19. The only other confession of which we shall take notice is that of the Westminster assembly, which met in 1643, and at which five ministers and three elders as commissioners from the general assembly of the church of Scotland attended, agreeably to engagements between the convention of estates there, and both houses of parliament in England. This confession is contained in thirty-three chapters, and in every point of doctrine, fully accords with the sentiments of the synod of Dort; and on some points going rather beyond it, as with respect to a supposed election of angels. It was approved and adopted by the general assembly in 1647; and two years after, ratified by act of parliament, as “the public and avowed confession of the church of Scotland.” By act of parliament in 1690, it was again declared to be the national standard of faith in Scotland; and subscription to it as “the confession of his faith,” specially required of every person who shall be admitted “a minister or preacher within this church.” Subscription to it was also enjoined by the act of union in 1707, on all “professors, principals, regents, masters, and others bearing office,” in any of the Scottish universities.
CONFLAGRATION, a general burning of a city, or other considerable place. But the word is more ordinarily restrained to that grand period, or catastrophe of our world, wherein the face of nature is expected to be changed by a deluge of fire, as it was anciently by that of water. The ancient Chaldeans, Pythagoreans, Platonists, Epicureans, Stoics, Celts, and Etrurians, appear to have had a notion of the conflagration; though whence they should derive it, unless from the sacred books, it is difficult to conceive; except, perhaps, from the Phenicians, who themselves had it from the Jews. The Celts, whose opinions resembled those of the eastern nations, held, that after the burning of the world, a new period of existence would commence. The ancient Etrurians, or Tuscans, also concurred with other western and northern nations of Celtic origin, as well as with the Stoics, in asserting the entire renovation of nature after a long period, or great year, when a similar succession of events would again take place. The cosmogony of an ancient Etrurian, preserved by Suidas, limits the duration of the universe to a period of twelve thousand years; six thousand of which passed in the production of the visible world, before the formation of man. The Stoics also maintained that the world is liable to destruction from the prevalence of moisture or of drought; the former producing a universal inundation, and the latter, a universal conflagration. “These,” they say, “succeed each other in nature, as regularly as winter and summer.” The doctrine of conflagration is a natural consequence of the general system of Stoicism; for, since, according to this system, the whole process of nature is carried on in a necessary series of causes and effects, when that operative fire, which at first, bursting from chaos, gave form to all things, and which has since pervaded and animated all nature, shall have consumed its nutriment; that is, when the vapours, which are the food of the celestial fires, shall be exhausted, a deficiency of moisture must produce a universal conflagration. This grand revolution in nature is, after the doctrine of the Stoics, thus elegantly described by Ovid:--
“Esse quoque in fatis reminiscitur, affore tempus
Quo mare, quo tellus, correptaque regia cœli
Ardeat; et mundi moles operosa laboret.”
Metamor. lib. i, 256.
or, as Dryden has translated the passage,--
“Rememb’ring in the fates a time when fire
Should to the battlements of heaven aspire;
When all his blazing worlds above should burn,