The sermon was followed by an animated debate within the church. It was moved, amid quotations from 1 Cor. v. 11, that Mr. Keane should be excommunicated. That he might be excommunicated, if he were a covetous person within the meaning of the text, was doubted as little as that he had recently given a pitiable exhibition of covetousness. The question was only whether he had erred through ignorance or careless, or whether he had acted “against his conscience or the very light of nature”—whether, in short, his sin was accidental or a trade. In the end he escaped with his fine and admonition.[[89]]

If the only Christian documents which survived were the New Testament and the records of the Calvinist Churches in the age of the Reformation, to suggest a connection between them more intimate than a coincidence of phraseology would appear, in all probability, a daring extravagance. Legalistic, mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work of a jurist and organizer of genius, Calvin’s system was more Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either. That it should be as much more tyrannical than the medieval Church, as the Jacobin Club was than the ancien régime, was inevitable. Its meshes were finer, its zeal and its efficiency greater. And its enemies were not merely actions and writings, but thoughts.

The tyranny with which it is reproached by posterity would have been regarded by its champions as a compliment. In the struggle between liberty and authority, Calvinism sacrificed liberty, not with reluctance, but with enthusiasm. For the Calvinist Church was an army marching back to Canaan, under orders delivered once for all from Sinai, and the aim of its leaders was the conquest of the Promised Land, not the consolation of stragglers or the encouragement of laggards. In war the classical expedient is a dictatorship. The dictatorship of the ministry appeared as inevitable to the whole-hearted Calvinist as the Committee of Public Safety to the men of 1793, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to an enthusiastic Bolshevik. If it reached its zenith where Calvin’s discipline was accepted without Calvin’s culture and intellectual range, in the orgies of devil worship with which a Cotton and an Endicott shocked at last even the savage superstition of New England, that result was only to be expected.

The best that can be said of the social theory and practice of early Calvinism is that they were consistent. Most tyrannies have contented themselves with tormenting the poor. Calvinism had little pity for poverty; but it distrusted wealth, as it distrusted all influences that distract the aim or relax the fibers of the soul, and, in the first flush of its youthful austerity, it did its best to make life unbearable for the rich. Before the Paradise of earthly comfort it hung a flaming brand, waved by the implacable shades of Moses and Aaron.[[90]]

CHAPTER III
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

“If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common, state, he is void of the sense of piety, and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth and in the body of the Church.”

Laud, Sermon before His Majesty, June 19, 1621.

The ecclesiastical and political controversies which descend from the sixteenth century have thrust into oblivion all issues of less perennial interest. But the discussions which were motived by changes in the texture of society and the relations of classes were keen and continuous, nor was their result without significance for the future. In England, as on the Continent, the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle Ages. The result was a re-assertion of the traditional doctrines with an almost tragic intensity of emotion, their gradual retreat before the advance of new conceptions, both of economic organization and of the province of religion, and their final decline from a militant creed into a kind of pious antiquarianism. They lingered, venerable ghosts, on the lips of churchmen down to the Civil War. Then the storm blew and they flickered out.

Medieval England had lain on the outer edge of economic civilization, remote from the great highways of commerce and the bustling financial centers of Italy and Germany. With the commercial revolution which followed the Discoveries, a new age began. After the first outburst of curiosity, interest in explorations which yielded no immediate return of treasure died down. It was not till more than half a century later, when the silver of the New World was dazzling all Europe, that Englishmen reflected that it might conceivably have been lodged in the Tower instead of at Seville, and that talk of competition for America and the East began in earnest.

In the meantime, however, every other aspect of English economic life was in process of swift transformation. Foreign trade increased largely in the first half of the sixteenth century, and, as manufactures developed, cloth displaced wool as the principal export. With the growth of commerce went the growth of the financial organization on which commerce depends, and English capital poured into the growing London money-market, which had previously been dominated by Italian bankers. At home, with the expansion of internal trade which followed the Tudor peace, opportunities of speculation were increased, and a new class of middlemen arose to exploit them. In industry, the rising interest was that of the commercial capitalist, bent on securing the freedom to grow to what stature he could, and produce by what methods he pleased. Hampered by the defensive machinery of the gilds, with their corporate discipline, their organized torpor restricting individual enterprise, and their rough equalitarianism, either he quietly evaded gild regulations by withdrawing from the corporate towns, within which alone the pressure of economic conformity could be made effective, or he accepted the gild organization, captured its government, and by means of it developed a system under which the craftsman, even if nominally a master, was in effect the servant of an employer. In agriculture, the customary organization of the village was being sapped from below and battered down from above. For a prosperous peasantry, who had commuted the labor services that were still the rule in France and Germany, were rearranging their strips by exchange or agreement, and lords, no longer petty sovereigns, but astute business men, were leasing their demesnes to capitalist farmers, quick to grasp the profits to be won by sheep-grazing, and eager to clear away the network of communal restrictions which impeded its extension. Into commerce, industry and agriculture alike, the revolution in prices, gradual for the first third of the century, but after 1540 a mill race, injected a virus of hitherto unsuspected potency, at once a stimulant to feverish enterprise and an acid dissolving all customary relationships.