the legal establishment, charging them with subscribing "The Confession of Faith as that of the nation, but not their own." The charge was perfectly true; and the Clergy were quite consistent in their course, which was also in accordance with the views of the Government, who only called upon them to submit to Presbytery, as the legal establishment. King William was therefore compelled to interpose to check the Presbyterians.[1] Had a disclaimer of Episcopacy been required, not one Episcopal Clergyman would have remained within the establishment. William wished to embrace all, while the Presbyterians were anxious to exclude all. "He disobliged the Presbyterians (the only party on whom he could rely in Scotland) to gratify," says the writer just quoted, "the Prelatists, in forbearing to punish those who had forfeited their lives by overturning the constitution of government in the late reigns: nay, and that which was more, advanced some of them to the highest places of power and trust, while he turned out Presbyterians who ventured all for him, and were steadfast to him. He disobliged the Presbyterians by ordering the General Assembly to admit the Episcopal Clergy on such terms as the Parliament have thought fit to refuse, and then by dissolving them for their declining it."[2] Thus is it avowed, that the Presbyterians would have had execution done upon
- ↑ Birch's Life of Tillotson, 310, 311, 312. "This was a strain of moderation that the Presbyterians were not easily brought to. A subscription that owned Presbytery to be the only legal government of that Church, without owning any divine right in it, was far below their usual pretensions. And this act vested the King with an authority very like that which they used to condemn as Erastianism." Tindal, p. 246.
- ↑ Scots Episcopal Innocence, pp. 9, 10.
