been long overgrown with weeds, if the good seed begins to spring up, men will at first look upon it as tares.

The seed corn of Christ's Church has been beaten from the chaff by the flail of persecution. So it was with the Puritans of England. Sometimes some kernels flew aside in strange places, and sprang up, men knew not how. The 20th of November, 1572, in England some of this seed corn, under the blows of that heavy flailsman, Archbishop Parker, fell out from the husk and cob of the establishment, and the first Presbyterian church in England grew from it. But in 1554 the great flail of Queen Mary had already driven a handful of this corn across the British seas into Frankfort. There, however, the tares of ceremonial despotism were sown along with it, and the good seed was soon after transplanted thence into Geneva. After remaining awhile in that mountain-girdled region of liberty and light, a school of great souls, where lessons were learned that were of power to change kingdoms, John Knox went to Scotland, and in the year 1559, on the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the throne of England, the exiles generally returned from Geneva and other foreign parts, to their native kingdom. Here some of them conformed to the State-and-Church discipline themselves, and sought to enforce it upon others. Others refused such conformity, and endured the oppressive tyranny of Church and State united against them, as against the Papists, the severity of the prelates becoming continually more severe, and the temper of the Puritans themselves growing more inflexible, like a steel anvil, the more it was beaten. Principles were beaten into form and consistency on both sides. The Puritans were formed from the outset in the school of suffering and of patient endurance. They never made any revolution or rebellion in their native kingdom. Long before the civil wars broke out between the first Charles and his parliament, the persecution against them under James had grown so hot, that they were forced to leave the country, and take refuge in Hol

land.

The canons of Archbishop Bancroft were of such mortal despotism, that it would have been a reproach to the Church of Christ, if there had not been within it a body of Christians determined to resist them. A true regard to the purity of the gospel would on such an occasion, of itself alone, bind Christians to such resistance as a duty. The Puritans were likewise compelled into it as a necessity. The unmitigated cruelty with which the canons were enforced caused many of the Nonconformists to quit the kingdom, and form churches on freer independent principles in the Low Countries. To such an excess of vigilant severity had proceedings been carried, that ministers and private Christians were imprisoned on the charge of having held a conventicle, merely because, on the Lord's day, they had repeated

together the heads of the discourse which they heard preached in the Established Church. A learned barrister who undertook to be their counsel, was himself thrown into prison for this boldness, and not released to the day of his death.

All true liberty was stricken down. But it needed such an extreme of cruelty to bring things to a crisis, and to teach the disciples of Christ that in separating from such a tyrannical church they were not committing a sin, but performing a duty; they were not separating from the Church of Christ, but maintaining its liberty; they were not committing schism, but resisting the causes of it. If the persecuting flailsmen had let them alone, they would have remained in bondage all their life-time. They would have remained under the yoke and tyranny of the national Church, trembling at the bare thought of an independent Church, that simple form of Christ's kingdom in the New Testament, as if a step towards it were a mortal sin. The compulsion which, under God's Providence, drove them to it, was the only thing that tore from their minds the veil of the prelacy, that removed their blindness, that enlightened them as to the nature of the Church and of its Christian liberty.

Thus Archbishop Bancroft, and they who before and with him worked upon the Puritans, were but beating off the Nightmare of ecclesiastical superstition from their souls. They were filing away the rust, and purging out the dross from the metal. They were all unconsciously hard at work, in a perfect tug and sweat of persecution, carrying on the processes which were necessary in order to smelt the ore and separate it, when they thought verily they were confining it in the bowels of the mountain. It was a great work, a wonderful work of God's providence and truth, this work of teaching our fathers that they had themselves a right as Christians to be a Church of Christ, without asking leave of the rubrics or the prelates, of the King or the Church of England. It was an idea that may be truly said to have been beaten into them-welded as it were, to their souls, and wrought into unalterable hardness, by the blows of Church and State despots, on the anvil of ecclesiastical tyranny. Their enemies thought they could terrify them from separating, by holding it up to their consciences as a sin against Christ. They thought with this terror on the one sidethe terror of quitting the Church, as if they were committing schism-and the threat of prisons and tortures on the other, they could frighten and beat them into conformity with the superstitions of the Church of England, and make them its tools. But instead of this, they disciplined and beat their consciences out of darkness into light, out of the remaining bondage of the Papal church and the despotism of the prelatical, into the liberty of the gospel. So, from looking upon a great duty and privilege as if it

were a sin, persecution taught them the cheerful performance of it as a duty, trusting in God.

This great work of separation from a corrupt and oppressive Church once accomplished, there would be the possibility and room for a free and symmetrical growth in Christ. But not, as yet, in England. The despotism of the Church there was almost omnipotent. There must be a transplantation of the separated free germ into a land prepared of God for it, where it might demonstrate to the world how much more powerful is the Church of Christ under Christ's headship and government, than under man's; in Christ's liberty, than under the State's protection and jurisdiction. Nearly all that could be done in England was the effecting the work of separation; but that done, the germ separated, being a living germ in Christ, almost everything was done; its growth from strength to strength, from glory to glory, under Christ's care, was inevitable. The vine shot forth its branches, and was filled with fruit, although the boar out of the wood strove to waste it, and the wild beast of the field to devour it. Once brought out of Egypt, it could grow; and God himself cast out the heathen and planted it. He prepared room before it, and caused it to take deep root, and it filled the land. The hills were covered with the shadow of it, and the boughs thereof were like the goodly cedars. She sent out her boughs unto the sea, and her branches unto the river.

There was a remarkable providence, and discipline of providence, in the selection and training of the chosen keeper of this vine, in its infancy, before its final setting in New England soil. The roots of this vine, under the care of John Robinson of Norfolk, strike back into the year 1602, when, in the language of the pious pilgrim, Governor Bradford, certain men of England, "whose hearts the Lord had touched with heavenly zeal for his truth, shook off the yoke of Anti-Christian bondage, and as the Lord's free people, join themselves by a covenant of the Lord, into a church estate, in the fellowship of the gospel." In the persecutions and labors of this band of Christians, Mr. Robinson participated, and his friends were almost ruined by the tyranny of the Ecclesiastical courts. Born in 1576, and educated at Cambridge, he became a minister of the gospel in 1607, and in the same year went over with the Pilgrim Church into Holland.

John Robinson of Norfolk! There is all his name, title, he raldry. Who knew or cared for him, except to endeavor to set foot upon him, as a worm, save those "touched hearts," of which Governor Bradford spake, that came with him out of bondage. He never reached this country, though his heart was set upon it, nor does his name appear with the roll of the May Flower Pilgrims, except for a few moments on the deck of the vessel THIRD SERIES, VOL. IV. No. 1.

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in prayer; and, therefore, it is not so embalmed in our history as that of some other men not at all superior to him either by nature or grace, or in the honor of original obscurity and humility. He was a remarkable man. Had he come to this country, what between the love of faithful souls, the strength of a great mind, a sacred superiority of trial and suffering, and the weakness of his flock, his own power might have been too great, might have been laid up to accumulate, and might have grown into worms, like Israel's manna, kept for future use, and not received from God and Providence, according to occasions of want. There was a wonderful guardianship from God against this evil, an evil which lay in man's nature, and not in mere circumstances, not only in the case of Robinson, but of some other dear and necessary men, dangerous by their very dearness. It was a wonderful providence which sent this vine to take root in New England, not only a Church without a Bishop, but without even the simple New Testament Bishop, the ascension gift of Christ, the beloved, legitimate, unusurping pastor. The Church was to be thrown in its simplest original elements as a band of Christians, in its barest independence of any earthly power, and its most entire dependence upon Christ, into a state of isolation, unrivalled, unequalled, since the formation of the Church at Antioch. There was in all this an evident return of Christ's Church to those original sources of power which it possessed, disconnected from any earthly organization in existence, at the day of Pentecost. There was in this kind of original plantation in New England one of the greatest exercises of God's superintending wisdom ever manifested in the history of mortals. It seemed as if man was to do nothing, God everything, in this new reformation and creation of the Church.

Its foundations were sunk deep down in an abyss of trial, in faith, in self-denial, in love, in God. There was hardly ever in the world a more complete cutting off from all human dependence, no, not even when the Israelites, just escaped from Egypt, with the chariots of Pharaoh rattling behind them, stood at the Red Sea. And, indeed, the miracle in such a case is a lower kind of training of the soul to faith, than the deliverance by the pressure of God's gradual providence, when the sense can see nothing but nature, and the soul must be armed with grace, must see God by faith, or see him not at all. The miracle is but the bud of greater dealings, of a more refined and exquisite spiritual training; the miracle is good for babes, the great things of God's ordinary providence for men; the discipline of the soul for a life of faith, and for the daily sight of God in daily trials, is the most costly and the greatest thing. The old miraculous dispensation was comparatively crude, but this is more perfect; that was of sense, but this is of the Spirit.

Mr. Robinson was a remarkable man, placed in circumstances very like those of the original founders of Christianity, and with a simplicity, honesty, and freedom of spirit, singularly similar to As Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, he was called by some. the author of Independency; but Mr. Cotton of New England afterwards wisely replied, that "the New Testament was the author of it, and that it was received in the times of purest primitive antiquity, many hundred years before Mr. Robinson was born." Besides this, the Church, and not the pastor, were appointed to plant it, and under God did plant it, in New England. Unto principalities and powers in heavenly places, as well as to the gazing monarchies on earth, and angry counsellings together of kings and rulers, has been made known by the Church, as of old, the manifold wisdom of God.

There was at this time a degree of religious liberty in Holland, such as was not to be found anywhere else in the world. It was brought about by the fierceness of the persecutions of Philip the Second, through the exercise of God's great prerogative of bringing good out of evil, and causing the wrath of man to praise him. The Romish Church, in the persons of Philip and the Duke of Alva, put up a gallows in the Netherlands to hang the Reformation, but hung their own cause upon it. To this place of liberty Robinson and the Pilgrims with much difficulty escaped in 1607. It was a night of many nights in one, when they made their Exodus out of Egypt. Not in one body, but separately, individually, and with many tears, harassments, and persecutions, did they effect their escape. And when this was accomplished, they dwelt many years as strangers on the Egyptian side of the Red Sea, before they crossed the ocean to come to that Canaan, which God had chosen and prepared for them.

They removed from Rameses and pitched in Succoth ; and they departed from Succoth and pitched in Etham. They seemed all the while to hear as of old the voice of Jehovah, "I will take you to me for a people, and 1 will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the Lord your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning the which I did swear to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob: and I will give it to you for an heritage." God, who was with them, made them feel that it was not for a lasting encampment in Amsterdam or Leyden that he had brought them out, nor for themselves alone, nor for their own enjoyment, that he was leading them. God awoke within them the great purpose of crossing the ocean, and incited them to it by many inducements, providences, and trials, inward and external. Above all, God caused to grow up in their hearts, in the language of Gov. Bradford, "a great hope and inward zeal of laying some good foundation, or at least to make some way