Section 656

written by a young man of twenty-six years, com- mended its author to the Parliamentary committee for purging the Church of scandalous ministers, and thus it was the occasion of liis being introduced to a pastoral charge. The incumbent of the parish church at Ford- ham, in Essex, having been found "scandalous," the living was " sequestered," and Owen was commissioned to supply the vacancy. In that retired parish his abil- ity as a preacher, and his diligence in visiting the families and catechising the children of his flock, gave character and success to his ministr}', so that in 1646 (when he was thirty years of age) he was called to preach before the House of Commons at one of their monthly fasts. Not far from that time the incumbent of Fordham,whose place he was occupying, having died, the right of presentation to the living was exercised by the patron, and Owen was displaced. Immediately the peo- ple of Coggeshall, in the same county, invited him to become their minister; and by the Puritan earl of War- wick, patron of that parish, he was presented to the liv- ing. The invitation came from a people who had been trained in Christian knowledge and tftity by faithful ministers, and who called him because they knew him. It was by the patron's judicious use of his right of pre- sentation that the parish had become so competent to choose ; and his contirraation of the people's choice, when they chose so wisely, was a matter of course. TiU this time Owen had accepted, in a general way, the Presbyterian theory of a National Church, governed by classical and synodical courts; but in connection with his removal to Coggeshall he began to act more definite- ly upon those principles of ecclesiastical polity which, in that age and country, more than now and here, dis- tinguished the Independents or Congregationalists from the Puritans of the Presbyterian party. Long after- wards, reviewing what he had asserted and practiced in the administration of his parish at Fordham, and de- scribing the change in his position, he said, "I found that my principles were far more suited to what is the judgment and practice of the Congregational men than to those of the Presbyterian." Yet he had considered himself a Presbyterian, for he had not consciously ad- vanced beyond the position of his Puritan friends. His acquaintance was not with any of the ministers or of the people who held " the Congregational way," but wholly with those of " the Presbyterian way." When the question between those two parties was becoming the great question in England, he set himself "serious- ly to inquire into the controversy." After reading much of what had been written on both sides, he pro- ceeded in his study of the question as his manner had been in other controversies. He " took under peculiar consideration and examination" the work "which seemed most methodically and strongly to maintain that which was contrary," as he thought, to what was then his own persuasion. The book thus selected was from New England — John Cotton's book of The Keys ; and to " the examination and confutation" of that book he addressed himself " for his own particular satisfac- tion." His own account of the result is, " Quite beside and contrary to my expectation, at a time and season when I could expect nothing on that account but ruin in this world, without the knowledge or advice of or conference with any one person of that judgment, I was prevailed upon to receive those principles which I had thought to have set myself in opposition imto." He bad published, while at Fordham, a tract entitled The Duty of Factors and People Distinguished. His first publication after coming to his new charge was Eshcol, or Hulls for Church Fvlloicship ; and thenceforward he found himself among the champions of Congregational- ism, or ('luirch independency against the theory of a National Church under a National Church government. Yet his mind and heart were always set much more upon great questions in theology, and upon the themes of Christian experience and Christian living, than upon questions of Church polity. His Eshcol was a simple