CHAP. III DEVELOPMENT OF SECTS 39 II "The greatest liberty of our kingdom is religion," said Pym, and Cromwell's place in history is due to the breadth with which he underwent this mastering impression of the time, and associated in his own person the double conditions, political and moral, of national advance. Though the conditions were twofold, religion strikes the key-note. Like other movements, the course of the Reformation followed the inborn differences of human temperament, and in due time divided itself into a right wing and a left. Passion and logic, the two great working elements of revolutionary change, often over-hot the one, and narrow and sophistical the other, carry men along at different rates according to their natural composition, and drop them at different stages. Most go to fierce extremes; few hold on in the "quiet flow of truths that soften hatred, temper strife" ; and for these chosen spirits there is no place in the hour of conflagration. In England the left wing of protestantism was puritanism, and puritanism in its turn threw out an extreme left with a hundred branches of its own. The history of Cromwell almost exactly covers this development from the steady-going doctrinal puritanism he found prevailing when he first emerged upon the public scene, down to the faiths of the countless enthusiastic sects whom he still left preaching and praying and warring behind him when his day was over. In this long process, so extensive and so complicated, an inter-related evolution of doctrine, discipline, manners, ritual, church polity, all closely linked with corresponding changes in affairs of civil government, it is not easy to select a leading clue through the labyrinth. It is not easy to disentangle the double plot in church and state, nor to fix in a single formula that wide twofold impulse, religious and political, under which Cromwell's age, and Cromwell the man of his age, marched toward their own ideals of purified life and higher citizenship. It is enough here to say in a word that in the Cromwellian period when the ferment at once so subtle and so tumultuous had begun to clear, it was found that, though by no direct and far-sighted counsel of Cromwell's own, two fertile principles had struggled into recognised life upon English soil-the principle of toleration, and the principle of free or voluntary churches. These might both of them have seemed to be of the very essence of the Reformation; but, as everybody knows, Free Inquiry and Free Conscience, the twin pillars of protestantism in its fundamental theory, were in practice hidden out of sight and memory, and, as we shall see, even Cromwell and his independents shrank from the full acceptance of their own doctrines. The advance from the early to the later phases of puritanism was not rapid. Heated as the effervescence was, its solid products were slow to disengage themselves. Only by steps did the new principles of Toleration and the Free Church find a place even in the two most capacious understandings of the time—in the majestic reason of Milton and the vigorous and penetrating practical perceptions of Cromwell. Puritanism meanwhile profited by the common tendency among men of all times to set down whatever goes amiss to something wrong in government. It is in vain for the most part that sage observers like Hooker try to persuade us that "these stains and blemishes, springing from the root of human frailty and corruption, will remain until the end of the world, what form of government soever take place." Mankind is by nature too restless, too readily indignant, too hopeful, too credulous of the unknown, ever to acquiesce in this. But the English Revolution of the seventeenth century was no mere ordinary case of a political opposition. The puritans of the Cromwellian time were forced into a brave and energetic 41 conflict against misgovernment in church and state. But it is to the honour of puritanism in all its phases that it strove with unending constancy, by the same effort to pierce inward to those very roots of " human frailty and corruption that are always the true cause of the worst mischiefs of an unregenerate world. Puritanism came from the deeps. It was, like Stoicism, monasticism, Jansenism, even Mohammedanism, a manifestation of elements in human nature that are indestructible. It flowed from yearnings that make themselves felt in Eastern world and Western; it sprang from aspirations that breathe in men and women of many communions and faiths; it arose in instincts that seldom conquer for more than a brief season, and yet are never crushed. An ascetic and unworldly way of thinking about life, a rigorous moral strictness, the subjugation of sense and appetite, a coldness to every element in worship and ordinance external to the believer's own soul, a dogma unyielding as cast-iron -all these things satisfy moods and sensibilities in man that are often silent and fleeting, easily drowned in reaction, but readily responsive to the awakening voice. History, as Döllinger has said, is no simple game of abstractions; men are more than doctrines. It is not a certain theory of grace that makes the Reformation; it is Luther, it is Calvin. Calvin shaped the mould in which the bronze of puritanism was cast. That commanding figure, of such vast power, yet somehow with so little lustre, by his unbending will, his pride, his severity, his French spirit of system, his gift for government, for legislation, for dialectic in every field, his incomparable industry and persistence, had conquered a more than pontifical ascendancy in the protestant world. He meets us in England, as in Scotland, Holland, France, Switzerland, and the rising England across the Atlantic. He was dead (1564) a generation before Cromwell was born, but his influence was still at its height. Nothing less than to create in man a new nature was his far-reaching aim, to regenerate character, to simplify and consolidate religious faith. Men take a narrow view of Calvin when they think of him only as the preacher of justification by faith, and the foe of sacerdotal mediation. His scheme comprehended a doctrine that went to the very root of man's relations with the scheme of universal things; a church order as closely compacted as that of Rome; a system of moral discipline as concise and as imperative as the code of Napoleon. He built it all upon a certain theory of the government of the universe, which by his agency has exerted an amazing influence upon the world. It is a theory that might have been expected to sink men crouching and paralysed into the blackest abysses of despair, and it has in fact been answerable for much anguish in many a human heart. Still Calvinism has proved itself a famous soil for rearing heroic natures. Founded on St. Paul and on Augustine, it was in two or three sentences this :-Before the foundations of the world were laid, it was decreed by counsel secret to us that some should be chosen out of mankind to everlasting salvation, and others to curse and damnation. In the figure of the memorable passage of the Epistle to the Romans, as the potter has power over the clay, so men are fashioned by antemundane will, some to be vessels of honour and of mercy, others to be vessels of dishonour and of wrath. Then the Potter has mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth. On this black granite of Fate, Predestination, and Foreknowledge absolute, the strongest of the protestant fortresses all over the world were founded. Well might it have been anticipated that fatalism as unflinching as this would have driven men headlong into " desperation and wrecklessness of most unclean living." Yet that was no more the actual CHAP. III CALVINISM 43 effect of the fatalism of St. Paul, Augustine, and Calvin than it was of the fatalism of the Stoics or of Mahomet. On the contrary, Calvinism exalted its votaries to a pitch of heroic moral energy that has never been surpassed; and men who were bound to suppose themselves moving in chains inexorably riveted, along a track ordained by a despotic and unseen Will before time began, have yet exhibited an active courage, a resolute endurance, a cheerful self-restraint, an exulting selfsacrifice, that men count among the highest glories of the human conscience. It is interesting to think what is the secret of this strange effect of the doctrine of fatality; for that was the doctrine over which Cromwell brooded in his hours of spiritual gloom, and on which he nourished his fortitude in days of fierce duress, of endless traverses and toils. Is it, as some have said, that people embraced a rigorous doctrine because they were themselves by nature austere, absolute, stiff, just, rather than merciful? Is it, in other words, character that fixes creed, or creed that fashions character? Or is there a bracing and an exalting effect in the unrewarded morality of Calvinism; in the doctrine that good works done in view of future recompense have no merit; in that obedience to duty for its own sake which, in Calvin as in Kant, has been called one of the noblest efforts of human conscience towards pure virtue? Or, again, is there something invigorating and inspiring in the thought of acting in harmony with eternal law, however grim; of being no mere link in a chain of mechanical causation, but a chosen instrument in executing the sublime decrees of invincible power and infinite intelligence? However we may answer all the insoluble practical enigmas that confronted the Calvinist, just as for that matter they confront the philosophic necessarian or determinist of to-day, Calvinism was the general theory through which |
