The period of which I am to speak is one of the most trodden grounds
of history. It has not indeed the same intense attraction for an
Englishman which the epoch of 1789 has for the Frenchman, for the
interest in one case is purely historical, in the other it is that
of a movement still in progress. Our revolution has long since run
its round. The cycle was limited and belonged essentially to another
world than that in which we live. Doubtless it was not insulated; its
force has been felt throughout the subsequent series of political
action and reaction, but the current along which European society
is being now carried has another and a wider sweep. In the one we
are ourselves too thoroughly absorbed to contemplate its course from
without. From the other we have emerged far enough for our vision of
it to be complete and steady.
But though this is so, and though the period in question is perhaps
more familiar than any other to historical students, it may be
doubted whether its character has ever been quite fairly exhibited.
By partisans it has been regarded without ‘dry light,’ by judicious
historians with a light so dry as not at all to illustrate the
real temper and purpose of the actors. In reaction from the latter
has appeared a mode of treatment, worked with special force by Mr.
Carlyle, which puts personal character in the boldest relief, but
overlooks the strength of circumstance, the organic life of custom
and institution, which acts on the individual from without and from
within, which at once informs his will and places it in limits
against which it breaks itself in vain. Such oversight leaves out an
essential element in the tragedy of human story. In modern life, as
Napoleon said to Goethe, political {278} necessity represents the
destiny of the ancient drama. The historic hero, strong to make the
world new, and exulting in his strength, has his inspiration from a
past which he knows not, and is constructing a future which is not
that of his own will or imagination. The providence which he serves
works by longer and more ambiguous methods than suit his enthusiasm
or impatience. Sooner or later the fatal web gathers round him too
painfully to be longer disregarded, when he must either waste himself
in ineffectual struggle with it, or adjust himself to it by a process
which to his own conscience and in the judgment of men is one of
personal debasement.
It is as such a tragic conflict between the creative will of man and
the hidden wisdom of the world, which seems to thwart it, that the
‘Great Rebellion’ has its interest. The party spirit of the present
day is ill-spent on it. Neither our conservatism nor our liberalism,
neither our oligarchic nor our ‘levelling’ zeal, can find much to
claim as its own in a struggle which was for a hierarchy under royal
licence on the one side, and for a freedom founded in grace on the
other. But if our party spirit is out of place here, not less so
is our censoriousness. As our critical conceit gets the better of
our political insight when we judge of the political capacity of a
nation or class by the roughness of its ideas or the bad taste of
its utterances, so it masters our historical sense when we treat
the enthusiasm of a past age as simulation, its unscrupulousness
as want of principle, and the energy which regards neither persons
nor formulae in going straight to its end as a selfish instinct
of aggrandisement. Yet, again, we do but dishonour God and the
rationality of his operation in the world, if, by way of cheap honour
to our hero, we depreciate the purposes no less noble than his
own which crossed his path, and find nothing but unreason in that
necessity of things which was too strong for his control.
It will be my endeavour in speaking of the short life of English
republicanism to avoid these opposite partialities, and to treat it
as the last act in a conflict beginning with the Reformation, in
which the several parties had each its justification in reason, and
which ended, not simply, as might seem, in a catastrophe, but was
preliminary to a reconciliation of the forces at issue of another
kind than could to an actor in the conflict be apparent. If I seem to
begin far back, I must trust to the sequel for vindication.
{279} The Reformation, we know, opened a breach in the substantial
unity of Christendom, or rather brought to view in a new form one
as old as the conflict between the spirit and the flesh. Such a
breach lies deep down in the constitution of man, as a spirit
self-determined and self-contained, yet related to a world which
it regards as external and its opposite, and so related that from
this world it receives its character, nay, in the proper sense, its
reality. Outward ordinances were in St. Paul’s eyes fleshly and alien
to the spirit. Yet had they been the spirit’s schoolmaster, and in
outward ordinances it was fain in turn to embody itself when it went
forth to recast the world in a Christian society.
The Christianity of the west remained till the Reformation
essentially a Christianity of ordinances. The opposition of church
and empire, of ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction, was not in
any proper sense an opposition of the spirit and the world. The
church and its law had not yet been questioned by the reason, and
hence their authority had not been recognised as rational. The
obedience rendered to them was that of the servant rather than of
the son. The Christ who ruled through them was still a ‘Christ after
the flesh.’ The two swords which Peter showed to Jesus were taken
by medieval fancy as emblematic of the double sovereignty of church
and state, and indeed fitly represented the sameness in kind of the
two powers. Each was a carnal weapon, nor was there any essential
distinction between the objects to which each was applied. Neither
touched the spirit, or rather the spirit was not in a state to be
conscious of the wound. To the higher intellects of the time, like
Dante, the co-ordination of the two seemed an evil, for under the
name of a separation between the spiritual and temporal was covered
an antagonism of sovereignties equally temporal. The one thwarted,
supplemented, combined with the other in the same sphere of outward
relations. Together they built up the firmament of custom and
ordinance, which the boundless spirit had not yet learned to feel as
a limitation.
The Reformation, however, had a history. Not only was it struggling
into life during the whole fifteenth century; it was the result
of the same spiritual throes which long before had issued in
movements superficially most opposite to it; in the impulse to find
in Palestine the Christ whom ordinances had hidden, in periodic
revulsions from recognised and {280} comfortable usage to monastic
poverty and contemplation, in the scholastic effort to rationalise
and thus reconcile to the spirit the dogmas of the church. All these
movements, however, the church, as an outward authority, had been
able to direct. She had been general of the crusades, had stereotyped
monasticism into a ceremonial discipline, and had kept the schoolmen
to the work of spinning threads of which she held the ends. Thus the
very effort of the reason to break its shell had complicated its
confinement. As it was growing more conscious of its inward rights,
the institutions in which it had to acquiesce were becoming more
artificial, and the dogmas to be accepted by it more abstract. The
result was such a conscious entanglement in the yoke of bondage,
holding back the believer from free intercourse with God, as provoked
the spiritual revolt of Luther.
‘Justification by faith’ and ‘the right of private judgment’ are the
two watchwords of the Reformation. Each indicates a new relation
between the spirit and outward authority. ‘Faith’ in the Lutheran
language is raised to a wholly different level from that which it
had occupied in the language of the church. It no longer means the
implicit acceptance of dogma on authority, for lack of which the
‘infidel’ was out of the pale of salvation. As with St. Paul it
expressed the continuous act in virtue of which the individual breaks
loose from the outward constraint of alien ordinances, and places
himself in a spiritual relation to God through union with his Son, so
with Luther faith is simply the renunciation by which man’s falser
self, with its surroundings of observance and received opinion,
slips from him that he may be clothed upon with the person of
Christ. The ghost of scholasticism, no doubt, still haunted Luther,
and led him astray into disquisitions on the relation of faith to
the other virtues. But according to his proper idea, faith was no
positive, finite virtue at all. It was the absorption of all finite
and relative virtues, as such, in the consciousness of union with
the infinite God. Again the spirit searcheth all things, even the
deep things of God, as mysteries which Christ had opened. Again the
handwriting of ordinances contrary to us was blotted out. Again the
conscience moved freely in a redeemed world. [1]
[1] [This passage, from ‘Justification by faith’ occurs in the essay
on Dogma, above, pp. 178-179.]
{281} How was this new consciousness of spiritual freedom and right
to be reconciled with submission to institutions which seemed to rest
on selfish interest or the acquiescence of the animal nature? How
was the dominion of God in the believer’s soul to be adjusted to his
dominion in a church which restrained the operations of his spirit,
and in a state which only honoured him with the lips? Such was the
practical question which the Reformation offered to European society.
Raised first and in its rudest form by Münzer’s anabaptists, it
worked with more subtle influence in all the countries which felt the
Reformation. The opposition between the inward and outward, between
reason and authority, between the spirit and the flesh, between
the individual and the world of settled right, no longer a mere
antithesis of the schools, was being wrought into the political life
of Christendom. It gives the true formula for expressing the nature
of the conflict which issued in the English commonwealth.
This conflict was rightly regarded by the higher intellects that took
part in it as but a stage in a vaster one of which all christendom
was the arena [1]; as a completion of the Reformation, a struggle
against the catholic reaction. In the special form which it assumed
in England we shall find the reason why the course of religious,
and indirectly of political development, with us has been different
from that which obtained severally in protestant Germany, in France,
and in southern Europe. It is only by considering the modes in
which the spiritual forces brought into play in the Reformation
had their relations adjusted elsewhere, that we can appreciate the
nature of their collision and reconciliation in England. These
modes may be summed as respectively jesuitry, the divorce of the
secular from the religious, and the complete assimilation of the
religious to the political life of states. The power by which the
catholic church met the new emergency, the new demand for personal
spiritual satisfaction, was, speaking broadly, jesuitry. So long
as human life remained in that ‘wholeness’ which is health, there
was no room for such an agency. The catholic of the middle ages had
no thought of a spiritual world beyond that presented to him in
the outward institutions of the church. His sins were sins against
some established ordinance, which the upholder of the ordinance
could absolve. But with the awakened conscience of a spiritual
world, apart from all {282} ordinances, to which the soul in its
individual essence for good or evil was related, came a new need
of spiritual direction. Where the reason was strong enough to be a
law to itself, this direction was found in the Bible as interpreted
by the individual conscience. Where the authority of the church
retained its hold, it could only do so by regulating the most secret
intricacies of personal experience, and by meeting the importunities
of personal fear or aspiration by an answer equally personal. Through
the jesuits, as educators and confessors, it was able to do this.
It supplied an elaborate mechanism through which the individual
might work out his own justification in disregard of recognised
outward duties. The protestant idea of an inward light, to whatever
extravagances it might be open, stimulated the sense of a universal
law which the inward light revealed. Hence it has issued, as among
the quakers, in a far-reaching zeal of cosmopolitan philanthropy.
Jesuitry, on the other hand, is the ruin of all public spirit. It
satisfies the individual soul and reconciles it to the church by
casuistical devices which give the guise of reason to the interested
suggestions of personal passion. In saving the soul it ruins nations,
not because it proposes a higher law than that of which the kingdoms
of this world are capable, but because it makes salvation a process
of self-seeking no other than the satisfaction of the hunger of
sense. In southern Europe jesuitry had its way. Sometimes it might
justify the tyrant, sometimes (as in France under the League) the
tyrannicide; but it was equally antagonistic to rational freedom.
Acting on the ruler, it derationalised the state, which came to be,
not the passionless expression of general right, but the engine of
individual caprice under alternating fits of appetite and fear.
Acting on the subject, again, it gave him over to private interests
in the way either of vicious self-indulgence or of the religious zeal
which compounds for such indulgence. The creature of the jesuits is
no longer spontaneously loyal to the institutions under which he is
born, nor yet has he, like the puritan, a new law written on his
conscience which he is to enact in society, but he has a transaction
of his own to negotiate with a power wielding spiritual terrors. He
may be either rake or devotee, but never a citizen, as the Spain and
southern Germany of the seventeenth century too plainly testified.
[1] [Amended from “area”. Tr.]
Thus directed, then, the conflict between inward and {283} outward
interest ends in such a supremacy of the former as gives the state
over to caprice and undermines the outward morality which forms the
moral man. So far as catholic countries have escaped, or recovered
from, such a result, they have done so by the gradual obliteration
or confinement within strict limits of all personal interest in
religion. The Romance nations, it has been often remarked, have not
the same instinct of spiritual completeness as the Teutonic. They are
not distressed by the spiritual divorce which is implied in leaving
religion and morality as unreconciled principles of action. Thus
in some of them we find a political and social interest growing up
in complete independence of the church, and organising itself with
a rational regularity which the protestant politician, constantly
thwarted in schemes which he deems secular by religious intrusion,
may sometimes be disposed to envy. Religion, meanwhile, is regulated,
and the agencies such as jesuitry by which it might interfere with
secular life are carefully watched. Under such regulation it is left
to itself. To the citizen it becomes a mere ceremonial. His attitude
towards it is simply passive. At best it does but fill up the
vacancies of his social life or comfort him in his final seclusion
from it. The devout become a class by themselves, estranged from the
activities of civil life. Only for them and for women, as the passive
element in society, is religion a permanent influence. Wherever
in catholic countries, under the influence of the revolutionary
revival of the last century, the reorganisation of society has been
achieved, it has only been under the condition of this confinement
and passivity of religion. In France, as the source of this revival,
the condition has been most fully realised. It is the natural sequel,
indeed, of the compromise of interests effected by Henry IV.
To the Germans, as to every other nation, the quickened Christianity
of the Reformation brought not peace but a sword. Their religious
wars, however, were rather brought on by crowned violence and the
ambition of the house of Hapsburg than the result of any strife of
principles involved in lutheranism itself. The protestantism of
North Germany, growing up under the protection of princes, from
the first blended with the existing institutions of the state.
It escaped internal rupture, and had not seriously to fight for
existence till the time of the thirty years’ war. It then {284}
owed its preservation, not to itself, but to the sword of Gustavus
and the diplomacy of Richelieu, and Germany emerged from the war in
such a state of wretchedness and exhaustion, that popular religion
was in no condition to assert itself against princely patronage and
control during the ‘constituted anarchy’ which followed the peace
of Westphalia. This circumstance, acting on the German instinct of
comprehension, prevented the antagonism of the secular and religious
from developing itself in the lutheran countries. The German, with
his speculative grasp, has no difficulty in regarding church and
state as two sides of the same spiritual organism. To him each
expresses an idea which is the necessary complement of the other,
and each alike commends itself to his reason. How little the reality
of either church or state may correspond to the idea, how powerless
in action may be the permeating strength of German thought, an
Englishman needs not to be told. But it is important to observe
the effect of this union of strength with weakness, of the faculty
of intellectual fusion with moral acquiescence, in reconciling the
freest spiritual consciousness to secular limitations, and in healing
the breaches of religious strife. All that we associate with the term
‘sectarian’ is for good or evil unknown in Germany. The conflict
of reason and authority has not indeed ceased among the countrymen
of Luther. It has its wars and its truces, its conquerors and its
victims; but its arena has been the study and the lecture-room, not
the market-place or the congregation.
The Reformation in England begins simply with the substitution of
royal for papal power in the government of the church. If Henry
VIII. had left a successor capable of wielding his sceptre, English
religion would scarcely have grown up, as it has done, in the
bracing atmosphere of schism. During the minority of Edward, a form
of protestant episcopacy, unique among the reformed churches, grew
up with a certain degree of independence, while at the same time
ideas of a different order, whose mother was Geneva, were working
undisturbed. The Marian persecution, while it strengthened the
influence of the aggressive Genevan form of protestantism on England,
completed its estrangement from the state. Thus when ‘anglicanism,’
episcopal, sacramental, ceremonial, was established by Elizabeth,
it had at once to deal with an opposite system, thoroughly formed
and {285} nursed in antagonism to the powers of this world. This
system is, so to speak, the full articulation of that voice of
conscience, of the inner self-asserting spirit, in opposition to
outward ordinance, which the Reformation evoked. In this light let us
consider its action in England.
The lutheran doctrine, as we have seen, brings the individual soul,
as such, into direct relation to God. From this doctrine the first
practical corollary is the placing of the bible in the hands of the
people; the second is the exaltation of preaching. From these again
follows the diffusion of popular education. The soul, admitted in
its own right to the divine audience, still needs a language. It
must know whom it approaches, and what it is his will to give. But
as the intercourse is inward and spiritual, so must be the power
which regulates it; not a priest or a liturgy, but the voice of the
divine spirit in the bible, interpreted by the believer’s conscience.
Religion being thus internalised and individualised, preaching,
as the action of soul on soul, becomes the natural channel of its
communication. It is the protestant’s ritual, by which the heart is
elevated to the state in which the divine voice speaks not to it in
vain. Education, again, is the means by which the individual must be
rendered capable of availing himself of his spiritual independence.
A people’s bible, then, a reading people, a preaching ministry, were
the three conditions of protestant life. The force which results from
them is everywhere an unruly one. With the English, who have neither
the acquiescence nor the comprehensive power of the Germans, it at
once, to use the language of a German philosopher, ‘stormed out into
reality.’ It demanded and sought to create an outward world, a system
of law, custom, and ordinance, answering to itself. Not only is the
law of the bible to be carried directly and everywhere into action;
whatever is of other origin is no law for the society whose head is
Christ. An absolute breach is thus made between the new and the old.
Those who by a conscious, deliberate wrench have broken with the old,
and lived themselves into the new, are the predestined people of
God. Outside them is a doomed world. They are the saints, and their
prerogative has no limits. They admit of no co-ordinate jurisdiction
which is of the world and not of Christ. The sword of the magistrate
must be in their hands, or it is a weapon of offence against Christ’s
people.
{286} Such a system soon builds again the bondage which it began
with destroying. Originating, as we have seen, in the consciousness
of a spiritual life which no outward ordinances could adequately
express, it hardens this consciousness into an absolute antithesis,
false because regarded as absolute, between the law of Christ and
the law of the world. The law of Christ, however, must be realised
in the world, and thus from this false antithesis there follows by
an inexorable affiliation of ideas, a new authority, calling itself
spiritual, but binding the soul with ‘secular chains,’ which from
the very fact of its sincerity and logical completeness, from its
allowing no compromise between the saints and the world, is more
heavy than the old. It behoves us to note well these conflicting
tendencies to freedom and bondage, often almost inextricably
convolved, which puritanism contained within itself. It was the
temporary triumph of the one tendency that made the commonwealth
a possibility, and the interference of the other that stopped its
expansion into permanent life. The one gave puritanism its nobility
during its period of weakness while it struggled to dominion; the
other made its dominion, once attained, a contradiction in fact which
no individual greatness could maintain.
Puritanism, in the presbyterian form, had obtained supremacy in
Scotland, while it was still struggling for life in England. In
execution of its principle that a system of positive law was to be
found in the bible, so absolute and exclusive as to leave no room for
things indifferent, it not only established an absolute uniformity
of church government and worship, but made itself virtually the
sovereign power in the state. Without scruple or disguise it pursued
‘the work of reformation’ by conforming under pains and penalties
the manners and opinions of men to a supposed scriptural model. In
England, though the theory of puritanism was the same speculatively,
its position was happily different. No one who believes that the
scriptures are to be looked to, not for a positive moral law, much
less for a system of church polity and ceremonial, but for moral
impulse and principle, can sympathise with the doctrine, which at
first was the ostensible ground of puritan opposition to the church
of England, that whatever scripture does not command, it forbids. In
contrast with this, the position of the early protestant bishops,
that the true rule for matters of church {287} polity is practical
expediency, if it fitted less aptly the interest of its maintainers,
would seem to represent the higher wisdom that gives the world its
due, and recognises the continuity of custom and institution which
builds up the being that we are. Compared, indeed, with such pedantry
as that of Cartwright, the great puritan controversialist under
Elizabeth, the ‘judiciousness’ of Hooker becomes real philosophy.
But in the confused currents of the world it is not always the party
whose maxims are the more rationally complete which has the truer
lesson for the present or the higher promise for the future. The
reforming impulse, the effort to emancipate the inward man from
ceremonial bondage, was with puritanism rather than with the church.
Judaic itself, it yet broke the pillars of Judaism. Its limitations
were its own, and happily it had no chance of fixing them finally
in an outward church. Its force belonged to a larger agency, which
was transforming religion from a sensuous and interested service to
a free communion of spirit with spirit, and just for this reason it
kept gathering to itself elements which its own earthen vessel could
not long contain.
From the puritanism of Cartwright to that of Milton is a long
step upwards; it answers to the descent from the anglicanism of
Hooker to that of Laud or Heylin. The ‘Polity’ of Hooker, under an
appearance of theological artifice, covers a statesmanlike endeavour
to reconcile the protestant conscience to the necessities of the
state and society. The anglicanism of Laud was simply the catholic
reaction under another name. The political change corresponded to the
theological. Elizabeth had ruled a nation. James and Charles never
rose beyond the conception of developing a royal interest, which
religion should at once serve and justify. Thus there arose that
combination, by which the catholic reaction had everywhere worked,
of a court party and a church party, each using the other for the
purpose of silencing the demand for a ‘reason why’ in politics and
religion. Charles and Laud alike represent that jesuitical conscience
(if I may be allowed the expression) which is fatal to true loyalty.
As Milton has it, ‘a private conscience sorts not with a public
calling.’ Such a conscience may be true to a cause, as Charles
and Laud were doubtless, from whatever reason, both true to the
cause of a sacerdotal church. But it dare not look into the law of
liberty, or {288} conceive the operation of God except in a system of
prescribed institutions, about which no questions are to be asked,
and in the maintenance of which cruelty becomes mercy and falsehood
truth. Through the policy of the fifteen years which preceded the
Long Parliament, a policy sometimes outrageous, sometimes trivial,
the same purpose runs. The promulgation of the Book of Sports, the
torturing of writers against plays and ceremonies, the persecution
of calvinism, the suppression of the lectureships by which the more
wealthy puritans sought to maintain a preaching ministry uncontrolled
by the bishops, all tend to divert the human spirit from the
consciousness of its right and privilege to acquiescence in what
is given to it from without. Whether this diversion were effected
in the interest of court or sacerdotalism, whether the head of the
sacerdotal system were the old pope or ‘my lord of Canterbury,’
‘lineally descended from St. Peter in a fair and constant manner of
succession,’ mattered little. The result, but for puritan resistance,
must have been that freedom should yield in England, as it had
yielded in Spain and South Germany, and was soon to yield in France,
to a despotism under priestly direction, which again could end only
in the ruin of civil life, or in its recovery by the process which
relegates religion to women and devotees.
The body of protestant resistance, however, had no organic unity
but that of a common antagonism. Already there was in existence
a sect, not yet directly opposed to presbyterianism, but created
by the demand for a more free spiritual movement than that system
allowed of. The men commonly reckoned as the authors of independency
or congregationalism, an influence which more than any other has
ennobled the plebeian elements of English life, bore the fitting
names of Brown and Robinson. That the brownists were a well-known
sect as early as 1600 is shown by the healthy hatred of Sir Andrew
Aguecheek, who ‘would as lief be a brownist as a politician.’ It was
in 1582, when the puritans were discussing the propriety of temporary
conformity, that Brown wrote his treatise on ‘Reformation, without
tarrying for any,’ and by way of not tarrying for any in his own
case, took to preaching nonconformity up and down the country. After
seeing the inside of thirty-two prisons as the reward of his zeal,
he betook himself to Holland, carrying a congregation with him.
This he afterwards left, and it does not seem {289} certain whether
the subsequent brownist congregations were directly affiliated to
it. Certain views of church polity, however, were current among
them, which formed the principles of independency in later years.
The chief of those were the doctrine of the absolute autonomy of
the individual congregation, and the rejection of a special order
of priests or presbyters. Each congregation was to elect or depose
its own officers, the officer who should preach and administer the
sacraments among the rest. When tho number of communicants in a
congregation became too large to meet in any one place, a new one was
to be formed, but no congregation or sum of congregations was to have
any control in regard to doctrine or discipline over another.
Such a system of church government may not in itself be of more
interest than others. As giving room for a liberty of prophecy
which the rule of bishops or a presbytery denies, its importance
was immense. This appears already in Robinson’s disavowal of the
pretension to theological finality. Robinson, driven from England by
episcopal persecution, had formed a congregation at Leyden. Here, in
regard at least to the reformed churches of the continent, he gave up
the strict separatist doctrine of the original brownists, ‘holding
communion with these churches as far as possible.’ In 1620 the
younger part of his congregation transferred itself to America, where
it founded the colony of New Plymouth. His well-known exhortation
to them at parting breathes a higher spirit of christian freedom
than anything that had been heard since christianity fixed itself in
creeds and churches.
‘If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument
of his, be as ready to receive it as ever you were
to receive any truth by my ministry; for I am verily
persuaded the Lord has more truth yet to break forth out
of his holy word. For my part, I cannot sufficiently
bewail the condition of the reformed churches, who are
come to a period in religion, and will go at present no
farther than the instruments of their reformation. The
lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw;
whatever part of his will God has revealed to Calvin,
they will rather die than embrace it; and the calvinists,
you see, stick fast where they were left by that great
man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery
much to be lamented, for though they were burning and
shining lights in their time, yet they penetrated {290}
not into the whole counsel of God, but were they now
living, would be as willing to embrace farther light as
that which they first received. I beseech you remember,
it is an article of your church covenant, that you be
ready to receive whatever truth shall be made known to
you from the written word of God. Remember that ... for
it is not possible the christian world should come so
lately out of such thick anti-christian darkness, and
that perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.’
[1]
[1] [Neal, _Puritans_, i. p. 477, Ed. 1837.]
It is as giving freer scope than any other form of church to this
conviction, that God’s spirit is not bound, that independency has its
historical interest.
During the period of Laud’s persecution the difference between
the presbyterian and independent order of ideas could not come
prominently to view. The court and sacerdotal party would recognise
no distinction but a greater or less violence of opposition to the
ceremonies enforced by the High Commission, and to the arminianism
and Sunday sport, which were the great means, one inward, the other
outward, of evaporating the consciousness of spiritual privilege
and strength. The so-called puritans were mostly of presbyterian
sympathies, but their ministers, though under frequent suspensions,
adhered to their benefices. They were obliged, indeed, by statute
to use no other than the established liturgy, but no statute then
existed, like that passed after the Restoration, requiring absolute
agreement of opinion with everything contained in the liturgy. The
attitude of temporary conformity under protest might therefore be
a legitimate one for a puritan minister; at any rate it was the
one commonly held. A certain number, however, insisting like the
original Brown on a nonconformity that would tarry for no man, formed
separate congregations, and these were known as Brownists. Their only
chance, however, under Laud, was either to keep in absolute hiding
or withdraw to Holland or New England. If there were many of them in
England at the meeting of the Long Parliament, their presence was due
to an order in council of 1634, a strange instance of the blindness
of persecution, which prohibited emigration to New England without
royal licence.
In the Long Parliament, at the time of its meeting, the only
recognised representative of independency was young Sir Harry Vane.
He was not, indeed, properly of the {291} independent or any other
sect. Baxter, who hated him as a despiser of ordinances, gives him
a sect to himself; but he represented that current of thought which
flowed through independence, but could not be contained by it. His
ideas are worth studying, for they are the best expression of the
spirit which struggled into brief and imperfect realisation during
the commonwealth. In his extant treatises, entitled a ‘Retired Man’s
Meditations’ and a ‘Healing Question,’ and in extracts from other
writings preserved by his contemporary biographer Sikes, we find,
under a most involved phraseology and an allegorising interpretation
of scripture, a strange intensity of intellectual aspiration,
which, if his secondary gifts had been those of a poet instead of a
politician, might have made him the rival of Milton. The account of
him by Baxter, who, with all his saintliness, was never able to rise
above the clerical point of view, may be taken to express the result,
rather than the spirit, of his doctrines.
‘His unhappiness lay in this, that his doctrines were so
cloudily formed and expressed, that few could understand
them, and therefore he had but few true disciples.
Mr. Sterry is thought to be of his mind, but he hath
not opened himself in writing, and was so famous for
obscurity in preaching (being, said Sir Benjamin Rudyard,
too high for this world and too low for the other) that
he thereby proved almost barren also, and vanity and
sterility were never more happily conjoined’ (a clerical
pun). ‘This obscurity was by some imputed to his not
understanding himself; but by others to design, because
he could speak plainly when he listed. The two courses in
which he had most success, and spake most plainly, were
his earnest plea for universal liberty of conscience, and
against the magistrate’s intermeddling with religion,
and his teaching his followers to revile the ministry,
calling them blackcoats, priests, and other names which
then savoured of reproach.’ [1]
[1] [_Reliquiae Baxterianae_, p. 76.]
His zeal for liberty of conscience and disrespect for ministers
were early called into play by his experience as governor of
Massachusetts. The eldest son of one of the most successful courtiers
of the time, he had, when a boy, shown a soul that would not fit his
position.
‘About the fourteenth or fifteenth year of my age,’ he
said of himself on the scaffold, ‘God was pleased to
lay the foundation or groundwork of repentance {292} in
me ... revealing his Son in me, that ... I might, even
whilst here in the body, be made partaker of eternal
life.’
In this temper he was sent to Oxford, where he would not take the
oath of supremacy, and was consequently unable to matriculate. He
then spent some time at Geneva. On his return, his nonconformity gave
such offence to the people about court, that the powers of Laud were
applied in a special conference for the purpose, to bring him to a
better mind. The final result is best stated in the words of a court
clergyman: [1]
‘Mr. Comptroller Vane’s eldest son hath left his father,
his mother, his country, and that fortune which his
father would have left him here, and is, for conscience’
sake, gone to New England, there to lead the rest of his
life, being but twenty years of age. He had abstained two
years from taking the sacrament in England, because he
could get no one to administer it to him standing. He was
bred up at Leyden; and I hear that Sir Nathaniel Rich and
Mr. Pym have done him much hurt in their persuasions this
way.’
Already on the voyage he found that he had not left bigotry behind
him. He had, according to Clarendon, ‘an unusual aspect, which made
men think there was somewhat in him of extraordinary.’ He seems to
have had long hair, a lustrous countenance, and the expression of a
man looking not with, but through, his eyes. ‘His temper was a strong
composition of choler and melancholy.’ These ‘circumstances of his
person’ and his honourable birth, ‘rendered his fellow-passengers
jealous of him, but he that they thought at first sight to have too
little of Christ for their company, did soon after appear to have too
much for them.’ [2] It appeared notably enough in the matter of Anne
Hutchinson, with whom he had to deal as governor of Massachusetts,
having been chosen to that office soon after his arrival, while still
only twenty-three. This brought him into direct relation to the
spirit which the clergy called sectarian, and of which he became the
mouthpiece and vindicator under the commonwealth. Let us consider
what that spirit was. I have already ventured to describe faith in
the higher lutheran sense as the absorption of all merely finite and
relative virtues, as such, in the consciousness of union with the
infinite God. From this principle, as extravagances, if we like, but
necessary {293} extravagances, are derived the fanatic sects of the
seventeenth century, antinomians, familists, seekers, quakers. We
live perhaps an age too late for understanding them. The ‘set gray
life’ of our interested and calculating world shuts us out from the
time when the consciousness of spiritual freedom was first awakened
and the bible first placed in the people’s hands. Here was promised
a union with, a realisation of, God; immediate, conscious, without
stint, barrier, or limitation. Here, on the other hand, were spirits
thirsting for such intercourse. Who should say them nay? Who could
wonder if they drank so deep of the divine fulness offered them,
that the fixed bounds of law and morality seemed to be effaced, and
the manifestation of God, which absorbs duty in fruition, to be
already complete? The dream of the sectary was the counterpart in
minds where feeling ruled instead of thought, of the philosophic
vision which views the moving world ‘sub quadam specie aeterni.’ It
was the anticipation in moments of ecstasy and assurance of that
which must be to us the ever-retreating end of God’s work in the
world. Its mischief lay in its attempt to construct a religious
life, which is nothing without external realisation, on an inward
and momentary intuition. It is needless to investigate the history
of Mrs. Hutchinson’s antinomian heresy, which bears the normal type.
It expressed the consciousness of the communication of God to the
individual soul apart from outward act or sign. Its formula was that
sanctification, _i.e._ a holy life, was no evidence of justification;
and this again was said to lead to a heresy as to the nature and
operation of the Holy Ghost. Practically, perhaps, it was the result
of reaction from the rule of outward austerity under which she lived.
It must have escaped persecution, had she not employed it (in this,
again, anticipating the sectaries of the commonwealth) as a weapon
of offence against the puritan ministers. It was the custom in the
colony to hold weekly exercises, in which lay people expounded and
enforced the sermons heard on Sunday. Mrs. Hutchinson was allowed
to hold such an exercise for women, and unhappily soon turned
exposition into hostile criticism. This roused the fury of the more
rigid professors, who demanded her death as a heretic. Vane protected
her, and in consequence, though supported by the Boston people, was
superseded by Winthrop in the annual election of governor. This
led, soon afterwards, to his return {294} to England; not, however,
before Roger Williams had, through Vane’s influence with the Indians,
obtained a settlement at Rhode Island, and there, for the first time
in Christian history, founded a political society on the basis of
perfect freedom of opinion. In Rhode Island Mrs. Hutchinson found
shelter, but was pursued by the clergy with hideous stories of her
witchcraft and commune with the devil. These Baxter with malignant
credulity was not ashamed to accept, and to ascribe her cruel murder
by the Indians to the judgment of heaven.
[1] [_Strafford’s Letters_, i. p. 463.]
[2] [_The life and Death of Sir Henry Vane_, by George Sikes, p. 8,
Ed. 1662.]
I dwell at some length on this story, because it exhibits in little
the forces whose strife, tempered but not governed by the practical
genius and stern purpose of Cromwell, formed the tragedy of the
commonwealth. Here we find the puritan enthusiasm by a necessary
process, when freed from worldly restraints, issuing in the sectarian
enthusiasm, and then weaning and casting out the child that it has
borne. We see the rent which such schism makes in a society founded
not on adjustment of interests but on unity of opinion, and may judge
how fatal this breach must be when the society so founded, like the
republic in England, is but the sudden creation of a minority, and
exists, not in a new country with boundless room where the cast-off
child may find shelter, but in the presence of ancient interests,
which it ignores but can neither suppress nor withdraw from, and in
the midst of an old and haughty people, proud in arms, whom it claims
to rule but does not represent. In detachment from both parties
stands the clear spirit of Vane, strong in a principle which can give
its due to both alike, yet weak from its very refusal to obscure its
clearness by compromise with either. This principle, which became the
better genius of independence in its conflict with presbyterianism, I
will endeavour to state as Vane himself conceived it.
The work of creation in time, he held, which did but reflect the
process by which the Father begets the eternal Son, involved two
elements, the purely spiritual or angelic, represented by heaven or
the light, on the one hand, and the material and animal on the other,
represented by the earth. Man, as made of dust in the image of God,
includes both, and his history was a gradual progress upward from a
state which would be merely that of the animals but for the fatal
gift of rational will, to a life of pure spirituality, which he {295}
represented as angelic, a life which should consist in ‘the exercise
of senses merely spiritual and inward, exceeding high, intuitive
and comprehensive.’ This process of spiritual sublimation, treating
the spirit under the figure of light or of a ‘consuming fire,’ he
described as the consuming and dissolving of all objects of outward
sense, and a destruction of the earthly tabernacle, while that which
is from heaven is being gradually put on. In the conscience of man,
the process had three principal stages, called by Vane the natural,
legal, and evangelical conscience. The natural conscience was the
light of those who, having not the law, were by nature a law unto
themselves. It was the source of ordinary right and obligation.
‘The original impressions of just laws are in man’s nature and very
constitution of being.’ These impressions were at once the source and
the limit of the authority of the magistrate. The legal conscience
was the source of the ordinances and dogmas of the christian. It
belongs to the champions of the covenant of grace as much as to their
adversaries. It represents the stage in which the christian clings to
rule, letter, and privilege. It too had its value, but fell short of
the evangelical conscience, of the stage in which the human spirit,
perfectly conformed to Christ’s death and resurrection, crucified to
outward desire and ordinance, holds intercourse ‘high, intuitive and
comprehensive’ with the divine.
Doctrine of this kind is familiar enough to the student of theosophic
and cosmogonic speculation. Whether Vane in his foreign travels
had fallen in with the writings of Jacob Boehme we cannot say, but
the family likeness is strong. The interest of the doctrine for us
lies in its application to practical statesmanship by the keenest
politician of a time when politicians were keen and strong. That
it should have been so applied has been a sore stumbling-block to
two classes of men not unfrequently found in alliance, sensational
philosophers, and theologians who find the way of salvation
in scripture construed as an act of parliament. The man above
ordinances, as Vane was called by his contemporaries, [1] was
naturally not a favourite with men whom he would have reckoned in
bondage to the legal conscience. Baxter’s opinion of him has been
already quoted. To the lawyers, calling themselves theologians, of
the next century he was even less intelligible. Burnet had ‘sometimes
taken pains to see if I could find out his meaning in his words, yet
I could never reach it. And since many others {296} have said the
same, it may be reasonable to believe that he hid somewhat that was
a necessary key to the rest.’ [2] Clarendon had been more modest;
when he had read some of his writings and ‘found nothing in them of
his usual clearness and ratiocination in his discourse, in which he
used much to excel the best of the company he kept’ (the company, we
must remember, that called Milton friend), ‘and that in a crowd of
very easy words the sense was too hard to find out, I was of opinion
that the subject of it was of so delicate a nature that it required
another kind of preparation of mind, and perhaps another kind of
diet, than men are ordinarily supplied with.’ [3] Hume was superior
to such a supposition; ‘This man, so celebrated for his parliamentary
talents, and for his capacity in business, has left some writings
behind him. They treat all of them of religious subjects and are
absolutely unintelligible. No traces of eloquence, even of common
sense, appear in them.’ In this language is noticeable a certain
resentment common to men of the world and practical philosophers,
that a man whom they deem a fool in his philosophy should not be
a fool altogether. From his derided theosophy, however, Vane had
derived certain practical principles, now of recognised value, which
no statesman before him had dreamt of, and which were not less potent
when based on religious ideas struggling for articulate utterance,
than when stated by the masters of an elegant vocabulary from which
God and spirit were excluded.
[1] [Amended from “cotemporary”. Tr.]
[2] [Burnet, _Own Time_, p. 108, Ed. 1838.]
[3] [Clarendon on ‘Creasy’s answer to Stillingfleet,’ as quoted in
the _Biographia Britannica_ (art. ‘Vane.’)]