That that the bedrock of alternative English ecclesiological thought among the godly ministers was Amesian in form, we are led to ask a question that would seem strange to those who have assumed the normative content of ecclesiological opposition to be Presbyterian: where were the English Presbyterians before 1643? Here it is necessary to reiterate that, despite the individuals discussed in the previous two chapters, many godly ministers, and probably the majority, regarded church-government issues as superfluous, as a divisive waste of energy or as questions of a secondary nature. Indeed, one of the lessons of the 1640s was that episcopacy was not an institution unanimously reviled as Antichristian, and if the middling sorts who put their names to petitions in favour of the bishops could distinguish between the office and the incumbent, and between Laudian prelacy and old-fashioned preaching bishops, so too could their ministers, and many of those ministers would be regarded as godly. Moreover, before the civil war many ministers who might have been sympathetic to questions of ecclesiology and the ceremonies were put off by the manner of these disputes. Thomas Goodwin admitted that