, half the worshippers of England and Wales are
Dissenters--that is to say, are of this spurious religion, and pay their
own ministers, and build their own chapels, without asking a farthing
from the State. Their leading denominations are the Baptists and
Congregationalists; and it shows how terribly Dissent undervalues the
historical element when I state that the Independents now prefer to call
themselves Congregationalists. There is an historical halo around
Independency. Mr. Brodie remarks that "the grand principle by which the
Independents surpassed all other sects was, universal toleration to all
denominations of Christians whose religion was not conceived to be
hostile to the peace of the State--a principle to which they were
faithful in the height of power as well as under persecution." Nor
should it be forgotten that Locke, the first of our philosophers to argue
on behalf of toleration, gained, as his biographers confess, his
enlightened views from the Independent Divines.

Speaking relatively, Dissent is a thing of yesterday. It was born of the
Puritanism which filled the gaols and fed the fires of Smithfield, when
there were men and women ready to die for Christ and his Cross. Wycliffe
was one of our earliest Dissenters. What he taught was the study of the
Bible as the source of religious faith and the rule of a religious life.
At college he was known as the Gospel doctor.

Queen Elizabeth ever believed in the invocation of saints; the worship of
the Virgin Mary; thought it sinful for priests to marry, and had a couple
of lighted candlesticks on her altar; but the country was full of learned
divines, who had come from Geneva or Frankfort with a contempt for such
papistical ideas, and with a more keen appreciation of the spiritual
character of true religion. About twenty years after her accession, the
principles of Independency were openly taught by Robert Brown, a relative
of Cecil, the Lord Treasurer. When Black Bartholomew came, Puritans and
Presbyterians were alike driven out of the Church. Owen, Vice-Chancellor
of the University of Oxford, Baxter and Calamy, might have been Bishops,
but they held that they could not assent to the teaching and ritualism of
the Church, and be false to conscience and to God. For this they had to
endure hardships, poverty, imprisonment, of all kinds--when Charles II.,
who obtained the Crown of England under false pretences, though he did,
as Pepys tells us, take the