death, the people of England groaned within themselves, being burdened. Having no refuge in man, they sought relief in God, into whose ear they poured their complaints, and cried with a loud voice, saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge our cause, and avenge our sufferings on them that oppress us?"

Prelacy is a plain and manifest deviation from the institutions of Christ. As such it appeared to all the reformed churches, and to a large portion of the English people. They sought, therefore, its removal by an appeal to scriptural argument and authority. But prelacy had also become identified with spiritual despotism and arbitrary proceedings. Secular power, external violence, inquisitorial authority, and political tyranny, as well as ecclesiastical jurisdiction, had long been annexed to the hierarchy, had become characteristic of its conduct, and interwoven with all its proceedings. Bishops were not only lords spiritual, but also lords temporal. Their power extended equally to the body and the soul, and to civil as wel! as to ecclesiastical penalties. They domineered over all the ecclesiastical rights of the people in the church, while they lent themselves as the tools of arbitrary monarchs in the state. They had, too, become possessed of extensive power, independent of the crown and parliament; a power which, being based upon a divine right and thus beyond the reach of any human control, could be questioned only by the voice of blasphemous impiety. Their history is filled with treasons, conspiracies, and oppression.* They had ever been found opposed to the laws and liberties of the people, and to the reformation of abuses. Their high-handed proceedings in the Bishops' courts; their illegal powers as members of the High Commission; and the exorbitant prerogative of the crown, which they abetted and sustained, prostrated all freedom, trampled upon the just rights of the citizen, and left men of every quality and degree at the mercy of a rapacious despotism.†

*The collected proofs of these charges, from authentic sources, may be seen given at length by that learned and persecuted man. Counsellor Prynne, in his "Antipathie of the English Lordly Prelacy both to regular Monarchy and civil Unity; or an Historical Collection of the several execrable Treasons, Conspiracies. Rebellions, Seditions, Stateschisms. Contumacies, Oppressions, and Anti-Monarchical Practices, of our English. British, French, Scottish, and Irish Lordly Prelates, against our Kings, Kingdomes, Laws, Liberties; and of the several Wars, and civil Dissensions occasioned by them in. or against our Realm, in former and latter ages." London, 1641. 2 vols, 4to.

By this dreadful tribunal many were reduced to utter poverty by fines, many were imprisoned till they contracted fatal diseases, others were banished. and some were actually sold for slaves.

It was actually decided by the twelve judges of the Star Chamber, "That the King, having the supreme ecclesiastical power, could, without parliament make orders and constitutions for church government; that the High Commissioner might enforce them, ex officio, without libel; and

This language may appear strong, but it is inadequate to express the true character of the Anglican hierarchy. Take, for example, the case of Leighton, father of the celebrated Archbisop. At the instigation of Laud, and upon the charge of having published a book against prelacy!--he was thrown into prison, where he lay in a filthy cell infested with vermin for fifteen weeks, so that when served with his libel his hair and skin had come off his body, and he was so reduced in strength as to be unable to appear at the bar. This, however, made no difference. Untried and unheard he was condemned to suffer the following sentence, on hearing which pronounced, Laud, we are told, "pulled off his cap and gave God thanks." "The horrid sentence," says the sufferer in his petition to parliament some years afterwards, "was to be inflicted with knife, sword, fire, and whip, at and upon the pillory, with ten thousand pounds fine; which some of the lords of court conceived could never be inflicted, but only that it was imposed on a dying man to terrify others. But Laud and his creatures caused the sentence to be executed with a witness; for the hangman was animated all the night before, with strong drink in the prison, and with threatening words, to do it cruelly. Your petitioner's hands being tied to a stake, besides all other torments, he received thirty-six stripes with a treble cord, after which he stood almost two hours in the pillory in cold, frost, and snow, and then suffered the rest, as cutting off the ear, firing the face, and slitting up the nose. He was made a spectacle of misery to men and angels. And on that day seven nights, the sores upon his back, ears, nose and face, not being cured, he was again whipped at the pillory in Cheapside, and then had the remainder of the sentence executed by cutting off the other ear, slitting up the other nostril, and branding the other cheek!"

Similar punishments were inflicted on Counsellor Prynne, Dr. Bastwick, and Dr. Burton, and for the same atrocious crime of having written against the prelacy!

In short, "the Church of England continued under the Stuarts what she had become under the Tudors: a submissive slave to the higher ranks, a tyrant to the lower."* And the portentous re-appearance, at the present time, and in our own country as well as in England, of the fundamental principle,— the prelatical doctrine of Apostolical Succession,-from which these results followed, may well excite alarm; embodying, as it does, the very essence of despotism, civil and religious, and

that subjects might not frame petitions for relief without being guilty of an offence finable at discretion, and very near to treason and felony." Neal, Vol. I. p. 416, 417.

*Hoffman's Anglo-Prussian Bishopric, p. 28.

possessing an energy that nothing human can control without a struggle, wide, wasting, and deadly, too fearful even to be imagined.†

Nor was this all. While prelacy had become identified, as was believed, with despotic cruelty and injustice, an event occurred which awakened the whole people of Britain to a full perception of their awful condition, and still more fearful prospects, I allude to the horrible massacre of the Irish Protestants, by the Roman Catholics. Taught to believe that by putting heretics to death they would merit favor at the hands of God, these deluded men received the sacrament before commencing the work of carnage, and swore before high heaven that they would not leave a Protestant alive in the whole kingdom. For many months, nay, with some little intermission, for two years, the country was a scene of the most unparalleled atrocities. No mercy was shown to age, or rank, or sex. Men, women, and even children, became the executioners of helpless victims, and everywhere perpetrated the most execrable atrocities. Suffice it to say, that according to some writers not less than 300,000 Protestants were sacrificed to glut the ferocious appetite of Popery. Neither can King Charles be altogether freed from the charge of having connived at, if he did not promote, this infamous treachery. Certain it is, that the object avowed by the Papists was the subjugation of the English parliament and the Scottish army; the support of the king in his struggle for arbitrary power, and the more complete enslavement of the British nation.§

By these, and other similar causes, which time will not permit us to detail, the public mind was led to regard prelacy as equally dangerous to the religion, liberties, and peace of the three kingdoms, and thus to desire the complete extirpation of the hierarchy. The controversy respecting high-churchism,

†Hatherington, Hist. of Westm. Ass., p. 50. See abundant proofs of the intolerant tendencies and results of this doctrine both in England and America, in the Author's Lectures on the Prelatical Doctrine of the Apostolical Succession, Lecture XIII.

See on this subject the various calculations as given in Dr. Reid's History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. Vol. I. p. 336, 337.

The Royal Commission from Charles I. for the movements of 1641, has been strenuously denied. The evidence of its reality seems, however, beyond controversy. The evidence may be summed up as follows:-(1.) The Royal Commission was published by Sir Phelim O'Neil himself. in his proclamation from Newry, 1641. (2.) It was reprinted in the "Mysterie of Iniquity," 1643. (3.) In "Vicar's Parliamentary Chronicle," 1646. (4.) In Milton's Works, 1698. And those who desire to see the genuineness of the Commission fully canvassed. may consult Brodie, Vol. III. p. 190-9; and Godwin, Vol. I. p. 225-30. (5.) Even Reilly, a stanch Romanist, admits that Lords Auburn and Osmond were instructed by Charles to seize the castle of Dublin, the lords justices, &c., and that Sir Phelim merely endeavoured to have the first hand in the work. (6.) The declaration of the commons, July 25, 1642, is sufficient to prove that there was a plot between the queen and the Irish Papists, and that the king knew of it.

which had hitherto been carried on by the Puritans on religious grounds, was now, by the conduct of the prelates, forced to assume the character of a defence of civil liberty. The floodgates of the popular mind were opened. The subject of church government became the all-engrossing topic of the day, and, from its close connection with public affairs, a national question. Within a period of twenty years no fewer than 30,000 pamphlets were issued on this subject. Feeling ran deeper every day against the prelates, until, by the disclosures brought out upon the trial of Archbishop Laud, it burst forth in ungovernable fury, and demanded their removal from office.

The commons, therefore, having been petitioned to that effect by the London ministers, in their grand remonstrance, presented in 1641, urged the necessity of a free synod, to take into consideration, and remove the grievances of the church. In the treaty of Oxford a bill was offered to the same purpose and rejected. Some time after, Dr. Burgess, at the head of the Puritan clergy, again applied to parliament for the same purpose. At length an ordinance was passed by the parliament in June, 1643, convening an assembly by their own authority. In this ordinance they say, "Whereas, among the infinite blessings of Almighty God upon this nation, none is, or can be, more clear to us than the purity of our religion; and for that as yet many things remain in the liturgy, discipline, and government of the church, which do necessarily require a further and more perfect reformation, than as yet hath been obtained; and whereas it hath been declared and resolved by the lords and commons assembled in parliament, that the present church government, by archbishops, bishops, their chancellors, commissars, deans, and chapters, arch-deacons, and other ecclesiastical officers, depending upon the hierarchy, is evil and justly offensive and burdensome to the kingdom, a great impediment to reformation and growth of religion, and very prejudicial to the state and government of this kingdom; therefore they are resolved, that the same shall be taken away, and that such a government shall be settled in the church as may be most agreeable to God's holy word, and most apt to procure and preserve the peace of the church at home, and nearer agreement with the Church of Scotland and other reformed churches abroad; and for the better effecting hereof, and for the vindicating and clearing of the doctrine of the Church of England from all false calumnies and aspersions, it is thought fit and necessary to call an assembly of learned, godly, and judicious divines, who, together with some members of both houses of parliament, are to consult and advise of such matters and things, touching the premises, as shall be proposed unto them, by both or either houses of parliament, and to give their council and

advice therein to both or either of said houses, when, and so often, as they shall be thereunto required."

The language and spirit of this ordinance will be considered as justly marvellous, when it is recollected, that this very parliament was composed of persons who had been almost to a man Episcopalians, and attached to Episcopal government; men, too, possessed of great and plentiful fortunes; and, as Clarendon, who states these facts, allows, of great gravity and wisdom.*

SECTION II.

THE NATURE, HISTORY, AND CHARActer of the WESTMINSTER ASSEMBLY.

The Assembly was to consist of ten lords, twenty commoners, and one hundred and twenty-one ministers; in all, about one hundred and fifty-one members. In accordance with what we have stated, as it regards the ecclesiastical views of the parliament, the members chosen to constitute this Assembly were, almost all, such as had till then conformed to the Established Church of England.§ From the fact that it was convened at Westminster, in the Abbey Church, it has been denominated the Westminster Assembly. And forasmuch as it was not called by ecclesiastical authority, or according to any fixed rules of ecclesiastical procedure, but by the authority of parliament, it is styled an Assembly, and not a Convocation or Synod. It was designed to be an ecclesiastical advisory council, to aid and assist the parliament in the determinations of religious questions. It was thus identified with the national legislature and became a part of that body, or rather its ecclesiastical cabinet.† All its members were chosen by the parliament, who selected two from each county, and in addition to these, some of the most learned men of the age, such as Archbishop Usher, Dr. Holdsworth, Dr. Hammond, Dr. Wincop, Bishops Westfield, and Prideaux, and many more.‡ Parliament also drew up the

*Clarendon, Vol. I., p. 184. M'Crie's Scottish Church Hist. p. 275. "As to religion," says Clarendon, "they were all members of the Established Church, and almost to a man for Episcopal government."

§In their answer to the reasons given by the Episcopal divines for withdrawing from the body, the assembly answer the charge that "the divines were for the most part of a puritanical stamp and enemies to the hierarchy," by saying, "the divines, except the Scots and French, were in Episcopal orders, educated in our own universities, and most of them graduates." Neal's Hist. of Puritans, Vol. III. 49. "Those who made up the Westminster Assembly. and who were the honour of the parliamentary party throughout the land, were almost all such as had till then conformed." Orme's Life of Baxter, Vol. I. p. 35.

In the answer of the assembly to the Episcopal divines they say, "This being not designed for a legal convocation, but for a council to the parliament in the reformation of the church." Neal, III. 49.

A few of the royalist Episcopal divines at first met with the Assembly, but afterwards withdrew when the king had prohibited their meeting.