Probably he was in the House while they passed the order, and wondering how far Roger Williams had got on his voyage, and meditatively twirling his thumbs. A good stroke of business by the Westminster Assembly in two days after their vacation! But they followed it up. There were frequent Solemn Fasts, by Parliamentary order, in those days, when all London was expected to go to church and listen to sermons by divines from the Westminster Assembly. Tuesday, the 13th of August, 1644, was one of those Solemn Fast-days--an "Extraordinary Day of Humiliation;" and the ministers appointed by the Assembly to preach in chief--_i.e._ to preach before the two Houses of Parliament, and the Assembly itself, in St. Margaret's, Westminster--were Mr. Thomas Hill and Mr. Herbert Palmer. These two gentlemen, it seems, did their duty: They satisfied even Baillie. "Mr. Palmer and Mr. Hill," he says, "did preach that day to the Assembly two of the most Scottish and free sermons that ever I heard anywhere. The way here of all preachers, even the best, has been to speak before the Parliament with so profound a reverence as truly took all edge from their exhortations, and made all applications of them toothless and adulatorious. That style is much changed, however: these two good men laid well about them, and charged public and Parliamentary sins strictly on the backs of the guilty." [Footnote: Baillie's Letters, II. 220, 221.] As the sermons themselves remain in print, we have the means of verifying Baillie's description. It is quite correct. Not only in the "Epistle Dedicatory" to his sermon when it was printed did Mr. Hill denounce the Toleration doctrine, and make a marginal reference to Roger Williams's "_Bloody Tenent_" as a book not too soon burnt; but in the sermon itself, the subject of which was the duty of "advancing Temple-work" (Haggai i. 7, 8), he openly attacked two classes of persons as the chief "underminers of Temple-work." First, he said, there were those who would allow nothing to be _jure divino_ in the Church, but held that all matters of Church-constitution were to be settled by mere prudence and State-convenience--in other words, the Erastians, _They_ are lectured, but are let off more easily than the second sort of underminers: viz. "such who would have a toleration of all ways of Religion in this Church." Parliament is reminded that all tendency to this way of thinking is unfaithfulness to the Covenant, and is told that "to set the door so wide open as to tolerate all religions" would be to "make London an Amsterdam," and would lead to--in fact, would certainly lead to-- Amsterdamnation! So far Mr. Hill; but Mr. Palmer was even more bold. Preaching on Psalm xcix. 8, this delicate little creature laid about him most manfully. Parliament are rebuked for eluding the Covenant, for too great tenderness in their dealings with delinquents, and for remissness in the prevention and punishment of false doctrine. They are exhorted to