CHAP. III THE STATE AND THE CHURCH

49

and heretic have mixed up with mysteries of the faith all the issues of mundane policy and secular interest, all the strife of nationality, empire, party, race, dynasty. A dogma becomes the watchword of a faction; a ceremonial rite is made the ensign for the ambition of statesmen. The rival armies manœuvre on the theological or the ecclesiastical field, but their impulse like their purpose is political or personal. It was so in the metaphysical conflicts that tore the world in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era, and so it was in the controversies that swept over the sixteenth century and the seventeenth.

The centre of the storm in England now came to be the question that has vexed Western Europe for so many generations down to this hour, the question who is to control the law and constitution of the church. The Pope and the Councils, answered the Guelph; the emperor, answered the Ghibelline. This was in the early Middle Age. In England and France the ruling power adopted a different line. There, kings and lawyers insisted that it was for the national or local government to measure and limit the authority of the national branch of the church universal. The same principle was followed by the first reformers in Germany and Switzerland, and by Henry VIII. and Cranmer. Then came a third view, not Guelph, nor Ghibelline, nor Tudor. The need for concentration in religion had not disappeared; it had rather become more practically urgent, for schism was followed by heresy and theological libertinism. Calvin at Geneva, a generation after Luther, claimed for the spiritual power independence of the temporal, just as the Pope did, but he pressed another scheme of religious organisation. Without positively excluding bishops, he favoured the system by which the spiritual power was to reside in a council of presbyters, partly ministers, partly laymen. This was the scheme

E

that the strenuous and powerful character of John Knox had succeeded in stamping upon Scotland. It was also the scheme that in England was the subject of the dispute in Elizabeth's time between Cartwright and Whitgift, and the main contention of that famous admonition of 1572 in which puritanism is usually supposed to have first taken definite shape. During the years when Cromwell was attending to his business at St. Ives, this reorganisation of the church upon the lines of the presbyterian churches abroad marked the direction in which serious minds were steadily looking. But with no violently revolutionary sense or intention. That slowly grew up with events. Decentralisation was the key in church reform as in political reform; the association of laity with bishops, as of commonalty with the king. Different church questions hovered in men's minds, sometimes vaguely, sometimes with precision, rising into prominence one day, dwindling away the next. Phase followed phase, and we call the whole the puritan revolution, just as we give the name of puritan alike to Baxter and Hugh Peters, to the ugly superstition of Nehemiah Wallington and the glory of John Milton, men with hardly a single leading trait in common. The Synod of Dort (1619), which some count the best date for the origin of puritanism, was twofold in its action: it ratified election by grace, and it dealt a resounding blow to episcopacy. Other topics of controversy indeed abounded as time went on. Vestment and ceremonial, the surplice or the gown, the sign of the cross at baptism, altar or table, sitting or kneeling, no pagan names for children, no anointing of kings or bishops, all these and similar things were matter of passionate discussion, veiling grave differences of faith under what look like mere triflings about indifferent form. But the power and station of the bishop, his temporal prerogative, his coercive jurisdiction, his usurping arrogance, his subserviences

CHAP. III TEMPORAL POWER & SPIRITUAL 51

to the crown, were what made men's hearts hot within them. The grievance was not speculative but actual, not a thing of opinion but of experience and visible circumstance.

The Reformation had barely touched the authority of the ecclesiastical courts, though it had rendered that authority dependent upon the civil power. Down to the calling of the Long Parliament, the backslidings of the laity no less than of the clergy, in private morals no less than in public observance, were by these courts vigilantly watched and rigorously punished. The penalties went beyond penitential impressions on mind and conscience, and clutched purse and person. The archdeacon was the eye of the bishop, and his court was as busy as the magistrate at Bow Street. In the twelve months ending at the date of the assembly of the Long Parliament, in the archdeacon's court in London no fewer than two thousand persons were brought up for tippling, sabbath-breaking, and incontinence. This Moral Police of the Church, as it was called, and the energy of its discipline, had no small share in the unpopularity of the whole ecclesiastical institution. Clarendon says of the clergymen of his day in well-known words, that "they understand the least, and take the worst measure of human affairs, of all mankind that can write and read." In no age have they been admired as magistrates or constables. The jurisdiction of the court of bishop or archdeacon did not exceed the powers of a Scottish kirk-session, but there was the vital difference that the Scottish court was democratic in the foundation of its authority, while the English court was a privileged annex of monarchy.

In loftier spheres the same aspirations after ecclesiastical control in temporal affairs waxed bold. An archbishop was made chancellor of Scotland. Juxon, the Bishop of London, was made

Lord High Treasurer of England. No churchman, says Laud complacently, has had it since the time of Henry the Seventh. The Chief Justice goes down to the assizes in the west, and issues an injunction to the clergy to publish certain judicial orders against feasts and wakes. He is promptly called up by Laud for encroaching on church jurisdiction. The king commands the Chief Justice to recall the orders. He disobeys, and is again brought before the council, where Laud gives him such a rating that he comes out in tears.

The issue was raised in its most direct form (November 1628) in the imperious declaration prefixed to the thirty-nine articles in the Prayer Book of this day. The churchgoer of our time, as in a listless moment he may hit upon this dead page, should know what indignant fires it once kindled in the breasts of his forefathers. To them it seemed the signal for quenching truth, for silencing the inward voice, for spreading darkness over the sanctuary of the soul. The king announces that it is his duty not to suffer unnecessary disputations or questions to be raised. He commands all further curious search beyond the true, usual, literal meaning of the articles to be laid aside. Any university teacher who fixes a new sense to one of the articles will be visited by the displeasure of the king and the censure of the church; and it is for the convocation of the bishops and clergy alone, with licence under the king's broad seal, to do whatever may be needed in respect of doctrine and discipline. Shortly before the accession of Charles, the same spirit of the hierarchy had shown itself in notable instructions. Nobody under a bishop or a dean was to presume to preach in any general auditory the deep points of predestination, election, reprobation, or of the universality, resistibility, or irresistibility of divine grace. But then these were the very points that thinking men were interested in. To remove them

CHAP. III

ECCLESIASTICAL CLAIMS

53

out of the area of public discussion, while the declaration about the articles was meant in due time to strip them of their Calvinistic sense, was to assert the royal supremacy in its most odious and intolerable shape. The result was what might have been expected. Sacred things and secular became one interest. Civil politics and ecclesiastical grew to be the same. Tonnage and poundage and predestination, ship-money and election, habeas corpus and justification by faith, all fell into line. The control of parliament over convocation was as cherished a doctrine as its control over the exchequer. As for toleration, this had hardly yet come into sight. Of respect for right of conscience as a conviction, and for free discussion as a principle, there was at this stage hardly more on one side than on the other. Without a qualm the very parliament that fought with such valour for the Petition of Right (March 1629) declared that anybody who should be seen to extend or introduce any opinion, whether papistical, Arminian, or other, disagreeing from the true and orthodox church, should be deemed a capital enemy of the kingdom and commonwealth.

It was political and military events that forced a revolution in ecclesiastical ideas. Changing needs gradually brought out the latent social applications of a puritan creed, and on the double base rose a democratic party in a modern sense, the first in the history of English politics. Until the middle of the seventeenth century, independency was a designation hardly used, and Cromwell himself at first rejected it, perhaps with the wise instinct of the practical statesman against being too quick to assume a compromising badge before occasion positively forces. He was never much of a democrat, but the same may be said of many, if not most, of those whom democracy has used to do its business. Calvinism and Jacobinism sprang alike from France,