to be the mind of God without wilful sin. Nevertheless, the public way of instructing the nation (so it be not compulsive) is referred to the parliament's discretion." This paper was presented in November, 1647. Thus explained, the feelings of the army scarcely justify Baxter's extreme alarm. There was one sect more dangerous than all the rest, and the jesuits it was supposed had set them on. Their rapid growth and sudden maturity, the extravagance of their opinions, the inconsistency of their doctrines with each other and with all government civil or religious, their union, their violence bordering on ferocity, all seemed to indicate the presence of jesuitical intrigue. These were the levellers, so called a few years afterwards, who, though severely punished, tormented Cromwell through his life. They declaimed at first upon all those doctrines which are in dispute between the jesuits and dominicans, the arminians and calvinists. Then they cried down the English translation of the scriptures and derided its authority. All orders of the ministry in England, and all its churches, episcopalian, presbyterian, and independent, were denounced. They vilified public worship, especially singing psalms, and family devotions. They were * Life, &c., part i. pp. 51-55. + Whitelocke, p. 278. CHAPTER Vehement against the king and against all forms of V. CHAS. I. A D. 1646-8. government except democracy. They denied the right of magistrates to intermeddle in religion, and yet they trusted more to intrigue and scorn and the power they possessed in consequence of Cromwell's favour than to argument. They disputed fiercely on the slightest opposition, and seemed ready to draw their swords on the instant upon their opponents. They were ambitious of command, and always contrived to displace those with whose promotion they were dissatisfied, and to fill the vacancy with one of their own party.* These men were the dregs of a revolution; turbulent and clamorous but comparatively few in number. In the army they were chiefly confined to one regiment, indeed to one troop of horse, of which Bethell was the captain. He fell at the storming of Bristol, and but for the countenance of Cromwell the cause of the levellers might have perished with him: it spread to some extent and was eagerly embraced by the most ignorant of the populace of London and a few great towns. But in England the management of the revolution never for an instant descended to the mob. The injury done by the levellers was confined to the disgrace they brought upon their cause, and the condign punishment they brought upon themselves. Amongst the wildest and most wicked of the sects there were some who denied the existence of a God, and others who maintained with the Greek sophists that the deity pervaded everything, and that in fact they were gods themselves. There was a class * Baxter, Life, part i. p. 55. V. which believed that every dream was an inspira- CHAPTER tion from above, and another which taught with Mahomet that women had no souls.* Besides these there was a host of other sectaries, whose number was not great and whose names have well-nigh perished. The old sects ripened on a sudden, and under new names displayed a new existence. The anabaptists, the brownists, and the family of love, revived. The socinians now first appeared as a body, and they spread rapidly. The seekers and behmenites and perfectionists headed that large class of mystics who generally infest the church in troublous times. The Westminster assembly issued a declaration touching heresies and errors, in which they condemn the following prevalent opinions amongst others : viz., the assertions that the scriptures are not of divine authority; that the deity has a bodily shape; that there is no trinity of persons; that the moral law is not the rule of life; that there is no church, or sacrament, or sabbath; and that the soul of man is mortal, sleeping with the body till the day of judgment. But in the same paper they condemn the arminian doctrine of Dr. Hammond and John Goodwin, namely, that Christ died for the sins of all mankind, and also their doctrine of free will.† Besides these, there were the students of Overton's Martin Marpriest, and the disciples of John Lilburn. Overton seems to have taught that the office of the christian ministry was a priestcraft, and Lilburn that civil government was a tyranny. For all these *Sewell's Hist. of the People called Quakers, p. Neal, vol. iii. p. 305. 11. CHAS. I. A.D. 1646-8. V. CHAS. I. A.D.1646-8. CHAPTER sects a generic term was wanted. It was readily supplied, and they were called malignants against the ministry. Hitherto malignant had been the name of reproach for a royalist; it was now transferred to the sectaries, because these were supposed to be infected with the same malignity in matters of religion as the royalists in matters of civil liberty. But after all, these men of every name, though turbulent, were comparatively few. Baxter, we have seen, viewed their progress with alarm, and he afterwards wrote against them with great severity in a tract which he entitles, "One Sheet for the Ministry against the Malignants of all sorts." We may therefore accept his statement of their numbers with some degree of confidence. He admits that one half of the army was untainted; of the other half a moiety was sound though confused in judgment. A fourth part of the army, then, or a body of about five thousand men, remains--the " malignants of all sorts." Through the kingdom the proportion was probably much less. It was, we suspect, rather the suddenness of the evil than its extent that excited so much alarm. Five thousand armed fanatics, it is true, has a formidable sound; but these men were in the presence of fifteen thousand fellow-soldiers, and the whole were governed by the strong hand of Cromwell. When Baxter wrote against them, ten years later, it is evident that contempt, and not apprehension, was uppermost in his mind. "Blind wretches !" he exclaims, "it is the devil's game they play, and his interest and kingdom they promote. Wretches! you shall shortly see your master, and he will pay you your wages contrary CHAPTER to your expectation."* He enumerates the quakers chapter amongst other malignants; and the reader may sigh as he reflects that the saintly Baxter was so far CHAS. I. behind one class at least of his opponents, in charity and christian love. The rise of quakerism and the personal history of its founder George Fox belong to this period. The most original minds are moulded to some extent by the times in which they live; and the institutions which astonish us most by their seeming novelty trace their parentage to the circumstances amongst which they first appeared. England had been stunned for twenty years with religious polemics. The forms of church government,-presbyterianism and prelacy, the claims of the independents and the clamours of the sectaries, the respective rights of the pastors and the people, were discussed in every pulpit; they distracted every parish and every house. The din was incessant, and it is surprising that true religion was not deafened by the clamour. But while piety, and a right sense of the importance of what is real in religion, continued to exist, those who were beneath its influence must have deplored the infatuation which diverted good men from whatever was most important; fixing their attention upon the accidents and circumstances rather than upon the true work of the church of Christ; upon the mode of its existence rather than the great ends for the sake of which its existence is decreed. Such were some of the anxieties of George Fox. In appearance he was a simple youth in humble cir * "One Sheet against the Malignants of all sorts, by Richard Baxter. Kidderminster, 1657." A.D. 1646-8. |