BEGINNINGS OF CHURCH LIFE.

WHEN the Pilgrim Fathers of New England founded Plymouth Colony, they did so as a federal body bound together by solemn, social compact, and not as separate emigrants drawn by mere accident to the same settlement. This special character of the colony, which had important political results in after time, may be explained by the fact that its founders had first been in fellowship in the same Christian community in the Old World before they were colonists together in the New. The Covenant of Citizenship signed on board the May

flower, in 1620, really had its origin in that 'Covenant of the Lord' which, as the Lord's free people,' the members of the Church, first at Gainsborough, and then at Scrooby, solemnly made, 'to walk together in all His ways made known, or to be made known to them, according to their best endeavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them.'

The church thus founded by covenant, unlike the other Separatist churches we have already met with in London, or in provincial cities like Norwich, took its rise in a scattered rural district, remote from the great centres of population. What is also remarkable is that this church took its rise in a region where, a generation or two before, the people had risen in revolt against Protestantism and in favour of retaining Roman Catholicism as the religion of the National Church. It was only some forty miles from Scrooby, as the crow flies, and only about thirty years before William Brewster was born, that the insurrection known as the 'Pilgrimage of Grace' took its rise. For it was on October 2, 1536, that the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for the Suppression of Monasteries were to hold their visitation at Louth, and it was then the people of Lincolnshire rose in armed rebellion against them. As one of the commissioners rode into the town the alarm bell pealed out from Louth Tower, and the inhabitants swarmed into the streets with bills and staves, 'the stir and noise arising hideous.' The commissioner, alarmed for his safety, fled into the church for sanctuary, but was soon brought out into the market-place, and with a sword held at his breast was made to swear to be true to the

Commons upon pain of death. There were risings, too, at Caistor and at Horncastle, where the bishop's chancellor was murdered in the street; at Lincoln also, where the bishop's palace was attacked and plundered. Before the week was out all the countryside was in movement,

beacons blazing, alarm bells ringing, and whole parishes rising to demand that the suppressed monasteries should be restored, and the new Protestant bishops deprived and punished. From the Lincolnshire side of Scrooby the rising spread to the Yorkshire side also, taking even more serious shape. It was at Scrooby that on October 21, the Earl of Shrewsbury, Lord Steward of the King's Household and Lieutenant-General from the Trent northward, was in anxious consultation with the Earls of Rutland and Huntingdon concerning this Catholic rebellion, and it was from Scrooby that same day they sent Thomas Myller, Lancaster Herald, as he himself tells us, ' with a proclamation to be read amongst the traitors and rebellious persons assembled at Pomfret, contrary to the King's laws.'1

The intense feeling of hostility thus manifested against the Reformation, in the district of which Scrooby may be roughly regarded as the centre, was doubtless largely owing to the numerous monasteries the district contained. All the more conspicuous monastic orders had their representatives within a comparatively short distance of the village where William Brewster was born. There were Cistercians at Rufford, Gilbertines at Mattersey, Carthusians in the Isle of Axholm, Benedictine monks at Blythe, Benedictine nuns at Wallingwells, Augustinians at Worksop, and Premonstratensians at Welbeck-the chief house of that order in the country-so that together they seemed to form a circle round that part of the Basset-Lawe Hundred to which Scrooby belonged. The influence of these great religious houses remained after they themselves were suppressed, and goes far to explain why, long after the Reformation, so many of the county families of the neighbourhood, the Molineuxes and Markhams, the Cliftons and Mortons, the Countess of Shrewsbury at Rufford, and her sister Frances Lady 1 State Papers. Henry VIII. Part II., p. 462, sq. 1536.

Pierrepoint at Thoresby, held tenaciously to the Church of Rome, and in Elizabeth's reign were ready, many of them, to face dangers and endure hardship in its service.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, however, other influences had been at work in a contrary direction. Many of the ministers introduced to the parish churches of the district were of a strongly marked Puritan type. Bradford, in his History of Plymouth Plantation, distinctly traces the rise of the Scrooby church, of which he was himself one of the foremost members, to the religious influence exercised by the Puritan clergy. He tells us that it was 'by the travail and diligence of some godly and zealous preachers and God's blessing on their labours, as in some other places of the land, so in the north parts, many became enlightened by the Word of God, and had their ignorance and sins discovered unto them, and began by His grace to reform their lives and make conscience of their ways.' The movement, therefore, was from the first distinctly spiritual in its character, proceeding from earnest men with a deep sense of the infinite, and feeling the gravity and grandeur of eternal things. The craving for the new life thus created by the truth and the Spirit of truth, also kindled in them a spirit of holy indignation against the abuse of sacred things they saw going on around them. The free spirit of Englishmen was stirred within them as they saw what they described as 'base and beggarly ceremonics' retained in the Church, and enforced both upon clergy and laity by 'the lordly and tyrannous power of the prelates, which ought not to be submitted unto.' They protested that it was 'contrary to the freedom of the Gospel so to load and burden men's consciences, and by their compulsive power to make a prophane nixture of persons and things in the worship of God.' They maintained that these ecclesiastical 'offices and callings, courts and canons were unlawful and un

Christian, and had no warrant in the Word of God.' 'So many, therefore, of these professors as saw the evil of these things in these parts, and whose hearts the Lord had touched with heavenly zeal for His truth, shook off this yoke of anti-Christian bondage, and as the Lord's free people joined themselves, by a covenant of the Lord, into a church estate, in the fellowship of the Gospel.'

We are able to recall to our minds some at least of the godly and zealous preachers whose travail and diligence in that region produced such enduring results. Between six and seven miles due south of Scrooby was the village of Babworth, close to Retford. It had for its rector in those days Richard Clyfton, described by Bradford as 'a grave and reverend preacher, who by his pains and diligence had done much good.' He was instituted to the rectory of Babworth on July 11, 1586, and was probably set aside from his cure about the time of Bancroft's enforcement of the canons of 1603. Long years afterwards, when he was growing an old man himself in his New England home, William Bradford recalled the name and memory of this good man, whom in his youth he walked some nine miles from Austerfield on Sunday mornings to hear. There is a touch of filial affection in the way he speaks of him. He says: 'He was a grave and fatherly old man when he came first into Holland, having a great white beard; and pity it is that such a reverend old man should be forced to leave his country and at those years to go into exile. But it was his lot, and he bore it patiently. Much good had he done in the country where he lived, and converted many to God by his faithful and painful ministry, both in preaching and catechizing.'

Even Richard Bernard, his clerical neighbour at Worksop, though in after years they took divers ways, could not help saying that Richard Clyfton was one whom he truly and entirely loved as a man devoted to