The new law, passed by a Puritan Commons, contributed in no small degree to swelling the flood of oppression, which was destined to sweep Separatism out of England. The Puritans could not tolerate any opposition to the old idea of ecclesiastical unity, and were willing to go as far as the farthest in suppressing it. They held that the National Church, though perhaps in some respects corrupt and unscripturally organized, contained within itself a true Church of Christ, and therefore they abhorred separation from its worship and communion as a sinful schism. They believed that Parliament might rightfully enact laws for ecclesiastical government, and for the punishment of ecclesiastical offenders. Their approval of this law, therefore, was not inconsistent with their attitude of hostility to the Separatists, and should always be borne in mind by the reader as measuring the difference between two distinct bodies of reformers, which have been ignorantly and persistently mingled and confounded. The next independent church established in England was that of John Smith, organized at Gainsborough in 1602. Mr. Smith shortly after removed with his congregation to Amsterdam, where dissensions among his people embarrassed his work. Though a learned man, he was unstable and capricious, as appears by his own confession in the preface to one of his books, in which he desires that his last writings may always be taken for his present judgment. He afterward became a Baptist, and moved with his disciples to Leyden, where he soon afterward embraced the views of Arminius, which he ably defended in a book answered by John Robinson in 1611. In early life he had been a pupil of Francis Johnson, and was at one time connected with the Southwark church. This church, which is claimed by Mr. Waddington to have inspired the movement which resulted in the Pilgrim church at Scrooby, has certainly a memorable record. Francis Johnson was its first pastor, John Greenwood its first teacher, Daniel Studley and George Kniston its first elders, and Christopher Bowman and Nicholas Lee its first deacons. Henry Jacob and John Lathrop, its pastors at a later day, complete the list of those known to have been connected with it in its earliest years. Surely every true son of New England should hold the old church of Southwark, the parent of Congregationalism in England, only less dear to his heart than the old Plymouth church, the child of the Pilgrim church at Scrooby.