Life of John Milton, vol 3, 1643-1649 | Page 4

till Thursday, July 6, or indeed Saturday, July 8, was the Assembly constituted for actual business. On the first of these days the Regulations which had been drawn up by the two Houses of Parliament for the procedure of the Assembly were duly received; and on the second all the members of Assembly present took the solemn Protestation which had been settled for them by the Commons with the concurrence of the Lords. It was in these terms: "I, A. B., do seriously and solemnly protest, in the presence of Almighty God, that in this Assembly, wherein I am a member, I will not maintain anything in matters of Doctrine but what I think in my conscience to be truth, or in point of Discipline but what I shall conceive to conduce most to the glory of God and the good and peace of His Church." So sworn, the members were ready for their first work. That also had been rigidly prescribed for them by Parliament. On July 5 the Commons had ruled and the Lords had agreed "that the Assembly, in their beginning, in the first place shall take the ten first Articles of the Church of England into their consideration, to vindicate them from all false doctrine and heresy." In other words, it was the pleasure of Parliament that the first business of the Assembly should consist in a revision and amendment of the Thirty-nine Articles, and that, by way of a commencement in this business, or specimen to Parliament of the manner in which it might be done, they were to confine themselves at first to the first Ten of the Articles. Accordingly, the Assembly at once addressed themselves to this business. It was with a view to it that they first adopted that machinery of Committees which was to be employed subsequently, with so much effect, in all the deliberations. The Divines of the Assembly were distributed, in the order in which their names stood in the Ordinance calling the Assembly, into three Committees for preparatory revision of the said Articles in such a manner that the whole Assembly might more clearly exercise its final judgment on them; while a fourth Committee, in which the lay-members were included, was to assist the others by procuring the most correct copies of the text of the Articles. To the first revising Committee, of which Dr. Burges was appointed chairman, were entrusted the first four Articles; to the second, of which Dr. Stanton was chairman, the fifth, sixth, and seventh Articles; and to the third, which had Mr. Gibbon for chairman, the eighth, ninth, and tenth.
Imagine the Assembly collectively in Henry the Seventh's Chapel, and its Committees distributively there or in other places of meeting, busy day after day, through the rest of the hot month of July, and then into August, over its appointed revision of the Articles. "_I. Of Faith in the Holy Trinity; II. Of the Word, or Son of God, which was made very Man; III. Of the going down of Christ into Hell; IV. Of the Resurrection of Christ; V. Of the Holy Ghost; VI. Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation; VII. Of the Old Testament; VIII. Of the Three Creeds; IX. Of Original or Birth Sin; X. Of Free Will_;" imagine the Articles under these headings discussed successively, sentence by sentence and clause by clause, most of the sentences and clauses allowed to pass without change as perfectly satisfactory, but here and there at intervals a phrase modified or omitted, or a slight addition made, so as to bring the meaning more sharply into accord with the letter of Scripture or the Calvinistic system of doctrine. Such mere imagination of the general process will suffice, and it is unnecessary to take account of the actual changes proposed in the phraseology of particular Articles. For, in fact, these first weeks of the Assembly's pains over the Articles of the Church were to be labour wasted. Before the end of August, and while they were still probing through the first Ten Articles, events had taken such a course that the Assembly was called upon to co-operate with the Parliament in matters of greater urgency.
THE SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT: SCOTTISH COMMISSIONERS TO THE ASSEMBLY.
The war, which had been on the whole in the King's favour hitherto, was going more and more against Parliament. In the north, Lord Fairfax had been beaten at Atherston Moor by the Earl of Newcastle (June 30); Sir William Waller, the hitherto unconquered, had been beaten twice in the south-west (at Lansdowne, July 5, and at Roundway Down, July 13); the Queen, coming from the north, had joined the King in his quarters, amid great rejoicing, after their seventeen months of separation; and Bristol, inefficiently defended by Nathaniel Fiennes,