choosing; that they had argued as if the ceremonies to which they objected were indifferent instead of sinful, had barely propounded the points in controversy which they brought forward, and had wholly omitted others. The conference, however, was not useless; it showed how insignificant the objections were which the most discreet and learned of their party could advance when they were called upon to state them; and it produced a new translation of the Bible, upon which seven and forty of the most learned men in England were employed, Reynolds and one of his colleagues being of the number. They were instructed to keep as close to the version then in use, as was consistent with fidelity to the original. A truly admirable translation was thus completed, wherein, after the great advances which have been made in oriental and biblical learning, no error of main importance has been discovered. Minor ones inevitably there are; and whenever it may be deemed expedient, after this example, to correct them, we may trust that the diction will be preserved in all other parts with scrupulous veneration, and that no attempt will be made to alter what it is impossible to improve.

The marriage of the clergy, which Elizabeth had reluctantly suffered, but never could be persuaded to legitimate, was made lawful now by reviving the statute of Edward VI.: and an effectual stop was put to the alienation of church lands by an act, whereby all grants or leases of such to any person, even the King himself, for more than one and twenty years, were declared void. James was, indeed, sincerely desirous of promoting the welfare of the church. At his instigation F. Paolo Sarpi composed that admirable history of the Council of Trent, and by which the intrigues and secret springs of that assembly were laid open by one of the best and wisest members of the Romish communion; and by his means that most important work was given to the world. And when the first national synod of the Protestants was held at Dort, it was owing to the influence of the English' divines, that its sanction was not given to the monstrous doctrine of the Supralapsarians. The proceedings of the synod were sufficiently disgraceful without coming to such a conclusion; nevertheless the abominable doctrine that the Almighty has placed the greater part of mankind under a fatal necessity of commit

1 Mosheim, iv. p. 498.

ting the offences, for which he has predetermined to punish them eternally, from that time lost ground. But it became the distinguishing tenet of the nonconformists; it increased their strength, because those clergy who agreed with them at first in this point alone, gradually became political, as well as doctrinal, puritans; and it exasperated the implacable spirit of dissent, by filling them with a spiritual pride as intolerant as it was intolerable; for fancying that they were the favourites and elect of the Almighty, they looked upon all who were not with them as the reprobate; and presuming that heaven was theirs by sure inheritance, they were ready on the first opportunity to claim the earth also by the same title.

If few men have been betrayed into greater faults than James by mere facility of temper, there are few whom posterity has so unjustly depreciated. His talents were quick and lively, his understanding sound, and his acquirements such as fairly entitled him to a place among the learned men of a learned age. As he grew older he perceived wherein his opinions had been erroneous, and he was not ashamed to acknowledge and act upon the conviction of his maturer mind. He had written a treatise upon demonology; and yet in consequence of what he afterwards observed, and the discovery of many impostures which were detected by his sagacity, he was perhaps the first person who shook off the superstitious belief of witchcraft, and openly proclaimed its falsehood. He had been bred up in Calvinism, and therefore at one time regarded the Arminian opinions with abhorrence upon this point also his mind underwent a salutary change; and perceiving that the discussion tended to promote any thing, rather than devotion and charity, he enjoined all preachers to abstain from such perilous and unprofitable questions; but in this instance his authority proved as inefficient as that of the Papacy, when it was exerted afterwards with the same intent. He had been taught, like all his contemporaries, to believe that heresy was high treason against the Almighty, and therefore to be punished with death. But when a Socinian had suffered martyrdom in Smithfield, and one, who seems rather to have been crazed than heretical, at Lichfield, James perceived that such executions were impolitic, and though his abhorrence

1 Fuller, Cent. xvii. p. 74.

of the offence was not abated, felt also that they outraged the heart of man. A Spanish Arian, therefore, who had been condemned to the same dreadful death, was left in prison as long as he lived; and if other cases of the like kind had occurred it was the King's intention never to make another martyr.'

If he had proposed to repeal the law, an outcry would have been raised by zealots at home; and Protestants, as well as Romanists abroad, would have regarded it as a scandal in the English Church. The principle of toleration was acknowledged no where; that which existed in France was only an armed truce, during which both parties retained their implacable animosity against each other. In this respect, James was advanced beyond his country and his age. He saw in the Romish Church much that ought for ever to prevent its re-establishment in these kingdoms, but nothing for which the bonds of Christian charity ought to be broken: and if his desires and purposes had not been frustrated by the temper of the nation, and the spirit of the times, England would then have been placed upon that just footing with Rome, and with the Popish parts of Christendom, from which the Protestant cause would have had every thing to hope, and nothing to fear.

Hostile as the nation was to these conciliatory views, its vindictive feelings toward the Papists were violently exasperated by the discovery of the Gunpowder plot. That atrocious treason was devised by a few bigots, who had become furious, when their hopes of bringing about a Spanish invasion were frustrated by the peace with Spain. The English Catholics, as a body, were innocent of it; but the opprobrium which it brought upon their Church was not unjust, because Guy Fawkes and his associates acted upon the same principles as the head of that Church, when, in his arrogated infallibility, he fulminated his Bulls against Elizabeth, struck medals in honour of the Bartholomew massacre, and pronounced that the friar who assassinated Henri III., had performed "a famous and memorable act, not without the special providence of God, and the suggestion and assistance of his Holy Spirit!" The ringleaders were not men of desperate fortunes, but of family and condition, some of them possessed of rank and affluence, and actually enjoying the King's favour. If they had Fuller, Cent. xvii. p. 64.

felt any compunctious scruples, the sanction of their ghostly fathers quieted all doubts; and when one of their confessors, the Jesuit Garnet, suffered for his share in the treason, it was pretended that a portrait of the sufferer was miraculously formed by his blood upon the straw with which the scaffold was strewn ; the likeness was miraculously multiplied; a print of the wonder with suitable accompaniments was published at Rome; Garnet in consequence received the honour of beatification from the Pope, and the society to which he belonged enrolled him in their books as a martyr.'

The Parliament thought it necessary upon this discovery that an oath of allegiance should be required from every Papist; the Pope forbade them to take it, as being injurious to his authority, and therefore destructive to their own souls. It was, however, taken without apparent scruple or reluctance; but Romish writers, of the first eminence abroad, maintained the Papal pretensions in their whole extent and the Protestants were thus confirmed in their well-founded opinion, that the doctrine of equivocation which was publicly taught by the Romish casuists, and the belief of the Pope's absolute power, rendered it impossible to confide in the oaths of men, whose consciences were not in their own keeping. The effect was injurious to all parties, and deeply so to the nation. It frustrated the conciliatory views of a good-natured King, and a wise administration: and it strengthened that acrimonious faction, whose sole ground of quarrel with the Church of England was, that it had not separated as widely as possible from the Romanists in all forms and ceremonies. But the growth of that faction confirmed the Romanists in their attachment to the old superstition, with all its enormities and errors; for they, who seeing the moderation, the decorum, and the stability of the establishment, might gradually, like so many others, have been drawn within its pale, were deterred when they saw its moderation reproached, its decorum insulted, and its stability threatened. They apprehended, with too much reason, that the temper which had occasioned so utterly unwarrantable a schism would lead to the wildest anarchy of fanatical opinions; and they adhered, therefore, the more tenaciously to a church which was liable to no such danger.

Fuller, b. x. p. 41.

Bancroft, who succeeded Whitgift in the Primacy, pursued the proper course of ejecting from their benefices all such ministers as would not conform to the rules of the Church. They were few in number, and yet this was complained of as one of the most grievous persecutions recorded in history! Had Bancroft confined himself to this, acting uniformly upon the plain principle, that they who entered into the service of the Church were bound to observe its institutions, his conduct would have been equally politic and just. A minister estimable in all respects, saving that he troubled himself and others with, those busy scrupulosities which were the disease of the party, told him in private, that it went against his conscience to conform, and therefore he must submit to be deprived. Bancroft asked him how then he would be able to subsist? He replied, "that nothing remained, but to put himself on Divine Providence, and go a begging." "You shall not need that," the primate answered, "come to me, and I will take order for your maintenance." There was a spirit of true benevolence in this, that might have prevailed with tempers which no rigour could subdue. But Bancroft had neither the wisdom nor the moderation of Parker and Whitgift. He framed canons by which all persons who spoke in derogation of the Church of England, either as related to its doctrine or discipline, were to be excommunicated, ipso facto. The laws against libels were already too severe. And with an impolicy gross as his intolerance, when several Puritan families migrated to Virginia, that they might form a church there, according to their own opinions, and great numbers were preparing to follow them; this imprudent Primate, instead of rejoicing that so many intractable spirits were willing to transport themselves out of the country, obtained a proclamation whereby they were forbidden to leave it without a special licence from the King.

Bancroft's rigour was less injurious to the Church than the counter-conduct of his successor Abbot; a man who, inclining to the Puritans, first because he sympathized with them as a Calvinist, and afterwards as a malecontent, connived at nonconformity. Bancroft had nearly succeeded in weeding out the discontented ministers, who sought to subvert the Church in whose service they had engaged; under Abbot's patronage they became numerous enough to form a formidable party, and to