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HISTORY

OF THE

WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY.

SECTION I.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS, WITH A REVIEW of the causes wHICH LED TO THE CALLING OF THE WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY.

We are on this occasion called upon, with an innumerable multitude in every quarter of the globe, and of many different denominations, to celebrate the bicentenary anniversary of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. To this body the world is indebted for those standards of faith and practice which have been substantially adopted, not only by the Presbyterian Church in all its branches, but also by the Congregational and Baptist denominations. The return of a second centennial anniversary of this Assembly, invokes the grateful remembrance of all who value these standards, and the blessings of religious and civil freedom with which they have become inseparably connected. If the clear definition and establishment of those doctrines that are of God, alike freed from Antinomian licentiousness on the one hand, and from fanatical extravagance on the other; if the preparation of standards which have served as bulwarks to the truth as it is in Jesus, when error and heresy have come in like a flood upon the church, and which are at this moment venerated, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the word of God, by growing multitudes; and if a devotion to the cause of human rights which no bribery or persecution could extinguish; if, I say, these achievements are sufficient to demand our gratitude, then are we imperatively called upon to hail with exultation this natal day of our spiritual birthright, to consider the days of old and the years of ancient times, and to bring to remembrance the Westminster Assembly.

In order, however, properly to appreciate the debt of gratitude we owe to this General Council of the Church, and to enter heartily into this commemoration, we must recall to mind the circumstances which gave origin to this assembly.* and the nature and influence of its proceedings. It will be our object, therefore, in this discourse to present some general observations relating to the history, character, and results of this body.

*See these minutely given in the Preface to Reid's Lives of the Divines of the Westminster Assembly. Paisley, 1811.

The Westminster Assembly of Divines is to be regarded both as an effect and as a cause. It was at once the result of certain previous movements, and the source of other and momentous consequences to which it gave occasion. Itself the fruit of former vegetation, it became the seed of new productions. From it, as a starting point, the Presbyterian Church commenced her glorious race, freed from the clogs and hinderances with which she had been long previously bound, and is now seen in all the strength of growing maturity, pressing on towards the mark for the prize of her high calling; whi'e upon the foundation of its doctrinal standards millions build the fabric of their everlasting hopes.

To understand the causes which led to the convention of the Westminster Assembly, we must go back to the era of the English Reformation and trace the history and working of the Anglican hierarchy. Unlike the Continental and Scottish reforms, which were originated, and sustained, and completed by the people, the English Reformation was altogether a political movement, and an affair of state. It was forced upon an unprepared and unenlightened people, like any other matter of political legislation. Neither was it a reformation, but rather an adaptation of the existing hierarchy to the views and purposes of a covetous, worldly-minded, and ambitious monarch. While the supremacy of the pope was renounced, the king was recognized as the head of the church, and was thus implicated in that usurpation of the royal prerogative of Christ, and in those encroachments on the rights of the church, which form one of the weightiest charges against the Roman Antichrist. And while the people, in their state of ignorance, spurned from them the established religion-as far as they dared express their feelings-because it was in any way, and to any degree an alteration of the old, that same people, when fully instructed in the knowledge of the gospel, rejected to a great extent this same established religion, because it was but a modification of the corrupted papacy, and altogether unlike the primitive and apostolical church of Christ. It is beyond all controversy certain, that had the great body of the clergy and the laity, in the days of Elizabeth, possessed the liberty of carrying out their views, the Church of England would have been modelled after the same original platform of Presbyterian polity which was preserved to us in the sanctuary of truth, and universally adopted by every reformed church in Christendom.* Coerced into obedience to the powers that ruled over them, and legislated into conformity by the all-convincing arguments of proclamations, penalties, imprisonment, torture, infamy, and

*See the author's Work on "Presbytery, and not Prelacy, the Scriptural and Primitive Polity," for proof.

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