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and realise that improvement in Church and State can only be effected through a widely diffused sense of duty and the willing co-operation of the citizens; it cannot be brought about by coercion alone. Coercion may be exercised by a personal monarch who claims the right to rule, as was done by Charles I and his council, and it may be extraordinarily efficient, as it has proved in Germany, where the loyalty of the people has rallied in such an extraordinary degree to support the designs of the Emperor. The right to rule may also be claimed by a triumphant majority, which insists that minorities must suffer and is prepared to enforce its will ruthlessly; but there can be no stability in a community where there is constant submission to superior force and where civil order does not justify itself by public opinion or rest on popular consent. Civil authority is much less likely to commend itself in attempting to promote the common good than in prohibiting and putting down obvious wrong; and the collapse of the monarchy of Charles I is a warning for all time. It may be possible to levy taxes and obtain money for objects which many citizens regard as of doubtful utility, but they will not willingly alter their own habits as to diet, or the management of their own affairs, for reasons which do not commend themselves to their own judgment. They

are specially sensitive if they believe that the common good is not really involved, but that their interests are being sacrificed to those of more favoured individuals.

The aims of Elizabeth and the Stuarts were for the most part judicious. History has failed to justify their methods, but it has also condemned their opponents. The Nonconformists of the Elizabethan era were deeply attached to Calvinism, they found their inspiration in their belief as to personal predestination to be the instrument of carrying out God's Will here and of sharing in glory hereafter. The unpopularity of the Church of England in religious circles in the early seventeenth century was due, so far as doctrine is concerned, to her unwillingness to accept Calvinism; but in this she was wise. Calvinism in its strict form has been completely outlived; and the Christian denominations, which originally took their stand upon it, are vying with each other in discarding it. The Elizabethan Nonconformists were also inclined to refuse compliance with usages in Christian worship for which no warrant could be found in Holy Writ; they hesitated about lessons from the Apocrypha, the keeping of Christmas Day, and the use of organs; but their descendants have abandoned that principle, and are ready to employ the aids to worship against

which their forefathers protested as a ground of offence.

There was a general agreement in the Elizabethan period that there ought to be a common order of service, and that there should be some safeguard against the vagaries of Anabaptists. But those who agreed on the desirability of a national use differed greatly in regard to the question as to what that common order should be. The compromise which was embodied in the Book of Common Prayer has justified itself as a common order for the nation, both at the time at which it was compiled, and in subsequent centuries as well.

Even in the economic regulation, which caused so much irritation, the critics of the government have been condemned. The granting of concessions to commercial companies was dropped for a time under the Council of State, but the difficulties which ensued were so great that Cromwell revived the practice of authorising such companies. The main lines, by which the Crown had endeavoured to direct economic activities so as to promote the power of the nation, were acted upon by Parliament after the Restoration; and the Council gave much attention to the founding of factories and the planting of new colonies, and thus carried out the schemes for expansion which

had occupied the attention of James and Charles I. In all these matters it may be fairly claimed that the aims of the Stuart Kings and their advisers were far-seeing, and that their critics were shortsighted and concentrated their attention unwisely on immediate interests.

Modern rulers, who disregard this warning and make fresh attempts to coerce free persons for the common good, would do well to assure themselves that the particular projects at which they aim are really for the common weal and that their action will be recognised as really public-spirited. They have also need to be sure that the agents by whom pressure is brought to bear in any given direction are honest and tactful. If they fail in either respect their schemes are sure to be subjected to criticism, which may be ill-natured and shortsighted, but may yet appeal sufficiently to the popular imagination to render their schemes unworkable and to baulk their endeavours for the public good. A free people can only be led, and can never be successfully driven. It is the art of leadership to convince the people that some scheme of policy is really for the common good, so that they may be willing to comply with it in spite of the sacrifices it may entail.

III

PRESBYTERIANISM AND THE SUPREMACY OF SCRIPTURE

I. THE SCRIPTURAL MODEL OF A POLITY

A GENERATION had passed away after the time when Henry VIII had defied the authority of the Pope (1533) before a similar change occurred in Scotland (1560). The pent-up forces in the Northern Kingdom were very violent when once they were let loose, and a new conception of a reformed Christian polity had taken shape under the guiding hand of John Calvin at Geneva. The Reformation Movement in Scotland was a veritable revolution, since it was a conscious repudiation of the past, and a genuine effort to introduce something that was wholly new.

The aim of King Henry VIII and the English Reformers had been to retain as much as possible of the medieval tradition of a Christian polity, but yet to build it on a national basis, and to use Scripture as a test which should show what ought to be discarded as unnecessary in a Christian community. But the antagonism to the old order in Scotland was much more intense: there was no

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