protest had been made hardly so much by the Assembly in its corporate capacity as by manifestos from the London ministers as such, and from those ministers in the provinces who were in time to join them. By these manifestos, however, Presbyterianism had taken up a position antagonistic beforehand to the principles of the Commonwealth, as well as to the acts that had brought it about. An Assembly of Divines composed almost entirely of Presbyterians could not comfortably, or even possibly, prolong itself into the Commonwealth. Accordingly, on Thursday, Feb. 22, 1648-9, three weeks after the King's death, the Assembly had held its last (i. e. its 1163rd) sitting. There was no formal abolition of it: on the contrary, it was still assumed by Parliament as existing; nay, a certain phantom of it survived as a Committee for the performance of special duties which could not be alienated or transferred. Practically, however, from that date it was defunct.1 The Presbyterian form of Church-Establishment, nevertheless, so far as it had been set up in England, had by no means perished with the Westminster Assembly. Though Presbyterianism was in deadly quarrel with the Commonwealth, the Commonwealth did not profess any hostility to Presbyterianism within the legalised bounds. London, for example, which had been in the epoch of its fourth Half-yearly Provincial Synod, with Mr. Edmund Calamy for Moderator, at the time of the King's execution, had passed quietly enough (May 1649) into the epoch of its fifth Synod, with Mr. Arthur Jackson for Moderator; and one has to suppose, under these Synods, the due meetings of the twelve London Presbyteries, and of the parochial Courts of the Congregations. So in Presbyterian Lancashire; and so in other places, to whatever extent the Presbyterian apparatus had been anywhere introduced. For the true Presbyterian soul, indeed, all this was sadly insufficient. Not to speak of the radical, irreconcileable, antipathy between Presbyterianism and the Commonwealth which thus professed to shelter it, what a truncated Presbyterianism it was, after all, that the Commonwealth did shelter! 1 Neal's Puritans, III. 350-354, and 452-453. No adequate powers yet given to the Church-courts; the hideous principle of Toleration still avowed and patronized by the ruling statesmen; even the Assembly's Confession of Faith authorized only with the omission of some of its essentials! Any faint hope that these defects might have been remedied by Parliament had vanished utterly at the establishment of the Commonwealth. Nay, of real countenance to English Presbyterianism, such as it was, or willingness to extend it, such as it was, what hope was there from the new powers? Themselves for the most part Independents and Sectaries, what sort of religionists were they favouring, or likely to favour? Had not the Arch-Independent of the Assembly, Mr. Thomas Goodwin, and the younger Independent, Mr. John Owen, been the preachers most about the Council of State; had they not been selected as chief preachers on the great Thanksgiving Day in London; had not Parliament signified its desire that places should be found for them in the Universities; and had not Mr. Owen meanwhile been expressly chosen by Cromwell to go with him, as his friend and chaplain, into Ireland? Were not Hugh Peters, John Goodwin, Peter Sterry, and others, more or less exceptionable, of the same sort, hanging about the Council with expectations? By the promotion of such men, their gradual appointments to livings, or even by the liberty afforded them of preaching, locomotion, and combination, would not the Presbyterian Establishment be soon turned into a mockery? The Assembly's Directory of Worship, Catechisms, and Confession of Faith, were priceless guarantees of the Reformed Religion in England; but how were they to be enforced ?1 There was one signal compensation. Unhappy England; but O thrice and four times happy Scotland! That nurseryland of Presbytery had emerged from the turmoil more Presbyterian than ever, a pattern to the whole world of Presbytery at its purest. In each of her thousand parishes walked the single accredited minister, with his kirk-session of lay-elders; 1 Neal, III. 455, and IV. 13; Commons Journals, June 8, 1649 (provision to be made for Goodwin, Owen, and others), and July 2 (Owen's appointment to go with Cromwell); Notes from Council of State Order Books. in each circle of contiguous parishes was the monthly Presbyterial Court; in each division of the country was the periodical Synod; and at the centre, reviewing all and commanding all, was the annual General Assembly in Edinburgh, represented through the rest of the year by the permanent Commission of the Kirk. Then how the Scottish Government co-operated with the Kirk, and listened to her advices, and, in everything except increasing her endowments, carried out her wishes! The Marquis of Argyle and his colleagues, almost all of them lay-elders of the Kirk, and with their hands in the affairs of the Kirk Assembly, the Kirk Commission, and all the minor Kirk judicatories, were, in spiritual and ecclesiastical matters, and in all the connexions of these with civil and social life, the disciples and factors of the Kirkmen. Where the Kirk judicatories laid on the spiritual lash, by excommunication or any minor sentence, there the State tribunals were ready, when necessary, with the hot iron and pincers of secular penalties. Never was a country under such discipline as Scotland was precisely in this year 1649, when it was governed by Argyle, Loudoun, Warriston, and the rest, in the name of the absent Charles II., abjuring and detesting the adjacent Commonwealth of England; and to this day historians of the Kirk must go back to that year if they would study Scottish Presbytery in its full flower and bloom. It was not merely that moral offences were watched and tracked out in every neighbourhood, through windows and keyholes, by a skilled police, and visited, when detected, with unsparing castigation; it was not merely that Sabbathstrolling, promiscuous dancing, card-playing, and the singing of profane songs, were made so difficult that their most passionate devotees were compelled to desist from them and find other amusements; it was not even that all the shires, and Fifeshire in particular, were scoured for secret dealings with the Devil, and there were more burnings of witches and warlocks in Scotland in this one year than in any other year of Scottish History. All this was much; but England herself, now that she was Puritanised, was not far behind Scotland in some of these respects. It was the absence of Religious Dissent, the impossibility of Religious Dissent, that was the peculiar characteristic of Presbyterian North Britain. Not a man, not a woman, not a child, not a dog, not a rabbit, all over Scotland, but belonged to the Kirk, or had to pretend that relationship. No Independency, no Anabaptism, no Antinomianism, no Socinianism, no Familism, no Libertinism, no Scepticism, no Erastianism, no Sectarianism of any sort, no outcry for Toleration! The Kirk was the nation, and the nation was the Kirk. No garbling either of those Westminster Assembly documents which had been prepared as the standards and safeguards for the future of pure and perfect Presbytery. In God's Providence it seemed as if that great Assembly, though called by an English Parliament, held on English ground, and composed of English Divines, with but a few Scotchmen among them, had existed and laboured, after all, mainly for Scotland. With all the more zeal, because England had accepted but some of the fruits of the Westminster Assembly, had Scotland, with a touch or two of her own by the way, accepted them completely and universally. The Directory of Worship, approved by the General Assembly in Feb. 1645, had been established by Act of Parliament in the same month; and the Confession of Faith, approved by the General Assembly in Aug. 1647, with the Larger Catechism and Shorter Catechism, approved by the Assembly in July 1648, had been enacted by the Legislature together in Feb. 1648-9. Copies of all these the Scottish Commissioners had taken with them to the Hague; and they had made Charles II. a present of a volume in which they were superbly bound up for his perusal, together with the National Scottish Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant. Charles was to be left under no mistake as to the creed and the laws of at least one part of his dominions.1 1 Records of Scottish General Assemblies of 1647, 1648, and 1649; Balfour's Annals for 1649, and other Scottish Histories; Authorized Scottish Edition of Confession of Faith, &c.; Baillie, III. 86-87. CHAPTER II. MILTON'S ADHESION TO THE REPUBLIC : HIS TENURE OF KINGS AND MAGISTRATES: ANALYSIS OF THAT MISSION TO ANSWER THE EIKON BASILIKE. MILTON was the first Englishman of mark, out of Parliament, that signified his unqualified adhesion to the Republic. This he did on the 13th of February, 1648-9, by publishing that pamphlet on which we saw him engaged in his house in High Holborn during the King's trial (Vol. III. pp. 718–719). The full title of the pamphlet, which consists of forty-two small quarto pages, was as follows:-The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: proving, That it is Lawfull, and hath been held so through all Ages, for any, who have the Power, to call to account a Tyrant, or wicked King, and after due conviction, to depose, and put him to death; if the ordinary Magistrate have neglected, or deny'd to doe it. And that they, who of late, so much blame Deposing are the Men that did it themselves. The Author, J. M. London, Printed by Matthew Simmons, at the Gilded Lyon in Aldersgate Street, 1649. Matthew Simmons had been the publisher of Milton's Bucer Tract on Divorce, and probably |