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