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been brought to the reader's notice. Presbytery was the form which Puritanism had chosen to wear in Scotland. Endeared by the approval and the services of a venerated clergy, and by the experience or the history of heroic sacrifices in its cause, it had taken the strongest hold of the national mind and heart.

Presbytery

Thomas

Cartwright.

Perhaps it was from the expositions of Calvin, in England. perhaps from an independent study of the Bible, that Thomas Cartwright, commonly accounted the first English Presbyterian, derived his convictions on the subject of Church government. With signal ability and learning, he argued in published works the equality, or rather the unity, of orders in the priesthood, drawing his arguments from Scripture and from the history of the Church. And he must have been encouraged and delighted by the work which went on before his eyes in the sister kingdom. But it is only with some qualification that Cartwright may be called the founder of Presbytery in England. Being what it was in his conception, it could not be founded in his time. Separatism, or the beginning of a religious revolution by isolated or popular movements, made no part of his method. As much as Archbishop Cranmer or any other primate of England, Cartwright aimed at a dominant, intolerant religion, established by the law and armed with its powers. This, he held, ought to be, not Episcopal, but Presbyterian, or else the dictates of God's word would be disobeyed, and the rightful claims of England and of the age denied. And such a revolution Cartwright was too early to make progress with; for he died in the same year as Queen Elizabeth.

His theory, however, was not altogether moperative, even in his own time. Some of his disciples proceeded to

1 See Vol. I. 565.

Ibid., 119, 120.

ten some part of the Scottish Second Book of Discipline. (Marsden, Early

* He was charged with having writ- Puritans, 178.)

1572.

1582.

reduce it to practice on a scale proportioned to the means which already they could command. In the year in which Cartwright first attracted attention by his public advocacy of the Presbyterian scheme,1 a Presbytery is said to have been instituted in the county of Surrey. Ten years later, there was a meeting of sixty non-conformist ministers of the East of England, believed to have been Presbyterians. But their conference was strictly private, and its subjects and results are unknown. In the same year, at a "solemn council," held at Cambridge or at London, -with such caution were the proceedings conducted, that the place is matter of uncertainty, - "Platform of Discipline was adopted, with a view probably to definite and united action when the state of things in Parliament should encourage an attempt. The accession of Whitgift to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and his activity with his High-Commission Court, now made matters critical; but the more demand there was for action, the more need also there was that it should be clandestine. In the year of the defeat of the 1588. Armada, at a meeting of Presbyterians of War- April 10. wickshire, a "Book of Discipline" was adopted as

1 Two Puritan ministers, named Field and Wilcox, had addressed to Parliament what they called " An Admonition for the Reformation of Church Discipline." An answer to this paper by Whitgift (assisted, it is said, by Archbishop Parker and others) called forth, in 1572, Cartwright's "Second Admonition to the Parliament," to which Whitgift also replied; and Cartwright rejoined. (Strype, Life of Whitgift, Book I. Chaps. IX. and X.; comp. Fuller, Church History of Britain, II. 504.)

a

See Vol. I. 120, 121.

66

1583.

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"The certain place of their convening [the Presbyterian ministers] is not known, being clandestine, arbitrary, and changeable, as advised by their conveniences. They are better discovered by their moving then by their meeting, and their practices more conspicuous than their places. Some agents for them were all day at the door of the Parliament-house [for lobbying is no new or American invention], and some part of the night in the chambers of Parliament men, effectually soliciting

2 Fuller, II. 505. John Knox died their business with them." (Fuller,

in the same year.

III. 73.)

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tial and necessary for all times;" and it was resolved "that men of better understanding are to be allured privately to the present embracing of the discipline and practice of it, as far as they shall be well able with the peace of the Church." Presbyterianism, in its most earnest efforts for a reformed rule, never ceased to watch over the ecclesiastical unity. The seamless garment was to be cleansed, but by no means to be rent. A Scriptural purity and order were to be aimed at, but it must be without schism.

1590.

1591.

"Assemblies termed Synods" were now known to the government to be held in more than ten of the shires of England, and Cartwright was reputed to be the chief heresiarch. His committal to the Fleet prison by the High-Commission Court suggested to his old friend, the Archbishop, the policy of lenient treatment, which proved to be not without effect. "On Mr. Cartwright's general promise to be quiet," Whitgift caused him to be discharged, and "henceforward Mr. Cartwright became very peaceable." He was getting old and discouraged. The time was not ripe for such men as he to assert their due place, and he was dissatisfied with the erratic course of some of his associates.2 The effect of his retirement from public action was seconded by an occurrence of a different character. A conscientious Presbyterian, named Stone, having been

1 Fuller, III. 101, 105–114.

"Mr. Cartwright grew sensible, with sorrow, how all sects and schisms, being opposite to bishops (Brownists, Barrowists, &c.), did shroud and shelter themselves under his protection, whom he could neither reject with credit, nor receive with comfort, seeing his conscience could not close with their enormous opinions, and his counsel could not regulate their extravagant violences, which made him by degrees decline their party. Yet, for all this,

there want not those who will maintain, that all this while Mr. Cartwright was not more remiss, but more reserved in his judgment; being still as sound, but not as sharp, in the cause, out of politic intents; like a skilful pilot in a great tempest, yielding to the violence of a storm, therewith to be carried away, contrary to his intents for the present, but waiting when the wind should soon turn about to the north, and blow him and his a prosperous gale." (Ibid., 166.)

induced to take an oath in the Star-Chamber Court, made disclosures concerning the condition of his party in Northamptonshire, of which the government did not fail assiduously to avail itself; and "thus, one link being slipped out, the whole chain was quickly broken and scattered. Stone's discovery marred for the future all their former meetings, as classically or synodically methodized. If any of these ministers hereafter came together, it was for visits, not visitations; to enjoy themselves, not enjoin others orders to be observed by them."1

The repose to which, after this alarm was over, the Presbyterians now surrendered themselves for several years, was imputed to their "weariness, because so long they had in vain sought to cast off the yoke of the hierarchy from them. Besides, they did not so much practise for the present, as project for the future, to procure hereafter an establishment of their ecclesiastical government. For they beheld the Queen's old age as a taper of virgin wax now in the socket, ready to be extinguished." It has been before seen with what moderate proposals some of the discontented clergy approached the Scottish Presbyterian King James, on his ac- 1603. cession to the throne of England; how sternly they were repulsed; how severe was the treatment of Puritanism that followed, under the administrations of Bancroft and Laud; and how manfully it advanced its position through forty years of indignity and suf fering.

A precisely organized national Church, a body political as well as religious, patronized and honored by the government, leaning upon it and in turn affording it support, was a traditional idea with Englishmen of condition and culture, and scarcely less so with the mass of their countrymen, in proportion to their capacity of apprehending

1 Fuller, III. 116–121. * Ibid., 165.

3 See Vol. I. 127–132.

it. Accordingly, when study of the Bible had combined in England with the experience of practical evils to dif fuse widely a dissatisfaction with the episcopal system, it was to be expected that great numbers ould recognize an eligible form of national religious unity in that Presbyterian order, which Cartwright and others had recommended with such erudition and zeal; which the great master of reformed theological science had set up;1 which in the sister kingdom had produced such generous fruits of righteousness; and which now offered itself as a bond of intimate fraternity between the Protestant communions of the two united realms, and between the armies allied in the holy war for truth and freedom against a common oppressor. And, in point of fact, so it was that, throughout the early proceedings of the Long Parliament, the Presbyterian was the decidedly prevailing religious interest among the opposers of King Charles. Some of the patriot party would still have been glad to re-establish the doomed fabric of the Episcopal Church; but most of these went over to the king with Falkland and Hyde; and the influential or capable persons, who, in the place of a Church governed by bishops, wanted neither the Presbyterian nor any other religious establishment, if not few in number, did not yet appear numerous enough to constitute a considerable element in the state.

1

1642.

The time for the desired substitution of Presbytery for

Cartwright probably visited Geneva, and saw the working of its ecclesiastical system, but not till 1654, several years after Calvin's death. There it is likely that he formed a friendship for Theodore Beza, who, in a letter to Walter Travers, interesting on several accounts, calls him "noster Cart wrightius." (Fuller, III. 26.) Travers, afterwards preacher with Hooker at the Temple (see Vol. I. 281), is called

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by Fuller (III. 26) "the neck, allowing Mr. Cartwright for the head, of the Presbyterian party, the second in honor and esteem." He too paid a visit to Geneva in Beza's time. "By the advice of Mr. Melville, he and Mr. Cartwright were solemnly sent for to be Divinity Professors in the University of St. Andrews." (Ibid., 126.) But both preferred to remain in England.

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