ole time. The earliest years of the
assembly were the most important. All in all, it was an assembly which
left remarkable and permanent effects in the British islands, and the
history of which ought to be more interesting, in some homely respects,
to Britons now, than the history of the Council of Basel, the Council of
Trent, or any other of the great ecclesiastical councils, more ancient
and ecumenical, about which we hear so much.

Such was the famous Westminster Assembly, called together by the
Parliament of England to consider the entire state of the country in
matters of religion. The business intrusted to it was vast and complex.
It was to revise and redefine the national creed, after its long lapse
into so-called Arminianism and semi-popish error, and to advise also as
to the new system of church government and the new forms of worship that
should come in place of rejected episcopacy and the condemned liturgy.
For it was still, be it remembered, the universal notion among English
politicians that there must be a national church, and that no man,
woman, or child within the land should be permitted to be out of the
pale of that church. It was still the notion that it was possible to
frame a certain number of propositions respecting God, heaven, angels,
hell, devils, the creation of the universe, the soul of man, sin and its
remedy, a life beyond death, and all the other most tremendous subjects
of human contemplation, that should be absolutely true, or at least so
just and sure a compendium of truth that the nation must be tied up to
it, and it would be wrong to allow any man, woman, or child, subject to
the law of England, to be astray from it in any item. This was the
notion, and those one hundred forty-nine persons were appointed to frame
the all-important propositions, or find them out by a due revision of
the old articles, and to report to Parliament on that subject, as well
as on the subjects of church organization and forms of worship.

The appointment, among the original one hundred forty-nine or one
hundred fifty members of assembly, of such persons as Archbishop Usher,
Bishops Brownrigge and Westfield, Featley, Hacket, Hammond, Holdsworth,
Morley, Nicolson, Saunderson, and Samuel Ward--all of them defenders of
an episcopacy of some kind--seems hardly reconcilable with the very
terms of the ordinance calling the assembly. That ordinance implied that
episcopacy was condemned and done with, and it convoked