The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-10-29
CORNWELL'S INDEPENDENCY-By George Eaves D. D.

gressive westward-steppng foot What peculiar strain there was left in the im- migrant blood which has permanently occupied the eastern counties may be hard to determine. But certainly in the pres ent day as in the days of Charles the First, very general breadth of view, d very sturdy radicalism abounds there. Perhaps it is less by something in the blood than by something in the land scape less by what the children subject lively inherit than by the scenes with which they and their fathers are hourly familiar, the unbroken illimitable reach of the earth, the ilimitable vastness of the sea, that the sense of individualism is so well cultivated. People who grow up amid the hills and woods are apt to emphasize the clan and the social bound ary When men are born on the prairie or the seashore, where the value of the individual man is in constant eVideuce, and the brotherhood of all men implied traditions and institutions count for less, and the sense of a divine mission for the individual becomes more reasonable Ger tan it is that in the continuously disas- trous year. 1643, when the cause of the commonwealth had no encouragement elsewhere, the eastern counties were steadfastly loyal to the people and hos tile to the King. There Cromwell was on his native soil, organizing his cavalry, and checking or driving back the royalist at jacks. Among those people a certain type of Puritansm had long been cultl- vated. It was there that Bunyan, once a Roundhead soldier, later went to jail rather than cease to preach the gospel. It was there that Pastor John Robinson, Cambridge graduate and Episcopal clergy man, became great force among the Separatists and from thence led his per- secuted flock to Holland in search of 2 place where worship could be held undls- turbed by the followers of Laud, and whence later still, they sailed for the New World.
 These, of course, are matters that have chiefly an academic interest for us to- day, but by way of stirring up the pure minds of modern Puritans they are not without their value. Puritanism. indeed, was then of two or three types. Inside the recently established Church of Eng land were multitudes of zealous Calvin istic believers whose conviction it was that church headed by the King was precisely the fulfilment of primitive Christianity. They were, however con stantly wavering between Episcopacy and Presbyterianism. Episcopacy seemed the more logical more in the line of historicey continuity. less likely therefore to pro- yoke dsloyal and sectarian strife The church constitution was indeed con- promise between Puritanism and Catholi- cism, and these men were striving to me diate and make one spiritual people of the whole English folk. But on the other hand, the Kings toying with France and with the Pope made it unpalatabe to these Episcopalian Puritans that he should be the head of the church snd they sought to devise means of presbv- terial authority as a check upon ap- pointees of the crown. If Archbishop I.aud represented royal ideas of church. mnaship then the rank and file of church. men were likely to break clear away from all bishops and archbishops. This was the attitude of Episcopal Puritanism. It was Anglicanism, but Anglcanism pro- foundly restless.
 The second Puritan group was the Prss- bvterian. who were not all of them so in- tenselv attached to the final authority of elected elders as to he willing to break away from the church, but who frankly reeretted the compromise effected under Elizabeth. They looked to Geneva for the 'nsniration of a'national church thorough lv Protestant. To them the irritation of the nation by Laud and Charles was of less significance than the recognition in the national church of the rights of such men to be called members of the church or nation. They wanted comprehension national and church unity, and were mod erately willing to make concessions; but