An Apologeticall Narration

Despite the book deliberately seeking a moderate, indeed "apologeticall," tone, it launched an enormous amount of printed debate that definitively split the godly community into the presbyterian and independent factions. This included a rebuttal by Adam Steuart, published in February, and a longer Antapologia by Thomas Edwards the same year. English historian Veronica Wedgwood argues that submitting the tract directly to Parliament, rather than the Westminster Assembly, was an effective way of bringing the authors' point of view to a wider public without exposing it to contest in the Assembly, where it would have faced being out-argued and they themselves would have been outnumbered. ==See also==