1URCH 
 IN THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
Cibrarp of C:he trheolocfical (Seminary 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 William L. Tucker 
 BX 5071 .C58 1892 
 The Church in the British 
 Isles 
 
The Church Club Lectures. 
 
 Netv and cheaper editions in cloth binding* 
 Price, 50 cents each, net. 
 
 1888. — THE HISTORY AND TEACHINGS OF 
 THE EARLY CHURCH, as a Basis for the 
 Re-Union of Christendom. By Bishops Coxe and 
 Seymour, and Rev. Drs. Richey, Garrison, and 
 Egar. 
 
 1889. -THE CHURCH IN THE BRITISH ISLES. 
 Sketches of its continuous history from the earliest 
 times to the Restoration. By Bishops Doane and 
 Kingdon, and Rev. Drs. Hart, Allen, and Gailor. 
 
 1800.-THE POST-RESTORATION PERIOD OF 
 THE CHURCH IN THE BRITISH ISLES. 
 In continuation of the series of 1889. By Bishops 
 Perry and McLaren, and Rev. Drs. Mortimer, 
 Richey, and Davenport. 
 A superior edition in cloth, gilt lettered. 
 Price, $1.25 each, net. 
 
 E. & J. B. YOUNG & CO., 
 Cooper Union, Fourth Ave., New York. 
 
IN 
 
 THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 Sfcetcbes 
 
 OF ITS CONTINUOUS HISTORY 
 
 FROM 
 
 THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE RESTORATION 
 
 LECTURES DELIVERED IN 1889 UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THB 
 CHURCH CLUB OF NEW YORK 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 NEW YORK 
 E.&J.B.YOUNG&CO. 
 
 COOPER UNION, FOURTH AVENUE 
 1892 
 
Copyright 1890, 
 By E. & J. B. Young & Co. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH I 
 
 The Right Rev. Wm. C. Doane, D.D., S.T.D., LL.D., 
 Bishop of Albany. 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH 
 
 The Rev. Samuel Hart, D.D., Professor of Latin 
 at Trinity College, Hartford. 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 97 
 
 The Rev. Alex. V. G. Allen, D.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical 
 History at the Theological School, Cambridge. 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE REFORMATION PERIOD 157 
 
 The Right Rev. H. T. Kingdon, D.D., Bishop Coadjutor 
 of Fredericton, New Brunsivick. 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 THE PURITAN REACTION i 
 
 The Rev. Thomas F. Gailor, S. T.B., Professor of Ecclesias- 
 tical History at the University of the South. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2015 
 
 https://archive.org/details/churchinbritishiOOdoan 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Those who in theory or in practice deny 
 that corporate union of Christians is desir- 
 able, undervalue one of the main functions 
 of the Church, albeit one which has for some 
 centuries been but imperfectly fulfilled ; that 
 is, its witness, as a continuous institution, 
 to the verity of the facts of Christianity. 
 An unorganized number of believers, of dif- 
 ferent confessions, without external or vis- 
 ible association, are witnesses each to his 
 own experience or belief ; and the force of 
 their testimony lies in the concurrence of 
 so many persons. 
 
 The Church's existence as an institution 
 is evidence of a different kind. This indi- 
 cates both the experience or the belief of 
 the individuals who now constitute the 
 organization and the prevalence of that 
 belief when the organization was founded. 
 
Vi PREFACE. 
 
 It carries back the testimony to contempo- 
 raneous witnesses who saw the facts that 
 they declared, and it has perpetuated their 
 testimony, making it speak afresh to each 
 successive generation of men. No other 
 institution has exerted so profound an influ- 
 ence upon human society, and none has 
 shown so wonderful adaptability to the 
 vicissitudes of human experience both social 
 and individual, and no other has maintained 
 its essential character and its vital principles 
 without change or diminution, as this has ; 
 and to-day it is witness to the same facts 
 that it testified to eighteen centuries and a 
 half ago. 
 
 The corporate organization of the Church 
 has alone made this testimony possible. It 
 has both preserved the formal statement of 
 the Christian faith, and checked individual 
 and sectary deviations from it. Whilst most 
 of the important evangelical bodies of Chris- 
 tians have held to the same facts in general, 
 and even to the form in which the Church 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 vii 
 
 declares them, however far they may have 
 departed from the Church's unity and order, 
 and from her ministry and sacraments, yet 
 who shall say that the Catholic Church's 
 standard has not been their guide? that she 
 has not really marked the channel of the 
 truth, however they may have seemed to be 
 steering their own way ? Suppose that at 
 and after the time of the Reformation all 
 Christians had deserted the Church, as so 
 many did in Northern Europe and Great 
 Britain, and had established all over Chris- 
 tendom little or large sects, or independent 
 congregations, each with its own confession, 
 its self-constituted ministry, and its own 
 pride of opinion : would they not have lost 
 themselves and been swallowed up, like the 
 Rhine, in the sands and swamps of philo- 
 sophical and theological uncertainties, of 
 political and social transformations ? 
 
 As in all human affairs the most cogent 
 evidence of past transactions is found in 
 their monuments, whether in the chipped 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 flints of cave-dwellers, the pyramids of 
 Egyptian kings, or the jurisprudence of 
 Justinian, so we, confronted by the monu- 
 ments of Christianity — the Church, with her 
 sacraments and holy rites, the Lord's Day, 
 and others, and by the effects of Christian- 
 ity upon mankind, — we believe that Jesus 
 Christ lived, and died, and rose again, and 
 was what He declared Himself to be, the 
 Eternal Son of God. 
 
 An invisible Church has no such eviden- 
 tial value. It has neither form nor organi- 
 zation, no connection with the past ; it is 
 not a monument nor an institution ; it is, in 
 short, not a thing at all: it is but an idea, a 
 philosophical conception, a name. It is not 
 a house built of hewn stones : it is a heap of 
 pebbles. 
 
 As time separates the generations of men 
 farther and farther from the events of our 
 Lord's life on earth, the importance of main- 
 taining this monument in all its strength in- 
 creases ; and Churchmen deplore the weak- 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 ix 
 
 ening of this evidence of Christianity by 
 Christians, whose chief interest has too 
 often seemed to be its disparagement. Im- 
 pressed with this need the Bishops of the 
 whole Anglican Communion have invited 
 all Christians to return to the unity of the 
 Catholic Church, and have named the four 
 well-known propositions on the basis of 
 which this result may be achieved, namely 
 the Scriptures, the Creeds, the Sacraments, 
 the Historic Episcopate. 
 
 Organized soon after the General Con- 
 vention of 1886, in which these overtures 
 were promulgated by the House of Bishops, 
 the Church Club set on foot a course of 
 lectures with a view to elucidate in some 
 measure the significance of the last of these 
 points, the Historic Episcopate, not so 
 much in the form of a critical study as in 
 the form of a popular exposition of the 
 teaching and practice of the Church on this 
 subject during the period that intervened 
 between the Ascension of our Lord and the 
 
X 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 first General Council of Nicaea, in a.d. 325, 
 when the form of the Creed was substan- 
 tially settled ; a period during which the 
 teaching and practice of the Church is in 
 theory, if not actually, appealed to with 
 confidence by nearly all Christians as the 
 true standard of uncorrupt Christian faith 
 and theology, and by which most of the 
 educated reformers and founders of sects 
 professed to be guided. In those lectures, 
 delivered by the Bishops of Western New 
 York and Springfield, and by Professors 
 Richey, Garrison and Egar, the remarkable 
 consensus of the great fathers and teachers 
 of the Church, and of the Church's practice 
 everywhere was very strikingly portrayed ; 
 and incidentally they forcibly illustrated the 
 possibility of theologians and communities 
 of widely differing habits of thought and 
 life, dwelling in far-distant lands, or near to- 
 gether, placing special stress on different 
 points of the Christian faith, and contend- 
 ing as the special champions of one or an- 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 xi 
 
 other phase of the truth, without setting up 
 a new sect, or cutting loose from the Cath- 
 olic Church, in order to give emphasis to 
 their particular topics : an example which, 
 if the piety of Protestants had followed it, 
 would have gone far to preserve the unity 
 of the Church to our own days. 
 
 That course of lectures has been followed 
 by another, of which the present volume 
 contains the first series, designed to exhibit 
 the continuous corporate life in the British 
 Isles, of the Church whose teaching and 
 practice were thus described, not by a dis- 
 cussion of the evidence of continuous suc- 
 cession of the Episcopate, but by describing 
 in brief sketches how the British and Eng- 
 lish Church, the stock and parent of the 
 Church in the United States, appeared and 
 acted in the great periods and larger divisions 
 of her history, in relation to the State, the 
 individual, and the Church in other lands, 
 and how she fulfilled, at different times, her 
 divine mission to the people who dwelt in 
 
xii 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 those islands ; and so sketching our bio- 
 graphy back to the Apostolic ages. The 
 second series of this course, continuing the 
 history to the present day, will soon be 
 published. 
 
 The thanks of the Church Club and of 
 Churchmen are due to the lecturers, Bishops 
 Doane and Kingdon and Professors Allen, 
 Hart and Gailor, whose learned and care- 
 ful cooperation has enabled the Club to carry 
 out the scheme of these lectures. 
 
 Ascension Day, 1890. 
 
Ebe Celtic Cburcb. 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 THE RT. REV. W. CROSWELL DOANE, S.T.D., LL.D., 
 
 Bishop of Albany. 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 I THINK I may be justified in assuming that I 
 am here to speak not to, but in the name of the 
 Church Club : that I am not expected to say 
 much that is new to the instructed intelligence of 
 thoughtful Churchmen ; but rather to help them in 
 setting before those who have not been called upon 
 to look into the story — at any rate, from our stand- 
 point, — the grounds of our conclusion about the 
 cradle of Christianity in which our ecclesiastical 
 babyhood was really rocked, and about those who 
 rocked that cradle when the Church and the re- 
 ligion of Jesus Christ were in their infancy in 
 Britain. 
 
 And having said this, I think it right to say one 
 more thing: that I am sure it is important, even 
 at the risk of some tedious repetition of well- 
 known facts, to avoid what is said (I think with 
 justice) to be a clerical error — namely, the taking 
 3 
 
4 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 for granted that the people whom we are teaching 
 know as much about the subjects as the teachers 
 themselves. 
 
 One must frankly say, in reference to the story 
 of the first missionaries to that which was the 
 original of England, that it is enveloped in the 
 impenetrable mystery of myths; and the mystery 
 of myths, like the mists that veil the inaccessible 
 mountains, and muster their shadow-fleet upon 
 the marge and rim of the mighty sea, are of double 
 birth — earthy and heavenly ; springing from be- 
 neath, but drawn up on high. Whatever may be 
 the human admixture in the ten separate legends 
 as to the first evangelization of Britain, there is 
 at least the heavenly element in them of high 
 motive and holy zeal. And myths mean always 
 distance and expanse. So that even if St. Clem- 
 ent's description of St. Paul's journey, " to the 
 boundary of the setting sun," shall only mean 
 Spain and the Gauls ; if the story of the conse- 
 cration, by St. Paul, of Aristobulus means merely 
 what the name means, that the best counsel and 
 judgment were used and set apart for this great 
 work ; if the holy thorn of Glastonbury, instead 
 of being an Aaron's rod, fades into a dry stick 
 without either leaf or bloom ; if we must give up 
 the story in the Welch Triads of the father of 
 Caractacus, coming back, like Onesimus, from his 
 exile as a hostage to be a preacher of the faith ; 
 
THE CELTrC CHURCH. 
 
 5 
 
 if we must forego Bede's story of the mission of 
 Lucius to Eleutherus, the Bishop of Rome (till it 
 means only that Rome was free to act for the con- 
 version of these heathen) ; even if we relegate all 
 these to the shadowy land of legends, at least 
 there is evidence in their very shadowiness of the 
 very early introduction of Christianity into Brit- 
 ain, before history becomes legible, or chronology 
 troubles itself with dates. 
 
 Loveliest and most unlikely of the fabulous 
 foundings of Christianity in Britain is the story of 
 Glastonbury. One almost hates to say that no 
 evidence of it existed earlier than the eleventh 
 century. It has so tinged the romantic history 
 of the period, and is so closely connected with the 
 favorite hero of knighthood and chivalry, King 
 Arthur ; and it has been recited in so many stories 
 of wandering minstrels, and sung itself in such 
 sweet idylls in Tennyson and Lowell, that, false 
 and foolish as the story is, it seems to have had 
 in it a power of purity and a motive of high pur- 
 pose, in a very peculiar period of English history. 
 When Sir Galahad, the just and faithful knight of 
 God, whose " strength was as the strength of ten, 
 because his heart was pure," rides " unarmed what- 
 e'er betide until he finds the Holy Grail," we must 
 remember that it was the story of the introduction 
 of Christianity into England by Joseph of Arima- 
 thea, through which the element of religious chiv- 
 
6 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 airy entered into the court and times of Arthur, 
 whose knightly vow was " to break the heathen 
 and uphold the Christ." St. Joseph was reported 
 to have brought with him the San Greal or Sang 
 Real, the sacred chalice of the first Eucharist, or 
 the cup in which the Angels collected the drops of 
 blood during the crucifixion ; and the story of this 
 vision, granted to the maiden knight, rings in our 
 ears and lingers in our hearts with at least this 
 holy teaching : that the vision of God is to the 
 pure in heart ; that only high and holy consecration 
 can preserve manhood or womanhood against the 
 temptations of the flesh ; and that they only and 
 they always, to their souls' good, find in the chalice 
 of every Eucharist the true Blood of Christ, who 
 come to the holy Altar with pure and clean hearts. 
 
 It is a curious phase of this legend that at the 
 councils of Pisa and Constance and Basle, the ques- 
 tion of precedence between English and French 
 ambassadors came constantly up, and finally was 
 decided in favor of the English ambassador, on 
 the ground that the English traced their Chris- 
 tianity to Joseph of Arimathea, who came earlier 
 to Britain than Dionysius the Areopagite came 
 to France. 
 
 To be told that the source of a great river is 
 inaccessible, because the way to it lies through 
 the tangle of primeval forests, because its crystal 
 cup is concealed by the accumulation of the dry 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 7 
 
 leaves of countless Novembers, is at least to know 
 that the stream takes its rise in a region of primi- 
 tive purity, and is incorrupt and uncontaminated 
 at the fountain head. 
 
 There must be in any investigation like this a 
 certain agreement about the meaning of unusual 
 words ; a certain recognition of facts of profane 
 history and legend ; and a certain amount of 
 knowledge of the connection among the nations, 
 at the true beginning of European history, or 
 we cannot intelligently enter upon the fascinating 
 subject of this lecture. 
 
 To begin with, let us understand that by the 
 term Celtic Church, we mean the Church which 
 existed in Great Britain and Ireland five centu- 
 ries before, and as many centuries after, the mis- 
 sion of St. Augustine. In central England, be- 
 fore Augustine landed, the Church had become 
 extinct, partly by the extermination of its mem- 
 bers, and partly by the removal of the rest to 
 a safe distance from the heathen invaders. In 
 North Wales, Scotland and Ireland the Britons 
 remained, differing from the usages and inde- 
 pendent of the rule of the Anglo-Saxon Church, 
 until the close of the eighth century, and in Corn- 
 wall until the close of the tenth. So that we must 
 (rather we may) include in this survey the story, 
 in a portion at least of Great Britain, of at least 
 eight centuries of Christian life and work. Equally 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 important it is to recognize certain facts of pro- 
 fane history, about the people whom we call the 
 Celts, and about their relation to the inhabitants 
 of other countries. Celts, Galatians, Gauls : these 
 are the same words really, in their root ; and the re- 
 lation among these people, in their different dwell- 
 ing places, was close, and is important to be studied. 
 The oldest form of the name undoubtedly is Celt, 
 which we find in Dionysius and Strabo, in Heca- 
 taeus and Herodotus It was the name by which 
 the Gauls in the neighborhood of Marseilles desig- 
 nated themselves. Later on they were called by 
 the Greeks Galatians ; and the Roman name for 
 the same people was the Gauls. 
 
 Originating in Central Asia, one of the three 
 great divisions of men (Celts, Teutons and Slavs), 
 they were a restless, turbulent, nomad people, re- 
 taining their characteristics in spite of admixtures, 
 whether with the Phrygians and Greeks in Asia, 
 with Romans and Jews in Gaul, or in England, 
 with Saxons, Normans and Danes. 
 
 Lightfoot in his wonderful introduction to the 
 Epistle of the Galatians describes them as " quick 
 of apprehension, prompt in action, very impress- 
 ible, and with a great craving after knowledge," and 
 on the other hand, as " constantly quarrelsome and 
 treacherous in their dealings, incapable of sus- 
 tained effort, and very easily disheartened by fail- 
 ure." " The language in which Roman writers 
 
THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 9 
 
 speak of the martial courage of the Gauls [he 
 quotes Livy], impetuous at the first onset, but 
 rapidly melting in the heat of the fray, well de- 
 scribes the short-lived prowess of these converts 
 in the warfare of the Christian Church," and while 
 Caesar speaks of them as " very much given to re- 
 ligion," Motley says, in his " Dutch Republic," 
 that " the Celtic element from the earliest ages 
 had always been keenly alive to the more sensu- 
 ous and splendid manifestations of the devotional 
 principle." 
 
 Giving over the vain attempt to disentangle fact 
 from fable, in the earlier accounts of the emigra- 
 tion of these people from Asia into Britain, it is at 
 least certain that in the century before the Chris- 
 tian era a portion of the Celtic group had settled 
 in Britain; and when Julius Caesar landed (fifty- 
 four years before Christ) Wales and Cornwall and 
 the South of England were peopled by them. 
 
 There are historians, and especially in our own 
 day, who have attempted to find in the religious 
 rites and philosophy of the Druids, who were the 
 priests of heathen Britain, certain lines of provi- 
 dential preparation for the introduction of Chris- 
 tianity. And though Lightfoot does not hesitate 
 to say that " the nobler aspect of the Druidical 
 system has been exaggerated," there certainly 
 were some points of teaching, eminently their doc- 
 trine of the immortality of the soul, which left the 
 
10 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 people who held it upon a higher plane than was 
 attained by even such philosophers as Marcus Au- 
 relius, or by the religions of the Roman world. 
 
 So much for the character of the people. If we 
 are puzzled about the date and circumstances of 
 the first population of Britain by the Celts, we 
 shall find ourselves even more at sea in attempt- 
 ing to fix the precise time or manner of the intro- 
 duction of the faith of Christ among them. I 
 suppose it may be taken as a recognized fact to- 
 day that the earliest unquestionable statement of the 
 existence of Christianity in Britain is in " Tertullian 
 Against the Jews," about A.D. 207. " The different 
 nations of the Gauls and the portions of Britain 
 inaccessible to the Romans, have been truly con- 
 quered for Christ." An argument of certainly in- 
 genious plausibility, I think one may almost say 
 of possibility, carries us back thirty years further. 
 The Asiatic mission of Pothinus and Irenaeus to 
 the Church in Gaul would naturally have found 
 vent in the direction of Britain. This would be 
 about the year 176, and although in Irenaeus' 
 enumeration of the countries in which the one 
 true faith was professed (in his book " Against the 
 Heresies") no specific mention is made of Britain, 
 it is not impossible that he included the Britons 
 among the Celts in Gaul ; more possible because 
 in the list of the Bishops present at the Council 
 of Aries (A.D. 314) the three British Bishops who 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 were there are catalogued among the Bishops of 
 Gaul. There is still another possibility, which has 
 in it the ring and character of Apostolic times, 
 when the persecution that arose about Stephen 
 scattered the disciples to become ankppiokoyoi, 
 " sowers of the word," in the various countries to 
 which they fled for shelter. It is not impossible 
 that the terrific persecution, under the Emperor 
 Marcus Aurelius in A.D. 177, drove Christians from 
 southern Gaul to Britain, who carried with them 
 the message of the Master, to which they became 
 witnesses in life, as their brethren at Vienne and 
 Lyons had been witnesses for it unto death ; and 
 so the blood of Gallican martyrs became the 
 seed of the British Church. What Mr. Pryce calls 
 " the surprising ductility with which Christianity 
 crept through the various pores of the world " may 
 perhaps after all be the true account of the intro- 
 duction of the religion of Christ into Britain. Put 
 two things together. Remember the statement 
 which Tertullian made of his own time (which was 
 true long before his time) that " Christians filled 
 every place, cities, fortresses and towns, and even 
 the camps." And remember that in A.D. 61, 
 twenty years after London was founded, it was a 
 flourishing town, with a commerce that connected 
 the Thames with the Mediterranean ; and it is 
 quite possible that, as in southern Gaul so in Brit- 
 ain, the truth was brought early, and found lodg- 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 ment and growth before the first century was 
 over. 
 
 "Thus," Bishop Lightfoot says, "in the age 
 when St. Paul preached, a native of Galatia spoke a 
 language essentially the same with that which was 
 current in the southern part of Britain. And if 
 (to indulge a passing fancy) we picture to our- 
 selves one of his Asiatic converts visiting the far 
 West to barter the hair-cloths of his native coun- 
 try for the useful metal which was the special pro- 
 duct of this island, we can imagine that, finding a 
 medium of communication in a common language, 
 he may have sown the first seeds of the Gospel, 
 and laid the foundations of the earliest Church in 
 Britain." 
 
 It is impossible to pass in silence over the well 
 authenticated facts of the story of the Church's 
 early life and work in Gaul. There is not wanting 
 authority for the opinion that when St. Paul wrote 
 to Timothy that " Crescens had gone to Galatia" 
 it was the European and not the Asiatic country 
 to which he went. At any rate the Churches at 
 Vienne claim him as their founder. This of course 
 would place the date of the first planting of Chris- 
 tianity in Gaul not long after the middle of the 
 first century. And it is true that Pothinus, a 
 friend of Polycarp, who was St. John's disciple, 
 became Bishop of Lyons; and that Irenaeus be- 
 came the great preacher to the native population 
 
THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 13 
 
 of this city. Leaving to others the ministry of 
 the wealthier and more cultivated Greek and Ro- 
 man population, he set himself to the study of 
 the Celtic language that they might hear " in their 
 own tongue the wonderful works of God." And 
 the pathetic story of the persecution which over- 
 whelmed those converts in Lyons and Vienne, as 
 they told it themselves in their letter to their 
 brethren in Asia Minor, proves the reality of their 
 conversion and the constancy of their faith. 
 
 We do not forget either the Provincial Synod 
 at Lyons, with twelve Bishops present, in the mid- 
 dle of the second century ; nor the fact that it was 
 on his march through Gaul that Constantine em- 
 braced Christianity. The same century produced 
 the great Bishop of Tours, St. Martin, " the Apostle 
 of Gaul," whose fame and influence are commemo- 
 rated alike by St. Ninian's " Candida Casa," or 
 Whitehouse, the stone church built at what is 
 known as Whithern in Scotland ; and by the oldest 
 surviving church in England, St. Martin's in Can- 
 terbury, which still retains in its walls some of the 
 old Roman bricks of the chapel in which Ethel- 
 bert's Queen Bertha worshipped ; and where Ethel- 
 bert permitted Augustine and his monks to worship 
 with her; and where, on Whitsunday in A.D. 597, 
 he was himself baptized, the first of the Saxon 
 kings to embrace the religion of Britain, which for 
 nearly five centuries had existed in the kingdom. 
 
14 
 
 THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 I really think that this Galatian element is per- 
 haps the most vital feature in the Celtic story. 
 It is most important to recognize that so far as 
 the grace of Orders is concerned, it matters not 
 one whit whether they came through Rome or 
 from the East. No error of doctrine, no vicious- 
 ness of life affects in the faintest degree the valid- 
 ity of transmitted grace, any more than the moss 
 that greens the outside, or the decay that softens 
 the bark, of wooden troughs vitiates the clearness 
 of the water, or destroys the purity of the spring 
 from which the water flows. But it is so striking 
 as to seem at least providential that, as the first in- 
 troduction of Christian belief and life leaked over 
 from Gaul, according to the earliest genuine rec- 
 ords ; so the Saxon line, which twined its authority 
 in with the old Apostolic network, came from the 
 Bishop of Aries in France, whose descent is Ephe- 
 sine and so Eastern ; and Johannine and not *Ro- 
 man at all. 
 
 We have noticed Tertullian's statement in the 
 beginning of the third century, of the subjugation 
 of the remote parts of this island to Christ. Ori- 
 gen, writing in A.D. 239, argues for the greatness 
 of the Christian religion from its diffusion through 
 the whole world, and specifies, in evidence, the 
 
 * I do not say Petrine; because even if it were Roman, it 
 would have no special relation to St. Peter, who was never 
 Bishop of Rome. 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 15 
 
 fact that it had reached the Moors and " the Brit- 
 ons who are divided from our world." And there 
 is similar testimony from Eusebius and Hilary. 
 Arthur Haddan, in his remarkable review called 
 "The Churches of the British Confession," is in- 
 clined to consider that, " during all these early 
 centuries and almost until the departure of the 
 Romans, Christianity was confined to Roman set- 
 tlements and Romanized natives, and limited to 
 the Roman provinces of Britain with no national 
 strength or character ; only a feeble reflection of 
 its Gallic sister across the channel, from whom al- 
 most certainly it was derived." But the difficulty 
 of either accepting or rejecting this conclusion is 
 found in the acknowledgment by Gildas, the first 
 British historian, that " if there were any early 
 records of his own country, they had been de- 
 stroyed in the fires or had been conveyed by his 
 exiled countrymen to foreign lands." He wrote 
 in 576 ; and through and from his statement we are 
 able to pass on sure and safe grounds. The Roman 
 occupation of Britain lasted for about three hun- 
 dred years. The Picts were never subdued by Ro- 
 man arms. And when, in the opening of the fifth 
 century, the Roman legions were withdrawn from 
 Britain, the land was given over to three separate 
 invaders, the Picts from the Highlands, the Scots, 
 as they were called, from Ireland ; and the Saxon 
 pirates. Attacked on four sides, north, west, east 
 
1 6 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 and south, the problem remained unsolved for 
 nearly a century, as to what race should finally 
 dominate the island. The hiring of mercenaries, 
 the pitting of barbarian against barbarian, the slow 
 surrender, the bitter resistance, the hiding behind 
 the fastnesses of mountains and the thicknesses of 
 woods, all these are matters of well known history. 
 And at last Saxons and Jutes having only par- 
 tially conquered, the outcome was that the Engles 
 became the final conquerors and Britain really be- 
 came England. " The new England may well be 
 called a heathen country." Green, in his " History 
 of the English People," puts most strongly the re- 
 lation of these events to the history of the Celtic 
 Church. 
 
 " Before the landing of the English in Britain, 
 the Christian Church stretched in an unbroken 
 line across western Europe to the farthest coasts 
 of Ireland. The conquest of Britain by the pagan 
 English thrust a wedge of heathendom into the 
 heart of this great communion, and broke it into 
 two unequal parts. On the one side lay Italy, Spain 
 and Gaul, whose Churches owed obedience to and 
 remained in direct contact with the See of Rome. 
 On the other side, practically cut off from the 
 general body of Christendom, lay the Church of 
 Ireland. While the vigor of Christianity in Italy 
 and Gaul and Spain was exhausted in a bare strug- 
 gle for life, Ireland which remained unscourged by 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 17 
 
 invaders, drew from its conversion an energy such 
 as it has never known since. For a time it seemed 
 as if the course of the world's history was to be 
 changed, as if the older Celtic race that the Roman 
 and German had swept before them, had turned 
 to the moral conquest of their conqueror; as if 
 Celtic and not Latin Christianity was to mould 
 the destinies of the Churches of the West." And 
 Haddan says, " Church historians cannot be far 
 wrong in saying that a mere turn of the scale, hu- 
 manly speaking, prevented the establishment in 
 the seventh century of an aggregate of Churches 
 in north-western Europe, looking for their centre 
 to the Irish and British Churches, and as entirely 
 independent of the papacy as are the English- 
 speaking Churches of the present day. The Celtic 
 skull and the Celtic temperament, we are told by 
 naturalistic ethnologists, are perforce Romanist. 
 We commend the fact to notice, that the largest 
 and most powerful company of European ortho- 
 dox Churches, not paying obedience to the Roman 
 See at any period anterior to the Reformation, 
 consisted of the entire aggregate of the Celtic 
 Churches existing at the time, with the addition of 
 a body of Celtic missions among Teutonic tribes." 
 That turn of the scale, it is plain to see, was due in 
 the first place to the lack of any real unity among 
 the inhabitants of the British islands, who were 
 divided into separate and contending races and 
 
1 8 
 
 THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 tribes ; and to their entire severance from southern 
 Christendom, which led them to look rather to 
 Jerusalem and the Holy Land than to Rome. 
 And while, as we shall see later on, great mission- 
 ary enterprises were undertaken into the lands 
 across the sea, the wave of Christianity was con- 
 stantly passing to and fro, as Ireland gives St. 
 Columba to Scotland, and Scotland gives St. Pat- 
 rick to Ireland ; and as the religion of the Master, 
 beaten back from one point established itself 
 among the inhabitants of some remoter portion 
 of the land. It was as though a full spring disap- 
 peared from one locality to pour its waters in an- 
 other place ; as though the sunlight hidden by some 
 overhanging cloud left the centre of a landscape in 
 shade, to dispense its glory on some distant scene. 
 
 I hope I have at least guarded against three 
 popular mistakes. One, that unless St. Paul went 
 to Britain, there is no evidence whatever as to the 
 source from which it derived its Christianity ; one, 
 that if there is no evidence of the source, then 
 there is no proof that Christianity existed in Great 
 Britain in the earlier days ; and one, that the first 
 planting of the religion of Christ dates from the 
 landing at Canterbury of the Monk Augustine in 
 A.D. 597. 
 
 While on the one hand we recognize that Cel- 
 tic Christianity, overborne by the wave of English 
 heathenism, was hardly to be found in southern 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 England ; yet let us remember that the queen 
 who welcomed Gregory's messenger with such 
 cordial affection, and won him access to her hus- 
 band, was a descendant herself from one of those 
 Christian kings in the line of Clovi's of France ; 
 so that even when the tide of Italian missions 
 touched the English coast, it met the wave of 
 Galatian Christianity ; and the two mingling into 
 one made the Christianity of Great Britain, like 
 its civilization, composite, but with its dominant 
 element still Galatian and Eastern. And I hope 
 that I have not only cleared up the confusion in 
 so many minds on this subject, but that I have 
 impressed my hearers with the fact that from 
 whatever source derived, and to whatever space 
 extended, the Celts of the first century had heard 
 of and trusted in Christ ; that probably this was 
 true not merely of Roman settlements and 
 Romanized natives, but of the Celts themselves, 
 speaking the common language, and learning in 
 it the common faith of their brethren, first in 
 Asiatic, and then in European Gaul ; that while 
 authenticated history hardly begins until the time 
 of Gildas, indisputable evidence from the writings 
 of the third century prove that Christianity was 
 certainly in Britain a well known and established 
 fact, in the century before ; that the organization 
 of the Church was Apostolic in its government 
 by Bishops, if not in its founding by one of the 
 
20 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 Apostles ; that it was Catholic, in that it derived 
 its orders from, and held communion with, the 
 Church of Christ in Jerusalem and Italy and 
 Spain and France ; that its Bishops were recog- 
 nized, as representing an organized and indepen- 
 dent national Church, at Aries and Sardica, if not 
 at Nicea; that it was so filled with the spirit of 
 Christ and His Apostles, that it perpetually set 
 itself to conquer for Christ its barbarous and 
 heathen conquerors ; that it was finally, and most 
 strongly, established in Ireland, because Ireland 
 was free from the scourge of perpetual invasions ; 
 and that we must recognize as thorough an inde- 
 pendence in the Church of the Scots (as the Irish 
 people were called then) and the Celts and the 
 Britons, as exists to-day in the English Church, 
 the successor of the Anglo-Saxon organization, 
 which, in the eleventh century, absorbed into it- 
 self the national and ecclesiastical organizations 
 of Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales. 
 
 May I say one more thing about the character 
 of this old Mother Church of ours? Namely, 
 that it vindicated alike its catholicity, its holi- 
 ness, its unity, and its Apostolic origin by its 
 orthodoxy. Here again two facts are constantly 
 overstated and misunderstood. It is true that 
 certain British Bishops, when nearly all Christen- 
 dom was touched with the plague of Arianism, 
 signed a semi-Arian creed at Ariminum in 359; 
 
THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 21 
 
 and it is true that Pelagius was a Briton and that 
 his heresy spread for a while among his fellow- 
 countrymen. But we have distinguished and 
 venerable evidence, from St. Hilary, St. Athana- 
 sius, St. Chrysostom and St. Jerome, in the earlier 
 centuries (I mean the fourth and fifth), that the 
 British Church, in the language of St. Athanasius, 
 " had signified their adhesion to the doctrine of 
 the Nicene Creed." Montalembert allows, with 
 regard to primitive Ireland, what is I think proven 
 in regard to the whole Celtic Church, that " it was 
 profoundly and unchangeably Catholic in doc- 
 trine, but separated from Rome in various points 
 of discipline and liturgy." 
 
 It is one of the grave mistakes into which men 
 have been drawn in the heat of controversy to call 
 the Celtic Church anti-Roman. The very title is 
 an anachronism. Founded and flourishing in the 
 days when the Bishops of Rome claimed only 
 local and suburbicarian jurisdiction, she was, like 
 every ancient, independent Church, zw-Roman. 
 At the time of her founding, Rome itself was 
 virtually a Greek Church. The fact of the exist- 
 ence, propagation, and extension of the Celtic 
 Church, through centuries when communication 
 with southern Europe was impossible ; of her 
 Bishops recognizing and recognized by, the Church 
 in Rome as everywhere else ; and of their stub- 
 born refusal to submit to any intrusive jurisdic- 
 
22 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 tion, are simply illustrations of that traditional 
 independence which for so many centuries was 
 universal in the world. That the old See of 
 central and civil prominence was held in honour, 
 but second to Jerusalem ; that Bishops, in many 
 instances, got consecration and mission, but not 
 jurisdiction from the Bishop of Rome, is undoubt- 
 edly true: but no one can read the story of the 
 attitude of Columbanus toward Boniface IV., or 
 of the British Bishops who held conferences 
 with St. Augustine, and not realize the absolute 
 autonomy of the Church, whose Bishops wrote 
 such words and maintained such an attitude to- 
 ward Rome. 
 
 Although their connection is more in subject 
 than in time, let me put these two things together 
 here. Columbanus, one of the Irish saints at the 
 end of the sixth century (he was Bishop of Lein- 
 ster), writes to Boniface IV. lamenting over " the 
 infamy of the chair of St. Peter in consequence 
 of disputes at Rome," urges him to " be more on 
 the watch and to cleanse the See from all error " ; 
 says that " many persons entertained doubts about 
 the purity of his faith " ; allows " Rome to be 
 the chief city of the world and of the Church, 
 save the especial prerogative of Jerusalem " ; and 
 upbraids the Roman Church " for claiming a 
 greater authority and power than was possessed 
 by other Churches " ; all in language which can, 
 
THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 23 
 
 by no excess of ingenuity be reconciled with any 
 claim of papal supremacy. And the attitude of 
 the British Bishops toward Augustine at the two 
 conferences, due in part to national antagonism 
 and to an unwillingness to recognize a Pope at 
 home in Canterbury, nevertheless proves that no 
 such claim of authority, as Rome made in Eng- 
 land in the later years and makes now over all the 
 Churches in the world, was known or acknowl- 
 edged in Britain. In the same way, I think, too 
 much has been made as to the difference between 
 Britain and the rest of the Western churches in 
 regard to the keeping of Easter. About the time 
 of the council of Nice the practice of the British 
 Church harmonized with that of the entire West- 
 ern Church ; but after that time the Britons, 
 probably as Bede says, " because the synodal 
 decrees about the time of the observance of 
 Easter did not reach them owing to their distant 
 position," fell into the observance of a different 
 day, by adhering to the old cycle known as that 
 of Sulpicius Severus. It is a mistake to imagine 
 that they adopted the quarto-deciman theory, or 
 that their position grew out of their Eastern 
 Galatian source and sympathies ; but the mere 
 fact that they went on for so many centuries inde- 
 pendently of, and differing from, the Roman use, 
 shows that no connection between England and 
 Italy was needful to keep up the orthodoxy or 
 
2 4 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 the order of the Church. What Maclear says of 
 the conquests of Caesar is true in a deeper ecclesi- 
 astical sense. He is speaking of the fact that Ire- 
 land and Scotland were exempt from the invasion 
 of the soldiers of Caesar, and he says " Britain 
 never became quite Roman as Gaul did ; and Ire- 
 land was never Roman at all." Would that the 
 latter were true now; and thank God for the 
 strong statement we can make to-day about Eng- 
 land. 
 
 The other differences were as to the method of 
 administering baptism, which may have been and 
 probably was, that they baptized with the single 
 immersion against the Apostolic canon ; and the 
 consecration of Bishops by a single Bishop. 
 
 Surely it cannot but be providential that in so 
 many ways, — at the beginning, in times of national 
 severance, in times of restoration, — the English 
 Church, from British days to our own, has been 
 independent of, even when in full communion 
 with, the Roman See ; in Galatian origin ; in Gal- 
 lican orders and liturgy ; in the strong link twice 
 fastened, through Lyons and Aries, with Ephe- 
 sus and St. John, and in the striking facts that 
 Ninian, her first great missionary, and Aidan, the 
 restorer of St. Augustine's ruined work, and 
 Germanus, the defender of the faith against Pela- 
 gius, all came, with no mission and no authority 
 from Rome. 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 25 
 
 "It happens not unfrequently that history is 
 written best in the lives of the men who made it. 
 Among the crowd and confusion of events as 
 they melt into the indistinctness of distance, here 
 and there stand out solitary and conspicuous fig- 
 ures, who were in part the incarnation of the 
 spirit of the age, and in part the spirit that in- 
 formed the age. I think one may really learn more, 
 of some distinct and most characteristic periods 
 of Celtic Church history, in the lives of St. Patrick 
 and St. Columba, of St. Aidan and St. Margaret, 
 both associated with Columba, than in almost any 
 other way. Of course I am passing over many 
 prominent and attractive names which loom out 
 from the darkness of the pagan background, and 
 the almost darker confusion of legend and ro- 
 mance; like St. Ninian, a British Christian, conse- 
 crated by St. Martin of Tours, who became the 
 Aoostle of the Southern Picts, and built the stone 
 church at Galway, in the early part of the fifth 
 century ; St. Kentigern, who followed in Ninian's 
 footsteps, and is known in Glasgow as St. Mungo, 
 because of " the gentleness and sweetness " of his 
 nature ; of St. Aidan, who, Bishop Lightfoot says, 
 was the true Apostle of England, because God 
 gave to him the privilege of restoring what was 
 left of " St. Augustine's Mission in England." 
 Many others there are of whom one may say with 
 St. Paul that " the time would fail him to tell." But 
 
26 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 the four names that I have mentioned have such 
 clear personality, and cover such important periods 
 of history that they may be well considered as 
 representatives of their time. 
 
 The story of St. Patrick comes to us beset and 
 surrounded with peculiar difficulties. Bcde, who ' 
 records the coming of Palladia, the first Bishop 
 sent to " the Scots believing in Christ," is absolute- 
 ly silent concerning St. Patrick. It is to be noted 
 here first, that the Scots were the people of Ire- 
 land ; and that the historian's statement that "they 
 believed in Christ " recognizes the existence of 
 Christianity there before he came. And it is fur- 
 ther to be recognized that Patrick came apparently 
 without any commission from the then Pope Celes- 
 tine. Columbanus, the Bishop of Leinster (which 
 St. Ninian founded) never alludes to him at all ; and 
 no single writer before the eighth century makes 
 more than passing mention of him ; and makes no 
 reference whatever to the story of Marianus Scotus 
 (who died in 1084) that "after preaching for sixty 
 years, St. Patrick converted the whole island of 
 Ireland to the faith." At the same time, St. Pat- 
 rick's " Confession," as it is called, and his curious 
 letter to Coroticus (both of which are counted 
 genuine) give evidence of the fact and reality of 
 his mission, and tell the leading particulars of his 
 life. 
 
 He was born about 387, not only of Christian 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 27 
 
 parentage, but his father was a Deacon and his 
 grandfather a Priest. He was twice taken captive 
 by the pagans and carried to Ireland, where he 
 lived in captivity and was employed in tending 
 sheep. Earnest and enthusiastic in his nature, he 
 dwelt much in his solitary life upon religious mat- 
 ters and especially upon what he calls " the dis- 
 obedience of his fellow-countrymen to God, and 
 to the Priests who admonished them for their sal- 
 vation." And in this rapt condition of feeling he 
 felt his vocation to the Ministry, coming to him in 
 a vision and through a voice which he could not 
 disobey. " In the dead of the night," he says, " I 
 saw a man coming to me, bearing innumerable 
 epistles, and he gave me one of them and I read 
 the beginning of it which contained the words 
 ' the voice of the Irish,' and I heard in my mind the 
 voice of those who were near the wood Folocut 
 which is near the Western Sea." " And again on 
 another night, I know not, God knoweth, whether 
 it was within me or near me, I heard distinctly 
 words which I could not understand except that 
 at the end of what was said there was uttered, 
 ' He who gave His life for thee is He who speak- 
 eth with thee.' And so I awoke rejoicing." 
 Against the entreaties of his relatives and friends 
 he seems to have gone to the monastery of St. 
 Martin at Tours, and studied under St. Germanus 
 and afterward at Lerins, whose famous school is 
 best known through its distinguished scholar Vin- 
 centius. 
 
28 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 Although his consecration has been connected 
 with the then Bishop of Rome, Celestine, there is 
 no evidence for it, and the most natural supposi- 
 tion is that he was consecrated Bishop where he 
 was ordained Priest, by the Bishops of Gaul. 
 
 The only name that he associates with his mis- 
 sion is that of Victor, the man who appeared to 
 him in the vision, and his only statement of him- 
 self in his letter to Coroticus is " Patricius, a sinner 
 and unlearned, but appointed a Bishop in Ireland." 
 He probably landed in the north part o'f the 
 County of Wicklow, and traversed the country, in 
 his mission, over its whole extent. 
 
 Stripped of what Skene calls the encrustations 
 of legendary matters, he seems to have ordained 
 large numbers of clergy, of whom an unusual pro- 
 portion were Bishops after the manner of that 
 period. Angus the Culdee says that there were 
 " three hundred and fifty Bishops and three hun- 
 dred presbyters" ; the Bishops many of them being 
 of the nature of the Chorepiscopi. Mr. Skene de- 
 scribes it as " a congregational and tribal Episco- 
 pacy." And the fact that the chief king of Ireland 
 remained a pagan during all of St. Patrick's mis- 
 sion, goes to show that at least there was never any 
 national adoption of Christianity. He established 
 a large number of monastic schools and devoted 
 himself with great courage and labour, to breaking 
 down alike the idolatrous paganism of the country, 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 29 
 
 and the nature worship which to a large extent 
 prevailed. 
 
 One of the most striking scenes in his life was 
 his bold denunciation of the chieftain Coroticus, 
 who, though calling himself a Christian, made a 
 descent upon the Irish coast and murdered several 
 of the natives, and carried off a number to sell 
 as slaves. And the Churches which he and his 
 companions founded were certainly lights in the 
 darkness of that pagan country, which not only 
 illuminated it, but became sources and centres of 
 light to the whole of Western Europe. 
 
 What is known as his " Confession " is really a 
 confessio fidci, the avowal of his faith, and a 
 brief memoir of his life and work in Ireland. It 
 bears strong resemblance, as a Creed, to the symbol 
 of Nicea. It illustrates, after the manner of the 
 Benedicite, the superstitious worship of nature 
 which he attacked. Plainly recognizing the three 
 orders of the Ministry, and with entire simplicity 
 and freedom from any of the extravagant legends 
 which we find in the lives which other people 
 wrote f/him (the earliest of which dates from the 
 ninth century, and the most elaborate of which 
 belongs to the thirteenth century), it gives us the 
 story of an earnest and holy man, fearless and 
 faithful in his nature, who well earned for himself 
 in the best sense of the word, the title of the 
 Apostle of Ireland. The probability is that he died 
 
3Q 
 
 THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 on the 17th of March, A.D. 493. And his true 
 glory consists in the fact that he was enabled, not 
 to found the Church in Ireland because he found 
 it there, nor to convert the whole people to Chris- 
 tianity ; but to throw into the feeble current of its 
 religious life, the strong warm tide of his own per- 
 sonal enthusiasm and his intense self-consecration ; 
 and so to spread and swell its wave of holy in- 
 fluence, and make the waste places of a pagan 
 country, green— a very emerald isle— with the re- 
 freshing streams of Christian truth. 
 
 Of Columba we have, in the authenticated 
 writings of Adamnan, a picture painted by his 
 successor after an interval of about one hundred 
 years. Columba was born in 521 at Gartan, in 
 the County Donegal. The slab of stone on which 
 his mother lay when the child was born is still 
 shown, and one cannot fail to feel the picturesque 
 pathos of certain legends connected with it. Him- 
 self a wanderer and traveller for more than thirty 
 years of his life, and always with the intensest 
 love and longing to return to his native land deep 
 in his heart, yet this stone is said to hold a sover- 
 eign remedy against home-sickness ; so much so, 
 that to-day Irish emigrants flock to touch this 
 stone, as they are leaving their old home for their 
 new, remembering their great missionary. We 
 know from Columba's life, and we know from very 
 touching instances of the Irish emigrants of to- 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 31 
 
 day, how little the long travelling and the wide 
 parting sever the hearts of either from their first 
 home. 
 
 The curious legend of the cause that gave rise 
 to Columba's banishment is at least characteristic 
 of the saint in two features : his love of learning, 
 and his dominant, fiery, intense zeal. Angered 
 first, the story goes, by the king's decision that he 
 must return to the Abbot Finnian the stolen copy 
 of the Psalter ( " to every cow her calf; " to every 
 book its copy), he was led further to carry out his 
 threatened vengeance, when the king put to death 
 a young prince of Connaught, who had taken 
 refuge with Columba from being punished for an 
 involuntary murder. He executed this vengeance 
 by stirring up the chieftains of his own tribe and 
 of the Connaught clans to a destructive war, in 
 which the slaughter was enormous. When this 
 fit of vengeance had passed over he was over- 
 whelmed with remorse, alike by the accusations 
 of his conscience, and by the 'judgment of his 
 superiors, and set himself to do and bear a double 
 penance : first, of exile from his beloved country ; 
 and next, of converting to Christianity a number 
 of pagans equal to the number of Christians who 
 had been slain in the battle. To this he conse- 
 crated his life with a reality and intenseness which, 
 even when we have discarded the extravagant 
 stories of his career, win for him a glorious title 
 
32 
 
 THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 of honour in the roll of the greatest missionaries 
 of the world. 
 
 He was forty-two years old when he set sail 
 with twelve companions, in the year 563, in a frail 
 wicker boat covered with hide, braving the stormy 
 seas and dangerous coasts, and landed, we are 
 told, first on the little island of Oronsay. Climb- 
 ing a low hill near the shore, he found the coasts 
 of Ireland still in sight ; and, either because he 
 did not dare to trust himself within view of his 
 beloved country, or because he felt that he must 
 entirely separate himself from it, he re-embarked 
 and landed on the island of Iona. Anything 
 more bleak and barren, " sullen " Montalembert 
 calls it, than this little strip of treeless, flat earth, 
 cannot be imagined. Rocky, sandy, unyielding, 
 save by the most severe toil, of pasture for flocks 
 or crops for men, and only about three miles and 
 a half long by two miles wide, it became the 
 centre of some of the widest-spread and most 
 deeply-rooted missionary enterprises of the Chris- 
 tian world. No one who sets foot on it can fail 
 to feel that Johnson's language, in the description 
 of his tour to the Hebrides, is only too weak. 
 "We were now treading," he says, "that illus- 
 trious island which was once the luminary of the 
 Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and rov- 
 ing barbarians derived the benefit of knowledge 
 and the blessing of religion." "That man is 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 33 
 
 little to be envied whose patriotism would not be 
 enforced upon the plain of Marathon, or whose 
 piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of 
 Iona." So William Croswell sang, in Auburn, fifty 
 years ago : 
 
 " The pilgrim at Iona's shrine 
 Forgets his journey's toil, 
 As faith rekindles in his breast 
 On that inspiring soil." 
 
 To-day the halo of his wonderful name hangs 
 over it like a spell. Only the very earth itself 
 remains to tell the story of his life, his journey- 
 ings and his death. The tombs of the kings 
 speak of its widespread fame of sanctity, which 
 brought sovereigns of Norway and Spain, as well 
 as British and Celtic kings, there for burial ; Dun- 
 can among the rest whom Macbeth murdered, and 
 who, Shakespeare says, " was carried to Colmes 
 Kill, the sacred storehouse of his predecessors, 
 and guardian of their bones." The ruins that re- 
 main of the ecclesiastical buildings are connected 
 with another of the sacred and poetical characters 
 of Scottish history, St. Margaret, whose beautiful 
 and beloved memory not only lives in the old 
 Abbey of Dunfermline, but is associated with St. 
 Columba in the memories of the Scottish people ; 
 from the fact that in 1093 she built here the 
 Chapel of St. Oran, whose walls still stand, the 
 
54 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 successor of the successive churches of Columba, 
 built first of wattles, then of wood, which had to 
 be brought to the island from the neighboring 
 shore. The Cathedral, as it is called, though it 
 must mark some holy site, and though its ruins 
 have rung with the holy utterances of an ancient 
 and uncorrupted faith, is of a date not earlier 
 than the twelfth century. It is claimed that Mc- 
 Lean's Cross, one of the two dignified crosses 
 which have survived the barbarous prejudice of 
 Christian men, is the cross which Adamnan names 
 in his life of Columba, as associated with the spot 
 where the saint rested on the last day of his life, 
 and where the old white horse of the monastery 
 came weeping to bid him farewell. But the spot 
 where one is thrilled intensely with the magic 
 power of this remarkable life, is the hill which he 
 climbed that Saturday night with infinite diffi- 
 culty, and where since then hosts of pilgrims have 
 fulfilled his latest prophecy, delivered there, " To 
 this spot, although small and mean, shall come 
 not only kings and people of the Scots, but the 
 rulers of barbarous and remote nations with their 
 people." Passing from this place to the monas- 
 tery, he could only half finish the verse of the 
 Psalter he was copying, " They that seek the Lord 
 shall want no manner of thing that is good," and 
 on that Sunday morning, June the 9th, A.D. 597, 
 having hastened, before the monks, to the matins 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 35 
 
 of the festival, he died * before the Altar, among 
 his spiritual children, who hurried to him in the 
 dim light before the dawn, to get his last blessing. 
 The voice was gone, and the power of the right 
 hand to uplift itself. But raised by another, he 
 made with it the sign of the cross, and passed, 
 with a benediction in his heart, to receive the ben- 
 ediction of his Lord. 
 
 The heroism and enterprise of this man are 
 among the mightiest records of missionary advent- 
 ures for Christ that the world has known. Of fifty- 
 three churches and monasteries which he founded, 
 and which have left their traces in what is now 
 called Scotland, thirty-two were in the Western 
 Isles, and twenty-one in the northern country of 
 Caledonia, which remained in the hands of the 
 
 * " Such was the life and death of the first great Apostle 
 of Great Britain," says Montalembert. " We have lingered, 
 perhaps too long, on the grand form of this monk, rising 
 up before us from the mists of the Hebridean Sea, who, for 
 the third part of a century, spread over those sterile isles 
 and gloomy shores a pure and fertilizing light. In a con- 
 fused age and unknown regions he displayed all that is the 
 greatest and purest, and, it must be added, most easily for- 
 gotten in human genius : the gift of ruling souls by ruling 
 himself. To select the most marked and graphic incidents 
 from the general tissue of his life, and those most fit to un- 
 fold that which attracts the modern reader— that is, his per- 
 sonal character and influence upon contemporary events — 
 from a world of minute details having almost exclusive 
 reference to matters supernatural, has been no easy task. 
 
36 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 savage Picts. They had lapsed after St. Ninian's 
 death, into the violence of their ancestors ; and 
 when Columba virtually bearded their king in 
 Inverness, he was at the mercy of their lawless 
 ways, and exposed himself to the cruelty of the 
 Druid priests. In spite of the dangers of the 
 ocean travel, he was constantly in his boat, cross- 
 ing and re-crossing the dangerous gulfs and bays, 
 and going frequently back to Ireland, to begin or 
 re-establish religious foundations. He shared in 
 all the labors of the agriculture, and in the perils of 
 the navigation, of his fellow monks ; and it is no 
 extravagance of language to say, that Iona began 
 under him, and for two centuries continued, to be 
 " the nursery of Bishops, the centre of education, 
 the asylum of religious knowledge, the point of 
 
 But when this is done, it becomes comparatively easy to 
 represent to ourselves the tall old man, with his fine and 
 regular features, his sweet and powerful voice, the Irish 
 tonsure high on his shaven head, and his long locks falling 
 behind, clothed with his monastic cowl, and seated at the 
 prow of his coracle, steering through the misty archipelagoes 
 and narrow lakes of the north of Scotland, and bearing 
 from isle to isle and from shore to shore, light, justice and 
 truth, the life of the conscience and of the soul. 
 
 " He was at the same time full of contradictions and con- 
 trasts—at once tender and irritable, rude and courteous, 
 ironical and compassionate, caressing and imperious, grate- 
 ful and revengeful — led by pity as well as by wrath, ever 
 moved by generous passions, and among all passions fired 
 to the very end of his life by two, which his countrymen 
 
I HE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 37 
 
 union among the British Isles, the capitol and ne- 
 cropolis of the Celtic race." 
 
 Alongside of the wider current of testimony 
 which this whole history supplies against the rec- 
 ognition of any papal claim of supremacy, runs 
 a tide of equally important witness, which has 
 been strangely perverted. The organization of the 
 monastic system for the missionary work of these 
 early missionaries, and the absolute power of the 
 abbots, have given rise to an argument for a Pres- 
 byterian system of government which is as un- 
 founded as the legendary invention of Roman 
 control. That the inherent and essential antago- 
 nism between monks and Bishops began from the 
 first, may be taken for granted, since it is as much 
 a proverb as that which grew out of it in the 
 
 understand the best, the love of poetry and the love of his 
 country. Little inclined to melancholy when he had once 
 surmounted the great sorrow of his life, which was his exile ; 
 little disposed even, save toward the end, to contemplation 
 or solitude, but trained by prayer and austerities to triumphs 
 of evangelical exposition ; despising rest, untiring in mental 
 and manual toil, born for eloquence and gifted with a voice 
 so penetrating and sonorous that it was thought of after- 
 wards as one of the most miraculous gifts that he had 
 received of God ; frank and loyal, original and powerful in 
 his words as in his actions— in cloister and mission and 
 parliament, on land or on sea, in Ireland as m Scotland; 
 always swayed by the love of God and of his neighbor, 
 whom it was his will and pleasure to serve with an impas- 
 sioned uprightness— such was Columba. Besides the monk 
 
38 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 cathedrals of the old foundation, namely, the 
 rivalry between Bishops and Deans. But nothing 
 is clearer, in the whole ancient story, than the 
 enormous multiplication of Bishops, the recogni- 
 tion of the Diocesan Episcopate, and the abso- 
 lutely exclusive reservation of the right of confer- 
 ring orders, to the Bishops. As to the number of 
 Bishops, the story of St. Patrick's consecrations 
 furnishes sufficient proof. The titles of the Brit- 
 ish Bishops present at Aries, Eborius of York, 
 Restitutus of London, and Adelfius of Caerleon- 
 on-Usk, prove that the historic Episcopacy was 
 Diocesan. It remains to look at the matter of 
 the monasteries, and the relation of Bishops to 
 them. First of the monasteries themselves, f " The 
 monastic character of the Church gave a peculiar 
 stamp to her missionary work, which caused her 
 to set about it in a mode well calculated to im- 
 press a people still to a great extent under the in- 
 
 and the missionary there was in htm the making of a sailor, 
 a soldier, poet, and orator. To us, looking back, he appears 
 a personage as singular as he is lovable, in whom through 
 all the mists of the past and all the cross-lights of legends, 
 the man may still be recognized under the saint— a man 
 capable and worthy of the supreme honor of holiness, since 
 he knew how to subdue his inclinations, his weakness, his 
 instincts, and his passions, and to transform them into docile 
 and invincible weapons for the salvation of souls and the 
 glory of God." — Monks of the West. 
 t Skene, Celtic Churches. 
 
THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 39 
 
 fluence of heathenism. It is difficult for us now to 
 realize to ourselves what such pagan life really was 
 — its hopeless corruption, its utter disregard of the 
 sanctity of domestic ties, its injustice and selfish- 
 ness, its violent and bloody character ; and these 
 characteristics would not be diminished in a peo- 
 ple who had been partially Christianized, and had 
 fallen back from it into heathenism. The monas- 
 tic missionaries did not commence their work, as 
 the earlier secular Church would have done, by 
 arguing against their idolatry, superstition, and 
 immorality, and preaching a purer faith ; but they 
 opposed to it the antagonistic characteristics and 
 purer life of Christianity. They asked and ob- 
 tained a settlement in some small and valueless 
 island. There they settled down as a little Chris- 
 tian colony, living under a monastic rule requiring 
 the abandonment of all that was attractive in life. 
 They exhibited a life of purity, holiness and self- 
 denial. They exercised chanty and benevolence, 
 and they forced the respect of the surrounding pa- 
 gans to a life, the motives of which they could not 
 comprehend, unless they resulted from principles 
 higher than those their pagan religion afforded 
 them ; and having won their respect for their 
 lives and their gratitude for their benevolence, 
 these monastic missionaries went among them 
 with the Word of God in their hands, and preached 
 to them the doctrines and pure morality of the 
 Word of Life." 
 
4o 
 
 THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 As to the relation of the Episcopate to these 
 monastic families, it is of course true that the 
 Bishop, if a member of the monastery, was sub- 
 ject as such member to the rule and authority of 
 the abbot : and very often in order to avoid the 
 restraint of Episcopal authority each monastery 
 had its own Bishop, sometimes as abbot, some- 
 times as a member of the family. Indeed it is 
 said that Columba was only ordained Priest by 
 mistake, it having been intended to make him 
 Bishop. But of the recognition of the separate 
 Order, alike in its duties and its dignities, there can 
 be no question. Orders were always conferred by 
 the Bishops and only by them. When the Bishop 
 officiated as celebrant he broke the Bread, alone. 
 And Adamnan records the fact, that on one 
 occasion, when a Bishop came to the monastery 
 at Iona not avowing his rank, St. Columba was 
 greatly distressed, because in the ignorance of his 
 office, the respect due to it had not been paid 
 him. 
 
 There is a link to be inserted here, both in 
 order that one may save the appearance of too 
 wide a gap in the sequence of the story, and in 
 order to assure the connection between the Celtic 
 missionaries and the Church of England of to-day. 
 There are good and sufficient reasons why we 
 have less distinct detail of the story of Chris- 
 tianity in central and southern England, than in 
 
THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 4* 
 
 Cornwall or Ireland or Wales ; because, as by the 
 ravages of fire and flood, populations were wiped 
 out of existence or banished to remoter regions 
 of safety. But that it certainly was there, with 
 Churches, congregations, Dioceses and Bishops, 
 down to the time when the Roman legions were 
 withdrawn from Britain, is undoubted. The names 
 of the Sees and the Bishops that filled them are 
 left ; and we have the relic of a treatise on the 
 Christian life written by Fastidius, who was 
 Bishop, probably of London, at this time. The 
 founding of these Churches can be traced to no 
 other, than the same source from which Christian- 
 ity found its way to the other portions of Britain 
 After this time, desolated by the Picts and Scots, 
 depleted by famine, and devastated by civil wars 
 among the native chiefs, Churton's statement is 
 undoubtedly true, that " from the year 449," when 
 the Saxons were invited by the Britons to pro- 
 tect them from the Picts and Scots, " Christianity 
 began to disappear from the most important and 
 fruitful provinces of Britain. As the Saxons 
 founded one after another of their petty king- 
 doms, they destroyed the Churches, and the Priests 
 fled before them. Some found refuge in the colony 
 of Brittany, and others escaped to the borders of 
 Wales." " There were British Bishops still dwell- 
 ing in the invaded parts, as long as there were any 
 means of assembling a flock of Christians around 
 
4? 
 
 THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 them ; " and " no doubt," " it was so appointed 
 by God's Providence, that Christianity should be 
 planted in North Britain, at the very time when 
 it was nearly driven out at the south, that the 
 means of its restoration might be at hand. ' The 
 fact is that the story of St. Alban really belongs 
 here as evidence of the early and earnest existence 
 of Christianity in this part of England, for the 
 scene of his life and death was at the town of 
 Verulam, close to the site of the present Abbey 
 Church which bears his name. 
 
 His name is best authenticated in the history 
 of the early Church in England, as given by Bede, 
 whose account is based partly upon legend and 
 partly upon the history of Gildas. It has at least 
 these well attested facts : 
 
 His martyrdom occurred during the persecution 
 of Diocletian. Himself a pagan, he had received 
 into his house a Priest flying from his persecutors, 
 and was so impressed by the faith and holiness of 
 the man, that after instruction he embraced the 
 Christian faith. When the soldiers of the gov- 
 ernor came to his house, instead of surrendering 
 the guest whom they sought, he put on his long 
 cloak and was led, bound, before the judge. No 
 entreaty or violence could induce him to surrender 
 his faith, and he was finally taken to the bank of 
 a river and put to death. The miracle of the re- 
 ceding water, and the uprising of the living spring, 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 43 
 
 and the conversion of the executioner are well 
 known, and it is curious to notice that in the 
 twelfth-century version of his story the long cloak 
 or amphibalus, in which the martyr was clad, is 
 transformed into the name of the priest in whose 
 stead he suffered, and becomes St. Amphibalus, 
 who is said to have been martyred later on. It is 
 notable also, not only that the first British martyr 
 whose name comes down to us was a layman, as 
 the first martyr of the Christian Church in early 
 times was a Deacon ; but that his name, suggesting 
 the white robe of the saints, is preserved both in 
 the earlier name of a portion of Scotland, and 
 also in the title of a duke belonging to the Royal 
 House of England ; and I am glad to say, through 
 him, in the Capital City of this great State (as part 
 of its historic relation to colonial days), and in 
 the Diocese whose Bishop I am privileged to be. 
 
 St. Ninian's mission to the southern Picts is an 
 instance of the way in which the tide of Chris- 
 tian teaching ebbed to and fro ; for he went from 
 Cumbria, of whose British King he is said to have 
 been the son, to Galloway, a British missionary of 
 the British Church. 
 
 When Augustine landed, there can be no ques- 
 tion but that, owing to the circumstances which 
 have been just mentioned, Christianity in south- 
 ern England was the shadow of a name. And 
 when after his death, and the death of Ethelbert, 
 
44 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 the progress of that mission was rudely arrested, so 
 that nothing was left of it except in Kent ; when 
 Paulinus, who had labored for the conversion of 
 the Northumbrians, returned to Rochester; the 
 providential protection of the old centres of light 
 among the Celts fulfilled its gracious purpose. 
 St. Aidan, assisted by a band of Columban mis- 
 sionaries, succeeded in restoring Christianity 
 among the Northumbrians, abundantly aided by 
 Oswald the king, who had himself in early youth 
 found refuge in Iona, and been there taught Chris- 
 tianity and baptized. Attended by the king him- 
 self, who acted as interpreter to the Irish mission- 
 aries, Aidan, wandering on foot, preached to the 
 peasants of Yorkshire and Northumbria. And 
 as Oswald gradually extended his dominion until 
 he was once called " Emperor of the whole of 
 Britain," the supremacy of the Cross was asserted. 
 After Oswald's death, a tide of heathenism swept 
 back again, but it was not for long. And after 
 the death of Penda, Central England was won 
 back to the religion of Christ, by what Green 
 calls, " a victory for Irish Christianity." St. Aidan, 
 St. Chad and St. Cuthbert are the three names, all 
 children and descendants really of Columba, most 
 closely associated with the British Christianity 
 which makes the link in that age, between the 
 Celtic Churches and the Church of England of 
 to-day. 
 
THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 45 
 
 Rut it will be noticed, meanwhile, that the na- 
 tive Church which resisted Augustine's claim to 
 foreign jurisdiction, was represented in the con- 
 ference on the banks of the Severn by nine 
 Bishops, seven of whom came from Wales, and 
 two from Somerset and Cornwall. " We are 
 bound," the Bishops said, " to serve the Church 
 of God, and the Bishop of Rome, and every 
 godly Christian as far as helping them in offices 
 of love and charity. This service we are ready to 
 pay, but more than this we do not know to be 
 due to him, or to any other. We have a primate 
 of our own who is to oversee us for God, and to 
 keep us in the way of spiritual life." 
 
 I pass over, not thoughtlessly or with indiffer- 
 ence to all we secured out of it, the story of 
 Augustine's mission to England. There can be 
 no question but that the efforts which the British 
 Church had made to convert the invaders of 
 Britain had failed. The religion of central and 
 southern England at the end of the sixth cen- 
 tury was as pagan as when they first landed. 
 The old story, favorite and familiar as it is, of the 
 strong purpose of Gregory the Great, formed 
 when he was Abbot of the Celian Monastery, and 
 carried out after he became Bishop of Rome, 
 hardly needs repetition. The Angles, who were 
 angels coming from the Province of Deira, to be 
 rescued " de ira Dei" that so their king, named 
 
46 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 Ella, might sing Alleluia, was one of those plays 
 on words of which the monks were very fond, 
 and which led to the very noble work of Augus- 
 tine's mission. 
 
 Sometimes I think that Augustine's real great- 
 ness has been merged in our admiration for the 
 great Pope. Really, the courage with which he 
 pursued his journey in spite of all alarms and 
 threats, the dignity with which they presented 
 themselves before King Ethelbert, chanting their 
 litany to the Gregorian tones, and then the quiet 
 way in which they settled down to their half 
 monastic and half missionary life add great pict- 
 uresqueness to the story, as they gave great power 
 to the effect of their work. Bertha, the Queen, 
 was already a Christian, and it was to the little 
 Church where her own Priest celebrated the offices 
 of religion, that Augustine and his followers went 
 for their worship. 
 
 On Whitsunday, 597, the King was baptized, 
 and on the following Christmas day it is said that 
 ten thousand English converts received the holy 
 sacrament of Baptism. Augustine brought with 
 him, undoubtedly, the belief which was growing 
 more and more on the Italian Church in his time, 
 that all Bishops and Churches owed allegiance to 
 the See of Rome ; and he found steady and stern 
 resistance on the part of all the British Bishops 
 and Christians to this claim, or to any demand 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 47 
 
 that he should be recognized as set over them. 
 That resistance lasted on and on, involving ques- 
 tions not merely of the keeping of Easter, but of 
 the method of Baptism, and the whole matter of 
 jurisdiction. And while in obedience to Gregory's 
 large-minded instructions, as to the introduction 
 of the Gallican use, Augustine yielded in regard 
 to the liturgies, he remained firm in his claim of 
 jurisdiction over the British Churches ; and the 
 result, due partly to insular independence, partly 
 to national pride, partly to ecclesiastical convic- 
 tion and, through all, to the Providence of God, 
 was a schism between the British and the English 
 Churches. 
 
 It is a wonderful fact, that when, owing to the 
 relapse into paganism of Ethelbert's son when he 
 came to the throne, and to a similar reaction among 
 the eastern Saxons, all that Augustine had gained 
 was lost after his death, except in the kingdom of 
 Kent, it was reserved to St. Aidan, the successor 
 of Columba, assisted by a band of missionaries 
 from Iona, to refresh and restore what Augustine 
 had begun. His See was fixed in Lindisfarn, called 
 afterward the Holy Island ; and from that time on 
 there was a gradual eating away of the national 
 independence of the British Church, until in the 
 eleventh century, very largely under the influence 
 of Queen Margaret, the subjection was virtually 
 completed. 
 
4 8 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 But two things not only deserve but demand 
 our attention. First, that England has had more 
 Christian centuries of independence than of subor- 
 dination. And secondly, that although sent as a 
 monk by Gregory, and receiving afterwards from 
 him the pallium which declared his own personal 
 allegiance, Augustine's orders as Bishop came from 
 Etherius, the Bishop of Aries, and so were Galli- 
 can and Eastern, through Polycarp and St. John. 
 
 I have no time, no right, no need to speak of 
 these four centuries which belong to the next lec- 
 ture in this course. But as it is part of the story 
 of Iona and the Celtic Church to tell of Oswald 
 the King, and Aidan the Bishop, so it is still the 
 story of Columba and Iona, to speak of Margaret 
 the Queen. And really among all the figures 
 that pass before us in this panoramic review of 
 the early story of Christian work in Britain, cer- 
 tainly none is more beautiful and attractive than 
 hers. " Mirror of wives, mothers and queens," and 
 mother of many kings, her character is most re- 
 markable in its combination of all that we call 
 manly in courage and strength of intellect and 
 purpose, afid of all we know to be womanly in 
 tenderness, purity, gentleness and devotion. Of 
 course, one recognizes always with pain and regret, 
 that it was largely due to her strong influence, that 
 the second " Roman occupation of Britain " was 
 brought about, seven centuries after pagan Rome 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 49 
 
 had left it ; but no prejudice can blind our eyes to 
 the influence of her holy character and the beauty 
 of her saintly life. 
 
 We have an authenticated account of her in the 
 memoir written by Turgot, who was her confessor 
 and intimate friend, Prior of Durham and Bishop 
 of St. Andrews, and who died in 1115. He calls 
 himself in the prologue of the life "a servant of 
 the servants of St. Cuthbert." 
 
 She was the granddaughter of King Edmund, 
 who was known for his matchless valor as " Ed- 
 mund the Ironside." Her coming to Scotland was 
 brought about by the wars and massacres attend- 
 ing the past struggles of the Saxons against the 
 Normans. At the death of Harold, Edgar, the 
 brother of Margaret, though still a boy, was chosen 
 King ; and after the defeat of the English, he fled 
 with his mother and his two sisters to seek shelter 
 at the court of Malcolm, King of Scotland, who 
 received them at Dunfermline and persuaded Mar- 
 garet to give up her purpose of becoming a nun 
 and to marry him. 
 
 Mr. Freeman says of this marriage that it was 
 " through Margaret that the old kingly blood of 
 England passed into the veins of the descendants 
 of the Conqueror. The tree runs back to the root 
 when Henry the First marries Matilda, the daugh- 
 ter of Margaret, and it bears leaves at the birth of 
 her children." And we must remember how dis- 
 
5° 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 tinguished the royal line was that descended from 
 her in the kings Edgar, Alexander and David and 
 their descendants ; so that Scotland for two hun- 
 dred years was governed by seven admirable kings, 
 all tracing their life and character to her. 
 
 Turgot's description of the personal relations 
 between Margaret and Malcolm is very touching 
 and interesting. He was an unlettered savage 
 really, whom she refined and elevated and Chris- 
 tianized ; and although he could not read, he 
 would turn over and examine books which she 
 used either for her devotion or her study ; and 
 whenever he heard her express especial liking for 
 a particular book, he would look at it with special 
 interest, kissing it, and often taking it into his 
 hands. Sometimes he sent for a worker in pre- 
 cious metals, whom he commanded to ornament 
 that volume with gold and gems ; and when the 
 work was finished, the king himself used to carry 
 the book to the queen, as a loving proof of his 
 devotion. She had a strong sense of the dignity 
 of royalty, and kept up the kingly estate with 
 great precision and care ; but through all, her own 
 heart was fixed upon higher and holier things. 
 She lived really a life of religious meditation and 
 perpetual consecration to God. And her great 
 anxiety and care, and the exercise both of her 
 authority and her influence, in reforming various 
 corruptions in the Church of Scotland at that 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 51 
 
 time, make her truly one of the " nursing mothers " 
 of the Church. As to the observance of Lent and 
 the offering of the Holy Eucharist, the keeping of 
 the Lord's Day and the matter of lawful as against 
 unlawful marriages, she counselled with the clergy 
 and by her own example, influence and authority 
 reformed many things that had gone wrong. 
 
 Her charities were unbounded ; so much so that 
 Turgot says that she was poorer than any of her 
 paupers, often stripping herself and her attendants 
 of garments that they had on, to give to those who 
 were in want, that none should go away in distress. 
 " Now and then," Turgot says, " she helped her- 
 self to something or other out of the king's pri- 
 vate property, it mattered not what it was, to give 
 to a poor person ; and this pious plundering the 
 king always took pleasantly and in good part. It 
 was his custom to offer certain coins of gold upon 
 Maundy Thursday and at High Mass, some of 
 which coins the queen often devoutly pillaged and 
 bestowed on the beggar who was petitioning her 
 for help. Although the king was fully aware of 
 the theft, he generally pretended to know nothing 
 of it, and felt much amused by it. Now and then 
 he caught the queen in the very act, with the 
 money in her hand, and laughingly threatened 
 that he would have her arrested, tried, and found 
 guilty." 
 
 This whole story of Queen Margaret is sur- 
 
52 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 rounded, as almost all these histories are, with the 
 atmosphere of marvels through which it is diffi- 
 cult to see the real truth of history ; but there can 
 be no question of the beauty and holiness of her 
 life, of the wonderful influence that she had over 
 her husband, and of the moral value of her reforms 
 in the Church ; over and against which is to be set 
 the fact that it was through her influence that the 
 last resistance to the intrusion of the Bishop of 
 Rome was overcome, and that for a little while 
 England became Roman again. 
 
 It is with her that the story of the Holy Rood is 
 connected, in honour of which the youngest of her 
 sons, King David, built a Church ; and it was with 
 this sacred relic in her hand that she died, just at 
 the moment that her son Edgar brought news 
 that Malcolm had been slain in battle. Although 
 the ruins of Dunfermline no longer guard the act- 
 ual tomb of the saint, they speak of her beautiful 
 memory all the more eloquently, because of the 
 contrast with the ugly reminder of puritan Scot- 
 land which has been built on to it. And the 
 place where she was buried, recently restored by 
 the carefulness of Queen Victoria, is a shrine to 
 which many reverent and loving people make fre- 
 quent pilgrimages. 
 
 Her biographer stops in the middle of the re- 
 cital of a wonderful story of the preservation, after 
 its immersion in water, of her book of the Gos- 
 
THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 53 
 
 pels, to say what we may all endorse, " I leave it 
 to others to admire the tokens of miracles which 
 they see elsewhere. I admire much more the 
 works of mercy which I perceived in Margaret, 
 for signs are common to the good and the bad, 
 whereas works of piety and true charity belong to 
 the good only. The former sometimes are the 
 proof of holiness, the latter are that which consti- 
 tutes it." 
 
 My reverend brother who is to take up the 
 story of the Anglo-Saxon Church will not feel that 
 I have trenched upon his portion of the history, 
 if I recall, merely to pass over it the simple fact 
 that the Gregorian tone which entered, through St. 
 Augustine, into the worship of the ancient Celtic 
 Church, was a " tonus peregrinus ": not " the 
 Lord's song in a strange land," but a strange song, 
 in a land that was already the Lord's. Like bells 
 jangled out of tune, it was the source of a discord 
 which jars upon the ear, for centuries. 
 
 My one concern with it is to call your attention 
 to the fact, that the Roman mission was, and 
 is, and always will be exotic in England ; and 
 that it really had no strong or permanent hold in 
 England. At the end of the seventh century the 
 whole of England was in communion with the 
 Scoto-Celtic Church except Kent, East Anglia, 
 Wessex and Sussex ; and of these exceptions 
 Sussex was heathen, Wessex was under a Bishop 
 
54 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 in Gallican Orders, and in communion with the 
 British Bishops, so that Kent and East Anglia 
 alone remained in subjection to Canterbury and 
 Rome. In central England, Christianity was 
 really extinct at the close of the fifth century by 
 the massacre of Christians and the removal of the 
 survivors to the north. The Britons in North 
 Wales remained independent of Rome until the 
 end of the eighth century; in Cornwall till the 
 middle of the tenth ; in southern England and 
 Ireland till the beginning of the eighth ; in Scot- 
 land till the middle of the eleventh century, and 
 Ireland did not entirely surrender until nearly the 
 middle of the twelfth; so that the Roman occupa- 
 tion of Britain ecclesiastically was really only for 
 these four centuries, from the twelfth to the six- 
 teenth, about equal to the duration of the civil 
 dominion of Rome in the first centuries. 
 
 And such was the energy of the Celtic mission- 
 ary monks that between the fifth and eighth cen- 
 turies they had entered Gaul, Italy, Switzerland 
 and Germany ; and even reached the Faroe Isles 
 and Iceland ; so that the Celtic Church extended 
 from Iceland to Spain, from the Atlantic to the 
 Danube, from Ireland to Italy. 
 
 Is there, the question recurs, any living relation 
 between the Church of England to-day and the 
 old founding among the Celts and Britons? I 
 think there is. The remains of the earlier litur- 
 
THE CELTfC CHURCH. 
 
 55 
 
 gies arc few ; but certain distinctive and character- 
 istic features of Celtic Christianity are very marked, 
 as showing in them the influence of the Galatian 
 and Mozarabic Liturgies ; and as reproduced in our 
 own. Of the latter may be instanced the bid- 
 dings to prayer, called prefaces ; which have a 
 resemblance at least to our exhortations ; the place 
 of the commemoration of the departed after the 
 Offertory, rather than as in the Roman use after, 
 and as part of, the Consecration Prayer; the use of 
 a hymn after the consecration in the Communion 
 Office; the administration of the Holy Communion 
 in both kinds ; the use of confession to a Priest 
 left optional (in the Celtic Church it seems to have 
 been public) ; and the observance of the Rogation 
 days, unknown in the Roman Church until the time 
 of Leo Third. Of the former, we find very marked 
 features of a Gallican and Mozarabic character, as 
 for instance the singing of the hymn Benedicite, 
 before the Epistle or the Gospel ; the use of 
 several, sometimes seven collects instead of the 
 one ; the Lection from the Old Testament beside 
 the Epistle and Gospel ; the Episcopal benedic- 
 tion given after the consecration and fraction of 
 the Bread ; reservation in both kinds for the sick, 
 and the use of unleavened bread. 
 
 A very curious and striking instance is found 
 also in the rule that, in the Holy Eucharist, if the 
 celebrant were a Bishop he consecrated alone, if a 
 
56 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 Priest he had a Priest associated with him ; where- 
 as in the Roman use the Bishop always had a 
 Priest associated with him who joined in the words 
 of consecration. It was this habit which furnished 
 an instance of the respect that Columba paid to 
 the Episcopal office, for once, Adamnan records, a 
 stranger from the Province of Munster who con- 
 cealed through humility the fact that he was a 
 Bishop, was invited on the next Sunday by 
 Columba to join with him in consecrating the 
 Body of Christ, that as Priests they might break 
 the Bread of the Lord together. Columba on 
 going to the Altar discovered his rank and ad- 
 dressed him thus: "Christ bless thee, brother: 
 consecrate alone as a Bishop, now that we know 
 that thou are of that rank. Why hast thou en- 
 deavored to disguise this, and so prevent us giving 
 thee the honour due to thee?" 
 
 More than this, I think there is a likeness, 
 which proves a lineal descent, between the Church 
 of England of the last three centuries and the 
 Celtic Church of the older days. Something else 
 beside Wicklif s ashes was carried by the Severn 
 to the sea. The spirit of the nine British Bishops 
 who, on the bank of the Severn, under what was 
 called St. Augustine's Oak, held their conference 
 with the great Gregory's great missionary — that 
 spirit of the old British Bishops revived and lived 
 again in Cranmer and Ridley and Latimer. The 
 
THE CEL TIC CHURCH. 
 
 57 
 
 heart of the oak was British ; and only sheltered 
 Augustine for a time. Its root was in its native 
 soil. And from the Severn to the sea, and over 
 the seas to us, and over all seas, as the Church of 
 England goes with English commerce and English 
 colonization to the ends of the earth, it is the old 
 life, autonomous, independent, needing and know- 
 ing no fountain-head but Christ, and charged 
 alike with the spirit and the power, the privilege 
 and the responsibility, of bearing the sound of the 
 Gospel into all lands, and its words unto the ends 
 of the world. 
 
 There is a yew -tree in the churchyard at Crow- 
 hurst in Surrey, which bears the botanical marks, 
 allowed by scientific experts, of fifteen hundred 
 years of life: so that it might have heard' the vic- 
 torious shouts of the battle of the Hallelujah, and 
 listened to St. Germanus, refreshing with a new 
 current of Catholic truth the old Galatian heritage 
 of British Christianity. It is in a churchyard ; and 
 it suits some people to deal with it therefore 
 as a memorial of mourning and a suggestion of 
 decay. Shall it not rather tell us how, in God's 
 acre, it stands to preach the blessed story of "mor- 
 tality swallowed up in life," of the old deeply- 
 rooted tree of primitive Christianity, which draws 
 its very nourishment from the decay of the gener- 
 ations that it shelters and survives ; which graces 
 and guards the graves of successive and continuous 
 
58 
 
 THE CELTIC CHURCH. 
 
 Christian centuries ; which witnesses, with every 
 wind that waves its spreading branches, to its 
 " rooting and grounding " in eternal truth ? The 
 emblematic, ever-green yew tree is the symbol of 
 the imperishableness of the British Church, green 
 in its old age ; which has fulfilled the hope, that 
 passes still into our prayers, Floreat radix. " She 
 stretches forth her branches unto the sea, and her 
 boughs unto the river." "The hills are covered 
 with the shadow of it ; and the boughs thereof are 
 like the goodly cedar trees." God made room for 
 it, and " when it had taken root it filled the land." 
 
Z\k Hnolo-Sayon Cburcb. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 THE REV. SAMUEL HART, D.D., 
 Professor of Latin at Trinity College, Hartford. 
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 The history of the Anglo-Saxon Church is the 
 history of the Church of the English people, dur- 
 ing the first centuries of their life in the home 
 which they had conquered for themselves in the 
 island of Britain. The former inhabitants of that 
 island, who were dispossessed by these invaders 
 from the continent, had indeed been converted to 
 Christianity ; they formed a part of that Celtic 
 Church, the history of which has been lately pre- 
 sented to you. But the Angles and Saxons and 
 Jutes were heathens when they crossed the sea in 
 the fifth and sixth centuries, and they were in no 
 way affected by the political organizations, the so- 
 cial customs, or the religious faith of those whom 
 they swept before them into the mountains of 
 Wales and the peninsula of Cornwall. The Bri- 
 tish Christians, not without brave attempts at re- 
 sistance, fell back before the ruthlessly cruel in- 
 61 
 
62 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 vaders ; and nearly the whole of what we now call 
 England — the country south of the Tweed and 
 east of the Dee and the Severn — became again an 
 utterly heathen land. In the long strife the wor- 
 shippers of Woden and of Thor had overcome 
 and expelled the worshippers of Christ ; in the 
 conquered land there were none left to tell the 
 conquerors the story of His truth, nor did the 
 British Christians venture from their hiding-places 
 to teach it to the savages of whom they had good 
 reason to stand in dread. 
 
 The story of the conversion of the English — 
 for such we may fairly call them after the time 
 when they had taken possession of the land in 
 which their descendants dwell to-day — is a story 
 of wonderful and romantic interest. And that 
 interest is by no means confined to the time of 
 the conversion of the people to Christianity. The 
 whole period during which the English Church 
 was laying its foundations and beginning the erec- 
 tion of that stately fabric which was destined to 
 be the mother-city of Churches beyond the seas 
 and a firm bulwark of the truth in times of its 
 utmost danger — the whole of the Anglo-Saxon 
 period is filled with events which call forth all the 
 enthusiasm of faith, and its history is crowded 
 with the names of great men. We find pervading 
 it a touching simplicity, as we read of the words 
 and deeds of bishops and of kings, who with all 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 63 
 
 of a father's love cared for both the temporal 
 and the eternal interests of their children in the 
 Church and in the State ; a faithful, unquestion- 
 ing obedience to the Christ Whom they preached, 
 and to Whom they hacl devoted their lives, corre- 
 sponding to which we are scarce surprised to read 
 the record of what would be in our days extraor- 
 dinary manifestations of Divine approval and 
 help ; and withal an earnest determination to im- 
 part to others the truth and the blessings which 
 were worth so much to themselves. Outside of 
 the limits of the great world-empire, which still in 
 name asserted the power and the prerogatives of 
 the Caesars, outside of the lands in which the lan- 
 guage of that empire was the speech of civilized 
 men, there grew up during some five centuries the 
 one purely national Church of the West. Influ- 
 enced by Rome so far as to be brought into touch 
 with the life of the great Catholic Church, inde- 
 pendent of Rome so far as to assert and maintain 
 the rights of a national Church as they were then 
 understood, our English ancestors of that early 
 day were beginning a work, the importance of 
 which was quite beyond the reach of their imag- 
 ination. The conversion of the English, the es- 
 tablishment of the English Church, the growth 
 of a Christian English nation, form a chapter in 
 history so full of records of apostolic faith and of 
 primitive zeal and of practical applications of the 
 
6 4 
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 law of Christianity, that it is hard to remember 
 that, when we begin to read it, we are close at 
 the opening of the seventh century of our era; it 
 seems rather to belong to those earlier days when 
 the virtues of Christian men were of that simple 
 kind which best embodies the spirit of our re- 
 ligion, and when even their faults were such' as 
 pertain rather to the infirmities than to the vices 
 of human nature. 
 
 I venture to think, gentlemen of the Church 
 Club, that I can best remind you of the important 
 facts in the history of the early English Church 
 and of the work which it accomplished for its own 
 time and for the future, by asking you to look 
 at a few of the prominent scenes in that history. 
 In nearly every case we shall find a famous man 
 whose name is closely associated with a famous 
 place. 
 
 r. 
 
 And first of all, we think of St. Augustine and 
 of Canterbury; for with him and there the work of 
 the Christianization of the English people began. 
 Kent was not the most important of the kingdoms 
 which the invaders had founded ; but it was the 
 place where the earliest permanent Teutonic set- 
 tlement had been made : and it was not very 
 closely connected with the other kingdoms ; for 
 its people were Jutes, while those of the others 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 65 
 
 were Saxons or Angles ; but it occupied the part 
 of the island which was nearest the continent, and 
 it was almost of necessity the place to which mis- 
 sionaries would first come. We all know the story 
 of the pious monk Gregory, who, struck by the 
 beauty of some fair-skinned and golden-haired 
 youths whom he saw exposed in the slave-market 
 at Rome, asked of what nation they were : when 
 he was told that they were Angles, he said that 
 they should rather be called angels ; when he 
 learned that they were from the province of 
 Deira, he affirmed that they ought to be delivered 
 from the ire of God ; and still further, learning 
 that the name of their king was Aella, declared 
 that their tongues should be taught to sing 
 Alleluia. But he did not content himself with 
 playing upon words. His heart was touched, 
 and he prayed, and obtained consent, that he 
 might go to the end of the earth and preach the 
 Gospel to the Angles. But this purpose could not 
 be accomplished at once ; and after a few years 
 his election to the bishopric of Rome made it 
 impossible for him to fulfil in person the plan 
 which he had formed. Yet he did not forget the 
 bright faces of the lads who had been brought 
 from Yorkshire, very possibly having been cap- 
 tured by the men of Kent, to be sold as slaves at 
 Rome ; and soon he selected Augustine, the pro- 
 vost of his own monastery of St. Andrew, to lead 
 
66 
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 a band of missionaries to the English. Perhaps, 
 for reasons already suggested, he would under 
 any circumstances have sent them at first to the 
 southeastern peninsula ; but he can hardly have 
 been ignorant of the fact that there was at least the 
 possibility of a more favorable opening there than 
 elsewhere in the island. Ethelbert had been for 
 thirty years king of Kent, and he had married 
 Bertha, the daughter of a Frankish king, promis- 
 ing that she should be allowed the practice of 
 her religion as a Christian, her chaplain being the 
 Frankish bishop Liudhard. 
 
 It was after Easter in the year 597 that the mis- 
 sionaries landed on the isle of Thanet ; and in the 
 Ascension week, by permission of the king, they 
 came to Canterbury. Outside the city stood the 
 little church of St. Martin's, where St. Martin's 
 Church stands to-day, the Roman brick in its 
 walls still testifying to the great antiquity of a part 
 at least of its structure, once the worshipping-place 
 of a Christian congregation, then the chapel of a 
 Christian queen. As they entered, Augustine, lift- 
 ing up the Cross, took possession of Canterbury 
 and of England for Christ. Then he and his 
 brethren, chanting the Rogation antiphon which 
 they had learned in Gaul, and adding to it the Gre- 
 gorian Alleluia of the Easter-tide, prophesied of 
 the struggle and the victory which lay before them, 
 and with prayers and thanksgiving began their 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 67 
 
 work. It was, we are told, the simplicity and 
 purity and devotion of the lives of these men, 
 which drew to them the hearts of the heathen 
 among whom they had come to dwell. Soon 
 Ethelbert himself was baptized, and soon Kent- 
 could be called a Christian kingdom ; and the 
 conversion of Teutonic England began just a.v 
 Columba, the great missionary of Celtic Britain, 
 was breathing his last. Presently Augustine, at 
 Gregory's direction, repaired to Aries in Gaul to 
 receive consecration as a bishop ; and on his re- 
 turn, he restored an ancient Roman church within 
 the walls of Canterbury, dedicated it to the Lord 
 Christ, and made it his cathedral, while for those 
 who had come with him he founded a monastery 
 hard by. The stately pile which is the metropo- 
 litical church of all England is the Christ Church 
 of Augustine's foundation, and the missionary col- 
 lege which bears his own name has rescued from 
 desecration the site of the buildings that served 
 to shelter the simple monks who first taught to 
 the men of Kent the way of salvation. 
 
 Gregory the Great was a man of no meagre 
 plans or narrow hopes. It was he, we are told, 
 who first spoke of the people of England as if 
 they were all one nation ; he authorized Augustine 
 to use the powers of a metropolitan, consecrating 
 twelve suffragans for himself ; and he planned that 
 Deira, the land of the beautiful youths, further 
 
68 
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 north, should also, when its people should become 
 Christians, have a metropolitan with twelve suf- 
 fragans. The plan was never carried into effect 
 in all its details; fortunately for England, the ar- 
 rangement of English dioceses followed the lines 
 of the divisions and sub-divisions of English king- 
 doms, and was not guided by schemes drawn up 
 at Rome and based on former Roman arrange- 
 ments in Britain ; it was a natural growth, not an 
 artificial structure. But after all it was Gregory 
 who planned the organization of all England into 
 the form of a national Church. 
 
 And Gregory had plans also which included the 
 Christians in the remoter part of the land to the 
 heathen portion of which he had sent his mission- 
 aries. Writing to Augustine in reply to questions 
 which he had addressed him as to certain matters, 
 among them his relations to the British bishops, 
 he had told him that he was to ask them to work 
 with him in converting the Saxons, but had added, 
 with a truly Roman assumption, that he was to 
 consider them all as subject to the authority which 
 he had established at Canterbury. Augustine 
 thereupon asked the British bishops to meet him 
 in conference ; they came a first and a second 
 time ; they argued with him as to the three points 
 of divergence between the Roman and the British 
 Churches — the Easter rule and cycle, the shape of 
 the tonsure, the ceremonies accompanying bap- 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 69 
 
 tism ; they were offended at what they thought 
 to be an indication of arrogance on his part ; they 
 refused to yield to his demands and to unite with 
 him in preaching to the Saxons ; and Augustine 
 returned to Kent unsuccessful and disappointed. 
 Nearer home, however, his work made progress ; 
 Justus was consecrated bishop of Rochester, ap- 
 parently the chief city of a petty kingdom of 
 West Kent; and the king of the East Saxons, 
 Ethelbert's nephew and dependent, became a 
 Christian, and Mellitus was made first bishop of 
 London. 
 
 Such is in outline what St. Augustine of Can- 
 terbury had accomplished, when, in the prospect 
 of immediate death, he designated and conse- 
 crated his friend Laurence to be his successor, 
 eight years after he had set foot on English soil. 
 It is true that Augustine was not a great man, 
 nor was he always a wise man ; but he laid the 
 foundations of a great work which was guided by 
 a wisdom superior to his own. There have been 
 those who have exaggerated his labors and their 
 results, as if from him alone came the knowledge 
 of Christianity to the British Isles ; and there have 
 been others who have looked upon his mission as 
 almost a failure. The true estimate of what he 
 did lies between the two. We cannot forget the 
 British Christians, who kept the knowledge of the 
 truth in the wild mountains of the west ; we can- 
 
70 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 not forget the debt which the north and the mid 
 lands owed to the Celtic missionaries from the 
 island of the saints ; we must acknowledge that 
 when Augustine died, his influence had not ex- 
 tended far: but he had brought Christianity to 
 the English people ; he had established a see, the 
 power of which would soon be felt over a united 
 nation and would at last extend throughout the 
 world; and he had inspired into the English 
 somewhat of the missionary zeal which already 
 marked the Scots. Though he lived to consecrate 
 but two of the proposed suffragans of his see, the 
 result of his labors was soon felt outside of Kent 
 and Essex. Along ways which he had pointed 
 out, Felix of Burgundy was sent by one of his 
 successors to East Anglia, and Birinus of Italy 
 carried the Gospel to Wessex. And under more 
 happy circumstances and in a more natural way 
 than had marked his unsuccessful attempts, the 
 remnant of the ancient British Church and the 
 Celtic Church of the north were brought into 
 union with the Roman mission, and the Church 
 of the British isles was made one. 
 
 II. 
 
 The next scene which attracts our attention 
 as marking a turning-point in the history is the 
 council or conference at Whitby in the spring of 
 the year 664 ; and the man who stands out prom- 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 inently before us is the bishop Wilfrid. Before 
 this time — and it was less than sixty years after 
 Augustine's death — great changes had taken place. 
 Ethelbert's son and successor had for a time re- 
 fused Christianity, and Kent had nearly relapsed 
 into paganism ; but Ethelbert's sister had married 
 Edwin of Northumbria, and she had taken with 
 her to the northern kingdom Paulinus, who had 
 been first consecrated a bishop. Edwin was con- 
 verted, and, by a decision of his Witan, Northum- 
 bria became Christian ; and Paulinus was recog- 
 nized as bishop of York, including under his ju- 
 risdiction the land of Deira and extending his 
 labors to Lincoln. But the north Welsh, joining 
 themselves to the still heathen Mercians, invaded 
 Northumbria ; Edwin was killed, and Paulinus 
 fled. Then Oswald, Edwin's nephew, took the 
 throne, repulsed the Welsh, and while he extended 
 his supremacy took care also to restore the Chris- 
 tian religion, to which he was devoutly attached. 
 To accomplish this, he needed a bishop ; and he 
 sent to the far-off isle of Hy, the Iona of later 
 days, the great centre of light and learning, the 
 very name of which fills us even now with deep 
 emotion. So Aidan came, consecrated by the 
 Celtic bishops of Hy and bringing with him their 
 customs, so strange in the eyes of those who were 
 in the habit of looking to Rome as their pattern ; 
 and, with a love for an island home and a Celtic 
 
72 
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 bishop's desire for retirement, he placed his bishop, 
 stool on Lindisfarne, the holy island of the east- 
 ern coast. Aidan and Oswald labored and almost 
 lived together until the still youthful king fell 
 in battle slain by the heathen against whom he 
 was defending the homes of his people ; and soon 
 Aidan was succeeded by Finan, another bishop 
 from Hy. Under Finan the paschal question 
 was raised, or at least revived, in Northumbria. 
 The Scottish bishop followed the British use, 
 claiming that it came from Ephesus and St. 
 John ; those who had received their Christianity 
 from Kent or from Gaul followed the Roman use, 
 basing it on the authority of St. Peter as the chief 
 of the Apostles. The question was not the an- 
 cient quartodeciman controversy, of which we 
 read in ante-Nicene times, though it was and is 
 often confused with it ; for both parties kept 
 Easter on Sunday : it related partly to the cycle 
 which should be used in determining the time of 
 the ecclesiastical full moon, the British Christians 
 not having learned of the tables adopted at Rome 
 since they had ceased to have regular intercourse 
 with that city, and partly (and especially) to the 
 determination of the earliest day on which Easter 
 might fall, the British keeping it on the day of 
 the full moon if that fell on a Sunday, while the 
 Romans in that case deferred it to the Sunday 
 following. Each party accused the other of un- 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 73 
 
 catholic action and of heresy ; and the controversy 
 was most persistent and bitter. Northumbria and 
 Kent were not far apart, and had constant com- 
 munication with each other ; the two branches 
 of the Church represented in these kingdoms were 
 in many ways brought closely together ; and it 
 was impossible that a matter which both consid- 
 ered so important should be left undecided. In 
 fact, the matter came still nearer home to the 
 southern Christians ; for Cedd, who had labored 
 successfully among the East Saxons, had been 
 consecrated by Finan and two other Scottish 
 bishops to preside over the Church in that king- 
 dom. Soon came the conflict between Colman, 
 Finan's successor, himself of Scottish ordination, 
 and Wilfrid. This Wilfrid was a Northumbrian 
 of noble birth, who had visited Rome and Lyons, 
 and had formed a strong attachment to the Roman 
 see. He came back to take up his home at Ripon, 
 and to feel and resent the peculiarities and the de- 
 fects of the Christianity which had been brought 
 to his native land from the uncouth Christians of 
 the north. He was determined that the civilized 
 customs should not yield to those which were 
 barbarous, and that the Roman should displace 
 the Celtic Easter. 
 
 A conference was called, which, as has been 
 said, met in the year 664, at Whitby, on a lofty 
 bluff overlooking the northern sea, lately chosen 
 
74 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 as the site of a monastery. In arguing the case, 
 Colman appealed to the ancient custom of his 
 Church ; Wilfrid urged the extended influence of 
 the Roman Church and the power which the Lord 
 had given to St. Peter. The king decided, solely 
 (as it would seem) from the latter argument, that 
 Rome must be right ; and Colman withdrew to the 
 western isles. The controversy had been about a 
 matter of very little importance, save as it affected 
 uniformity of usage and brotherly charity ; and 
 we are inclined to regret here, as so often in later 
 history, the stamping out of local usage by the 
 harsh assumptions of the Roman see. Yet, so far 
 as there was a right and a wrong in this matter, 
 Rome was in the right ; and the conference of 
 Whitby kept the English Church from becoming 
 isolated from the living and growing Christianity 
 which was gaining so much and so useful power 
 in western Europe. Had the matter been decided 
 otherwise, English Christianity could hardly have 
 escaped disruption, and it would at least have 
 been cramped in a narrow mould and so prevented 
 from accomplishing the work which lay before 
 it. We cannot but sympathize with the Celtic 
 bishop who went back sorrowfully to his former 
 home ; but we can see that Wilfrid saved the 
 English Church from the danger of becoming a 
 tribal and monastic Church and from falling into 
 that Irish chaos which overwhelmed all order and 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 75 
 
 discipline. At Whitby a most important step 
 was taken, while yet there was in no strict sense 
 a nation of the English, towards establishing a 
 national English Church. 
 
 It would be instructive and interesting, had we 
 the time, to trace out in some detail the after life 
 of Wilfred ; but a few words must suffice for such 
 facts as bear upon the progress of the history. 
 He was soon chosen bishop of York; and, unwil- 
 ling to accept consecration from those whom he 
 called schismatics, he went to France and was 
 consecrated by the bishop of Paris. But he was 
 long in returning; and when he came to North- 
 umbria, he found that Chad had been consecrated 
 in his place by Wina of Wessex and two bishops 
 from West Wales — the first step towards an act- 
 ual union of the English Church with the Welsh, 
 but the last time for centuries that any English 
 bishop had a consecrator outside of the Roman 
 communion. Wilfrid retired and worked faith- 
 fully in Mercia and Kent, until he was restored to 
 York. There, after a time of much labor and 
 great success, he incurred the displeasure of the 
 king and placed himself in opposition to the plans 
 of Archbishop Theodore (of whom we shall hear 
 presently) ; and when a part of his diocese was re- 
 moved from his jurisdiction without his consent, 
 he determined to carry an appeal in person to 
 Rome. On his way his ship landed him in Fries- 
 
7 6 
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 land ; there his love of adventure and of work 
 prevailed for a time, and he became the first Eng- 
 lish missionary, moving the hearts of the rude 
 people to hear and to accept the truth. At last 
 he went to Rome ; his case was heard by a 
 council and determined in his favor; but now, as 
 formerly when he went to France, he could not 
 easily tear himself away from Rome. When he 
 did reach Northumbria he produced the papal 
 bull, only to discover that his appeal was regarded 
 as disloyalty and that he was charged with having 
 gained his case dishonestly. After imprisonment 
 he was practically banished, and he found no 
 resting-place till he came to Sussex, the only 
 part of England that was still heathen. Here his 
 missionary enthusiasm was again aroused ; he 
 first taught the barbarous people to catch fish, 
 and then preached to them the Gospel ; and for five 
 years he stayed among them apparently without a 
 murmur. Then Theodore sent him back again to 
 the north, where once more he got into trouble, 
 and whence once more he carried an appeal 
 to Rome, to meet with success there, but to find 
 that the papal decrees were not considered infal- 
 lible in England. Wilfrid was now an old man; 
 he consented to a compromise, and accepted Hex- 
 ham and Ripon as his diocese for the rest of his 
 life. The moral of his career is to be read all 
 through English history. He succeeded when 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 77 
 
 and where he identified himself with the people ; 
 but he could not easily identify himself with 
 others than those who were willing to submit 
 themselves to him. He failed when he ceased to 
 act as an Englishman, to respect English preju- 
 dices, and to follow English customs ; he failed 
 when he appealed for justice to a foreign ruler, 
 even to one whose authority in matters spirit- 
 ual was highly respected ; he failed when he at- 
 tempted, though probably without intending it, 
 to make the English Church a dependency of the 
 Roman see. His virtues were those of the Eng- 
 lishman ; his faults were those of the Roman. 
 
 III. 
 
 But we must pass now, stepping a little back 
 in the history, to the important, though little 
 known, Council of Hertford, and to the great man 
 who presided at it, Theodore, called of Tarsus, 
 archbishop of Canterbury. The place is north of 
 London, not far from the spot where St. Albans 
 points to the site of an ancient Roman city and 
 preserves the memory of a tradition of British 
 Christianity, and where a noble cathedral is 
 crowned with a tower made largely of the Roman 
 brick of Verulamium. The man who summoned 
 an assembly of the English Church to meet there 
 in 673, was one who united in himself the training 
 
78 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 of the East, a mission from the great imperial 
 city, and the duties of a primacy in the far West 
 Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury ' 
 We are reminded of the great apostle, whose birth 
 and early training had been in the wealthy and 
 learned city on the banks of the Cydnus, and who 
 had carried the words of the Gospel past Rome to 
 the very bounds of the West. So this scholar, taught 
 in the secular learning of the schools of his native 
 city and in the theology of the Oriental Church, 
 having the tonsure of an eastern monk, already 
 beyond what men call the prime of life, had come 
 to Rome at a time when the English Church was 
 in a weakened state, when a priest sent to Rome 
 to be consecrated to the vacant see of Canterbury 
 had died there, and when Hadrian, a Roman abbot 
 to whom the position was offered, had declined to 
 accept it. On Hadrian's recommendation, Theo- 
 dore, not yet even a subdeacon, was designated 
 for the post. He was obliged to tarry at Rome 
 till his hair should be grown, that he might re- 
 ceive the Roman tonsure ; and then, having been 
 ordained and consecrated by the Pope himself, he 
 set out on his journey to Britain, accompanied by 
 Hadrian with instructions to see that he did not 
 follow the Greeks in anything that was contrary 
 to the faith. This precaution may have had refer- 
 ence to the tonsure or the Easter question or to 
 matters connected with the liturgy ; but it seems 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 79 
 
 more probable that it was feared that this theo- 
 logian from the East might not hold the orthodox 
 side in the monothelite controversy which was 
 then vexing the Church. 
 
 Theodore arrived in England in the year 669, 
 being then sixty-seven years old. The paschal 
 controversy had been settled by the conference at 
 Whitby ; the paganism of the Anglo-Saxons was 
 practically gone ; but the English Church was in 
 a depressed condition. The succession introduced 
 by Augustine survived only in the person of 
 Boniface of East Anglia, who died within a year ; 
 and there were but three bishops engaged in active 
 duties in England : Wilfrid, consecrated for York 
 but officiating in Kent ; Chad, occupying York 
 in what was held to be an irregular way as to both 
 consecration and jurisdiction ; and Wina, who had 
 been expelled from Wessex and had, by purchase, 
 procured for himself the see of London. It was 
 no small task which lay before this man of schol- 
 arly habits, who had spent all his life in monas- 
 teries in southern Europe. But Theodore, a very 
 gift of God to England, was equal to the work. 
 He made a visitation of the whole country ; he 
 consecrated bishops to vacant sees ; he restored 
 Wilfrid to York and Lindisfarne ; he supplied (as 
 we are told) the defects in Chad's consecration — 
 it is impossible to say just what the words mean 
 1 — and gave him a bishopstool at Lichfield ; and 
 
8o THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 he became in a sense the sole ecclesiastical ruler 
 of England more than a century before it was all 
 subjected to the rule of one king. 
 
 In the autumn of 673, some four years and a 
 half after his arrival in England, Theodore sum- 
 moned his suffragans to meet him at Hertford. 
 Chad was dead ; Wilfrid was represented by depu- 
 ties ; Wina did not attend; and the four bishops 
 who sat with Theodore appear to have been all 
 of his own consecration. The archbishop called 
 upon them to accept the definitions of the faith, 
 and discussed with them certain canons relating 
 to the organization and the administration of the 
 Church under a diocesan system, and to other like 
 matters; then the decrees were formulated, signed, 
 and promulgated. It is impossible to overesti- 
 mate the importance of the council thus solemnly 
 assembled, and of the work which it did. It gave 
 unity and form to the English Church by provid- 
 ing it with a synodical system, from the lack of 
 which its organization had thus far been imper- 
 fect, even as compared with that of the British 
 Church in Wales ; it made England an ecclesiasti- 
 cal province, having a unity of life and work and 
 common interests ; and, more than that, it gave to 
 Englishmen the idea of a unity which afterwards 
 found embodiment under kings of all England. 
 It was, as the historians confess, " the first of all 
 national gatherings for general legislation,'' and 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 81 
 
 " the precursor of the Witenagemots and parlia- 
 ments of the one indivisible imperial realm." The 
 acts which made the bishops heads of dioceses 
 rather than general missionaries, and governors in 
 a national Church rather than chaplains of petty 
 princes, had no little influence in the making of 
 England. From Theodore and his council at 
 Hertford went forth the inspiration which consoli- 
 dated the realm, which gave the bishops seats in 
 the meetings of the kings' wise men, which led to 
 the assembling of the Commons at Westminster, 
 and which has secured to England a unique place 
 among the Churches and the kingdoms of the 
 world. 
 
 Thus Theodore had done much to perfect the 
 organization and external form of the English 
 Church. He was strongly convinced himself that 
 it was absolutely necessary for its welfare that the 
 number of dioceses should be largely increased, 
 though as to this point he had not been able to 
 persuade his first council to take definite action. 
 But he watched his opportunities ; and he did his 
 best to carry out plans like those of Gregory for 
 the division of the land into comparatively small 
 dioceses. It was in consequence of resistance to 
 these plans that Wilfrid, as we have seen, fell into 
 disfavor with the archbishop, and carried his ap- 
 peal to Rome ; and probably for a like reason the 
 successor of Chad in the large diocese of Lich- 
 
82 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 field was removed from his see. In 685, Theo- 
 dore, then eighty-three years old, was in York 
 and was assisted by seven bishops in consecrating 
 Cuthbert to Lindisfarne ; and before this time he 
 seems to have accomplished his wish in regard to 
 the increase of the number of dioceses. Five 
 years later, at the great age of eighty-eight, he 
 died, and was buried in Augustine's monastery in 
 his cathedral city. 
 
 As we have seen, he had organized and given 
 unity to the English Church, and had prepared the 
 way for the unity of the English nation ; and in 
 doing this he had secured for the Church of Eng- 
 land a dignified and honored place among the 
 Churches of Christendom. He had divided all 
 the southern and eastern part of the island into 
 permanent dioceses, largely on the lines of the 
 ancient kingdoms ; and he had prepared the way 
 for the introduction of the parochial system, which 
 tradition indeed ascribes to him, but which, in its 
 details, is certainly the work of a later generation. 
 Nor must we forget the impulse which he gave 
 to learning. Himself no mean scholar, he founded 
 schools of learning at Canterbury and elsewhere, 
 where Greek and mathematics, as well as theology 
 and canon law, were studied ; he left behind him 
 a penitential, which bears witness to the way in 
 which he contended with the practical evils of his 
 time ; and to the impulse given by his devotion 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 83 
 
 and his diligence is doubtless due much of the 
 missionary zeal which marks the time that fol- 
 lowed him. " Both his character and his work," 
 writes the Bishop of Oxford, " seem to place him 
 among the first and the greatest of the saints 
 whom God has used for the building up of the 
 Church and the development of the culture of the 
 world." 
 
 On lines thus marked out the English Church 
 went on with its work. We have noted how its 
 development preceded that of the kingdom, and 
 how it gave a tone to the national life rather than 
 received one from it. It may not be amiss to re- 
 mind ourselves how much this means. For al- 
 though, as has been said, the early bishops may 
 seem to have been little more than court-chaplains, 
 yet the Christianity of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors 
 was not a court-religion ; nor, on the other hand, 
 was the Church obliged to take up the position 
 of a defender of the people against the tyranny 
 of their rulers. There was a strong democratic 
 element in those little kingdoms, which indeed 
 the Teutonic emigrants had brought with them 
 from their former homes ; and politically the town 
 preceded the kingdom ; the realm of England, 
 like the states of New England and the nation of 
 the United States, was a growth from beneath. 
 But the Church of England was a growth from 
 above ; the diocese preceded the parish ; the 
 
84 
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 bishop had a general jurisdiction, and his clergy 
 were rather missionaries at large until duties were 
 assigned them by the bishop, acting on the nomi- 
 nation of the lords of manors, over their respective 
 parishes, the limits of which depended upon those 
 of the towns. And many of the bishopstools 
 were not in great and important places, and the 
 civil capital has never been the metropolitical city. 
 Moreover, the clergy of England have from the 
 first been a part of the people, and have not 
 formed a separate caste, with different civil in- 
 terests. And so it has happened that the religious 
 life and the religious organization of the country 
 have remained through many political changes, 
 and that the influence of bishops and clergy has 
 been constantly good and constantly respected. 
 Thus, while all the rest of Western Christendom 
 accepted imperialism in Church and in State, 
 England always claimed, and nearly always main- 
 tained, her independence ; the freedom of the 
 Church constantly defended the freedom of the 
 State. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Upon the completion of the organization of the 
 English Church there followed, as has been sug- 
 gested, a time of quiet growth and of devotion to 
 learning. The name which stands out promi- 
 nently now is that of Bede, of whom all succeeding 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 85 
 
 generations have spoken as the Venerable ; his 
 home for fifty-four years was in the monastery at 
 Jarrow, near the Scottish boundary. His was a 
 life of quiet diligence, unambitious and affection- 
 ate, the only wish of which was to do something 
 which would be of use. If he studied and wrote 
 theology, it was that he might make the learning 
 of the fathers of avail for the needs of his coun- 
 trymen ; if he committed the history of his own 
 day to writing, it was that he might bear witness 
 to future generations of what God had done. 
 With a charming simplicity, an unaffected patriot- 
 ism, and an unfailing faith, he used his abilities 
 for the glory of his Master and for the good of the 
 Church ; and his name well stands to-day, where 
 he could never have expected to see it, at the very 
 beginning of the long line of English writers. 
 Few scenes are more touching than that of his 
 death on the eve of the Ascension-day ; as in the 
 neighboring chapel they were about to sing the 
 antiphon, " We beseech Thee leave us not or- 
 phans," he roused himself to dictate the last words 
 of his English version of St. John's Gospel, and 
 then, as the music of the choir reached his ears, 
 he began the Gloria, and " breathed his last when 
 he had named the Holy Spirit." Nor may we for- 
 get Caedmon, the rustic Northumbrian, who be- 
 lieved that he was divinely taught to sing, and who 
 told in the simple rhythm of that day the story of 
 
86 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 the Scriptures and of God's dealings with men ; 
 nor how the close of the life of this first of Eng- 
 lish poets, told by the first of English historians, 
 so closely resembles that which another should 
 soon tell of Bede himself. And, though he did 
 not write in the vernacular, England must ever 
 honor Alcuin, the great theologian of the cathe- 
 dral school at York, called by Charles the Great 
 to his court, the restorer of learning in France and 
 Germany, a man remarkable alike as a teacher 
 and as a writer. These men, and those who were 
 associated with them, were the crown of English 
 learning in the eighth century. 
 
 As a restorer of learning some two centuries 
 later, it may not be unfitting to speak here of 
 King Alfred, successor of the Egbert of Wessex 
 who founded the one kingdom of England. He 
 was, says a great historian, " the most perfect 
 character in history — a saint without superstition, 
 a scholar without ostentation, a warrior all of 
 whose wars were fought in defence of his country, 
 a conqueror whose laurels were never stained by 
 cruelty, a prince never cast down by adversity, 
 never lifted up by insolence in the hour of tri- 
 umph." " His virtue," proceeds the same writer, 
 " like the virtues of Washington, consisted in no 
 marvellous displays of superhuman genius, but in 
 the simple, straightforward discharge of the duty 
 of the moment." In all his life and his work he 
 
THE AXCLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 87 
 
 was a veritable nursing-father of the Church of 
 England. But the Church owes him most for his 
 devotion to learning and his determination that 
 all his people should well understand what was 
 written in their own tongue. He himself trans- 
 lated and enriched Boethius and Orosius and 
 Bede, and gave a new tone to the Anglo-Saxon 
 Chronicle. With him, in one sense, English his- 
 tory, as the history of one people, begins ; with him, 
 too, in an important sense, English literature has 
 its beginning ; and Alfred was the father of the 
 English people, and has a name high among Eng- 
 lish writers, because he was a faithful son of the 
 English Church. 
 
 But before Alfred's day the Danish invasions 
 had begun, and the quiet life of England, espe- 
 cially in the north, had been disturbed. In those 
 troubled times, great names do not rise up before 
 us as in the days of foundation and growth at 
 which we have been glancing. The time was 
 drawing near when a conqueror was to come 
 from without, and while he should not put an end 
 to either the political or the ecclesiastical life of 
 England, should yet produce a change so impor- 
 tant that it might well be called a revolution. Of 
 the preparations for the changes, which really have 
 not much to do with the history of the early 
 English Church, it is not necessary to speak here 
 and now. 
 
88 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 But one would be doing scant justice to that 
 Church who should not have a word to say in re- 
 gard to what was done by the missionaries whom, 
 in the days of her early faith, she sent out to the 
 heathen. We need not wonder that men went 
 from Kent to Essex and to Sussex, or from North- 
 umbria to Mercia, to tell their neighbors of the 
 truth which had been brought to them ; and per- 
 haps the labors of Wilfrid, when he preached to 
 the Frisians and to the men of Wessex, may 
 seem to us no more than the work of an energetic 
 but disappointed man, who felt that he must be 
 laboring somewhere ; in reality, however, these 
 were but examples of what the Church of the 
 Angles and the Saxons in England seems to have 
 been always ready to do. Willibrord, educated 
 at Ripon by Wilfrid and later in Ireland, filled 
 with a missionary inspiration, became the apostle 
 of the Frisians, and preached to the Danes and the 
 Franks, and became the Archbishop of Utrecht. 
 And Winfrid of Wessex, known to history as 
 Boniface, longing for the labors of a missionary's 
 life, became the apostle of Germany, worked 
 most indefatigably and successfully, attained great 
 honor and influence, gained a martyr's crown, and 
 left an example to those who came after him. 
 
 V. 
 
 It is well that the story of the early English 
 Church, which began with events so strangely 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 89 
 
 combining the romantic with the miraculous, 
 should end with a person about whom there 
 gather stories of romance and of miracle. It was 
 a wonderful change that took place from the time 
 when a Frankish princess, with her chaplain, wor- 
 shipped in the little St. Martin's Church at CanteF 
 bury, to the time when the fair minster of West 
 London rose in place of the humbler edifice built 
 by the first Christian king of Essex on Thorney 
 Island near the Thames ; a wonderful change from 
 Ethelbert the heathen lord of Kent to Edward the 
 sainted king of England. The light which blazed 
 up at one place and another among Angles and 
 Saxons and Jutes had illumined the whole land, 
 and, though dimmed by the violence of enemies, 
 had never ceased to burn. And now that a great 
 change was to take place, the devotion of the last 
 king of Saxon England (if one may use the 
 phrase) showed itself in his determination to com- 
 plete what he considered the great duty of his 
 life. For fourteen years he pushed the work on 
 the great abbey at Westminster, some of the 
 foundations and arches of which are still seen 
 beneath or near the more glorious building with 
 which a later age has replaced it. The Witan of 
 all England met to hallow the new minster on the 
 Innocents' Day of the year 1065 ; but the king, 
 who had appeared in public on the preceding day, 
 was not able to be present. Before the Christmas 
 
90 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 festivities were over, he was stricken with death ; 
 and on the festival of the Epiphany, 1066, " the 
 last royal son of Woden was borne to his grave." 
 It may be that Edward was not a great man or a 
 great ruler ; it may be that it would have been 
 better for his kingdom and no worse for himself 
 if he had devoted his energies to something be- 
 sides the erection of a stately church in the hope 
 that he might thereby secure the salvation of his 
 soul ; but whose heart is not touched as he thinks 
 of the king of England, who, on the very eve of 
 the Norman conquest, was laid to rest in the 
 shrine which he had just completed ? Who that 
 sees the receptacle of his ashes, alone of all the 
 feretories of English saints, still in a place of honor 
 in the house of God, and that remembers the 
 reverence with which generations have treated it, 
 does not feel that, after all, there was something 
 appropriate in the time of the death of Edward 
 the Confessor and in the place of his burial ? And 
 when we think that the great abbey is the resting- 
 place of a long line of kings, successors of Ethel- 
 bert and Alfred and Edward, though not because 
 they were of their blood, and that there lie under 
 the same roof the bones of the good and the great 
 and the wise who have entered into the labors of 
 the good and great and wise of the earlier days — 
 when we recall the constant worship which has 
 been offered in that hallowed spot, and how holy 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 91 
 
 men have stood in their place to guide the devo- 
 tions and instruct the souls of a Christian English 
 people through all these centuries — when we see 
 the glorious chapter- house, so long the place of 
 meeting of England's Commons, and the palace 
 of Westminster hard by which now supplies its 
 place, where are carried out the principles of gov- 
 ernment which found expression in the council at 
 Hertford and in the assemblies in which the kings 
 consulted with their bishops and their lords — 
 who does not feel that the history of the earlier 
 England fitly passes at Westminster with hardly 
 a break into the history of the later England, from 
 St. Edward the English Confessor to William the 
 Norman Conqueror ? 
 
 I have thus ventured to trace out the history of 
 the Anglo-Saxon Church by reminding you of 
 Augustine at Canterbury, of Wilfrid at Whitby, 
 of Theodore at Hertford, of Bede at Jarrow, and 
 of King Edward at Westminster. The scenes at 
 which we have looked may have served to remind 
 us how archbishops and kings, missionaries and 
 scholars, monks and statesmen, worked together 
 in the making of the Church of England. And 
 the whole of the period which belongs to our sub- 
 ject this evening is full of like events, less promi- 
 nent perhaps, but no less really affecting the cen- 
 turies that were to follow. At times the story 
 
92 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 may suggest to us that good men often do things 
 which call for an apology, and that it may not be 
 well to criticise too closely the characters and the 
 actions of some of those whom we honor with 
 the title of saints ; but on the other hand we 
 cannot refrain from paying the tribute of rever- 
 ential respect to those simple-hearted and faithful 
 kings and bishops, for whom religion was the 
 whole of life, and who gladly served the Lord 
 Christ from love of Him Who had saved them. 
 And it was — who can doubt it ? — because of the 
 completeness of their devotion that their " work 
 of faith and labour of love and patience of hope " 
 were so evidently accepted and blessed. As we 
 read Homer with an ever-increasing sense of the 
 beauty of " the dawn of history's morning," as 
 there always breathes from the verses of Chaucer 
 the sweet freshness of the spring of poetry, so as 
 we follow the chronicles of the days when Chris- 
 tianity was brought into the England and to the 
 Englishmen of history, we get much of the inspira- 
 tion of that loving devotion and patient faith 
 which we hardly dare hope to find reproduced in 
 our own times. We see our holy religion accepted 
 by warlike Teutonic tribes, without the interven- 
 tion of force or arms, simply because it was quiet 
 and self-denying and pure ; we see it changing their 
 temper towards the Britons whom they had driven 
 from their homes, because they had, though from 
 
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH. 
 
 93 
 
 another source, received the faith of their con- 
 quered foes; we see it making the numerous king- 
 doms of Angles and Saxons and Jutes into one 
 nation, the national unity being based upon the 
 ecclesiastical ; we see the Britons drawn with the 
 English into the visible unity of the Catholic 
 Church of the West ; and we see the Church of 
 England maintaining her rights as a branch of the 
 Church Catholic against the already immoderate 
 claims of the see of Rome. And we see the light 
 of learning which had flashed from the emerald 
 plains of Ireland and from the rocks of Iona, shin- 
 ing now from England and dispelling the darkness 
 which had begun to settle on portions of the con- 
 tinent. And thus we see the English Church, 
 strong in faith and wise in holy learning, able to 
 bear the shocks which were to come upon it and 
 to defend the sacred deposit of faith and order 
 which it had received. It is indeed no ordinary 
 history which we have been studying, as we have 
 watched the building of a plain but solid sub- 
 structure, which rests firmly upon the one founda- 
 tion than which man can lay no other, and which 
 supports in safety a stately pile that ministers to 
 the needs of human souls and echoes with the 
 unceasing praises of Almighty God. 
 
£be morman perioo of tbe English 
 Cburcb. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 BY ALEXANDER V. G. ALLEN, D.D., 
 Professor in the Episcopal Theological School, in Cambridge, 
 
 Mass. 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD OF THE ENGLISH 
 CHURCH 
 
 The Norman people came to England with 
 William the Conqueror in 1066. Their first ap- 
 pearance in Europe dates from the middle of the 
 ninth century, or some two hundred years earlier 
 than their conquest of England. They came from 
 the Scandinavian countries in the north, what are 
 now the kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden and Nor- 
 way. They were a fierce and warlike people, 
 whose empire was the sea. At a time when, to 
 the other people of Europe, the ocean was a bar- 
 rier of separation, it was to the Normans a high- 
 way and channel of communication. Leaving 
 their homes in the north, in the ninth century 
 they had gone into France and taken possession 
 of that province now known as Normandy. In 
 the early part of the eleventh century they had 
 wandered into the south, where they had made 
 97 
 
9 8 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 themselves masters of southern Italy, including 
 Sicily. In their love of conquest they had also 
 discovered and settled Iceland, they had planted 
 colonies in Greenland, and by some it is believed 
 that they had landed in North America, and had 
 even made some settlement on the coast of New 
 England.* 
 
 The Normans were a Teutonic people, and 
 therefore closely related by blood to the English 
 and the Germans. But close as may be the race 
 connection, the difference between them and the 
 other Teutonic races is great and striking. Their 
 peculiarities are brought out most clearly in 
 France, where they had been settled for two 
 hundred years before the conquest of England. 
 They had taken on the refinements of civilization, 
 as civilization then was ; they threw themselves 
 
 * It is a mistake, however, to speak of the Northmen as 
 having discovered America. The word discovery in its true 
 historical use applies only to Europe in the sixteenth century 
 — to the age and people which were waiting to carry on the 
 advancing civilization. A discovery also implies some con- 
 scious, intelligent purpose, not an accidental stumbling upon 
 a territory, which incident was, moreover, followed by no 
 result. If it were right to speak of the Northmen as having 
 discovered America, it would be still more correct to speak 
 Of the Indians as its first discoverers ; and then it might as 
 well be admitted that it was never discovered at all. It was 
 always known to some people or race as far back as history 
 reaches. 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 99 
 
 into the life of the continent, and whatever was 
 in vogue at the time they appropriated as their 
 own, and carried out to its full development. Just 
 as they had conquered for themselves a home 
 in countries which did not belong to them, so they 
 also entered into the life of the age, accepting 
 its features, its ideals, its lines of movement with 
 as genuine an enthusiasm as if they had originated 
 them from their own consciousness. They be- 
 came the most devoted adherents of the papacy 
 to be found in Europe. In Italy, so great was 
 their reverence for the Bishop of Rome, they 
 formed a sort of body-guard to the pope, taking 
 an oath to defend the papacy against all its foes. 
 Hildebrand found them most useful allies in the 
 maintenance of his policy for subjecting the States 
 of Europe to the obedience of the Church. The 
 Normans being, as it were, a people without a 
 home, were emancipated from local or national 
 restrictions ; they were cosmopolitans, cherishing 
 what was large and universal in scope or ten- 
 dency, with an admiration for power and splendor 
 without reference to its national bearings. They 
 were an imaginative people, instinctively giving 
 themselves up to the cultivation of art, which 
 then assumed the phase of architecture. The 
 cathedrals, the monasteries, the churches which 
 rose in Normandy may be regarded as expressing 
 their religious and imaginative genius. More 
 
IOO 
 
 THE NORMAN rERIOD 
 
 than any other part of Europe did Normandy 
 abound in ecclesiastical foundations after the 
 model of the rising Gothic style, which there 
 reached its fullest growth, producing monuments 
 of beauty which are unexcelled. 
 
 When the crusades began in the end of the 
 eleventh century, whose object was the chivalrous 
 attempt to recover the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusa- 
 lem from the hand of the infidel Moslem, it was 
 the Normans who were foremost in responding to 
 the call of the pope, and who first planted them- 
 selves as conquerors in the sacred city. And, 
 indeed, throughout the crusades, it is either the 
 Normans or peoples of the Latin races, not Ger- 
 mans or English, who are chiefly identified with 
 this vast movement in the interest of an ideal 
 purpose. Let us add that the Normans were a 
 peculiarly religious people in what are called the 
 ages of faith. Here, too, they showed the same 
 disposition as in other things. They accepted the 
 forms of the monastic life as expressing the high- 
 est type of sanctity and devotion. Wherever they 
 went, they built magnificent monasteries as they 
 built magnificent churches, every great feudal 
 lord, it is said, planting a monastic establishment 
 upon his domain. The Normans easily subscribed 
 the monastic vows of chastity, poverty and obe- 
 dience, sacrificing that element of being or exist- 
 ence which we call vitality or vigorous personality, 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 as readily as they also sacrificed home and nation- 
 ality in the love of what was foreign, or splendid, 
 or cosmopolitan. 
 
 Here lay also their weakness. Nowhere did 
 they build up a nation. It has been their fate to 
 be merged in other peoples; they have disap- 
 peared in Italy ; in France and in England they 
 have been fused with the original population. 
 The test of a people's vitality is seen in the re- 
 tention of their language ; Germany and England 
 have shown the purity and tenacity of their orig- 
 inal stock by retaining their language, despite all 
 foreign influences. The Normans gave up their 
 own language for the language of the people 
 they conquered. Not only did they fail to build 
 up a nation ; they weakened by their emigration 
 the countries which were their original homes, 
 so that Denmark and Sweden and Norway lost 
 the future which might have been theirs, and have 
 never played an important part in the history of 
 Europe. 
 
 Such were the people who came over into Eng- 
 land from Normandy in France, with William the 
 Conqueror in the year 1066. A greater contrast 
 than that between the English — the Anglo-Sax- 
 ons, as they are generally called — and the Nor- 
 man conquerors it is hard to imagine. Hitherto 
 England had taken little part in the great move- 
 ments going on upon the Continent. The insu- 
 
102 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 lated character of the country showed itself in the 
 insulation and exclusiveness which marks the char- 
 acter of the people. England pursued its own 
 way through the early Middle Ages, unaffected 
 by the changes in France, or Germany, or Italy. 
 She knew but little of the ambition of popes, or 
 the methods by which the Bishop of Rome was 
 recasting into legislation the moral sentiment 
 which went forth toward his person as the Vicar 
 of Christ upon earth. Church and State in Eng- 
 land during the Anglo-Saxon period, were in har- 
 monious relations. No one was then asking the 
 momentous question of a later age, whether the 
 Church should rule the State, or the State the 
 Church ; it was hard to tell them apart, as when 
 the dignitaries of Church and State met in one 
 common assembly, legislating alike for the Ec- 
 clcsia or the nation. There was a form of mo- 
 nasticism in England, but it was of the mildest 
 type, not adhering to the Benedictine rule. The 
 clergy also were for the most part married, nor 
 did their conception of the Christian ideal lead to 
 the exaggeration of celibacy, as the equivalent of 
 chastity. There was, in a word, nothing cosmo- 
 politan about the English; they were then, as 
 they have been ever since, a practical people, 
 cherishing no visionary schemes, not endowed 
 with a glowing imagination, rude in their archi- 
 tecture, their prevailing sin, it is often remarked, 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 103 
 
 being gluttony — a type of pleasure which they 
 indulged in at their numerous and hospitable 
 feasts. 
 
 All this was changed by the coming of the Nor- 
 mans. The conquest was so complete that Eng- 
 land now wheels into line as one of the papal 
 states of Europe, accepting more entirely than 
 almost any other country the authority of the 
 Bishop of Rome, taking on foreign fashions, and 
 embroiled in the politics of Christendom. The 
 change was easily effected. William, the Nor- 
 man conqueror, had received the approval and 
 even the blessing of the pope on his attempt to 
 subjugate the English people, and to take pos- 
 session of their crown, sailing for England, it is 
 said, with a banner blessed for the undertak- 
 ing by Alexander, the Bishop of Rome. It is 
 unnecessary to recount here the details of the 
 story of his conquest. The resistance which he 
 met with from the English people was overcome 
 by a fierce and cruel determination to make the 
 country entirely his own. He assumed from the 
 first the feudal principle that all the land belonged 
 to him by sovereign right ; he proceeded at once 
 to dispossess its English owners and to assign 
 their estates to his Norman followers. Although 
 the process was a gradual one, it went on, until 
 the ejection of a great nation of landowners from 
 their land was accomplished. Nor was all this 
 
104 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 effected without enormous suffering. " No book 
 in the world," it has been said, " covers so huge a 
 mass of misery, thinly disguised under its cold, 
 curt phraseology, as the great terrier of the Nor- 
 man king's English estate," to which the English 
 people gave the name of Domesday. A Norman 
 nobility now displaced the Englishmen of high 
 rank, who sank into the lower grades of tenants ; 
 the Episcopal seats throughout England were filled 
 with Norman bishops, with only one exception ; 
 the English Archbishop of Canterbury was re- 
 moved, and in his room was placed an Italian, 
 Lanfranc, who came from the monastery of Bee, 
 in Normandy. There were two races in the land, 
 the English and the French, as the Normans 
 called themselves. The Normans despised the 
 Anglo-Saxons, looking down with contempt upon 
 their rude and narrow ways, while the English or 
 Saxons returned their contempt with bitter hat- 
 red In consequence of the frequent assassina- 
 tions of the Normans, a law was framed which 
 made the local hundred responsible for every mur- 
 der if the murderer was not found, while every 
 murdered man was held to be a Norman, unless 
 he could be proved to be an Englishman. 
 
 This was the age when the great castles were 
 erected all over England. The traveller who 
 admires to-day their beauty as a feature of the 
 English landscape does not trouble himself to re- 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 I05 
 
 call their origin. The hard and cruel necessities 
 of a former age become the luxuries and play- 
 things of later generations. These castles were 
 built by the Normans in self-defence ; they domi- 
 nated the country around ; they were the strong- 
 holds of Norman tyranny and rapine. Horrors 
 were perpetrated in their dungeons which never 
 saw the light of day. 
 
 "Every powerful man," says the last English chronicler, 
 "built his castle, and they filled the land full of castles. 
 They heavily afflicted the poor men of the land with castle- 
 building, and when the castles were built they filled them 
 with devils and evil men. Then, both by night and day, 
 they took the men they supposed to possess any goods, 
 country men and women, and threw them into prison, to ob- 
 tain their gold and silver and torture them with unutterable 
 torture, for never were martyrs tortured as they were. . . . 
 They were constantly levying tributes on the towns ; and 
 when the wretched men had no more to give, they destroyed 
 and burnt the towns; and well might you travel all day and 
 never find a man settled in a town or land cultivated, so that 
 corn was dear ; of flesh and cheese and butter none was there 
 in the land. Wretched men starved of hunger. Some went 
 begging through the country who formerly had been rich 
 men. Some fled the country. Never was greater wretched- 
 ness in the land and never did heathen men cause worse 
 evils than these did. So that men said openly that Christ 
 and His saints were asleep." 
 
 The old England came to an end under the Nor- 
 man kings, and these are the last words of the 
 Anglo-Saxon chronicler. 
 
io6 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 The Norman lords built their castles and the 
 Norman bishops raised their great cathedrals. 
 These wonderful structures, like the castles, have 
 now become almost a constituent part of English 
 scenery. The English nation has forgotten the 
 misery of their origin. Even nature itself has ac- 
 cepted them, as if man, in rivalry with the work 
 of the Creator, had done something of which the 
 heavens, that look down upon them, might be 
 proud. The cathedrals of the Norman bishops, 
 even the churches in towns and villages, the splen- 
 did monasteries, are relics of the Norman conquest. 
 The older churches of the Anglo-Saxon period 
 were destroyed to make place for the grander 
 architecture ; only a few remain to tell us what 
 they were like ; they were despised by the Nor- 
 mans because they were small. But even with 
 all their beauty and splendor and vast proportions, 
 these things are not the typical utterance of the 
 English mind. Even if we forget their origin, 
 Durham, and Canterbury, and Salisbury, and 
 Winchester still remind us of the age when Eng- 
 land became for the first time in her history a 
 constituent part of Roman Catholic Christendom, 
 gradually learning to forget the simplicity of her 
 earlier Church, in the grandeur and comprehen- 
 siveness of the papal empire. 
 
 Other features of the period might be inter- 
 esting and instructive to study, especially the fill- 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 i tv- 
 
 ing up of England with the various branches of 
 monasticism, which the foreign invaders brought 
 with them from France or Italy. For it is a cir- 
 cumstance not without its significance, that no 
 great monastic order has ever originated in Eng- 
 land. The Cistercian order, the order of Clugny, 
 the order of the Carthusians or of the Carmel- 
 ites, at a later time the mendicant orders, Fran- 
 ciscan and Dominican, none of these sprang from 
 the religious genius or aspiration of the English 
 Church ; they were importations from Italy or 
 France or Spain. Their monastic houses were 
 endowed with all the imaginative beauty of the 
 Norman mind ; their sites reveal a wonderful ap- 
 preciation of the beauty of nature, and the Eng- 
 lish people are still proud of their ruins. Fur- 
 ness and Fountains and Melrose and hundreds of 
 others, we may admit, did good in their day ; for 
 the Normans as monks were a better people than 
 the lay lords who built the castles. But these in- 
 stitutions are not indigenous to English soil; 
 they do not reflect the characteristic religious life 
 or purpose of the English people. The time came 
 when the English nation swept them away, while 
 hardly a voice was heard to protest in their behalf. 
 
 Of all these foreign institutions and methods, 
 one general remark holds true — they enlarged the 
 spirit of the English Church. There were in them 
 seeds of evil, but there were also seeds of good. 
 
I OS 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 Feudalism, for example, which was introduced 
 into England with the Normans, though in a 
 modified shape, cultivated a spirit of loyalty to an 
 over-lord which, when transferred to Christ, be- 
 comes the source of what is most beautiful and 
 vital in Christian piety. The customs of chivalry, 
 also brought in by the Normans, elevated the tone 
 of manners, raised the ideal of woman, cultivated 
 the sense of personal honor, which forms not only 
 an integral element in the character of what we 
 call the gentleman, but an indispensable element 
 in all moral culture. Influences like these lifted 
 the Church of England out of its natural exclu- 
 siveness. Left to itself the English Church might 
 have become a stunted, narrow institution, feebly 
 reflecting the spirit of Christianity, feebly nourish- 
 ing the life of the nation, — not unlike the Russian 
 Church of to-day, which in all its history has re- 
 ceived no life from without, and sits weak and 
 powerless at the feet of the Czar. 
 
 Of these institutions and ideals which are 
 foreign to the typical English mind, the most im- 
 portant is the papacy. It was the leading conse- 
 quence of the Norman invasion that England was 
 made an organic part of the Latin or Roman 
 Catholic Church, accepting the headship of the 
 pope over the State as well as over the Church. 
 How the process of its conquest by the pope was 
 accomplished, what were the effects on the English 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 1 09 
 
 Church and nation, how at last this yoke was 
 thrown off, is the story I propose to tell. 
 
 Before the Norman conquest, and during the 
 Anglo-Saxon age, there existed in England, as on 
 the continent, a feeling of respect and deference 
 for the Bishop of Rome. He was regarded as the 
 successor of St. Peter, and St. Peter was believed 
 to have been the head or prince of the apostles. So 
 early as the eighth century English bishops had 
 begun to take an oath of allegiance to the Bishop 
 of Rome. Indeed, the first bishop who ever took 
 such an oath was an Englishman, St. Boniface, 
 known as the missionary apostle of Germany. 
 When he left England for Germany to convert 
 the new races from heathenism, he felt the need 
 of some centre, some responsible head to whom 
 he might offer his Christian conquests, and thus 
 connect them with a larger Church than the local 
 body which he represented. This act of Boniface 
 may be regarded as one illustration out of many, 
 of the working of that moral sentiment of rev- 
 erence for the Bishop of Rome which existed 
 among all the people of western Europe. 
 
 But the Latin Church has never been content 
 with moral sentiments. They seem to the Latin 
 mind vague, intangible things, until they have 
 been transmuted into the form of law. During 
 the eighth and ninth centuries, or in the age 
 
I 10 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 when Charlemagne was sole ruler of the new 
 western empire, the process went on apace, of con- 
 verting this sentiment of reverence for Rome into 
 legal statutes, by means of which the bishops of 
 Rome might govern the Church in accordance 
 with what they believed to be the will of God. 
 Rome was in the habit of gratifying the sentiment 
 of reverence toward her ancient see, by present- 
 ing to the bishops, on their consecration, the pal- 
 lium, as a token of her recognition of their office, 
 — a badge of their relationship through Rome to 
 the universal Church. In that confused and strug- 
 gling age, when the nations had not yet been 
 born, and in the isolation of the peoples no other 
 bond of unity existed, the presentation of the 
 pallium was a glimpse into a larger world, reveal- 
 ing a grander Church behind the local Churches 
 in the various kingdoms or states of western 
 Europe. 
 
 When the bishops who received the pallium 
 took the oath of allegiance to Rome, a great step 
 forward had been accomplished in the process of 
 subjecting the Church to the will of Rome. But 
 still, the oath was a vague one, and meant little 
 or much as any bishop might choose to interpret 
 it. In order to give the bishop's oath any real 
 import, it was necessary to define by legal statute 
 how much it meant. The popes who inherited 
 the spirit of the old Roman law, were at no loss to 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 I I I 
 
 determine the form which the legislation should 
 take. It was necessary, as they thought, for the 
 government of the Church, that the papacy should 
 constitute a court of final appeal in all grave 
 cases in which the bishops might be concerned. 
 The bishops were encouraged to appeal to Rome 
 under the conviction that their causes would be 
 more justly adjudged, than if they were decided 
 by some aichbishop, or metropolitan, or were re- 
 ferred to the king's court. 
 
 But how to accomplish this result was the dif- 
 ficulty. In those days, men did not reason upon 
 the subject and enact a law because it was in ac- 
 cordance with justice or right. It was necessary 
 to show, if possible, that such had always been 
 the law of the Church from the time of the 
 apostles. If the origin of law could be buried in 
 the mists of antiquity, beyond which no eye 
 could reach, then the reverence for it could be 
 based upon a divine right which none would dis- 
 pute. 
 
 There were those in the ninth century who were 
 equal to the emergency. It is sad to relate that 
 the papacy — the only high and universal ideal of 
 the middle ages — was driven to build up its legal 
 power over the Church by the most stupendous 
 fraud which is known to history. There appeared 
 suddenly in Germany, about the middle of the 
 ninth century, a code of laws for the government 
 
I 12 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 of the Church, in which it was made to appear 
 that the popes had possessed the right of hearing 
 appeals from the very time of the apostles. The 
 first bishops of Rome, after St. Peter, were there 
 represented as claiming this power in explicit 
 decretals ; and as they stood on the threshold of 
 the apostolic age, and embodied its spirit, the 
 inference followed that the appellate jurisdiction 
 of Rome rested upon divine right, eternal and 
 irrefragable as the law of Christ. The forgery was 
 complete and successful. No one denied or dis- 
 puted its authenticity; no one was learned enough 
 to expose the falsehoods or anachronisms with 
 which the " forged decretals " abounded ; the popes 
 accepted them as a law for the justification of 
 their action. 
 
 It might be an interesting question to discuss 
 what would have been the fortunes of the papacy 
 without the forged decretals. It is doubtful if its 
 history could have been the same. In this age 
 it is hard to make allowance for institutions which 
 call themselves divine and which yet make use of 
 deception to accomplish their ends. We need not 
 ask in this case where the responsibility of the 
 falsehood lies. Of course, primarily upon the 
 monk who, in the silence and secrecy of his cell, 
 forged the document which received universal 
 credence upon its appearance. Of the inner his- 
 tory of the forgery we know but little, nor is it 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 1 1 3 
 
 certain that the popes knew it to be a fraud. 
 This pretended legislation fell in so naturally and 
 easily with what they believed ought to have 
 been the law of the Church, that they may be 
 pardoned for the willing credulity with which they 
 accepted and acted upon its principles. And 
 Europe for the most part was also in the same 
 situation. 
 
 Two hundred years had passed away since the 
 forged decretals appeared and the bishops of Rome 
 had made little or no progress toward the accom- 
 plishment of their ideal vision. They desired to 
 see the Church in Europe one vast organization, 
 governed by a responsible head, who should be 
 strong enough to protect the clergy everwhere in 
 the exercise of their sacred functions, strong 
 enough to resist encroachments upon their rights, 
 courageous to speak for truth and righteousness 
 despite the opposition of all earthly powers. 
 In the eleventh century, the age of the Norman 
 conquest, there rose up a pope, in some respects 
 the master mind of his age — a man who would 
 have been famous in any age. Hildebrand, or by 
 his ecclesiastical title Pope Gregory VII., con- 
 trolled the policy of Rome for thirty years before 
 he assumed the tiara. It is supposed that William 
 the Conqueror had papal permission to make the 
 conquest of England through Hildebrand's influ- 
 ence, and that the reigning pope was merely his 
 
ii 4 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 spokesman. Hiidebrand deserves to be called 
 great, because he read his age so clearly. He saw 
 that the Church could never become an universal 
 Christian empire, a theocracy accomplishing the 
 will of God on earth, unless the civil power, the 
 princes, the kings and emperors were first made 
 subject to its control. Everywhere he looked he 
 saw that the State stood in the way of the Church. 
 Because the Church had grown rich in lands and 
 revenues, it was a constant temptation to kings 
 and princes to use the Church and its endow- 
 ments in order to secure civil ends. It seemed 
 to Hiidebrand as if the Church were desecrated 
 and robbed of its divine strength, by having any 
 connection with the State. As he reasoned on 
 the subject, the spiritual was higher and more im- 
 portant than the secular or worldly, the ecclesi- 
 astical interests were eternal while those of the 
 State were temporal. The policy outlined in his 
 far-seeing mind was a stupendous effort for one 
 man to attempt. He saw that the Church must 
 first be separated from the State, owning no con- 
 nection with or allegiance to the civil power; and 
 then that the States of Europe must be made 
 subject to the direct power of God on earth, as 
 represented by the Bishop of Rome. It was 
 another mark of the greatness of Hiidebrand that 
 he believed in the success of an effort to accom- 
 plish this vast revolution. Hiidebrand combined 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 the capacity of the most astute of politicians, with 
 the mood of a divine dreamer, who lives not for 
 himself, but for God. In his words, contained in 
 the bull by which he excommunicated the German 
 emperor, we have revealed to us the extent of his 
 ambitious purpose : " Come, now, I pray you, O 
 most Holy Father, and princes (Peter and Paul), 
 that all the world may know that if you are able 
 to bind and loose in heaven, you are able on earth 
 to take away or to give to each according to his 
 merits, empires, kingdoms, duchies, marquisates, 
 counties and the possessions of all men." Hilde- 
 brand was sincere in his belief that this power had 
 been committed to him, and that to resist his will 
 was to defy the authority of God. He stands at 
 the beginning of a new era in Europe, the age of 
 the papal supremacy, a dominion which endured 
 for 300 years. With this age coincides the Nor- 
 man period in the history of the Church of Eng- 
 land. It shall be in England that we follow the 
 popes, until they achieve their purpose. 
 
 The first step which was taken toward sepa- 
 rating the Church from the State was the enforce- 
 ment of clerical celibacy — an ideal of the Middle 
 Ages which had not yet been realized. So long 
 as the clergy were married they would be inter- 
 ested in the fortunes of the State and dependent 
 upon the well-being of the State for the advancement 
 of themselves and their children ; but a celibate cler- 
 
u6 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 gy, having no interest in the State, would become 
 devoted exclusively to the Church. Up to this time 
 the clergy in England had for the most part been 
 married. Hildebrand's decree of celibacy was car- 
 ried out against their will ; and though there must 
 have been more exceptions to its enforcement in 
 England than elsewhere, it became the law of the 
 English Church. The Norman conqueror in this 
 respect sympathized with the papal policy, as did 
 also his Norman followers. They brought with 
 them to England the idea prevailing upon the 
 Continent, that duty to the Church demanded 
 this sacrifice of all who ministered at its altars. 
 
 There was also another law which Hildebrand 
 promulgated, and which he was not so successful 
 in enforcing, at least in England — a law the pro- 
 mulgation of which gave rise to a long and violent 
 controversy, known as the Investiture Contro- 
 versy. We shall better understand its nature by 
 following the course of events in England. 
 
 Although William the Conqueror had procured 
 the approval of the pope for the conquest of Eng- 
 land, yet after he was established there he did not 
 propose that the pope should interfere with his 
 authority. The pope also was prudent, and re- 
 frained from interfering with William, while he 
 violated the law, for whose infraction he dared 
 to excommunicate the Emperor of Germany. 
 The theory on which William governed England 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 1 17 
 
 is known as Feudalism. It assumed that all the 
 lands of the country belonged to the king. The 
 king had given these lands to his subjects on cer- 
 tain conditions, among the foremost of which was 
 the understanding that the tenant or vassal should 
 aid the king in his wars, by furnishing a certain 
 contingent of soldiers equipped for his army. 
 The great question of the hour was whether the 
 Church lands should also be held on the same ten- 
 ure. Were the bishops and the heads of great 
 monasteries, the king's men, and were they also 
 bound in return for lands which they held, to ren- 
 der the vassal's service and to aid the monarch 
 with their revenues? If the spiritual nobility, 
 like the secular lords, were vassals to the king, 
 then it followed that lands and other property 
 which had been given to the Church still belonged 
 primarily to the king. It was the king's pleasure 
 to allot these lands to the Church on fixed condi- 
 tions, and these conditions implied that the arch- 
 bishop or bishop should do homage to the king 
 in order to be invested with the dignities and rev- 
 enues of their sees. It must be remembered that 
 at this time in England the Church held nearly 
 one-third of all the lands of the kingdom. The 
 king would have felt impoverished and unable to 
 carry on his constant wars, or to reward his sub- 
 jects who had done him service, had one-third of 
 his territory been alienated from his control. 
 
1 1 s 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 William the Conqueror had no doubt upon the 
 , question. He claimed the Church's lands as be- 
 longing to the crown. He regarded the bishops 
 as great feudatories quite as truly as the secular 
 lords. He proceeded to put his friends and ser- 
 vants in possession of the lands of the Church 
 without much regard to their spiritual fitness for 
 the position. The bishops became courtiers, 
 holding by feudal tenure, and the only distinction 
 between them and the secular lords was the at- 
 taching of what were called spiritual duties to the 
 conditions on which they were entitled to their 
 office and revenues. But the qualification for 
 spiritual duties came last. In the impressive cer- 
 emonial by which, as Mr. Freeman has shown, the 
 bishops qualified for their position, first came the 
 act of homage to the king, in which the bishop 
 designate, kneeling before the king and placing 
 his hands in the king's hands, swore to be an 
 obedient vassal to his overlord. The act of hom- 
 age was followed by the enthronement or investi. 
 ture, when the king presented him with the staff 
 and ring as the symbols of his office. After these 
 ceremonies he was spiritually qualified in the act 
 of consecration by bishops who represented the 
 Church's part in the transaction. It shows how 
 great the change is which has since taken place, 
 that in the present method of making a bishop 
 in the English Church, consecration by the bish- 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 110 
 
 ops comes first, then follows the enthronement or 
 investiture with the dignities and revenues of the 
 see, and lastly comes the act of homage to the 
 throne. 
 
 It was Hildebrand or Pope Gregory VII. who 
 attempted to overcome this doctrine that the 
 high dignitaries of the Church were the king's 
 men. He regarded the property of the Church 
 as belonging solely to God, and to the pope as the 
 head of His Church in the world. The bishops 
 were primarily the pope's men and not the king's 
 men ; they must be invested with the rights of 
 their office by religious authority and not by the 
 civil power. For the king to claim the Church's 
 lands was robbery and sacrilege. For the bishop 
 to allow himself to be invested with ring and staff 
 by the secular power was to be guilty of simony, 
 as when Simon Magus, in the apostles' time, 
 sought to purchase the gifts of God with money. 
 
 Thus arose the great controversy about inves- 
 titure, which lasted for more than a generation, 
 and which finally ended in a compromise ; for 
 there was right on both sides of the question, and 
 the papacy was unable to carry out Hildebrand's 
 decree without some qualification of its sweeping 
 purpose. Hildebrand had excommunicated and 
 humiliated at Canossa the Emperor of Germany 
 for daring to invest his bishops with the symbols 
 of their office. But William the Conqueror was 
 
t2Q 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 at a distance, strongly entrenched in his posses- 
 sion, and Hildebrand thought it imprudent to in- 
 terfere. It would be unwise, even for him, to 
 have more than one quarrel at a time with the 
 monarchs of Europe. So William was left to his 
 own devices. He filled up the sees of England at 
 his pleasure, offering them as rewards to his faith- 
 ful servants, who accepted them as a feudal tenure 
 with their spiritual duties attached as a sort of 
 secondary consideration. 
 
 William the Conqueror died in 1087. He was 
 succeeded by his son, William II., or William 
 Riifus, as he is generally called, who not only fol- 
 lowed his father's policy in the matter of investi- 
 ture, but went beyond his father in his claims of 
 authority over the Church. The first William 
 had lived on terms of amity with his archbishop 
 Lanfranc, and both had labored together in the in- 
 terest of consolidating the English nation. Will- 
 iam the Conqueror, like David among the kings 
 of Israel, had known how to adjust himself with 
 the prophetic office as represented in the great see 
 at Canterbury. Lanfranc, although an Italian, 
 was a true yoke-fellow to his king, laboring with 
 him for the strengthening of the kingly authority, 
 and not neglectful of the well-being of the Church. 
 We can hardly speak of England yet as a nation, 
 but William and Lanfranc were unconsciously im- 
 pelled by that subtle leaven of influence which 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 \2\ 
 
 had been an active force in earlier history, and 
 which was destined to work until England should 
 become foremost among the nations of the earth. 
 We are chiefly impressed, as we study this period 
 of English history, with the power and triumphs 
 of the papacy, as it moved steadily on to the ful- 
 filment of its purpose. And yet the real interest 
 lies, not in this temporary sway of a theocratic 
 emperor of Christendom, but in the silent and im- 
 perceptible steps by which the conquered English 
 were assimilated to their Norman conquerors, un- 
 til they became one people ; the most absorbing 
 study is to watch the process by which the Eng- 
 lish spirit vindicates itself against all foreign influ- 
 ences. And at last the English nation has come 
 to the birth, richer and fuller for the invasions and 
 humiliations which it has undergone. 
 
 But we must pause yet for a few moments 
 longer upon this great duel between the English 
 throne and the Roman pope before the utterance 
 of the national consciousness is heard.* 
 
 William Rufus was inferior to his father not 
 only as a king but as a man. He has been called 
 the worst, the most thoroughly wicked king who 
 
 * There are several lives of Anselm, in which the story of 
 his struggle with the crown is related ; among others those 
 of Dean Church, Rule, Hasse and Remusat. The best ac- 
 count, to which I am chiefly indebted, is given in Freeman's 
 History of William Rufus, Vol. I. 
 
] 22 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 ever wore the English crown. It is sometimes 
 questioned whether there were any skepticisms in 
 these ages of faith. But William Rufus was not 
 only skeptical about religion, he was also a blas- 
 phemer and a hater of God, determined, as he ex- 
 pressed it, to have his vengeance upon God for 
 all the evil that he suffered at His hands. He was 
 not only this, but he was a man of the foulest life, 
 introducing nameless vices into England which 
 had been before unknown, except in the east and 
 in the degraded times of the Roman Empire. It 
 was a strange coincidence that such a man should 
 be associated with an Archbishop of Canterbury 
 like Anselm, the greatest saint of his age, the one 
 man of all others who penetrated most deeply 
 in that time into the higher mysteries of the 
 Christian faith. 
 
 Anselm, too, was a foreigner, a native of Italy 
 who, wandering away from his native village in 
 Piedmont, had turned up in Normandy at the 
 Monastery of Bee. When Lanfranc, its former 
 abbot, was promoted to the See of Canterbury, 
 Anselm had succeeded him as the head of the 
 monastery. He had been known and liked by 
 William the Conqueror, who had the gift, it is 
 said, of discerning and loving men who were good 
 at heart. In this way William Rufus had come to 
 be acquainted with Anselm. If there was one re- 
 deeming trait in the character of William Rufus 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 123 
 
 it was his reverence for the memory of his father. 
 This fondness of his father for Anselm had some- 
 thing to do with his becoming the Primate of all 
 England. 
 
 Anselm is generally known in Church history as 
 the greatest theologian of the time, as a master in 
 dialectics, and the founder of what is called the 
 Scholastic philosophy. He is not generally asso- 
 ciated with England in our minds, when we think 
 of him in his theological and philosophical capacity. 
 Perhaps England has no right to claim him as her 
 own in this respect. For great as has been the 
 history of the English Church, it has not been her 
 mission to produce theologians of the highest or- 
 der. Each nation has its special calling in the 
 vineyard of God. It has been the work of Ger- 
 many to produce great theologians rather than to 
 create an ecclesiastical organization. The call of 
 England has lain in the direction of building up 
 a great national Church, — the reflex of the spirit- 
 ual life of its people. As England gave birth to 
 no great monastic orders, so her greatest theolo- 
 gian was also an importation from abroad, deriving 
 his motive and his culture from a foreign source. 
 But his connection with the English Church is 
 nevertheless a close one, and the story of his rela- 
 tion to the line of our history is interesting in the 
 highest degree. 
 
124 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 William Rufus not only accepted his father's 
 doctrine, that the lands of the Church belonged 
 primarily to the crown, but he made a further ap- 
 plication of the principle which shocked the moral 
 sense of the people. Claiming for his own the 
 lands and revenues of the sees and monasteries, 
 he declared that it rested with his mere pleasure 
 when they should be filled after the death of their 
 occupants, or whether they should be filled at all. 
 In case they were filled, it should be by those who 
 were willing by rich presents and easy terms to 
 make it an object for him to do so. After the 
 death of Archbishop Lanfranc he allowed the See 
 of Canterbury to remain vacant for five years, as- 
 serting his purpose to be his own archbishop. 
 During these years he rented the lands of Canter- 
 bury to his own creatures, on his own terms, and 
 appropriated to his own use the revenues. It 
 seems as if he would have maintained this attitude 
 throughout his reign, had he not been taken with 
 a grievous sickness, which threatened his life and 
 brought him to repentance. Under these circum- 
 stances he appointed Anselm, who happened to be 
 in England at the time, as Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, in the year 1093. 
 
 When Anselm became primate of all England, 
 he did not share in the views which Hildebrand 
 was proclaiming, that the Church should be sepa- 
 rated from the State, and the State be subordi- 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 125 
 
 nated to ecclesiastical rule. He stipulated with 
 the king that he would take the office, which he 
 did not seek and did not want, on condition that 
 the king would restore to the Church the posses- 
 sions which had belonged to it in the days of his 
 predecessor, Lanfranc. To this condition the 
 king in his softened mood consented. Other 
 conditions also Anselm had proposed, to which it 
 is not so clear that the king assented — that the 
 king would take him for his spiritual adviser, and 
 also that he would recognize Pope Urban, who 
 was then struggling with a rival claimant for the 
 papal throne. So Anselm was made archbishop 
 in the usual way, doing homage to the king and 
 swearing obedience, receiving the ring and staff as 
 symbols of his investiture with the possessions of 
 his see, and then, lastly, consecrated by the bish- 
 ops in order to his qualification for his spiritual 
 functions., 
 
 Anselm had foreseen the difficulties which he 
 would encounter in the execution of his office un- 
 der such a king as William Rufus. He made use 
 of an illustration which clearly shows how the two 
 offices of king and primate then stood related to 
 each other in the popular mind. " If," he re- 
 marked, " the field of the Church of England is 
 to be cultivated, two of the strongest oxen must 
 draw the plough, — the king and the archbishop, 
 the former by his worldly authority and rule, the 
 
126 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 latter by spiritual instruction and guidance." He 
 compared himself to an old and feeble sheep 
 yoked to an ox in all the wildness of youth, and 
 there would be danger that the ox would drag the 
 sheep through hedges of thorns and brambles, un- 
 til the lambs of the flock had perished. The sig- 
 nificance of the illustration lies in this,— that An- 
 selm allowed to the king an equal share with him- 
 self in the cultivation of the field of the Church of 
 England. All this was soon to be changed, and 
 Anselm was to become the agent of the change. 
 I dwell upon the story because in it may be seen 
 the transition of the popular sentiment by which 
 the pope became supreme in England. 
 
 The repentance of William Rufus was not of 
 long duration. When he recovered from his ill- 
 ness he fell back again to his evil ways. He re- 
 fused to listen to Anselm, who remonstrated with 
 him in his capacity as spiritual adviser; he robbed 
 theChurchinorderto find means to carry on his sin- 
 ful pleasures ; he refused to fill the monasteries with 
 abbots who would promote discipline ; he neglected 
 to appoint bishops and claimed the revenues of 
 the vacant sees. When Anselm urged him to 
 recognize Urban as pope he declined, for he 
 wanted no interference from that source with his 
 policy. At last, when Anselm asked permission 
 to go to Rome to get the pallium, the token of 
 his recognition by the Bishop of Rome, William 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 i-7 
 
 refused his consent. It shows the character of the 
 king, that, perceiving how Anselm had right on 
 his side in this request, he finally sent to Rome 
 secretly, recognized Urban and had the pallium 
 brought to England by a papal messenger. At 
 first it was proposed that Anselm should receive 
 it at the hands of the king. When he declined 
 to do this the pallium was laid on the altar of the 
 great church at Canterbury, from whence Anselm 
 took it with his own hands. 
 
 There was now a state of open rupture between 
 the archbishop and the king. The king showed 
 his displeasure in ways that annoyed his yoke- 
 fellow and hindered his performance of his spirit- 
 ual duty. He sent out of the country the friends 
 and sympathizers of Anselm. He steadily refused 
 to allow any synod to be held for the reformation 
 of manners and discipline. Under these circum- 
 stances it is not strange that the soul of Anselm 
 went through an inward transition which was 
 typical of an impending revolution. He became 
 hopeless of the situation and looked away from 
 the kingdom for relief. He now began to muse 
 upon the pope and his relation to the universal 
 Church. "Rome seen at a distance seemed pure 
 and holy; its pontiff seemed the one embodiment 
 of right and law, the one shadow of God left upon 
 the earth in a world of force and falsehood and 
 wrong." It was a circumstance of deep signifi- 
 
128 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 cance for the fortunes of the English Church when 
 Anselm fell to thinking about the pope. From 
 that time the spirit of the man began to change. 
 On three occasions he asked permission of the 
 king to go to Rome, and each time the king, re- 
 fusing his consent, grew more incensed against 
 him. Then Anselm announced his intention to 
 go without consent even though, as the king 
 threatened, the archbishopric should be taken 
 from him. On these terms the archbishop parted 
 from the king. 
 
 William Rufus died while Anselm was absent an 
 exile from his see. When Anselm returned he 
 came back an altered man. He had seen some- 
 thing of the power of the Church abroad ; he had 
 embraced the theory of Hildebrand; he had par- 
 ticipated in two councils at which secular investi- 
 ture had been condemned, and those who dared 
 perform it threatened with excommunication. 
 When King Henry I., who succeeded William 
 Rufus, demanded of Anselm the customary oath 
 of allegiance in order that he might receive anew 
 the archbishopric at his hands, Anselm refused to 
 promise obedience and was again in open rupture 
 with the royal authority. The mild and saintly 
 man who had submitted so patiently to the insults 
 of William Rufus now stood ready to excommuni- 
 cate his successor for encroaching upon his spirit- 
 ual authority. Under the moral influence of An- 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 I2 9 
 
 selm the sentiment grew in the kingdom that the 
 king should have no part in cultivating the field 
 of the Church. Spiritual things were for spiritual 
 men. The Church, since it controlled spiritual 
 and eternal destinies, must be independent of the 
 State in order to realize its mission. It shows how 
 the Church had gained on the State, that Anselm 
 was able to hold the king in check by fear of ec- 
 clesiastical penalties. Had the Pope Paschal, 
 come to the aid of the archbishop, the humilia- 
 tion of the king might have been accomplished. 
 But Paschal's situation, like that of Hildebrand, 
 had its difficulties. Even the popes, claiming the 
 supreme government of the world, were hampered 
 by the limitations of worldly policy. The Em- 
 peror of Germany, Henry IV., was still giving the 
 pope so much trouble that he was obliged to com- 
 promise the case between Henry of England, and 
 his archbishop. Anselm did not carry his point. 
 According to the terms of the compromise the king 
 retained the really important part of investiture — 
 the oaths of fealty and homage, while resigning 
 the idle symbol of the gift of ring and crozier. 
 But in the light of those intangible sentiments 
 which govern the opinion of mankind, the Church 
 had gained and the State had lost. It was a vic- 
 tory in itself, as the tides were then running, that 
 an archbishop of Canterbury had defied the king 
 of England and still retained possession of his see. 
 
ISO 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 The Church had vindicated its spiritual indepen- 
 dence, overcoming the danger which threatened 
 it, of becoming a mere appanage of the crown. 
 The gain was a real one for the cause of true re- 
 ligion, even though it inevitably promoted the 
 civil supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. 
 
 The conflict of Anselm with the kings of Eng- 
 land represents one stage in the process by which 
 the popes achieved supremacy over the States of 
 Europe. The principle at issue in this conflict 
 had been the separation of the Church from the 
 State in order to the freedom and independence 
 of the Church. But hardly had this result been 
 secured when the scene changes and the papacy 
 appears as claiming that authority over the State 
 which the State had been condemned for seeking 
 io exercise over the Church. In following the 
 steps of the process by which the popes attained 
 their end in England, we are led to consider the 
 question of ecclesiastical courts, which created the 
 necessity of an appeal to the papacy as having su- 
 preme appellate jurisdiction. 
 
 In the happier adjustment of the relations of 
 Church and State during the Anglo-Saxon period, 
 there had been but one mode of legal procedure 
 for clerics and for laymen. All cases were brought 
 before a mixed tribunal composed of the highest 
 ecclesiastical and lay dignitaries of the kingdom, 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 131 
 
 to whose decision the clergy yielded as final no less 
 than the laity. It was not thought improper that 
 a layman should take part in adjudging questions 
 which concerned the spiritual interests of the 
 kingdom. 
 
 When William the Conqueror came to England, 
 he brought with him another practice, which pre- 
 vailed on the continent. He set up ecclesiastical 
 courts presided over by bishops, with exclusive 
 jurisdiction in the case of ecclesiastical offenders 
 who were thus emancipated from secular tribun- 
 als. These spiritual or ecclesiastical courts have 
 a curious history. They seem to have originated 
 with the advice of St. Paul to the Corinthians : — 
 
 " Dare any of you, having a matter against his neighbor, 
 to go to law before the unrighteous and not before the 
 saints ? Know ye not that the saints shall judge the world, 
 and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to 
 judge the smallest matters ? Know ye not that we shall 
 judge angels, how much more things that pertain to this life? 
 If then ye have to judge things pertaining to this life, do 
 ye set them to judge who are of no account in the church? 
 Is it so that there cannot be found among you one just man 
 who shall be able to decide between his brethren, but brother 
 goes to law with brother, and that before unbelievers ? " 
 
 It was these words which became the warrant 
 for the establishment of spiritual or ecclesiastical 
 courts, in contrast with the civil or the king's 
 courts. One hardly need stop to comment on the 
 inapplicability of the apostle's words. They were 
 
1 32 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 spoken when the great world was heathen, when 
 the Church formed a small circle of believers 
 hemmed in by hostile sentiment. But after the 
 world had become Christian, to go to law before 
 lay judges, was not to go before unbelievers or 
 unspiritual men. And further, St. Paul spoke to 
 the laity, the people of Corinth ; but the Church 
 applied his principle only to the clergy. It was 
 the clergy alone in the Middle Ages, who were 
 regarded as constituting the saints, to whom the 
 title of religious or spiritual belonged. The laity 
 still belonged to the world, and were spoken of as 
 camales, carnal men, in contrast with the clergy, 
 who were spirituales. 
 
 We have in these so-called spiritual courts, the 
 germ of the papacy as a supreme court of appeals. 
 For if each bishop was to hold his courts, and 
 above the bishops' courts were the courts of the 
 metropolitan or archbishop, it was necessary that 
 the final appeal should be taken either to the king 
 or to the Bishop of Rome. The kings, as we 
 know, at a later time resisted the appeal to 
 Rome. But the principle had been established 
 by the forged decretals that the final appeal 
 in all grave cases should go to Rome ; and 
 the sentiment of the clergy for the most part 
 favored the practice of going to the spiritual head 
 of the Church, as the surest means of redress in 
 their troubles. Justice is not always an easy thing 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 133 
 
 to secure in this world. It is not strange that the 
 clergy, appreciating keenly the injustice of na- 
 tional tribunals, should have cherished the ideal 
 of a justice which might be had beyond the sea, 
 in the distant and larger world of the Bishop of 
 Rome. It needed only that Rome should be 
 given a fair opportunity to show the world its 
 conception of justice, in order that so delusive a 
 sentiment should forever disappear. 
 
 When Henry II. came to the throne in 1 154, he 
 was confronted with the difficulties springing from 
 these ecclesiastical courts. The times in which he 
 reigned were full of lawlessness, confusion, and 
 misery ; a strong king was needed, who could es- 
 tablish a powerful government and good order. 
 Such a man was Henry II., possessing sagacity 
 and courage and a legal judicial mind. The con- 
 solidation of the people into one nation, by which 
 the distinction between Norman and English dis- 
 appeared, is generally placed to his Credit. In his 
 reign an Englishman ascended the papal throne, 
 Nicholas Breakspar, under the name of Adrian 
 IV., — the only Englishman who ever attained the 
 honor. The connection between England and 
 Rome became in consequence closer than it had 
 been before. It is a circumstance which deserves 
 to be recalled, that Pope Adrian made a grant of 
 the schismatical country of Ireland to the English 
 king— a circumstance which the generous hearts 
 
134 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 of our Irish brethren have never treasured up 
 against the holy father. They are prepared rather 
 to resent its acceptance by the king than its gift 
 by the pope. 
 
 It was one of the projects of Henry II. to curb 
 the power of the Church, which had been growing 
 stronger in the kingdom since the days of An- 
 selm, and which now threatened the rightful pre- 
 rogatives of the king and the well-being of the 
 State. With his inherent love of justice, the king 
 was offended with the ecclesiastical courts in 
 which the clergy took refuge, escaping the penal- 
 ties which they would have suffered in the secular 
 courts. In his attempts to bring the clergy to 
 justice, he was opposed and thwarted by Thomas 
 a Becket, who had formerly been his chancellor 
 and his intimate friend, but who as Archbishop of 
 Canterbury became his mortal foe. A bad case of 
 clerical justice was the first occasion of the Quar- 
 rel. A clerk by the name of Philip Brois had 
 committed a murder and received no punishment. 
 The civil courts had claimed to try the case and 
 found him guilty ; but Becket had insisted that 
 he should be withdrawn from the secular jurisdic- 
 tion, and had sentenced him to two years' de- 
 prival of his benefice. It was this incident which 
 is said to have determined the king to restore the 
 ancient customs of the country, when the clergy 
 were amenable to the civil jurisdiction. At a great 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 135 
 
 council held at Clarendon in 1 164, what are known 
 as the Clarendon Constitutions were enacted, 
 which embodied the king's views, — what may be 
 called the national view of the king's authority. 
 According to the Clarendon Constitutions crimi- 
 nal cases among the clergy were to be determined 
 in the king's court. Other laws were also en- 
 acted, such as that bishops should not leave the 
 country without the king's consent, nor should 
 they be allowed to excommunicate the king's 
 men ; and newly elected bishops were to swear 
 fealty to the king. 
 
 These statutes Becket at first refused to sign ; 
 afterwards he signed them and then retracted his 
 signature, appealing to the pope to absolve him 
 for his sin in yielding. He now carried his 
 case to Rome as Anselm had done before him ; 
 he took his stand upon the forged decretals in op- 
 position to the law of the kingdom ; he declared 
 that he placed himself and the Church under the 
 guardianship of the pope and of God. Leaving 
 the kingdom, as Anselm had done, he remained 
 abroad, resisting the king and vainly expecting 
 aid from a pope who was too busy or too prudent 
 to give him the support for which he asked. 
 
 It is unnecessary to repeat the familiar story of 
 Thomas a Becket. He long continued to defy 
 the king, and his actions were so irritating and 
 exasperating as to drive the king into a frenzy 
 
i 3 6 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 which he could not control. Whether the king 
 was responsible for his murder is doubtful. As 
 the story goes, certain of the king's attendants, 
 supposing, from his language, that he would be 
 pleased to be rid of Becket altogether, assassin- 
 ated the archbishop near the altar of Canterbury 
 cathedral, on the eventful day, December 29, 11 70. 
 It depends somewhat on our sympathies, whether 
 they are with Church or State, as to the estimate 
 which we shall place on the fate of Thomas a 
 Becket. By some, notably Mr. Froude, his death 
 has been treated as a righteous punishment for 
 his treachery to the highest interests of the nation ; 
 by others he has been regarded as a martyr dying 
 in a holy cause. The distinguished historian, Mr. 
 Freeman, who is entitled to speak with authority, 
 thinks that the principle for which Becket died 
 was not the authority of the pope over the Church, 
 but some minor point growing out of his belief 
 that the prerogatives of the See of Canterbury had 
 been invaded, so that in reality he died in the in- 
 terests of a national cause. It is certain that he 
 carried with him the sympathy of the people in 
 his opposition to the crown. It is possible that 
 the confused and complicated situation may yet 
 be so read as to reveal Becket in the light of a 
 friend of the people, with the cause of the people 
 as the issue for which he staked his life. In those 
 days the people as a force in civil society as yet 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 *37 
 
 hardly existed. It may be that they were not 
 wrong in rallying round the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury as their hope against oppression — the only 
 man in the kingdom who could defy the king. 
 
 But however this may be, the death of Becket 
 did more for the cause of the Church against the 
 State than his life would have done. He became 
 the typical martyr in the popular estimation not 
 only of England, but of Europe. In Becket Eng- 
 land gave to western Christendom the most in- 
 fluential saint of the middle ages; no shrine in 
 Europe was so rich or so attractive to the pilgrim 
 as the shrine of Becket in the Canterbury cathe- 
 dral ; and so it remained until the age of the Ref- 
 ormation. 
 
 The murder of Becket was followed by the 
 humiliation of the king. He had already suffered 
 one humiliation while the archbishop was still liv- 
 ing, when, kneeling before him, he had held his 
 stirrup as he mounted his horse, — a token that 
 the civil power recognized its inferiority to the 
 ecclesiastical. When Becket was murdered the 
 outcry in England and throughout Europe made 
 Henry aware that he had lost his cause. Over- 
 come by this sentiment he undertook a pilgrimage 
 to Becket's tomb, and there submitted to the pen- 
 ance imposed upon him. A night and a day were 
 spent in prayer and tears, imploring the interces- 
 sion in heaven of him who had been his enemy on 
 
138 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 earth. The bitter fruit of this victory of the 
 Church, it now remained forEngland to realize 
 
 H.therto the popes had refrained from inter- 
 fering with the struggles in England which were 
 subjecting the nation to its control. But when 
 Innocent III. mounted the papal throne in nog 
 he undertook the task which his predecessors had 
 neglected. Disposing of all other affairs which 
 might embarrass him, he turned his attention to 
 England with the purpose of bringing that refrac- 
 tory kingdom into formal submission to the au 
 thority of Rome. The moment was a propitious 
 one. King John had made himself obnoxious by 
 his tyranny to the people, to the great barons 
 and also to the dignitaries of the Church. When 
 Innocent proceeded, contrary to the customs of 
 the English Church, to appoint Stephen Langton 
 his old friend, to be archbishop of Canterbury and 
 the appointment was resisted by John, the pope 
 issued the ban and interdict which freed the sub- 
 jects of the king from their oath of allegiance, 
 and forbade also the performance of Church ser- 
 vices throughout the kingdom with the exception 
 of baptism and extreme unction. In the year 
 1209 he excommunicated the king. For nearly 
 two years John continued his opposition despite 
 the action of the pope and his desertion by the 
 clergy. But when France began to prepare an 
 army for the purpose of invading the kingdom 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 J 39 
 
 and driving him from his throne, the spirit of the 
 man was overcome and he stooped to the lowest 
 degradation. He resigned the crown of England 
 and Ireland into the hands of the papal legate and 
 received it back again as a gift of pure grace on 
 the part of the pope, to be held henceforth as a 
 papal fief on condition of the payment of an 
 annual tribute of a thousand marks. 
 
 Such was the humiliation of England at the 
 hands of the great Pope, Innocent III., who re- 
 garded himself as the sun shining by his own in- 
 herent light, while the kingdoms of Europe were 
 regarded as satellites or planets shining with his 
 reflected light. It was the custom of the popes to 
 apply to themselves the large language of the in- 
 spired Psalms of David. A favorite passage was 
 the language of the second Psalm : The kings of 
 the earth stand up and the rulers take counsel to- 
 gether against the Lord and against His anointed. 
 Hildebrand on his death-bed applied to himself 
 the words : / have loved righteousness and hated 
 iniquity, therefore I die in exile. The attendant 
 priest encouraged him, " Thou canst not die in 
 exile, vicar of Christ and His apostle ; thou hast 
 the heathen for thine inheritance and the uttermos 
 parts <f the earth for thy possession." It was a 
 favorite passage with Innocent the Great : The 
 righteous sh ill have dominion over them in the 
 morning. Though thou hast lain among the pots, 
 
1 40 THE NORMA A r PER 10 D 
 
 yet shalt thou be as the wings of a dove, wMch 
 hath silver wings and her feathers like gold. 
 
 A few years ago, in the pages of the Nineteenth 
 Century, in which educated Englishmen carry 
 on a sort of private conversation before the 
 world, Cardinal Manning re-told the story of 
 Innocent and King John, asking the English peo- 
 ple, if it would not be for the interests of the 
 nation to have such a fatherly adviser restored to 
 his authority, who by his word could check disor- 
 der and misrule. But the Cardinal had forgotten 
 the episode of Magna Charta, in which the op- 
 pressed and humiliated people asserted their 
 rights— the charter of English liberties to our 
 own day. Innocent had protested against the 
 Charter, and done his utmost to prevent its ac- 
 ceptance. When the distinguished Cardinal was 
 reminded of this circumstance, he replied that 
 Pope Innocent had not probably read the charter 
 and was ignorant of its real meaning and pur- 
 pose. 
 
 It is one of the wonderful anomalies of human 
 life, which may lend consolation in the hour of 
 defeat and humiliation, that seeming victories 
 sometimes promote the cause which ostensibly 
 they have crushed. The conquest of the pope over 
 the English nation was a crisis in its history from 
 which date the movements that gave England the 
 ultimate victory. 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 I 4 I 
 
 It only needed that the Church of Rome as em- 
 bodied in the pope should achieve the end for 
 which it labored in order that the falseness and 
 untenability of its ambitious project should stand 
 revealed. From this time on the interest of Eng- 
 lish history lies in tracing the steps by which the 
 nation grew and the papacy declined. The impos- 
 sibility of one man's ruling all the states of Eu- 
 rope became increasingly manifest. The papacy 
 was a mischievous thing, because of its impossi- 
 bility. We cannot see very far into the future, 
 but one thing we can see, and should most de- 
 voutly believe, that God's will is that nationalities 
 should be regarded as a sacred end in themselves. 
 God has appointed that the peoples of the world 
 should dwell in certain large families which we call 
 nations. Here is an ultimate result in the divine 
 purpose beyond which we cannot go. 
 
 There is a mystery about the' birth and growth 
 of a nation which we cannot always trace in the 
 complicated process which it involves. It is true 
 of states, as it is of individuals, that history seems 
 careful of the national type, while careless of the 
 individual nation. There are many attempts at 
 achieving nationality and but few successes. The 
 papacy had risen in Europe when nations were 
 struggling to their birth or were still in the weak- 
 ness of infancy. Everywhere the papacy stood 
 for resistance to the growth of the national con- 
 
142 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 sciousness. The whole system of the Roman 
 canon law, from the time of the forged decretals 
 conspired to hinder, to crush, if it were possible,' 
 the rising instinct which was urging the different 
 peoples of Europe to the attainment of national 
 independence. The question may arise what use- 
 ful purpose, in a world where God is ruling, such 
 an institution as the papacy may have subserved. 
 It is best to be fair always in discussing such a 
 question, for we gain nothing by sacrificing or ob- 
 scuring the truth. Let us admit, then, that the 
 papacy may have served some useful ends, in the 
 divine economy. If it served no other purpose, 
 it stood as a resisting force, against which the 
 nations threw themselves, an obstacle which they 
 must overcome, in order to their successful asser- 
 tion of national existence. Purification of the na- 
 tional purpose, the clear consciousness of a divine 
 call, must be reached by a struggle with such oppo- 
 sition as the papacy presented. But other ends 
 were also served by the papacy. It held the na- 
 tions together in their infancy by such close ties 
 as to give them a common likeness and sympathy, 
 a feeling of kinship which makes them a family of 
 nations in the Kingdom of God. The striking 
 difference in this respect between Europe and 
 Asia has been often remarked. In Asia, the 
 great kingdoms are separated by physical barriers 
 and by other differences, such as religion, to such 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 ■43 
 
 an extent that they have nothing in common. 
 India and China are as distinct and widely apart 
 as if they were in different hemispheres. But in 
 despite of the differences which mark them, there 
 is a spirit of community among the nations of Eu- 
 rope, which, though it cannot altogether prevent 
 hostility and war, is yet a basis for the growth of 
 the large sense of humanity — the promise of the 
 ultimate unity of the family of God. 
 
 Whatever may have been the evils of the papal 
 dominion — and they were great — yet individual 
 popes were capable of disinterested action, and 
 did not always abuse their power. The papacy 
 served as a court of arbitration between monarch- 
 ies and kingdoms, before any system of interna- 
 tional law had arisen, or was yet possible. Those 
 who still maintain, like Cardinal Manning, the 
 usefulness and the necessity of the papacy, fasten 
 their gaze upon circumstances like these, and feel 
 that history is unjustly read when they are sup- 
 pressed or overlooked. We, too, may then admit 
 that the papacy has served a divine end. But 
 even divine institutions may be removed by the 
 same hand that has created them, in order to give 
 place to institutions more fully charged with the 
 divine will. So Judaism, which was divinely or- 
 dered, has given way to the Christian Church, 
 while the Jew still remains unable to see that 
 progress is the law, in the evolution and revelation 
 of the will of God in the world. 
 
144 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 From the moment when the papacy attained 
 the fulness of its power, the great Protestant 
 movement began, which called for reformation 
 and ended finally in revolution. Great bishops 
 and statesmen in the English Church, who were 
 devoted to Rome and never thought of question- 
 ing its divine claim, appeared in protest against 
 the evils it engendered all through the thirteenth 
 and fourteenth centuries. Not only were things 
 no better in England, after Innocent the Great 
 had conquered the king,— they rapidly grew to be 
 worse than they had been under the most tyranni- 
 cal and irreligious of English sovereigns. Papal 
 or religious investiture brought forth no better 
 fruits than secular investiture. The Church was 
 no better off when it was robbed by the papacy 
 than when it was robbed by its own king. The 
 difference was that the money now went out of 
 the kingdom, when before it was used at home 
 and indirectly enriched the people. The English 
 Parliament complained in 1376 that five time- 
 as much money went out of the country to sup- 
 port the pope as the whole produce of the taxes 
 which accrued to the king. The popes now 
 claimed the ownership of all the benefices or 
 property of the Church. Nowhere in Europe was 
 the practice carried out to a greater extent than 
 in England, by which the best livings and digni- 
 ties were filled by the nominees of the pope 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 '4 5 
 
 In England it was almost like another foreign 
 invasion, when Italian and Spanish and French 
 priests were everywhere found in English monas- 
 teries as priors or abbots, in English canonries 
 and English bishoprics. They did not under- 
 stand the language of the people, they did not in 
 many cases even deign to reside in England, but 
 simply drew the revenues of their livings. If the 
 kings had claimed gifts when they appointed high 
 dignitaries, the popes claimed still greater gifts, 
 until it almost impoverished a monastery or a 
 bishopric when it was obliged to fill a vacancy. 
 In this case it was a so-called spiritual power, pro- 
 fessing to be above the temporal, which was weak- 
 ening the Church no less than the State. 
 
 It may seem unworthy in itself that the great 
 issues of Church and State — the supremest issues 
 of human affairs should turn so largely on the 
 question of money. But money is only the sym- 
 bol of other things. Men are quick to see the 
 large evils which its improper use creates. In the 
 relations of life the highest qualities or the lowest 
 of our nature are brought to light by the use or 
 abuse of money. When a so-called spiritual power 
 appears to be covetous of wealth, or eagerly con- 
 cerned to find money for its schemes, it is degrad- 
 ing the entire ecclesiastical service of which it 
 is the head, and it will not be long before the 
 eyes of a people are opened to its hollowness and 
 
146 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 iniquity. Just as a partisan civil service is an evil 
 corrupting the life of a nation, a debased ecclesi- 
 astical service undoes the spiritual vitality of the 
 Church. 
 
 It was no doubt true that the papacy had need 
 of all the money it could raise. As it grew in 
 power and absorbed in itself the government of 
 the Church and the world, it became a more and 
 more costly thing to support. Self-government 
 in Church or State is comparatively inexpensive. 
 An absolute monarchy, such as the papacy really 
 was, may become so expensive an object to main- 
 tain that at last it may break down from its ina- 
 bility to obtain the money needed for its support. 
 
 English legislation on the affairs of the Church 
 from the thirteenth century onwards, shows a de- 
 termination to go to the root of the question in 
 regard to money. In 1279 the statute of Mort- 
 main was enacted, which forbade the transfer of 
 any landed property to the Church without the 
 king's consent. What was given to the Church 
 now began to be regarded as tending to the im- 
 poverishment of the nation. Again in 1343 there 
 was passed the Statute of Provisors which pro- 
 hibited the pope from appropriating the revenues 
 of English benefices. When the aggrieved parties 
 were found carrying their cases to Rome, it was 
 enacted, in the Statute of Praemunire in 1352, 
 that outlawry should be the penalty for carrying 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 147 
 
 pleas to Rome, which belonged to the king's 
 court. In the year 1379 an act was passed pro- 
 hibiting the holding of benefices in England by 
 foreigners. The Statute of Praemunire was again 
 confirmed in 1392, and in 1404 the two statutes 
 of Provisors and Praemunire were re-enacted, by 
 which the pope was henceforth prevented from 
 appointing to English bishoprics, and the king 
 was- forbidden to grant exceptions to the law. 
 
 But there was a deeper protest in the heart of 
 the English nation than the desire to save the 
 people from impoverishment. Great men arose, 
 who saw with increasing clearness the ideal of what 
 a Church should be. Such an one was Grosse- 
 teste, Bishop of Lincoln, who protested against 
 the abuses caused by the presence of a foreign 
 clergy, and was able to prevent Pope Innocent IV. 
 from making his infant nephew a canon of Lin- 
 coln Cathedral. William of Occam, though he 
 spent most of his life abroad, was an Englishman 
 by birth and training, — a philosopher as well as 
 a statesman, who broke down, by his vigorous in- 
 cisive arguments, the vicious principles of the 
 Scholastic philosophy, especially denouncing that 
 metaphysical conception of the Church which exag- 
 gerated the importance of institutions, till it had 
 made impossible the freedom and growth of the 
 individual man. The famous Bradwardin, who 
 became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1349, asserted 
 
THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 the dependence of men upon God for their sal- 
 vation, following Occam also in pointing away 
 from the pope to Christ as the only real, though 
 invisible Head of the Church. The "Vision of 
 Piers the Ploughman," a book which had vast 
 popularity and influence, exposes the evils which 
 a corrupt official service was creating, sets forth in 
 glowing terms the Christian ideal, and does not 
 hesitate to recommend the remedy for the ills of 
 the Church to its highest dignitaries. An evil life 
 is for him an evil life, whether in pope, or bishop, 
 or peasant. 
 
 And at last came Wycliffe in the fourteenth 
 century, who may be regarded as the greatest man 
 to whom the English Church has given birth in all 
 her history. With a brief allusion to his work, I 
 close my lecture. It is a remark of Milton, that 
 " had it not been for the obstinate perverseness 
 of our prelates against the divine and admirable 
 spirit of Wycliffe, to suppress him as a schismatic 
 and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian 
 Huss and Jerome, no, nor the name of Luther and 
 Calvin had ever been known. The glory of re- 
 forming all our neighbors had then been ours." 
 I will not undertake to summarize his efforts 
 for the reformation of the Church ; how he re- 
 sisted the pope, redefined the Christian doctrines, 
 rejected abuses, declaimed against monks, trans- 
 lated the Scriptures, preached constantly, and 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 149 
 
 sent forth preachers in his own spirit throughout 
 the kingdom. He made mistakes, it is true; in 
 his opposition to what was false, he may have gone 
 to false extremes. But his errors may be forgiven 
 to one who has done more for Christendom than 
 any other Englishman. 
 
 And exactly what was it that he did, that made 
 possible the overthrow of the papacy, and the 
 emancipation of England from a foreign usur- 
 pation ? I should answer that he laid down a 
 higher doctrine of the relation of Church and State. 
 He was the first to grasp the sacred principle of 
 nationality, to implant in the consciousness of 
 kings and people the idea of their divine and 
 spiritual calling as a nation. 
 
 The kings of England and its archbishops, 
 through the Norman period, had been laboring 
 unconsciously for the great end which Wycliffe 
 now unveiled in its majesty. But because they 
 labored unconsciously, they labored often ineffect- 
 ually or in vain. They were guided by an instinct 
 which they were unable to formulate or define. 
 But they builded better than they knew. Take 
 the period we have been considering as a whole, 
 and it reveals a progressive movement, even under 
 weak or immoral kings, toward the same common 
 goal. It is not a history which one need to be 
 ashamed of or to apologize for. There was some 
 latent divine element in the atmosphere of that 
 
1 SO THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 little island beyond the seas, which gives to Eng- 
 land a homogeneous principle through all its 
 career. Hardly had the Norman kings landed in 
 England, when the old process of the earlier his- 
 tory was resumed, and they began to work for a 
 national end. Archbishops of Canterbury, even 
 an Anselm, or a Becket, or a Stephen Langton, 
 could not escape the subtle contagion of this mys- 
 terious motive. There are phases of their ad- 
 ministration which may have a national bearing. 
 
 But the great deficiency of the period was the 
 lack of an intelligible formula or doctrine, which 
 would enable the nation to reject the false doctrine 
 by which the popes built up their supremacy.' 
 When it was said that the Church was above the 
 State, because the State dealt with temporal or 
 secular concerns, the things that related to this 
 earthly life, while the Church had the exclusive 
 prerogative of dealing with spiritual or eternal in- 
 terests, no one lifted up a voice in behalf of the 
 State as having equally with the Church, a spirit- 
 ual origin, a spiritual purpose and a spiritual end. 
 Everywhere throughout Europe, men acquiesced 
 in the common statements that only the Church 
 was spiritual, and as such, must be placed above 
 all earthly potentates. So long as they continued 
 to think so, the power of the Roman popes was 
 secure. What is the spiritual, when we ask for its 
 definition ? Is it not the unseen, the end not yet 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 1 5 I 
 
 attained, the moral ideal to be achieved in the 
 future, toward which the present is tending? The 
 things which are seen are temporal, the things which 
 are not seen are spiritual or eternal. The State 
 then labors for the spiritual and moves toward it 
 as by a divine decree. Wycliffe dared to hold up 
 before the kings of England, a divine ideal which 
 redeemed the nation from the degradation of in- 
 feriority and subjection to the Church. 
 
 But if the nation has a spiritual, divine character 
 no less than the Church, where then lies the dif- 
 ference between them ? Wycliffe's answer is clear 
 and emphatic. The State represents the dominion 
 of Christ, the power and rule of Christ in the 
 world. If there must be a vicar of Christ, it is the 
 king or ruler of the nation, not the head of the 
 ecclesiastical principality. The State expresses 
 and reveals the dominium or the power of Christ ; 
 the Church represents the ministerium, the service 
 of Christ ; as when Christ remarks : / am among 
 you as lie that serveth. The kingdoms of the 
 world are the kingdoms of our Lord and of His 
 Christ ; their power is the power of Christ to whom 
 is given all power in Heaven and earth. One func- 
 tion of the Church is to minister to the well-being 
 of the State, in all the countless ways of spiritual 
 ministration, of which Christ, who is still among 
 us as one that serveth, is the type and illustration. 
 It is the function of the Church to hold up con= 
 
152 
 
 THE NORMAN PERIOD 
 
 stantly before the State its divine calling; in its 
 prophetic office, to declare constantly and un- 
 hesitatingly the divine will. 
 
 Christ has a double character, one side of which 
 is represented by the State, and the other by the 
 Church. If either is higher than the other, it is 
 the function of service, — the ministerium, as when 
 it is said, He that is chief among you, let him be as 
 servant. If the Church represents what is higher 
 than the State, it is so because and in so far as the 
 Church possesses faith in the spiritual purpose of 
 the nation, even when the nation is without faith, 
 — that faith which is the substance of things hoped 
 for, the evidence of things not seen. But the con- 
 dition of servantship still in this world implies a 
 willingness to accept humiliation as its lot. Come 
 what may, the State must have the authority. 
 Priests and prophets have never known how to 
 exercise power. The worst governments the 
 world has seen have been administered by ecclesi- 
 astics. It is a mixture of things which are in their 
 nature incongruous, when the prophet whose mis- 
 sion is to reveal a divine truth by moral insight, 
 infringes upon the calling of the State and seeks 
 to carry out his message by force. So long as the 
 world continues must humiliation attend the min- 
 isterium, which waits upon the suffering Christ in 
 humanity, when hungry, or naked, or sick, or in 
 prison, or in the captivities of the human race, 
 from which it seeks redemption. 
 
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH. I 53 
 
 This then was the work of the English Wycliffe, 
 to place before his own countrymen and before 
 the world the divine ideal of the State or nation. 
 When it came to the Reformation of the sixteenth 
 century, it is the cause of the nations against the 
 empire of the pope. " The swing of the monarchy 
 of Henry VIII., " as Canon Mozley has remarked, 
 " was simply nationalism and nothing else, — the 
 nation delighted in it." 
 
 The divine calling of the nations is as yet very 
 far from being realized. But it has not hurt the 
 nations to have proclaimed their true mission ; 
 nor has it hurt or weakened the Church. The one 
 thing which America most needs to-day is the re- 
 proclamation of Wycliff e's message. For there are 
 those among us and notably also a foreign Church 
 whose aim, whose necessity it is to rob the State 
 of its spiritual prerogative in order to its own ad- 
 vancement. Here in this new world, the conflict 
 of the ages is impending ; indeed, there are signs 
 that the struggle has already begun. If our vision 
 is clear, and as Churchmen we can follow Wycliffe 
 in asserting the divine dominion of the State, the 
 result cannot be doubtful. By our hesitancy or 
 inaction the result may be retarded; but if the 
 Word of God be true, it will only be a tarrying of 
 the vision until the time be ripe for its fulfilment. 
 In the book of the revelation of St. John the 
 Divine, where the final glorifiaction of things is un- 
 
I 54 THE NORMAN PERIOD, E TC. 
 
 veiled, it is not as Churches or as branches of the 
 Church that the world stands at last before God 
 that humanity takes its rank in the temple and 
 city of God. Into that city of which God is the 
 light, the kings of the earth are represented as 
 bringing their glory. And they bring the honor 
 and the glory of the nations into it. 
 
Cbe "Reformation period 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE RT. REV. H. T. KINGDON, D.D., 
 Bishop Coadjutor of Fredericton. 
 
 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 The Reformation of the Church of England 
 was not the work of a few years, nor the result of 
 any one force. It was the crisis of centuries of 
 discontent, the irrepressible outburst of long pent 
 up indignation, brought about by the resultant of 
 many forces, religious, political, financial, domestic, 
 civil. It took the form in England of a proleptic 
 assertion of the Monroe doctrine, that no foreign 
 interference could be tolerated in domestic matters. 
 This feeling had always been very strong, and it 
 so often showed itself where opportunity offered, 
 that it may almost be said that the Reformation 
 commenced from the time the Bishop of old Rome 
 attempted to interfere in temporal and spiritual 
 matters in England. 
 
 The first act of the English as a nation was t< 
 compel the acceptance of the Great Charter. This, 
 has been said to be " the first great public act o\ 
 the nation after it realized its own identity : the 
 157 
 
158 
 
 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 consummation of the work for which unconsciously 
 kings, prelates, and lawyers had been laboring for 
 a century." The very first clause secured the free- 
 dom ot the Church of England : " Quod Ecclesia 
 Anglicana* libera sit, et habeat omnia jura sua 
 integra et libertates suas illaesas." That the Church 
 of England be free, and have all her rights undi- 
 minished, and her liberties unimpaired. From 
 this we might say that the Reformation began 
 with the signing of the Great Charter on June 15, 
 A.D. 121 5. 
 
 A century later the same feeling was evidenced 
 in the Statute of Provisors (as it was called) passed 
 in A.D. 1 35 1, and of Praemunire passed two years 
 later. The Bishop of Rome had claimed to sus- 
 pend the right of presentation to benefices in 
 England, in order that he might make provision 
 for his own foreign adherents. Against this the 
 Statute of Provisors was aimed ; while the Statute 
 of Praemunire forbade appeals from the King's 
 Courts, or obtaining bulls or other instruments 
 from Rome, under penalty of forfeiture of goods, 
 personal freedom, and protection of the law. 
 
 But these were mainly political, and did not 
 touch the conscience so much as the terrible decay 
 
 * The title Ecclesia Anglicana, was anticipated in the cor- 
 respondence of St. Thomas a Becket ; where it is used in- 
 terchangeably with Ecclesia Anglorum which had been used 
 by Bede in the eighth century. 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 159 
 
 of vital religion and morality throughout Europe. 
 From the beginning of the fifteenth century, there 
 was one universal wail throughout Europe from 
 holy men, deploring the state of religion, and 
 laxity of morals. In Brown's Fasciculus is a list 
 of works on the reformation of the Church. There 
 are about one hundred such writers between A.D. 
 1400 and A.D. 1550. This would mean a great 
 deal for a period commencing before the invention 
 of printing, yet the list is not by any means ex- 
 haustive. I possess a little tract printed in 1489, 
 " De Miseriis Curatorum," on the woes of parish 
 priests, which is not enumerated in Brown's Cat- 
 alogue. It seems to have been published in 
 Saxony, as reference is made to Meissen in Saxony 
 as a well-known wealthy benefice. The tract, 
 consisting of fourteen pages, must have made 
 some stir at the time, as at least three other 
 editions were published. It is certainly valuable 
 as exhibiting the state of things from the stand- 
 point of a parish priest ; and we may learn from 
 this why Saxony became so favorable to the views 
 of the reformers. The writer says that the priests 
 were worried beyond measure by " novem diaboli." 
 I am sorry to say that one of the diaboli was the 
 bishop himself. Another is the itinerant preacher, 
 and the account given reminds one of the dialogue 
 of Erasmus about the Franciscans, published about 
 thirty years later. The Saxony priest complains 
 
1 60 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 of the exacting character of these preachers. " If 
 you do not always give him the most delicate 
 meats to eat and spiced wine with the best ale to 
 drink, he will preach about it in the pulpit, and 
 hold you up to scorn before the people." But the 
 greatest wail is about one of the diaboli, which 
 perhaps is the saddest of all : this is about the 
 housekeeper or cook. In the midst of this the 
 writer says : " There are three officials of the 
 utmost necessity to mankind, the hangman, the 
 knacker, the curate. The hangman strings up 
 thieves on the gallows ; the knacker removes dead 
 horses ; the curate teaches the people. The world 
 cannot do without them ; otherwise the thieves 
 would seize everything; horses would become 
 offensive; men would become brutal. But the 
 more necessary they are to men, the more men 
 despise them. There is no difference between 
 them in the opinion of the laymen. Tell me, 
 prithee, what virtuous, neat, chaste woman will 
 ever be a servant to a hangman, a knacker, or a 
 curate?" Thus on the continent of Western 
 Europe there was a call for reformation. 
 
 The cry for reformation was equally earnest in 
 England, and the English spirit revolted against 
 foreign interference as well as against the means 
 by which it was supported. England had long 
 been regarded as a milch cow to yield provision for 
 needy Italians who never visited England and 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 1 6 1 
 
 spent their revenues in the Roman Court. For 
 fifty years the See of Worcester was filled by a 
 succession of Italians who spent most of their 
 time and money away from England. Among 
 them was Giulio de Medici, the bastard son of 
 Giuliano, the brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent. 
 This Giulio was afterwards pope under the title of 
 Clement VII. At Salisbury, Cardinal Campeggio 
 was bishop or was so called and drew all the in- 
 come away, while he was really bishop of Bologna 
 and never visited Salisbury. At the same time 
 the dean of Salisbury was an Italian who never 
 came near his cathedral and after twenty-four years 
 was compelled to resign. These were provided by 
 the pope. Can we wonder that complaints were 
 continually made that the glorious cathedral of 
 Salisbury was becoming ruinous ? Such facts as 
 these set going the financial force which tended to 
 the Reformation. After much forbearance, the 
 English revolted against their ecclesiastical rev- 
 enues being spent to glorify the papal court. 
 
 Then there was the sickening adulation paid to 
 the pope; as the Canonist complains, some sought 
 by flattery to equal the popes with God Himself. 
 Nay, in the Gloss on the Decretal there is the title 
 " Nostrum Dominum Deum Papam," our Lord 
 God the Pope, still printed certainly as late as 
 1609. This greatly moved such as knew of it in 
 England, and is one of the things mentioned with 
 
1 62 THE REFORM A T10N PERIOD. 
 
 abhorrence by Bishop Jewel. Still it does not 
 seem much different from the claim reported to 
 have been made by Pius IX. on the first of April, 
 1866. The French legitimist journal "Union," 
 gave the text of his address in which he said : 
 " I am the way, the truth and the life. They who 
 are with me are with the Church ; they who are 
 not with me are out of the Church, they are out 
 of the way, the truth and the life." It is a large 
 claim. 
 
 Then there were the pretended miracles and 
 miraculous images, the exposure of which caused 
 a great shock to the devout minds of men. Henry 
 VIII. was a firm believer in the Blood of Hales till 
 nearly the end of his life. At Hales Abbey the 
 pilgrim looked at a phial said to contain the Blood 
 of the Saviour which was invisible to them in 
 mortal sin. Some colored substance there was 
 within glass of unequal thickness, and by turning 
 the vessel half round, this was hidden or revealed 
 at the option of the showman. Some of the 
 more celebrated images were exhibited at Paul's 
 Cross at sermon time, with the springs and levers 
 by which they were worked. It seems hard to 
 believe this, and yet somewhat of it is continued 
 in our own day. A friend of mine, twenty-five 
 years ago, was shown in Spain a fine white feather, 
 which, said the priest, fell from the wing of the 
 Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation. " Do you 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 1 63 
 
 believe that ? " enquired my friend. The priest 
 took a pinch of snuff, and said : " Good for the 
 people." 
 
 Can we wonder at the revolt against all this ? 
 Nay, we should rather wonder that the revolt came 
 not earlier. It has been well pointed out that at 
 the Council of Pisa in 1409, Constance in 141 5 and 
 just before the Council of Basle, English leaders 
 had urged a reformation ; and for a long time, they 
 waited for this to come from without. But it came 
 not. It was like the fable of the lark and her nest- 
 lings. So long as the farmer waited for his neigh- 
 bors to come to his help in harvest, the lark knew 
 she was safe; directly the farmer determined to set 
 to work himself, she flitted with her young. At 
 length the English Church determined to reform 
 herself ; but how was this to be ? There was the 
 example set on the continent of Europe in various 
 parts. At Pontresina on the Engadine, the popu- 
 lation, inflamed by the earnest preaching of a 
 Reformer, dismissed their priest, stripped their 
 Church and flung all the furniture and ornaments, 
 images, aye, and the sacred vessels into the river, 
 and inaugurated a devoted personal worship of 
 our Blessed Lord of which psalmody from the 
 whole congregation formed the chief part. At 
 Zurich, Zwingli disregarded the teaching of the 
 Church, and sought to build up a body of doctrine 
 from his private study of the Greek Testament. 
 
164 THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 No such scheme found favor in England. English 
 people loved law and order; and all was done 
 legally and in order. Everything was reformed 
 by a careful examination of antiquity. It was, in- 
 deed, a passionate appeal to the primitive Church, 
 so far as the practice and teaching of the earliest 
 Church could be discovered. For this there had 
 been much providential preparation. 
 
 The fall of the Greek empire was part of this 
 preparation. Rome said that Constantinople fell 
 because the Greeks did not symbolize with Rome. 
 But in the Thirty-nine Articles, Constantinople is 
 the only Patriarchate omitted from imputation of 
 error, out of a tender consideration for their late 
 distress. 
 
 The siege and destruction of Constantinople by 
 the Turks had driven many learned Greeks to 
 Western Europe; and their presence promoted 
 the study of the Greek language and of the Greek 
 Testament. The study was soon introduced into 
 England, and without doubt helped on the Ref- 
 ormation there. John Colet, the eldest son of an 
 eminent citizen of London, studied Greek in France 
 and Italy, and returned to lecture on the Greek of 
 S. Paul's Epistle at Oxford. Receiving preferment 
 in London, he returned there, and soon was made 
 Dean of S. Paul's. He at once began to preach on 
 the Epistles in the Cathedral, and founded S. Paul's 
 School for the express purpose of teaching the 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 165 
 
 scholars Greek. This was in 1509. Boys to the 
 number of one hundred and fifty and three, the 
 number of the fish in the second miraculous draught 
 of fishes, were to be taught there gratuitously. 
 At the present moment six colonial Bishops owe 
 their education to Dean Colet's munificence, my- 
 self among the number. Erasmus was a great 
 friend of the Dean, and took great interest in the 
 school. His dialogue " pietas pnerilis" is sup- 
 posed to show the excellence of the teaching given 
 at that particular institution. All this helped on 
 the Reformation. It was said by the monks that 
 Erasmus laid the egg which Luther hatched. 
 Certainly, his influence and teaching in England 
 helped on the Reformation there in a conservative 
 and healthy manner and direction. 
 
 The learned English at the time knew what 
 they were about perfectly well, and we cannot 
 think that they were left without guidance. For 
 though we may and must acknowledge that in 
 these troublous times, several leading English di- 
 vines were somewhat rambling in their theology, 
 feeling about as it were after the truth, yet in the 
 authoritative formularies of the Church, there is 
 no rambling, no error. Some years ago, one who 
 might have been thought sufficiently learned in 
 liturgical knowledge to have hesitated to impute 
 error to others, said that the translators of our 
 Liturgy were mistaken in one of their statements. 
 
1 66 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 The statement which Mr. Seager objected to is 
 " the ancient Fathers divided the psalms into seven 
 portions, whereof every one is called a Nocturn." 
 The translators were supposed to have misunder- 
 stood a lesson in the Breviary for S. James' Day. 
 The Saint, it is said, " Psalterinm quoque per ferias 
 distinxit, et unicuique ferice nocturnum dedit." He 
 divided the psalter for the days of the week, and 
 appointed a Nocturn to each day. However, 
 twenty years ago, the late learned librarian of the 
 University of Cambridge, England, showed me a 
 manuscript of the thirteenth century (I think). It 
 was a commentary on the psalms appointed for 
 each day of the week, and in this the division of 
 psalms for each day is called a Nocturn. Thus the 
 psalms for Tuesday are called the psalms of the 
 third Nocturn. The translators knew what they 
 were about, for they were familiar from constant 
 use with details which we have to acquire feebly 
 with long study. Nor did they make any statement 
 or any change without laborious investigation, it 
 was not without good reason that they challenged 
 a condemnation of their work from the voice of 
 antiquity. They had searched the ground, and 
 were ready for the attack. Cranmer alone had a 
 thousand folio pages of manuscript, quotations 
 from the ancient Fathers, transcribed by his own 
 hand in support of his views. Archbishop Parker 
 had this copied for his own use, and this copy is 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 I6 7 
 
 now in the British Museum. Crannier also tran- 
 scribed much from the Scriptures, Fathers and 
 Schoolmen before he attempted to formulate the 
 Eleventh Article and the Homily on Salvation. 
 This collection occupies seventeen pages of the 
 octavo edition of his works, and this on the single 
 question of Justification. He could, therefore, 
 with confidence, write in the 'Homily, " Beside 
 Hilary, Basil and St. Ambrose before rehearsed, 
 we read the same in Origen, St. Chrysostom, St. 
 Cyprian, St. Augustine, Prosper, CEcumenius, 
 Photius, Bernardus, Anselm and many other au- 
 thors, Greek and Latin." But Cranmer was not 
 alone of this mind, as may be seen in any of the 
 recognized formularies and documents of the 
 Church. The Homilies lay down over and over 
 again the principles on which Christian doctrine 
 and practice were to be proved. " Ye have heard 
 it proved, (i.) by God's word, (ii.) the doctors of the 
 Church, (iii.) ecclesiastical histories, (iv.) reason and 
 experience." Such is the universal statement, and 
 the Homilies were to be "a pattern and boundary" 
 for all preachers and teachers. In the Homilies, 
 there are nine quotations from councils of the 
 Church and two hundred and thirty-nine quota- 
 tions from the Fathers. The four quoted most 
 frequently are S. Augustine, fifty-nine times; S. 
 Chrysostom, twenty-six times ; S. Jerome, twenty- 
 two times ; S. Ambrose, fourteen. In Jewel's Apol- 
 
THE REFORM A T/O.V PERIOD. 
 
 ogy, the councils are quoted thirty-two times while 
 two hundred and seventeen citations are from the 
 Fathers. Here again S.Augustine is the favorite, 
 and heads the list with thirty-two quotations. 
 Then Tertullian comes to the front with twenty- 
 one references, and S. Chrysostom, S. Jerome and S. 
 Ambrose come next in order. This is but a sample. 
 The "general index" to the rather useless " Pr.r- 
 ker Society" books tells the same tale. Wher- 
 ever the work of the Reformers of the Church of 
 England is tested, the same principles are found to 
 exist. The Reformation of the Church of England 
 went on the plan of a passionate appeal to Scrip- 
 ture as interpreted by the ancient Fathers. "The 
 primitive Church," say the Homilies, " is especially 
 to be followed as most incorrupt and pure " The 
 oft-quoted canon of 1 57 1 maintains the principle, 
 and enforces it on the clergy. "Imprimis, preachers 
 shall take heed that they never teach anything to 
 be religiously held and believed by the people, ex- 
 cept that which is agreeable to the doctrine of the 
 Old or New Testament, and what from that very 
 doctrine the Catholic Fathers and ancient Bishops 
 have gathered." Bishop Jewel professed, "We 
 came as near as we possibly could to the Church 
 of the Apostles, and of the old Catholic Bishops 
 and Fathers; and have directed according to 
 their customs and ordinances, not only our doc- 
 trine, but also the sacraments and the form of 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 l6g 
 
 common prayer." " I prefer the antiquity of the 
 primitive Church," said Bishop Ridley, "before 
 the novelty of the Church of Rome." 
 
 Herein then was the essential difference between 
 the Reformation of the Church of England, and 
 the Reformation on the continent of Europe. 
 The Church of England reformed herself, taking 
 for her guide Holy Scripture as interpreted by the 
 primitive Church ; the continental reformers rather 
 accepted the principle of Scripture, interpreted 
 by private judgment. Private judgment is men- 
 tioned only once in the formularies of the Church 
 of England, and then it is condemned. The Ar- 
 ticles maintained that it is " the Church that has 
 authority in controversies of faith " ; and con- 
 demned those that " through their private judg- 
 ment willingly and purposely break the traditions 
 and ceremonies of the Church." But then the con- 
 tinuity and identity of the Church of England re- 
 mained intact ; she reformed herself. Her Bishops 
 remained in the same sees, with their succession 
 unbroken; whereas the continental reformers were 
 compelled to break away from their Bishops, and 
 inaugurate a plan of their own. 
 
 The " infamous Blackburn," as he has been 
 called, saw this clearly when (in the middle of the 
 last century) he wrote that the Reformers " deter- 
 mined the one (true) sense of Scripture to be the 
 sense of the primitive Church, that is to say, the 
 
170 
 
 THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 sense of the orthodox fathers for a certain number 
 of centuries. From these they took their inter- 
 pretations of Scripture, and upon these they 
 formed their rule of faith and doctrine." As this 
 was opposed to the unbounded liberty of private 
 judgment, which Archdeacon Blackburn regarded 
 as the essence of Protestantism, he thought that 
 the Reformation of the Church of England was 
 to be condemned. This testifies to the fact which 
 meets us at every turn, that the Church of Eng- 
 land in all things wills to be guided by Scripture 
 as interpreted by the tradition of the primitive 
 Church. 
 
 Here we must remember the perfect indepen- 
 dence of the Church of England. Her very name 
 shows her independence. In the eighth century 
 Bede speaks of the Ecclesia Anglorum. In the 
 twelfth century, in the correspondence of S. 
 Thomas a Becket, we have both Ecclesia Anglorum 
 and Ecclesia Anglicana ; while from the time of the 
 Great Charter in 1215, the name in Latin, Ecclesia 
 Anglicana, has been the most frequent, though 
 the phrase Angliae Ecclesia occurs occasionally. 
 She always had her own laws ; and the Canon 
 law of the continent of Europe never obtained in 
 England except so far as the Church of England 
 adopted and incorporated such canons as were 
 regarded as suitable. This is so much the case 
 that even now the Canons of Trent are not bind- 
 
THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD. 1 7 1 
 
 ing even on the Roman obedience in England, 
 because they have never been promulged and 
 accepted there. The most striking instance of 
 this is the marriage law. The law of the Church 
 of England has always been that Holy Matrimony 
 to be valid must be " in facie Ecclesice, per verba 
 de prcesenti, per presbyterum sacris ordmibus con- 
 stitututtt." It must be celebrated openly in the 
 Church by a priest in holy orders. This, the con- 
 tinuous law of the Church of England, was also 
 the law of England until the middle of this cen- 
 tury ; but it was not the law of the continent of 
 Western Europe. There mere consent before 
 any witnesses constituted valid matrimony ; it 
 was the same as the present Scotch law which 
 was anciently assimilated to that of France rather 
 than that of England. But when, about the end 
 of the sixteenth century and later, the Jesuits and 
 other priests who had been trained abroad were 
 sent into England to promote a schism, they 
 knew nothing of the old law of the English 
 Church, but brought with them the Canon law of 
 the Continental Church before it was altered at 
 Trent. There was no public authority in England 
 to promulge the Tridentine Canons ; these, there- 
 fore, were not of force. In consequence of this 
 the law of marriage accepted at this day amongst 
 those of the Roman obedience in England is per- 
 fectly different from the old law of the Church of 
 
172 
 
 THE REFORM A TIOX PERIOD. 
 
 England, and would alone proclaim the Roman 
 schism in England to be a modern intrusion. 
 
 Knowing this peculiarity of the Roman position 
 in England, I had a curious conversation with a 
 Jesuit priest in that country some years ago. At 
 that time all Roman Catholic marriages were made 
 valid in the eye of the law by the presence of the 
 Civil Registrar, and my friend told me the follow- 
 ing story: A nobleman was to be married, and 
 there was to be pontifical high mass in the noble- 
 man's private chapel. In the middle of the Creed, 
 which was being sung, the Registrar came to the 
 bridegroom and said, " My lord, I do not know 
 how much longer this is going on, but it is five 
 minutes of twelve, and if you are not married 
 before twelve the marriage will be illegal." " What 
 shall we do? " was the question. " Just step into 
 the drawing-room with the bride, give your con- 
 sent there and then return." This was done, and 
 after the civil marriage in the drawing-room the 
 couple returned into the chapel and the marriage 
 service, which had been going on during their 
 absence, still proceeded. 
 
 I at once saw I had the Jesuit priest on the 
 horns of a dilemma. So I said, " Which of those 
 was the sacrament of marriage ? " He said, 
 "They never told the bishop." "Never mind 
 that," was my answer, " which ceremony was the 
 sacrament ?" " Of course," he replied, as he was 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 173 
 
 bound, " the consent before the Registrar.' - 
 " Then," said I, " the second consent was an 
 iteration of the sacrament and sacrilege." " Ah, 
 let me see," said the Jesuit, " before the Registrar 
 they withheld their interior consent. I think that 
 will do.*' " Then," was the reply, " the marriage 
 is illegal as being after hours." " I think," said 
 the other, " we had better talk no more about it." 
 
 This peculiarity of the Roman Catholic posi- 
 tion in England is not generally known ; the 
 peculiarity of their law about marriage accounts 
 for the stringent action of Cardinal Manning in 
 preventing, or endeavoring to prevent, mixed 
 marriages when the ceremony was often per- 
 formed first in an English Church. 
 
 Having thus endeavored to exhibit the general 
 principles on which the Church of England re- 
 formed herself, it will be useful now to see how 
 these principles were applied in detail in some 
 cases. Here we must be as brief as is consistent 
 with accuracy so as not to exceed the limits of a 
 lecture. 
 
 We must always remember that the Church of 
 England has nothing to do with the private 
 motives of Henry VIII., King of England. His 
 public professions were excellent at all times, and 
 the Church was only too glad of the opportunity 
 afforded her to reform herself. If any one says 
 that this king was not a moral man, the retort is 
 
i/"4 
 
 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 ready that he was a saint by the side of the popes 
 of his time. The heathen conceits of Leda and 
 Europa, which are to be seen on the great bronze 
 gates of S. Peter's to this day, are testimonies to 
 the classical semi-heathenism of Leo X. Then 
 the Borgia Pope Alexander VI., has no savory 
 reputation. But it may well be said that these 
 immoralities have not influenced for ill the Roman 
 Communion. Still less have the peculiarities of 
 Henry VIII. to do with the Church of England, 
 of which he was no bishop. With respect to the 
 position of the Church, in the matter of the 
 Bishop of Rome, there was little difference 
 between us and the true Gallican Church, until 
 Napoleon the First conspired with the pope to 
 destroy the Old Gallican Church by the stroke of 
 a pen, and erect a new one on its ruins. 
 
 In declining to submit any longer to the Bishop 
 of Old Rome, the Church of England was cer- 
 tainly following ancient precedent. As early as 
 the beginning of the fifth century, the Church in 
 Africa was troubled by the meddlesome interfer- 
 ence of the Bishop of Rome, who claimed to hear 
 and decide appeals under the pretended authority 
 of the Council of Nicaea. Zosimus, Bishop of 
 Rome, sent legates to Carthage, who quoted a 
 canon as Nicene which was not to be found 
 amongst the twenty canons in the text brought 
 back from Nicaea by Caecilianus, Bishop of Car- 
 
THE REFORM A T/O.V PERIOD. 
 
 175 
 
 thage, who had been present at the council. The 
 legates of Rome naturally claimed that their copy 
 was correct and the African copy was defective. 
 The African bishops courteously agreed to accept 
 the Roman text until such time as certified copies 
 could be secured from Constantinople, Alexandria 
 and Antioch. In answer to their request, Atticus, 
 Patriarch of Constantinople, and S. Cyril, Patri- 
 arch of Alexandria, sent certified copies which 
 agreed with the African, and disproved the 
 Roman claim. It is hard to suppose that a 
 Christian bishop would knowingly and wittingly 
 falsify the code of Nicsa, and perchance his claim 
 arose from ignorance. It has been suggested that 
 the Sardican canons (which, indeed, were quoted), 
 were written without any break after the Nicene 
 canons, and that thus the mistake arose. But 
 the illustrious Archbishop of Paris, Peter de 
 Marca, in the middle of the seventeenth century, 
 drily remarks, " the conjecture might be held to 
 be probable, if borne out by the evidence of any 
 ancient codex, but this has not yet been discov- 
 ered." He thinks that Zosimus cannot be ac- 
 quitted of wilful falsification. So early was the 
 arrogance of Rome seeking to support itself on 
 false claims. 
 
 Then with respect to one succession of orders, 
 Bishop Jewel claims to have been ordained priest 
 by the same bishop and the same ordinal as his 
 
1 76 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 opponent Harding, and then continues: "I am a 
 bishop, and that by the free and canonical election 
 of the whole chapter of Salisbury, assembled 
 solemnly for that purpose. Our bishops are made 
 in form and order, as they have been ever, by free 
 election of the chapter ; by consecration of the 
 archbishop and other three bishops, and by admis- 
 sion of the prince. Therefore, we neither have 
 bishops without Church nor Church without bish- 
 ops." " To be short we succeed the bishops that 
 have been before our days. We are elected, con- 
 secrated, confirmed, admitted as they were." 
 Here, then, comes in another instance of the 
 great care taken to adhere to precedent of anti- 
 quity. The confirmation of the election of Arch- 
 bishop Parker was carefully framed on the old 
 form used in the confirmation of Archbishop 
 Chichell, in A.D. 1414. The form then used can 
 not be traced earlier. " Its use was exceptional, 
 having been resorted to at a time when the Eng- 
 lish Church did not acknowledge either of the 
 rival claimants of the papacy. The tradition of 
 that confirmation was only a century old. It was 
 of the providence of God that they had that pre- 
 cedent to fall back upon. But the selection of 
 this one precedent shows how careful Parker and 
 his consecrators were to follow the ancient prece- 
 dents." There was no particular of carelessness or 
 haste about the matter. There was but one mat- 
 
THE RE FORMA TION PERIOD. 
 
 1 77 
 
 ter overlooked, but it was of no spiritual conse- 
 quence. When Bishop Home, of Winchester, 
 tendered the oath of supremacy to Bishop Bon- 
 ner (he being at the time in the Marshalsea, and 
 consequently in the diocese of Winchester), 
 Bishop Bonner took two legal exceptions to 
 Bishop Home's position. Had he known any 
 more valid objection, he would not have confined 
 himself to legal technicalities. First, Bishop Home 
 had not been consecrated by an ordinal which had 
 statutable, authority ; secondly, Archbishop Parker 
 had been consecrated by four bishops, three of 
 whom had been deprived, and the fourth deposed 
 by Act of Parliament. The ordinal used had 
 been deprived of the authority of Parliament 
 under Philip and Mary, but the act could not give 
 or take away spiritual validity from the service. 
 It was but a legal quibble, which was soon set 
 straight by an Act of Parliament. Of the conse- 
 crators of Archbishop Parker, Coverdale was 
 spiritually the diocesan of Exeter, though another 
 had been intruded into his see ; Hodgkin was a 
 diocesan suffragan, the other two were " vacant " 
 bishops elect to sees in the province. But then of 
 Pole's seven consecrators, two were diocesan bish- 
 ops, three were intruders, and two acting diocesan. 
 Those who wish to pursue this particular branch 
 of the subject should consult the accurate and 
 precise little work of my friend and brother, John 
 
1 78 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 Walter Lea, on " The Succession of Spiritual 
 Jurisdiction." He gives the particulars of each 
 see during the whole period of the Reformation 
 troubles. It was most providential that Cardinal 
 Pole, of Canterbury, died within twenty-four 
 hours of Queen Mary ; and within two years after 
 the accession of Elizabeth, no less than fifteen 
 sees were vacated by death. If Elizabeth did 
 cause some Bishops to be intruded into sees not 
 canonically vacant, her sister Mary had been pre- 
 viously equally high-handed and had intruded a 
 similar number. But in neither case would this 
 affect the validity of the succession. For such 
 bishops would consecrate validly to the Epis- 
 copate, but invalidly to the particular see. 
 
 Mr. Lea writes : "Some of the results of this in- 
 quiry were unexpectedly satisfactory. I was not 
 prepared to find the breaches in jurisdiction so 
 few in themselves, so temporary in their con- 
 sequences, and so evenly divided between Rome 
 and England." " As to the duration of the Ref- 
 ormation disturbance, it was twenty-five years and 
 less than one month ; and canonical succession in 
 every diocese was completely re-established by the 
 consecration of Scambler's successor on February 
 7th, 1 584-5." " On the whole I think we may con- 
 clude that the Reformation dislocation of succes- 
 sion [of jurisdiction] in the English Church has 
 been greatly exaggerated by popular traditions and 
 
THE REFORM A T10N PERIOD. 1 79 
 
 misconceptions. All traces, however, have long 
 since disappeared." 
 
 Let us now turn to the question of the vernacu- 
 lar service. Several times have I heard the ques- 
 tion asked by an enthusiastic ignoramus : " By 
 what right were the services translated out of 
 Latin into English?" The answer is so near to 
 hand that it is difficult to understand how the 
 question could be raised. " By the same right 
 that they were translated out of Greek into Latin." 
 Greek was the original language of Christianity 
 even in Rome itself, and the first Christian Latin 
 appears in the colony of Africa. 
 
 Two points have here to be touched upon : 
 first, the adoption of one use throughout the 
 Church of England and next the translation of 
 that use into the vernacular. 
 
 For we must remember that there were several 
 different service books in use in England, and each 
 diocese adopted the variation which was most 
 agreeable to the Cathedral. With substantial 
 identity, these presented some inconsiderable 
 variations ; but they were all of the English 
 Church. The Roman office books were never 
 used in England until the Jesuits came in after the 
 Reformation to create a schism. The first step 
 of the English Bishops was to mould all the vari- 
 ous uses into one. Thus the original preface to 
 the one Service Book expressed it : " Whereas 
 
1 80 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 hitherto there hath been great diversity in saying 
 and singing in Churches within this realm ; some 
 following Salisbury use, some Hereford use, some 
 the use of Bangor, some of York, some of Lincoln ; 
 now from henceforth all the whole realm shall 
 have but one use." This use, therefore, on the 
 general title-page is called, " the use of the Church 
 of England." 
 
 It is somewhat remarkable that almost all the 
 manuscripts of the old service books of the Sarum 
 use date from about A.D. 1420. It would almost 
 seem as if there were some move at that time to 
 renovate if not to reform the services. A century 
 later in 15 16, there is an unmistakable evidence of 
 a steady design to amend the existing service 
 books; and eighteen years later in 1534, the issue 
 of printed service books in England, " suddenly 
 ceased, and in the case of the Missal was never 
 resumed up to the first Revision of the offices in 
 1549." Seven years later again by a regular Act 
 of Convocation, the ancient and illustrious use of 
 Sarum was extended to the whole province of 
 Canterbury. This was on March 3d, 1541, and 
 was the last step before the book of 1549, which 
 was made obligatory on both provinces. 
 
 This extension of one Use to the whole of 
 England went hand in hand with a gradual desire 
 to popularize the services of the Church and make 
 them adapted for congregational use. There is 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 181 
 
 evidence of a continual tendency to have such ser- 
 vices as were held in the nave amongst the people 
 in the vernacular, in the language that the people 
 could understand. Not only were they taught 
 the creed, the Lord's Prayer and the ten com- 
 mandments in their own language, but from early 
 times the Bidding the Bedes was in the vernacular. 
 About twenty-five years ago I drew attention to a 
 very interesting service in English preserved in a 
 fine Sarum Breviary on a spare leaf just before 
 the Kalendar which is in the middle dividing the 
 Temporale from the Sanctorale. It is the opening 
 of the fifty-first Psalm with an Antiphon to be 
 used at the Sprinkling of Holy Water. This was 
 always done in procession amongst the people. 
 The manuscript is ascribed by experts to the 
 middle of the fifteenth century about 1450. As 
 it is set to music, it was clearly intended for public 
 use and was no private peculiarity. It forms an 
 important link in the chain of evidence which 
 shows how gradual the Reformation was in Eng- 
 land ; and for how long a period there was a 
 steady determination to have the Scriptures and 
 the Service Books in English. In 1534 and again 
 in 1536, Convocation petitioned for an authorized 
 translation of the Bible, and the Epistles and 
 Gospel of the Communion service were printed 
 and circulated in English. Then came the next 
 step. 
 
1 82 THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 In 1544, Henry VIII. started for France at the 
 head of a large fleet, and he was anxious to gain 
 friends abroad and at home. To this end he 
 caused what has been called the " King's Book," 
 the title of which was, " The Necessary Doctrine 
 and Erudition for any Christian Man," to be trans- 
 lated into Latin for circulation abroad. He wished 
 to show foreign princes that he and his realm were 
 perfectly orthodox, and the translation is very free 
 with a good deal of new matter introduced. This 
 desire probably accounts for the Latin name, " Pia 
 et Cathohca Xtiani hominis institutio." On the 
 title-page of a copy in the Library of Salisbury 
 Cathedral, there is written in handwriting of the 
 sixteenth century, " Libellus supplex ad Caesaream 
 Majestatem et principes electores Germanise. " A 
 humble pamphlet addressed to His Imperial Maj- 
 esty and the prince-electors of Germany. This 
 was doubtless the intention of the book, though it 
 was no friend of Henry that added the supplex. 
 One thing at once strikes the reader of this book, 
 there is one passage of Greek introduced. Greek 
 printing was very rare at that date ; indeed the 
 scribe held his own in Greek against the printer 
 for a long time. Just as the early printed books 
 have the initial capitals filled in by hand, so we 
 find Latin printed books with gaps for the Greek 
 to be filled in by hand. This Greek quotation is 
 in one of the fresh paragraphs inserted in the 
 
THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 I S 3 
 
 translation, and it is from S. Chrysostom. This 
 would imply that between May 29, 1543 and 
 February, 1544, some one in authority had been 
 reading S. Chrysostom's works. 
 
 At the same time in 1 544 for use at home, there 
 was issued what we now call the Litany, but was 
 then called also "the procession in English." 
 Remark it is a procession said or sung among the 
 people like the sprinkling of holy water just 
 spoken of; the Litany is here called "Common 
 Prayer of Procession." At the end of this we 
 find the Prayer of S. Chrysostom as we have it 
 now, another hint that S. Chrysostom's works 
 were being studied. About this time, too, we 
 read in a letter from Cranmer to the king that the 
 Archbishop had been engaged in translating other 
 processions. 
 
 Next after the death of Henry there followed in 
 1548, "the Order of Communion " when all which 
 was addressed to the people, or said by the people, 
 was in English, and the rest still in Latin ; and the 
 next year following the service book was issued, 
 which is known to us under the title of the first 
 book of Edward VI. 
 
 As we should expect from the principles which, 
 as we have seen, actuated the Reformers in Eng- 
 land, there was all along the determination to 
 bring the Scriptures in English before the people. 
 About the same time, therefore, the Bible and 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 Prayer Book were translated. The public reading 
 of the Scriptures was so arranged that, in the 
 daily service, which was now popularized that the 
 people at large might be induced to attend, all 
 the Old Testament, or most of it, should be read 
 once through in the year, and the New Testament 
 three times over. But here again antiquity was 
 followed and Isaiah was read in Advent in the 
 Dominical and Ferial cycle of lessons, and after 
 that Genesis was commenced. It was the aim of 
 the English Reformers to make the people 
 acquainted with the Scriptures. In a very won- 
 derful way they have succeeded. For, though in 
 my own neighborhood where I am now resident, 
 the Scriptures are not as well known as could be 
 wished, yet our daily familiar language, and 
 almost every page, or even column, of the daily 
 journals, testify to the prevalence of a knowledge 
 of the words and phrases of the English Bible. 
 
 Yes, the English Bible is a priceless gift of the 
 English Church to the English-speaking race. It 
 was translated by the English Church for the 
 English people. I speak not of the modern re- 
 vised version, which is in no sense the work of the 
 English Church. I mean the Bible as represented 
 in the Prayer Book psalter, and that which is 
 commonly known as the authorized version. All 
 Englishs-peaking Christians, whether they own 
 the tender authority of the Church or not, owe 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 1 85 
 
 her this vast debt, that she has given them their 
 English Bible. The beauty of the translation may 
 be realized if any one compares it with any other 
 translation. To give one example. How could 
 we bear to hear read as a lesson in Church such as 
 the following, from the Douay version — the 
 mother of Sisera, " looked out of a window and 
 howled. She spoke from the dining-room." 
 
 There is one widely prevalent mistake in Eng- 
 lish which has arisen from a mistaken under- 
 standing of a phrase in the Communion Office, 
 which is a testimony to its influence. It is, unfor- 
 tunately, a very common vulgarism of the present 
 day, to say " I will try and do this or that," in- 
 stead of " I will try to doit." This can only come 
 from misunderstanding the exhortation to com- 
 municants " to try and examine themselves." 
 Try in the sense of test is now rare, and some 
 clearly have thought the exhortation meant that 
 people were to endeavor and examine themselves. 
 
 Here then we pass on to another point in which 
 reform was eagerly demanded ; and no wonder. It 
 was no less than the restoration of the Cup to the 
 laity and such of the clergy as were present but 
 not actually celebrating. The Sacrament had been 
 mutilated and truncated, and there was a loud 
 demand for the restoration of a complete Sacra- 
 ment. The feeling of the laity was so adverse to 
 this denial of the cup that in England and in many 
 
THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 places on the continent after the laymen had com- 
 municated in the one species, an unconsecrated 
 cup was ministered -to them to assist (it was said) 
 in the act of deglutition ; but it was really to con- 
 tent the people. True, the priests were told to 
 inform the laity that the wine was unconsecrated; 
 true, they knelt to receive the consecrated element 
 and stood to receive the wine. But the mass of 
 the unlearned most probably were left in igno- 
 rance; while the learned resented the mutilation. 
 The formal denial of the Cup to all but the cele- 
 brant only dates from the Council of Constance in 
 141 5. though the custom had arisen in many 
 places several centuries before, and it had rightly 
 and justly given rise to great searchings of heart. 
 
 There is in my possession a manuscript volume 
 of sermons on the Sacrament of the Holy Euchar- 
 ist. They were written by the Dominicans of 
 Cologne in A.D. 1268, and bear internal evidence 
 of the work of S. Thomas Aquinas who was lec- 
 turing at Cologne about that time. In these ser- 
 mons three reasons are given for withholding the 
 chalice from the laity. The first is that so pre- 
 cious a gift should have a chosen vessel, such as 
 the priest, to receive it. The second, to avoid the 
 irreverence from the multitudes that receive at the 
 great feasts. The third, to forestall a remedy for 
 error in faith lest the rude multitude should think 
 that Christ is not present entire under either 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 1 87 
 
 species. The Scripture proof is curious: under 
 the second reason it is argued that when the Lord 
 administered to the Apostles at the Last Supper, 
 as there were but few of them, He gave them the 
 Cup ; whereas, when He fed the multitude in the 
 wilderness, He gave them bread alone. The next 
 sermon says that the Blood of Christ is received by 
 the faithful in three ways, first, sacramaitally and 
 this by the priest alone ; secondly , intellectually by 
 the people under the species of bread. The Scrip- 
 ture proof of this is Job xxxix., 30: " The young 
 of the eagle suck up blood." There seems to be a 
 confusion here between the eagle and the fable of 
 the pelican, for the argument runs, " The young 
 of the eagle, that is, the children of the Church, 
 drink the Blood, not from the Chalice, but directly 
 from the very Body of Christ." In further illus- 
 tration or proof, two more passages are quoted. 
 Canticles, i., 14: "My beloved is to me like a 
 cluster of grapes"; and Ps. i., 16: "With honey 
 out of the strong rock should I have satisfied 
 thee." The third way of receiving is spiritually, 
 by pious meditation on the death of Christ. We 
 cannot wonder that men were not satisfied with 
 such arguments as these. There was the institu- 
 tion of Christ Himself. He would not have insti- 
 tuted the Sacrament under two kinds, if one alone 
 were sufficient. He would not have laid such 
 stress upon their all drinking, if one only were to 
 
1 88 
 
 THE REFORM A T/O.V PERIOD. 
 
 receive. The argument of concomitance and all 
 such were swept away as making the Word of 
 God of none effect by mere human tradition; 
 and, thank God, the Chalice is restored to the 
 laity. 
 
 There is, it maybe, a hint of the time when the 
 Cup was withheld in the use of the plural in the 
 XXVth Article. " The sacraments were not or- 
 dained of Christ to be gazed upon or carried 
 about." The two elements were spoken of as two 
 sacraments. In the first Prayer Book of Edward 
 VI. we read, '• as the priest ministereth the Sac- 
 rament of the Body so shall he minister the Sac- 
 rament of the Blood." Some thirty or more pas- 
 sages of a similar character may be found in the 
 official documents or private writings of the 
 period. A similar use seems to be suggested by 
 S. Isidore, of Seville, at the beginning of the 
 seventh century, who says " the sacraments are 
 Baptism and Chrism, the Body and Blood of 
 Christ." Just as in the West, there is a divorce 
 between Baptism and Confirmation, so there was 
 also a divorce and mutilation in the sacrament of 
 the Eucharist. Then again, as when Confirmation 
 was separated by an interval of time from Bap- 
 tism, there was a symptom of it left in the use of 
 oil, and with us in the sign of the cross which is 
 really part of Confirmation ; so, also to content 
 the people, there was the cup of unconsecrated 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 1 89 
 
 wine given, a symptom and relic of the time when 
 the laity were communicated in the Chalice. 
 
 Here again is seen the eager desire to return to 
 the practice of the primitive Church ; that all 
 things in this (as the Homily saith), " be in such 
 wise done and ministered, as our Lord and 
 Saviour did, and commanded to be done ; as His 
 holy Apostles used it ; and the good fathers in the 
 primitive Church frequented it." The Church in 
 the United States may be felicitated on having 
 restored to their service a beauty, which we of the 
 Canadian Church have lost in common with our 
 common mother, the Church of England. 
 
 The next point to which I would refer is the 
 marriage of the clergy. No one can doubt that 
 the proposition of the article is absolutely true, 
 that the clergy are not forbidden jure divino to 
 enter upon or to remain in the married state. This 
 has ever been regarded as a matter of pure dis- 
 cipline varying with the different ages, and the 
 necessities of the Church ; varying also with the 
 public opinion of Christian society. In the 
 eleventh century in the Church at Milan, the 
 archbishop and all the priests and deacons were 
 married; and Milan was proverbial for the excel- 
 lence of the clergy. In England there was never 
 a vow of celibacy taken in the ordination service, 
 as was the custom on the continent ; and though 
 in the twelfth century canons were passed forbid- 
 
1 9 o 
 
 THE REFORM A TION rERIOD. 
 
 ding the marriage of the clergy, we learn that 
 they had no universal effect, for the clergy mar- 
 ried as before. Indeed, more than one instance is 
 known of a somewhat exaggerated protest against 
 such canons, when the priest had more than one 
 wife. One such, the Vicar of Mundeham, in 
 A.D. 1225, exhibited a dispensation from the pope 
 allowing him to retain two wives. It was not at 
 all uncommon in England and Wales for priests 
 to be married. Indeed, it is said that the wife of 
 Archbishop Warham, the immediate predecessor of 
 Cranmer, was recognized by his friends in society. 
 We need look no further than to a long list of 
 surnames, English and Scotch, to see that if there 
 were canons against clerical marriage, they were 
 disregarded. In English we have Pope, Clerk in all 
 its spellings, Bishop, Dean, Cantor, Cancellor, Can- 
 non, Parsons, Chaplin, Priest, Arcedeckne, Deacon, 
 Vicars, and others. In Scotch, Mactaggart, son of 
 a priest ; Mac Nab, abbot's son, all tell the same 
 tale. In refusing to condemn the marriage of the 
 clergy, there was a return to primitive antiquity, 
 most desirable, and most loudly demanded on 
 all sides. 
 
 To return now, in conclusion, from particular 
 details to general principles. The position taken 
 up by the Church of England may be learned 
 from the fact that there is no large treatise of posi- 
 tive doctrine formulated by her; the Thirty-nine 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 1 9 1 
 
 Articles are mainly negative. The difference be- 
 tween the first eight of the Articles and the rest 
 will be at once remarked. Where the faith of the 
 Church is repeated there are few negatives; where 
 the Articles begin to deal with errors current at 
 the time, the negations abound. This would show 
 that the Church took the teaching as she found 
 it, but warned her preachers against certain errors 
 which were prevalent at the time. The Creeds 
 are " the Confession of Faith " of the Church of 
 England. The creeds are what " the Catholic 
 Fathers and ancient Bishops have gathered " from 
 the Scripture. Of these, therefore, Archbishop 
 Parker and the bishops in 1559, said, "Such as do 
 not believe these must not be reckoned amongst 
 true Catholics." Qui istis non crediderint, inter 
 veros Catholicos non sunt recipiendi. It may be 
 true that " The Bible, and the Bible only, is the 
 religion of Protestants." No such statement was 
 ever made by the English Church. Whichever 
 way we turn, the same principles are manifest 
 from the first. In A.D. 1533, in an Act of Parlia- 
 ment, we read, " that nothing in the Act shall be 
 interpreted as if the king and his subjects intended 
 to decline or vary from the congregation of 
 Christ's Church in anything concerning the very 
 Articles of the Catholic Faith of Christendom." 
 Nine years later, in another Act, it is declared ex- 
 pedient " to ordain and establish a certain form of 
 
1 92 
 
 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 pure and sincere teaching, agreeable to God's 
 word and the true doctrine of the Catholic and 
 Apostolical Church." The same is seen under 
 Edward VI., whose council speak of the book of 
 the " ministration of the sacraments well and sin- 
 cerely set forth, according to the Scripture and 
 the use of the primitive Church." From first to 
 last the same passionate appeal is seen. In the 
 thirtieth canon of 1603, it is declared that it was 
 not " the purpose of the Church of England to 
 forsake and reject the Churches of Italy, France, 
 Spain, Germany, or any such like Churches in all 
 things which they held and practised " ; but the 
 right is claimed to reform "in those particular 
 points wherein they were fallen both from them- 
 selves in their ancient integrity, and from the 
 Apostolic Churches which were their first found- 
 ers." This was the aim which the Reformers set 
 before them. They worked hard to achieve their 
 object ; and, considering their opportunities, their 
 accuracy is remarkable. To give one instance. 
 There is a quotation from S. Vincent of Lerins 
 which is very often cited now as a test of Catho- 
 licity. It is quoted in this form: "quod semper, 
 quod ubique, quod ab omnibus." It is said that it is 
 first quoted in this order by Newman in the Oxford 
 Tracts. I have not verified this, but, certainly, in 
 the last fifty years it has been commonly quoted in 
 this order. Now S. Vincent's work is not easily 
 
THE REFORM A TIOiV PERIOD. 
 
 193 
 
 found, and, therefore, inaccuracy may be pardoned 
 in second-hand citation. But S. Vincent reckoned 
 universality of place in the foremost rank, and 
 wrote " quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab om- 
 nibus " ; and Cranmer cites him accurately: " Vin. 
 centius Lirinensis teacheth plainly that the canon 
 of the Bible is perfect and sufficient of itseif for 
 the truth of the Catholic faith ; and that the whole 
 Church cannot make one article of the faith, 
 although it may be taken as a necessary witness, 
 for the receiving and establishing of the same, 
 with these three conditions, that the thing which 
 we would establish thereby hath been believed in 
 all places, ever, and of all men." 
 
 Matters of doctrine cannot well be dealt with 
 here in the small compass of a lecture, therefore, 
 in detail they have not been referred to ; but the 
 same principles held in respect to these as to mat- 
 ters of practice and discipline. 
 
 In the great upheaval of those troublous times, 
 there may be many things which we cannot now 
 in calm dispassionate criticism wholly approve. 
 But we were not living then and cannot be impar- 
 tial judges because we cannot always understand 
 what was at stake. Looking on at a distance we 
 may discern the dust of the struggle, but we can- 
 not always distinguish the exact point over which 
 the battle is fought. For example, at first sight, 
 it is difficult to see why Hooper was compelled to 
 
1 94 THE RE FORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 "wear a square cap albeit his head was round." 
 But the distinction between the laity and the clergy 
 was at stake. At the Universities and so else- 
 where the square cap marked the theological and 
 clerical faculties ; the round cap was worn by the 
 lay faculties, medicine, law and the like. It was 
 the same fight as over the name priest. But this 
 contest was more fully developed later. There is 
 much evidence that in the earlier years of Eliza- 
 beth's reign, the changes interpreted by custom 
 and previous usage were comparatively small. 
 We cannot think that so few ecclesiastics would 
 have abandoned their preferments if it were other- 
 wise ; for there is no reason for thinking that by 
 far the greater mass of the lower clergy were un- 
 conscientious self-seekers. 
 
 The position may fairly be represented by the 
 picture as seen in Shakespeare's plays. He prob- 
 ably represented the current religion of the great 
 mass of the people. The result is that some be- 
 lieve him to have been of the purely Roman obedi- 
 ence ; some claim him as an Anglican of our type ; 
 others think he cared not for distinction of 
 religious belief. He represents the old Catholic 
 religion modified and reformed from excesses and 
 superstitions ; or, as has been well said, " Chris- 
 tianity alike Scriptural, Catholic and Reformed." 
 
 The changes were gradual, and caused but little 
 friction in many parts. At Salisbury, at the com- 
 
THE RE FORM A T10N PERIOD. 
 
 195 
 
 mencement of the sixteenth century, Bishop 
 Langton made a statute that all prebendaries on 
 their installation should pay for a new cope for the 
 cathedral. In consequence of this ordinance, in 
 1 591, the great Richard Hooker paid £3 6s. 8d. 
 for his cope on his installation, though at that 
 time the money probably went toward the repair 
 of the fabric, which the Italian dean had left in so 
 ruinous a condition. At the same cathedral, the 
 Morrowmas Chapel becomes the Chapel of Morn- 
 ing Prayer, and the Morrowmas rents become the 
 Morning Prayer rents. 
 
 The Homilies represent also a transitional state 
 of opinions. The Apocrypha is " the infallible 
 and undeniable Word of God." Orders and mar- 
 riage are sacraments, though not such sacraments 
 as Baptism and the Communion. All show the 
 same — it was a reformation of the old, and not a 
 revolution introducing something entirely new. It 
 is no wonder that there was no breach in Com- 
 munion with the Romanists for more than ten 
 years after Elizabeth came to the throne. It is no 
 wonder that we hear of the offer of the Pope to 
 recognize the existing state of things if only his 
 authority were recognized in England. But this 
 could not be. The people had never liked the 
 foreign influence, and would not tolerate its fresh 
 introduction. 
 
 It is interesting to read the testimony of the 
 
196 THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 great traveller, Sir Edwyn Sandys, in 1599, to tne 
 view of the more sober-minded foreigners about 
 our Reformation. He writes: "In their more 
 sober moods sundry of them will acknowledge 
 [England] to have been the only nation that took 
 the right way of justifiable reformation, in com- 
 parison of others who have run headlong rather to 
 a tumultuary innovation (so they conceive it): 
 whereas that alternative which hath been in Eng- 
 land was brought in with peaceable and orderly 
 proceeding by general consent of the Prince and 
 the whole Realm representatively assembled in 
 solemn parliament, a great part of their own clergy 
 according and conforming themselves unto it ; no 
 Luther, no Calvin, the square of their faith ; what 
 public discussion and long deliberation did per- 
 suade them to be faulty, that taken away ; the 
 succession of bishops and vocation of ministers 
 continued ; the dignity and state of the clergy 
 preserved ; the honour and solemnity of the service 
 of God not abated ; the more ancient usages of 
 the Church, not cancelled; in sum no humour of 
 affecting contrariety, but a charitable endeavour 
 rather of conformity with the Church of Rome, in 
 whatsoever they thought not gainsaying to the 
 express law of God which is the only approvable 
 way in all meet reformations." 
 
 Such, indeed, is the view of candid Romanists 
 now as> ever ; and we may well close with this 
 expression of opinion. 
 
THE REFORM A TION PERIOD. 
 
 1 97 
 
 But the Lord is King, be the people never so 
 impatient : He sitteth between the cherubims, 
 be the earth never so unquiet. The work is 
 God's — there must be some great future in store 
 for us. Just as of old, the Hebrew Church was 
 cradled in the Holy Land, shut in on all sides from 
 much intercourse with foreigners and then trained 
 and taught, until in the fulness of time the Jews 
 were driven into all parts of the world taking with 
 them the Old Testament Scriptures and the 
 knowledge of God ; even so with the English 
 Church. Isolated within the four seas she has 
 been trained for some great work for God, until 
 she sees her children in every part of the world 
 carrying the English Bible and the knowledge of 
 the teaching of the English Church : witness the 
 assembly at Lambeth last year cf the 145 bishops 
 from every part of the world. 
 
 Surely the providential character of the English 
 Church is not for nothing. Surely as she seems 
 on the one hand to have somewhat in common 
 with the various Protestant bodies who love the 
 Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, and on the other 
 to hold on to the Greek and Roman Communions, 
 so we may hope that in our Communion a means 
 of reunion of Christendom may be discovered. 
 
 All honor to the Church here in the States for 
 the move in advancement of this which was made 
 at the last General Convention. Let us be thank- 
 
THE REFORM A T/O.V PERIOD. 
 
 ful that the Lambeth Conference was able to en- 
 dorse that movement. And while we hope that 
 the time may come when " the envy of Ephraim 
 shall depart, and the adversaries of Judah shall be 
 cut off : Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah 
 shall not vex Ephraim "; let us end with the 
 prayer of the man of blameless life and great 
 learning — Matthew Parker — Archbishop of Can- 
 terbury : 
 
 " The Lord defend His Church : govern 
 it with His Holy Spirit and bless the same 
 
 WITH ALL PROSPEROUS FELICITY. AMEN." 
 
 Adveniat regnum Tuum, Domine; Jiat voluntas 
 Tua. 
 
Gbe puritan IReaction. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 THE REV. THOS. F. GAILOR. S.T.B., 
 
 Professor of Ecclesiastical History, University of the South, 
 Sewanee, Term. 
 
 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 An eminent scholar,* a Unitarian, in the Hibbert 
 Lectures for 1883, has remarked that "to enumer- 
 ate the English among the Reformed Churches 
 which own a Genevan origin ... is a pro- 
 cedure conspicuously unfaithful to historical fact. 
 Lutheran, Calvinistic, perhaps even Zwinglian 
 lines of influence upon the English Reformation 
 may be traced without difficulty ; but there was a 
 native element stronger than any of these, which 
 at once assimilated them and gave its own char- 
 acter to the result. . . . The Reformation in 
 England followed no precedents and was obedi- 
 ent only to its own law of development." 
 
 This may be taken as the mature judgment of 
 history. 
 
 What that " native element " would have ac- 
 complished in the way of ecclesiastical reform, 
 
 *Prof Beard. 
 
 201 
 
202 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 without any of these "lines of influence," it were 
 useless to conjecture. Certain it is that this for- 
 eign interference in the conduct of the affairs 
 of the Church of England is largely, if not en- 
 tirely responsible for the pain and misery and 
 contention of her subsequent history, and, there, 
 fore, for the present divisions of Reformed Chris- 
 tendom. That very theory of absolute uniform- 
 ity in outward observances which provoked dis- 
 sension, was imported from Geneva. The first 
 Prayer Book of Edward VI., which expresses the 
 mind of the English Church, is far less restrict- 
 ive than the second Prayer Book, which was put 
 forth at the instance of the continental reformers. 
 And the germ of the theory of clerical subscrip- 
 tion, that bane of later times, was introduced by 
 a letter from John Calvin to Somerset, in 1548,* 
 in which the great master of Puritanism says : 
 " There be two kinds of men who seditiously stir 
 themselves against you and the realm — those who 
 walk disorderly in the name of the Gospel, and 
 those who are sunk in the old superstitions. Both 
 these and those deserve to feel the sword of the 
 Prince." " Let there be a form of doctrine re- 
 ceived by all and taught by all. Let all your 
 bishops and parish priests be bound by oath to 
 maintain that ; and admit none to office in the 
 
 * Dixon, II. 525. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 203 
 
 Church who will not swear." And yet down to 
 the reign of Elizabeth, the " native element " in 
 England left the penalty of recusancy to spiritual 
 censures. 
 
 Foreign associations and internal dissensions 
 began together. It was the reign of Edward VI., 
 " the seven years' rule of an infant — the protector- 
 ate of Somerset and the domination of Northum- 
 berland " — " a chaos," it has been called, " in the 
 semblance of order" — which witnessed the first 
 considerable immigration of continental reform- 
 ers into England and the first organized separa- 
 tion from her ancient Church. In May, 1549, we 
 find Peter Martyr, the Italian exile and zealous 
 Calvinist, thundering disaffection in the Univer- 
 sity of Oxford ; and the more learned Bucer 
 counselling moderation at Cambridge, in the face 
 of bitter ridicule from his fellow-countrymen. In 
 1550, the numerous foreigners of every shade of 
 religious belief had to be permitted to set up 
 their own place of worship in the metropolis, in 
 order that, by the protection and limitation of the 
 law, they might be prevented from falling into the 
 extremes of fanaticism.* Over them was placed 
 John Laski, the Polish Bishop, the fiery revolu- 
 tionist of East Friesland, who gladly imported his 
 own congregation and his theological controversies 
 into the hospitable island. The same year saw the 
 
 * Dixon, III. 233 and 208. 
 
204 
 
 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 rise of small communities of separatists in the 
 eastern and southern, and more exposed parts of 
 the kingdom whose teachings were an incongruous 
 mixture of Calvinism and Pelagianism with Ana- 
 baptist license. These were the first Non-con- 
 formists. John Knox, the Scotch Priest, has the 
 credit of sounding the first note of rebellion against 
 the rubric requiring kneeling at the Holy Com- 
 munion. He had come to England in 1551, fresh 
 from the galleys, where his alliance with the mur- 
 derers of Beatoun had sent him, and was self- 
 confident, fierce and ruthless in the exercise of his 
 genius for the utter overthrow of the ancient order. 
 The name of John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, 
 sometimes called the father of English Non-con- 
 formity, deserves more than a passing notice. As 
 early as 1539 he had fled to Switzerland and there 
 under the influence of Henry Bullinger he had 
 become an enthusiastic convert to the Zwinglian 
 doctrines. On his return to England in 1549 he 
 was almost immediately nominated to the Bishop- 
 ric of Gloucester, in spite of considerable opposition 
 on account of his revolutionary tendencies ; but 
 when he came to be consecrated, absolutely refused 
 to wear the Episcopal vestments prescribed in the 
 Ordinal or to subscribe to Cranmer's articles of re- 
 ligion. His main argument against the vestments 
 is illustrative of the mental attitude of his class. 
 Vestments, he said, were used by the Aaronic 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 205 
 
 Priesthood because the truth of their Priesthood, 
 i. c, Christ, had not yet come. " Christ hung naked 
 upon the cross," and " since His sacrifice the truth 
 no longer needs veil or shadow." * Hooper at first 
 preferred to go to prison rather then wear the 
 vestments, but soon afterwards relented and Avas 
 consecrated. Strange to say he lived to become a 
 model of Episcopal intolerance. We find him in 
 1552 ruling his diocese with a strong hand, enforc- 
 ing clerical subscription without mercy, determined 
 in requiring uniformity of practice even beyond 
 the Prayer Book, especially when it was in the 
 direction of his own opinions. It may be that the 
 prospect of so many dangerous errors convinced 
 him of the necessity of strict law ; or perhaps he 
 began to believe, with so many other men who 
 have been called to bear the responsibility of high 
 office, that even a tyrannical control is better than 
 unlimited license for the welfare of religion and 
 government. 
 
 But there was no spirit in Edward's reign en- 
 dowed with sufficient authority and courage to 
 check the prevailing tendency to disunion. The 
 King was the perpetual target of unwearied preach- 
 ers. Cranmer groaned in the weak struggle be- 
 tween the contending parties. The King's sanc- 
 tion of the revised Prayer Book seemed to be the 
 
 * Dixon, III. 216 n. 
 
2o6 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 beginning of the end, when the death of Edward 
 and the accession of Mary drove the most advanced 
 reformers into a five years' exile on the continent, 
 where they had leisure, under the influence of 
 Geneva, to nurse their hatred against Rome, and 
 to organize a determined opposition to the wise 
 and moderate position heretofore occupied by the 
 English Church. In the year 1555 English con- 
 gregations were established at Wesel, in the 
 dominions of the Duke of Cleves, at Arrow in 
 Switzerland, Embden, Zurich and Strasburg and 
 Frankfort-on-the-Main. Among them were many 
 who afterwards became prominent in the Church, 
 as Edmund Grindal, Sandys, Home and Jewell. 
 Of these congregations Fuller says * " Embden was 
 the richest for substance, Wesel the shortest for 
 continuance, Arrow the slenderest for number; 
 Strasburg of the most quiet temper. Zurich had 
 the greatest scholars, and Frankfort the largest 
 privileges." Fellowship in suffering was not suffi- 
 cient to unite the exiles. A fierce and unseemly 
 strife about the use of the Prayer Book arose in 
 Frankfort, in which Whittingham, Knox and Coxe 
 were the chief contestants. An apologetic account 
 of it, written probably by Whittingham, then Dean 
 of Durham, and published in 1 5/5,-f has come 
 down to us, containing Knox's scornful and unfair 
 description of the Book of Common Prayer, and 
 
 * VIII., 406. 
 
 t Reprinted, 1846. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 2O7 
 
 Calvin's famous judgment on the " Book of Eng- 
 land " wherein he decides that " there are many 
 tolerably foolish things in the Liturgy," and ex- 
 presses his astonishment at " those men which so 
 greatly delite in the leavings of Popish dregges." 
 Knox was banished from the city on account of 
 his book entitled " An Admonition to Christians," 
 in which he compared the German Emperor to 
 Nero. The book was brought to the notice of the 
 magistrates by Knox's opponents, and they re- 
 luctantly admitted it to be treason and gave the 
 victory to the ceremonial party. It is interesting 
 to note that in all these contentions about the 
 surplice and responsive worship Bishop Hooper's 
 case was constantly referred to. The troubles at 
 Frankfort mark the real beginning of Non-con- 
 formity. Hardly a man returned to England who 
 was not determined on further reformation on 
 Genevan lines. Many of the exiles, smarting under 
 their injuries, actually burned with the desire to 
 abolish the last remnant of connection with the 
 old order. To them Lutheranism was not only a 
 base compromise, but a gross hypocrisy. The 
 Pope was the visible anti-christ and child of Hell. 
 
 The reign of Elizabeth is in many respects the 
 most' important as well as the most difficult to 
 understand in English history. .For at least thirty 
 years Church and State together rocked and trem- 
 bled between contending factions ; and whatever 
 
208 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 faults of character or of policy may justly be 
 charged against the Queen, it is to her immortal 
 honor that she had the courage and the ability to 
 achieve triumphant success in the face of almost 
 unequalled difficulties. It is not accurate to attrib- 
 ute every thing to her. She was Henry's daughter, 
 but she cannot be said, like him, to fill the whole 
 canvas. She was intelligent enough to divine 
 what the mass of her people wanted, and cour- 
 ageous enough to insist upon it. More than onge 
 she yielded her own will to that of parliament. 
 More than once she found it necessary to modify 
 her orders about religion. Had her conscience 
 and her piety been equal to her intellectual grasp, 
 she would have treated her Archbishops and their 
 convictions with more consideration, and saved 
 her successors many trials. As it was, she came 
 to the throne in November, 1558, and at once 
 adopted, with the advice of her ablest ministers, 
 that conservative attitude in religion which we have 
 come to honor as Anglo-Catholic. To this she was 
 intellectually loyal to the very end, although she 
 permitted her greatest court favorite to torment 
 the Archbishop by open encouragement of both 
 Puritan and Roman dissentients. There was prac- 
 tically no opposition to her conservative policy. 
 As Mr. Gladstone showed last year,* the indefi- 
 
 * Nineteenth Century, July, 1888. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 2og 
 
 nite resolutions of the lower house of Convocation 
 amounted to nothing. Mary's reign had cured 
 England of Popery, and when subscription to the 
 new order was demanded, only 192 out of more than 
 9,000 clergy refused ; and of these, only eighty were 
 rectors of churches.* As Mr. Green says, at least 
 two-thirds of her people were with her, among them 
 the older and wealthier of the gentry of the king- 
 dom, and no marked repugnance to the new worship 
 was shown by the people at large. It took foreign 
 influence, from Rome on the one side and Geneva 
 on the other, to stir up- the strife during the sub- 
 sequent years of her reign, which occupies so much 
 of the space of ordinary histories, that one almost 
 wonders when he reads the one-sided account of 
 innumerable grievances, whether there were any 
 adherents of the established Church at all. Yet, 
 the acts of this reign mark the practical conclusion 
 of that readjustment of the doctrinal and liturgical 
 system of the Church which we call the Reformation. 
 The strong and clear assertion and maintenance of 
 the Church's historical continuity, were agreeable 
 to the nation, and were destined to survive. The 
 miserable Nag's Head fable is now universally dis- 
 credited, f The insertion of the Ornaments Rubric ; 
 the rejection of the title " Supreme Head"; the 
 limitation of the test of heresy to Holy Scripture, 
 
 *Strype. Annals. I. 106 ; Heylin II. 295. 
 fCf. Hibbert Lectures, 1883. 
 
210 
 
 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 and the first four general councils ; the public 
 declaration of the venerable antiquity and inde- 
 pendence of the English Church — these are facts 
 with which we are all familiar. 
 
 The return of the exiles in 1559, marks the 
 beginning of Puritanism, although that name does 
 not appear until about five years afterwards,* and 
 then has no invariable signification. There were 
 men in Elizabeth's reign, called Puritans on account 
 of their strict lives, who were loyal Churchmen, 
 but the effort to shift the name was not success- 
 ful. The later Puritanism was a thing of gradual 
 growth, and there were always various shades of 
 opinion included in the designation. There were 
 doubtless some quiet souls who conformed to the 
 established usages of the Church, and who would 
 have been better pleased if certain ceremonies had 
 been omitted. Others refused to conform to the 
 wearing of the surplice, kneeling at the Holy 
 Communion, and using the sign of the cross in 
 Baptism, but did not attack the ecclesiastical gov- 
 ernment. And finally, the true Puritans, led by 
 Cartwright, fought for the abolition of the Church 
 of England, and the substitution of what came to 
 be known as Presbyterianism, without thought of 
 toleration in any direction. 
 
 Calvin naturally undertook to give directions as 
 
 * Fuller, IX. 474. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 21 I 
 
 to the proper method of reform in England, but 
 his letter was disregarded.* The more prominent 
 of the exiles began, on their return, an ineffectual 
 movement to do away with the compulsory use of 
 the surplice and academic habit. Some of them 
 became Bishops, and all of them manifest in their 
 letters a great horror of Lutherans, Anabaptists, 
 Arians, and other heretics (not Calvinistic), and 
 this very dread of heretics evidently chilled their 
 ardor for changes when they realized the possible 
 outcome of the Puritan movement. In 1567, we 
 find in the Zurich letters, two of these bishops 
 writing to Bullinger and Gualter, in great disgust 
 at the crudeness and violence of the Puritan fac- 
 tion. Nine years afterwards, in a letter to Gualter, 
 they thanked God for the enforced silence of those 
 "contentious, vainglorious, mischievous men, who 
 with ungovernable zeal for discord, led the people 
 into a madness of error, called purity."f 
 
 It was well for the Church that a man like 
 Matthew Parker was Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 He has been rightly called " the great conserva- 
 tive spirit of the English Reformation." His ripe 
 learning, especially in ecclesiastical history and 
 antiquities, made him a primitive and Catholic 
 Churchman, whose influence upon Elizabeth in her 
 earlier years may in some measure account for her 
 
 * Ep., p. 133, Heylin. 
 
 t I. 177. 
 
212 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 own predilections. His zeal for learning and his 
 preservation of manuscripts have won for him an 
 honorable name among all historians ; and his wis- 
 dom and firmness in dealing with the two fanati- 
 cal extremes he was compelled to cope with, gained 
 for him enemies, some of whom rebelled against 
 his authority, and confessed after his death that he 
 was " a godly man with a zeal for true religion." 
 His visitation in 1564 revealed so much disorder 
 and irregularity in the performance of public wor- 
 ship — and the Queen herself had accidentally wit- 
 nessed such shameful sacrilege — that by her order 
 he consulted with the Bishops of the ecclesiastical 
 commission and proceeded to enforce the law. 
 While Neale, the Puritan historian, regards the 
 " Popish vestments " as the original sole ground 
 of dispute, there was evidently a determination to 
 increase the demand. Humphreys and Sampson 
 in 1566 wrote* to their advisers in Zurich and 
 Geneva complaining of the cap and surplice ; the 
 use of music and organs ; sponsors and the cross 
 in Baptism ; kneeling at the sacrament and the 
 use of unleavened bread, besides the removal of 
 the explanatory rubric at the end of the commun- 
 ion service. Bullinger's advice to them was 
 learned and moderate, but Beza was fierce and 
 sweeping. The new-made Superintendents in 
 Scotland finally expressed their opinion in a letter 
 
 * I. 164. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 213 
 
 " breathing," as Neale says, " an excellent spirit," 
 in which they say " if surplice, corner-cap and tip- 
 pet have been badges of idolatry, what have 
 preachers to do with the dregs of the Roman 
 beast." * An argument quite convincing to men 
 who said that according to Jerome " gold that was 
 ordered for use in the Jewish Temple could not be 
 used for ornament in the Christian Church, and so 
 much less can copes brought in by Papists be used 
 in Christian worship." 
 
 The Puritan leaders were vigilant, aggres- 
 sive and determined, and they lost no oppor- 
 tunity for the propagation of their opinions, and 
 open ridicule of the law. The Archbishop re- 
 sorted to severer measures. The more active and 
 turbulent were deprived, and as Puritanism was 
 not so much a popular as a clerical party, this 
 step threatened serious injury to their cause. 
 They resorted, as Neale says, to that door of en- 
 trance to the ministry which was providentially 
 left open to them.f For by bull of Alexander 
 VI. the University of Cambridge was authorized 
 to license twelve preachers each year indepen- 
 dently of the Bishops, whose authority it was ever 
 the Papal policy to depreciate ; and now this 
 privilege the Head of the University made use of 
 for the relief of the Puritans, not without a protest 
 from the Archbishop, and the scorn of some who 
 
 t Ibid, I. 101. 
 
214 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 despised this alliance between " their Herod and 
 their Pilate." The year closed with a flood of 
 pamphlets and sermons, and in midsummer, 
 1566, some of the deprived ministers finally 
 separated from the English Church, and set up a 
 new worship with the Genevan service-book, and 
 without the " idolatrous gear of the Papists." 
 Four years afterward the adherents of the Pope 
 also formed separate congregations in consequence 
 of the bull of Pius V., excommunicating the 
 Queen and absolving her subjects from their 
 allegiance. The rest of Parker's life was a strug- 
 gle to preserve the order and existence of the 
 Church in the midst of various sects, which took 
 courage from these two beginnings of organized 
 dissent and logically asserted their equal right to 
 live. It is curious to read the plea of the Puritan 
 historian* for individual liberty in the interpreta- 
 tion of Scripture along with his fierce and con- 
 temptuous description of Quietists, Brownists 
 and Anabaptists. They were perilous and trying 
 times for Parker and his coadjutors. The Bishops 
 were urged in some cases against their better judg- 
 ment to adopt extreme measures, and in official 
 documents were accused of lukewarmnessf and 
 neglect of their spiritual duties, while at the very 
 time they knew that the Non-conformists were 
 
 * Neale, I. 151. t Card well's Annals, I. 385. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 21$ 
 
 secretly encouraged by the unscrupulous Leicester, 
 and other powerful members of the royal council. 
 In 1573 Parker warned the court that the end of 
 this movement was the overthrow of civil govern- 
 ment, but it was not until 1592 that the Privy 
 Council had courage to declare with -the Bishops, 
 that for the Church to attempt to satisfy the 
 demands of every sect that arose, would be to put 
 a premium on disputations and disunion. Parlia- 
 ment was beseigedwith bills and petitions for fur- 
 ther reforms in the direction of the Genevan dis- 
 cipline. The petitioners drew up no less than 
 three revised and expurgated Prayer Books, one 
 after another,* and the more they purified the less 
 satisfied they seemed to be with it. The godly 
 zeal ran into fanaticism, and fanaticism rapidly be- 
 came crime. Puritan preachers strove to awe the 
 multitude by the display of miraculous power.f 
 and devils were cast out of some poor creatures, 
 who afterwards confessed that they had duped the 
 crowd. Mr. Hatton, a member of the Council and 
 afterward Lord Chancellor, was finally singled out 
 for assassination by a Puritan zealot, who said he 
 was " moved by the Spirit of God to kill him as 
 an enemy of God's Word, and a maintainer of 
 Papistry." Parker died in 1575. He had left his 
 mark for good. No historian questions his fitness 
 
 * Strype's Whitg. II. 340. 
 
 t Fuller. III. 78. 
 
2l6 
 
 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 in moral character and intellectual ability for his 
 high office, but some have condemned him for his 
 efforts to enforce obedience to the law. His own 
 letters are the best evidence of his moderation, his 
 desire for peace, his humility, his deep distress 
 at the opposition and discouragement met with in 
 the performance of what he knew to be his duty. 
 It was not natural that the Puritans should love 
 the man who had effectually opposed them. In 
 the next century when they came into power they 
 tore the Archbishop's body from its grave, 
 sold the lead of the coffin, and buried the remains 
 in a dung-hill. Edmund Grindal succeeded to the 
 primacy. He had been an exile in Mary's reign, 
 and was known to favor the more moderate Puri- 
 tans. His one year of office is only memorable for 
 his encouragement of a Puritan practice of pub- 
 lic disputation among the clergy and laity called 
 " Prophesyings," which bred mischief and strife 
 throughout the country. He had the courage to 
 resent the Queen's arbitrary interference and was 
 suspended for contumacy, although he was after- 
 wards restored and died in possession of his see in 
 1583. His successor, John Whitgift was a man of 
 different mould, a Churchman after the type of 
 Parker, and his vigorous administration was des- 
 tined to bring about a new order of things in 
 quieter and less tumultuous times. Whitgift was 
 a man of learning, keenly alive to the importance 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 217 
 
 of the questions of the hour, and he entered upon 
 the discharge of his duties with decision of charac- 
 ter and manliness of conviction.* His boldness 
 and courage in the defence of the Church rallied 
 round him many dispirited Churchmen, and opened 
 the eyes of all to the insidious and volcanic agen- 
 cies by which they were surrounded. Hitherto 
 Churchmen had been cautious, conservative and 
 defensive in their arguments. The boldness and 
 aggressiveness had been largely with the Puritans. 
 And it was true then, as it is now, that the side 
 which was thrown on the defensive, which dared 
 not to assert itself, was losing ground. The re- 
 markable revival of the English Church towards 
 the close of the century was due under God to the 
 confidence and vigor with which Whitgift and his 
 colleagues, casting off the yoke of the modern re- 
 formers, and planting themselves upon the early 
 Church, attacked and exposed the positions of 
 their opponents. There was indeed an aspect of 
 severity in the firmness with which the law was 
 enforced. The Court of High Commission was 
 freely used. Clerical subscription to the Prayer 
 Book and the articles was insisted on. Prophesy- 
 ings were put down. Irregularities and flagrant 
 violation of the rubrics were conscientiously pun- 
 ished, and the government of the Church was as- 
 
 * Hardwick Hist, of Ref., p. 237. 
 
218 
 
 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 serted independently of the patronage of the Swiss 
 authorities, as being of Scriptural and divine au- 
 thority. The younger men in the Church began 
 to realize that here was something worth fighting 
 for : that the Church of England not only had a 
 right to exist, but the very best right to exist- 
 that she was not simply to be tolerated by the 
 modern founders of the only true religion, but 
 that she had her own ancient title-deed in the 
 Scriptures themselves and the Christian history of 
 fifteen centuries. This saved the English Church 
 from the Puritans' " Holy Discipline." This asser- 
 tion of her historical continuity, of her lawful in- 
 heritance from the ancient Church became the 
 rallying ground of earnest men, and saved her 
 from complete destruction at the most critical 
 period in her history. 
 
 The advance of Puritanism in influence and 
 numbers during the first twenty-five years of Eliz- 
 abeth's reign, may be easily accounted for if we 
 remember the condition of the times. Europe 
 was a seething sea of discord. That cold and 
 brutal inquisitor, the Duke of Alva, was just be- 
 ginning, with his " council of blood," the reign of 
 terror in the Netherlands which led to the 
 heroic struggle and assassination of William of 
 Orange in 1584. The civil wars in France had 
 reached their climax when Catherine de Medici and 
 the Guises, not without the Pope's approval, had 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 2I 9 
 
 horrified Europe with the massacre of St, Barthol- 
 omew in 1572. Spain, suspecting England's inter- 
 ference in the affairs of Holland, was encouraging 
 treason in England and Ireland, and was making 
 preparations for an irresistible and overwhelming 
 invasion. It is impossible for us to realize the 
 conflicting doubts and fears of Englishmen in the 
 presence of so many dangers. The Queen, ex- 
 communicated, deposed, declared to be a usurper, 
 and her subjects incited to rebellion by one who 
 had been but a few years before the spiritual head 
 of Christendom, and who had now the richest and 
 most powerful king in Europe pledged by re- 
 ligion and by personal interest to execute his 
 orders ; Ireland on the west in a state of utter 
 lawlessness and misrule; Scotland on the north 
 boiling with civil and religious discord ; a rebel- 
 lion of the Papal party in the North of England 
 under one of the most powerful of the nobles ; and 
 Mary of Scotland, with all her pitiful history, the 
 heir to the crown, a Roman Catholic, leagued 
 with Philip of Spain for the overthrow of the 
 government, and conducting her intrigues with 
 more or less voluntary treason under the very 
 shadow of the throne. These were the times 
 when the world was divided by the sword of ex- 
 termination into Papalists and anti-Papalists ; 
 when Churchmen thanked God even for Calvin's 
 form of Protestantism ; when the Church of Eng- 
 
220 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 land was compelled to recognize the Continental 
 Churches of every type in some way, as sisters in 
 distress, and gladly sent of her money and sym- 
 pathy to the aid of the Genevan reformers, even 
 when they had denounced her government and 
 ceremonies. Perplexed by the terrors of the time, 
 men, even like Parker, faltered and hesitated in 
 asserting the Church's claims ; and the leaders of 
 the Puritans, taking courage from that hesitation, 
 roused to a very ferocity of zeal against Popery, 
 became more and more rampant in their demands 
 for further changes. The Jesuits took advantage 
 of this internal dissension, and sent their emissa- 
 ries to play the part of Puritans. In 1569, a paper 
 was found on an arrested Jesuit, in which three 
 men, Hollingham, Coleman, and Benson, are men- 
 tioned as being employed " to sow faction among 
 the heretics," and these very men are unsuspect- 
 ingly described by Fuller and Heylin as violent 
 Puritans.* 
 
 Thomas Cartwright is called by Neale the 
 " Father of the Puritans." His public career 
 began at Cambridge, where he was Margaret Pro- 
 fessor of Divinity in 1572, soon after the publica- 
 tion of the famous " Admonition to Parliament," 
 in which, among denunciations of the Praver 
 Book and Prelacy, a brand-new Church is recom- 
 mended, whose holy discipline should copy the 
 
 * Curteis, B. L., p. 63 n. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 221 
 
 Presbyterian models extant in Scotland and Gen- 
 eva.* Cartwright defended the Admonition in a 
 controversy with Whitgift, which extended over a 
 period of about four years, and in which he estab- 
 lished his reputation for unparalleled self-confidence 
 and insolent fanaticism. Mr. Green says,f that " his 
 bigotry was that of a mediaeval inquisitor." To 
 him, the rule of Bishops was begotten of the 
 devil ; but the rule of Presbyters was established 
 by the Word of God. This was a new departure. 
 For, according to Neale, the moderate Puritans 
 in 1 571 would have been satisfied with mild con- 
 cessions. They would use the Prayer Book, pro- 
 vided that they did not kneel at the Holy 
 Communion ; that there were no organs nor sing- 
 ing ; that no one was allowed to walk abroad, or 
 sit idly in the streets during service time ; that min- 
 isters examined into the private lives of communi- 
 cants; that children were instructed in Calvin's 
 catechism — and other matters of this sort.J But 
 Cartwright was bent on revolution. The language 
 of the " Admonition " was, " The Bishops are 
 a remnant of Anti-Christ's brood, which do battle 
 to Christ and His Church, and I protest before the 
 eternal God I take them so." The ceremonies one 
 and all were the intolerable marks of the Roman 
 beast. The Calvinistic or Presbyterian scheme of 
 government was exclusively, absolutely, divinely 
 * Hardwick, p. 236. t p. 468. fl„ 117. 
 
222 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 true, and the ministers so ordained were not only 
 the arbiters of religious doctrine and discipline, 
 but the guardians of public morals. The State 
 must be subject to the Church, and that the Calvin- 
 istic model. The penalty of all heresy was death. 
 " I deny," wrote Cartwright in 1573, " that upon 
 repentance there ought to follow any pardon of 
 death. Heretics ought to be put to death now. 
 If this be bloody and extreme, I am contented to 
 be so counted with the Holy Ghost.' * But Cart- 
 wright's utterances were mild compared with the 
 "Martin Marprelate " tracts, which began to ap- 
 pear early in 1588. These documents are marvels 
 of vituperation and scurrility, even for that age. 
 It would be painful to quote the language. The 
 Puritan historian describes themf as " bitter, rude, 
 and unbecoming," and regrets that "controversy 
 about serious things should run such dregs." 
 
 Thus Presbyterian Puritanism reached its high 
 water mark in 1590, and as soon as its ultimate 
 aims became generally recognized, its influence 
 began to wane. Several causes contributed to 
 bring about this change. First, the aspect 
 of the political world was far more encouraging 
 and England was no longer disturbed by internal 
 discord, or the threat of foreign invasion. The 
 civil wars in France had ended with the accession 
 of a Protestant king, who conformed, from mo- 
 
 * Green, 469. t I. 189. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 223 
 
 tives of policy, to the Roman Church, but toler- 
 ated his former colleagues. The mighty Spanish 
 Armada had foamed itself away in the English 
 Channel ; and the unhappy Mary Queen of Scots, 
 had expiated all her crimes upon the scaffold. 
 England was at peace, and a native literature, un- 
 equalled in the world, had burst into splendid • 
 flower. The intellect of Germany was still ex- 
 hausted by theological debate. The noble literary 
 promise of Italy and Spain was crushed by civil 
 and religious despotism. Shakespeare, the glory 
 of modern letters, was the child of conservative 
 and Catholic England. Second, and above all, 
 the Church herself was represented by a new gen- 
 eration of scholars, who had learned to love her 
 doctrine and her worship, and were not afraid to 
 throw off the influence of the continental reform- 
 ers, and boldly to defend her on the solid grounds 
 of Scripture and of history. Bancroft openly pro- 
 claimed the doctrine of the Apostolical succession 
 in his famous sermon at St. Paul's Cross in Feb- 
 ruary, 1589, and it was warmly defended by a 
 learned layman of the Queen's Chamber the same 
 year. Twelve months afterwards Saravia's book 
 asserted the same doctrine, and Bilson followed 
 in 1593 with his "Perpetual Government of the 
 Church." Hooker's crushing reply to the Puri- 
 tans, in his " Ecclesiastical Polity " finally ap- 
 peared in 1594. One more attempt to Calvinize 
 
224 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 the Church by the adoption of the Lambeth 
 Articles, was made in 1595, and was at first ap- 
 proved by Whitgift, whose theological learning 
 was largely drawn from modern Protestant sources. 
 But the time for such an alliance was passed. 
 Men like Andrews, Overall and Harsnet, opened 
 the eyes of the Archbishop, who had long since 
 learned to doubt the infallibility of Calvin and 
 Beza, and the scheme failed. This was practi- 
 cally the end of dissenting Puritanism as a religious 
 movement, since the Presbyterian theory, as Green 
 says, never had any general hold on England, for, 
 even in the moment of its seeming triumph under 
 the commonwealth, it was rejected by the vast ma- 
 jority of the people. The close of Elizabeth's reign 
 was marked by a steady, healthy development of 
 loyal Churchmanship, which had certainly vindi- 
 cated itself in the face of the two great extremes 
 of theological antagonism, and was about to enter 
 upon a new trial, in which unhappy political com- 
 plications well-nigh accomplished its destruction. 
 Some of the most prominent of the Puritans real- 
 ized themselves that a reaction had set in. We 
 have already seen how Hooper, the first Non-Con- 
 formist, lived long enough to appreciate the 
 dangers of indiscriminate license in matters of dis- 
 cipline, and became at last a strict and unflinch- 
 ing promoter of uniformity in his diocese. So 
 also Robert Brown, the founder of the Independ- 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 225 
 
 ents, or Congregationalists, the most logical, but 
 not least intolerant branch of the Puritans, who 
 has been immortalized by the migration of some 
 of his followers to New England in the May- 
 flower and by the triumph of his sect under 
 Cromwell, became wearied with the discords which 
 he himself had fostered. His separatist commun- 
 ion in Holland was rent with internal strife, and 
 Brown had to retreat to Scotland and thence to 
 England, where, by the influence of his kinsman, 
 Lord Burleigh, he was allowed to make his peace 
 with the Church and die in her communion. And 
 Thomas Cartwright, the pitiless iconoclast, whose 
 language failed him in the expression of his dis- 
 gust at Prelacy, was conquered at last by the 
 forbearance of Whitgift * and the prospect of 
 contending sects. He died in 1601 in friendly 
 submission to the Church's authority, expressing 
 upon his death bed f " his sorrow for the unneces- 
 sary troubles he had caused the Church by the 
 schism he had been the great fomenter of, and his 
 wish that he might begin his life again in order 
 that he -might testify to the world the dislike he 
 had of his former ways." 
 
 The reign of James I. marks the beginning of a 
 new era. We are all familiar with that character 
 which the genius of so many historians has por- 
 trayed. The King was indeed insignificant in his 
 
 * Fuller, 163. t Strype, Whitgift, II. 460. 
 
226 
 
 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 appearance; narrow and petulant in his humors; 
 childishly vain of his superficial acquirements and 
 fatuously jealous of his royal prerogative, but with 
 all this not incapable at times of the display of 
 much shrewd common sense and a rather caustic 
 wit. His stormy experience in Scotland had 
 thoroughly cured him of Puritanism, and his as- 
 sociation with the great English Divines of the day 
 made him an intelligent and ardent Churchman. 
 The Church and the Crown were heartily united, 
 not only on the ground of State policy but also 
 of religious conviction. We all know now and 
 deplore the misfortune of this alliance. It placed 
 the leaders of the Church on the unpopular side of 
 a quarrel not unlike that which four hundred years 
 before the Church had fought for the people 
 against the King. And it gave Puritanism the ac- 
 cidental advantage of espousing the cause which 
 became in later days the cause of civil liberty. 
 Strange that the Church which fought for the 
 Magna Charta should have been placed in the al- 
 titude of defending the tyranny of royalty, and that 
 a sect whose fundamental doctrine was the ultra- 
 montane denial of the rights of civil government 
 should appear as the champion of constitutional 
 liberty. 
 
 The political history of James' reign is the his- 
 tory of the development of the Parliamentary 
 consciousness of its rights and of the Crown's 
 
THE rURITAN RE ACTIO X. 
 
 227 
 
 blind determination not to recognize it'. The King 
 possessed neither the presence, nor the intellect, 
 nor the courage, nor the personal popularity of 
 the Tudors, and yet his claims were even more 
 absolute and his public utterances more dictato- 
 rial. Elizabeth had recognized the growth of the 
 parliamentary spirit, and after a severe struggle 
 over the question of monopolies, had yielded to 
 the Commons with her usual sagacity. But James 
 was devoid of political wisdom and his four par- 
 liaments, one by one, were dissolved, each more 
 discontented than the others. We are familiar 
 with the Parliament's use of its financial authority 
 to bring the King to terms ; the popular excite- 
 ment over the King's exercise of his prerogative 
 in raising duties on imports and exports, and his 
 vindication by the Court of Exchequer ; his un- 
 wise challenge to popular prejudice in seeking a 
 Spanish alliance ; his sacrifice of Bacon and 
 Raleigh, and devotion to the wretched Bucking- 
 ham ; his interference with the freedom of Parlia- 
 mentary debate, and his disastrous attempt at war 
 in the Palatinate, altogether the seed of a fearful 
 harvest for his son to reap. 
 
 Ecclesiastically the reign promised well, but 
 ended most unhappily. The Church had the 
 ablest set of Bishops since the Reformation. 
 Bancroft, and Andrewes, and Bilson would have 
 done credit to any age, and the translation of the 
 
228 
 
 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 Bible in 1611 is a lasting monument to the lit- 
 erary taste and judgment and scholarship of the 
 time. The Puritans had receded from many of 
 their extreme positions, and asked only the privi- 
 lege of ministering in the Church without obeying 
 the objectionable rubrics. Their " millenary peti- 
 tion," or "petition of a thousand," signed by 750 
 preachers, had little weight with the King, al- 
 though he summoned representative Churchmen 
 and Puritans to a Conference at Hampton Court 
 in 1604. The record * of this conference is a fair 
 illustration of the character of the King and the 
 method and matter of the arguments on the oppos- 
 ing sides. The King showed his partiality and his 
 vanity by naming more Churchmen than Puritans, 
 and by largely conducting the disputation him- 
 self. Yet some of his arguments have so much 
 shrewdness in them that we almost enjoy his 
 interference. The Puritans offered the usual objec- 
 tions, with many trivial criticisms of the Prayer 
 Book, as, for example, that in the XXIIId article 
 it is said, " it is not lawful for anyone in the con- 
 gregation to preach before he is lawfully called," 
 and this might imply that " anyone out of the 
 congregation might preach without being law- 
 fully called." The King expressed his objection 
 to adding any negative statements to the Ar- 
 ticles, and said : " I think it unfit to thrust into 
 
 ♦Fuller, III. 172. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 229 
 
 the book of Articles every position negative, which 
 would swell the book into a volume as big as the 
 Bible and confound the reader. Thus, one Mr. 
 Craig, in Scotland, with his ' I renounce and 
 abhor,' and his multiplied detestations and abre- 
 nunciations, so amazed simple folk that, not 
 being able to conceive all these things, they fell 
 back into Popery or remained in their former ig- 
 norance." Dr. Reynolds, who moderately pleaded 
 for the Puritans, was the scholar of whom Fuller 
 says that " he had been in early life a zealous 
 Papist, whilst his brother William was as earnest 
 a Protestant, and Providence so ordered it that by 
 their mutual disputation John Reynolds turned 
 an eminent Protestant and William an inveterate 
 Papist." He was himself a strict Conformist, and 
 although called a leader of the Puritans, it is char- 
 acteristic of the times that on his dying bed he 
 asked for and received the formal absolution of 
 the Church. 
 
 The Hampton Court Conference left the King 
 more than ever satisfied with his aphorism — " No 
 Bishop, no King,'' and the Churchmen absurdly 
 worshipful of his royal ability. The Puritans, not 
 satisfied with the concessions made to them, began 
 an earnest agitation for the ultimate triumph of 
 their cause, by petitions and preaching, and by 
 the gradual acquisition of influence in Parliament. 
 
 Archbishop Whitgift died in 1604 and was sue- 
 
230 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 ceeded by Richard Bancroft, who proceeded on 
 the same lines and with much the same deter- 
 mination. Finding that many of the clergy sub- 
 scribed to the oath of obedience with internal reser- 
 vations, he was authorized to enforce the ex animo 
 test which compelled conscientious acquiescence 
 and roused great opposition. Many of the Puri- 
 tans were deprived, although from the conflicting 
 accounts it is impossible to ascertain the number; 
 and an agitation was begun in Parliament to com- 
 pel the Bishops to cease enforcing obedience to 
 the rubrics on the ground that this was the only 
 way in which the vacant parishes could be sup- 
 plied with ministers. Bancroft rightly or wrongly 
 held that it was poor policy to fill the pulpits with 
 men who ridiculed the method of public worship 
 they were sworn to use. King James' resistance 
 of this demand of Parliament was the beginning 
 of his troubles. 
 
 Lord Clarendon in his " History of the Great 
 Rebellion " praises the wisdom and efficiency of 
 Bancroft's administration, and maintains that his 
 policy of strict conformity was rapidly eliminating 
 the obstructionist element from the Church, and 
 so by combining the more zealous of the clergy 
 and people was weakening the Puritan party. 
 Certain it is that throughout this period there is 
 growing complaint from the Puritans of the in- 
 creasing popularity of the Church and her cere- 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 23 I 
 
 monies* — although the stricter line between par- 
 ties and the alienation of many who had hitherto 
 conformed for the sake of peace, together with the 
 fierce mutterings on the subject in Parliament, 
 give the impression of the increased strength of 
 the opposition. 
 
 The appointment of George Abbot to the 
 primacy in 161 1 was perhaps the very worst thing 
 that could have happened to the Church. Whit- 
 gift and Bancroft had been at least consistent, but 
 Abbot cannot be classified. The Bishops had 
 agreed to recommend Launcelot Andrewes, who 
 was in every way fitted for the position, but Ab- 
 bot's flattery of the King and his court influence 
 won the day. The new primate was a rigid Cal- 
 vinist, a sympathizer with the Puritans, superfi- 
 cially learned, and narrow and morose in charac- 
 ter. He showed his true Calvinistic temper by 
 his persecution of heretics, two of whom were 
 burnt the year after his accession, the first time 
 such a thing had happened in England, in forty 
 years. f Under him and James together the 
 Church was nearly committed to the Calvinistic 
 decrees of the Synod of Dort and the pitiful perse- 
 cution of Barnveldt and Hugo Grotius. It was the 
 beginning of that discussion of predestination and 
 free-will which gave a theological cast to the Puri- 
 tan position. Abbot favored and consorted with 
 
 * Perry, 370. f Perry, 388. 
 
232 THE PURITAN REACT/OA'. 
 
 Puritans until many of the Bishops, looking to the 
 King alone for support and direction, became so 
 abject in their flattery and dependence that we 
 read their letters with shame. True there was a 
 new school springing up in the Universities, of 
 which Laud was the chief spirit. But the times 
 were too critical for gradual improvement. The 
 laxity and indifference and unwisdom of a reign 
 like that of Abbot's brought about a condition of 
 things, the issue of which no power on earth could 
 have prevented. Laud gave his life afterwards to 
 this hopeless task — hopeless in so far as he him- 
 self did not live to see the result. That twenty- 
 two years from Bancroft's death to Laud's acces- 
 sion is in some respects the saddest period in the 
 history of the Church of England. Churchmen, 
 blind to the signs of the times, wasted their en- 
 ergy in attacking Romanism which was powerless 
 to harm them. The Archbishop fostered a nega- 
 tive and hazy Churchmanship which was sapping 
 the strength of the Establishment in high places. 
 It is the drifting of a bark without a pilot in a 
 stormy sea, frightened by the distant prospect of 
 Romanism and hugging the dangerous coast upon 
 which it was fated to go to pieces. 
 
 When King James died in 1625, he left the 
 Church weakened by the incompetency of its 
 leaders, and the Puritans strong with the patron- 
 age and politic favor of a discontented Parliament. 
 
THE rURITAN REACTION. 
 
 233 
 
 There are two events of the reign which demand 
 a more extended notice, as bearing upon matters 
 of deep interest to Churchmen in our own day. 
 The first is the publication in 161 8 of the King's 
 " Book of Sports," intended especially for the re- 
 lief of the people of Lancashire, who appeared to 
 the King to be subjected by the magistrates to an 
 unnecessary and ill-advised restriction from all 
 recreation on Sunday.* The book was repub- 
 lished in 1633 by order of Charles I., and roused 
 the most terrific opposition because it contradicted 
 the fundamental principle of Puritanism, which 
 was the literal application of Old Testament pre- 
 cepts to the regulation of Christian conduct. To 
 us the provisions of the book, certainly if intended 
 for the poor and laboring classes, are not unrea- 
 sonable. It was simply ordered that " between the 
 hours of Divine Service which in no case should be 
 let or hindered," lawful athletic recreations might 
 be indulged in, provided there was nothing essen- 
 tially inconsistent with the observance of the day, 
 such as bear-baiting and bull-baiting and cruelties 
 of like character. Such liberty appears to be 
 sanctioned, as Dr. Hessey says.f by the general 
 practice of the Church before the Reformation, 
 and was never prohibited either by precept or ex- 
 ample by the first reformers — neither by Calvin 
 nor Cranmer, nor either, it would seem, by John 
 
 * Fuller, III. 270. t B. L, p. 198. 
 
234 
 
 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 Knox himself. It may be that the confusion of 
 the times led to an abuse of the privilege in the 
 reign of Elizabeth, for the Puritan advocacy of a 
 Sabbatarian strictness begins about 1 580. The 
 same view of religion which induced the Puritans 
 to assert the obligation of the Mosaic law * in crim- 
 inal cases so that idolaters or Papists, adulterers, 
 witches, demoniacs, Sabbath-breakers and other 
 offenders ought to be put to death, determined 
 their conception of Sunday. To them the word 
 Sunday had a heathenish sound. It was not found 
 in the Bible. The Sabbath, with all its severity of 
 judgments, did occur in that part of it to which 
 they were most devoted. Accordingly they 
 reasoned that they were bound by the Levitical 
 ordinance, although not so strictly but that " one 
 day in seven " might be substituted for the " sev- 
 enth day." This interpretation satisfied all the 
 difficulties which might arise from St. Paul's epis- 
 tles. These floating opinions were reduced to 
 a system in a book written by Dr. P. Bownd and 
 published in 1595. He declares that the Mosaic 
 law on the subject is moral and perpetual and for- 
 bids all levity on the Christian Sabbath, from " the 
 ringing of two bells " to private conversation on 
 pleasurable or worldly topics. It was nothing to 
 him that the Church in every age had distinguished 
 between the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian 
 
 * Cf. Hallam, C. H. I. 210. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 235 
 
 festival, and the inference from the New Testa- 
 ment was disregarded. The ideas thus promul- 
 gated spread with great rapidity and were welcome 
 to large numbers of people who in transition from 
 one religion to another craved definite and decided 
 changes. Their natural outcome among American 
 Puritans is seen in the " Blue Laws " of Connecti- 
 cut, and in the very logical and apparently unan- 
 swerable position taken by John Traske in 
 England in 1618. This man argued that the 
 observance of the first day of the week under a 
 strict interpretation of the Jewish law was inconsist- 
 ent and that if it was wrong to change the manner 
 of observance, it was wrong to change the day. 
 He accordingly founded a sect which substituted 
 Saturday for Sunday and in many other respects 
 conformed to the literal observance of Old Testa- 
 ment precepts. To us, as we recall the storm of 
 abuse through which Laud and Charles I. had to 
 pass in their opposition to this Sabbatarian view, 
 it cannot but be a cause of devout thanksgiving 
 that the Church of England has never committed 
 herself to any man's theory on this subject, but 
 has quietly followed in the footsteps of the Apos- 
 tles and of the Catholic Church for eighteen cen- 
 turies in celebrating " the Day of our Lord's 
 Resurrection and the weekly earnest of our own " ; 
 teaching her people to reverence the great event 
 which the day commemorates, and trusting an en- 
 
236 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 lightened conscience more than written law : rec- 
 ognizing that all men are not alike either in 
 disposition, in habit, in position or circumstances, 
 and that while the Church's public and formal 
 thanksgiving to God is not neglected, there may 
 be various and lawful expression of our serious 
 joy over" the day which the Lord hath made " for 
 the good of all His children. 
 
 The second matter of special importance — im- 
 portant because it led ultimately to that league 
 between Scotland and the Long Parliament which 
 overthrew the Church and throne of England — was 
 the consecration in 1610 of three Bishops for the 
 Scotch Church. This measure, though pressed by 
 the King, seems to have been fully sanctioned by the 
 Scotch Assembly* which nominated the three Bish- 
 ops to be consecrated. Indeed during the whole 
 terrible and turbulent period of the Scotch Refor- 
 mation from 1560 onwards — a movement which for 
 barbarous violence has no parallel except perhaps 
 in Switzerland — there had never been more than 
 eight years when there was not a nominal or 
 pseudo-Episcopacy. The eight years of Melville's 
 Presbyterian government really ended in iooo.f 
 During the two years following James was in cor- 
 respondence with Bancroft, having already secured 
 the passage of an act restoring the Bishops to parlia- 
 ment. In 1603 or 1604 a canon was passed by the 
 
 * Perry, 382. t Lawton. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 237 
 
 English Convocation ordering prayer to be said 
 for the Church of Scotland which, considering the 
 high views of Bancroft and Andrewes, the authors 
 of the canon, maybe taken as an indication that a 
 genuine Episcopacy was about to be restored 
 to that country. The unhistorical use of this 
 canon to convict the English Church of official 
 recognition of the validity of non-episcopal ordina- 
 tion, suggests the propriety of a brief consider- 
 ation of the views of Episcopacy entertained by 
 the reformers on the continent and in England. 
 There can be no question as to the law of the Eng- 
 lish Church. That has been declared of late years 
 by judicial decision. The statutes and formal 
 doctrinal statements are unwavering from the 
 beginning. " The Institution of a Christian Man," 
 put forth in 1 537 * before the question of orders 
 had arisen, is clear enough, though in Scholastic 
 language. The Ordinal of 1 549, which the Puritans 
 interpreted as teaching Apostolical Succession, 
 the twenty-third and thirty-sixth of the XXXIX. 
 Articles, the Acts of Elizabeth, even the " Refor- 
 matio Legum," leave no room for doubt as to the 
 Church's mind. It has been said that Whitting- 
 ham, Dean of Durham in Elizabeth's reign, and 
 Travers, preacher at the Temple, had neither of 
 them received Episcopal ordination, and this is 
 true. But Whittingham died while his trial was 
 
 * Formularies of Henry VHIth's reign. 
 
238 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 pending, and Travers was actually deprived for 
 this violation of the law.* At the beginning 
 of Elizabeth's reign a letter was received from 
 Calvin requesting the Queen to take steps for 
 holding a conference of all Protestants for the 
 purpose of uniting them under a common gov- 
 ernment and discipline. To this the Council 
 quietly replied through the Archbishop that they 
 would take the matter under consideration, but 
 that the English Church was determined to pre- 
 serve her Episcopate which had come down to her 
 from Joseph of Arimathea in British times before 
 the Roman usurpation. f This was the English 
 view of Episcopacy without any uncalled for criti- 
 cism of other Christian bodies. The law of the 
 English Church never wavered once. As for the 
 personal views of the reformers themselves they 
 are rather difficult to ascertain in the continuous 
 shifting of their theological position, but are inter- 
 esting in the light of modern discussion. Until 
 1532 the treatment of the subject of Holy Orders 
 was evidently largely influenced by the Scholastic 
 language. S. Thomas Aquinas expressed the 
 views of the Schoolmen in his " Summa Theolo- 
 giae," where (Q. 40 and 41 Sup.), in order to em- 
 phasize the dignity of the priestly office and the 
 supremacy of the Pope, he denies that the Episco- 
 pate is a separate order, although in other places 
 
 * Neale I. 145. 
 
 tStrypes Parker, I. 138. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 239 
 
 he asserts the distinct superiority of Bishops in 
 matters of government. The Papal claims were 
 in constant conflict with the earlier doctrine of the 
 Apostolical Succession so that John Gerson, Chan- 
 cellor of the University of Paris, in 1410* 
 declares that the authority of the Episcopate 
 had been so depreciated by the Papalists that they 
 had left only " painted images of Bishops." As 
 late as 1560 the Italian party in the Council of 
 Trent succeeded in suppressing the true doctrine 
 of the Apostolical Succession which had been 
 urged by the Spanish and French Bishops. f To 
 this we may add the enormous prominence given 
 to the sacrificial aspect of the Eucharist, which 
 created a desire to level the Episcopate down to 
 the Priesthood, and it will be evident that the 
 germ of later Protestant theories was found in 
 Ultramontanism. Thus the earlier reformers 
 started out with at best a maimed conception of 
 the ministry which prepared them, deserted as 
 they were by their Bishops, for the ultimate denial 
 of the Episcopal succession, whenever a new 
 theory of government should be boldly proclaimed. 
 This tendency was increased by the popular iden- 
 tification of the Episcopal regime with Papal 
 tyranny. As it was, however, Luther and Melanc- 
 thon fairly longed for a restoration of Episcopacy,^; 
 and Bucer regarded it as established by the Holy 
 
 * Gies. iv. 131. t Buckley. \ Hardwick, p. 343 n. 
 
240 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 Ghost.* The Augsburg confession itself accepts 
 the government of Bishops, and whatever Eras- 
 tianism colored Cranmer's wavering opinions he 
 certainly had very high views of the ministry in 
 1548 and I549f just about the time when the 
 preface to our Ordinal was written. In 1 541 John 
 Calvin, a French layman, never in Holy Orders, 
 " flew to his funereal throne of Geneva" and be- 
 gan to teach that Bishops and Presbyters were 
 originally of the same order, quoting the private 
 opinion of S. Jerome.^ His genius recognized 
 that the Lutherans had crippled themselves by 
 subjection to the State and he seized the acciden- 
 tal advantages offered him in Geneva to establish 
 a system which became a considerable factor in our 
 history. Calvin never denied the historical pres- 
 tige and expediency of the Episcopal government 
 — in one of his letters he recommends it to be 
 adopted, and in his Commentary on Titus he ad- 
 mits its apostolic institution. Yet the Genevan 
 Council of Presbyters gradually became to the 
 continental reformers the model of all Church 
 government, and it is amazing in the light of this 
 history to hear the exclusive claims of this 
 system so strongly asserted in Elizabeth's reign 
 that there are several instances of English clergy 
 going over to the Continent to be reordained 
 by Calvin's successors on the ground that 
 
 t Catechism, 1548. 
 
 I Institutes. 
 
THE PUR J TAN REACTION. 
 
 24 [ 
 
 their previous ordination was invalid.* The do- 
 minion that Calvin claimed and exercised in the 
 Protestant world of the sixteenth century has no 
 parallel in history. It was dangerous to differ 
 from him and his word was law. The generation 
 of English Churchmen immediately succeeding 
 Cranmer grew up under this influence. In Mary's 
 reign they were indebted to the continental re- 
 formers for many offices of friendship, and they 
 were drawn to them by the bond of a common 
 persecution. Calvin, Bullinger and Beza gradu- 
 ally supplanted Luther and Melancthon as au- 
 thorities in theology and the ancient Fathers were 
 but superficially examined. For thirty years 
 therefore there is an unsatisfactory vagueness and 
 sometimes an Erastian indifference on the part of 
 English Churchmen, even like Parker, in asserting 
 the historic truth of Episcopacy. Most of them 
 seem to have been satisfied to preserve the insti- 
 tution themselves without hazarding any opinion 
 as to the continental Churches, holding, as Bram- 
 hall expressed it, that " it is charity to think well 
 of our neighbors and good divinity to look well to 
 ourselves."! The fiercer race of Puritans, recog- 
 nizing the feebleness of this position, boldly op- 
 posed to it the positive, dogmatic claim of the 
 divine obligation of Presbyterian government, and 
 this was successfully resisted only when a new 
 
 * Neale, I. 144. t III. 475. 
 
-4- 
 
 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 generation of men like Bancroft, Bilson, Saravia 
 and Andrewes dared to defend the Prayer Book 
 theory of the ministry by an appeal to Scripture 
 and antiquity — and to take a stand which, if not 
 agreeable to the politicians, was at least defensible 
 and consistent. Hooker, while carefully leaving 
 a rather impracticable loophole of escape for his 
 opponents in two hypothetical cases of special 
 revelation and absolute necessity, shows no real 
 doubt as to his own position. He was a pioneer 
 — his great work was of an essentially tentative 
 character, although some controversialists have 
 endeavored vainly to find in him the final state- 
 ment of the Anglican position. In Mr. Gar- 
 diner's words, " Hooker's greatness indeed . . . 
 consisted rather in the entireness of his nature 
 than in the thoroughness with which his particu- 
 lar investigations were carried out. . . . The 
 work which had to be done by the generation 
 which came after him was work which he could 
 not do. . . . Men were to arise who in clear- 
 ness of conception and in logical precision, sur- 
 passed the great Elizabethan writer as far as the 
 political themes of Pym and Somers surpassed 
 those of Elizabethan statesmen." * 
 
 The storm of political revolution was already 
 gathering when Charles I. came to the throne 
 of England in 1625. The gradual development 
 
 * I. 158 (cf. Perry). 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 243 
 
 of the royal power, largely emphasized by an- 
 tagonism to the temporal claims of the Papacy 
 and the decay of feudalism, had brought men 
 face to face with the issue between absolutism 
 in government and constitutional liberty. Spain 
 and France had solved the problem in favor 
 of pure despotism, and it was left to Eng- 
 land to enter upon that terrific struggle which 
 lasted over forty years, and which is in many re- 
 spects the most important and the most deplora- 
 ble in her annals. The movement was conducted 
 not by the mass of the people, for it was not in 
 the true sense popular, but by a group of promi- 
 nent leaders who were not perfectly clear in their 
 own minds as to the end in view, and who had 
 hardly begun their work of political reform before 
 they were overwhelmed, and driven and swept 
 away by a riot of religious and political fanaticism 
 which tore up the institutions of government and 
 society from their foundations. Thus Churchmen 
 like Hampden, Pym and Eliot sounded the note 
 of civil freedom, and Puritans like Prynne and 
 Peters and Cromwell swelled it into a blast of 
 anarchy. The conflicting currents of thought and 
 action during this period defy complete analysis. 
 The elements of truth in all such national convul- 
 sions are to be judged only by their permanent re- 
 sults and two things survived the English rebel- 
 lion. The principle of constitutional liberty was 
 
244 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 established in 1688 and the widespread reaction in 
 favor of the old Church was the triumphant wit- 
 ness to the folly and fanaticism which had tried to 
 confound religious with political questions. What 
 the Church, trammelled as she was, had failed to 
 accomplish by the unhappy use of the secular arm, 
 was easily won by the glaring incompetence of the 
 enemies who supplanted her. 
 
 The logic of events has forever demolished that 
 theory of the divine right of kings for which Charles 
 I. contended ; but the most brilliant historian has 
 failed in his effort to justify the proceedings of 
 the Long Parliament or to convict the King of 
 intentional injustice. Charles I. began his reign 
 fettered, handicapped by a' false and pernicious 
 education which had filled him with a conscious- 
 ness of the royal prerogative. That isolation 
 which was pre-eminently in his day the curse of 
 kings shut him off from any real knowledge of the 
 feelings and the needs and wishes of his people, 
 for Parliament was not yet truly representative. 
 He was by nature weak and yielding. He lacked 
 that enormous self-will which is the safety and 
 shame of tyrants. He was not gifted with the 
 bold shrewdness and unscrupulous craft which 
 made Elizabeth's deception not only successful 
 but respectable and gained for kings the reputa- 
 tion for statesmanship. His unskilful attempts at 
 so-called diplomacy have excited the scorn of par- 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 245 
 
 tial historians. His theory of royalty and his 
 treatment of parliaments are the well-worn targets 
 of modern ridicule. And yet there are thousands 
 of men who deplore the strange and dreadful fury 
 which made him its victim. His kingly dignity, 
 his courage, the personal purity and gentleness of 
 his private life, his love of art and literature, ap- 
 peal still to many men who pity his weakness in 
 sacrificing Strafford, and compassionate the en- 
 forced ignorance and hereditary blindness which 
 failed to read the signs of the times ; and admire 
 the devotion with which, in spite of wife and 
 friends, he clung to the Church he loved and went 
 calmly to his death. He was at his best when he 
 stood upon the scaffold. As even Macaulay is 
 forced to say: "The captive King, retaining all 
 his regal dignity and confronting death with 
 dauntless courage, gave utterance to the feelings 
 of his oppressed people, manfully refused to plead 
 before a court unknown to the law, appealed from 
 military violence to the principles of the constitu- 
 tion, asked by what right the House of Commons 
 had been purged of its most respectable members 
 and the House of Lords deprived of its legislative 
 functions, and told his weeping hearers that he 
 was defending not only his cause but theirs . . . 
 and thus his enemies gave him an opportunity of 
 displaying at the last on a great theatre before 
 the eyes of all nations and ages some qualities 
 
246 
 
 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 which irresistibly call forth the admiration and 
 love of mankind, the high spirit of a gallant gen- 
 tleman and the patience and meekness of a peni- 
 tent Christian." 
 
 The history of the Church from 1630 to 1644 is 
 the life of William Laud, successively President of 
 S. John's College, Oxford, Bishop of London and 
 Archbishop of Canterbury. It has taken two- 
 hundred and fifty years for the smoke of bitter 
 controversy and unscrupulous abuse to clear away, 
 and even now historians are only beginning to do 
 him simple justice. It is hardly to be expected 
 that those who deny the truth of his religious posi- 
 tion will find anything attractive in him. But 
 any Churchman who regards Christianity as an 
 historical inheritance ; whose sympathy is roused 
 and his zeal inflamed by the memory of the 
 Church's continuous organic life ; anyone who re- 
 jects the theory that religion is the mere product 
 of the individual or collective consciousness of any 
 age or generation — he must find in Laud. no. 
 perfection perhaps, not freedom from all fault and 
 weakness, but an example of heroic unselfishness 
 as honest and as fearless as any which the 
 English Church has produced. The reckless 
 and unlimited abuse which his enemies have 
 heaped upon him is the best contradiction of their 
 repeated statement that he was not a great man. 
 
 Laud was fifteen years old when Bancroft 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 247 
 
 preached his famous sermon at St. Paul's Cross in 
 1589 and the full tide of the earnest Churchman- 
 ship of that era swept his heart away with it. 
 One idea took possession of him — mind and soul. 
 He dreamed of a Church which should be truly 
 Catholic ; which should be loyal to those funda- 
 mental principles of faith and order which had 
 conquered the heathenism of Rome and had sur- 
 vived the contention and abuse of fifteen centu- 
 ries. A Church which should be too broad, he 
 said, to bind men's minds in the specific and nar- 
 row doctrinal tyranny of either the Romanist or 
 the Puritan ; which should be a patron of art, of 
 literature, of science, and yet be faithful to all that 
 was truest and noblest in her venerable past. To 
 this idea Laud devoted all his time, his energy, 
 his learning. He saw the Church drifting into a 
 narrow and immoral Calvinistic conception of God, 
 with its theory of an invisible and unknowable 
 Church and unreal sacraments. He saw the Ro- 
 manist on the one hand and the Puritan on the 
 other pledged to accomplish the Church's ruin, 
 and men in high place who had been enriched by 
 her spoil encouraging that fanaticism. At Oxford 
 men called him an Arminian and a Romanist. 
 They scoffed at his reverence and reviled at his 
 doctrine. The leader of the Puritans taunted him 
 with being a poor man's son and the chief of the 
 Romanists sneered at his mad theory of the 
 
248 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 Church's Catholicity. He was always calm, un- 
 ruffled and persistent. His learning vanquished 
 his opponents when his patience did not disarm 
 them. He made his way through a very thicket 
 of curses and contempt, and he lived to find him- 
 self, in spite of almost unnumbered obstacles, 
 Bishop of London at the age of fifty-five and 
 Archbishop of Canterbury at sixty-one. During 
 all these years he had not wavered for an instant 
 The idea of the Church in the breadth, fulness 
 and richness of her life and beauty — that idea had 
 mastered and possessed him. As Archbishop of 
 Canterbury he had the power he thought to real- 
 ize something of his dream. The King was no 
 longer an Erastian Tudor but himself religiously 
 loyal to the Church, and Laud saw in the legal 
 authority of the Archiepiscopal office an instru- 
 ment for the accomplishment of his purpose. He 
 used the High Commission Court as he found it 
 and for the existence of which he was not responsi- 
 ble. He increased and enlarged his power by 
 personal influence. He rebuked the King for dis- 
 regard of the proprieties of public worship. He 
 converted the frivolous Buckingham to his views. 
 He roused the poorer clergy to something like en- 
 thusiasm. He threw himself perhaps unwisely 
 into the political life of the nation and mastered 
 every detail of its commerce and manufacture. 
 The greatest minds of the Church owed their en- 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 249 
 
 couragement or elevation to him, — Jeremy Taylor, 
 Sanderson, Bramhall, Heylin, Herbert, Hammond, 
 Chillingworth. He fought Romanism with un- 
 precedented success because he stood on solid, 
 historic ground, and the Pope took the mean 
 revenge of offering him a Cardinal's hat in order 
 to rouse against him the reckless hatred of his 
 enemies. The Puritans said that he had no re- 
 ligion because for this great dream of his life he 
 consented to mix with the courtly crowd and busy 
 himself with State questions of the time. Yet 
 beneath all this busy, terrifically exciting, superfi- 
 cial life, his diary showed that he was religious — 
 religious after the old fashion, the religion of the 
 hair-shirt and leathern girdle — in bitter penitence, 
 in strict self-denial, in hours of private agony and 
 rapture of prayer, in glad study of Holy Scripture. 
 Little he thought that some of his enemies whose 
 religion consisted largely in confident assurance of 
 their freedom from sin and certainty of salvation, 
 would drag out these expressions of penitence 
 from his diary and torture them into an admission 
 of heinous crime. He did not know or seem to real- 
 ize that it was too late ; that complications had 
 arisen which rendered a struggle for the Church 
 unequal; that Puritanism was too completely or- 
 ganized to be easily overthrown. The Archbishop 
 made himself unpopular. At the King's desire he 
 approved and encouraged the introduction of litur- 
 
250 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 gical worship into the Scotch Church where an 
 Episcopal government was smothered by a Calvin- 
 istic machinery. He dared to rebuke the nobles 
 for their immoral and unchristian living. He 
 dared to insist upon the Church's right to her own 
 incomes and to take the part of the poorer and lower 
 clergy and to censure Bishops for living in luxury 
 in London when their dioceses were neglected. 
 He dared to be accessible always to the poor and 
 the oppressed, to give them lavishly of his income, 
 to dress plainly, to avoid ostentation and to pro- 
 test against the fanaticism, the narrowness of 
 Puritanism, and to assert the native healthfulness 
 and brightness of the English character. He of- 
 fended that class of land-owners who controlled 
 Parliament and who never forgave him for making 
 his way to high office in the Church. Above all he 
 refused to permit men who voluntarily took the 
 vows in the Ordinal to contradict the Prayer 
 Book in all their services : for of one thing he was 
 certain — that the "Prayer Book, whatever else it 
 was, had never been a Puritan book and until it 
 should be changed it ought to be obeyed. 
 
 They said that he was an innovator and he was. 
 He repaired the old Cathedral windows which had 
 been broken down, and he loved the dignity and 
 grandeur of a ceremonial service. He found the 
 communion table in churches a mockery and a 
 disgrace.* " Churchwardens kept their accounts 
 
 * Quoted by Mozley. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 251 
 
 on it ; parishioners despatched parish business 
 at it ; schoolmasters taught their boys to write at 
 it ; boys had their hats, satchels and books upon 
 it ; men sat on it and leant on it at sermon time, 
 and glaziers knocked it full of nail holes." He did 
 resent this, as even the Puritan Abbot had 
 done before him,* and he ordered that the table 
 should be placed close to the wall against the east 
 end of the church and railed off from the congre- 
 gation with a " railing close enough to keep out 
 the dogs." That was all. He did practise acts of 
 reverence and encourage men to do so, but I do 
 not find them in the published orders. In fact as 
 we read Bishop Wren's " orders and directions," 
 put out with Laud's sanction, and the charges 
 made against him at his trial, we are astonished at 
 his moderation. Laud was not hated chiefly for 
 his ceremonialism. He was hated because he be- 
 lieved in the Catholicity and historical continuity 
 of the Church ; because he refused to permit the 
 XXXIX. Articles to be interpreted in the interest 
 of the extremest Calvinism and the whole tone 
 and teaching of the Prayer Book to be ignored. 
 He was hated finally because in every position 
 he took he seemed to be so resolutely successful. 
 As he said boldly at his trial : " Whatever I did, I 
 did to the uttermost of my knowledge, according 
 to both law and canon and with the consent and 
 
 *Cardwell, II. 227. 
 
252 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 liking of the people; nor did any command issue 
 out from me against the one or without the other 
 that I know of." 
 
 Every man has his failings and Laud's lack of 
 tact and policy, his care for little things, his 
 straightforward resoluteness and invincible deter- 
 mination won for him the reputation of being 
 bigoted, foolish, superstitious and narrow-minded. 
 The best modern criticism, even that which is un- 
 friendly, does him more justice and contents itself 
 with saying that he was pure, unselfish, even ascetic 
 in his private life, that he was by nature a lover 
 of order and discipline, " devoid of the higher spirit- 
 ual enthusiasm " which characterizes greater minds. 
 He was devoid of that "higher spiritual enthusi- 
 asm" which would attempt an uncertain union of 
 the Church by the surrender of the fundamental 
 principles upon which her life had rested for one 
 thousand five hundred years. His bitterest enemy 
 admitted that his defence before Parliament was 
 able, learned and complete and that there was no 
 law under which he could be convicted. And so 
 he died — the old man in his seventy-third year. 
 Or as he expressed it, he passed through the red- 
 sea — the sea of blood — with the same calm and 
 cheerful trust in God which had characterized him 
 all his life and which provoked his tormentcrs 
 into a brutality of petty cruelty upon the scaffold, — 
 a cheerfulness which some count madness and 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 253 
 
 others know to be the assurance of faith. As 
 Professor Mozley says : " Laud saved the English 
 Church " — saved her from being choked with the 
 iron chain of Calvinism and made it possible that 
 men with Catholic convictions could live within 
 her fold. 
 
 The history of the long parliament demonstrates 
 the deadly effect of all these years of religious 
 strife. The parliament was composed almost en- 
 tirely of Churchmen, but Churchmen of three 
 classes. There were those who sympathized with 
 Laud and who regarded the Church as their 
 Catholic heritage and reverenced its sacraments and 
 its services. There were others, including many 
 of the nobility and gentry who owed their place 
 and fortunes to Tudor times, who regarded the 
 Church as a department of the State and were satis- 
 fied with the expediency of Episcopal government 
 if it could be easily and consistently maintained. 
 And finally there were Churchmen who were in- 
 fected with Calvinistic doctrine and who secretly 
 longed for further reformation in the direction of 
 the Genevan model, and who had conformed to 
 the Prayer Book rather from policy than convic- 
 tion. Neither of these two latter classes of Church- 
 men were capable of resisting the strain ot 
 political necessity. 
 
 Parliament in 1606 fought King James and de- 
 clared that the Scots were beggars, rebels, traitors ; 
 
254 
 
 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 that there had not been a single King of Scotland 
 who had not been murdered by his subjects, and 
 that it was as reasonable to unite England and 
 Scotland as it would be to place a prisoner at the 
 bar on an equality with a judge upon the bench. * 
 And Parliament in 1643, alarmed for its own safety 
 in the civil war against the King, abandoned the 
 Church in order to get assistance from the Scotch 
 and bound itself by the " Solemn league and 
 and covenant" to extirpate Prelacy and to submit to 
 Presbyterianism. Thus Puritanism won the day 
 and began a seventeen years' reign of religious in- 
 tolerance and confusion without a precedent in 
 English history. Prelacy was abolished. Calvin- 
 ism was adopted. A Directory of worship was 
 published. All holidays were forbidden — all relig- 
 ious services at funerals were condemned. The 
 use of the Prayer Book in public or in private was 
 prohibited and a penalty imposed of a fine of £$ for 
 the first offence and imprisonment for the second, 
 and this was afterwards extended to a recitation 
 of the prayers from memory. Walker, on p. 198 
 of his book on " The Sufferings of the Clergy." 
 demonstrates with abundant evidence that about 
 8,000 of the English clergy, most of them with 
 their wives and children, were ejected from their 
 livings, notwithstanding numerous petitions from 
 their parishioners, and left without means of sup- 
 * Skottowe, p. 63. 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 255 
 
 port. Some fled to the continent, many were im- 
 prisoned, some starved to death, and negotiations 
 were entered into for disposing of some of them 
 by selling them into slavery. Churches were 
 desecrated, and art galleries and monuments 
 destroyed. Horses and swine were baptized in 
 mockery in the Cathedral fonts. S. Paul's became 
 a stable for horses, and Westminster Abbey was 
 turned into a barrack. Within two years sixteen 
 sects sprang up which vied with each other in the 
 active encouragement of misrule. Arguments 
 against toleration were put forth by the Presby- 
 terian party which anathematized schism and main- 
 tained that it was grievous sin to separate from 
 their true Church. But Cromwell and his army put 
 an end to this tyranny and established a system 
 of government which was forced to be tolerant to 
 all sects except Churchmen, Roman Catholics, 
 Quakers and Unitarians. Thus both religiously 
 and politically the rebellion was a failure. Once 
 indeed the Lord Protector permitted a free elec- 
 tion, and the Parliament of 1654 is known as the 
 first Parliament representing the United King- 
 dom ; but its early dissolution proved that con- 
 stitutional government was impossible, and 
 Cromwell did not dare to trust again to a free 
 election. 
 
 Religiously the government was a parody, and 
 the great mass of the people were indignantly 
 
256 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 restive under this new Papalism and longed for 
 the Church's restoration. When that came in 
 1660, the reformation of the Church of England 
 may be said to have been completed. The con- 
 flict had been for one hundred years on the inter- 
 pretation of the Prayer Book, and the Church's 
 revision in 1662 settled that question by finally 
 deciding in favor of Laud as against the Puritans. 
 
 The years that have passed since the Great 
 Rebellion have removed much bitterness, and 
 sobered men's judgments and taught them many 
 lessons of breadth, of wisdom, of toleration. The 
 ideal Puritan with his gloomy solemnity, his 
 relentless determination, his peculiarities of man- 
 ner, of dress, and conversation; his exquisite as- 
 sumption of right to examine into other men's 
 consciences; his enormous assurance, his pas- 
 sionate zeal for a narrow and Judaic conception 
 of Christianity — has passed away from amongst 
 us. What was true and abiding in that for which 
 he contended is with us still. For the present 
 contains the harvest of all the past and the seed 
 of all the future, and history is but the record of 
 God's dealings with His people, whereby He has 
 brought good out of apparent evil and has vindi- 
 cated the truth of that unchangeable law of 
 righteousness to which all human actions must 
 ultimately be adjusted. 
 
 Puritanism has been regarded by many as a 
 
THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 257 
 
 necessary factor in the growth of that civil liberty 
 with which at the Rebellion it was accidentally 
 associated. But nothing can be clearer, rein- 
 forced as it is by the history of New England, 
 than that not only was there no essential con- 
 nection between that peculiar form of reformed 
 Christianity and our modern freedom; but that 
 some of its axioms were as contradictory to our 
 modern conceptions of the proper relations be- 
 tween Church and State as were the theories of 
 Hildebrand and Innocent III. 
 
 Puritanism as a system must be judged by its 
 immediate results. It must be looked at, as it 
 was, — not glorified by the characters of individ- 
 ual men who in later days have owned hereditary 
 allegiance to it; not as modified and altered to 
 meet new conditions and adapted to the more 
 liberal and enlighted conceptions of our modern 
 world. The Puritanism we have been consider- 
 ing had its results to be seen and read of all men. 
 As Matthew Arnold * says, " The triumph of the 
 Puritan conception and presentation of righteous- 
 ness was so at war with the ancient and inbred 
 integrity, piety and good nature and good humor 
 of the English people, that it led straight to 
 moral anarchy, to the profligacy of the Restora- 
 tion. It led to the court, the'manners, the stage, 
 the literature which we know. It led to the 
 
 * Essay on Falkland, p. 170. 
 
2 5 8 
 
 THE PURITAN REACTION. 
 
 long- discredit of serious things, to the dryness of 
 the 18th century, to the irreligion which vexed 
 Butler's righteous soul, the aversion and incapac- 
 ity for all deep inquiries concerning religion and 
 its sanctions, to the belief so frequently found 
 now among the followers of natural science that 
 such inquiries are unprofitable." 
 
 It checked and cramped that intellectual and 
 literary development which was the glory of 
 Elizabeth's reign. An alien in every sense, by 
 birth and by adoption, it has been a source of 
 discord to the English Church — choking the 
 freedom of her growth and deadening her spirit- 
 ual power — breeding that widespread and un- 
 happy dissension and disunion which is the 
 present agony of the English-speaking Protes- 
 tant world.