them to hope for a noble harvest, when all these excellent qualities of their Sovereign should be ripened and mellowed. But all these accomplishments, of so great promise, were to be matured in a soil and climate more congenial to their nature, and where there is no more curse; and therefore they were translated from earth to Heaven, to ripen before, the throne of God and the Lamb.

Soon after the accession of Mary, the whole fabric which, in her brother's reign, had been raised with so careful and so pious a hand, was demolished, and all its beauties laid in the dust. Popery, with all its absurd and impious doctrines, its cumberous rites, its extravagant pretensions, and its idolatrous worship, reared its polluted dome, on the former site of the temple of truth; and, that the consecration might be worthy of the pile, it was sprinkled with the blood of hundreds of human sacrifices. The fires were every where lighted, and victims carefully selected to be sacrificed around the altars of superstition. No station was so elevated, as to afford protection from the tyranny and cruelty,-no condition so humble, as to escape the vigilance of the Ecclesiastical despotism and rage, over which this female fury presided. Like another Tisiphone, let out from Stygian darkness, upon this upper world, she brandished her flaming torch, and called for fresh victims to feed the flames she had kindled. With a gloomy delight, this priestess of Moloch, saw her altars fattened with human gore. In mercy to mankind, it pleased Heaven to call her from this scene of blood and slaughter, before her appetite was gorged with the torments of human nature, to give an account of the havock she had made, and the blood she had spilt. Archbishop Grindal reckons

the number of those who were burnt in her reign, to have been eight hundred; but Bishop Burnet, in his history of the Reformation, makes them two hundred and eighty-four.

When death had disburdened our island of this fiend, and Elizabeth had succeeded to the throne, justice and mercy returned to their former habitation, and true religion rose out of her grave, to smile upon, and to bless the children of men. The temple of the living God was rebuilt, and while Truth sprang from the earth, Righteousness looked down from Heaven. The Protestant religion was restored to the establishment it obtained in Edward's reign. The Supremacy was, by an act of Parliament, annexed to the Crown, and the Queon was denominated, Governess of the Church. By this act the Crown was invested with power, without the concurrence either of the Parliament, or of the Convocation, to repress all heresies, and might establish or repeal any canons, might alter every point of discipline, and might ordain or abolish any religious rite and ceremony. In determining what was heresy, the sovereign was only limited to such doctrines as had been adjudged heresy, by the authority of the Scriptures; by the first four general councils; or by any general council which followed the Scripture as their rule; or to such other doctrine as should hereafter be denominated heresy, by the Parliament and Convocation.

The character of Elizabeth has justly obtained a distinguished place among those of the great Sovereigns who, by their wisdom, their penetration, their learning, their love of their country, and their highly cultivated talents, have conferred more honour upon thrones and sceptres, than they derived from them. She was, however, a Prin

cess of high spirit, and impatient of every restraint that opposed boundaries to her absolute power; and, as the . love of liberty has generally been found to be associated with the doctrines of the Reformation, and despotic government to be in unison with the tenets of Popery, she seems to have been inclined to a nearer approach to the spirit and superstition of Popery, than the principles of the Establishment would admit. To one of her divines, who had preached a sermon in defence of the Real Presence, she gave thanks for his pains and piety.* When Nowel, one of her Chaplains, had, in a sermon, spoken of the sign of the cross with less reverence than she approved, she commanded him to leave that ungodly digression, and return to his text. It was the interposition of Cecil alone, that prevented her from forbidding the clergy to marry. So little zeal had she for sermons, that she thought two or three preachers a sufficient number for a whole county: a sentiment which sufficiently discriminates between a predilection for Popery, and an attachment to the Reformation: the spirit of the latter requiring a reasonable service for its devotions; that of the former, nothing more than implicit faith. In the choice she made between the two religions, it would ap pear that policy and external circumstances, more than religious principles of any kind, had determined her decision. Her mother had embraced the Protestant faith, and warmly exerted herself in its defence. The Pope,

by his bull, had declared the nullity of her mother's marriage, and her own illegitimacy; and, by consequence, she was considered by the Catholics as an usurper.

Heylin, p. 124.

Those, who in the most perilous times had been her friends, were all attached to the Reformation, and those who had been her enemies, were of the Catholic party. She therefore naturally embraced that party, to which she was invited by every consideration of interest and convenience. But the highest designation to which she seems to have been entitled, is, that of a Protestant with Popish principles. Whether her protestantism was the consequence of conviction, or of reasons of state, placed at the head of the Protestant interest, she performed many substantial services to the Protestants abroad, and was justly considered by them, as well as by their enemies, their protectress. To her memory the English Church and nation owe the tribute of gratitude.

It was, during her reign, that those men arose in England who were called by the name of Puritans, because they contended for a mode of worship more purified, from what they considered as the ceremonies of Popery, than that of the Established Church; and for a course of life more pure and strict, than was thought necessary by the greater part of those who were members of the Church of England. With respect to the doctrinal articles of the Church, there was, during Elizabeth's reign, no dispute. Nor does it appear that even Episcopacy was the object of their general aversion, for several Prelates were attached to the tenets of the Puritans, and suffered in their The unjust and imprudent severities inflicted on the Puritans, to the infliction of which, many of the Bishops were accessary, contributed, in the two following reigns, to spread among the people a general aversion to that mode of Church Government. The principal subjects of the complaints, made by the Puritans against the national worship were, kneeling at the Com

cause.

munion, the sign of the cross in baptism, the surplice, and the other peculiar vestments of the clergy. These objections are said to have been principally formed and disseminated through the nation, by those Protestants who, in the reign of Mary, had fled for an asylum into Foreign Countries, where the simple and less splendid worship of Geneva, and other Churches modelled on the same principles, presented to many of them, what they reckoned, a more perfect form. Returning to their own country after the storm of persecution had ceased to rage, they laboured with vehemence to retrench the ceremonies of the Church of England. To repress these attempts, Elizabeth appointed a Court of Ecclesiastical Commission, which she invested with all the powers of a Spanish Inquisition. "They (the Commissioners) were empowered to visit and reform all errors, heresies, schisms; in a word, to regulate all opinions, as well as to punish all breach of uniformity in the exercise of public worship. They were directed to make inquiry, not only by the legal methods of juries and witnesses, but by all other means and ways, which they could devise; that is, by the rack, by torture, by inquisition, by imprisonment. Where they thought proper to suspect any person, they might administer to him an oath, called ex-officio, by which he was bound to answer all questions, and might thereby be obliged to accuse himself or his most intimate friend. The fines which they levied were merely discretionary, and often occasioned the total ruin of the offender, contrary to the established laws of the kingdom. The imprisonment, to which they condemned any delinquent, was limited by no rule but their own pleasure."

• Hume's History of England, Vol. 5, p. 213.