numerous party of fanatic members of the one, or the encouragement of any favourite in the other, whose covetousness was gaping at the patrimony of the Church.  They who will consult the works of our venerable Hooker, or the account of his life, or more particularly the letter written to him on this subject by George Cranmer, may see by what gradations they proceeded:  from the dislike of cap and surplice, the very next step was admonitions to the parliament against the whole government ecclesiastical:  then came out volumes in English and Latin in defence of their tenets:  and immediately practices were set on foot to erect their discipline without authority.  Those not succeeding, satire and railing was the next:  and Martin Mar-prelate, the Marvel of those times, was the first Presbyterian scribbler, who sanctified libels and scurrility to the use of the good old cause:  which was done, says my author, upon this account; that their serious treatises having been fully answered and refuted, they might compass by railing what they had lost by reasoning; and, when their cause was sunk in court and parliament, they might at least hedge in a stake amongst the rabble:  for to their ignorance all things are wit which are abusive; but if Church and State were made the theme, then the doctoral degree of wit was to be taken at Billingsgate:  even the most saint-like of the party, though they durst not excuse this contempt and vilifying of the government, yet were pleased, and grinned at it with a pious smile; and called it a judgment of God against the hierarchy.  Thus sectaries, we may see, were born with teeth, foul-mouthed and scurrilous from their infancy:  and if spiritual pride, venom, violence, contempt of superiors, and slander, had been the marks of orthodox belief, the presbytery and the rest of our schismatics, which are their spawn, were always the most visible church in the Christian world.

It is true, the government was too strong at that time for a rebellion; but, to show what proficiency they had made in Calvin’s school, even then their mouths watered at it:  for two of their gifted brotherhood, Hacket[86] and Coppinger, as the story tells us, got up into a pease-cart and harangue the people, to dispose them to an insurrection, and to establish their discipline by force:  so that however it comes about, that now they celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s birth-night as that of their saint and patroness; yet then they were for doing the work of the Lord by arms against her; and in all probability they wanted but a fanatic lord mayor and two sheriffs of their party to have compassed it.

Our venerable Hooker, after many admonitions which he had given them, towards the end of his preface breaks out into this prophetic speech:—­ “There is in every one of these considerations most just cause to fear, lest our hastiness to embrace a thing of so perilous consequence (meaning the Presbyterian discipline) should cause posterity to feel those evils, which as yet are more easy for us to prevent, than they would be for them to remedy.”