In the same connection may be mentioned _The Church and Puritans_,[471] a small and compact volume, written in the best spirit of moderation and candor. In but little more than two hundred open pages, the author traces the whole course of Dissent,—its rise, aims, principles, and methods, and its struggles, buffetings, and discomfitures, from its manifestations under Elizabeth to the failure of “a glorious opportunity of reconciling all moderate Dissenters to the communion of the Church of England, under William and Mary.” By the judicious restraint upon what might naturally be his promptings, as a clergyman of the Church of England, to criticise with some sharpness what has so generally been represented as the perversity and weak scrupulosity of the Puritans, he is eminently fair and considerate in presenting their side of the controversy, and in dealing with their more conspicuous men. The abounding citation of original authorities on both sides in his notes authenticates, for nearly every sentence of the work, the statement made in it. Two works of a remarkably liberal and scholarly character which have quite recently appeared from the pens of eminent divines of the English Church, would have been gratefully welcomed by the Nonconformists in the period of their sharpest conflict, on account of their generous spirit and their contents. They would have been especially noteworthy in the liberal concessions which they make upon all the points involved in the controversy, as to the simple authority and pattern of Scripture in the constitution and discipline of the Christian Church, as against the hierarchical claims based upon traditions and usages subsequent to the age of the apostles, and traceable in the so-called Primitive Church. These books are Mr. Edwin Hatch’s _Organization of the Early Christian Churches_,[472] and Dean Stanley’s _Christian Institutions_.[473] Mr. Hatch has also published articles of a similar tenor to the contents of his Bampton Lectures, in the _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_. In these lectures, the author aims to trace the facts of ecclesiastical history in the same way as those of civil history are usually dealt with. His aim is to investigate the framework of the earliest Christian societies. He says these societies in their formation adjusted themselves to previously existing methods of association. The philanthropic element in them suggested the sort of officers needed, their provinces and functions. A president of the society and one or more distributors of alms were the requisite officers. Then as increasing numbers in a society, and of societies, made necessary a distribution of functions, with centralization and subordination of duty and authority, an ecclesiastical system was developed by like methods to those of a civil or political system. Convenience and adaptation thus originated the elements of a hierarchy, the regulation of which was watched over and disposed by a system of councils.