APPOINTMENT OF THE ASSEMBLY.
Soon after the opening of the Long Parliament the convening of a conference of divines for the settlement of the theological and ecclesiastical part of the great conflict suggested itself to the minds of leading men. The first bill of Parliament to that effect was conceived in a spirit hostile to the Episcopal hierarchy, but rather friendly to the ancient liturgy, and was passed Oct. 15, 1642, but failed for the want of royal assent.
As the king's concurrence became hopeless, Parliament issued on its own responsibility an ordinance, June 12, 1643, commanding that an assembly of divines should be convened at Westminster, in London, on the first day of July following, to effect a more perfect reformation of the Church of England in its liturgy, discipline, and government on the basis of the Word of God, and thus to bring it into nearer agreement with the Church of Scotland and the Reformed Churches on the Continent. Presbyterianism was not mentioned, but pretty plainly pointed at. The Assembly was to consist of one hundred and fifty-one members in all, viz., thirty lay assessors (ten Lords and twenty Commoners), who were named first, [1390] and included such eminent scholars, lawyers, and statesmen as John Selden, John Pym, Boulstrode Whitelocke, Oliver St. John, Sir Benjamin Rudyard, and Sir Henry Vane, and of one hundred and twenty-one divines, who were selected from the different counties, chiefly from among the Presbyterians, with a few of the most influential Episcopalians and Independents. Forty members constituted a quorum.
The Assembly was thus created by State authority. In like manner, the ancient oecumenical councils were called by emperors, and the Synod of Dort by the government of the United Provinces. The English Convocations also can not meet, nor make canons, nor discuss topics without royal license. The twenty-first of the Thirty-nine Articles forbids the calling of General Councils except 'by the command and will of princes.' Parliament now exercised the privilege of the crown, and usurped the ecclesiastical supremacy. It nominated all the members, with the exception of the Scotch commissioners, who were appointed by the General Assembly, and were admitted by Parliament. It fixed the time and place of meeting, it prescribed the work, and it paid the expenses (allowing to each member four shillings a day); it even chose the prolocutor and scribes, filled the vacancies, and reserved to its own authority all final decision; reducing thus the Assembly to an advisory council. Hence even the Westminster Confession was presented to Parliament simply as a 'humble Advice.' But with all its horror of ecclesiastical despotism, engendered by the misgovernment of Laud, the Long Parliament was the most religious political assembly that ever met in or out of England, and was thoroughly controlled by the stern spirit of Puritanism. Once constituted, the Assembly was not interfered with, and enjoyed the fullest freedom of debate. Its standards were wholly the work of competent divines, and received the full and independent assent of ecclesiastical bodies.
The king by proclamation prohibited the meeting of the Assembly, and threatened those who disobeyed his order with the loss of all their ecclesiastical livings and promotions. This unfortunately prevented the attendance of loyal Episcopalians.
COMPOSITION AND PARTIES.
It was the intention of Parliament to comprehend within the Assembly representatives of all the leading parties of the English Church with the exception of that of Archbishop Laud, whose exclusive High-Churchism and despotism had been the chief cause of the troubles in Church and State, and made co-operation impossible. [1391] The selection was upon the whole judicious, though some of the ablest and soundest Puritan divines, as Richard Baxter and John Owen, were omitted. Scotland came in afterwards, but in time to be of essential service and to give the Assembly a strong Presbyterian preponderance. The Colonial Churches of New England were invited by a letter from members of Parliament (Sept., 1642) to send the Rev. John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and John Davenport as delegates; but they declined, because compliance would subject them to all the laws that might be made, and might prove prejudicial to them. Hooker, of Hartford, 'liked not the business,' and deemed it his duty rather to stay in quiet and obscurity with his people in Connecticut than to go three thousand miles to plead for Independency with Presbyterians in England. Davenport could not obtain leave from his congregation at New Haven. Cotton, of Boston, would not go alone. [1392]
The Assembly itself, by direction of Parliament, addressed fraternal letters to the Belgic, French, Helvetic, and other Reformed Churches (Nov. 30, 1643), and received favorable replies, especially from Holland, Switzerland, and the Huguenot congregation in Paris. [1393] Hesse Cassel advised against meddling with the bishops. The king issued a counter manifesto from Oxford, May 14, 1644, in Latin and English, to all foreign Protestants, and denied the charge of designing to introduce popery. [1394]
As to doctrine, there was no serious difference among the members. They all held the Calvinistic system with more or less rigor. There were no Arminians, Pelagians, or Antinomians among them.
But in regard to Church government and discipline the Assembly was by no means a unit, although the Scotch Presbyterian polity ultimately prevailed, and became for a brief season, by act of Parliament, even the established form of government in England. The most frequent and earnest debates were on this point rather than on doctrine and worship. This conflict prevented the Assembly, says Neal (an Independent), from 'laying the top stone of the building, so that it fell to pieces before it was perfected.' Hereafter the common name of Puritans gave way to the party names of Presbyterians and Independents.
We may arrange the members of the Assembly under four sections: [1395]
1. The Episcopalians. Parliament elected four prelates, viz.: James Ussher (Archbishop of Armagh and Bishop of Carlisle), Brownrigg (Bishop of Exeter), Westfield (Bishop of Bristol), Prideaux (Bishop of Worcester); [1396] and five doctors of divinity, viz.: Drs. Featley (Provost of Chelsea College), Hammond (Canon of Christ's Church, Oxford), Holdsworth (Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge), Sanderson (afterwards Bishop of Lincoln), and Morley (afterwards Bishop of Winchester). An excellent selection. But with one or two exceptions they never attended, and could not do so without disloyalty and disobedience to the king; besides, they objected to the company with an overwhelming number of Puritans, and a council not elected by the clergy and mixed with laymen. Ussher is said to have attended once, but on no good authority; he was present, however, in spirit, and great respect was paid to his theology by the Assembly. [1397] Brownrigg sent in an excuse for non-attendance. Westfield was present, at least, at the first meeting. Dr. Featley, a learned Calvinist in doctrine, and a violent polemic against the Baptists, was the only Episcopalian who attended regularly and took a prominent part in the proceedings until, after the adoption of the Scotch Covenant, he was expelled by Parliament for revealing, contrary to pledge, the secrets of the Assembly in a letter to Ussher, then in the king's headquarters at Oxford, and was committed to prison (Sept. 30, 1643). This act of severity is strongly condemned by Baxter. Here ends the connection of Episcopacy with the Assembly.
Before this time Parliament had been seriously agitated by the Episcopal question. As early as Nov. 13, 1640, the 'Root and Branch' party sent in a petition signed by 15,000 Londoners for the total overthrow of the Episcopal hierarchy, while 700 clerical petitioners prayed merely for a reduction and modification of the same. Radicalism triumphed at last under the pressure of political necessity and the popular indignation created by Laud's heartless tyranny. First the bishops were excluded from the House of Lords (Feb. 5, 1642), with the reluctant assent of the king; and then the hierarchy itself was decreed out of existence (Sept. 10, 1642), the bill to take effect Nov. 5, 1643, [1398] but the ordinances to carry this measure into full effect were not-passed till Oct. 9 and Nov. 16, 1646. [1399] The old building was destroyed before a new building was agreed upon. This was the very question to be decided by the Assembly; hence the interval between the law and its execution. For nearly twenty years the Episcopal Church, though not legally abolished, from want of royal assent, was an ecclesia pressa el illicita on her own soil.
Among the scores or hundreds of pamphlets which appeared in this war upon the bishops, the five anti-Episcopal treatises of John Milton were the most violent and effective. He attacked the English hierarchy, especially as it had developed itself under the Stuarts, with a force and majesty of prose which is unsurpassed even by his poetry. He went so far as to call Lucifer 'the first prelate-angel,' and treats Ussher with lofty contempt as a mere antiquarian or dryasdust. 'He rolls,' says his biographer, 'and thunders charge after charge; he tasks all his genius for epithets and expressions of scorn; he says things of bishops, archbishops, the English Liturgy, and some of the dearest forms of the English Church, the like of which could hardly be uttered now in any assembly of Englishmen without hissing and execration.' [1400]
2. The Presbyterians formed the great majority and gained strength as the Assembly advanced. Their Church polity is based upon the two principles of ministerial parity, as to ordination and rank (or the original identity of presbyters and bishops), and the self-government of the Church by representative judicatories composed of clerical and lay members. It was essentially the scheme of Calvin as it prevailed in the Reformed Churches on the Continent, and was established in Scotland.
The Scots seemed to be predestinated for Calvinistic Presbyterianism by an effective decree of Providence. The hostility of their bishops to the Reformation, and the repeated attempts of the Stuarts to force English institutions upon them, filled the nation with an intense aversion to Episcopacy and liturgical worship. Bishop Bancroft, of London, the first real High-Church Episcopalian, called English Presbyterianism an 'English Scottizing for discipline.'
In England, on the contrary, Episcopacy and the Prayer-Book were identified with the Reformation and Protestant martyrdom, and hence were rooted in the affections of the people. Besides, the early bishops were in fraternal correspondence with the Swiss Churches. But in the latter part of Elizabeth's reign, when Episcopacy took exclusive ground and rigorously enforced uniformity against all dissent, Presbyterianism began to raise its head under the lead of two eminent Calvinists, Thomas Cartwright (1535-1603), Professor of Theology in Cambridge, and Walter Travers (d. 1624), Preacher in the Temple, London, afterwards Provost of Trinity College, Dublin. The former was in conflict with the High-Churchism of Archbishop Whitgift; [1401] the latter with the moderate Churchism of Richard Hooker, who was far his superior in ability, and whom he himself esteemed as 'a holy man.' The first English presbytery within the prelatic Church, as an ecclesiola in ecclesia, was formed at Wandsworth, in Surrey, in 1572, and Cartwright drew up for it a 'Directory of Church-Government,' or 'Book of Discipline,' in 1583, which is said to have been subscribed by as many as five hundred clergymen, and which was printed by authority of Parliament in 1644. [1402]
This anomalous organization was stamped out by authority, but the recollection of it continued through the reigns of James and Charles, and gathered strength with the rising Conflict.
The Westminster divines, with the exception of the Scotch Commissioners and two French Reformed pastors of London, [1403] were in Episcopal orders, and graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, and therefore as a body not opposed to Episcopacy as such. A goodly number inclined to Ussher's scheme of a 'reduced' or limited Episcopacy, i.e., a common government of the Church by presbyters under the supervision of the bishop as primus inter pares. [1404]
Had the moderate Episcopalians attended, the result would probably have been a compromise between Episcopacy and Presbytery. But the logic of events which involved Parliament in open war with the stubborn king, and necessitated the calling in of the aid of Presbyterian Scotland, changed the aspect of affairs. The subscription of the 'Solemn League and Covenant' (Sept., 1643) bound both the Parliament and the Assembly to the preservation of the doctrine, worship, and discipline of the Church of Scotland and the extirpation of popery and prelacy (i.e., the government of the Church by archbishops and bishops).