British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIV / July and October, 1871

by Various

Mr. Froude has recently indulged, in a wild, vigorous way, in a glorification of Calvinism, before an audience whose traditional sympathies, at any rate, must have been strongly on his side. He suggests a pregnant question: How is it that a system which is so terribly dishonouring to the goodness and righteousness of God, should have afforded such an inspiration to some of the very noblest men who have ever left their trace on the history of mankind? He gives a list of great names, noble names, among the noblest of our race; and with regard to most of them, at any rate, the claim or charge of being strongly under the influence of Augustinian ideas of the Divine government cannot be denied. And yet there is something horrible in the picture of the Divine principles and methods of action, which Calvinism in its pure and naked form presents. It is difficult for us to contemplate, without shuddering, the ideas of divine and human things which seem to have been adopted with grim satisfaction by some of the very strongest and most high-minded men who have ever swayed the destinies of the world. How are we to account for it?

Surely the solution of the difficulty is to be found in the fact that the great Calvinists held more vitally to the affirmations than to the negations of their creed. Its bearing on them and their lives, in an age of strong swift action, was the thing of vital personal moment; its bearing on their fellow-men and the universal government of God, though expressed in terribly clear and logical formularies, held a very secondary place in their minds. The grand idea, God's election—man the chosen agent of God, raised up, though all unworthy, for the setting forth of His counsels, and the execution of His will—seized and possessed them wholly; and the outside bearing of the truths, so to speak, appeared but partially to their moral sight. The world was then a great camp, in which the fiercest martial passions were raging. Sections of society, as well as nations, were in chronic and stern antagonism; and it was not so unnatural to regard in those days as reprobate children of the devil those whom it was almost a matter of religious duty to afflict and to destroy. A man easily persuades himself that an enemy is a child of darkness when his sword will soon be at his throat. Terms have changed; but the language and thoughts of the French army and the National Guards in Paris about each other, repeat in substance the relations of Protestant and Romanist, Englishman and Spaniard, Cavalier and Roundhead, in the Elizabethan and Caroline days. The thing appeared to them quite otherwise than to us, who have been studying for ages the Christian doctrine of the brotherhood of mankind; a doctrine which, to our shame be it spoken, was first forced on the public notice of peoples by profane and godless writers who laid the train of the first French Revolution.

We need only read the language in which Hawkins or Raleigh utter the thoughts of their hearts about the Spaniards, to comprehend how easy it was for them to regard themselves as elect instruments for the overthrow of the devil and his works, in their daring, but semi-piratical forays into the harbours and the treasure fleets of Spain. Hawkins, with his cargo of slaves on board, crowded so close that fever began to rage among his crew, could hardly have comforted himself so complacently, in the midst of a terrible calm in the tropics, with the thought that 'God never suffers His elect to perish,' unless his whole thought had been occupied with what he was doing against those whom he believed to be ministers of darkness, while his relations and duties to his hapless fellow-creatures were dropped out of sight. Calvinism easily inspires men, that is, the larger sort of men, who are capable of the inspiration, with the sense of a Divine call to a Divine service, and it makes them sharp as flint and hard as iron in working out their mission. And these great Protestants and Puritans in the age of the struggle for life saw, partly, no doubt, through prejudiced eyes, so much moral foulness in those with whom they were contending, that reprobation did not seem so dread a doctrine in their sight as it seems in ours; who sit down calmly, after the great battle is over, to think out the system in all its bearings, and to examine its principles in the light of modern cosmopolitan sympathy and charity. To us much of it seems simply revolting, and we marvel how it could ever have commended itself as of God, as it unquestionably did commend itself, to some of the wisest, noblest, and most merciful of our race.

The Calvinism of the Reformers, as a body, is of course unquestionable. Even Whitgift, bitterly as he hated, and hard as he struck the Puritans, shared their profoundest convictions as theologians, as the Lambeth Articles fully reveal. So long as the battle with Rome was a life and death struggle, that is, through the whole reign of Elizabeth, Calvinistic ideas strung the courage and energy of the chief actors to the keenest tension. When the Church had won its position, and was settling down into a respectable institution, one of whose chief functions seemed to be to sustain the dogma of the divine right of kings, then the Arminian bed was made ready for it; and most of the chief actors in the next stage of the drama in which the Church was the main prop of the monarchy, leaned strongly to the Arminian side. The men, on the other hand, who had to fight the battle of liberty—liberty of body, liberty of thought, liberty of spirit—against all the force which the world of authority could bring to bear against them, were Calvinist to the backbone. God's elect they held themselves to be, weak, unworthy instruments, by whom He was yet pleased to manifest His glory, and to accomplish His will. And this was the backbone of their strength, ''Not I, but the grace of God which is in me.'

It may well be questioned whether anything weaker than this sense of a personal call, a personal inspiration, to which the Calvinist readily opened his soul, could have borne the conquerors through that tremendous struggle which assured the liberties of Englishmen forever, first against the spiritual tyrant at Rome, next against the domestic tyrant on the throne of their own realm. Perhaps the Puritan struggle against episcopal and regal tyranny, which brought the Independents to the front, was the sternest ever fought out in the world. The best measure of the grandeur of Cromwell's proportions is to be found in the measure of the men whom he ruled. The English under Elizabeth proved themselves, in the Narrow Seas, on the Spanish Main, amid Arctic ice, and all around the world, the most masterful race upon earth. The spirit had not died out in the Caroline days. The Puritan party nursed its traditions and cherished its fire, as, among other significant signs, these words of Pym reveal:—'Blasted may that tongue be, that in the smallest degree shall derogate from the glory of those halcyon days which our fathers enjoyed during the government of that ever-blessed, never-to-be-forgotten, royal Elizabeth.'

The struggle within the bosom of such a nation demanded powers of the highest and strongest order, and drew them forth. And the man who could conduct that struggle to a successful issue and rule such a strong-handed, imperious race as the English of the Commonwealth, could have found little beyond his strength in any enterprise in any age of the world; and nothing but that spirit which from the positive side of their Calvinistic creed entered into Cromwell, and the men of whom he became the organ and the head, could have borne them through the tremendous pressure. No 'sweetness and light' of intellectual culture, no sense of 'natural human power' could have borne John Robinson's company of pilgrims first to Holland, and then across the stormy Atlantic, and given them strength to hold together, as they say of themselves touchingly, 'in a most strict and sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the violation of which we make great conscience; and by virtue whereof we do hold ourselves strictly tied to all care for each other's good, and of the whole by every, and so mutual.'—(Letter of Robinson and Brewster to Sir E. Sandys.) It was this spirit, which no conformity to an Elizabethan, still less to a Jacobean church, could have nurtured, which made New England, and through New England made America.

Calvinism was so profoundly associated through that age with the advancing cause of the spiritual and political liberties of our country that the Arminian bias of the dignified clergy of the Establishment, which began to manifest itself after the settlement of the Church and the kingdom under King James, is by no means a noble or beautiful feature in its history. Arminianism in the Church went hand in hand with worldly compliance, slavish homage to princes, idolatrous rites, gorgeous ritual, and episcopal tyranny; and it went down with the Church righteously to ruin under the shock of the men who did believe themselves called, quickened, and raised up as witnesses, by the God of righteousness and truth.

We look too little at these doctrinal developments in the light of the political life of the times which produce them. The connection is a profound one between schemes of doctrine and political ideas. A point too little considered is the truth of a scheme of doctrine for its times. They must be blind indeed who cannot see that with the Calvinistic Puritans, and not with the Arminian Anglicans, rapidly tending to the Laudian Church, were stirring through the whole of that struggle the motive forces of the progress of society.

But the question now arises, and it is the central point of this discussion of the genius of Nonconformity in its relation to the progress of society, What is this affirmation of Nonconformity which has made it in all ages a factor of supreme importance in the culture and development of mankind? It stands as a witness against the State organization of Christianity, but that is not its strength. Not what it stands against, but what it stands for, is the secret of its power. Briefly, then, it witnesses for the ancient historic and Christian idea of the Church, as the manifestation and the organ of the Spirit working freely in individual consciences and hearts. It is Nonconformity which truly inherits and cherishes the legacy of early and mediæval Christian society, which the Roman organization of Christendom did its best to destroy. Throughout the whole of the Mediæval period the true development of the Church was carried on, not on the basis of authority, or by the application of accepted doctrines and methods, but by the original energetic action of individual men and the disciples whom they might gather round them, who brought new ideas into the Church, and leavened it with their own independent life. The antagonism of constituted Church authorities to all the leaders of new modes of Christian activity and development, is precisely parallel to the treatment which original men of genius in all ages have met with at the hand of the constituted authorities of society. The young monasticism had to fight its way desperately into the hallowed sphere of Church organization. 'It is the ancient advice of the Fathers,' says Cassianus, 'advice which endures, that a monk at any cost must fly bishops and women.' And the bishops repaid the antipathy with interest. The struggles of the monks and bishops in the West, in the sixth and seventh centuries, form the most interesting and pregnant chapter of their ecclesiastical history. The monks had to fight hard for their independence, and to fight their way into influence. But no intelligent student of the history of that period, we imagine, can doubt that the higher life and aim of the Church was on the whole more fully represented in the irregular than in the regular line.

How far such a man as St. Bernard was in his day a Nonconformist, would be an interesting subject to discuss. Champion of orthodoxy as he was, and maker of Popes, his position was far more like that of the Puritan in the Anglican Church of King James than at first sight appears. But the discussion of this question would lead us too far out of the direct line of our argument. What hard work St. Francis had to wring recognition for himself and his tattered mendicant company from Pope Innocent III., great and far-seeing man as he was, is well known to all students of Mediæval history. And yet St. Francis and holy poverty for the time saved the Church. Though the mendicant orders soon grew fearfully corrupt, and made the Reformation doubly imperative, yet their brief career of purity and power added, it is not too much to say, two centuries to the life of the Roman system, and staved off the Ecclesiastical Revolution till the Western nations were full-grown, and were strong enough to use nobly the freedom which they might win. The life of the Church has been cherished, and its influence has been fed in all ages, by men who drew fresh ideas, fresh inspiration, from the life of the Saviour as set forth in the Divine Word. And the Mediæval Church had room for them. There was nothing out of tune with its professed organization in this direct appeal to the fountain head of truth. It could include its Nonconformists, and find room and work for them; though it had but a dim eye to distinguish between its Nonconformists and its heretics, and was prone to harry the last with fearful brutality,—a brutality which would be blankly incomprehensible, for they were often far from brutal men who exercised it, but for the idea which filled the minds of Churchmen, that heresy was the spawn of hell. When the Catholic Church, like the Anglican in after ages, was unable to comprehend its Nonconformists, could only cast out its Luthers, as Anglicanism cast out its Barrowes, its Robinsons, its Baxters, its Whitfields, it ceased to be Catholic and became Roman, and all the living energy of the Church, and all its promise, passed over to the opposite side.