A large proportion of the proceedings of the House and the Council may be described as simply a re-establishment of Presbyterianism.  The secluded members being Presbyterians to a man, there was at once an enthusiastic recollection of the edicts of the Long Parliament between 1643 and 1648, setting up Presbytery as the national Religion, with a determination to revert in detail to those symbols and forms of the Presbyterian system which the triumph of Independency had set aside during the Commonwealth, and which had been allowed only partially, and side by side with their contraries, in the broad Church-Establishment of the Protectorate.  The unanimity and rapidity of the House in their votes in this direction must have alarmed the Independents and Sectaries.  It was on Feb. 29 that the House appointed a Committee of twenty-nine on the whole subject of Religion and Church affairs—­Annesley, Ashley Cooper, Prynne, and Sir Samuel Luke (i.e.  Butler’s Presbyterian “Sir Hudibras”) being of the number; and on the 2nd of March, on report from this Committee, the Westminster Assembly’s Confession of Faith, as it had been under discussion in the Long Parliament in 1646 (Vol.  III. p. 512), was again brought before the House, and passed bodily at once, with the exception of chapter 30, “Of Church Censures,” and chapter 31, “Of Synods and Councils”—­which two chapters it was thought as well to keep still in Committee.  The same day there were other resolutions of a Presbyterian tenor.  But the climax was on March 5, in this form:  “Ordered, That the SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT be printed and published, and set up and forthwith read in every church, and also read once a year according to former Act of Parliament, and that the said SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT be also set up in this House.”  Thus, when the bones of Alexander Henderson had been for more than thirteen years in their tomb in Grey Friars churchyard in Edinburgh, was the great document which he had drafted in that city in August 1643, as a bond of religious union for the Three Kingdoms, and only the first fortunes of which he had lived to see, resuscitated in all its glory.  What more could Presbyterianism desire?  That nothing might be wanting, however, there followed, on the 14th of March, a Bill “for approbation and admittance of ministers to public benefices and lectures,” one of the clauses of which prescribed means for the immediate division of all the counties of England and Wales into classical Presbyteries, according to those former Presbyterianizing ordinances of the Long Parliament which had never been carried into effect save in London and Lancashire.  The Universities were to be constituted into presbyteries or inserted into such; and the whole of South Britain was to be patterned ecclesiastically at last in that exact resemblance to North Britain which had been the ideal before Independency burst in.  What measures of “liberty for consciences truly tender” might be conceded did not yet appear.  Anabaptists, Quakers, Fifth Monarchy enthusiasts, and Monk’s “Fanatics” generally, might tremble; and even moderate and orthodox Independents might foresee difficulty In retaining their livings in the State Church.  Indeed Owen was already (March 13) displaced from his Deanery of Christ Church, Oxford, by a vote of the House recognising a prior claim of Dr. Reynolds to that post.[1]