It is a common view that the Westminster Assembly was dominated by Scots pursuing their nationalistic goals to the disadvantage of a desperate English Parliament. But in Covenanted Uniformity in Religion , Wayne R. Spear reassesses the Assembly from the standpoint of the Scottish commissioners and their influence in the drawing up of the Form of Church Government. Spear begins by placing the Assembly in its historical setting and giving an overview of how it conducted its business. Then, following the order of the Form of Church Government, he traces each significant expression from its origin in a committee, through its debate and modification in the Assembly, to its final placement in the document. Finally, Spear evaluates the significance of this document by considering the responses it received in England and Scotland. Here we see how the Scots failed to achieve some of their most cherished goals in the Assembly debates, which demonstrates that the Assembly operated as a truly deliberative body. This book gives us a more accurate picture of the Westminster Assembly as it debated the proper structure and function of the Christian church. Table of Contents: Part 1: The Westminster Assembly in its Historical Setting 1. The Historical Background of the Westminster Assembly 2. The Organization and Operation of the Assembly 3. The Scottish Commissioners and Their Work Part 2: The Composition of the Westminster Assembly’s Form of Church Government 4. The Church and Its Officers 5. The Local Church 6. Governmental Assemblies 7. Ordination Series Description Complementing the primary source material in the Principal Documents of the Westminster Assembly series, the Studies on the Westminster Assembly provides access to classic studies that have not been reprinted and to new studies, providing some of the best existing research on the Assembly and its members.

Today, Scotland's history is frequently associated with the clarion call of political nationalism. However, in the nineteenth century the influence of history on Scottish national identity was far more ambiguous. How, then, did ideas about the past shape Scottish identity in a period when union with England was all but unquestioned? The activities of the antiquary Cosmo Innes (1798-1874) help us to address this question. Innes was a prolific editor of medieval and early modern documents relating to Scotland's parliament, legal system, burghs, universities, aristocratic families and pre-Reformation church. Yet unlike scholars today, he saw that editorial role in interventionist terms. His source editions were artificial constructs that powerfully articulated his worldview and agendas: emphasising Enlightenment-inspired narratives of social progress and institutional development. At the same time they used manuscript facsimiles and images of medieval architecture to foreground a romantic concern for the texture of past lives. Innes operated within an elite associational culture which gave him access to the leading intellectuals and politicians of the day. His representations of Scottish history therefore had significant influence and were put to work as commentaries on some of the major debates which exorcised Scotland's intelligentsia across the middle decades of the century. This analysis of Innes's work with sources, set within the intellectual context of the time and against the antiquarian activities of his contemporaries, provides a window onto the ways in which the 'national past' was perceived in Scotland during the nineteenth century. This allows us to explore how historical thinkers negotiated the apparent dichotomies between Enlightenment and Romanticism, whilst at the same time enabling a re-examination of prevailing assumptions about Scotland's supposed failure to maintain a viable national consciousness in the later 1800s.