It would be unfair to ascribe the theory of Vane in its speculative fulness to the independents as a body. It seems, however, to be but the development of the view on which Mr. Robinson had dwelt in his last words to the settlers of New Plymouth; and, so far as it could be represented by a sect, it was represented by the independents. It came before the world, in full outward panoply, in the army of Cromwell. The history of its inevitable conflict with the spirit of presbyterianism on the one hand and the wisdom of the world on the other, of its aberrations and perplexities, of its brief triumph and final flight into the wilderness, is the history of the rise and fall of the English commonwealth. I have yet {298} to speak, however, of the representation of the wisdom of the world in the Long Parliament. Before the outbreak of the war, as I have explained, Vane was the only man in the house of commons whose opinions were recognised as definitely opposed both to episcopacy and presbyterianism. In the lords his only recognised follower was lord Brook, known to the readers of Sir Walter Scott as the ‘fanatic Brook,’ really an eminent scholar and man of letters, who was shot in storming the close at Lichfield in the first year of the war, leaving as a legacy to the parliament a plea for freedom of speech and conscience. The majority of the parliament, however, had no special love for the presbyterian discipline and theology. Their favour to it was merely negative. They dreaded arminianism, as notoriously at that time the great weapon in the hands of the jesuits; they objected to the high episcopacy as sacerdotal, and as maintaining a jurisdiction incompatible with civil liberty. In 1641 a modified episcopacy on Usher’s plan was a possible solution of the difficulty. Each shire was to have a presbytery of twelve members, with a bishop as president who, ‘with assistance of some of the presbytery,’ was to ordain, degrade, and excommunicate. Though the pressure of strife with the king prevented anything being done to carry out this resolution, it probably represented the views even of the more advanced parliamentary leaders; but only, however, as afterwards appeared, on the supposition that the presbyters with their bishop should be strictly under civil control. The worldly wisdom of the Long Parliament was, in the party language of the times, essentially erastian.