Baptists.
The larger section of the Baptist ministers and Churches stood outside the pale of Cromwell's establishment, and probably, in general, they preferred that position. The well-known Hanserd Knollys, a Cambridge graduate, after resigning a living, and gathering a Baptist Church, would only accept the free contributions of his hearers, eking out his subsistence by school-keeping. The Fifth Monarchy Anabaptists distinctly and boldly opposed tithes, and protested against all State endowments. John Canne, in his "Second Voice from the Temple, to the Higher Powers," 1653, violently inveighs against a national ministry, as "essentially derived from the Pope," and after pointing to Presbyterians and Independents, as those who "do appear most for tithe;" archly adds, "yet the truth is, neither of them, by the law of the land, have any title to it; for they are not such incumbents or ecclesiastical persons as the law allows."[243]
The most united and consistent opponents of both State alliance and State allowance were the people called Quakers, and other mystic sects who took up their position altogether outside of Cromwell's Broad Church.
To them we shall pay attention in a subsequent chapter, but, in the meanwhile, it is necessary that we should supply some account of the state of the Universities, and also point out the position of Episcopalians in reference to the Establishment.
CHAPTER XI.
The civil wars, and the changes consequent upon the taking of Oxford, left the University in a deplorable condition. Many Fellows and Scholars were dead. Men of learning and high character had been ejected. No admissions from Westminster, Eton, St. Paul's, Merchant Tailors, or other public schools had taken place during five or six years; and parents, in times so troubled, had naturally felt unwilling to send their sons to a place which was almost as much of a camp as of a school.