ARTICLE IV.-THE FREE CHURCHES OF ENGLAND.

A History of the Free Churches of England from A. D. 1688 to A. D. 1851. By HERBERT S. SKEATS. Second edition. London: Arthur Miall. New York: Scribner, Welford & Co. 8vo. pp. 638.

In a ponderous but very readable volume of more than six hundred pages, Mr. Herbert S. Skeats (of whom we know nothing more) gives the history of the Protestant Dissenters from the Established Church of England, beginning with the expulsion of the Stuart dynasty, and coming down to the census of 1851. We in this country are familiar with the story of Puritanism from the date of the Reformation-or rather from Wycliffe and the Lollards; for it is inseparably blended with our own ecclesiastical history. But this volume tells a story with which American readers are naturally less familiar.

Modern Dissent in England is doubtless the historic sequel of the old Puritanism. The names of the great Puritans, Baxter, Howe, Calamy, and the rest-the memories of the Westminster Assembly and the Long Parliament-are a portion of what the Free Churches of England have inherited from the past. Yet the men who occupy, to-day, the position once held by the Puritans, properly so called, are not the Dissenters, but rather the thoroughly Protestant members of the Establishment-the Calvinistic or Low Church party-those who regard Ritualism with a religious abhorrence. They are the modern Puritans, believers in a national church established by the State, but dissatisfied with the discipline and tendencies of the national church as it is. They are unlike their predecessors, the Puritans of the heroic age, in that they meekly submit to existing regulations, and do not brave the penalties of non-conformity. They are neither imprisoned nor silenced; they are not deprived of their livings; they are not driven into exile; they go not forth to plant in some wilderness a new church purified from all mediæval corruption; they

do not even agitate their native country for a further reformation; they satisfy their consciences with protesting against the antique novelties brought in by men who are trying to get rid of even that measure of reformation which was wrought by Queen Elizabeth. The Dissenters have been, in reality, ever since the date from which Mr. Skeats begins his story, Separatists from the Church of England, as by law established, and not a Puritan or reforming party within the Church of England.

Under the Long Parliament, the Church of England was essentially a Presbyterian establishment, though the details of a classical and synodical government, like that in Scotland, were never perfected. Under the Protectorate, there were some clergymen who preferred the Congregational polity, and were permitted to "gather" churches on the platform of that polity in their parishes or in the ecclesiastical edifices in which they ministered. But the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II. was followed by the Act of Uniformity and the memorable expulsion of nearly two thousand non-conforming ministers from their places in the ecclesiastical establishment. Of those ejected ministers, very few were Separatists or Independents; the great majority were Puritans, heartily accepting the theory of a national church established by law. They were commonly known as Presbyterians; though many of them repudiated that name, and, with Baxter, avowed their preference for a reduced or parochial episcopacy after the scheme proposed by Archbishop Usher. For nearly forty years they cherished a dying hope of so much reformation in the Church of England as would permit them to serve in its ministry. What they desired and waited for was not merely to be tolerated as seceders from the established order, but rather to be comprehended in the establishment. It was not till the great men of the Puritan age had gone to their graves, and the liberal intentions of William III. had been thwarted and finally baffled by the fanatical toryism of Parliament, that the Non-conformists generally accepted the situation and gave up their cherished hope of comprehension. Despair and the Toleration Act converted the Puritans into Protestant Dissenters. Thenceforward their congregations,

instead of being merely provisional arrangements to serve a temporary purpose, began to be permanent institutions independent of the state.

The revolution, then, of 1688, followed by the Toleration Act in 1689, marks the end of Puritanism as a struggle for reformation in the state church. Although the desire and the hope of "comprehension " lingered for many years in many minds on each side of the line between Conformists and Nonconformists, the story, from that date, exhibits the growth of religious institutions organized and maintained on what is now called "the voluntary principle." The Puritans, with their full belief that ecclesiastical reformation was the duty of the state, found themselves under a necessity either of compromising their consciences or of becoming reformers on their own account by gathering voluntary churches independent of the legally established Church of England. With all their dislike of Separation, they found themselves in the position of Separatists. They were "compelled to volunteer;" and the difference between a voluntary church established by Puritans or Presbyterians and a voluntary church established by Separatists or Independents became, as the hope of comprehension slowly died away, too little to be easily measured. Less than three years after the Revolution, less than two years after the passage of the Toleration Act, the difference was felt to be so slight, that a scheme of union between the ministers of the two denominations was contrived at London, and was joyfully accepted not only there but in many other parts of England. The platform of principles on which the union was affected, is said to have been drawn up by John Howe, and is singularly related to the history of American Cangregationalism. Approved and commended by the Saybrook Synod in 1708, it acquired a sort of authority in the Connecticut churches, and became, in some degree, a precedent for later "plans of union" with Presbyterians. Its full title, as originally published, was, "Heads of Agreement assented to by the United Ministers in and about London, formerly called Presbyterian and Congregational; not as a measure for any national constitution, but for the preservation of order in our congregations that cannot come up to the common rule by law established.”

The attempted fusion of the two denominations into one was baffled by personal and theological controversies that arose soon afterwards, and not by any incompatibility in respect to church government. The so-called Presbyterian churches in England at that time were mutually independent; and the "Heads of Agreement" hardly differ from the Cambridge Platform except as it is less argumentative and theoretical, more compendious in its statement of principles, and generally more felicitous in expression. No good reason can be discovered for the failure of the attempt. Had the fusion of the two denominations in one confederation of churches been effected in accordance with the Heads of Agreement, the Free Churches of England would have been, from the date of the Toleration Act, a more powerful element in the religious life of the nation than they have ever been till within the last forty years.

The existence of Non-conforming churches in England, since the Toleration Act, as well as before, has been a contiuued conflict with the spirit of oppression. While they have been free in the sense of being constituted as voluntary associations, their freedom in relation to the civil power has been only a limited "toleration "--the very word implying that they existed not because they had a right to exist, but only by concession from a power which had a right to prohibit their existence. In order to understand the legal status of dissenters from the doctrine or ritual of the ecclesiastical establishment in England, at the date at which the old Puritanism was compelled to identify itself with Separation, and till the reign of George IV., it is necessary to recollect the gist and extent of the memorable Toleration Act which was all that William the Deliverer could obtain from his Parliament, by way of concession to Protestant Dissenters. That act does not acknowledge at all the right of an Englishman to hold any opinion or to worship in any way different from the opinions and the worship established by Queen Elizabeth and reëstablished under Charles II. It grounds itself not on any consideration of justice, but only on the consideration of political expediency: "Forasmuch as some ease to scrupulous consciences, in the exercise of religion, may be an effectual means to unite their Majesties' Protestant

subjects in interest and affection." In view of that consideration the legislative power of England enacted that persons dissenting from the Church of England might be exempted from the operation of existing laws against separate assemblies for worship and against absence from the parish churches, on condition of their making certain oaths and declarations supposed to be necessary for the security of the kingdom and of the established religion; but with a proviso that no meeting of dissenters held "with the doors locked, barred, or bolted," and no person present in such a meeting should have the benefit of the exemption. Dissenting ministers were required to subscribe the thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England except three and a part of a fourth-an additional exception being made in favor of Antipedobaptists. A special provision was also made for "certain other persons" (Quakers), who, instead of the oath, were to make a solemn affirmation, and, instead of the Articles, were to subscribe a profession of their belief in the Divine Trinity. But no assembly of Dissenters could have the offered toleration unless it should be held in a place previously certified and registered as a place of worship. Assemblies of registered Dissenters, with registered ministers, in registered houses, were to be protected from disturbance and insult. Such was the Toleration Act under which dissent from the Church of England began to be, under the laws of England, not quite a crime.

To trace the limits of the religious liberty conceded by that memorable Act, we must remember what it did not concede. First, the Act itself provided explicitly that no Dissenter should be exempted from the payment of tithes and other dues for the support of the established worship. Secondly, by the Corporation Act, made in the height of the reaction under Charles II., they were excluded from office in every municipal corporation; a participation in the Lord's Supper, according to the established ritual, as well as a profession under oath that it is unlawful, on any pretence whatever, to take arms against the king, being exacted of all persons elected to such offices. Thirdly, the Test Act, though it was made chiefly for the purpose of preventing Charles II. and his brother James II., then heir presumptive to the crown, from filling all offices of trust