It was Cartwright’s political rather than his religious views that alarmed Elizabeth and her Ministers. As against their theory of a State-controlled Church, he advocated a Church-controlled State. In fact, the most arrogant and insolent pretensions of the Papacy were surpassed by this Presbyterian divine. Of course, all his demands were based on the authority of Scripture and the ways and customs of the primitive Christian Church. The rule of bishops he denounced as begotten of the devil; the absolute rule of presbyters he held to be established by the word of God. All other forms of Church government were ruthlessly to be suppressed, and heretics were to be punished by death. For the ministers of the Church he claimed not only all spiritual power and jurisdiction, the decreeing of doctrines, the ordering of ceremonies, and so on, but also the supervision of public morals, under which every branch of human activities was included. In short, the State, as well as the individual, was to be placed beneath the heel of the Church. The power of the prince, the secular power, was tolerated only so that it might “protect and defend the councils of the clergy, to keep the peace, to see their decrees executed, and to punish the contemners of them.” Such doctrines aroused no responsive echo in the minds of the English people. The nation whose revolt against the papal supremacy had made the Reformation possible, were not disposed to accept Presbyterian supremacy in its place. The national impatience of ecclesiastical power was not likely suddenly to be removed by any attempt to re-impose it under a new name and in a new garb. In fact, Cartwright’s work almost seems as if specially written to warn the nation against a possible, if not an imminent, danger, to warn them, in truth, that—“New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large.”
Cartwright’s narrow-minded dogmatism was crushingly answered in Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, the first volume of which appeared in 1594. This remarkable book forms, indeed, an important landmark in the history of English political and religious thought. Its forcible exposition of the basic principles of constitutional civil government makes many portions of it even to-day most attractive and instructive reading. For the first time in the history of religious controversy, reason is extolled above any and every authority, and accepted as supreme judge and arbiter of spiritual, as well as of temporal, affairs. Though Hooker thought it fit that the reason of the individual should yield to that of the Church, he did not hesitate to declare “that authority should prevail with man either against or above reason, is no part of our belief. Companies of learned men, be they never so great and reverend, are to yield unto reason.” As Buckle well points out,[21:1] if we compare this work with Jewel’s Apology for the Church of England, written some thirty years previously,—and ordered, together with the Bible and Fox’s Martyrs, “to be fixed in all parish churches and read to the people,”—“we shall at once be struck by the different methods these eminent writers employ.... Jewel inculcates the importance of faith; Hooker insists on the exercise of reason.... In the same opposite spirit do these great writers conduct their defence of their own Church. Jewel thinks to settle the whole dispute by crowding together texts from the Bible, with the opinions of the commentators upon them.... Hooker’s defence rests neither upon tradition, nor upon commentators, nor even upon revelation; but he is content that the pretensions of the hostile parties shall be decided by their applicability to the great exigencies of society, and by the ease with which they adapt themselves to the general purposes of ordinary life.”
The celebrated work by Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants, a Safe Way to Salvation, published in 1637, and of which two editions were issued within less than five months, also deserves special mention here. His fundamental position may be well summarised in one of his own sentences—“I am fully assured that God does not, and therefore that man ought not to require any more of any man than this, to believe the Scriptures to be God’s word, to endeavour to find the true sense of it, and to live according to it.” Even more fully than Hooker, Chillingworth accepts reason as the all-sufficient guide of human conduct, and admits no reservations that might limit the sacred right of private judgement. The essential difference between these three eminent writers is admirably summarised by Buckle in the following [words]:[21:2] “These three great men represent the three distinct epochs of the three successive generations in which they respectively lived. In Jewel, reason is, if I may so say, the superstructure of the system; but authority is the basis upon which the superstructure is built. In Hooker, authority is only the superstructure, and reason is the basis. But in Chillingworth, whose writings were harbingers of the coming storm, authority entirely disappears, and the whole fabric of religion is made to rest upon the way in which the unaided reason of man shall interpret the decrees of an omnipotent God.”
In fact, Chillingworth’s great work may well be regarded as the last word of the Protestant Reformation in England.
[15:1] According to Beard, The Hibbert Lectures, 1883, p. 119, “It was a mediæval maxim, which no one thought of questioning, that the language of the Bible had four senses—the literal, the allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical, of which the last three were mystical or spiritual, in contradistinction to the first.” The learned Erasmus, who lived and died a devout Roman Catholic, seems to have accepted this allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures. Of interpreters of the Holy Scriptures, he recommends those “who depart as far as possible from the letter.” Erasmus, Opp. (Enchiridion), v. 29, B, C, D. Quoted by Beard, p. 120.
[16:1] Church History, vol. iv. p. 407.
[17:1] When occasion arose, they do not seem to have been averse to giving publicity to their opinions. In 1656 a London publisher, Giles Calvert, to whom we shall have occasion to refer again, republished A Discourse on the Family of Love, originally presented to the High Court of Parliament in the time of Queen Elizabeth. This Giles Calvert was the printer and publisher of nearly all Winstanley’s pamphlets, and also one of the first authorised printers and publishers for the Children of Light, as the Quakers, or Society of Friends, originally styled themselves. We have reason to believe that Calvert, as well as many other of Winstanley’s disciples, joined the Quakers about the time of the republication of this pamphlet.
[18:1] “There is no other flame in which the sinner is plagued, and no other punishment of hell, than the perpetual anguish of mind which accompanies habitual sin.”—Erasmus, Enchiridion. Quoted by Beard.
[18:2] See Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation, by Karl Kautsky, more especially p. 79.
[19:1] Green’s Short History of the English People, p. 457.