Henceforth, whatever authority claimed their submission as divine, must come home to their conscience with a like directness, and this the _jus divinum_ of the presbyterians failed to do. This new spiritual force the ministers had left to itself. While they were wrangling at Westminster or settling warmly into the berths which the episcopal clergy had vacated, it had been gathering strength unheeded. At the outbreak of the war each regiment had a regular minister as its chaplain, but after the battle at Edgehill made it clear that the business would be a longer one than had been expected, these divines, according to Baxter, withdrew either to the assembly or to their livings. Baxter himself lost an opportunity which he afterwards regretted, in declining the chaplaincy of Cromwell’s regiment, ‘which its officers proposed to make a gathered church.’ ’These very men,’ he says, ‘that then invited me to be their pastor, were the men that afterwards headed an army, and were forwardest in all our charges; which made me wish I had gone among them, for all the fire was in one spark.’ [1] The news of the battle of Naseby, however, so far stirred Baxter, then living at Coventry, that he must needs join his old friends, and for two years he moved about with the army, as chaplain to Whalley’s regiment which had been {308} formed out of Cromwell’s. The sectarian spirit he then found too strong for his mild piety to control. [1] [_Reliquiae Baxterianae_, p. 51.] ‘We that lived quietly at Coventry did keep to our old principles; we were unfeignedly for king and parliament; we believed the war was only to save the parliament and kingdom from papists and delinquents and to remove the dividers, that the king might return again to his parliament, and that no changes might be made in religion but with his consent. But when I came to the army among Cromwell’s soldiers, I found anew face of things which I never dreamt of. The plotting heads were very hot upon that which intimated their intentions to subvert church and state. Independency and anabaptistry were most prevalent. Antinomianism and arminianism were equally distributed.’ Hot-headed sectaries in the highest places, Cromwell’s chief favourites, were asking what were the lords of England but William the Conqueror’s colonels, or the barons but his majors, or the knights but his captains? ‘plainly showing that thy thought God’s providence would cast the trust of religion and the kingdom upon them as conquerors.’ Of some of these dangerous men, particularly of Harrison and Berry, then reckoned Cromwell’s prime favourites, Baxter gives a more particular account. Berry