the writer, was one of 56 quarto pages, entitled, "Reasons against the Independent Government of particular Congregations: As also against the Toleration of such Churches to be erected in this Kingdom: Together with an Answer to such Reasons as are commonly alleged for such a Toleration: Presented, in all humility, to the Honourable House of Commons now assembled in Parliament, by Tho: Edwards, Minister of the Gospel. 1641." Let the reader put his mark upon this Thomas Edwards. He had been educated at Cambridge, and had graduated M.A. there in 1609; had been incorporated in the same degree at Oxford in 1623; and had been a Nonconformist lecturer in Hertfordshire and other midland counties, and also in London. And now in 1641, when he was between fifty and sixty years of age, he flashed out in this pamphlet. "Considering," he says in his Introduction," how many are of that [the Independent] way, some "inhabiting in this kingdom, others who are come over into "England on purpose, being sent as messengers of their "Churches to negotiate on that behalf; and observing how

diligently and close they follow it, by daily attending at "Westminster, by insinuating themselves into the company "of sundry members of the House of Commons, by preaching "often in Westminster, the more to ingratiate themselves "and their cause; printing also their desire of a Toleration "for Independent Government, and that with casting of dirt

upon the reformation and government of this National "Church, whatever it may be-as witness The Protestation "Protested-I, a minister of the Gospel, and a sufferer for it "these many years past. . . have thought it my duty. . . "to print these Reasons at this time, that so, when any "of those Petitions come to be propounded in the House of "Commons, under specious pretences and fair pretexts, there

may by these Reasons appear a snake under the green grass." With the same spirited verbosity he goes on to predict all kinds of horrors from Independency, or the least toleration of it in England. His pamphlet appears to have circulated widely, and to have been particularly stinging to the Independents. At all events, among the replies from that side to

the Presbyterian attacks now beginning to be numerous, Mr. Edwards was honoured with one all to himself. What Mr. Edwards, however, did not like, for it set society on the grin, was that his antagonist was a woman. "The Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ: being an Answer to Mr. Edwards his Book, which he hath written against the Government of Christ's Church, and Toleration of Christ's public worship; briefly declaring that the Congregations of the Saints ought not to have Dependency in government upon any other, or direction in worship from any other, than Christ, their Head and Lawgiver. By Katherine Chidley. 1641." Such was the title of the Reply, of 81 pages, that astonished Mr. Edwards. People wondered who this sheBrownist, Katherine Chidley, was, and did not quite lose their interest in her when they found that she was an oldish woman, and a member of some hole-and-corner congregation in London. Indeed she put her nails into Mr. Edwards with some effect. In the close of her pamphlet she offers to have the argument out with him, if he chooses, in a debate before a jury of listeners impartially selected. "If you overcome "me," she adds, rather unfairly, "your conquest will not be "great, for I am a poor woman, and unmeet to deal with "you." Mr. Edwards did not accept the proposal; but Mrs. Chidley's pamphlet left him fuming, and we shall see he kept her in mind.1

And so we are brought to the year 1642. In that year the difference between Presbyterianism and Independency was no longer a mystery in England. Ball's tracts on the one side, and Burton's Protestation Protested on the other, had wakened Baxter on the subject. There is proof that Milton also had read the Protestation Protested, and the reply to it which was suspected to be Bishop Hall's; and it is observable

that the fourth of Milton's Anti-Episcopal tracts, The Reason of Church Government, published in January or February, 1641-2, is not, like its predesessors, a mere argument for the destruction of Prelacy, but is an express discussion of the farther question of the form of Church Government to be substituted for Prelacy. That pamphlet, as we saw, may be classed as, in the main, a Presbyterian pamphlet, as if Milton, when he wrote it, were still in sympathy with his Smectymnuan friends and the Presbyterian party generally; but a certain vague melting towards Independency may be discerned in the language throughout. It is the parochial consistory, or court of each individual parochial congregation, consisting of the pastor, lay-elders, and deacons, acting for and even in consultation with the entire body of the members, that Milton dwells on; it is this that he thinks of and describes as the essential atom of the Presbytery he contends for; and, though he does have in view the consociation or" conglobing" of the parochial or congregational Presbyteries over a whole land by a gradation of larger consistories, or at least by occasional national assemblies, he is hazy in this part of the scheme, and still seems to leave to every congregation within itself the real power of Church censure. In this, as well as in his obvious indifference in the same pamphlet to the alarms of his stricter contemporaries about Brownism, Anabaptism, and the increase of sects, one traces the effects of his recent readings of tracts from the Independent side, though these had not wholly won him over. Nor is there much difference, I think, between Milton's mood so expressed and the mood of Lord Brooke in his famous Discourse on Episcopacy, or of Lord Saye and Sele in his Parliamentary speeches at the same date. The Separatists found far kindlier judges and interpreters in these Lords than among the Presbyterians. In short, in 1642, though Presbyterianism in England was enormously in the ascendant, though an overwhelming majority of the Parliamentarians throughout the country, and of their exponents in Parliament, had made up their

"the Remonstrant in those idioms of "speech wherein he seems most to de

"light."-Milton's Apology for Smee

tymnuus.

minds for the establishment of a Presbyterian Church in England as near as might be to the Scottish pattern, though the citizens of London in the mass were passionately Presbyterian, and there were but two or three out of all the 120 parish-ministers of the city suspected of Independency, yet the existence of a certain amount of opinion in favour of Independency, and consequently of a demand for some toleration for Independency in the system to be established, was no longer dubious. From this year

too we may reckon the permanent acceptance of the name Independency as designating the thing. The term had been in occasional use among the Independents themselves for thirty years, and indeed was a very natural growth out of the phrases "mutual Independency of particular churches," "Independency of particular churches on any superior or synodical authority," which they had so often to employ in explaining their system. Hence, in recent pamphlets on both sides, a tendency to concurrence in this name, though Brownism, Separatism, and the like, remained convenient synonyms for those who wanted words of opprobrium. Now, however, Independency became the generic name, or name in chief, and there was some recognition of the shades and degrees of opinion which that one name might include. Perhaps the most frequent name for the middle or moderate kind of Independency-and it was with this that the Presbyterians foresaw their chief battle would be-was "the New England way." For there was now more and more a perception of the power possessed by Independency in the fact that it was the established Church polity already of an English population of 22,000 or 23,000 souls, with some seventy or eighty ministers among them, of Cambridge and Oxford training, across the Atlantic. Far off as this population was, self-organized and self-governed as it was, it was still a portion of the realm of England. Nay, was it not clear that this population had not abnegated its interest in the Church concerns of England, but was trying to act in these concerns by correspondence and through emissaries? This had been visible since the arrival of Messrs. Peters

and Welde in the preceding year; but throughout 1642 it became more and more apparent. The letter-writing and the coming and going between England and New England were brisk through all that year; and before the end of it the New England Church had spoken out her sentiments, in what might be called an authoritative manner, through the most eminent of all her ministers, Mr. John Cotton of Boston. "The True Constitution of a Particular Visible Church proved by Scripture" was the title of a treatise sent over by Cotton, and published with his name in London, in 1642. It was much read, and it passed into a second edition, with a changed title, within a year; and Cotton became from that moment the exponent of moderate Independency whom the Presbyterians felt themselves most bound to answer.1

An important change in the political system of the New England colonies was accomplished in May 1643, only a week or two before the convention of the Westminster Assembly. This event, the news of which must have reached England just as the Assembly was beginning its work, does not seem to have excited much attention. Yet not only was it the first step towards the formation of the future Republic of the United States, but even on the English Church questions which the Westminster Assembly had been called to debate it was not to be without some immediate bearing.

The sudden stoppage of the immigration from England, and the commencement even of a return-wave, had strengthened in the New Englanders the sense that they were in fact a distinct commonwealth, depending on themselves for their future, and bound to look after that future by wise provisions. They were more dispersed along the coast-line than they had originally intended; they had had troublesome wars

1 Hanbury's Memorials, II. 117-166. Fletcher (Hist. of Independency, III. 34) finds the first distinct use of the term Independent in its ecclesiastical sense in a tract of Henry Jacob, published in 1612; but it seems to me likely that a search among the writings

of Robinson and the other early AngloDutch Independents would detect earlier, or contemporary, instances. Hanbury (II. 49) shows that the name Independency had certainly not become general in 1640.