The Reformation has often been charged by Roman Catholic writers with being the mother of the bloody civil wars which grew out of the close union of Church and State, and which devastated Europe for more than a century. But the fault is primarily on the side of Rome. Exclusiveness and intolerance are fundamental principles of her creed, and persecution her consistent practice wherever she has the power. In Italy and Spain Protestantism was strangled in its cradle. In Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland it was reduced to a struggling minority by the civil sword and the Jesuit intrigues. In France it barely escaped annihilation in the massacre of the night of St. Bartholomew, which the pope hailed with a Te Deum; and after fighting its way to the throne, and acquiring the limited toleration of the Edict of Nantes, it was again persecuted almost to extermination by the most Catholic King Louis XIV. In Switzerland the war between the Catholic and Reformed Cantons, in which Zwingli fell, fixed the boundaries of the two religions on a basis of equality. Germany had to pass through the fearful ordeal of the Thirty-Years' War, which destroyed nearly one half of its population, but ended, in spite of the protest of the pope, with the legal recognition of the Lutheran and Reformed Confessions by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The United Provinces of Holland came out victorious from the long and bloody struggle with the tyranny and bigotry of Spain. Scotland fought persistently and successfully against popery and prelacy. England, after the permanent establishment of the Reformation under Elizabeth, was shaken to the base by an internal conflict, not between Protestants and foreign Romanists, but between Protestants and native Romanizers, ultra-Protestant Puritans and semi-Catholic Churchmen.
This conflict marks the most important period in the Church history of that island; it called forth on both sides its deepest moral and religious forces; it made England at last the stronghold of constitutional liberty in Europe, and laid the foundations for a Protestant republic in America. The Puritans were the pioneers in this struggle in Old England, and the fathers of New England beyond the sea. As the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church, so freedom is the sweet fruit of bitter persecution.
7.VII.1
Puritanism—an honorable name, etymologically and historically, though originally given in reproach,1 like Pietism and Methodism—aimed at a radical purification and reconstruction of Church and State on the sole basis of the Word of God, without regard to the traditions of men. It was a second Reformation, as bold and earnest as the first, but less profound and comprehensive, and more radical in its antagonism to the mediaeval Church. It was a revolution, and ran into the excesses of a revolution, which called forth, by the natural law of reaction, the opposite excesses of a reactionary restoration; but it differs from more recent revolutions by the predominance of the religious motive and aim. The English Puritans, the Scotch Covenanters, and the French Huguenots were alike spiritual descendants of Calvin, and represent, with different national characteristics, the same heroic faith and severe discipline. They were alike animated by the fear of God, which made them strong and free. They bowed reverently before his holy Word, but before no human authority. In their eyes God alone was great.
The Puritans were no separate organization or sect, but the advanced wing of the national Church of England, and at one time they became the national Church itself, treating their opponents as Nonconformists, as they had been treated by them before, and as they were treated afterwards in turn. Conformity and Nonconformity were relative terms, which each party construed in its own way and for its own advantage. The Puritan ministers were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and had bishops, deans, and professors of theology among their leaders and sympathizers. Their intention was not to secede, but simply to reform still further the national Church in the interest of primitive purity and simplicity by legislative and executive sovereignty. The tyrannical measures of the ruling party drove them to greater opposition, and a large portion of them into complete independency and the advocacy of toleration and freedom. But originally they were as intolerant and exclusive as their opponents. The common error of both was that they held to a close union of Church and State, and aimed at one national Church, to which all citizens must conform.
'Nonconformity,' says Thomas Fuller in his quaint and pithy way, 'was conceived in the days of King Edward, born in the reign of Queen Mary (but beyond the sea, at Frankfort-on-the-Main, nursed and weaned in the reign of Elizabeth, grew up a youth or tall stripling under King James, and shot up under Charles I. to the full strength and stature of a man able not only to cope with, but to conquer the hierarchy, its adversary.'
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The open conflict between Puritanism and High-Churchism dates from the closing years of the sixteenth century, but its roots may be traced to the beginning of the Reformation, which embraced two distinct tendencies—one semi-Catholic, conservative and aristocratic; the other anti-Catholic, radical and democratic.
The aristocratic politico-ecclesiastical movement, headed by the monarch and the bishops, grew out of the mediaeval conflict of the English crown and Parliament with the foreign papacy, and effected under Henry VIII. the national independence of the English Church, and under Edward VI. a positive though limited reformation in doctrine and ritual. The democratic religious movement, which sprang from the desire of the people after salvation and unobstructed communion with God and the Bible, had its forerunners in Wycliffe and the Lollards, and was nurtured by Tyndale's English Testament, the writings of the Continental Reformers, and the personal contact of the Marian exiles with Bullinger and Calvin. At first it was nearly crushed under Henry VIII., who would not even tolerate the circulation of the English Bible; but it gained considerable influence under Edward VI., passed through a baptism of blood under Mary, and became a strong party under Elizabeth. It included a number of bishops, pervaded the universities, and was backed by the sympathies of the common people as they were gradually weaned from the traditions of popery.
Under Edward VI. the martyr-bishop Hooper, of Gloucester, a friend of Bullinger, and one of the fathers of Puritanism, opened the ritualistic controversy by refusing to be consecrated in the sacerdotal garments, and to take the customary episcopal oath, which included an appeal to the saints. He was quieted by the representations of the young king, of Bucer, and Peter Martyr, who regarded those externals as things indifferent; but he continued to strive after 'an entire purification of the Church from the very foundation.'
Under Queen Mary the conflict continued in the prisons and around the fires of Smithfield, and was transferred to the Continent with the English exiles, such as Jewel, Grindal, Sandys, Pilkington, Parkhurst, Humphrey, Sampson, Whittingham, Coverdale, Cox, Nowel, Foxe, Horn, and Knox. It produced an actual split in the congregation at Frankfort-on-the-Main. There it turned on the question of the Prayer-Book of Edward VI., whether it should be adhered to, or reformed still further after the model of the simpler worship of Zurich and Geneva. The episcopal and liturgical party was led by Dr. Cox (afterwards bishop of Ely), and formed the majority; the Puritan party was headed by John Knox, who was required to leave, and organized another congregation of exiles at Geneva.
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After the accession of Elizabeth both parties flocked back to their native land, and forgot the controversy for a while in the common zeal for the re-establishment of Protestantism. As long as the ruling powers favored the Reformation the Puritans were satisfied, and heartily co-operated in every step. Though badly treated by the proud queen, they were to the last among her most loyal subjects, and prayed even in their dungeons for her welfare. They overlooked her faults for her virtues. They were the strongest supporters of the government and the crown against popish plots and foreign aggression, and helped to defeat the Spanish Armada, whose 'proud shipwrecks' were scattered over 'the Northern Ocean even to the frozen Thule.' But when the anti-Romish current stopped, and the Church of England seemed to settle down in a system of compromise between Rome and Geneva, fortified and hedged in by a cruel penal code against every dissent, the radicals assumed an antagonistic attitude of nonconformity against the rigorous enforcement of conformity, and stood up for the rights of conscience and the progress of ecclesiastical reform.
The controversy was renewed in different ways, between Cartwright and Whitgift, and between Travers and Hooker. In both cases the combatants were unequally matched: Cartwright, the father of Presbyterianism, was a much abler man than Archbishop Whitgift, the father of High-Church episcopacy; while Hooker, the Master of the Temple, far excelled Travers, the Lecturer at the Temple, in learning and depth. Here the question was chiefly whether the Scriptures as interpreted by private judgment, or the Scriptures as interpreted by the fathers of the primitive Church, should be the rule of faith and discipline. With this was connected another question—whether the Roman Church had lost the character of a Christian Church, and was therefore to be wholly disowned, or whether she was still a true though corrupt Church, with valid ordinances, coming down through an unbroken historical succession. The Puritans advocated Scripture Christianity versus historical Christianity, Hooker historical Christianity as consistent with Scripture Christianity. But in substance of doctrine both parties were Augustinians and Calvinists, with this difference, that the Puritans were high Calvinists, the Churchmen low Calvinists. Whitgift advocated even the Lambeth Articles, and Hooker adopted them with some modifications. Arminianism did not make its appearance in England till the close of the reign of James.
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The accession of James I. (1603-1625) marks a new epoch. He was no ordinary man. His learning ranged from the mysteries of predestination to witchcraft and tobacco; he had considerable shrewdness, mother-wit, ready repartee, and uncommon sense, but little common-sense, and no personal dignity nor moral courage; he was given to profanity, intemperance, and dissimulation. His courtiers and bishops lauded him as the Solomon of his age, but Henry IV. of France characterized him better as 'the wisest fool in Christendom.' He was brought up in the school of Scotch Presbyterianism, subscribed the Scotch Confession, and once said of the Anglican liturgy that 'it is an ill-said mass in English.' But the Stuart blood was in him, and when he arrived in England he felt relieved of his tormentors, who 'pulled his sleeve as they administered their blunt rebukes to him,' and was delighted by the adulation of prelates who had much higher notions of royalty than Scotch presbyters.
He lost no time in showing his true character. He answered the famous Millenary (or Millemanus) petition, signed by nearly a thousand Puritan ministers, and asking for the reform of certain abuses and offenses in worship and discipline, by the imprisonment of ten petitioners on the ground that their act tended to sedition and treason, although it contained no demand inconsistent with the established Church. Thus the opportunity for effecting a compromise was lost. He agreed, however, to a Conference, which suited his ambition for the display of his learning and wit in debate.
The Conference was held January 14, 16, and 18, 1604 (old style, 1603), at Hampton Court. The persons summoned were nine bishops, headed by Archbishop Whitgift of Canterbury and Bishop Bancroft of London, and eight deans, on the part of the Conformists, and four of the most learned and moderate Puritan divines, under the lead of Dr. John Reynolds, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The King himself acted both as moderator and judge, and took the leading part in the discussion. He laid down his famous pet-principle (which he called his 'aphorism'), 'No bishop, no king;' and, after browbeating the Puritans, used as his final argument, 'I will make them conform themselves, or else I will harry them out of the land, or else do worse.'
Archbishop Whitgift was so profoundly impressed with the King's theological wisdom that he said, 'Undoubtedly your Majesty speaks by the special assistance of God's Spirit;' and Bishop Bancroft, of London (who first proclaimed the doctrine of a jure divino episcopacy), thanked God on his knees that of his singular mercy he had given to them 'such a king, as since Christ's time the like hath not been.' The same haughty
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prelate rudely interrupted Dr. Reynolds, one of the most learned men in England, saying, 'May your Majesty be pleased that the ancient canon be remembered—Schismatici [sic] contra episcopos non sunt audiendi; and there is another decree of a very ancient council, that no man should be admitted to speak against that whereunto he hath formerly subscribed. And as for you, Doctor Reynolds, and your associates, how much are ye bound to his Majesty's clemency, permitting you, contrary to the statute primo Elizabethae, so freely to speak against the liturgy or discipline established.'
Fuller remarks 'that the King in this famous Conference went beyond himself, that the Bishop of London (when not in a passion) appeared even with himself, and that Dr. Reynolds fell much beneath himself.' The Nonconformists justly complained that the King invited their divines, not to have their scruples satisfied, but his pleasure propounded—not to hear what they had to say, but to inform them what he would do. Hallam, viewing the Conference calmly from his stand-point of constitutional history, says: 'In the accounts that we read of this meeting we are alternately struck with wonder at the indecent and partial behavior of the King and at the baseness of the bishops, mixed, according to the custom of servile natures, with insolence toward their opponents. It was easy for a monarch and eighteen churchmen to claim the victory, be the merits of their dispute what they might, over four abashed and intimidated adversaries.'
The Conference, however, had one good and most important result—the revision of our English Bible. The revision was suggested and urged by Dr. Reynolds, who was subsequently appointed one of the revisers, and it was ordered to be executed by King James, from whom it has its name.
With all his high notions about royalty, James had not the moral courage to carry them into full practice, and with all his high notions about episcopacy, he had no sympathy with Arminianism, but actually countenanced the Calvinistic Presbyterian Synod of Dort, and sent five delegates to it, among them a bishop. In both these respects Charles went as far beyond James as Laud went beyond Whitgift and Bancroft.
The antagonism was intensified and brought to a bloody issue under Charles I. (1625-1649) and William Laud. They belong to the most lauded and the most abused persons in history, and have been set down by opposite partisans among the saints and among the monsters. They were neither. They were good men in private life, but bad men in public. They might have been as respected and useful in a humble
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station, or in another age or country, as they were hateful and hurtful at the helm of government in Protestant England. It was their misfortune rather than their crime that they were utterly at war with the progressive spirit of their age. Both were learned, cultured, devout gentlemen and churchmen, but narrow, pedantic, reactionary, haughty aristocrats. The one was constitutionally a tyrant, the other constitutionally a pope or an inquisitor-general. They fairly represented in congenial alliance the principle and practice of political and ecclesiastical absolutism, and the sovereign contempt for the rights of the people, whose sole duty in their opinion was passive obedience. Kingcraft and priestcraft based upon divine right was their common shibboleth. By their suicidal follies they destroyed the very system which they so long defended with a rod of iron, and thus they became the benefactors of Protestantism, which they labored to destroy. Both died as martyrs of despotism, and their last days were their best. 'Nothing in life became them as their leaving it.'
Charles wanted to rule without a Parliament; he did so, in fact, for more than eleven years, and the four Parliaments which he was compelled to convoke he soon arbitrarily dissolved (1625, 1626, 1629, and 1640). He preferred ship-money to legal taxation. He made himself intolerable by his duplicity and treachery. 'Faithlessness was the chief cause of his disasters, and is the chief stain on his memory. He was in truth impelled by an incurable propensity to dark and crooked ways. It may seem strange that his conscience, which on occasions of little moment was sufficiently sensitive, should never have reproached him with this great vice. But there is reason to believe that he was perfidious, not only from constitution and from habit, but also on principle. He seems to have learned from theologians whom he most esteemed that between him and his subjects there could be nothing of the nature of mutual contract; and that he could not, even if he would, divest himself of his despotic authority;and that in every promise which he made there was an implied reservation that such promise might be broken in case of necessity, and that of the necessity he was the sole judge.'2
William Laud rose, like Cardinal Wolsey, by his abilities and the royal favor from humble origin to the highest positions in Church and State. He began his career of innovation early at Oxford, and asserted in his exercise for the degree of Bachelor of Divinity (1604) the absolute necessity of baptism for salvation, and the necessity of diocesan episcopacy, not only for the well-being, but for the very existence of the Church. This position exposed him to the charge of heresy, and no one would speak to him in the street. Under James he was kept back, but under Charles he rose rapidly, and after the death of Abbot, who
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was a Puritan, he succeeded him in the primacy of the English Church. When he crossed the Thames to take possession of Lambeth, he met with an ominous accident, which he relates in his Diary (Sept. 18, 1633). The overloaded ferry-boat upset, and his coach sank to the bottom of the river, but he was saved as by water, and 'lost neither man nor horse.'
Laud was of small stature and narrow mind, but strong will and working-power, hot and irascible in temper, ungracious and unpopular in manner, ignorant of human nature, a zealous ritualist, a pedantic disciplinarian, and an overbearing priest. He was indefatigable and punctilious in the discharge of his innumerable duties as archbishop and prime minister, member of the courts of Star-Chamber and High-Commission, of the committee of trade, the foreign committee, and as lord of the treasury. He was for a number of years almost omnipotent and omnipresent in three kingdoms, looking after every appointment and every executive detail in Church and State.
His chief zeal was directed to the establishment of absolute outward uniformity in religion as he understood it, without regard to the rights of conscience and private judgment. His religion consisted of High-Church Episcopalianism and Arminianism in the nearest possible approach to Rome, which he admired and loved, and the furthest possible distance from Geneva, which he hated and abhorred. But while Arminianism in Holland was a protestant growth, and identified with the cause of liberal progress, Laud made it subservient to his intolerant High-Churchism, and liked it for its affinity with the Semipelagianism of the Greek fathers. To enforce this Semipelagian High-Churchism, and to secure absolute uniformity in the outward service of God in the three kingdoms, was the highest aim of his administration, to which he bent every energy. He could not conceive spiritual unity without external uniformity. This was his fundamental error. In a characteristic sermon which he preached at Westminster before Parliament, March 17, 1628, on unity in Church and State (Eph. iv. 3), he says: 'Unity of any kind will do much good; but the best is safest, and that is unity of the Spirit. . . . The way to keep unity both in Church and State is for the governors to carry a watchful eye over all such as are discovered or feared to have private ends. . . . Provide for the keeping of unity, and . . . God will bless you with the success of this day. For this day, the seventeenth of March, Julius Caesar overthrew Sextus Pompeius. . . . And this very day, too, Frederick II. entered Jerusalem, and recovered whatsoever Saladin had taken from the Christians. But I must tell you, these emperors and their forces were great keepers of unity.'
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In the same year he caused the Royal Declaration to be added to the Thirty-nine Articles to check their Calvinistic interpretation. From the same motive he displaced, through the agency of Wentworth and Bramhall, the Calvinistic Irish Articles, and neutralized the influence of Archbishop Ussher in Ireland. But the height of his folly, and the beginning of his fall, was the enforcement of his episcopal and ritualistic scheme upon Presbyterian Scotland in criminal defiance of the will of the people and the law of the land. This brought on the Scotch Covenant and hastened the Civil War.
In England he filled all vacancies with Churchmen and Arminians of his own stamp. He kept (as he himself informs us in his Diary) a ledger for the guidance of his royal master in the distribution of patronage: those marked by the letter O (Orthodox) were recommended to all favors, those marked P (Puritans) were excluded from all favors. Bishop Morely, on being asked what the Arminians held, wittily and truthfully replied, 'The best bishoprics and deaneries in England.' He expelled or silenced the Puritans, and shut up every unauthorized meeting-house. 'Even the devotions of private families could not escape the vigilance of his spies.' In his eyes the Puritans were but a miserable 'fraction' of fanatics and rebels, a public nuisance which must be crushed at any price. He made the congregations of French and Dutch refugees conform or leave the land, and forbade the English ambassador in Paris to attend the service of the Huguenots. He restrained the press and the importation of foreign books, especially the favorite Geneva translation of the Bible prepared by the Marian exiles. He stopped several ships in the Thames which were to carry persecuted and disheartened Puritans to New England, and thus tried to prevent Providence from writing the American chapter in history. In this way Oliver Cromwell is said to have been kept at home, that in due time he might overthrow the monarchy.
With equal rigor Laud enforced his ritualism, which was to him not only a desirable matter of taste and propriety, but also an essential element of reverence and piety. He took special care and showed great liberality for the restoration of cathedrals and the full cathedral service with the most pompous ceremonial; he made it a point of vital importance that the communion-tables be removed from the centre of the church to the east end of the chancel, elevated above the level of the pavement, placed altar-ways, railed in, and approached always with the prescribed bows and genuflexions. He called the altar 'the greatest place of God's residence on earth,' and magnified it above the pulpit, because on the altar was Christ's body, which was more than his Word; but he denied the charge of transubstantiation. He introduced pictures, images, crucifixes, candles, and brought put every worn-out relic from
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the ecclesiastical wardrobe of the Middle Ages. Being himself unmarried, he preferred celibates in the priesthood. In the University of Oxford, to which he was a munificent benefactor, he was addressed as His Holiness, and Most Holy father.
No wonder that he was charged with the intention to reintroduce popery into England. The popular mind, especially in times of excitement, takes no notice of minor shades of distinction, and knows only friend and foe. Laud, no doubt, did the pope's work effectually, but he did it unintentionally. He loved the Roman Church much better than the Protestant sects, but he loved the Anglican Church more. He once dreamed, as he tells us, 'that he was reconciled to the Church of Rome,' but was much troubled by it. He was twice offered, by some unnamed agent, a cardinal's hat, but promptly declined it. He preferred to be an independent pope in England, and aped the Roman original as well as he could, with more or less show of real or imaginary opposition that springs from rivalry and affinity. Neal says that he was not 'an absolute papist,' but 'ambitious of being the sovereign patriarch of three kingdoms.' From his 'Conference' with Fisher the Jesuit, which is by far his ablest and most learned performance, it is very evident that he differed from Rome on several points of doctrine and practice, such as the invocation of Mary and the saints, the worship of images, transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the mass, works of supererogation, the temporal power of the pope, and the infallibility of councils; and that his mind, though clear and acute, was not sufficiently logical to admit the ultimate conclusions of some of his own premises. He regarded the Reformation merely as an incident in the history of the English Church, and rejected only such doctrines of Romanism as he was unable to find in the Bible and the early fathers. In his long and manly defense before the House of Lords he claimed to have converted several persons (Chillingworth among them) from popery, but frankly admitted that 'the Roman Church never erred in fundamentals, for fundamentals are in the Creed, and she denies it not.
Were she not a true Church, it were hard with the Church of England, since from her the English bishops derive their apostolic succession. She is, therefore, a true but not an orthodox Church. Salvation may be found in her communion; and her religion and ours are one in the great essentials. I am not bound to believe each detached phrase in the Homilies, and I do not think they assert the pope to be Antichrist; yet it can not be proved that I ever denied him to be so. As to the charge of unchurching foreign Protestants, I certainly said generally, according to St. Jerome, "No bishop, no Church;" and the preface of the book of ordination sets forth that the three orders came from the apostles.' In his last will and testament he says: 'For my faith, I die as I have lived, in
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the true orthodox profession of the Catholic faith of Christ, foreshadowed by the prophets and preached to the world by Christ himself, his blessed apostles, and their successors; and a true member of his Catholic Church within the communion of a living part thereof, the present Church of England, as it stands established by law.'
In one word, Laud was a typical Anglo-Catholic, who unchurched all non-episcopal Churches, and regarded the Anglican Church as an independent sister of the Latin and Greek communions, and as the guardian of the whole truth as against the 'sects,' and of nothing but the truth as against Rome. The Anglo-Catholicism of the nineteenth century is simply a revival of Laud's system divested of its hateful tyranny and political ambition and entanglements. Dr. Pusey, the father of modern Anglo-Catholicism, is superior to Archbishop Laud in learning, spirituality and charity, but in their theology and logic there is no difference.
The two chief instruments of this royal episcopal tyranny were the Star-Chamber and the High-Commission Court—two kinds of inquisition—the first political, the second ecclesiastical, with an unlimited jurisdiction over all sorts of misdemeanors, and with the power to inflict the penalties of deprivation, imprisonment, fines, whipping, branding, cutting ears, and slitting noses.
Freedom of speech and the press, which is now among the fundamental and inalienable rights of every Anglo-Saxon citizen, was punished as a crime against society. Prynne, a graduate of Oxford, and a learned barrister of Lincoln's Inn, who published an unreadable book (Histrio-Mastix, the Player' Scourge, or Actors' Tragedie, divided into Two Parts) against theatres, masquerades, dancing, and women actors, with reflections upon the frivolities of the queen, was condemned by the Star-Chamber to be expelled from Oxford and
Lincoln's Inn, to be fined £5000, to stand in the pillory at Westminster and Cheapside, to have his ears cut off, his cheeks and forehead branded with hot irons, and to be imprisoned for life. His huge quarto volume of 1006 pages, with quotations from as many authors, was burned under his nose, so that he was nearly suffocated with the smoke. Leighton, a Scotchman (father of the saintly archbishop), Bastwick, a learned physician, and Henry Burton, a B.D. of Oxford, and rector of a church in London, were treated with similar cruelty for abusing in printed pamphlets the established hierarchy. No doubt their language was violent and coarse, but torture and mutilation are barbarous and revolting. And yet Laud not only thanked the lords of
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the Star-Chamber for their 'just and honorable sentence upon these men,' but regretted, in a letter to Strafford, that he could not resort to more 'thorough' measures.
The excesses of despotism, sacerdotalism, ceremonialism, intolerance, and cruelty exhausted at last the patience of a noble, freedom-loving people, and kindled the blazing war-torch which burned to the ground the throne and the temple. The indignant nation rose in its majesty, and asserted its inherent and constitutional rights.
The storm burst forth from the North. The Scots compelled the King to abandon his schemes of innovation, and to admit that prelacy was contrary to Scripture. In England the memorable Long Parliament organized the opposition, and assumed the defense of constitutional liberty against royal absolutism. It met Nov. 3, 1640, and continued till April 20, 1653, when it was dissolved by Cromwell to give way to military despotism. The war between the Parliament and the King broke out in August, 1642. For several months the Cavaliers fought more bravely and successfully than the undisciplined forces of the Roundheads; but the fortunes of war changed when Oliver Cromwell, a country gentleman, bred to peaceful pursuits, appeared at the head of his Ironsides, whom he selected from the ranks of the Puritans. It was an army such as England never saw before or since—an army which feared God and hated the pope; which believed in the divine decrees and practiced perseverance of saints; which fought for religion; which allowed no oath, no drunkenness, no gambling in the camp; which sacredly respected private property and the honor of woman; which went praying and psalm-singing into the field of battle, and never returned from it without the laurels of victory. And when these warriors were disbanded at the Restoration, they astonished the royalists by quietly taking their place among the most industrious, thrifty, and useful citizens.
During the reign of the Long Parliament the Star-Chamber and the High-Commission Court were ignominiously and forever swept out of existence amid the execrations of the people. The episcopal hierarchy and the Liturgy were overthrown (Sept. 10, 1642); about two thousand royalist ministers, many of them noted for incapacity, idleness, and immorality, others highly distinguished for scholarship and piety—as Hammond, Sanderson, Pocock, Byron Walton, Hall, Prideaux, Pearson—were ejected as royalists from their benefices and given over to poverty and misery, though one fifth of the revenues of the sequestered livings was reserved for the sufferers. This summary and cruel act provoked retaliation, which in due time came with increased severity.
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The leaders of despotism—the Earl of Strafford (May 12, 1641), Archbishop Laud (Jan. 10, 1645), and at last the King himself (Jan. 30, 1649)—were condemned to death on the block, and thus surrounded by the halo of martyrdom. Their blood was the seed of the Restoration. The execution of Charles especially was, in the eyes of the great majority of the English and Scotch people a crime and a blunder, and set in motion the reaction in favor of monarchy and episcopacy.
At first, however, Cromwell's genius and resolution crushed every opposition in England, Ireland, and Scotland. On the ruins of the monarchy and of Parliament itself he raised a military government which inspired respect and fear at home and abroad, and raised England to the front rank of Protestant powers, but which created no affection and love except among his invincible army. The man of blood and iron, the ablest ruler that England ever had, died at the height of his power, on the anniversary of his victories at Dunbar and Worcester (Sept. 3), and was buried with great pomp among the legitimate kings of England in Westminster Abbey (Nov. 23, 1658).'
The Puritan Commonwealth was but a brilliant military episode, and died with its founder. His son Richard, amiable, good-natured, weak and incompetent, succeeded him without opposition, but resigned a few months after (April 22, 1659). The army, which under its great commander had ruled the divided nation, was now divided, while the national sentiment in the three kingdoms became united, and demanded the restoration of the old dynasty as the safest way to escape the dangers of military despotism. Puritanism represented only a minority of the English people, and the majority of this minority were royalists. The Presbyterians, who were in the saddle during the interregnum, were specially active for the unconditional recall of the treacherous Stuarts. The event was brought about by the cautious and dexterous management of General Monk, a man of expediency, who had successively served under Charles I. and Cromwell, and worshiped with Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents, and at last returned to the Episcopal Church. Charles II., 'who never said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one,' was received with such general enthusiasm on his triumphal march from Dover to London that he wondered where his enemies were, or whether he ever had any. The revolution of national sentiment was complete. The people seemed as happy as a set of unruly children released from the discipline of the school.3 The restoration of the monarchy was followed by the restoration of Episcopacy and the Liturgy with an exclusiveness that did not belong to it before. The Savoy Conference between twenty-one Episcopalians and an equal
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number of Presbyterians (April 15 till July 25, 1661) utterly failed, and left both parties more exasperated and irreconcilable than before. The Churchmen, once more masters of the situation, refused to make any concessions and changes.4 Thus another opportunity of comprehension was lost. In the revision of the Liturgy, which was completed by Convocation at the close of the same year (Dec., 1661), approved by the King, and ratified by Act of Parliament (April, 1662), not the slightest regard was paid to Presbyterian objections, reasonable or unreasonable, although about six hundred alterations were made; on the contrary, all the ritualistic and sacerdotal features complained of were retained and even increased. The Act of Uniformity, which received the royal assent May 19, 1662, and took effect on the ominous St. Bartholomew's Day, Aug. 24, 1662 (involuntarily calling to mind the massacre of the Huguenots), required not only from ministers, but also from all schoolmasters, absolute conformity to the revised Liturgy and episcopal ordination, or reordination. By this cruel act more than two thousand Puritan rectors and vicars—that is, about one fifth of the English clergy, including such men as Baxter, Howe, Poole, Owen, Goodwin, Bates, Manton, Caryl—were ejected and exposed to poverty, public insult, fines, and imprisonment for no other crime than obeying God rather than men. A proposition in the House of Commons to allow these heroes of conscience one fifth of their income, as the Long Parliament had done in the removal of royalist clergymen, was lost by a vote of ninety-four to eighty-seven.5
Even the dead were not spared by the spirit of 'mean revenge.' The magnates of the Commonwealth, twenty-one in number (including Dr. Twisse, the Prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly), who had been buried in Westminster Abbey since 1641, were exhumed and reinterred in a pit (Sept. 12, 1661). Seven only were exempt; among them Archbishop Ussher, who had been buried there at Cromwell's express desire, and at a cost of £200 paid by him. Cromwell himself, Ireton, and Bradshaw were dug up Jan. 29, 1661, next day dragged to Tyburn, hanged (with their faces turned to Whitehall), decapitated, and buried under the gallows. Cromwell's head was planted on the top of Westminster Hall.
The Puritans were now a target of hatred and ridicule as well as persecution. They were assailed from the pulpit, the stage, and the press by cavaliers, prelatists, and libertines as a set of hypocritical Pharisees and crazy fanatics, noted for their love of Jewish names, their lank hair, their sour faces, their deep groans, their long prayers and sermons, their bigotry and cant. And yet the same Puritanism, blind, despised, forsaken, or languishing in prison, produced some of the noblest works, which can never die. It was not dead—it was merely
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musing and dreaming, and waiting for a resurrection in a nobler form. Milton's 'Paradise Lost' (1667) and Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress' (1678) are the shining lights which illuminate the darkness of that disgraceful period.6
With the Restoration rushed in a flood of frivolity and immorality; the King himself setting the example by his shameless adulteries, which he blazoned to the world by raising his numerous mistresses and bastards to the rank and wealth of the nobility of proud old England. 'The violent return to the senses,' says a French writer who has not the slightest sympathy with Puritanism, 'drowned morality. Virtue had the semblance of Puritanism. Duty and fanaticism became mingled in a common reproach. In this great reaction, devotion and honesty, swept away together, left to mankind but the wreck and the mire. The more excellent parts of human nature disappeared; there remained but the animal, without bridle or guide, urged by his desires beyond justice and shame.'
Bad as was Charles II (1660-1685), his brother, James II (1685-1688), was worse. He seemed to combine the vices of the Stuarts without their redeeming traits. Charles, indifferent to religion and defiant to virtue during his life, sent on his death-bed for a Romish priest to give him absolution for his debaucheries. James openly professed his conversion to Romanism, filled in defiance of law the highest posts in the army and the cabinet with Romanists, and opened negotiations with Pope Innocent XI. At the same time he persecuted with heartless cruelty the Protestant Dissenters, and outraged justice by a series of judicial murders which have made the name of Chief Justice Jeffreys as infamous as Nero's.
At last the patience of the English people was again exhausted, the incurable race of the Stuarts, unwilling to learn and to forget any thing, was forever hurled from the throne, and the Prince of Orange, who had married Mary, the eldest daughter of James, was invited to rule England as William III.
The Revolution of 1688 was a political triumph of Puritanism, and secured to the nation constitutional liberty and the Protestant religion. The Episcopal Church remained the established national Church, but the Act of Toleration of 1689 guaranteed liberty and legal protection to such Nonconformists as could subscribe thirty-five and a half of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, omitting those to which the Puritans had conscientious scruples. Though very limited, this Act marked a
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great progress. It broke up the reign of intolerance, and virtually destroyed the principle of uniformity. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 was intended for the whole kingdom, and proceeded on the theory of an ecclesiastical incorporation of all Englishmen; now it was confined to the patronized State Church. It recognized none but the Episcopal form of worship, and treated non-Episcopalians as disloyal subjects, as culprits and felons; now other Protestant Christians—Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and even Quakers—were placed under the protection of the law, and permitted to build chapels and to maintain pastors at their own expense. The fact was recognized that a man may be a good citizen and a Christian without conforming to the State religion. Uniformity had proved an intolerable tyranny, and had failed. Comprehension of different denominations under one national Church, though favored by William, seemed impracticable. Limited toleration opened the way for full liberty and equality of Christian denominations before the law; and from the soil of liberty there will spring up a truer and deeper union than can be secured by any compulsion in the domain of conscience, which belongs to God alone. Puritanism did not struggle in vain. Though it failed as a national movement, owing to its one-sidedness and want of catholicity, it accomplished much. It produced statesmen like Hampden, soldiers like Cromwell, poets like Milton, preachers like Howe, theologians like Owen, dreamers like Bunyan, hymnists like Watts, commentators like Henry, and saints like Baxter, who though dead yet speak. It lives on as a powerful moral element in the English nation, in the English Church, in English society, in English literature. It has won the esteem of the descendants of its enemies. In our day the Duke of Bedford erected a statue to Bunyan (1874) in the place where he had suffered in prison for twelve years; and Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents united in a similar tribute of justice and gratitude to the memory of Baxter at Kidderminster (1875), where he is again pointing his uplifted arm to the saints' everlasting rest. The liberal-minded and large-hearted dean of Westminster represented the nobler part of the English people when he canonized those great and good men in his memorial discourses at the unveiling of their statues. Puritanism lives moreover in New England, which was born of the persecutions and trials of its fathers and founders in old England, and gave birth to a republic truer, mightier, and more enduring than the ephemeral military commonwealth of Cromwell. It will continue to preserve and spread all over the Saxon world the love of purity, simplicity, spirituality, practical energy, liberty, and progress in the Christian Church.
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On the other hand, it is for the children of the Puritans to honor the shining lights of the Church of England who stood by her in the days of her trial and persecution. That man is to be pitied indeed who would allow the theological passions of an intolerant age to blind his mind to the learning, the genius, and the piety of Ussher, Andrewes, Hall, Pearson, Prideaux, Jeremy Taylor, Barrow, and Leighton, whom God has enriched with his gifts for the benefit of all denominations. It is good for the Church of England—it is good for the whole Christian world—that she survived the fierce conflict of the seventeenth century and the indifferentism of the eighteenth to take care of venerable cathedrals, deaneries, cloisters, universities, and libraries, to cultivate the study of the fathers and schoolmen, to maintain the importance of historical continuity and connection with Christian antiquity, to satisfy the taste for stability, dignity, and propriety in the house of God, and to administer to the spiritual wants of the aristocracy and peasantry, and all those who can worship God most acceptably in the solemn prayers of her liturgy, which, with all its defects, must be pronounced the best ever used in divine service.
While the fierce conflict about religion was raging, there were prophetic men of moderation and comprehension on both sides—
Whose dying pens did write of Christian union,
How Church with Church might safely keep communion;
Who finding discords daily to increase,
Because they could not live, would die, in peace.'
In a sermon before the House of Commons, under the arched roof of Westminster Abbey, Richard Baxter uttered this sentence: 'Men that differ about bishops, ceremonies, and forms of prayer, may be all true Christians, and dear to one another and to Christ, if they be practically agreed in the life of godliness, and join in a holy, heavenly conversation. But if you agree in all your opinions and formalities, and yet were never sanctified by the truth, you do but agree to delude your souls, and neither of you will be saved for all your agreement.'7
This is a noble Christian sentiment, echoing the words of a greater man than Baxter: 'In Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision,'—we may add, neither surplice nor gown, neither kneeling nor standing, neither episcopacy nor presbytery nor independency—' but a new creature.'
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