THE AGE OF DOCTRINES.

We now leave the age of Imagination for the age of Doctrines; we have entered into another reign; and a new epoch arises in our Literature, our tastes, and

our manners.

We turn from the noble wrestlings of power, the stirrings of adventure, and the commanding genius of the Maiden Queen, to the uninterrupted level of a long protracted tranquillity; a fat soil, where all flourished to the eye, while it grew into rankness, and an atmosphere of corruption, breeding, in its unnatural heat, clouds of insects. A monarch arrived in the flush of new dominion with a small people, who, as an honest soul among them said, "having been forty years in the desert, were rushing to take possession of the promised land." All was to be the festival of an unbroken repose—a court of shows and sports, the rejoicings of three kingdoms.

But the Queen, with these dominions, had bequeathed her successor two troublesome legacies, in two redoubtable portions of the English public; both the Romanists, and those numerous dissenters, emphatically called Puritans, were looking up to the new monarch, while

the "true protestants of Elizabeth" closed not their eyes in watchfulness over both papist and presbyter.

To the monarch from the Kirk of Scotland, which he had extolled for the sincerest Kirk in the world," as suited a Scottish sovereign, and who had once glanced with a presbyter's eye on “an evil mass in England," the English bishops hastened to offer the loyalty of their church. His more ancient acquaintance, the puritans, were not behind the bishops, nor without hope, to settle what they held to be "the purity" of church discipline; but James had drunk large draughts of a Scottish presbytery, and knew what lay at the bottom-he had tasted the dregs. He did not like the puritans, and he told them why; to unking and to unbishop was "the parity" of their petty model of Geneva. The new monarch declared, perhaps he would not otherwise have been received, that “he came to maintain what the Queen had established,” — he demanded from the puritans, conformity to the State, and probably little imagined that they preferred martyrdom. James lived to see the day when silencing, ejecting, and expatiating, ended in no other conformity than the common sufferings of the party *.

The claims of the Romanist were more tender than

"James granted to the Puritans the public discussion then prayed for the famous conference at Hampton Court.

those of the sons of John Knox, they prayed only for a toleration. The monarch delayed what he dared not concede. He is charged by the non-conformist with being "very charitable" to these votaries of an indefeasible right of monarchy, and his project of "meeting them half-way startled the English protestant. What does the king mean? Are our doctrines the same? are we to return to the confessional? purchase plenary pardons? require absolution and the salvation of souls from the bishop of Rome?

The main objection of the king himself to what he styled "the corruption of the mother-church," was the papal supremacy, and its pretended power of deposing monarchs, or of granting a dispensation for their murder. Here the popular patriot exclaimed, "Was the great revolution of civil liberty made only for the prince's safety?" Whatever might be this reverie of a coalition with Rome, Rome for ever baffled, by the never-ceasing principle of her one and indivisible divine autocracy. "The celestial court," omnipotent and omniscient, hurled its bolt at the pacific heretic of England. It menaced his title, while its priests busily inculcated that "anything may be done against heretics, because they are worse than Turks and infidels;" then barrels of gunpowder were placed under his throne, and the papal breves equally shook his

tominion in acsong me Emmists of England Fra ther wrá of allegates. The Engisi nemarai chose 31 de fe after if is MI HE 1 vzdiate his Erge against

giga, mi as prices bedre

ta KOLEZs station. He wrote The Apology for the Gath of Allegiance, and we must ccccede to his tract this merit, that if the case were small, boundless and enduring was the efect Is every country in Europe, through all the ranks ef the learned, and for many a year, this effusion of James occupied the pens alike of the advocates of the apostolical court, and of the promulgators of the emancipation of mankind*; nor is it remotely connected with the noble genius of Paul Sarpi, whose great work was first published in London, and patronised by the English monarch.

It was on a nation divided into unequal parties of irreconcileable opinions that James conferred the dubious blessing of a long peace; for twenty years there were no wars but the battle of pens, and the long artillery of a hundred volumes.

Polemical studies become political when the heads of parties mask themselves under some particular doctrine. Opinion only can neutralise opinion; but in the age of doctrines before us, authority was considered stronger

* A curious list of some of the more remarkable controversialists on both sides may be found in Irving's "Lives of the Scottish Poets," ii. 234.

than opinion, and in their unsettled notions and contested principles, each party seemed to itself impregnable. Every Æneas brandished his weapon, but could never wound the flitting chimeras. It was in the spirit of the age that Dr. Sutcliffe, the Dean of Exeter, laid the foundations of a college for controversies or disputations at Chelsea, on the banks of the quiet Thames. In this institution the provost and the fellows were unceasingly to answer the Romanist and the Mar-Prelate. The fervent dean scraped together all his properties in many an odd shape to endow it, obtained a charter, and obscured his own name by calling it "King James' College." He lived to see a small building begun, but which, like the controversies, was not to be finished. A college for controversy verily required inexhaustible funds. When the day arrived that those became the masters whom these dogmatists had so constantly refuted, the controversial college was oddly changed into a manufactory of leather-guns, which probably were not more efficacious.

James ascended the English throne as a poor man comes to a large inheritance. In securing peace he deemed he had granted the people all they desired, and he was the only monarch who cast a generous thought on their social recreations. That image of peace and of delight was to be reflected in the court; and in that