expulsion of a great party which from the time of the Reformation had
played the most active and popular part in the life of the Church. It
was the close of an effort which had been going on ever since
Elizabeth's accession to bring the English Communion into closer
relations with the Reformed Communions of the Continent and into greater
harmony with the religious instincts of the nation at large. The Church
of England stood from that moment isolated and alone among all the
Churches of the Christian world. The Reformation had severed it
irretrievably from those which still clung to the obedience of the
Papacy. By its rejection of all but episcopal orders the Act of
Uniformity severed it as irretrievably from the general body of the
Protestant Churches whether Lutheran or Reformed. And while thus cut off
from all healthy religious communion with the world without it sank into
immobility within. With the expulsion of the Puritan clergy all change,
all efforts after reform, all national developement, suddenly stopped.
From that time to this the Episcopal Church has been unable to meet the
varying spiritual needs of its adherents by any modifications of its
government or its worship. It stands alone among all the religious
bodies of Western Christendom in its failure through two hundred years
to devise a single new service of prayer or of praise.

[Sidenote: Its political results.]

But if the issues of St. Bartholomew's Day have been harmful to the
spiritual life of the English Church they have been in the highest
degree advantageous to the cause of religious liberty. At the
Restoration religious freedom seemed again to have been lost. Only the
Independents and a few despised sects, such as the Quakers, upheld the
right of every man to worship God according to the bidding of his own
conscience. The bulk of the Puritan Party, with the Presbyterians at its
head, was at one with its opponents in desiring a uniformity of worship,
if not of belief, throughout the land. Had the two great parties within
the Church held together their weight would have been almost
irresistible. Fortunately the great severance of St. Bartholomew's Day
drove out the Presbyterians from the Church to which they clung, and
forced them into a general union with sects which they had hated till
then almost as bitterly as the bishops themselves. A common persecution
soon blended the Nonconformists into one. Persecution broke down before
the numbers, the w