With Sancroft's departure opens a new age of Lambeth's ecclesiastical history. The Revolution which flung him aside had completed the work of the great Rebellion in sweeping away for ever the old pretensions of the primates to an autocracy within the Church of England. But it seemed to have opened a nobler prospect in placing them at the head of the Protestant Churches of the world. In their common peril before the great Catholic aggression, which found equal support at Paris and Vienna, the Reformed communities of the Continent looked for aid and sympathy to the one Reformed Church whose position was now unassailable. The congregations of the Palatinate appealed to Lambeth when they were trodden under foot beneath the horse-hoofs of Turenne. The same appeal came from the Vaudois refugees in Germany, the Silesian Protestants, the Huguenot churches that still fought for existence in France, the Calvinists of Geneva, the French refugees who had forsaken their sunny homes in the south for the Gospel and God. In the dry letter-books on the Lambeth shelves, in the records of bounty dispensed through the Archbishop to the persecuted and the stranger, in the warm and cordial correspondence with Lutheran and Calvinist, survives a faint memory of the golden visions which filled Protestant hearts after the accession of the great Deliverer. "The eyes of the world are upon us," was Tenison's plea for union with Protestants at home. "All the Reformed Churches are in expectation of something to be done which may make for union and peace." When a temper so cold as Tenison's could kindle in this fashion it is no wonder that more enthusiastic minds launched into loftier expectations—that Leibnitz hoped to see the union of Calvinist and Lutheran accomplished by a common adoption of the English Liturgy, that a High Churchman like Nicholls revived the plan, which Cranmer had proposed and Calvin had supported, of a general council of Protestants to be held in England. One by one such visions faded before the virulence of party spirit, the narrowness and timidity of Churchmen, the base and selfish politics of the time. Few men had higher or more spiritual conceptions of Christian unity than Tenison; yet the German translation of our Liturgy, stamped with the royal monogram of King Frederick, which still exists in the library, reminds us how in mere jealousy of a Tory triumph Tenison flung away the offer of a union with the Church of Prussia. The creeping ambition of Dubois foiled whatever dreams Archbishop Wake may have entertained of a union with the Church of France.
From the larger field of political and ecclesiastical history we may turn again ere we close to the narrower limits of the Lambeth Library. The storm which drove Sancroft from his house left his librarian, Henry Wharton, still bound to the books he loved so well. Wharton is one of those instances of precocious developement which are rarer in the sober walks of historical investigation than in art. It is a strange young face that we see in the frontispiece to his sermons, the impression of its broad, high brow and prominent nose so oddly in contrast with the delicate, feminine curves of the mouth, and yet repeated in the hard, concentrated gaze of the large, full eyes which look out from under the enormous wig. Wharton was the most accomplished of Cambridge students when he quitted the University at twenty-two to aid Cave in his 'Historia Litteraria.' But the time proved too exciting for a purely literary career. At Tenison's instigation the young scholar plunged into the thick of the controversy which had been provoked by the aggression of King James, and his vigour soon attracted the notice of Sancroft. He became one of the Archbishop's chaplains, and was presented in a single year to two of the best livings in his gift. With these however save in his very natural zeal for pluralities he seems to have concerned himself little. It was with the library which now passed into his charge that his name was destined to be associated. Under him its treasures were thrown liberally open to the ecclesiastical antiquaries of his day—to Hody, to Stillingfleet, to Collier, to Atterbury, and to Strype, who was just beginning his voluminous collections towards the illustration of the history of the sixteenth century. But no one made so much use of the documents in his charge as Wharton himself. In them, no doubt, lay the secret of his consent to take the oath, to separate from his earlier patron, to accept the patronage of Tenison. But there was no permanent breach with Sancroft; on his deathbed the Archbishop committed to him the charge of editing Laud's papers, a charge redeemed by his publication of the 'Troubles and Trials' of the Archbishop in 1694.
But this with other labours were mere by-play. The design upon which his energies were mainly concentrated was "to exhibit a complete ecclesiastical history of England to the Reformation," and the two volumes of the 'Anglia Sacra,' which appeared during his life, were intended as a partial fulfilment of this design. Of these, as they now stand, the second is by far the more valuable. The four archiepiscopal biographies by Osbern, the three by Eadmer, Malmesbury's lives of Aldhelm and Wulstan, the larger collection of works by Giraldus Cambrensis, Chaundler's biographies of Wykeham and Bekington, and the collection of smaller documents which accompanied these, formed a more valuable contribution to our ecclesiastical history than had up to Wharton's time ever been made. The first volume contained the chief monastic annals which illustrated the history of the sees whose cathedrals were possessed by monks; those served by canons regular or secular were reserved for a third volume, while a fourth was to have contained the episcopal annals of the Church from the Reformation to the Revolution.
The last however was never destined to appear, and its predecessor was interrupted after the completion of the histories of London and St. Asaph by the premature death of the great scholar. In 1694 Battely writes a touching account to Strype of his interview with Wharton at Canterbury:—"One day he opened his trunk and drawers, and showed me his great collections concerning the state of our Church, and with a great sigh told me his labours were at an end, and that his strength would not permit him to finish any more of that subject." Vigorous and healthy as his natural constitution was he had worn it out with the severity of his toil. He denied himself refreshment in his eagerness for study, and sat over his books in the bitterest days of winter till hands and feet were powerless with the cold. At last nature abruptly gave way, his last hopes of recovery were foiled by an immoderate return to his old pursuits, and at the age of thirty-one Henry Wharton died a quiet scholar's death. Archbishop Tenison stood with Bishop Lloyd by the grave in Westminster, where the body was laid "with solemn and devout anthems composed by that most ingenious artist, Mr. Harry Purcell;" and over it were graven words that tell the broken story of so many a student life:—"Multa ad augendam et illustrandam rem literariam conscripsit; plura moliebatur."
The library no longer rests in those quiet rooms over the great cloister in which a succession of librarians, such as Gibson and Wilkins and Ducarel, preserved the tradition of Henry Wharton. The 'Codex' of the first, the 'Concilia' of the second, and the elaborate analysis of the Canterbury Registers which we owe to the third are, like Wharton's own works, of primary importance to the study of English ecclesiastical history. It was reserved for our own day to see these memories swept away by the degradation of the cloister into a kitchen yard and a scullery; but the Great Hall of Archbishop Juxon, to which by a happy fortune the books were transferred, has seen in Dr. Maitland and Professor Stubbs keepers whose learning more than rivals the learning of Wharton himself. It is not without significance that this great library still lies open to the public as a part and a notable part of the palace of the chief prelate of the English Church. Even if Philistines abound in it the spirit and drift of the English Church have never been wholly Philistine. It has managed somehow to reflect and represent the varying phases of English life and English thought; it has developed more and more a certain original largeness and good-tempered breadth of view; amidst the hundred jarring theories of itself and its position which it has embraced at one time or another it has never stooped to the mere "pay over the counter" theory of Little Bethel. Above all it has as yet managed to find room for almost every shade of religious opinion; and it has answered at once to every national revival of taste, of beauty, and of art.
Great as are the faults of the Church of England, these are merits which make men who care more for the diffusion of culture than for the propagation of this shade or that shade of religious opinion shrink from any immediate wish for her fall. And they are merits which spring from this, that she is still a learned Church, not learned in the sense of purely theological or ecclesiastical learning, but a Church which is able to show among its clergy men of renown in every branch of literature, critical, poetical, historical, or scientific. How long this distinction is to continue her own it is hard to say; there are signs indeed in the theological temper which is creeping over the clergy that it is soon to cease. But the spirit of intelligence, of largeness of view, of judicious moderation, which is so alien from the theological spirit, can still look for support from the memories of Lambeth. Whatever its influence may have been, it has not grown out of the noisy activity of theological "movement." Its strength has been to sit still and let such "movements" pass by. It is by a spirit the very opposite of theirs—a spirit of conciliation, of largeness of heart, that it has won its power over the Church. None of the great theological impulses of this age or the last, it is sometimes urged, came out of Lambeth. Little of the theological bitterness, of the controversial narrowness of this age or the last, it may fairly be answered, has ever entered its gates. Of Lambeth we may say what Matthew Arnold says of Oxford, that many as are its faults it has never surrendered itself to ecclesiastical Philistines. In the calm, genial silence of its courts, its library, its galleries, in the presence of its venerable past, the virulence, the petty strife, the tumult of religious fanaticism finds itself hushed. Amongst the storm of the Wesleyan revival, of the Evangelical revival, of the Puseyite revival, the voice of Lambeth has ever pleaded for a truth simpler, larger, more human than theirs. Amid the deafening clamour of Tractarian and anti-Tractarian disputants both sides united in condemning the silence of Lambeth. Yet the one word that came from Lambeth will still speak to men's hearts when all their noisy disputations are forgotten. "How," a prelate, whose nearest relative had joined the Church of Rome, asked Archbishop Howley, "how shall I treat my brother?" "As a brother," was the Archbishop's reply.