n anticipation of the famous move by which Pascal, fifty
years later, "took theology out of the schools into drawing-rooms," except
that Martin and his adversaries transferred the venue rather to the
tap-room than to the drawing-room. The controversy between the framers of
the Church of England in its present state, and the hot gospellers who,
with Thomas Cartwright at their head, denied the proposition (not deniable
or denied now by any sane and scholarly disputant) that church discipline
and government are points left to a great extent undefined in the
Scriptures, had gone on for years before Martin appeared. Cartwright and
Whitgift had fought, with a certain advantage of warmth and eloquence on
Cartwright's side, and with an immense preponderance of logical cogency on
Whitgift's. Many minor persons had joined in the struggle, and at last a
divine, more worthy than wise, John Bridges, Dean of Salisbury, had
produced on the orthodox side one of those enormous treatises (it had some
fifteen hundred quarto pages) which are usually left unread by the side
they favour, and which exasperate the side they oppose. The ordinary law of
the time, moreover, which placed large powers in the hands of the bishops,
and especially entrusted them with a rigid and complete censorship of the
press, had begun to be put in force severely against the more outspoken
partisans. Any one who will take the trouble to read the examination of
Henry Barrow, which Mr. Arber has reprinted,[41] or even the "moderate"
tracts of Nicholas Udall, which in a manner ushered in the Marprelate
controversy, will probably be more surprised at the long-suffering of the
judges than at the sufferings of their prisoners. Barrow, in a long and
patient examination before the council, of which the Bishop of London and
the Archbishop of Canterbury were members, called them to their faces the
one a "wolf," a "bloody persecutor," and an "apostate," the other "a
monster" and "the second beast that is spoken of in the Revelations." The
"moderate" Udall, after publishing a dialogue (in which an Anglican bishop
called Diotrephes is represented, among other things, as planning measures
against the Puritans in consort with a papist and an usurer), further
composed a _Demonstration of Discipline_ in which, writing, according to
Mr. Arber, "without any satire or invective," he calls the bishops merely
_qua_ bishops, "the wretched fathers of a filthy mother," with abundant
epithets