Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/394

380 people in power on its behalf. Barclay delineated its features in his celebrated "Apology for the true Christian Divinity." Penn wrote boldly for it, and spoke boldly for it, too, on his trials, especially that with William Mead at the Old Bailey, an account of which has often been reprinted, as a splendid instance of the vindication of trial by jury. Anthony Pearson, who had been a justice of the peace, published his "Great Case of Tithes," in which all the evils and and-Christianity of the tithe system were duly exposed. Thomas Lawson wrote, "A Mite in the Treasury," and "The Call, Work, and Wages of the Ministers of Christ and of Antichrist," two most spirited and able expositions of political religion. Elwood wrote his interesting life, abounding with scenes of imprisonment and patient endurance for his principles. Besse compiled, from official documents of the Society of Friends, a work of everlasting condemnation to the priests of the church of England; and Sewell wrote the "History of the Society" at large, a work declared by Charles Lamb to be worth all other ecclesiastical history put together. In these and other works they asserted those great principles of religious freedom now so generally adopted, and for these they suffered. Seeing clearly how a royal religion disturbed and oppressed the real church of Christ, how it neutralised all its benign doctrines, they determined, cost what it would, to hold no communion with it. They would neither marry at its altars, nor bury in its soil, and for this their dead were torn out of their graves by the parish priests and their minions; and they were not only heavily fined and imprisoned for marrying at their own chapels, but their children were declared illegitimate. At Nottingham, in 1661, an attempt was made by a public trial to disinherit some orphans on this ground, but the worthy old judge Archer brought Adam and Eve as precedents, and declared that their taking each other in marriage in the presence of God was valid, and if those children were illegitimate, then we were all so. On this singular decision the marriages of Friends were recognised and made legal. But had it been otherwise, such was the sturdy firmness of the Friends, that they would have suffered loss of both property, liberty, and life, to the last man, sooner than concede an iota to this unjust system; and the whole fury of the executive power was let loose upon them. They were given up a prey to vindictive parsons, and ignorant, priest-ridden justices of the peace, and to the whole greedy rabble of informers, constables, and the lowest refuse of society.

The history of their full extent of persecutions belongs to a later period; but the rise and principles of this society demand a notice in the religious history of this period as one of the most important events of any age. Those principles—their effect, or field of influence—are not to be measured by the limited growth of the society which first promulgated them. Like many other bodies out of which great principles have sprung, it has become, as it were, fossilised, retaining the form, and even the reverence of the original body; but the principles themselves are the principles of Christianity, coextensive with the universe in their action on spiritual life. It was the mission of Fox to liberate them from the conventional forms in which outward and worldly motives had imprisoned them, to sweep away all the cobwebs of school and state sophistry from them, and to recall the conviction of man to them in all their simple and sublime beauty. The puritans in general had made little progress in the comprehension of religious freedom; what they claimed themselves they were ready to withhold from others. Cromwell and the independents made a great advance, yet withheld this liberty from catholics and episcopalians; but Fox demonstrated that the liberty of the Gospel was the equal birthright of all men. All these religious reformers were ready to permit or become themselves a state church. Fox reminded them that the "Kingdom of Christ was not of this world;" that when they had rendered to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, civil support and obedience, they must render to God the things which are God's, the rights of conscience, and the independence of his church. For all the civilising and angelising influences of religion—resistance to slavery, oppression, war, priestcraft, world-worship, and mammon-worship—which are the divine and eternal essence of the Gospel, the philosophy and the theology of George Fox asserted the independence and universality, and these principles, now adopted into nearly all creeds, are silently but perceptibly at work to leaven the whole mass of society, and in the course of ages to throw down every tyranny, every cruelty, every abomination, on every side of the globe.

PROGRESS OF THE ARTS, MANUFACTURES, AND COMMERCE.

In the reigns of James and Charles this country neither maintained the reputation of our navy acquired under Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, nor made great progress in foreign commerce. The character of James was too timid for maritime or any other war, and when he was forced into action it was only to show his weakness. He put to death the greatest naval captain of his time, Raleigh, who, if well employed by him, might have made him as much respected at sea as was Elizabeth. Yet he built ten ships of war, and for some years spent thirty-six thousand pounds a year on the navy. The largest ship which had yet been built in England was built by him, which, however, was only fourteen hundred tons. As for commerce, he was too much engaged in theological disputations, in persecution of papists, wrangling with his parliaments, and following his hawks and hounds, to think of it, and consequently there were every fresh session grievous complaints of the decay of trade. The Dutch were fast engrossing both the commerce and the carrying trade of this country. During this reign they traded to England with six hundred ships, and the English traded to Holland with sixty.

The naval affairs of Charles were quite as inglorious as those of his father. As James beheaded the best admiral of England, Charles chose for his the very worst in Europe, and the disgrace of Buckingham's expedition to the Isle of Rhé was the consequence. Charles's contests with his parliaments, which terminated only with his life, destroyed all chance of his promotion of our naval ascendancy, and of the cultivation of commerce. All this was wonderfully changed by the vigorous spirits of the commonwealth. The victories of Blake, by which the naval greatness of Holland and Spain were almost annihilated, raised the reputation of the