The Magistrate, the Oath and Marriage

The magistrate. There are three positions, and it is well to distinguish them, for they are commonly confused. Westminster gives the magistrate the duty of keeping the truth and of suppressing heresy. Savoy does not take it from him: it still binds him to protect the gospel and to prevent the divulging of blasphemy and errors which subvert the faith. What it does is to set a limit: among those "holding the foundation", the magistrate may not abridge liberty on account of differences of doctrine or of worship. It is the toleration of those who are agreed in essentials, not the neutrality of the State. London, on the other hand, says nothing: it deletes the paragraph, and of the magistrate's duty towards the church not a word remains. It does keep the first two paragraphs: that God has ordained magistrates, and that it is lawful for the Christian to execute that office and to wage war upon just occasions.

Liberty of conscience. In the preceding chapter, both confessions delete the whole of paragraph IV of Westminster, the one which ends by saying that those who publish errors destructive to the peace of the church may be proceeded against "by the censures of the Church, and by the power of the civil magistrate". Savoy omits it following Parliament, and gives the reason in its preface: it was one of those "doubtful assertions, and so unsuitable to a Confession of Faith", which the Houses had thought fit to lay aside. The American Presbyterians were to remove in 1788 only the last words of the paragraph.

The oath. Savoy keeps the chapter. London shortens it, and among what it removes is the sentence which the northern Presbyterian church of the United States was to strike out in 1903: "it is a sin to refuse an oath touching anything that is good and just, being imposed by lawful authority". As then, the duty remains in the preceding paragraph, which London retains: the lawful oath, imposed by lawful authority in matters of weight, "ought to be taken". It also removes that the oath binds "although to a man's own hurt" and although made "to heretics or infidels".

Marriage. Savoy deletes the last sentence of paragraph IV, on marriage with the kindred of one's spouse, and paragraphs V and VI, on adultery and divorce. London does the same. Here too Savoy follows Parliament, which had omitted "a great part" of the chapter; and the first of those deletions is the one which the American Presbyterians were to make in 1887.

What this shows. That nothing of what the American revisers did was new. The clause on the magistrate, that on the oath and that on marriage had already fallen, one by one, in England, in the very century of the Assembly: first in the Parliament which had called it, and afterwards at the hands of men of its own theology.
But the road has degrees, and the texts allow them to be measured. Savoy still wants a magistrate who shelters the gospel and represses blasphemy; it asks liberty only for those who dissent in secondary matters, which was its own case. London no longer asks anything of the magistrate, nor attributes anything to him: it is silent. And the American text of 1788 will turn that silence into doctrine: the magistrate must not prefer any denomination. From the toleration of the brethren men passed to silence, and from silence to neutrality.
In favour of Savoy and of London it must be said that they wrote from the other side of the sword: they were themselves the dissenters whom the magistrate persecuted, and would persecute still more after 1660. That explains the change; it does not decide whether the Assembly, which cited Isaiah 49:23 and 2 Chronicles 19:8-11, read Scripture aright.