century to formalize the separation between the threefold clergy and the laity, and to emphasize the exclusive authority of the former, especially with regard to the Christian sacraments and ordinances. By then the lay believer’s free-dom for action had shrunk to little more than the private sphere of personal devotion.

To many observers the new presbyters within the reformed churches of western Europe looked little different from the old priests in terms of their relationship to the laity. The surviving 1587 version of the English ‘Book of Discipline’, which was not printed until 1644, makes it clear that active involvement in the church was regarded as wholly a clerical matter, with the ruling elders and deacons, no less than the other officers, considered to be ministers.13 Within ecclesiastical leadership hierarchy had given way to parity, but the emergent Calvinism was demonstrating atavistic tendencies. Among the many strands of continuity with the past that characterized the Reformation era, the persistence of clericalism, or what Professor Ward with regard to a later period has termed ‘punditry’, was arguably the most prominent and significant. Not until the Enlightenment brought a new focus upon the development of the individual through education, encouraged the growth of religious pluralism and toleration, and challenged the monopoly of state churches, were the full implications of the general priesthood of believers able to emerge.