preliminary, the sanction of the kirk.  It was useless to reply that this was a civil, and not a religious treaty.  The Scots rejoined, that the two houses had always announced the reformation of religion as the chief of their objects; that they had repeatedly expressed their wish of “a nearer union of both churches;” and that, in their last letters to the Assembly, they had requested the members to aid them with their prayers and influence, to consult with their commissioners, and to send some Scottish ministers to join the English divines assembled at Westminster.[1] Under these circumstances, Vane and his colleagues could not refuse to admit a deputation from the Assembly, with Henderson the moderator at its head.  He submitted to their consideration the form of a “solemn league and covenant” which should bind the two nations to prosecute the public incendiaries, to preserve the king’s life and authority in defence of the true religion and the liberties of both kingdoms, to extirpate popery, prelacy, heresy, schism, and profaneness, and to establish a conformity of doctrine, discipline, and church government throughout the island.  This last clause alarmed the commissioners.  They knew that, though the majority of the parliamentarians inclined to the Presbyterian tenets, there existed among them a numerous and most active party (and of these Vane himself was among the most distinguished) who deemed all ecclesiastical authority an invasion of the rights of conscience; and they saw that, to introduce an obligation so repugnant to the principles of the latter, would be to provoke an open rupture, and to marshal the two sects in hostile array against each other.  But the zeal of the

[Footnote 1:  Journals, vi. 140.]

Scottish theologians was inexorable; they refused to admit any opening to the toleration of the Independents; and it was with difficulty that they were at last persuaded to intrust the working of the article to two or three individuals of known and approved orthodoxy.  By these it was presented in a new and less objectionable form, clothed in such happy ambiguity of language, as to suit the principles and views of all parties.  It provided that the kirk should be preserved in its existing purity, and the church of England “be reformed according to the word of God” (which the Independents would interpret in their own sense), and “after the example of the best reformed churches,” among which the Scots could not doubt that theirs was entitled to the first place.  In this shape, Henderson, with an appropriate preface, laid[a] the league and covenant before the Assembly; several speakers, admitted into the secret, commended it in terms of the highest praise, and it was immediately approved, without one dissentient voice.[1]