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1642.

Episcopacy, as the established church of England, seemed to have arrived.1 In the first month of the civil war, an Ordinance of Parliament provided that the episcopal jurisdiction should cease after fourteen Sept. 10. months, thus allowing time to mature another discipline to take its place. It was followed after some months by the "Ordinance of the Lords and Commons Houses 1643. in Parliament for the calling of an Assembly of June 12 Learned and Godly Divines and others, to be consulted with by the Parliament for the Settling of the Government and Liturgy of the Church of England, and for vindicating and clearing of the Doctrine of the said Church from False Aspersions and Interpretations." The Ordinance recited that the government of the Church "by archbishops, bishops, . . and other ecclesiastical officers, .. is evil and justly offensive and burdensome to the kingdom, and an impediment to reformation and religion;" and it declared, "that such a government should be settled in the Church as might be most agreeable to God's holy word," and that it should be brought into a 66 nearer agreement with the Church of Scotland and other reformed churches abroad." 8

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League

This made way for a treaty with the Scots, the fruit of which was the Solemn League and Covenant. That Solemn famous compact, allying the two nations in a defence of the rights and liberties of both, pro- nant. vided that the Kirk of Scotland should be main- Aug. 17.

1 The claims of Presbytery were fully set forth in England in 1641, in the "Defence of Church Government, exercised in Presbyteriall, Classicall, and Synodall Assemblies, by John Paget, late able and faithful Pastour of the Reformed English Church in Amsterdam."

* Five weeks before the passage of this Ordinance, Parliament had received a letter from the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, recommending

and Cove

"that in all his Majesty's dominions there might be one confession of faith, one directory of worship, one public catechism, and one form of church government." (Marsden, Later Puritans, 60.) When the King presently began the war, this recommendation was felt with the greater force, as coming from a quarter where twenty thousand trained troops stood ready for the field.

8 Rushworth, V. 337.

tained in its existing polity, and that the Church of England should be reformed "according to the word of God, and after the example of the best reformed churches."1 The Scottish Commissioners had insisted on a stipulation for ecclesiastical uniformity in the two kingdoms (which of course meant conformity to their own standard) as the indispensable condition of a treaty. Their prepossessions led them to construe the language which was proposed on the other side as being equivalent to what they desired But two of the six English Commissioners, Vane, seven years before Governor of Massachusetts, and the minister Philip Nye, who was entirely in his confidence, had in mind a different interpretation of the words, to be asserted when the time should be ripe.

Assembly.

The Ordinance provided that the council for Church Reformation, since familiarly known as the Westminster Westminster Assembly, should come together in Henry the Seventh's Chapel in Westminster Abbey. It was subject to be adjourned or dissolved by Parliament. It was to entertain no other questions but such as Parliament should propose, and to assume no "jurisdiction, power, or authority, ecclesiastical or otherwise," beyond what were expressly conferred in the Ordinance. Prolocutor, or presiding officer, was to be appointed by the Parliament. In these strict limitations we seem already to discern the marks of hands different from those which would have uplifted the Presbyterian power.

Its

By the Ordinance, the Assembly was constituted of a hundred and twenty-one English ministers, with ten members of the Upper House of Parliament and twenty of the Lower. Four ministers and two laymen of the Scottish Kirk also had seats, and to the number of English ministers twenty-one more were soon added. Only sixty-nine members, however, appeared on

July 1.

1 Rushworth, V. 478, 479.

The ministers were Baylie, Gillespie, Rutherfurd, and Henderson. The

laymen were Maitland, afterwards the notorious Earl of Lauderdale, and Johnstone of Waristown.

the first day; and it is probable that the number present at a session never exceeded eighty. The meetings, after the first, were held in what was called the Jerusalem Chamber in St. James's Palace.

Parties in the

Presbyteri

Erastians.

The most numerous party in the Assembly consisted of earnest Presbyterians.1 Calamy, Corbet, Gataker, Hildersham, Spurstowe, Vines, and others Assembly. prominent, in recent years, in the Non-conformist ans. ranks, were among them. Of ecclesiastics favoring more or less the old system of things there were Episcopaabout twenty, among whom were the excellent lians. Archbishop Ussher, and three other Bishops; but the King issued a proclamation denouncing the Assembly, and this section of it at once withdrew. Another party went by the name of Erastians, derived from a physician of Heidelberg, named Erastus, author of a system of church government, which resolved it into a department of the civil administration. According to the doctrine of the English Erastians, -not sparingly avowed, but in some cases, perhaps, only imputed, the Christian minister is simply a lecturer, employed or protected by the State, to which belongs all authority, religious as well as civil. From the nature of this scheme, its supporters could not be so precisely counted as the partisans of theories more definite. But one of those understood to represent it in the Assembly was the very learned Orientalist, John Lightfoot.

Practically there was to some extent a natural coalition between the Erastians and a fourth party in the Assembly, composed of men of a character entirely Independissimilar from theirs, and known as the Indepen- dents. dents. And if in that council which was expected to give

1 From a letter of Robert Baylie to a friend, Mr. John James Tayler has drawn a lively picture of the Assembly while in session. (Retrospect of the

Religious Life of England, 130.) For a list of eminent members of it, with their several party affinities, see Fuller, III. 446, 447.

ecclesiastical unity and stability to the British realm, Scotland gave being, or contributed great force, to what was at first the controlling element, to New England may not without reason be traced that other influence which in a short time rose to irresistible ascendency.

3

The scheme of church administration, which perhaps Robert Brown1 had been the first to set forth formally in writing, though he was not the first to maintain it,2 suited the speculations of the generation next after his own, as they shaped themselves in a large class of minds. The name Brownist had never been willingly borne by most of those who had accepted the distinguishing doctrine of the heresiarch to whom it related. Nor was it without reason that a distinction was alleged, and a new name preferred, when, relaxing the offensive severity of Brown's system, some who had adopted his tenet of the absolute independence of churches came to differ from him respecting the duty of avoiding and denouncing dissentients from it as rebellious, apostate, blasphemous, antichristian, and accursed.

To this amendment of Brownism the mature reflections

1 See Vol. I. 123, 125.

Charge, because they will tarrie till

See Baylie's Dissuasive, 13 et seq.; the Magistrate commande and compell Young's Pilgrims, 442 et seq.

* Browne's earliest book, I suppose, was the treatise printed, in 1582, at Middelburg, in Zeeland, under the title, "A Booke which sheweth the Life and Manners of all true Christians, and howe unlike they are unto Turkes and Papistes and Heathen Folke; also the Pointes and Partes of all Divinitie, that is, of the Revealed Will and Worde of God, are declared by their several Definitions and Divisions in Order as followeth; also there goeth a Treatise before of Reformation without tarrying for anie, and of the Wickednesse of those Preachers which will not reforme themselves and their

them." This last clause evidently points to that policy of the Presbyterians which I have indicated, of enlisting at the outset the supreme power, and supplanting the existing State religion by means of an act of the Estates of the Realm, instead of putting their own system at once into operation among such portion of the people small or large- as should be found ready to receive it. Nothing that I have read elsewhere respecting Robert Brown would have led me to attribute to him the high ability which I think this book displays.

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✦ Young, Pilgrims, 397, 412, 416, 428, 444; Baylie, Dissuasive, 102.

and studies of the excellent Robinson of Leyden conducted him;1 and with reference to it he and his followers were sometimes called Semi-separatists. Such a deference to reason and to charity gave a new position and attractiveness to the sect, and appears to have been considered as entitling Robinson to the character of "father of the Independents." 3

1640-1641.

Immediately on the meeting of the Long Parliament, "the Brownists, or Independents, who had assembled in private, and shifted from house to house for twenty or thirty years, resumed their courage, and showed themselves in public." During this period of the obscurity of a sect which, when arrived at Connection its full vigor, was to give law to the mother of the Indecountry, the history of the progress of its prin- with New ciples is mainly to be sought in New England. They were brought from Leyden to New Plymouth by Bradford and his company. Ten years later, they became the basis of the churches in Massachusetts. When,

1 Robinson, Apology, passim. — “Illi Brunitæ, isti Robinsoniani; nondum Independentium nomen eventilatum erat." (Salmasius pro Carolo, 386.)

2

Baylie, Dissuasive, &c., 17. ' So Neal calls him (I. 423). "Mr. Robinson .... first struck out the Congregational or Independent form of church government." (Ibid., 367.) – "It [Robinson's doctrine] was the womb and seed of that lamentable Independency which in Old and New England hath been the fountain of many evils already, though no more should ensue." (Robert Baylie, Dissuasive from the Errors of the Time, 17.) A good abstract of the scheme of the Brownists is given by Neal (I. 246-248). There is no difference between them and the Independents, except in the rigid exclusiveness of the former. Neal (I. 461, 462) understood the first Independent church in Eng

pendents

England.

land, properly so called, to be that instituted in London in 1616, by Henry Jacob, who had been a disciple of Robinson, at Leyden. In 1624, he came over to Virginia, where he died soon after. His "Attestation of many learned, godly, and famous Divines," &c., published in 1613, - the only book of his that I have seen, learnedly maintains two propositions, viz. "That the church government ought to be always with the people's free consent," and "That a true Church under the Gospel containeth no more ordinary congregations but one.” John Lothrop, subsequently minister of Barnstable, on Cape Cod, was Jacob's successor in London.

* Neal, II. 23.

Cotton says positively that Skelton, the first pastor of the Salem church, "was studious of that way" before he left England. (Way Cleared, 16.)

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