ANGLICANISM

THE THOUGHT AND PRACTICE OF THE

CHURCH OF ENGLAND, ILLUSTRATED FROM

THE RELIGIOUS LITERATURE OF THE

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

COMPILED AND EDITED BY

PAUL ELMER MORE,

FELLOW OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS,

SOMETIME LECTURER IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY IN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY,

AND AUTHOR OF “THE GREEK TRADITION,” ETC.

AND

FRANK LESLIE CROSS,

PRIEST-LIBRARIAN OF THE PUSEY HOUSE,

EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE BISHOP OF BRADFORD, AND OXFORD UNIVERSITY

LECTURER IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

“We have a vast inheritance, but no inventory of our treasures.  All is given in profusion; it remains for us to catalogue, sort, distribute, select, harmonize, and complete.”CJohn Henry Newman in “Lecture on the Prophetical Office of the Church” (1837).

LONDON

SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, 1935

PREFACE

The origin of this work goes back to a conversation some four years ago with Bishop Rhinelander, of the college of Preachers in Washington.  At that time I chanced to remark that it had long been in my mind to make a collection of passages from the ecclesiastical writers of the Seventeenth Century which would set forth the doctrine and discipline, – what might be called in a broad sense the genius, – of the Church of England in that age of adjustment after the first confusions of the Reformation, but that other occupations had compelled me to abandon the project.  It seemed to Bishop Rhinelander, as it had seemed to me, that such a compilation would have value for those concerned with the religious issues of the present day as well as for students of the past.  For that reason he asked me to lay the plan before a committee which he called together in New York, and which included among others Dean Fosbroke and Professor Gavin of the General Theological Seminary, Dean Washburn of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass., and Dean Ladd of the Berkeley Divinity School.

At this meeting various aspects of the scheme were discussed, and the chairman, with the guile doubtless engendered by episcopal experience, suggested that I might be induced to take up the task if it were shared by an associated editor and if a certain amount of money were raised for incidental expenses.  To these proposals the committee assented, but beyond such concurrence they are not responsible for the character of the work as actually carried out.  We were fortunate enough to engage the interest of Dr. Cross in the project, and it is only fair to say that much the heavier part of the burden or reading and editing has been borne by him, and that he alone has assumed the labour of collating the texts and seeing the volume through the press.

For the purpose in view the selections have been drawn preferably from the more authoritative and better known writings of the period.  Even so the field to be covered was immense and the need of discrimination very exacting.  The editors cannot hope that their judgement will meet with the universal approval, but they believe that the documents here assembled represent what was clearly the dominant teaching of the Anglican Church in that age.  Those familiar with the vastness and variety of the literature will, they trust, be the slowest to find fault with any particular omission or insertion.  In some cases the extract as printed is composed of passages strung together out of a long treatise, and in one or two instances the order of sequence has been changed; but all lacunae are indicated by points.  The editors believe that a considerable number of the passages they have included have not been reprinted since the century in which they were written.

A major problem for the editors was the fact that often two or three subjects were entangled in a single passage, so that the same extract might have been placed with almost equal propriety under more than one heading.  The arrangement of the passages under any particular caption was determined sometimes by chronology, sometimes by similarity of theme, as convenience dictated.

It was felt that some readers might welcome a connected account of the theological literature of the period from which the following extracts have been drawn, and accordingly Mr. F. R. Arnott, of Keble College, Oxford, who had already rendered generous assistance in the preparation of the bulky manuscript for the press, was invited to contribute the essay which stands after his name.  The rich store of Dr. Darwell Stone’s learning, seemingly inexhaustible in all branches of theology, enabled the editors to get on the track of a number of the passages they have included, though of course they themselves assume sole responsibility for the use made of them.  In varying stages of the work, valuable help was received from Mr. C. S. Nye, of St. Peter’s Hall; from Messrs. G. Watson and D. M. Mackinnon, both of New College, Oxford; and from Mr. G. L. Phillips, of Brasenose College.  To all these gentlemen the editors tender their sincere gratitude.

The editors also desire to express their indebtedness to the author and to Messrs. Longmans, Green and Co., for permission to use the translation of some passages of William Forbes’ Considerationes Modestae, contained in Dr. Stone’s History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist; and to Messrs. P. J and A. E. Dobell for allowing them to reprint two extracts from Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations.

P. E. M.

CONTENTS

[Footnotes have been moved into the text at the place of citation within square brackets and

beginning with *.  Non-footnote text originally in square brackets will not begin with *.]

The Spirit of Anglicanism, by Paul Elmer More.

Anglicanism in the Seventeenth Century, by Felix R. Arnott

The above essays are below within this file (1).

 

2   I.  The Anglican Faith.    II.  The Church.    III.  Separated Churches.    IV.  The Bible.

3   V.  Standards of Faith.    VI.  Natural Theology.    VII.  Revealed Theology.

4   VIII.  Soteriology.    IX.  Eschatology.    X.  The Christian Ministry.    XI.  The Sacraments.

5   XII.  Baptism and Confirmation.    XIII.  The Eucharist.

6   XIV.  Other Religious Practices.    XV.  Prayer.

7   XVI.  Ethics.    XVII.  King and State.    XVIII.  Visitations.

8   XIX.  Caroline Piety.    Bibliographies in Outline.

The Spirit of Anglicanism

by Paul Elmer More

The documents from which this compilation is drawn fall within the period from 1594 to 1691, for which the “seventeenth century” will pass as a convenient and sufficiently accurate term.  On the earlier of these dates Hooker published the first four books of his Ecclesiastical Polity, which in the quiet living of Boscombe he had written out in memory of his controversy with Travers in the Temple.  They were intended primarily to be a defence against the servile submission to Geneva that threatened to reduce the English reformation to a mere echo of the radical Protestantism of the Continent.  In effect the finished product went far beyond any such defensive intention.  Here first the Anglican Communion was made aware of itself as an independent branch of the Church Universal, neither Roman nor Calvinist, but at once Catholic and Protestant, with a positive doctrine and discipline of its own and a definite mission in the wide economy of Grace.  As it has been well said, “Hooker was the father of Anglo-Catholic theology”; [L. S. Thornton, Richard Hooker, p. 101.  Cf. H. M. Gwatkin, “If Jewel is the apologist of the Reformation, Hooker is the apologist of the Church of England” (Church and State in England to the Death of Queen Anne, pp. 263 f.).] for it was he who laid the foundation upon which the majestic edifice of Caroline divinity was built.  The publication of the Ecclesiastical Polity is thus the given terminus a quo for any compilation designed to illustrate the specific genius of Anglicanism.

For the terminus ad quem the year 1691 has been chosen as dating the schismatic activity of the Non-Jurors, and as marking a notable break in English ecclesiastical history.  As a result of that schism we see on the one side a succession of writers who in the main, though with some lack of balance, follow the true line of development from Hooker and Laud, but whose place in an exposition of Anglicanism might be challenged on the ground that they can hardly be called members of the National Church.  On the other side the theology of those who continued within the Establishment becomes irrelevant to our purpose for another reason.  The extrusion of so large a body of the more Catholic elements left the rest of the Church for several decades a prey to the rising tide of rationalism and deism, so that the apologetic literature of the orthodox took, perforce, a new turn.  The aim, for instance, of such a work as Bishop Butler=s Analogy is not so much to define the peculiar position of the Church of England as to defend Christianity against the open or disguised attacks of infidelity.  Thus the special task of the seventeenth century may be said to have been accomplished by the date 1691.

I

Within this period of nearly a hundred years a considerable diversity of opinion may be discovered among admittedly Anglican writers on points of doctrine and discipline, and something of that uncertainty may be felt in the selections here brought together.  England, it is important to remember, did not produce at that time, and indeed has never produced, a single theologian to whom appeal can be made for a final sentence in disputed questions, as the Germans could appeal to Luther and the Presbyterians to Calvin, nor had she any such ultimate court of authority as the Counter-Reformation possessed in the Council of Trent.  Possibly Hooker, had he written at the conclusion of our century, might have summed up the scattered thought of his predecessors in quasi-definitive form; but that is conjecture, and as a matter of fact no such legislator did appear.  Of this condition the apologists of the age were well aware; they could even turn it into a boast, as when Chillingworth declared proudly that we “call no man master on the earth.”

Diversity of opinion and diffusion of authority are patent on the surface of the Caroline literature.  But withal an attentive student of the whole movement will be more impressed by the unity within the variety and by the steady flow of the current beneath all surface eddies towards a definite goal.  What we have to look for in the ecclesiastical literature of England is not so much finality as direction; and if this implies a degree of inconsistency among those groping for the way, such pliancy of mind in approaching the mysteries of revelation may prove safer than premature fixation.  The finished system of Calvin fell into ruins as soon as a single flaw was detected in its chain of logic, and a single discrepancy between fact and theory may bring the “fundamentalism” [*I use this term in its modern connotation to describe those who cling to a belief in the complete inerrancy of the Bible.  It signifies a position the very opposite of the Anglican instance on Afundamentals@ of faith, of which later.] of Rome to the same doom.  In Aubrey de Vere’s account of his conversion to Rome there is a passage that bears on this point.  “Carlyle,” he says, “was one of those who gave me the most curious form of warning: ‘I have ridden over here to tell you not to do that thing.  You were born free.  Do not go into that hole.’  I answered: ‘But you used always to tell me that the Roman Catholic Church was the only Christian body that was consistent, and could defend her position.’  He replied: ‘And so I say still.  But the Church of England is much better notwithstanding, because her face is turned in the right direction’.” [*Recollections, p. 321.  (The Italics are in the original.)]  The word “right” may be a begging of the question, but it was in establishing a certain “direction” and in avoiding a premature fixation that Anglican theology in its formative period showed at once its character and wisdom and its underlying consistency.

II

If challenged to state the motive that started the Church of England on her peculiar course, the historian is likely to reply that it was political rather than religious.  The first impulse towards independence was given by the Papal refusal to admit the annulment of Henry the Eighth’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and this conflict, however much it may have concerned that monarch’s taste in wives, was presented to the people as though the monarchy and national autonomy were at stake.  Henry was a Catholic still.  He applied the “Whip with the Six Strings” (the Six Articles) with an inquisitorial zest that must have been infinitely distressing to the cautious Cranmer.  And then no sooner was the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome discredited than there arose a new party, influenced from Geneva, which denied the authority of all bishops whatsoever.  And again the issue, as presented to the people, became confused with politics.  It was henceforth the cry of the Court and the Church that episcopacy and monarchy were indissolubly bound together: No Bishop, no King!  Between these opposite intrusions from the Continent the Church of England was thus directed, primarily by reasons of State, to the via media which has been her watchword from that day to this.  And the secular aspect of the cause persisted, in somewhat changed form, until the Revolution.  We see it in Sanderson=s theory of ecclesiastical laws: “In this, as in many other debates, the mean between the two extremes seems to be the truer opinion, and safer to follow,” – that is the middle way between “Romanists who would exempt the clergy from all jurisdiction of the civil magistrates” and “the Puritanical Reformers, . . . who . . .take away all power, authority, and ecclesiastical jurisdiction from the Crown and confine it wholly to their own classes and conventions.”

It is in the light of this thrust of civil influences from abroad that we should interpret the special form which the Erastianism of the age took in England, and should consider the disabilities imposed upon Romanist and Nonconformist alike which were not removed until well into the nineteenth century.  How far Erastianism is right or wrong in principle, what should be the exact relation between Church and State, is a question still sub judice.  It flared up after the Vatican Council between Gladstone and Newman; it flared up again recently in a presidential election in the United States, and is ablaze now on the Continent of Europe.  The issue is not dead.  Manifestly it is not the business of the present writer to express an opinion on the peculiar form of the problem as it confronts Great Britain today; but those who may care to know the natural bent of the English mind will find matter for reflection in the arguments and distinctions of the older controversialists arranged under Section XVII.

That, however, is by the way.  For our purpose the point of interest is the manner in which the Church gradually disentangled her theology from these secular disputes as she became more aware of her separate mission and function.  And it is characteristic of this evolution that at the beginning so much heat was expended upon what might be called the furniture of religion.  To turn from the contemporary debates on the Continent over the metaphysics of faith to the bickerings in England over the adjuncts of worship is to enter a different world – to the uninstructed reader a world wherein the more spiritual aspects of the conflict are lost in matters at once petty and materialistic.  But that is the Englishman’s way, to talk about what lies on the surface and to avoid as long as possible the deeper concerns of the heart.  At any rate, not only were the vexed problems of faith involved in the wrangling over surplices and posture, communion table and altar, but we can see them in the literature from Hooker onwards slowly coming out into the open.  [*This subject has been treated amply and acutely by Principal Tulloch in the Introduction to his English Puritanism and Its Leaders.]

III

Such quite clearly is the external origin of the via media which was to become the very charter of the Church.  It may have begun as a protest against the political claims of Rome on the one side and the Genevan theories of State on the other.  It may have looked at the outset like a shift to avoid difficulties, a modus vivendi, at the best a “middle way” as commended by Donne because “more convenient and advantageous than that of any other Kingdom.”  But behind it all the while lay a profounder impulse, pointing in a positive direction, and aiming to introduce into religion, and to base upon the “light of reason,” that love of balance, restraint, moderation, measure, which from sources beyond our reckoning appears to be innate in the English temper.  Thus Hooker, at the inception of the great work which opened our era, carried this principle up to that first eternal law which is no less than the nature of God Himself, and then showed how from it depends as a golden chain the second eternal law, stretching down, link by link, to the humanly devised polity of Church and State:

“If therefore it be demanded why, God having power and ability infinite, the effects notwithstanding of that power are all so limited as we see they are, the reason hereof is the end which He hath proposed, and the law whereby His wisdom hath stinted the effects of His power, in such sort that it doth not work infinitely, but correspondently unto that end for which it worketh, even ‘all things χρηστως, in most decent and comely sort,’ all things in Measure, Number, and Weight.”

That is the note struck by the master musician, and it gives the key to all that follows.  We shall find Joseph Hall exalting measure as that which guides the celestial bodies in their harmonious courses, and as “the centre wherein all, both divine and moral philosophy meet, the rule of life, the governess of manners, the silken string that runs through the pearl – chain of all virtues, the very ecliptic – line under which reason and religion move without any deviation.”  And Fuller, who employs the same metaphor of the silken chord through the pearl-chain of the virtues, is careful to explain that “moderation is not an halting betwixt two opinions, when the thorough-believing of one of them is necessary to salvation,” nor is it mere “luke-warmness” in matters divine, but a law and an ideal whereupon all a man’s soul may be set, even to martyrdom.

So understood, the principle of measure is at once English and Greek.  One is reminded of Aristotle’s definition of the ethical mean as both a limit and unlimited.  Courage, for instance, in relation to the vices of rashness and cowardice is a measured avoidance of excess in either direction; but in itself, as a motive of conduct, it has its own direction to which there is no limit.  A man cannot be too courageous; there is no such thing as excess of virtue.  Quite consciously, as could be shown by specific passages, the Anglican divines were expanding this Greek precept of ethics into a spiritual law of Christianity.

The point is, that though in matters of human expediency measure and restraint may seem to result in compromise, in the sphere of religion, where ultimate principles are involved, they depend upon a positive choice of direction which is intrinsically different from compromise.  And this difference can be illustrated by the heretical and the orthodox attitude towards the primary doctrine of Christianity.  Here the Fathers were confronted by the plain fact that the Founder of their faith was presented to them by a tradition going back to those who had lived with Him, as at once, in some unique manner, both divine and human, both God and man.  Reason was thunderstruck by such a paradox; the wisdom of the schools could make nothing of it.  Logic could deal with Him as God only or as man only, and indeed as one or the other He did so appear to the docetic or humanitarian philosophy of Gnostics and Adoptionists.  But theology was bound to discover a path between these two exclusions; and the great heresy, the first to threaten the very existence of Christianity as a religion, was an attempt to explain the via media as a compromise.  To the Arians Christ was neither quite God nor quite man, but a something intermediary which resembled the natures of both without being purely either.  Against this plausible and seemingly reasonable escape between the horns of faith’s dilemma (which in fact possessed the virtues neither of reason nor of paradox), the Church, by the Definition of Chalcedon, simply thrust its way through the middle by making the personality of the Incarnate so large as to carry with it both natures.  [*The reader who wishes further to consider the character of the path thus cleft may be referred to Dr. Quick’s works – notably his Liberalism, Modernism and Tradition and his Gospel of Divine Action.  It is fashionable today to pour scorn on the Christology of Chalcedon.  But Dr. Quick in the books referred to (particularly in the latter, where he interprets the purpose of the Incarnation in terms of the twin concepts of Symbol and Instrument) seems completely to vindicate the conclusions of the Fathers.]  Evidently in this case at least the principle of measure does not produce a diminished or half truth, but acts as a law of restraint preventing either one of two aspects of a paradoxical truth from excluding the other.  Nor is the middle way here a mean of compromise, but a mean of comprehension.

Now the dogma of the Incarnation, so conceived, is not specially Anglican, since it is held by Roman and Reformed and Anglican alike so far as they adhere to the Catholic faith – indeed, so far as they remain Christian.  The Abbé Bardy, for instance, in a work published with the full imprimatur of Rome, concludes his account of the early Christological controversies with just such an exposition of the voie moyenne, which he declares to be the criterion of Catholic orthodoxy not only for the mystery of the Incarnation but for the Trinity and other dogmas de fide.  [*En lisant les Pères, 2nd ed., pp. 35 and 43.]  The course of the Anglicans was peculiar in this, that deliberately and courageously they clung to the principle of mediation in regions of doctrine and discipline, where, as they contended, the Romanist and the radical Protestant did in fact stray aside into vicious extremes of exclusion.

If we follow this contention through its ramifications we shall find that it revolves about the nature of authority in Tradition and Scripture as bearing upon two main points: (1) the practical distinction between fundamentals and accessories of religion, and (2) the axiomatic rejection of infallibility.

IV

The distinction between fundamentals and accessories, or, in the more usual language of the day, between things necessary for salvation and things convenient in practice, was clearly drawn by Hooker and recurs constantly through the ensuing literature.  The fundamentals are few and revealed, the accessories are indeterminate and more or less dependent on human invention.  So Jeremy Taylor declares that the “intendment” of his discourse on The Liberty of Prophesying is that men should “not make more necessities than God made, which indeed are not many.”  For the Anglicans of the seventeenth century those few things necessary for salvation were summed up conveniently in the Creeds, particularly in the so-called Apostles’ Creed.  And for the truth of this Creed they appealed, as did other Christians, to the double authority of Tradition and Scripture.  They held the common belief that the twelve articles of the Creed went back to the actual Apostles, each one of whom made his individual contribution to the formula, and so handed on the deposit of the faith to the keeping of successive generations.  But behind the Creed, guaranteeing its truth and in general confirming the authority of tradition where right and correcting it when astray, was the sacred canon of written books.  For this reason Chillingworth, while allowing due weight to tradition in its place, could speak of the Bible as the religion, and, in case of dispute, the sole religion, of Protestants.  “I am fully assured,” he wrote, “that God does not and therefore that men ought not to require any more of any man than this, to believe Scripture to be God’s Word, to endeavour to find the true sense of it, and to live according to it.”  And he who looks for the plain indisputable sense of the Bible will discover that it consists, not in a complicated web of theological propositions nor in subtleties of definition, but simply in the presentation of Jesus Christ as the Son of God who was born and lived and died for the salvation of the world.

Certainly no Anglican divine of the seventeenth century, if questioned, would have admitted that faith in the Incarnation as the one thing necessary could be divested of such accessories as the Virgin Birth and the literal Ascension into heaven which are included in the Creed and based on the record of Scripture; but three quotations, from the beginning, the middle, and the end of our period, will show how the continued emphasis on what is fundamental was leading the Church in the direction of an utter simplicity.  Hooker, commenting on the text, These things are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God, declares that the drift of Holy Scripture is to make men wise for salvation, the Old Testament by teaching of Him Who should come, the New by teaching that the Saviour is actually come.  In the same vein, and more emphatically, Cudworth asserts that “the Gospel is nothing else but God descending into the world in our form and conversing with us in our likeness,” in order “that He might deify us, that is (as St. Peter expresseth it), make us partakers of the divine Nature.”  And South, carrying on and, so to speak, closing the process of simplification, affirms that the fundamentals are embraced in a single article of faith: “Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”

Just how literally such statements should be taken may be a matter of debate, but the direction in which the leading divines of England were moving cannot be missed by any unprejudiced reader of the literature.  And it is certain that in thus isolating the few things, or the one thing, in the Bible necessary for salvation they saw themselves placed between the two fires of Romanist and Puritan.  In their controversy with the former it was a question of tradition.  To the Anglicans the value of tradition was measured by its tenacity of the original depositum fidei.  It was not that they rejected the principle of development utterly, but that in matters fundamental they limited its competence to an interpretation of dogma held strictly at every step to the test of Scripture.  Ussher, for instance, is definite on this point, when he denies that “any traditions should be accepted for parcels of God’s word [that is as demanding implicit belief] beside the Holy Scriptures and such doctrines as are either expressly therein contained or by sound inference may be deduced from thence.”  Now the admission of “sound inference” as a canon of truth may seem to transfer the weight of authority from the book itself to the interpreter of the book, but practically the issue was clear and sharp.  The quarrel with Rome was because of her practice of extending the fundamentals of faith by increments on the warrant of her own inspired authority, and so of creating, as it were, instead of obeying tradition.  South was voicing the common view of all Protestants when he made the specific charge: “The Church of Rome has (in this respect) sufficiently declared the little value she has for the old Christian Truth, by the new, upstart articles she has added to it.”  And Newman was merely repeating what he had learned from the Caroline divines when he criticized the Council of Trent and the Creed of Pope Pius IV, because, “after adding to it [i.e. to the Apostles’ Creed] the recognition of the seven Sacraments, Transubstantiation, Purgatory, the Invocation of Saints, Image-worship, and Indulgences, the Romanist declares, ‘This true Catholic Faith, out of which no one can be saved, . . . do I promise, vow, and swear . . . most constantly to retain and confess, whole and inviolate, to the last breath of life’.”  [*Prophetical Office of the Church, 1st ed., p. 268.  The words in italics contain the real sting of the charge.]

We have seen how a modern Roman Catholic apologist applies the law of the voie moyenne to the Christological formula drawn up at Chalcedon.  There is in the same author an eloquent passage [*Bardy, op. cit., pp. 50 ff.] in which he shows how the Catholic of today is united by the long continuity of tradition with the ancient Fathers, holding the same articles of faith, worshipping in essentially the same forms, employing many of the same words to express the deeper emotions of his heart before the majesty of God.  It is a stirring appeal to the imagination intended to enforce the attraction of Rome as against the aridity of the merely Protestant service.  But reading it, one asks what, if these pages had fallen under his eyes, would have been the response of an Anglican Protestant of the seventeenth century, who claimed also to be genuinely Catholic, to whom the unsurrendered memories of the past were as the very breath of life, and who was passionately devoted to the liturgy and forms of adoration so marvellously transferred to his own native tongue in the Prayer Book.  Certainly he would have been moved by the nobility of the French Abbé’s sentiment; certainly he would have accepted the perpetuity of tradition as a power that confirms the truth, while it enhances the grace and poetry, of worship; but with equal certainty he would have contended that the obstinate retention by Rome of discordant elements added in the darker ages enveloped the core of truth to such an extent as to obscure what had been handed down from the beginning.  To the Roman apologist for continuity he might have uttered the Virgilian retort: Sic vos non vobis!

In their repudiation of the Roman efforts to cover her dogmatic innovations under the authority of tradition, and in their insistence on the Bible as the sole final criterion of orthodoxy, the Anglicans stood with the Protestants; but on the other side they departed from the Reformers of the Continent and from the Puritans at home in their rejection of what they regarded as an illegitimate extension of Scriptural authority.  Again it was a question of fundamentals and accessories.  Certain inferences from the central dogma of the Incarnation they allowed as self-evident, even in a way as essential to the faith that saves; but they hesitated over, and with the passing of time drew back more resolutely from, the doctrines of absolute predestination, effectual calling, justification by faith alone, imputed righteousness, and the whole scaffolding of rationalized theology which Luther and Calvin had constructed about the central truth out of an unbalanced exposition of isolated texts.  Not that way lay the simplicity of the faith.

Also, and even more unhesitatingly, they followed Hooker in his protest against the Puritan denunciation of all the accessories of ritual and discipline for which specific warrant could not be found in Scripture.  Here they stood with Rome in so far as they would admit the immense value of tradition in much that was vital to religious observance, though it might not be necessary to salvation.

The true thread of continuity, the Anglicans held, was broken either by superimposing new and disputable dogmas upon the divine revelation after the manner of Rome, or by disallowing due weight in the practical sphere of religion to the wisdom of accumulated human experience after the manner of Geneva.

V

Closely connected with the distinction between fundamentals and accessories was the axiomatic denial of infallibility.  One of the surprises awaiting a student of the ecclesiastical literature of the seventeenth century is the frequency with which this word “infallibility” occurs in unexpected places.  It was the veritable bugbear of the English mind of that age as it has become again since the Vatican Council, and upon the attitude to all that is conveyed by those fatal syllables hangs the ultimate philosophic difference, or let us say incompatibility of temper, between Roman and Anglican Catholicism and, in a fashion less sharply defined, between radical and Anglican Protestantism.  “Two things there are,” says Hooker, “which trouble greatly these later times: one that the Church of Rome cannot, another that Geneva will not, err.”  And in a sweeping assertion Hales sums up the Anglican position thus: “Infallibility either in judgement, or interpretation, or whatsoever, is annext neither to the See of any Bishop, nor to the Councils, nor to the Church, nor to any created power whatsoever.”  Now such a statement, which might be supplemented by quotations from other and more authoritative, at least more Catholic writers, if taken superficially would seem to leave religion a prey to the universal flux of uncertainty; but not if full weight be given to the phrase “created power.”  Evidently this does not exclude from infallibility those necessary truths which proceed directly from a divine and uncreated source.  What Hales had in mind is exactly the addition to these fundamentals by tradition or their expansion by reason.  So Laud, replying to the Romanists’ usurpation of the text, I will send you the Spirit of Truth, which will lead you into all truth, is quite explicit: “‘All’ is not always universally taken in Scripture.  Nor is it here simply for ‘all truth’; for then a General Council could no more err in matter of fact than in matter of faith, in which yet yourselves grant it may err.  But ‘into all truth’ is a limited ‘all’: ‘into all truth absolutely necessary to salvation.’ . . . A Church may err, and dangerously too, and yet not fall from the foundation.”  On the same ground Chillingworth drew his distinction between “being infallible in fundamentals and being an infallible guide in fundamentals,” and adds, “that there shall be always a Church infallible in fundamentals, we easily grant; for it comes to no more but this, that there shall be always a Church.”

Taking together then the two axioms in regard to fundamentals and infallibility, we can see that the Anglicanism of the seventeenth century comes to something like this: The means divinely ordained for the salvation of mankind is plainly set forth in the Bible in the story of the birth and life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  This truth, as Chillingworth maintained, is of such “admirable simplicity” – though its simplicity and plainness rather enhance than diminish its significance – as to need no inspired interpreter.  But there are recorded in the same book other facts and doctrines, a vast body enveloping, so to speak, the central truth, which, however great their importance, are not necessary to salvation, and do not open their meaning so immediately.  For the interpreting of these secondary truths, and for the drawing of inferences therefrom, upon which rests the whole structure of disputable theology, there is no oracular organ of infallibility appointed among men or in any human institution.  This distinction is made clearly by Chillingworth in words that might be taken as the charter of Anglican liberalism: “Though we pretend not to certain means of not erring in interpreting all Scripture, particularly such places as are obscure and ambiguous, yet this, methinks, should be no impediment but that we may have certain means of not erring in and about the sense of those places which are so plain and clear that they need no interpreters; and in such we say our Faith is contained.”  The Anglicans believed and declared that, however the human mind might go astray in its efforts to interpret and unfold the whole mystery of God’s economy of salvation, yet by the office of the Holy Ghost the truth in its simplicity should not be lost or ever utterly obscured, and the Church as the instrument of Grace should not fail from the earth.

VI

At this point the Anglican attitude towards infallibility raises a question to which only a tentative answer can be given, in accordance with one’s notion of what was implicit in the direction of Caroline theology.  All branches of the Church in the seventeenth century held the Bible to be infallibly inspired by God; if, then, the more liberal of the Anglicans at that time had been faced by the results of modern Biblical scholarship, how would they have reacted?  Popes, they knew, were against Popes, Councils against Councils, some Fathers against others, age against age; what then if they had been compelled to extend this sic et non to the ultimate source of all authority, and to admit that the Bible also was a “created power” and therefore to the same degree and in the same manner subject to error?  Practically, indeed, they had come very close to such an a admission, – how close we can see from Chillingworth’s admission that the Bible, though infallible in fundamentals is not an infallible guide in fundamentals.  The distinction was directed against the claim of Rome that she was the inspired guardian and unerring interpreter of Scripture.  But its implications go beyond any such purpose of apology; for quite manifestly in practice an oracle that offers no infallible guide to its meaning is itself for any who consult it fallible.  So far Chillingworth, and those for whom he spoke, would have been driven by the force of logic to go.  But would they have yielded the next step?  Would they, in submission to the evidence of critical examination, have been ready to acknowledge inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible itself as a “created power,” while yet holding fast to the belief that it contains the record of a fundamental truth upon which the assurances of faith may be built?  This is not an idle question.  Upon an affirmative answer to it depends the identity of the Anglican spirit as manifested in that day and in ours.  Thus much is at stake, namely whether the Church can be said to have moved in a straight direction, whether, in a word, it is proper to speak of any such thing as Anglicanism.

Now no one is likely to dispute the statement that the eighteenth century failed in the main to carry on the line of development indicated by Hooker and Laud and Beveridge and Ken, and historians have pretty well agreed in holding the significance of the Oxford Movement to be exactly this, that it brought theology back to the path from which it had deviated in the arid intervening years.  The renewed emphasis on the Church as a divine institution, on the continuity of the Catholic tradition as overleaping the more radical and destructive elements of the Reformation, the enrichment of public worship, and the deepening of individual religious experience, – these were common to the leaders of the Movement, and they were a deliberate regression to the seventeenth century.  All this abides, and Newman’s part in the great instauratio ecclesiae will not be forgotten.  But it may still be asked whether in the thought of him who is by common consent the greatest of the Tractarians there were not also certain traits which would have diverted the Church from its true course, had they completely dominated the Movement as they finally did prevail in his own life.

The question first arises as to whether Newman’s Prophetical Office of the Church, avowedly a defence of the Anglican via media, was conceived in loyalty to the spirit of the Caroline divines.  So the author thought it to be, and on the face of it the animus of the book would appear to support his view.  The attack on Romanism is powerful, indeed in places unmeasured if not virulent.  In no modern work will one find a more eloquent exposition of the Anglican attitude towards fundamentals and infallibility.  In the chapters dealing directly with these subjects he speaks with a philosophical consistency and clarity to which the older theologians seldom attained.  Under the influence of Butler he even went beyond what the seventeenth century would have granted in its revolt from the pretensions of infallibility.  “We, for our part,” he declares categorically, “have been taught to consider that faith in its degree as well as conduct, must be guided by probabilities, and that doubt is ever our portion in this life.”  Nevertheless there are passages in the book which awaken a suspicion that his apology for Anglicanism was dictated more by affection (a perfectly sincere sentiment) for the Communion of his birth than by the native propension of his mind, and that his hostility to Rome was caused in part by misunderstanding and in part by an unconscious impulse of self-defence.  And this apprehension is confirmed by his attitude towards the higher criticism of the Bible which was before very many years to trouble the sleepy conscience of the Church.

Now historically considered Newman=s conservatism may not be of much importance, since it was shared by most of his countrymen.  But one gets the impression that his “fundamentalism” (in the modern, not the Caroline, sense of the word) was not due to ignorance of German, and would have been as strong were he living today as it was in the mid-nineteenth century; that it was in fact symptomatic of a deep-seated craving for the support of an absolute external authority which, from the beginning and despite all his protests, he was dimly conscious of needing for his faith.  It is significant that in the Prophetical Office, after his large, if not too large, concessions to probability, after his dismission of “the claim of infallibility” as “an expedient [i.e. a cunning device of Rome] for impressing strongly upon the mind the necessity of hearing and of obeying the Church,” he proceeds to plead for an infallible organ of authority, compounded of “Scripture, Antiquity, and Catholicity,” of which the Church of England is the sacred custodian.  It is a disputable thesis, but one for which a good case might be made, that Newman, deep down in his heart, was never in full sympathy with the liberal spirit of the seventeenth century, and that the Oxford Movement, so far as it was swayed by his genius, has not been without danger of leading the Church away from the line of its normal development.

Certainly at least any one who comes fresh from reading the Caroline divines to Gore and the other essayists of Lux Mundi will feel that here, rather than in Newman, he has picked up again the straight continuity of direction.  That book of essays is not final, it is rather a new beginning; but in its determination to face the results of increased knowledge (particularly as shown by the editor in his Preface to the tenth edition), and in its frank extension of fallibility to the Bible, while insisting on the Personality of Christ and on the Incarnation as the fundamental dogma on which the whole fabric of Christianity rests, one breathes again that air of larger freedom which frightened Newman into the prison-house of absolutism.  It would be interesting, if space permitted, to show in detail how exultantly the leaders of Anglican thought since the appearance of Lux Mundi have responded to this reacquired note of intellectual liberty.  We know what has happened in the other great branches of the Church.  The Roman Curia has condemned both the good and the bad of “modernism” unflinchingly and, it would seem, irredeemably.  For their part the radical Protestants have either clung to an impossible theory of Scriptural inerrancy, and so have put themselves hopelessly out of court, or else, bowing to the results of the higher criticism, have seen their faith in the fundamentals of religion go down in ruins along with their anti-catholic bibliolatry.  With the recent literature of “fundamentalism” on the one side and of the liberalische Theologie (I use the phrases technically) on the other side one need only compare such works, to name a few out of many, as Essays Catholic and Critical, Canon Quick’s Christian Sacraments, Sir Edwyn Hoskyns’ and Mr. Noel Davey’s Riddle of the New Testament, Dr. K. E. Kirk’s Vision of God, Prof. A. E. Taylor’s Faith of a Moralist, and the more recent essays on Northern Catholicism, to see the advantage of this line of the via media upon which the Church of England started out more than three centuries ago.

VII

Looking backwards, then, upon the theology of the Caroline divines, we can see that their manifest intention was to steer a middle course between the excesses of Romanist and Radical Protestant.  Clearly also such a middle course was not in the nature of compromise or of hesitation to commit themselves to conviction, but was governed by a positive determination to preserve the just balance between fundamentals and accessories which was threatened by an authority vested in the infallibility whether of Tradition or of Scripture.  So far there can be no doubt in regard to the guiding principle of the Anglican via media.  And at this point, if our sense of direction be right, we may venture upon a further step in definition, in the light of the continuity of the two movements instituted by Hooker and Gore.  Here indeed we must proceed warily.  But if we are looking for a single term to denote the ultimate law of Anglicanism, I do not see that we can do better than adopt a title which offers itself as peculiarly descriptive, despite the unsavoury repute it may have acquired from its usurpation by certain modern sects of philosophy; I refer to the title “pragmatism.”  The self-styled “pragmatist” of today is commonly one who, pretending to eschew what he regards as unverifiable theory, limits his assent to “facts,” and whose criterion of fact is “that which works” – works, that is, by the test of physical experience.  But etymologically there is no reason why the word “pragmatism” should be so narrowed in its meaning as to include only one half of human experience.  Rightly understood it maybe said that among philosophers Plato was the supreme pragmatist, in so far as he sought to defend his belief in “Ideas” as facts more real than the objects of nature by showing that there is a spiritual intuition larger, deeper, more positive and trustworthy, more truly scientific, than the clamorous rout of physical sensations.  And by the same token there is no reason why we should shrink from describing the genius of Anglicanism as supremely pragmatic.

Such a pragmatism, then, if the word be allowed and if the more recent theology since the publication of Lux Mundi be the true heir and interpreter of the Caroline age, would come to this.  Let us consider some questions.  In the first place did the person Jesus ever live, was He born as our records assert and did He suffer death on the Cross?  Secondly, did He, again as the records assert, think and speak of Himself as the Messiah, the Son of God?  Now these, plainly, are questions of simple history the answer to which depends on the weighing of documentary evidence, exactly as in the case of any other recorded event of the past.  So far the truth of the narrative may be granted without committing one=s self to any supernatural creed.  The real problem of Christianity begins with a question of a different order: When Jesus thought and spoke of Himself as the Messiah, the Son of God, was He what He proclaimed Himself to be or was He suffering a delusion?  This also comes down to a simple question of fact, pragma, as do finally all questions of truth; but quite obviously the answer is to be sought otherwise than in the mere weighing of documentary evidence.  We have passed from the province of history to that of philosophy and religion.  All Christians of course believe in the actuality of this fact.  If the Anglican differs from the Romanist or the radical Protestant, it is because more definitely and consciously than either he justifies his belief by the pragmatic test of experience, namely: “Does it work?”  It is not that he rejects authority for an unchecked individualism; he sees that his personal experience is no more than a fragment of the larger experience of mankind, and must be controlled at every step by that accumulation of wisdom which is the voice of the Church.  What he rejects is the Absolute of authority based on a priori theories of infallibility.  Rather, looking within and without, he asks the consequences of believing or not believing.  How does acceptance of the dogma of the Incarnation work out in practice?  Does faith bring with it any proof of its objective validity?

Now pragmatism of this sort may seem to leave religion exposed to the shifting winds of human opinion, and, not to mention the charges brought against the Church of England by infallibilists of both branches, we have seen how Newman in his Anglican days confessed that faith must be guided by probabilities and that doubt is always our portion in this life.  But Newman, it may be maintained, was here under a mistaken notion of the function and scope of probability, a mistake which helps to explain his later defection from the body he was defending.  Historic evidence can never rise above the probable, though unprejudiced scholarship can and does say that the external evidence for Jesus’ own avowed pretensions to the Messianic role is so convincing as to leave no sound warrant for doubt.  But it does not follow that the pragmatic test of our faith in Jesus as in very truth the Incarnate Word is subject to the same conditions.  Except in those cases of miraculously sudden conversion, of which the Anglican is temperamentally suspicious, though he would not deny their occasional happening, it may be that the Christian convert must begin with the probabilities with which history ends.  It may be that he will never attain to that ecstasy of immediate knowledge claimed by the mystics, of which again the Anglican is inclined by nature to be sceptical.  But, quickly or slowly, the experiment of believing may pass into experience, and the result of experience may be of such a kind as to bring the believer, however incapable he may be of convincing others, to a sure conviction that he has chosen the right way.  He may come to know by effects which leave for him no doubt of their cause that the Christ in whom he trusts is not dead but living, and that faith has brought him into touch with fact.  Nor is it arrogant to suggest that the Anglican insistence on distinguishing the fundamentals, or the one fundamental, of Christian theology may help to clarify this fundamental of Christian experience.  At any rate the pragmatist may be aware of the working of divine Grace and certified of revelation, and this without leaning for support on the theory of an oracular infallibility committed to any visible organ of speech.  Such, very nearly, would appear to be the meaning of Chillingworth in his retort upon the Romanists:

“You content not yourselves with a moral certainty of the things you believe, nor with such a degree of assurance of them as is sufficient to produce obedience to the condition of the new Covenant, which is all that we require.  God’s spirit, if He please, may work more, a certainty of adherence beyond a certainty of evidence; but neither God doth, nor man may, require of us as our duty to give a greater assent to the conclusion than the premises deserve.”

[Compare the statement of Professor Williams in Northern Catholicism, p. 233: “The final and clinching proof of Christian truth, which raises ‘probability’ to certainty, for intellectual and simple alike, lies in its verification through first-hand experience of God in Christ, and of Christ in the Church and the Sacraments.”  That, I take it, is in the line, the direction, from Hooker through Gore.]

VIII

But perhaps the full force of the word pragmatic as applied to the Church of England can be seen even better in her attitude towards the priesthood and its sacramental function.  We may concede that the Anglicans, particularly at the early stage of the controversy over the eucharistic sacrifice, rather shunned the term “priest” and even went so far as to deny that a “minister” should in any true sense be so called.  This Hooker declares explicitly; and the “pious and profoundly learned Joseph Mede” defines “priest” as the English for presbyter, not sacerdos, as being a “minister” rather than a “sacrificer”.  It is fair, however, to add that the direction of Anglican theology was towards a more Catholic, even a more Roman view; and Hickes, in his monumental treatise on The Christian Priesthood Asserted (which as the work of a Non-Juror falls out of our period), was in the true line of development from Laud and Cosin and Thorndike.

But the acuteness of the debate centred not so much on the priesthood itself as on the various orders of ministry, more especially on the episcopate.  Here, as we have seen, the Anglicans held primarily to a view that might be regarded as a sort of compromise.  With Rome they adhered to the historic authority of bishops against the immoderate hostility of the Protestants to any distinction of orders; while at the same time they stood with the Reformation in disavowing the equally immoderate pretensions of the Bishop of Rome.  The pragmatic note is felt in the kind of arguments by which they defended their medial position.  Here indeed we encounter some differences in method.  Certain controversialists contend that the distinct order of the episcopate can be justified by statements in the Bible; others, including notably Hooker, prefer to base their defence on the usage of sub-apostolic antiquity and on the continuous tradition of the Church since then.  But in either case their ultimate appeal is to expedience and thus “pragmatic”, though pragmatic in the sense that the values discovered by practice are spiritual as well as physical.  It is in harmony with such arguments that the most convinced Episcopalians hesitated to rank the Divine origin of episcopacy among the credenda; and thus it was a common opinion among them that the Protestant communions on the Continent, which possessed no bishops at all, or at best no unbroken succession of bishops, should not for that reason be denied their place as a true, though errant, branch of the Church Universal.  But they were insistent on the demonstrably historic fact that the integrity of the Church has been sustained chiefly by the recognition of episcopal authority, and their vast scholarship was nowhere better displayed than in their fierce rebuttal of the Roman efforts to deprive the English Church of its catholicity by discovering flaws in the consecration of the Elizabethan bishops.  Very definitely they held that the spiritual function of the priesthood was proved by experience to depend for its higher and purer efficacy on the Apostolic Succession of the bishops.  And from this pragmatic argument they could go on to infer that episcopacy, even though devised by man rather than commanded by revelation, was sanctioned by Providence to be the means of preserving the Church as the channel of Grace.

Whatever uncertainty may hover about the earlier conception of the priesthood there was practical unanimity in regard to the importance of the Eucharist administered by sacerdotal hands.  Here, plainly, was a fundamental of religion which, standing parallel with the Incarnation, is the prime factor in the sacramental function of the Church as that is of its dogmatic theology; or, rather, it might be said that the two are not so much parallel factors as twin aspects of the one divine economy of salvation.  The Anglicans widely admitted the “real presence”, not corporal but spiritual, of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist.  In so far, they tended away from Reformation Eucharistic theology towards the Objectivism of Rome.  But in a different respect, namely in their emphasis on the need for the cooperation of faith in the communicant, they leaned towards the Protestant position.  In regard to the spiritual fact behind the Eucharistic rite they were thus in the line of the via media between the extremes, to speak locally, of Rome and Zurich, and their departure from the one might be measured by their comprehension of the other.  The radical difference from both appears when we touch the question of theory.

In so far as the Anglicans theorized at all about the how of the Sacrament, the prevalent view would seem to have followed Calvin and one side of St. Augustine in using the language of dynamic or instrumental symbolism.  The physical participation, as Hooker expresses it, is “instrumentally a cause of that mystical participation”; and a favourite metaphor for the symbolic power of the consecration was to liken the elements to a legal document before and after the attachment of the royal seal.  But they were not entirely coherent or, one gathers, very deeply concerned in such explanations.  Hooker avowedly adopts his instrumentalism as a kind of common denominator upon which Lutheran and Roman and Anglican might agree in peace, since it “hath in it nothing but what the rest do all approve”.  And in general such theories, when they occur, have the air of half-hearted attempts to find a substitute for the Tridentine dogma of transubstantiation, which is denounced quite whole-heartedly as bad theology and bad philosophy and as a legacy of error under which the Roman Church, owing to its presumption of infallibility, must stagger on for ever.  Oftener and more characteristically the Anglican theologians refused on principle to theorize at all on the how of sacramental efficacy.  So Andrewes: “Christ said, This is My body; He did not say, This is My body in this way.”  So Ussher, scorning the untenable metaphysics of Trent, declares that the real presence must be left an inexplicable mystery.  And Bramhall sums up the whole contention with the theorists of either party, Roman or Protestant, finally and definitely.  We know not, he insists, whether the real presence is by transubstantiation or consubstantiation, by production or conservation or adduction or assumption; and he quotes the great dictum attributed to Durandus of Troarn: Motum sentimus, modum nescimus, praesentiam credimus.

Why God should choose this special channel of sacramental grace we know not, any more than we know why His eternal purpose for the redemption of mankind should have necessitated the awful fact of the Incarnation; how the sacrament works we know not any more than we know how the death of His Son is made the instrument of eternal life.  In such matters we are brought face to face with the causes and operation of Providence which reach up into the vast, transcendental, all-surrounding circle of the supernatural.  But we do know by experience (motum sentimus) what faith and practice effect in our own souls.  Here is not a reckoning of probabilities, but an immediate impress of reality growing ever from less to more distinctness; and, perceiving that the eucharistic elements do so operate, we believe in a supernatural power imparted to them (praesentiam credimus).

This is the pragmatic argument from effect to cause which permeates the theology of Anglicanism.  Not only in the seventeenth century but from the time of Henry VIII to the present day, if there is any outstanding note of the English temper it is a humility of awe before the divine mysteries of faith and a recognition of the incompetence of language to define the ultimate paradox of experience.  It is a pragmatism not of the lips only, as with the scholastics of the past or the present, but from a deep conviction that the rationalization of the supernatural is always in danger of pushing on to a formula which magnifies one half of the truth to an Absolute by excluding the other half.  As Cudworth, one of the most metaphysical of the Caroline theologians, expressed it, “neither are we able to inclose in words and letters the life, soul, and essence of any spiritual truth, and as it were to incorporate it in them.”

It is not fanciful to say that in the Anglican writers of the seventeenth century we find the Chalcedon of eucharistic theology.  The perils alike of transubstantiation and receptionism are avoided: the one because it implies a docetic view of the divine operation in the Eucharist utterly inconsistent with that operation in the sacramental processus considered as a whole; the other because it points to what in the language of the present day might be called sacramental epiphenomenalism.  And here again, as in the Christology of Chalcedon, the middle way is not compromise; it is direction.*  [*To see how this direction has been carried on in Anglican Eucharistic theology compare the contribution of Will Spens to Essays Catholic and Critical; O. C. Quick, The Christian Sacraments; the Report of the Anglo-Catholic Congress, 1927; the Report of the Farnham Conference on Reservation, 1925; and F. C. N. Hicks, The Fullness of Sacrifice.]

IX

It may appear to some who have followed this essay in its endeavour, admittedly tentative, to get at the principles directing the course of the Anglican Church that the outcome is a “diminished” Christianity.  Such was not the intention of the essayist.  Nor is it the belief of the joint editors of this volume.  Rather, as they have collected these documents from the stalwart divinity of a past age, they have been impressed by the richness and depth and beauty of the religious life to which that literature as a whole bears witness.  In particular they have discovered no trace of “diminution” in a theology which aimed at separating the accretions to the faith from the dogmas necessary for salvation.  It might seem that in so insisting on the kernel of truth as distinguished from its accessories, the Church was playing into the hands of a Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the others who were laying the foundation of deism upon an elemental set of beliefs which, as they supposed, were common to all the religions of the world; and it cannot be denied that after the schism of the Non-Jurors a portion of the established Church fell for a time under the chilling sway of that movement.  But in reality the refrigeration of the eighteenth-century theologians was owing to their loss of grip on the very dogma which their predecessors had singled out.  The fact of the Incarnation, with its corollary in the Sacramental life, was the one thing that could find no place in the five points of Lord Herbert’s universal religion and that was inimical to the whole trend of deism, – as it is to the kindred “religiosity” of the present day.  As for the caviller who would admit this distinction yet would criticize the Anglican position as tending to narrow the scope of Christianity, it may be proper to ask whether he has ever really considered the infinite riches of the Incarnation and the Eucharist, their inexhaustible meaning, the depth and breadth of their transforming power upon conduct and character, the glory of their promise.  The Anglicans were here in the great tradition of antiquity; they, as Cudworth and others knew, were but taking up the doctrine of Irenaeus and Athanasius: ο Θεος γέγονεν άνθρωπος, ίνα ημας εν εαυτω θεοποιήση.  Concentration may bring gain rather than loss; to intensify may be to move towards more of strength and certainty.  We can remember the words of Christ Himself, His last perhaps upon the Cross: It is finished.  It was the utter simplicity of the Christian faith concentrated upon an act of God=s merciful condescension that inspired one of the most modern and most Caroline of George Herbert’s poems:

Could not that wisdom which first broach’d the wine

Have thicken’d it with definitions?

And jagg’d His seamless coat, had that been fine,

With curious questions and divisions?

But all the doctrine which He taught and gave,

Was clear as heav’n from whence it came,

At least those beams of truth which only save,

Surpass in brightness any flame.

It was a favourite thesis of Baron von Hügel that the English Church, with all its excellencies, has failed in producing the variety and depth of the saintly life to be found within the Roman Communion.  And this in a manner may be conceded.  Naturally, in the matter of variety, it could not be expected that Christianity manifested through the temperament of a single people at a given time should produce as many different types of holiness as a Communion embracing a number of divergent nationalities.  But if one will compare the lives in Walton with, let us say, the biographies of contemporary saints and mystics of a neighbouring country collected by Abbé Bremond, it is not at all clear that the advantage lies with Roman Catholicism.  And if to the little group commemorated in Walton=s inimitable pages one adds Andrewes and Barrow and Taylor and Traherne and Henry More and Sir Thomas Browne and Ken, one will have a striking variety ranging through the man of prayer, the great scholar, the golden-mouthed orator, the romantic dreamer, the Platonic idealist, the devout physician, and the irreproachable prelate.

We may grant that among them all there is no one who stirs the poetic imagination quite as does St. Francis of Assisi.  But, in the first place, such a character as St. Francis, coming before the Reformation, does in a sense belong to England of the seventeenth century almost as much as to France or Catholic Germany of the same age; for the Anglicans, though in the heat of controversy they may have spoken uncharitably of Romanism, did not forget that, as Hooker reminded the Puritans, their fathers had served God and found salvation in communion with the Pope.  And secondly they might say, or we may say for them, that, though a St. Francis could scarcely be expected in England at any time, neither could a Hooker or a Ken be imagined in Italy.  One star differs from another in glory, and the galaxy of English saints sheds a light very precious for the world.

It might even be argued with plausibility that the saintly type of the future, as the mediatorial work of Christ is better understood, will conform rather to the Anglican than to the medieval model.  Anglicanism will never become formally the religion of the world, nor has Canterbury any ambition to usurp the place claimed by Rome; but there is reason to believe that a liberal ethos of Christianity, resembling that developed by Englishmen in their clear-eyed opposition to the pseudo-antiquity of the Reformation and to the tenacious medievalism of the Counter-Reformation, will more and more prevail in the Holy Catholic Church.  The image of the Anglican branch of that brotherhood, rising before a mind imbued in the literature from which the following documents are compiled, is of one that rejoiceth as a giant to run his course.

Anglicanism in the Seventeenth Century

by Felix R. Arnott

I.  The Background of the Age.

II.  The Struggle with Puritanism.

III.  The Controversy with Rome.

IV.  Seventeenth-Century Scholarship.

V.  Its Prose.

VI.  Its Preachers.

VII.  Its Poets.

VIII.  Its Saints.

IX.  The Significance of the Age.

I

On March 24th, 1603, Queen Elizabeth passed to her rest.  For forty-five years she had ruled autocratically; but by force of character she had made England strong, and won the favour of all classes of the English nation.  Her dying words, – “Far above all earthly treasure I esteem my people’s love,” were typical of her ideals.  Just over a month later she was buried beside her unhappy sister in that magnificent chapel at Westminster which had been raised by the piety, and the extortions, of the first of her dynasty.  Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, conducted the funeral service, and Andrewes, the Dean of the Abbey, preached the sermon.  Ten years afterwards, in an anniversary sermon preached at St. Paul’s Cross, Joseph Hall paid fitting tribute to her memory: – “O, Blessed Queen, the mother of this nation, the nurse of this Church, the glory of womanhood, the envy and example of foreign nations, the wonder of times ; how sweet and sacred shall thy memory be to all posterities! . . . And though the foul mouths of our adversaries stick not to call her miseram feminam, as Pope Clement did . . . yet, as we say, she never prospered so well as when she was most cursed by their Pius V.”  [Strype, Annals of the Reformation, Vol. IV, Doc. cclxx.]

With the passing of the great Queen, there passed also a completed era of English History.  Henry VII had succeeded to the throne of a country in which feudal government had broken down under the stress of internal warfare.  The new learning, which had followed upon the capture of Constantinople by the Saracens in 1453, had changed the whole character of European thought and art.  Close in its train had followed the Reformation, and the Sixteenth Century throughout its course had been an age of turmoil and uneasiness both in politics and religion.  But the first years of the Seventeenth Century inaugurated a new epoch.  The spirit of mediaeval England gradually yielded before a more philosophical point of view, and Bacon, Burton and Hobbes are the typical thinkers of the new era.  The adventurous seamen and the chivalrous courtiers of earlier days found a fresh outlet for their enterprise in a whole-hearted devotion to commerce, the pursuit of which has earned England the gibes and the jealousy of many other countries.  After the defeat of the Spanish Armada had ended any danger of foreign invasion, James I found himself at the head of a country which the genius of Wolsey and his successors had raised to a first-class power.  Indeed, it was now even possible to hope for a marriage alliance between the royal houses of England and Spain.

The new policy of government in Church as well as in State is admirably represented in the position taken up by the “judicious” Richard Hooker in his Ecclesiastical Polity.  Hooker succeeded in rescuing theological controversy from the filth of the market place, and investing it with a new and dignified splendour.  When we pass from the scurrility of the Marprelate Tracts to Hooker’s breadth of religious vision, we find ourselves in an altogether different milieu, where bickering about minutiae has given place to the reasoned examination of principles.  [*On Hooker, cp. especially F. Paget, An Introduction to the Fifth Book of Hooker’s Treatise of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1899.] In his writings we can trace the germ of the characteristic Anglican doctrine of aurea mediocritas laid down against the claims of both Rome and Geneva.  Hallam justly described the Ecclesiastical Polity as the first great original prose work in our language, pointing out that its author “not only opened the mine, but explored the depths of our native eloquence.” [*Hallam, Constitutional History, Vol. I, ch. iv.]  The Polity formed the stylistic basis on which most of the later divines built, and its long and straightforward periods are constantly re-echoed in the magnificent language of the Authorized Translation of the Bible.  Hooker’s spirit permeated almost all that was best in subsequent English religious thought, and his ideas were worked out to their full conclusions by Andrewes, Laud and Sanderson; for it was his task serere arbores, quae alteri saeculo prosint.  His fame penetrated even the walls of the Vatican itself, as Pope Clement VIII’s eloquent eulogy of the Ecclesiastical Polity testifies.  “There is no learning that this man hath not searched into, nothing too hard for his understanding. . . . His books will get reverence by age, for there are in them such seeds of eternity, that, if the rest be like this, they shall last till the last fire shall consume all learning.” [*Quoted in Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ed. 1691, Vol. I, p. 262.  Walton, Life of Hooker, ed. 1927, p. 212.]

The Seventeenth-Century divines grew up and flourished in a period of great artistic activity.  The same year that saw James VI of Scotland become James I of England saw also William Shakespeare writing the tragedy of Hamlet, Francis Bacon receiving a knighthood for his Essays – the first edition of which had been published in 1597 – and John Donne, then a young Oxford student, composing some of the sweetest of English love lyrics.  The flower of poetry blossomed abundantly throughout the Seventeenth Century; and though the splendour of John Milton has tended to overshadow the work of his contemporaries, it must not be forgotten that many of them wrote poetry of the highest quality, especially in the sphere of lyrical verse.

In the realm of music, Orlando Gibbons carried on the great tradition of madrigals and motets inherited from Talus and Merbecke, both of whom had died some twenty years before the century opened.  The Puritans strongly objected to music, especially when played by the organ, and we find Prebendary Peter Smart [*Cp. Document No. 254.] indicting John Cosin for erecting two organs in Durham Cathedral and causing them to be played during the administration of the Lord’s Supper.  The Puritans would consent to sing the Psalms only if transposed into doggerel verse, and there is a striking absence of really great hymns written during this century.  In opposition to Puritan attacks we find John Gauden [*Cp. Document No. 279.] writing in praise of music: “If there be not music in Heaven, sure there is a kind of heaven in music.  . . . Certainly music is of all sensible human beauty the most harmless and divine.  Nor did I ever see any reason why it should be thought to deform us Christians, or be wholly excluded from making a part in the beauty of holiness.”  With the appointment of Henry Purcell as organist of Westminster Abbey in 1680, English music found its full vindication, and flourished more splendidly than it has ever done until the dawn of the present century.

Similarly, the art of painting, which had lain dormant since the days of Holbein, was given fresh inspiration from the visit of Sir Anthony Van Dyck, who first came to London in 1621.  In 1626 he was followed by his master, Peter Paul Rubens, as an ambassador from the King of France.  The new influence speedily revealed itself in the work of the Royalist painters, William Dobson and Godfrey Kneller, and there were thus sown the seeds of the school of English portrait painting which was to bloom so luxuriantly in the following century.  Charles I was a liberal patron and himself an ardent collector of pictures, though his collection was dispersed, for the most part on the continent, during the Puritan regime.  Architecture in no way dallied behind the plastic arts, and this century saw the rebuilding of London on a magnificent scale.  In the reign of James I Inigo Jones built the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall and the pleasant Ashburnham House within the precincts of Westminster, while the Great Fire of 1666 gave Sir Christopher Wren his opportunity for crowning the city with the splendid dome of St. Paul’s.  Such is the artistic background, against which we must view the lives and characters of the Seventeenth-Century divines.

The political background of the age was less exalted.  We have already remarked that Hooker found a common basis of law for both Church and State.  It was a primary consideration of Stuart policy that the Church should maintain its existence in close dependence upon the Crown.  At the head of all stood the King, whose word must be supreme both in Convocation and in Parliament.  The Tudors had acted on this hypothesis, but it was left for James I to defend such absolutism with the new philosophy of the divine prerogative of monarchy.  In a speech to his judges in the Star Chamber, he asserted: “That which concerns the mystery of the King’s power is not lawful to be disputed; for that is to wade into the weakness of princes, and to take away the mystical reverence that belongs unto them that sit in the throne of God.” [*Works of James I (ed. 1616), p. 557.]  Such a theological basis being found for absolutism, it was only natural that the leaders of the National Church should closely ally themselves with the claims of the Crown.  At first, both Papists and Puritans expected favours from James.  But when these were withheld, the former almost at once resorted to the Gunpowder Plot; while the latter, biding their time until the autocracy of Charles’ rule without a Parliament for the eleven years, 1629-1640, enabled them to disguise their revolutionary religious aspirations with the fair cloak of being defenders of English liberty, entered the Civil War with the express intention of overthrowing both the monarchy and the Anglican Church as settled by Elizabeth.  With the melancholy story of the struggle of Anglicanism against both Puritans and Romanists we shall deal in later sections.  The execution of the King in 1649 was, however, a defeat only in appearance.  Events soon revealed that the English people were determined not to submit to a pleasureless Puritanism which was every whit as tyrannical as the rule of any king.  It required but the death of Cromwell in 1658 to make even such staunch Parliamentarians as Monk and Prynne begin clamouring for the restoration of the Monarchy.

On May 29, 1660, Charles II entered London in triumph.  The exiled bishops were recalled, and William Juxon was summoned from his retirement in the little village of Chastleton in Oxfordshire to the throne of St. Augustine.  In 1661 the Savoy Conference was convened, which led in the following year to the publication of the revised Prayer Book, annexed to an Act of Uniformity.  With this Act the English Reformation may be said to have ended.  The doctrine of aurea mediocritas had prevailed over either extreme, and, sanctified by the blood of an archbishop and a king – the latter the only Saint she had canonized since the Reformation [*See the discussion in W. H. Hutton, The Influence of Christianity upon National Character, Illustrated by the Lives and Legends of the English Saints,²  pp. 349-52.] – Ecclesia Anglicana had embarked on that course by which she might hope to become the “bridge Church” of all Christendom.

The years extending from the passing of the Prayer Book by Parliament on April 16, 1662, to the end of the period covered by the documents of this book is one of the sadder epochs of English Church History.  The tolerance which Charles II had promised at Breda was overshadowed by the triumphant zeal of the Church leaders and the Royalist Parliament, which proceeded to persecute Nonconformist and Papist alike.  The reign of James II (1685-88) showed Puritan iconoclasm at its worst in the acts wrought by Monmouth’s soldiers in Wells Cathedral and elsewhere in the West of England; but it also proved once and for all that England would not tolerate a Catholicism which involved the acceptance of the papal claims.  On the accession of William and Mary, Archbishop Sancroft, and six bishops, including the saintly Ken of Bath and Wells and Lloyd of Norwich, refused, out of a rather narrow conception of the Oath of Allegiance which they had taken to the House of Stuart, to swear loyalty to another sovereign, and in 1691 they seceded from the Church, followed by about 400 clergy and many of the laity.  These so-called “Non-Jurors” included the very cream of the Church of England, and their schism involved a loss of piety and learning which might have proved an effective counterblast to the Latitudinarian and often semi-Deistic rationalism that characterized the Eighteenth Century.

II

If the Civil War occupies the chief field of interest to students of English political history in the Seventeenth Century, the struggle between Anglicanism and Puritanism fills the corresponding place for the Church historian.

The Puritans met James I on his way from Scotland to London in April, 1603, with the “Millenary Petition.” [*No original copy of the Petition survives.  The text is given in Fuller, Church History (ed. 1655,  pp. 21ff.), and in Gee-Hardy, Documents Illustrative of History of English Church, No. 88.]  Compared with Cartwright’s Full and Plain Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline it was a mild document.  It made no sweeping demands for a Presbyterian ministry, but merely set forth the stock objections to the Book of Common Prayer, attacking such things as the Cross at Baptism, the Ring in Matrimony, Lessons from the Apocrypha, and the wearing of the surplice.  At first James was sympathetic.  But when the University of Oxford successfully brought to his notice that the framers of the Petition were men who wished to limit the power of the Monarchy, the King=s sympathies moved towards the anti-Puritan views of Whitgift, then Archbishop of Canterbury, and of Bancroft, the Bishop of London.  The following January (1604) he summoned a Conference at Hampton Court, at which he took the chair himself, and thoroughly enjoyed lecturing on theology to the assembled divines.  The leaders on the Puritan side were Reynolds, the Dean of Lincoln, and Knewstubbs, a minister from Cockfield in Suffolk, while Bancroft was the fiery and uncompromising spokesman of the Bishops.  On the first day discussion centred in the usual Puritan objections to the Prayer Book and the use of excommunication, to which was added the somewhat strange subject of the provision of clergy for Ireland.  It at once became clear, however, that the ceremonial demands of the Puritans were only a cloak for introducing into England Presbyterian government.  This discovery very quickly alienated James from the Puritan cause, and he delivered a sermon on his favourite text “No Bishop, no King,” in the course of which he stated “A Scottish Presbytery . . . as well agreeth with a monarchy as God and the devil.” [*Quoted in William Barlow, The Sum and Substance of the Hampton Court Conference, p. 79.]  His experience of Presbyterians in Scotland was indeed an exceedingly bitter memory.  “While I am in England,” he said, “I will have bishops, for I had not been so quietly settled in my seat but for them,” adding that he had “sufficiently tasted of the mischiefs thereof of a presbytery in Scotland . . . as some here in England already have begun to deal with me.  For at the first they prayed for me as supreme governor over all causes and persons, but after they began to abate their terms of my superiority.” [*Harleian MSS. 828, f. 32.]

Such an attitude on the part of the King made further progress impossible, and the Conference was dismissed without any considerable results being attained other than the provision for the publication of the Authorized Translation of Holy Scripture, and the addition to the Catechism of the section on the Sacraments, probably the work of Overall, the then Dean of St. Paul’s.  The Bishops for their part had decided beforehand to concede nothing, and treated the King with an almost repulsive attitude of adulation.  The petulant tone of the Conference can well be judged from a statement made by Sir John Harington, who was himself present.  “I was by and heard much discourse; the King talked much Latin and disputed with Doctor Reynolds at Hampton, but he rather used upbraidings than argument, and told the petitioners that they wanted to strip Christ again, and bid them away with their snivelling ... The Bishops seemed much pleased, and said his majesty spoke by the power of inspiration.  I wist not what they mean, but the Spirit was rather foul mouthed.” [*Nugae Antiquae (ed. 1779), Vol. II, pp. 227 f.]

After their rebuff at Hampton Court, the Puritans grew more open in their demands.  Matters of ritual became of secondary importance, and the struggle entered upon a more dogmatic phase.  Bancroft, an avowed opponent of Puritanism, succeeded Whitgift as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1604; but when he in turn died in 1611, George Abbot, already well known as a staunch adversary to Laud’s reforming zeal at Oxford, was chosen to fill the vacant see.  The appointment of this mild and somewhat insignificant man must be ascribed to James’ strong Calvinist views; for however little patience the King might have with the ceremonial grievances of the Puritans, he deeply disliked the “Arminianism” now prevalent among the High Church party.  In fact, he himself sent Joseph Hall and three other English representatives to the Synod of Dort, summoned in 1618 for the express purpose of condemning the Arminian doctrines, with their insistence upon man’s free will.  The Canons to which the Synod gave its assent were favourable to an extreme form of Calvinist teaching about the total depravity of human nature and God’s inscrutable election to salvation of the chosen alone.  It is an unhappy thought that eminent Anglican theologians should have expressed their agreement with the proposition: “Election is the unchangeable purpose of God whereby, before the foundation of the world, He hath out of mere grace, according to the sovereign good pleasure of His Own Will, chosen from the whole human race, which had fallen through their own fault from their primitive state of rectitude into sin and destruction, a certain number of persons to redemption in Christ, Whom He from eternity appointed the Mediator and Head of the Elect, and the foundation of salvation” (First Head of Doctrine, Art. vii).

An incident which occurred shortly before the death of James I led the controversy with Puritanism to enter a new stage.  Political considerations are now seen more and more to be superseding purely religious questions; and even the King began to transfer his support to the High Church party.  Some “Romish Rangers” had visited the flock of Richard Montague at Petworth in Sussex, and caused a disturbance.  In defence Montague, who was at that time also Dean of Hereford and Canon of Windsor (even the greatest of Anglicans were not afraid to accept pluralities), drew up three propositions against Rome, which were answered in turn by one, Matthew Kellison, in a book called A Gag for the New Gospel.  To this attack Montague replied in 1624 with No, a New Gag for an Old Goose, in which he declared that the Roman Church, though not itself the Catholic Church, nor even a sound member of it, was yet a real part of that Church.  The foreign Reformed Churches, on the other hand, were not members of the true Church at all: for non est sacerdotium nisi in ecclesia; non est ecclesia sine sacerdotio. [*Orgines Ecclesiasticae, p. 464.]  This indirect attack on the Protestant Churches aroused the fury of the English Puritans, especially in view of Montague=s style, which sparkled with witty thrusts and epigrams.  As Fuller, the Church Historian, observed of him, “his great parts were attended with tartness of writing; very sharp the nib of his pen, and much gall in his ink against such as opposed him.” [*Fuller, Church History, Book XI, chap. vii.]  Further fuel was added to the flames by Montague publishing in the same year a book in defence of the Invocation of Saints, for teaching which doctrine he had been attacked three years before by the infamous Antonio de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalatro. [*This unscrupulous trimmer had abandoned his see (and also incidentally his faith) and fled to England, where he was made Dean of Windsor.  Later he returned to Italy, was arrested by the Inquisition, and died in prison at Rome in 1624.]  On a petition from two Ipswich ministers, John Yates and Samuel Ward, the whole matter was laid before Parliament.  Montague appealed to James I, who voiced his regard for Montague by writing to Abbot, “If that is to be a Papist, so am I a Papist.”  In the next year (1625) Montague made a new defence of himself, addressed to the King, Appello Caesarem, in which he repudiated the charges of both Popery and Arminianism.  “I am none of that fraternity,” he asserted, “no Calvinist, no Lutheran, but a Christian.” [*Appello Caesarem (ed. 1625), p. 45.]  This hint that Calvinists were not Christians moved the Commons to arrest him, but he was saved by Charles I, who had just succeeded to the Crown.  Charles, having thus at the very beginning of his reign irritated the Parliament, committed the further indiscretion of making him his chaplain, and in 1628 appointed him Bishop of Chichester.

The translation of William Laud to Canterbury in 1633 brought the crisis to a head.  He was known to be a very ardent advocate of High Church Anglicanism, and in his career at Oxford as President of St. John’s, and later as Chancellor, he had shown himself determined to purge the University of Calvinism as Andrewes and Whitgift had succeeded in doing at Cambridge.  The suppression of the Genevan theology, coupled with the attempt to restore the outward dignity of public worship, became the dominant aim of his archiepiscopate.  He attempted to enforce the observance of the Prayer Book by means of the Court of High Commission.  “This I have observed,” he said, “that no one thing hath made conscientious men more wavering in their own minds or more apt and easy to be drawn aside from the sincerity of religion professed in the Church of England, than the want of uniform and decent order in too many churches of the kingdom and a great weakness it is not to see the strength which ceremonies, ... things weak enough in themselves, God knows, ... add even to religion itself.” [*Wm. Laud, Epistle Dedicatory to the King, in Conference with Fisher the Jesuit, edit. Simpkinson, p. xxix.]  The Visitation Articles for the Diocese of Winchester [*See Document No. 334.] show a desire to impose order and morality upon Church and State alike, and to recover for the English Church some of the rights of which she had been deprived by the avariciousness of the Tudors.  “Laud intended,” said Clarendon, “that the discipline of the Church should he felt as well as spoken of.” [*History of the Great Rebellion, ed. 1702, Bk. I, Vol. I, p. 73.]

It was the Court of High Commission, a sign of the close ties which bound Charles and Laud together, that incurred for Laud the undying hatred of the Puritans.  It was regarded as an English counterpart of the Inquisition, encouraging Popery in belief and frivolity in daily life.  If Charles had no use for Calvinism, Laud had none for democracy.  Fluctus populi fluctus maris he said in 1625 in a sermon before Charles= Second Parliament: hence the people need a King to keep them in control. [*Works, L. A. C. T., Vol. I, p. 85.]  It was inevitable that the proceedings of the High Commission should have led to persecution.  Puritan parsons were deprived for refusing to wear the surplice, to kneel at Communion, to restore the altar to its proper place at the East End, or to observe the Rubrics of the Prayer Book in their entirety.  Even civil cases came under its jurisdiction.  Thus in 1632 Prynne, who in his Histriomastix had attacked Queen Henrietta Maria in the coarsest and most unseemly language for taking part in a rehearsal of a Shepherd’s Pastoral, was ordered by the Court to be fined and branded.

In 1642, the smouldering flames were kindled into open warfare, and King and Parliament took the field against each other.  In the following year the Solemn League and Covenant was made between Parliament and the Scots, involving the adoption of a Presbyterian form of ministry in England.  The King, when the fortunes of war turned against him, and when his money chests began to run dry, yielded first Strafford and then Laud to his enemies.  Laud was impeached for High Treason before the House of Commons, and executed on Tower Hill, on January 10, 1645.  In the same year the use of the Book of Common Prayer was made a penal offence, and the Presbyterian Directory for fifteen years was forced upon the country.  Finally the King threw himself upon the mercy of the Scots, and was surrendered to Cromwell and his Ironsides.  A mock remnant of the Long Parliament after a mere pretence at a trial condemned him as “a tyrant, a murderer, and a public enemy to the Commonwealth of England.”  On January 30, 1649, Charles was executed outside his palace of Whitehall.

Under the Commonwealth, the Anglican Faith was suppressed by force of law.  The Bishops had been driven abroad, or had sought refuge in remote country parishes.  The faithful clergy were deprived, churches were despoiled and desecrated, the use of the Prayer Book became a crime.  In 1657 a congregation which had assembled in London for the observance of Christmas was arrested and imprisoned by Cromwell’s soldiers.  Hence the parishes lapsed into a state of complete anarchy, and were subject to an even more rigorous inquisition than any they had suffered under Laud=s Court of High Commission.  So great was the disorder that even the Puritan Baxter could write: “The disorderly tumultuous cries and petitions of such ignorant zealots for extremes under the name of Reformation had so great a part in our sin and misery from 1641-1660, as I must give warning to Posterity to avoid the like and love moderation.” [*Reliquiae Baxterianae, No. VIII, p. 125.]

With the Restoration of the Monarchy the exiled supporters of Anglicanism flocked back into popularity, and steps were immediately taken to place the English Church on a firm foundation.  Seldom has England seen a gathering of such learned theologians as came together for the conference which met at the Savoy on April 15, 1661, to revise the Prayer Book.  Gilbert Sheldon, the Bishop of London, presided; John Cosin, who had been appointed Bishop of Durham in 1660, introduced into the new Book many liturgical changes in a Catholic direction, and advocated yet more; Robert Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln, wrote the new Preface; William Sancroft, who was later to become Archbishop of Canterbury, superintended the printing.  Three other important members of the Revisers’ Committee were Matthew Wren, the Bishop of Ely, Peter Gunning, who succeeded him at Ely in 1675, and Anthony Sparrow, later Bishop of Norwich.  The Puritans, led by Richard Baxter, were represented at the Conference, but they exercised practically no influence over its decisions.  Their leader, who had declined the See of Hereford, proceeded to draw up a rival book, full of “weak and pettish criticisms,” as Coleridge rather aptly described them: he quite failed to see any difference between public and private prayers, and objected to many such Anglican fundamentals as the historic Episcopate, Baptismal Regeneration, and the Real Presence.  Although there were some six hundred changes altogether in the Prayer Book of 1662, few were of great importance.  Among the more significant was the re-insertion of the Black Rubric of 1552, with, however, the words “real and essential” altered to “corporal,” and a large number of rubrical directions, including explicit orders for the Fraction in the Eucharistic Canon.

The Prayer Book of 1662 may well be regarded as the triumph of the cause for which Laud and Charles had died.  By it, the Anglican position was definitely secured against Puritanism.  The kneeling at Communion, the use of vestments, the Cross at Baptism, the Ring at Marriage, Absolution for the Sick, – all these things to which the Puritans had objected were not only retained in the new Book, but also enforced by Parliament, which required ministers to adopt the new Services, to submit to Episcopal Ordination, and to acknowledge the irregularity of their former conduct.  The Declaration at the end of the Baptismal Service that “children which are baptized, dying before they commit actual sin, are undoubtedly saved” closed the door to the Calvinist ideas of reprobation, “which doctrine,” as Laud had so strongly insisted to Lord Saye and Sele in the House of Lords, “my very soul abominates; for it makes God, the God of all mercies, to be the most fierce and unreasonable tyrant in the world.” [*Laud, Works. L. A. C. T., Vol. VI, Part i, p. 133.]

It must also not be forgotten that the memory of Charles’ martyrdom did much to secure the Restoration of the Monarchy and the re-establishment of the Anglican position.  Parliament might revile him as a public enemy, but the crowd who mourned in Whitehall that winter morning knew otherwise.  It was because he would not surrender the Anglican Faith as settled by Elizabeth and by Hooker that he died, in his own words, “a Christian according to the profession of the Church of England.”  Bona agere, et mala pati, regium est.

III

The opposition which the English Church had to encounter at the hands of Rome in the Seventeenth Century was as persistent though not as dangerous as that which confronted her from Puritanism.

James I was at first inclined to take up an attitude of toleration, but the “Bye Plot” of Watson and the “Main Plot” of Lord Cobham, followed by the far more serious Gunpowder Plot, made such a policy quite impossible.  As early as February 22, 1604, a proclamation was issued ordering “all Jesuits, seminaries and other priests to depart the realm by the day appointed.”  [*For the full text, see E. Cardwell, Documentary Annals, Vol. II, pp. 50 ff.]  A little later all Roman Catholics were forced to take an Oath of Allegiance to the Throne.  This led to theological controversy in two directions.  It was alleged by the Papists that the priest Garnet, who had been executed for his conspiracy with Catesby, had been required to reveal information gleaned from the Confessional, and the issue was debated whether confessors were justified in concealing political crimes.  A more far-reaching controversy centred upon the actual Oath, in which the protagonist on the Roman side was Cardinal Bellarmine, the most distinguished and learned exponent of the Tridentine theology.  In 1607 James himself proceeded to defend the Oath with a book entitled Triplici Nodo Triplex Cuneus, in which he attacked the two Breves of Pope Clement VIII and Bellarmine’s Letter to Blackwell, maintaining that Roman Catholics could lawfully take the Oath without any disloyalty to the Pope.  Bellarmine replied under the name of his chaplain, Matthaeus Tortus. James, finding that the dispute had now entered an arena of European importance, and thinking that the subject was beyond his own rather pedantic capabilities, called upon Andrewes to answer him, on the pretence that a monarch could not lower himself to controvert a mere chaplain.  Andrewes stated his case in his Tortura Torti, in which he diverted the argument from the Oath to the wider ground of the Papal primacy.  He contended that the primacy of the Pope was not held by the Primitive Church, and hence that the Oath, even if the taking of it were proved incompatible with the papal primacy, was not incompatible with the Catholic Faith.  He also rebutted the Cardinal’s statement that “the authority of the head of the Church had been transferred in England from the successor of St. Peter to the successor of Henry VIII,” by defining the exact relationship of Church and State in this country.  Bellarmine having made a further retort with an Apologia in his own name, Andrewes showed his scholarship at its best in his Responsio ad Apologiam Cardinalis Bellarmini.  Here the argument takes a much more positive tone, and the Catholicity of the English Church is shown to be true to the Vincentine Canon and the claims of the Primitive undivided Church.  Both Andrewes’ books were written in Latin, in a scintillating style, broken by many delightful touches of satire.  In the year 1610 a fresh contribution to the controversy came from the pen of John Donne, who, at the King’s request, published his Pseudo-Martyr, in which he denied the Papal claims and the recusants’ title to martyrdom.  His work was the more valued, since he came from a family of staunch Papists, being a direct descendant on his mother’s side of Elizabeth, the sister of Sir Thomas More.  Study, however, at both Universities had convinced him that Anglicanism was the natural faith of Englishmen, and the remainder of his life, as Dean of St. Paul’s, he devoted to its cause.  The King’s own interest in the controversy never flagged.  He had his own exegesis of the Petrine texts, and had declared that he did not deny all supremacy to the Pope, since the Pope, like himself, was a Western Monarch. [*See Document No. 1, p. 7.]  Against this higher level of controversy must be set the more unpleasant picture of cruel persecution, burning, and torturing, which marked the end of James’ reign – Pound and Latham being but two out of many victims.

Shortly before the accession of Charles I, the theological controversy broke out again.  Lady Villiers, the mother of the Duke of Buckingham, had been converted to Romanism by a famous Jesuit, Percy, who wrote under the name of Fisher.  The Duke himself was wavering, and, at his wish, a conference was held between Fisher and Francis White, then Rector of St. Peter’s, Cornhill, and later Bishop of Ely.  At the third meeting held on May 24, 1622, William Laud, then Bishop of St. David’s, was ordered by the King to defend the English position.  A lively series of attacks and retorts continued to come from the press, until in 1639 Laud published his Conference with Fisher the Jesuit, in which he dissected, criticized and demolished each sentence of Fisher’s book.  In the course of this controversy Laud argued that the Church of England had not erred in fundamentals, and he went on to discuss the true nature of the Catholic Church.  From such an ideal the Romanists had sadly departed with their claim to infallible faith, reposing in the Pope; they were “fishermen [a play, of course, on the Jesuit’s name] which pretend St. Peter, but fish not with his net.” [*“Epistle Dedicatory to the King,” in Conference with Fisher the Jesuit, edit. Simpkinson, p. xxiv.]  The English Church, on the other hand, deserves the complete confidence of the Christian world: for “to believe the Scripture and the Creeds, to believe these in the sense of the ancient primitive church, to receive the four great General Councils, to believe all points of doctrine generally received as fundamental in the Church of Christ, is a faith in which to live and die, cannot but give salvation.” [*W. Laud, Conference with Fisher the Jesuit, edit. Simpkinson, p. 379.]

The controversy with Roman Catholicism was also waged over a period of years on foreign shores.  John Bramhall, Bishop of Derry since 1634, wrote a polemical treatise against the Jesuit, Sylvester Norris, in which he defended the Anglican Articles of Faith, and the validity of her orders against such absurdities as the Nag’s Head Fable, [*See Document No. 164.] which had first appeared in print as far back as 1604.  While an exile in France during the Commonwealth, he had an opportunity to prove to De la Muletière, a French lay convert to Roman Catholicism, that the Church of England was not a Calvinist body, although she differed in much from the Church of Rome, as, for instance, in repudiating the doctrine of Transubstantiation, and reverting to the more primitive and scriptural doctrine of the Real Presence.

The Roman question again caused great alarm in the country when the news of Charles II’s secret “Treaty of Dover” (1670) began to leak out.  The terms of this treaty were that Charles should change his faith, issue an act of Indulgence, and then join Louis XIV in a war with Holland.  It was known that several members of the Cabal were in favour of such a policy.  When, however, on March 15, 1672, the King actually issued the Declaration of Indulgence, Parliament promptly declared it illegal, and forced its withdrawal.  The next year they followed up their victory with the iniquitous Test Act, demanding that in future no one should be admitted to any office or public position unless he abjured the doctrine of Transubstantiation, and declared that in the Sacrament after Consecration there is the substance of bread and wine. [*The text of the Act is printed in H. Gee and W. J. Hardy, Documents Illustrative of English Church History, No. CXX.]  It also required that the holder of any public office should produce a certificate stating that he had received the Sacrament of the Lord=s Supper according to the usage of the Church of England.  This Act made toleration impossible for Papists and Nonconformists alike, and was at least partly responsible for the low value attached to the Eucharist throughout the Eighteenth Century.  Of the persecution which followed the abominable lie of Titus Oates Concerning a Popish plot, and of the miserable reign of James II, nothing need be said here.  Whereas the Nonconformists began to receive toleration almost immediately after the Revolution of 1689, the Roman Catholics had to wait until 1829 for their emancipation.

A study of the Controversy in all its stages makes it clear that Anglican theologians throughout the Century were hostile to all compromise with Rome.  Thus Laud not only saved the Duke of Buckingham from secession, but converted no less than twenty-two Roman Catholics, including the great scholar, William Chillingworth, to the Anglican Faith.  Joseph Mede was followed by most other writers in interpreting the prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse as referring to the Papacy.   When Montague and Cosin ventured to assert that the great Turk was foretold by the title of Anti-Christ as much as the Pope, they were attacked for their supposed partiality to Rome.  Joseph Hall and Jeremy Taylor both wrote Dissuasives from Popery in no measured terms.  The extent of the hostility to Rome was largely dependent upon the theology of the individual divine.  Thus Hooker sharply criticizes those “which measure religion by dislike of the Church of Rome” and “think every man so much the more sound, by how much he can make the corruptions thereof to seem more large.” [*Ecclesiastical Polity, Book IV, chap. viii, ‘ 2.  Ed. J. Keble, Vol. I, p. 443.]  On the other hand, Thomas Jackson, Dean of Peterborough, the most vehement, perhaps, of all the anti-Roman divines, wrote in his huge Commentary on the Apostles= Creed: “Whosoever steadfastly believes the absolute authority of the Romish Church, as now it is taught, doth truly and properly believe no article of Christian Faith, no God, no Trinity, no Christ, no Redemption, no Resurrection, no Heavenly joys, no Hell.” [*Works, edit. Oxford, 1844, Vol. II, p. 501.]

IV

The Seventeenth Century was an age of vast erudition.  The number of marginal references to the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers is amazing to one reading the folio editions for the first time.  It is true that as yet the historical and critical faculties of scholars were not highly developed, even though Henry More doubted the Pauline authorship of Hebrews, and Jeremy Taylor was more or less certain that St. Athanasius had nothing to do with the creed called by his name.  But passages from the Bible and the Fathers are quoted by controversialists at every turn, often without much regard to their contexts or real meaning.  Texts were useful foils to gain advantage over one=s adversary.  Scholarship was ponderous rather than brilliant, and with a few notable exceptions used mainly in order to lay low theological opponents.

Of the many examples of erudition, we can here select only a few typical cases.  Our first instance shall be King James I.  He is chiefly remembered by posterity in the words of Henry IV’s aphorism, “the wisest fool in Christendom.”  It has been customary to dwell upon his folly, his want of tact, his bad statecraft, and to forget his wisdom.  Yet he is almost certainly the most learned monarch that has ever sat on the English Throne, and his learning was predominantly theological.  Indeed, Lord Cecil remarked at the end of the second day of the Hampton Court Conference that he had now seen the truth of the statement Rex est mixta persona cum sacerdote. [*William Barlow, The Sum and Substance of the Conference, Second Day, p. 84.]  In the year 1597 James had written a book on Demonology: in 1603 he put forward his theory of kingship in Basilikon Doron, and further expounded it in The True Law of Free Monarchies, also 1603.  The versatility of his interests was proved when in the following year he published A Counterblast to Tobacco.  William Barlow well described him in the words of Eunapius as βιβλιοθήκη τις έμψυχος και περιπατουν μουσειον. [*Ibid.]

From the many learned Bishops of the Seventeenth Century, three may be singled out for mention here.  Of James Ussher (1581-1656), appointed Primate of Ireland 1625, Selden well remarked that he “was learned to a miracle.”  In his theology he was much influenced by Calvin, and in 1615 drew up for the Church of Ireland a set of 104 Articles of Religion of a distinctively Calvinistic nature, while later he proposed a scheme for a modified episcopacy.  Yet he was a great friend of Laud’s, and reproached Charles for yielding to Strafford’s execution.  His defence of prayers for the Dead was reprinted in 1836 as one of the Tracts of the Times.  In 1644 he had shown his historical scholarship at its best in his Polycarpi et Ignatii Epistolae, in which work he attempted to prove the genuineness of six of the Ignatian Epistles.  His work in this direction was ably carried on by John Pearson, Bishop of Chester, our second instance.  In opposition to Presbyterian views on the ministry, he published his Vindiciae Epistolarum Sancti Ignatli, in which he showed all seven Epistles to be genuine.  His work earned the approbation of Bishop Lightfoot for its critical ability and its moderation of tone.  Pearson=s greatest work, however, was his Exposition of the Creed (1659).  It is packed with references to Scripture and the Fathers, and is written with a fine sense of proportion and relevant reasoning.  The third of this important triad of scholars was George Bull (1634-1710), whose two greatest works were the Harmonia Apostolica and the Defensio Fidei Nicaenae.  In the former he dealt with Justification, and his arguments formed the basis of Newman’s Lectures on the subject.  But this book was thought by his enemies to savour of Socinianism; hence in his Defence of the Nicene Faith, Bull proceeded to vindicate the orthodoxy of the Ante-Nicene Fathers on the doctrine of the Trinity with a vast display of learning and much common sense, which earned him the congratulations of Bossuet and the French Church.

One of the most individualistic of Seventeenth-Century scholars was Herbert Thorndike (1598-1672), who attempted to give a fuller and more comprehensive treatment of theology than most of his contemporaries.  He alone approximates in outlook to the Schoolmen of earlier centuries in desiring to produce a Summa Theologiae.  Thorndike had been deprived by the Puritans of his living at Barley in Hertfordshire and of his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1643, and was prevented from being elected Master of Sidney Sussex by the Roundheads forcibly removing some of the Fellows.  In the dark days which marked the end of the Commonwealth he wrote his Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England, and published it in 1659.  It consists of three large volumes, written in mazes of complex sentences, which make the work singularly difficult to read.  From a study of his arguments, it is clear that Thorndike is one of the most Catholically minded of the Seventeenth-Century divines, defending the Epiclesis in the Eucharist, the practice of Reservation, and Prayers for the Dead.  His characteristic doctrines, however, found little acceptance in the pages of the 1662 Prayer Book.

Two groups of scholars, each united among themselves by close personal ties, also call for notice.  The first was the brilliant company which frequented the house of the witty and pious Lucius Cary (Viscount Falkland) at Great Tew in Oxfordshire. [*Vid. Clarendon, Life, edit. 1759, pp. 21–3, and Document No. 343.]  Cary’s mother was a staunch recusant, and to secure himself against her arguments he read the whole of the Greek and Latin Fathers, and made himself thoroughly conversant with the history of the great Councils.  Among those who frequently made Great Tew their rendezvous may be mentioned Hammond, Sheldon, Morley, Earle, Chillingworth  and Hales.  Earle, in turn Bishop of Worcester and Salisbury, “would frequently profess that he had got more useful learning at Tew than he had at Oxford.” [*Clarendon, Life, edit. 1759, pp. 26–7.]   Izaak Walton said of him, “since Mr. Hooker died, none have lived whom God hath blessed with more innocent wisdom, more sanctified learning, or a more pious, peaceable, primitive temper.”  [*Life of Hooker, ed. 1927,  p. 214.]   His most famous work was the Microcosmography, a series of “witty and sharp” discourses on typical characters of the day.  William Chillingworth was converted from Romanism in 1632 by Laud, whose spirit penetrates almost every page of his great work, The Religion of Protestants, a Safe Way to Salvation.  The method of the book is polemical, and Chillingworth drives home his arguments for liberty against the exclusiveness of Rome with a force which reminds one of a woodsman felling a tree.  Yet, with all its roughness, the book reveals deep thinking on the nature of the Church, and we meet occasional short sentences which impress themselves indelibly on the mind.  Not the least interesting scholar in this group was “the ever memorable Mr. John Hales,” Professor of Greek at Oxford, and Provost of Eton.  In his early life he had been a Calvinist, but as an Oxford don he became a firm friend of Laud, and after the Synod of Dort declared, “There I bid John Calvin good night.”  He was possessed of a kindly and tolerant disposition, and Clarendon tells us he “would often say that he would renounce the religion of the Church of England tomorrow if it obliged him to believe that any other Christians should be damned.” [*Clarendon, Life, p. 28. For a full account of Hales’ impression of the Conference, see his Golden Remains.]   He had a great desire for Reunion, and at one time suggested a scheme, comparable to that of Thomas Arnold two centuries later, for uniting all Englishmen by a Liturgy, “as might bring them into one Communion, all doctrinal points upon which men differed in their opinions, being to have no place in any Liturgy.” [*Clarendon, ibid., p. 28.]  Hales was by temperament a recluse, with the nature of a philosopher, who loved to be alone with his books, and he was fittingly chosen to pronounce the funeral oration over Sir Thomas Bodley.  Yet he fully understood the difficulties of life, warning his Eton boys of the responsibilities of riches and the wickedness of duelling.  He was the loved and admired friend of the great ones of his day; “he tells men how to know, and love and worship God as one whose simple object it was to find it out.” [*W. H. Hutton, Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. VII, p. 152.]

Of the famous Cambridge Platonists, perhaps the four most illustrious were Whichcote, More, Cudworth and Smith.  They were the first English divines to attempt a philosophy of religion and to set forth in clear terms the divine inspiration of human reason.  On these grounds, they hoped to overthrow the materialism of such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, who published his Leviathan in 1651.  They also desired to destroy all divisions amongst Protestants; for “all the differences in Christendom,” said Whichcote, “are about institutions not about morals.”  With this group we may also number Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, who found a new approach to religion through the wonders of the universe and the power of natural science.  The writings both of Boyle and Newton have much literary distinction, particularly in their descriptions of the significance of natural phenomena.  Whilst they had a real love of the Anglican Church, they formed, however, the stepping stone to the Latitudinarian and Deistic thought of the Eighteenth Century. [*Cp. F. L. Cross, The Oxford Movement and the Seventeenth Century, pp. 22 f.]

V

The Seventeenth Century has a strong claim to be called the golden age of English Prose, and it is significant that the period produced both the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, two of the foundations upon which the modern English language is built.  The translation of the Bible, published in 1611, was a response to the Puritan appeal at Hampton Court, and its main instigator was James himself, who “wished that some special pains should be taken in that behalf for one uniform translation, professing that he could never yet see a Bible well translated in English.” [*So William Barlow, quoted in E. Cardwell, A History of Conferences, p. 188.]   Moreover, he had a personal objection to the King’s Bible: “for where it is said that Asa deposed his mother Maachah, [*II Chronicles, xv, 16.] some have it in the margin that he should rather have put her to death, and accordingly (said his Majesty) some in Scotland upon that ground would have had him in such sort to have proceeded against his grandmother, which he liked not of.” [*Harleian MSS., 828, f. 32.]   James stipulated, therefore, that there should be no marginal notes, since those in the Genevan Version appeared to him “very partial, untrue, seditious and savouring too much of dangerous and traiterous deceits.” [*Barlow, ibid., p. 188.]  It is, as Sir Arthur Quiller Couch has pointed out, [*The Art of Writing, p. 122.] well-nigh a miracle that forty-seven men, otherwise unknown for any particular literary talent, should have produced a work “with a rhythm so personal, so constant, that our Bible has the voice of one author speaking through its many mouths.”  Sometimes the effect is gained through sheer simplicity, by the use of strings of monosyllables, as in much of the discourse in the Upper Room in St. John=s Gospel.  At other times the grand style is achieved by a succession of rolling polysyllables, as in Our Lord’s condemnation of the Pharisees (St. Matt. xxiii), and the splendid Fifteenth Chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians.  A subtle interplay of vowel sounds adds melody and variety to the style, and the translators showed extraordinary felicity in the selection of exactly the right word to express their meaning.

That the Prayer Book is likewise a masterpiece of English prose becomes only too clear when it is compared with many modem compositions, such as some of the “Occasional Prayers” in the 1928 Book.  [*Cf. W. K. Lowther Clarke, “The Prayer Book as Literature” in Liturgy and Worship, pp. 806–12.]  As has already been pointed out, most of the 1662 Prayer Book was inherited from Cranmer and the two Prayer Books of Edward VI; but among the additions are such an admirable Collect as that for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, and the beautiful General Thanksgiving.  The Prayers for Parliament, and for All Sorts and Conditions of Men, were also new, as well as the two Prayers for the Ember Weeks, taken from the Scottish Book of 1637.  It is to be regretted that the Revisers did not take more notice of the Scottish Book, particularly its fine prayer for the Church and its Eucharistic Canon.  The Psalms in the translation of the Great Bible of 1540 were for the first time bound up with the Prayer Book in 1662.  In spite of many inaccuracies of translation, their simple and melodious rhythm has made them a religious classic, and our Psalter remains for all time an ideal example of what a translation of ancient verse should be.  In the flowing cadences of our Prayer Book we hear again and again the echoes of Cicero’s eloquent periods, passing down through the Latin Fathers.  The Prayer Book preserves in language and doctrine the peculiar and splendid tradition of the national faith which it enfolds.  As such, it has been finely suited to become a ceaseless source of inspiration and the prototype of the Prayer Books of the daughter Churches of the Anglican Communion.

The glories of the Bible and Prayer Book are reflected in much of the other literature of the period.  W. H. Hutton has well written, “Nothing is more remarkable in an age of fading literary excellence than the way in which the thoughts and methods of the great poets and prose writers of the preceding generation were taken up and handled by the clergy of the National Church.” [*Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. VII, p. 142.]  Of the Seventeenth Century theological prose writers, far the greatest is Jeremy Taylor (1613-67).  Coleridge [*Table Talk, edit. Oxford, 1917, p. 110, Letters (1895), p. 640.  Taylor’s prose may be conveniently studied in L. P. Smith’s collection, The Golden Grove (Oxford, 1930).] placed him among the geniuses of the age, alongside Shakespeare, Milton and Bacon.  He is one of the most individual of writers, and his style is full of an almost oriental splendour of colour and imagery.  Each sentence is composed with an ear to its music, and even the most controversial and the most technical of his writings are written with a beautiful and harmonious freedom which becomes very apparent when compared with the laboured and often harsh prose style of his great contemporary, John Milton.  Normally his style followed the Ciceronian model, but at times his imagination soared on high, and then he seems to dip his pen into an enchanted ink, so that the words dance to his music, and echo like the fading notes of a symphony in the mind.  A fine example of his combination of sound and rhythm is to be found in his description of the fallen angels, “They grew vertiginous, and fell from the battlements of heaven.” [*Works, ed. Heber, Vol. VI, p. 80.]   What could excel his description of the Virgin=s grief at the Crucifixion for brilliance of simile and depth of poetic imagination: “deep as the water of the abyss, but smooth as the face of a pool”? [*The Great Exemplar, Part III (ed. Heber), Vol. III, p. 382.]  For longer passages illustrating his power to pile up clauses and words and similes and epithets into one great diapason of splendour, one might study the description of sunrise [*Holy Dying, Jeremy Taylor’s Works, ed. Heber, Vol. IV, p. 350.] or of the soul in sickness. [*Ibid., p. 409.]  Jeremy Taylor, however, deserves a place among the immortals for his learning and his piety, apart from any literary qualities.  He was a typical example of the great Anglican priest of the period, and his style is never more than the instrument by which he registers the passionate sincerity of his convictions.

VI

Much of the best Seventeenth-Century prose remains in the form of sermons; [*For a full account, see W. F. Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson, S.P.C.K., 1932.] for preaching was then a great and solemn art, in which every divine was expected to excel.  Thus Hooker says of preaching: We esteem it “as the blessed ordinance of God, sermons as keys to the kingdom of heaven, as wings to the soul, as spurs to the good affections of man, unto the sound and healthy as food, as physick unto diseased minds.” [*Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, Bk. V, xxii, I.]  Some of the sermons are important to us for their intrinsic merits, in which class the work of Donne and Jeremy Taylor is preeminent.  Izaak Walton, in referring to Donne’s first sermon before the Court, described him as “a preacher in earnest; weeping sometimes for his auditory, sometimes with them; always preaching to himself like an angel from a cloud, but in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to Heaven in holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred Art and Courtship to amend their lives.” [*Walton, Life of Donne, ed. 1927, p. 49.] Others are of interest for the occasion on which they were preached, or for their historical effect.  Thus Bishop Beveridge’s Salvation in the Church only under the Sacred Ministry, preached in Latin before the Convocation of Canterbury, resulted in the complete failure of William III’s Plan of Comprehension, and his scheme for a new revision of the Prayer Book in 1689.

From the many great preachers, we may here take four examples.  Of the older style Lancelot Andrewes was called by his contemporaries he Stella Praedicantium.  To us his sermons seem fastidious in the extreme.  They usually begin with a highly detailed and almost pedantic analysis of the text, which is followed by a very intellectual and precise exegesis of the subject in hand.  They are full of quotations from the Fathers and from modern apologists, usually in the original tongue.  That they were prepared with great care is clear from Buckeridge’s assertion that few of them but were thrice between the anvil and hammer before they were preached, and “he ever misliked often and loose preaching without study of antiquity.”  [*Andrewes’ Works, L. A. C. T., Vol. V, p. 295.]  Moreover, the preacher=s delivery must have possessed a force which we cannot recapture, since it fascinated Elizabeth and James, both of them astute critics.  With all his learning, there remains a charming vein of wit and humour, and a skilful use of word-play, as, for instance, the pun on Immanu-el, Immanu-hell, and Immanu-all, in one of his Christmas sermons preached before the King at Whitehall in 1614. [*Ibid., Vol. I, p. 145.  On Andrewes’ preaching, cp. T. S. Eliot’s notable essay in For Lancelot Andrewes.]

When we pass to the sermons of Henry Hammond, we find ourselves in a quieter and less learned atmosphere.  He had held various country livings until 1643, when he became Archdeacon of Chichester, and shortly afterwards Canon of Christ Church and Public Orator in the University of Oxford.  Charles I said he was the most natural orator he had ever heard.  In his sermons we discover no rhetorical purple passages, but a simple, restrained style which appeals through its very clarity.  His life was spent apart from controversy, and with a broad and noble spirit, he pleads for religious toleration and denounces persecution as alien to the spirit of Christianity.

As representatives of the later preachers of the Century, we may instance Robert Sanderson and Isaac Barrow.  In these writers we find neither the pedantry of Andrewes nor the elaborate conceits which had distinguished Donne and Jeremy Taylor.  Their model was the severe simplicity characteristic of John Bunyan and Izaak Walton.  Wealth of metaphor and illustration gives way to a directness of style, which avoids the strained sense, but also lacks some of the individuality of earlier writers.  The Restoration prose is, however, capable of a splendid dignity for the treatment of serious themes.  Robert Sanderson had at one time been a chaplain to Charles I, who said of him, “I carry my ears to hear other preachers, but I carry my conscience to hear Mr. Sanderson.”  [*Walton, Life of Sanderson, ed. 1927, p. 368.]  His sermons, some of them reaching nearly 25,000 words in length, are sober in tone, and full of kindly argument and modest learning; here, as Walton notes, we have “no improper rhetoric,” but “his learning was methodical and exact, his wisdom useful, his integrity visible.” [*Ibid., p. 397.]  The dignity of his style is nowhere better exemplified than in the language of the General Thanksgiving and the Preface to the Book of Common Prayer.

Isaac Barrow, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who died at the early age of forty-seven in 1677, was another illustrious preacher.  Aubrey in his Brief Lives tells us he was “pale as the candle he studied by.”  He had travelled extensively; and as he lay dying he kept murmuring, “I have seen the glories of the world.”  His sermons reflect an original mind and a broad thinker.  He argues with the clarity of a mathematician and writes with the easy and unextravagant flow of a classical scholar.  He begins as a rule by stating an hypothesis of some opponent, real or imagined, and allows him to make a full defence of his position, and then demolishes it with a series of rapid and irresistible blows.  Thus Barrow presents us with a thoroughly solid and massive structure, reminding us somewhat of an elaborate geometrical problem which has been satisfactorily proved.  He took extraordinary care over his style, with the result that his long and often complex sentences yet run smoothly.  Coleridge declares that “he closes the first great period of the English language,” and William Pitt the Elder was accustomed to learn his sermons by heart, and declaim them as a useful preparation for public speaking.  This was no small feat since Barrow, like Sanderson, preached at a length which even for its age was inordinate.  His sermon at the Spital on Bountifulness to the Poor took three hours and a half.  Indeed, Charles II remarked that he was a very unfair speaker, since he never left any one else anything to say.  It is recorded that on one occasion his eloquent flow in Westminster Abbey was only stopped by a noisy outburst on the organ, the organist being constrained to interrupt by the pleadings of the Vergers, who were missing their fees for escorting visitors round the church.

VII

As has already been hinted, the Seventeenth Century saw a considerable output of religious poetry, in which art the Anglicans produced distinguished examples, even if none of them rivaled the great Puritan, Milton.  John Donne, the first to break the supremacy of the Petrarchian tradition in English Literature, wrote much excellent mystical verse.  His wit was essentially serious, and his gloomy brooding reminds the reader of Propertius, both in its love of melancholy and the magnificence of the language in which it is expressed.  In his poems, as in his sermons, we find swift reasoning, a quaint but impressive imagery, a love of rare words and odd expressions, and a wide background of learning to which St. Augustine, Calvin, the Spanish mystics and secular chroniclers have all contributed their share.  Something of a Puritan in his art, he despised mere verbal beauty.  His verse is full of arguing, often in the subtlest forms, as, for instance, about the incorporeal nature of love in Our Angels.  His love of the bizarre is, however, always pleasantly tempered with that admiration for aurea mediocritas which Donne had possibly inherited from one of Horace’s Odes.  Unfortunately, when subsequent verse-makers, particularly Crashaw and Traherne, tried to imitate him, their work was full of a grotesque bathos, relieved only by occasional flashes of genius.  Just as Leonardo and Raphael were the culmination of their schools of Italian art, and stumbling-blocks to their slavish imitators, so was Donne to his poetical heirs.

Of the one or two exceptions to the decay which set in after the death of Donne, the most notable is that of Henry Vaughan, who was born in 1622.  He ascribed his conversion to practising Christianity to “that blessed man, Mr. George Herbert, whose holy life and verse gained many converts, of whom I am the least.”  He had a genius for forcible epithets, as, for instance,

“The fruitful flocks fill every dale

And purling corn doth clothe the vale.” [*Paraphrase of Psalm LXV.]

or again,

“Condemning thoughts – like sad eclipses – scowl

Upon his soul.” [*The World.]

His use of metaphor and simile is daring, but wonderfully effective.  The first poem of Silex Scintillans provides an excellent example.

“And as a pilgrim’s eye

Far from relief,

Measures the melancholy sky

Then drops and rains for grief.” [*Regeneration, Stanza II.]

Another instance may be taken from his poem, The Lamp.

“Stars nod and sleep

And through the dark air spin a fiery thread

Such as doth gild the lazy glow-worm’s bed.”

He modelled his style on Herbert, but his spirit is the melancholy air of Donne.  He loved to brood wistfully over man’s relations with the unseen and eternal, and he could express the profoundest thoughts with an almost magical simplicity of language, as in the opening lines of his poem, The World: –

“I saw eternity the other night

Like a great ring of pure and endless light

All calm, as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,

Driv’n by the spheres,

Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world,

And all her train were hurled.”

The Elizabethans, like the ancients, had regarded Nature as an ornamental appendage to human life; but for Vaughan, as for Herbert, Nature yielded through her beauties both a mirror of God’s mysteries and a pledge of His unfailing goodness.  Vaughan was led to see in her a new atmosphere of mystery, the link between earth and heaven, and it was at this point that he influenced so profoundly Wordsworth, Shelley, and the poets of the Romantic Revival.

Of all the poets of the Seventeenth Century, George Herbert represents most markedly the Anglican spirit.  His greatest composition was The Temple, which he sent on his death-bed to Ferrar.  There are 169 poems in the book, and 116 different metres are employed.  Sometimes, especially in his use of simile, he is apt to descend to bathos, though he never fell to such depths of absurdity as did Crashaw.  The book is marred by a frequent obscurity, and attempts to be clever with puns and trite sayings, of which the following anagram on the name of the Virgin Mary is typical: –

      Mary

^Ana Army ^Gram.

“How well her name an ARMY doth present,

In whom the Lord of Hosts did pitch His tent.”

Then again, some poems are written in a quaint shape, such as an altar, or a pair of wings, or the Echo in Heaven.  Yet, with his faults, Herbert could rise to great heights of imagination, and many of his poems convey an impression of musical simplicity and profound religious thought which perfectly reflect the character of their author.  Of such a type we may instance The Elixir or The Quip.  Possibly, however, his finest couplet comes at the end of The Agony.

“Love is that liquor sweet and most divine

Which my God feels as blood, but I as wine.”

Herbert imbibed, as did Keble later, the full beauty of the English countryside, and all things spoke to him of God.  The poems of both reflect sorrow for sin, as surely as joy in communion with God, all the more intensified by the spiritual struggle which has preceded it.  Both, too, had a deep affection for the English Church, which called forth the whole-hearted devotion of their art and their lives.  This affection is well expressed, in the final verse of Herbert’s poem, The British Church.

But, dearest mother (what those miss),

The mean Thy praise and glory is

And long may be.

Blessed be God, Whose love it was

To double-moat thee with His grace

And none but thee.”

VIII

It must ever be remembered that the Seventeenth Century was an age of Anglican piety, and remains a standing contradiction to those controversialists who have argued that the Church of England has produced no saints since the Reformation.  Charles I set a noble example to his country, and we find the quiet and spiritual manner of his life reflected in all classes of the community.  The diaries of Mary, Countess of Warwick, and Evelyn’s biography of Margaret Blagge show how deep and religious lives could be spent even in the corrupt atmosphere of Charles II’s Court.  We have a vast amount of devotional literature, varying from Lancelot Andrewes’s Preces Privatae to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.  Both Cavalier and Roundhead entered battle with a prayer upon their lips.  Cromwell led his Ironsides to Naseby with a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other, while before the same battle, Sir Jacob Astley, one of the Royalist commanders, could utter this simple and sincere prayer, “Lord, I shall be very busy this day, and I may forget Thee, but do not Thou forget me.”

To read the story of Charles’ captivity and death, as related, for example, in Sir Thomas Herbert’s Memoirs, is to recapture the spirit of the Acta of the primitive Christian martyrs.  We learn that during his imprisonment at Holmby House, and later at Carisbrooke and St. James’ Palace, his favourite books were the Bible, Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, Andrewes’ Sermons, Shakespeare, Spenser, Herbert, and translations of Tasso and Ariosto.  The day before his execution, Bishop Juxon preached a sermon to him, [*On the text Rom. ii, 16.] and then gave him his Communion.  The rest of the day he spent in prayer and meditation, eating and drinking almost nothing.  The Princess Elizabeth, who, with her small brother, the Duke of Gloucester, visited him in the course of the day, wrote down at her father’s dictation his last message: “He wishes me not to grieve and torment myself for him.  For that would be a glorious death that he would die, it being for the laws and liberties of his land, and for maintaining the true Protestant religion.  He bid me read Bishop Andrewes’ Sermons, Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity and Bishop Laud’s Book against Fisher, which would ground me against Popery.” [*Quoted in G. S. Stevenson, Charles I in Captivity, pp. 254 f.]  He also wrote a long letter to the Prince of Wales urging him to meditate frequently on the Bible, “which in all the time of his affliction had been his best instructor and delight.” [*Ibid., p. 279.]  On the morning of the 30th, Charles was much moved on learning that the Proper Lesson for the day was St. Matt., xxvii, the story of Our Saviour’s Passion.  He then made his last Confession to Juxon, and received his viaticum, and, thus comforted, went forth to the scaffold, exclaiming as he went: “This is my second marriage day.  I would be as trim today as may be.  For before night, I hope to be espoused to my blessed Jesus.” [*Ibid., p. 278.]  He gave Juxon his Bible as a keepsake, and taking off his George Order, he Commended it to the Bishop, and charged him to deliver it to Prince Charles, saying: “I have a good and gracious God, – Remember.” [*The Life and Death of King Charles I, 1676, pp. 287 f.]  After a short address to the crowd, he turned to the faithful Juxon and said: “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown where no disturbance can be, but peace and joy for evermore.” [*Ibid., p. 288.]

The popular feeling for Charles is well exemplified by the success of Eikon Basilike, written probably by John Gauden, one of Charles= chaplains, and published less than a month after the King=s death.  It contained some of the King’s prayers, which the author had secured from Juxon, and preserved with remarkable fidelity the picture of the Saint preparing to meet his God in a spirit of penitent humility.  In its pages Charles is portrayed at his best, as the simple and great-hearted Christian who desired peace and prayed for it earnestly, while here the Anglican Church is painted as Laud and Hooker longed to see her, quite free from party strife.  If the book contained many arguments for kingship, it contained still more for Anglicanism.  The following is typical: “I do require and entreat of you as your Father and your King, that you never suffer your heart to receive the least check against or disaffection from the true religion established in the Church of England.” [*Eikon Basilike, ed. 1648 [= 9], p. 171.  Cp. especially chs. xvi, xxiv, and xxviii.]

Of the many saintly Anglicans who have left us a legacy of their piety in their writings, we can select only a few examples.  Here once more Lancelot Andrewes set the tune to which all the later divines sang in harmony.  His Preces Privatae, originally composed in Greek, reveal the wide extent of his love and sympathy towards God and man.  We are told that this book was seldom out of his hands as he lay dying, and Richard Drake adds: “Had you seen the original manuscript, happy in the glorious deformity thereof, watered with his penitential tears, you would have been forced to confess that book belonged to no other than pure and primitive devotion.” [*Preface to first published Edition, 1648.]  In 1627, John Cosin, at the King’s request, published his Collection of Private Devotions, a manual based on the Mediaeval Hours, and intended as an Anglican substitute for the somewhat profane Roman books, then popular in the Court of Henrietta Maria.  The real character of Laud is best revealed in his book of Devotions, where we find prayers for the unity of Christ’s mystical Body and the peace and happiness of the English people.  It is ironical, in view of his death, to remember that Laud almost certainly composed our fine “Prayer for the High Court of Parliament.”  One last book we may mention here is Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne.  This is a more mystical work, and its author seems to have aimed at providing an Imitatio Christi for the Anglicans of his day.  He was a splendid literary artist, who to the simplicity of Bunyan’s prose added the rich imagery of Jeremy Taylor; and he presents us with a wonderful combination of mysticism and common sense.  To Traherne no beauty of the natural world could be left outside the Kingdom of God.  “You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world. . . . Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.” [*Centuries of Meditations – First Century, Meditation No. 29, ed. B. Dobell, 1927, p. 19; cf. also Document No. 358.]

Approximating more to the science of ascetic and moral theology, we may count the writings of Jeremy Taylor, and his two contemporaries Joseph Hall and Robert Sanderson.  Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying are English counterparts to the Introduction to the Devout Life by the great French Saint of the period, Francis de Sales.  Here many of the melancholy notes we have remarked in Donne and Vaughan re-occur in the form of meditations upon mortality and death.  In his Ductor Dubitantium, Taylor advises priests how to cultivate the fruits of the Spirit in the lives of their penitents, and presents us with discussions on Tutiorism, Probabilism and other matters of casuistry. [*See Jeremy Taylor, Works, ed. Heber, Vol. XII, pp. 87 if. and 127 if.; cp. Documents Nos. 310, 309.]  Indeed, these three divines almost alone among Anglicans until the present day have attempted to give any systematic treatment of moral theology, based on sound philosophical and psychological principles, and yet essentially practical in their application.

In one of the loneliest and dullest parts of England, some ten miles from Huntingdon, a narrow lane runs off the Great North Road to the village of Little Gidding. [*See Walton=s Lives, ed. 1927, pp. 309–12, and Document No. 339.]  Yet this obscure place saw the only attempt at Community life in England between the Reformation and the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and the fame of it travelled through the length of the land and leavened its whole life.  Its founder was one Nicholas Ferrar, who, after a busy life as a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and much travelling in the service of his father, a wealthy merchant, was ordained Deacon by Laud, and together with his family and a few friends to the number of thirty in all devoted himself to religion.  They passed the day in religious exercises, saying the offices in the little village church, or in the oratory they had furnished within the Manor House.  Often the nights too were devoted to prayer and meditation; they fasted frequently, and gave alms with great liberality to the poor.  At first John Williams, the kindly Bishop of Lincoln, would not allow the daughters to take a vow of celibacy, but he relented after his visit in 1640, and both Mary and Anna Collett took their vows.  Much time was also devoted to study, and the women-folk of the house wrote harmonies of the Gospels which they bound in the most beautiful style of the day.  A different kind of literature was a series of moral dialogues and tales, all of them with a pleasant touch of romance, which were read round the fireside in the evenings.  It was in this retreat that Charles I spent the night in hiding, before he gave himself up to the Scots on May 5, 1646.  The little Community had already been rudely attacked by the Puritans in 1641 with a pamphlet entitled The Arminian Nunnery. [*See Document No. 340.]  Before the end of 1646 the Parliamentary soldiers broke up the community, – Nicholas having died in 1637, – and sacked the church and house.  The plate was carried away, and the lectern and beautiful chased font of brass, both of them presents from Nicholas Ferrar, were thrown into a nearby duck-pond, whence they were recovered many years later, and restored to their former use.

Two further Anglican saints were great friends of the Little Gidding Community, George Herbert and Izaak Walton.  With Herbert as a poet we have dealt.  As a writer of prose he also excelled, his manner expressing the same open-air atmosphere as his poetry; we have the same characteristic simplicity and beauty of style, while the words used are almost all common ones and his metaphors homely in the extreme.  The best known of his prose writings is A Priest to the Temple (1632) or, as it is more often entitled, The Country Parson. [*For extracts, see Document No. 335.]  It might well be a description of the writer=s own life as a parish priest, and is remarkable for its high ideals, its evident sincerity, and its abundant common sense.  One quotation must here suffice us: “The Country Parson is not only a father to his flock, but also professeth himself thoroughly of the opinion, carrying it about with him as fully as if he had begot his whole parish.” [*The Country Parson, Chap. XVI.]  We cannot better Izaak Walton’s appreciation of its value: “a book so full of plain, prudent, and useful rules that that country parson that can spare12d. and yet wants it, is scarce excusable; because it will both direct him what he ought to do, and convince him for not having done it.” [*Life of Herbert, ed. 1927, p. 294.]

Izaak Walton himself is a charming example of the pious country gentleman.  Originally a linen draper in London, he gained through his wife, Anne Ken, the friendship of many of the most famous divines of the day.  In his Lives of Donne, Wotton, Hooker, Herbert, and Sanderson, we have a delightful picture of simple and good-tempered Christian practice.  Walton’s prose, like Bunyan’s, gains its whole force through its essential directness, although Walton had the advantage over Bunyan of possessing an abundant fount of humour.  By a happy chance three of his friends were keen fishermen.  In The Complete Angler, first published in 1653, we see the kindly old gentleman fly-fishing in beautiful Dovedale, listening intently to the bubbling of the river and the trilling of the lark, and watching the flowers unfolding their beauty in the sun.  All Nature deserved respect and admiration, since it was God’s handiwork; hence Walton could say of the frog: “Use him as though you loved him; that is, harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live the longer.” [*The Complete Angler, ed. 1824, Vol. I, ch. viii, p. 239.]  It is possibly true, as an over-zealous Puritan rival hastened to point out to him, that Walton’s method of casting flies was not the best.  We turn to his pages, however, for other delights than learning the best methods of catching fish.

Of the important and permanent contribution of the Seventeenth Century towards the restoration of the Beauty of Holiness in Church worship little can here be said.  Prynne, in his Canterbury’s Doom, has left us a detailed description of the beautiful chapel of Andrewes, [*W. Prynne, Canterbury=s Doom (1646), pp. 121–4.] with its carefully furnished altar, and Ussher gives us a glowing account of Laud=s private chapel at Lambeth.  The Injunctions of Peter Smart, Prebendary of Durham, against John Cosin well reveal how the Cathedral was improved with new altars, placed in their proper position at the East End, carved oak screens, vestments and altar lights.  It is recorded that on the evening of Candlemas Cosin burned over 300 candles in the Cathedral in honour of Our Lady. [*Cosin, Articles, Edit. Surtees Society, Vol. LII, pp. 161–97.]  The inventories of William Dowsing, Commissioner under the Earl of Manchester in Suffolk 1643–4, and of other Puritan iconoclasts show how much of the pre-Reformation decorations still survived in parish churches until the Civil War.  Dowsing’s account of his work at Clare is typical.  “At Clare, Jan. 6, we brake down 1000 pictures superstitious.  I broke down 200; three of God the Father and three of Christ and the Holy Lamb, and three of the Holy Ghost like a Dove with wings; and the 12 Apostles were carved in wood on the top of the roof, which we gave orders to take down; and 20 Cherubims to be taken down; and the Sun and Moon by the King’s Arms to be taken down.” [*Journal, Edited by Evelyn White, in Proceedings of Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, Vol. VI, 1883, p. 248.]  This appalling destruction of England=s artistic wealth under Puritan domination is too sad a subject to dwell upon.  We may be thankful that the cautious people of Fairford removed and buried their glorious Fifteenth-Century glass until the danger was past, and that Cromwell himself restrained one of his generals, who desired to pull down the West Tower of Ely and use it to build houses for his soldiers.

IX

The Seventeenth Century thus saw the English Church firmly established on the two-fold basis of Scripture and ancient tradition.  The Anglican divines, whose writings comprise this book, had an uncompromising faith in the Catholicity of the English Church, and refused to bow to the claims of Rome, or to admit the revolutionary ideas of the Continental Reformers.  They saw the Church of England as Catholic and as Protestant, as ancient and as reformed.  “She has a plenary authority within herself, and has no need to recur to any other Church to direct her what to retain and what to do.”  So wrote Archbishop Wake. [*Quoted in Perry, Church History, Vol. III, p. 46.]  This spirit of independence did not prove incompatible with many schemes for Reunion throughout the Century; Andrewes, Laud, and Stillingfleet all attempted negotiations with the Eastern Orthodox Church, and would also have welcomed negotiations with the rest of the West, if only Rome had been content to hold herself aloof from political ambitions and alliances, and if she had been content to reform herself, otherwise than by the Canons of the Council of Trent.  Laud was twice offered a Cardinal’s hat, but his answer was, “that somewhat dwelled within [him] which would not suffer that till Rome were other than it is.” [*Laud, Works, L. A. C. T., Vol. III, p. 219.]

In this brief review we have attempted to show something of the essential greatness of the Seventeenth Century.  The age was preeminently one of stress and storm, and the ideals of Anglicanism were necessarily forged upon the hard anvil of controversy.  It was only as the result of a prolonged struggle against both Puritanism and Rome that the independent position of the English Church was at last attained by the Prayer Book of 1662.  What is most remarkable against such a tumultuous background, is the fact that the age has bequeathed to posterity so positive and so permanent a contribution in learning, literature and art.  May we, however, attribute this to that deep piety which we have seen to be reflected in the personal lives of every class of the community, clergy and laity alike?  It was the religious aspirations of the Seventeenth-Century divines which made the Via Media become a glorious reality instead of a barren philosophical theory.  They desired to gather up all that was best in the Church’s past, and to adapt it for English use, their aim being “to do that which to [their] best understandings [they] conceived might most tend to the preservation of peace and unity in the Church, the procuring of reverence, and exciting of piety and devotion in the public worship of God.” [*Preface to The Book of Common Prayer, 1662.  Cp. Document No. 78.]  It was not the purpose of the Seventeenth-Century divines to imitate in a slavish spirit the doctrine or the ceremonial of other Churches.  Their ideal of the Catholic Church was of a body universal, which could yet contain within her fold divers independent Churches with peculiar national characteristics of faith and worship.  The Caroline divines would almost unanimously have agreed to Mr. Inglesant’s verdict: “I am not blind to the peculiar dangers that beset the English Church.  Nevertheless, as a Church it is unique; if suffered to drop out of existence, nothing like it can ever take its place.” [*J. H. Shorthouse, John Inglesant, ch. xxxix.]

Editorial Note

For the text of the passages included in this corpus, the editions which have been used are named in the introductory note preceding each extract.  Where good modern reprints existed, these have usually been preferred to the Seventeenth-Century originals for the purpose of page references on the ground that they are likely to be more accessible to the student.  The inconsistencies of Seventeenth-Century orthography made any attempt to reproduce the original capitalization, punctuation and spelling a quite profitless task.  No hesitation was felt, therefore, about modifying them in order to bring them, as far as possible, into conformity with modern practice.  Only where differences in spelling were believed to imply differences in pronunciation has present usage in these matters been abandoned, though the long and often complicated structure of Seventeenth-Century sentences has probably tended to make our punctuation somewhat heavy.  For the most part, footnotes and marginal references have been silently excised; but the editors have used complete discretion in this matter.  In cases where emendations in the text have been ventured or explanatory notes added, they have been included in square brackets.  Obvious misprints have been corrected.  Considerable pains have been taken to secure an accurate text, in order to permit of the quotation of extracts without recourse to the (in some cases, rather scarce) original treatises.  As we hardly dare hope, however, that complete exactitude has been attained, we make our own the request of Thomas Thompson which we print below.

It is less easy to summarize the principles which have determined the selection of the extracts themselves.  As stated in the Preface, the primary purpose of this volume is to present the genius of Anglicanism as it found expression in the Seventeenth Century; and this end has never been long out of sight.  Like all historical study which is more than the discovery and presentation of mere facts, such a task calls at every turn for discrimination and judgement.  No purely mechanical method of selection could have been devised.  It would clearly have been impossible, for instance, to have sought “objectivity” by including the first extract that was met with on each Subject.  Apart from the inherent objections to such a plan, it must be remembered that a Table of Subjects itself presupposes a prior study of the literature.  It would have been equally undesirable for the editors to have chosen only such extracts as expressed their own views on each particular theme.  A catena composed on such principles would have been foreign to their purpose, which was not to bring together a number of proof texts, but to illustrate the ethos of a phase of English religion wherein (as in all historical manifestations of the Spirit) the permanent and the transitory were closely intertwined.  The Seventeenth Century itself did not attain complete consistency; and occasionally the editors have illustrated this fact by setting side by side passages which give expression to opposing religious attitudes or beliefs.  It was also felt desirable that as large a number as possible of representative Divines should be included in this corpus.  Herein will be found the explanation of the presence (and absence) of several passages.

The extended Table of Contents, when taken in conjunction with the Outline Biographies at the end of the volume, seemed to make an index quite unnecessary.

F. L. C.

“If any faults be in printing, as it may be some few thou hast, as you read amend them, always remembering that as men we may slip, but as Christians we would not.” – Thomas Thompson, in a note affixed to a work published in A.D. 1612.

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