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This last order united in a common cause those who might privately rejoice in Porteous's death, though they dared not vindicate the manner of it, with the more scrupulous Presbyterians, who held that even the pronouncing the name of the "Lords Spiritual" in a Scottish pulpit was, quodammodo, an acknowledgment of prelacy, and that the injunction of the legislature was an interference of the civil government with the jus divinum of Presbytery, since to the General Assembly alone, as representing the invisible head of the kirk, belonged the sole and exclusive right of regulating whatever pertained to public worship.
Lightfoot is at a loss to understand what single fact relating to the history of the Christian Church during the first half of the second century can be regarded as established, if we reject his baseless assertion! The Genesis of Prelacy.
What did he understand by those materials of Prelacy absolutely necessary to be retained? Did he understand the dispensing of the word and sacraments, which is common to all pastors? Or did he understand the privileges of Parliament? Were either of those two materials of Prelacy? And if he had meant either of these, was this the way to satisfy that scruple concerning the extirpation of Prelacy?
Continued subjection to the heartless autocrat became intolerable. There was public indignation likewise against Prelacy, for by it the king was inspired and upheld. In the State the revolt was from monarchy to democracy: in the Church, from Episcopacy to Presbyterianism.
He lamented the idolatry of his mother, and the toleration of it in his father's house; a matter of great offence, he said, to all the Protestant churches, and a great provocation to him who is a jealous God, visiting the sins of the father upon the children, He professed, that he would have no enemies but the enemies of the covenant; and that he detested all Popery, superstition, prelacy, heresy, schism, and profaneness; and was resolved not to tolerate, much less to countenance, any of them in any of his dominions.
But these persons will tightly shut their eyes against a great many substantially good deeds done by a man who thinks Prelacy the abomination of desolation, or who thinks that stained glass and an organ are sinful. I grant you that there is a certain fairness in trying the blackguard and the religionist by different standards. Where the pretension is higher, the test may justly be more severe.
It may be expedient to give a translation:— “Master George Gillespie, minister at Edinburgh, in his youthful years overthrew a host of ‘English popish ceremonies;’ as he approached full manhood, having been sent as commissioner to the Westminster Assembly, his attention was directed to the task of extirpating Prelacy from England, and promoting purity and uniformity in the worship of God.
A fast, on the last Wednesday of every month, had been ordered by the parliament at the beginning of these commotions; and their preachers on that day were careful to keep alive, by their vehement declamations, the popular prejudices entertained against the king, against prelacy, and against Popery.
And secondly, let us join issue upon this point, and make no more words of it; if there be an episcopacy or prelacy found in the Word, as the way of gospel-government, which Christ hath bequeathed the churches, and this be made appear, we are so far from swearing to extirpate such a prelacy, as that rather we are bound by virtue of this oath to entertain it, as the mind and will of Jesus Christ.
In the second session of the pretended parliament, anno 1662 diocesan Erastian Prelacy is established, and the king solemnly invested with the church's headship, by act of parliament; wherein it is blasphemously declared, "That the ordering and disposal of the external government and policy of the church, doth properly belong unto his majesty as an inherent right of the crown, by virtue of his royal prerogative and supremacy in all causes ecclesiastical."
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