We must believe all sports are ta’en away;
Whereby, I see, instead of active things,
What harm the same unto our nation brings;
The pipe and pot are made the only prize
Which all our spriteful youth do exercise.’”
There appeared also the Puritan who objected to the study of Latin and Greek as encouraging idolatry and pagan superstition. And the Puritan who would have no Christmas festivities, who put down the custom of plum porridge, and changed the name of Christmas pie to mince-pie, which it is still called. The gloomy face of the Puritan belongs to later developments, as do the texts worn on the sleeve, the lank hair, and the hat without a band.
With such a temper in the people, against such leaders, Charles and Laud began their campaign for the overthrow of civil and religious liberty. It is easy to exclaim against a short-sighted policy, and against the blindness of those who could not observe the signs of the times. In the absence of newspapers and public meetings, how was a statesman to understand the signs of the times? The King, like his father, had not been brought up in the knowledge of English liberties and their history. To this ignorance a great deal of the blundering, both of James and of Charles, may be attributed. Laud, for his part, was an ecclesiastic through and through. It was not for him to seek out the opinions of the unlearned or of the dissentient. It was his business to enforce the ecclesiastical law as he found it, and as he designed to make it.
The number of London clergy afterwards ejected sufficiently proves the support which he obtained from that class. It is, indeed, always safe to expect support from the clergy whenever steps are taken to magnify the ecclesiastical office or to advance the sacerdotal pretensions. As it is in our time, so it was in the days of Laud.
The Archbishop ordered conformity with the ceremonies of the Prayer Book. The surplice was enforced; the sign of the Cross in Baptism was continued; the ring in marriage remained in use; kneeling, and not sitting, at the administration of the Holy Communion became obligatory. The Geneva Bible, the old favourite of the people, with its short and pithy notes, was prohibited; those ministers who refused to conform were ejected; the lectures, which in London had been mostly on the Puritan side, were suppressed.
It became evident fifteen years later that the intolerance of Laud was not so much a subject of complaint as the enforcement of ritual and teaching abhorrent to the mind of Puritan, Presbyterian, and Independent. In 1644 it was proved that intolerance belonged equally to all sects. The possibility of allowing people differing in creeds to live in peace was not as yet admitted; nor would it be admitted until all alike, Anglican, Presbyterian, Independent, Quaker, Anabaptist, Socinian, Roman Catholic, had each and all in turn felt and realised that religion would mean continuous persecution, ejection, rebellion, and suffering, unless a modus vivendi were arrived at.