sufferers, for conscience sake. And in the persecution which cast them out the foundations of modern dissent were laid.

If this were all that could be said, no better materials could be desired, either for advancing the cause of dissent, or damaging the church of England. Had the Congregational Union confined itself to the former task, we should not have interfered. But since it has thought fit to open the campaign in a spirit of avowed hostility to the church of England, we shall make no apology for reminding our dissenting friends of a few circumstances connected with this disastrous and melancholy affair, which common justice will not allow to be forgotten.

The ejection of the two thousand Nonconformists of 1662 was the last act of a long and miserable revolution. It had dragged on for twenty years through strife and bloodshed, bloodshed on the field and bloodshed on the scaffold, and ended where it began, without establishing any one great principle either of religious or of civil liberty. All had to be done over again; and all was done, and well done, by the men who had been taught moderation by their fathers' violence, and who won success by avoiding their errors. The revolution of 1688 owes its calmness, its moderation, and therefore its triumph, to the revolution which began in 1642, and died out disgracefully with the ejection of the non-conforming clergy. Yet this last act, bad as it may seem, was not what it is frequently described. It was not an unprovoked aggression. It was not without some show of justice. It was an act of retaliation; it was a repayment in kind for injuries done upon a greater scale, and with far greater barbarities, by Presbyterians and Independents against the episcopal clergy. And since our congregational friends seem not to be aware of this, they will thank us for explaining briefly how the matter really stands; and our own readers will not be displeased to be reminded of some passages in our domestic history, which of later years have been almost forgotten.

The revolution, then, had opened with the trial and execution of an archbishop, whose faults were great, and whose folly was even greater than his faults. We need not add that none of these were such as to justify his death; for no man now endeavours to excuse it. Then followed the overthrow of the episcopal church, and of course the ejection of the bishops. Some of these were ambitious, worldly-minded men; some of them, though without much zeal, were great scholars; many were eminent for learning, zeal, and piety. But all fared alike; or, if any difference were made, the best men were the most hardly used. Bishop Hall of Norwich would have been revered as an eminent saint, and admired as a man of genius, a preacher, and an author, in any age of the church. He was moderate in his politics; in doctrine he was called a Puritan. But he was a bishop, and therefore insulted by the soldiers, mobbed by the

common people, cast out penniless by the revolutionary parliament, and left in his old age to lean on the staff which never failed him-the staff which comforted the Psalmist, when called to pass, in his old age, along the same dark valley, the valley of the shadow of death. Prideaux, bishop of Worcester, was of the school which High Churchmen then, as in later times, sneered at as puritanical. It was said while he was yet living, that “in him the wit of Jewel, Rainolds, and Hooker united as in one, and seemed to triumph anew." He was, moreover, "an humble man of plain and downright behaviour, and careless of money, unless it was to bestow upon the poor, to whom he was very charitable, until he became one of them himself. Yet he suffered as much as the worst men, and died in a mean condition, leaving to his children, as he tells them in his will, no other legacy than pious poverty, God's blessing, and a father's prayers." No theological library is even now complete without a copy of his works. He was a hard student, and had to the last a cheerful spirit, and withal a good stomach, of which there goes this memorable story. "Towards the end of his life, a friend coming to see him, and saluting him in the common form of, How doth your lordship do?' Never better in my life,' said he; only I have too great a stomach; for I have eaten that little plate which the sequestrators left me, I have eaten a great library of excellent books, I have eaten a great deal of linen, much of my brass, some of my pewter, and now I am come to eat iron, and what will come next I know not.'”* All this he suffered from the party whom the two thousand Nonconformists were supposed, and not without some truth, to represent. When episcopacy was restored, is it surprising that these stories-and there were hundreds like them-were not forgotten? For the sufferers were not confined to the hierarchy. It had been resolved in parliament to have a presbyterian church, and at the same time to have what the parliament itself termed a root and branch purgation of the clergy. The latter part of this notable device was carried out with a fervent zeal; the former broke down, and utterly miscarried. When the parliament began to see its way a little more clearly, it made the discovery that a presbyterian church would be still more difficult to deal with than the old episcopacy. The English people would none of it. It seemed to them as despotic as the old hierarchy. Under other names it would have had its Star Chambers and Courts of High Commission in every county. The scheme was utterly abortive, and the Independents, in a few years, established themselves in the parsonages and pulpits which the Presbyterians had snugly prepared for their own reception. Cromwell was their leader, and he it was who first formed in the army what was termed "a gathered church;"

* Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy, &c. He gives his authorities.

for they disliked the name of Independents, which the Presbyterians had fastened on them as a badge of reproach. "Old Noll" is justly claimed by the Congregationalists as one of themselves, a gathered Churchman. Short work would he have made with some of their proceedings, had he been in the chair at the great meeting of which Mr. Bull gave some account in our last Number! Perhaps he would have asked them-for he did ask awkward questions in very plain words sometimesif they were not half-crazed to exalt him into "something like a demi-god," just three years after the church of England had asked the queen's permission to leave out the service for "the Royal Martyr" from the prayer-book.

These, however, the Presbyterians and Independents, were the two parties who made up the parliament in 1645. Between them it was resolved to clear out all malignants from the ministry. Just as, ten years before, every clergyman who did not run into the popish extravagance of Laud was a Puritan, so now every clergyman who did not crouch to a despotic parliament was a malignant; or, which was quite as fatal, "hugely suspected of malignancy." Five committees of the House of Commons were appointed-" committees for scandalous ministers," they were called; and certainly they did their work well, as revolutionary bodies like to have it done. Every accusation was listened to, every scandal credited; the vilest arts were used to promote complaints against the ministers, and every hinderance thrown in the way of those who would have spoken in their favour. "Parishioners were animated against their minister, and few or none of the loyal clergy escaped the lash." "Honesty and learning," said the illustrious Selden, who, though a member of the House, was disgusted with its proceedings, "were sins enough in a clergyman." Under these committees, commissioners were despatched into every part of the kingdom with summary powers. The persecution lasted from eight to ten years; and we owe it to Cromwell's memory, that what mitigations it received were owing chiefly to his more tolerant spirit. He connived at the preaching of archbishop Usher; and after he found himself firmly seated, and able to set all parties at defiance,-Anabaptists, Presbyterians, or gathered Churchmen, he gave no encouragement to the hunting up of delinquents, and bringing them to justice. Calamy, himself a sufferer in 1662, has given us the history of that disgraceful affair, and described the harrowing scenes of the fatal St. Bartholomew's day; and Walker, a clergyman of Exeter, has, with at least equal zeal, chronicled the lives and sorrows of the episcopal clergy deprived by the parliament. Walker makes a grand total of six thousand sufferers. His book, a closely printed folio, in double columns, was not published till after Calamy's history, to which it was intended as an answer.

It is splenetic and vindictive, and affords one of a thousand instances to show how a good cause is damaged by a bad temper. Walker allows no virtues to a nonconformist, and is unwilling to admit that there could be any vice in a royalist. From the day on which his book first saw the light, it has been under the fire of a never-ceasing criticism. It has been as well abused by dissenters as Fox's Book of Martyrs by Roman Catholics. In his preface he admits that, what from imperfect information, from men holding pluralities, and from other causes, he may have unintentionally erred sometimes; and the same sufferer may, in a few instances, have appeared twice or even three times over in different places. But making every reasonable abatement, his volume carries with it the stamp of truth. Walker, though a violent man, was an an upright one. But if we were even to grant (which would be an outrageous concession) that one half, or even two-thirds of his reputed sufferers were fictitious persons, who had no more reality than the saints upon the Romish calendar, there would still remain two thousand suspended episcopalians against Dr. Calamy's two thousand nonconformists. But as Walker goes through each diocese, and takes each parish seriatim, giving the name of the clergyman deprived, and, when he could obtain it, a short biography, we do not see how it was possible either that he should have been imposed upon to any great extent, or that he himself could have committed any formidable imposture upon the world. When he published his book, the occurrences he professes to relate were still within living memories. And let it also be understood, that of the two thousand sufferers of 1662, no inconsiderable number reconsidered the step they had taken, and afterwards conformed. Dr. Calamy, with laudable candour, notes those instances, and they occur on almost every page. If we pare down Walker, Calamy must submit to the same process. As the numbers of the one diminish, the numbers of the other must be reduced in perhaps the same proportion. There is another circumstance of which our friends of the Congregational Union must be reminded. Of the ejected ministers to whom they lay claim as the fathers of their church, and its early confessors, a large proportion were intruders. They were not Episcopalians; they never had been. Their orders were Presbyterian or Congregational. They had been imposed in times of violence upon parishes to which they had no other right than right of the strongest. They had been thrust often upon reluctant parishes by revolutionary committees, and at the sword's point. They had often displaced men as godly as themselves. The revolution had travelled through its frightful circuit. It had flung itself round again with wild contortions to the point from which it set out. It ended just where it had begun. The men who

had been unjustly thrust in were now cruelly cast out. It may be maintained that their possession of the parishes they held was lawful, because the nation, by its de facto government, had decreed the abolition of episcopacy. If so, the same measure must be meted to them again now, when the de facto and de jure government of 1662 had decreed the abolition of Presbyterian and gathered churches, and passed the Act of Uniformity. But it is a pitiful squabble, which party sinned most against the great principles of truth and righteousness; more pitiful still to see it revived for the mean purpose of raising prejudices against the church of England after the lapse of more than two hundred years. And most of all it may well raise the astonishment of honest men, that the ejection of the two thousand ministers, not one of whom had a doubt, or the shadow of a doubt, as to the lawfulness and expediency of an established church, should be made the pretext for an assault upon all "state churches," as if they, of all men, had been martyrs to the "voluntary principle." The fact was precisely the reverse. They felt that they were sufferers, not because they were compelled against their consciences to sit at meat in the idol's temple of an establishment, but because when its polluted table was spread no seat was left for them!

We know, of course, that the parliamentary committees were instructed to cast out only "scandalous ministers." We know, too, what has been said by Baxter and others in defence of these proceedings; though Baxter was very far from defending them in the gross. For who could define a scandal so as to shield an Episcopalian in times when it was a scandal to throw out the remotest hint that the parliament might do wrong, or the unhappy king do right? What honest churchman could retain a living when he might be fined £5 for using the prayerbook once, £100 for repeating the offence, and was guilty of a felony for the third transgression-a felony which exposed the culprit to the risk of swinging on the gallows, or (to a man of education the scarcely milder sentence) of slavery for life in the intolerant Puritan colonies of New England? If it be said that the sequestered clergy of 1645 were in any proper sense delinquents, while we are ready to allow that too many of them were miserably inefficient men, and some, no doubt, immoral, and that the state of the church demanded reformation, still it is incredible that all, or even the majority, were such. Had no record of their lives been handed down to us, we should not credit the slander with regard to any body of men of decent station, whose character was in fact their livelihood. But the names of not a few of the sufferers have been handed down to us. There were Balcanqual, master of the Savoy, who represented the Church of England with bishop Hall at the synod of Dort, and Fuller, its historian, and the historian of the