ENDOWMENTS AND THE ESTABLISHMENT AT THE REFORMATION. "THE Reformation in England," said Mr. Gladstone, thirty years ago, "was brought about, not by a revolt against authority, but by an internal agreement of the rulers and authorities of the Church among themselves. The case of Ireland was providentially yet more simple, as in that country there was a much smaller difference among the rulers of the Church." In another place he has said:"If there be no conscience, no form of religious discernment in well ordered States, and if the unity of the body be no law of the Church, let us freely abandon the ancient policy under which this land has consolidated her strength, and sustained her happiness, and earned a fame yet wider than the dominions that are washed by every sea. But if the reverse of both these propositions be true, then let us decline to purchase moral debility and death, wrapped in thin disguise, and entitled peace; then, in the sacred name of God, to the utmost, and to the last of our power, let us steadily abide by the noble traditions of our fathers, and be faithful to posterity, even as antiquity has been faithful to us." In addition to this, speaking of the Irish he says, "We believe that what we place before them is, whether they know it or not, calculated to be beneficial to them; and that if they know it not now, they will know it when it is presented to them fairly. Shall we then purchase their applause at the expense of their substantial, nay, their spiritual interests?" The same eloquent writer at that time objected to the Maynooth grant, "because it is monstrous to pay one man to back truth, and another to denounce that truth as error.” When a considerate man compares this language with that which is now used by the writer of such noble sentiments, surely he may say : "I will weep for thee, For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like Another fall of man." I. The Reformation was not a revolt against authority. Archbishop Cranmer, who has been classed by the notorious Dr. Littledale with "unredeemable villains," and whom he considers worse than the worst of the French anarchists at the close of the last century, was a religious reformer, not a religious revolutionist. "If there be one thing more than another," says Professor Blunt, "that fixes the attention of sober-minded and considerate men, when contemplating the Vol. 67.-No. 369. 4 Q progress of the Reformation, it is the calmness, the temper, the prudence, the presence of mind with which Cranmer endeavoured to direct (like a good guardian angel) the tempest on which he rode. While he felt how much the fierce element was imperatively commissioned to destroy, he never for a moment lost sight of the still nobler part, how much he was permitted to spare. He steered the ark of his Church with wonderful dexterity through a sea of troubles, avoiding the scattered Cyclades, when it is probable, that had his great predecessor (Wycliffe) been the pilot, he would have run it a ground, and left it a wreck." He and his colleagues did not think it necessary at once to renounce and destroy everything that had been abused and desecrated by papal hands. They separated most carefully the precious from the vile; the former most religiously preserving, and casting the latter most unsparingly away. Every precious grain of Scripture truth which they found in Rome, and every ancient usage which she had evidently received from the earliest age of the Church, they did not hesitate a moment to retain. In addition to this, if they found a glorious hymn in the earliest liturgies of the primitive Christians, or a noble prayer among the rubbish of the Romish missal, they thankfully embodied it in their own incomparable Prayer Book. Neither was this all. Some innocent ceremonies, and some time-honoured observances, indifferent in themselves, and neither commanded nor forbidden in the Holy Scriptures, they did not scruple to enjoin, without in any wise calling them either essential matters, or articles of faith. While they openly acknowledged that the particular forms of divine worship, and the rites and ceremonies which belong to it, are things in their own nature indifferent and changeable, they distinctly held up the written Word of God as the proper emblem and genuine source of the Reformation. It was a noble object for which they were contending-the re-establishment of a Scriptural Church in these kingdoms; they themselves were a noble army; and the struggle which they made was a noble struggle. Like the great reformer of the ancient Church, who came to recall a revolted people to the pure worship which they had forsaken, they have gone to heaven in a chariot of fire. Like him, they have left behind, and bequeathed to their successors, a most invaluable legacy. They have won, and left to this Church and nation, the free use of an open Bible. Be it ours most reverently to take it up, and most religiously to regard it as the Magna Charta of all our spiritual privileges and all our national blessings. Surely, we may apply to the fathers of the Reformation, who won for us, and bequeathed to us, such an inestimable benefit, the thrilling words, which were meant to perpetuate the memory of the bold barons of Runnymede, to whom, under God, we are indebted for the great Charter itself: "Pass not on and paid Till thou hast blessed their memory, The sacred rights to which himself was born." II. How fared it with the temporalities of the Church, the endowments of the Establishment, at the time of the Reformation? With regard to these, the Reformers did what they could, not what they would. They would most thankfully have preserved the whole of the Church property, if they possibly could have done so, intact from the harpies of Henry. Well indeed it was that such conservatives were at hand, when the destructives and devourers were abroad. Now was the age of impropriations. Not only lands and tithes, but manses and benefices which had been left for pious and charitable uses, began to pass into the hands of those who improperly held them. Upon the suppression of abbeys and monasteries, there commenced then, what would be repeated now, were the Irish Church to be dis-endowed, an unprincipled scramble for the spoil. Though the lion's share was seized by the king, he dealt it with a free and liberal hand to his nobles and vassals. When once the taste for these forfeited possessions was acquired, it was rarely relinquished, and as rarely satisfied. There were very few, from the king himself down to the remotest country squire, who did not earnestly long for some convenient slice of abbey land or church property. By this means, the abbey lands almost entirely passed into the hands of the king and his suitors; while the National Church, at the same time, was considerably shorn of her patrimony. Archbishop Whitgift, in his appeal to Queen Elizabeth against the designs of Leicester and others, challenges this as a truth already become visible in many families, that church land added to an ancient and just inheritance, has proved like a moth fretting a garment, and secretly consumed both. Cranmer did not think it lawful even for the king to do what he would with church property. It was not his own. Could he have accomplished his wish, he would have made new schools of the prophets to arise out of the old and corrupted monasteries. He would have increased the number, and diminished the extent of the English bishopricks, so that a bishop might really overlook his diocese. In addition to this, good. old Latimer pleaded hard, among the distribution of the pro perty, "Pray remember the poor." It is true, six new bishopricks were founded, and endowed out of these forfeited lands and tithes. This was a good beginning; but it proved unhappily the end as well as the beginning. From a great variety of causes, the Reformation did not go forward according to this beginning. Private interest prevailed over public good. The framers of the Articles and the Liturgy were not paramount in the disposal of the temporalities of the Church. In vain did they plead that Church endowments, of whatever kind, ought to be religiously preserved for Church purposes. The They were most studious not to interfere with the parochial system. England was divided into parishes so early as the year of our Lord 636. This was not done in Ireland until a much later period. Why had the owner of the ancient manor, which is generally co-extensive with the parish, built a church, and made all his lands there chargeable with a payment for its per petual endowment? Surely it was that all the souls in the district might meet together for divine worship, and have in the midst of them a spiritual person, whose business and office should be to instruct and admonish them, and have the spiri tual oversight of them. This was the origin of parishes here in England. A parish is a certain portion of the country, within fixed and definite bounds, in which the parish church is erected; and in this all the parishioners, or inhabitants of that district, have an equal right and common property. parish church is the church of the parishioners. It was erected for their use and benefit for ever; and all the lands and houses which they occupied in that parish were made chargeable for ever with the repairs of the church. It was only meet and right that he who built and endowed the church should be the patron of it, and have the privilege of presenting a spiritual person to the bishop of the diocese in which the parish was situated, to be instituted to that particular charge. Who so likely, in the nature of things, to make a wise selection, as the noble, or baron, or squire, who dwelt among his own people, and who had already given such substantial proof of his earnest desire for their spiritual welfare? This right of patronage which he had so honourably acquired himself, would naturally descend to the lawful heirs of his honours and estates. Here it is to be observed, that, in this matter of honouring the Lord with their substance, a far larger scale was observed by our forefathers than by ourselves. With some noble exceptions, almost in every place, it must be confessed, as a general rule, that neither our merchant princes, nor our cotton lords, nor our railway kings, have had the spiritual welfare of the people so much at heart, as the lords of the soil in Anglo-Saxon times. For the most part, wherever they fortified a castle, they erected a church; and wherever they had retainers and dependents, they made provision for their spiritual welfare. How often have the owners and proprietors of mills, and mines, and ships, and factories, drawn together a large population to carry out their work, and have accumulated large and princely fortunes, without ever considering that increasing property has increasing responsibility, and that it is the bounden duty of the higher classes, who obtain their comforts or their riches through the instrumentality of their work-people, to consider that those work-people are not pieces of material machinery, but have both temporal comforts and spiritual necessities to be supplied. A Christian man should never bring a population together, and profit by their industry, without making provision for their spiritual welfare, where such provision does not already exist. III. There are not wanting specious arguments against the arrangements made by the Reformers with the temporalities of the Church at the Reformation. "What right," it is said, "had either the divines or the lawyers of the Reformation to alienate the churches and endowments of Roman Catholics, applying the one to purposes for which they were not built, and the other to subserve a use for which they were not bequeathed?" "Were not," the objection is continued, "all your old churches and cathedrals once ours? Did not all the emoluments, which you have made over to your Protestant Church, once belong to us? In addition to this, is it not a notorious fact, that many of the lands which now enrich your Church were once chantry lands, and bequeathed for masses to be said for the repose of the souls of the pious donors? How can you keep the lands, when you do not fulfil the conditions upon which they were left by the ancient testators?" All these are grave objections, and at the first they appear very formidable. But a little reflection is amply sufficient to furnish us with a complete answer to every one of them. It is admitted, though the Christian religion had flourished long before in the British Isles, that the Anglo-Saxons received the Gospel through the instrumentality of Rome. At that early period, indeed, the fine gold had become dim, and the faith of the Romans was no longer spoken of throughout all the world; but still their Church was, comparatively speaking, a pure Church. Most of the false doctrines, and many of the superstitious practices that grew up in the darkness of the middle ages, had not then appeared. Take, for instance, the supremacy and sufficiency of Holy Scripture in all matters of faith; take the true nature of the Lord's Supper; or, take the doctrine of absolution. On all these momentous points, it is easy to prove, from the writings of the venerable Bede, and from the Saxon homily, that the ancient faith of the Anglo-Saxons was essentially one with all true Protestants, and in no wise |