Mr. W. Bridge, M.A., was the lecturer of St. George Tombland, Norwich, up to the year 1637. He was a pious and learned man, who held other livings and performed his duties well. To him, on a certain day, came Bishop Wren’s order to read the “Book of Sports” on the next Sunday in church. He sat in dejection, with the odious volume before him, abhorring the profaneness of its contents and its daring contradiction of Scripture. He resolved not to read it. He took counsel of his brethren, and several of them together refused compliance, fled to Yarmouth, and thence with sad hearts embarked for Holland, where they spent many anxious years, hoping to be allowed to return. Laud informed King Charles I. that Bridge had left two livings and a lectureship and had fled to Holland; and the king wrote against his name this bitter sentence: “_We are well rid of him_.” It was an expression worthy of a bigoted and worldly mind. Thus it appears that the reformation was not the work of kings or bishops, or the great and learned. The history of those times is the history of persecuting power in opposition to the progress of the Gospel—an opposition the more dreadful inasmuch as it was carried on under the pretence of doing service to religion. The Reformed Church of England acknowledged the right of private judgment in theory, but ignored it in practice. The Puritans, on the other hand, carried it out to its legitimate consequences; and Milton, their great champion, advocated absolute freedom of thought and speech as the birthright of every man. No doubt Puritanism ran into some excesses of bigotry and intolerance, but it was an intolerant age. Puritanism, however, preserved civil and religious liberty and the right of private judgment, and perpetuated that right to all sects and classes of the nation. Puritanism has been charged with the sin of schism, but the early reformers were forced into it by persecution for conscientious scruples respecting points of doctrine and discipline. William Bridge, Asty, Allen, Cromwell, and Fynch, all were thrown out of their livings by the Act of Uniformity, and became Nonconformist ministers in Norwich. Without any conference the question put to them was, “_Will you upon oath conform_?” The answer was, “We cannot.” Immediate expulsion followed. Where, then, was the sin of schism? Their sin would have been in conformity. They would have proved to the world that they were mere hirelings, like the “Vicar of Bray,” who changed his religion to please the reigning sovereign of the day. Bridge, returning with some others to his native county, founded the first Independent church at Yarmouth about 1642. A year later the church at Norwich was formed into a distinct body. They met at first in a brew-house in St. Edmund’s, afterwards in the refectory over the cloisters in the convent formerly belonging to the Black Friars. THE INDEPENDENTS.