It was not, however, in the main stream of Puritanism, but in one of its obscure rivulets that this world-famous movement originated.  During the reign of Elizabeth it was not the purpose of the Puritans to separate themselves from the established church of which the sovereign was the head, but to remain within it and reform it according to their own notions.  For a time they were partially successful in this work, especially in simplifying the ritual and in giving a Calvinistic tinge to the doctrines.  In doing this they showed no conscious tendency toward freedom of thought, but rather a bigotry quite as intense as that which animated the system against which they were fighting.  The most advanced liberalism of Elizabeth’s time was not to be found among the Puritans, but in the magnificent treatise on “Ecclesiastical Polity” by the churchman Richard Hooker.  But the liberalism of this great writer, like that of Erasmus a century earlier, was not militant enough to meet the sterner demands of the time.  It could not then ally itself with the democratic spirit, as Puritanism did.  It has been well said that while Luther was the prophet of the Reformation that has been, Erasmus was the prophet of the Reformation that is to come, and so it was to some extent with the Puritans and Hooker.  The Puritan fight against the hierarchy was a political necessity of the time, something without which no real and thorough reformation could then be effected.  In her antipathy to this democratic movement, Elizabeth vexed and tormented the Puritans as far as she deemed it prudent; and in the conservative temper of the people she found enough support to prevent their transforming the church as they would have liked to do.  Among the Puritans themselves, indeed, there was no definite agreement on this point.  Some would have stopped short with Presbyterianism, while others held that “new presbyter was but old priest writ large,” and so pressed on to Independency.  It was early in Elizabeth’s reign that the zeal of these extreme brethren, inflamed by persecution, gave rise to the sect of Separatists, who flatly denied the royal supremacy over ecclesiastical affairs, and asserted the right to set up churches of their own, with pastors and elders and rules of discipline, independent of queen or bishop. [Sidenote:  Puritanism was not intentionally allied with liberalism]

In 1567 the first congregation of this sort, consisting of about a hundred persons assembled in a hall in Anchor Lane in London, was forcibly broken up and thirty-one of the number were sent to jail and kept there for nearly a year.  By 1576 the Separatists had come to be recognized as a sect, under the lead of Robert Brown, a man of high social position, related to the great Lord Burleigh.  Brown fled to Holland, where he preached to a congregation of English exiles, and wrote books which were smuggled into England and privately circulated there, much to the disgust, not only of the queen, but of all parties, Puritans as