29 that the House appointed a Committee of twenty-nine on the whole subject of Religion and Church affairs--Annesley, Ashley Cooper, Prynne, and Sir Samuel Luke (i.e.Butler's Presbyterian "Sir Hudibras") being of the number; and on the 2nd of March, on report from this Committee, the Westminster Assembly's Confession of Faith, as it had been under discussion in the Long Parliament in 1646 (Vol.III.p.

512), was again brought before the House, and passed bodily at once, with the exception of chapter 30, "_Of Church Censures_," and chapter 31, "_Of Synods and Councils_"-- which two chapters it was thought as well to keep still in Committee.

The same day there were other resolutions of a Presbyterian tenor.

But the climax was on March 5, in this form: "_Ordered_, That the SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT be printed and published, and set up and forthwith read in every church, and also read once a year according to former Act of Parliament, and that the said SOLEMN LEAGUE AND COVENANT be also set up in this House." Thus, when the bones of Alexander Henderson had been for more than thirteen years in their tomb in Grey Friars churchyard in Edinburgh, was the great document which he had drafted in that city in August 1643, as a bond of religious union for the Three Kingdoms, and only the first fortunes of which he had lived to see, resuscitated in all its glory.

What more could Presbyterianism desire?
That nothing might be wanting, however, there followed, on the 14th of March, a Bill "for approbation and admittance of ministers to public benefices and lectures," one of the clauses of which prescribed means for the immediate division of all the counties of England and Wales into classical Presbyteries, according to those former Presbyterianizing ordinances of the Long Parliament which had never been carried into effect save in London and Lancashire.