The church in the British Isles : sketches of its continuous history from the earliest times to the restoration

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THE CHURCH

IN

THE BRITISH ISLES

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OF ITS CONTINUOUS HISTORY

FROM

THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE RESTORATION

LECTURES DELIVERED IN 1889 UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE
5HURCH CLUB OF NEW YORK

NEW YORK
E. & J. B. YOUNG & CO.

COOPER UNION, FOURTH AVENU8
1890

THE NEW VORi-

PUBLIC LIBRARY'

141143

fcCTOR LFNCX AND

Copyright 1890,
By E. & J, B. Young & Co.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

LECTURE I.

THE CELTIC CHURCH I

The Right Rev. Wm. C. Doatie, D.D., S.T.D., LL.D.,
Bishop of Albany.

LECTURE IL

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH 6l

The Rev. Samuel Hart, D.D., Professor of Latin
at Trinity College, Hartford.

LECTURE IIL

THE NORMAN PERIOD 97

The Rev. Alex. V. G. Allen, D.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical
History at the Theological School, Cambtidge.

LECTURE IV.

THE REFORMATION PERIOD 157

The Right Rev. H. T Kingdon, D.D., Bishop Coadjutor
of Frederic ion. New Brunswick.

LECTURE V.

THE PURITAN REACTION.... 20I

The Rev. Thomas F, Gailor, S. T.B., Professor of Ecclesias-
tical History at the University of the South.

PREFACE.

Those who in theory or in practice deny
that corporate union of Christians is desir-
able, undervalue one of the main functions
of the Church, albeit one which has for some
centuries been but imperfectly fulfilled ; that
is, its witness, as a continuous institution,
to the verity of the facts of Christianity.
An unorganized number of believers, of dif-
ferent confessions, without external or vis-
ible association, are witnesses each to his
own experience or belief ; and the force of
their testimony lies in the concurrence of
so many persons.

The Church's existence as an institution
is evidence of a different kind. This indi-
cates both the experience or the belief of
the individuals who now constitute the
organization and the prevalence of that
belief when the organization was founded.

VI PREFACE.

It carries back the testimony to contempo-
raneous witnesses who saw the facts that
they declared, and it has perpetuated their
testimony, making it speak afresh to each
successive generation of men. No other
institution has exerted so profound an influ-
ence upon human society, and none has
shown so wonderful adaptability to the
vicissitudes of human experience both social
and individual, and no other has maintained
its essential character and its vital principles
without change or diminution, as this has ;
and to-day it is witness to the same facts
that it testified to eighteen centuries and a
half ago.

The corporate organization of the Church
has alone made this testimony possible. It
has both preserved the formal statement of
the Christian faith, and checked individual
and sectary deviations from it. Whilst most
of the important evangelical bodies of Chris-
tians have held to the same facts in general,
and even to the form in which the Church

PREFACE. Vii

declares them, however far they may have
departed from the Church's unity and order,
and from her ministry and sacraments, yet
who shall say that the Catholic Church's
standard has not been their guide ? that she
has not really marked the channel of the
truth, however they may have seemed to be
steering their own way? Suppose that at
and after the time of the Reformation all
Christians had deserted the Church, as so
many did in Northern Europe and Great
Britain, and had established all over Chris-
tendom little or large sects, or independent
congregations, each with its own confession,
its self-constituted ministry, and its own
pride of opinion : would they not have lost
themselves and been swallowed up, like the
Rhine, in the sands and swamps of philo-
sophical and theological uncertainties, of
political and social transformations ?

As in all human affairs the most cogent
evidence of past transactions is found in
their monuments, whether in the chipped

viil PREFA CE.

flints of cave-dwellers, the pyramids of
Egyptian kings, or the jurisprudence of
Justinian, so we, confronted by the monu-
ments of Christianity — the Church, with her
sacraments and holy rites, the Lord's Day,
and others, and by the effects of Christian-
ity upon mankind, — we believe that Jesus
Christ lived, and died, and rose again, and
was what He declared Himself to be, the
Eternal Son of God.

An invisible Church has no such eviden-
tial value. It has neither form nor organi-
zation, no connection with the past ; it is
not a monument nor an institution ; it is, in
short, not a thing at all: it is but an idea, a
philosophical conception, a name. It is not
a house built of hewn stones : it is a heap of
pebbles.

As time separates the generations of men
farther and farther from the events of our
Lord's life on earth, the importance of main-
taining this monument in all its strength in-
creases ; and Churchmen deplore the weak-

PRE FA CE. ix

ening of this evidence of Christianity by
Christians, whose chief interest has too
often seemed to be its disparagement. Im-
pressed with this need the Bishops of the
whole Anglican Communion have invited
all Christians to return to the unity of the
Catholic Church, and have named the four
well-known propositions on the basis of
which this result may be achieved, namely
the Scriptures, the Creeds, the Sacraments,
the Historic Episcopate.

Organized soon after the General Con-
vention of 1886, in which these overtures
were promulgated by the House of Bishops,
the Church Club set on foot a course of
lectures with a view to elucidate in some
measure the significance of the last of these
points, the Historic Episcopate, not so
much in the form of a critical study as in
the form of a popular exposition of the
teaching and practice of the Church on this
subject during the period that intervened
between the Ascension of our Lord and the

X PREFACE.

first General Council of Nicaea, in a.d. 325,
when the form of the Creed was substan-
tially settled ; a period during which the
teaching and practice of the Church is in
theory, if not actually, appealed to with
confidence by nearly all Christians as the
true standard of uncorrupt Christian faith
and theology, and by which most of the
educated reformers and founders of sects
professed to be guided. In those lectures,
delivered by the Bishops of Western New
York and Springfield, and by Professors
Richey, Garrison and Egar, the remarkable
consensus of the great fathers and teachers
of the Church, and of the Church's practice
everywhere was very strikingly portrayed ;
and incidentally they forcibly illustrated the
possibility of theologians and communities
of widely differing habits of thought and
life, dwelling in far-distant lands, or near to-
gether, placing special stress on different
points of the Christian faith, and contend-
ing as the special champions of one or an-

PREFACE, xi

Other phase of the truth, without setting up
a new sect, or cutting loose from the Cath-
olic Church, in order to give emphasis to
their particular topics : an example which,
if the piety of Protestants had followed it,
would have gone far to preserve the unity
of the Church to our own days.

That course of lectures has been followed
by another, of which the present volume
contains the first series, designed to exhibit
the continuous corporate life in the British
Isles, of the Church whose teaching and
practice were thus described, not by a dis-
cussion of the evidence of continuous suc-
cession of the Episcopate, but by describing
in brief sketches how the British and Eng-
lish Church, the stock and parent of the
Church in the United States, appeared and
acted in the great periods and larger divisions
of her history, in relation to the State, the
individual, and the Church in other lands,
and how she fulfilled, at different times, her
divine mission to the people who dwelt in

xii PRE FA CE.

those islands ; and so sketching our bio-
graphy back to the Apostolic ages. The
second series of this course, continuing the
history to the present day, will soon be
published.

The thanks of the Church Club and of
Churchmen are due to the lecturers, Bishops
Doane and Kingdon and Professors Allen,
Hart and Gailor, whose learned and care-
ful cooperation has enabled the Club to carry
out the scheme of these lectures.

Ascension Day, 1890.

^be Celtic Cburcb.

LECTURE I.

THE RT. REV. W. CROSWELL DOANE, S.T.D., LL.D.,

Bishop of Albany.

THE CELTIC CHURCH,

I THINK I may be justified in assuming that I
am here to speak not to, but in the jiame of the
Church Club : that I am not expected to say
much that is new to the instructed intelHg-ence of
thoughtful Churchmen ; but rather to help them in
setting before those who have not been called upon
to look into the story — at any rate, from our stand-
point,— the grounds of our conclusion about the
cradle of Christianity in which our ecclesiastical
babyhood was really rocked, and about those who
rocked that cradle when the Church and the re-
ligion of Jesus Christ were in their infancy in
Britain.

And having said this, I think it right to say one
more thing: that I am sure it is important, even
at the risk of some tedious repetition of well-
known facts, to avoid what is said (I think with
justice) to be a clerical error — namely, the taking

3

4 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

for granted that the people whom we are teaching
know as much about the subjects as the teachers
themselves.

One must frankly say, in reference to the story
of the first missionaries to that which was the
original of England, that it is enveloped in the
impenetrable mystery of myths ; and tire mystery
of myths, like the mists that veil the inaccessible
mountains, and muster their shadow-fleet upon
the marge and rim of the mighty sea, are of double
birth — earthy and heavenly ; springing from be-
neath, but drawn up on high. Whatever may be
the human admixture in the ten separate legends
as to the first evangelization of Britain, there is
at least the heavenly element in them of high
motive and holy zeal. And myths mean always
distance and expanse. So that even if St. Clem-
ent's description of St. Paul's journey, " to the
boundary of the setting sun," shall only mean
Spain and the Gauls ; if the story of the conse-
cration, by St. Paul, of Aristobulus means merely
what the name means, that the best counsel and
judgment were used and set apart for this great
work ; if the holy thorn of Glastonbury, instead
of being an Aaron's rod, fades into a dry stick
without either leaf or bloom ; if we must give up
the story in the Welch Triads of the father of
Caractacus, coming back, like Onesimus, from his
exile as a hostage to be a preacher of the faith ;

THE CELTIC CHURCH, 5

if we must forego Bede's story of the mission of
Lucius to Eleutherus, the Bishop of Rome (till it
means only that Rome was /r^^ to act for the con-
version of these heathen) ; even if we relegate all
these to the shadowy land of legends, at least
there is evidence in their very shadowiness of the
very early introduction of Christianity into Brit-
ain, before history becomes legible, or chronology
troubles itself with dates.

Loveliest and most unlikely of the fabulous
foundings of Christianity in Britain is the story of
Glastonbury. One almost hates to say that no
evidence of it existed earlier than the eleventh
century. It has so tinged the romantic history
of the period, and is so closely connected with the
favorite hero of knighthood and chivalry. King
Arthur ; and it has been recited in so many stories
of wandering minstrels, and sung itself in such
sweet idylls in Tennyson and Lowell, that, false
and foolish as the story is, it seems to have had
in it a power of purity and a motive of high pur-
pose, in a very peculiar period of English history.
When Sir Galahad, the just and faithful knight of
God, whose " strength was as the strength of ten,
because his heart was pure," rides " unarmed what-
e'er betide until he finds the Holy Grail," we must
remember that it was the story of the introduction
of Christianity into England by Joseph of Arima-
thea, through which the element of religious chiv-

6 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

airy entered into the court and times of Arthur,
whose knightly vow was ** to break the heathen
and uphold the Christ." St. Joseph was reported
to have brought with him the San Greal or Sang
Real, the sacred chalice of the first Eucharist, or
the cup in which the Angels collected the drops of
blood during the crucifixion ; and the story of this
vision, granted to the maiden knight, rings in our
ears and lingers in our hearts with at least this
holy teaching : that the vision of God is to the
pure in heart ; that only high and holy consecration
can preserve manhood or womanhood against the
temptations of the flesh ; and that they only and
they always, to their souls' good, find in the chalice
of every Eucharist the true Blood of Christ, who
come to the holy Altar with pure and clean hearts.

It is a curious phase of this legend that at the
councils of Pisa and Constance and Basle, the ques-
tion of precedence between English and French
ambassadors came constantly up, and finally was
decided in favor of the English ambassador, on
the ground that the English traced their Chris-
tianity to Joseph of Arimathea, who came earlier
to Britain than Dionysius the Areopagite came
to France.

To be told that the source of a great river is
inaccessible, because the way to it lies through
the tangle of primeval forests, because its crystal
cup is concealed by the accumulation of the dry

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 7

leaves of countless Novembers, is at least to know-
that the stream takes its rise in a region of primi-
tive purity, and is incorrupt and uncontaminated
at the fountain head.

There must be in any investigation like this a
certain agreement about the meaning of unusual
words ; a certain recognition of facts of profane
history and legend ; and a certain amount of
knowledge of the connection among the nations,
at the true beginning of European history, or
we cannot intelligently enter upon the fascinating
subject of this lecture.

To begin with, let us understand that by the
term Celtic Church, we mean the Church which
existed in Great Britain and Ireland five centu-
ries before, and as many centuries after, the mis-
sion of St. Augustine. In central England, be-
fore Augustine landed, the Church had become
extinct, partly by the extermination of its mem-
bers, and partly by the removal of the rest to
a safe distance from the heathen invaders. In
North Wales, Scotland and Ireland the Britons
remained, differing from the usages and inde-
pendent of the rule of the Anglo-Saxon Church,
until the close of the eighth century, and in Corn-
wall until the close of the tenth. So that we must
(rather we may) include in this survey the story,
in a portion at least of Great Britain, of at least
eight centuries of Christian life and work. Equally

8 ' THE CELTIC CHURCH.

important it is to recognize certain facts of pro-
fane history, about the people whom we call the
Celts, and about their relation to the inhabitants
of other countries. Celts, Galatians, Gauls : these
are the same words really, in their root ; and the re-
lation among these people, in their different dwell-
ing places, was close, and is important to be studied.
The oldest form of the name undoubtedly is Celt,
which we find in Dionysius and Strabo, in Heca-
tiEus and Herodotus It was the name by which
the Gauls in the neighborhood of Marseilles desig-
nated themselves. Later on they were called by
the Greeks Galatians ; and the Roman name for
the same people was the Gauls.

Originating in Central Asia, one of the three
great divisions of men (Celts, Teutons and Slavs),
they were a restless, turbulent, nomad people, re-
taining their characteristics in spite of admixtures,
whether with the Phrygians and Greeks in Asia,
with Romans and Jews in Gaul, or in England,
with Saxons, Normans and Danes.

Lightfoot in his wonderful introduction to the
Epistle of the Galatians describes them as " quick
of apprehension, prompt in action, very impress-
ible, and with a great craving after knowledge," and
on the other hand, as " constantly quarrelsome and
treacherous in their dealings, incapable of sus-
tained effort, and very easily disheartened by fail-
ure." *' The language in which Roman writers

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 9

speak of the martial courage of the Gauls [he
quotes Livy], impetuous at the first onset, but
rapidly melting in the heat of the fray, well de-
scribes the short-lived prowess of these converts
in the warfare of the Christian Church," and while
Caesar speaks of them as ** very much given to re-
ligion," Motley says, in his " Dutch Republic,"
that '* the Celtic element from the earliest ages
had always been keenly alive to the more sensu-
ous and splendid manifestations of the devotional
principle."

Giving over the vain attempt to disentangle fact
from fable, in the earlier accounts of the emigra-
tion of these people from Asia into Britain, it is at
least certain that in the century before the Chris-
tian era a portion of the Celtic group had settled
in Britain ; and when Julius Caesar landed (fifty-
four years before Christ) Wales and Cornwall and
the South of England were peopled by them.

There are historians, and especially in our own
day, who have attempted to find in the religious
rites and philosophy of the Druids, who were the
priests of heathen Britain, certain lines of provi-
dential preparation for the introduction of Chris-
tianity. And though Lightfoot does not hesitate
to say that " the nobler aspect of the Druidical
system has been exaggerated," there certainly
were some points of teaching, eminently their doc-
trine of the immortality of the soul, which left the

10 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

people who held it upon a higher plane than was
attained by even such philosophers as Marcus Au-
relius, or by the religions of the Roman world.

So much for the character of the people. If we
are puzzled about the date and circumstances of
the first population of Britain by the Celts, we
shall find ourselves even more at sea in attempt-
ing to fix the precise time or manner of the intro-
duction of the faith of Christ among them. I
suppose it may be taken as a recognized fact to-
day that the earliest unquestionable stdit^rnQnt of the
existence of Christianity in Britain is in '* Tertullian
Against the Jews," about A.D. 207. " The different
nations of the Gauls and the portions of Britain
inaccessible to the Romans, have been truly con-
quered for Christ." An argument of certainly in-
genious plausibility, I think one may almost say
of possibility, carries us back thirty years further.
The Asiatic mission of Pothinus and Irenaeus to
the Church in Gaul would naturally have found
vent in the direction of Britain. This would be
about the year 176, and although in Irenaeus'
enumeration of the countries in which the one
true faith was professed (in his book " Against the
Heresies ") no specific mention is made of Britain,
it is not impossible that he included the Britons
among the Celts in Gaul ; more possible because
in the list of the Bishops present at the Council
of Aries (A.D. 314) the three British Bishops who

THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 1 1

were there are catalogued among the Bishops of
Gaul. There is still another possibility, which has
in it the ring and character of Apostolic times,
when the persecution that arose about Stephen
scattered the disciples to become GnipfxoXoyoi,
''sowers of the word," in the various countries to
which they fled for shelter. It is not impossible
that the terrific persecution, under the Emperor
Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 177, drove Christians from
southern Gaul to Britain, who carried with them
the message of the Master, to which they became
witnesses in life, as their brethren at Vienne and
Lyons had been witnesses for it unto death ; and
so the blood of Gallican martyrs became the
seed of the British Church. What Mr. Pryce calls
" the surprising ductility with which Christianity
crept through the various pores of the world " may
perhaps after all be the true account of the intro-
duction of the religion of Christ into Britain. Put
two things together. Remember the statement
which Tertullian made of his own time (which was
true long before his time) that *' Christians filled
every place, cities, fortresses and towns, and even
the camps." And remember that in A.D. 61,
twenty years after London was founded, it was a
flourishing town, with a commerce that connected
the Thames with the Mediterranean ; and it is
quite possible that, as in southern Gaul so in Brit-
ain, the truth was brought early, and found lodg-

12 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

ment and growth before the first century was
over,

^*Thus," Bishop Lightfoot says, ** in the age
when St. Paul preached, a native of Galatia spoke a
language essentially the same with that which was
current in the southern part of Britain. And if
(to indulge a passing fancy) we picture to our-
selves one of his Asiatic converts visiting the far
West to barter the hair-cloths of his native coun-
try for the useful metal which was the special pro-
duct of this island, we can imagine that, finding a
medium of communication in a common language,
he may have sown the first seeds of the Gospel,
and laid the foundations of the earliest Church in
Britain."

It is impossible to pass in silence over the well
authenticated facts of the story of the Church's
early life and work in Gaul. There is not wanting
authority for the opinion that when St. Paul wrote
to Timothy that " Crescens had gone to Galatia"
it was the European and not the Asiatic country
to which he went. At any rate the Churches at
Vienne claim him as their founder. This of course
would place the date of the first planting of Chris-
tianity in Gaul not long after the middle of the
first centur>^ And it is true that Pothinus, a
friend of Polycarp, who was St. John's disciple,
became Bishop of Lyons; and that Irenaeus be-
came the great preacher to the native population

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 1 3

of this city. Leaving to others the ministry of
the wealthier and more cultivated Greek and Ro-
man population, he set himself to the study of
the Celtic language that they might hear *' in their
own tongue the wonderful works of God." And
the pathetic story of the persecution which over-
whelmed those converts in Lyons and Vienne, as
they told it themselves in their letter to their
brethren in Asia Minor, proves the reality of their
conversion and the constancy of their faith.

We do not forget either the Provincial Synod
at Lyons, with twelve Bishops present, in the mid-
dle of the second century ; nor the fact that it was
on his march through Gaul that Constantine em-
braced Christianity. The same century produced
the great Bishop of Tours, St. Martin, " the Apostle
of Gaul," whose fame and influence are commemo-
rated alike by St. Ninian's " Candida Casa," or
Whitehouse, the stone church built at what is
known as Whithern in Scotland ; and by the oldest
surviving church in England, St. Martin's in Can-
terbury, which still retains in its walls some of the
old Roman bricks of the chapel in which Ethel-
bert's Queen Bertha worshipped ; and where Ethel-
bert permitted Augustine and his monks to worship
with her ; and where, on Whitsunday in A.D. 597,
he was himself baptized, the first of the Saxon
kings to embrace the religion of Britain, which for
nearly five centuries had existed in the kingdom.

14 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

I really think that this Galatian element is per-
haps the most vital feature in the Celtic story.
It is most important to recognize that so far as
the grace of Orders is concerned, it matters not
one whit whether they came through Rome or
from the East. No error of doctrine, no vicious-
ness of life affects in the faintest degree the valid-
ity of transmitted grace, any more than the moss
that greens the outside, or the decay that softens
the bark, of wooden troughs vitiates the clearness
of the water, or destroys the purity of the spring
from which the water flows. But it is so striking
as to seem at least providential that, as the first in-
troduction of Christian belief and life leaked over
from Gaul, according to the earliest genuine rec-
ords ; so the Saxon line, which twined its authority
in with the old Apostolic network, came from the
Bishop of Aries in France, whose descent is Ephe-
sine and so Eastern ; and Johannine and not "^Ro-
man at all.

We have noticed TertuUian's statement in the
beginning of the third century, of the subjugation
of the remote parts of this island to Christ. Ori-
gen, writing in A.D. 239, argues for the greatness
of the Christian reHgion from its diffusion through
the whole world, and specifies, in evidence, the

* I do not say Petrme ; because even if it were Roman, it
would have no special relation to St, Peter, who was never
gishop of Rome.

THE CELTIC CHURCH. I 5

fact that it had reached the Moors and " the Brit-
ons who are divided from our world." And there
is similar testimony from Eusebius and Hilary.
Arthur Haddan, in his remarkable review called
" The Churches of the British Confession," is in-
clined to consider that, '' during all these early
centuries and almost until the departure of the
Romans, Christianity was confined to Roman set-
tlements and Romanized natives, and limited to
the Roman provinces of Britain with no national
strength or character ; only a feeble reflection of
its Gallic sister across the channel, from whom al-
most certainly it was derived." But the difficulty
of either accepting or rejecting this conclusion is
found in the acknowledgment by Gildas, the first
British historian, that ** if there were any early
records of his own country, they had been de-
stroyed in the fires or had been conveyed by his
exiled countrymen to foreign lands." He wrote
in 576 ; and through and from his statement we are
able to pass on sure and safe grounds. The Roman
occupation of Britain lasted for about three hun-
dred years. The Picts were never subdued by Ro-
man arms. And when, in the opening of the fifth
century, the Roman legions were withdrawn from
Britain, the land was given over to three separate
invaders, the Picts from the Highlands, the Scots,
as they were called, from Ireland ; and the Saxon
pirates. Attacked on four sides, north, west, east

1 6 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

and south, the problem remained unsolved for
nearly a century, as to what race should finally
dominate the island. The hiring of mercenaries,
the pitting of barbarian against barbarian, the slow
surrender, the bitter resistance, the hiding behind
the fastnesses of mountains and the thicknesses of
woods, all these are matters of well known history.
And at last Saxons and Jutes having only par-
tially conquered, the outcome was that the Engles
became the final conquerors and Britain really be-
came England. " The new England may well be
called a heathen country." Green, in his " History
of the English People," puts most strongly the re-
lation of these events to the history of the Celtic
Church.

'' Before the landing of the English in Britain,
the Christian Church stretched in an unbroken
line across western Europe to the farthest coasts
of Ireland. The conquest of Britain by the pagan
English thrust a wedge of heathendom into the
heart of this great communion, and broke it into
two unequal parts. On the one side lay Italy, Spain
and Gaul, whose Churches owed obedience to and
remained in direct contact with the See of Rome.
On the other side, practically cut off from the
general body of Christendom, lay the Church of
Ireland. While the vigor of Christianity in Italy
and Gaul and Spain was exhausted in a bare strug-
gle for life, Ireland which remained unscourged by

THE CELTIC CHURCH.

17

invaders, drew from its conversion an energy such
as it has never known since. For a time it seemed
as if the course of the world's history was to be
changed, as if the older Celtic race that the Roman
and German had swept before them, had turned
to the moral conquest of their conqueror; as if
Celtic and not Latin Christianity was to mould
the destinies of the Churches of the West." And
Haddan says, '* Church historians cannot be far
wrong in saying that a mere turn of the scale, hu-
manly speaking, prevented the establishment in
the seventh century of an aggregate of Churches
in north-western 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. The Celtic
skull and the Celtic temperament, we are told by
naturalistic ethnologists, are perforce Romanist.
We commend the fact to notice, that the largest
and most powerful company of European ortho-
dox Churches, not paying obedience to the Roman
See at any period anterior to the Reformation,
consisted of the entire aggregate of the Celtic
Churches existing at the time, with the addition of
a body of Celtic missions among Teutonic tribes."
That turn of the scale, it is plain to see, was due in
the first place to the lack of any real unity among
the inhabitants of the British islands, who were
divided into separate and contending races and

1$ / THE CEL TIC CHURCH.

tribes ; and to their entire severance from soutliern
Christendom, which led them to look rather to
Jerusalem and the Holy Land than to Rome.
And while, as we shall see later on, great mission-
ary enterprises were undertaken into the lands
across the sea, the wave of Christianity was con-
stantly passing to and fro, as Ireland gives St.
Columba to Scotland, and Scotland gives St. Pat-
rick to Ireland ; and as the religion of the Master,
beaten back from one point established itself
among the inhabitants of some remoter portion
of the land. It was as though a full spring disap-
peared from one locality to pour its waters in an-
other place ; as though the sunlight hidden by some
overhanging cloud left the centre of a landscape in
shade, to dispense its glory on some distant scene.

I hope I have at least guarded against three
popular mistakes. One, that unless St. Paul went
to Britain, there is no evidence whatever as to the
source from which it derived its Christianity ; one,
that if there is no evidence of the source, then
there is no proof that Christianity existed in Great
Britain in the earlier days ; and one, that the first
planting of the religion of Christ dates from the
landing at Canterbury of the Monk Augustine in
A.D. 597.

While on the one hand we recognize that Cel-
tic Christianity, overborne by the wave of English
heathenism, was hardly to be found in southern

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 1 9

England ; yet let us remember that the queen
who welcomed Gregory's messenger with such
cordial affection, and won him access to her hus-
band, was a descendant herself from one of those
Christian kings in the line of Clovis of France ;
so that even when the tide of Italian missions
touched the English coast, it met the wave of
Galatian Christianity ; and the two mingling into
one made the Christianity of Great Britain, like
its civilization, composite, but with its dominant
element still Galatian and Eastern. And I hope
that I have not only cleared up the confusion in
so many minds on this subject, but that I have
impressed my hearers with the fact that from
whatever source derived, and to whatever space
extended, the Celts of the first century had heard
of and trusted in Christ ; that probably this was
true not merely of Roman settlements and
Romanized natives, but of the Celts themselves,
speaking the common language, and learning in
it the common faith of their brethren, first in
Asiatic, and then in European Gaul ; that while
authenticated history hardly begins until the time
of Gildas, indisputable evidence from the writings
of the third century prove that Christianity was
certainly in Britain a well known and established
fact, in the century before ; that the organization
of the Church was Apostolic in its government
by Bishops, if not in its founding by one of the

20 THE CEL TIC CHURCH.

Apostles ; that it was Catholic, in that it derived
its orders from, and held communion with, the
Church of Christ in Jerusalem and Italy and
Spain and France ; that its Bishops were recog-
nized, as representing an organized and indepen-
dent national Church, at Aries and Sardica, if not
at Nicea; that it was so filled with the spirit of
Christ and His Apostles, that it perpetually set
itself to conquer for Christ its barbarous and
heathen conquerors ; that it was finally, and most
strongly, established in Ireland, because Ireland
was free from the scourge of perpetual invasions ;
and that we must recognize as thorough an inde-
pendence in the Church of the Scots (as the Irish
people were called then) and the Celts and the
Britons, as exists to-day in the English Church,
the successor of the Anglo-Saxon organization,
which, in the eleventh century, absorbed into it-
self the national and ecclesiastical organizations
of Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales.

May I say one more thing about the character
of this old Mother Church of ours? Namely,
that it vindicated alike its catholicity, its holi-
ness, its unity, and its Apostolic origin by its
orthodoxy. Here again two facts are constantly
overstated and misunderstood. It is true that
certain British Bishops, when nearly all Christen-
dom was touched with the plague of Arianism,
signed a semi-Arian creed at Ariminum in 359;

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 21

and it is true that Pelagius was a Briton and that
his heresy spread for a while among his fellow-
countrymen. But we have distinguished and
venerable evidence, from St. Hilary, St. Athana-
sius, St. Chrysostom and St. Jerome, in the earlier
centuries (I mean the fourth and fifth), that the
British Church, in the language of St. Athanasius,
'' had signified their adhesion to the doctrine of
the Nicene Creed." Montalembert allows, with
regard to primitive Ireland, what is I think proven
in regard to the whole Celtic Church, that " it was
profoundly and unchangeably Catholic in doc-
trine, but separated from Rome in various points
of discipline and liturgy.-"

It is one of the grave mistakes into which men
have been drawn in the heat of controversy to call
the Celtic Church <^^//z-Roman. The very title is
an anachronism. Founded and flourishing in the
days when the Bishops of Rome claimed only
local and suburbicarian jurisdiction, she was, like
every ancient, independent Church, ////-Roman.
At the time of her founding, Rome itself was
virtually a Greek Church. The fact of the exist-
ence, propagation, and extension of the Celtic
Church, through centuries when communication
with southern Europe was impossible ; of her
Bishops recognizing and recognized by, the Church
in Rome as everywhere else ; and of their stub-
born refusal to submit to any intrusive jurisdic-

22 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

tion, are simply illustrations of that traditional
independence which for so many centuries was
universal in the world. That the old See of
central and civil prominence was held in honour,
but second to Jerusalem ; that Bishops, in many
instances, got consecration and mission, but not
jurisdiction from the Bishop of Rome, is undoubt-
edly true : but no one can read the story of the
attitude of Columbanus toward Boniface IV., or
of the British Bishops who held conferences
with St. Augustine, and not realize the absolute
autonomy of the Church, whose Bishops wrote
such words and maintained such an attitude to-
ward Rome.

Although their connection is more in subject
than in time, let me put these two things together
here. Columbanus, one of the Irish saints at the
end of the sixth century (he was Bishop of Lein-
ster), writes to Boniface IV. lamenting over " the
infamy of the chair of St. Peter in consequence
of disputes at Rome," urges him to *' be more on
the watch and to cleanse the See from all error " ;
says that '' many persons entertained doubts about
the purity of his faith " ; allows " Rome to be
the chief city of the world and of the Church,
save the especial prerogative of Jerusalem " ; and
upbraids the Roman Church " for claiming a
greater authority and power than was possessed
by other Churches " ; all in language which can,

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 23

by no excess of ingenuity be reconciled with any
claim of papal supremacy. And the attitude of
the British Bishops toward Augustine at the two
conferences, due in part to national antagonism
and to an unwillingness to recognize a Pope at
home in Canterbury, nevertheless proves that no
such claim of authority, as Rome made in Eng-
land in the later years and makes now over all the
Churches in the world, was known or acknowl-
edged in Britain. In the same way, I think, too
much has been made as to the difference between
Britain and the rest of the Western churches in
regard to the keeping of Easter. About the time
of the council of Nice the practice of the British
Church harmonized with that of the entire West-
ern Church ; but after that time the Britons,
probably as Bede says, " because the synodal
decrees about the time .of the observance of
Easter did not reach them owing to their distant
position," fell into the observance of a different
day, by adhering to the old cycle known as that
of Sulpicius Severus. It is a mistake to imagine
that they adopted the quarto-deciman theory, or
that their position grew out of their Eastern
Galatian source and sympathies ; but the mere
fact that they went on for so many centuries inde-
pendently of, and differing from, the Roman use,
shows that no connection between England and
Italy was needful to keep up the orthodoxy or

24 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

the order of the Church. What Maclear says of
the conquests of Caesar is true in a deeper ecclesi-
astical sense. He is speaking of the fact that Ire-
land and Scotland were exempt from the invasion
of the soldiers of Caesar, and he says " Britain
never became quite Roman as Gaul did ; and Ire-
land was never Roman at all." Would that the
latter were true now ; and thank God for the
strong statement we can make to-day about Eng-
land.

The other differences were as to the method of
administering baptism, which may have been and
probably was, that they baptized with the single
immersion against the Apostolic canon ; and the
consecration of Bishops by a single Bishop.

Surely it cannot but be providential that in so
many ways, — at the beginning, in times of national
severance, in times of restoration, — the English
Church, from British days to our own, has been
independent of, even when in full communion
with, the Roman See ; in Galatian origin ; in Gal-
ilean orders and liturgy ; in the strong link twice
fastened, through Lyons and Aries, with Ephe-
sus and St. John, and in the striking facts that
Ninian, her first great missionary, and Aidan, the
restorer of St. Augustine's ruined work, and
Germanus, the defender of the faith against Pela-
gius, all came, with no mission and no authority
from Rome.

THE CELTIC CHURCH.

25

It happens not unfrequently that history is
written best in the Uves of the men who made it.
Among the crowd and confusion of events as
they melt into the indistinctness of distance, here
and there stand out sohtary and conspicuous fig-
ures, who were in part the incarnation of the
spirit of the age, and in part the spirit that in-
formed the age. I think one may really learn more,
of some distinct and most characteristic periods
of Celtic Church history, in the lives of St. Patrick
and St. Columba, of St. Aidan and St. Margaret,
both associated with Columba, than in almost any
other way. Of course I am passing over many
prominent and attractive names which loom out
from the darkness of the pagan background, and
the almost darker confusion of legend and ro-
mance; like St. Ninian, a British Christian, conse.
crated by St. Martin of Tours, who became the
Aoostle of the Southern Picts, and built the stone
church at Galway, in the early part of the fifth
century ; St. Kentigern, who followed in Ninian's
footsteps, and is known in Glasgow as St. Mungo,
because of " the gentleness and sweetness " of his
nature ; of St. Aidan, who. Bishop Lightfoot says,
was the true Apostle of England, because God
gave to him the privilege of restoring what was
left of " St. Augustine's Mission in England."
Many others there are of whom one may say with
St. Paul that '' the time would fail him to tell." But

26 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

the four names that I have mentioned have such
clear personaHty, and cover such important periods
of history that they may be well considered as
representatives of their time.

The story of St. Patrick comes to us beset and
surrounded with peculiar difficulties. Bede, who
records the coming of Palladius, the first Bishop
sent to " the Scots believing in Christ," is absolute-
ly silent concerning St. Patrick. It is to be noted
here first, that the Scots were the people of Ire-
land ; and that the historian's statement that ''they
believed in Christ " recognizes the existence of
Christianity there before he came. And it is fur-
ther to be recognized that Patrick came apparently
without any commission from the then Pope Celes-
tine. Columbanus, the Bishop of Leinster (which
St. Ninian founded) never alludes to him at all ; and
no single writer before the eighth century makes
more than passing mention of him ; and makes no
reference whatever to the story of Marianus Scotus
(who died in 1084) that " after preaching for sixty
years, St. Patrick converted the whole island of
Ireland to the faith.'' At the same time, St. Pat-
rick's " Confession," as it is called, and his curious
letter to Coroticus (both of which are counted
genuine) give evidence of the fact and reality of
his mission, and tell the leading particulars of his
life.

He was born about 387, not only of Christian

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 2/

parentage, but his father was a Deacon and his
grandfather a Priest. He was twice taken captive
by the pagans and carried to Ireland, where he
lived in captivity and was employed in tending
sheep. Earnest and enthusiastic in his nature, he
dwelt much in his solitary life upon religious mat-
ters and especially upon what he calls " the dis-
obedience of his fellow-countrymen to God, and
to the Priests who admonished them for their sal-
vation." And in this rapt condition of feeling he
felt his vocation to the Ministry, coming to him in
a vision and through a voice which he could not
disobey. " In the dead of the night," he says, " I
saw a man coming to me, bearing innumerable
epistles, and he gave me one of them and I read
the beginning of it which contained the words
* the voice of the Irish,* and I heard in my mind the
voice of those who were near the wood Folocut
which is near the Western Sea." '* And again on
another night, I know not, God knoweth, whether
it was within me or near me, I heard distinctly
words which I could not understand except that
at the end of what was said there was uttered,
' He who gave His life for thee is He who speak-
eth with thee.' And so I awoke rejoicing."
Against the entreaties of his relatives and friends
he seems to have gone to the monastery of St.
Martin at Tours, and studied under St. Germanus
and afterward at Lerins, whose famous school is
best known through its distinguished scholar Vin-
centius.

28 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

Although his consecration has been connected
with the then Bishop of Rome, Celestine, there is
no evidence for it, and the most natural supposi-
tion is that he was consecrated Bishop where he
was ordained Priest, by the Bishops of Gaul.

The only name that he associates with his mis-
sion is that of Victor, the man who appeared to
him in the vision, and his only statement of him-
self in his letter to Coroticus is " Patricius, a sinner
and unlearned, but appointed a Bishop in Ireland."
He probably landed in the north part of the
County of Wicklow, and traversed the country, in
his mission, over its whole extent.

Stripped of what Skene calls the encrustations
of legendary matters, he seems to have ordained
large numbers of clergy, of whom an unusual pro-
portion were Bishops after the manner of that
period. Angus the Culdee says that there were
" three hundred and fifty Bishops and three hun-
dred presbyters" ; the Bishops many of them being
of the nature of the Chorepiscopi. Mr. Skene de-
scribes it as " a congregational and tribal Episco-
pacy." And the fact that the chief king of Ireland
remained a pagan during all of St. Patrick's mis-
sion, goes to show that at least there was never any
national adoption of Christianity. He established
a large number of monastic schools and devoted
himself with great courage and labour, to breaking
down alike the idolatrous paganism of the country,

THE CELTIC CHURCH.

29

and the nature worship which to a large extent
prevailed.

One of the most striking scenes in his life was
his bold denunciation of the chieftain Coroticus,
who, though calling himself a Christian, made a
descent upon the Irish coast and murdered several
of the natives, and carried off a number to sell
as slaves. And the Churches which he and his
companions founded were certainly lights in the
darkness of that pagan country, which not only
illuminated it, but became sources and centres of
light to the whole of Western Europe.

What is known as his '' Confession " is really a
confessio fidei, the avowal of his faith, and a
brief memoir of his life and work in Ireland. It
bears strong resemblance, as a Creed, to the symbol
of Nicea. It illustrates, after the manner of the
Benedicite, the superstitious worship of nature
which he attacked. Plainly recognizing the three
orders of the Ministry, and with entire simplicity
and freedom from any of the extravagant legends
which we find in the lives which other people
wrote ^/"him (the earliest of which dates from the
ninth century, and the most elaborate of which
belongs to the thirteenth century), it gives us the
story of an earnest and holy man, fearless and
faithful in his nature, who well earned for himself
in the best sense of the word, the title of the
Apostle of Ireland. The probability is that he died

30 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

on the 17th of March, A.D. 493. And his true
glory consists in the fact that he was enabled, not
to found the Church in Ireland because he found
it there, nor to convert the whole people to Chris-
tianity ; but to throw into the feeble current of its
religious life, the strong warm tide of his own per-
sonal enthusiasm and his intense self-consecration ;
and so to spread and swell its wave of holy in-
fluence, and make the waste places of a pagan
country, green — a very emerald isle — with the re-
freshing streams of Christian truth.

Of Columba we have, in the authenticated
writings of Adamnan, a picture painted by his
successor after an interval of about one hundred
years. Columba was born in 521 at Gartan, in
the County Donegal. The slab of stone on which
his mother lay when the child was born is still
shown, and one cannot fail to feel the picturesque
pathos of certain legends connected with it. Him-
self a wanderer and traveller for more than thirty
years of his life, and always with the intensest
love and longing to return to his native land deep
in his heart, yet this stone is said to hold a sover-
eign remedy against home-sickness ; so much so,
that to-day Irish emigrants flock to touch this
stone, as they are leaving their old home for their
new, remembering their great missionary. We
know from Columba's life, and we know from very
touching instances of the Irish emigrants of to-

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 3 1

day, how little the long travelling and the wide
parting sever the hearts of either from their first
home.

The curious legend of the cause that gave rise
to Columba's banishment is at least characteristic
of the saint in two features : his love of learning-,
and his dominant, fiery, intense zeal. Angered
first, the story goes, by the king's decision that he
must return to the Abbot Finnian the stolen copy
of the Psalter ( " to every cow her calf ; " to every
book its copy), he was led further to carry out his
threatened vengeance, when the king put to death
a young prince of Connaught, who had taken
refuge with Columba from being punished for an
involuntary murder. He executed this vengeance
by stirring up the chieftains of his own tribe and
of the Connaught clans to a destructive war, in
which the slaughter was enormous. When this
fit of vengeance had passed over he was over-
whelmed with remorse, alike by the accusations
of his conscience, and by the judgment of his
superiors, and set himself to do and bear a double
penance : first, of exile from his beloved country ;
and next, of converting to Christianity a number
of pagans equal to the number of Christians who
had been slain in the battle. To this he conse-
crated his life with a reality and intenseness which,
even when we have discarded the extravagant
Stories of bis career, win for him a glorious title

32 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

of honour in the roll of the greatest missionaries
of the world.

He was forty-two years old when he set sail
with twelve companions, in the year 563, in a frail
wicker boat covered with hide, braving the stormy
seas and dangerous coasts, and landed, we are
told, first on the little island of Oronsay. Climb-
ing a low hill near the shore, he found the coasts
of Ireland still in sight ; and, either because he
did not dare to trust himself within view of his
beloved country, or because he felt that he must
entirely separate himself from it, he re-embarked
and landed on the island of lona. Anything
more bleak and barren, '' sullen " Montalembert
calls it, than this little strip of treeless, flat earth,
cannot be imagined. Rocky, sandy, unyielding,
save by the most severe toil, of pasture for flocks
or crops for men, and only about three miles and
a half long by two miles wide, it became the
centre of some of the widest-spread and most
deeply-rooted missionary enterprises of the Chris-
tian world. No one who sets foot on it can fail
to feel that Johnson's language, in the description
of his tour to the Hebrides, is only too weak.
*'We were now treading," he says, "that illus-
trious island which was once the luminary of the
Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and rov-
ing barbarians derived the benefit of knowledge
and the blessing of religion," " That man is

THE CELTIC CHURCH.

33

little to be envied whose patriotism would not be
enforced upon the plain of Marathon, or whose
piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of
lona." So William Croswell sang, in Auburn, fifty
years ago :

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

To-day the halo of his wonderful name hangs
over it like a spell. Only the very earth itself
remains to tell the story of his life, his journey-
ings and his death. The tombs of the kings
speak of its widespread fame of sanctity, which
brought sovereigns of Norway and Spain, as well
as British and Celtic kings, there for burial ; Dun-
can among the rest whom Macbeth murdered, and
who, Shakespeare says, " was carried to Colmes
Kill, the sacred storehouse of his predecessors,
and guardian of their bones." The ruins that re-
main of the ecclesiastical buildings are connected
with another of the sacred and poetical characters
of Scottish history, St. Margaret, whose beautiful
and beloved memory not only lives in the old
Abbey of Dunfermline, but is associated with St.
Columba in the memories of the Scottish people ;
from the fact that in 1093 she built here the
Chapel of St. Oran, whose walls still stand, the

34 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

successor of the successive churches of Columba,
built first of wattles, then of wood, which had to
be brought to the island from the neighboring
shore. The Cathedral, as it is called, though it
must mark some holy site, and though its ruins
have rung with the holy utterances of an ancient
and uncorrupted faith, is of a date not earlier
than the twelfth century. It is claimed that Mc-
Lean's Cross, one of the two dignified crosses
which have survived the barbarous prejudice of
Christian men, is the cross which Adamnan names
in his life of Columba, as associated with the spot
where the saint rested on the last day of his life,
and where the old white horse of the monastery
came weeping to bid him farewell. But the spot
where one is thrilled intensely with the magic
power of this remarkable life, is the hill which he
climbed that Saturday night with infinite diffi-
culty, and where since then hosts of pilgrims have
fulfilled his latest prophecy, delivered there, *' To
this spot, although small and mean, shall come
not only kings and people of the Scots, but the
rulers of barbarous and remote nations with their
people." Passing from this place to the monas-
tery, he could 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 Sunday morning, June the 9th, A.D. 597,
having hastened, before the monks, to the matins

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 35

of the festival, he died ^ before the Altar, among
his spiritual children, who hurried to him in the
dim light before the dawn, to get his last blessing.
The voice was gone, and the power of the right
hand to uplift itself. But raised by another, he
made with it the sign of the cross, and passed,
with a benediction in his heart, to receive the ben-
ediction of his Lord.

The heroism and enterprise of this man are
among the mightiest records of missionary advent-
ures for Christ that the world has known. Of fifty-
three churches and monasteries which he founded,
and which have left their traces in what is now
called Scotland, thirty-two were in the Western
Isles, and twenty-one in the northern country of
Caledonia, which remained in the hands of the

* " Such was the life and death of the first great Apostle
of Great Britain," says Montalembert. " We have lingered,
perhaps too long, on the grand form of this monk, rising
up before us from the mists of the Hebridean Sea, who, for
the third part of a century, spread over those sterile isles
and gloomy shores a pure and fertilizing light. In a con-
fused age and unknown regions he displayed all that is the
greatest and purest, and, it must be added, most easily for-
gotten in human genius : the gift of ruling souls by ruling
himself. To select the most marked and graphic incidents
from the general tissue of his life, and those most fit to un-
fold that which attracts the modern reader— that is, his per-
sonal character and influence upon contemporary events—
from a world of minute details having almost exclusive
reference to matters supernatural, has been no easy task.

36 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

savage Picts. They had lapsed after St. Ninian's
death, into the violence of their ancestors ; and
when Columba virtually bearded their king in
Inverness, he was at the mercy of their lawless
ways, and exposed himself to the cruelty of the
Druid priests. In spite of the dangers of the
ocean travel, he was constantly in his boat, cross-
ing and re-crossing the dangerous gulfs and bays,
and going frequently back to Ireland, to begin or
re-establish religious foundations. He shared in
all the labors of the agriculture, and in the perils of
the navigation, of his fellow monks ; and it is no
extravagance of language to say, that lona began
under him, and for two centuries continued, to be
" the nursery of Bishops, the centre of education,
the asylum of religious knowledge, the point of

But when this is done, it becomes comparatively easy to
represent to ourselves the tall old man, with his fine and
regular features, his sweet and powerful voice, the Irish
tonsure high on his shaven head, and his long locks falling
behind, clothed with his monastic cowl, and seated at the
prow of his coracle, steering through the misty archipelagoes
and narrow lakes of the north of Scotland, and bearing
from isle to isle and from shore to shore, light, justice and
truth, the life of the conscience and of the soul.

" He was at the same time full of contradictions and con-
trasts—at once tender and irritable, rude and courteous,
ironical and compassionate, caressing and imperious, grate-
ful and revengeful — led by pity as well as by wrath, ever
moved by generous passions, and among all passions fired
to the very end of his life by two, which his countrymen

1 HE CELTIC CHURCH. 37

union among the British Isles, the capitol and ne-
cropoHs of the Celtic race."

Alongside of the wider current of testimony
which this whole history supplies against the rec-
ognition of any papal claim of supremacy, runs
a tide of equally important witness, which has
been strangely perverted. The organization of the
monastic system for the missionary work of these
early missionaries, and the absolute power of the
abbots, have given rise to an argument for a Pres-
byterian system of government which is as un-
founded as the legendary invention of Roman
control. That the inherent and essential antago-
nism between monks and Bishops began from the
first, may be taken for granted, since it is as much
a proverb as that which grew out of it in the

understand the best, the love of poetry and the love of his
country. Little inclined to melancholy when he had once
surmounted the great sorrow of his life, which was his exile ;
little disposed even, save toward the end, to contemplation
or solitude, but trained by prayer and austerities to triumphs
of evangelical exposition ; despising rest, untiring in mental
and manual toil, born for eloquence and gifted with a voice
so penetrating and sonorous that it was thought of after-
wards as one of the most miraculous gifts that he had
received of God ; frank and loyal, original and powerful in
his words as in his actions — m cloister and mission and
parliament, on land or on sea, in Ireland as m Scotland;
always swayed by the love of God and of his neighbor,
whom it was his will and pleasure to serve with an impas-
sioned uprightness — such was Columba. Besides the monk

38 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

cathedrals of the old foundation, namely, the
rivalry between Bishops and Deans. But nothing
is clearer, in the whole ancient story, than the
enormous multiplication of Bishops, the recogni-
tion of the Diocesan Episcopate, and the abso-
lutely exclusive reservation of the right of confer-
ring orders, to the Bishops. As to the number of
Bishops, the story of St. Patrick's consecrations
furnishes sufificient proof. The titles of the Brit-
ish Bishops present at Aries, Eborius of York,
Restitutus of London, and Adelfius of Caerleon-
on-Usk, prove that the historic Episcopacy was
Diocesan. It remains to look at the matter of
the monasteries, and the relation of Bishops to
them. First of the monasteries themselves, f " The
monastic character of the Church gave a peculiar
stamp to her missionary work, which caused her
to set about it in a mode well calculated to im-
press a people still to a great extent under the in-

and the missionary there was in him the making of a sailor,
a soldier, poet, and orator. To us, looking back, he appears
a personage as singular as he is lovable, in whom through
all the mists of the past and all the cross-lights of legends,
the man may still be recognized under the saint— a man
capable and worthy of the supreme honor of holiness, since
he knew how to subdue his inclinations, his weakness, his
instincts, and his passions, and to transform them into docile
and invincible weapons for the salvation of souls and the
glory of God." — Monks of the West.
f Skene, Celtic Churches.

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 39

fluence of heathenism. It is difficult for us now to
reaHze to ourselves what such pagan life really was
— its hopeless corruption, its utter disregard of the
sanctity of domestic ties, its injustice and selfish-
ness, its violent and bloody character ; and these
characteristics would not be diminished in a peo-
ple who had been partially Christianized, and had
fallen back from it into heathenism. The monas-
tic missionaries did not commence their work, as
the earlier secular Church would have done, by
arguing against their idolatry, superstition, and
immorality, and preaching a purer faith ; but they
opposed to it the antagonistic characteristics and
purer life of Christianity. They asked and ob-
tained a settlement in some small and valueless
island. There they settled down as a little Chris-
tian colony, living under a monastic rule requiring
the abandonment of all that was attractive in life.
They exhibited a life of purity, holiness and self-
denial. They exercised charity and benevolence,
and they forced the respect of the surrounding pa-
gans to a life, the motives of which they could not
comprehend, unless they resulted from principles
higher than those their pagan religion afforded
them ; and having won their respect for their
lives and their gratitude for their benevolence,
these monastic missionaries went among them
with the Word of God in their hands, and preached
to them the doctrines and pure morality of the
Word of Life."

40 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

As to the relation of the Episcopate to these
monastic famihes, it is of course true that the
Bishop, if a member of the monastery, was sub-
ject as such member to the rule and authority of
the abbot : and very often in order to avoid the
restraint of Episcopal authority each monaster}^
had its own Bishop, sometimes as abbot, some-
times as a member of the family. Indeed it is
said that Columba was only ordained Priest by
mistake, it having been intended to make him
Bishop. But of the recognition of the separate
Order, alike in its duties and its dignities, there can
be no question. Orders were always conferred by
the Bishops and only by them. When the Bishop
ofificiated as celebrant he broke the Bread, alone.
And Adamnan records the fact, that on one
occasion, when a Bishop came to the monastery
at lona not avowing his rank, St. Columba was
greatly distressed, because in the ignorance of his
office, the respect due to it had not been paid
him.

There is a link to be inserted here, both in
order that one may save the appearance of too
wide a gap in the sequence of the story, and in
order to assure the connection between the Celtic
missionaries and the Church of England of to-day.
There are good and sufficient reasons why we
have less distinct detail of the story of Chris-
tianity in central and southern England, than in

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 4 1

Cornwall or Ireland or Wales ; because, as by the
ravages of fire and flood, populations were wiped
out of existence or banished to remoter regions
of safety. But that it certainly was there, with
Churches, congregations. Dioceses and Bishops,
down to the time when the Roman legions were
withdrawn from Britain, is undoubted. The names
of the Sees and the Bishops that filled them are
left ; and we have the relic of a treatise on the
Christian life written by Fastidius, who was
Bishop, probably of London, at this time. The
founding of these Churches can be traced to no
other, than the same source from which Christian-
ity found its way to the other portions of Britain
After this time, desolated by the Picts and Scots,
depleted by famine, and devastated by civil wars
among the native- chiefs, Churton's statement is
undoubtedly true, that *' from the year 449," when
the Saxons were invited by the Britons to pro-
tect them from the Picts and Scotsi " Christianity
began to disappear from the most important and
fruitful provinces of Britain. As the Saxons
founded one after another of their petty king-
doms, they destroyed the Churches, and the Priests
fled before them. Some found refuge in the colony
of Brittany, and others escaped to the borders of
Wales." *' There were British Bishops still dwell-
ing in the invaded parts, as long as there were any
means of assembling a flock of Christians around

42 / THE CELTIC CHURCH.

them ; " and ** no doubt," " it was so appointed
by God's Providence, that Christianity should be
planted in North Britain, at the very time when
it was nearly driven out at the south, that the
means of its restoration might be at hand.' The
fact is that the story of St. Alban really belongs
here as evidence of the early and earnest existence
of Christianity in this part of England, for the
scene of his life and death was at the town of
Verulam, close to the site of the present Abbey
Church which bears his name.

His name is best authenticated in the history
of the early Church in England, as given by Bede,
whose account is based partly upon legend and
partly upon the history of Gildas. It has at least
these well attested facts :

His martyrdom occurred during the persecution
of Diocletian. Himself a pagan, he had received
into his house a Priest flying from his persecutors,
and was so impressed by the faith and holiness of
the man, that after instruction he embraced the
Christian faith. When the soldiers of the gov-
ernor came to his house, instead of surrendering
the guest whom they sought, he put on his long
cloak and was led, bound, before the judge. No
entreaty or violence could induce him to surrender
his faith, and he was finally taken to the bank of
a river and put to death. The miracle of the re-
ceding water, and the uprising af the living spring,

7 HE CELTIC CHURCH.

43

and the conversion of the executioner are well
known, and it is curious to notice that in the
twelfth-century version of his story the long cloak
or amphibalus, in which the martyr was clad, is
transformed into the name of the priest in whose
stead he suffered, and becomes St. Amphibalus,
who is said to have been martyred later on. It is
notable also, not only that the first British martyr
whose name comes down to us was a layman, as
the first martyr of the Christian Church in early
times was a Deacon ; but that his name, suggesting
the white robe of the saints, is preserved both in
the earlier name of a portion of Scotland, and
also in the title of a duke belonging to the Royal
House of England ; and I am glad to say, through
him, in the Capital City of this great State (as part
of its historic relation to colonial days), and in
the Diocese whose Bishop I am privileged to be.

St. Ninian's mission to the southern Picts is an
instance of the way in which the tide of Chris-
tian teaching ebbed to and fro ; for he went from
Cumbria, of whose British King he is said to have
been the son, to Galloway, a British missionary of
the British Church.

When Augustine landed, there can be no ques-
tion but that, owing to the circumstances which
have been just mentioned, Christianity in south-
ern England was the shadow of a name. And
when after his death, and the death of Ethelbert,

44 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

the progress of that mission was rudely arrested, so
that nothing was left of it except in Kent ; when
Paulinus, who had labored for the conversion of
the Northumbrians, returned to Rochester ; the
providential protection of the old centres of light
among the Celts fulfilled its gracious purpose.
St. Aidan, assisted by a band of Columban mis-
sionaries, succeeded in restoring Christianity
among the Northumbrians, abundantly aided by
Oswald the king, who had himself in early youth
found refuge in lona, and been there taught Chris-
tianity and baptized. Attended by the king him-
self, who acted as interpreter to the Irish mission-
aries, Aidan, wandering on foot, preached to the
peasants of Yorkshire and Northumbria. And
as Oswald gradually extended his dominion until
he was once called " Emperor of the whole of
Britain," the supremacy of the Cross was asserted.
After Oswald's death, a tide of heathenism swept
back again, but it was not for long. And after
the death of Penda, Central England was won
back to the religion of Christ, by what Green
calls, *' a victory for Irish Christianity." St. Aidan,
St. Chad and St. Cuthbert are the three names, all
children and descendants really of Columba, most
closely associated with the British Christianity
which makes the link in that age, between the
Celtic Churches and the Church of England of
to-day.

THE CELTIC CHURCH, 45

But it will be noticed, meanwhile, that the na-
tive Church which resisted Augustine's claim to
foreign jurisdiction, was represented in the con-
ference on the banks of the Severn by nine
Bishops, seven of whom came from Wales, and
two from Somerset and Cornwall. '' We are
bound," the Bishops said, *' to serve the Church
of God, and the Bishop of Rome, and every
godly Christian as far as helping them in offices
of love and charity. This service we are ready to
pay, but more than this we do not know to be
due to him, or to any other. We have a primate
of our own who is to oversee us for God, and to
keep us in the way of spiritual life."

I pass over, not thoughtlessly or with indiffer-
ence to all we secured out of it, the story of
Augustine's mission to England. There can be
no question but that the efforts which the British
Church had made to convert the invaders of
Britain had failed. The religion of central and
southern England at the end of the sixth cen-
tury was as pagan as when they first landed.
The old story, favorite and familiar as it is, of the
strong purpose of Gregory the Great, formed
when he was Abbot of the Celian Monastery, and
carried out after he became Bishop of Rome,
hardly needs repetition. The Angles, who were
angels coming from the Province of Deira, to be
rescued '' de ira Dei,'' that so their king, named

46 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

Ella, might sing Alleluia, was one of those plays
on words of which the monks were very fond,
and which led to the very noble work of Augus-
tine's mission.

Sometimes I think that Augustine's real great-
ness has been merged in our admiration for the
great Pope. Really, the courage with which he
pursued his journey in spite of all alarms and
threats, the dignity with which they presented
themselves before King Ethelbert, chanting their
litany to the Gregorian tones, and then the quiet
way in which they settled down to their half
monastic and half missionary life add great pict-
uresqueness to the story, as they gave great power
to the effect of their work. Bertha, the Queen,
was already a Christian, and it was to the little
Church where her own Priest celebrated the offices
of religion, that Augustine and his followers went
for their worship.

On Whitsunday, 597, the King was baptized,
and on the following Christmas day it is said that
ten thousand English converts received the holy
sacrament of Baptism. Augustine brought with
him, undoubtedly, the belief which was growing
more and more on the Italian Church in his time,
that all Bishops and Churches owed allegiance to
the See of Rome ; and he found steady and stern
resistance on the part of all the British Bishops
and Christians to this claim, or to any demand

THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 47

that he should be recognized as set over them.
That resistance lasted on and on, involving ques-
tions not merely of the keeping of Easter, but of
the method of Baptism, and the whole matter of
jurisdiction. And while in obedience to Gregory's
large-minded instructions, as to the introduction
of the Gallican use, Augustine yielded in regard
to the liturgies, he remained firm in his claim of
jurisdiction over the British Churches ; and the
result, due partly to insular independence, partly
to national pride, partly to ecclesiastical convic-
tion and, through all, to the Providence of God,
was a schism between the British and the English
Churches.

It is a wonderful fact, that when, owing to the
relapse into paganism of Ethelbert's son when he
came to the throne, and to a similar reaction among
the eastern Saxons, all that Augustine had gained
was lost after his death, except in the kingdom of
Kent, it was reserved to St. Aidan, the successor
of Columba, assisted by a band of missionaries
from lona, to refresh and restore what Augustine
had begun. His See was fixed in Lindisfarn, called
afterward the Holy Island ; and from that time on
there was a gradual eating away of the national
independence of the British Church, until in the
eleventh century, very largely under the influence
of Queen Margaret, the subjection was virtually
completed.

48 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

But two things not only deserve but demand
our attention. First, that England has had more
Christian centuries of independence than of subor-
dination. And secondly, that although sent as a
monk by Gregory, and receiving afterwards from
him the pallium which declared his own personal
allegiance, Augustine's orders as Bishop came from
Etherius, the Bishop of Aries, and so were Galli-
can and Eastern, through Polycarp and St. John.

I have no time, no right, no need to speak of
these four centuries which belong to the next lec-
ture in this course. But as it is part of the story
of lona and the Celtic Church to tell of Oswald
the King, and Aidan the Bishop, so it is still the
story of Columba and lona, to speak of Margaret
the Queen. And really among all the figures
that pass before us in this panoramic review of
the early story of Christian work in Britain, cer-
tainly none is more beautiful and attractive than
hers. *' Mirror of wives, mothers and queens," and
mother of many kings, her character is most re-
markable in its combination of all that we call
manly in courage and strength of intellect and
purpose, and of all we know to be womanly in
tenderness, purity, gentleness and devotion. Of
course, one recognizes always with pain and regret,
that it was largely due to her strong influence, that
the second '' Roman occupation of Britain " was
brought about, seven centuries after pagan Rome

THE CELTIC CHURCH, 49

had left it; but no prejudice can blind our eyes to
the influence of her holy character and the beauty
of her saintly life.

We have an authenticated account of her in the
memoir written by Turgot, who was her confessor
and intimate friend, Prior of Durham and Bishop
of St. Andrews, and who died in 11 15. He calls
himself in the prologue of the life '' a servant of
the servants of St. Cuthbert."

She was the granddaughter of King Edmund,
who was known for his matchless valor as " Ed-
mund the Ironside." Her coming to Scotland was
brought about by the wars and massacres attend-
ing the past struggles of the Saxons against the
Normans. At the death of Harold, Edgar, the
brother of Margaret, though still a boy, was chosen
King ; and after the defeat of the English, he fled
with his mother and his two sisters to seek shelter
at the court of Malcolm, King of Scotland, who
received them at Dunfermline and persuaded Mar-
garet to give up her purpose of becoming a nun
and to marry him.

Mr. Freeman says of this marriage that it was
*' through Margaret that the old kingly blood of
England passed into the veins of the descendants
of the Conqueror. The tree runs back to the root
when Henry the First marries Matilda, the daugh-
ter of Margaret, and it bears leaves at the birth of
her children." And we must remember how dis-

50 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

tinguished the royal line was that descended from
her in the kings Edgar, Alexander and David and
their descendants ; so that Scotland for two hun-
dred years was governed by seven admirable kings,
all tracing their life and character to her.

Turgot's description of the personal relations
between Margaret and Malcolm is very touching
and interesting. He was an unlettered savage
really, whom she refined and elevated and Chris-
tianized ; and although he could not read, he
would turn over and examine books which she
used either for her devotion or her study ; and
whenever he heard her express especial liking for
a particular book, he would look at it with special
interest, kissing it, and often taking it into his
hands. Sometimes he sent for a worker in pre-
cious metals, whom he commanded to ornament
that volume with gold and gems ; and when the
work was finished, the king himself used to carry
the book to the queen, as a loving proof of his
devotion. She had a strong sense of the dignity
of royalty, and kept up the kingly estate with
great precision and care ; but through all, her own
heart was fixed upon higher and holier things.
She lived really a life of religious meditation and
perpetual consecration to God. And her great
anxiety and care, and the exercise both of her
authority and her influence, in reforming various
corruptions in the Church of Scotland at that

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 5 1

time, make her truly one of the '' nursing mothers "
of the Church. As to the observance of Lent and
the offering of the Holy Eucharist, the keeping of
the Lord's Day and the matter of lawful as against
unlawful marriages, she counselled with the clergy
and by her own example, influence and authority
reformed many things that had gone wrong.

Her charities were unbounded ; so much so that
Turgot says that she was poorer than any of her
paupers, often stripping herself and her attendants
of garments that they had on, to give to those who
were in want, that none should go away in distress.
" Now and then," Turgot says, " she helped her-
self to something or other out of the king's pri-
vate property, it mattered not what it was, to give
to a poor person ; and this pious plundering the
king always took pleasantly and in good part. It
was his custom to offer certain coins of gold upon
Maundy Thursday and at High Mass, some of
which coins the queen often devoutly pillaged and
bestowed on the beggar who was petitioning her
for help. Although the king was fully aware of
the theft, he generally pretended to know nothing
of it, and felt much amused hy it. Now and then
he caught the queen in the very act, with the
money in her hand, and laughingly threatened
that he would have her arrested, tried, and found
guilty."

This whole story of Queen Margaret is sur-

52 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

rounded, as almost all these histories are, with the
atmosphere of marvels through which it is dififi-
cult to see the real truth of history ; but there can
be no question of the beauty and holiness of her
life, of the wonderful influence that she had over
her husband, and of the moral value of her reforms
in the Church ; over and against which is to be set
the fact that it was through her influence that the
last resistance to the intrusion of the Bishop of
Rome was overcome, and that for a little while
England became Roman again.

It is with her that the story of the Holy Rood is
connected, in honour of which the youngest of her
sons, King David, built a Church ; and it was with
this sacred relic in her hand that she died, just at
the moment that her son Edgar brought news
that Malcolm had been slain in battle. Although
the ruins of Dunfermline no longer guard the act-
ual tomb of the saint, they speak of her beautiful
memory all the more eloquently, because of the
contrast with the ugly reminder of puritan Scot-
land which has been built on to it. And the
place where she was buried, recently restored by
the carefulness of Queen Victoria, is a shrine to
which many reverent and loving people make fre-
quent pilgrimages.

Her biographer stops in the middle of the re-
cital of a wonderful story of the preservation, after
its immersion in water, of her book of the Gos-

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 53

pels, to say what we may all endorse, '* I leave it
to others to admire the tokens of miracles which
they see elsewhere. I admire much more the
works of mercy which I perceived in Margaret,
for signs are common to the good and the bad,
whereas works of piety and true charity belong to
the good only. The former sometimes are the
proof of holiness, the latter are that which consti-
tutes it."

My reverend brother who is to take up the
story of the Anglo-Saxon Church will not feel that
I have trenched upon his portion of the history,
if I recall, merely to pass over it the simple fact
that the Gregorian tone which entered, through St.
Augustine, into the worship of the ancient Celtic
Church, was a '' tonus percgrinns ".• not " the
Lord's song in a strange land," but a strange song,
in a land that was already the Lord's. Like bells
jangled out of tune, it was the source of a discord
which jars upon the ear, for centuries.

My one concern with it is to call your attention
to the fact, that the Roman mission was, and
is, and always will be exotic in England ; and
that it really had no strong or permanent hold in
England. At the end of the seventh century the
whole of England was in communion with the
Scoto-Celtic Church except Kent, East Anglia,
Wessex and Sussex ; and of these exceptions
Sussex was heathen, Wessex was under a Bishop

54 THE CELTIC CHURCTJ.

in Gallican Orders, and in communion with the
British Bishops, so that Kent and East Angiia
alone remained in subjection to Canterbury and
Rome. In central England, Christianity was
really extinct at the close of the fifth century by
the massacre of Christians and the removal of the
survivors to the north. The Britons in North
Wales remained independent of Rome until the
end of the eighth century ; in Cornwall till the
middle of the tenth ; in southern England and
Ireland till the beginning of the eighth ; in Scot-
land till the middle of the eleventh century, and
Ireland did not entirely surrender until nearly the
middle of the twelfth; so that the Roman occupa-
tion of Britain ecclesiastically was really only for
these four centuries, from the twelfth to the six-
teenth, about equal to the duration of the civil
dominion of Rome in the first centuries.

And such was the energy of the Celtic mission-
ary monks that between the fifth and eighth cen-
turies they had entered Gaul, Italy, Switzerland
and Germany ; and even reached the Faroe Isles
and Iceland ; so that the Celtic Church extended
from Iceland to Spain, from the Atlantic to the
Danube, from Ireland to Italy.

Is there, the question recurs, any living relation
between the Church of England to-day and the
old founding among the Celts and Britons? I
think there is. The remains of the earlier litur-

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 55

gies are few ; but certain distinctive and character-
istic features of Celtic Christianity are very marked,
as showing in them the influence of the Galatian
and Mozarabic Liturgies ; and as reproduced in our
own. Of the latter may be instanced the bid-
dings to prayer, called prefaces ; which have a
resemblance at least to our exhortations ; the place
of the commemoration of the departed after the
Offertory, rather than as in the Roman use after,
and as part of, the Consecration Prayer; the use of
a hymn after the consecration in the Communion
Office; the administration of the Holy Communion
in both kinds ; the use of confession to a Priest
left optional (in the Celtic Church it seems to have
been public) ; and the observance of the Rogation
days, unknown in the Roman Church until the time
of Leo Third. Of the former, we find very marked
features of a Galilean and Mozarabic character, as
for instance the singing of the hymn Benedicite,
before the Epistle or the Gospel ; the use of
several, sometimes seven collects instead of the
one ; the Lection from the Old Testament beside
the Epistle and Gospel ; the Episcopal benedic-
tion given after the consecration and fraction of
the Bread ; reservation in both kinds for the sick,
and the use of unleavened bread.

A very curious and striking instance is found
also in the rule that, in the Holy Eucharist, if the
celebrant were a Bishop he consecrated alone, if a

56 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

Priest he had a Priest associated with him ; where-
as in the Roman use the Bishop ahvays had a
Priest associated with him who joined in the words
of consecration. It was this habit which furnished
an instance of the respect that Columba paid to
the Episcopal office, for once, Adamnan records, a
stranger from the Province of Munster who con-
cealed through humihty the fact that he was a
Bishop, was invited on the next Sunday by
Columba to join with him in consecrating the
Body of Christ, that as Priests they might break
the Bread of the Lord together. Columba on
going to the Altar discovered his rank and ad-
dressed him thus: ''Christ bless thee, brother:
consecrate alone as a Bishop, now that we know
that thou are of that rank. Why hast thou en-
deavored to disguise this, and so prevent us giving
thee the honour due to thee?"

More than this, I think there is a likeness,
which proves a lineal descent, between the Church
of England of the last three centuries and the
Celtic Church of the older days. Something else
beside Wicklif's ashes was carried by the Severn
to the sea. The spirit of the nine British Bishops
who, on the bank of the Severn, under what was
called St. Augustine's Oak, held their conference
with the great Gregory's great missionary — that
spirit of the old British Bishops revived and lived
again in Cranmer and Ridley and Latimer. The

THE CELTIC CHURCH. 57

heart of the oak was British ; and only sheltered
Augustine for a time. Its root was in its native
soil. And from the Severn to the sea, and over
the seas to us, and over all seas, as the Church of
England goes with English commerce and English
colonization to the ends of the earth, it is the old
life, autonomous, independent, needing and know-
ing no fountain-head but Christ, and charged
alike with the spirit and the power, the privilege
and the responsibility, of bearing the sound of the
Gospel into all lands, and its words unto the ends
of the world.

There is a yew tree in the churchyard at Crow-
hurst in Surrey, which bears the botanical marks,
allowed by scientific experts, of fifteen hundred
years of life : so that it might have heard the vic-
torious shouts of the battle of the Hallelujah, and
listened to St. Germanus, refreshing with a new
current of Catholic truth the old Galatian heritage
of British Christianity. It is in a churchyard ; and
it suits some people to deal with it therefore
as a memorial of mourning and a suggestion of
decay. Shall it not rather tell us how, in God's
acre, it stands to preach the blessed story of '* mor-
tality swallowed up in life," of the old deeply-
rooted tree of primitive Christianity, which draws
its very nourishment from the decay of the gener-
ations that it shelters and survives ; which graces
and guards the graves of successive and continuous

58 THE CELTIC CHURCH.

Christian centuries ; which witnesses, with every
wind that waves its spreading branches, to its
'' rooting and grounding" in eternal truth ? The
emblematic, ever-green yew tree is the symbol of
the imperishableness of the British Church, green
in its old age ; which has fulfilled the hope, that
passes still into our prayers, Florcat radix. " She
stretches forth her branches unto the sea, and her
boughs unto the river." ''The hills are covered
with the shadow of it ; and the boughs thereof are
like the goodly cedar trees." God made room for
it, and " when it had taken root it filled the land."

Zhc Hncilo^Sayon Cburcb.

LECTURE II.

THE REV. SAMUEL HART, D.D.,
Professor of Latin at Trinity College, Hartford.

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH.

The history of the Anglo-Saxon Church is the
history of the Church of the EngHsh people, dur-
ing the first centuries of their life in the home
which they had conquered for themselves in the
island of Britain. The former inhabitants of that
island, who were dispossessed by these invaders
from the continent, had indeed been converted to
Christianity ; they formed a part of that Celtic
Church, the history of which has been lately pre-
sented to you. But the Angles and Saxons and
Jutes were heathens when they crossed the sea in
the fifth and sixth centuries, and they were in no
way affected by the political organizations, the so-
cial customs, or the religious faith of those whom
they swept before them into the mountains of
Wales and the peninsula of Cornwall. The Bri-
tish Christians, not without brave attempts at re-
sistance, fell back before the ruthlessly cruel in-

6i

62 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH,

vaders ; and nearly the whole of what we now call
England — the country south of the Tweed and
east of the Dee and the Severn — became again an
utterly heathen land. In the long strife the wor-
shippers of Woden and of Thor had overcome
and expelled the worshippers of Christ ; in the
conquered land there were none left to tell the
conquerors the story of His truth, nor did the
British Christians venture from their hiding-places
to teach it to the savages of whom they had good
reason to stand in dread.

The story of the conversion of the English —
for such we may fairly call them after the time
when they had taken possession of the land in
which their descendants dwell to-day — is a story
of wonderful and romantic interest. And that
interest is by no means confined to the time of
the conversion of the people to Christianity. The
whole period during which the English Church
was laying its foundations and beginning the erec-
tion of that stately fabric which was destined to
be the mother-city of Churches beyond the seas
and a firm bulwark of the truth in times of its
utmost danger — the whole of the Anglo-Saxon
period is filled with events which call forth all the
enthusiasm of faith, and its history is crowded
with the names of great men. We find pervading
it a touching simplicity, as we read of the words
and deeds of bishops and of kings, who with all

THE ANGLO-SAXON- CHURCH. 63

of a father's love cared for both the temporal
and the eternal interests of their children in the
Church and in the State; a faithful, unquestion-
ing obedience to the Christ Whom they preached,
and to Whom they had devoted their lives, corre-
sponding to which we are scarce surprised to read
the record of what would be in our days extraor-
dinary manifestations of Divine approval and
help ; and withal an earnest determination to im-
part to others the truth and the blessings which
were worth so much to themselves. Outside of
the limits of the great world-empire, which still in
name asserted the power and the prerogatives of
the Caesars, outside of the lands in which the lan-
guage of that empire was the speech of civilized
men, there grew up during some five centuries the
one purely national Church of the West. Influ-
enced by Rome so far as to be brought into touch
with the life of the great Catholic Church, inde-
pendent of Rome so far as to assert and maintain
the rights of a national Church as they were then
understood, our English ancestors of that early
day were beginning a work, the importance of
which was quite beyond the reach of their imag-
ination. The conversion of the English, the es-
tablishment of the English Church, the growth
of a Christian English nation, form a chapter in
history so full of records of apostolic faith and of
primitive zeal and of practical applications of the

64 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH.

law of Christianity, that it is hard to remember
that, when we begin to read it, we are close at
the opening of the seventh century of our era ; it
seems rather to belong to those earlier days when
the virtues of Christian men were of that simple
kind which best embodies the spirit of our re-
ligion, and when even their faults were such as
pertain rather to the infirmities than to the vices
of human nature.

I venture to think, gentlemen of the Church
Club, that I can best remind you of the important
facts in the history of the early English Church
and of the work which it accomplished for its own
time and for the future, by asking you to look
at a few of the prominent scenes in that history.
In nearly every case we shall find a famous man
whose name is closely associated with a famous
place.

I.

And first of all, we think of St. Augustine and
of Canterbury; for with him and there the work of
the Christianization of the English people began.
Kent was not the most important of the kingdoms
which the invaders had founded ; but it was the
place where the earliest permanent Teutonic set-
tlement had been made : and it was not very
closely connected with the other kingdoms ; for
its people were Jutes, while those of the others

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 65

were Saxons or Angles ; but it occupied the part
of the island which was nearest the continent, and
it was almost of necessity the place to which mis-
sionaries would first come. We all know the story
of the pious monk Gregory, who, struck by the
beauty of some fair-skinned and golden-haired
youths whom he saw exposed in the slave-market
at Rome, asked of what nation they were : when
he was told that they were Angles, he -said that
they should rather be called angels ; when he
learned that they were from the province of
Deira, he affirmed that they ought to be delivered
from the ire of God ; and still further, learning
that the name of their king was Aella, declared
that their tongues should be taught to sing
Alleluia. But he did not content himself with
playing upon words. His heart was touched,
and he prayed, and obtained consent, that he
might go to the end of the earth and preach the
Gospel to the Angles. But this purpose could not
be accomplished at once ; and after a few years
his election to the bishopric of Rome made it
impossible for him to fulfil in person the plan
which he had formed. Yet he did not forget the
bright faces of the lads who had been brought
from Yorkshire, very possibly having been cap-
tured by the men of Kent, to be sold as slaves at
Rome ; and soon he selected Augustine, the pro-
vost of his own monastery of St. Andrew, to lead

(£ THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH,

a band of missionaries to the English. Perhaps,
for reasons already suggested, he would under
any circumstances have sent them at first to the
southeastern peninsula ; but he can hardly have
been ignorant of the fact that there was at least the
possibility of a more favorable opening there than
elsewhere in the island. Ethelbert had been for
thirty years king of Kent, and he had married
Bertha, the daughter of a Prankish king, promis-
ing that she should be allowed the practice of
her religion as a Christian, her chaplain being the
Prankish bishop Liudhard.

It was after Easter in the year 597 that the mis-
sionaries landed on the isle of Thanet ; and in the
Ascension week, by permission of the king, they
came to Canterbury. Outside the city stood the
little church of St. Martin's, where St. Martin's
Church stands to-day, the Roman brick in its
walls still testifying to the great antiquity of a part
at least of its structure, once the worshipping-place
of a Christian congregation, then the chapel of a
Christian queen. As they entered, Augustine, lift-
ing up the Cross, took possession of Canterbury
and of England for Christ. Then he and his
brethren, chanting the Rogation antiphon which
they had learned in Gaul, and adding to it the Gre-
gorian Alleluia of the Easter-tide, prophesied of
the struggle and the victory which lay before them,
and with prayers and thanksgiving began their

THE ANGLO-SAXON- CHURCH. 6j .^

work. It was, we are told, the simplicity and
purity and devotion of the lives of these men,
which drew to them the hearts of the heathen
among- whom they had come to dwell. Soon
Ethelbert himself was baptized, and soon Kent
could be called a Christian kingdom ; and the
conversion of Teutonic England began just as*
Columba, the great missionary of Celtic Britain,
was breathing his last. Presently Augustine, at
Gregory's direction, repaired to Aries in Gaul to
receive consecration as a bishop ; and on his re»
turn, he restored an ancient Roman church within
the walls of Canterbury, dedicated it to the Lord
Christ, and made it his cathedral, while for those
who had come with him he founded a monastery
hard by. The stately pile which is the metropo-
litical church of all England is the Christ Church
of Augustine's foundation, and the missionary col-
lege which bears his own name has rescued from
desecration the site of the buildings that served
to shelter the simple monks who first taught to
the men of Kent the way of salvation.

Gregory the Great was a man of no meagre
plans or narrow hopes. It was he, we are told,
who first spoke of the people of England as if
they were all one nation ; he authorized Augustine
to use the powers of a metropolitan, consecrating
twelve suffragans for himself; and he planned that
Deira, the land of the beautiful youths, further

68 THE ANGLO-SAXOiV CHURCH.

north, should also, when its people should become
Christians, have a metropolitan with twelve suf-
fragans. The plan was never carried into effect
in all its details; fortunately for England, the ar-
rangement of English dioceses followed the lines
of the divisions and sub-divisions of English king-
doms, and was not guided by schemes drawn up
at Rome and based on former Roman arrange-
ments in Britain ; it was a natural growth, not an
artificial structure. But after all it was Gregory
who planned the organization of all England into
the form of a national Church.

And Gregory had plans also which included the
Christians in the remoter part of the land to the
heathen portion of which he had sent his mission-
aries. Writing to Augustine in reply to questions
which he had addressed him as to certain matters,
among them his relations to the British bishops,
he had told him that he was to ask them to work
with him in converting the Saxons, but had added,
with a truly Roman assumption, that he was to
consider them all as subject to the authority which
he had established at Canterbury. Augustine
thereupon asked the British bishops to meet him
in conference ; they came a first and a second
time ; they argued with him as to the three points
of divergence between the Roman and the British
Churches — the Easter rule and cycle, the shape of
the tonsure, the ceremonies accompanying bap-

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 69

tism ; they were offended at what they thought
to be an indication of arrogance on his part ; they
refused to yield to his demands and to unite with
him in preaching to the Saxons ; and Augustine
returned to Kent unsuccessful and disappointed.
Nearer home, however, his work made progress ;
Justus was consecrated bishop of Rochester, ap-
parently the chief city of a petty kingdom of
West Kent; and the king of the East Saxons,
Ethelbert's nephew and dependent, became a
Christian, and Mellitus was made first bishop of
London.

Such is in outline what St. Augustine of Can-
terbury had accomplished, when, in the prospect
of immediate death, he designated and conse-
crated his friend Laurence to be his successor,
eight years after he had set foot on English soil.
It is true that Augustine was not a great man,
nor was he always a wise man ; but he laid the
foundations of a great work which was guided by
a wisdom ^superior to his own. There have been
those who have exaggerated his labors and their
results, as if from him alone came the knowledge
of Christianity to the British Isles ; and there have
been others who have looked upon his mission as
almost a failure. The true estimate of what he
did lies between the two. We cannot forget the
British Christians, who kept the knowledge of the
truth in the wild mountains of the west ; we can-

70 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH.

not forget the debt which the north and the mid-
lands owed to the Celtic missionaries from the
island of the saints ; we must acknowledge that
when Augustine died, his influence had not ex-
tended far : but he had brought Christianity to
the English people ; he had established a see, the
power of which would soon be felt over a united
nation and would at last extend throughout the
world ; and he had inspired into the English
somewhat of the missionary zeal which already
marked the Scots. Though he lived to consecrate
but two of the proposed suffragans of his see, the
result of his labors was soon felt outside of Kent
and Essex. Along ways which he had pointed
out, Felix of Burgundy was sent by one of his
successors to East Anglia, and Birinus of Italy
carried the Gospel to Wessex. And under more
happy circumstances and in a more natural way
than had marked his unsuccessful attempts, the
remnant of the ancient British Church and the
Celtic Church of the north were brought into
union with the Roman mission, and the Church
of the British isles was made one.

II.

The next scene which attracts our attention
as marking a turning-point in the history is the
council or conference at Whitby in the spring of
the year 664 ; and the man who stands out prom-

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 7 1

inently before us is the bishop Wilfrid. Before
this time — and it was less than sixty years after
Augustine's death — great changes had taken place.
Ethelbert's son and successor had for a time re-
fused Christianity, and Kent had nearly relapsed
into paganism ; but Ethelbert's sister had married
Edwin of Northumbria, and she had taken with
her to the northern kingdom Paulinus, who had
been first consecrated a bishop. Edwin was con-
verted, and, by a decision of his Witan, Northum-
bria became Christian ; and Paulinus was recog-
nized as bishop of York, including under his ju-
risdiction the land of Deira and extendinsf his
labors to Lincoln. But the north Welsh, joining
themselves to the still heathen Mercians, invaded
Northumbria ; Edwin was killed, and Paulinus
fled. Then Oswald, Edwin's nephew, took the
throne, repulsed the Welsh, and while he extended
his supremacy took care also to restore the Chris-
tian religion, to which he was devoutly attached.
To accomplish this, he needed a bishop ; and he
sent to the far-off isle of Hy, the lona of later
days, the great centre of light and learning, the
very name of which fills us even now with deep
emotion. So Aidan came, consecrated by the
Celtic bishops of Hy and bringing with him their
customs, so strange in the eyes of those who were
in the habit of looking to Rome as their pattern ;
and, with a love for an island home and a Celtic

72 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH.

bishop's desire for retirement, he placed his bishop-
stool on Lindisfarne, the holy island of the east-
ern coast. Aidan and Oswald labored and almost
lived together until the still youthful king fell
in battle slain by the heathen against whom he
was defending the homes of his people ; and soon
Aidan was succeeded by Finan, another bishop
from Hy. Under Finan the paschal question
was raised, or at least revived, in Northumbria.
The Scottish bishop followed the British use,
claiming that it came from Ephesus and St.
John ; those who had received their Christianity
from Kent or from Gaul followed the Roman use,
basing it on the authority of St. Peter as the chief
of the Apostles. The question was not the an-
cient quartodeciman controversy, of which we
read in ante-Nicene times, though it was and is
often confused with it ; for both parties kept
Easter on Sunday : it related partly to the cycle
which should be used in determining the time of
the ecclesiastical full moon, the British Christians
not having learned of the tables adopted at Rome
since they had ceased to have regular intercourse
with that city, and partly (and especially) to the
determination of the earliest day on which Easter
might fall, the British keeping it on the day of
the full moon if that fell on a Sunday, while the
Romans in that case deferred it to the Sunday
following. Each party accused the other of un-

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 73

catholic action and of heresy ; and the controversy-
was most persistent and bitter. Northumbria and
Kent were not far apart, and had constant com-
munication with each other ; the two branches
of the Church represented in these kingdoms were
in many ways brought closely together ; and it
was impossible that a matter which both consid-
ered so important should be left undecided. In
fact, the matter came still nearer home to the
southern Christians ; for Cedd, who had labored
successfully among the East Saxons, had been
consecrated by Finan and two other Scottish
bishops to preside over the Church in that king-
dom. Soon came the conflict between Colman,
Finan's successor, himself of Scottish ordination,
and Wilfrid. This Wilfrid was a Northumbrian
of noble birth, who had visited Rome and Lyons,
and had formed a strong attachment to the Roman
see. He came back to take up his home at Ripon,
and to feel and resent the peculiarities and the de-
fects of the Christianity which had been brought
to his native land from the uncouth Christians of
the north. He was determined that the civilized
customs should not yield to those which were
barbarous, and that the Roman should displace
the Celtic Easter.

A conference was called, which, as has been
said, met in the year 664, at Whitby, on a lofty
bluff overlooking the northern sea, lately chosen

74 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH.

as the site of a monastery. In arguing the case,
Colman appealed to the ancient custom of his
Church ; Wilfrid urged the extended influence of
the Roman Church and the power which the Lord
had given to St. Peter. The king decided, solely
(as it would seem) from the latter argument, that
Rome must be right ; and Colman withdrew to the
western isles. The controversy had been about a
matter of very little importance, save as it affected
uniformity of usage and brotherly charity ; and
we are inclined to regret here, as so often in later
history, the stamping out of local usage by the
harsh assumptions of the Roman see. Yet, so far
as there was a right and a wrong in this matter,
Rome was in the right ; and the conference of
Whitby kept the English Church from becoming
isolated from the living and growing Christianity
which was gaining so much and so useful power
in western Europe. Had the matter been decided
otherwise, English Christianity could hardly have
escaped disruption, and it would at least have
been cramped in a narrow mould and so prevented
from accomplishing the work which lay before
it. We cannot but sympathize with the Celtic
bishop who went back sorrowfully to his former
home ; but we can see that Wilfrid saved the
English Church from the danger of becoming a
tribal and monastic Church and from falling into
that Irish chaos which overv/helmed all order and

THE Anglo-Saxon church. 75

discipline. At Whitby a most important step
was taken, while yet there was in no strict sense
a nation of the English, towards estabHshing a
national English Church.

It would be instructive and interesting, had we
the time, to trace out in some detail the after life
of Wilfred ; but a few words must suffice for such
facts as bear upon the progress of the history.
He was soon chosen bishop of York ; and, unwil-
ling to accept consecration from those whom he
called schismatics, he went to France and was
consecrated by the bishop of Paris. But he was
long in returning; and when became to North-
umbria, he found that Chad had been consecrated
in his place by Wina of Wessex and two bishops
from West Wales — the first step towards an act-
ual union of the English Church with the Welsh,
but the last time for centuries that any English
bishop had a consecrator outside of the Roman
communion. Wilfrid retired and worked faith-
fully in Mercia and Kent, until he was restored to
York. There, after a time of much labor and
great success, he incurred the displeasure of the
king and placed himself in opposition to the plans
of Archbishop Theodore (of whom we shall hear
presently) ; and when a part of his diocese was re-
moved from his jurisdiction without his consent,
he determined to carry an appeal in person to
Rome. On his way his ship landed him in Fries-

76 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH.

land ; there his love of adventure and of work
prevailed for a time, and he became the first Eng-
lish missionary, moving the hearts of the rude
people to hear and to accept the truth. At last
he went to Rome ; his case was heard by a
council and determined in his favor ; but now, as
formerly when he went to France, he could not
easily tear himself away from Rome, When he
did reach Northumbria he produced the papal
bull, only to discover that his appeal was regarded
as disloyalty and that he was charged with having
gained his case dishonestly. After imprisonment
he was practically banished, and he found no
resting-place till he came to Sussex, the only
part of England that was still heathen. Here his
missionary enthusiasm was again aroused ; he
first taught the barbarous people to catch fish,
and then preached to them the Gospel ; and for five
years he stayed among them apparently without a
murmur. Then Theodore sent him back again to
the north, where once more he got into trouble,
and whence once more he carried an appeal
to Rome, to meet with success there, but to find
that the papal decrees were not considered infal-
lible in England. Wilfrid was now an old man ;
he consented to a compromise, and accepted Hex-
ham and Ripon as his diocese for the rest of his
life. The moral of his career is to be read all
through English history. He succeeded when

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 'J'J

and where he identified himself with the people ;
but he could not easily identify himself with
others than those who were willing to submit
themselves to him. He failed when he ceased to
act as an Englishman, to respect English preju-
dices, and to follow English customs ; he failed
when he appealed for justice to a foreign ruler,
even to one whose authority in matters spirit-
ual was highly respected ; he failed when he at-
tempted, though probably without intending it,
to make the English Church a dependency of the
Roman see. His virtues were those of the Eng-
lishman ; his faults were those of the Roman.

III.

But we must pass now, stepping a little back
in the history, to the important, though little
known, Council of Hertford, and to the great man
who presided at it, Theodore, called of Tarsus,
archbishop of Canterbury. The place is north of
London, not far from the spot where St. Albans
points to the site of an ancient Roman city and
preserves the memory of a tradition of British
Christianity, and where a noble cathedral is
crowned with a tower made largely of the Roman
brick of Verulamium. The man \yho summoned
an assembly of the English Church to meet there
in 673, was one who united in himself the training

78 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCtt.

of the East, a mission from the great imperial
city, and the duties of a primacy in the far West.
Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury!
We are reminded of the great apostle, whose birth
and early training had been in the wealthy and
learned city on the banks of the Cydnus, and who
had carried the words of the Gospel past Rome to
the very bounds of the West. So this scholar, taught
in the secular learning of the schools of his native
city and in the theology of the Oriental Church,
having the tonsure of an eastern monk, already
beyond what men call the prime of life, had come
to Rome at a time when the English Church was
in a weakened state, when a priest sent to Rome
to be consecrated to the vacant see of Canterbury
had died there, and when Hadrian, a Roman abbot
to whom the position was offered, had declined to
accept it. On Hadrian's recommendation, Theo-
dore, not yet even a subdeacon, was designated
for the post. He was obliged to tarry at Rome
till his hair should be grown, that he might re-
ceive the Roman tonsure ; and then, having been
ordained and consecrated by the Pope himself, he
set out on his journey to Britain, accompanied by
Hadrian with instructions to see that he did not
follow the Greeks in anything that was contrary
to the faith. This precaution may have had refer-
ence to the tonsure or the Easter question or to
matters connected with the liturgy ; but it seems

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH, 79

more probable that it was feared that this theo-
logian from the East might not hold the orthodox
side in the monothelite controversy which was
then vexing the Church.

Theodore arrived in England in the year 669,
being then sixty-seven years old. The paschal
controversy had been settled by the conference at
Whitby ; the paganism of the Anglo-Saxons was
practically gone ; but the English Church was in
a depressed condition. The succession introduced
by Augustine survived only in the person of
Boniface of East Anglia, who died within a year ;
and there were but three bishops engaged in active
duties in England : Wilfrid, consecrated for York
but officiating in Kent ; Chad, occupying York
in what was held to be an irregular way as to both
consecration and jurisdiction ; and Wina, who had
been expelled from Wessex and had, by purchase,
procured for himself the see of London. It was
no small task which lay before this man of schol-
arly habits, who had spent all his life in monas-
teries in southern Europe. But Theodore, a very
gift of God to England, was equal to the work.
He made a visitation of the whole country ; he
consecrated bishops to vacant sees ; he restored
Wilfrid to York and Lindisfarne ; he supplied (as
we are told) the defects in Chad's consecration —
it is impossible to say just what the words mean
—and gave him a bishopstool at Lichfield ; and

8o THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH.

he became in a sense the sole ecclesiastical ruler
of England more than a century before it was all
subjected to the rule of one king.

In the autumn of 673, some four years and a
half after his arrival in England, Theodore sum-
moned his suffragans to meet him at Hertford.
Chad was dead ; Wilfrid was represented by depu-
ties ; Wina did not attend ; and the four bishops
who sat with Theodore appear to have been all
of his own consecration. The archbishop called
upon them to accept the definitions of the faith,
and discussed with them certain canons relating
to the organization and the administration of the
Church under a diocesan system, and to other like
matters ; then the decrees were formulated, signed,
and promulgated. It is impossible to overesti-
mate the importance of the council thus solemnly
assembled, and of the work which it did. It gave
unity and form to the English Church by provid-
ing it with a sy nodical system, from the lack of
which its organization had thus far been imper-
fect, even as compared with that of the British
Church in Wales ; it made England an ecclesiasti-
cal province, having a unity of life and work and
common interests ; and, more than that, it gave to
Englishmen the idea of a unity which afterwards
found embodiment under kings of all England.
It was, as the historians confess, " the first of all
national gatherings for general legislation,'' and

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 8 1

^' the precursor of the Witenagemots and parHa-
ments of the one indivisible imperial realm." The
acts which made the bishops heads of dioceses
rather than general missionaries, and governors in
a national Church rather than chaplains of petty
princes, had no little influence in the making of
England. From Theodore and his council at
Hertford went forth the inspiration which consoli-
dated the realm, which gave the bishops seats in
the meetings of the kings' wise men, which led to
the assembling of the Commons at Westminster,
and which has secured to England a unique place
among the Churches and the kingdoms of the
world.

Thus Theodore had done much to perfect the
organization and external form of the English
Church. He was strongly convinced himself that
it was absolutely necessary for its welfare that the
number of dioceses should be largely increased,
though as to this point he had not been able to
persuade his first council to take definite action.
But he watched his opportunities ; and he did his
best to carry out plans like those of Gregory for
the division of the land into comparatively small
dioceses. It was in consequence of resistance to
these plans that Wilfrid, as we have seen, fell into
disfavor with the archbishop, and carried his ap-
peal to Rome ; and probably for a like reason the
successor of Chad in the large diocese of Lich-

82 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH.

field was removed from his see. In 685, Theo-
dore, then eighty-three years old, was in York
and was assisted by seven bishops in consecrating
Cuthbert to Lindisfarne ; and before this time he
seems to have accomplished his wish in regard to
the increase of the number of dioceses. Five
years later, at the great age of eighty-eight, he
died, and was buried in Augustine's monastery in
his cathedral city.

As we have seen, he had organized and given
unity to the English Church, and had prepared the
way for the unity of the English nation ; and in
doing this he had secured for the Church of Eng-
land a dignified and honored place among the
Churches of Christendom. He had divided all
the southern and eastern part of the island into
permanent dioceses, largely on the lines of the
ancient kingdoms ; and he had prepared the way
for the introduction of the parochial system, which
tradition indeed ascribes to him, but which, in its
details, is certainly the work of a later generation.
Nor must we forget the impulse which he gave
to learning. Himself no mean scholar, he founded
schools of learning at Canterbury and elsewhere,
where Greek and mathematics, as well as theology
and canon law, were studied ; he left behind him
a penitential, which bears witness to the way in
which he contended with the practical evils of his
time ; and to the impulse given by his devotion

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 83

and his diligence is doubtless due much of the
missionary zeal which marks the time that fol-
lowed him. " Both his character and his work,"
writes the Bishop of Oxford, '' seem to place him
among the first and the greatest of the saints
whom God has used for the building up of the
Church and the development of the culture of the
world."

On lines thus marked out the English Church
went on with its work. We have noted how its
development preceded that of the kingdom, and
how it gave a tone to the national life rather than
received one from it. It may not be amiss to re-
mind ourselves how much this means. For al-
though, as has been said, the early bishops may
seem to have been little more than court-chaplains,
yet the Christianity of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors
was not a court-religion ; nor, on the other hand,
was the Church obliged to take up the position
of a defender of the people against the tyranny
of their rulers. There was a strong democratic
element in those little kingdoms, which indeed
the Teutonic emigrants had brought with them
from their former homes ; and politically the town
preceded the kingdom ; the realm of England,
Hke the states of New England and the nation of
the United States, was a growth from beneath.
But the Church of England was a growth from
above ; the diocese preceded the parish ; the

84 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH.

bishop had a general jurisdiction, and his clergy
were rather missionaries at large until duties were
assigned them by the bishop, acting on the nomi-
nation of the lords of manors, over their respective
parishes, the limits of which depended upon those
of the towns. And many of the bishopstools
were not in great and important places, and the
civil capital has never been the metropolitical city.
Moreover, the clergy of England have from the
first been a part of the people, and have not
formed a separate caste, with different civil in-
terests. And so it has happened that the religious
life and the religious organization of the country
have remained through many political changes,
and that the influence of bishops and clergy has
been constantly good and constantly respected.
Thus, while all the rest of Western Christendom
accepted imperialism in Church and in State,
England always claimed, and nearly always main-
tained, her independence ; the freedom of the
Church constantly defended the freedom of the
State.

IV.

Upon the completion of the organization of the
English Church there followed, as has been sug-
gested, a time of quiet growth and of devotion to
learning. The name which stands out promi-
nently now is that of Bede, of whom all succeeding

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 85

generations have spoken as the Venerable ; his
home for fifty-four years was in the monastery at
Jarrow, near the Scottish boundary. His was a
hfe of quiet diHgence, unambitious and affection-
ate, the only wish of which was to do something
which would be of use. If he studied and wrote
theology, it was that he might make the learning
of the fathers of avail for the needs of his coun-
trymen ; if he committed the history of his own
day to writing, it was that he might bear witness
to future generations of what God had done.
With a charming simplicity, an unaffected patriot-
ism, and an unfailing faith, he used his abilities
for the glory of his Master and for the good of the
Church ; and his name well stands to-day, where
he could never have expected to see it, at the very
beginning of the long line of English writers.
Few scenes are more touching than that of his
death on the eve of the Ascension-day ; as in the
neighboring chapel they were about to sing the
antiphon, " We beseech Thee leave us not or-
phans," he roused himself to dictate the last words
of his English version of St. John's Gospel, and
then, as the music of the choir reached his ears,
he began the Gloria, and '' breathed his last when
he had named the Holy Spirit." Nor may we for-
get Caedmon, the rustic Northumbrian, who be-
lieved that he was divinely taught to sing, and who
told in the simple rhythm of that day the story of

86 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH,

the Scriptures and of God's dealings with men ;
nor how the close of the life of this first of Eng-
lish poets, told by the first of English historians,
so closely resembles that which another should
soon tell of Bede himself. And, though he did
not write in the vernacular, England must ever
honor Alcuin, the great theologian of the cathe-
dral school at York, called by Charles the Great
to his court, the restorer of learning in France and
Germany, a man remarkable alike as a teacher
and as a writer. These men, and those who were
associated with them, were the crown of English
learning in the eighth century.

As a restorer of learning some two centuries
later, it may not be unfitting to speak here of
King Alfred, successor of the Egbert of Wessex
who founded the one kingdom of England. He
was, says a great historian, '' the most perfect
character in history — a saint without superstition,
a scholar without ostentation, a warrior all of
whose wars were fought in defence of his country,
a conqueror whose laurels were never stained by
cruelty, a prince never cast down by adversity,
never lifted up by insolence in the hour of tri-
umph." '' His virtue," proceeds the same writer,
" like the virtues of Washington, consisted in no
marvellous displays of superhuman genius, but in
the simple, straightforward discharge of the duty
of the moment." In all his life and his work he

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 87

was a veritable nursing-father of the Church of
England. But the Church owes him most for his
devotion to learning and his determination that
all his people should well understand what was
written in their own tongue. He himself trans-
lated and enriched Boethius and Orosius and
Bede, and gave a new tone to the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle. With him, in one sense, English his-
tory, as the history of one people, begins ; with him,
too, in an important sense, English literature has
its beginning ; and Alfred was the father of the
English people, and has a name high among Eng-
lish writers, because he was a faithful son of the
English Church.

But before Alfred's day the Danish invasions
had begun, and the quiet life of England, espe-
cially in the north, had been disturbed. In those
troubled times, great names do not rise up before
us as in the days of foundation and growth at
which we have been glancing. The time was
drawing near when a conqueror was to come
from without, and while he should not put an end
to either the political or the ecclesiastical life of
England, should yet produce a change so impor-
tant that it might well be called a revolution. Of
the preparations for the changes, which really have
not much to do with the history of the early
English Church, it is not necessary to speak here
and now.

88 THE auglo-saxOn church.

But one would be doing scant justice to that
Church who should not have a word to say in re-
gard to what was done by the missionaries whom,
in the days of her early faith, she sent out to the
heathen. We need not wonder that men went
from Kent to Essex and to Sussex, or from North-
umbria to Mercia, to tell their neighbors of the
truth which had been brought to them ; and per-
haps the labors of Wilfrid, when he preached to
the Frisians and to the men of Wessex, may
seem to us no more than the work of an energetic
but disappointed man, who felt that he must be
laboring somewhere ; in reality, however, these
were but examples of what the Church of the
Angles and the Saxons in England seems to have
been always ready to do. Willibrord, educated
at Ripon by Wilfrid and later in Ireland, filled
with a missionary inspiration, became the apostle
of the Frisians, and preached to the Danes and the
Franks, and became the Archbishop of Utrecht.
And Winfrid of Wessex, known to history as
Boniface, longing for the labors of a missionary's
life, became the apostle of Germany, worked
most indefatigably and successfully, attained great
honor and influence, gained a martyr's crown, and
left an example to those who came after him.

V.

It is well that the story of the early English
Church, which began with events so strangely

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 89

combining the romantic with the miraculous,
should end with a person about whom there
gather stories of romance and of miracle. It was
a wonderful change that took place from the time
when a Prankish princess, with her chaplain, wor-
shipped in the little St. Martin's Church at CanteF
bury, to the time when the fair minster of West
London rose in place of the humbler edifice built
by the first Christian king of Essex on Thorney
Island near the Thames ; a wonderful change from
Ethelbert the heathen lord of Kent to Edward the
sainted king of England. The light which blazed
up at one place and another among Angles and
Saxons and Jutes had illumined the whole land,
and, though dimmed by the violence of enemies,
had never ceased to burn. And now that a great
change was to take place, the devotion of the last
king of Saxon England (if one may use the
phrase) showed itself in his determination to com-
plete what he considered the great duty of his
life. For fourteen years he pushed the work on
the great abbey at Westminster, some of the
foundations and arches of which are still seen
beneath or near the more glorious building with
which a later age has replaced it. The Witan of
all England met to hallow the new minster on the
Innocents' Day of the year 1065 ; but the king,
who had appeared in public on the preceding day,
was not able to be present. Before the Christmas

90 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH.

festivities were over, he was stricken with death ;
and on the festival of the Epiphany, 1066, ** the
last royal son of Woden was borne to his grave."
It may be that Edward was not a great man or a
great ruler ; it may be that it would have been
better for his kingdom and no worse for himself
if he had devoted his energies to something be-
sides the erection of a stately church in the hope
that he might thereby secure the salvation of his
soul ; but whose heart is not touched as he thinks
of the king of England, who, on the very eve of
the Norman conquest, was laid to rest in the
shrine which he had just completed? Who that
sees the receptacle of his ashes, alone of all the
feretories of English saints, still in a place of honor
in the house of God, and that remembers the
reverence with which generations have treated it,
does not feel that, after all, there was something
appropriate in the time of the death of Edward
the Confessor and in the place of his burial? And
when we think that the great abbey is the resting-
place of a long line of kings, successors of Ethel-
bert and Alfred and Edward, though not because
they were of their blood, and that there lie under
the same roof the bones of the good and the great
and the wise who have entered into the labors of
the good and great and wise of the earlier days —
when we recall the constant worship which has
been offered in that hallowed spot, and how holy

THE ANGLO-SAXON CITURCir. 9 1

men have stood in their place to guide the devo-
tions and instruct the souls of a Christian English
people through all these centuries — when we see
the glorious chapter-house, so long the place of
meeting of England's Commons, and the palace
of Westminster hard by which now supplies its
place, where are carried out the principles of gov-
ernment which found expression in the council at
Hertford and in the assemblies in which the kings
consulted with their bishops and their lords —
who does not feel that the history of the earlier
England fitly passes at Westminster with hardly
a break into the history of the later England, from
St. Edward the English Confessor to William the
Norman Conqueror ?

I have thus ventured to trace out the history of
the Anglo-Saxon Church by reminding you of
Augustine at Canterbury, of Wilfrid at Whitby,
of Theodore at Hertford, of Bede at Jarrow, and
of King Edward at Westminster. The scenes at
which we have looked may have served to remind
us how archbishops and kings, missionaries and
scholars, monks and statesmen, worked together
in the making of the Church of England. And
the whole of the period which belongs to our sub-
ject this evening is full of like events, less promi-
nent perhaps, but no less really affecting the cen-
turies that were to follow. At times the story

92 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH.

may suggest to us that good men often do things
which call for an apology, and that it may not be
well to criticise too closely the characters and the
actions of some of those whom we honor with
the title of saints ; but on the other hand we
cannot refrain from paying the tribute of rever-
ential respect to those simple-hearted and faithful
kings and bishops, for whom religion was the
whole of life, and who gladly served the Lord
Christ from love of Him Who had saved them.
And it was — who can doubt it ? — because of the
completeness of their devotion that their " work
of faith and labour of love and patience of hope "
were so evidently accepted and blessed. As we
read Homer with an ever-increasing sense of the
beauty of " the dawn of history's morning," as
there always breathes from the verses of Chaucer
the sweet freshness of the spring of poetry, so as
we follow the chronicles of the days when Chris-
tianity was brought into the England and to the
Englishmen of history, we get much of the inspira-
tion of that loving devotion and patient faith
which we hardly dare hope to find reproduced in
our own times. We see our holy religion accepted
by warlike Teutonic tribes, without the interven-
tion of force or arms, simply because it was quiet
and self-denying and pure ; we see it changing their
temper towards the Britons whom they had driven
from their homes, because they had, though from

rilE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 93

another source, received the faith of their con-
quered foes ; we see it making the numerous king-
doms of Angles and Saxons and Jutes into one
nation, the national unity being based upon the
ecclesiastical ; we see the Britons drawn with the
EngHsh into the visible unity of the Catholic
Church of the West ; and we see the Church of
England maintaining her rights as a branch of the
Church Catholic against the already immoderate
claims of the see of Rome. And we see the light
of learning which had flashed from the emerald
plains of Ireland and from the rocks of lona, shin-
ing now from England and dispelling the darkness
which had begun to settle on portions of the con-
tinent. And thus we see the Enghsh Church,
strong in faith and wise in holy learning, able to
bear the shocks which were to come upon it and
to defend the sacred deposit of faith and order
which it had received. It is indeed no ordinary
history which we have been studying, as we have
watched the building of a plain but solid sub-
structure, which rests firmly upon the one founda-
tion than which man can lay no other, and which
supports in safety a stately pile that ministers to
the needs of human souls and echoes with the
unceasing praises of Almighty God.

Zhc IRorman periob of tbc lenolieb
Cbuaix

LECTURE III.

BY ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN, D.D.,

Professor in the Episcopal Theological School, in Cambridge,

Mass.

THE NORMAN PERIOD OF THE ENGLISH
CHURCH,

The Norman people came to England with
William the Conqueror in 1066. Their first ap'-
pearance in Europe dates from the middle of the
ninth century, or some two hundred years earlier
than their conquest of England, They came from
the Scandinavian countries in the north, what are
now the kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden and Nor-
way. They were a fierce and warlike people,
whose empire was the sea. At a time when, to
the other people of Europe, the ocean was a bar-
rier of separation, it was to the Normans a high-
way and channel of communication. Leaving
their homes in the north, in the ninth century
they had gone into France and taken possession
of that province now known as Normandy. In
the early part of the eleventh century they had
wandered into the south, where they had made

97

98 THE NORMAN PERIOD

themselves masters of southern Italy, including
Sicily. In their love of conquest they had also
discovered and settled Iceland, they had planted
colonies in Greenland, and by some it is believed
that they had landed in North America, and had
even made some settlement on the coast of New
England.*

The Normans were a Teutonic people, and
therefore closely related by blood to the English
and the Germans. But close as may be the race
connection, the difference between them and the
other Teutonic races is great and striking. Their
peculiarities are brought out most clearly in
France, where they had been settled for two
hundred years before the conquest of England.
They had taken on the refinements of civilization,
as civilization then was ; they threw themselves

* It is a mistake, however, to speak of the Northmen as
having discovered America. The word discovery in its true
historical use applies only to Europe in the sixteenth century
— to the age and people which were waiting to carry on the
advancing civilization. A discovery also implies some con-
scious, intelligent purpose, not an accidental stumbling upon
a territory, which incident was, moreover, followed by no
result. If it were right to speak of the Northmen as having
discovered America, it would be still more correct to speak
of the Indians as its first discoverers; and then it might as
well be admitted that it was never discovered at all. It was
always known to some people or race as far back as history
reaches.

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH.

99

into the life of the continent, and whatever was
in vogue at the time they appropriated as their
own, and carried out to its full development. Just
as they had conquered for themselves a home
in countries which did not belong to them, so they
also entered into the life of the age, accepting
its features, its ideals, its lines of movement with
as genuine an enthusiasm as if they had originated
them from their own consciousness. They be-
came the most devoted adherents of the papacy
to be found in Europe. In Italy, so great was
their reverence for the Bishop of Rome, they
formed a sort of body-guard to the pope, taking
an oath to defend the papacy against all its foes.
Hildebrand found them most useful allies in the
maintenance of his policy for subjecting the States
of Europe to the obedience of the Church. The
Normans being, as it were, a people without a
home, were emancipated from local or national
restrictions ; they were cosmopolitans, cherishing
what was large and universal in scope or ten-
dency, with an admiration for power and splendor
without reference to its national bearings. They
were an imaginative people, instinctively giving
themselves up to the cultivation of art, which
then assumed the phase of architecture. The
cathedrals, the monasteries, the churches which
rose in Normandy may be regarded as expressing
their reHgious and imaginative genius. More

lOO THE NORMAN PERIOD

than any other part of Europe did Normandy
abound in ecclesiastical foundations after the
model of the rising Gothic style, which there
reached its fullest growth, producing monuments
of beauty which are unexcelled.

When the crusades began in the end of the
eleventh century, whose object was the chivalrous
attempt to recover the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusa-
lem from the hand of the infidel Moslem, it was
the Normans who were foremost in responding to
the call of the pope, and who first planted them-
selves as conquerors in the sacred city. ■ And,
indeed, throughout the crusades, it is either the
Normans or peoples of the Latin races, not Ger-
mans or Eiiglish^ who are chiefly identified with
this vast movement in the interest of an ideal
purpose. Let us add that the Normans were a
peculiarly religious people in what are called the
ages of faith. Here, too, they showed the same
disposition as in other things. They accepted the
forms of the monastic life as expressing the high-
est type of sanctity and devotion. Wherever they
went, they built magnificent monasteries as they
built magnificent churches, every great feudal
lord, it is said, planting a monastic establishment
upon his domain. The Normans easily subscribed
the monastic vows of chastity, poverty and obe-
dience, sacrificing that element of being or exist-
ence which we call vitality or vigorous personality,

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. lot

as readily as they also sacrificed home and nation-
ality in the love of what was foreign, or splendid,
or cosmopolitan.

Here lay also their weakness. Nowhere did
they build up a nation. It has been their fate to
be merged in other peoples; they have disap-
peared in Italy ; in France and in England they
have been fused with the original population.
The test of a people's vitality is seen in the re-
tention of their language ; Germany and England
have shown the purity and tenacity of their orig-
inal stock by retaining their language, despite all
foreign influences. The Normans gave up their
own language for the language of the people
they conquered. Not only did they fail to build
up a nation ; they weakened by their emigration
the countries which were their original homes,
so that Denmark and Sweden and Norway lost
the future which might have been theirs, and have
never played an important part in the history of
Europe.

Such were the people who came over into Eng-
land from Normandy in France, with William the
Conqueror in the year 1066. A greater contrast
than that between the English — the Anglo-Sax-
ons, as they are generally called — and the Nor-
man conquerors it is hard to imagine. Hitherto
England had taken little part in the great move-
ments going on upon the Continent. The insu-

I02 THE NORMAN PERIOD

lated character of the country showed itself in the
insulation and exclusiveness which marks the char-
acter of the people. England pursued its own
way through the early Middle Ages, unaffected
by the changes in France, or Germany, or Italy.
She knew but little of the ambition of popes, or
the methods by which the Bishop of Rome was
recasting into legislation the moral sentiment
which went forth toward his person as the Vicar
of Christ upon earth. Church and State in Eng-
land during the Anglo-Saxon period, were in har-
monious relations. No one was then asking the
momentous question of a later age, whether the
Church should rule the State, or the State the
Church ; it was hard to tell them apart, as when
the dignitaries of Church and State met in one
common assembly, legislating alike for the Ec-
clesia or the nation. There was a form of mo-
nasticism in England, but it was of the mildest
type, not adhering to the Benedictine rule. The
clergy also were for the most part married, nor
did their conception of the Christian ideal lead to
the exaggeration of celibacy, as the equivalent of
chastity. There was, in a word, nothing cosmo-
politan about the English ; they were then, as
they have been ever since, a practical people,
cherishing no visionary schemes, not endowed
with a glowing imagination, rude in their archi-
tecture, their prevailing sin, it is often remarked,

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 103

being gluttony — a type of pleasure which they
indulged in at their numerous and hospitable
feasts.

All this was changed by the coming of the Nor-
mans. The conquest was so complete that Eng-
land now wheels into line as one of the papal
states of Europe, accepting more entirely than
almost any other country the authority of the
Bishop of Rome, taking on foreign fashions, and
embroiled in the politics of Christendom. The
change was easily effected. William, the Nor-
man conqueror, had received the approval and
even the blessing of the pope on his attempt to
subjugate the English people, and to take pos-
session of their crown, sailing for England, it is
said, with a banner blessed for the undertak-
ing by Alexander, the Bishop of Rome. It is
unnecessary to recount here the details of the
story of his conquest. The resistance which he
met with from the English people was overcome
by a fierce and cruel determination to make the
country entirely his own. He assumed from the
first the feudal principle that all the land belonged
to him by sovereign right ; he proceeded at once
to dispossess its English owners and to assign
their estates to his Norman followers. Although
the process was a gradual one, it went on, until
the ejection of a great nation of landowners from
their land was accomplished. Nor was all this

I04 THE NORMAN PERIOD

effected without enormous suffering. '* No book
in the world," it has been said, *' covers so huge a
mass of misery, thinly disguised under its cold,
curt phraseology, as the great terrier of the Nor-
man king's English estate," to which the English
people gave the name of Domesday. A Norman
nobility now displaced the Englishmen of high
rank, who sank into the lower grades of tenants ;
the Episcopal seats throughout England were filled
with Norman bishops, with only one exception ;
the English Archbishop of Canterbury was re-
moved, and in his room was placed an Itahan.
Lanfranc, who came from the monastery of Bee,
in Normandy. There were two races in the land,
the English and the French, as the Normans
called themselves. The Normans despised the
Anglo-Saxons, looking down with contempt upon
their rude and narrow ways, while the English or
Saxons returned their contempt with bitter hat-
red In consequence of the frequent assassina-
tions of the Normans, a law was framed which
made the local hundred responsible for every mur-
der if the murderer was not found, while every
murdered man was held to be a Norman, unless
he could be proved to be an Englishman.

This was the age when the great castles were
erected all over England. The traveller who
admires to-day their beauty as a feature of the
English landscape does not trouble himself to re-

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. lOj

call their origin. The hard and cruel necessities
of a former age become the luxuries and play-
things of later generations. These castles were
built by the Normans in self-defence ; they domi-
nated the country around ; they were the strong-
holds of Norman tyranny and rapine. Horrors
were perpetrated in their dungeons which never
saw the light of day.

"Every powerful man," says the last English chronicler,
"built his castle, and they filled the land full of castles.
They heavily afflicted the poor men of the land with castle-
building, and when the castles were built they filled them
with devils and evil men. Then, both by night and day,
they took the men they supposed to possess any goods,
country men and women, and threw them into prison, to ob-
tain their gold and silver and torture them with unutterable
torture, for never were martyrs tortured as they were. . . .
They were constantly levying tributes on the towns; and
when the wretched men had no more to give, they destroyed
and burnt the towns; and well might you travel all day and
never find a man settled in a town or land cultivated, so that
corn was dear ; of flesh and cheese and butter none was there
in the land. Wretched men starved of hunger. Some went
begging through the country who formerly had been rich
men. Some fled the country. Never was greater wretched-
ness in the land and never did heathen men cause worse
evils than these did. So that men said openly that Christ
and His saints were asleep."

The old England came to an end under the Nor-
man kings, and these are the last words of the
Anglo-Saxon chronicler.

I06 THE NORMAN PERIOD

The Norman lords built their castles and the
Norman bishops raised their great cathedrals.
These wonderful structures, like the castles, have
now become almost a constituent part of English
scenery. The English nation has forgotten the
misery of their origin. Even nature itself has ac-
cepted them, as if man, in rivalry with the work
of the Creator, had done something of which the
heavens, that look down upon them, might be
proud. The cathedrals of the Norman bishops,
even the churches in towns and villages, the splen-
did monasteries, are relics of the Norman conquest.
The older churches of the Anglo-Saxon period
were destroyed to make place for the grander
architecture ; only a few remain to tell us what
they were like ; they were despised by the Nor-
mans because they were small. But even with
all their beauty and splendor and vast proportions,
these things are not the typical utterance of the
English mind. Even if we forget their origin,
Durham, and Canterbury, and Salisbury, and
Winchester still remind us of the age when Eng-
land became for the first time in her history a
constituent part of Roman Catholic Christendom,
gradually learning to forget the simplicity of her
earlier Church, in the grandeur and comprehen-
siveness of the papal empire.

Other features of the period might be inter-
esting and instructive to study, especially the fill-

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 1 07

ing up of England with the various branches of
monasticism, which the foreign invaders brought
with them from France or Italy. For it is a cir-
cumstance not without its significance, that no
great monastic order has ever originated in Eng-
land. The Cistercian order, the order of Clugny,
the order of the Carthusians or of the Carmel-
ites, at a later time the mendicant orders, Fran-
ciscan and Dominican, none of these sprang from
the rehgious genius or aspiration of the English
Church ; they were importations from Italy or
France or Spain. Their monastic houses were
endowed with all the imaginative beauty of the
Norman mind ; their sites reveal a wonderful ap-
preciation of the beauty of nature, and the Eng-
lish people are still proud of their ruins. Fur-
ness and Fountains and Melrose and hundreds of
others, we may admit, did good in their day ; for
the Normans as monks were a better people than
the lay lords who built the castles. But these in-
stitutions are not indigenous to English soil;
they do not reflect the characteristic religious life
or purpose of the English people. The time came
when the English nation swept them away, while
hardly a voice was heard to protest in their behalf.
Of all these foreign institutions and methods,
one general remark holds true — they enlarged the
spirit of the English Church. There were in them
seeds of evil, but there were also seeds of good.

I08 THE NORMAN PERIOD

Feudalism, for example, which was introduced
into England with the Normans, though in a
modified shape, cultivated a spirit of loyalty to an
over-lord which, when transferred to Christ, be-
comes the source of what is most beautiful and
vital in Christian piety. The customs of chivalry,
also brought in by the Normans, elevated the tone
of manners, raised the ideal of woman, cultivated
the sense of personal honor, which forms not only
an integral element in the character of what we
call the gentleman, but an indispensable element
in all moral culture. Influences Hke these lifted
the Church of England out of its natural exclu-
siveness. Left to itself the English Church might
have become a stunted, narrow institution, feebly
reflecting the spirit of Christianity, feebly nourish-
ing the life of the nation, — not unlike the Russian
Church of to-day, which in all its history has re-
ceived no life from without, and sits weak and
powerless at the feet of the Czar.

Of these institutions and ideals which are
foreign to the typical English mind, the most im-
portant is the papacy. It was the leading conse-
quence of the Norman invasion that England was
made an organic part of the Latin or Roman
Catholic Church, accepting the headship of the
pope over the State as well as over the Church.
How the process of its conquest by the pope was
accomplished, what were the effects on the English

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 109

Church and nation, how at last this yoke was
thrown off, is the story I propose to tell.

Before the Norman conquest, and during the
Anglo-Saxon age, there existed in England, as on
the continent, a feeling of respect and deference
for the Bishop of Rome. He was regarded as the
successor of St. Peter, and St. Peter was believed
to have been the head or prince of the apostles. So
early as the eighth century English bishops had
begun to take an oath of allegiance to the Bishop
of Rome. Indeed, the first bishop who ever took
such an oath was an Englishman, St. Boniface,
known as the missionary apostle of Germany.
When he left England for Germany to convert
the new races from heathenism, he felt the need
of some centre, some responsible head to whom
he might offer his Christian conquests, and thus
connect them with a larger Church than the local
body which he represented. This act of Boniface
may be regarded as one illustration out of many,
of the working of that moral sentiment of rev-
erence for the Bishop of Rome which existed
among all the people of western Europe.

But the Latin Church has never been content
with moral sentiments. They seem to the Latin
mind vague, intangible things, until they have
been transmuted into the form of law. During
the eighth and ninth centuries, or in the age

I lO THE NORM AN PERIOD

when Charlemagne was sole ruler of the new
western empire, the process went on apace, of con-
verting this sentiment of reverence for Rome into
legal statutes, by means of which the bishops of
Rome might govern the Church in accordance
with what they believed to be the will of God.
Rome was in the habit of gratifying the sentiment
of reverence toward her ancient see, by present-
ing to the bishops, on their consecration, the pal-
lium, as a token of her recognition of their office,
— a badge of their relationship through Rome to
the universal Church. In that confused and strug-
gling age, when the nations had not yet been
born, and in the isolation of the peoples no other
bond of unity existed, the presentation of the
pallium was a glimpse into a larger world, reveal-
ing a grander Church behind the local Churches
in the various kingdoms or states of western
Europe.

When the bishops who received the pallium
took the oath of allegiance to Rome, a great step
forward had been accomplished in the process of
subjecting the Church to the will of Rome. But
still, the oath was a vague one, and meant little
or much as any bishop might choose to interpret
it. In order to give the bishop's oath any real
import, it was necessary to define by legal statute
how much it meant. The popes who inherited
the spirit of the old Roman law, were at no loss to

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 1 1 I

determine the form which the legislation should
take. It was necessary, as they thought, for the
government of the Church, that the papacy should
constitute a court of final appeal in all grave
cases in which the bishops might be concerned.
The bishops were encouraged to appeal to Rome
under the conviction that their causes would be
more justly adjudged, than if they were decided
by some aichbishop, or metropolitan, or were re-
ferred to the king's court.

But how to accomplish this result was the dif-
ficulty. In those days, men did not reason upon
the subject and enact a law because it was in ac-
cordance with justice or right. It was necessary
to show, if possible, that such had always been
the law of the Church from the time of the
apostles. If the origin of law could be buried in
the mists of antiquity, beyond which no eye
could reach, then the reverence for it could be
based upon a divine right which none would dis-
pute.

There were those in the ninth century who were
equal to the emergency. It is sad to relate that
the papacy — the only high and universal ideal of
the middle ages — was driven to build up its legal
power over the Church by the most stupendous
fraud which is known to history. There appeared
suddenly in Germany, about the middle of the
ninth century, a code of laws for the government

1 1 2 THE NORMAN PERIOD

of the Church, in which it was made to appear
that the popes had possessed the right of hearing
appeals from the very time of the apostles. The
first bishops of Rome, after St. Peter, were there
represented as claiming this power in explicit
decretals ; and as they stood on the threshold of
the apostolic age, and embodied its spirit, the
inference followed that the appellate jurisdiction
of Rome rested upon divine right, eternal and
irrefragable as the law of Christ. The forgery was
complete and successful. No one denied or dis-
puted its authenticity ; no one was learned enough
to expose the falsehoods or anachronisms with
which the '' forged decretals " abounded ; the popes
accepted them as a law for the justification of
their action.

It might be an interesting question to discuss
what would have been the fortunes of the papacy
without the forged decretals. It is doubtful if its
history could have been the same. In this age
it is hard to make allowance for institutions which
call themselves divine and which yet make use of
deception to accomplish their ends. We need not
ask in this case where the responsibility of the
falsehood lies. Of course, primarily upon the
monk who, in the silence and secrecy of his cell,
forged the document which received universal
credence upon its appearance. Of the inner his-
tory of the forgery we know but little, nor is it

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 1 1 3

certain that the popes knew it to be a fraud.
This pretended legislation fell in so naturally and
easily with what they believed ought to hav^e
been the law of the Church, that they may be
pardoned for the willing credulity with which they
accepted and acted upon its principles. And
Europe for the most part was also in the same
situation.

Two hundred years had passed away since the
forged decretals appeared and the bishops of Rome
had made little or no progress toward the accom-
plishment of their ideal vision. They desired to
see the Church in Europe one vast organization,
governed by a responsible head, who should be
strong enough to protect the clergy everwhere in
the exercise of their sacred functions, strong
enough to resist encroachments upon their rights,
courageous to speak for truth and righteousness
despite the opposition of all earthly powers.
In the eleventh century, the age of the Norman
conquest, there rose up a pope, in some respects
the master mind of his age — a man who would
have been famous in any age. Hildebrand, or by
his ecclesiastical title Pope Gregory VII., con-
trolled the policy of Rome for thirty years before
he assumed the tiara. It is supposed that William
the Conqueror had papal permission to make the
conquest of England through Hildebrand's influ-
ence, and that the reigning pope was merely his

1 14 THE NORMAN PERIOD

Spokesman. Hildebrand deserves to be called
great, because he read his age so clearly. He saw
that the Church could never become an universal
Christian empire, a theocracy accomplishing the
will of God on earth, unless the civil power, the
princes, the kings and emperors were first made
subject to its control. Everywhere he looked he
saw that the State stood in the way of the Church.
Because the Church had grown rich in lands and
revenues, it was a constant temptation to kings
and princes to use the Church and its endow-
ments in order to secure civil ends. It seemed
to Hildebrand as if the Church were desecrated
and robbed of its divine strength, by having any
connection with the State. As he reasoned on
the subject, the spiritual was higher and more im-
portant than the secular or worldly, the ecclesi-
astical interests were eternal while those of the
State were temporal. The policy outlined in his
far-seeing mind was a stupendous effort for one
man to attempt. He saw that the Church must
first be separated from the State, owning no con-
nection with or allegiance to the civil power ; and
then that the States of Europe must be made
subject to the direct power of God on earth, as
represented by the Bishop of Rome. It was
another mark of the greatness of Hildebrand that
he believed in the success of an effort to accom-
plish this vast revolution. Hildebrand combined

OP THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 1 1 5

the capacity of the most astute of poHticians, with
the mood of a divine dreamer, who Hves not for
himself, but for God. In his words, contained in
the bull by which he excommunicated the German
emperor, we have revealed to us the extent of his
ambitious purpose : ** Come, now, I pray you, O
most Holy Father, and princes (Peter and Paul),
that all the world may know that if you are able
to bind and loose in heaven, you are able on earth
to take away or to give to each according to his
merits, empires, kingdoms, duchies, marquisates,
counties and the possessions of all men." Hilde-
brand was sincere in his belief that this power had
been committed to him, and that to resist his will
was to defy the authority of God. He stands at
the beginning of a new era in Europe, the age of
the papal supremacy, a dominion which endured
for 300 years. With this age coincides the Nor-
man period in the history of the Church of Eng-
land. It shall be in England that we follow the
popes, until they achieve their purpose.

The first step which was taken toward sepa-
rating the Church from the State was the enforce-
ment of clerical celibacy — an ideal of the Middle
Ages which had not yet been realized. So long
as the clergy were married they would be inter-
ested in the fortunes of the State and dependent
upon the well-being of the State for the advancement
of themselves and their children ; but a celibate cler-

1 1 6 THE NORMAN PERIOD

%y, havincj no interest in the State, would become
devoted exclusively to the Church. Up to this time
the clergy in England had for the most part been
married. Hildebrand's decree of celibacy was car-
ried out against their will ; and though there must
have been more exceptions to its enforcement in
England than elsewhere, it became the law of the
English Church. The Norman conqueror in this
respect sympathized with the papal policy, as did
also his Norman followers. They brought with
them to England the idea prevailing upon the
Continent, that duty to the Church demanded
this sacrifice of all who ministered at its altars.

There was also another law which Hildebrand
promulgated, and which he was not so successful
in enforcing, at least in England — a law the pro-
mulgation of which gave rise to a long and violent
controversy, known as the Investiture Contro-
versy. We shall better understand its nature by
following the course of events in England.

Although William the Conqueror had procured
the approval of the pope for the conquest of Eng-
land, yet after he was established there he did not
propose that the pope should interfere with his
authority. The pope also was prudent, and re-
frained from interfering with William, while he
violated the law, for whose infraction he dared
to excommunicate the Emperor of Germany.
The theory on which William governed England

OF THE EISTGLTSFT CHURCH. \ \ y

Is known as Feudalism. It assumed that all the
lands of the country belonged to the king. The
king had given these lands to his subjects on cer-
tain conditions, among the foremost of which was
the understanding that the tenant or vassal should
aid the king in his wars, by furnishing a certain
contingent of soldiers equipped for his army.
The great question of the hour was whether the
Church lands should also be held on the same ten-
ure. Were the bishops and the heads of great
monasteries, the king's men, and were they also
bound in return for lands which they held, to ren-
der the vassal's service and to aid the monarch
with their revenues? If the spiritual nobility,
like the secular lords, were vassals to the king,
then it followed that lands and other property
which had been given to the Church still belonged
primarily to the king. It was the king's pleasure
to allot these lands to the Church on fixed condi-
tions, and these conditions implied that the arch-
bishop or bishop should do homage to the king
in order to be invested with the dignities and rev-
enues of their sees. It must be remembered that
at this time in England the Church held nearly
one-third of all the lands of the kingdom. The
king would have felt impoverished and unable to
carry on his constant wars, or to reward his sub-
jects who had done him service, had one-third of
his territory been alienated from his control.

1 1 8 THE NORMAN PERIOD

William the Conqueror had no doubt upon the
question. He claimed the Church's lands as be-
longing to the crown. He regarded the bishops
as great feudatories quite as truly as the secular
lords. He proceeded to put his friends and ser-
vants in possession of the lands of the Church
without much regard to their spiritual fitness for
the position. The bishops became courtiers,
holding by feudal tenure, and the only distinction
between them and the secular lords was the at-
taching of what were called spiritual duties to the
conditions on which they were entitled to their
ofifice and revenues. But the qualification for
spiritual duties came last. In the impressive cer-
emonial by which, as Mr. Freeman has shown, the
bishops qualified for their position, first came the
act Oi homage to the king, in which the bishop
designate, kneeling before the king and placing
his hands in the king's hands, swore to be an
obedient vassal to his overlord. The act of hom-
age was followed by the enthronement or investi.
ture, when the king presented him with the staff
and ring as the symbols of his office. After these
ceremonies he was spiritually qualified in the act
of consecration by bishops who represented the
Church's part in the transaction. It shows how
great the change is which has since taken place,
that in the present method of making a bishop
in the English Church, consecration by the bish-

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 1 19

ops comes first, then follows the enthronement or
investiture with the dignities and revenues of the
see, and lastly comes the act of homage to the
throne.

It was Hildebrand or Pope Gregory VII. who
attempted to overcome this doctrine that the
high dignitaries of the Church were the king's
men. He regarded the property of the Church
as belonging solely to God, and to the pope as the
head of His Church in the world. The bishops
were primarily the pope's men and not the king's
men ; they must be invested with the rights of
their office by religious authority and not by the
civil power. For the king to claim the Church's
lands was robbery and sacrilege. For the bishop
to allow himself to be invested with ring and staff
by the secular power was to be guilty of simony,
as when Simon Magus, in the apostles' time,
sought to purchase the gifts of God with money.

Thus arose the great controversy about inves-
titure, which lasted for more than a generation,
and which finally ended in a compromise ; for
there was right on both sides of the question, and
the papacy was unable to carry out Hildebrand's
decree without some qualification of its sweeping
purpose. Hildebrand had excommunicated and
humihated at Canossa the Emperor of Germany
for daring to invest his bishops with the symbols
of their office. But William the Conqueror was

120 THE NORMAN PERIOD

at a distance, strongly entrenched in his posses-
sion, and Hildebrand thought it imprudent to in-
terfere. It would be unwise, even for him, to
have more than one quarrel at a time with the
monarchs of Europe. So William was left to his
own devices. He filled up the sees of England at
his pleasure, offering them as rewards to his faith-
ful servants, who accepted them as a feudal tenure
with their spiritual duties attached as a sort of
secondary consideration.

William the Conqueror died in 1087. He was
succeeded by his son, William H., or William
Rufus, as he is generally called, who not only fol-
lowed his father's policy in the matter of investi-
ture, but went beyond his father in his claims of
authority over the Church. The first William
had lived on terms of amity with his archbishop
Lanfranc, and both had labored together in the in-
terest of consolidating the English nation. Will-
iam the Conqueror, like David among the kings
of Israel, had known how to adjust himself with
the prophetic office as represented in the great see
at Canterbury. Lanfranc, although an Italian,
was a true yoke-fellow to his king, laboring with
him for the strengthening of the kingly authority,
and not neglectful of the well-being of the Church.
We can hardly speak of England yet as a. nation,
but William and Lanfranc were unconsciously im-
pelled by that subtle leaven of influence which

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 12 1

had been an active force in earlier history, and
which was destined to work until England should
become foremost among the nations of the earth.
We are chiefly impressed, as we study this period
of English history, with the power and triumphs
of the papacy, as it moved steadily on to the ful-
filment of its purpose. And yet the real interest
lies, not in this temporary sway of a theocratic
emperor of Christendom, but in the silent and im-
perceptible steps by which the conquered English
were assimilated to their Norman conquerors, un-
til they became one people ; the most absorbing
study is to watch the process by which the Eng-
lish spirit vindicates itself against all foreign influ-
ences. And at last the English nation has come
to the birth, richer and fuller; for the invasions and
humiliations which it has undergone.

But we must pause yet for a few moments
longer upon this great duel between the English
throne and the Roman pope before the utterance
of the national consciousness is heard. "^

William Rufus was inferior to his father not
only as a king but as a man. He has been called
the worst, the most thoroughly wicked king who

* There are several lives of Anselm, in which the story of
his struggle with the crown is related ; among others those
of Dean Church, Rule, Hasse and Remusat. The best ac-
count, to which I am chiefly indebted, is given in Freeman's
History of Wtllzam Rufus, Vol. I.

122 THE NORMAN PERIOD

ever wore the English crown. It is sometimes
questioned whether there were any skepticisms in
these ages of faith. But William Rufus was not
only skeptical about religion, he was also a blas-
phemer and a hater of God, determined, as he ex-
pressed it, to have his vengeance upon God for
all the evil that he suffered at His hands. He was
not only this, but he was a man of the foulest life,
introducing nameless vices into England which
had been before unknown, except in the east and
in the degraded times of the Roman Empire. It
was a strange coincidence that such a man should
be associated with an Archbishop of Canterbury
like Anselm, the greatest saint of his age, the one
man of all others who penetrated most deeply
in that time into the higher mysteries of the
Christian faith.

Anselm, too, was a foreigner, a native of Italy
who, wandering away from his native village in
Piedmont, had turned up in Normandy at the
Monastery of Bee. When Lanfranc, its former
abbot, was promoted to the See of Canterbury,
Anselm had succeeded him as the head of the
monastery. He had been known and liked by
William the Conqueror, who had the gift, it is
said, of discerning and loving men who were good
at heart. In this way William Rufus had come to
be acquainted with Anselm. If there was one re-
deeming trait in the character of William Rufus

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. I23

it was his reverence for the memory of his father.
This fondness of his father for Anselm had some-
thing to do with his becoming the Primate of all
England.

Anselm is generally known in Church history as
the greatest theologian of the time, as a master in
dialectics, and the founder of what is called the
Scholastic philosophy. He is not generally asso-
ciated with England in our minds, when we think
of him in his theological and philosophical capacity.
Perhaps England has no right to claim him as her
own in this respect. For great as has been the
history of the English Church, it has not been her
mission to produce theologians of the highest or-
der. Each nation has its special calling in the
vineyard of God. It has been the work of Ger-
many to produce great theologians rather than to
create an ecclesiastical organization. The call of
England has lain in the direction of building up
a great national Church, — the reflex of the spirit-
ual life of its people. As England gave birth to
no great monastic orders, so her greatest theolo-
gian was also an importation from abroad, deriving
his motive and his culture from a foreign source.
But his connection with the English Church is
nevertheless a close one, and the story of his rela-
tion to the line of our history is interesting in the
highest degree.

124 ^^^ NORMAN PERIOD

William Rufus not only accepted his father's
doctrine, that the lands of the Church belonged
primarily to the crown, but he made a further ap-
plication of the principle which shocked the moral
sense of the people. Claiming for his own the
lands and revenues of the sees and monasteries,
he declared that it rested with his mere pleasure
when they should be filled after the death of their
occupants, or whether they should be filled at all.
In case they were filled, it should be by those who
were willing by rich presents and easy terms to
make it an object for him to do so. After the
death of Archbishop Lanfranc he allowed the See
of Canterbury to remain vacant for five years, as-
serting his purpose to be his own archbishop.
During these years he rented the lands of Canter-
bury to his own creatures, on his own terms, and
appropriated to his own use the revenues. It
seems as if he would have maintained this attitude
throughout his reign, had he not been taken with
a grievous sickness, which threatened his life and
brought him to repentance. Under these circum-
stances he appointed Anselm, who happened to be
in England at the time, as Archbishop of Canter-
bury, in the year 1093.

When Anselm became primate of all England,
he did not share in the views which Hildebrand
was proclaiming, that the Church should be sepa-
rated from the State, and the State be subordi-

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 1 25

nated to ecclesiastical rule. He stipulated with
the king that he would take the office, which he
did not seek and did not want, on condition that
the king would restore to the Church the posses-
sions which had belonged to it in the days of his
predecessor, Lanfranc. To this condition the
king in his softened mood consented. Other
conditions also Anselm had proposed, to which it
is not so clear that the king assented — that the
king would take him for his spiritual adviser, and
also that he would recognize Pope Urban, who
was then struggling with a rival claimant for the
papal throne. So Anselm was made archbishop
in the usual way, doing homage to the king and
swearing obedience, receiving the ring and staff as
symbols of his investiture with the possessions of
his see, and then, lastly, consecrated by the bish-
ops in order to his qualification for his spiritual
functions.

Anselm had foreseen the difficulties which he
would encounter in the execution of his office un-
der such a king as William Rufus. He made use
of an illustration which clearly shows how the two
offices of king and primate then stood related to
each other in the popular mind. ** If," he re-
marked, *' the field of the Church of England is
to be cultivated, two of the strongest oxen must
draw the plough, — the king and the archbishop,
the former by his worldly authority and rule, the

126 THE NORMAN PERIOD

latter by spiritual instruction and guidance." He
compared himself to an old and feeble sheep
yoked to an ox in all the wildness of youth, and
there would be danger that the ox would drag the
sheep through hedges of thorns and brambles, un-
til the lambs of the flock had perished. The sig-
nificance of the illustration lies in this, — that An-
selm allowed to the king an equal share with him-
self in the cultivation of the field of the Church of
England. All this was soon to be changed, and
Anselm was to become the agent of the change.
I dwell upon the story because in it may be seen
the transition of the popular sentiment by which
the pope became supreme in England.

The repentance of William Rufus was not of
long duration. When he recovered from his ill-
ness he fell back again to his evil ways. He re-
fused to listen to Anselm, who remonstrated with
him in his capacity as spiritual adviser ; he robbed
the Church in order to find means to carry on his sin-
ful pleasures ; he refused to fill the monasteries with
abbots who would promote discipline ; he neglected
to appoint bishops and claimed the revenues of
the vacant sees. When Anselm urged him to
recognize Urban as pope he declined, for he
wanted no interference from that source with his
policy. At last, when Anselm asked permission
to go to Rome to get the pallium, the token of
his recognition by the Bishop of Rome, William

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 127

refused his consent. It shows the character of the
king, that, perceiving how Anselm had right on
his side in this request, he finally sent to Rome
secretly, recognized Urban and had the pallium
brought to England by a papal messenger. At
first it was proposed that Anselm should receive
it at the hands of the king. When he declined
to do this the pallium was laid on the altar of the
great church at Canterbury, from whence Anselm
took it with his own hands.

There was now a state of open rupture between
the archbishop and the king. The king showed
his displeasure in ways that annoyed his yoke-
fellow and hindered his performance of his spirit-
ual duty. He sent out of the country the friends
and sympathizers of Anselm. He steadily refused
to allow any synod to be held for the reformation
of manners and discipline. Under these circum-
stances it is not strange that the soul of Anselm
went through an inward transition which was
typical of an impending revolution. He became
hopeless of the situation and looked away from
the kingdom for relief. He now began to muse
upon the pope and his relation to the universal
Church. ''Rome seen at a distance seemed pure
and holy; its pontiff seemed the one embodiment
of right and law, the one shadow of God left upon
the earth in a world of force and falsehood and
wrong." It was a circumstance of deep signifi-

128 THE NORMAN PERIOD

cance for the fortunes of the EngHsh Church when
Anselm fell to thinking about the pope. From
that time the spirit of the man began to change.
On three occasions he asked permission of the
king to go to Rome, and each time the king, re-
fusing his consent, grew more incensed against
him. Then Anselm announced his intention to
go without consent even though, as the king
threatened, the archbishopric should be taken
from him. On these terms the archbishop parted
from the king.

William Rufus died while Anselm was absent an
exile from his see. When Anselm returned he
came back an altered man. He had seen some-
thing of the power of the Church abroad ; he had
embraced the theory of Hildebrand; he had par-
ticipated in two councils at which secular investi-
ture had been condemned, and those who dared
perform it threatened with excommunication.
When King Henry I., who succeeded William
Rufus, demanded of Anselm the customary oath
of allegiance in order that he might receive anew
the archbishopric at his hands, Anselm refused to
promise obedience and was again in open rupture
with the royal authority. The mild and saintly
man who had submitted so patiently to the insults
of William Rufus now stood ready to excommuni-
cate his successor for encroaching upon his spirit-
ual authority. Under the moral influence of An-

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH.

129

selm the sentiment grew in the kingdom that the
king should have no part in cultivating the field
of the Church. Spiritual things were for spiritual
men. The Church, since it controlled spiritual
and eternal destinies, must be independent of the
State in order to realize its mission. It shows how
the Church had gained on the State, that Anselm
was able to hold the king in check by fear of ec-
clesiastical penalties. Had the Pope Paschal,
come to the aid of the archbishop, the humilia-
tion of the king might have been accomplished.
But Paschal's situation, like that of Hildebrand,
had its difficulties. Even the popes, claiming the
supreme government of the world, were hampered
by the limitations of worldly policy. The Em-
peror of Germany, Henry IV., was still giving the
pope so much trouble that he was obliged to com-
promise the case between Henry of England, and
his archbishop. Anselm did not carry his point.
According to the terms of the compromise the king
retained the really important part of investiture —
the oaths of fealty and homage, while resigning
the idle symbol of the gift of ring and crozier.
But in the light of those intangible sentiments
which govern the opinion of mankind, the Church
had gained and the State had lost. It was a vic-
tory in itself, as the tides were then running, that
an archbishop of Canterbury had defied the king
of England and still retained possession of his see.

130 THE NORMAN PERIOD

The Church had vindicated its spiritual indepen-
dence, overcoming the danger which threatened
it, of becoming a mere appanage of the crown.
The gain was a real one for the cause of true re-
ligion, even though it inevitably promoted the
civil supremacy of the Bishop of Rome.

The conflict of Anselm with the kings of Eng-
land represents one stage in the process by which
the popes achieved supremacy over the States of
Europe. The principle at issue in this conflict
had been the separation of the Church from the
State in order to the freedom and independence
of the Church. But hardly had this result been
secured when the scene changes and the papacy
appears as claiming that authority over the State
which the State had been condemned for seeking
:o exercise over the Church. In following the
steps of the process by which the popes attained
their end in England, we are led to consider the
question of ecclesiastical courts, which created the
necessity of an appeal to the papacy as having su-
preme appellate jurisdiction.

In the happier adjustment of the relations of
Church and State during the Anglo-Saxon period,
there had been but one mode of legal procedure
for clerics and for laymen. All cases were brought
before a mixed tribunal composed of the highest
ecclesiastical and lay dignitaries of the kingdom,

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 131

to whose decision the clergy yielded as final no less
than the laity. It was not thought improper that
a layman should take part in adjudging questions
which concerned the spiritual interests of the
kingdom.

When William the Conqueror came to England,
he brought with him another practice, which pre-
vailed on the continent. He set up ecclesiastical
courts presided over by bishops, with exclusive
jurisdiction in the case of ecclesiastical offenders
who were thus emancipated from secular tribun-
als. These spiritual or ecclesiastical courts have
a curious history. They seem to have originated
with the advice of St. Paul to the Corinthians : —

" Dare any of you, having a matter against his neighbor,
to go to law before the unrighteous and not before the
saints ? Know ye not that the saints shall judge the world,
and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to
judge the smallest matters.^ Know ye not that we shall
judge angels, how much more things that pertain to this life,^
If then ye have to judge things pertaining to this life, do
ye set them to judge who are of no account in the church?
Is it so that there cannot be found among you one just man
who shall be able to decide between his brethren, but brother
goes to law with brother, and that before unbelievers ? "

It was these words which became the warrant
for the establishment of spiritual or ecclesiastical
courts, in contrast with the civil or the king's
courts. One hardly need stop to comment on the
inapplicability of the apostle's words. They were

132 THE NORMA N PERIOD

Spoken when the great world was heathen, when
the Church formed a small circle of believers
hemmed in by hostile sentiment. But after the
world had become Christian, to go to law before
lay judges, was not to go before unbelievers or
unspiritual men. And further, St. Paul spoke to
the laity, the people of Corinth ; but the Church
applied his principle only to the clergy. It was
the clergy alone in the Middle Ages, who were
regarded as constituting the saints, to whom the
title of religious or spiritual belonged. The laity
still belonged to the world, and were spoken of as
carnales, carnal men, in contrast with the clergy,
who were spirituales.

We have in these so-called spiritual courts, the
germ of the papacy as a supreme court of appeals.
For if each bishop was to hold his courts, and
above the bishops' courts were the courts of the
metropolitan or archbishop, it was necessary that
the final appeal should be taken either to the king
or to the Bishop of Rome. The kings, as we
know, at a later time resisted the appeal to
Rome. But the principle had been established
by the forged decretals that the final appeal
in all grave cases should go to Rome ; and
the sentiment of the clergy for the most part
favored the practice of going to the spiritual head
of the Church, as the surest means of redress in
their troubles. Justice is not always an easy thing

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 1 33

to secure in this world. It is not strange that the
clergy, appreciating keenly the injustice of na-
tional tribunals, should have cherished the ideal
of a justice which might be had beyond the sea,
in the distant and larger world of the Bishop of
Rome. It needed only that Rome should be
given a fair opportunity to show the world its
conception of justice, in order that so delusive a
sentiment should forever disappear.

When Henry II. came to the throne in 1 154, he
was confronted with the difficulties springing from
these ecclesiastical courts. The times in which he
reigned were full of lawlessness, confusion, and
misery ; a strong king was needed, who could es-
tablish a powerful government and good order.
Such a man was Henry II., possessing sagacity
and courage and a legal judicial mind. The con-
solidation of the people into one nation, by which
the distinction between Norman and English dis-
appeared, is generally placed to his credit. In his
reign an Englishman ascended the papal throne,
Nicholas Breakspar, under the name of Adrian
IV , — the only Englishman who ever attained the
honor. The connection between England and
Rome became in consequence closer than it had
been before. It is a circumstance which deserves
to be recalled, that Pope Adrian made a grant of
the schismatical country of Ireland to the English
king — a circumstance which the generous hearts

134 THE NORMAN PERIOD

of our Irish brethren have never treasured up
against the holy father. They are prepared rather
to resent its acceptance by the king than its gift
by the pope.

It was one of the projects of Henry II. to curb
the power of the Church, which had been growing
stronger in the kingdom since the days of An-
selm, and which now threatened the rightful pre-
rogatives of the king and the well-being of the
State. With his inherent love of justice, the king
was offended with the ecclesiastical courts in
which the clergy took refuge, escaping the penal-
ties which they would have suffered in the secular
courts. In his attempts to bring the clergy to
justice, he was opposed and thwarted by Thomas
a Becket, who had formerly been his chancellor
and his intimate friend, but who as Archbishop of
Canterbury became his mortal foe. A bad case of
clerical justice was the first occasion of the quar-
rel. A clerk by the name of Philip Brois had
committed a murder and received no punishment.
The civil courts had claimed to try the case and
found him guilty ; but Becket had insisted that
he should be withdrawn from the secular jurisdic-
tion, and had sentenced him to two years' de-
prival of his benefice. It was this incident which
is said to have determined the king to restore the
ancient customs of the country, when the clergy
were amenable to the civil jurisdiction. At a great

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCB, I35

council held at Clarendon In 1 164, what are known
as the Clarendon Constitutions were enacted,
which embodied the king's views, — what may be
called the national view of the king's authority.
According to the Clarendon Constitutions crimi-
nal cases among the clergy were to be determined
in the king's court. Other la.ws were also en-
acted, such as that bishops should not leave the
country without the king's consent, nor should
they be allowed to excommunicate the king's
men ; and newly elected bishops were to swear
fealty to the king.

These statutes Becket at first refused to sign ;
afterwards he signed them and then retracted his
signature, appealing to the pope to absolve him
for his sin in yielding. He now carried his
case to Rome as Anselm had done before him ;
he took his stand upon the forged decretals in op-
position to the law of the kingdom ; he declared
that he placed himself and the Church under the
guardianship of the pope and of God. Leaving
the kingdom, as Anselm had done, he remained
abroad, resisting the king and vainly expecting
aid from a pope who was too busy or too prudent
to give him the support for which he asked.

It is unnecessary to repeat the familiar story of
Thomas a Becket. He long continued to defy
the king, and his actions were so irritating and
exasperating as to drive the king into a frenzy

136 THE NORMA^r PERIOD

which he could not control. Whether the king
was responsible for his murder is doubtful. As
the story goes, certain of the king's attendants,
supposing, from his language, that he would be
pleased to be rid of Becket altogether, assassin-
ated the archbishop near the altar of Canterbury
cathedral, on the eventful day, December 29, 1 170.
It depends somewhat on our sympathies, whether
they are with Church or State, as to the estimate
which we shall place on the fate of Thomas a
Becket. By some, notably Mr. Froude, his death
has been treated as a righteous punishment for
his treachery to the highest interests of the nation ;
by others he has been regarded as a martyr dying
in a holy cause. The distinguished historian, Mr.
Freeman, who is entitled to speak with authority,
thinks that the principle for which Becket died
was not the authority of the pope over the Church,
but some minor point growing out of his belief
that the prerogatives of the See of Canterbury had
been invaded, so that in reality he died in the in-
terests of a national cause. It is certain that he
carried with him the sympathy of the people in
his opposition to the crown. It is possible that
the confused and complicated situation may yet
be so read as to reveal Becket in the light of a
friend of the people, with the cause of the people
as the issue for which he staked his life. In those
days the people as a force in civil society as yet

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 137

hardly existed. It may be that they were not
wrong in rallying round the Archbishop of Canter-
bury as their hope against oppression — the only
man in the kingdom who could defy the king.

But however this may be, the death of Becket
did more for the cause of the Church against the
State than his life would have done. He became
the typical martyr in the popular estimation not
only of England, but of Europe. In Becket Eng-
land gave to western Christendom the most in-
fluential saint of the middle ages ; no shrine in
Europe was so rich or so attractive to the pilgrim
as the shrine of Becket in the Canterbury cathe-
dral ; and so it remained until the age of the Ref-
ormation.

The murder of Becket was followed by the
humiliation of the king. He had already suffered
one humiliation while the archbishop was still liv-
ing, when, kneeling before him, he had held his
stirrup as he mounted his horse, — a token that
the civil power recognized its inferiority to the
ecclesiastical. When Becket was murdered the
outcry in England and throughout Europe made
Henry aware that he had lost his cause. Over-
come by this sentiment he undertook a pilgrimage
to Becket's tomb, and there submitted to the pen-
ance imposed upon him. A night and a day were
spent in prayer and tears, imploring the interces-
sion in heaven of him who had been his enemy on

138 THE NORMAN PERIOD

earth. The bitter fruit of this victory of the
Church, it now remained for England to reaUze.

Hitherto the popes had refrained from inter-
fering with the struggles in England which were
subjecting the nation to its control. But when
Innocent III. mounted the papal throne in 1198,
he undertook the task which his predecessors had
neglected. Disposing of all other affairs which
might embarrass him, he turned his attention to
England with the purpose of bringing that refrac-
tory kingdom into formal submission to the au-
thority of Rome. The moment was a propitious
one. King John had made himself obnoxious by
his tyranny to the people, to the great barons,
and also to the dignitaries of the Church. When
Innocent proceeded, contrary to the customs of
the English Church, to appoint Stephen Langton,
his old friend, to be archbishop of Canterbury and
the appointment was resisted by John, the pope
issued the ban and interdict which freed the sub-
jects of the king from their oath of allegiance,
and forbade also the performance of Church ser-
vices throughout the kingdom with the exception
of baptism and extreme unction. In the year
1209 he excommunicated the king. For nearly
two years John continued his opposition despite
the action of the pope and his desertion by the
clergy. But when France began to prepare an
army for the purpose of invading the kingdom

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 1 39

and driving him from his throne, the spirit of the
man was overcome and he stooped to the lowest
degradation. He resigned the crown of England
and Ireland into the hands of the papal legate and
received it back again as a gift of pure grace on
the part of the pope, to be held henceforth as a
papal fief on condition of the payment of an
annual tribute of a thousand marks.

Such was the humiliation of England at the
hands of the great Pope, Innocent III., who re-
garded himself as the sun shining by his own in-
herent light, while the kingdoms of Europe were
regarded as satellites or planets shining with his
reflected light. It was the custom of the popes to
apply to themselves the large language of the in-
spired Psalms of David. A favorite passage was
the language of the second Psalm : TJie kings of
the earth stand up and the rulers take counsel to-
gether against the Lord and against Hts anointed.
Hildebrand on his death-bed applied to himself
the words : / have loved righteousness and hated
iniquity, therefore I die in exile. The attendant
priest encouraged him, '' Thou canst not die in
exile, vicar of Christ and His apostle ; thou hast
the heathen for thine inheritance and the uttermos
parts of the earth for thy possession.'' It was a
favorite passage with Innocent the Great : The
righteous shall have dominion over them in the
morning. Though thou hast lain among the potSy

140 THE NORMAN PERIOD

yet shalt thou be as the wings of a dove, which
hath silver wings and her feathers like gold.

A few years ago, in the pages of the Nineti enth
Century, in which educated EngHshmen carry
on a sort of private conversation before the
world, Cardinal Manning re-told the story of
Innocent and King John, asking the English peo-
ple, if it would not be for the interests of the
nation to have such a fatherly adviser restored to
his authority, who by his word could check disor-
der and misrule. But the Cardinal had forgotten
the episode of Magna Charta, in which the op-
pressed and humiliated people asserted their
ricfhts — the charter of Encrlish liberties to our
own day. Innocent had protested against the
Charter, and done his utmost to prevent its ac-
ceptance. When the distinguished Cardinal was
reminded of this circumstance, he replied that
Pope Innocent had not probably read the charter
and was ignorant of its real meaning and pur-
pose.

It is one of the wonderful anomalies of human
life, which may lend consolation in the hour of
defeat and humiliation, that seeming victories
sometimes promote the cause which ostensibly
they have crushed. The conquest of the pope over
the English nation was a crisis in its history from
which date the movements that gave England the
ultimate victory.

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 141

It only needed that the Church of Rome as em-
bodied in the pope should achieve the end for
which it labored in order that the falseness and
untenability of its ambitious project should stand
revealed. From this time on the interest of Eng-
lish history lies in tracing the steps by which the
nation grew and the papacy declined. The impos-
sibility of one man's ruling all the states of Eu-
rope became increasingly manifest. The papacy
was a mischievous thing because of its impossi-
bility. We cannot see very far into the future,
but one thing we can see, and should most de-
voutly believe, that God's will is that nationalities
should be regarded as a sacred end in themselves.
God has appointed that the peoples of the world
should dwell in certain large families which we call
nations. Here is an ultimate result in the divine
purpose beyond which we cannot go.

There is a mystery about the birth and growth
of a nation which we cannot always trace in the
complicated process which it involves. It is true
of states, as it is of individuals, that history seems
careful of the national type, while careless of the
individual nation. There are many attempts at
achieving nationality and but few successes. The
papacy had risen in Europe when nations were
struggling to their birth or were still in the weak-
ness of infancy. Everywhere the papacy stood
for resistance to the growth of the national con-

142 THE NORMAN PERIOD

sciousness. The whole system of the Roman
canon law, from the time of the forged decretals,
conspired to hinder, to crush, if it were possible,
the rising instinct which was urging the different
peoples of Europe to the attainment of national
independence. The question may arise what use-
ful purpose, in a world where God is ruling, such
an institution as the papacy may have subserved.
It is best to be fair always in discussing such a
question, for we gain nothing by sacrificing or ob-
scuring the truth. Let us admit, then, that the
papacy may have served some useful ends, in the
divine economy. If it served no other purpose,
it stood as a resisting force, against which the
nations threw themselves, an obstacle which they
must overcome, in order to their successful asser-
tion of national existence. Purification of the na-
tional purpose, the clear consciousness of a divine
call, must be reached by a struggle with such oppo-
sition as the papacy presented. But other ends
were also served by the papacy. It held the na-
tions together in their infancy by such close ties
as to give them a common likeness and sympathy,
a feeling of kinship which makes them a family of
nations in the Kingdom of God. The striking
difference in this respect between Europe and
Asia has been often remarked. In Asia, the
great kingdoms are separated by physical barriers
and by other differences, such as religion, to such

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 1 48

an extent that they have nothing in common.
India and China are as distinct and widely apart
as if they were in different hemispheres. But in
despite of the differences which mark them, there
is a spirit of community among the nations of Eu-
rope, which, though it cannot altogether prevent
hostility and war, is yet a basis for the growth of
the large sense of humanity — the promise of the
ultimate unity of the family of God.

Whatever may have been the evils of the papal
dominion — and they were great — yet individual
popes were capable of disinterested action, and
did not always abuse their power. The papacy
served as a court of arbitration between monarch-
ies and kingdoms, before any system of interna-
tional law had arisen, or was yet possible. Those
who still maintain, like Cardinal Manning, the
usefulness and the necessity of the papacy, fasten
their gaze upon circumstances like these, and feel
that history is unjustly read when they are sup-
pressed or overlooked. We, too, may then admit
that the papacy has served a divine end. But
even divine institutions may be removed by the
same hand that has created them, in order to give
place to institutions more fully charged with the
divine will. So Judaism, which was divinely or-
dered, has given way to the Christian Church,
while the Jew still remains unable to see that
progress is the law, in the evolution and revelation
of the will of God in the world.

144 ^^^ NORMAN PERIOD

From the moment when the papacy attained
the fulness of its power, the great Protestant
movement began, which called for reformation
and ended finally in revolution. Great bishops
and statesmen in the English Church, who were
devoted to Rome and never thought of question-
ing its divine claim, appeared in protest against
the evils it engendered all through the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. Not only were things
no better in England, after Innocent the Great
had conquered the king, — they rapidly grew to be
worse than they had been under the most tyranni--
cal and irreligious of English sovereigns. Papal
or religious investiture brought forth no better
fruits than secular investiture. The Church was
no better off when it was robbed by the papacy
than when it was robbed by its own king. The
difference was that the money now went out of
the kingdom, when before it was used at home
and indirectly enriched the people. The English
Parliament complained in 1376 that five times
as much money went out of the country to sup-
port the pope as the whole produce of the taxes
which accrued to the king. The popes now
claimed the ownership of all the benefices or
property of the Church. Nowhere in Europe was
the practice carried out to a greater extent than
in England, by which the best livings and digni-
ties were filled by the nominees of the pope.

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 145

In England it was almost like another foreign
invasion, when Italian and Spanish and French
priests were everywhere found in English monas-
teries as priors or abbots, in English canonries
and English bishoprics. They did not under-
stand the language of the people, they did not in
many cases even deign to reside in England, but
simply drew the revenues of their livings. If the
kings had claimed gifts Vv^hen they appointed high
dignitaries, the popes claimed still greater gifts,
until it almost impoverished a monastery or a
bishopric when it was obliged to fill a vacancy.
In this case it was a so-called spiritual power, pro-
fessing to be above the temporal, which was weak-
ening the Church no less than the State.

It may seem unworthy in itself that the great
issues of Church and State — the supremest issues
of human affairs should turn so largely on the
question of money. But money is only the sym-
bol of other things. Men are quick to see the
large evils which its improper use creates. In the
relations of life the highest qualities or the lowest
of our nature are brought to light by the use or
abuse of money. When a so-called spiritual power
appears to be covetous of wealth, or eagerly con-
cerned to find money for its schemes, it is degrad-
ing the entire ecclesiastical service of which it
is the head, and it will not be long before the
eyes of a people are opened to its hollowness and

146 THE NORMAN PERIOD

iniquity. Just as a partisan civil service is an evil
corrupting the life of a nation, a debased ecclesi-
astical service undoes the spiritual vitality of the
Church.

It was no doubt true that the papacy had need
of all the money it could raise. As it grew in
power and absorbed in itself the government of
the Church and the world, it became a more and
more costly thing to support. Self-government
in Church or State is comparatively inexpensive.
An absolute monarchy, such as the papacy really
was, may become so expensive an object to main-
tain that at last it may break down from its ina-
bility to obtain the money needed for its support.

English legislation on the affairs of the Church
from the thirteenth century onwards, shows a de-
termination to go to the root of the question in
regard to money. In 1279 the statute of Mort-
main was enacted, which forbade the transfer of
any landed property to the Church without the
king's consent. What was given to the Church
now began to be regarded as tending to the im-
poverishment of the nation. Again in 1343 there
was passed the Statute of Provisors which pro-
hibited the pope from appropriating the revenues
of English benefices. When the aggrieved parties
were found carrying their cases to Rome, it was
enacted, in the Statute of Praemunire in 1352,
that outlawry should be the penalty for carrying

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. I4;

pleas to Rome, which belonged to the king's
court. In the year 1379 an act was passed pro-
hibiting the holding of benefices in England by
foreigners. The Statute of Praemunire was again
confirmed in 1392, and in 1404 the two statutes
of Provisors and Praemunire were re-enacted, by
which the pope was henceforth prevented from
appointing to English bishoprics, and the king
was forbidden to grant exceptions to the law.

But there was a deeper protest in the heart of
the English nation than the desire to save the
people from impoverishment. Great men arose,
who saw with increasing clearness the ideal of what
a Church should be. Such an one was Grosse-
teste. Bishop of Lincoln, who protested against
the abuses caused by the presence of a foreign
clergy, and was able to prevent Pope Innocent IV.
from making his infant nephew a canon of Lin-
coln Cathedral. William of Occam, though he
spent most of his life abroad, was an Englishman
by birth and training, — a philosopher as well as
a statesman, who broke down, by his vigorous in-
cisive arguments, the vicious principles of the
Scholastic philosophy, especially denouncing that
metaphysical conception of the Church which exag-
gerated the importance of institutions, till it had
made impossible the freedom and growth of the
individual man. The famous Bradwardin, who
became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1349, asserted

148 THE NORMAN PERIOD

the dependence of men upon God for their sal-
vation, following Occam also in pointing away
from the pope to Christ as the only real, though
invisible Head of the Church. The '* Vision of
Piers the Ploughman," a book which had vast
popularity and influence, exposes the evils which
a corrupt official service was creating, sets forth in
glowing terms the Christian ideal, and does not
hesitate to recommend the remedy for the ills of
the Church to its highest dignitaries. An evil life
is for him an evil life, whether in pope, or bishop,
or peasant.

And at last came Wycliffe in the fourteenth
century, who may be regarded as the greatest man
to whom the English Church has given birth in all
her history. With a brief allusion to his work, I
close my lecture. It is a remark of Milton, that
" had it not been for the obstinate perverseness
of our prelates against the divine and admirable
spirit of Wycliffe, to suppress him as a schismatic
and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian
Huss and Jerome, no, nor the name of Luther and
Calvin had ever been known. The glory of re-
forming all our neighbors had then been ours."
I will not undertake to summarize his efforts
for the reformation of the Church ; how he re-
sisted the pope, redefined the Christian doctrines,
rejected abuses, declaimed against monks, trans-
lated the Scriptures, preached constantly, and

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 149

sent forth preachers in his own spirit throughout
the kingdom. He made mistakes, it is true; in
his opposition to what was false, he may have gone
to false extremes. But his errors may be forgiven
to one who has done more for Christendom than
any other Englishman.

And exactly what was it that he did, that made
possible the overthrow of the papacy, and the
emancipation of England from a foreign usur-
pation ? I should answer that he laid down a
higher doctrine of the relation of Church and State.
He was the first to grasp the sacred principle of
nationality, to implant in the consciousness of
kings and people the idea of their divine and
spiritual calling as a nation.

The kings of England and its archbishops,
through the Norman period, had been laboring
unconsciously for the great end which Wycliffe
now unveiled in its majesty. But because they
labored unconsciously, they labored often ineffect-
ually or in vain. They were guided by an instinct
which they were unable to formulate or define.
But they builded better than they knew. Take
the period we have been considering as a whole,
and it reveals a progressive movement, even under
weak or immoral kings, toward the same common
goal. It is not a history which one need to be
ashamed of or to apologize for. There was some
latent divine element in the atmosphere of that

150 THE NORMAN PERIOD

little island beyond the seas, which gives to Eng-
land a homogeneous principle through all its
career. Hardly had the Norman kings landed in
England, when the old process of the earlier his-
tory was resumed, and they began to work for a
national end. Archbishops of Canterbury, even
an Anselm, or a Becket, or a Stephen Langton,
could not escape the subtle contagion of this mys-
terious motive. There are phases of their ad-
ministration which may have a national bearing.

But the great deficiency of the period was the
lack of an intelligible formula or doctrine, which
would enable the nation to reject the false doctrine
by which the popes built up their supremacy.
When it was said that the Church was above the
State, because the State dealt with temporal or
secular concerns, the things that related to this
earthly Hfe, while the Church had the exclusive
prerogative of dealing with spiritual or eternal in-
terests, no one lifted up a voice in behalf of the
State as having equally with the Church, a spirit-
ual origin, a spiritual purpose and a spiritual end.
Everywhere throughout Europe, men acquiesced
in the common statements that only the Church
was spiritual, and as such, must be placed above
all earthly potentates. So long as they continued
to think so, the power of the Roman popes was
secure. What is the spiritual, when we ask for its
definition ? Is it not the unseen, the end not yet

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. I 5 I

attained, the moral ideal to be achieved in the
future, toward which the present is tending? The
things which are seen are temporal, tJie tJiings which
are not seen are spiritual or eternal. The State
then labors for the spiritual and moves toward it
as by a divine decree. Wycliffe dared to hold up
before the kings of England, a divine ideal which
redeemed the nation from the degradation of in-
feriority and subjection to the Church.

But if the nation has a spiritual, divine character
no less than the Church, where then lies the dif-
ference between them ? Wycliffe's answer is clear
and emphatic. The State represents the dominion
of Christ, the power and rule of Christ in the
world. If there must be a vicar of Christ, it is the
king or ruler of the nation, not the head of the
ecclesiastical principality. The State expresses
and reveals the dominiiun or the power of Christ ;
the Church represents the ministerium, the service
of Christ ; as when Christ remarks: I am among
you as he that serveth. The kingdoms of the
world are the kingdoms of our Lord and of His
Christ ; their power is the power of Christ to whom
is given all power in Heaven and earth. One func-
tion of the Church is to minister to the well-beinp;
of the State, in all the countless ways of spiritual
ministration, of which Christ, who is still among
us as one that serveth, is the type and illustration.
It is the function of the Church to hold up con-

152 THE NORMAN PERIOD

stantly before the State fts divine calling ; in its
prophetic office, to declare constantly and un-
hesitatingly the divine will.

Christ has a double character, one side of which
is represented by the State, and the other by the
Church. If either is higher than the other, it is
the function of service, — the ministeriiun, as when
it is said, He that is chief among yon, let him be as
servant. If the Church represents what is higher
than the State, it is so because and in so far as the
Church possesses faith in the spiritual purpose of
the nation, even when the nation is without faith,
— that faith which is the substance of things hoped
for, the evidence of tilings not seen. But the con-
dition of servantship still in this world implies a
willingness to accept humiliation as its lot. Come
what may, the State must have the authority.
Priests and prophets have never known how to
exercise power. The worst governments the
world has seen have been administered by ecclesi-
astics. It is a mixture of things which are in their
nature incongruous, when the prophet whose mis-
sion is to reveal a divine truth by moral insight,
infringes upon the calling of the State and seeks
to carry out his message by force. So long as the
world continues must humiliation attend the min-
isterium, which waits upon the suffering Christ in
humanity, when hungry, or naked, or sick, or in
prison, or in the captivities of the human race,
from which it seeks redemption.

OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH.

153

This then was the work of the English WycHffe,
to place before his own countrymen and before
the world the divine ideal of the State or nation.
When it came to the Reformation of the sixteenth
century, it is the cause of the nations against the
empire of the pope. " The swing of the monarchy
of Henry VIII., " as Canon Mozley has remarked,
*' was simply nationalism and nothing else, — the
nation delighted in it.''

The divine calling of the nations is as yet very
far from being realized. But it has not hurt the
nations to have proclaimed their true mission ;
nor has it hurt or weakened the Church. The one
thing which America most needs to-day is the re-
proclamation of Wycliffe's message. For there are
those among us and notably also a foreign Church
whose aim, whose necessity it is to rob the State
of its spiritual prerogative in order to its own ad-
vancement. Here in this new world, the conflict
of the ages is impending ; indeed, there are signs
that the struggle has already begun. If our vision
is clear, and as Churchmen we can follow WycHffe
in asserting the divine dominion of the State, the
result cannot be doubtful. By our hesitancy or
inaction the result may be retarded ; but if the
Word of God be true, it will only be a tarrying of
the vision until the time be ripe for its fulfilment.
In the book of the revelation of St. John the
Divine, where the final glorifiaction of things is un-

154 THE NORMAN PERIOD, ETC,

veiled, it is not as Churches or as branches of the
Church that the world stands at last before God,
that humanity takes its rank in the temple and
city of God. Into that city of which God is the
light, the kings of the earth are represented as
bringing their glory. And they bring the honor
and the glory of the Jiations into it.

Zbc IRcfonnation periob.

LECTURE IV.

THE RT. REV. H. T. KINGDON, D.D.,
Bishop Coadjutor of P'redericton.

THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD,

The Reformation of the Church of England
was not the work of a few years, nor the result of
any one force. It was the crisis of centuries of
discontent, the irrepressible outburst of long pent
up indignation, brought about by the resultant of
many forces, religious, political, financial, domestic,
civil. It took the form in England of a proleptic
assertion of the Monroe doctrine, that no foreign
interference could be tolerated in domestic matters.
This feeling had always been very strong, and it
so often showed itself where opportunity offered,
that it may almost be said that the Reformation
commenced from the time the Bishop of old Rome
attempted to interfere in temporal and spiritual
matters in England.

The first act of the English as a nation was to

compel the acceptance of the Great Charter. This

has been said to be "" the first great public act of

the nation after it realized its own identity : the

157

158 THE REFORM A TIO.V PERIOD.

consummation of the work for which unconsciously
kings, prelates, and lawyers had been laboring for
a century." The very first clause secured the free-
dom ot the Church of England : '' Quod Ecclesia
Anglicana* libera sit, et habeat omnia jura sua
integra et libertates suas illaesas." That the Church
of England be free, and have all her rights undi-
minished, and her liberties unimpaired. From
this we might say that the Reformation began
with the signing of the Great Charter on June 15,
A.D. I215.

A century later the same feeling was evidenced
in the Statute of Provisors (as it was called) passed
in A.D. 135 1, and of Praemunire passed two years
later. The Bishop of Rome had claimed to sus-
pend the right of presentation to benefices in
England, in order that he might make provision
for his own foreign adherents. Against this the
Statute of Provisors was aimed ; while the Statute
of Praemunire forbade appeals from the King's
Courts, or obtaining bulls or other instruments
from Rome, under penalty of forfeiture of goods,
personal freedom, and protection of the law.

But these were mainly political, and did not
touch the conscience so much as the terrible decay

* The title Ecclesia Anglicana, was anticipated in the cor-
respondence of St. Thomas k Becket ; where it is used in-
terchangeably with Ecclesia Anglorum which had been used
by Bede in the eighth century.

THE RE FORM A TIOiX PERIOD. I 59

of vital religion and morality throughout Europe.
From the beginning of the fifteenth century, there
was one universal wail throughout Europe from
holy men, deploring the state of religion, and
laxity of morals. In Brown's Fasciculus is a list
of works on the reformation of the Church. There
are about one hundred such writers between A.D.
1400 and A.D. 1550. This would mean a great
deal for a period commencing before the invention
of printing, yet the list is not by any means ex-
haustive. I possess a little tract printed in 1489,
'* De Miseriis Curatorum," on the woes of parish
priests, which is not enumerated in Brown's Cat-
alogue. It seems to have been published in
Saxony, as reference is made to Meissen in Saxony
as a well-known wealthy benefice. The tract,
consisting of fourteen pages, must have made
some stir at the time, as at least three other
editions were published. It is certainly valuable
as exhibiting the state of things from the stand-
point of a parish priest ; and we may learn from
this why Saxony became so favorable to the views
of the reformers. The writer says that the priests
were worried beyond measure by '* novem diaboli."
I am sorry to say that one of the diaboli was the
bishop himself. Another is the itinerant preacher,
and the account given reminds one of the dialogue
of Erasmus about the Franciscans, published about
thirty years later. The Saxony priest complains

l60 THE REFORM A TIOM PERIOD.

of the exacting character of these preachers. ** If
you do not always give him the most dehcate
meats to eat and spiced wine with the best ale to
drink, he will preach about it in the pulpit, and
hold you up to scorn before the people." But the
greatest wail is about one of the diaboli, which
perhaps is the saddest of all : this is about the
housekeeper or cook. In the midst of this the
writer says : *' There are three officials of the
utmost necessity to mankind, the hangman, the
knacker, the curate. The hangman strings up
thieves on the gallows ; the knacker removes dead
horses ; the curate teaches the people. The world
cannot do without them ; otherwise the thieves
would seize everything ; horses would become
offensive ; men would become brutal. But the
more necessary they are to men, the more men
despise them. There is no difference between
them in the opinion of the laymen. Tell me,
prithee, what virtuous, neat, chaste woman will
ever be a servant to a hangman, a knacker, or a
curate?" Thus on the continent of Western
Europe there was a call for reformation.

The cry for reformation was equally earnest in
England, and the English spirit revolted against
foreign interference as well as against the means
by which it was supported. England had long
been regarded as a milch cow to yield provision for
needy Italians who never visited England and

THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD. i6l

spent their revenues in the Roman Court. For
fifty years the See of Worcester was filled by a
succession of Italians who spent most of their
time and money away from England. Among
them was Giulio de Medici, the bastard son of
Giuliano, the brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent.
This Giulio was afterwards pope under the title of
Clement VII. At Salisbury, Cardinal Campeggio
was bishop or was so called and drew all the in-
come away, while he was really bishop of Bologna
and never visited Salisbury. At the same time
the dean of Salisbury was an Italian who never
came near his cathedral and after twenty-four years
was compelled to resign. These were /r^^/</^</ by
the pope. Can we wonder that complaints were
continually made that the glorious cathedral of
Salisbury was becoming ruinous ? Such facts as
these set going the financial force which tended to
the Reformation. After much forbearance, the
English revolted against their ecclesiastical rev-
enues being spent to glorify the papal court.

Then there was the sickening adulation paid to
the pope; as the Canonist complains, some sought
by flattery to equal the popes with God Himself.
Nay, in the Gloss on the Decretal there is the title
'' Nostrum Dominum Deum Papam," our Lord
God the Pope, still printed certainly as late as
1609. This greatly moved such as knew of it in
England, and is one of the things mentioned with

1 62 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD.

abhorrence by Bishop Jewel. Still it does not
seem much different from the claim reported to
have been made by Pius IX. on the first of April,
1866. The French legitimist journal "Union,"
gave the text of his address in which he said :
" I am the way, the truth and the life. They who
are with me are with the Church ; they who are
not with me are out of the Church, they are out
of the way, the truth and the life." It is a large
claim.

Then there were the pretended miracles and
miraculous images, the exposure of which caused
a great shock to the devout minds of men. Henrj^
VIII. was a firm believer in the Blood of Hales till
nearly the end of his life. At Hales Abbey the
pilgrim looked at a phial said to contain the Blood
of the Saviour which was invisible to them in
mortal sin. Some colored substance there was
within glass of unequal thickness, and by turning
the vessel half round, this was hidden or revealed
at the option of the showman. Some of the
more celebrated images were exhibited at Paul's
Cross at sermon time, with the springs and levers
by which they were worked. It seems hard to
believe this, and yet somewhat of it is continued
in our own day. A friend of mine, twenty-five
years ago, was shown in Spain a fine white feather,
which, said the priest, fell from the wing of the
Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation. '* Do you

THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 1 63

believe that ? " enquired my friend. The priest
took a pinch of snuff, and said : '' Good for the
people."

Can we wonder at the revolt against all this ?
Nay, we should rather wonder that the revolt came
not earlier. It has been well pointed out that at
the Council of Pisa in 1409, Constance in 141 5 and
just before the Council of Basle, English leaders
had urged a reformation ; and for a long time, they
waited for this to come from without. But it came
not. It was like the fable of the lark and her nest-
lings. So long as the farmer waited for his neigh-
bors to come to his help in harvest, the lark knew
she was safe; directly the farmer determined to set
to work himself, she flitted with her young. At
length the English Church determined to reform
herself ; but how was this to be ? There was the
example set on the continent of Europe in various
parts. At Pontresina on the Engadine, the popu-
lation, inflamed by the earnest preaching of a
Reformer, dismissed their priest, stripped their
Church and flung all the furniture and ornaments,
images, aye, and the sacred vessels into the river,
and inaugurated a devoted personal worship of
our Blessed Lord of which psalmody from the
whole congregation formed the chief part. At
Zurich, Zwingli disregarded the teaching of the
Church, and sought to build up a body of doctrine
from his private study of the Greek Testament.

164 THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD.

No such scheme found favor In England. EngUsh
people loved law and order; and all was done
legally and in order. Everything was reformed
by a careful examination of antiquity. It was, in-
deed, a passionate appeal to the primitive Church,
so far as the practice and teaching of the earliest
Church could be discovered. For this there had
been much providential preparation.

The fall of the Greek empire was part of this
preparation. Rome said that Constantinople fell
because the Greeks did not symbolize with Rome.
But in the Thirty-nine Articles, Constantinople is
the only Patriarchate omitted from imputation of
error, out of a tender consideration for their late
distress.

The siege and destruction of Constantinople by
the Turks had driven many learned Greeks to
Western Europe; and their presence promoted
the study of the Greek language and of the Greek
Testament. The study was soon introduced into
England, and without doubt helped on the Ref-
ormation there. John Colet, the eldest son of an
eminent citizen of London, studied Greek in France
and Italy, and returned to lecture on the Greek of
S. Paul's Epistle at Oxford. Receiving preferment
in London, he returned there, and soon was made
Dean of S. Paul's. He at once began to preach on
the Epistles in the Cathedral, and founded S. Paul's
School for the express purpose of teaching the

THE REFORM A TION PERIOD, 165

scholars Greek. This was in 1 509. Boys to the
number of one hundred and fifty and three, the
number of the fish in the second miraculous draught
of fishes, were to be taught there gratuitously.
At the present moment six colonial Bishops owe
their education to Dean Colet's munificence, my-
self among the number. Erasmus was a great
friend of the Dean, and took great interest in the
school. His dialogue ^^ pietas piierilis'' is sup-
posed to show the excellence of the teaching given
at that particular institution. All this helped on
the Reformation. It was said by the monks that
Erasmus laid the ^^g which Luther hatched.
Certainly, his influence and teaching in England
helped on the Reformation there in a conservative
and healthy manner and direction.

The learned English at the time knew what
they were about perfectly well, and we cannot
think that they were left without guidance. For
though we may and must acknowledge that in
these troublous times, several leading English di-
vines were somewhat rambling in their theology,
feeling about as it were after the truth, yet in the
authoritative formularies of the Church, there is
no rambling, no error. Some years ago, one who
might have been thought sufficiently learned in
liturgical knowledge to have hesitated to impute
error to others, said that the translators of our
Liturgy were mistaken in one of their statements.

1 66 THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD.

The statement which Mr. Seager objected to is
" the ancient Fathers divided the psahns into seven
portions, whereof every one is called a Nocturn."
The translators were supposed to have misunder-
stood a lesson in the Breviary for S. James' Day.
The Saint, it is said, ''Psalteruini qitoquc per fcrias
distinxit, et unicuique fericB nocturnum deditJ" He
divided the psalter for the days of the week, and
appointed a Nocturn to each day. However,
twenty years ago, the late learned librarian of the
University of Cambridge, England, showed me a
manuscript of the thirteenth century (I think). It
was a commentary on the psalms appointed for
each day of the week, and in this the division of
psalms for each day is called a Nocturn. Thus the
psalms for Tuesday are called the psalms of the
third Nocturn. The translators knew what they
were about, for they were familiar from constant
use with details which we have to acquire feebly
with long study. Nor did they make any statement
or any change without laborious investigation. It
was not without good reason that they challenged
a condemnation of their work from the voice of
antiquity. They had searched the ground, and
were ready for the attack. Cranmer alone had a
thousand folio pages of manuscript, quotations
from the ancient Fathers, transcribed by his own
hand in support of his views. Archbishop Parker
had this copied for his own use, and this copy is

THE REFORMATION PERIOD. 1 6/

now in the British Museum. Cranmer also tran-
scribed much from the Scriptures, Fathers and
Schoolmen before he attempted to formulate the
Eleventh Article and the Homily on Salvation,
This collection occupies seventeen pages of the
octavo edition of his works, and this on the single
question of Justification. He could, therefore,
with confidence, write in the Homily, '' Beside
Hilary, Basil and St. Ambrose before rehearsed,
we read the same in Origen, St. Chrysostom, St.
Cyprian, St. Augustine, Prosper, CEcumenius,
Photius, Bernardus, Anselm and many other au-
thors, Greek and Latin." But Cranmer was not
alone of this mind, as may be seen in any of the
recognized formularies and documents of the
Church. The Homilies lay down over and over
again the principles on which Christian doctrine
and practice were to be proved. " Ye have heard
it proved, (i.) by God's word, (ii.) the doctors of the
Church, (iii.) ecclesiastical histories, (iv.) reason and
experience." Such is the universal statement, and
the Homilies were to be "a pattern and boundary"
for all preachers and teachers. In the Homilies,
there are nine quotations from councils of the
Church and two hundred and thirty-nine quota-
tions from the Fathers. The four quoted most
frequently are S. Augustine, fifty-nine times; S.
Chrysostom, twenty-six times ; S. Jerome, twenty-
two times; S. Ambrose, fourteen. In Jewel's Apol-

1 68 THE REFORMATION PERIOD.

ogy, the councils are quoted thirty-two times while
two hundred and seventeen citations are from the
Fathers. Here again S. Augustine is the favorite,
and heads the list with thirty-two quotations.
Then TertuUian comes to the front with twenty-
one references, and S. Chrysostom, S.Jerome and S.
Ambrose come next in order. This is but a sample.
The "general index" to the rather useless "Par-
ker Society" books tells the same tale. Wher-
ever the work of the Reformers of the Church of
England is tested, the same principles are found to
exist. The Reformation of the Church of England
went on the plan of a passionate appeal to Scrip-
ture as interpreted by the ancient Fathers. " The
primitive Church," say the Homilies, " is especially
to be followed as most incorrupt and pure " The
oft-quoted canon of 1571 maintains the principle,
and enforces it on the clergy. ''Imprimis, preachers
shall take heed that they never teach anything to
be religiously held and believed by the people, ex-
cept that which is agreeable to the doctrine of the
Old or New Testament, and what from that very
doctrine the Catholic Fathers and ancient Bishops
have gathered." Bishop Jewel professed, "We
came as near as we possibly could to the Church
of the Apostles, and of the old CathoHc Bishops
and Fathers; and have directed according to
their customs and ordinances, not only our doc-
trine, but also the sacraments and the form of

THE REFORM A TIOiV PERIOD. 1 69

common prayer." '' I prefer the antiquity of the
primitive Church," said Bishop Ridley, "before
the novelty of the Church of Rome."

Herein then was the essential difference between
the Reformation of the Church of England, and
the Reformation on the continent of Europe.
The Church of England reformed herself, taking
for her guide Holy Scripture as interpreted by the
primitive Church ; the continental reformers rather
accepted the principle of Scripture, interpreted
by private judgment. Private judgment is men-
tioned only once in the formularies of the Church
of England, and then it is condemned. The Ar-
ticles maintained that it is *' the Church that has
authority in controversies of faith " ; and con-
demned those that " through their private judg-
ment willingly and purposely break the traditions
and ceremonies of the Church." But then the con-
tinuity and identity of the Church of England re-
mained intact ; she reformed herself. Her Bishops
remained in the same sees, with their succession
unbroken ; whereas the continental reformers were
compelled to break away from their Bishops, and
inaugurate a plan of their own.

The " infamous Blackburn," as he has been
called, saw this clearly when (in the middle of the
last century) he wrote that the Reformers " deter-
mined the one (true) sense of Scripture to be the
sense of the primitive Church, that is to say, the

1 70 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD.

sense of the orthodox fathers for a certain number
of centuries. From these they took their inter-
pretations of Scripture, and upon these they
formed their rule of faith and doctrine." As this
was opposed to the unbounded hberty of private
judgment, which Archdeacon Blackburn regarded
as the essence of Protestantism, he thought that
the Reformation of the Church of England was
to be condemned. This testifies to the fact which
meets us at every turn, that the Church of Eng-
land in all things wills to be guided by Scripture
as interpreted by the tradition of the primitive
Church.

Here we must remember the perfect indepen-
dence of the Church of England. Her very name
shows her independence. In the eighth century
Bede speaks of the Ecclesia Anglorum. In the
twelfth century, in the correspondence of S.
Thomas a Becket, we have both Ecclesia Anglorum
and Ecclesia Anglicana ; while from the time of the
Great Charter in 12 15, the name in Latin, Ecclesia
Anglicana, has been the most frequent, though
the phrase Angliae Ecclesia occurs occasionally.
She always had her own laws ; and the Canon
law of the continent of Europe never obtained in
England except so far as the Church of England
adopted and incorporated such canons as were
regarded as suitable. This is so much the case
that even now the Canons of Trent are not bind-

THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD. \ 7 1

ing even on the Roman obedience in England,
because they have never been promulged and
accepted there. The most striking instance of
this is the marriage law. The law of the Church
of England has always been that Holy Matrimony
to be valid must be '' in facie Ecclesice, per verba
de prcBsentt, per presbyterum sacris ordinibns coii-
stittittimr It must be celebrated openly in the
Church by a priest in holy orders. This, the con-
tinuous law of the Church of England, was also
the law of England until the middle of this cen-
tury ; but it was not the law of the continent of
Western Europe. There mere consent before
any witnesses constituted valid matrimony ; it
was the same as the present Scotch law which
was anciently assimilated to that of France rather
than that of England. But when, about the end
of the sixteenth century and later, the Jesuits and
other priests who had been trained abroad were
sent into England to promote a schism, they
knew nothing of the old law of the English
Church, but brought with them the Canon law of
the Continental Church before it was altered at
Trent. There was no public authority in England
to promulge the Tridentine Canons ; these, there-
fore, were not of force. In consequence of this
the law of marriage accepted at this day amongst
those of the Roman obedience in England is per-
fectly different from the old law of the Church of

172 THE RE FOR MA TIOX PERIOD.

England, and would alone proclaim the Roman
schism in England to be a modern intrusion.

Knowing this peculiarity of the Roman position
in England, I had a curious conversation with a
Jesuit priest in that country some years ago. At
that time all Roman Catholic marriages were made
valid in the eye of the law by the presence of the
Civil Registrar, and my friend told me the follow-
ing story: A nobleman was to be married, and
there was to be pontifical high mass in the noble-
man's private chapel. In the middle of the Creed,
which was being sung, the Registrar came to the
bridegroom and said, '' My lord, I do not know
how much longer this is going on, but it is five
minutes of twelve, and if you are not married
before twelve the marriage will be illegal." " What
shall we do? " was the question. '' Just step into
the drawing-room with the bride, give your con-
sent there and then return." This was done, and
after the civil marriage in the drawing-room the
couple returned into the chapel and the marriage
service, which had been going on during their
absence, still proceeded.

I at once saw I had the Jesuit priest on the
horns of a dilemma. So I said, " Which of those
was the sacrament of marriage ? " He said,
*' They never told the bishop." " Never mind
that," was my answer, " which ceremony was the
sacrament ?" " Of course," he replied, as he was

THE RE FORM A TlON PERIOD. 1 73

bound, **the consent before the Registrar."
'' Then," said I, ** the second consent was an
iteration of the sacrament and sacrilege." *' Ah,
let me see," said the Jesuit, " before the Registrar
they withheld their interior consent. I think that
will do." " Then," was the reply, *' the marriage
is illegal as being after hours." *' I think," said
the other, " we had better talk no more about it."

This peculiarity of the Roman Catholic posi-
tion in England is not generally known ; the
peculiarity of their law about marriage accounts
for the stringent action of Cardinal Manning in
preventing, or endeavoring to prevent, mixed
marriages when the ceremony was often per-
formed first in an English Church.

Having thus endeavored to exhibit the general
principles on which the Church of England re-
formed herself, it will be useful now to see how
these principles were applied in detail in some
cases. Here we must be as brief as is consistent
with accuracy so as not to exceed the limits of a
lecture.

We must always remember that the Church of
England has nothing to do with the private
motives of Henry VHI., King of England. His
public professions were excellent at all times, and
the Church was only too glad of the opportunity
afforded her to reform herself. If any one says
that this king was not a moral man, the retort is

1 74 THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD.

ready that he was a saint by the side of the popes
of his time. The heathen conceits of Leda and
Europa, which are to be seen on the great bronze
gates of S. Peter's to this day, are testimonies to
the classical semi-heathenism of Leo X. Then
the Borgia Pope Alexander VL, has no savory
reputation. But it may well be said that these
immoralities have not influenced for ill the Roman
Communion. Still less have the peculiarities of
Henry VIII. to do with the Church of England,
of which he was no bishop. With respect to the
position of the Church, in the matter of the
Bishop of Rome, there was little difference
between us and the true Galilean Church, until
Napoleon the First conspired with the pope to
destroy the Old Galilean Church by the stroke of
a pen, and erect a new one on its ruins.

In declining to submit any longer to the Bishop
of Old Rome, the Church of England was cer-
tainly following ancient precedent. As early as
the beginning of the fifth century, the Church in
Africa was troubled by the meddlesome interfer-
ence of the Bishop of Rome, who claimed to hear
and decide appeals under the pretended authority
of the Council of Nicaea. Zosimus, Bishop of
Rome, sent legates to Carthage, who quoted a
canon as Nicene which was not to be found
amongst the twenty canons in the text brought
back from Nicaea by Caecilianus, Bishop of Car-

THE REFORMATION PERIOD. 175

thage, who had been present at the council. The
legates of Rome naturally claimed that their copy
was correct and the African copy was defective.
The African bishops courteously agreed to accept
the Roman text until such time as certified copies
could be secured from Constantinople, Alexandria
and Antioch. In answer to their request, Atticus,
Patriarch of Constantinople, and S. Cyril, Patri-
arch of Alexandria, sent certified copies which
agreed with the African, and disproved the
Roman claim. It is hard to suppose that a
Christian bishop would knowingly and wittingly
falsify the code of Nicaea, and perchance his claim
arose from ignorance. It has been suggested that
the Sardican canons (which, indeed, were quoted),
were written without any break after the Nicene
canons, and that thus the mistake arose. But
the illustrious Archbishop of Paris, Peter de
Marca, in the middle of the seventeenth century,
drily remarks, '* the conjecture might be held to
be probable, if borne out by the evidence of any
ancient codex, but this has not yet been discov-
ered." He thinks that Zosimus cannot be ac-
quitted of wilful falsification. So early was the
arrogance of Rome seeking to support itself on
false claims.

Then with respect to one succession of orders,
Bishop Jewel claims to have been ordained priest
by the same bishop and the same ordinal as his

176 THE REFORMATION PERIOD.

opponent Harding, and then continues: ''I am a
bishop, and that by the free and canonical election
of the whole chapter of Salisbury, assembled
solemnly for that purpose. Our bishops are made
in form and order, as they have been ever, by free
election of the chapter ; by consecration of the
archbishop and other three bishops, and by admis-
sion of the prince. Therefore, we neither have
bishops without Church nor Church without bish-
ops." '* To be short we succeed the bishops that
have been before our days. We are elected, con-
secrated, confirmed, admitted as they were."
Here, then, comes in another instance of the
great care taken to adhere to precedent of anti-
quity. The confirmation of the election of Arch-
bishop Parker was carefully framed on the old
form used in the confirmation of Archbishop
Chichell, in A.D. 1414. The form then used can
not be traced earlier. '' Its use was exceptional,
having been resorted to at a time when the Eng-
lish Church did not acknowledge either of the
rival claimants of the papacy. The tradition of
that confirmation was only a century old. It was
of the providence of God that they had that pre-
cedent to fall back upon. But the selection of
this one precedent shows how careful Parker and
his consecrators were to follow the ancient prece-
dents." There was no particular of carelessness or
haste about the matter. There was but one mat-

THE REFORM A TION PERIOD, \ '/y

ter overlooked, but it was of no spiritual conse-
quence. When Bishop Home, of Winchester,
tendered the oath of supremacy to Bishop Bon-
ner (he being at the time in the Marshalsea, and
consequently in the diocese of Winchester),
Bishop Bonner took two legal exceptions to
Bishop Home's position. Had he known any
more valid objection, he would not have confined
himself to legal technicalities. First, Bishop Home
had not been consecrated by an ordinal which had
statutable authority ; secondly, Archbishop Parker
had been consecrated by four bishops, three of
whom had been deprived, and the fourth deposed
by Act of Parliament. The ordinal used had
been deprived of the authority of Parliament
under Phihp and Mary, but the act could not give
or take away spiritual validity from the service.
It was but a legal quibble, which was soon set
straight by an Act of Parliament. Of the conse-
crators of Archbishop Parker, Coverdale was
spiritually the diocesan of Exeter, though another
had been intruded into his see ; Hodgkin was a
diocesan suffragan, the other two were *' vacant "
bishops elect to sees in the province. But then of
Pole's seven consecrators, two were diocesan bish-
ops, three were intruders, and two acting diocesan.
Those who wish to pursue this particular branch
of the subject should consult the accurate and
precise little work of my friend and brother, John

178 THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD.

Walter Lea, on " The Succession of Spiritual
Jurisdiction." He gives the particulars of each
see during the whole period of the Reformation
troubles. It was most providential that Cardinal
Pole, of Canterbury, died within twenty-four
hours of Queen Mary ; and within two years after
the accession of Elizabeth, no less than fifteen
sees were vacated by death. If EHzabeth did
cause some Bishops to be intruded into sees not
canonically vacant, her sister Mary had been pre-
viously equally high-handed and had intruded a
similar number. But in neither case would this
affect the validity of the succession. For such
bishops would consecrate validly to the Epis-
copate, but invalidly to the particular see.

Mr. Lea writes : "Some of the results of this in-
quiry were unexpectedly satisfactory. I was not
prepared to find the breaches in jurisdiction so
few in themselves, so temporary in their con-
sequences, and so evenly divided between Rome
and England." " As to the duration of the Ref-
ormation disturbance, it was twenty-five years and
less than one month ; and canonical succession in
every diocese was completely re-established by the
consecration of Scambler's successor on February
7th, 1 584-5." *' On the whole I think we may con-
clude that the Reformation dislocation of succes-
sion [of jurisdiction] in the English Church has
been greatly exaggerated by popular traditions and

THE RE FOR MA TION PERIOD. 1 79

misconceptions. All traces, however, have long
since disappeared."

Let us now turn to the question of the vernacu-
lar service. Several times have I heard the ques-
tion asked by an enthusiastic ignoramus : " By
what right were the services translated out of
Latin into English?" The answer is so near to
hand that it is difficult to understand how the
question could be raised. " By the same right
that they were translated out of Greek into Latin."
Greek was the original language of Christianity
even in Rome itself, and the first Christian Latin
appears in the colony of Africa.

Two points have here to be touched upon :
first, the adoption of one use throughout the
Church of England and next the translation of
that use into the vernacular.

For we must remember that there were several
different service books in use in England, and each
diocese adopted the variation which was most
agreeable to the Cathedral. With substantial
identity, these presented some inconsiderable
variations ; but they were all of the English
Church. The Roman office books were never
used in England until the Jesuits came in after the
Reformation to create a schism. The first step
of the English Bishops was to mould all the vari-
ous uses into one. Thus the original preface to
the one Service Book expressed it : "" Whereas

l8o THE REFORM A TION PERIOD.

hitherto there hath been great diversity in saying
and singing in Churches within this realm ; some
following Salisbury use, some Hereford use, some
the use of Bangor, some of York, some of Lincoln ;
now from henceforth all the whole realm shall
have but one use." This use, therefore, on the
general title-page is called, " the use of the Church
of England."

It is somewhat remarkable that almost all the
manuscripts of the old service books of the Sarum
use date from about A.D. 1420. , It would almost
seem as if there were some move at that time to
renovate if not to reform the services. A century
later in 15 16, there is an unmistakable evidence of
a steady design to amend the existing service
books; and eighteen years later in 1534, the issue
of printed service books in England, " suddenly
ceased, and in the case of the Missal was never
resumed up to the first Revision of the offices in
1549." Seven years later again by a regular Act
of Convocation, the ancient and illustrious use of
Sarum was extended to the whole province of
Canterbury. This was on March 3d, 1541, and
was the last step before the book of 1549, which
was made obligatory on both provinces.

This extension of one Use to the whole of
England went hand in hand with a gradual desire
to popularize the services of the Church and make
them adapted for congregational use. There is

THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD. 1 8 1

evidence of a continual tendency to have such ser-
vices as were held in the nave amongst the people
in the vernacular, in the language that the people
could understand. Not only were they taught
the creed, the Lord's Prayer and the ten com-
mandments in their own language, but from early
times the Bidding the Bedes was in the vernacular.
About twenty-five years ago I drew attention to a
very interesting service in English preserved in a
fine Sarum Breviary on a spare leaf just before
the Kalendar which is in the middle dividing the
Temporale from the Sanctorale. It is the opening
of the fifty-first Psalm with an Antiphon to be
used at the Sprinkling of Holy Water. This was
always done in procession amongst the people.
The manuscript is ascribed by experts to the
middle of the fifteenth century about 1450. As
it is set to music, it was clearly intended for public
use and was no private peculiarity. It forms an
important Hnk in the chain of evidence which
shows how gradual the Reformation was in Eng-
land ; and for how long a period there was a
steady determination to have the Scriptures and
the Service Books in English. In 1534 and again
in 1536, Convocation petitioned for an authorized
translation of the Bible, and the Epistles and
Gospel of the Communion service were printed
and circulated in English. Then came the next
step.

1 82 THE REFORMATION PERIOD.

In 1544, Henry VIII. started for France at the
head of a large fleet, and he was anxious to gain
friends abroad and at home. To this end he
caused what has been called the " King's Book,"
the title of which was, " The Necessary Doctrine
and Erudition for any Christian Man," to be trans-
lated into Latin for circulation abroad. He wished
to show foreign princes that he and his realm were
perfectly orthodox, and the translation is very free
with a good deal of new matter introduced. This
desire probably accounts for the Latin name, " Pia
et Catholica Xtiani hominis institutio." On the
title-page of a copy in the Library of Salisbury
Cathedral, there is written in handwriting of the
sixteenth century, '' Libellus supplex ad Caesaream
Majestatem et principes electores Germanise." A
humble pamphlet addressed to His Imperial Maj-
esty and the prince-electors of Germany. This
was doubtless the intention of the book, though it
was no friend of Henry that added the supplex.
One thing at once strikes the reader of this book,
there is one passage of Greek introduced. Greek
printing was very rare at that date ; indeed the
scribe held his own in Greek against the printer
for a long time. Just as the early printed books
have the initial capitals filled in by hand, so we
find Latin printed books with gaps for the Greek
to be filled in by hand. This Greek quotation is
in one of the fresh paragraphs inserted in the

THE REFORMATION PERIOD. 1 83

translation, and it is from S. Chrysostom. This
would imply that between May 29, 1543 and
February, 1544, some one in authority had been
reading S. Chrysostom's works.

At the same time in 1 544 for use at home, there
was issued what we now call the Litany, but was
then called also "the procession in English."
Remark it is 2, procession said or sung among the
people like the sprinkling of holy water just
spoken of; the Litany is here called ''Common
Prayer of Procession." At the end of this we
find the Prayer of S. Chrysostom as we have it
now, another hint that S. Chrysostom's works
were being studied. About this time, too, we
read in a letter from Cranmer to the king that the
Archbishop had been engaged in translating other
processions.

Next after the death of Henry there followed in
1548, "the Order of Communion " when all which
was addressed to the people, or said by the people,
was in English, and the rest still in Latin ; and the
next year following the service book was issued,
which is known to us under the title of the first
book of Edward VL

As we should expect from the principles which,
as we have seen, actuated the Reformers in Eng-
land, there was all along the determination to
bring the Scriptures in English before the people.
About the same time, therefore, the Bible and

1 84 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD.

Prayer Book were translated. The public reading
of the Scriptures was so arranged that, in the
daily service, which was now popularized that the
people at large might be induced to attend, all
the Old Testament, or most of it, should be read
once through in the year, and the New Testament
three times over. But here again antiquity was
followed and Isaiah was read in Advent in the
Dominical and Ferial cycle of lessons, and after
that Genesis was commenced. It was the aim of
the English Reformers to make the people
acquainted with the Scriptures. In a very won-
derful way they have succeeded. For, though in
my own neighborhood where I am now resident,
the Scriptures are not as well known as could be
wished, yet our daily familiar language, and
almost every page, or even column, of the daily
journals, testify to the prevalence of a knowledge
of the words and phrases of the English Bible.

Yes, the English Bible is a priceless gift of the
English Church to the English-speaking race. It
was translated by the English Church for the
English people. I speak not of the modern re-
vised version, which is in no sense the work of the
English Church. I mean the Bible as represented
in the Prayer Book psalter, and that which is
commonly known as the authorized version. All
Englishs-peaking Christians, whether they own
the tender authority of the Church or not, owe

THE REFORMATION PERIOD. 185

her this vast debt, that she has given them their
English Bible. The beauty of the translation may
be realized if any one compares it with any other
translation. To give one example. How could
we bear to hear read as a lesson in Church such as
the following, from the Douay version — the
mother of Sisera, " looked out of a window and
howled. She spoke from the dining-room."

There is one widely prevalent mistake in Eng-
lish which has arisen from a mistaken under-
standing of a phrase in the Communion Office,
which is a testimony to its influence. It is, unfor-
tunately, a very common vulgarism of the present
day, to say '' I will try and do this or that," in-
stead of *' I will try to do it." This can only come
from misunderstanding the exhortation to com-
municants " to try and examine themselves."
Try in the sense of test is now rare, and some
clearly have thought the exhortation meant that
people were to endeavor and examine themselves.

Here then we pass on to another point in which
reform was eagerly demanded ; and no wonder. It
was no less than the restoration of the Cup to the
laity and such of the clergy as were present but
not actually celebrating. The Sacrament had been
mutilated and truncated, and there was a loud
demand for the restoration of a complete Sacra-
ment. The feeling of the laity was so adverse to
this denial of the cup that in England and in many

1 86 THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD.

places on the continent after the laymen had com-
municated in the one species, an unconsecrated
cup was ministered to them to assist (it was said)
in the act of deglutition ; but it was really to con-
tent the people. True, the priests were told to
inform the laity that the wine was unconsecrated;
true, they knelt to receive the consecrated element
and stood to receive the wine. But the mass of
the unlearned most probably were left in igno-
rance; while the learned resented the mutilation.
The formal denial of the Cup to all but the cele-
brant only dates from the Council of Constance in
141 5, though the custom had arisen in many
places several centuries before, and it had rightly
and justly given rise to great searchings of heart.
There is in my possession a manuscript volume
of sermons on the Sacrament of the Holy Euchar-
ist. They were written by the Dominicans of
Colog;ne in A.D. 1268, and bear internal evidence
of the work of S. Thomas Aquinas who was lec-
turing at Cologne about that time. In these ser-
mons three reasons are given for withholding the
chalice from the laity. The first is that so pre-
cious a gift should have a chosen vessel, such as
the priest, to receive it. The second, to avoid the
irreverence from the multitudes that receive at the
great feasts. The third, to forestall a remedy for
error in faith lest the rude multitude should think
that Christ is not present entire under either

THE RE FOR MA TIOiV PERIOD. 1 8/

species. The Scripture proof is curious: under
the second reason it is argued that when the Lord
administered to the Apostles at the Last Supper,
as there were but few of them, He gave them the
Cup ; whereas, when He fed the multitude in the
wilderness. He gave them bread alone. The next
sermon says that the Blood of Christ is received by
the faithful in three ways, first, sacramcntally and
this by the priest alone ; secondly, intellectually by
the people under the species of bread. The Scrip-
ture proof of this is Job xxxix., 30: " The young
of the eagle suck up blood." There seems to be a
confusion here between the eagle and the fable of
the pelican, for the argument runs, ** The young
of the eagle, that is, the children of the Church,
drink the Blood, not from the Chalice, but directly
from the very Body of Christ."' In further illus-
tration or proof, two more passages are quoted.
Canticles, i., 14: "My beloved is to me like a
cluster of grapes"; and Ps. i., 16: "With honey
out of the strong rock should I have satisfied
thee." The third way of receiving is spiritually^
by pious meditation on the death of Christ. We
cannot wonder that men were not satisfied with
such arguments as these. There was the institu-
tion of Christ Himself. He would not have insti-
tuted the Sacrament under two kinds, if one alone
were sufficient. He would not have laid such
stress upon their all drinking, if one only were to

1 88 THE RE FOR MA TION PERIOD.

receive. The argument of concomitance and all
such were swept away as making the Word of
God of none effect by mere human tradition;
and, thank God, the Chalice is restored to the
laity.

There is, it maybe, a hint of the time when the
Cup was withheld in the use of the plural in the
XXVth Article. " The sacraments were not or-
dained of Christ to be gazed upon or carried
about." The two elements were spoken of as two
sacraments. In the first Prayer Book of Edward
VI. we read, ^as the priest ministereth the Sac-
rament of the Body so shall he minister the Sac-
rament of the Blood." Some thirty or more pas-
sages of a similar character may be found in the
official documents or private writings of the
period. A similar use seems to be suggested by
S. Isidore, of Seville, at the beginning of the
seventh century, who says '* the sacraments are
Baptism and Chrism, the Body and Blood of
Christ." Just as in the West, there is a divorce
between Baptism and Confirmation, so there was
also a divorce and mutilation in the sacrament of
the Eucharist. Then again, as when Confirmation
was separated by an interval of time from Bap-
tism, there was a symptom of it left in the use of
oil, and with us in the sign of the cross which is
really part of Confirmation ; so, also to content
the people, there was the cup of unconsecrated

THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 189

wine given, a symptom and relic of the time when
the laity were communicated in the Chalice.

Here again is seen the eager desire to return to
the practice of the primitive Church ; that all
things in this (as the Homily saith), " be in such
wise done and ministered, as our Lord and
Saviour did, and commanded to be done ; as His
holy Apostles used it ; and the good fathers in the
primitive Church frequented it." The Church in
the United States may be felicitated on having
restored to their service a beauty, which we of the
Canadian Church have lost in common with our
common mother, the Church of England.

The next point to which I would refer is the
marriage of the clergy. No one can doubt that
the proposition of the article is absolutely true,
that the clergy are not forbidden jure divino to
enter upon or to remain in the married state. This
has ever been regarded as a matter of pure dis-
cipline varying with the different ages, and the
necessities of the Church ; varying also with the
public opinion of Christian society. In the
eleventh century in the Church at Milan, the
archbishop and all the priests and deacons were
married ; and Milan was proverbial for the excel-
lence of the clergy. In England there was never
a vow of celibacy taken in the ordination service,
as was the custom on the continent ; and though
in the twelfth century canons were passed forbid-

190 THE REFORMATION PERIOD.

ding the marriage of the clergy, we learn that
they had no universal effect, for the clergy mar-
ried as before. Indeed, more than one instance is
known of a somewhat exaggerated protest against
such canons, when the priest had more than one
wife. One such, the Vicar of Mundeham, in
A.D. 1225, exhibited a dispensation from the pope
allowing him to retain two wives. It was not at
all uncommon in England and Wales for priests
to be married. Indeed, it is said that the wife of
Archbishop Warham, the immediate predecessor of
Cranmer, was recognized by his friends in society.
We need look no further than to a long list of
surnames, English and Scotch, to see that if there
were canons against clerical marriage, they were
disregarded. In English we have Pope, Clerk in all
its spellings. Bishop, Dean, Cantor, Cancellor, Can-
non, Parsons, Chaplin, Priest, Arcedeckne, Deacon,
Vicars, and others. In Scotch, Mactaggart, son of
a priest ; Mac Nab, abbot's son, all tell the same
tale. In refusing to condemn the marriage of the
clergy, there was a return to primitive antiquity,
most desirable, and most loudly demanded on
all sides.

To return now, in conclusion, from particular
details to general principles. The position taken
up by the Church of England may be learned
from the fact that there is no large treatise of posi-
tive doctrine formulated by her ; the Thirty-nine

THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD. I9I

Articles are mainly negative. The difference be-
tween the first eight of the Articles and the rest
will be at once remarked. Where the faith of the
Church is repeated there are few negatives ; where
the Articles begin to deal with errors current at
the time, the negations abound. This would show
that the Church took the teaching as she found
it, but warned her preachers against certain errors
which were prevalent at the time. The Creeds
are " the Confession of Faith " of the Church of
England. The creeds are what " the Catholic
Fathers and ancient Bishops have gathered " from
the Scripture. Of these, therefore, Archbishop
Parker and the bishops in 1559, ^^i^, " Such as do
not believe these must not be reckoned amongst
true Catholics." Qui istis non crediderint, inter
veros Catholicos non sunt recipiendi. It may be
true that " The Bible, and the Bible only, is the
religion of Protestants." No such statement was
ever made by the English Church. Whichever
way we turn, the same principles are manifest
from the first. In A.D. 1533, in an Act of Parlia-
ment, we read, '' that nothing in the Act shall be
interpreted as if the king and his subjects intended
to decline or vary from the congregation of
Christ's Church in anything concerning the very
Articles of the Catholic Faith of Christendom."
Nine years later, in another Act, it is declared ex-
pedient " to ordain and establish a certain form of

192 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD.

pure and sincere teaching, agreeable to God's
word and the true doctrine of the CathoHc and
ApostoHcal Church." The same is seen under
Edward VI., whose council speak of the book of
the " ministration of the sacraments well and sin-
cerely set forth, according to the Scripture and
the use of the primitive Church." From first to
last the same passionate appeal is seen. In the
thirtieth canon of 1603, it is declared that it was
not " the purpose of the Church of England to
forsake and reject the Churches of Italy, France,
Spain, Germany, or any such like Churches in all
things which they held and practised"; but the
right is claimed to reform *' in those particular
points wherein they were fallen both from them-
selves in their ancient integrity, and from the
Apostolic Churches which were their first found-
ers." This was the aim which the Reformers set
before them. They worked hard to achieve their
object ; and, considering their opportunities, their
accuracy is remarkable. To give one instance.
There is a quotation from S. Vincent of Lerins
which is very often cited now as a test of Catho-
licity. It is quoted in this form: "quod semper,
quod ubique, quod ab omnibus." It is said that it is
first quoted in this order by Newman in the Oxford
Tracts. I have not verified this, but, certainly, in
the last fifty years it has been commonly quoted in
this order. Now S. Vincent's work is not easily

THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 193

found, and, therefore, inaccuracy may be pardoned
in second-hand citation. But S. Vincent reckoned
universaHty of place in the foremost rank, and
wrote ** quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab om-
nibus " ; and Cranmer cites him accurately: " Vin.
centius Lirinensis teacheth plainly that the canon
of the Bible is perfect and sufficient of itself for
the truth of the Catholic faith ; and that the whole
Church cannot make one article of the faith,
although it may be taken as a necessary witness,
for the receiving and establishing of the same,
with these three conditions, that the thing which
we would establish thereby hath been believed in
all places^ ever, a7id of all men T

Matters of doctrine cannot well be dealt with
here in the small compass of a lecture, therefore,
in detail they have not been referred to ; but the
same principles held in respect to these as to mat-
ters of practice and discipHne.

In the great upheaval of those troublous times,
there may be many things which we cannot now
in calm dispassionate criticism wholly approve.
But we were not living then and cannot be impar-
tial judges because we cannot always understand
what was at stake. Looking on at a distance we
may discern the dust of the struggle, but we can-
not always distinguish the exact point over which
the battle is fought. For example, at first sight,
it is difficult to see why Hooper was compelled to

194 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD.

" wear a square cap albeit his head was round."
But the distinction between the laity and the clergy
was at stake. At the Universities and so else-
where the square cap marked the theological and
clerical faculties ; the round cap was worn by the
lay faculties, medicine, law and the like. It was
the same fight as over the ^diVa^ priest. But this
contest was more fully developed later. There is
much evidence that in the earlier years of Eliza-
beth's reign, the changes interpreted by custom
and previous usage were comparatively small.
We cannot think that so few ecclesiastics would
have abandoned their preferments if it were other-
wise ; for there is no reason for thinking that by
far the greater mass of the lower clergy were un-
conscientious self-seekers.

The position may fairly be represented by the
picture as seen in Shakespeare's plays. He prob-
ably represented the current religion of the great
mass of the people. The result is that some be-
lieve him to have been of the purely Roman obedi-
ence ; some claim him as an Anglican of our type ;
others think he cared not for distinction of
religious belief. He represents the old Catholic
religion modified and reformed from excesses and
superstitions ; or, as has been well said, " Chris-
tianity alike Scriptural, Catholic and Reformed."

The changes were gradual, and caused but little
friction in many parts. At Salisbury, at the com-

THE RE FORMA TION PERIOD. 1 95

mencement of the sixteenth century, Bishop
Langton made a statute that all prebendaries on
their installation should pay for a new cope for the
cathedral. In consequence of this ordinance, in
1 591, the great Richard Hooker paid £i 6s. 2>d.
for his cope on his installation, though at that
time the money probably went toward the repair
of the fabric, which the Italian dean had left in so
ruinous a condition. At the same cathedral, the
Morrowmas Chapel becomes the Chapel of Morn-
ing Prayer, and the Morrowmas rents become the
Morning Prayer rents.

The Homilies represent also a transitional state
of opinions. The Apocrypha is " the infallible
and undeniable Word of God." Orders and mar-
riage are sacraments, though not such sacraments
as Baptism and the Communion. All show the
same — it was a reformation of the old, and not a
revolution introducing something entirely new. It
is no wonder that there was no breach in Com-
munion with the Romanists for more than ten
years after Elizabeth came to the throne. It is no
wonder that we hear of the offer of the Pope to
recognize the existing state of thmgs if only his
authority were recognized in England. But this
could not be. The people had never liked the
foreign influence, and would not tolerate its fresh
introduction.

It is interesting to read the testimony of the

196 THE REFORMATION PERIOD,

great traveller, Sir Edwyn Sandys, in 1599, to the
view of the more sober-minded foreigners about
our Reformation. He writes: *' In their more
sober moods sundry of them will acknowledge
[England] to have been the only nation that took
the right way of justifiable reformation, in com-
parison of others who have run headlong rather to
a tumultuary innovation (so they conceive it):
whereas that alternative which hath been in Eng-
land was brought in with peaceable and orderly
proceeding by general consent of the Prince and
the whole Realm representatively assembled in
solemn parliament, a great part of their own clergy
according and conforming themselves unto it ; no
Luther, no Calvin, the square of their faith; what
public discussion and long deliberation did per-
suade them to be faulty, that taken away ; the
succession of bishops and vocation of ministers
continued ; the dignity and state of the clergy
preserved ; the honour and solemnity of the service
of God not abated ; the more ancient usages of
the Church, not cancelled; in sum no humour of
affecting contrariety, but a charitable endeavour
rather of conformity with the Church of Rome, in
whatsoever they thought not gainsaying to the
express law of God which is the only approvable
way in all meet reformations."

Such, indeed, is the view of candid Romanists
now as ever; and we may well close with this
expression of opinion.

THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 1 9/

But the Lord is King, be the people never so
impatient : He sitteth between the cherubims,
be the earth never so unquiet. The work is
God's — there must be some great future in store
for us. Just as of old, the Hebrew Church was
cradled in the Holy Land, shut in on all sides from
much intercourse with foreigners and then trained
and taught, until in the fulness of time the Jews
were driven into all parts of the world taking with
them the Old Testament Scriptures and the
knowledge of God ; even so with the English
Church. Isolated within the four seas she has
been trained for some great work for God, until
she sees her children in every part of the world
carrying the English Bible and the knowledge of
the teaching of the English Church : witness the
assembly at Lambeth last year of the 145 bishops
from every part of the world.

Surely the providential character of the English
Church is not for nothing. Surely as she seems
on the one hand to have somewhat in common
with the various Protestant bodies who love the
Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, and on the other
to hold on to the Greek and Roman Communions,
so we may hope that in our Communion a means
of reunion of Christendom may be discovered.

All honor to the Church here in the States for
the move in advancement of this which was made
at the last General Convention. Let us be thank-

1 98 THE REFORM A TIOX PERIOD.

ful that the Lambeth Conference was able to en-
dorse that movement. And while we hope that
the time may come when " the envy of Ephraim
shall depart, and the adversaries of Judah shall be
cut off : Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah
shall not vex Ephraim "; let us end with the
prayer of the man of blameless life and great
learning — Matthew Parker — Archbishop of Can-
terbury :

'' The Lord defend His Church : govern
IT WITH His Holy Spirit and bless the same

WITH ALL prosperous FELICITY. AmEN."

Adveniat regnuni Tuurriy Domine; fiat voluntas
Tua.

Zhc puritan IRcaction.

LECTURE V.

THE REV. THOS. F. GAILOR, S.T.B.,

Professor of Ecclesiastical History, University of the South,
Sewanee, Tenn.

THE PURITAN REACTION,

An eminent scholar,* a Unitarian, in the Hibbert
Lectures for 1883, has remarked that ''to enumer-
ate the EngHsh among the Reformed Churches
which own a Genevan origin ... is a pro-
cedure conspicuously unfaithful to historical fact.
Lutheran, Calvinistic, perhaps even Zwinglian
lines of influence upon the English Reformation
may be traced without difficulty ; but there was a
native element stronger than any of these, which
at once assimilated them and gave its own char-
acter to the result. . . . The Reformation in
England followed no precedents and was obedi-
ent only to its own law of development."

This may be taken as the mature judgment of
history.

What that '' native element " would have ac-
complished in the way of ecclesiastical reform,

*Prof Beard.

202 THE PURITAN REACTION.

without any of these '' Hnes of influence," it were
useless to conjecture. Certain it is that this for-
eign interference in the conduct of the affairs
of the Church of England is largely, if not en-
tirely responsible for the pain and misery and
contention of her subsequent history, and, there,
fore, for the present divisions of Reformed Chris-
tendom. That very theory of absolute uniform-
ity in outward observances which provoked dis-
sension, was imported from Geneva. The first
Prayer Book of Edward VI., which expresses the
mind of the English Church, is far less restrict-
ive than the second Prayer Book, which was put
forth at the instance of the continental reformers.
And the germ of the theory of clerical subscrip-
tion, that bane of later times, was introduced by
a letter from John Calvin to Somerset, in 1548,*
in which the great master of Puritanism says :
** There be two kinds of men who seditiously stir
themselves against you and the realm — those who
walk disorderly in the name of the Gospel, and
those who are sunk in the old superstitions. Both
these and those deserve to feel the sword of the
Prince." " Let there be a form of doctrine re-
ceived by all and taught by all. Let all your
bishops and parish priests be bound by oath to
maintain that ; and admit none to office in the

* Dixon, II. 525,

THE PURITAN REACTION. 203

Church who will not swear." And yet down to
the reign of Elizabeth, the '' native element " in
England left the penalty of recusancy to spiritual
censures.

Foreign associations and internal dissensions
began together. It was the reign of Edward VI.,
" the seven years' rule of an infant — the protector-
ate of Somerset and the domination of Northum-
berland " — '' a chaos," it has been called, ** in the
semblance of order " — which witnessed the first
considerable immigration of continental reform-
ers into England and the first organized separa-
tion from her ancient Church. In May, 1549, we
find Peter Martyr, the Italian exile and zealous
Calvinist, thundering disaffection in the Univer-
sity of Oxford ; and the more learned Bucer
counselling moderation at Cambridge, in the face
of bitter ridicule from his fellow-countrymen. In
1550, the numerous foreigners of every shade of
religious belief had to be permitted to set up
their own place of worship in the metropolis, in
order that, by the protection and limitation of the
law, they might be prevented from falling into the
extremes of fanaticism.* Over them was placed
John Laski, the Polish Bishop, the fiery revolu-
tionist of East Friesland, who gladly imported his
own congregation and his theological controversies
into the hospitable island. The same year saw the

* Dixon, 111. 233 and 208.

204 THE PURITAN REACTION.

rise of small communities of separatists in the
eastern and southern, and more exposed parts of
the kingdom whose teachings were an incongruous
mixture of Calvinism and Pelagianism with Ana-
baptist license. These were the first Non-con-
formists. John Knox, the Scotch Priest, has the
credit of sounding the first note of rebellion against
the rubric requiring kneeling at the Holy Com-
munion. He had come to England in 1551, fresh
from the galleys, where his alliance with the mur-
derers of Beatoun had sent him, and was self-
confident, fierce and ruthless in the exercise of his
genius for the utter overthrow of the ancient order.
The name of John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester,
sometimes called the father of English Non-con-
formity, deserves more than a passing notice. As
early as 1539 he had fled to Switzerland and there
under the influence of Henry Bullinger he had
become an enthusiastic convert to the Zwinglian
doctrines. On his return to England in 1549 he
was almost immediately nominated to the Bishop-
ric of Gloucester, in spite of considerable opposition
on account of his revolutionary tendencies ; but
when he came to be consecrated, absolutely refused
to wear the Episcopal vestments prescribed in the
Ordinal or to subscribe to Cranmer's articles of re-
ligion. His main argument against the vestments
is illustrative of the mental attitude of his class.
Vestments, he said, were used by the Aaronic

THE PURITAN REACTION. 205

Priesthood because the truth of their Priesthood,
i. t\, Christ, had not yet come. " Christ hung naked
upon the cross," and " since His sacrifice the truth
no longer needs veil or shadow." * Hooper at first
preferred to go to prison rather then wear the
vestments, but soon afterwards relented and was
consecrated. Strange to say he lived to become a
model of Episcopal intolerance. We find him in
1552 ruling his diocese with a strong hand, enforc-
ing clerical subscription without mercy, determined
in requiring uniformity of practice even beyond
the Prayer Book, especially when it was in the
direction of his own opinions. It may be that the
prospect of so many dangerous errors convinced
him of the necessity of strict law ; or perhaps he
began to believe, with so many other men who
have been called to bear the responsibility of high
office, that even a tyrannical control is better than
unlimited license for the welfare of religion and
government.

But there was no spirit in Edward's reign en-
dowed with sufficient authority and courage to
check the prevailing tendency to disunion. The
King was the perpetual target of unwearied preach-
ers. Cranmer groaned in the weak struggle be-
tween the contending parties. The King's sanc-
tion of the revised Prayer Book seemed to be the

* Dixon, III. 216 n.

206 THE PURITAN REACTION.

beginning of the end, when the death of Edward
and the accession of Mary drove the most advanced
reformers into a five years' exile on the continent,
where they had leisure, under the Influence of
Geneva, to nurse their hatred against Rome, and
to organize a determined opposition to the wise
and moderate position heretofore occupied by the
English Church. In the year 1555 English con-
gregations were established at Wesel, in the
dominions of the Duke of Cleves, at Arrow in
Switzerland, Embden, Zurich and Strasburg and
Frankfort-on-the-Main. Among them were many
who afterwards became prominent in the Church,
as Edmund Grindal, Sandys, Home and Jewell.
Of these congregations Fuller says* '' Embden was
the richest for substance, Wesel the shortest for
continuance, Arrow the slenderest for number;
Strasburg of the most quiet temper. Zurich had
the greatest scholars, and Frankfort the largest
privileges." Fellowship in suffering was not suffi-
cient to unite the exiles. A fierce and unseemly
strife about the use of the Prayer Book arose in
Frankfort, in which Whittingham, Knox and Coxe
were the chief contestants. An apologetic account
of it, written probably by Whittingham, then Dean
of Durham, and published in I575,t has come
down to us, containing Knox's scornful and unfair
description of the Book of Common Prayer, and

* VIII., 406. t Reprinted, 1846.

THE PURITAiV J^E ACTION. lOJ

Calvin's famous judgment on the " Book of Eng-
land " wherein he decides that *' there are many
tolerably foolish things in the Liturgy," and ex-
presses his astonishment at " those men which so
greatly delite in the leavings of Popish dregges."
Knox was banished from the city on account of
his book entitled " An Admonition to Christians,"
in which he compared the German Emperor to
Nero. The book was brought to the notice of the
magistrates by Knox's opponents, and they re-
luctantly admitted it to be treason and gave the
victory to the ceremonial party. It is interesting
to note that in all these contentions about the
su-rplice and responsive worship Bishop Hooper's
case was constantly referred to. The troubles at
Frankfort mark the real beginning of Non-con-
formity. Hardly a man returned to England who
was not determined on further reformation on
Genevan lines. Many of the exiles, smarting under
their injuries, actually burned with the desire to
abolish the last remnant of connection with the
old order. To them Lutheranism was not only a
base compromise, but a gross hypocrisy. The
Pope was the visible anti-christ and child of Hell.
The reign of Elizabeth is in many respects the
most important as well as the most difficult to
understand in English history. For at least thirty
years Church and State together rocked and trem-
bled between contending factions ; and whatever

2o8 THE PURITAN REACTION.

faults of character or of policy may justly be
charged against the Queen, it is to her immortal
honor that she had the courage and the ability to
achieve triumphant success in the face of almost
unequalled difficulties. It is not accurate to attrib-
ute every thing to her. She was Henry's daughter,
but she cannot be said, like him, to fill the whole
canvas. She was intelligent enough to divine
what the mass of her people wanted, and cour-
ageous enough to insist upon it. More than once
she yielded her own will to that of parliament.
More than once she found it necessary to modify
her orders about religion. Had her conscience
and her piety been equal to her intellectual grasp,
she would have treated her Archbishops and their
convictions with more consideration, and saved
her successors many trials. As it was, she came
to the throne in November, 1558, and at once
adopted, with the advice of her ablest ministers,
that conservative attitude in religion which we have
come to honor as Anglo-Catholic. To this she was
intellectually loyal to the very end, although she
permitted her greatest court favorite to torment
the Archbishop by open encouragement of both
Puritan and Roman dissentients. There was prac-
tically no opposition to her conservative policy.
As Mr. Gladstone showed last year,"^ the indefi-

* Nineteenth Century, July, 1888.

THE PURITAN REACTION. 209

nite resolutions of the lower house of Convocation
amounted to nothing. Mary's reign had cured
England of Popery, and when subscription to the
new order was demanded, only 192 out of more than
9,000 clergy refused ; and of these, only eighty were
rectors of churches."^ As Mr. Green says, at least
two-thirds of her people were with her, among them
the older and wealthier of the gentry of the king-
dom, and no marked repugnance to the new worship
was shown by the people at large. It took foreign
influence, from Rome on the one side and Geneva
on the other, to stir up the strife during the sub-
sequent years of her reign, which occupies so much
of the space of ordinary histories, that one almost
wonders when he reads the one-sided account of
innumerable grievances, whether there were any
adherents of the established Church at all. Yet,
the acts of this reign mark the practical conclusion
of that readjustment of the doctrinal and liturgical
system of the Church which we call the Reformation.
The strong and clear assertion and maintenance of
the Church's historical continuity, were agreeable
to the nation, and were destined to survive. The
miserable Nag's Head fable is now universally dis-
credited.f The insertion of the Ornaments Rubric ;
the rejection of the title *' Supreme Head"; the
limitation of the test of heresy to Holy Scripture,

*Strype. Annals. I. 106 ; Heylin II. 295.
fCf. Hibbert Lectures, 1883.

210 THE PURITAN REACTION.

and the first four general councils ; the public
declaration of the venerable antiquity and inde-
pendence of the English Church — these are facts
with which we are all familiar.

The return of the exiles in 1559, marks the
beginning of Puritanism, although that name does
not appear until about five years afterwards,* and
then has no invariable signification. There were
men in Elizabeth's reign, called Puritans on account
of their strict lives, who were loyal Churchmen,
but the effort to shift the name was not success-
ful. The later Puritanism was a thing of gradual
growth, and there were always various shades of
opinion included in the designation. There were
doubtless some quiet souls who conformed to the
established usages of the Church, and who would
have been better pleased if certain ceremonies had
been omitted. Others refused to conform to the
wearing of the surplice, kneeling at the Holy
Communion, and using the sign of the cross in
Baptism, but did not attack the ecclesiastical gov-
ernment. And finally, the true Puritans, led by
Cartwright, fought for the abolition of the Church
of England, and the substitution of what came to
be known as Presbyterianism, without thought of
toleration in any direction.

Calvin naturally undertook to give directions as

♦Fuller, IX. 474.

THE PURITAN REACTION. 211

to the proper method of reform in England, but
his letter was disregarded."^ The more prominent
of the exiles began, on their return, an ineffectual
movement to do away with the compulsory use of
the surplice and academic habit. Some of them
became Bishops, and all of them manifest in their
letters a great horror of Lutherans, Anabaptists,
Arians, and other heretics (not Calvinistic), and
this very dread of heretics evidently chilled their
ardor for changes when they realized the possible
outcome of the Puritan movement. In 1567, we
find in the Zurich letters, two of these bishops
writing to BuUinger and Gualter, in great disgust
at the crudeness and violence of the Puritan fac-
tion. Nine years afterwards, in a letter to Gualter,
they thanked God for the enforced silence of those
" contentious, vainglorious, mischievous men, who
with ungovernable zeal for discord, led the people
into a madness of error, called purity. "f

It was well for the Church that a man like
Matthew Parker was Archbishop of Canterbury.
He has been rightly called " the great conserva-
tive spirit of the EngHsh Reformation." His ripe
learning, especially in ecclesiastical history and
antiquities, made him a primitive and CathoHc
Churchman, whose influence upon Elizabeth in her
earher years may in some measure account for her

Ep., p. 133, Heylin. f I. 177.

212 THE PURITAN REACTION.

own predilections. His zeal for learning and his
preservation of manuscripts have won for him an
honorable name among all historians ; and his wis-
dom and firmness in dealing with the two fanati-
cal extremes he was compelled to cope with, gained
for him enemies, some of whom rebelled against
his authority, and confessed after his death that he
was " a godly man with a zeal for true religion."
His visitation in 1564 revealed so much disorder
and irregularity in the performance of public wor-
ship— and the Queen herself had accidentally wit-
nessed such shameful sacrilege — that by her order
he consulted with the Bishops of the ecclesiastical
commission and proceeded to enforce the law.
While Neale, the Puritan historian, regards the
" Popish vestments " as the original sole ground
of dispute, there was evidently a determination to
increase the demand. Humphreys and Sampson
in 1566 wrote* to their advisers in Zurich and
Geneva complaining of the cap and surplice ; the
use of music and organs ; sponsors and the cross
in Baptism ; kneeling at the sacrament and the
use of unleavened bread, besides the removal of
the explanatory rubric at the end of the commun-
ion service. BuUinger's advice to them was
learned and moderate, but Beza was fierce and
sweeping. The new-made Superintendents in
Scotland finally expressed their opinion in a letter

* I. 164.

THE PUR I TAX REACTION. 21 3

** breathing," as Neale says, '' an excellent spirit,"
in which they say '*if surplice, corner-cap and tip-
pet have been badges of idolatry, what have
preachers to do Vv^ith the dregs of the Roman
beast." "^ An argument quite convincing to men
who said that according to Jerome " gold that was
ordered for use in the Jewish Temple could not be
used for ornament in the Christian Church, and so
much less can copes brought in by Papists be used
in Christian worship."

The Puritan leaders were vigilant, aggres-
sive and determined, and they lost no oppor-
tunity for the propagation of their opinions, and
open ridicule of the law. The Archbishop re-
sorted to severer measures. The more active and
turbulent were deprived, and as Puritanism was
not so much a popular as a clerical party, this
step threatened serious injury to their cause.
They resorted, as Neale says, to that door of en-
trance to the ministry which was providentially
left open to them.f For by bull of Alexander
VI. the University of Cambridge was authorized
to Hcense twelve preachers each year indepen-
dently of the Bishops, whose authority it was ever
the Papal policy to depreciate ; and no\v this
privilege the Head of the University made use of
for the rehef of the Puritans, not without a protest
from the Archbishop, and the scorn of some who

I. 95. flbid, I. loi.

214 ^^^ PURITAN REACTION.

despised this alliance between " their Herod and
their Pilate." The year closed with a flood of
pamphlets and sermons, and in midsummer,
1566, some of the deprived ministers finally
separated from the English Church, and set up a
new worship with the Genevan service-book, and
without the *' idolatrous gear of the Papists."
Four years afterward the adherents of the Pope
also formed separate congregations in consequence
of the bull of Pius V., excommunicating the
Queen and absolving her subjects from their
allegiance. The rest of Parker's life was a strug-
gle to preserve the order and existence of the
Church in the midst of various sects, which took
courage from these two beginnings of organized
dissent and logically asserted their equal right to
live. It is curious to read the plea of the Puritan
historian ^ for individual liberty in the interpreta-
tion of Scripture along with his fierce and con-
temptuous description of Quietists, Brownists
and Anabaptists. They were perilous and trying
times for Parker and his coadjutors. The Bishops
were urged in some cases against their better judg-
ment to adopt extreme measures, and in official
documents were accused of lukewarmnessf and
neglect of their spiritual duties, while at the very
time they knew that the Non-conformists were

* Neale, I. 151. f Cardwell's Annals, I. 385.

THE PURITAN REACTION. 21$

secretly encouraged by the unscrupulous Leicester,
and other powerful members of the royal council.
In 1573 Parker warned the court that the end of
this movement was the overthrow of civil govern-
ment, but it was not until 1592 that the Privy
Council had courage to declare with the Bishops,
that for the Church to attempt to satisfy the
demands of every sect that arose, would be to put
a premium on disputations and disunion. Parlia-
ment was beseiged with bills and petitions for fur-
ther reforms in the direction of the Genevan dis-
cipline. The petitioners drew up no less than
three revised and expurgated Prayer Books, one
after another,* and the more they purified the less
satisfied they seemed to be with it. The godly
zeal ran into fanaticism, and fanaticism rapidly be-
came crime. Puritan preachers strove to awe the
multitude by the display of miraculous power,f
and devils were cast out of some poor creatures,
who afterwards confessed that they had duped the
crowd. Mr. Hatton, a member of the Council and
afterward Lord Chancellor, was finally singled out
for assassination by a Puritan zealot, who said he
was *' moved by the Spirit of God to kill him as
an enemy of God's Word, and a maintainer of
Papistry." Parker died in 1575. He had left his
mark for good. No historian questions his fitness

Strype's Whitg. II. 340. t Fuller. III. ^Z.

2l6 THE PURITAN REACTION.

in moral character and intellectual ability for his
high office, but some have condemned him for his
efforts to enforce obedience to the law. His own
letters are the best evidence of his moderation, his
desire for peace, his humility, his deep distress
at the opposition and discouragement met with in
the performance of what he knew to be his duty.
It was not natural that the Puritans should love
the man who had effectually opposed them. In
the next century when they came into power they
tore the Archbishop's body from its grave,
sold the lead of the coffin, and buried the remains
in a dung-hill. Edmund Grindal succeeded to the
primacy. He had been an exile in Mary's reign,
and was known to favor the more moderate Puri-
tans. His one year of office is only memorable for
his encouragement of a Puritan practice of pub-
lic disputation among the clergy and laity called
" Prophesyings," which bred mischief and strife
throughout the country. He had the courage to
resent the Queen's arbitrary interference and was
suspended for contumacy, although he was after-
wards restored and died in possession of his see in
1583. His successor, John Whitgift was a man of
different mould, a Churchman after the type of
Parker, and his vigorous administration was des-
tined to bring about a new order of things in
quieter and less tumultuous times. Whitgift was
a man of learning, keenly alive to the importance

THE PURITAN REACTION. 21/

of the questions of the hour, and he entered upon
the discharge of his duties with decision of charac-
ter and manhness of conviction.^ His boldness
and courage in the defence of the Church ralUed
round him many dispirited Churchmen, and opened
the eyes of all to the insidious and volcanic agen-
cies by which they were surrounded. Hitherto
Churchmen had been cautious, conservative and
defensive in their arguments. The boldness and
aggressiveness had been largely with the Puritans.
And it was true then, as it is now, that the side
which was thrown on the defensive, which dared
not to assert itself, was losing ground. The re-
markable revival of the English Church towards
the close of the century was due under God to the
confidence and vigor with which Whitgift and his
colleagues, casting off the yoke of the modern re-
formers, and planting themselves upon the early
Church, attacked and exposed the positions of
their opponents. There was indeed an aspect of
severity in the firmness with which the law was
enforced. The Court of High Commission was
freely used. Clerical subscription to the Prayer
Book and the articles was insisted on. Prophesy-
ings were put down. Irregularities and flagrant
violation of the rubrics were conscientiously pun-
ished, and the government of the Church was as-

* Hardwick Hist, of Ref., p. 237.

2l8 THE PURITAN REACTION.

serted independently of the patronage of the Swiss
authorities, as being of Scriptural and divine au-
thority. The younger men in the Church began
to realize that here was something worth fighting
for : that the Church of England not only had a
right to exist, but the very best right to exist —
that she was not simply to be tolerated by the
modern founders of the only true religion, but
that she had her own ancient title-deed in the
Scriptures themselves and the Christian history of
fifteen centuries. This saved the English Church
from the Puritans' " Holy Discipline." This asser-
tion of her historical continuity, of her lawful in-
heritance from the ancient Church became the
rallying ground of earnest men, and saved her
from complete destruction at the most critical
period in her history.

The advance of Puritanism in influence and
numbers during the first twenty-five years of Eliz-
abeth's reign, may be easily accounted for if we
remember the condition of the times. Europe
w^as a seething sea of discord. That cold and
brutal inquisitor, the Duke of Alva, was just be-
ginning, with his •* council of blood," the reign of
terror in the Netherlands which led to the
heroic struggle and assassination of William of
Orange in 1584. The civil wars in France had
reached their climax when Catherine de Medici and
the Guises, not without the Pope's approval, had

THE PURITAN REACTION. 219

horrified Europe with the massacre of St. Barthol-
omew in 1572. Spain, suspecting England's inter-
ference in the affairs of Holland, was encouraging
treason in England and Ireland, and was making
preparations for an irresistible and overwhelming
invasion. It is impossible for us to realize the
conflicting doubts and fears of Englishmen in the
presence of so many dangers. The Queen, ex-
communicated, deposed, declared to be a usurper,
and her subjects incited to rebellion by one who
had been but a few years before the spiritual Jiead
of Christendom, and who had now the richest and
most powerful king in Europe pledged by re-
ligion and by personal interest to execute his
orders ; Ireland on the west in a state of utter
lawlessness and misrule; Scotland on the north
boiling with civil and religious discord ; a rebel-
lion of the Papal party in the North of England
under one of the most powerful of the nobles ; and
Mary of Scotland, with all her pitiful history, the
heir to the crown, a Roman Catholic, leagued
with Philip of Spain for the overthrow of the
government, and conducting her intrigues with
more or less voluntary treason under the very
shadow of the throne. These were the times
when the world was divided by the sword of ex-
termination into Papalists and anti-Papalists ;
when Churchmen thanked God even for Calvin's
form of Protestantism ; when the Church of Eng-

220 THE PURITAN REACTION.

land was compelled to recognize the Continental
Churches of every type in some way, as sisters in
distress, and gladly sent of her money and sym-
pathy to the aid of the Genevan reformers, even
when they had denounced her government and
ceremonies. Perplexed by the terrors of the time,
men, even like Parker, faltered and hesitated in
asserting the Church's claims ; and the leaders of
the Puritans, taking courage from that hesitation,
roused to a very ferocity of zeal against Popery,
became more and more rampant in their demands
for further changes. The Jesuits took advantage
of this internal dissension, and sent their emissa-
ries to play the part of Puritans. In 1569, a paper
was found on an arrested Jesuit, in which three
men, HoUingham, Coleman, and Benson, are men-
tioned as being employed *' to sow faction among
the heretics," and these very men are unsuspect-
ingly described by Fuller and Heylin as violent
Puritans.*

Thomas Cartwright is called by Neale the
" Father of the Puritans." His public career
began at Cambridge, where he was Margaret Pro-
fessor of Divinity in 1572, soon after the publica-
tion of the famous " Admonition to Parliament,"
in which, among denunciations of the Prayer
Book and Prelacy, a brand-new Church is recom-
mended, whose holy discipline should copy the

* Curteis, B. L., p. 63 n.

THE PURITAN REACTION. 221

Presbyterian models extant in Scotland and Gen-
eva.^ Cartvvright defended the Admonition in a
controversy with Whitgift, which extended over a
period of about four years, and in which he estab-
lished his reputation for unparalleled self-confidence
and insolent fanaticism. Mr. Green says,f that " his
bigotry was that of a medicxval inquisitor." To
him, the rule of Bishops was begotten of the
devil ; but the rule of Presbyters was established
by the Word of God. This was a new departure.
For, according to Neale, the moderate Puritans
in 1 571 would have been satisfied with mild con-
cessions. They would use the Prayer Book, pro-
vided that they did not kneel at the Holy
Communion ; that there were no organs nor sing-
ing ; that no one was allowed to walk abroad, or
sit idly in the streets during service time ; that min-
isters examined into the private lives of communi-
cants; that children were instructed in Calvin's
catechism — and other matters of this sort. if But
Cartwright was bent on revolution. The language
of the " Admonition " was, " The Bishops are
a remnant of Anti-Christ's brood, which do battle
to Christ and His Church, and I protest before the
eternal God I take them so." The ceremonies one
and all were the intolerable marks of the Roman
beast. The Calvinistic or Presbyterian scheme of
government was exclusively, absolutely, divinely

* Hardwick, p. 236. t p. 46S. if:!., 117.

222 THE PURITAN REACTION.

true, and the ministers so ordained were not only
the arbiters of reHgious doctrine and discipline,
but the guardians of pubHc morals. The State
must be subject to the Church, and that the Calvin-
istic model. The penalty of all heresy was death.
" I deny," wrote Cartwright in 1573, *' that upon
repentance there ought to follow any pardon of
death. Heretics ought to be put to death now.
If this be bloody and extreme, I am contented to
be so counted with the Holy Ghost.' ^ But Cart-
wright's utterances were mild compared with the
"Martin Marprelate " tracts, which began to ap-
pear early in 1588. These documents are marvels
of vituperation and scurrility, even for that age.
It would be painful to quote the language. The
Puritan historian describes themf as '' bitter, rude,
and unbecoming," and regrets that " controversy
about serious things should run such dregs."

Thus Presbyterian Puritanism reached its high
water mark in 1590, and as soon as its ultimate
aims became generally recognized, its influence
began to wane. Several causes contributed to
bring about this change. First, the aspect
of the political world was far more encouraging^
and England w^as no longer disturbed by internal
discord, or the threat of foreign invasion. The
civil wars in France had ended with the accession
of a Protestant king, who conformed, from mo-

* Green, 469. t I. 189.

THE PURITAN REACTION. 223

tives of policy, to the Roman Church, but toler-
ated his former colleagues. The mighty Spanish
Armada had foamed itself away in the English
Channel ; and the unhappy Mary Queen of Scots,
had expiated all her crimes upon the scaffold.
England was at peace, and a native literature, un-
equalled in the world, had burst into splendid
flower. The intellect of Germany was still ex-
hausted by theological debate. The noble literary
promise of Italy and Spain was crushed by civil
and religious despotism Shakespeare, the glory
of modern letters, was the child of conservative
and Catholic England. Second, and above all,
the Church herself was represented by a new gen
eration of scholars, who had learned to love her
doctrine and her worship, and were not afraid to
throw off the influence of the continental reform-
ers, and boldly to defend her on the solid grounds
of Scripture and of history. Bancroft openly pro-
claimed the doctrine of the Apostolical succession
in his famous sermon at St. Paul's Cross in Feb-
ruary, 1589, and it was warmly defended by a
learned layman of the Queen's Chamber the same
year. Twelve months afterwards Saravia's book
asserted the same doctrine, and Bilson followed
in 1593 with his "Perpetual Government of the
Church." Hooker's crushing reply to the Puri-
tans, in his " Ecclesiastical Polity " finally ap-
peared in 1594. One more attempt to Calvinize

224 THE PURITAN REACTION.

the Church by the adoption of the Lambeth
Articles, was made in 1595, and was at first ap-
proved by Whitgift, whose theological learning
was largely drawn from modern Protestant sources.
But the time for such an alliance was passed.
Men like Andrews, Overall and Harsnet, opened
the eyes of the Archbishop, who had long since
learned to doubt the infallibility of Calvin and
Beza, and the scheme failed. This was practi-
cally the end of dissenting Puritanism as a religious
movement, since the Presbyterian theory, as Green
says, never had any general hold on England, for,
even in the moment of its seeming triumph under
the commonwealth, it was rejected by the vast ma-
jority of the people. The close of Elizabeth's reign
was marked by a steady, healthy development of
loyal Churchmanship, which had certainly vindi-
cated itself in the face of the two great extremes
of theological antagonism, and was about to enter
upon a new trial, in which unhappy political com-
plications well-nigh accomplished its destruction.
Some of the most prominent of the Puritans real-
ized themselves that a reaction had set in. We
have already seen how Hooper, the first Non-Con-
formist, lived long enough to appreciate the
dangers of indiscriminate license in matters of dis-
cipline, and became at last a strict and unflinch-
ing promoter of uniformity in his diocese. So
also Robert Brown, the founder of the Independ-

THE PURITAN REACTION. 22$

ents, or Congregationalists, the most logical, but
not least intolerant branch of the Puritans, who
has been immortalized by the migration of some
of his followers to New England in the May-
flower and by the triumph of his sect under
Cromwell, became wearied with the discords which
he himself had fostered. His separatist commun-
ion in Holland was rent with internal strife, and
Brown had to retreat to Scotland and thence to
England, where, by the influence of his kinsman,
Lord Burleigh, he was allowed to make his peace
with the Church and die in her communion. And
Thomas Cartwright, the pitiless iconoclast, whose
language failed him in the expression of his dis-
gust at Prelacy, was conquered at last by the
forbearance of Whitgift ^ and the prospect of
contending sects. He died in 1601 in friendly
submission to the Church's authority, expressing
upon his death bed f " his sorrow for the unneces-
sary troubles he had caused the Church by the
schism he had been the great fomenter of, and his
wish that he might begin his life again in order
that he might testify to the world the dislike he
had of his former ways."

The reign of James I. marks the beginning of a
new era. We are all familiar with that character
which the genius of so many historians has por-
trayed. The King was indeed insignificant in his

* Fuller, 163. t Strype, Whitgift, II. 460.

226 THE PURITAN REACTION.

appearance ; narrow and petulant in his humors ;
childishly vain of his superficial acquirements and
fatuously jealous of his royal prerogative, but with
all this not incapable at times of the display of
much shrewd common sense and a rather caustic
wit. His stormy experience in Scotland had
thoroughly cured him of Puritanism, and his as-
sociation with the great English Divines of the day
made him an intelligent and ardent Churchman.
The Church and the Crown were heartily united,
not only on the ground of State policy but also
of religious conviction. We all know now and
deplore the misfortune of this alHance. It placed
the leaders of the Church on the unpopular side of
a quarrel not unlike that which four hundred years
before the Church had fought for the people
against the King. And it gave Puritanism the ac-
cidental advantage of espousing the cause which
became in later days the cause of civil liberty.
Strange that the Church which fought for the
Magna Charta should have been placed in the at-
titude of defending the tyranny of royalty, and that
a sect whose fundamental doctrine was the ultra-
montane denial of the rights of civil government
should appear as the champion of constitutional
liberty.

The political history of James' reign is the his-
tory of the development of the Parliamentary
consciousness of its rights and of the Crown's

THE PURITAN REACTION. 22^

blind determination not to recognize it. The King
possessed neither the presence, nor the intellect,
nor the courage, nor the personal popularity of
the Tudors, and yet his claims were even more
absolute and his public utterances more dictato-
rial. Elizabeth had recognized the growth of the
parliamentary spirit, and after a severe struggle
over the question of monopolies, had yielded to
the Commons with her usual sagacity. But James
was devoid of political wisdom and his four par-
liaments, one by one, were dissolved, each more
discontented than the others. We are familiar
with the Parliament's use of its financial authority
to bring the King to terms ; the popular excite-
ment over the King's exercise of his prerogative
in raising duties on imports and exports, and his
vindication by the Court of Exchequer ; his un-
wise challenge to popular prejudice in seeking a

Spanish alliance ; his sacrifice of Bacon and
Raleigh, and devotion to the wretched Bucking-
ham ; his interference with the freedom of Parlia-
mentary debate, and his disastrous attempt at war
in the Palatinate, altogether the seed of a fearful
harvest for his son to reap.

Ecclesiastically the reign promised well, but
ended most unhappily. The Church had the
ablest set of Bishops since the Reformation.
Bancroft, and Andrewes, and Bilson would have
done credit to any age, and the translation of the

228 THE PURITAN REACTION.

Bible in 1611 is a lasting monument to the lit-
erary taste and judgment and scholarship of the
time. The Puritans had receded from many of
their extreme positions, and asked only the privi-
lege of ministering in the Church without obeying
the objectionable rubrics. Their '* millenary peti-
tion," or ''petition of a thousand," signed by 750
preachers, had little weight with the King, al-
though he summoned representative Churchmen
and Puritans to a Conference at Hampton Court
in 1604. The record "^ of this conference is a fair
illustration of the character of the King and the
method and matter of the arguments on the oppos-
ing sides. The King showed his partiality and his
vanity by naming more Churchmen than Puritans,
and by largely conducting the disputation him-
self. Yet some of his arguments have so much
shrewdness in them that we almost enjoy his
interference. The Puritans offered the usual objec-
tions, with many trivial criticisms of the Prayer
Book, as, for example, that in the XXIIId article
it is said, " it is not lawful for anyone in the con-
gregation to preach before he is lawfully called,"
and this might imply that '' anyone out of the
congregation might preach without being law-
fully called." The King expressed his objection
to adding any negative statements to the Ar-
ticles, and said : " I think it unfit to thrust into

* Fuller, III. 172.

THE PURITAX REACTION. 229

the book of Articles every position negative, which
would swell the book into a volume as big as the
Bible and confound the reader. Thus, one Mr.
. Craig, in Scotland, with his ' I renounce and
abhor,' and his multiplied detestations and abre-
nunciations, so amazed simple folk that, not
being able to conceive all these things, they fell
back into Popery or remained in their former ig-
norance." Dr. Reynolds, who moderately pleaded
for the Puritans, was the scholar of whom Fuller
says that " he had been in early life a zealous
Papist, whilst his brother William was as earnest
a Protestant, and Providence so ordered it that by'
their mutual disputation John Reynolds turned
an eminent Protestant and William an inveterate
Papist." He was himself a strict Conformist, and
although called a leader of the Puritans, it is char-
acteristic of the times that on his dying bed he
asked for and received the formal absolution of
the Church.

The Hampton Court Conference left the King
more than ever satisfied with his aphorism — " No
Bishop, no King,'' and the Churchmen absurdly
worshipful of his royal ability. The Puritans, not
satisfied with the concessions made to them, began
an earnest agitation for the ultimate triumph of
their cause, by petitions and preaching, and by
the gradual acquisition of influence in Parliament.

Archbishop Whitgift died in 1604 and was sue-

230 THE PURITAN REACTION.

ceeded by Richard Bancroft, who proceeded on
the same Hnes and with much the same deter-
mination. Finding that many of the clergy sub-
scribed to the oath of obedience with internal reser-
vations, he was authorized to enforce the ex animo
test which compelled conscientious acquiescence
and roused great opposition. Many of the Puri-
tans were deprived, although from the conflicting
accounts it is impossible to ascertain the number,
and an agitation was begun in Parliament to com-
pel the Bishops to cease enforcing obedience to
the rubrics on the ground that this was the only
way in which the vacant parishes could be sup-
plied with ministers. Bancroft rightly or wrongly
held that it was poor policy to fill the pulpits with
men who ridiculed the method of public worship
they were sworn to use. King James' resistance
of this demand of Parliament was the beginning
of his troubles.

Lord Clarendon in his " History of the Great
Rebellion " praises the wisdom and efficiency of
Bancroft's administration, and maintains that his
policy of strict conformity was rapidly eliminating
the obstructionist element from the Church, and
so by combining the more zealous of the clergy
and people was weakening the Puritan party.
Certain it is that throughout this period there is
growing complaint from the Puritans of the in-
creasing popularity of the Church and her cere-

THE PCRITAX REACTION. 23 1

although the stricter h'ne between par-
ties and the aHenation of many who had hitherto
conformed for the sake of peace, together with the
fierce mutterings on the subject in Parhament,
give the impression of the increased strength of
the opposition.

The appointment of George Abbot to the
primacy in 161 1 was perhaps the very worst thing
that could have happened to the Church. Whit-
gift and Bancroft had been at least consistent, but
Abbot cannot be classified. The Bishops had
agreed to recommend Launcelot Andrewes, who
was in every way fitted for the position, but Ab-
bot's flattery of the King and his court influence
won the day. The new primate was a rigid Cal-
vinist, a sympathizer with the Puritans, superfi-
cially learned, and narrow and morose in charac-
ter. He showed his true Calvinistic temper by
his persecution of heretics, two of whom were
burnt the year after his accession, the first time
such a thing had happened in England in forty
years.f Under him and James together the
Church was nearly committed to the Calvinistic
decrees of the Synod of Dort and the pitiful perse-
cution of Barnveldt and Hugo Grotius. It was the
beginning of that discussion of predestination and
free-will which gave a theological cast to the Puri-
tan position. Abbot favored and consorted with

* Perry, 370. t Perry, 388.

232 THE PURITAiV REACTION.

Puritans until many of the Bishops, looking to the
King alone for support and direction, became so
abject in their flattery and dependence that we
read their letters with shame. True there was a
new school springing up in the Universities, of
which Laud was the chief spirit. But the times
were too critical for gradual improvement. The
laxity and indifference and unwisdom of a reign
like that of Abbot's brought about a condition of
things, the issue of which no power on earth could
have prevented. Laud gave his life afterwards to
this hopeless task — hopeless in so far as he him-
self did not live to see the result. That twenty-
two years from Bancroft's death to Laud's acces-
sion is in some respects the saddest period in the
history of the Church of England. Churchmen,
blind to the signs of the times, wasted their en-
ergy in attacking Romanism which was powerless
to harm them. The Archbishop fostered a nega-
tive and hazy Churchmanship which was sapping
the strength of the Establishment in high places.
It is the drifting of a bark without a pilot in a
stormy sea, frightened by the distant prospect of
Romanism and hugging the dangerous coast upon
which it was fated to go to pieces.

When King James died in 1625, he left the
Church weakened by the incompetency of its
leaders, and the Puritans strong with the patron-
age and politic favor of a discontented Parliament.

THE PURITAN REACTION. 233

There are two events of the reign which demand
a more extended notice, as bearing upon matters
of deep interest to Churchmen in our own day.
The first is the publication in 1618 of the King's
"■ Book of Sports," intended especially for the re-
lief of the people of Lancashire, who appeared to
the King to be subjected by the magistrates to an
unnecessary and ill-advised restriction from all
recreation on Sunday."^ The book was repub-
lished in 1633 by order of Charles I., and roused
the most terrific opposition because it contradicted
the fundamental principle of Puritanism, which
was the literal application of Old Testament pre-
cepts to the regulation of Christian conduct. To
us the provisions of the book, certainly if intended
for the poor and laboring classes, are not unrea-
sonable. It was simply ordered that " between the
hours of Divine Service which in no case should be
let or hindered," lawful athletic recreations might
be indulged in, provided there was nothing essen-
tially inconsistent with the observance of the day,
such as bear-baiting and bull-baiting and cruelties
of like character. Such liberty appears to be
sanctioned, as Dr. Hessey says,t by the general
practice of the Church before the Reformation,
and was never prohibited either by precept or ex-
ample by the first reformers — neither by Calvin
nor Cranmer, nor either, it would seem, by John

* Fuller, III. 270. t B. L., p. 198.

234 ^^HE PURITAN REACTION.

Knox himself. It may be that the confusion of
the times led to an abuse of the privilege in the
reign of Elizabeth, for the Puritan advocacy of a
Sabbatarian strictness begins about 1580. The
same view of religion which induced the Puritans
to assert the obligation of the Mosaic law * in crim-
inal cases so that idolaters or Papists, adulterers,
witches, demoniacs. Sabbath-breakers and other
offenders ought to be put to death, determined
their conception of Sunday. To them the word
Sunday had a heathenish sound. It was not found
in the Bible. The Sabbath, with all its severity of
judgments, did occur in that part of it to which
they were most devoted. Accordingly they
reasoned that they were bound by the Levitical
ordinance, although not so strictly but that '' one
day in seven " might be substituted for the '' sev-
enth day." This interpretation satisfied all the
difficulties which might arise from St. Paul's epis-
tles. These floating opinions were reduced to
a system in a book' written by Dr. P. Bownd and
published in 1595. He declares that the Mosaic
law on the subject is moral and perpetual and for-
bids all levity on the Christian Sabbath, from " the
ringing of two bells " to private conversation on
pleasurable or worldly topics. It was nothing to
him that the Church in every age had distinguished
between the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian

* Cf. Hallam, C. H. I. 210.

THE PURITAN REACTION. 235

festival, and the inference from the New Testa-
ment was disregarded. The ideas thus promul-
gated spread with great rapidity and were welcome
to large numbers of people who in transition from
one religion to another craved definite and decided
changes. Their natural outcome among American
Puritans is seen in the " Blue Laws " of Connecti-
cut, and in the very logical and apparently unan-
swerable position taken by John Traske in
England in 161 8. This man argued that the
observance of the first day of the week under a
strict interpretation of the Jewish law was inconsist-
ent and that if it was wrong to change the manner
of observance, it was wrong to change the day.
He accordingly founded a sect which substituted
Saturday for Sunday and in many other respects
conformed to the literal observance of Old Testa-
ment precepts. To us, as we recall the storm of
abuse through which Laud and Charles L had to
pass in their opposition to this Sabbatarian view,
it cannot but be a cause of devout thanksgiving
that the Church of England has never committed
herself to any man's theory on this subject, but
has quietly followed in the footsteps of the Apos-
tles and of the Catholic Church for eighteen cen-
turies in celebrating " the Day of our Lord's
Resurrection and the weekly earnest of our own " ;
teaching her people to reverence the great event
which the day commemorates, and trusting an en-

236 THE PURITAN REACTION.

lightened conscience more than written law : rec-
ognizing that all men are not alike either in
disposition, in habit, in position or circumstances,
and that while the Church's public and formal
thanksgiving to God is not neglected, there may
be various and lawful expression of our serious
joy over '* the day which the Lord hath made " for
the good of all His children.

The second matter of special importance — im-
portant because it led ultimately to that league
between Scotland and the Long Parliament which
overthrew the Church and throne of England — was
the consecration in 1610 of three Bishops for the
Scotch Church. This measure, though pressed by
the King, seems to have been fully sanctioned by the
Scotch Assembly* which nominated the three Bish-
ops to be consecrated. Indeed during the whole
terrible and turbulent period of the Scotch Refor-
mation from 1560 onwards — a movement which for
barbarous violence has no parallel except perhaps
in Switzerland — there had never been more than
eight years when there was not a nominal or
pseudo-Episcopacy. The eight years of Melville's
Presbyterian government really ended in i6oo.t
During the two years following James was in cor-
respondence with Bancroft, having already secured
the passage of an act restoring the Bishops to parlia-
ment. In 1603 or 1604 a canon was passed by the

* Perry, 382. t Lawton.

THE PURITA.Y REACTION. 237

English Convocation ordering prayer to be said
for the Church of Scotland which, considering the
high views of Bancroft and Andrewes, the authors
of the canon, maybe taken as an indication that a
genuine Episcopacy was about to be restored
to that country. The unhistorical use of this
canon to convict the English Church of official
recognition of the validity of non-episcopal ordina-
tion, suggests the propriety of a brief consider-
ation of the views of Episcopacy entertained by
the reformers on the continent and in England.
There can be no question as to the law of the Eng-
lish Church. That has been declared of late years
by judicial decision. The statutes and formal
doctrinal statements are unwavering from the
beginning. " The Institution of a Christian Man,"
put forth in 1537 ^ before the question of orders
had arisen, is clear enough, though in Scholastic
language. The Ordinal of 1 549, which the Puritans
interpreted as teaching Apostolical Succession,
the twenty-third and thirty-sixth of the XXXIX.
Articles, the Acts of Elizabeth, even the " Refor-
matio Legum," leave no room for doubt as to the
Church's mind. It has been said that Whitting-
ham, Dean of Durham in Elizabeth's reign, and
Travers, preacher at the Temple, had neither of
them received Episcopal ordination, and this is
true. But Whittingham died while his trial was

* Formularies of Henry Vlllth's reign.

238 THE PURITAN REACTION.

pending, and Travers was actually deprived for
this violation of the law."^ At the beginning
of Elizabeth's reign a letter was received from
Calvin requesting the Queen to take steps for
holding a conference of all Protestants for the
purpose of uniting them under a common gov-
ernment and discipline. To this the Council
quietly replied through the Archbishop that they
would take the matter under consideration, but
that the English Church was determined to pre-
serve her Episcopate which had come down to her
from Joseph of Arimathea in British times before
the Roman usurpation.f This was the English
view of Episcopacy without any uncalled for criti-
cism of other Christian bodies. The law of the
English Church never wavered once. As for the
personal views of the reformers themselves they
are rather difficult to ascertain in the continuous
shifting of their theological position, but are inter-
esting in the light of modern discussion. Until
1532 the treatment of the subject of Holy Orders
was evidently largely influenced by the Scholastic
language. S. Thomas Aquinas expressed the
views of the Schoolmen in his ** Summa Theolo-
giae," where (Q. 40 and 41 Sup.), in order to em-
phasize the dignity of the priestly office and the
supremacy of the Pope, he denies that the Episco-
pate is a separate order, although in other places

* Neale I. 145. fStrype's Parker, I. 138.

THE PURITAN REACTION. 239

he asserts the distinct superiority of Bishops in
matters of government. The Papal claims were
in constant conflict with the earlier doctrine of the
Apostolical Succession so that John Gerson, Chan-
cellor of the University of Paris, in 1410"
declares that the authority of the Episcopate
had been so depreciated by the Papalists that they
had left only " painted images of Bishops." As
late as 1560 the Italian party in the Council of
Trent succeeded in suppressing the true doctrine
of the Apostolical Succession which had been
urged by the Spanish and French Bishops.f To
this we may add the enormous prominence given
to the sacrificial aspect of the Eucharist, which
created a desire to lev^el the Episcopate down to
the Priesthood, and it will be evident that the
germ of later Protestant theories was found in
Ultramontanism. Thus the earlier reformers
started out with at best a maimed conception of
the ministry which prepared them, deserted as
they were by their Bishops, for the ultimate denial
of the Episcopal succession, whenever a new
theory of government should be boldly proclaimed.
This tendency was increased by the popular iden-
tification of the Episcopal regime with Papal
tyranny. As it was, however, Luther and Melanc-
thon fairly longed for a restoration of Episcopacy, :j:
and Bucer regarded it as established by the Holy

*Gies. IV. 131. t Buckley. J Hardwick, p. 343 n.

240 THE PURITAN REACTION.

Ghost.* The Augsburg confession itself accepts
the government of Bishops, and whatever Eras-
tianism colored Cranmer's wavering opinions he
certainly had very high views of the ministry in
1548 and 1549! just about the time when the
preface to our Ordinal was written. In 1541 John
Calvin, a French layman, never in Holy Orders,
" flew to his funereal throne of Geneva" and be-
gan to teach that Bishops and Presbyters were
originally of the same order, quoting the private
opinion of S. Jerome.:]: His genius recognized
that the Lutherans had crippled themselves by
subjection to the State and he seized the acciden-
tal advantages offered him in Geneva to establish
a system which became a considerable factor in our
history. Calvin never denied the historical pres-
tige and expediency of the Episcopal government
— in one of his letters he recommends it to be
adopted, and in his Commentary on Titus he ad-
mits its apostolic institution. Yet the Genevan
Council of Presbyters gradually became to the
continental reformers the model of all Church
government, and it is amazing in the light of this
history to hear the exclusive claims of this
system so strongly asserted in Elizabeth's reign
that there are several instances of English clergy
going over to the Continent to be reordained
by Calvin's successors on the ground that

* Bramhall. f Catechism, 1548. \ Institutes.

THE PURITAN REACTION. 24 1

their previous ordination was invalid."^ The do-
minion that Calvin claimed and exercised in the
Protestant world of the sixteenth century has no
parallel in history. It was dangerous to differ
from him and his word was law. The generation
of English Churchmen immediately succeeding
Cranmer grew up under this influence. In Mary's
reign they were indebted to the continental re-
formers for many offices of friendship, and they
were drawn to them by the bond of a common
persecution. Calvin, Bullinger and Beza gradu-
ally supplanted Luther and Melancthon as au-
thorities m theology and the ancient Fathers were
but superficially examined. For thirty years
therefore there is an unsatisfactory vagueness and
sometimes an Erastian indifference on the part of
English Churchmen, even like Parker, in asserting
the historic truth of Episcopacy. Most of them
seem to have been satisfied to preserve the insti-
tution themselves without hazarding any opinion
as to the continental Churches, holding, as Bram-
hall expressed it, that " it is charity to think well
of our neighbors and good divinity to look well to
ourselves." f The fiercer race of Puritans, recog-
nizing the feebleness of this position, boldly op-
posed to it the positive, dogmatic claim of the
divine obligation of Presbyterian government, and
this was successfully resisted only when a new

* Neale, I. 144. t HI. 475-

242 THE PURITAN REACTION.

generation of men like Bancroft, Bilson, Saravia
and Andrewes dared to defend the Prayer Book
theory of the ministry by an appeal to Scripture
and antiquity — and to take a stand which, if not
agreeable to the politicians, was at least defensible
and consistent. Hooker, while carefully leaving
a rather impracticable loophole of escape for his
opponents in two hypothetical cases of special
revelation and absolute necessity, shows no real
doubt as to his own position. He was a pioneer
— his great work was of an essentially tentative
character, although some controversialists have
endeavored vainly to find in him the final state-
ment of the Anglican position. In Mr. Gar-
diner's words, '' Hooker's greatness indeed . . .
consisted rather in the entireness of his nature
than in the thoroughness with which his particu-
lar investigations were carried out. . . . The
work which had to be done by the generation
which came after him was work which he could
not do. . . . Men were to arise who in clear-
ness of conception and in logical precision, sur-
passed the great Elizabethan writer as far as the
political themes of Pym and Somers surpassed
those of Elizabethan statesmen." *

The storm of political revolution was already
gathering when Charles I. came to the throne
of England in 1625. The gradual development

*I. 158 (cf. Perry).

THE PURITAN REACTION. 243

of the royal power, largely emphasized by an-
tagonism to the temporal claims of the Papacy
and the decay of feudalism, had brought men
face to face with the issue between absolutism
in government and constitutional liberty. Spain
and France had solved the problem in favor
of pure despotism, and it was left to Eng-
land to enter upon that terrific struggle which
lasted over forty years, and which is in many re-
spects the most important and the most deplora-
ble in her annals. The movement w^as conducted
not by the mass of the people, for it was not in
the true sense popular, but by a group of promi-
nent leaders who were not perfectly clear in their
own minds as to the end in view, and who had
hardly begun their work of political reform before
they were overwhelmed, and driven and swept
away by a riot of religious and political fanaticism
which tore up the institutions of government and
society from their foundations. Thus Churchmen
like Hampden, Pym and Eliot sounded the note
of civil freedom, and Puritans like Prynne and
Peters and Cromwell swelled it into a blast of
anarchy. The conflicting currents of thought and
action during this period defy complete analysis.
The elements of truth in all such national convul-
sions are to be judged only by their permanent re-
sults and two things survived the English rebel-
lion. The principle of constitutional liberty was

244 ^^^ PURITAN REACTION.

established in 1688 and the widespread reaction in
favor of the old Church was the triumphant wit-
ness to the folly and fanaticism which had tried to
confound religious with political questions. What
the Church, trammelled as she was, had failed to
accomplish by the unhappy use of the secular arm,
was easily won by the glaring incompetence of the
enemies who supplanted her.

The logic of events has forever demolished that
theory of the divine right of kings for which Charles
I. contended ; but the most brilliant historian has
failed in his effort to justify the proceedings of
the Long Parliament or to convict the King of
intentional injustice. Charles I. began his reign
fettered, handicapped by a false and pernicious
education which had filled him with a conscious-
ness of the royal prerogative. That isolation
which was pre-eminently in his day the curse of
kings shut him off from any real knowledge of the
feelings and the needs and wishes of his people,
for Parliament was not yet truly representative.
He was by nature weak and yielding. He lacked
that enormous self-will which is the safety and
shame of tyrants. He was not gifted with the
bold shrewdness and unscrupulous craft which
made Elizabeth's deception not only successful
but respectable and gained for kings the reputa-
tion for statesmanship. His unskilful attempts at
so-called diplomacy have excited the scorn of par-

THE PVRITAX REACTION-. 245

tial historians. His theory of royalty and his
treatment of parliaments are the well-worn targets
of modern ridicule. And yet there are thousands
of men who deplore the strange and dreadful fury
which made him its victim. His kingly dignity,
his courage, the personal purity and gentleness of
his private life, his love of art and literature, ap-
peal still to many men who pity his weakness in
sacrificing Strafford, and compassionate the en-
forced ignorance and hereditary blindness which
failed to read the signs of the times ; and admire
the devotion with which, in spite of wife and
friends, he clung to the Church he loved and went
calmly to his death. He was at his best when he
stood upon the scaffold. As even Macaulay is
forced to say : " The captive King, retaining all
his regal dignity and confronting death with
dauntless courage, gave utterance to the feelings
of his oppressed people, manfully refused to plead
before a court unknown to the law, appealed from
military violence to the principles of the constitu-
tion, asked by what right the House of Commons
had been purged of its most respectable members
and the House of Lords deprived of its legislative
functions, and told his weeping hearers that he
was defending not only his cause but theirs . . .
and thus his enemies gave him an opportunity of
displaying at the last on a great theatre before
the eyes of all nations and ages some qualities

246 THE PURITAN REACTION.

which irresistibly call forth the admiration and
love of mankind, the high spirit of a gallant gen-
tleman and the patience and meekness of a peni-
tent Christian."

The history of the Church from 1630 to 1644 is
the life of William Laud, successively President of
S. John's College, Oxford, Bishop of London and
Archbishop of Canterbury. It has taken two-
hundred and fifty years for the smoke of bitter
controversy and unscrupulous abuse to clear away,
and even now historians are only beginning to do
him simple justice. It is hardly to be expected
that those who deny the truth of his religious posi-
tion will find anything attractive in him. But
any Churchman who regards Christianity as an
historical inheritance ; whose sympathy is roused
and his zeal inflamed by the memory of the
Church's continuous organic life ; anyone who re-
jects the theory that religion is the mere product
of the individual or collective consciousness of any
age or generation — he must find in Laud, not
perfection perhaps, not freedom from all fault and
weakness, but an example of heroic unselfishness
as honest and as fearless as any which the
English Church has produced. The reckless
and unlimited abuse which his enemies have
heaped upon him is the best contradiction of their
repeated statement that he was not a great man.

Laud was fifteen years old when Bancroft

THE PURITAN REACTION. 247

preached his famous sermon at St. Paul's Cross in
1589 and the full tide of the earnest Churchman-
ship of that era swept his heart away with it.
One idea took possession of him — mind and soul.
He dreamed of a Church which should be truly
Catholic ; which should be loyal to those funda-
mental principles of faith and order which had
conquered the heathenism of Rome and had sur-
vived the contention and abuse of fifteen centu-
ries. A Church which should be too broad, he
said, to bind men's minds in the specific and nar-
row doctrinal tyranny of either the Romanist or
the Puritan ; which should be a patron of art, of
literature, of science, and yet be faithful to all that
was truest and noblest in her venerable past. To
this idea Laud devoted all his time, his energy,
his learning. He saw the Church drifting into a
narrow and immoral Calvinistic conception of God,
with its theory of an invisible and unknowable
Church and unreal sacraments. He saw the Ro-
manist on the one hand and the Puritan on the
other pledged to accomplish the Church's ruin,
and men in high place who had been enriched by
her spoil encouraging that fanaticism. At Oxford
men called him an Arminian and a Romanist.
They scoffed at his reverence and reviled at his
doctrine. The leader of the Puritans taunted him
with being a poor man's son and the chief of the
Romanists sneered at his mad theory of the

248 THE PURITAN REACTION,

Church's Catholicity. He was always calm, un-
ruffled and persistent. His learning vanquished
his opponents when his patience did not disarm
them. He made his way through a very thicket
of curses and contempt, and he lived to find him-
self, in spite of almost unnumbered obstacles,
Bishop of London at the age of fifty-five and
Archbishop of Canterbury at sixty-one. During
all these years he had not wavered for an instant
The idea of the Church in the breadth, fulness
and richness of her life and beauty — that idea had
mastered and possessed him. As Archbishop of
Canterbury he had the power he thought to real-
ize something of his dream. The King was no
longer an Erastian Tudor but himself religiously
loyal to the Church, and Laud saw in the legal
authority of the Archiepiscopal office an instru-
ment for the accomplishment of his purpose. He
used the High Commission Court as he found it
and for the existence of which he was not responsi-
ble. He increased and enlarged his power by
personal influence. He rebuked the King for dis-
regard of the proprieties of public worship. He
converted the frivolous Buckingham to his views.
He roused the poorer clergy to something hke en-
thusiasm. He threw himself perhaps unwisely
into the political life of the nation and mastered
every detail of its commerce and manufacture.
The greatest minds of the Church owed their en-

THE PURITAN REACTION.

249

couragement or elevation to him, — Jeremy Taylor,
Sanderson, Bramhall, Heylin, Herbert, Hammond,
Chillingworth. He fought Romanism with un-
precedented success because he stood on solid,
historic ground, and the Pope took the mean
revenge of offering him a Cardinal's hat in order
to rouse against him the reckless hatred of his
enemies. The Puritans said that he had no re-
ligion because for this great dream of his life he
consented to mix with the courtly crowd and busy
himself with State questions of the time. Yet
beneath all this busy, terrifically exciting, superfi-
cial life, his diary showed that he ivas religious —
religious after the old fashion, the religion of the
hair-shirt and leathern girdle — in bitter penitence,
in strict self-denial, in hours of private agony and
rapture of prayer, in glad study of Holy Scripture.
Little he thought that som^e of his enemies whose
religion consisted largely in confident assurance of
their freedom from sin and certainty of salvation,
would drag out these expressions of penitence
from his diary and torture them into an admission
of heinous crime. He did not know or seem to real-
ize that it was too late ; that complications had
arisen which rendered a struggle for the Church
unequal ; that Puritanism was too completely or-
ganized to be easily overthrown. The Archbishop
made himself unpopular. At the King's desire he
approved and encouraged the introduction of litur-

250 THE PURITAN REACTION.

gical worship into the Scotch Church where an
Episcopal government was smothered by a Calvin-
istic machinery. He dared to rebuke the nobles
for their immoral and unchristian living. He
dared to insist upon the Church's right to her own
incomes and to take the part of the poorer and lower
clergy and to censure Bishops for living in luxury
in London when their dioceses were neglected.
He dared to be accessible always to the poor and
the oppressed, to give them lavishly of his income,
to dress plainly, to avoid ostentation and to pro-
test against the fanaticism, the narrowness of
Puritanism, and to assert the native healthfulness
and brightness of the English character. He of-
fended that class of land-owners who controlled
Parliament and who never forgave him for making
his way to high office in the Church. Above all he
refused to permit men who voluntarily took the
vows in the Ordinal to contradict the Prayer
Book in all their services : for of one thing he was
certain — that the Prayer Book, whatever else it
was, had never been a Puritan book and until it
should be changed it ought to be obeyed.

They said that he was an innovator and he was.
He repaired the old Cathedral windows which had
been broken down, and he loved the dignity and
grandeur of a ceremonial service. He found the
communion table in churches a mockery and a
disgrace."^ " Churchwardens kept their accounts

* Quoted by Mozley.

THE PUKITAX REACTIOX. 25 I

on it ; parishioners despatched parish business
at it ; schoohnasters taught their boys to write at
it ; boys had their hats, satchels and books upon
it ; men sat on it and leant on it at sermon time,
and glaziers knocked it full of nail holes." He did
resent this, as even the Puritan Abbot had
done before him,"^ and he ordered that the table
should be placed close to the wall against the east
end of the church and railed off from the congre-
gation with a " railing close enough to keep out
the dogs." That was all. He did practise acts of
reverence and encourage men to do so, but I do
not find them in the published orders. In fact as
we read Bishop Wren's " orders and directions,"
put out with Laud's sanction, and the charges
made against him at his trial, we are astonished at
his moderation. Laud was not hated chiefly for
his ceremonialism. He was hated because he be-
lieved in the Catholicity and historical continuity
of the Church ; because he refused to permit the
XXXIX. Articles to be interpreted in the interest
of the extremest Calvinism and the whole tone
and teaching of the Prayer Book to be ignored.
He was hated finally because in every position
he took he seemed to be so resolutely successful.
As he said boldly at his trial : " Whatever I did, I
did to the uttermost of my knowledge, according
to both law and canon and with the consent and

* Cardwell, II. 227.

252 THE PURITAN REACTION.

liking of the people ; nor did any command issue
out from me against the one or without the other
that I know of."

Every man has his failings and Laud's lack o*
tact and policy, his care for little things, his
straightforward resoluteness and invincible deter-
mination won for him the reputation of being
bigoted, foolish, superstitious and narrow-minded.
The best modern criticism, even that which is un-
friendly, does him more justice and contents itself
with saying that he was pure, unselfish, even ascetic
in his private life, that he was by nature a lover
of order and discipline, " devoid of the higher spirit-
ual enthusiasm " which characterizes greater minds.
He was devoid of that "higher spiritual enthusi-
asm" which would attempt an uncertain union of
the Church by the surrender of the fundamental
principles upon which her life had rested for one
thousand five hundred years. His bitterest enemy
admitted that his defence before Parliament was
able, learned and complete and that there was no
law under which he could be convicted. And so
he died — the old man in his seventy-third year.
Or as he expressed it, he passed through the red-
sea — the sea of blood — with the same calm and
cheerful trust in God which had characterized him
all his life and which provoked his tormenters
into a brutality of petty cruelty upon the scaffold, —
a cheerfulness which some count madness and

THE PURITAN REACTION. 253

Others know to be the assurance of faith. As
Professor Mozley says : " Laud saved the EngHsh
Church " — saved her from being choked with the
iron chain of Calvinism and made it possible that
men with Catholic convictions could live within
her fold.

The history of the long parliament demonstrates
the deadly effect of all these years of religious
strife. The parliament was composed almost en-
tirely of Churchmen, but Churchmen of three
classes. There were those who sympathized with
Laud and who regarded the Church as their
Catholic heritage and reverenced its sacraments and
its services. There were others, including many
of the nobility and gentry who owed their place
and fortunes to Tudor times, who regarded the
Church as a department of the State and were satis-
fied with the expediency of Episcopal government
if it could be easily and consistently maintained.
And finally there were Churchmen who were in-
fected with Calvinistic doctrine and who secretly
longed for further reformation in the direction of
the Genevan model, and who had conformed to
the Prayer Book rather from policy than convic-
tion. Neither of these two latter classes of Church-
men were capable of resisting the strain of
political necessity.

Parliament in 1606 fought King James and de-
clared that the Scots were beggars, rebels, traitors ;

254 ^^^ PURITAN REACTION.

that there had not been a single King of Scotland
who had not been murdered by his subjects, and
that it was as reasonable to unite England and
Scotland as it would be to place a prisoner at the
bar on an equality with a judge upon the bench. *
And Parliament in 1643, alarmed for its own safety
in the civil war against the King, abandoned the
Church in order to get assistance from the Scotch
and bound itself by the " Solemn league and
and covenant" to extirpate Prelacy and to submit to
Presbyterianism. Thus Puritanism won the day
and began a seventeen years' reign of religious in-
tolerance and confusion without a precedent in
English history. Prelacy was abolished. Calvin-
ism was adopted. A Directory of worship was
published. All holidays were forbidden — all relig-
ious services at funerals were condemned. The
use of the Prayer Book in public or in private was
prohibited and a penalty imposed of a fine of ^5 for
the first offence and imprisonment for the second,
and this was afterwards extended to a recitation
of the prayers from memory. Walker, on p. 198
of his book on " The Sufferings of the Clergy,"
demonstrates with abundant evidence that about
8,000 of the English clergy, most of them with
their wives and children, were ejected from their
livings, notwithstanding numerous petitions from
their parishioners, and left without means of sup-

* Skottowe, p. 63.

THE PURITAN REACTIOiV. 255

port. Some fled to the continent, many were im-
prisoned, some starved to death, and negotiations
were entered into for disposing of some of them
by selling them into slavery. Churches were
desecrated, and art galleries and monuments
destroyed. Horses and swine were baptized in
mockery in the Cathedral fonts. S. Paul's became
a stable for horses, and Westminster Abbey was
turned into a barrack. Within two years sixteen
sects sprang up which vied with each other in the
active encouragement of misrule. Arguments
against toleration were put forth by the Presby-
terian party which anathematized schism and main-
tained that it was grievous sin to separate from
their true Church. But Cromwell and his army put
an end to this tyranny and established a system
of government which was forced to be tolerant to
all sects except Churchmen, Roman Catholics,
Quakers and Unitarians. Thus both religiously
and politically the rebellion was a failure. Once
indeed the Lord Protector permitted a free elec-
tion, and the Parliament of 1654 i^ known as the
first Parliament representing the United King-
dom ; but its early dissolution proved that con-
stitutional government was impossible, and
Cromwell did not dare to trust again to a free
election.

Religiously the government was a parody, and
the great mass of the people were indignantly

256 THE PURITAN REACTION.

restive under this new Papalism and longed for
the Church's restoration. When that came in
1660, the reformation of the Church of England
may be said to have been completed. The con-
flict had been for one hundred years on the inter-
pretation of the Prayer Book, and the Church.'s
revision in 1662 settled that question by finally
deciding in favor of Laud as against the Puritans.

The years that have passed since the Great
Rebellion have removed much bitterness, and
sobered men's judgments and taught them many
lessons of breadth, of wisdom, of toleration. The
ideal Puritan with his gloomy solemnity, his
relentless determination, his peculiarities of man-
ner, of dress, and conversation; his exquisite as-
sumption of right to examine into other men's
consciences; his enormous assurance, his pas-
sionate zeal for a narrow and Judaic conception
of Christianity — has passed away from amongst
us. What was true and abiding in that for which
he contended is with us still. For the present
contains the harvest of all the past and the seed
of all the future, and history is but the record of
God's dealings with His people, whereby He has
brought good out of apparent evil and has vindi-
cated the truth of that unchangeable law of
righteousness to which all human actions must
ultimately be adjusted.

Puritanism has been regarded by many as a

THE PURITAX REACT/OX. 257

necessary factor in the growth of that civil libert\-
with which at the Rebellion it was accidental 1\-
associated. But nothing can be clearer, rein-
forced as it is by the history of New England,
than that not only was there no essential con-
nection between that peculiar form of reformed
Christianity and our modern freedom; but that
some of its axioms were as contradictory to our
modern conceptions of the proper relations be-
tween Church and State as were the theories of
Hildebrand and Innocent III.

Puritanism as a system must be judged by its
immediate results. It must be looked at, as it
was, — not glorified by the characters of individ-
ual men who in later days have owned hereditary
allegiance to it; not as modified and altered to
meet new conditions and adapted to the more
liberal and enlighted conceptions of our modern
world. The Puritanism we have been consider-
ing had its results to be seen and read of all men.
As Matthew Arnold * says, " The triumph of the
Puritan conception and presentation of righteous-
ness was so at war with the ancient and inbred
integrity, piety and good nature and good humor
of the English people, that it led straight to
moral anarchy, to the profligacy of the Restora-
tion. It led to the court, the manners, the stage,
the literature which we know. It led to the

* Essay on Falkland, p. 170.

258 THE PURITAN REACTION.

long^ discredit of serious things, to the dryness of
the 1 8th century, to the irreHgion which vexed
Butler's righteous soul, the aversion and incapac-
ity for all deep inquiries concerning religion and
its sanctions, to the belief so frequently found
now among the followers of natural science that
such inquiries are unprofitable."

It checked and cramped that intellectual and
literary development which was the glory of
Elizabeth's reign. An alien in every sense, by
birth and by adoption, it has been a source of
discord to the English Church — choking the
freedom of her growth and deadening her spirit-
ual power — breeding that widespread and un-
happy dissension and disunion which is the
present agony of the English-speaking Protes-
tant world.

^,