Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/624

 portion of that flock he had quarrelled, not for being Presbyterian, but because the Presbyterianism of this precocious conventicle was already taking that acutely democratic and distinctly uncalvinian form, in which the elders are the annually elected officers of a congregation which keeps both minister and elders well under control. Among Englishmen a drift towards Congregationalism appears almost as soon as the ruling elder.

The enthusiasm and antagonism were awakened by a different cry: it was not a call for presbyters, but a call for "parity," for an equality among all the ministers of God's Word, and consequently for an abolition of all "prelacy." As a battle cry this is hardly Calvinian; nor is it Knoxian; it is first audible at Cambridge. The premisses, it is true, lay ready to the hand of anyone who chose to combine them. The major was that Protestant principle which refers us to the primitive Church. The minor was a proposition familiar to the Middle Age:—originally there was no difference between the presbyter and the episcopus. Every student of the Canon Law knew the doctrine that the prelacy of Bishops is founded, not on divine command, but on a "custom of the Church." When the Puritan said that the episcopal jurisdiction was of popish origin, he agreed with Laynez and the Pope; at least, as had been amply shown at Trent, the divine right of Bishops was a matter over which Catholic doctors could quarrel bitterly. But the great Reformers had been chary of their words about ecclesiastical polity; there were many possibilities to be considered, and the decision would rest with Princes or civic Councils. The defenders of Anglican episcopacy occasionally told the Puritan that he was not a good Calvinist, and even Beza could hardly be brought by British pressure to a sufficiently dogmatic denunciation of prelacy. As to Knox, it is clear that, though he thought the English dioceses too large, he had no radical objection to such prelacy as existed in England. Moreover, the Church that he organised in Scotland was prelatic, and there is but little proof that he regarded its prelatic constitution as a concession to merely temporary needs. The word " bishop " was avoided (in Scotland there still were lawful Bishops of another creed); but over the "dioceses" stand "superintendents" (the title comes from Germany), who, though strictly accountable to the general assembly, are distinctly the rulers of the diocesan clergy. Between superintendent and minister there is no " parity"; the one may command, the other must obey. The theory that valid orders can be conferred by none but a Bishop, Knox would, no doubt, have denied; but some at all events of the contemporary English Bishops would have joined him in the denial.

Apparently Thomas Cartwright, a young professor of divinity at Cambridge, spoke the word (1570) that had not yet been spoken in Scotland. Cambridge was seething with Puritanism; the Bishops had been putting the vestiarian law in force; and the French Church had declared