Cromwell's Establishment not a Church.
So far as moral discipline akin to that of the old Church Courts was instituted and enforced by Protectorate enactments, it was by civil statute, not by any kind of canon law. Ordinances for the improvement of public morals appear on the statute book of that period. Cock-matches and horse-races were prohibited, professedly on account of the danger attendant upon large gatherings of people.[86] Fighting a duel upon which death should ensue was adjudged to be murder. Challenges, and the conveyance of them, were made punishable.[87] The Commissioners of Customs, and other officers, received authority to suppress drunkenness and profane swearing amongst all people employed in their departments.
These laws rested on the authority of the Protector and his Council; and the resolutions enacting them can be traced in the order-books of that small but potent assembly. When we turn to these records, we discover numerous proofs and illustrations of the supreme power which was exercised in this way over ecclesiastical causes. Decisions respecting titles to Church livings, and the augmentation of poor benefices, and for the payment of sums to poor clergymen, frequently appear in those interesting minutes.[88]
CHAPTER V.
All the ecclesiastical legislation of the first nine months of the Protectorate had been in the form of ordinances, framed mainly by the genius, and resting principally on the authority, of the Protector. In the autumn of 1654, he summoned his first Protectorate Parliament; and in our notices of its proceedings will be discovered the introduction of measures by certain ecclesiastical parties for modifying the platform of the Broad Establishment which he had laid down in the articles of government.
The elections met with little interference from the Protector and his Council. Glyn, and a large number of Presbyterians, took their seats. Neither Vane nor Marten were returned. Dr. Owen, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, was elected for the University.
The members assembled on the 3rd of September. It was, we are told, the Lord's Day, and they met "in the temple of the Lord," at Westminster; "and the first work they began was to seek the face of the most high God and Eternal Protector of Heaven, by prostrating themselves before Him in His Divine ordinances." On Monday, his Highness went to Westminster—regally attended by life guards, pages, and lackeys, and, upon alighting at the door of the abbey, he proceeded to take his seat over against the pulpit, "Members of Parliament sitting on both sides." Goodwin preached a sermon on "the deliverance out of Egypt and the pilgrimage towards Canaan through the wilderness"—which so gratified Cromwell, that he repeatedly referred to it in the speech with which he opened the Parliament, and indeed the spirit of it pervaded the whole of that address.[89]