“We cannot mention the Reformation of the Law,” said Cromwell to Ludlow in 1650, “but the lawyers cry out we mean to destroy property, whereas the law as it is now constituted serves only to maintain the lawyers, and to encourage the rich to oppress the poor.” “Relieve the oppressed,” he urged Parliament in his Dunbar despatch; “reform the abuses of all professions, and if there be any one that makes many poor to make a few rich, that suits not a Commonwealth.”

Parliament had done something already to meet these complaints. In November, 1650, it had passed an act ordering that all legal proceedings and documents should be henceforth in English, besides an earlier act for the relief of poor prisoners. Now it boldly appointed twenty-one commissioners, chosen outside its own body, with Matthew Hale at their head, “to consider the inconveniencies of the Law—and the speediest way to remedy the same,” and to report their proposals to a Committee of the House itself (January 17, 1652). The commissioners fell roundly to work, and presented in the next few months drafts of many good bills, some of which became law during the Protectorate, and others in the present century. They even took in hand the task of codification, and drew up “a system of the Law” for the consideration of Parliament.

During this same period the reorganisation of the Church was also attempted. The Long Parliament had passed acts for the augmentation of livings, for the punishment of blasphemy, and for the propagation of the Gospel in Wales and Ireland. But it had abolished Episcopacy without replacing it by any other system of Church government, and it had ejected royalist clergymen without providing any machinery for the appointment of fit successors. In London, in Lancashire, and in a few other districts, there were voluntary associations of ministers on the Presbyterian model, but throughout the greater part of England, the Presbyterian organisation decreed in 1648 had never been actually established. The Church was a chaos of isolated congregations, in which a man made himself a minister as he chose, and got himself a living as he could. The reduction of this chaos to order seemed so difficult a problem, and beset with so many controversial questions, that Parliament hesitated to undertake it.

John Owen, once Cromwell’s chaplain in Ireland, took the duty on himself, and on February 10, 1652, he and fourteen other ministers presented to Parliament a comprehensive scheme for the settlement of the Church. The House answered by referring it to a committee appointed to consider the better propagation of the Gospel, of which committee Cromwell was the most important member. Owen’s scheme, like the Agreement of the People, proposed the continuance of a national Church with tolerated dissenting bodies existing by its side. The Church was to be controlled by two sets of commissioners, partly lay and partly clerical: local commissioners, who were to determine the fitness of all candidates seeking to be admitted as preachers; itinerant commissioners, who were to move from place to place ejecting unfit ministers and schoolmasters. On the limits of the toleration to be granted to dissenters, the committee was split into two sections. The scheme proposed that the opponents of the essential principles of the Christian religion should not be suffered to promulgate their views. When pressed to define what these principles were, Owen and his friends produced a list of fifteen fundamentals, the denial of which was to disqualify men from freedom to propagate their opinions. Cromwell thought these limitations too restrictive, and wished for a more liberal definition of Christianity. “I had rather,” he emphatically declared, “that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us, than that one of God’s children should be persecuted.” It was in consequence of these debates that Milton, in May, 1652, addressed to Cromwell the sonnet in which he adjured him to remember that “peace hath victories no less renowned than war.”

REV. JOHN OWEN, D.D.
(From a painting, possibly by Robert Walker, in the National Portrait Gallery.)

“New foes arise

Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains;

Help us to save free conscience from the paw

Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.”