The truth is, that while the Covenant in Scotland was a reality, inasmuch as it sprung from the hearts of the people, and expressed a sentiment to which they were devoted, the case was far otherwise in our own country. Imported here, it never rallied around it the sympathies of the nation. Exasperating High Churchmen, it did not please the Puritans. Many could not go so far as it went and many were anxious to go much further still. Moderate Episcopalians were reluctant to adopt it, because they were not prepared for the total abolition of Episcopacy; and, on the other hand, many Independents disliked it, because its condemnation of schism, they knew, was regarded in some quarters as a condemnation of themselves. They were advocates for a liberty and a toleration to which the spirit of the Covenant was thoroughly opposed. That the Scotch should insist upon its adoption by the English, and that the rulers of this country should accept the condition, and endeavour to enforce it upon all their subjects, was an unfortunate mistake, destined to be attended in some instances by failure, in others by mischief, in all by disappointment. [Sidenote: 1643, September.] The adoption of the Covenant by the Westminster Assembly will be in the reader's remembrance; and to the subsequent proceedings of that venerable body his attention is now to be directed. The Divines first met in Henry the Seventh's Chapel. That stone building, pleasantly cool in summer, became too cold for them as autumn drew on. They then, by order of Parliament, adjourned to the Jerusalem Chamber.[413] "What place more proper for the building of Zion, as they propounded it," asks Fuller, "than the Chamber of Jerusalem, the fairest of the Dean's lodgings where King Henry IV. died?" Romance and poetry, through the pens of Fabian and Shakespeare, have thrown their hues over this memorable room; other and higher associations now belong to it as the birth-place of a confession of faith still dear to the Church of Scotland, and as the spot where the Puritan advocates of religious liberty fought one of its early and most earnest battles. [Sidenote: _The Westminster Assembly._]