The great change of religious opinions was not so much effected by reasoning on points of theological controversy, upon which some are apt to fancy it turned, as on a persuasion that fraud and corruption pervaded the established church. The pretended miracles, which had so long held the understanding in captivity, were wisely exposed to ridicule and indignation by the government. Plays and interludes were represented in churches, of which the usual subject was the vices and corruptions of the monks and clergy. These were disapproved of by the graver sort, but no doubt served a useful purpose.[117] The press sent forth its light hosts of libels; and though the catholic party did not fail to try the same means of influence, they had both less liberty to write as they pleased, and fewer readers than their antagonists.
Its establishment under Edward.—In this feverish state of the public mind on the most interesting subject, ensued the death of Henry VIII., who had excited and kept it up. More than once, during the latter part of his capricious reign, the popish party, headed by Norfolk and Gardiner, had gained an ascendant and several persons had been burned for denying transubstantiation. But at the moment of his decease, Norfolk was a prisoner attainted of treason, Gardiner in disgrace, and the favour of Cranmer at its height. It is said that Henry had meditated some further changes in religion. Of his executors, the greater part, as their subsequent conduct evinces, were nearly indifferent to the two systems, except so far as more might be gained by innovation. But Somerset, the new protector, appears to have inclined sincerely towards the Reformation, though not wholly uninfluenced by similar motives. His authority readily overcame all opposition in the council: and it was soon perceived that Edward, whose singular precocity gave his opinions in childhood an importance not wholly ridiculous, had imbibed a steady and ardent attachment to the new religion, which probably, had he lived longer, would have led him both to diverge farther from what he thought an idolatrous superstition, and to have treated its adherents with severity.[118] Under his reign accordingly a series of alterations in the tenets and homilies of the English church were made, the principal of which I shall point out, without following a chronological order, or adverting to such matters of controversy as did not produce a sensible effect on the people.
Sketch of the chief points of difference between the two religions.—1. It was obviously among the first steps required in order to introduce a mode of religion at once more reasonable and more earnest than the former, that the public services of the church should be expressed in the mother tongue of the congregation. The Latin ritual had been unchanged ever since the age when it was familiar; partly through a sluggish dislike of innovation, but partly also because the mysteriousness of an unknown dialect served to impose on the vulgar, and to throw an air of wisdom around the priesthood. Yet what was thus concealed would have borne the light. Our own liturgy, so justly celebrated for its piety, elevation, and simplicity, is in great measure a translation from the catholic services; those portions of course being omitted which had relation to different principles of worship. In the second year of Edward's reign, the reformation of the public service was accomplished, and an English liturgy compiled not essentially different from that in present use.[119]
2. No part of exterior religion was more prominent, or more offensive to those who had imbibed a protestant spirit, than the worship, or at least veneration, of images, which in remote and barbarous ages had given excessive scandal both in the Greek and Latin churches, though long fully established in the practice of each. The populace, in towns where the reformed tenets prevailed, began to pull them down in the very first days of Edward's reign; and after a little pretence at distinguishing those which had not been abused, orders were given that all images should be taken away from churches. It was perhaps necessary thus to hinder the zealous Protestants from abating them as nuisances, which had already caused several disturbances.[120] But this order was executed with a rigour which lovers of art and antiquity have long deplored. Our churches bear witness to the devastation committed in the wantonness of triumphant reform, by defacing statues and crosses on the exterior of buildings intended for worship, or windows and monuments within. Missals and other books dedicated to superstition perished in the same manner. Altars were taken down, and a great variety of ceremonies abrogated; such as the use of incense, tapers, and holy water; and though more of these were retained than eager innovators could approve, the whole surface of religious ordinances, all that is palpable to common minds, underwent a surprising transformation.
3. But this change in ceremonial observances and outward show was trifling, when compared to that in the objects of worship, and in the purposes for which they were addressed. Those who have visited some catholic temples, and attended to the current language of devotion, must have perceived, what the writings of apologists or decrees of councils will never enable them to discover, that the saints, but more especially the Virgin, are almost exclusively the popular deities of that religion. All this polytheism was swept away by the reformers; and in this may be deemed to consist the most specific difference of the two systems. Nor did they spare the belief in purgatory, that unknown land which the hierarchy swayed with so absolute a rule, and to which the earth had been rendered a tributary province. Yet in the first liturgy put forth under Edward, the prayers for departed souls were retained; whether out of respect to the prejudices of the people, or to the immemorial antiquity of the practice. But such prayers, if not necessarily implying the doctrine of purgatory (which yet in the main they appear to do), are at least so closely connected with it, that the belief could never be eradicated while they remained. Hence, in the revision of the liturgy, four years afterwards, they were laid aside;[121] and several other changes made, to eradicate the vestiges of the ancient superstition.
4. Auricular confession, as commonly called, or the private and special confession of sins to a priest for the purpose of obtaining his absolution, an imperative duty in the church of Rome, and preserved as such in the statute of the six articles, and in the religious codes published by Henry VIII., was left to each man's discretion in the new order; a judicious temperament, which the reformers would have done well to adopt in some other points. And thus, while it has never been condemned in our church, it went without dispute into complete neglect. Those who desire to augment the influence of the clergy regret, of course, its discontinuance; and some may conceive that it would serve either for wholesome restraint, or useful admonition. It is very difficult, or perhaps beyond the reach of any human being, to determine absolutely how far these benefits, which cannot be reasonably denied to result in some instances from the rite of confession, outweigh the mischiefs connected with it. There seems to be something in the Roman catholic discipline (and I know nothing else so likely) which keeps the balance, as it were, of moral influence pretty even between the two religions, and compensates for the ignorance and superstition which the elder preserves: for I am not sure that the protestant system in the present age has any very sensible advantage in this respect; or that in countries where the comparison can fairly be made, as in Germany or Switzerland, there is more honesty in one sex, or more chastity in the other, when they belong to the reformed churches. Yet, on the other hand, the practice of confession is at the best of very doubtful utility, when considered in its full extent and general bearings. The ordinary confessor, listening mechanically to hundreds of penitents, can hardly preserve much authority over most of them. But in proportion as his attention is directed to the secrets of conscience, his influence may become dangerous; men grow accustomed to the control of one perhaps more feeble and guilty than themselves, but over whose frailties they exercise no reciprocal command! and, if the confessors of kings have been sometimes terrible to nations, their ascendency is probably not less mischievous, in proportion to its extent, within the sphere of domestic life. In a political light, and with the object of lessening the weight of the ecclesiastical order in temporal affairs, there cannot be the least hesitation as to the expediency of discontinuing the usage.[122]
5. It has very rarely been the custom of theologians to measure the importance of orthodox opinions by their effect on the lives and hearts of those who adopt them; nor was this predilection for speculative above practical doctrines ever more evident than in the leading controversy of the sixteenth century, that respecting the Lord's supper. No errors on this point could have had any influence on men's moral conduct, nor indeed much on the general nature of their faith; yet it was selected as the test of heresy; and most, if not all, of those who suffered death upon that charge, whether in England or on the Continent, were convicted of denying the corporal presence in the sense of the Roman church. It had been well if the reformers had learned, by abhorring her persecution, not to practise it in a somewhat less degree upon each other, or by exposing the absurdities of transubstantiation, not to contend for equal nonsense of their own. Four principal theories, to say nothing of subordinate varieties, divided Europe at the accession of Edward VI. about the sacrament of the eucharist. The church of Rome would not depart a single letter from transubstantiation, or the change, at the moment of consecration, of the substances of bread and wine into those of Christ's body and blood; the accidents, in school language, or sensible qualities of the former remaining, or becoming inherent in the new substance. This doctrine does not, as vulgarly supposed, contradict the evidence of our senses; since our senses can report nothing as to the unknown being, which the schoolmen denominated substance, and which alone was the subject of this conversion. But metaphysicians of later ages might enquire whether material substances, abstractedly considered, exist at all, or, if they exist, whether they can have any specific distinction except their sensible qualities. This, perhaps, did not suggest itself in the sixteenth century; but it was strongly objected that the simultaneous existence of a body in many places, which the Romish doctrine implied, was inconceivable, and even contradictory. Luther, partly, as it seems, out of his determination to multiply differences with the church, invented a theory somewhat different, usually called consubstantiation, which was adopted in the confession of Augsburgh, and to which, at least down to the end of the seventeenth century, the divines of that communion were much attached. They imagined the two substances to be united in the sacramental elements, so that they might be termed bread and wine, or the body and blood, with equal propriety.[123] But it must be obvious that there is merely a scholastic distinction between this doctrine and that of Rome; though, when it suited the Lutherans to magnify, rather than dissemble, their deviations from the mother church, it was raised into an important difference. A simpler and more rational explication occurred to Zuingle and Œcolampadius, from whom the Helvetian Protestants imbibed their faith. Rejecting every notion of a real presence, and divesting the institution of all its mystery, they saw only figurative symbols in the elements which Christ had appointed as a commemoration of his death. But this novel opinion excited as much indignation in Luther as in the Romanists. It was indeed a rock on which the Reformation was nearly shipwrecked; since the violent contests which it occasioned, and the narrow intolerance which one side at least displayed throughout the controversy, not only weakened on several occasions the temporal power of the protestant churches, but disgusted many of those who might have inclined towards espousing their sentiments. Besides these three hypotheses, a fourth was promulgated by Martin Bucer of Strasburgh, a man of much acuteness, but prone to metaphysical subtlety, and not, it is said, of a very ingenuous character. His theory upon the sacrament of the Lord's supper, after having been adopted with little variation by Calvin, was finally received into some of the offices of the English church. If the Roman and Lutheran doctrines teemed with unmasked absurdity, this middle system (if indeed it is to be considered as a genuine opinion, and not rather a politic device),[124] had no advantage but in the disguise of unmeaning terms; while it had the peculiar infelicity of departing as much from the literal sense of the words of institution, wherein the former triumphed, as the Zuinglian interpretation itself. It is not easy to state in language tolerably perspicuous this obsolete metaphysical theology. But Bucer, as I apprehend, though his expressions are unusually confused, did not acknowledge a local presence of Christ's body and blood in the elements after consecration—so far concurring with the Helvetians; while he contended that they were really, and without figure, received by the worthy communicant through faith, so as to preserve the belief of a mysterious union, and of what was sometimes called a real presence. It can hardly fail to strike every unprejudiced reader that a material substance can only in a very figurative sense be said to be received through faith; that there can be no real presence of such a body, consistently with the proper use of language, but by its local occupation of space; and that, as the Romish tenet of transubstantiation is rather the best, so this of the Calvinists is the worst imagined of the three that have been opposed to the simplicity of the Helvetic explanation. Bucer himself came to England early in the reign of Edward, and had a considerable share in advising the measures of reformation. But Peter Martyr, a disciple of the Swiss school, had also no small influence. In the forty-two articles set forth by authority, the real or corporeal presence, using these words as synonymous, is explicitly denied. This clause was omitted on the revision of the articles under Elizabeth.[125]
6. These various innovations were exceedingly inimical to the influence and interests of the priesthood. But that order obtained a sort of compensation in being released from its obligation to celibacy. This obligation, though unwarranted by Scripture, rested on a most ancient and universal rule of discipline; for though the Greek and Eastern churches have always permitted the ordination of married persons, yet they do not allow those already ordained to take wives. No very good reason, however, could be given for this distinction; and the constrained celibacy of the Latin clergy had given rise to mischiefs, of which their general practice of retaining concubines might be reckoned among the smallest.[126] The German Protestants soon rejected this burden, and encouraged regular as well as secular priests to marry. Cranmer had himself taken a wife in Germany, whom Henry's law of the six articles, one of which made the marriage of priests felony, compelled him to send away. In the reign of Edward this was justly reckoned an indispensable part of the new Reformation. But the bill for that purpose passed the Lords with some little difficulty, nine bishops and four peers dissenting; and its preamble cast such an imputation on the practice it allowed, treating the marriage of priests as ignominious and a tolerated evil, that another act was thought necessary a few years afterwards, when the Reformation was better established, to vindicate this right of the protestant church.[127] A great number of the clergy availed themselves of their liberty; which may probably have had as extensive an effect in conciliating the ecclesiastical profession, as the suppression of monasteries had in rendering the gentry favourable to the new order of religion.
Opposition made by part of the nation.—But great as was the number of those whom conviction or self-interest enlisted under the protestant banner, it appears plain that the Reformation moved on with too precipitate a step for the majority. The new doctrines prevailed in London, in many large towns, and in the eastern counties. But in the north and west of England, the body of the people were strictly Catholics. The clergy, though not very scrupulous about conforming to the innovations, were generally averse to most of them.[128] And, in spite of the church lands, I imagine that most of the nobility, if not the gentry, inclined to the same persuasion; not a few peers having sometimes dissented from the bills passed on the subject of religion in this reign, while no sort of disagreement appears in the upper house during that of Mary. In the western insurrection of 1549, which partly originated in the alleged grievance of enclosures, many of the demands made by the rebels go to the entire re-establishment of popery. Those of the Norfolk insurgents in the same year, whose political complaints were the same, do not, as far as I perceive, show any such tendency. But an historian, whose bias was certainly not unfavourable to protestantism, confesses that all endeavours were too weak to overcome the aversion of the people towards reformation, and even intimates that German troops were sent for from Calais on account of the bigotry with which the bulk of the nation adhered to the old superstition.[129] This is somewhat a humiliating admission, that the protestant faith was imposed upon our ancestors by a foreign army. And as the reformers, though still the fewer, were undeniably a great and increasing party, it may be natural to enquire, whether a regard to policy as well as equitable considerations should not have repressed still more, as it did in some measure, the zeal of Cranmer and Somerset? It might be asked, whether, in the acknowledged co-existence of two religions, some preference were not fairly claimed for the creed, which all had once held, and which the greater part yet retained; whether it were becoming that the counsellors of an infant king should use such violence in breaking up the ecclesiastical constitution; whether it were to be expected that a free-spirited people should see their consciences thus transferred by proclamation, and all that they had learned to venerate not only torn away from them, but exposed to what they must reckon blasphemous contumely and profanation? The demolition of shrines and images, far unlike the speculative disputes of theologians, was an overt insult on every catholic heart. Still more were they exasperated at the ribaldry which vulgar Protestants uttered against their most sacred mystery. It was found necessary in the very first act of the first protestant parliament, to denounce penalties against such as spoke irreverently of the sacrament, an indecency not unusual with those who held the Zuinglian opinion in that age of coarse pleasantry and unmixed invective.[130] Nor could the people repose much confidence in the judgment and sincerity of their governors, whom they had seen submitting without outward repugnance to Henry's various schemes of religion, and whom they saw every day enriching themselves with the plunder of the church they affected to reform. There was a sort of endowed colleges or fraternities, called chantries, consisting of secular priests, whose duty was to say daily masses for the founders. These were abolished and given to the king by acts of parliament in the last year of Henry, and the first of Edward. It was intimated in the preamble of the latter statute that their revenues should be converted to the erection of schools, the augmentation of the universities, and the sustenance of the indigent.[131] But this was entirely neglected, and the estates fell into the hands of the courtiers. Nor did they content themselves with this escheated wealth of the church. Almost every bishopric was spoiled by their ravenous power in this reign, either through mere alienations, or long leases, or unequal exchanges. Exeter and Llandaff from being among the richest sees, fell into the class of the poorest. Lichfield lost the chief part of its lands to raise an estate for Lord Paget. London, Winchester, and even Canterbury, suffered considerably. The Duke of Somerset was much beloved; yet he had given no unjust offence by pulling down some churches in order to erect Somerset House with the materials. He had even projected the demolition of Westminster Abbey; but the chapter averted this outrageous piece of rapacity, sufficient of itself to characterise that age, by the usual method, a grant of some of their estates.[132]
Tolerance in religion, it is well known, so unanimously admitted (at least verbally) even by theologians in the present century, was seldom considered as practicable, much less as a matter of right, during the period of the Reformation. The difference in this respect between the Catholics and Protestants was only in degree, and in degree there was much less difference than we are apt to believe. Persecution is the deadly original sin of the reformed churches; that which cools every honest man's zeal for their cause, in proportion as his reading becomes more extensive. The Lutheran princes and cities in Germany constantly refused to tolerate the use of the mass as an idolatrous service;[133] and this name of idolatry, though adopted in retaliation for that of heresy, answered the same end as the other, of exciting animosity and uncharitableness. The Roman worship was equally proscribed in England. Many persons were sent to prison for hearing mass and similar offences.[134] The Princess Mary supplicated in vain to have the exercise of her own religion at home; and Charles V. several times interceded in her behalf; but though Cranmer and Ridley, as well as the council, would have consented to this indulgence, the young king, whose education had unhappily infused a good deal of bigotry into his mind, could not be prevailed upon to connive at such idolatry.[135] Yet in one memorable instance he had shown a milder spirit, struggling against Cranmer to save a fanatical woman from the punishment of heresy. This is a stain upon Cranmer's memory which nothing but his own death could have lightened. In men hardly escaped from a similar peril, in men who had nothing to plead but the right of private judgment, in men who had defied the prescriptive authority of past ages and of established power, the crime of persecution assumes a far deeper hue, and is capable of far less extenuation, than in a Roman inquisitor. Thus the death of Servetus has weighed down the name and memory of Calvin. And though Cranmer was incapable of the rancorous malignity of the Genevan lawgiver, yet I regret to say that there is a peculiar circumstance of aggravation in his pursuing to death this woman, Joan Boucher, and a Dutchman that had been convicted of Arianism. It is said that he had been accessary in the preceding reign to the condemnation of Lambert, and perhaps some others, for opinions concerning the Lord's supper which he had himself afterwards embraced.[136] Such an evidence of the fallibility of human judgment, such an example that persecutions for heresy, how conscientiously soever managed, are liable to end in shedding the blood of those who maintain truth, should have taught him, above all men, a scrupulous repugnance to carry into effect those sanguinary laws. Compared with these executions for heresy, the imprisonment and deprivation of Gardiner and Bonner appear but measures of ordinary severity towards political adversaries under the pretext of religion; yet are they wholly unjustifiable, particularly in the former instance; and if the subsequent retaliation of those bad men was beyond all proportion excessive, we should remember that such is the natural consequence of tyrannical aggressions.[137]