The struggle within the bosom of such a nation demanded powers of the highest and strongest order, and drew them forth. And the man who could conduct that struggle to a successful issue and rule such a strong-handed, imperious race as the English of the Commonwealth, could have found little beyond his strength in any enterprise in any age of the world; and nothing but that spirit which from the positive side of their Calvinistic creed entered into Cromwell, and the men of whom he became the organ and the head, could have borne them through the tremendous pressure. No 'sweetness and light' of intellectual culture, no sense of 'natural human power' could have borne John Robinson's company of pilgrims first to Holland, and then across the stormy Atlantic, and given them strength to hold together, as they say of themselves touchingly, 'in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation of which we make great conscience; and by virtue whereof we do hold ourselves strictly tied to all care for each other's good, and of the whole by every, and so mutual.'--(Letter of Robinson and Brewster to Sir E. Sandys.) It was this spirit, which no conformity to an Elizabethan, still less to a Jacobean church, could have nurtured, which made New England, and through New England made America. Calvinism was so profoundly associated through that age with the advancing cause of the spiritual and political liberties of our country that the Arminian bias of the dignified clergy of the Establishment, which began to manifest itself after the settlement of the Church and the kingdom under King James, is by no means a noble or beautiful feature in its history. Arminianism in the Church went hand in hand with worldly compliance, slavish homage to princes, idolatrous rites, gorgeous ritual, and episcopal tyranny; and it went down with the Church righteously to ruin under the shock of the men who did believe themselves called, quickened, and raised up as witnesses, by the God of righteousness and truth. We look too little at these doctrinal developments in the light of the political life of the times which produce them. The connection is a profound one between schemes of doctrine and political ideas. A point too little considered is the truth of a scheme of doctrine for its times. They must be blind indeed who cannot see that with the Calvinistic Puritans, and not with the Arminian Anglicans, rapidly tending to the Laudian Church, were stirring through the whole of that struggle the motive forces of the progress of society.