, differing on many points among themselves,
but united by a common animosity of all outside ecclesiastical control.
Within the Church the Catholic sentiment crystallised into the
Episcopalian, the Protestant sentiment into the Presbyterian section of
the Church of England. During the reign of Elizabeth the Protestant
element grew steadily stronger, as did also the spirit of political
independence, as manifested in the debates and divisions of the House of
Commons. It is a suggestive and noteworthy fact that during the long
reign of Henry the Eighth the House of Commons only once refused to pass
a Bill recommended by the Crown. During the reigns of Edward the Sixth
and of Mary the spirit of political independence commenced to revive;
and during the reign of Elizabeth the spirit of liberty and sense of
responsibility manifested by the House of Commons were such as
repeatedly to thwart the designs and to alter the policy of this
high-spirited monarch. It was, however, the severity of the policy of
the last of the Tudors and the first two of the Stuart kings against the
dissenting Protestants, that identified the struggle for religious
liberty, for liberty of conscience, with the struggle for political
liberty, and made these men in a special sense the champions of a more
or less qualified religious toleration, and of a constitutional
political freedom.

The growth of extreme Protestantism, more especially perhaps of
Independency, was greatly quickened during the reigns of both Mary and
Elizabeth, by the immigration of many thousands of refugees fleeing from
religious persecutions on the Continent. Amongst these were disciples
and apostles of many sects that were heretics in the eyes of both the
Catholic and the Protestant Churches, and who rejected alike the dogmas
and doctrines of Rome, of Wittenberg, and of Geneva. The one point all
such sects seem to have had in common was the denial of the sanctity and
efficacy of infant baptism: hence their inclusion under the general term
Anabaptists, even though many of them passionately disclaimed any
connection with this hated, proscribed and persecuted sect. As Gerrard
Winstanley, the inspirer of the Digger Movement, seems to us to have
been greatly influenced by the teaching of one of these sects, the
Familists, or Family of Love, it may be well to give here a brief
outline of its history and main doctrines.

The founder of the Family of Love was one David George, or Joris, wh