CHAP. III 66 CHURCH GOVERNMENT 139 force of the orthodox current. A deliberative assembly tends to make party spirit obdurate. Oh, what may not pride do!" cries Baxter ; "and what miscarriages will not faction hide!" The Reconcilers, who called for unity in necessary things, liberty in things indifferent, and charity in all things, could not be heard. The breach widened as time went on, and by 1645 its repair was hopeless. The conflict in its progress made more definite the schism between presbyterian and independent. It was the alliance of independent and Erastian in parliament that finally baffled the presbyterian after the Scottish model, and hardened the great division, until what had been legitimate difference on a disputable question became mutual hatred between two infuriated factions. Baillie says of the independents that it would be a marvel to him if such men should always prosper, their ways were so impious, unjust, ungrate, and every way hateful. One Coleman, an Erastian, gave good men much trouble by defending, with the aid of better lawyers than himself, the arguments of the Erastian doctor against the proposition that the founder of Christianity had instituted a church government distinct from the civil, to be exercised by the officers of the church without commission from the magistrates. Coleman was happily stricken with death; he fell in an ague, and after four or five days he expired. "It is not good," runs the dour comment, "to stand in Christ's way." The divines were too shrewd not to perceive how it was the military weakness of the Scots that allowed the independents with their heresies to ride rough-shod over them. If the Scots had only had fifteen thousand men in England, they said, their advice on doctrine and discipline would have been followed quickly enough; if the Scottish arms had only been successful last year, there would have been little abstract debating. "It's neither reason nor religion that stays some men's rage, but a strong army bridling them with fear." Such were the plain words of carnal wisdom. A story is told of a Scot and an Englishman disputing on the question of soldiers preaching. Quoth the Scot, "Is it fit that Colonel Cromwell's soldiers should preach in their quarters, to take away the minister's function? Quoth the Englishman, "Truly I remember they made a gallant sermon at Marston Moor; that was one of the best sermons that hath been preached in the kingdom." The fortune of war, in other words, carried with it the fortunes of theology and the churches. We need not follow the vicissitudes of party, or the changing shadows of military and political events as they fell across the zealous scene. One incident of the time must be noted. While presbytery had been fighting its victorious battle in the Jerusalem Chamber, the man whose bad steering had wrecked his church was sent to the block. The execution of Archbishop Laud (January 10, 1645) is the best of all the illustrations of the hard temper of the age. Laud was more than seventy years old. He had been for nearly five years safe under lock and key in the Tower. His claws were effectually clipped, and it was certain that he would never again be able to do mischief, or if he were, that such mischief as he could do would be too trivial to be worth thinking of, in sight of such a general catastrophe as could alone make the old man's return to power possible. The execution of Strafford may be defended as a great act of retaliation or prevention, done with grave political purpose. So, plausibly or otherwise, may the execution of King Charles. No such considerations justify the execution of Laud, several years after he had committed the last of his imputed offences and had been stripped of all power of ever committing more. It is not necessary that we should echo Dr. Johnson's lines about Rebellion's vengeful talons seizing CHAP. III TOLERATION 141 on Laud, while Art and Genius hovered weeping round his tomb; but if we rend the veil of romance from the cavalier, we are bound not to be overdazzled by the halo of sanctity in the roundhead. was It was in 1646 that parliament consummated what would have seemed so extraordinary a revolution to the patriots of 1640, by the erection of the presbyterian system of Scotland, though with marked reservations of parliamentary control, into the established church of England. The uniformity that had rooted itself in Scotland, and had been the centre of the Solemn League and Covenant, now nominally established throughout the island. But in name only. It was soon found in the case of church and state alike, that to make England break with her history is a thing more easily said than done, as it has ever been in all her ages. The presbyterian system struck no abiding root. The assembly, as a Scottish historian has pointedly observed, though called by an English parliament, held on English ground, and composed of English divines, with only a few Scotsmen among them, still, as things turned out, existed and laboured mainly for Scotland. III The deliberations of the divines were haunted throughout by the red spectre of Toleration. For the rulers of states a practical perplexity rose out of protestantism. How was a system resting on the rights of individual conscience and private reason to be reconciled with either authority or unity? The natural history of toleration seems simple, but it is in truth one of the most complex of all the topics that engage either the reasoner or the ruler; and until nations were by their mental state ready for religious toleration, a statesman responsible for order naturally paused before committing himself to a system that might only mean that the members of rival communions would fly at one another's throats, like catholics and Huguenots in France, or Spaniards and Beggars in Holland. In history it is our business to try to understand the possible reasons and motives for everything, even for intolerance. Religious toleration was no novelty either in great books or in the tractates of a day. Men of broad minds, like More in England and L'Hôpital in France, had not lived for nothing; and though Bacon never made religious tolerance a political dogma, yet his exaltation of truth, knowledge, and wisdom tended to point that way. Nor should we forget that Cromwell's age is the age of Descartes and of Grotius, men whose lofty and spacious thinking, both directly and indirectly, contributed to create an atmosphere of freedom and of peace in which it is natural for tolerance to thrive. To say nothing of others, the irony of Montaigne in the generation before Cromwell was born, had drawn the true moral from the bloodshed and confusion of the long fierce wars between catholic and Huguenot. Theories in books are wont to prosper or miscarry according to circumstances, but beyond theory, presbyterians at Westminster might have seen both in France and in Holland rival professions standing side by side, each protected by the state. At one moment, in this very era, no fewer than five protestants held the rank of marshal of France. The Edict of Nantes, indeed, while it makes such a figure in history (1598-1685), was much more of a forcible practical concordat than a plan reposing on anybody's acceptance of a deliberate doctrine of toleration. It was never accepted by the clergy, any more than it was in heart accepted by the people. Even while the edict was in full force, it was at the peril of his authority with his flock that either catholic bishop or protestant pastor CHAP. III TOLERATION 143 in France preached moderation toward the other communion. It was not French example, but domestic necessities, that here tardily brought toleration into men's minds. Helwys, Busher, Brown, sectaries whose names find no place in literary histories, had from the opening of the century argued the case for toleration, before the more powerful plea of Roger Williams; but the ideas and the practices of Amsterdam and Leyden had perhaps a wider influence than either colonial exiles or home-bred controversialists, in gradually producing a political school committed to freedom of conscience. The limit set to toleration in the earlier and unclouded days of the Long Parliament had been fixed and definite. So far as catholics were concerned, Charles stood for tolerance, and the puritans for rigorous enforcement of persecuting laws. In that great protest for freedom, the Grand Remonstrance itself, they had declared it to be far from their purpose or desire to let loose the golden reins of discipline and government in the church, to leave private persons or particular congregations to take up what form of divine service they pleased; "for we hold it requisite," they went on to say, "that there should be throughout the whole realm a conformity to that order which the laws enjoin according to the Word of God." It was the rise of the independents to political power that made toleration a party question, and forced it into the salient and telling prominence that is reserved for party questions. The presbyterian majority in principle answered the questions of toleration and uniformity just as Laud or the Pope would have answered them-one church, one rule. The catholic built upon St. Peter's rock; the presbyterian built upon scripture. Just as firmly as the catholic, he believed in a complete and exclusive system, " and the existence |
