Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham

by Harold J. Laski

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.