Proposed Surrender of the Prayer-Book and Articles of the Church of England / A Letter to the Lord Bishop of London on Professor Stanley's Views of Clerical and University "Subscription"

by William J. Irons

The Reformatio Legum.

I refer, of course, to the “Reformatio Legum.” The Archbishop of Canterbury, the subsequently-elect Archbishop of York, and certain suffragans; great Reformers, such as Peter Martyr and Rowland Taylour; known scholars, such as Sir John Cheke and Dr. Haddon, were engaged in this business, which was looked to as the crowning act of the Reformation of Religion. Archbishop Parker took up the work which Cranmer had begun, and even pressed it on the reluctant Queen as far as he dared.

Subscription demanded in 1553.

The connexion of the Reformatio Legum with the Articles of our Church, and the light which they throw on each other, I need not point out to any who are acquainted with the history of our Church at that time. The Forty-two Articles, from which our Thirty-nine were, ten years afterwards, derived, were first published in 1553. In the November of the preceding year, Cranmer proposed that the bishops should have them at once subscribed throughout their dioceses. The death of King Edward prevented this from being accomplished. They were revised and subscribed by Convocation in 1563, in the name of the whole clergy of England. The early chapters of the Reformatio Legum contain the doctrine of the Articles, and were, no doubt, intended to be an authorized exposition of them. How strict a system was meant to be inaugurated by the Reformers may be judged by even a superficial perusal of that Book. Heresy and blasphemy were to be punishable by death. Adultery was to be visited with imprisonment and even banishment. Impenitent persons were to be “handed over to the civil power.” All this was the sort of Discipline which was waiting to be put in force as soon as the Reformers could persuade the nation to bear it;—and yet this is the supposed time when Subscription was alien from the mind of the Reformed Church!

Temporary restriction of the Clergy.
Subscription in 1564.

But during this interval of twelve years, while the bishops were doing their best to bring the clergy and people to Uniformity, and preparing them for the “Discipline” which was openly clamoured for, we find that immediately after the Articles were published, “advertisements” came out by authority further to restrain the liberty of the preachers. In 1564, the clergy, who had by their proctors subscribed the Articles in Convocation, were required “to protest and subscribe” that they would not preach at all without special license from the bishop, but “only read that which is appointed by public authority:” and further, that they would “observe, keep, and maintain, all the rites, ceremonies, good usages and order” set forth by the Act of Uniformity. Here then was “Subscription” to the whole Prayer-book as it then stood. And, indeed, even three years before, the “readers” in Churches were obliged, by “Subscriptions” to certain injunctions, to execute their office within prescribed and narrow limits. The state of things doubtless was still felt on all hands to be but provisional. The great Roman Catholic party waited, without separating formally. The Puritans were stirring themselves in the cause of “Discipline:” it was hoped by both parties that some change might, from the lapse of a few years, better their position. The latter reckoned on the more aged of the old Popish Clergy dying out; the former were encouraged by a fanatical prophecy to expect the death of the Queen herself in the twelfth year of her reign; but after that time the Puritan and Popish parties became openly defined, while the Church had as yet no such “Discipline” as could hold her members together at all, except by the Court of Commissioners. It was to restrain both parties, then, that recourse was once more had to “Subscription.”

Can there be need, my Lord, to pursue any further an inquiry into so well known a piece of history as this? I should not have said so much, had not the Ecclesiastical History Professor declared that Subscriptions and Declarations of Faith were “not in fact contemplated at the time of the first compilation of the Prayer Book and Articles;” that Subscription is “superfluous,” “needless,” “capricious,” “extrinsic,” and “accidental,” (pp. 38, 39), “and that the Church of England, as such, recognises absolutely no Subscriptions!” I submit to your Lordship, that the Church of England “at the time of the first compilation of the Articles and Prayer Book,” encouraged no freedom whatever to diverge from the one or the other—demanded Subscription (by Cranmer) in 1553—obtained it from all the bishops and representatives of the clergy in Convocation in 1563—and laboured to restrain both Papists and Puritans within more and more rigid limits year by year, till by the thirteenth of Elizabeth “Subscription” was universally enforced, as the only practical substitute for that Ecclesiastical Discipline which was refused.

I have purposely abstained from here noticing minor inaccuracies which singularly abound in the learned Professor’s letter, and have kept to the main point. His position is that since the twelfth year of Elizabeth, a stern and gradual growth of Subscription has superseded the liberal system of the earlier years in which the tolerant Church “knew absolutely nothing of Subscription!” Without this, again I say, his argument comes utterly to an end. It will be useless to weigh syllables, and retreat upon the ipsissima verba of the Letter. The broad representation means this, or it is nihil ad rem. And the whole history of the period is again, directly the reverse of the representation given by Dr. Stanley. [18]

The Primitive Church.

II. I pass, then, to the next point—the alleged absence of Subscription in the primitive age. Not content with the reference to the history of our own Church, Dr. Stanley says:—“I will not confine myself to these isolated instances, but examine the history of Subscription from the first. For the first three centuries the Church was entirely without it.” “The first Subscription to a series of dogmatical propositions as such was that enforced by Constantine at the Council of Nicæa. It was the natural, but rude, expedient of a half-educated soldier to enforce unanimity in the Church as he had by the sword enforced it in the empire.” (p. 35). Again, I am painfully compelled to meet the statements of Dr. Stanley with a direct negative. The case is not as he states it. A “rude soldier,” in those days—(when comparatively few people wrote at all)—would not, I think, have been likely to invent this “expedient:” but, in fact, he did not invent it.