H>emocracE ant> IReUQion.

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little known passage reads as follows 1 : " O Oliver,hadst thou been faithful and thundered down thedeceit, the Hollander had been thy subject andtributary, Germany had given up to have donethy will, and the Spaniard had quivered like a dryleaf wanting the virtue of God, the King of France should have bowed his neck under thee, the Popeshould have withered as in winter, the Turk in allhis fatness should have smoked, thou shouldst nothave stood trifling about small things, but mindedthe work of the Lord as He began with thee atfirst." Years after George Fox wrote to CharlesII : " Sion needs no helpers who fight; his kind-dom stands for peace."

Such in approximate outline were the ideas ofthe sects called the " Reform of the Reformation "which were suppressed on the Continent in a sea ofblood. In England, and in New England likewise,the Stuarts aimed at the same consummation. Ifthe Free Churches were allowed in the Anglo-Saxon world to develop fully and to leave theirstamp on the life around them, they owe this to oneman who made a breach that broke through intothe new age : Oliver Cromwell . The Common-wealth (1653-1658) signifies according to Troeltsch a return to the German Baptist movement, a re-appearance of the spirit of the Peasants' War , thelast attempt to establish the Kingdom of God withthe sword, which though it did not bring aboutthe new Zion did result in the growth of the Anglo-American world supremacy.

1 William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism,London , Macmillan, 1912, p. 440.