Platform
In Carlyle’s “Letters of Oliver Cromwell,” vol. iii, p. 89, is a passage in which Cromwell uses the word platform in the modern American sense of a creed, or theory, or declaration of principles. He charges Governor Dundas (Edinburgh Castle) and the Presbyterian ministers with “darkening and not beholding the glory of God’s wonderful dispensations in this series of His providences in England, Scotland, and Ireland, both now and formerly, through envy at instruments, and because the things did not work forth your platform, and the great God did not come down to your minds and thoughts.”