Cylchgronau Cymru

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Vol. II.] JULY, 1869. [No. 7. THE CARDIFF CONGREGATIONAL MAGAZINE. CHURCH AND STATE—Continued. We have given, in our previous chapter, what we believe to be a correct account of the relation of different parties towards each other and towards the governing power when the Constitution of Church and State became finally settled. England was henceforth nominally, and to a great extent really, a Protestant country. But it soon became evident that the Demon of persecution did not possess Popery alone. It could rage and revel just the same under a Protestant guise. The spirit of persecution is not generated by any particular form of religious faith. It grows simply out of certain evil tendencies of our nature, taking the form of religious animosities, when those tendencies are coupled with the pos¬ session of secular power. Give any Church the power to prosecute, and it will—in some form or other. Its position of supremacy will at least give it the opportunity of "tolerating" others. And to talk of toleration in matters of conscience and religious faith is insulting. And what is insult if it be not persecution ? But the sufferings of the men in those days who were true to their own consciences, were far more palpable and terrible than this. The very name of " Toleration " was as yet unknown, unheard. Suppression, non-toleration, utter extermina¬ tion, was the ruling idea of the times, as towards all unauthorized forms of religious thought and practice; and the ceaseless effort of the supreme ecclesiastical powers was to find out the best and quickest way of effecting it. We will not weary and sicken our readers with anything like a detailed account of the wrongs and cruelties that were inflicted upon noble-minded, patient men and women who would not violate their con¬ sciences by conformity, or darken the light that was within them—how their homes were desolated, they were torn from their children, reduced to beggary, thrown into loathsome dungeons, starved, beaten, burned ;— how, as Neal says, they " perished like rotten sheep" all over the land, not accepting deliverance." What a dismally-suggestive view do we get of all these miseries when we read of a company of prisoners writing upon^ the coffin of one of their fellow-sufferers such words as these :— Ihis is the body of Poger Rippon, a servant of Christ and her majesty's