Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/114

 land Independents did not appear, the Assembly contained men of their way of thinking. In the fall of 1643 the Assembly found in its midst certain men of unblemished orthodoxy who protested when it endeavored to put a check on the “gathering of churches,” i.e. the forming of new congregations after the Independent model with members drawn from the old parish churches. Many such churches had been formed, notably by the five Holland ministers; they had grown up everywhere around prominent Independent preachers. December 22, 1643, when the Assembly finally issued a recommendation that no more of these churches should be gathered, the Independent members blocked a further proposal that the churches already gathered be disbanded.

The undoubted respectability of the more aristocratic Independents protected a host of heretical opinions among the baser sort. In May, 1644, Baillie mournfully testified that Manchester’s army was so full of Anabaptists, Antinomians, and Independents that he feared lest they corrupt the Scottish army on its arrival in England. June 7,