Synods; it held the same position as the General Assembly of the Established Church of Scotland.
The Public Edicts, which treated the French Protestants as a foreign people, necessitated the erection of Assemblies for their secular affairs. Historians call them political assemblies, but that is only a descriptive phrase, and not a formal designation. They were called “Assemblies”; the mass of them were local, and the highest was called the General Assembly. When the cautionary towns were taken away from the Protestants, there was little business left for these assemblies to transact. There was still the payment of their pastors and deputies-general; the funds came formally from the Royal Treasury, but really from the Protestant people, who, having paid (Roman Catholic) tythes as citizens, were repaid by this provision for their own spiritual guides. Professor Leonce Anquez, the historian of the Political Assemblies of the Reformed of France, fixes the birth and death of those assemblies by the dates, 1573 to 1622. At their final dissolution the Pastoral Fund fell to be distributed by the National Synods which, when invested with that additional function, most closely resembled the present General Assemblies of the Free Church of Scotland.
The English refugee congregations had a special discipline as old as the days of Calvin. John à Lasco, their superintendent, was the first author of a Book of Discipline, intended for non-prelatic Protestants (older than both the Confession de foi and the Discipline Ecclesiastique promulgated by the first French National Synod at Paris in 1559). Archbishop Parker was tolerant enough to suggest in outline some rules for the ministers of the foreigners' churches. In 1560 Calvin sent the Pasteur Nicolas Des Gallars to London, and by him a Book of Discipline was drawn up, founded upon the labours of a Lasco, the French Synod, and Parker. This Discipline was issued in 1561 under the editorship of a Lasco; and copies were multiplied in manuscript, to be lodged in the various churches, to be signed by the office-bearers, and to be presented for signature to future office-bearers in all time coming.
This code may have been from time to time amended in minor details, so as to be better adapted to the circumstances of the refugees in England. A manuscript of this kind was authoritatively consigned to the Norwich congregation on 5th April 1589, space being left for the insertion of a paragraph appropriating the book to Norwich, and for the local signatures.[1]
The one unimportant difference between the refugee and the French Discipline is that four orders of ministers are described in the English Discipline — pastors, doctors, elders, deacons — the order of doctors includes Theological Professors and ordinary schoolmasters. This Discipline requires a promise to be made by each pastor, elder, and deacon on his ordination, and forms are prescribed varying according to the respective offices, except the first clause as to loyalty, which is the same in all — “item, vous promettez de garder et de maintenir (autant qu’ en vous sera) le bien et conservation de ce royaume, procurer (en ce qui vous sera possible) le paix et union de celui, et ne consentir aucunement à ce qui y pourroit contrevenir.”
The Presbyterianism of the French Church was never doubted by any of its British correspondents. King James VI. extracted letters of advice from French pastors to Scotch ministers, on the ground that they were Presbyterian brethren. When the Westminster Assembly communicated with the foreign churches, its letter, in order to give it weight with those Presbyterian communities, was (by order) signed by each of the Scottish Commissioners, the other signatures being only those of official members. In 1660 it is true that several French pastors, having a personal friendship for our mild-spoken King Charles, and having received partial and imperfect news as to the religious state of England, were favourable, on the whole, to the Act of Uniformity, and almost seemed to wish our Presbyterians to conform to Episcopacy. But the utmost that any of these reverend men could state as to their own circumstances was that they regretted that they had no diocesan Episcopacy in their church in France.
It was, however, from the department of worship that the imagination of Episcopalianism in the French Church arose. Many excellent people value the Prayer-Book as the grand feature of English Episcopacy. From the time of Edward VI. it was well known in London and Canterbury that the worship of the French Church was Calvinistic, and not liturgical in the Anglican sense. When, owing to the distance of the City Church in Threadneedle Street from their dwellings, some of the French
- ↑ This manuscript was brought to light by Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith, and inserted by her, with a descriptive narrative and notes, in the Norfolk Antiquarian Miscellany, Part III., 1879. But it is now a British Museum manuscript.
