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In the Basilicon Doron he unveiled his real feelings and designs with regard to Presbytery, which, at the very time he was writing, he was professing to respect declaring that the ruling of the Kirk was no small part of the King's office; that parity among the ministers could not agree with a monarchy; that Puritans were pests in the Kirk and commonwealth of Scotland, and that bishops must be set up.
A splendid specimen of opus Alexandrinum, the finest north of the Alps, exists in the presbytery of Westminster Abbey. Another description of building is customarily met with in connection with early Christian churches, the baptistery. This is commonly a detached building, and almost always circular or polygonal.
In some of these bosses the figures are five feet long. There are also good foliage bosses against the walls between the pendentives. The westernmost pendentive on either side rests on a Perpendicular corbel carved with delicate foliage. The general arrangements of the presbytery have been much changed since the middle ages.
This small excrescence, chapel it can scarcely be called, probably did not rise very high, as room had to be left above it for the east window, which, with the clerestory, was needed to light the presbytery. The latter, like the choir of the present cathedral and like that of St. Alban's, had its aisles divided from it by solid walls.
"Upon the Presbytery day the youth delivered an excellent sermon upon the text appointed him, which pleased and amazed the Presbytery to a degree; only Mr Blair smelt out something in it which made him call the youth aside to the corner of the church, and thus he began with him: 'Sir, you have delivered a nate sermon, every way well pointed.
Wherefore the presbytery, amidst their many difficulties, partly noticed in the introduction, as a court of the true Presbyterian Covenanted Church of CHRIST in Scotland, constituted in the name of the LORD JESUS CHRIST, the alone KING and HEAD of his church, judicially to commemorate: Likeas, they did, and hereby do acknowledge, with the utmost gratitude, the great goodness and tender mercy of our God unto our church and land; who, in consequence of that early new covenant grant, made by JEHOVAH to his eternal SON, to give him the heathen for his inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession, caused the day spring from on high to visit us.
That the parliament at this time, or the king and parliament conjunctly, acted from the above latitudinarian principle, is further evident, from their establishing and consenting to the establishment of these two different and opposite forms of church government, Presbytery in Scotland, and Prelacy in England and Ireland, and both of them considered as agreeable to the word of God, and the only government of Christ's church in the several kingdoms, where they were espoused; which, as it is self-contradictory and absurd, so it is impossible they could ever have done this, if they had believed the divine right of either of them.
To prevent such violent enterprises on the one side or on the other, since each Church was going to be disarmed of a legislature wholly and peculiarly affected to it, and lest this new uniformity in the State should be urged as a reason and ground of ecclesiastical uniformity, the Act of Union provided that presbytery should continue the Scotch, as episcopacy the English establishment, and that this separate and mutually independent Church-government was to be considered as a part of the Union, without aiming at putting the regulation within each Church out of its own power, without putting both Churches out of the power of the State.
The applicant had first to convince the minister of his worthiness, then his name was openly propounded, and those who knew of any objection to his character, either moral or religious, were asked to give notice to the presbytery of elders. If the candidate succeeded in passing this private examination as to his fitness the following scene took place in church:
In the late dusk of summer Bernard went his way from the place where he had preached, to the presbytery of Saint Mary Magdalen, where he was to lodge that night.
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