but from the parallel passage in Mark seen to be Salome), Mary the wife of Cleopas, and Mary Magdalene." It appears that the Peschito, the most ancient and one of the most authentic versions of the New Testament, actually inserts the copulative between "mother's sister" and "Mary the wife of Alphæus," thus making them out to be two different women.

If now we take Salome to have been Christ's aunt, we see at once why John does not name her. He does not name himself, and his shrinking modesty would naturally suppress his mother's name where it would disclose his relationship to the Lord.

There are some other considerations, which would have no great weight if we had not this independent reason for regarding Salome as the aunt of our Lord, but which have a certain confirmatory weight.

One is the essential intimacy between the two sons of Zebedee, especially John, and our Lord. This, as we see from the case of Peter, by no means implies consanguinity, but consanguinity, being on other grounds probable, renders special intimacy probable. Our Lord, in his humanity, must have had a specific formation of native character. And by the laws of descent, there must have been something in the native character of his near kindred analagous to his own, which, elevated and purified by grace, may well have been the foundation of a peculiarly near friendship. It is some confirmation of this that painters, quite without knowledge of this hypothesis of relationship, appear strongly disposed to bring out a decided resemblance in countenance between our Saviour and St. John.

There is also a peculiarity in the relation of cousins, which might appear to have worked as favorably for their early discipleship, as the nearer relationship of brother worked against it. Cousins are the link between a man's immediate family and the world at large. On the one side they are his own flesh and blood, on the other they are strangers. They are near enough to be attracted towards an eminent kinsman and to identify themselves with his fame; while they are not, like brothers, so one with him in origin as to find it hard to believe that there is anything in him which is not in them. An odious, but not uninstructive parallel is found in the fact that the victory of the mission of the false prophet Mohammed was first determined by the zealous adhesion of his cousin Ali.

Another confirmation may be found in the petition of James and John that they might occupy the places of honor on his right and left hand in his kingdom. Their special intimacy might easily have prompted this request, as against the nine, independently of relationship, but hardly as against Peter. But as cousins of the Messiah, and therefore according to their as yet unspiritualized notions, princes of the blood, they might not unnaturally hope for the chief places of honor, quite consistently with deferring to Peter as the prime minister of the Messianic kingdom. But this inference becomes stronger when we turn to the more particular account in Matthew xx: 20, where it appears that the request of the two brethren was preferred through their mother. Now, if James and John were not kinsmen of Christ, their relation to him would have been immeasurably nearer than their mother's. But assuming that their request was, as appears not improbable from the above suggested reasons, founded on actual kinship, then, as the relationship if it existed came through Salome, she would stand nearer to the Lord than themselves, and might well imagine herself entitled to assume a quasi-maternal influence over him on behalf of his two cousins. This interference would be then a less authenticated form of the one or two attempts of the virgin herself to guide her son's official conduct, only that the authority, being so much less, needed to be repelled with less vigor.

We may wonder why if these two chief apostles were really first cousins of our Lord they are not somewhere mentioned as such. This is not without weight as an adversative argument. On the other hand, we must bear in mind that the prominence into which Christ's brothers, James especially, afterwards rose, might well obscure the more distaut relationship; that the high official dignity of the two sons of Zebedee, and the early check given by our Lord to any pretentions apart from this, might have still further obscured the sense of consanguinity, or at least the memory of it in the church; that James was soon martyred; and that the spirituality of John developed so far as to swallow up almost all sense of any other relation to the Lord than the one dear reminiscence that he was the disciple whom Jesus loved; and that with the development of Gentile Christendom the value which the Jewish believers for awhile put upon outward relationship to Christ soon vanished quite away. The

subsequent development of excessive veneration for Mary is a very different thing.

The uncertainty in which all such questions as these must remain, and their absolute unimportance except from an entirely subordinate point of view, is one of the most striking evidences of the fundamental distinction between Christianity, and its degenerate and clumsy imitation and depravation, Mohammedanism. Certainly, the early Jewish believers knew as much about our Lord's kindred, as the early followers of the false prophet did about his. But how evanescent were all these remembrances in the growing light of his Divine glory. Whereas Mohammed's first wife, and his uncle, and his daughter Fatima, and his cousin and son-in-law Ali, are hardly less important in the scheme of Islam than the camel driver himself. And the great schism of Shiite and Sunnite, which is in Islam even more than the schism between Papists and Protestantism in Christendom, and which, unlike that, dates back almost to its beginning, turns upon certain paltry questions as to the claim of Mohammed's descendants to the succession in the Caliphate as compared with some who wrested it from them. The difference between this schism and the two great schisms of Christendom, measures the difference between the essential earthliness and emptiness of Islam, and the divinity and fulness of Christianity.

ART. IX. THE PRESBYTERY OF WANDSWORTH, ERECTED

IN 1572.*

BY REV. PETER LORIMER, D.D.

THE YEAR 1572 was an annus mirabilis in the history of Protestantism. It was the year of the successful revolt of the Protestants of the Netherlands against the cruel tyranny of Spain, and of the foundation of Dutch independence—a grand event in the history of religious liberty, whose tercentenary was celebrated in Holland last spring with immense enthusiasm. It was the year of the Bartholomew massacre, that carnival of blood whose victims, many of them illustrious, the Protestants of France would no doubt this year have recalled to public memory, not in bootless anger, but in pious sorrow, had not their country been lying under the pall of a great recent disaster and overthrow. In Scotland, too, the same year was ever memorable, for it saw the beginning of her great struggle against the despotic imposition of Episcopacy; a battle which lasted, with few intermissions, for more than a hundred years, handed down from sire to son, and which nothing short of a national revolution at last crowned with victory. It was also the death year of John Knox, than whom, as Mr. Froude has recently remarked, "no grander figure can be found in the entire history of the Reformation in this island." His death was the passing away of "the greatest of living Scotchmen."

In England also, 1572 was a year of crisis in the history of the national church; for that was the year when Parliament was first solemnly summoned by the young giant, Puritanism, to carry out to a more satisfactory issue the great work of reformation which had only been re-begun at the accession of Elizabeth-the year of the two famous " Admonitions to Parliament," which shook with repeated shocks all the high places of the land, the palaces of the Legislature and the bishops and the Queen. It was also the year when the first steps were taken to give the Puritanism of the country an organization conformable to the Presbyterian type; a step in advance, which meant that all that had been done for fourteen years before by the Queen and the bishops to put down this reformation-power had been in vain, that this power had a future big with destiny both for a despotic crown and an oppressive church-big with promise both to the civil and to the religious liberties of the realm.

The first step taken in the organization of English Presbyterianism was the erection of the Presbytery of Wandsworth. Up till 1572 Presbyterianism in England was a church theory, an ecclesiastical programme. Then first it became a fact, an institution; in Bacon's phrase, "a germinant and springing accomplishment." And singularly enough, the only original record remaining of this significant incident has been preserved to us in a work written for the purpose of discrediting and defacing the whole move*From the British and Foreign Evangelical Review, Oct. 1872.

ment. In Dr. Bancroft's "Dangerous Positions and Proceedings, published and practised within this Island of Britain under pretence of Reformation and for the presbyterial Discipline," which appeared in 1593, we read the following brief passage:

"Whereupon-presently after the said Parliament (viz., the twentieth of November, 1572)—there was a Presbytery erected at Wandsworth, in Surrey (as it appeareth by a Bill endorsed with Mr. Field's hand, thus: The order of Wandsworth)—in which order the elder's names, eleven of them, are set down; the manner of their election is declared; the approvers of them (one Smith, of Mitcham, and Crane, of Roehampton) are mentioned; their offices and certain general rules then given unto them to be observed were likewise agreed upon and described."

This is really all that we know of the incident. The story indeed grew considerably in the hands of later writers on both sides of the question,in the hands of Heylin, Fuller, Collier, Neal and Brooks, and in this enlarged form it is still repeated, and even added to, by writers of our own times. In Neal's "History of the Puritans" it takes the following shape: "There being no further prospect of a public reformation by the Legislature, some of the leading Puritans agreed to attempt it in a more private way; for this purpose they erected a Presbytery at Wandsworth, a village four miles from the city, conveniently situated for the London brethren, as standing on the banks of the river of Thames. The heads of the Association were Mr. Field, lecturer of Wandsworth, Mr. Smith, of Mitcham, Mr. Crane, of Roehampton, Mr. Wilcox, Standen, Jackson, Bonham, Saintloe, and Edmonds, to whom afterwards were joined Mr. Travers, Charke, Barber, Gardiner, Crook, Egerton aud a number of very considerable laymen. On the 20th of November, eleven elders were chosen, and their offices described in a register entitled, "The Orders of Wandsworth. This was the first Presbyterian Church in England."

In Marsden's " History of the Early Puritans "* the story is developed still farther:

"In 1572 a Presbyterian Church was formed and a meeting-house erected at Wandsworth, in Surrey. Field, the lecturer of Wandsworth, was its first minister; and several names of consideration with the Puritans, including those of Travers and Wilcox, were amongst its founders. The step was a decisive and, in all the circumstances, a daring one. The Court resided in the adjoining parish of Richmond, and would not fail to regard the proceeding with indignation; while the river Thames, on the banks of which Wandsworth stands, and which was at that time the highway of communication even for the higher classes of society, brought it under the immediate observation of the metropolis. The Bishop of London gave information to the Government, and the Queen issued a proclamation enjoining compliance with the Act of Uniformity. The Conventicle-for by this obnoxious term such assemblages were now designated-was immediately suppressed, though after a while it reappeared; and in a retired court-yard in this suburban village there yet stands a meeting-house, the representative of the modest structure which once give note to England that a division had taken place among her sons, which, alas! was never to be healed.

Such are the successive amplifications which the account first given by

2d Edition. 1853.