Four Lectures on the English Revolution

by Thomas Hill Green

[2] [Burnet, Own Time, p. 108, Ed. 1838.]

[3] [Clarendon on ‘Creasy’s answer to Stillingfleet,’ as quoted in the Biographia Britannica (art. ‘Vane.’)]

LECTURE II.

In Vane first appears the doctrine of natural right and government by consent, which, however open to criticism in the crude form of popular statement, has yet been the moving principle of the modern reconstruction of Europe. It was the result of his recognition of the ‘rule of Christ in the natural conscience’ in the elemental reason, in virtue of which man is properly a law to himself. From the same idea followed the principle of universal toleration, the exclusion of the magistrate’s power alike from the maintenance and restraint of any kind of opinion. This principle did not {297} with Vane and the independents rest, as in modern times, on the slippery foundation of a supposed indifference of all religious beliefs, but on the conviction of the sacredness of the reason, however deluded, in every man, which may be constrained by nothing less divine than itself.

‘The rule of magistracy’ says Vane, ‘is not to intrude itself into the office and proper concerns of Christ’s inward government and rule in the conscience, but it is to content itself with the outward man, and to intermeddle with the concerns thereof in reference to the converse which man ought to have with man, upon the grounds of natural justice and right in things appertaining to this life.’ [1]

[1] [‘A Retired Man’s Meditations,’ (quoted by Forster, Eminent British Statesmen, iv. p. 84).]

Nor would he allow the re-establishment under the name of christian discipline, of that constraint of the conscience which he refused to the magistrate. Such discipline, he would hold, as he held the sabbath, to be rather a ‘magistratical institution’ in imitation of what was ‘ceremonious and temporary’ among the Jews, ‘than that which hath any clear appointment in the gospel.’ [1] Christ’s spirit was not bound. A system of truth and discipline had not been written down once for all in the scriptures, but rather was to be gradually elicited from the scriptures by the gradual manifestation in the believer of the spirit which spoke also in them. A ‘waiting,’ seeking attitude, unbound by rule whether ecclesiastical or secular, was that which became a spiritual church. The application of this waiting spirit to practical life is to be found in the policy of Cromwell.

[1] [Sikes, quoted by Forster, ib. p. 81, note.]

It would be unfair to ascribe the theory of Vane in its speculative fulness to the independents as a body. It seems, however, to be but the development of the view on which Mr. Robinson had dwelt in his last words to the settlers of New Plymouth; and, so far as it could be represented by a sect, it was represented by the independents. It came before the world, in full outward panoply, in the army of Cromwell. The history of its inevitable conflict with the spirit of presbyterianism on the one hand and the wisdom of the world on the other, of its aberrations and perplexities, of its brief triumph and final flight into the wilderness, is the history of the rise and fall of the English commonwealth. I have yet {298} to speak, however, of the representation of the wisdom of the world in the Long Parliament.

Before the outbreak of the war, as I have explained, Vane was the only man in the house of commons whose opinions were recognised as definitely opposed both to episcopacy and presbyterianism. In the lords his only recognised follower was lord Brook, known to the readers of Sir Walter Scott as the ‘fanatic Brook,’ really an eminent scholar and man of letters, who was shot in storming the close at Lichfield in the first year of the war, leaving as a legacy to the parliament a plea for freedom of speech and conscience. The majority of the parliament, however, had no special love for the presbyterian discipline and theology. Their favour to it was merely negative. They dreaded arminianism, as notoriously at that time the great weapon in the hands of the jesuits; they objected to the high episcopacy as sacerdotal, and as maintaining a jurisdiction incompatible with civil liberty. In 1641 a modified episcopacy on Usher’s plan was a possible solution of the difficulty. Each shire was to have a presbytery of twelve members, with a bishop as president who, ‘with assistance of some of the presbytery,’ was to ordain, degrade, and excommunicate. Though the pressure of strife with the king prevented anything being done to carry out this resolution, it probably represented the views even of the more advanced parliamentary leaders; but only, however, as afterwards appeared, on the supposition that the presbyters with their bishop should be strictly under civil control. The worldly wisdom of the Long Parliament was, in the party language of the times, essentially erastian.