Page:The Leveller movement; a study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War (IA levellermovement01peas).djvu/95

 stances that aroused the wrath of the House, and made the Erastians confident of success in pushing matters to extremes. Under Erastian tutelage, the Commons responded with a series of questions to be answered by the divines; the questions took up point after point of the Presbyterian system, asking if each were of divine right, and demanding Scripture proofs for the answers, with the names of the divines accepting or rejecting each answer. The Assembly never answered the questions. With the authorization by Parliament of a limited Presbyterianism, with a standing committee at Westminster to judge finally of “unenumerated offenses,” the fruitful period of the ecclesiastical controversy was over. For the time Parliament had vindicated its right to supreme legislative power over the church.

The organization of presbyteries and assemblies began. The work dragged, the extreme Presbyterians trusting that some future alteration in the military or political situation would give them all they had asked. In few parts of the kingdom was more than a perfunctory Presbyterianism set up. Years of political and ecclesiastical confusion, followed by years of the rule of Saints and Ironsides who knew not Gillespie and Edwards, ended at last in the restoration of episcopacy. The Presbyterianism that Baillie had hoped to see erected, the close, compact series of ecclesiastical assemblies with power to inflict spiritual censure on all men in the kingdom; the Presbyterianism that Erastians had feared because by divine right