The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain / Nineteenth Century Europe

by J. A. Cramb

Political history has its effect upon the growth of this conviction. In the fourteenth century, for instance, the Papacy is at Avignon. Edward I in the beginning of that century withstands Boniface VIII, the last great pontiff in whom the temper and resolution of Hildebrand appear, as William the Conqueror had withstood Gregory VII. The statute of praemunire, a generation later, prepares the way for Wyclif. The Papacy is now but an appanage of the Valois monarchs. How shall England, conqueror of those monarchs at Creçy and on other fields, reverence Rome, the dependent of a defeated antagonist?

The same bright energy of the soul, the same awe, rooted in the blood of our race, which manifest themselves in the early and Middle Ages, determine the character of the religious history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the fifteenth century, suffering and the presence of suffering, the law of tragedy of which we have spoken, add their transforming power to spiritual life. As in political life the sympathy with the wrongs of others grows into imaginative justice, so sympathy with the faiths of others, which springs from the consciousness of the first great illusion lost, and sorrow for a vanished ideal, grows into tolerance for the creeds and religions of others. For only a race deep-centred in its own faith, yet sensitive to the faith that is in others, can understand the religion of others; only such a race can found an empire characterized at once by freedom and by faith.

The very ardour of the belief of the race in the ideal from Rome—a Semitic ideal, transmuted by Roman genius and policy—swept the Teutonic imagination beyond the ideal, seeking its sources where Rome herself had sought them. This is the impulse which binds the whole English Reformation, the whole movement of English religious thought from Wyclif to Cromwell and Milton, to Wordsworth and Carlyle. It is this common impulse of the race which Henry VIII relies upon, and because he is in this their leader the English people forgets his absolutism, his cruel anger, his bloody revenges.

The character of the English Reformation after the first tumultuous conflicts, the fierce essays of royal theocracy and Jesuit reactionism, set steadily towards Liberty of Conscience.

This spirit is glorified in Puritanism, the true heroic age of the Reformation. It appears, for example, in Oliver Cromwell himself. Cromwell is one of the disputed figures in our history, and every English historian has drawn his own Cromwell. But to foreign historians we may look for a judgment less partial, less personal. Dr. Döllinger, for instance, to whom wide sympathy and long and profound study of history have given the right, which can only be acquired by vigil and fasting, to speak about the characters of the past—he who by his position as Romanist is no pledged admirer, describes Cromwell as the "prophet of Liberty of Conscience."[[2]] This is the deliberate judgment of Döllinger. It was the judgment of the peasants of the Vaudois two hundred and fifty years ago! Somewhat the same impression was made by Cromwell upon Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Guizot.

Again in the seventeenth century, in the Irene of Drummond, and in the remarkable work of Barclay, the Argenis,[[3]] in its whole conception of the religious {72} life, of monasticism, as in its idealization of the character of the great Henri Quatre, you find the same desire for a wider ideal, not less in religion than in politics. We encounter it later in Shaftesbury and in Locke. It is the essential thought of the work of Thomas Hobbes. It is supremely and beautifully expressed in Algernon Sidney, the martyr of constitutional freedom and of tolerance.

And what is the faith of Algernon Sidney? One who knew him well, though opposed to his party, said of him, "He regards Christianity as a kind of divine philosophy of the mind." Community of religious not less than of political aims binds closer the friendship of Locke and Shaftesbury. In the preparation of a constitution for the Carolinas they found the opportunity which Corsica offered to Rousseau. In the Letters on Toleration[[4]] Locke did but expand the principles upon which, with Shaftesbury's aid, he elaborated the government of the new State. The Record Office has no more precious document than the draught of that work, the margins covered with corrections in the handwriting of these two men, the one the greatest of the Restoration statesmen, the other ranking amongst the greatest speculative thinkers of his own or any age. One suggested formula after another is traceable there, till at length the decision is made, that from the citizens of the new State shall be exacted, not adherence to this creed or to that, but simply the declaration, "There is a God." Algernon Sidney aids Penn in performing a similar task for Pennsylvania, and their joint work is informed by the same spirit as the "Constitutions" of Locke and Shaftesbury.

Thus in religion the men of the seventeenth century occupy a position analogous to their position in politics, already delineated. In politics, as we have seen, they establish a constitutional government, and make sure the path to the wider freedom of the future. In religion they fix the principles of that philosophic tolerance which the later centuries develop and apply. Both in politics and in religion they turn aside from the mediaeval imperialism of Bourbon and Hapsburg, consciously or unconsciously preparing the foundations of the Imperialism of to-day.

If the divines, scholars, poets, and wits who met and talked under the roof of the young Lord Falkland at Tew represent in their religious and civil perplexities the spirit of the seventeenth century, within the intersecting circles of Pope and Bolingbroke, Swift and Addison, may be found in one form or another all the varied impulses of the eighteenth—intellectual, political, scientific, literary, or religious. England had succeeded to the place which Holland filled in the days of Descartes and Spinoza—the refuge of the oppressed, the home of political and religious freedom, the study of Montesquieu, the asylum of Voltaire.[[5]] Yet between the England of the eighteenth and the England of the seventeenth century there is no such deep gulf fixed as Carlyle at one period of his literary activity imagined. The one is the organic inevitable growth of the other. The England which fought at Blenheim, Fontenoy, and Quebec is the same England as fought at Marston Moor and Dunbar. Chatham rescued it from a deeper abasement than that into which it had fallen in the days of the Cavalier parliaments, and it followed him to heights unrecked of by Cromwell. Nor is the religious character of the century less profound, less earnestly reverent, when rightly studied. Even its scepticism, its fiery denials, or vehement inquiry—a Woolston's, for instance, or a Cudworth's, like a Shelley's or a James Thomson's[[6]] long afterwards—spring from no love of darkness, but from the immortal ardour for the light, for Truth, even if there come with it silence and utter death. And from this same ardour arises that extraordinary outburst of varied intellectual and religious effort, critical or constructive, which makes the Revolutionary and the Georgian eras comparable in energy, if not in height of speculative inquiry, to the great period of the Aufklärung in Germany. Kant acknowledged his indebtedness to Hume. Rousseau, Voltaire, Condillac, and Helvetius are in philosophic theory but pupils of Locke.

Towards the close of the century appeared Gibbon's great work, the Decline and Fall, a prose epic in seventy-one books, upon the last victories, the last triumphs, and the long, reluctant death-struggles of the Roman Empire, the insidious advance of inner decay, the ever-renewed assaults of foreign violence, the Goth, the Saracen, the Mongol, and at the close, the leaguering lines of Mahomet, the farewell to the Greeks of the last of the Constantines, the Ottomans in the palaces of the Caesars, and the melancholy musings of an Italian scholar over the ruins on the Seven Hills. An epic in prose—and every one of its books might be compared to the gem-encrusted hilt of a sword, and each wonderfully wrought jewel is a sentence; but the point of the sword, like that of the cherubim, is everywhere turned against superstition, bigotry, and religious wrong.