political which controlled the English Re formation. did not specially engage the attention of the German CHAP. II. divines. The case was altogether different with the English reformation. No one pretends that the two sovereigns who had most to do with it, Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, had either an enlightened or disinterested love for the reformed cause. They were influenced mainly by personal Personal and and political considerations, and these not unfrequently of influences the basest and most disreputable kind. "Believe and worship with the monarch to-day, and you might be burned for doing so to-morrow; perhaps by himself, or if not by himself, by his successor. The church, the clergy, and the people trembled in suspense from hour to hour on the changeful whims of the royal theologue. Christendom, hitherto, had seen nothing at once so cruel and so ridiculous as was the usurpation of spiritual authority by the kings and queens of England. The persecutions of the pagan Roman emperors had tried the constancy, but did not rack the consciences, of the sufferers; and the same may be said of the persecutions carried on by the papacy. But the Caprice and capricious barbarities perpetrated by the English sovereigns of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, exhibited spiritual ferocity under the most appalling of its forms; that, namely, which it puts on when, although its savage heart may be known well enough, its will and purpose none can certainly foretell. Those only could be secure whose determination was to veer with the royal faith as steadily as the vane with the wind." * No wonder if this author describes it not simply as the fault, but as what might be called "the treason of the fathers of the English reformation," that in circumstances like these, when there was no possibility of being blind to the danger, they surrendered to the monarch that supremacy Taylor's Spiritual Despotism, pp. 357, 358. tyranny of the English in Church sovereigns affairs. English Reexcusable in formers in consenting to the supre macy of the State in all matters and causes eccle siastical. СНАР. ІІ. VIII. attach in matters spiritual which the crown still exercises over the English church. What is here intended, however, is not to determine the amount of blame due to the men who were involved in these transactions. That which alone is contemplated is to arrest attention upon the fact, that the question of what belongs to the proper jurisdiction of the church was not considered by them. The subject of the church's constitution, of the nature and extent of church authority, and of the relation in which the church ought to stand to the civil power, instead of being investigated by the church itself, and decided by an appeal to the word of God, was never formally and deliberately examined at all. It was disposed of summarily and arbitrarily, without the church having either hand or voice in it, by an act of the secular power. The forfeited jurisdiction of the pope was annexed to the crown of the English king, and that was Act of Henry all. "Be it enacted," so ran the decree, "by the authoing the for- rity of this present parliament, that the king, our sovereign feited jurisdiction of the lord, his heirs and successors, kings of this realm, shall be taken, accepted, and reputed, the only supreme head on earth of the church of England; and shall have and enjoy, annexed and united to the imperial crown of this realm, as well the title and style thereof as all honours, dignities, immunities, profits, and commodities to the said dignity of supreme head of the said church belonging and appertaining; and that our sovereign lord, his heirs and successors, kings of this realm, shall have full power and authority to visit, repress, redress, reform, order, correct, restrain, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, contempts, and enormities, whatsoever they be, which by any manner of spiritual authority or jurisdiction ought or may be lawfully reformed, repressed, ordered, redressed, restrained, or amended, most to the pleasure of Almighty God, and increase of virtue in Christ's religion, and for the conservation Pope to the crown. premacy, in ritual, inde fensible and pernicious. of peace, unity, and tranquillity of this realm, any usage, CHAP. II. custom, foreign law, foreign authority, prescription, or any thing or things to the contrary notwithstanding." If the pope could have made good his impious claim to infallibility, such a supremacy in his person would have been natural and just. But to vest that supremacy in a civil ruler, who made no pretensions to infallibility, and who had no office in the church whatever, as it had no other warrant but arrogance and despotism at the period of the reformation, The royal suso nothing but the power of habit and hereditary prejudice matters spicould have blinded men to its utterly untenable and mischievous principles in after times. That it proved a fatal barrier to the progress of the reformation is too notorious to be called in question. It converted the struggle for divine truth and christian liberty, in which the reformation began, into a mere carnal contest for power between a profligate monarch and a presumptuous priest. Shall the strings be pulled in the Vatican or at Windsor? In either case, the church of England must be deprived of self-regu lating power. She must rise as far up towards the dawning light of the reformation, or sink down as far into mediæval darkness; advance in the direction of protestantism, or go back in the direction of papal error and corruption, as the external power which controlled her might be pleased to ordain or to allow. And hence not only was conscience outraged often as grievously as before, but the very name Neale's History of the Puritans, vol. i. pp. 10, 11. In the Hampden case-the Queen versus the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1848)—the identity of the Queen's supremacy over the Church of England with that formerly possessed by the Pope, was thus explicitly affirmed by the law officers of the Crown. The Attorney-General said: "By the statute of Henry VIII., the Crown stands in the place of the Pope; and the Crown can do now what the Pope could do before." To the same effect spoke the Solicitor-General: "He should show, that whatever pre-eminence the Pope had, and whatever right or power he had, became by that statute (the statute of Henry VIII.) the power of the King." СНАР. ІІ. Disastrous consequen gion, and to of England, which re sulted from tions of the State. of religion was dishonoured by the grossest inconsistencies; the very same men who, in deference to Henry's usurped supremacy, abjured the pope to-day, almost with one consent offering him their allegiance to-morrow, when a popish queen had ascended the throne. Although not more than seven or eight peers opposed the laws made in favour of the reformation in the time of Edward VI., there were hardly any of them who did not join in restoring Romanism, when the crown was found once more on the head of a popish sovereign. There cannot be a doubt that these wholesale ces to reli- tergiversations, which disgrace the history of the English the Church reformation, were mainly the result of the royal supremacy in matters spiritual. The necessary effect of that supremacy the usurpa- was to give in England both a secular and a superficial character to the whole reformation movement. It is not by an influence external and worldly, but by an influence internal and spiritual, that any church can be really and thoroughly reformed. My kingdom, said Christ, is within you; and as it is that inner life, that hidden man of the heart, which moulds the outward conduct, and conforms the entire walk and conversation of the individual believer to the divine rule; so it is in the case of the collective body of the church. Like the forest oak, which attains its gigantic stature and acquires its majestic form in virtue of energies The Church which operate within, the church is in the best condition reformed for developing the divine model, when, uncramped and unfluences in- obstructed by any external force, it is left to grow up into spiritual Him who is the Head, yielding freely to the guidance and and worldly. government of those vital energies derived from His own word and spirit, which he has hidden in its bosom. There is something indeed which external power may do . can be truly only by in ternal and not external for the church, as there is something it may do even for the monarch of the woods. It may shield it from outward violence and make provision for its unimpeded growth; but when, going beyond this limit, the civil power will bind it CHAP. II. with the ligatures of state control, or bend it into subjection to state authority, or prune it into accordance with state caprice or policy, the church, so dealt with, cannot fail to prove a stunted and deformed thing, deprived of its moral beauty, and shorn of its spiritual strength. formation. In Switzerland, though the course and character of the The Swiss Rereformation were in many respects widely dissimilar, the result was nearly the same. There also state supremacy * from away The dius re monstrates against the macy. became the order of the day. labours were chiefly instrumental in liberating so many of the Swiss cantons from the yoke of Rome, there were at least a few who foresaw the danger of compromising the church's freedom. "The magistrate," exclaimed Ecolam- Ecolampa. padius in a letter to Zwingle, "who should take the churches the authority that belongs to them, would be civil supremore intolerable than antichrist himself. hand of the magistrate strikes with the sword, but the hand of Christ heals. Christ has not said, If thy brother will not hear thee, tell it to the magistrate, but tell it to the church. The functions of the state are distinct from those of the church." The views thus indicated, this enlightened and apostolic man laboured to impress both on his brethren in the ministry and on the civil authorities themselves. Before the senate of Basle and before a synodal assembly of the church, he expressed them at large, nor were his efforts without some partial and temporary success. Even Zwingle himself appeared for a moment to regard them with favour; but unhappily this distinguished reformer, the master-spirit of the Swiss reformation, had already advanced too far on a career which was not only more congenial to his own character, but from which it was already impossible to * D'Aubigné's History of the Reformation, Blackie and Son's 8vo edition, vol. iii., p. 430. |