ut to candidates for the ministry at their
ordination, need hesitate to put his name to that which in 1647 was
received as "in nothing contrary" to the former, and held its place
alongside of it even after the restoration of Charles II., and under the
episcopal _regime_.[134] Most assuredly at least no one need hesitate to
do so who would have put his name to that Confession which was drawn up
in the time of the first episcopacy,[135] and which is quite as
distinctively Calvinistic as the Westminster Confession, while it
ventures incidentally to determine some points the Westminster divines
have wisely left undetermined.[136] The old Confession can advance no
claim to the terse English style, the logical accuracy, the judicial
calmness, and intimate acquaintance with early patristic theology which
characterise that mature product of the faith and thought of the more
learned Puritans of the south. I am not ashamed to avow that it has long
appeared to me that there is somewhat to be said in favour of the
opinion that Scottish presbyterianism gained quite as much as, nay, more
than, it lost, by being brought into contact with the broader, richer,
and decidedly more catholic spirit of the south, and adding to its
earlier symbolical books those which it still holds in common with
almost all the orthodox presbyterians of the Anglo-Saxon race. No one
who will take the trouble to read the report of the discussion on
Arminianism in the Scottish General Assembly of 1638[137] will, I am
sure, be so bold as to affirm that the type of theology then prevalent
among Scottish ministers was in any material respect different from that
which was set forth in the Confession of 1647, and which has never
since, either under episcopal or presbyterian _regime_, been set aside
in the National Church. The teaching of the latest of our symbolical
books imposes nothing in regard to the doctrines known as
Calvinistic[138] but what is explicitly contained in or fairly deducible
from the earliest Confession drawn up for the English church at Geneva,
of which Knox was pastor, and adopted (along with the larger one on
which I have been commenting) at the beginning of the Reformation in
Scotland, and printed in Scotch psalm-books[139] as late as 1638, in
which it is asserted "which church is not seene to man's eye but only
knowne to God, who of the lost sonnes of Adam hath ordained some as
vessels of wrath to damnation, and hath chosen others as vessels o