the recently founded Emmanuel College, and Whitaker, Master of St. John's, both leading men in the University, are mentioned as examples of this moderate party. Like almost all the earlier Elizabethan bishops, they sympathised with the Puritans in the main, but were unwilling to accept the consequences of doing so openly, and they utterly condemned the violence, intemperance, and coarseness of the polemics; but in those days, as in all times in which party spirit, and especially religious party spirit, runs high, moderation is the unpardonable sin, and a theologian who ventures to suggest that a question has two sides, is consigned by both parties to the bottomless pit, as a hopeless example of Laodicean tepidity.
The Puritans insisted strongly on the absolute and divine right of their 'discipline' or form of Church government. It was, according to them, taken direct from Holy Scripture, and had an exclusive claim to the obedience of all Christian men.[1] Whitgift, and Hooker himself, in common with all the earlier defenders of the English Church against them, had insisted that the Church was free in these matters, as also in that of rites and ceremonies; and also on the necessity for some degrees of authority in the Church, and the consequent absurdity of requiring equality among all ministers. Now, for the first time, in February 1588, a sermon was preached by Dr. Bancroft (afterwards Archbishop) at Paul's Cross, in which he suggested, rather than asserted, the divine right of bishops in the Church of England, thus, as he supposed, making good its position against the asserted divine right of the Pope on the one hand and of the Puritan 'discipline' on
- ↑ See Hunt's Religious Thought in England, vol. i. pp. 54-60, for a short résumé of these arguments.
