As Thorndike is more full and explicit in the statement of his views respecting the schism which he believed to be involved in Nonconformity, so also he goes beyond some other Anglicans in denouncing its principles, and censuring its professors. Perhaps certain writers of his class might think less unjustly, and more charitably, of Dissenters; yet none of them, consistently with their own Church notions, could regard Independent societies as Churches, whatever favourable opinion they might entertain of individual members.
Anything like intercommunion with communities not Episcopalian, seems, in the estimation of such a man as Thorndike, utterly out of the question; and therefore by him, and by those who think with him, the Episcopal Church of England is placed in an entirely isolated position, in reference to the rest of Protestant Christendom, except where Bishops are retained; such instances being few and doubtful.
THE PRAYER BOOK.
Cosin, in his Confession, declares very strongly against sectaries and fanatics, amongst whom he ranks “not only the Separatists, the Anabaptists, and their followers, alas, too, too many, but also the New Independents and Presbyterians of our country, a kind of men hurried away with the spirit of malice, disobedience, and sedition, who by a disloyal attempt (the like whereof was never heard since the world began) have, of late, committed so many great and execrable crimes, to the contempt and despite of religion, and the Christian faith: which, how great they were, without horror cannot be spoken or mentioned.”[447]
Connected with love for the Anglican Church, with dislike of the Papacy, and with alienation from unepiscopal communities, there existed a strong attachment to the formularies of faith, and of worship, contained in the Book of Common Prayer. That Book was used in secret during the Commonwealth; and before being reviewed in 1662—indeed previously to the Restoration—it received comment and eulogy from the pen of Hamon L’Estrange,—who published, in 1659, an elaborate and learned work on The Alliance of Divine Offices, in which he compared other Liturgies with that of the Church of England since the Reformation. His book is based upon the study of Whitgift and Hooker, who had answered Cartwright’s objections to the Anglican services, and who had convinced the author that they did not lie open to the charge of unlawfulness, but were of a nature to command obedience. L’Estrange also studied the previous records, as he calls them, of the first six centuries; the result being a conviction, that the noblest parts of the Liturgy were used by the Primitive Church, before a Popish Mass had ever been said; and that an admirable harmony obtained, even in external rites, between the Church of England and the ancient Fathers. This volume did not reach a second edition before the year 1690; but until it was supplemented or superseded by later works, it continued to be the chief authority on the subject, and has been, in our own time, thought worthy of republication in the library of Anglo-Catholic Theology.
A new publication appeared, partly in 1651, and partly in 1662, bearing upon the Anglican controversy with Puritanism, of too important a character to be passed over in silence. The first five books of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, had long been the admiration of Episcopalian Churchmen,—the rest of the treatise, supposed to be lost, remaining to them an object of desire. At the periods now mentioned, there came to light the last three books of this great work as possessed by posterity.
HOOKER’S WORKS.
The sixth book, included in the part which issued from the press in 1651, is, according to the title, a disquisition upon ecclesiastical power and the question of lay eldership; but the reader does not proceed many pages before he finds the disquisition going off in a tangent, from the subject of Church jurisdiction, to pursue inquiries relative to the Popish dogmas of confession and penance. Such a method of composition is so unlike that of “the judicious Hooker,” that there can be no doubt his last accomplished Editor is right in concluding, that we have here some compositions from the author’s pen not intended for insertion in the Ecclesiastical Polity. Notes remain showing that he had drawn up a plan for this department of his task, which would have methodically and pertinently disposed of it, but no MS. has been discovered filling up the carefully-digested outline. It has been suspected that the Puritan relatives of the Church champion in Elizabeth’s reign were guilty of foul play in this matter, and that after destroying most of the genuine copy, they vamped up the mutilated remainder with dissertations selected from other papers. Such a thing may be possible, but certainly it is not proved. I can find no satisfactory positive evidence in support of the suspicion,[448] and it is quite unaccountable how, if the Puritan manglers of his MSS. had made away with what related to lay eldership, they should leave in existence a long Essay, containing a lengthened defence of Episcopal order. This defence, which appeared in 1662, under the Editorship of Gauden, who does not say where he obtained it, presents abundant internal proof of its genuineness, showing nevertheless the absence of that careful revision and correction, which the Author would have bestowed, had he lived to complete his own publication. It forms the seventh book.
In the fourth and fifth chapters there is a discussion of the main point, “whence it hath grown that the Church is governed by Bishops.” In the fifth, Hooker says:—
“It was the general received persuasion of the ancient Christian world, that Ecclesia est in Episcopo, ‘the outward being of a Church consisteth in the having of a Bishop.’ That where colleges of presbyters were, there was at the first, equality amongst them, St. Jerome thinketh it a matter clear: but when the rest were thus equal, so that no one of them could command any other as inferior unto him, they all were controllable by the Apostles, who had that Episcopal authority abiding at the first in themselves, which they afterwards derived unto others. The cause wherefore they under themselves appointed such Bishops as were not every where at the first, is said to have been those strifes and contentions, for remedy whereof, whether the Apostles alone did conclude of such a regiment, or else they together with the whole Church judging it a fit and a needful policy, did agree to receive it for a custom; no doubt but being established by them on whom the Holy Ghost was poured in so abundant measure for the ordering of Christ’s Church, it had either Divine appointment beforehand, or Divine approbation afterwards, and is in that respect to be acknowledged the ordinance of God, no less than that ancient Jewish regiment, whereof though Jethro were the deviser, yet after that God had allowed it, all men were subject unto it, as to the polity of God, and not of Jethro.”