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

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 faith alone. In his Preface the author bewails "the daily increase of this error," declaring that "in many shires of this our country there are meetings and conventicles of this Family of Love." Amongst those who have been converted, he tells us, were many who had hitherto been "professors of Christ Jesus' gospel according to the brightness thereof." He denounces Christopher Vittel, the joiner, as "the only man that hath brought our simple people out of the plain ways of