The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1 by Thomas Babington Macaulay (diy ebook reader .txt) π
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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
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
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