Note Note 2, page 146 — BOOK II. THE PURITAN MIGRATION.

Rise of Separatism. Separatism in some form existed before Browne's zeal made it a thorn in the side of the bishops. Something like a separation existed in 1567. Barclay's Inner Life, pp. 13, 53. In 1571 there was an independent church of which we know little but the pastor's name. Dialogue of 1593 quo. by Waddington. Bradford even dates independency back to the reign of Mary. In truth, the rise of this sect, from which came the earliest New England colony, appears to be lost in obscurity. Bradford's Dialogue. Significant movements are usually cradled in rustic mangers, to which no learned magi think it worth their while to journey. Note 2. The beginning of Separatism was probably in the little conventicles held by devout Puritans who, in the words of one of their own writers, "met together to sing a psalm or to talk of God's word." Josias Nichols, The Plea for the Innocent, 1602, in Hanbury, i. 3. But Browne, so far as we know, was one of the earliest to organize independent churches, with officers named and classified after those of the petty hierarchies of the early Christian congregations, or rather according to such deductions regarding them as he was able to make from the Epistles of Paul. Separatism, though it owed something to Browne's activity, was not founded by him. Browne's labors began about 1581, and his fiery career as a Brownist had lasted only four or five years when he began to vacillate. A great part of this time was spent in exile, much of it in prison, and very little of it about London. Stephen Breadwell, 1588, in Dexter, 255. But before 1587 London seems to have been the center of the Separatists, from which they had "sparsed their companies into severall partes of the Realme."