British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV: July and October, 1871Various
History
British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV: July and October, 1871
Various
English periodicals
The volume concludes with a most able and valuable account of English
Presbyterianism and English Independency, introduced by a biographical
analysis of the Westminster Assembly.
Professor Masson, in a very masterly way, traces the rise and history
of English Independency from the first Brownists of 1580; gives an
account of the Separatists in Holland from 1592 to 1640; of the
Separatist congregations in London from 1610 to 1632; of the New
England Pilgrims and their Church from 1620 to 1640; of the
persistency, reinvigoration, and growth of Independency in England
from 1632 to 1643; and closes his volume by representing the array of
Presbyterianism and Independency in July, 1643, and their prospects in
the Westminster Assembly, which met on the first day of that month,
and which, as Professor Masson justly observes, 'for more than five
years and a half is to be borne in mind as a power or institution in
the English realm, existing side by side with the Long Parliament, and
in constant conference and co-operation with it. The number of its
sittings during these five years and a half was 1,163 in all, which is
at the rate of about four sittings every week for the whole 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 oecumenical,
about which we hear so much.' We can neither condense nor criticise
here the very able and impartial narrative of this section of
Professor Masson's history. We may at a future time return to it. We
simply commend it to the attention of both Churchmen and
Nonconformists, as a very masterly sketch of a historic movement which
both should be familiar with, which the former is too apt to speak of
with a sneer which only ignorance could render possible, and which is
destined to produce great ecclesiastical and national results.
_A Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury,
1621-1683._ By W. D. CHRISTIE. Macmillan and Co.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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