How Puritanism glided into a state of separation, and the nonconformist in the Church became a dissenter outside its pale, is curiously illustrated in the Records of the Church assembling in Broadmead, Bristol. In those records is a story of a certain zealous lady of that city named Kelly.[128] "She kept a grocer's shop in High Street, between the Builders' Inn and the High Cross," and that she might bear a testimony against superstitious observances, "she would keep open her shop on Christmas Day, and sit sewing in the face of the sun, and in the sight of all men." Afterwards, when she heard a clergyman she did not like at the parish church, "away she went forth before them all, and said she would hear no more, and never did." Puritan emigrants to New England embarked at Bristol, and would abide with Mrs. Hazzard "if they waited for a wind." Women actually sought to be confined in the parish of a Puritan clergyman, to avoid the ceremonies of "churching and crossing." "The consciences of the good people began to be very weary." Then "it pleased the Lord to stir up some few of the professors of this city to lead the way out of Babylon." "Five persons began to go further, and scrupled to hear common prayer, even four men and one woman." So that in the year 1640, those five persons met together at Mrs. Hazzard's house, "at the upper end of Broad Street, in Bristol, and came to a holy resolution to separate from the worship of the world and times they lived in, and that they would go no more to it."[129] In this case, we see how dissatisfaction with the Established Church gradually led to positive separation, and how extremely feeble, in some instances, was the commencement of organized dissent. But the spirit working in the way just indicated, slowly, and without much notice, came suddenly and boldly on the surface, soon after the Long Parliament had opened. [Sidenote: _Presbyterianism._] Though the incumbents of the metropolis were almost all High Churchmen, there were many Puritan lecturers in the city with strong Presbyterian sympathies, supported by wealthy citizens, and in high repute with the multitude. Amongst them, Dr. Cornelius Burgess is a very noticeable man--already mentioned as the fast-day preacher--who, in connection with a lectureship at St. Paul's, held other Church preferment. To him and his brother lecturers may be ascribed the inspiration of much intense public feeling against prelatical assumptions, and against Episcopacy itself,[130] out of which arose an extraordinary memorial, which has attained no small notoriety under the name of the _Root and Branch_ petition.