people themselves, the matter was not exclusively a congregational one, but connected with a London Class or Conference superintending the arrangements.1

What really occurred, therefore, was this:

An Association or Conference (or what now would be called a Presbytery, but what would then have been called a Classis,) had its meetings in London. This Association agreed to erect or constitute a parochial eldership under John Field, in connection with his work in the Parish Church of Wandsworth; and this parochial eldership was the famous Presbytery of Wandsworth, the herald and model of hundreds of others that spread through the parishes of England.o

1 It is not difficult to understand how mistakes have arisen as to what really was done at Wandsworth. Heylin (Hist. of Presbyterians, b. vii. p. 237), not so much through malice in this case as by a careless indifference about particulars, has confounded things that differ, by mixing the two paragraphs from Bancroft as to what was done in London and what at Wandsworth. Neal, in his "History of the Puritans," has fallen into the same confusion from similar causes; and by speaking both of the Association, and of the eleven elders as the Presbytery, and finally adding: "This was the first Presbyterian Church in England," he has led later writers into mistakes-some supposing the London Association to have been the Presbytery of Wandsworth; and others conceiving the Presbytery to have been a Church assembling in some meeting-place, distinct from and in rivalry with the Wandsworth parish Church. Thus Brook (p. 34 of his Introduction to Lives of the Puritans) says: "For this purpose they erected a Presbytery at Wandsworth, near London. The Members of this Association were Messrs. Smith, Crane, Field, etc."; whereas we know that the Association, while they erected that Presbytery of Wandsworth, were in no sense members of it at all-the eleven Elders alone composing it, along with their Lecturer. Again, the other equally mistaken notion has been adopted, very naturally, by an able and careful modern writer, Marsden (Hist. of the Early Puritans, pp. 62-64), who says: "In 1572, a Presbyterian Church was formed, and a meeting-house erected at Wandsworth, in Surrey. Field, the Lecturer of Wandsworth, was its first Minister. The Conventicle,-for by this obnoxious term such assemblages were now designated,-was immediately suppressed, though after a while it reappeared." No doubt there still stands, in a retired courtyard in Wandsworth, an old Puritan chapel; but it has no possible connection with so early a date as 1572, when in fact, such a meeting-place could not have existed there at all.

That a Presbytery meant a parochial eldership is easily evidenced from the current use of the word in those days. 1. Bancroft habitually uses Presbytery in this parochial or congregational sense. Thus : "Concerning the Presbyteries, which the book affirmeth should be in every parish. Richard Holmes affirmeth (in evidence before the Court of High Commission) that by such speeches as he hath heard he doth verily think that the Ministers in their Classes have resolved to erect up their several Presbyteries in their own parishes." (See Dangerous Positions, Book iii., ch. 14, passim.) 2. This was the familiar use of the word, both with friends and foes. "In every particular Church there ought to be a Presbytery, which is a consistory, and as it were a senate of Elders. Under the name of Elders here are contained they who in the Church minister doctrine, and they who are properly called Elders."- The Directory of Church Government, drawn up and used

"Nor ought it to surprise any intelligent Presbyterian," says Dr. Lorimer," that the Presbyterian Church-builders of England at that early date began their work of reform with the institution of the Lesser, and not of the Greater Presbytery. For was not this the only proper place to begin it? It is not the Greater Presbyteries of a Church which constitute its basis, but its Lesser Presbyteries. The primary ecclesiastical unit, the rudimentary Church germ, is the "particular Church," with its own "particular Eldership." It was quite in the order of nature, that the very first stone of the new ecclesiastical pyramid should have been an Eldership, or Presbytery of Wandsworth; and not a Classical Presbytery, or a SYNOD of London. It was in truth about these parochial or congregational presbyteries that the Elizabethan Presbyterians were chiefly concerned for the whole decade of years from 1572 to 1582. At a later period it was in season and in order, when Particular Elderships had greatly multiplied, to distribute them into "Classes," and other Courts of appeal and Review. But that was not done till ten years afterwards, when, about 1583, they had, after prolonged deliberations, come to embody their "platform" in their disciplinary book, already mentioned, the "Directory of Church Government."

All the early English Presbyterian writers, like Cartwright, Travers, Field, Fenner, attached the highest importance to this particular point in the discipline. They demanded some guarantee for purity of Communion, apart from the arrangements of civil law-some recognition of the right, in the Church and the Communicants, to be protected against unworthy and unfit Communicants-some constitutional method for the Church herself, exercising her own inherent powers of disciplining, training, and spiritually appealing to her members, other than had been already provided. There were Two things especially obnoxious to them,

1. That only "open and notorious evil livers" should be debarred Communion; and that the whole power should rest with the Curate, or clerical pastor, to "advertise" such an one "not

by the Elizabethan Presbyterians (see next chapter). And this usage was still a common enough one at the Westminster Assembly time. Thus, in the treatise on "The Divine right of Church Government," by the London Ministers, in 1645, the phrase, "Congregational Presbyteries," often recurs :-"All Censures and Acts of Government in single Congregations are dispensed in Congregational PRESBYTERIES, subordinately with liberty of appeal to presbyterial or synodal assembles." The twelfth chapter treats, "Of the Divine right of parochial Presbyteries or Congregational Elderships. These are called the lesser assemblies, or SMALLER PRESBYTERIES." The larger Presbyteries were, for distinction's sake, known by the name of Classes, or Classical Presbyteries.

to presume to come to the Lord's table "-no provision being made by the canon law or the rubric for the "mutual edifying of one another in love." This was to them as shocking as to make the Lord's Supper a qualification for civil office, or otherwise subject it to civil enactment.

2. The other evil was, for the Church to be uttering its frequent "Commination, or denouncing of God's anger and judgments against sinners," and deploring the loss of the primitive discipline-for "in the Primitive Church there was a godly discipline," it says-and yet never proceeding to take steps for securing the operation and restoration of that godly discipline "which is much to be wished." To these Presbyterian ChurchPuritans the exercise of the primitive discipline was an essential and vital portion of the full doctrine or Gospel of Christ. For this they wrote and suffered and struggled nobly, supplicating it in vain as a boon from the higher authorities in Church and State. Can we wonder if they urged its introduction everywhere, however quietly and secretly, among the devouter portion of their flocks, and set up its machinery in every parish they could command?

This was the first great object of their consultations and activity; and they succeeded in securing its acceptance in hundreds of parishes in every corner of the land.

VI.

THE PRESBYTERIANS FORMULATING THEIR CHURCH

PRINCIPLES, 1573 TO 1583.

DURING the first decade of Elizabeth's reign (1559-69), the Church Puritans confined their efforts to the removal, if possible, of superstitious ceremonies, ritual, and vestments. But finding all their efforts in this direction of little avail, they proceeded to inquire more narrowly into the causes of their failure; and when they began to apprehend with growing clearness, that the evil lay deep down in the very constitution of the Church, they seized on and emphasized certain simple principles that might counteract the mischief. The formulating of these occupied the second decade of Elizabeth's reignbeginning with the ORDER OF WANDSWORTH in 1572, and issuing in the Great DIRECTORY which was dragged to light by the High Commission (acting under its extended and more terrific powers when Whitgift became Primate) in 1583.

The third decade, 1584-94, witnessed the vehement struggle to bring these radical principles into practical action in the Church at all hazards; and then was the time of the most severe sufferings and persecution, even to the crushing down if not the crushing out of the Presbyterianizing attempts. For the prelatic authorities grew greatly alarmed when they discovered the deep and wide-spread influence of the " Holy Discipline;" and then made every effort to destroy it, by the arrest of Cartwright and all the other leaders in 1590 and subsequent years.

It is with what transpired in the SECOND decade, between 1573 and 1583, we are now to deal; when the Presbyterian principles of organization were being built up through secret gatherings similar to that at Wandsworth in 1572, though on a larger scale and over a more extended area.

THE CONTROVERSY BETWEEN CARTWRIGHT AND WHITGIFT.

It will have been observed that the name of THOMAS CARTWRIGHT is conspicuous by its absence from those London Conferences which issued in the WANDSWORTH PRESBYTERY. Deprived of his professorship 11 December, 1570, and of his fellowship at Trinity College in September, 1571, he repaired to Geneva, to enjoy intercourse with Beza and other leaders of the Reformed Churches, by whom he was confirmed in his Presbyterian views. He had not returned, when the important first "Admonition to Parliament" had been agreed on; but he arrived soon after, in November, 1572, and proceeded at once to follow up the bold work, for which Field and Willcox were suffering in Newgate, by a yet bolder "Second admonition,” with, as Bancroft says, "Great lightning and thunder, as though heaven and earth should have met together." Then began in earnest that long struggle which shook at last the whole fabric of the Church to its very foundations, and the full issues of which have yet to be seen. The discussion

covered the whole field of what the Puritans had hitherto contended for, and introduced fresh elements of debate.1

Then arose a controversy which, while it lasted, occupied the attention and absorbed the sympathies of all the Reformed Churches; and which has ever since been referred to as containing within itself the germ of almost every important argument which either party has been able to advance."-Marsden, Early Puritans, p. 84.

It is to be borne in mind that many of the tracts and treatises on Cartwright's side were written under persecution; and they had usually to be printed abroad or by stealth, on account of the entire control of the press by the Bishops. Hence these and all early publications under the Episcopal ban are exceedingly scarce, and of many of them not a copy remains, so effectually were they destroyed; while not a few bear evidence of the untoward conditions under which they were printed, with their bad paper, foul ink, and battered type, in some cases hardly now legible. Thus in CARTWRIGHT'S-A Replye to An Answer made by M. Doctor Whitgifte, against the Admonition to Parliament (1573, though it has no imprint of date or place. It is a quarto of 190 pages)—the printer has to complain, "It falleth out, Gentle Reader, that I neither having the wealth to furnish the print with sufficient variety of letters, have been compelled (as a poor man doth one instrument to divers purposes), so to use one letter for three or four tongues. . . . I was sometimes for want of help driven both to work at the press, to set and to correct; and . . . I wanted the commodity of being near unto the Author, or to some that is made privy unto his book."

That Whitgift had the last word in this controversy is a mistake, more or less wilful, on the part of Sir G. Paule, Heylin, and other writers.

The mistake seems to have originated in Cartwright's final reply being printed abroad in his exile, and somewhat delayed by sickness. To Cartwright's "Second