This remarkable body of men, whose history has presented such strange contrasts of wild enthusiasm and imperturbable stolidity, of fanaticism and quietism, of contempt for the world and its rewards on the one side, and of sordid love of peace and money-getting upon the other, had recently come into being as one of the natural results of the unsettling of religious faiths and practices which had accompanied the political revolution in England. The Quaker movement was a revolt at once from the enforced conformity of the Laudian establishment and from the intolerable spiritual oppression of the Calvinistic divines, whose little fingers, when they came into power, had been thicker than the loins of their predecessors. The great Anglican prelates of the reign of Charles I. were unfortunate in the circumstances amidst which their lives were spent. They were liberal and tolerant in theology, and they were pilloried as bigots; they held an idea of what the Church of England should be, that was utopian in its comprehensiveness, and they are described by every New England writer of school histories or children’s story-books as narrow minded enemies of freedom of thought. The system proposed by Andrewes and Montague was essentially that of Sir Thomas More: liberality in matters of belief, with uniformity in practice and in ritual. The Puritan divines, on the other hand, were despotic in matters of faith and doctrine to a degree rarely equalled in the history of the human mind, while they insisted upon their right of refusing the system of worship which was established by law in the Church of England, and of choosing for themselves religious ordinances to suit their own tastes and fancies. They did not plead for liberty on the ground that the principle of compulsion in religious matters was wrong and illegitimate, but because the services of the Church of England were, in their opinion, unscriptural if not idolatrous. The one party was tolerant in doctrine, and despotic, tyrannical at times, in matters of ritual; the other claimed to be indifferent as to ritual, but was despotic in opinions. The church, by attempting to regulate public worship, was led in some instances to appear to be persecuting men for doctrinal differences; the Puritans, from their zeal for orthodoxy in doctrine, became, when the power was placed in their hands, the strictest possible disciplinarians. The tendency of the one party was to subject the church to the state, and thus make it an instrument of political authority; the other tended to the subjection of the state to the church, making the civil authority little more than the body by which the edicts of the ministers should be registered and their decrees should be enforced.