Maverick, and The Presbyterian cabal.  Dr. Robert Child.  Maverick we have already met.  From the day when the ships of the first Puritan settlers had sailed past his log fortress on Noddle’s Island, he had been their enemy; “a man of loving and curteous behaviour,” says Johnson, “very ready to entertaine strangers, yet an enemy to the reformation in hand, being strong for the lordly prelatical power.”  Vassall was not a denizen of Massachusetts, but lived in Scituate, in the colony of Plymouth, where there were no such restrictions upon the suffrage.  Child was a learned physician who after a good deal of roaming about the world had lately taken it into his head to come and see what sort of a place Massachusetts was.  Although these names were therefore not such as to lend weight to such a petition, their request would seem at first sight reasonable enough.  At a superficial glance it seems conceived in a modern spirit of liberalism.  In reality it was nothing of the sort.  In England it was just the critical moment of the struggle between Presbyterians and Independents which had come in to complicate the issues of the great civil war.  Vassall, Child, and Maverick seem to have been the leading spirits in a cabal for the establishment of Presbyterianism in New England, and in their petition they simply took advantage of the discontent of the disfranchised citizens in Massachusetts in order to put in an entering wedge.  This was thoroughly understood by the legislature of Massachusetts, and accordingly the petition was dismissed and the petitioners were roundly fined.  Just as Child was about to start for England with his grievances, the magistrates overhauled his papers and discovered a petition to the parliamentary Board of Commissioners, suggesting that Presbyterianism should be established in New England, and that a viceroy or governor-general should be appointed to rule there.  To the men of Massachusetts this last suggestion was a crowning horror.  It seemed scarcely less than treason.  The signers of this petition were the same who had signed the petition to the General Court.  They were now fined still more heavily and imprisoned for six months.  By and by they found their way, one after another, to London, while the colonists sent Edward Winslow, of Plymouth, as an advocate to thwart their schemes.  Winslow was assailed by Child’s brother in a spicy pamphlet entitled “New England’s Jonas cast up at London,” and replied after the same sort, entitling his pamphlet “New England’s Salamander discovered.”  The cabal accomplished nothing because of the decisive defeat of Presbyterianism in England.  “Pride’s Purge” settled all that.  The petition of Vassall and his friends was the occasion for the meeting of a synod of churches at Cambridge, in order to complete the organization of Congregationalism.  In 1648 the work of the synod was embodied in the famous Cambridge Platform, which adopted the Westminster Confession as its creed, carefully defined the powers of the clergy, and declared it to be the duty of magistrates to suppress heresy.  In 1649 the General Court laid this platform before the congregations; in 1651 it was adopted; and this event may be regarded as completing the theocratic organization of the Puritan commonwealth in Massachusetts. [Sidenote:  The Cambridge Platform; deaths of Winthrop and Cotton]