That grand scripturient paper-spiller,
That endless, needless, margin-filler,
So strangely tossed from post to pillar.
There was, indeed, something preternatural in the persistent vitality and industry of this man. Only forty years of age when the Long Parliament released him from his second imprisonment and restored him to society, a ghoul-like creature with a scarred and mutilated face, hiding the loss of his twice-cropped ears under a woollen cowl or nightcap, and mostly sitting alone among his books and papers in his chamber in Lincoln's Inn, taking no regular meals, but occasionally munching bread and refreshing himself with ale, he had at once resumed his polemical habits and mixed himself up as a pamphleteer with all that was going on. As many as thirty fresh publications, to be added to the two-and-twenty or thereabouts already out in his name, had come from his pen between 1640 and 1645, bringing him through about one-fourth part of the series of some 200 books and pamphlets that were to form the long ink-track of his total life. In these recent pamphlets of his he had appeared as a strenuous Parliamentary Presbyterian, an advocate of the Scottish Presbyterianism which was being urged in the Assembly, but with more of Erastianism in his views than might have pleased most of his fellow-Presbyterians. No man more violent against Independency of all sorts, and the idea of Toleration. And so, after various other pamphlets against Independency in general, and this or that Independent in particular, there came from him, in July 1645, [Footnote: Date from my notes from Stationer's Registers.] a quarto of about 50 pages, with this title: "A Fresh Discovery of some Prodigious new Wandering-Blazing-Stars and Firebrands, styling themselves New Lights, firing our Church and State into new Combustions." The pamphlet was dedicated to Parliament; and its purpose was to exhibit all the monstrous things that lay in the bosom of what called itself Independency. Hence "Independency" is used by Prynne as a common name for all the varieties of Sectarians as well as for the Congregationalists proper; and his plan is to shock the public and rouse Parliament to action, by giving a collection of specimens, culled from pamphlets of the day, of the "scurrilous, scandalous, and seditious" views put forth, with impunity hitherto, by some of the "Anabaptistical Independent Sectaries and new-lighted Firebrands," Accordingly his tract contains a jumble of the most wild and extravagant sayings against the Assembly, the Scots, and the Parliament itself, that Prynne could pick out from the contemporary pamphlets of the Anabaptists and other Sectaries.[Footnote: Wood's Athenæ, III. 844 et seq.; Aubrey's Lives (for a notice of Prynne's habits); and the Fresh Discovery itself. The edition before me is the second, dated 1646, and swollen by added matter at the end to over 80 pages.]
Much cleverer and more spirited than Featley, old Ephraim Paget, or Prynne, as a describer and opponent of the Sectaries, was our friend, Mr. Thomas Edwards, of the Antapologia (antè, pp. 130-135). That "splendid confutation" of Independency and Tolerationism had so increased Mr. Edwards's fame that the Presbyterians of London had erected a weekly lectureship for him at Christ Church in the heart of the City, that he might "handle these questions and nothing else before all that would come to hear." Thus encouraged, he ranged beyond Independency proper, and employed himself in collecting information respecting the English Sectaries generally; and in about eighteen months, or before the end of 1645, he had ready a treatise (his third in order) entitled "Gangræna: or, a Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time." This treatise, consisting of more than 60 pages, he dedicated to Parliament, in an Epistle of twelve pages, hinting at the remissness of Parliament in its dealings with the Sectaries up to that time, and reminding it of its duty. There is all Edwards's fluency of language in the pamphlet, and some real literary talent; so that not only was Edwards's Gangræna a popular Presbyterian book at the time, but it is still valued by bibliographers and antiquarians. As it has come down to us, however, it is not a pamphlet merely, but a concretion of pamphlets. For it was enlarged by the author, in the course of 1646, to eight or nine times its original bulk, by the addition of a Second Part and then a Third Part, containing "New and Farther Discoveries" of the Sectaries, and their opinions and practices. This was because Mr. Edwards had solicited fresh information from all quarters, and it was poured in upon him superabundantly by Presbyterian correspondents. The First Part, as the skimming of the cream by Mr. Edwards himself, is perhaps the richest essentially. The others consist mainly of verifications and additional details, rumours, and anecdotes. Altogether, the Three Parts of Edwards's Gangræna are a curious Presbyterian repertory of facts and scandals respecting the English Independents and Sectaries in and shortly after the year of Marston Moor. The impression which they leave of Mr. Edwards personally is that he was a fluent, rancorous, indefatigable, inquisitorial, and, on the whole, nasty, kind of Christian. [Footnote: Wood's Fasti, I. 413; Baillie's Letters, II. 180, 193, 201, 215, 251: and Gangræna itself—the copy of which before me consists of the third edition of Parts I. and II. (1646) and the first edition of Part III, (1646) bound in two volumes.]
With Featley, Paget, Prynne, and Edwards, as authorities full of detail, though also full of prejudice on the subject of the English Sects and Sectaries of 1644, we may finally name Baillie. We name him now, however, not on account of his "Letters," but on account of two publications of his dealing expressly with this subject. One of these, published in November 1645, in a quarto of 252 pages, was his "Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time: wherein the Tenets of the Principall Sects, especially of the Independents, are drawn together in one Map, for the most part in the words of their own Authors;" the other, published in December 1646, in about 180 pages quarto, and intended as a Second Part of the "Dissuasive," was entitled "Anabaptism, the True Fountain of Independency, Brownisme, Antinomy, &c." In both publications, but especially in the former, we see Baillie's characteristic merits. He writes, of course, polemically and with strong Presbyterian prejudice; but in clearness of arrangement and statement he is greatly superior to either the senile Paget, or the fluent and credulous Edwards. His Dissuasive, indeed, is, in its way, a really instructive book.[Footnote: Both the Dissuasive and its continuation were published in London (by "Samuel Gellebrand at the Brazen Serpent in Paul's Churchyard"), and dedicated to "The Right Honourable the Earle of Lauderdaile, Lord Metellane"—i.e. to Baillie's Scottish colleague in the Assembly, Lord Maitland, then become Earl of Lauderdale.]
The information from these and other sources may be summed up, from the
Presbyterian point of view, under two headings, as follows:—
I. MISCELLANEOUS BLASPHEMIES AND ENTHUSIASMS.—The very air of England, it seemed, was full of such. There had broken loose a spirit of inquiry, a spirit of profanity and scoffing, and a spirit of religious ecstasy and dreaming; and the three spirits together were producing a perfect Babel of strange sayings, fancies, and speculations. From a catalogue of no fewer than 176 miscellaneous "errors, heresies, and blasphemies" collected by Edwards, and which he professes to give as nearly as possible in the very words in which they had been broached by their authors in print, or in public or private discourse, take the following samples:—
"That the Scriptures are a dead letter, and no more to be credited than the writings of men."
"That the holy writings and sayings of Moses and the Prophets, of Christ and his Apostles, and the proper names, persons, and things contained therein, are allegories."
"That the Scriptures of the Old Testament do not concern nor bind Christians" (in which belief, says Edwards, some Sectaries had ceased to read the Old Testament, or to bind it with the New).
"That right Reason is the rule of Faith."