Two Interesting Documents found in the Register of the Consistory at the English Church in Amsterdam

Abstract

These twenty questions, which clear so many points of difference between Reformed and non-Separating Independent polity, as well as elucidating doctrinal issues, have hitherto been known from a copy made of them, with their orthodox Reformed, and with Hooker’s own answers, for Sir William Boswell. This copy, to be found in the British Museum, was printed as an appendix by Professor Stearns in his study of ‘Congregationalism in the Dutch Netherlands,’ and was discussed by Professor Perry Miller, among others, in his definitive ‘Orthodoxy in Massachusetts.’ In the Consistory Register of the English Reformed Church in the Begynhof in Amsterdam, is a different version. Persons familiar with the subject will know that Thomas Hooker, who had been obliged to flee to Holland in 1630, following a threatened attack by the English High Commission, was about to receive a call, though irregularly, to the ministry of this church, where John Paget had been pastor since its opening in 1607. The Amsterdam version of this document, possibly more exact than that in the Boswell Papers, does illumine some of the considerable difficulties posed by the version as printed by Stearns. A collated text of both manuscripts and of the printed version appears as an appendix to my book about the English Reformed Church in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century.