Until the Reformation, our history scarcely deserved the name. The government an iron despotism, the people serfs, the barons tyrants, and the religion Popery, England possessed neither equal law, nor popular knowledge, nor security of property. And she suffered the natural evils of a condition of moral disorder; all her nobler qualities only aggravated the national misfortune, her bravery only wasted her blood in foreign fields. Her fidelity to her lords only strewed the soil with corpses; her devotional spirit only bound her to the observances of a pedantic superstition. While every kingdom of the Continent was advancing in the march of power, or knowledge, or the arts; while Germany in her mail gathered round her the chivalry of Europe; while Italy began that glittering pageant of the arts which has left such brilliant remnants behind, even in her dilapidated archives and tottering palaces; while Portugal was spreading her sails for the subjugation of the ocean, and Spain was sending Columbus to the west for a prouder conquest than was ever won by consul or emperor,—England remained like a barbarian gazer on this passing pomp of kings.
The Reformation changed all,—gave her a new sense of existence, a new knowledge of her own faculties, new views of her destination; and brought her, like the wanderers in the parable, from the highways and hedges, to that marriage feast of power and fame, from which so many of the original guests were to be rejected.
The change was remarkable, even from its rapidity. It had none of the slow growth by which the infancy of nations ascends into manhood. She assumed the vigour of a leading member of the European commonwealth with the life of a generation. Actually expelled from the Continent in the middle of the sixteenth century, she held the balance of European power in its hand before its close. But the effect of the Reformation in England was of a superior order to its effect on the Continent. We shall not say that it lived and died in Germany with Luther; or in France with Calvin; but there can be no doubt, that its purer and loftier portion perished with those great reformers. The schools of the prophets remained; but when the Elijah had been swept upwards on the chariot and horses of fire, they uttered the prophetic voice more feebly, and their harps no longer resounded through Israel. But, in England, the double portion of the spirit had been given; the Reformation had become national; and there is scarcely a national act, from that period, which has not held some connexion with Protestantism; been modified by its influence, or required by its necessities, originated in its principles, or governed by its power.
And it is not the less remarkable, that this continued operation has existed in England alone.
The gift of the Reformation was, like the gift of Christianity, a universal offer. It came, as the rising of the sun comes, to all Europe at once. The preaching of Luther and his contemporaries was heard in every country of the civilised world, and by a large portion of that world is retained, in all its substantial doctrines, to the present hour. Within the lapse of a few years, it had made a progress scarcely less rapid and triumphant than the career of the apostolic mission; but in a period incomparably more intellectual, and among nations more active, intelligent, and vigorous, than the dwellers among the languor of Asia Minor, the dissolute populace of ancient Italy, or the rugged barbarians of Thrace and Arabia.
Before the close of the century in which it was born, the Reformation had founded churches far beyond the German frontier, in the most active portion of France, in the British Isles, in the north of Europe; it had even forced its way through the sullen prejudices and fierce persecutions of Spain; by a still more singular success, it had given a temporary impulse to Italy itself; made converts in the natural land of the monk, built churches under the shadow of the convent; and redeemed at least one generation from the profligate supineness of their fathers. But this gush of the living breeze into the cloister was soon overpowered by the habitual heaviness of the atmosphere of cells and censers. The light, which had shot in through the chinks of the dungeon, was soon shut out, and all within was dark as ever. The multitude, at first exulting in their freedom, no sooner found that they must march through the wilderness, than they longed for the fatness and the flesh of Egypt, and returned to their house of bondage. The name of Protestantism still existed on the Continent, but its power was no more. Statesmen, in their political projects, passed it by; philosophers, in their calculations of human progress, left it out of their elements. The popular feelings were no longer roused or abused at its command. The teacher remained, but the gift of miracles was gone.
But, in England, it was a political creator. The manners, the feelings, the laws in a great degree, and the political movements almost wholly, were impressed with this one image and superscription. Since her first emergence from feudalism, when, like the traveller struggling through defiles and forests to the brow of the mountains which shows him the plain and the ocean before him, she saw the first boundless sweep of national power and moral renown before her, Protestantism, in all the casualties of its course, in its purity, or its profanation, in the vindication of its rights, or in the sufferance of its wrongs, in the national zeal for its advance, or in the national zeal for its retrenchment and spoil, has been the great object of contemplation and interest to every leader of the councils of England. It has been the voice which has never died in the statesman's ear, the shape which has met him at every step, the star which, whether clouded or serene, has never set in his horizon. The whole line of British sovereignty seemed scarcely more than royal administrators of the concerns of Religion.
Even the striking variety of royal character, during this long and stirring period, made but slight difference in their general connexion with the public belief. The brutish self-will of Henry, the savage bloodthirstiness of Mary, the proud supremacy of Elizabeth, the chivalry of Charles, the republicanism of Cromwell, the languid decline of the Stuarts, the energy of William, and the law-loving quietude of the Brunswicks, all bore the impress of the same principle.
During the last three hundred years, the world had been singularly active, and England perhaps its most active portion; but what relics of its political questions are left to posterity? The passions and the power of the great parties even of the last century have sunk into their graves. Even their names, which were supposed to have made an imperishable fixture in the political strifes of the country, and under which it was presumed that ministers and opposition would be marshalled for ever, have gone like the rest, and the difficulty would now be, to give a name to the political principles of any party in the state. But the religious questions of our ancestry are still not merely existing, but absorbing all others at this moment; instead of clearing up, they are darkening by time; instead of giving way to the thousand questions which year by year press on public deliberation, they still exalt their frowning front above them all. Ireland and Rome are as powerful objects of anxiety as in the days of Pius V. and Elizabeth; and Protestantism is forced to be as vigilant as in the days when the Bible was first read at Paul's Cross, or the Long Parliament drove the bishops out of the pale of the constitution.
In this language we are claiming no peculiar merit for the character of England; we are not arrogating for her any religious superiority; we are not pronouncing on her especial sensitiveness to conscience; we are simply giving facts; and those urge us to one conclusion alone, that by the determinate and original dispensation of Providence, our country has been selected as the especial arena for great religious inquiries, and the establishment of great religious principles.