men's urgent efforts to adjust, explain and suppress them, these grievous objections to the Presbyterian way, as it was advocated by them to be the agent of the sorely needed further religious reform in England.

1. They looked for it, and waited for it, at the hands of the civil government.

2. They proposed, when achieved, to leave it substantially under civil control.

3. Their theory of the church was as unsuited to any genuine and thorough reform as it was unscriptural in essence, because it included the entire baptized population; trusting to church discipline to raise the general life up to the Gospel level—the identical mistake of the ancient papal system, which, with no difference in this vital respect other than one of name, it was seeking to supplant; and because, although vaguely, it so constituted from within an organic unity between the different local sections, and so bound them together with State bonds from without, that no one portion could lift itself toward a purer development until all other portions were ready to be exalted with it. No single person, company, or locality alone could do anything effectual. On such a basis every effort at fundamental reform would be like trying to free a great water-logged ship, by rigging a pump at the bow, or one at the stern, while the sea is left to flow freely in at a dozen holes, each admitting water to the whole length of hulk faster than the pump can throw

it out.

I can hardly doubt that to a philosophical mind of this period -say of the year 1580-among our fathers; one thoroughly honest and earnest; one sorrowed by a sense of that terrible inertia of conservatism which bound so many of the well-meaning of the nation to its past, because it had been its past; one sickened by that well-nigh universal timidity of respect for the Bishops and the hierarchy, which made it per se a sin to find. fault with them, or even to think of going whither they were not prepared to lead; one saturated with a sense of the exceeding sinfulness of the sin of matters as they were, to that degree that to rot in prison, or to be burned, or hanged, would seem a very little thing in comparison with the guilt of conscious acquiescence in a condition of affairs so degrading to man and so dis

pleasing to God; and yet one unconvinced of the Scriptural force, or the practical competency, of any - perhaps, least of all, of the Presbyterian-propositions yet made for relief; three things would commend themselves as of absolute necessity to further, not to say to any general, reformation. The public thought must be directed to some more excellent method; some method more vital with the marrow and fatness of the New Testament on the one hand, and on the other, more obviously competent for the waiting work. This done, the spell of conservatism and the fear of the Bishops must somehow be shattered; setting the people at liberty to walk in this better way. And then, in face of the appalling difficulties that would still remain, believers must somehow be stimulated to such a pitch of heroism as is seldom reached except in times that try men's souls; until they shall be ready at the risk of all to leave all - even life itself to follow their Lord whithersoever he listeth.

It will be my purpose, in three next succeeding lectures, to endeavor to show how Divine Providence was pleased to supply these needs.

LECTURE II.

Robert Browne and his Co-workers.

T was not found good for the repute of Oliver Cromwell that it should be left exclusively to royalist remembrancers. Robert Browne has experienced a like misfortune, with the added

circumstance, that, having abandoned the polity which he developed, and alienated dissent without regaining the confidence of the establishment, he left few, if any, mourners behind him. Brief mention of his career occurs in many encyclopædias and manuals of church history, wherein the few half-truths and absolute errors of the two or three earliest writers who mentioned him, have been turned over and over, and sometimes amplified, but, although largely incongruous, apparently never sifted; until, in the absence of his own books in testimony of what he was, any just estimate of the man began to seem an impossibility. More than a century and a half has now elapsed since a careful English ecclesiastical writer remarked that the reports concerning him were so various as to make it hard to discern the truth; although he saw attractive wheat grains enough among the chaff to lead him to express the hope, that "in a little time we may have a much more full and certain account of him than we have at present."

Jas. Peirce, Vindication of the Dissenters, etc. [1717], 143.