above all human ordinances, until at last his own interpretations of Scripture, which he made his sole guide in every public and private relation of life, seemed to him guaranteed by the highest of all sanctions. He thus became capable of trampling with a serene conscience upon the rights of those who maintained opinions different from his own. Fair and just in matters in which questions of doctrine or polity were not involved, in affairs of religion the Puritan became the type and embodiment of all that is unyielding and fanatical. Opposition to the use of the surplice, the sign of the cross in baptism, the posture of kneeling at the Lord’s Supper, and antiphonal chanting, expanded into uncompromising condemnation of the whole ritual. Puritanism and Presbyterianism became amalgamated, and it only wanted the time and opportunity to pull down episcopacy and liturgy in a common overthrow. The antipathy of the Puritans to artistic music and official choirs was, therefore, less a matter of personal feeling than it was with Calvin. His thought was more that of the purely religious effect upon the individual heart; with the Puritan, hatred of cultured church music was simply a detail in the general animosity which he felt toward an offensive institution. The most conspicuous of the agitators during the reign of Elizabeth was Thomas Cartwright, Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge, who first gained notoriety by means of public lectures read in 1570 against the doctrine and discipline of the established Church. The coarseness and violence of this man drew upon him the royal censure, and he was deprived of his fellowship and expelled from the University. His antipathy was especially aroused by the musical practice of the established Church, particularly the antiphonal chanting, “tossing the psalms from one side to the other,” to use one of his favorite expressions. “The devil hath gone about to get it authority,” said Cartwright. “As for organs and curious singing, though they be proper to popish dens, I mean to cathedral churches, yet some others also must have them. The queen’s chapel and these churches (which should be spectacles of Christian reformation) are rather patterns to the people of all superstition.” The attack of Cartwright upon the rites and discipline of the Church of England, since it expressed the feeling of a strong section of the Puritan party, could not be left unanswered. The defence was undertaken by Whitgift and afterward by Richard Hooker, the latter bringing to the debate such learning, dignity, eloquence, and logic that we may be truly grateful to the unlovely Cartwright that his diatribe was the occasion of the enrichment of English literature with so masterly an exposition of the principles of the Anglican system as the _Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_.