[Sidenote: H. M. Dexter's Congregationalism, 255-257.] It seems that their rise in London came from the devout meetings of those who had begun to repudiate the Church of England as antichristian. Without any officers or organization apparently, these people, when we first get sight of them, were wont to assemble in the summer time in the fields about London, sitting down upon a bank while the Bible was expounded now by one and now by another of the company. In the winter it was their custom to spend the whole Sunday together from five o'clock in the morning, eating dinner in company and paying for it by a collection. They responded in prayer only by spontaneous groans or sobs, much after the fashion of the early Quakers, Methodists, and other enthusiasts of a later time. If one of their members returned to a parish assembly, they pronounced him an apostate and solemnly delivered him over to Satan until he should repent. V. [Sidenote: Barrowism.] When they began to organize themselves formally into a church the London Separatists in their turn resorted to the apostolic epistles. These had already been treated like the magician's bottle that is made to yield white wine or red at pleasure. From them whatsoever form of discipline was desired by Anglican, Presbyterian, or Brownist had been derived, and now a still different discipline was deduced, a mean betwixt Presbyterian and Brownist theories. This is known now as Barrowism. It was the form of church government brought by the Pilgrims to Plymouth, and substantially that which prevailed in New England throughout the seventeenth century. [Illustration: The cradle of the Pilgrims.] [Sidenote: Separatists in Amsterdam, 1593.] The London Separatists suffered miserably from persecution. Many of them languished and died in prison. Barrow and Greenwood, their leaders, were hanged at Tyburn. A part of them migrated to Amsterdam, while the rest maintained a furtive church in London. Those in Amsterdam, having no lingering abuses of the English church to reform, set every man's conscience to watch his neighbor's conduct. Having seceded from the communion of the Church of England on account of scandals, they were scandalized with the least variation from their rigorous standard by any of their own church members, and they were soon torn asunder with dissensions as the result of this vicariousness of conscience. The innocent vanity of the pastor's wife who could never forego a "toppish" hat and high-heeled shoes was the principal stumbling-block. Though Separatism had been almost extirpated from England by the close of Elizabeth's reign, there remained even yet one vigorous society in the north which was destined to exert a remarkable influence on the course of history. VI. [Sidenote: The cradle of the Pilgrims.]