Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham

by Harold J. Laski

[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.

[11] A Vindication of their Majesties' Authority to fill the Sees of the Deprived Bishops (1691).