NONCONFOEMITY. 805 



an ti -sacerdotal movement which reached its extreme in the 

 next century with the Quakers ; who, going directly to the 

 fountain head of the creed, and carrying out more consis 

 tently than usual the professed right of private judgment, 

 repudiated the entire paraphernalia of ecclesiastic! sm 



It is true that the histories of these various non-conform 

 ing bodies, not excluding even the Society of Friends, show 

 us the re-growth of a coercive rule, allied to that against 

 which there had been rebellion. Of religious revolutions as 

 of political revolutions, it is true that in the absence of 

 differences of character and culture greater than can be ex 

 pected in the same society at the same time, they are fol 

 lowed by gradually established forms of rule only in some 

 degree better than those diverged from. In his assumption 

 of infallibility, and his measures for enforcing conformity, 

 Calvin was a pope comparable with any who issued bulls 

 from the Vatican. The discipline of the Scottish Presbyte 

 rians was as despotic, as rigorous, and as relentless, as any 

 which Catholicism had enforced. The Puritans of New 

 England were as positive in their dogmas, and as severe in 

 their persecutions, as were the ecclesiastics of the church they 

 left behind. Some of these dissenting bodies, indeed, as the 

 Wesleyans, have developed organizations scarcely less priestly, 

 and in some respects more coercive, than the organization of 

 the church from which they diverged. Even among the 

 Quakers, notwithstanding the pronounced individuality im 

 plied by their theory, there has grown up a definite creed 

 and a body exercising control. 



644. Modem Nonconformity in England has much mora 

 tkcidedly exhibited the essential trait of anti-sacerdotalism. 

 It has done this in various minor ways as well as in a major 

 way. 



There is the multiplication of sects, with which by foreign 

 observers England is reproached, but which, philosophically 

 considered, is one of her superior traits. For the rise of every 



