It was not only by such means, however, that James showed his deepening attachment to the semi-Romish party that was rising in the Church. This party aimed, under a totally different feeling from that which impelled the early reformers, to assimilate the religious observances of the country to those that had existed in the old Catholic times. Regular attendance in the parish church on Sundays, and the old recreations and games afterwards, was one of their favourite devices for this purpose; and the Book of Sports was the consequence. There was nothing which more deeply offended the Puritan. It violated at once his profound convictions and his most sacred feelings. The May-pole and Sunday dance on the village green became a standing opprobrium to his conscience, as they were a dishonour to his religion; and among all his incentives to violent action, none was stronger than his outraged feeling against a system identified to him with such desecrating abominations.

After the accession of Charles in 1625, the great parties in the Church and country became more definitely and widely opposed to one another. A quarter of a century's renewed and embittered conflict had left traces wholly irremovable. James's selfish vanity and pedantic tyrannies had thwarted and annoyed the popular instincts at every point, without doing anything to extinguish them. Beyond doubt, the powers opposed to Puritanism had lost during this period both in intellectual and moral strength. The proud earnestness which had distinguished the leading churchmen

gether." "The lecturers," says the more sober Selden, "get a great deal of money, because they preach the people tame, as a man watches a hawk, and then they do what they list with them."

of the age of Elizabeth, the national sense and dignity which they had represented, had passed away; while Puritanism itself had grown, from being a mere contentious and unruly element, into a great moral and political as well as religious cause.

It is impossible to conceive any one more in contrast with this growing phase of the national life than the monarch who now succeeded to its guidance. Trained under the tutorship of Buckingham and Laud, he had attained to manhood without the slightest notion of liberty of conscience or liberty of any kind. His reason was a slave to the dogmas which he had been taught, and all his feelings and sympathies were enlisted on the same side. His judgment was narrow, and his will at once sanguine and perverse. Blameless in personal conduct, and of pure and pious affections, all that was good equally with all that was evil in his nature and education, clung to the fabric of the constitution in Church and State as it had descended to him. He cared not so much for its principles-for of principles his mind did not fit him to have any clear conception-but he admired and worshipped its forms and supposed prerogatives. He was, in short, a natural despot, with the mystic enthusiasm and deep falsehood, without the resolute energy and unscrupulous decision, of the race. He and Laud suited each other perfectly; the same dictatorial and overbearing policy in conception, the same earnestness in details, the same love of ceremonies, the same intensity in trifles, the same suppleness of principle and the same rigour of creed, the same mysticism and the same formalism, characterised them. Their sympathies exactly met, their views coalesced, and their ambition sought the same channels of gratification. Under their united action, the question

which had so long agitated the country assumed dimensions far more serious and startling than had yet characterised it. It became a question not merely of ceremonialism and anti-ceremonialism, nor even of Episcopacy and Presbytery, but of Protestant freedom and popular rights against Popery in the Church and absolutism in the State. The principles of the prolonged controversy had worked themselves into this broader and more fundamental opposition. The ground was taken up for the final conflict approaching between the parties.

It was the political element at length mingling in the controversy which carried it to its full height. Charles I., in his more consistent assertion of despotic power in the face of an increasing disaffection, was destined to bind up the opposing forces into a fiercer and more compact antagonism, and to precipitate them towards their great outbreak. The gap between the parties had gone on widening and changing its attitude, until they fairly confronted each other in deadly hostility. It was not so much that any new claims were advanced on the part of the Crown-precedents might be found for the most obnoxious exercises of the royal prerogative (although scarcely for the exact form of them)-but it was that such claims were no longer tenable in the face of the changes in public opinion, and the altered relations which the Crown and Parliament, as the representative of that opinion, now bore to one another. The absoluteness which was natural and possible to Elizabeth, which had an excuse in the comparatively disorganised condition of the national sentiment, and which rested, beyond doubt, on a great conservative interest in the State and in the Churchwhich, in short, had so much national life in it, and

was sustained by such moral dignity as to enlist in its support all the highest minds of the time-had ceased to have the same reality and meaning in the hands of Charles; while, by its mere continued exercise, it had rather grown in pretension than abated any of its severity. It had lost its weight without losing its sting. The great interests on which it rested had disappeared, while it seemed to stand as insolently erect as ever. The Tudor spirit had fled from it, while it showed even an uglier face of tyranny than in the Tudor age.

The mere continuance of the strife had helped to aggravate its issue. Constant provocation incensed the Crown and increased its arbitrariness, while diminishing its material and moral strength. The dominant party in the Church suffered from the reaction of their uncontrolled privileges-especially from the withdrawal of that earnest spiritual life which, naturally inclining to a freer exercise of spiritual rights than the Church allowed, was absorbed in nonconformity. There are many painful evidences of this in the social history of the time, as preserved in Baxter's account of his early years, and in Mrs Hutchison's Memoirs. Under the force of the restraint which was everywhere laid upon the movements of the religious life, great laxity of manners had sprung up under the shelter of the Church-nay, within the bosom of the Church itself. The parochial clergy, who made themselves the mere creatures of a State system, showed not merely a lack of earnestness, but frequently a deplorable irreligion and immorality in their conduct.* The system became still more contemptible in the men who represented it, than oppressive in the agencies by *See Sketch of Baxter's Life.

which it was enforced. ligious and social impulses which were confined and driven into obscurity gathered strength in their confinement. Kept under control, they got hardened and disciplined instead of extinguished. A wide, though lurking, popular feeling was gradually awakened, which began not merely to resent the old interferences with religious freedom, but to oppose itself constitutionally to the royal prerogative. Religious oppression was recognised as merely one aspect of a power which was inimical to the national freedom in all its manifestations. The old spirit of English independence was aroused, and looked abroad for its enemies on which to take a deadly vengeance.

On the other hand, the re

It is a striking process of revolution by which a controversy about vestments passed into a great national struggle. The progress, the outbreaks, and the triumph of the contest are all singularly characteristic. The patience of resentment, and yet the tenacity of conviction, on the part of the people, gradually passing in the one case beyond bounds, and, in the other case, swelling into a mighty and indomitable principle; the vacillations and contending fanaticisms in the Church; the infatuation and blinded selfishness of the two Stuart monarchs; the mingled heroism and caution of the Parliamentary leaders; the disorderly humours which might have proved ruinous, and the patriotic resistance which might have been broken or wearied out, had not a great Hero stepped forward to give unity to the former, and to carry the latter forward in a splendid career of victory; the magnanimous and apparently unselfish advance of this Hero, till, returning from the bloody glory of his

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