for Religion, and this Committee having appointed a working sub-Committee of about fourteen, the sub-Committee was empowered to take steps for coming to a definition.  Naturally enough, in such a matter, the sub-Committee wanted clerical advice; and, each member of the sub-Committee having nominated one divine, there was a small Westminster Assembly over again to illuminate Parliament on the dark subject.  Dr. Owen and Dr. Goodwin were there, with Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Stephen Marshall, Mr. Vines, Mr. Manton, and others.  Mr. Richard Baxter had the honour of being one, having been asked to undertake the duty by Lord Breghill, when the venerable ex-Primate Usher had declined it; and it is from Baxter that we have the fullest account of the proceedings.  When he came to town from Kidderminster, he found the rest of the divines already busy in drawing up a list of “fundamentals of faith,” the profession of which was to be the necessary title to the toleration promised.  Knowing “how ticklish a business the enumeration of fundamentals was,” Baxter tried, he says, to stop that method, and suggested that acceptance of the Creed, the Lord’s P[r]ayer, and the Decalogue would be a sufficient test.  This did not please the others; Baxter almost lost his character for orthodoxy by his proposal; Dr. Owen, in particular, forgetful of his own past, was now bull-mad for the “fundamentals.”  They were drawn out at last, either sixteen or twenty of them in all, and handed to Parliament through the sub-Committee.  Thus illuminated, Parliament, after a debate extending over six days (Dec. 4-15, 1654), discharged its mind fully on the Toleration Question.  They resolved that there should certainly be a toleration for tender consciences outside the Established Church, but that it should not extend to “Atheism, Blasphemy, damnable Heresies to be particularly enumerated by this Parliament, Popery, Prelacy, Licentiousness or Profaneness,” nor yet to “such as shall preach, print, or avowedly maintain anything contrary to the fundamental principles of Doctrine held forth in the public profession,”—­said “fundamental principles” being the “fundamentals” of Dr. Owen and his friends, so far as the House should see fit to pass them.  They were already in print, with the Scriptural proofs, for the use of members, and the first of them was passed the same day.  It was “That the Holy Scripture is that rule of knowing God, and living unto Him, which whoso does not believe cannot be saved.”  The others would come in time.  Meanwhile it was involved in the Resolution of the House that the Protector himself should have no veto on any Bills for restraining or punishing Atheists, Blasphemers, damnable Heretics, Papists, Prelatists, or deniers of any of the forthcoming Christian fundamentals.[1]