ten thousand.  But neither of the great religious parties was satisfied. 1.  The Independents strongly objected to the intolerance of the Presbyterian scheme;[1] and though willing that it should be protected and countenanced by the state, they claimed a right to form, according to the dictates of their consciences, separate congregations for themselves.  Their complaints were received with a willing ear by the two houses, the members of which (so we are told by a Scottish divine who attended the assembly at Westminster) might be divided into four classes:  the Presbyterians, who, in number and influence, surpassed any one of the other three; the Independents, who, if few in number, were yet distinguished by the superior talents and industry of their leaders; the lawyers, who looked with jealousy on any attempt to erect an ecclesiastical power independent of the legislature; and the men of irreligious habits, who dreaded the stern and scrutinizing discipline of a Presbyterian kirk.  The two last occasionally

[Footnote 1:  Under the general name of Independents, I include, for convenience, all the different sects enumerated at the time by Edwards in his Gangraena,—­Independents, Brownists, Millenaries, Antinomians, Anabaptists, Arminians, Libertines, Familists, Enthusiasts, Seekers, Perfectists, Socinians, Arianists, Anti-Trinitarians, Anti-Scripturists, and Sceptics.—­Neal’s Puritans, ii. 251.  I observe that some of them maintained that toleration was due even to Catholics.  Baillie repeatedly notices it with feelings of horror (ii. 17, 18, 43, 61).]

served to restore the balance between the two others, and by joining with the Independents, to arrest the zeal, and neutralize the votes of the Presbyterians.[a] With their aid, Cromwell, as the organ of the discontented religionists, had obtained the appointment of a “grand committee for accommodation,” which sat four months, and concluded nothing.  Its professed object was to reconcile the two parties, by inducing the Presbyterians to recede from their lofty pretensions, and the Independents to relax something of their sectarian obstinacy.  Both were equally inflexible.  The former would admit of no innovation in the powers which Christ, according to their creed, had bestowed on the presbytery; the latter, rather than conform, expressed their readiness to suffer the penalties of the law, or to seek some other clime, where the enjoyment of civil, was combined with that of religious, freedom.[1]

2.  The discontent of the Presbyterians arose from a very different source.  They complained that the parliament sacrilegiously usurped that jurisdiction which Christ had vested exclusively in his church.  The assembly contended, that “the keys of the kingdom of heaven were committed to the officers of the church, by virtue whereof, they have power respectively to retain and remit sins, to shut the kingdom of heaven against the impenitent by censures, and to open it to the penitent by absolution.”  These claims of the divines were zealously supported by their brethren in parliament, and as fiercely opposed by all who were not of their communion.  The divines claimed for the presbyteries the right of inquiring into the private lives of individuals, and of suspending the unworthy[b]