ile
Luther was the prophet of the Reformation that has been, Erasmus was the
prophet of the Reformation that is to come, and so it was to some extent
with the Puritans and Hooker. The Puritan fight against the hierarchy
was a political necessity of the time, something without which no real
and thorough reformation could then be effected. In her antipathy to
this democratic movement, Elizabeth vexed and tormented the Puritans
as far as she deemed it prudent; and in the conservative temper of the
people she found enough support to prevent their transforming the church
as they would have liked to do. Among the Puritans themselves, indeed,
there was no definite agreement on this point. Some would have stopped
short with Presbyterianism, while others held that "new presbyter was
but old priest writ large," and so pressed on to Independency. It was
early in Elizabeth's reign that the zeal of these extreme brethren,
inflamed by persecution, gave rise to the sect of Separatists, who
flatly denied the royal supremacy over ecclesiastical affairs, and
asserted the right to set up churches of their own, with pastors
and elders and rules of discipline, independent of queen or bishop.
[Sidenote: Puritanism was not intentionally allied with liberalism]

In 1567 the first congregation of this sort, consisting of about a
hundred persons assembled in a hall in Anchor Lane in London, was
forcibly broken up and thirty-one of the number were sent to jail and
kept there for nearly a year. By 1576 the Separatists had come to be
recognized as a sect, under the lead of Robert Brown, a man of high
social position, related to the great Lord Burleigh. Brown fled to
Holland, where he preached to a congregation of English exiles, and
wrote books which were smuggled into England and privately circulated
there, much to the disgust, not only of the queen, but of all parties,
Puritans as well as High Churchmen. The great majority of Puritans,
whose aim was not to leave the church, but to stay in it and control
it, looked with dread and disapproval upon these extremists who seemed
likely to endanger their success by forcing them into deadly opposition
to the crown. Just as in the years which ushered in our late Civil War,
the opponents of the Republicans sought to throw discredit upon them by
confusing them with the little sect of Abolitionists; and just as the
Republicans, in resenting the imputation, went so far as to frown upon
the Abolitionists, so t