Free The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 by Robert Middlekauff Page A

and place. Of course, the Church should have ministers, but how they garbed themselves was not a critical question. The surplice affected no one's eternal state; nor indeed did anything related to the Church's organizationits government, its discipline, or its rites. That, however, did not mean that the Church should permit Puritan ministers to appear without the surplice (as Richard Mather was to discover); nor did it mean that they and their flocks should feel free to abandon the liturgy or the Prayer Book. Rather the decisions of the Church about such matters ought to be accepted without controversy, as a bishop said, ''for order and obedience sake.'' 8
None knew better than Anglican divines how little regard some Puritans paid to order and obedience. Among the most disobedient and disorderly were the Separatists. The Separatists (they took the name because of their insistence that in forming churches good men must separate themselves from evil ones) rejected virtually every contention of the Anglicans. Although they did not agree among themselves on every point, they all echoed Robert Browne's confident assertion about the Church of England and its bishops"It is the Beast and they are the Ryders." 9
The first true churches, according to John Robinson, minister of the church that eventually founded Plymouth Colony, were established by the Apostles. Christ himself formed no churches; He lived and died "a minister of the circumcision." 10 The churches of the Apostles, and those established since then, appeared when believers voluntarily covenanted among themselves. Compulsion could not be used in the forming of these bodies since the substance of a church had to be gathered from men of faith, and faith could not be coerced. The means by which it was obtained was teaching and instruction by Christ's disciples. 11
The Church of England, Robinson said, could not claim such an origin. It was the offshoot of the Church of Rome and the Roman Church had never been a true church freely gathered. To be true, saints had lived in Rome during Christ's time, and true churches had also maintained themselves. The Antichrist, or the Church of Rome, made his appearance long after the Apostles' time. The Antichrist existed "as an embryo in the womb," the Pope was his head, the hierarchy, his body. 12 The

 

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Antichrist grew in size until he dispossessed Christ of His leadership of the Church in the world. Until the Protestant Reformation, the English Church served her parent, the Antichrist, without interruption and without serious challenge. The Church of England was never Christ's Church, it neverdespite its claimscomprised the body of the people of England. What saints there were in England lived in defiance of the diabolical efforts of the Antichrist and enjoyed Christ's truth only precariously. 13
If the saints were few in these days of the long apostasy from the primitive Church, their number, by the Separatists' computations, did not increase much with the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Reformation in England began, according to Separatist accounts, with young Edward VI. His father, Henry VIII, made so few changes in matters close to their hearts that they dismissed him with hardly a word. In Edward's short reign the Antichrist in England received a few injuries, a part of the old doctrine was revoked and a few of his servants, the bishops and their minions, were dismissed. The saints took heart and gathered churches which they thought approached the purity of the primitive Church. The Antichrist had barely quailed before these meager assaults when his creature, Mary, acceded to the throne. Yet something was achieved even under the bitter persecutions of Mary's dreadful reign. For, as Henry Ainsworth, a Separatist divine, put it, the martyrs "by their faithful testimonyes and patient sufferings, [did] throw down a great part of Antichrists church." 14 But Christian suffering could achieve only so much and