The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1, Thomas Babington Macaulay [ebook pc reader txt] 📗

of

the Church, retain the visible marks of the compromise from which

she sprang. She occupies a middle position between the Churches

of Rome and Geneva. Her doctrinal confessions and discourses,

composed by Protestants, set forth principles of theology in

which Calvin or Knox would have found scarcely a word to

disapprove. Her prayers and thanksgivings, derived from the

ancient Breviaries, are very generally such that Cardinal Fisher

or Cardinal Pole might have heartily joined in them. A

controversialist who puts an Arminian sense on her Articles and

Homilies will be pronounced by candid men to be as unreasonable

as a controversialist who denies that the doctrine of baptismal

regeneration can be discovered in her Liturgy.


The Church of Rome held that episcopacy was of divine

institution, and that certain supernatural graces of a high order

had been transmitted by the imposition of hands through fifty

generations, from the Eleven who received their commission on the

Galilean mount, to the bishops who met at Trent. A large body of

Protestants, on the other hand, regarded prelacy as positively

unlawful, and persuaded themselves that they found a very

different form of ecclesiastical government prescribed in

Scripture. The founders of the Anglican Church took a middle

course. They retained episcopacy; but they did not declare it to

be an institution essential to the welfare of a Christian

society, or to the efficacy of the sacraments. Cranmer, indeed,

on one important occasion, plainly avowed his conviction that, in

the primitive times, there was no distinction between bishops and

priests, and that the laying on of hands was altogether

superfluous.


Among the Presbyterians the conduct of public worship is, to a

great extent, left to the minister. Their prayers, therefore, are

not exactly the same in any two assemblies on the same day, or on

any two days in the same assembly. In one parish they are

fervent, eloquent, and full of meaning. In the next parish they

may be languid or absurd. The priests of the Roman Catholic

Church, on the other hand, have, during many generations, daily

chanted the same ancient confessions, supplications, and

thanksgivings, in India and Lithuania, in Ireland and Peru. The

service, being in a dead language, is intelligible only to the

learned; and the great majority of the congregation may be said

to assist as spectators rather than as auditors. Here, again, the

Church of England took a middle course. She copied the Roman

Catholic forms of prayer, but translated them into the vulgar

tongue, and invited the illiterate multitude to join its voice to

that of the minister.


In every part of her system the same policy may be traced.

Utterly rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation, and

condemning as idolatrous all adoration paid to the sacramental

bread and wine, she yet, to the disgust of the Puritan, required

her children to receive the memorials of divine love, meekly

kneeling upon their knees. Discarding many rich vestments which

surrounded the altars of the ancient faith, she yet retained, to

the horror of weak minds, a robe of white linen, typical of the

purity which belonged to her as the mystical spouse of Christ.

Discarding a crowd of pantomimic gestures which, in the Roman

Catholic worship, are substituted for intelligible words, she yet

shocked many rigid Protestants by marking the infant just

sprinkled from the font with the sign of the cross. The Roman

Catholic addressed his prayers to a multitude of Saints, among

whom were numbered many men of doubtful, and some of hateful,

character. The Puritan refused the addition of Saint even to the

apostle of the Gentiles, and to the disciple whom Jesus loved.

The Church of England, though she asked for the intercession of

no created being, still set apart days for the commemoration of

some who had done and suffered great things for the faith. She

retained confirmation and ordination as edifying rites; but she

degraded them from the rank of sacraments. Shrift was no part of

her system. Yet she gently invited the dying penitent to confess

his sins to a divine, and empowered her ministers to soothe the

departing soul by an absolution which breathes the very spirit of

the old religion. In general it may be said that she appeals more

to the understanding , and less to the senses and the

imagination, than the Church of Rome, and that she appeals less

to the understanding, and more to the senses and imagination,

than the Protestant Churches of Scotland, France, and

Switzerland.


Nothing, however, so strongly distinguished the Church of England

from other Churches as the relation in which she stood to the

monarchy. The King was her head. The limits of the authority

which he possessed, as such, were not traced, and indeed have

never yet been traced with precision. The laws which declared

him supreme in ecclesiastical matters were drawn rudely and in

general terms. If, for the purpose of ascertaining the sense of

those laws, we examine the books and lives of those who founded

the English Church, our perplexity will be increased. For the

founders of the English Church wrote and acted in an age of

violent intellectual fermentation, and of constant action and

reaction. They therefore often contradicted each other and

sometimes contradicted themselves. That the King was, under

Christ, sole head of the Church was a doctrine which they all

with one voice affirmed: but those words had very different

significations in different mouths, and in the same mouth at

different conjunctures. Sometimes an authority which would have

satisfied Hildebrand was ascribed to the sovereign: then it

dwindled down to an authority little more than that which had

been claimed by many ancient English princes who had been in

constant communion with the Church of Rome. What Henry and his

favourite counsellors meant, at one time, by the supremacy, was

certainly nothing less than the whole power of the keys. The King

was to be the Pope of his kingdom, the vicar of God, the

expositor of Catholic verity, the channel of sacramental graces.

He arrogated to himself the right of deciding dogmatically what

was orthodox doctrine and what was heresy, of drawing up and

imposing confessions of faith, and of giving religious

instruction to his people. He proclaimed that all jurisdiction,

spiritual as well as temporal, was derived from him alone, and

that it was in his power to confer episcopal authority, and to

take it away. He actually ordered his seal to be put to

commissions by which bishops were appointed, who were to exercise

their functions as his deputies, and during his pleasure.

According to this system, as expounded by Cranmer, the King was

the spiritual as well as the temporal chief of the nation. In

both capacities His Highness must have lieutenants. As he

appointed civil officers to keep his seal, to collect his

revenues, and to dispense justice in his name, so he appointed

divines of various ranks to preach the gospel, and to administer

the sacraments. It was unnecessary that there should be any

imposition of hands. The King,-such was the opinion of Cranmer

given in the plainest words,-might in virtue of authority

derived from God, make a priest; and the priest so made needed no

ordination whatever. These opinions the Archbishop, in spite of

the opposition of less courtly divines, followed out to every

legitimate consequence. He held that his own spiritual functions,

like the secular functions of the Chancellor and Treasurer, were

at once determined by a demise of the crown. When Henry died,

therefore, the Primate and his suffragans took out fresh

commissions, empowering them to ordain and to govern the Church

till the new sovereign should think fit to order otherwise. When

it was objected that a power to bind and to loose, altogether

distinct from temporal power, had been given by our Lord to his

apostles, some theologians of this school replied that the power

to bind and to loose had descended, not to the clergy, but to the

whole body of Christian men, and ought to be exercised by the

chief magistrate as the representative of the society. When it

was objected that Saint Paul had spoken of certain persons whom

the Holy Ghost had made overseers and shepherds of the faithful,

it was answered that King Henry was the very overseer, the very

shepherd whom the Holy Ghost had appointed, and to whom the

expressions of Saint Paul applied.3


These high pretensions gave scandal to Protestants as well as to

Catholics; and the scandal was greatly increased when the

supremacy, which Mary had resigned back to the Pope, was again

annexed to the crown, on the accession of Elizabeth. It seemed

monstrous that a woman should be the chief bishop of a Church in

which an apostle had forbidden her even to let her voice be

heard. The Queen, therefore, found it necessary expressly to

disclaim that sacerdotal character which her father had assumed,

and which, according to Cranmer, had been inseparably joined, by

divine ordinance, to the regal function. When the Anglican

confession of faith was revised in her reign, the supremacy was

explained in a manner somewhat different from that which had been

fashionable at the court of Henry. Cranmer had declared, in

emphatic terms, that God had immediately committed to Christian

princes the whole cure of all their subjects, as well concerning

the administration of God's word for the cure of souls, as

concerning the administration of things political.4 The

thirty-seventh article of religion, framed under Elizabeth,

declares, in terms as emphatic, that the ministering of God's

word does not belong to princes. The Queen, however, still had

over the Church a visitatorial power of vast and undefined

extent. She was entrusted by Parliament with the office of

restraining and punishing heresy and every sort of ecclesiastical

abuse, and was permitted to delegate her authority to

commissioners. The Bishops were little more than her ministers.

Rather than grant to the civil magistrate the absolute power of

nominating spiritual pastors, the Church of Rome, in the eleventh

century, set all Europe on fire. Rather than grant to the civil

magistrate the absolute power of nominating spiritual pastors,

the ministers of the Church of Scotland, in our time, resigned

their livings by hundreds. The Church of England had no such

scruples. By the royal authority alone her prelates were

appointed. By the royal authority alone her Convocations were

summoned, regulated, prorogued, and dissolved. Without the royal

sanction her canons had no force. One of the articles of her

faith was that without the royal consent no ecclesiastical

council could lawfully assemble. From all her judicatures an

appeal lay, in the last resort, to the sovereign, even when the

question was whether an opinion ought to be accounted heretical,

or whether the administration of a sacrament had been valid. Nor

did the Church grudge this extensive power