"they have power to withdraw from them the right hand of fellowship, and no longer to hold them in the communion of saints;" and this course may be decided upon at a meeting of messengers from "the churches thereabouts." The same was the doctrine of a treatise issued in London about the time of the meeting of the Westminster Assembly, with the title, "Church Government and Church Covenant discussed, in an Answer of the Elders of the several Churches in New England to Two and Thirty Questions sent over to them by divers Ministers in England." 2 1643. Among the clerical members of the Westminster Assembly only eight or ten were reckoned as Independents; but, of that small number, five at least, Philip Nye, Thomas Goodwin, William Bridge, Sidrach Simpson, and Jeremiah Burrows, were men of undisputed ability.* Among the laymen the great names of Oliver St. John, John Selden, and Bulstrode Whitelocke were counted either with them or with the Erastians. In Parliament, Lord Say and Sele in the Upper House, and in the Lower the younger Vane, Oliver Cromwell, and Nathaniel Fiennes, with St. John, Selden, and Whitelocke, were as yet almost their only decided and eminent friends. Outside of the Assembly there were popular forces more or less allied in policy with the Independents. A variety Variety of of names had come into use, to designate one English or another of the systems of erratic specula sectaries. 1 True Constitution, &c., 12, 13."Synods" for this purpose made a part of Robert Browne's project. (A Book which showeth The Life and Manners of all True Christians, &c., Question 51.) 2 The questioners were Presbyterians. The Answer was drawn up by Richard Mather of Dorchester. (Cot ton, Answer to Williams, 63.) In a Preface by Hugh Peter, he repudiates the name Independent. "Of late we find them passionately reject the name of 3 Hetherington, History of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, 140. Henry Phillips, previously of Dedham in Massachusetts, was a member. (Hist. and Geneal. Reg., XIII. 79.) tion, which had grown up under the stimulating influences of the time. In politics, some of the most noisy fanatics the word is said to have now first become common held that government in every form is a usurpation; while their moral theory maintained, that the Gospel had superseded not only the Jewish law, but all divine law, and that, "since the death of Christ upon the cross, sin itself, its guilt and punishment, are so utterly abolished, that there is now no sin in the Church of God, and God now sees no sin in us." It was in great part owing to their profession of doctrines of this description, so directly and mightily bearing upon practice in public and private life, that the Anabaptists and Antinomians labored under such general discredit. But they and the more obscure sectaries might be relied upon for opposition to the Presbyterians in the controversy about ecclesiastical regulation, and consequently in the more practical disputes which grew out of it. The cause of the Independents was so far their own. 1643. For a little while the business of the Assembly proceeded without strife. It petitioned Parliament to appoint a Fast-Day, which was accordingly ob- July 21. served. It spent ten weeks in a revisal of the first fifteen of the Articles of the Church. Together with the Parliament, in a church in Westminster, it adopted, with imposing ceremony, the Solemn League and Cove 1 In his "Gangræna," Thomas Edwards, Presbyterian incumbent of Christ Church, London, treats of the sectaries of his time under the following general heads, sixteen in number; namely, Independents, Brownists, Millenaries, Antinomians, Anabaptists, Arminians, Libertines, Familists, Enthusiasts, Seekers, Perfectists, Socinians, Arians, Anti-Trinitarians, Anti-Scripturists, Sceptics. Edwards published in 1646; but all these forms of opinion, full-shaped or in their elements, had appeared at least Sept. 25. some few years before. Other names, as Ranters, Rationalists, Levellers, &c., came into use later. Pagett's list (Heresiography, or a Description of the Heretics and Sectaries of these Latter Times, &c., 1647) contains forty-five names of sects. Samuel Rutherfurd's abridged catalogue (Survey of the Spiritual Antichrist, 1648) comprises Antinomians, Libertines, Anabaptists, Socinians, Perfectists, Familists, Swenckfeldians, Enthusiasts, and others. • Marsden, Later Puritans, 222–235. Dissension in bly. nant, in the month after the Parliamentary sanction of that compact. This proceeding led to a rupture. The Presbyterians understood the League and Covenant to include an engagement to set up their church polity; the Assem- and they did not scruple to avow their design, that that polity should be exclusive and intolerant. The small, but weighty, minority took alarm; and, with the help of able backers in Parliament, they managed to fend off the threatened mischief, though their position was still altogether insecure. When the scheme for their oppression was sufficiently unfolded, their obvious resource was to look abroad for sympathy and support; and the five leading Independent ministers published, with their signatures, what they called an "Apologetical Narration," in the form of a me1643. morial to Parliament. They concluded by "beseeching" that body, for themselves and those whom they represented, "to have some regard to their past exile and present sufferings, and upon these accounts to allow them to continue in their native country, with the enjoyment of the ordinances of Christ, and an indulgence in some lesser differences, as long as they continued subjects." This, however, was no part of the plan of the confident and determined Presbyterian leaders, who with difficulty were kept back from the immediate consummation of their purposes by the skilful tactics of the experienced lay members of the smaller party.2 1 Fuller, Church History, III. 466. In writing thus of the Presbyterians, I have not overlooked the liberal views and generous character of many of the party, or the serious embarrassments with which they were beset. A large proportion of the best men of England were of their number. After the overthrow of the hierarchy, they constituted the conservative element in the kingdom. They were disgusted and alarmed by the crop which they saw growing around them, of extravagant nonsense in speculation, of conceited and ignorant dogmatism, of sentiments hostile to public order, of refinements in morality which ended in escape from the sense of moral obligation, and in libertinism and universal license. The responsible Independents could not fairly be charged with an agency in bringing in these mischiefs. But the exigencies of self-defence had brought the Independents into political The hard-pressed Independents again looked across the water for help; and, with a hope, as they expressed it, "to reconcile some present differences about discipline," Goodwin and Nye printed and circu alliance with the hare-brained and foolhardy sectaries of other names; and the intimacy grew more close in proportion as the Presbyterians insisted more upon that ecclesiastical union, in which they hoped to find a remedy for the prevailing disorders. It should further be said, that, had the Presbyterian party obtained the permanent power at which it aimed, there were numbers of good men belonging to it and possessing powerful influence in it, who without doubt would, to the utmost of their power, have restrained the impetuous intolerance of their less enlightened associates. But how far they might be able to do this could not be known till after the experiment; whether they would even wish to be lenient to the full extent that was desirable for the dissenting body, was uncertain; and, at all events, men who have power, or hope to have it, are not content to hold by sufferance what they esteem their right. Whatever the Independents might have been justified in hoping, had they allowed the opposing party to establish itself in the authority at which it aimed, certainly they had cause for apprehension sufficient to forbid them to resign themselves to its mercy. Whatever influences they might imagine would ultimately prevail, certain it is, that the language of many of the Presbyterian leaders and among them men whose control over the passions of their friends was unsurpassed was threatening in the extreme. The party had scarcely, in any rank of life, a man of more consequence than Robert Baylie. This is his language in the Preface to his Sermon preached before the House of 1644. Lords in July, 1645: "It is more, at least no less, unlawful for a Christian State to give any liberty or toleration to errors, than to set up, in every city or parish of their dominions, bordels for uncleanness, stages for plays, and lists for duels. A liberty for errors is no less hateful to God, no less hurtful to men, than a freedom, without any punishment, without any discouragement, for all men, when and wheresoever they pleased, to kill, to steal, to rob, to commit adultery, or to do any of those mischiefs, which are most repugnant to the civil law, and destructive of human society." And if so, what followed in respect to the Independent party? For, he continues, "That so much extolled Independency, wherein many religious souls for the time do wander, is the chief hand that opened at first, and keepeth open to this day, the door to all the other errors that plague us."— Edmund Calamy was a Presbyterian oracle. "If," said he, in 1644, in a Sermon before Parliament, "you do not labor, according to your duty and power, to suppress the errors and heresies which are spread in the kingdom, all those errors are your errors, and those heresies are your heresies; they are your sins." (Price, Hist. Non-Conformity, II. 327.)-“A toleration," urged the Presbyterian Edwards in 1646, "is the grand design of the Devil, the master-piece and chief engine he works by at this time to uphold his tottering kingdom. It is a most transcendent, catholic, and fundamental evil..... The Devil follows it night and day, working mightily in many, by writing books for it, and other ways, all the devils in hell and their instru lated an elaborate treatise composed by Cotton, bearing the title of "The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven, and Power thereof, according to the Word of God." This was followed up by a larger work, also from his pen and published by his friends in London, on "The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England, or the Way of Churches walking in Brotherly Equality or Co-ordination, without Subjection of one Church to another, measured and examined by the Golden Reed of the Sanctuary." Some Presbyterian immediately published an elaborate ments being at work to promote toleration. O, let ministers oppose toleration, as that by which the Devil would at once lay a foundation for his kingdom through all generations." (See Gangræna, I. 58-85.) — The Presbyterian ministers of Lancashire, in 1645, testified with "harmonious consent," that toleration was "soul-murder, the greatest murder of all, for the establishment whereof damned souls in hell would accuse men on earth." (Price, Non-Conformity, II. 331.) — Prynne was a man well able to make himself heard, and his multitudinous writings breathed an uncompromising harshness against dissent. In fine, that the apprehensions of the Independents from a Presbyterian government had not been unreasonable, was manifested by the strictest proof, when, at a late stage of the quarrel (May 2, 1648), a temporary Presbyterian majority in Parliament, in an "Ordinance against Blasphemy and Heresy," constituted some alleged errors capital offences, and made others highly penal. (Crosby, History of the English Baptists, I. 199.) To avert the dangers thus threatened in England by a Presbyterian sway, the men of New England were prompted to interpose, not only by zeal for the defence of what they had themselves received as the truth, and by sympathy with their English friends in both hopes and fears, but by the probability that the success of the plans which were avowed would ultimately involve peril to themselves, or would at least impair the cordiality of friendship between themselves and the rulers of the parent country. At the same time, the leaders in New England had no share in the anxieties which might seem to excuse the rigor of the English Presbyterians, nor was their position by any means the same. In New England, the Independents were the party interested to keep things as they were. They were in little danger from Familism and its kindred fancies; they had subdued it when they conquered the faction of Hutchinson and Wheelwright; and they had since had a settled order of their own, which a triumph of Presbytery in England could influence only to their disturbance. If conservatism in England might be excused for securing power to Presbyterianism, and exercising rigor against Independents, in New England it looked the other way. New-England conservatism was concerned to have Independency maintained intact. Mather says (Introduction to the Cambridge Platform) that Owen, having undertaken to answer this book, found it too strong for him, and was converted by it. |