CHURCH AND STATE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
I
The Revolution of 1688 drew its main source of strength from the
traditional dislike of Rome, and the eager desire to place the Church of
England beyond the reach of James' aggression. Yet it was not until a
generation had passed that the lines of ecclesiastical settlement were,
in any full sense clear. The difficulties involved were mostly
governmental, and it can hardly even yet be said that they have been
solved. The nature of the relation between Church and State, the
affiliation between the Church and Nonconformist bodies, the character
of its internal government--all these had still to be defined. Nor was
this all. The problem of definition was made more complex by schism and
disloyalty. An important fraction of the Church could not accept at all
the fact of William's kingship; and if the larger part submitted, it
cannot be said to have been enthusiastic.
Nor did the Church make easy the situation of the Nonconformists.
Toleration of some kind was rapidly becoming inevitable; and with a
Calvinist upon the throne persecution of, at any rate, the Presbyterians
became finally impossible. Yet the definition of what limits were to be
set to toleration was far from easy. The Church seemed like a fortress
beleaguered when Nonjurors, Deists, Nonconformists, all alike assaulted
her foundations. To loosen her hold upon political privilege seemed to
be akin to self-destruction. And, after all, if Church and State were to
stand in some connection, the former must have some benefit from the
alliance. Did such partnership imply exclusion from its privilege for
all who could not accept the special brand of religious doctrine? Locke,
at least, denied the assumption, and argued that since Churches are
voluntary societies, they cannot and ought not to have reciprocal
relation with the State. But Locke's theory was meat too strong for the
digestion of his time; and no statesman would then have argued that a
government could forego the advantage of religious support. And William,
after all, had come to free the church from her oppressor. Freedom
implied protection, and protection in that age involved establishment.
It was thus taken for granted by most members of the Church of England
that her adoption by the State meant her superiority to every other form
of religious organization. Superiority is, by its nature exclusive, the
more especially when it is united to a certainty of truth and a kinship
with the dominant political interest of the time. Long years were thus
to pass before the real meaning of the Toleration Act secured
translation into more generous statutes.
The problem of the Church's government was hardly less complex. The very
acerbity with which it was discussed proclaims that we are in an age of
settlement. Much of the dispute, indeed, is doubtless due to the dislike
of all High Churchmen for William; with their consequent unwillingness
to admit the full meaning of his ecclesiastical supremacy. Much also is
due to the fact that the bench of bishops, despite great figures like
Tillotson and Wake, was necessarily chosen for political aptitude rather
than for religious value. Nor did men like Burnet and Hoadly, for all
their learning, make easy the path for brethren of more tender
consciences. The Church, moreover, must have felt its powers the more
valuable from the very strength of the assault to which she was
subjected. And the direct interference with her governance implied by
the Oaths of Allegiance and of Abjuration raised questions we have not
yet solved. It suggested the subordination of Church to State; and men
like Hickes and Leslie were quick to point out the Erastianism of the
age. It is a fact inevitable in the situation of the English Church that
the charge of subjection to the State should rouse a deep and quick
resentment. She cannot be a church unless she is a _societas perfecta_;
she cannot have within herself the elements of perfect fellowship if
what seem the plain commands of Christ are to be at the mercy of the
king in Parliament. That is the difficulty which lies at the bottom of
the debate with Wake in one age and with Hoadly in the next. In some
sort, it is the problem of sovereignty that is here at issue; and it is
in this sense that the problems of the Revolution are linked with the
Oxford Movement. But Newman and his followers are the unconscious
sponsors of a debate which grows in volume; and to discuss the thoughts
of Wake and Hoadly and Law is thus, in a vital aspect, the study of
contemporary ideas.
We are not here concerned with the wisdom of those of William's advisers
who exacted an oath of allegiance from the clergy. It raised in acute
form the validity of a doctrine which had, for more than a century, been
the main foundation of the alliance between throne and altar in England.
The demand precipitated a schism which lingered on, though fitfully,
until the threshold of the nineteenth century. The men who could not
take the oath were, many of them, among the most distinguished churchmen
of the time. Great ecclesiastics like Sancroft, the archbishop of
Canterbury and one of the seven who had gained immortality by his
resistance to James, saints like Ken, the bishop of Bath and Wells,
scholars like George Hickes and Henry Dodwell, men like Charles Leslie,
born with a genius for recrimination; much, it is clear, of what was
best in the Church of England was to be found amongst them. There is not
a little of beauty, and much of pathos in their history. Most, after
their deprivation, were condemned to poverty; few of them recanted. The
lives of men like Sancroft and Ken and the younger Ambrose Bonwicke are
part of the great Anglican tradition of earnest simplicity which later
John Keble was to illustrate for the nineteenth century. The Nonjurors,
as they were called, were not free from bitterness; and the history of
their effort, after the consecration of Hilkiah Bedford and Ralph
Taylor, to perpetuate the schism is a lamentable one. Not, indeed, that
the history even of their decline is without its interest; and the
study, alike of their liturgy and their attempt at reunion with the
Eastern Church, must always possess a singular interest for students of
ecclesiastical history.
Yet the real interest of the Nonjuring schism was political rather than
religious; and its roots go out to vital events of the past. At the
bottom it is the obverse side of the Divine Right of kings that they
represent. That theory, which was the main weapon of the early secular
state against the pretensions of Rome, must naturally have commanded the
allegiance of members of a church which James I, its main exponent, had
declared of vital import to his very existence. Its main opponents,
moreover, were Catholics and Dissenters; so that men like Andrewes must
have felt that when they answered Bellarmine they were in substance also
defenders of their Church. After the great controversy of James I's
reign resistance as a duty had come to be regarded as a main element in
Jesuit and Nonconformist teaching; with the result that its antithesis
became, as a consequence of the political situation, no less integral a
part of Church of England doctrine. For it was upon the monarchy that
the Church had come to depend for its existence; and if resistance to
the king were made, as Knox and Bellarmine had in substance made it, the
main weapon of the dissenting churches there was little hope that it
would continue to exist once the monarchy was overthrown. And it is
this, unquestionably, which explains why stout ecclesiastics like Barrow
and Jackson can write in what seems so Erastian a temper. When they urge
the sovereignty of the State, their thesis is in truth the sovereignty
of the Church; and that means the triumph of men who looked with
contemptuous hatred upon Nonconformists of every sect. The Church of
England taught non-resistance as the condition of its own survival.
How deep-rooted this doctrine had become in the course of the
seventeenth century the writings of men like Mainwaring and Sanderson
sufficiently show; yet nothing so completely demonstrates its widespread
acceptance as the result of the Revolution. Four hundred clergy
abandoned their preferment because James ruled by Divine Right; and they
could not in conscience resist even his iniquities. An able tract of
1689[10] had collected much material to show how integral the doctrine
was to the beliefs of the Church. Had William's government, indeed,
refrained from the imposition of the oath, it is possible that there
might have been no schism at all; for the early Nonjurors at
least--perhaps Hickes and Turner are exceptions--would probably have
welcomed anything which enabled the avoidance of schism. Once, however,
the oath was imposed three vital questions were raised. Deprivation
obviously involved the problem of the power of the State over the
Church. If the act of a convention whose own legality was at best
doubtful could deprive the consecrated of their position, was the Church
a Church at all, or was it the mere creature of the secular power? And
what, moreover, of conscience? It could not be an inherent part of the
Church's belief that men should betray their faith for the sake of
peace. Later thinkers added the purely secular argument that resistance
in one case made for resistance in all. Admit, it was argued by Leslie,
the right to disobey, and the fabric of society is at a stroke
dissolved. The attitude is characteristic of that able controversialist;
and it shows how hardly the earlier notions of Divine Right were to
die.
[Footnote 10: _The History of Passive Obedience_. Its author was
Jeremy Collier.]
These theories merit a further examination. Williams, later the Bishop
of Chichester, had argued that separation on the basis of the oath was
unreasonable. "All that the civil power here pretends to," he wrote "is
to secure itself against the practices of dissatisfied persons." The
Nonjurors, in this view, were making an ecclesiastical matter of a
purely secular issue. He was answered, among others, by Samuel Grascom,
in an argument which found high favor among the stricter of his sect.
"The matter and substance of these Oaths," he said, "is put into the
prayers of the Church, and so far it becomes a matter of communion. What
people are enjoined in the solemn worship to pray for, is made a matter
of communion; and if it be simple, will not only justify, but require a
separation." Here is the pith of the matter. For if the form and
substance of Church affairs is thus to be left to governmental will,
then those who obey have left the Church and it is the faithful remnant
only who constitute the true fellowship. The schism, in this view, was
the fault of those who remained subject to William's dominion. The
Nonjurors had not changed; and they were preserving the Church in its
integrity from men who strove to betray it to the civil power.
This matter of integrity is important. The glamour of Macaulay has
somewhat softened the situation of those who took the oaths; and in his
pages the Nonjurors appear as stupid men unworthily defending a dead
cause. It is worth while to note that this is the merest travesty.
Tillotson, who succeeded Sancroft on the latter's deprivation, and
Burnet himself had urged passive resistance upon Lord William Russell as
essential to salvation; Tenison had done likewise at the execution of
Monmouth. Stillingfleet, Patrick, White Kennett, had all written in its
favor; and to William Sherlock belongs the privilege of having defended
and attacked it in two pamphlets each of which challenges the pithy
brilliance of the other. Clearly, so far as consistency is in question,
the Nonjurors might with justice contend that they had right on their
side. And even if it is said that the policy of James introduced a new
situation the answer surely is that Divine Right and non-resistance can,
by their very nature, make no allowance for novelty.
The root, then, of this ecclesiastical contention is the argument later
advanced by Leslie in his "Case of the Regale and the Pontificate" in
which he summarized the Convocation dispute. The State, he argues, has
no power over bishops whose relationship to their flock is purely
spiritual and derived from Christ. The Church is independent of all
civil institution, and must have therefore within herself the powers
necessary to her life as a society. Leslie repudiates Erastianism in the
strongest terms. Not only is it, for him, an encroachment upon the
rights of Christ, but it leads to deism in the gentry and to dissent
among the common people. The Church of England comes to be regarded as
no more than the creature of Parliamentary enactment; and thus to leave
it as the creature of human votes, is to destroy its divinity.
It is easy enough to see that men who felt in this fashion could hardly
have decided otherwise than as they did. The matter of conscience,
indeed, was fundamental to their position. "I think," said the Bishop of
Worcester on his death-bed, "I could suffer at a stake rather than take
this oath." That, indeed, represents the general temper. Many of them
did not doubt that James had done grievous wrong; but they had taken the
oath of allegiance to him, and they saw in their conscience no means of
escape from their vow. "Their Majesties," writes the author of the
account of Bishop Lake's death, "are the two persons in the world whose
reign over them, their interest and inclination oblige them most to
desire, and nothing but conscience could restrain them from being as
forward as any in all expressions of loyalty." In such an aspect, even
those who believe their attitude to have been wrong, can hardly doubt
that they acted rightly in their expression of it. For, after all,
experience has shown that the State is built upon the consciences of
men. And the protest they made stands out in the next generation in
vivid contrast to a worldly-minded and politically-corrupt Church which
only internal revolution could awaken from its slumbers.
No one represents so admirably as Charles Leslie the political argument
of the case. At bottom it is an argument against anarchy that he
constructs, and much of what he said is medieval enough in tone to
suggest de Maistre's great defence of papalism as the secret of
world-order. He stands four square upon divine right and passive
obedience. "What man is he who can by his own natural authority bend the
conscience of another? That would be far more than the power of life,
liberty or prosperity. Therefore they saw the necessity of a divine
original." Such a foundation, he argued elsewhere, is necessary to
order, for "if the last resort be in the people, there is no end of
controversy at all, but endless and unremediable confusion." Nor had he
sympathy for the Whig attack on monarchy. "The reasons against Kings,"
he wrote, "are as strong against all powers, for men of any titles are
subject to err, and numbers more than fewer." And nothing can unloose
the chain. "Obedience," he said in the _Best of All_, "is due to
commonwealths by their subjects even for conscience' sake, where the
princes from whom they have revolted have given up their claim."
The argument has a wider history than its controversial statement might
seem to warrant. At bottom, clearly enough, it is an attack upon the new
tradition which Locke had brought into being. What seems to impress it
most is the impossibility of founding society upon other than a divine
origin. Anything less will not command the assent of men sufficiently to
be immune from their evil passions. Let their minds but once turn to
resistance, and the bonds of social order will be broken. Complete
submission is the only safeguard against anarchy. So, a century later,
de Maistre could argue that unless the whole world became the subject of
Rome, the complete dissolution of Christian society must follow. So,
too, fifty years before, Hobbes had argued for an absolute dominion lest
the ambitions and desires of men break through the fragile boundaries of
the social estate.
The answer is clear enough; and, indeed, the case against the Nonjurors
is nowhere so strong as on its political side. Men cannot be confined
within the limits of so narrow a logic. They will not, with Bishop Ken,
rejoice in suffering as a doctrine of the Cross. Rather will oppression
in its turn arouse a sense of wrong and that be parent of a conscience
which provokes to action. Here was the root of Locke's doctrine of
consent; for unless the government, as Hume was later to point out, has
on its side the opinion of men, it cannot hope to endure. The fall of
James was caused, not as the Nonjurors were tempted to think, by popular
disregard of Divine personality, but by his own misunderstanding of the
limits to which misgovernment may go. Here their opponents had a
strong case to present; for, as Stillingfleet remarked, if William had
not come over there might have been no Church of England for the
Nonjurors to preserve. And other ingenious compromises were suggested.
Non-resistance, it was argued by Sherlock, applied to government in
general; and the oath, as a passage in the _Convocation Book_ of Overall
seemed to suggest, might be taken not less to a _de facto_ monarch than
to one _de jure_. Few, indeed would have taken the ground of Bishop
Burnet, and allotted the throne to William and Mary as conquerors of
the Kingdom; at least the pamphlet in which this uncomfortable doctrine
was put forward the House of Commons had burned by the common hangman.
What really defeated the Nonjurors' claims was commonsense. Much the
ablest attack upon their position was Stillingfleet's defence of the
policy employed in filling up the sees vacated by deprivation; and it is
remarkable that the theory he employs is to insist that unless the
lawfulness of what had been done is admitted, the Nonjuror's position is
inevitable. "If it be unlawful to succeed a deprived bishop," he
wrote,[11] "then he is the bishop of the diocese still: and then the law
that deprives him is no law, and consequently the king and Parliament
that made that law no king and Parliament: and how can this be
reconciled with the Oath of Allegiance, unless the Doctor can swear
allegiance to him who is no King and hath no authority to govern." All
this the Nonjurors would have admitted, and the mere fact that it could
be used as argument against them is proof that they were out of touch
with the national temper. What they wanted was a legal revolution which
is in the nature of things impossible. We may regret that the oath was
deemed essential, and feel that it might not have been so stoutly
pressed. But the leaders of a revolution "tread a path of fire"; and the
fault lay less at the door of the civil government than in the fact that
this was an age when men acted on their principles. William and his
advisers, with the condition of Ireland and Scotland a cause for
agitation, with France hostile, with treason and plot not absent from
the episcopate itself, had no easy task; what, in the temper of the
time, gives most cause for consideration, is the moderate spirit in
which they accomplished it.
[Footnote 11: _A Vindication of their Majesties' Authority to fill
the Sees of the Deprived Bishops_ (1691).]
III
The Nonjuring schism was by no means the only difficulty which the
Church of England had to confront in these troubled years. The
definition of her relationship with State and nation, if at the moment
it aroused less bitterness, was in the long run more intricate in its
nature. That some sort of toleration was inevitable few, save a group of
prejudiced irreconcilables, would have denied. But greater things were
in the air, and there were still many who dreamed of a grand scheme of
Comprehension, by which all save the more extreme Dissenters would have
been admitted to the Church. It is this which explains the acrimonious
debates of the next two years. The hatred of the Church for dissent can
only be understood by those who study with care the insults heaped upon
her by the sectaries during the Civil Wars. That men who had striven for
her dissolution should be admitted to her privileges seemed to Churchmen
as tragic as ironical. Nor must we miss the political aspect of the
matter. William had received an eager, if natural, support from
Nonconformists; and since the vast majority of them was Whig in temper,
the greater the degree of toleration, the greater likelihood there was
of an attack upon the Church. Exclusion thus became a fundamental
article of the Tory creed; and it was the more valued because it
enabled them to strike at their opponents through an institution which
at the trial of Sacheverell, in 1710, still showed an overwhelming hold
upon the mass of the people.
The attitude of mind herein implied is in large part the reaction from
the Erastian temper of the government. Under William, that temper is
intelligible enough; for unless he held the Church in strict control, he
must have felt that he was giving a large handle to his enemies. Under
Anne, the essence of the situation remained unchanged, even though her
eager sympathy with the Church was beyond all question. William had
relieved Nonconformists from the burden of penal statute; the Occasional
Conformity Act of 1713 broadly continued the exclusion of all save the
more yielding of them from political office. When the Hanoverians
succeeded they were willing to repeal its more rigid intolerance; but
the Test Act remained as evidence that the Dissenters were not yet
regarded as in a full sense part of the national life.
The reasons for the hatred of dissent go back in part to the Civil War
and in part also to the feeling of common ground between the dissenting
interest and Rome which was born of the struggle under Elizabeth and
James. The pamphlets are innumerable; and most of them deserve the
complete obliquity into which they have fallen. We are told, in the
eighteenth as in the seventeenth century, that the Presbyterian theory
of government is inconsistent with the existence of the civil power.
"They claim," said Leslie, "power to abrogate the laws of the land
touching ecclesiastical matters, if they judge them hurtful or
unprofitable... They require the civil magistrate to be subject to their
power." Of Knox or Cartwright this is no unfair account; but of the
later Presbyterians it is the merest travesty. It supposes that they
would be willing to push to the utmost limit the implications of the
theory of the two kingdoms--a supposition which their passive submission
to the Act of 1712 restoring lay patronage decisively refutes. Bramhall
had no doubt that their discipline was "the very quintessence of refined
popery," and the argument is repeated by a hundred less learned
pamphleteers. Neither the grim irony of Defoe nor the proven facts of
the case could wean either the majority of Churchmen or the masses of
the people from the belief that the Revolution endangered the very
existence of the Church and that concession would be fatal. So stoutly
did the Church resist it that the accession of George I alone, in
Lecky's view, prevented the repeal of the Toleration Act and the
destruction of the political benefits of the Revolution.
But nowhere was the temper of the time more clearly displayed than in
the disputes over Convocation. To William's advisers, perhaps, more than
to the Church itself their precipitation is due; for had they not, at
the outset of the reign, suggested large changes in the liturgy
suspicions then aroused might well have slumbered. As it was, the
question of the royal supremacy immediately came into view and the
clergy spared no effort to meet the issue so raised. And this they felt
the more bitterly because the upper house of Convocation, two-thirds of
which were William's nominees, naturally inclined to his side. Both
under William and Anne the dispute continued, and the lower clergy
shrank from no opportunity of conflict. They fought the king, the
archbishop, the upper house. They attacked the writings of Toland and
Burnet, the latter's book since recognized as one of the great treasures
of Anglican literature. In the main, of course, the struggle was part of
the perennial conflict between High Church doctrine and
latitudinarianism. But that was only a fragment of the issue. What
really was in question was the nature of the State's power over the
Church. That could be left unanswered so long, as with James I and
Charles, the two powers had but a single thought. The situation changed
only when State and Church had different policies to fulfil and
different means for their attainment.
The controversy had begun on the threshold of William's accession; but
its real commencement dates from 1697. In that year was published the
_Letter to a Convocation Man_, probably written by Sir Bartholomew
Shower, an able if unscrupulous Jacobite lawyer, which maliciously,
though with abounding skill, raised every question that peaceful
churchmen must have been anxious to avoid. The _Letter_ pointed out the
growth of infidelity and the increasing suspicion that the Church was
becoming tainted with Socinian doctrine. Only the assembly of
Convocation could arrest these evils. The author did not deny that the
king's assent was necessary to its summons. But he argued that once the
Convocation had met, it could, like Parliament, debate all questions
relevant to its purpose. "The one of these courts," said Shower, "is of
the same power and use with regard to the Church as the other is in
respect to the State," and he insisted that the writ of summons could
not at any point confine debate. And since the Convocation was an
ecclesiastical Parliament, it followed that it could legislate and thus
make any canons "provided they do not impugn common law, statutes,
customs or prerogative." "To confer, debate and resolve," said Shower,
"without the king's license, is at common law the undoubted right of
convocation."
Here was a clear challenge which was at once answered, in _The Authority
of Christian Princes_, by William Wake, who was by far the most learned
of the latitudinarian clergy, and the successor of Tenison in the see of
Canterbury. His argument was purely historical. He endeavored to show
that the right to summon ecclesiastical synods was always the
prerogative of the early Christian princes until the aggression of the
popes had won church independence. The Reformation resumed the primitive
practice; and the Act of Submission of 1532 had made it legally
impossible for the clergy to discuss ecclesiastical matters without
royal permission. Historically, the argument of Wake was irrefutable;
but what mostly impressed the Church was the uncompromising Erastianism
of his tone. Princes, he said, "may make what laws or constitutions they
think fit for the Church.... a canon is but as matter prepared for the
royal stamp." In this view, obviously, the Church is more than a
department of the State. But Wake went even farther, "I cannot see why
the Supreme Magistrate," he wrote, "who confessedly has a power to
confirm or reject their (Convocation's) decrees, may not also make such
other use of them as he pleases, and correct, improve, or otherwise
alter their resolutions, according to his own liking, before he gives
his authority to them."
So defined no Church could claim in any true sense the headship of
Christ; for it was clearly left at the mercy of the governmental view of
expedient conduct. Wake's answer aroused a sensation almost as acute as
the original _Letter_ of Shower. But by far the ablest criticism it
provoked was that of Francis Atterbury, then a young student of Christ
Church and on the threshold of his turbulent career. His _Rights, Powers
and Privileges of an English Convocation Stated and Vindicated_ not only
showed a masterly historic sense in its effort to traverse the
unanswerable induction of Wake, but challenged his position more
securely on the ground of right. The historical argument, indeed, was
not a safe position for the Church, and Wake's rejoinder in his _State
of the Church_ (1703) is generally conceded to have proved his point, so
far as the claim of prescription is concerned. But when Atterbury moves
to the deeper problem of what is involved in the nature of a church, he
has a powerful plea to make. It is unnecessary now to deal with his
contention that Wake's defence of the Royal Supremacy undermines the
rights of Parliament; for Wake could clearly reply that the seat of that
power had changed with the advent of the Revolution. Where the avoidance
of sympathy is difficult is in his insistence that no Church can live
without an assembly to debate its problems, and that no assembly can be
real which is subject to external control. "Their body," as he remarks,
"will be useless to the State and by consequence contemptible"; for its
opinions will not be born of that free deliberation which can alone
ensure respect. Like all High Churchmen, Atterbury has a clear sense
that Church and State can no longer be equated, and he is anxious to
preserve the personality of the Church from the invasions of an alien
body. To be real, it must be independent, and to be independent, it must
have organs of self-expression. But neither William nor Anne could
afford to forego the political capital involved in ecclesiastical
control and Erastian principles proceeded to their triumph.
Here, as elsewhere, it was Charles Leslie who best summed up the
feeling of High Churchmen. His _Case of the Regale_ (1701) is by far the
ablest of his many able performances. He saw at the outset that the real
issue was defined by the Church's claim to be a divine society, with
rights thus consecrated by the conditions of its origin. If it was
divine, invasion did not touch its _de jure_ rights. "How," he asked,
"can rights that are divine be given up? If they are divine, no human
authority can either supersede or limit them.... How can rights that are
inherent be given up? If they are inherent, they are inseparable. The
right to meet, to consult, to make rules or canons for the regulation of
the society, is essential to every society as such ... can she then part
with what is essential to her?" Nor could it be denied that "where the
choice of the governors of one society is in the hands of another
society, that society must be dependent and subject to the other." The
Church, in the Latitudinarian view was thus either the creature of the
state or an _imperium in imperio_; but Leslie would not admit that
fruitful stumbling block to the debate. "The sacred and civil powers
were like two parallel lines which could never meet or interfere ... the
confusion arises ... when the civil power will take upon them to control
or give laws to the Church, in the exercise of her spiritual authority."
He did not doubt that the Church should give securities for its loyalty
to the king, and renounce any effort at the coercion of the civil
magistrate. But the Church was entitled to a similar privilege, and
kings should not "have their beneficence and protection to the Church of
Christ understood as a bribe to her, to betray and deliver up into their
hands the powers committed into her charge by Christ." Nor did he fail
to point out the suicidal nature of Erastianism. For the church's hold
upon men is dependent upon their faith in the independence of her
principles. "When they see bishops," he wrote wisely, "made by the
Court, they are apt to imagine that they speak to them the court
language; and lay no further stress upon it than the charge of a judge
at an assizes, who has received his instructions beforehand from the
Court; and by this means the state has lost the greatest security of her
government."
The argument is powerful enough; though it should be noted that some of
its implications remain undetermined. Leslie does not say how the
spheres of Church and State are to be differentiated. He does not
explain the methods whereby an establishment is to be made compatible
with freedom. For it is obvious that the partnership of Church and State
must be upon conditions; and once the State had permitted the existence
of creeds other than that of its official adoption, it could not
maintain the exclusive power for which the Church contended. And when
the Church not only complained of State-betrayal, but attempted the use
of political means to enforce remedial measures it was inevitable that
statesmen would use the weapons ready to their hand to coerce it to
their will. The real remedy for the High Churchmen was not exclusiveness
but disestablishment.
That this is the meaning of the struggle did not appear until the reign
of George I. What is known as the Bangorian controversy was due to the
posthumous publication, in 1716, of the papers of George Hickes, the
most celebrated of the Nonjurors in his generation. The papers are of
no special import; but taken in connection with the Jacobite rising of
1715 they seemed to imply a new attack upon the Revolution settlement.
So, at least, they were interpreted by Benjamin Hoadly, then Bishop of
Bangor, and a stout upholder of the Latitudinarian school. The conflict
today has turned to dust and ashes; and few who read the multitude of
pamphlets it evoked, or stand amazed at their personal bitterness, can
understand why more than a hundred writers should have thought it
necessary to inform the world of their opinions, or why the London Stock
Exchange should have felt so passionate an interest in the debate as to
cease for a day the hubbub of its transactions. Nor can any one make
heroes from the personalities of its protagonists. Hoadly himself was a
typical bishop of the political school, who rose from humble
circumstances to the wealthy bishopric of Winchester through a
remarkable series of translations. Before the debate of 1716, he was
chiefly known by two political tracts in which he had rewritten, in less
cogent form, and without adequate acknowledgment, the two treatises of
Locke. He clearly realized how worthless the dogma of Divine Right had
become, without being certain of the principles by which it was to be
replaced. Probably, as Leslie Stephen has pointed out, his theorizing is
the result of a cloudy sense of the bearing of the Deist controversy. If
God is to be banished from direct connection with earthly affairs, we
must seek a human explanation of political facts. And he became
convinced that this attitude applies not less completely to
ecclesiastical than to secular politics. Of his opponents, by far the
ablest was William Law, the only theologian whom Gibbon may be said to
have respected, and the parent, through his mystical writings, of the
Wesleyan movement. Snape, then Provost of Eton, was always incisive; and
his pamphlet went through seventeen editions in a single year and
provoked seven replies within three months. Thomas Sherlock would not be
either himself or his father's son, were he not caustic, logical and
direct. But Hoadly and Law between them exhaust the controversy, so far
as it has meaning for our own day. The less essential questions like
Hoadly's choice of friends, his attitude to prayer, the accuracy of the
details in his account of the Test Act, the cause of his refusal to
answer Law directly, are hardly now germane to the substance of the
debate. Hoadly's position is most fully stated in his _Preservative
against the Principles and Practice of Nonjurors_ which he published in
1716 as a counterblast to the papers of Hickes; and they are briefly
summarized in the sermon preached before the King on March 31, 1717, on
the text "My Kingdom is not of this world," and published by royal
command. Amid a vast wilderness of quibbles and qualifications, some
simple points emerge. What he was doing was to deprive the priesthood of
claims to supernatural authority that he might vindicate for civil
government the right to preserve itself not less against persons in
ecclesiastical office than against civil assailants. To do so he is
forced to deny that the miraculous powers of Christ and the Apostles
descended to their successors. For if that assumption is made we grant
to fallible men privileges which confessedly belong to persons outside
the category of fallibility. And, exactly in the fashion of Leslie in
the _Regale_ he goes on to show that if a Church is a supernatural
institution, it cannot surrender one jot or tittle of its prerogative.
It is, in fact, an _imperium in imperio_ and its conflict with the state
is inevitable. But if the Church is not a supernatural institution, what
is its nature? Hoadly here attacks the doctrine which lies at the basis
of all ecclesiastical debate. The Church, he claims, is not a visible
society, presided over by men who have authority directly transmitted by
Christ. There are not within it "viceregents who can be said properly to
supply his place; no interpreters upon whom his subjects are absolutely
to depend; no judges over the conscience or religion of his people. For
if this were so that any such absolute viceregent authority, either for
the making of new laws, or interpreting old ones, or judging his
subjects, in religious matters, were lodged in any men upon earth, the
consequence would be that what still retains the name of the Church of
Christ would not be the kingdom of Christ, but the kingdom of those men
invested with such authority. For whoever hath such an authority of
making laws is so far a king, and whoever can add new laws to those of
Christ, equally obligatory, is as truly a king as Christ himself. Nay,
whosoever hath an absolute authority to interpret any written or spoken
laws, it is he who is truly the lawgiver to all intents and purposes,
and not the person who first wrote and spoke them."
The meaning is clear enough. What Hoadly is attacking is the theory of a
visible Church of Christ on earth, with the immense superstructure of
miracle and infallibility erected thereon. The true Church of Christ is
in heaven; and the members of the earthly society can but try in a
human, blundering way, to act with decency and justice. Apostolic
succession, the power of excommunication, the dealing out of forgiveness
for men's sins, the determination of true doctrine, insofar as the
Church claims these powers, it is usurping an authority that is not its
own. The relation of man to God is his private affair, and God will ask
from him sincerity and honesty, rather than judge him for his
possession of some special set of dogmas. Clearly, therefore, if the
Church is no more than this, it has no supernatural pretensions to
oppose to the human claims of the State. And since the State must have
within itself all the means of sufficient life, it has the right to
resist the ecclesiastical onslaught as based upon the usurpation of
power assumed without right. And in later treatises Hoadly did for
ceremonial exactly what he had done for church government. The eucharist
became a piece of symbolism and excommunication nothing more than an
announcement--"a mere external thing"--that the rules of the fellowship
have been broken. It at no point is related to the sinner's opportunity
of salvation.
In such an aspect, it would clearly follow that the Church has no
monopoly of truth. It can, indeed, judge its own beliefs; but reason
alone can demonstrate the inadequacy of other attitudes. Nor does its
judgment preclude the individual duty to examine into the truth of
things. The real root of faith is not the possession of an infallible
dogma, but the arriving honestly at the dogma in which you happen to
believe. For the magistrate, he urges, what is important is not the
table of your springs of action, but the conduct itself which is based
upon that table; from which it follows that things like the Test and
Corporation Acts have no real political validity. They have been imposed
upon the State by the narrow interpretations of an usurping power; and
the Nonconformist claim to citizenship would thus seem as valid as that
of a member of the Church of England.
All this sounds sensible enough; though it is curious doctrine in the
mouth of a bishop of that church. And this, in fact, is the
starting-point of Law's analysis of Hoadly. No one who reads the
unsparing vigor of his criticism can doubt that Law must have been
thoroughly happy in the composition of his defence; and, indeed, his is
the only contribution to the debate which may claim a permanent place in
political literature. In one sense, indeed, the whole of Law's answer is
an _ignoratio elenchi_, for he assumes the truth of that which Hoadly
sets out to examine, with the inevitable result that each writer is, for
the most part, arguing from different premises. But on the assumption
that Hoadly is a Christian, Law's argument is an attack of great power.
He shows conclusively that if the Church of England is no more than
Hoadly imagines it to be, it cannot, in any proper historic sense, be
called the Church of England at all. For every one of the institutions
which Hoadly calls an usurpation, is believed by Churchmen to be
integral to its nature. And if sincerity alone is to count as the test,
then there cannot, for the existing world, be any such thing as
objective religious truth. It subverted not merely absolute
authority--which the Church of England did not claim--but any authority
in the Church. It impugned the authority of the Crown to enforce
religious belief by civil penalties. Hoadly's rejection of authority,
moreover, is in Law's view fatal to government of any kind. For all
lawful authority must affect eternal salvation insofar as to disobey it
is to sin. The authority the Church possesses is inherent in the very
nature of the Church; for the obligation to a belief in Christianity is
the same thing as to a belief in that Church which can be shown to
represent Christ's teaching.
From Law's own point of view, the logic of his position is undeniable;
and in his third letter to Hoadly, the real heart of his attack, he
touches the centre of the latter's argument. For if it is sincerity
which is alone important it would follow that things false and wrong are
as acceptable to God as things true and right, which is patently absurd.
Nor has Hoadly given us means for the detection of sincerity. He seemed
to think that anyone was sincere who so thought himself; but, says Law,
"it is also possible and as likely for a man to be mistaken in those
things which constitute true sincerity as in those things which
constitute true religion." Clearly, sincerity cannot be the pith of the
matter; for it may be mistaken and directed to wrong ends. The State, in
fact, may respect conscience, but Hoadly is no more entitled to assume
the infallibility of private belief than he is to deny the infallibility
of the Church's teaching. That way lies anarchy.
Here, indeed, the antagonists were on common ground. Both had denied the
absolute character of any authority; but while Hoadly virtually
postulates a Church which logically is no more than those who accept
the moral law as Christ described it, Law restricts the Church to that
society which bears the traditional marks of the historic institution.
On Hoadly's principles, there was no reason why anyone not hostile to
the civil power should not enjoy political privilege; on Law's there was
every reason simply because those who denied the doctrines of the High
Church refused a truth open for their acceptance. Law, indeed, goes so
far as to argue that in the light of his principles Hoadly should be a
Deist; and there is ground for what, in that age, was a valuable point
to make. The sum total of it all is that for the bishop the outward
actions of men alone concern the State; while Law insists that the root
of action and the test of fitness is whether men have seen a certain
aspect of the truth and grasped it.
The result, to say the least, was calamitous. In May of 1717,
convocation met and the Lower House immediately adopted an unanimous
report condemning the "Preservative" and the sermon. But Hoadly had the
government behind him and the convocation was prorogued before further
action could be taken. Snape, Hare, Mosse and Sherlock, all of whom were
chaplains royal, and had been drawn into the conflict, were dismissed
from their office; and for more than one hundred and thirty-five years
convocation was not again summoned. It was a striking triumph for
Erastianism, though the more liberal principles of Hoadly were less
successful. Robert Walpole was on the threshold of his power, and, as a
manager of Sacheverell's impeachment, he had seen the hold of the Church
upon the common people, may even, indeed, have remembered that Hoadly's
own dwelling had been threatened with destruction in the popular
excitement. _Quieta non movere_ was his motto; and he was not interested
in the niceties of ecclesiastic metaphysic. So the Test Act remained
immovable until 1828; while the annual Act of Indemnity for its
infractions represented that English genius for illogical mitigation
which solves the deeper problems of principle while avoiding the
consideration of their substance.
In the hundred and twenty years which passed between the Bangorian
Controversy and the Oxford Movement, there is only one volume upon the
problem of Church and State which deserves more than passing notice.
Bishop Warburton was the Lord Brougham of his age; and as its
self-constituted universal provider of intellectual fare, he deemed it
his duty to settle this, amongst others of the eternal questions. The
effort excited only the contempt of Leslie Stephen--"the peculiar
Warburton mixture," he says "of sham logic and bluster." Yet that is
hardly fair to the total result of Warburton's remarks. He tried to
steer a middle path between the logical result of such Erastianism as
that of the _Independent Whig_, on the one hand, and the excessive claim
of High Churchmanship on the other. Naturally enough, or the writer
would not be Warburton, the book is full of tawdry rhetoric and stupid
quibbles. But the _Alliance between Church and State_ (1736) set the
temper of speculation until the advent of Newman, and is therefore
material for something more than contempt. It acutely points out that
societies generate a personality distinct from that of their members in
words reminiscent of an historic legal pronouncement.[12] "When any
number of men," he says, "form themselves into a society, whether civil
or religious, this society becomes a body different from that aggregate
which the number of individuals composed before the society was
formed.... But a body must have its proper personality and will, which
without these is no more than a shadow or a name."
[Footnote 12: Dicey, _Law and Opinion in England_ (2nd edition),
p. 165.]
And that is the root of Warburton's pronouncement. The Church is a
society distinct from the State, but lending to that body its assistance
because without the sanction of religion the full achievement of the
social purpose is impossible. There is thus an alliance between them,
each lending its support to the other for their common benefit. The two
remain distinct; the union between them is of a federal kind. But they
interchange their powers, and this it is which explains at once the
royal supremacy and the right of Churchmen to a share in the
legislature. This also it is which explains the existence of a Test
Act, whereby those who might injure that which the State has undertaken
to protect are deprived of their power to evil. And, in return, the
Church engages to "apply its utmost endeavors in the service of the
State." It becomes attached to its benefactor from the privilege it
receives; and the dangers which might arise from its natural
independence are thus obviated. For a federal union precludes the grave
problem of an _imperium in imperio_, and the "mischiefs which so
terrified Hobbes" are met by the terms upon which it is founded.
It is easy enough to discover the loopholes in the theory. The contract
does not exist, or, at least, it is placed by Warburton "in the same
archive with the famous original compact between monarch and people"
which has been the object of vast but fruitless searches. Nor does the
Act of Submission bear upon its face the marks of that tender care of
the protection of an independent society which Warburton declared a
vital tenet of the Union. Yet such criticisms miss the real significance
of the theory. It is really the introduction into English politics of
that notion of the two societies which, a century before, Melville and
Bellarmine had made so fruitful. With neither Presbyterian nor Jesuit
was the separation complete, for the simple reason that each had a
secret conviction that the ecclesiastical society was at bottom the
superior. Yet the theory was the parent of liberty, if only because it
pointed the way to a balance of power between claims which, before, had
seemed mutually exclusive.
Until the Toleration Act, the theory was worthless to the English Church
because its temper, under the ægis of Laudian views, had been in
substance theocratic. But after 1692 it aptly expressed the compromise
the dominant party of the Church had then in mind. They did, indeed,
mistake the power of the Church, or, rather, they submitted to the State
so fully that what they had intended for a partnership became an
absorption. So that the Erastianism of the eighteenth century goes deep
enough to make the Church no more than a moral police department of the
State. Saints like Ken and preachers like South are replaced by
fashionable prelates like Cornwallis, who made Lambeth Palace an adjunct
to Ranelagh Gardens, and self-seeking pluralists like Bishop Watson. The
Church could not even perceive the meaning of the Wesleyan revolt; and
its charity was the irritating and complacent patronage of the
obstrusive Hannah More. Its learning decayed, its intelligence
slumbered; and the main function it fulfilled until Newman's advent was
the provision of rich preferment to the younger sons of the nobility. It
is a far cry from Lake of Chichester and Bishop Ken to a church which
was merely an annex to the iniquities of the civil list.
IV
No one can mistake the significance of this conflict. The opponents of
Erastianism had a deep sense of their corporate Church, and it was a
plea for ecclesiastical freedom that they were making. They saw that a
Church whose patronage and discipline and debates were under the control
of an alien body could not with honesty claim that Christ was in truth
their head. If the Church was to be at the mercy of private judgment
and political expediency, the notion of a dogmatic basis would have to
be abandoned. Here, indeed, is the root of the condemnation of Tindal
and of Hoadly; for they made it, by their teaching, impossible for the
Church to possess an ethos of her own. It was thus against the
sovereignty of the State that they protested. Somewhere, a line must be
drawn about its functions that the independence of the Church might be
safeguarded. For its supporters could not be true to their divine
mission if the accidental vote of a secular authority was by right to
impose its will upon the Church. The view of it as simply a religious
body to which the State had conceded certain rights and dignities, they
repudiated with passion. The life of the Church was not derived from the
State; and for the latter to attempt its circumscription was to usurp an
authority not rightly its own.
The real difficulty of this attitude lay in the establishment. For here
the Church was, at bottom, declaring that the State life must be lived
upon terms of her own definition. That was possible before the
Reformation; but with the advent of Nonconformity and the growth of
rationalism the exclusive character of the Church's solution had become
unacceptable. If the Church was to become so intimately involved with
the State as an establishment implied, it had no right to complain, if
statesmen with a genius for expediency were willing to sacrifice it to
the attainment of that ideal. For the real secret of independence is,
after all, no more than independence. The Church sought it without being
willing to pay the price. And this it is which enabled Hoadly to emerge
triumphant from an ordeal where logically he should have failed. The
State, by definition is an absorptive animal; and the Church had no
right to complain if the price of its privileges was royal supremacy. A
century so self-satisfied as the eighteenth would not have faced the
difficulties involved in giving political expression to the High Church
theory.
Yet the protest remained, and it bore a noble fruit in the next century.
The Oxford movement is usually regarded as a return to the seventeenth
century, to the ideals, that is to say, of Laud and Andrewes.[13] In
fact, its real kinship is with Atterbury and Law. Like them, it was
searching the secret of ecclesiastical independence, and like them it
discovered that connection with the State means, in the end, the
sacrifice of the church to the needs of each political situation. "The
State has deserted us," wrote Newman; and the words might have been
written of the earlier time. The Oxford movement, indeed, like its
predecessor, built upon foundations of sand; and when Lord Brougham told
the House of Lords that the idea of the Church possessing "absolute and
unalienable rights" was a "gross and monstrous anomaly" because it would
make impossible the supremacy of Parliament, he simply announced the
result of a doctrine which, implicit in the Act of Submission, was first
completely defined by Wake and Hoadly. Nor has the history of this
controversy ended. "Thoughtful men," the Archbishop of Canterbury has
told the House of Lords,[14] "... see the absolute need, if a Church is
to be strong and vigorous, for the Church, _qua_ church, to be able to
say what it can do as a church." "The rule of the sovereign, the rule of
Parliament," replied Lord Haldane,[15] "extend as far as the rule of the
Church. They are not to be distinguished or differentiated, and that was
the condition under which ecclesiastical power was transmitted to the
Church of England." Today, that is to say, as in the past, antithetic
theories of the nature of the State hinge, in essence, upon the problem
of its sovereignty. "A free church in a free state," now, as then, may
be our ideal; but we still seek the means wherewith to build it.
[Footnote 13: Cf. my _Problem of Sovereignty_, Chapter III.]
[Footnote 14: _Parliamentary Debates_. Fifth Series, Vol. 34,
p. 992 (June 3, 1919).]
[Footnote 15: _Parliamentary Debates_. Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p 1002.
The quotation does not fully represent Lord Haldane's views.]