Religious Toleration--Eminent Nonconformists--The Puritans--Oliver
Cromwell--The Pilgrims--The Corporation and Test Acts--Their
Origin--Their Effects upon Dissenters and others--Their virtual
Abandonment and final Repeal--The first Triumph of the Reformers.
For centuries it was a settled maxim in England, that the only sure way
to convert a heretic was to put him to death. All dominant sects have
been persecutors in their turn. The Papists burnt the Episcopalians, the
Episcopalians decapitated the Puritans, and the Puritans hung the
Quakers. With the advancing light of civilization, the dungeon and the
pillory were substituted for the scaffold and the stake. Then, as each
sect had the power, it imprisoned, scourged, and cropped the others. At
length, bigotry was satisfied with imposing pecuniary fines and civil
disabilities on schismatics. Though it is long since the nostrils of a
dominant sect in England have been regaled with the incense of a
roasting heretic, it is only twenty years since the Established Church
of that country erased from the statute book the grosser penalties
against the exercise of the rights of conscience, leaving a sufficient
number unrepealed to operate as a terror to evil doers, and a praise and
a profit to them that do not "dissent."
The struggle between Right and Prerogative, which has agitated the
kingdom for the past half century, has not been confined to civil
institutions. The miter of the archbishop has not been deemed more
sacred from scrutiny than the crown of the monarch. The Church as well
as the State has been shaken by the earthquake tread of Reform.
Prominent among the divines of our time, who have materially contributed
to these results, stand Robert Hall, John Angell James, Ralph Wardlaw,
Thomas Chalmers, and Baptist W. Noel. But the tree of Toleration, whose
fruits the people of England are now gathering, was planted long ago by
hallowed hands. Distinguished among those who, in the expressive phrase
of Burke, early preached and practiced "the dissidence of Dissent, and
the protestantism of the Protestant religion," are Baxter, Owen, Calamy,
Howe, Flavel, Henry, Bunyan, Bates, Doddridge, Law, Watts, and Fuller;
names illustrious in the annals of Nonconformity, whose writings exerted
a wide influence among their cotemporaries, and in our day are the text
books of the profoundest theologians, and the solace and guide of the
most humble and devout of the unlearned classes.
In tracing the origin of recent reforms in the ecclesiastical
institutions of England, due credit should be given to the Puritans of
the times of Cromwell. In the convulsions of 1642-9, the English Church
establishment, the power which had held the national conscience in awe
for more than a century, was overthrown, and Puritanism became the
prevailing religion of the Commonwealth. The professors of the new faith
were distinguished for a strange mixture of austere piety and wild
fanaticism--the natural product of the times in which they lived. No
wonder they were guilty of excesses. The tightest band breaks with the
wildest power. Their extravagances were the spontaneous out-gush of the
soul, when freedom of opinion, suddenly let loose from the thraldom of
ages, found itself in a large place. Our Puritan fathers of the
seventeenth century, by the recoil of the revolutionary wave, found
themselves standing on the _terra firma_ of the rights of conscience,
high above the reach of the returning surge. They must have been more
than mortal, had they not roamed far and wide over the fair country
which spread its tempting landscape around them. No wonder they
indulged in wild speculations, and made extravagant investments, in
those then unexplored regions. They were like captives suddenly released
from the galling chains and stifling atmosphere of the slave ship, who
tread Elysian fields and inhale the intoxicating air of God's unfettered
winds. It is an evidence of their sincerity that they carried their
religion into everything, even their fighting and their politics. Bodies
of their troops, often dispensing with what they denominated the carnal
drum and fife, marched to the harmony of David's Psalms, sung to the
tunes of Mear and Old Hundred. Sermons, extending in length to six and
eight mortal hours, were preached to the regiments, by chaplains mounted
on artillery carriages. The camp of the revolutionists was not more the
scene of rigid military drilling, than of warm discussions on the five
cardinal points of their faith. The Roundheads in Parliament engaged in
debates on original sin, and the scriptural mode of baptism, as well as
upon laws concerning the civil and military affairs of the State. The
very names which figure in the transactions of those times indicate the
spirit of the age. There was Praise-God Barebones, Kill-sin Pimple,
Smite-them-hip-and-thigh Smith, Through-much-tribulation-we-enter-into-
the-kingdom-of-heaven Jones--names as familiar as those of John Hampden
and Harry Vane. What happier illustration of Cromwell's intuitive
knowledge of the men he commanded, than his brief bulletin, pronounced
at the head of his army, on the eve of one of the decisive battles of
the revolution, fought under a drizzling rain, "_Soldiers trust in God;
and keep your powder dry!_" Faith and works.
OLIVER CROMWELL, _the_ man of his age, and whose impartial biography is
yet unwritten, was the soul of old Puritanism, and the warrior-apostle
of religious toleration. He maintained this priceless principle in
stormy debate, on the floor of Parliament, against the passive obedience
of the Churchman, and the uniformity of the Presbyterian, and defended
it amid the blaze and roar of battle against the brilliant gallantry of
Rupert and the fiery assaults of Lesley. The "Ironsides" of the
revolutionary forces, composed of the Independents of Huntingdonshire,
constituting the "Imperial guard" of the republican army, were raised
and disciplined by Cromwell. Through long training, in the camp and the
conventicle, he had fired them with a hatred of kingly and priestly
tyranny, which, in after years, on many a field, under his leadership,
swept to ruin the legions of an arrogant court and hierarchy. The
historic pen of England has done injustice to him and to them. The
reason is obvious. That pen has not been held by their friends, but
their enemies. For a hundred years succeeding Cromwell's time, the
English scholar and historian was dependent on the rich and noble, in
Church and State, for patronage and bread. He must have been a rare man
who coveted opprobrium and penury, by writing against civil and
ecclesiastical institutions, hoary with age and venerated by the great
mass of his countrymen. And these very institutions Cromwell and his
followers had temporarily overthrown. He assisted at the death of the
monarch--they aided to prostrate the church--bringing kings and
subjects, bishops and curates, to a common level. Can we expect the
leveled to do justice to the leveler? English historians have written of
him and them as the beaten always write of the beaters--as the scattered
of the scatterers--the vanquished of the victors. Admitting their
extravagances and their austere sectarianism, the impartial pen will
record of the Puritans of 1645, that they exhibited many of the fruits
of a sincere piety, and fostered the germ of that toleration which
blends the dignity of free thought with the humility of Christian
charity. Their descendants have exhibited all the heroic virtues of
their fathers, tempered with the liberalizing influences of succeeding
generations. Eminent for learning and piety, they have been the patrons
of all the arts which adorn and purify mankind, and, in the darkest
hours of the party of progress and reform, have been true to the good
cause. The scion from the parent stock, planted by the Pilgrims at
Plymouth, in 1620, struck its roots deep into our American soil, and
myriads of master minds in all the States of the Confederacy now repose
under its overshadowing foliage, and pluck the fruits of civil and
religious freedom from its spreading branches.
The power of the Established Church received a blow in the civil wars,
from which it never fully recovered. At the Restoration, under Charles
II, it took advantage of a real or fancied dread of the increase of
Popery in the kingdom, to seduce Dissenters into an acquiescence in the
adoption of laws favoring Episcopal supremacy, and which were
subsequently employed to oppress Protestant Nonconformists. The chief of
these were the _Corporation_ and _Test Acts_, to the enactment,
operation, and final repeal of which, the reader's attention is invited.
Says the complacent Blackstone, "In order the better to secure the
Established Church against perils from Nonconformists of all
denominations, Infidels, Turks, Jews, Heretics, Papists, and
Sectaries--there are two bulwarks erected, called the Corporation and
Tests Acts. By the former, (enacted in 1661,) no person can be legally
elected to any office relating to the government of any city or
corporation, unless, within a twelvemonth before he has received the
sacrament of the Lord's Supper according to the rites of the Church of
England; and he is also enjoined to take the oaths of allegiance and
supremacy at the same time that he takes the oath of office; or, in
default of either of these requisites, such election shall be void. The
other, called the Test Act, (enacted in 1683,) directs all officers,
civil and military, to take the oaths and make the declaration against
transubstantiation, in any of the King's courts at Westminster, or at
the quarter sessions, within six months after their admission; and,
also, within three months to receive the sacrament of the Lord's Supper,
according to the usage of the Church of England, in some public church,
immediately after divine service and sermon, and to deliver into court a
certificate thereof, signed by the minister and churchwardens, and also
to prove the same by two credible witnesses, upon forfeiture of L500,
and disability to hold the same office." The disabilities operated still
further. By subsequent enactments, if any person held office without
submitting to the tests, he was not only fined L500, but was forever
incapacitated from prosecuting any action in the courts of law or
equity, from being the guardian of a child, or the executor or
administrator of a deceased person, or receiving a legacy. By subsequent
legislation, the same tests, except the sacrament, were exacted of
various classes of persons not holding civil or military offices, such
as dissenting ministers, practitioners of the law, teachers of schools
or pupils, members of colleges who had attained the age of eighteen, &c.
As has been stated, the Corporation and Test Acts were passed when
England was alarmed at a threatened invasion of Popery, and their
penalties were intended to be aimed chiefly at Papists, though their
sweeping provisions included all classes of Nonconformists. The
Protestant dissenters, through fear or hatred of the Catholics,
consented to be placed under the general anathema, with a sort of
understanding that, when the danger was over, they should be relieved
from its pressure. They lived long enough to repent of their folly.
These acts were not only a gross violation of the rights of conscience,
but were injurious to the public weal in many respects, and beneficial
in none. Whilst they never made one Christian, they deprived the State
of the services of many of its best and bravest citizens, drove much of
learning and piety from the pulpit, and genius and promise from the
university. By making the profession of a particular creed a necessary
qualification for office, and the reception of the Lord's Supper
according to a prescribed ritual the passport to civil and
ecclesiastical advancement, they degraded the holiest rites of religion,
brought annually to the communion-table of the Establishment thousands
of hypocrites, and placed constantly at its altars hundreds of
horse-racing and fox-hunting clergymen. They were a perpetual source of
annoyance to dissenters who would not barter their faith for place and
pelf, by subjecting them to prosecutions for refusing to qualify
themselves for offices to which they had been maliciously elected, to be
followed by ruinous fines or long imprisonments. In a single year (1736)
L20,700 were raised from fines imposed on dissenters, who
conscientiously refused to serve in the office of sheriff; and for a
long time it was the custom of municipal corporations to elect
dissenters to office, and then enrich their coffers from fines levied
upon them for refusing to receive the qualifying tests. At length, the
common oppression drove Protestant and Catholic dissenters into a
formidable union for the restoration of their common rights, and
engendered a hatred of the Established Church, its clergy, its creed,
and its ordinances, which twenty years of qualified toleration have not
been able to abate or scarcely to mitigate.
Repeated efforts were made for the repeal of these acts. Protestant
dissenters, having suffered their penalties for nearly a century, grew
numerous and influential, when Parliament, instead of boldly meeting the
question of repeal, began to exercise that temporizing cunning so
characteristic of British legislation, and grudgingly ameliorated a
grievance which it had not the grace to wholly abrogate. It commenced
the practice of passing, at the close of each session, amnesty bills,
exempting dissenters, who had violated the acts, from the operation of
their penalties; and so framing the bills as to cover not only past
offenses, but all which might be committed before the close of the next
session, when another bill would be enacted. This relieved dissenters
from practical oppression under these acts, for some eighty years
previous to their final repeal.
But, so intelligent and high-minded a portion of the State were not
content to receive rights inherent and immutable, as an annual boon from
the legislature. The struggle for unqualified repeal never ceased till
the disgraceful acts were blotted from the statute book. On the 26th of
February, 1828, was struck the first successful blow against the
supremacy of the Church of England since the Restoration. Lord John
Russell moved that the House resolve itself into a Committee to take
into consideration the regulations of the Corporation and Test Acts. A
stormy debate followed, in which Bigotry and Power made a desperate
stand for victory. A division showed 237 for the motion, and 193 against
it. In committee, Ministers entreated earnestly for delay, but a
resolution was adopted for the instant repeal of the acts. A bill, based
on this resolution, was introduced, and passed its second reading. The
Bishop of Oxford rent his robes, and Lord Eldon shed many tears--but all
in vain. After witnessing the temper of the House, Mr. Peel declared
that he was prepared to dismiss from his mind every idea of adhering to
the existing laws, and only asked for some slight modifications in the
pending bill. His request being complied with, Ministers withdrew from
the contest, and speedily the Corporation and Test Acts, the offspring
of a grim and bigoted age, ceased to be the law of the realm.
This was the first cardinal measure which the modern reformers had
carried through Parliament (the abolition of the slave trade and the
melioration of the criminal code were advocated by the chiefs of both
parties) during a conflict of nearly half a century. It was hailed as an
era in the contests of the People with the Crown; the harbinger of
better days to come; and was the first in a series of still more
glorious achievements.