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LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

BV THE SAME AUTHOR

IN THE HOUSEHOLD OF FAITH. Crown 8vo, $1.25.

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THE OLD CHURCH IN THE NEW LAND

LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

BY

THE REV. C. ERNEST SMITH, M.A.

RECTOR OF THE CHURCH OF ST, MICHAEL AND ALL ANGELS, BALTIMORE, MD. EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE BISHOP OF MARYLAND

WITH PREFACE

BV

THE BISHOP OF MARYLAND SECOND EDITION

NEW YORK LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO,

LONDON AND BOMBAY 1896

sc<^r

Copyright, 1S94, by LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

TROW DIBECTORY

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY

NEW YORK

PREFACE BY THE BISHOP OF MARYLAND

The names given to books do not always give a clear idea of their purpose. The title of this lit- tle book, however, admirably suggests its story. The truths are not new. They are known to scholars, and known to many who would not claim that name, but are only plain readers and thinkers. But old truths need to be often told. Each generation has to learn them for itself. And the same old truths may be truthfully told in new ways. Many who already love the Church, and are sure of its identity with the Church which our Saviour founded, will hold that conviction more firmly and see more clearly as this new tell- ing traces the course of its continuous history, and throws its light on every link of the "un- broken chain " which binds us in America, to the first believers in Jerusalem.

"The Old Church in the New Land." Most happily and clearly the title tells the story and the

VI PREFACE

meaning of the book. He who wrote it gained his Christian birthright, received his Christian blessing, and grew to Christian manhood in the old Church in the old land. And it was at the very cradle-seat of England's earliest Church tra- ditions that he learned the story which he here tells. Sent in God's providence to do missionary duty in the new land, he found in that new land that same old Church. In his own experience he verified its identity ; and I do not wonder he loves to trace it out for others to see and under- stand.

The Church in America does not seem to some to have had a very long, or very eventful, or very interesting history. It is little more than one hundred years since it began its distinct na- tional existence, as the nation itself became inde- pendent. But the Church was here before the nation. Its history did not begin with the na- tional distinctness. The line, the life, runs back unbroken, and claims its part in all the rich story of the Mother Church of England. That history is our history also.

And it is well and helpful that this identity should be brought clearly and often to the minds of the Church people in America, and that they

PREFACE Vll

should claim and love every sacred memory and glorious incident of England's Church life as be- longing to them also.

It is England's Church History claimed as our American heritage, and told to American ears as belonging to American hearts.

The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America is not a new Church or one lately born. The civil law of the State of Mary- land so affirms, when, soon after the War of Inde- pendence, it was enacted that the vestry of each parish " shall have good titles and estates in all property heretofore belonging to the Church of England, now called * The Protestant Episcopal Church in Maryland.' " And in another place it speaks of '* The Protestant Episcopal Church, heretofore called the Church of England."

The life, then, of this Church in America is the continuation of the life begun in apostolic days in England.

" Coelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt."

To trace the links of that continuity — to make churchmen feel sure through them of an aposto- lic origin — to help them know that this is no late- born sect — but that in it we are in the very

Vlll PREFACE

" fellowship of the Apostles," is the purpose of this book. We too often read English history, and especially English Church history, as if it were foreign history. But their glories are ours. It is our own early history which we thus trace back to its real beginning.

The chapters of this book were first given as lectures in the course of parochial Instruction. The immediate and permanent and studious in- terest awakened in those who heard them was evident proof of their helpfulness.

I have often been asked to name books for family reading, or sermons and lectures which would be both interesting and instructive for the use of lay-readers. This story of *' The Old Church in the New Land " may well be added to any such list.

William Paret,

Bishop of Maryland.

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

The Source of all Christianity,

The Channel of American Christianity,

PAGE I

15

Our First Missionary Heroes, SS. Patrick and

COLUMBA, 35

IV. The First Italian Mission to England, in the

Sixth Century, 53

V. Our Church Under the Saxons, . . . -73

VI. The First Primate of all England, . . .89

VII. Our Church under the Normans, .... 105

VIII. The Babylonian Bondage, 123

IX. An Anglican Elijah, 143

X. The End of Captivity, 157

XI. The Restoration, 173

XII. The Nag's Head Fable. An Apocryphal Story, . 193

XIII. Shakespeare a Son of the Reformation, . .211

XIV. Puritanism, 229

XV. The Church of England in Our Times, . . .245

XVI. America, the Heritage of Our Church, . . 263

I.

THE SOURCE OF ALL CHRISTIANITY

I.

THE SOURCE OF ALL CHRISTIANITY

" The church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth." — I Timothy iii. 15.

A KNOWLEDGE of some of the chief facts in the history of the Church has become almost a neces- sity to every churchman ; and there are, con- sequently, few subjects upon which lecture-ser- mons can more appropriately be preached in our day than on Church History, especially on the history of our own branch. To some persons this may seem a very unedifying kind of a sub- ject ; they prefer what is known as ^' Gospel preaching ; " they have indeed no interest in any other ; and if, unfortunately, they are compelled to listen to any other, they imagine there is no help in it, and are none the better for it, but rather the worse. Now there is no more satis- factor}^ argument for a course of sermons on the Church than that which is furnished by the ex- istence of this very class of Christians. Surely

4 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

they are themselves the best evidence we can have that the Church has been remiss in its duty, for the real cause of such indifference is want of knowledge. Many do not know even the sim- plest and most important facts about their Church. This want of knowledge is indeed sin- gular. It is unlike the usual conduct of men on other occasions and in other affairs. If we are de- scended from distinguished fathers and mothers, and are entitled to armorial quarterings and hon- orable distinctions, we are not unmindful of the fact, and we do not wish others to be unmindful of it. But in our ecclesiastical life, with such dis- tinguished ancestry as ours is, it is simply mar- vellous that some of us take no pride in their spir- itual pedigree; although we justly claim to be members of that branch of Christ's Church which has an origin as venerable as any, and which has had a record honorable beyond an}^ and which has the prospect of a still more glorious future, for it has its hold to-day upon the hearts and con- sciences of the most influential and intellectual portion of the most vigorous and progressive of all the nations of the modern world. It is a Church, indeed, the mention of whose name should cause a glow of pardonable pride to thrill

THE SOURCE OF ALL CHRISTL\NITY 5

the veins of everyone of its members, as he utters the words of thankfulness and praise, " Thank God, I am a member of that Church ! " " Bap- tized, catechised, confirmed in her, I rejoice in my inheritance ; and I thankfully accept at her hands the Bread of Life distributed by her."

We speak, then, of the Anglo - American Church, that Church which in Britain and the dependencies of Britain is called the Anglican Church, and in these United States of America The Protestant Episcopal Church, which is in- deed the same Church. But if we are to under- stand the subject we must define our terms. What do we mean by the Church ? What is the Church ? We speak, it is true, in the creed of the *^ holy Catholic Church " and profess our belief in it ; but are we sure that we have an in- telligent grasp of the subject, so that we can give to every one that asks us a reasonable explanation of this article of our faith? What, then, is the Church ? Two theories which we hold to be un- tenable at once confront us. First, the Roman theory. According to this the Catholic Church is coextensive with the authority of the Bishop of Rome. Where the authority of the Bishop of Rome is not, there is not the Catholic Church.

6 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

According to this idea the great Greek com- munion with its millions of adherents, and the great Anglican communion with its millions, and with its glorious opportunities and unrivalled past, are both mere delusions ; by it they are not what they claim to be, integral portions of the holy Catholic Church. This theory we deem worthy of no serious consideration.

Secondly, comes the theory of various Protes- tant religious bodies in Western Christendom, that there is no one duly consecrated and organ- ized body with an outward, visible, and objective existence. When they speak of the Church they mean^ the general company of true believers spread throughout the world, without any direct reference to external relationships ; and only in the sense that " the Church " is an invisible body, consisting of such persons, whose names are known only to God, will they speak of the Chris- tian Church at all. According to this theory Christ founded no visible Church which could accurately be spoken of as a body or a society having a true corporate existence, endowed with powers of self-government, invested with distinct privileges and blessings, and clothed with certain responsibilities. If this view be correct, Christ's

THE SOURCE OF ALL CHRISTIANITY ^

Church is little better, if anything, than an incor- poreal idea, having a merely subjective existence. This theory need not trouble us more than the first ; Christ came not to found an idea.

Now, in opposition to these two theories, our Church in her Prayer Book and other formularies proclaims that there is a Church with as distinct and corporate existence as ever even any Bishop of Rome dreamed of; but she asserts that its limits are far wider than the widest of Rome's pretensions ; and she further proclaims that what is and what is not a part of this Church is simply a question of historical evidence.

Let us see if she is warranted in her statements by the teaching of the New Testament.

It was one great purpose of Our Lord's com- ing to earth to found a Church. Christ came, of course, pre-eminently to be a sacrifice for sin, and also to be an example of godly life ; but behind these objects there lay another. He came to found a visible church, to establish a visible king- dom ; not merely to make men good, or to preach a crusade against sin, but to organize a society which, clothed with unseen powers, endowed with perpetual life, with definite aims and a definite work, should conquer the world for Him, so that

8 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

the kingdoms of this world should become the kingdoms of Our Lord and His Christ. Christ so spoke of this Church or kingdom that we cannot but regard it as a true kingdom in all essential points. We cannot think of it as being merely or as at all a theoretical bond of union, a mere sen- timental growth, an intangible idea without a dwelling-place, a disembodied truth, a mere col- lection of floating theories, a thing without shape, or form, or substance, but a definite organization ; called spiritual not as opposed to visible and real, but as describing better the nature of its work and the sphere of its influence ; and of this kingdom Christ Himself is the only true King.

Now Jesus was constantly looking forward when on earth to the early establishment of this kingdom. He spoke of it to His disciples, spoke of it as something yet close at hand. Observe a few of His utterances. He began His ministry by calling men to repentance in language which must have reminded His hearers of John the Bap- tist, and even of Daniel the prophet: "Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." The kingdom prophesied by Daniel was near, but it had not yet come. It was not yet in the world ; its foundations had not been laid.

THE SOURCE OF ALL CHRISTIANITY 9

Witness, again, the Lord's words to Simon Peter, St. Matthew xvi. 18, 19: "And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church ; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven : and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven : and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven/' Here the Church of the one verse is the kingdom of Heaven of the other. We are accustomed to speak of the history of the Church, but it is evi- dent that it would be equally correct to speak of the history of the kingdom of heaven. Witness the parables of Our Lord given by St. Matthew in chapter xiii. : " The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field ; but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way." Again it is like a grain of mustard seed ; it is like leaven ; it is like a net. Then since they obvi- ously speak not of a perfect kingdom but of an imperfect, not of that which is above but that which is on earth, since they do speak of that which has an outward and visible existence, such as tares and wheat growing together, saints and

10 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

sinners side by side, this is no picture of the heaven of God at the last, into which we are told " there shall nothing enter that defileth nor work- eth abomination nor maketh a lie, but they only whose names are written in the book of life."

Christ's declared intention of building or found- ing a Church, was not, it is true, fulfilled in His own earthly lifetime. He did indeed lay down the laws which should govern the kingdom. He appointed its officers and gave them au- thority and power to appoint their successors. He declared its character, the nature of its work and its constitution. He revealed its sanctions. He spent forty days on earth after His resurrec- tion speaking to His apostles about it, giving them final instructions ; but when He went away the* kingdom about which He had spoken was not in existence. There was, indeed, but one thing wanting. It was as if some beautiful statue, hewn out of glittering marble by the hand of a master sculptor, stood before men, the very personification of life, and yet wanting life. So with the Church; all was ready, but the spirit and the life were wanting. Now on the day of the first Christian Pentecost, a.d. 33, this life was visibly given and the saying of Christ fulfilled :

THE SOURCE OF ALL CHRISTIANITY II

" On this rock I will build my church." On that day the fifth kingdom of Daniers vision was ushered into the world. Then Christ established forever the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. Accordingly after Pen- tecost we no longer read of the Church as not yet formed, but as in being and action, as the mys- tical body of Christ, into which men are to be incorporated, and in which they are to receive the means of grace and everlasting life.

And now comes the all-important and momen- tous question, Is this same Church historically in the world to-day, and if so, where do we find it ? The first of these questions is easily answered. Christ pledged His word that the Church should remain unto the end of the world, and we dare not do Him such dishonor as to presume that .that word has fruitlessly passed away or His promise become of none effect.

As we have thus answered the first question from Scripture, we would answer the second from the Prayer Book, for no doctrine of the Church is of any private interpretation. In her Twenty- third Article we read : " It is not lawful for any man to take upon him the office of public preach- ing or Ministering the Sacraments in the Congre-

12 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

gation, before he be lawfully called, and sent to execute the same." And even more emphatic is the Preface to the Ordination Service : " No man shall be accounted or taken to be a lawful Bishop, Priest, or Deacon, in this Church, or suffered to execute any of the said functions, except he be called, tried, examined, and admitted thereunto, according to the form hereafter following, or hath had Episcopal Consecration or Ordination." Wherever there is the true ministry, there is the Church that Christ founded. Let us not fail to note what is the real question here. It is not whether other bodies of Christians are doing good work, or whether their members will be saved or not. With such questions we have ab- solutely nothing to do. We are concerned only with the one main question as to w^hat is that very body that Christ came to found ; and we conceive that it is no breach of charity to say that it is only where Christ's appointed ministry is that this organization exists ; and that organi- zations which took their rise some fifteen hun- dred years after Christ's ascension can have no shadow of a claim to be considered parts of it. This is not a matter of doctrine, but of historical evidence ; not a question of theology, but of legal

THE SOURCE OF ALL CHRISTIANITY 1 3

proof. Nor is it an open question, but one on which the Church has spoken with no uncertain voice.

She emphatically refuses to recognize as a dis- tinct branch of herself any body of Christians which has not this apostolic ministry. For this ministry, which she calls the historic episcopate, is one essential test with her as to whether an ecclesiastical organization is or is not a part of herself ; yet she is not, and never has been, ex- clusive. She cannot justly be termed narrow- minded or bigoted. She holds this gift as in trust for the world ; as a public not a private trust. She refuses it to none that worthily seeks it. But if some think otherwise, regarding it as unnecessary, she has not a word of censure. She leaves them to Christ She regards herself not as a judge over them, but as entrusted with sacred treasures for the universal benefit of the children of men. That some count her spiritual jewels of little or no value is to her a subject of sorrow, but no power on earth will cause her to admit that they have no need of these jewels. That she may be misunderstood and misinterpreted is not strange to her ; the Master Himself was misrep- resented and misunderstood when He lived on

14 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

earth. Meanwhile she goes on her way, pained sometimes by the conduct of disloyal sons even more than by the misrepresentations of open ene- mies ; for she knows the truth is with her, and conscious in her Lord's abiding presence she clings to that faith once for all delivered to her, and continues to be the faithful dispenser of the Word of God and of His holy sacraments ; and so abundantly does she make real her right to that glorious title, " The Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth."

II.

THE CHANNEL OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY

II.

THE CHANNEL OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY

•' Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn." — Isaiah li. i.

These words were a summons to the Jews to look back amid their trials and difficulties to the true source of all their life and the beginning- of their former strength. Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the Lord. Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you. You are the children of distin- guished parents, do not be unmindful of this ; do not be forgetful of your birthright ; do not ignore your glorious past. Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged. And as you rejoice in the past and find strength in the contemplation of the source of all that is best and noblest in what you are to-day, rejoice also in the future — for it prom- ises to be even more glorious ; for the Lord shall comfort Zion, He will comfort all her waste places,

1 8 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

and He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and the voice of melody.

In a very different spirit and from a far different motive we of the American Church are also bidden to look unto the rock whence we are hewn. And we are assured that we have not far to travel ere we reach that rock. We are sometimes told that y our Church had no existence before Luther and the sixteenth century ; that Henry VI IL of Eng- land was our kingly but far from respectable founder and Queen Elizabeth our royal patron ; and that thus were remarkably fulfilled for us the prophetic words : '' Kings shall be your nursing fathers, and Queens your nursing mothers." We are thus given to understand that as a Church we have no history before the sixteenth century ; that we are only disobedient and gainsaying children of the Church of Rome, our spiritual mother, upon whom we turned our back at the time of the so-called Reformation in England ; and that conse- quently we are only a sect of yesterday, having no rightful connection with the ancient Catholic Church of Christ of which we have fondly but vainly supposed ourselves to be a part.

THE CHANNEL OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 1 9

Marvellous as it may seem to many of us there are doubtless persons who as sincerely and stead- fastly believe all this as they believe the Gospel itself. But we have not so read history. What- ever may be said of the Anglo-American Church, this at least can never be said, with any show of truth, that it was ever a part of the Roman Church ; and this for the best of all reasons. The Roman Church itself in Britain is but a new creation. It had no existence there at all until it was estab- lished by Pius V. in 1570, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It is only what it has been aptly styled by the present Archbishop of Canterbury, ^' the new Italian Mission," and as such is merely one of the latest born of the sects which trouble the peace of the ancient national Chuixh of the land, having no more connection with that old historic Church than it has with, say the Church on the Malabar coast of India, or the Moravian settle- ments on the Labrador.

Now we do not propose to make mere asser- tions of what we believe. We are prepared to submit evidence. The truth is afraid of nothing. IVe have not that dread of history which found ex- pression in the well-known utterance of a Roman cardinal : '* Thank God we have done with history."

20 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

We have not done with history, and we do not propose that its teachings shall be ignored. To every one who is laboring vnider the delusion that the American Church is a thing of yesterday, and bids us look back to our rock, we are ready to reply in the spirit of one of old : Hast thou ap- pealed unto history ? Unto history shalt thou go.

Look unto the rock whence ye are heivn. Our rock is Britain. We are not unmindful of the bond which unites us to the Church of the Apos- tles in Jerusalem ; not a bond merely of sympathy and brotherly love, but one of visible and organic continuity. We have an actual share in the events of the upper room and in the doings of the infant Church. We claim a vital interest in the first ser- mon ever preached, the first synod held, the first Gentile converts gathered in. We think of those things as the very beginnings of our Christianity, the first-fruits of our Church. But thinking mere- ly of our separate national and ecclesiastical ex- istence as but one portion of the holy Catholic Church, we look to Britain as the rock whence we are hewn, as the rock from whence flows to us that living stream which makes glad the city of God.

Now what Britain was in those early days we

THE CHANNEL OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 21

well know. Covered with dense forests through which wild beasts roamed and sought their prey, the country presented much the same appearance as many a wild and uncivilized land to-day. The inhabitants, clothed in skins and miserably shel- tered, were ruled by religious teachers called Druids, whose religion comprised belief in a Su- preme Deity, and the immortality and transmi- gration of souls. At times sacrifices were offered in open-air temples, surrounded by groves of oak- trees or circles of immense stones. On national occasions the Druids made immense images of wicker-work, which they filled with unfortunate human beings and barbarously offered up as burnt- offerings.

It is some seventeen or eighteen years since I stood within one of these open-air temples in Wilt- shire, on Salisbury Plain. The sight was solemn and even weird in the extreme. For miles around extended the absolutely level plain. Far off in one direction one could see the huge mounds which are said to have been the burying-places of British chiefs. Looking out over that lonely plain one felt himself carried back two thousand years. There, in an almost perfect circle, were stones so ponderous and vast that one could but

22 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

wonder by what means they had been transported across that grassy plain. These stones, oblong in shape, were standing on end ; whilst across the tops of some of them still rested similar stones, though some were fallen to the ground. A short distance away was to be seen one stone standing all alone in solitary state and grandeur, and the old shepherd who watched the place informed us that once every year in the days of the Druids, when the sun's rays first gilded the top of that stone as seen from a certain point within the temple, the dreadful sacrifices began and the air was filled with the shrieks of dying men.

But the day came when the reign of the Druids was over. In the year of Our Lord 43, Claudius Caesar invaded Britain, and soon afterward the Druids were swept away. In the track of the Roman legions, there followed Christian mission- aries. The sounds of war, the shouts of them that strive for the mastery, and the scenes of blood- shed were followed by the Gospel of Peace :

*' the Julian spear A way first opened, and with Roman chains The tidings came of Jesus crucified."

It was, indeed, a blessed change, and destined

THE CHANNEL OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 23

to work far greater changes and accomplish far more lasting and glorious results. Well may every Christian joyfully repeat after the prophet the words which occur in the very next chapter : " How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace ; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation ; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth ! "

Now WHERE did these first preachers of the Gospel in Britain come from and WHO were they? The question has been often asked and never an- swered satisfactorily. It is, indeed, a hard ques- tion. We must frankly own that the story of these first missionaries is wrapped, as the tops of some of our lofty mountains are wrapped, in an impenetrable shroud of mists and clouds. There are traditions, some of them very beautiful, which tell us of those early days. Would that we could implicitly believe them ! Like the will -of -the - wisp, they shine out of the thick darkness, and we fain would follow them ; but we dare not. We cannot trust them. Yet we are glad to have them ; they may be true, and if so, lovely indeed is the story of the introduction of Christianity into Britain.

24 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

But whether true or not, we feel that they pro- claim one thing with no uncertain voice ; they tell of the early founding of the Church there. They show how the Church was planted at a time when, if not the very apostles themselves, at least some taught directly by them were the missionary he- roes of the Church.

The traveller standing on the spot where

" The castled crag of Drachenfels Looks o'er the wide and winding Rhine,"

sees a beautiful sight. Far below at his feet lies the Rhine, and as he looks down the river he sees its stream, swollen high by the Moselle, which mingles itself with its waters from where Coblent": stands beneath the frowning fortress of Ehren- breitstein, sweeping past the city of Bonn, with its university and time-worn castles, and on by Co- logne, whose cathedral is one of the noblest speci- mens of Gothic architecture in Europe, on and on until it falls at length as one mighty river into the boundless sea. But as he looks in the op- posite direction whence the river takes its rise, different, but still strikingly beautiful, is the scene. Far, far away, like gleaming coils of sil- ver, the river is lying, until one can follow its

THE CHANNEL OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 2 5

course no farther. On the distant horizon the mists gather and no eye can pierce them, no glass can shorten the distance or show what lies be- yond those thin mists which gather in the far-off distance. Only in thought can the traveller fol- low the course of the stream till he stands in fancy before its rocky bed, far up in the everlast- ing hills, whence, clear as crystal, it issues forth, till, by and by, gathering force and volume, it be- comes the mighty river, passing towering fortress and lowly cottage, passing busy city and quiet hamlet till it falls into the sea. So methinks it is with the British Church. We can follow it for a while as it rolls past, first, this ancient castle, and then that bold headland — but there comes a time and a place where we can follow it no farther. But the purity of the source we cannot doubt, as we behold the river itself.

We admit, then, that the origin of the British Church is lost amid the mists and shadows of tra- ditions. What are these traditions? It may be sufficient for our purpose to mention two.

I. There is the story, of which most people who know anything at all about ecclesiastical history have heard, that St. Paul himself was the first preacher of the Gospel in Britain. Between St.

26 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Paul's first and second imprisonments at Rome there are eight years of the Apostle's life during which the Acts of the Apostles fail to reveal to us the scene of his apostolic labors. When we read St. Paul's letter to the Romans we see that he pur- posed a visit into Spain. And there are not want- ing indications in the New Testament itself that this visit was paid, and that it was extended even into Gaul. But that he ever paid a visit, or ever meditated a visit, to the islands beyond, we have, of course, not the slightest indication in the New Testament. How then came the tradition (that he he did) to be so widely spread and so universally believed? It is due in part to the fact that Cle- ment of Rome (whom the Roman Catholics claim as an infallible Pope) expressly says: "Our be- loved brother Paul preached the Gospel in the ut- most bounds of the west ; " and in part to the fact that Claudia and Pudens and Linus, mentioned by St. Paul in his letter to Timothy, are thought to have been British Christians. There is certainly nothing impossible in the tradition, but we build nothing upon it. Yet it is infinitely more worthy of belief than the tradition, resting upon no foun- dation at all, that St. Peter was ever Bishop of Rome.

THE CHANNEL OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 2/

2. On a par with the fond delusion of our Roman brethren that St. Peter was their first Bishop, is the tradition which tells us that Joseph of Arimathea was the father of British Christi- anity. The Jews, it is said, having a special en- mity against SS. Philip, Lazarus, Martha, Mary, and Joseph of Arimathea, banished them. In their exile they arrived at Marseilles, where SS. Philip and Lazarus remained, but St. Joseph was sent, with twelve companions and the holy women, to Britain. They landed on the southwest coast and made their way to Avalon, now Glastonbury, bearing with them the Holy Grail {i.e., the cup or chalice wherein Our Lord consecrated the wine and water at the institution of the Eucharist). Here they preached to the people, and St. Joseph, to confirm the truthfulness of their preaching, stuck into the ground his staff of thorn, which forthwith bloomed like Aaron's rod, and grew into a tree, which thereafter blossomed at every Christmas season. Whereupon, Ave are told, the king gave them that land and allowed them to settle there. They at once built a church in honor of the Virgin Mary, out of wattles and wreathed twigs, which they plastered with mud. No one, of course, believes all this mythical story, but this

28 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

much is certain that no place in England has ever attempted to rival Glastonbury as the site of the first permanent Christian settlement.

Yet there is a curious incident connected with this legend. At the Councils of Pisa and Con- stance and Basle the question of precedence be- tween English and French ambassadors was con- stantly coming up, and finally was decided in favor of the English ambassador, on the ground that the English traced their Christianity to Jo- seph of Arimathea, who came earlier to Britain than Dionysius the Areopagite came to France.

We may now leave the realm of tradition and come to actual historical testimony. It is a rec- ognized fact to-day that the earliest unquestion- able statement of the existence of Christianity in Britain is in TertuUian's work against the Jews. This great African apologist of Christianity wrote, about A.D. 207, as follows : " For in whom else have all nations believed but in Christ ? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, all the coasts of Spain, the vari- ous nations of Gaul, and the portions of Britain inaccessible to Rome, but now subject to Christ."

Gildas, the historian of the British Church, who lived early in the sixth century, after describing the defeat of the Druids, a.d. 61, immediately goes

THE CHANNEL OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 29

on to say, '' In the meantime Christ, the true Sun, for the first time cast his rays, />., the knowledge of his laws, on this island." Here we have a de- finite date assigned. Compare the statements of TertuUian and Gildas, and remember that in A.D. 61, twenty years after London was founded, Lon- don was a flourishing town, with commerce that connected the Thames with the Mediterranean, and you will see that it is quite possible that the true faith could be published in Britain and find lodging and growth before the first century had run its course.

The veil which hides from our view the early British Church, thus partially lifted, is not again, even in part, uplifted until after the third cen- tury. What the national history of the Church was in that silent period we know not ; but the fourth century opens with as grand and touching a scene as is to be witnessed in all the history of the Church of God.

" Lament ! for Diocletian's fiery sword Works busy as the lightning ! "

During the Diocletian persecution, which reached as far as the shores of Britain, Alban, a pagan, a citizen of Verulam, sheltered in his house a

30 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Christian priest who was fleeing from his perse- cutors. He had taken into his house an angel unawares. The sight of the good man's life, his watchings and prayers, so impressed Alban that he became a convert. On its becoming known where the priest was concealed, soldiers were sent to Alban's cottage ; but Alban, putting on the priest's cloak, met the soldiers at the door and gave himself up into their hands, declaring him- self to be a Christian, whilst the priest made good his escape. On being brought before the magis- trate he was ordered to sacrifice, but this he re- fused to do, and declaring himself to be a Chris- tian he was ordered to execution. A short dis- tance from the cit}^ wall he was beheaded, the first martyr of the Church of God in Britain.

" Self-offered victim for his friend he died, And for the Faith."

It is remarkable that the first martyr in Britain should thus have been not a priest or a bishop, but a layman, the first of a noble army.

On the spot where St. Alban died the Christian Britons subsequently erected a church to his memory, which was replaced, as centuries rolled by, with larger and more commodious structures.

THE CHANNEL OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 3 1

Saxons and Danes, as they became Christians, each strove to outvie their predecessors in the honor done to the memory of Britain's proto- martyr. To - day, upon that spot, St. Alban's Cathedral stands, and so connects the English Church of the present age with that first martyr- dom in her distant past.

Of the presence of Bishops from Britain at the Councils of Aries and Sardica, in the fourth cen- tury, and of the fact that they were invited to be present at the Nicene Council, which gave us the Nicene Creed, we may not now speak ; nor of the fact that they were jealous with a godly jealousy for the Faith once for all delivered to the saints, and refused to hearken to the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely. Nor can we further speak now of the glorious missionary work of the British Church, and of how St. Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland, was a British clergyman and son of a British clergyman — these things we must speak of another time. To the average Church- man the fact that there was a British Church in the first century may come as a revelation. His- tory, especially Church history, has been so per- sistently perverted that many even of our Church's own sons and daughters are not prepared to hear

32 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

of any Church in Britain until the arrival of the Roman missionary, Augustine, at the close of the sixth century. Let such remember that we are dealing with sober facts. It may suit the pur- poses of controversial writers to ignore alto- gether some great events and to magnify others, and call such distorted teaching history ; but we have no such custom, neither the Church of God.

There is in Hampton Court Palace Gardens, in England, a vine. It is the oldest vine in that coun- try, some say in the world. Year after year it bears its clusters of grapes, and last year there were some 1,200 clusters clinging to its venerable branches. It has its roots far down in the ground, reaching out even to the river Thames, from whence it draws its nourishment and strength. This vine is a true type of the British Church ; that, too, is bringing forth more fruit in its age, and is fat and well liking. It is still flourishing like a palm-tree and spreading abroad like a cedar in Libanus. Of that vine we might say unto God with the Psalmist: ''Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt ; thou hast cast out the heathen and planted it. Thou madest room for it ; and when it had taken root it filled the land. The hills were

THE CHANNEL OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY 33

covered with the shadow of it and the boughs thereof were like the goodly cedar-trees. She stretched out her branches unto the sea, and her boughs unto the river."

III.

OUR FIRST MISSIONARY HEROES, SS. PATRICK AND COLUMBA

III.

OUR FIRST MISSIONARY HEROES, SS. PATRICK AND COLUMBA

" And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament ; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever." — Daniel xii. 3.

Most interesting it is to follow the fortunes of the Church in the British isles from the martyr- dom of Alban to the coming of the monk Augus- tine ; a period extending from the beginning of the fourth century to the end of the sixth — a sec- ond period of three hundred years.

This period may be called the missionary age of the early Church in the British isles, wherein two names stand out and shine like beacon-lights, proclaiming that those who bore them were true princes of the Church of God, true leaders of the spiritual Israel. These are St. Patrick, the Apos- tle of Ireland, and St. Columba, the Apostle of Scotland ; both of them saints who had been bap- tized, taught, and catechised in the old Church

SS LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

of the land ; saints, therefore, not of any foreign Church but of that old Church in the British isles which owed allegiance to none save to the Universal Bishop, the one Shepherd of our souls, Christ our Lord. Never did men toil more fer- vently than these for the spread of the kingdom of Christ on earth, and never did men, since the days of St. Paul, have truer, grander, or more de- servedly earned success than these. Of all men they might have been cheered and strengthened and have found grace to persevere in those words of the Prophet Daniel : "And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament ; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever."

But that age was distinguished for another thing, it was the age ol Councils. Whilst the persecu- tions lasted, it had been impossible to hold public Councils. But with the close of Diocletian's per- secution, the Church had rest. Then it was that the Christians had no longer any need to hide themselves in dens and caves of the earth — they no longer carried their lives in their hands — they began openly to organize themselves for work. Accordingly, we shall find that, following the ex- ample of the Apostles and Elders who came to-

OUR FIRST MISSIONARY HEROES 39

gather to Jerusalem to deliberate concerning the common welfare, the scattered Churches began to come together again to hold Councils. In these Councils the Church in Britain, as a true branch of Christ's Holy Apostolic Church, had always open and undisputed right of representation.

In the year 3 14 such a Council was held in Aries, in Gaul, partly to consider the question of the growing Donatist schism in Africa, and partly to determine what was to be done with those timid disciples who had compromised their faith in the late persecutions. In the records of that Council we find the names of three Bishops from Britain, — Eborius, Bishop of York ; Restitutus, Bishop of London; and Adelphius, Bishop of Colonia Civi- tate Londinensium, which some have assumed to be Colchester, others Lincoln, and others Caer- leon-on-Usk in Wales.

In 325 a great General Council of the Church was held at Nicea vuider the presidency of Con- stantine, the first Christian emperor — the first Ecclesiastical Council in which the civil authority took part. This was the Council which gave us the substance of the Nicene Creed. No Bishops from Britain were present at that Council; but they had been invited, and although not present

40 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

they had found some means of giving their vote, for in a letter of Constantine's, now extant, the Emperor mentions the British Bishops as sub- scribing to the Creed and to the ruling of the Council.

Moreover, in 347, when the Council of Sardica was held, the representatives of the British Bish- ops were present, for Athanasius mentions that they supported him against the errors of the Arians, who were, notwithstanding the Council of Nicea, at that time in great favor at Constan- tinople.

It is mainly from such plain historical and un- questioned facts that we know the Church of Britain was not only an orthodox and indepen- dent national Church at that time, but was recog- nized as such by the Church at large. Otherwise the Church at this period is like a landscape wrapped in fog, across which some fitful lights irregularly gleam. Of its Episcopal succession and its internal organization and methods of work we really know very little. We know that it had its sacred edifices at Canterbury, at Caerleon, and at Glastonbury. A few relics have been found which plainly point to the Christianity of that period. Here and there some Christian mono-

OUR FIRST MISSIONARY HEROES 41

gram has been found, or coin bearing the Alpha and Omega, and here and there a gravestone re- cording the fact that a Christian man once slept below. How far, however, that Church had really occupied the land for Christ is now hidden from us. It had, indeed, as we have seen, sought to take possession ; but it is a question how far it had expelled the Canaanite and the Perizzite from the land. How far, too, that ancient Church brought the heathen soldiers of Rome to believe in Christ, how far it leavened the army, not with the old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, this we do not know. But we may well believe that the Church which tra- dition tells us gave Linus to be the first Bishop of Rome, did do all that it could to influence the common soldiers to believe in Christ ; and it may be that when the time came that those soldiers had to return to Italy to defend the Imperial City itself against the Gothic invader, many re- turned as servants of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords ; and that, as such, they would re- joice to tell their comrades and their friends what they had learned by the camp-fires in distant Britain.

42 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

The Roman legions were withdrawn in 410, and Britain then practically ceased to be a part of the Roman Empire. But alas for the British Church ! Blood was again to flow. Ere half a century had passed away the pagan Angles came, and they and their kindred Saxons continued coming for the next one hundred and fifty years. Fiercely they fought with the old inhabitants of the land for the mastery, and little by little they conquered and gained the country for them- selves. To the British Christians the evil days of Diocletian seemed to have returned. The ad- vance of the pagans was marked everywhere by the burning of Christian sanctuaries and the slaughter of Bishops, ministers, and people, until the greater part of the land was again reduced to paganism.

But we must not suppose that the effect of the Anglo-Saxon invasion was to utterly destroy the British Church. It was very far from doing that. Whilst it did indeed seriously cripple the Church, and even in certain places entirely destroy it, yet it did not uproot it from the land. Its candle- stick was not taken away. We need no better proof of this than the fact that when, two cen- turies later, Augustine came to preach the Gospel

OUR FIRST MISSIONARY HEROES 43

to the Angles, he discovered a fully organized Church in the western parts, whither the Chris- tian Britons had been driven by the heathen, and where they still lived unconquered by them. If we needed more proof we should find it in the fact that, in a conference with seven Bishops of this Church, St. Augustine made certain propo- sals to them which they rejected, on the express ground that he claimed, as if a superior, unwar- ranted lordship over them.

The natural result of the Saxon invasion v/as to isolate the British Church from the Churches in Europe by a wedge of heathenism. Probably this very fact contributed more than aught else to preserve the sturdy independence of that Church. Certain, however, it is, that it was an independent national Church, having its own Liturgy, its own version of the Bible, different from the Vulgate, its own mode of administering Baptism, keeping Easter, and of Consecrating Churches and Bishops. It was so unlike, in many of its customs and ceremonies, anything seen either in the Churches of France or Italy, that its origin must be looked for elsewhere than from Western Christendom.

We come now to a question of great interest :

44 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Was this ancient British Church a missionary Church ? We reply it was ; though it carried on no missionary work among the pagans, and for the best of reasons, because no Briton could have gone among them with any prospect of coming back alive. Yet notwithstanding this, it was filled with that missionary spirit which rests not until it has done something for Christ. But had that British Church done no more than give St. Patrick to the work, it had done much ; for never was there a more faithful and devoted missionary than he. He it is who is so universally recog- nized as the Apostle of Ireland ; and of his mis- sion, which is one of the most interesting events in Church history, we happily possess most trustworthy documents.

The principal of these records is the work composed by St. Patrick himself in his old age, and addressed to the people of Ireland and en- titled his Confession; a kind of profession of faith. This profession of faith he wrote as a brief memoir of his own ministry and life, and also as a public and thankful acknowledgment to God for the manifold mercies vouchsafed to him. He intended by means of it that all men should know what he had taught and done, and

OUR FIRST MISSIONARY HEROES 45

that all might know that though he had been permitted to labor in Ireland for many years, and had baptized many thousands there, and had planted many churches in that country, yet he claimed no honor to himself, but ascribed all the glory to God.

Now who was this man of whom it might be truthfully said, " He was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost." He was not an Irishman, he was not an Italian. His baptismal name of Suc- cath points to Celtic origin. He tells us that his father and his grandfather were clergymen, and his birthplace is generally supposed to have been on the banks of the Clyde, in Scotland, between Dumbarton and Glasgow, though some suppose that he was born in France. Certainly he was either born in Scotland or France, but the proba- bility is in favor of Scotland, and for this reason : When sixteen years of age he was captured by pirates and carried to the north of Ireland, where he was sold as a slave. Until his twenty-third year he remained the slave of a heathen master in Ireland. He speaks in his Confession of his own course at that time. '' I wandered as a shepherd," he says, " drenched by rains and chilled by dews and frost." But in his twentj^-third year he es-

46 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

caped and returned to his native land. He would not, however, remain there. He had seen the people of Ireland scattered like sheep with- out a shepherd, and his heart was moved toward them ; and so after some years of preparation he received the Holy Orders of Deacon, Priest, and Bishop, and about the year of Our Lord 430, with a noble Christian forgetfulness of the past, and a spirit of Christian self-sacrifice, he went back to preach the Gospel in the land where he had been an exile and a slave. There he lived the remainder of his 3^ears, and there he died. For sixty years he toiled, never quitting the field, and at last, full of labors and of years, like a reaper with his sheaves around him, he fell asleep in Christ. Truly "they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever."

We do not wonder that another Church, that of Rome, whom he never knew, has claimed him as her son, for his praise is in all the Churches. But did St. Patrick never know the Church of Rome ? He had heard of her, of course, but he owed nothing to her, and into his life she never en- tered. In his Confession he never mentions hen

OUR FIRST MISSIONARY HEROES 47

He mentions the clergy of Britain ; he mentions the clergy of France ; he mentions the clergy ot Ireland ; but he never mentions the clergy of Rome, and the name of Rome never once occurs in St. Patrick's own writings and work.

This, however, is not all. Rome evidently did not know St. Patrick. Let me show this. Our Roman Catholic brethren claim that he was sent to Ireland by Celestine, in his time Bishop of Rome. Well, in the time of Celestine, Prosper Aquitanus lived. He composed the " Annals of the Church." Now /ic never mentions St. Patrick in his history, but he does mention Palladius, a missionary whom Celestine sent to Ireland one year before St. Patrick went there, and who was a complete failure, giving up his work almost at once and leaving the country. Patrick, on the other hand, was a glorious success, and became Ireland's Apostle. Singular, is it not, that the Roman historian should tell us all about the poor failure of Palladius, and not say anything about the apostolic St. Patrick, if St. Patrick really had come from Rome, or ever been commissioned by her?

Again, to speak of our own records. The most ancient of English Church historians is the Vener-

48 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

able Bede, who was born a.d. 672, less than two centuries after St. Patrick's death. He was sup- plied with much material from the archives of Rome, but nevertheless he never mentions St. Patrick. Do we ask why ? The reason is evi- dent. Patrick was not one of the Roman cler- gy. He was a missionary from the old British Church !

Again, another great missionary was St. Co- lumba, who is justly regarded as the Apostle of the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland. He was of Ireland's ancient line of kings, and preached the gospel in Northern Britain thirty years before Augustine landed in England.

Banished from Ireland, he, with twelve com- panions, crossed the sea to Scotland. They landed on the little island of lona, which King Colman, a kinsman of Columba, gave him to be used for religious purposes. Here a monastery was founded, to which the whole of Northern Scotland, and the isles surrounding it, owe their first knowledge of Christianit}^ Ireland, in the person of Columba, was thus magnificently re- paying her debt to Britain for her St. Patrick. No place on earth outside the Holy Land is richer in sacred associations than that spot from whence

OUR FIRST MISSIONARY HEROES 49

radiated the rays of Christian teaching for many a century to come.

" The pilgrim at lona's shrine Forgets his journey's toil, As faith rekindles in his breast On that inspiring soil."

The words of Columba, spoken but a few hours before he died, have been signally fulfilled. " To this place, little and poor though it be, there shall come great honor, not only from Scottish kings and people, but from barbarians and foreign na- tions, and from the saints of the other Churches also." It was a true prophecy. The sanctity of the place brought thither for burial not merely kings of the British and Celtic people, but even kings of Spain and Norway. Here Duncan Avas buried, whom Macbeth murdered ; for he was carried, as Shakespeare tells us, to Colmes Kill, the sacred storehouse of his predecessors and guardian of their bones.

Columba's end was singularly beautiful ; it re- minds us of the last hours of Bede. Coming from the hill where he had delivered his prophecy con- cerning the future greatness of lona, it is related that he entered the monastery to die. He could 4

50 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

only half finish the verse of the Psalter he was copying : " They that seek the Lord shall want no manner of thing that is good ; " and on that Sun- day morning, June 7, A.D. 597, having hastened to the matins of the festival, he died before the altar, among his spiritual children, who had hur- ried to him in the dim light before the. dawn to obtain his last blessing. His voice was gone and there was no power in his right hand. But, raised by another, he made the sign of the cross, and passed into the visible presence of his Lord, to re- ceive the reward of those who turn many to righteousness.

As St. Patrick's was the noblest and most fruit- ful missionary career ever accomplished in Ire- land, so in like manner St. Columba's was the noblest ever accomplished in Scotland.

Was it a strange coincidence that, whilst this great missionary (to use his own words) " was en- tering on the way of his fathers," another mission- ary was beginning his work to the southward? The founder of lona died on the 7th of June ; and on the 14th of April, in the same year, the Roman missionary Augustine had landed on the southern coast to join in the same holy work, and to leave behind him the glory of an apostolic example.

OUR FIRST MISSIONARY HEROES 5 1

We have spoken of the Church in Britain and of the Church in Ireland. Sister Churches were they, working side by side ; together working in God's cause, together possessing God's blessing. Like the two olive-trees Zechariah saw in his vision, so were these two Churches. *'And the angel that talked with me came again, and waked me, as a man that is wakened out of his sleep." '' Then answered I, and said unto him. What are these two olive-trees upon the right side of the candlestick, and upon the left side thereof?" " And he answered me and said, Knowest thou not what these be?" ''Then said he, These are the two anointed ones, that stand by the Lord of the whole earth."

IV.

THE FIRST ITALIAN MISSION TO ENGLAND, IN THE SIXTH CENTURY

IV.

THE FIRST ITALIAN MISSION TO ENGLAND, IN THE SIXTH CENTURY

" Out of Zion went forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem." — Isaiah, xi. 3.

We have hitherto brought down our studies in early British Church history to the end of the sixth century. The state of the British Church at the close of that period was briefly as. follows : In the greater part of what we now* call England, where the Saxons had obtained possession, Chris- tianity had practically perished. But in the un- conquered portions of the land, all along the west- ern seaboard, from Cornwall to the Lowlands of Scotland, the Christian Church held possession. There Bishops and clergy still ministered to their people, and the sacrifice of prayer and praise was offered as beforetimes. Across the Channel, in Ireland, mainly through the preaching of the apostolic missionary St. Patrick, the Church had gained some of her brightest triumphs and many tribes had been won for Christ ; whilst in Scot-

56 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

land again, the great Irish -born St. Columba had carried the knowledge of Christ crucified northward, far to the Highlands and through all the western Isles, fulfilling the beautiful prophecy of Isaiah (li. 5) : " The isles shall wait upon me, and on mine arm shall they trust."

But zealous as it was for Christ, that old British Church had done nothing to convert the pagan invaders of their land. Side by side for one hun- dred and fifty years Christian Britons and pagan Saxons lived, and during all that time the Saxons might have justly exclaimed, " No man cares for our souls." But in the sixth century Christian teachers appeared on the southern coast to lead the Saxons to kneel at the feet of Him whom once, like St. Paul, they had cruelly persecuted.

These missionaries were Augustine, the Bene- dictine monk, and his forty companions, sent by Gregory the Great, 'Bishop of Rome.

May we recall the well-known story which tells of the sending of these missionaries by Gregory? Humanly speaking Augustine would never have come at all had it not been for one of those oc- currences which men speak of as chance, but in which we can often see God's providential hand. You doubtless know the incident well. The story

THE FIRST ITALIAN MISSION TO ENGLAND 5/

of it is at once old and yet ever fresh. There was the market-place at Rome ; among bales of mer- chandise, newly arrived, there were three boys to be sold as slaves. Gregory, the future Bishop, passing through the market-place was attracted by the sight of these boys, with their fair com- plexions and light flaxen hair, so unlike the dark olive skins and jet black hair of the Italians. " What is the name of the nation from which these boys are brought ? " asked Gregory of the trader. " They are Angles/' is the reply. In po- etic fancy the good Gregory answers : " Rightly are they called Angles for their faces are the faces of Angels and they ought to be fellow-heirs with the angels of heaven." Such is the legend.

Years passed away, but Gregory never forgot that pathetic sight in the market-place. He of- ten thought of those little slave bo3^s. They had made an impression on his mind which could not be effaced. Vividly had they made him realize the needs of their nation, and often in the night- time would there arise in his dreams one like the man of Macedon, who said : '' Come over and help us ; " nay not one voice but many :

" Thousand voices, thousand voices, Called him o'er the waters blue."

$8 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

At length he could resist no longer the plead- ing of those voices, and he gave himself for the work. But a man so beloved as he was the Ro- man people could ill spare, and they refused to let him go. Disappointed for the time his pur- pose never faltered, directly or indirectly he WOULD preach the Gospel in the land of the Angles. Not till six years had elapsed, however, could he fulfil his heart's desire, and then the way was opened before him ; for he had become Bishop of Rome, and, as such, one of his first acts was to summon a certain Benedictine monk, named Au- gustine, to do what he himself had so earnestly longed to do, and carry the Gospel to the isles of the west. We do not marvel that Augustine was loth to exchange the fair Italian skies and his peaceful monastic life for the wandering life of a missionary among savage Saxons. But he had to deal with a m^an who was as capable as he was good, and the Benedictine rule called for implicit obedience. Augustine therefore yielded, and on April 14, 597, he, with forty companions, crossed the Channel and stood on English soil. The sight of the slave boys at Rome was now to bear its fruit at last. Rome, which had torn those boys from their homes, had now sent men to their

THE FIRST ITALIAN MISSION TO ENGLAND 59

fatherland to free those who dwelt therein from the slavery of sin and heathenism. It was a noble recompense to make.

The first care of Augustine and his fellow-mis- sionaries was to send from the Isle of Thanet, where they had landed, their homage to the King of Kent. This was Ethelbert, King of the Jutes. They were come, they said, from Rome, with the best of all messages, and, if he would ac- cept it, he would undoubtedly insure for him- self an everlasting kingdom. The heathen king warily replied that he would come and see them : meanwhile they were to remain on the Isle of Thanet. There, when at the appointed time and place Ethelbert and his thanes had taken their seats, the missionaries approached. As they came into the presence of the king they raised aloft a silver cross, and a board on which was painted a figure of The Crucified. And then by means of a Gallic interpreter Augustine delivered his message. He told, said a Saxon homilist long after, how the tender-hearted Jesus by His throes had redeemed the sinful world, and had opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.

The religion he heard thus preached by Au- gustine could not have been entirely new to him,

60 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

for his queen was a Christian, and she and her chaplain had long worshipped God in the lit- tle British chapel on the slopes of St. Martin's Hill, just outside the city of Canterbury. But Ethelbert had never before seen his wife's faith represented with such dignity and solemnity, and it is evident that he was most favorably im- pressed. He at once gave the missionaries per- mission to proceed to Canterbury, and there carry out all that lay in their hearts. In Ascension week, 597, Augustine for the first time saw the city which was destined to be the seat of his archbishopric, and of all future Archbishops of Canterbur}^ The desire seized him to claim the city for Christ. A procession was formed, the cross was again uplifted, and with it " a like- ness of the great King, Our Lord," and he and his companions entered Canterbury singing : " Turn from this cit}^ O Lord, Thine anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy house, for we have sinned."

Thus was inaugurated the foundation of the Church among the Saxons. Passing into the heart of the city through a long line of curious Jutes, who came out of their houses to look at the dark strangers, they made their home near to a hea-

THE FIRST ITALIAN MISSION TO ENGLAND 6 1

then temple, which stood ahnost on the ground where now stands the Cathedral Church of Can- terbury. Here they dwelt, giving themselves to frequent prayers, watching, and fasting, preach- ing to all within their reach. " What need we say more," says Bede ; " some believed and were bap- tized, admiring the simplicity of their blameless life and the sweetness of their heavenly teaching." The language of the historian forcibly reminds us of the summing up by an inspired writer in a very similar case, " And some believed the things which were spoken, and some believed not."

On June first following, not quite one year after they arrived, their cup of joy was full to overflowing. Whether won by the earnest per- suasions of Bertha, his queen, or convinced by the life and teaching of the missionaries, Ethel- bert offered himself for baptism. His example told on his subjects, and from that day the success of the mission seemed assured. Alas ! how little can we foresee the future. When the great mis- sionary and philanthropist Livingstone returned from Africa to tell of what he had seen there, fields white already to harvest, only waiting for the coming of the reapers, he created so much enthusiasm in Ens^land that after a crowded

62 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

meeting at Cambridge one was heard to say : ^' I am afraid of this ; most successful undertak- ings have had less auspicious beginnings." So here Augustine might have said, " I am afraid of this." It may be that a fear did arise in his heart that what he saw would be as the morning dew. But so far all went merry as a marriage-bell, and no warning voice was heard.

So ends the first scene in the great drama. Soon afterward Augustine passed over to France, where, on the i6th November following, he was consecrated a Bishop, at the hands of Bishops of the national Church of Gaul. On his return home he found a multitude of new proselytes, more than ten thousand Kentish men having been baptized in his absence. Such successes as these must have reminded the missionaries of the first great Pentecostal day. Inspired, doubtless, by the feel- ing that God was with them, Augustine sought to build up not only the grand spiritual temple of living souls, but a visible dwelling-place of the Most High, which should be not only an outward token of the work done, but a place where prayers were wont to be made. Upon Augustine himself the king had freely bestow^ed his own royal palace, and it may be that tlie Bishop, like

THE FIRST ITALIAN MISSION TO ENGLAND 63

David of old, could take no rest until he had found out a place for the temple of the Lord, an habitation for the mighty God of Jacob. He re- stored therefore the church which had been built by Roman Christians, but had afterward been used by the heathens, and rededicated it " in the name of the holy Saviour Jesus Christ, our God and Lord." As the modern pilgrim to Canter- bury passes through the hop-gardens which stretch far away on either side of the road, he sees the spire of the present cathedral, which marks the spot where the Christ Church of Au- gustine's foundation originally stood.

Now in order that we may have a distinct idea of the precise state of Augustine's mission at the close of the first year of his work, and indeed for some time afterward, let us assume that Augus- tine landed not in England, but in the United States. In that case entering at the southeast his sphere of work would have been Florida, and his cathedral city St. Augustine. In that case, too, he would have found, all along the Pacific coast, from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico, a fully organ- ized national Church. Canada he would have recognized to be in no need of his missionary labors, for she, too, had her own Church, a branch

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64 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

of that same Church which was in existence on the slopes of the Pacific.

Let us further assume at the time of his landing in this country that the various States were not yet in constitutional union, but were often at war with one another, and that Florida was neither the greatest nor the most important of them, and then I think we shall have a good general idea of the nature, difficulties, and actual sphere of Au- gustine's work. We can admit that the Church along the Pacific shore was doing nothing for the conversion of the States east of the Rocky Moun- tains, or to second in anyway the efforts of the missionaries in Florida ; but, on the other hand, we should require it to be acknowledged that the Canadian Church was pushing its mission south- ward over the Eastern and Middle States, and that these missions were eventually far more suc- cessful than the missions in Florida, and were in fact to be their means of salvation in the dark days which should come upon them.

Which things are an allegory — the United States answereth to England that then was, Flor- ida to Kent, the Pacific coast to the British coast from Cornwall northward, and Canada to Scot- land. We do not wish to minimize Augustine's

THE FIRST ITALIAN MISSION TO ENGLAND 6$

work. Nor do we. He was the Apostle of Kent. He planted a mission there which, notwithstand- ing serious reverses of fortune, took root and bore its fruit toward the conversion of England. All honor to him for what he did. He had the true missionary spirit. He gave himself to the mis- sionary cause, and died, like Columba and Patrick, in the harvest - field, laboring to gather in the sheaves. But as to the nature and extent of his work, that is adequately and even best described in the words of the epitaph placed upon his tomb : " Here rests Augustine, first Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, who formerly, directed hither by the blessed Gregory, Pontiff of the city of Rome, and sustained by God in the working of miracles^ brought over King Ethelbert and his nation from the worship of idols to the faith of Christ, and having completed the days of his office in peace, deceased on the 7th day of the Kalends of June, in the same King's reign."

How the magnitude and the difficulties of the work must often have weighed upon Augustine's mind. How was he to reach the various Anglo- Saxon kingdoms ? He seemed as far off as ever from converting the kingdom from whence the little slaves had come. What could he do for 5

66 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

these and for others with whom as yet he had not been brought into contact? In the first place, he felt he needed more men, and in response to an appeal Gregory sent him four, of whom three were destined to play no insignificant part in the story of English Christianity : Mellitus, Justus, and Paulinus ; and in the second place he made overtures to the Bishops of the British Church to join him in reaping the spiritual harvest-fields.

In response to his overtures seven Bishops of the British Church met Augustine in conference at a place now known as Augustine's Oak, near the Severn, not very far from the ancient settle- ment at Glastonbury. But two cannot walk to- gether unless they be agreed, and there were points of difference between him and them which he deemed necessary first to be settled. Three of these differences — (a) of keeping Easter; {&) of bap- tizing; and (c) of wearing the tonsure — were, in Augustine's judgment, insuperable difficulties in the way of joint action, and he strenuously urged the British Bishops to lay aside their own tra- ditions and to follow those of his own Church as being more in harmony with the practices of the Catholic Churches generally throughout the world.

THE FIRST ITALIAN MISSION TO ENGLAND 6/

The native bishops, however, were not so ready to give way and adopt the customs of a stranger. Yet they would not act hastily, and so they asked for another meeting when these matters might be finally settled. In the meantime they took coun- sel with one famed for wisdom. Would he ad- vise them to adopt the new custom ? The reply was : " If Augustine be a man of God, follow him." But how was this to be ascertained ? " Contrive," said the oracle, " that the stranger come to the place of meeting before you. If when you approach he rises to meet you, then be sure that he is a servant of Christ and listen to him obediently." They so arranged it. Augus- tine failed to arise, and they would therefore con- cede nothing to one in whom they thus thought abided none of the spirit of Christ. So Augustine returned to his home in Kent. His first plan had failed completely.

How fared his other attempt? By Ethelbert's influence he managed to get Mellitus settled in London, in the kingdom of Sabert, King of the East Saxons ; Justus he placed in Rochester, a Kentish city, not far from his own. Paulinus went northward. But sad reverses followed the efforts of all these, and their work was for a time

68 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

as if blotted out. In London, as soon as Sabert was dead, who had been to Mellitus what Ethel- bert had been to Augustine, his son drove out Mellitus, and London returned to its idols, and for nearly forty years Essex and London were lost to Christianity. It was almost as bad in Kent after the deaths of Ethelbert and Augus- tine. Numbers at once relapsed into paganism, and even in the city of Canterbury Christianity seemed about to perish.

We have dwelt at somewhat greater length than we should otherwise have done on the par- ticular share Augustine had in the conversion of \ j England, because there are those who have so ex- r, aggerated his labors as if from him alone came ' the knowledge of Christianity to the British Isles. But only those who know but little of the real facts will venture to speak of him as if he had been to England what Patrick was to Ireland ^ i and Columba to Scotland. When he died his '' 1 influence had barely extended beyond the little kingdom of Kent, and it was not till long after his death that the event which he desired in vain to see became an accomplished fact, and the rem- K nant of the ancient British Church and the Celtic I Church of the north Avere brouo:ht into union with

THE FIRST ITALIAN MISSION TO ENGLAND 69

the Italian mission, and the scattered Christian forces in Britain at length were welded into one harmonious whole. In so far as he contributed to this grand result we give all praise to Augustine ; but it must ever be remembered that his whole work was all done in one extreme corner of Eng- land, and that after his death, in the reign of an- other king who knew not Joseph, who knew not, that is, the Archbishops of Canterbury, his very foundations seemed thrown down. The glory, however, that has been claimed for Augustine be- longs to another — to one of the missionaries of the Northern Church, St. Aidan of Lindisfarne, in Northumbria, for it was he who bore the chief part in England's conversion ; so that, in the strong and forcible language of Bishop Lightfoot, " Aidan, and not Augustine, was the Apostle of England."

Later on we shall see how can be trul}^ claimed for a saint of the Celtic Church the chief place of honor and glory ; but meanwhile this we would say that, were it otherwise, were it so that to Augustine pertained the honor of being God's instrument for the conversion of England, then the results would not follow which are claim.ed by our Roman brethren. If the whole people of

JO LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Britain had indeed been baptized by Augustine, it would not therefore follow that those whom he baptized were subject to the Church which sent him. If this argument had any weight, then it would follow that all Churches, Rome amongst them, would be subject to the Church of Jerusa- lem, for all the Apostles came forth of her. '■'■ Out of Zion went forth the law, and the word of the Lord from ferusalemr She was the Mother Church of Christendom. But who is Paul and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye be- lieved. Our Church to-day has her missionaries in Japan, but they are building up there not a Church of America, but a Church of Japan !

Yet, as we have seen, Augustine's work was confined to Kent, and he was but one of several missionaries at work there, many of whom were natives of the country and sons of the native Church. For all that he did we give him due praise, but let us remember that, through no fault of his, the mission after his death was ready to vanish away, so overwhelmed was it with trouble and disaster, and that the new life which was breathed into it after Gregory's and Augus- tine's deaths came from missionaries born in the land and yielding obedience to that old Celtic

THE FIRST ITALIAN MISSION TO ENGLAND 71

Church which gave us such missionary heroes \ / as Columba and Patrick and Aidan, than whose names none shine brighter in all the missionary records of the past.

V.

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE SAXONS

V.

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE SAXONS

*' Neither is he that planteth anything, neither is he that water- eth ; but God that giveth the increase." — i Cor. iii. 7.

Would that men had always remembered these words, and been willing to efface them- selves and give God the glory.

On the death of Ethelbert, King of Kent, and of Sabert, King of the East Saxons, the prospects of the Italian mission in England seemed gloomy indeed. Its very existence was threatened. With the rise of persecution the Bishops of London and Rochester fled into Gaul, and even Laurentius, the successor of Augustine, was on the point of following them when he was de- terred by a dream, in which he saw himself re- proved for his cowardice. A false step and all would have been lost. Happily Laurentius re- mained at his post, and his steadfastness saved the work of Augustine from utter extinction. Nothing that he could have done would have

76 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

more helped the cause of Christ in Kent than this simple obedience to the teaching of his con- science in the presence of danger. Eadbald, the new King of Kent, was so much impressed by the sight of this one Bishop remaining true to his charge that he shortly afterward embraced the Christian religion, and became to Laurentius all that his father had been to Augustine.

That readiness to suffer, even unto death, in the path of duty was fruitful of results greater even than Eadbald's conversion. To that one deed of Christian heroism was due the introduction of Christianity into Northumbria.

The story of the preaching of the Gospel in the north is so remarkably like the story of the preaching in the south, that the parallel strikes the least observant. In each case there is a Christian queen who influences her husband to become a Christian, under whom the nation turns with much enthusiasm to Christ, only to relapse again into paganism on the death of the Christian king. Then, cast down, but not destroyed, the Church, phoenix-like, rises from the fire to new- ness of life. The account of the introduction of Christianity into Northumbria reveals how Lau- rentius, living at Canterbury, obtained a share in

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE SAXONS TJ

that glorious work, and how indeed but for him no Italian missionary would have preached the Gospel there. We have already seen that the faithfulness of Laurentius resulted in Eadbald's conversion. But observe the result of his becom- ing a Christian. The day came when Edwin, the King of Northumbria, desired to marry Ethel- burga, Eadbald's sister. But Eadbald would not allow his sister to marry a pagan unless she should have full power to worship Christ accord- ing to her conscience ; when this had been agreed to the Kentish princess went northward, accom- panied by Paulinus, one of the four missionaries whom Gregory had sent to Augustine. So Ethel- burga became Edwin's queen, with Paulinus as her chaplain.

Paulinus, not content with being merely a queen's chaplain, preached in all the surrounding country ; but long he toiled, long without success. There was apparently no result. Like Henry Martyn in India, or St. Anskar in Denmark, he labored on without gaining a single convert. Doubtless the king respected the tall, stately, dignified old man who had left his home to preach the Gospel in a foreign land ; but he re- mained apparently uninfluenced, and even unin-

78 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

terested. Yet God's word does not return unto Him void. Respect for the preacher passed at last into respect for the religion he preached, and Edwin was at last persuaded in his own mind that the religion Paulinus preached was true. He called a meeting of his wise men at Good- manham, near York, famous for its idolatrous temple, that they might publicly consider the merits of Christianity.

Most interesting is the account we have in Bede of that memorable gathering. The king opened the. proceedings. For a year they had had, he said, the new faith represented in their midst by Paulinus. What did they think of it? Were they prepared to accept it ?

Coifi, the pagan priest of the adjoining temple, was the first to speak. And the moment he be- gan it was evident that paganism was doomed in Deira.

*' No man," he said, " had served the gods better than he had done, but many Avere much better off. Now if the gods were of any use at all they would most certainly have favored him most, but they had not done so. He for one was read}^ to try the new religion."

It was the speech of a man whose idea of re-

\

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE SAXONS 79

ligion was not very exalted. It was of the earth, earthy. Far different, indescribably suggestive and pathetic, was the speech of a certain thane, vv'ho expressed in a vivid simile that bewilder- ment as to the mystery of life which weighed heaviest on the most thoughtful of the heathen.

" I will tell you, O King, what methinks man's life is like. Sometimes when your hall is lit up for supper on a wild winter's evening, and warmed by a fire in the midst, a sparrow flies in by one door, takes shelter for a moment in the warmth, and then flies out again b}^ another door, and is lost in the stormy darkness. No one in the hall sees the bird before it enters, nor after it has gone forth ; it is only seen while it hovers near the fire. Even so, I ween, as to this brief span of our life in this v/orld ; what has gone before it, what will come after it — of this we know nothing. If the strange preacher can tell us, by all means let him be heard."

Then Paulinus was invited to address the as- sembly. Ver}^ picturesque must the scene have been. The Italian stood there in his black flow- ing robes :

" Mark him of shoulders curved and stature tall, Black hair and vivid eye, and meag^re cheek."

So LECTURES OX CHURCH HISTORY

Such was Paulinus, a t3'pical Italian ecclesias- tic. The King, his thanes and freemen, sat around the hall in their snow}' tunics and cloaks, fastened with cairnsrorms. What Paulinus said we know not. Perhaps like Augustine before Ethelbert, '* he told how the tender-hearted Jesus bj His throes redeemed this sinful world, and had opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers." But the effect his address produced we do know. When he had finished, Coifi spoke again. " Now I un- derstand what the truth is. I have long known that it was not with us : but now I see it shining out clearly in this teaching. Let us destrov these useless temples and altars, and give them up to the curse and the flame I " Thus by its own priest paganism stood condemned. " Who will begin," said Edwin, *' the work of destroving the altars and temples of idolatry." Coifi claimed that it was most fitting that he should deal the first blow, and apply the torch to that which in his folly he had reverenced. No time was lost. The temple of Goodmanham was soon from end to end a sheet of fire, and the red glare of the burning building proclaimed to the men of De- ira that their king and his wise men had declared the gods of their fathers to be no gods, but only

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE SAXOXS Si

the work of men's hands and the imagination of their hearts.

Thus did* Xorthumbria by a national act accept Christianity. Edwin speedily caused a chapel to be reared at York, on the spot where now the glorious minster stands, and in that rude chapel on Easter eve, April ii, Gij, he was baptized, and many of his nobles and people with him. That was the birthday of the Northumbrian Church.

But as it was in Kent, so it was in Northum- bria. The day came when the joy of the Chris- tians was turned into sorrow. The sword of paganism went through the land, and Edwin was cut off in the midst of his days. A champion of paganism had appeared, Penda, King of the Mer- cians. For thirty years this heathen king was a terror to the Christians. There is a sort of fasci- nation about the career of one who seemed irre- sistible as destiny. Of five kings he slaughtered, Edwin was the first. Edwin's death was to the Christians in Northumbria what the slaying of Josiah at Megiddo was to the Jews of old. Good men recovered his body and buried it, but who could take Edwin's place ? It was as when the ark of God was taken. The Bishop of York, in the royal palace which would never again hear

S2 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

the master's voice, felt that the end had come. He could stay no longer. Taking with him Ed- win's widowed queen, he fled with her and her child back to her old Kentish home. But he never returned to York. The See of Rochester being vacant at the time he became its Bishop.

When the ashes of the Northumbrian Church were fanned into a flame the breeze that blew upon them came not from the south but from the north ; not from Kent but from lona ; not from Italy but from Scotland ; not from the Roman Church but from the Celtic. From the monas- tery St. Columba had founded among the West- ern Isles came forth the missionaries who were to be God's instruments in the double work of res- toration and extension ; a work which should be crowned with lasting and abundant success, and which should give to one of them the title of Apostle of England. But Penda's victory over Edwin had not given him the sovereignty of Northumbria. Edwin was succeeded by Oswald.

Very beautiful was Oswald's character. He was all Edwin had been and more. In the prime and glow of a pure and noble Christian manhood ; a man who was wont, in the words of Bede, whilst finding a temporal Kingdom to labor and pray

OUR CHURCH UNDER THK SAXONS 83

rather for an eternal one. He was altogether a prince of men, one born to attract general en- thusiasm, admiration, reverence, and love.

His first care on coming to the throne was to set about the restoration of Christianity. Churches were to be built, clergy appointed, services car- ried on, Sacraments administered, and, above all, the Bishopric filled. Where should he look for aid ? Paulinus had fled, and was now Bishop of Rochester. He looked for help nearer home. He and his brother Oswy had spent years of exile in lona, and had there learned to love the Celtic Church and its holy teachers. Was it not an evi- dent fulfilment of the famous prophecy of Co- lumba, that to lona would come great honor, not only from Scottish kings and people, but from the kings of other nations also, when to lona the Northumbrian king sent his request for a Bishop, who should build up the church of God in his land. The request was joyfully received, and a Bishop named Corman was sent into Northumbria. But Corman, though a good man, was ill-suited for that work, and he soon returned to the Scottish monastery. On telling how he could do noth- ing with the barbarians of Northumbria, a gentle voice asked, " Did you not, good brother, forget

84 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

the apostolic maxim about milk for babes ?" The speaker was Aidan, one of the most lovable of men, upon whom the choice of the brethren at once fell. Going forth as a missionary Bishop, Aidan settled not at York, but at the Isle of Lin- disfarne, off the coast, and there made a second lona. From that Holy Island, watered by the North Sea, a race of missionaries came that real- ly made England Christian. Of these Aidan was the first and greatest. But mark this well — Aidan, who came forth from the Celtic mission station at lona, a missionary Bishop of the Celtic Church, consecrated by Bishops of that Church at the re- quest of the Northumbrian king, whose lot it was never to meet Roman missionaries nor to have dealings with Rome, is yet acknowledged by Rome as a canonized saint.

The mission there begun again was carried on with faith and zeal. Soon an event happened which gave a great impetus to the missionary work. Peada, a son of Penda, came from Mercia to ask for the sister of Oswald to wife. In the train of the princess went four priests of lona into the heart of Penda's territory, to preach the Gospel there. One of these priests, Diuma, be- came Bishop of the Mercians, and another, Cedd,

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE SAXONS 8$

went farther southward— far into the land of the East Saxons, where nearly forty years before Mellitus had abandoned his Bishopric. There Cedd did a brave and good work, and laid foun- dations well and strong, like a wise master-builder.

Thus everywhere the Celtic missionaries were strengthening the things which remained, which were ready to die, and recovering the waste places. With them the word of God was not bound. They preached without let or hindrance. It was not so with the Italians, as if an invisible hand held them back, they could do nothing beyond Kent ; to that little corner they seemed confined. Their missionaries had indeed gone forth thence in a spirit worthy of all honor to win new con- quests, but a strange fatality pursued them. Their work often came to naught. Yet where they failed the Celtic teachers succeeded.

At length the time came when the long series of victories over the outer works of paganism were to be followed by the fall of the citadel it- self. For many years Penda had reigned the prop and support of heathenism. At last the fate he had meted out to others came to himself. Seized with the ambition to extend his borders, he came into Northumbria determined to make it a part

86 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

of his own kingdom. Under Oswy, the king who had succeeded Oswald, his elder brother, the Northumbrians met the Mercians in the final battle between paganism and Christianity. " Relying on Christ their Leader," Oswy entered the battle.

Penda had an army like that of Ben-hadad, at- tended by thirty chiefs of princely rank with their auxiliaries, while Oswy had a mere handful. But the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong ; Penda was slain and his mighty host was scattered.

That day must always remain a red - letter day in Anglican Church history. The plains of Yorkshire witnessed the fall of paganism ; since then no secular powder in Britain has ever drawn the sword for a heathen god.

The time was now fast approaching when the seven Saxon nations would become one, but the main factor in the accomplishment of that grand result would be the Christian Church. Unity in temporal matters would be suggested and brought about by unit}^ in spiritual. This would be the teaching force of the spectacle of '' the one Lord, the one Faith, the one Baptism " in the Church. But at present, as in civil and political life, so in ecclesiastical. There was no unity of

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE SAXOXS 8/

action. We have seen that missionaries in Kent labored independently of missionaries in Nor- thumbria. There were other missionaries, too, la- boring independently of either in the other Sax- on kingdoms. Birinus, a Bishop consecrated in Gaul, labored amongst the Saxons of Wessex ; Fe- lix, a Bishop of Burgundy, and Fursey, an Irish monk, labored together in Anglia with great suc- cess, where two Italian missions had previously failed, and lastly, AVilfrid, a monk of Lindisfarne, preached to the Saxons of Sussex.

These were all bringing about the glorious re- sult of a truly national Church, whose life Vv^as in itself. Scotch and Irish, Burgundians and Ital- ians, all were workers in that vineyard of the Lord : to whom shall we yield the palm ?

Man is but a poor judge of the value of spirit- ual work, and ought not to dogmatize at any time. But to us it now seems plain that Scotland of- ten succeeded when Italy failed, and that not to Rome but to lona is justly due our greatest debt of gratitude. Yet after all what matters it? For *' who is Paul, and who is ApoUos but ministers by whom ye believed ; for neither is he that plant- eth anything, neither is he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase."

VI.

THE FIRST PRIMATE OF ALL ENGLAND

VI.

THE FIRST PRIMATE OF ALL ENGLAND

" And they buried him in the city of David, among the kings, because he had done good in Israel, both toward God and toward his house." — 2 Chron. xxiv. 16.

If one had climbed to the top of a lofty moun- tain in England, in the middle of the seventh cen- tury, and from thence surveyed the whole land from Northumbria to Kent, he would have seen missionaries at work in all the seven Saxon king- doms ; whilst in the extreme west of the countr}-, v/ here the Saxon had never penetrated, and where the ancient British still lived untrammelled and free, he would have seen the old Church of Brit- ain, planted and watered in apostolic times, flour- ishing like a green bay-tree in the house of the Lord. Of the various bands of missionaries none were building up a grander spiritual temple than those of the Celtic Church. That Church, rather than the Latin, seemed destined to be the domi-

92 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

nating Christian influence in Western Europe. It early gained for Ireland the name of the Isle of the Saints, whilst its missionary successes in other regions were such that it seemed to be the leaven leavening the whole lump.

" Church historians," writes Haddon, himself a Church historian, " cannot be far wrong in saying that a mere turn of the scales, humanly speaking, prevented the establishment in the seventh cen- tury of an aggregate of Churches in Northwestern Europe, looking for their centre to the Irish and British Churches, and as entirely independent of the Papacy as are the English-speaking Churches of the present day."

Until the seventh century the sight might com- monly have been witnessed in England of the Cel- tic missionaries succeeding where Italian mission- aries had failed, and of Celtic Bishops filling the Bishoprics which had been abandoned in fear and despair by those who had first held them. Thus Cedd filled the Bishopric of London, from whence Mellitus had fled ; Aidan the Bishopric of York, from which Paulinus had fled ; whilst in Mercia Diuma and Chad ruled with gentle sway, where never, since the earliest days, had been seen upon the mountains the feet of them that preach the

THE FIRST PRIMATE OF ALL ENGLAND 93

Gospel of peace and bring glad tidings of good things. As yet, however, there was no " Church of England," properly so called. Indeed there was no England, but only a number of petty king- doms, perpetually at war with one another; each kingdom having its own separate and indepen- dent mission at work within its borders.

But such a view from the mountain-top would have revealed that, diverse as were the sources of the missions, yet they grouped themselves around two great centres, and practically there were but two systems at work — the Celtic and the Italian. There were on the one hand the missions of lona, sent by the Church of St. Patrick and St. Co- lumba, and on the other the missions of Rome, sent out by St. Gregory and his successors. Around one or other of these centres all mission- ary efforts were grouped. Soon a contest for supremacy arose between them. Rome unfurled her standard to the breeze, and in reply to the challenge the Celtic Church unfurled hers, and summoned her warriors to the battle.

But let us here guard against a possible mis- take. It would be to forestall history to suppose that Rome, at this early date, had put forth those claims of universal dominion which she, unhap-

94 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

pily and to the lasting injury of Christendom, put forth in after years, and maintained ever since with that dogged persistency which at once raises the suspicion that she feels she must make up for the weakness of her case by the very strength and dogmatism of her assertions.

However, all the dogmatism in the world can- not alter one jot or tittle of the facts of history. There was a Church in Britain, in Scotland, and in Ireland, which had all along maintained its own separate and independent existence, and which had begotten sons of such glorious character and such distinguished careers that even the Latin Church, with a catholicity and a large-hearted- ness which it has rarely, if ever, shown since, folded them in loving embrace and called them Saints in the Holy Church of God. Thus she loved Patrick and Aidan, until in a later age she forgot that they were not hers, but the children of her old rival — the sister Church in the isles of Britain.

We have said that a contest for supremacy arose between the two Churches : this was fought out at Whitby, in Yorkshire, where the Romans were victorious.

The proper time for keeping the Easter festival

THE FIRST PRIMATE OF ALL ENGLAND 95

was the chief subject for discussion at that coun- cil, as it was also the immediate cause of its being held.

The Churches in Britain had, as we have seen, a method of keeping Easter unlike that generally observed in Western Christendom. Augustine had, without success, tried to persuade the British Bishops to change this custom. At Whitby this question was again opened, and, to the dismay of the Celtic missionaries, their time-honored custom was condemned, and that of their rivals held in honor.

Os wy. King of Northumbria, had married a daughter of Edwin and Ethelburga, one of the children whom Paulinus had trained. Oswy favored the Celtic customs, for he had been trained at lona; but his queen favored the Italian custom, far she had been taught by Kentish mis- sionaries. Moreover, the tutor of her family was Wilfrid, a monk of Lindisfarne, and one who both b}^ birth and early training was a Celtic church- man, but who had become a great admirer of Rome, and a strong advocate of her claims. But two could not walk together except they were agreed. Oswy and part of the court were soon keeping high festival in honor of Christ's resur-

g6 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

rection, whilst the queen and the other half of the court were observing the most solemn time of the Lenten Fast. And the Council of Whitby, in 664, to establish uniformity of usage and custom, was the not unnatural result.

King Oswy opened the proceedings by urging the benefits of uniformity of custom among those who were united in one faith, and then briefly stated the subject for discussion :

They were to determine what w^as the right day on which to observe Easter. Colman, Bishop of Lindisfarne, argued for the Celtic custom, and claimed for it the authority of St. Columba, and above all, of St. John. Wilfrid was spokesman for the other side. He admitted the truth of Col- man's statement, but claimed that St. Peter, whose teaching he followed, was of higher authority than St. John, for that he kept the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Turning to the Bishop of Lindisfarne, the king asked if the words used by Wilfrid had ever been spoken by the Lord to St. Peter. The Bishop replied that they had been certainly spoken. Then said the king w^ith a quiet smile, but yet not wanting in seriousness : '' And I say unto you both, that this is that door- keeper whom I do not choose to gainsay, but as

THE FIRST PRIMATE OF ALL ENGLAND 9/

far as I know and am able, I desire in all things to obey his rulings, lest haply when I come to the doors of the kingdom I may find none to unbar them, if he is adverse to me who is proved to hold the keys."

The decision was a severe blow to the Celtic members. In their judgment it was not only disrespectful to the memory of Columba, but it compromised the independence of their national Church. Colman at once resigned his Bishopric and returned to his old home. Doubtless he thought of it as a victory for Rome, but it was rather a victory of the universal Church against lona. Of course Rome profited by it. From that time forward Kent, the centre of Italian mis- sionary work, became, in place of Northumbria, the centre of the missionary work in all England.

And now we enter upon one of the most event- ful periods of Anglican Church history. Within the life of one generation men Avere to become familiar with the idea of building up a great national Church out of all the scattered elements of Christianity, and they were to see that idea visibly embodied before them. There was soon to appear one of the grandest men in all the long and eventful history of the English Church —

98 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury. Under him the scattered missionaries were to leave off building their small and independent chapels, and uniting together as one strong and compact body, they were to enter upon the building of a mighty cathedral which should be great enough and grand enough to tax all their energies and enshrine their noblest aspirations. Very rapidly was the change effected.

One has seen in a play the curtain fall, and on its rising again a wholly different scene pre- sented. So it was at Whitby. There the cur- tain fell. In the interim before it rose again the yellow pest raged from one end of the country to the other. It struck down high and low. It swept away Tuda, who followed Colman as Bishop of Lindisfarne ; it swept away the Bishops of London and Rochester, and spared not the King of the Kentish men, nor the Arch- bishop ot Canterbury himself.

When the curtain was lifted again, Wilfrid had become Bishop of York, and Theodore, Arch- bishop of Canterbury.

The appointment of Wilfrid to York was the most natural thing in the world, but who could have predicted the future life of Theodore when

THE FIRST PRIMATE OF ALL ENGLAND 99

a Greek monk at Tarsus ? The providence of God in the choice of Theodore was plainly mani- fest. His appointment was indeed providential. As soon as the plague ceased, and the Church could take measures for the spread of the Gospel, it was decided, with the joint approval of the Kings of Northumbria and Kent, to choose an Archbishop from among the native clergy, and to send him to Rome for consecration. In this way the}^ thought to secure greater uniformity of wor- ship and to reconcile the more or less discordant and jarring elements. Whereupon the two kings chose Wighard, one of the Kentish clergy, and sent him to Rome for consecration. But in Rome Wighard and nearly all of his companions were carried off by a deadly pestilence. The Bishop of Rome, Vitalian, was thereupon re- quested by the two kings, himself to select a suit- able man, and having consecrated him, to send him to England. This Vitalian agreed to do, but he had undertaken no easy task. Britain was far away, and the vacant Bishopric went abegging.

At last, however, a man was found, who was destined to be to England, as his name implies, a very gift of God ; and who, like St. Paul, was a

100 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

citizen of Tarsus, a city of Cilicia, and was like him, too, well trained in secular and sacred learn- ing, and a man also of proved character. Conse- crated on March 26, 66S, by the Bishop of Rome, the first Archbishop of the English Church to be thus consecrated, and the last for three hundred and fifty years afterward ; he was at the time sixty-six years of age. Think of a man at such an age — an age when men now speak of them- selves as old, and of their work as done — hesi- tating not to leave his home for a foreign land there to labor among a people whose ways were strange to him, and whose language he did not understand. Yet for over twenty years he ruled the Anglican Church, being over eighty-eight years when he died. And he so ruled it that of all the ninety-two Archbishops who have sat on the throne of Augustine, none have been more worthy than he. Of the good high-priest, Je- hoiada, it is written : *' They buried him in the city of David, among the kings, because he had done good in Israel, both toward God and toward his house." So the same honor might most fit- tingly have been given to the " grand old man," as Dean Hook calls him, who on the second Sun- day after Pentecost — May 27, 669— entered upon

THE FIRST PRIMATE OF ALL ENGLAND 101

his work as Archbishop of Canterbury, seventy- two years after the arrival of Augustine.

Soon after his arrival Theodore made a general visitation of the whole country. None disputed his authority. He was at once and universally accepted as the Primate of all England.

Summoning, in 673, at the earliest opportunity, a council of his Suffragan Bishops and their clergy, the Churches were constitutionally organized into one province with the Archbishop as its spiritual head. From that Council— known in history as the Council of Hertford — the English Church dates its existence as the National Church of the whole land.

Having thus consolidated the Church, Theodore next proceeded to take measures for its more ef- fective working. His first act was to divide the larger and more unwieldy dioceses into two or more. Out of this action there arose the first ap- peal to Rome ever made by an English Church- man. Wilfrid's See of York was one of the largest of these dioceses, and the Archbishop divided it into four parts. Wilfrid, deeply offended at this, lodged a personal appeal at Rome. Never before had such a thing been done, and little encourage- ment was given to any Bishop ever to do it again.

102 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

When Wilfrid returned, bringing judgment in his favor, he was looked upon as a traitor. His letters were burned and he himself w^as thrown into prison, from which he was only released on covenanting to depart from Northumbria. The whole incident is most instructive, for all that was done was the act, not of a despotic king, but of a national Council whose presiding officer was the only Archbishop consecrated by the Pope whom England had received, or was to receive for centuries.

Theodore evidently considered that he. Arch- bishop of Canterbury, had no ecclesiastical su- perior on earth, and believing this, he contended manfully against all foreign interference with the national Church of v/hich he was Primate. For this we honor his name and memory ; but not for this only. It was under him, too, that the rival missions of Celts and Romans among the Anglo- Saxons were blended together. Their Orders were blended too.

Henceforth there was a double line of Apos- tolic ministry in the Anglo -wSaxon Church, and when by degrees the British Church, leaving her mountain fastnesses, came forth and joined in the noble work, the treble stream quickly became a

THE FIRST PRIMATE OF ALL ENGLAND IO3

mighty river flowing on to make glad the city of God, thus making the Anglican Episcopate, whether in England or America, the strongest Apostolic succession in the world. Well, indeed, then do w^e compare Theodore to Jehoiada as having '' done good in Israel, both toward God and toward his house."

And now, in bringing to a close this lecture on the Anglo-Saxon period of English Church his- tory, I cannot do so more fitly than by a sum- mary in the words of Canon Bright, of the life of that devoted saint, the Venerable Bede, whose history (for he was born in 673), falls within this period.

*' He is," says Canon Bright, in his '' Early Eng- lish Church History," *' one of the most original personages in history. And he is more — he is one of the most admirable and lovable.

" Bede is the man of warm heart, whose affec- tions go out to brethren and pupils, who is spoken of as a ' dear father ' and a ' most be- loved master,' and the man of thoroughly pious soul, who ' shudders ' when ignorantly charged with heresy ; calls sin by its right name in monks or prelates, and lives in the thought of Divine judgment and Divine mercy ; who describes

104 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

himself through life as rejoicing to serve the Supreme Loving-kindness, and, student as he is, comes regularl}^ to the daily offices, and is sup- posed to have said in his sweet way that the angels must not find him absent ; who closes his history with a thanksgiving to the ' good Jesus * for the ' sweet draught ' of Divine knowledge, and a prayer to be brought safe to the Divine Fountain of all wisdom ; who in his last hours combines a loving trust in God and a desire to be with Christ with a sense of the awfulness of the ' need-fare ' and the doom ; who spends his last minutes of working power in dictating an English version of St. John's Gospel, calls his work * finished ' when the last sentence has been written, and passes away with his head resting on a pupil's hands, with his eyes fixed on his wonted place of devotion, with the ' Gloria ' to the Trinity as the last utterance of his lips. ' A truly blessed man.' We may well say with the eye-witness to whom we owe this record : a man * venerable ' and dear to all generations of English Christianity ; a

* candle,' in the words of the great St. Boniface,

* which the Lord lighted up ' in Northumbria, and which has burned with a calm lustre through the centuries that have canonized his name."

VII. OUR CHURCH UNDER THE NORMANS

VII. OUR CHURCH UNDER THE NORMANS

" I will make them one nation in the land." — Ezekiel xxx. 22.

Archbishop Theodore died in the year 690, and was laid to rest in the Monastery of Saints Peter and Paul, once the palace of Ethelbert, King of Kent, and which had become the resi- dence of the Archbishops of Canterbury, and is now St. Augustine's College, whose alumni are to be found in every part of the world.

But just a century later, in 787, the first of those roving bands of pirates which were for many years to trouble the peace of England and of Eng- land's Church, appeared off the coast of Nor- thumbria. They landed at Whitby, when a panic-stricken people learned only too late the character of their visitors. They were the rob- bers of the North Sea. Not inappropriately did they fly from the masthead of their ships their black raven standard — black death followed in their train. Their first act at Whitby was to

I08 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

massacre the people, who, suspecting no evil, had poured down to the waterside to meet them ; whilst their next was to sack and destroy the monastery which had been the glory of the town, but which was now the innocent cause of its ruin.

The Monastery of Whitby was, indeed, famous throughout England, not only as the place where the great Paschal controversy had been settled, but for the value of its sacred treasures. But alas for Whitby ! The King of Babylon in times long gone by did not more completely despoil the ancient Jewish Temple of its treasures, nor leave it in greater ruins, than the Northmen de- spoiled and destroyed

" High Whitby's cloistered pile ; "

they found it a calm and peaceful dwelling-place of men of God, they left it a smoking ruin.

But this was onl}^ a beginning — an instalment of what was to come afterward. Dark days were in store for the Church throughout the land. The ravagers of Whitby were but the forerun- ners of others who would come in swarms to de- solate the land with fire and sword, driven on, not only by a thirst for plunder, but also by a mad

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE NORMANS IO9

hatred against the Saxon Christians, who had for- saken the worship of Woden.

Soon others came and plundered even the sa- cred shrine on Holy Island. It was that deed, more than any other, which cast a spell of terror far and wide, for there was no spot in all England so sacred or so dear as the Abbey of Lindisfarne.

" A solemn, huge and dark-red pile Placed on the margin of the Isle.

*' In Saxon strength that abbey frown'd, With massive arches broad and round That rose alternate, row and row, On ponderous columns short and low,

Euilt ere the art was known By pointed aisle and shafted stalk, The arcades of an abbey'd walk To emulate in stone."

As the monks fled from the Holy Isle they saw behind them the glare of their burning home. Sadly they recalled and applied to themselves the words of the Psalmist, words which they had often recited in their daily offices :

" O God, wherefore art thou absent from us so long? Why is thy wrath so hot against the sheep of thy pasture? Thine adversaries roar in the

no LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

midst of thy congregations and set up their ban- ners for tokens. They break down all the carved work thereof with axes and hammers. They have set fire upon thy holy places and have despoiled the dwelling-places of thy name, even to the ground. Yea, they said in their hearts, Let us make havoc of them altogether : thus have they burnt up all the houses of God in the land."

Within seven years every monastic institution in Northumbria was swept away. From Lindis- farne to Canterbury there was an unbroken scene of desolation. And for miles inland the land, once like the garden of the Lord, became a waste, and the few Christians that were left sat down and wept when they remembered their goodly land and the place where they had loved to wor- ship God : '' Our holy and beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire : and all our pleasant things are laid waste." So Isaiah had said in his sixty-fourth chapter, and it had come to pass in their time that the prophecy was fulfilled.

To the men of that day, says John Richard Green, it must have seemed as though the world had gone back three hundred years. The same northern fiords poured forth their pirate fleets

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE NORMANS III

as in the days of Hengist or Cerdic. There was the same wild panic as the black boats of the in- vaders struck inland along the river-reaches or moored round the river isles ; the same sights of horror, firing of homesteads, slaughter of men, women driven off to slavery, children tossed on pikes or sold in the market-place, as when the English themselves had attacked Britain. Chris- tian priests were again slain at the altar by wor- shippers of Woden ; letters, arts, religion, gov- ernment, disappeared before these Northmen as before the Northmen of three centuries before. Churches were again the special object of attack ; invaders again settled on a conquered soil ; hea- thendom again proved stronger than the faith in Christ."

But "the night is long that never finds the day." As soon as the heathen had made for themselves a home in the land, the two races settled down peaceably side by side and became one people. The Danes readily embraced the re- ligion of the Saxons. The conquerors sank into the mass of the conquered, and Woden yielded without a struggle to Christ, and the prophecy was again fulfilled, '' I will make them one nation in the land."

112 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Yet it is remarkable how little permanent trace the Danes left of their invasion and settlement of England in the history of the Church. That his- tory would have been written, almost identically as it has been, even if the Danes had never come. The waves of persecution indeed rolled over the Church, threatening- at times to overwhelm her, but they left almost no permanent effects. As she came forth tried in the fire of Saxon persecution, so she came forth triumphant from that of the Danes. But there zuas this striking difference in the after-history of Saxons and Danes. The Saxons were converted from without ; the Danes were converted from within. Italians and Celts taught the way of truth to the Saxons, whilst the ancient British stood idly by ; but the Saxons became mis- sionaries to their conquerors, a blessed illustration of the principle of forgiveness and a noble in- stance of obedience to the command to do good even unto enemies. True, the Saxons and Danes were both of the same Teutonic race. They both came from the north country : they were breth- ren. But, brothers in blood, they found a closer tie in the one great family of God. That was indeed a beautiful sight when, not long after the battle of Ethandune, in which Alfred vanquished

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE NORMANS II3

the Danes, Alfred stood sponsor to the Danish king at his baptism, and gave him his Christian name of Athelstan.

It was during the life of King Alfred — " a saint without superstition; a scholar without ostenta- tion; a warrior all of whose wars were fought in defence of his country ; a conqueror whose hands were never stained by cruelty ; a prince never cast down by adversity, never lifted up by insolence in the hour of triumph " — that the Church of Eng- land, under his guidance, gave proof of that en- ergy which had preserved her national and inde- pendent character, by opening a communication with the Christians of the far east in Jerusalem and with Churches in India. What first induced Alfred to send such a mission we know not, but the '' Chronicles " say that he sent ships to India with alms for the poor Churches there which had been founded in apostolic times.

" Behold a pupil of the monkish gown, The pious Alfred, King to Justice dear ; Lord of the harp and liberating spear,

Mirror of princes ! Though small his kingdom as a spark or gem, Of Alfred boasts remote Jerusalem ; And Christian India, through her wide-spread clime, In sacred converse gifts with Alfred shares." 8

114 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

We enter now upon the Norman period, which begins in 1066, when England found her con- queror in the person of William of Normandy. At the battle of Hastings, which gave the crown to William, the curtain falls ; when it rises again the English Church has entered upon a new phase of her existence, and we are face to face with what has been termed the Mediseval Church, a Church which has fallen under the domination of the Bishop of Rome.

The Normans were in reality Northmen who had been settled in France some two hundred years before the conquest of England.

But they had long ceased to have anything in common with their forefathers. They were now Frenchmen, speaking a French tongue and no other. A similar process was to go on in Eng- land. They were there to become more English than the English themselves, and there was to be but one nation in the land. But as they came in on the flood-tide, bearing down all opposition, it really seemed as if the independence of the Church had gone forever, for the Papacy had no more devoted followers than they.

It required no prophet to predict the loss of her independence by the English Church. Will-

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE NORMANS II5

iam had received the blessing of Pope Alexan- der on his attempt to subjugate the English peo- ple, sailing for England with a banner blessed for the undertaking by him. William professed that he desired to bring the country under the domin- ion of the Roman See — hence the consecrated banner — and this was the surest way to gain the Pope's approval ; for as Mr. Freeman, the histo- rian of the Norman Conquest, says : *' England's crime, in the eyes of Rome — the crime to pun- ish which William's crusade v/as approved and blessed — was the independence still retained by the English Church and nation. A land where the Church and nation were but different names for the same community, a land whei"e priests and prelates were subject to the law like other men, a land where the king and his witan gave and took away the staff of the Bishops, was a land which, in the eyes of Rome, was more dangerous than a land of Jews and Saracens."

But we must not exaggerate the influence even of Rome at this time, although it is easy to do so. There was nothing like that complete surrender of all liberty of thought and action which we ob- serve is the result of Roman teaching and Roman claims in this nineteenth century. The assertion

Il6 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

of authority went far, but not so far. How far it went we may see in the correspondence which William himself had with the Bishop of Rome, who was no other than the famous Hildebrand, Gregory VII.

Hildebrand had asked William for his homage. William's reply must have been a startling re- minder that William had ceased to be a mere Norman duke, for there rings out in his words that old spirit which had shown itself first in the reply of the British Bishops to Augustine, and later on in the refusal of an English Parliament to allow Wilfrid, Bishop of York, to go unpunished for having appealed to Rome. " Homage to thee I have not chosen, nor do I choose to do. I never made a promise to that effect, neither do I find that it was ever performed by my predecessors to thine."

This was indeed a strong rebuke to Hildebrand, who had conceived the idea of making the papa- cy a universal monarchy. The Bishop of Rome was to be supreme ruler, kings and princes were merely to govern in temporal matters as his depu- ties. He claimed to possess not only the keys of the kingdom of heaven, but of every earthly king- dom as well.

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE NORMANS 11/

Already the Eastern Church had protested against the extravagant claims of the Roman pontiff, and had refused to bow to his usurped authority ; and the Great Schism had separated the Church in the East from the Church in the West, and the sorry spectacle had been seen of a Roman Bishop claiming the title of Universal Bishop — which Gregory the Great had said none but Anti-christ could assume — excommunicating the Eastern Church and the Patriarch of Con- stantinople ; and the Patriarch of Constantinople, on his part, returning railing for railing, and ex- communicating the Roman Bishop and the West- ern Church.

With such a spirit as this abroad, and with such claims put forth in a semi-barbarous age by the Bishop of the greatest cit}^ of the West, when the tide of corruption was rising very rapidly, we may not wonder that the influx of Norman Bish- ops and clergy which followed in the footsteps of the Conqueror led to the binding of the English Church by Roman bonds. But it was a struggle of might against right. The English Church submitted simply because she could not help sub- mitting. Constitutionally, however, she never submitted to the overlordship of the Roman

Il8 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Bishop, and through all her long history no voice of hers, uttered in synod or convocation, ever acknowledged that she was a part of the Roman Church, and a part she never was, never has been, and we may well add, by the grace of God, never will be.

But to William, notwithstanding his sturdy re- fusal to allow any interference with the secular affairs of his kingdom, we owe the acknowledged interference of the Pope in the spiritual affairs of the Church. William, in fact, regarded the Bishop of Rome as the spiritual head of the Church, and he acted accordingly.

Through him two Cardinals, in 1070, presided at a synod in Winchester, when, for the first time in the course of over one thousand years, the Bishop of Rome was allowed by the alien Conqueror to exercise jurisdiction in the English Church. From that time onward the Bishop of Rome and his successors claimed the right to put down one and set up another in that Church.

But it was the Church of England still. The strong man armed might have broken into her house and robbed her of her gold and silver, her plate and her jewelry, yea even of freedom itself, but the property was rightfully hers, and she was

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE NORMANS II9

no bond-slave but a free woman. Bound for a time she was, then, in her own house, and she had the mortification of seeing thousands of gold and silver, in the shape of Peter's pence and tithes and first-fruits, going year by year to provide for the necessities of the successor of the Fisherman who dwelt in apostolic poverty at Rome; but she never ceased to protest against her unjust treat- ment, even Avhen she lay bound a helpless captive. Then the day came when, gathering all her strength, she threw off the yoke, and in those calm words, which sum up in one sentence the protests and the struggles of five centuries, she asserted her rightful freedom from all foreign in- terference : " The Bishop of Rome has no juris- diction in this realm of England."

Yet even after the power Avas broken and the chain cast away, it was long before the Church- men of Reformation days could feel themselves safe. Like a dread nightmare the memory of Egyptian bondage hung about them, and until far into the reign of Elizabeth they continued to pray in the Litany, " From the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities, Good Lord, deliver us."

Now it is in no spirit of uncharitableness that

I20 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

we say a single word against the Roman Church. Indeed it is not against her that we speak at all.

We are not dealing with Rome, but with Eng- land and America ; not with that Church but with our own, which lays this burden upon us. Canon 21, Title I, gives charge to this effect: ''Minis- ters of this Church, who have charge of parishes, shall be diligent in informing the youth and others in the Doctrine, Constitution, and Liturgy of the Church." We desire to be obedient to this teaching. But in so doing we must of necessity speak of that other Church, for the history of our own is bound up with it like the history of twin sisters. We have indeed a great respect for that Church. We reverence the names of many of its Bishops and clergy. We acknowledge the great- ness of the work it has done. But we are not blind to its faults. Yet even of these we would not speak were it not that some of them concern ourselves ; of its unsisterly conduct toward the national Church of England in times past — con- duct in which to this very day, so far as it can, it perseveres without sign of repentance or amend- ment of life — we may not be silent if we would be faithful to our ofhce and Church. In England and in this land she is a Church in schism. She

OUR CHURCH UNDER THE NORMANS 121

is an erring sister who is under the strange hallu- cination that she is the mother and mistress of all Churches.

Here we take our stand. We are not rabid Protestants seeing Rome at every turn as an ever- present evil, and believing that the Roman Bishop is unquestionably the man of sin who sits in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. But there are so many who imagine that the Anglo-American Church was once a part of the Roman, that for Zion's sake we may not hold our peace until that notion is consigned to the cate- gory of such popular fallacies as that Columbus ever discovered North America, or that if you hang a snake upon the limb of a tree it is a sure sign of rain.

Like old Cato, who never spoke in the Roman senate without closing his speech with the words — it mattered not what he had been speaking about — " Delenda est Carthago " (Carthage must be destroyed) ; so let our clergy say, with refer- ence to this popular fallacy that the Anglo-Ameri- can Church was ever a part of the Roman, this fal- lacy must be destroyed. We grant that through the advent of the Normans the Bishop of Rome carried matters in that Church with a high hand,

122 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

but it remained still the old Church of the land, and our own Church in America is not another but the same. It is not that the Church of England is our mother or our sister; she is identically the same Church, just as the Roman Church amongst us is the same as that from which Archbishop Satolli has come to keep it here in order.

Submit to Rome for a time she may have done, as the various national Churches of Spain, or France, or Austria are doing to-day, yet she is and was the Church of England all through her history, and when Saxon, Dane, and Norman dwelt at last together in peace and harmony, and God had made them one nation in the land, then the national Church rose again into newness of life and vigor ; and (in the words of Bishop Cleve- land Coxe),

" Again in noble English

The Christian anthems swell, And out the organ pealeth O'er stream and stilly dell.

" And the bells swing free and merry, And a nation shouteth round, For the Lord Himself hath triumphed And his Voice is in the sound."

VIII. THE BABYLONIAN BONDAGE

VIII. THE BABYLONIAN BONDAGE

"Men that had understanding of the times to know what Israel ought to do." — i Chron. xii. 32.

In our last lecture we barely crossed the thresh- old of the Norman period ; but we saw suffi- cient to indicate its general character so far as it affected the Church of England. It was a period when the gold had become dim and the fine gold changed. A period which recalls God's words to Abraham : " Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them, and they shall afflict them fourhun- dred years, and also that nation whom they shall serve will I judge." This prophecy might, in- deed, have been originally spoken of the Angli- can Church, so signally was it fulfilled in her his- tory. Although not in a foreign land, but in her own, she yet served in bondage for more than four hundred years, until God struck off the chain that bound her, and gave her the freedom

126 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

for which, like a bird in the snare of the fowler, she had long pined and struggled.

Now in declaring in the last lecture that not by choice but by necessity do we speak at all of the Church of Rome, and only then so far as her doings and her doctrines are bound up with our own history, we would not have you forgetful of one main purpose which is in our mind — to show that there was from the beginning a national Church in England, which, entirely independent of Rome in her origin, has been rightfully inde- pendent all through her history ; so that even when the strong man armed prevailed against her, she unceasingly raised her voice against the interference from which she suffered. When Galileo, brow-beaten by the court of Rome, was bidden deny that the earth moves, as he had taught it did, he was heard, so it is said, to mutter: ''It does move; it does move." So in like manner the national Church of England, en- slaved by the Bishop of Rome, protested : " This land is mine ; is mine, not yours." And to others she said : " Mark you, I pray, how I have built here a goodly temple for the Lord, and another seeks to rob me of it ; but it is mine, it is mine." But as we remember that the bondage of our

THE BABYLONIAN BONDAGE 12/

national Church was but the working out in one place of a vast system by which other Churches had also been deprived of their freedom, we may ask, not unreasonably, " How came such a system to meet with the success it did?" Surely we have here not man's work only, the mere workings of a boundless ambition. That, indeed, seems to have been the chief force in that old Roman world, when, by a masterful will, the republic was swallowed up by the empire, and Augustus Caesar became absolute lord from the Tigris to the Straits of Gibraltar. Or as when, in later days, the first Napoleon passed from country to country, deposing king after king, until he had filled the thrones of Europe with mere creatures of his own. But surely there is something nobler, better, grander, in the workings of the Roman Church toward a supremacy unparalleled in gran- deur of conception, as it is in the breadth of its sway and the extent of its dominion. May we not believe that behind a Gregory or a Leo we can see God's hand, in which they were even but the unconscious instruments and tools. We do not doubt that God was bringing about His purpose. It is often thus. Nebuchadnezzar fulfilled God's will when he destroyed the Temple and carried

128 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

the Jews into captivity. And the Papacy served a purpose in those days, which we call the " good old times," but which none of us would have back again even if we could ; for they were times when might was right, and when there prevailed

" The good old rule, the simple plan, That he shall take who has the power, And he shall keep who can."

But those days are passed, and despite the dream- ings of the prisoner of the Vatican, who longs to see Hildebrand's vision realized, those days will never return. The world will no more go back to them than the soldiers of this generation can be persuaded to fight with crossbows and arrows.

" The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.'*

But if we ask for those causes which we can see and tabulate, in the working out of the present Roman claims, we are at once struck with the difference between early and late positions on the subject. We are now told that the Bishop of Rome is great as the successor of St. Peter. The early Bishops of Rome, however, w^ould have

THE BABYLONIAN BONDAGE 1 29

told you that their greatness depended upon the importance of their historic Bishopric.

Here is the first great cause of the Roman Bish- op's importance. From almost the very first, they were inclined on this ground to magnify their office. Victor, Bishop of Rome in the second century, took a very lofty tone in a contro- versy with Polycrates, Bishop of Constantinople, just because he was the Bishop of Rome. He gave all men to understand that he was no Bish- op of a little provincial town, but the spiritual chief of Imperial Rome, the world's metropolis.

•' Ah, man dressed up in a little brief authority Plays such pranks as makes high heaven weep ! "

After this plan had been worked for a while, there came slowly creeping in the strange teach- ing that St. Peter had been at one time Bishop of Rome, and that he was Prince of the Apostles and keeper of the keys of heaven, and we know not what besides ; and this theory was made to do its part toward helping the growing preten- sions of the Bishop of Rome. But attractive as it was, it could not do all that was required of it. Darwin was not the first to realize the inconven- ience of a missing link. Granted that St. Peter 9

130 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

had been to Rome ; granted even the extremely improbable thing that he was ever Bishop there, what had the line of Popes and Antipopes to do with any personal gift or grace of St. Peter, any more than had, say, the Pontifex Maximus or the Pythia of Delphi ?

The fact is that the missing link was like to have proved fatal ; but everything comes to the man who can wait. One morning in the ninth century the Pope awoke and found himself famous. Certain letters had been found which professed to have been written in apostolic times, and in which all that the Popes desired was granted to them. These letters, which are the greatest fraud known to history, are the foundation upon which the Papacy must rest. They are the Forged Decretals. Every one now acknowledges them to be forgeries, but they served their purpose. A voice from the grave could not be questioned. The Popes only too gladly accepted them as valid and governed themselves accordingly ; and what the greatness of Rome could not do, nor yet the shadow of St. Peter, was done in a single lifetime by an abom- inable act of fraud.

When the Forged Decretals came to be ex-

THE BABYLONIAN BONDAGE 13I

amined they were easily proved to be an impu- dent and clumsy forgery, as manifestly false as a will written upon paper which at the date of the will had not actually been invented.

There is indeed nothing to show that the Popes of that day knew these documents were forger- ies; they probably did not. Singularly enough, indeed, no great scholar had been Bishop of Rome. Doubtless those good but not scholarly Bishops were imposed upon. Only the monk who in the silence of his cell was guilty of the de- ception, probably under the idea that he could rightly do evil that good might come, knew in that day what the character of those letters really was. But oh, what shall we say of the Pope's in- fallibility ? An infallible man the subject of de- ception !

Do you ask, when those letters were proved to be false why did not the Bishops of Rome, who had climbed to power by means of them, begin with shame to take the lowest room ? Is this your question? It is a natural one. Bishop Coxe, in his " Institutes of Christian History," answers it admirably. " Did you ever see stone- masons turn an arch ? They make a framework out of refuse wood, of laths and scantlings, any-

132 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

thing that comes to hand. A few nails suffice to hold these together. They set it in place on abutments well prepared, and then begin to work in stone. They soon erect the arch, and set the keystone, and build upon it a bridge or a castle or a tower that reaches to heaven. Then no longer any need of the framework ; a beggar may kick it out and turn it into fuel to boil his soup ; but the arch remains for ages. So the decretals have disappeared, but that arch of pride, the Pa- pacy, stands the firmer because of all that has been built upon it. And then the arch itself is old and interesting ; it is ivy-clad and green with associations of poesy and romance."

We have treated this matter at some length in order that you may understand that the Papacy was something comparatively new, and hence had not that prestige in those days which it has often now. For this alone will explain why it was that such a man as Theodore, Archbishop of Canter- bury, after being appointed to his Archbishopric by the Pope, should evidently assume that he was under no canonical obedience to him. No Roman Archbishop in these days could take that independent position ; indeed, accustomed so long to regard themselves as merely agents of the

THE BABYLONIAN BONDAGE 133

Roman See, it would hardly ever occur to them to do so ; and yet in those times the Archbishops of Canterbury were constantly seen resisting en- croachments of the Popes. We shall see that this was the case all through this period. Lan- franc at the beginning, and Langton later on, al- though one was an Italian, the other an English- man, both resented any interference as uncalled for and uncanonical ; and even Anselm, strong and fervent admirer as he was of the See of Rome — a second Wilfred in his devotion — even Anselm sent off, without a hearing, a Legate whom the Pope had ventured to send into Eng- land. But they were men that had understand- ing of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.

Let us make these statements good. In this lee- ture we shall not go beyond the reign of Henry III., which ended about the middle of the Nor- man period, i.e., the latter part of the thirteenth century, for then the reaction set in which found its goal in the Reformation of the sixteenth cen- tury. Until Henry's reign matters in the Church were getting worse and worse ; after his reign they began to get better and better. Henry was the eldest son of John of infamous memory, and,

134 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

to use the scriptural phrase, " He walked in the ways of his father, and did evil in the sight of the Lord."

The general character of this period was dark, and yet there was a continual assertion of the rights of the National Church. At one time those rights were asserted by the king in opposi- tion to the Archbishops and Bishops; at one time by the Archbishops and Bishops in opposition to the king, and then again by the two together ; but in one way or another the captive Church never failed to assert her rightful place. Let us observe this.

The first Norman Archbishop of Canterbury was Lanfranc, by birth an Italian, who had been Abbot of Bee, and might have become an Arch- bishop in Normandy. But it was reserved for him, as another Theodore, at sixty-six years of age, to assume the government of the Church in distant England. Under him, Italian as he was, Anglican liberties were openly asserted and were perfectly safe. Lanfranc was succeeded by Anselm, one of the saintliest of men and one of the most scholar- ly, but a great admirer of Rome. Anselm wished to go to Rome to receive investiture there as Archbishop ; but to this William Rufus would not

THE BABYLONIAN BONDAGE 1 35

agree. When Anselm pleaded a Roman canon, the king simply asked, what had he to do with a Roman canon ? saying he would never renounce a right which he had inherited. The Bishops, to their honor be it said, supported the king and maintained the customs of the Church of the land. Not long after, the king declared, " So long as he lived he would, God helping him, never permit the rights and privileges of the kingdom of Eng- land to be diminished ; " and added, " that even if he should be inclined to yield, which God forbid, his nobles would not tolerate it." He hoped therefore the Pope would not drive him to the extreme measure of renouncing all intercourse with the See of Rome.

The whole trouble between William Rufus and Anselm arose out of a question as to who should appoint the Bishops. The kings had claimed that privilege, and as a sign of their right they invested the new Bishop with his ring and staff. But Gregory VII. had objected to this, and ere the question was settled sixty battles had been fought and countless lives lost ; and not till fifty- six years after the question arose was it practi- cally settled against the Pope and in favor of the king, the latter giving up the form but re-

136 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

taining the substance, by ceasing to deliver the ring and staff, but continuing to nominate the Bishop !

In the reign of Henry II., the first Plantage- net, another question arose. At the Conquest the clergy had obtained the right to be tried in their own courts and by their own orders. The king wished to bring the clergy again under the same temporal discipline as the laity, a thing which seems both reasonable and desirable. But noth- ing would induce the then Archbishop, Thomas a Becket, to agree to it. Finally, after a few hasty words from the king, in his own cathedral the Archbishop was slain. It has been styled a martyrdom. It was undoubtedly an inexcusable and cruel murder, and as a matter of policy a gigantic mistake. Not until the Reformation was that change entirely effected. The king was humbled to the dust. He became the sinner, whilst Becket became the saint. In Canterbury^ the scene of martyrdom, a splendid shrine arose. It was the most popular shrine in Europe ; and so great were the crowds that came to Avorship there that the stone floor where they knelt is percepti- bly worn away. But the king, although he had been vanquished, was yet struggling for the right.

THE BABYLONIAN BONDAGE 1 37

He was, however, ahead of his age. The Church and the world were not ripe for the change. Of him we cannot say that he had understanding of the times, though he knew what Israel ought to do.

But we come now to a man who, of all men, had understanding of the times, and to whom God gave grace and power to be true to himself, his people, his Church, and even to the worthless king whom he withstood. This was Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury in the time of King John. Hildebrand had been long gath- ered to his fathers, but, animated by the same spirit. Innocent III. now ruled in Rome. During the pontificate of this Pope it was that, upon his bended knee. King John resigned his throne and his crown to the Pope through his Legate, the Roman Subdeacon, Pandulf.

It was enough. None reach the depth of base- ness all at once, but John had at last reached it. He had, however, given what was not his to give; he had attempted to part with the patrimony of another, and if he would not wholly lose his throne he must acknowledge this and repent of his folly. Magna Charta was the result. Stephen Langton became the leader of the army of God and Holy

138 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Church ; and he and the barons, with the whole English nation at their back, forced from the king that Charter, which lives still in the Com- mon Law both of England and America !

But just as if the Archbishop foresaw the rise of the future heresy, that the national Church was once a part of the Roman Church, he made the very first of the sixty-three Clauses to run as follows:

" That the English Church shall be free, and have her rights entire and her liberties invi- olate."

The charter was signed by King John, June 15, 1215; and let us note well that in the judgment of men who had understanding of the times, the Church in England, in 121 5, just after the Pope had asserted himself and his power so unmistak- ably, was the old Church of the land and not an- other. Such was the humiliation of the Church and nation which Innocent III. attempted, al- though in vain ; but who shall describe the feel- ings of Innocent? Who will do the Holy Father the injustice to repeat all he said in the heat of bafHed passion ? He even annulled, so far as he could, the charter itself. But as well might he have bidden the waves roll back at his word.

THE BABYLONIAN BONDAGE 139

Langton had a nation's support, and even John, in lucid intervals could see this.

" Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous To charge me to an answer, as the Pope. Tell him this tale ; and from the mouth of England Add this much more — that no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions."

Meanwhile the Anglo-American Church goes on her way. Her ablest sons have shown her what she ought to do. But oh, that there would arise a Bishop of Rome imbued with the spirit of Langton !

There is an old legendary story which tells us that a certain Pope was once accused before a Church council of heresy. He was found guilty and condemned to death. But it was found that the sentence could not legally be carried out without the consent of the Pope himself. Then the fathers of the council went to the Pope and stated the difficulty ; would he kindly pass judg- ment on himself. And so moved with pity for the dilemma in which the Church was placed, he consented to their prayer. He pronounced judg- ment upon himself and he was burned ! Where- upon in gratitude for so heroic an act of self-

I40 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

denial he was canonized and revered as a saint of the Church. It is a mere tale, but oh, for a new Pope, like minded, who would even blot out him- self, if thereby he might help on the unification of the Catholic Church ; who could go back to primitive times and Apostolic Episcopate for his example, and himself proclaim from his lofty eminence, " The Bishop of Rome is willing hence- forth to be but one of the chief Bishops of the Church ; and claims no more to be its chief and universal Bishop. Christ is the One only real and true occupant of the throne of the Chief Shep- herd ! " By doing so he might risk his life, but he would be the last of the Popes. Infallibility had then abolished the office, and none could ever again rise to claim it. The race had come to an end, like that of the Pharaohs or the Mohican Indians.

But from the days of Linus, Rome's first Bishop, to that day, none would have deserved so well of Christendom. An infallible Pope had gone, but a Bishop of Rome was left to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and to prove himself a man that had understand- ing of the times, to know what Israel ought to do. Through that act of simple effacement it would

THE BABYLONIAN BONDAGE 141

and it could not be long ere the Church would be united again, and there would be once more an undivided Church, with one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all, and through all, and in us all.

IX.

AN ANGLICAN ELIJAH

IX. AN ANGLICAN ELIJAH

"And I, even I only, am left ; and they seek my life, to take it away." — i Kings xix. lo.

The scene from the description of which these words are taken is sufficiently striking to have made for itself a very marked place in your mind. We need not enlarge upon it. Elijah the prophet stands forth prominently as the defender of the old state of things. He pleads for the old altar, the old worship and the old creed ; he is a be- liever in the Lord God of Israel, but alas ! he seems to stand alone. That love of novelty and desire for change which is so marked a feature of the human mind, and which exercises so much in- fluence both for good and evil, had been at work. But not happily ; the result was wholly evil. It was not, however, wholly so bad as Elijah im- agined it was. Looking out on the prospect be- fore him he contemplated it with the gloomiest forebodings. It was enough ; his cup of sorrow

146 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

was filled to the brim ; he was ready to die. He had been very jealous for the Lord God of Hosts, but all his efforts seemed to have been in vain. He could see no other man like-minded with him- self ; he only, of all God's prophets, was left, and they were seeking his life to take it away !

This whole scene has a wonderful parallel in Anglican Church history. In the fourteenth century there rose a man, like another Elijah, who seemed at times to stand alone, yet he was not alone. God was with him, and He was making even his enemies to be at peace with him. At one time He raised him up a defender in John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, a prince of the blood royal ; at another He caused the masses of the people to rise and stand between him and those who were seeking to take away his life.

This man was John Wyclif, the leading spirit and the master-mind of all that period — the fore- runner of the Reformation ; another Elijah ; a second John the Baptist ; a great schoolman and yet an earnest parish priest, who had put forth his hand to the setting up again in all its beauty of England's spiritual temple.

Wyclif has been called the morning-star of the Reformation ! and yet he was not the first of the

AN ANGLICAN ELIJAH 147

Reformers. Before him Robert Grostete, Bishop of Lincoln, and William of Occam had entered upon the work of Reformation. These were two great and loyal Churchmen, w^ho had understand- ing of the times. But when Wyclif came to the front it must indeed have seemed that God was with His people ; that He had not cast them away, but was, on the contrary, giving them such man- ifest proofs of His love that it was abundantly clear the national Church of England should not want a man to stand before Him forever, to be a witness for the truth once for all delivered to the saints.

And this long before the sixteenth century ! How foolish and entirely without foundation is the reproach that the English Reformation was started by King Henry VHI., and that if it had not been for that headstrong and ambitious monarch, there would have been no Reformation at all ! It is very much as if one should ascribe the authorship of a book to a man who had but befriended the publishers of some subsequent editions ; or as if one should attempt to date the Independence of America from the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Why do not such peo- ple learn that the year 1894 comes not before,

148 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

but after the year 1594, and that children are not the authors of their own parents' existence !

The simple truth is, that the Reformation of the sixteenth century was not the outgrowth of one will, nor of the will of one generation of men. If Henry had never appeared at all, the English Reformation would all the same have come to pass. " For the fatherland of the Eng- lish race," says John Richard Green, *' we must look far away from England itself." So for the Reformation of the sixteenth century we must look far away from the men, and the times of the sixteenth century. It is Milton who tells us that had it not been for the obstinate perverse- ness of the Bishops of that day against the divine and admirable spirit of Wyclif, and for their en- deavors to suppress him as a heretic and an inno- vator, neither the Bohemian Huss and Jerome, nor yet even Luther and Calvin, would have ever been heard of. All the glory of the Reformation might have belonged to that national Church of which Wyclif was so distinguished an ornament and so loyal a son.

In Anglican history we have certainly no man quite like him. Yet there is much resemblance between him and the German Reformer, Luther.

AN ANGLICAN ELIJAH 149

In one respect, indeed, the resemblance between them is very striking. It was the glory of each to give the Holy Scripture to his countrymen in their native tongue. In boldness and audacity and in fiery temperament the German stands easily first ; but who in this respect is like Luther? As we see him setting at naught the thunders of Rome and contemptuously burning her sentence of excommunication against him, we at once think of that stout warrior of antiquity who protested that the bolts of Jove himself would not turn him from his path nor stay his hand. Here the form of the German Reformer looms large before men's eyes as they read the history of those times ; but Wyclif has this dis- tinction which was denied Luther. He was the first to tell men what they ought to do. When Luther lived, the demand for change was no new thing; the air was already laden with many sounds and loud voices, all calling for reform. But in the days of Wyclif, though men felt its need, and knew that all was not what it should be, they felt helpless. They were as if in the dark, waiting for some one to lead them by the hand. The state of things under which they had grown up might be all right in theorj^,

ISO LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

but it was plainly and terribly wrong in practice. What could they do ? Pray ? Yes, we doubt not they did pray, and that oh, how earnestly !

" Break on this night of longing, Where hand in hand we grope Through wastes of vain endeavor, 'Neath stars of fruitless hope.

" Out of our gloom we call Thee, Out of our helpless night ; Sun of the world, sweet Saviour, Show us Thy perfect light ! "

Wyclif was God's answer to their prayer for light. With him the morning-star of the Refor- mation arose, and men began to see the way. Robert Grostete, Bishop of Lincoln, had indeed refused to confer a canonry on a mere child at the command of the Pope ; but beyond refusing obedience where obedience was palpably wrong, the good Bishop thought not of going. Wyclif, however, prepared for war — and waited his op- portunity.

And soon in the providence of God a door was opened wide. In 1378 Gregory XI. died ; where- upon the French and the Italians each elected a rival Pope ; the French selecting Clement VIL, who dwelt at Avignon, while the Italians chose

AN ANGLICAN ELIJAH 151

Urban VL, who lived at Rome. These rival Popes at first spent their time excommunicat- ing each other, but at last appealed to force of arms to maintain their respective pretensions. Here was a most unedifying spectacle. A man needed not then to be more than a sincere lover of the truth to ask : *' Is such a Papacy indeed of God's appointment?" Wyclif bade men learn the lesson of that divided pontificate ; not, indeed, that it was the first time that there had been scandalous wrangling for the possession of the See of Rome, but one of the greatest schoolmen looked on it now, and with resistless logic argued that men should surely look elsewhere for their knowledge of Christianity than to those who were so shamelessly proving that they did not know what spirit they were of ; moreover, unto Avhich of these two militant Popes should they turn for guidance ; no one could tell them, none can even now tell which one of the two was rightful Bishop of Rome. The whole matter is usually glossed over as '' the great Schism, or the Babylonish Captivity of the Papacy."

Then Wyclif began to teach men to go to the Scriptures for the knowledge of the truths of Christianity rather than to the decrees and tradi-

152 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

tions of a divided Church ; and it was Wyclifs own great privilege to give his countrymen the opportunity to read in their own tongue the won- derful works of God. Parts of the Bible had, as we have seen, been translated before his day ; Bede, the Monk of Yarrow, had died whilst trans- lating St. John's Gospel, and there were others who had undertaken the noble task ; but it was reserved for Wyclif first to give a systematic and complete English translation of the whole Bible, and so more effectually bring its teaching home to Englishmen's hearts and consciences, and en- able them truly to say, " Thy word is a lantern unto my feet and a light unto my paths."

All honor to Wyclif ! In the time he lived there was not a man better calculated to do the work God raised him to do. And yet we may be thankful that he did not live in the sixteenth century when the work of reconstruction went forward. If the Reformation movement then had been led by Wyclif, he would in all probability have anticipated Calvin, and instead of Reforma- tion we should have had Revolution. The Apos- tolic Episcopal government would probably have been discarded and a work of wholesale destruc- tion of ancient forms entered upon. Yet for the

AX ANGLICAN ELIJAH 1 53

special work to which God called him he was ad- mirably fitted, and he may rightfully take his place among those who have done good in Israel, both toward God and toward his house.

For one good thing which Wyclif did, and with- out which, indeed, he could have done but little besides, all must have been grateful to him. He popularized the national Church, for she had for a long time been intensely unpopular. The old monastic orders, which had done good service in an earlier day, had in his time become wealthy and idle ; whilst even the new orders of mendi- cant friars, which had invaded every part of the land, had also lost their original povert}^ and be- come corrupt and time-serving. But worse than all, there was even general discontent against the Church's doctrines, when Wyclif appeared as a reformer. His disciples numbered at one time a third of the population of the whole country. It is rarely, however, that any great popular move- ment can be held in check by those who first set it in motion. It was so then. The Lollards, as Wyclif's followers were called, soon became a menace to the nation. From attacking abuses in the Church they passed, naturally enough, to attacking abuses in the State. Then a civil re-

154 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

bellion of such alarming proportions arose, that it threatened to sweep away all authority both in Church and State. The cry of the mob was for perfect equality, and their popular song was :

" When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman ? "

Perfect equality ! Oh what a dream of dreams is this! In what has God made men equal ? We dif- fer from one another in a thousand different ways. Humanity lies between two points very far apart, but we can understand the cry well enough, and we do not hold Wyclif responsible for its being raised. Like the modern Socialists and Anarch- ists, the Lollards howled for the abolishment of law and order, and a redistribution of all property.

Wyclif died in 1384, and was buried beneath the chancel of his own church of Lutterworth. Years after — incredible sacrilege ! — his body was exhumed and burned, and the ashes cast into an adjoining brook. But the brook bore them to the ocean, and carried them — emblematic of the doctrines he preached — into all the world.

" Wyclif disinhumed, Yea, his dry bones to ashes are consumed And flung into the brook that travels near.

AN ANGLICAN ELIJAH 1 55

Forthwith that ancient Voice which streams can hear Thus speaks (that Voice which walks upon the wind Though seldom heard by busy humankind),

' As thou these ashes, little brook, wilt bear Into the Avon, Avon to the tide Of Severn, Severn to the narrow seas, Into main ocean they, this deed accurst ; An emblem yields to friends and enemies, How the bold teacher's doctrine, sanctified By truth, shall spread, throughout the world dispersed.' "

We have spoken of friars and monks ; of mon- asteries and nunneries. Were these not orders and institutions of the Roman Catholic Church, you may ask. No ; they were the orders and in- stitutions of our own Church as it then existed. Long before the Reformation, and to a great ex- tent from Wyclif's teaching, it was felt that their work had been fulfilled and they might pass away. At the Reformation they were abolished as being no longer serviceable ; but while they existed they were parts of the machinery, not of an}^ foreign Church, but of the national Church of the land ; a Church which, as we have seen, clung to all its rights through many and great vicissitudes, never failing to preserve its identity, and to keep unbroken its connection with the Church of the Lord and His Apostles.

156 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

This Church was now on the eve of purifying her house from the effects of evil communica- tions ; but we have spoken to little purpose unless we have shown clearly that, whether under the rule of Cassar, when Britain was but a province of Rome's vast empire, or under the Saxon, Dan- ish, and Norman kings, it was always the same Church ; and that even in the darkest and dreari- est period, when only solitary voices pleaded for truth, God had not left Himself without wit- ness ; there were even then thousands in Israel who had not bowed the knee, nor kissed the image of Baal ; yea, though a prophet of its own could truthfully say, " They seek my life to take it away ! '*

X. THE END OF CAPTIVITY

X. THE END OF CAPTIVITY

" Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein." — Jeremiah vi. i6.

This does not mean, as is sometimes supposed, " stand up and ask for the old paths, and never move from them, for there is the right way." The true meaning is very different; for the words are a call to rise up and stand in the ways and look about and inquire of the old ways which is the right way and then to walk in it. Among those old ways our feet may be standing in the wrong, and we must therefore take good heed and find out the right.

Now on the eve of that break with Rome in the sixteenth century, which we term the Reforma- tion, no more appropriate word could have been spoken than this : '' Stand ye in the ways, and see and ask for the old paths." Never in all their long history had Anglican Churchmen greater

l60 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

need for strength and patience. The very foun- dations were endangered, and what could the righteous do? It was a time of well-nigh univer- sal change. Yet by divine Providence those who were then leading our Church were not revolu- tionists ; they would do nothing rashly. They justly conceived of their work as the work of Reformation only, and they always seemed to hear a summons bidding them find their model in purer and better times. Accordingly they bent all their energies to the freeing of our Church from the unscriptural and uncatholic domination of a foreign Bishop.

In this great work of Reformation, England's Declaration of Independence in ecclesiastical mat- ters curiously anticipates America's Declaration of Independence in matters political. Whilst America was subject to the British Empire, a con- sciousness of her destiny was ever stealing in upon thoughtful men. It was one of the wisest of these who said, '* As soon as x\merica can take care of herself, she will do what Carthage did."

And yet from a final separation from England, the Colonists instinctively turned away. They still naturally looked upon England as the ancient home of their fathers, and they regarded her laws

THE END OF CAPTIVITY l6l

and customs as their own just inheritance. Yet they emphatically denied that their English kins- men had any rights over them. They were all equal, they were all free. But this, which none deny now, was not admitted then ; and separation inevitably came. And as it was in the days of the foolish King Rehoboam, so again it was in the days of the foolish and incapable George III. The king would use force, but the God of nations interposed ; " return every man to his house in peace, for this thing is from Me."

And now for the parallel. It is indeed close and exact. The great body of the English people had, in the course of the Norman period, learned to love the Roman Church and to wish her pros- perity. Yet they never thought of her as having any rights over them. When, therefore, that Roman Church, forgetting that she was at best no more than a sister, began to imagine herself the mother and mistress of Churches, to claim abso- lute power and dominion, and even to attempt to withdraw liberties which the English Church had enjoyed ever since apostolic men had taught her the truth and made her free ; when she tried to annul Magna Charta itself (which declared that the English Church was anciently and forever

1 62 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

free) ; when she attempted to deprive the people of England of their inalienable and time-honored right of choosing their own Bishops and chief pastors, then the action of the American colonies was anticipated by over two centuries, and the English Church declared that, for the future, she would look after her own affairs.

Now what is a commoner charge against our Church than that she is a new body, built on the ruins of the old Roman Church of England. Many of the Bishops and clergy and a few of the educated lait}^ of that Church know better, but the rank and file are taught differently. And as for Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists, and Baptists, however kindly disposed toward us they may be, they would as soon think of be- coming Roman Catholics as of ceasing to believe that in the sixteenth century the Church of Eng- land was a little babe in swaddling-clothes, which, having had Henry VIII. as its foster-father and Queen Elizabeth as its nursing mother, had at last grown up to vigorous life. This is history indeed, if we can call that history compared with which the stories of Grimm's goblins and Hans Andersen's fairy tales are sober truth.

Our forefathers would have been startled by

THE END OF CAPTIVITY 1 63

any such view. They did not see before their eyes a delicate and puny infant wailing its neces- sities in the ears of royal foster-parents. What they saw was their own strong and vigorous Church, into which they had been born, and which for over one thousand years had been in sole possession of the land, a Church which, older than the state itself, had done more than all other forces to make England what she was.

The Church's own Reformation Prayer Book asserts this with unfaltering voice. And its testi- mony has this peculiar value, that it is contempo- raneous testimony taken upon the spot. In the preface to that book, w^hich is attributed to Arch- bishop Cranmer, whom the Rom^ans afterward burned as a Reformer in the market-place at Oxford, are these words : " The service in this Church of England, these many years, hath been read in Latin to the people, which they under- stand not; so that they have heard with their ears only."

Plainly, in the judgment of the reforming Arch- bishop, the Church which proposed now to read the service in English was the same Church which had previously read it in Latin. In his mind there v/as no break in the continuity of the

l64 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Church's life or organization, she was merely re- forming evil customs.

In the reign of Alfred, King of England (871- 901), the Church leased a piece of property to the crov/n for nine hundred and ninety-nine years. A few years ago the term of the lease expired, and on a question arising as to what body was en- titled to the property, the courts decided it be- longed of right to the present Church of England as the original owner. But this decision was, as is well known, a part of a larger question. All Church property in England is legally held upon the principle that the Church of England of to- day is one and the same as the Church of Eng- land under the Heptarchy and all subsequent kings. The muniments of title to all the cathe- drals, and to Westminster Abbey itself, the most national of all the churches there, are involved in this legal presumption. But we have only to see how the " Anglicana Ecclesia " in Magna Charta is carefully distinguished from that " Sanctae Ro- manse Ecclesise," which is also there mentioned, to see that this is no presumption merely. Even Bede speaks of the " Ecclesia Anglorum," and never is there a hint that she was ever anything else.

THE END OF CAPTIVITY 1 65

It is true, alas, that this national Church was not always free from foreign dictation ; that for years she lay, as Samson, bound, but the bondage destroyed not her ancient character. Rightly did she claim her freedom. " Our records," said Queen Elizabeth, "show that the papal jurisdic- tion over this realm was usurpation." How like this reply to that made by William the Conquer- or to Hildebrand, more than five hundred years before.

Think of what the Popes were, and you will see not only how needful this declaration of indepen- dence was, but that it was made none too soon. Men had to look away in horror and dismay when they beheld all evil triumphant in the per- sons of men calling themselves Vicars of Christ. It was this, first, that set men thinking. When such a creature as the wretched Alexander VI. sat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself the Lord's anointed, had men been silent the very stones would have cried out against their silence and their apathy.

Then there were other and infinitely greater causes at work. The old social order which had prevailed throughout Western Europe was pass- ing away. The spell of the past — the spell of

l66 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

custom and tradition — which had enchained the minds of men, was roughly broken, and an era of free thought had dawned.

Great physical changes, too, were also contrib- uting largely to that spirit of inquiry and that search for truth which was behind the Reforma- tion movement. The world was, in fact, passing through wonderful changes. Its physical bounds had been suddenly enlarged. Portuguese mari- ners had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. Columbus had crossed the ocean in search of a nearer way to the Asiatic main, and had died pro- fessing his belief that he had found it. Sebastian Cabot, starting from Bristol, had threaded his way among the icebergs of Labrador, and thence sailed southward along the North American coast till he saw the shores of Florida.

The Reformation of the sixteenth century was an answer to the demands of the age. Firmly, but gently, and in canonical order, the Anglican Church reasserted her independence and en- shrined for all time a main principle of the Refor- mation in these words: "The Bishop of Rome hath no greater jurisdiction in this realm of Eng- land than any other foreign Bishop."

Reformation under these conditions was as nat-

THE END OF CAPTIVITY 1 6/

ural as that day should follow night. But we may be told that we have not mentioned the divorce of Henry VIII. To assign that miserable and protracted lawsuit as a cause of the Refor- mation, is very much like saying that the loss of the fifth wheel disables the coach. But many of us have travelled in four-wheeled coaches in per- fect safety. Some years ago it is said the Queen of England arrived at Dover, and not being met with the usual royal salute she asked the com- mander of the port why the salute was omitted, who at once replied, " Please your Majesty there are several reasons, but the first is we have no guns." The Reformation of the sixteenth century was a European matter. A little stone had been cut out of the mountain, without hands, which was destined to break the great image of folly and superstition which had been silently set up in Christendom. With the breaking of that image England was well content. She had no war but with error. Her Reformers sought only the old and good way that they might walk therein.

With Henry VIII., individually, we have noth- ing to do. He was no Bishop of the Church, nor was he a good man. Nor was he even a Reformer at all. He was a supporter of most

l68 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

of the mediaeval doctrines, and punished dissent from them with the sword. By his unprincipled treatment of the Church and his shameless rob- bery of her funds, he inflicted untold injury upon her. Yet he could not stem the resistless tide, and during his reign the Reformation was in the main accomplished. The Scriptures had been given to the people in their own tongue, a Prayer Book in English begun, and the return to primitive and apostolic doctrines inaugurated. But it was in its conservative character that the Anglican Reformation differed so widely from that of Europe generally. There, not reforma- tion but revolution was to be seen. Let us never fail to realize that here was the vital difference between the reform in England, and elsewhere. During the French Revolution the king, looking out on the mob from the Tuileries said : '' This is riot," the reply was : " Sire, it is revolution." When the smoke of battle rolled away in the re- ligious warfare of the sixteenth century through- out Germany and Switzerland, and elsewhere on the continent of Europe, a new Church had arisen, a Church without Bishops and without a past. A new thing had appeared under the sun.

THE END OF CAPTIVITY 1 69

In England, however, the old Church still lived. And she to-day, both in England and America, looks back with deep thankfulness over the ages, and sees no break in her continuity from first to last.

In Baltimore, of all the cities in America, the clergy and people of the American Church need to be rooted and grounded in the history of their Church. For here, more than elsewhere, do they hear insidious suggestions against her. '' 'Tis a trembling shadow, whilst the Church of Rome is the solid rock." Remember how Tennyson puts this sentiment into the mouth of Cardinal Pole as he addresses Lord Paget :

" Tremble, my Lord, The Church on Peter's rock ? Never !

I have seen A pine in Italy that cast its shadow Athwart a cataract ; firm stood the pine, The cataract shook the shadow. To my mind The cataract typed the headlong plunge and fall Of heresy to the pit ; the pine was Rome.

You see, my Lord, It was the shadow of the Church that trembled ; Your Church was but the shadow of a Church,

Wanting the papal mitre." — Queen Mary, Act iii., Sc. iv.

170 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

This is no poet's language merely. It is, ac- cording to some, only the sober teaching of his- tory. And are the clergy of this American Church to be silent and let this pass unchal- lenged ? Are they to be as dumb dogs ? Are they to be hearers only, may they never reply ? Are they to be as sentries posted on the walls of forti- fied towns, who seeing the enemy coming to at- tack, while all are asleep trusting to their watch- fulness and care, yet utter no sound and give no warning? Perish the thought. We attack none, but we claim the liberty of self-defence. We dare not accept any gagged responsibility. Whether they will hear or whether they will forbear, we must preach the Gospel ; yea, woe is unto us if we preach not the Gospel.

There is little to encourage us to keep silent, even if we would, as we contemplate the actual working of the Anglican and Roman Churches. By their fruits ye shall know them. Let Rome look to her own house and set that in order. Italy has deprived the Pope of his temporal power. Spain has come down in the world. Austria is weak. France is sneering at religion and has legalized divorce. Mexico and the South American republics are but thinly disguised bar-

THE END OF CAPTIVITY 1 71

barisms. Yet these are Roman Catholic powers. Perhaps religion has nothing to do with w^hat they are. Yet God does say, " Righteousness ex- alteth a nation," and we mark Avith satisfaction and thankfulness that the Anglo-Saxon nations, taught by our own beloved INIother, stand in the van of all commercial activity, of all intellectual progress, and of all religious thought.

XL THE RESTORATION

XI. THE RESTORATION

" This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes." — Psalm cxviii. 23.

Henry VIII. left behind him three children — Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth. And if one were to describe these children by terms with which we are now familiar, we should say that the first was a Puritan, the second a Roman Catholic, and the third an Anglican. It is certainly not a little remarkable that in one family there should have been such divisions, and it is still more remark- able that all three should in turn have come to the throne of England, and from that elevated position have given to the world a practical il- lustration of the working and characteristics of the three systems of religion — Puritanism, Roman Catholicism, and Anglicanism that is pure Catho- licism. In this respect the family of Henry VI 1 1, affords us one of the most striking object-lessons

iy6 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

which can be found in the whole field of eccle- siastical history.

Prince Edward was of the stuff of which Puri- tans are made. His reign has been called the seven years' reign of an infant, for he was but sixteen years old when he died ; but he had for an infant a remarkably strong will. Of the Tudor race, he knew well what he wanted, and was set to accom- plish it. He had no love for the Church nor ap- preciation of her apostolic character, and his one aim seemed to be to get as near as possible to the new communities founded by the German and Swiss Reformers. And had his reign continued, it is easy to conjecture what would have befallen the old national Church of England. As it was, the iconoclasm of the true Puritans was antici- pated. For the first time in England, men calling themselves Christians '' broke down all the carved work thereof with axes and hammers, and defiled the dwelling-places of the Most High." There were men who seemed to have a perfect horror of worshipping God ^' in the beauty of holiness." The one thing in connection with the Church they had no antipathy to, was her property. But the robber of the Church is the robber of God, and the Lord is mindful of His own.

THE RESTORATION 1 7/

" They tell us that the Lord of Hosts will not avenge His own ; They tell us that He careth not for temples overthrown ; Go look through England's thousand vales, and show me, he

that may, The abbey lands that have not wrought their owner's swift decay."

The reign of this Puritan boy came to an end on July 6, 1553. But young as he was, he had the spirit of his father before him and of every English king who had struggled for freedom against foreign interference. His last prayer de- serves to be remembered for its sublime patriot- ism : '' O Lord God, defend this realm from Pa- pistry and maintain Thy true religion." It re- minds us of the prayer of Oswald, the sainted King of Northumbria, on behalf of his Christian subjects, as he fell fighting against the heathen King of the Mercians, " Lord have mercy on their souls ! "

Mary, whose reign came next, was the Roman Catholic of the family. The daughter of the dis- carded Catherine of Aragon, she owed her zeal for the unreformed religion to her Spanish moth- er's training. Oh, mothers, what a power for good or evil is yours ! It was a true answer which, in reply to the question, what was the

178 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

great want of the French nation, said, *' Moth- ers." Give us earnest, conscientious, and relig- ious mothers, and the future of any nation is as- sured.

Mary's mother had made her a faithful disciple of the Italian Bishop. As soon as she became queen, she set herself to restore all the mediaeval practices which had been abandoned. Step by step she proceeded to undo all that her father or brother had done. The English Prayer Book was proscribed, the English Bible was banished ; old statutes against heresy were brought forward and solemnly promulgated afresh, and she set definitely before her, as a religious duty, to do what no English sovereign before her had ever at- tempted save the infamous John, she would force her people into the house of bondage. By the be- ginning of 155S) the arena was cleared and that frightful tragedy was begun in which an Archbish- op, four Bishops, twenty-one clergymen, fifty-five women, four children, and two hundred and three other persons were to be burned at the stake.

We are not about to harrow your feelings with any minute description of those terrible outrages. Our work is not to show the folly of Roman per- secution, it is the pleasanter duty of showing the

THE RESTORATION 1 79

wisdom of Anglican toleration. That particular persecution, indeed, inflicted on Rome such irre- parable injury that she has since again and again vainly tried to escape the responsibility for it And if we are to judge from the loud praises (with which all Marylanders are familiar) which are now lavished upon the spirit of toleration from unexpected quarters, we may assume that the error has been seen, and that the Anglican method has been generally recognized as the more excellent way.

Mary herself foresaw it, and weakened by ill- health and realizing the failure of all her cherished plans, died broken-hearted after a short reign of five years. In her life and reign men saw, or thought they saw, the good and evil of the Roman system, its virtues and its defects, and they con- demned it. She had made a strong and deter- mined effort to graft it upon English Christianity but without success. On November 17, I5S8, Mary breathed her last, and her sister Eliza- beth, almost without opposition, '' reigned in her stead."

The third and last of Henry's children now sat upon the throne. In Elizabeth's reign men were to see the practical working of the true Anglican

l8o LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Catholicism, which is the unifying power of all Anglo-Saxon Christendom to this very day.

In Hatfield Park a tree is still pointed out where Elizabeth was sitting when she received the news of her peaceable accession to the throne. At once she fell on her knees, and drawing a long deep breath, exclaimed, " It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes." Just as the coins of the United States now bear the words " In God we trust," so to the last of her reign those words were stamped upon the golden coin- age of the queen.

And there was a singular appropriateness in these words. They were spoken originally with reference to a proverb. " The same stone which the builders refused is become the head of the corner." We have no means of knowing whether or not they refer to any historical event, but whatever the origin of the proverb, as commonly used, it referred to a people rejected and cast away.

As the Princess Elizabeth she had been neg- lected, her birth had once been declared illegiti- mate, but she was now restored. The stone which the builders rejected had truly become the headstone in the corner. '' This was the

THE RESTORATION l8l

Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes." We remember again God's words : ** This thing is from Me ! " Plainly this was one of God's providences. To Him who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, who putteth down one and setteth up another, does the Church owe it that, in the most critical period of all her long history Eliza- beth arose as a mother in Israel. The queen herself felt that her preservation from the many perils which had threatened her life was due to the direct interposition of God.

Elizabeth's accession was the signal for the quenching of the fires of persecution. She put none to death for religious convictions. She was the type of a true Anglican Churchwoman. If, later in her reign, there were some that died for their opinions, it was not because those opinions were religious, but because they were political ; not because they were regarded as dangerous to the spiritual welfare of the nation, but because they threatened destruction to the state. This is the glory of Elizabeth. Throughout her long reign, save a few Anabaptists who seemed to menace the social order, no heretic was sent '' to the fire."

And her Anglican policy of toleration met

l82 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

with its reward. Gradually the mediaeval prac- tices of Mary's reign fell into disuse, and the ce- remonial of the later years of Henry became the standard of ritual and of practice. Slowly great changes were taking place, and habits were be- coming crystallized. But so wisely did she act, that the mass of the nation were not conscious that they were making an epoch in Anglican Church history.

The old Rectors, with few exceptions, remained in their parishes and ministered as of old. The new Prayer Book was for the most part an Eng- lish rendering of the old service — yet English and not Roman. Even those who sighed for the leeks and garlic of Egypt attended the public services and saw but little with which to find fault. Sometimes, where feeling ran high, dif- ficulties were removed by compromise. The priest would celebrate mass at his house for the more conservative members of his flock, whilst to the others he would administer the Communion in church according to the Reformed service. Sometimes all knelt together at the same altar- rail, some to receive wafers previously consecrat- ed after the old usage, others to receive wafers consecrated in church after the new. In many

THE RESTORATION 1 83

parishes in the North no change at all was made. Such a state of things seems to us little better than chaos. But chaos is better than war.

Yet the gains were substantial and permanent. All submission to Rome was at an end. The re- formed Book of Common Prayer was now the Prayer Book of the land. The Sacraments were restored to their proper place. The Scriptures were read in the language of the people. The Bishoprics were filled w^ith men who had been rightly consecrated, and not for many a long day was there a breath of suggestion that there was a flaw anywhere. Under Matthew Parker, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, England seemed, at the close of 1559, to be quietly settling down to enjoy peace. This peace, however, was to be rudely broken. As a Bishop of Rome was respon- sible for the lamentable schism between the Greek and Roman communions, so another Bishop of Rome was to be the cause of a schism, almost as disastrous, between the Roman and Anglican communions; but not before striking testimon}^ had been given to the uncalled-for and entirely gratuitous nature of his interference in the affairs of our national Church.

It was, strange to tell, reserved, in the provi-

1 84 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

dence of God, for a Bishop of Rome to declare the validity of Anglican orders, and to assert his belief that the Anglican Church had all things es- sential to her Catholicity. Indeed the worthy Bishop, Pius IV. (who did this), might have said to English Churchmen, " What more could I have done for you than I have done?" To whom they might have graciously replied, " Nothing, absolutely nothing. We thank you for your words of approval and the evidence of your good- will. We may not, however, accept 3^our offered leadership, for, under Christ, we obey the Arch- bishop of Canterbury, of whom one of your own predecessors has spoken as * the Pope of another world.' "

The circumstances are these: In 1560 Pius IV. made overtures to Elizabeth for a reconcilia- tion ; and the overtures he made practically con- cede the Anglican position as right. He under- took to give his approval of all that had been done during the Reformation period, provided his authority were recognized. So important is this evidence that I give you the very words as they occur in Butler's '' Historical Memoirs of the Catholics," pubHshed in London, 1822. It is especially valuable as coming from a Roman

THE RESTORATION 185

Catholic, though the truth of the statement is not called into question.

'' In May, 1560, Pius IV." (says Butler) ^' sent Vincentio Parpalio to the queen with a letter, most earnestly but respectfully entreating her to return to the bosom of the Church. Parpalio was instructed to offer to the queen that the Pope would annul the sentence of Clement, his predecessor, against her mother's marriage, settle the Liturgy by his authority, and grant to the English the use of the Sacraments in both kinds. Parpalio reached Brussels, and from that place he acquainted the English ministry with the ob- ject of his mission, and proceeded to Calais. The propriety of admitting him was debated in the Royal Council and determined in the negative."

Doubtless the queen and her Council had be- fore their eyes the first clause of Magna Charta : " The Church of England shall be free and hold her rights entire and her liberties inviolate."

Ten years rolled away, and another effort was made, this time by Pius V., successor of Pius IV. Paul IV. had tried threats. Pius IV. had sought the same end by persuasion. Then came Pius v., to whose fiery faith every means of warfare seemed hallowed by the sanctity of his cause.

1 86 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

He sent forth, in the year 1570, his spiritual thunders. Excommunication was the dread sen- tence lighting upon all who would not withdraw from their parish churches. A few, a very few, obeyed his bidding, and the second Italian mis- sion in England dates from this act and time. But a blight seems to have been always upon it; it has never prospered. Notwithstanding the terribly stagnant period of the Georges, when the national Church, settled upon her lees, was doing nothing, it grew not. Even to-day it num- bers less than a million, though founded more than three centuries ago. It is but a feeble schism ; the smallest and youngest aspirant to spiritual power in England.

After Pius came Sixtus V., who, seeing that threats, persuasion, and spiritual censure had all alike failed, tried arms. Spain at that time was mis- tress of the seas and the first power of the world. To Philip of Spain Sixtus opened the Papal treas- ury, if he would invade the heretic realm. Philip needed no pressing. With vast possessions in both worlds, he longed to extend them. Eng- land was to him Naboth's vineyard. The Pope's offer was as cold spring water to a thirsty man. He eagerly seized it. Three hundred priests

THE RESTORATION 187

under the Jesuit Father Allen were sent into England to spread dissatisfaction and to under- mine the government, while Spain prepared the mightiest navy ever seen. At last all was ready. On July 9, 1588, the sails of the Spanish Armada appeared off the Lizard, and the beacons flared out their alarm all along the coast,

" Till Skiddaw saw the fire that burned On Gaunt's embattled pile, And the red glare on Skiddaw roused The burghers of Carlisle."

It was a mighty array. The stoutest hearts might have quaked at the sight. It was in its overwhelming greatness like the host of Sen- nacherib of which Byron sings :

" The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold, And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea When the blue waves roll nightly in deep Galilee."

Yet vast as was the host, the enemy did not trust in it alone. The three hundred emissaries had been sowing disaffection broadcast. How could success be doubtful? There was overwhelming strength, a disaffected people eagerly watching for them, and the Papal blessing as well !

1 88 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

But the Queen's toleration had borne its fruits. Now was to be seen the wisdom of that policy. Englishmen, however much they might love the old ritual, had no mind to go into bondage. The Jesuit leader had assured the King of Spain that the bulk of the Nation would rise as soon as a strong Spanish force was landed on English ground. He even gave the names of those who would lead. The Earls of Arundel, Northum- berland, Worcester, Cumberland, Oxford, and Southampton were among these. Yet observe what followed. In the presence of the stranger religious strife was silent. Of the nobles and squires whose tenants were to muster under the flag of the invader, not one proved a traitor; and in the defence against the Armada the vessels of Cumberland, Oxford, and Northumberland fought side by side with those of Drake and Howard. Mark, again, we say, the wisdom of the Anglican policy. As the result of it, the great Armada was scattered. The Lord fought for England as in the times gone by He had fought for Israel, when they saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea- shore. The rugged coasts of Scotland and Ire- land were covered with wrecks. On the strand near Sligo, an English captain counted eleven

THE RESTORATION 1 89

hundred corpses which had been cast up by the sea. Poor men ! The Papal blessing had not helped them !

England acknowledged her debt to God. His was the victory, not theirs.

" The might of the Gentiles, unsmote by the sword, Had melted like snow in the glance of the Lord."

On the medal that commemorated the triumph, the words were engraved " The Lord sent His word and scattered them." With the fall of the Armada, Spanish supremacy vanished utterly away. Ambition and the Papal blessing thus proved Spain's ruin. One century later, and Spain was stripped of the bulk of the Nether- lands ; another, and her possessions in Italy had vanished ; yet a third, and her dominions in the New World were taken away. Her fall has been clearly traced to the loss of her maritime ascen- dency at that overwhelming catastrophe in the wreck of the grand Armada, when her power was broken, her influence destroyed, and her prestige forever taken away.

England, on the contrary, from that day for- ward took the first place. " God putteth down one and setteth up another," He evidently ex-

190 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

alted the nation whose Church had kept " the faith once for all delivered to the saints," and which had put their trust in His Word and Sac- raments. And mightily has He since blessed that Church. In His own providence He has made her the teacher of the most progressive nations of the modern world. He has made it possible for her rightly to claim as her heritage, to be used for Him, the better part of this New World, which was even then looming up wondrous large before the eyes of men.

Never since the sixteenth century has the Latin Church been able to recommend herself to the more intellectual and cultured classes. In lands where she holds sway the upper classes have for the most part relapsed into dreary scepticism. Her power is almost entirely confined to the illit- erate. As education spreads she will lose ground even more rapidly ; while the stream which makes for true Catholicism will flow on more steadily and more widely. Converts will come in greater numbers. Already do they come in not inconsiderably. Over seven hundred adult Ro- man Catholics has the present Bishop of Iowa received with his own hand into our Church since he has been Bishop, and all his Episcopal

THE RESTORATION I9I

brethren around him have similar reports to make.

Let us trust God to deal wisely with His peo- ple. Men saw ultra - Protestantism in Edward, and they liked it not ; again they saw ultra-mon- tanism in Mary, and they liked it no better. But they rejoiced when they saw the old faith in Eliz- abeth free from Papal superstition and Puritan innovation.

Elizabeth's work was great indeed. What Wolsey had desired to see and Henry had but dreamed of, she accomplished. But the princi- ple of her action was the true Anglican principle of respecting the rights and consciences of others. She remembered that the weapons of spiritual warfare are not carnal. The secular sword she never used to punish religious error. To the Great Judge of All, men were responsible for their spiritual life. She was a civil governor; and if men would dwell in peace and quietness in her realm, obeying the secular laws without of- fence, they were never molested by her. By that policy she welded together into one harmonious whole, a nation which had been as divided in religious sentiment as her own father's family. When Puritanism failed and Roman Catholicism

192 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

was found wanting, in that very field and on that very stage she had shown the power of the Angli- can Church.

Our debt to her is great. At times she herself must have been amazed at the success of her changes. But the cause was of God ; and when she came to die, she might well have recalled those words spoken under the old tree in Hatfield many years before, and engraved on her golden coins, as abundantly made good to her :

" This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes."

XII. THE NAG'S HEAD FABLE

XII. THE NAG'S HEAD FABLE

AN APOCRYPHAL STORY

'• The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder." — i Peter v i.

In the first four verses of this chapter we find exhortations addressed to the official heads and leaders of the Church. Beginning with the fifth verse we have exhortations to the younger and subordinate members of the ministry, but the four opening verses are strictly an address to the older members. There the highest authorities of the Church are exhorted to the discharge of their own special duties.

Now these words have a great historical inter- est to ever}^ true Churchman, for they were the text of a sermon preached at a very great crisis in the history of our Church. It was when Mat- thew Parker was consecrated Archbishop of Can- terbury that the Bishop of Chichester, having chosen these words for his text, preached, as the

196 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Register at Lambeth tells us, " not inelegantly." What made this consecration a great crisis, a very turning-point, in the history of our Church, a simple illustration will readily help us to see. We are all familiar with the appearance which North and South America present on the atlas. We see the northern continent tapering away toward the south, until there is but a slender band con- necting it with the southern continent. And on the other hand, beginning with that same slen- der band, the southern continent opens out and spreads until it becomes a vast continent watered by the mightiest of rivers, and covered with the densest of forests. So slender is this band — this isthmus, which in reality makes these two conti- nents one — that many attempts have been made to cut it through and let the waters of the Atlan- tic and Pacific meet together ; but up to the pres- ent time every such attempt has been a disas- trous failure, bringing nothing but confusion and trouble upon those who have attempted it, dis- crediting them before the eyes of all the world, indeed ruining and disgracing them.

Now in a similar way the Episcopate of the Anglican Communion, before and after the Refor- mation, may be likened to the configuration of the

THE nag's head FABLE 197

land in the Western world. Before the Refor- mation that Episcopate was a mighty body ; after the Reformation it again became, as it is to-day, a mighty body also. But at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, in the midst of the Reformation period, it had its isthmus, its narrow connecting band, so slender that some have attempted to cut it through, nay, to assert that it was cut through, and that the river of time flowed between. But as it was with those who attempted to pierce the material isthmus, so was it here. Only utter con- fusion has awaited them and they have retired discomfited, confessing that they had undertaken more than they could perform ; that they had asserted more than they could prove.

Let us see if these things are not so. When Queen Mary's death occurred, a plague was rag- ing in England which was in truth no respecter of persons. It entered with equal impartiality the Bishop's palace and the cottage of the peas- ant. It struck down the Archbishop of Canter- bury, who stood then, as he stands now, next in rank to the princes of the blood royal —

" Chief prelate of our Church, Archbishop, first In council/ second person in the realm,"

igS LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

It spared not the Bishops, and this at a time when, owing to the changes taking place, some had been deprived of their bishoprics or had vol- untarily resigned them. For awhile it seemed as if the Apostolic line in England was about to become extinct. But God willed otherwise. The isthmus of the Reformed Episcopate re- mained intact. There were but few left to pre- serve that sacred heritage, but these were enough and more than enough to make manifest unto all men that God had not cast away His people whom He foreknew, but lovingly abode with them still.

Now all men rightly believed then that no man could be made a Bishop except by a Bishop. The belief in Apostolic succession is simply a matter of history. It does not admit of a rea- sonable doubt that from the first century to the sixteenth men, rightly or wrongly, unquestiona- bly believed that none could be ministers of the Church unless they had been ordained by Bish- ops. Not even, in their judgment, could the Archangels Michael and Gabriel — had they ap- peared in the midst of the congregation robed in surplice of dazzling whiteness and in stole of heavenly richness — have made men ministers of

THE NAG'S HEAD FABLE 199

our God. *' Those only they judged lawfully called or sent who had been sent by men who had had public authority given unto them to call and send laborers into the Lord's vineyard." Least of all could any man take this honor unto himself but he that was called of God, as was Aaron.

There are some nowadays who profess to be- lieve that this is not necessary. Yet, strangely enough, the most intensely Protestant sects of to-day do not now countenance the ordination of preachers by mere laymen. It matters not that to laymen they must eventually retrace their or- ganic existence. All denominations now insist upon some ministerial ordination for their minis- ters.

What is this but a recognition of the ancient doctrine of Apostolic Succession ? There is in fact no difference between us and them in doc- trine, but only in practice. Our Church has main- tained this succession for eighteen hundred years, while the various Protestant religious organiza- tions around us have but practised it for three hundred years or less ; our Church has carried back the chain to the Apostles of the Lord ; other bodies to their first founders and organizers, lay-

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men or clergymen, as is expressed in the coup- let:

" Wesley his hand on Coke hath laid. But who laid hands on him ? "

Compare with this the example and teaching of

Christ :

" His twelve Apostles first He made His ministers of grace, And they their hands on others laid To fill in turn their place."

Happily the Catholic Church in England, in the sixteenth century, believed all this and preached all this. Now the first to be conse- crated under Elizabeth was Matthew Parker, who became Archbishop of Canterbury under such circumstances that one would have sup- posed his formal and canonical consecration could never have been questioned.

And yet this reasonable expectation was doomed to disappointment. Some forty years after that consecration, a story w^as circulated to the effect that he had never been duly conse- crated. This story is known commonly as " The Nag's Head Fable," and as it has been exten- sively circulated in this country by members of the Roman Church, a Cardinal-Archbishop of

THE nag's head FABLE 201

that Church having even sought in print to de- fend the fable, it seems necessary to give some full and accurate information about it — and the more, as our great Maryland lawyer and canonist, Hugh Davy Evans, found it advisable in his time not only to write a book to shov\^ its mani- fold absurdities, but at a subsequent period to very much enlarge the same.

We have Churchmen among us who dearly love their Church and who would even if need be die for her. But when these Churchmen are asked, not to die for their Church, but intelligent- ly to defend her, then they hasten to occupy the seat of the unlearned and their mouths are sealed in silence. '' Oh, your Church," says some candid Romanist, " is a very good one in its way, but after all it is a very new affair in comparison of ours ; we don't want to hurt your feelings, but really, to be frank, we don't regard yours as a Church at all. Don't you remember the Nag's Head inci- dent ? " Well, it so happens that they don't know anything about the said fable, but they gather from the triumphant tone in which reference is made that the mention of it is so convincing to their minds that practically there is nothing more to be said. Our friends of stanch devotion but of slen-

202 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

der knowledge feel that they have the worst of the argument, and they are grieved, not for them- selves, but for the Church. They are like a man who feels that he is not as healthy as he used to be. He would like to consult Doctor so and so, but he is afraid that the doctor will pronounce him in a bad way. Or like a man whose ac- counts are not satisfactory, he feels that some- thing is wrong, and he would like to have everj^- thing examined and set in order, but he dreads to look into the matter, and so he shuns the exam- ination. Even so our Churchman fears he will find a break somewhere cutting him off from the glorious and Apostolic past, and he is afraid.

What, then, is this terrible " Nag's Head Fable"? Briefly it is this: In 1604, forty-four years after Parker's consecration, an exiled Ro- man priest named Holywood, in a book pub- lished in Latin at Antwerp, started the story which bears this title. He pretended that the consecration of Archbishop Parker was an ir- regular ceremony performed at '' The Nag's Head Tavern," which a Chaplain of Bishop Bonner's witnessed by peeping through a key- hole in the door.

We are invited to consider this marvellous

THE nag's head FABLE 203

Story as of necessity discrediting Anglican or- ders. Why, if it were true, what difference would it make in our Anglican position ? A tavern is not a fit place certainly for such a re- ligious ceremony as the consecration of a Bishop. But there is no place on this earth where a con- secration rightly performed is not valid and binding. On the mountain-top or in the recess- es of the valley, on a glistening iceberg or a frail raft in mid-ocean, the great commission of the Episcopate may be laid on a man. Where did St. Paul consecrate Timothy? Where Ti- tus ? Surely such an argument as this is not to be taken seriously. And yet it is this argu- ment that a Cardinal- Archbishop brings forward against the validity of Anglican orders.

But the story is manifestly false. To begin with, Elizabeth was no Puritan. She was both Anglican and Catholic, and, for her own sake, she would naturally take care that all should be rightly done at Parker's consecration. It was politically a matter of life and death to her that lovers of the old state of affairs should be satis- fied. We must not suppose that the nation was anything but Catholic at heart. Churchmen might be willing to surrender many things, but

204 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

here at all events there must be no surrender. The queen knew this, and, whatever her own feel- ings and desires were, she would have been utterly powerless to get any diocese in England to acknowledge as its Archbishop anyone who had been appointed as the lay officers of State were appointed or as are elected the moderators of the Presbyterian Synod. But that there should be no break, that all should be done in essentials as had ever been done, was plainly the queen's own will and desire.

All eyes were upon the queen. There must be no mistake. Doubtless it was to this very jeal- ousy for the past methods in essentials that we owe the unusually careful notes and entries of various kinds which we have of these events. Every step, from the selection of Parker to his consecration, is minutely and accurately de- scribed. In the Lambeth Register there is given at length (we quote the very words of the Reg- ister) "The order of the Rites and ceremonies ob- served in the Consecration of the most Rev. Lord, Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the chapel within his Manor of Lambeth, on Suu' day, the 17th day of December in the year of our Lord one thousand five hundred and fifty nine."

THE NAG'S HEAD FABLE 205

There we read that into the beautifully adorned chapel entered early in the morning the Arch- bishop-elect, vested in scarlet cassock and hood, preceded by four torches and accompanied by the four Bishops who were to serve at his consecra- tion, viz. : William Barlow, Bishop of Bath and Wells ; John Scory, Bishop of Chichester ; Miles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, and John Hodgkins, Bishop Suffragan of Bedford. Of these four Bish- ops, two had been consecrated according to the Latin form of the old English ordinal in the days of Henry VIII., and two according to the English form of the ordinal during the reign of Edward VI. Will it be believed that the whole entry in the Register is pretended by Roman writers to be a forgery, on the sole ground that it is so very minute and circumstantial ? According to this theory, then, vagueness, indefiniteness, and inexactness are marks of truth. A strange conclu- sion certainly. " It bears," says a writer of that Church named John Williams, " intrinsic evidence of being concocted for a purpose. The scribe thought to himself people will say, ' Oh it must be true, it is so circumstantial.* But the thing is overdone — the dish is over-spiced." From mere partisan splenetic writing of this kind it is

206 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

refreshing to turn to the pages of the eminent Roman Catholic historian Dr. Lingard, and read concerning this very entry in the Lambeth Reg- ister these words : '' One objection was that the official Register containing a full account of the consecration was a forgery. But there was noth- ing to countenance such a supposition. The most experienced eye could not discover in the entry itself, or the form of the characters or the color of the ink, the slightest vestige of imposture. And if external confirmation were wanting there was the Archbishop's Diary, and the Zurich let- ters in which we find Sampson informing Peter Martyn of the consecration."

In truth this thing was not done in a corner. Long since has ever}^ Roman Catholic of note given up the absurd theory of forgery. Even op- ponents novv^ declare that the entry in the Register is in the same hand as the entries of Cranmer and Pole, and that it is attested by the same notaries pubKc as attested Pole's own record. Lingard speaks of any denial of this as folly. But there is a greater name still, a name which stands for the highest attainments in theological scholar- ship that this nineteenth century has seen. Dr. Von Dollinger, himself a Roman till driven out by

THE NAGS HEAD FABLE 20/

the Papal dogma of infallibility, at the Conference in Bonn in 1875, used these words: "The fact that Parker was consecrated by four rightly con- secrated Bishops Avith imposition of hands and the necessary words is so well attested that if one chooses to doubt this fact one could with the same right doubt one hundred thousand facts. The orders of the Romanist Church could be doubted with more appearance of reason."

What sad mistakes men make in not keeping up with the times. The information they possess is as valuable as a last year's almanac. Their want of knowledge is really inexcusable in these days. In colonial days a curious result of thus being behind the times was not infrequent. It was then, as it is now, the custom throughout the colonies of Britain to pray for the sovereign and the royal family, but sometimes it happened that news of the sovereign's death did not reach the distant colony till months after the event. In the meantime prayers were offered for the dead but none for the living ruler of the people. The min- ister was not up to the times, that was all. And those who would try to discredit Parker's conse- cration are behind the times, be they Cardinals, Archbishops, or laymen. They will need to read,

208 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

mark, learn, and inwardly digest not what we say, but what the men of their own Church say concerning the unimpeachable character of Par- ker's consecration.

Now what are we asked to accept as the alter- native, if for a moment we assume the truth of their objection ? The Nag's Head Fable.

We remember some years ago the Rector of a parish in Newfoundland describing a controversy which he had had in a very pleasant way with the Roman priest of Ferryland (the place where the first Lord Baltimore settled for awhile in his province of Avalon, before he and his family came down to Virginia). The Roman Catholic priest at Ferryland had been arguing against the validity of Anglican orders, but without much success, until finally he brought up his heaviest gun and discharged that at the outworks of the enemy. " What," said he, with the air of a man who is about to convince with an overwhelming argument, '' what about the Nag's Head Fable ? You can't answer that. You can't do away with the force of the argument from that." " I am right glad," replied the Rector, " to hear 3^ou call it a fable. I have always regarded it as such, but I am pleased to hear that you also so regard it."

THE nag's head FABLE 209

The Roman had not a word to say ; out of his own mouth he had been convicted. The Nag's Head Fable is a fable and nothing more. For a time it served its purpose and helped on the Roman cause, as the false decretals did in a great- er and earlier controversy, but, except by our Roman friends here who are behind the times and still quote it with approval, we rarely hear it mentioned.

Under the Atlantic Ocean there lies that won- derful production of enterprise and science, stretching over two thousand miles through the deep sea, the telegraph cable. Let that cable be all sound and entire except in one particular spot and the conducting power is lost. Thus it is with the Episcopate. If one link be missing, the conducting power of the Episcopacy is lost at that particular spot. But in all the Anglican chain they cannot find one missing link, all the links are perfect. When Matthew Parker was consecrated, a new star was visibly placed in the ecclesiastical firmament. He became Archbish- op of Canterbury with the hopes of a Church and nation resting upon him. How glorious a line of predecessors had gone before him in the

chair of Augustine ! But among the sainted i4

210 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Archbishops, the Anselms and Thomases and Ed- munds, there is none worthy of greater honor than the unsainted Archbishop Parker. Great and glorious were his services to the cause of truth, and if we may speak, as we surely may, of Elizabeth as a providential queen, we may not less certainly proclaim Matthew Parker as a provi- dential Archbishop at the time when the whole Anglican Episcopate was narrowed down as it were to the slender dimensions of an isthmus be- tween two broad and spreading continents.

There is that in the English Church organi- zation which gives us good ground to hope that to her will be granted at the last the blessing of the peacemakers. Let us hope so, praying and working meanwhile ; and for this purpose no prayer could be so fitting as the prayer of the man of blameless life and great learning, Mat- thew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury : ** The Lord defend His Church and govern it with His Holy Spirit, and bless the same with all pros- perous felicity. Amen."

XIII.

SHAKESPEARE A SON OF THE REFOR MATION

XIII.

SHAKESPEARE A SON OF THE REFOR- MATION

" What is man, that thou art mindful of him : and the son of man, that thou visitest him ? Thou madest him lower than the angels : to crown him with glory and worship." — Psalms viii. 4-5.

"Students of biography," observed Professor Drummond in his chapter on environment, " will observe that in all well-written lives attention is concentrated for the first few chapters upon two points. We are introduced first to the family to which the subject of the memoir belongs, and then we are invited to consider more external in- fluences. Schools and schoolmasters, neighbors, home, pecuniary circumstances, scenery, and by and by the religious and political atmosphere of the time. And these two forces," he tells us, *' known as heredity and environment are the master influences of the organic world."

We all doubtless agree with the words of the

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distinguished author of " Natural Law in the Spiritual World," for we have seen proof of them again and again and we know them to be true. The Napoleon Bonapartes, the George Washing- tons, the Charles Spurgeons, even the Uncle Toms and the Uriah Heeps of our day are what heredity and environment have made them. Bishops, cardinals, judges, generals, merchants, lawyers, bakers, tailors, saloon-keepers, publi- cans and sinners, the saints and the elect, all sorts and conditions of men are oftentimes what they are because of their training and surround- ings. Place, for example, Spurgeon in Italy, let him be born and educated in the faith of the Italian Church, and his career as a Baptist preacher will be a sheer impossibility. But he might become, with his silvery voice and mar- vellous powers of organization, the Bishop of Rome himself and the inspirer of the policy of the Holy Roman Church.

What we are is, indeed, all very much a matter ot what our fathers were, and what our own sur- roundings are or have been. When, therefore, the Psalmist asks : What is man, that God is mindful of him? and the son of man, that He visits him? may we not ourselves answer and

SHAKESPEARE A SON OF THE REFORMATION 215

say : '' Man is a creature of circumstances, the child of the past, the sport of the present, and the plaything of powers which seem to rob him of all individuality and of all independence, and make him, even as the Psalmist himself tells us, a thing of naught, whose time passeth away as a shadow."

And yet another answer may be given, an an- swer which we owe to Shakespeare, first of poets and greatest son of the Anglo-Saxon race. To him man is a piece of wonderful workmanship — " We are such stuff as dreams are made of." Hu- manity in his sight was not far from Divinity. As he penetrated deeper and deeper into the re- cesses of the soul, he saw how great and wonder- ful a being man is. He cries out in " Hamlet: " " How noble he is in reason, how infinite in facul- ty ; in form and moving how express and admi- rable ; in action how like an angel ; in appearance how like a god, the beauty of the world." The voice is Hamlet's, but the words are the words of Shakespeare.

We grant all this too. We rejoice in it. But we still maintain that man is largely formed by the forces that surround him, and even Shake- speare himself is no exception to the rule. Mani-

2l6 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

festly was he influenced by his environment. We speak, indeed, of that now, understanding by the term not the whole but only a part of the idea, not thinking of schools or school companions, nor yet of his home or the scenery of the Warwick- shire lanes, but only of the religious and political atmosphere of the time. He was the product of the sixteenth century, the outcome of the search- ing after truth which marked his age, the offspring of the spirit of religious liberty, the most gifted son of the Anglican Reformation, born of its spirit and nurtured under its influences.

Had Shakespeare lived one century earlier or one century later, he could not have been what he was. There were forces at work in his day which at an earlier period had not come into ex- istence, and at a later had spent themselves, and those forces gave us Shakespeare as we know him. And what a glorious gift he was ! He was of the Elizabethan age and of that only. He stood at the meeting-point of two great epochs in our history. Just when the usurped domin- ion of the Papal court over the national Church was waning forever in England, and before that Church had been called to see the unlovely flower of Puritanism blossoming in her vineyard, Shake-

SHAKESPEARE A SON OF THE REFORMATION 21/

speare was sent to catch the inspiration of the mo- ment and in immortal verse give proof that the doctrines and practice of the Anglican Church are the happy mean between the two extremes into which religious men have fallen.

And he does this in that spirit of toleration and kindly sympathy and consideration for the views of others with which we are familiar as a trait of Anglican Churchmen. He illustrated, indeed, in his own life the avoidance of extremes. He was no violent partisan, though he lived in troublous times. He was no scorner of other men's creeds. He saw good everywhere and in everything. He shared that larger hope

" That nothing walks with aimless feet, That not one life shall be destroy 'd Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete."

Of this no better proof can there be than that some even regard him as a favorer of Papal supremacy, while others again conceive of him as caring for none of those things, claiming that he was wholly indifferent to the distinctions of religious belief. It is not so. It is not so. He knew whom he had believed, but life was too full of mystery for

2l8 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

him to condemn others when they had fallen with the weight of cares

" Upon the world's great altar-stairs

That slope through darkness up to God."

Shakespeare, we say, lived in troublous times. Yet the country was united as one man. His countrymen were patriots first, whatever they miofht be afterwards. Elizabeth was the centre of national aspirations and of national hopes. One of the first sights to greet him in the streets of London, when he came to live in the great me- tropolis, was the marching of men to Tilbury Docks to join the fleets against the Spaniard. There was need of patriotism. There was need that men move as a unit. As Innocent III. in the reign of King John had asserted his right to de- pose the English sovereign, and release English- men from the bond of allegiance, so another Pope — Sixtus V". — was now claiming that power and right. History was repeating itself. The Church and nation had come to the verge of an- other period, when a voice should declare again those words that should never die : " The Eng- lish Church shall be free and hold her rights en- tire and her liberties inviolate." For the Armada

SHAKESPEARE A SON OF THE REFORMATION 219

was a religious crusade. It was the army of a Church going to make war upon another Church, forgetful of Christ's warning : " They that take the sword shall perish with the sword " : " If my king- dom were of this world, then would my servants fight: but now is my kingdom not from hence."

In these times of doubt and trouble, of anxiety and perplexity, Shakespeare sends forth his con- tribution to the cause of England's Church. He sounds the trumpet of battle, and he gives no un- certain sound. He comes as a second Stephen Langton, and what can he do better than send men back in thought to that earlier time when their liberty — the liberty wherewith Christ had made them free — was in jeopardy ? In his play of '' King John " we hear the voice of a true son of the national Church. In that play he depicts the ambition, the faithlessness, the sophistr}^ of the Court of Rome. When Philip of France, hearing John's reply to Pandulph, exclaims, '' Brother of England, you blaspheme in this : " hear his reply,

*' Though you and all the kings of Christendom Are led so grossly by this meddling priest, Dreading the curse that money may buy out, And by the merit of vile gold, dross, dust. Purchase corrupted pardon of a man

220 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Who in that sale sells pardon from himself, Though you and all the rest so grossly led This juggling witchcraft with revenue cherish, Yet I, alone, alone do me oppose Against the Pope, and count his friends my foes."

Yet even here, in this very place, we mark his kindly spirit : for in his *' King John " Shakespeare had followed an old play in two parts, at the end of which there was a ribald scene in which the licentiousness of the monks was exposed to ridi- cule. But this scene he wholly omits. If we re- member that this play was written when excite- ment was still high, and at a time when most if not all of the monasteries had been destroyed on the very ground — a Roman Cardinal being the judge — that the salt had lost its savor and was therefore good for nothing but to be cast out and trodden under foot of men, his silence becomes most noteworthy. We may be sure that to hold up to hatred, ridicule, and contempt as untrue to their vows the members of religious orders, would have been highly popular. But there is a noble absence of anything of this kind. Shakespeare is never guilty of playing to the gallery. For a passing popularity, for which some men seem will- ing to barter their souls, he never swerves a hair's-

SHAKESPEARE A SON OF THE REFORMATION 221

breadth from the path he had marked out as right. It is in his treatment of religion and religious per- sons that Shakespeare is seen to be so immeasu- rably superior to all others. In this respect what a charm separates him from our greatest writers since his day ! We read Dickens or Thackeray, Walter Scott or George Eliot, and there is the same fault in all, an ungenerous treatment if not of religion at least of those who represent it. Think of such whom you find in their pages, and you can barely call to mind one whom you would wish to have as a pastor. The Chadbands of Dickens or the Charles Honeymans of Thacke- ray, what contemptible creatures they are ! Even when no evil thing is said of them they are spoken of slightingly, as if they were the legiti- mate targets for the arrows of ridicule and amuse- ment:

" Hear how he clears the point o' faith Wi' rattlin' an' thumpin' ! Now meekly cahn, now wild in wrath, He's stampin' an' he's jumpin' ! "

There is nothing of this in Shakespeare. He has no shafts of ridicule for those who, however un- worthily, represented religion. Over their sins

222 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

and failings he throws the veil of that divine charity which both hopeth all things and be- lieveth all things. The world had, indeed, in- volved them all in one common ruin. Their day was past and gone. They had fallen into con- demnation. But nobly does the great poet take his stand. He will not throw water on the drowned rat. He will not join in the hue and cry. To condemn the righteous with the wicked is not in his nature, and it finds no expression in his life. For the sake of their profession he will speak generously of all, remembering that to their own Master they must stand or fall. It is thus he ever speaks : '' Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all."

Again, Shakespeare does not, like Byron, pol- lute the altar of genius with strange fire. He is ever practically saying : " He that will love life, and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile : Let him eschew evil, and do good ; let him seek peace, and ensue it." Tell me not that Shake- speare did not love innocency, had not the loftiest of standards. Is there a play that he has written that makes man the worse for reading it? Is there a character he has painted from which we

SHAKESPEARE A SON OF THE REFORMATION 223

draw an inspiration to do evil ? He has shown men the danger, as he only can, of giving way to temptation and strengthening themselves in wickedness. What a reality to him was the devil, and how has he portrayed his crafts and assaults, his wiles, devices and disguises, for the warning of the unwary and unstable :

" Mark you this, Bassanio, the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."

Shakespeare preached from no church pulpit. In the ordinary sense of the word he never preached a sermon in his life, yet he did preach. The stage of the Globe Theatre was his pulpit, and the audience that gathered before him his congregation. But what congregations has he had since ! Was there ever a preacher more uni- versally heard or read ? What tens of millions has he taught that what a man soweth, that shall he also reap ! See how he makes this terrible truth so plain that none can be ignorant of it. What a weird and awful scene is that when, on the eve of the battle of Bosworth Hill, one after another of the spirits of those whom he had slain comes to Richard III. and bids him despair and die. Prince Edward, King Henry, Clarence,

224 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

his own Queen Anne, and last of all Bucking* ham,

" The first that helped him to the crown, The last to feel his tyranny."

And then see in the tent of Richmond, his oppo^ nent, one who can say :

" For remember this, God and our good cause fight upon our side, The prayers of holy saints and wronged souls. Like high-reared bulwarks, stand before our face."

But all the while the guilty king is in agony of fear as he hears that fearful word from each : " Despair and die ! "

So it was with the dying Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester and a Roman Cardinal, who had mur- dered Gloster. As his own death drew near, he could think of nothing else but the murder he had done, muttering, incoherently : " Oh, torture me no more ! I will confess." Well might the good king, standing by such a death-bed, pray :

*' O thou Eternal Mover of the heavens, Look with a gentle eye upon this wretch, Oh, beat away the busy meddling fiend That lays strong siege unto this wretched one. And from his bosom purge this black despair."

SHAKESPEARE A SON OF THE REFORMATION 225

But in nothing is Shakespeare more truly a son of the Reformation than in his love of the Script- ures and his constant use of them in daily life. The Reformation brought out of its obscurity the word of God, and restored it to its rightful place of honor. Men now began to ask, " What saith the Lord ? " and, like the noble Bereans, they searched the Scriptures daily for the Lord's answer.

But what a diligent student of that new learn- ing was Shakespeare ! No writer in these days of multiplied Bibles has ever shown a greater knowledge. He seemed to know it all from Gen- esis to Revelation. There are said to be no less than five hundred and fifty biblical quotations, al- lusions, references, and sentiments in his works, ** Hamlet " alone contains about eighty, " Richard HL" nearly fifty, and '' Henry V." and ''Richard n." about forty each. He quotes from fifty-four of the books of the Bible, and not one of his thirty- seven plays is without a scriptural reference. Here it is that he is most clearly seen to be imbued with the spirit of our Church ; that spirit which finds expression in her declaration that '' Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary for salvation ; so that whatsoever is not read there- in, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required 15

226 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith." It is in this wide knowledge of Scripture that we find on the one hand, the secret of Shakespeare's freedom from all medisevai error and superstitions ; and on the other, his clear grasp of the great central truths of Christianity. How beautifully has he set forth one of these great truths — the scheme of our redemption :

" Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once, And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy."

Truly this man of marvellous powers, with his deep insight into scriptural truth, his mighty charity, his zeal for the right, was made a little lower than the angels, and has been crowned with glory and worship. Of him we say, as he spake in " Julius Cassar : "

*' His life was gentle : and the elements So mixed in him, that nature might stand up And say to all the world. This was a man."

How the true gospel spirit shines out in that last supreme moment just before his death, when first of all and before all, dictating his last will and testament, he said that he commended his

SHAKESPEARE A SON OF THE REFORMATION 22/

soul to God his Creator, and thus (these are his exact words) " hoping and assuredly believing through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting." " We called," said Carlyle, '' Dante the melodious priest of Middle- Age Catholicism."

We thank God that in him we behold one of whom this may be truly said. But the melodi- ous priest of a true Catholicism without supersti- tion, intolerance or fanatical fierceness, is William Shakespeare — son of the Anglican Reformation in the sixteenth century.

XIV. PURITANISM

XIV. PURITANISM

" The kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind." — St. Matthew xiii. 47.

Off the western coast of southern Italy, be- tween the mainland and the island of Sicily, lie Scylla and Charybdis, the rock and the whirlpool of ancient myth and legend. There the mariners of the Old World most dreaded the perils of the deep. There they most fervently prayed their gods for protection against the double danger of being wrecked upon the one, whilst trying to avoid the other. Hence the proverb : '' Between Scylla and Charybdis."

Now in the sixteenth century, the national Church of England was as a ship making the dan- gerous passage between Romanism and Puritan- ism. The good ship was sailing between the rag- ing waves of foreign interference on the one hand, and the bare rocks of unhistorical innovations on

232 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

the other. Not entirely unscathed, however, did she pass by the Roman whirlpool. Her pilot, Thomas Cranmer, was overwhelmed by its fury and deprived of his life ; a hostile pilot seized her wheel by force and put many of her faithful sail- ors to death. In a short while, however, her crew rallied, and under a pilot of her own choosing — the skilful Archbishop, Matthew Parker — she passed out into the calmer waters beyond, bearing high upon her mainmast a banner inscribed with the words : " No Italian priest shall tithe or toll in these our dominions."

It is now for us to see how she escaped the cragged rock of Puritanism. Never since apos- tolic men had preached the Gospel in Britain, had the Church known more perilous times ; barely was she saved from complete destruction. The spirit of evil had taken possession of her foes, and made them relentless and cruel. Against her they stood up and raged together ; against her they imagined a vain thing, and for a time it seemed as if their cause would triumph. Yet she was able to exclaim in her hour of uttermost need : '' Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy, for when I fall I shall rise again." The night was dark and stormy and full of danger, but at last

PURITANISM 233

she sailed by the perilous rock and found herself again in calmer waters, yet

" With torn sails, provisions short, And only not a wreck."

Coming back from the region of metaphor to that of plain fact, we may say that ere the nation- al Church had had time to congratulate herself upon her safe deliverance from the power of the Papacy, ere the Te Deums had ceased to roll through the choirs of her cathedrals, or the fires of rejoicings had died down on the tops of the hills, this new danger was seen close at hand. It is ever a tendency of the human mind to go from one extreme to the other; and so men rushed from mediasvalism, from the acceptance of gross superstitions, and from an uncatholic method of church government, to the wildest rejection of apostolic truth and order. Inspired by a bitter remembrance of wrong done, they hated with a blind unreasoning hatred everything which seemed to savor of Rome's teaching. Sponsors and the sign of the cross in baptism, music and organs, the ring in the marriage service, and kneeling at the reception of the blessed Sacra- ment— all were anathem.atized. Even the inno-

234 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

cent and comely surplice was bitterly spoken against as the idolatrous gear of the Papists, and as a vestment of Baal.

As the ball which the school-boy rolls along over the freshly fallen snow silently gathers in size and weight, until it becomes too large to be controlled any longer, so it was with the strange misapprehensions of Puritanism. It is probable that the earlier Puritans would have stood aghast at the excesses of the later ; but it was they who had evoked the Frankenstein. Beginning with objections against small matters of ritual and cer- emony, the Puritans went on until they had abol- ished both Prayer Book and Episcopacy ; had wrought havoc in the desecrated churches of their ancestors ; had persecuted the faithful with the sword ; had brought the Archbishop of Canter- bury to the scaffold ; had dismembered the king- dom and beheaded the king ; had overthrown both the Constitution and the national Church, and had desecrated the graves* of those long since dead. Yet they termed themselves the congregation of the Lord. It could not be otherwise. An unhol}^ Puritan was a contradiction in terms. The Puri- tan was already a member of the aristocracy of heaven. " He walked with God " like Enoch.

PURITANISM 235

Puritanism had no sinners, no chaff amongst its

wheat; this was the difference between Puritans

and other men.

" All piety consists therein In them, in other men all sin."

This unhappy result was not due to the excesses of a few erring individuals, but to the logical working out of the system ; the principles of the true Puritan made him necessarily intolerant; he was right and all other men were wrong, and it was his solemn duty to bring them to the truth. His method has well been described in '' Hudi-

bras : "

" For he was of that stubborn crew Of errant saints whom all men grant To be the true Church militant : Such as do build their faith upon The holy text of pike and gun, Decide all controversy by Infallible artillery : And prove their doctrine orthodox By apostolic blows and knocks ; Call fire and sword and desolation A godly thorough Reformation."

This is no parody : the founders of Puritanism and its best men gloried in the principle here laid down. They made the persecution of others a

236 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

part of their creed; Mohammed offered the alter^ native of the Koran or the sword. They offered a similar choice. " I deny," wrote Cartwright (whom Neale, the Puritan historian, calls the '' Father of the Puritans "), " that upon reforma- tion there ought to follow any pardon of death. Heretics ought to be put to death now." It must be admitted they were consistent in their after- dealings with so-called heretics, and in no way de- parted from the teaching of their chief apostles. Ah, when will men be wise? When will they learn from the mistakes of the past ? When will they have sanctified common-sense, and be true to the teaching of the Scriptures which they acknowl- edge as their guide ? When, indeed, did persecu- tion help any cause ? The Romanist tried it and failed. " Look to the Netherlands," exclaims Pole to Gardiner in the midst of Mary's persecution :

" Look to the Netherlands, wherein have been Such holocausts of heresy — to what end ? For yet the faith is not established there. Garditier. The end's not come.

Pole. No, nor this way will come,

Seeing there lie two ways to every end — A better and a worse — the worse is here To persecute, because to persecute Makes a faith more hated."

PURITANISM 237

Now what is this Puritanism which makes such lofty claims, and enshrines intolerance as an arti- cle of its creed ? We first meet with it by name in 1564, but the thing itself is as old as religion. The Pharisees were the earlier Puritans ; they thanked God they were not as other men were. The Puritans were ever doing the same. Crom- well's Puritan soldiers were the saints who looked upon themselves as God's chosen instruments for the punishment of evil-doers, and for the praise of them that do well. They were not sinners as other men. They were children of the light : other men dwelt in darkness. The Church, in their view, was a congregation of faithful men into which nothing entered that defiled or worked abomination or made a lie ; their ideal was lofty, but it was. not scriptural. Christ spoke of a very different Church. His Church was " like unto a net, that was cast into the sea, and gathered of every kind." '' Puritanism," says Carlyle, '' is the faith that became Scotland's, New England's, Oliver Cromwell's," and he tells us that historv will have something to say about this for some time to come. Probably it will, but we trust that its record in the future will be more lovely than it has been in the past, or history may shed tears

238 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

and weep because of it, and wish her task were given to another. Never had a system of relig- ion better opportunity to establish itself in men's hearts. In Old England and in New Eng- land it has been tried in a field where it had no rival ; in both countries it once for a time held the sceptre of absolute dominion. What, then, may we ask, have been the fruits of Puritanism ? It is after all by the fruits that we must judge of any religious system. " Wherefore," saith Christ, ** by their fruits ye shall know them."

All through the reign of Elizabeth the Puritans were growing in numbers, in power, and in influ- ence, within the national Church, but they were not of her. Their model was Geneva, and their pa- tron saint was John Calvin. Their ambition was to see the time when no child would be signed in baptism with the sign of the cross, and no min- ister ever wear a surplice ; when every memory of the past would be forgotten, every sign of that past obliterated, and every Catholic usage abolished ; when, in fact, the old Church should be no more and the Puritans alone be masters in the land.

Their ambition was for a time gratified. They saw the national Church overthrown, its minis-

PURITANISM 239

ters proscribed, and themselves masters of both Church and State. And one of the first acts by which they heralded their accession to power was to charge the Archbishop of Canterbury with treason, and send him a prisoner to the Tower. On the evening of the day he was arrested he wrote these words in his diary : " I stayed at Lam- beth till the evening to avoid the gaze of the peo- ple. I went to evening prayers in my chapel. The Psalms of the day and chapter fifty of Isaiah gave me great comfort. God make me worthy of it and fit to receive it. As I went to my barge hundreds of my poor neighbors stood there and prayed for my safety and return to my house, for which I bless God and them."

Four years later he was brought to trial, when even his enemies acknowledged that they could find no just occasion against him to put him to death ; yet he must not live —

" Prejudged by foes determined not to spare, An old weak man for vengeance thrown aside."

Happily he had no ground, like Wolsey, to re- proach himself with neglect of duty ; for with single-mindedness and unity of purpose he had served his God well ; he was the one man of that

240 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

day who saw clearly the true Catholic position of our Church.

On Tower Hill, in the seventy-third year of his age, in 1645, he was beheaded — the second Arch- bishop of Canterbury to be unjustly executed as a common felon in the course of one century. Our debt to him is enormous. We cannot all see it now, but in the strong words of Professor Mozley : " he had saved the English Church." " The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep."

But the end had not been reached. The men who had struck down an Archbishop sought a king next — a king whose principles were the same as those of the martyred archbishop. The fore- gone conclusion was soon reached ; amid popular excitement, with the air resounding with cries of ''Justice, justice!" Charles the First passed to his doom, and the whole kingdom was convulsed for twelve years.

And then began the reign of the saints. To this very day the cathedrals and parish churches in England bear silent witness to the character of that rule, for those churches were treated as if they had been temples of Baal ; the Puritans broke down all the carved work thereof with axes

PURITANISM 241

and hammers and defiled the dwelling-place of God's name even unto the ground. Over eight thousand clergymen, most of them with Avives and children, were deprived of their means of support and many died of want. The use of the Prayer Book in public or private was rigorous- ly forbidden, and it was made a crime for even a child to read by the bedside of a sick parent one of those beautiful collects which the whole world now justly admires. Even Macaulay, who tells us this, seems not to have wholly loved the Puritans. " They objected to bull-baiting," he says, " but it was not so much for the pain it gave the bulls as for the pleasure it gave the specta- tors." Do you v/onder that the very name of Puritan is now looked for in vain among our sects and denominations ? Who are the Puri- tans to-day ? In Elizabeth's day they were Pres- byterians ; in Cromwell's day they were Indepen- dents. But who are they now? We hear of no Puritan Church among all the churches with which we are afflicted. Is it because its record has not been one of unstained beauty and love- liness ?

But Puritanism crossed the Atlantic and plant- ed itself on our New England coast, in search, we 16

242 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

are told, of religious liberty. It has been beauti- fully sung

" Ay, call it holy ground, The soil where first they trod ; They have left unstained what there they found, Freedom to worship God : "

But this is the dreaming of poetry.

In the Puritan colony one knew exactly his duty and what he could not do. He might not run or even walk on the Sabbath day, except rev- erently to the meeting. Mothers were advised not to kiss their children on the Sabbath day, and absence from public worship was followed by fine and whipping. The rulers of the congregations, true to their Jewish anti-types, were thus mak- ing the commandments of God of none effect by their traditions, laying heavy burdens upon men's shoulders, and teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.

Yet their intentions were good. They meant to have founded a perfect church, an earthly king- dom of the saints ; that they were disappointed was not their fault. They failed as all men fail who attempt the impossible, but meanwhile we cannot say that Puritanism, like charity, hopeth all things, endureth all things, believeth all things.

PURITANISM 243

Puritanism lives still ; and so long as human nature remains what it is, it will live. But as a system it has largely passed away.

The good that its leaders did for the political enfranchisement of men remains as their best and enduring monument.

There are still sects that put a ban on innocent pleasure and seem to be at war with God's sun- shine and all that makes glad the heart of man ; in them the solemn and gloomy Puritan temper seems still to live. But can we marvel that our people have become weary of a system of religion which makes them think of their Heavenly Fa- ther far otherwise than as their living Father and God?

Oh, how infinitely better, more natural, and more helpful is it to rejoice in the glorious broth- erhood of the Son of man, who came eating and drinking and entering into all our social joys and pleasures, than to live under the cold, chilling effect of Puritanism, as if we were wrapped round about with the grave-clothes of the dead ! Let us up and be doing, not thinking ourselves better than others, not thinking life itself a burden, but thinking of it as an inestimable blessing and a noble opportunity, in w^hich we can ourselves

244 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

make sure of an eternal inheritance and help on our neighbors in the same heavenly road we are ourselves travelling. Yet if the clergy of our Church are respected to-day for their office's sake, let them cheerfully acknowledge that for this they are largely indebted to Puritanism. It was indeed Puritanism's great gift to the Christian Church. There was, however, a second gift : the essence of Puritanism is the sense of individual responsibility. Individualism is just now at a discount. Men see so clearly the selfishness which readily attaches to it, that they are in peril of denying its immense truth and importance. To go about doing good is a realization of the brotherhood of man, and is a side of religion im- mensely popular just now. But, on the other hand, it must never be forgotten that man stands alone before God, alone ivith God, as though there were no other created being in the uni- verse ; and that in the development of each man's own character in accordance with the Divine laws, lies his primary and lasting obligation.

XV.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN OUR TIMES

XV.

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN OUR TIMES

" Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life." — Rev. ii. ii.

Our present subject may well kindle with en- thusiasm the spirit of every Churchman, for we speak of the work accomplished by our beloved Church during the last half century in England. Triumphing over obstacles that seemed well-nigh insurmountable, " the little one has become a thou- sand, and a small one a strong nation." So that of her we can truthfully sing: "Like a mighty army moves the Church of God."

But many and grievous were the dangers that had threatened her. There was a time when she could say with St. Paul that she was " in perils of robbers, in perils of her own countrymen, in per- ils in the city, in perils among false brethren." But those dangers were for the most part past. Others indeed of a different kind were coming

248 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

upon her, for she had become prosperous. She had succeeded in her mission. She had nobly won her cause. She had shown her Catholicity. She had made good her claims to a divine origin. '' Fortune and victory sat on her helm." And in consequence, the temptations which overthrew the prosperous church of Laodicea were assailing her. She too might say that she was increased in goods and had grown rich, rich in men's affec- tions and rich in good deeds. It remained, there- fore, for her to take warning from the fate of the Laodicean Church, lest she failed of the crown of life. Meanwhile the Apocalyptic com- mendation of the chief of the churches of Asia Minor could be bestowed upon her : " I know thy works, and thy labor, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil ; and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars : and hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name's sake hast labored, and hast not fainted."

But if we go back to the beginning of this cen- tury, there were no signs of this later growth and this later success. Then was the winter of her existence. Hard frozen were the arteries and veins of her spiritual life. She seemed wrapped

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN OUR TIMES 249

in the cold, icy, embrace of death. Many indeed were asking whether she would ever live again, whether life still really dwelt in that motionless body.

At the building of the second Temple of the Jewish Church, many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers who were ancient men wept with a loud voice when they remembered the glory of the former house, and contrasted it with what they then saw. And there must have been many in the English Church who were read}- to weep in like manner as they saw the condition of their spiritual Mother. That condition was truly appalling. The clergy as a class had no concep- tion of the dignity of their office. Some of them, Dean Church tells us in his story of the Oxford movement, 1833-45, were highly cultivated, be- nevolent men, whose lives were governed by an unfaltering piety. But there Avere members of the clerical order who were mere hunters after preferment. Probably on the whole the clergy were kind and helpful and sociable, like Gold- smith's Vicar of Wakefield, but full of zeal for the Church they were not. At the country dinners they would say some pleasant things about the Church, when they responded to the usual toast

250 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

of Church and State, and they would wish her all prosperity as they honored the toast in cham- pagne or madeira. But there the matter ended. The parish churches were fast falling into ruin. Dirt and damp reigned supreme. The sparrow had in very truth found her a house, and the swallow a nest where she could lay her young, even the altars of the Lord of Hosts, our King and our God, and through the broken windows they came and went unhindered. The grave- yards were little better than the village common. Services were held on Sundays, but they were poor, dull, lifeless affairs, and they harmonized well with the unkept graveyard and the neglected church. It was all of a piece — churches and ser- vices, clergy and congregations, they were all alike in this, that they seemed drawing to an end. The hand of death was upon them all.

When the century opened, it wanted apparent- ly but a few years and the National Church would be as extinct as the dodo, and the sons of that Church, like the mound-builders of Ohio, a vanished race. " The Church, as it now stands," wrote Arnold, one of the Oxford scholars in 1832, " no human power can save." " The Church," wrote Whately, afterwards Archbishop of Dub-

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN OUR TIMES 25 1

lin, '' has been for one hundred years without a government, and in such a stormy season it will not go on much longer without a rudder." " If I thought that we could stand ten or fifteen years as we are, I should have little fear," wrote Hugh James Rose.

And had it come to this ? Was the mother of mighty children, the spiritual mother of Hooker and Wilson, of Andrews, Jeremy Taylor, and Ken, of Laud and Parker, of Hugh of Lincoln and William of Wykeham, of St. Chad of Lich- field and St. Aidan of Lindisfarne, thus to die? She that alone of all the churches of the West had fought successfully her battle for indepen- dence against the full noontide power of the pa- pal court ; she that had cared not for the spir- itual thunders of Hildebrand or of Innocent III., and had successfully turned the carnal weap- ons of Sixtus V. against himself ; she that had refused at the bidding of the Puritans to fling away her Catholic heritage, and had suffered in consequence as she and hers had never done since the days of Diocletian — had she at last come to the end of her career, and was she now to lie down and die ? God forbid. " At evening time it shall be light." False friends and open

253 LEClURliS ON CHURCH HISTORY

foes had brought her very low. Persecuted she had been, but not forsaken ; cast down, but not destroyed. She had clung to her apostolic heri- tage. She had preserved her charter. She had kept the faith. She had been faithful unto death. Notwithstanding all she had suffered, she was sacramental still ; she was sacerdotal still ; she was Episcopal still ; she was Catholic still. And because she had been faithful, God, even our own God, had given her His blessing. It was when the Church was weakest there came from God that force known as the Oxford movement, or the Catholic revival. We say from God. Re- membering what that movement was, we dare not say less than this. '* The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth ; so is every one that is born of the Spirit." So was it with the Oxford movement. Good men had been looking out over the wide field of the English Church's past; and as they looked their spirits burned within them, for they felt that the old Church deserved a better fate than that which threatened her, and the Spirit bade them speak, and preach, and write, and teach that the old Church should not die but live and declare the works of the Lord. Dilapi-

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN OUR TIMES 253

dated buildings there might be, careless cler- gy, lukewarm congregations there might be, nay worse, unfaithful sons proposing that the Church should unite with the sects, on the sects' own ground ; but given ten or fifteen years the}^ would not despair of the old Church. It would yet bear fruit in its old age.

Those were the days when Churchmen had come to take their knowledge of their own his- tory, and to receive their doctrines and ceremo- nies of relisfion from their enemies. Because Puri- tans discarded the surplice and the Prayer Book, and spoke of them contemptuously as relics of Baalism, they were ready to discard both Praver Book and surplice. Because the lawyers and pol- iticians spoke of the Church as " the Establish- ment," and the Evangelicals- regarded it as an invisible and mystical body. Nonconformists as an aggregate of separate congregations, the Eras- tians as a Parliamentary creature of the Refor- mation, and the Roman Catholics as a legalized schism, they were ready to believe one and all of them, and to teach their children the same.

At such a time, then, the leaders of the Catholic revival appeared, and their teaching was unmis- takablv clear : the Church of Ensfland was tlie

254 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

one historic, uninterrupted Church, than which historically there could be no other locally in England. They pointed men to the creed which bade them sa}^ '' I believe in the Holy Catholic Church," and the movement began. And equal- ly plainly did they speak of what that Church taught. Calvinism was no scriptural doctrine, but only a monstrous perversion of it. Nor was the law of her ritual to be found enshrined in Puritan sentiment or in Anglican neglect, but in the Church's own Book of Common Prayer, at once her book of devotion and her code of laws.

Between such teaching as this and what the Churchmen of that day had previously heard, there was a vast interval. But it took time to be widely spread. At first the Bishop in his palace heard of it, and feared that it would lead the Church into trouble; or the country Rector talked it over with the squire and they both liked it not. But the day soon came when it was the one sub- ject of conversation all through the land, and for a time it seemed as if it had turned the world up- side down. We who are living in the midst of this movement, who have felt its power and have been carried forward by it, have perhaps not

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN OUR TIMES 255

been able to accurately gauge its full importance as a religious force. Yet there never has been a religious movement that exercised greater influ- ence. Some day it will undoubtedly come to be recognized as one of the most important of all forces which have dominated this nineteenth cen- tury.

Yet such teaching could not but produce ex- citement in an age ignorant of the history and doctrines of the Church of England. The storm did come, and it threatened to sweep all before it. Terms of reproach were flung broadcast, neither learning, nor piety, nor aught else being a pro- tection. A strange excess of exciteraent held pos- session of men and deprived them of their rea- son and judgment. The leaders of the movement that had for its object the welfare of the Church were called in turn Puseyites, children of the mist, veiled prophets, Oxford heretics, Jesuits in disguise, agents of Satan, snakes in the grass, and other such names. Some idea of the fren- zy which had seized men may be had from the treatment meted out to the beautiful " Christian Year" of John Keble. Before the "Christian Year " was published, the friends of Keble en- deavored to dissuade him from giving it to the

256 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

world, on the ground that he would be mistaken for a Methodist ! But it was published, and, won- derful to tell, it was publicly burned at Oxford as the work of one of these Jesuits in disguise, one of these snakes in the grass who polluted the sacred edifice of the Church and left their slime about her altars !

Whence all this antagonism, this furor and wild excitement? To what cause must Ave as- cribe it ? Ah, the Puritans* work had been well done. Puritanism, though it had passed away as a system, had left some of its evil fruits behind it. Unreasoning hatred of every Catholic usage was one of the marks of that peculiar system of relig- ion, and many who were not Puritans but Anglican Churchmen had come to share this feeling, and so the first movement in the direction of a more implicit obedience to the plain teaching of the Prayer Book was met on every side with loud cries of " No Popery ! " The nation took fright, nay, a panic set in ; riots ensued and blood- shed was threatened. Even the Bishops became alarmed, and they issued their episcopal fulmi- nations against the new teachings as subverting the principles of the Reformation. One of these, more emphatic in his language than his breth-

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN OUR TIMES 2$/

ren, declared the new teaching to be '' the master- piece of Satan."

And what do you suppose all this was about? Only about the decorations of churches and the establishment of choral services, preaching in a surplice and having credence tables, and teaching that the Anglican Church was the Holy Catholic Church for Anglicans. But law was on the side of the Oxford teachers as well as Catholic cus- tom. Those teachers were the foremost scholars of the day, and the names of more than one of them will live in history. John Keble — a schol- ar and a poet — was the real author, under God, of the movement, which had for leaders Hugh James Rose, Richard Hurrell Froude, and Ed- ward Bouverie Pusey. These were they who, through good report and ill, were leading the Church to know herself and her own power. Did men speak of doctrine, they pointed to the offices of the Prayer Book ; did they find fault with cer- emonies, they pointed to the ornaments rubric at the very front of the Service for Morning Pray- er:

" And here it is to be noted that such ornaments of the Church and of the ministers thereof at all times of their minis- tration shall be retained and be in use, as were in this Church 17

253 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

of England, by the authority of Parliament, in the second year of the reign of King Edward the Vlth."

Can any rule be plainer ? Is anyone in doubt as to what a clergyman should wear in the time of divine service, or how the church should ap- pear, let him get a copy of the first Prayer Book of Edward and he need doubt no longer. He may, indeed, prefer a Geneva gown, and he may look upon an altar cross as an abomination, but if he does his feelings will receive a shock when he finds that the Prayer Book speaks not of Ge- neva gowns, nor does its ban rest upon flowers and altar crosses.

Yet such was the panic that had seized the public mind, that men whose only crime was obe- dience to this plain law were thrown into prison. No greater mistake than this could have been

made,

" Since to persecute Makes a faith more hated."

We call to mind the case of one of these im- prisoned clergy. He had chosen to work in a poor and wretched part of the Diocese of Man- chester and had literally given himself for it. He had gone to the homes of the very poor and had

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN OUR TIMES 259

gathered them around him as none had ever done there before. He had filled his church. He had spoken to them of Jesus and bade them lead holy, self-denying lives. True, he was " a Ritual- ist," as the phrase goes, but by bright services he said that he had helped his poor people to realize something of the beauty of holiness and to love the Church of God. But he was " a snake in the grass," *' a Jesuit in disguise," and so they tore him from his poor people and thrust him into jail and kept him there till, bereft of his par- ish, and with failing health, they opened the doors and let him go.

My brethren, it was said of Christopher Wren, *' If you would seek his monument, look around." We may say the same of the Oxford movement, Look around. The day when clergy were im- prisoned for conscience' sake is past and gone. But their work remains. Is there a church in this whole American land of ours that has not felt the power of this movement and has not been influenced by it ? We doubt if there be one. The reign of slovenliness is over. Restored churches, reverent and large congregations, in- creased interest in religion, tell their own tale. In the days since the Oxford movement took its

260 LFXTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

rise, over $250,000,000 have been spent in England alone on the single item of church-building res- toration, whilst over four thousand new churches have been built to meet the spiritual demands of our age.

We shall never forget a procession of the fa- thers of the Church which we once saw in Canter- bury Cathedral. Many processions have we seen since, but none like unto that. It made a man proud of belonging to a Church that could ac- complish it. Choristers and clergy, Bishops and Archbishops, their number seemed endless as they wended their way through the long aisles of Can- terbury Cathedral, up to the altar steps, where good old Archbishop Tait, in a few touching, dig- nified words, welcomed them ; he who ** was as good a man as ever trod in shoe-leather, mighty good to the poor, with a face like a benediction." Then came the sermon. Our own Bishop Stev- ens, of Pennsylvania, now gone to rest, was the preacher. His text we well remember : '^ Who is this that Cometh up from the wilderness leaning on her beloved." From all lands and from all na- tions the Bishops had come. Daughter churches, sister churches were all represented there. It was an inspiring spectacle, and the preacher spoke as

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN OUR TIMES 261

one inspired by the splendor of the scene before him. The Church was the Bride of Christ and she it was who, in the persons of those Bishops, had come up from the wilderness leaning on her beloved !

A greater meeting has taken place since in the same city and under the same conditions. One hundred and forty-five Bishops came together to tell the story of their work, and to learn that God had blessed them all. Oh, mighty Spirit of God ! He had bidden the Oxford teachers, like the old Hebrew prophet, breathe upon the dry bones in the open valley ; they haxi done so, and there had arisen and stood upright upon their feet an ex- ceeding great army. The Church had indeed come up from the wilderness leaning on her Be- loved.

XVI.

AMERICA, THE HERITAGE OF OUR CHURCH

XVI.

AMERICA, THE HERITAGE OF OUR CHURCH

" Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it ; for I will give it unto thee." — Gen. xiii. 17.

In the early years of this century there gradu- ated from the University of North Carolina a young man, James Hervey Otey by name, whose lot it was not only to be the first Priest of the Church settled in Tennessee, but to be also its first Bishop. After years of laborious efforts to promote the cause of Christ and to provide for the religious education of the people among whom he lived, and from whom, in recognition of his apostolic labors, he received the title of •'The Good Bishop," he was gathered unto his fathers in peace, having the testimony of a good conscience and in the communion of the Cath- olic Church. But ere he died he gave this charge to those around him : " Place none other inscription upon my tombstone than this : ' The

265 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

first Bishop of the Catholic Church in Tennes» see.' "

I can well believe that the average Tennesseean, standing for the first time by the grave of the pioneer Bishop, would exclaim : " What is this that is on this stone : ' First Bishop of the Catholic Church?* Stranger, don't you think that the carver of this stone has made a mistake ? Bishop Otey didn't belong to those Catholics ; he was one of ourselves; a Bishop of our own, and a mighty fine man he was, too. He was a good, sound Protestant, every inch of him, and he stood six feet three inches in his stocking feet. And yet this stone says : ' First Bishop of the Catho- lic Church in Tennessee.' "

Brethren, there are sermons in stones as well as in trees and running brooks, and there is one here. Bishop Otey was a Catholic Bishop, and yet he was a Protestant, too. That very stone proclaims his Protestantism and his Catholicity. By it he being dead yet speaketh. It is his pro- test, graven in solid rock, against all forgetfulness of our apostolic heritage. At one and the same time and in one and the same words, it asserts and it protests. And this is the character of true Catholicit}", which is ever the assertion of

AMERICA, THE HERITAGE OF OUR CHURCH 26/

that which is true, the denial of that which is false.

The Anglican Church to-day, while protesting against all errors, proudly claims that her Bishops are of the Catholic Church ; and her claim is just. But, some may ask, how do we know that it is just? Let us try to answer that question now.

In this country there are two great bodies of Christians which call themselves '' Catholic," but of only one of them is the word commonly used. Yet of that one it is so frequently used nowa- days that the terms '' Catholic Priest," " Catholic Church," are popularly taken to refer only to that one bod}^ It is not easy to explain how this us- age became so general, since it is not due to any formal assertion of her exclusive right to its use on the part of that particular Church herself. In her official documents she makes no such claim. We do not meet with it in the decrees of her Councils : there we read, not of the *' Catholic Church," but of the '^ Holy Roman Church," or at best the " Holy Roman Catholic Church."

Nay more : it has not been the habit of that Church in past time, in the ordinary practice and daily business of life, thus to arrogate to her own

268 LECTURES ON CHURCH PHSTORY

exclusive use this word descriptive of the whole Church ; of this fact any one may be a witness. Just opposite Archbishop Corrigan's residence in New York there is a large building with plain black letters of iron over the entrance gateway telling you it is " The Roman Catholic Orphan- age," and their Archbishop in Baltimore is ex- pressly styled (in his incorporation) as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Baltimore. But the fact remains all the same that this Church alone is popularly spoken of as " Catholic."

The other body which calls itself Catholic is our own Church, commonly styled the " Protes- tant Episcopal," which name, however, is mere- ly the civil name of our local Church. In the Creeds we may see her true ecclesiastical name ' — she is the Hofy Catholic and Apostolic Church. We have, then, these two churches, both claim- ing to represent Catholic Christianity. Now the body which can alone make good this claim is that of which we are members. She is the Cath- olic Church, and locally there can be no other here. As applied to another, the term is a mis- nomer and is misleading. To our Church, and not to another, God has given this land, saying, as He said to Abraham at Bethel, " Arise, walk

AMERICA, THE HERITAGE OF OUR CHURCH 269

through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee."

First. Our Anglican Church is the Church of the Anglo-Saxon race, and as such is rightfully supreme here. God has clearly ordained that His Church shall spread on national lines. Now this country was long ago taken possession of by men of the Anglo-Saxon race. The place where they dwelt on the other side of the sea was too strait for them, and they came seeking a larger field for their energies and a roomier dwelling- place ; they acquired this land as men have ever acquired new territories, by their sword and by their bow. Theirs was the right of conquest. When King John in mediseval times in England challenged the rights of the barons to the lands they claimed, a hundred swords flew out of their scabbards and strong voices forthwith declared : " By these we won them, and by these we will maintain them ! " This country, too, was won, not by kings' grants, written on parchment, but by force of arms. Only thus did the red men re- treat before the pale face, and the birch-bark tent of the savage give place to the rude cabin of the settler. It is thus that

" Westward the course of empire takes its way."

270 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

Was it not right ? Was it not natural ? Was it not demanded that the Church of the settlers should accompany the settlers ? Our Church is, therefore, the Church of those who have been and still are the makers of America, and as such she is the true Catholic Church of this land.

But, secondly, she was the first here. She first laid the foundation of Christianity in this land. The first Christian service here held, the first white child baptized, the first Eucharist cele- brated, the first Bishop consecrated, were all by her. Let her children know this, if others will not. Let them rejoice in the light, even if others are still in darkness. She first carried Christ's banner in this Western world. Let us see how this came about.

In the sixteenth century it had become the fashion for the younger men

" To seek preferment out — Some to the wars, to try their fortune there, Some to discover islands far away."

John Cabot was one of these, who, under the auspices of King Henry VIL, on the Feast of St. John the Baptist, 1497, first discovered the North American Continent, and took possession in the name of England.

AMERICA, THE HERITAGE OF OUR CHURCH 271

But not till the Reformation had been accom- plished was England actually free to enter upon the pathway of discovery and settlement. Then, many an expedition was fitted out and sailed for the distant West. Diverse were the motives of the voyagers. Some thought most of gold ; some of the souls of men ; but whatever the mo- tive, every English ship carried its Chaplain. Church and State were so allied together then that side by side with a desire to extend com- merce went a desire to bring the heathen into the Christian fold. It would have been strange had it not been so, for at that time religion filled a large space in human life. That was the day of great controversies ; all felt religion's force. When, therefore, the Spaniard, in the wake of Columbus, was going to his possessions in the West Indies, carrying with him the gentle appli- ances of the Inquisition to quicken the Indians' appreciation of the beauties of the Christian faith, the Englishman was saiHng where Cabot had shown the way, from the rocky coasts of Labra- dor to the Gulf-washed shores of Florida, bearing with him his Chaplain and his Prayer Book.

Thus, e.g., did the fleet of fifteen ships which left Harwich on May 31, 1578, under the com-

2/2 LECTURES ON CHURCH IHSTORV

niand of Martin Frobisher, carry one Maister Wolfall, a learned man, appointed by Her Majes- ty's Council to be their Minister. This good man, among the ice-fields of the north, held the first missionary service of the Reformed Church of England. Thus does the record run : " Mais- ter Wolfall on Winter's Furnace preached a God- ly sermon, which being ended, he celebrated also a Communion upon the land, at the partaking whereof was the Captain of the Anne Francis and many other gentlemen and soldiers with him. The celebration of the Divine Mystery was the first sign, seal, and confirmation of Christ's name, death, and passion ever known in these quarters.'* While this solemn service was being held on the northeastern coast, a similar service was being held on the Pacific, under the famous Sir Francis Drake. On the north Californian coast in 1579, three-quarters of a century after Cabot had landed on the eastern shores, Francis Fletch- er, the Chaplain, in the presence of Drake's crew and the natives, besought God in the Church's prayers to reveal Himself to the idolaters around them, and to open their eyes to the knowledge of Him and of Jesus Christ, the salvation of the Gentiles.

AMERICA, THE HERITAGE OF OUR CHURCH 2/3

It was thus that the Anglican Church was then seeking to spread His dominion from sea to sea. It was thus that within what is now the territory of these United States, the Church's Prayer Book was first used. Well may the Celtic cross which has lately been erected in sight of the Pacific on a spot so sacred to Catholic Churchmen lift up itself in proud pre-eminence ; for there, in the summer of 1579, ^^^ prayers of the Anglican Church were the first prayers to be offered in all this wide land.

Thus Cabot on the east and Drake on the west had both claimed this new world for Anglican Christianity, and had planted the standard of the cross in the sight of wondering natives ; but they made no permanent settlement. They came and they returned to tell the story of their wan- derings in their fatherland. When other men followed them, not for discovery but for settle- ment, they were men of a like faith with Cabot and Drake, who made their new home as nearly as they could like the old one across the sea. At Roanoke Island in Virginia ^ lived the first-fruits of those sixty odd millions of people who now in- habit this land. Here Manteo, the first Indian convert of our Church, was baptized; here too,

1 Then North Carolina. 18

274 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

was baptized Virginia Dare, grand-daughter of the governor, and the first child of white parents born in the New World. But the infant settle- ment was doomed to extinction. An Indian mas- sacre came, and with it the end of Roanoke Col- ony.

Another settlement was, however, soon made at Jamestown, where the good Anglican priest, Al- exander Whittaker, earned the title of " Apostle to the Indians ; " and there the seed took final root. The Church there became so strong that even the storms which beat upon the old Church across the seas did not disturb her. Whilst the Puritans under Cromwell were breaking down rood screens and tearing up surplices, burning Prayer Books and cutting off Bishops' heads, she was going on the even tenor of her way, for Church and State were firm friends in Virginia,

But some may say, " Oh, yes, we grant that in Virginia the Anglican Church was there from the first, but what have you to say about Maryland ? Was not Maryland first settled by Roman Catho- lics, just as Virginia had been by Anglo-Catho- lics ? " Well, that Maryland was settled under a Roman Catholic baron we have been told from childhood ; but it was only so in legal fiction.

AMERICA, THE HERITAGE OF OUR CHURCH 2/5

In plain, honest history, Mar3dand was like Vir- ginia, a colony of English Churchmen, and was never a formal settlement of Roman Catholics merely, neither were the Roman Catholics ever a majority here. The fact is that Maryland was first settled from Virginia between the years 1624 and 1628; and on Kent Island there was early a com- munity strong enough to maintain its own Rec- tor, the Rev. V/illiam James, who ministered to his flock before any Romanist ever saw Mar}- land. But whence has this error arisen ? In this way : Cecilius Calvert, the second Lord Balti- more, who received a grant of eight millions of acres from King Charles, happened to be a Ro- man Catholic. This grant was made on June 16, 1632 ; and in 1633-1634 Cecilius, Lord Baltimore, sent his brother Leonard Calvert to take posses- sion as governor of the lands thereby granted. With Leonard Calvert there came two hundred men, and it is fondly assumed that these were Roman Catholics, but on what ground ? Be- cause the Calverts were Roman Catholic? As well might one say that they were all peers of Ireland because the Lord Baltimore was such a peer, or that they all bore the name of Calvert because he bore that name. The majority, the

276 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

great majorit}^ of those early settlers were cer- tainly not Roman Catholics. They were Protes- tants, or as they called themselves, '' Protestant Catholics." Father White, the Jesuit, tells us that at the Christmas festival, which they spent in the West Indies, on th^ir way out from Eng- land, some of them drank so immoderately of the wine there that about thirty of the number were seized with fever the next day and twelve of them died, two being Catholics. Observe, not the twelve, but only two of them. Was not this the proportion the Romanists bore to the whole num- ber ?

Let any one to-day travel through southern Maryland and he will find abundant evidences of the fact that English Churchmen were ever the stronger party. Before 1692, when the coun- try was divided into parishes, there were eight large churches, of one of which the writer had once the privilege for some time to be the Rec- tor ; and even to-day in the very landing-place of the original settlers at St. Mar3^'s City, an Angli- can church alone is to be seen — even the cross re- cently erected by the State, which celebrates the arrival of Governor Leonard Calvert, stands in the churchyard of our own St. Mary's Church.

AMERICA, THE HERITAGE OF OUR CHURCH 2/7

It is the same throughout this whole countr3\ The Anglican Church was here first and has ever regarded herself as the Church of the people, has 3ver heard God's voice speaking to her and say- ing, " Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee ! " And it is but a very recent fiction that Maryland was settled a Roman Catholic colony.

Thirdly, our Church's constitution shows her the truly Catholic Church of America. She is a national Church and as such is independent of foreign rule. It is far different with the self-called Holy Roman Church, for she is a mere exotic here. She does not claim to be independent of foreign control. She is here, as she is in Eng- land, merely an Italian mission, and she can never be otherwise whilst her Bishops are but the creatures of the Propaganda and the Bish- op of Rome. Even the decrees of the Council of Trent they have never dared to promulgate here. The Roman Church amongst us is there- fore nothing but a missionary body, carrying out the policy of the papal court in Italy under the personal supervision of the alien Archbishop Sa- toUi, and until she throws off that yoke she can never be otherwise.

2/8 LECTURES ON CHURCH HISTORY

On the contrary, our American Church is a national, autonomous Church, absolutely inde- pendent of alien potentate or power. On that day when the first four American Bishops con- secrated Thomas John Claggett, the first Bishop ever consecrated in America, to be the first Bish- op of Maryland, her independent organization was openly complete. Since then she has been a Church whose seed is in itself upon the earth. She has had no cause to lean upon another for help. She has had no need to seek for papal able- gates or similar officers not papal to settle the disputes of Bishops, and to help them set our house in order. She is, in fact, the one Church here, while the Roman Church still remains a missionary society. Hers is the primitive faith, hers, too, the Apostolical Succession through the long line of Catholic Bishops in the past, reach- ing even to the Lord Himself, the Chief Shep- herd and Bishop of souls.

Thus backward we have traced our Church's history, first to England through Norman and Saxon and British times, till we meet with those early apostolic missionaries who came from the cradle and source of all Christianity, and through them we journey back to Jerusalem. So far back

AMERICA, THE HERITAGE OF OUR CHURCH 279

do we easily trace our lineage. And to us at this day we hear still given that Divine com- mand : '' Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it, for I will give it unto thee."

A SELECTED LIST

OF

RECENT THEOLOGICAL BOOKS

PUBLISHED BY

LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO.

NEW YORK

BISHOP A. C. A. HALL.

The Virgin Mother. Retreat Addresses on the Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as Told in the Gospels. With an Appended Essay on the Virgin Birth of Our Lord. By the Rt. Rev. A. C. A. Hall, D.D., Bishop of Vermont. i2mo, $1.25.

" It is often said, and the saying is true, that Protestantism and Anglicanism have lost something of sweet Christian tenderness in their extreme reaction from the semi- idolatrous cultus of the Blessed Virgin which prevailed in the Middle Ages. We have not the slightest tendency to that form of doctrinal aberration ; nor would it be possi- ble, we suppose, for any clear-minded Englishman or American to join in the glowing but hyperbolical addresses to the Mother of our Lord which are found in the liturgies of Oriental Churches ; yet it does seem that something has been lost in our habitual forgetfulness of the human being to whom our blessed Lord in His earthly life was nearest and dearest, and who, doubtless, of all the sons and daughters of men, was— nay, perhaps still is— nearest and dearest to Him. In this little volume, Bishop Hall very admirably and delicately discourses of the Blessed Virgin with the reverent affec- tion which is due to her, and yet without the slightest approach to the extravagances which our church has rightly and wisely banished. In a brief appendix, he has written a few timely words on the subject of the virgin birth of our Lord, considered as an article of the Christian faith."— The Church Standard, Philadelphia.

CANON SCOTT HOLLAND. God's City: Four Addresses delivered at St. Asaph on the Spiritual and Ethical Value of Belief in the Church. To which are added six sermons on kindred subjects. By the Rev. H. S. Holland, M.A., Canon and Precentor of St. Paul's. Crown 8vo, $2.00.

" As to their teaching, we think them to be admirable models of the spirit in which instruction concerning the church should be given. . . . The doctrine is both full and strong, and is enriched by that wealth of illustration which characterizes all the author's writings."— The Churchman, New York.

"We sometimes wonder why some sermons find their way into print ; but ser- mons such as these are in character of an inspiration that not only find their way into print, but into the hearts and lives of all who hear or read them."

— Thb Living Church, Chicago.

LOXGMANS, GREEN, 6- CO: S RECEXT PUBLICA TIOXS. CANON LIDDON.

Clerical Life and Work. A Collection of Sermons with an Essay on "The Priest in his Inner Life." By the Rev. Henry Parry Liddon, D.D., LL.D., D.C.L., late Canon and Chancellor of St. Paul's. Crown 8vo, $2.00.

" This is a collection of sermons addressed at various times to the clergry. They present a hijfh and serious view of clerical life, which had been slowly developing in the preacher's mind from early life.

There is very little of distinctly ' High Church ' opinions in them, but they tnke a strong hold on the subject in hand, and handle it in no ordinary way. We especially commend to our clerical friends the sermons on Our Lord's Example the Stretis:th 0/ His Ministers, The Secret of Clerical Power, and The Moral Value of a Mission from Christ'^ — The Independent.

NEW VOLUME OF CANON LIDDON' S LIFE OF DR. PUSEY.

Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, D.D. By Henry Parry Liddon, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D. Edited and prepared for publication by the Rev. J. O. Johnston, M.A , Vicar of All Saints', Oxford, and the Rev. Robert J. Wilson, D.D., Warden of Keble College. 4 vols., 8vo. With Portraits and Illustrations. Vol. I. and II., $9.00 7iet Vol. III.,

$4,50 net

" This volume deals with what may be considered, on the whole, the most impor- tant period of all in the history of the Oxford revival." — Standard.

" Our first feeling in laying down this long expected ' Life of Dr. Pusey' is one of satisfaction that so important a subject had so able a biographer. In whatever age Dr. Pusey had lived, his life would have been worth recording, for it was great in its natural gifts, great also in its powers of devotion. . . . Here as in his most admir- able commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Dr. Liddon takes nothing for granted. He is at great pains not only to make every name and event intelligible, but fresh and living. A sentence in a letter of Dr. Arnold's is a trifle obscure — a foot-note explains it. An epoch which in any other hands would have been dull and uninteresting to the English public, Dr. Pusey's studies in Germany, becomes under Dr. Liddon one of the freshest chapters in the book. Eichorn, Tholuck, Schleiermacher, and Neander are living portraits. And yet all this illustrative matter is kept carefully subordinate. You never forget Dr. Pusey. The author is lost in his subject." — The Churchman.

" The result proves that it is well worth waiting for. Valuable as is this work for the portraiture of a great man, it has an especial value for the light it throws upon the Oxford movement from contemporaneous history and documents. The work is indeed most complete and proiected on a grand scale, as is due to one who played so 'profoundlv influential ' apart in the great religious awakening of this century. . . .

" As a literarv nndertakitig it exhibits the tenderness of touch, the grasp of details, the felicitv of expression, the ripe scholarship, the thorough acquaintance with all the literature that could illustrate his subject, that mark all the writings of Dr. Liddon."— The Living Church.

" More has been expected of Canon Liddon's biography than from any other book that has attempted to deal with the grent Church Revival of the century, and the just anticipations of those who are interested in it will be realized. Canon Liddon restrains himself from every temptation to excess of statement or elaboration. When- ever important points are' treated, no pains are spared to give accurate and full information, and his opinions are never wanting where they are demanded. The fur- ther volumes in this biogranliv will be awaited with eager interest." — The Outlook.

LONGMANS, GREEN, &- CO.'S RECENT PUBLICATIONS. REV. C. ERNEST SMITH.

The Old Church in the New Land. Lectures on Church History. By the Rev. C. Ernest Smith, M.A., Rector of the Church of St. Michael and All Angels, Balti- more, Md., Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Maryland. With a Preface by the Bishop of Maryland. Crown 8vo, cloth, $1.25.

"We heartily endorse the recommendation of the Bishop of Mar^•land, and we go further ; we should say that this little book is perhaps the very best historical ac- count of the Church of England for family reading that we have ever seen ; and an at- tentive congregation to which these lectures should be read would be well prepared to vindicate the position of the Anglican Church against the assaults of either Rome or Geneva. It is not a controversial book, but its statements are so plain as to make argument superfluous." — The Church Standard.

" These lectures deserve all the praise we can give them. We strongly recom- mend their addition to parish libraries, and their studv to teachers, lav readers, and to not a few of the clergy. They retell the slory of the old church in the new land with an accuracy of detail both in fact and doctrine that is refreshing, and with a style as vigorous and pointed as it is clear." — The American Church Almanac, 1895.'

" Here is a book for every member of the Brotherhood to own and study. Mr. Smith very justly says : ' A knowledge of some of the chief facts in the history of the church has become almost a necessity to every churchman, and there are, conse- quently, few subjects upon which lecture-sermons can more appropriately be preached in our day than on Church History, especially on the history of our own branch. To some persons this may seem a very unedifying kind of a subject ; they prefer what is known as " Gospel preaching" ; they have indeed no interest in any other; and if, unfortunately, they are compelled to listen to any other, they imagine there is no help in it, and are none the better for it, but rather the worse.'

" This is all true enough, and when this instruction is given with a clearness and freshness that illuminate the subject, it becomes a pleasure as well as a duty to receive it. . . . V\'ith a scholarship which is never heavy, with a belief in the Catholic Church which never descends into mere partisanism, the lectures, in the words of the Bishop of Maryland who writes the preface, admirably fulfill their pur- pose 'to trace the links of that continuity (between the Church in America and the Church in England) to make churchmen feel sure, through tliem of an apostolic origin, to help them know that this is no late-born sect, but that in it we are in the very " fellowship of the Apostles." . . . Make yourself a . . . present of this book, read it, digest it, and then lend it as widely as possible among your friends."

— St. Andrew's Cross.

" The whole ston- is told in strong and clear outline, in a very interesting and instructive wav, atid anv one who follows the plain teaching in this little volume can- not fail to be convinced of the identitv of our church with that church which the Lord Jesus founded. We wish that everv lavman would read it, for we are sure he would find it full of strength and truth."— The Living Church.

THE BAMPTON LECTURES FOR 1893.

Inspiration : Eight Lectures on the Early History and Origin of the Doctrine of Biblical Inspiration.

Being the Bampton Lectures for 1893. By the Rev. W. Sanday, M.A., D.D., LL.D., Dean Ireland's Professor of Exegesis, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, Preacher at Whitehall. 8vo, $4.00.

LONGMANS, GREEN, ^ CO:S RECENT PUBLICATIONS.

ABBfi FOUARD. Saint Paul and his Missions. By the Abb^ Constant FouARD. Translated with the Author's sanction and co- operation by the Rev. George F. X. Griffith. With 2 Maps. Small 8vo, cloth, gilt top, $2.00.

" This work may not have the breadth of learning which one finds in the 'St. yaul ' of Conybeare and Howson ; it certainly has not the buoyancy of Archdeacon Farrar's work on the same subject ; it makes no pretension to the minute accuracy of Lewin ; but it is a very admirable work, for all that, and to the average reader it will be even more instructive than its predecessors. Its author, of course, is a clergyman of the Roman Catholic Church ; but his candor is above all praise, and his account of the church in apostolic days is absolutely faithful to historical fact. Indeed, we find that he explicitly states facts which writers in our own church would hesitate to affirm.

The candor and simplicity which we find everywhere in the historical treatment of our author's subject we find not less striking when he deals with doctrine ; and in his discussion of the Epistle to the Romans, his treatment of justification by faith is so thoroughly Scriptural that one cannot help wondering at the wearisome scho- lastic logomachy which, in the sixteenth century, so needlessly obscured the plain teaching of the Word of God. Taking it all in all, we have nothing but commendation for the Abbe Fouard's ' St. Paul.' "—The Church Standard.

"We give a hearty welcome to this new book of the Abbe Fouard's. His 'Saint Peter and the First Years of Christianity ' will have raised the expectations of students who have known it, but we think that even they will be hardly prepared for so delightful and interesting a book as this of the life of St. Paul. With such good work as that of Conybeare and Howson, Lewin and Archdeacon Farrar, the English scholar scarcely expects to find any fresh treatment of so well worn a theme. But whilst it is true that there is not much that is new, the setting and presentation of St. Paul's life is delightfully fresh and interesting. The descriptions of^ his journeys are given with all that color and life which French artists give to their landscapes, and long quota- tions from his letters are quite skillfully interwoven into the text, so that we feel that we know St. Paul better than we did before we took up the Abbe's work.

There are good maps, a full index, and an abundant supply of notes and refer- ences. We have had no opportunity of comparing the translation with the original, but we can say that it is eminently readable. On the whole, we believe there are few lives of St. Paul which the ordinary Bible student will find more attractive and helpful than this of the learned Abb6." — The Churchman.

" This volume follows in connected series ' Saint Peter and the First Years of Christianity,' by the same author and from the same publishers. The Abb6 Fouard has been fortunate in his translator, M-ho has succeeded in carrying over into his English rendering much of the vivacious and eloquent perspicuity of the original French work. Abb6 Fouard has done his work in this volume with great freedom. He touches the great notes of Pauline doctrine strongly, and proclaims them with an enthusiasm wholly his own. The translation enriches English theology with a volume catholic in tone and scholarship, and whose merits in the original form have been recognized in France." — The Independent.

B V THE SAME A UTHOR.

*The Christ, the Son of God.' A Life of Our Lord and

Saviour Jesus Christ. With an Introduction by Cardinal Manning. 2 vols., small 8vo, cloth, gilt top, with 3 Maps, $4.00.

St. Peter and the First Years of Christianity. With an Introduction by Cardinal Gibbons. With 3 Maps. Small 8vo, cloth, gilt top, $2.00.

4

LONGMANS, GREEN, ^ CO:S RECENT PUBLICA TIONS. THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES, 1894.

The Permanent Value of the Book of Genesis as an

Integral Part of the Christian Revelation. By the Rev. C. W. E. Body, M.A., D.C.L., Professor of Old Testament Literature and Interpretation in the General Theological Seminary, New York ; Sometime Provost of Trinity Col- lege, Toronto, and Fellow of St. John's College, Cam- bridge. Crown 8vo, $1.50.

" No greater service could have been rendered at this time to the average body of the church clergy than these four lectures by Prof. Body. Within the limited space restricted to the Paddock Lectures he has managed to give a comprehensive review of the so-called Higher Criticism, its history and principal authors, the various theories and conclusions of its literary analysis of the Old Testament, bringing to the front its unresolved problems, and philosophic or logical objections that are fatal to its assumptions, and, above all, bringing out that moral and spiritual character and purpose which stamps the Biblia Sacra as a Revelation from God for the behoof of man, but which mere perfunctory critical scholarship as completely misses, as the science of botany would do that confined itself to mere dried leaves, stamens, and pistils, and details of classification, without leading to the consideration of properties and uses, relation to pharmacopeia, commercial value, or benefit to mankind. Any Christian will be delighted with the incidental replies to Dr. Briggs, and the masterly expose of critical fallacies among German writers, especially the final discrediting of the presumptuous and utterly groundless dogmatism of such writers of the extreme school of Kuenen and Wellhausen.

The fourth lecture on Creation and Paradise, and the fifth on the Deluge and the Patriarchs are intensely interesting, and show how Prof. Sayce and the Monuments of Archaeology are rapidly making short work of much of the learned ignorance of the Higher Criticisms. There are several interesting appendices."

—The Church Eclectic, Utica, N. Y.

THE BISHOP PADDOCK LECTURES, 1892.

The Sacramental System Considered as the Extension of the Incarnation. By Morgan Dix, S.T.D., D.C.L., Rector of Trinity Church, New York. Crown 8vo, 260 pages, $1.50.

" We have been always hoping that the church of these scientific days might be able to show how deeply grounded the sacramental system is in nature, and the first of these lectures leads us to feel that we shall not be disappointed. Dr. Dix . . , shows what the teaching of the church respecting nature has been ; . . . what the remedial and restorative effect of the Incarnation in nature may be. . . . It is im- possible in the short space of a review to do justice to the argument in these two first chapters, which we feel to be of great importance in these days."— The Churchman.

" Presented, as it is in these pages, in a fresh and lively way, in clear and per- suasive argument, it touches the soul, excites the imagination, and deepens one's faith . . . The treatment is scholarly and philosophical, the discussion logical and con- clusive, the style clear and calm, and the volume is timelv and helpt'ul."

—The Living Church.

" It is most gratifying to have Dr. Dix's lectures on the sacramental system in permanent and availableform. The volume will prove a valuable addition to the religious literature, not of the day only, hut of the age. . . . The logical arrange- ment of the material is admirable, and the diction at once stately and precise."

—St. Andrew's Cross.

LONGMANS, GREEN, b' CO:s RECENT PUBLICA TIONS.

THE DEAN OF CHRIST CHURCH.

Studies in the Christian Character. Sermons with an Introductory Essay. By Francis Paget, D.D., Dean of Christ Church, Oxford ; Sometime Vicar of Bromsgrove. Crown 8vo, $1.75.

CANON BRIGHT.

Waymarks in Church History. By the Rev. William Bright, D.D., Canon of Christ Church, and Regius Pro- fessor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford. Crown 8vo, $2.00.

"The present volume . . . is the production of a man who has ctiltivated the habit of going to original sources for his materials, and who is at once a scholar and a thinker. While he is everywhere passionately devoted to the Church of England, he is also a universal scholar, and his writing can be trusted as substantially correct. He is one of the few English writers of to-day who carries the methods of literature into the study of theology and the writing of church history, and his sketches in every instance are fresh and strong and clear." — Boston Herald.

" Dr. Bright is so well known to readers in church history that, with them at least, no book of his needs any recommendation. This volume, however, appeals to a wider audience than students of history. It is as truly theological as it is historical , . . we have in succession a brief but scholarly treatment of the great religious questions of the first eight centuries of the church's life; and our interest is main- tained by the manner in which they have been grouped round living men. . . . Twelve valuable appendices give a more complete treatment of some of the serious questions raised in the book than was possible in the text. . . . Enough has been said, we hope, to persuade the lover of theological books to include this in his next purchase, for of the many valuable books that are being added to our theological libraries, there are few more immediately useful than the one we have noticed."

—The Churchman, BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

Faith and Life. Readings for the Greater Holy Days, and the Sundays from Advent to Trinity. Compiled from Ancient Writers. Second Edition. Small 8vo, $1.75.

Morality in Doctrine. Sermons. Small 8vo, $2.00.

Lessons from the Lives of Three Great Fathers :

St. Athanasius, St. Chrysostom, and St. Augustine. With Appendices. Crown 8vo, $2.00.

"The lectures, as their title indicates, are rather anecdotical than biographical. As such they are suggestive, and will doubtless help readers that are not themselves students of the F"athers, to a clearer conception of the characters and services of the three men." — Christian Literature.

The Incarnation as a Motive Power. Sermons. Second Edition. Crown 8vo, $2.00.

LONGMANS, GREEN, &^ CO:S RECENT PUBLIC A TIONS.

REV. HERBERT BRANSTON GRAY.

*' Men of Like Passions": Being Characters of some Bible Heroes and Otlier Sermons. Preached to Bradfield Boys. By the Rev. Herbert Branston Gray, D.D., Warden of Bradfield College, Berks. Crown 8vo, $1.75.

"The first thing that strikes the reader of these sermons will assuredly be their fitness for their purpose. . . . The sermons are partly sermons on the saints of the Prayer Book and partly on some of the Old Testament characters, with one or two occasional commemorative discourses. All are brief, pointed, and thoughtful, and we can assure our readers that they are well worth the study of much older and more instructed hearers than those for whom they are prepared."

—The Churchman.

" They are manly in tone, earnest in spirit, and must have been very interesting to listen to. Like a master bowman he cleans the mark he aims at, and under such teaching the boys of Bradfield ought to develop into manly men. They may be read with advantage by anybody, but every one who has to do with boys, parents as well as teachers, would find very much that is helpful and profitable." — Pacific Churchman.

REV. A. J. HARRISON.

The Repose of Faith: In View of Present-Day Diffi- culties. By the Rev. Alexander J. Harrison, B.D., Vicar of Lightcliffe, Evidential Missioner of the Church Parochial Mission Society, and Lecturer of the Christian Evidence Society, Boyle Lecturer, 1892, etc. Crown 8vo, $2.00.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

Problems of Christianity and Scepticism. Lessons from Twenty Years' Experience in the Field of Christian Evidence. Crown 8vo, $2.25.

" So wise and practical a volume as this cannot fail to do great good. . . . The style of the book is popular throughout. . . . The third book is a summary of lessons drawn from his own history. It describes the work he has done in the Ime of the subject of the volume, a work which has been his specialty for a long time, and considers all practical matters suggested at one or another point. The whole volume, and this portion of it in particular, will be found serviceable by all who have oppor- tunities of influencing those of a sceptical frame of mind. We commend the work to Christians also, not merely for its valuable statements of their views of truth, but quite as much because of its importance as an example of good sense, courtesy, and tact in religious argument." — The Congregationalist.

The Church in Relation to Sceptics. A Conversa- tional Guide to Evidential Work. Crown 8vo, $2.00.

" Mr. Harrison has had many years' practical experience in the work to which this may be regarded as a hand-book, and an extremely good one it is. . . . The book is a most helpful one, and every one engaged in pastoral work would find it an invaluable help."— Pacific Churchman.

LONGMANS, GREEN, ^^ CO:S RECENT PUBLIC A TIONS. DEAN LUCKOCK.

The History of Marriage, Jewish and Christian,

in Relation to Divorce and Certain Forbidden Degrees. By the Rev. Herbert Mortimer Luckock, D.D., Dean of Lichfield. Crown 8vo, $1.75.

" This volume is full of original and patient research, characterized by broad his- torical grasp and ample learning, and written in a pleasant and agreeable style."

— The Living Church.

CANON MACCOLL.

Life Here and Hereafter. Sermons. By the Rev. Malcolm Maccoll, M.A., Canon Residentiary of Ripon. Crown 8vo, $2.25. 1

CANON NEWBOLT.

Speculum Sacerdotum ; or, The Divine Model of the Priestly Life. By the Rev. W. C. E. Newbolt, M.A., Canon and Chancellor of St. Paul's. Crown 8vo, $2.00.

"We have nothing but praise for this beautiful collection of addresses which Dr. Liddon's able successor has, to use his own modest phrase, ' submitted to the kindness and forbearance of those whose lives are a constant exposition of the inspired words of the apostle, in the ranks of the Anglican clergy. . . .' The author knows whereof he speaks, and, accordingly, every word tells. We know of no book that would give such real help to the clergy as this, none that would be so suitable as a gift to those about to be ordained on Trinity Sunday. Such encouragement and warning given at the outset of a man's ministry might change and uplift it."

—The Churchman, New York.

" We consider it a great pity that such a book as this, so freighted with instruction, so full of spirituality, so graceful in expression, so gracious in spirit, should be sent out under a title which implies that it is intended for the clergy only. There is a com- pensation, however, in the thought that every clergyman who reads it will be likely to preach it over and over again to the people of his charge."

—The Church Standard, Philadelphia.

"... A book which every clergyman ought to read and re-read till he has thoroughly assimilated it and wrought it into the very texture of his being. Candi- dates for Holy Orders, and the younger clergy especially, should make a special study of it. The book is invaluable. . . ." — Pacific Churchman.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

Counsels of Faith and Practice : Being Sermons Preached on Various Occasions. New and Enlarged Edition. Crown 8vo, $1.50.

" What men are crying out for is not so much intellectual as spiritual wisdom ; not so much theology as the application of theology to their own spiritual needs. And this need is abundantly met by those strong, thoughtful, and stimulating ' Counsels of Faith and Practice.' "—The Churchman.

LONGMANS, GREEN, &- CO.'S RECENT PUBLICATIONS.

CANON T. T. CARTER.

Nicholas Ferrar : His Household and his Friends. Edited by the Rev. T. T. Carter, M.A., Hon Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. With Portrait engraved after a picture by Cornelius Janssen at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Crown 8vo, $1.75.

" The little volume before us is a real boon to the church. It might well be made a part of the Lent reading of those who would know what types of saintliness, after the ancient model, the Anglican Church has been able to produce."— Living Church.

BISHOP COPLESTON.

Buddhism, Primitive and Present ; in Magadha and Ceylon. By Reginald Stephen Copleston, D.D., Bishop of Colombo, President of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. 8vo, $5.00.

"Notwithstanding the numerous works on Buddhism recently issued, there was room for a book which, neglecting the side-growths, should undertake to give a con- tinuous history of the primitive faith of Gotama. This task Bishop Copleston has performed with excellent judgment and skill."— The Nation, New York.

REV. WYLLYS REDE, M.A.

The Communion of Saints. By the Rev. Wyllys Rede, M.x\., Rector of Emmanuel Church, Rockford, Illinois. With a Preface by Lord Halifax. Crown 8vo, $1.25.

" The substance of this book was delivered in a course of lectures at St. Mark's, Evanston, 111., during the Lent of 1S92. There is an introduction by Lord Halifax, President of the English Church Union, which is in itself a clear statement of the doc- trine which Air. Rede expounds in the book. But we do not agree with the assertion on the title-pa,2:e that it is a ' Lost Link in the Church's Creed.' Whatever obscura- tion it suffered in past days, it has now emerged from into the very forefront of church teaching. However, if this was one of the motives which led to the production of the book, we are disposed to rejoice in the assumption to which we are indebted for a very clev^er and sympathetic work. The leading idea of the book is the permanence of relationships in the Body of Christ, which is His Church, and the Communion of Sanits.

There is a chapter on ' Prayers for the Dead,' which puts that matter in a very clear and reasonable light. The book is valuable as a clear exposition of the teaching of the church concerning the fellowship, the brotherhood which in her mind exists between all who are bajjtized into the Church of Christ, whether living or departed. And it will be found no less valuable as affording the truest and most efficacious con- solation to all the sad companv of those who grieve because their friends are not. One turns away with almost angry impatience from the wearisome commonplaces with which many good people seek to bind up the breaking heart— for they act like salt upon a raw'wound. It is onlv in the truth that all are one in Christ, the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, that any healing for such sorrow resides. Therefore, both on this account and for the clear statement of this doctrine, the book is a very valua- ble one, and deserves to be not only widely read by church people, but carefully digested."— Pacific Churchman.

LONGMANS, GREEN, &- CO:S RECENT PUBLICA TIONS.

The Inheritance of the Saints ; or, Thoughts on the Communion of Saints and the Life of the World to Come. Collected chiefly from English Writers by L. P. With a Preface by the Rev. H. Scott Holland, M.A., Canon and Precentor of St. Paul's. Crown 8vo, $2.00.

" We can heartily commend it as full of sweet thoughts. It is not at all authori- tative, but there is nothing authoritative in these subjects. The devout will read it and bless God." — Standard of the Cross.

"Selected and put together with much care and skill, and under the guiding motive of a dominant churchly spirit, and a strong desire to help the children of faith to realize on earth the reality and nearness of the world to come as well as their own relation to the City and Kingdom of God."— The Independent.

" Though this admirable volume is a compilation of the thoughts of others it will be as widely read, we believe, as though it were the original work of its author. The book is well arranged, the subjects for the most part being illustrated by a text, pass- ages from authors in prose or verse, and a prayer. It would make a suitable and acceptable Easter gift."— The Churchman.

Verba Verbi Dei: The Words of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Harmonized by the Author of '* Charles Lowder." With an Introduction on the Different Periods in Our Lord's Life on Earth. Crown 8vo, $1.50.

" This is a book which everybody ought to have at hand. It contains the words of our Lord alone, and there are times when one cares to read or think of no other words than His. Even apostles and prophets mav sometimes be properly included in the words of Saint Thomas a Kempis : ' Let all the doctors hold their peace ; speak Thou alone to me.' The words are arranged in successive periods, including (i) the words of our Saviour as a child, at His baptism, and in the temptation ; (2) at the beginning of his ministry ; (3) during His first public ministry in Galilee ; (4) during His ministry in Judea, and subsequently to the last Passover; (5) during the week of His passion; (6) during the great Forty Davs, and afterwards to Annanias and St. Paul. We heartily commend this compilation to all students of Holy Scripture."

— The Church Standard.

" The book is chiefly intended for devotional use, and its unique plan, its lucid arrangement, and its consistent self-restriction to the ipsissima verba of our Lord, will assuredly give it a very high place among books of that class."

—The Churchman.

REV. G. R. PRYNNE.

The Truth and Reality of the Eucharistic Sacrifice,

Proved from Holy Scripture, the Teaching of the Primitive Church, and the Book of Common Prayer. By George RuNDLE Prynne, M.A., Vicar of St. Peter's, Plymouth; Author of '' The Eucharistic Manual," etc. Crown 8vo,

$1.25.

" An admirable presentation of the subject. Mr. Prjmne's book is brief and read- able, and contains in a concise form some of the most salient facts and arguments which have been adduced by learned divines in support of the truth and reality of the Eucharistic Sacrifice."— The Churchman.

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LONGMANS, GREEN, d- CO." S RECENT PUBLICATIONS, REV, RICHARD W. HILEY, D.D.

A Year's Sermons. Based upon some of the Scriptures appointed for each Sunday Morning. By the Rev. Richard Vy\ Hiley, D.D., of St. Mary Hall, Oxford, Vicar of Wighill, Tadcaster, Yorkshire. In two volumes. Vol. I., January — June. Vol. II., July — December. Crown 8vo, each, §2.00.

'•"Very plain, practjcal sermons, which it is at once a pleasure and a profit to read. Thoroughly evangelistic, they are yet eminently adapted to the needs and cares of the every-day man."— The Churchman.

THE ORACLES OF PAPIAS.

The Oracles Ascribed to Matthew by Papias of Hier- apolis : A Contribution to the Criticism of the New Testa- ment. With Appendices on the Authorship of the De Vita Contemplativa, the Date of the Crucifixion, and the Date of the Martyrdom of Polycarp. Crown 8vo, $2.00.

CANON AND MRS. S. A. BARNETT.

Practicable Socialism : Essays on Social Reform. By the Rev. Canon and Mrs. S. A. Barnett. New and Enlarged Edition. Crown 8vo, §1.50.

" These papers are really practical and helpful in their suggestions to people who want to do something to help the poor." — Scotsman,

" In republishing these essays it is not too much to say that the authors have made societv deeply their debtors. . . . Every social reformer will be the better for the perusal of thi's book."— Daily Telegraph.

" It is a very practical and admirable work and still timely and appropriate. We value this volume the more highly because while quite as practical and suggestive as any other, it is pervaded by a decided and helpful Christian spirit and tone."

— BOSTO.N CONGREGATIONALIST.

REV. F. W. PULLER, M.A.

The Primitive Saints and the See of Rome. By

F. W. Puller, M. A., Mission Priest of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, Cowley, Oxford. Crown 8vo, $2.25.

" Our earnest recommendation of this book can be best emphasized by the eulogy' which the Bishop of Lincoln pronounces — and no one could be fitter to pronounce it — on ' the brilliancv of the Christian spirit which runs through it all.' "

—Guardian, London.

" An excellent compendium for American churchm.en now, when the Roman question has taken a new turn in this country ... no one can afford to despise a carefully digested manual like this." — The Churchm.en, New York.

LO.VGMAXS, GREEA\ cr= CO:S RECENT PUBLICA TIONS. NEW BOOK BY A. K. H. B.

St. Andrews and Elsewhere : Glimpses of Some Gone and of Things Left. By A. K. H. Boyd, D.D., LL.D., First Minister of St. Andrews ; Author of " Recreations of a Country Parson," "Twenty-five Years of St. Andrews," etc. 8vo, $4.00.

"This volume has one serious fault. It is too full of good stories. . . . The truth is that this is a very enjoyable volume, and the author himself is always a source of delight." — North British Daily Mail.

" In the present book will be found a series of reminiscences of Dean Stanlev, of Canon Hugh Pearson, and of Mr. Froude. There are plenty of anecdotes about all three — some racy enough." — Times.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

Twenty-five Years of St. Andrews, 1865 to 1890. 2 vols., 8vo. Vol. I. 1867-1878, $3.00. Vol. II. 1878- 1890, $3.00.

" These reminiscences are so unique that one can hardly place them. They present Dr. Boyd's social life and, to some degree, his personality in a very strong light. They contain something characteristic of nearly everybody. The pages are full of bright and entertaining matter. . . . We are certain that not since Boswell's ' Life of Dr. Johnson,' has a more entertaining book of notable sketches and conversations been written.

These volumes will have a permanent interest for all who have a desire to know something about many of the most notable persons in England and Scotlatid during the last half of the nineteenth century."— The Outlook.

REV. H. E. HALL, M.A.

Manual of Christian Doctrine. Chiefly intended for Confirmation Classes. By the Rev. H. E. Hall, M.A., Vicar of S. Benet and All Saints', Kentish Town, N.W. ; Author of " Leadership not Lordship," "The Ritualists and the Reformation." With a Preface by the Rev. W. H. Hutchings, M.A., Rector of Kirby Misperton, and Rural Dean. Fcap. 8vo, 80 pages, 30 cents.

This manual aims at helping the teacher as well as the taught, and is therefore of a more distinctly theological character than many of a similar knid that are already in existence.

Tlie author interprets the Praver Book in the light of Catholic Truth, taking antiquitv and not noveltv for his guide. He adheres to the traditional teaching oJ Western Christendom, and is careful, in exalting the gift of Confirmation, not to depreciate that of Baptism. He is alive, too, to the practical advantage of separating the period of life for the reception of Confirmation from that of the initial Sacrament, \'\ order that fresh grace and strength may be vouchsafed to the young, just before they have to meet new temptations and to go forth into the world.

Although the manual is cspeciallv intended as a help in giving Confirmation classes, much of it may have a wider use, either as the basis of a series of instructions, >r for catechising in church and in the schools.

12

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