Besides, the Congregational cause was peculiarly unfortunate in Cromwell. That great adventurer did not fully comprehend its objects and mission. He may have understood it in part, and have felt the force of its general protest against the specific oppressions and abuses of the times. He saw that the evils of which the Puritans complained were evils, and that they demanded correction. But he did not comprehend their relation to their common parent and cause, civil and ecclesiastical despotism. He thought they arose from abused and perverted despotisms, and could be remedied by improved administrations of the same system. Hence he interpolated in the despotisms of the Stuarts a counter and overpowering despotism of his own. He was even more a despot, under the title of Lord Protector, than James VI. and Charles I. had been, under the titles of hereditary monarchs. He was unfortunately accepted by the Congregational Puritans as the great instrument of Providence to secure the ascendency of their principles, a despotic head of the church and state democracy. During his administration he was, to some extent, the patron of this party. He was its protector, in common with all parties. But his protection was that of a friendly despot.

The nation was not satisfied; neither the friends of democracy, nor others. The relation of Cromwell to all parties was that of a master; peculiarly unacceptable to the royalist party, as an adventurer, with no hereditary claims to the honors and emoluments of royalty; and entirely unsatisfactory to the democratic party, as a despot of the most absolute and unscrupulous kind, treading under foot all the cherished maxims of democracy. At his death the nation might have righted itself, and the cause of liberty have gained something by stipulating for a constitutional government of some kind, monarchical or democratic; or, combining these elements in certain fixed and definite proportions, had the Congregational Puritans been sustained by the Presbyterians. But, unfortunately, they were not; and a misjudged coalition of the Presbyterians, then in the ascendency,

and easily holding the balance of power, with the friends of monarchical and Episcopal despotism, by the recall of Charles II. surrendered all the fruits of the civil war and the commonwealth, and set everything back essentially in the same condition as under Charles I. and James VI.

Of this retrogression England repented at her leisure, and, from the accession of William III., prince of Orange, till the present time, it has been slowly retracing those back steps, and approximating towards the magnificent and attractive ideal of the Congregational Puritans in church and state.

The recovery of English Congregationalism from the shock it received at the accession of Charles II., in 1660, and the injuries it suffered during his reign, was slow and difficult. The public mind had been corrupted, and great pains had been taken to prejudice the nation against republican principles in the church and state. The signal failure of the revolution under Cromwell had the effect to increase this prejudice, as though democracy was something in its nature impracticable. But dissent has been steadily gaining ground in England ever since the act of toleration, and must, at no distant day, become overpowering.

In 1772 the Congregationalist churches in England were estimated at seven hundred and ninety-nine, in Wales two hundred and twenty-five; in all, one thousand and twenty-four. Their number had nearly doubled in thirty years. The Presbyterians at the same time, 1772, had two hundred and fifty churches in England, and eighteen in Wales, making in all two hundred and seventy. This was a great falling off from the predominance and general popularity of Presbyterianism in the early days of the Westminster Assembly, 1643-1648.

Excluded from the great English universities, the English Congregationalists have established independent colleges at Homerton, near London, Hoxton and Hackney, and have several other literary institutions of some importance.

By the recent census of 1851, it appears that the entire population of England and Wales, at that time, was seventeen mil

lion nine hundred and twenty-seven thousand six hundred and nine; and those who attended public worship in all the different churches, ten million eight hundred and ninety-six thousand and sixty-six, leaving seven million thirty-one thousand five hundred and forty-three who did not attend public religious worship at all; a most alarming indication of the prevalence of irreligion in that most Christian country. Of the religious portion of the population, five million two hundred and ninety-two thousand five hundred and fifty-one attended worship in the church of England churches; and five million six hundred and three thousand five hundred and fifteen, in the various dissenting churches. So that a majority of the actual religious worshippers of England and Wales is with the dissenters, and not with the establishment. Church of England religion, with all its superior advantages of court patronage and aristocratic favor, is not the religion of the British people. The nation gives a numerical majority of three hundred thousand nine hundred and sixty-four in favor of dissenting churches.

It appears from the same authority, the census of 1851, that, of the various dissenting bodies, the Methodists are ahead of all the rest, and next to them the Congregationalists. The Methodist worshippers number one million five hundred and forty-four thousand five hundred and twenty-eight, and the Congregationalists one million two hundred and fourteen thousand and fiftynine. The Unitarians are fifty thousand strong.

The Congregationalists in England were never more active, nor their cause more prosperous, than at the present time. Their benevolent societies for the propagation of the Gospel are numerous and efficient. The London Missionary Society has one hundred and sixty-seven missionaries employed in China, India, the West Indies and other foreign countries, and six hundred natives. The [London] Home Missionary Society is laboring efficiently for the extension of Congregationalism at home, and has one hundred and twenty-two stations in England and Wales. At the present time there are one thousand eight hundred and

fifty-three Congregationalist churches in England, four hundred and sixty-three in Wales, one hundred and three in Scotland, twenty-four in Ireland, and seventy-eight in the British provinces; in all, two thousand five hundred and twenty-one. The number of Congregationalist churches in England and Wales is two thousand three hundred and sixteen. This is a large number to have grown up since 1688, in a period of one hundred and sixty-six years. These churches have grown up under all the disadvantages of a powerful government patronage given to a rival state establishment. Great and unreasonable prejudices have been excited against them, and they have been the objects of great superciliousness on the part of the established church and its particular friends; but, under all these disadvantages, they have grown to be numerous and powerful, and are still growing and increasing in popularity.

The foregoing estimates are probably below the truth. A recent English paper makes the number of English Congregationalist churches to be two thousand. All accounts agree in representing this class of Christians as worthy descendants of the Congregational Puritans of earlier times, and as being considerably on the increase.

CHAPTER VI.

THE INTRODUCTION OF CONGREGATIONALISM IN AMERICA.

CONGREGATIONALISM was driven to this country by persecution. There was in its case a fulfilment of the prophecy contained in Rev. 12: 14, 15, 16, "And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place; where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent. And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman,

that he might cause her to be carried away with the flood. And the earth helped the woman; and opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth."

The woman, in this passage, is supposed to represent the true church of God, driven away into retirement before the persecuting power of pagan Rome. It symbolizes the same church driven away before the persecuting power of the same dragon, under the guise of religion, in Papal Rome. It also describes with equal precision the banishment of our pilgrim Puritan fathers from England by the religious despotism of those times, when there was given them the wings of a great eagle to fly away to this then wilderness, to be nourished in retirement for a time, far away from the dragon of persecution that threatened. to destroy them in their father-land.

The first emigration to New England was an emigration of the church, and an emigration to the wilderness. It consisted of Puritans of eminent piety and virtue, and many of them distinguished for learning and refinement, who could not conscientiously submit to the then prevailing religious despotism of England. Not only were the first emigrants English Puritans; they were Puritans of the most radical character in respect to their notions of reform both in church and state, and most irreconcilably opposed to corruption and injustice, and every species of vice and sin.

They were regarded by the prudent conservatives of the time as raving fanatics, on the borders of lunacy; as men of impracticable theories, who could not hear to reason and expediency; and as revolutionists and destructives in church and state, who must either be crushed and crippled or banished, in order that peace and security might be attained. They were represented in the most odious lights, caricatured and charged with all kinds of absurdities and inconsistencies, and their banishment and removal accounted a great public benefit. Such was the estimate of the Independents in the corrupt and arbi