revision and amendment of the Thirty-nine Articles, and that, by way of a
commencement in this business, or specimen to Parliament of the manner in
which it might be done, they were to confine themselves at first to the
first Ten of the Articles. Accordingly, the Assembly at once addressed
themselves to this business. It was with a view to it that they first
adopted that machinery of Committees which was to be employed
subsequently, with so much effect, in all the deliberations. The Divines
of the Assembly were distributed, in the order in which their names stood
in the Ordinance calling the Assembly, into three Committees for
preparatory revision of the said Articles in such a manner that the whole
Assembly might more clearly exercise its final judgment on them; while a
fourth Committee, in which the lay-members were included, was to assist
the others by procuring the most correct copies of the text of the
Articles. To the first revising Committee, of which Dr. Burges was
appointed chairman, were entrusted the first four Articles; to the
second, of which Dr. Stanton was chairman, the fifth, sixth, and seventh
Articles; and to the third, which had Mr. Gibbon for chairman, the
eighth, ninth, and tenth.

Imagine the Assembly collectively in Henry the Seventh's Chapel, and its
Committees distributively there or in other places of meeting, busy day
after day, through the rest of the hot month of July, and then into
August, over its appointed revision of the Articles. "_I. Of Faith in
the Holy Trinity; II. Of the Word, or Son of God, which was made very
Man; III. Of the going down of Christ into Hell; IV. Of the Resurrection
of Christ; V. Of the Holy Ghost; VI. Of the Sufficiency of the Holy
Scriptures for Salvation; VII. Of the Old Testament; VIII. Of the Three
Creeds; IX. Of Original or Birth Sin; X. Of Free Will_;" imagine the
Articles under these headings discussed successively, sentence by
sentence and clause by clause, most of the sentences and clauses allowed