In the form which the system assumed under Elizabeth, considerations of public policy, which appealed to the State, were hardly distinguishable from considerations of social morality, which appealed to the Church. As a result of the Reformation the relations previously existing between the Church and the State had been almost exactly reversed. In the Middle Ages the former had been, at least in theory, the ultimate authority on questions of public and private morality, while the latter was the police-officer which enforced its decrees. In the sixteenth century, the Church became the ecclesiastical department of the State, and religion was used to lend a moral sanction to secular social policy. But the religious revolution had not destroyed the conception of a single society, of which Church and State were different aspects; and, when the canon law became “the King’s ecclesiastical law of England,” the jurisdiction of both inevitably tended to merge. Absorbing the ecclesiastical authority into itself, the Crown had its own reasons of political expediency for endeavoring to maintain traditional standards of social conduct, as an antidote for what Cecil called “the license grown by liberty of the Gospel.” Ecclesiastics, in their turn, were public officers—under Elizabeth the bishop was normally also a justice of the peace—and relied on secular machinery to enforce, not only religious conformity, but Christian morality, because both were elements in a society in which secular and spiritual interests had not yet been completely disentangled from each other. “We mean by the Commonwealth,” wrote Hooker, “that society with relation unto all public affairs thereof, only the matter of true religion accepted; by the Church, the same society, with only reference unto the matter of true religion, without any other affairs besides.”[[56]]
In economic and social, as in ecclesiastical, matters, the opening years of Elizabeth were a period of conservative reconstruction. The psychology of a nation which lives predominantly by the land is in sharp contrast with that of a commercial society. In the latter, when all goes well, continuous expansion is taken for granted as the rule of life, new horizons are constantly opening, and the catchword of politics is the encouragement of enterprise. In the former, the number of niches into which each successive generation must be fitted is strictly limited; movement means disturbance, for, as one man rises, another is thrust down; and the object of statesmen is, not to foster individual initiative, but to prevent social dislocation. It was in this mood that Tudor Privy Councils approached questions of social policy and industrial organization. Except when they were diverted by financial interests, or lured into ambitious, and usually unsuccessful, projects for promoting economic development, their ideal was, not progress, but stability. Their enemies were disorder, and the restless appetites which, since they led to the encroachment of class on class, were thought to provoke it. Distrusting economic individualism for reasons of state as heartily as did churchmen for reasons of religion, their aim was to crystallize existing class relationships by submitting them to the pressure, at once restrictive and protective, of a paternal Government, vigilant to detect all movements which menaced the established order, and alert to suppress them.
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows!...
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong
(Between whose endless jar justice resides)
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,