Im* 
 
 ^V,* 

 
 THREE ESSAYS 
 
 LEADING PRINCIPLES 
 
 THE REEORMATION: 
 
 ILLUSTRATING ITS 
 
 CATHOLIC CHARACTER 
 
 FROM ITS 
 
 Consftitutional, Hoctrmal, anti ivitual fiisstorp* 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN HENRY BLUNT, 
 
 CURATE OF €OWLEY, OXFORD. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 JOSEPH MASTERS, ALDERSGATE STREET, 
 
 AND NEW BOND STREET. 
 
 MDCCCLX.
 
 NOTICE. 
 
 The writer of the following short Essays has been asked to reprint them in 
 a collected form from the pages of the "Ecclesiastic," in which periodical 
 they originally appeared, with the view of drawing attention to a much 
 neglected phase of Reformation History, the study of which seems especially 
 to bear upon the occurrences of our own time. A few corrections have been 
 made.
 
 ESSAY I. 
 
 THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASPECT OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 One of the greatest gains which can be obtained for our libraries 
 will be a History of the Reformation of the Church of England, 
 written in the same spirit in which that great movement was under- 
 taken. A great step towards such a work we may no doubt find 
 in the hearty rummaging of contempoi-ary records to which Mr. 
 Froude and others of his class have devoted themselves ; but almost 
 every work that has been written on that period impresses one with 
 the feeling that it is the production of authors whose sympathies 
 run much more in the direction of Presbyterianism than of those 
 high Ecclesiastical theories on which the Reformers really built 
 up their work. The earliest Reformers were those who most effec- 
 tually stamped the Church of England with the characteristics 
 which she possesses as a Reformed Church ; but these are generally 
 spoken of as men who were cutting out a road in the midst of a 
 mist of Popish prejudices; and whose endeavours to stand and see 
 and ask for the old paths required and received as much amend- 
 ment, as the mediaeval Church itself. It cannot be otherwise, so 
 long as the history of our Church during that critical period is 
 confided to the hands of those whose principles represent a school 
 which was as much opposed by the Reformers as Rome itself; and 
 what we now want is a good Catholic history of the Reformation, 
 in which it shall be judged by the actual words and deeds with 
 which the Church and State consummated their work; and judged 
 by one who (since it is impossible for men to write on such a sub- 
 ject without taking a side) will take the side of the Church, in pre- 
 ference to the side of her Presbyterian or her Roman enemies. 
 
 To do this effectually is impossible for those who are content 
 with the mere text of Burnet or Collier as their authorities. The 
 overlying strata of subsequent events have so hidden the original 
 form of that great cataclysm that its true outline can only be found 
 by an examination of the data belonging to the period in which it 
 was produced, and of such data it is reasonable to give the first 
 
 A 2
 
 4 THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASPECT 
 
 place in importance and authority to official or otherwise respon- 
 sible documents. But the tendency of the day is to write history 
 in the form of anecdote; to take up the popular theory of any 
 period, and overlay it with a multitude of personal details which 
 tell us next to nothing of real history ; or to reproduce the biography 
 of some individual whose name has become familiar to the ear from 
 certain quite insignificant causes, and make a "representative man" 
 out of one \^ ho has no claims whatever to be handed about in that 
 character. A recent and talented Scotch lecturer, Dr. TuUoch, has 
 fallen into this mistake in setting Latimer by the side of Luther, 
 Calvin, and Knox, and taking him for the representative of our 
 English Reformation in the same degree as the others are respec- 
 tively of the German, Swiss, and Scotch.^ One might as well take 
 Dr. Sacheverel as the representative of the Church in Queen Anne's 
 days. Latimer was a popular preacher, (chiefly because he was 
 very eccentric and violent) ; he took his death bravely, and he gave 
 his party a very useful mot in his last speech. This is almost all 
 that need be said of him in a history of the Reformation which 
 aims at representing things and men in their proper proportion ; 
 the exact measure of his power and influence on his generation 
 being probably about the same as that of the fluent and popular 
 preachers whose names are so often in the newspapers at the pre- 
 sent day ; but to whom no generation would entrust any important 
 undertaking. 
 
 The fact is that a just view of the Reformation will not permit 
 us to single out any individual as possessing so much influence 
 over his times, and taking so prominent a place among his con- 
 temporaries, that he is entitled to be called the leader of the move- 
 ment. Cranmer, who is often taken as the representative man of 
 the English Reformation, is certainly less deserving of such a con- 
 spicuous place than Ridley. In a great position, the Archbishop 
 could hardly fail to have some of the marks of greatness ; but it 
 was accident, not right, that gave him the position he held; and 
 it is the accident of his position rather than any intellectual, much 
 less any moral, power possessed by him which has made his name 
 so famous in the history of his times. Ridley, on the other hand, 
 was a man of much ability and great theological learning; and 
 had he been Archbishop of Canterbury instead of Cranmer, it is 
 probable that the course of the Reformation would have been cha- 
 racterised by much more firmness, and perhaps by a more definite 
 theology, though it may be doubted whether the latter would have 
 been so thoroughly orthodox as it might have been definite. 
 
 But a very {esv words are sufficient in commemorating the 
 •*' Leaders of the Reformation,'' so far as England was concerned ; 
 
 ' In a volume entitled " Leaders of the Reformation," published by Blackwoods. 
 It is a work which shows, however, a great revolution of opinion among the Pres- 
 byterians of Scotland, and a great advance in the right direction. j^*'"^ 
 
 \ J
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 for there really were none. The Reformation in England was not 
 the creature of any one individual's brain in its origin, or of any 
 one man's policy in its progress. It was not the creature of public 
 opinion either; for public opinion often tolerates the most gross 
 abuses, religious, political, and social, until it is influenced by some 
 cause outside of itself, which turns it in another direction : and 
 there is much evidence to show that public opinion was pretty well 
 satisfied with things as they were before the Reformation ; very 
 gradually veering round to a direction which supported things as 
 they were made afterwards. There are, in fact, strong currents 
 which arise from unseen causes, and carry whole nations, rulers 
 and people alike, in their course ; and it is to one of these psychical 
 phenomena, and not to public opinion or any human leader, that the 
 progress of the Reformation must be traced. Who can tell where 
 they begin, or how ? All one can conclude about them is that they 
 owe their origin to those powers which are able to act with im- 
 perceptible yet mighty energy upon whole masses of minds, and 
 to turn them by multitudes towards good or evil, according as it 
 is God or the Enemy of God whose will is the spring of action. 
 And amid all the evil with which the Enemy caused the English 
 Reformation to be adulterated, there is ample reason to believe that 
 the movement was spontaneous and unavoidable, and in the general 
 course of its progress was obeying the guidance of God's provi- 
 dential order. 
 
 In support of this view I would call attention to the fact that 
 the Reformation of the Church of England seems to have been 
 almost entirely unaffected by the influence of the changes effected 
 under Luther, Calvin, and Knox, who led the movement elsewhere. 
 In spite of attempts, both from without and within the Church, as 
 well abroad as at home, to bring those influences to bear upon the 
 Universities and the country in general, there is hardly a trace of 
 them to be found in the Prayer Book, which is our only dogmatic 
 standard ; and even in the Thirty-nine Articles, where, if anywhere, 
 one would have expected to find the influence shown, the marks 
 are more seeming than real. It has been attempted indeed to prove 
 that, because some portions, and after all very unimportant por- 
 tions — chiefly the Exhortations — of the Prayer Book, were derived 
 from the continental reformers, therefore their influence was at 
 work throughout ; but the whole substance of the services which it 
 contains is evidence to the contrary. It has been contended too, over 
 and over again, that the Articles were drawn up in a decidedly 
 Calvinistic sense ; but as our theological knowledge has improved 
 we have seen how untrue this is, and how often these very Articles 
 made their way in direct opposition to Calvinistic influences, even 
 when brought to bear upon them in the highest quarters. There is 
 something very remarkable too in the absence of any name what- 
 ever as an authority in the official documents which accompany the
 
 O THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASPECT 
 
 English Prayer Book and Bible. So far from Luther, Calvin, 
 Cranmer, or any one else being the Father of the Reformation, 
 these individuals might never have lived at all for anything that 
 appears in those documents. If the English Reformation had owed 
 anything to the foreign Reformers, common gratitude would have 
 instinctively brought up some allusion to them, and yet there is no 
 reference to them even in so discursive a production as the Preface 
 to the Bible ; while that of the Prayer Book distinctly asserts the 
 leading principle of its reconstruction to have been a reference to 
 antiquity, as indeed the Preface to the Bible also asserts in regard 
 to the work of its translation. In fact, take whatever line of in- 
 vestigation we will, the endeavour to trace the character of the 
 Reformation up to the strong will of any individual, English or 
 foreign, will eminently fail. And not only so, but we shall pro- 
 bably be brought to the conclusion, that whenever any individual 
 had succeeded, to any extent, in initiating a machinery by which 
 the course of the Reformation should be turned aside and brought 
 more within the range of his own personal bias, that individual 
 became involved in difficulties and ruin, and ultimately gave up his 
 life as a sacrifice to the just Nemesis which avenges every offence 
 against the Pi-ovidence of God. Such was the fate, to name no 
 others, of Cranmer and Ridley, who both endeavoured to set Lady 
 Jane Grey upon the throne, not because they thought her the law- 
 ful heir to the crown of England, but because they believed that 
 the cause of the Reformation would be forwarded by her influence 
 if she became sovereign, and retarded by that of Mary. 
 
 The only conclusion at which one can arrive is, that the Reforma- 
 tion of the Church of England, as it went on its way, was kept 
 almost entirely independent of personal influence, so far as that 
 influence deviated in any great degree from the course assigned to 
 the Reformation by the AVill higher than man's which is able to 
 control all events, and mould them for good in spite of every diffi- 
 culty thrown in the way by the opposing powers of evil. 
 
 The great change which goes by this name was in reality a con- 
 geries of events occurring in strict obedience to the providence 
 of God, and which were made necessary even in the policy of man 
 by the growth of evils of a very serious character. I shall endea- 
 vour to ])oint out the nature of some of these evils and the results 
 which followed their attempted remedy; and in so doing to mark 
 the line which, in my humble opinion, ought to be taken by any 
 writer who would try to supply the literary want spoken of in the 
 beginning of this essay. 
 
 1. The supremacy of the Pope was a tenet against which the mind 
 of England had for several centuries revolted. The growth of this 
 power is one of the most marvellous phenomena of history, and in 
 looking back upon the past stages of our national existence from 
 oui* present standing ground, one is quite astounded at the extra-
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 7 
 
 vagant height which it was allowed to attain.^ The official ideal of 
 the Papal Supremacy is to be found in the pages of S. Thomas 
 Aquinas and Bellarmine, and in the decrees of the Popes themselves. 
 The terms of strictly official documents are no doubt sometimes 
 unreal, as when, for example, our sovereigns for so many ages 
 assumed to themselves the titular sovereignty of France, although 
 they did not possess a foot of territory there. But they give at 
 least the theory held by those who issue the documents, and unless 
 that theory is nullified by a mild practical acquiescence in its ab- 
 surdity, as in the instance named, assumptions of such a character 
 must always be reckoned of importance. According to the autho- 
 rities named then, it is found that the Pope assumes to possess, ex 
 jure Divino, the most ample authority over the whole world, both 
 in civil and in ecclesiastical matters y^ his authority is the very 
 apex of civil and ecclesiastical power ;3 and so completely does this 
 authority override all other, that if any king is excommunicated on 
 account of Apostasy (which means, in this case, separation from 
 the Roman See) his subjects are, by the very fact of his excommu- 
 nication, liberated from his rule and from their oaths of fidelity to 
 him.* This universal authority is, moreover, of such a nature that 
 by virtue of his position jure divino, " ut supremum totius mundi 
 regem,'' he may exercise the privilege of an actual sovereign in 
 levying taxes upon Christian people in every part of the world, and 
 may even destroy fortresses and cities belonging to less universal 
 sovereigns if he think such destruction conducive to the interests 
 of the Church.5 
 
 This theory of the Papal Supremacy has been repudiated by 
 Roman writers of lesser note, and seems too absurd ever to have 
 been maintained by sensiblel men. It must be remembered, how- 
 ever, that it is the theory of the two greatest controversialists 
 which the Roman Church can boast of, and that the reticence of 
 the Popes and of the Council of Trent in respect to any counter 
 theory, or any of more moderate character, would be, by itself, some 
 indication that it was not discordant with the recognized official 
 pretensions of the Roman see. It must also be borne in mind 
 that this theory of the supremacy had often been illustrated by the 
 decrees and practice of the Popes in their intercourse with Chris- 
 tian sovereigns and their subjects in the middle ages ; and that 
 Bellarmine was only transferring to his pages the common law (so 
 to speak) of the Roman see, when he attributed to it these extra- 
 
 1 The theory of giving to the Church an authorised protector and arbitrator, 
 is, it must of course be admitted, very tempting. Constantine and Charlemagne 
 had both striven, and that in good faith, to vindicate the position for themselves, 
 and Hildebrand was only treading in their steps, when he succeeded in perpetuating 
 in the Popedom what they held in their own persons. 
 
 2 Bellarm. De potestate summi pontificis in rebus temporalibas, s. i. 
 
 3 Thom. Aq. See Sec. qu. xliii. art. 8. * Ibid. qu. xii. art. ii. 
 * Thom. Aq. de Reg. Princip. ex., cxix., quoted by Bellarm.
 
 8 THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASPECT 
 
 vagant pretensions. Beside which, in the very midst of the Re- 
 formation, when Pius V. excommunicated Queen Elizabeth for her 
 " apostasy," he declared himself to be " Prince over all nations, 
 and all kingdoms, having the right to pluck up, destroy, dissipate, 
 ruin, plant, and build ;^' and possessing this high authority, he 
 proceeds by virtue of it to deprive the Queen of her " pretended 
 right " to her dominions, and to absolve all her subjects from their 
 oath of allegiance. This was the traditional tone of the Roman 
 see, and whatever opinions may have been expressed by writers on 
 that side since the Reformation, none but the direct opponents of 
 the Papal power ever ventured to express a doubt as to the legiti- 
 mate character of such assumptions in the times which preceded. 
 Circumstances did indeed occur which prevented the execution of 
 this decree of Pius V. ; but there can be no doubt that the inten- 
 tion and meaning of it strictly coincided with the theory afterwards 
 propounded by Bellarmine ; and it was by no fault of the Popes or 
 their supporters that the practice and the theory were so far from 
 being coextensive. 
 
 With our modern notions, and especially our English constitu- 
 tional notions, it seems quite impossible that such a doctrine as this 
 could ever be admitted by the ruling powers of our country. But, 
 although in its extreme application, as exhibited in the case of King 
 John, it was indignantly repudiated by some of our most spirited 
 monarchs, there can be no doubt that it was admitted to a very 
 wide extent by both monarchs and people, for several centuries after 
 the Conquest. The power of the Popes had, in fact, become at length 
 greater in England than in any other country of Europe; and the 
 almost reckless exercise of that power was the principal cause which 
 led to the Reformation, as it was the chief reason by which the Re- 
 formation is to be justified. It is obvious to remark that the claim 
 to Political Supremacy is now silently ignored by all European 
 States, which proceed on their course without the least regard to 
 the will of the Pope. The English nation then only did what 
 France, and Austria, and Spain, and Sardinia have since done. 
 
 It is not meant to assert that, in the heat of the battle, or even 
 while the troops were deploying into line, each individual supporter 
 of the Reformation saw clearly the causes which originated and 
 justified the struggle in which he was engaged. Far from it. The 
 position at the outset of this essay was, that the Reformers were 
 led on by an instinctive rather than by a reasoning impulse, and 
 that their instinctive impulse was one of those providential forces 
 which we must trace chiefly by their results. And, surely, if the 
 independence of nations is a part of God's order in the world, as 
 there seems every reason to believe, there was so manifest a con- 
 trariety to that order in the operation of the Papal Supremacy in 
 England as fully to call for His interposition. Nor does this view 
 require us to deny that the power of the Pope was often beneficially
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 exercised. It is the prerogative of God to employ all kinds of 
 agents and instruments for His purposes. 
 
 2. Again, the loss of Nationality in the clergy, which was the ne- 
 cessary result of the Supremacy, must be considered as an impor- 
 tant infringement of the laws by which God governs the world. 
 I do not pretend that the principle of nationality is one that may 
 be admitted without restriction, but who does not believe its existence 
 to be decidedly according to the mind of God ? But if we look 
 through the pages of English History we shall find that it was only 
 under the strong rule of such monarchs as Edward the First and 
 Edward the Third, that the clergy as a body declined to take the 
 Pope's side when the interests of the nation were at stake. If, in- 
 deed, the Papacy had been an abstract spirituality, entirely free from 
 any contact with secular rule or secular interests, this might not 
 have been so disadvantageous to the country ; but since the spi- 
 ritual authority of the Popes was always entangled with many secular 
 interests — those of his own secular rule or those of continental 
 kingdoms — it is clear that a dutiful and unswerving allegiance to 
 him on the part of the English clergy must very frequently indeed 
 have made them forget their position as English citizens. 
 
 Looking back, therefore, upon the provocatives, so to call them, 
 of the Reformation, we may perhaps consider this not the least of 
 such provocatives, that the theory and the practical results of the 
 Papal supremacy were alike inconsistent with loyalty, on the part 
 of those who were bound by it, to the national independence of 
 England. And when we see, as we now do, how great a work that 
 national independence was to achieve in the world, it may reason- 
 ably be believed that the more perfect establishment of it was one 
 of the purposes of Divine wisdom in causing the authority of the 
 Pope in England to be annulled. The evidence of past history 
 justifies the conclusion that the independence of separate nations, 
 distinguished from each other by geographical situation, by origin, 
 language, and other natural peculiarities, is a privilege and a bless- 
 ing vouchsafed by the Ruler of all, neither to be lightly esteemed 
 by those on whom it is bestowed, nor to be justifiably broken in 
 upon by others. Often forfeited by national sins, far oftener has 
 it been almost miraculously preserved when He Who gave it saw 
 not fit that it should be forfeited. And although there are cases 
 in which, as in India at this time, the imperceptible flow of events 
 is so ordered that national independence passes away, to be replaced 
 by the wiser and better rule of a great and comprehensi'/e Empire, 
 it is seldom that one Christian power is permitted for any time to 
 subjugate another, without some nemesis appearing, both to mark 
 the transgression against the laws of Providence, and also to annul 
 the effects of the crime. When, therefore, we observe these two 
 historical phenomena, — on the one hand the culminating power of 
 the Roman see in England, and on the other the silent upgrowth
 
 10 THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASPECT 
 
 of a national instinct by which resistance to it was enforced, — we 
 must trace in them the error of man and the correcting hand of 
 God. a philosophical reader of history will perhaps think also 
 with me, that the revising Hand was interposed not less for the ad- 
 vantage of the spiritual power of the Pope than for the benefit of 
 the English Church and nation. One or two centuries more of 
 provocation on the part of the former would probably have led to an 
 aggressive Reformation on the part of England, as well as a defen- 
 sive one ; and, as the experience of the hour shows us, England 
 must be regarded as holding in her hands the power of deciding 
 whether or not the Bishop of Rome shall preserve that temporal 
 sovereignty by which, as is pretty generally acknowledged, his ec- 
 clesiastical authority is sustained. If she is called upon to defend 
 the position which the Pope holds as an European power, it will 
 not be the first time that she has done so since the Reformation. 
 But if the Reformation had been delayed for one or two centuries, 
 it is probable that the whole force of England^s power would have 
 been raised in an aggressive assault upon the Pope, as was that of 
 France in the days of Napoleon the First; and the addition of 
 England to the enemies of the Papacy would then have been the 
 addition of the one element by which its destruction would have 
 been accomplished. 
 
 3. Again it is to be considered that the Reformation was the 
 starting point of a great change in the political organization — 
 we will use the phrase in a higher sense than that of the news- 
 papers — of the world. Constitutional liberty is a good thing, 
 however much the name may have become odious through its con- 
 nexion with 1688, with Whig and Radical demagogues, and with 
 out-at-elbows foreigners. Those who doubt the advantages of 
 constitutional liberty should try and realise to themselves the 
 actual condition of all but a few powerful classes under the govern- 
 ment of an ultra-monarchical system. It may be described in a 
 few words as being most often a system in which there was no 
 middle ground between tyranny and licence ; the system, in fact, 
 of an ill-regulated family, in which extreme restraint and heavy 
 punishments are supposed to be counterbalanced by extravagant 
 indulgence, the distribution of each of these respectively being a 
 matter rather of chance than of a deliberate attempt at justice. 
 Now, notwithstanding the severe rule of the Tudors, it must be 
 allowed that the era of the Reformation was the beginning of real 
 constitutional liberty, at least in England. It is unnecessary to 
 argue the point at length, as probably all those who will think it 
 worth while to read these pages will agree with me : and if there 
 are among them any who would limit the term to the changes 
 made at and since the Revolution of 1688, I really must beg to 
 dechne entering the lists, even in imagination, with persons who
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 11 
 
 form their opinions on so very unhistoric a foundation. Assuming 
 then that constitutional liberty takes its rise in England from the 
 days of the Reformation, and that it is a blessing for which we 
 may well be thankful to Him by Whom kings reign, I ask whether 
 there is the faintest probability that this could have co-existed with 
 that exercise of the Pope's authority in England which forms so 
 prominent and characteristic a feature in pre-Reforraation govern- 
 ment ? That it was a consequence of the Reformation I by no 
 means wish to maintain, but only that the change in the ecclesi- 
 astical condition of England was contemporary in its origin and 
 development with the social and political reformation of our con- 
 stitution. They were as two streams running parallel to each other 
 in the same direction, subject to the same forces, but yet not 
 mingling their waters. But even accounting the constitutional 
 liberty which has been handed down to us, with gradual accretions, 
 from the seventeenth century, as no way connected directly with 
 the religious movement which threw aside the Pope's authority in 
 England, it is perfectly evident that the retention of that autho- 
 rity would have hindered and even stifled any development of those 
 principles on which our present mode of government is founded. 
 And if, in the Providence of God, England was to ofi'er to the 
 world the spectacle of a mighty and enduring empire founded and 
 built up on infinitely more Christian and humane principles of civil 
 order than any empire hitherto known, it was an absolute neces- 
 sity that she should first be perfectly set free from the embarrassing 
 connection she had long been forced to maintain with a power which 
 inherited the principles as well as the name of as tyrannical an 
 empire as the ages of the world had seen.^ 
 
 It seems almost too childish a folly for any one, in these days, 
 to deny tbat our country had a perfect right to the possession of 
 this entire independence. And yet persons have been heard to 
 argue, even in our own generation, that the Reformation was a 
 thoroughly unjustifiable step on the part of England. The fact is, 
 that it has been too much the habit to take a mere surface view of 
 that great event : and in justifiable regrets for the loss of unity 
 attributed to the Reformation, in indignation at the miserable con- 
 
 ^ Nothing has been said above of some other galling results of the Papal authority 
 in England, which were almost enough in themselves to have brought about its 
 expulsion as soon as the country came to its senses after the Wars of the Roses. 
 There was, for example, the drain of money from the kingdom for purposes which 
 contributed neither to its spiritual nor its secular advantage. A large proportion of 
 the monastic income so basely alienated by Henry VIII. was really the income of 
 the Pope, in the shape of taxes levied by him upon those who submitted to make 
 themselves, so far, his subjects. Wycliffe used to say that a hill of gold would 
 soon be worn away by the payments required for the Pope ; and the hyperbole of the 
 sturdy demagogue is very much corroborated by the more formal complaints exist- 
 ing in documentary evidence, which show that the patience of the whole laud, clergy 
 and laity alike, was overstrained by these extortious.
 
 12 THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASPECT 
 
 duct of Henry VIII., and in somewhat unfair comparisons be- 
 tween the condition of our own Church before and since that time, 
 the real principles which underlie the Reformation itself have 
 been lost sight of, and such language used respecting it as assumes 
 that it was a wilful and wanton rebellion against lawful authority. 
 This mistake has been fostered by the ordinary superficialness of 
 Protestant and popular writers on the subject. To them the foam 
 and scum that floats on the surface of the stream is not merely a 
 sign showing the strength of the current flowing beneath, it is the 
 very substance of the stream. The coarse and flippant declamation 
 of popular preachers like Latimer, the noisy pamphlets in which 
 his literary compeers decried all Catholic principles as much as 
 they assailed the "Enormyties of the Bishoppe of Rome,^^ the 
 Puritan fables of Foxe's Martyrology, and many such like efi'u- 
 sions for which Churchmen hold themselves not at all or very 
 slightly responsible : — these were the scum brought to the surface 
 by a deep and strong stream coming into contact with opposing 
 obstacles over and through which it rolled with irresistible power. 
 They hardly made their appearance till the work was done ; cer- 
 tainly the doing of it was not theirs. And while it must be ac- 
 knowledged that these frothy writers have formed the traditions of 
 the Reformation as they are held by the large bulk of Protestants 
 in later days, it ought to be clearly seen by the student of history 
 that what they originated and gave force to was not the Reforma- 
 tion, but that Puritan licence to which the Reformation had to 
 present as firm a front as it did to the older traditions of the Papal 
 system. 
 
 The false tradition of the Reformation thus handed down has 
 formed a floating and impalpable atmosphere around even those 
 who would be unlikely to be influenced directly by any one of the 
 writers with whom it has originated : and a work that is much 
 wanted is such a one as was before referred to — a work that will 
 not only show the wrongs which justified Englishmen in the re- 
 pudiation of the Papal system, but also justify the Reformers by a 
 detailed reference to their authentic and official acts in the several 
 stages of their labours. It would then be seen that, amidst all the 
 embai'rassments arising from the novelty of that work, from the 
 interference and forced co-operation of men whose objects were 
 either altogether illegitimate, or else very difierent from those 
 sought in the Reformation, they went on steadily in a straight- 
 forward course, setting a certain object before them, and feeling 
 their way gradually towards it. All the difficulty involved in the 
 careful reconstruction of the Ecclesiastical system of England, 
 entirely free from the foreign and denationalizing elements which 
 had been interwoven with it, and yet retaining as much as possible 
 of w'hat was Catholic, was surmounted by them with a wisdom and 
 courage so great that they cannot but command our respect.
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 13 
 
 Let us now then look at some of the official acts by which the 
 Reformation was really consummated ;i for it is these documents 
 alone that can decide the questions at issue on the subject. 
 
 The first thing to be noticed in such a review is the mode in 
 which the Papal supremacy was abolished. This abolition was by 
 no means a hasty or an ill-considered measure. All parties seemed 
 to feel that the question was an intricate one, and that it was only 
 safe to approach it with measured steps, and a deliberate knowledge 
 both of the grounds on which action was to be taken, and also of 
 the consequences which would result. For centuries there had 
 been a struggling under-current of discontent with the Pope's 
 authority, and occasionally this under-current had worked its way 
 up to the surface, as in the matter of Investitures, and the Legates ; 
 but there had never hitherto been any strong personal motive 
 urging the Sovereign as well as the Commons of England to op- 
 pose in toto the exercise of that authority. Such a motive, in 
 Henry VIII /s case, seems to have been the means by which the 
 opposing instinct of the nation was brought to a focus. But what- 
 ever the King's personal motives and intentions were, — the former 
 being connected with the divorce, and the latter looking forward 
 to a transference of the Pope's authority to himself, — no impartial 
 reader of history can fail to see how gradually and justly all the 
 measures were taken, so far as the Church and nation were con- 
 cerned, for bringing about the abolition of the Pope's jurisdiction 
 over England. 
 
 The respective stages by which the official renunciation and ex- 
 pulsion of this jurisdiction was accomplished in Henry's reign 
 occupied about four years and a half. The first decided attempt 
 made at limiting the power of the Pope during that reign was in 
 1530, when, in an Act of Parliament against pluralities, (21 Hen. 
 VIII. c. 13,) a clause was inserted forbidding the application of 
 any person to Rome for dispensation from the operation of the law. 
 The serving out such a dispensation was to be met by a penalty of 
 ^70, beside the loss of all profits pretended to be secured by its 
 means. A dispensation from Rome for non-residence was also 
 declared void and of none effect, and subject to a penalty of .€20. 
 These two clauses aimed at two glaring practical abuses of the Papal 
 power, by which the higher clergy, and especially foreigners, were 
 permitted to hold a number of benefices together, perhaps without 
 serving any ; and it was a real reformation in the Church for such 
 a wretched system to be abolished. The marvel is that an abuse 
 
 ' The dissolution of monasteries cannot fairly be regarded as a part of the 
 Reformation. Indeed the work had begun more than two centuries before, in the 
 confiscation of the property of the Knight-Templars. There can be little doubt that 
 what Henry did originated in the necessities of his Exchequer ; and that, liowever 
 much it assisted in establishing the Reformation on a firmer basis than it might other- 
 wise have possessed, none of those concerned in the dissolution had the least real 
 sympathy with the objects sought for and ultimately obtained by the Reformers.
 
 14 THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASPECT 
 
 of this kind could ever have sprung up in the land, and that it had 
 not been put an end to many years before the personal enmity be- 
 tween Pope and King suggested such an attack on the strong out- 
 works of the Papal jurisdiction. 
 
 In the following year, in the Parliament of 1531 — 2, another 
 step was taken, or rather preparations made for its being taken at 
 a future day. Large sums of money were annually sent out of 
 England for the purchase of privileges from Rome, and in the 
 form of direct taxes. Among these were the " annates,^* or first- 
 fruits of Bishoprics ; sums of money paid by every Bishop on first 
 coming to his see, for obtaining leave from the Pope to occupy it. 
 Although Bishops do not die every day, the sum received by the 
 Pope on this account alone amounted to an average of .€3,500 per 
 annum for the twenty- three sees of England and Wales, or 
 j£l60,000 from the beginning of Henry VII.^s reign up to this 
 date in that of his son ! That the Parliament of the country should 
 endeavour to stop the export of so large an amount of treasure from 
 the country was both natural and just ; and the manner in which 
 they carried out their intentions is remarkable for its fairness and 
 honourable good feeling. Although it was maintained that the 
 whole tax was an abuse, arising out of one levied for a very difierent 
 object, the maintaining of forces against the Infidels, yet they 
 ofi'ered to compromise the matter with the Pope, rather than pro- 
 ceed to " extremities ;" sending to him a request that he would 
 moderate these exactions, and come to an agreement as to some 
 equitable fees, at the rate of five per cent, on the value of the see, 
 or some similar valuation, in return for the bulls by which he gave 
 his assent to the appointment of the Bishops. For the quiet set- 
 tlement of Cranmer in the see of Canterbury, no fewer than eleven 
 of these Papal bulls were required, so that it really seems as if they 
 were multiplied for no other object but to increase the amount of 
 tax to be levied. The justice and reasonableness of such a measure 
 seems so plain to us at this day, that one is astonished at the want 
 of courtesy and good policy shown by the Pope in taking no notice 
 of the proposal made. The consequence was, of course, (in the 
 then state of things,) that judgment went by default; and the time 
 left open for compromise having expired, the Act abolishing the 
 payments of annates to the Pope was ratified and confirmed about 
 April or May, two years after it had been passed, that is, in 1534. 
 Surely nothing could be more justifiable than this act: nor could 
 it have been passed in a less ofiensive manner. 
 
 In the next year, 1533, another Act of Parliament was passed 
 against appeals to Rome from the Church Courts of England. No 
 doubt this was a personal matter as far as the King was concerned, 
 and probably brought about through his influence; but the absolute 
 justice of the Act is strikingly illustrated by the very terms in 
 which it is drawn up. After affirming that England is an inde-
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 15 
 
 pendent state, having courts of justice competent both in authority 
 and learning to decide all causes without application to foreign 
 powers, it goes on to state that this is especially the case with 
 " that part of the said body politic called the spirituality, or the 
 English Church," which has always been found upon trial to be 
 possessed of sufficient learning and integrity to determine all 
 doubts that might arise, and to administer such offices and duties 
 as belong to courts of the kind aimed at. " Several appeals," the 
 Act goes on to say, " have been made to the see of Rome, in causes 
 testamentary and matrimonial, in divorces, rights of tithes, obla- 
 tions and obventions, to the delay of justice and the great vexation 
 and charge of the King's Highness and his subjects. And foras- 
 much as the distance from Rome is such, that proof and evidence 
 relating to a cause cannot be brought thither without great inconve- 
 nience, for which reasons many persons are forced to suffer in their 
 rights, and sit down without remedy," it is finally decreed that all 
 causes shall be determined in Courts of the King's own jurisdic- 
 tion ; and persons making appeals to Rome, or procuring censures 
 from Rome on account of decisions in the King's Courts, are to be 
 liable to the penalty of prsemunire. In these days, when we ha- 
 bitually look up to our Sovereign as the supreme fountain of earthly 
 justice for every one of her subjects, is it not with as much indig- 
 nation as surprise that we contemplate the state of vassalage to a 
 foreign power — nominally a spiritual one only — which is thus indi- 
 cated as the practical condition of England before the much ma- 
 ligned Reformation ? We may not like the name of Protestant, as the 
 name goes ; but if protesting against such abuses as these had been 
 the cause of the cognomen being first assumed, we need none of 
 us care to disclaim it. 
 
 The divorce cause of Henry VIII. was so much a personal matter 
 in respect to the technical processes concerned, that, although ques- 
 tions and events of permanent national importance arose out of it, 
 the Church historian might be justified in passing it over without 
 regarding it as any portion of the official Reformation. There are, 
 however, some points worth notice in connection with the view we 
 are taking of those eventful days. Without discussing the merits 
 of the question, it is worth observing, for instance, that there was 
 an evident desire on the part of Henry to have the whole pro- 
 cess conducted in the most strictly legal manner. From this motive 
 alone it was that be allowed six years to pass away in illustrating 
 the inconvenience of appeals to an authority so distant and so diffi- 
 cult of legal access. And up to the very last moment, instead of 
 openly breaking with the Pope, he endeavoured by a great conces- 
 sion to obtain his decision in the cause. As is well known, Henry 
 sent terms to Rome, or rather the ratification of terms previously 
 agreed upon and approved there, by which the whole question was 
 practically put into the hands of the Pope. The bearer of these
 
 16 THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASPECT 
 
 terms, being delayed in his journey by the snow, did not arrive at 
 Rome until two days after the time agreed upon had expired ; and 
 so great was the impatience of the Pope to consummate the quarrel, 
 that, against the earnest remonstrance of the Archbishop of Paris, 
 who was acting as mediator, he passed the final sentence, decreeing 
 the excommunication of the King and interdict of the kingdom to 
 follow within three months ; when all subjects were released from 
 their allegiance, and the Emperor of Germany was to carry out the 
 Pope's sentence by invading England. Was anything but the total 
 abolition of the Pope's jurisdiction in England possible after such an 
 indignity ? No wonder that Henry had fortified himself, by anti- 
 cipation, behind an appeal to a General Council, when such mea- 
 sures as these were anticipated. Such an appeal preserved him at 
 least the position of a Christian monarch, until the Council con- 
 firmed the sentence passed on him ; and enabled him to maintain 
 his authority over his subjects, ecclesiastics and laymen, without 
 outraging their religious feelings.^ 
 
 It was then that the final extinction of the Papal supremacy was 
 determined on. But how was that extinction efi'ected ? Not by 
 any tyrannical act of a monarch ready enough for deeds of tyranny ; 
 not even by an authoritative Act of Parliament. The question was 
 first of all submitted to the proper Council of the Church, the Con- 
 vocations of Canterbury and York. On March 31, 1534, both 
 houses of the former Convocation decided (Gardiner, Bonner, 
 Pisher, Tunstal, and other such Bishops forming the upper house) 
 " Quod Romanus Episcopus non habet majorem jurisdictionem 
 sibi a Deo collatara in hoc regno quam alius quivis externus Epis- 
 copus." On June 1, 1534, the Convocation of York came — and 
 not hastily — to the same decision. And so general was the con- 
 viction of the clergy on this point, that hardly any, if any, declined 
 this renunciation of the Pope's authority. When the documents 
 belonging to the Convocation house were yet existing, Wharton, the 
 ecclesiastical antiquary, found the subscriptions of all the bishops, 
 chapters, abbots, &c., of thirteen dioceses, and afiirmed that those 
 of the remaining dioceses were to his certain knowledge in exist- 
 ence elsewhere. This general assent is also confirmed by the fact 
 that scarcely any one was found to maintain the doctrine of the 
 Papal supremacy. Such men as Friar Peto and Elstow would run 
 any risk in warning the King against what they thought an adul- 
 terous marriage ; and there were many as ready as they to suffer 
 martyrdom for a sufficient cause. But hardly a voice was raised — 
 not even the voices of More and Fisher — in favour of the Pope's 
 supremacy, however unwiUing they might be to accept its substi- 
 tute : so completely was the mind of England set against the con- 
 
 ' Cranmer also appealed to a General Couacil : and the reiteration of such appeals 
 goes far, by itself alone, to put the Pope in the wrong, as regards the Church of 
 England.
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. ' 17 
 
 tinued exercise of that usurped authority. It is even more to the 
 point that this acquiescence and agreement was not the result of 
 hasty passion and indignation, but that it was, as has been shown, 
 a deliberate conviction, arrived at after careful consideration, and 
 though consummated by the Churches synods, forming only the 
 final link in a chain of regular and national legislation. The se- 
 curing of a really competent Court of Appeal, which shall be free 
 from local and temporary prejudices, is one of the highest feats of 
 legislative skill. Nor can there be any antecedent surprise felt that 
 such a Court should have been originally sought at Rome. It was 
 a question, at first, only of order and expediency ; and when the 
 expedient failed to answer, there was nothing more natural than 
 that it should be abolished. 
 
 Let us pass now to opposite ground, and reconnoitre the clergy 
 in their acceptance of the king's supremacy vice the supremacy of 
 the Pope. And here, too, we find equal reasons for concluding 
 that every step in the Reformation was taken advisedly, and not 
 without much consideration of the consequences that would follow. 
 There was a difficulty in this case which had not occurred in the 
 other : and that was in the extreme demands of the king. Henry 
 was far from being ignorant of theology, but yet he seems to have 
 had confused notions as to the respective provinces of temporal and 
 spiritual jurisdiction. Upon the renunciation of the Pope^s supre- 
 macy in England, he evidently wished to transfer to the Crown all 
 the authority which had previously been exercised by the Bishop of 
 Rome. So far as all reasonable taxes on ecclesiastical revenue were 
 concerned this was nothing but right. It was but right also that 
 when appeals to that distant authority were abolished, those who 
 would otherwise have appealed should acknowledge the King to be 
 the supreme fountain of justice, whose duty it was to see that no 
 wrong was permitted either in causes ecclesiastical or civil. 
 
 Henry assumed, however, as is well known, the title of " Su- 
 preme Head of the Church of England/^ When the clergy in 
 Convocation were required to acknowledge and subscribe to this 
 new title proposed in the form "Ecclesise et Cleri Anglicani cujus 
 Protector et supremum Caput is solus est,^' they rigidly refused to 
 assent to it, even after three days of pressure while they were lying 
 under the penalty of the praemunire on account of Wolsey's exer- 
 cise of legatine authority. The King then allowed the title to be 
 submitted to them with the qualification " after God, supreme 
 Head,'' &c., but even this could not reconcile the consciences of 
 the clergy. In the end, as is well known, the document (a money 
 bill) in which the title was to be inserted, was sent up to the King 
 with the modified clause "quantum per legem Christi licet, supre- 
 mum caput," a modification to which a majority of the members of 
 Convocation assented willingly, though regretting the King's as- 
 sumption of the title in any form. The proceedings of the Con- 
 
 B
 
 18 THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASPECT 
 
 vocation of Canterbury were carried on so privately — apparently 
 through Cranmer's fear of exciting the King's further anger — that 
 nothing is known certainly of the arguments used on either side. 
 But in that of York, Bishop Tonstal, (president, on account of a 
 vacancy in the see of York,) protested against the title in terms 
 which seem to contain the whole argument from that side of the 
 question ; and his protest is so instructive that it will be well to 
 give the substance of it as an illustration of the assertion that much 
 wise forethought was exercised in this stage of the Keformation. 
 This good and wise Bishop wrote to the eflfect that if the title 
 meant only that the Sovereign is head in his own dominions, under 
 Christ, and in this particular case of the clergy, their head in 
 temporal matters as the head of all his other subjects, then they 
 were all agreed on the subject, only wishing that more definite lan- 
 guage should be used. On the other hand, if it was intended that 
 the King was supreme head in spiritual matters as fully as in tem- 
 poral, they believed such an assumption to be contrary to Catholic 
 doctrine. And although " quantum per Christi legem licet " was a 
 qualifying clause, yet " Supreme Head of the Church" had so com- 
 plicated and mysterious a meaning that they thought it exceedingly 
 capable of misconstruction and very likely to scandalize weak bre- 
 thren. There is little room for doubt that the resistance of the- 
 clergy to this title, even while they were in a position of much 
 difficulty and danger, exercised a wholesome restraint upon the 
 King, and prevented him from going the full length that he other- 
 wise would have done in personal interference in the government 
 of the Church. It was, moreover, fully justified by Queen Eliza- 
 beth when she refused to assume the title, even with its qualifying 
 clause, and so finally caused it to disappear from among the prero- 
 gatives claimed by the English crown. 
 
 In taking this very cursory review of the actual steps by which 
 that was brought about which was really the most important of all 
 the changes effected at the Reformation, I have not been careful 
 to point out the respective shares which the three estates of the 
 realm had in it, nor the cases in which any one opposed measures 
 attempted by the others. We stai'ted with the assumption that the 
 whole course of the Reformation may be proved by its progress and 
 by its results to have been providential : and we have had to look 
 rather, therefore, at the measures as a whole, than at the instru- 
 ments by whom they were brought about. A very important fea- 
 ture in the government of the universe is the providential balancing 
 of one force by another : and this is as true in the moral as in the 
 natural world. If, therefore, contentions are observed between the 
 several powers of the constitution in the course of the Reformation, 
 we may probably find an illustration in them of that balance of 
 which I speak. Certainly among all the errors committed or 
 nearly committed, whether by the civil or the ecclesiastical body,
 
 OF THE EEFORMATION. 19 
 
 there are none which need lower either body in our respect. 
 They were but the mistakes of men who were too much in the midst 
 of the crowding events to see clearly what was the true general 
 bearing of the whole. If the civil legislature sometimes wished to 
 exceed their province^ and became violent in their dealings with the 
 Church, we can hardly wonder when it is seen how grievous was 
 the nature of the abuses which they had to reform. If the clergy 
 were thought at the time by some good men over tenacious about 
 their rights, no sound Churchman can now hesitate to admit that 
 they were influenced by a truly prophetic wisdom. 
 
 As it was, the sturdy conservatism of the clergy was the great 
 bulwark against licence, and if they did commit errors in endeavour- 
 ing to maintain the status quo, we may yet look on them as the 
 Providential counterbalance to that swingeing desire for change 
 which often carries on a body of secular rulers in a course of reck- 
 lessness to which such a curb is exceedingly useful.
 
 20 
 
 ESSAY 11. 
 
 THE DOCTRINAL ASPECT OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 I. There is an a 'priori view of this phase of our ecclesiastical his- 
 tory which has received very little attention from historical writers : 
 or at least very little of that attention which would have prepared 
 them for a just estimation of things in their subsequent course. 
 When a change is made^ and we want to record the history of the 
 change, and " all about it/' the first question to be asked, — at 
 least when we get beyond the region of bare facts — is " Why was 
 there a change at all ?" I once knew a cynical fellow who was the 
 terror of all his feminine acquaintances on account of an inconvenient 
 habit which he had cultivated of always asking them " the reason 
 why" when they indulged in the illogical assertions and opinions to 
 which the more critical half of humanity declares ladies are so prone : 
 and really one cannot but think the historic muse of the English 
 Church would have been improved in her character, if she had years 
 ago been subjected to this triliteral form of persecution instead of 
 being allowed so long to act on theories of" instinctive feeling.'' If a 
 thinking man, reading for the first time the history of the English 
 Reformation, were to have no other account set before him than 
 that which has been stereotyped from the pages of our ordinary 
 writers, one of the most puzzling reflections that this account 
 would raise in his mind would be that a whole nation, (including 
 many intellectual persons in an intellectual age) should so entirely 
 change its religious opinions in the manner in which it is com- 
 monly represented to have done : and that this change should have 
 been made on so very superficial an investigation of principles. 
 He would probably come to the conclusion that the age of the 
 Reformation, with all its intellect, was a very light-minded one, 
 and much more open to the influence of prejudice than reason : 
 but his conclusions, though justly formed from his historical in- 
 formants, would be very decidedly wrong — at least as regards the 
 intellectual Churchmen of the day — and he would require to be 
 told that no history was ever so superficially written as that of the 
 doctrinal Reformation in the Church of England. 
 
 Let me then endeavour to trace out more justly the outline of
 
 THE DOCTRINAL ASPECT OF THE REFORMATION. 21 
 
 these changes ; and this, not in a self-confident spirit as if entrusted 
 with a special mission to correct all who have trodden the same 
 path of history before ; but rather with the view of submitting 
 certain theories on the subject to the judgment and consideration of 
 thoughtful readers. 
 
 It is usual to carry back the " first dawn of the Reformation" to 
 the days of Wicliff"e and the Lollards, on the hypothesis that the 
 subsequent acts of the Church in the sixteenth century were the 
 proper complement of the Wicliffite revolution attempted in the 
 fourteenth. There is not, however, as far as I know, the least 
 ground for supposing that the leading Reformers were at all in- 
 fluenced by the writings of Wicliff"e ; nor indeed that these writings 
 were at all well known to them. Subsequent centuries have dis- 
 entombed this sturdy Protestant from the oblivion into which he 
 had fallen ; and his name has become so familiar that it seems 
 impossible to many that it could have been otherwise than a house- 
 hold word in the times we are thinking of. But this was not the 
 case, as Mr. Froude will probably be as ready to maintain as the 
 present writer. With his death, nearly all Wicliffe's influence for 
 good passed away ; and whatever religion there may have been in 
 the would-be reformer himself, his followers have little more claim 
 to the name of reformers than the Chartists of modern days have. 
 To my mind the small results which followed from Wicliffe's reli- 
 gious teaching and the troubles that ensued from his political 
 teaching prove how little of real solid value there was in the agita- 
 tion of which he was the head ; how little, in fact, it was supported 
 by Divine Providence. His great enmity against the evils of the 
 monastic system was by no means peculiar to himself, for there 
 were always wise men who saw that the abuses of that system by 
 some were so gross, that they placed the whole body of those who 
 lived without abuse under it in danger, as well as themselves. 
 And, in short, very little of Wicliffe^s survived his death, except 
 the very dangerous principles on political matters which he held 
 rather as theoretical crotchets than in any other way, but which 
 his followers (including Wat Tyler's mob of 100,000) would gladly 
 have carried into practice. The people who looked to him as their 
 teacher were simply such as were attracted by those levelling doc- 
 trines which seemed to them the remedy for great miseries entailed 
 on a suffering nation by the wars of rival sovereigns. The reli- 
 gious peculiarities, which were to him the very substance of his 
 system, were to them mere makeweights. And while the latter were 
 dropped as soon as his personal influence was withdrawn, (or 
 maintained in a distorted form by some as a cloak for the more 
 severely punishable rebellion which they disguised) the former took 
 deep root, and were the real cause of much of that licence by which 
 the Reformation was disfigured. 
 
 A just historian will not, therefore, fall in with the popular
 
 22 THE DOCTRINAL ASPECT 
 
 notion that the Reformation of doctrine in the sixteenth century 
 was built up on Wicliflfe's principles, or had grown out of his work. 
 There was, no doubt, a living tradition of his name in connection 
 with the Lollards, and with the anti-Roman party in general ; but 
 it is hardly true that he contributed in any appreciable degree to 
 that stirring up of men's minds which resulted in the separation 
 of Rome from England, and the leaving the latter to stand alone 
 among the Catholic Churches of Europe. If we ask, therefore, 
 why the Reformers thought at all about any review or re-modelling 
 of the doctrinal standards and usages of the Church of England, 
 it will not do to answer that it was because Wicliffe had broken 
 the ground for them, showed them the way, and in a manner, com- 
 pelled them to follow. We must look elsewhere for the reason. 
 
 And in the reformation of doctrine, as in the constitutional 
 reformation, we find further indications of that over-ruling Hand, 
 which was fashioning anew the destinies of our Church and 
 country. It is not possible to point to one individual actively 
 concerned in the transactions of the day, and say that the doc- 
 trines of the Reformed Church were a reflex of his mind. But 
 it is possible to show that the general tendency of events in 
 their relation to the Church was such as very exactly to coincide 
 with the result produced ; and we cannot fail to see in such a 
 coincidence an indication of the real Power which was at work, 
 ordering the course of this world for the good of His Church, 
 raising up men to do His work, and while they were doing only 
 that protecting them from harm ; placing bari'iers in the way of 
 those who would have hindered all change, and suffering the re- 
 moval of His own instruments where they sought to carry changes 
 beyond the limits of His unchanging truth. 
 
 The truest way of philosophising history is to endeavour first of 
 all to trace out the course of Providential arrangement in the tem- 
 porary character and results of actual events : and if they are long 
 past, in their subsequent results also. Let us apply this principle 
 to the case before us, and it will be found, I believe, that the fol- 
 lowing causes contributed principally to suggest and to cause a 
 review and reconstruction of our doctrinal system. 
 
 1. A necessity for services in the vernacular had been developing 
 itself strongly for some time, with, probably, a great accession of 
 strength since the general adoption of the printing-press. To the 
 Church belongs the glory of first using that art by which the 
 intellectual progress of mankind has been so wonderfully accele- 
 rated, the first printed book being the Latin Bible printed at Mentz 
 in 1456, and afterwards named (from the Mazarin Library at Paris, 
 the place of its first disinterment in the last century) the Mazarin 
 Bible : and the second known, a Psalter printed in the year fol- 
 lowing. Though many religious books were printed in Germany 
 during the following twenty years, the art was not introduced into
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 33 
 
 ■England until 1474, but it is probable that portions of the Bible 
 in Latin, the Breviary and Missal (of the latter of which early 
 printed copies exist) were among its first productions. These, 
 printed at first in small number, must have at once suggested a 
 very large increase in the number of copies ; and the usual re- 
 action of supply and demand would be certain to promote their 
 production. So wide a circulation of books used in the face of all 
 the people week by week must as certainly have suggested to many 
 minds that the people at large had an interest in them, and that 
 the new art of printing should be made really useful to them in the 
 practice of their religion. Indeed, two small hornbooks were not 
 long since discovered underneath some ancient chancel stalls, on one 
 of which there yet remained portions of an English printed version 
 of the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ave Maria of a very early 
 date, and this in a quite obscure village church, dependent, at the 
 Reformation, on the monastery of Ramsey. These portions of the 
 service had been used by the people in English for a long period, 
 and for a longer, in Anglo-Saxon; and as is well known, the Litany 
 was also commonly in use by them in their own language for at 
 least a hundred years before the Reformation. ^ The evident anxiety 
 of the Church, therefore, to use the new art of printing, and the 
 growing literary intelligence of the people, were combining together 
 to make a Vernacular Bible and Prayer Book an absolute necessity 
 of the age, the introduction of which no opposition could long 
 hinder. It appears that vernacular services have lately become 
 quite common among English Roman Catholics, and I presume 
 their introduction has arisen from the conviction that it is im- 
 possible to carry the English people with you in the use of a Liturgy 
 written in a tongue unknown to them. What a marvel it is that 
 when once a step was made in that direction the point should not 
 have been at once yielded, and as much alacrity shown in the use 
 of the native language as soon as it had really come into existence, 
 as in the use of the printing press ! The use of an universal lan- 
 guage by the Church, when the dialects of Europe had not yet 
 taken a settled form ; or when, as in England, several different 
 tongues were spoken by the several classes of society, was probably 
 wise and proper : but it is simple folly to censure the change of 
 language which was effected in our services at the Reformation when 
 that anomaly had passed away and a new state of things had arisen. 
 The careful and thorough translation of the Holy Bible, and (with 
 its re-construction) the translation of our Prayer Book, was no act of 
 man's wilfulness, enmity, or self-love. It was an act done in 
 obedience to a necessity that had arisen in the providential course 
 of events, and later events would seem to show that these transla- 
 tions have had much to do in fixing the national mind and cha- 
 racter, whereby the Church and language of England are to 
 ^ See also page 46.
 
 24 THE DOCTRINAL ASPECT 
 
 do for the last ages of the Christian world, what the Roman' 
 Church and the Latin tongue did for the first. The Church itself 
 was henceforth to have a peculiarity of character not evident in 
 times when so many of its distinctive features were dropped, as 
 in the last age, but evident enough at the Reformation and now. 
 It was to be Catholic, in doctrine, ceremony, and discipline, yet 
 not Roman ; and was no longer to bear the impress of the old 
 effete Empire. In this point of view we must needs regard the 
 step now under consideration as embodying a great idea; for the 
 language then so new and so limited in its uses is one which these 
 later ages have proved to be capable of even greater extension 
 than the ancient tongue of Rome itself: and from being based on 
 the old Saxon, and yet so enriched and modified by the incorpora- 
 tion of foreign w^ords, it seems to approach nearer to the require- 
 ments of an universal language than any other, and is already 
 spoken by a larger proportion of the civilized world, than perhaps 
 any one language has been since the confusion of Babel. 
 
 The most important step of changing the ecclesiastical language 
 of the country was then one which was both necessary for the times 
 according to man's wisdom, and also one which held a prominent 
 place, as subsequent history proves, in the providential mission of 
 the Church of England. It may be that the full value of the 
 change has not even yet been developed; but that missionaiy 
 work will make very much more rapid progress when the use of 
 our own language as the vehicle uf native thought both in the offices 
 of devotion, and also in ordinary instruction, shall be made a first 
 principle of Indian and other churches. 
 
 2. The very means which had been taken by Rome to secure 
 uniformity of doctrine in all churches in communion with her, was 
 also that by which a review of her standard would be provoked. 
 Every thing was made to rest, officially at least, on the mere 
 authority of Rome. The Pope was the final point of appeal in all 
 disputed cases, and the fountain of dogma in every instance of 
 doubt. The Pope had decreed what was orthodox, and what was 
 not, — no matter if he contradicted his predecessors, — causa Jinita 
 est. When men's minds were shaken in their confidence towards 
 the Pope's supremacy, (and, as I have already shown, it would 
 have been most unreasonable if they had not been so shaken,) then 
 all that had been made to rest so entirely on the same authority 
 began also to be matter of question. It w^as clearly seen at last, 
 that a great wrong had been done to the Church universal by the 
 usurpation of an authority which had no foundation in reason or 
 right ; and what more natural than for men to ask. Is he who has 
 made so great a mistake, or done so great an injustice in this 
 matter of the supremacy certainly so incapable of error, of untruth, 
 even of misbelief in matters of doctrine ? It was impossible for 
 those who felt strongly on the constitutional question, as we may
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 25 
 
 call it, of the Church, — and every clear-sighted and honest man did 
 feel strongly about it when once stirred, however much he might 
 have acquiesced in the established order of things before, — it was ^ 
 impossible, I repeat, for such men to have the same religious 
 or theological confidence in the system of doctrine which had 
 been made so distinctively Papal, as he would if the supremacy 
 had never been claimed or exercised, or if the system had been 
 secured on a Catholic instead of on a Papal basis of authority. It 
 is very probable, too, that the secular and even Pagan character of 
 the court of Rome in the time of Leo X. did much in the same 
 direction towards weakening the respect of Englishmen for the 
 Pope's dogmatic authority. And certainly it must have required 
 either large faith or large mdifFerence to trust without doubt in the 
 absolute orthodoxy of the final court to which Christendom was then 
 accustomed to appeal. We need not be revilers of the Popes of Rome 
 ancient or modern, but we must not lose sight of those elements 
 in the papacy which provoked and justified, if there had not been 
 justification enough on other grounds, a great exercise of indepen- 
 dent judgment on the part of the English Church. Viewing this 
 movement historically we must see that it was essentially " English.^' 
 Nevertheless England was discharging a duty to the Church Ca- 
 tholic also, and if she is true to the " pattern " which has been pro- 
 videntially worked out in her, and will eschew all mere Protestant 
 theories, this her character will eventually be thankfully recognised 
 by all Christendom. 
 
 3. The course of controversy originated a school of original 
 thought of which there are very small traces before the Reforma- 
 tion, but which in fact was the real source of strength to our 
 Church in the reconstruction of our doctrinal system. By original 
 thought, I do not, of course, mean the self-sufficiency which looks 
 upon the authority of preceding times as worthless. Had the Re- 
 formers been men of this sort, the Church of England would have 
 been very different from what it is. What I mean is, a school of 
 thinkers who were not to be frightened out of the use of their 
 reason by an appeal to recent traditional authorities; and who had 
 snfticient confidence in the gift of intelligence with which God had 
 blessed them to track every stream up to its source, if necessity 
 seemed so to require. It may be doubted whether Hooker could 
 have been bred by any of the English schools of the fourteenth and 
 fifteenth centuries : with all his imperfections, he bears notwith- 
 standing a splendid testimony, (as even the best Roman theologians 
 have acknowledged,) to the original learning and wisdom which 
 dated its rise from the sixteenth century. 
 
 The growth of this original school of thought is to be traced to 
 the contest between stiff" traditional orthodoxy on the one hand, 
 and the real errors which had fermented out of the corruption 
 of rehiiion on the other. Of such errors there is no lack of re-
 
 26 
 
 THE DOCTRINAL ASPECT 
 
 cord.^ Contemporary history abounds with them, and enough are 
 to be found in the tracts of the day, when the press gained full 
 liberty, to show what the pulpit was before the press supplanted it. 
 
 Whatever may be thought about the happy unity of belief in the 
 middle ages, there can be no doubt that in the succeeding historical 
 period, including the years immediately preceding the Reformation, 
 there was a vast amount of wild misbelief abroad among the people, 
 and perhaps among the mendicant friars : and that the abominable 
 blasphemies of some of those whom the Protestant world has 
 falsely called martyrs were but an indication of widely spread errors 
 which only a few were bold enough to stand by. The cruelty^ of 
 their punishment has thrown a very false glare about these suf- 
 ferers, which has mostly hindered writers from really analyzing the 
 character of their assertions; but after making all allowance on this 
 score, it does excite wonder that religious persons have been ac- 
 customed to view so lightly the dreadful character of the replies 
 given in the examinations of many of these men as recorded by 
 Foxe. If I was writing controversially it would be my duty to 
 cite proofs of what I refer to, but otherwise my pen shrinks from 
 placing such evidence afresh in print; and I prefer calling on any 
 of my readers who doubt what I say to look through some of 
 these examinations of " martyrs^' and judge for themselves. 
 
 It was a natural consequence of these onslaughts on received 
 doctrine that many minds should be driven into a stiff" maintenance 
 of all that had been so received, or at least of all that was called in 
 question. Many who would at one time have fallen in with a 
 reverent but reasonable sifting of such points as Transubstan- 
 tiation. Purgatory, and the xldoration of the Virgin, were driven 
 by their recoil from these fanatics into a more extreme position 
 than perhaps they ever held before ; as was the case with Sir 
 Thomas More when he wrote his " Supplication of Souls." 
 Wolsey, Fisher, Tuustal, even Gardiner were all at one time favour- 
 able to the more learned men who headed the advance party of the 
 Reformation. It was Wolsey's great ambition to accumulate in 
 his college all the most valuable learning of the day, and there is 
 scarcely one of the early Reformers who did not receive coun- 
 tenance from the great Cardinal, while many were actually trans 
 ferred by his means from Cambridge and foreign Universities to 
 Oxford. Fisher, that good old man who has been so vilely treated 
 by Mr, Froude, and stigmatised as an ignorant fanatic, was actually 
 the means of giving Erasmus a position in England by securing 
 his appointment to the Margai'et Professorship of Divinity, and 
 
 ' I can but just refer to such as were condemned by Archbishop Warham, for 
 example. See Wilkins' Cone. iii. 729. 
 
 " There was a strange difference between those days and ours in respect to cruelty. 
 Latimer begged hard to be placed near to Friar Forrest when he was roasted to 
 death ; and in general the fearful nature of such a death as burning seems to have 
 been but little thought of by the spectators and those concerned.
 
 OP THE REFORMATION. 27 
 
 afterwards to that of Greek ; and when the restless giant grew 
 tired of his Professorship, Fisher appointed Dr. Richard Croke 
 to succeed him, who if not actually a Reformer, was at least one 
 whose learning assisted the Reforming party in no small degree. 
 These patrons of a revived learning in England could hardly but 
 be alarmed, however, when they saw the turn things were taking, and 
 found that the extreme principles of Luther, and extremes even 
 beyond his, were held and advocated by some of the very men they 
 were fostering. Wolsey, never severe with any, spared as long as 
 he could ; but even he was obliged to take notice at last of the 
 hasty and unauthorised proceedings of such men as Bilney and 
 Arthur at Cambridge, of Garrett, Dalaber, and others of whom 
 Foxe makes " martyrs" at Oxford, And thus great men, bred 
 under the Roman system, but by no means slaves to it, who would 
 have willingly aided in a judicious, deliberate, and authorised 
 Reformation of the Church, were alarmed into hugging that system 
 more closely by the extravagances of those who without authority 
 sought to turn upside down the whole order of Ecclesiastical 
 polity and received doctrine. They were, in fact, driven to the 
 position that many of us have been obliged to take up lately re- 
 specting a revision of the Prayer Book : they had no fundamental 
 objection to Reformation, they even acknowledged that it was re- 
 quired : but fanatic endeavours to turn Reformation of doctrine 
 into a destructive elimination of Catholic truth made it seem unsafe 
 at that time to do anything else than maintain the status quo. 
 Perhaps they were right : perhaps they were wrong. It may be 
 that a Reformation more fully entered upon at that time would have 
 been free from those convulsive movements by which it was after- 
 wards chai-acterised ; and, especially under the guidance of Wolsey's 
 wonderful mind for government, it might have peaceably and 
 bloodlessly carried the nation at large in its wake. 
 
 4. Nor must it be forgotten that, between two extremes, which 
 may be conveniently designated by their usual names of Romanism 
 and Puritanism, there always existed a third or middle party, not 
 in England only, (though there principally,) but almost all over 
 Europe, who, while they were shocked at the Anabaptist heresies 
 of the one side were yet far from endorsing the extreme state- 
 ments of their opponents. Perhaps the greater proportion of the 
 parochial clergy were of this class — a conservative body of men, 
 not averse to legitimate changes made under lawful authority, as 
 time proved, but anxious that such changes should be under- 
 taken in a wise and conservative spirit, to secure and preserve 
 the Church in its integrity, and not with the view of forwarding 
 the objects of either the Puritans or their direct opponents of that 
 day.^ It was from among this class of men that Erasmus ob- 
 
 ' It has been said by historical writers — perhaps was a current saying of his day 
 — that half the secular clergy of England agreed in opinion with Wicliffe. A more
 
 28 THE DOCTRINAL ASPECT 
 
 tained so many followers ; and that school of sound original thought 
 of which he may be called the founder was principally recruited 
 from their ranks. 
 
 From this (perhaps tedious^ but yet necessary) review of the rela- 
 tive positions in which men stood with reference to their doctrinal 
 opinions at the time which just preceded the Reformation, it will 
 be seen that the tendencies towards a reconstruction of our doc- 
 trinal system must have been very strong even before they were 
 drawn out by the accomplishment of England's independence; and 
 that when that was achieved, it became so far a necessity that it 
 could not be resisted. Probably Wolsey himself had he been living 
 and in power, would have been ready at once to take up the cue 
 which he had dropped, and to try and lead the Church safely in 
 her search for the true and just position which her new circum- 
 stances required her to occupy. It will also be seen that at the 
 beginning of the Reformation the intellectual leaders of the Clergy 
 were divided into two principal classes ; the one composed of Di- 
 vines who walked in the track of their predecessors, caring little 
 for originality of thought : the other composed of men equally 
 learned who cared little for precedent so far as it rested on recent 
 authorities, but wished, in the exercise of their own judgment, to 
 act on precedents which were old enough to be free from bias towards 
 either of the extremes which their own times had originated. 
 
 II. Leaving now the a priori view of the question let us take 
 some examples of the course followed in the Reformation of doc- 
 trine with respect to some very fundamental questions. 
 
 The cause of the English Church has been so learnedly and so 
 well advocated of late years that probably no controversial writer, 
 well-informed in respect to its history and principles, will in future 
 venture deliberately to accuse it of heresy. The Romanist argu- 
 ment against us is gradually being narrowed to the one point that 
 we are not in visible communion with the Pope ; and we do not 
 consider this a matter of vital importance. There need be but little 
 said, therefore, in proof of the pious caution with which the Re- 
 formers continued the Creeds in their original integrity as the 
 essence of Church of England doctrine. This is a glorious distinc- 
 tion between her and the Protestant communities of the Continent 
 which originated at the time of the Reformation, that the very sub- 
 stance of her confession of faith is in the ipsissima verba of ancient 
 Christendom ; and that she has not by a mere reception of the 
 Creeds as an authority co-ordinate with recent and local confessions, 
 tempted her children to look upon lightly at first, and afterwards 
 
 just way of expressing to our ears what was intended to be expressed by the saying 
 would be that half the Parish Priests of England were — even in Wicliffe's days — 
 more Anglican than Romanist. Wicliffe's impetuous disposition, and the contro- 
 versial position in which he found himself, exaggerated his detailed conclusions 
 beyond the limits of his own principles. Except in this exaggeration be was only one 
 of a class which comprehended a large proportion of tlie parochial clergy.
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 29 
 
 to abandon, important portions of the truth which they declare. 
 The Reformers, when they were providentially led to the trans- 
 lation of the services, (and in the translation of them to a recon- 
 struction which also assisted in bringing them more within the 
 knowledge and understanding of the laityj were also providentially 
 guided to set up in the midst of those services the ancient formu- 
 laries which are the very bulwark of a sound faith, if they are, as 
 the Eighth Article declares they ought to be, " thoroughly received 
 and believed." It was one of the ancient distinctions between the 
 English ritual and that of Rome before the Conquest that the 
 Nicene Creed was said in the Eucharistic service by the former 
 Church in agreement with the Spanish and Gallican rituals : and 
 the Sarum Breviary also directed the daily recital of the Athanasian 
 Creed, while in the Roman it was and is enjoined on Sundays alone. 
 When the denationalization of our ritual was set aside by the 
 Reformation, our services were again distinguished by a more free 
 public use of the Creeds ; and that of the Apostles was directed to 
 be recited openly and audibly, as the consentient declaration of the 
 orthodox faith of the Church, twice every day. Must we not consider 
 this as another of the many proofs existing that the reformation was 
 neither an ill-considered nor a wilful series of changes in respect to 
 doctrine ; but that there was a real desire to maintain the Church in 
 as strict analogy as possible with Catholic Christendom in its best 
 times ?^ Nor will any one venture to assert that there is a single 
 pai'agraph in the Book of Common Prayer which is not wholly and 
 reverently subordinated to the primary truths declared in the 
 Creeds. 
 
 Again, descend from the general doctrines of the Creeds to others 
 of a more special kind, and let us see there too how the Reforma- 
 tion need little fear the charge brought against it of having in- 
 jured the Catholic position of the Church of England. 
 
 1. Some changes were made, for instance, in the administration of 
 Baptism. Whether they were wisely or unwisely made need not be 
 discussed, such alterations as were made being of a ritual, not a 
 doctrinal character; and extreme care being used that the essentials 
 of Holy Baptism, water and the words of invocation, should be 
 clearly asserted in theory and properly used in practice. Was any 
 change whatever made by the Church of England in respect to the 
 doctrine of Holy Baptism ? This is a question which has been so 
 much before the world for the last twenty years that a mere allu- 
 sion to the works which have been written in defence of the doc- 
 trine of Regeneration is sufficient for my purpose. No one who 
 has not grown up in the almost invincible obstinacy of Calvinism 
 
 ^ It is, perhaps, worth notichig that in the Catechism of the Council of Trent 
 the exposition of the Creed occupies some hundred and fifty pages, and there are 
 but two pages of that exposition — the one on the Pope as the necessary centre of 
 Catholic Unity, and the other on the participation of merits in the Communion of 
 Saints — which are not consistent with the more elaborate work of Bishop Pearson.
 
 30 THE DOCTRINAL ASPECT 
 
 will be able henceforth to read the mind of the Church as expressed 
 in the Prayer Book, and elsewhere, without seeing clearly that, 
 (whatever his own opinion) the voice of the Reformation Church of 
 England declares undoubtingly the same doctrine respecting the 
 nature of man and the effects of Baptism that was held by the 
 Church before the Reformation was thought of. 
 
 It was, in fact, a stock grievance with the Puritans that " minis- 
 ters are obliged to pronounce all baptized infants regenerate by the 
 Holy Ghost," and that the " Church clearly teaches the doctrine 
 of Baptismal regeneration," from the Hampton Court Conference 
 to the last settlement of the Prayer Book. 
 
 2. If we consider the changes made in regard to the other sacra- 
 ment, that of the Holy Eucharist, we are indeed compelled to take 
 up other ground. In the case of Baptism there was no change to 
 vindicate as far as the authoritative belief of the Church is con- 
 cerned, but in this case an altei'ation was made in the form of the 
 rite, by the introduction of Communion in both kinds ; and also 
 in the statement of Doctrine, by the repudiation of Transubstantia- 
 tion. Was such a change wholly uncalled for, and unjustifiable? 
 To go fully into a vindication of the Church of England would be 
 the province of a complete history, not of a suggestive essay like 
 the present ; I shall thex'efore content myself with indicating a few 
 of the leading points which I conceive most certainly to justify the 
 Reformers in what they did. 
 
 First, with reference to the restoration of the Communion in 
 both kinds to the laity. There is reason to think that the general 
 denial of the Cup to lay people dates little more than a century be- 
 fore the Reformation age; and the custom at all of communion in 
 one kind alone — except in clinical communion — was almost unknown 
 before the twelfth century. Until the Council of Constance, in 
 1415, it had not been directed by any but individual Bishops ; 
 having, however, been a matter of warm discussion among the theo- 
 logians of the middle ages, that Council decided in favour of the novel 
 usage. But it was declared by Cardinal Bona as a fact fully acknow- 
 ledged by " Catholics as well as sectarians" that it was the custom 
 for all to receive in both kinds in ancient times. Moreover, only 
 three centuries before the Council of Constance gave this decision in 
 favour of so great an innovation upon the ancient practice of the 
 Church, another Council, that of Clermont, presided over by Pope 
 Urban II., in 1095, had given a decision directly the reverse, 
 obliging all to receive in both kinds unless there was some good 
 reason to the contrary: and a century later, in the year 1175, an 
 Archbishop of Canterbury in Convocation forbad the new usage in 
 its earliest form, that of giving the one species steeped in the 
 other, a form which had already given discontent to the laity. 
 When, therefore, the Reformers came to review the doctrines and 
 usages of the Church, it could not fail but this usage — so import-
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 31 
 
 ant, and so closely connected with doctrine — should be taken into 
 serious consideration : and since it was one which had been in- 
 troduced against the wish of the Church at large, was so novel, 
 and even contrary to the undoubted custom of the whole Church 
 for twelve or thirteen hundred years out of the fifteen of its existence, 
 no wonder that they came to the determination that they would re- 
 store to the faithful that of which they had been deprived. And 
 certainly they had charity on their side : for if the laity think (and 
 I hardly know why they should think otherwise) that they may 
 receive the Holy Eucharist with more hope of the fulness of its 
 grace if they receive in both kinds as the Church was accustomed 
 to for so long, it is a grievous thing (without extreme necessity) to 
 deny them the privilege they seek.^ Strongly, however, as that 
 generation seems to have felt on this subject, there is a clause in 
 the Act of Parliament which enjoins the change, declaring "that 
 this restoring the ancient practice with reference to the holy Sa- 
 crament must not be interpreted to the condemning the usage of 
 any Church out of His Majesty's dominions :" so anxious were the 
 English Reformers to legislate for their own Church and that only. 
 So exactly, moreover, did they act in this particular matter, that 
 the proviso of the Council of Clermont, — except necessity re- 
 quired administration in one kind only, — was introduced even into 
 the Act of Parliament. Prudence, charity, and deference to ancient 
 authority, are, then, a justification of the Reformers in this as in 
 other matters. 
 
 That Transubstantiation, or annihilation of the natural elements 
 by their consecration for the Blessed Sacrament was as novel as a 
 doctrine in the Church as communion in one kind was as an usage, 
 I need not go on to prove. Nor, in the face of controversies so very 
 recent, and so generally known among Church people, is there need 
 to prove that the new definitions of the English Reformers were 
 sound and Catholic. All I would ask of the Church historian is, 
 that in writing a record of what was done at the Reformation to- 
 wards a definition of the ancient doctrme of the Church, he will 
 take the authoritative documents which were issued as the basis of 
 his record and comment, and not the individual opinions of any 
 one, however celebrated, of the Reformers. In the Office for the 
 Holy Communion, in the Articles, in the Catechism, and in the 
 Homilies may be found a doctrine as decided in respect to the pre- 
 
 ' It was at the first re-introduction of communion in both species that the strong 
 exhortations about unworthy receiving were introduced. A communicant who had 
 not heard these read for some years, lately remarked that they were enough to 
 frighten even regular communicants away from the altar, rather than to invite them 
 there. No doubt it requires great indifference or a very well informed mind to 
 take them otherwise. But when they were first directed to be used, persons were 
 little accustomed to communicate and such cautions were necessary. An Act of 
 Parliament against the depravation of the Blessed Sacrament was necessary for the 
 same reason. Their utility at the present day is another question, which T need not 
 enter into.
 
 32 
 
 THE DOCTRINAL ASPECT 
 
 sence of Christ, as that is respecting Regeneration. And if there 
 are some things to be regretted as consequences of the Reformation 
 controversy on this subject, let us remember that it was forced 
 upon the Church partly by heresies arising out of recoil from the 
 strong statements of the Transubstantiationists, and partly by the 
 formal reiteration of those strong and unjustifiable statements at 
 the Council of Trent. Had that controversy never arisen the 
 Church might have been more united, but it was not the Reforma- 
 tion which first broke ground in this terrible contest. Neither do 
 the Formularies of the English and Roman Communions indicate 
 the existence of any essential doctrinal differences between the 
 Churches on this head. The difference, whatever it may be, re- 
 sides simply in a definition ; one that is, to say the least, super- 
 fluous, and the meaning of which is debated among Roman Ca- 
 tholics themselves. 
 
 3. Having thus vindicated the Reformers from the imputation 
 of being rash innovators, seeking a change where no necessity 
 drove them to it, and no finger of Providence pointed towards it, 
 let us now go on to analyse the results which followed, as regards 
 some other less conspicuous matters, disencumbering the princi- 
 ples, as before, from the details by which they are overwhelmed in 
 our ordinary histories. 
 
 Perhaps the most important point of all that requires to be no- 
 ticed in this view of Reformation history is, that in all the authori- 
 tative changes that were made there was no step whatever taken to 
 interfere with or encroach upon the ancient ideal of the Church. 
 The well-known definition contained in our Nineteenth Article of 
 Religion, "The Visible Church of Christ is a congregation of 
 faithful men,''' &c.,i is identical in the most essential part with the 
 definition given by S. Thomas Aquinas : " Corpus Christi mys- 
 ticum, quod est societas sanctorum ;"2 and the very words used in 
 the Latin article, " coetus fidelium," are to be found (among others) 
 in Cornelius a Lapide, who says, " Jesus Christus per incar- 
 natiouem despondit sibi ecclesiam, sive totumcoetum populi fidelis,"^ 
 where the " totum " serves to illustrate the meaning of the article 
 itself, and to disconnect it from the false idea sometimes taken up 
 by those who read the Thirty-nine Articles only in the English, and 
 without consideration of the sources from which the original ex- 
 pressions were derived. So also in the Homilies : " The true 
 Church is an universal congregation or fellowship of God's faithful 
 and elect people, built upon the foundation of the apostles and 
 prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the head corner-stone."* 
 There was an evident care, therefore, on the part of the Reformers 
 
 1 " Congregation,^'' thronghout the Articles, appears to be used for the whole 
 visible Ecclesia, not in a temporising sense, as is sometimes supposed. 
 
 2 Summa Theolog., p. iii., q. 60. ^ Corn, a Lap. in Joann. iii. 29. 
 * Whitsunday. Second part.
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 33 
 
 to avoid those contracted notions respecting the Church which had 
 been brought in by the rising Puritans, and they retained the cur- 
 rent definition of the Church which was familiar to them in their 
 earUest theological days, asserting as the primary idea thereof that 
 it was " a congregation," the whole body, of " faithful people," — of 
 those " fideles," that is, known to the Church from the first — all 
 who have been baptized. 
 
 If, moreover, we go on beyond this primary idea of the Church, 
 and look for the Reformation principle in respect to the ministry of 
 the Church, we shall still find those who had the guidance of the 
 movement preserving the old theories unaltered. Take, for example, 
 their loosest formula on the subject, the Twenty-third Article. It 
 contains two principles which, if interpreted, as they ought to be, 
 by the pi-actical formulary of the Ordinal, and by the continuous 
 usage of the Reformers, utterly repudiate all those modifications of 
 theory on this subject which became necessary in the systems of 
 Luther, Calvin, Knox, and the Anabaptists. It makes two decla- 
 rations, the first, that no one may assume — non licet cuiquara 
 sumere sibi — the ofiice of public preaching and of administration 
 of the Sacraments w^ithout legitimate call and mission ; and the 
 second, that such call and mission can only be legitimate when it 
 proceeds from those upon whom such authority is devolved. If 
 this is taken in connection with the Preface to the Ordination Ser- 
 vices, and with the actual practice of the Reformers, it is quite 
 evident that whatever individual Bishops or Clergymen might 
 assert, the authoritative voice of the Church of England most dis- 
 tinctly repudiated any change from the ancient theory. " Men 
 may not take the office of the ministry of their own authority," 
 they say ; "they may only take it when properly commissioned by 
 those who have the power given them to call and send the Clergy 
 to their work. No man can read the Bible and old ecclesiastical 
 writers without seeing that the ministry has consisted of Bishops, 
 Priests, and Deacons from the days of the Apostles until now ; and 
 that these orders of the ministry may be continued as they always 
 have been, we enjoin these services to be used in 'calling^ and 
 ' giving mission ' to every man who is to exercise the offices in 
 question, and no man shall be accounted or taken to be a lawful 
 Bishop, Priest, or Deacon, (that is, no ' man shall publicly preach 
 or minister the Sacraments,' or ordain, ' in the Church of Eng- 
 land,) except he receives ordination in the form appointed.' " There 
 is, indeed, one proviso, but one that makes the words of the Refor- 
 mation still more definite and strong : it is that if he " hath had 
 formerly episcopal consecration or ordination," then a man may 
 exercise his office in the Church of England without going through 
 the ceremony appointed : a proviso which, of course, excluded all 
 those who claimed Presbyterian ordination as a qualification for the 
 ministry, and admitted all who could prove themselves ordained by 
 
 c
 
 34 
 
 THE DOCTRINAL ASPECT 
 
 a bishop, or consecrated canonically, to whatever Church they 
 might previously have belonged. It is not necessary to point 
 out that the substantial portions of our Ordinal are as practi- 
 cally in accordance with the old ordinals of the Church as the 
 newly-stated theory is in agreement with the theory always acted on. 
 Nor can there be any difficulty in showing that this theory of Orders 
 maintained its ground against all assaults that were made upon it ; 
 for there seems absolutely to have been no hesitation or doubt upon 
 the subject at the time when the new formularies were issued, the 
 Reformed Church of England simply carrying on and perpetuating 
 the theory, and, in substance, the practice, of the Church of Eng- 
 land as it had been when in direct communion with Rome.^ 
 
 The first principle of the doctrinal review of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury was therefore one which committed the Reformers to the 
 assertion of essential continuity between the Reformed and the un- 
 reformed Church of England by means of its ministry ; and histo- 
 rical records (as, for example, in the case of Archbishop Parker^s 
 consecration) show us that practical care was taken by them to carry 
 out in its integrity the theory which they stated upon paper. On 
 the very first occasion, too, when a necessity arose for determinate 
 action on the part of the Church and State in 1663; the result 
 was that all who refused to be formally ordained to the office of 
 the priesthood as thus recognised in the Church of England were 
 prohibited from exercising in her Churches any of the duties to 
 which they pretended ; and this, too, at a dangerous crisis, when 
 such decided conduct seemed likely to be almost ruinous, a second 
 time, to the depressed Church. There is consequently no ground 
 at all for the assertions which have been made from time to time by 
 Romanists, Dissenters, and, alas ! by Priests, Bishops, and Arch- 
 bishops, to the efi"ect that the Reformation standard of the mini- 
 sterial office was less strict than that of the times preceding, or of 
 the present Church of Rome. On the contrary, deviation from the 
 old paths, so far as principles were concerned, seems never to have 
 been thought of; or, if it was, extreme care was used that such 
 deviation should not be made. So much depends upon this practi- 
 cal care that a Priest or a Bishop after the Reformation should be 
 the same as a Priest or a Bishop before and in all earlier ages of 
 the Church, that the point ought to be very carefully covered 
 in any history of that period. Had it been so attended to, for 
 instance, in the Church Histories, and Manuals which our own 
 
 * The doctrine of Apostolical Succession was not asserted in terms at the time of 
 the Reformation, because the point of original importance is that of Episcopal 
 Ordination. If the necessity of this is granted, then the other follows as a corol- 
 lary, and the only question is one of fact, i.e., as to the actual status of those who 
 ordain in each successive ecclesiastical generation. If episcopal ordination is neces- 
 sary. Bishops are necessary : and if those claiming to be Bishops are Bishops, the 
 inheritance of the Apostolical succession is, of course, the result of being ordained 
 by them.
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 35 
 
 day has seen published, we should hardly have heard the mi- 
 serable evasions and misrepresentations with which the honest 
 part of the world was afflicted at the time of the wretched Gaw- 
 thorne^s attempt upon the Archbishop of Canterbury's good- 
 nature. But the Reformation ideal of the Church of England 
 as a portion of the Universal Church composed of baptised per- 
 sons, and ministered to by those only who have received episcopal 
 ordination, has not always been the ideal which our Church histo- 
 rians have set before themselves. They have sometimes been more 
 anxious to explain away the doctrine of the Reformation as inter- 
 fering with the Protestantism of modern days ; and have been 
 more anxious to word their histories in a way that would not seem 
 uncharitable to Dissenters, than to look simply at the justice which 
 history, and especially the history of their own Church, requires at 
 their hands. 
 
 This, then, was the ground on which the English Reformers 
 acted with reference to the most essential features of the doctrinal 
 review which they were obliged to undertake : it remains to notice 
 some others of a less essential and fundamental character, but in 
 respect to which a grave responsibility was thrown upon that gene- 
 ration. 
 
 4, Among the questions on which they were forced to come to a 
 decided opinion, was that respecting the relative character of the 
 rites which had been known by the corporate term of the " Seven 
 Sacraments.^^ In the later theology of the Pre-Reformation 
 Church the number seven had been commonly assigned as that of 
 the essential Christian rites ; and very little, if any difference was 
 made as to the comparative position of these as Divine institutions : 
 but the arbitrary number by which they were classified was un- 
 known before the days of Peter Lombard. As a convenient term 
 of enumeration, applied to what were considered the principal 
 spiritual channels of grace to man from the cradle to the grave, 
 there was nothing to be said against this way of speaking ; but if 
 it was to be taken in a more strict sense, then the Reformers felt 
 that explanations were necessary, to say the least. That the ques- 
 tion underwent deliberate discussion we have proof yet remaining, 
 in a well-known paper published by Bishop Burnet as No. 21, in 
 Book III. of his Records, and also by Collier; and the sentence 
 framed on that discussion, ^ is to be found in the definition of the 
 Catechism, the XXVth Article of Religion, and the Homily on 
 the Common Prayer and Saci-aments. The Church of England by 
 no means repudiates the idea of Seven Sacraments, but thinks it 
 more convenient to restrict the customary use of so honourable a 
 name to the two " generally," i.e. universally " necessary to salva- 
 tion.'^ And who can deny that when a necessity had arisen for 
 
 ^ In which they all agreed, by the by, that " the nature, effect, and virtue of all 
 the seven, be contained in Scripture." 
 
 c2
 
 36 
 
 THE DOCTRINAL ASPECT 
 
 defining what a Sacrament is in its highest sense, the Church of 
 England is more exact in this use of the term than the Council of 
 Trent was in perpetuating the inexact application of one term to all 
 seven of the rites in question ? 
 
 Having already shown the course taken with respect to three of 
 these seven, Holy Baptism, the Blessed Sacrament, and Holy 
 Orders, it is not necessary to make any further remarks about 
 them : let us therefore go on just to notice what was the doctrinal 
 result of the Reformation after the other four had been brought 
 under review. The terms in which the XXVth Article speaks of 
 "those five commonly called Sacraments," do not decide the 
 question whether or not the whole five were admitted to be of 
 such importance that they were to be retained in use ; nor does 
 that Article show clearly whether it was meant to say, by the 
 expression " that they had grown partly of the corrupt following 
 of the xVpostles," that the adjuncts of some or all of the five had 
 so gronn up, or that a part of the number — as Extreme Unction — 
 was a corruption of Apostolic doctrine and practice. One inclines 
 to the former view, and chiefly because no indication is given in 
 the Article, or in the corresponding passage of the Homilies as to 
 any differencing of the five; while there is a very plain indication 
 that the late or scholastic theory of the five was thought " corrupt," 
 or incorrect. If this is a true interpretation of the expression, then 
 it must be held that the XXVth Article does not pass any censure 
 whatever upon the doctrine that these "five commonly called 
 Sacraments" are means of grace, but declaring generally that a 
 corrupt theory had sprung up respecting them, implies that the 
 particular doctrine respecting each is to be found elsewhere in the 
 formularies of the Church. 
 
 What is to be found elsewhere respecting Holy Orders has been 
 already shown, and also that there is absojutely no change of 
 theory at least respecting the results which follow upon the use 
 of the ordinance, although the Reformers declined to call it a 
 Sacrament in the highest sense of the word. Confirmation must 
 be put in the same category, with the exception that it cannot, as 
 Orders, be directly assigned to Christ's own ordinance, however 
 improbable it may be that the Apostles would have originated it 
 without His express instructions. The Reformers did, however, in 
 effect, retain with scrupulous care^ that part of the rite of Con- 
 firmation wliich alone was considered by even the Mediaeval Church 
 as essential to it as a Sacrament, the Imposition of a Bishop's 
 hands. For although Chrism was used at the solemn adminis- 
 
 ^ Would that equally scrupulous care was used in carrying out their spirit by say- 
 ing: the words of Confirmation contemporaneously with the use of the action. But 
 unfortunately many Confirmations of modem days have relapsed into an imitation of 
 the Romanist practice at ordinations. In both cases the hands of the Bishop are 
 laid on iu silence, and the words afterwards spoken over the whole number.
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 37, 
 
 tration of Confirmation in Churches, it was a by no means un- 
 common practice for Mediaeval Bishops to confirm children brought 
 to them as they passed along the road on their journeys; and there 
 is one case on record in which a Bishop is censured for so adminis- 
 tering the rite even without alighting from his horse. It is not 
 to be supposed that Chrism was used on such occasions, and we 
 must conclude that Imposition of hands was considered the essen- 
 tial and inalienable portion of the rite. That the Office has been 
 so much curtailed is perhaps a matter for regret, but its curtail- 
 ment is not of a nature to interfere vvith the effectual administra- 
 tion of Confirmation ; nor, in reverent hands, with the due solemnity 
 by which it ought to be characterized. If Confirmation is not what 
 it should be in the English Church, the "living authorities" are the 
 parties to bear the blame, not the revisers of our ritual and doc- 
 trine. It seems to be a very " corrupt following" of the Reformers 
 to delay Confirmation for years after the conditions made necessary 
 by them have been fulfilled : and there is cause to fear that many 
 a baptized soul has been lost through that rule respecting age im- 
 posed in more modern times, which shuts out children from receiv- 
 ing the grace of Confirmation and of the Holy Eucharist when it is 
 most necessary to build them up in their innocence, and withholds 
 it until it is necessary to convert them from their sin. This is 
 no injunction of the Reformers, nor can it be proved that it is a 
 tradition derived from them. On the contrary, it is the impres- 
 sion of many that they would share in the grief and indignation 
 which is often felt in respect to this corruption of their intention 
 and practice, so inconsistent as it is with a simple and hearty faith 
 in the grace of God given for holy living. 
 
 With respect to another of the five Sacraments of which I am 
 speaking, — that of Penance — the same remarks apply which were 
 made when speaking of the Holy Eucharist ; the question of Con- 
 fession and Absolution has been so fully discussed, and its continued 
 use in the Church so clearly proved to have been the intention of 
 the Reformers that I feel it unnecessary to repeat arguments which 
 must be still fresh in the minds of my readers. 
 
 We then come to the fourth of the number. Holy Matrimony. 
 And this may be disposed of very shortly by referring to two things 
 which in themselves bear testimony to the wisdom and Catholicity 
 of our service as it stands. The first is that fewer complaints have 
 been made respecting the Marriage Service by Protestants than re- 
 specting any other portion of the Prayer Book, and that although 
 facilities for connubial union in other ways have long been offered 
 by our laws, not more than about one in ten of those (not Roman 
 Catholics) who wish to marry, object to be married according to the 
 rite of the Church of England. The second is, that, while the only 
 substantial difference between us and Rome in respect to Holy 
 Matrimony is as to its Sacramental position, the theories of Roman
 
 88 
 
 THE DOCTRINAL ASPECT 
 
 writers vary so greatly as to what is the matter and what the 
 form of the Sacrament as very much to confirm, without further 
 argument, the conviction of the Reformers that it was not a Sacra- 
 ment at all in the full definition of the term. Let me just add, 
 further, that the rubric which declares that it is expedient for the 
 newly married couple to receive the Blessed Sacrament as soon as 
 may be — at the time of, or shortly after their marriage, — shows 
 how desirous those who inserted it were that the very highest 
 value should be set upon the Matrimonial Ofiice, and the greatest 
 solemnity attached to the bond contracted. 
 
 Lastly, a few words respecting the fifth of the number — Extreme 
 Unction. That the mediseval and modern form of this rite is not 
 identical with that mentioned in the Epistle of S. James and in S. 
 Mark's Gospel, must, I think, be conceded by all. The latter 
 was a means of recovery ; the former is used in articulo mortis when 
 recovery is supposed to be past expectation. Nor is it by any 
 means clear, even in Roman writers like Bellarmine, that the pre- 
 sent form of Extreme Unction, with its present object, dates further 
 back than the twelfth centuiy. As has been shown, however, the 
 rite is not censured by the Twenty-fifth Article, though alluded to ; 
 and indeed, in the first book of Edward VI., a form for adminis- 
 tering it was inserted. This form was omitted from the second 
 book, and has never been restored ; but I believe there is some 
 difference of opinion as to the lawfulness or not of the usage since 
 the omission in question. Being, as it is, so late an usage in the 
 Church, and no proof existing that it really possesses the Sacra- 
 mental character which it seems to possess, it can hardly be ne- 
 cessary to defend the Post-Reformation position of the English 
 Church in respect to it ; and the less as no formal repudiation of it 
 is recorded. In my own humble opinion it is one of those usages 
 by which, as from the sign of the Cross, a measure of grace may pos- 
 sibly be conveyed that will be for the good of those who receive it, 
 but that it cannot be considered of any primary importance, and 
 that much superstition and abuse are likely to attach themselves to 
 its use with any but persons of very devout dispositions. ^ 
 
 5. Before concluding the subject of Doctrinal Reformation I shall 
 be expected to say a few words concerning some of those articles of 
 the mediEeval faith which were distinctly and without reserve repu- 
 diated by the Church of England at the Reformation. One of 
 these has been already referred to, viz., that which made visible 
 communion with Rome absolutely necessary to the life of a Church ; 
 and we may pass on to two others, (1.) the Doctrine of Purgatory; 
 (2.) the cultus of the Blessed Virgin and other Saints of God. 
 
 ' The Paper before alluded to in Burnet's Records shows how much doubt the 
 Reformers had on this question generally ; and I do not remember any later theo- 
 logian of note who has spoken positively on the subject. The general feeling seems 
 to be that there was an Apostolic rite of extreme unction, but that the Roman form 
 does not represent it.
 
 OP THE REFORMATION. 39 
 
 It was well shown in the much-abused "Tract XC." that the 
 Twenty-second Article very plainly condemns the " Romish doctrine 
 concerning purgatory," but I forget whether it is noticed there 
 that in the corresponding Article of an earlier date, the Twenty- 
 third of Edward VI., that which was condemned was " The doc- 
 trine of the school-authors." When it is considered that the Re- 
 formers were perfectly well aware that from the second century at 
 least, downwards, it had been the practice of the Church to pray 
 for the dead, as if they were in a condition which admitted of im- 
 provement — not being one of perfect bliss : and also that S. Au- 
 gustine for whom they had so great a reverence, with others of the 
 " godly fathers," believed that the souls of the righteous undergo 
 some purgation from the stain of sin in Paradise as their bodies do 
 in the grave, it seems impossible to suppose otherwise than that the 
 distinctive adjective here was used with a distinctive meaning ; and 
 that what it was intended to condemn by this Article was that ex- 
 aggerated theory of punishment in the intermediate state which 
 was Romish in its origin and Romish in all its abuses. For it was 
 out of this doctrine that all that mechanism of " pardons" and " in- 
 dulgences" arose which became a matter of shame to Christendom. ^ 
 I will not stay to justify the Church of England in her repudia- 
 tion of the Romish doctrine of Purgatory and Pardons, but will 
 only express my wonder that any theologian and reasoner can be 
 found who will attempt to justify a contrary conduct. The phe- 
 nomenon is only to be explained on the ground of perfect out- 
 ward submission both of will and intellect to every dictum sanctioned 
 by the Popes : from which, may Heaven preserve us. 
 
 Again, in respect to the other doctrine mentioned, the cultus of 
 the Blessed Virgin : it is certainly a marvel to find any who can be 
 discontented with the authorised position of the Church of England 
 on this point. We all know perfectly well that at the time of the 
 Reformation and long since, there have been profane minds which 
 have delighted in dishonouring the name of the Mother of our 
 Lord, and the names of other saints also. But what sympathy 
 or authority have such persons found in any document issued by 
 the Church of England ? Amidst all the provocations arising 
 from the discovery of equal profanity on the other side in the 
 direct adoration of her who, in all her purity and holiness, is not 
 God, the Reformers reverently set apart two princi[)al Festivals in 
 her honour, those of the Purification and the Annunciation, and 
 two minor or " black letter " festivals, those of the Conception and 
 
 ■ The wild extravagance of the system of indulgences may be illustrated by some 
 conceded in the Sarum Hours of the Virgin. Paris : 1526. Sixtus IV. granted 
 1 1 ,000 years of pardon on account of one prayer said before one Image of our Lady ; 
 to another the old allowance of pardon was 32,755 years, which was doubled by this 
 same indulgent Pontiff. Tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands were as little 
 accounted of in the matter of indulgence granting for the future as they are by Dr. 
 Darwin or the geologists in their speculations about the past.
 
 40 THE DOCTRINAL ASPECT 
 
 the Visitation. In all their writings they spoke of the Blessed 
 Virgin with the utmost reverence, and even so anti-Romish a pre- 
 late as Bishop Hall could write, "Blessed Mary, he doth not 
 honour thee too much who maketh not a goddess of thee." What 
 the Church did at the Reformation was to pay to the Blessed Virgin 
 Mary the very highest respect and reverence, by giving up all that 
 false adoration which dishonoured her, and was blasphemy towards 
 God. If it can be proved that there was not any such adoration 
 oflfered, let us accept the proof thankfully, but not one iota will 
 the justification of those learned and prudent men be diminished 
 who, with their senses about them, believed and were convinced 
 that such adoration was common. 
 
 Nor do I believe that, in a later day, Bishop Pearson spoke 
 more strongly than the Reformers would have done in respect to 
 the veneration of ancient times for the Saints when he said, in his 
 fourth Concio ad Clerum, " If we cut off all intercession of angels 
 and saints for us who are living on earth, and contending with the 
 host of evil spirits ; if we acknowledge no power at all before the 
 throne of God, on the part of those who poured forth their lives for 
 Christ; if all those who venerated their relics (reliquias) are 
 rejected and scouted by us, and we call them idolaters, . . I know 
 not what Church at all that can be with which it will be possible for 
 us to hold communion." 1 But to make the saints the dispensers of 
 the grace of God, as the Pre-Reformation prayers too often did, is 
 no doctrine of the Catholic Church, and the Reformers did well to 
 shut out such a notion for the future, as far as lay in their power. 
 
 Having now gone over all the principal matters connected with 
 the Reformation of Doctrine in the sixteenth century, — as in 
 former pages the changes in the Church of England were consi- 
 dered from a constitutional point of view — I have only to ask in 
 conclusion whether there is not ample ground for vindicating the 
 position that was then taken up by her, without conceding one iota 
 of that Catholic doctrine and practice which we believe to be her 
 true inheritance ? We have a Mother to whom is owing not merely 
 the respect which is her due because she is our parent ; but who 
 also claims our reverent and loyal love because she has in all things 
 done her best to walk in the paths of orthodox holiness. God^s 
 good Providence guided her steps when unexampled dangers and 
 temptations lay about her path : He restrained the officiousness of 
 man, and cast it down when from the civil or the ecclesiastical 
 throne it was interfering with the straightforward course in which 
 He had bidden her to walk : He gave light and knowledge, even 
 beyond their own consciousness of its possession, to those who 
 were to strengthen her for her last and greatest stage of providen- 
 tial destiny : and we have no reason to doubt that His hand is with 
 her still to lead her safely through present and future difficulties. 
 ' Pearson's Minor Theological Works, ii. p. 54.
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 41 
 
 And the truth really is^ that if we take diligent pains and a loyal 
 heart to the reading of our ecclesiastical history in the sixteenth 
 century, its lessons will give us a much better faith in the present 
 stability and future destiny of our Church than many among us 
 seem to possess, though not more than every one who is working 
 in her ranks assuredly ought to have.
 
 42 
 
 ESSAY III. 
 
 THE RITUAL ASPECT OF THE REFORMATION. 
 
 The Churcli of England has been singularly unfortunate in respect 
 to the documentaiy materials by means of which the history of the 
 Reformation ought to have been elucidated. In Queen Mary's 
 reign there appears to have been a deliberate destruction of many 
 records which might have assisted us to a more satisfactory account 
 of the dissolution of the monasteries : at a later period the pro- 
 ceedings of Convocation during some centuries were swept out of 
 mind by fire : the same element destroyed or irretrievably damaged 
 many valuable papers in the Cottonian library during the present 
 century; and within our own memory the original MS. of the 
 Prayer Book has disappeared, no one knows where. Of these 
 losses, that of the Convocation records is the one most to be la- 
 mented, as regards our present subject ; as we should there, doubt- 
 less, have found the authoritative documents by which each of 
 the successive changes that ensued at the Reformation might be 
 identified as changes originating, at least, with the ecclesiastical 
 portion of the State ; and thus have secured an official contradiction 
 to the popular but very false impression, that the Reformation was 
 forced upon the Clergy by the civil power and public opinion, and 
 so far as it was adopted by them, adopted against their will. 
 
 There is, however, one document of great importance remaining, 
 (a document, too, which has the advantage of being accessible to 
 every one,) and its tenour goes far to indicate the direction which the 
 ecclesiastical mind of England took, and the principles which it made 
 the foundation of all action in the changes that had become, through 
 the causes I have already referred to, an absolute necessity. The 
 Prayer Book at large is of course a full elucidation of this, for the 
 legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi is a rule which ought never 
 to be lost sight of in judging of the Reformation ; but the contro- 
 vei'sies of late days have shown that it is a long business to draw 
 out this lex from the pages of our Common Prayer, however easy 
 it might seem to be ; and many, no doubt, have longed that the 
 Reformers had actually stated, in so many words, what they were 
 doing, rather than left us to draw out indirect evidence of their
 
 THE RITUAL ASPECT OF THE REFORMATION. 43 
 
 deeds and their intentions in the manner we are mostly driven to 
 resort to. The document to which I refer is, however, of this 
 positive nature ; and, as far as it goes, really does furnish us with 
 what we want. For when those who set forth the Prayer Book 
 added a preface to it, they must have done so from the feeling that 
 it was necessary to offer some explanation, both to their own gene- 
 ration and also to posterity, of their reasons for doing what they 
 had done; and to those reasons we may no doubt look as a general 
 index of the principles by which the acting portion of the Church 
 of England was guided. 
 
 As it now stands in our Prayer Books, this preface is a little cal- 
 culated to mislead any who have not made themselves accurately 
 acquainted with the historical phases of the book itself. What is 
 now headed " The Preface," beginning, " It hath been the wisdom 
 of the Church of England," and ending " truly conscientious sons 
 of the Church of England," was introduced into the Prayer Book 
 after the Great Rebellion, having been drawn up, it is supposed, 
 by Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln ; and refers to those very few 
 alterations which were made in 1662. That which had previously 
 been headed " A Preface," beginning, " There was never anything 
 by the wit of man so well devised," and ending, " that the people 
 may come to hear God's Word, and to pray with him," was now 
 entitled, " Concerning the Service of the Church," and placed im- 
 mediately after the new insertion. Following this document is 
 another, headed, " Of ceremonies, why some be abolished and some 
 retained," originally — that is, in the First Book of Edward VI. — 
 placed after the Commination Service, but in the Second Book of 
 1553 and all others adopted as a sort of second chapter of the 
 Preface. These two earlier portions, which alone formed the Pre- 
 face of the Prayer Book from 1549 to 1662, are the document to 
 which I refer, as very clearly setting forth the principles on which 
 the Reformers acted in the reconstruction of our Services; prin- 
 ciples which, if they were adopted in the most grave part of their 
 work, we may legitimately extend to the rest of their labours also.^ 
 
 Some of my readers may be aware that this original Preface to 
 the English Prayer Book has several points of identity with the 
 preface to the reformed Breviary of Cardinal Quignonez, which was 
 published at Rome in 1536, and appears to have been used in many 
 places until it was condemned by Pius V., and superseded by the 
 reformed Breviary of the Council of Trent. There is reason to 
 think that this Breviary was used by the Reformers of our own 
 Prayer Book to some extent ; and the identity of expression evi- 
 dent in the two prefaces cannot certainly be accidental. Take three 
 passages as an example : — 
 
 ^ I heard it suggested lately that every clergyman should be obliged to read this 
 Preface concerning the Service and Ceremonies of the Church to his flock four times 
 a year.
 
 44 THE RITUAL ASPECT 
 
 Quignonez, 1536. Prayer Book, 1549. 
 
 "Nihil enim humano elabo- "There was never anything by 
 
 ratum ingenio, tam exactum initio the wit of man so well devised, or 
 unquam fuit, quia postea " . . . so sure estabhshed, which, in con- 
 
 tinuance of time "... 
 " Nam libri scripturse sacrse, "... the ancient fathers . . . 
 
 statis anni temporibus legendi so ordered the matter, that all the 
 erant more majorum . . . vixdum whole Bible (or the greatest part 
 iiicsepti omittuntur in alio bre- thereof) should be read over once 
 viario "... every year . . . but . . . commonly, 
 
 when any book of the Bible was 
 
 begun, after three or four chapters 
 
 were read out, all the rest were 
 
 unread" . . . 
 
 "Accedit tam perplexus ordo, "Moreover, the number and 
 
 tamque difficilis precandi ratio, ut hardness of the rules called the 
 
 interdum paulo minor opera in re- Pie, and the manifold changings of 
 
 quirendo ponatur quam, cum in- the service, was the cause, that to 
 
 veneris, in legendo." turn the book only was so hard 
 
 and intricate a matter, that many 
 times there was more business to 
 find out what should be read, than 
 to read it when it was found out." 
 
 Here, then, is another proof that the acting. representatives of 
 the Church of England were by no means desirous (as Baxter was, 
 at a later day^) of providing for its use a Prayer Book which should 
 have the claim of originality. Even their justification of the step 
 which they were taking in setting it forth at all, was partly trans- 
 lated from a Breviary reconstructed by a Roman Cardinal (a 
 Spaniard, by the way), and which, from the approval given to it in 
 the Bull of Paul III., — " Summa cura et diligentia recognovit, 
 atque ad veterum Sanctorum Patrum Conciliorumque constituta 
 ac meliorem precandi ritum et norraaui faciliorem brevioremque 
 redegit," — was probably intended to be gradually introduced into 
 all the churches which owned the authority of Borne. 
 
 I. Now if we inquire, Why need the services of the Church have 
 been altered at all ? we find, in this Preface to the Prayer Book, 
 an answer to the question, at least so far as the judgment of those 
 who wi'ote can be taken. There are eight separate charges brought 
 against the received order of the Service, which are so distinctly 
 named, that I shall put them down in order. 
 
 1. It is alleged that a very corrupt habit had sprung up, and 
 had even established itself for " many years past " in the manner 
 of using the appointed Lections or Lessons taken from Holy Scrip- 
 ture. The original intention of the Church being " that the whole 
 
 ' Baxter knocked up an entirely new Prayer Book, as a rival to the old one, in a 
 single night. If the whim had taken him, he would have re-written the Bible in a 
 fortnight, no doubt.
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 45 
 
 Bible (or the greatest part thereof) should be read over every year," 
 this intention had been thwarted, and the order " altered, broken, 
 and neglected j" so that when a book of Holy Scripture — as Isaiah, 
 for example, in Advent, or Genesis in Septuagesima — was begun to 
 be read, three or four chapters were read out, and all the rest left 
 unread ; the unread portion being superseded by " uncertain stories 
 and legends." Mention is also made of a multitude of " responds, 
 verses, vain repetitions, commemorations, and synodals," as inter- 
 fering with the continuous reading of Holy Scripture. Of the 
 responds and verses, only the Gloria Patri after the Psalms, the 
 Kyrie after the Commandments, and the versicle before and after 
 the Gospel were retained in the English Prayer Book. A more 
 free use of such responds as give the key-note to the portion of 
 Scripture read would have been an improvement, some think, on the 
 present form of our Lessons ;i but their use was carried to an ex- 
 travagant length in mediaeval times, and there is no reason to think 
 that the other things complained of as interrupting the due reading 
 of Scripture are complained of unjustly. 
 
 2. These uncertain stories and legends in the place of Holy 
 Scripture were no imagination of the Beformers. Even the modern 
 Boman Breviary will show this ;2 but they are mentioned by Car- 
 dinal Quignonez in his preface with more severity, by far, than by the 
 Beformers of the English Church, for he says of the old Breviaries 
 that " historise sanctorum qusedam tam incultae, et tam sine delectu 
 scripts? habentur in eodem, ut nee authoritatem habere videantur 
 nee gravitatem." They did not, therefore, stand alone when they 
 looked upon these insertions as unmeet to be used in the service of 
 the sanctuary, much less to supersede the Divine writings themselves. 
 
 3. They make the very reasonable statement that the Service 
 having been read in Latin these many years, a language which the 
 people did not understand, the latter heard with their ears only, 
 and their heart, spirit, and mind were not edihed thereby : which 
 is really such a very obvious i-emark, that one feels the only ques- 
 tion open to an opponent of the change was. Whether the people 
 
 ' Though of course there is a danger in such responses that they may give a. false 
 note. Such a danger is refen-ed to in the Preface of the Reformed Benedictine 
 Breviary, " ad usum congregationis Sancti Mauri," published at Paris, in 1787 ; so 
 that there are two sides to this question also. 
 
 - A later reformed Breviary than that of Trent, one edited (in 1713) for the dio- 
 cese of Meaux by the successor of Bossuet, speaks of such legends in a tone evidently 
 intended to rellect, though cautiously, on the Roman Breviary. Stating the various 
 alterations made, the Preface goes on to say : " Absunt non solum aperte falsa, sed 
 et apocrypha, ut reddentes Deo vitulos labiorum nostrorum veritatem faciamus, et 
 loquamur coram iUo, qui summa Veritas est, et quserit qui adorent eum in spiritu et 
 veritate. Nam religio, sancto Augustino teste, non debet esse in phantasmatis 
 nostris, et melius est quodcunque verum, quam quidquid pro arbitrio fingi potest. 
 Quapropter ex prtescripto Concilii Africaui in Capitulis Regum Francorum vetitum 
 est, ne falsa nomina martyrum, et incertas sanctorum memorias, fideles venerantur. 
 Quill et Innoceutius III. uegat falsitatem sub nomine pietatis tolerari debere." — 
 Breviarium Meldense. Meldis, 1713.
 
 46 THE RITUAL ASPECT 
 
 need be edified by the service ? Those who thought then, or who 
 think now, that the whole force of Common Prayer consists in the 
 utterance of it by the priest, and that there is no subordinate ad- 
 ditional force derived from the vocal and intelligent participation in 
 it on the part of the people, would no doubt consider that the latter 
 were in quite as good a position for edification when the service was 
 said in a tongue unknown to them as when said in their own lan- 
 guage. This, however, the Reformers did not think : and reasons 
 have been already shown for believing that the whole feeling of the 
 Church of England went with them in the change of language 
 which they effected. ^ 
 
 4. The same kind of complaint which was made respecting the 
 Lessons is also made as to the recitation of the Psalms. It is 
 alleged that " Notwithstanding that the ancient Fathers have di- 
 vided the Psalms into seven portions, whereof every one was called 
 a nodurn, now of late time a few of them have been daily said, 
 and the rest utterly omitted :" which was as gross a departure 
 from the spirit of Catholic ritual as anything possibly could be. 
 The explanation of such a strange omission is pi'obably to be found 
 in a fact which is strongly brought out by the Preface of Cardinal 
 Quiguon^s Breviary. He alleges that the reason which had chiefly 
 moved him to rearrange the hours of the Church were that both 
 the clergy and the laity were deterred from their use by their length 
 and difficulty. The hours of prayer in England were practically 
 reduced to two long offices before the innovations of the Reformers : 
 and there can be no doubt from their remark about the omission of 
 the Psalms, which formed the chief portion of them, that the hours 
 left unsaid at the usual time were not added on to the other services 
 which were said, but were left out altogether. Their complaint 
 was therefore just, that this was an infringement both of Catholic 
 spirit and Catholic practice.^ 
 
 5. The complexity of the service is a fifth reason which they 
 allege as causing a necessity for change. Upon this point there is 
 little to be said ; for many will think it legitimately open to question 
 whether this was really a difficulty of much importance. The evil, 
 if it was one, would have been in no small degree remedied by the 
 other changes necessitated : and the Reformers carried their sim- 
 plification of the service, as well as of the rubric, further than 
 some would think necessary. Yet it is observable that the very 
 same objection to the old Breviaries is made by Quignon, and in 
 
 * The change in our ecclesiastical language was by no means so sudden as is some- 
 times supposed. Although printed Breviaries had issued from the press during 
 (probably) every year of the century up to 1535, none were printed at all for sLv: 
 years after that date ; while at the same time Primers, the Holy Bible, the Litany 
 and portions of the Communion Service, all in English, were gradually paving the 
 way (by royal authority endorsing the work of Convocation) for the general use of 
 our native tongue in the oflSces of the Church. 
 
 ^ Mr. Neale gives another explanation in his recent Commentary on the Psalms, 
 p. 19, viz., that the recurrence of Festivals with their proper Psalms was so frequent, 
 as to push aside a full half of the regular recitation.
 
 OP THE REFORMATION. 47 
 
 the very same words as those used by the writers of our own 
 Preface. 
 
 6. Next, the Reformers congratulate themselves and the Church 
 on the substitution of one uniform Prayer Book according to the 
 " use of the Church of England," for the various books " accord- 
 ing to the use of Salisbury, Hereford, Bangor, York, and Lincoln/* 
 which had authority in different districts of the country : a sub- 
 stitution of uniformity for diversity which the course of Western 
 Christendom has since then abundantly adopted, and perhaps 
 justified.^ 
 
 7. In respect to the Ceremonies in use, two principal objections 
 are offered, the first of which is that of those " which had their 
 beginning by the institution of man," (as distinguished from such 
 a ceremony as that of Baptism which was instituted by Christ 
 and is absolutely binding on the Church) some of which had 
 been appointed with good intention, and had been profitable at 
 first, had yet in later days become vain and superstitious : were 
 growing more and more abused, and while they blinded the 
 people, obscured the glory of God. These it was thought de- 
 sirable to put away altogether, simply on account of their abuse : 
 and a precedent was assuredly to be found for such a course 
 by the total abolition of such " ceremonies" as love-feasts at a 
 much earlier age of the Church. 
 
 8. A second reason for reducing the number of Ceremonies was 
 that they had so accumulated as by their great excess and mul- 
 titude to have become quite insupportable : the meaning, too, of 
 many being utterly lost. 
 
 These then, were some of the more cogent reasons which moved 
 the English Church of the sixteenth century to review the whole 
 system of its divine worship : and if there was to be any, change 
 at all, it is difficult to see how they could avoid making such as are 
 indicated. But, of course, it is quite possible that we might agree 
 with the Church of that day in thinking that the things which 
 they mentioned as abuses really required reformation, and yet not 
 agree as to the principles on which they should be amended. The 
 Lutherans abroad and the Calvinists at home agreed with our Con- 
 vocation as to the abuses, but their remedy was of a very destruc- 
 tive nature : let us examine therefore the course taken by Convo- 
 cation, so far as it is elucidated by our Prayer Book Preface. 
 
 II. First it is to be noted that they speak of their work in a 
 thoroughly conservative spirit, and although they are pointing out 
 the corruptions which had arisen in the ritual and ceremonies of 
 the Church, are far from using towards them the contemptuous 
 language which we are accustomed to associate with the names of 
 the more notorious Reformers. The reckless buffoonery of Latimer's 
 sermons, and his wild condemnation of everything that had been 
 
 ' The Sarum Breviary (as reformed in 1516) had already been enjoined through' 
 out the province of Canterbury by the Convocation of 1542.
 
 48 THE RITUAL ASPECT 
 
 connected with Rome, has no counterpart, nor shadow of counter- 
 part in the language adopted by the learned and serious- minded 
 men who composed the document in question. They speak re- 
 spectfully of the preceding Breviary of the Church, and say that 
 it had only met with tbe fate of every human device in being 
 corrupted : and all tbey wish to do is to recur as far as possible 
 to the original substance of the Church's Common Prayer, making 
 such alterations as were necessary for the altered circumstances of 
 the times ; as for instance, in the adoption of the English lan- 
 guage instead of the Latin, now that the various tongues spoken 
 in the land had all become amalgamated into one. 
 
 They therefore refer to the " ancient Fathers," — " the godly and 
 decent Order of the ancient Fathers" as the authority to which they 
 wish to appeal, and by which they wish to be guided. This ex- 
 pression has mostly been interpreted, probably, of those whom it ' 
 is our custom at this day to call the " Fathers," — the great eccle- 
 siastical writers of the first six centuries ; but this is certainly a 
 mistake, for with the exception of S. Gregory the Great, there are 
 none of these whose names are so especially connected with the 
 ritual of the Church, (not even S. Ambrose,) that they could be 
 definitely appealed to as general authorities in such matters as those 
 of which the Reformers were writing. Moreover, the very first 
 reference to their authority is with respect to the Lessons, (just 
 as Quignon uses "more majorum'^ in the same way,) and so far 
 as can be judged there was no more ground at the time of the 
 Reformation for ascertaining what the practice of the early Church 
 W' as as to the reading of Holy Scripture during Divine Service than 
 there is now: and certainly our modern information does not enable 
 us to say so plainly that we are following the authority of the Primi- 
 tive Church.^ But it was not to the Primitive Church that the 
 Reformers appealed in matters of ritual. They evidently meant by 
 the " old Fathers" the ancient Church of England before it came 
 to be encrusted with the successive accretions of mediaeval times ; 
 and what they called the "mind and purpose" of these "old Fa- 
 thers," the model to which they wished to conform the New Prayer 
 Book, was the nucleus which they thought themselves able to dis- 
 cover as the original central and fundamental portion of the Eng- 
 lish ritual ; not perhaps very round and definite, but sufficiently 
 evident to enable them to exercise that power of conscientiously 
 separating the ancient from ^he novel, to which they were devoting 
 their energies. ^ 
 
 ' The first movement towards a return to ancient practice in the reading of Holy 
 Scripture was made so long as thirty- three years earlier, when in the revised Sarum 
 Breviary of 1516 the length of the daily Lessons was considerably increased, and 
 many of the Responds, &c., which broke up the chapters, expunged from the service. 
 
 - Archbishop Parker's well known anxiety to ascertain and make known the belief 
 and practice of the Anglo-Saxon Church is another illustration of the spirit by which 
 the Reformers were actuated.
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 49 
 
 And it must be remembered that this Preface was written for the 
 original Prayer Book of 1549, in which the services bore a much 
 more strict resemblance to the ancient services of the Church than 
 they do at present. We are dealing now with the early Eeformers, 
 and must take their words in the relation which they bore to the 
 Prayer Book as they set it forth. A little inspection of the tables 
 of comparison given by Mr. Freeman in his Principles of Divine 
 Service/ or by Mr. Procter at the end of his Rationale of our 
 Offices, will show that the woi-ds used by those who wrote the Pre- 
 face are honestly expressive of the work which they did ; and that 
 the first book of Edward VI. was nothing more nor less than the 
 old Breviary and Missal Offices translated, with a re-arrangement 
 of the Scriptural portion, and the expulsion of such novelties as 
 were connected with the adoration of the saints, purgatory, the 
 distinctively medieval theory respecting the annihilation of the 
 elements in the Eucharist, and the assumed authority of the Pope. 
 I do not say that the Reformers had any ancient Breviary before 
 them in which these novelties were wanting ; but what I allege is 
 that they exercised their power of ciiticism to eliminate them and 
 them only, and that it was as much, at least, their wish to retain all 
 that was really Catholic, as it was to expunge all that was merely 
 Roman. They tried to discover " the mind and purpose of the 
 old Fathers" of the Church of England, with the object of mould- 
 ing the Book of Common Prayer according to it, just as we try to 
 discover for our own guidance the " mind and purpose" of those 
 who by the lapse of time have become " old Fathers" to us of this 
 generation. There was probably as good reason for them to pass 
 over their immediate predecessors when they wanted ecclesiastical 
 and ritual precedent as there is for us to pass over the last century 
 or two and go back to the fifteenth. The distortions of Catholic 
 ritual were in a diflFerent direction, perhaps, at the two periods ; but 
 they have a considerable resemblance in their origin ; and it is pro- 
 bable that the Reformers had as good reason to complain of foreign 
 influences acting on the Church of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- 
 turies, as we who come after the days of William of Orange, the 
 Hanoverian kings, and a race of political bishops. 
 
 The conservative principles of the Reformers were then very 
 deeply laid, even deeper than has been represented by those who 
 have supposed that they made the Primitive Church their model 
 in the changes which they introduced'. Such a far off model, and 
 one so difficult, (at least in those days) to get at, they did not 
 set before them ; but it was their great anxiety to continue tlie 
 traditions of the Church of England itself in their purity. They 
 did not point to any particular age, and say. This is what we will 
 adopt ; but they took out of the current ritual of the Church of 
 England whatever they had reason to thmk was the true growth of 
 
 1 Vol. I. p. 288. 
 D
 
 50 THE RITUAL ASPECT 
 
 Catholic usage ; and with some little, but not much, concession to 
 the specialities of that particular time, they framed the Prayer Book 
 of 1549 as the true Catholic representative of the ancient Breviaries 
 of England. Subsequent criticism, with the great additional light 
 it has had, may have discovered that they made a few mistakes — 
 chiefly of omissions ; but the student who goes fairly to investigate 
 the result of their labours will soon acknowledge that the critical 
 discrimination of the Prayer Book revisers of 1548 was quite equal 
 to the work set before them ; and also that they honestly acted up 
 to the principle which they had laid down, that of making our ritual 
 " agreeable to the mind and purpose of the old Fathers" — of those 
 generations of the Church of England to which they could look as 
 representing it when unencumbered by mediaeval peculiarities and 
 fancies. To me it appears that this is a point of no small im- 
 portance. In the first place it shows what the intention of the 
 Reformers originally was, viz., to link on the reconstructed offices 
 to those which had always been used in England, without any 
 further changes than were made necessary by the return we were 
 making to the normal constitutional and doctrinal character of the 
 Church. It was no wish of theirs to break away from the line of 
 their forefathers, or to originate such a novelty as an isolated 
 Church. The former they took care not to do ; and if the latter 
 was a consequence of their work, it was not a result which should 
 justly have followed, but which was brought about by the unrea- 
 sonableness, worldliness, and want of policy by which the acts of 
 the Roman court were characterized. And, secondly, it is to be 
 noticed, that although subsequent alterations of the original Prayer 
 Book were made (out of a spirit of concession to the pressure used 
 by men who possessed great temporary influence with the king and 
 his advisers) the Preface remained substantially unchanged, and has 
 been handed down to us as being still the legal exponent of the 
 Principles on which the Prayer Book was reconstructed. If those 
 who set forth the second book of Edward VI. went upon diff"erent 
 principles, nothing has come down to us imposing their principles 
 upon us ; and the retention, even by them, of the words of their 
 predecessors in revision seems to show that whatever concessions 
 they had been obliged to make, they still adopted or wished to 
 adopt the same rule of deference to the old continuous traditions of 
 the Church. At any rate the tendency of revisions, since that 
 Second Book, has always been to recur to the first work of the 
 Reformers as the real standard of Church of England ritual ; and 
 the principles on which that standard was constructed are therefore 
 fastened upon us both by the force of their re-assertion, and by the 
 subsequent practical expressions of the authoritative mind of our 
 Church. 
 
 Having thus seen that the acting portion of the Church of the 
 sixteenth century did really leave on record, in so many words, the
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 51 
 
 view which they took of their position and duty as Reformers of 
 ritual, let us now go back for a short time to our examination of the 
 manner in which they carried out their avowed principles, that we 
 may see what degree of consistency there was between their words 
 and their deeds. 
 
 1. In all the changes that they made with respect to " cere- 
 monies/' they were as careful to retain the old idea of Worship 
 as they had been to retain that of Church and Priesthood. There 
 appears to have been no synodical act of the Church of England 
 by which any variation whatever was enjoined, either from the an- 
 cient form of the fabric, or the application of its various parts. 
 The destruction of altars was no act of the Church, but of a 
 tyrannizing monarch or a tyrannizing bishop : and the same may 
 be said of whatever changes took place in regard to the magnifi- 
 cence or number of sacred utensils ; with the addition that many 
 unauthorised thieves helped to make more ruinous the ruin which 
 the thieves authorized by Henry VIII. and Edward VI. ^ had begun. 
 To the eye and intention of those who reformed our ritual, its prac- 
 tical use presented hardly any outward variation of importance. If 
 there was any dispute about stone altars, about their elevation above 
 the ordinary level of the building in which they were situated, about 
 their dignified and sumptuous decoration; such disputes did not 
 originate with the Church, and alterations arising out of them were 
 not ratified by the Church. It has been proved by the decision of 
 our highest courts that the second year of Edward VI., (which is 
 our present authorized standard of ritual accessories) was charac- 
 terized by the lawful and enjoined use of all such utensils and or- 
 naments of previous days (both for the Church and Clergy) as were 
 consistent with the modified form which the ancient Breviary had 
 taken in the new Book of Common Prayer : such, for instance, as 
 Altar Crosses for the one and vestments or Chasubles for the other. 
 And although many unconstitutional invasions of the privileges of 
 the Church in this respect, — outrages upon the law of the land, — 
 took place during that unhappiest of tyi-annies when our country 
 realized the words " Woe to thee, land, when thy king is a child ;" 
 yet even those assaults upon the sumptuousness of our worship did 
 not suffice to efface the continuous tradition of the Church itself, 
 that "the Chancels shall remain as they have done in times past." 
 At this distant day, we have seen that it is a question of eocpediencij 
 only, whether or not a very sumptuous character shall be given to 
 Divine Service by means of its accessories : that the law of the 
 Church as laid down by the Reformers was little else but a reasser- 
 tion of its ancient customs ; and that this law, (ratified and con- 
 firmed by the civil power) actually enjoins upon us even now an 
 
 ' In the Journal of Edward VI., written by himself, there iB an entry that he has 
 had four dishes for his table made out of " church- stuff, as mitres, and golden mis- 
 sals, and crosses, and reliques of Plessay." — Burnet's Records, Vol. ii. p. 39.
 
 52 THE RITUAL ASPECT 
 
 elaborate form of ritual, accompanied by all that can be wished of 
 magnificence and beauty. That we do not obey the law is to be 
 attributed to various causes : but our disobedient practice must not 
 be taken as the measure of the ritual provided for the Church of 
 England by the care of its authoritative synodical representatives 
 at the time of its reformation. Perhaps nothing would astonish 
 the Reformers so much as to see the character given to Divine 
 worship in some of the churches with which they were familiar. 
 They would certainly repudiate with indignation the assertion that 
 such a character was in accordance with their own wishes and 
 principles : and would protest against such a deviation from " the 
 mind and purpose of the old fathers," with far more indignation 
 than they exhibited against any part of the ceremonies of the 
 Church which they had " put away because the great excess and 
 multitude of them" had " so increased that the burden of them 
 had become intolerable." More intolerable still to them would be 
 the absence of almost all ceremony from Divine Service, and its 
 reduction to a form which had never entered into their imagination 
 as possible in the Church of England. Our deviation from the 
 Reformers in this respect is immensely greater than was their 
 deviation from the Church of mediaeval days. "The simplicity of 
 our Reformed Worship," is a phrase often in use among us, but 
 one totally inapplicable in the sense in which it is used, to the 
 worship instituted by the Reformers. Such " simplicity" has never 
 been sanctioned by the Church of England, any more than the 
 simplicity of a Quakers' meeting-house. 
 
 It is a great injustice to the Church to father upon it, as if they 
 were its law, the inclinations and practices of individuals. It may 
 be there have always been some persons — always, perhaps, since 
 the Reformation began — who have preferred an undemonstrative 
 service, such as that which is called " simple," to an ornate one in 
 which taste and beauty are made the handmaids of the sanctuary ; 
 and who have acted accordingly. But let us call things by their 
 right names. Such an undemonstrative form of service was not 
 originally contrived by the Reformers, but by their Puritan oppo- 
 nents ; and has no claim whatever to be called the service of the 
 reformed Church of England, that bemg of a very ornate kind in 
 nearly all its details. 
 
 2. In accordance with this course of action, the Preface of the 
 Prayer Book goes on to defend the use of ceremonies against pre- 
 judices which had already risen among the Puritans. Some such, 
 they declare, there must necessarily be, if the Apostolic precept is 
 to be observed, " Let all things be done among you in a seemly and 
 due order," and they condemn with some expression of indignation 
 those who " be so new fangled, that they would innovate all things, 
 and so despise the old, that nothing can like them but that is 
 new." Such Puritans they found it impossible to satisfy ; they
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 53 
 
 were even more impracticable than the intensely conservative party 
 who thought that every small ceremony of their own day was so 
 binding upon their consciences that nothing could be changed 
 without a violation of duty. The obvious course was, to disregard 
 both extremes, and looking to no party, making it no part of their 
 object to please or satisfy unreasonable men, to set before them- 
 selves as the true end of their labours the real glory of God and 
 the real profit of His Church. 
 
 In carrying out this determination it was manifestly not a neces- 
 sary part of their duty to wipe out from the Church's service every 
 ceremony that had been hitherto in use, and invent new ones, but 
 rather to make a selection of those which they thought suitable for 
 the object which they had in view. This accordingly they did, so that 
 there is not a single ceremony enjoined in the Prayer Book (so far 
 as I can remember) which had not been previously in use under 
 the reign of the unreforraed Breviary. And in making this selec- 
 tion it is very distinctly asserted that the more ancient had the pre- 
 ference; as drawing nearer, (no doubt their reason was,) to that 
 fountain of orthodoxy to which they appealed, the customs of the 
 " ancient fathers." 
 
 Far too little importance is given to the fact that the Reformers 
 made very exact provisions for continuing the tradition of the 
 Church in respect to her daily worship ; and yet, though dreary 
 times have elapsed between then and now, there have never been 
 wanting in any of those ten generations, men carefully acting up 
 to the intention of the Church, and so continuing the tradition 
 down to our own times of revival. ^ It is difficult to ascertain what 
 was the ordinary parochial practice of the times preceding the six- 
 teenth century in respect to daily services. The hours were used, 
 more or less completely, in the monasteries ; and mass was cele- 
 brated every morning in the Cathedrals. There were also a multi- 
 tude of chantry priests, who celebrated mass for the departed either 
 in chantries, or at the altar of the parish churches, as often as the 
 endowment under which they acted provided for. I do not 
 think there is evidence that daily mass or daily service of any kind 
 M'as universal in parish churches, independently of these chantry 
 endowments; though I have in mind a curious endowment by 
 Henry VIII. himself, which is made contingent upon the attend- 
 ance of the recipients at " daily service " in the church of the parish 
 
 1 Arcbdeacon Basire, after his return from exile in 1G70 makes the following entry 
 in his journal. 
 
 '■ Residence in Stanhope, above 3 raoneths, 100 days. 
 
 " Residence at EaglesclifFe, 3 monetbs, 90 days. 
 
 " Dayly Publick Prayers, and constant Sermons in both every Sunday and Holy 
 Day.'' — Life and Correspondeiice of Dr. Basire. 
 
 I believe the daily service at Holy Trinity, Hull, was never intermitted : and 
 the continuous usage of our Cathedrals, except during the Rebellion, is known to 
 every one.
 
 54 THE RITUAL ASPECT 
 
 to which it was given. i However this may have been, it was cer- 
 tainly the intention of the Reformers that the hours, as they had 
 condensed them into Matins and Evensong, should be used day by 
 day in every Church and Chapel, and probably they were continuing 
 what was really the most ordinar)' form of daily service in doing 
 so. They also made distinct provision for the daily celebration of 
 the Holy Eucharist ; and if it had been up to their time the cus- 
 tom of Parish Churches in general, they placed no restriction upon 
 such custom beyond that which was necessary' to ensure the abo- 
 lition of solitarj' masses; "in chapels annexed, and all other places, 
 there shall be no celebration of the Lord^s Supper, except there be 
 some to communicate with the priest." But on Wednesdays and 
 Fridays, and " all other days, whensoever the people be customa- 
 bly assembled to pray in the Church, it was directed that the Com- 
 munion Service should be read by the priest, properly vested in 
 albe, and cope, or chasuble, as far as the Offertory, if there were no 
 communicants ;" clearly implying that it was to be said throughout, 
 if any offered. The provision respecting the Collect, Epistle, and 
 Gospel of the week clearly points to the probability of a daily 
 celebration, as does also the injunction, — alas! how neglected, — that 
 " in Cathedral and Collegiate Churches, and Colleges, where there 
 are many Priests and Deacons, they shall all receive the Commu- 
 nion with the Priest every Sunday at the least, except they have 
 a reasonable cause to the contrary." 
 
 Thus, although the ancient " hours " were no longer to be en- 
 forced, (although perhaps all the day hours are represented by the 
 Matins, Litany, and Evensong,) yet strict injunctions were given 
 
 * The conclusion of that portion of the Preface, " Concerning the Service of the 
 Church," as note printed, contains three provisions: (1) Thai the Morning and 
 Evening Prayer, if said prirately, may be said in any language understood by those 
 who say it ; (2) That all Priests and Deacons (Bishops not being named) are to say 
 daily the Morning and Evening Prayer, privately or openly, not being hindered by 
 sickness or any other urgent cause ; (3) That it is to be used in every Parish 
 Church and Chapel by every priest having cure of souls. The second and third of 
 these provisions were not inserted in the first Book of Edward VI., but in the place of 
 them a clause to the effect, that no man shall be bound to the sajring of these daily 
 Prayers, " but such as from time to time, in Cathedral and Collegiate Churches, Parish 
 Churches, and Chapels to the same annexed, shall serve the congregation." If this 
 latter represents the old rule, the more recent one would seem to be the stricter. 
 In 1541 was issued " An explanation of Ceremonies to be used in the Church of 
 England," in which it is said, " It is laudable and convenient, that (except sickness, 
 or any other reasonable impediment, or let) every bishop, priest, and others having 
 orders, and continuing in their administration, shall daily say Divine service, (i.e.,) 
 Matins, Prime, Hours, Evensong, and Compline ; and such as are Bishops and 
 Priests, divers times to say mass ; and that they may say it oftener, they ought to pray 
 for grace, and dispose themselves accordingly." (Collier, part ii. book iii. 1P7.) The 
 word " privately " was first introduced into Edward VI. 's second book. Wheatley, 
 and other commentators on the Prayer Book, interpret it of the priest's family : but 
 in our own day it is more frequently considered to mean solitary recitation of the 
 Daily Services by Priests and Deacons as distinguished from public. It is certainly 
 strange that those who abolished solitary masses so strictly should enjoin solitary 
 Matins and Evensong.
 
 OF THE REFORMATION. 55 
 
 that the voice of the Church should rise in every parish day by 
 day; and provision made that wherever two or three should meet 
 together desiring to receive the Holy Eucharist as their " daily 
 bread," they should by no means be denied the privilege. 
 
 From this document then, the Preface to the Prayer liook, we 
 see what was really the " mind and purpose " of those who law- 
 fully represented and acted for the Church of England in the 
 revision of her ritual. They did not seek to make any change 
 for the sake of change. Certain principles were laid down in re- 
 spect to what was necessary and what was expedient. (1.) It was, 
 one may say, forced upon them, by God's Providence, to give to the 
 people their ritual in their own language. (2.) It was necessary to 
 put away some usages and some prayers because they were con- 
 nected with doctrine of late introduction, by which the Church of 
 England would no longer permit herself to be held in bondage. 
 (3.) It was expedient to put away others, because though not other- 
 wise objectionable, they had become the medium of superstition, 
 and the abuse had made the good use of them almost impossible. 
 But in acting upon these first principles, the Reformers used great 
 care to make as little substantial alteration as possible. They looked 
 upon the old Church and its old usages with the greatest respect, 
 and had no sympathy with those who did otherwise. Least of 
 all had they any notion of taking up a position of antagonism to 
 those portions of the Church which still adhered to the current 
 usages of the day. The term Protestant was then and afterwards 
 deliberately ignored, and they declare that "in these our doings we 
 condemn no other nations, nor prescribe anything but to our own 
 people :" with other words of a like moderate tone. And in the 
 midst of all their work we may trace their extreme anxiety that 
 none should have fewer opportunities than hitherto for worship- 
 ping God, or for receiving that grace which they, as much as the 
 Churchmen of older days, considered to be the life of every Chris- 
 tian soul. 
 
 Thus as in constitution and doctrine, so in ritual also, the Refor- 
 mation of the Church of England was thoroughly conservative of 
 established principle ; the one chief endeavour of those who con- 
 ducted it through its various stages being to lop off only such 
 branches of the old tree as were diseased or decayed, to prune away 
 such new growth as weakened it, and to leave the Church standing 
 in its ancient grandeur full of youthful life and vigour, and good 
 for many a long century to come. May she " hold that fast 
 which" she hath, " that no man take" her " crown." 
 
 JOSEPH MABTEBB AND CO., PBIl^EBS, ALDEBBGATE 6TBEET.
 
 90^\X^ 
 
 -i.m. 1 
 
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