Bible alone, accompanied as it was by a nearly unanimous pre-conviction that it was the Calvinistic body of doctrines. alone that could be reasoned out of the Bible, was to keep the Assembly, I repeat, pretty much together from the first in matters of creed and theology. For perplexing questions as to the extent and limits of the inspiration of the Bible had not yet publicly arisen to invalidate the accepted method. There were the germs of such questions in the theological mind of England, as elsewhere in Europe; and they were perhaps not unrepresented in the thoughts of some in the Assembly. The conditions were, however, such as to crush such thoughts down into secrecy. Only in one form perhaps was there known to be represented by some few in the Assembly a principle of Biblical interpretation that might possibly lead to differences of theology and to deviations from Calvinism. This was the principle of the "Inner Light," or an intuition of Divine Truth, by the gift of the Spirit, in each individual heart. This principle, not being in conflict with the cardinal maxim of Protestantism respecting the Bible, could hardly be directly opposed; but dangers from it were foreseen. For, once let this "Inner Light" be the best interpreter of Scripture, and the standard of sound doctrine would no longer be the distinct objective standard of what the Bible says, but would tend rather to shift itself into each man's constitutional fervours and excitements playing over the Bible in the vague, or over what in it pleased him best! It was, however, only or mainly on the question of Church Government that the Assembly knew itself from the first to be divided into parties. Or, rather, it was on this question that the Assembly, more distinctly than it could have foreseen at first, did divide itself into parties. But that is a story for our next Volume, and for which the remainder of this Volume must be regarded meanwhile as an absolutely necessary preparation. BOOK IV. ENGLISH PRESBYTERIANISM AND ENGLISH INDEPENDENCY: Ar the time of the meeting of the Westminster Assembly there was a tradition in the Puritan mind of England of two varieties of opinion as to the form of Church-government or discipline that should be substituted for Episcopacy. ENGLISH PRESBYTERIANISM. In the first place, there was a tradition of the system of views known as PRESBYTERIANISM :-From the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, if not earlier, there had been Nonconformists who held that some form of the consistorial model which Calvin had set up in Geneva, and which Knox enlarged for Scotland, was the best for England too. Thus Fuller, who dates the use of the term "Puritans," as a nickname for the English Nonconformists generally, from the year 1564, and who goes on to say that within a few years after that date the chief of those to whom that term was first applied were either dead or very aged, adds, “Behold "another generation of active and zealous Nonconformists "succeeded them: of these Coleman, Button, Halingham, and Benson (whose Christian names I cannot recover) "were the chief; inveighing against the established Churchdiscipline, accounting everything from Rome that was not from Geneva, endeavouring in all things to conform the government of the English Church to the Presbyterian "Reformation." Actually, in 1572, Fuller proceeds to tell |