God and the Lawe of our Lande. It was a collection of Puritan papers, letters, petitions, complaints, arguments, and proceedings of the ecclesiastical authorities, written between 1570 and 1588.
The title indicated that it was a portion of a larger collection, which the repressive action of the government prevented from publication in its entirety. In fact most copies of the Parte of a Register printed were destroyed by the authorities. Where the manuscripts for proposed further issues may now be, if in existence, is unknown; but fortunately they were copied, in the seventeenth century, for Roger Morrice (1628–1702), a clergyman of Puritan sympathies, and the transcript came in some way, now unknown, into the Williams Library of London. The collection was carelessly, but somewhat extensively, used by Neal in his History of the Puritans, and by Brook in his Lives of the Puritans, and it has been consulted on special topics by a few other authors. In general, it has been neglected or ignored.
The marked recent interest in Elizabethan religious history has induced Dr. Albert Peel to prepare a careful calendar which constitutes the volumes now under review. The work has been admirably done. The calendar includes 257 documents, the more important of which lie between 1570 and 1590, and the large majority in the last ten years of that period. Their content is such as to justify the claim of the editor "that no accurate account of the ecclesiastical history of the years 1570–1590 can be written without consulting them".
Naturally such a collection is of a very miscellaneous character, but there is abundant evidence of the aims of the Puritans, of the attempts made to realize those wishes in practice, and of the resistance encountered from the ecclesiastical authorities. Much light is thrown on the extent and localities of the Puritan movement among the clergy, and on the relatively scanty participation of the laity in it, in contrast to the seventeenth century. For the general student of the religious conditions of the period no documents are more suggestive than the elaborate surveys of the ministry of a considerable portion of England prepared by Puritans in 1586, and giving names of clergymen, parishes, sometimes stipends, and indicating whether pluralists, residents, and preachers or "dumbe". Even more significant is the estimate of moral worth or worthlessness given, with definite charges in the case of a large portion of the clergy here enumerated. Such charges were, of course, partizan; but their number and definiteness leave a distinct impression that many of the Elizabethan parish ministers, quite apart from any question of ability to preach, were unworthy of their office. As Professor Firth remarks in his interesting preface:
The revolutions through which the Church passed after 1551 were not calculated to increase the learning and efficiency of the clergy. Puritans and Bishops alike aimed at raising the standard, by different methods, and each with some success, though the process was a slow one.
