ties as the episcopalians themselves. Cromwell and his independents saved this nation from the gloomy asceticism, which in Scotland had established a right on the part of the ministers to exercise the most unheard of interference in the private habits of individuals and families, a watchfulness, a surveillance over all the motives, opinions, tastes, and wishes of every soul in their flocks, which not even the practice of confession amongst the catholics could exceed in pressure is a priestly yoke. The anabaptists and fifth-monarchy men were ultra-republicans. The former were the crude material of the modern English baptists, who gradually moulded their opinions and practices into very much the same character as those of the independents, except as it regarded their distinctive tenet of baptism itself. The fifth-monarchy men held that as there had been four great monarchies, the Assyrian, the Persian under Cyras, the Greek and the Roman, the fifth and last was to be that of Christ, who had promised to come and reign on earth. They were, therefore, for establishing this fifth-monarchy at once; their government was to be a theocracy, the people being only under their God. These zealots, believing in a grand truth, had only antedated the millennium by an indefinite time, and long before the world was ripe for it. Some of Cromwell's generals, Harrison especially, were enthusiastic fifth-monarchy men, and had to be held, and with difficulty, in check.
But the strong hand and sense of Cromwell, so long as he lived, had enabled him to maintain a free church, in which all men of red Christian faith and feeling were permitted to officiate, except insubordinate episcopalians and catholics. Moderate episcopalians, who could conscientiously hold livings, were not expelled, so that they were of religious lives, and did not interfere with the existing government even, says Cromwell, a few anabaptists were in it. To papists the liberality of Cromwell never reached; he considered them, with the rest of his age, as belonging to the mother of superstition, and objectionable as the avowed adherents of a foreign and hostile power. Though the protector was on the whole averse to persecution, yet the fines on recusants were dilligently levied, and the presbyterians, perhaps for the most part without his knowledge, persecuted other religionists under the commonwealth—a fact amply demonstrated by the history of the Society of Friends, for during the commonwealth arose that singular people.
The doctrines and conduct of the Friends, or, as they were Boon denominated, the Quakers, marked another epoch of that age in the advance towards the true understanding of Christianity, and the acquirement of its freedom. We have seen, that notwithstanding all that the nonconformists had suffered, notwithstanding all the great minds and noble hearts which had appeared among them, they had not yet come to perceive the full and true liberty of Christ. They objected to certain ceremonies and habits, and certain religions opinions, but they did not object at all to the establishment of a state religion,—many of them not even to the episcopal hierarchy, but were a part of it. The independents had made the nearest approach to the apprehension of perfect freedom; they had adopted and acted upon the opinion, that every congregation is independent of all others, and that no minister of the gospel possesses any jurisdiction over another; but they still admitted the right of a state establishment, and under Cromwell accepted office in one. The Friends not only proclaimed the doctrine that all state establishments of Christianity are unscriptural, but that they, violate the political rights of the subject; they therefore denounced all usurpation of human lordship over conscience; all hireling teachers of a state creed, tithes, church rates, and every ecclesiastical demand whatever. To George Fox we owe this bold and manly system, this sudden leap from the chains of long spiritual slavery, into the full freedom of the gospel law—a man to whom there has never yet been done full justice beyond the pale of his own society, and whom we have recently seen attacked by lord Macaulay with an animus extraordinary in a descendant of this society. Macaulay has represented Fox as half an idiot, but it would be far better for the world if it had more such idiots. It would be enough to set aside this splenetic opinion of a writer who has taken every opportunity to vilify the great men of Quakerism, to place against his opinion that of some great thinkers of our own country and time. Coleridge, from whom so many modern celebrities have drawn what is original in their philosophy, Emerson and Carlyle included, says, "There exist folios on the human understanding and the nature of man, which would have a far juster claim to their high rank and celebrity, if, in the whole huge volume, there could be found as much fulness of heart and intellect as burst forth in many a simple page of George Fox." Carlyle says, "This man, the first of the Quakers, and by trade a shoemaker, was one of those to whom, under ruder form, the divine idea of the universe is pleased to manifest itself; and across all the hills of ignorance and earthly degradation, shine through, in unspeakable awfulness, unspeakable beauty on their souls; who, therefore, are rightly accounted projects, God-possessed. Mountains of incumbrance, higher than Ætna, had been heaped over that spirit; but it was a spirit, and would not be buried there. That Leicester shoeshop, had men known it, was a higher place than Vatican or Loretto shrine. Stitch away, thou noble Fox! every prick of that little instrument is pricking into the heart of slavery and world-worship and the mammon god. Thy elbows jerk in strong swimmer strokes, bearing thee into lands of true liberty. Were the work done, there would be in broad Europe one free man, and thou art he."
The opinions of great men, English and American, might be numerously added, but they are the fruits by which we must recognise the tree; and from no religious reformer has the modern world received, and is receiving, more substantial benefit in weaning it from forms and task-masters to spiritual freedom. The awl of Fox still goes on pricking into the heart of slavery, world-worship, and the mammon god. I do not intend to exempt him from the charge of a certain degree of fanaticism—both he and his adherents were not altogether free from it; but the theory of his religious belief comprehended the ideal of all religious freedom. And this arose in part from that want of education which the outward-tending mind of Macaulay has seen only as a defect. Free from every educational dogma, he became struck with the importance of religion, and taking the Bible with him into the fields, he there carefully studied it, and soon discovered the true native of this beneficent dis-
