Section 0 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the 17th century. Volume 1 by John Tulloch. My aim in these volumes has been to describe a movement hitherto imperfectly understood. In depicting the great struggle of the 17th century in England, our historians have very much confined their view to the two chief parties betwixt whom it may be said to have been fought out. The religious forces of the time, which influenced so deeply the national history, have been roughly classified as prolactical on one side and puritan on the other. In point of fact these forces were extremely various and complicated, and we still wait an adequate account of them, a great history of this great period which shall do justice to all the impulses then moving the national mind and the powerful characters which they called forth. We may have to wait long. The yet unspent prejudices and passions of the struggle, the necessity of it once sympathizing with and yet critically regarding the most diverse religious phenomena, and the vast mass of documentary material which requires to be sifted and illumined constitute difficulties in the way of accomplishing such a task which only the highest historical genius can surmount. In the meantime I have endeavored to sketch in the following chapters one very significant and not the least powerful phase in the religious history of the 17th century. At the commencement of the contest betwixt the Parliament and the King there was a moderate party which was neither laudian nor puritan, a party of which the hapless but heroic Falkland was the head and with which many if not a majority of the most thoughtful minds of the country sympathized. This combination, which was even then more intellectual than political, shared the common fate of all middle parties in a period of revolution. It disappeared under the pressure of violent passions and the urgency of taking aside for the King or the Parliament, but the principles with which it was identified and the succession of illustrious men who belonged to it made a far more powerful impression on the national mind than has been commonly supposed. The clear evidence of this is the virtual triumph of these principles rather than those of either of the extreme parties at the revolution of 1688 which, and not the restoration, was a natural outcome of the preceding struggle. The same principles, both in church and state, have never since ceased to influence our national thought and life. Their development constitutes one of the strongest and, as it appears to me, one of the soundest and best strands in the great thread of our national history. It is of importance, therefore, that their origin and primary movement should be understood. I have spoken of the Latitudinarians of the 17th century as in some degree a party, but they are, rather, as Dolinger somewhere says of their representatives in our own time, a band or group of spiritually related savans than a party in the strict sense of the term. They pursued common objects and so far acted together, but their combined action resulted from congruity of ideas rather than from any definite ecclesiastical or personal aims. It is the inevitable characteristic of a moderate or liberal section in church or state to hold together with comparative laxity. The very fact of their liberality implies a regard to more than one side of any question, a certain impartiality which refuses to lend itself to mere blind partisanship or to that species of irrational devotion which forms the rude strength of great parties. This characteristic makes the action of such a moderating force all the more valuable, and it may be safely said that no ecclesiastical or civil organization would long survive its elimination. The rational element in all churches is truly the ideal element that which raises the church above its own little world and connects it with the movements of thought, the course of philosophy, or the course of science, with all, in fact, that is most powerful in ordinary human civilization. Instead of being expelled and denounced as merely evil, rationalism has high and true Christian uses, and the church which has lost all savor of rational thought of the spirit which inquires rather than asserts is already a feat and ready to perish. The movement which I have described in these volumes appears to me the highest movement of Christian thought in the seventeenth century. I am far from disparaging the theology and literature of prelacy or of Puritanism during that eventful and fruitful period. There is much in both that still deserves perusal and may be said to have permanently molded and enriched our national intellect. There may be single writers on either side of more unique genius than any I have sketched. It is nevertheless true that the stream of Christian thought runs more free and rises to a higher elevation in the rational theologians of the time than in any others. In the case of the Cambridge Platonists it is eminently true that, with all their faults, philosophy in England never reached a more ideal height, a summit of more pure intellectual contemplation than it did in them. English philosophy became tainted at the revolution with a certain political bias and it may be a question how far it is yet emancipated from it. Perhaps it is least emancipated from such a bias in the school which is supposed by many to be the most prevalent and popular amongst us at the present time. Deeply interested in the principles expounded in these volumes and the writers who first advocated them in England I have had sincere pleasure in endeavoring to do some measure of justice to both the one and the other. I have felt this pleasure all the more that some of these writers have hitherto received scanty acknowledgement. It is something of a misfortune for religion and the history of the church that the men who secure most attention in their own day and afterwards are by no means those distinguished for Christian moderation. Violent and picturesque characters, the fervid and zealous missionary, the eloquent fanatic, the dogmatic and denunciatory theologian, are all apt by their prominence to throw men of quiet thoughtfulness and tempered and rational enthusiasm into the shade. Churchmen like Hales and Witchcoat are forgotten, while the noisy champions of extremes are remembered and live in the historic page. I have derived so much pleasure from the repeated study of Hales and Chillingworth, and again of Witchcoat and his Cambridge Compeers, and cherish so warm an admiration of their great gifts of Christian reasonableness that I should rejoice if I have done anything to restore the images of men who appear to me the very best types of the English theologian, manly and fearless in intellect while reverent and cautious in spirit. May I be pardoned for expressing my astonishment that the University of Cambridge has done nothing to give us new or critical additions of any of the Cambridge Platonists. There is a special difficulty in the case of Henry Moore, whose writings are at once so voluminous and so forgotten, but surely the pit press would not be unworthily employed in issuing critical additions of Cudworth's intellectual system of the universe, Witchcoat's sermons and aphorisms, and above all John Smith's select discourses, and Cambridge possesses in Mr. John E. B. Mayer of St. John's College a student of the literature of the seventeenth century well qualified to superintend such a task. All the accessible additions of these works are poor, and Witchcoat's aphorisms and even his sermons in a complete form are scarce. This is hardly fair to writers who did so much to adorn and illustrate this great university at a trying period of its history. End footnote. In a time like our own I have thought these sketches peculiarly appropriate. The questions discussed by the liberal theologians of the seventeenth century are very much the questions still discussed under the name of broad Churchism. Our present parties have all their representatives in the earlier period. The closeness of the parallel not only in its great lines, but in some of its special features, must strike every attentive reader. We are nearer the seventeenth century, not only in our theological questions, supposed by some to be so novel, but in our scientific theories then we are apt to think. And if this should incline any to despair of ecclesiastical or theological progress, it may also serve to convince them that the conditions of real advance are only to be found in a wide and intelligent comprehension of all that has gone before. In the spread of a thorough yet wise criticism and the increase of the simplest Christian virtues in every church, patience, humility, charity, there are even enlightened men now crying out for a new theology which shall once more mold into a unity the distracted experiences of our modern spiritual life. But such a theology cannot spring from the ground nor yet descend as a ready-made gift from heaven. Christian science has far outgrown the efforts of any single mind. The days of Augustinian dominance are forever ended. It can only come from the slow elaboration of the Christian reason, looking before and after, gathering into its ample thoughtfulness the experiences of the past as well as the eager aspirations of the present. If these volumes shall help any to understand better the spiritual problems which harass our own time, and the attempt which they make to revive the questions of a time gone by, and to restore the faded images of thinkers who deserve to be more remembered than they have been, my purpose will be fully served. St. Andrew's September 1872. CHAPTER I. SPIRIT OF RATIONAL INQUERY IN PRODISTINTIZM. PART I. The reformation of religion in the sixteenth century was the product of many influences, intellectual, spiritual, and political. The revival of learning, the rise of modern literature and higher modes of philosophy, the rediscovery, as it were, of the Bible, a widespread excitement and aspiration of faith, the growth of wider social instincts and the exigencies of political parties, were all powerful. It would be difficult to fix the proportions in which these several influences acted, for they were intermingled in a high degree, and the more we go beneath the surface the more complex and numerous do we find the springs of the great movement to have been. A spirit of inquiry is especially conspicuous in the religious forces which preceded the reformation and helped to forward it. Starting mainly from a revived biblical interest and an eager life of freshly discovered thought, these earlier forces are of a very interesting and enlightened character. They assailed the prevailing scholasticism and superstition, not only with weapons of felicitous criticism and ridicule, but also with a quiet Christian thoughtfulness which went in many cases direct to the truth. They brought the aids both of a new study of scripture and of new intellectual methods to the effort which the European mind was making in many quarters to throw off a bondage which had become intolerable. Erasmus is the well-known representative of this rational Christian spirit before the reformation, but it had many representatives. The new learning was widely circulated and can be traced extensively not only in Germany and the Low Countries but also in Italy and England. Along with Erasmus and in some respects before him must be reckoned John Wessel, Roichlin and Stoutpitz. The Platonic Academy at Florence, of which Pico and Ficino were the chief ornaments, and again Colet, Sir Thomas Moore, Tyndale, and others in England were all more or less reformers before the reformation, agents in a movement antecedent to the great movement which was essentially religious if also a great deal more than religious. The success of the later and more powerful movement has drawn attention away from this earlier impulse of reform, but it was in many respects highly significant and deserves a closer study than it has yet received. It spoke of harmonizing Christianity and natural truth, of interpreting the books of scripture like other books, of simplifying Christian doctrine to the limits of the Apostles Creed, of putting the Bible before everything, and being content with the simple truths evidently set forth in it as necessary to salvation. It was broad and tolerant as well as earnest. It aimed at spiritual enlightenment rather than dogmatic change. When we turn to the great reformers themselves, these principles of intellectual freedom no longer occupy the foreground. No doubt they too carried forward the higher intelligence of their age. They were the leaders upon the whole of its best thought. But their special task was not so much to guide thought as to stimulate religious life. They were, above all, men of faith and of Christian enthusiasm. They were religious before everything else, and what they desired for themselves and others was not primarily rational liberty so much as spiritual salvation. Their hearts and consciences were more awakened in search of peace than their minds in search of truth. They preached yet more earnestly the necessity of deliverance from the burden of guilt and sin than from the oppression of medieval dotage and ignorance. It is impossible to read the writings or study the lives of Luther, Calvin, and Knox without seeing that their main interests were thus evangelical and turned round the great question of how the individual soul was to be reconciled with God and find peace in him. Popory was specially obnoxious to them because it had obscured and perverted the answer to this question. St. Paul was specially dear to them because he had given to it such an articulate and satisfactory answer. And undoubtedly it needed this mightier impulse of faith to break the superstitious sleep of centuries. The earlier spirit of reform with its quieter intellectual impulses could not have accomplished the same result. The voice of Erasmus would never have moved Europe as the voice of Luther did. It needed the cry of the evangelist rather than the inquiry of the biblical critic and rational theologian to penetrate to the popular heart and shake the religious thralldom which had so long oppressed it. It was only by the spiritual forces outrunning the intellectual, the enthusiasm of faith so largely absorbing the mere love of light that the reformation grew into such significance and became a power in Europe. This subsidence of the rational side of Protestantism arose not only from the character of the chief reformers and the real nature of their work, it was also in the end the natural result of their position. The very strength of the spiritual excitement which they had roused needed by and by to be curbed. The tide of religious passion swelled till it threatened to burst all bounds and to subvert the order of society. Luther himself had to struggle against his own headlong impulses and Kaustadt came in his wake. He was forced to forget the Pope while he declaimed against his theological colleague and the Zvikov fanatics. And Calvin recognized his most persistent and hated opponents in the libertines at Geneva who strove continually to cross his purposes. It was absolutely necessary, therefore, to set a restraint upon the impulses of inquiry and to break in the spirit of freedom which in its license menace the very existence of the church. And so the very men who had headed the enthusiastic forces of the reformation as they broke down the old barriers of authority and spread themselves as springs of religious revolution throughout Europe are found erelong, busy in collecting, consolidating, and placing a new under authority the spiritual energies which they had everywhere called forth. When we let's look at all the circumstances we have no difficulty in understanding, what may seem otherwise surprising, the extremely dogmatic character which Protestantism soon assumed. This tendency lay in it from the beginning, in its intense assertion of one side of the evangelical principle, what the Germans called the material in contradistinction to the formal side. If the spiritual life which the movement had evoked was not to be wasted but to grow into a social and educative power it must incarnate itself in dogma and take to itself a legislative and controlling as well as quickening function towards the human conscience. The national Protestant churches could never have made a stand against the reviving influence of Rome, could never in fact have been formed into stable organizations at all without a distinctive basis of Christian opinion and a definite power of discipline. And so it came to pass that in the second stage of the reformation the principle of authority had almost entirely superseded the principle of inquiry. The men of dogma have everywhere come to the front. Luther, always opinionative, grew more violently so from the time of his conflicts with the Anabaptists and his conference with Zwingli. Zwingli himself, of all the leaders of the movement the most candid, rational, and open-minded, perished prematurely. Melanchthon and Castello almost alone remained representatives of the earlier humanistic spirit. But the former was overborn by the rabies Theologorum, bread of hardening Lutheranism, and the latter had no chance with Calvin. The prevailing Protestantism of the 16th century set aside both these men. Its scholastic dogmatism repudiated the one, its evangelical earnestness the other. While the fate of Cervitas was a terrible warning to all who might attempt to carry their rational spirit to extreme lengths, and to venture into speculations not only beyond the verge of Augustinianism, but a traditionary theology altogether. In the second half of the 16th century Protestantism is almost stationary in its character as in its progress. It has grown into churches which from this time make little advance. It has consolidated its theology, which henceforth receives few or no additions. All the great Protestant creeds, with two exceptions which rather illustrate than contradict our statement, were completed long before the end of the century. FUTNO The series of Lutheran symbolic books was summed up by the formula of Concord in 1577. Of the numerous confessions of the Reformed Church, all connected with the movement of the 16th century were in existence before this, and even early in the preceding decade. End of FUTNO The men who formed them had no doubts or hesitations. They were dogmatists and not inquirers. They set forth what they believed to be a definite system of truth against a definite system of error. In nothing did they ask, what is truth, and remain in any question whether they had found an answer. They confidently opposed dogmatism to dogmatism. And for a time the questioning intellectual side of Protestantism may be said to have sunk out of sight altogether. But it was in the very nature of the movement, as well as in the course of events, that the rational side of Protestantism should again air long emerge. In Lutheranism, indeed, this was not to be the case till after a long while, and then in a form of extreme reaction proportioned to the depression which it had undergone. The miseries of the Thirty Years' War, and still more the unhappy influence exerted by Luther's personal name and influence, and the barren controversies arising out of the manuter adjustments of his theological system, destroyed for a time all genuine activity of thought in the Lutheran Church. A more deplorable period of religious contention than that which attended and followed the death of Melanchthon is scarcely to be found. It is spoken of by the Germans themselves as a new scholastic epoch, from its similarity to the absurd and wasteful argumentativeness which characterized the age preceding the Reformation. The baleful effects of this dogmatic frivolity and bigotry extended far into the next century. With an exception like Calyxtus there can hardly be said to be a living theological thinker in Germany from Luther to Bengal. This should be born in mind in connection with the later history of German theology. The home of rational thought was certainly not in Germany in the earlier times of Protestantism. We must look elsewhere for its reappearance. If Lutheran theology rapidly hardened into dogmatism, Calvinism was intensely dogmatic from the beginning. Calvin was a far more powerful and consistent theologian than Luther. His conceptions of Christian doctrine were at once more clear and more definitely and thoroughly organized. Adopting the same great outlines of Augustinianism, which it never occurred either to him or Luther to question, he elaborated them, if not with a more penetrative and profound insight, yet with far more logical coherence and proportion. He put every relative dogma in its place with legal exactness and adjusted all the parts of the theological system so completely that he left no room among his followers for the host of minor disputes which infested the Lutheran church. But this very completeness of the Calvinian dogmatism prepared the way for a reaction. Satisfactory in the highest degree to those who accepted its main principles and identified them without hesitation with the teaching of Saint Paul, to other minds of a less unquestioning character, it left no scope for the free play of Christian thought, while its stern logical consecutiveness directly tended to grade against the edge of this thought. The system, in short, broke down just where its triumphant logic topped its highest summit. The doctrine of absolute predestination was the keystone of the whole. Augustin himself had not shrunk from the most extreme consequences of this doctrine, and neither did Calvin. But these consequences were such as to revolt many minds more Christian, so to speak, than logical. The very enthusiasm of spiritual feeling which made their own religious interests so vital to them, drew them back from the results of a logic which seemed harsh and un-Christian. They felt there must be a flaw somewhere in a system which, however consecutive, terminated in such results. For, after all, the idea of the divine benevolence is as essential as that of the divine omnipotence. And if we cannot separate from God the thought of absolute will, neither can we separate from him the thought of absolute good. The same grace which on one side issues in predestinary indeterminism, saving whom it will according to its own elective arbitration or mere good pleasure, on the other side takes the former divine love which instinctively desires the good of all and wills all men to be saved. It was inevitable, therefore, that a reaction should spring up against the rigidity of the Calvinian doctrine, and such a reaction was all the more likely the more this doctrine had touched the national life of a people and become one of its main springs of action. The very stimulus which it thus gave to the religious and moral consciousness was sure in course of time to call forth opposition. There was only required some free life and energy of thought to develop it. This is exactly as we find the fact to be. No national life upon the whole had been so powerfully moved by Calvinism as that of Holland or the Low Countries, where for more than a century before the Reformation, evangelical principles had been widely circulated. Calvinism gathered up these principles and stamped them in the Belgic Confession with its most rigorous and earnest impress. FUTNO The Belgic Confession was, in the first instance, a private document composed in French by Guido de Bre in 1562. It was subsequently published in Dutch and German, and in 1566 it was adopted in a condensed form by the Synod of Antwerp. It was finally approved after revision by the Synod of Dort. END OF FUTNO It suited the religious genius of the country, had nursed the heroic character of William of Orange, and inspired the popular mind with that proud desire of national independence which maintained itself unshaken in one of the sternest and grandest struggles which patriotism has ever waged, and in its indomitable enthusiasm proved more than a match for all the intrigue and cruelty of Philip II. Here, where its intellectual and political action was so vigorous, hard discovered the first traces of opposition to it, and the ultimate development of a formidable rival system. END OF CHAPTER I CHAPTER I This opposition did not commence within the universities or among professional theologians, although it speedily spread to both. It was started first of all, or at least first attracted prominent attention, in the writings of a layman whose Christian sensibilities were repelled by the doctrine of predestination. Theodore Cornhert, who was not alone in his opposition, but his name has come prominently to the front of the movement, and a footnote. Notwithstanding the attempts made to convince him of his errors, he remained obstinate and was finally proclaimed a heretic. Out of this movement there arose in 1586 a demand for a formal revision of the Belgique Confession. The question was taken up by two ministers at Delft, who in the course of their arguments started a distinction which became in itself a fresh element of controversy. The necessities of logic compelled them to ask whether the divine decree had reference to the fall of man and specially embraced it or, so to speak, only came into operation after and dependently upon this great event. The former of these views became known as superlapsarianism, the latter as infralapsarianism. It was in these circumstances that James Hermann, or Hermanson, better known as Arminius, had his attention specially called to the subject. He was invited to undertake the defense of the doctrine of his master Beza, thus assailed and misinterpreted. But, as sometimes happens, the chosen defender became the most serious impuner of Calvinism. Herminius, in the course of his inquiries, gradually lost faith in the old doctrine, and passed even beyond the modified position of the Delphian theologians to a more decided attitude of hostility towards it. He became the leader of a distinguished group of anti-Calvinists, as his name has been taken to stamp the movement which he first made prominent with its enduring historical title. Whatever may be thought of the system of theology known as Arminianism, beyond question Arminius himself was a man not only of clear head and rare culture, but of earnest practical piety. He had received a singularly elaborate education both in philosophy and in theology, having studied not only at Utrecht and Leiden in his own country, but with Beza at Geneva and Gineas at Basel. At the latter place he had so distinguished himself that the theological faculty wished to confer upon him the degree of doctor in divinity, although he was only twenty-two years of age, an honor which he sensibly declined. To his varied mental acquisitions and acquaintance with the state of theological study in these great Protestant centers he superadded the advantages of travel in Italy. He visited Rome and resided for some time at the University of Padua, chiefly for the sake of pursuing his philosophical studies under the guidance of Zabarella, whose name at this time drew many students to that ancient seat of learning. During all his foreign travels and studies he seems to have lived a frugal and earnest life, carrying with him we are told, for the exercise of piety his Greek Testament and Hebrew Psalter. After a further brief residence at Geneva he returned to Holland in 1587 and became one of the ministers of Amsterdam. At first received with some disfavor on account of his supposed intercourse with the papal authorities while at Rome he soon obtained great popularity by his gifts as a preacher. To clearness and force of judgment he united a singularly winning and persuasive eloquence. His voice has spoken of as slender but touching in its modulations and capacity of adapting itself to the varying themes of his discourse. None heard him but confessed themselves moved, enlightened, and sharpened in their religious thoughts. A certain sharpening quality, quick, decisive and polishing in its effects, like a whetstone or file, seems to have been his distinguishing characteristic. Pastors and preachers as well as ordinary citizens flocked to hear him and welcomed with admiration his instructions. It was while quietly pursuing this career of usefulness and popularity that Arminius was called upon to adjudicate regarding the doctrine in which he had been taught and the more he occupied himself with the subject the more did he see cause to modify the conclusions of Calvin and Beza. He corresponded with Francis Junius, then professor of theology at Leiden, continued with unremitting ardor his biblical researches and pondered deeply the questions of liberty and necessity. Gradually his change of sentiments began to show itself in his sermons and he was more than once accused of a defection from reformed orthodoxy. It was not, however, till his appointment in 1603 to succeed his friend Junius at Leiden, that formal opposition broke out betwixt him and the orthodox party, headed by Francis Gomar, his colleague in the university. Arminius charged Gomar with so teaching the doctrine of predestination as to make God the author of sin. Gomar, on the other hand, accused Arminius of Pelagianism, or in other words of so exalting the human element in redemption as to obscure or destroy altogether the doctrine of divine grace. A general synod was convoked in 1606 with a view of settling the controversy. Later a conference was held betwixt the two main disputants themselves, but all was without effect. Theological ranker had been thoroughly roused. The watchwords of the conflict circulated amongst the clergy and people and were bandied to and fro in the pulpit, the senate, and the marketplace as in the early days of the Trinitarian controversy. Political interests and rivalries mingled in the agitation and complicated the result. The disturbance prevailed not only in Holland, but spread violently to England and other countries. The Synod of Dort in 1618, while giving an authoritative deliverance on the questions involved, which was accepted by the main sections of the Reformed Church, yet by this very act as well as by its course of procedure, served to deepen and give consistency to the schism. For the Arminians, or remonstrants as they were called, were thus driven to form a separate organization and to perpetuate their special theological views in schools and institutions of their own. FOOT NOTE They were so called from having addressed a remonstrance in five articles to the State's General of Holland and West Friesland in 1610. And FOOT NOTE It was not till 1630 that they were fully tolerated and allowed peaceably to reside in the cities and villages of Holland. Arminius himself soon passed away from the strife. He died in 1609. But his successor, Simon Episcopius, brought all the resources of a marvelous temper and address as well as a most accomplished erudition to the aid of the party, while he gave to its principles a more systematic elaboration than Arminius himself was probably capable of imparting to them. It was upon this distinguished leader that the defense of the remonstrants devolved at the Synod of Dort, and one at least of the addresses which he delivered on this occasion is marked by the highest qualities of enlightened reason and comprehensive charity. FOOT NOTE The conclusion of this address, which will be found afterwards alluded to and partly quoted in Hale's letters, amply bears out what we say. A fairer and more Christian spirit expressed in more sententious and admirable language it would be difficult to conceive. Episcopius was not only the theological head of Arminianism in succession to his friend and teacher Arminius, but above all others, its literary and organizing genius. The confession was composed during his exile in Brabant following the Synod of Dort and was published in 1622. The apology appeared after his return to Holland in 1626 with the first remission of the civil persecution against the remonstrants. FOOT NOTE The distinctive principles of Arminianism all take their start from the fundamental modification of the cardinal doctrine of predestination initiated by Arminius and in connection with which the whole movement arose. The divine decree to which human salvation is to be attributed was, according to Calvin's conception, absolute and irresistible. It implied a divine partition of the human race into saved and not saved, originating in the pure will and determination of God. The decisiveness of the decree was quite as real on the negative as on the positive side. The reprobate, as they were called, were as definitely marked out as the saved. The whole drama of the moral world in short, in its antagonism of good and evil, hung upon the absolute fiat of an almighty will. The Delphian theologians had so far sought to modify this tremendous doctrine as to exclude from the sphere of the divine determinism the origin of evil, or, in other words, the event of the fall. Arminius passed beyond this modification, which merely conditioned the divine by one inscrutable human act, and extended the conditioning process more or less to all human acts. In other words, he passed out of the pure sphere of the divine to which Calvin and his followers tended to confine their view and brought prominently forward the free activity of the human will as a co-determinant in the work of salvation. The essential difference that remained was as to the character and measure of this co-determination, for even the most rigorous Calvinism could not exclude it altogether. Was the primary, preponderant, and truly conditioning element in salvation with man or with God? It was the idea on the part of the Calvinists that the principles of Arminius virtually implied the denial of divine grace and transferred the work of salvation both in its origin and execution from God to man that made them accuse him of Pelagianism and excited such a stormy enthusiasm against the party. The logical suspicion was a justification of religious earnestness but not of un-Christian violence. Again, it was the idea on the part of the Arminians that the Calvinism of Beza and Gomar converted the divine will into mere fate or an arbitrary instead of moral and loving activity, and so made God the author of sin, which kindled the intensity of their opposition and made them suffer all manner of hardness rather than yield their convictions. They were right in vindicating the voluntary and ethical side of religion, but it does not follow that they were right in their interpretation and denunciation of their opponents' system. It is no part of our intention, and would be quite beside our purpose, to enter into any consideration of the relative truth or value of these rival theologies. The connection of our subject with Arminianism is entirely apart from the validity or invalidity of its special dogmatic theories. It must be confessed by impartial thinkers that these theories look pale and dubious across the distance at which we contemplate them. Using the same logical weapons and not shrinking from their application to the deepest mysteries of the divine action, Arminianism does not certainly succeed in explaining these mysteries, or making intelligible the rationale of the divine action in the work of salvation any better than Calvinism, while the latter has the great advantage of being a more powerful and coherent system. It starts from the higher divine side and argues out courageously and organically its conclusions towards divine ends. If we are to theorize at all about such matters, and not at once recognize that our forms of logic or scientific statement are incompetent to deal with them, then Calvinism may be pronounced the higher theory of the two. Arminianism breaks down in its logic, while it uses with a confidence quite equal to its antagonist the weapon which pierces its own side. But Arminianism was a great deal more than a dogmatic theory. It was also, or at least it rapidly became, a method of religious inquiry. The method grew out of the necessities of the system, instead of forming the system in the ordinary manner, but soon became its most vital element, and has alone given to it enduring significance in the history of Christian thought. It revived the suppressed rational side of the original Protestant movement, and for the first time organized it into a definite power, and assigned it its due place both in theology and the church. It was inevitable that Arminianism should make a new appeal to the intellectual side of Protestantism. It could only make good its form of doctrine and vindicate its position within the Reformed churches by biblical inquiry and argument. Its beginning we have seen was in the reaction of the Christian feeling against the oppression of the Calvinistic doctrine. It sprang from the moral rather than from the intellectual side of the Protestant Christian consciousness. But it could not make a movement at all, still less could this movement assume force and significance without a new indirect appeal to Scripture. And no sooner, therefore, was the spiritual difficulty started by others taken up and pursued by Arminius then it plunged him into a fresh and elaborate course of biblical inquiry. He felt that he must retrace all his dogmatic theories in the light of Scripture and bring them again to its test. And this renewed spirit of scriptural inquiry was more fully taken up by Episcopius. Its rules were worked out and its applications pursued and methodized. Protestantism had started on its course with an appeal to Scripture loudly proclaimed. It had confronted the Pope with the Bible and the right of all to interpret its contents in search for the truth therein. But the process of inquiry thus initiated had been rapidly arrested by the necessities of the age. Nay, it had never been fairly and fully carried out. Neither Luther nor Calvin had succeeded in approaching Scripture with free and unbiased minds. Both read it under the influence of Augustinian prepossessions, which directed and colored all the course of their interpretations. Svinglian Melanchthon brought more open and truly rational minds to the study of the Bible. But in the crisis which ensued, neither of them gave the prevailing impress to the confessional theology of the Protestant churches. This theology, in its main types, was entirely cast in the mold of the great theologian of the fifth century, who had communicated his thoughts to Western Christendom with such force that they have never since ceased vitally to influence it. But not only was the process of biblical inquiry thus specially modified and limited in the outset of the Reformation, it was directly hindered and brought to a temporary conclusion by the course of things. The question of authority became so urgent that everything else was comparatively forgotten, and exacting demand was made upon all the Protestant churches to give an account of themselves, of the definite doctrines which they taught and the principles for which they claimed to exist. Not only with reference to the Roman Catholicism which they repudiated, but to the civil communities in which they sought to establish themselves, and the social and ecclesiastical necessities which they professed to satisfy. Hence the multiplicity of creeds or confessions following the Reformation, one of the most extraordinary phenomena in Christian history, the full significance of which has hardly been appreciated. Within a period of about thirty years Protestant Christendom added upwards of twenty confessions to the three creeds which had hitherto satisfied the Christian church. Lutheranism was content with one main confession, to which, however, it speedily added four supplementary and explanatory documents. But in the reformed churches confession rapidly followed confession till their number reached a goodly volume, less than one page of which would contain the creed which the United Christendom of the east and west in the fourth century judged to be amply adequate for all purposes of Christian communion, denouncing an anathema upon those who should venture to impose anything further upon the Christian conscience. In Niemeyer's collection of confessions in the reformed church there are reckoned twenty-eight distinct confessions, some of which, however, are of later date than the period to which we refer. In addition to the Augsburg confession, which may be said to begin the series of Protestant creeds in fifteen thirty, Lutheranism recognizes among its symbolical books the Apology of the Confession, the Articles of Small Cald, Luther's Catechisms, and the Formula of Concord, already noticed as closing the series in fifteen seventy-seven, and a footnote. This mass of confessional theology was the result of temporary exigencies. The churches of the Reformation could not well help themselves or avoid the task thrown upon them, but it exercised at the time and has continued to exercise an injurious influence upon the development of Christian thought. It did so then in two ways. It exhausted too rapidly the spirit of religious research and left the theological mind at the close of the sixteenth century, as the medieval theology had done before, to feed only upon results instead of carrying on with ever-fresh light the study of Scripture. It introduced a new reign of traditionalism, but it not only tended thus directly to diminish the power of religious inquiry, it encompassed its exercise with difficulties and even dangers. Theologians were warned, as by so many fences, from approaching Scripture saved through the medium of dogmatic conclusions already reached. These conclusions speedily came to be identified with Scripture itself and to take something of its direct authority. Nay, with that natural tendency which lies in all men and all churches to love and prefer their own things before all others, and to impart the highest religious sanction to the familiar formula of childhood and of Christian habit, the dogmas of each church came to acquire to the popular mind a special sacredness which had always been comparatively slow to accord to the more simple and concrete statements of Scripture. It was the theory of the Reformation Churches, no doubt, as it remains the theory of all Protestant churches to this day, that their Confessions only possess authority insofar as they represent the Word of God, and that they are consequently subject to revision with advancing learning and experience. But no theory was ever more inoperative. In point of fact, the confession becomes the measure of the Word of God, and not the Word of God, the measure of the Confession, and no national Protestant church, so far as we know, has ever ventured deliberately to revise its confession. Such then was the position of Protestantism in the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century. Its spiritual impulse, on the continent at least, was already spent. Its theology had become a tradition of Augustinianism, with certain Lutheran and Calvinian accretions polemically adjusted to the errors of popery. Within the German church there raged a spirit of blind contentiousness, which had well now eaten all heart out of the noble teaching of Luther and Melanchthon. Within the Reformed churches, such theologians as Beza and Melville and Gommar, all of an essentially polemical temper and an inferior order of spiritual genius, had taken the places Vingley and Calvin and Knox. These men were not only not inquirers any more than Luther and Calvin had been, but they were destitute of the elevation of mind and the dignity and grandeur of spirit which made the dogmatism of the great German and Swiss reformers tolerable. They were confessional theologians, men who had grown up under the shadow of the new dogmatism rather than originated or formed it. It admits of no question that the confessionalism of the Reformed churches was already beginning before the close of the century of the Reformation, to burden Christian minds which had not lost all sense of freedom, in which any trace of the original Protestant spirit survived. This is clearly seen in the writings of the early Arminians, the preface to the remonstrant confession drawn up after the Synod of Dort, is little else than an elaborate apology for the very idea of a new confession, and the apologist only succeeds in his object by virtually abandoning the principle of confessions altogether. He explains at length that there was no intention of placing any further imposition upon the conscience, but only of indicating the sense and meaning in which he and others, remonstrants, understood scripture. In this respect confessions are declared to be useful as indices or guides of Christian opinion, but not as compulsory enactments. As such they had already done much harm. The setting forth of so many symbols and forms of belief had hindered Christian inquiry, impeded Christian liberty, and opened the way to factions and schisms in the church. The authority of scripture had been thereby more and more weakened until at length it had fallen away and been transferred to these human formularies as more perfect. All judgments and opinions pertaining to religion had become so associated with these formularies and depended upon them that, quote, men waving and undervaluing the sacred scripture appealed to them as unexceptionable rules, and he that swerved but of fingers bred from them, although moved there too by a reverence for scripture itself, was, without any farther proof, accused and condemned of heresy, close, quote. Arminianism became the special and formal outlet for all this mental uneasiness and Protestantism. The long suppressed stream of religious thought burst forth afresh when once the wall of Augustinian dogmatism was fairly breached. The living waters, not only of a broader spiritual feeling and a conciliatory instead of dividing doctrineism, but of critical and speculative inquiry, began to flow. A rational spirit sprang up and developed itself rapidly under all obstacles. And although this same spirit has frequently spent itself in arid tracts of mere intellectualism, or wandered into more asses of vulgar and superficial rationalism, it has never since altogether ceased. Its presence may be traced in all the subsequent development of Protestantism, in a nobler and more comprehensive thoughtfulness and freshening life, if also here and there in a weakened and reduced Christianity and defective religious interest. This renewed manifestation of the rational spirit and Protestantism touched three points, or assumed three main directions, all significant and important. 1. Scripture. 2. The authority of the Church in the interpretation of Scripture, or the whole subject of creeds and confessions. And 3. A point to which we have not hitherto alluded, but which became, as will be seen, one of the most influential in the course of rational religious thought, namely the limits of dogma, or the distinction between fundamental and not fundamental articles of Christian belief. 1. The Armenians recognized the supreme authority of Scripture no less than the Calvinists, and equally traced the element of authority in it not to any decree of the Church, or acceptance by the Church of the several canonical books, but to the revealed doctrine itself in its admirable force and efficacy. The truth of Scripture was held as declaring itself, and in the very fact of doing so, making known to the mind and conscience, its autocratical or absolute and supreme power. It shone forth, in short, as an authoritative light by its own intrinsic luster. This divine-like authority belongs to nothing else, and by the Scriptures alone, therefore, quote, as by touchstones and firm immovable rules must all controversies and debates in religion be tried and examined, and according to them, decided so as to leave the judgment of truth, finally to God alone speaking in his own word, close quote. So far there was no difference in the biblical theory of the two parties. There was no question raised as yet by the most forward theological intelligence as to the character of divine inspiration, or the relative divine value of the various books of the Bible. The patristic traditions as to the composition of these books, their organic connection, uniform meaning, and equivalent authority remained as yet unbroken. Historical criticism in the modern sense was not born till much later, although he could trace its tentative and imperfect beginnings in Episcopius, Grotius, and others. By the time of its birth, Armenianism had long ceased to have any significance as a distinctive phase of Christian thought, but it is nevertheless true that a more purely grammatical and historical exegesis, which may be said to be, if not the parent, yet the lineal predecessor of that great instrument of modern thought, took its rise in the Armenian school and was greatly helped by the intellectual and literary influences which proceeded from it. Footnote The remonstrant confession emphasizes in a very marked manner the necessity of interpreting scripture in the same manner as any other book, according to its native and literal sense. Understanding by this not merely the bare sense of separate passages, but the meaning agreeable to right reason and the very mind and intention of him that uttered the words. This is surely something like an anticipation of the critical historical method. The document precedes in emphatic language. But to desire to fetch or take this exposition from any other author, head or fountain whatsoever, to wit from any symbol or creed of men's making, or analogy of faith in this or that place received, or any public confession of churches, or from the decrees of councils or consent of fathers one or other, though even the most or greatest part of them, is a thing too uncertain and oftentimes dangerous. But while agreeing in their general theory as to scripture, the Arminians and Calvinists differed in their application of the theory, and the difference proved very important. The Calvinists recognized in scripture not merely an authoritative guide to the reason and the conscience, but a co-active and constraining power over the reason and conscience. The authority of scripture, said the Arminians, is merely directive. It is the witness of the Holy Spirit in the Divine Word. But it can only be brought near to the individual, and become operative by his own free inquiry and assent. The infallibility of scripture, in short, to the one was an embodied rule, a co-active decision, which the Church was entitled to apply to heretics and dissenters from the common orthodoxy. To the other it was nothing more than a private judgment, which all might reach for themselves, which all honestly inquiring minds did reach for themselves. It was not, and could not be, an external power capable of being wielded by the Church, and any claim to exercise such a power was strongly repudiated. This proved one of the main points of disagreement betwixt the two parties. Such a private liberty of interpreting scripture, of prophesying, as it was called, was intolerable to the Calvinists of the seventeenth century, all the more that they felt a logical pinch of the conclusion involved, for where was the right of private judgment at all save in this form? If the truth of scripture is to be infallibly declared and enforced in the teaching of the orthodox, where is the essential difference betwixt the Protestant and the papal infallibility? The Calvinian dogmatist was ready to reply that his judgment was according to scripture, and only claimed force as such, and that if such a claim was not allowed there could be no end of controversy in the Church. But then this was the very point in question, which judgment was really according to scripture? The Arminian was no less sturdy in his dogmatism so far that his was the truly scriptural judgment, and so the question was brought back to the point from which it should have started, was private judgment really the right of all? Were the individual reason and conscience absolutely free in the light of the Divine Word? Theoretically Calvinism professed to hold the affirmative, which was a primary postulate of the Reformation, and there is nothing in any of the Protestant confessions that variants with it. But in point of fact, orthodox Protestantism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not remain true to its own principle or carry it out consistently to its conclusion. Arminianism attempted to do so, and so far, while elevating scripture to the same supremacy as Calvinism, differed from it in its estimate of the supremacy. The supreme authority of scripture, however nominally recognized, could hardly be maintained practically in the face of the numerous confessions which had already settled and proclaimed its meaning. A Protestantism which had elaborated and concluded its theology in the most minute points naturally fell back upon its own work, and in all cases of controversy interposed the secondary authority which it had set up as virtually absolute. The primacy of scripture remained a dogma among other dogmas, but it ceased to have any living influence. Arminianism sought to revive this influence, and to reassert, in its full meaning, the principle of private judgment, or the indefeasible right of every man to examine and decide the truth of scripture for himself. It recognized no other rule of faith even as subordinate. No interpretation of scripture, however profitable, or invested with whatever sanction, has entitled to come between the soul and the divine word. In the face of all the opposition which it encountered, it asserted incessantly, and tried to work out in all its practical applications, the great truth, recognized indeed but unrealized by other phases of Protestantism, that God alone is Lord of the Conscience. 2. In carrying out this truth it was led to attack the whole system of confessions. It prepared indeed a confession of its own, but in doing so it expressly repudiated any claim to do more than draw out an expository and vindicatory document. Symbols and confessions it held, according to their true meaning and even their ancient usage, to have no other design but to testify not what was to be believed, but what the authors of themselves believed. They were not to be received as certain indices or discoverers, much less as judges of the true sense or meaning of scripture, but only as indices of that sense or meaning which the authors of them held for true. They were mirrors of Christian opinion, formulated expressions of the Christian consciousness of the time, and in such a case as that of the Arminians themselves, served to declare and make clear their position and opinions, and so to disperse the accusations and calumnes to which they had been subjected. In their own language they were like lighthouses, to show to the unwary and imprudent the shoals and quicksands of error hurtful to piety and salvation, and, moreover, apologies against columniaters, whereby all might understand how false were the charges brought against them. But in no respect were they to be held as limiting the freedom of Christian discussion or as fountains of faith. Controversies were not to be brought to their anvil, but to be fearlessly prosecuted and decided by the Word of God alone, as the only rule beyond all exception. The private judgment was always entitled to bring these forms themselves under review and even without scruple to contradict them. This was the only adequate security against their being set up as idols in the church and placed in an equal degree of honor with scripture and made fetters for the human conscience. Above all, they were not to be held as limiting the truth of God so that those who were unable or who refused to receive them were thereby excluded from salvation or shut out from the kingdom of heaven. In short, they were useful as ensigns or standards declarative of the belief of those who set them forth, but no farther. No deliverance of sinned nor decree of counsel had or could have in itself or in virtue of its official enunciation any sacredness which might not be fairly and fully challenged. Extremes of criticism or mere license of opinionativeness were, of course, to be avoided. Christian controversy should always be moderate and charitable. It was the part of prudence to weigh things and the times and places in which this or that opinion might be fitly propounded. It was the part of charity to have a regard to persons that they be not offended or troubled who ought to be edified. But no human enactment, however deliberate or formal, had any right to stand between the conscience and God. No Protestant party ventured to maintain in theory that confessions were in their composition other than human infallible documents. Yet, in admitting this, the dominant orthodoxy strongly contended for the infallibility of the doctrines taught in them and their compulsory relation to the individual conscience. The most able and thoroughgoing exponents of the system held so much beyond doubt. Believing that all controversies were determined in Scripture, they also believed that it was within the power of the Church to declare these determinations with certainty. In other words, they believed that the Church, though not infallible itself, might determine infallible points, as an earthen pitcher, for thus they ventured to illustrate their position, might contain gold and precious rubies and sapphires, although there was no gold in the matter of the pitcher itself but only clay. The infallible truth, no doubt, may be hidden as treasure in the earthly vessel of the Church, like gems in a pitcher of clay. But then this is not the question. The real analogy is not with the truth, thus treasured in the Church, but with the truth expressed and formulated by human argument. Every proposition of fallible men must share in their fallibility, and there is no escape from this, save by leaving the divine truth in its original form in Scripture. The gems may remain pure and precious within their enclosure, but not when broken up and mixed with common clay. Supposing the Church capable of giving infallible decisions according to Scripture, it may well be supposed also capable of applying and enforcing them. The element of compulsion was ultimately traced to God, yet ministerially it was held to belong to the Church, or to the civil magistrate as executive of the Church. It was the duty of the magistrate to take order that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire, and that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed. It was allowed, indeed, that compulsion could not make men religious or change their beliefs. Conscience, where it did not manifest itself by illicit acts, was not to be muzzled or enforced. This would have been an inquisitorial tyranny too intolerable. But all expressed opinions at variance with those of the Church were not only to be reproved but forcibly repressed. God has given even to a single pastor, far more to a synod of pastors and doctors, more to rebuke with authority, to lay on burdens and decrees. Whoever will not hear an ambassador virtually refuses to hear the prince who has sent him, whoever despises the minister of God despises God himself, and when offenders were obstinate and heretics hardened they were to be handed over without mercy to the civil magistrate for punishment, if necessary for punishment unto death. This was a conclusion, as is well known, from which none of the Reformers, not even Melanchthon, shrank, and which was strongly maintained in England even in the middle of the seventeenth century. All this system of confessional and church authority was vigorously attacked by Arminianism. The principle of private judgment, consistently carried out and applied without reserve, swept it away, although not without a long continued and violent struggle. III But perhaps the most significant and solvent of all the rational principles enunciated by Arminianism was the distinction with tricks of fundamental and non-fundamental doctrines. This distinction not only assailed the narrowness and stringency of the prevailing Protestant dogmatism but the whole idea upon which dogmatism, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, was built. And there is abundant evidence, as in the case of Chillingworth's opponent, not, that the Roman Catholics, no less than the Calvinists and Puritans, felt the force of this assault. It raised the vital question as to the essential character of Christianity and the conditions of Christian communion. Did any series of dogmas after all constitute Christianity? Was it not rather a personal belief in one or two great facts, a very few things which alone are precisely necessary to be known and believed for the obtaining of eternal life? And has the Church right to insist upon anything beyond the acknowledgment of these facts as its formal basis? Is the profession of any doctrinal belief or theological creed at all necessary to Christian communion? The Arminians inclined to answer these last questions in the negative. The only fundamental truths they maintained were the facts lying at the basis of Christianity as contained in the language of Scripture, or at the utmost as expressed in the Apostles Creed. They not only refused to move the sphere of authority beyond Scripture, but they strove to bring the compass of faith within the simple bounds of the Primitive Church. As we proceed we shall find ample evidence of the working of this fruitful principle and of the earnestness with which it was taken up and advocated by our series of rational divines. These several forces of free opinion, or more truly several manifestations of the same right of free inquiry, reappear again and again, sometimes in a desultory, sometimes in a more organic form. Protestantism found in them its full meaning, and gradually they have leavened the spirit of modern thought. Holland continued their chief home in the seventeenth century, but they found a congenial soil in the minds of a few of the most distinguished members of the Church of England, and grew up amidst many difficulties into a party which has never ceased to influence it and the character of English religious opinion. Rational causes have also nursed a rational spirit within the bosom of the English Church. It sprang and continues to spring naturally out of its constitution, but in its origin it was greatly indebted to the movement of the Dutch remonstrance, and can only be understood fully in connection with it, and the general course of Protestant thought which in this chapter we have endeavored to sketch. End of Chapter 1 Part 2 Section 3 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy Volume 1 by John Tullock. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 2. Course of Religious Opinion and Parties in England 1500-1625. Part 1. The Reformation in England was singular amongst the great religious movements of the 16th century. It was the least heroic of them all, the least swayed by religious passion or molded and governed by spiritual and theological necessities. From a general point of view it looks at first little more than a great political change. The exigencies of royal passion and the dubious impulses of statecraft seem its moving and really powerful springs. But regarded more closely, we recognize a significant train both of religious and critical forces at work. The lust and avarice of Henry, the policy of Cromwell, and the vacillations of the leading clergy attract prominent notice. But there may be traced beneath the surface a widespread evangelical fervor amongst the people and, above all, a genuine spiritual earnestness and excitement of thought at the universities. These higher influences preside at the first birth of the movement. They are seen in active operation long before the reforming task was taken up by the court and the bishops and bring before us in truth one of the most interesting phases of that earlier and more purely biblical spirit of inquiry which almost everywhere ushered in the Reformation. In England, with the opening of the sixteenth century, we find genuine and decided manifestations of an awakening of religious life, of a new tone of religious thought and of a desire to renovate the church and deliver theology and the study of the scriptures from the bondage of scholasticism. Colet and Tyndale are the most conspicuous representatives of this early movement. The first initiated it by his lectures on St. Paul at Oxford and his active cooperation with Erasmus in the promotion of the new learning. The second carried it on by his self-denying devotion and persevering labors in the English translation of the scriptures till the year of his martyrdom, 1536. Around these names there are others less distinguished such as Bilney and Frith, all earnest students of scripture and all animated by an enlightened reforming zeal drawn from its pages. The spirit of this movement was at once highly rational and evangelical. It is impossible to read Colet or Tyndale without recognizing that a deep seated love of truth and vital power of divine faith moved them in all they did. Not less than either Luther or Calvin, they owned the reality of the evangelical principle, of the necessity of penetrating beyond all means of grace or accessories of devotion to the very life of communion with God in Christ. Colet had learned from the study of his beloved St. Paul to look up from him to the wonderful majesty of Christ and loyalty to Christ was the ruling passion of his life. Tyndale's whole being was inspired by the ardor of self-sacrifice for the Holy Evangel. But with all this evangelical enthusiasm and fire of spiritual zeal there was in both an admirable sobriety, candor, and fairness of theological temper. They approached the study of scripture with their minds thoroughly cleared of the old formal scholasticism and desiring simply to read the divine meaning in its own light and purity. They fixed boldly upon the fact that it could only have one consistent meaning in contrast to the scholastic nonsense of a fourfold sense, literal, tropical, allegorical, and anagogical. Twenty doctors said Tyndale will, quote, expound one text to twenty ways as children make descant upon plain song. Then our sophistas, with an antitheme of half an inch, will draw out a thread of nine days long. Ye, thou shalt find enough that will preach Christ and prove whatsoever point of the faith thou wilt, as well out of a fable of Ovid or any other poet, as out of St. John's Gospel or Paul's Epistles, close, quote. Colet in his lectures on the Romans, which Tyndale probably heard at Oxford in the first years of the century, had once threw aside all this scholastic trifling, and tried to bring his hearers face to face with the living mind of the apostle. To a priest who came to him for some hints in his studies, he said, quote, open your book, and we will see how many and what golden truths we can gather from the first chapter only of the Epistle to the Romans, close, quote. He loved to point out, more after the manner of the nineteenth and the sixteenth century, the personal traits in St. Paul's writings, his vehemence of speaking, which did not give him time to perfect his sentences, the rare prudence intact with which he balanced his words to meet the needs of the different classes addressed, his modesty, toleration, self denial, and consideration for others, and the reality of application there was in many of his sayings to the circumstances of the times. He recognized, even largely, a principle of accommodation in scripture, as in the Mosaic account of the creation and St. Paul's statements about marriage. He showed himself in his doctrinal conclusions independent of Augustinianism, and while emphasizing the necessity of divine grace, kept clear of the absolute decree and the extreme tenet of the bondage of the will. He came at last to find the true sum of Christian theology in the simple facts of the apostle's creed. To the young theological students who, quote, came to him in despair on the point of throwing up theological study altogether because of the vexed questions in which they found it involved and dreading lest they might be found unorthodox, he was want to say, keep firmly to the Bible and the apostle's creed and let divines, if they like, dispute about the rest, close quote. Tyndale, if animated by a more profound and energetic evangelical feeling than Collet, was less liberal in his theology. His leanings were Augustinian, even of a somewhat strong type. Yet he is almost equally clear and rational in his method of scriptural exposition. Scripture has but one sense, he says, which is the literal sense. This literal sense is the root and ground of all. Quote, there is no story, seem it never so simple, but that thou shalt find there in spirit and life an edification in the literal sense. For it is God's scripture written for thy learning and comfort, close quote. Of the sacraments, he says, quote, there is none other virtue in them then to testify and exhibit to the senses and understanding the covenants and promises made in Christ's blood, close quote. And therefore, where the sacraments or ceremonies are not rightly understood, there they be clean, unprofitable. The same enlightened spirit is expressed in his general definition of the church, quote, as the whole multitude of repenting sinners that believe in Christ and put all their trust in the mercy of God, feeling in their hearts that God for Christ's sake loveth them, close quote. The rational spirit is sufficiently conspicuous in these early traces of the Reformation in England, and although it cannot be said in its subsequent development to have been true to the broader theology of Collet, yet it retained something of its original breadth. This is seen in the doctrinal basis which it finally accepted. The preparation of this basis may be said to begin with the termination of the earlier movement of reform, and it lasted more or less actively for upwards of thirty years, till the settlement of the articles in their present number informed in 1571. Footnote. The first series of ten articles date as far back as 1536. They were afterwards, in 1552, expanded into forty-two articles, and finally in 1571 reduced to their present number of 39. End of footnote. The theology of these articles is conciliatory and moderate. The great question of predestination, round which the theological thought of the Reformation everywhere circulated, is handled in a strictly scriptural manner without argument or any attempt to draw out the divine fact in its negative as well as its positive side. The same thing may be said of the definitions in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth articles on free will, justification, and good works. An enlightened and clear perception of the truth and yet a cautious moderation both of thought and language characterize these significant propositions. And if the darkened tone and exaggerations of Augustinianism may be found in the thirteenth article, this is almost the only case in which they occur. Nowhere was the theology of the sixteenth century capable of doing justice to the virtues of the heathens, or of rising to the philosophic comprehension of the ancient Alexandrian school. In this respect, as in some others, the mere dominance of the western church had marred its theology and imparted to it an exclusive and negative character. The definition of the church in the nineteenth article is strictly scriptural and strikes at the root of all illiberal ecclesiasticism. And if the question of authority cannot be said to be fully cleared up in the article which follows, it is yet stated with admirable balance. The church has, quote, authority in controversies of faith, and yet it is not lawful for the church to ordain anything that is contrary to God's word written, neither may it so expound one place of scripture that it be repugnant to another, close quote. In other words, the church has power to settle its own doctrine, but this power can only be legitimately exercised in consistency with scripture and reason. The same moderate type of doctrine inclining upon the whole to Augustinianism, but free from many of its exaggerations, is found to distinguish the chief English theologians of the sixteenth century, from Cranmerk to Hooker. The homilies are mainly practical, and where they divergent to doctrine they are not extreme, and the homily on the reading of scripture is remarkable for the use of an expression which has since become prominent in connection with the advancement of a spirit of rational religious inquiry. In scripture it says, quote, is contained God's true word, close quote. The most memorable exception to this fair and conciliatory doctrineism of the Church of England in the century of the Reformation is to be found in the famous Lambeth articles, prepared at a conference called by Whittgift in the year 1595. Certain attacks had been made both at Oxford and Cambridge upon the tenet of predestination, the effect of which so much alarmed not only Whittgift, but others of the bishops, as to surprise them into the most intemperate and painful expression of predestinarianism anywhere to be found in the shape of a creed. Footnote. There seems at this time to have been a simultaneous excitement at both the universities on the subject of Calvinism. A preacher of the name of Barrett at Oxford had got into difficulties with the university authorities and complained to the Archbishop. While at Cambridge there was a keen controversy on the subject between the two professors of divinity. Whittgift himself stated to the Queen that, quote, the design of the Lambeth articles was only to settle some propositions to be sent to Cambridge for quieting some unhappy differences in that university, close quote. The bishops of London and of Bangor, with the Dean of Ely and the Queen's Divinity Professor at Cambridge, and others, concurred with the Archbishop in framing the articles. The want of moderation so apparent in their language is attributed by Sir Philip Warwick to Fletcher Bishop of London. The Archbishop of York, Dr. Hutton, was unable to attend the conference, but he afterwards approved of the positions laid down, which, he added, quote, may be collected from the holy scriptures either expressly or by necessary consequence, and also from the writings of St. Augustine, close quote. End footnote. It is true that almost every word of the nine Lambeth propositions is to be found in the articles agreed upon by the Archbishops and bishops, and the rest of the clergy of Ireland, in 1615, and through these articles probably much of the phraseology passed into the Westminster Confession of Faith. But neither in the Irish articles, nor in the Confession of Faith, are the logical inferences drawn from the primary predestinarian affirmation presented in so naked, abrupt, and coarse a manner. While the ninth and concluding statement of the Lambeth series stands absolutely alone in its appalling simplicity. Footnote. It is briefly as follows, quote, it is not in the will and power of every man to be saved, close quote. End footnote. It may be an explanation of the Lambeth theology that all the successive propositions are strictly deducible from the initiative or major premise, which is no less virtually contained in the present thirty-nine articles, but this is no justification of the attempt to draw out such a theology into the form of a creed, nor does it really alter its harsh, un-moral, and, in the concluding negation, utterly unevangelical character. Happily for the Church of England, the Lambeth articles never acquired any legal sanction, and, no less happily, they cannot be said to have exercised any influence upon the development of its theology. It is not on the side of doctrine, however, that we must look for the most active display of rational thoughtfulness in the Church of England at this time. Upon the whole, there was in it, as in the other churches of the Reformation, a disposition to accept without questioning the doctrines originally elaborated by the great teacher whose influence had been so powerful over the whole of the Western Church, and which had been revived and systematized anew by Luther and Calvin. The spirit of inquiry, even in such a man as Collet, rather transcended or evaded Augustinianism then disturbed it. True to its practical character, the questions which chiefly agitated the Church of England and preserved the real life of thought in it were ecclesiastical rather than theological. Such questions, for example, as the sacraments' orders and, above all, the government of the Church. This latter question, which in a sense embraced the others, was the stirring question of all the Elizabethan age, as it was destined in a significantly altered form to become that of the succeeding period. 1. The early sacramentarian views of the Church of England were substantially the same as those of the Geneva or Reformed churches. Cranmer, although his language is not free from figure and perplexity, taught that the Eucharist is profitable and edifying as a means of grace from its spiritual suggestiveness, not otherwise. It serves to bring before the believing mind the sacrifice of Christ in a vivid and comfortable manner, and so helps it to realize the personal power of redeeming love. But in and by itself it has no saving efficacy. It is impossible in any other than a spiritual manner to eat the body or drink the blood of Christ, for the body of Christ is in heaven and therefore cannot be also present in the bread or wine of the communion. This phraseology, according to Christ's own witness, means nothing else than to believe in him. Christ is present in his sacraments as he is present in his word, when he worketh mightily by the same in the hearts of the hearers. But in no other sense is he present in the communion or to be specially worshipped in it. Ridley held the same views and claims the authority of the fathers for them. He as well as Cranmer, indeed, used language which by itself would imply a higher meaning, but this they did on the principle of ascribing to the sacrament or the sign what was only true really of the matter of the sacrament or the thing signified. Such an expression, for example, as blood in the chalice, he admitted in a certain sense to be true but only by grace in a sacrament. He clung to the patristic language and got into confusion and apparent materialism from doing so, but there could be no doubt that he rejected an incorporeal presence or efficacy in the mere right. The grace of the sacrament, he says, is not included in it, but to those that receive it well it is turned to grace. Jewel, who alone besides Hooker of the Elizabethan divines, can be said to be a systematic writer, is equally, if not more clearly, rational in his sacramentarian teaching. The bread and wine are with him in the usual language, quote, the holy and heavenly mysteries of the body and blood of Christ, close quote, and Christ himself is received by them through faith. He is present and given in them as he is present and given in his word. But there is no singular or corporeal presence of him in the Eucharist, quote, it is not the bodily mouth but faith alone that receives and embraces Christ's body, close quote. II The question of orders was freely discussed, and a whole catena of evidence might be adduced to show the liberal direction which, for the most part, the discussion took. Cranmer's opinions are well known. He denied the distinction of presbyter and bishop and seems even to have questioned the distinctive character and independence of the sacred office altogether. A priest he contended might be validly constituted by the supreme civil power in virtue of the authority committed to it and also by the people in virtue of their election. Footnote. His words are, quote, a bishop may make a priest by the scripture and so may princes and governors also and that by the authority of God committed to them and the people also by their election, close quote. This is one of his answers to the famous series of questions propounded by Henry VIII to the bishops. The questions and answers are to be found in Burnett's history of the Reformation Volume I and also in Collier's ecclesiastical history. End footnote. Jewel was no less Erastian. Those who speak of themselves as being the only true church he compares to the scribes and Pharisees who cried, The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, and cracked that they were Abraham's children. God's grace, he added, is not promised to seize and successions but to them that fear God. Beckon, a voluminous writer who was chaplain to Cranmer and the author of one of the homilies, no less explicitly denied the distinction between bishop and presbyter and advocated the old practice of appointing ministers by popular election. While Hooker, in conformity with all the principles of his great work, maintained that, quote, there may be sometimes very just and sufficient reason to allow ordination made without a bishop, close quote. But apart from all such special testimonies, the liberal views of the Church of England in the 16th century on the subject of orders are notorious. The correspondence carried on betwixt Cranmer and Parker on the one hand and the reformed divines on the other prove beyond all reasonable controversy that the question of Episcopal ordination was not regarded as a vital one on either side. There was a sense in which the foreign churches would not have objected to Episcopacy while the English bishops were disposed so to modify it as to meet their views. In short, the Church of England had, on this important point, reached in the 16th century an attitude more rational and more consistent at once with the spirit of Christianity and the facts of its origin than it has unhappily as a whole been able to maintain in the course of its history. Three, but the main point which then evoked and sustained the rational thought of the Church of England was that of the government of the Church or the idea of the Church as an institution. What was this idea? Was it definitely fixed in Scripture and the model or pattern of Church government formerly laid down there? No, was the distinct reply of the leaders of the Church of England in the 16th century. While strangely enough the affirmative dogmatic side was zealously maintained by the extreme reformers known thus early as Puritans who had brought from abroad not only Calvinian theology but Calvinian Presbyterianism. There are two phases in this great struggle during the Elizabethan age. First, the controversy betwixt Cartwright and Whitgift and secondly, that betwixt Travers and Hooker which led to the composition of the laws of ecclesiastical polity. Nothing can be more clear than the attitude of both these distinguished representatives of the Church of England. Whitgift is indeed an infinitely inferior genius and while his principles are conciliatory and his tone of argument moderate his language is often harsh and overbearing. Of his rational position however he leaves no doubt. There is according to him no one certain and perfect kind of government prescribed or commanded in the Scriptures to the Church of Christ and the only essential notes of the Church everywhere are the true preaching of the Word of God and the right administration of the sacraments. The substance and matter of government must indeed be taken out of the Word of God but the offices in the Church whereby this government is wrought are not namely and particularly expressed in the Scriptures but in some points left to the discretion and liberty of the Church to be disposed according to the state of times places and persons. Whitgift in short vindicates for the Church a rational liberty to order in particulars its frame of government according to the principle of expediency. He met the dogmatism of the Puritan who could not understand a divine revelation which did not fix everything regarding religion to the minutest particular by the simple assertion that in point of fact revelation had left such matters undetermined. And it is no small injury which you do unto the Word of God to pin it in so narrow a room as that it should be able to direct us but in the principle points of our religion. Is it likely that he who appointed not only the tabernacle and the temple but their ornaments would not only neglect the ornaments of the Church but that without which it cannot long stand? Shall we conclude that he who remembered the bars there hath forgotten the pillars here? Or he who there remembered the pins here forgot the master-builders? Should he there remember the bisms and here forget archbishops if any had been needful? Could he there make mention of the snuffers to purge the lights and here pass by the lights themselves?" Cartwrights replied to Admonition 1482. End of Footnote. He encountered dogmatism by negation and the sharp and pointed exposure congenial to his somewhat rough if acute sense and shrewdness. But he did little more. His mind, as the Lambeth articles show, was of that limited pseudo-logical character which, while sound and rational on such a practical matter as that of Church government, had yet no real power of thought or penetration of higher principles. It remained to hooker to carry the controversy into a region of rational light and philosophic comprehension capable of shedding illustration and a new life of meaning not only upon the constitution of the Church but upon the whole sphere of theology. Hooker began, not from negations, but from a positive analysis of the primary and essential principles of all government. Granting he virtually said that divine laws are only immutable guides in the ordering of the Church, which was the Puritan postulate, yet laws are not divine merely because they are found in Scripture. All law, truly so, is no less divine as forming an expression of the original law or reason of the universe. Whether the law is revealed in Scripture or in the rational constitution of human nature makes no difference. Its sacredness is the same as springing out of the same fountain of all light and order. This unity of nature and life in Scripture, as all equally true, if not equally important, revelations of the divine will, lies at the foundation of Hooker's whole argument. It is the comprehensive and germinant idea underlying its entire structure and breathing form and meaning into it, in articulate sometimes but not the less powerful. According to this idea, the Church of England in the Catholic hierarchy of offices which it preserved was defensible not merely because it was there and there was nothing in Scripture against it but because it was in itself a fair, seemly, and rational order of government. It based itself on the divine reason expressed in the national consciousness and sanctioned both by the national sentiment and the course of Catholic history. In this the higher sense it possessed undoubted divine right. It was conformable to Scripture and the Christian reason and had its origin directly in the growth and advance of this reason. The Church was to Hooker, in fine, no dogmatic or exclusive institution, as a Puritans would have made it, partitioning by formal lines and boundaries the cosmos of spiritual thought and experience which had sprung from the divine ideal in Christ and in him recreated and transformed humanity. It was a spiritual order, capable of diverse forms and tolerantly comprehensive of all Christian gifts and activities. If the Church of England had never produced any other writer of the same stamp it might yet have boasted in Hooker one of the noblest and most rational intellects which ever enriched Christian literature or adorned a great cause. In combination of speculative, literary, imaginative and spiritual qualities, the laws of ecclesiastical polity stand as a polemical treatise unrivaled. The same rich and ample intellect and the same calm and judicial wisdom shine through it all, but especially in the first book where the author rises to his loftiest flight of thought and expatiates with the most sustained force and compass of reasoning. Nowhere in the literature of philosophy has ethical and political speculation assayed a profounder and more comprehensive task or sought to take a broader sweep, and never has the harmony of the moral universe and the interdependence and unity of man's spiritual and civil life in their multiplied relations been more finely conceived or more impressively expounded. The chief characteristic of the work is its elevated calmness of luminous and reasonable thought. Many writers are more acute, subtle and forcible in detail and reach their conclusions by more rapid, vivid and close processes of logic. But no writer ever conducted a great argument in a higher, purer and more enlightened spirit. None ever dwelt in a more lofty, serene and truthful atmosphere or raised himself more directly by mere grandeur and largeness of conception above all the petty and vulgar details which beset controversy even on the greatest subjects. The work remains an enduring monument of all the highest principles of Christian rationalism, of that spirit and tendency of thought which everywhere ascends from traditions or dogmas to principles, and which tests all questions not with reference to external rules or authorities, but to the indestructible and enlightened instincts of the Christian consciousness. CHAPTER II THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND LOST MUCH OF ITS ORIGINAL BREATH AND CATHOLICITY The growth of what is known as Anglo-Catholicism marks exactly the decay of the more genuine Catholic spirit which united the Church of the English Reformation to the other reformed churches. It might almost seem as if James I and Charles I, both of them naturally of a small and irrational type of mind, had impressed something of their own narrowness and pedantry upon the Church and the theology of their day. It is certainly strange that a genius so rich and fine and a cast of thought so truly noble as hookers should have produced so little result. The Stuart Divines, if they read him at all, only read him on one side of his mind, the patristic and controversial, which, when divorced from the higher philosophic side, loses all its life in true meaning. It is impossible to conceive writers with less real affinity to the great Elizabethan divine than Anders or Dunn or Lod, or even Hall, Hammond or Sanderson. The Anglo-Catholic theology, with all, is a genuine development of the Church of England. In some respects it is its most characteristic development, while no theological school has been adorned by a series of higher or more beautiful characters. It is the special line of thought by which the present Church connects itself with the ancient Catholic hierarchy. Toleter Abusus Maniatusus was the special motto of the English Reformation, and the spirit of the motto was, upon the whole, consistently maintained, notwithstanding the strong desire among some of the bishops such as Sandus and Grindal, and even Jewel, to carry out more thorough and extensive changes. In a letter to Peter Martyr, Jewel expressed a strong approval of the comparative thoroughness with which the Reformation was carried out in Scotland. All the monasteries, he says, are everywhere leveled to the ground, the altars are consigned to the flames, not a vestige of the ancient superstition and idolatry is left. Jewel's letters end of footnote. The patristic element, again, was something different with the English reformers end with either Luther or Calvin, with all their deference to the Augustinian theology. Not only Augustine, but the Fathers generally, both Greek and Latin, were constantly appealed to in the sacramentarian discussions, and also in the early phase of the controversy with the Puritans. On the former subject, as we have already seen, the greatest anxiety was manifested to adhere to the patristic language, even where it obviously covered a meaning beyond that which the English Divine was disposed to accept. This is evident not only in Cranmer and Ridley, but also in Jewel with his wider and more liberal culture. The peculiar force which patristic authority retained over the minds of the English reformers cannot, indeed, be better exemplified than in the case of this writer, with all his broad and clearly rational tendencies. His defense of his apology against Harding bristles with patristic references from all sources, everywhere handled with the utmost reverence. Antiquity was therefore a distinct note of the Church of England from the beginning, and the Fathers were in some sort recognized as authorized expositors of divine truth. This position is claimed for them in one of Archbishop Parker's cannons in the year 1571, when the articles were finally settled, and the Reformation may be said to have reached its culminating point. Preachers are there admonished not, quote, to propound anything publicly as an article of faith, save only what is agreeable to the doctrine of the Old and New Testament, and to what the Catholic Fathers and ancient bishops of the Church have collected out of Holy Writ, close, quote, footnote. Parker's cannons were subscribed by the bishops of both provinces, and are therefore a valid indication of the state of opinion in the Church, but they never received either royal or parliamentary assent, and Grindal, then Archbishop of York, in thanking Parker for sending him a copy of them, doubts whether, in default of such sanctions, they had Vigorum legis, Stripe's Life of Parker, Vol. 2, page 57, and a footnote. So far, therefore, the theological tenancy of Lod and his school may be traced back to the peculiar character of the Anglican Reformation. As a definite system, however, Anglo-Catholicism did not emerge till the 17th century, and the Anglo-Catholics, as a party, have no right to claim the inheritance of the Church of England. They are really the successors and not the precursors of the Puritans, and if they followed out certain features of the Old National Party, and so far became their representatives, they yet did so in a very different spirit. The original advocates of the Church of England, via media, fought their battle upon the whole with the weapons of reason and fair scriptural inquiry, and nothing more honourable can be said of them in such a time. They had no exclusive theory of divine right, and their sacerdotalism, so far as it existed at all, was traditionary and not dogmatic. If not Latitudinarian, they were never destitute of a certain intellectual breadth, but the age was too troublesome and men too impatient and violent to appreciate such an attitude as this. The Puritans were felt to have a certain advantage with the popular and even the ordinary theological mind in the very narrowness of their theory. It was understood of all, that nothing was to be in the Church, which was not commanded in Scripture, that an explicit divine command or use divinem must settle everything, was a very obvious, ready-made, and effective, if somewhat coarse, weapon of controversy. It might satisfy men like Hooker, or even Twitgift, to say, no, rational expediency in matters of Church government is the only law and the highest law we can have. But men like Bancroft were not content to maintain their cause with such reasoning. They saw how a theory of divine right carried itself with the popular mind, which, in the second decade before the close of the century, was violently agitated by the Martin Mar-Prolate pamphlets against the bishops and the English hierarchy generally. In these pamphlets the Scriptural Theory of Presbyterianism, with many other popular arguments, was ventilated with a lively, if rough and vulgar, humor. In such circumstances it was that Bancroft conceived the great polemical idea of turning the tables upon the Puritan Presbyterians by the assertion of a converse theory of divine right on behalf of Episcopacy, in his famous sermon at St. Paul's Cross in February 1588. The conformists, it is said, quote, were amazed at the novelty of the doctrine. The Puritans were confounded with the boldness of the claim. Twitgift said he did not believe the doctrine to be true, but he wished that it were. When this counter-dogmatism was once started it gained rapid ground. It addressed not only the popular intelligence, to which a ready-made dogmatism is always the best form of argumentative assertion, but it commended itself to higher minds than Bancroft, such as Soravia, Hooker's friend in his later years, and Thomas Billson, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, and gradually it worked itself into the whole texture of the controversy with the Puritans. Apostolic order, a use to Venom of Episcopacy, arising out of the supposed direct sanction of the apostles in the close of the first century, became the watchword of the one party, as scriptural purity was the watchword of the other. Or, more particularly, the exclusive authority of a threefold ministry, bishops, priests, and deacons, became the special theory, or raison d'être, of the Anglo-Catholics against the tetrarchy or fourfold order, doctors, pastors, elders, and deacons, of the Puritans. Thus at the end of the sixteenth century emerged the rival dogmatisms which were destined to such fatal conflict. With the accession of James I, these dogmatisms are seen confronting one another in the Hampton Court Conference, as elsewhere, conscious of their mutual dislike, but as yet unconscious of the sanguinary issues which were to come from their rivalry. It is not our business to sketch the course of their relations to one another, or to a portion betwixt then the responsibilities of the struggle which ensued. That the deadliest elements of this struggle, however, lay in the womb of these rival theories, admits of no question. All the reflective minds of the time felt this, from hails to hobs. Political complications, and insane abuse of the royal prerogative, and a tyrannous exercise of the executive functions both of church and state, all helped to bring the long-continued struggle to a crisis. But it was the hate and determination engendered by religious fanaticism on both sides that made the fierce background of the struggle and compelled it to be fought out to its bitter end. Hobbes was wrong in seeking to avenge the national confusions upon the religious principle itself by virtually extirpating it, or, what comes very much to the same thing, by subordinating it entirely to the civil authority. But he was not wrong in ascribing the train of calamities which overtook the country to its aggressive and high-handed violence on the one side and the other. It remains for us only farther in this chapter to describe somewhat more fully the characteristic principles and attitude of the rival dogmatisms, and then to point out the special causes which contributed to the formation of a third or liberal party betwixt the two, or, in other words, to the reappearance in a definite and progressive form of the rational religious spirit in which the English Reformation had started, and of which it had already, in Hooker, produced so splendid an example. 1. The Anglo-Catholic system, while narrow in theory and capable both of violent and of vulgar manifestations, yet presents many aspects of speculative and literary interest. It has had the power through all its history of captivating many fine, interesting, and original minds, while in its highest developments it often loses not indeed its bigotry, but all which makes bigotry offensive and dangerous. It is grounded on a strange illusion of a golden patristic age when Christian teachers, reverently termed fathers, enjoyed special advantages of interpreting and declaring divine truth. The Church of England is supposed to inherit the continuous tradition of this golden age under the name of Catholicity, while protesting, along with the other reformed churches, against the abuses and perversions of Rome, it has yet, according to this theory, kept clear of either German or Geneva extremes. It threw off the usurpations of the papacy and translated with modifications the old ritual into the common tongue. It remedied various errors of doctrine and of practice which had crept in during the ages of darkness and corruption, but it has preserved unimpaired the sacredness of the apostolic succession, the deposit of Catholic truth, and the sweetness and grandeur of the ancient prayers. The prestige, dignity, and spiritual authority of the Anglican Church descend with unbroken force from the Canterbury Mission and the Supreme Catholic Church which it represented. The ideal of Anglican Catholicism is not the primitive Church, as it is seen emerging in its rude simplicities from the synagogue, or as pictured in the touching symbolism of the catacombs. It is the Church of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries, with its elaborated creed and full grown splendor. The Orthodox Athanasian Church, illustrated by great names and strong in its possession of the truth against the Arians and others who had threatened its life. To ascend to this Catholic time with any doctrine or usage is sufficient, and indeed the most sufficient warrant either can have. The statements of the Christian writers who then instructed the Church possess an exceptional value and are examined and expounded with a deferential regard only second, if indeed second, to those of Scripture itself. The great ecumenical councils which were held during the same period command special admiration, and their decisions are received with special reverence and faith. The great aim of the school is not to reach the primary ideas of Christianity and trace their growth downwards, to show, for example, how Athanasianism developed from a simpler or less systematized creed, but reading upwards from the great era of Catholic orthodoxy to vindicate even the technical subtleties and barbaric exclusiveness of the Symbolum Quiconque in the earlier Christian remains. Its method, in short, is essentially and in all things dogmatic, yet with a touch of conciliatory breadth which never fails to come from historic studies and the recognition of historic difference or dogmatic growth in any form. The Anglo-Catholic theologian not only rests upon authority, but delights to do so. He works out all his conclusions on assumed data no less truly, if not so entirely, as the medieval theologian did. He starts from recognized principles. He does not go in quest of them. The truth is for him already found and deposited, not to be found or inquired after. He is content and proud to inherit the wisdom of the past and to be the heir of Catholic thought and Catholic worship through many ages. Christianity is not for him characteristically a divine philosophy nor yet a spiritual life, but a dogmatic treasure, an heirloom of the ancient divine family which has gathered the good and orthodox of all generations into its bosom, and he sits reverently at the feet of the great names who have exhibited and transmitted its power or shone with its beauty since it came into the world. Even when we see in this type of theologian a rare force or charm of mind, it is not so much capacity of inquiry or pure love of truth for its own sake that is developed as largeness of faith and receptive power of thought. That which has come along the golden links of Catholic tradition and association, not the result of his own research but a consecrated continuity of opinion, he loves and defends. He rationalizes little, never if he can help it, even when his sweep of argument is boldest and his reason takes its highest flight. This Anglo-Catholic tendency, it is almost needless to say, has more than once in the course of its history shown an inclination towards Romanism. It has, in some of its brightest examples, lost its distinctive national character and returned into the bosom of the older Catholicism, from whose corruptions it professed to have separated. In times of excitement and agitation of the principles lying at its foundation this is inevitable, but it would nevertheless be a grave mistake to confound the general movement with these occasional vacillations. The movement has in itself both a distinct dogmatic and historical life, and is not to be identified with Romanism even if it be true that its principles lead thither when pushed to their logical consequences. The great lines of religious faith in a country are not to be classified and still less exhausted by any applications of logic. And if, on the one hand, Anglo-Catholicism has sometimes inclined to Romanism, it has also, and never more strongly than in the seventeenth century, shown an inclination towards liberalism. This is one of the strange anomalies with which we meet in religious developments. Puritanism, which began in impulses of liberty and which, through all its history, has been so associated with the assertion of political independence and the rights of conscience, has yet always been intolerant of dogmatic differences. In the seventeenth century it manifested this intolerance in an extreme degree. From no quarter did the liberal theological spirit receive more discontentance or more fervent denunciation and resistance. On the other hand, the High Church Party, while servile in spirit and tyrannic in the exercise of constituted authority, is found, and eminently so in the case of its most notable representative, extending patronage to the earliest of our rational theologians. All these theologians came out of the bosom of the party and continued, more or less, closely associated with it. And even in the case of some of the most distinctive of the Anglo-Catholic theologians themselves, there are traces of a certain freedom of thought on purely theological matters, as certain libertas opinandi, as Halen says, on points of philological and scholastic divinity. Some truths, he adds, are found in each school, but not all in any. A statement has the touch of the liberal and eclectic party, so that if Romanism may be said to lie in wait for Anglo-Catholicism on one side, there is a sense in which Latinitudinarianism springs from it on another. 2. Puritan dogmatism, again, rests or is supposed to rest on direct scriptural authority. It appeals simply and absolutely to the Divine Word, which it identifies with Scripture. Its watchword is not only Scripture as an ultimate authority or rule of faith, for in this respect all forms of Protestantism may be said to agree with it, or at least did agree with it in the seventeenth century, but Scripture as an infallible dogmatic code. It has never fairly faced, and during that century it was not even conscious of, such questions as, what is Scripture, and what is the relative dogmatic import of its several books. The Bible presents itself to the Puritan as a uniform manual of doctrine and duty, an absolute law of truth and right, in which his own system is plainly and authoritatively laid down. His special dogmas are supposed to be mere transcripts of its letter. He ignores, and has always ignored, the idea of dogmatic and ecclesiastical development. St. Paul appears to him to speak with as clearly a predestinarian voice as St. Augustine, and the Presbyterian platform to be as clearly revealed as the Levitical economy. He has found even the ruling eldership in a text of the pastoral epistles. All the teaching of life, the experience of history, the accumulations of Catholic ordinance and ritual, have with him comparatively no divine meaning. He is careless of the venerable associations and harmonizing beauties which Christian opinion has gathered during the long lapse of the Christian centuries. The Catholic Church and its traditions, if they are regarded at all, are regarded with no enthusiasm. What the Fathers have written is an altogether secondary or irrelevant question. He sets aside all as a dim and imperfect twilight of tradition to look straight at Scripture and catch the divine truth in its clear daylight. Its formal enunciations and prescriptions alone are presumed to guide him. To the law and to the testimony is his invariable appeal. It is difficult to conceive a more complete antagonism to the Anglo-Catholic theory. Even when the theological conclusions of the two schools may not greatly differ, their modes of argument and of exposition widely disagree. The 39 articles cannot be taken as a characteristic specimen of Anglo-Catholic theology. They were framed before the emergence of its distinctive dogmatic spirit and have, indeed, constituted a main difficulty to the most pronounced adherence of the school who have sought by various glosses to harmonize them with Catholic doctrine. But such as they are, they exhibit a marked difference to the full grown type of Puritan theology, as presented, for example, in the canons of the Synod of Dort, or the chapters of the Westminster Confession of Faith. In the one there is present everywhere a touch of moderation, the softening influence of a conciliatory doctrineism which is true to the positive aspects of Augustinianism and the evangelical import of the great questions raised by the Reformation, but which yet shrinks for the most part from all negative and extreme deductions. Their meaning is Calvinian, but the logic of Calvinism is sparingly used, and a dogmatic scripturism does not obtrude itself. In the other, all generality and scriptural manifoldness have disappeared. The concrete has become abstract, the statement of fact has been transformed into the process of rationsination, and the negative polemical side of almost every truth is set forth in clearer sharpness and definition than its positive substance. Dogmas are rigorously carried out to their consequences, and the intellect and conscience alike are assailed by the coercive authority with which these consequences, in their most theoretic relations, are expressed and enforced. Above all, the letter of Scripture is itself turned into logic, and the divine idea, living and shapely in its original form, is drawn out into hard and unyielding propositions. Nothing is more singular, nor in a sense more impressive, than the daring alliance thus forced to be tricks to logic and Scripture. The thought and the letter, the argument and the fact, are in rot. This identification of Scripture with its own forms of thinking was of the very essence of Puritanism, and gave it something of its marvellous success in an age when argument was strong and criticism weak. To do justice to Puritanism it must be admitted that it did not only bring its ideas to Scripture, but supposed that it found them there. St. Paul appeared to speak to it with its own voice, to be a dogmatist of its own type. Calvinism was only Christianity reduced to a system. It was the divine thought articulated in human language. Calvinian speculation has always this true element of sublimity in it. It soars directly to the throne of God, and seeks to chain all its deductions to that supreme height. But it fails to realize how far men's best thoughts are below this height, and how much human weakness and error must mingle in the loftiest efforts to compass and set forth divine truth. Like Puritanism was the offspring of an uncritical and polemical age when men theologized as they fought with no scruples and no tenderness towards opponents. And this hard and one-sided spirit survives in it. It barely recognizes even now in the sphere of theology that truth is not all on one side. It still looks with jealousy on that more tolerant spirit, both of faith and of criticism, which labors to distinguish the essential from the accidental, and so to penetrate and sift all systems as to labor the multiplied influences of time place and character which have mingled in their production and stamped and colored them with their own impress and hue. It shrinks from the critical impartiality which exposes everywhere the purely human side of Christian doctrine and clings obstinately to ideas of compensation, forensic imputation, and covenants as being of the very essence of the divine truth, original elements of the primitive Christian consciousness. It matters not that the origin of such ideas can be distinctly traced outside of Scripture as temporary conventionalities or transitory habits of human speculation. It delights to identify them with the divine meaning, and parting with them is as if parting with the very substance of divine revelation. In its later ecclesiastical or Presbyterian form, Puritanism cannot be said to connect itself directly with the English Reformation. For, in the first instance, there was no question of abandoning the historical polity of the Church of England. None of the earliest reformers entertained this thought, or supposed that there was anything incompatible between Scripture and the hierarchy of offices into which this polity had grown. Yet in such men as Tyndale, and Latimer, and Hooper, and Ridley, we see something of the same dogmatic Scripturism of which Puritanism was only the full development. The bare text of Scripture is with them a final appeal, and although they accepted the Anglican system, there is little doubt that, if they had been allowed their own way, they would have greatly modified it. If not enamored, like Cartwright and others after the Marian persecution with the Geneva model, they were yet entirely free from Catholic pre-elections. They cared little or nothing for the external dignity and historical associations of the Church, and earnestly desired a reduction of its medieval ceremonies. They were therefore Puritans before Puritanism, and the name had come into vogue before the party can be said to have been formed. As Anglican Catholicism links itself with the Church before the Reformation, with a proud sense of its ancient lineage, Puritanism connects itself with the Reformation as its most characteristic outgrowth, although both in their definite form were really later developments. This side of English religious thought grew and hardened by the very means taken to check and destroy it. The continental experience of the English reformers when driven abroad in the reign of Mary tended greatly to encourage and strengthen it. The hostility of Elizabeth and James I, the vacillations of the Archbishops, now, as in the case of Bancroft, violently denouncing and opposing it, and again in the case of Abbott, temporizing with and favoring it. The pettiness and ignorance of the authorities generally and their small and incessant interferences contributed to nurse its irritations, foster its surly independence, and give point to its zeal. Whether the two sides of thought, if left alone to their natural working, would have come to understand one another, and so have kept the peace, if not coalesced, it is needless to conjecture. There are some indications that they might have done so. There were statesmen in England, like Lord Keeper Williams, who could look with indifference on their antagonism and hold the balance fairly betwixt them. Footnote. Bishop of Lincoln and Chief Ecclesiastical Advisor in the last years of James. End of Footnote. If Williams had not been supplanted by Lod at the accession of Charles and the dogmatic fever propagated under the unhappy rule of the latter prelete to its fiercest height, affairs might have taken a different course. But Lod forced the evil genius of the time. In him were unluckily concentrated all the intensities of one side, not only in an exaggerated and narrow but in an intensely aggressive attitude. Not destitute of generous and liberal qualities, as he has been sometimes painted, nor even without a certain breadth of dogmatic sympathy, he was yet wholly deficient in largeness of mind or any real insight into the thoughts of others. The strengthened earnestness of spiritual convictions differing from his own were unintelligible to him, and so he hardly realized the difficulties with which he had to deal. Not only his policy, his schemes for procuring uniformity and decency of external worship, but his very nature, his watchfulness, and the pettiness and persistency of his interferences proved an irritant of the worst kind. Footnote. All that I labored for in this particular, he said, when charged on his trial with introducing popish ceremonies, quote, was that the external worship of God in this church might be kept up in uniformity and decency and in some beauty of holiness, close quote. End of footnote. Slowly but surely during those years when he and his master and Wentworth may be said to have governed alone, the crisis was ripening. The religious consciousness of Puritanism, far from being subdued, deepened to a darker hue, and gathered a firmer tenacity. Instead of being weakened, it grew strong under oppression, and, adding to its strength, intensity, deliberateness, and a gradually kindling fierceness, it braced itself for the struggle and nursed a wrath which was to be terrible in its vengeance. Three. It was so far a natural result of the attitude of these respective systems, facing one another in unyielding antagonism, that a third or middle party should spring up. Thoughtful men on either side could not but be visited with misgivings as to the effects of such an antagonism, and the futile and miserable controversies which arose from it. They were driven by the very discomforts of the ecclesiastical position to consider whether there was not a more excellent way than that presented by either extreme. Three. Moreover, it was the direct tendency of the controversies between the two sides to raise fundamental questions as to the constitution of the Church, the nature and importance of doctrinal differences, and the relations of authority and freedom within the limits of the national communion. So far, therefore, the liberal movement was born naturally out of the oppositions we have described. It came forth a new element out of the theological fullness of the time. A few reflective minds pondering over the distracted condition of the Church and the country, and wearied with the ceaseless contention between Puritan and Anglo-Catholic, struck their line of thought deeper than either, and brought into view a wider set of principles, in the light of which the old antagonism seemed hollow and false. Getting below the dogmatic basement of both, the structures which had been reared upon them crumbled away, and there was opened up the fair prospect of a higher structure, a Church more true than either had conceived, more divine because more simple and comprehensive. But there were two special causes which contributed to the origin of the new movement. A, as we have already indicated, the influence of Arminianism, and B, the aggressions of popery. A. Arminianism was at first by no means welcomed in England. The Church, moderately but decidedly Augustinian in its theology, looked with hostility upon the liberal movement in Holland. James I professed to be a strong Calvinist, and when the Synod of Dort was convened, sent to it, as is well known, a deputation from the Church of England to countenance and strengthen the Calvinists against the remonstrants. This they did, but the effect of their visit, and still more the visit of one who was not a member of the deputation but who had accompanied the English ambassador to the Hague, was different from what was intended. The proceedings of the Synod, however favourable to the Calvinian Party, were highly unfavourable to dogmatic peace and Christian concord. The questions supposed to be settled when transferred to an English atmosphere were discussed over again with very different results in the case of many of the most active-minded and influential of the clergy. James himself, although he did not formally abjure his Calvinism, was perplexed by the manifestations of the new doctrinal spirit. Those among the clergy who began to incline to Arminianism were found by him the most favourably disposed to his favourite ideas of royal prerogative, while the Puritans were all strict Calvinists. And much as he loved Calvinism, he loved servility and the principle of passive obedience still more. Thus it was that even before the accession of Charles and the date of Lod's influence the current of royal favour had begun to flow steadily towards the novel doctrines and those who espoused them. So far Arminianism became in England merely another form of dogmatism. It passed in fact into the Anglo-Catholic movement as its theological background and gave to it a party meaning and consistency which it had not hitherto possessed. It became, along with Popory, a subject of parliamentary complaint. The High Church and the Puritan parties were henceforth divided theologically as well as ecclesiastically, and the dogmatism of Montague and of Lod himself was more resolved while really less intelligent and devout than the Calvinism of Abbot. But Arminianism was, we have seen, a great deal more than a mere system of doctrines. It raised, wherever it spread, a new spirit of religious inquiry. It opened up large questions as to the interpretation of Scripture and the position and value of dogma altogether and, in short, diffused a latitudinary an atmosphere. The liberal impulses which it thus helped to communicate to a few thoughtful minds in England will be abundantly evident in the course of our volumes. B. But strangely, also, the very activities of Popory at this time served to quicken in England a new seed of thought. The Roman Church had never lost the hope of winning back the English crown and people to its old Catholic allegiance. It had never, even after the death of Mary and the defeat of its great champion Philip of Spain, quite abandoned its intrigues for this purpose. And now, in the last years of James, and especially following the marriage of Charles with the Catholic Princess, it renewed its efforts with redoubled zeal. Flushed by the success of the Jesuits on the Continent and well informed of the prevalent ecclesiastical divisions, it sent its emissaries throughout England under feigned names everywhere to foment the disunion of the two parties and to insinuate the claims of Roman Catholicism as the only remedy for the distractions of controversy and the only means of establishing a stable theology and church order. Many of the higher classes, as in more recent times, were won over by the seductions of these clever and polished polemics. Buckingham's mother became a pervert as early as 1622, and Buckingham himself seemed on the eve of yielding to, quote, the continual cunning labors of Fisher the Jesuit and the persuasions of the lady his mother, close, quote. Footnote. Lod's own statement in his speech to the Lords, 1643. He mentions no fewer than twenty cases of such perverts or waverers, whom, by God's blessing upon his labors, he succeeded in settling in the true Protestant religion. See, as to the extent of the Romanizing influence at this time in England, Hallam's constitutional history, volume 2, page 66 and 67, 10th edition. Massons Milton, volume 1, page 638 at sequence. End of footnote. Lod claimed the credit, by God's blessing, of rescuing him as well as many others from their danger, and especially, as is well known, of bringing back Chillingworth to the bosom of the Church of England. The fact that a mind like Chillingworth's was entangled by the thickly sown sophistries is enough to show how powerful they were, and how ingenious and seasonable their adaptation to the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of the time. But the very stress of the Jesuit arguments opened the way for a more rational theory of religion. The necessity of an infallible Church was their great point. How could men believe a right without some certain guide? How could the form of the Church be settled without some power to settle it? It was the pressure of such questions that drove minds like Falkland and Chillingworth to examine the whole subject of authority and religion and to work it out to its only consistent and reasonable conclusion. Thus, as also in later times, the wave of rational and of Jesuit thought met in collision, the aggressions of the one serving to evoke the full strength and life of the other.