So, on and on, Edwards goes, decidedly more readable than most pamphleteers of the time, because he writes with some spirit, and mixes a continual pepper of personalities with his arguments against the tenets of the Independents. With these arguments we shall not meddle. Their purpose was to hold up "a true glass to behold the faces of Presbytery and Independency in, with the beauty, order, strength, of the one, and the deformity, disorder, and weakness of the other." In other words, the pamphlet is a digest of everything that could be said against Independency and in favour of Presbyterianism. But the grand tenet of Presbyterianism in which Mr. Edwards revels with most delight, and which he exhibits as the distinguishing honour of that system, and its fitness beyond any other for grappling with the impiety of men in general and the disorderliness of that age in particular, is its uncompromising Anti- Toleration. Throughout the whole pamphlet there runs a vein of declamation to this effect; and at the close some twenty pages are expressly devoted to the subject, in connexion with that claim for a Limited Toleration which the Apologists had advanced. Eight Reasons are stated and expounded why there should not be even this Limited Toleration, why even Congregationalist opinions and practice should not be tolerated in England. It would be against the rule of Scripture as to the duty of the civil magistrate; it would be against the Solemn League and Covenant; it would be against the very nature of a national Reformation, for "a Reformation, and a Toleration are diametrically opposite;" it would be "against the judgment of the greatest lights in the Church, both ancient and modern;" it would be an invitation and temptation to error and "an occasion of many falling who otherwise never would;" &c. &c. Wherever Presbytery and strict Anti-Toleration had prevailed since the Reformation had there not been a marvellous orderliness and freedom from error and heresy? All over the map of Europe would it not be found that error and heresy had been rank precisely in proportion to the deviation of a country from Presbytery or to the relaxation of its grasp where it was nominally professed? What, in particular, had made Scotland the country it was, pure in faith, united in action, and with a Church "terrible as an army with banners"? What but Presbytery and Anti-Toleration? O then let Presbytery and Anti-Toleration reign in England as well! And, while they were proceeding to the great work of establishing Presbytery, let them beware of such an inconsistency as granting the least promise beforehand of a Toleration! On this point Mr. Edwards addresses the Parliament in his own name, telling them that Toleration is the device of the Devil. "I humbly beseech the Parliament," he says, "seriously to consider the depths of Satan in this design of a Toleration; how this is now his last plot and design, and by it would undermine and frustrate the whole work of Reformation intended. 'Tis his masterpiece for England; and, for effecting it, he comes and moves, not in Prelates and Bishops, not in furious Anabaptists, &c., but in holy men, excellent preachers; moderate and fair men, not for a toleration of heresies and gross opinions, but an 'allowance of a latitude to some lesser differences with peaceableness.' This is Candidus ille Diabolus [that White Devil], as Luther speaks, and meridianus Diabolus [mid-day Devil], as Johannes Gersonius and Beza express it, coming under the merits of much suffering and well-deserving, clad in the white garments of innocency and holiness. In a word, could the Devil effect a Toleration, he would think he had gained well by the Reformation and made a good exchange of the Hierarchy to have a Toleration for it. I am confident of it, upon serious thoughts, and long searching into this point of the evils and mischief of a Toleration, that, if the Devil had his choice whether the Hierarchy, Ceremonies, and Liturgy should be established in this kingdom, or a Toleration granted, he would choose and prefer a Toleration before them."
Did Mr. Thomas Edwards in all this represent the whole body of the
Presbyterians of his time? I am afraid he did. In his very sense,
with the same vehemency, and to the same extent, they were all Anti-
Tolerationists.
Was there no exception? Had no one Presbyterian of that day worked out, in the interest of Presbytery, a conclusion corresponding to that which we have seen reason to think some of the wiser Anglicans then within the Royalist lines were quietly working out in the interest of Episcopacy, in case Episcopacy should ever again have a chance? Was no one Presbyterian prepared to come forth with the proposal of a Toleration in England, either limited or unlimited, round an Established National Church on the Presbyterian model? That there may not have been some such person among those Erastian laymen who favoured Presbytery on the whole for general and political reasons, one would not assert positively. None such, however, is distinctly in historical view; and it is certain that among the real or dominant Presbyterians, the jure divino Presbyterians, English or Scottish, there was no one upon whom the idea in question had clearly dawned or who dared to divulge it. Perhaps it was the belief in the absolute jus divinum of Presbytery that made the idea impossible to them. Yet why should it have been impossible in consistency even with that belief? It may be jure divino that the square on the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the sides, that he is a blockhead who believes otherwise, and that a permanent apparatus should be set up in every land for teaching this mathematical faith; and yet it may be equally jure divino that no one shall be compelled to avail himself of that apparatus, or be punished for doubting or denying the proposition. But the Presbyterians of 1644 did not so refine or argue. They stood stoutly to the necessary identity of Presbyterianism and absolute Anti-Toleration. And so Presbyterianism missed the most magnificent opportunity she has had in her history. Had her offer to England been "Presbytery with a Toleration," who knows what a different shaping subsequent events might have assumed? What if Henderson, in whose natural disposition one sees more of room and aptitude for the idea than in that of any other Presbyterian leader, had actually become possessed with the idea and had proclaimed it? Would he have carried the mass of the Presbyterians with him? or would they have deposed him from the leadership? It is useless to inquire. The idea never occurred even to Henderson; and that it did not occur to him constituted his unfitness for leadership, out of Scotland, in the complex crisis which had at last arrived, and was the one weakness of his career near its close.
MULTIPLICATION OF HERESIES: SYNOPSIS OF ENGLISH SECTS AND SECTARIES IN 1644.
It was all very well, the Presbyterians argued, to propound the principle of Toleration in the abstract. Would its advocates be so good as to think of its operation in the concrete? The society of England was no longer composed merely of the traditional PAPISTS, PRELATISTS, PRESBYTERIANS, and CONGREGATIONALISTS or ORTHODOX INDEPENDENTS. Beyond these last, though sheltering themselves under the unfortunate principle of Church- Independency, there was now a vast chaos of SECTS and SECTARIES, some of them maintaining the most dangerous and damnable heresies and blasphemies! Would the Tolerationists, and especially the Limited Tolerationists, take a survey of this chaos, and consider how their principle of Toleration would work when applied to its ghastly bulk and variety?
This matter, of the extraordinary multiplication of Sects and Heresies in England, had been in constant public discussion since the opening of the Long Parliament. It had figured constantly in messages and declarations of the King; who had first charged the fact of the sudden appearance and boldness of the Sects and Sectaries to the abrogation of his Kingly prerogative and Episcopal government by the Parliament, and had then attributed the origin of the Civil War to the lawless machinations of these same Sects and Sectaries. It had figured no less, though with very different interpretations and comments, in the proceedings and appeals of the Parliament. Now, however, the SECTS and SECTARIES had become the objects of a more purely scientific curiosity. Without a survey and study of them as well as of the PAPISTS, the PRELATISTS, the PRESBYTERIANS, and the ORTHODOX INDEPENDENTS, there could, it was argued, be no complete Natural History of Religious Opinion in England in the year 1644. The Presbyterians, for reasons of their own, were earnest for such a survey and study; and they recommended it ironically to the Orthodox Independents in their character of Tolerationists. Not the less did the Presbyterians, with some Prelatists among them, undertake it themselves.- -Coming after these authorities, and availing myself of their inquiries, but with other authorities to aid me, and as much of fresh investigation, and of criticism of my authorities, as I can add, I shall attempt what, even for our own forgetful and self-engrossed time, ought to be a not uninteresting portion of the history of bygone English opinion.
This is a case in which the authorities should be mentioned formally at the outset. They are numerous. They include the Lords and Commons Journals, Lightfoot's Notes of the Assembly, Baillie's Letters, Pamphlets of the time passim, and even the Registers of the Stationers' Company. Certain particular publications, however (all of the year 1645 or the years immediately following), are of pre-eminent interest, as being attempts at a more or less complete survey of the huge medley or tumult of opinions on religious subjects that had by that time arisen in English society, with some classification of its elements.
The reader will remember Dr. DANIEL FEATLEY, Rector of Lambeth and Acton, the veteran Calvinist who had persisted in attending the Assembly in spite of his disapproval of the Covenant and his adhesion to the theory of a modified Episcopacy, but who had at length (Sept. 30, 1643) been ejected for misdemeanour. His misdemeanour had consisted in maintaining a correspondence with Usher, reflecting on the Assembly and the Parliament, and divulging secrets in the King's interest. For this he had not only been ejected from the Assembly by the Commons, and sequestered from his two livings, but also committed to custody in "the Lord Petre's house in Aldersgate Street," then used by Parliament as a prison for such culprits. To beguile his leisure here, he had occupied himself in revising his notes of a dispute he had held, in Oct. 1642, with a Conventicle of Anabaptists in Southwark, where he had knocked over a certain "Scotchman" and one or two other speakers for the Conventicle. But this revision of his notes of that debate had suggested various extensions and additions; so that, in fact, he had written in prison a complete exposure of Anabaptism. It was ready in January 1644-5, and was published with this title: "The Dippers Dipt; or, The Anabaptists Duck'd and Plung'd over Head and Ears," &c. It is a virulent tractate of about 186 pages, reciting the extravagances and enormities attributed to the German Anabaptists, and trying to involve the English Baptists in the odium of such an original, but containing also notices of the English Baptists themselves, and their varieties and ramifications. It became at once popular, and passed through several editions. [Footnote: Commons Journals, Sept. 30 and Oct 3, 1613; Wood's Athenæ, III. 156 et seq.; and Featley's Epistle Dedicatory to his treatise. The copy of the treatise before me at present is one of the sixth edition, published in 1651, six years after the authors death. It contains a portrait of Featley by W. Marshall, and, among other illustrations, a coarse ad captandum print by the same engraver, exhibiting the "dipping" of men and women naked together in a river.]
A well-known personage in London, of humbler pretensions than Featley, was a certain EPHRAIM PAGET (or PAGIT), commonly called "Old Father Ephraim," who had been parson of the church of St. Edmund in Lombard Street since 1601, and might therefore have seen, and been seen by, Shakespeare. Besides other trifles, he had published, in 1635, a book called "Christianographia" or a descriptive enumeration of the various sorts of Christians in the world out of the pale of the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps because he had thus acquired a fondness for the statistics of religious denominations, it occurred to him to write, by way of sequel, a "Heresiography; or, A Description of the Hereticks and Sectaries of these latter times." It was published in 1645, soon after Featley's book, from which it borrows hints and phrases. There is an Epistle Dedicatory to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London, very senile in its syntax and punctuation, and containing this touching appeal: "I have lived among you almost a jubilee, and seen your great care and provision to keep the city free from infection, in the shutting up the sick and in carrying them to your pest-houses, in setting warders to keep the whole from the sick, in making of fires and perfuming the streets, in resorting to your churches, in pouring out your prayers to Almighty God, with fasting and alms, to be propitious to you. The plague of Heresy is greater, and you are now in more danger than when you buried five thousand a week." Then, after an Epistle to the Reader, signed "Old Ephraim Pagit," there follows the body of the treatise in about 160 pages. The Anabaptists are taken first, and occupy 55 pages; but a great many other sects are subsequently described, some in a few pages, some in a single paragraph. There is an engraved title-page to the volume, containing small caricatures of six of the chief sorts of Sectaries—Anabaptism being represented by one plump naked fellow dipping another, much plumper, who is reluctantly stooping down on all fours. The book, like Featley's, seems to have sold rapidly. In the third edition of it, however, published in 1646, there is a postscript in which the poor old man tells us that it had cost him much trouble. The sectaries among his own parishioners had quarrelled with him on account of it, and refused to pay him his tithes; nay, as he walked in the streets, he was hooted at and reviled, and somebody had actually affirmed "Doctor Featley's devil to be transmigrated into Old Ephraim Paget." This seems to have cut him to the quick, though he avows his sense of inferiority in learning to the great Doctor. In short, we can see Father Ephraim as a good old silly body, of whom people made fun. [Footnote: Wood's Athenæ, III. 210 et seq.; and Paget's own treatise.]
Another writer against the Sectaries was the inexhaustible WILLIAM
PRYNNE,