It is, in fact, to this attempt of all Nonconformists to make the Scriptures the sole and rigid guide alike in Church discipline as in doctrine, that we are to trace their divergencies and dissensions among themselves, their heated controversies, their discordant factions, their constant parting up of their small conventicles into smaller ones, even of only two or three members, and the real origin of all modern sects. This was the common experience of such Dissenters from the Church, alike in England before their exile and then in all the places of their exile,—Holland, Frankfort, Geneva, and elsewhere. It could not but follow on their keen, acute, and concentrated searching and scanning of every sentence and word of Scripture as bearing upon their contest with prelacy, that they should be led beyond matters of mere discipline into those of doctrine. A very small point was enough to open a new issue. It is vexing to the spirit, while winning sometimes our admiration for the intense and awful sincerity of the self-inflicting victims of their own scruples, magnified into compunctions of conscience, to trace the quarrels and leave-takings of those poor exiles on the Continent, struggling in toil and sacrifice for a bare subsistence, but finding compensation if not solace in their endless and ever-sharpening altercations. But while all this saddens and oppresses us, we have to allow that it was natural and inevitable. The Bible, the Holy Scriptures, will never henceforward to any generation, in any part of the globe, be, or stand for, to individuals or groups of men and women, what it was to the early English Puritans. To it was intrusted all the honor, reverence, obedience, and transcendent responsibility in the life, the hope, and the salvation of men, which had but recently been given, in awe and dread, to a now dishonored and repudiated Church, against which scorn and contempt and hate could hardly enough embitter reproach and invective. With that Book in hand, men and women, than whom there have never lived those more earnest and sincere, sat down in absorbed soul-devotion, to exercise their own thinking on the highest subjects, to decide each for himself what he could make of it. Those who have lived under a democracy, or a full civil, mental, and religious freedom like our own, well know the crudity, the perversity, the persistency, the conceits and idiosyncrasies into which individualism will run on civil, social, and political matters of private and public interest. How much more then will all exorbitant and eccentric, as well as all ingenious and rational, manifestations of like sort present themselves, when, instead of dealing with ballots, fashions, and social issues, men and women take in hand a book which, so to speak, they have just seized out of a descending cloud, as from the very hand of God. It was easy to claim the right of private judgment; but to learn how wisely to use it was quite a different matter. It was, however, in those earnest, keen studies, those brooding musings, those searching and subtle processes of speculation and dialectic argument engaged upon the Bible and upon institutional religion, that the wit, the wisdom, the logic, and the vigor of the understanding powers of people of the English race were sharpened to an edge and a toughness known elsewhere in no other. The aim of Prelatists, Conformists, and clerical and civil magistrates in religion, to bring all into a common belief and ritual, was hopeless from the start. It made no allowance for the rooted varieties and divergencies in nature, taste, sensibility, judgment, and conscience in individuals who were anything more than animated clods. How was it possible for one born and furnished in the inner man to be a Quaker, to be manufactured into a Churchman? It soon became very evident that bringing such a people as the English into accord in belief and observance under a hierarchical and parochial system would be no work of dictation or persuasion, but would require authority, force, penalties touching spiritual, mental, and bodily freedom, and resorting to fines, violence, and prisons.
The consumptive boy-king, Edward VI., dying when sixteen years of age, through his advisers, advanced the Reformation in some of its details beyond the stage at which it was left by his father, and put the work in the direction of further progress. But “Bloody Mary,” with her spectral Spanish consort, Philip II., overset what had by no means become a Protestant realm, and made it over to cardinal and pope. Nearly three hundred martyrs, including an archbishop and four bishops, perished at the stake, besides the uncounted victims in the dungeons. No one had suffered to the death for religion in the preceding reign. After her accession, Elizabeth stiffly held back from accepting even that stage of reform reached by Edward. In the Convocation of 1562, only a single vote, on a division, withstood the proposal to clear the ritual of nearly every ceremony objectionable to the Puritans. The two statutes of supremacy and uniformity, passed in the first year of the reign of Elizabeth, brought the English Church under that subjection to the temporal or civil jurisdiction which has continued to this day. The firmness, not to say the obstinacy, with which the Queen stood for her prerogative in this matter has been entailed upon Parliament; and the ecclesiastical Convocation has in vain struggled to assert independency of it. Elizabeth exhibited about an equal measure of zeal against Catholics and Puritans. She frankly gave out her resolution that if she should marry a Catholic prince, she should not allow him a private chapel in her palace. About two hundred Catholics suffered death in her reign.
An important episode in the development of Puritanism and Separatism in the English Church brings to our notice the share which different parties came to have in both those forms of dissent during a period of temporary exile on the Continent in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Mary, and afterward of Elizabeth. The results reached by the two classes of those exiles were manifested respectively in the colonization, first by Separatists, at Plymouth, and next by Nonconformists in the Massachusetts Bay, and by other New England colonists.
In the thirty-first year of Henry’s reign, 1539, while the monarch was vacillating between the old religion and the new, was enacted what was called “The Bloody Statute.” This was of “six articles.” These articles enforced the dogmas of Transubstantiation, of Communion in One Element, of the Celibacy of the Clergy, of the Vows of Chastity, of Private Masses, and of Auricular Confession. An infraction of these articles in act or speech or writing was to be punished either by burning, as heresy, or by execution, as felony. The articles were to be publicly read by all the clergy quarterly. To escape the operation of this statute, many of the clergy went to Geneva. Returning on the accession of Edward, they had to exile themselves again when Mary came to the throne, to venture home once more under Elizabeth, in 1559. As early as 1528, there had been a small but earnest religious fellowship of devout scholars in Cambridge, meeting for exercises of prayer and reading. Three of its members—Bilney, Latimer, and Bradford—were burned under Mary. Afterward Travers and Cartwright, both of them men of eminent ability and religious fervor, had found refuge in Geneva; and to them, on their return, is to be ascribed the strength and prevalence of the spirit of Puritanism in Cambridge. The fact that so many men of parts and scholarship and distinguished position were thus principal agents in the first working of Puritanism, should qualify the common notion that Nonconformity in England had its rise through obscure and ordinary men. Some of the most eminent Puritans, and even Separatists, were noted university men and scholars,—like Cartwright, Perkins, Ames, Bradshaw, and Jacob, the last being of Oxford. Robinson, the pastor at Leyden, has been pronounced to have been among the first men of his time in learning and comprehensiveness of mind.[447] It was really in the churches of the English exiles in Holland that the ultimate principles of Independency and Congregationalism were wrought out, to be asserted and so manfully stood for both in Old and in New England. Indeed, the essential principles of largest toleration and of equality, save in civil functions, had been established in Holland in 1572, before the coming of the English exiles. Almost as real as ideal was the recognition there of the one all-comprehensive church represented by a multitude of independent elements. Greenwood and his fellow-student at Cambridge,—Barrow, a layman,—joined the Separatists in 1586. The Separatists in England might well, as they did, complain to King James that he did not allow the same liberty to them, his own subjects, as was enjoyed by the French and Walloon churches in London and elsewhere in England.
On the accession of Queen Mary, who was crowned in 1553, more than eight hundred of the English Reformers took refuge on the Continent. Among them were five bishops, five deans, four archdeacons, fifty doctors of divinity and famous preachers, with nobles, merchants, traders, mechanics, etc. Among the “sundrie godly men” who went to Frankfort, the Lutheran system gained much influence. Those who found a refuge in Zurich and Geneva were more affected towards the Calvinistic. Soon after a flourishing and harmonious church, with the favor of the magistrates, had been established at Frankfort, dissension about matters of discipline and the use of the Prayer-book of King Edward VI., with or without a revision, was opened by some new-comers. The advice of Knox, Calvin, and others, which was asked, did not prevent an acrimonious strife, which ended in division.[448] Carrying back their differences to England, we find them contributing to deepen the alienation and the variances between Conformists, Nonconformists, and Separatists. The intimacy and sympathy with Reformers on the Continent naturally induced the exiles, even the English bishops who had been among them, to lay but little stress on the exclusive prerogatives of Episcopacy, including the theory of Apostolic Succession.
The English bishops who were most earnest in the early measures of reform,—such as Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer,—realizing that in the minds of the common people the strong ties of association connected with the emblems, forms, and vestments of the repudiated Church of Rome would encourage lingering superstitions in their continued use, would have had them wholly set aside. Especially would they have had substituted in the chancels of churches tables instead of altars, as the latter would always be identified with the Mass. The people also associated the validity of clerical administrations with priestly garments. The starting point of the Puritan agitation and protest as to these matters may well be found, therefore, in the refusal of Dr. Hooper to wear the clerical vestments for his consecration as Bishop of Gloucester in 1550. Having exiled himself at Zurich during the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII., Hooper had become more thoroughly imbued with Reforming principles, and withstood the compromising compliances which some of the Continental Reformers yielded. Even Ridley insisted upon his putting on the vestments for his consecration; and after being imprisoned for his recusancy, he was forced to a partial concession. This matter of habits, tippets, caps, etc., may be viewed either as a bugbear, or as representative of a very serious principle.
In an early stage of the Puritan movement as working in the progress of the Reformation in England, it thus appeared that what, as represented in men and principles, might be called a third party, was to assert itself. As the event proved, in the struggle for the years following, and in the accomplished result still triumphant, this third party was to hold the balance of power. There was a general accord in dispensing with the Pope, renouncing his sway, and retaining within the realm the exercise of all ecclesiastical jurisdiction. A Romanizing party was still in strength, with its hopes temporarily reviving, its agencies, open and secret, on the alert, and its threats bold, if opportunity should favor the execution of them. This Romanizing faction may represent one extreme; the Puritans may represent another. A third, and for a considerable space of time weaker, as already stated, than either of them, intervened, to win at last the victory. In ridding themselves of Rome, the Puritans aimed to rid the Church of everything that had come into it from that source,—hierarchy, ceremonial, superstition, discipline, and assumption of ecclesiastical prerogative,—reducing the whole Church fabric to what they called gospel simplicity in rule and order; the apostolic model. This, as we have noticed, was to be sought full, sufficient, and authoritative in the Scriptures. But neither of the Reforming monarchs, nor the majority of the prelates successively exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction, were prepared for this reversion to so-called first principles. They would not allow the sufficiency nor the sole authority of the Scriptural model; nor would they admit that all that was wrought into the hierarchy, the ceremonial, the institution, and the discipline of the English Church came into it through Popery, and had the taint or blemish of Popery. The English Church now represents the principles then argued out, maintained, and adopted. It followed a principle of selection, sometimes called compromise, to some seeming arbitrary, to others reasonable and right. It proceeded upon the recognition of an interval between the close of the ministry of the apostles and the rise of the Papacy, with its superstitious innovations and impositions, during which certain principles and usages in the government and ceremonial of the Church came into observance. Though these might not have the express warrant of Scripture, they were in nowise inconsistent with Scripture. They might claim to have the real warrant and approval of the apostles, because they were “primitive,” and might even be regarded as essential, as Hooker so earnestly tried to show, to the good order, dignity, and efficiency of the Church of Christ. With exceeding ability did the Puritan and the Church parties deal with this vital issue. The Puritans brought to it no less of keen acumen, learning, and logic than did their opponents. They thoroughly comprehended what the controversy involved. When, fifty years ago, substantially the same issue was under vigorous discussion in the Oxford or Tractarian agitation, so far were the “Puseyites,” so-called, from bringing into it any new matter, that the old arsenal was drawn upon largely for fresh use.
The Puritans held loyally to the fundamental position asserted by their sturdy champion. Cartwright, in his Admonition, etc.,—“The discipline of Christ’s Church that is necessary for all time is delivered by Christ, and set down in the Holy Scripture.” The objection, fatal in the eyes of the Puritans, to receiving, as authoritative, customs and vouchers of the so-called “Primitive” Church and of the Fathers, was that it compelled to the practice of a sort of eclecticism in choosing or rejecting, by individual preference or judgment, out of that mass of heterogeneous gathering which Milton scornfully described as “the drag-net of antiquity.” Though the pleaders on both sides of the controversy succeeded in showing that “patristic” authority, and the usages and institutions which might be traced out and verified in the dim past, were by no means in accord or harmony as to what was “primitive,” both parties seem to have consented to hide, gloss over, or palliate very much of the crudity, folly, superstition, conceit, and discordancy so abounding in the writings of the Fathers. Nothing could be more positive than the teaching of St. Augustine,—not drawn from the New Testament, in which the rite was for adults, but from the then universal practice of the Church,—that baptism was to be for infants, and by immersion. That Father taught that an unbaptized infant is forever lost; and that, besides baptism, the infant’s salvation depends upon its receiving the Eucharist. Yet this has not hindered but that the vast majority of Christians, Roman Catholic and Protestant, save a single sect, administer the rite by sprinkling infants. How, too, could the Prelatists approve a quotation from Tertullian:[449] “Where there are only three, and they laics, there is a church”?
In consistency with this their vital principle of the sole sufficiency of the Scripture institution and pattern for a church, the work of purification led its resolute asserters to press their protests and demands against not only such superstitions and innovations as could be traced directly to the Roman corruption and innovation, but to a more thorough expurgation. Incident to the rupture with the Papacy, and in the purpose to repel what seemed to be its vengeful and spiteful devices for recovering its sway, there was developed among the most impassioned of the Reformers an intense and scornful hate, a bitter heaping of invectives, objurgations, and all-wrathful epithets against the old Church as simply blasphemous,—the personification of Antichrist. So they were resolute to rid themselves of all “the marks of the Beast.” The scrapings, rags, tatters of Popery, and everything left of such remnants, especially provoked their contempt. Having adopted the conviction that the “Mass” was an idolatrous performance, all its paraphernalia, associated in the minds of the common people with it as a magical rite, the priestly and altar habits, the cap, the tippet, the rochet, etc., were denounced and condemned. The very word “priest,” with all the functionary and mediatorial offices going with it, was repudiated. The New Testament knew only of ministers, pastors, teachers. While, of course, recognizing that the apostles exercised special and peculiar prerogatives in planting the Church, the Puritans maintained that they had no successors in their full authority. The Christian Church assembly they found to be based upon and started from the Synagogue, with its free, popular methods, and not upon the Temple, with its altar, priests, and ritual. It is an interesting and significant fact, that while the Reformation in its ferment was working as if all the elements of Church institution were perfectly free for new combinations, the edition of the English Bible called Cranmer’s, in 1539, translated the word ecclesia by “congregation,” not “church,”—thus providing for that Puritan principle of the province of the laity. Doctrine, discipline, and ritual, or ceremony, being the natural order in which ecclesiastical affairs should receive regard, there being at first an accord among the Reformers as to doctrine, the other essentials engrossed all minds. The equality of the ministers of religion, all of whom were brethren, with no longer a master upon earth, struck at the very roots of all hierarchical order. What would have been simply natural in the objections of the Puritans when they saw that Rome was to leave the prelatical element of its system fastened upon the realm, was intensified by the assumption of dangerous and, as they believed, unchristian and unscriptural power and sway by a class of the clergy of lordly rank exercising functions in Church and State, and taking titles from their baronial tenure of land. These lordly prelates had recently been filling some of the highest administrative and executive offices under the Crown, and holding places in diplomacy. In an early stage of the Reformation, the mitred abbots had been dropped out of the upper house of Parliament. While they were in it, they, with the twenty-one “Lord Bishops,” preponderated over the temporal peers. As their exclusion weakened the ecclesiastical power in the government, the prelates who remained seemed to believe and to act as if it fell to them to represent and exercise the full prerogative of sway which had belonged to the old hierarchy. Very marked is the new phase assumed by the spirit and course of the Nonconformists under this changed aspect of the controversy. The Puritans had begun by objecting and protesting against certain usages; they now set themselves resolutely against the authority of those who enforced such usages. To a great extent, the Roman Catholic prelates on those parts of the Continent where the Reformation established itself, deserted their sees. This left the way clear in those places for a church polity independent of prelacy. The retention of their sees and functions by the English bishops, and the addition to their number by the consecration of others as selected by the Crown, thus made the struggle which the Puritans maintained in England quite unlike that of their sympathizers on the Continent. The issue thus raised on the single question of the Divine right and the apostolic authority and succession of bishops was continuously in agitation through the whole contention maintained by Dissenters. In other elements of it, the controversy exhibited changing phases, as the process of the reform seemed at intervals to be advanced or impeded, while the kingdom, as we have noted, was pulsating between the old and the new régime,—as Henry VIII. and his three children, in their succession to his throne, sought to modify, to arrest, or to limit it. The distribution among the people of the Scriptures in the English tongue was favored and brought about by Thomas Cromwell and Cranmer. The privilege, however, was soon revoked, as the people were thus helped to take the matter of religion into their own hands. The mother tongue was first used in worship with the translated litany in 1542, which was revised in 1549. The new prayer-book, canons, and homilies were brought into use. It was by royal authority, and not either by Convocation or Parliament, that the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion were imposed. On Elizabeth’s accession there were nine thousand four hundred priests in England. About two hundred of these abandoned their posts rather than comply with the conditions exacted by the stage in innovation already reached. The more pronounced champions of the Church of England are earnest in pleading that the rupture with Rome was not the act of the King, but of what might be called the Church itself. The as yet unreformed bishops, we are told, had in Convocation, in 1531, denied the Papal supremacy; then Parliament, the universities, the cathedral bodies, and the monastic societies had confirmed the denial. But on all these points there are still open and contested questions of fact and argument not requiring discussion here.
Another radical question concerned the rights and province of the laity in all that entered into the institutional part of religion, and the oversight and administration of discipline in religious assemblies. There certainly could be no complaint that lay or civil power as represented by the monarch had not exhibited sufficient potency in fettering the ecclesiastical or clerical usurpation. An already quoted Act in the twenty-sixth year of Henry’s reign affirmed that “whatsoever his Majesty should enjoin in matters of religion should be obeyed by all his subjects.” The Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity in the first year of Elizabeth made the Church subordinate to, and dependent upon, the civil power. Thus ecclesiastical authority was restrained by the prerogative of the Crown, while ceremonial and discipline, as approved by the monarch, were left at the dictation of Parliament.