CRANMER.--THE DIVORCE.--THE SUPREMACY.
We have now touched upon a few of the many elements which were secretly
at work preparing England for a reformation of religion, and without
some regard to which it would be impossible to account for the rapid
pace at which it was consummated: let us but shut our eyes to this
undercurrent of events--take our stand at the accession of Henry the
Eighth--and endeavour to guess at the future; and what could seem
to us more improbable, than that a reign so begun was destined to
effect the extinction of the papal power in England? Henry mounted the
throne with a treasury full to overflowing, the fruits of a revenue
improved by the wisdom of his father’s laws, by the care with which
that sagacious monarch husbanded the nation’s purse, and, it must be
added, by the rapacity of Dudley and Empson, his fiscal officers; who
then would conjecture that an exhausted exchequer was to drive him to
the plunder of the church, in order to continue the profusion which
its affluence had taught him?--He had mounted the throne a zealous
papist and a learned, having been himself intended, it was said, for
the see of Canterbury, had not the death of his elder brother put the
crown upon his head instead of the mitre; ambitious, moreover, of papal
distinctions, and eventually able to procure them by entering the lists
with Luther as a volunteer champion of the ancient creed; who would
then conjecture that the title of “Defender of the Faith,” in the
sense in which it was conferred upon him, was the very last to which
he was to have a just claim?--He mounted the throne, having Katherine,
his brother’s widow, for his wife by a dispensation from the Pope,
who counted it the ratification of his own authority in England, that
her very princes were thenceforth to derive their title to the crown
from the validity of this his bull; who then would conjecture that
this stroke of policy, as it was thought, for which a point had been
strained at Rome, was to be precisely the ruin of the politician, and
that the subversion of papal usurpation in England would be actually
effected by the very measure which was to have confirmed it? Amongst
the distinctive marks by which God’s hand may be perceived regulating
human affairs, this, says Barrow, in his noble sermon on a special
Providence,[217] is one--“the wonderful strangeness of events compared
with the ordinary course of things, or the natural influence of
causes: when effects are performed by no visible means, or by means
disproportionate, unsuitable, repugnant to the effect:”--and surely,
when tried by such a criterion, nothing can furnish stronger evidence
of a work which “was not of man but of God,” than the events which
immediately preceded the Reformation, and the consequences which flowed
from them. It might seem that a question concerning the king’s marriage
was the most unlikely thing in the world to set this great cause in
motion--yet such was the fact.--Henry, after living nearly twenty
years with Katherine, felt, or affected to feel, scruples as to the
lawfulness of marrying a brother’s widow. Whether the exception which
was taken against the legitimacy of the Princess Mary by the French
ambassador when the marriage between her and the Duke of Orleans came
under discussion, was honestly made and did in reality open Henry’s
eyes to a new view of his own position--whether Wolsey started the
objections which unsettled the King’s mind, with the intention of
serving his own ends by thwarting the Emperor the Queen’s nephew, and
providing the King with a match more agreeable to himself--whether the
death of the Queen’s untimely offspring with a single exception, did
as he pretended, fill him with concern as the accomplishment of the
Levitical law, “that if a man take his brother’s wife it is an unclean
thing; they shall be childless;”[218]--or whether, on the other hand,
he was weary of a wife whose ascetic devotions might seem to fit her
more for a convent than a court, whilst her person, not attractive
at best, was now rendered less so by increasing infirmities;--or,
lastly, whether the charms of Ann Bullen had conjured up in him his
strong sense of the sin he had committed in uniting himself with
Katherine, as may be imagined without any great breach of charity of
a man, whose conscience, upon other occasions, besides this, seems to
have been singularly ill-timed in its suggestions--so it was, that a
divorce was determined upon, and measures were adopted to carry the
determination into effect. Opinions were divided; the sexes in general
took opposite sides; but the learned themselves were not agreed--on
the one hand, it was argued that the prohibition of such a marriage
was clear in the Levitical law,[219] and such prohibition was not to
be considered as confined to the Jews, for that the violation of it is
expressly numbered among the sins of the Canaanites by which the land
was polluted,[220] and therefore that it was of universal obligation;
moreover, that John the Baptist declared of Herod, that it was “not
lawful for him to have his brother’s wife;” that John, therefore, held
the law of Moses upon this point to be still binding;[221]--that in the
same manner St. Paul condemned the Corinthian convert of a fornication
not so much as named among the Gentiles, “in that he had his father’s
wife;”[222] which like the other was one of the degrees forbidden in
Leviticus, and forbidden in the very same chapter of Leviticus as the
relation in question;[223]--that St. Paul, therefore, pronounced the
Mosaical law, in these particulars, still to stand good.
On the other side, it was replied, that the Levitical precept must be
understood, of not taking a brother’s wife whilst he was living, for
that the brother was actually enjoined to take the brother’s widow, he
having died childless and to raise up seed unto his brother;[224]--that
with regard to Herod, he was guilty in the case of Herodias, not of
incest but of adultery--Philip, as seems probable from Josephus, being
yet alive;--that the like must be said of the Corinthian delinquent,
“fornication not to be named among the Gentiles,” implying that the
offence was committed in his father’s lifetime, since, otherwise the
connection, however monstrous, was not unknown among the Persians,
and that even amongst the Jews Adonijah had desired Abishag in
marriage.[225]
To this it was rejoined,--that the exception in the general law
proved only that God might dispense with his own ordinances for his
own ends, and that the end in this case was, the preservation of
a family in Israel, and care for the protection of the genealogy
of the future Messiah, objects now accomplished, and the means
thereto now superseded;--that in Herod’s affair, it cannot be with
certainty affirmed that when he married Herodias, Philip was living,
that she certainly deserted her former husband, but that she was
probably divorced from him; and that for aught which appears to the
contrary, Josephus who condemns her conduct as an infraction of the
law, understands, when he does so, her marriage with her husband’s
brother, he not having left her _childless_;[226]--that the case
of the Corinthian does not admit of the interpretation that he took
his father’s wife before his father’s death, for that the seventh
commandment alone was provision enough against such an abuse, and
that the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus, in which this and similar
abominations are forbidden, and to which St. Paul has here an eye, must
have contemplated something distinct from adultery, and does in fact
contemplate the case of incestuous alliance.
Much more was said. But the question was not debated upon scriptural
grounds only. The fathers, the schoolmen, and the Pope’s decretals were
all brought into the controversy, and a case under no circumstances
very simple became immeasurably complicated. It was at this period,
about the year 1529, that the King being upon a journey, chanced to
pass a night at Waltham-Cross; on this occasion it fell to the lot
of two of his servants, to sleep at the house of one Mr. Cressy, of
Waltham, where the conversation at the supper-table happened to turn
upon the great topic of the day--the royal divorce. Of the party, was
a fellow of Jesus’ College, Cambridge, whom the plague had driven from
the University, and who had taken up his quarters meanwhile at Mr.
Cressy’s house, being a relation of his wife, and the tutor of his
children; his opinion was asked, he being a learned academician,--it
went to this, that the question was one concerning the meaning of
Scripture and nothing else; and that of this, men of learning, and the
Universities more especially, would be the fittest judges; for “that
the Bishop of Rome had no such authority as whereby he might dispense
with the word of God.” Here were some great principles involved;
Scripture set up as the rule of action; the interpretation of it
asserted to be matter of private right; and the Pope himself declared
not to be above it. The sentiment was reported to the King, already
wearied with his “infinite cause,” as he called it; and the author of
it, much against his own will, was sent for to court--it was Cranmer.
“How far God fetches his purposes about!” is the contemplation of
Bishop Hall on the manner of Saul’s call to the kingly office. “The
asses of Kish, Saul’s father, are strayed away; what is that to the
news of a kingdom? But God lays these small accidents for the ground
of greater designs.”[227] The sickness at Cambridge, the moment at
which it occurred, the trifle which determined Waltham above all
places for the retreat of Cranmer, the casual sojourn of the king
there for a single night, the house of all the houses to which his
secretary and almoner were directed for their evening’s lodging,
and the subject-matter of the conversation, incidents, most of them
inconsiderable in themselves, and independent of one another, yet all
conspiring to call out of obscurity probably the fittest, perhaps the
only fit man in the whole kingdom, for superintending ecclesiastical
affairs at a crisis so peculiar--this is altogether a combination
of circumstances, which it may be philosophy to call a chapter of
accidents, but which it is not superstition to ascribe to the finger
of “a God that governs the earth.” With so splendid an instance before
our eyes, that opinion can scarcely be treated with disrespect, which
holds the call to the ministry to be in some degree, though certainly
in a subordinate degree, external; to be the voice of events which have
been so ordered as to guide the party to his novitiate, and to land him
at last in the priestly office. But this by the way. Cranmer had been
a hard student, and in the subjects of his study had kept pace with
the times in which he lived. He began, where most scholars in those
days ended, with Duns Scotus and the subtle doctors, a discipline
which had at least the merit of making astute disputants; and, as
Bishop Berkeley said of academical learning in general, might serve
even when forgotten, like a crop when ploughed under, to improve and
enrich the soil.[228] Escaped from the schools, he betook himself to
the writings of Erasmus, for whom he seems ever to have entertained a
strong personal regard, perhaps as being the author who first opened
his eyes. Luther absorbed him in his turn; and now the controversy
between that reformer and his opponents being serious, agitating
matters no less than the fundamentals of the Christian faith (_agitur
de vita et sanguine_), the appeal moreover being made to Scripture
alone, Cranmer set himself resolutely to the examination of the word
of God, that he might qualify himself for exercising a sound judgment
on these high arguments; and of the patience, the learning, the
discrimination, with which he did this, the Liturgy of our church (were
there no other) would be an everlasting monument, in which, whoever
will be at the pains of taking a prayer or a clause to pieces, will
find occasion to wonder at the masterly knowledge of the Bible which
the selection even of some single expression often betrays, so that
having pursued happily, as he thinks, some intricate point of theology
through windings manifold, and having arrived at a conclusion which
he almost fancies his very own, he will be surprised to find that our
reformer has been beforehand with him even in this, and has given some
unobtrusive indication of his being in possession of the secret by a
word in season dropped out of his abundance as he passes on his way.
Such was the man whom the accidents we have recounted introduced to
King Henry. Henry commanded him to digest in writing the substance of
what he had uttered on the question of the divorce, and committed him
to the hospitality of the Earl of Wiltshire, the most accomplished
nobleman of the day, the father of Ann Bullen, where that friendship
was formed between the future archbishop and the future queen, which
still further promoted the cause of the Reformation, and disposed the
latter to be in heart, as well as in principle, a nursing mother to the
infant church.
Meanwhile the King’s cause, which had been submitted in an early
stage of it to the Pope’s decision, had made small progress. Cardinal
Campejus had been united in a commission with Wolsey to try it in
England, but there was no serious intention of ever giving judgment.
Whatever hand Wolsey might have had in stirring the question at first,
he soon found that he should not be able to substitute for Katharine
a queen of his own; and though not a cordial churchman, nor caring
about giving offence to churchmen, nor very nice upon the sin of
sacrilege (for his example was afterwards quoted in the dissolution
of the abbeys), still he was not desirous of exchanging even the most
rigorous Romanist for a Lutheran, and he therefore was lukewarm in the
prosecution of the suit. His colleague had his private instructions
and private interests too. The affair was embarrassing to the Pope: he
could not decide without exasperating an Emperor of Germany or a King
of England, and he seems to have halted between the two, hoping perhaps
that some propitious accident of death or disaster might intervene to
release him from his unpleasant dilemma. Accordingly, the judgment
of the commissioners is expected from day to day; the court meets,
deliberates, examines witnesses, and determines nothing. It was for
the credit of the King that matters should not seem to be done in heat
or haste. The Queen was to be cited; on her non-appearance, to be
pronounced contumacious; a fresh citation to be issued; a reservation
to be made of some collateral question for the Pope’s own decision; the
sittings of the court to follow the rules of the Consistory of Rome,
of which it was but a branch, and the cause to be suspended during the
vacations at Rome; finally, the commission was to be closed, and the
whole process to be transferred to the hearing of the Pontiff himself,
and the King and Queen to appear before him in person or by proxy. But
this last was an alternative to which the King had too high a stomach
to submit, who pleaded the prerogative of his crown, which did not
allow of being subjected to foreign jurisdiction, and the liberties of
his people, which demanded that questions of marriage should be tried
at home and by their own church.[229] Thus passed away six long years
in fruitless negotiations, till Henry, having now secured the opinion
of nearly all the universities at home and abroad in his favour, a
measure which Cranmer, whom he had sent upon the Continent as his
champion for this purpose, had been very instrumental in accomplishing,
as well as the verdict of the most distinguished individuals amongst
the divines and scholars of Europe, gave proof that the “strong blood”
of the Plantagenets was in his veins, took the law into his own hands,
married Ann Bullen probably on the 14th November, 1532, and set the
Pope at defiance.
On reviewing the question of the divorce (as by a misnomer it has been
called), there can be little doubt, we suppose, that the marriage was
in the first instance unlawful. The authorities which declared it
so preponderated at the time of the discussion; many, and amongst
others Archbishop Warham, had protested against the match when it was
originally proposed; and when the canon of prohibited degrees was
afterwards adjusted by Archbishop Parker, it was expressly determined
that a man may not marry his brother’s wife. If, therefore, the
conduct of Henry had been such in other respects as to give token of
a scrupulous conscience, it might have been credited that in this
instance he was sincere in his professions of uneasiness; and that
believing Katharine and himself to be joined together otherwise than
God’s word doth allow, he sought for relief in the dissolution of the
contract. But that contract was entered into with deliberation; it
was made when the King was a minor--it was repeated and ratified when
he was of just age; the objections, whatever they were, were not new;
they had been raised and over-ruled, when Katharine was to be the
bride, when she had youth to plead for her, and a dower of unparalleled
magnitude, the first fruits of the trans-Atlantic treasures of Spain:
it was only when these advocates were no more, her blossom faded, and
her golden fruit gathered and gone, that the objections (valid in
themselves) became fatal. Her lot in life was indeed hard; but her
grave at least has been strewed with immortal flowers; and “the meek
sorrows and virtuous distress of Katharine have furnished some scenes
(says no mean critic) which may be justly reckoned amongst the greatest
efforts of tragedy.”
And now, Archbishop Warham being sick unto death, the King intimates
to Cranmer, who was engaged in his service on the Continent, his
intention of promoting him to the primacy. There are some men who seek
honours, and some who have honours thrust upon them: Cranmer belonged
to the latter class; he was not prepared for so great and sudden an
elevation. Under pretence that the King’s affairs still required
his presence abroad, he tarried six months longer, in the hope that
Henry might consign the crosier to some other hand.[230] There was no
affectation in this--no _fuga ad salices_. Ambition is made of
sterner stuff than the spirit of Cranmer. Even at an age when such a
passion, if ever, must have been most active, and when he was as yet
without a patron, he, like Parker, declined the offer of a fellowship
in cardinal Wolsey’s college at Oxford, preferring the society of
his old friends, or fellow-students, to the more splendid prospects
which, a connection with the great favourite of the day presented;
and even risking his displeasure rather than do violence to his own
early associations, and bid adieu to the scenes of his boyhood and
his youth. Neither was it of his own good will that he was in the
first instance brought under the King’s notice, by the question of
the divorce;--on the contrary, he quarrelled with his friends who had
thus disturbed his repose, pleaded that it was a matter on which he
had bestowed no pains or study, and begged in vain that he might be
excused the honour of being closeted with a king.[231] Nor, indeed,
were the times such as promised the head which wore the mitre an office
of ease. Likely it was to prove but “a glistering grief,”--“a golden
sorrow,” to the wearer; and it wanted no great sagacity to foresee
(what the King told Cranmer when he afterwards changed his arms) that
the pelican was fitter for his crest than the crane: seeing that “he
would one day have to shed his blood for his young ones, if he stood
to his tackling.”[232] But there was yet another and a stronger reason
for Cranmer holding back;--the scruples he entertained touching the
oath of fidelity to the Pope, which was exacted of an archbishop at
his presentation. As yet the supremacy of the Pope was acknowledged;
and though the subject had been mooted two years before, and even
the title of supreme head of the church and clergy of England had
been ascribed to Henry by the convocation under Archbishop Warham, in
1530, it was reluctantly, and was not immediately followed up. Here,
therefore, Cranmer was embarrassed. The oath, however, he took under a
previous public[233] protestation, “that he did not admit the Pope’s
authority any further than it agreed with the express word of God; and
that it might be lawful for him at all times to speak against him, and
to impugn his errors when there should be occasion.”[234] The honesty
of this proceeding has been often made the subject of debate; and it
must be acknowledged that it presents some symptoms of a mind yet
scarcely escaped from the dangerous casuistry of the Roman Catholic
doctors;--some touch of that jesuitical spirit which is so effectually
exposed in the letters of Pascal; and against the insidious approaches
of which even the native integrity of the single-hearted Cranmer was
not altogether proof. In this instance, as in the instance of Sir T.
More’s persecutions, and indeed of his own, it was a corrupted and
corrupting creed that was in fault, rather than an evil heart or evil
eye in the individuals themselves. Still many circumstances may be
pleaded in extenuation of Cranmer’s conduct. He did not take the Pope
by surprise; the name, the writings, and the person of Cranmer, were
familiar to him; Cranmer had openly contended against his dispensing
power in the case of the divorce both in Germany, and at Rome itself,
nearly three years before; so that even had no protest been made on
his part, the Pope must have been aware of the character and opinions
of the man; and if he admitted him to the primacy, he must have been
conscious that he did it at his peril. The truth was, the pope had no
choice, and he felt that he had none: doubtless he would have been
too glad to reject the King’s candidate and to substitute for him a
creature of his own; but he knew with whom he had to deal in Henry,
not with a tame monarch, and with what he had to deal in England, no
longer with a tame people. He knew that the very point at issue, the
necessity of his bull at all to legalise the appointment to the see
of Canterbury, was even then disputed, and that to withhold it under
such circumstances would be merely to hasten the crisis which he had
too much reason to think was in any case at hand, the loss of his
supremacy. The event proved this. He did not refuse the bull, (not
that he was aware of Cranmer’s protest at the time; but of Cranmer’s
character, which was equivalent to it, he was perfectly aware,) and
accordingly he staved off the evil that menaced him for one year
more, but it was only for one year. This was the last bull he sent
into England during the reign of Henry; and had that capricious
prince listened to the advice and entreaty of Cranmer, application
would not have been made even for this,[235] and then Henry would
have been sooner spared the dishonour of subjecting his bishops to a
dilemma by which perjury to the Pope or to the King could scarcely be
escaped, and Cranmer would have been spared the equivocation by which
he laboured to reconcile oaths which were irreconcilable. Here, after
all, was the grievance, and on those who exacted them was, in a great
measure, the guilt. Nothing less was required of a bishop than to swear
allegiance to two masters, who had no two interests in common:--to
the Pope; that he would, from that hour forward, be faithful and
obedient to St. Peter and to the holy church of Rome, to my Lord
the Pope and his successors; that they should suffer no wrong by any
means with his advice, consent, or connivance, that their counsel he
would not discover, their regality he would help, maintain and defend,
against all men; their rights, honours, privileges, authorities, he
would augment and promote; and any designs against the same, which
came to his knowledge, he would resist and denounce:--to the King,
that he would thenceforward utterly forsake all clauses, words,
sentences, grants which he had or should have hereafter from the Pope’s
Holiness in virtue of his bishopric that in any wise were or might be
prejudicial to his Highness, his heirs, successors, dignity, privilege,
or estate royal; that to him and his he would be faithful and true,
and live and die with him against all people; that he acknowledged
himself to hold his bishopric of him only, and accordingly besought of
him the restitution of the temporalities of the same.[236] Now to be
impaled on one or other of the horns of such an alternative as this
was a cruel situation into which no man ought to have been forced; and
though it is an easy thing for an indifferent spectator at a distance
to philosophise upon the unseemly writhings of the victim, yet some
allowance will be made for him by every pitiful-hearted observer if,
in his struggles to get off the hook, he should chance to uncover his
nakedness. The question indeed, resolved itself into this; were there,
or were there not, to be bishops in England? for if none would take
the oaths who could not acquiesce in both of them to the letter, and
if none were to be admitted to consecration who refused either of the
oaths, the order of prelates was at an end.[237]
On the 30th March, 1533, Cranmer was consecrated by the Bishops
of Lincoln, Exeter, and St. Asaph; and in the May following (the
convocation having declared the King’s marriage with Katharine
unlawful) he publicly pronounced the sentence of their separation;
and about the same time confirmed by another judgment, the match with
Ann Bullen. Thus was he now fairly embarked in the same boat with
the King, and the part he took in the transactions of these days was
faithfully treasured up in the memory of Mary, and served at length
(though not in the scriptural sense of the expression) to heap coals
of fire upon his head. But however important such measures were in
fact, they were doubly so in principle. The Pope had joined a King
and Queen together as lawful man and wife; his right to do this is
not only disputed, but denied; and the church of England, assuming an
attitude of independence, rescinds his decision, and sets his authority
at nought. This could not be passed over. Rome threatens the King with
excommunication; and as the last ounce it is that breaks the camel’s
back, so here the menace proved enough to try the question of papal
claims upon England, and to effect the rejection of them for ever.
The grounds of such a decision were many and various; in the first
place, St. Peter himself, on whose transmitted authority the popes
pretended to found their own, was not at all superior to the other
apostles:--“Thou art Peter,” said indeed our Lord to him, “and on this
rock will I build my church;” but he only built it upon him as he built
it upon James or John. Of the church of Ephesus, it was expressly
declared that it was built “upon the foundation of the _apostles_
and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner-stone.”[238]
In whatever sense, therefore, Peter might be called the rock, (if
indeed to Peter the expression referred, and not to Christ,) James or
John might be called so too. When an apostle was to be appointed in the
room of Judas, it did not fall to Peter’s province especially to choose
him; when deacons were instituted, it was not exclusively by Peter
that it was done; the bishop of the first and principal church after
our Lord’s ascension was not Peter but James; and by James the decree
touching circumcision was issued. St. Paul had no scruple in rebuking
Peter to his face when he dissembled, or in asserting of himself
that “he was not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles.”[239] But
further, even had St. Peter been all that the church of Rome pretended,
his superiority would still have been of person, not of place, and
could not attach to Rome more than to Antioch; nor so much, if Rome,
as some even of the earliest interpreters of Scripture affirmed, was
Babylon. Moreover, whilst the commission given by our Lord to Peter,
“Feed my sheep,” (which was a text put in the fore-front of the
controversy by the Romanists) could be interpreted to mean the whole
world was to be the Pope’s diocese, there was nothing which Scripture
might not be made to mean; besides, if the Pope was St. Peter’s
successor, wherein, it was asked, did the succession consist? What one
thing had St. Peter like the Pope, or the Pope like St. Peter? Did St.
Peter take away the keys of the kingdom of heaven; hide the treasures
of God’s word; consign souls to purgatory, or release them from it
at his pleasure for silver or gold; pray in an unknown tongue; carry
about the sacrament with lights and bells; sell jubilees, graces,
palls, bulls, pardons, indulgences? Did he call himself the head of
the church, the bishop of bishops, and usurp dominion over all God’s
creatures? Did he exempt himself from the power of civil government;
maintain wars; set princes at variance; or sit in a chair with a purple
gown and regal sceptre and diadem of gold and precious stones, and set
his feet on kings’ necks? Did St. Peter, it was asked in conclusion,
leave these affairs and others like them in charge to his successors
from hand to hand?
Nor, in transferring the supremacy from the Pope to the King, did
the church of England act unadvisedly, however it was objected to
her that civil princes should confine themselves to civil matters.
Certainly, nothing could be more inexpedient, whether for the good
government of the country, or its spiritual improvement, than that
there should be in it two sovereign heads, each desirous to have the
pre-eminence, and a struggle be thus perpetuated between politics and
religion; such a mingling of hot blood with sacrifice could never be
acceptable to a God of order and peace; and how was the inconvenience
to be avoided except by making one and the same person in all causes,
ecclesiastical as well as civil, supreme? Neither was this a new thing
under the sun: God had of old time commissioned kings to execute
many holy offices.--Isaiah had spoken of them as nursing fathers of
the church;[240]--Moses, the civil magistrate, had rebuked Aaron the
priest for a breach of duty--Joshua had set many things in order which
pertained to God; enjoining circumcision, commanding sacrifices to be
made, and the blessings and curses of the law to be sounded in the
ears of the people--David had directed and superintended the removal
of the ark to Jerusalem--Solomon had reared the Temple, addressed his
subjects afterwards in a godly oration, deposed Abiathar the priest,
and set up Zadok in his place--Josiah had restored and reformed the
worship of his time; cleansed the Temple, broken the brazen serpent,
now become an object of idolatry, and despatched his priest to inquire
of the prophetess respecting the copy of the law which he had recently
discovered;[241] and whatever may be said of a change of times and
systems since these dynasties passed away, still the principle itself
is not affected by such change; and nothing can be more certain than
that these persons were temporal and not spiritual governors of their
nation, and yet that in matters ecclesiastical they were authorised to
a certain extent to interfere--we say, to a certain extent; for neither
could these sovereigns, nor can any sovereigns, as such, excommunicate,
or bind, or loose, or perform, one of the priestly functions; still
they may lawfully see that others duly commissioned do perform them; it
is one thing to exercise the office of a bishop, and another to provide
that a bishop there be, and a fit one, to execute it for himself.[242]
Neither does it seem to be unmeet that they who are themselves
the “ministers of God,” (as St. Paul expressly calls the supreme
magistrates) the “powers ordained of God,” the men to whom “every
soul,” without any reservation of ecclesiastics, is to be subject
“because they are of God,” should have some voice in the approval
of the servants of God’s church, and some control over them; more
especially when it is remembered that it is the duty of a king to rule
well, and that it would be difficult for him to rule at all, with a
body of men within his realm and out of his own reach, who must always
possess, so long as the concerns of a world beyond the grave can touch
mankind, a very powerful lever in their hands, which, however honestly
it may be, and is in general applied, is nevertheless capable of
misapplication, as the history of every nation can testify, and none
more than our own.[243] And without any reference to extreme cases, to
the danger, for instance, of religious meetings becoming, in critical
seasons, schools of sedition, and of the divine resolving himself into
the demagogue; a danger, however, by no means chimerical when there is
nothing to connect the system of religious instruction with the office
of the civil magistrate; even in ordinary times it would be found, and
it has been found, that the spirit of the independent congregation
and that of the government under which it exists, but to which it
owes nothing, coincide but little--and that the state is apt to feel
its energies crippled by the positive opposition, or at least the
non-co-operation of these, its members, in their religious capacity.
It may be added, in defence of the consolidation of the supremacy, both
civil and ecclesiastical, in the king, that the Romanists themselves
could not deny that the early councils (the decrees of which are
recognised by the church of Rome to this day) were summoned by the
magistrate, and not by the Bishop of Rome; the council of Nice; for
example, by Constantine, “who called together a synod (they are the
words of Sozomen), and wrote letters to those who were set over the
churches, in every place to attend on a certain day--and there were
present (he adds) at this assembly, from the apostolic see, Macarius
of Jerusalem, Eustathius, the President of the church of Antioch, (who
is reported by Theodoret, it may be observed, as the leader of the
council, and the orator who opened it by an address to the emperor,)
Alexander of Alexandria, Biton and Bicentius, presbyters of the church
of Rome, Julius the bishop being absent, and in all, of bishops about
three hundred and twenty, and of presbyters and deacons who attended
them no small number.”[244]
Thus do we find Scripture lending its sanction to such an alliance
between church and state, as the identification of the king with the
supreme head of the church implies--early ecclesiastical history
declaratory of the authority by which councils were at first summoned,
giving it the approbation of primitive usage--and the necessity of one
mind actuating every member of the body politic, both civil and sacred,
dictating its expediency.