1. The name Puritans (from pure, as Catharists from ?a?a???), or Precisians, occurs first about 1564 or 1566, and was employed to brand those who were opposed to the use of priestly vestments, as the cap, surplice, and the tippet (but not the gown, which the Puritans and Presbyterians retained, as well as the Continental Protestant ministers). Shakspere uses the term half a dozen times, and always reproachfully (see Clarke's Shaksp. Concordance and Schmidt's Shaksp. Lexicon, s.v.). In the good sense, it denotes those who went back to the purity and simplicity of apostolic Christianity in faith and morals. Neal defines a Puritan to be 'a man of severe morals, a Calvinist in doctrine, and a Nonconformist to the ceremonies and discipline of the Church, though not totally separated from it'
2. Macaulay, chap. i. p. 65 (Boston ed.). I add the admirable description of Charles by Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, in the Memoirs of her husband (Bohn's ed. p. 84): 'King Charles was temperate, chaste, and serious; so that the fools and bawds, mimics and catamites, of the former court, grew out of fashion; and the nobility and courtiers, who did not quite abandon their debaucheries, yet so reverenced the king as to retire into corners to practice them. Men of learning and ingenuity in all arts were in esteem, and received encouragement from the king, who was a most excellent judge and a great lover of paintings, carvings, gravings, and many other ingenuities, less offensive than the bawdry and profane abusive wit which was the only exercise of the other court. But, as in the primitive times, it is observed that the best emperors were some of them stirred up by Satan to be the bitterest persecutors of the Church, so this king was a worse encroacher upon the civil and spiritual liberties of his people by far than his father. He married a Papist, a French lady, of a haughty spirit, and a great wit and beauty, to whom he became a most uxorious husband. By this means the court was replenished with Papists, and many who hoped to advance themselves by the change turned to that religion. All the Papists in the kingdom were favored, and, by the king's example, matched into the best families; the Puritans were more than ever discountenanced and persecuted, insomuch that many of them chose to abandon their native country, and leave their dearest relations, to retire into any foreign soil or plantation where they might, amidst all outward inconveniences, enjoy the free exercise of God's worship. Such as could not flee were tormented in the bishops' courts, fined, whipped, pilloried, imprisoned, and suffered to enjoy no rest, so that death was better than life to them; and notwithstanding their patient sufferance of all these things, yet was not the king satisfied till the whole land was reduced to perfect slavery. The example of the French king was propounded to him, and he thought himself no monarch so long as his will was confined to the bounds of any law; but knowing that the people of England were not pliable to an arbitrary rule, he plotted to subdue them to his yoke by a foreign force, and till he could effect it, made no conscience of granting any thing to the people, which he resolved should not oblige him longer than it served his turn; for he was a prince that had nothing of faith or truth, justice or generosity, in him. He was the most obstinate person in his self-will that ever was, and so bent upon being an absolute, uncontrollable sovereign that he was resolved either to be such a king or none. His firm adherence to prelacy was not for conscience of one religion more than another, for it was his principle that an honest man might be saved in any profession; but he had a mistaken principle that kingly government in the State could not stand without episcopal government in the Church; and, therefore, as the bishops flattered him with preaching up his sovereign prerogative, and inveighing against the Puritans as factious and disloyal, so he protected them in their pomp and pride, and insolent practices against all the godly and sober people of the land.'
3. 'Almost all the gentry of all parts went—some to fetch him over, some to meet him at the sea-side, some to fetch him into London, into which he entered on the 29th day of May, with a universal joy and triumph, even to his own amazement; who, when he saw all the nobility and gentry of the land flowing in to him, asked where were his enemies. For he saw nothing but prostrates, expressing all the love that could make a prince happy. Indeed, it was a wonder in that day to see the mutability of some, and the hypocrisy of others, and the servile flattery of all. Monk, like his better genius, conducted him and was adored like one that had brought all the glory and felicity of mankind home with this prince.' (Memoirs of the Life of Col. Hutchinson, 402.)
4. The fullest account of the conference held in the Savoy Hospital, London, is given by Baxter, who was a member, in his Autobiography. Hallam casts the chief blame on the Churchmen, who had it in their power to heal the division and to retain or to expel a vast number of worthy clergymen. But both parties lacked the right temper, and smarted under the fresh recollection of past grievances. Baxter embodied the changes desired by the Puritans in his Liturgy, the hasty work of a fortnight, which was never used, but republished by Prof. Shields of Princeton, Philadelphia, 1867.
5. Dr. Stoughton, a well-informed and impartial historian, gives it as the result of his careful inquiry that the persecution and sufferings of the Episcopalians under the Long Parliament and the Commonwealth are not to be compared with the persecution of the Nonconformists under Charles I. and Charles II. (Ch. of the Commonwealth, p. 346). Hallam is of the same opinion. Richard Baxter, one of the ejected ministers, gives a sad account of their sufferings: 'Many hundreds of these, with their wives and children, had neither house nor bread. . . . Their congregations had enough to do, besides a small maintenance, to help them out of prisons, or to maintain them there. Though they were as frugal as possible, they could hardly live; some lived on little more than brown bread and water; many had but eight or ten pounds a year to maintain a family, so that a piece of flesh has not come to one of their tables in six weeks' time; their allowance could scarce afford them bread and cheese. One went to plow six days and preached on the Lord's day. Another was forced to cut tobacco for a livelihood. . . . Many of the ministers, being afraid to lay down their ministry after they had been ordained to it, preached to such as would hear them in fields and private houses, till they were apprehended and cast into gaols, where many of them perished' (quoted by Green, p. 612). Baxter himself was repeatedly imprisoned, although he was a royalist and openly opposed Cromwell's rule. For many details of suffering, see Orme's Life of Baxter (Lond. 1830), pp. 229 sqq.
6. 'Puritanism,' says an Oxford historian, 'ceased from the long attempt to build up a kingdom of God by force and violence, and fell back on its truer work of building up a kingdom of righteousness in the hearts and consciences of men. It was from the moment of its seeming fall that its real victory began. As soon as the wild orgy of the Restoration was over, men began to see that nothing that was really worthy in the work of Puritanism had been undone. The revels of Whitehall, the skepticism and debauchery of courtiers, the corruption of statesmen, left the mass of Englishmen what Puritanism had made them—serious, earnest, sober in life and conduct, firm in their love of Protestantism and of freedom. In the Revolution of 1688 Puritanism did the work of civil liberty, which it had failed to do in that of 1642. It wrought out through Wesley and the revival of the eighteenth century the work of religious reform which its earlier efforts had only thrown back for a hundred years. Slowly, but steadily, it introduced its own seriousness and purity into English society, English literature, English politics. The whole history of English progress, since the Restoration, on its moral and spiritual sides, has been the history of Puritanism.'—J. R. Green's Short History of the English People, p. 586.
7. Vain Religion of the Formal Hypocrite. Baxter's Works, Vol. XVII. p. 80. Quoted by Stoughton, p. 195. The sermon was preached Apr. 30, 1660, just before the recall of Charles II. See Orme, Life of Baxter, p. 160.
8. Clarendon, who hated Presbyterianism as a plebeian religion unfit for a gentleman, disposes of the Westminster Assembly in a few summary and contemptuous sentences: 'Of about one hundred and twenty members,' he says, 'of which the Assembly was to consist, a few very reverend and worthy persons were inserted; yet of the whole number there were not above twenty who were not declared and avowed enemies of the doctrine or discipline of the Church of England; some were infamous in their lives and conversations, and most of them of very mean parts in learning, if not of scandalous ignorance; and of no other reputation but of malice to the Church of England.' These charges are utterly without foundation, and belong to the many misrepresentations and falsehoods which disfigure his otherwise classical History of the Rebellion. The number of members was 151.
9. In his Fragments of a History of England (1670), Milton speaks both of the Long Parliament and the Assembly in vindictive scorn, and calls the latter 'a certain number of divines neither chosen by any rule or custom ecclesiastical, nor eminent for either piety or knowledge above others left out; only as each member of Parliament, in his private fancy, thought fit, so elected one by one.' He charges them with inconsistency in becoming pluralists and nonresidents, and with intolerance, as if 'the spiritual power of their ministry were less available than bodily compulsion,' and the authority of the magistrate 'a stronger means to subdue and bring in conscience than evangelical persuasion.' On his unhappy marriage and his tracts on Divorce growing out of it, see Masson, Vol. III. pp. 42 sqq.
10. 'There must be some laymen in the Synod to overlook the clergy, lest they spoil the civil work; just as when the good woman puts a cat into the milk-house to kill a mouse, she sends her maid to look after the cat, lest the cat eat up the cream.'—Selden, Table-Talk, p. 169. (Quoted by Stoughton and Stanley.)
11. Laud says of the Assembly: 'The greatest part of them were Brownists, or Independents, or New England ministers, if not worse; or at best enemies to the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England,' The facts are, that the Independents were a small minority, and that New England was not represented at all.
12. Prideaux's name seems to have been omitted in the final ordinance of June, 1643.
13.Ussher was a second time appointed by the House of Commons a member of the Assembly when he came to London in 1647, and on his petition received permission to preach in Lincoln's Inn. Journals of the House of Commons, Vol. V. p. 423 (quoted by Dr. Mitchell).
14. 'An act for the utter abolishing and taking away of all archbishops, bishops, their chancellors and commissaries,' etc. Clarendon says that marvelous art was used, and that the majority of the Commons were really against the bill; but the writer of the 'Parliamentary Chronicle' says that it passed unanimously, and was celebrated by bonfires and the ringing of bells all over London.—Neal, Vol. I. p. 421. Hallam also follows the latter account. 1389 Neal, Vol. II. pp. 35 sq.
15. Even Whitgift, however, did not go to the extreme of jure divino Episcopacy, but admitted that the Scripture has not set down 'any one certain form of Church government to be perpetual.' Cartwright, on the other hand, was an able and earnest, but radical Presbyterian, and with Calvin and Beza advocated the death penalty for heretics.
16. The origin of the name is uncertain. Some derive it from the tapestries or pictures of Jerusalem on the wall. Dr. Stoughton, who is well informed in English history and archaeology, informs me (by letter of May 4, 1876) that it probably arose 'from the fact of its adjoining the sanctuary, the place of peace;' and he quotes a passage from the account of King John's death: ' Nec providet quod est Romae ecclesia Jerusalem dicta, id est, visio pacis; quia quicunque illuc confugerit, cuiuscunque criminis obnoxius, subsidium invenit' (William of Malmesbury, De gestis Angl. Lib. II. p. 67).
17. Shakespere, Second Part of King Henry IV., act iv. sc. 4.
18. I may be permitted to add from personal experience an interesting recent incident in the history of that chamber. At the kind invitation of the Dean of Westminster, the delegates to the International Council of Presbyterian Churches, then meeting in London for the formation of a Presbyterian Alliance, repaired to the Jerusalem Chamber on Thursday afternoon, July 22, 1875, and, standing around the long table, were instructed and entertained by the Dean, who, modestly taking 'the Moderator's chair,' gave them a graphic historical description of the chamber, interspersed with humorous remarks and extracts from Baillie. He dwelt mainly on the Westminster Assembly, promising, in his broad-Church liberality, at some future time to honor that Assembly by a picture on the northern wall. Dr. McCosh, as Moderator of the Presbyterian Council, proposed a vote of thanks for the courtesy and kindness of the Dean, which was, of course, unanimously and heartily given. The writer of this expressed the hope that the Jerusalem Chamber may yet serve a still nobler purpose than any in the past, namely, the reunion of Christendom on the basis of God's revealed truth in the Bible; and he alluded to the fact that the Dean had recently (in the 'Contemporary Review,' and in an address at Saint Andrews) paid a high compliment to the Westminster Confession by declaring its first chapter, on the Holy Scriptures, to be one of the best, if not the very best symbolical statement ever made.
19. Probably a misprint for 'heart-confessed and other seen faults in the Assembly.'
20. The 'all' was in the original edition of 1563 and the edition of 1628, but is missing in the edition of 1630 and other English editions, and also in the American Episcopal revision.
21. 'The taking of the Covenant in Scotland was perhaps the most solemn scene in the history of nations. The forced imposition of it in England was an insult and a burlesque.' Fuller refutes it at length from his English and Episcopal stand-point (Church Hist. Vol. VI. pp. 259 sqq.). It certainly turned out to be a blunder in England, but it was a sublime blunder for a noble end, and not without important results, among which is the one mentioned in the text.
22. The original title, 'A Confession of Faith,' was voted down by sixty-one to forty-one. Minutes, p. 415.
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