We must now close this narration of the issues raised in the Puritan controversy, whether by Nonconformists in the Church or by Separatists withdrawing from it, that we may note the concentration of forces and witnesses which were drawn together in assemblies or fellowships prepared in Old England to transfer and establish their principles in New England. Many of the clergy whose views and sympathies were warmly engaged in the further work of reform and purification within the Church, and who at the same time were moderate and conciliatory in their spirit, contrived to remain in their parochial fields, perhaps in this way accomplishing the most for all that was reasonable and good in the cause which they had at heart. When occasionally molested or challenged, they might contrive to make their peace. But the crisis and its demands called—as has always been the case in such intense agitations of religious passions—for patient, steadfast, and resolute witnesses in suffering, for those who should be hounded and tracked by judicial processes, who should be deprived of subsistence and liberty, and be ready not only for being hidden away in prisons or exiled beyond the seas, but for public execution as martyrs. The emergency of time and occasion found such as these; and it was of such as these that there were men and women in training for wilderness work on this soil. And the combination of materials and persons was precisely such as would meet the exactions of such an enterprise. There were university men, scholars, doctors in divinity, practised disputants in their cherished lore, and with gifts of zeal, fervor, and tender eloquence in discourse and prayer. There were gentry likewise,—men and women lifted in the social scale, with furnishings of mind and worldly goods. To these were joined, in a fellowship which equalized many distinctions, yeomen, small traders, artisans, and some of every place and grade, save the low or mean or reckless, in the make-up of the population of the realm. Governor Bradford says that the first Separatist or Independent Church in England was that of which John Rough, the minister, and Cuthbert Symson, the deacon, were burned alive by Bonner, in the reign of Queen Mary. The laborious and faithful pages of Dr. Dexter, in his _Congregationalism_, must be closely studied for the results of the marvellous diligence and keen research by which he has traced every vestige, memorial, and testimony that can throw light on the little assemblies of those outlawed Puritans. It is a curious and engaging occupation in our peaceful and lethargic times of religious ease, to scan the make-up, the spirit, and methods of those humble assemblies in their lurking-places, private houses, barns, or the open fields, frequently changing their appointments under risks from spies and tipstaves, with their secret code of signals for communicating intelligence. Their religious exercises were of