The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1 - Thomas Babington Macaulay (novel books to read TXT) 📗

who had

stood before Bonner had passed away, a change took place in the

feeling of the Anglican clergy. Their hostility to the Roman

Catholic doctrine and discipline was considerably mitigated.

Their dislike of the Puritans, on the other hand, increased

daily. The controversies which had from the beginning divided the

Protestant party took such a form as made reconciliation

hopeless; and new controversies of still greater importance were

added to the old subjects of dispute.


The founders of the Anglican Church had retained episcopacy as an

ancient, a decent, and a convenient ecclesiastical polity, but

had not declared that form of church government to be of divine

institution. We have already seen how low an estimate Cranmer had

formed of the office of a Bishop. In the reign of Elizabeth,

Jewel, Cooper, Whitgift, and other eminent doctors defended

prelacy, as innocent, as useful, as what the state might lawfully

establish, as what, when established by the state, was entitled

to the respect of every citizen. But they never denied that a

Christian community without a Bishop might be a pure Church.6 On

the contrary, they regarded the Protestants of the Continent as

of the same household of faith with themselves. Englishmen in

England were indeed bound to acknowledge the authority of the

Bishop, as they were bound to acknowledge the authority of the

Sheriff and of the Coroner: but the obligation was purely local.

An English churchman, nay even an English prelate, if he went to

Holland, conformed without scruple to the established religion of

Holland. Abroad the ambassadors of Elizabeth and James went in

state to the very worship which Elizabeth and James persecuted at

home, and carefully abstained from decorating their private

chapels after the Anglican fashion, lest scandal should be given

to weaker brethren. An instrument is still extant by which the

Primate of all England, in the year 1582, authorised a Scotch

minister, ordained, according to the laudable forms of the Scotch

Church, by the Synod of East Lothian, to preach and administer

the sacraments in any part of the province of Canterbury.7 In the

year 1603, the Convocation solemnly recognised the Church of

Scotland, a Church in which episcopal control and episcopal

ordination were then unknown, as a branch of the Holy Catholic

Church of Christ.8 It was even held that Presbyterian ministers

were entitled to place and voice in oecumenical councils. When

the States General of the United Provinces convoked at Dort a

synod of doctors not episcopally ordained, an English Bishop and

an English Dean, commissioned by the head of the English Church,

sate with those doctors, preached to them, and voted with them on

the gravest questions of theology.9 Nay, many English benefices

were held by divines who had been admitted to the ministry in the

Calvinistic form used on the Continent; nor was reordination by a

Bishop in such cases then thought necessary, or even lawful.10


But a new race of divines was already rising in the Church of

England. In their view the episcopal office was essential to the

welfare of a Christian society and to the efficacy of the most

solemn ordinances of religion. To that office belonged certain

high and sacred privileges, which no human power could give or

take away. A church might as well be without the doctrine of the

Trinity, or the doctrine of the Incarnation, as without the

apostolical orders; and the Church of Rome, which, in the midst

of all her corruptions, had retained the apostolical orders, was

nearer to primitive purity than those reformed societies which

had rashly set up, in opposition to the divine model, a system

invented by men.


In the days of Edward the Sixth and of Elizabeth, the defenders

of the Anglican ritual had generally contented themselves with

saying that it might be used without sin, and that, therefore,

none but a perverse and undutiful subject would refuse to use it

when enjoined to do so by the magistrate. Now, however, that

rising party which claimed for the polity of the Church a

celestial origin began to ascribe to her services a new dignity

and importance. It was hinted that, if the established worship

had any fault, that fault was extreme simplicity, and that the

Reformers had, in the heat of their quarrel with Rome, abolished

many ancient ceremonies which might with advantage have been

retained. Days and places were again held in mysterious

veneration. Some practices which had long been disused, and which

were commonly regarded as superstitious mummeries, were revived.

Paintings and carvings, which had escaped the fury of the first

generation of Protestants, became the objects of a respect such

as to many seemed idolatrous.


No part of the system of the old Church had been more detested by

the Reformers than the honour paid to celibacy. They held that

the doctrine of Rome on this subject had been prophetically

condemned by the apostle Paul, as a doctrine of devils; and they

dwelt much on the crimes and scandals which seemed to prove the

justice of this awful denunciation. Luther had evinced his own

opinion in the clearest manner, by espousing a nun. Some of the

most illustrious bishops and priests who had died by fire during

the reign of Mary had left wives and children. Now, however, it

began to be rumoured that the old monastic spirit had reappeared

in the Church of England; that there was in high quarters a

prejudice against married priests; that even laymen, who called

themselves Protestants, had made resolutions of celibacy which

almost amounted to vows; nay, that a minister of the established

religion had set up a nunnery, in which the psalms were chaunted

at midnight, by a company of virgins dedicated to God.11


Nor was this all. A class of questions, as to which the founders

of the Anglican Church and the first generation of Puritans had

differed little or not at all, began to furnish matter for fierce

disputes. The controversies which had divided the Protestant body

in its infancy had related almost exclusively to Church

government and to ceremonies. There had been no serious quarrel

between the contending parties on points of metaphysical

theology. The doctrines held by the chiefs of the hierarchy

touching original sin, faith, grace, predestination, and

election, were those which are popularly called Calvinistic.

Towards the close of Elizabeth's reign her favourite prelate,

Archbishop Whitgift, drew up, in concert with the Bishop of

London and other theologians, the celebrated instrument known by

the name of the Lambeth Articles. In that instrument the most

startling of the Calvinistic doctrines are affirmed with a

distinctness which would shock many who, in our age, are reputed

Calvinists. One clergyman, who took the opposite side, and spoke

harshly of Calvin, was arraigned for his presumption by the

University of Cambridge, and escaped punishment only by

expressing his firm belief in the tenets of reprobation and final

perseverance, and his sorrow for the offence which he had given

to pious men by reflecting on the great French reformer. The

school of divinity of which Hooker was the chief occupies a

middle place between the school of Cranmer and the school of

Laud; and Hooker has, in modern times, been claimed by the

Arminians as an ally. Yet Hooker pronounced Calvin to have been a

man superior in wisdom to any other divine that France had

produced, a man to whom thousands were indebted for the knowledge

of divine truth, but who was himself indebted to God alone. When

the Arminian controversy arose in Holland, the English government

and the English Church lent strong support to the Calvinistic

party; nor is the English name altogether free from the stain

which has been left on that party by the imprisonment of Grocius

and the judicial murder of Barneveldt.


But, even before the meeting of the Dutch synod, that part of the

Anglican clergy which was peculiarly hostile to the Calvinistic

Church government and to the Calvinistic worship had begun to

regard with dislike the Calvinistic metaphysics; and this feeling

was very naturally strengthened by the gross injustice,

insolence, and cruelty of the party which was prevalent at Dort.

The Arminian doctrine, a doctrine less austerely logical than

that of the early Reformers, but more agreeable to the popular

notions of the divine justice and benevolence, spread fast and

wide. The infection soon reached the court. Opinions which at the

time of the accession of James, no clergyman could have avowed

without imminent risk of being stripped of his gown, were now the

best title to preferment. A divine of that age, who was asked by

a simple country gentleman what the Arminians held, answered,

with as much truth as wit, that they held all the best bishoprics

and deaneries in England.


While the majority of the Anglican clergy quitted, in one

direction, the position which they had originally occupied, the

majority of the Puritan body departed, in a direction

diametrically opposite, from the principles and practices of

their fathers. The persecution which the separatists had

undergone had been severe enough to irritate, but not severe

enough to destroy. They had been, not tamed into submission, but

baited into savageness and stubborness. After the fashion of

oppressed sects, they mistook their own vindictive feelings for

emotions of piety, encouraged in themselves by reading and

meditation, a disposition to brood over their wrongs, and, when

they had worked themselves up into hating their enemies, imagined

that they were only hating the enemies of heaven. In the New

Testament there was little indeed which, even when perverted by

the most disingenuous exposition, could seem to countenance the

indulgence of malevolent passions. But the Old Testament

contained the history of a race selected by God to be witnesses

of his unity and ministers of his vengeance, and specially

commanded by him to do many things which, if done without his

special command, would have been atrocious crimes. In such a

history it was not difficult for fierce and gloomy spirits to

find much that might be distorted to suit their wishes. The

extreme Puritans therefore began to feel for the Old Testament a

preference, which, perhaps, they did not distinctly avow even to

themselves; but which showed itself in all their sentiments and

habits. They paid to the Hebrew language a respect which they

refused to that tongue in which the discourses of Jesus and the

epistles of Paul have come down to us. They baptized their

children by the names, not of Christian saints, but of Hebrew

patriarchs and warriors. In defiance of the express and

reiterated declarations of Luther and Calvin, they turned the

weekly festival by which the Church had, from the primitive

times, commemorated the resurrection of her Lord, into a Jewish

Sabbath. They sought for principles of jurisprudence in the

Mosaic law, and for precedents to guide their ordinary conduct in