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HISTORY OF ENGLAND,

CHAP.

II . 1

Unpopu-larity ofthe Puri-tans.

they objected to concession chiefly because it tended to pro-duce union.

Such feelings, though blamable, were natural and notwholly inexcusable. The Puritans in the day of their powerhad undoubtedly given cruel provocation. They ought tohave learned, if from nothing else, yet from their own discon-tents, from their own struggles, from their own victory, fromthe fall of that proud hierarchy by which they had been soheavily oppressed, that, inEngland, and in the seventeenth cen-tury , it was not in the power of the civil magistrate to drill theminds of men into conformity with his own system of theology.They proved, however, as intolerant and as meddling as everLaud had been. They interdicted under heavy penalties theuse of the Book of Common Prayer, not only in churches, buteven in private houses. It was a crime in a child to read by thebedside of a sick parent one of those beautiful collects whichhad soothed the griefs of forty generations of Christians.Severe punishments were denounced against such as shouldpresume to blame the Calvinistic mode of worship. Clergymenof respectable characterwere not only ejected from their bene-fices by thousands, but were frequently exposed to the out-rages of a fanatical rabble. Churches and sepulchres, fineworks of art and curious remains of antiquity, were brutallydefaced. The Parliament resolved that all pictures in theroyal collection which contained representations of Jesus orof the Virgin Mother should be burned. Sculpture fared asill as painting. Nymphs and Graces, the work of Ionianchisels, were delivered over to Puritan stone-masons to bemade decent. Against the lighter vices the ruling factionwaged war with a zeal little tempered by humanity or bycommon sense. Sharp laws were passed against betting. Itwas enacted that adultery should be punished with death.The illicit intercourse of the sexes, even where neither vio-lence nor seduction was imputed, where no public scandal was