those voluntary assemblies should be determined wholly by themselves, and not at all by the secular power. In the reign of Mary, an act of state had set forth the whole people of England as constituting a popish church. On the accession of Elizabeth, an act of state had set forth the same nation as constituting a protestant church. In both cases the people were the same, and the priesthood for the most part remained the same. The bold men to whom we refer demurred to this manner of proceeding. The mixed multitude of people so spoken of, no doubt included many enlightened and sincere Christians, but could not, it was alleged, be described in any sober sense as being truly a church. In like manner, the ministry of such a church might include many devout men; but the validity of a ministry so appointed must rest on moral grounds, and not in any degree on the state sanctions which might be urged in its favour.

These principles, simple and harmless as they may now seem, struck at the root of the ecclesiastical supremacy then claimed by the crown. Elizabeth saw that if such doctrines became prevalent, the one half of her empire, and the half which she especially valued, must pass to other hands. Opinions of this nature, accordingly, were in her view treasonable-treasonable in the worst sense. They embraced that very principle of divided allegiance which had caused Romanism to become so obnoxious. The catholic gave his conscience in religious matters to his particular church. This new sect of protestants gave their conscience immediately to God. In either case, the body and the outward only were reserved in allegiance to the throne, the soul and the inward were given to another. In the judgment of Elizabeth, the man holding such a doctrine could be only half a subject, and its natural tendency was to reduce every crowned head to the condition of being only half a sovereign.

Robert Brown, a clergyman by education and office, and a kinsman to the great Lord Treasurer Burleigh, distinguished himself, about the middle of the reign of Elizabeth, as the promulgator of such opinions. This divine was a personage of ready, earnest, and impassioned utterance, and in his pulpit exhibitions was eminently popular. Crowds assembled to hear him at Cambridge, and subsequently at Norwich where he was beneficed. As a preacher he was well known through great part of England, and with his itinerant and irregular services in that capacity, he connected the publication of his opinions from the press. One seal of an apostle was not wanting in his instance. In prosecuting his vocation, he found that bonds and imprisonment commonly awaited him. These he bore through

many years with the most dogged obstinacy, if not with the most exemplary patience. It was his boast that he had been committed to more than thirty prisons, in some of which his hand could not be seen at noonday. To escape from this inconvenient usage, and from some more severe treatment with which he was threatened, Brown fled to Middleburgh in Zealand, and instituted a church in that city after his own model. But the pastor soon found occasion of disagreement with his new charge, and returning to England, he submitted to the authorities to which he had been so much opposed, and again became a beneficed clergyman. Brown lived to an extreme old age, but the last forty years of his life were the years of a sorry worldling, and his death is said to have been brought on by one of those fits of passion and self-will to which he was liable.

The story of this unhappy man is instructive. He was one of a class—a zealot in religion, without being religious. His hatred of some real or supposed Christian abuses, was presumed to be evidence of his own Christian character; but while doing so much to mend the religion of other men, it was ere long to be manifest that he had no religion of his own. Passionate opposition to error is not the surest way to truth. Piety is self-government in its highest form. It is the Christian temper which must regenerate Christian institutions.

It was natural that the men who embraced the principles once avowed by this apostate should be solicitous not to be called by his name. But their enemies were no less solicitous to fasten that reproach upon them. To call them Brownists, was to identify them with the extravagant, the fickle, and the base in the career of Robert Brown. What theologian, or what philososopher even, could be expected to forego so felicitous an occasion of using a nickname. The principles of the said Brown were one thing, and the character of the man another. But how much was to be gained by not seeming to perceive that distinction? The learned and the vulgar-philosophy and Billingsgate -are found, on such occasions, to possess much more in common than is commonly supposed.

But whatever may have been the case with their persecutors, the conscientious men holding the principles which Brown had abandoned, were philosophers enough not to allow themselves to be scared from great truths by the accident of an infelicitous association. They held their secret assemblies. They possessed a private printing-press, and issued tracts and treatises, sometimes grave and sometimes satirical, impugning the order of things in the established church, and inculcating their own widely different views on such subjects. In some of these pieces the language

employed was not always the softest which might have been chosen. But men perishing under the weight of hard blows, may be excused if they sometimes use hard words. Proclamations were issued to suppress these irregular proceedings, and many of the alleged delinquents were made to feel that these intimations of the royal pleasure were not so much empty threatening. Two Brownist ministers, named John Copping and Elias Thacker, were imprisoned in Bury St. Edmund's, on the charge of dispersing books opposed to the ecclesiastical supremacy of the crown, and acknowledging the authority of the queen in civil matters only. Within our own memory, confinement in a jail, especially in some provincial districts, has been connected with enough of the loathsome and the horrible. But of the miseries of such a durance in the age of Elizabeth, we have little conception, except as suggested by some of those painful descriptions which have reached us from the cells of such sufferers. Copping and Thacker might have obtained their liberty on renouncing their errors, and promising conformity. During five long winters their wants and wretchedness were made to plead on the side of submission, but though examined once and again, they wavered not. At length they were apprised that their life would be the cost of their further contumacy. On the 4th of June, 1583, Thacker was led to the place of execution. The books which he had been convicted of dispersing were burned in his presence, and the injured man gave noble proof that his religious principles were stronger than his fear of death. Two days afterwards, Copping was conducted to the same spot, and having witnessed the same proceedings, died with the same martyr firmness. It is something to meet death as the soldier meets it, when multitudes share in the common peril; it is more to submit to it in the comparative solitariness of martyrdom, when nothing can come from man except the influence of distant sympathy or admiration; but these sufferers bade adieu to earth amidst circumstances which left them no sustaining power, beside their simple hope of heaven. The scattered and bleeding remnant who would honour their memory, were a people despised as much as they were wronged. The heart is formed to crave a sympathetic power from other hearts, and can be strong without it only as strength shall come to it from a much higher Man becomes superior to the terrors of this world, in such circumstances, only as he can take firm hold on a better.

source.

The houses of persons suspected of embracing the opinions professed by these men were often rigorously searched. The officers employed on those occasions frequently ill-treated even the women and the children of such families, and, under various

pretences, often added the spoiling of their goods to insult and oppression. In 1592, fifty-six men of this sect were apprehended while holding a secret assembly for religious worship in a large room in the parish of Islington. The place of meeting was that in which the persecuted protestants had often worshipped during the reign of Queen Mary. These persons were committed to the dungeon in Newgate, the Fleet, Bridewell, and other prisons in the metropolis. One of their number states that their persecutors would allow them neither meat, drink, fire, nor lodging, 'nor suffer any, whose hearts the Lord would stir up for their relief, to have any access to them; purposing, belike, to im'prison them to death, as they have done seventeen or eighteen 'others, in the same noisome jails, within these six years.' Most of these men were needy persons, with families dependent for subsistence on their industry. Their offence was declared to be unbailable, and according to the bad usage of those times, a jail delivery, in place of coming at brief and certain intervals, as with us, was an event which the government managed to evade in particular cases, so as to punish, by means of imprisonment, to any extent, denying to the imprisoned their right to an open, a legal, and a speedy trial. Many, accordingly, died in prison, and the prayer of the men who had been apprehended at Islington was- We crave for all of us but the liberty either to die openly ' or to live openly, in the land of our nativity; if we deserve death, 'it beseemeth the majesty of justice not to see us closely mur'dered, yea, starved to death with hunger and cold, and stifled in ' loathsome dungeons; if we be guiltless, we crave but the benefit ' of our innocence, that we may have peace to serve our God and our prince, in the place of the sepulchres of our fathers.'

Among the persons apprehended in 1592, were Henry Barrow and John Greenwood. In the records of the proceedings against these recusants, the former is described as 'gentleman,' the latter as clerk.' Barrow was the author of a petition to parliament on behalf of himself and his suffering brethren, from which the above extracts are taken. The indictment against Barrow and Greenwood charged them with holding and promulgating opinions which impugned the queen's supremacy; with forming churches, and conducting religious worship contrary to law; and with having indulged in libellous expressions concerning some eminent persons. On these grounds sentence of death was passed on them; and in pursuance of that sentence, they were both conveyed from Newgate to Tyburn.

The rope was fastened to the beam and placed about their necks, and in that state they were allowed for a few moments to address the people collected around them. Those moments they em

ployed in expressing their loyalty to the queen, their submission to the civil government of their country, and their sorrow if they had spoken with irreverence or with improper freedom of any man. They reiterated their faith in the doctrines on account of which they were about to suffer death, but entreated the people to embrace those opinions only as they should appear to be the certain teaching of Holy Scripture. When they had prayed for the queen, their country, and all their enemies and persecutors, and were about to close their eyes on the world, the proceedings were suddenly stayed, and it was announced that her majesty had sent a reprieve. The revulsion of feeling which ensued may be imagined. Consciousness of life suddenly flowed back to hearts from which it seemed to have passed away, and men as good as dead again began to live. The breathless people shared in this reflux of emotion. The condemned men gave expression to their joy as became them-the people did so in loud acclamations; and, as the victims were re-conducted from the suburbs of the metropolis to Newgate, the populace in the lanes and streets, and from the windows of the houses, hailed their return as a happy and righteous deliverance. On that day, Barrow sent a statement of these occurrences to a distinguished relative, having access to Elizabeth, pleading that, as his loyalty could no longer be doubtful, he might be set at liberty, or at least be removed from the loathsome jayle' of Newgate. But early on the following morning, the two prisoners were again summoned from their cells. All that had taken place on the preceding day proved to be a mockery. It was not true that the bitterness of death had passed. They had again to gather up the strength of nature which might enable them to meet that stroke from the hands of a public executioner, and thus, mentally at least, it was their hard lot to undergo the penalty of a double dissolution. They were now conveyed to the same spot with more secrecy, and were there disposed of in the manner in which society has been wont to dispose of marauders and cutthroats.

The case of John Penry was similar to that of Barrow and Greenwood, but, in some respects, is a still more affecting illustration of the tyranny of the times. Penry was a native of Wales. He had studied at Cambridge, and had taken his degree at Oxford. He was a young man of considerable scholarship, of sincere and fervent piety, and in the warmth of his religious zeal he ventured to publish a treatise, in which he complained, with some vehemence, of the pride, and secularity, and popishness of the state of things in respect to religion, with which the English nation appeared to be so well content. A warrant was issued