yet Arminianism
was little more than a reaction against a system that contradicted the
obvious facts of life, a desire to bring theology into some sort of
harmony with human experience; but it was soon to pass by a fatal
necessity into a wider variance, and to gather round it into one mass of
opposition every tendency of revolt which time was disclosing against
the Calvinism which now reigned triumphant in Protestant theology.

[Sidenote: The doctrinal bigotry of Puritanism.]

From the belief in humanity or in reason which gave strength to such a
revolt the Puritan turned doggedly away. In the fierce white light of
his idealism human effort seemed weakness, human virtue but sin, human
reason but folly. Absorbed as he was in the thought of God, craving for
nothing less than a divine righteousness, a divine wisdom, a divine
strength, he grasped the written Bible as the law of God and
concentrated every energy in the effort to obey it. The dogma of
justification, the faith that without merit or act of man God would save
and call to holiness His own elect, was the centre of his creed. And
with such a creed he felt that the humanity of the Renascence, the
philosophy of the thinker, the comprehension of the statesman, were
alike at war. A policy of comprehension seemed to him simply a policy of
faithlessness to God. Ceremonies which in an hour of triumph he might
have regarded as solaces to weak brethren, he looked on as acts of
treason in this hour of defeat. Above all he would listen to no words of
reconciliation with a religious system in which he saw nothing but a
lie, nor to any pleas for concession in what he held to be truth. The
craving of the Arminian for a more rational theology he met by a fiercer
loyalty to the narrowest dogma. Archbishop Whitgift had striven to force
on the Church of England a set of articles which embodied the tenets of
an extreme Calvinism; and one of the wisest acts of Elizabeth had been
to disallow them. But hateful as Whitgift on every other ground was to
the Puritans, they never ceased to demand the adoption of his Lambeth
Articles.

[Sidenote: Its hatred of sectaries.]

And as he would admit no toleration within the sphere of doctrine, so
would the Puritan admit no toleration within the sphere of
ecclesiastical order. That the Church of England should both in
ceremonies and in teaching take a far more distinctively Protestant
attitude than it had hitherto done, every Puritan was resol