Hall and on the Liberationist platform; each is subsidized for political agitation against the Church of England.

Ejected Nonconformists, as distinct from the ejected Separatists, continued to uphold the traditional Puritan witness against Dissent or Separatism by their strict attendance at their parish churches, and by their regular participation in the parochial Eucharist. Although we have already illustrated their standpoint by citing Baxter and Philip Henry as witnesses, it will be in place here to cite a few less known fellow-witnesses. Zachary Crofton was ejected from S. Botolph, Aldgate. But although he was cruelly persecuted and even imprisoned for his nonconformity, he steadily refused to turn a Dissenter. Even while he was in gaol this consistent Nonconformist wrote a pamphlet against Dissent.1 When he was at liberty he attended the public worship of the Church, though he himself, as a minister, could not use the Common Prayer or the Ceremonies.' 2 Peter Vincke, who was ejected from S. Michael's, Cornhill, took his stand upon the via media theory of the old Nonconformists. He kept up communion with the Church, 'whereupon, as he sometime observed, he incurred the anger of some that he went so far ; and of others that he went no farther.'3 Thomas Gouge, who was ejected from S. Sepulchre's, at once forebore preaching as well as ministering. The Welsh bishops, learning that he was in priest's orders, licensed him to preach in Wales. He regularly communicated at the parish churches, but remained a Nonconformist, refusing to celebrate the Eucharist, wear the surplice, or conform ministerially to the Book of Common Prayer. John Ray, the famous naturalist, who had been Episcopally ordained, was a true Nonconformist. He regularly communicated at church, but would not minister. It is curious that Palmer-who is usually confused and

1

Reformation not Separation, or a Plea for Communion with the Church under those corruptions to which he cannot conform, &c., 4to, 1660. It called forth a controversy, to which Crofton replied in his Ferubaal Justified, 4to, 1663.

26 My resolution is to attend these corrupt administrations and that disorderly service of God' (p. 3). 'At present I have no choice. If I will attend God's solemn public worship I must do it in this place and order, or not at all' (p. 6). Their Common Prayer is my burden, by reason of its defects and disorder; yet I find in it no matter to which a sober, serious Christian may not say Amen' (p. 24). 'It is nauseous, but not venomous; puddled, but not poisonous' (p. 24). We are without a sufficient ground for Separation' (p. 26). He calls himself 'an Anti-Sectarian,' like 'the old Nonconformists who repelled and reproved the brainsick Brownists.' 3 Palmer, i. 166.

" not

2

unscientific in his nomenclature-when he is attempting to orientate Ray's position, stumbles as if by accident upon the true distinction, which is so rare in Dissenting literature. 'Strictly and properly speaking,' he observes, 'Ray was a Nonconformist, and not a Dissenter.' Orme, the Dissenting biographer, had a glimpse of only one aspect of the true distinction when he said that the Brownists, as they have been nicknamed, were treated with great severity both by Churchmen and Nonconformists; they were the first consistent Dissenters from the Church of England.' But by his uninquiring acceptance of the modern Dissenting assumption that the Nonconformists were Churchmen,' and by his consequent qualification of the Separatists as 'consistent Dissenters,' he shows that he was blind to another aspect of the distinction. The dissent of the Nonconformists or Presbyterians, to use their own scholastic phraseology, was merely 'formal,' and left them free to keep within the National Church; whereas the dissent of the Separatists, Independents, Baptists, or Quakers was 'material,' and so compelled them to go outside the Church. We detect a similar mixture of perception and confusion in Mr. Barclay's attempt to orientate the nomenclature of ecclesiastical controversy. He rightly says that it is of the utmost importance to have a clear view of the origin and the distinct character of the religious opinions of the persons who are termed Puritans (he should add, or Nonconformists), and to distinguish them from those of the people called Separatists, Brownists, Barrowists, and afterwards Independents and Congregationalists, and those again who are termed Anabaptists or Baptists.' He tells us that throughout his own volume 'the word Puritan is used in its original meaning, viz. of a person who desired the reform of the Church of England in a Presbyterian sense. The application of the word (since the ejection of the 2,000 Puritan ministers from the Established Church in 1662) to any Nonconformist has led to serious misconception.' He ought to have said 'to any Separatist.' We need hardly say that not a single Nonconformist among the two thousand' ever believed that he was ejected from the Established Church, while several of them, on Mr. Barclay's showing, had no right whatever to the title of 1 I. 274. The italics are his own.

4

2 Memoirs of F. Owen, D.D., 1820, p. 60.

3 He is more clear on p. 6. The great mass of the early Puritans, and even of the later Nonconformists, were not Dissenters from the Church's constitution, but Nonconformists to some of its requisitions.' The italics are Orme's own.

4 The Inner Life, p. 11,

Puritans, as they were Independents and Baptists. His own treatment involves him in a mass of misconceptions, since it starts with the assumption that 'the Established Church' was made by the Tudors, and was consequently not so old as 'the idea of a Church' which the Independents, Baptists, and Quakers 'embodied.' He says elsewhere, 'From the period of the ejection of the 2,000 nonconforming ministers the terms Puritan, Dissenter, Nonconformist, were applied to all the Free Churches indiscriminately; but these terms were totally inapplicable to the ancient Independent and Baptist Churches, and to the Society of Friends. They never had any connection with the Church of England, and no modification of a Church connected with the State would have satisfied them :' albeit―he should have added—the most eminent and famous of the Independents were beneficed as rectors, vicars, and lecturers of the English Church. With the ejected Presbyterians as Puritans,' he rightly adds, 'the case was different. They were constantly looking forward to the time when, by some shifting of the political parties, they would again be included in the State Church. They were prepared to meet the Anglican party half way. In some Presbyterian societies this was actually contemplated in the trust-deeds of their chapels.'1

Writers upon the Anglican side have been equally careless and unscientific in their nomenclature. Thus the late Mr. Lathbury, knowing that the Presbyterians of his own age were Dissenters or Separatists, applied the latter term indiscriminately to the Puritans or Nonconformists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 'Cartwright, the Lady Margaret professor at Cambridge,' he says, 'was one of the chief leaders of the Separatists.' 2 The exact reverse was true. Thomas Cartwright, the greatest of the Nonconformists, was the chief opponent of the Separatists. Though Cartwright was previously a strong Presbyterian,' says Mr. Lathbury, 'he died in the bosom of the Church of England.' He never left the Church. 'The grand design' (of Cartwright and Travers), says T. Fuller, 'was to set up a discipline in a discipline, Presbytery in Episcopacy' (A.D. 1584, p. 142). Every honoured Nonconformist teacher and confessor from the early Noncon1 P. 588.

3

2 A History of the English Episcopacy, 1836, p. 47. He accuses Neal and Brooks of being 'slipshod' in their use of the term Puritan, but his corrections are as bad as their faults. See pp. 54-56.

3 See what the Separatists said of T. Cartwright. Hanbury, Hist. Me morials of Independency, i. 35. Bp. Stillingfleet, Unreason of Separation, 3rd ed., 1682, p. 28.

formist agitation for supremacy over the Church to the later Nonconformist demand for comprehension within the Church, protested against any degree of Separatism or actual Dissent. When Dr. Copcote, a Conformist opponent of Cartwright at Cambridge, in his sermon at Paul's Cross, 1584, charged the Nonconformists with saying that 'the Church of England was no Church but after a sort,' the Nonconformists retorted that this was a slander, and they could appeal to their antagonism against the Brownists and Anabaptists as a proof of their resolute Churchmanship. 'We hold the Church of England,' they replied, for a true Church, from which no man may separate himself." They doubtlessly held that the CommonPrayer-Book of the National Church contained a theology and a humanity which needed much reforming. They held that the Church's doctrinal form, as well as its disciplinary form, needed to be more emphatically Protestantized, Puritanized, Calvinized, narrowed. They regarded it as too catholic, too liberal, too widely national, too widely parochial—too ‘Arminian.' 2 But the English Nonconformists never held nor taught, at any point in their history, that the doctrinal and disciplinary faults in the Church, as they thought them, were sufficiently anti-Christian to justify separation from the National Church and the erection of a sect. Thomas Fuller bore witness to the resolution with which two successive generations of Puritans or Nonconformists, in spite of persecution on one side and flattering invitations on the other side, would neither give up their Nonconformity nor their Churchmanship. The prime of the first set of Puritans, which, being very aged, expired for the most part about this time, when, behold, another generation of active and zealous Nonconformists succeeded them, inveighing against the established Church-discipline, accounting everything from Rome which was not from Geneva, endeavouring in all things to conform the government of the English Church to the Presbyterian reformation'—that is to say, not to set up a new and rival Church. As Heylin uncharitably put it, when speaking of the Separatists, Their more cunning brethren (the Nonconformists) kept within the pale of the Church.'3 If a Puritan incumbent was imprisoned or deprived for nonconformity, for disobedience to his ordinary, for not wearing the surplice, for

6

1 A Defence of the Reasons of the Counterpoison for the maintenance of the Eldership, against an Answer made by Dr. Copequot, 8vo, 1586, n.p. 2 The Church History of Great Britain, Book IX., vol. iii. p. 81, fol.

mutilating the prescribed service, for autocratically imposing upon his parish a foreign Genevan ritual, for refusing to baptize a child because he held its parents not to be within the covenant of grace, or for any other plea-he never left the Church of England; or, if he did, he was no longer counted a Nonconformist. By the act of schism he passed out of the regiment of the Nonconformists into the hostile army of the Separatists or Dissenters. A man ceased to be a Nonconformist in the very moment in which he became a Separatist,

ART. X.-POSITION AND PROSPECTS OF
CURATES.

1. Report of Sub-Committee of the Curates' Alliance on Tenure and Status of the Unbeneficed Clergy. (London, 1882.) 2. The Church and her Curates. (Gardner: London, 1877.) 3. Reports of Curates' Augmentation Fund. (London, 186781.)

THE movement which has within the last few months attracted a considerable deal of notice, at all events in ecclesiastical circles, and which, under the name of 'The Curates' Alliance,' aims at promoting the more special interests of the unbeneficed parochial clergy, has, if not very successful in gaining general support, still done good service in calling the attention of churchmen to certain disadvantages and anomalies in the position of the assistant curates, which, however impossible, by any means hitherto suggested, to correct, still advance a claim, which cannot be made too prominent, upon the sympathy, the good will, and the considerate regard of all. The disadvantages they labour under, as compared to those who have passed from their ranks into independent posts in the Church, may be admitted by everyone, while the extent of these disadvantages, as experienced by the least fortunate in the way of promotion, may be appreciated by very few; and the discussing of the matter cannot fail to bear good fruit in some directions, if not in those immediately proposed.

With these convictions, we are certainly not of those who regard the establishment of the Curates' Alliance as a sort