from many benefits enjoyed by their fellow-parishioners. It was
the fashion to treat them with scorn, yet I have heard one of the most
excellent and finished gentlemen in the district declare that he heard
better talk in my father's parlour than he did anywhere else in the
neighbourhood, and I can well believe it, for the Dissenting minister, as
a rule, at that time, was a better read man, and a more studious one,
than the clergyman of the district, in spite of his University education;
and in matters affecting the welfare of the nation, and that came under
the denomination of politics, his views were far more rational than those
of Churchmen in general, and the clergy in particular. We learn from
Milton's State Papers that the churches of East Anglia petitioned Oliver
Cromwell that the three nations might enjoy the blessings of a godly,
upright magistracy; that they might have Courts of Judicature in their
own country; and that honest men of known fidelity and uprightness might
be authorized to determine trivial matters of debt or difference.
Assuredly the East Anglian saints--the latter term was, and, strange to
say, is still, used as a term of reproach--were wise and right-thinking
men where Church government and public policy were concerned. We love to
read the story of the Pilgrim Fathers. With what rapture Mrs. Hemans
wrote:

'What sought they thus afar?
Bright jewels of the mine?
The wealth of seas? the spoils of war?
They sought a faith's pure shrine.

'Ay, call it holy ground,
The soil where first they trod;
They left unstained what there they found--
FREEDOM TO WORSHIP GOD.'

But it seems to me that a greater glory was won by, and a greater honour
should be paid to, the men who did not cross the Atlantic; who did not
seek an asylum in a foreign land; who remained at home to suffer--to die,
if need be, to uphold the rights of conscience, and to fight the good
fight of faith. It is not even in our tolerant, and, as we deem it, more
enlightened day, that full justice is done to these men. In what calls
itself good society you meet men and women whose ancestors were
Dissenters, and yet who are ashamed of the fact--a fact of which no one
can be ashamed who feels how in East Anglia, at any rate, the religious
teaching of Dissent purified the life of the people, enlarged their
political views, and helped this great land of ours to sweep into a
better and a younge