for the most part broken into rival bodies, fiercely contending with one another, but within themselves representing respectively one of the two great tendencies of the period. To these tendencies I will not give a theological name, but will call them those of the Reformation and the counter-Reformation respectively. From the time of the Council of Trent and of Loyola the Church of Rome represented more strictly than it had done before the tendencies of counter-Reformation. The Reformed Church had partly in the letter, and yet more in the spirit, broken with the previous constitution of the Church as well as with her dogma. Their confessions were indeed complex, but were framed upon a basis which their members felt, or at least thought they understood. They had all become in different degrees less like legislatures and more like clubs; that is to say, in the points to which I refer. A considerable time elapsed accordingly before the Latin Church was again seriously troubled with theological quarrels within its own domain; so also the Protestant Churches on the Continent underwent far less of trouble from internal dissensions than did the Church of England. ‘In the Scandinavian countries we may almost say such trouble has been unknown; the reason is, I apprehend, that in each case the hostile elements had been in the main suppressed or expelled by the struggle of the sixteenth century. Within this island it was not so. Both in England and in Scotland the effort was not only made, but tenaciously persisted in, to maintain the external unity of the nation in a common religious profession. I may here drop the case of Scotland, which has found a solution of its own. It is enough to speak of the case of England. It presents a result at first sight paradoxical in this respect—that the Church, which among reformed communions had least broken with tradition and most maintained the framework of the ancient authority, was the most perplexed, and indeed convulsed, with controversies and with schisms. When the matter is examined the cause is not far to seek. Weingarten, a German writer, lays down the proposition that the Reformation, as a religious movement, took its shape in England not in the sixteenth century, but in the seventeenth. The sixteenth century made the Church and the nation independent, and established the external framework of an ecclesiastical policy; but it seems difficult to show that the religion now professed as national in England took its rise at that epoch otherwise than as a legal and national profession. It seems plain that the great bulk of those burned under Mary were Puritans. Under Elizabeth we have to look, I believe (with very rare and remarkable exceptions), among Puritans or among recusants for the