Within the past month of July there has assembled in London the first International Council of the Independents, the present-day representatives of the religious sect to which we largely owe the remodelling of the world. The Independents have remade England in their own image. The British Empire as we now know it, the American Republic as it exists to-day, are superstructures reared upon the foundations laid by the despised sectaries, who in jail, on the gallows, and on the bloody battlefield earned the royal prerogative of transforming the laws, the institutions, and the very political atmosphere of the land in which they were born.

History, all history, is as miraculous as the day dawn or the blossoming of the flowers in spring-time; but there is no more miraculous chapter in the annals of our race than the transformation effected by the Independents in the polity of the world. It is a strange reverse process to the transformation which the world wrought in the Church in the early days of Christianity. The Roman Empire in dying bequeathed its ideas, its system, and no small portion both of its genius and of its crimes, to the new religion which had sprung up under its feet in the Catacombs. The world transformed the Church, and the Popes appeared in due time as the heirs of the Cæsars. Within the last three hundred years of the Christian era we witness a great movement in the opposite direction. The Church, the Church of the Independents, has gradually transformed the world. The whole of Englishspeakingdom, if we may coin the word, is now governed upon the principles first brought into the domain of practical politics by the early Independents. Nor is it only in the English-speaking world that the Independents have created a new state. The French Revolution was but a Continental adaptation, with blood and fire accompaniments that had better have been omitted, of the fundamental doctrines for preaching which the early Independents had been hanged. They are, it may be fearlessly asserted, the remodellers of the modern world. The great principles upon which all society is now based, although they had, of course, been recognized in very early times, as in the first making of England, were first proclaimed and enforced and put in a way of practical realization by the Independents. They were the pioneers of all our liberties. The spirit which they generated in the conventicle has become the oxygen of the atmosphere of modern civilization. If you want to see the democracy of our day in its cradle, you must go back to the years when the Brownist sectaries, in the reign of Elizabeth, first confronted an intolerant and contemptuous world with the realized conception of a free commonwealth, emancipated from the feudalism of the old Monarchy and the intolerance of the Established Church-a conception which has been the matrix in which every New England beyond the Seas has been cast, and which tends every day more and more to complete the transformation of our own country. The Independent church was the germ cell of the modern Democratic state. In the United States of America and in the colonies, where the New World has been as a sheet of blank paper on which the new settlers could trace at will the outlines of the new commonwealth, the ideas of the Independents have been adopted almost in their entirety. In England, where the Old World has struck its

roots far down into the lowest strata of society, much still remains to be done before the nation fully assimilates the principles of the Independent meeting-house. The Established Church still lords it over God's heritage, offending in principle and in practice against the elementary doctrine of religious equality. The corpse of feudalism still lies in state in the House of Lords, and caste distinctions, plutocratic or otherwise, still deface and deform the simple brotherhood of a free and equal citizenship which forms the solid basis of the modern state. But everywhere and always the leaven of the Independents works and is working, and will work until it has subdued all things unto itself. The other side will, no doubt, exist. The prelates and the princes, the swashbucklers and the bravoes will survive. But they will go under. The future is not with those who seek to set up again the dead past upon its throne. It lies with the men of stronger faith and clearer insight, who first saw in the simple Christian polity of the New Testament Church the clue to the solution of the difficulties of the modern state.

The English-speaking world represents with curious fidelity the limitations as well as the abounding strength of its Independent model. Notably is this the case in two directions. The first in the failure, up to the present time, of the English communities to recognize that in citizenship as in the Church there must be neither male nor female. There are exceptions, no doubt. Wyoming is a case in point, and the right of women not only to elect but to be elected to school boards indicates the extent to which the ancient usage of the Independents in allowing women to vote in Church meetings is working its way

into the modern state. But Independents unfortunately trammelled by a literalism that made them regard the limitation imposed on Corinthian women as the universal rule of the Church, never recognized the female ministry as freely as did the Friends in the seventeenth, the Wesleyans in the eighteenth, or the Salvationists in our time. Hence the source of much trouble, and the certainty that, following the precedent of the Independent conventicle, the right to elect will be conferred upon women in the state long before they succeed in securing its logical corollary in the right to be elected.

The second point in which the Independent new modellers have somewhat hindered progress is visible in the present condition of the British Empire. The Independents, as their name implied, were jealous of the independence of each particular church and congregation. In their protests against prelates and presbyters, who were but priests writ large, they pushed the right of isolation to the extreme. As it was with them, so it has been with our colonies. Each colony acts like an independent church. It stands apart on its own feet, it elects its own officers and makes its own rules; it is a law and a world unto itself. Nothing can more clearly demonstrate the failure of either the Episcopalian, the Presbyterian, or the Methodist Church to impress its character upon the English-speaking people, than our present Imperial chaos. Independency has stamped its peculiar character upon the English world, and it would be well if it had not been quite so successful.

This is serious, but it is not fatal. The Independents are beginning somewhat tardily to recognize the need for fraternal union. This International Council is itself a proof illustrative of this tendency. But the most reassuring demonstration of the compatibility of federation with independency is afforded by the history of the United States. The sons of the Pilgrim Fathers not merely federated a continent, but when the descendants of the Cavaliers attempted to rend the Republic in twain, they showed that the heirs of the Puritan traditions were as able to wield the sword in defence of federal unity, as their forefathers were to use it in vindication of the liberties of the people. In the British Empire, the antagonism of the old with the new, and the imperfect and halting application of the principles of Independency to the body politic, have retarded the natural development of the federal principle. It is coming, however, and those who disbelieve this may at least recognize that if it does not come all is up with the Empire. Possibly and providentially this centrifugal tendency of Independency may but retard the federation of the Empire until the time has fully come for undoing the fatal mistake of George III. and of uniting the English-speaking commonwealths-Republican and Imperial-in a fraternal federation. Nothing could be more in harmony than this with the traditions of the men of the Mayflower and the men of the Commonwealth. Towards that great ideal our efforts should constantly be directed, and so strong is the sense of brotherhood amongst some of us that, if there were no other way, the reunion of the English-speaking world would be accepted on the basis of the American Constitution rather than that the old schism of last century should be made eternal. Of that, however, it is as yet unnecessary to speak.

1. THE EARLY MARTYRS OF INDEPENDENCY.

In this paper I shall not attempt to do more than to indicate by a few free rough sketches one or two of the more silent features of this sect, which has in so marvellous a fashion transfigured the world. It began, as usual,

in obscurity, and it was nourished by persecution. England, whose whole future was to be transformed by the ideas of the obscure fanatics, treated them as Herod treated the infants of Bethlehem. When Browne, Lord Burghley's kinsman, began preaching towards the close of the sixteenth century, nothing could have seemed more absurdly impossible than the prediction that the principles expounded by this obscure and somewhat erratic youth of twenty-nine would triumph over the old orders, both Catholic and Anglican, which were then in deadly strife. Yet that impossible thing has clearly come to pass. Brownist principles as to the relation of the magistrate to the Church are accepted as practical politics by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and enforced as an actual fact upon the Pope of Rome by the head of the Italian monarchy.

It is very glorious to sit as a prophet on the mountain top and to be the first to see the splendor of the new day dawning on the Eastern horizon, but its glories are apt to be forgotten in the discomforts of the exposed position and the scoffing incredulity with which the news of the sunrise is apt to be received by the dweller in the valley, to say nothing of the more active opposition of the candlestick-makers and the children of darkness who hate the light because their deeds are evil. The early Independents had their fair share of the disadvantages of the post of pioneer.

Robert Browne, from whom the Independents were first known as Brownists, as the Methodists became known as Wesleyans, was a Rutland gentleman, educated at Cambridge, who about the year 1580 set the eastern countries aflame by the preaching of the fundamental principles of Independency. Independency seems to have found the eastern counties the most congenial soil. They were to Independency what Scotland was to Presbyterianism. Here Browne preached. Here Cromwell was born, from thence the Pilgrim Fathers sailed to found the new world beyond the seas, and here it was that the Puritans founded the association which shattered the Stuart monarchy into irretrievable ruin. Browne's doctrine was, in its essence, the doctrine of every sincere democrat in every land. Democracy is saturated, often unconsciously, with Christian ideas. Browne made Christ the corner-stone of his whole system. Equally against the Romanists, who proclaimed that the headship of the Church belonged to the Pope, and against the Anglicans, who claimed the headship for the sovereign of England, Browne asserted that "One is your Lord, even Christ," and he followed that up by the equally apostolic corollary that "All ye are brethren." "The voice of the whole people guided by the elders and the forwardest, is the voice of God." Over the Christian democracy no apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, teacher, or particular elder was suffered to bear rule or exercise authority. Each little community of believing men and women was a microcosm of the Church Universal; Christ was its only Head, and all its members were equal. The lead was to the worthiest and the forwardest. Here we have the aboriginal bedrock of democracy. All ranks, hierarchies, feudalisms disappear. The career is open to all talents. The drayman is equal to the noble, the peasant to the prince. this equality there is something of the same spirit as in the faith of Islam. Indeed, no one can read Ockley's "History of the Saracens" without being reminded in every page of the Puritans of the Commonwealth. But the Independent apostle, unlike Mohammed, grasped the doctrine of liberation, and supplemented his gospel of equality by the equally emphatic assertion of the gospel of religious liberty. The civil magistrate, he taught, had no right to

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interfere in the domain of spiritual affairs. Agains Erastianism in every shape and form the Independents have always protested. It is one of the points upon which we often find ourselves more in sympathy with the "pretensions" of the Church of Rome than with the subserviency of the Church of England to the authority of Parlia

ment.

The teaching of the Early Independent on this point is clear and unmistakable from the earliest times. We read in Dexter a contemporary complaint as to Browne's teaching:

"Concerning the magistrate, Master Browne teacheth that he hath no right to meddle with any matter of religion, but to permit the liberty and free choice of re ligion to the conscience of every one of his subjects." And so he declares again:

"Mr. Browne did take from the magistrate all powers about matters of religion; these he did remit absolutely to the conscience of every particular person, declaring himself, while he stood in his infamous ways, for a full liberty of conscience, uncontrollable by the laws of any mortal man; but in this all the disciples till of late did leave the master."

Said one of the earliest martyrs for the faith on the eve of his execution:—

"I thinke that the Queene's maigestie supreme gouernour of the whole land, and ouer the church also, bodies and goods; but I thinke that no prince, neither the whole world, neither the church itself, may make any lawes for the church other than Christ hath already left in his worde. Yet I think it the dutie of every Christian, and principally of the Prince, to enquire out and renue the lawes of God, and stir vp al their subjects to more diligent and careful keepinge of the same."

But there was to be no compulsion. The Lord's people must be willing. Barrowe, who was hanged for the faith, was not so clear. He admitted the right of the Prince to compel his subjects to attend divine service, even when he denied his right to compel any one to be a member of the Church. Church discipline was to be in the hands of the Church alone.

"It (a Congregational church) is neither monarchical, like the Church of Rome, nor aristocratical, like the Presbyterian Church, but a pure democracy, which places every member of the church upon a level, and gives him perfect liberty with order. If any one commits an offence, he is to be tried by his peers, by his Christian friends, and by the whole ecclesiastical body to which he belongs."

It was natural that such doctrines, preached at a time when Anglican and Romanist were slaying each other for the love of God and zeal for pure religion, would excite the liveliest feelings of indignation. Browne had to leave the country and settle in Holland. When he returned he made his peace with the Anglican Church, and died as one of its clergy, not altogether in the odor of sanctity. But the seed which he sowed fell on good ground. As usual, not many rich, not many noble, were called. But the common people received the doctrine gladly, dimly, perhaps, discerning in it the germ of their own future emancipation—the day-dawn of the Democracy which three centuries hereafter was to finally consummate the triumph of the people.

But in proportion as the common people welcomed the new doctrine, the authorities regarded it with alarm and indignation. They watered the growing cause with the blood of its professors. In this operation, the Old Bailey dock and Newgate Jail figured as conspicuously as usual in the story of the struggle for progress. Twenty-four persons, including several women, were done to death in

the prisons of London alone-most of them dying untried in the dungeon at Newgate. Six were publicly executed, viz. Mr. Henry Barrowe, Mr. Greenwood (these suffered at Tyburn); Mr. Penry, at St. Thomas Waterings, by London; Mr. William Dennis, at Tetford, in Norfolk; two others at St. Edmund, in Suffolk, whose names were Copping and Elias. The stake had gone out of fashion as an instrument of conversion. The gallows was more convenient. But sometimes, as in the case of Copping and Elias, the moral effect of the hanging was heightened by the burning of the books of Browne and Harrison, "to the number of fortie." The victims did not wince.

"God gave them courage to bear it, and make this answer: 'My Lord, your face we fear not, and for your threats we care not, and to come to your read service we dare not.""

It is a curious story-or rather it reads curiously to-day -of how the authorities of Queen Elizabeth's day attempted to exorcise the unwelcome apparition of Independency. At first they resorted to the simple expedient of clapping as many of them as they could discover into the common jail, and then after a sufficient number had accumulated on their hands they were parcelled out among the clergy to be converted.

"The Bishop of London, on order of the Archbishop, with the advice of both Chief Justices, parcelled out fiftytwo prisoners of this general quality; of whom there were in Newgate five; in the Fleet, eight; the Gatehouse, ten; the Clink, ten; the Counter, Wood Street, fourteen; and the Counter, Poultry, five-among forty-three clergymen in and around London, headed by Dr. Bancroft; instructing these gentlemen 'tvvise euery vveeke' (at the least) to repayre to those persons and prysones" and "seeke by all learned & discrete demeanure you may to reduce them from their errors."

When this process of combined prison and persuasion failed, the authorities employed the gallows, prefacing the execution by a trial at the Old Bailey. The most famous of these trials was that of Barrowe and Greenwood in 1593. They had written very severe things about the Book of Common Prayer, and this was regarded by the judges as the same thing as libelling the Queen.

"They were indicted under a statute of the 23rd of Elizabeth which made it felony, punishable with death without benefit of clergy, or right of sanctuary, to write, print, set forth or circulate ‘any manner of booke, ryme, ballade, letter, or writing,' which with 'a malicious intent' set forth 'any false, seditious, and slanderous matter to the defamation of the Queenes Maiestie," or to "the stirring up of insurrection or rebellion."

After their conviction they were thrice reprieved. The second occasion is thus described by Barrowe:

"Vpon the last day of the third moneth (31 March), my brother, Grenewood, and I, were very early and secretly conveyed to the place of execution, where being tyed by the necks to the tree, we were permitted to speak a few wordes." They declared their innocence of a malice or ill intent, exhorted the people to obey and love the Prince and magistrates: to follow their leaders no further than they had followed Scripture; then craving pardon for all in which they had offended, and freely forgiving all who had offended them, they were in the act of praying for the Queen when they were again reprieved; this time as the result of a supplication to the Lord Treasurer that "in a land where no papist was put to death for religion, theirs should not be the first blood shed who conurred about faith with what was professed in the country, and desired conference to be convinced of their errors."

Six days later they were taken out and hanged sud