e and prosecute the chiefs, it was, in fact, stamped
out. But the recollection of Cartwright and of Presbyterian principles
remained in the English mind through the reigns of James and Charles,
and characterized the main mass of the more effective and respectable
Puritanism of those reigns. In other words, most of those Puritans,
whether ministers or of the laity, who still continued members of the
Church, only protesting against some of its rules and ceremonies,
conjoined with this nonconformity in points of worship a dissatisfaction
with the prelatic constitution of the Church, and a willingness to see
the order of bishops removed, and the government of the Church
remodelled on the Presbyterian system of parochial courts, classical or
district meetings, provincial synods, and national assemblies.

During the supremacy of Laud, indeed, when any such wholesale revolution
seemed hopeless, it is possible that English Puritanism within the
Church had abandoned in some degree its dreamings over the Presbyterian
theory, and had sunk, through exhaustion, into mere sighings after a
relaxation of the established episcopacy. But the success of the
Presbyterian revolt of the Scots in 1638, and their continued triumph in
the two following years, had worked wonders. All the remains of native
Presbyterian tradition in England had been kindled afresh, and new
masses of English Puritan feeling, till then acquiescent in episcopacy,
had been whirled into a passion for presbytery and nothing else. When
the Long Parliament, at its first meeting (November, 1640), addressed
itself to the question of a reform of the English Church, the force that
beat against its doors most strongly from the outside world of English
opinion consisted no longer of mere sighings after a limitation of
episcopacy, but of a formed determination of myriads to have done with
episcopacy root and branch, and to see a church government substituted
somewhat after the Scottish pattern.

Two years more of discussion in and out of Parliament had vastly
enlarged the dimensions of this revived and newly created English
Presbyterianism. The passion for presbytery among the English laity had
pervaded all the counties; and scores and hundreds of parish ministers
who had kept as long as they could within the limits of mere Low-church
Anglicanism, and had stood out, in their private reasonings, for the
lawfulness and expediency of an order of officers in the Church superior
to