instructed to organise a scheme for a church; to compose a directory in place of the Prayer Book; to set forth in a confession of faith what men must believe; to draw up a catechism for teaching the true creed. Work that in itself would have sufficed for giants was complicated by the play of politics outside and the necessity of serving many changing masters. The important point is, that their masters were laymen. The assembly was simply to advise. Parliament had no more intention of letting the divines escape its own direct control, than Henry VIII. or Elizabeth would have had. The assembly was the creature of a parliamentary ordinance. To parliament it must report, and without assent of parliament its proceedings must come to naught. This was not all. The Solemn League and Covenant in the autumn of 1643, and the entry of the Scots upon the scene, gave a new turn to religious forces, and ended in a remarkable transformation of political parties. The Scots had exacted the Covenant from the parliamentary leaders as the price of military aid, and the Covenant meant the reconstruction of the English Church, not upon the lines of modified episcopacy or presbytery regulated by lay supremacy, but upon presbytery after the Scottish model of church government by clerical assemblies.

The divines first met in Henry VII.'s chapel (July 1, 1643), but when the weather grew colder they moved into the Jerusalem Chamber-that oldworld room, where anybody apt, "in the spacious circuit of his musing," to wander among far-off things, may find so many memorable associations, and none of them more memorable than this. For most of five years and a half they sat-over one thousand sittings. On five days in the week they laboured from nine in the morning until one or two in the afternoon. Each member received four shillings a day, and was fined sixpence if he was

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late for prayers at half-past eight. Not seldom they had a day of fasting, when they spent from nine to five very graciously. "After Dr. Twisse had begun with a brief prayer, Mr. Marshall prayed large two hours most divinely. After, Mr. Arrowsmith preached one hour, then a psalm, thereafter Mr. Vines prayed near two hours, and Mr. Palmer preached one hour, and Mr. Seaman prayed near two hours, then a psalm. After Mr. Henderson brought them to a short, sweet conference of the heart confessed in the assembly, and other seen faults to be remedied, and the convenience to preach against all sects, especially baptists and antinomians." These prodigies of physical endurance in spiritual exercises were common in those days. Johnston of Warriston, intending to spend an hour or two in prayer, once carried his devotions from six in the morning until he was amazed by the bells ringing at eight in the evening.

There were learned scholars and theologians, but no governing churchman of the grand type rose up among them-nobody who at the same time comprehended states and the foundation of states, explored creeds and the sources of creeds, knew man and the heart of man. No Calvin appeared, nor Knox, nor Wesley, nor Chalmers. Alexander Henderson was possessed of many gifts in argument, persuasion, counsel, but he had not the spirit of action and command. Sincere presbyterians of to-day turn impatiently aside from what they call the miserable logomachies of the Westminster divines. Even in that unfruitful gymnastic, though they numbered pious and learned men, they had no athlete. They made no striking or original contribution to the strong and compacted doctrines of Calvinistic faith. To turn over the pages of Lightfoot's journal of their proceedings is to understand what is meant by the description of our seventeenth century as the Middle Ages of protestantism.

Just as mediaeval schoolmen discussed the nature and existence of universals in one century, and the mysteries of immortality and a superhuman First Cause in another century, so now divines and laymen discussed predestination, justification, election, reprobation, and the whole unfathomable body of theological metaphysics by the same methodverbal logic drawing sterile conclusions from untested authority.

Happily it is not our concern to follow the divines as they went ploughing manfully through their Confession of Faith. They were far from accepting the old proposition of Bishop Hall that the most useful of all books of theology would be one with the title of "De paucitate credendorum "of the fewness of the things that a man should believe. After long and tough debates about the decrees of election, they had duly passed the heads of Providence, Redemption, Covenant, Justification, Free Will, and a part of Perseverance. And so they proceeded. The two sides plied one another with arguments oral and on paper, plea and replication, rejoinder and rebutter, surrejoinder and surrebutter. They contended, says honest Baillie, tanquam pro aris et focis-as if for hearth and altar.

It was not until May in 1647 that this famous exposition of theological truth was submitted to the House of Commons. By that time parliament, in deep water, had other things to think of, and the Westminster Confession never received the sanction of the state. Nor did the two Catechisms, which, along with the Confession, are still the standards not only of the Church of Scotland, but of the great body of presbyterian churches grouped all over the English-speaking world, and numbering many millions of strenuous adherents. The effect of familiarity with the Shorter Catechism upon the intellectual character of the Scottish peasantry, and the connection between presbyterian government

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and a strongly democratic turn of thought and feeling in the community, are accepted commonplaces. Perhaps this fruit of the labours of the Westminster Assembly, appraise it as we may, was in one sense the most lasting and positive product of the far-famed Long Parliament that set it up and controlled it.

II

A great group of questions one following another arose upon the very threshold of the Reformation. The Pope dislodged, tradition cast forth, the open Bible placed in the emptied shrine, fresh fountains of spiritual truth and life unsealed of which all save the children of reprobation might partake,—a long campaign of fierce battles was next fought on fields outside of purely theologic doctrine. What is the scriptural form of church government-prelacy, presbytery, or congregational independence? Who was to inherit the authority of the courts spiritual -the civil magistrate or the purified and reconstituted church? Ought either bishop or synod to have coercive jurisdiction against the outward man, his liberty, life, or estate? Ought the state to impose one form of church government upon all citizens; or to leave to free choice both form of government and submission to discipline; or to favour one form, but without compulsion on individuals who favoured another? Ought the state to proscribe or punish the practices of any church or adhesion to any faith? These were the mighty problems that had now first been brought to the front in England by a great revolution, partly political, partly ecclesiastical, and wholly unconscious, like most revolutions, of its own drift, issues, and result. Few more determined struggles have ever been fought on our sacred national battleground at Westminster, than the contest between the Assembly of Divines and the parliament. The

divines inspired from Scotland insisted that presbytery was of divine right. The majority of the parliament, true to English traditions and instinct, insisted that all church government was of human institution and depended on the will of the magistrate. The divines contended that presbytery and synod were to have the unfettered right of inflicting spiritual censures, and denying access to the communion-table to all whom they should choose to condemn as ignorant or scandalous persons. The parliament was as stubborn that these censures were to be confined to offences specified by law, and with a right of appeal to a lay tribunal. It was the mortal battle so incessantly renewed in that age and since, between the principles of Calvin and Knox and the principles imputed to Erastus, the Swiss physician and divine, who had died at Heidelberg in 1583.

For ten days at a time the assembly debated the right of every particular congregation to ordain its own officers. For thirty days they debated the proposition that particular congregations ought to be united under one presbyterian government. In either case the test was scripture: what had happened to Timothy or Titus; how the church of Antioch had stood to the first church at Jerusalem; whether St. Paul had not written to the Philippians words that were a consecration of presbytery. The presbyterian majority besought the aid of a whole army of Dutch orthodox; they pressed for letters from France and from Geneva, which should contain grave and weighty admonitions to the assembly at Westminster, to be careful to suppress all schismatics, and the mother and fosterer of all mischief, the independence of congregations. On the other hand the half-dozen independents, whom Cromwell wished to strengthen by the addition of three divines of the right sort from New England, kept up a spirited resistance against the driving