74. | ORIENTATION.
be defeated by the little popes at home. It broke out at last in open revolt against the tyranny of the Stuarts, and the cruelties of the Star Chamber and High-Commission Court, wnich were not far behind the Spanish Inquisition, and punished freedom of speech and of the press as a crime against society.
5. Puritanism ruled England for about twenty years (1640 to 1660), which form the most intensely earnest and excited period in her history. Jt saved the rights of the people against the oppression of their rulers, but it punished intolerance with intolerance, and fell into the opposite error of enforcing Puritan, in the place of Episcopal, uniformity, though with far less severity. The Long Parliament abolished the Episcopal hierarchy and liturgy (Sept. 10, 1642), expelled about two thousand royalist clergymen from their benefices, and executed on the block Archbishop Laud (1644) and King Charles I. (1649), as traitors ; thus crowning them with the glory of martyrdom and preparing the way for the Restoration. Episcopalians now became champions of toleration, and Jeremy Taylor, the Shakespeare of the English pulpit, raised his eloquent voice for the Luberty of Prophesying (1647), which, however, he afterward recalled in part when he was made a bishop by Charles IT. (1661).'
The Westminster Assembly of Divines (1643-1652), which numbered one hundred and twenty-one divines and several laydeputies and is one of the most important ecclesiastical meetings ever held, was intrusted by Parliament with the impossible task of framing a uniform creed, discipline and ritual for three kingdoms. The extraordinary religious commotion of the times gave rise to all sorts of religious opinions from the most rigid orthodoxy to deism and atheism, and called forth a lively pamphlet war on the subject of toleration, which became an apple of discord in the Assembly. Thomas Edwards, in his Gangrena (1645), enumerated, with uncritical exaggeration, no less than sixteen sects and one hundred and seventy-six miscellaneous
1 Coleridge regards this revocation as the only blot on Taylor’s character. His second wife was a natural daughter of Charles I.
§ 12. RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE AND LIBERTY. 79
“errors, heresies and blasphemies,” exclusive of popery and deism."
There were three theories on toleration, which may be best stated in the words of George Gillespie, one of the Scottish commissioners of the Assembly.”
(a) The theory of the “ Papists who hold it to be not only no sin, but good service to God to extirpate by fire and sword all that are adversaries to, or opposers of, the Church and Catholic religion.” Under this theory John Hus and Jerome of Prague were burnt at the Council of Constance. Gillespie calls it, in the Preface, “the black devil of idolatry and tyranny.”
(Ὁ) “The second opinion doth fall short as far as the former doth exceed : that is, that the magistrate ought not to inflict any punishment, nor put forth any coercive power upon heretics and sectaries, but on the contrary grant them liberty and toleration.” This theory is called “the white devil of heresy and schism,” and ascribed to the Donatists (?), Socinians, Arminians and Independents. But the chief advocate was Roger Williams, the Baptist, who became the founder of Rhode Island.* He went to the root
1 For the extensive literature on the subject see the list of Dr. Dexter, The Congregationalism of the last three hundred years as seen in its Literature (N. York, 1880), Appendix, pp. 49-82. The Hansard Knollys (Baptist) Society has published, in 1846 at London, a series of Tracts on Liberty of Conscience and Persecution, written from 1614-1661. I mention only those which I have myself examined in the rich McAlpin Collection of the Union Theol. Seminary, N. York.
? Wholesome Severity reconciled with Christian Lberty, or the true Resolution of a present Controversie concerning Liberty of Conscience. Here you have the question stated, the middle way between Popish tyrannie and Schismatizing Liberty approved, and also confirmed from Scripture, and the testimonies of Divines, yea, of whole churches . . . . And inconclusion a Parenetick to the five Apologists for choosing Accemnodation rather than Toleration. London, 1645 (40 pages). Dexter (p.56) assigns the pamphlet, which is anonymous, to Gillespie, and its sentiments agree With those he expressed in a sermon he preached before the House of Lords, August 27, 1645.
* He wrote “ The Bloody Tenent of Persecution,” etc., 1644 (248 pp.), and “ The Bloody Tenent yet more Bloody,” etc., 1652 (373 pp.). Among the anonymous pamphlets on the same side, we mention The Compassionate Samaritane, Unbinding the Conscience, and pouring oyle into the wounds which have been made upon the Separation, etc., 1644 (84 pp.).