over the bishops; and this was answered unanimously in the affirmative[109]. This took place in the seventh session of the Assembly, on November 28, 1638. On the 29th a proclamation from the King was read in the Market-place of Glasgow, by [A.D. 1638.] which all further meetings of the members of the illegal Assembly were forbidden, and all resolutions which it might draw up were declared null and void. The Assembly made answer on the same spot by means of a protestation, in which they refused to allow this dissolution to take effect. One of their reasons was the necessity in which they found themselves of rejecting the Royal Covenant and of maintaining their own. The members of the Privy Council had all of them signed the King’s proclamation: only one name was missing, that of Lord Lorne, now Earl of Argyle, one of those ambitious and capable men, who with sure instinct attach themselves to the power which is strongest. He had chosen this moment for passing over from the side of the royal Covenant to that of the Covenant of the nobles and the people. Thus these elements, whose previous struggles had still left a hope of reconciliation, now opposed one another face to face in open and irreconcilable hostility. The intention originally professed was only that of abolishing the arbitrary innovations of King Charles, and of returning to the ordinances which James I had carried out in the General Assemblies and Parliaments after his accession to the throne of England. But it had always been the opinion of the staunch presbyterians, who dated the decay of the Church from the rise of the royal influence, that even this course should be opposed: and the ruling thought of the Assembly at Glasgow was directed to the same end. Everything was there declared invalid, which had been enacted in the Assembly of Linlithgow in the year 1606 and in subsequent Assemblies. The two Books, the High Commission, and with them also the Articles of Perth were not merely rejected: it was declared a crime to have taken part in their composition or introduction. Episcopacy was not only abolished on the ground that it had no warrant in God’s Word, but it was abjured. Upon the Bishops who had taken part in the ecclesiastical enactments of the last ten years, sentence of excommunication and deposition was pronounced; upon the others sentence of deposition alone. And how could bishops and lay elders even exist side by side? The former exhibit the authority of the Church as [A.D. 1638.] hierarchical; the latter exhibit it as democratic in principle. The chief obstacle that prevented the Kings from establishing the authority of the bishops was in truth the independent origin of the Scottish national Church, and the correspondence which existed in consequence between its fundamental arrangements and this origin. The institution which they had wished to make the basis of their influence over the Church was now shattered and annihilated. The