THE history of English Puritanism still remains to be written. Separate aspects of the subject have been treated in detail by different writers. M. Guizot, Mr Carlyle, Mr Foster, and, from an ecclesiastical point of view, Mr Marsden, have all contributed by their labours to a right understanding of the great constitutional and religious struggle of the seventeenth century. But it cannot be said that the subject, as a whole, in its strange complexity of political, military, religious, moral, and social relations, has received as yet adequate treatment. Who, for example, has pictured to us the living features of those diverse sects, whose presence meets us everywhere in surveying the period, but whose real character and influence it is so difficult to estimate? The present volume has no pretensions to be a history of Puritanism: it professes merely to give some side-glimpses into that history-openings into a wide field. If it has any peculiar merit, this will probably be found in the analysis which it presents of the moral meaning and characteristics of Puritanism as exhibited in the great lives which it tries to depict. There is nothing in the subject that retains more interest; and this feeling has been present to the writer throughout, and served to give, in his own mind, some degree of unity to the successive sketches of the volume. ST MARY'S COLLEGE, ST ANDREWS, 5th February 1861. CONTENTS. Character of the English Reformation, Calvinism and Puritanism, Epochs in the history of Puritanism, Act of Uniformity. Balance of parties in the Church, 1564-5. Extreme policy of Elizabeth, Sufferings of Fox, Coverdale, Sampson, Humphrey, 1567. Meeting of Dissenters in Plumber's Hall, PAGE |