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Covenanted Presbyterianism has always stood for liberty, conscience, enlightenment, progress, and exalted manhood, resisting all tyrants and oppressors. Presbyterianism recognizes as the crowning glory of man, his relation to God, all men alike being subjects of His government and accountable at His throne; all being under law to God and under law to no man, except in the Lord.

First, there were the members entitled to church, privileges; next the anciens; and lastly the pastors. As in Presbyterianism, so in Huguenot Calvinism, its form of government was republican. There were three grades of service in the rank of pastor first students, next preachers, and lastly pastors.

The leaders in that day also, such men as Henderson, Gillespie, Rutherford and Baillie, understood the spirit of Presbyterianism and the need of the Church quite as fully as did any leaders of either an earlier or a later day.

The Assembly, we have shown, besides still carrying on within itself the main question between Presbyterianism and Congregationalism, had begun a wider war against Schism, Sectarianism, the whole miscellany of English heresies, and especially the all-including heresy of Toleration.

Peden was born in 1626, when King Charles was trying hard to stamp out Presbyterianism. He was twelve years old, when the Covenant renewed at Greyfriars' Church thrilled the kingdom. He was twenty-four when Charles II. took the throne, and wrought havoc with the Reformation. When thirty-six, he was driven from his church at Glenluce by the wrath of the king.

He was ignorant of the real characteristics of Scotland, and alienated from the country by his antipathy to Presbyterianism. But Ireland was a hot-bed of faction, the intricacies of which baffled his discernment.

Wylie continued, "I hope you have strict Christian principles?" "I was brought up Presbyterian," said Susan anxiously. She was far from sure that in Cincinnati and by its Mrs. Wylies Presbyterian would be regarded as Christian. "There's your kind of a church a few squares from here," was all Mrs. Wylie deigned to reply. Susan suspected a sneer at Presbyterianism in her accent.

Here you may hop from Presbyterianism to a prelatical mode; and if time and chance should serve you, backwards and forwards again: yea, here you can make use of several consciences, one for this way now, another for that anon; now putting out the light of this by a sophistical, delusive argument. then putting out the other by an argument that best suits the time.

With such a man to look up to, and with patrons also in the two Houses of Parliament, little wonder that the Independents in the Army began to feel themselves strong, and to regard the drift of the Westminster Assembly and the Londoners towards an absolute Presbyterianism as a movement innocent enough while it consisted in talk only, but to be watched carefully and disowned in due time.

It should, therefore, be considered by those who would have the Church return to the bondage of forms or even to their optional use, that they are advocating not a return to the practice of any former period in which the Church was free to exercise its own desire in this matter, but rather that they are urging her to a course that will be wholly antagonistic to the spirit of Presbyterianism as indicated by the trend of its practice during a stirring and eventful history of three hundred years.