How the Confession Was Made
prosecuting this purpose two tasks present themselves. One concerns the modes of procedure of the Assembly in framing the Confession; the other the course of the debates by which it was beaten out. We shall attempt to give some account of both matters. The latter offers so wide a field, however, that we shall be constrained to deal with it by sample - and, for reasons which will readily suggest themselves at the present juncture, we shall select the third chapter of the Confession as the sample to be dealt with. We shall therefore try first to trace the formal procedure of the Assembly in framing the whole
Confession, and to obtain some adequate conception of the labor and time that was expended on it; and then, taking up the third chapter, we shall essay to reconstruct as fully as may be a picture of the actual work of the Assembly in producing it.2
I. HOW THE CONFESSION WAS MADE
The amount of time consumed directly on the preparation of the Confession of Faith was certainly very great. But even this does not completely represent the pains expended on this task. To estimate that fairly, there should also be taken into account the time and care given formally to other subjects, which yet necessarily conduced indirectly to the perfecting of the final statement of doctrine. Nearly all the labors of the body, from its coming together on July 1, 1643 till the completion of the Shorter Catechism on April 12, 1648, may without exaggeration be said to have had a doctrinal side; and much time was spent in direct doctrinal discussion. None of this discussion that was precedent to or contemporary with the formulation of the propositions incorporated into the Confession was lost labor with respect to it. There were in particular three or four of the tasks of the Assembly, however, which bore so immediately on its preparation for framing the Confession that they deserve especial mention in this connection.
Among these the first in time to occupy its attention was the revision of the Thirty-nine Articles to which it was set on first coming together.3 This was the main work of the Assembly from the 8th of
July to the 12th of October, 1643, and it necessarily led to a somewhat thorough review, at the very outset of its labors, of the doctrines of God and the Trinity, the Person and Work of Christ, the Scriptures and Rule of Faith, Original Sin and the Freedom of the Will, Justification and Sanctification - the main topics on which the first sixteen Articles touch. Lightfoot's "Journal" contains very little record of the debates that were held in the course of this revision,4 and we should perhaps be in danger of underestimating their reach and thoroughness, had not some fuller intimation of them been preserved in the manuscript Minutes and some specimens of their nature in the published speeches of Dr. Featley. It is evident that very careful and thoroughgoing work was done, of which the text of the revised Articles themselves gives but meager suggestion. All this told afterward on the formulation of these same topics in the Confession of Faith. "The keen and lengthened debates," remarks Dr. Mitchell,
"which occurred in the discussions on these Articles could not fail to prepare the way for a more summary mode of procedure in connection with the Confession of Faith. The proceedings then were more summary, or at least more summarily recorded, just because the previous discussions on the more important doctrines of the Protestant system, and especially on that of Justification by Faith, had been thorough and exhaustive, and pretty fully recorded."5 There does not even lack evidence that in framing the very language of the Confession, regard was had to the minutiæ of the work done on this former occasion. Now and again little points of phraseology, for example, are taken over into the Confessional statements from the revised Articles,6 such as serve to show that the Divines kept their former labors fully in mind in the prosecution of their later, and were perfecting their work in full view of all that had previously been done.7
Of far less importance, but perhaps worth mentioning in this connection, was the work done by the Assembly in the spring of 1645, in defining for the House of Commons "the particulars of that ignorance and scandal for which persons should be excluded from
the sacrament."8 At this time, also, though in a more summary manner, the Assembly had occasion, prior to its entrance on the actual preparation of the Confession, to review in a systematic exhibit all the chief topics of a dogmatic system.9
Many topics which touched on the subjects treated in parallel portions of the Confession were also debated in the preparation of the Form of Government; and, we may be sure, this was not without consciousness on the part of the debaters that their investigations would bear double fruit. We meet, for example, on May 6, 1645, before any part of the Confession had come before the Assembly, a note like this: "Debate whether to bring this under the head of government or a Confession of Faith." And accordingly the proposition thus debated was in substance actually incorporated into the subsequently framed Confession.10 Similarly the long debates on the jus divinum cannot fail to have borne fruit both for the Government and for such chapters of the Confession as that on "The Church and Church Censures," then in process of framing.
Finally the labors of the Assembly in preparing its Catechism, so far as they were carried on before the Confession left its hands, were of course of use to it in preparing the Confession also. In some sense, these labors began indeed as early as December, 1643: but the matter incorporated into the Catechism does not seem to have come before the Assembly itself earlier than September 14, 1646, from which date until January 4, 1647, the substance of the original Catechism was reported as far as that project was prosecuted by the Assembly.11
During this period the Assembly was in the process of its review of the text of the Confession, and had reached a portion of it for which the debates upon the Catechism could afford little or no aid.12 The scrutiny of the substance of doctrine for the Catechism therefore could serve as a help in the formulation of the Confession only in so far as the members of the Committee at work on the Catechism were moulding their opinions by it. In the general Assembly the influence was the other way about. In fact, Baillie tells us that on the reporting