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 -1916, 
 The church, past and presei 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 
 
TH E CHURCH 
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 A REVIEW OF ITS HISTORY 
 
 THE BISHOP OF LONDON, BISHOP BARRY, 
 AND OTHER WRITERS 
 
 EDITED BY THE 
 
 REV. H. M. GWATKIN, M.A. 
 
 DIXIE PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CAMBRIDGE; D.D. OF EDINBURGH 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 
 2 & 3 BIBLE HOUSE 
 
PREFACE 
 
 We write not as advocates of this or that party in 
 Church or State, but as students who are persuaded 
 that history as well as science is the message of the 
 Spirit to our own time. Our bond of union is the con- 
 viction that our Saviour's Person is itself the revelation, 
 of which Scripture and the Church are only the record 
 and the witness; but that His Holy Spirit is the Teacher 
 of all ages, revealing more and more of Christ as men 
 can bear it — to nations in history, to individuals in life. 
 We believe that Spirit speaks in the creative thought 
 and work of every age — in Origen and Athanasius, in 
 Augustine and Gregory VII., in the reformers and the 
 authors of our own Liturgy and Articles, and in the 
 great discoveries of history and science in our own 
 time. We are the heirs of all the ages, and we claim 
 all truth as ours in Him who is the Truth. Though 
 the historical facts which constitute the Gospel are 
 recorded once for all, we believe that the unfolding of 
 their meaning is a work of many ages, that its fulness 
 far transcends the systems of Latin sectarianism, and 
 that every return to the limitations of a buried past is 
 so much sin against the Holy Spirit's teaching to our 
 own time. 
 
 The above paragraph was the basis of the present 
 volume, and states its general purpose. 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 Be it clearly understood that each contributor is 
 responsible for his own work, and for nothing more. 
 The writers approach their subjects from very different 
 standpoints, and sometimes differ considerably in 
 opinions ; and no attempt has been made to conceal 
 differences ; for they do but emphasize their general 
 agreement. 
 
 It was no part of the original plan that the Editor 
 should write as many as four chapters out of thirteen. 
 Only the failure of a valued contributor at the last 
 moment obliged him to undertake four chapters instead 
 of two, and to write the last of the four without access 
 to his own reference books. He would have much 
 preferred to leave it in Professor Allen's abler hands. 
 
 CoLwicH Vicarage, 
 
 Sept. 9, 1899. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAOB 
 
 The Apostolic Age .... . . i 
 
 By the Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies, M.A., 
 Vicar of Kirkby Lonsdale. 
 
 CHAPTER n 
 The Second Century. .... 17 
 
 By the Editor. 
 
 CHAPTER in 
 The School of Alexandria . . , -33 
 
 By the Rev. C. Bigg, D.D., 
 Rector of Fenny Compton. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 The Age of -Councils • . . . . .56 
 
 By the Rev. G. A. Schneider, M.A., 
 
 Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Sodor and Man. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 The Latin Church ...... 87 
 
 By the Editor. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 England before the Reformation . . . 104 
 
 By the Rev. W. E. Collins, M.A., 
 
 Professor of Ecclesiastical History, King's College, London. 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 PACK 
 
 The Reformation . . . . . .125 
 
 By the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of London. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 The Rise of Dissent in England . . . .135 
 
 By the Rev. J. Hunt, D.D., 
 Vicar of Otford. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 The Origins of Church Government . . .163 
 
 By the Editor. 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 History of the Lord's Supper . . . .179 
 
 By the Rev. Canon Meyrick, M.A., 
 Rector of Blickling. 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 Protestantism ... . . . .199 
 
 By the Editor. 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 Romanism since the Reformation .... 221 
 
 By the Rev. Chancellor Lias, M.A., 
 Rector of East Bergholt. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 English Christianity to-day . . . .265 
 
 By the Right Rev. Alfred Barry, D.D. 
 
THE CHURCH 
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 By the Rev. J. LLEWELYN DA VIES, M.A. 
 
 The records of the life and teaching of our Lord and 
 of the founding of the Christian Society cannot but 
 have a unique authority to all who claim to belong to 
 that society ; and it is not wonderful that it should often 
 have been assumed that the constitution and customs 
 of the Church in any age ought to imitate as closely 
 as possible what is shown us in the New Testa- 
 ment. But our sacred volume itself contradicts such 
 an assumption ; for, the more thoroughly and intel- 
 ligently it is examined, the more clearly is it seen to 
 describe, not a fixed arrangement such as might be 
 copied and reproduced, but a growing organism. This 
 character of the Church of Christ, that it began as a 
 germ and grew with the years, is a part of its glory, 
 and declares it the more manifestly to be a product of 
 the creative power of the Eternal. We contemplate 
 in the New Testament the powers of the new age 
 exhibiting themselves and doing their earliest work ; 
 and the faithfulness of each Christian communion is 
 proved in its letting those forces work freely and with 
 effect upon the historical conditions of the time. 
 
 A 
 
2 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 The Church of Christ had its birth on the Day of 
 Pentecost. But preparation had been previously made 
 for the great event of that day. The Apostles, " Peter 
 with the Eleven," who stood forth as the founders of 
 the Church, had been instructed and commissioned 
 for their work. They were envoys of the Lord Jesus, 
 agents whom He chose and sent forth. Their task was 
 to bear witness of Him ; to proclaim Him as the 
 Messiah who after being rejected and crucified had 
 risen from the dead, and to invite men to believe in 
 Him. Promises had been given them which were ful- 
 filled on the Day of Pentecost : their eyes were to be 
 opened by an Ephphatha from above, emotions and 
 thoughts were to be breathed into them by a Divine 
 Spirit, and they were to find themselves in a Home 
 with Christ and the Father and their brethren ; they 
 were to be clothed with power from on high. And 
 that was what they experienced. They spoke, those 
 few Galileans, in their new strength, with confidence 
 and dignity and fervour, and the Spirit spread from 
 them to their hearers. Men were touched and moved, 
 and drawn to the Crucified and to the Father, and this 
 common attraction bound them together in a rudi- 
 mentary association. So the Church began its life of 
 the ages. 
 
 Even the forming of the society was a natural 
 result, rather than an express project. All turned upon 
 the action of the Apostles ; and they, we must assume, 
 were possessed and absorbed by the vision of their 
 Heavenly Lord as present with them, and by that power 
 of the Spirit which had first lifted them from their 
 feet and carried them away, and then had settled into 
 a strong joy and hope within them. What could 
 
THE APOSTOLIC AGE 3 
 
 believers in the Crucified do but keep together ? There 
 were, indeed, two injunctions of their Master which the 
 Apostles remembered and followed. Those who should 
 be brought to believe in Jesus and the Father were to 
 be cleansed from their sins by a washing of forgiveness. 
 So this baptism was from the first the mark put upon 
 those who desired to join themselves to the Apostles. 
 The other ordinance was the joint feeding upon the Body 
 and Blood of Christ. When we look at the narratives 
 of the Last Supper, we see no inclusion of others 
 besides the Twelve in the privilege then conferred, nor 
 is there any word of Christ recorded in the Gospels 
 which made this ordinance a universal one. The 
 character of suspense which belongs to the period 
 between the Resurrection and the Pentecost would 
 incline us to the belief that the Apostles did not begin 
 the observance of the Lord's Supper for themselves in 
 those days. But when the outpouring of the Holy 
 Spirit brought the Apostles and the other believers 
 together in joy and brotherhood, we can hardly imagine 
 that the Twelve could have helped associating their 
 brethren with themselves in the act which drew them 
 closest to the invisible Christ. We seem to see what 
 could not have been otherwise in the Church life of 
 the very first days ; " they continued steadfastly in the 
 Apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of 
 bread and the prayers." The Church, then, at its 
 beginning was a fellowship of men and women who 
 gathered round the Twelve, beheving in the Crucified 
 Jesus as the Son of God and as present with them, 
 animated by a spirit of enthusiastic thankfulness and 
 joy, all having been baptized and observing for their 
 one distinctive custom the joint partaking of the bread 
 
4 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 and the wine which represent the Body and Blood of 
 their Lord, and looking forward with a yearning hope 
 to a triumph of His royal authority. 
 
 What is most necessary for the understanding of 
 the history of the Church in the Apostolic age, is to 
 bring to bear upon it the belief of its members in the 
 active Lordship of Christ, and their consciousness of 
 the continued influence of the Spirit. If these powers 
 had been nothing but delusions, they were delusions 
 which had the full force of living realities to the 
 founders of the Church, and with that authority im- 
 pelled and guided their action. After the Pentecost 
 the Society went on, conscious of a marvellous salva- 
 tion, referring its call and its spiritual life to the one 
 Lord and the one Spirit, assuming its duty to be to 
 carry out the purposes of the Redeemer of mankind, 
 which were those of the One Eternal Father. The 
 Church organised itself, not on any prescribed plan, but 
 just as organisation was called for by its nature and its 
 task, combined with the circumstances of its history. 
 
 It was led on step by step. Our attention is drawn 
 by the sacred history much more to the propaganda 
 committed to the envoys of Christ, and to the working 
 of the Spirit in the lives of the believers, than to 
 details of the Church's internal constitution. The first 
 creation of an office was a typical instance of the 
 manner in which Church order was developed. The 
 Seven were appointed to meet a need which called for 
 some action, and to guard the concord and mutual 
 trust which it was the glory of the Spirit to produce. 
 The Twelve were still exercising their original authority^ 
 but they asked the brethren to make choice of seven 
 good men, and to these they committed, with prayer 
 
THE APOSTOLIC AGE 5 
 
 and the laying-on of hands, the charge of distributing 
 aid to the poor. The Twelve and the Seven now held 
 office in the Church at Jerusalem. A more serious 
 movement of expansion came on by degrees and 
 slowly. The Church was a Jewish body, believing in 
 a Messiah, and its original home was in Jerusalem. 
 But its Gospel soon showed that it could not be con- 
 lined within the Jewish enclosure. The receiving of 
 Gentile proselytes into the fold of the Abrahamic 
 covenant had long been a familiar thing to the Jews, 
 and the Apostles had been prepared by some intima- 
 tions from their Master for the universal dominion of 
 the Son of Man. The leader of the Twelve had the 
 privilege of baptizing the first Gentile as a brother of 
 those who believed in Jesus as the Messiah ; and he 
 was induced to do this by various indications which 
 he understood to be signs of the will of God, conspiring 
 as they did with the pious hope which was waiting to 
 be stirred into energy. But a new envoy of Christ was 
 chosen and commissioned for the bold action which 
 was to claim all Gentile races for the Kingdom of the 
 crucified Messiah, and to turn the Jerusalem brother- 
 hood into a world-wide Church. 
 
 The place of St. Paul in the history of the Church 
 has much to astonish us, and nothing could illustrate 
 more strikingly than his career the free working of the 
 powers of the new Dispensation. 
 
 We see the Church called into existence by the 
 Twelve, and taught and governed for a time by them 
 as a society entirely depending upon themselves. The 
 dependence is qualified by the direct rule of Christ 
 and the moving power of the Spirit, but not by any 
 other human authority. Then they begin to fade as a 
 
6 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 governing body out of the history of the Church. No 
 explanation is given us of this disappearance. Yet not 
 only were they the de facto supreme and sole authority 
 in the Church, but the Gospels show us what a distinct 
 and solemn commission they received from their 
 Master, and with what comprehensive forethought they 
 were prepared for the unique task to which they were 
 appointed. We see them the envoys of the risen Jesus, 
 sent forth by Him as He had been sent forth by His 
 Father, charged to proclaim their Lord as King and to 
 draw men to belief in Him, enabled by their intimacy 
 with Him to convey to other men trustworthy know- 
 ledge concerning Him, endowed with a heavenly Spirit, 
 having the promise that they should sit on twelve 
 thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. All this 
 was fully recognised by the early Church, and is set 
 forth in its records. It does not appear that there was 
 any dissension caused by differences of judgment 
 amongst them. Precedence was yielded to Peter and 
 James and John, and of these to Peter. We read of their 
 acting with joint authority as the governing body of 
 the Church when they send Peter and John to Samaria, 
 to receive into the fellowship of the Spirit the converts 
 made by Philip. They are mentioned again when Bar- 
 nabas, acting as surety for Saul, " brought him to the 
 Apostles " at Jerusalem. After that time the Twelve 
 appeared to lose by degrees their coherence as a govern- 
 ing body, and the Church at Jerusalem, whilst it re- 
 mains the Mother Church, obtains an organisation of 
 its own. The report of the success of the Gospel at 
 Antioch " came to the ears of the Church which was at 
 Jerusalem, and they sent forth Barnabas as far as 
 Antioch." When the disciples at Antioch were moved 
 
THE APOSTOLIC AGE 7 
 
 to send relief to the brethren which dwelt in Judaea, 
 they sent it " to the elders," When James the brother 
 of John was put to death, we do not read that his place 
 was filled ; the Twelve must have come by this time to 
 the momentous conviction that they were appointed for 
 a special work, and that they were not to co-opt suc- 
 cessors as a permanent governing body. Another 
 James appears on the scene. Peter, after his deliver- 
 ance from prison, coming first to the house of Mary 
 the mother of John, declares to those who were assem- 
 bled there " how the Lord had brought him forth out 
 of the prison," and then bids them " tell these things 
 unto James and to the brethren," and goes away to 
 another place. The brethren at Antioch, when they 
 were troubled by the question whether Gentile converts 
 should be circumcised or not, appointed that Paul and 
 Barnabas and others " should go up to Jerusalem unto 
 the Apostles and elders about this question." The 
 phrase, " the Apostles and elders," is repeated. The 
 Antioch envoys were received by " the Church and the 
 Apostles and the elders." " The Apostles and the 
 elders were gathered together to consider of this 
 matter." There was much questioning, and then Peter 
 rose up, reminding his audience that he had been chosen 
 to receive the first Gentile into the Church. It is James 
 who pronounces the final judgment of the Assembly. 
 And the action taken is thus described : " It seemed 
 good to the Apostles and the elders, with the whole 
 Church," to send two of their chief men with an official 
 letter to Antioch ; and the letter begins, " The Apostles 
 and the elder brethren unto the brethren which are of 
 the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greeting." 
 Some time after, when St. Paul went up on his last visit 
 
8 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 to Jerusalem, we read, " The brethren received us gladly. 
 And the day following Paul went in with us unto 
 James, and all the elders were present." It seems a 
 reasonable inference from these passages that, when the 
 Church began to spread beyond Jerusalem, the Twelve 
 withdrew from the actual government of the Jerusalem 
 society, and did not retain any official unity as the 
 governing body of the whole Church. What deference 
 was paid to them was paid to their personal authority, 
 and they occupied themselves as each was moved and 
 led in bearing their witness and proclaiming their 
 Gospel. 
 
 The question is a little complicated by the habit 
 which arose of giving the name Apostles to others 
 besides the Twelve. If, when Andronicus and Junias are 
 said by St. Paul to be " of note among the Apostles," 
 it is meant that they were leading and conspicuous 
 Apostles, a wide extension seems to be given to the 
 term. We should hardly expect persons of whom we 
 know nothing but their names to be Apostles at all, 
 in that age of the " Acts " ; but that they should be 
 Apostles of note, sets us wondering how many Apostles 
 there may have been who were not of note. Critics 
 are putting us on our guard against assuming titles 
 like eTr/cr/fOTTO? and aTroa-roKoq and SiaKovo? and even 
 'Trpecr^urepog to be always official names ; but St. Paul 
 more than once appears to give a definite first place 
 to "Apostles" amongst the ministries of the Church. 
 The view that the designation was limited to those who 
 had seen the Lord Jesus after His resurrection has 
 much to commend it, but it is hardly in harmony with 
 the significance of the word " envoy," or with the sub- 
 apostolic use of the title. Perhaps " Apostles " are 
 
THE APOSTOLIC AGE 9 
 
 named first as being those who began the work of 
 building up the Church in any new place by making a 
 first appearance there as heralds of the Christ. Or the 
 title may have been given to those who were known to 
 have been sent on special missions by leading Churches, 
 as Barnabas and Saul were by the Church at Antioch. 
 
 Whilst the Twelve were decreasing, another was 
 increasing. Saul of Tarsus showed no eagerness to 
 head a party in the Church. He took time for con- 
 victions to mature and develop themselves in his great 
 soul. He was content for a while to act as coadjutor 
 to the genial and fervid Barnabas. He did not make 
 himself dictator of the society at Antioch which owed 
 so much to his labours. Remarkable as his call had 
 been, and as he thoroughly well knew it to have been, 
 he waited for guidance as to what he should do and 
 where he should go. It is quite open to us to believe 
 that it was not without suggestions from Barnabas and 
 Saul themselves that these two zealous preachers were 
 sent forth by the Church at Antioch on that mission 
 which was bold and adventurous from the first, and 
 which proved so supremely important in the history of 
 the Church. But it is made clear that the Twelve had 
 nothing to do with it. What St. Paul did afterwards on 
 his own authority justified him in leaving out of account 
 the fact that he had accepted a definite commission 
 from men, in the fulfilling of which he was made the 
 actual Apostle of the Gentiles. But the journey of the 
 two missionaries ended with their duly making their 
 report at Antioch, " from whence they had been com- 
 mitted to the grace of God for the work which they 
 had fulfilled." These words suggest a question whether 
 the opening of the Church to Gentiles had been dis- 
 
lo THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 cussed by the chief persons of the Church at Antioch 
 before their envoys started. It is not easy to ex- 
 plain why more is not made of the conversion of so 
 important a Gentile as Sergius Paulus the proconsul, 
 but perhaps we are not to conclude that he was bap- 
 tized and became a professed Christian. The word, 
 " Lo, we turn to the Gentiles," was not spoken at 
 Paphos. It was in a curiously obscure region that the 
 gospel was first preached freely to Gentiles, and churches 
 formed of Gentile as well as Jewish believers. The pro- 
 clamation of Jesus the Crucified, in being thus extended, 
 was also itself exalted. Jesus believed in by Jews as 
 their Messiah, even with a promise of His future dominion 
 over the world, was hardly the same object of faith as 
 Jesus the Son of God inviting all men to come to the 
 Father and be forgiven. It was this Son of God of 
 whom Paul was henceforth the herald. The relations 
 of his expanding work to the Jewish Christian societies 
 in Judaea and Syria became a question of great interest 
 and importance. As we have seen, there was no chief 
 Apostle, no governing body, presiding over the church 
 as a whole. But St. Paul was as loyal as the most 
 devoted of the companions of Jesus to the invisible 
 Head of the Church ; and the one Spirit moving in all 
 the societies and all the members was as real and divine 
 to him as it had been to the 3000 of the Day of Pente- 
 cost. These powers — the rule of Christ, the influence 
 of the Spirit — continue to carry the Church forward, 
 and they preserve its unity in the most difficult circum- 
 stances. Over the churches which owed their existence 
 to him St. Paul exercised what we must call an auto- 
 cratic authority. His personal rule kept these churches 
 together. Paul was the one Apostle, the one teacher, to 
 
THE APOSTOLIC AGE ii 
 
 whom they looked up. But he never allowed them to 
 forget that he was the slave of the Jesus who had shown 
 Himself in Galilee and been put to death in Jerusalem, 
 of the Messiah whom the Jews had been taught by 
 their prophets to expect. And whilst he owned no sub- 
 jection to any other Apostles, claiming firmly to have 
 an independent commission from Christ, his loyalty to 
 Christ made him set the highest value on the spiritual 
 fellowship of all Christ's flock, and urged him to do his 
 utmost to preserve that fellowship unbroken. What we 
 see as regards the Church in general, in the latter years 
 of the Apostolic age, is — Paul by far the most com- 
 manding figure in the Church, those who remained of the 
 Twelve working here and there and regarded with great 
 personal respect, the Churches of St. Paul acknowledging 
 his authority, those of Judaea and Syria held together by 
 their traditions and by deference to the Church of Jeru- 
 salem, and unity preserved between the Pauline and the 
 Judaean Churches by the profound reverence of all for 
 their one Heavenly Lord and by their consciousness of 
 the active influence of the one Spirit. 
 
 Each society had some internal organisation, and 
 no doubt the example set by the earliest societies was 
 followed by the others. "The elders" in the Church 
 of Jerusalem are mentioned frequently, and there were 
 elders in every Church. The precedents afforded by the 
 Jewish communities in Judaea and throughout the Dis- 
 persion, and by the confraternities of various kinds 
 which then abounded in the Roman Empire, were 
 hardly needed to suggest what was so rudimentary 
 and natural a constitution. It is a matter of course 
 for an association to have a committee ^ under some 
 
 ^ The word committee appears to be derived, through the French comite, 
 from comitatus. 
 
12 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 name or other, and a committee will, in general, have a 
 chairman. The elders of a church were a representa- 
 tive committee, consisting of persons, for the most part 
 elderly men, in whom their brethren had confidence ; 
 and in some cases the leading elder would have an 
 acknowledged precedence. In later years the presiding 
 elder was specially designated by the title e7r/o-/co7ro9, 
 and became the bishop of the local church. But in 
 the New Testament, it would seem, eTr/o-zcoTro? should 
 rather be rendered overseer than bishop, being used 
 to describe the functions of an elder. In addition to 
 the elders, there might be in any Church another class 
 of persons, resembling the Seven who were appointed 
 by the Twelve at Jerusalem, and called ministers or 
 servers. The word Skxkovo? had hardly then obtained 
 a strictly official sense, but was used in accordance 
 with its ordinary meaning. A Christian Society, 
 whether in Judaea or founded by St. Paul, consisted 
 of " the brethren " ; and these had their elders, with 
 or without a recognised chief elder, and their deacons. 
 
 There were two features of the Apostolic age, which, 
 while they existed and when they passed away, must be 
 considered as having had an important influence upon 
 the organisation of the Church. One was, the personal 
 authority of the Twelve and St. Paul ; the other, the 
 worship offered in the Temple at Jerusalem. The 
 departure of the Apostles made room for the develop- 
 ment of the order of bishops ; and it may be supposed 
 that the sacrificial ideas and sentiments which had been 
 associated with the Temple-worship sought some satis- 
 faction, when the Temple was destroyed and its worship 
 abolished, in the regular ministry and worship of the 
 Church. 
 
THE APOSTOLIC AGE 13 
 
 We contemplate with astonishment the work done 
 by the Apostle of the Gentiles during the few years of 
 his Apostohc service between Antioch and Rome. It 
 is evident that there was a wonderful persistent enthu- 
 siasm by which he was himself impelled, and which he 
 was able in some degree to communicate to strangers 
 who heard him. We can understand the impression 
 that might be made by the proclamation of the Cross 
 and the offer of forgiveness and reconciliation. But 
 the Apostle's testimony produced in the minds of the 
 believers not only a response to Divine grace, but also 
 a conviction that there was something before them, 
 something to live for, a movement to which they were 
 surrendering themselves. The Christians of the Apos- 
 tolic age were looking forward to a Coming, an Appear- 
 ing, a Day, of the Lord. What this exactly signified to 
 St. Paul and the Apostolic teachers in general it is not 
 easy to determine. There are some passages in the 
 New Testament which suggest that they expected an 
 " end of the world " as it would be popularly under- 
 stood now. But other passages convey a different 
 impression, and would lead us to believe that St. Paul 
 was rather looking for a fuller diffusion of light which 
 had already shone, for the prevailing over the world of 
 a kingdom which had been already established, for a 
 gradual accomplishment of Divine purposes of which 
 the working was already manifested. 
 
 The reader of the Epistle to the Ephesians, for 
 example, would conclude that the writer had his mind 
 set upon a gradual consummation of what had been 
 gloriously begun. The believers were contemplated 
 and addressed as having been raised from the dead and 
 exalted with Christ ; the future was to be in accordance 
 
14 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 with the power already working in them ; God was to 
 show in the ages coming on the exceeding riches of His 
 grace in kindness towards men in Christ Jesus ; the 
 body of Christ was to be built up through the action of 
 the ministries provided for that purpose. The Day of 
 the Lord was regarded as the coming of light ; and the 
 believers at Thessalonica and at Rome were bidden to 
 understand that for them the light had already come, 
 that they were sons of light, sons of the day, and that 
 they were bound to walk as in the light. In the per- 
 plexing address of St. Peter given in Acts iii., he calls 
 upon his countrymen to repent, so that God may send 
 them the Christ who had been appointed for them. 
 The time in which he is speaking is that of which all 
 the prophets had spoken, the time of the restoration or 
 resettlement of all things, introduced by a second 
 Elijah. Indeed, the risen Christ was already sent, if 
 only the people by repenting would open their eyes to 
 see Him. "To you first God, having raised up His 
 Servant, sent Him to bless you, in turning away every 
 one of you from your iniquities." The consummation 
 was to be brought about through the turning to God of 
 Israel and of all the families of the earth. On the 
 whole, the Christians were taught that there was Divine 
 glory to be revealed, that they were enlisted into an 
 army of light for which victory and triumph were pre- 
 pared, and that they and all men were to be blessed 
 in knowing Christ and the Father. Appeal was con- 
 stantly made to the Spirit working in the societies and 
 in each believer ; this Spirit was an earnest of the 
 future inheritance, a sign and guide as to the Divine 
 purpose. So that the consciousness of the believers 
 was not that, when they had been saved out of estrange- 
 
THE APOSTOLIC AGE 15 
 
 ment and darkness, things had been settled for them, 
 and that each had only to look forward to being re- 
 moved by death into a condition of perfect felicity, but 
 rather that they were called to have a part in an 
 approaching triumph, and that they had to follow such 
 a leader as Paul in a campaign against the evil powers 
 which was to end in a conquest of the world for Christ. 
 And we can understand this to have been an inspiriting 
 consciousness.^ 
 
 As we look back from our existing environment upon 
 the Church of St. Paul and his fellow-believers, the dif- 
 ferences between our condition and theirs multiply upon 
 the imagination till it becomes a little difficult to pro- 
 nounce distinctly what we have as Christians in common 
 with them. We have at least a negative point of agree- 
 ment, upon which I have thought it important to dwell. 
 There is now no earthly head or governing body of the 
 universal Church. It is sometimes depressing to many 
 of us to reflect that Christendom is made up of a 
 number of bodies independent of each other, and that 
 there is no authority over all to tell them what they are 
 to believe and how they are to act, so that they may 
 believe and act in unison. But there was similar inde- 
 pendence, a similar absence of a constitutional govern- 
 ing body over the Church, in the Apostolic age. In 
 
 1 There are symptoms of impatience and disappointment following the 
 excited expectations of the early Christian years. But on the other hand there 
 can have been no general collapse of the Church at the close of the Apostolic 
 age, when the Christians saw that the age was closing without that visible 
 return of the Lord in celestial glory which many had expected. And it is 
 remarkable that the prophecies of the Lord's coming which had been pre- 
 served in the Apostolic memoirs and letters were studied and edited in the 
 second century without any apparent uneasy feeling that the prophecies had 
 been fallacious. The Church lived and grew through a period of what might 
 be represented as overwhelming disillusionment. 
 
1 6 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 that age the Christians were taught to beheve that 
 Christ and His Spirit were governing the Church, and 
 that those who sought guidance from Christ and the 
 Spirit might rely on the promise, " I will not leave you 
 bereaved, helpless," and would receive the guidance 
 they needed. If it was, and is, the will of the Divine 
 Saviour that His people should always look to Him and 
 the Spirit, would not that explain why the Church is 
 without a visible governing authority ? Divided as 
 Christians are now, we have great unities to which we 
 all profess allegiance in common with the Apostolic 
 Christians. " There is one body, and one Spirit, even 
 as also we were called in one hope of our calling ; one 
 Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of 
 all." If we would accept the monition of the Apostolic 
 age, the way to the vital and perfect unity of the body 
 of Christ, the hope of justifying more obviously the 
 name of the Catholic Church, is not through agreeing 
 to submit to one governing authority, still less through 
 bringing all Christian societies into one pattern of 
 outward organisation, but through adhering more 
 closely to the one Heavenly Head, submitting more 
 simply to the impulses of the one Spirit, and cherish- 
 ing with more fervour the common ambitions of the 
 Divine kingdom. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE SECOND CENTURY 
 
 By THE EDITOR 
 
 The revelation to which the Church of God bears 
 witness is neither a body of dogmas, nor a code of 
 laws, nor a system of philosophy, but a living Person. 
 Christ our Saviour, Son of God and Son of Man, is 
 Himself the revelation, at once of God to man and 
 of God in man. The gospel of His thirty years or 
 so of sojourn here on earth is only the light from 
 heaven by which His mighty working in heaven and 
 earth is thrown on the majestic background of eternity. 
 Christ came to destroy nothing at all, save the works of 
 the devil, but to fulfil the fair promise of God's world, 
 which man had marred by sin. He came that we 
 might have life, and have it in abundance ; not to 
 stunt or mutilate even the bodily nature, but to quicken 
 the dormant spirit and hallow every deed and word 
 and thought of man with life divine. 
 
 Hence the elasticity and vast variety of Christianity. 
 Dogma is satisfied with assent, law with obedience, 
 philosophy with understanding ; but a living Person calls 
 for nothing short of the whole man's personal devotion. 
 Given only that personal devotion, the Lord receives 
 men as He finds them, with all their weaknesses and 
 errors, and all their limitations of race and time and 
 individual character. Through all these His Spirit 
 
i8 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 works, guiding them into truth as they are able to 
 receive it. Thus, though Christianity — the love of 
 Christ — is always in itself the same, its outward and 
 historic form is shaped by outward and historic causes. 
 Just because the living power is from heaven, heavenly, 
 its working in the world is natural, not magical. At 
 once transcendent and immanent, it works in and 
 through natural laws, yet lifts up nature to a higher 
 level. The lifting process may seem slow and partial, 
 though we can trace out something of its course in 
 history ; but if ages of ages were needed to prepare 
 the world for the coming of the eternal Word, ages 
 may be needed again for the working of the power 
 that is to lift up man above the angels. 
 
 Christian duty is the love of Christ and nothing 
 more : but love must work on knowledge and show 
 itself in action. The knowledge is of the Lord's person, 
 for there is no Christian doctrine but this — the rest are 
 inferences of reason from it. The action ranges through 
 the whole of life, for no part of life in Christ is common 
 or unclean. Religions may be content with a ritual, 
 but the revelation calls for the whole man. If there 
 be right action, or true fact, or living force apart from 
 Christ, then Christ is neither the way, nor the truth, nor 
 the life. 
 
 Now the natural man — and we all have a good deal 
 of the natural man — cannot give this personal devotion. 
 His religion is a religion of fear, as the Cambridge 
 Platonists used to say ; and he cannot get rid of his 
 fear by simply calling himself a Christian. He fears 
 Christ, and searches heaven and earth for mediators — 
 angels and saints in heaven, saints and priests on earth, 
 who seem nearer to him and less terrible than the 
 
THE SECOND CENTURY 19 
 
 gracious Saviour. He fears Christ, and seeks by all 
 means to escape the searching sternness of the Saviour's 
 claim — the claim of perfect love — on every act and 
 word and thought. Sometimes he ignores its practical 
 side, and contents himself with right belief or right 
 feeling which leaves his life untouched. More com- 
 monly he tones it down till he thinks he can meet it, 
 requiring perhaps what he fancies a higher standard 
 from saints or clerics. He may limit its range like 
 the Pharisees, and take refuge in ceremonialism and 
 formality ; or he may turn ascetic, and fight the body 
 instead of the carnal nature. Above all, he walks by 
 sight and not by faith, and craves a carnal certainty 
 which the Lord never promised. He may make gods 
 to go before him, and worship any sort of idols ; or 
 he may make for himself masters upon earth — popes, 
 councils, churches, priests, or spiritual directors, who 
 shall precisely tell him what he must believe and do. 
 
 These are permanent tendencies of human nature, 
 abundantly illustrated in the history of religions. 
 Mahometanism, Buddhism, and other systems, have 
 run courses very like that of Christianity. The ten- 
 dencies are much the same in all, though in each 
 case one or another of them may find a check. Thus 
 Mahometanism has developed saints and ascetics in 
 abundance, and an uncreated Koran, but neither priests 
 nor idols. Judaism had its priestly ritual and traditions 
 of the elders, but was quite free from idols. Greek and 
 Roman heathenism had gods many and lords many, 
 each with his peculiar worship ; but their authoritative 
 traditionalism was more political than religious. The 
 tendencies of the natural man are clearly seen in the 
 common features of the development of religions, and 
 
2 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 we may expect to meet them again in the history of the 
 revelation. 
 
 We shall not be disappointed. The race is like the 
 man. Age after age starts with fresh enthusiasm, 
 rejoicing as a giant to run his course ; and age after 
 age sinks paralysed with sin, its work but half begun, 
 its ideals defiled and cast aside. History is a record of 
 failures, of ruined empires and forgotten peoples, vanished 
 civilisations and fallen Churches, for even the power of 
 God seems drawn into the vortex of universal failure. 
 Yet history is the most inspiriting of all studies. 
 Through shames and failures the uplifting hand is 
 working hitherto. The shames remain for warning, 
 the failures do but lay foundations deeper, and the 
 work that is done in Christ abideth. To each genera- 
 tion is given some new view of truth ; and that remains. 
 The veil is lifting slowly ; but in these latter days we 
 begin to see how the long procession of the ages is 
 gathering round the glorious figure of the Son of Man 
 who is the Lord of all. 
 
 We begin, then, with the Apostolic age, when the 
 steps of Christ were fresh, and echoes of His gracious 
 words remained with hundreds who had followed Him. 
 It was an age of great things. Churches overspread 
 the empire in one generation, from Gaul to Pontus ; 
 and they not only witnessed the new life that had 
 come into the world, but showed its working. In them 
 the love of Christ had overcome the deepest prejudices 
 of the ancient world — Jew and Gentile, slave and bar- 
 barian, were brethren alike — and solved the social 
 problems which baffled Rome, and baffle Europe still. 
 They had abolished beggary, lifted woman to her 
 rightful place, and even drawn the sting of slavery. 
 
THE SECOND CENTURY 2i 
 
 No marvel if all generations have called them blessed. 
 Yet even the Apostolic age was no golden time of purity. 
 Mightily as the spirit of Christ was working, the spirit 
 of Antichrist was working too. There was lying at 
 Jerusalem, strife at Antioch, apostasy in Galatia, for- 
 nication at Corinth, " philosophy " at Colossae. The 
 scandals were great, the divisions quite as deep as 
 those of later times. 
 
 The Apostolic age is separated from the sub-Apostolic 
 by a storm that shook the world. First the fires of 
 Nero's persecution shone out in lurid horror like the 
 dawning of the day of doom. Then came the last 
 great strife of Rome and Israel for the dominion of 
 the East. Then the Empire was itself convulsed with 
 the great civil wars which revealed its fatal weakness of 
 dependence on the legions. And when the storm had 
 spent its fury, the scene was changed. Rome, indeed, 
 seemed as glorious as ever ; yet something had passed 
 away with the house of Divus Julius. With the mea- 
 sured strength of middle life — still ample, but not 
 without a conscious limit — she entered on a silver 
 age of prosaic peace, unstirred by civil war, before 
 the death of Commodus. But the Temple was in 
 ruins, Jerusalem a desolation, Israel uprooted from 
 its place among the nations. The Christian Church 
 was uprooted too. The Churches were cut loose in 
 one direction from apostolic guidance, in another from 
 their Jewish origins, in yet another from Roman tolera- 
 tion. Some strands of connection with the past re- 
 mained, like St. John at Ephesus, but, upon the whole, 
 the Churches became more and more Greek Churches, 
 guided by successors of Apostles, while Rome had now 
 declared herself a standing enemy. In equal contrast 
 
2 2 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 to the particularism of ancient times, the Empire and the 
 Church were universal forces, and between them lay the 
 future of the world. Hence three centuries of bitter 
 enmity, followed by a thousand years of firm alliance. 
 
 There is the sharpest possible contrast between the 
 bursting fulness of apostolic writings and the intel- 
 lectual poverty of the next generation. Its greatness 
 was not on that side. Perhaps even Polycarp under- 
 stood the deeper teachings of St. John no better than 
 Clement understood St. Paul. Yet the sub-Apostolic 
 fathers are striking characters. There is Clement, the 
 lover of concord, setting forth the order of God's world 
 as a plea for order in God's Church at Corinth ; and 
 the martyr Ignatius, whose rugged sentences are sparkles 
 of intense conviction ; and the saintly Polycarp, who 
 " stood like an anvil," and could speak with all the stern- 
 ness of St. John himself. But all three are alike in a 
 deep and thankful piety unsurpassed in later ages. 
 There is a loveliness of its own in this afterglow of 
 Apostolic times. 
 
 The problem before them was one that called for 
 all their piety, and more than all their wisdom. The 
 Churches had suddenly lost their ready appeal on 
 doctrine to the witness of Apostles, and could no longer 
 call in the authority of Apostles to put down corporate 
 disorder ; and the organisation which remained when 
 Apostles were withdrawn was very weak. They needed 
 stronger local government and stronger bonds of union 
 with each other, if they were to face the dangers of the 
 new age. The outward danger from persecution was 
 not small, for persecution falls first on leaders, and cuts 
 off the very men whose wisdom is most needed. True, 
 it calls out heroic examples, and greatly helps to weed 
 
THE SECOND CENTURY 23 
 
 out the time-servers and the unstable brethren ; but it 
 seldom softens those whom it fails to overcome. Its 
 hardening influence is conspicuous in the later persecu- 
 tions which we know best, and the sudden arrests and 
 executions must have done a good deal to confuse order 
 and relax discipline. But the internal dangers were the 
 greatest. Our scanty information gives us no reason 
 to suppose that the strifes and rivalries of the Apostolic 
 age were followed by unruffled calm. The quarrels 
 might be merely personal, as they seem to have been 
 at Corinth when Clement wrote ; but they were often 
 also doctrinal. The disorders of Galatians, Colossians, 
 or Corinthians sprang from permanent tendencies of 
 human nature, and have therefore been reproduced in 
 all ages. Galatians were now represented by Judaizers 
 generally, and Colossians by Gnostics, while the partisan- 
 ship and immorality of Corinth is always a practical 
 danger. Christian duty was fairly clear, however it 
 might be neglected ; and indeed it differed from the 
 better popular ideas of duty more in motives and 
 sanctions, and therefore in intensity, than in substance 
 and contents. But the Christian doctrine, which is the 
 ground of Christian motive, was less easily kept in view, 
 so that it was necessary to put its essential parts into 
 simple forms for common use, and to provide for it 
 more lasting guardians than the original witnesses. 
 Furthermore, the Churches were compelled by the 
 attacks of heathens and heretics not merely to define 
 their positions, but to defend them, to show their 
 historic soundness and consistency with reason, and to 
 refute current objections. If they began with simple 
 apologies like those of Aristides and Justin, they were 
 gradually drawn on to the historical criticism of Irenaeus, 
 
24 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 to the philosophy of Clement, and to the fuller doctrinal 
 schemes of Origen and Cyprian. 
 
 Thus there were three great needs. Church govern- 
 ment needed strengthening, to check disorders like those 
 of Corinth and to secure continuity of teaching. That 
 teaching needed to be placed on a basis of Scripture, 
 now that even the disciples of the old witnesses were 
 passing away ; and it needed also to be summed up in 
 simple forms, so that neither friends nor enemies could 
 mistake its main contents. The revelation moreover 
 needed to be set forth in its relation to the thought of 
 that age and of past ages, not merely answering Jewish 
 or heathen objection, but showing its bearing on cur- 
 rent forms of religion and philosophy, and showing also 
 the abiding power of the risen Son of Man to satisfy 
 the deepest needs of human nature in its widest range. 
 
 In each of these three directions the Apostles had 
 laid foundations. If they had no wish to solve pre- 
 maturely the problems of the next generation, they left 
 hints on which it could work. The first problem, as 
 we saw, was that of Church government, and a few 
 words will suffice on this, for its growth will be more 
 fully traced in another chapter. There is no trace of 
 (monarchical) bishops in the New Testament, whereas 
 by the end of the second century every city has its one 
 bishop, who for his lifetime is head of the presbyters 
 and official guardian of orthodoxy in that city. It is 
 needless as well as unhistorical to suppose that the 
 Apostles ordained episcopacy as the one lawful form of 
 Church government. Yet St. John must have seen its 
 rise in Asia, and seen it without disapproval, to say 
 the least. There was an earlier hint in such a vicar- 
 apostolic as Timothy. The only reason (though it is a 
 
THE SECOND CENTURY 25 
 
 sufficient one) for refusing to recognise Timothy as 
 bishop at Ephesus is that he was no more than a 
 special commissioner. He was soon recalled, and there 
 is no reason to suppose that he ever saw Ephesus again. 
 But other vicars-apostolic may have been left stranded 
 by an apostle's death, and remained at their post as 
 bishops. It cannot have been a common case ; but it 
 was hint enough. Monarchy is the natural resource of 
 men in times of danger. Just as the nations of Europe 
 strengthened their kings against the anarchy which con- 
 stantly threatened the later Middle Ages, so the sub- 
 Apostolic Churches strengthened their bishops as centres 
 of unity and guardians of orthodoxy. Episcopacy was 
 so visibly the best and strongest form of government 
 for the second century, that hardly anything short of a 
 definite prohibition by the Apostles could have prevented 
 its spread. 
 
 We come now to the source and the expression of 
 Church teaching. The Old Testament was the Bible of 
 the Apostles, so that Christianity was never a purely 
 traditional faith. But the formation of a New Testa- 
 ment was unavoidable, when they put the words they 
 had heard from the Carpenter's lips on a level with the 
 words which God spake from Sinai to them of old. It 
 was complete, with just a fringe of doubt concerning 
 certain books, long before the last of their disciples 
 passed away, and thenceforth remained for many 
 generations the one unquestioned source of all Chris- 
 tian doctrine. However interpretations might differ, its 
 supremacy was never doubted in the early Church. It 
 is as fixed an axiom with Athanasius as with the Church 
 of England. 
 
 But if Scripture was acknowledged as the court of 
 
26 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 final appeal, it did not follow that every man was free 
 to interpret it exactly as he pleased, — to force on 
 it, for instance, Ebionism or Gnosticism, in defiance 
 of statements whose meaning could not fairly be 
 called doubtful. For this reason as well as others, it 
 was necessary to sum up in a short form the chief 
 points, not so much of Christian doctrine as of the 
 apostolic testimony. There was an outline ready in the 
 Lord's baptismal Formula (Matt, xxviii. 19 ; I see no 
 reason to doubt its genuineness), and several passages 
 of the New Testament give something like summings-up, 
 though not of the sort required. So ancient creeds are 
 always modelled on the Formula, and for this reason 
 make slight mention of Baptism, and none at all of the 
 Lord's Supper, of Justification, the Atonement, and 
 other important doctrines. But all these summaries 
 were matters of usage. A Church might have a very 
 short confession for the catechumen to pronounce with 
 his own lips, and a somewhat longer creed to form the 
 basis of his instruction ; but its next neighbour might 
 word them very differently. Every Church did that 
 which was right in its own eyes, and to this day there 
 has never been a Catholic creed, in the sense of one 
 acknowledged by all churches. An Eastern Christian 
 will tell us that the Apostles' creed and the Quicunque 
 are not creeds of the orthodox Church, and that our 
 Nicene creed is shamefully interpolated. Yet though 
 the early creeds varied much in wording, in substance 
 they differed little. Agreement in the midst of diversity 
 summed up in the most emphatic way the historical 
 facts which constitute the Gospel, and defined better 
 than any law could have done the limits which none 
 who bear the name of Christ may overpass. 
 
THE SECOND CENTURY 27 
 
 There still remained the hardest task of all. Though 
 no language of men can fully express the truth of God, 
 it was none the less necessary to show that the revela- 
 tion could bear the keenest scrutiny of thoughtful 
 heathens — not only that it practically answered the 
 spiritual needs of all men, but that the truth it declares 
 is one that satisfies, and more than satisfies, the noblest 
 aspirations of human thought. And for this the sub- 
 Apostolic age was hardly ripe. A full century of pon- 
 dering was needed before a measure could be attempted 
 of the stupendous facts connected with our Saviour's 
 coming. Love might recognise at once the true light ; 
 but reason wanted time to gaze, and to realise its be- 
 wildering grandeur. Small wonder if men stumbled in 
 that dazzling light, and formed strange theories of Him 
 whom Ebionites at one end and Gnostics at the other 
 perforce acknowledged as the centre of the world's his- 
 tory. Nor were the sub-Apostolic fathers men who could 
 rule the intellectual anarchy which the coming of the 
 Son of Man had thrown into the ancient world. Their 
 task was to preach and iterate the Apostolic story, not 
 to mix it up with philosophy. No man was ever less fit 
 than Polycarp to understand the strange thoughts of a 
 younger generation. Their firm conservatism was abso- 
 lutely needed for their time : and, after all, the second 
 century did its fair share of the work of ages in orga- 
 nising Churches, settling the canon, and framing creeds. 
 The way forward was pointed out by the Biblical 
 studies of Tatian and Melito, by the commentaries of 
 Papias and Heracleon, by the Apologies of Aristides 
 and Justin, and above all by the historical criticism of 
 Irenaeus and his deep thoughts on the Incarnation and 
 the Supper of the Lord. Even the errors of Gnostics 
 
28 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 and Montanists were found useful warnings when the 
 School of Alexandria came forward to essay the great 
 problem. Origen and Athanasius are beyond our pre- 
 sent limits ; but the twentieth century will have to go 
 back to school (not to slavery) at Alexandria. Latin 
 doctrine came in like the Law, by reason of transgres- 
 sions ; and now that its work is done, we must return 
 to that older and freer covenant of God with Greece, 
 which no later Latin law can disannul. 
 
 The second century has points of likeness to many 
 later ages. In one direction it recalls the iron conser- 
 vatism of the changeless East ; in another the firm 
 discipline of Rome or Geneva ; in another the Scrip- 
 turalism of Protestant Churches ; in another the excite- 
 ment of the old Methodists or the new Salvation Army. 
 In yet another it reflects the anarchy of thought in our 
 time, for most of the disputed questions were astonish- 
 ingly modern ; and the final question behind them — 
 Christ or Agnosticism ? — is the final question of all 
 ages. 
 
 Yet it differed greatly from them all. Lines of 
 thought were less defined, and language was less fixed 
 than in later times. Words were still fluid which after- 
 wards became technical terms, and many technical 
 terms were not yet invented. Whole regions of doc- 
 trine were so far unexplored, and the best studied parts 
 of it were not yet worked out with the many-sided care 
 of many ages. There was no possibility yet of any- 
 thing like our modern Confessions, where every phrase 
 recalls the controversies of the past, and every sentence 
 is shaped by the struggles of centuries. With this state 
 of things there naturally went many crudities of doctrine. 
 Some of them have seldom been revived in later times, 
 
THE SECOND CENTURY 29 
 
 like the materialising views of both sacraments connected 
 with the materialising idea of the soul derived from the 
 Stoics. Even if the material water of baptism or the 
 material bread of the Lord's Supper be supposed to 
 have a quasi-material influence, nobody would now 
 explain it by their affinity to a material soul. But most 
 of the crudities are the recurring ideas of all ages. The 
 Millennarians, for instance, are always with us, and the 
 computers of the number of the Beast and of the end 
 of the world, and the believers in the material fires of 
 hell, for the literalists are men of all times. The 
 Quakers are not the first who scrupled oaths and war ; 
 and there is no novelty in the vegetarians, or in the 
 temperance men who refuse the eucharistic wine. 
 There were thought-readers, too, and spiritualists and 
 mediums — no mean practitioners — and conjurers and 
 impostors in rich variety, ranging down from hypnotists 
 as devilish as some of our own to the common quacks of 
 the market. Hardly a folly of our time was wanting — 
 Anglo-Israel of course excepted. Graver thoughts were 
 also very like our own. The difficulties of Theism and 
 Agnosticism were most of them familiar to the Gnostics ; 
 and things like Mariolatry and transubstantiation were 
 not unknown among them, for it would not be easy to 
 find a heresy the Gnostics never thought of. So modern 
 is it all, in many ways more modern than a world our 
 fathers could well remember. 
 
 How then shall we class the Church of the second 
 century with regard to modern Churches ? Protestant 
 it was not, for Protestantism never succeeded very well 
 in its persistent endeavour to return to primitive models. 
 It is no harder to raise the dead than to restore a 
 vanished past. For good and for evil, the simplicity of 
 
30 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 early times was gone for ever long before the Reforma- 
 tion. The long centuries of Latin tutelage had left an 
 indelible mark on Western thought ; and Protestantism 
 — at least Lutheran and English Protestantism — was 
 far too reverent and wise to undo with one fell blow 
 the work of ages. It was too Christian and too Northern 
 to accept without reserve, too Christian and too Latin 
 to set aside without discrimination, the great structure 
 of Latin thought which faced it at the Reformation. 
 Thus the part rejected was rejected with an emphasis 
 unknown to earlier times, and the part retained had 
 much in it of purely Latin and not of primitive growth. 
 Protestantism might speak in deliberate opposition to 
 Rome, or in deliberate agreement with Rome ; and 
 either way was a clear departure from primitive models. 
 The one thing it could not possibly do was to speak in 
 primitive unconsciousness of Rome's existence. Thus 
 though we find in the second century plenty of the 
 Protestant doctrine which the Latin Church rejects, it 
 is hardly ever laid down with the distinctive emphasis 
 of Protestantism. In this sense, and chiefly in this 
 sense, the second century is not Protestant. 
 
 On the other hand, we find very few traces of the 
 Latin doctrine which Protestantism, at least Lutheran 
 and English Protestantism, rejected ; and those we do 
 find are chiefly Gnostic. There were germs of evil in 
 prayers for the dead, in enthusiastic admiration of 
 martyrs, and in overmuch regard for the physical facts 
 of fasting and virginity, and perhaps in other things ; 
 but they were hardly more than germs. Speaking 
 broadly, the Church of the second century meets the 
 current Latin doctrine of the Middle Ages with a 
 negative protest of silence and of contrary teaching and 
 
THE SECOND CENTURY 31 
 
 example, which to the student is even more impressive 
 than the positive protest of the Reformation. Thus we 
 find no traces of Papal jurisdiction, but abundant signs 
 that every Church in Christendom would have resented 
 any such claim as a piece of arrogance. All are agreed 
 that the Church bears witness to the broad facts of the 
 creed ; but nobody contemplates a further Catholic 
 tradition of ritual, discipline, or dogma, which individual 
 Churches are not free to alter as they think fit. The 
 infallibility of councils is unknown to this age and the 
 next ; and even in the fourth century the first faint 
 suggestion of it by the Arians rouses the indignant 
 scorn of Athanasius. The supremacy of Scripture is 
 everywhere taken for granted ; and if Scripture is no- 
 where directly and expressly opposed to tradition, 
 neither is tradition anywhere made an independent 
 source of doctrine. Even TertuUian maintains no 
 more than Hooker's position, that a Church is not 
 bound to show a direct command of Scripture for 
 every ceremony it ordains. There is no trace of a 
 sacrificing (not purely pastoral and eucharistic) priest- 
 hood till after Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria ; and 
 Cyprian himself strictly limits that priesthood to the 
 bishop, and calls the presbyters no more than Levites. 
 Sacrifice is commonly spoken of, but only sacrifice of 
 thanksgiving, and the altar, Irenaeus tells us, is in 
 heaven. The bread of the Lord's Supper is no longer 
 common bread ; but bread it always is, though " bread 
 with a blessing," for nobody dreams of anything like 
 transubstantiation unless it be a few Gnostics. If Pro- 
 testantism has too sharply limited the possibilities of 
 God's mercy to the dead, it at least went wrong with 
 Irenaeus ; and the hardest Calvinism never preached a 
 
32 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 more horrible gospel of hell fire than Cyprian in the 
 next age. Altogether, the questions are few on which 
 there is any reason to suppose that the Church of the 
 second century would have preferred Roman statements 
 to those of the English Articles. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA 
 
 By THE Rev. C. BIGG, D.D. 
 
 Christianity was a new life cast into the midst of an 
 old civilisation. With amazing strength and speed it 
 flew forth beyond the narrow limits of its birthplace, 
 the land of Judaea, circling through every region of the 
 empire, and rising from class to class of society. 
 
 At first it was little more than a life, with many 
 intuitions and few formularies, yet carrying within it 
 the germs of thought which experience must necessarily 
 develope. It went forth like a child, naive and un- 
 conscious, yet always serenely confident that it was 
 endued with a power capable of regenerating the whole 
 world. 
 
 As the Church passed on its way, onwards and up- 
 wards, it came into contact with all the convictions and 
 all the doubts of Jew and Gentile, of all sorts and condi- 
 tions of men. The old state of unreasoned assurance 
 could not endure. Sooner or later the Christian was 
 bound to give account of himself, to himself and to 
 others, in the light of the best knowledge of the day, 
 and in language that could be accepted or disputed. 
 Was the Church fit only for cobblers and fullers, as 
 Celsus asserted, or could it take charge of intelligence ? 
 Could it really widen the horizon by raising the point 
 of view ? Could it help the statesman and the scholar ? 
 
 33 C 
 
34 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 Was Christ, in truth, the Hght that lighteth every 
 man ? These were the questions that demanded 
 answers. 
 
 By the end of the second century the Church was 
 emerging from the contest with Gnosticism, or rather, 
 was rising above that social stratum in which Gnosti- 
 cism abode. Gnosticism was essentially a bourgeois 
 phenomenon, borrowing much from the wild and coarse 
 imagination of Egypt or Syria, but still more from the 
 narrowness, the recalcitrance, and the pessimism of 
 the ill-educated and ill-used middle class. Take a 
 serious but unenlightened man of inferior social grade, 
 born and bred in the Greco-Roman Empire, where a 
 score of mythologies seethed in confusion, give him a 
 smattering of philosophy, then introduce him to Christi- 
 anity as a new religion somewhat better than the rest, 
 and he will form a Gnostic system with its evil God, its 
 asceticism or antinomianism, and its families of Aeons, 
 in which Christian graces, heathen gods. Oriental 
 angels or demons play their part as in a wild kind of 
 religious melodrama. 
 
 Gnosticism never produced an eminent man, yet it 
 possessed extraordinary vitality among the middle class, 
 enduring under one shape or another till late in the 
 Middle Ages. It raised just those formidable problems 
 which are obvious to everybody, but it answered none 
 of them, nor did it even point the way to an answer. 
 Its sourness and its recalcitrance are best exemplified in 
 the phrase of Basilides : " I will say anything rather 
 than admit that Providence is evil." Truth does not 
 reveal herself to men who court her thus. If the 
 reader thinks this description of Gnosticism harsh, he 
 should read the Ptstts Sophia, of which an English 
 
THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA 35 
 
 translation is accessible, or the account of the Manichees 
 in the Confessions of St. Augustine. 
 
 But in the second century the Church was coming 
 daily into closer contact with men of the highest educa- 
 tion. Plutarch knew something of the Bible, and 
 Celsus knew much. The Emperor M. Aurelius dis- 
 approved of the '' obstinacy " of the Christians whom 
 he put to death ; and Pronto, his tutor, is said to have 
 written against them. Two illustrious names in the 
 history of Neo-Platonism are those of Numenius and 
 Ammonius Saccas. Ammonius was at one time a 
 Christian. Numenius spoke of Plato as "an Attic 
 Moses," and, if we may venture on an inference from 
 the curious dislike shown towards him by the friends 
 of Plotinus, may have been a Jew, or even a Christian. 
 
 Clearly the hour had come for an explanation between 
 Christianity and philosophy, and the times were favour- 
 able for such an attempt. Platonism, a noble and 
 relicfious form of idealism, was in the ascendant, and 
 offered many points of contact with the Church, espe- 
 cially in its doctrines of spirit and of the immortality of 
 the soul. And, as a natural consequence of this change 
 in the temper of the schools, the old hostility to Greek 
 thought, which is so strongly marked in the Apologists, 
 with the single exception of Justin, was giving way. 
 The rank and file of the Church were still as strong as 
 ever in their dislike of the wisdom of the world, and 
 the same feeling is still very evident in Tertullian. No 
 Christian would have dreamed of putting philosophy 
 above the Creed, or substituting it for the Creed. But 
 many were beginning to ask whether a highly-trained 
 human intelligence could not throw light on the diffi- 
 culties of Scripture, on the details of moral duty, even 
 
36 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 on the axioms of the Creed itself. God made man in 
 His own image. Surely, then, thought can meet revela- 
 tion. The one is higher, the other lower, but there 
 must be some affinity between the two. Reason can- 
 not predict revelation, nor judge it when it comes, but 
 it can prepare the way for it, test at any rate its opera- 
 tions, and so believe in its source, as a child believes in 
 the larger wisdom of its father. 
 
 We must confine ourselves in the present paper to 
 the two great Alexandrine doctors, Clement and Origen. 
 It will not be possible to enter largely on their bio- 
 graphies or their personal characteristics. They were 
 very different men. Clement, we may say, was the first 
 Christian mystic ; Origen, the first Christian schoolman. 
 Clement was much the braver and the brighter of the 
 two. There is a large lay element in his charming 
 temper. He loved letters, prose or verse, tragic or comic^ 
 grave or gay. He was mystic in the same sense as 
 Fenelon, believing that the purified spirit truly sees God 
 and becomes one with God, and his mysticism gives him 
 extraordinary freedom, tenderness, and tolerance. He 
 seems to rise above all forms, " touching earth," to use 
 his own phrase, " with but one foot ; " yet he is a severe 
 disciplinarian, bidding men seek freedom through law. 
 But his severity, though it strikes the modern reader 
 as rather Puritanical, is in principle always kindly and 
 moderate, like that of St. Anselm, who loved to see his 
 guests enjoy themselves, though he himself took none 
 but the simplest fare. 
 
 Clement seems to roam through the fields of know- 
 ledge picking every beautiful flower that comes in his 
 way, without stopping to think how it will harmonise 
 with the rest of his nosegay. Origen is of quite another 
 
THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA 37 
 
 Type, laborious, erudite, critical, always desperately in 
 earnest. He saw into things far more deeply than 
 Clement. Clement has no doubts ; Origen has many, 
 and he drags them all into the light, in full assurance 
 that there is an answer, and that God has somewhere 
 revealed it. Scripture must be a sufficient key to all 
 spiritual truth, and so he collects manuscripts, revises 
 texts, publishes the Hexapla, ransacks the stores of 
 grammar, science, philosophy, and brings all this mass 
 of human learning to bear upon the sacred text. This 
 is, of course, very much what we do ourselves, but still 
 there is a broad difference. The modern scholar wants 
 to see the Bible exactly as it is, and is prepared to admit 
 that revelation is limited by its purpose and by the 
 circumstances under which it is given. Origen, holding 
 the great Platonic maxim that God is all in all, and all in 
 every part, maintained that the whole body of truth lies 
 hidden in Scripture. Any sentence, any word, rightly 
 and fully explained, is a microcosm, and involves all 
 heaven and all earth, like " the little flower " of which 
 Tennyson sang. Hence the Bible is the one book 
 needful. Science is not a revelation so much as the 
 key to a revelation ; it is that " key of knowledge " of 
 which our Saviour spoke, a necessary instrument for the 
 commentator, but of no value except as an instrument. 
 It has been said that self-limitation is the condition 
 of strength. Origen is certainly limited. The realm of 
 beauty in nature and art, in which Clement finds a 
 keen enjoyment, does not exist for him. All his great 
 faculties were bent with superb energy on the establish- 
 ment of ecclesiastical knowledge ; theology swallows up 
 everything. It is true that his conception of theology 
 is broad and noble, and that he accomplished great 
 
38 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 things in every department of the science. Still he is 
 ecclesiastical, professional, and judges everything from 
 the one point of view. He said of philosophy, " Few 
 are they who have taken the spoils of the Egyptians 
 and made of them the furniture of the tabernacle." 
 Clement wrote : " There is one river of Truth, but many 
 streams fall into it on this side and on that." There 
 are dangers on both sides ; but Clement's view is the 
 more genial, the more modern, and, we may add, the 
 braver. 
 
 The teaching of the Alexandrines was shaped to 
 meet the problems of their times. They are the pro- 
 blems of all times, but from age to age they take 
 different forms, and the solution, as far as a solution 
 can be attained, needs to be continually revised. 
 
 We may take first their treatment of Scripture, and 
 here we must think chiefly of Origen. 
 
 He held that the Bible is one book, "the Word," 
 and not " the words," of God. Till the other day every 
 one would have repeated this phrase ; it is the expres- 
 sion of what was called "the plenary inspiration" of 
 Scripture. 
 
 But, when the scholar began to study the recently 
 completed canon of Scripture as a whole, he became 
 aware of numerous and grave difficulties. Manuscripts 
 were corrupt, and readings varied. There were dis- 
 crepancies of statement between one writer and another. 
 There were divergences of view between one apostle and 
 another. The mysticism of St. Paul is not quite the 
 same as the mysticism of St. John, and neither could 
 be reconciled without some effort with the strong 
 discipline of the existing Church. What then was 
 the function of Law ? and what was the precise 
 
THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA 39 
 
 relation of the Mosaic Law to the Gospel ? in what 
 sense was it abolished, and in what sense did it still 
 endure ? 
 
 Other questions were forced upon Origen from the 
 outside, by heathen thinkers like Celsus, or by Chris- 
 tians like Ambrosius, who had felt the attractions of 
 Gnosticism, One was the homeliness, and, as it seemed 
 to the rhetorical taste of the day, the vulgarity of the 
 Scripture narrative. Another was the contradiction 
 between Scripture and science or common sense, for 
 instance in the account of Creation. Above all, the 
 morality of the Old Testament was vehemently im- 
 pugned from many different sides by Ebionites, Gnostics, 
 and enlightened pagans. Men pointed to the naive 
 anthropomorphism of the Hebrew Scriptures, to the 
 polygamy of the Patriarchs, to the wars of extermination, 
 to the fierce language of some of the Psalms, to the story 
 of Tamar, and asked in what sense a book which con- 
 tained all these extravagances could be regarded as 
 divine. Some went so far as to ascribe the authorship 
 of the Old Testament to an inferior and evil god. 
 
 The Alexandrines were not troubled by those 
 theories as to the date and composition of the different 
 books which have been suggested in our own times by 
 Greek and Hebrew philologers. How Clement would 
 have regarded the refinements of modern scholarship 
 may be doubtful, but that noble and intrepid spirit, 
 with which he compared philosophy to God's rain 
 falling on all kinds of soil, and causing all kinds of 
 seeds to grow, was hospitable to truth from whatever 
 quarter it came. Origen's mind was not so open, and 
 when we remember how he refused to be convinced, 
 even by Africanus, that the story of Susanna was not 
 
40 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 an integral part of the Hebrew book of Daniel, on the 
 ground that it is not well " to remove the eternal land- 
 marks which those set up who were before us," we may 
 guess that he would have looked with a jealous eye on 
 the audacities of German scholarship. He was far 
 from being uncritical, and ventured to question the 
 Pauline authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
 But theological caution, strange as this may sound, 
 was a strong feature in his character, and, if he had 
 yielded assent to the modern view of the Book of 
 Genesis, it would have been after a severe struggle. 
 But this has been the experience of many among 
 ourselves. 
 
 The grave perplexities which attach to the idea of 
 Evolution were of course unknown to the Alexandrines. 
 Evolution may be compared to the spear of Achilles ; 
 it heals at any rate some of the wounds which it causes. 
 In particular it has supplied a sufficient answer to the 
 moral problems of the Old Testament, by telling us of 
 " the light which slowly broadens down," and how, in 
 all manifestations of the eternal law, the lower must 
 always prepare the way for the higher. The fine intelli- 
 gence of St. Augustine had grasped this idea at least in 
 its ethical application, and in a remarkable passage of 
 the Confessions the saint defends the morality of the 
 Hebrew Scriptures on this very ground. In the days 
 of his Manichaean wilfulness he too had measured the 
 past by the stiff rule of the present. " I did not know," 
 he writes, "the true inner righteousness which judges 
 not conventionally but by the upright law of Almighty 
 God, whereby the customs of countries and times are 
 adapted to the countries and times, though the law is 
 the same everywhere and always." But Origen had 
 
THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA 41 
 
 not risen to this height. Like all the men of his day, 
 and many men of our day, he thought that the precept 
 was as unchangeable as the principle. 
 
 Hence, as he could not and would not strangle his 
 doubts, he was driven to adopt that mode of inter- 
 pretation which we call Allegorism. It had been in- 
 vented by pagans to defend their myths, and came to 
 Origen stamped with the approval of Philo and Clement. 
 But he greatly extended its application, using it with 
 the utmost freedom for four different purposes — (i) as 
 a weapon of defence ; (2) as a means of demonstrating 
 the unity of Scripture ; (3) as an engine of prophecy ; 
 (4) as a necessary interpretation of the dogma and 
 discipline of the Church. 
 
 Allegorism in our times is almost universally mis- 
 understood. Quite recently the author of an excellent 
 work upon Clement, M. de Faye, has spoken of it as 
 " resting entirely upon fiction." It is indeed " the art of 
 making one thing mean another." But then everything 
 does mean something else. Everything is symbol. 
 Every atom is vitally linked to its neighbour atom, and 
 every effect is an image of its cause. Undoubtedly 
 there is such a thing as analogy ; but some analogies 
 are much deeper than others, and if we cannot distin- 
 guish between the trivial and the profound, there is, of 
 course, great possibility of error. 
 
 The Alexandrines fell into this error, but this must 
 not blind us to their great merit. They were allegorising 
 when they found in the number three hundred and 
 eighteen, the number of the servants of Abraham, a 
 type of Christ. But they were also allegorising when 
 they said that God is Spirit and not matter, or when 
 they said that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist 
 
42 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 is not corporeal. The fact is that many of us are 
 allegorists without knowing it. And we may admire 
 the hard fate of the Alexandrines. The trivialities of 
 their symbolism were found interesting and edifying, 
 were eagerly caught up by the Church and lived on till 
 the other day. Their noble evangelical spiritualism, 
 except as regards the doctrine of the Trinity, was re- 
 jected by the Church, was recovered only by a few, and 
 only after a bitter struggle. We forget that this too is 
 Allegorism and Alexandrinism. 
 
 The working rule of Allegorism was that Scripture 
 contains three senses, the literal, the moral, and the 
 spiritual, and that many passages possess all three. 
 Origen added to this rule another, that many passages 
 have no historical truth at all, because in the literal 
 sense they contain impossibilities. Such were the whole 
 account of Creation and the Fall, many precepts of the 
 Law, and some even of the Gospel — for instance, the 
 command to pluck out the offending eye. The main 
 fault of these rules is just that they are rules. All 
 language descriptive of spiritual experience is meta- 
 phorical, and hals more senses than one. But when we 
 set to work upon a text with the conviction that the 
 more erroneous or the more trivial it may appear, the 
 more profound must be its significance, or that the New 
 Testament must lie hid, not merely in germ but in 
 actual detail in the Old, great errors are at hand. 
 They are errors not of substance, because the rash 
 Allegorist finds only what he already possesses, but 
 they confuse to an intolerable degree our knowledge of 
 the past. 
 
 Yet Allegorism rests on profound truths, that " the 
 letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life," and that " nothing 
 
THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA 43 
 
 unworthy ought to be believed of God." It insisted 
 that the whole world was made by God and bears His 
 sign-manual. Further it maintained that the Bible, being 
 the creation of the same author as Nature, must neces- 
 sarily exhibit the same method of workmanship ; this 
 was the thought from which sprang Butler's Analogj'. 
 Yet again that the Old Testament is not against the 
 New, but is part of one Divine scheme for the educa- 
 tion of the world, and contains previsions, foretastes, 
 shadows of the better things to come. These are great 
 thoughts, however they may have been misapplied. 
 
 But we must pick up our thread again, and consider 
 in sufficient detail the four uses to which Allegorism 
 was applied. 
 
 Its apologetic worth varies very greatly with the 
 character of the objections against which it was directed. 
 The homehness of Scripture, which shocked Origen, 
 does not shock us. We see no difficulty in the wells of 
 water which Caleb gave his daughter, or in the cakes 
 which Abraham baked, or in the touching story of Ruth. 
 Our taste has been formed upon the Bible, and we 
 condemn the vapid Byzantine rhetoric, which had no 
 dignity because it had no simplicity. But many of the 
 doubts urged by the Gnostics, or by the keen and 
 haughty Celsus, were of a very different type. Among 
 the chief was that arising out of the justice of God. 
 They were all answered by Allegorism, but we need not 
 dwell upon them here, as we must recur to the more 
 important later on. 
 
 Neither must we linger on the second use. Types 
 and prophecies undoubtedly exist in Scripture, though 
 our modern scholarly ways teach us to be much more 
 discreet in their discovery and application. Few will 
 
44 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 doubt that Isaiah foresaw the advent of our Lord, 
 though but darkly as in a glass. The Alexandrines — 
 Origen more especially — were carried much too far in 
 their desire to make all Scripture eloquent of Christ. 
 It was the fault of their time ; after all it was not a 
 grave fault, and what we have said upon the subject 
 will amply suffice. 
 
 A much more serious question, arising out of the 
 belief in the unity of Scripture, is that which concerns 
 the relation of the Law to the Gospel. It lies at the 
 bottom of much of the religious confusion of our own 
 times. 
 
 In what sense was the Law abolished ? Is the 
 Gospel itself a law ? Is obedience to a law, which as 
 yet we imperfectly comprehend, a duty, a virtue, and a 
 help ? Or are we to regard all true believers as a law 
 unto themselves, or as so informed by the Holy Spirit 
 that they need no rule and see for themselves exactly 
 what they ought to do and believe ? 
 
 The question is by no means an idle one. Epipha- 
 nius, the Gnostic, taught that the precept makes the 
 sin. Nature is not chaste ; or, as he expressed it, "the 
 vine welcomes both the sparrow and the thief." Since 
 his time many so-called Christians have looked upon 
 the Gospel freedom as implying moral anarchy. This 
 is putting the difficulty in its most brutal shape, but it 
 has many milder forms. Can there be any moral and 
 religious worth in belief in the Unknown, or, to use 
 the common phrases, in Faith and in Authority ? Does 
 the Act affect the Motive, or, in other words, what is 
 the value of good works, and what is the place of 
 moral philosophy ? What is the precise meaning of 
 Continuity in the spiritual life ? Does the present 
 
THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA 45 
 
 grow out of the past, or are there breaks and new 
 beginnings ? And if history, both in the Church and 
 in the individual, is a development, how are we to dis- 
 tinguish between growth and degeneration ? What is 
 Unity, and by what means is it secured ? These are 
 crucial questions arising out of the connection between 
 the Old Testament and the New. The answer we give 
 them marks us off as belonging to one or the other of 
 the two great types of Christianity. 
 
 The Alexandrines ranged themselves emphatically on 
 the side of authority. They held that the Creed itself 
 was a law, which must be accepted before it could be 
 understood, like the axioms of metaphysics or the rules 
 of a practical art. The only difference is that the 
 Christian Creed belongs not to what Whichcote calls 
 "things of natural knowledge, or of first inscription in 
 the heart of man by God, which are known to be true 
 as soon as ever they are proposed," but to revelation. 
 "The great things of revealed truth," Whichcote pro- 
 ceeds, "though they be not of reason's invention, yet 
 are they of the prepared mind readily entertained and 
 received." This is a good statement of the Alexandrine 
 position. The Christian revelation is a manifestation 
 of the higher reason of God, and is possible only 
 because it completes the " truth of first inscription." 
 We could not have "invented" it, but the "prepared 
 mind " can recognise it. The mind must be prepared 
 by discipline, because the truth is largely, indeed funda- 
 mentally, moral. From this point of view action under 
 discipline becomes of very high importance. 
 
 The Alexandrines, no doubt, took a strictly legal 
 view. When we use the word legalism we are thinking 
 of the Rabbis, with their stiff, unchanging, slavish 
 
46 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 mechanism. But law, as it is understood by Clement, 
 or Origen, or Hooker, or Ruskin, is a noble thing, the 
 guide of aspiration, the bond of unity, the nurse of 
 freedom. Let us see what Origen says of the different 
 kinds of law. 
 
 Take first the Law of Nature. St. Paul says in the 
 words of the Psalmist, "There is none that doeth good, 
 no, not one." " What," asks Origen, " was there none 
 who sheltered a stranger, or gave bread to the hungry, 
 or clothed the naked, or rescued the innocent from the 
 grip of the oppressor ? I do not think that the Apostle 
 Paul wished to make so incredible a statement." He 
 goes on to say that, though the heathen are excluded 
 from the Beatific Vision, they cannot wholly lose " the 
 glory, honour, and peace of good works." 
 
 The Law of Moses Origen held to have been a 
 means of grace, adapted to the times though imperfect, 
 transitional in form but not in substance, absorbed and 
 transfigured but not abolished by the Gospel. It corre- 
 sponds to a stage of the Christian experience, that of 
 " washing." Men must be washed before they can be 
 clothed, before they can " put on Christ." " Let Moses, 
 therefore, wash thee. ... It is the law of God which 
 washes thee, cleanses thy filth, removes, if thou wilt hear 
 it, the stains of thy sins." 
 
 Even the Gospel itself is constantly spoken of as 
 a Law. Origen distinguishes three stages of Justifica- 
 tion. The first is that of Faith, which, if accompanied 
 by Repentance, receives pardon through Baptism. The 
 second is that of " imputed righteousness," of imperfect 
 obedience, of hope on man's side and on God's. The 
 third is real and true righteousness ; the man is right- 
 eous, a son and no longer a servant, a man not a babe, 
 
THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA 47 
 
 and no further imputation is needed ; hope has given 
 way to love. 
 
 To the Alexandrines, as to all Platonists, Law is 
 Freedom. Freedom is not self-assertion, but inner con- 
 formity to the perfect will of God. 
 
 Origen is more practical than Clement, and did not 
 believe that man can become absolutely one spirit with 
 the Lord in this short hfe. Clement, as was said above, 
 is more mystical. His " Gnostic," or finished Christian, 
 lives in uninterrupted communion with the Saviour, 
 and needs no helps, forms, or symbols of any kind, 
 except the Eucharist. But there is a very broad dis- 
 tinction between Clement and some of the later mystics. 
 He would have said that the Gnostic must still obey, 
 for the sake of others if not for his own. Though he 
 needs no forms others do, and therefore he will still 
 go to church, hear sermons, say his prayers, and 
 observe the customary regulations. The Body must 
 care for all, the weak as well as the strong, and the 
 saint is still a member of the Body. Clement was no 
 Quietist, nor would he have broken unity for a form 
 which his brethren valued. 
 
 The Alexandrines did not differ from the Church of 
 their time in their notion of unity, or in their belief that 
 all Christians were not free. Where they did differ 
 was in thinking that all Christians ought to become free, 
 and that the Church ought to leave much more space 
 for freedom. 
 
 AUegorism was also used as an engine of prophecy, 
 and this was its most dangerous application. The 
 Alexandrines craved more light than God has been 
 pleased to give, and set to work to manufacture it ; or 
 rather, we should say, to extort hidden mysteries from 
 
48 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 Scripture by means of exegesis. Origen regarded the 
 commentator as qualified for his task by a special 
 inspiration. There is much truth in this. " Scripture," 
 it has been said, " can only be understood by the aid of 
 the same Spirit by whom it was given." The scholar 
 ought to be a revealer. But he is an interpreter of 
 prophecy, not a prophet. The prophet, as we see him 
 in Scripture, is one who has received a direct communi- 
 cation from God. He does not argue or reason, he 
 proclaims what the Voice has told him. He gives from 
 God an order, a judgment, an intimation of things to 
 come. The last is the function that specially belongs 
 to him. He was not, as such, a preacher or a teacher, 
 though the difference lies not so much in the substance 
 of the message as in the mode of its communication. 
 
 In the time of Origen the Montanist prophetism had 
 been practically suppressed, and the gift of prophecy in 
 the Church was very rare. Origen had never seen a 
 prophet ; but he bent his eyes with eager curiosity 
 towards the darkness of the future. Could not the 
 veil be lifted ? Were there not hints in Scripture ? 
 Might not scholarship and devotion attain to at least 
 something of prophetic strain ? 
 
 He found his clue in the " Eternal Gospel " of St. 
 John, and in the text, " God shall be all in all." How 
 far he was right in his interpretation of these words of 
 St. Paul it is hard to say, but he took them to mean 
 that the end shall be like the beginning, that as all 
 came from God, so all shall return to God, and that evil 
 will cease to be. 
 
 I need not here describe his theory of Restitution at 
 length. He found it in Scripture, in a thousand texts, 
 but he had previously borrowed it from Plato. From 
 
THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA 49 
 
 the Gorgias he had gathered the behef that all pain is 
 corrective ; by the Phcedrus and the ReptiblichQ had been 
 taught that the soul lived and sinned before it came 
 down to earth, that the short span of its existence here 
 is but an episode in its age-long probation, that the great 
 drama goes on for aeon after aeon, till at last, one by 
 one, all spirits have found rest in the bosom of God. 
 All this Origen held only as a speculation, as a hope or 
 pious opinion. There are many passages where he ex- 
 presses doubts. 
 
 It is a very bold and a very noble theodicy. We 
 need not criticise it in detail. But one point involved 
 is of such far-reaching importance as to call for a few 
 remarks. 
 
 The belief that all pain is corrective is certainly 
 wrong, and it is most singular that neither Clement nor 
 Origen perceived this. How could they, on this Platonic 
 theory, account for the death of our Lord, and the 
 efficacy of the Cross ? Or how could they explain the 
 patent fact that ignorance and hardness are not only the 
 cause but the effect of vice ? Origen has more than one 
 fine passage on the value of the deaths of martyrs and 
 heroes, but somehow he never pushed the thought of 
 vicarious suffering to a conclusion. The heathen Platon- 
 ists laughed at the idea of an unjust man being made 
 better by the unmerited suffering of the just, and many 
 Christians are half-ashamed of it. Yet, if self-sacrifice 
 is not the chief agent in moral regeneration, what be- 
 comes of the Church ? My pain may make me better, 
 but why should I suffer for others who can only be 
 healed by their own pain ? Thus we lose the noblest 
 of all motives to which the dullest of mankind will 
 
 respond. 
 
 D 
 
50 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 The doctrine that pain is corrective means, in coarse 
 language, that moral evil is cured by flogging. This is 
 so manifestly untrue that the Church could never wholly 
 believe it. Yet the old disciplinarians came very near 
 to the belief. The death of Christ, it was held, availed 
 to purchase free pardon for the sinner at his baptism, 
 but all subsequent misdeeds must be atoned for by full 
 satisfaction. Here we have the root of the mediaeval 
 doctrine of Penance with all its abuses. Tetzel stands 
 on the same ground as Origen. 
 
 The last point that we need consider is the bearing 
 of Allegorism upon the doctrine and organisation of the 
 Church. On this field it rendered its noblest services, 
 but within the limits at our disposal it is not possible 
 to do more than briefly point out the chief of them. 
 
 Down to the end of the second century theology 
 had been sadly hampered by Stoic materialism. The 
 soul was very generally regarded as possessing shape 
 and capable of division. The Platonists, who hardly 
 existed in the first century and did not acquire wide 
 influence till rather late in the second, were the men to 
 whom we owe the interpretation of our Lord's words, 
 " God is Spirit." Here we have the most conspicuous 
 justification of Clement's love for philosophy. The 
 tremendous importance of this new view — we may call 
 it new, for it had been practically lost — is best seen in 
 the life of St. Augustine. The belief that God has 
 neither body parts nor passions, that His Spirit is all 
 in the whole and all in every part, and that consequently 
 it is not a bare logical or mathematical unity but the 
 fulness of life, destroyed Gnosticism with its second 
 and evil god, destroyed Chiliasm, greatly strengthened 
 the conviction of the soul's immortality, and rendered 
 
THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA 51 
 
 it possible to explain, at any rate in some degree, the 
 mystery of the Creed. Further it explained also the 
 Church itself, because it showed how men may be one 
 with each other and with God. Unity in diversity is a 
 great spiritual allegorical truth, and we owe its currency 
 to the Alexandrines. 
 
 There were differences in detail between Clement 
 and Origen, but it may be said that they made the 
 doctrine of the Trinity what it has since remained. The 
 main task left to religious thought was the definition of 
 our Lord's Humanity. In this field the rather old- 
 fashioned Platonism of the Alexandrines was to some 
 extent a hindrance. 
 
 Almost equally conspicuous is the working of their 
 free spiritual liberality in the region of practical theology. 
 Here Allegorism is what we term Evangelicalism. But 
 here they were ages before their time. 
 
 We find it difficult to estimate their service because 
 so little is known of the actual working of the Church in 
 their day. Great changes were taking place. Down 
 to the time of Clement there is good reason for thinking 
 that the Bishop of Alexandria had been elected and 
 consecrated by the city rectors. The liturgy was 
 assuming its final shape, and the power of the priest- 
 hood was becoming much greater. We can see that 
 Clement's use of philosophy excited violent opposition 
 among those whom he calls " Orthodoxasts," and Origen 
 also was clearly not in harmony with " the simpler 
 brethren." In later times the hatred of Origen was 
 justified mainly by his Universalism and his Subordi- 
 natianism, but in his own day there were many other 
 causes of dislike which it is not difficult to find. The 
 Alexandrine attitude was at once too spiritual and too 
 
52 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 conservative for the drift of the time, which ran strongly 
 in the direction of stricter disciphne and closer de- 
 finition. 
 
 At what date was the Epiclesis, or Invocation of the 
 Holy Spirit, in the prayer of consecration altered ? If 
 we could only answer this question, we should gain a 
 great accession of light. 
 
 The ancient Egyptian Church Order has, '' We pray 
 Thee instantly that Thou send Thy Holy Ghost upon the 
 sacrifice of this Christian Church." Equally broad is the 
 language of the old Nestorian Liturgy of SS. Adcetts and 
 Maris. But in the great bulk of the Eastern Liturgies 
 the Holy Spirit is invoked to " make " the bread and 
 wine the Body and Blood of our Lord. And by the 
 end of the fourth century, Jerome, a Western, says 
 of the priest that he conficit corpus Domini. The Body 
 is material, and it is " made " by the celebrant, no 
 longer by the Holy Spirit. Here we discern two very 
 important steps in advance. The early Church had 
 been content to take our Lord's words as they found 
 them, without any attempt at definition. 
 
 Origen found the doctrine of the Corporeal Presence 
 in existence, but he could not accept it, partly because 
 he held a low view of our Lord's Humanity, which he 
 regarded as little more than the veil of His Divinity, 
 partly because his Platonism made any approach to 
 materialism impossible. Like Clement he held a purely 
 spiritual view of our Lord's presence in the Eucharist. 
 But what we should notice is that this Evangelicalism — 
 shall we call it so ? — is part of his philosophy, of his 
 Allegorism. He does not deny ''the common explana- 
 tion," nor does it make him furious. But he relegates 
 it to "the lower life." The body of the Church holds 
 
THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA 53 
 
 it, and may hold it, but the educated Christian may 
 think otherwise. He claims for himself and for others 
 full enjoyment of the liberty which God has given, yet 
 without a thought of breaking communion. 
 
 Another grave question was that of Penance and 
 Absolution. The old discipline of public confession 
 in the Church had been found to be more than men 
 would endure, as we can well understand. People 
 were beginning to ask whether it was really necessary 
 that every peccadillo should be laid bare before an 
 assembly in which there would be many rigorists and 
 possibly some enemies. Hence there grew up among 
 the wealthy a custom of attaching to their households 
 a spiritual adviser, as the rich heathen had a domestic 
 philosopher. These directors were often laymen, but 
 often also priests, and a priest in this position would 
 be naturally disposed to give absolution on his own 
 authority, and on his own private knowledge. Origen 
 complains that there were many priests in his own time 
 who ventured to forgive even mortal sins " by their own 
 prayer." Not only did he oppose private absolution, 
 but he held, like Cyprian, and like Wyclif, that the 
 " power of the keys " depended on the worthiness of 
 the minister. 
 
 All this was too spiritual, too conservative for the 
 Church of his time. Men took from Origen what they 
 liked, and reviled him fiercely for what they did not like. 
 They could not understand how he should be against 
 them on some points, when he had been with them, 
 heart and soul, in others. He seemed to be not only 
 an opponent but a traitor. 
 
 Now what lesson are we to draw from the Alex- 
 andrines ? Perhaps the reader will be best pleased if 
 
54 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 he is left to draw his own. There are points on which 
 we are all in deep agreement with them, points on 
 which, for one reason or another, everybody will be 
 against them. Yet a few inferences may be suggested. 
 
 The first is that we can no more go back to the 
 time of Origen than we can to that of Pope Innocent 
 III. Theology has been immensely changed by the 
 Aiigustinian doctrine of Grace, and by Anselm's doc- 
 trine of the Atonement, which, with all its defects, was 
 an abiding gain to religious thought ; and our practical 
 problems are not the same as those of Origen. 
 
 A second is the vital necessity of free thought — free 
 not because it is wilful, not because it is built on alien 
 premises, but because it has risen with Christ and can 
 see all things as they are in Him. Two great marks of 
 free thought are that it is not contentious, and that it 
 makes for unity. It springs from faith, it is widened 
 by discipline, and it is blessed with unction, 
 
 A third is that of all symbols it may be said '' the 
 best of this kind are but shadows." As shadows they 
 are true, yet but shifting and impermanent. They have 
 a spiritual meaning ; we do not invent it ; but they are 
 helps which always tend to become hindrances as we 
 advance towards the realities. " They shall perish, but 
 Thou shalt endure." 
 
 Lastly, may we say that one of the chief lessons that 
 the Alexandrines have to teach us is to be found in that 
 doctrine of reserve which Englishmen incline to regard 
 with suspicion and even with abhorrence ? We are a 
 political race, talking publicly about everything, inclined 
 to regulate everybody's opinion, waxing hot against con- 
 tradiction, and using adjectives of absurd intensity. We 
 could not get on at all in private life unless we agreed 
 
THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA 55 
 
 sometimes " to banish politics." The Alexandrines 
 proposed to banish religious differences, and let every 
 good Christian enjoy a sphere of liberty in his own 
 inmost convictions. They thought it not only right, 
 but quite natural, that one man should be High Church, 
 and another Low. But they knew that this reign of 
 tolerance could not endure, if each was to flaunt his 
 views in the face of his neighbour. 
 
 One day all differences will be composed in the 
 light of the eternal day. Meantime the Church is richer 
 and more truly one for embracing in her Catholic bosom 
 every aspect of the infinite truth. All aspects are partial, 
 but aspects of truth can never be really antagonistic. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE AGE OF COUNCILS 
 
 By THE Rev. G. A, SCHNEIDER, M.A. 
 
 The fourth and fifth centuries form an important epoch 
 in the history of Christian thought, for they are the age 
 of Creeds and of General Councils. During this period 
 the great doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, 
 hitherto partially apprehended and tentatively formulated 
 by leading teachers, were more fully developed. And 
 since the need for accurate definition of Christian truth 
 had come to be more strongly felt, General Councils of 
 the Church were held, at which these doctrines were 
 embodied in authoritative Creeds. In this work Eastern 
 Christendom took the principal share. 
 
 Christianity is the Revelation of God in the Person 
 of Jesus Christ. Christ is not merely the Teacher, 
 not merely the Founder, not merely the Example, but 
 Christianity is based on His Person, is inseparable from 
 it — indeed, He constitutes Christianity. Accordingly the 
 Church felt from the first that the Person of the Lord 
 had a unique significance. The first duty of the dis- 
 ciple was allegiance to Him ; the secret of strength was 
 union with Him ; the life obtained through Him was 
 more than human Ufe. Thus the Lord's divinity was 
 from the beginning the guiding principle of the Church. 
 " Jesus is Lord," was the first Christian confession. In 
 
 the thought of the early Christians Christ, though born 
 
 56 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 57 
 
 into this world as one of our race, was far exalted above 
 every creature. 
 
 Next to this, there was another fundamental prin- 
 ciple, one which the Church had inherited from Judaism, 
 one which in view of the surrounding heathenism it was 
 constantly called upon to assert and to maintain, namely, 
 the unity of God. 
 
 The difficulty was soon felt of reconciling with 
 each other these two principles, the divinity of Christ 
 and the unity of God. If Christ is in the fullest sense 
 a divine being, are there not two Gods ? How then 
 can the charge of polytheism be avoided? The problem 
 might be approached from two different sides, and 
 two opposite forms of error were possible, both of 
 which occurred in the early Church. On the one hand, 
 a rationalizing tendency was at work which endeavoured 
 to maintain the unity of God by denying to Christ 
 divinity in the highest sense, regarding Him as a man 
 in whom a divine power dwelt, and who was raised to 
 divine honour because of His obedience to the Father's 
 will. Such was the Ebionite view. On the other hand, 
 a mystic tendency was at work which sought to main- 
 tain the unity of God by denying the personal distinction 
 between Father and Son, so that Father and Son are 
 not two separate Persons, but two successive manifesta- 
 tions of the One divine Person. This was the view of 
 the Sabellians. 
 
 Both of these extremes were condemned as heresies, 
 yet the teaching within the Church itself was still 
 indeterminate. Many problems were still unsolved con- 
 cerning Christ's relation to the Father. If Christ is the 
 Son of God, what is the nature of this Sonship ? Had 
 the Son a beginning ? If not, how can He be Son at 
 
58 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 all ? And if He had a beginning, does not this imply 
 that He must have been created, and is He not then a 
 creature ? On these questions the Church of the first 
 three centuries gave no clear answer. Not indeed that 
 the Church v^^as heretical, for there is a broad line of 
 distinction between heresies and defective stages of 
 Christian knowledge. The early Christians felt within 
 them the power of the new life which they had received 
 from their Lord ; they were filled with love to Him ; 
 they were ready to accept all that the New Testament 
 Scriptures revealed of Him. But then it was not fully 
 understood as yet what they did reveal, and so various 
 inadequate hypotheses were put forward concerning His 
 Person. 
 
 For all that, progress was made by Christendom at 
 large in the apprehension of this doctrine. Some of the 
 difficulties were cleared up by the ante-Nicene Fathers. 
 Tertullian (about 200 A.D.), who was the first writer to 
 use the word " Trinity," was the first also who taught 
 expressly that tripersonality belongs to the one God as 
 He is in Himself. The Son is of the same essence as 
 the Father, and Tertullian compares their relation to 
 each other with that of the tree to the root, the ray to 
 the sun, the river to the fountain. Yet Tertullian falls 
 short of the full truth. The Word of God, the second 
 Person of the Trinity, is with him at first the impersonal 
 reason of God ; He does not emerge into separate per- 
 sonality till the work of creation is to commence. Thus 
 the Trinity is not one of essence, but merely an eco- 
 nomic Trinity. Not long afterwards Origen (about 230 
 A.D.) cleared up the significance of the generation of the 
 Son by the Father, showing that it does not denote any 
 definite act, either in time or before time, but an eternal 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 59 
 
 relation. From all eternity, and to all eternity, the Son 
 has His being of the Father, just as the will proceeds 
 from the mind, and the brightness from the light. And 
 it is erroneous to say that " there was ever when the 
 Son was not." But side by side with this Origen holds 
 the subordination of the Son. The generation of the 
 Son is not by necessity of nature, but by the will of the 
 Father ; and hence the Father alone is in the highest 
 sense God, while the Son is " the second God," subor- 
 dinate to the Father, and in some not clearly defined 
 sense inferior to His original. 
 
 By the close of the third century Western Christen- 
 dom for the most part had come to emphasize the unity 
 between Father and Son, while partially obscuring the 
 distinction of Persons. Eastern Christians, on the other 
 hand, following the last-mentioned side of Origen's teach- 
 ing, tended to some theory of subordination, regarding 
 Christ as a kind of secondary God. The Sabellian 
 controversy, which had lately disturbed the East, had 
 aroused the fear lest an acknowledgment of the unity 
 of essence between Father and Son might lead to a 
 denial of their personal distinction. 
 
 What was needed, in order that the Church should 
 advance to a firmer grasp of the truth, was that the con- 
 ception of deity should be revised. Christianity is 
 indeed a monotheistic religion, but its monotheism is not 
 the same as that of Judaism, or of Mohammedanism, or 
 of ancient philosophy. In the latter systems God is 
 conceived of as a far-off Supreme, enthroned in in- 
 accessible mystery, absolutely one and absolutely 
 simple, with an insurmountable barrier separating His 
 creatures from Him. There can be no real union 
 between such a God and man ; no place is left on 
 
6o THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 such a view for the Christian doctrine of the Incar- 
 nation. 
 
 Our God, on the other hand, is a single, but not a 
 simple God ; His being is complex. God is love, and 
 love is not merely one aspect of the divine essence, but 
 that essence in its fulness. And if God is love, He 
 must have lived an inner life of love ; He must from 
 eternity love Himself in the threefold relation of Father, 
 Son, and Holy Spirit. Thus there is, and ever has 
 been, a society within the Godhead. Hence, not only 
 the Father, but the Son and the Holy Spirit, existed 
 eternally. The generation of the Son by the Father is 
 not a matter of will, as though the Father had chosen 
 to have a Son, but of nature. This conception of God, 
 we may remark, is not the outcome of metaphysics, it 
 is a deduction from the revelation recorded in Holy 
 Scripture. 
 
 But converts to the Church during the early 
 centuries, whether they came from Judaism or from 
 Heathenism, brought with them a conception of the 
 deity at variance with the Christian idea. Not till this 
 was given up could Christian thought advance. And 
 Arianism, which based its entire system on this non- 
 Christian conception of God, and which caused a stir 
 throughout the whole of Christendom, rendered the 
 Church the great indirect service of compelling it to 
 reconsider and remodel its idea of divine unity. 
 
 Arianism arose about 318 A.D. at Alexandria, where 
 Arius was a presbyter. He was a man of high character, 
 and had been a pupil of the venerated martyr, Lucian 
 of Antioch. His doctrinal system started from the 
 belief in one God, who is alone ingenerate, alone 
 eternal, alone unchangeable — and who is far exalted 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 6i 
 
 above all creatures. As to the Person of Christ, Arius 
 rightly felt that He must have had a real existence 
 before the world, independent of the Incarnation. But 
 wishing to avoid on one side the Sabellian confusion of 
 persons, and on the other heathen polytheism, he denied 
 to Christ divinity in the highest sense. The Father 
 alone is ingenerate, the Son is generated, and Arius 
 refused to allow any difference between generation and 
 creation. The Arian Christ is then the created Word 
 (Logos) of God, the highest of creatures, created before 
 the world, through whom all other things were made — 
 but still a creature. He is not from eternity, and 
 " there was when He was not." Being a creature. He 
 depends, like any other creature, on divine grace. He 
 is morally changeable for good or for evil. Sinless He 
 was, but He might have sinned like us. Arius was 
 indeed willing to allow to Christ the title " God " and 
 " Son of God," but not in the primary sense of like- 
 ness to the Supreme. If Arius degraded the divinity 
 of Christ, he degraded His humanity even more. He 
 assigned to Him a human body, but neither human 
 soul nor human spirit, the place of the latter being 
 taken — as he supposed — by the Logos. 
 
 Thus the Arian Christ is neither truly God nor truly 
 man, but a being not unlike a heathen demigod, and 
 Arius, who began by establishing the unity of God, 
 ended by reintroducing polytheism. Such a Christ, 
 who is neither truly divine nor truly human, cannot 
 bridge the gulf between God and man, cannot bring the 
 latter into fellowship with the Almighty, nor be the 
 giver of life and immortality. 
 
 Alexander, the Bishop of Alexandria, summoned a 
 synod of Egyptian bishops about 321 A.D., at which 
 
62 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 Arius was condemned and excommunicated. But he 
 was too much in earnest to desist from his teaching, 
 so he moved to Caesarea, and there found not a httle 
 sympathy among the bishops of Syria and Asia, many 
 of whom, hkc himself, had been pupils of Lucian of 
 Antioch. 
 
 The controversy was widespread, and caused the 
 greatest excitement, so that when Constantine became 
 sole ruler of the Roman Empire in 323 A.D., he felt it 
 necessary to intervene. Not that Constantine personally 
 understood the gravity of the questions discussed, but 
 he was alarmed to see the East torn asunder by the 
 dispute. After some abortive negotiations, he conceived 
 the idea of holding a General Council, to deal both 
 with this and with other questions which needed to be 
 settled. During the third century local councils had 
 frequently been the resource in controversies which 
 agitated one part of the Church. It seemed natural 
 then to suggest an QEcumenical Council as a means of 
 settling a controversy which agitated the whole Church. 
 This Council met at Nicaea in the summer of a.d. 325. 
 
 We cannot linger over the external features of the 
 Council.^ SufHce it to say that 318 bishops, with a 
 number of presbyters and deacons, were assembled, and 
 that these came from all parts of the Empire, and a 
 few even from beyond its confines, such as Theophilus 
 the Goth and John the Persian. Eusebius compares 
 the gathering with the Day of Pentecost, when devout 
 men of every nation under heaven were convened, or 
 with a garland of flowers woven together as a bond of 
 peace. By far the greater number were Easterns, 
 
 1 These have been ably described in Stanley's "History of the Eastern 
 Church," Lectures II. to V. 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 63 
 
 though seven bishops came from the West, while 
 Sylvester, the Bishop of Rome, v^ho was too old to 
 come himself, was represented by two presbyters. There 
 was a peculiar brightness and hopefulness resting over 
 the Council. It was barely twenty years since the last 
 and most terrible of the persecutions, that of Diocletian, 
 had swept over the Church ; several of the bishops 
 present bore the marks of the sufferings which they 
 had undergone for the faith. And now the Emperor 
 had bowed before the Cross of Christ, and the bishops 
 of Christendom were assembled at the summons and 
 under the protection of that very power which had 
 hitherto been the great enemy of the Church, and its 
 most formidable rival in claiming the allegiance of man- 
 kind. We cannot wonder that to some it seemed as 
 though the kingdoms of the world were already become 
 the kingdom of God. 
 
 But what was the attitude of the Council towards 
 Arianism ? The pronounced Arian bishops scarcely 
 numbered twenty ; they were from Syria and Asia, and 
 the most prominent of their number was Eusebius of 
 Nicomedia. Hardly more numerous were the pro- 
 nounced orthodox leaders ; they included Eustathius of 
 Antioch and Alexander of Alexandria. With the latter 
 was his young Archdeacon, who was destined to become 
 the most prominent figure, both at the Council and in 
 the long warfare which followed it, the great Athanasius. 
 Between these two extremes there was a large middle 
 party. These were not Arians, for when at the com- 
 mencement of the proceedings an Arianizing Creed was 
 presented, it was angrily rejected by the Council. But 
 neither were they definitely orthodox. They may best 
 be described as Conservatives, that is to say, they 
 
64 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 wished the doctrine of the Lord's divinity to be stated 
 in such general terms as had sufficed before the out- 
 break of the controversy. With a few exceptions, they 
 were not men of learning, indeed they scarcely under- 
 stood the full bearing of the controversy. Their minds, 
 too, were full of the last heresy which had disturbed 
 the Church, Sabellianism. If Arius was in error, so 
 they thought, his system was at least a protest against 
 a more dangerous error, for he upheld the personal 
 distinction between the Father and the Son, which 
 Sabellianism obliterated. And to condemn Arianism 
 might be to open the door to Sabellianism. We may say 
 at once that the attitude of this large section enables us 
 to understand why Arianism suffered a crushing defeat 
 at the Council, and yet was restored a few years later. 
 
 It was recognised on all hands that the best mode 
 of dealing with the question was to issue a new Creed. 
 It was not, however, intended that this should supersede 
 any existing Creed, but merely that it should serve as 
 a test Creed which bishops might be called upon to sign 
 whose orthodoxy was called in question. So Eusebius 
 of Caesarea, the Church historian, laid before the Council 
 the ancient Creed of his own Church, which spoke of 
 Christ as "the Word of God, God of God, Light of 
 Light, Life of Life, the only begotten Son, the First- 
 born of all Creation, begotten of the Father before all 
 worlds, by whom also all things were made, who for 
 our salvation was made flesh, and lived amongst men." 
 This Creed was unanimously adopted. Its scriptural 
 language, and the fact that it necessarily ignored the ques- 
 tion at issue, made it acceptable to the Conservative 
 centre ; the orthodox leaders could find no heresy in 
 it ; and even the Arians were willing to accept it, for 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 65 
 
 it did not exclude their views. Its " God of God " 
 was compatible with the Arian doctrine of Christ as a 
 secondary God, and its " Firstborn of all Creation " lent 
 itself to the interpretation that Christ was a creature 
 made before all other creatures. The unanimity with 
 which the Creed was accepted convinced Athanasius 
 that it was insufficient. Now that the vital question 
 had been raised, whether Christ was in the fullest sense 
 God or not, that question must not be left open. If 
 the Creed was to contain everything that Christian 
 bishops needed to confess, it must be made to ex- 
 clude the view that our Lord is a creature. Thus a 
 number of additions and alterations were pressed upon 
 the Council, which after much hesitation were accepted, 
 and so the Creed of Nicaea took shape. In it the 
 doctrine of the Lord's Person was stated as follows : 
 " We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, 
 begotten of the Father, only begotten, that is of the 
 essence of the Father^ God of God, Light of Light, very 
 God of very God, begotten not made, of one essence with 
 the Father." Lower down the words " and was made 
 man " were added to " was made flesh," in order to 
 exclude the Arian teaching that our Lord had nothing 
 human but the body. At the close anathemas were 
 appended, expressly condemning the Arian tenets. The 
 most important additions were the two clauses " that 
 is of the essence of the Father " {rodr ea-riv e/c rijf ova-la^ 
 rov IlaT/oof) and " of one essence with the Father " 
 (6fx.oov(Tio9 TU) Uarpl). It was on the former of these 
 that Athanasius laid the greater stress, " Ousia " is 
 a term derived from Greek philosophy, denoting the 
 unknown something which makes a thing what we 
 apprehend it to be. To say then that Christ is " of 
 
 E 
 
66 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 the Ousia of the Father," is to declare that His existence 
 is an essential part of the idea of deity. In other words, 
 it is as essential to the nature of God that there should be 
 both a Father and a Son, as that God should be just and 
 holy and good. Thus the existence of the Son of God 
 is no result of the Father's will, but an expression of the 
 Father's nature. Next comes the word " Homoousios," 
 which is one of a group of words of similar form, that 
 denote the sharing in a thing in common. The word 
 then denotes that the Son is the common possessor 
 with the Father of the divine essence. The word had 
 Sabellianizing associations, had indeed been condemned 
 as Sabellianizing by a previous Council, and hence was 
 unwelcome to the Fathers at Nicaea. Nor can it be 
 denied that, as used at first by the orthodox leaders, it 
 failed to emphasize the distinct personality of the Son. 
 It was only some half century later that the word was 
 understood to convey the meaning which we now 
 attach to it, namely, that the Son possesses all the 
 divine attributes which the Father has. 
 
 We have said that it was only after much hesitation 
 that the Council was prevailed upon to accept these 
 alterations in the Creed. Indeed the bishops were most 
 reluctant to insert in the test Creed a word which had 
 been condemned by a previous Synod, and which was 
 not found in Scripture. Gradually the majority came 
 to see that there was no other way of excluding 
 Arianism. The Arians were willing to accept every 
 Scriptural expression that was proposed, putting their 
 own sense upon it. It was recognised accordingly that, 
 when a definite meaning was to be placed on Scripture 
 passages, it was necessary to go outside Scripture for 
 terms to define that meaning. 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 67 
 
 Ultimately they all signed the amended Creed 
 except two Egyptian bishops; and these, together with 
 Arius, were sent into exile by the Emperor. The great 
 Council broke up. 
 
 But the controversy was not ended. The policy of 
 Athanasius had been a bold one, however necessary ; 
 the majority of the Conservatives had been persuaded 
 against their will, and a reaction was inevitable. The 
 reaction was largely due to the Conservatives ; the 
 Arians were merely the extreme wing of those who 
 sought to upset the decisions of Nicaea. It was not till 
 the time of the second General Council, that of Con- 
 stantinople, in 381 A.D., that Arianism was finally 
 crushed within the Roman Empire. The strife was a 
 long and weary one, often degenerating into personal 
 retaliations ; and we cannot do more now than indicate 
 some of its more important features. 
 
 The great champion of orthodoxy continued to be 
 Athanasius, who on the death of Alexander in 328 A.D. 
 became Bishop of Alexandria, and who lived till 373 
 A.D. His character impressed friends and foes alike ; 
 his career was as chequered as a romance. Five times 
 was he sent into exile, yet from the Egyptian desert he 
 ruled his Church. Alone he stood against the Emperor, 
 the Court, the Councils of his time. Hooker's expres- 
 sion, "the whole world against Athanasius, and Atha- 
 nasius against it," has become proverbial. His life was 
 consecrated to a single purpose, to witness to the co- 
 essential divinity of the Incarnate Son of God. Atha- 
 nasius has sometimes been accused of "fighting in 
 behalf of a dogma which, when riveted on the Church, 
 limited its intellectual freedom." But it has been well 
 pointed out that in reality he was the champion of 
 
68 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 personal liberty.^ If Christ is in the highest sense God, 
 then in Him God has entered into humanity. Thus , 
 the whole race which Christ took into organic union J 
 with Himself is ennobled. " He was made man that 
 we might be made God." No one proclaimed to such 
 a degree as Athanasius the dignity and consequent 
 freedom of man, which he had learnt to see in the 
 Incarnation of the Son of God. In this strength he 
 could oppose single handed, and oppose successfully, the 
 tyranny of the Roman Empire. The Arian conception 
 of God, on the other hand, fell in with the principles of 
 imperial despotism. The Arian God is not the God of 
 love, but a far-off Supreme, unconditioned, incom- 
 prehensible to man, ruling by an arbitrary will which 
 does not appeal to man's sense of justice and truth, but 
 merely calls for unconditional obedience. It is | 
 significant accordingly that the Arian reaction owed its 
 temporary success largely, if not exclusively, to the 
 support of the Emperors, of Constantine in some 
 degree, and in a larger measure of his son Constantius 
 (337 to 361 A.D.), and of Valens (364 to 378 A.D.). 
 
 To turn now to the actual course of events, the 
 first effort of Conservative policy was to obtain the 
 recall of the Arian leaders on the strength of indefinite 
 and evasive confessions. This done, they next sought 
 to procure the exile of the orthodox leaders on any 
 charges, political or moral, which lent themselves to 
 the purpose. It may seem strange that Constantine 
 should have consented to the exile of Athanasius, but 
 probably this was not due to any change of principle 
 or policy. He simply regarded Athanasius as a trouble- 
 some personage whose presence disturbed — what Con- 
 
 1 See Allen's "Christian Institutions," p. 307 ff. 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 69 
 
 stantine most valued — the unity of Christendom. The 
 third effort, marked by the Councils of Antioch (A.D. 
 341), Sardica (A.D. 343), Seleucia and Ariminum (A.D. 
 359), was to replace the Nicene Creed by some formu- 
 lary which would secure the adhesion of all parties. 
 But such an effort was doomed to failure. The Ortho- 
 dox would not consent to leave the Lord's divinity an 
 open question ; hence they would not accept any 
 colourless Creed, however unexceptionable in itself ; no 
 Creed would suffice which did not expressly exclude 
 Arianism. Thus, if the Arians came in at one door, 
 the Orthodox went out at the other ; and, though a 
 number of Creeds were issued, not one could secure 
 general acceptance. Towards the close of the reign 
 of Constantius, largely owing to the policy of the 
 Emperor and the intrigues of the Court, Arianism 
 obtained the supremacy ; and not only the Orthodox, 
 but also the Conservative bishops were sent into exile 
 (a.d. 360). But this supremacy was purely artificial. 
 In A.D. 361 the last heathen Emperor ascended the 
 throne, Julian the Apostate. He hated all parties 
 within the Christian Church alike ; he recalled all the 
 exiled bishops, rejoicing in the prospect of the strife 
 and confusion which would ensue. But confronted 
 with a heathen foe, softened too by the endurance 
 of like sufferings, many of the Christian leaders were 
 ashamed to continue the fierce strife. Moreover, 
 the Conservatives were of themselves drawing nearer 
 to the Nicene position at this time. Though still 
 rejecting the word " Homoousios," they took as their 
 watchword " Homoiousios," i.e., they asserted that the 
 Son is of like essence with the Father. The old age 
 of Athanasius was devoted to the work of conciliation 
 
70 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 between Homoousians and Homoioiisians, though their 
 complete union was still retarded by the Arianizing 
 policy of the Emperor Valens, who succeeded Julian, 
 and by other causes. A new Nicene party now came 
 to the front, the chief leaders of which were the three 
 great Cappadocian Fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory 
 of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. These had started 
 with Homoiousian traditions, but " owed to Athanasius 
 a more perfect understanding of their unaltered belief." 
 Their great merit is that they differentiated the term 
 "Hypostasis" from '' Ousia," with which it had been 
 synonymous at Nicaea. They used " Ousia " to desig- 
 nate the indivisible divine essence, and "Hypostasis" 
 to denote the personal modes in which the Deity is 
 realised. In a word, emphasis was laid on the distinc- 
 tion of persons within the Trinity, along with unity of 
 essence : " One Ousia, three Hypostaseis." This party 
 did much to secure the general acceptance of the 
 Nicene faith, which by their efforts was freed from any 
 leaning to Sabellianism. ^ 
 
 When the Emperor Valens fell in battle in a.d. 378, 
 the deathblow was given to Arianism. Theodosius, who 
 became ruler of the East, adopted a vigorous policy in 
 the interests of orthodoxy. He expelled Demophilus of 
 Constantinople on his refusal to accept the Nicene faith, 
 and appointed Gregory of Nazianzus in his place. He 
 next summoned a Council to meet at Constantinople 
 in A.D. 381, and at this Nicene orthodoxy was finally 
 established. The Council was attended by one hundred 
 and fifty bishops, all of whom were Easterns ; it was a 
 " General " Council, therefore, only in the wider sense 
 that its decisions were ultimately accepted by the whole 
 Church. There was little of the brightness which had 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 71 
 
 characterised the Council of Nicaea ; all were thankful 
 that the weary strife was at last at an end. The Nicenes 
 and the Conservatives were now finally united, except a 
 section of the latter who would not admit the co-essential 
 divinity of the Holy Spirit. This latter doctrine had 
 not been put forward at Nicsea, but in the course of 
 time the orthodox leaders came to recognise that it was 
 a necessary corollary of the co-essential divinity of the 
 Son. Some thirty-six Conservative bishops, however, 
 were unwilling to acquiesce in this conclusion, and held 
 that the Holy Spirit was divine in some lower sense 
 than the Son. These, who were called Macedonians 01 
 Pneumatomachoi, surrendered their churches and with- 
 drew from the Council. Thereupon the first Canon 
 was adopted : a formal condemnation of all the Arian- 
 izing parties, and a solemn ratification of the Nicene 
 Creed in its original shape. 
 
 The Creed drawn up at Nicaea and ratified at Con- 
 stantinople is not, however, that which occurs in our 
 Communion Office and is generally called " the Nicene 
 Creed." For a long time it was the received view that 
 the original Creed of Nicaea was expanded at the Coun- 
 cil of Constantinople by the addition of all that follows 
 the sentence, " I believe in the Holy Ghost." But 
 neither external nor internal evidence favours this view. 
 On the contrary, the contemporary writers tell us that 
 at Constantinople the original Creed of Nicaea was re- 
 affirmed unchanged. And a comparison of the two 
 Creeds shows us that, supposing our present Creed to 
 be a revision of the original Creed of Nicaea, not only 
 must a number of unnecessary and meaningless changes 
 have been made in the latter, but — what is inconceiv- 
 able — that clause on which Athanasius chiefly insisted 
 
72 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 as laying down the Lord's full divinity in the most 
 decisive terms, namely, the clause, " that is of the 
 essence of the Father," must have been dropped alto- 
 gether. It has been shewn conclusively^ that the Creed 
 now called " the Nicene " is the old local Creed of the 
 Church of Jerusalem, revised and enlarged between 363 
 and 374 A.D., the revision being the work most probably 
 of Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem. It would seem that 
 about this period a desire was felt in Palestine to 
 furnish the local Creed with clauses which would guard 
 against the worst errors then current on two great 
 doctrines of the faith, the doctrine of Christ and the 
 doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The former doctrine could 
 be best safeguarded by the introduction of some portion 
 of the definition of Nicaea, including the word " Homo- 
 ousios " ; for the latter new clauses had to be devised. 
 But how came this Creed to be ascribed to the Council 
 of Constantinople ? There are strong reasons for think- 
 ing that at this Council Cyril's orthodoxy was called in 
 question, and was vindicated. If this was so, what 
 more likely than that Cyril should have produced the 
 ancient Creed of his Church, as he had enlarged it, and 
 that the Council should have expressed approval of this 
 Creed. After a lapse of time, when the exact circum- 
 stances were forgotten, it might well happen that tradi- 
 tion would regard the Fathers at Constantinople as the 
 authors of a Creed which they had approved. At the 
 Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. no mention was made 
 of any other Creed than that drawn up at Nicaea. At 
 Chalcedon in 451 A.D. both Creeds were read, but, 
 while the original Creed of Nicaea was received with 
 enthusiasm by the members of the Council, the other 
 
 ' See Hort's "Two Dissertations," No. II. 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 73 
 
 Creed was evidently still unknown to a majority of 
 them. From that time onwards, however, the Revised 
 Creed of Jerusalem gradually superseded the Creed of 
 Nicaea. It superseded it by its own intrinsic merit, and 
 by its greater fitness for congregational use. The Creed 
 of Nicaea was a dogmatic standard, drawn up, not for 
 popular use, but as a test Creed for bishops, and its 
 anathemas made it unfit for liturgical use. Moreover, 
 the Revised Creed of Jerusalem is really a more com- 
 plete Creed. Not only does it expand the doctrine of 
 the Holy Spirit, but it also lays down the doctrine of 
 the two natures of our Lord in its sentence, " And was 
 incarnate of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary." 
 These facts need not cause distress to a Churchman of 
 the present day. The Revised Creed of Jerusalem has 
 yet more venerable associations than the Creed of Nicaea. 
 It is the ancient Creed of the Mother Church of Chris- 
 tendom, while at the same time it embodies the most 
 important portion of the decisions of the Fathers 
 assembled at Nicaea. 
 
 The year 381 marks a turning-point in our history. 
 Till then the controversies about the Person of the 
 Lord had been trinitarian ; henceforth they are christo- 
 logical. That is to say, it was now recognised by all 
 that Christ was in the fullest sense a divine Being, 
 co-essential with the Father ; but the question remained 
 to be solved : Granted that there are two elements in 
 the Person of the Lord, the divine and the human, 
 what is the connexion of these two with each other ? 
 How can they be joined together to form one Person ? 
 
 But on a narrowed battle-field the same tendencies 
 of thought can be traced as in the earlier period, a 
 more rationalizing tendency which laid stress on the 
 
74 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 human element in the Person of Christ, and a more 
 mystic tendency which laid stress on the divine element. 
 The former was represented by the School of Antioch, 
 which had always been characterised by its sober, 
 grammatical exegesis of Holy Scripture, and by the 
 ethical character of its theology. In the latter the 
 moral development of man, and so too of the man 
 Jesus Christ, was all-important ; and since moral de- 
 velopment implies a free exercise of moral choice, 
 freedom of the will is essential. But any mixture 
 between the divine and the human natures in the 
 Person of Christ would limit the freedom of the latter. 
 Accordingly the Antiochenes regarded the union be- 
 tween these two natures as a loose one. The Logos 
 has taken up His abode in a perfect man ; there is no 
 real unity, but only a moral fellowship, yet so that the 
 man shares in the honour and glory which belong to 
 the Logos. For all that, the School desired to hold 
 fast the oneness of the Person of Christ, though they 
 were unable to explain how it comes about. Pushed 
 to an extreme, the teaching of Antioch led to Nestori- 
 anism, according to which the Logos takes up His 
 abode in a man created for the purpose, without com- 
 munication or interchange of attributes, the result 
 being something which it is hard to distinguish from 
 two Persons. 
 
 The mystic tendency was represented by the School 
 of Alexandria, who regarded the Lord's divine nature 
 as the all-important factor in His Person. Athanasius, 
 and the Cappadocian Fathers who follow him, insist 
 indeed as against Arianism and Apollinarianism on the 
 truth that Christ assumed the totality of human nature, 
 for otherwise that portion of man which He did not 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 75 
 
 assume would have no part in the redemption. They 
 affirm the two natures of Christ ; they distinguish be- 
 tween the properties which belong to the Logos and 
 those which belong to the flesh,. Yet they speak of 
 the two natures as " flowing into one " ; they say that 
 there is a physical union between the two, and that 
 the flesh when mixed with the divine nature no longer 
 continues in its own limitations and properties. This 
 teaching also, when pushed to an extreme, becomes 
 heretical. The result is Monophysitism, according to 
 which the humanity of Christ, after the union, becomes 
 merged in the divinity as a drop of water in the ocean, 
 and thus practically disappears altogether. 
 
 The controversy arose soon after 428 A.D., in 
 which year Nestorius, a presbyter of Antioch, became 
 Bishop of Constantinople. After his arrival there 
 he preached sermons against the title " Theotokos " 
 (Mother of God) as applied to the Virgin Mary, which 
 had come into frequent use. His objection was on 
 theological, not on practical, grounds. The Virgin, 
 he thought, should be called " Mother of Jesus," or 
 " Mother of Christ," for she was in no sense the 
 Mother of God ; she was the Mother of the man to 
 whom the Logos was united. In a word, Nestorius 
 objected to transferring the human attributes to the 
 divine Logos ; he would not allow, for example, that 
 the Logos participated in the sufferings of the human 
 nature of Christ. Logically his doctrine implied two 
 distinct personalities in the Lord. 
 
 Such teaching naturally excited much opposition 
 at Constantinople. In the end, however, Nestorius 
 agreed to accept the term "Theotokos," and the matter 
 would probably have been allowed to rest here, had 
 
76 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 not Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, intervened. Cyril was 
 a great theologian who understood fully the bearings 
 of the controversy, but he was a man of violent temper 
 and very unscrupulous in the means which he employed. 
 Doubtless ecclesiastical rivalry between the ancient see 
 of Alexandria and the new see of Constantinople had a 
 share in inducing Cyril to take up the cause of the 
 adversaries of Nestorius, Before long, however, he 
 turned the controversy into an attack upon the whole 
 School of Antioch. To settle the dispute the Emperor 
 Theodosius II. summoned a General Council to meet at 
 Ephesus in a.d. 431. Cyril, with a large number of 
 Egyptian bishops and monks, arrived there first, opened 
 the Council without waiting for the Syrian bishops, 
 and, supported by the Bishop of Ephesus, condemned 
 and deposed Nestorius. A few days afterwards John, 
 Bishop of Antioch, with the Syrian bishops, arrived. 
 He in turn opened a Council, at which he condemned 
 and deposed Cyril. Thus there were two rival Councils 
 confronting each other ; Cyril had a majority on his 
 side, but he had proceeded with utter irregularity. 
 The Emperor Theodosius, having to decide between 
 the two Councils, at first ratified the deposition, both 
 of Nestorius and of Cyril. But by extensive bribery 
 at Court the scale was turned in favour of Cyril ; the 
 Emperor restored him, while allowing the deposition 
 of Nestorius to remain valid. Two years later peace 
 was made between Cyril and the School of Antioch, 
 the former accepting a Creed drawn up by the 
 Antiochenes, the latter agreeing to the condemnation 
 of Nestorius. The followers of Nestorius retired into 
 Persia and founded a separate Church, which has 
 survived to the present day. 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 77 
 
 A further stage in the warfare commenced in 
 A.D. 448. In that year Eutyches, the head of a 
 monastery near Constantinople, an adherent of the 
 Alexandrian School, propounded an opinion which 
 went beyond that of his School, namely that, while 
 Christ is of two natures — two natures entering into 
 the Incarnation — yet after the Incarnation there is 
 only one nature. Moreover, Eutyches held that the 
 body of Christ was not of the same essence (homo- 
 ousios) with our bodies. For this teaching, known 
 as Monophysitism, Eutyches was condemned by a 
 local Council under Flavian of Constantinople. Both 
 Eutyches and Flavian wrote to Leo I., Bishop of 
 Rome, who in his famous " Letter to Flavian " ex- 
 pressed approval of the condemnation of Eutyches, 
 and proceeded to set forth in clear language the 
 doctrine of the two natures in the Person of the Lord. 
 Meanwhile Dioscorus, who now held the Bishopric 
 of Alexandria, a man of fierce, fanatical character, 
 who had the failings of Cyril without his greatness, 
 took up the cause of Eutyches, and induced the 
 Emperor to summon a Council to meet at Ephesus 
 in A.D. 449. The result was a scene of unparalleled 
 violence. Dioscorus, who took the chair, carried all 
 before him by means of threats and coercion ; Leo's 
 letter to Flavian was not allowed to be read, his legates 
 were pushed aside, and a decree was passed in favour 
 of Eutyches. Thus ended the Latrocinium, or Robber- 
 Synod, as Leo not unjustly called it ; and for the 
 moment Monophysitism was triumphant in the East. 
 But not for long. In the next year Theodosius II. 
 died, and his sister Pulcheria, who practically suc- 
 ceeded him on the throne, was determined to break 
 
78 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 the power of the Bishop of Alexandria. With the 
 support of Leo of Rome she summoned a new General 
 Council to assemble at Chalcedon in October 45 1 . 
 This Council ratified the three previous (Ecumenical 
 Councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus. It 
 deposed Dioscorus for his crimes. It condemned 
 Nestorianism on the one hand, Monophysitism on the 
 other, expressing approval of Leo's letter to Flavian, 
 and making it the basis of its own decree. This decree 
 stated that the Lord is "perfect in His godhead and 
 perfect in His manhood, both truly God and truly 
 man, of a rational soul and body, co-essential (homo- 
 ousios) with the Father as to His godhead, co-essential 
 with us as to His manhood, that He is in two natures 
 united without confusion, without change, without divi- 
 sion, without separation {acrvyyvTW^, uTpetrTbo'S, aSiaipeTws, 
 a-)((jopi(rT(joi), the properties of each nature being preserved 
 and combining into one Person." The doctrine then 
 is that our Lord assumed — not a man — but human 
 nature, that this was perfect and complete, and that 
 He assumed it for ever, so that it is not a mere 
 vesture. 
 
 In bringing to a close our account of the first four 
 General Councils we are naturally led to ask, what is 
 the nature of their authority. At a later period the 
 view came to be held that, when the entire Church 
 assembled in a General Council agrees on any state- 
 ment of doctrine, that statement must be infallibly 
 certain, must indeed be received as a divinely-inspired 
 utterance. But the actual history of the Councils is 
 opposed to such a theory. Contemporaries did not 
 deem it a matter of faith to believe in the infallibility 
 of General Councils ; the language used in reference to 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 79 
 
 them by such Fathers as Athanasiiis and Gregory of 
 Nazianzus is very different. Moreover, not one of the 
 General Councils was accepted by Christendom at large 
 without a long struggle. The story of the Arian re- 
 action shows how lightly even the most venerable of 
 all Councils, that of Nica^a, was respected by many, for 
 at one Council after another during the next fifty years 
 efforts were made to reopen the question already 
 settled at Nicaea, and to modify the Nicene decisions. 
 As to the Council of Constantinople, it was unaccept- 
 able in the West because of a canon which it passed 
 bearing on the Roman primacy, and until the Council 
 of Chalcedon in A.D. 451 it does not appear to have 
 ranked as a General Council at all. At Ephesus in 
 A.D. 431 the Council broke up into two rival portions, 
 each condemning the other, and it was the Emperor 
 who decided between the two. 
 
 Nevertheless, the decisions of the first four General 
 Councils are of the greatest value to us Christians of 
 the present time. They bear an important witness to 
 the belief of the Church in their days. But that is not 
 all. Christ promised that His Holy Spirit should be 
 with His followers, and should guide them into all 
 truth. So we may well believe that, when the ministers 
 of His Church were met together for deliberation on 
 great religious questions, with a sincere desire to reach 
 the truth. His blessing was not withheld from them ; 
 and that in spite of human infirmities and vacillations 
 divine guidance was vouchsafed ; nay, that these very 
 infirmities were in time overruled by Him for good. 
 If the General Councils have obtained great authority, 
 it is because the doctrines set forth by them are 
 true. Such documents as the Creed of Nicaea and the 
 
8o THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 Decree of the Council of Chalcedon, though they do not 
 contain all truth, will bear careful testing, both by 
 Holy Scripture, and by the spiritual experience of men. 
 Their guidance has been found trustworthy in the 
 past ; doubtless it will be found trustworthy also in the 
 future. 
 
 We have said that they do not contain all truth, and 
 it will at once be noticed that the range and subject- 
 matter of the ancient Creeds and other conciliar defini- 
 tions is limited. What they contain is mainly the 
 theology of the Trinity and of the Incarnation. On 
 other departments of truth, for example on the theo- 
 logy of the Atonement, they are silent ; and in this 
 respect they differ markedly from the Confessions of 
 the sixteenth century. Nor is this accidental. The 
 Incarnation is the union of God with the whole human 
 race ; the Atonement is the application to the needs of 
 the individual soul of the blessings brought into the 
 world by the Incarnation. Hence in the order of 
 Christian thought and apprehension the Incarnation 
 will have the first place. Over and above this, the 
 thoughts of Christ's atoning work, of the guilt of sin, 
 of forgiveness, justification, personal salvation, were 
 much less prominent in Eastern than in Western 
 Christendom. Such teaching is not indeed absent 
 from any great Eastern Father, but it is not promi- 
 nent. To the West it was given to work in these 
 regions of truth, whereas the decrees of Councils were 
 mainly due to the labours of Easterns. 
 
 But to what purpose are these minute definitions 
 concerning the Godhead ? Cannot a practical piety 
 safely dispense with them ? We answer that it is a 
 distinctive mark of the Gospel that it makes the know- 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 8i 
 
 ledge of truth indispensable for the highest service of 
 God.' When our Lord says, "This is the eternal life 
 that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Him 
 whom Thou hast sent, Jesus Christ," He speaks of 
 eternal life being dependent on knowledge, the objects 
 of this knowledge being God, the only true God among 
 many phantom gods, and He whom God sent. His 
 Word, the utterance of His truth. Every sincere 
 Christian will aim at righteousness of life ; this right- 
 eousness is to be obtained through Christ, and only as 
 Christ can be explained to the intellect can He com- 
 mand the conscience. And though Christ is Himself 
 the Truth, yet man — constituted as he is — cannot do 
 without separate derivative Christian truths, commu- 
 nicable fragments, as it were, of the knowledge of God 
 and of His Son Jesus Christ. 
 
 It is not a valid objection to urge that the finite 
 cannot know the infinite, and that accordingly the 
 human mind is incapable of forming any accurate 
 notions concerning God. It is sufficient to answer 
 that man is created in the image of God, and that 
 therefore he will be able to attain to some knowledge 
 of his great Archetype. Limitations, doubtless, there 
 will be on all sides ; but our knowledge of the spiritual 
 world, though fragmentary and imperfect, will not 
 therefore be unreal or false, any more than our 
 scientific knowledge is unreal, though this also has 
 its imperfections due to the limits of the human 
 faculties. 
 
 Nor again would it be a valid objection to urge that 
 the definitions of the ancient Councils are of little 
 
 ^ The writer is indebted for several thoughts in the sequel to Hort's 
 Hulsean Lectures, " The Way, the Truth, the Life." 
 
 F 
 
82 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 value, because they were affected by the intellectual 
 environment of those who drew them up. It is true 
 that the form of these statements was determined by the 
 philosophic thought of the age ; it is true that such 
 terms as Ousia, Homoousios, Hypostasis, rest on 
 philosophical ideas which are not those of our present- 
 day thought. But may not Greek philosophy have 
 had its place and function in God's providential guid- 
 ance of mankind ? And the substance of the statements 
 remains unaffected by such influences ; it has its source 
 in the revelation contained in Scripture, its constant 
 verification in the spiritual experience of Christians. 
 Yet undoubtedly the knowledge of this fact may well 
 stimulate us to penetrate afresh through the form to the 
 substance. 
 
 This brings us to another point of great importance. 
 We have dwelt on the authority of the General 
 Councils, which is unquestionably great. But, as it 
 has been well said, their authority, like all other 
 authority in matters of belief, is salutary only in so far 
 as it is educative. That is to say, authority gives us 
 valuable help towards forming a judgment ; the teach- 
 ing is commended to our hearts and consciences by the 
 authority which promulgates it ; but authority ought 
 never to demand that we should accept its ruling 
 against our own conviction. Our power of recognising 
 truth presented to us is greater than our power of 
 discovering truth for ourselves. Accordingly, while we 
 have to depend on what the past generations of 
 Christians have handed down to us as the sum of their 
 religious experience, while without such dependence 
 our own view is sure to be crude and distorted, yet at 
 the same time we need to verify for ourselves what has 
 
THE AGE OF COUNCILS 83 
 
 been thus transmitted to us. Dogmas should be to us 
 the Hving expression of our own faith, and not dead 
 forms, however venerated, recording the conviction of 
 past generations, and submitted to without inquiry. 
 For that truth which we have learnt to see and know 
 for ourselves — it may be by a laborious struggle — is 
 the only truth which has for us the power of truth. 
 These two duties then are indissolubly united for us, to 
 stand fast in the truth handed down to us, and to make 
 unceasing progress in apprehending it for ourselves. 
 " Bonds exist that men may be free ; traditions exist 
 that men may see and know." Some portion of what 
 is transmitted will be within the range of our own 
 experience ; and when we have verified that for 
 ourselves, it will in turn be an assurance to us of what 
 lies above experience. 
 
 The need of such personal apprehension of religious 
 truth is increased by the difference between the age of 
 Creeds and Councils and our own age. At that time 
 no truth except theological truth was ascertained by the 
 Christian world. The main substance of the Christian 
 revelation is the knowledge of God, and this knowledge 
 it was given to Christendom to learn first, for this 
 knowledge alone was indispensable to the life of faith 
 and holiness. Thus Christians in the early ages might 
 easily come to think that no other kind of truth was 
 attainable by man. In this scientific age, however, in 
 which we ourselves live, many new departments of 
 knowledge are being cultivated. The world of man — 
 man's past history, his thought, his language — has 
 become the subject of systematic study. By the con- 
 templation of nature entire realms of fresh knowledge 
 have been opened up. Theology is called upon to 
 
84 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 take account of this new teaching, now that traditional 
 behefs, such as those handed down to us in the Creeds, 
 are placed face to face with fresh data gathered from 
 historical and scientific research. In some instances, 
 as we know, the result has been a disparagement of 
 theology. Yet, in the long run, this progress of know- 
 ledge is calculated to benefit and invigorate theology. 
 The Church is in danger at times of becoming slothful 
 in the search after truth, and of substituting for truth 
 a belief which has been merely handed down and 
 accepted without inquiry. It will be stimulated afresh 
 to pursue and value truth, when it is called upon to 
 instruct those who are already trained to learn and 
 value truth and cannot rest satisfied with anything 
 lower than the truth. Furthermore, just as it will be 
 the duty of Christians to carry the light which they 
 possess into all the regions of knowledge, to show that, 
 only as Christianity is accepted as true, can a purpose 
 be discerned in the universe, and that the Gospel alone 
 can assign to each separate truth its fitting place and 
 use in the life of man, so Christianity in turn will 
 reap a reflex blessing. The more the Gospel is used 
 to illuminate other departments of knowledge, the 
 better it will itself be understood. The progress of 
 knowledge will bring in its train a growing sense of the 
 vast range of the truths of the Gospel, and of their 
 power to fulfil all the varied needs of men. Every 
 addition to our knowledge of nature adds to our know- 
 ledge of God. To take but one instance, there can be no 
 doubt that those who drew up the words of our Creed, 
 '< Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible 
 and invisible," thought of God as an Artificer, forming 
 the universe at once by a single creative act. If in the 
 
thp: age of councils 85 
 
 present day we have come to think of this world as 
 the close of a long process of transformation, and of 
 ourselves as slowly developed through an ascending 
 series of lower beings, the great truth witnessed to by 
 our Creed stands unchanged, namely, that all things 
 are of God — while yet the new view, so far from 
 diminishing, will greatly increase our reverent awe 
 and admiration of the divine working. Thus increased 
 knowledge of the earth may lead to increased know- 
 ledge of things divine. 
 
 Lastly, in considering the Creeds and the decrees of 
 General Councils, we must be on our guard lest their 
 metaphysical character should at any time veil from 
 us their deep moral significance. The history of the 
 Eastern Church may serve here as a warning. The 
 leading Fathers, indeed, such as Athanasius, did not 
 forget, in the midst of their controversies, the claims 
 of practical godliness. But with some the love of 
 contention on speculative points was so great that it 
 well-nigh destroyed true piety and Christian charity. 
 And this attitude brought its own punishment. The 
 result was a growing sense of the importance of hold- 
 ing orthodox views, an increasing respect for authori- 
 tative decisions as to what ought to be believed, and 
 an almost morbid anxiety to brand as heretical all 
 teachers whose views did not conform to a recognised 
 standard. Hence the East came to be bound in the 
 fetters of traditionalism, and all creative life, all advance 
 in the apprehension of Christian truth, came to an end 
 about the sixth century. It shall not be so with our- 
 selves. The sentences of the Creeds place before us 
 a summary of Christ's life on earth, and that life is for 
 us the expression of His nature. When they tell us 
 
86 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 that "He was made man, and was crucified also for us 
 under Pontius Pilate, that He suffered and was buried, 
 and the third day He rose again according to the 
 Scriptures, and ascended into heaven," they rehearse 
 to us what may be known of One whose love to us is 
 immeasurable, to whom we owe our own selves, with 
 whom we are to enter into the closest union and 
 fellowship. And those clauses, too, which assert 
 Christ's divine nature, His pre-existence from eternity, 
 His equality with the P'ather, will be pregnant in 
 meaning for the Christian believer ; he will find much 
 in them for daily practical application, for they teach 
 our Lord's supremacy over the realm of nature and 
 the realm of grace, over our own conscience and over 
 the whole moral world. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE LATIN CHURCH 
 
 By the editor 
 
 We know what the old Romans were hke, whose heroic 
 tenacity overcame the fleets of Carthage and the genius 
 of Hannibal. Hard, narrow, brutal men they were, 
 who never stuck at any cruelty, full of class pride and 
 utterly unconscious of any duty to aliens, great soldiers 
 and great rulers, with much taste for law and little for 
 philosophy, and even less for spiritual things. Religion, 
 indeed, was real enough among them, pervading life 
 with ritual, but not with virtue. The state had its gods, 
 too, as well as the family, and enforced their rites when- 
 ever it thought fit, for private judgment in the choice 
 of gods was a public danger. Religion was purely 
 social and ceremonial, and had nothing to do with 
 truth or virtue. To give the gods their due was piety : 
 to know the ritual was hoUness. 
 
 The conquest of the world brought mighty changes. 
 The old farmers who fought the Samnite and Punic 
 wars were extinct before the world was lost in Rome ; 
 and the sharp edges of the old Roman character were 
 gone when Rome was lost in the world. If the old sense 
 of public duty was weakened, the old hardness was dis- 
 guised by literary polish and sensibility. The senators 
 of the declining Empire found more pleasure in country 
 living and literary trifling than in the heroic virtue or 
 
88 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 outrageous vice of the past. They were much sounder 
 morally than is commonly supposed. Yet the change 
 was less than it seemed. The old pride of class was 
 unabated ; and Symmachus is as careless of barbarian 
 bloodshed as Tacitus. Indeed, the ruin of the Empire 
 was largely caused by the truly Roman greed of these 
 polished aristocrats, who laid field to field without a 
 thought either of the danger of the state or of their duty 
 to the Roman poor and to the barbarian stranger. 
 
 God sometimes teaches by revolution ; and something 
 of that duty was learned in the crash of the ancient 
 world. But in the main, the Roman Church is like 
 the Roman state before it. Her popes are commonly 
 lawyers and administrators like the old proconsuls, 
 hardly ever thinkers or philosophers. Her first word 
 by Clement is of law and order ; and of law and order 
 is her last word by Leo XIII. A noble work she did 
 for law and order in the evil days of barbarian con- 
 fusion and feudal anarchy, and it would be ungrateful 
 to refuse her full admiring homage for it ; but with 
 law and order she has always been content. She never 
 greatly cared whether her law and order was that of 
 charity and truth. She always aimed at something of 
 a military discipline ; and there is something of military 
 sharpness even in the noble collects of Leo and Gelasius. 
 So for law and order she has outraged nature, trampled 
 on charity, and shut her eyes to truth far more deli- 
 berately than any other great Church. 
 
 " The Church of God which sojourneth in Rome " 
 was a Greek colony which needed time to become 
 thoroughly Latin. It is the converse of Rome's own 
 great colony at Byzantium, which took a long time in 
 becoming a thoroughly Greek Constantinople. Hints of 
 
THE LATIN CHURCH 89 
 
 the character already shaping may be found on 
 Clement's grave plea for order in "the Church of God 
 which sojourneth at Corinth" ; in Soter's behaviour as 
 a Father of Christendom ; in the appeal of Irenaeus to 
 the great central Church whose orthodoxy was kept 
 fresh by never-failing streams of travellers ; in the 
 statesmanship of Victor ; in the practical compromises 
 of Callistus with the spirit of his own time. But the 
 Latin theory was not developed in Rome herself, but 
 in another great colony of Rome across the sea. The 
 first great utterance of the Latin spirit came from the 
 Roman centurion at Capernaum, who imaged the 
 Saviour of the world as the Imperator of the host of 
 heaven ; and its first great development was due to the 
 son of a Roman centurion at Carthage. Tertullian 
 showed how to shape the Gospel by the principles of 
 Roman law. The faith is an estate committed to the 
 Church by Christ ; and now that heretics have arisen to 
 dispute her title, there must be no appeal to Scripture. 
 The Church has the truth and does not need to seek it. 
 Heretics have no property in Scripture, and get incon- 
 venient arguments from it. The Church will do best 
 by refusing to touch the merits of the case at all. She 
 has only to enter a demurrer of uninterrupted posses- 
 sion, then judgment must be given in her favour. The 
 argument is simple enough, but it is not conclusive 
 unless we assume either that there is no such thing as 
 gradual change of doctrine, or else that such change is 
 always and without reserve legitimate. Nor can we 
 take for granted that an earlier age is more likely to be 
 right than a later, unless we go back to the earliest age 
 of all, which is practically unknown except from 
 Scripture ; and this is precisely the appeal to Scrip- 
 
90 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 ture which Tertulliim calls waste of brains and 
 temper. 
 
 Under Cyprian of Carthage and Cornelius of Rome, 
 the two great Western sees were held for the first time 
 by men of the world who moved in the highest circles 
 of heathen society. Cyprian was a born ruler of men, 
 courteous and literary as the great proconsuls often 
 were ; a Christian man withal, and saint and martyr 
 too. Yet Cyprian it was who showed how to shape the 
 Gospel by the principles of Roman religion. He was a 
 practical man, who took his ideas from the air around 
 him without seriously thinking them out for himself ; 
 and these ideas are mostly heathen. As the heathen 
 god's favour is strictly limited to his worshippers, so 
 God's grace is strictly limited to the visible Church. As 
 the idol's favour is dispensed by the priests, so God's 
 grace is dispensed by His priests the bishops — for 
 Cyprian would have been as horrified as any Protestant 
 at the impiety of turning presbyters into priests. As a 
 Roman magistrate held a defined authority by regular 
 transmission, so it must be, and so it must always have 
 been, with the Christian ministry. Thus sound doctrine 
 is guaranteed by the outward succession, and the legal 
 questions of a valid transmission become vital. Cyprian 
 starts from the unity of the Church, which practically 
 means with him the visible unity of a visible society 
 ruled by an aristocracy of co-equal bishops. The 
 Christian priesthood differs from the Jewish in nothing 
 but its permanence. He might have added, that it is 
 precisely like the heathen except that it is not the 
 priesthood of an idol. 
 
 The bishop is the priest, and resistance to him is 
 the sin of Korah. No grace outside the Church. 
 
THE LATIN CHURCH 91 
 
 Baptism will save the infant, and martyrdom the 
 catechumen ; but as for one who never heard the 
 Gospel, or wandered into heresy, or died out of 
 communion with the bishop — no innocence, no virtue, 
 no repentance, not even death for Christ, will in the 
 least avail to save him from the everlasting fire of hell. 
 In this direction Cyprian was as hard as any Calvinist. 
 On this theory, Church pardon and divine forgiveness 
 are closely linked together. It is plain that God 
 forgives none to whom the Church refuses pardon ; 
 and the converse was an easy inference, that God 
 forgives whomsoever the Church pardons. 
 
 The Cyprianic theory has long since drifted from 
 its Cyprianic moorings. No Church but Rome now 
 denies all salvation beyond its own limits. No Church 
 now counts all bishops equal. No Church now counts 
 the presbyter a Levite. In the Church of Rome he is 
 only the bishop's deputy, but it is still the essence of 
 his office to be a priest, not a Levite. But these are 
 secondary modifications. In its broad outlines the 
 Cyprianic theory, as completed by Augustine and 
 worked by Roman bishops, has shaped the Western 
 Church ever since, and deeply influenced both the 
 orthodox East which never accepted it, and the 
 Protestant North Vk'hich rebelled against it. 
 
 We come now to the third great development of 
 Latin thought. Augustine indeed was too great a man 
 to be so purely Latin as Cyprian, and has points of 
 affinity both with Eastern Orthodoxy and with Northern 
 Protestantism. Yet he too is flecked with human in- 
 firmity. He never fully overcame the duahsm of his 
 old Manichean theosophy. It rather increased on him 
 as he grew stiffer and harder in his old age, and 
 
92 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 renounced, like Sir Thomas More, the gentler thoughts 
 of his earlier years. But hope was hard in the age 
 when the ancient world was overthrown. It was not 
 the sense of sin that deepened in the deepening gloom : 
 only the sense of God's love became less able to 
 contend with it. The Greek Church has but one 
 doctrine, for the Incarnation lights up all the rest : the 
 Latin also has but one, for the rest are overshadowed 
 by the Church. The Gloria in Excelsis is the voice of 
 one, the Dies Iroe of the other. For us men and for 
 our salvation, sang the Fathers of Nicaea. From this 
 evil world to ransom his elect, replied the Western 
 monks. Augustine's high Calvinism was not an acci- 
 dent of Latin thought, but represents it more worthily 
 than the practical Pelagianism of mediaeval asceticism. 
 Cyprian had long ago declared the necessity of com- 
 munion with the visible Church for salvation : Augus- 
 tine accounted for that necessity by the guilt of original 
 sin, which dooms to perdition all but those who through 
 the Church are guided by special grace. And a change 
 in our view of man involves a change in our view of 
 God. All-ruling Love fades out before almighty Will, 
 and our heavenly Father becomes a Nebuchadnezzar 
 in heaven — whom he would he slew, and whom he 
 would he kept alive. Latin theology rejected as 
 sharply as Mahometanism the revelation of God as 
 Love commending itself to us, and justifying itself at 
 every step to the image of God within us : and fell 
 back like Mahometanism on the idea that God is Will 
 inscrutable — which is a form of Agnosticism. The 
 short heroic age of Islam was fired by the convic- 
 tion that the Inscrutable had somehow declared for 
 righteousness ; but a still nobler belief never ceased 
 
THE LATIN CHURCH 93 
 
 to struggle within the Latin Church, for Rome never 
 quite forgot that story of Christ crucified which 
 witnesses to all ages that So God loved the world. 
 Obscured it might be, and that very grievously, as by 
 saint worship and all the rest of the carnality ; but in 
 the Middle Ages it was never utterly forgotten. Even 
 Augustine could not reconcile the Agnostic and the 
 Christian ways of thinking ; and sooner or later the 
 struggle between them was bound to tear the Western 
 Church in sunder. 
 
 Latin theology was now complete in outline. The 
 Middle Ages worked out one side of Augustine's teach- 
 ing, the Reformers groped for another, and both 
 counted him their spiritual father. But this African 
 system needed Rome's imperial instinct to put on it a 
 corner-stone. Now that the Church was as concrete 
 as the State, it equally called for an earthly head ; and 
 this was more than Carthage could supply. The choice 
 lay between Rome and New Rome. But Constanti- 
 nople was an upstart and a creature of the court, 
 whereas the Roman See was apostolic as well as 
 imperial, and by this time Latin too. When the East 
 was torn with heresies, Rome could take a commanding 
 tone as the mouthpiece of Western orthodoxy ; and 
 indeed she fared badly in the few cases when she 
 ventured to speak without the West behind her. Her 
 supremacy begins to be practical in Augustine's time, 
 though even then it is firmly and successfully resisted 
 by the African bishops. As soon as Africa was wasted 
 by the Vandals, Leo I. obtained from Valentinian III. 
 an edict (445), which practically subjected to him the 
 Western Churches of the Empire. Thus the first effec- 
 tive Roman supremacy was a grant from the State : 
 
94 THK CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 and it was more than the perishing State could enforce. 
 In another generation the Empire had vanished from 
 Italy, and Rome was subject to the Herul and the 
 Goth : and if she was made Roman again by Belisarius, 
 the Byzantine yoke proved heavier than the Gothic. 
 
 In her deep humiliation she began to recognise the 
 great work before her. As the Roman State had made 
 Southern Europe Latin, so was the Roman Church to 
 make Northern Europe Christian. She could not make 
 it Latin, for the Teutons have a character of their own, 
 and even the Celts have never been thoroughly Roman. 
 It was "Gregory our father" who cast aside the con- 
 tempt of barbarians which had ruined the Empire, and 
 laid a firm foundation for the future Papacy by his 
 mission to the wildest of them all. The decisive step 
 was taken when he welcomed the English to the Chris- 
 tian fold. The conversion of the English directly led 
 to the conversion of Germany, and that again to the 
 reformation of the Gaulish Churches and the restoration 
 of the Empire in the West which delivered Rome from 
 her Byzantine captivity. 
 
 The feud of ages was forgotten when the holy diadem 
 of Empire was laid on the great Karl's barbarian head. 
 The Roman and the Teuton were reconciled at last ; 
 and for a while pope and emperor worked together as 
 twin heads of Christendom, though the emperor was 
 much the greater of the two. Karl's own great work 
 was the conquest and conversion of Northern Germany, 
 which cleared the way for the conversion of Scandi- 
 navia. But the Empire of the Karlings was too weak 
 for its work. Its strength was wasted in civil wars, 
 and its oppressive military system broke down help- 
 lessly before the attacks of Northmen and Moors and 
 
THE LATIN CHURCH 95 
 
 Magyars, which carried fire and sword throughout its 
 bounds. Hardly a city escaped but Rome. Dark as 
 was the outlook before the Karhngs rose, it was even 
 darker when they fell. And if civilisation was saved 
 by feudalism from the outside enemies who were break- 
 ing it to pieces, it was only saved at a fearful cost of 
 anarchy within. 
 
 The tenth century was one long wail of misery. 
 Gaul and Italy were sunk in feudal anarchy, Spain 
 in Moorish slavery : only in England and Germany 
 stronger kingdoms had been organised by Alfred and 
 by Heinrich the Fowler, and even they kept very 
 imperfect order in the land, though Athelstan and Otto 
 the Great were splendid kings. But towards the end 
 of the century the English monarchy crashed down 
 before the Danes, and the German was dreadfully 
 shaken by the disaster of Cotrone in 982. Europe 
 seemed dissolving into universal ruin. No panic of 
 the end of the world was needed to melt the hearts 
 of men in that day of trouble and distress, of waste- 
 ness and desolation. Small wonder if they turned 
 away from this world's wretchedness to win by pain- 
 ful asceticism the glories of another. Monasticism 
 crept into the Church in the fourth century, and was 
 organised in the sixth by Benedict of Nursia ; but 
 now it came forth from Cluny in a sterner form to 
 preach its gospel — of forgiveness truly, but forgiveness 
 to be won by self-chosen and self-inflicted suffering. 
 Asceticism despairs of the world like Calvinism, as 
 though God could not or would not save more than 
 a remnant ; and it is as common a form of that despair 
 for weak natures as Calvinism is for strong. The old 
 prophet's mantle rested on the monk when he preached 
 
96 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 wrath and doom on a corrupted Church ; but there 
 was no power in his asceticism to purify it, for the 
 ascetic takes as low and physical a view as any sinner 
 of the revelation of God in common life, and the con- 
 clusion he draws from it is hardly less demoralising to 
 the world outside his monastery. 
 
 However, the worst was really past. The North- 
 men had been checked by Alfred and Count Odo in 
 the peace of Wedmore and the three years' siege of 
 Paris ; the Magyar hosts were scattered to the winds 
 by the great Otto on the Lechfeld, and at last the 
 Moors were driven from Provence, But now that the 
 outside enemies were beaten off, the internal anarchy 
 of feudalism seemed hardly less intolerable than the 
 ravages of the Northmen. Yet what remedy ? Kings 
 were helpless, the Church was deeply feudalised. Fight- 
 ing bishops compared badly even with fighting barons. 
 The popes indeed had seemed for a while to rise on 
 the ruins of the Empire. The Field of Lies was a 
 premature Canossa ; and Nicolas I. was the most com- 
 manding pope yet seen. But the Papacy was soon 
 swept into the whirlpool of Italian anarchy, and be- 
 came the sport of harlots and factions for more than a 
 century. It had some strong popes like Gerbert, 
 and even the weak popes commanded a certain respect 
 beyond the Alps. But a real reform was clearly needed. 
 The ninth century had outlined it in the False Decre- 
 tals, and provided a weapon in transubstantiation : now 
 the work had to be done in the eleventh. 
 
 The reforming party leaned on the Empire, which 
 had recovered its power under Heinrich III. (1039- 
 1056). Three quarrelling popes were set aside at once, 
 and unity and decency restored, but at the cost of sub- 
 
THE LATIN CHURCH 97 
 
 jection to the Empire. The next thirty years are the 
 critical period, in which the reforming movement passed 
 from German to ItaHan hands, and developed its policy 
 of putting down the fighting clergy, the marrying clergy, 
 and the simoniac clergy. At a later stage the last be- 
 came a prohibition of investiture by a layman, which 
 brought it into collision with the kings. The object 
 was to separate the Church sharply from the world, and 
 the means thereunto was the elevation of the Papacy 
 above the Empire. The sanction of transubstantiation 
 came later still, for Gregory VII. does not seem to have 
 seen the importance of the doctrine. 
 
 The Hildebrandine reformation was the answer of 
 the Church to the world's appeal for help. We utterly 
 misread it if we see in Gregory VII. nothing more than 
 priestcraft and vulgar scheming. He is more like some 
 old Hebrew prophet whom the Lord has lifted up on 
 high, to rebuke the kings of the earth and smite its evil- 
 doers. The aim of the mediaeval Papacy was a noble 
 one — to purify the Church into a kingdom of righteous- 
 ness overlooking and controlling the world. It was a 
 splendid service to hold up such an ideal as this to an 
 age of wrong and violence, however the reality may 
 have fallen short of it. Yet Rome was not unworthy 
 of the great position which the world had thrust upon 
 her. Nicolas of Langley was not the only pope who 
 felt his crown a crown of fire. Rome's influence in 
 England, for example, was upon the whole for good, 
 from Augustine's landing till past the times of Anselm 
 and Thomas of Canterbury. But the dilemma was 
 hopeless. If the Church stood aside from the world, it 
 might drain away its best elements, but it would only 
 debase what remained ; and, if it endeavoured to govern 
 
 G 
 
98 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 the world, a carnal fight would have to be fought with 
 carnal weapons. Meanwhile asceticism cooled down in 
 spite of sundry revivals, and passed by easy stages into 
 indifference and licence. The higher the Papacy rose, 
 the more worldly it became. Gregory VII. began the 
 contest with the Empire in the spirit and power of 
 Elijah ; Innocent IV. triumphantly finished it in the 
 spirit of Simon Magus. "The seller of sacred things 
 is dead," said his successor. 
 
 The twelfth century is, upon the whole, a continua- 
 tion of the eleventh ; but the Hildebrandine enthusiasm 
 was dying out. Gregory himself would gladly have 
 swept away the " brigands, and sons of brigands," as he 
 called the kings, but his successors had to make terms 
 with the world. The feature of its first half is the Cis- 
 tercian revival, represented by Bernard of Clairvaux and 
 in a different way by Nicolas of Langley ; that of its 
 second is the parallel reigns of Frederick Barbarossa 
 in Germany, and of Henry Fitz-Empress in England 
 and Aquitaine, and the beginning by Albert the Bear 
 and Henry the Lion of the great north-eastern expan- 
 sion of Germany in Slavic lands. 
 
 The thirteenth century saw the culmination of the 
 Latin Church and the beginning of its decline. We 
 pass in it from the triumphs of Innocent III. to the 
 gasconades of Boniface VIII.; from the consolidation 
 of Latin doctrine in transubstantiation and auricular 
 confession by the Lateran Council of 12 15 to its codi- 
 fication by Thomas Aquinas, and then again to its dis- 
 integration by the subtle unbelief of Duns Scotus. The 
 panorama of events is magnificent — the capture of Con- 
 stantinople, the breaking of the Moorish power in Spain 
 at Navas de Tolosa, King John's submission and the 
 
THE LATIN CHURCH 99 
 
 Charter, the extirpation of the Albigenses, the rise of 
 the mendicants, the Mongol devastations, the last and 
 mightiest struggle of the Hohenstaufen Empire, the 
 Barons' War in England, the loss of Antioch and Acre, 
 and the rise of France to a position in Europe almost as 
 commanding as Napoleon's. This was the age of the 
 schoolmen, the age of Roger Bacon, the age of the 
 great cathedrals. A wave ran through the world, from 
 the Irrawaddy to the Scottish border, from the gold and 
 silver temples of Pagan to the minsters of York and 
 Lincoln. So glorious was the start of the young nations 
 of Europe. The age was one of revolution. Pope and 
 emperor were in theory twin rulers of a Catholic world, 
 so that the fall of the Hohenstaufens undermined the 
 whole Catholic theory of society, and left the popes 
 exposed alone to the impact of the growing world of 
 nations. There was little help in the Hapsburgs put up 
 by Gregory X. Frederick II. is emperor as well as 
 king, but St. Louis after him and Edward 1. are purely 
 national kings. Rome's last good gift to England was 
 Stephen Langton ; and before the century is out she 
 has had her decisive repulse from Edward I. with a 
 nation behind him, and this is followed by a still more 
 disastrous overthrow from Philip of France. Univer- 
 sities are formed instead of monasteries built, and even 
 the mendicants are monks of a new sort. Asceticism is 
 coming out from the cloister to preach and teach and 
 minister to the people, and even to share the aspirations 
 of the people, like the English Franciscans in the Barons' 
 War. The schoolmen show new stirrings of northern 
 thought inside the Latin Church, for they are mostly 
 northerners, and largely Englishmen. Even Thomas 
 Aquinas had a father related to the Hohenstaufens, and 
 
loo THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 a Norman mother. The Inquisition, to be sure, was 
 not northern. It was chiefly in Dominican hands, and 
 the difference of Dominican and Franciscan is very 
 much the difference of Spain and Italy. But its great 
 significance — the bishops would not work it — is that the 
 Church was ceasing to be a Church of the people, and 
 forming a new aUiance with kings and nobles rather 
 than with peoples. Robert of Lincoln shows us what 
 is passing away, Lewis of Beaumont what is coming. 
 
 The change from the thirteenth to the fourteenth 
 century is well figured by this change from the learned 
 and saintly son of a peasant to the illiterate aristocrat 
 who could not read his profession of obedience to 
 the metropolitan. The great Edward slept with 
 his fathers, and an asinus coronatus reigned in his 
 stead. Though the thirteenth century was no more 
 perfect than the sixteenth — Adam Marsh had reason 
 for his His diebus damnatissimis — it was almost as 
 full of bursting life, and of promise in all directions 
 that remained for generations unrealised. The four- 
 teenth was a showy, hollow, barren age, which fully 
 revealed the decay of Latin Christianity. The only 
 wave that ran through the world in it was the Black 
 Death. Its landmarks are the decisive defeat of the 
 Papacy under Boniface VIII. by the new nations, its 
 '' Babylonish Captivity " at Avignon, and following this 
 the Great Schism and the rise of Lollardism in England. 
 Hardly less important was the failure of Monasticism. 
 Its first ideal, falsely called chastity, was plainly impos- 
 sible for men in general. The endeavour to enforce it 
 even on the clergy was a practical failure, and had 
 caused the most appalling evils ; and now experience 
 was showing that the family life on which the nations 
 
THE LATIN CHURCH loi 
 
 rested is purer and nobler than the monastic. Its 
 second ideal of poverty received a fatal blow from 
 John XXII. in 1322. For centuries the popes had 
 been balancing between the bishops as the ofBcial 
 heads of the great system and the monks who stood 
 for individualism inside it ; but now the very principle 
 of the mendicants was declared contrary to Christ's 
 example. The dead mass might go on by vis inertice ; 
 but the more earnest of the monks henceforth looked 
 restlessly to mysticism, to new forms of association, or 
 even to heresy. Small wonder if the Reformation 
 (which finally discredited for Northern Europe the 
 third monastic vow of obedience) found so many of 
 its leaders from Brother Martin downward in the 
 monasteries. 
 
 So in the fifteenth century we see the Latin Church 
 in deep decay. The thoughts of the Middle Ages were 
 thrust aside by the growth of nations, of commerce 
 and of family life. One after another its ideals had 
 been discredited. The emperor was the first to go. 
 True, they had set up Caesar in his place again ; but 
 the Hapsburg emperors were the merest shadows of 
 their mighty predecessors. The lord of the world had 
 shrunk into a second-rate archduke in Germany, in 
 real power quite unequal to Charles of Burgundy. 
 The pope went next. The scandals of the thirteenth 
 century were followed by subjection to France and 
 greater scandals in the fourteenth ; and the culminating 
 scandals of the Great Schism made irresistible the cry 
 for reformation of the Church in head and members. 
 For a while the Papacy seemed subjected to Councils. 
 Three popes were deposed ; and for a moment even 
 the Luxemburger Sigismund could mimic a great 
 
I02 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 emperor. But the Church was too far gone for reform 
 from within. Councils could not even limit the Papal 
 supremacy, much less replace it by their own ; and 
 least of all did they even wish to reform the false doc- 
 trine which underlay the scandals. If they set aside 
 an infamous pope like John XXIII. they were bound to 
 replace him by a decent pope ; and before a Martin V. 
 they were helpless. A little diplomacy was enough to 
 dispose of the Councils ; and then the Papacy seemed 
 restored to its former splendour. 
 
 Seemed, and only seemed, for it was but a restora- 
 tion like the Hapsburg Empire, though not so badly 
 tarnished. For the last half century before the Reforma- 
 tion, the serious policy of the popes is very much 
 limited to Italy. Albigensic, Lollard, and Hussite heresy 
 had witnessed wide and bitter discontent in Romance, 
 Teutonic, and Slavonic Europe ; and that discontent was 
 kept in check by a threefold policy : for unbelief, how- 
 ever heathen, there was licence, witness Pomponazzo ; 
 for sin, however gross, there was formal penance and 
 easy payment. " God willeth not the death of a sinner, 
 but rather that he should pay and live " ; only for 
 attacks on Church privilege there was merciless repres- 
 sion. Though the records of persecution were systema- 
 tically destroyed, it seems to have raged on quite as 
 great a scale before the Reformation as after it. 
 
 Latin Christendom undertook a burden never laid 
 by God upon His Church, and broke down under it. 
 From being a witness of Christ and guide of men, it 
 aspired to be a governor of men and final judge of 
 truth, and forgot its proper work of ministration. The 
 oversight of nations with which the Hildebrandine re- 
 formation started, developed into a systematic and 
 
THE LATIN CHURCH 103 
 
 demoralising interference with government which ought 
 to be national. Rome could not really govern nations 
 from one centre, so she only meddled, and meddled 
 only for the sake of gain. The oversight of private life 
 with which the Latin Church began developed into a 
 systematic and demoralising interference with conduct 
 which ought to be individual. Rome could not really 
 govern private life by any central church law, so she 
 only meddled, and seemed to meddle only for the sake 
 of gain. The condemnation of the Latin Church is not 
 that great sins were done in the twelfth century, but 
 that under her guidance sin had almost ceased to be 
 recognised as sin in the fifteenth. She had made ship- 
 wreck of conscience in Western Europe. She had 
 degraded the world, and yet more degraded herself, by 
 absorbing into the Church the proper work of the nation 
 and the individual, as though the Church were God's 
 one voice on earth, till it was time for the world to take 
 the Church in hand and teach it something better. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 ENGLAND BEFORE THE REFORMATION 
 
 By the Rev. W. E. COLLINS, M.A. 
 
 The conversion of the English was but one act in the 
 making of the great Christian commonwealth of the 
 Middle Ages, and yet the English Church has always 
 had a position and a character which is unique in 
 Christendom. On the one hand, it is no more than an 
 incident, though a most important one, in the growth 
 of Western Christendom. On the other, the English 
 Church is an entity from the first ; and even the great 
 convulsion of the Reformation movement, whilst it has 
 added to our insularity and given new directions to our 
 activities, has but emphasized and developed a deter- 
 minate character which was there from the first. 
 
 It is unnecessary here to speak in detail of the 
 work of conversion which began with the coming of 
 Augustine in 597. Suffice it to say, that the resultant 
 of the various forces which took part in that process 
 was a Church and a Nation which was most intimately 
 bound up with the West as a whole. The English 
 peoples were still " barbarian " when it began, and as 
 yet practically outside the pale of the historic civilisa- 
 tion of the West. Our conversion gave us a place 
 amongst the infant nationalities of Europe, and left us 
 with a strong national life which bore in every feature 
 the impress of the new faith and the new Society. It 
 
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 105 
 
 found us entirely heathen, although our Celtic neigh- 
 bours had been to a large extent Christian for centuries : 
 it left us not only Christians, but also, for good or for 
 evil, bound up with the life-history of Latin Christen- 
 dom. It found isolation and division : it left a strong 
 united Church life which quickly absorbed and gathered 
 into itself the Church life of the Celtic peoples, wherever 
 the two came into close contact. No other result was 
 possible. The Celtic peoples, wherever they had re- 
 nounced their heathenism, were earnestly and passion- 
 ately Christian. But theirs was an isolated and tribal 
 Christianity which still retained many elements which 
 were directly heathen. It was a private religion which, 
 if it did not actually foster strife, at least proved itself 
 singularly incapable of overcoming the tendencies to 
 disunion and disintegration to which their temperament 
 and the character of their institutions only too readily 
 exposed them. With a few conspicuous exceptions, it 
 seems to have been remarkably lacking in expansive 
 power, and this in spite of a very real missionary 
 spirit. With all its poetry and all its beauty, it showed 
 singularly few signs of containing a Power of Life for 
 wayfaring men. 
 
 It need hardly be said that the illusive dream must 
 be once for all abandoned which would regard " the 
 British Church " as one of transcendent purity, directly 
 apostolical in origin, scriptural in doctrine, and free 
 from papal corruptions, and which holds that this pure 
 Church was confronted, displaced, and superseded by a 
 corrupt and popish organisation. There can be no 
 real question that the Christianity which the English 
 received from the continent of Europe was far nobler 
 than that which the Britons intentionally withheld from 
 
io6 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 them. The theology of Latin Christendom as set forth 
 by Gregory the Great may be in some ways unsatisfying, 
 but at least it is equal to that of Gildas the Wise. The 
 moral life of Rome and Italy compares very favourably 
 with that which is revealed to us in the canons of 
 the early Welsh Synods, and certainly the level of 
 civilised life was far higher. But above all, we were 
 launched upon the full stream of human life and 
 progress, instead of being drawn aside into what was 
 after all no more than a backwash, in which certain 
 primitive elements still survived simply because they 
 had drifted aside out of the current. No doubt there 
 were dangerous tendencies in the new life which were 
 not present, or at least were hardly perceptible, in the 
 old : such is always the case, for there is no human 
 progress which does not involve the loss of much that 
 is good, the generation or development of much that is 
 merely partial or transitory, or that may become 
 dangerous in the future. But we are not therefore at 
 liberty to prefer that which is ready to vanish away ; it 
 does not follow that " the former days were better than 
 these." In a word, the Christianity which we received 
 through our fathers in the faith was immeasurably 
 richer and higher than anything else of its own day. 
 Of course, it is easy enough to see the imperfections of 
 that which we received, and easy enough to set before 
 ourselves something that should better satisfy our own 
 imaginations. But to conclude that Celtic Christianity 
 would have supplied this is to be absolutely at variance 
 with the plain teaching of the facts. 
 
 For good or for evil, then, the English Church was 
 entirely bound up with the history of Latin Christendom; 
 
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 107 
 
 and in spite of our strongly-marked individual character 
 we shared fully in that life. As the Gallican or the 
 Spanish Church, or the daughter Church of Germany, 
 became gradually more subject in consequence of the 
 growth of the Papacy, so also did we. We shared also 
 with them the effects of that process of gradual cen- 
 tralisation, and elimination of local characteristics and 
 landmarks, which is so marked a feature of the Middle 
 Ages. It is this, and this alone, which rendered pos- 
 sible that strange misuse of terms whereby people have 
 come to speak of the greater part of Western Christen- 
 dom as the Roman Church. 
 
 If we compare the circumstances of the English 
 Church in these two respects, with those of others, it 
 would be true to say, that (i) the Enghsh Church, 
 which has taken the lead in emancipating itself from the 
 papal tyranny, was in some ways even more closely 
 connected with the Papacy than the other Churches of 
 the West, owing to the circumstances of our first re- 
 ception of the faith. The offerings which were made 
 to the Holy See in its tribulations by grateful Eng- 
 lishmen grew by degrees into the earliest of papal 
 taxes. In later days, when Honorius III. and other 
 popes were seeking the munitions of war against the 
 Empire, it was England which gained the unenviable 
 honour of being par excellence the papal treasure-house ; 
 and many of the encroachments upon the episcopal 
 office were essayed in England before they were ex- 
 tended to other nations. (2) On the other hand, our 
 remoteness, and the sturdy independence of the English 
 character, often delayed for a time the introduction into 
 England of new developments of various kinds. And 
 consequently, everything that brought about renewed 
 
io8 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 intercourse between England and the Continent was 
 likely to bring with it some fresh impetus or some new 
 fashion in religion. Thus the coming of the Normans 
 led to the introduction of the revived monastic spirit 
 and the strongly developed '* High Churchmanship " 
 which had taken so firm a hold upon their character, 
 together with the new Prankish theory of the nature 
 of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. Subsequent 
 intercourse with the Continent gave us the full benefit 
 of the Hildebrandine reformation, and later still the 
 all-embracing system of the Roman Canon Law. One 
 precedent led to another, and the result of each was 
 that the English Church had become more closely in- 
 volved in the toils of this great human system than it 
 was before. And thus, little by little, the whole fully- 
 developed structure of the Papal Monarchy cast its 
 protecting shadow over us as it did over the rest of 
 Western Christendom. 
 
 It is easy to see the inevitableness of this system of 
 ever-increasing centralisation, and hardly less easy to 
 see that it served a very real purpose in its own day. 
 Without really making for peace, or even for a good 
 understanding between the gradually shaping nationali- 
 ties of Europe, it provided a background and an order 
 of life which was common to them all, and thus helped 
 to bring them into relations of mutual intercourse. 
 In such ways it supplied the place which had formerly 
 been occupied by the Roman Empire, and which is 
 occupied in our own day by that interdependence of all 
 the activities of modern civilised life which transcends 
 all national boundaries, and has made the whole world 
 one as it never was before. It gave the consciousness 
 of a great unity to all the nobler aspirations of men, 
 
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 109 
 
 thus lending to them a force which they could never 
 have possessed in isolation. It presented an embodi- 
 ment of the claims of faith and righteousness which 
 often compelled obedience where nothing else could 
 have done so, thus making for freedom even when its 
 methods seemed to be those of tyranny. It supplied a 
 sphere of education for the Christian intellect, narrow 
 and over-rigid in itself, but so subtle and methodical 
 that, when once the bonds and limitations were re- 
 moved, learning itself formed the best solvent for that 
 system which it had hitherto been used to defend. 
 
 In all this, and much more, England and the Eng- 
 lish Church shared quite as largely as any other part 
 of Western Christendom. The theology current in 
 England was not less mediaeval in character ; the inter- 
 course between the English Church and the Papal See 
 was in no way less frequent. Of all the nations 
 of the West, as has been said above, England was 
 second to none in deference for the Holy See. 
 Respect for the papal office was unbounded, and 
 for papal ordinances so far as it was convenient 
 to observe them. It was the ordinary thing to 
 solve dilemmas in ecclesiastical matters by having re- 
 course to the Papal Chancery and the Curia, and this 
 continued, by a kind of mutual accommodation between 
 King and Pope, in spite of the legislation which from 
 time to time aimed at restricting it. Nevertheless, 
 during the later Middle Ages the Papacy was un- 
 doubtedly very unpopular in England. The main 
 reason for this unpopularity was not that the system 
 was felt to be wrong in principle : quite the contrary. 
 When Grosseteste is writing most severely against the 
 Papacy of his own day he does not suggest that it is 
 
no THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 in itself an evil, but simply that the abuse of such power 
 as the Pope possesses is a thing antichristian. And 
 not for centuries, not until legend had given place to 
 a truer knowledge of the history of the Church, was it 
 possible for Englishmen as a whole to advance beyond 
 this. But in England the Papacy was unpopular, from 
 the thirteenth century and onward, because in its 
 practical working it led to consequences which were 
 very objectionable. It gave rise to continual delays 
 and uncertainties in matters which had a very direct 
 bearing upon every-day life. It conveyed a continual 
 stream of good English money out of the country, and 
 this often at times when it could ill be spared. More- 
 over, during the greater part of the fourteenth century 
 the Popes were Frenchmen and dwelt at Avignon, 
 which, if not actually in French territory, was the 
 next thing to it ; so that our money was being sent 
 out of England virtually to support our enemies the 
 French. Above all, great causes were continually 
 and inevitably settled, by the power which professed 
 to be the supreme spiritual arbiter of Christendom, 
 upon grounds which were simply and indubitably 
 political. Such political decisions were not always made 
 with our interests in view, but rather against them ; 
 and it even happened sometimes that the settlement 
 was dictated by the ambassadors of some prince with 
 whom we were actually at war. Considerations such 
 as these had undoubtedly much to do with the actual 
 breach with Rome when it occurred. And yet no mis- 
 take could well be greater than that of thinking that 
 these were the causes which led to the English Refor- 
 mation, or even to the particular side of it which was 
 concerned with the Pope — the abolition of his jurisdic- 
 
BEFORE THE REFORMATION in 
 
 tion in England. The fact is that the system contained 
 within itself, in its rigidity and its one-sidedness and its 
 ever-increasing narrowness, the seeds of its own decay. 
 An institution which had arisen to supply the needs of 
 the Middle Ages could not possibly be suited in the 
 same degree to an age in which every characteristic 
 feature of mediievalism had been shattered to pieces. 
 The measure of its previous success was the measure 
 of its present failure. As one transitory method of 
 God's working, the Papacy had had its value for us 
 and for others. But when it claimed to be not a 
 partial agency in God's providence, but a revelation 
 of essential truth, men came by degrees to see for 
 themselves that it was a lie ; and where they could 
 not see, the logic of facts made it clear. 
 
 A Reformation of some kind was a thing inevitable, 
 and not least so in England, long before the opening 
 of the sixteenth century. Its precise nature and scope 
 were still indeterminate, and would depend upon the 
 circumstances which should actually give rise to it, and 
 the persons who should be immediately concerned in 
 it. But the thing itself was bound to come : it was the 
 result of forces which were already in operation and of 
 tendencies which were already at work. 
 
 (a) The first of these was the New Learning. There 
 had arisen a spirit of inquiry which was no longer con- 
 tent to exert its faculties upon questions the answers to 
 which were regarded as already completely known ; 
 or to accept things precisely as it found them, on the 
 ground that they were stamped with the sanction of 
 authority acting in and through the machinery of the 
 Church. A great army of scholars was beginning to 
 
112 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 look for the bases of authority in a new direction ; 
 which was inevitable when once the study of the New 
 Testament was put in its rightful place, as the primary 
 record of God's revelation in Christ. This, no doubt, 
 might easily degenerate, and often did, into a literalism 
 which was almost as slavish as the theory of Church 
 authority which it displaced ; but in itself there could 
 be nothing more noble than the conviction of the New 
 Learning, as it was expressed by Erasmus, that in the 
 pages of the New Testament they might behold the 
 Master, and know His will more clearly than if He were 
 actually before their bodily eyes. Meanwhile an enlight- 
 ened criticism was sweeping away the foundations upon 
 which the very existence of the Papacy depended ; whilst 
 from the printing press there came forth into common 
 knowledge the writings of the Fathers, the records of a 
 Catholic antiquity to which the Papacy in the mediaeval 
 sense was a thing unknown. If the Corpus J ut'is Canonici 
 had been powerful as a code of ecclesiastical law, its 
 influence had been hardly less great as a kind of 
 authorised commentary on the past history of the 
 Church ; and the pages of Gratian's Decretumy with its 
 large incorporation of the pseudo-Isidorian decretals 
 and other forged documents, assured the mediaeval 
 student that from the beginning things had been as 
 they were in his own day. Whatever other learning 
 he might have, it was this which formed the basis and 
 pattern of all his ideas of the history and constitution 
 of the Church. Now came the great awakening : the 
 student learned that from the beginning it was not so. 
 Controversialists might still dispute about isolated facts, or 
 produce spurious or interpolated texts of the Fathers, 
 but the case in its broad outlines was too clear. Hence- 
 
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 113 
 
 forward, if the Papacy was to stand, it must stand on 
 its own merits and not by any inherent right. 
 
 Nor was the necessity for its existence so clear as 
 it had once seemed to be. The unity of Christendom 
 was almost a necessity of thought to the mediaeval mind, 
 and hitherto the Papacy had seemed to be an absolutely 
 essential part of that unity. For the Catholicity of the 
 Middle Ages was a very imperfect Catholicity, and 
 Christendom was commonly taken to mean no more 
 than the Christians of the Roman obedience. Western 
 writers, even great writers like Gerson and Thomas 
 More, commonly use the word Christendom in this 
 sense ; and it is therefore a significant fact when 
 thinkers like Wyclif turn their thoughts further abroad, 
 and conceive it as a possible thing that we should live 
 without a pope like the Greeks. By degrees the con- 
 ception of the oneness of Christendom which centred 
 in "the Holy Roman Church, mother and teacher of 
 Churches," began to give place to one which was at 
 once less arbitrary and more Catholic. 
 
 {b) Another change which was coming over the 
 thought of the West had reference to the relations 
 between Church and State. According to the concep- 
 tion which found its strongest expression in the work 
 of Gregory VII. and his successors, the Church was an 
 organisation existing over against the secular organisa- 
 tion, and standing in contrast to it as the heavenly to 
 the earthly. Meanwhile, largely owing to the practical 
 neglect of Confirmation and the partial loss of the con- 
 ception of public worship, the rights and functions of 
 the layman, and the fact that he is after all the primary 
 unit of which the Church is composed, were more and 
 more completely overlooked. And thus the Church- 
 
 H 
 
114 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 manship of the Middle Ages came to be as imperfect 
 as its Catholicity. In practice an entire confusion was 
 made between the Church and the officers of the 
 Church, and when men spoke of the one they were 
 really thinking of the other. To them the Church 
 meant primarily the great hierarchy, from the Pope 
 down to the lowest person in minor orders. It existed, 
 no doubt, for the benefit of the secular world outside, 
 but still it stood outside of and over against this world. 
 The phrase "to go into the Church," which we are 
 sometimes asked to regard as an invention of the seven- 
 teenth or eighteenth century, is in reality a mediaeval 
 idea expressed in mediaeval language. So far as this 
 idea can be said to have been displaced at all, the fact 
 is certainly one of the results of the religious upheaval 
 of the sixteenth century. To this extent, and no further, 
 there is real truth in the statement which has often been 
 made, that the Reformation was a layman's revolt for 
 the recovery of the things which belong to him by right. 
 The consequence of this accentuated clericalism 
 was that the clergy became an estate, with interests and 
 instincts peculiar to themselves. They never actually 
 degenerated into a caste, because of the prevailing law 
 of celibacy, which, in part the expression of an exag- 
 gerated asceticism, expressed also a true instinct for its 
 own day. But the gulf between clergy and laity, at all 
 times and in every religion a possible danger, had now 
 become a very grievous one, and the lay folk began to 
 look elsewhere for help which should really supply their 
 souls' needs. And this was not all. From being a 
 sharply defined estate, the clergy came to be a kind of 
 imperiunt in imperio, nominally subject to the laws which 
 bound other men, but in practice claiming that they 
 
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 115 
 
 were only bound ** saving their order," and making this 
 reservation cover a very large part of their lives. In 
 truth, they were only " half the king's subjects." Al- 
 though a working arrangement might be reached from 
 time to time, the position was one of constant friction. 
 As soon as the nation became conscious of its own unity, 
 it became impossible. When Henry VIII. called atten- 
 tion to the incompatibility between Cranmer's oath to 
 the Papacy, when he became Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 and his duty as a subject, he had made no new discovery, 
 but was only saying what all men had long known to 
 be perfectly true. It might be met by a definite recog- 
 nition on the part of the clergy of their position as 
 subjects (leaving them still free, of course, to disobey 
 for conscience' sake if need be, and to take the conse- 
 quences), or the settlement might be veiled under a 
 series of concordats and somewhat unreal " accommo- 
 dations." But in one or other of these two ways the 
 royal supremacy had to be vindicated, and vindicated it 
 was, sooner or later, in every country of Western 
 Christendom. 
 
 (c) A third side must be briefly noticed, the most 
 important of all, upon which a reformation was already 
 being prepared for. The mediaeval system was one 
 of ever-growing complexity and uniformity, and con- 
 sequently one of increasingly mechanical character. 
 Meanwhile, although some of the elements which under- 
 lay it were permanent, many features of the system 
 were growing old, and were no longer suited to the 
 requirements of a new age, which was striving to find 
 an expression of its own. The strenuous and ever- 
 renewed life which coursed along its channels was bound 
 in time to burst its bonds and break away the limita- 
 
ii6 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 tions of a system which had become too narrow for 
 it. The same thing was the case with rehgious rites 
 and customs. Men naturally endeavour to tind an 
 outward expression for the impulses of devotion, to 
 enshrine their religious worship in acts of reverence. 
 But herein lies a danger : the outward act remains after 
 the reverent impulse which gave rise to it has become 
 habitual or has passed away. A new impulse of rever- 
 ence generally seeks to find for itself some new form 
 of expression, not being content simply to re-vivify 
 that which is there already. It is very jealous, how- 
 ever, of any attempt to remove the rites or ceremonies 
 which it finds already in possession ; and thus a con- 
 tinual process of accretion is going on, until the fringe 
 of outward acts may only serve to hide that which 
 it was intended to show forth, and to become an end 
 in itself instead of a means to an end. Opinions may 
 differ as to whether this point has been reached ; 
 but, granted that it has been reached, there can be 
 no question that the only thing to be done is to clear 
 away with a bold hand, in spite of the fact that the pro- 
 cess is one of no little danger. There is the clearest 
 evidence of a wide-spread feeling in the sixteenth cen- 
 tury that this point had been reached. Again, as 
 regards theology : the current theology of any par- 
 ticular age is in constant danger of becoming depraved 
 by over-definition in some particular direction. And 
 this result is almost inevitable when it is divorced in 
 a measure from practical religion and treated as an 
 abstract science. The great foundation truths get to be 
 taken for granted and thus overlooked, whilst theological 
 study tends to become a mere intellectual exercise upon 
 points of detail. And thus, not only are the opinions of 
 
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 117 
 
 theologians made to rank with the facts of the Christian 
 creed, but the whole proportion of the faith is lost. 
 The student of mediaeval theology can hardly fail to see 
 to how large an extent this had come to be the case. 
 And now the inevitable reaction was at hand, in the 
 shape of a return to first principles, and a recon- 
 struction of theological systems from the primary facts 
 upon which they were based. And once more, as 
 regards the individual religious life. The fundamental 
 question as to all religion is, which end does it start 
 from ? Is what I am doing for God the basis of 
 everything, or what He is doing for me ? In other 
 words, are Works the primary fact, or is Grace ? The 
 one view is essentially pagan, the other is essentially 
 Christian. But the difficulty is, that we are continually 
 liable to slip back into a pagan doctrine of works, 
 owing in part to the self-centredness which is at the 
 root of our sin, in part to the fact that the grace of 
 God must needs produce works in us, unless we 
 have received it e<V Kemv. That this was a dominant 
 tendency in the later Middle Ages is indisputable, 
 in spite of many and most beautiful exceptions. Per- 
 sonal religion frequently degenerated into an endeavour 
 to make an atonement for sins, and thus to appease an 
 offended God. We can see signs of it in the multipli- 
 cation of expiatory masses, in the undue stress which 
 came to be laid upon the performance of external acts 
 of penance, and in many other ways. It has even 
 been said that religion had become an elaborate system 
 of safeguards against the consequences of human sin. 
 This, no doubt, is as true and as false as many other 
 smart sayings ; but the fact remains that it is in part 
 true. And perhaps there was hardly anything against 
 
ii8 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 which the reaction of the sixteenth century was so 
 keen. Certainly there were very many who had Uttle 
 or no sympathy with Luther's theory of justification by 
 faith, at any rate in the form in which he stated it, who 
 yet strove strenuously to vindicate again the CathoHc 
 doctrine of grace. 
 
 Now all these things, the huge pretensions of the 
 papal monarchy, the withdrawal of the whole clerical 
 body from the duties of ordinary citizenship, and the 
 increasingly mechanical character which was coming 
 over religion as a whole, affected other parts of Western 
 Christendom not less than England. And the solvent 
 forces which were gradually undermining the mediaeval 
 fabric are to be perceived as clearly on the continent as 
 here. And yet the course of the movement was en- 
 tirely different here from what it was there. On the 
 continent the movement was either one of radical re- 
 construction, or else it degenerated into a mere sweeping 
 away of practical abuses and a forging of the old chains 
 yet closer. In England, on the other hand, it is clear 
 that what was aimed at was not to make anything new 
 but rather to protect and invigorate what was really old, 
 and to cut away everything which obstructed its free 
 growth. And whatever failures there may have been 
 in the process, it is at least clear that this description 
 fits the English Reformation better than any other could 
 do. How then is the fact to be accounted for, that the 
 course of the Reformation was so different here from 
 what it was elsewhere ? Why did not England go the 
 way of Spain or of Germany ? The answer is obvious. 
 The Reformation in England no doubt largely depended 
 upon the special circumstances of our history in the six- 
 
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 119 
 
 teenth century ; but it was largely conditioned also by 
 what the English Church and nation already was and 
 had always been. 
 
 To speak first of our relations with the Papacy. 
 Englishmen were quite accustomed to think of Britain 
 as having a distinct position in Europe. The strip of 
 sea was a barrier to an extent which we can hardly 
 realise now, and to the inhabitant of the mainland the 
 Englishman long continued a stranger, with a character 
 which was at least full of individuality. English kings 
 had proudly repudiated the idea that their realm was in 
 any way bound to the Empire, and had claimed the 
 proud title of Imperator or Basileus in witness of the 
 fact. No English king but Richard the Lion-hearted 
 had ever recognised that he held his crown from an 
 Emperor; and he only did so in order to regain the 
 freedom which would enable him to repudiate his 
 bargain. Nor was this aloofness confined to civil 
 concerns ; and bearing in mind the relations of An- 
 selm with Dublin and St. Andrews, there is a real 
 fitness in the salutation of the Archbishop of Canterbury 
 by Pope Urban II. as quasi alterius orbis papa. Again, 
 it must be borne in mind that there was no mediaeval 
 theory without its counter-theory ; and this was very 
 definitely the case with the current theory as to the 
 relation of the Papacy to the Church. Of the great 
 schoolmen who set themselves against it in one way or 
 another, three, Alexander of Hales, William of Ockham, 
 and John Wyclif, were Englishmen. Although it would 
 not be true to say that their view was in any sense that 
 of English Churchmen as a whole, there are many signs 
 that the other theory had begun to sit very lightly upon 
 thoughtful men. No doubt, there were great Church- 
 
120 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 men who magnified the Papacy on every occasion, and 
 made use of language about it which modern Papists 
 can read and quote with complacency ; but there are 
 also others who did their utmost to check its constant 
 encroachments, and to secure that English affairs should 
 be settled in England. Once more, the English character 
 of the sixteenth century did not greatly differ from that 
 of the nineteenth. The temperament which thinks more 
 of what is practically useful than of what is logically 
 unassailable was as characteristic of us then as it is 
 to-day. The Englishman cared little for the precise 
 credentials of the system by which he was governed so 
 long as it worked well ; on the other hand, a system 
 which had been proved and found to work ill need look 
 for little mercy at his hands. Consequently, resistance 
 to Papal tyranny was no new thing to us : time after 
 time English Churchmen and English statesmen had 
 had recourse to it. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say 
 that there had been a growing tendency to resist these 
 encroachments for two centuries before the abolition of 
 the papal jurisdiction. But at length, in the sixteenth 
 century, there were new facts. The New Learning had 
 shown us that, in Tonstal's words, " The Church of 
 Rome had never of old such a monarchy as of late 
 it hath usurped." Since therefore the papal monarchy 
 was not of divine right, and since experience had 
 shown that it was a nuisance, the practical English- 
 man wished nothing better than that it should be 
 swept away, so far as he was concerned. Others 
 who were less practical, or to whom the existence 
 of a Papacy had become a kind of second nature, might 
 do as they thought good ; but at least they claimed 
 the right to exercise a corresponding discretion. In 
 
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 121 
 
 doing this, however, he never dreamt of separating 
 himself from the unity of the Church. The Enghsh 
 theologians, Tonstal and Gardiner, Stokesley and 
 Sampson, make this perfectly plain in their defence 
 of the king's proceedings against attacks from with- 
 out. All that we had done was to remove an inno- 
 vation which had come to be a notable obstacle to 
 that unity, so far as no small part of Christendom was 
 concerned. 
 
 Turning now to the relations between Church and 
 State, and the position of the clergy : here also the action 
 which was ultimately taken in England had been led up 
 to by previous events. The question was to us no new 
 one ; it had been raised again and again, now on this 
 point, now on that. Conflicts of jurisdiction, diver- 
 gences between the canon law and the law of the realm, 
 questions of immunity, and disputes about taxation were 
 of frequent occurrence : questions hardly spiritual at all 
 in any real sense, although at the time they were con- 
 tested as if the whole spiritual order stood or fell with 
 them. Now there was no great difference between the 
 claims of the civil power in England and elsewhere. 
 But the course of the struggle in England was pro- 
 foundly modified by the fact that the civil power was 
 far stronger as a rule than elsewhere. In England, 
 and here alone, there was a government and a civil 
 administration of justice as wide-spread and as constant 
 as that of the Church itself. This being so, a contest 
 between Church and State, on matters which were not 
 really vital to either, could have but one result. And 
 in fact the contest always ended, sooner or later, in a 
 victory for the Crown. It might be glossed over, the 
 rights of the Church might be set forth in imposing 
 
122 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 language, but the result was uniformly the same. In 
 other words, in England the Royal Supremacy was 
 from the first a reality and not a shadow. If there 
 existed for a time an imperium in imperio, it only existed 
 on sufferance ; and little by little the civil power 
 extended its sway. 
 
 At length, at the Reformation, the civil power 
 called for a formal recognition of its authority, and 
 laid hold upon that which it claimed with no light 
 hand. Henceforward there was to be no imperium in 
 imperio ; henceforward there was to be no question of 
 the fact that the King of England was king of all his 
 people. But still, excepting for the temporary excesses 
 of the period of transition, no new principle was intro- 
 duced. If we compare the Reformation Settlement in 
 this respect with the famous principles of William the 
 Conqueror as recorded by Eadmer, there is little if 
 anything that is new in principle. All that has hap- 
 pened is that what was once arbitrary and occasional 
 has now been made regular and precise. Here again^ 
 the Reformation was but the completed work of forces 
 which had been in operation long before. 
 
 And once more, with regard to the clearing away 
 of what had become formal or out of proportion in 
 faith and worship. Such a task appealed to some of 
 the most deeply-rooted elements of the English char- 
 acter ; and above all, it commended itself to English- 
 men at a time when they were busily engaged in 
 weighing the existing order and ascertaining for them- 
 selves how much of it was practically useful. The 
 only danger was lest they should do their work over- 
 sweepingly, with too utilitarian an eye and with too 
 little of real spiritual insight. But the process itself of 
 
BEFORE THE REFORMATION 123 
 
 regulation and simplification was the carrying out of an 
 aim which had long been before the English mind. It 
 is hard to make a hero of Reginald Pecock, but he was 
 a very far-seeing man, and often represents the best 
 spirit of the English Church of his day as no other 
 does. Never is this more convincingly the case than 
 when he warns his fellow-bishops that it is not wise to 
 make the way of salvation narrower by multiplying 
 definitions and rules, and so to place additional diffi- 
 culties and stumbling-blocks in the path of the way- 
 faring man. The warning is taken up by John Colet 
 when he advises his scholar to keep to the Creed, the 
 Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, and let 
 divines, if they will, dispute about the rest. It finds its 
 most perfect expression in the words of Launcelot 
 Andrewes, " God hath made plain those things that be 
 necessary ; those that are not plain, not necessary." 
 
 It is sometimes said that the English Church 
 steered a middle course in the religious revolution of 
 the sixteenth century. If this means that we delibe- 
 rately made a compromise, nothing could be further 
 from the truth. Men were not in the mood for com- 
 promise ; rather they often fought about minor points 
 of personal preference and individual opinion when 
 they might very well have left them open. But on 
 the other hand, if it means that the English Reforma- 
 tion aims at giving expression to the many-sidedness 
 of God's revelation, it is doubtless most true. It is 
 true in the sense that our Reformation was the w'ork 
 of the body as a whole and not of any particular 
 section. And it is true in the sense that the English 
 Church made a deliberate efiFort to assimilate what was 
 
124 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 i^ood, whencesoever it came. That our Reformation 
 took such a course is due in part to the fact that 
 many of the elements in it were famiUar to us already ; 
 in part to the fact that the EngHsh Church already 
 possessed the type which has been developed more 
 strongly since. 
 
 Such a Reformation is no doubt open to attack 
 from many quarters. P'or example, the Via Media 
 may be the way of loftiest aspirations, but it may be 
 no more than the line of least resistance. The prac- 
 tical man is frequently a bungler, and his handiwork 
 does not always serve the purposes which it was in- 
 tended to serve. The work in which a whole people is 
 occupied will hardly be done without gathering round 
 it the harpies and the vultures. And a change which 
 was carried out in so business-like a fashion does not 
 satisfy those who are accustomed to judge of spiritual 
 fervour by excitement. 
 
 Much loss and failure there undoubtedly was. But 
 it ought not to discourage us to find that the English 
 Reformation can be so spoken against, and from so 
 many contradictory points of view. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THE REFORMATION! 
 
 Bv THE Right Rev. the LORD BISHOP OF LONDON 
 
 All great movements which affect the organisation of 
 society are of slow growth, and are complex in their 
 nature. It is difficult always to keep this truth in mind. 
 There is a tendency to investigate one cause to the 
 exclusion of others. There is a tendency to regard 
 only the immediate steps which produced a change, or 
 criticise only the immediate results which that change 
 produced. I propose to regard the Reformation in 
 England under three aspects : political, moral, and 
 intellectual ; and to consider the larger and more per- 
 manent causes and results. 
 
 I. Politically the Reformation expressed the dis- 
 satisfaction of the national spirit with the Papal govern- 
 ment of the Church. The Middle Ages tell a continuous 
 tale of opposition to Papal interference. In England, 
 earlier than in any other country, a national spirit was 
 developed. The end of the thirteenth century saw 
 England united under a truly national system of govern- 
 ment. The Pope was not allowed to exercise any 
 influence on English affairs. Clergy and laity alike saw 
 with growing discontent the drain of English money to 
 the Roman Court. So far as the Reformation declared 
 that the affairs of the English Church should be managed 
 
 1 A Paper read at the Church Congress, Carlisle, 1884, Reprinted by 
 permission. 
 
126 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 within the rcahn, it only expressed a long-prevailing 
 sentiment of the English people. 
 
 2. Morally, the organisation of the mediaeval Church 
 had become unwieldy. Institutions once useful had 
 survived the period of their usefulness. Monasticism 
 fostered an indolent class. There were too many 
 clergy, and many of them acted unworthily of their 
 calling. Ecclesiastical discipline had become a vexa- 
 tious means of exacting money. Ecclesiastical disputes 
 were common, and appeals to Rome were encouraged. 
 A process in the Papal court was costly and was end- 
 less. Diocesan and provincial jurisdictions were almost 
 destroyed by the system of appeals. The encroach- 
 ments of Rome had thrown into confusion the old 
 machinery of the Church. Thoughtful men had long 
 seen the dangers of this disorganisation, and the need 
 of reform ; but national or provincial Synods were 
 powerless without the Pope. Even Europe, united 
 into the reforming Councils of the fifteenth century, 
 failed to discover a practicable scheme for reform. 
 Nothing could be done save through the Papacy, and 
 the Papacy became more and more secular in its aims, 
 more and more immersed in Italian politics. Mean- 
 while the feeling of nationality grew apace. In England 
 the rise of a prosperous middle class created a practical 
 spirit which wished to see the Church made more useful 
 to the people. The associations of the past ceased to 
 outweigh the needs of the present. The clergy were 
 bidden to feel that they were made for the people, 
 not the people for them. The moral aspect of the 
 Reformation was a desire for a simpler Church system, 
 more intimately connected with the aspirations of 
 national life. 
 
THE REFORMATION 127 
 
 3. Intellectually, the Reformation movement was 
 helped by an increased knowledge of the world, of 
 literature, and of the language of the Scriptures. Men 
 were not satisfied with being told that doctrines or cere- 
 monies were the traditions of the Church ; they asked 
 for the grounds of these traditions ; they demanded 
 proof of their agreement with the words of the Church's 
 Divine Founder. 
 
 These three tendencies were each of them of long 
 growth. No one of them necessarily involved the 
 overthrow of the Papal headship, or any breach in 
 the outward unity of the Church ; but when they 
 all came together, they created a mass of opposition 
 to the existing system, which ended in a series of 
 revolts. 
 
 The importance of Wyclif in religious history lies 
 in the fact that in him these three tendencies first 
 converged, and were embodied in his career. At first 
 he was an ecclesiastical politician, who employed his 
 learning in finding arguments for combating the Papal 
 claims to interfere in the affairs of the English Church. 
 Next, he laboured at the restoration of preaching and a 
 revival of religious life. The more he increased in 
 spiritual earnestness, the more he felt that the spiritual 
 interests of men were sacrificed to an overgrown 
 ecclesiastical system. He asserted that the Church was 
 the congregation of faithful people, and that the Papal 
 primacy ought to be exercised solely for the purpose of 
 ministering to their needs. His noble translation of the 
 Bible put into the hands of Englishmen the whole of 
 Scripture ; " Our great charter," he calls it, " written 
 and given to us by God, on which alone we can found 
 our claims to His kingdom." Then, in the interests, as 
 
128 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 he thought, of theological learning, Wyclif went on to 
 attack the current form in which the doctrine of the 
 Sacrament of the Altar was expressed. He invoked 
 " grammar, logic, natural science, and the sense of the 
 Gospel," against a definition which stated that the words 
 of the priest at consecration wrought a change in the 
 actual substance of the bread and wine. He did not 
 deny, nay, he condemned those who denied, the real 
 presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Christ's body, he 
 said, was sacramentally and spiritually, but still actually, 
 present in every part of the Host, as the soul was 
 present in the human body. Wyclif did not seek to 
 overthrow the current belief in the nature of the 
 Sacrament ; he only demanded that the philosophical 
 definition of its operation should be less material and 
 more spiritual. He thought that the language in 
 ordinary use was unscientific, and led to a low view of 
 the Sacrament itself, and to an undue exaltation of the 
 person of the priest. 
 
 Thus, politically, Wyclif asserted the freedom of 
 England from Papal interference ; morally, he strove 
 to adapt the ecclesiastical system to the needs of the 
 people ; intellectually, he demanded that doctrines 
 should be defined in accordance with " logic, natural 
 science, and the sense of the Gospel." Wyclif strove to 
 gain these ends within the existing framework of the 
 Church ; but this was not to be. The Papacy refused 
 to move in the direction of reform till it was startled 
 by the revolt of half of Western Christendom. It then 
 became less powerful for political interference, in the 
 countries which remained in its obedience. It reformed 
 the more glaring abuses in its ecclesiastical system, and 
 developed a strong organisation for defensive and 
 
THE REFORMATION 129 
 
 offensive purposes. Intellectually, it made little change 
 in its traditions. 
 
 The question of the influence of the Reformation 
 on England can only be answered by considering what 
 England gained and lost by abandoning the Papal 
 headship. This is only possible by comparing the chief 
 features of the English Church, not with an idealised 
 Church of the Middle Ages, but with the Roman Church 
 as it has been in operation since the Council of Trent. 
 I wish to be as impartial as inherent prejudice will 
 allow an English Churchman to be. You will pardon 
 me if my language sounds cold, as I briefly indicate 
 a few considerations of the results of the three causes 
 which I have traced. 
 
 I. Politically, the Reformation largely developed 
 the national spirit of England, through the need of 
 antagonism to the Papacy and the Pope's adherents. 
 First, the war with Spain, which was a direct result of 
 the Reformation, directed England into the career of 
 colonisation, to which her present greatness is due. 
 Next, the breach between England and her chief neigh- 
 bours on the Continent produced a feeling of isolation, 
 which forced Englishmen to think and act for them- 
 selves. The national spirit of England became more 
 resolute, adventurous, and practical. Englishmen were 
 driven to face actual facts, and deal with them promptly 
 and sensibly. It was this training which enabled Eng- 
 land to overcome her competitors for the mastery j of 
 the New World ; but she would not have overcome 
 them permanently unless she had also shown a greater 
 civilising power, which means greater honesty, greater 
 straightforwardness, greater love of justice. National 
 morality, it must be remembered, can only be judged 
 
 I 
 
I30 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 by comparison. I cannot say that before the Reforma- 
 tion England's policy showed a greater care for right- 
 eousness than did that of her neighbours ; but since 
 the Reformation there have been many conspicuous 
 instances in which England has shown a more exalted 
 standard of national morality. England has gained 
 by the Reformation in the more sterling qualities of 
 national life. On the other hand, it must be admitted 
 that Europe as a whole lost somewhat by the breach 
 of its religious unity. Its aims became narrower, more 
 self-interested, less concerned with matters of European 
 policy. As regards England itself, increased strength of 
 national character was won by a sacrifice of larger 
 interests. The Reformation intensified England's ten- 
 dency to isolation. It deepened, if it did not create, 
 the less attractive features of the English character — 
 a narrowness of sympathy, an inability to recognise 
 problems which lie outside the sphere of immediate 
 practice, and a disregard of logical principles of national 
 action. This was in a great measure England's loss 
 from the Reformation. 
 
 2. I turn to the ecclesiastical system of England as 
 it was affected by the Reformation. First, as regards 
 the mechanism for the self-government of the Church, 
 the Reformation did not go far enough. The Papal 
 headship was abolished, and the temporal privileges of 
 that headship were transferred to the Crown. Nothing 
 was done to re-establish the organisation of the Church 
 as a self-governing community in spiritual matters. It 
 must be noted that the loss of its old mechanism was 
 the result of a long course of Papal aggression. The 
 English Church inherited confusion, and the time of 
 the Reformation was not propitious for amending that 
 
THE REFORMATION 131 
 
 confusion. The royal supremacy took the place of 
 the Papal supremacy ; but the Church as a spiritual 
 community gained no greater liberty of action. As a 
 consequence of this, the English Church has shown 
 too great a tendency to Erastianism. Its discipline is 
 defective ; it lacks a logical or settled system of juris- 
 diction. This must be admitted ; but again an impartial 
 comparison with other countries suggests some com- 
 pensation. The English Church has been in close 
 relation with the national life. Its demands may not 
 have been so precise as those of the Roman Church, but 
 its pervading influence has been greater. It has had no 
 exact theory of the relations between Church and State ; 
 but the exact theory of Rome has never been successful 
 in practice. A theory may be very imposing ; but when 
 it is whittled away by separate concordats, which are 
 being constantly eluded, it ceases to command much 
 respect. The English Church may still repair its system 
 in the future ; but I doubt whether it has much to learn 
 from the success of the system of the Church of Rome. 
 As regards the relations of the Church to the 
 people, it must be admitted that the changes made at 
 the time of the Reformation were too exclusively made 
 in the interests of the prosperous middle class. The 
 old services were adjusted to their intelligence, were 
 made simpler and more practical. Moreover, the 
 exigencies of a time of change demanded one intelli- 
 gible and uniform mode of worship. Everything 
 combined to make the new system narrower and 
 smaller than the old one. It contained fewer elements 
 which appealed to higher and lower minds ; it aimed 
 more exclusively at the average man ; it had little 
 outlying region of mysticism in which finer souls might 
 
132 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 wander at will ; it did not enthral the unintelligent by 
 appeals to their feelings ; it disregarded the teaching of 
 the eye ; it aimed at practical edification, at an orderly, 
 but comprehensive organisation of religious society. I 
 pass by the question how far the Anglican Church did 
 the utmost, or the best, that the times allowed. She 
 certainly achieved one great object, which marks her as 
 distinct from other deviations from the old system. She 
 preserved intact the institution of the Church and of the 
 Sacraments as they were in the Apostolic age. By so 
 doing she retained the possibility of strong organic life. 
 On the other hand, she lost some of the more imagina- 
 tive elements of religious feeling ; adopted a form of 
 worship which was simple, but somewhat inflexible ; 
 and became too exclusively connected with the aspira- 
 tions and desires of the active and influential classes in 
 English society. Hence, in a time of spiritual awaken- 
 ing, she could find no room for John Wesley, and was 
 so well satisfied with her own work of edification that 
 she looked coldly on the work of evangelisation. In 
 another time of spiritual awakening she lost the alle- 
 giance of many fine minds, which missed in her the 
 definite assertion of the principles of ecclesiastical life. 
 
 Admitting these defects, let us again turn to com- 
 parison with the history of the Roman Church. The 
 Church of England has not, at all events until recent 
 times, produced the same number of individuals who 
 have scaled the higher regions of the spiritual life. She 
 has not in the past succeeded in laying so firm a hold 
 upon the masses. But she has undoubtedly succeeded 
 in carrying Christianity into the principles which direct 
 the life and conduct of the community, in a larger 
 degree than prevails in any other country. Her direct- 
 
THE REFORMATION 133 
 
 ness, her demand for a sense of individual responsibility, 
 her full offer to all of the means of grace — these things 
 have tended to keep strong in Englishmen that which 
 is the chief element of the religious life, a sense of sin. 
 The more elaborate system of the Roman Church has 
 not been so successful in this point in those countries 
 where it has worked unimpeded. This consideration 
 seems to me to be a very weighty one ; for the sense of 
 sin is the most powerful bulwark against the tempta- 
 tions of unbelief. On their capacity for quickening and 
 keeping alive this sense of sin, the future of all religious 
 organisations will more and more closely depend. The 
 strength of the Church of England lies in the fact that 
 she has created and maintained a high average of 
 practical Christianity. The national difficulties which 
 impressed upon her in the sixteenth century somewhat 
 limited aims have now passed away. Made wise by 
 experience, she has the promise of a great future. 
 Without any change in her constitution she has made 
 her system more definite, has found room for higher 
 aspirations, has shown that she can influence the 
 masses, has developed great missionary activity, and 
 has spread her influence in every quarter of the globe. 
 Only in later years has she begun to reap the full 
 harvest of the Reformation. 
 
 3. Intellectually, I see no losses to be set against 
 the gain of a frank acceptance of Holy Scripture as the 
 sole basis of doctrine and Church government, and a 
 recognition that the sense of the Gospel has to be deter- 
 mined by strict adherence to " logic, grammar, and 
 natural science." The modest claim of the Anglican 
 Church to be " a witness and keeper of Holy Writ " 
 has been fully maintained. The greater pretension of 
 
134 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 the Roman Church to inherent powers of authoritative 
 interpretation has not proved so efficient a barrier 
 against unbeHef. An extensive frontier affords weak 
 places for attack. The process of slow retreat from un- 
 tenable positions is hard to accomplish. The imposing 
 appearance of strength and organisation vanishes on 
 closer inspection. English theology has shown a capa- 
 city for facing the actual questions which perplex men's 
 minds. It has been strong in its readiness to accept 
 the historic method, and in its desire to obtain scientific 
 results ; it has done this in a careful and sober spirit, 
 which has made it powerful to mediate between con- 
 flicting opinions. The English Church has been espe- 
 cially successful in retaining the allegiance and directing 
 the thought of vigorous minds. 
 
 To sum up these fragmentary remarks. The teach- 
 ing and the personality of Wyclif expressed and fore- 
 shadowed the great characteristics of the English 
 Reformation. The influence of the Reformation in 
 England was strong in directing our national history 
 and moulding our national character. The reformed 
 Church of England has kept alive the spirit of personal 
 religion in a way which contrasts favourably with other 
 religious organisations. Her defects have been serious^ 
 but they are not irremediable, and she has shown a 
 capacity to remedy them. In the region of thought 
 she has held the strongest position, for she has elected 
 to stand by the strength of her great central fort, the 
 power of the Scriptures as the Word of God, and the 
 historical truth of the facts which they relate. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND 
 
 Bv THE Rev. J. HUNT, D.D. 
 
 Why is not the National Church the Church of the 
 nation ? To this question there are many answers, 
 according to the different readings of history. Un- 
 fortunately, the history of religious parties in England 
 is rarely written with impartiality. Facts are sometimes 
 ignored and often denied, so that, instead of history, 
 we have merely the colouring or the party prejudices 
 of the writers. They follow each other, tell the same 
 stories without further inquiry, misrepresent the men 
 whom they dislike, praise those with whom they agree, 
 and end in a representation of history which is essen- 
 tially false. 
 
 This essay is intended to be an historical inquiry. 
 The writer wishes to keep close to undisputed facts, 
 and to make only such inferences as he believes can 
 undeniably be deduced from the facts. He wishes to 
 write in a conciliatory spirit, not to provoke opposition, 
 which, however, he scarcely hopes to avoid so long as 
 there are any who to truth prefer their party or their 
 prejudices. 
 
 The first and most direct answer to the question 
 we have asked is to be found in the principles of a 
 narrow Puritan party. It is difficult to speak on this 
 subject with sufficient caution, because of the vague 
 
136 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 and indefinite use of the word Puritan. A custom has 
 of late arisen which speaks of Catholics and Puritans, 
 or Anglicans and Puritans, as if all Puritans were one 
 definite class, and distinct from the Church of England, 
 while some who were not Puritans are regarded as con- 
 stituting the Church. But all Puritans were Church- 
 men. They strove to avoid separation. Independents, 
 Baptists, and all who separated from the Church, ought 
 not to be classed with Puritans. As a matter of history, 
 the name has been applied to all who embraced the 
 doctrinal system of Calvin. Bishop Montague called 
 the framers of the Lambeth Articles Puritans ; and 
 according to Bishop Sanderson, Richard Hooker him- 
 self, as a doctrinal Calvinist, was called a Puritan. 
 The name was also used as a general term for all 
 persons who were more than usually serious, who had 
 morning and evening worship in their families, and 
 were more strict than others in their religious duties. 
 King James I. reckoned all as Puritans who did not 
 approve of his arbitrary government. Richard Baxter 
 said that in his time a Puritan was one that was for 
 archbishops, bishops, liturgies, and ceremonies, as he 
 had always been. 
 
 When we speak of a narrow Puritan party, we 
 mean those represented by Thomas Cartwright — those 
 who believe that in the New Testament there is a 
 complete system of ecclesiastical polity, that Christ 
 established a Church with authority to confer Orders, 
 without which no man had a right to preach or to 
 administer Sacraments, and that this Church polity was 
 not episcopal, but presbyterial. The minutest points 
 of government and ritual were supposed to have been 
 determined by Christ, as they had been by Moses in 
 
RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND 137 
 
 the old dispensation. The argument was that if care 
 was taken for the ornaments of the Temple, much more 
 for those of the Christian Church. If the bars, pins, 
 and besoms of the Tabernacle were of Divine appoint- 
 ment, it was not likely that the government and the 
 ritual of the Christian Church would be left undeter- 
 mined. The elder Leighton to the same efifect said, 
 that if God remembered the bars of the ark, it was not 
 likely that He should forget the pillars of the Church. 
 Even the genius of Milton, led away by the exigencies 
 of an argument, failed to realise that the Christian 
 Church had more of the spirit and less of the letter 
 than the older dispensation. He, too, thought that 
 if God cared so much for the inferior building, much 
 more for the more glorious structure. 
 
 Those who speak of Puritans as if they were not 
 Churchmen suppose a Catholic or Anglo-Catholic party. 
 There was, indeed, at one time such a party. It was 
 represented by Gardiner, Tonstal, Bonner, and others, 
 who held all the Roman Catholic doctrines taught in 
 the Church of England before the Reformation, with 
 the exception that they acknowledged the supremacy 
 of the King in the place of the supremacy of the Pope. 
 But to this they returned in the days of Queen Mary, 
 and when Elizabeth came to the throne they refused 
 the oath of royal supremacy. They were strictly and 
 properly Roman Catholics. In the time of Elizabeth 
 there was no such party as is now called the Catholic 
 or High Church party. Those who were not Roman 
 Catholics were definitely on the side of the Protestant 
 Reformation. Most of them had been in exile, and 
 were the friends, and to some extent the disciples, of the 
 Swiss Reformers. The majority of them would not have 
 
138 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 objected to the establishment of a Presbyterian poHty 
 and Presbyterian ritual. But it was the will of Queen 
 Elizabeth that the hierarchy or a hierarchy be con- 
 tinued. Her policy was to make outward changes as 
 few, as possible. Such men as Jewel, Grindal, Sandys, 
 Pilkington, Parkhurst, and others, who afterwards became 
 bishops, were indifferent as to what polity was estab- 
 lished. Parkhurst, when Bishop of Norwich, said in 
 plain words, that he wished the Church of England had 
 been modelled after the pattern of the Church of Zurich. 
 There were many things enforced by the Queen which 
 they did not like, but they reckoned that to conform 
 was the wisest thing they could do. Sandys, who at one 
 time strongly objected to the ceremonies, recommended 
 that they should be laid aside gradually and quietly. A 
 beautiful house, he said, was not to be pulled down and 
 levelled to the ground because there was " a window 
 awry or some little eyesore." Some of the same bishops 
 were afterwards strict in enforcing the ceremonies, be- 
 cause they were ordered by royal authority. The whole 
 of the bishops and leading clergy in Elizabeth's time 
 were Calvinists, strong Protestants, in a sense Puritans. 
 The real division was into Erastians and Anti-Erastians. 
 Those who conformed and enforced conformity did so 
 because they believed the habits and ceremonies were 
 indifferent in themselves, but the royal or state autho- 
 rity should be obeyed. Those who scrupled conformity 
 did so because they believed that the things imposed 
 were not indifferent, that they had a meaning, and that 
 the Queen or Parliament had no right to enforce 
 them. 
 
 If the Reformation in any way affected the consti- 
 tution of the Church of England besides the introduc- 
 
RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND 139 
 
 tion of Protestant doctrines, it was in establishing the 
 supremacy of the civil ruler as supreme head of the 
 Church. The Act of King Henry's time conferred on 
 him the power to redress, reform, &c., all such errors, 
 heresies, &c., whereby any manner of spiritual authority 
 or jurisdiction, &c. The same power was restored to 
 Elizabeth. The Church which had authority in con- 
 troversies of faith was the Church of which she was 
 the governor. Convocation has had no actual authority 
 since the Act of Submission. The argument which 
 underlies the whole of Hooker's Polity,^ which is fully 
 set forth in the eighth Book, is the supremacy of the 
 civil ruler over the Church. Hooker even defended 
 the title given to Henry of " Supreme Head of the 
 Church," on the ground that the civil ruler had the 
 same authority in the Christian Church which the 
 Jewish kings had in the State Church of the Jews. 
 He did not defend the divine right of episcopacy as 
 opposed to what Cartwright maintained of the divine 
 right of presbytery. He defended the authority of the 
 king or queen to rule the Church. The first writer 
 in the Church of England after the Reformation who 
 advocated the divine institution of episcopacy was 
 Bancroft, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. In 
 a famous sermon, preached at St. Paul's Cross in 
 1588, he took the ground for episcopacy which Cart- 
 wright^ had taken for presbytery, but far above the 
 
 ^ Burnet says that this Act was understood by the old learning as no 
 interference with ecclesiastical matters, but by the new learning that in such 
 matters the magistrate had full authority (" History of Reformation," P. iii., 
 B. iii.). As a matter of fact, it took away all power from Conrocation. 
 
 " So much is said in the sermon of the supremacy of the civil magistrate 
 over the Church that Hallam says Bancroft did not advocate the jus diviuiwi 
 of Episcopacy, but only stated the fact of its existence, and that " in no strong 
 terms" ("Constitutional History," vol. i., p. 396, n.). He quotes Cardwell 
 
I40 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 ecclesiastical authority he put the civil. He reproached 
 those represented by Cartwright as being the only 
 party of Christians in the world that had framed an 
 ecclesiastical polity in which the civil ruler was not 
 supreme. It was on the same principle that the Eliza- 
 bethan bishops enforced the habits and the ceremonies. 
 Archbishop Parker said that he cared nothing for sur- 
 plice, cope, tippet, or wafer bread, but he did care for 
 the authority that enjoined them.^ Bishop Aylmer told 
 his recalcitrant clergy that they were the Queen's ser- 
 vants ; the surplice was the queen's livery, and they 
 must wear it. 
 
 The principles of this narrow party of Puritans 
 were an entire innovation on the principles of the 
 PvUglish Reformation. They believed that they found 
 an ecclesiastical polity in the Scriptures, and therefore 
 they refused to acknowledge the supremacy of the 
 Queen in matters which concerned the Church. The 
 controversy evoked by Cartwright turned on this ques- 
 tion. Whitgift, who answered Cartwright before Hooker 
 did, found no Church polity in the New Testament, and 
 maintained that the civil ruler should be supreme in 
 the government of the Church. These principles ac- 
 corded with the facts of the Reformation, which had 
 been effected mainly by the sovereign and Parliament. 
 Henry compelled the clergy to submission ; Edward 
 and his advisers took the side of the Reforming bishops, 
 who were the minority in his reign ; and Elizabeth sus- 
 pended all who refused to acknowledge her supremacy 
 and embrace the reformed faith. 
 
 as saying the contrary, which has certainly been the general belief. The ser- 
 mon is said to have been evoked by the Mar-Prelate Tracts, which were 
 written not by a Puritan, but by a Separatist, if John Penry was, as is 
 supposed, the author. ' Quoted in Hook's " Parker." 
 
RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND 141 
 
 It is common now with some party historians to 
 follow Peter Heylyn and the Nonjuror Brett, in 
 ascribing the scruples of the Puritans to the influence 
 of Calvin. Heylyn even credits him with having cajoled 
 the English bishops not to enforce the ceremonies. 
 The great Reformer of Geneva is not at the present 
 time in high favour, but he was certainly not respon- 
 sible for the scruples of the Nonconforming Puritans. 
 Calvin was a man of peace, a great reconciler. He 
 was willing to sacrifice much for unity. He wished 
 to unite all the Protestant Churches into one great 
 Reformed Church, and he looked to the Church of 
 England as the natural and proper leader in such an 
 enterprise. Heylyn has a story of Cranmer's refusing 
 Calvin's help, giving as a reason that " he knew the 
 man," but like many of Peter's stories it does not rest on 
 any authority. Cranmer always called Calvin his " dear 
 brother in Christ." Great deference was always paid 
 by our Reformers to Calvin's judgment. The first 
 Prayer Book of Edward is believed to have been 
 revised at his suggestion, and changes introduced 
 which he recommended. The sentences, exhortation, 
 confession, and in a sense the absolution, as they now 
 stand in our Prayer Book, were in substance taken 
 from Calvin's. He thought the revised book still con- 
 tained tolerabiles irieptice, trifles that might be endured, 
 but he urged conformity on all the Puritans. When 
 the troubles at Frankfort were ended he rejoiced, 
 though the victory was on the side of those who had 
 contended for the use of the English Prayer Book. 
 He regretted that the Queen enforced the ceremonies, 
 but it was due to him, to Bucer, and to Peter Martyr, 
 that many of the Puritans did not make an actual 
 
142 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 separation. These all advised conformity as the wisest 
 thing to be done in the circumstances. Beza gave the 
 same advice to a congregation of Baptists at Banstead 
 in Surrey. They were to continue to frequent their 
 Parish Churches. When some Puritans succeeded in 
 forming a presbytery or classt's, it was to be in subjection 
 to the existing government of the Church. The classt's 
 was not to ordain but to recommend to the bishops 
 proper persons for ordination. 
 
 On the principle that opposites generate each other 
 this narrow party produced another. Peter Heylyn 
 calls the Puritans a " faction," and so they were if they 
 are all to be identified with Cartwright, but this cannot 
 be done. Heylyn's party was also a " faction," and of 
 later origin. It, too, was an innovation on the prin- 
 ciples of the Reformed Church of England. The old 
 Episcopal regime of the Church had been retained by 
 the will of Elizabeth, but it was not regarded as of 
 divine institution or essentially necessary to the con- 
 stitution of a Church. The orders of foreign and 
 non-Episcopal Churches were recognised by Act of 
 Parliament.^ Men like Travers at the Temple, and 
 Whittingham, Dean of Durham, who had been or- 
 dained by presbyters, were licensed and instituted by 
 the bishops. The Huguenots were openly protected 
 and their Orders acknowledged, and there are cases 
 of Scotch Presbyterians preaching in the Church of 
 England. The narrow party among the Puritans had 
 taken very high ground in the assertion of the divine 
 right of Presbytery. The new party was to rival them 
 in the same claim for Episcopal government. 
 
 ' 13 Eliz. c. 12, "An Act for the Ministers of the Church to be of Sound 
 Religion." It is quoted at length in Marsden's " Early Puritans," p. 227. 
 
RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND 143 
 
 By the time of Archbishop Laud this new faction 
 had become so strong that it was able in great measure 
 to revolutionise the Church. The communion tables, 
 which took the place of the altars ejected at the Refor- 
 mation, and which were to stand, as the rubric still 
 directs, in the body of the church or chancel, were 
 removed to the place where the altars formerly stood, 
 and placed altar-wise by the east wall, and people were 
 told to bow to them as Roman Catholics bow to the 
 altars. We do not know if in Laud's time the clergyman 
 turned with the tables, and, contrary to the rubric, stood 
 on the west side instead of the north. 
 
 This party not only made changes in the worship 
 and ritual of the Church, they even succeeded to some 
 extent in changing the doctrine. Hitherto the clergy 
 accepted the theology of Calvin. All the Reformers, so 
 far as their sentiments are known, were Calvinists. As 
 the doctrinal system of Calvin is now all but universally 
 abandoned, the question is merely one of antiquarian 
 interest. We may examine it with the same impartiality 
 that we would a petrified fossil. But the Calvinism of 
 the Standards of the Church of England is a fact which 
 no one who has not party interests to serve would 
 ever have thought of denying. The arguments of such 
 writers as Archbishop Lawrence are not worth a 
 moment's consideration. His main argument on that 
 side is that our Articles were taken from the Augsburg 
 Confession, which was compiled by Melanchthon, and 
 he was not a Predestinarian. It is true that some of 
 our Articles are taken from this Confession, but it is also 
 true that this Confession has no Article on Predestina- 
 tion, and our Reformers thought proper to compile one. 
 Lawrence has another argument, which is, that the sub- 
 
144 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 ject was not yet under discussion when our Articles 
 were written ; but Calvin's Institutes were first published 
 in 1534, and that was a famous book with all the Re- 
 formers. The contrary doctrine was first preached at 
 Cambridge, and struck with astonishment the old ortho- 
 dox Churchmen as much as they had been struck by 
 the doctrine of the jus divinum of Episcopacy. It was 
 at once denounced as a dangerous novelty. The heads 
 of the Church — Canterbury, York, and London — imme- 
 diately met and asserted in the strong language of the 
 Lambeth Articles the doctrines which were embodied 
 in the Standards of the Church, The chief Anglican 
 theologians in the time of Elizabeth and James were 
 Calvinists. Not merely Hooker and Whitgift, but some 
 of the ablest defenders of Episcopal government. Hall, 
 Carleton, and Davenant were sent to the Synod of Dort 
 to support the Calvinists of Holland. Some sneer at 
 this as merely an eccentricity of the Scottish king, but 
 it was in accordance with the prevailing belief of the 
 Church at that time. James said of Bertius, a Dutch 
 Arminian, that he was so shameless as to identify his 
 doctrine with that of the Church of England. By the 
 time of Charles I. the change was very marked. Not 
 many years had passed since the Synod of Dort, when 
 some one asking what the Arminians held, was answered, 
 that they held all the best bishoprics and deaneries in 
 the kingdom.^ 
 
 It is not easy, nor is it necessary for our purpose, 
 
 ^ The Church of England not only adopted Calvin's doctrine of Predesti- 
 nation, but also his doctrine of the Eucharist. We often hear of " the bare 
 meal" and "the nude commemoration" of the Calvinists, but Calvin ex- 
 pressly repudiated the view of the sacrament commonly ascribed to Zwingli. 
 He calls the Lord's Supper a spiritual banquet, a feast on Christ's sacrifice, a 
 real participation of Christ, not a simple figure, but the verity joined with the 
 symbol. If any one were to compare what Calvin wrote on the Sacraments 
 
RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND 145 
 
 to trace all the influences at work from the Long Par- 
 liament to the time of the Restoration of Charles II. 
 The Civil War has been called the bishops' war, but this 
 is scarcely correct, for many of the bishops, as Williams, 
 Hall, Ussher, and others, had opposed the faction which 
 had revolutionised the Church. They had, indeed, to 
 share the misfortunes of Laud's party, but this was owing 
 to their political action. They did not wish to oppose 
 the king. The time of the Commonwealth has been 
 called the reign of the Puritans, and the hardships 
 which some of the clergy had to bear are ascribed to 
 Puritan persecution. But those here called Puritans 
 were entirely different from Cartwright's party in the 
 time of Queen Elizabeth. The members of the Long 
 Parliament were regular members of the Church of 
 England, and in nowise opposed to Episcopal govern- 
 ment in the Church. The Westminster Assembly of 
 Divines, if we exclude the Scotch contingent brought by 
 political necessity, were almost to a man of the general 
 rank and file of the English clergy, who had received 
 regular Episcopal ordination, and were satisfied with 
 the constitution of the Church as it stood in the time of 
 Queen Elizabeth. It is only in a conventional sense 
 that they are called Presbyterians. Some of the chief 
 of them, as, for instance, Herbert Palmer, had received 
 promotion at the hands of Archbishop Laud. They 
 agreed to a Presbyterian government as the best thing 
 they could do in their circumstances. That they were 
 Calvinists in doctrine shows what a strong hold the 
 doctrines of Calvin still had on a great body of the 
 
 with the fifth Book of Hooker, the conclusion will be irresistible that Hooker 
 had Calvin before him when he wrote. There is not only the same doctrine, 
 but often the same language and illustrations. Calvin's doctrine is not to 
 be confounded with Cartwright's, which Hooker refutes. 
 
 K 
 
146 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 English clergy. They were now the party in power, 
 and it is contrary to all that we know of parties in 
 triumph if those on the other side do not suffer. 
 
 During the Commonwealth were heard the voices 
 of two men, afterwards bishops, who well deserved to 
 be heard. These were Jeremy Taylor and Edward 
 Stillingffeet. They were at that time on the losing 
 side, and were more alive to the evils of intolerance 
 than they might have been in their hour of prosperity. 
 Taylor advocates the liberty of prophesying^ on the 
 broadest principles, and with resources of ecclesiastical 
 learning such as have been rarely equalled. He 
 called it terrible folly to expect all men to be of one 
 mind. There was room in heaven for men of different 
 opinions, and so there ought to be on earth. Unity may 
 be desirable, but charity is even better than unity. The 
 Apostles' Creed is the summary of the Christian faith, 
 but it is not even necessary to believe this to be a 
 Christian. It is enough to confess that Jesus is the 
 Christ. There is no heresy where there is a good life. 
 The party which called itself the Catholic Church 
 assumed the office of judge of heresy, and then went on 
 adding new articles to the Christian faith. But those 
 who jndge are as likely to be in error as those who are 
 judged. Protestants who take the Bible as their 
 standard ought to be tolerant of those who differ from 
 them, because of the uncertainty of the meaning of 
 many things in the Bible. Every religion ought to be 
 tolerated except it can be shown to be injurious to the 
 State. God will not be angry with a man because he 
 is in error if he has done his best to find the truth, and 
 we should not be less tolerant than God is. 
 
 1 Published in 1647. 
 
RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND 147 
 
 Edward Stillingfleet ^ wished to see the whole 
 nation united in one Broad National Church. His 
 argument, like Hooker's, was addressed to those who 
 believed in the divine institution of the Presbyterian 
 government. These must have been very few, for many 
 of the leaders of them, who at this time were called 
 Presbyterians, agreed with Hooker and Stillingfleet that 
 there was no definite ecclesiastical polity in the New 
 Testament. Stillingfleet said that the old Catholic 
 Church was broad, embracing different parties and 
 admitting different doctrines and ceremonies. A 
 Church is a society for public worship, and all its out- 
 ward forms should be arranged according to what is 
 convenient. At first a Church was probably a society 
 with a pastor or deacon, but when a Church became 
 co-extensive with a nation, a different form was not 
 merely lawful but necessary. The Jewish Church was 
 constituted after the fashion of the civil polity, and if 
 Jesus is to be over His house as Moses was over that of 
 the Jews, then the Christian Church should receive its 
 polity from the State. 
 
 At the Restoration of Charles there was a golden 
 opportunity for strengthening the National Church on 
 its true basis, as here expounded by Stillingfleet, with 
 the liberty of prophesying which had been advocated 
 by Jeremy Taylor. But Stillingfleet at the Restoration 
 was too young to have any influence with those in 
 authority, and Taylor was away in Ireland. The party 
 called Presbyterians told the king that they wished to 
 see a wide National Church. Very few of them 
 objected to Episcopacy in itself. Notwithstanding the 
 sneer of Jeffries, " Baxter for bishops ! " it is true that, 
 
 ^ The " Irenicum " was published in 1659. 
 
148 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 though against what is understood by a hierarchy or 
 prelacy, they wished an Episcopacy in which the 
 bishops would act with the presbyters. They also 
 wished the creation of suffragan bishops, as some of the 
 dioceses were too large for one man to govern. 
 
 The King issued a warrant for a conference on the 
 Prayer-Book, in which both parties were to meet, 
 consult, and determine on the changes to be made. 
 When they met, the Puritans were not treated as 
 equals, but as the vanquished or disinherited. The 
 Bishop of London said that they had asked the Con- 
 ference, and now they must say what they wanted. 
 This was clever policy, worthy of a statesman like 
 Sheldon, but when the question was the peace and 
 unity of the Church, something else was wanted than 
 clever policy. The Puritans asked some things which 
 were desirable and would have been beneficial to the 
 Church, but they also asked many things which were 
 trifling and unimportant. They would have been satis- 
 fied with much less than they asked, but they were at 
 the mercy of men more disposed for retaliation than for 
 unity. The Prayer-Book was in some matters made 
 more objectionable than it was before. The great 
 opportunity was lost. The blame is generally con- 
 sidered to have rested with Sheldon. " This," Coleridge 
 once wrote, " was the incendiary ; this Sheldon, the 
 most virulent enemy and poisoner of the English 
 Church. She still feels the taint in her very bones." 
 Perhaps this is too strong, but Dissent may now be 
 said to have really begun. Those called Puritans had 
 been hitherto members of the Church of England, 
 unwiUing to separate. Now they are called Noncon- 
 formists, and are in separation. The ejected ministers 
 
RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND 149 
 
 had popular preaching power, and their adherents 
 among the laity represented a very large proportion of 
 the wealth and industry of the nation. Bishop Burnet 
 says that for many years after the Restoration the 
 Churches were but thinly attended. It was not till 
 towards the end of the century that they began to fill. 
 The Nonconformists had decreased by a third or a 
 fourth, yet some years later Lord Barrington could say 
 that they were still a fourth part of the population and 
 were " men of substance and of great influence in the 
 nation." 
 
 Not many years had passed before some on both 
 sides began to devise schemes of accommodation or 
 comprehension. The King had proved as unreliable to 
 the victorious party as he had been faithless to the 
 vanquished. Now both found that they were brothers 
 born for adversity. The primary difficulty with the 
 Nonconformists was re-ordination. Even the most 
 liberal of them had an idea that there was something 
 mystical or mysterious about ordination. Art. XXV. 
 of the XXXIX. seems to suggest that Orders, Con- 
 firmation, and Extreme Unction were merely " a corrupt 
 following of the Apostles." There is, indeed, the other 
 alternative that they are states of life allowed in Scrip- 
 ture, which does not seem a description applicable to 
 any of them. The Puritans, that is some of them, 
 thought it sacrilege to take a second ordination, but 
 common-sense Churchmen, like Bishop Wilkins, ex- 
 plained that re-ordination simply meant compliance 
 with the present law. Orders implied order. To leave 
 some ceremonies open was a common Puritan request, 
 and one which might wisely have been granted. Some 
 which were called " nocent " would in time have been 
 
I50 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 found to be in-" nocent." Another reasonable request 
 was that they might use the Prayer-Book without giving 
 ** assent and consent " to all and everything contained 
 therein. This is now virtually granted. 
 
 Richard Baxter once said that " if all the Epis- 
 copalians had been like Archbishop Ussher, all the 
 Presbyterians like Stephen Marshall, and all the Inde- 
 pendents like Jeremiah Burroughs, the breaches of the 
 Church could soon have been healed." But this spirit 
 was not that which prevailed. There were other men who 
 would yield nothing. Many books were written against 
 toleration, and compulsion was declared to be the 
 sure way to make "good Catholics." St. Augustine wai> 
 quoted, who had testified that the Donatists flourished 
 so long as they werb tolerated by Constantine, but they 
 were soon extinct after Honorius made laws for their 
 suppression. Herbert Thorndike saw no other remedy 
 for Nonconformity but to compel all to embrace the 
 Catholic faith as set forth in the first six General 
 Councils. This was the duty of those in authority. 
 To comprehend Presbyterians was to put them on 
 equality with the Catholic Church. Samuel Parker, 
 afterwards Bishop of Oxford, said that the pretence of 
 conscience was the greatest of all disturbers of govern- 
 ment, and that Christianity itself would be annihilated if 
 the State did not use its authority to suppress the sects. 
 As the State was so remiss in its duty, another writer 
 proposed the restoration to Convocation of its eccle- 
 siastical authority, for that was the proper body to dis- 
 tinguish between heresy and the Catholic faith. That 
 it should be again assembled, the writer said, was abso- 
 lutely necessary, for there were even pleas current for 
 "universal unlimited toleration." 
 
RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND 151 
 
 Now we come to a new development in our Church 
 history. James II. became a Roman Catholic. William 
 of Orange, a Presbyterian, came in his place. There 
 was no more trust to be put in princes. Hitherto, to 
 use StiUingfleet's comparison, Church and kmg, like 
 Hippocrates' twins, laughed and wept together. But 
 now the new faction had taken the ground of the old 
 Cartwright faction, that the Church should rule itself, 
 and be independent of all secular authority. The Lower 
 House of Convocation asserted this principle by some 
 acts of lawless disobedience. It refused to obey the 
 royal mandate, and claimed a right to meet when and 
 where it liked, independently of the Upper House or 
 any higher authority. The Lower House pursued its 
 course of rebellion till George I. found it necessary to 
 put it to silence as a disturbing element both in Church 
 
 and State. 
 
 The great comprehension scheme of 1689 missed 
 its way. Tillotson had recommended that it should be 
 referred to Convocation. A High Churchman was chosen 
 prolocutor, and its fate was soon sealed. With one party 
 there was great rejoicing ; South expressed his delight 
 that the " rabble " had been excluded and the " thief " 
 not allowed an easy entrance, but the ejected party 
 still showed its unwillingness to be entirely separated 
 from the National Church. After the Act of Uni- 
 formity they had made an agreement to continue 
 to receive the sacrament at their Parish Churches. 
 Though not conforming in all things they wished to 
 be regarded as members of the Established Church. 
 This they showed by occasional conformity; but it 
 raised opposition from some of both parties. The 
 famous De Foe was the chief objector on the Non- 
 
152 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 conformist side. As a political Dissenter, it appeared 
 to him as merely a mode of evading the Test Act. His 
 argument was the easy one, that if attending church 
 was right going to chapel was wrong, and contrari- 
 wise if going to chapel was right going to church was 
 wrong. To dissent and yet occasionally to conform 
 was to deny the lawfulness of Dissent. Howe, as an 
 occasional Conformist, answered De Foe. He argued 
 that the Church of England was not essentially defec- 
 tive ; its defects were only the accidentals. It was, 
 therefore, the duty of Nonconformists to conform as 
 far as they could with a good conscience. De Foe's 
 alternative of God or Baal was not regarded as serious, 
 but only as a play of wit. Though a Nonconformist 
 by circumstances he had never tried to persuade any 
 one to Nonconformity. To this De Foe answered, 
 that when a man has become so indifferent to the 
 interests of Dissent, it is his duty to conform at once 
 and entirely. 
 
 In 1703 a bill was brought into Parliament to 
 prohibit occasional conformity. Moderate men on 
 both sides regarded this as an infringement of the 
 rights of Nonconformists. On one side it was defended 
 by such men as Sacheverell, who wished to see 
 Dissenters effectually excluded from all civil offices. 
 The interests of the State required the suppression of 
 all Dissent. The object of occasional conformity was 
 said to be the undermining of the Church. Leslie, the 
 Nonjuror, supported Sacheverell, and to use his elegant 
 language, stripped the " wolves " of their shepherd's 
 clothing. He rejoiced to find that the spirit of 
 intolerance had its counterpart in the Scotch Presby- 
 terian Church, which had just petitioned Parliament 
 
RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND 153 
 
 that in any bill for toleration the benefits of it might 
 not be extended to the Episcopal Church in Scotland. 
 Other Nonconformists besides Howe defended occa- 
 sional conformity. They pleaded that they were 
 unwilling Dissenters, and had always been opposed to 
 separation. One of the chief of them was Lord Bar- 
 rington, father of the famous Bishop of Durham. He 
 called it an injury and a hardship if Nonconformists 
 were not allowed to communicate at their Parish 
 Churches. Bishop Burnet opposed the bill as incon- 
 sistent with the principles and practice of the Church 
 of England since the Reformation. In the time of 
 Queen Elizabeth Roman Catholics held civil offices, 
 and practised occasional conformity until they were for- 
 bidden by the Pope. Both Burnet and De Foe said 
 that the tendency of occasional conformity was to 
 reconcile Dissenters to the Church, while the denial 
 of it tended to confirm them in their Nonconformity. 
 
 The result which many foresaw came in its time. 
 The Nonconformists gradually conformed. Only a 
 small remnant was left, which became Arian and 
 ultimately Unitarian. In the third decade of the 
 eighteenth century many are known to have conformed. 
 Among them were Joseph Butler and his friend Thomas 
 Seeker ; Isaac Madox, who died Bishop of Worcester ; 
 and Josiah Hort, who became Archbishop of Tuam. It 
 may be difficult to trace the causal nexus, but as a 
 matter of fact the decay of the Dissenting interest 
 became a subject of lamentation among Nonconformists. 
 With the accession of the House of Hanover the spirit 
 of toleration had increased. The Stuarts were gone, 
 and with them the Sheldons, the Thorndikes, the 
 Sacheverells, the Souths, and the Leslies. The Lower 
 
154 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 House of Convocation had paid the penalty of its 
 intolerance. It last effort was to censure Bishop 
 Hoadly, that great but much abused prelate, whose 
 whole life was a continuous battle for the toleration of 
 all sects and parties. He lived to a great age, and saw 
 the complete triumph of the principles for which he con- 
 tended. His biographer's words are, " He was so happy 
 as to live long enough to reap the full reward of his 
 labours, to see his Christian and moderate opinions 
 prevail over the Kingdom in Church and State, to see 
 the Nonconformists at a low ebb for want of the 
 opposition and persecution they were too much 
 accustomed to expect from both, many of them 
 ministers desiring to receive re-ordination from his 
 hands, to see the general temper of the clergy entirely 
 changed, the bishops preferring few or none of 
 intolerant principles, and the clergy claiming no in- 
 herent authority but what is the natural result of their 
 own good behaviour as individuals in the discharge of 
 their duty." Nonconformity had fallen almost to zero. 
 Some of the ministers said that they were starved into 
 conformity, but it was not dead, and it had a new life in 
 the future. The Presbyterians may be said to have 
 ceased to exist. The Independents and Baptists had 
 always been separated, and were not, properly speaking, 
 Puritans. It seems correct to say that they had the 
 new life from the Evangelical or Methodist revival, 
 which was' a movement within the Church, though it 
 produced communities which are practically Dissenters. 
 The Wesleyan community, which is the largest Protes- 
 tant Church in the world, the Anglican not excepted, 
 are Nonconformists as it were by accident. They 
 never made any formal separation, and if they have ever 
 
RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND 155 
 
 shown hostility it has been in the way of retaUation for 
 having been treated as schismatics. 
 
 The Church of England is still the National Church. 
 The nationality is the basis of its unity. The enemies 
 of the Church's nationality are the two factions of 
 which we have spoken, who, each in its own way, have 
 maintained that there is in the New Testament a 
 definite ecclesiastical polity, and therefore the Church 
 should not be subject to any secular authority. Tolera- 
 tion and comprehension are still our ideals. Let us 
 unite as a nation for national worship, and tolerate each 
 other as far as toleration is possible or practical. But 
 let us look honestly at facts. The Church of England 
 at the Reformation was stamped as a Protestant Church. 
 By a licence of speech it may be called Catholic, but 
 it is not Catholic in the sense in which Catholic is the 
 antithesis of Protestant. At the Reformation it separated 
 from the Papal Church, and accepted the same doctrines 
 as were taught by the continental Reformers. It has 
 become a custom with some party-writers to speak of 
 the foreign Reformers as having instituted new Churches 
 while we reformed the old. This is made on the as- 
 sumption that Episcopacy is an essential of a Church, 
 but this distinction was never made by any of the 
 Reformers either in England or on the continent. 
 They all professed to reform the old Church. Luther, 
 Hooker says, formed no new Church.^ The Church of 
 England is the same that was established by Augustine, 
 not in virtue of a successive hierarchy but in virtue 
 of a successive people. It had its origin from the 
 Church of Rome. It shared for centuries the errors 
 
 ^ As if we were of opinion that Luther invented a new Church ! No. — 
 II. iii., s. I. 
 
156 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 of the Church of Rome, but these were cast off 
 when it took its stand as a separate National Church. 
 Through all its changes it was still the Church of the 
 Nation. 
 
 The recent decision of the Pope concerning the 
 invalidity of Anglican Orders is one of the most for- 
 tunate things that could have happened to the Church 
 of England in its present stage. It has been what the 
 Germans call an Aufkldriing, a clearing up of the whole 
 business. It accords with the indelible Protestant 
 character which was stamped on the Church of Eng- 
 land at the Reformation. The Reformed Ordinal did 
 not contemplate making a priest in the Roman Catholic 
 or Jewish sense of a priest. In the revisions of the 
 Liturgy everything that seemed to have such a meaning 
 was carefully eliminated. The mere fact of the removal 
 of the old altars, and the excision of even the word 
 " altar " from the Prayer-Book, is sufficient evidence of 
 that, and but for the ambiguity of the word priest it 
 too would have been excluded. The Archbishops justly 
 retorted on the Pope a Tu quoquc, by showing that 
 the primitive Ordinals had not the words which the 
 Pope said were necessary to make a sacrificing priest, 
 which by the Pope's argument proves that his own 
 Orders are not valid, and that the very idea of a sacri- 
 ficing priest is an innovation in the Christian Church. 
 The power of working the miracle which the priest 
 professes to perform by the consecration of the bread 
 and wine, is denied to the English clergy in virtue of 
 the denial of transubstantiation in our Articles and the 
 substitution of the doctrine of a spiritual presence only 
 to the worthy receiver. 
 
 The Pope took one clear strong point, and that one 
 
RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND 157 
 
 was sufficient for his purpose, but there were many 
 other considerations. On what is called the Catholic 
 ground, that in virtue of the hierarchy we continue one 
 with the Church Catholic, our Reformers certainly vio- 
 lated the canons which were made for the preservation of 
 unity. A canon of the Council of Nicaea requires for 
 the appointment of a bishop the sanction of all the 
 bishops of the province, but the bishops in possession 
 of the sees did not approve of a Protestant Consecration. 
 When Elizabeth came to the throne they were sus- 
 pended, not by ecclesiastical but by lay authority — all 
 except Kitchen of Llandaff, a man of doubtful character, 
 who turned with every wind. One of the most noto- 
 rious falsifications of history is that the Church of 
 England was reformed by the bishops and Convocations. 
 It is a simple historical fact that the first Convocation 
 in Elizabeth's reign, that of 1559, passed a series 
 of resolutions strongly in favour of Roman Catholic 
 doctrines and against the Reformed. Elizabeth had 
 to wait for the sanction of Convocation till she 
 got a Protestant Convocation willing to do as she 
 wished. She issued a mandamus to four of the bishops 
 to consecrate an archbishop. They refused. She then 
 very properly did just what the head of a National 
 Church ought to have done. She found some Pro- 
 testant bishops who had been deprived under Mary who 
 were willing to consecrate, and by her regal power she 
 undertook to make good whatever was defective. On 
 Catholic principles there was a defect which she could 
 not make good. These bishops had no ecclesiastical 
 jurisdiction ; they were not bishops in office. The sees 
 to which some of them were nominated were not 
 vacant, and on Catholic principles there cannot be two 
 
158 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 bishops in one see. This subject was exhaustively 
 discussed in the time of the Nonjurors. They said 
 that the deprived bishops were still the bishops of their 
 sees, and those who took their places were merely 
 intruders. No civil power can deprive a bishop. 
 Elizabethan bishops might confer such orders as were 
 necessary for a Protestant Church, but they could 
 not be valid according to Catholic law as it was 
 interpreted by the Nonjurors. There were other 
 objections to the consecration of Parker. Barlow, who 
 was the consecrator, did not believe in the necessity of 
 consecration. He said, as Cranmer had done, that elec- 
 tion by the king or the people was enough without any 
 consecration; so that if intention was necessary, he had no 
 intention to make any such consecration as would now 
 be considered Catholic by either Roman or Anglican. 
 Miles Coverdale is known to have been a decided 
 Puritan, and appeared at the consecration in his 
 Geneva gown, as did also John Hodgkins. Moreover, 
 Coverdale was not a bishop on Catholic principles. 
 He had been intruded into the See of Exeter while 
 John Voysey the lawful bishop still lived, who was 
 restored in Queen Mary's time. Protestants may be 
 perfectly satisfied with Parker's consecration, but Anti- 
 Protestants can scarcely be satisfied with Orders through 
 a succession in which there is so much uncertainty, and 
 where the secular has governed the ecclesiastical. 
 
 The Pope by his decision had declared that the 
 English Church can only be re-united with Rome by an 
 unreserved submission. It would have been to the Papal 
 interest to have acknowledged Anglican Orders. We 
 might, like the Maronites in the East, have been allowed 
 our own Liturgy and our own ceremonies, and we might 
 
RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND 159 
 
 gradually have drawn nearer and nearer to the Pope 
 in all things, just as occasional conformity among Non- 
 conformists tended to entire conformity. Again, we may 
 be thankful for the Pope's decision, for now we know 
 that we can never effect union with Rome by merely 
 doing as Rome does. Our experience in past times of 
 the Pope's interference is not such as to make us long 
 for it again. It is better that we keep our ground as 
 an independent National Church. Those in England 
 who adhere to the Pope have now their full rights as 
 citizens. We do not wish to see them make progress, 
 but this need not hinder the exercise of charity which 
 is the bond of all virtues. They have declared by 
 following the rites of a foreign Church, and by sub- 
 mission to a foreign bishop, that in religion they are 
 not Englishmen but foreigners. 
 
 The corporate reunion of Protestant Dissenters has 
 not the same impossibility as with the Church of Rome, 
 but the difficulties are not to be ignored. Their absorp- 
 tion into the National Church seems from our point of 
 view as desirable. But members of Dissenting com- 
 munities are not of our opinion. Some see advantages 
 in the very fact of separation, and some even see evil in 
 the connection of the Church with the State, regarding 
 the secular as in itself unholy. Their Church organisa- 
 tions are the means of the defence and propagation of 
 principles which are to them of great ^importance, and 
 in some cases they are agencies for reaching classes 
 which have not been reached by the National Church. 
 Some of these communities were begun with sacri- 
 fices, and are kept together by self-denial. They may 
 have originated from forefathers whose memories are 
 revered for their unwavering adherence to principles 
 
i6o THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 which are still deemed sacred. They may have been 
 centres of religious life when the lamp burned but dimly 
 in the National Church, and they may be so again. 
 That they will at once give up their present position as 
 separate communities is not to be expected ; but the 
 clergy might often show a better spirit towards them. 
 As a rule, the average Dissenter is a more tolerant man 
 than the average Churchman. The Churchman's idea 
 of a Nonconformist is generally taken from Nonconfor- 
 mist newspapers, where the predominant spirit is that of 
 political or militant Nonconformity. This is like taking 
 the idea of Churchmen from party Church newspapers 
 where they appear in the least amiable light. 
 
 There are occasions in which the clergy and 
 Nonconformist ministers might work together, but 
 they are not many. Here we are met by a difficulty 
 the same in kind as that of asking them to break up 
 their present Church organisations. By the parochial 
 system, which is a necessary part of the National Church 
 idea, the clergyman of a parish is bound to do the best 
 he can for his parish and for every parishioner. But 
 Dissent is a discordant element. This, it may be said, 
 is a disadvantage to the Nonconformist, and so an 
 argument against the principle of a National Church. 
 To this objection Dr. Chalmers rightly answered, that 
 the question is not one of justice between Church and 
 Church, sect and sect, but one of justice to the whole 
 population. It is the misfortune of the present Non- 
 conformists that, having been so long excluded from the 
 universities, they have failed to reach a high standard of 
 education. A Dissenting minister is not necessarily an 
 educated man, while a clergyman of the Established 
 Church is generally one who has had the highest ad- 
 
RISE OF DISSENT IN ENGLAND i6i 
 
 vantages of public school and university training. This 
 has resulted in what may be called a class distinction. 
 The old Nonconformists strove hard to give their 
 ministers a high class education, but the Noncon- 
 formity which has sprung up under Methodist in- 
 fluence has been more indifferent. A change, however, 
 is gradually going on. Many of the clergy can now 
 boast no more than the meagre training of a clerical 
 college. On the other hand, now that the universities 
 are open, the Nonconformists begin to have a higher 
 education. It is yet to be seen if, with this higher 
 education, they will remain Nonconformists. There 
 does not appear to be any abstract reason why they 
 should not, and so it may come to pass that a Non- 
 conformist minister in a parish may be a Senior 
 Wrangler at Cambridge or a double-first at Oxford, 
 while his brother, the rector or vicar, may rejoice in 
 nothing higher than a pass degree. We may lament our 
 divisions, and show the healing spirit though we may not 
 have the healing power. At the moment in the last 
 century when there was the greatest likelihood of re- 
 union, Dr. Doddridge proposed that the conforming and 
 nonconforming clergy should occasionally preach for 
 each other. This met the approbation of Archbishop 
 Herring, but there are old Canons made under other 
 circumstances by which this is illegal. It might per- 
 haps be well to deal with some of these Canons on the 
 principle which has been adopted in other cases, that of 
 Solvitur Ambulaitdo. 
 
 We have tried to state the facts concerning the 
 National Church. It is by its very constitution a broad 
 Church, and it is better that it should embrace parties 
 which differ than not exist at all. But it must also be 
 
 L 
 
1 62 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 tolerant to those that are without. Comprehension 
 may not at present be practical, but the clergy should 
 show such a spirit of charity as at least will not produce 
 further alienation. Hostility has been provoked by the 
 conduct of many Churchmen. The Wesleyan com- 
 munity is not likely to forget such an act as that of an 
 amiable bishop who refused to allow " Rev." to be 
 prefixed to the name of a departed minister in an 
 epitaph in a country churchyard. The body of Non- 
 conformists are not likely to forget the attitude once 
 assumed by the National Society under the influence of 
 such men as Denison and Manning, when it opposed 
 the conscience clause, and even proposed to exclude 
 from the benefits of secular education all children not 
 baptized in the Established Church. Intolerance is 
 hard to tolerate, and it is to be hoped that these things 
 will be regarded merely as the eccentricities of indi- 
 viduals for which the Church is not responsible. It is 
 gratifying to contemplate the good spirit which at the 
 present time generally prevails among all Churches and 
 sects towards each other. The Greek as well as the 
 Latin Church repudiates the Anglican claims to such 
 Orders as make a sacrificing priest, but the friendly 
 intercourse which has lately appeared between the 
 Russian Church and the English ought to be welcomed 
 and encouraged. It is pleasant also to see that the 
 Pope of Rome, though he does not admit the Anglican 
 claims to Catholicism, is no more " the Man of Sin " 
 and the great " Antichrist," but the " Venerable 
 Brother " of Canterbury and York. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 THE ORIGINS OF CHURCH GOVERNMENT 
 
 By the editor 
 
 The precise origin of Church government is an 
 obscure question, complicated not only by the general 
 scantiness of our information on the Apostolic Age and 
 that which followed it, but by the special difficulty that 
 things must have been in a fluid and transitional state. 
 One disturbing influence was the indefinite authority 
 held in reserve by Apostles, another the waning 
 ministry of gifts, which for some time crossed the grow- 
 ing ministry of office. Nor is it altogether an advan- 
 tage that the question is a battlefield of controversy. 
 If partisan zeal has done good service in collecting 
 evidence, it has also done much harm — never more 
 than in our own time — by its persistent appeal to other 
 motives than the love of truth. Fortunately we need 
 not go into the whole question. If Church government 
 is as much ordained of God as secular, the powers that 
 be of every lawful Church must have in any case as 
 much divine sanction as the Empire under Nero. But 
 is any particular form of Church government in itself 
 unlawful ? Whatever be the sin of its founders, is a 
 later generation living quietly under it living in sin ? Is 
 Episcopacy, for example, or Presbyterianism so ordained 
 of God that a Church otherwise governed is in a state of 
 
 disobedience ? 
 
 163 
 
1 64 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 Now we are all agreed that there is a distinction 
 between means and ends, and that in some cases God 
 has made some particular means necessaryfor a particular 
 end. If therefore Church government is a means and 
 not an end, this does not hinder but that some par- 
 ticular form of it may have been ordained of God as 
 necessary, or at any rate as conducive to the end. 
 Whether this be the fact is plainly a different question, 
 which it would be rash to decide by a priori considera- 
 tions of doctrine or philosophy or personal inclination. 
 The general tone of Scripture may give us a presump- 
 tion, perhaps a strong presumption, one way or the 
 other ; but we are simply begging the question if we 
 allow mere presumptions, however strong, to overrule 
 clear historical facts. It may be true that we start with 
 " presuppositions," as they are too politely called ; but 
 I hope we are not all of us too contemptuous of truth 
 to alter them if truth requires it. These however are 
 truisms, albeit two-edged truths as well, and the only 
 reason for reciting them is the loud complaint of late in 
 certain quarters that Bishop Lightfoot (of all men) was 
 fool enough to overlook them. However, if any 
 particular form of Church government is ordained of 
 God as the only lawful one, there must be historical 
 proof of the fact, and there can be no other proof of it. 
 If no direct command of Christ or His Apostles can be 
 shown like that which enjoins the Lord's Supper, it will 
 suffice to show that the historical facts cannot reason- 
 ably be explained without assuming that such a com- 
 mand was given. The proof may be indirect ; but it 
 must be historical, and purely historical. 
 
 Let us first make sure of our terms. When the 
 bishop first appears in history, he holds his office for 
 
ORIGINS OF CHURCH GOVERNMENT 165 
 
 life, standing singly at the head of his presbyters, and 
 governing the congregations of a single city. Country 
 bishops governing villages cannot be more than a 
 secondary growth of the office, for the Gospel spread 
 from city to city, and more slowly to the country 
 districts. So far as I am aware, there is no early 
 instance of a bishop not holding his office for life. 
 Even translations were a novelty in the third century, 
 and were forbidden by the Nicene Council. Neither do 
 we meet with two bishops governing one Church, for 
 Narcissus of Jerusalem, at the age of 116, is hardly a 
 real exception either to this or to the life-long tenure ; 
 or with two bishops governing distinct Churches in one 
 city, unless Hippolytus at Portus be an exception ; or 
 with a bishop governing several cities at once. Thus 
 the city bishop as just defined will be the earliest type 
 of the bishop. It is not till Teutonic times that we find 
 bishops of tribes, like the Goths or the Kentishmen, and 
 the modern territorial bishop is a much later develop- 
 ment. Of course the city bishop, the country bishop, 
 the tribal bishop, and the territorial bishop are equally 
 legitimate forms of the office ; but the early Church was 
 necessarily governed by city bishops, because the 
 ancient world was as definitely constituted by cities 
 as the modern world is constituted by territorial states. 
 The bishop might have a country district attached to 
 his city ; but a bishop of several cities was as unthink- 
 able as the King of Europe is now. 
 
 Let us next set down some undisputed facts. 
 Whether the so-called bishops mentioned in the New 
 Testament held definite offices or not, it is now agreed 
 on all hands that their functions are ministerial, and 
 not what we should call episcopal. They are doers of 
 
1 66 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 work, not overseers. Their relation to the presbyters 
 is obscure ; but the single fact that there were several 
 of them at Ephesus and Philippi is enough to distin- 
 guish them broadly from the bishop of the next age. 
 It is therefore all but universally admitted that there is 
 no trace whatever of the bishop (unless it be James at 
 Jerusalem) before, say, St. Paul's arrival at Rome : and 
 it is equally admitted that every city has its one bishop 
 at the end of the second century. Here then is a great 
 change. How is it to be accounted for ? 
 
 The short answer is that the Apostles must have left 
 command that every Church was to have its bishop. 
 There is a good deal to be said for this theory. It 
 explains a whole series of the facts before us, like the 
 early spread of Episcopacy in Asia and elsewhere, and 
 the insistance of Ignatius. It gives us an additional 
 reason for the importance attached to the lists or 
 succession of bishops by Hegesippus and Irenaeus. 
 Above all, it explains why later ages so firmly believed 
 in a divine sanction for Episcopacy. So utterly have 
 they forgotten the earlier state of things that they read 
 Episcopacy without hesitation into the New Testament, 
 calling James Bishop of Jerusalem, Timothy of 
 Ephesus, and so on. Even Iren?eus turns the bishops 
 or presbyters of Ephesus (Acts xx. 17, 28) into the 
 bishops and presbyters of Ephesus and the neighbour- 
 ing Churches. Taking these facts together, they are 
 summarily decisive that Episcopacy dates back to 
 Apostolic times, and is at any rate not contrary to any 
 Apostolic ordinance that was meant to be permanent. 
 Whatever the Apostles did, they never gave command 
 that the Churches were not to be ruled by bishops. 
 
 The theory is tempting : but it is not yet proved. 
 
ORIGINS OF CHURCH GOVERNMENT 167 
 
 It explains some of the facts, and would be a poor 
 theory if it did not : but we must go further to make 
 sure that it is needed to explain them, and that it is 
 consistent with other facts. Now if the Apostles really 
 commanded that every Church was to have its bishop, 
 this must be a historical fact capable of historical proof 
 from the New Testament or later writings. We there- 
 fore begin with the New Testament. Can we trace in 
 it (under no matter what names) a class of permanent 
 local officers, each ruling singly the presbyters of his 
 own city ? These will be bishops in our sense of the 
 word. 
 
 The first instance commonly given is James the 
 Lord's brother, who was no doubt the chief man at 
 Jerusalem after the removal of the other " pillars." His 
 strictness of life and near relation to the Lord (a more 
 important matter to Easterns than to us) mijst in any 
 case have given him enormous influence. Buv mfiuence 
 is one thing, office is another ; and an influence suffi- 
 ciently accounted for as personal does not compel us 
 to assume that he held a great office, though as a 
 matter of fact he is called an Apostle, and ranked 
 with the chiefest of the Apostles. The story that he 
 was Bishop of Jerusalem was old in the time of Euse- 
 bius, for it dates back to the Clementine romances ; but 
 there is no sign that Eusebius knew more than we do 
 of the matter, for we cannot take seriously the episcopal 
 chair which was shown as that of James. Perhaps 
 there is a touch of truth in the romances, when James 
 is given a Papal rather than an Episcopal position at 
 Jerusalem, for even in the New Testament he is rather 
 a centre of all the Churches than a local bishop. 
 
 The case of Timothy and Titus is a stronger one, 
 
1 68 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 for their work of appointing and governing elders is 
 plainly that of a bishop. But this is work which must 
 be done in every Church ; and if it is done by a single 
 man, he still needs a permanent tenure and local con- 
 nexion to make him a bishop. Now Timothy and 
 Titus have no permanent office, and Titus moreover is 
 not connected with any particular city. They are not 
 bishops, but vicars apostolic, sent in the apostle's place 
 on special missions at Ephesus and in Crete. The 
 letters by which we know them are letters of recall 
 (2 Tim. iv. 9, Tit. iii. 12), and there is no serious evi- 
 dence that they ever saw Ephesus and Crete again. 
 
 Then come the " angels " of the seven churches of 
 Asia. It would be rash to take these for literal bishops, 
 contrary to the general symbolic character of the 
 Apocalypse and to the particular argument that " the 
 wor iv,-7,e^~'^l " ^* Thyatira cannot well be taken 
 
 litei r^vioreover, these angels are identified with 
 
 their Churches for good and evil, and made responsible 
 for them to an extent which would be quite unjust to 
 any literal bishop. As regards the " rulers " mentioned 
 (Heb. xiii. 7, 17), it is commonly agreed that the 
 Epistle is written to a definite Church ; and if so, its 
 plural rulers cannot be a single bishop. There remains 
 the " ministry " of Archippus (Col. iv. 17), and this gives 
 no reason for making him Bishop of Colossas or 
 Laodicea, rather than, for instance, an evangelist or 
 presbyter. We do not know what it was, though the 
 allusion indicates, if anything, a subordinate ofHce. 
 
 These appear to be the only instances by which 
 serious persons have endeavoured to prove the exist- 
 ence of the bishop from the New Testament, and the 
 proof seems in each case a failure. But if the necessity 
 
ORIGINS OF CHURCH GOVERNMENT 169 
 
 of Episcopal government cannot be proved by Scripture, 
 we are bound, on the principles of the Church of Eng- 
 land, to deny that it belongs to the essence of a lawful 
 Church, however legitimate and useful it may be. How- 
 ever, there is still the possibility that, though this neces- 
 sity is not declared in the New Testament, surviving 
 Apostles may have laid it down a few years later. This 
 would have been a binding command for that age, and 
 for our own it would be, to say the least, a recommen- 
 dation of the most weighty character, which a Church 
 will disregard at its peril. 
 
 There are few cases (if any) where the Apostles 
 can be proved, otherwise than by Scripture, to have 
 issued a particular command. However, there is no 
 reason why this should not prove an exception. If, 
 then. Apostles commanded every Church to have its 
 bishop, either we shall find a bishc^ in everv^ Q^Birch, 
 or else (if fair occasion arise) we shall get a i>UiflI. hint 
 that the disobedient Churches are doing wrong. Now 
 it is as certain as any historical fact can well be, that 
 there was no bishop in the important Church of Corinth 
 when Clement wrote. The purport of his letter is that 
 certain presbyters have been turned out of office with- 
 out good cause— the question of all others on which the 
 bishop must have had an important word to say. It is 
 begging the question to answer that the see must have 
 been vacant, gratuitous and impossible to distinguish 
 the " rulers " (plural, by the way) from the presbyters, 
 or to assume that Corinth was ruled by some wander- 
 ing prophet, or even to suggest that an episcopal 
 Church need not have a resident bishop, as was the 
 case with Virginia in 1775. All these explanations are 
 shattered on one simple fact. From beginning to end 
 
1 70 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 of a long letter, Clement never gives us the faintest hint 
 that the presbyters at Corinth either had, or ought to 
 have had, over them any human authority whatsoever. 
 They are responsible to Christian opinion, but not to 
 any official superiors. Again, though we need not 
 doubt that Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna, there seems 
 to have been no bishop at Philippi when he wrote. A 
 monarchical bishop can hardly lie hid among the 
 bishops and deacons greeted by him. It is just pos- 
 sible that St. Paul's greeting is copied without regard 
 to facts, but I should be sorry to think that Polycarp 
 " had far too much respect for the bishop " to send him 
 so much as a civil message. Corinth and Philippi were 
 important Churches, and are therefore flagrant cases of 
 disobedience, if disobedience it was ; and to them we 
 may add the Churches contemplated in the so-called 
 Teaching of the Apostles. The work is good evidence 
 for some Churches of the sub-apostolic age, unless it be 
 rejected as a romance of the fourth century — which at 
 present seems an excess of scepticism. 
 
 We now come to Ignatius. Lightfoot has left little 
 room for doubt that the seven Greek letters are genuine, 
 and that he wrote them on his way to death in Trajan's 
 reign. If we date them roughly in no, they will fall 
 about a dozen years after the death of St. John ; and as 
 Ignatius was then an elderly man, his youth must be 
 well within the Apostolic Age. His conversion was prob- 
 ably not in early life, but, in any case, he must have 
 known the truth of the matter perfectly well. His 
 evidence, if we can get it, ought to be decisive ; and so, 
 indeed, it is. Episcopacy has already got a footing in 
 Syria, in Asia, and probably elsewhere. He names the 
 bishops of Ephesus, Magnesia, and Tralles, calls Poly- 
 
ORIGINS OF CHURCH GOVERNMENT 171 
 
 carp a bishop, and mentions a bishop at Philadelphia. 
 He calls himself a bishop from Syria, and speaks of 
 bishops near Antioch, and says that the bishops at the 
 ends of the earth are in the counsels of Jesus Christ. 
 These are most likely monarchical bishops, and however 
 exaggerated the phrase may be, it at least seems to 
 prove that Ignatius knew of such bishops outside Asia 
 and Syria. But this is only a small part of his evidence. 
 He has the firmest possible conviction that Episcopacy 
 is according to God's will, and this conviction he puts 
 in the strongest language. " Obey the bishop " is his 
 recurring theme. To put a few of his sentences to- 
 gether : " We ought to regard the bishop as the Lord 
 Himself. It is good to know God and the bishop. He 
 that honoureth the bishop is honoured of God. It is 
 not lawful to baptize or to hold a love feast without the 
 bishop. The Spirit preached, saying. Do nothing with- 
 out the bishop " ; and much more to the same effect. 
 
 If a reasonable time be allowed for this spread of 
 Episcopacy, its beginnings in Asia must fall within the 
 lifetime of St. John ; and his opinion of it must have 
 been well known. Indeed there is some reason to 
 suppose that Tertullian may be right in tracing back 
 bishops to St. John, and that the Apostle may him- 
 self have constituted some bishops, like Polybius and 
 Polycarp at Tralles and Smyrna. Ignatius could not 
 have used or found acceptance for his daring language 
 without some sort of Apostolic sanction. Yet all his 
 urgency falls very far short of proof that an Apostle 
 commanded every Church to have its bishop. In the 
 first place, Ignatius is attacking separatists, not presby- 
 terians ; individuals who disobeyed an existing order, not 
 Churches which deliberately preferred another order. 
 
172 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 With all his earnestness, he says nothing of Episcopacy 
 different in kind from what the Apostles say of the 
 Empire, " Honour the emperor : the powers that be 
 are ordained of God." Yet few of us will hold that 
 republican countries are living in sin. As the Apostles 
 commanded obedience to the emperor as the dc facto 
 ruler of the world, so Ignatius with still more emphasis 
 preaches obedience to the bishop as the de facto ruler 
 of the Church to which he writes. But this is not all. 
 He says, Obey the bishop, and that with all the urgency 
 he can. His earnestness in the matter has not been 
 exaggerated. All the more significant is the absence 
 of the one decisive argument which would have made 
 everything else superfluous. He never says. Obey the 
 bishop as the Lord ordained, or as the Apostles gave 
 command.^ Must not this be the first argument in the 
 mind of every one who believes it to be true ? Could 
 such a one, especially a man like Ignatius, have sup- 
 pressed it all through six letters full of urgent exhorta- 
 tions on the matter ? The silence of so earnest an 
 advocate seems a plain confession that he knew of no 
 such command : and the ignorance of one who must 
 have known the truth of the matter seems decisive that 
 no such command was given. 
 
 ^ The only passage which needs discussion is Trail 7 dxiipicToi [0«oO] 
 'ItjctoO XpiCTOv Kai roD einaK6irov Kcd tup SiarayfidTwi' rdv ol-k oarb'Kwv, where 
 Lightfoot says, "the reference is doubtless to the institution of Episcopacy." 
 Very well ; but in what sense precisely ? It does not assert that the Apostles 
 instituted Episcopacy as a binding ordinance on all Churches, For (i) if 
 Ignatius alluded at all to so decisive a fact, he cannot have failed to mention it 
 freijuently, (2) The StardY^aTa (plural, be it noted) need not be taken more 
 narrowly than the 7rapa56<reis of 2 Thess. ii. 15 and I Cor. xi. 2 : and New 
 Testament usage will not allow us to say that the compound word necessarily 
 implies a general command. (3) If Apostles appointed Polybius bishop of 
 Tralles, as they very likely did, the fact would be alluded to in tov eiri<TK6irov, 
 and the 5iaTdy)xaTa would be injunctions to obey him. Sec, rather than general 
 commands that other Churches should have bishops. 
 
ORIGINS OF CHURCH GOVERNMENT 173 
 
 We have seen in a former chapter that the Apostohc 
 Age was not without hints which may have helped the 
 transition to Episcopacy. If James was not actually 
 Bishop of Jerusalem, the example of a Church prac- 
 tically guided by a single man was conspicuous, and 
 may have been suggestive. Occasionally some old dis- 
 ciple, one perhaps who had seen the Lord, would settle 
 down in the midst of a younger generation, and might 
 wield an enormous influence. Again, Timothy holds 
 for the moment the powers of a Bishop of Ephesus ; 
 and he is not likely to have been the only special 
 commissioner of the sort. If some of the others 
 were left stranded by the Apostle's death, they might 
 decide to remain indefinitely at their posts ; and in this 
 case they would be (monarchical) bishops at once. As 
 the Apostle had entrusted Churches to them, another 
 generation would say with practical truth, though not 
 with precise accuracy, that Apostles had made them 
 bishops of their Churches. Even this is more than 
 we need to account for the origin of such a tradition. 
 Imagine that St. John made Polycarp only one of 
 the (plural) bishops at Smyrna, and that he did not 
 become the (monarchical) Bishop of Smyrna till after 
 the Apostle's death. It would be a very pardonable 
 confusion of dates if the next writer told us roundly 
 that St. John made him Bishop of Smyrna. This would 
 be verbally true, though not strictly accurate. I give 
 this merely as an illustration of what might happen in 
 other cases, for when Irenaeus tells us that his own 
 teacher was made Bishop of Smyrna by Apostles, he is 
 not likely to be mistaken. 
 
 We need not assume any Apostolic command to 
 explain the rapid spread of Episcopacy. Given that 
 
174 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 there was no Apostolic command the other way, the 
 fact is as easily accounted for as the spread of despotism 
 over Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. The 
 Churches must have felt a heavy strain as the last of the 
 Apostles were passing away. The Neronian persecu- 
 tion, the fall of Jerusalem, and the rise of heresies had 
 seemed to usher in the last days, yet the Lord delayed 
 His coming. Meanwhile strong measures were urgently 
 needed to brace up the loose government which re- 
 mained when the two great Apostles had been cut off. 
 Corinth was one conspicuous object-lesson of disorder, 
 and most likely there were plenty more ; and even if 
 Clement's Christian tact availed for the moment, the 
 Church could not long escape the task of working out 
 its own enduring peace. But when the forces of anarchy 
 rise high men always turn to monarchy for help, and 
 the bishop was visibly the strongest centre of unity the 
 Churches could have, at a time when they needed all 
 the strength they could get. A Papacy, for instance, 
 would have been very much weaker. It may well be 
 that the last word of St. John from Ephesus was pre- 
 cisely that encouragement which alone was needed to 
 make the drift to Episcopacy irresistible. 
 
 The change was easy, for the bishop was no suc- 
 cessor of the Apostle. The two offices are utterly diffe- 
 rent. The Apostle is a witness to the world, who 
 preaches from city to city, founding and confirming 
 Churches, but never treating any particular city as more 
 than a convenient centre for the work in hand. The 
 bishop is the resident head of a local Church, whose 
 proper business is just the administration with which 
 the Apostle meddles but seldom and unwillingly. In 
 the main, the one office is preaching the Word, the 
 
ORIGINS OF CHURCH GOVERNMENT 175 
 
 other serving tables. Things are fairly clear if the one 
 monarchical bishop was developed from the plural 
 bishops of the Apostolic Age. In this case the name 
 would remain, and few who are not students of history 
 know how easily even great changes are overlooked, if 
 only names are kept unchanged. Indeed, the great 
 difficulty in studying history is that meanings change so 
 much faster than words. If so, there is nothing sur- 
 prising in the naive way in which most of the early 
 teachers are called bishops by writers of the third or 
 fourth century, who may sometimes have known rather 
 less of the facts than we do. 
 
 The right conclusion would seem to be that Episco- 
 pacy is like monarchy, an ancient and godly form of 
 government, which we may be well content to live 
 under and loyally to serve. Divine sanction it has, and 
 of the clearest, but we have found no trace of any such 
 exclusive divine authority as would make other forms of 
 government sinful. It is often, indeed, maintained that 
 when a custom has once obtained prevalence in the 
 Churches, it becomes as binding on all future ages as if 
 the Lord Himself had so declared it. But as such pre- 
 valence may fairly be claimed for some customs plainly 
 repugnant to God's written Word, like the worship of 
 images in the fifteenth century, such prevalence is of itself 
 no proof whatever of divine authority. The Lord called 
 Himself Truth, not Custom, as the arch-reformer Gre- 
 gory VII. reminds us. Truly the voice of God is in 
 the silent adoration of the ages bending low before the 
 cross of Love. Through all the sins and ignorances of 
 men the Spirit of God is working hitherto. Christ pro- 
 mised to be with us all the days, and that promise He 
 will most surely keep and perform ; but He never pro- 
 
176 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 mised to tie God's truth to any decisions of sinners, 
 however unanimous they may be. Circumstances may 
 change our duty with regard to any custom that is not 
 ordained of God, and of circumstances every Church 
 must necessarily judge for itself in each generation. If 
 the Scots, for example, have done rashly in abolishing 
 bishops, then so much the worse for them ; but we can- 
 not say that they have disobeyed Christ. Granted that 
 our own clergy are as truly called of God as if St. Paul's 
 own hands were laid on them, what more can we want ? 
 Whitgift and Hooker took a strong position when they 
 limited themselves to the proof that Episcopacy is a 
 lawful and ancient institution ; the Caroline divines only 
 weakened it by attempting to turn the tables on Puri- 
 tans who insisted that a Church governed by bishops is 
 no Church at all. 
 
 But if we deny that Episcopacy has any exclusive 
 divine authority, some of the weaker brethren will ask 
 whether we are not giving up all certainty in religion. 
 Not at all. Christ is none the less our Saviour, and 
 His Holy Spirit none the less our guide, if we use His 
 gift of reason on a command He never gave. It is bad 
 logic, not to say unbelief, which refuses to be sure of 
 our own place inside Christ's Church if we cannot lock 
 our neighbour out of it. But some consequences do 
 follow our denial. If bishops are not essential to the 
 being of a lawful Church, neither is any particular mode 
 of appointing or consecrating them, provided all things 
 are done decently and in order. If even the outlines of 
 Church government are not positive laws of God, much 
 less are the details of public worship. There is a strong 
 presumption (though not the argument they took it for) 
 in the scoff of the Puritans, that the Holy Ghost had 
 
ORIGINS OF CHURCH GOVERNMENT 177 
 
 remembered the basons, and forgotten the archbishops. 
 The particular ceremonial of the Lord's Supper, for 
 instance, is not more likely to have been directly or- 
 dained of Christ than an order of bishops ; and there 
 is no historical evidence that it was. Christ's Church 
 is no fortress of Zion with guarded gates and battle- 
 mented walls, for Jerusalem shall be inhabited as towns 
 without walls, and the Lord Himself shall be a wall of 
 fire around her. It is a flock, not a fold ; and its unity 
 is not in a Catholic uniformity of doctrine, discipline, 
 and ritual, but in the living faith which alone has power 
 to touch the ever-living Shepherd. This the Church 
 of England has not forgotten. " In these our doings 
 we condemn no other nations, nor prescribe anything 
 but for our own people only. For we think it con- 
 venient that every country should use such ceremonies 
 as they shall think best to the setting forth of God's 
 honour and glory, and to the reducing of the people to 
 a most perfect and godly living, without error or super- 
 stition ; and that they should put away other things, 
 which from time to time they perceive to be most 
 abused, as in men's ordinances it often chanceth di- 
 versely in divers countries." So says the National 
 Church of England, and so the National Churches 
 which make up Eastern Christendom must say too. 
 Rome is the dissenter. 
 
 We do not believe as we are taunted, that God 
 remembers the ends and forgets the means, or that 
 the things He leaves to men's discretion are uncared for 
 by Him. We are not the men who cut God's world in 
 sunder with a sharp distinction of sacred and profane. 
 It is all holy. Christ ordained but two sacraments ; 
 yet the men who invented others were not entirely 
 
 M 
 
178 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 wrong, if the thought of their heart was a dim idea that 
 every experience of hfe has a sacramental virtue of its 
 own, if only we have faith to make it ours. All things 
 end in mystery, as the schoolmen said ; and on the 
 deepest mystery of all, the guidance of our life by the 
 Spirit of Truth, we can safely rest in reverent and 
 loving thankfulness. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 HISTORY OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 
 
 By thk Rev. Canon MEYRICK, M.A 
 
 On the day before He suffered, the Lord Jesus Christ 
 sent two of His disciples, Peter and John, from Bethany 
 to Jerusalem, to make the necessary preparations for 
 the Paschal feast. The preparations consisted in the 
 purchase of a lamb, some bitter herbs of the nature of 
 endive, a mixture of vinegar, dates and other dried 
 fruits, forming a sop, some unleavened bread, and 
 sufficient wine to fill four cups or bowls when mixed 
 with water. The bread, the wine, the sop, and the 
 bitter herbs they probably sent immediately to the 
 guest-chamber designated to them by the Lord ; the 
 lamb they led to the temple and killed it before the 
 altar in the court, some of its blood being caught by 
 a priest and solemnly thrown at the base of the altar. 
 Then having taken out and burnt on the altar the 
 inward fat, they dressed the lamb to be ready for 
 cooking, and transfixing it with a pomegranate spit, 
 carried it to their lodging and roasted it in an oven. 
 
 At a later period in the day the Master, with the 
 remaining ten Apostles, entered Jerusalem and took His 
 way to the house where He was to eat the Passover. 
 When the hour for the banquet on the sacrificed lamb 
 arrived, He and His twelve companions disposed them- 
 selves round the board in a reclining position. He 
 
i8o THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 then took one of the cups, known ;is the first cup, in 
 His hands, and having given thanks over it, gave it to 
 His disciples, saying, "Take this and divide it among 
 yourselves" (Luke xxii. 17). This vi-as the cup of the 
 Old Testament, as distinct from one that was to follow. 
 When they had drunk of it, they dipped their hands in 
 water, and to add the lesson of humility to that of 
 purity, the Lord also washed His disciples' feet. Next, 
 each took in turn with their fingers from the dish a 
 mouthful of the bitter herbs (which reminded them of 
 the oppression suffered by their fathers in Egypt), and 
 the second cup was filled. Then, after an exposition of 
 the historical bearing of the sacrificed lamb, the bitter 
 herbs, and the unleavened bread, Psalms cxiii. and cxiv. 
 were sung, the second cup was drunk, and the lamb 
 was eaten. The feast was now drawing towards its 
 close when the Master, taking a piece of the bread in 
 His hands, blessed, brake, and gave it to the disciples ; 
 and just as He had probably said a little before over 
 the dish containing the lamb, '' This is the body of the 
 lamb that was sacrificed by our fathers in Egypt," so 
 now He said of the bread, " This is My Body, that is 
 being given for you." As the solemn eating of the 
 lamb had hitherto commemorated the Israelites' 
 deliverance in Egypt, effected by the sacrifice of the 
 Paschal Lamb, so henceforth the solemn eating of the 
 bread was to commemorate the greater deliverance 
 effected by the sacrifice of Himself, the antitype of the 
 Lamb. Next came the drinking of the third cup, which 
 in like manner the Lord transformed and elevated into 
 being a commemoration of His blood-shedding on the 
 cross. The final address to the disciples and the inter- 
 cessory prayer (John xiv.-xvii.) followed ; the fourth cup 
 
HISTORY OF THE LORD'S SUPPER i8i 
 
 was drunk ; Psalms cxv.-cxviii. were sung ; and the 
 Paschal supper was over, while from the dead wood of 
 the old form, whose meaning was now exhausted, there 
 had blossomed forth a new institution which was to last 
 until He came again. 
 
 Twice the Master had commanded His disciples to 
 " do this," that is, to eat the bread and drink the cup, 
 in memory of Him, when He should have passed away 
 from the earth. Primitive Christian piety was not con- 
 tent to confine the injunction to one part of the feast 
 that was being celebrated. The Apostles and their 
 disciples felt themselves bound to re-enact the whole of 
 the feast, and they kept it on the evening of every 
 Lord's Day, with such changes as circumstances had 
 made necessary. Those changes were considerable. 
 The Paschal Lamb could no longer be eaten, for it was 
 a type now fulfilled by the antitype ; the bitter herbs 
 could not belong to a feast which, since the resurrection 
 of the Lord and His ascension, had become a com- 
 memoration of joy and gladness ; bread could no 
 longer be used unleavened, for that was peculiar to the 
 Paschal week, and represented an event no longer to 
 be commemorated. Instead of these things, ordinary 
 food was provided by those who were capable of 
 offering it, and shared by all alike ; while towards 
 the end of the meal, in the same place that it had 
 occupied in the Lord's Last Supper, a loaf and a cup 
 of mixed wine, selected from the offerings, was placed 
 before the president, was solemnly set apart by prayer 
 as the Body and Blood of the Lord, and was distri- 
 buted to all present, who, no doubt, stood for the 
 ceremony. Then followed exhortation, prayer, and 
 singing of Psalms after the model of the original feast. 
 
1 82 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 Two hundred years later, Tertullian says, that when the 
 eating was over, they somethnes chanted the Psalms of 
 David, sometimes sang original hymns, and that prayer 
 concluded the feast. " We go away," he adds, " as 
 men who have not so much supped as been to a school 
 of philosophy " (Apol. xxxix.). 
 
 Such an institution as this, a joyous commemora- 
 tion of the Master spiritually and invisibly present to 
 their affections, was altogether in accordance with the 
 character of Christ's religion, who described Himself as 
 coming not as an ascetic like John the Baptist, but (in 
 contrast with him) eating and drinking ; and it accorded 
 with the practice of the Apostles, who not only on the 
 particular occasions of the public meal, but every day 
 in their own homes, " ate their meat with gladness and 
 singleness of heart, praising God " (Acts ii. 46). 
 
 So much was the Lord's Supper, both in its social 
 and devotional aspect, a part of the early Church 
 system, that St. Paul instituted it as a matter of course 
 in the Churches which he founded, and when it was 
 abused did not therefore countermand it, but ordered 
 the correction of the abuses. 
 
 To us it might seem the most natural thing possible 
 that St. Paul should have prevented the recurrence of 
 the profanities of which the Corinthian converts had 
 been guilty (in not discerning or distinguishing the Me- 
 morial food from the other elements of the meal), by 
 enjoining a separation of the sacred and the common 
 parts of the feast. But this, we see, he did not do, and 
 it probably would have shocked the Apostles who had 
 been present at the Last Supper, and all the Christians 
 of the first century, to have proposed to do so. It was 
 not any theological reason, nor any sense of the practical 
 
HISTORY OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 183 
 
 evils indicated by St. Paul (and seemingly almost 
 inseparable from the ordinance when enthusiasm had 
 died), that at length caused the transference of the 
 Eucharist to the forenoon from the evening, and the 
 consequent separation of the sacred and the social 
 feast. It was the stern pressure of Imperial Roman 
 Law. 
 
 At the beginning of the second century the Emperor 
 Trajan entertained a rooted apprehension and dislike 
 of all societies and clubs, and absolutely forbade their 
 holding their meetings in the evening, when he believed 
 that conspiracies would be hatched by them against the 
 State. The various prefects, therefore, issued prohibi- 
 tory edicts against evening meetings in the years no 
 and III. The prohibitions imposed by these edicts 
 covered the case of the Lord's Supper, understanding 
 by that name the feast consisting both of the Agape, or 
 love feast, as it was called, and of the Eucharist proper, 
 the two not being yet separated (Ignatius Ep. ad Smyrn. 
 viii., Ed. Lightfoot). What was the Church to do ? She 
 transferred the Lord's Supper to the forenoon, making 
 at the same time a change in the order of proceeding. 
 Whereas hitherto the memorial part had been nearly 
 at the end of the feast in accordance with the order of 
 the Last Supper, it was now made to precede the meal, 
 which thus came at a time more suitable for refresh- 
 ment than the earlier morning would have been. It 
 was probably the practice of the second century, not 
 of the first, which St. Chrysostom describes as follows : 
 " After the sermon, and prayers, and the communion, 
 when the congregation broke up, all the faithful did 
 not return immediately to their homes ; but the rich 
 and well-to-do, bringing food and eatables from their 
 
1 84 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 own homes, invited the poor, and made a common table, 
 a common meal, a common party in the Church itself ; 
 and thus, from eating together, and from reverential 
 regard for the place, they were all closely united in 
 Christian love " {Horn, in Did. Pauli, Oportet esse hoereses). 
 
 This order did not last long. Before the end of 
 the century, probably in the reign of Commodus, when 
 the severe vigilance of the Emperors was relaxed, the 
 Agape or social meeting was re-transferred to the even- 
 ing, whilst the Holy Communion proper remained as 
 part of the forenoon service, or occasionally even of 
 the ante-lucan service (Tertull. De Corona, iii.). The 
 likeness to the original Lord's Supper was diminished 
 by the change effected at the beginning of the second 
 century, and still more by this further change towards 
 the end of the same century, when indeed to outward 
 appearance it was almost destroyed. The Communion 
 was now preceded by the " Missa Catechumenorum," 
 consisting of psalms, hymns, lessons from the Old and 
 New Testaments, sermon, prayers for the catechumens, 
 for the possessed, and for penitents ; then came the 
 Communion service proper, or " Missa fidelium " (so- 
 called from all but the faithful who were about to 
 become communicants having been now dismissed), 
 which was composed of a litany, an offertory, the 
 consecration prayer and the reception in both kinds, 
 followed by further prayers, hymns, and thanksgivings, 
 and concluded by the bishop's blessing. 
 
 Up to this period the Eucharistic thanksgiving 
 ofTered by the officiating minister had scarcely taken 
 a fixed form, but whether extempore or not, it con- 
 sisted of a giving of thanks for two things, first, for the 
 supply of the necessary wants of man, secondly, for the 
 
HISTORY OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 185 
 
 benefits received through the death and passion of 
 Christ, solemnly commemorated in the Bread and Wine, 
 which at once represented the Creator's gifts to His 
 creatures, and were the tokens of the Body and Blood 
 of Christ. When the Holy Communion and the Agape 
 were finally separated, the thanksgiving for temporal 
 food was confined to the Agape, and the character of 
 a mystical commemoration of the sacrifice of the death 
 of Christ was more notably stamped on the offering of 
 the Bread and Wine, now standing apart from its pre- 
 vious environment. In the "teaching of the Apostles," 
 A.D. 100, in Justin Martyr, A.D. 150, in Irenaeus, a.d. 
 180, we find a joyous recognition of the sovereignty of 
 God and His goodness in giving sustenance to man, 
 together ivith an offering of praise and thanksgiving for 
 the redemption wrought by Christ. Now the idea of 
 temporal sustenance drops away, and from the time of 
 Cyprian, A.D. 250, the more solemn character of the rite, 
 as commemorating the sacrifice of the Lord, is dwelt on 
 with great and greater emphasis and exclusiveness. 
 
 Then in the fifth and sixth centuries came an event 
 which had an untold influence on the doctrine and on 
 the constitution of the Church. This was the breaking- 
 up of the Roman Empire and the irruption of the 
 barbarians. The Roman troops drew back, and left 
 territories which they had occupied in the possession of 
 the Northern invaders ; the Church did not equally 
 recoil. To its infinite credit, it exerted every nerve to 
 gather within its fold the heathen conquerors. The 
 strain was enormous, and the Church had to condone a 
 vast amount of ignorance and superstition, which it 
 hoped afterwards to remove and correct, satisfied for 
 the time if only it could gather the new nations within 
 
1 86 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 the net. The barbarians found that the Church to 
 which they had submitted celebrated, with great pomp, 
 a pomp once unknown, a service, not now making part 
 of a social meal in which the Last Supper of the Founder 
 had been commemorated and re-enacted, but standing 
 by itself and apart from its old surroundings, in which 
 the priest appeared to declare that the bread which he 
 held in his hand, and the wine which he poured forth, 
 were the Body and Blood of the Lord. The new con- 
 verts were for the most part simple, rude soldiers of the 
 peasant class, not acquainted with Hebrew parable and 
 poetry, but familiar with the magical rites of their own 
 superstitions. They accepted the words that they heard 
 in their baldest signification. Their teachers knew that 
 they were materialising the traditional faith in respect 
 to the Sacrament, but they had to leave the rude con- 
 ception uncorrected for the present, considering that the 
 immediate work to be done was to secure a profession 
 of Christianity, and that if they did that, all would come 
 right in the end. 
 
 Thus, the materialistic view of the bread and wine 
 becoming the Body and Blood of Christ took its place 
 in the Church, and when once it was rooted in the 
 apprehensions of the vulgar, the more enlightened 
 members of the body were not able, as they had ex- 
 pected, to eradicate it. It continued, however, to be only 
 the view of the uneducated populace, and it was not 
 till the ninth century that any one was found to put it 
 into words and advocate it in a serious treatise. This 
 was done by Paschasius Radbert, a monk of Corbey, 
 probably himself sprung from the people. His doctrine 
 was at once controverted by men more learned than 
 himself, who had been trained in the traditional doc- 
 
HISTORY OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 187 
 
 trine of the Church, Amalarius, Archdeacon of Treves, 
 Rabanus Maiirus, Archbishop of Mentz, John Scotus 
 Erigena, Walafrid Strabo, and Bertram, or Ratramnus. 
 But argument could not overthrow a now widespread, 
 if ignorant, belief, which based itself when assailed upon 
 the apparent meaning of the words of Scripture. The 
 materialistic conception still grew, and invaded the 
 higher ecclesiastical ranks, so that two centuries later, 
 when Berengarius restated the primitive doctrine, that 
 the bread and wine were not Christ, but were the 
 means of conveying the benefits of His death and pas- 
 sion to the soul if received with faith and love, he was 
 regarded as an innovator, and brought before Synods 
 and Popes for heresy. One of the Popes was Hilde- 
 brand (Gregory VII.). Hildebrand hesitated ; "he was 
 not sure himself," but he, too, had to yield to the pres- 
 sure from below, and by his command Berengarius 
 made confession that " the bread and the wine placed 
 upon the altar are, by the mystery of holy prayer and 
 the words of our Redeemer, converted into the true, 
 actual, and life-giving Flesh and Blood of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, and are after consecration the true Body 
 of Christ, which was born of the Virgin, and which 
 hung on the Cross an offering for the salvation of the 
 world, not only in the way of sign and in virtue of a 
 sacrament, but also in propriety of nature and truth of 
 substance." 
 
 Two things still remained, one to give a name and 
 authority to the new doctrine that had won its way to 
 the mastery of the Western Church, the other to con- 
 struct an intellectual support for it. The Lateran 
 Council, A.D. 12 15, supplied the first need, the Realistic 
 Schoolmen the second. Intelligent thinkers could not 
 
1 88 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 hold the common people's belief of a physical change. 
 The question must be taken out of the sphere of physics 
 and transferred to that of metaphysics. The theory of 
 Realism seemed to be the Dens ex tnachwa to effect 
 this. 
 
 When we look at a number of tables of different 
 sizes and shapes, by disregarding their differences we 
 get a general idea of a table ; when we look at a number 
 of men and women, differing in colour, height, and 
 looks, by disregarding these differences we get the 
 general idea of man. These general ideas are creations 
 of our minds. They have no objective existence in 
 themselves outside our minds, but the Realists did not 
 understand that their existence was only subjective. 
 They held that they had a real substantial existence of 
 their own ; and more, that every table that we see, 
 comes to be a table only by partaking of the table- 
 substance ; and that every man comes to be a man only 
 by partaking of the man-substance. The Schola theolo- 
 gonim, whose business it was to find arguments for the 
 new doctrine, grasped eagerly at the realistic theory. 
 Here, they said, are indicated the relations of the bread 
 and of the Body of Christ. By consecration we do 
 not take away the properties or appearances of bread, 
 but the bread-substance lying beneath them, which 
 makes the bread to be bread ; and we substitute for 
 that bread-substance the flesh-substance, which makes 
 the Body of Christ to be a body. With this theory 
 they were content. They did not apprehend, or they 
 kept it in the background, that on the very principles 
 of the philosophy in which they took refuge, the cessa- 
 tion of the bread-substance must make the properties 
 and appearances of bread to cease also ; and that the 
 
HISTORY OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 189 
 
 substituted body-substance could not either lose the 
 properties and appearance of a body, or invest itself with 
 those of bread. But it was hardly worth while for 
 opponents thus to point out the invalidity of the hypo- 
 thesis, for very soon the whole theory of Realism was 
 overthrown by Conceptualists and Nominalists, and it 
 was proved and acknowledged that there was no such 
 thing at all as a supposed metaphysical substance 
 separable from its phenomena. With Realism the only 
 argumentative prop for transubstantiation fell, and no 
 other has ever been erected. Henceforth its supporters 
 justified it, not by argument but by the authority of the 
 Roman See. " The chief thing is to hold about it what 
 the holy Roman Church holds," said Duns Scotus. " I 
 prove that the bread is changed into the Body of Christ, 
 because we must hold what the Roman Pontiff says 
 must be held " (Joan. Bacon). In other words, accept- 
 ance of the unintelligible, on the authority of Rome, 
 had to be substituted for intelligent belief. When com- 
 pelled to argue, the transubstantiationist still falls back 
 on the exploded Realism. 
 
 The change which took place in the conception 
 entertained as to the result of consecration on the 
 bread and wine could not but affect the conception 
 entertained of the Eucharistic sacrifice. At first men 
 offered in the Eucharist praise and thanksgivings to 
 God, and that was a sacrifice (Heb. xiii, 15); they 
 offered prayer, and that was a sacrifice (Justin Martyr, 
 Dial. 117, Tertull. Ad Scap. ii.) ; they offered of their 
 goods, and that was a sacrifice (Phil. iv. 18); they 
 offered themselves individually, and that was a sacrifice 
 (Rom. xii. i); they offered themselves as the mystical 
 body of Christ collectively, and that was a sacrifice 
 
190 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 (S. Augustine, De Civ. Dei x. and xix.) ; they offered 
 bread and wine to the Creator in acknowledgment of 
 His sovereignty and of our dependence on Him ("of 
 Thine own have we given Thee," i Chron. xxix. 14), 
 and that was a sacrifice ; they offered the bread and 
 wine in commemoration of Christ's offering on the 
 Cross, and that was a commemorative sacrifice, or 
 might be called so. And all these sacrifices were 
 offerings made to a reconciled Father by His recon- 
 ciled children, conscious of their reconciUation having 
 been already effected, who for that reason approached 
 their Father with the loving confidence of sons. But 
 when men came to believe that the bread and wine 
 were Christ Himself, not only did all other minor senses 
 of sacrifice drop away from the rite, but a propitiatory 
 force was attributed to the one sacrifice which was left. 
 It passed over from the class of peace offerings to that 
 of sin offerings. The offerer was no longer God's child, 
 joyously feasting with its loving Father, to whom he 
 had been brought nigh by the adoption in Christ ; he 
 was still in his sins ; God's face was averted from him, 
 and Christ was now being offered to God to serve as a 
 propitiation and satisfaction and to restrain His wrath. 
 We gather from the highest existing authorities in the 
 Roman Church, S. Alfonso de' Liguori and Cardinal 
 Bellarmine, that the present phase of the doctrine of 
 the sacrifice of the Mass is as follows: — i. That when 
 the consecration takes place Christ in His Divinity and 
 Humanity, Spirit, Soul, and Body, enters on a sacramental 
 existence on the Altar. 2. That He is there offered 
 as a propitiatory sacrifice to the Father. 3. That His 
 sacramental existence is again destroyed (else according 
 to their definition there could be no sacrifice) by the 
 
HISTORY OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 191 
 
 priests eating the wafer and drinking the wine ; but 
 that nevertheless, 4. He exists still in the consecrated 
 wafers, where He may be worshipped until He is eaten 
 by the teeth of the recipient. 
 
 Many other consequences follow from the doctrine 
 of Transubstantiation beside that of the propitiatory 
 sacrifice of the Mass. Anselm's dogma of the Reception 
 of the whole Christ under either of the two elements 
 was a logical conclusion from it, and from that followed 
 the denial of the cup. Reservation of the Sacrament 
 for worship. Processions of the Host, Elevation, Hearing 
 Mass or attendance without communicating. Worship 
 of the Sacrament, Fasting Communion imposed as a 
 necessity, the tenet of the eating of Christ's Body 
 by the wicked, all result from the theory of Christ's 
 entering into the bread and wine, or the appearances 
 of bread and wine, on their consecration. From it 
 consequences upon consequences have been drawn, 
 from the eleventh century onwards, and are being 
 drawn in our own day, Le Manreze du Pretre is a 
 manual ordinarily employed in the annual retreat of 
 French priests. In this manual the priests are assured 
 that it is no exaggeration to equal them with God. 
 *' God created the universe, but our daily creation is 
 no less than the Word Himself made flesh." " God 
 can make other universes, but He cannot make under 
 the sun a greater action than your sacrifice." " You 
 are creators, as Mary was when she co-operated in 
 the Incarnation." " Jesus dwells under your lock and 
 key. His audiences are opened and closed by you. 
 He does not move without your permission. He does 
 not bless without your concurrence. He gives only by 
 your hands, and this dependence is so dear to Him 
 
192 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 that in more than 1800 years He has not for one 
 instant escaped from the Church to return to His 
 Father's glory." 
 
 The tenet of the objective presence of Christ in 
 the sacred elements slipped into acceptance, as we 
 have seen, almost imperceptibly, and without prevision 
 of the future. In the above quotations we see the 
 portentous consequences derived from it in the nine- 
 teenth century ; and we have indications of further 
 consequences already coming into sight, such as ihat 
 the recipient partakes of the flesh of Mary, from whom 
 Christ took His Body, and that Christ's incessant occupa- 
 tion of Heaven is offering to the Father His body, 
 brought by the mystical agency of angels from every 
 altar on earth at which a consecration takes place. 
 
 We now turn to England. No doubt the primitive 
 and traditional doctrine that the bread and wine, 
 being the symbols of His sacrificed Body and Blood, 
 are means by which the benefits of the sacrifice of His 
 death upon the cross are conveyed to the penitent and 
 faithful soul, as it spiritually feeds upon Him, prevailed 
 throughout the British Church before the Saxon inva- 
 sion, as it did elsewhere. We may reasonably suppose 
 that some of the heathen Saxons that were swept in 
 masses into the fold of the Church by Augustine in the 
 south and by Aidan and the Celtic missionaries in the 
 north and midlands, like the Franks and other barba- 
 rians, misapprehended the Lord's words, and accepted 
 them in a gross and materialistic sense, but we have no 
 proof that this error of the multitude spread upwards 
 to the educated classes and the clergy, of whom 
 Archbishop ^Ifric, who was free from any such taint, 
 may be taken as a specimen. It was not formu- 
 
HISTORY OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 193 
 
 lated before the Norman Conquest. Then Lanfranc 
 and Anselm brought in from Bee the theology by this 
 time prevalent in France and Italy, to which even 
 Hildebrand had bowed. Lanfranc, unaware that he 
 was himself the innovator, and believing himself to be 
 a champion of orthodoxy, wrote a book to refute 
 Berengarius, who represented the traditional but for- 
 gotten teaching of the Church ; and Anselm drew from 
 the now accepted doctrine of a substantial presence of 
 Christ in the elements the legitimate conclusion of 
 reception in one kind. From this time onwards in 
 England, as elsewhere in the west, the materialistic 
 view became dominant, supported by the philosophy 
 of Realism, as long as it prevailed, and on its overthrow 
 by the authority of the Roman See. On the repu- 
 diation of the authority of the See of Rome there 
 followed, not immediately, but necessarily, the rejec- 
 tion of transubstantiation and of the sacrifice of the 
 mass. Cranmer and Ridley, perhaps the two most 
 learned Prelates that have ever sat in English Sees, 
 had been brought up in the Mediaeval conception of 
 the Eucharist. But they knew familiarly the writings 
 of the Fathers and Divines of the first thousand years, 
 and gradually they came to see the incompatibility of 
 the mediaeval with the primitive doctrine. Ridley was 
 aided by Bertram or Ratramn's treatise of the ninth 
 century, and having by its help cleared his own mind 
 and resumed the theology of the early Church, he led 
 Cranmer to the same standing-point as himself. We 
 can imagine the discussions of these two seekers after 
 truth, their references to Holy Scripture, to Augustine, 
 Chrysostom, Theodoret, Gelasius, their longing after 
 spirituality in the midst of the materialism with which 
 
 N 
 
194 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 the faith had been corrupted. They may have had 
 before them too the words of Wychf, " This Sacra- 
 ment is not naturally the Body of Christ, but the same 
 Sacrament is Christ's Body figuratively. . . . That this 
 venerable Sacrament is in its own nature veritable 
 bread and sacramentally Christ's Body, is shown to 
 be the true conclusion. Hardness, softness, &c., can- 
 not exist per se, nor can they be the subject of other 
 accidents ; it remains therefore that there must be 
 some subject as bread. Oh ! how great diversity is 
 between us that trow this Sacrament is very bread in 
 its kind, and between heretics that tell us that it is an 
 accident without subject" {Trialogus, Book IV.). 
 
 Ridley, in his " Brief Declaration of the Lord's 
 Supper," states the two theories with the utmost clear- 
 ness, concluding — i. That "there is no such thing in 
 deed and in truth as they call transubstantiation, for 
 the substance of bread remains still in the sacrament of 
 the body." 2. That "the natural substance of Christ's 
 human nature is in heaven, and not here enclosed under 
 the form of bread." 3. That "that godly honour which 
 is due only unto God is not to be done to the Holy 
 Sacrament." 4. That " the wicked do not receive the 
 natural substance of the blessed Body and Blood of 
 Christ." 5. That " Christ's blessed Body and Blood, 
 which was once only offered and shed upon the Cross, 
 is offered up no more in the natural substance thereof, 
 neither by the priest nor any other thing" (p. 109). 
 
 In the next generation the same doctrine was held 
 by Hooker and by Andrewes. " If," says Hooker, " it 
 is on all sides confessed that the grace of baptism is 
 poured into the soul of man, that we receive it, though 
 it be neither seated in the water, nor the water changed 
 
HISTORY OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 195 
 
 into it, what should induce men to think that the grace 
 of the Eucharist must needs be in the Eucharist before 
 it can be in us that receive it ? The real presence of 
 Christ's blessed Body and Blood is not to be sought 
 for in the Sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the 
 Sacrament " {Eccles. Pol. v. 6). Andre wes' words are so 
 strong that, were it not that he is quoted as if he were 
 on the other side of the question, we might shrink from 
 using them. " That a memory is there made of the 
 sacrifice we grant willingly ; that your Christ made of 
 bread is sacrificed there we will never grant. The King 
 (James I.) knows that the word ' sacrifice ' is used by 
 the Fathers, and he does not put it among novelties, 
 but your ' sacrifice of the Mass ' he does " {Answer 
 to Bellarmme^ viii.). So with all the Caroline divines, 
 beginning with Laud and ending with Bull ; so with 
 all the leaders of thought, and writers of the Anglican 
 Church, down to the middle of the present century. 
 Without exception they taught the doctrine of the 
 Primitive, and condemned the doctrine of the Mediaeval 
 Church. But a short time before he left the Anglican 
 for the Roman communion. Archdeacon Robert Isaac 
 Wilberforce wrote a book on the Eucharist, restating 
 and enforcing the mediaeval doctrine, avoiding the word 
 transubstantiation, but teaching an objective presence, 
 which is best expressed by the formula of transub- 
 stantiation. Since that time others have been found 
 within the Church of England to maintain the objective 
 or even the substantial presence of Christ in the elements 
 after consecration and before reception, and, as a con- 
 sequence, to explain away the Church's condemnation 
 of transubstantiation. But they represent only a back 
 eddy in the main stream of the Church's teaching. 
 
196 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 Historically then the question of the Eucharist 
 stands thus. During the first century the Apostolic 
 Church re-enacted the Last Supper, as far as that was 
 possible, on the evening of the first day of every week, 
 thus carrying out the command of their Lord, " Do 
 this in remembrance of Me," in its amplest signification. 
 What He had meant by calling the bread His Body, 
 and by calling the wine His blood, they meant ; but 
 they were so far from regarding the bread as having 
 become His Body and the wine His Blood that some 
 of them, having grown careless, ceased to distinguish 
 the sacred elements from the ordinary materials of a 
 common meal, which, however shocking, is an eloquent 
 testimony to the nature of St. Paul's teaching when he 
 instituted the Lord's Supper. In the second century 
 the re-enactment of the Last Supper still continued, but 
 now the hour at which it was held was altered, from 
 political causes external to the Church, to the morning. 
 The memorial eating and drinking was made to precede 
 the eating and drinking of the common meal, and was 
 accompanied by ceremonies and prayers previously 
 impossible. At the end of the century the social meal 
 was once more transferred to the evening, and the 
 spiritual feeding upon Christ by means of the appointed 
 memorials, separated from its original surroundings, 
 was celebrated in the forenoon of each Sunday in con- 
 junction with the matin prayers. The thanksgiving for 
 the fruits of the earth, which had hitherto been a part 
 of the complex rite, being now relegated to the Agape, 
 the writers and teachers of the third, fourth, and fifth 
 centuries, such as Cyprian, Augustine, and Chrysostom, 
 dwelt the more urgently on the commemorative char- 
 acter of the Eucharistic partaking, frankly calling the 
 
HISTORY OF THE LORD'S SUPPER 197 
 
 bread the Body and the wine the Blood of Christ, but 
 explaining that when they spoke of the Eucharist as a 
 sacrifice, they meant a memorial of the sacrifice of Christ. 
 The gross imagination of His actual Body and Blood 
 being eaten and drunk, and of the Lord Himself being 
 sacrificed, had not yet emerged ; and natural reverence 
 as well as the traditional teaching of the Church made 
 the very thought inadmissible. But from the sixth 
 century onwards the rude conception of the uneducated 
 masses that had been swept wholesale into the fold of 
 the Church began to prevail over the traditional belief, 
 making itself heard in the ninth century, and in the 
 eleventh century triumphing over all opposition in 
 Western Christendom. The elements were no longer 
 types through which the realities that they represented 
 were conveyed to the soul, but they were those realities 
 themselves. Christ was present, not only in the heart 
 of the believer, but in the elements after consecration 
 and before reception. Educated theologians, over- 
 whelmed by this inflow of popular superstition, fled to 
 the philosophy of Realism as a resource against the out- 
 cries of their reason, and when that philosophy fell, 
 substituted for rational explanation the now dominant 
 authority of the Roman See. Wherever the influence 
 of that See has prevailed, the doctrines of Transub- 
 stantiation and the Sacrifice of the Mass have prevailed 
 likewise. In the sixteenth century those nations which 
 repudiated the authority of the Roman See repudiated 
 also the doctrine of Transubstantiation, and, with the 
 exception of the immediate followers of Luther, the doc- 
 trine of any objective presence in the sacred elements. 
 The Church of England, as proved by her formularies 
 and the teaching of all her divines down to the present 
 
198 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 century, returned to the primitive view that the bread 
 and wine are the types, symbols, and figures of the 
 Body and Blood of Christ ; that what is conveyed to 
 the mouth is bread and wine, set apart for a sacred 
 purpose, and that by receiving these elements in a 
 faithful and humble spirit the recipient is enabled to 
 feed upon Christ in his soul, and receives the benefits 
 wrought for man by the one true and proper Sacrifice 
 of the Cross. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 PROTESTANTISM 
 
 By the editor 
 
 The centre of Christian thought has twice been shifted 
 in the course of history ; first from the East to the 
 West, then from the southern to the northern West. 
 Thus the development falls at once into three great 
 periods, each with its own peculiar task, and a char- 
 acter of its own almost entirely shaped by one great 
 race. The Greek does the work for several hundred 
 years, and then stiffens into monumental orthodoxy. 
 Then the Latin takes up his work till he has brought 
 the Catholic Church to something very like paganism 
 in the age of the Renaissance : and since the Reforma- 
 tion the new thought of Christendom has been almost 
 wholly Teutonic. 
 
 As soon as Christianity outgrew its Jewish cradle, 
 it of necessity became a Greek religion. Greek culture 
 was supreme, and of necessity shaped the expression — 
 not the substance — of Christian belief. There is no 
 such contrast as is fancied between the Sermon on the 
 Mount and the Nicene Creed. Even the marvellous 
 teaching of the Sermon on the Mount is less impressive 
 than the unspoken challenge of the Teacher. Who is 
 this that says. Ye have heard what God said to them 
 of old ; but I tell you something better ? This surely 
 is the question that comes first ; and the Greeks did 
 
200 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 right in seizing on it and working it out to an answer 
 in the Nicene Creed. The revelation is not directly of 
 morality, but of the Lord who is Himself the way, as 
 well as the truth and the life, so that the Person of the 
 Lord was the first and fundamental problem of the 
 Gospel. Now Greek thought had in the providence of 
 God reached a stage in which it was eminently qualified 
 for the work, trained as it was by philosophy to seek 
 for truth, and wielding a language of unrivalled pre- 
 cision and subtlety. Yet more, the old Greek belief in 
 man, which tempted the pagans to deify men, also 
 helped the Christians to realise the old Gospel of 
 Creation which enabled them to see that divine and 
 human in the Incarnation are not foreign to each other 
 but near akin, and therefore capable of a perfect union 
 in Christ for evermore. This was the conviction which 
 guided the Eastern Church through two of the four 
 great struggles of Christian thought, that with Gnosti- 
 cism, against a tyrannous philosophy which trifled 
 with the historic facts of the Gospel and explained 
 away the Lord's humanity ; and that with Arianism, 
 against a tyrannous philosophy which confessed indeed 
 the historic facts, but explained away the Lord's 
 divinity. 
 
 Presently the Greek Church came to a stop. Its 
 task was to ascertain the outlines of the revelation ; 
 and this was fairly completed when the Council of 
 Chalcedon rose, though they still went on refining the 
 theoretic truth of the Lord's Person till Iconoclasm 
 burst in to convict them of gross idolatry. The causes 
 of the stop are fairly clear. The Church was too 
 closely connected with the Empire not to share its 
 decline and assume something of the same fossilised 
 
PROTESTANTISM 201 
 
 Byzantine form. Again, the Greek search for truth 
 was too purely intellectual, and tended to a barren 
 orthodoxy which might shelter strange growths of 
 untruth and superstition. Again, even their noble 
 defence of the Lord's divinity tempted them to forget 
 His manhood, and by a natural reaction to worship 
 saints who seemed to give them back the human 
 sympathy they could no longer look for in the gracious 
 Lord. Indeed, even Athanasius speaks of Him far 
 more as a theological Person than as a man who lived 
 among men. Beyond all this there was the unrecog- 
 nised difficulty that theological truth does not stand 
 alone, but has the closest relation to other truth which 
 is equally divine, but which could not yet be effec- 
 tively compared with it. Doctrinal questions necessarily 
 engrossed attention for a long time ; but in the fact 
 that the Gospel is history and life, not philosophy and 
 dogma, lay the pledge that sooner or later it would be 
 the clue to truth in all its range. 
 
 First, however, came a set-back of a thousand years. 
 Latin Christendom started on a lower plane, and was 
 more deeply influenced by the stronger paganism of 
 the West. If the Greek evaporated the Gospel into 
 philosophy, the Latin hardened it into law. He never 
 was much interested in the Greek discussions of the 
 Person of the Lord, and accepted the decisions of the 
 Eastern Councils chiefly as a matter of law and order. 
 He was a practical man, and therefore began at the 
 other end, from the practical fact that mankind lies in 
 sin. He thought it too speculative to look on the 
 Incarnation as the manifestation in time of an eternal 
 humanity that is in God. He was content to regard 
 it as the practical remedy for sin, to be dispensed 
 
202 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 according to the law and order of the Church. In 
 this Hfe, and most of all in the evil days of barbarian 
 invasion and feudal anarchy, sin seemed nearer than 
 salvation, and the Church seemed nearer than an absent 
 Lord. So Western thought did most of its original 
 work in the monasteries, and on doctrines hardly men- 
 tioned in the Eastern creeds. It revolved round original 
 sin, predestination, grace, atonement, justification, sac- 
 raments, and above all, the authority and functions of 
 the Church. The East remembered that Christ is the 
 revelation of man, and began with Christ : the West 
 forgot that fallen man is no revelation of Christ, and 
 began with man. This was the Arian error of order 
 pointed out by Athanasius ; and it was mischievous 
 also in the West. 
 
 This low view of man determined the whole attitude 
 of the Latin Church. So far as man is a child of God, 
 he can be reasoned with, but so far as he is a beast 
 without understanding, he must be kept in order like a 
 beast without understanding ; so that a low view of 
 human nature emphasizes and enlarges the functions 
 of authority and law. In this way the Latin Church 
 tended to become a judge and a divider rather than 
 a witness. It was from the first much too ready to 
 silence inconvenient questions by an appeal to authority 
 and order ; and this tendency increased when it under- 
 took the training of the northern nations, again when 
 the world turned to the Church for help in the eleventh 
 century, and yet again when the world began to rebel 
 against the Church in the later Middle Ages. Educa- 
 tion is a hard task, and Rome thought she did well 
 when she let go the Greek theology as unpractical, 
 concentrating herself on a few main doctrines, and 
 
PROTESTANTISM 203 
 
 building round them rampart after rampart of Church 
 observance. It seemed a great thing to save any 
 Christianity at all from the wild passions of northern 
 barbarians. The policy was tempting : yet it was not 
 St. Paul's policy, even in the slums of Corinth. The 
 Apostles had but one gospel of Christ crucified for 
 wise and unwise, and taught men to hold it for them- 
 selves, not to lean on saints and confessors, images and 
 exorcisms, vain repetitions and sensuous rituals, and 
 such like " helps for the weak." If men needed them 
 in the Middle Ages and until now, they did not need 
 them then, though some were " weak in the faith " at 
 Rome already. The Latin Church forgot the image of 
 God in man, and did not notice that her own glorious 
 victories were not won in the strength of helps forsooth 
 like these, but in the might of love divine, which can 
 burst its way through all of them. More and more it 
 seemed unfit that sinful men should presume to speak 
 directly to the sinless Christ, or rather to the terrible 
 Judge of all. So more and more the Virgin and the 
 saints replaced Him in the worship of the people, and 
 more and more the Church became the real mediator 
 between God and men. The Church was the one 
 dispenser of grace, and outside it there was no salva- 
 tion. The Church was the one mouthpiece of God's 
 will, and from its commands there was no appeal to 
 conscience. The Church was the one interpreter of 
 God's truth, and from its decisions there was no appeal 
 to reason. In this way church authority was made the 
 single and sufficient test of truth. 
 
 And church authority along with the Church itself 
 had fallen into discredit before the Reformation. 
 Reason revolted at the quarrelling popes, and con- 
 
2 04 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 science at the scandalous popes. Were these the 
 Vicars of Christ ? Transubstantiation was an insult 
 to common sense, auricular confession a defilement of 
 purity, and wilful treachery to heretics an outrage on 
 common truthfulness. Christendom cowered under 
 Amurath's rebuke at Varna. And had the Church 
 Christ's authority to make traffic of God's forgiveness, 
 and to turn purgatory into a bottomless treasure for 
 the pope ? Whatever was true, these things must be 
 false ; and it was time to bring the Church to account 
 for them. 
 
 The Church, however, was not easily brought to 
 account. The profane might scoff at hocus-pocus and 
 make songs on the disreputable popes, and the learned 
 might tear in pieces the False Decretals and such like 
 pious frauds ; but men's hearts misgave them at the 
 thought of serious conflict. The Church seemed as 
 strong as ever, entrenched behind its twin strongholds 
 of transubstantiation and auricular confession. The 
 one made the priest almost a god on earth, the other 
 laid private life at his mercy. In fact the Church was 
 stronger in one direction than it ever was before. 
 Now that it leaned on princes, it no longer needed to 
 stir up a Pataria to lynch the married clergy, but could 
 use the power of the State to put down its rebels. 
 The Church was never so terrible to its enemies as 
 when it neared its fall in northern Europe. 
 
 The Reformation was the stormy centre of an age 
 of revolution. First the revival of learning revealed an 
 older and nobler literature than that of Rome, an older 
 Bible than the Vulgate. The decayed and worn-out 
 world grew fair and young beneath the spell of Greece. 
 Peradventure it was not so bad as the Church made 
 
PROTESTANTISM 205 
 
 out. Then the discovery of America and the Cape let 
 loose the spirit of adventure like a new crusade. The 
 conquest of Mexico is a romance as brilliant as the 
 siege of Antioch. The Turkish conquest of Egypt and 
 the ruin of Italy completed the revolution of com- 
 merce. The political work of the age was the struggle 
 against the overwhelming power of Spain, the struggle 
 maintained by France till she sank into the confusion 
 of the religious wars, and then by the tiny Dutch re- 
 public till the decisive blow was struck by England. 
 When France recovered herself under Henry IV., the 
 danger was over for awhile. A second period of con- 
 test followed in the Thirty Years' War, so that the 
 struggles of the Reformation extended to the Peace of 
 Westphalia in 1648. 
 
 At one time the Reformation bade fair to cover 
 most of Europe ; but its advance was checked by its 
 own divisions, and by the crafts and assaults of the 
 Jesuits and of the princes they trained. Its permanent 
 conquests were limited to England and the Teutonic 
 North, dividing Germany and securing toleration for a 
 time in France. Thus the Pope lost half his domain ; 
 but he gained a much stronger hold on what remained 
 to him. The Council of Trent reformed the Church of 
 Rome, though the reform was only of scandals and 
 abuses, for the doctrine underlying them was not re- 
 formed at all — only the reins of government were 
 drawn much tighter. And from that day to this the 
 Church of Rome has gone on the same line, consoU- 
 dating and developing the old doctrinal system in 
 opposition to Protestantism, and tightening yet again 
 the reins of government to breaking point. Will it be 
 endured much longer in America ? However, we have 
 
2o6 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 done with Rome. She has had her mystics ; but her 
 Church in general has contributed very Httle to Christian 
 thought since the Reformation. She has chiefly dealt 
 in unhealthy casuistry, false miracles and noyel super- 
 stitions, and anatomical devotions. 
 
 The Greek Church laid out the outlines of Christian 
 doctrine, the Latin guarded them through the evil 
 times ; the task of the Reformation was to find some 
 better test of truth for them than the church authority 
 which had gone so grievously wrong. Three main 
 forms of Protestantism emerged — Lutheranism, Cal- 
 vinism, and the Church of England — Zwingli is too 
 isolated to count as a fourth, though on some points 
 (not the sacraments, if he really differed here from 
 Calvin) he is in advance of both Luther and Calvin. 
 These three then agreed in rejecting the Pope and the 
 mischievous developments of the Middle Ages, accept- 
 ing the ancient creeds, and restoring what they deemed 
 to be the primitive doctrine and government of Christ's 
 Church. In this sense they may be each called catholic. 
 They were further agreed on Justification by faith only, 
 on the supremacy of Scripture, and in general on Pre- 
 destination also. The English reformers generally went 
 with Calvin in this matter, though fortunately they 
 never made it a binding doctrine of the English Church. 
 On these three doctrines the three groups of reformers 
 were in the main agreed ; but each ^ group laid the 
 emphasis in a different way. 
 
 Justification by faith only was to the Lutheran the 
 articulus stantis aut cadcntis ecclcsice. He might com- 
 promise on other matters if need were, but this was 
 vital. It looks scholastic, and in fact it lent itself 
 before long to a scholasticism as wearisome and un- 
 
PROTESTANTISM 207 
 
 spiritual as any that had gone before. But in its proper 
 and original meaning it is nothing else than St. Paul's 
 doctrine (almost forgotten, except among the mystics), 
 that God calls us to know Him directly, not simply to 
 hear of Him through the Church ; to receive our for- 
 giveness and do good works in the strength it brings, 
 not to set about the hopeless task of buying forgiveness 
 with works of law. Thus Church and State are alike 
 holy. The Church was made for man, not man for the 
 Church — for Rome had gone back to her old heathen 
 sacrifice of the individual to the society. Individualism, 
 which in the evil days had fled for refuge to the selfish 
 cowardir.e of the monastery, had in the mendicants 
 renounced the selfishness, and in the Reformation it 
 thanked God and took courage to face the duties of that 
 state of life to which He should please to call it. The 
 victory of faith is not that which fleeth from the world. 
 Calvinism proclaimed the same fundamental truth — 
 the supreme sacredness of the individual — but preached 
 it in the doctrine of predestination. Calvinism is out of 
 fashion in our time ; and if we mix it up with Armi- 
 nianism, as most of its enemies do, the compound is 
 as diabolical as they say ; but if we take it fairly, and 
 therefore as a whole, it will be found rather one-sided 
 than untrue. The difficulty is not in predestination, 
 but in the doctrine of hell fire that was commonly held 
 with it, for the Bible is full of predestination — to every- 
 thing except perdition. Are not all the gifts born with 
 us matter of predestination ? Calvinism bore the brunt 
 of battle with Rome ; yet in its fundamental ideas it is 
 much nearer to Rome than either Lutheranism or the 
 Church of England. Was not Calvin the one great 
 reformer not of Teutonic birth ? He held and even 
 
2o8 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 hardened the Latin conception of God as a Roman 
 emperor in heaven, an inscrutable despot in a far 
 country — though he tempered it with a much firmer 
 hold than Rome's on Christ and His manhood — and 
 worked it out into a system of Church government and 
 discipHne as rigid as the Roman, and as regardless of 
 the State. The real objection to Calvinism is that it 
 was too Romish. It took over persecution, for example, 
 from the Church of Rome ; and if it taught that infants 
 deserve damnation, what else did the old English bap- 
 tismal service teach, with its four successive exorcisms 
 of all the devils from the infant ? Calvinism saved 
 some by election, Rome saved some by baptism : the 
 rest were a massa perditionis. But the freedom which 
 Calvinism took away with one hand was often given 
 back by the other. The true ideal of our heart is not 
 the caprice of roving fancy, but the rest of a service 
 which is perfect freedom. As the old monk had found 
 this in willing and complete submission to God's calling 
 in the rule of his house, so the Calvinist found it in 
 willing and complete submission to God's calling in his 
 Bible. And there he found something that lifted him 
 above his baser self. Had not the Most High fore- 
 known him from eternity ? Had not the Saviour died 
 for His elect ? Was not the call to good works as much 
 as to salvation ? He could do them too, because his 
 strength was not his own, but given him from on high, 
 and given him for the very purpose. The living power 
 of Calvinism — the inner meaning of predestination — 
 was the conviction it shared with Lutheranism and with 
 the mystics of all ages, that sovereign Love can save 
 without the help of men — 
 
 " Thou must save, and Thou alone." 
 
PROTESTANTISM 209 
 
 Calvinism has fought some of the hardest of Christ's 
 battles in the world ; and its failure was the common 
 failure of Western Christendom to reach the fulness 
 of the Gospel, that Christ should taste of death for 
 every man. 
 
 The English Reformation ran a different course. 
 It bears the stamp of no one great man, but that of 
 the nation itself. It is as national as the Swedish. It 
 was the work of the State (the Church was more than 
 once compelled to acquiesce), and therefore its aim was 
 practical, not to work out a theory with French com- 
 pleteness, but to remedy practical evils and do no 
 more. If Edward served the theorists a little, and Mary 
 served them much, Elizabeth soon brought things back 
 to common sense. She at least understood England. 
 The royal supremacy was true conservatism as well 
 as needful reformation. If Henry used his power 
 tyrannically, the power itself was only what the old 
 kings had used before him, and later kings had never 
 abandoned. If he restrained Convocation, this was 
 only the Conqueror's law, that nothing should be enacted 
 by Church councils but what he had himself ordained 
 beforehand. As soon as the Church had been properly 
 subjected to the State, the way was clear, first for the 
 reform of abuses, then for the revision of doctrine. 
 And here a Conservative policy was followed. The 
 reformers did not change for the sake of change, and 
 were as far as possible from the Puritan idea that 
 nothing was right which Rome had done, or which 
 is not expressly commanded in Scripture. So they 
 changed no practice unless it was "vain or superstitious," 
 and altered no doctrine unless it was " repugnant to 
 the plain words of Scripture," or at least " could not 
 
 O 
 
210 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 be proved by Scripture." In some ways then they 
 made Httle change. The old creeds were retained, the 
 prayers were to a large extent the old ones translated, 
 the succession of bishops was carefully preserved, and 
 even their old jurisdiction was to some extent con- 
 tinued. This generally Conservative policy gives a 
 double emphasis to the changes they did make. And 
 these changes are much deeper than the Calvinistic. 
 No Church has ever put on record a more deliberate 
 and comprehensive repudiation of the distinctive ideals 
 of Latin Christianity. Other Churches have taught the 
 supremacy of Scripture over Church tradition ; but no 
 Church has ever taken such pains to make that supremacy 
 effective. It is not merely that Scripture is constantly 
 appealed to for proof, and even the creeds are only to be 
 received and believed because " they may be proved by 
 most certain warrants of Holy Scripture." Rome quotes 
 too, though very commonly in a super grammaticam sense. 
 It is not merely that Scripture saturates our Liturgy, 
 and that it is read to the people more fully and sys- 
 tematically than in any other Church. The laity also 
 are encouraged (not forbidden) to read it freely for 
 themselves ; and the clergy at priests' orders are urgently 
 exhorted " to be studious in reading and learning the 
 Scriptures," and give their solemn promise to teach 
 nothing as necessary " but what they are persuaded 
 may be concluded and proved by the Scripture," and 
 " to banish and drive away all erroneous and strange 
 doctrines contrary to God's Word." The decisive point 
 is that the meaning of Scripture is left for reason to 
 determine. No judge is constituted ; and all human 
 infallibility is utterly denied. Is it in Churches ? All 
 the great Churches have " erred, not only in their 
 
PROTESTANTISM 2 1 1 
 
 living and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters 
 of Faith." Is it in Councils ? " General ^ Councils may 
 err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining 
 unto God." Is it in the Pope ? He " hath no juris- 
 diction in this realm of England." The Church is " a 
 witness and a keeper of Holy Writ," not its final inter- 
 preter. It is assumed here that Scripture is reasonably 
 clear on essentials, and that the Holy Spirit will so far 
 guide every one who truly seeks Him. Truth within 
 will recognise God's truth without. Here then in the 
 midst of care for the society comes the fullest asser- 
 tion of individualism that any Church has ever made. 
 Private judgment is not private licence, but a necessity 
 we cannot escape, and there can be no faith without 
 it. The most besotted of infallibilists depends on it 
 as absolutely as the most blatant of freethinkers, only 
 he likes a quick way down from the pinnacle of the 
 temple. 
 
 The promise of the Reformation was hardly realised, 
 though the next generation was a splendid period on 
 both sides of the North Sea. A great and complex 
 movement is not to be judged by the scandals of its 
 beginnings — we do not measure the French Revolution 
 simply by the Reign of Terror — and the value of the 
 Reformation is not so much in what it did, as in what 
 it made possible. Now that the method was found, 
 the advance would come sooner or later. Now that 
 the great tyrant was checked, there was less danger 
 from the petty tyrants who came after him. They 
 were only shadows that would pass away. But there 
 
 ^ The reformers made no distinction between CEcumenical (East andWesi) 
 and General (East or West) Councils. When Jewell denounces the General 
 Council of Trent as a sham, his first question is, Where are the Greeks? 
 Even Sancta Clara (no mean special pleader) seems ignorant of the evasion. 
 
212 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 were plenty of them, for the Epigoni of Protestantism 
 shrank from the vision of liberty, and tried hard to get 
 back into slavery. Lutheranism soon lost itself in the 
 scholastic jangle, and Calvinism followed a little later ; 
 and in England the reactionary Carolines came to 
 power under the Stuarts. Yet England fared much 
 better than the continent, for even Laud was no 
 traitor ; and it was good to have a voice for decency 
 and order, and a protest against the exclusive domin- 
 ance of Calvinism. Meanwhile the religious wars were 
 brutalising, and sometimes utterly ruinous ; and tolera- 
 tion and charity were not likely to grow up among 
 Protestants as long as they were compelled to fight a 
 battle of life and death against an implacable enemy 
 who systematically used and glorified the resources of 
 treachery and assassination. There is no more skilful 
 devilry in history than the work of the Catholic reac- 
 tion in that age ; and the only marvel is that the 
 struggle against it did not make the Protestants a great 
 deal worse than they were. 
 
 The peace of Westphalia was a peace of exhaustion 
 for Germany ; and a few years later England settled 
 down for awhile under the Restoration, and France 
 under Louis XIV,, so that there was a clear pause in 
 the wars of religion. It is not accidental that Science 
 now came forward to make its decisive advance. 
 Modern science is the nursling of Christianity. The 
 unity of God implied the unity of Nature, the Incarna- 
 tion implied the dignity of man which gave research a 
 worthy object, and the Christian duty of patient and 
 impartial search for truth pointed out the scientific 
 method of research. Advance was checked first by an 
 asceticism which " despised the world," then by an 
 
PROTESTANTISM 213 
 
 infallible Church which reduced Science to a minor 
 department of Theology, and decided questions even of 
 criticism by authority, as it notably did at Trent ; and 
 now that the Reformation had renounced asceticism 
 and limited the province of the Church, the advance 
 was checked for another century by the noise of the 
 doctrinal disputes and the wars they caused. But now 
 the way was free, the method clear. It was time for 
 a revelation to come up from the earth to meet the 
 revelation which had come down from heaven.^ Nature 
 is as truly God's word as Scripture ; and now that 
 Scripture had unsealed it, the time was come to com- 
 pare God's new Book with His old. This has been the 
 work of the last two hundred years and more ; and if 
 it has searched out the weaknesses of Christian theories, 
 it has also revealed Christ on a new side, and unveiled 
 whole worlds of glory which our fathers never knew. 
 
 England and Germany both had two great religious 
 movements between the Reformation and the French 
 Revolution, one to piety, and one to scepticism. But 
 in Germany the pietistic movement came before the 
 sceptical ; in England Deism culminated before the 
 Methodist Revival. It was but one sign of the wide- 
 spread weariness of Church controversies, which the 
 Cambridge Platonists represented from the side of 
 mysticism, the Latitudinarians from that of common 
 sense. The Deists also stood for common sense; but 
 unlike Tillotson, they went far beyond the limits of 
 English orthodoxy. The floating doubts of half a 
 century were summed up on their behalf by Matthew 
 Tindall in 1730. Christianity is "as old as Creation," 
 because it is a republication of Natural Religion and 
 
 ^ Hort Hulsean Lectures, ch. ii. 
 
214 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 nothing more. So far as it is this, it deserves respect, 
 though truly it is not much needed ; but anything 
 more than this is harmful, or at best useless. 
 
 Deism was really too shallow. It could not be 
 more than a passing phase of thought, even in an age 
 which had so little sense of mystery. The French were 
 behind the times when they dressed it up (with a little 
 sentiment from Rousseau) to be the Gospel of the 
 Revolution. Yet Deism is no unworthy opening to the 
 great contest whose end our children may not live to 
 see, for it threw down among the people the questions 
 it raised, and they have never rested since. Is the 
 Bible credible ? Are miracles possible ? Is atone- 
 ment needed for sin ? Deism itself never went on 
 (though others soon did) to the final question — Is 
 there a God at all ? and if so, can we know Him ? 
 It was good that the questions should be raised, 
 that some of the huge masses of unbelief which 
 lurk in all conventional religion should be brought to 
 light. Faith is never secure till unfaith has been 
 probed to the bottom. Better any wrangling than 
 unreasoning orthodoxy, for there is no poison so deadly 
 as God's own truth if swallowed whole. Wesley was 
 right when he welcomed the Deists to laugh the 
 Christianity out of the nominal Christians who are none 
 the better for the name they bear, " and then He whom 
 neither you nor they know now, shall rise and gird 
 Himself with strength, and go forth in His almighty 
 love, and sweetly conquer you all together." ^ 
 
 Meanwhile Science came on like a giant, and dealt 
 at every step another blow at human pride. Astronomy 
 reduced the world of men to a mere atom of the 
 
 1 Works, ix. 77. 
 
PROTESTANTISM 215 
 
 universe, geology reduced the human period to an 
 insignificant fraction of the earth's duration, and evolu- 
 tion firmly linked man himself to the beasts that perish. 
 And if all is law, where shall we find room for our 
 Father in heaven ? Is not revelation finally disproved ? 
 Not at all. The science which abases man reveals a 
 glory of God which fills earth as well as heaven with a 
 splendour undreamed of in past ages. And to that we 
 must lift up our hearts. What if God is in the world 
 as well as above it, immanent with the Greeks as well as 
 transcendent with the Latins ? What if rather the 
 world is in God, and in Him lives and moves and has 
 its being ? What if law is no arbitrary appointment, 
 but the expression of a Nature in which there is neither 
 variableness nor shadow of turning ? Its awful unre- 
 lenting sternness proves indeed that God is not easy- 
 going good nature ; but not that He is other than Love. 
 Is it not the very thing we ought to expect from Love 
 too strong to change in moods, too faithful to spare us 
 the self-sacrifice which makes us like Himself, the 
 suffering through which the final summing-up in Christ 
 is working out from age to age ? He that spared not 
 His own Son, will He spare us ? 
 
 The French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon 
 cleared away the wrecks of mediaevalism from Europe, 
 and a peace of more than fourscore years has fol- 
 lowed, broken chiefly by the struggle which transferred 
 the military leadership from a Latin to a Teutonic 
 power. It was now time that yet a third revelation 
 should come back from the past to meet the revelation 
 which had come down from heaven. Marvellous as 
 the work of Science has been, and yet more marvel- 
 lously as it grows from year to year, I still incline to 
 
2i6 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 think that History is quite as much as Science the 
 special message to our own time, and that it is giving 
 us a second and not less thorough sifting of our 
 Western thoughts concerning God and man. History 
 was of necessity fragmentary among the old heathens, 
 with their " godless multitude of gods " and hatred of 
 barbarians ; for the unity of God was needed to reveal 
 the unity of mankind, and to give worth and meaning 
 to the obscure fightings of barbarian peoples. The 
 Incarnation is the philosophy of history, as St. Paul 
 showed in his Epistles to the Romans and Ephesians, 
 so that his clues needed only to be followed up. The 
 Apologists and the Alexandrians did something, Augus- 
 tine did something more ; but no great advance was 
 possible till the Reformation had lifted the dead weight 
 of authority, nor even then till fairly settled peace 
 returned to Europe, for the first time in fourteen 
 hundred years. Scripture gave the method of research 
 to Science and History in common ; and Scripture 
 gave to History through Science the illuminating 
 thought of evolution. The teaching of History is less 
 advanced and less generally understood at present than 
 that of Science ; but it is not less profoundly in- 
 fluencing our ideas of revelation. 
 
 On the Old Testament we must speak with caution, 
 for we are still in the thick of the battle. But it may 
 safely be said that the moral difficulties become less 
 formidable the more clearly we recognise that Israel 
 had no more than the dawn of the light which we 
 believe is shining more and more unto the perfect day. 
 Nor need we fear for the general result, though the 
 book be sifted as never book was sifted yet. God's 
 guidance of Israel in a direction contrary to the 
 
PROTESTANTISM 217 
 
 national character is much too deeply marked on 
 Israel's history to be overlooked by any reasonable 
 student: and whatever modifications of current opinions 
 about the method of that guidance truth may finally 
 require, they cannot but be so many avenues to truth 
 which is now obscured. 
 
 On the New Testament the results are clearer ; and 
 they are not in the sceptic's favour. One Epistle is 
 no longer St, Paul's, and another is no longer to the 
 Ephesians only. The Apocalypse is shifted back to 
 Nero's time, and perhaps the First Epistle of Peter 
 thrown forward to Vespasian's. A few passages are 
 spurious, though not all even of these are unhistorical ; 
 and a few more are doubtful. But these are secondary 
 matters : seventy years of searching study have only 
 settled the historical integrity of the New Testament 
 as a whole more firmly than it stood before. Nobody, 
 for instance, would now date St. John's Gospel as Baur 
 did, some seventy years after the Apostle's death ; and 
 nobody would now feel it safe to charge St. Luke with 
 the gross historical blunders that were so freely fathered 
 on him a generation ago. But there are deeper things 
 than these outward evidences. The student is even 
 more impressed by the subtle accuracy of the language, 
 and by the subtle harmonies of thought which unfold 
 themselves more and more to patient and truthful 
 study, harmonies not only with other parts of Scrip- 
 ture, but with the course of Nature and the course of 
 History, and most of all with the spiritual truth we 
 have already learned by living it. Must not such 
 words as these be words of life eternal ? 
 
 Yet History gives no countenance to the rigid 
 systems of Western Orthodoxy, whether they call them- 
 
2i8 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 selves Protestant or Catholic. History joins its witness 
 to that of Scripture, that even so far as they are true, 
 they cannot be the vital things men take them for. 
 The Gospel is neither a Protestant idea nor a Catholic 
 organisation, neither a Greek philosophy nor a Latin 
 law, but a living Person including and transcending all 
 of them, a living Person on whom faith can feed 
 continually, and only faith, for it is a plain absurdity 
 to fancy that anything else can have touch of spiritual 
 things. The witness of History confirms the instinct 
 of every spiritual man, that the questions of govern- 
 ment, of discipline, of ritual, of dogma, which occupy 
 the noisy world are very minor matters, however 
 needful it be to get some of them settled. History 
 points us back with solemn emphasis to Christ himself. 
 All Christian doctrine is summed up in Christ's Person, 
 all Christian morality in Christ's example. 
 
 The warning we had of late, that we are more 
 Latin than we know,^ is not only for the silly creatures 
 who are always bewitched with the last new finery, 
 if only they hear say it comes from Rome. Some of 
 our stoutest Protestants also are enslaved to Latin 
 glosses on the Gospel. If the Reformation broke the 
 yoke of bondage, it could not of itself cast out the 
 spirit of slavery. Only " the truth shall make you 
 free ; " and the truth is Christ, not Protestantism, far 
 less Romanism. Rome has not always towered over 
 Christendom. She was a minor power when she 
 committed schism against the Holy Orthodox Church 
 a thousand years ago ; and she will be a minor power 
 a hundred years hence, if she cannot conquer England. 
 The future is not with the Latin Church, unless God 
 
 ^ Wilson Hidsean Lectures, 143. 
 
PROTESTANTISM 2 1 9 
 
 raise it from the dead. We shall find a better guide, 
 though still but a human help, in the older Church 
 of God which flourished before the times of Roman 
 greatness. The same Providence which has brought 
 us round to the old problems of Christ's Person also 
 bids us take them up again. The knowledge of Christ 
 is the revelation of man ; and we need it even for 
 the reconstruction of society which is the visible task 
 of our time ; for only in the light of His sinless purity 
 dare we look up the steep ascents to heights of human 
 nature towering as far above the angels as the deeps 
 of sin are sunk below the beasts that perish. Yet we 
 may not — we cannot — take up the old Greek problems 
 quite on the old Greek lines, as if all things had con- 
 tinued as they were from the beginning, since the 
 fathers of Chalcedon fell asleep. Christ reveals Himself 
 to us in the Latin Church, which laboured for a thou- 
 sand years to teach the law and order if not the 
 freedom of the Gospel ; in the Reformation which tore 
 in sunder the unspiritual unity of Western Europe, and 
 broke the yoke of human infallibility ; in the students 
 of Nature who have scrutinised the universe from the 
 far away stars to the dust of our feet and the nerves 
 of our body ; in the students of History who have 
 sifted every word of Scripture with microscopic accu- 
 racy, and traced with loving care God's training of the 
 world from Ur of the Chaldees to yesterday's news- 
 paper. The change from the times of Origen and 
 Athanasius is the change from a winter to a summer 
 landscape. Every tree is there, and every twig ; but 
 almost hidden by the glory of the spring with which 
 our God has clothed it. In Christ all things are holy. 
 In Christ the Bible is holier than to the men who make 
 
2 20 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 it an idol, for its record is of Christ ; and the Church 
 is holier than to the men who make it a goddess, for 
 its witness is of Christ. "The old things are passed 
 away ; behold, they are become new." As we look 
 back through the long ages of history, we see the evil 
 consuming itself, the good perishing only to return in 
 new and nobler forms. The day of the Lord is 
 burning round us even now ; and on the decision of 
 England rests her future. We must go forward, if we 
 are not to be choked in the backwash of a dead super- 
 stition. A mere return to Protestantism would now 
 be as unbelieving as a mere return to Romanism. 
 But the signs are rather signs of hope. The blending 
 of parties of late years, their willingness (would it 
 were more I) to learn truth from one another, is a 
 pledge that Christ has not forsaken us. And in Christ 
 all the questions of our heart are answered, and all our 
 discords have their everlasting peace and harmony. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 
 
 By the Rev. Chancellor LIAS, M.A. 
 
 The present volume of Essays is, as I take it, an 
 attempt to recur to the first principles of the Reform 
 movement in the sixteenth century, as a preliminary to 
 the application of them to the problems which await us 
 in the century now so close at hand. Those principles 
 have been sufficiently treated by those who have gone 
 before. For me, whose difficult task it is to sum up in 
 a few pages the conflict between the absolutist and the 
 reforming principles since the close of the Council of 
 Trent, it must suffice to say that the Reformation 
 presents itself to us under two aspects, the one tem- 
 porary, the other permanent. The dogmatic basis on 
 which the principal Reforming systems were erected 
 has been unquestionably proved to have been tem- 
 porary. Yet at the time such a dogmatic basis was 
 both necessary and unavoidable ; necessary, because in 
 that age it was found impossible to meet the majestic 
 and prescriptive claims of Rome on so wide a basis as 
 that of free thought and free inquiry alone ; unavoid- 
 able, because the Reformers themselves approached 
 the questions of their day with minds trained in the 
 mediaeval schools of theology, and great men though 
 they were, they were unable altogether to shake off 
 the prejudices, and emancipate themselves from the 
 
222 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 traditions, of the theological systems in which they had 
 been brought up. Scholars and thinkers like Colet, 
 Erasmus, Fisher, and More, were doubtless abstractedly 
 right in their desire to see philosophic and dispassionate 
 inquiry take the place of religious bigotry. But they 
 were before their age. Strong religious convictions, 
 and the passions and energy they engender, were 
 necessary in the Reformation era, if the conscience 
 of Europe was to be stirred to a struggle with the 
 gigantic spiritual authority at that time wielded by the 
 Pope. Colet, fclix opportunitate mortis, died before the 
 storm had burst. The others, timidly and unwisely, as I 
 must believe, shrunk from taking their part in a conflict 
 in which they fully sympathised with neither party, and 
 took refuge in the haven provided for them by authority 
 and custom. There is at least one excuse for them. 
 The philosophic mind, accustomed to reflect, to discuss, 
 to balance probabilities, is somewhat apt to fail us in 
 times of stress. The philosopher is the man of all ages. 
 Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, as well as the English 
 Reformers, were the men of their own day. They 
 applied the training they had received to what they felt 
 to be the needs of the hour, and they generated an 
 amount of spiritual force which enabled them practi- 
 cally to deal with those needs. But the bottles in 
 which that spiritual force was confined have of late 
 '' decayed and waxen old," and are like to burst with 
 the pressure of modern opinion. The Lutheran and 
 Calvinist systems of theology, so long dominant among 
 Protestants, are on the point of " vanishing away." 
 Men on all sides are recurring to the first principles of 
 Christianity itself, and if there be any presentment of 
 those principles which is more likely to find favour 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 223 
 
 than any other in the coming age, it is that which is 
 found in the writers of the Alexandrian school in the 
 third and fourth centuries. 
 
 To the permanent and therefore more important 
 aspect of the work of the Reformers scant justice, I must 
 confess, seems to have been done of late. Not only 
 has a determined effort been made during the last fifty 
 years to rehabilitate Roman and mediaeval opinion among 
 us, but even liberal thinkers, in their earnest desire to 
 be candid, have of late shown less gratitude to, and less 
 appreciation of the men in the sixteenth century who 
 won for us the freedom we now enjoy, than they deserve. 
 If a portion of their work was transitory, there is another 
 part of it for which the world is permanently indebted to 
 them. And this in two ways. First, the civil and re- 
 ligious liberty we now enjoy, which has spread so many 
 blessings around, and which we may hope is our per- 
 manent heritage, is exclusively traceable to the action 
 taken by the Reformers ; and next, the spirit of reform 
 itself which they evoked is still at work among us. 
 The Reformation was not confined to the sixteenth 
 century, though it began then. It has been operating 
 ever since, and never more widely and effectually than 
 at the present moment. In truth the spirit of reform 
 is the spirit of Christianity. Or may we not rather say, 
 it is the Spirit of the living God, who can never cease 
 His efforts until He has destroyed every abuse, every 
 perversion or denial of God's truth, and has brought 
 not only every form of human life, but every thought 
 of the human heart, into captivity to the law of Christ. 
 The secret of Luther's vast success was that he 
 gave voice to the long-suppressed yearnings of thou- 
 sands of his contemporaries. His defiance to the 
 
224 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 powers that be penetrated like wildfire throughout the 
 West ; but the infant Hercules to which his protests 
 gave birth had still many labours to achieve before it 
 reached maturity, and many more still await it before it 
 is destined to achieve its final triumph. Governments 
 took fright at the new force which had been introduced 
 into the world. Despotic monarchs instinctively per- 
 ceived that religious freedom and civil freedom could 
 not be separated. And so they set themselves to put 
 down the former by axe and gibbet, fire and sword, wher- 
 ever their authority reached, in order to preserve them- 
 selves from the danger of the latter. The new doctrines 
 were, in the first instance, often suppressed by torture and 
 the executioner before they had any time to take root. 
 In those cases it was no wonder if the new inspiration 
 soon died out. The first occasion on which the world 
 was called upon to witness the death-grapple between 
 despotism and liberty, civil as well as religious, was the 
 war of Independence, partly religious and partly 
 secular, between Spain and Holland. At the outset, all 
 the success was on the side of discipline and authority. 
 The task of the fathers of civil and religious liberty at 
 first seemed hopeless. The patriots were beaten in 
 almost every action ; the Spanish arms proceeded 
 almost unresisted throughout the land. The most 
 fiendish cruelties, the blackest perfidy, the most cynical 
 contempt for human suffering, were not sufficient to 
 rouse even a maddened people to successful resistance. 
 One might have fancied, as one witnessed the repeated 
 hideous scenes of treachery and bloodshed, that, as an 
 English chronicler said of his country in the days of 
 Stephen, "God and His saints slept." But at length 
 the tide turned. " The heavens themselves " seemed at 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 225 
 
 last to "strike" at Spanish "injustice." "The Lord 
 arose as one out of sleep and as a giant refreshed 
 with wine," when the Spaniards retreated from before 
 Leyden, baffled by Dutch valour combined with the 
 fury of the elements. The same thing was repeated 
 twenty years after, at the climax of the long struggle 
 of England against Spanish bigotry, faithlessness, and 
 arrogance. Once more the " stars in their courses " 
 seemed to " fight against " the oppressor of the nations. 
 After English valour had done its best, the storm arose 
 which swept the baffled fleet into the North Sea, 
 whence only a few disabled hulks were destined to 
 return. The fight for religious freedom has been a 
 longer and yet more desperate one. In many coun- 
 tries it has not yet been achieved. It is a more 
 arduous struggle in precisely the same proportion as 
 the "children of this world are wiser in their genera- 
 tion than the children of light." But that the free 
 development of individual opinion, rather than the voice 
 of external authority, will be the means by which 
 the Spirit of truth will ultimately lead Christ's disciples 
 into all the truth, admits of little doubt. The irpwrov 
 y\rev^o<i of the Roman and semi-Roman theories is that 
 there exists an authority competent to decide, at any 
 given moment, every controversy which is at that 
 moment in existence. Such a theory is at variance with 
 the fundamental idea of the Christian Church. That 
 Church had power to define what the message was 
 with which she was charged. But she never claimed 
 the power of settling what deductions might fairly be 
 drawn from its principles. External authority un- 
 questionably has its place in all communities destined 
 to occupy a place of any prominence in the world's 
 
 P 
 
2 26 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 history. It is necessary to secure order, law, the 
 coherence of the body politic. And as with nations, 
 so with Churches. If they are not to be reduced to 
 chaos by a process of disruption, there must be regula- 
 tions, as well as persons whose business it is to enforce 
 them, and periods during which it is necessary that 
 they should be definitely ascertained and laid down. It 
 is only when the principle of order and submission to 
 lawful authority has taken a firm root, and when its 
 nature and limits are clearly understood, that the 
 principle of free and constitutional development can be 
 allowed full play. It is here that the disciples of the 
 Reformation have made their gravest mistakes. Like 
 the Hollanders, who constantly began to argue with 
 their commanders just as they were going into 
 action against men long inured to discipline, the 
 Reformers began to quarrel with one another at the 
 outset of their combat a outrance with spiritual autho- 
 rity, backed by superstition and long prescription, and 
 enforced by the sword of the civil magistrate. The 
 Calvinist hated the Lutheran and the Arminian as 
 much as, if not more than, he hated the Papist. What 
 wonder if religious freedom found a home only among 
 the stronger races, if the weaker ones made a poor 
 fight against authority when they felt they were hope- 
 lessly divided among themselves ? Moreover, unfor- 
 tunately for itself. Protestantism, in its struggle for 
 freedom, has consecrated the spirit of religious division. 
 If men were not altogether satisfied with the regulations 
 of the religious body to which they belong, they held 
 themselves justified in forming another for themselves. 
 And they have not been content to view secession as 
 a necessary evil. In some quarters it has been ex- 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 227 
 
 tolled to the skies as the perfection of Christian liberty. 
 So Rome, like Napoleon, has defeated, and continues 
 to defeat, her antagonists in detail, and is able to pre- 
 serve the imposing front which it cannot be denied 
 that she still continues to present to the world even 
 to the present hour. 
 
 Thus the struggle between Romanism and Pro- 
 testantism has, from the moment of its commencement 
 to the present hour, been a conflict between organised 
 and unorganised effort. Rome commenced the conflict 
 with every external advantage in her favour. Not only 
 did the strongest civil governments ultimately range 
 themselves on her side, but she had all the prestige 
 attaching to long-standing supremacy. The shock of 
 the Reformation compelled her to perfect her discipline, 
 in order to meet more serious dangers than she had 
 ever before been required to face. At the Council of 
 Trent she succeeded in closing her ranks into a compact 
 phalanx. The body of religious opinion which had 
 grown up by degrees in the Church was crystallised 
 into a system. Purgatory, the worship of the Virgin 
 and the Saints, Sacramental grace, Justification, and 
 other doctrines which had long been practically accepted, 
 were carefully defined, and some extravagances on both 
 sides were firmly repressed. It was felt, moreover, that 
 some of the worst abuses prevalent in the Church must 
 be put down, and the fact was recognised that even the 
 most absolute ecclesiastical despotism could hardly, in 
 the then condition of affairs, continue to exist without 
 at least some regard for public opinion. Side by side 
 with this careful and skilful consolidation of Church 
 organisation, a body of men arose, whose special pro- 
 vince it was to bring that organisation to bear on the 
 
2 28 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 life of individuals and of nations. It is not too much 
 to say that the very existence of the Roman Church 
 during the last three centuries has been bound up with 
 the activity of the Society of Jesus. Even their sup- 
 pression is only the exception which proves the rule. 
 The rare instinct the Roman communion displays in 
 dealing with the difficulties which beset her, soon 
 showed her that Rome without the Jesuits was as a 
 warrior without arms or ammunition. Therefore the 
 Order was re-established, and is probably the stronger 
 for the mistakes in the seventeenth century which 
 led to its temporary downfall. The existence of a 
 body of defenders pledged to nothing but the estab- 
 lishment of a spiritual supremacy over the human 
 mind, and ready to adopt any means whereby that 
 spiritual supremacy can be gained and secured, is 
 absolutely essential to the maintenance of a despotism 
 such as that which is enshrined at the Vatican. 
 It has lately been said of the leaders of the Jesuit 
 body that they are absolutely destitute of religious 
 convictions themselves, and only use religion as a 
 means of obtaining supremacy over others. It may 
 well be believed that this is so — that the man who 
 is restrained by no religious scruples or prejudices 
 of his own is best qualified for playing on the religi- 
 ous emotions of others. But, however this may be 
 in the case of the present heads of his society, want 
 of intense religious conviction certainly cannot be laid 
 to the charge of the founder of the Order. Strange, 
 even bizarre, his religious convictions may have been. 
 His notions of morality on many points were not those 
 of the religion of Christ. But it must be borne in mind 
 that in religious, as in civil despotisms, fidelity to the 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 229 
 
 despot outweighs every other consideration whatso- 
 ever. If submission to constituted authority be the 
 articulus stantis ant cadentis ecclesice, then the end will 
 naturally justify the means whereby obedience to 
 that authority is enforced. Firmly convinced that 
 fidelity to the Vicar of Jesus Christ, and to the 
 rules and regulations of the body over which he 
 ruled, was fidelity to Jesus Christ himself, Ignatius 
 Loyola founded a society on the principle of loyalty 
 to the Head of Christ's Church on earth, an object 
 to which every other principle whatever must give 
 way. Morality, no doubt, even the highest standard 
 of morality, wherever possible ; but wherever this came 
 into conflict with the best interests of the Church, the 
 ordinary rules of morality must be set aside. Accord- 
 ingly Loyola and his followers set themselves, with the 
 utmost energy, to set up permanently and irreversibly on 
 earth that kingdom of which Gregory VII. and Innocent 
 III. had dreamed, and were admirably seconded in their 
 single-minded efforts by the self-will, the self-assertion, 
 the contentious spirit of their adversaries. The pages of 
 Ranke will tell us how they set about their task. They 
 flung themselves, with the utmost energy and judgment, 
 into the movement for secular education, and contrived 
 for the most part to get it into their hands. They used 
 the Confessional with extraordinary dexterity, and espe- 
 cially did they contrive to gain an influence over the 
 female sex. Recognising the truths of the absolute 
 supremacy of conscience on the one hand, and the 
 imperfection of popular ideas of morality on the other, 
 they skilfully adapted their principles to the spirit of 
 the age. No standard of morality at all would have 
 shocked the public conscience ; a too exalted standard 
 
230 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 would have provoked resistance. So in their books on 
 casuistry they lowered their morality to the level of 
 public opinion, and if they sowed the seeds of future 
 disaster, they were at least rewarded by immediate 
 success. They were acute enough also to see that 
 absolutism was still the dominant principle in civil 
 government. It was their policy to ally themselves 
 with existing despotisms, to accommodate the religious 
 system of Rome as far as possible to the wishes and 
 prejudices of the civil ruler, and to point out to him 
 the intimate connection of religious liberty with licence 
 and insubordination in the State. By this means they 
 gained an extraordinary influence in public affairs. 
 Before very long they had the Latin races in Spain, 
 in France, in Italy, in Belgium, at their feet. If the 
 spirit of freedom was stronger in the Teutonic races, 
 they at least won back Austria and half the rest of 
 Germany ; and if they could not regain Germany as a 
 whole, yet by arraying Teuton against Teuton they 
 could at least paralyse German influence in Europe, 
 and had good reason for entertaining the hope that 
 ultimately all Western Christendom would be won back 
 to the Roman obedience. 
 
 To gain this end they used every weapon in their 
 power — denunciation, calumny, intrigue, bribery, assas- 
 sination, and above all, persecution. One can but 
 make a passing allusion to the Spanish and Nether- 
 landish Inquisition, to the vast number of lives that 
 were sacrificed by their means, until the spirit of re- 
 ligious inquiry was absolutely crushed. The Jesuit 
 morality of persecution was disturbed by no scruples. 
 Those who ventured to think for themselves were 
 " burned handsomely," as a Roman Catholic eye-wit- 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 231 
 
 ness puts it. Cities which would not expel the Re- 
 forming preachers were at once besieged. The doctrine 
 that no faith need be kept with rebels and heretics 
 was extremely to the taste of the tyrants of the sixteenth 
 and seventeenth centuries ; and again and again the 
 articles of capitulation under which beleaguered cities 
 were surrendered were most shamefully violated, and 
 those whose lives the victors had solemnly promised to 
 spare were butchered by hundreds in cold blood. The 
 connection of such foul breaches of faith with ecclesias- 
 tical despotism is about as clearly proved as any fact 
 of history can be. In the old heathen days, conditions 
 of capitulation were, as a rule, strictly and faithfully 
 kept. Heathen deities were supposed to hate and 
 punish perfidy. Even when the barbarians swept 
 down in their savagery upon the Roman empire, the 
 breach of the pledged word was rare. It was not 
 until submission to an earthly potentate had taken 
 the place of obedience to the moral law that such 
 breaches became common. As early as 1444 we hear 
 of Cardinal Julian, the papal legate, proclaiming at 
 the battle of Varna, that faith need not be kept with 
 unbelievers ; and report states that the Sultan Amurath 
 called on Jesus, the Son of Mary, to avenge the 
 treachery of His disciples. It is satisfactory to think 
 that in this case, the first, so far as I remember, in 
 which this unworthy doctrine was publicly proclaimed, 
 its promulgation was rewarded by a disastrous defeat. 
 Nevertheless, it continued to hold the field for more 
 than two centuries, and even then it was necessity, not 
 conviction, certainly not any recantation at the Vatican, 
 which led to its abandonment. There are few students 
 of history who do not sympathise with the Dutch in 
 
232 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 their war of independence, when they were at last in a 
 position to threaten reprisals on their perfidious and 
 dishonest foes, and with William III., when after 
 allowing Marshal Boufflers to depart, according to the 
 terms of the capitulation of Namur, he afterwards re- 
 arrested and detained him until he pledged his word that 
 similar engagements, entered into with equal solemnity 
 by his master, Louis XIV., should be observed with 
 equal fidelity. It was everywhere the same. Violence, 
 cruelty, perfidy — very seldom indeed reason, argument, 
 persuasion — were the means by which countries were 
 won back to the Roman yoke. English people have 
 been persuaded to lavish a good deal of sentimental 
 admiration on that interesting personage, St. Fran9ois 
 de Sales, whose gentleness, meekness, and persuasive- 
 ness, combined with a rare eloquence and logical power, 
 we are asked to believe, restored the authority of the 
 Roman Church in the neighbourhood of Geneva. The 
 story is about on a level, in point of historic accuracy, 
 with a mediaeval legend. The hard, stern truth is, 
 that Fran9ois endeavoured for a considerable time to 
 use such means as have been attributed to him in later 
 times, and did not make a single convert ; and that 
 then, despairing of making any impression on hearts so 
 hardened as those of the Protestants of Annecy and 
 the neighbourhood, he suggested more efficacious 
 means to the Pope and the Duke of Savoy. Backed 
 by a body of troops he took possession of the 
 churches, and restored the mass in them, while the 
 Duke of Savoy threatened imprisonment and confis- 
 cation of goods to those who refused to hear the 
 Roman preachers. The Reformers and their adherents 
 were deported to the frontiers, happy only in this, 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 233 
 
 that they were not required to seal their testimony 
 with their blood.^ 
 
 By such means were the Latin races and some 
 Teutonic districts recovered to the Roman fold. The 
 Thirty Years' War, the intervention of Sweden, and the 
 ultimate peace of Westphalia, put a term to the con- 
 quests of the Papacy in Germany, and it is a remarkable 
 fact that the religious settlement then arrived at has never 
 been disturbed. Nor is this the only remarkable fact to 
 be observed. Religious opinion has ultimately, in every 
 case, followed the lead of the civil government. Where 
 the government was inclined to the Papacy the popula- 
 tion declared for the Pope. Where it favoured Re- 
 forming opinions, the people accepted them also ; and 
 from that time to this, neither party has been able to 
 win back the ground they have lost. This points, first 
 of all, to religious exhaustion, which has rendered men 
 weary of controversy ; next, to the divisions and mutual 
 hatreds among the Reformers, which neutralised their 
 efforts after freedom and truth ; and lastly, to the ten- 
 dency among many of the nations which adhered to 
 the Reformation to substitute a sentiment, a philosophy, 
 a theological system, a bare spirit of inquiry and re- 
 search, for the eternal principles of the " faith once 
 delivered to the saints " — the historical religion preached 
 by Apostles, recorded by Evangelists, and handed down 
 in the creed of Christendom as the one unchanging 
 deposit committed by Christ to the care of His 
 Church. 
 
 At first, in France at least, some toleration was 
 
 ^ It is further said that the Saint offered a bribe to the heretic Beza, then 
 resident in Switzerland, under the impression that the Reformer was capable 
 of being approached by such a proposal, but that it met with the reception 
 it desers-ed. 
 
2 34 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 extended to the Reformers. Henry IV., though he 
 thought the Crown of France well worth a mass, 
 was not so unprincipled as to betray those who had 
 so bravely fought for him. The Edict of Nantes 
 protected the Protestants in the enjoyment of their 
 belief. But the engagement was ill kept. The Hugue- 
 nots may have been turbulent at times, but their 
 opponents were unscrupulous and unmerciful. Savoy, 
 then a state independent of France, continued to dis- 
 play a similar spirit. We are all of us acquainted 
 with Milton's sonnet on the atrocities which disturbed 
 the peace of the tranquil valleys in which the Vaudois 
 had carried on their simple worship for centuries, and 
 if, as we have been lately told, the effect of Cromwell's 
 intervention has been exaggerated, there has been no 
 exaggeration of the cruelties against which our great 
 national poet protested. As time went on things went 
 from bad to worse in the countries of the Latin race. 
 The voice of religious freedom in Spain had long since 
 been reduced to silence, and with it went the moral 
 strength of the nation, whose history, from that day 
 to this, has been one of moral and political, and, 
 it might be added, religious corruption and decay. 
 Italy was the battle-ground of the stranger, and it is 
 a question whether the oppression of foreign races, of 
 native princes, or of the States of the Church, was the 
 worst. Ranke tells us how the dominions of the Pope 
 were harassed by mal- administration and excessive 
 taxation, and it is remarkable how, at the present 
 moment, though in other parts of Europe it is the 
 ignorant peasantry who form the chief support of the 
 Papal cause, in the States of the Church it is the 
 peasantry who hate the Pope most, so keen a sense 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 235 
 
 do they continue to entertain of the injustice and 
 oppression to which they were exposed at the hands 
 of his officials. As for France, she also steadily de- 
 clined in prosperity and in her influence on Europe. 
 Despotism, ambition, civil and religious oppression 
 went hand in hand, and slowly and surely the moral 
 and material life-blood of the nation was drained away. 
 People in this age have unfortunately forgotten the 
 cruel persecutions of the Protestants, the horrors of 
 the Dragonnades, in comparison with which the recent 
 Armenian atrocities would scarcely seem more shock- 
 ing. It might be well that they should be forgotten, 
 had it not also come to be more than half forgotten, that 
 the principles of the Reformation alone delivered Europe 
 from atrocities such as these. Had it not been for 
 those principles, the fiendish outrages which the infallible 
 head of the Church frequently encouraged, and never 
 took the least trouble to repress or to denounce, would 
 still, unless Protestantism had meanwhile been extir- 
 pated, have been going on, under the sanction of the 
 so-called " Vicar " of the " Prince of Peace." The 
 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was a 
 wanton and inexcusable infraction of a religious peace 
 which had existed for a century, and it inflicted cruel 
 losses and wrongs on the most industrious, the most 
 peaceable, and not the least loyal of the subjects of 
 the Grand Monarque. Our own national historian. Lord 
 Macaulay, has sketched, with his usual inimitable 
 clearness and point, the effect of this foolish as well 
 as barbarous measure. It is a satisfaction to think that 
 it not only turned out to be a source of national 
 weakness and humiliation for France, but by substi- 
 tuting religious subjection for religious conviction, it 
 
2 36 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 paved the way for that fierce revolt against the hierarchy 
 which was one of the distinguishing characteristics of 
 the French Revolution. 
 
 Nor were the Jesuits, who contrived to gain the 
 upper hand in France as well as elsewhere, less reso- 
 lute and less revengeful in extirpating the last lingering 
 remnants of freedom of opinion in their own Church. 
 Molinos was burned at Rome for believing that the soul 
 should be passive in its reception of impulses from on 
 high, rather than active in seeking them. Madame Guyon 
 was rewarded for her expression of similar opinions by 
 relentless persecution and a dungeon ; and the great, 
 the good, the pious Fenelon, though he had been en- 
 trusted with the education of the Duke of Burgundy, 
 son of Louis XIV., was involved in her disgrace.^ The 
 struggle of the Jesuits with Port Royal deserves more 
 extended mention, since it has been the means, after 
 a long interval, of inflicting the most serious blow the 
 Church of Rome has sustained since the Reformation. 
 In the earlier part of the seventeenth century there 
 arose a great struggle between the followers of Augus- 
 tine and the Jesuits. The former accused the latter 
 of Pelagianism ; and Paul V., in 1607, had gone so far 
 as to censure a work by the Jesuit Molina, published 
 in Portugal in 1588, as Pelagian. The controversy 
 waxed warm. After the death of Cornelius Janssen, 
 Bishop of Ypres, in Belgium, his "Augustinus" was pub- 
 lished. In this work he maintained with great ability 
 
 ^ La Combe, Madame Guyon's confessor, was also imprisoned on the plea 
 that he had imparted these views to his penitent, and was kept in prison till 
 he had lost his reason ! This was in the last decade of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, just when England was passing her Toleration Act. Cruel as the laws 
 of the Restoration were against Nonconformists, they displayed no such ferocity 
 as was shown in France to all who did not abjectly submit to the opinions 
 of the sovereign. 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 237 
 
 the Pelagian tendency of the Jesuit teaching. The 
 Jesuits, embittered by the influence Janssen's disciples 
 were gaining in France, replied by procuring the con- 
 demnation of Janssen's book by Urban VIII. The 
 Abbe St. Cyran, a friend of Janssen's, was at this time 
 Director of the Convent at Port Royal, then presided 
 over by the celebrated Mere Angelique, whose secular 
 name was Marie Jacqueline Arnauld. Around these 
 soon gathered a band of learned and able men, whose 
 names have become well known to posterity : Arnauld 
 d'Andilly, Antoine Arnauld, De Sacy, the translator of 
 the Scriptures, Tillemont the historian, Quesnel, Nicole, 
 and, greatest of them all, the immortal Pascal, whose 
 "Provincial Letters" have thrown such light on the re- 
 markable methods of reasoning to which the Jesuits were 
 addicted. St. Cyran set himself to oppose the morality 
 taught by the Jesuits in the Confessional. For this the 
 Jesuits prevailed on Cardinal Richelieu to imprison him. 
 He was released, but his health had suffered so much 
 by his imprisonment that he soon died. Others of his 
 party were treated with similar rigour. The intense 
 sincerity and earnestness, however, of the Port Royal- 
 ists, as they were now called, continued to attract 
 attention, though it must be confessed that their high 
 qualities were mingled with credulity, superstition, and 
 an excessive and unreasonable asceticism. Neither argu- 
 ment nor intrigue, however, were sufficient to crush them.^ 
 The Jesuits, therefore, after an attempt to close Port Royal 
 altogether, at length obtained a Papal Bull condemning 
 
 ^ It was reported that a bishop in the Jesuit interest, entering the refectory 
 of a monastery as the reader was uttering the words, " For it is God that 
 worketh in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure," angrily asked 
 from what Jansenist book these heretical words were taken. Argument ia 
 such hands was not likely to be very successful. 
 
2 38 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 five propositions which they asserted were extracted 
 from Janssen's " Augustinus." The Port Royalists re- 
 pHed that the propositions were unquestionably false 
 and worthy of condemnation, but that Janssen had never 
 maintained them. The Jesuits, having complete influ- 
 ence over Louis XIV., who had taken the reins of 
 power into his own hands on the death of Mazarin, 
 obtained his sanction to the forcible closing of the 
 whole establishment at Port Royal, which was regarded 
 as the head-quarters of Janssen's party. The Port 
 Royalists were driven into exile ; but three bishops in 
 Holland, the Archbishop of Utrecht and the Bishops 
 of Haarlem and Deventer, remained firm to Janssen's 
 •cause, and continued to maintain, in flat contradiction 
 to the Pope, that Janssen had never affirmed the pro- 
 positions it was sought to attribute to him. As they 
 remained obstinate, the Papal excommunication was 
 launched against them, not, be it observed, for heresy, 
 but for disputing the Papal infallibility on a question, 
 not of doctrine, but of fact. The small Jansenist, or 
 more properly. Old Catholic Church of Holland, con- 
 tinued to exist, though in declining numbers, in spite 
 of the papal excommunication. After much hesitation, 
 during the course of which the succession to these 
 Bishoprics had actually more than once died out, it 
 was resolved to transmit it. And through the de- 
 scendants of these protesting bishops, a valid Episcopal 
 succession, according to the principles of canonicity 
 acknowledged in the West, was transmitted to the pre- 
 sent Old Catholic Bishops of Germany and Switzerland, 
 and to the ecclesiastic recently consecrated to preside 
 over the Independent Polish Catholic Church in the 
 United States. 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 239 
 
 The policy of the Jesuits had thus been to crush 
 out all independence of thought by measures of violence. 
 They allied themselves with the despotisms of the day, 
 and what they failed to secure by fair means, they 
 contrived to obtain by force. The natural result fol- 
 lowed. The stronger and more deeply earnest among 
 the persecuted fled to foreign countries to find that liberty 
 which was denied them at home. The weaker and less 
 conscientious submitted to authority, and rendered an 
 outward conformity to rites and doctrines which in their 
 hearts they did not believe. Thus by degrees, in the 
 nations which submitted to the Papacy, sober and 
 rational religious conviction ceased to exist. In Spain 
 the national energy died out, and with it enlighten- 
 ment, religious and secular. Italy had no national life 
 at all, but still lay, crushed and bleeding, in the hands 
 of her oppressors. France and Austria alone were left 
 to support the Roman Catholic interests in Europe. 
 The latter, as a mere congeries of nationalities, was all 
 along in the same perilous position in which we see 
 her at the present moment. France, however, remained 
 a predominant force in European politics. But the 
 policy of Jesuitism was not long in displaying its natural 
 results. The later years of Louis XIV. were years of 
 humiliation and defeat. During the whole of the 
 eighteenth century Roman Catholic France and Austria 
 were on the decline, while Protestant England and 
 Prussia were rapidly rising into pre-eminence, the latter 
 in Europe, the former more especially in America and 
 in Hindostan, from both of which she expelled the 
 French by force of arms. The growth of indifferentism 
 in France, the natural result, as has been said, of the 
 religious policy of her monarch under the direction of 
 
240 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 the Jesuits, filled the hearts of earnest men with deep 
 forebodings, and historical critics have attributed to that 
 policy, first the scepticism of Voltaire and the Encyclo- 
 paedists, and afterwards the French Revolution. The 
 cynical disregard of all moral principle on the part of the 
 dominant classes in Church and State, coupled with the 
 repressive measures which had destroyed intelligent 
 religious opinion, and substituted for it fanaticism on the 
 one hand, or a mere external conformity on the other, 
 were the two factors which brought about the excesses 
 at which the whole world stood aghast. It is true that 
 the miserable failure of Jesuitism in the seventeenth 
 century brought about the suppression of the Jesuits 
 in the eighteenth. But it was soon found that the 
 modern Papacy without the Jesuits was an impossibility. 
 The Pope might do without them in the religious apathy 
 which distinguished the early part of the eighteenth 
 century ; but the revival of religious energy neces- 
 sitated an organisation devoted to Papal interests. The 
 Jesuits were recalled into existence. As has already 
 been remarked, they have learned wisdom by their 
 former failure, and are the mainstay of the Roman 
 system at the present moment. 
 
 The evils of religious despotism, however, are less 
 clearly marked on the surface than those of civil oppres- 
 sion. There is much which tends to conceal from the 
 superficial observer the real demoralisation which lurks 
 beneath the Ultramontane appearance of piety. He 
 sees that the churches are frequented ; but he does 
 not ask himself what are the nature of the influences 
 which fill them, nor does he ask whether the moral and 
 religious tone of the persons who thus throng to church 
 is better than elsewhere. Religious societies are at 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 241 
 
 work, but it is not observed that they lie apart from the 
 feelings of the nation at large. Spasmodic reactions 
 there continually are, where Christianity is identified 
 with Romanism. Such a reaction has lately been 
 in progress in Spain and in France. It could not 
 be otherwise. The religious sentiment is a necessity 
 for the human heart. And in these countries no 
 form of the religious idea has taken root, save that 
 of the Roman Catholic Church. But these reactions 
 do not last long. There is no permanent foundation 
 of rational religious conviction to build upon. And so, 
 when they have passed away, the conscience of the 
 nation which has experienced them is more hardened 
 than before. The " last state " of the penitent 
 "is worse than the first." As with nations, so with 
 individuals. The fear of death causes a man to send 
 for the priest whom he has scorned all through his 
 life. The need of religion for women and children is 
 a creed to the man who has no other. And so he 
 supports the priest against the religious reformer, and 
 regards the latter as a pestilent disturber of the peace 
 of society. Beside these occasional and short-lived 
 reactions in Roman Catholic countries, it cannot be 
 denied that everywhere the " dissidence of Dissent," 
 the tendency, that is, which Protestantism has dis- 
 played towards infinite sub - division, has been a 
 source of strength to Rome both before and since 
 Bossuet's " Variations of Protestantism " saw the light. 
 In one age such men as Charles II. and James 11.,^ 
 in another, Frederick Schlegel, in another, Newman 
 
 ^ Whatever value may be attached to the opinions of our last two Stuart 
 kings, it cannot be doubted that their conversion was the result of conviction, 
 any more than, on the other hand, we can doubt that had they never joined 
 the Church of Rome, they would have been better kings and better men. 
 
 Q 
 
242 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 and Manning, pass over from what Newman once 
 called " the city of confusion and the house of bond- 
 age," into what they fondly presume to be a haven 
 of security and peace. The Tractarian movement 
 has undoubtedly strengthened the Roman communion 
 in this country as much as it has strengthened our 
 own. The Ultramontanes are never weary of predict- 
 ing that it will ultimately bring about the submission 
 of England to the Pope. And no doubt there is a 
 constant " oozing over to Rome," to adopt an expression 
 used to me years ago by one of the most able and 
 original of the Tractarian clergy, from the extreme 
 right among ourselves. Such considerations as these 
 lead many to imagine that Rome is destined to regain 
 the ground she has lost, and when skilfully urged, they 
 are not unfrequently successful in inducing superficial 
 reasoners to join her. But there is another side to the 
 picture. The Church of Rome is by no means the 
 happy family she is represented to outsiders as being. 
 There has long been a restless dissatisfaction among the 
 best and wisest of her members with things as they are, 
 which must in the end produce its effect ; and her 
 secret history has long been one of perpetual bicker- 
 ings and strife. As long as heretics could be burned 
 and imprisoned, the task of '* an insolent and aggressive 
 faction," as Newman once termed the body which 
 directs the movements of the Vatican, was easy 
 enough. But it is by no means so easy, in these days 
 of general toleration, to suppress opinion by weapons 
 purely spiritual. From the days of Arnold of Brescia, 
 of Savonarola, of Wyclif, of John Huss, and Jerome of 
 Prague, to say nothing of the Reformation, there have 
 been signs, within the pale of the Roman communion 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 243 
 
 itself, of dissatisfaction with her doctrine and discipHne, 
 and in the present century these signs have been ex- 
 tremely frequent. In France the recoil from the Con- 
 cordat established by Napoleon with the Pope, led to a 
 re-condescence of the old Jansenist and Gallican spirit. 
 Thirty-six bishops refused to accept the Concordat, and 
 died without having done so. Only, unlike the Old 
 Catholics in Holland, they refused to perpetuate the 
 schism. Yet the spirit remained, even when not only 
 the bishops but the priests died out one by one ; and 
 at the present moment it is reckoned that there are 
 about 10,000 persons in various parts of France who 
 refuse to attend Roman Catholic worship. They call 
 themselves the Petite Eglise. They have neither priest nor 
 church. But the works of the divines of Port Royal 
 are handed down among them as the most precious 
 treasures, and they remain to this day firm to the 
 doctrines which the Jesuits imagined they had extirpated 
 in the eighteenth century.-^ The Pope lately addressed an 
 appeal to them to return to communion with the chair 
 of St. Peter, but it fell upon deaf ears. Some of them 
 have asked for religious privileges from the Old Catholic 
 congregation at Paris, which is practically a mission 
 from the Old Catholic Church in Holland, itself the 
 ecclesiastical heir of Janssen and the Port Royalists. 
 Others still remain " as sheep without a shepherd." In 
 Germany, too, the spirit of discontent has found expres- 
 sion. The celebrated Hirscher, better known than at 
 present to us English some two generations back, through 
 the translation of his work under the title " Sympathies of 
 the Continent," by the late Bishop Cleveland Coxe, strove, 
 
 ^ M. Leon Seche has lately written an account of this most interesting 
 ■community. 
 
244 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 in the early part of the present century, to press reform 
 upon his ecclesiastical superiors. He defended the aboli- 
 tion of the rule of celibacy for the clergy, recommended 
 that the services of the Church should be conducted in the 
 vernacular, and pleaded for the reform of sundry abuses 
 connected with indulgences, confession, and the worship 
 of the Virgin and the Saints.^ Sailer, too, afterwards 
 Bishop of Ratisbon, advocated the reforms which the 
 Old Catholics afterwards carried out, after their final 
 separation from the Pope. 
 
 The story of Wessemburg, Coadjutor-Bishop of 
 Constance, deserves, perhaps, to be told at greater 
 length. He was chosen as coadjutor to the celebrated 
 Dalbey in 1802, in consequence of his having recom- 
 mended himself to the Vatican, as well as to Dalbey 
 himself, by his successful discharge of a mission to 
 Switzerland, with which he had been entrusted. His 
 delegated authority extended over parts of Switzerland, 
 as well as of the Grand Duchy of Baden. As soon as 
 he entered upon his duties he laboured might and main 
 for a reform in the condition of the clergy and the 
 Church. He found the clergy uneducated and unfitted 
 for their office, a defect which he strove at once to 
 remedy. He reformed the Theological Seminary, and 
 strove to improve the education the candidates for 
 Orders received before they entered it. He endeavoured 
 to introduce services in the vernacular and the know- 
 ledge of the Bible, as well as to improve the musical 
 portion of the Church services. He next laboured to 
 impart a more democratic character to the Church 
 
 ^ A full account of Hirscher as a theologian and reformer, by Dr. Lauchert, 
 will be found in the Revue Internationale de Theologie, Oct. 1894, April and 
 Oct. 1895, and Jan. 1896. He was a voluminous writer himself, and the 
 subject of many biographical and theological writings. 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 245 
 
 organisation in the diocese. He advocated self-govern- 
 ment in the place of government from Rome, as well as 
 the right of the laity to be consulted in the management 
 of Church affairs, and in the choice of their pastors. 
 This brought the long- suppressed indignation of the 
 Jesuit party to a head. On the death of Dalbey, in 1817, 
 Wessemburg was chosen by the Chapter of Constance 
 to succeed him. The Vatican replied by requesting 
 that a man of better report should be chosen. Wessem- 
 burg, in spite of the remonstrances of his friends, set 
 off to Rome to plead his own cause, and tedious and 
 protracted were the arguments and intrigues which 
 followed. His Roman experiences, like those of 
 Lamennais after him, have been made familiar to us of 
 late in the pages of Zola's " Rome." Wessemburg, like 
 others, found it impossible to make any impression on 
 the Pope and his entourage. Submission, and submission 
 only, was the course required of him. After six months 
 he left Rome, saying '' I breathe more freely now I 
 have escaped from that atmosphere." ^ " The uncondi- 
 tional power of the Pope," said Wessemburg of the 
 " Romlingseele," " is their idol." The Pope steadily re- 
 fused to allow him to become Bishop of Constance ; and 
 when, after some negotiations, the seat of the Bishopric 
 was transferred to Freiburg, the Vaticanists contrived to 
 induce the Grand Duke Ludwig to nominate some one 
 else in Wessemburg's place. The story of Wessem- 
 burg's Hfe is narrated in glowing terms by Dr. Beck, a 
 member of the Council of the Duchy of Baden, who 
 calls him the courageous pioneer and worthy leader of 
 
 ^ Some may be reminded by this of Dr. Newman's memorable observa- 
 tion, when the intrigues against him at Rome were at their height, and when 
 it was reported that he was about to repair thither, that " the atmosphere of 
 Rome did not agree with his constitution." 
 
246 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 the reform party of the Cathohc confession among his 
 people. He survived till i860, and after nearly forty 
 years his memory is still held in honour. A Swiss 
 friend of my own, who, while he lived, was among 
 the most energetic and enlightened of the old Catholic 
 laity, but who has lately, alas ! been taken from us,^ 
 told me, how in 1863, seven years before the Vatican 
 Council, his first act, when he went as a young 
 gymnasiast to Constance, was to go to the Cathedral 
 and visit Wessemburg's grave. " So highly," he added, 
 " was the character of this man honoured in the non- 
 Ultramontane circles of the Catholic Church." 
 
 At a still later period, Leopold Schmidt, formally 
 elected to the Bishopric of Mainz in 1849, an era 
 of storm and revolution in Europe, was opposed by 
 the Jesuits for his supposed Protestantising tendencies. 
 They procured his rejection from the Pope, and in- 
 duced the Pope to nominate the well-known Von 
 Ketteler in his place. Their intrigues drove Schmidt, 
 mild, gentle, and inoffensive as had been his life, to 
 renounce communion with the Roman Church as in- 
 tolerant and Ultramontane ; while he still maintained 
 that he was not a Protestant, but a Catholic. Augustin 
 Theiner, again, the Librarian of the Vatican, held his 
 post amid ever increasing misgivings. His book on 
 Clement XIV., the suppressor of the Jesuits, was put at 
 once on the Index. His work on the Council of Trent 
 was stopped. At last, in 1870, he was turned out of 
 his office on account of his persistent opposition to the 
 Vatican decrees.^ 
 
 1 Dr. Weibel. 
 
 ^ Since the Vatican Council Professor Reusch, one of the Reforming 
 Party, in his Die Deutschen Bischofe and der Aberglanbe, has called attention 
 to the increase of superstitions connected with Purgatory, the use of scapulars 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 247 
 
 In Italy the same reforming spirit showed itself, 
 though amid great dangers and difficulties. The cele- 
 brated Rosmini, a philosophical theologian of high 
 repute in the Roman communion, published, in 1849, 
 a work called the " Five Wounds of the Church," ^ in 
 which he boldly and honestly laid bare the evils which 
 afflicted the communion to which he belonged. The 
 Jesuits laboured hard to obtain a condemnation of this 
 book, but only partially succeeded, and Rosmini died 
 in the communion of the Church he had in vain en- 
 deavoured to reform. Gioberti, about thirty years pre- 
 viously, had written a treatise on " Catholic Reform in 
 the Church." But this simply consisted in h.s recom- 
 mendation of a more philosophical system of Church 
 teaching, in which the sharp angles of dogma were 
 to be rubbed off, and an exaggerated asceticism 
 toned down. The case of Father Passaglia also 
 deserves notice. The hero of the proclamation of the 
 dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed 
 Virgin in 1854, he was the principal figure in a 
 picture painted to commemorate that event. But 
 as he afterwards put himself at the head of 9000 priests 
 who protested against the temporal power of the Pope, 
 he fell into disgrace, and his likeness was removed from 
 the picture in which it had occupied the most pro- 
 minent place. Monsignore Tiboni, Canon of Brescia, 
 about the same time advocated the translation and free 
 reading of the Scriptures, services in the vernacular, 
 the Holy Communion in both kinds, confession made 
 
 and blessed wonder-working medals, and has appealed to the Roman bishops 
 to put a stop to it, but of course in vain. 
 
 1 The five wounds of the Church are — i. Worship in an unknown tongue; 
 2. The ignorance of the clergy; 3. The despotism of the bishops; 4. The ap- 
 pointing of bishops by the State; 5. The State control of Church property. 
 
248 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 voluntary, and the abolition of enforced clerical celi- 
 bacy, as well as the abolition of the autocracy of the 
 Pope. Audisio was another priest of reforming senti- 
 ments, and cautious as was his avowal of them, he did 
 not escape the usual denunciation, from the conse- 
 quences of which he freed himself by declaring that 
 he had never said, nor wished to say, anything contrary 
 to the authority of the Pope and the Church. When 
 Count Campello actually seceded from the Roman Church 
 in 1 88 1 in order to devote himself to the unfettered 
 prosecution of the work of reform, Audisio, while wish- 
 ing him God speed, excused himself from following him 
 on the ground of his age. The two most prominent 
 opponents, however, of the Vatican in late years were 
 Cardinal d' Andrea and Padre Curci. The former placed 
 himself at the head of the movement for an Italian 
 Catholic Reformed Church in Southern Italy, and was 
 followed by three hundred priests. After some contro- 
 versy, d' Andrea, contrary to the advice of his friends, 
 accepted an invitation from the Vatican to discuss the 
 question with the Pope. This was in May 1866. Im- 
 mediately afterwards he died so suddenly that Cardinal 
 Antonelli was compelled to acquiesce in a post-mortem 
 investigation. No cause of death was assigned, but the 
 immediate realisation of the forebodings of his friends 
 has been held by many unprejudiced persons to justify 
 the suspicion that he was poisoned.^ Baron Ricasoli, 
 the Italian Prime Minister at that juncture, not seeing 
 the importance of the movement which d'Andrea had 
 inaugurated, delivered the three hundred priests into 
 
 ^ Dr. Beck, in his Freiherr lieinrich von Wessemburg, Sein Leben und 
 Wirken, p. 277, says of Wessemburg's journey to Rome in 181 7, " Viele furch- 
 teten — und bei dem todtlichen Hass der Partei, und der damaligen Zeitlage, 
 nicht ganz ohne Grund — fiir die personliche Sicherheit des Freundes." 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 249 
 
 the hands of their bishops. They were one by one 
 starved into submission, and thus ended a bold and 
 promising attempt at Reform in the ItaHan Church. 
 Curci's case is also remarkable. Himself a Jesuit, he 
 became discontented with the policy of his order. In 
 two powerful books. La Nuova Italia ed i Vecchi Zelanti^ 
 and // Vaticano Regio, the first published in 1881, the 
 second shortly afterwards, he painted in strong terms 
 the miserable condition of his communion in Italy, the 
 fanaticism, the intrigue, the party spirit at work in it, 
 the ignorance and worthlessness of the great majority 
 of the clergy, and especially the neglect of the study of 
 Holy Scripture, a neglect he strove to remedy by pub- 
 lishing a Commentary on the Bible. But his works were 
 speedily condemned ; the Jesuits laboured incessantly 
 to effect his overthrow, and, after a noble and vigorous 
 resistance, the old man (Curci was over seventy) was 
 effectually starved out and silenced. 
 
 If we turn once more to France, the same spectacle 
 awaits us. I have already referred to the history of the 
 Petite £glise. I proceed to further manifestations of the 
 same spirit. Like Grosseteste in the thirteenth century, 
 Lamennais in the nineteenth commenced his career as 
 a devout believer in the Papacy. As in Grosseteste's 
 case, the severe logic of facts compelled Lamennais to 
 change his mind. In his Essai sur VIndifference en 
 matiere de Religion, he gave the warmest expression to 
 his earlier belief. Pursued by Jesuit opposition, by 
 jealousy and intrigue, as he strove to develop a policy 
 which he believed would reconcile his Church and 
 nation, he found his idol shattered in his grasp. In 
 vain did he go to Rome and appeal to the Pope 
 (Gregory XVI.) personally. In his last interview the 
 
2 50 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 wily Italian, so SpuUer tells us, did but enlarge on the 
 talents of Michael Angelo, and offer the enthusiastic 
 reformer a box of lapis lazuli^ containing some of the 
 Pope's best snuff. Disgusted with the idol he had once 
 adored, in his Paroles d'un Croyant he gave vent to his 
 disappointment and despair. Together with Montalem- 
 bert and Lacordaire, whose youthful enthusiasm, like 
 that of Lamennais, had seen in the Roman Catholic 
 Church, with the Pope at its head, the only hope of 
 regenerating society, he started L'Avenir, a journal 
 devoted to the interests of religion. But in the 
 Encyclical Mirari Vos the principles advocated in this 
 journal were condemned. Its issue was suspended. 
 Lamennais retired into silence, solitude, and as 
 his enemies asserted, into scepticism. His com- 
 rades in the work ended their lives under a more or 
 less thick cloud of censure and reproach. And so 
 pilgrimages to Lourdes and the like take the place of 
 rational religion, new cults supplant the worship of God, 
 the clergy grow more ignorant and fanatical, and in 
 many villages the Church is unable to supply any 
 clergy at all.^ 
 
 The Roman Church then, in various lands, has long 
 presented the aspect of a sea which, though smooth appar- 
 ently on the surface, is heaving and struggling beneath 
 that surface with the ground-swell of suppressed emotions. 
 The ablest spirits of the ruling faction within her pale 
 were not insensible of the dangers which environed her. 
 And they jumped to the conclusion that the best way to 
 repress rebellion within, and to confound their enemies 
 
 These facts are vouched for by the Abbe Bougaud in a work called 
 
 Le Grand Peril de t £glise de France. Mgr. Dupanloup, Archbishop of 
 
 Lyons, also published a pamphlet in 1876, entitled Ou allons nous, speaking 
 of the unsatisfactory state of things among the laity. 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 251 
 
 without, was to put the capstone on the monarchical 
 system of the Church by the proclamation of Papal 
 infallibility. Of this policy Manning was the most 
 persistent and determined supporter. He believed he 
 saw in it a weapon with which recalcitrants within could 
 instantly be crushed, and a means by which those 
 without who were wont to taunt their Roman Catholic 
 antagonists with having indeed an infallible Church, 
 but as being unable to define where the infallibility 
 resided, could effectually be silenced. The risks were 
 unquestionably great. The opposition was bold, 
 numerous, and intelligent, even among the bishops 
 who were present at the Council, and the three Munich 
 Professors, Dollinger, Huber, and Friedrich, supported 
 by a host of other learned men in Germany and else- 
 where, had organised a most formidable resistance. 
 On this, however, as on other occasions, courage and 
 determination triumphed over all obstacles. The poHcy 
 of the promoters of the Council was resolutely and not 
 too scrupulously carried out. One by one the protesting 
 bishops gave in their submission, and at length all 
 fear of an organised Episcopal revolt was at an end. 
 The rebellious German and Swiss Professors were 
 excommunicated, and the establishment of a Papal 
 monarchy over the Roman Church was a fait accompli. 
 The success of Manning and his party, however, 
 though almost beyond expectation, was not quite com- 
 plete. A movement, which, though small in its 
 beginnings, has been already not unfruitful in results, 
 was initiated in opposition to the sentence of the 
 Council. The ferment, which at first was great, rapidly 
 subsided, and those who finally determined on an 
 organised resistance to the new ecclesiastical despotism 
 
252 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 were few indeed. Dollinger himself, though he could 
 not bring himself to discountenance this resistance, did 
 not feel at liberty to give it his active support. Never- 
 theless the small band of resolute opponents, headed by 
 Reinkens, Reusch, and Von Schulte, determined to 
 proceed. The bishops of the Old Catholic Church of 
 Holland, the history of which has been narrated above, 
 offered to consecrate a bishop, and Reinkens was ulti- 
 mately consecrated to the charge of some fifty thousand 
 souls in Germany, who were resolved as Catholics to 
 have religious privileges for themselves and their families. 
 The Papal excommunication, it should be understood, 
 involved the denial of all Church rites to those who 
 came under its ban. Reinkens consecrated Herzog to 
 preside over about the same number of dissidents in 
 Switzerland. Thus was what is known as the Old 
 Catholic movement inaugurated — the first attempt 
 since the Reformation at organised resistance to Rome. 
 Among the fickle and volatile French Old Catholicism 
 never took any root. In spite of the strenuous exertions 
 of M. Hyacinthe Loyson, one congregation only, at 
 Paris, has been brought into existence to maintain Old 
 Catholic principles. It is now under the supervision of 
 the Old Catholic bishops of Holland. In Austria, on 
 the contrary, the movement has made rapid and in- 
 creasing progress,^ and is only prevented by the intoler- 
 ance of the Austrian Government from having a bishop 
 of its own. In Italy, Count Campello, once Canon of 
 St. Peter's at Rome, has been struggling manfully since 
 1 88 1, and not altogether unsuccessfully, to form an 
 Italian Catholic Church, and Professor Miraglia, who has 
 lately initiated an independent movement of his own at 
 
 ^ Especially during the present year (1S99). 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 253 
 
 Piacenza, has also, towards the close of the year 1897, 
 announced his accession to the Old Catholic body.^ 
 The consecration of a sixth Old Catholic bishop for an 
 Independent Church of the Poles in America, at the 
 beginning of this year, has extended the movement as 
 far as the United States. The immediate result of the 
 formation of Old Catholic communities was the carrying 
 out, as far as their members were concerned, of the 
 reforms which earnest men in the Roman Catholic 
 communities had so long desired. The Old Catholic 
 Churches lost no time in repudiating the decrees of a 
 purely Western Council such as Trent, and recurred to 
 the voice of the undivided Church. The prayers were 
 said in the vernacular ; the free reading of the Bible 
 was permitted ; confession was made optional ; the 
 voice of the laity forced on a somewhat reluctant 
 clergy the permission of marriage to the members of 
 the clerical order, and the modern cults, the excessive 
 veneration paid to the Virgin, and the abuses con- 
 nected with private masses, purgatory, and indulgences 
 were done away with. The election of priests by their 
 congregations, and the free participation of the laity in 
 Church Government, are among the most prominent fea- 
 tures of the system, and it is on the intelligent co-opera- 
 tion of its laity that the Old Catholic cause mainly 
 reposes. Of course, too, the incubus of the Index has 
 been removed, and the clergy permitted freely to speak 
 their mind on all points not formally decided by the 
 Universal Church. It is yet too early to estimate the 
 effect such a bold step as the Old Catholics have taken 
 is likely to produce. The number of those who dared 
 
 ^ Protestantism, some years ago, under the eloquent Gavazzi, made much 
 progress. But it has lost much ground since by its internal and external 
 dissensions. 
 
2 54 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 adopt an attitude so unprecedented as that of resistance 
 to the Head of the Church was no doubt at first almost 
 infinitesimal. But, small as it was, neither persecution, 
 abuse, bribery, social or political pressure, nor persua- 
 sion — and all have been freely and unscrupulously used 
 by the Ultramontanes — have availed to put the Old 
 Catholics down. They have survived the indifference, 
 the jealousy, the hostility of Romanism, of Protestantism, 
 and of the civil government alike. They have faced the 
 difficulties of organisation, and these were considerable ; 
 but their publications are slowly and surely leavening 
 the mind of Europe ; no fear of the Index disturbs their 
 freedom of speech ; and their Churches are making 
 steady, if slow progress. Their negotiations for union 
 with the Orthodox Churches of the East are consider- 
 ably advanced. Their relations with the Anglican com- 
 munion would be most cordial if it were possible to 
 induce Anglicans to take the slightest interest in them. 
 Even now Anglicans are freely admitted to communion 
 in their Churches. As to their protest against Rome, it 
 cannot be silenced, as the previous movements already 
 recorded have been silenced. Weekly in their pulpits, 
 and in their organs in the press, is that protest being 
 made, and it is steadily increasing in volume and in 
 effect. The continual affirmation of the fact that 
 Vaticanism is not Catholicism, but the most grotesque 
 perversion imaginable of Catholicism, cannot possibly 
 be without result. But perhaps the greatest service 
 Old Catholicism is rendering to Christendom, and the 
 most serious injury it is inflicting on the Church of 
 Rome, is the policy which has instituted Reunion 
 Conferences, to which all Christians are freely invited, 
 and to which all but Roman Catholics and extreme 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 255 
 
 Protestants freely resort, and which has estabhshed 
 the Revue Internationale de Theologie, in which all com- 
 petent persons desirous of reunion are invited freely 
 to discuss the points of difference between the various 
 Churches.^ 
 
 Englishmen may be inclined to wonder at the 
 smallness of the results obtained so far by the Old 
 CathoHcs. Those who are well acquainted with the 
 Roman Catholic Church will be inclined to wonder that 
 they are not smaller. The condition of helplessness 
 and indifference to which the Roman Catholic system 
 has reduced most men who outwardly conform to 
 that Church, can scarcely be imagined by an outsider. 
 Lamennais, in 1837, had prophesied the birth of such 
 a movement, and he added the following remarkable 
 words : " It will be at first like a point one hardly per- 
 ceives, a small aggregation at which possibly people 
 will laugh. But that point will expand, that aggrega- 
 tion will spread. From all parts people will flow to 
 it, because it will be a refuge to all who suffer." A 
 French Abbe, writing on Old Catholicism in the Revue 
 Internationale de The'ologie for January 1898, speaks of 
 the "indifference of the esprits biases by Popery and 
 Voltairianism." He adds, and he is not alone in 
 adding, " Mais il finira par triompher." It is at least 
 the only body on the Continent which retains the 
 organisation on which Roman Catholics set such store. 
 
 Thus a general view of the relative positions of the 
 Roman Catholic body and other communions displays 
 the former as gradually, though very slowly, losing 
 ground. Where Rome was able to make use of 
 despotic authority to crush freedom of thought, for the 
 
 ^ This serial admits articles in French, German, and English. 
 
256 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 time she bore down all opposition. But since she lost 
 the support of the civil government, her task has 
 become immeasurably harder. First and foremost, the 
 control of education has slipped from her hands/ Then 
 the influence of the nations which lent themselves to 
 her policy has steadily declined in Europe, while those 
 which adopted the principles of the Reformation have 
 as steadily advanced to supremacy. France, the 
 country on which her system had a hold for the 
 shortest time, shook herself fiercely free from Roman 
 domination at the Revolution, and has never in reality 
 been a " Catholic," scarcely even a Christian nation 
 since. Nor is Rom.e able to maintain her hold, even 
 on her own adherents. In Germany the Lutheran 
 Church steadily gains on her Roman antagonist. 
 Within the last few months thirty priests have left the 
 Roman Catholic Church in France, including the Abbe 
 Charbonnel and the Abbe Philippot, men of mark in 
 their communion, and the Abbe Bourrier, the leader 
 of the movement, has established a journal, Le Chretien 
 Fran^ais, to record its progress.^ Italy, by her ad- 
 herence to the House of Savoy, and her determination 
 to become once more a country, is at daggers drawn 
 with the Vatican, and derives what national spirit she 
 has from that very fact. Spain and Portugal have ceased 
 to be of any account in the councils of nations. Their 
 dominions have been dismembered already, and the 
 former has just been dismembered once more. Austria 
 
 ^ Theiner, the Librarian of the Vatican mentioned above, writes to 
 Dbllinger in a letter, dated April 28, 1867, "The Protestants are the sole 
 masters in this field [education]. And this because the Jesuits were in 
 exclusive possession of education, and crammed us only with their wretched 
 dog Latin, so that we understood neither Latin nor German." 
 
 ^ The effect of the Dreyfus case has been largely to increase M. Bourrier's 
 following. 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 257 
 
 engaged in a duel with Prussia for the hegemony of 
 Germany, and was signally worsted in the conflict. 
 The Vatican did its best to stir up strife between France^ 
 at that time under Roman Catholic influences, and 
 Prussia, a Protestant kingdom, whose progress as such 
 the Vatican feared, and was resolved if possible to 
 prevent. The struggle took place, France was hope- 
 lessly worsted, and William I., the Protestant King 
 of Prussia, became Emperor of Germany.^ Thus 
 Vatican intrigues succeeded in placing the ascendency 
 in Germany in the very hands from which it had 
 hoped to wrest them. If we confine our glance to 
 Europe, we find no Roman Catholic power holding a 
 commanding position. Austria seems almost on the 
 point of dissolution. France is rather an infidel than a 
 Christian country. Germany on the whole is Pro- 
 testant, Russia Orthodox. In the British Isles, the 
 Roman Catholics, at the beginning of the century 
 about one-fourth, are now not more than a seventh of 
 the population. If we endeavour to forecast the 
 probable future of the world, three powers stand out 
 above all others as the great powers of the future. 
 They are England, Russia, and the United States. 
 None of these profess any allegiance to the Holy See. 
 Nor, in spite of the able and almost superhuman efforts 
 of the Vatican to extend, or at least to retain, its influ- 
 ence, do those efforts seem to produce much result. It has 
 always been its policy to obtain temporal supremacy, 
 and a promising Mission came to nought in Japan, chiefly 
 because the missionaries followed the vicious Roman 
 
 ^ M. Hoffet, in an article in the Revue Internationale de Thiologie, April 
 1898, p. 403, remarks on the unification of German Protestantism brought 
 about by the unification of Germany. 
 
 R 
 
258 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 custom of interfering in the civil politics of the country. 
 In the effort to obtain a tangible authority, instead of 
 simply endeavouring to leaven religious thought, it has 
 in various countries allied itself with influences the most 
 antagonistic. Imperialism or Legitimism in France, 
 Socialism and Republicanism in Ireland, Carlism in 
 Spain, have been employed to strengthen Papal in- 
 fluence, and to obtain supremacy in the United States, 
 the "Catholic elector" has not scrupled to enter 
 into close relations with the notorious Tammany Hall. 
 The loss of the temporal power, which the Papacy 
 struggled so desperately to retain, has proved an ad- 
 vantage in carrying out this policy, because the Vatican 
 has been able to give its undivided attention to it, un- 
 hampered by the cares and political entanglements of 
 civil government. Another advantage of which it avails 
 itself to the utmost in Roman Catholic countries is the 
 recent wide extension of the suffrage throughout Europe. 
 Political power is placed thereby in the hands of the 
 most ignorant classes. It is precisely these over which 
 Rome has the most control. Consequently, in Roman 
 Catholic countries there are continual clerical reactions 
 of a very dangerous kind. To promote these reactions, 
 the Vaticanists do not scruple to resort to the most 
 unscrupulous tactics. This very year the question of 
 the acquisition of the Swiss railways by the State has 
 been taken up by the Roman Catholic Church for her 
 own purposes. Railways promote the circulation of 
 intelligent opinion ; therefore the increase of railways 
 in Switzerland is eminently undesirable in the eyes of 
 the Vatican faction, and the most ignorant and back- 
 ward of the Swiss cantons voted solid against the pro- 
 position, though it was supported by all the cantons. 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 259 
 
 Roman Catholic or Protestant, where intelHgence and 
 manufacturing industries are to be found. Where Pro- 
 testantism is strong, the Vatican puts forward its fairest 
 and most Hberal aspect, poses as the friend of social 
 order and the rights of capital, and endeavours to secure 
 Conservative support against the dangerous tendencies 
 of modern Liberalism. In dealing with the infidel 
 Socialist, the Roman Catholic Church makes capital of 
 the very strongly-pronounced indifferentism of many 
 of her supporters ; and a Socialist lately informed an 
 Old Catholic candidate for the representation of Lucerne 
 in the Swiss Federal Assembly, that he should prefer to 
 vote for the Roman Catholic candidate, assigning as his 
 reason that in voting for a Roman Catholic he would 
 be voting for a man with no definite religious convic- 
 tions, whereas in voting for an Old Catholic he would 
 be doing the very opposite. Yet where Rome has a 
 free hand, all the old fierce intolerance breaks out, as 
 fierce as in the days when the Church had the stake 
 and the gibbet at her command. 
 
 Thus, spite of all this skilful manipulation of policy 
 to suit the particular occasion, the Vatican seems to be 
 making very little, if any, progress. Clerical reactions 
 are followed by Liberal reactions. The most remark- 
 able of these, though by no means the only one, is the 
 extraordinary revulsion of feeling in Canada last year 
 in regard to the Manitoba schools question, which 
 placed Mr. Laurier, a Liberal Roman Catholic, in 
 power. A serious opposition, headed by Archbishop 
 Ireland, and supported by theologians of note, against 
 the government of the Roman Catholic Church from 
 the Vatican, and in favour of Home Rule, has lately 
 broken out in the United States, and it has taxed all the 
 
2 6o THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 resources of the Vatican, which has been compelled to 
 give way to it.^ The consecration by the Old Catholics 
 last year of Herr Anton Kozlowski, to preside over 
 30,000 members of the " Polish Independent Catholic 
 Church," is a further illustration of the progress in 
 America of the movement for ecclesiastical Home Rule. 
 The Roman Church, in fact, is environed on all sides 
 by difficulties and dangers, and well may Papal allo- 
 cutions be full of complaints and lamentations. She 
 reminds us at the present moment of those conjurors 
 who, with inimitable dexterity, balance themselves upon 
 a pole. We admire the dexterity ; but we do not fail 
 to perceive that a moment's giddiness, a moment's for- 
 getfulness, might lead to very disastrous results. More- 
 over, it is as dangerous now as it was in the days of 
 Bishop Pecock to try to defend her system by argu- 
 ment. The simple assertion of authority is felt to be 
 far easier, and far more consistent. Accordingly, the 
 able writers and orators who arise from time to time 
 to maintain the cause of Rome, are seen, one by one, 
 to "go down into silence." Lamennais was con- 
 demned, was driven from the Roman communion, and 
 refused to see a priest before he died. Lacordaire 
 died out of favour with the authorities of his Church. 
 Montalembert's last moments were clouded by oppo- 
 sition and suspicion. That splendid living orator and 
 thinker, Pere Hyacinthe, whom the age has hardly 
 appreciated as he deserves, was in difficulties with 
 
 ^ At one time Archbishop Ireland was in disgrace, and his supporter 
 Dr. Keane was removed from the headship of his Seminary at Washington. 
 Now Archbishop Ireland is in high favour, and Dr. Keane is preaching at 
 Rome and giving general satisfaction. At least, so says the Gazette de 
 Lausanne of February 28, 1898. Since this note was written, however, the 
 Pope has condemned Archbishop Ireland and his followers. 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 261 
 
 his ecclesiastical superiors before the decrees of the 
 Vatican Council compelled him to brave the ex- 
 communication pronounced against those who reject 
 them. Pere Didon, another great French preacher, 
 was ordered to retire and meditate on his rash utter- 
 ances in the seclusion of his convent. Padre Agostino 
 di Montefeltro, who rather more than ten years ago 
 was drawing vast crowds to the churches of Italy, 
 and whose addresses were sold at every newspaper 
 stall in the country, was compelled to read his recan- 
 tation in the pulpit, his voice choked with tears ; and 
 from 1889 to the present moment, nothing more has 
 been heard of him. In short, Vaticanism at the pre- 
 sent day must be described as an organisation which 
 is determined, if possible, to wield unlimited power 
 over the hearts and consciences of men, by the nega- 
 tion of reason and the suppression of inconvenient 
 facts. 
 
 In the foregoing observations it is frankly admitted 
 that only the unfavourable side of the Roman system 
 has been presented to the reader. It is not for a 
 moment denied that there is another, and a better. 
 It could hardly be otherwise as long as Christ on His 
 Cross remains the prominent figure in Roman Catholic 
 Churches. There is an incalculable amount of the 
 deepest self-devotion, the most ardent zeal, the most 
 exquisite purity of heart and life, the most unbounded 
 meekness, humility, and submission in the Roman 
 communion ; and it must be admitted that these 
 qualities are, to a very considerable extent, a conse- 
 quence of her system. Such qualities are an untold 
 source of moral strength, and without them she would 
 barely have been able to outlast the century. As 
 
262 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 Carlyle once said, Romanism unquestionably has a 
 raison d'etre, and not until she ceases to have one 
 can she cease to exist. It cannot be denied that for 
 the ignorant, for women, for men of meek and sub- 
 missive temperament, for men who are worn out by 
 intellectual conflicts, the Roman Catholic Church pre- 
 sents herself as a haven of peace, a calm and restful 
 authority which stills the struggles of the rebellious 
 heart. But certainly at the present moment it has 
 once more become necessary to remind men that there 
 is a reverse to the medal, another side to the picture.^ 
 The recoil towards Rome from the vulgar Protestantism 
 of half a century back, reinforced as it is by a spurious 
 Liberalism and a still more spurious charity, compels 
 us once more to call attention to the fact that there is 
 a " seamy side " to Romanism as a religious system. 
 The ignorant, the commonplace, the submissive, the 
 meek and lowly, the wearied and exhausted are not 
 the only members of a church which numbers a 
 Peter and a Paul, an Athanasius, a Jerome, and a 
 Bernard, to name no other name, among her saints. 
 It has become necessary once more to insist, and 
 to insist strongly, that freedom of thought, freedom 
 of opinion, freedom of discussion, are the inalienable 
 privileges of mankind. If freedom, as it often does, 
 degenerates into licence, authority not unfrequently 
 slides into tyranny, and tyranny is everywhere a blight- 
 ing curse.^ A combination of circumstances has of 
 
 ^ These words were written before the revelations of the Dreyfus case 
 startled all honest men, Roman Catholic as well as Protestant. Many who 
 would have disputed their justice when they were written would admit it now. 
 
 ^ " Disunion comes from rebellion, and rebellion comes from tyranny, and 
 tyranny is only the exaggeration of authority pushed to excess" (Duggan, 
 "Steps towards Reunion," p. 77). "Rebellion comes from too much ruling, 
 blind obedience makes blind subjects ; blind subjects make blind rulers, and 
 
ROMANISM SINCE THE REFORMATION 263 
 
 late tended to obscure our English apprehension of 
 the evils of an ecclesiastical despotism, its injustice, its 
 intrigues,^ its favouritism, its suppression, whenever 
 possible, of inconvenient facts. We have had our eyes 
 too exclusively fixed on our own shortcomings, our at- 
 tention too unfrequently directed to the far graver evils 
 produced by a system the very opposite of our own. 
 Men forget, moreover, that Rome, in spite of her mani- 
 fold shortcomings in every respect, professes to be 
 under infallible guidance, whereas at most we do not 
 pretend to do more than feel our way from good to 
 better. Many of us, appalled by the spectacle of our 
 own intestine divisions, have come to look upon schism 
 as the one unpardonable sin, forgetting that there is 
 at least one thing more precious than the preservation 
 of an external unity — and that one thing is truth. 
 At a moment such as this, a restatement of the main 
 principles of the Reformation has become a para- 
 mount necessity. At the Reformation there was no 
 intention of questioning the fundamental truths of the 
 Christian religion. All that was contended for was, 
 that those principles once admitted, the fullest liberty 
 should be conceded of discussing and elaborating them, 
 of applying them, and of drawing conclusions from 
 them. Christians are pledged neither to the opinions 
 of Luther, Calvin, nor Zwingli, of Cranmer, Ridley and 
 Latimer, nor, we may even venture to add, of Origen, 
 Athanasius, or Augustine. We venerate all these men ; 
 
 we know what happens when the blind lead the blind" (Ibid., p. io8). Car- 
 dinal Vaughan has found it his duty to delate this work, written by a Roman 
 Catholic priest, to the Holy See as " offensive to pious ears, temerarious, and 
 scandalous." 
 
 ^ "Cardinal Manning's Life," by Mr. Purcell, shows to what courses an 
 educated Englishman could descend, as, for instance, in the Errington'casc, 
 when entangled in the meshes of the Vaticanist system. 
 
264 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 we believe that the Holy Ghost has spoken by each 
 and all of them in their measure. But the Christian 
 conscience recognises none of them as infallible. It 
 attributes infallibility to nothing but the teaching of 
 Christ, as preserved in the Scriptures, and handed 
 down in and by the Universal Church. It claims to be 
 left unfettered, save by those elementary principles. It 
 asks to be allowed to " prove all things," as well as to 
 *' hold fast that which is good." It declines to " teach 
 for doctrines the commandments of men." It draws 
 no artificial or exaggerated distinctions between the 
 governors and the governed in Christ's Church, believ- 
 ing that "the manifestation of the Spirit is given to 
 every man to profit withal," and that the "unction 
 from the Holy One," which enables us to " know all 
 things," is not the exclusive possession of any class or 
 order within her pale. Upon the fact that each one of 
 us hath been "made to drink" into "a free Spirit" it 
 is content to rest. And it hopes, day by day, and step 
 by step, in rehance on that Spirit's indwelling in the 
 Church, to draw ever nearer to the hour when it shall 
 have been guided by the same Spirit "into all the 
 truth." 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 
 
 By the Right Rev. ALFRED BARRY, D.D. 
 
 In the order of thought suggested in these Essays, 
 " the English Christianity of to-day " must be con- 
 sidered, both in itself, and in respect of the contribution 
 which it has to make to the present and future life of 
 the whole Church of Christ. It is clear that this con- 
 sideration of it must take account, not merely of those 
 essentials of Christianity, in which all Christians and 
 all Churches are one, but of the peculiar characteristics 
 which have been so stamped upon it in the course of 
 its history, as to give it at this moment a certain tone 
 and power of its own. Now the " English Christianity 
 of to-day " is the outcome of a continuous growth from 
 the whole English Christianity of the past, but especi- 
 ally since the great epoch of the Reformation. For at 
 that time it had to take up a position of decided, 
 though not unlimited, independence ; while declaring 
 emphatically that it " intended not to decline or vary 
 from the congregation of Christ's Church in things 
 concerning the Catholic faith of Christendom, or 
 declared in Holy Scripture and the Word of God to be 
 necessary to salvation." It is the combination of the 
 attachment to Catholic unity here claimed, with the 
 independence of a free development of its own especial 
 
 character, which has always constituted the peculiarity 
 
 265 
 
2 66 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 of English Christianity, and determined its function as 
 a factor in the common growth of the Kingdom of 
 Christ itself. But our own age has brought out that 
 function with a new clearness and vividness, because 
 (as will be noticed more fully hereafter) it is a period 
 of expansion of that Christianity, both in fact and in 
 idea, losing insularity in the conception and realization 
 of a world-wide mission. 
 
 I ought to say at the outset that, in this attempt to 
 estimate it, I must be in the main content to refer to 
 English Christianity as it is represented in the Church 
 of England. I do so, not only with a view to limit a 
 subject of formidable extent, and to consider it in a field 
 of which we Churchmen have the fullest knowledge, 
 but also, because — while I do not for a moment ignore 
 the strength and vitality of Nonconformist Christianity, 
 in England itself and (still more) among the English- 
 speaking race in other parts of the world — I cannot but 
 see that the Church of England, as the old National 
 Church, is necessarily most truly representative of the 
 characteristics of English Christianity, as a whole — not 
 only in the present, but in the past — not in some classes, 
 but in all classes of our people. It is, of course, itself 
 affected by the reflex action upon it of other religious 
 Communions — each of which tends to emphasize, 
 prominently, sometimes almost exclusively, some one 
 element of its own complex life. But it maintains 
 still the comprehensiveness of its representative 
 character. Although the old condition of things has 
 passed away, in which the Church was looked upon as 
 co-extensive with the nation — as in fact the nation itself 
 in its spiritual life — it has left behind this representa- 
 tive character as an inheritance from the past. More- 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 267 
 
 over, the Church of England by its very nature stands, 
 not only as the Nonconformist Communions stand, 
 for Christian truth, but for Christian unity, which Non- 
 conformity, as such, disregards, though it is remarkable 
 that some Nonconformist Communions are now begin- 
 ning to make tentative approaches to it. If therefore 
 English Christianity, as such, is to have any collective 
 mission of service to the whole Church of Christ, 
 it seems overwhelmingly probable, if not absolutely 
 certain, that it will have to discharge that mission 
 mainly through the Church of England. 
 
 I. Now it is clear that the peculiar character of 
 our English Christianity is determined by the very fact 
 that it is English — that it is indeed the leading factor in 
 the remarkable function, which undoubtedly belongs to 
 the English-speaking race, in regard to the progress of 
 humanity. For its main principle — distinctly asserted 
 at the Reformation, but not as a new thing — is the 
 realization in the spiritual sphere of what has been the 
 distinguishing feature of the whole national life of 
 England. This is unquestionably the resolute main- 
 tenance of a harmony of individuality with unity, 
 of freedom with authority — a harmony necessarily 
 difficult and imperfect, involving many irregularities 
 and anomalies, which are the scorn of the adherents 
 of narrower systems, but accordant with our human 
 nature, which is at once individual and social, and with 
 the Divine Government, which. Almighty as it is, never- 
 theless works upon men, and through men, as free. It 
 is an ideal, which has been to a great extent realized 
 in the lower spheres of English experience. There its 
 realization has, first, created a splendid national life, 
 ruled by a free loyalty, which is incomprehensible to 
 
268 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 the iron systems of despotism, and lasting on in an 
 unbroken continuity, while revolution has convulsed 
 them, or oppression has brought with it decay of 
 national strength. It has, next, been the chief secret 
 of that extraordinary spread of the dominion and in- 
 fluence of the English-speaking race, which is acknow- 
 ledged as being in some sense unique in the history 
 of the world. Accordingly it has been, as indeed it 
 was bound to be, the leading characteristic of the 
 English Christianity, which lies at the heart of English 
 character and English influence. Even under the Papal 
 autocracy it asserted itself vigorously, although perhaps 
 illogically so long as that autocracy was acknowledged, 
 mainly in respect of the independence of the National 
 Church, but in some degree in respect of individual 
 freedom of thought and faith. In the sixteenth century 
 that assertion in both its elements, but especially the 
 latter, was made more thorough and consistent. On 
 it depends the true meaning of the common phrase, 
 sometimes discredited, but undoubtedly true, that the 
 Church of England is at once "Catholic and Protestant." 
 For Protestantism, if we pass beyond its merely negative 
 sense of repudiation of Papal authority and doctrines 
 distinctively Romish, is really religious individuality ; 
 while Catholicity involves the right subordination of 
 this individuality to the authority of the whole body. 
 But this harmony of the two ideas was a natural 
 growth, not an artificial balance of opposites. There 
 can be no greater error than to suppose, as men con- 
 stantly appear to suppose, that the course of the English 
 Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
 or of the subsequent history of the English Church, 
 was determined by a deliberate attempt to secure this 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 269 
 
 harmony artificially, and to choose with that view what 
 has been called (from an extension of a statement in 
 the Preface to our Prayer-Book, which refers only 
 to the matter of Revision), the Via Media of balance 
 between opposite extremes. The leading idea of our 
 Reformers was undoubtedly the ascertainment and 
 revival in all essentials of primitive truth, as is shown 
 by the emphatic appeal to the sufficiency and supremacy 
 of Holy Scripture, as the articulus stantis aut cadentis 
 ecclesicE. A true way is likely enough to be a middle 
 way ; for historically errors are apt to diverge on 
 either hand. But it is important to understand that 
 the ideal of the Church of England is the Via Media 
 quia vera, and not the Via vera quia Media : for there 
 is a world-wide difference between the comprehensive- 
 ness which is the natural result of the one, and the 
 compromise which must attach to the other. Nor 
 should we fail to notice that, as usual in our English 
 experience, the approach to that ideal has been rather 
 a natural and gradual advance, than the result of any 
 deliberate scheme of thought and action. For the object 
 contemplated has always been the modification and re- 
 formation of the old, so far, and only so far, as was 
 necessary, rather than the striking out of a system 
 absolutely new. In this respect the Christianity of the 
 Church of England stood out in the sixteenth century 
 in obvious distinction from Continental Protestantism, 
 especially in the logical completeness of the Calvinistic 
 system, by which the Puritan party tried in vain to 
 mould it. In this it still stands distinct from the 
 Christianity of other reformed Communions at home 
 and abroad. The distinction involved, and still involves, 
 some penalty of isolation. But it points to that in 
 
2 70 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 which lie the real strength of the Church of England, 
 and her hope of larger service to Christendom. 
 
 In all that is here said I shall take it for granted 
 that this ideal will be substantially preserved. It is, 
 indeed, natural, perhaps inevitable, that there should 
 have been at different times tendencies within the Church 
 of England itself to destroy or impair this characteristic 
 position, by so exaggerating one or other of the ele- 
 ments of this harmony, as practically to ignore the 
 harmony itself. In past times this tendency has been 
 perhaps mainly what is commonly called " ultra-Pro- 
 testant," recognising only the sacredness of individual 
 Christianity, ignoring the equal sacredness of the collec- 
 tive life of the Church itself, and ascribing whatever 
 authority and unity it has to its Establishment by the 
 State. At the present moment what calls itself the 
 " Catholic Revival " adopts the opposite extreme, tend- 
 ing to overbear individual freedom and independence, 
 as far as possible, by appeal to ecclesiastical, which is 
 virtually clerical authority, and accordingly, as it seems, 
 desiring to revert, in respect both of worship and Church 
 government, to that condition of things which the 
 Reformation swept away. These tendencies manifest 
 themselves in the formation of opposite schools of 
 thought in the Church, to which they give a distinc- 
 tive colour, and which stand in pronounced and often 
 vehement antagonism. But the seriousness of these 
 divisions, unhappy as they are, is apt to be exaggerated, 
 both within the Church, and still more beyond her 
 pale. They do not touch the chief fundamentals of 
 the faith ; they do not enlist in their conflict the mass 
 of the Church ; their sound is far greater than their 
 strength ; what her enemies call " a city of confusion " 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 271 
 
 is really " a city that hath the foundations." For neither 
 of these antagonistic tendencies has ever prevailed, or 
 is Hkely to prevail, against the comprehensive ideal of 
 the Church of England. There were times, as in the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when success may 
 have appeared to be within the reach of the former ; 
 but the appearance was falsified by the event. The 
 latter, hovi^ever, loudly and earnestly urged, is simply 
 an anachronism ; its prevalence is out of the question ; 
 it is more likely to provoke a dangerous and revolu- 
 tionary reaction in the opposite direction. The great 
 body of the Church goes on quietly in loyalty to 
 its old traditions — perhaps over quietly ; for it allows 
 the extremes, vehemently and noisily self-assertive, 
 to assume an apparent importance, far beyond their 
 intrinsic strength. 
 
 II. Now this harmony of individuality and unity is 
 not a matter of theory, nor does it depend on abstract 
 declarations, which have little effect on the great mass 
 of men. It is brought home practically to all in the 
 doctrine of the Word and the Sacraments, and so in the 
 daily life and worship of the Church. 
 
 The appeal to Holy Scripture, as the one ultimate 
 standard of faith, is a leading characteristic of all 
 English Christianity. But it is put forth with a singular 
 clearness and force in the Church of England. Prob- 
 ably no Church in Christendom has enunciated it more 
 decisively ; few, if any, have taken so much pains to 
 make it effective, by providing that Holy Scripture 
 shall be read through and through in the public 
 Service. Of course, to take the Bible literally, as "the 
 Bible alone," without illustration and interpretation 
 from the thought and life of the Church in all ages, and 
 
2 72 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 to suppose that no ordinance of the Church can have 
 authority, which is not expressly enjoined in Holy 
 Scripture, is not to take the Bible as God gave it. For 
 it was certainly given under His Providence to a 
 Church, and given in close connection with its con- 
 tinuous life. The Old Testament grew up through the 
 centuries within the Covenant of Israel ; it cannot be 
 fully understood except in connection with the history 
 of the covenanted people. The New Testament grew 
 up through the first century of our era, in a Church, 
 which had actually been founded in the whole Roman 
 Empire before the New Testament itself was complete ; 
 and it takes the existence and authority of that Church 
 for granted in every page. The Church of England, 
 true, as usual, to history, commits no such error ; she 
 accepts the Creeds of the Catholic Church, as the 
 interpreters of Scriptural truth, in its essence and in the 
 right proportion of its various elements ; she recognises 
 that the Church, and even " each particular or national 
 Church," " has an authority to decree rites and cere- 
 monies," which is binding on the individual conscience, 
 provided that nothing be decreed contrary to Holy 
 Scripture ; " as a witness and keeper of Holy Writ," 
 she claims ''authority" — a real, although not absolute 
 or infallible, authority — " in controversies of faith." 
 But that authority is of interpretation, not of addition ; 
 no tradition of the Church is to be co-ordinated with 
 Scripture, and regarded pari pietatis affectu et reverentia. 
 Nothing is allowed to set aside, or explain away, the 
 free appeal to Holy Scripture as supreme ; nothing 
 accordingly to stand between it and the individual mind 
 and conscience of the believer. 
 
 Now this appeal to an open Bible, freely circulated 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 273 
 
 and freely read, is certainly the charter of individuality 
 in the Church. For the Bible speaks directly to the 
 individual, as the Word of God in Christ. It is, 
 indeed, ministered to us by the Church, and, in fact, 
 received by us generally through that ministration. 
 But it can speak, and does speak, independently, as 
 " living and powerful," to each soul alone, face to face 
 with God, with no mediation except the mediation of 
 the Lord Jesus Christ ; and by it ultimately, as the 
 supreme standard of faith, all teaching must be judged 
 and tested in each man's conscience. The appeal to it 
 is, therefore, the safeguard in the Church of individual 
 freedom and individual responsibility. 
 
 Yet at the same time it clearly supplies the basis 
 of the only Christian unity, which is possible in days 
 of growing spiritual activity and spiritual freedom — a 
 unity comprehensive of variety, because dependent on 
 principle, rather than formal rule and law. That unity 
 can be seen largely realized even now in our English 
 Christianity, in spite of the divisions and controversies 
 which are its bane. Wherever Holy Scripture is ac- 
 cepted as a Divine rule of faith, there is a striking 
 agreement in the great body of English Christians on 
 the fundamental verities of the faith, as expressed, for 
 example, in the Apostles' Creed. For Holy Scripture, 
 as we see more clearly every day, is a power, "not 
 of the letter, but of the Spirit," in its infinite variety 
 appealing to the whole man in mind and heart and 
 spirit, and yet through all that variety essentially one. 
 As simply a record, historical and spiritual, of the dis- 
 pensation of God to humanity, it centres in the Word 
 and Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Up to Him all 
 leads which goes before, from Him all which follows 
 
 S 
 
2 74 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 is derived. Hence it has to be taken as a whole, which 
 cannot be understood piecemeal, as though in each 
 text or book the perfect truth was enshrined. So taken 
 it founds our faith on the central reality — " learning 
 Christ, and being taught of Christ " — and on this basis 
 there must be a resting-place for all who come to Him 
 as " having the words of eternal life." 
 
 The Church of England, moreover, as we know, 
 has laid down as authoritative no theory as to the in- 
 spiration of that Holy Scripture. That it is a true and 
 all-sufficient revelation of God in Christ, " containing all 
 things necessary to salvation " — this, indeed, is most 
 unequivocally asserted ; but beyond this, which alone 
 is absolutely needful, the declaration does not go. It 
 implies, no doubt, a belief in a special and unique 
 inspiration of the writers of Holy Scripture, enabling 
 them to speak in the name of God the Gospel of Christ, 
 in words of truth, which shall endure for ever, and 
 determine the faith of all mankind. But what that 
 inspiration is, how it has been given, how much it 
 implies, how it is related to the human personality of 
 him who receives it and to the spirit of his age — this is 
 nowhere determined. On all these points the thought- 
 ful mind must and will speculate ; on all these has 
 always been, among sincere believers, great variety of 
 opinion. But on the determination of them the Church 
 does not venture : for it is clearly a secret of the Spirit 
 of God Himself. 
 
 Accordingly, in the study of Holy Scripture, our 
 English Christianity leaves free scope for the Biblical 
 criticism, which examines these very points ; and gives 
 her members perfect liberty to consider it in each case 
 on its own merits, provided always — and the proviso 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 275 
 
 is important — that the great fundamental principle, 
 so emphatically asserted, shall neither be denied nor 
 explained away. In this generation it is all but 
 universally acknowledged that, taken as a whole, such 
 criticism has given a more living interest and force 
 to Holy Scripture, and taught us better to understand 
 it in all the stages of its development as a whole. No 
 doubt the criticism itself, especially the confident a 
 priori criticism, needs to be criticized, and corrected by 
 appeal to evidences of a different kind ; and experience, 
 in regard especially to the New Testament, has shown 
 us how, so treated, it is sure to be reduced to its right 
 limits of authority. But it is to such correction, not to 
 suppression or denunciation, that the Church of England 
 is bound by her traditions to trust. 
 
 Nor is her position different in relation to the 
 discoveries of physical or historical science, which 
 crowd upon us every day. All who believe in God 
 must suppose that the book of Nature and the book of 
 Humanity are in a true sense books of God, revealing 
 Him in His almighty power, His perfect wisdom, His 
 transcendent righteousness and love. If, therefore, the 
 Church of England appeals to Holy Scripture as the 
 supreme revelation of Him, she is bound to welcome 
 all these lower revelations as necessarily harmonizing 
 with it, although incapable of rising to the higher 
 mysteries of the Gospel, which this supreme revelation 
 has made to be the treasure of all humanity. Their 
 discoveries may affect, and have affected, our interpre- 
 tations of Holy Scripture, where it touches upon the 
 lower spheres. But the central spiritual truth, and its 
 inherent spiritual power, they cannot touch. Nay, as 
 they are more philosophically considered, and pre- 
 
276 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 tensions put forth in their name are more carefully 
 scrutinized, there can be no doubt that, like the Biblical 
 criticism to which I have already referred, they have 
 already thrown the light of illustration and analogy on 
 many of the most important elements of the Christian 
 faith. And this attitude of what may be called a 
 friendly and gracious independence towards all scientific 
 or historical discovery is of infinite importance ; on it 
 depends not only the freedom of individual thought and 
 faith within the pale of the Church, but also the 
 accordance of her teaching with human progress, and 
 the consequent prospect of her ability to direct and 
 mould it in the future, as in the past. 
 
 Once more — and this vitally affects its fitness for the 
 vast opportunity of missionary work, which has been 
 given us under the Providence of God — our English 
 Christianity is now learning to assume a corresponding 
 attitude towards the religions of the world. We see 
 the infinite significance of the fact, that in all races of 
 the earth religion in some form — the recognition, that 
 is, of a Superhuman Power creating, ruling, sustaining 
 the world and man — is in possession of the whole field 
 of human thought. Crude, often grotesque, in the 
 barbarian races — elaborate, profound, philosophical in 
 advanced civilisations — everywhere it manifests itself as 
 a development of an universal instinct implanted in our 
 human nature by its Creator. As such, it must always 
 have an essential sacredness, in spite of all perversions, 
 hesitations, superstitions. Our English Christianity is 
 more and more realizing that sacredness, and beginning 
 to reproduce, with the advantage of larger knowledge 
 and experience, the attitude of the old Alexandrian 
 School of Theology towards the heathenism of earlier 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 277 
 
 days. For, after all, this is but to follow the teaching 
 of St. Paul at Athens. It is to acknowledge, on the one 
 hand, that all these religions are embodiments of that 
 " feeling after God," which is an element of the 
 supreme purpose, for which " He made of one blood all 
 the nations of the earth," and that whatever is true in 
 them is a divine revelation, through which they " find 
 Him," or rather " are found of Him." It is to put 
 forth, on the other, with reverent and enthusiastic 
 confidence, the claim of our Christianity to declare in 
 Christ the God who, to their " ignorant worship," is " a 
 God unknown," though not unfelt, and in this revela- 
 tion, of which they are but " broken lights," to dispel 
 all. mists of doubt, and all clouds of error and super- 
 stition. The deeper study of the religions of the world, 
 in the light of our Christianity, and especially the com- 
 parison of their sacred books with the transcendent 
 power of Holy Scripture, have certainly taught us to 
 hold firmly both these elements of the Apostolic teach- 
 ing, and to hold them moreover in their right proportion. 
 
 All these things are results of the supreme appeal 
 to Holy Scripture, bringing out, first the freedom of 
 religious individuality, and then through it the unity of 
 comprehensiveness. 
 
 The same result seems to follow, but in the 
 reverse order, from the co-ordination of the Sacraments 
 of the Gospel with the Word. 
 
 Primarily it is clear that the Sacraments are 
 witnesses and expressions of Church unity. For they 
 cannot be laid hold of by each man for himself ; they 
 need the ministration of the Church. By the first, men 
 <' are grafted into the body of Christ's Church ; " by the 
 second, they are perfected in the membership thus 
 
2 78 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 begun. As Hooker expresses it in well-known words : 
 " The saving grace, which Christ originally is, or hath, 
 for the good of His whole Church, the same by 
 sacraments He severally deriveth to each member 
 thereof." The Church of England has brought out in 
 her Services, with unmistakable emphasis, the mys- 
 terious reality of the Sacraments, as Christ ordained 
 them in His Church for ever. In relation to that 
 second great Sacrament, which has unhappily been the 
 battlefield of religious coutroversy, she has in her 
 Service gone back through the ancient Liturgies to 
 what we may well hold to be the substance of an 
 Apostolic original. This " sacramental teaching " is the 
 needful and most unequivocal witness to the corporate 
 life and unity in Christ of the Church as a whole. By 
 pure religious individualism it is accordingly apt to be 
 ignored or depreciated. In an age like our own — when 
 pure individualism in any form is felt to be insufficient 
 to solve human problems, and when what may be 
 called in the most general sense " socializing " principles 
 are increasingly maintained and reverenced — it is most 
 natural that this sacramental teaching of our Prayer- 
 Book, and the consciousness which it implies of the 
 sacredness of the Communion of Saints, and its autho- 
 rity over individual life, should have been brought out, 
 in word and in practice, with increased emphasis, and 
 should, as usual, have sometimes tended by reaction to 
 exaggeration. This movement of thought (be it noted) 
 is traceable in different degrees in other religious Com- 
 munions than our own. But in the steadfast and 
 thoughtful maintenance of it by our own Church, is one 
 main secret of her power of adaptation to the needs 
 of humanity, especially in these later days. 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 279 
 
 At the same time it will be noticed that in her 
 sacramental teaching, individuality is doubly guarded. 
 
 First, the Church has deliberately abstained from 
 all attempts to dogmatize on the method and character 
 of the mystery of the Sacraments, and has absolutely 
 protested against rationalizing it (so to speak) in either 
 direction, Roman or Zwinglian. On this matter indivi- 
 dual opinion and faith are left free, with room for 
 large variety of development. What was said by the 
 same theologian, already quoted, as to the second great 
 Sacrament, in an age of bold speculation and vehement 
 controversy, expresses most truly the mind of the 
 Church of England on the whole subject. There are 
 sufficient grounds of universal agreement, on which all 
 may rest. Beyond this lie varieties of theory, more or 
 less speculative, more or less inclined to define the 
 indefinable. It is well for her children to be of the 
 number, not " of those who, because they enjoyed not, 
 disputed, but of those who disputed not, because they 
 enjoyed." All that is asked of them is to acknowledge 
 the reality of the Sacraments as in the New Testament 
 sense a " mystery," a secret (that is) of God's dispensa- 
 tion, revealed, so far as it can be revealed, by our Lord 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 Next, while emphatically witnessing to the reality 
 of the Sacraments in themselves, the Church has, with 
 at least equal emphasis, declared again and again that 
 it can be made effectively real to each soul only through 
 individual faith, drawing out, as in the Gospel miracle, 
 the "virtue," which is in the Presence of Christ — in 
 infancy a potential faith of promise, to be unfolded here- 
 after, in mature age a faith of actual energy. That 
 which is spiritual can only be spiritually received. In 
 
2 8o THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 the clear conception of this truth is obviously the safe- 
 guard against superstition properly so-called ; but in it 
 is also implied the assertion of individuality, as resting 
 all access to God on the secret grace of the Holy 
 Spirit. When in 1559 the words of Administration 
 in the Holy Communion were brought to their present 
 form, dwelling in benediction on the reality of the 
 Sacramental gift, and in exhortation on the conditionality 
 of reception, the harmony of the two ideas was expressed 
 with a clearness which leaves nothing to be desired. 
 
 III. It should be added that on this same harmony 
 depends what is again of infinite importance, the true 
 conception of the relation of the clergy and laity in the 
 Church. 
 
 The Ministry of the Church is the chief organ of 
 expression of its corporate life. It exists (as its very 
 name implies) for the ministration both of the Word 
 and of the Sacraments to the whole body of the Church. 
 That it has so existed from the beginning, as an integral 
 element in the constitution of the Church, and that 
 those who are set apart for it have always been regarded, 
 not as mere delegates of the congregation, but as having 
 a mission from Christ Himself, through the chief of 
 His existing ministers from the Apostles downwards — 
 this is a matter of unquestionable historical fact. On 
 that historical fact, not only as to the ministry in general, 
 but even as to the three Orders of the ministry, the 
 Church of England takes an unhesitating stand. Her 
 Ordination service would be unmeaning, and worse than 
 unmeaning, except on this ground ; and it draws the 
 inevitable inference, that continuity of ministerial charge 
 implies a continuity of ministerial blessing from Christ 
 Himself — an inference boldly expressed in the repetition 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 281 
 
 of the words of our Lord's own charge to His Apostles. 
 It is well : for without this acknowledgment of the 
 sacredness of the ministry, no Church can well have an 
 authoritative and effective pastoral ministration, a firm 
 organisation, and a real sense of corporate unity. No 
 society can hold together without the recognition of 
 some authority, having in some sense a Divine sanction, 
 although not claiming, in virtue of that sanction, an 
 absolute and irresponsible power. Such an authority the 
 Church finds in a ministry, not dependent on the will 
 of the congregation, but holding a commission from 
 the Lord Himself. In keeping firmly to the acknow- 
 ledgment of this character in the ministry, the Church 
 of England places herself in indissoluble connection with 
 the Church Catholic of the past and of the present. 
 
 On the other hand, the grasp of the principle of 
 Individuality is the safeguard of the rights of the lay 
 members of the Church ; for it implies for every 
 member of Christ individually a large measure of 
 religious liberty, both in thought and in action ; it 
 asserts for him what has been called " the priesthood 
 of the laity," — the freedom (that is) of access to God 
 in Christ, without absolute necessity of any interven- 
 tion by the ministration of the Church ; it claims for 
 him an indefeasible right to all Church ordinances, 
 provided that he has the necessary spiritual conditions 
 of repentance and faith. In all these points the posi- 
 tion of the Church of England stands in marked con- 
 trast with the strongly compacted system of priestly 
 authority in the Church of Rome, as it once ruled, 
 although with some restriction, in England, and as it 
 now asserts itself more absolutely than ever in Churches 
 under the Roman obedience. This freedom is so 
 
2 82 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 deeply engrained in our whole conception of Christian 
 life, that any attempt to destroy or even impair it must 
 prove, as I have said, to be a pure anachronism, and 
 accordingly a disastrous failure. For it should be noted 
 that in the extreme simplicity of the terms of entrance 
 on lay-membership — the acceptance of Holy Baptism 
 and of the Apostles' Creed, which grew up freely in the 
 West out of the simple Baptismal profession ; in the 
 large liberty of the actual membership, and in the free 
 access, with due spiritual preparation, to the fulness of 
 that membership in the Holy Communion, we find the 
 expression of that comprehensiveness of the Church of 
 England on a broad Scriptural basis, of which I have 
 already spoken. It is a comprehensiveness which is 
 often made her reproach, and which, undoubtedly, 
 involves some loss of wholesome discipline, some risk 
 of licence, division, perplexity, but which is nevertheless 
 the secret of her vitality, and of the unequalled in- 
 fluence which she exercises over English life and thought. 
 Liberty may be perverted to licence through abeyance 
 of discipline ; but it is still the true condition of 
 humanity and the mainspring of its progress. Nor 
 is this all. For with individual liberty, as experience 
 in other relations of life shows us, is always associated 
 some claim of a share in the collective self-government 
 of the Church itself, in respect of the legislative, judicial, 
 and executive functions which such self-government 
 implies ; and this claim must be made practically effec- 
 tive through the representative institutions, which alone 
 are capable of reconciling freedom with unity. All 
 these rights of the laity belong to the traditions of our 
 Church ; all were distinctly reasserted in the whole 
 action of the Reformation. The individual rights are 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 283 
 
 recognised still to the full. The right to a co-ordination 
 in government of laity with clergy is acknowledged, 
 as a matter of course, in all other branches of the 
 Anglican Communion. If it has fallen into abeyance in 
 England itself — in consequence not so much of Estab- 
 lishment as of the abuses of Establishment — no one 
 can doubt that we are feeling our way towards it in our 
 tentative English fashion ; that in some way the self- 
 government of the whole body must be attained; and 
 that, when it is attained, the two Orders can work in it 
 together, without confusion and conflict, because with- 
 out trenching on each other's rights. 
 
 Such, as it seems to me, is the leading characteristic 
 principle of English Christianity as represented in the 
 National Church, which is, I believe, in reality, as well 
 as in theory, the truest organ of expression of the Chris- 
 tianity of the nation as a whole. But in working out 
 this principle, which is (as I have said) characteristically 
 English in the civil as well as in the ecclesiastical sphere, 
 against the irregularities and inconsistencies of which 
 Englishmen are tolerant even to excess, there can be 
 no doubt that our Church suffers greatly from the want 
 of that which is the very life of the nation — the power 
 through self-government of self-reformation and self- 
 adaptation, throwing off what is virtually obsolete, 
 adopting what is required by new needs and oppor- 
 tunities. The result of this want is a mixture of con- 
 stitutional immobility with developments of a strong 
 individual licence. Constitutionally we can change 
 little or nothing. In times of crisis and difficulty we are 
 obliged to rally round a Prayer-Book, even in its present 
 form more than two hundred years old ; our clergy 
 still sign Articles intended for the needs, and tinctured 
 
2 84 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 by the theology, of the sixteenth century. Church re- 
 form and Church discipHne can seldom be carried out 
 without the consent of a Parliament wholly different 
 in character from the Parliament of the Reformation 
 period, and in many cases cannot be carried out at 
 all. The lay members of the Church as such have no 
 constitutional means of expressing their opinion on 
 Church policy or doctrine. Practically there is, almost 
 of necessity, much of arbitrary irregularity, individual 
 and congregational ; much of irresponsible agitation 
 and dictation through voluntary societies and Church 
 newspapers ; much unwillingness to submit to consti- 
 tutional authority, and a practical impossibility of 
 appeal in the last resort to Church law through our 
 existing Courts. For variation from appointed order 
 there is but one means of authorization in that Epis- 
 copal licence, which in itself might be questioned in 
 strict law : in default of legal enforcement, appeal can 
 only be made to Episcopal decisions, which have to 
 rely simply on moral authority, and have no remedy 
 against wilful disobedience. That, in spite of all these 
 drawbacks, the Church is advancing, and that rapidly, 
 in power and efficiency, is happily true. But it is also 
 true that the present position is fraught with difficulty 
 and danger ; and the only remedy seems to lie in the 
 attainment or restoration of self-government of the 
 whole body. That this is not inconsistent with Estab- 
 lishment in fact, the experience of the Church of Scot- 
 land shows. Nay, we may see clearly that, if exercised, 
 as it must be exercised, under recognition of the power 
 of Parliament to prevent its infringing on the rights of 
 individual citizens, or militating against the welfare of 
 the whole community, it must tend to the efficiency of 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 285 
 
 the Church in that service to the higher life of the 
 people, which is the object of Establishment, and be 
 accordingly for the interests of the nation as well as of 
 the Church. Certainly it seems to be the one thing 
 most needful for the full vitality and progress of 
 English Christianity, as represented in the National 
 Church. 
 
 IV. It presses itself with a special urgency on our 
 attention at this moment, because in the Church of 
 England the present century has been, as I have 
 already said, a most remarkable era of expansion. 
 This expansion is the fruit of the revivals which have 
 passed over it, and thrilled through its whole life 
 during the last hundred years ; and these — realizing 
 vividly, as all true revivals must do, the Headship of 
 Christ — seem to have corresponded generally to the 
 evolution of the idea of that Headship, which we trace 
 in the New Testament. The strong Evangelical revival 
 of personal Christianity early in the century drew its 
 inspiration from the truth on which St. Paul dwelt 
 to the Corinthians (i Cor. xi. 3), that "Christ is the 
 Head of every man " in his own distinct individuality. 
 The great High-Church movement which followed — 
 avowedly not to supersede, but to supplement it — was 
 simply a realization, in view of the continuity of truth 
 and life in the Church as a whole, of the later utter- 
 ance of the same Apostle to the Ephesians (Eph. i. 22), 
 that " Christ is the Head over all things to the Church, 
 which is His body." The broader and larger concep- 
 tion of our Christianity, which is now developing itself 
 — not least among the adherents of the High-Church 
 movement — rather seems to take up the teaching of 
 the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians on the 
 
2 86 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 " gathering up under one head " all humanity and all 
 created being in Christ (Eph. i. lo; Col. i. 16-18), 
 claiming for Him all knowledge and life, and seeing 
 in His Gospel the interpretation of both. The result 
 has been to bring out, as in the ancient Creeds, the 
 transcendent significance of the Incarnation ; as, on 
 the one hand, implying the completion of its purpose 
 for the salvation of the world from the guilt and bon- 
 dage of sin, through the Atonement, the Resurrection, the 
 Ascension ; as, on the other hand, throwing back its 
 light on the pre-existence of the Son of God, and so on 
 the true nature of the Godhead, and showing itself, as 
 in the Divine counsels " ordained from the foundation 
 of the world " — to be the consummation of the creation 
 of humanity in that image of God, which is defaced but 
 not destroyed by the sin of the present, and is to be 
 restored perfectly in the future. It preaches " Christ 
 crucified," deeply conscious of the burden of sin, with 
 its fruits of suffering and death, under which we can 
 see that all humanity groans, and hailing in Him the 
 Saviour, who is the propitiation for our sins. But it 
 preaches also Christ the Eternal "Word of God," 
 incarnate in our humanity, to regenerate it in Himself, 
 and to give us the capacity of the new life here and 
 hereafter. It is clear that the vivid consciousness of 
 this supreme truth must determine the conception of 
 the mission of the Church to humanity, and of humanity 
 itself. 
 
 These three movements of revival, showing them- 
 selves at first in the formation of schools and parties in the 
 Church, and resulting accordingly in much controversy 
 and conflict, because each was apt to assume itself to 
 be all in all, are now undoubtedly being fused 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 287 
 
 together, stirring the life of the whole body, and giving 
 it much enlargement of idea and operation, and a 
 wider conception of its own mission to the world. For 
 just in proportion as, under different aspects, they 
 realize the One Headship, men come to see that it is 
 greater than their own conception of it, and to discern 
 the truth contained in the views taken of it by others. 
 Exaggeration and extravagance there are still, and 
 always will be, in those who are incapable of this 
 discernment. But, in great degree, it is impressing 
 itself on the great body of the Church, and in this lies 
 much of the hope of the future. 
 
 This expansion of idea is closely connected, both 
 in cause and effect, with that extraordinary outward 
 expansion of the Church (corresponding to the general 
 " Expansion of England "), which has been the glory of 
 this century, and especially of the last fifty or sixty 
 years. Few things are more remarkable in Church 
 history than the development of the Church of Eng- 
 land — once described, somewhat scornfully, by Macaulay 
 as an institution " as purely local " to England, " as the 
 Court of Common Pleas " — once supposed by many to 
 derive its unity and authority simply from that recogni- 
 tion and support of it by the State, which we call 
 " Establishment,' and to which, of course, this purely 
 local character does attach — into a great "Anglican 
 Communion," having a world-wide extension and an 
 independent life. That development, moreover, although 
 solid enough, has been marvellously rapid. It belongs 
 almost entirely to our own age ; for it is little more 
 than a hundred years since the first creation of an 
 English Episcopate abroad, marking the first planting 
 of an independent and self-governed Branch of our 
 
288 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 Church, beyond the narrow limits of our own shores. 
 Even when this beginning had been made, the progress 
 was for many years slow. At the opening of the 
 present reign there were but seven of such bishoprics 
 in the whole area of the British Empire, where now 
 there are more than eighty, to say nothing of nearly 
 the same number in the Sister Church in America. Now 
 we see everywhere vigorous and self-governing branches 
 of the Church, still preserving a close unity with the 
 Mother Church at home. And this expansion brings 
 with it a great variety of development. The Sister 
 Church in the United States, and the Churches of the 
 three great groups of our Colonies, in North America 
 and the West Indies, in Australasia, and in South Africa, 
 are, as might have been expected, virtual reproductions 
 in the English-speaking race, with independent variations 
 and adaptations to various needs, of the old Church of 
 England itself, only without the national recognition of 
 Establishment, and with a more unfettered freedom. 
 But the growth of our Church has extended itself 
 far beyond our own race, partly by direct missionary 
 impulse from England, partly by corresponding mis- 
 sionary energy in the sister or daughter Churches. In 
 face alike of the ancient religions and civilisations of 
 Asia, and of the comparative barbarism of Africa or 
 Polynesia, new daughter Churches are springing up, 
 which we rightly call " native Churches," because, while 
 they have been planted and watered by our English 
 hands, they must gradually have a large independence 
 of development, on lines of their own, and by their own 
 ministry. United with us in the essentials of Christian 
 truth and Catholic order, they are not by any means to 
 reproduce the formal Anglican constitution, which is 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 289 
 
 here a natural growth, but which would be artificial and 
 unreal for races and conditions of life wholly unlike our 
 own. The task of this varied and almost unbounded 
 expansion has been a glorious, but a formidable task. 
 We cannot say that it has been adequately carried out, 
 or that the Church of England has fully maintained, 
 even in the " Greater Britain," the spiritual leadership, 
 which ought to be hers in English Christianity. But 
 still the expansion has been great already ; and the 
 undoubted awakening of a stronger missionary spirit 
 gives promise of a more rapid progress in the next fifty 
 years. The growth of the Lambeth Conference, which 
 is really, though not formally, a General Anglican 
 Council, is a visible token of that expansion. Fifty 
 years ago it would have been thought impossible. Even 
 at its first conception, it was received with hesitation 
 and division of opinion. Now it has established itself 
 as an indispensable part of our collective Church life — a 
 manifestation to ourselves and to all men of emergence 
 from insularity to a world-wide extension — an object 
 lesson on the combination of spiritual unity with free- 
 dom and variety. 
 
 V. For, as has been seen, this visible expansion " in 
 length and breadth " is, as usual, closely connected 
 with expansion " in depth and height." It bids the 
 Church go down deep to the ultimate foundation in 
 Christ ; it bids it rise to higher conceptions and hopes 
 of its own mission for Him. 
 
 Accordingly it has, on the one hand, forced upon us 
 the all-important distinction between fundamentals, on 
 which all must be at one, and the secondary develop- 
 ment of idea and practice, in which variety according to 
 various needs is a condition of vitality. Unity cannot any 
 
 T 
 
290 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 longer be identified, as perhaps in our Church it was too 
 apt to be identified, with uniformity. The claim of free- 
 dom of variation within the necessary limits, put forward 
 by our Church for herself in the sixteenth century, is seen 
 to have a wide application. In estimating, moreover, the 
 essentials of faith and the condition of communion, the 
 tendency of our time is undoubtedly towards simplicity 
 — not the simplicity of vagueness and superficiality, but 
 the simplicity of the deepest and most definite thought. 
 If a Church is to include all nations and characters, 
 uniting dominant and subject races in one brotherhood, 
 reviving old civilisations and civilizing barbarism, it is 
 obvious that it must rest simply on the one foundation 
 of " Christ as all in all." 
 
 On the other hand, this expansion has necessarily 
 inspired higher and larger conceptions of what is the 
 mission of English Christianity to the world. It is not 
 to be content with isolation for itself, still less to 
 glory in it as a mark of purity and superiority. A 
 world-wide extension must carry with it an universal 
 mission. Nor is it to acquiesce, contentedly or de- 
 spondently, in the present divisions which splinter up 
 Christianity generally, and are among the chief hin- 
 drances to that extension of the Church of Christ over 
 the whole world, of which the title " Catholic " is a 
 claim and a promise. Serious thinkers, even beyond 
 her pale, have ascribed to the Church of England 
 the capacity, and therefore the duty, of a " ministry of 
 reconciliation." Certainly nothing is more remarkable 
 in the recent proceedings of the Lambeth Conferences 
 than the earnest desire to realize that idea — not only 
 in regard to these divisions in our English Christianity 
 itself, which are its shame and hindrance, but in rela- 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 291 
 
 tion to the divided Churches of Christendom. On 
 every side there is a reaching out towards reunion. 
 In one direction only is it barred, because in that 
 direction a wholly different ideal of Church unity is 
 inflexibly presented, and submission to it imperiously 
 demanded. The Roman ideal is a despotic spiritual 
 empire over all Christendom, driven by the very nature 
 of its pretensions to claim for its head a superhuman 
 authority and infallibility. The ideal of the Anglican 
 Communion is a free federation of Churches, under the 
 sole headship of Christ Himself, each having its own 
 characteristics and variety of development, but all 
 having communion with one another in Him. The two 
 are so absolutely incompatible, that union between 
 those who hold to them is practically impossible. But 
 no one who reads the history of the past, or studies 
 the nature and progress of humanity, will doubt with 
 which of these two ideals lies the greater hope of the 
 future. 
 
 The basis of such federation, even more truly than 
 the basis of Anglicanism, must be a basis simple and 
 deep. For the reunion of English Christianity itself, the 
 Lambert Conference laid down as a basis of faith, only 
 the acknowledgment of Holy Scripture as the ultimate 
 standard of truth ; the acceptance of the two Creeds, 
 substantially (Ecumenical Creeds, of the West and the 
 East ; the preservation of the two great Sacraments as 
 ordained by Christ Himself ; and as a basis of Govern- 
 ment, "the historic Episcopate" — that is, the Episco- 
 pate as a great, all but universal, fact, without insistence 
 on any theory of its origin and its authority — taking 
 for granted, moreover, that constitution of Synodical 
 Government, which limits Episcopal autocracy, and 
 
2 92 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 unites all, clergy and laity alike, in the legislation of 
 the Church. Of these the first three are simply the 
 embodiment of the essence of Christianity as such. On 
 the last, although it stands on a wholly different foot- 
 ing, yet certainly, if we consider Christendom as a 
 whole, depends the only chance of anything like 
 visible unity between the Churches of the world at 
 large. After all, the non-Episcopal Christianity of the 
 world is but a fragment, although a considerable and 
 important fragment ; and for it the conditions of 
 federation might be simpler than even the conditions 
 of reunion. How far this ideal of our Anglican 
 Christianity is from any hope of realization is only too 
 obvious. But to have it before us, if it be indeed a 
 true ideal, must exercise an infinitely important influence, 
 not only on the Church policy of the future, but on the 
 tone and character of our Church in the present. 
 
 VI. To the progress of English Christianity, in itself 
 and in its service to the whole Church of Christ along 
 the lines here indicated, there are two main hindrances. 
 Looking to English Christianity as a whole, there is the 
 disintegration and confusion caused by our religious 
 divisions — felt only too keenly at home, but felt even 
 more painfully in the fields of its expansion. For 
 divisions, in spite of the sincerest professions, are but 
 too apt to become antagonisms : they not only fritter 
 away our spiritual strength, but waste it by friction. 
 Moreover, they must tend to impair the true proportion 
 of the faith. Each sect comes into existence in order 
 to emphasize some one element of Christian doctrine or 
 order. It can hardly fail to make this emphasis dispro- 
 portionate ; for unhappily under these conditions the 
 lesser points of our differences are allowed to obscure 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 293 
 
 the greater points of our universal agreement. No 
 doubt there is often, perhaps generally, some happy 
 forgetfulness of these divisions in face of the conflict 
 against heathenism and sin. But it is not absolute and 
 universal. The witness of our English Christianity is 
 therefore confused and discredited, both to the Church 
 and to the world. If only these divisions could be, 
 wholly or partially, removed — even if the bitterness of 
 conflict and estrangement could be mitigated — no one 
 can doubt that the effectiveness of that witness would 
 be multiplied tenfold. What human probability there 
 is of this, who can tell ? But at least it is right that 
 the Church of England, from which the secessions of 
 these divided bodies have taken place, — on grounds, 
 moreover, which in many cases have been almost en- 
 tirely removed — should earnestly strive against such 
 division in prayer, and reiterate invitation to consider 
 and promote some measure of reunion. 
 
 Looking to the Church of England itself, we find 
 unfortunately some reproduction within her own pale 
 of these religious divisions — always undermining her 
 unity and effectiveness of power — from time to time 
 breaking out into virulence of conflict, and threatening 
 actual disruption. But over and above these, and 
 perhaps not unconnected with them, there is a still 
 greater hindrance, in her undoubted difficulty of 
 origination, or even adaptation, to meet new needs, and 
 rise to new opportunities, due mainly to that loss of self- 
 government, to which I have already referred. Perhaps 
 in any case a certain over-conservatism, afraid of bold 
 ventures, distrustful of new enthusiasms, averse to great 
 schemes of advance, might be among her characteris- 
 tics. But the present conditions almost force that over- 
 
294 THE CHURCH, PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 conservatism upon the Church : for the want of consti- 
 tutional means of right innovation makes it the best 
 safeguard against vagary and error, against internal 
 division and conflict. Conservative of the great simple 
 essentials of faith and order, she has always been, and 
 I trust always will be. But if she is to fulfil her 
 obvious mission of expansion, and her possible ministry 
 of reconciliation, at home and abroad, she must unite 
 with this conservatism of the old some greater elasticity 
 in her methods of thought and action, with a view to 
 the new developments to which she is and will be called. 
 Had this been hers in the past, she might have been 
 spared some of the secessions, which have withdrawn 
 from her so much of the vital Christianity of England. 
 Till it is made possible to her now, it is certain that her 
 advance must be greatly hampered, and her witness for 
 her characteristic principles must lose the freshness of 
 right adaptation to the present. 
 
 Still, in spite of these hindrances, it is hard to doubt 
 that there is a great future for English Christianity in 
 general, and especially for it as represented in the 
 Church of England. The advance towards it will, no 
 doubt, bring out prominently the characteristics of that 
 general advance of English power and influence, of 
 which it is a chief determining and inspiring element. 
 Its expansion will have in it much of that natural and 
 half-unconscious growth which Sir John Seeley has 
 traced in the general " Expansion of England." It 
 will probably be tentative, partial, gradual, sometimes 
 almost involuntary : determined at each moment by 
 the force of practical needs and opportunities, rather 
 than by great preconceived schemes of policy ; bolder, 
 therefore, in action than in origination, and liable to 
 
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY TO-DAY 295 
 
 friction, irregularity, vicissitude ; always more careful 
 to recognise truths and principles which appear to be 
 genuine, than to weld them together into logical con- 
 sistency ; inclined accordingly, almost to excess, to 
 leave opinions to develop themselves freely, and to 
 trust, in case of conflict, to natural (or supernatural) 
 selection for " the survival of the fittest." But, if it be 
 faithful to that harmony of individuality and unity, 
 which gives it vitality and comprehensiveness, the 
 advance will be real and probably continuous. For it 
 will be in accordance with what must be the spirit of 
 the Christianity of the future — simple in its basis, various 
 in its superstructure, inclusive of all who hold firmly 
 to the Divine Headship of the Lord Jesus Christ, as 
 the secret alike of individual and collective life, and 
 the supreme reality in the relation of the finite to the 
 Infinite. 
 
 Printed by Ballantvne, Hanson if Co. 
 Edinburgh Sf London 
 
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 The Church past and present : a review 
 
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