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would have been carried on as unsparingly in England as in Scotland.

the

But, as the government needed the Origin of support of the Protestants, so Church of the Protestants needed the England. protection of the government. Much was therefore given up on both sides: an union was effected; and the fruit of that union was the Church of England.

and discourses, composed by Protestants, set forth principles of theology in which Calvin or Knox would have found scarcely a word to disapprove. Her prayers and thanksgivings, derived from the ancient Breviaries, are very generally such that Cardinal Fisher or Cardinal Pole might have heartily joined in them. A controversialist who puts an Arminian sense on her Articles and

Homilies will be pronounced by candid men to be as unreasonable as a controversialist who denies that the doctrine of baptismal regeneration can be discovered in her Liturgy.

To the peculiarities of this great institution, and to the strong passions which it has called forth in the minds both of friends and of enemies, are to be attributed many of the most important events which have, since the Re- The Church of Rome held that episformation, taken place in our country; copacy was of divine institution, and nor can the secular history of England that certain supernatural graces of a be at all understood by us, unless we high order had been transmitted by the study it in constant connection with imposition of hands through fifty genethe history of her ecclesiastical polity. rations, from the Eleven who received The man who took the chief part in their commission on the Galilean mount, settling the conditions of the alliance to the bishops who met at Trent. A which produced the Anglican Church large body of Protestants, on the other was Archbishop Cranmer. He was the hand, regarded prelacy as positively representative of both the parties which, unlawful, and persuaded themselves that at that time, needed each other's assist- they found a very different form of ecance. He was at once a divine and a clesiastical government prescribed in courtier. In his character of divine he Scripture. The founders of the Angliwas perfectly ready to go as far in the can Church took a middle course. They way of change as any Swiss or Scottish retained episcopacy; but they did not Reformer. In his character of courtier declare it to be an institution essential he was desirous to preserve that orga- to the welfare of a Christian society, nisation which had, during many ages, or to the efficacy of the sacraments. admirably served the purposes of the Cranmer, indeed, on one important ocBishops of Rome, and might be expected casion, plainly avowed his conviction now to serve equally well the purposes that, in the primitive times, there was of the English Kings and of their no distinction between bishops and ministers. His temper and his under-priests, and that the laying on of hands standing eminently fitted him to act as was altogether superfluous. mediator. Saintly in his professions, Among the Presbyterians, the conunscrupulous in his dealings, zealous for duct of public worship is, to a great nothing, bold in speculation, a coward extent, left to the minister. Their and a timeserver in action, a placable prayers, therefore, are not exactly the enemy and a lukewarm friend, he was same in any two assemblies on the same in every way qualified to arrange the day, or on any two days in the same terms of the coalition between the re-assembly. In one parish they are ferligious and the worldly enemies of vent, eloquent, and full of meaning. In Popery. the next parish they may be languid or To this day the constitution, the doc- absurd. The priests of the Roman Catrines, and the services of the tholic Church, on the other hand, have, liar cha Church, retain the visible marks during many generations, daily chaunted of the compromise from which the same ancient confessions, supplicashe sprang. She occupies a middle tions, and thanksgivings, in India and position between the Churches of Rome Lithuania, in Ireland and Peru. The and Geneva. Her doctrinal confessions | service, being in a dead language, is

Her pecu

racter.

intelligible only to the learned; and the great majority of the congregation may be said to assist as spectators rather than as auditors. Here, again, the Church of England took a middle course. She copied the Roman Catholic forms of prayer, but translated them into the vulgar tongue, and invited the illiterate multitude to join its voice to that of the minister.

Church of Rome, and that she appeals less to the understanding, and more to the senses and imagination, than the Protestant Churches of Scotland, France, and Switzerland.

she stood

crown.

Nothing, however, so strongly distinguished the Church of Eng- Relation land from other Churches as in which the relation in which she stood to the to the monarchy. The King In every part of her system the same was her head. The limits of the aupolicy may be traced. Utterly reject- thority which he possessed, as such, ing the doctrine of transubstantiation, were not traced, and indeed have never and condemning as idolatrous all adora- yet been traced, with precision. The tion paid to the sacramental bread and laws which declared him supreme in wine, she yet, to the disgust of the ecclesiastical matters were drawn rudely Puritan, required her children to re- and in general terms. If, for the purceive the memorials of divine love, pose of ascertaining the sense of those meekly kneeling upon their knees. Dis- laws, we examine the books and lives carding many rich vestments which of those who founded the English surrounded the altars of the ancient Church, our perplexity will be increased. faith, she yet retained, to the horror For the founders of the English Church of weak minds, a robe of white linen, wrote and acted in an age of violent typical of the purity which belonged to intellectual fermentation, and of conher as the mystical spouse of Christ. stant action and reaction. They thereDiscarding a crowd of pantomimic ges-fore often contradicted each other, and tures which, in the Roman Catholic sometimes contradicted themselves. worship, are substituted for intelligible That the King was, under Christ, sole words, she yet shocked many rigid Pro-head of the Church, was a doctrine testants by marking the infant just which they all with one voice affirmed: sprinkled from the font with the sign but those words had very different sigof the cross. The Roman Catholic ad-nifications in different mouths, and in dressed his prayers to a multitude of the same mouth at different conjuncSaints, among whom were numbered tures. Sometimes an authority which many men of doubtful, and some of would have satisfied Hildebrand was hateful, character. The Puritan refused the addition of Saint even to the apostle of the Gentiles, and to the disciple whom Jesus loved. The Church of England, though she asked for the intercession of no created being, still set apart days for the commemoration of some who had done and suffered great things for the faith. She retained confirmation and ordination as edifying rites; but she degraded them from the rank of sacraments. Shrift was no part of her system. Yet she gently invited the dying penitent to confess his sins to a divine, and empowered her ministers to sooth the departing soul by an absolution which breathes the very spirit of the old religion. In general it may be said that she appeals more to the understanding, and less to the senses and the imagination, that the

ascribed to the sovereign: then it dwindled down to an authority little more than that which had been claimed by many ancient English princes who had been in constant communion with the Church of Rome. What Henry and his favourite counsellors meant, at one time, by the supremacy, was certainly nothing less than the whole power of the keys. The King was to be the Pope of his kingdom, the vicar of God, the expositor of Catholic verity, the channel of sacramental graces. He arrogated to himself the right of deciding dogmatically what was orthodox doctrine and what was heresy, of drawing up and imposing confessions of faith, and of giving religious instruction to his people. He proclaimed that all jurisdiction, spiritual as well as temporal, was derived from him alone, and that it was in his

power to confer episcopal authority, and to take it away. He actually ordered his seal to be put to commissions by which bishops were appointed, who were to exercise their functions as his deputies, and during his pleasure. According to this system, as expounded by Cranmer, the King was the spiritual as well as the temporal chief of the nation. In both capacities His Highness must have lieutenants. As he appointed civil officers to keep his seal, to collect his revenues, and to dispense justice in his name, so he appointed divines of various ranks to preach the gospel, and to administer the sacraments. It was unnecessary that there should be any imposition of hands. The King-such was the opinion of Cranmer given in the plainest wordsmight, in virtue of authority derived from God, make a priest; and the priest so made needed no ordination whatever. These opinions the Archbishop, in spite of the opposition of less courtly divines, followed out to every legitimate consequence. He held that his own spiritual functions, like the secular functions of the Chancellor and Treasurer, were at once determined by a demise of the crown. When Henry died, therefore, the Primate and his suffragans took out fresh commissions, empowering them to ordain and to govern the Church till the new sovereign should think fit to order otherwise. When it was objected that a power to bind and to loose, altogether distinct from temporal power, had been given by our Lord to his apostles, some theologians of this school replied that the power to bind and to loose had descended, not to the clergy, but to the whole body of Christian men, and ought to be exercised by the chief magistrate as the representative of the society. When it was objected that Saint Paul had spoken of certain persons whom the Holy Ghost had made overseers and shepherds of the faithful, it was answered that King Henry was the very overseer, the very shepherd, whom the Holy Ghost had appointed, and to whom the expressions of Saint Paul applied.*

See a very curious paper which Strype believed to be in Gardiner's handwriting.

These high pretensions gave scandal to Protestants as well as to Catholics; and the scandal was greatly increased when the supremacy, which Mary had resigned back to the Pope, was again annexed to the crown, on the accession of Elizabeth. It seemed monstrous that a woman should be the chief bishop of a Church in which an apostle had forbidden her even to let her voice be heard. The Queen, therefore, found it necessary expressly to disclaim that sacerdotal character which her father had assumed, and which, according to Cranmer, had been inseparably joined, by divine ordinance, to the regal function. When the Anglican confession of faith was revised in her reign, the supremacy was explained in a manner somewhat different from that which had been fashionable at the court of Henry. Cranmer had declared, in emphatic terms, that God had immediately committed to Christian princes the whole cure of all their subjects, as well concerning the administration of God's word for the cure of souls, as concerning the administration of things political. The thirty-seventh article of religion, framed under Elizabeth, declares, in terms as emphatic, that the ministering of God's word does not belong to princes. The Queen, however, still had over the Church a visitatorial power of vast and undefined extent. She was entrusted by Parliament with the office of restraining and punishing heresy and every sort of ecclesiastical abuse, and was permitted to delegate her authority to commissioners. The Bishops were little more than her ministers. Rather than grant to the civil magistrate the absolute power of nominating spiritual pastors, the Church of Rome, in the eleventh century, set all Europe on fire. Rather than grant to the civil magistrate the absolute power of nominating spiritual pastors, the ministers of the Church of Scotland, in our own time,

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resigned their livings by hundreds. | The advantages which the crown The Church of England had no such derived from this close alliance with scruples. By the royal authority alone the Established Church were great; her prelates were appointed. By the but they were not without serious royal authority alone her Convocations drawbacks. The compromise arranged were summoned, regulated, prorogued, by Cranmer had from the first been and dissolved. Without the royal considered by a large body of Protestsanction her canons had no force. One ants as a scheme for serving two of the articles of her faith was that masters, as an attempt to unite the without the royal consent no eccle- worship of the Lord with the worship siastical council could lawfully assem- of Baal. In the days of Edward the ble. From all her judicatures an Sixth the scruples of this party had appeal lay, in the last resort, to the repeatedly thrown great difficulties in sovereign, even when the question was the way of the government. When whether an opinion ought to be ac- Elizabeth came to the throne, those counted heretical, or whether the ad- difficulties were much increased. Vioministration of a sacrament had been lence naturally engenders violence. valid. Nor did the Church grudge The spirit of Protestantism was therethis extensive power to our princes. fore far fiercer and more intolerant By them she had been called into after the cruelties of Mary than before existence, nursed through a feeble them. Many persons who were The Puinfancy, guarded from Papists on one warmly attached to the new ritans. side and from Puritans on the other, opinions had, during the evil days, protected against Parliaments which taken refuge in Switzerland and Gerbore her no good will, and avenged on many. They had been hospitably reliterary assailants whom she found it ceived by their brethren in the faith, hard to answer. Thus gratitude, hope, had sate at the feet of the great doctors fear, common attachments, common of Strasburg, Zurich, and Geneva, and enmities, bound her to the throne. had been, during some years, accusAll her traditions, all her tastes, were tomed to a more simple worship, and monarchical. Loyalty became a point to a more democratical form of church of professional honour among her government, than England had yet clergy, the peculiar badge which distinguished them at once from Calvinists and from Papists. Both the Calvinists and the Papists, widely as they differed in other respects, regarded with extreme jealousy all encroachments of the temporal power on the domain of the spiritual power. Both Calvinists and Papists maintained that subjects might justifiably draw the sword against ungodly rulers. In France Calvinists resisted Charles the Ninth Papists resisted Henry the Fourth both Papists and Calvinists resisted Henry the Third. In Scotland Calvinists led Mary captive. On the north of the Trent Papists took arms against the English throne. The Church of England meantime condemned both Calvinists and Papists, and loudly boasted that no duty was more constantly or earnestly inculcated by her than that of submission to princes.

seen. These men returned to their country, convinced that the reform which had been effected under King Edward had been far less searching and extensive than the interests of pure religion required. But it was in vain that they attempted to obtain any concession from Elizabeth. Indeed her system, wherever it differed from her brother's, seemed to them to differ for the worse. They were little disposed to submit, in matters of faith, to any human authority. They had recently, in reliance on their own interpretation of Scripture, risen up against a Church strong in immemorial antiquity and catholic consent. It was by no common exertion of intellectual energy that they had thrown off the yoke of that gorgeous and imperial superstition; and it was vain to expect that, immediately after such an emancipation, they would patiently submit to a new spiritual tyranny. Long accustomed, when the

priest lifted up the host, to bow down | copacy might, without much difficulty, with their faces to the earth, as before be turned against royalty; and many a present God, they had learned to treat of the arguments which were used to the mass as an idolatrous mummery. prove that spiritual power was best Long accustomed to regard the Pope lodged in a synod seemed to lead to as the successor of the chief of the the conclusion that temporal power apostles, as the bearer of the keys of was best lodged in a parliament. earth and heaven, they had learned to regard him as the Beast, the Antichrist, the Man of Sin. It was not to be expected that they would immediately transfer to an upstart authority the homage which they had withdrawn from the Vatican; that they would submit their private judgment to the authority of a Church founded on private judgment alone; that they would be afraid to dissent from teachers who themselves dissented from what had lately been the universal faith of western Christendom. It is easy to conceive the indignation which must have been felt by bold and inquisitive spirits, glorying in newly acquired freedom, when an institution younger by many years than themselves, an institution which had, under their own eyes, gradually received its form from the passions and interests of a court, began to mimic the lofty style of Rome.

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Thus, as the priest of the Established Church was, from interest, from principle, and from passion, zealous for the royal prerogatives, the Puritan was, from interest, from principle, and from passion, hostile to them. The power of the discontented sectaries was great. They were found in every rank; but they were strongest among the mercantile classes in the towns, and among the small proprietors in the country. Early in the reign of Elizabeth they began to return a majority of the House of Commons. And doubtless, had our ancestors been then at tematic liberty to fix their attention mentary entirely on domestic questions, offered to the strife between the Crown the goand the Parliament would in- of Elizastantly have commenced. But that was no season for internal dissensions. It might, indeed, well be doubted whether the firmest union among all the orders of the state could Since these men could not be con- avert the common danger by which all vinced, it was determined that they were threatened. Roman Catholic should be persecuted. Persecution Europe and reformed Europe were produced its natural effect on them. struggling for death or life. France, It found them a sect: it made them a divided against herself, had, for a time, faction. To their hatred of the ceased to be of any account in Chrispublican Church was now added hatred tendom. The English government was of the Crown. The two senti- at the head of the Protestant interest, ments were intermingled; and each and, while persecuting Presbyterians at embittered the other. The opinions home, extended a powerful protection of the Puritan concerning the relation to Presbyterian Churches abroad. At of ruler and subject were widely the head of the opposite party was the different from those which were in- mightiest prince of the age, a prince culcated in the Homilies. His favourite who ruled Spain, Portugal, Italy, the divines had, both by precept and by Netherlands, the East and the West Inexample, encouraged resistance to dies, whose armies repeatedly marched tyrants and persecutors. His fellow to Paris, and whose fleets kept the Calvinists in France, in Holland, and coasts of Devonshire and Sussex in in Scotland, were in arms against alarm. It long seemed probable that idolatrous and cruel princes. His Englishmen would have to fight despenotions, too, respecting the government rately on English ground for their of the state took a tinge from his religion and independence. Nor were notions respecting the government of they ever for a moment free from apthe Church. Some of the sarcasms prehensions of some great treason at which were popularly thrown on epis- home. For in that age it had become

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spirit.

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