en of irreligious habits,
who dreaded the stern and scrutinizing discipline of a Presbyterian kirk.
The two last occasionally

[Footnote 1: Under the general name of Independents, I include, for
convenience, all the different sects enumerated at the time by Edwards
in his Gangraena,--Independents, Brownists, Millenaries, Antinomians,
Anabaptists, Arminians, Libertines, Familists, Enthusiasts, Seekers,
Perfectists, Socinians, Arianists, Anti-Trinitarians, Anti-Scripturists,
and Sceptics.--Neal's Puritans, ii. 251. I observe that some of them
maintained that toleration was due even to Catholics. Baillie repeatedly
notices it with feelings of horror (ii. 17, 18, 43, 61).]

served to restore the balance between the two others, and by joining with
the Independents, to arrest the zeal, and neutralize the votes of
the Presbyterians.[a] With their aid, Cromwell, as the organ of the
discontented religionists, had obtained the appointment of a "grand
committee for accommodation," which sat four months, and concluded nothing.
Its professed object was to reconcile the two parties, by inducing the
Presbyterians to recede from their lofty pretensions, and the Independents
to relax something of their sectarian obstinacy. Both were equally
inflexible. The former would admit of no innovation in the powers which
Christ, according to their creed, had bestowed on the presbytery; the
latter, rather than conform, expressed their readiness to suffer the
penalties of the law, or to seek some other clime, where the enjoyment of
civil, was combined with that of religious, freedom.[1]

2. The discontent of the Presbyterians arose from a very different
source. They complained that the parliament sacrilegiously usurped that
jurisdiction which Christ had vested exclusively in his church. The
assembly contended, that "the keys of the kingdom of heaven were committed
to the officers of the church, by virtue whereof, they have power
respectively to retain and remit sins, to shut the kingdom of heaven
against the impenitent by censures, and to open it to the penitent by
absolution." These claims of the divines were zealously supported by their
brethren in parliament, and as fiercely opposed by all who were not of
their communion. The divines claimed for the presbyteries the right of
inquiring into the private lives of individuals, and of suspending the
unworthy[b]

[Footnote 1: Baillie, i. 408, 420, 431; ii. 11, 33, 37, 42, 57, 63, 66,
71.]

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