historical element when I state that the Independents now prefer to call themselves Congregationalists. There is an historical halo around Independency. Mr. Brodie remarks that “the grand principle by which the Independents surpassed all other sects was, universal toleration to all denominations of Christians whose religion was not conceived to be hostile to the peace of the State—a principle to which they were faithful in the height of power as well as under persecution.” Nor should it be forgotten that Locke, the first of our philosophers to argue on behalf of toleration, gained, as his biographers confess, his enlightened views from the Independent Divines. Speaking relatively, Dissent is a thing of yesterday. It was born of the Puritanism which filled the gaols and fed the fires of Smithfield, when there were men and women ready to die for Christ and his Cross. Wycliffe was one of our earliest Dissenters. What he taught was the study of the Bible as the source of religious faith and the rule of a religious life. At college he was known as the Gospel doctor. Queen Elizabeth ever believed in the invocation of saints; the worship of the Virgin Mary; thought it sinful for priests to marry, and had a couple of lighted candlesticks on her altar; but the country was full of learned divines, who had come from Geneva or Frankfort with a contempt for such papistical ideas, and with a more keen appreciation of the spiritual character of true religion. About twenty years after her accession, the principles of Independency were openly taught by Robert Brown, a relative of Cecil, the Lord Treasurer. When Black Bartholomew came, Puritans and Presbyterians were alike driven out of the Church. Owen, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Baxter and Calamy, might have been Bishops, but they held that they could not assent to the teaching and ritualism of the Church, and be false to conscience and to God. For this they had to endure hardships, poverty, imprisonment, of all kinds—when Charles II., who obtained the Crown of England under false pretences, though he did, as Pepys tells us, take the Sacrament on his knees, received from his pliant Bishops his title of most religious King. Calamy, when a lad, wondered why the old ministers who led peaceable lives, and always prayed for the King, were persecuted, and in our day the feeling of wonder still exists.