General Assembly, and also a more private letter signed by about seventy English Divines! And how the Scots were impressed by the letters! The private letter of the seventy Divines in especial was "so lamentable" that, when it was read in the General Assembly, "it drew tears from many." And how all were struck by the ability and gravity of young Sir Harry Vane, and liked him and Stephen Marshall, but did not take so much to Mr. Nye, because of his known Independency! In short, in conferences between the English Commissioners and Commissioners appointed by the Scottish Convention and General Assembly to meet them, it was all arranged. There was, indeed, still some lingering question at first among the Scottish leaders whether it might not do to "go as redders or friends to both, without siding altogether with the Parliament;" but Warriston alone "did show the vanity of that notion and the impossibility of it." And so Vane and the other Commissioners could write to England that their mission had been successful, and that the armed aid of the Scottish nation might be expected. Ay, but there was a special condition. The Commissioners had come to treat about "Scottish assistance to Parliament and a uniformity of religion," and it was the prospect held out in the second phrase that most reconciled the Scots to all that was involved in the first. The extension of Scottish Presbyterianism over all England and Ireland, or, at all events, the union of the two kingdoms in some common form of Church-government not essentially differing from Scottish Presbyterianism--for that object the Scots _would_ strike in; for that object they _would_ shed their blood, as fellow-soldiers with Englishmen, in the fields of England! Now the English Commissioners, like wary men, and probably in accordance with their instructions, would fain have avoided any too definite a pledging of England to a particular ecclesiastical future. Nye, in especial, as an Independent, must have desired to avoid this; and Vane, as a man who did not know how far from his present opinions continued reasoning might carry him, may have felt with Nye. Hence, on the religious question, they tried to get off with generalities. If there were a league between the two kingdoms for their civil liberties, would not a uniformity in Church matters naturally follow? But this was not quite satisfactory to the Scottish Commissioners. "The English were for a civil league, we for a religious covenant," says Baillie; and the event has made the sentence memorable historically. Let England and Scotland unite first in subscribing one and the same document, swearing one and the same oath, which should base their alliance on a certain amount of mutual engagement in the matter of Religion! To such oaths of mutual allegiance the Scots, among themselves, had long been accustomed. They called them "Covenants." This agency of "Covenanting" had been a grand agency in Scottish History. Was not the