THE NAVAL MANŒUVRES. By Sir J. C. R. Colomb THE CHAUTAUQUA READING CIRCLE. By J. G. Fitch THE INDUSTRIAL VILLAGE OF THE FUTURE. By Prince Kropotkin SINS OF BELIEF AND SINS OF UNBELIEF. By St. George Mivart MR. FORSTER AND HIS COLLEAGUES. By T. Wemyss Reid THE CRY FOR USELESS KNOWLEDGE. By Lord Armstrong THE MEMOIRS OF THE COMTE DE BRIENNE. THE FUTURE OF THE UNIONISTS. By Montague Crackanthorpe AN AUTUMN VISIT TO JAPAN. By Lord Eustace Cecil TWO CONFLICTING REPORTS' ON EDUCATION. By Lord Norton THE FRUIT-GROWING REVIVAL. By Frank A. Morgan SELECTING COLONIAL GOVERNORS. By Sir George Baden-Powell THE BEOTHUKS OF NEWFOUNDLAND. By Lady Blake THE PROTEST AGAINST OVER-EXAMINATION, A REPLY. (1) By THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. No. CXXXVII.-JULY 1888. THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. IN the great movement of the sixteenth century, England stands contrasted with other great European countries in this vital respect, that the instinct of national unity was throughout more powerful than the disintegrating tendencies of religious controversy. Hence there went abroad a notion highly injurious to the nation that it was ready to accept whatever religion the sovereign might think proper to give it. I recollect a slight but curious illustration of this fact as recently as near the beginning of the present auspicious reign. In the year 1838, travelling through Calabria, I fell into conversation with an intelligent Italian of the middle class, interested in the religion of his country. He expressed to me his fervent desire that the Queen might become Roman Catholic; for in that case it would follow as a matter of course that the English nation would also return to the obedience of the Pope. It is plain that, both in England and in Scotland, purely secular interests played a very great and important part. In the reign of Mary, the Latin service was soon and easily re-established: but the reaction did not dare to lay a finger on the alienated estates of the dissolved monasteries. There was a strong Roman, and a strong Puritan, sentiment of religion. But what afterwards came to be known as Anglicanism, the product of a composition of heterogeneous forces, had neither a visible nor, except perhaps in individual cases, a conscious exist~ LUC. There was not, as there was in Scotland and in Ireland, a single dominant religious tendency, Protestant in the one, Roman VOL. XXIV.-No. 137. B Catholic (much more decisively) in the other. And it was the comparatively near balance of the various forces, which made it possible to have in England, not merely one, but three or four religious revolutions; revolutions which, by the action of the same causes, were softened as well as multiplied. The consequence has been that the historic presentation of the subject ever since to general readers has been secular, and not religious, or even ecclesiastical. It has been largely overlooked that what the sixteenth century lacked, the seventeenth supplied. The consciences of the country then came to a settlement of their accounts with one another. The Anglican idea of religion, very traceable in the mind and action of Elizabeth, of Parker, and of Cecil, had received scientific form through the works of Hooker. The Roman antagonist had been reduced, by the accommodations of the Prayer Book and the law, to civil impotence; and he only counted, in the grand struggle under Charles the First, as a minor auxiliary on the royal side. The Church, as its organisation was worked under Laud, had become a vast and definite force, but it was fatally compromised by its close alliance with despotism and with cruel severities, and in retribution for its sins it shared the ruin of arbitrary power. In consequence of this association and its result, for nearly twenty years the Puritan element was supreme, and the Anglican almost suppressed. But when the monarchical instinct of the nation brought about the restoration of Charles the Second, and the comparative strength of the religious parties came to be ascertained, what had been taken for a minority asserted itself in overwhelming force, and the ecclesiastical settlement of that epoch, whatever may have been in other respects its merits or defects, expressed the prevailing sentiment of probably at least nine-tenths of the community. Down to that time, the question which cast of belief and opinion should prevail, as between Anglican and Puritan, had been fought within the precinct of the National Church. It was now determined by the summary method of excluding the weaker party. In its negative or prohibitory part, the settlement accomplished at the Restoration was either wholly new, or it formulated a tendency, that had become paramount, into a fact. But in its positive bases it was, as to all main interests and purposes, an acceptance and revival of the Elizabethan settlement. On this, therefore, in giving an account of herself, the Church of England must fall back. And such an account it is obvious she must, now and henceforward, be prepared to give. It is no longer with her as it was in the eighteenth century—and God forbid it should ever be so again—when her clergy were the companions of the peers and the gentry, as magistrates on the bench of justice, and as sportsmen in the huntingfield; when she found no immediate occasion to look into her titledeeds, for she rested on possession and on quietude. In that less tranquil but nobler form of existence, which she is now called to sustain, she has to extricate her own religious history from the civil broils, from the economical and literary devastations, from the great national to-and-fro of the sixteenth century; and to show the world whether, along with an external, material, and legal framework that is unquestioned, she has derived herself as a religious society in historical continuity from the ancient Church of the country, or whether, as her opponents may charge, she is a construction of lath and plaster set up, in mean and futile imitation, by the side of the solid and majestic structure of the middle age. And here I must ask pardon for a momentary digression. In recurring to the year 1662, it is impossible wholly to avoid the deeply interesting question, What became of the partner ejected from the firm? The old English Puritanism has largely passed, on a widened scale, and with features mitigated but developed and enlarged, into the modern English Nonconformity. I do not mean that it has been by a direct or uniform, but by a real if mostly a moral succession. In 1662 it expressed, as I believe, the sense of a small numerical minority of the country, but with more than a proportionate share both of its distinguished theologians and of its religious life. The spiritual side of its position has been set forth, within not very many years, in a masterly tract by Dr. Allon. After the ejectment from the national establishment of religion, it travelled through a period of declension. But it has since developed, throughout the British Empire, in the United States, and in heathen lands, into a vast and diversified organisation of what may be roughly termed an Evangelical Protestantism, which, viewed at large, is inclusive of the Presbyterian Churches in Scotland and elsewhere; which has received a large collateral accession from the movement of Wesley; and which exceeds in aggregate numbers, and perhaps in the average of religious energies, the old Lutheran and Reformed communities on the Continent. It may be estimated moderately at one tenth of the entire numerical strength of Christendom; it depends almost entirely on the voluntary tributes of Christian affection; and it has become a solid inexorable fact of religious history, which no rational inquirer, into either its present or its future, can venture to overlook. But my purpose at this moment is confined within a circle both narrower and far more sharply defined. The Christian Church, as it stood before the Reformation, was throughout its whole extent an organism governed by fixed laws; and it possessed a machinery, in which from the very first a lay, and later on a civil or temporal, element found place, and which was applicable both to legislative and to administrative purposes. In the East, the different portions of this vast body were not united by any bond of such a nature as to involve the interference of a central power by the exercise of jurisdiction in the ordinary affairs of the local Church. But in the West there had gradually grown up usages, which became a complex juridical system, and which assigned to the Roman See large, and not everywhere defined, prerogatives of interposition in the affairs of each national Church. In most of the countries of the Reformation, the framework, through which this juridical system took effect, was destroyed in those ruling parts which formed the chief channel of connection with the former organisation. In England they were retained; and prima facie the effect of the legislative changes, begun under Henry the Eighth and consummated under Elizabeth, was to place the local or national Church, relatively to the rest of Christendom taken at large, in a position analogous to that occupied by the Churches of the East. Being, however, a society which claims in her present state continuity with what she was in a former state, she is liable to a challenge and to the denial of her claim on any one at least of the four following grounds 1. By changes of doctrine, she altered the one perpetual Christian faith, and became heretical. 2. By changes of rite, she failed to fulfil the sacramental communion of the Church, and her ordinances, or vital portions of them, became ineffectual or invalid. 3. By changes of law, she destroyed the jurisdiction of the Roman See in England, which, as being divine, it was beyond her power lawfully to touch, and she thus became schismatical. 4. In the three foregoing propositions, exception is taken only to the nature of the changes made, and not to the nature of the authority which made them. But they were not made by the Church at all. They were made without or against her by the action of the Civil Power, which as such was incompetent to act in the matter, and the changes were therefore null. Of these four great counts of indictment, the three first are properly theological, and being beyond my reach are wholly excluded from the purview of the present paper. But the fourth is properly historical, and my object in these pages is, without prejudice to any other portion of the subject, to establish the negative of this proposition, and to show that, in the last and determining resort, the changes in question were not acts of the State forced upon the Church, but acts of the Church herself, which supply the key to her juridical position held ever since down to the present day. A cloud of vague misrepresentation has down to a recent period overlain the facts. The passions of Henry, the shiftings of Cranmer, the cruel executions of Fisher and More, the contrast of characters between the preceding and the succeeding queens, the general prevalence of violence and license, all these are topics which, carelessly blended or confused, have resulted in an ill-defined and unsifted |