nominated by the presbytery; but the other lay patrons could not generally be induced, in the same manner, to surrender their rights into the hands of the church courts. At length, however, in March, 1649, the legislature was prevailed upon to end the difficulty by a very summary measure. "The parliament," says Sir James Balfour, "passed a most strange act this month, abolishing the patronages of kirks which pertained to laymen since ever Christianity was planted in Scotland. Francis, Earl of Buccleugh, and some others, protested against this act as wrangous and altogether derogatory to the just rights of the nobility and gentry of the kingdom of Scotland, and so departed the parliament-house. But current was carried for the presbyteries and church-way, in respect Argyle, the chancellor, and Archibald Johnston, the kirk's minion, durst do no otherwise, lest the leaders of the church should desert them, and leave them to stand on their own feet, which, without the church, none of them could well do." Commenting further upon "this notable prank," as he calls it, the annalist proceeds :"And this act, to make it the more specious, they coloured with the liberty of the people to choice their own ministers; yet the general assembly, holden at Edinburgh in the months of July and August, this same year, made a very sore mint [attempt] to have snatched this shadow from the people; notwithstanding their former pretences, collationed the sole power on the presbyteries; and out-fooled the people of that right they formerly pretended did only and especially belong to them jure divino; as, according to the new divinity of these times, both the leaders and their creature Johnston pleaded, with all the forcible arguments wrested Scripture could produce, to procure their own ends and greatness." The act passed by the assembly, in fact, provided that, when a congregation became vacant, the presbytery should send down certain preachers for the people to hear; that, if the people desired to hear any others, they might apply for that purpose through their elders (that is, the members of the parochial kirk session) to the presbytery, which, however, was not to be bound to grant the application, any more, indeed, than the elders were to make it, unless they chose; that after a competent time, not the people, but the elders or session only, should meet and proceed to the election; that if the people acquiesced, the presbytery, upon finding the person thus elected to be qualified, should admit him to the ministry in the said congregation : but if it happen," continues the act, "that the major part of the congregation dissent from the person agreed upon by the session, in that case the matter shall be brought unto the presbytery, who shall judge of the same; and, if they do not find their dissent to be grounded on causeless prejudices, they are to appoint a new election in manner above specified.' The whole right accorded to the people, therefore, was simply to state their objections; the sole right of deciding

66

upon the reasonableness of the said objections being reserved to the presbytery. Such, in the purest times of the Scottish kirk, was the popular election of the clergy, of which we still sometimes hear so much! The act concludes with a clause which would no doubt be found convenient in many cases :-"Where the congregation is disaffected and malignant, in that case the presbytery is to provide them with a minister." It is not clear whether this was intended to cure or to punish their disaffection and malignity.

At the memorable date of the assembling of the Long Parliament, in November, 1640, English puritanism had not yet taken the shape of presbyterianism to any considerable extent. Besides the statement of Clarendon, that, with the exception of Fiennes and the younger Vane, and, as he asserts, at a somewhat later stage, Hampden, there were scarcely any members of that parliament, at its opening, who were opposed to the principle of the constitution of the national church, we have the authority of Richard Baxter, in his account of his own Life, for the fact that, although "the younger and less experienced ministers in the country were against amending the bishops and liturgy, apprehending this was but gilding over their danger;" yet "this was not the sense of the parliament, nor of their principal divines." "The matter of bishops or no bishops," he adds, "was not the main thing, except with the Scots, for thousands that wished for good bishops were on the parliament side." And even of those who were altogether opposed to episcopacy,-the Root-andbranch-men, as they were called, to which party Vane, and his friends that have just been mentioned, belonged,-very few were at this time Presbyterians; it was Independency, not Presbytery, which they would have substituted for the government of bishops.

For the present, however, the mere diminution of the episcopal power which was alone derived by the majority of the House of Commons afforded a common object which united all these parties; and the habit they thus acquired of acting in concert, together with the course events took, which na turally tended to heat and exasperate many of those whose feelings and views were at first comparatively moderate, soon enabled the few persons of more extreme opinions to become the leaders of the movement, and to draw the great majority of the others along with them. How the established church fell under this combined attack has been already related.* The first blow struck at the bishops, if we except the impeachment and committal to the Tower of Laud, on the 1st of March, 1641, was the bill brought in to take away votes in parliament, and to leave them out in all commissions that had relation to any temporal affairs, which, after being passed in the House of Commons with little opposition, was sent up to the Lords on the 1st of May, but thrown out by the Upper House after the second reading. This was

See ante, p. 227, et seq.

their

followed in the same session by Sir Edward Deering's bill for the utter eradication of bishops, deans, and chapters, with all officers belonging to them, which also, however, took no effect, having, after it had been read a second time in the House of Commons, been dropped in committee. The first measures that were actually carried against the church were the two bills abolishing the courts of High Commission and Star Chamber, which received the royal assent in the beginning of July. On the last day of that month the Commons appointed their committee for drawing up the charges of impeachment against the thirteen bishops, which were presented at the bar of the House of Lords on the 4th of August following. On the 30th of December ten of the bishops were sent to the Tower, and two more debarred from their places in parliament, on being impeached of high treason by the Commons for their protestation against the legality of the acts passed in their absence. On the 14th of February, 1642, a new bill incapacitating the bishops for voting in parliament was at last passed into a law. From this date the church, though not yet actually pulled down, may be considered as a mere ruin.

*

Only a few days after the opening of the Long Parliament the Commons had appointed a grand committee, consisting of the whole House, to inquire into the scandalous immoralities of the clergy. But the vast number of cases that came pouring in, upon the general invitation that was given to all sorts of persons to get up all sorts of complaints against their ministers, soon made it necessary that the grand committee should divide itself into four or five committees, which were called White's, Corbet's, Harlow's, Deering's committees, after the chairman of each. It is said that, in a short time, above two thousand petitions were brought before them, of which Corbet's committee, which it appears was the favourite tribunal, had for its share no fewer than nine hundred. About two years after, another committee was appointed to consider of "the fittest way," as it was expressed," for the relief of such godly and wellaffected ministers as have been plundered, and what malignant clergymen have benefices in and about the town, which benefices being sequestered may be supplied by others who may receive their profits;" and in July, 1643, the scandalous committee and this other (nicknamed by the royalists the plundering committee) were empowered to carry on their proceedings in concert. By means of their united powers, and the aid of a succession of ordinances passed by the House to facilitate their operations, these bodies, in course of time, cleared the church pretty effectually both of immoral clergymen and also of those who were not of their own way of thinking. Many of the royalist clergy were besides still more summarily ejected by the parliament soldiers. Multitudes, of them," to quote the account of the historian of See ante, p. 248.

See ante, p. 272.

† See ante, p. 261.

the Puritans, "left their cures and took sanctuary in the king's armies or garrisons, having disposed of their goods and chattels in the best manner they could. Others, who had rendered themselves obnoxious by their sermons, or declarations for the king, were put under confinement in Lambeth, Winchester, Ely, and most of the bishop's houses about London; and, for want of room, about twenty, according to Dr. Walker, were imprisoned on board of ships in the river Thames, and shut down under decks, no friend being allowed to come near them." ""* It is said that 110 of the clergy of the diocese of London alone were turned out of their livings in the years 1642 and 1643; and that as many more fled, to avoid imprisonment. "It is to be lamented," adds Neal," that several pious and worthy bishops and other clergymen, who withdrew from the world, and were desirous to live peaceably without joining either side, suffered afterward in common with the rest of their brethren; their estates and livings being sequestered, their houses and goods plundered by ungovernable soldiers, and themselves reduced to live upon the fifths, or a small pension from the parliament, either because they could not take the covenant, or comply with the new directory for public worship. Among these we may reckon the most reverend Archbishop Usher, Bishops Morton and Hall, and many others. When the bishops' lands were seized for the service of the war, which was called Bellum Episcopale, or the bishops' war, it was not possible to show favour to any under that character; and though the two houses voted very considerable pensions to some of the bishops, in lieu of their lands that were sequestered, due care was not taken of the payment; nor would several of their lordships so far countenance the votes of the houses as to apply for it." To the names of the eminent sufferers here mentioned may be added one of the most illustrious in English literature, that of Jeremy Taylor, who being driven from hist living of Uppingham, which was sequestered, retired into Wales, and, while supporting himself and his family by, teaching a school, there composed some of the greatest of his immortal works.

For a space of some two years the country might be said to be without any established form of worship. The clergy were left to read the liturgy or not, as they pleased, and to take their own way, in like manner in all other points: thus, we are told, while some of them continued to wear the canonical habits, others gratified their taste by preaching in a cloak, after the fashion of the Protestant ministers of Geneva and France. The cathedral worship was also everywhere put down; and many of the sacred edifices themselves were lamentably defaced and injured, principally in the process of executing an ordinance, passed by the parliament in the summer of 1643, by which it was directed, that before the 1st of November ensuing all altars and tables of stone, in churches, should be utterly Neal, Hist. Pur, ii. 189.

customed to crowd around St. Paul's cross, to hear their favourite preachers declaim from the same pulpit from which Ridley and Latimer and Cranmer had addressed their forefathers in the first days of the Reformation.

Of

The building up of a new ecclesiastical polity was made the work of the Assembly of Divines, which was called together by an order of the two houses dated 12th June, 1643, and met at Westminster on the 1st of July thereafter. The members of the assembly, selected as they had been by the puritanical parliament, were generally agreed in holding the doctrinal theology of Calvin; but upon the question of church government they were more divided in opinion. A few of them were attached to episcopacy as it had lately existed in the national church; but these, finding themselves in a hopeless minority, soon retired. those that remained the great majority appear to have been at first inclined towards a modified episcopacy, or rather some such combination of episcopacy and presbytery as had been established by the original reformers of the Scottish church, in which bishops, without any secular rank or authority, like the district superintendents instituted by Knox, should be associated with a system of diocesan and provincial church courts. party, however, coalescing with the commissioners from Scotland, and swayed by the great influence which circumstances at the time gave to the church of that country, ultimately became thoroughly Presbyterian, some of them even going the length of adopting the principle of the divine right of presbytery. From them proceeded all the successive creeds and compendiums published in the name of the assembly-the Directory for Public Worship; the Confession of Faith; and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms. All these expositions are thoroughly both Calvinistic and Presbyterian: they constitute indeed the authorised formularies of the church of Scotland at the present day.

This

But the Presbyterians were to the last vigorously opposed in the Westminster Assembly by a minority consisting of two sections, which, although they generally acted in concert against the common foe, were also sufficiently distinguishable from each other. These were the Independents, and those called Erastians, from their adoption of the tenets of Erastus, a German divine of the preceding century, who reduced the questions of church government, and also of the connexion between the church and the state, to the simplest possible form, by maintaining that the church, or the clergy as such, possessed no inherent legislative power of any kind, and that the national church in its form and discipline was in all respects the mere subject and creature of the civil magistrate. That, however, which in both the Erastians and the Independents more than anything else enraged and alarmed the Presbyterian party was, their advocacy of the principle of a general toleration-a doctrine which Presbytery, as we have seen, had always held in especial abhorrence. As yet, the Independents

VOL. III.

appear to have generally held this great principle with some limitation; being inclined, for instance, though rather on political than theological grounds, to exclude the adherents of popery from the full liberty which they would have granted to all other Christian sects. But the views of the Erastians were of the most comprehensive amplitude. Baillie, who was one of the commissioners to the Assembly from the church of Scotland, repeatedly notices in his letters the assertion in various quarters of a toleration which should be without any limits whatever. Thus, in one place he speaks of a letter that was given into their clerk, inveighing against the covenant, and exhorting the Assembly to give a full liberty of conscience to all sects. "Here," he says, "rose a quick enough debate; Goodwin, Nye, and their party (the Independents), by all means pressing the neglect, contempt, and suppressing of all such fantastic papers; others were as vehement for the taking notice of them, that the parliament might be acquaint therewith, to see to the remedy of these dangerous sects."* person mentioned in this passage is Thomas Goodwin: he afterwards speaks of a John Goodwin, of Coleman-street, not a member of the Assembly, who, he says, "is a bitter enemy to Presbytery, and is openly for a full liberty of conscience to all sects, even Turks, Jews, Papists." "This way," he adds, "is very pleasant to many here." + In another place he describes Cromwell and Vane as "both for universal liberty."+

The

Although, also, the majority in the Assembly of Divines remained with the Presbyterians till its dissolution, about three weeks after the king's death (on the 22nd of February, 1649), the Independents and other sectaries had long before that date been getting a-head of them both in the parliament and in the army. The Directory of Public Worship, which supplanted the Liturgy, was established by an ordinance of the parliament on the 3rd of January, 1645; but the Confession of Faith, which laid down a Presbyterian system of ecclesiastical polity, although it was at once received by the Scottish church, was never in fact sanctioned by any act of the English legislature. Nor were even the name, style, and dignity of archbishops and bishops formally taken away till the 5th of September, 1646. By an act passed on the 6th of June, 1646, however, the Presbyterian form of church government was partially established by way of experiment, the preamble of the act declaring, "that if upon trial it was not found acceptable, it should be reversed or amended;" and to this law a further effect was afterwards given by several additional ordinances of the House of Commons; till at last, in 1649, it was declared without qualification by the house that presbytery should be the established religion. Yet, many difficulties still stood in the way of the actual extension of the new system of ecclesiastical polity over the whole kingdom; and, in point of fact, it

never obtained more than a very limited and imperfect establishment.

Accordingly the national church of England, if it might be so called, in the time of the Commonwealth, although the clergy and probably also the people, especially in the towns, were for the greater part Presbyterians, was by no means exclusively composed of the members of that persuasion. Some of the benefices were still retained by their old episcopalian incumbents; a considerable number were held by Independents; and a few were filled even by persons belonging to some of the many minor sects that now swarmed in the sunshine of the Protector's all but universal toleration. For some time, indeed, the pulpits appear to have been opened even to any of the laity who were esteemed to possess an edifying gift of utterance. At last, in March, 1653, Cromwell, by an ordinance of council, appointed a board of triers, as they were called, in all thirty-eight in number, of whom part were Presbyterians, part Independents, and a few Baptists, to which was given, without any instructions or limitations whatever, the power of examining, and approving or rejecting, all persons that might thereafter be presented, nominated, chosen, or appointed to any living in the church. This was tantamount to dividing the church among these different religious bodies, or so liberalizing and extending it as to make it comprehend them all. Cromwell, however, held forth the measure as one, on the contrary, of a restrictive character-as designed to restrain the excessive liberty that had previously existed, when any one who would might set up as a preacher, and so give

himself a chance of obtaining a living in the church. The board of triers continued to sit, and to exercise its functions, at Whitehall, till a short time after the death of Cromwell.

Of the numerous sectaries, as they were called, that sprung up in this age, we shall not now enter into any account, further than to mention that those of chiefest note were the Baptists (generally called by others the Anabaptists), the Quakers, or followers of George Fox, and the Fifth-monarchy Men, all of whom will meet us again in the next period.

In Scotland, also, Cromwell and his deputy, Monk, enforced, in spite of the teeth of the Presbyterian clergy, the same general toleration that had been established in England. But it soon became manifest that that system could only be maintained, with any chance of an hour's quiet to the country, by putting a gag upon the church. Accordingly, when, after many heats, the general assembly had met as usual at Edinburgh in the summer of 1652, and was about to proceed to business, Lieutenant-colonel Cotterel suddenly came into the church, and, standing up upon one of the benches, informed them that no ecclesiastical judicatories were to sit there but by authority of the parliament of England; and, without giving them leave to reply, commanded them instantly to withdraw themselves, and then conducted the whole of the reverend body out of the city, by one of the gates called the West Port, with a troop of horse and a company of foot. The assembly did not dare to attempt to meet again so long as Cromwell lived.