Principles of western civilisation

ix DHE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 317

same alliance—between civil authority and a particular interpretation of religious doctrine believed to be right—as they had left behind them at home. Decidedly liberal and democratic as were the refugees’ ideals at first, their ecclesiastical conceptions soon turned in favour of the enforcement of strict conformity to law;* and the right of the civil authorities to punish lapses from the accepted doctrine was in time, in more than one of the New England colonies, exercised with as great severity as by the Presbyterians at home.?

In England itself the stern logic of facts progressed slowly through history to the last analysis, in a series of events the evolutionary significance of which has even as yet hardly reached the general mind. As we read between the lines of the Grand Remonstrance presented to the king in 1641, on the eve of the great struggle of the civil war, we see how inexorable were the tendencies of the development in which both sides alike were caught. In the clauses numbered from 183 to 187,° the aim of the times is most clearly set forth. It was to secure the enforcement through the State, and as against the king, of the religious opinions of the party behind it. In the words of Professor Gardiner, ‘there was to be no toleration of nonconformity, the plan of the framers of the Grand Remonstrance was to substitute the general enforcement of their own form of Church government and worship for that which had recently been enforced by the authority of the king and the bishops.” ‘

} Moeller, Hist. of Chr. Church, vol. iii. div. v. c. iii. 2 Ibid. * Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, No. 43. 4 [bid., Intro. p. xxxix.