Four Lectures on the English Revolution

by Thomas Hill Green

This conflict was rightly regarded by the higher intellects that took part in it as but a stage in a vaster one of which all christendom was the arena [1]; as a completion of the Reformation, a struggle against the catholic reaction. In the special form which it assumed in England we shall find the reason why the course of religious, and indirectly of political development, with us has been different from that which obtained severally in protestant Germany, in France, and in southern Europe. It is only by considering the modes in which the spiritual forces brought into play in the Reformation had their relations adjusted elsewhere, that we can appreciate the nature of their collision and reconciliation in England. These modes may be summed as respectively jesuitry, the divorce of the secular from the religious, and the complete assimilation of the religious to the political life of states. The power by which the catholic church met the new emergency, the new demand for personal spiritual satisfaction, was, speaking broadly, jesuitry. So long as human life remained in that ‘wholeness’ which is health, there was no room for such an agency. The catholic of the middle ages had no thought of a spiritual world beyond that presented to him in the outward institutions of the church. His sins were sins against some established ordinance, which the upholder of the ordinance could absolve. But with the awakened conscience of a spiritual world, apart from all {282} ordinances, to which the soul in its individual essence for good or evil was related, came a new need of spiritual direction. Where the reason was strong enough to be a law to itself, this direction was found in the Bible as interpreted by the individual conscience. Where the authority of the church retained its hold, it could only do so by regulating the most secret intricacies of personal experience, and by meeting the importunities of personal fear or aspiration by an answer equally personal. Through the jesuits, as educators and confessors, it was able to do this. It supplied an elaborate mechanism through which the individual might work out his own justification in disregard of recognised outward duties. The protestant idea of an inward light, to whatever extravagances it might be open, stimulated the sense of a universal law which the inward light revealed. Hence it has issued, as among the quakers, in a far-reaching zeal of cosmopolitan philanthropy. Jesuitry, on the other hand, is the ruin of all public spirit. It satisfies the individual soul and reconciles it to the church by casuistical devices which give the guise of reason to the interested suggestions of personal passion. In saving the soul it ruins nations, not because it proposes a higher law than that of which the kingdoms of this world are capable, but because it makes salvation a process of self-seeking no other than the satisfaction of the hunger of sense. In southern Europe jesuitry had its way. Sometimes it might justify the tyrant, sometimes (as in France under the League) the tyrannicide; but it was equally antagonistic to rational freedom. Acting on the ruler, it derationalised the state, which came to be, not the passionless expression of general right, but the engine of individual caprice under alternating fits of appetite and fear. Acting on the subject, again, it gave him over to private interests in the way either of vicious self-indulgence or of the religious zeal which compounds for such indulgence. The creature of the jesuits is no longer spontaneously loyal to the institutions under which he is born, nor yet has he, like the puritan, a new law written on his conscience which he is to enact in society, but he has a transaction of his own to negotiate with a power wielding spiritual terrors. He may be either rake or devotee, but never a citizen, as the Spain and southern Germany of the seventeenth century too plainly testified.

[1] [Amended from “area”. Tr.]

Thus directed, then, the conflict between inward and {283} outward interest ends in such a supremacy of the former as gives the state over to caprice and undermines the outward morality which forms the moral man. So far as catholic countries have escaped, or recovered from, such a result, they have done so by the gradual obliteration or confinement within strict limits of all personal interest in religion. The Romance nations, it has been often remarked, have not the same instinct of spiritual completeness as the Teutonic. They are not distressed by the spiritual divorce which is implied in leaving religion and morality as unreconciled principles of action. Thus in some of them we find a political and social interest growing up in complete independence of the church, and organising itself with a rational regularity which the protestant politician, constantly thwarted in schemes which he deems secular by religious intrusion, may sometimes be disposed to envy. Religion, meanwhile, is regulated, and the agencies such as jesuitry by which it might interfere with secular life are carefully watched. Under such regulation it is left to itself. To the citizen it becomes a mere ceremonial. His attitude towards it is simply passive. At best it does but fill up the vacancies of his social life or comfort him in his final seclusion from it. The devout become a class by themselves, estranged from the activities of civil life. Only for them and for women, as the passive element in society, is religion a permanent influence. Wherever in catholic countries, under the influence of the revolutionary revival of the last century, the reorganisation of society has been achieved, it has only been under the condition of this confinement and passivity of religion. In France, as the source of this revival, the condition has been most fully realised. It is the natural sequel, indeed, of the compromise of interests effected by Henry IV.

To the Germans, as to every other nation, the quickened Christianity of the Reformation brought not peace but a sword. Their religious wars, however, were rather brought on by crowned violence and the ambition of the house of Hapsburg than the result of any strife of principles involved in lutheranism itself. The protestantism of North Germany, growing up under the protection of princes, from the first blended with the existing institutions of the state. It escaped internal rupture, and had not seriously to fight for existence till the time of the thirty years’ war. It then {284} owed its preservation, not to itself, but to the sword of Gustavus and the diplomacy of Richelieu, and Germany emerged from the war in such a state of wretchedness and exhaustion, that popular religion was in no condition to assert itself against princely patronage and control during the ‘constituted anarchy’ which followed the peace of Westphalia. This circumstance, acting on the German instinct of comprehension, prevented the antagonism of the secular and religious from developing itself in the lutheran countries. The German, with his speculative grasp, has no difficulty in regarding church and state as two sides of the same spiritual organism. To him each expresses an idea which is the necessary complement of the other, and each alike commends itself to his reason. How little the reality of either church or state may correspond to the idea, how powerless in action may be the permeating strength of German thought, an Englishman needs not to be told. But it is important to observe the effect of this union of strength with weakness, of the faculty of intellectual fusion with moral acquiescence, in reconciling the freest spiritual consciousness to secular limitations, and in healing the breaches of religious strife. All that we associate with the term ‘sectarian’ is for good or evil unknown in Germany. The conflict of reason and authority has not indeed ceased among the countrymen of Luther. It has its wars and its truces, its conquerors and its victims; but its arena has been the study and the lecture-room, not the market-place or the congregation.

The Reformation in England begins simply with the substitution of royal for papal power in the government of the church. If Henry VIII. had left a successor capable of wielding his sceptre, English religion would scarcely have grown up, as it has done, in the bracing atmosphere of schism. During the minority of Edward, a form of protestant episcopacy, unique among the reformed churches, grew up with a certain degree of independence, while at the same time ideas of a different order, whose mother was Geneva, were working undisturbed. The Marian persecution, while it strengthened the influence of the aggressive Genevan form of protestantism on England, completed its estrangement from the state. Thus when ‘anglicanism,’ episcopal, sacramental, ceremonial, was established by Elizabeth, it had at once to deal with an opposite system, thoroughly formed and {285} nursed in antagonism to the powers of this world. This system is, so to speak, the full articulation of that voice of conscience, of the inner self-asserting spirit, in opposition to outward ordinance, which the Reformation evoked. In this light let us consider its action in England.

The lutheran doctrine, as we have seen, brings the individual soul, as such, into direct relation to God. From this doctrine the first practical corollary is the placing of the bible in the hands of the people; the second is the exaltation of preaching. From these again follows the diffusion of popular education. The soul, admitted in its own right to the divine audience, still needs a language. It must know whom it approaches, and what it is his will to give. But as the intercourse is inward and spiritual, so must be the power which regulates it; not a priest or a liturgy, but the voice of the divine spirit in the bible, interpreted by the believer’s conscience. Religion being thus internalised and individualised, preaching, as the action of soul on soul, becomes the natural channel of its communication. It is the protestant’s ritual, by which the heart is elevated to the state in which the divine voice speaks not to it in vain. Education, again, is the means by which the individual must be rendered capable of availing himself of his spiritual independence.

A people’s bible, then, a reading people, a preaching ministry, were the three conditions of protestant life. The force which results from them is everywhere an unruly one. With the English, who have neither the acquiescence nor the comprehensive power of the Germans, it at once, to use the language of a German philosopher, ‘stormed out into reality.’ It demanded and sought to create an outward world, a system of law, custom, and ordinance, answering to itself. Not only is the law of the bible to be carried directly and everywhere into action; whatever is of other origin is no law for the society whose head is Christ. An absolute breach is thus made between the new and the old. Those who by a conscious, deliberate wrench have broken with the old, and lived themselves into the new, are the predestined people of God. Outside them is a doomed world. They are the saints, and their prerogative has no limits. They admit of no co-ordinate jurisdiction which is of the world and not of Christ. The sword of the magistrate must be in their hands, or it is a weapon of offence against Christ’s people.

{286} Such a system soon builds again the bondage which it began with destroying. Originating, as we have seen, in the consciousness of a spiritual life which no outward ordinances could adequately express, it hardens this consciousness into an absolute antithesis, false because regarded as absolute, between the law of Christ and the law of the world. The law of Christ, however, must be realised in the world, and thus from this false antithesis there follows by an inexorable affiliation of ideas, a new authority, calling itself spiritual, but binding the soul with ‘secular chains,’ which from the very fact of its sincerity and logical completeness, from its allowing no compromise between the saints and the world, is more heavy than the old. It behoves us to note well these conflicting tendencies to freedom and bondage, often almost inextricably convolved, which puritanism contained within itself. It was the temporary triumph of the one tendency that made the commonwealth a possibility, and the interference of the other that stopped its expansion into permanent life. The one gave puritanism its nobility during its period of weakness while it struggled to dominion; the other made its dominion, once attained, a contradiction in fact which no individual greatness could maintain.

Puritanism, in the presbyterian form, had obtained supremacy in Scotland, while it was still struggling for life in England. In execution of its principle that a system of positive law was to be found in the bible, so absolute and exclusive as to leave no room for things indifferent, it not only established an absolute uniformity of church government and worship, but made itself virtually the sovereign power in the state. Without scruple or disguise it pursued ‘the work of reformation’ by conforming under pains and penalties the manners and opinions of men to a supposed scriptural model. In England, though the theory of puritanism was the same speculatively, its position was happily different. No one who believes that the scriptures are to be looked to, not for a positive moral law, much less for a system of church polity and ceremonial, but for moral impulse and principle, can sympathise with the doctrine, which at first was the ostensible ground of puritan opposition to the church of England, that whatever scripture does not command, it forbids. In contrast with this, the position of the early protestant bishops, that the true rule for matters of church {287} polity is practical expediency, if it fitted less aptly the interest of its maintainers, would seem to represent the higher wisdom that gives the world its due, and recognises the continuity of custom and institution which builds up the being that we are. Compared, indeed, with such pedantry as that of Cartwright, the great puritan controversialist under Elizabeth, the ‘judiciousness’ of Hooker becomes real philosophy. But in the confused currents of the world it is not always the party whose maxims are the more rationally complete which has the truer lesson for the present or the higher promise for the future. The reforming impulse, the effort to emancipate the inward man from ceremonial bondage, was with puritanism rather than with the church. Judaic itself, it yet broke the pillars of Judaism. Its limitations were its own, and happily it had no chance of fixing them finally in an outward church. Its force belonged to a larger agency, which was transforming religion from a sensuous and interested service to a free communion of spirit with spirit, and just for this reason it kept gathering to itself elements which its own earthen vessel could not long contain.

From the puritanism of Cartwright to that of Milton is a long step upwards; it answers to the descent from the anglicanism of Hooker to that of Laud or Heylin. The ‘Polity’ of Hooker, under an appearance of theological artifice, covers a statesmanlike endeavour to reconcile the protestant conscience to the necessities of the state and society. The anglicanism of Laud was simply the catholic reaction under another name. The political change corresponded to the theological. Elizabeth had ruled a nation. James and Charles never rose beyond the conception of developing a royal interest, which religion should at once serve and justify. Thus there arose that combination, by which the catholic reaction had everywhere worked, of a court party and a church party, each using the other for the purpose of silencing the demand for a ‘reason why’ in politics and religion. Charles and Laud alike represent that jesuitical conscience (if I may be allowed the expression) which is fatal to true loyalty. As Milton has it, ‘a private conscience sorts not with a public calling.’ Such a conscience may be true to a cause, as Charles and Laud were doubtless, from whatever reason, both true to the cause of a sacerdotal church. But it dare not look into the law of liberty, or {288} conceive the operation of God except in a system of prescribed institutions, about which no questions are to be asked, and in the maintenance of which cruelty becomes mercy and falsehood truth. Through the policy of the fifteen years which preceded the Long Parliament, a policy sometimes outrageous, sometimes trivial, the same purpose runs. The promulgation of the Book of Sports, the torturing of writers against plays and ceremonies, the persecution of calvinism, the suppression of the lectureships by which the more wealthy puritans sought to maintain a preaching ministry uncontrolled by the bishops, all tend to divert the human spirit from the consciousness of its right and privilege to acquiescence in what is given to it from without. Whether this diversion were effected in the interest of court or sacerdotalism, whether the head of the sacerdotal system were the old pope or ‘my lord of Canterbury,’ ‘lineally descended from St. Peter in a fair and constant manner of succession,’ mattered little. The result, but for puritan resistance, must have been that freedom should yield in England, as it had yielded in Spain and South Germany, and was soon to yield in France, to a despotism under priestly direction, which again could end only in the ruin of civil life, or in its recovery by the process which relegates religion to women and devotees.