member kept step, and every officer wore his appropriate insignia. A separate congregation was an enormity to which she could give place, no, not for a moment; and an angel from heaven might preach very good doctrine, but if his cap were not square, or his tippet were not en règle, he need not expect any favour from Elizabeth. Questions of the toilette fell under her special domain. Part of the goodly heritage to which her Scotch kinsman succeeded was the eighty wigs and the ten thousand gowns in which her royal fancy had displayed its fertility; and just as one of her chief solicitudes was to array her imperial person in goodly attire, so she was anxious to clothe the various grades of her clergy in apparel worthy of a splendid hierarchy, and one over which a sumptuous monarch need not be ashamed of presiding.

66

But the point to which the sovereign attached such importance was one which many of her clergy could not regard as trivial. At Frankfort and Geneva, the refugees from the Marian persecution had acquired a taste for simple observances, and had learned to regard as rags of the Beast," and "Babylonish garments," the ceremonies and vestments in which the sovereign sought to array the national religion. In the lower house of Convocation, a proposition to abolish saints' days, the use of the cope, the cross in baptism, and organs, and to leave kneeling at the communion optional, was lost by a majority of only fifty-nine to fifty-eight; but although so large a body of the clergy, the best of the bishops, the sovereign's civil advisers, and the populace were opposed to what they deemed relics of Romanism, the queen was resolute, and the edict went forth permitting none to worship outside of the Established Church, and allowing none to minister at that Church's altars except in the cope and corner cap.

In this way the golden opportunity was lost; and instead of founding a Church truly comprehensive and rational, by flying in the face of her best advisers, lay and spiritual, Elizabeth's

A LOST OPPORTUNITY.

79

wilfulness entailed on England a hundred years of rancorous controversy, and, by narrowing the basis of the new institution, occasioned its overthrow amidst the assaults of the following century. To use the language of a wise and temperate historian of the Anglican Church, "If, when the Convocation of 1562 revealed the extent of an unreasonable yet wholesome jealousy of Popish corruptions, she had had the penetration to discern in that jealousy the strength of her throne-if copes, which no one now ever sees, had been discarded, and the surplice, the cross in baptism, and the posture at communion left, for a time at least, optional-if a presbytery, co-extensive with rural deaneries, had been empowered to administer a gentle parochial discipline under Episcopal control-if the able and excellent men, whom her discernment raised to high stations in the Church, had been allowed to exercise their own judgments unfettered by her interference—if the rights of conscience had been respected, and the idea of casting all minds in one mould abandoned as soon as its impracticability was ascertained and if, instead of enforcing, under heavy penalties, the attendance of her subjects at their parish church, all her efforts had been directed to render that Church increasingly worthy of her people's affection-a far closer approximation to unity might have been attained than has ever yet been accomplished; the lingering Popery of Oxford and the Puritanism of Cambridge would have blended in that happy union of evangelical truth with apostolical order, by which the writings and life of a Hooker were so eminently distinguished; and the cause of religion, consolidated at home, might have drawn continental Protestantism into its alliance, and made head against the Roman Antichrist. But foresight is not more characteristic of sovereigns than of individuals. He who ordereth all things wisely, though inscrutably, saw fit to allow the enemy a partial triumph; nor can we reflect upon the contentions in which good men have been permitted to engage, without feeling

that perfect harmony is reserved for the regions of perfect purity."*

Doubtless the Queen did not anticipate the resistance which her edicts of uniformity were destined to arouse. In the days of her Romish sister she had acted on conformist principles herself, and, rather than oppose the sovereign, had attended mass, and in all outward observances had symbolized with the Church of Rome; and the amazing facility with which the whole body of the clergy had swung round from one Church to the other the instant that the Crown declared on the Protestant side,† may very naturally have led Elizabeth to expect a prompt compliance with her commands in matters so subordinate. But there were elements which did not enter into her calculation; and more especially she forgot the hundreds of consciences which had taken refuge from Mary's fury in Germany and Switzerland, and which now returned with the conviction deepened, that, in God's services, whatever is not scriptural is sinful. By these PURITANS Elizabeth's vestments were refused, and her ceremonies resisted, and, in retaliation, pains and penalties were inflicted on the recusants, till a new and dismal persecution succeeded to the Marian martyrdoms, and the most learned and fervent of their fellowchurchmen were condemned to fines, imprisonment, and exile by a Protestant princess and her prelates.

Painful as it is to dwell on these details, some notice of them is essential in a sketch of our country's Christian literature. The points originally at issue were soon almost forgotten in new subjects of controversy; but successive years only widened the chasm between the Court party and the obnoxious Puritans.

* Rev. J. A. Baxter's "Church History of England," p. 545.

† Of 9000 beneficed clergy, less than 200 refused the oath of supremacy. Of these, no doubt, many continued Papists at heart, and some were afterwards deprived. Still, this wholesale trimming is one of the most melancholy facts recorded in history, and gives a deplorable view of the ministry at the time of Elizabeth's accession.

THE PURITANS AND THE PULPIT.

81 As these latter enjoyed the reputation of superior sanctity, it became loyal and fashionable to eschew righteousness overmuch; and as it was not easy to find fervent preachers except among those who "scrupled the vestments," the ordinance of preaching was itself treated with contempt. During the reign of Elizabeth there was no dissent, and in nearly half the parishes the incumbents either could not compose a sermon, or were never permitted to try. "Preaching was discountenanced; it fell into decay. The Puritans assiduously cultivated an art which their enemies despised. They seized the rusty weapon, and with it smote their opponents. Both parties suffered; for the existence of coldness in the one produced an artificial fervour in the other, and the sermon, undervalued in the cathedral, was doated upon in the meeting-house. But inasmuch as the error arising from excess was less injurious than that arising from the contempt of a Divine ordinance, the Church party suffered most. The dictum of Queen Elizabeth that one or two preachers were sufficient for a country, obtained a mischievous currency, and received an almost literal interpretation. Her successor on the throne repeated it in substance, and discouraged preaching to the utmost of his power. We became an unpreaching Church. Eloquence, powerful at the senate and the bar, was banished from the pulpit. Then followed the drowsy audience and the deserted pew, and at length the professed spiritual lethargy of the eighteenth century. There were great divines, and there were writers of sermons of high and deserved repute, but preaching as an art—as the noblest and most legitimate exercise of eloquence had departed from amongst us, and an alienation of the hearts of the common people took place, from which we have never yet recovered."*

Truth conceded is a cure begun. To a Christian patriot, one of the most cheering signs of the times is the growing

* Marsden's "Early Puritans," p. 124.

attention given to the ordinance of preaching within the Church of England. The community whose pulpits are filled by such masters of sacred eloquence as Melville and Macneile, Alford and Stowell, Dale and Croly, and the Bishops of Oxford, Carlisle, and Ripon, is stronger in elements of popular attraction and public usefulness than if every bishop on the bench had edited a classic or transfixed anew the Gnostic heresy.

Elizabeth was no bigot. In torturing Protestants, her predecessor Mary, and her contemporary Philip II., thought that they were doing God service; but in enforcing the act of uniformity, the daughter of Anne Boleyn was under no such delusion. Her law was her own arbitrary will-her motive was self-aggrandisement, and the exaltation of the royal prerogative. For these she hanged the Popish priests and burned the Anabaptists; for these she drove into exile and reduced to beggary many of her best and most peaceable subjects, and allowed others to rot slow years in prison; and for these she insulted and punished the most venerable of her prelates, and left without religious instruction the half of her realm till the day of her death. These are the great blot on a reign otherwise unequalled in glory, and the foil which brings out in bright contrast the memory of her young but pious brother. For the promotion of the real interests of the Christian Church, the least in the kingdom can do better than the wisest and mightiest outside.

We now come to our more agreeable task, and shall try to indicate a few of those lights which were found in the ecclesiastical firmament when the fog of the Marian persecution had cleared away.

No circumstance has done more to distinguish the reign of Elizabeth, and nothing shewed more strikingly her admirable talent for governing, than the skill with which she selected occupants for posts of influence throughout the realm. She was hardly less fortunate in her first prelates than in her great