When at last, on a subsequent day, the representatives of the eight hundred petitioners were admitted to this mutuallyadmiring coterie, they found that they had little chance of a fair or temperate hearing. As one by one they stated their grievances, they were interrupted by the keen partizanship of Bancroft, or were answered by the pleasantries of James, who, not content with making himself the mouthpiece of foregone conclusions, jeered at the scruples of men like Reynolds and Chaderton, browbeat poor Mr Knewstubs, and smiled to his courtiers, or touched his hat to the bishops, when he deemed his own wisdom especially brilliant. However, he lost selfcommand when the proposition was made to revive the " prophesyings," as approved by the good Archbishop Grindal, and to refer matters of debate to the episcopal synod, or the bishop with his "presbytery." At this last word his Majesty was "somewhat stirred," and exclaimed that presbytery "agreeth as well with monarchy as God and the devil. Then Jack and Tom, and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasures censure me and my council, and all our proceedings. Then Will will stand up and say, 'It must be thus ;' then Dick shall reply and say, 'Nay, marry, but we will have it thus.' And, therefore, here I must reiterate my former speech, 'Le roi s'avisera.' Stay, I pray you, seven years before you demand that of me, and then if you find me pursy and fat, and my windpipes stuffed, I will perhaps hearken to you; for, let that government be once up, I am sure I shall be kept in breath then shall we all of us have work enough-both our hands full. But, Doctor Reynolds, till you find that I grow lazy, let that alone." As he retired from that day's discussion, the king remarked, "If this be all they have to say, I shall make them conform themselves, or I will harry them out of this land, or else do worse." Another day concluded the unavailing conference; and, at the close, the Archbishop of Canterbury declared, that "undoubtedly his Majesty had

ANOTHER GOLDEN OCCASION LOST.

149

spoken by the special assistance of God's Spirit ;" whilst the Bishop of London fell on his knees, and protested that "his heart melted within him, whilst he made haste to acknowledge to Almighty God His singular mercy in giving them such a king, as since Christ's time the like, he thought, had not been seen.”

This conference was immediately followed by a convocation, at which Bancroft, soon afterwards raised to the primacy, presided, and by which the one hundred and forty-one canons still governing the Church of England were enacted. According to these canons, any one who said that anything in the Thirty-nine Articles is erroneous, or that anything in the ceremonies of the Church is superstitious, was liable to excommunication; and as the same year, 1604, was signalised by a proclamation enjoining strict conformity, the reign of King James was inaugurated by a vast amount of misery. Hundreds of the most conscientious ministers were suspended; not only ministers but laymen were immured in common gaols; and for no other crime but defending a nonconformist, the high commissioners consigned an intrepid bencher of Gray's Inn to prison, where he languished till he died. As the last refuge of oppression, thousands of peaceful and industrious citizens were fain to quit for ever their native shores, and, first in Holland, and by and by in New England, seek "freedom to worship God."

Had the piety of Grindal or the catholicity of Abbot occupied the see of Canterbury during James's first years, or had James himself been a wiser man, it would have been well for the realm of England. In that case a few slight concessions, such as every Protestant would have hailed at the accession of Elizabeth, might have retained within the Church an undivided population; and, although sects might have arisen opposed to any prelacy, however modified, or to any liturgy, however scriptural its contents, the spectacle should certainly not have been witnessed on the Census Sunday of 1851, of as many

Englishmen worshipping outside of the Established Church as within its ancient sanctuaries. But, enforced by persecution, practical differences soon intensified into doctrinal contrarieties; and, disgusted at the scrupulosity of Puritans, like his predecessor Queen Elizabeth, James every year learned to love less and less the religious strictness with which that scrupulosity was identified; till, betwixt the proclamation inviting his subjects to spend the Sabbath afternoon in dancing and athletic amusements, the countenance ominously given to Papists in preference to the detested Puritans, and the shocking licentiousness which prevailed in the atmosphere of the court, the seventeenth century closed its first quarter on the grave of a monarch who had done as much to demoralise his subjects, as he had done to vitiate their taste and squander their national renown.

There can be little doubt that James ascended the English throne a zealous Calvinist, and for some years there is no symptom of any change in his sentiments. As late as the year 1611, he was so horrified with the doctrines contained in a publication of Conrad Vorstius, the successor of Arminius at Leyden, that he at once ordered the book to be publicly burned in London, Oxford, and Cambridge, and wrote to the States of Holland, expressing his conviction that if the recantation of "this wretched Vorstius" should move them "to spare his person, and not cause him to be burned (which never any heretic better deserved, and wherein we will leave him to your own Christian wisdom),"* they would never suffer “a thing so abominable as that he should be allowed to continue and

* King James was the last sovereign who lit the fires of Smithfield. In 1612 he signed the death-warrant of Legate, a Socinian, and Edward Wightman, who was accused of holding the doctrines of Simon Magus and the Anabaptists. The former the king summoned to an interview, hoping to convince him of his error; but hearing him avow that he had not for seven years prayed to the Saviour, in a fit of indignation, real or assumed, James spurned him with his royal foot, and he was carried off to Newgate, and eventually committed to the flames.

teach among them." But before 1618 his zeal had somewhat moderated. In that year he was invited by Prince Maurice to send deputies to the Synod of Dort, which was convened for the purpose of suppressing the very errors which James had denounced so fiercely in Vorstius. But the divines whom James selected, and the instructions which he gave them, shewed that his ardour was on the wane. By this time the Greek Fathers were beginning to supplant Calvin's "Institutes" in the English universities; many of the theologians with whom the king was in nearest contact substantially agreed with the Dutch "remonstrants ;" and there could be no doubt that the hated Puritans were the most earnest opponents of Arminius. To a mind less shrewd than James's the inference was obvious. However mystic might be the relation between them, predestinarian doctrine, Sabbath-observance, and resistance to royal edicts, must be somehow connected. They must be so many several elements in that pestilential east wind which had blown John Knox from Geneva to Edinburgh, and infected all Scotland with that presbyterian catarrh, from which, until he came south, James himself had suffered so severely. Accordingly, as soon as, through the moderate dealing of his carefully-selected and well-balanced deputation, the king had comfortably escaped from the Dutch dilemma, he published an edict, forbidding preachers to handle the deep points of predestination, reprobation, and resistible or irresistible grace, as fitter for the schools than simple auditories. Divines, like Laud, who, repudiating the doctrine of justification by faith alone, began to speak of baptism as an actual salvation, and who held the real presence of Christ's natural body in the Eucharist,-such divines were patronised and preferred at court, and the views of the English reformers were denounced by the new name of " doctrinal puritanism. "* And

* See this subject lucidly expounded in Mr Marsden's "Early Puritans," chap. xii.

as soon as the first of the Stewarts was removed from the scene, it seemed only a natural sequence when, in the persons of both the primate and the prince, an Arminianism full-fledged into Pelagianism, and a Sacerdotalism all but Papal, displayed themselves in the highest places of the church and kingdom.

The personal character* and taste of King James had a material influence on the Christian literature of his reign. There was nothing in which he more loved to dabble than divinity; at the same time, Christian experience and Christian ethics were subjects on which it was not easy for a court preacher to descant, in the audience of a prince who was a drunkard, a swearer, and a liar, and who confounded spirituality with puritanism. The range of topics was, therefore, restricted to the commonplaces of theology, and to duties like

Perhaps the best sketch of James's character is from the friendly pen of Sir Walter Scott:

"He was deeply learned, without possessing useful knowledge; sagacious in many individual cases, without having real wisdom; fond of his power, and desirous to maintain and augment it, yet willing to resign the direction of that and of himself to the most unworthy favourites; a big and bold assertor of his rights in words, yet one who tamely saw them trampled on in deeds; a lover of negociations, in which he was always outwitted, and a fearer of war, where conquest might have been easy. He was fond of his dignity, while he was perpetually degrading it by undue familiarity; capable of much public labour, yet often neglecting it for the meanest amusement; a wit, though a pedant, and a scholar, though fond of the conversation of the ignorant and uneducated. Even his timidity of temper was not uniform, and there were moments of his life, and those critical, in which he shewed the spirit of his ancestors. He was laborious in trifles, and a trifler where serious labour was required; devout in his sentiments, and yet too often profane in his language; just and beneficent by nature, he yet gave way to the iniquities and oppression of others. He was penurious respecting money which he had to give from his own hands, yet inconsiderately and unboundedly profuse of that which he did not see. In a word, those good qualities which displayed themselves in particular cases and occasions, were not of a nature sufficiently firm and comprehensive to regulate his general conduct; and, shewing themselves as they occasionally did, only entitled James to the character bestowed on him by Sully, that he was the wisest fool in Christendom."-" Fortunes of Nigel," chap. v.