Bible commanded their separation from the Establishment as witnesses
to the corruptions it countenanced. Poring over the Bible story, they
had become enamored with the simplicity of the Gospel age.

From the days of Elizabeth, the English nation became more and more a
people of one book, and that book the Bible. As, deeply dyed with
Calvinism, they read over and over its sacred pages, they became a
serious, sombre, purposeful--and almost fanatic people. The faults and
extravagances of the Puritan party and of the later Commonwealth do
not at this time concern us. It is with their purposefulness, their
determination to make the church a home of vigorous and visible
righteousness, and to preserve their ecclesiastical and civil
liberties from the encroachment of Stuart pretensions, that we have to
do. More and more, as has been said, the Puritan was coming to the
conviction that the best way to reform the church would be to
substitute some restrictive policy for her all-embracing membership,
or, at least, to supplement it by such measures of local church
discipline as should practically exclude the unregenerate and the
immoral. Again, the Church of England could be arraigned as a
politico-ecclesiastical institution, and in the pages of the Bible,
King James's theory of the divine right of kings and bishops found no
support. It was obnoxious alike to Separatist and Puritan, and James's
Puritan subjects had the sympathy of more than three fourths of the
squires and burgesses in the king's first Parliament of 1604, while
the Separatists counted some twenty thousand converts in his
realm. The Puritan opposition was a formidable one to provoke. Yet
"the wisest fool in Christendom" jeered at its clergy and scolded its
representatives in Parliament for daring to warn him, in their reply
to his boasted divine right of kings, that