USA > Virginia > City of Staunton > City of Staunton > The First Presbyterian Church, Staunton, Virginia > Part 13
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After obtaining a favorable expression on the part of the King, the Parliament in the spring of 1642, appointed the commissioners. Dr. Alexander F. Mitchell, the foremost authority on the Westminster Assembly says: "The general opinion has been that the divines were recommended by the members of Parliament representing each county and the boroughs within it (the House in one or two instances how- ever, insisting that a vote be taken on the names proposed) and the balance of evidence seems to me to favor that opinion."t But there is evidence that the nominations were made with care and perhaps with the advice of one or more of the accomplished divines of the day. Two commissioners were appointed for each English shire, two for each of the universities, Oxford and Cambridge, one for each county in Wales, four for the city of London, and some others.
Had the King given his consent the Assembly would have met in July, 1642. But the King was now openly opposed. Finally in June, 1643, an ordinance for calling the Assembly was passed by the Parlia- ment on its own authority.
"This ordinance declares that the purpose of the Assembly was to settle the government and liturgy of the Church of England, to vin- dicate and clear the doctrines of that church from false aspersions and interpretations in a way most agreeable to the word of God and most apt to procure and preserve the peace of the church at home, and a nearer agreement with the Church of Scotland and other Reformed churches abroad."#
We have very ample evidence that this very able body of men, the Long Parliament-a body, too. in spite of grave faults very conscientious, and earnest and enlightened-a body away above the ordinary Parliament-we have ample evidence, I say, that this body both conceived the work to be done by the Assembly as of vast impor- tance, and tried to select a body of men fit to do the work.
THIRD. The body chosen is shown to have been of extraordinary intellectual and moral worth by contemporary and subsequent testimony. Old Richard Baxter had all the qualifications needed for credible
* Mitchell: The Westminster Assembly, page 105.
t Mitchell: The Westminster Assembly, page 108.
Į Mitchell: Westminster Assembly, pp. 111, 112.
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witness-bearing about the Westminster Assembly. He had the natural ability to acquire the truth about it. He had the amplest opportunity to inform himself on the subject. He is conceded to have been uncommonly free from prejudice and honest and godly. No better witness could be desired, and he says of the Assembly at West- minster: "The divines there congregated, were men of eminent learning, godliness, ministerial abilities and fidelity, and being not worthy of being one of them myself, I may the more freely speak that truth which I know, even in the face of malice and envy, that so far as I am able to judge by the information of all history *
* * the Christian world since the days of the Apostles had never a synod of more excellent divines."* Dr. Stroughton says: "The West- minster divines had learning, Scriptural, patristic, scholastic and modern enough and to spare, all solid and substantial and ready for use. They had a clear, firm grasp of evangelical truths. The godliness of the men is proved by the spirit of their writings and by the history of their lives. Their talents and attainments, even Milton does not attempt to deny." Mr. Hallam, in whom the desire to be just is a marked characteristic, said of the Assembly: "They were perhaps equal in learning, good sense, and other merits to any Lower House of Convocation that ever made a figure in England." There is good reason for supposing that Mr. Hallam's testimony had been more nearly correct if he had asserted that the Assembly was superior to any Lower House of Convocation that ever cut a figure in England. The lay element in the Assembly-statesmen and scholars - and the extraordinary men from Scotland who sat as corresponding members helped to lift it above any Lower House of Convocation, perhaps. But taking Mr. Hallam's estimate as correct, the West- minster Assembly appears as a great body; for the great Church of England in all its years can show no Lower House superior to it; and the Lower House of Convocation is almost always, in enlightened ages, superior to the Upper House just as the House of Parliament is almost always superior to the House of Lords.
General von Rudloff, who has written the best account of the Assembly in the German language, according to Dr. Phillip Schaff, says, "A more zealous, intelligent and learned body of divines seldom ever met in Christendom." The great German-American prince of church historians, Schaff, says: "The Westminster Assembly forms the most important chapter in the ecclesiastical history of England during the seventeenth century. Whether we look at the extent or ability of its labors, or upon its influence upon future generations, it stands first among protestant councils." Dr. Charles A. Briggs, who
* Quoted in Schaff's Creeds, I p. 729, from Baxter's "Life and Times " I p. 73.
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has done good historical work on the Westminster Assembly, and who will probably not be accused by any one of us of over-attachment to the body says: "Looking at the Westminster Assembly as a whole it is safe to say that there never was a body of divines who labored more conscientiously, carefully and faithfully, produced more impor- tant documents, or a richer theological literature than the remarka- bly learned, able and pious body who sat for so many trying years in the Jerusalem Chamber of the Westminster Abbey."*
But time fails us, we cannot continue to multiply these testi- monies to the mental and moral worth of the Westminster Assembly.
Hear now from the records of the Assembly itself an extraordinary proof of at least the moral greatness of the Assembly. Every member of the Assembly was required to take the following vow, which was read in the Assembly every Monday morning": I do seriously promise and vow in the presence of Almighty God, that in this Assembly where- of I am a member, I will maintain nothing in a point of doctrine but what I believe to be most agreeable to the Word of God; nor in point of discipline but what may make most for God's glory and the peace and good of the Church." This vow was required by the Parliament, it is true, but probably was suggested to the Parliament by the divines, themselves; and was received as an injunction from Parliament with entire satisfaction by the Assembly.
Now, we appeal to the hearer, does not this recognition of man's liability to continue debate after the scripture teaching has been made plain, implied in the form of this vow, speak both for the wisdom and goodness of the Assembly? Disputants are apt to argue a poor cause after the strength of the opposite cause has been made evidently impregnable, out of hatred of acknowledging defeat, out of pride of consistency, out of a dozen unworthy motives. This vow manfully recognizes the fact, and obligates the members in a most solemn way to withstand the tendency. It says, I am not in this Assembly to consider my reputation, but God's truth, God's word, God's glory, and the peace and reputation of God's Church.
Consult the past records of these men, too, and note the fact that not a few of them have felt in their own persons and fortunes the bit- terness of persecution. When we look back on the Council of Nicea, 325, the martyr element in that body lends a sort of glory to the whole body. We see men there ready to suffer unto death for the testimony of Jesus-men who bore in their bodies the marks of Christ from the Diocletian persecution-"Paphnutius, of the Upper Thebaid; Potamon, of Heraclea, whose right eye had been put out; and Paul, of Neo-
* Presbyterian Review, vol. - p. 136.
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Cæsarea, who had been tortured with red hot irons under Licinius, and crippled in both his hands." These men had the courage of their con- victions. The martyr element of the Nicene Council gives an increment of dignity to the Council as a whole. But the martyr element in the Westminster Assembly was far larger than that in the Nicene Assembly. The Westminster was predominantly a martyr Assembly. It is the testi- mony of the ablest historians of the great body that not a few of its members had been honored to suffer on account of the truths to which they clung, and that "many of them had the courage afterwards to brave suffering, ignominy, and penury rather than renounce their creed and their views of Church polity and discipline," and further that "they may be said by the very act of their meeting, to have put their livings, if not their lives, in jeopardy"; and so to have given of the true spirit of witnesses to Jesus, of heroic type.
We may add that a study of the period shows that the Assembly was so constructed as to include all the learning of the time which could be conceivably applied in the work to which the body was destined save that in the extreme High Church party. It was not designed to include all the learned men, of course, but all the learning. The three most learned men in the British Isles were appointed members. Two of them became active members. The third did not become a member; but his work was freely used in the construction of our Confession. So that though absent, his great personality was yet powerful in the Assembly. And about one-third of the active, working members of the Assembly are admitted, even by those who depreciate the body, to have been men of special eminence. They were scholars, men of talent, of constructive, and creative power in literature. Many of the ablest works of the age come from their pens.
Can any one with the testimonies here given to the intellectual and moral excellence of the Assembly regarded as a whole, doubt as to its very superior character ? We believe that these testimonies alone are sufficient to show that the Assembly was worthy of the British people, worthy of Puritan Britain, in its purest and highest days.
FOURTH. Let us confirm ourselves further in the favorable impression which we have of the Assembly by considering for a little time the several parties into which the Assembly was divided, and some of the more prominent leaders of the parties severally.
Not all who were requested to become members of the Assembly did so. The Assembly was designed to consist of 151 members in all -one hundred and twenty-one divines, ten Lords and twenty Com- moners. Among the appointees were in fair proportions, moderate
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Episcopalians, Erastians, Independents, and Presbyterians. The party of Laud was naturally not desired in the Assembly, nor would it have appeared had it been desired. For it was utterly hostile to Puritanism; and irreconcilably opposed to all compromise with Puritanism. But other parties were fairly represented.
Dr. Mitchell says "that almost all the clerical members named by the Parliament were in Episcopal orders. Most of them graduates in Arts, and not a few of them graduates in Divinity, either of Oxford or Cambridge. Three or four were bishops, and five of them after- wards rose to be so, and several others were known to be favorable to the continuance of Episcopacy and a liturgy, and some of them to side with the King rather than with Parliament. Many were known to favor Presbytery. A place was found among the members for some of the most prominent ministers of the French Church in England, for one of Dutch or German descent, for two or three Irishmen, and for some who, to avoid the persecution of Laud, had left their native land for a time and acted as pastors to the congregations of English exiles and merchants in Holland. Invitations to send some commissioners were addressed to the Church of Scotland, and it is said also, to the Congregational churches of New England."* And this is a correct representation of the ecclesiastical complexion of the body. It thus appears that there were four distinct elements among the appointees, viz .: Moderate Episcopalians, Erastians, Independents, and Pres- byterians.
THE EPISCOPALIAN ELEMENT included the names of three bishops and five doctors of divinity. One of the bishops was Archbishop Usher, one of the three most learned men appointed, and indeed of all Great Britain of the time. Usher did not attend. At any rate there is no good evidence that he attended even once. But he was held in the highest honor by the Assembly; and his work embodied in the Irish Articles was much used by the divines at Westminster in the construction of their Standards. Of the other Episcopal appointees only one or two attended, and they exercised no influence in deter- mining the course of the Assembly.
THE ERASTIANS, who maintained the ecclesiastical supremacy of the civil government in all matters of discipline; and who made the Church a department of the State; who held that clergymen were teachers only and not rulers; and that the power of the keys belonged to the civil magistrate; the Erastians who, out of fear of priestly tyranny, would have set up and maintained a civil tyranny in matters spiritual, constituted a small but powerful party in the Assembly.
* Mitchell : The Westminster Assembly, pp. 116, 117.
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They were Selden-a man learned in the law, in theology, and in Hebrew lore-accounted one of the three most learned men of his time in the British Isles-and Lightfoot and Coleman, who were also distinguished for Hebrew learning, and the lawyers generally among the lay assessors in the Assembly.
THE INDEPENDENTS, who maintained congregational independency, that a local congregation is not subject to the jurisdiction of Presby- teries or Synods, and that it has a right to ordain its own ministers, were also a small element in the Assembly. The Independents were at most not more than a dozen, but four or five of them were strong men (particularly Dr. Thomas Goodwin and the Rev. Phillip Nye). They were not only men of ability and learning, but of great strength of character. They had learned to love deeply their preferred form of polity while suffering for it during the persecution under Laud. They made as able a defense of it as could, perhaps, be given to-day. There seems to be some evidences indeed, that Nye was not above political measures in the effort to accomplish what he believed to be good ends; and that he pursued indirection more than once in his battle against the Presbyterians. But in this respect he was beneath his party. The Independents in the Assembly, as a body, have a high moral record.
The party of independents advocated religious toleration. The Independent party at large, as we have already remarked, gets a great deal of credit for its advanced views on the subject of religious toleration and religious liberty. And it deserved some credit; but not so much as it gets. We repeat: The oppressed party often betakes itself to a correct position. Christians, prior to the time of Constantine the Great, pleaded for universal toleration as right and proper. But they forgot the propriety of universal toleration once Christianity had be- come dominant in the empire. Under oppression they had seen the truth; prosperous, they forgot it. This history has repeated itself over and over. While under oppression in England Independency saw the propriety of toleration; but when the party became supreme, as a party it ceased to act on the principle, both in England and in New England. The tolerance of the Independents and the intolerance of the Presbyterians in the country at large and in the Westminster Assembly have been misunderstood and misrepresented. There was really little essential difference between Independents and other denominations on this subject. Christendom was to wait for some time yet before any considerable body of Christians should maintain the tenet of toleration while having an opportunity to grant toler- ation to others on a large scale. Presbyterians indeed, had illustrated a partial toleration prior to this time. The Dutch Presbyterians had
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furnished an asylum to these very Independents, and had even granted to them the use of their own church buildings to worship in. This is but one instance of many of the kind in the history of Continental Presbyterianism prior to 1640. And this history was paralleled in the British Isles. But it is true that Presbyterians in the middle of the seventeenth century believed in the propriety of a state religion, and were thus logically shut up to intolerance, save by way of exception. We repeat, however, that if Independents as a body entertained other views it was while they were in no position to determine what the form of the state religion should be.
THE PRESBYTERIAN ELEMENT was the great element in the Assembly. They formed the majority at first and grew as the Assembly advanced. This party held to the original identity of Presbyters and Bishops, and that the church ought to govern itself by representative courts made up of teaching and non-teaching elders. It was on these subjects that the greatest debates took place, and that the great powers and learning of the Assembly were most ex- haustively displayed. Moderate Calvinism was so general in the Assembly that it was comparatively easy to reach agreement in the statement of doctrines, while the divergent beliefs on the proper polity of the Church made it immensely difficult to agree on the funda- mental principles of polity. Among the Presbyterians there were two parties, one holding the so-called Jure Humano theory of Presby- terianism-the theory that Presbyterianism is simply the best form of government; but to be adopted or not according to the preferences of God's people; the other party holding the Jure Divino theory, the theory that Presbyterianism is the form of Church government ex- pressly established and commanded by Christ. This latter theory triumphed substantially.
The leaders of the Presbyterians were Messers. Twisse, Gataker, Reynolds, Palmer, Thomas Young, Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstow and others, and the Scotch commissioners who were joined to the Assembly as corre- sponding members after the adoption in England of the Solemn League and Covenant.
DR. WILLIAM TWISSE, the Prolocutor, or Moderator, of the Assembly, was a man "full of learning and speculative genius." "He was distinguished by his writings against the Armenians, particularly against the Jesuits." Bishop Hall, himself a royalist and strong defender of the hierarchy, speaks of Dr. Twisse as "a man so eminent in school divinity that the Jesuits had shrunk under his strength." Thomas Fuller says, "his plain preaching was good, solid disputing
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better, pious living best of all good." Four folio volumes and one quarto attest at once his industry and ability, learning and godliness.
THOMAS GATAKER, the divine and critic, was reputed to be the most learned man in England after Usher and Selden. He was not only a great Hebrew scholar; but in his real insight into New Testament Greek surpassed every other Englishmen of his day. His religious books were numerous, including "English Annotations upon Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Lamentations." He put forth also valuable critical works among which was the edition of Marcus Antonius, which Hal- lam says, "was the earliest edition of any classical writer published in England with original annotations." He was offered the Mastership of Trinity College Cambridge; and refused it.
DR. EDWARD REYNOLDS, was a divine, "eloquent, learned and cau- tious," one of the most attractive and influential members of the Assembly; and some times spoken of as "the pride and glory of the Assembly," though without sufficient warrant.
HERBERT PALMER, "gracious little Palmer" as Bailie saw him, was a devout man, the best catechist, perhaps, in England, a scholarly and powerful preacher with scruples at first about the divine right of ruling elders, but coming over bravely to the support of Presbyterianism in the end. He was made master of Queens College, Cambridge, in 1644.
STEPHEN MARSHALL, was characterized by one of his enemies as the "Geneva Bull, a factious and rebellious divine," but he was the greatest preacher and the most popular speaker of his times; the most influential member of the Assembly in ecclesiastical affairs, a great favorite in the Assembly and "their trumphet by whom they sounded their solemn fasts."
EDMUND CALAMY was a popular preacher. He was the first openly to avow and defend the Presbyterian government before a committee of Parliament. He was active in the restoration of the Stuarts, but impervious to all temptations to enter the Episcopal fold, the re-establishment of which followed upon the Restoration.
THOMAS YOUNG was the Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, a Scotchman by birth and an able protagonist for Presbyterianism.
But we cannot go on with this list of English worthies. We cannot speak of SEAMAN, the orientalist, " the man of profound judgment in matters of controversal divinity, the invincible disputant," nor of HERLE, nor of DR. CORNELIUS BURGESS, nor others, clever College Professors, and authors whose published works show their scholarship and ability.
THE SCOTCH COMMISSIONERS were a great power in the Assembly. They did not vote. But like Athanasius at Nicea, they swayed the
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voting members by their intellectual and moral power. We cannot speak particularly of the lay commissioners from Scotland, though they included the MARQUIS OF ARGYLE, who afterwards proved his loyalty to the Scotch Church by suffering death for her; and that great lawyer, and devout Christian, SIR ARCHIBALD JOHNSTONE, of Warris- tone. Nor shall we speak of SAMUEL RUTHERFORD and ROBERT BAILIE, worthy professors of Divinity though they were as well eloquent and godly preachers. But of HENDERSON and GILLESPIE we must a word.
ALEXANDER HENDERSON is to be put into the company of Knox, Melville, and Chalmers. He was one of the very greatest of Scotch ecclesiastics. Hardly one of these other men had such a universal range of influence in his own country and in England. He was remarkable for tact, statesmanship, and patriotism as well as for conscientious devotion to the principles of the Reformed religion and the Presbyterian polity. He had in his mature manhood given up Episcopacy for Presbytery. He had soon afterwards opposed "the five articles " in the Perth Assembly, 1618; his hand had been one of the most forceful in framing the National League of 1638. He was the Moderator of the General Assembly which was convened later in the same year-that Assembly which continued its sessions after the royal commissioner had dissolved it; and which "condemned the spurious Assemblies from 1606 to 1618, as well as the Service book;" and excom- municated eight of the bishops and deposed the other six, and prohibited Episcopacy, and the Articles of Perth." He was appointed on several commissions to treat with Charles I. And when at length hope of pacification between Charles and the English Parliament had been exhausted, and the Puritans of England looked to Scotland for help, Alexander Henderson drafted the Solemn League and Covenant which was adopted in both countries. "My researches," says Pro- fessor Masson, " have more and more convinced me, that Henderson was, all in all, one of the ablest and best men of his age in Britain, and the greatest, wisest, and most liberal of the Scottish Presby- terians. They had all to consult him; in every strait and conflict he had to be appealed to, and came in at the last as the man of super- eminent composure, comprehensiveness and breadth of brow. Although Scottish Presbyterian rule was that no churchman should have author- ity in state affairs it had to be practically waived in his case; he was a Cabinet minister without office."*
Such a man, of course, was bound to have immense influence even in the Westminister Assembly.
*Life of Milton, Vol. III p. 16.
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GEORGE GILLESPIE entered the Assembly at the age of thirty-one years, "the youngest and yet one of the brightest stars, " the prince of debaters and a man of learning. He had in his twenty-fourth year attracted much attention by his work entitled, "The English Popish Ceremonies Obtruded on the Church of Scotland," this had been followed four years later (1641) by a vindication of the government of the Church of Scotland against Independents. His ablest work was to be published in 1646, a vindication of Jure Divino Presbyterianism against Erastianism. He was thus fitted for his great debates against Independency and Erastianism. He was furnished as well as able and skillful. There is a Scotch tradition that he once made the great Sel- den reel and say: "That young man by his single speech has swept away the labors of ten years of my life." This may be patriotic exaggeration, but it is a historical fact that Selden never made any attempt to answer Gillespie's demolition of his Erastian theory, while yet he attempted to answer others.
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