appeared soon afterwards from their petition of 1606*, in which the ceremonies, deemed by the Hampton Court remonstrants, indifferent, were pronounced actually sinful. V. Whitgift did not long survive these discussions. He died the spring following, in the seventy-second year of his age; having pronounced with his last breath, the words, "Pro ecclesia Dei." In times when parties run in violent op position, nothing is so difficult to ascertain as historical characters. Whitgift, a high churchman, and a high Calvinist, has suffered alike from the unfair detraction of Puritan and Arminian censurers. Faultless he was not, for he was a man; too ostentatious for an ecclesiastic; and in Mary's reign, it is said, complying with the popish regimen, rather than honestly relinquishing his benefice." But what a monster," I quote the venerable and weighty eloquence of an old historian-" what a monster might be made of the fairest beauty in the world, if a limner should leave what is lovely, and collect only what he findeth amiss!-I know there be a black bill in the whitest swan: yet only to insist on faults is See Neale, vol. i. p. 419. Two proclamations were issued in the following month; the one giving an account of the conference, and requiring conformity to the Liturgy and ceremonies; and the other commanding all priests and Jesuits, commissioned by foreign powers, to quit the kingdom. a most odious employment. God, we know, so useth his fan as to keep the corn, and to drive away the chaff: but who is he that winnoweth so as to throw away the good grain, and to retain the chaff only?" To these remarks I shall add, that in the drawing up of characters, a sort of antithetical halfpraise is frequently bestowed, which has more point than truth, and injures perhaps as deeply as unqualified abuse. And when I consider that Whitgift patronized the foreign divines in England, and endowed the school of Croydon; that his house was an academy for young students; that he treated the recusants of both denominations with mildness, being attached to the government of the Catholics, and the doctrine of the Puritans; that his domestics were armed in loyalty, and first suppressed the insurrection of Essex; and that he boldly remonstrated with Elizabeth against the sacrilege of alienating the church-lands, by granting them to courtiers,-I cannot esteem it just or generous to designate him, with some writers, as a man "more learned than tolerant, more hospitable than charitable, and more magnificent than meek." He was succeeded in the primacy, Dec. 4, 1604, after a vacancy of nine months, by Bancroft, Bishop of London; who reinforced by his suggestions, the notions entertained by James respecting the arbitrary power of the English sovereign. VI. James opened his first parliament with an harangue of great sense and merit: in which he stated that he found three religions within his realm; that by law established; the Catholic, or more properly the Popish; and, lastly, that of the Puritans, a sect lurking within the bowels of the church. He confessed the Catholic to be the mother church, though tainted with various blemishes and corruptions;—he wished to abolish all rigorous statutes in force against its members;and professed his willingness to meet them half way in any plausible scheme for re-union. -- With these sentiments all parties were alike dissatisfied. Bare toleration contented not the Catholics: the Puritans deemed themselves calumniated and insulted; while the members of the church in general expressed their disgust at the proposed concessions to the Papists, and at the idle plan for a midway conciliation. The parliament, chiefly consisting, in the lower house, of Puritans, petitioned James for a relaxation of ecclesiastical laws; and being suspicious of him, they passed a bill, disabling the crown, or courtiers through the medium of the crown (a shift which the statute of Elizabeth had left them), from receiving conveyances of land belonging to the bishoprics. To this, James readily assented: glad, perhaps, to silence the importunity with which his courtiers solicited, and to impose a check on that facility with which he was himself too much disposed to grant, favours injurious to the church*. VII. In the convocation of the same year, a book of one hundred and forty-one canons, collected out of the articles, injunctions, and synodical acts, published in the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth, passed both chambers, after some debate. It contained all the canons now in force, together with several others, since expunged by an act of parliament for granting indulgence to dissenters. Neale inveighs against them as bearing hard against the Puritans; but those which he produces only evince the claim of the church (the reasonable claim of any society whatever) to excommunicate or deprive of its privileges such persons as refuse conformity to its regulations. VIII. Bancroft, on his accession to the metropolitan chair, rigorously urged conformity to the rubric, and to the canons recently established. About the same time the judges, whom the King had consulted, determined, that it was lawful for the high commissioners to deprive Puritan ministers, for non-conformity to the ceremonies which * Provision was also made by the legislature, for the rigorous prosecution of recusants; the act of Mary against the marriage of the clergy was repealed; and all processes, citations, and judgments in the spiritual court, were directed to be issued in the King's name, and to bear his seal. It has been several times determined in Westminster Hall, that these canons bind only the clergy, the laity not being represented in convocation. these canons had prescribed. Encouraged by this decision, the Primate prepared for assailing the obnoxious irregulars with fresh violence. He found not the London clergy, however, disposed to second his design: for, having been summoned to Lambeth, that they might repeat their subscription to the three articles of Whitgift, agreeably to the letter of the thirty-sixth canon," that they subscribed willingly and from the heart,”—many withdrew themselves, and others refused their signatures. The court, who had hitherto believed the number of non-conformists to be trifling, were now alarmed at the prospect of a scarcity of preachers for the churches: and till a succession of conforming clergy could be obtained from the universities, it was deemed expedient for the present to relax the severity of the exaction in regard to the cross and surplice. The bishops were instructed, in a pastoral letter from the Primate, to grant a delay to the subscription of persons already fixed in churches; yet on no account to admit any one, without subscription, to the discharge of ecclesiastical functions. Some among the Puritan clergy made a verbal promise of conformity, though they declined repeating their subscription: and to such it was that time was now afforded for deliberation. Others positively refused both subscription and conformity; and directions were issued, that these, if lecturers, should be silenced; if beneficed persons, deprived. Much has been |