The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth | Page 7

have been unquestioningly accepted by both. The
one desired to make use of the temporal power to prevent, the other to
promote, further changes in Church government, worship and doctrine.
The result was a compromise, which, like most compromises, satisfied
the more logical and consistent of neither party. As ultimately
established, in the reign of Elizabeth, the Church of England occupied a
sort of middle position between the Church of Rome and the Reformed
Churches of the Continent; and the attempt to enforce conformity to its
demands resulted in the separation from it of the extremists of both
sections. On the one hand, the English Roman Catholics became a
distinct and persecuted religious body, whose members were generally
regarded, despite repeated evidence to the contrary, as necessarily
enemies of England. On the other, despairing of further changes in the
direction they desired, a large number of the extreme Protestants
separated themselves from the National Church--though by so doing
they rendered themselves liable to be accused not only of heresy, but of
high treason, and to suffer death--and formed themselves into different
bodies of Separatists or Independents, 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,
who was born at Delft in 1501. In 1530 he was severely punished for

obstructing a Catholic procession in his native town. In 1534 he joined
the Anabaptists, but soon left them to found a sect of his own. He
seems to have interpreted the whole of the Scripture allegorically;[15:1]
and to have maintained that as Moses had taught hope, and Christ had
taught faith, it was his mission to teach love. His teachings were
propagated in Holland by Henry Nicholas, and in England by one
Christopher Vittel, a joiner, who appears to have undertaken a
missionary journey throughout the country about the year 1560.
According to Fuller,[16:1] in 1578, the nineteenth year of the reign of
Elizabeth, "The Family of Love began now to grow so numerous,
factious, and dangerous, that the Privy Council thought fit to endeavour
their suppression."
The most lucid account of the doctrines of this sect may be gained from
a beautifully printed little book, entitled The Displaying of an Horrible
Sect of Gross and Wicked Heretics naming themselves the Family of
Love, published the same year, 1578, and written by one I. R. (Jn.
Rogers), a bitter but fair-minded opponent of their heresies, a Protestant,
and a zealous defender of the Lutheran dogma of justification by