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 neighbouring kingdom, which afforded room enough for Puritan zeal, and possessed a strong system of discipline in marked contrast to the lukewarmness of the English Church? So thought the political leaders of the new age, and so they acted, on grounds of policy just as true and just as false as those which animated the statesmen of Elizabeth in framing the Anglican Church. The commissioners of the Kirk assembled at Westminster, and England was to be legislated into the model of Geneva.

That this result was prevented, and that the great Civil War succeeded in its objects, was due to the Independents and to the principles which they asserted. Hitherto they had not been influential in England, though it was in that country that they took their rise. They were the direct results of the evil effects which followed from the too great identity of the Church with the State. They were the advanced wing of the English Puritans, whose sense of existing wrongs was so keen that their one object was to protest vehemently against them. The first man who gave expression to these feelings was Robert Browne, a puritan clergyman in Norfolk, who stated his desire for a fuller reformation in the form that "the Kingdom of God was not to be begun by whole parishes, but rather of the worthiest, were they never so few". The importance of this statement lay in the fact that not only was he dissatisfied with the trammels of the English Church, but the system of Calvin seemed to him to be open to equal objections. He did not struggle for readjustments of the liturgy or of the ceremonies or of the government of the