Having recently risen to power, they had become dazzled by the dream of an impracticable uniformity, and, as Baxter, himself a Presbyterian, complains, had shown too great a readiness to invoke to their aid in realizing this ambitious dream the arm of secular power. The endless diversity of opinion which the growing liberty and the general ferment of the public mind had occasioned was regarded by them as evidence of the dangers of unlimited tolera- tion, and they imagined that amid such discordant sounds truth must be indistinguishable, and even perish from the earth. Owen's mind had, meanwhile, far advanced beyond these narrow views, and risen above these imaginary fears. He had boundless confidence in the vitality of truth,— strong convictions of the power of its own spi- ritual weapons, and of the utter impotence of every other : and while so many of those with whom he had hitherto been associated saw only,
HIS PASTOEATE. XXXVII
in the mingled light and darkness, tlie approach of night, he hailed in them the hopeful twilight which was to grow into perfect day. In a " Comitry essay for the practice of church government," prefixed to his sermon before Parliament, he repeatedly condemns all enforced con- formity and punishment of heretical opinions by the sword. " He- resy," says he, " is a canker, but it is a spiritual one ; let it be prevented by spiritual means: cutting off men's heads is no proper remedy for it."^ That Owen should have renounced Presbytery, in the intolerant and repulsive form in which it was at this time presented to him, is not to be wondered at ; but that he recoiled equally far at every point from all the essential and distinctive principles of that form of church government is a statement which many have found it more difficult to believe. At the same time, no reasonable doubt can be entertained that the government of Owen's church at Coggeshall was decidedly Congi'egational ; and if that church in any degree corresponded with the counsels which Owen addressed to it in his next publication, it must have been pre-eminently one of those to which Baxter alludes in that honourable testimony, " I saw a commendable care of serious holiness and discipline in most of the Independent churches." The publication to which we refer is " Eshcol; or, Rules of Direction for the Walking of the Saints in Fellowship according to the order of the Gospel, 1647." The rules are arranged into two parts, — those which relate to the duty of members to their pastors, and those which specify the duties of members to each other. They are designed to recall men fi-om debates about church order to the serious, humble perform- ance of those duties which grow out of their common fellowship in the gospel Amid its maxims of holy wisdom it would be impossible to discover whether Owen was a Congregationalist or a Presbyterian.
" Eshcol" was the work of Owen as a pastor ; in the following year he was once more to appear as a theologian and Christian pole- mic, in a work on which he had long been secretly engaged, — " Salus Electorum, Sanguis lesu ; or, the Death of Death in the Death of Christ." The gi'eat subject of this treatise is the nature and extent of the death of Christ, with especial reference to the Arminian senti- ments on the latter subject. It is dedicated to the Earl of Warwick, the good patron who had introduced Owen to Coggeshall, and warmly recommended by two Presbyterian ministers as " pulling down the rotten house of Amiinianism upon the head of those Philistines who would uphold it."^ Owen himself makes no secret of having devoted to it immense research and protracted meditation. He had given it to the world after a more than seven-years serious inquiry, with a serious perusal of all that the wit of man, in former or latter days,
' Owen's Sermons, fol. ed., p. 229.
^ The names of these ministei's are, Stanley Gower and Richard Byfield,
XXXVIII LIFE OF DR OWEN.
had published in opposition to the truth.^ It is not without good reason, therefore, that he claims a serious perusal in return: " Reader, if thou art as many in this pretending age, a sign or title gazer, and comest into books as Cato into the theatre, to go out again, — thou hast had thy entertainment: farewell." The characteristic excellencies of Owen's mind shine out in this work with gTeat lustre ; — comprehension and elevation of view, which make him look at his subject in its various relations and dependencies, united with the most patiently minute examination of its individual parts, — intellectual strength, that delights to clear its way through impeding sophistries and snares, — soundness of judgment, often manifesting, even in his polemical writ- ings, the presence and power of a heavenly spirit, and " expressing itself in such pithy and pregnant words of wisdom, that you both de- light in the reading, and praise God for the writer."^ Owen does not merely touch his subject, but travels through it with the elephant's grave and solid step, if sometimes also with his ungainly motion; and more than any other writer makes you feel, when he has reached the end of his subject, that he has also exhausted it.