raised around him, he accepted a living in Northamptonshire; and, though he is not known to have ever formally recanted any of his opinions, he lived on in his parsonage till as late as 1630, when Fuller knew him as a passionate and rather disreputable old man of eighty, employing a curate to do his work, quarrelling with everybody, and refusing to pay his rates. Meanwhile the opinions which he had propagated fifty years before had passed through a singular history in the minds and lives of men of steadier and more persevering character. For, though Brown himself had vanished from public view since 1590, the Brownists, or Separatists, as they were called, had persisted in their course, through execration and persecution, as a sect of outlaws beyond the pale of ordinary Puritanism, and with whom moderate Puritans disowned connexion or sympathy. One hears of considerable numbers of them in the shires of Norfolk and Essex, and throughout Wales; and there was a central association of them in London, holding conventicles in the fields, or shifting from meeting-house to meeting-house in the suburbs, so as to elude Whitgift's ecclesiastical police. At length, in 1592, the police broke in upon one of the meetings of the London Brownists at Islington; fifty-six of these were thrown into divers jails; and, some of the Separatist leaders having been otherwise arrested, there ensued a vengeance far more ruthless than the Government dared against Puritans in general. Six of the leaders were brought to the scaffold, including Henry Barrowe, a Gray's Inn lawyer (of such note among those early Brownists by his writings that they were also called Barrowists), John Greenwood, a preacher, and the poor young Welshman, John Penry, whose brave and simple words on his own hard case, addressed before his death to Lord Burleigh, thrill one's nerves yet. All these were of Cambridge training, though Penry had also been at Oxford. Others died in prison; and of the remainder many were banished.- -Among the observers of these severities was Francis Bacon, then rising into eminence as a politician and lawyer. His feeling on the subject was thus expressed

at the time: "As for those which we call Brownists, being, "when they were at the most, a very small number of very silly and base people here and there in corners dispersed, "they are now (thanks be to God) by the good remedies "that have been used suppressed and worn out, so as there

is scarce any news of them." Bacon, doubtless, here expressed the feeling of all that was respectable in English society. For not only was it the theory of Brownism intrinsically that the Church of England was a false Church, an institution of Antichrist, from which all Christians were bound to separate themselves; but the scurrilities against the Bishops that had been vented anonymously by some particular nest of Brownists, or their allies, in the famous series of Martin Marprelate Tracts (1589) had disgusted and enraged many who would have tolerated moderate Nonconformity.1

ENGLISH INDEPENDENCY :-II. THE ENGLISH SEPARATISTS IN HOLLAND (1592-1620).

Bacon was mistaken in supposing that Brownism was extinguished. Hospitable Holland received and sheltered what England cast out. Amsterdam was their first refuge. Hither, between 1593 and 1608, there migrated gradually a little colony of English Brownists, distinct from the resident Church of England men and the Scottish Presbyterians who were pretty numerous in the city. They were pious, mutually critical, and full of a ferment of they knew not what. History has preserved the names of only the chiefs, the elected pastors and teachers of these Brownist outcasts in Amsterdam; but they are names not to be forgotten.

1 Fuller's Church History, III. 6266; Neal's Puritans, I. 328-333, and 468-486; Hanbury's Historical Memorials relating to the Independents, Vol. I. (1839) pp. 18-83; Fletcher's History of Independency (1847), II. 97——

206; Wilson's History of Dissenting Churches and Meeting-houses in London (1808), I. 13-20; Bacon's Observations on a Libel (1592), in Bacon's Letters and Life by Spedding, Vol. I. p. 165.

Francis Johnson, who had been pastor of the suppressed London congregation, and the friend of Barrowe, Greenwood, and Penry, was the first pastor of the Amsterdam congregation of Brownists, and was assisted by Henry Ainsworth, as doctor or teacher. Johnson was of Cambridge education, and had been in orders in the Church of England. Of Ainsworth's antecedents nothing is known; which is the more to be regretted as he was, by universal consent, the most profoundly learned of all the Brownists, and a man of fine character and zeal. He turns up in Amsterdam in 1593, "living upon ninepence a week and some boiled roots," but recommending himself to the booksellers and printers by his knowledge of Hebrew. Later arrivals in Amsterdam. than he and Johnson were-John Smyth, who had been a clergyman in Lincolnshire before joining the Brownists; Henry Jacob, of Oxford training, who had been a clergyman in Kent; Richard Clifton, formerly rector of Babworth in Nottinghamshire, and then a Separatist preacher at Scrooby in the same county; and John Robinson, educated at Cambridge, and first a clergyman in Norwich, and then Clifton's colleague at Scrooby. Thus in 1608 there were six Separatist or Brownist ministers altogether in Amsterdam.

The six proved too many for one town. There were splits and controversies among them on this point or that, Smyth in particular tending to Arminianism and Anabaptism. Hence at length a dispersion. Ainsworth persevered in Amsterdam, preaching, publishing, and highly respected, till his death in 1622; Clifton also remained in Amsterdam, where he died in 1616; Johnson, after remaining for some time in Amsterdam in opposition to Ainsworth, removed to Emden, where there is little farther trace of him or his congregation; Jacob went to Middleburg; and Smyth and Robinson went to Leyden, though Smyth retained some hold on Amsterdam. These two last may be followed a little farther. They represented between them the split that had already begun to declare itself among the English Brownists in Holland.- -The essence of the question seems to have been whether that original tenet of Brownism

should be retained in its full vehemence which denounced the Church of England as an utterly false and abominable Church, all whose ordinances were null and void. It was mainly this tenet that made the difference between the moderate Puritans or Presbyterians and the Brownists; and the latter were called Separatists on account of it. Now, Smyth, adhering to the tenet, had pushed it to a logical consequence not ventured on by the Separatists before him. If the ordination of the Church of England were rejected, so that her ministers had to be reordained when they became pastors and teachers of Separatist congregations, why was the baptism of the Church of England accounted valid, why were not members of that Church rebaptized when they became Separatists? Through the prosecution of this query, aided by other investigations, Smyth had developed his Separatism into the form known as Anabaptism, not only requiring the rebaptism of members of the Church of England, but rejecting the baptism of infants altogether, and insisting on immersion as the proper Scriptural form of the rite. "The Separation," he wrote, "must either go "back to England, or go forward to true Baptism: all that "shall in time to come separate from England must separate " from the baptism of England; and, if they will not separate "from the baptism of England, there is no reason why they "should separate from England as from a false Church." It was even said that Smyth, to make sure there should be no flaw in his own baptism, had performed the rite on himself; and he accordingly figures in satires of the time as "Smyth, the Se-Baptist." Certain it is that the obscure congregation he formed in Leyden, or shifted between Amsterdam and Leyden, was one of extreme Separatists, who were also Baptists, and with peculiarities besides in their doctrines and worship. Of this congregation he was pastor till his death in 1610, when he was succeeded by a Thomas Helwisse, one of their oldest members, a plain man, of pragmatic notions, and quite self-taught. -Meanwhile, side by side with Smyth, and in constant controversy with him on Baptism and other points of difference, John Robinson had formed

in Leyden a much more flourishing congregation on broader principles. Robinson's place in the history of Independency is, indeed, especially important. Though he seems to have been a rigid Brownist, or Barrowist, when he went into exile, a natural breadth and liberality of mind, and farther study and experience, had led him to a more moderate view of the duty and rights of Separation. While holding that the errors and defects of the Church of England and of the other Reformed Churches were so serious as to justify and require the formation of separate congregations, he would not join the extreme Separatists in denying that these were true Churches; on the contrary, he defended and practised Christian intercourse with them as far as might be. "For 'myself," he wrote, "thus I believe with my heart before God, and profess with my tongue before the world: That I "have one and the same faith, hope, spirit, baptism, and "Lord, which I had in the Church of England, and none "other; that I esteem so many in that Church, of what "state and order soever, as are truly partakers of that faith (as I account many thousands to be) for my Christian "brethren, and myself a fellow-member with them of that "mystical Body of Christ scattered far and wide throughout "the world." Hence he would attend Church of England places of worship, if no other were at hand, with the fullest friendliness and affection, and he would admit members of that Church to communion in prayer and hearing the Word, though not in express "Church-actions." Henry Jacob had taken a similar view of the question of Separation; but Robinson's advocacy was so much more public that it was identified with him, and he was spoken of as the author of a theory which might be called Semi-Separatism. Then, on various points, he helped to give dignity and precision to the system of the Separatist Church-discipline, till then called Brownism. That name he abjured, and advised all his adherents to abjure, as a mere term of obloquy, tending to conceal the claim of their system to an authority in Scripture and in the history of the primitive Church. He argued that claim afresh. "He maintained that every