And so, after prayer by the Moderatour, and singing the 23 Psalme, and saying the blessing, the Assemblie depairted, joyfullie and glad for all the wonders that God had done for this Church and Land.
FINIS.
THE
GENERAL ASSEMBLY,
AT ABERDEEN, 1640.
After perusing the Reports which we have given of the proceedings in the Assemblies of 1638 and 1639, and the several relative documents therewith connected, our readers, we are convinced, will agree with us, that the mere Acts, as they are technically termed, of these and similar Assemblies, convey but a faint and feeble impression of the real character of those Conventions. They are but the dry bones, as it were, of our Ecclesiastical Constitutions. It is in the circumstances attendant on their enactment; the causes in which they originated; the muniments of the period, (sometimes public and frequently long concealed); the reasonings of the antagonist parties, and incidental outbreaks of individual feeling; and, more especially, in the dramatic movements of debate in popular assemblages—that we catch the true spirit by which the more formal enactments are re-awakened in the present age, and presented to the eye and the mind of a modern student with all the vividness and force of scenes passing daily around us.
We have now reached the Acts of the Assembly 1640; but, ere we proceed to that very limited portion of our undertaking, we must be permitted to take a review of the more prominent features of the Assembly in 1639, and of the events which intervened betwixt that and the subsequent meeting in 1640.
It will be recollected that, by the Treaty of 18th June 1639, it was stipulated that all matters ecclesiastical were agreed to be settled in a General Assembly, and matters civil in the Parliament and inferior judicatories established by law. Unhappily for the King and the Covenanters, this vague and general basis was soon found to be too narrow to bear the superstructure which each party intended to rear on it; and ere the parties had retired to their several homes, the seeds of future collision were sown. No dear and precise line of distinction was drawn in the treaty, betwixt what was to be deemed ecclesiastical and what civil; and in his warrant for the proclamation by which the Assembly and Parliament of 1639 were indicted, the King, on the 29th of June, directed that all “Archbishops, Bishops, and Commissioners of Kirks,” among others, entitled to place and voice therein, should attend, as Members of the Assembly, on the 12th of August following.
This, in the estimation of the Covenanters, was tantamount to a departure from the spirit of the treaty, in which nothing was said in plain terms as to the constituent Members of that Assembly. The Covenanters could not, as the King well knew, recognise Archbishops and Bishops as legitimate Members of a General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland—the intrusion of them into the Church being all along stated as their chief and leading grievance, for the removal of which, and the oppressions thence resulting, they had taken up arms. Of this the King and his Counsellors were fully aware—and therefore his proclamation was truly the signal for a renewal of the agitations which had ostensibly been quelled. It was literally keeping his word of promise to the ear, but breaking it to the hopes of his Scottish subjects; and, accordingly, no sooner was the proclamation issued, than it was followed by the usual flood of protestations and manifestoes on all hands. No doubt Episcopacy was still the unrepealed law of Scotland, and the parties, by mutual consent, had agreed to wave all discussion as to the Assembly of 1638; yet, if the King honestly intended to leave Church matters proper, to the decision of a new General Assembly, to be afterwards considered and ratified in Parliament, he was bound to have informed the Covenanters explicitly, that the Assembly of 1639 was not to consist (as they necessarily understood) of Members chosen on the old Presbyterian platform, but of Prelates and Statesmen sent thither by virtue solely of the Royal prerogative, and who were not, in any intelligible sense, the representatives of the Scottish Church. In short, (as is proved by his correspondence with the fugitive Prelates, and other evidence,) his entering into the treaty of 18th June was a mere juggle, and his promise of a Free General Assembly a palpable fraud—his settled purpose being unquestionably to restore Prelacy whenever he could, and to render the deliberations of the promised Assembly altogether nugatory, with reference to the objects for which it was sought and agreed to.
Although the latent proofs of Charles’s duplicity were not known to the Covenanters, they found in the proclamation and other circumstances, sufficient reason for distrust; and their past experience, both of the King and his advisers, was sufficient to rouse their suspicions. Their vigilance and preparations continued unrelaxed; and so formidable was the tone of public feeling in Scotland, during the brief space which elapsed betwixt the date of the treaty and the meeting of the Assembly, that the King found it necessary to adopt a temporizing and most insidious policy. Traquair, a man of talent and consummate address, armed with the King’s secret instructions, came down to Scotland as Commissioner, and the Assembly met on the 12th of August.