The body of protestant resistance, however, had no organic unity but that of a common antagonism. Already there was in existence a sect, not yet directly opposed to presbyterianism, but created by the demand for a more free spiritual movement than that system allowed of. The men commonly reckoned as the authors of independency or congregationalism, an influence which more than any other has ennobled the plebeian elements of English life, bore the fitting names of Brown and Robinson. That the brownists were a well-known sect as early as 1600 is shown by the healthy hatred of Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who ‘would as lief be a brownist as a politician.’ It was in 1582, when the puritans were discussing the propriety of temporary conformity, that Brown wrote his treatise on ‘Reformation, without tarrying for any,’ and by way of not tarrying for any in his own case, took to preaching nonconformity up and down the country. After seeing the inside of thirty-two prisons as the reward of his zeal, he betook himself to Holland, carrying a congregation with him. This he afterwards left, and it does not seem {289} certain whether the subsequent brownist congregations were directly affiliated to it. Certain views of church polity, however, were current among them, which formed the principles of independency in later years. The chief of those were the doctrine of the absolute autonomy of the individual congregation, and the rejection of a special order of priests or presbyters. Each congregation was to elect or depose its own officers, the officer who should preach and administer the sacraments among the rest. When tho number of communicants in a congregation became too large to meet in any one place, a new one was to be formed, but no congregation or sum of congregations was to have any control in regard to doctrine or discipline over another. Such a system of church government may not in itself be of more interest than others. As giving room for a liberty of prophecy which the rule of bishops or a presbytery denies, its importance was immense. This appears already in Robinson’s disavowal of the pretension to theological finality. Robinson, driven from England by episcopal persecution, had formed a congregation at Leyden. Here, in regard at least to the reformed churches of the continent, he gave up the strict separatist doctrine of the original brownists, ‘holding communion with these churches as far as possible.’ In 1620 the younger part of his congregation transferred itself to America, where it founded the colony of New Plymouth. His well-known exhortation to them at parting breathes a higher spirit of christian freedom than anything that had been heard since christianity fixed itself in creeds and churches.