[Footnote 1:  Baxter, 74; Wood’s Ath.  IV. 319; Godwin, IV. 40-41.]

Distinct from the County Committees of Ejectors, and forming the other great constitutional power in Cromwell’s Church-Establishment, was the Central or London Committee of the Thirty-eight Triers (Vol.  IV. p. 571).  It was their duty to examine “all candidates for the public ministry,” i.e. all persons presented to livings by the patrons of the same, and pass only those that were fit.  Baxter’s report of the work of these Triers, as done either by themselves in conclave, or by Sub-commissioners for them in the counties, is the more remarkable because he disowned the authority under which the Triers acted and was in controversy with most of them.  “Though their authority was null,” he says, “and though some few over-busy and over-rigid Independents among them, were too severe against all that were Arminians, and too particular in inquiring after evidences of sanctification in those whom they examined, and somewhat too lax in their admission of unlearned and erroneous men that favoured Antinomianism or Anabaptism, yet, to give them their due, they did abundance of good to the Church.  They saved many a congregation from ignorant, ungodly, drunken teachers.  That sort of men that intended no more in the ministry than to say a sermon as readers say their common prayers, and so patch up a few good words together to talk the people asleep with on Sunday, and all the rest of the week go with them to the ale-house and harden them in sin; and that sort of ministers that either preached against a holy life, or preached as men that never were acquainted with it; all those that used the ministry but as a common trade to live by, and were never likely to convert a soul:—­all these they usually rejected, and in their stead admitted of any that were able serious preachers, and lived a godly life, of what tolerable opinion soever they were.  So that, though they were many of them somewhat partial for the Independents, Separatists, Fifth Monarchy men, and Anabaptists, and against the Prelatists and Arminians, yet so great was the benefit above the hurt which they brought to the Church that many thousands of souls blessed God for the faithful ministers whom they let in.”  Royalist writers after the Restoration give, of course, a different picture.  “Ignorant, bold, canting fellows,” they say, “laics, mechanics, and pedlars,” were brought into the Church by Cromwell’s Triers.  One may, in the main, trust Baxter.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Baxter, 72; Noal, IV. 102-109.]

Cromwell’s Established Church of England and Wales may now be imaged with tolerable accuracy.  It contained two patches of completed Presbyterian organization, one in London and the other in Lancashire.  The system of Presbyteries or Classes, with half-yearly Provincial Assemblies, which had been set up by the Long Parliament in these two districts, remained undisturbed.  Both in London and in Lancashire, however, the system