146 MINUTE BOOK OF THE WIRKSWORTH CLASSIS. 



brought down on them the severe raillery and scorn of the 

 Independents, who affected to be unable to see the difference 

 between the ordination of the Church and of the Presbytery. An 

 Independent pamphleteer of 1648, writing of the similarity of the 

 two rites, applies to them the well known line of Plautus, thus 

 roughly rendered : — 



" 'Tween milk and milk the likeness is not greater, 

 No egg from egg distinguished lesse in feature." 



The Wirksworth Minute Book affords proof of the pains taken 

 by that Classis in examining candidates. One was rejected, 

 notwithstanding good birth and repeated applications, for scan- 

 dalous life, two for insufficient learning, and one apparently for 

 unsound doctrine. 



We are not able to say under what precise circumstances the 

 Presbytery of one Classis was considered justified in ordaining a 

 minister who was about to take a charge outside their jurisdiction, 

 but it will be found that this was several times done by the 

 Wirksworth Classis. Ministers were ordained who purposed to 

 serve cures in the counties of Worcester, Warwick, Leicester, 

 Nottingham, Stafford, and York respectively. In several of these 

 cases the reason seems to have been either that the candidate was 

 of Derbyshire birth, or well known to one or more of the 

 Presbytery ; but in the later years, when these foreign ordinations 

 increased, it may possibly have arisen from the collapse of the 

 Classis in their own districts. 



According to the paper constitution of Presbyterian govern- 

 ment, the elders, usually termed " ruling elders," ought to have 

 considerably outnumbered, if not doubled, the ministers at the 

 classical meetings. But the keeping up of the lay element, some- 

 what contemptuously headed in this notebook as " Others," seems 

 to have been the great drawback to the effectual working of their 

 system in England. The Minute Book, at Sion College, of the 

 London Provincial Assembly, abounds in complaints of the 

 absence of a competent body of men to act as " ruling elders," 

 some of the largest churches being without any. This seems to 

 have been also a characteristic of the Wirksworth Classis. The 



