It looked at first as if the Presbyterians had really made some impression on their opponents; at least Clarendon was willing, that just then, they should think so. On the 4th of September he sent them the draft of a Royal Declaration of Indulgence. It did not satisfy Baxter; and he, therefore, wrote an elaborate reply, which was altered at the suggestion of some of his friends.[134] The reply took the shape of a petition to the King; yet it was such an immoderately long dissertation that the idea of Charles reading it through is perfectly amusing. No man except a guileless one could have written the paper, but the paper betrayed an utter want of tact and judgment. [Sidenote: 1660.] [Sidenote: THE CONTROVERSY.] An opportunity had arisen in the history of the Church of England for healing a wound which had been bleeding ever since the Reformation. A moment had arrived, calling upon the two great parties, into which that Church had been so long divided, to look at their differences in the light of wisdom and charity. But the history of mankind presents so many misimproved conjunctions of circumstances, that students of the past become familiar with lost opportunities, and are almost hardened against the sorrow which they inspire in the bosoms of more benevolent but less experienced persons. It is useless to speculate upon the probable issue, at the period under review, if the settlement of affairs had been approached in another kind of spirit. It is more practical to endeavour to understand how things really stood; and it will enable the reader to follow the controversy better, if we here pause for a moment to look distinctly at deep differences which lay around narrow discussions, and to show what were some of the salient points which presented themselves in relation to the larger question. The Presbyterians, with great confidence, carried their cause before the tribunal of Scripture, and showed from their own point of view, that for their fundamental doctrine of the official equality of all Christian ministers they had on their side the law of the New Testament; for they maintained that on its pages the terms Bishop and Presbyter are interchangeably used, and that no traces of a clerical hierarchy are to be found in the inspired records. Turning to Church history, from the third century to the seventeenth, they easily gathered proofs and illustrations of the growth of ecclesiastical usurpation; of the change of primitive Episcopacy into an elaborate system of spiritual despotism; of the rise of Archbishops and Patriarchs; of the pride, the power, the ambition, and the wealth of prelates; of the tyranny they exercised over civil society; of the corruptions of all kinds which gathered round the perverted institute; and of the tendency from bad to worse, which exists in all cases where men are not careful to preserve the simplicity of Christ. The state of England in the time of Archbishop Laud was a subject upon