There is a state of transition in society which we usually call a crisis. A crisis is the most active moment of conflicting principles; the novel must extirpate the ancient, the ancient must eject the novel; the one looks to be continued and the other to be settled; it is a painful state of obstinate resistance, like that of two wrestlers when neither can cast down the other.
Fortunate are the people who have only to pass through a single crisis. But in the wrath of Providence there may be reserved another connecting crisis in the chain of human events, and this we term a reaction, usually accompanied by a retaliation; then comes the hoarded vengeance and the day of retribution on which issues no amnesty. In physics, action and reaction are equal; the reciprocation of any impulse not being greater than the impulse itself. Nature in her operations thus preserves an equilibrium; but the human hatreds and the partial interests which man has contrived for his own misery, can only find that equilibrium when he submits to a toleration. But a toleration is a partition of power, and predominance is the vitality of a party. The Catholic vengeance of Mary in its reaction was out of all proportion greater than the Protestant docility of Edward. Our nation has been more subject to this crisis and this reaction than perhaps any other. The reign of Charles the First was a crisis, that of Charles the Second a reaction; that of James the Second brought on a crisis, and the revolution of 1688 was the consequential reaction. But never have the people suffered more than during the three reigns of Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth; a terrible intolerance disorganized the whole community: the conflict of old and of new creeds; of reciprocal persecutions, and alternate triumphs; of abjurations and recantations; of supple compliers and rabid polemics; and of pugilistic contests of the ejected with the ejectors—rapid scenes at once tragic and ludicrous.
Henry the Eighth died in 1547, and the accession of Elizabeth was in 1558. In this short period of eleven years we were governed by two sovereigns, whose reigns, happily for the English people, were the shortest in our annals.
A new era was opening under the dominion of Henry, for he was a monarch of enlarged views. But the intellectual character of England in its vernacular literature was retarded by the events which occurred in the reigns of the two successors of this sovereign. The nation indeed suffered no longer from the civil wars of the rival Roses; but another war now shook the empire with as merciless a rivalry—it was a universal conflict of opinions and dogmas. The governing powers themselves combated each other; and whether in opposing the Reformer to the Romanist, or in restoring “the papelin” to root out “the gospeller,” in these two mutable reigns, they neutralised or distracted the unhappy people; and while both maintained that they were proffering “the true religion,” religion itself seemed to have lost its eternal truth. Edward with an infirm hand established, what from her short reign Mary, with her barbarous energy, could only imperfectly cast down.
Edward the Sixth, a boy-king, and a puppet-prince, invested with supreme power, acted without any volition of his own. We are prepossessed in his favour by his laborious diary. It is, however, remarkable that no solitary entry made in that book of life, no chance effusion, disturbs the uninterrupted equanimity. Whether the young king signs for the decapitation of his two uncles, or jots down the burning of Joan of Kent, an Arian, and another of a Dutchman, a Socinian, or records how a live goose suspended had its head sliced off by those who run at the ring, they seem equally to be matters of course, and by him were only distinguished by their respective dates. A nation’s hope has always been the flattering painter of every youthful prince who dies immaturely; in the royal youth is lamented the irreparable loss of the future great monarch. But his father had been the most glorious youthful prince who ever adorned a throne; and it would be hard to decide, by the heartless chronicle of Edward, whether such an imperturbable spirit would have closed his life as a Nero or a Titus. This unhappy young prince must have felt the utter misery of his condition, for his was that curse of power, when in its exercise power itself becomes powerless, while its hands must be directed by another’s. Had the reign of Edward the Sixth been prolonged, we should have had a polemical monarch, if we may judge by a collection of texts of Scripture, in proof of the doctrine of justification by faith, which exists in his own handwriting, written in French, and dedicated to his uncle.[1]
This was a calamitous period for the nation; we derive little consolation when we discover that not more than three centuries ago our ancestors were a semi-barbarous race? We seem to be consulting the annals of some Asiatic dynasty, when we see a royal nephew tranquilly affixing his signature to the death-warrants of his uncles; imprisonment or exile would have been too tender for these state victims; we see one brother attainted by another, and the scaffold finally receiving both; and a Queen of England, in the captivity of the Romish superstition, hailing with a benediction her own autos da fè. What we should have gained had the accomplished prince lived, we cannot conjecture; but what the nation were spared by the death of the melancholy Mary, is not doubtful. Edward and Mary were opposite bigots; and both alike presumed that they were appointed to the work of sanctity; but every reform which requires to be carried on by coercion will long appear ambiguous to the better-tempered. The bigotry as well as the puerile taste of the prince appeared when he composed a comedy or interlude against The Whore of Babylon, and the The False Gods; but the brawls of polemics, at least, are more tolerable than torture and the sacrifice of fire.
It was one of the first evils of the Reformation, that the people were ill prepared to receive their emancipation. All sense of subordination rapidly disappeared in society; even the spell of devotion was dissolved; and the people seemed to consider that, having rid themselves of one spurious mode of religion, there was no longer any religion in the world. “Thus for religion ye keep no religion,” wrote the learned Cheke, in once addressing an armed multitude, who cruelly would not tolerate the Christianity of their neighbours.
An immature reformation is accompanied by certain unavoidable inconveniences. Its first steps are incomprehensible to the thoughtless, and too vague for the considerate, doing what it should not do, and leaving undone what it ought to do, comprehending too much, and omitting many things. A revolutionary reform breaks out with an ebullition of popular feelings; but in escaping from one tyranny, men do not necessarily enter into freedom. The reformer, in abandoning what is known, looks to an uncertain and distant futurity; the anti-reformer appeals to precedent, and clings to what is real—his good is positive, and his evil is not concealed. In the removal of some long-standing evils in civil society, some portion of good goes with them; for many of these served as expedients to supply certain wants, and therefore relatively were or may be beneficial. Even our old prejudices, when scrutinised, often will be found to have struck their roots in the common welfare. The complicate interests of civil society were at first a web woven by strong hands, so that much of the antiquated may retain its soundness, while the gloss of the new may set off but a loose and flimsy texture. These are some of the difficulties of an age of innovation, which may wisely check without stopping the velocity of its movements. The only unerring reformer who partakes not of human infirmities, neither deceived by illusions, nor overcome by prejudices, and whose only wisdom is experience, must be that silent and unceasing worker of the destinies of man—Time!
At the period now before us, the crisis and the reaction were alike remarkable. The people who witnessed in four successive reigns four different systems of religion, mutable with the times, amidst their incertitude were in fact taught a religious scepticism. One of the great innovations in divine service was that of preaching from the pulpit, instead of reading set homilies or other prescribed lessons, by which the Romanists had reduced their whole devotion to a mumbled ritual and a mechanical service—formularies and forms which ceased to operate on the heart, and carried on a religion that was not religious.