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Oct. 27.

Lord Manchester, with Cromwell for his lieutenant, was ordered from the North, to form a junction with Waller, and renew the struggle. They met and fought Second battle the King at Newbury, the scene, thirteen months of Newbury. before, of an indecisive engagement. Now he had decidedly the worst, and it was said that nothing but the approach of night prevented his total overthrow. Having obtained reinforcements from Oxford, he advanced again. Manchester, though his forces were still superior, refused to accept another battle, to the great displeasure of Cromwell; and the armies went into winter quarters.

of 1644-45.

The transactions of the winter were momentous. A fruitless negotiation for peace exasperated the existing animosities; and the army of the Parliament was Transactions placed upon a new footing. The former of these of the winter proceedings involved the dispute between the Anglican Church and the Presbyterians; the latter, the dispute between the Presbyterians and the Independents. To understand the position in which affairs now stood, it is necessary to attend to some events of an earlier date.

polity.

The ecclesiastical constitution established in England on the reformation from Popery in the sixteenth century, is familiarly known to readers of English history, and has been sufficiently indicated in this work. On the Continent, the reformed churches of the German States, Lutheran of Denmark, and of Sweden, adopted the polity church of Luther, while in those of the Low Countries, of France, and of Switzerland, the institutions of Calvin were set up. Of the two, the Lutheran system recognized a closer union of the Church with the State. Like the Anglican, it asserted the supremacy of the sovereign in ecclesiastical affairs. He exercised this branch of his power through tribunals of his own appointment, known by the name of Consistories; and among the clergy there

was a diversity of ranks, and a sort of episcopate, though the name of bishop was avoided.1

1541. Presbyterian

ity of Calvin.

The regimen of Calvin, though it did not make the churches independent of the government, assigned to them a larger province in their own administration. It acquired an establishment at Geneva, when its author, seeking a better sphere for his activity than his native land afforded, made himself a sort of autocrat in that city, and won for it the name of the Mechurch pol- tropolis of Reform. According to this scheme, - which claimed the support of the letter of the New Testament, all Presbyters, or Elders, are equal in rank and authority and competent alike to all sacred functions, and the officers of each congregation control its members in spiritual things; but each congregation is also a part, and subject to the government, of the aggregate national Church. To administer this general government, Calvin established what he called a Consistory, composed of laymen and ecclesiastics, who were appointed from year to year, the former being the greater number. And this body, in its turn, was subject to the supervision of the Council of Two Hundred which governed the little republic. No greater elaboration was required for the convenient action of the system within so small a sphere.

When Calvin revived the Augustinian doctrine, exhibiting it with a sharper distinctness than its ancient champion had attained, and maintaining it with a more subtile logic, the welcome which was widely extended to his dogmatic theory among the reformed churches naturally recommended his scheme of Church polity to the favor of those great men of other countries who

1 Mosheim, Ecclesiastical History, Histoire de France, VIII. 191, 323; Part II. Chap. II. §§ 12, 32. Dyer, Life of John Calvin, 121; Mignet, Mémoires Historiques, 360.

Calvin, Institutiones Christianæ, Lib. IV. Capp. III., IV.; Henri Martin,

owned him as the master of their minds. Accordingly when the Scotchman, John Knox, formerly chaplain to King Edward the Sixth, went home from a second visit to Geneva, it was with the Presbyterian model

1559.

in Scotland.

in his mind as the perfection of church rule, May. but as at the same time requiring extension and refinement in order to its complete adaptation to a Presbytery larger society. Many things were to be brought to pass in Scotland before the work of ecclesiastical reconstruction could be done. It was formally at- 1560. tempted in the year after Knox's return; but the August. selfishness of the Reformed nobles effectually obstructed it, and it languished during his life.1

1578.

It was accomplished under the auspices of his scarcely less able successor, Andrew Melville. According to the Second Book of Discipline, which became the ecclesiastical law of the land, the minister of a single congregation is the highest church officer; with him ruling elders ought to be associated; and these officers together constitute a parochial court, called the Church Session. A small number of neighboring congregations are united in a Presbytery, in which they act by representatives; several neighboring Presbyteries in like manner are convened in a Synod, or Provincial Assembly; and the ultimate authority over all resides in a national convention of the Church, called the General Assembly, in which, as in all the inferior councils, lay members sit, as well as clergymen. Two years 1580. after the General Assembly was thus invested with supreme ecclesiastical power, it abolished the office of Bishop by a unanimous vote. The controversy was not over; but to follow it does not belong to the purposes of this work. The result of an attempt of King Charles to revive episcopacy in his Northern kingdom has

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been brought to the reader's notice.1 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,- -a "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- Apr 10. wickshire, a "Book of Discipline" was adopted as "essen

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.)

See Vol. I. 120, 121.

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

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

in the same year.

3 Ibid., III. 25, 26, 30-33.

III. 73.)

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