Puritanism was cradled among small traders, conscious of their virtues, but socially ill at ease. It at once became terribly at ease in the courts of Zion. It began with a retail outlook, and it soon politicised its creed. It became eminently republican, nor was it ever democratic. Instinctively counter to all forms, whether “temporal” or “spiritual,” it aimed at the destruction both of Monarchy and the Church, and yet it set up an exclusiveness of its own. The Jewish Theocracy had, as I have pointed out, broken down even under that monarchical shape which suited it, just because its outward State apparatus was mechanical and out of touch with the development of national life. The finer spirits of Puritanism—and they were very fine—had these features to reckon with. Cromwell, like Savonarola, compassed an impracticable solecism. He desired a Republican Theocracy. His scheme only chimed with that of the Church which he sought to ruin in this, that he too wished religion to be nationally organised—to be political. But the result was an intolerant fanaticism of mutually persecuting sects, and a Parliamentary censorship of morals which cramped, nay, imprisoned self-developing virtue, confounded holiness with austerity, and furnished the best argument for a “national Church.”
Milton, who tempered the Puritanic fire with the Renaissance light, who, in his youth, was a worshipper of the subdued loveliness of the Church and “her dim, religious light,” came to regard our national Church as merely, in his own phrase, “an anti-papal schism.” Like Cromwell, he longed to destroy it.
“It is a rule and principle,” he urges,[90] “worthy to be known by Christians, that no Scripture, no, nor so much as any ancient creed, binds our faith or our obedience to any Church whatsoever denominated by a particular name; far less if it be distinguished by a several government from that which is indeed Catholic.... It were an injury to condemn the papist of absurdity and contradiction for adhering to his Catholic Romish religion, if we, for the pleasure of a king and his public considerations, shall adhere to a Catholic English.” Milton only wanted republican instead of monarchical forms. Politics were still the setting of religion. He was even more inconsistent. He deprecated any discipline by the State, although his Church was a political Church, and although Cromwell’s purposes are contradicted by Milton’s very deprecation” ”If we think”—who can forget this fine passage from his “Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing”?—“if we think to regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to men. No music must be set or sung but what is grave and Doric.... I hate a pupil-teacher; I endure not an instructor that comes to me under the wardship of an overseeing fist.” How did Milton relish the Independents as “pupil teachers,” or the “overseeing fist” of the Fifth-Monarchy men, or the wardship of the Reign of Saints? Milton wants neither the Church as a Polity, nor the State as a Church. Not staying to inquire what fits the genius of England and her national traditions and customs, he seeks a Theocracy which is untheocratic, and a national republic doomed to fall when the perfect ruler is removed.
“When,” he indignantly exclaims[91]—“when God shakes a kingdom with strong and healthful commotions to a general reforming, it is not untrue that many sectaries and false teachers are then busiest in seducing, but yet more true is it that God then raises to His own work men of rare abilities and more than common industry, not only to look back and revise what hath been taught heretofore, but to gain further and to go on some new enlightened steps in the discovery of truth.” So, then, a reformed commonwealth, and no visible Church are Milton’s ideals.
“The Parliament of England,” he protests, had turned “regal bondage into a free commonwealth.” “All Protestants,” he proceeds, “hold that Christ in His Church hath left no vicegerent of his power, but Himself without deputy is the only head thereof, governing it from heaven.” So far Milton announces pure Theocracy; but the leaven of his classical republicanism is disclosed in the next sentence: he cannot divorce religion from politics. “How, then, can any Christian man derive his kingship from Christ? I doubt not but all ingenuous and knowing men will easily agree with me that a free commonwealth, without a single person or House of Lords, is by far the best Government, if it can be had.” And then he propounds grand councils of a perpetual senate, safe-guarded against “any dogeship of Venice,”[92] as the means to save the State. “The whole freedom of man,” he says, “consists either in spiritual or civil liberty.” No rule for the first is admitted by him but the Scriptures; for the second he takes the Dutch model of the United Provinces. But he neglects to consider how liberty can be settled without order, or order without discipline, or discipline without authority, or authority without creed.
Even the loftiest Puritan ideal of Theocracy, therefore, was no less political than that of the Church.
A very few years witnessed the complete breakdown of a system which sought to blend the early Latin and the early Semitic ideals together in unnatural alliance, and disregarded the native bias of Great Britain.
The ensuing reaction rendered the English Church more political than ever. She was split into contending partisanship for contending dynasties. She repudiated James the Second, but not the Stuarts. Under William of Orange latitudinarianism, even her latitudinarianism, was militant. But under the two first Georges she grew torpid and time-serving. The rash and rabid Sunderland, the astute Walpole, parodied the old Miltonic ideals in their zeal for indifferentism, and in self-defence the Church tended temporarily to seem the mere stipendiary of the State, like an excise officer. But Wesley in England, and Whitefield both here and in America, re-aroused the Church to the higher and holier ideals of a national Theocracy. Some century later the Tractarian movement spurred her energies afresh, and they have since been once more quickened in the battle with mechanical materialism.
But all along it has been a sheer necessity in England—a necessity for spiritual as well as civil freedom—that the State should lend its earthly sanction of order to the Church. A national Church so uncontrolled is impossible in England, where politics tinge every form of aspiration. For international Theocracy, for that “millenary year” which is the magnificent ideal of Romanism, the times are unripe. It must remain a remote goal so long as the competitive egoism of nations, transfiguring the baser egotism of individuals and of mere races, is paramount.
The Church State has been unrealisable. England alone has realised the State Church. The former has been impossible in the West, owing to the Aryan genius for State development, and especially to the national instinct of the Anglo-Saxon family. With the British spirit a cosmopolitan religion is incompatible. No nation ambitious of being a world-power can revert to Theocracy. It is not feasible under such conditions.