There are three very admirable works[467] covering much of the matter of this chapter, from the pen of John Tulloch, D.D., Principal of St. Mary’s College in the University of St. Andrew’s.
Though these three works are from the pen of a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, they are written in a spirit of the most broad and comprehensive catholicity. They set forth with keen discernment and with generous appreciation the advances made by highly gifted individual minds in the several stages and phases of the development of a protracted controversy upon the principles involved in an attempted adjustment of the rights of conscience and free thought, in asserting themselves against traditional and ecclesiastical proscriptions. It required the contributions from many such minds and spirits, with their fragments of certified truth, to insure the substitution of reason for authority.
Church of England Authorities.—Among the recently published works, the authors of which have aimed with moderation and impartiality to treat a theme of embittered relations and rehearsals so as to present readers with information of facts and the means of judging fairly between violent contestants in their once angry issues, is one already referred to as Curteis’s Bampton Lectures.[468] Assuming that the English Church had an origin and existence independent of the ecclesiastical authority of the Pope, the author relates the process by which it reformed itself, by renouncing his interference and impositions, and establishing its own discipline and ritual. After this he regards and treats the Romanists as but one class of Dissenters, taking their place as such with the Independents, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Unitarians, and the Wesleyans. Of these divided elements of the common Christian fold, the author traces the rise, the leading principles, and the distinct institutions and methods which they adopted. His treatment of his large and tangled subject is as fair, considerate, and judicious as could be expected from an earnest and heartily loyal minister of the English Church. He makes many strong statements to commend and urge a national establishment of religion as far more dignified, consistent, and desirable than the scattering and fragmentary multiplication, indefinitely increasing under petty variances, of independent religious organizations. But he does not work out a practicable method for his suggested scheme when those concerned in it prefer their own ways. Mr. Curteis is very severe (p. 62) in his rebuke upon the harshness of terms in which Mr. Skeats[469] deals with Archbishop Parker, in the course pursued by him towards the Puritans. But the view presented by Mr. Skeats is more than justified by Hallam,[470] in his calm dealing with the original documents.
In the same connection may be mentioned The Church and Puritans,[471] a small and compact volume, written in the best spirit of moderation and candor. In but little more than two hundred open pages, the author traces the whole course of Dissent,—its rise, aims, principles, and methods, and its struggles, buffetings, and discomfitures, from its manifestations under Elizabeth to the failure of “a glorious opportunity of reconciling all moderate Dissenters to the communion of the Church of England, under William and Mary.” By the judicious restraint upon what might naturally be his promptings, as a clergyman of the Church of England, to criticise with some sharpness what has so generally been represented as the perversity and weak scrupulosity of the Puritans, he is eminently fair and considerate in presenting their side of the controversy, and in dealing with their more conspicuous men. The abounding citation of original authorities on both sides in his notes authenticates, for nearly every sentence of the work, the statement made in it.
Two works of a remarkably liberal and scholarly character which have quite recently appeared from the pens of eminent divines of the English Church, would have been gratefully welcomed by the Nonconformists in the period of their sharpest conflict, on account of their generous spirit and their contents. They would have been especially noteworthy in the liberal concessions which they make upon all the points involved in the controversy, as to the simple authority and pattern of Scripture in the constitution and discipline of the Christian Church, as against the hierarchical claims based upon traditions and usages subsequent to the age of the apostles, and traceable in the so-called Primitive Church. These books are Mr. Edwin Hatch’s Organization of the Early Christian Churches,[472] and Dean Stanley’s Christian Institutions.[473]
Mr. Hatch has also published articles of a similar tenor to the contents of his Bampton Lectures, in the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities. In these lectures, the author aims to trace the facts of ecclesiastical history in the same way as those of civil history are usually dealt with. His aim is to investigate the framework of the earliest Christian societies. He says these societies in their formation adjusted themselves to previously existing methods of association. The philanthropic element in them suggested the sort of officers needed, their provinces and functions. A president of the society and one or more distributors of alms were the requisite officers. Then as increasing numbers in a society, and of societies, made necessary a distribution of functions, with centralization and subordination of duty and authority, an ecclesiastical system was developed by like methods to those of a civil or political system. Convenience and adaptation thus originated the elements of a hierarchy, the regulation of which was watched over and disposed by a system of councils.
Dean Stanley’s volume is a collection of essays, previously published separately. They are liberal in tone and tenor, and by no means in harmony with, or even quite respectful toward, any high-church principles, or any demands of “divine right” for ecclesiastical authority. He adopts a rational point of view for marking the accumulation of sentiments and usages around the original substance of Christianity. He exhibits the entire unlikeness of conditions and needs between the early days of the religion and our own. He recognizes the vast superstructure of fable reared upon original simple verities, and, like Mr. Hatch, identifies the development of ecclesiastical with that of civil forms and usages.
An Essay on the Christian Ministry, by Bishop Lightfoot, treats after a like unconventional method, the themes which in the days of early Nonconformity were dealt with in so different a tone and method.
New England Authorities.[474]—The authorities concerning every detail in the institution and disposing of church affairs in New England are abundant and well-nigh exhaustive. They may be consulted as digested and set in order in the more recently published works to be here named by title, or they may be traced fragmentarily in chronological order in the writings of the Fathers themselves. The organization of the New England churches came to be best described under the term “Congregational.” It was in substance a modification of Barrowism. While there seems to have been but little discordancy here among those who followed the pattern, they were soon challenged by some of their brethren in England most nearly in sympathy with them, as to doubtful or debated principles and methods in their institution and discipline of churches. There were two chief points which came under discussion: first, the respective rights of all the brethren composing a church fellowship in administering discipline, and those of the pastor, teacher, and elders. Should the whole church, or only its officers, be primarily and ultimately invested with executive and administrative power? The second point covered all the considerations which would come into prominence in deciding upon the relations of churches to each other,—whether each should maintain an absolute independency, or qualify it in any way by seeking sympathy, fellowship, and advice, and heeding remonstrances or interference from “sister churches,” through their teachers and elders.
Contemporary references to these matters as they presented themselves to the attention of those who here first entered into a “church estate,” are scattered over Governor Winthrop’s journal. John Cotton, minister of the First Church of Boston, diligently and earnestly, in successive writings and publications, set himself to answering all questioning and challenging friends abroad. He evidently had to work out clear and consistent views of his own on a subject which, besides being novel in many of its relations, was embarrassed by local difficulties, and by some conscientious or practical diversities of judgment among his associates. Richard Mather, of Dorchester, also contributed his help in the exposition of the Congregational polity, which was to be defended alike from extreme Barrowism and from Presbyterianism, which was soon found to have some sympathizers in the colony. By a sort of general consent, recourse was had to a succession of “synods,” or councils of the representatives of the churches, first those of the Bay Colony alone, then with some of the other New England colonies. These synods resulted in the formation of a “Platform,” which laid out in form and detail the system of the Congregational polity.