Part III. The English Church and the Systems Which Divide It

Chapter I. How Far This Subject Is Connected with Those Previously Discussed

Are these principles applicable to our circumstances as Englishmen? If not, we may be sure that there is some flaw in them which we have not yet detected. If they are, the question how to apply them must be, above all others, important to us.

I think the young English ecclesiastical student is very apt to be perplexed with questions of this kind. ‘Is our National Church, as I have often been told it is, the best in the world? Supposing it is not, why may I not go in search of a better! It is easy to talk of acquiescence in the state which Providence has assigned us. But surely there are circumstances in which a Christian must regard acquiescence as a sin. How do I know that mine are not these circumstances?’

Now were the principles which have seemed to prove themselves to us in other cases appropriate to this one, the reader will perceive at once that there is a fallacy in the statement of these questions. We have maintained that there is a spiritual and universal society in the world: that there are also national societies in the world: that the Universal Society and the National Society cannot, according to the scheme of Providence, be separated from each other, that when they are brought into conjunction, that form of character which is intended for each nation is gradually developed in it by means of the spiritual body. Can we then be called upon to prove either—(1), that there is some constitution for the Universal Society as it exists in England, which does not belong to it elsewhere, and which makes it better here than elsewhere; or (2), that the principles which unite the Universal Society with the National Society among us are not the same principles which unite it elsewhere, and that we are better for this difference; or (3), that what is peculiarly our National character, ought to be the character of every other nation? Evidently, no one who has any real affection for his Church or his land, will put forth such claims as these on its behalf. He will inquire whether it does or does not recognize that constitution which belongs to all mankind; whether this constitution be or be not so recognized here, as to be compatible with the distinct National Constitution; what character it is which is intended for Englishmen; how that character may be realised in its perfection, or depraved. But putting the inquiry into this form, one does not see what acquiescence can be demanded of us, which is inconsistent with the position of militant Christians. Have we lost that Universal Constitution or any element of it? We must labour by all means to recover it. Have we lost our distinct National position? We must seek it again. Are we living inconsistently with the one or the other? We must inquire where the evil is, and commence at once the work of personal reformation. The subject then upon which I propose now to enter will divide itself in the way which I have indicated. As we take for granted the previous steps of our discussion, it will not, I hope, occupy us long.

Section I. Do the Signs or a Universal and Spiritual Constitution Exist in England?

There is no difficulty in giving a direct answer to this question. Supposing these signs to be Baptism, the Creeds, Forms of Worship, the Eucharist, the Ministerial Orders, the Scriptures, no one will deny that a society has existed in England for the last twelve hundred years, of which these are constituent elements. Under all changes in the outward circumstances of the country, in its national policy, in its religious opinions, a body has dwelt in this land, which has acknowledged not one or two but all of these signs, which has acknowledged them as the conditions of its own subsistence.

But is this the only point to be considered? Ought we not to inquire whether the same import has in all times, or what import has at any particular time been attached to these signs, by the body which acknowledged them? And again, may there not be two bodies existing at the same time in this country, differing with each other, and yet both acknowledging all these signs? In that case how are we to determine which does and which does not represent the Universal Society?

I. In reference to the first question I answer, If you mean that I am to take the votes of the members of the English Church now, or at any period since it was established, for the purpose of ascertaining what the majority think or have thought about any or all of these signs, I should decline the task, not merely on the ground of its impossibility, but because, if it were possible, I should be violating all the principles which I have put forward in this book, by undertaking it. I have said, that the members of a Church will be continually losing sight of the grounds of the society to which they belong, and that permanent institutions are given us for the purpose of witnessing against our tendencies to degeneracy, and of enabling us to obtain, in each successive age, a clearer view of the Divine purpose and order. On the same grounds, I must protest against any attempt to ascertain the principles of the English Church, by comparing or balancing the opinions of its most eminent writers. For I have urged, that permanent creeds and institutions are our preservatives against the particular judgments and prepossessions of these writers. But if there be among these signs any one which has so far a peculiar character, is so far distinctively English, that it may be taken as expressive of the mind of the English Church itself, by that I am most willing it shall be tried. Now a Liturgy is of this kind. I have shewn how remarkably it is the sign of a universal society. Yet it is equally true that each nation has always had its own Liturgies. To this, therefore, there is a fair appeal. But how shall the appeal be made? Why may I not read my own opinions into the Liturgy as well as into any other book? Undoubtedly I may. And therefore, the fairer way of getting at its meaning is to receive it from others, especially from those who have attacked it. Let us try this course.

1. Again and again the English Dissenters have complained of our formularies, because they assert in what seems to them such plain and direct language, so solemnly, so habitually, the principle that a baptized man is to regard himself as regenerate, a child of God, an heir of the blessings of the New Covenant. ‘It is idle,’ say these Dissenters, ’to pretend that by leaving out a few words in your form of baptism, you would remove this dreadful plague-spot from your Church. Supposing that were possible, think what a monstrous delusion you have been propagating in such solemn moments for so many generations. What, thrust out such words privily in this nineteenth century! ought to be extirpated amidst groans and confessions of sin, for having mocked God and ruined the souls of men. But if you did thrust out the words, the spirit of them goes through all your other services. You tell the same story to the children whom you are catechising: you declare to them that they are members of Christ and children of God. Nay, every confession and every prayer in which you call upon adults old in sin to engage, turns upon the same principle. You invite them to confess and to pray, as if they were children of God, and as if the Spirit were still with them.

That these charges are constantly preferred against us everyone knows. I ask, are they not true? Has any apologist for the Liturgy, who agreed with the Dissenters in their theological principle, been able to refute them? And is it not very painful to think that we should be using equivocations and double meanings, at a time when we are professing to address the most awful prayers to Him who is Truth? I may affirm then, not from any conclusions of my own, but on the authority of those who are most opposed to me, that the idea of Baptismal Regeneration is the idea of our Liturgy.

But is this connected with the idea of an opus operatum? I think the question has already been answered. The Dissenter perceives, everyone who thinks perceives, that the whole of our Liturgy is constructed upon the principle that the men who engage in it have not lost their baptismal privileges; that the sin which they confess is the sin of not having owned God as their Father, of not having remembered His covenant, and therefore, of not having walked in His ways; that they ask to be restored to the enjoyment of a position with which their lives need not have been and have been at variance; in one word, that the sacrament is not believed to have conferred on men a temporary blessing, but to have admitted them into a permanent state, which is at all times theirs, which they are bound at all times to claim, and by which they will be judged.

I know that we have apologists who can defend us from this imputation as well as the other, by dint of ingenious special pleading. They say, ‘All this language presumes the existence of discipline; we have undoubtedly lost our discipline, but we are not therefore to lose our prayers.’ How, not to lose our prayers? We had better lose anything than go on in direct mockery of God. If the want of discipline makes the prayers false, if there are not half a dozen persons in any congregation who would dare to say they have not lost their baptismal purity; and if those nine or ten be the very persons, who one may be sure cannot join in these prayers, or in any prayer but that of the Pharisee, how can we have courage to practise such profaneness, because, at some time or other, we hope to get a discipline which shall cut off the majority of those who now call themselves Churchmen? But does our Liturgy give the slightest sanction to the notion, that the most complete restoration of discipline would make these prayers more true than they are now? Why then in her Commination Service does she not announce the doctrine of the opus operatum? Why does she not say, there, ‘You have been made members of Christ once, but the privilege is gone, the blessing is exhausted; you have resisted the Spirit, He is striving no more with you; recover the gift, if possible, by penitence and prayer’? Why in this service, as much as in all the rest, are men called to repent, on the ground of their being children, though rebellious children; on the ground of the will of God that they should turn from their wickedness and live?

2. Thus far I have spoken of Baptism. The view which the Liturgy takes of the Creeds, is sufficiently evident from the mode of their introduction into it. They are made parts of our worship; acts of allegiance, declarations by the whole congregation of the Name into which each one has been baptized; preparations for prayer; steps to communion. The notion of them as mere collections of dogmas is never once insinuated, is refuted by the whole order of the services.

3. In speaking of the Eucharist, it is safer again to refer to the language of opponents. Again and again we have been told that the idea of a Real Presence is distinctly implied in our Communion Service; that at all events the words must convey this impression to any ordinary person; that they are such as could not have been written by anyone who held the simple Zwinglian dogma, and cannot be used with comfort, nay, without a sense of pain and contradiction, by anyone who feels it to be the true one. And yet, though there may be constant admonitions respecting the spirit in which this sacrament is to be received, the faith and repentance which are the preparations for it, the danger of a careless and unworthy treatment of such mysteries, is it not evident at the same time, from the earnest exhortations to partake of it, that it is looked upon as a common blessing, as one to which all men have a claim, as one from which it is a perilous responsibility to exclude any, whose open sins do not shew that they have excluded themselves? The English Dissenter regarding this ordinance as the right of a few who can give an account of their feelings, and experiences, and change of mind, is continually denouncing our service for its manifest departure from the maxims upon which he acts. On the one hand the Eucharist is spoken of in such awful language, as it seems to him must have been borrowed from periods of pure superstition; on the other hand, there is the strangest notion of it, as if it were a bond of fellowship for the whole universe. ‘One would suppose,’ he says, ‘from the phrases you use, that you look upon this sacrament as the very opening of the kingdom of heaven, and yet you treat it as the proper preparation for the most vulgar and earthly employments. Sometimes you seem to fancy it possible, that men should eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man by partaking of these elements, and yet you can admit persons to be partakers of it who would have very great difficulty in explaining themselves respecting the most ordinary propositions of the Christian system. By your carefulness in restraining the administration of the sacrament to a particular class, one would suppose that you regarded it as a Jewish sacrifice, or as something yet more wonderful. And yet you speak, at the same time, of the sacrifice of Christ, once made upon the cross, as full, and sufficient, and satisfactory.’

Meantime, it is not pretended by any person, be he friend or foe, that a single passage exists in this service which favours the notion that the presence of Christ is connected with a change in the elements. Whoever adopts that notion instantly becomes dissatisfied with the eucharistic part of our liturgy, proclaims it to be cold, heartless, dead, &c. In like manner, whoever believes the Eucharist to be a sacrifice in any sense which implies that the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross is less complete and finished for all mankind than it has been supposed to be by the strongest Lutheran or Calvinist, also denounces our Liturgy as departing from that idea which the Mass, in other portions of the Latin Church, embodies. By the confession, then, of all it regards the feast as the highest Christian privilege, as the most complete reality; not because it works a change in our Christian state and position; not because it brings one before us who is habitually absent from us, but because it enables us to enter into the fulness of our Church life, into that truly human and divine fellowship, which Christ, by His incarnation, His death, and His ascension, has claimed for all whom He is not ashamed to call His brethren.

4. This being the case, the communion service in our liturgy interprets the rest of our worship. Throughout, it is the worship of a body, of a family. It is open, and has been subject, to all the objections which the defenders of extempore prayer can raise against any form as belonging to mankind in general, and not to our nation and our family, to our particular circumstances, except so far as we can connect them with the knowledge of God and of His purposes to our race. On the other hand, it is open, and has been subject, to the objections of those who think that worship is cold and dead, if it lead us from the visible to the invisible, if it claim the privilege of approaching at once through the one Mediator the throne of the Absolute and the Infinite. It proscribes nothing; it does not affirm how much or how little of the sensible may be useful in assisting us to reach that which is beyond our senses. Human agency and help it distinctly recognizes as the appointed and ordinary channel through which the blessings of Him who was made flesh descend upon His Church, and through which the prayers and praises of His Church ascend as a united sacrifice to Him. But it does affirm, that all sensible helps, and all human agency, lose their meaning and become positively evil when they are converted into ends, or when they impair the belief that the whole Church is admitted into the holiest place.

5. It is impossible to separate this subject from that of ministerial orders, as it is expounded to us in our ordination and consecration services. Part of the complaint against these had been considered already. Only those who have received presbyteral ordination are allowed to administer the Eucharist or to pronounce absolution. ‘Now,’ argue the Dissenters, ‘you may say if you will, that the words πρεσβύτερος and ἱερεύς are different; and that you affix the former, not the latter, to the second rank of your ministers. But is not the refusal of these particular offices to the lower order a distinct and significant recognition of the principle, though you may not express it by a name? If your Church felt as we do about the sin of appropriating these names to men, would she have dared to approach so very closely in her acts to such an assumption? Would she have proceeded habitually upon a maxim, which must at least convey the impression, that she thinks it no assumption at all?’ I leave those who please to answer these arguments; to me they seem irresistible. Nor am I better able to clear our services of the charge of distinctly and formally connecting the gift of spiritual powers with ordination; of distinctly encouraging and urging her ministers to believe that they have the Holy Spirit committed to them for the work of the ministry. I do not complain of anyone who performs the office of a minister in our Church, and yet believes that he possesses no such power. I should no more wish to exclude him from his office on that account, than I should wish to depose a magistrate who did not understand the extent of the powers which the laws invested him with. Each may be using that which he does believe is his, very far more honestly than I am using that which I believe is mine. Each is far more honest than he would be if he merely acknowledged the words without attaching a meaning to them. But still the words are there; and I think he cannot complain of me for taking them in their plain sense; for saying that, little as I enter into their force, little as my conduct corresponds with them, there are very few which I have ever heard, that I could bear less to part with, or that I more feel I must learn to understand by acting upon the conviction of their truth.

With the continual allegation of Dissenters, that in spite of many tendencies to the contrary opinion in some of our divines, ancient as well as modern, our Liturgy recognizes the Episcopate as the root of all the other orders, and supposes it to contain them all within itself, I can as little quarrel as with either of the former. They seem to me to have made their point good. And I cannot find that any answers which have been made to them amount to more than awkward though ingenious evasions.

But where are we to find the doctrine of the vicarial powers of ministers in any part of these services? Where are we to find one single hint that the Presbyter absolves or administers the Eucharist, that the Bishop exercises his own functions or that he ordains others, as the minister and delegate of one who is absent from his Church? Those who adopt this opinion begin at once to exclaim against our services, as containing the most cold and unsatisfactory recognition of the mighty authority with which the Priest and Bishop of the New Testament are endowed. They feel it absolutely necessary that he should clothe himself with other attributes, in another mystery, than any which the English Church recognizes in him. The self-same language which offends the Dissenter as containing such high and profane assertions of a perpetually derived and renewing power, is that which contradicts this notion of an inherent power.

6. Lastly, we come to the Scriptures.

Here the intention of the Liturgy seems remarkably evident. The Scripture is adopted into our worship, the service explains the lessons, the lessons explain the service. The Bible is read partly as a continuous history, the history of God’s revelation, and of the Church’s growth and expansion; partly in connexion with our communion—the epistles of the New Testament expounding to us the law of the Spirit of life, the Gospels, the image after which the Spirit would form us. This is precisely that relation between the Scriptures and the Church, which I endeavoured to set forth in the former part of this book. The Protestant Dissenter says that we set aside the Bible, though we read more of it in any one month in one of our Churches than he reads in two years in any of his meetings; and though our reading of it is continuous, his casual and arbitrary. The Romanist says that we set aside the authority of the Church in the interpretation of Scripture, though we make it a formal and habitual part of the services, in which the mind of the Church is expressed.

II. 1. I think, then, I have answered the question as to the meaning which the English Church puts upon the signs which it has in common with other Churches, fairly and legitimately.

Another question was, how we can determine between two bodies, both existing in this country, and both possessing these signs, which may and which may not fairly call itself Catholic. If our previous statements have been true, this question is also settled. A body acknowledging itself connected with the Church in all previous ages by the bond of sacraments, of creeds, of worship, of ministerial succession, has the prima facie marks of Catholicity. Should any other body standing aloof from it put in a claim upon the same grounds to be Catholic, it is bound to shew the reasons of its own pretension, and the reasons upon which it rejects the former pretension. Those reasons must be the same which we have considered already. We are not Catholic in the opinion of the Romish body which resides in this country, because we do not acknowledge the opus operatum in Baptism, the new creeds of Popes, Transubstantiation in the Eucharist, the existence of an intermediate agency between Christ and His members on earth, the vicarial authority of ministers, the existence of a Universal mortal Bishop, the right of the Church to hide the Scriptures from the Laity; in one word, because we do not acknowledge that system which appeared to us, before we entered upon English ground at all, to be anti-Catholic. The Church in every land exists under the condition, either of professing this system, or of protesting against it. Its existence is not denoted by the Profession or by the Protest, but by the Signs to which the profession and the protest refer. If the Romish body say that it stands in certain notions about sacraments and about orders, and not in its sacraments and in the orders themselves, that declaration is a practical renunciation of its claims to be a Church. We say that we protest against these notions, because they are incompatible with the acknowledgment of Christ’s Spiritual and Universal kingdom.

2. But since we have seen that the confessions in different Protestant bodies have (contrary to the intentions of their compilers) greatly interfered with the simple recognition of the facts contained in the creed, and that the Romish confessions sanctioned by the Council of Trent, and by Pope Pius IV., interfere with it yet more; we are bound to shew whether there is anything corresponding to these in the Church of England, any addition made upon its own authority to the admitted formularies of the whole Church.

Till we are satisfied on this point we cannot, I conceive, rightly understand our own position in reference to the other portions of the Church.

Now it appears that in the sixteenth century, we as well as the Protestants and Romanists on the Continent, drew up a set of dogmatic articles, and that these have continued to be the test of orthodoxy for those who take orders in our Church and for those who are studying in at least one of our universities, ever since. Seeing then that there were different systems at that time in vogue, and that the object of different religious bodies in making confessions, was to identify themselves with one or other of these systems,—for example, the Genevan body thus identified itself with the Calvinistic system, the Romanist bodies with the Tridentine system,—we must desire to know how far these articles of ours identify us with any of them. One remark has been made respecting them, which is not unimportant for our present purpose, that they carefully avoid any intrusion upon the ground occupied by the old creeds. They do not take the living forms of the creeds, they constitute a set of distinct dogmatic propositions; they would be ridiculous if introduced into worship; they are not intended for the majority of the laity; they belong exclusively to the student. But these observations respecting them would be of little worth, if it appeared that they inculcate upon the teacher a certain theological system alien from the spirit and temper of the creeds; for this system he will communicate to those who hear him.

How stands the case? We have seen that there is one main characteristic of the Calvinistic system as a system. It makes the fall of man the central point of its divinity: it treats the incarnation, and all the facts which manifest the Son of God to men, as merely growing out of this, and necessary in consequence of it.¹ On this principle that very spirited confession which was drawn up by the Scotch preachers for the use of the Kirk in the sixteenth century, is constructed. The first Article is on the Trinity; the second, on the Fall; then comes the explanation of the existence of the Church or Kirk, as grounded upon the predestination of certain individuals in this fallen race to eternal life. There cannot be a finer or better model of a purely Calvinistical confession than this one; nor any which illustrates more completely the direct opposition between the idea of the Genevan system and the idea of the old Catholic Creeds. We have seen again that the Lutheran had a very different conception of Christianity from this, a great desire to make the incarnation of Christ the centre of all his thoughts, and to use the Apostles’ Creed as his symbol: of such a disposition the Augsburg Confession is a satisfactory testimony. But we have seen, also, that in his eagerness to assert conscious Justification as the one great principle of divinity, he was driven back upon the same ground as the Calvinist; he was forced to start from the evil root, in order that he might explain the process of restoration. And thus, as I remarked before, systematic Protestantism became identical with Calvinism, until the Arminian form of it was developed, which is little more than a contradiction of Calvinism, little more than a denial of the principle that the will of God is the originating cause of all good in man.

Now if anyone will turn to our Thirty-nine Articles, he will perceive that the first Article being upon the Trinity, the second is upon the Incarnation, and that the first eight Articles relate to truths directly connected with the being of God, to His manifestations of Himself, to the Scriptures as expounding them, to the Creeds as illustrating and interpreting the Scriptures. When this Catholic foundation has been laid, we proceed in the ninth Article to the fall of man, and then to all those questions concerning free-will, justification and election, which were occupying men’s minds in the sixteenth century. On all these points it seems to me the language of the Articles is as distinct and definite as it can be. The Calvinistic and Lutheran principles are plainly and distinctly asserted, there is no hint or prophecy of Arminianism; the Romish system in every point wherein it is opposed to the distinct affirmations of the Reformers, on the subject of God’s will and man’s faith, is repudiated; that is to say, the system of Romanism is rejected in the Articles from the ninth to the nineteenth, just as the system of Calvinism, or pure Protestantism, had been repudiated by the Articles from the first to the eighth. The principles of the Reformation are asserted in the one division, not as necessary qualifications, but as indispensable conditions, of the great Catholic truths which had been asserted in the other. And so, to whatever cause we owe it, this has been the result of these Articles; they have been thorns in the side of those who have wished to establish an English theological system, fashioned out of the materials which either Romanism or Calvinism supplies; they have encouraged persons of all sects and schools to hope that their principles, in some sense or other, might be contained in them, or by some process or other extracted out of them, or, at all events, not positively denied by them; and yet there is no sect or school, when speaking its sect or school language, which, if it were honest, would not confess that there are clauses and passages in them which it would be glad to be rid of; that a small omission, or addition, of a ‘not’ would often be very acceptable to it; that it would like exceedingly, if not to remodel them, at least to subjoin to them on all occasions a commentary of its own.

I conclude this head with remarking, that if our observations respecting the true meaning of Quakerism, of Calvinism, of Lutheranism, of Unitarianism, be accurate, the ideas and principles of each of these bodies are expressed in the forms of our English Church; only the systems which they have grafted upon these, and which have separated them from each other, are rejected. The idea of man as constituted in the divine Word, of a Kingdom based upon that constitution, of a Spirit working to bring him into conformity with it, of a perpetual struggle with an evil and sensual nature; this is the idea of Quakerism, and it is the idea of our Liturgy in every one of its forms and services. The idea of a divine Will going before all acts of the human will, the primary source of all that is in eternity, and all that becomes in time, to which everything is meant to be in subjection, which can alone bring that which has rebelled into subjection, to which every creature must attribute all the motions to good which he finds within him, the primary direction of his thoughts, the power of perseverance; this is the idea of Calvinism, and it is the idea which is implied in all the prayers of our Litany, which is formally set forth in the words of our Articles. The idea of man struggling with his own evil nature, discovering in it nothing but a bottomless pit of evil, grasping at a deliverer, finding that in union with him only is his life; that he is strong only in his strength, righteous only in his righteousness; this is the idea of Lutheranism, and it is the idea which is involved in all our prayers and Creeds, which our Articles reassert in logical terms. The idea of a unity which lies beneath all other unity, of a love which is the ground of all other love, of Humanity as connected with that love, regarded by it, comprehended in it; this is the idea which has hovered about the mind of the Unitarian, and which he has vainly attempted to comprehend in his system of contradictions and denials: this idea is the basis of our Liturgy, our Articles, our Church.

Section II. Does the Universal Society in England Exist Apart from Its Civil Institutions, or in Union with Them?

To this question the answer is unanimous.

The English dissenter affirms that the Church is embodied in the State; it is an Act of Parliament Church. The modern civil Ruler says, that the State is impeded in all its operations by the Church; the Sovereign is crowned by the Archbishop, the Bishops as a body taking part in the deliberations of Parliament; above all, the greater part of the education of the land is ecclesiastical. The Romanist affirms that the Church has no pretensions to be called a Catholic body; it is a national body. There can be no doubt, then, that the ecclesiastical and civil institutions are united, and this by bonds which it must require some violence to break. But when did this union take place? How was it brought to pass? Who were the contracting parties to it? On all these questions history preserves a profound silence. It records no meeting of Sovereigns and Bishops to adjust the terms of the fellowship; it fixes no date at which the Church began to say it would acknowledge the State, or at which the State said it would acknowledge the Church. So soon as we find the Church in the land, we find her doing homage to the civil powers, such as they were, which ruled the land. So soon as the Church begins to exercise its own peculiar influence, the civil power begins to feel that influence, and to be moulded by it. Then indeed we meet with records of transactions between these two bodies, each of which is perceived to have its distinct representative, and its peculiar object, though neither the representatives nor the objects are defined by any formal line of separation. But these transactions are not for the purpose of establishing a covenant on the part of the State, that it will protect the Church, or on the part of the Church, that it will do certain services for the State; far rather they are attempts by each, either to reclaim a portion of its own province which it supposes that the other has invaded, or to conquer a portion of that province of which the other has hitherto had peaceable possession. They are such transactions as presuppose a real, though a yet imperfectly understood relation, not such as could have been produced by a compact, or had the least tendency to create one. The Church affirms that it has a right to assign the powers and jurisdiction of its own Bishops; the State maintains that Bishops as well as the rest of its subjects must acknowledge its paramount authority. The Church affirms that it has a spiritual government altogether distinct from the civil government. The State says that the minister of the Church must submit like other men to its laws and its tribunals. Every impartial and thoughtful reader of our history feels that there is a right and wrong in each of these pretensions; that Becket must have been contending for a principle, that Henry must have been contending for a principle. The resolution of our annalists generally to choose favourites, and to nickname opponents, the eagerness of young readers to arrive at a positive conclusion about every matter in dispute, the obvious injustice of those (so called) fair critics, who try both parties by the standards of their own time, and of course condemn both, acquitting and exalting only themselves and their own wisdom, may hinder us from acknowledging at once and in terms, that we are under deep obligations to these opposing champions, and that a higher power was working out its ends by the help of both; but we all feel inwardly, that this is the case; we all unconsciously express our conviction that it is so in one set of phrases or another. And we feel also in a remarkable way, that the history of these struggles is, if not the history of England, yet the heart and centre of it, whence more light is thrown upon the records of the conflicts between Kings and Barons, Normans and Saxons, the old orders and the new, than they throw back upon it. Those who have learnt that the science of politics is not comprehended in the theory of representation, that in order to understand what representation means, we must first know what there is to represent, have perceived that in these civil and ecclesiastical disputes lies the inward secret which we have need to investigate before we can trace its working on the surface and in the external machinery of Society.

So it was before the Reformation. And what was the Reformation itself? Its opponents of both classes say, that it was merely a national movement. ‘Henry not Cranmer was at the root of it. There was more of politics in it than of religion.’ I should not use such language; I do not understand their distinction between politics and religion. But I believe that in their meaning they are right. The most obvious peculiarity of the English Reformation seems to be this, that it was a movement originating with the Sovereign and not with Theologians. And therefore it was not a new movement, but one of a series of movements. Not only the Constitutions of Clarendon, made in the days of a rebellious Sovereign, but the statutes of praemunire, passed in the time of some of the most orthodox, some of the greatest persecutors of Lollardism, had attempted to cut off the correspondence of the Church of Rome. The difference in the reign of Henry VIII. was simply this, that a large body of the Bishops and Clergy had been led by their religious feelings to desire that this correspondence should be broken off; to feel that the English Church could not maintain its own position unless it became strictly national; unless it abandoned that subjection to a foreign bishop, which the State had always wished it to abandon.

And what has been the state of things since the Reformation? It is this: a number of bodies or sects have gradually grown up in the country, which have affirmed that the principles of Protestantism were not asserted with sufficient boldness at our Reformation. We stopped short, it is said, at a certain point. We retain much of the papal system, which the other Protestant nations have thrown off. On the other hand, the Romanists have felt that the English Reformation was more fatal to the maxim upon which they were habitually acting than the Reformation in any other quarter had been. There was a hope that men might renounce a new system of opinions and adopt an old one. But a Church which had affirmed the principle of nationality, which had come to an understanding with the Sovereign of its own land, was, to all appearance, utterly incorrigible. The most earnest and intelligent Jesuits who came over perceived that this was a condition of things, which must be changed, not merely by preaching, but by plotting; many of them believed that the best hope of the restoration of the papal power lay in the triumph of those sects which professed a more vehement Protestantism. Another curious point deserves to be noticed: the Puritan body was, as I have said before, essentially Calvinistical. Calvinism was the principle of its life. It was the feeling that the English Church was not founded upon the Calvinistical idea which gave occasion to the earliest Puritan movements. And yet we imported the anti-Calvinistical doctrine, which the Puritans afterwards identified with popery, from one of the purely Protestant countries of the Continent. Nay, further, it was not till we had a Scottish King upon the throne, a King bred under Presbyterian preachers, that we had any connexion with this Arminian system at all. It is to this King that we owe a very marked change in our position. Elizabeth had troubled herself as little as possible about systems of opinion; she had merely endeavoured to assert her position as a national Sovereign. James could only look upon every question as a schoolman and a pedant. He had, indeed, one living practical feeling; he had been disgusted with the Presbyterian preachers, and had found that their power practically interfered with his. But he had no sense of sympathy or connexion with our Church; he only wished that the Episcopalian system should prevail against the Presbyterian. And this system, with whatever belonged to it, was to be established in Scotland, and maintained here, by the efforts of the State. Both in Scotland, therefore, and in England, the feeling that there is a spiritual power distinct from and higher than the mere State power, was called forth. In Scotland this spiritual feeling connected itself with the national feeling. The people revolted against the notion of a prelacy which was imposed upon them by England. Here, the mixture of spiritual with national feelings in the Puritan produced some strange anomalies. The body in the Commons’ House which had most sympathy with Puritanism were occupied in maintaining the old forms of the national constitution against the royal prerogative. The Puritan clergy were raising their voices against old national and ecclesiastical forms, and maintaining the rights of the spiritual man. Mixed with these assertions, however, one can perceive in them from the first a desire for a more formal and systematic divinity than had ever existed in England before. At length they triumph, and it is their business to realise as well as they can their three objects, of upholding the liberty of the subject, which had been asserted by the Long Parliament; the superiority of Christians to outward forms, which had been maintained by their preachers against Laud and the Bishops; and, lastly, the all-importance of a peculiar theological system. The first attempt issued in the establishment of a military despotism; the second led to the rise and independence of the different sects which revolted from the stern Presbyterian government and sought to maintain freedom of conscience; the last effort was embodied in the deliberations, decrees, catechisms, committees of triers, of the Westminster Assembly. It is a grievous thing that English Churchmen should, from their prejudices and partialities, refuse to study the history of this remarkable period simply and fairly, looking at it from all sides and all points of view, and labouring to do justice to the feelings of all the parties who were concerned in it. For it is when thus considered, and not when warped into an apology for some ecclesiastical hero, or into a sentence of condemnation upon his opponents, that it illustrates and makes manifest the essential relation between spiritual and civil life, and the impossibility of destroying that relation by any efforts of ours, however unfriendly and uncomfortable we may make it.

The Westminster Assembly had done their best to establish an uniformity of opinions; that wherein they had left their ministers free, was in their modes of worship. The opposite principle had been the one hitherto recognized in England. The bond of national fellowship had been supposed to be the bond of worship; men who had books and leisure might occupy themselves with the study of opinions. I do not know how far the Episcopal clergy at the Restoration were aware that this was the question at issue between them and their opponents; possibly they looked upon it merely as a question whether the nation should adopt a more or less comprehensive system. But if so, their old habits were stronger than their theories; the State felt that it could not trouble itself about shades of opinion, but that old forms of worship were practical and general, and there was One over us who saw further than either statesmen or churchmen. At all events, this was the result. The Act of Uniformity in Worship was the substitute for the efforts at a dogmatic uniformity which belonged to the genius of Presbyterianism. The immediate effect of that measure was the separation of the Puritan clergy from that which was now again recognized as the national Church. Then began various stupid efforts on the part of the State to silence them, or to coerce them into a union, mixed with various royal experiments at a general liberty of conscience which should include Romanist as well as Protestant Dissenters. The resistance to these marks the strong sense of the people and of the Parliament that Romanism was something anti-national. This feeling was strong in the minds of the seven Bishops who refused to read James’s declaration. They believed that the act of the King was, as it proved to be, suicidal. Several of them could not, however, follow out that principle to what seems to me its legitimate consequence; that when the King did commit his act of legal suicide by deserting the country, he was as one lying under a sentence of deposition from God Himself, for having violated the covenant by which he held his power. The Convention Parliament took that pious view of the matter, and accordingly inquired, not what person they might by their own power or in conformity with the people’s will choose into his place, but who seemed to be designated to the office by the providence of God.² At no period, I think, was the religious character of the English State more distinctly asserted than at this; and at no time was it more important that it should be asserted. For now was beginning that change in the habits and feelings of men, here as well as elsewhere, to which I adverted in Part I.; the change, I mean, from the notion of government as grounded upon deep mysterious principles, to the notion of it as the result of mere commercial arrangements—of some imaginary artificial compact. That this change has been productive of very mischievous effects to the Church and the nation of England, I shall have occasion presently to remark. That it has led to any legislative Acts which involve a formal or a virtual violation of the union between the ecclesiastical and the civil bodies, I believe is a notion which could only have become prevalent through this very habit of mind. We have supposed the Church and the State to be knit together by some material outward terms of agreement: we do not know what they are; they may be that the State shall not recognize any persons as its subjects who are not Churchmen; in other words, that it should ignore facts; they may therefore be violated by Acts of toleration, repeals of test laws, emancipation of Romanists. I do not express any opinion about the policy of one or other of these measures; some of them may have been inexpedient measures; they were all, I should conceive, defended as well as attacked by many feeble and imperfect arguments. But I do think that it requires something far deeper and more subtle than any such measures, to destroy a union which has cemented itself by no human contrivances, and which exists in the very nature of things. By carelessness, ignorance, faithlessness, immorality, we may undermine our national life, and to these perils it is continually exposed. But the Acts of our legislators when they are evil, are in general but reflexes of something which is evil in the national mind, and which legislators cannot correct. And in general they are better than could at all be expected from the tempers of those who passed them, or of us who criticise them. Oftentimes the very errors which are in them, and the mischievous consequences to which they lead, may become our teachers, and may be far more profitable to us than the success of our opposition to them could have been. And therefore I am naturally led from the consideration of this subject, to that which I proposed next to consider.

Section III. What Is the Form of Character Which Belongs Especially to Englishmen? to What Kind of Depravation Is It Liable?

From what I have said already, it will be evident to the reader that I believe the first thoughts of men upon this subject to be well founded. ‘You Englishmen are such mere politicians,’ this is the ordinary complaint which foreigners make of us. ‘Alas! how exclusively we are devoted to politics,’ this is our continual groan concerning ourselves. The proofs of the position are manifold—none more striking than those which are supplied by men who are determined that they will at all events be exempt from the national disease; that they will be artists, philosophers, mystics—anything but politicians. Watch them well, and you will see how utterly impossible it is for them to realise their dream; how continually some speculation about the organisation of society, some practical effort to remodel it, mixes with their high and serene contemplations; how fierce and restless the contemplators become, from the very effort to keep themselves from all contact with the fever and restlessness which they suppose to be inherent in the English character, and which they know are in their own. Other cases there are, of another kind, which confirm the same fact still more remarkably. I have known persons who possessed no practical talent whatever, all whose attempts at action were of the most ludicrously and painfully abortive kind, who, if they tried to realise some fine conception of their own, were sure either to render it contemptible by their failure, or else very soon to run into one of the old ruts from which they had been labouring with all their might to extricate themselves. And yet such Englishmen as these, who, if they have any gifts at all, seem to be exclusively endowed with those which are most un-English, feel themselves just as much compelled to be political and practical as their countrymen. They find it impossible to think unless they can in some way or other connect their thoughts with action, and despairing of any such alliance in their own persons, they try whether they may not at least be able to point out a method of action to others, aspiring to no other fame than that of the whetstone;

acutum
Reddere quae ferrum valet, exsors ipsa secandi.

But though these arguments are very decisive, I cannot but think that there are others which are more cheering. Why do we turn to the literature of the reign of Queen Elizabeth as to that which most represents the genius of our nation, as that which most shews of what we are capable? Why but because in every department it was more historical, more political than it has been at any time since. Look at our drama, how it draws its highest inspirations from the old records of our national life. See how needful it was even for the allegorical poet, the singer of Fairy Land, when dealing with his twelve moral virtues and the battles of the inner man, to interweave a history of Prince Arthur, and to confound the image of Gloriana with that of Queen Elizabeth. With all their dreams about poetry, and scholarship, and philosophy, how evident it is that the deepest and most earnest thoughts of Sidney and Raleigh were occupied with policy and politics! What nation may not be able to shew profounder works in exegetical or dogmatical divinity than we? Who can hold our countrymen pace, when they fashion their minds to the consideration of the laws according to which God has formed heavenly, and human, and natural creatures?

Hooker’s work is the specimen of a class, though certainly the highest specimen. And when one considers it, and the whole life and character of the man who wrote it, I think we must feel how very little excuse lies in that habit of mind which God has bestowed upon us, for any defect in meekness and gentleness, in superiority to the low notions and canons of this world, in converse with the hierarchies of heaven. I do not wish to exalt this form of character above every other; I cannot tell whether it is better or worse than that which belongs to Frenchmen or Germans; I know only that it is ours, and that it is capable of being expanded into that which is most noble, as well as sinking into that which is most base.

We ought to contemplate it in both conditions, that we may not separate hope from humiliation, that we may know both our responsibilities and our temptations, and that we may be able to honour the good when it is mixed with the evil which lies nearest to it. Of that charity we have need in every part of our history. It is impossible not to observe a tendency in the English Reformers of the sixteenth century to a kind of diplomacy which one does not like to perceive in holy men, and which it is very easy to represent as pervading the whole of their characters, and explaining the meaning of their acts. Presently after you find them suffering with a constancy worthy, their detractors say, of heroes,³ we have been used to believe and think, of martyrs. The political bias of their mind did not, I fancy, tend on the whole to lower the tone of it, to bring them more helplessly into contact with outward things, or to give them less faith in the invisible. Its main effect was to lead them to think of Christ’s Church as a Kingdom rather than as a system: in the dust and bustle of affairs their strong conviction that this kingdom was a reality and not a metaphor may have led them to forget that it is the type of all kingdoms, and is not moulded after the maxims of any even of those which confess it, and do homage to it. But in silence and suffering, this thought gave a fixedness and substantiality to their faith, which even the most devout schoolmen are seldom able to attain. They knew that it was a Person in whom they were believing; in the hour of trial and death they looked directly to Him, and not to any dogma or system of dogmas, for strength and consolation.

That this way of considering the Church is an eminently English one, became evident in the time of the civil wars. It might be said to characterise every class of thinkers. It was at first less marked in those among whom one would expect most of it, I mean among the Episcopalians; for the systematic tendency had become very prevalent through the influence of James I., and Laud especially seems to have contracted it. His faults were far more those of a schoolmaster⁴ or a collegian, than of an arrogant and usurping politician. And these faults made him especially unable to deal with the energetic national impulses of that period. But the sense of the Church as a kingdom returned to the Episcopalians in their hour of humiliation. It is this which prevailed in the mind of Jeremy Taylor, above all other views. In spite of his learning and his fondness for casuistry, he could not bear to contemplate Christianity as a system. He would look upon it as a life, but then it was a life connecting itself with an order, and realised in that kind of dependence which a subject pays to his sovereign, rather than that which a pupil renders to his master. Therefore one may trace a curious point of sympathy between him and the most extreme mystics and spiritualists of that age; all spoke of a divine kingdom, none could be content with any language which did not import it, or with any acts which did not endeavour to realise it. Even Milton, who was as a star, and dwelt apart, was in the last age of his life as much as in the first, dreaming of a polity. All men might be kings and priests in his commonwealth, but kings and priests they were to be, not professors and doctors.

But we must look at another side of the picture. When the feeling of spiritual life and spiritual government decayed, as we saw it did decay, in the latter part of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, one may fancy what an effect must have been produced upon a people, whose political feelings were the deepest which they had. Our literature could not separate itself from our social life. It was a mere mockery and pretence when it tried to throw itself into some Arcadian condition of things. It had always been real and homely, and such it must continue to be. But if all realities had become conventions, if what was homely had become base, we need be at no loss to understand the necessary limitations of our best, and the fearful debasement of our worst literature during the period between the Revolution in England and that in France. The degradation of our professed statesmen, the loss of all high ends in their policy, the maxims and practices which have made Sir Robert Walpole’s name and administration immortal, are all equally explicable. Still there were indications of English strength, and of the direction which that strength naturally takes. In the physical world, men are busy, either about the mechanism of actual things, or about God’s laws and order. Either study was most fitted to the truest and noblest part of our character, and here therefore there were true and worthy results.

But the commercial activities and the scientific discoveries of this age were gradually concentrating an immense population of human beings in our cities. Who were caring for these? The Church possessed some prelates of high and even comprehensive views, many humble and sincere pastors in its rural districts; many men capable of thinking vigorously respecting the moral constitution of individuals and of society. In general however, its habit of mind was too well expressed in the theory of Warburton respecting the alliance of the Church and State; in the practice of sending bishops to Ireland for the sake of supporting the English interest. It apparently possessed the means of influencing the aristocracy; but the aristocracy was commonly infidel. It should have been able through its less exalted members to have reached the heart of the trading classes, but they were chiefly under the influence of dissent; it seemed not to be aware that the new class of poor men was coming into existence. Undoubtedly they were members of the National Church who first went forth to evangelise the mining and manufacturing districts; but their movements were regarded with anything but sympathy by the rulers of the Church; no pains were taken to give them a right direction. Humble and quiet men in country parishes disliked them because they were opposed to the order and regularity which had been always associated in their minds with the idea of religion; to others they were odious because they appealed to feelings which were dormant in themselves, but which were found to exist in their flocks. Then came the French Revolution, with its terrors and warnings. The clergy began to feel themselves less mere parts of an obsolete machinery existing for some unintelligible purposes; more necessary to the being of the commonwealth. The aristocracy began to acknowledge them in that character. Their scepticism vanished, and they spoke of religion and its teachers with much respect, as exerting those influences of fear and hope, which could alone make property and government secure. Such was the new tone which the character and patronage of George III., and the dread of French disorganisation, rendered popular. One cannot call it a very elevated tone. So long as the war lasted, it was mixed with much that was generous and patriotic in the upper classes of laymen; the portion of the clergy who shared in it became active magistrates, careful of their domestic and relative duties, zealous in defence of that which seemed to them old and English. With these useful dispositions were connected a tendency to maintain customs and practices, simply because they did exist, and could allege some moderate prescription in their favour; an acquiescence in the maxims of society even when they seemed to be at variance with the higher morality; a great impatience of enthusiasm and mysticism, and all that cannot be at once brought under the rules of existing convention or obvious expediency; a suspicion of any great efforts of active virtue and self-sacrifice; a feeling that the Church is bound to sympathize with the aristocracy, and to overlook its sins, for the sake of preserving good order among the people; a strong sense of the service which subjects owe to their rulers, without any corresponding sense of the service which rulers owe to their subjects; an inclination to assert the privileges of clergymen, chiefly by treating it as a rudeness that any infidel notions should be broached in their presence; great anxiety for a State encouragement of religion on the ground that otherwise it was not likely to thrive, or to enlist fashion and the opinion of the world on its side; a vehement dislike of dissenters, as disturbing the quietness and regularity of society, and as introducing something of vulgarity into religion; a certain anger and restlessness at the discovery of any new doubts respecting the English Church or Christianity, which could not at once be removed by an application of the arguments used on behalf of Establishments in Paley’s Moral Philosophy, and of the Gospel in his Evidences.

Now the spirit of this State Churchmanship was evidently the spirit of an age of our national Church, not of the Church itself. That continued to express itself in the Liturgy; and when it required a dogmatical language, in the Articles. The younger and more active members of the Church soon became conscious of the contradiction. They began to seek for some System which should be a refuge from the dreariness of political Anglicanism. What they have found is our next inquiry.