THE FOUNDERS OF CHARLES CHURCH. 
97 
seventeenth century, which I have attempted, there is one element 
which is missing with us. The toleration of the present day- 
causes much insincerity. That which is fashionable, either for 
good or evil, in Church or State, is followed, and oftentimes aban- 
doned carelessly as a counter fashion springs up; but in 1600 there 
was no such thing as toleration known. The victors of to-day 
were, in the turn of the social wheel, the victims of to-morrow, 
and each party, when in power, cruelly and ruthlessly persecuted 
its opponents ; each fancied it was doing only its duty to its king 
and country, and so the retaliatory and recriminatory process was 
ever beginning. The plan, however, had one advantage. The 
leaders in any movement were men of signal earnestness, labouring 
for a single purpose. The spirit of the times caused them to work 
with a whole-heartedness and devotion to their cause which in 
these our quieter times is unknown. Each knew that if he was 
contending for any high purpose in Church or State, he worked 
with his life in his hand. The speeches he made, the pamphlets 
he wrote, and the sermons he preached, were not shots carelessly 
fired ; but the better they were aimed, and the more they hit the 
target, the surer was it that they were carefully marked by his 
opponents for retaliation at a future day. Among the leaders 
idlers there were none. Fashionables found the stake too costly, 
and only those really in earnest continued the fight, and losing, as 
one side must, paid the penalty with their fortunes or exile, if not 
with their heads. This feeling gathered in intensity until it 
culminated in that supreme contest between Cavalier and Round- 
head, which resulted at last in the Commonwealth, and in the 
Revolution of 1688. Amidst the gathering murmurs of this forth- 
coming storm Charles Church was founded, during the height of 
the tempest it was reared, and in the calm that followed, and to 
our own day, it stands as a monument of the bravery and devotion 
with which our ancestors — both Royalist and Puritan — laboured 
for great principles; for which they gladly laid down their lives 
and fortunes to secure the grand privileges of freedom, which have 
descended to us their sons. 
It now becomes my duty to ask your attention more particularly 
to some of the principal actors in the historic picture, and the four 
characteristic figures that rise head and shoulders above the others 
are Robert Trelawny, Thomas Bedford, Sir John Gayer, and William 
Jennens. Of these all were natives of Plymouth except Bedford, 
