ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes how far a coherent presbyterian church existed within the larger fabric of the establishment and explores the institutions and nascent traditions of the puritan parishes. It investigates the extent to which a single reformed church order – that of the Book of Discipline and the Genevan Forme of prayers – was being covertly realized at the local, congregational level in the election and ordination of the ministry and in the conduct of discipline and worship. In progressive Bast Anglia, at least, the weightier parishioners sometimes contrived to exercise the rights which would have been theirs as elected officers in a thoroughly reformed church. Private chaplaincies in puritan families lent themselves even more readily to presbyterian practice. The preaching and catechizing which went on in numerous substantial private households, serving a ‘family’ in the widest and loosest possible sense, in effect created so many private churches, presbyterian or congregational in form and in a state of virtual separation.
