II. THE REFORMATION UNDER EDWARD VI.[475]
When Henry VIII. died, in 1547 (Jan. 28th), the situation in England was difficult for those who came after him. A religious revolution had been half accomplished; a social revolution was in progress, creating popular ferment; evicted tenants and uncloistered monks formed raw material for revolt; the treasury was empty, the kingdom in debt, and the coinage debased. The kingly authority had undermined every other, and the King was a child. The new nobility, enriched by the spoils of the Church, did not command hereditary respect; and the Council which gathered round the King was torn by rival factions.[476]
Henry VIII. had died on a Friday, but his death was kept concealed till the Monday (Jan. 31st), when Edward VI. was brought by his uncle, the Earl of Hertford, and presented to the Council. There a will of the late King was produced, the terms of which make it almost impossible to believe that Henry did not contemplate a further advance towards a Reformation. It appointed a Council of Regency, consisting of sixteen persons who were named. Eleven belonged to the old Council, and among them were five who were well known to desire an advance, while the two most determined reactionaries were omitted--Bishop Gardiner and Thirlby. The will also mentioned by name twelve men who might be added to the Council if their services were thought to be necessary. These were added. Then the Earl of Hertford was chosen to be Lord Protector of the Realm, and was promoted to be Duke of Somerset. The coronation followed (Feb. 20th), and all the Bishops were required to take out new commissions in the name of the young King--the King's ecclesiastical supremacy being thus rigidly enforced. Wriothesley, Henry's Lord Chancellor, who had been created the Earl of Southampton, was compelled to resign the Great Seal, and with his retirement the Government was entirely in the hands of men who wished the nation to go forward in the path of Reformation.
Signs of their intention were not lacking, nor evidence that such an advance would be welcomed by the population of the capital at least. On Feb. 10th a clergyman and churchwardens had removed the images from the walls of their church, and painted instead texts of Scripture; an eloquent preacher, Dr. Barlow, denounced the presence of images in churches; images were pulled down from the churches in Portsmouth; and so on. In May it was announced that a royal visitation of the country would be made, and Bishops were inhibited from making their ordinary visitations.
In July (31st) the Council began the changes. They issued a series of Injunctions[477] to the clergy, in which they were commanded to preach against "the Bishop of Rome's usurped power and jurisdiction"; to see that all images which had been "abused" as objects of pilgrimages should be destroyed; to read the Gospels and Epistles in English during the service; and to see that the Litany was no longer recited or sung in processions, but said devoutly kneeling. They next issued Twelve Homilies, meant to guard the people against "rash preaching." Such a series had been suggested as early as 1542, and a proposed draft had been presented to Convocation by Cranmer in that year, but had not been authorised. They were now issued on the authority of the Council. Three of them were composed by Cranmer. These sermons contain little that is doctrinal, and confine themselves to inciting to godly living.[478] Along with the Homilies, the Council authorised the issue of Udall's translation of the Paraphrases of Erasmus, which they meant to be read in the churches.
The royal visitation seems to have extended over a series of years, beginning in 1547. Dr. James Gairdner discovered, and has printed with comments, an account or report of a visitation held by Bishop Hooper in the diocese of Gloucester in 1551. One of the intentions of the visitation was to discover how far it was possible to expect preaching from the English clergy. Dr. Gairdner sums up the illiteracy exhibited in the report as follows:--Three hundred and eleven clergymen were examined, and of these one hundred and seventy-one were unable to repeat the Ten Commandments, though, strangely enough, all but thirty-four could tell the chapter (Ex. xx.) in which they were to be found; ten were unable to repeat the Lord's Prayer; twenty-seven could not tell who was its author: and thirty could not tell where it was to be found. The Report deserves study as a description of the condition of the clergy of the Church of England before the Reformation. These clergymen of the diocese of Gloucester were asked nine questions--three under three separate heads: (1) How many commandments are there? Where are they to be found? Repeat them. (2) What are the Articles of the Christian Faith (the Apostles' Creed)? Repeat them.--Prove them from Scripture. (3) Repeat the Lord's Prayer. How do you know that it is the Lord's? Where is it to be found? Only fifty out of the three hundred and eleven answered all these simple questions, and of the fifty, nineteen are noted as having answered mediocriter. Eight clergymen could not answer any single one of the questions; and while one knew that the number of the Commandments was ten, he knew nothing else. Two clergymen, when asked why the Lord's Prayer was so called, answered that it was because Christ had given it to His disciples when he told them to watch and pray; another said that he did not know why it was called the Lord's Prayer, but that he was quite willing to believe that it was the Lord's because the King had said so; and another answered that all he knew about it was that such was the common report. Two clergymen said that while they could not prove the articles of the Creed from Scripture, they accepted them on the authority of the King; and one said that he could not tell what was the Scripture authority for the Creed, unless it was the first chapter of Genesis, but that it did not matter, since the King had guaranteed it to be correct.[479]
There is no reason to believe that the clergy of this diocese were worse than those in other parts of England. If this report be compared with the accounts of the unreformed clergy of central Germany given in the reports of the visitations held there between 1528 and 1535, the condition of things there which filled Luther with such despair, and induced him to write his Small Cathechism, was very much better than that of the clergy of England. Not more than three or perhaps four out of the three hundred and eleven had ever preached or could preach. These facts, extracted from the formal report of an authoritative visitation made by a Bishop, explain the constant cry of the Puritans under Elizabeth for a preaching ministry.
The Council were evidently anxious that the whole service should be conducted in the English language, and that a sermon should always be part of the public worship. The reports of the visitation showed that it was useless to make any general order, but an example was given in the services conducted in the Royal Chapel. Meanwhile (1547) Thomas Hopkins was engaged in making a version of the Psalms in metre, to be sung both in private and in the churches, and these soon became highly popular. Like corresponding versions in France and in Germany, it served to spread the Reformation among the people; and, as might have been expected, Archbishop Laud did his best to stop the singing of these Psalms in later days.
The first Parliament of Edward VI. (Nov. 4th to Dec. 24th, 1547) made large changes in the laws of England affecting treason, which had the effect of sweeping away the edifice of absolute government which had been so carefully erected by Henry VIII. and his Minister Thomas Cromwell. The kingly supremacy in matters of religion was maintained; but the Act of the Six Articles was erased from the Statute Book, and with it all heresy Acts which had been enacted since the days of Richard II., and treason was defined as it had been in the days of Edward III. This legislation gave an unwonted amount of freedom to the English people.
Convocation had met in November and December (1547), and, among other things, had agreed unanimously that in the Holy Supper the partakers should communicate in both kinds, and had passed a resolution by fifty-three votes to twelve that all canons against the marriage of the clergy should be declared void. These two resolutions were communicated to Parliament, with the result that an Act was passed ordaining that "the most blessed Sacrament be hereafter commonly administered unto the people within the Church of England and Ireland, and other the King's dominions, under both the kinds, that is to say, of bread and wine, except necessity otherwise require."[480] An Act was also framed permitting the marriage of the clergy, which passed the Commons, but did not reach the House of Lords in time to be voted upon, and did not become law until the following year. Other two Acts bearing on the condition of the Church of England were issued by this Parliament. According to the one, Bishops were henceforth to be appointed directly by the King, and their courts were to meet in the King's name. According to the other, the property of all colleges, chantries, guilds, etc., with certain specified exceptions, was declared to be vested in the Crown.[481]
Communion in both kinds made necessary a new Communion Service, and as a tentative measure a new form for the celebration was issued by the Council, which is called by Strype the Book of Communion.[482] It enjoined that the essential words of the Mass should still be said in Latin, but inserted seven prayers in English in the ceremony. The Council also proceeded in their war against superstitions. They forbade the creeping to the Cross on Good Friday, the use of ashes on Ash-Wednesday, of palms on Palm Sunday, and of candles on Candlemas; and they ordered the removal of all images from the churches. Cranmer asserted that all these measures had been intended by Henry VIII.
The next important addition to the progress of the Reformation was the preparation and introduction of a Service Book[483]--The Boke of the Common Praier and Administration of the Sacramentes and other Rites and Ceremonies after the use of the Churche of England (1549), commonly called The First Prayer-Book of King Edward VI. It was introduced by an Act of Uniformity,[484] which, after relating how there had been for long time in England "divers forms of Common Prayer ... the use of Sarum, York, Bangor, and of Lincoln," and that diversity of use caused many inconveniences, ordains the universal use of this one form, and enacts penalties on those who make use of any other. The origin of the book is somewhat obscure. There is no trace of any commission appointed to frame it, nor of any formally selected body of revisers. Cranmer had the chief charge of it, and was assisted by a number of divines--though where they met is uncertain, whether at Windsor as the King records in his diary, or at Chertsey Abbey, as is said in the Grey Friars Chronicle. About the end of October the Bishops were asked to subscribe it, and it was subjected to some revision. It was then brought before the House of Lords and discussed there. It was in this debate that Cranmer disclosed that he had definitely abandoned the theory of transubstantiation. The Prayer-Book, however, was eminently conservative, and could be subscribed to by a believer in the old theory. The giving and receiving of the Bread is called the Communion of the Body of Christ, of the Wine, the Communion of the Blood of Christ; and the practice of making the sign of the Cross is adhered to at stated points in the ceremony. An examination of its structure and contents reveals that it was borrowed largely from the old English Use of Sarum, and from a new Service Book drafted by the Cardinal Quignon and dedicated to Pope Paul III. The feeling that a new Service Book was needed was not confined to the Reformers, but was affecting all European Christians. The great innovation in this Liturgy was that all its parts were in the English language, and that every portion of the service could be followed and understood by all the worshippers.
With the publication of this First Prayer-Book of King Edward VI. the first stage of the Reformation during his reign comes to an end. The changes made had all been contemplated by Henry VIII. himself, if we are to believe what Cranmer affirmed. They did not content the more advanced Reformers, and they were not deemed sufficient by Cranmer himself.
The changes made in the laws of England--the repeal of the "bloody" Statue of the Six Articles and of the treason laws--had induced many of the English refugees who had gone to Germany and to Switzerland to return to their native land. The Emperor Charles V. had defeated the German Protestants in the battle of Mühlberg in 1547 (April), and England for a few years became a place of refuge for continental Protestants fleeing from the requirements and penalties of the Interim. All this gave a strong impetus to the Reformation movement in England. Martin Bucer, compelled to leave Strassburg, found refuge and taught in Cambridge, where he was for a time the regius professor of divinity. Paul Büchlein (usually known by his latinised name of Fagius), a compatriot of Bucer and a well-known Hebrew scholar, was also settled at Cambridge, where he died (Nov. 1549). Peter Martyr Vermigli and Bernardino Ochino, two illustrious Italian Protestants, came to England at the invitation of Cranmer himself, and long afterwards Queen Elizabeth confessed that she had been drawn towards their theology. Peter Alexander of Arles and John à Lasco, the Pole, also received the protection and hospitality of England.[485] The reception of these foreign divines, and their appointment as teachers in the English universities, did not escape protest from the local teachers of theology, who were overruled by the Government.
Between the first and the second stage of the Reformation of the Church of England in this reign, a political change occurred which must be mentioned but need not be dwelt upon. The Duke of Somerset incurred the wrath of his colleagues, and of the new nobility who had profited by the sale of Church lands, by his active sympathy with the landless peasantry, and by his proposals to benefit them. He was driven from power, and his place was taken by the unscrupulous Earl of Warwick, who became Lord Protector, and received the Dukedom of Northumberland. The new Governor of England has been almost universally praised by the advanced Reformers because of the way in which he pushed forward the Reformation. It is well to remember in these days, when the noble character of the Duke of Somerset has received a tardy recognition,[486] that John Knox, no mean judge of men, never joined in the praise of Northumberland, and greatly preferred his predecessor, although his advance in the path of Reformation had been slower and much more cautious.
There was much in the times to encourage Northumberland and his Council to think that they might hurry on the Reformation movement.
The New Learning had made great strides in England, and was leavening all the more cultured classes, and it naturally led to the discredit of the old theology. The English advanced Reformers who had taken refuge abroad, and who now returned,--men like Ridley and Hooper,--could not fail to have had some influence on their countrymen; they had almost all become imbued with the Zwinglian type of theology, and Bullinger was their trusted adviser. It seemed as if the feelings of the populace were changing, for the mobs, instead of resenting the destruction of images, were rather inspired by too much iconoclastic zeal, and tried to destroy stained-glass windows and to harry priests. Cranmer's influence, always on the side of reform, had much more weight with the Council than was the case under Henry VIII. He had abandoned long ago his belief in transubstantiation, he had given up the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation, if he ever held it, and had now accepted a theory of a real but spiritual Presence in the communion elements which did not greatly differ from the more moderate Zwinglian view. The clergy, many of them, were making changes which went far beyond the Act of Uniformity. The removal of restrictions on printing the Bible had resulted in the publication of more than twenty editions, most of them with annotations which explained and enforced the new theology on the authority of Scripture.
In these circumstances the Council enforced the Act of Uniformity in a one-sided way--against the Romanist sympathisers. Many Romanist Bishops were deprived of their sees, and their places were filled by such men as Coverdale, Ridley, Ponet, and Scovey--all advanced Reformers. John Knox himself, freed from his slavery in the French galleys by the intervention of the English Government and made one of the King's preachers, was offered the bishopric of Rochester, which he declined. It must be remembered, however, that the Lord Protector and his entourage seem to have been quite as much animated by a desire to fill their own pockets as by zeal to promote the cause of the Reformation. Indeed, there came to be in England at this time something like the tulchan Bishops of a later period in Scotland; great nobles got possession of the episcopal revenues and allowed the new Bishops a stipend out of them.[487]
Then came a second revision of the Prayer-Book--The Boke of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacramentes and other Rites and Ceremonies in the Churche of England (1552). It is commonly called the Second Prayer-Book of King Edward the Sixth.[488] Cranmer had conferences with some of the Bishops as early as Jan. 1551 on the subject, and also with some of the foreign divines then resident in England; and it is more than probable that his intention was to frame such a liturgy as would bring the worship of the Church of England into harmony with that of the continental Reformers. There is no proof that the book was ever presented to Convocation for revision, or that it was subject to a debate in Parliament, as was its predecessor. The authoritative proclamation says:
"The King's most excellent majesty, with the assent of the Lords and Commons in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, has caused the aforesaid order of common service, entitled The Book of Common Prayer, to be faithfully and godly perused, explained, and made fully perfect, and by the aforesaid authority has annexed and joined it, so explained and perfected, to this present statute."[489]
This Book of Common Prayer deserves special notice, because, although some important changes were made, it is largely reproduced in the Book of Common Prayer which is at present used in the Church of England. The main differences between it and the First Prayer-Book of King Edward appear for the most part in the communion service, and were evidently introduced to do away with all thought of a propitiatory Mass. The word altar is expunged, and table is used instead: minister and priest are used indifferently as equivalent terms. "The minister at the time of the communion, and at all other times in his ministration, shall use neither Alb, Vestment, nor Cope; but being an archbishop or bishop, he shall have or wear a rochet: and being a priest or deacon, he shall have and wear a surplice only." Instead of "standing humbly afore the midst of the altar," he was to stand "at the north side of the table"; and the communion table was ordered to be removed from the east end of the church and to be placed in the chancel. Ordinary instead of unleavened bread was ordered to be used. In the older book the prayer, Have mercy on us, O Lord, had been used as an invocation of God present in the sacramental elements; in the new it became an ordinary prayer to keep the commandments. The Ten Commandments were introduced for the first time. Some rubrics--that enjoining the minister to add a little water to the wine--were omitted. Similar changes were made in the services for baptism and confirmation, and in the directions for ordination. One rubric was retained which the more advanced Reformers wished done away with. Communicants were required to receive the elements kneeling. But the difficulties were removed by a later rubric:
"Yet lest the same kneeling might be thought or taken otherwise, we do declare that it is not meant thereby, that any adoration is done, or ought to be done, either unto the sacramental bread or wine there bodily received, or to any real or essential presence there being of Christ's natural flesh and blood."
This addition is said, on somewhat uncertain evidence, to have been suggested by John Knox.
The most important change, however, was that made in the words to be addressed to the communicant in the act of partaking. In the First Prayer-Book the words were:
"When the priest delivereth the sacrament of the Body of Christ, he shall say to every one these words:
'The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given, for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.'
And the minister delivering the sacrament of the Blood, and giving every one once to drink and no more, shall say:
'The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life.'"[490]
In the Second Prayer-Book the rubric was altered to:
"Then the minister, when he delivereth the bread, shall say:
'Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on Him in thy heart by faith and with thanksgiving.'
And the minister that delivereth the cup shall say:
'Drink this in remembrance that Christ's blood was shed for thee, and be thankful.'"[491]
The difference represented by the change in these words is between what might be the doctrine of transubstantiation and a sacramental theory distinctly lower than that of Luther or Calvin, and which might be pure Zwinglianism.
This Second Prayer-Book of King Edward was enforced by a second Act of Uniformity, which for the first time contained penalties against laymen as well as clergymen--against "a great number of people in divers parts of the realm, who did wilfully refuse to come to their parish churches." The penalties themselves show that many of the population refused to be dragged along the path of reformation as fast as the Council wished them to go.[492]
Soon after there followed a new creed or statement of the fundamental doctrines received by the Church of England. This was the Forty-two Articles, interesting because they formed the basis of the later Elizabethan Thirty-nine Articles. They were thrust on the Church of England in a rather disreputable way. It was expressly slated on the title-page that they had been agreed upon by the Bishops and godly divines at the last Convocation in London--a statement which is not correct. They were never presented to Convocation, and were issued on the authority of the King alone, and received his signature on June 12th (1553), scarcely a month before he died.
One other document belonging to the reign of Edward VI. must be mentioned--the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, drafted by Cranmer. The Archbishop had begun in 1544 to collect passages from the old Canon Law which he thought might serve to regulate the government and discipline of the Church of England. A commission of thirty-two was appointed to assist him, and from these a committee of eight were selected to "rough hew the Canon Law." When the selection was made, a Bill to legalise it was introduced into Parliament, but it failed to pass; and the Reformatio Legum never became authoritative in England. It was as well, for the book enacted death penalties for various heresies, which would have made it a cruel weapon in the hands of a persecuting government.
During the reign of Edward VI. the beginnings of that Puritanism which was so prominent in the time of Elizabeth first manifested themselves. Its two principal spokesmen were the Bishops Hooper and Ridley. Hooper was an ardent follower of Zwingli, and was esteemed to be the leader of the party; and Ridley's sentiments were not greatly different. Hooper came into contact with the Government when he was appointed to the See of Gloucester. He then objected to the oath required from Bishops at their consecration, and to the episcopal robes, which he called "Aaronic" vestments. The details of the contest are described by a Zwinglian sympathiser, Macronius, in a letter to Bullinger at Zurich[493] (Aug. 28th, 1550):
"The King, as you know, has appointed him (Hooper) to the bishopric of Gloucester, which, however, he refused to accept unless he cd. be altogether relieved from all appearance of popish superstition. Here then a question immediately arises as to the form of oath which the Bishops have ordered to be taken in the name of God, the saints, and the Gospels; which impious oath Hooper positively refused to take. So, when he appeared before the King in the presence of the Council, Hooper convinced the King by many arguments that the oath should be taken in the name of God alone, who knoweth the heart. This took place on the 20th of July. It was so agreeable to the godly King, that with his own pen he erased the clause of the oath which sanctioned swearing by any creatures. Nothing could be more godly than this act, or more worthy of a Christian king. When this was done there remained the form of episcopal consecration, wh., as lately prescribed by the Bishops in Parliament, differs but little from the popish one. Hooper therefore obtained a letter from the King to the Archbishop of Canterbury (Cranmer), that he might be consecrated without superstition. But he gained nothing by this, as he was referred from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Bishop of London (Ridley), who refused to use any other form of consecration than that which had been subscribed by Parliament. Thus the Bishops mutually endeavour that none of their glory shall depart. A few days after, on the 30th of July, Hooper obtained leave from the King and the Council to be consecrated by the Bishop of London without any superstition. He replied that he would shortly send an answer either to the Council or to Hooper. While, therefore, Hooper was expecting the Bishop's answer, the latter went to court and alienated the minds of the Council from Hooper, making light of the use of the vestments and the like in the church, and calling them mere matters of indifference. Many were so convinced by him that they would hardly listen to Hooper's defence when he came into court shortly afterwards. He therefore requested them, that if they would not hear him speak, they would at least think it proper to hear and read his written apology. His request was granted: wherefore he delivered to the King's councillors, in writing, his opinion respecting the discontinuance of the use of vestments and the like puerilities. And if the Bishop cannot satisfy the King with other reasons, Hooper will gain the victory. We are daily expecting the termination of this controversy, which is only conducted between individuals, either by conference or by letter, for fear of any tumult being excited among the ignorant. You see in what a state of affairs the Church would be if they were left to the Bishops, even to the best of them."
In the end, Hooper allowed himself to be persuaded, and was consecrated in the usual way.
The advanced Reformers in England were probably incited to demand more freedom than the law permitted by the sight of the liberty enjoyed by men who were not Englishmen. French and German Protestants had come to England for refuge, and had been welcomed. The King had permitted them to use the Augustines' church in London, that they might "have the pure ministry of the Word and Sacraments according to the apostolic form," and they enjoyed their privileges.
"We are altogether exempted by letters patent from the King and Council from the jurisdiction of the Bishops. To each church (I mean the German and the French) are assigned two ministers of the Word (among whom is my unworthy self), over whom has been appointed superintendent the most illustrious John à Lasco; by whose aid alone, under God, we foreigners have arrived at our present state of pure religion. Some of the Bishops, and especially the Bishop of London, with certain others, are opposed to our design; but I hope their opposition will be ineffectual. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the special patron of foreigners, has been the chief support and promoter of our church, to the great astonishment of some."[494]
These foreigners, outside episcopal control and not subject to the Acts of Uniformity, enjoyed liberties of worship which were not granted to Englishmen. They were driven out of the country when Mary succeeded; but under Elizabeth and James they had the same privileges and were naturally envied by the English Puritans, coerced by Bishops and harried by Acts of Uniformity.
While the Reformation was being pushed forward in England at a speed too great for the majority of the people, the King was showing the feebleness of his constitution. He died on the 6th of July 1553, and the collapse of the Reformation after his death showed the uncertainty of the foundation on which it had been built.
III. THE REACTION UNDER MARY.[495]
One of the last acts of the dying King had been to make a will regulating the succession. It was doubtless suggested to him by the Duke of Northumberland, but, once adopted, the lad clung to it with Tudor tenacity. It set aside as illegitimate both his sisters. It also set aside the young Queen of Scotland, who, failing Mary and Elizabeth, was the legitimate heir, being the granddaughter of Margaret, the eldest sister of Henry VIII., and selected the Lady Jane Grey, the representative (eldest child of eldest child) of Mary, the younger sister of Henry VIII. Both the King and his Council seem to have thought that the nation would not submit to a Roman Catholic on the throne; and Charles V. appears to have agreed with them. He considered the chances of Mary's succession small.
The people of England, however, rallied to Mary, as the nearest in blood to their old monarch, who, notwithstanding his autocratic rule, had never lost touch with his people.
The new Queen naturally turned to her cousin Charles V. for guidance. He had upheld her mother's cause and her own; and in the dark days which were past, his Ambassador Chapuys had been her indefatigable friend.
It was Mary's consuming desire to bring back the English Church and nation to obedience to Rome--to undo the work of her father, and especially of her brother. The Emperor recommended caution; he advised the Queen to be patient; to watch and accommodate her policy to the manifestations of the feelings of her people; to punish the leaders who had striven to keep her from the throne, but to treat all their followers with clemency. Above all, she was to mark carefully the attitude of her sister Elizabeth, and to reorganise the finances of the country.
Mary had released Gardiner from the Tower, and made him her trusted Minister. His advice in all matters, save that of her marriage, coincided with the Emperor's. It was thought that small difficulty would be found in restoring the Roman Catholic religion, but that difficulties might arise about the papal supremacy, and especially about the reception of a papal Legate. Much depended on the Pope. If His Holiness did not demand the restoration of the ecclesiastical property alienated during the last two reigns, and now distributed among over forty thousand proprietors, all might go well.
Signs were not wanting, however, that if the people were almost unanimous in accepting Mary as their Queen, they were not united upon religion. When Dr. Gilbert Bourne, preaching at St. Paul's Cross (Aug. 13th, 1553) praised Bishop Bonner, he was interrupted by shouts; a dagger was thrown at him; he was hustled out of the pulpit, and his life was threatened. The tumult was only appeased when Bradford, a known Protestant, appealed to the crowd. The Lord Mayor of London was authorised to declare to the people that it was not the Queen's intention to constrain men's consciences, and that she meant to trust solely to persuasion to bring them to the true faith.
Five days later (August 18th), Mary issued her first Proclamation about Religion, in which she advised her subjects "to live together in quiet sort and Christian charity, leaving those new-found devilish terms of papist or heretic and such like." She declared that she meant to support that religion which she had always professed; but she promised "that she would not compel any of her subjects thereunto, unto such time as further order, by common assent, may be taken therein"--a somewhat significant threat. The proclamation prohibited unlicensed preaching and printing "any book, matter, ballad, rhyme, interlude, process, or treatise, or to play any interlude, except they have Her Grace's special licence in writing for the same," which makes it plain that from the outset Mary did not intend that any Protestant literature should be read by her subjects if she could help it.[496]
Mary was crowned with great ceremony on October 1st, and her first Parliament met four days later (Oct. 5th to Dec. 6th, 1553). It reversed a decision of a former Parliament, and declared that Henry VIII.'s marriage with Catharine of Aragon had been valid, and that Mary was the legitimate heir to the throne; and it wiped out all the religious legislation under Edward VI. The Council had wished the anti-papal laws of Henry VIII. to be rescinded; but Parliament, especially the House of Commons, was not prepared for anything so sweeping. The Church of England was legally restored to what it had been at the death of Henry, and Mary was left in the anomalous position of being the supreme head of the Church in England while she herself devoutly believed in the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. The title and the powers it gave were useful to restore by royal proclamation the mediæval ritual and worship, and Mass was reintroduced in this way in December.[497]
Meanwhile the marriage of the Queen was being discussed. Mary herself decided the matter by solemnly promising the Spanish Ambassador (Oct. 19th) that she would wed Philip of Spain; the marriage treaty was signed on January 12th, 1554; the formal betrothal took place in March, and the wedding was celebrated on July 25th.[498] It was very unpopular from the first. The boys of London pelted with snowballs the servants of the Spanish embassy sent to ratify the wedding treaty (Jan. 1st, 1554); the envoys themselves were very coldly received by the populace; and Mary had to issue a proclamation commanding that all courtesy should be used to the Prince of Spain and his train coming to England to marry the Queen.[499]
In September (1553) the pronouncedly Protestant Bishops who had remained in England to face the storm, Cranmer, Ridley, Coverdale, Latimer, were ejected and imprisoned; the Protestant refugees from France and Germany and many of the eminent Protestant leaders had sought safety on the Continent; the deprived Romanist Bishops, Gardiner, Heath, Bonner, Day, had been reinstated; and the venerable Bishop Tunstall, who had acted as Wolsey's agent at the famous Diet of Worms, had been placed in the See of Durham.
Various risings, one or two of minor importance and a more formidable one under Sir Thomas Wyatt, had been crushed. Lady Jane Grey, Lord Guilford Dudley (February 12th, 1554), Sir Thomas Wyatt, Lord Suffolk, and others were executed. Charles V. strongly recommended the execution of the Princess Elizabeth, but his advice was not followed.
England was still an excommunicated land, and both Queen and King Consort were anxious to receive the papal peace. As soon as he had been informed by Mary of her succession to the throne, the Pope, Julius II., had selected Cardinal Pole to be his Legate to England (early in August 1553). No one could have been more suitable. He was related to the royal house of England, a grandson of the Duke of Clarence, who was the brother of Edward IV. He had so thoroughly disapproved of the anti-papal policy of Henry VIII. that he had been compelled to live in exile. He was a Cardinal, and had almost become Pope. No one could have been more acceptable to Mary. He had protested against her mother's divorce, and had suffered for it; and he was as anxious as she to see England restored to the papal obedience. But many difficulties had to be cleared away before Pole could land in England as the Pope's Legate. The English people did not love Legates, and their susceptibilities had to be soothed. If the Pope made the restoration of the Church lands a condition of the restoration of England to the papal obedience, and if Mary insisted on securing that obedience, there would be a rebellion, and she would lose her crown. No one knew all these difficulties better than the Emperor, and he exerted himself to overcome them. The Curia was persuaded that, as it was within the Canon Law to alienate ecclesiastical property for the redemption of prisoners, the Church might give up her claims to the English abbey lands in order to win back the whole kingdom. Pole himself had doubts about this. He believed that he might be allowed to reason with the lay appropriators and persuade them to make restoration, and his enthusiasm on the subject caused many misgivings in the minds of both Charles and Philip. Nor could the Cardinal land in England until his attainder as an English nobleman had been reversed by Parliament. He had been appointed Legate to England once before (February 7th, 1536), in order to compass Henry VIII.'s return to the papal obedience; he had written against the Royal Supremacy. Neither Lords nor Commons were very anxious to receive him.
At last, more than thirteen months after his appointment, the way was open for his coming to England. He landed at Dover (Nov. 20th, 1554), went on to Gravesend, and there found waiting him an Act of Parliament revers ing his attainder. It had been introduced into the Lords, passed in the Upper House in two days, was read three times in the Commons in one day, and received the Royal Assent immediately thereafter (Nov. 27th, 1554). Tunstall, the Bishop of Durham, brought him letters patent, empowering him to exercise his office of Legate in England. He embarked in a royal barge with his silver cross in the prow, sailed up the Thames on a favouring tide, landed at Whitehall, and was welcomed by Mary and Philip. On the following day the two Houses of Parliament were invited to the Palace to meet him, and he explained his commission. The day after, the question was put in both Houses of Parliament whether the nation should return to the papal obedience, and was answered affirmatively. Whereupon Lords and Commons joined in a supplication to the Queen "that they might receive absolution, and be received into the body of the Holy Catholic Church, under the Pope, the Supreme Head thereof." The Supplication was presented on the 30th, and in its terms the Queen besought the Legate to absolve the realm for its disobedience and schism. Then, while the whole assembly knelt, King and Queen on their knees with the others, the Legate pronounced the absolution, and received the kingdom "again into the unity of our Mother the Holy Church."
It now remained to Parliament to pass the laws which the change required. In one comprehensive statute all the anti-papal legislation of the reigns of Henry VIII. and of Edward VI. was rescinded, and England was, so far as laws could make it,[500] what it had been in the reign of Henry VII. Two days later (Dec. 2nd, 1554), on the first Sunday in Advent, Philip and Mary, with the Legate, attended divine service in St. Paul's, and after Mass listened to an eloquent sermon from Bishop Gardiner, in the course of which he publicly abjured the teaching of his book De vera obedientia.[501] Convocation received a special absolution from the Legate. To show how thoroughly England had reconciled itself to Mother Church, Parliament proceeded to revive the old Acts against heresy which had been originally passed for the suppression of Lollardy, among them the notorious De hæretico comburendo, and England had again the privilege of burning Evangelical Christians secured to it by Act of Parliament.[502]
In March 1554 the Queen had issued a series of Injunctions to all Bishops, instructing them on a variety of matters, all tending to bring the Church into the condition in which it had been before the innovations of the late reign. The Bishops were to put into execution all canons and ecclesiastical laws which were not expressly contrary to the statutes of the realm. They were not to inscribe on any of their ecclesiastical documents the phrase regia auctoritate fulcitus; they were to see that no heretic was admitted to any ecclesiastical office; they were to remove all married priests, and to insist that every person vowed to celibacy was to be separated from his wife if he had married; they were to observe all the holy days and ceremonies which were in use in the later days of the reign of King Henry VIII.; all schoolmasters suspected of heresy were to be removed from their office. These Injunctions kept carefully within the lines of the Act which had rescinded the ecclesiastical legislation of the reign of Edward VI.[503] The Bishop of London, Bonner, had previously issued a list of searching questions to be put to the clergy of his diocese, which concerned the laity as well as the clergy, and which went a good deal further. He asked whether there were any married clergymen, or clergymen who had not separated themselves from their wives or concubines? Whether any of the clergy maintained doctrines contrary to the Catholic faith? Whether any of the clergy had been irregularly or schismatically ordained? Whether any of them had said Mass or administered the sacraments in the English language after the Queen's proclamation? Whether they kept all the holy days and fasting days prescribed by the Church? Whether any of the clergy went about in other than full clerical dress? Whether any persons in the parish spoke in favour of clerical marriage? These and many other minute questions were put, with the evident intention of restoring the mediæval ceremonies and customs in every detail.[504] His clergy assured the Bishop that it was impossible to make all the changes he demanded at once, and Bonner was obliged to give them till the month of November to get their parishes in order. This London visitation evidently provoked a great deal of discontent. In April (1554) "a dead cat was hung on the gallows in the Cheap, habited in garments like those of a priest. It had a shaven crown, and held in its forepaws a round piece of paper to represent a wafer.... A reward of twenty marks was offered for the discovery of the author of the outrage, but it was quite ineffectual."[505] Other graver incidents showed the smouldering discontent.
The revival in Parliament of the old anti-heresy laws may be taken as the time clearly foreshadowed in the Queen's first proclamation on religious affairs when persuasion was to cease and force take its place. The platitudes of many modern historians about Mary's humane and merciful disposition, about Gardiner's aversion to shedding blood, about "the good Bishop" Bonner's benevolent attempt to persuade his victims to recant, may be dismissed from our minds. The fact remains, that the persecutions which began in 1555 were clearly indicated in 1553, and went on with increasing severity until the Queen's death put an end to them.
The visitations had done their work, and the most eminent of the Reformed bishops and divines had been caught and secured in various prisons. "The Tower, the Fleet, the Marshalsea, the King's Bench, Newgate, and the two Counters were full of them."[506] Their treatment differed. "The prisoners in the King's Bench had tolerably fair usage, and favour sometimes shown them. There was a pleasant garden belonging thereunto, where they had liberty sometimes to walk." They had also the liberty of meeting for worship, as had the prisoners in the Marshalsea. Their sympathisers who had escaped the search kept them supplied with food, as did the early Christians their suffering brethren in the first centuries. But in some of the other prisons the confessors were not only confined in loathsome cells, but suffered terribly from lack of food. At the end of Strype's catalogue of the two hundred and eighty-eight persons who were burnt during the reign of Mary, he significantly adds, "besides those that dyed of famyne in sondry prisons."[507] Some of the imprisoned were able to draw up (May 8th, 1554) and send out for circulation a confession of their faith, meant to show that they were suffering simply for holding and proclaiming what they believed to be scriptural truth. They declared that they believed all the canonical books of Scripture to be God's very Word, and that it was to be the judge in all controversies of faith; that the Catholic Church was the Church which believed and followed the doctrines taught in Scripture; that they accepted the Apostles' Creed and the decisions of the first four Oecumenical Councils and of the Council of Toledo, as well as the teachings of Athanasius, Irenæus, Tertullian, and Damasus; that they believed that justification came through the mercy of God, and that it was received by none but by faith only, and that faith was not an opinion, but a persuasion wrought by the Holy Ghost; they declared that the external service of God ought to be according to God's Word, and conducted in a language which the people could understand; they confessed that God only by Jesus Christ is to be prayed to, and therefore disapproved of the invocation of the saints; they disowned Purgatory and Masses for the dead; they held that Baptism and the Lord's Supper were the Sacraments instituted by Christ, were to be administered according to the institution of Christ, and disallowed the mutilation of the sacrament, the theory of transubstantiation, and the adoration of the bread.[508] This was signed by Ferrar, Hooper, Coverdale (Bishops), by Rogers (the first martyr), by Bradford, Philpot, Crome, Saunders, and others. John Bradford, the single-minded, gentle scholar, was probably the author of the Confession.
Cardinal Pole, in his capacity as papal Legate, issued a commission (Jan. 28th, 1555) to Bishop Gardiner and several others to try the prisoners detained for heresy. Then followed (Feb. 4th, 1555) the burning of John Rogers, to whom Tyndale had entrusted his translation of the Scriptures, and who was the real compiler of the Bible known as Matthews'. The scenes at his execution might have warned the authorities that persecution was not going to be persuasive. Crowds cheered him as he passed to his death, "as if he were going to his wedding," the French Ambassador reported. His fate excited a strong feeling of sympathy among almost all classes in society, which was ominous. Even Simon Renard, the trusted envoy of Charles V., took the liberty of warning Philip that less extreme measures ought to be used. But the worst of a persecuting policy is that when it has once begun it is almost impossible to give it up without confession of defeat. Bishop Hooper was sent to Gloucester to suffer in his cathedral town, Saunders to Coventry, and Dr. Taylor was burnt on Aldham Common in Suffolk. Several other martyrs suffered the same fate of burning a few days afterwards.
Robert Ferrar, the Reformed Bishop of St. David's, was sent to Carmarthen to be burnt in the chief town of his diocese (March 30th, 1555). Perhaps it was his death that gave rise to the verses in Welsh, exhorting the men of the Principality to rise in defence of their religion against the English who were bent on its destruction, and calling them to extirpate image worship and the use of the crucifix.[509]
Bishops Ridley and Latimer and Archbishop Cranmer had been kept in confinement at Oxford since April 1554; and they were now to be proceeded against. The two Bishops were brought before the Court acting on a commission from Cardinal Pole, the Legate. They were condemned on Oct. 1st, 1555, and on the 16th they were burnt at Oxford in the present Broad Street before Balliol College. Cranmer witnessed their death from the top of the tower in which he was confined.
In the Archbishop's case it was deemed necessary, in order to fulfil the requirements of Canon Law, that he should be tried by the Pope himself. He was accordingly informed that his sovereigns had "denounced" him to the Pope, and that His Holiness had commissioned the Cardinal Du Puy, Prefect of the Inquisition, to act on his behalf, and that Du Puy had delegated the duty to James Brooks, who had succeeded Hooper as Bishop of Gloucester, to the Dean of St. Paul's, and to the Archdeacon of Canterbury. The trial took place in St. Mary's Church. The accusers, Philip and Mary, were represented by Drs. Martyn and Story. They, in the name of their sovereigns, presented a lengthy indictment, in which the chief charges were adultery, perjury, and heresy. The first meant that although a priest he had been married, and had even married a second time after he had been made an Archbishop; the second, that he had sworn obedience to the Pope and broken his oath; and the third, that he had denied the doctrine of transubstantiation.[510]
Cranmer refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of his judges, but answered the charges brought against him to his accusers because they represented his sovereigns. He denied that the Pope had any ecclesiastical power within England; but submitted to the kingly supremacy. As Brooks had no authority from the Pope to do more than hear the case, no judgment was pronounced; it was only intimated that the proceedings would be reported to Rome. Cranmer was conducted back to his prison. There he addressed first one, then a second letter to the Queen.[511] In dignified and perfectly respectful language he expressed the degradation of the kingdom exhibited in the act of the sovereigns appealing to an "outward judge, or to an authority coming from any person out of this realm" to judge between them and one of their own subjects. Cranmer early in his career had come to the unalterable opinion that the papal supremacy was responsible for the abuses and disorders in the mediæval Church, and that reformation was impossible so long as it was maintained. In common with every thoughtful man of his generation, he repudiated the whole structure of papal claims built up by the Roman Curia during the fifteenth century, and held that it was in every way incompatible with the loyalty which every subject owed to his sovereign and to the laws of his country. He took his stand on this conviction.
"Ignorance, I know," he said, "may excuse other men; but he that knoweth how prejudicial and injurious the power and authority which the Pope challengeth everywhere is to the Crown, laws, and customs of this realm, and yet will allow the same, I cannot see in anywise how he can keep his due allegiance, fidelity, and truth to the Crown and slate of this realm."
In his second letter he struck a bolder note, and declared that the oath which Mary had sworn to maintain the laws, liberties, and customs of the realm was inconsistent with the other oath she had taken to obey the Pope, to defend his person, and to maintain his authority, honour, laws, and privileges. The accusation of perjury did not touch him at all. The sovereigns--Bishop Brooks, appointed to try him--every constituted authority in the realm--when confronted by it, had to choose between the oath of allegiance to country or to Papacy; he had chosen allegiance to his fatherland; others who acted differently betrayed it. That was his position. The words he addressed to Queen Mary--"I fear me that there be contradictions in your oath "--was his justification.
At Rome, Cranmer was found guilty of contumacy, and the command went forth that he was to be deposed, degraded, and punished as a heretic. In the meantime he was burnt in effigy at Rome. When he heard his sentence, he composed an Appeal to a General Council, following, he said, the example of Luther.[512] The degradation was committed to Bonner and Thirlby, and was executed by the former with his usual brutality. This done, he was handed over to the secular authorities for execution. Then began a carefully prepared course of refined mental torture, which resulted in the "Recantations of Thomas Cranmer."[513] A series of recantations was presented to him, which he was ordered to sign by his sovereign; and, strange as it may seem now, it was the sovereign's command that made it almost impossible for Cranmer to refuse to sign the papers which, one after another, were given him. He was a man who felt the necessity of an ultimate authority. He had deliberately put aside that of the Pope, and as deliberately placed that of the sovereign in its place; and now the ultimate authority, which his conscience approved, commanded him to sign. The first four were not real recantations; Cranmer could sign them with a good conscience; they consisted of generalities, the effect of which depended on the meaning of the terms used, and everyone knew the meanings which he had attached to the words all throughout his public life. But the fifth and the sixth soiled his conscience and occasioned his remorse. It was not enough for Mary, Pole, and Bonner that they were able to destroy by fire the bodies of English Reformers, they hoped by working partly on the conscience and partly on the weakness of the leader of the English Reformation, to show the worthlessness of the whole movement. In the end, the aged martyr redeemed his momentary weakness by a last act of heroism. He knew that his recantations had been published, and that any further declaration made would probably be suppressed by his unscrupulous antagonists. He resolved by a single action to defeat their calculations and stamp his sincerity on the memories of his countrymen. His dying speech was silenced, as he might well have expected; but he had made up his mind to something which could not be stifled.[514]
"At the moment he was taken to the stake he drew from his bosom the identical paper (the recantation), throwing it, in the presence of the multitude, with his own hands into the flames, asking pardon of God and of the people for having consented to such an act, which he excused by saying that he did it for the public benefit, as, had his life, which he sought to save, been spared him, he might at some time have still been of use to them, praying them all to persist in the doctrines believed by him, and absolutely denying the Sacrament and the supremacy of the Church. And, finally, stretching forth his arm and right hand, he said: 'This which hath sinned, having signed the writing, must be the first to suffer punishment'; and thus did he place it in the fire and burned it himself."[515]
If the martyrdoms of Ridley and Latimer lighted the torch, Cranmer's spread the conflagration which in the end burnt up the Romanist reaction and made England a Protestant nation. The very weakness of the aged Primate became a background to make the clearer his final heroism. The "common man" sympathised with him all the more. He had never been a very strong man in the usual sense of the words. The qualities which go to form the exquisite liturgist demand an amount of religious sensibility and sympathy which seldom belongs to the leader of a minority with the present against it and the future before it. His peculiar kind of courage, which enabled him to face Henry VIII. in his most truculent moods, was liker a woman's than a man's, and was especially called forth by sympathy with others in suffering. None of Henry's Ministers pleaded harder or more persistently for the Princess Mary, the woman who burnt him, than did Cranmer; and he alone of all his fellows dared to beseech the monarch for Cromwell in his fall.[516]
The death of Cranmer was followed by a long succession of martyrdoms. Cardinal Pole became the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in Philip's absence the principal adviser of the Queen. He did not manage, if he tried, to stop the burnings. Sometimes he rescued prisoners from the vindictive Bonner; at others he seems to have hounded on the persecutors. Mary's conscience, never satisfied at the confiscation of property, compelled her to restore the lands still in possession of the Crown, and to give up the "first fruits" of English benefices--the only result being to awaken the fears of thousands of proprietors, and set them against the papal claims. She attempted to restore the monastic institutions, with but scanty results; to revive pilgrimages to shrines, which were very forced affairs, and had to be kept alive by fining the parents of children who did not join them. The elevation of Pope Paul IV. (Cardinal Caraffa) to the See of Rome increased her difficulties. The new Pontiff, a Neapolitan, hated her Spanish husband, and personally disliked Cardinal Pole, her chief adviser. Her last years were full of troubles.
Mary died in 1558 (Nov. 17th). "The unhappiest of queens, and wives, and women," she had been born amidst the rejoicings of a nation, her mother a princess of the haughtiest house in Europe. In her girlhood she had been the bride-elect of the Emperor--a lovely, winning young creature, all men say. In her seventeenth year, at the age when girls are most sensitive, the crushing stroke which blasted her whole life fell upon her. Her father, the Parliament, and the Church of her country called her illegitimate; and thus branded, she was sent into solitude to brood over her disgrace. When almost all England hailed her Queen in her thirty-seventh year, she was already an old woman, with sallow face, harsh voice, her dark bright eyes alone telling how beautiful she had once been. But the nation seemed to love her who had been so long yearning for affection; she married the man of her choice; and she felt herself the instrument selected by Heaven to restore an excommunicated nation to the peace of God. Her husband, whom she idolised, tired of living with her after a few years. The child she passionately longed for and pathetically believed to be coming never came.[517] The Church and the Pope she had sacrificed so much for, disregarded her entreaties, and seemed careless of her troubles. The people who had welcomed her, and whom she really loved, called her "Bloody" Mary,--a name which was, after all, so well deserved that it will always remain. Each disappointment she took as a warning from Heaven that atonement had not yet been paid for England's crimes, and the fires of persecution were kept burning to appease the God of sixteenth century Romanism.
IV. THE SETTLEMENT UNDER ELIZABETH.[518]
Mary Tudor's health had long been frail, and when it was known for certain that she would leave no direct heir (i.e. from about June 1558), the people of England were silently coming to the conclusion that Elizabeth must be Queen, or civil war would result. It seemed also to be assumed that she would be a Protestant, and that her chief adviser would be William Cecil, who had been trained in statecraft as secretary to England's greatest statesman, the Lord Protector Somerset. So it fell out.
Many things contributed to create such expectations. The young intellectual life of England was slowly becoming Protestant. Both the Spanish ambassadors noticed this with alarm, and reported it to their master.[519] This was especially the case among the young ladies of the upper classes, who were becoming students learned in Latin, Greek, and Italian, and at the same time devout Protestants, with a distinct leaning to what afterwards became Puritanism. Elizabeth herself, at her most impressionable age had been the pupil of Bishop Hooper, who was accustomed to praise her intelligence. "In religious matters she has been saturated ever since she was born in a bitter hatred to our faith," said the Bishop of Aquila.[520] The common people had been showing their hatred of Romanism, and "images and religious persons were treated disrespectfully." It was observed that Elizabeth "was very much wedded to the people and thinks as they do," and that "her attitude was much more gracious to the common people than to others."[521] The burnings of the Protestant martyrs, and especially the execution of Cranmer, had stirred the indignation of the populace of London and the south counties against Romanism, and the feelings were spreading throughout the country. All classes of the people hated the entire subjugation of English interests to those of Spain during the late reign, just as the people of Scotland at the same time were growing weary of French domination under Mary of Lorraine, and Elizabeth shared the feeling of her people.[522]
Yet there was so much in the political condition of the times to make both Elizabeth and Cecil pause before committing themselves to the Reformation, that it is necessary to believe that religious conviction had a great influence in determining their action. England was not the powerful nation in 1558-60 which it became after twenty years under the rule of the great Queen. The agrarian troubles which had disturbed the three reigns of Henry VIII., Edward, and Mary had not died out. The coinage was still as debased as it had been in the closing years of Henry VIII. Trade was stagnant, and the country was suffering from a two years' visitation of the plague. The war with France, into which England had been dragged by Spain, had not merely drained the country of men and money, but was bringing nothing save loss of territory and damage to prestige. Nor was there much to be hoped from foreign aid. The Romanist reaction was in full swing throughout Europe, and the fortunes of the continental Protestants were at their lowest ebb. It was part of the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (April 1559) that France and Spain should unite to crush the Protestantism of the whole of Europe, and the secret treaty between Philip II. and Catherine de' Medici in 1565[523] showed that such a design was thought possible of accomplishment during the earlier years of Elizabeth. It was never wholly abandoned until the defeat of the Armada in 1588. Cecil's maxim, that the Reformation could not be crushed until England had been conquered, had for its corollary that the conquest of England must be the prime object of the Romanist sovereigns who were bent on bringing Europe back to the obedience of Rome. The determination to take the Protestant side added to the insecurity of Elizabeth's position in the earlier years of her reign. She was, in the opinion of the Pope and probably of all the European Powers, Romanist and Protestant, illegitimate; and heresy combined with bastardy was a terrible weapon in the hands of Henry II. of France, who meant to support the claims of his daughter-in-law, the young Queen of Scots,--undoubtedly the lawful heir in the eyes of all who believed that Henry VIII. had been lawfully married to Catharine of Aragon. The Spanish Ambassador, Count de Feria, tried to frighten Elizabeth by reminding her how, in consequence of a papal excommunication, Navarre had been seized by the King of Spain.[524] His statement to his master, that at her accession two-thirds of the English people were Romanists,[525] may be questioned (he made many miscalculations), but it is certain that England was anything but a united Protestant nation. Still, who knew what trouble Philip might have in the Netherlands, and the Lords of the Congregation might be encouraged enough to check French designs on England through Scotland.[526] At the worst, Philip of Spain would not like to see England wholly in the grip of France. The Queen and Cecil made up their minds to take the risk, and England was to be Protestant and defy the Pope, from "whom nothing was to be feared but evil will, cursing, and practising."
Paul IV., it was said, was prepared to receive the news of Elizabeth's succession favourably, perhaps under conditions to guarantee her legitimacy; but partly to his astonishment, and certainly to his wrath, he was not even officially informed of her accession, and the young Queen's ambassador at Rome was told that she had no need for him there.
The changes at home, however, were made with all due caution. In Elizabeth's first proclamation an "et cetera" veiled any claim to be the Head of the Church,[527] and her earliest meddling with ecclesiastical matters was to forbid all contentious preaching.[528] The statutory religion (Romanist) was to be maintained for the meantime. No official proclamation was made foreshadowing coming changes.
Elizabeth, however, did not need to depend on proclamations to indicate to her people the path she meant to tread. She graciously accepted the Bible presented to her on her entry into London, clasped it to her bosom, and pressed it to her lips. Her hand ostentatiously shrank from the kiss of Bonner the persecutor. The great lawyer, Goderick, pointed out ways in which Protestant feeling might find vent in a legal manner:
"In the meantime Her Majesty and all her subjects may by licence of law use the English Litany and suffrages used in King Henry's time, and besides Her Majesty in her closet may use the Mass without lifting up the Host according to the ancient canons, and may also have at every Mass some communicants with the ministers to be used in both kinds."[529]
The advice was acted upon, improved upon. "The affairs of religion continue as usual," says the Venetian agent (Dec. 17th, 1558), "but I hear that at Court when the Queen is present a priest officiates, who says certain prayers with the Litanies in English, after the fashion of King Edward."[530] She went to Mass, but asked the Bishop officiating not to elevate the Host for adoration; and when he refused to comply, she and her ladies swept out of church immediately after the Gospel was read.[531] Parliament was opened in the usual manner with the performance of Mass, but the Queen did not appear until it was over; and then her procession was preceded by a choir which sang hymns in English. When the Abbot of Westminster met her in ecclesiastical procession with the usual candles sputtering in the hands of his clergy, the Queen shouted, "Away with these torches, we have light enough."[532]
She was crowned on January 15th, 1559; but whether with all the customary ceremonies, it is impossible to say; it is most likely that she did not communicate.[533] The Bishops swore fealty in the usual way, but were chary of taking any official part in the coronation of one so plainly a heretic. Later in the day, Dr. Cox, who had been King Edward's tutor, and was one of the returned refugees, preached before the Queen. As early as Dec. 14th (1558) the Spanish Ambassador could report that the Queen "is every day standing up against religion (Romanism) more openly," and that "all the heretics who had escaped are beginning to flock back again from Germany."[534]
When Convocation met it became manifest that the clergy would not help the Government in the proposed changes. They declared in favour of transubstantiation and of the sacrifice of the Mass, and against the royal supremacy. The Reformation, it was seen, must be carried through by the civil power exclusively; and it was somewhat difficult to forecast what Parliament would consent to do.
What was actually done is still matter of debate, but it seems probable that the Government presented at least three Bills. The first was withdrawn; the second was wrecked by the Queen withholding her Royal Assent; the third resulted in the Act of Supremacy and in the Act of Uniformity. It is most likely that the first and second Bills, which did not become law, included in one proposed Act of legislation the proposals of the Government about the Queen's Supremacy and about Uniformity of Public Worship.[535] The first was introduced into the House of Commons on Feb. 9th (1559), was discussed there Feb. 13th to 16th, and then withdrawn. A "new" Bill "for the supremacy annexed to the Crown" was introduced in the Commons on Feb. 21st, passed the third reading on the 25th, and was sent to the Lords on the 27th.[536]
The majority in the House of Commons was Protestant;[537] but the Marian Bishops had great influence in the House of Lords, and it was there that the Government proposals met with strong opposition. Dr. Jewel describes the situation in a letter to Peter Martyr (March 20th):
"The bishops are a great hindrance to us; for being, as you know, among the nobility and leading men in the Upper House, and having none there on our side to expose their artifices and confute their falsehoods, they reign as sole monarchs in the midst of ignorant and weak men, and easily overreach our little party, either by their numbers or their reputation for learning. The Queen, meanwhile, though she openly favours our cause, yet is wonderfully afraid of allowing any innovations."[538]
The Bill (Bill No. 2--the "new" Bill), which had passed the Commons on the 25th, was read for the first time in the Lords on the 28th, passed the second reading on March 13th, and was referred to a Committee consisting of the Duke of Norfolk, the Bishops of Exeter and Carlisle, and Lords Winchester, Westmoreland, Shrewsbury, Rutland, Sussex, Pembroke, Montagu, Clinton, Morley, Rich, Willoughby, and North. They evidently made such alterations on the Bill as to make that part of it at least which enforced a radical change in public worship useless for the purpose of the Government. The clearest account of what the Lords did is contained in a letter of a person who signs himself "Il Schifanoya," which is preserved in the State Archives in Mantua.[539] He says:
"Parliament, which ought to have ended last Saturday, was prolonged till next Wednesday in Passion Week, and according to report they will return a week after Easter (March 26, 1559); which report I believe, because of the three principal articles the first alone passed, viz. to give the supremacy of the Anglican Church to the Queen ... notwithstanding the opposition of the bishops, and of the chief lords and barons of this kingdom; but the Earls of Arundel and Derby, who are very good Christians, absented themselves from indisposition, feigned, as some think, to avoid consulting about such ruin of this realm.
"The Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of Shrewsbury, Viscount Montague and Lord Hastings did not fail in their duty, like true soldiers of Christ, to resist the Commons, whom they compelled to modify a book passed by the Commons forbidding the Mass to be said or the Communion to be administered (ne se communicassero) except at the table in the manner of Edward VI.; nor were the Divine offices to be performed in church; priests likewise being allowed to marry, and the Christian religion and the Sacraments being absolutely abolished; adding thereto many extraordinary penalties against delinquents. By a majority of votes they have decided that the aforesaid things shall be expunged from the book, and that the Masses, Sacraments, and the rest of the Divine offices shall be performed as hitherto.... The members of the Lower House, seeing that the Lords passed this article of the Queen's supremacy of the Church, but not as the Commons drew it up,--the Lords cancelling the aforesaid clauses and modifying some others,--grew angry, and would consent to nothing, but are in very great controversy."[540]
The Lords, induced by the Marian Bishops, had wrecked the Government's plan for an alteration of religion.
The Queen then intervened. She refused her assent to the Bill, on the dexterous pretext that she had doubts about the title which it proposed to confer upon her--Supreme Head of the Church.[541] She knew that Romanists and Calvinists both disliked it, and she adroitly managed to make both parties think that she had yielded to the arguments which each had brought forward. The Spanish Ambassador took all the credit to himself; and Sandys was convinced that Elizabeth had been persuaded by Mr. Lever, who "had put a scruple into the Queen's head that she would not take the title of Supreme Head."[542]
The refusal of Royal Assent enabled the Government to start afresh. They no longer attempted to put everything in one Bill. A new Act of Supremacy,[543] in which the Queen was declared to be "the only supreme governor of this realm ... as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes as temporal," was introduced into the Commons on April 10th, and was read for a third time on the 13th. Brought into the Lords on April 14th, it was read for a second time on the 17th, and finally passed on April 29th. If the obnoxious title was omitted, all the drastic powers claimed by Henry VIII. were given to Elizabeth. The Elizabethan Act revived no less than nine of the Acts of Henry VIII.,[544] and among them the statute concerning doctors of civil law,[545] which contained these sentences: "Most royal majesty is and hath always been, by the Word of God, Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England, and hath full power and authority to correct, punish, and repress all manner of heresies ... and to exercise all other manner of jurisdiction commonly called ecclesiastical jurisdiction"; and his majesty is "the only and undoubted Supreme Head of the Church of England, and also of Ireland, to whom by Holy Scripture all authority and power is wholly given to hear and determine all manner of causes ecclesiastical." Thus the very title Supreme Head of the Church of England was revived and bestowed on Elizabeth by this Parliament of 1559. It may even be said that the ecclesiastical jurisdiction bestowed upon Elizabeth was more extensive than that given to her father, for schisms were added to the list of matters subject to the Queen's correction, and she was empowered to delegate her authority to commissioners--a provision which enabled her to exercise her supreme governorship in a way to be felt in every corner of the land.[546] This Act of Supremacy revived an Act of King Edward VI., enjoining that the communion should be given in both "kinds," and declared that the revived Act should take effect from the last day of Parliament.[547] It contained an interesting proviso that nothing should be judged to be heresy which was not condemned by canonical Scripture, or by the first four General Councils "or any of them."[548]
The same Parliament, after briefer debate (April 18th to 28th), passed an Act of Uniformity which took an interesting form.[549] The Act began by declaring that at the death of King Edward VI. there "remained one uniform order of common service and prayer, and of the administration of sacraments, rites, and ceremonies in the Church of England, which was set forth in one Book, entitled The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and other Rites and Ceremonies in the Church of England." This Book had been authorised by Act of Parliament held in the fifth and sixth years of King Edward VI., and this Act had been repealed by an Act of Parliament in the first year of the reign of Queen Mary "to the great decay of the due honour of God, and discomfort of the professors of the truth of Christ's religion." This Act of Queen Mary was solemnly repealed, and the Act of King Edward VI., with some trifling alterations, was restored. In consequence, "all and singular ministers in any cathedral or parish church" were ordered "to say and use the Matins, Evensong, celebration of the Lord's Supper, and administration of each of the sacraments, and all their common and open prayer, in such order and form as is mentioned in the said Book, so authorised by Parliament in the said fifth and sixth years of the reign of King Edward VI., with one alteration or addition of certain lessons to be used on every Sunday in the year, and the form of the Litany altered and corrected, and two sentences only added in the delivery of the sacrament to the communicants, and none other or otherwise." This meant that while there might be the fullest freedom of thought in the country and a good deal of liberty of expression, there was to be no freedom of public worship. All Englishmen, of whatever creed, were to be compelled by law to join in one common public worship according to the ritual prescribed. The Act of Parliament which compelled them to this had no specific Book of Common Prayer annexed to it and incorporated in it. It simply replaced on the Statute Book the Act of King Edward VI., and with it the Second Prayer-Book of King Edward, which with its rubrics had been "annexed and joined" to that Act[550]--certain specified alterations in the Book being notified in the Elizabethan Act.
The history of the Elizabethan Prayer-Book is confessedly obscure. If an important paper called the Device,[551] probably drafted by Cecil, embodied the intentions of the Government, their procedure may be guessed with some probability. It enumerates carefully, after the manner of the great Elizabethan statesman, the dangers involved in any "alteration of religion," and shows how they can be met or averted. France and Scotland can be treated diplomatically. Rome may be left unheeded--it is far away, and its opposition will not go beyond "evil will and cursing." The important dangers were at home. They would come from two sides--from the Romanists backed by most of the higher clergy; and from the advanced Reformers, who would scoff at the alteration which is alone possible in the condition of the kingdom, and would call it a "cloaked papistry and a mingle-mangle." Yet both may be overcome by judicious firmness. The Romanists may be coerced by penal laws. The danger from the advanced Reformers may be got over by a carefully drafted Prayer-Book, made as far as possible to their liking, and enforced by such penalties as would minimise all objections. There is great hope that such penalties would "touch but few." "And better it were that they did suffer than Her Highness or Commonwealth should shake or be in danger." The Device suggested that a small committee of seven divines--all of them well-known Reformers, and most of them refugees--should prepare a Book "which, being approved by Her Majesty," might be laid before Parliament. It was evidently believed that the preparation of the Book would take some time, for suggestion is made that food, drink, wood, and coals should be provided for their sustenance and comfort. There is no direct evidence to show that the suggested committee met or was even appointed; but evidence has been brought forward to show that most of the theologians named were in London, and were in a position to meet together and consult during the period when such a Book would naturally be prepared.[552] The whole matter is shrouded in mystery, and secrecy was probably necessary in the circumstances. No one knew exactly what was to take place; but some change was universally expected. "There is a general expectation that all rites and ceremonies will shortly be reformed," said Richard Hilles, writing to Bullinger in the end of February (1559), "by our faithful citizens and other godly men in the afore-mentioned Parliament, either after the pattern which was lately in use in the time of King Edward the Sixth, or which is set forth by the Protestant Princes of Germany in the afore-mentioned Confession of Augsburg."[553]
The authorities kept their own counsel, and nothing definite was known to outsiders. A Book was presented to the Commons--The Book of Common Prayer and Ministration of the Sacraments--on Feb. 16th, at the time when the first draft of the Supremacy Bill was being discussed.[554] It must have been withdrawn along with that Bill. The second attempt at a Supremacy Act was probably accompanied with a Prayer-Book annexed to the Bill; and this Prayer-Book was vehemently opposed in the Lords, who struck out all the clauses relating to it.[555] What this Book of Common Prayer was, cannot be exactly known. Many competent liturgist scholars are inclined to believe that it was something more drastic than the Edwardine Prayer-Book of 1552, and that it was proposed to enforce it by penalties more drastic than those enacted by the Act of Uniformity which finally passed. They find the characteristic features of the Book in the well-known letter of Guest (Geste) to Cecil.[556] Such suggestions are mere conjectures. The Book may have been the Edwardine Prayer-Book of 1552.
The Government had made slow progress with their proposed "alteration of religion," and the Protestant party were chafing at the delay. Easter was approaching, and its nearness made them more impatient. Canon law required everyone to communicate on Easter Day, which in 1559 fell on the 26th of March, and by a long established custom the laity of England had gone to the Lord's Table on that one day of the year. Men were asking whether it was possible that a whole year was to elapse before they could partake of the communion in a Protestant fashion. The House of Commons was full of this Protestant sentiment. The reactionary proceedings in the House of Lords urged them to some protest.[557] A Bill was introduced into the Lower House declaring that "no person shall be punished for now using the religion used in King Edward's last year." It was read twice and engrossed in one day (March 15th), and was read a third time and passed on March 18th.[558] It does not appear to have been before the Lords; but it was acted on in a curious way. A proclamation, dated March 22nd, declares that the Queen, "with the assent of Lords and Commons," in the "present last session," has revived the Act of King Edward VI. touching the reception of the Communion in both "kinds," and explains that the Act cannot be ready for Easter. It proceeds: "And because the time of Easter is so at hand, and that great numbers, not only of the noblemen and gentry, but also of the common people of this realm, be certainly persuaded in conscience in such sort as they cannot be induced in any wise to communicate or receive the said holy Sacrament but under both kinds, according to the first institution, and to the common use both of the Apostles and of the Primitive Church ... it is thought necessary to Her Majesty, by the advice of sundry of her nobility and commons lately assembled in Parliament," to declare that the statute of Edward is in force, and all and sundry are commanded to observe the provisions of the statute.[559] What is more, the Queen acted upon her proclamation. The well-informed "Schifanoya," writing on March 28th, says that the Government "during this interval" (i.e. between March 22nd and March 28th) had ordered and printed a proclamation for every one to take the communion in both "kinds" (sub utraque specie). He goes on to say that on Easter Day "Her Majesty appeared in chapel, where Mass was sung in English, according to the use of her brother, King Edward, and the communion received in both 'kinds,' kneeling." The chaplain wore nothing "but the mere surplice" (la semplice cotta).[560] The news went the round of Europe. Elizabeth had at last declared herself unmistakably on the Protestant side.
Easter had come and gone, and the religious question had not received final settlement. The authorities felt that something must be done to counteract the speeches of the Romanist partisans in the Lords.[561] So, while Parliament was sitting, a conference was arranged between Roman Catholic and Protestant divines. It seems to have been welcomed by both parties. Count Feria, the Spanish Ambassador, declared that he had something to do with it. He was anxious that the disputation should be in Latin, that the arguments should be reduced to writing, and that each disputant should sign his paper. He was overruled so far as the language was concerned. The authorities meant that the laity should hear and understand. The three questions debated were:--Whether a "particular Church can change rites and ceremonies; Whether the services of public worship must be conducted in Latin; Whether the Mass is a propitiatory sacrifice." The conference was held at Westminster on March 31st, in presence of the Privy Council, the Lords and Commons, and the "multitude." Great expectations were cherished by both parties in anticipation, and when the Romanist divines withdrew on points of procedure, their cause suffered in the popular estimation. Two of the Bishops were sent to the Tower "for open contempt and contumacy"; and others seem to have been threatened.[562]
Parliament reassembled after the Easter recess and passed the Act of Supremacy in its third form, and the Act of Uniformity, which re-enacted, as has been said, the revised Prayer-Book--that is, the Second Book of King Edward VI. with the distinctly specified alterations. The most important of these changes were the two sentences added to the words to be used by the officiating minister when giving the communion. The clauses had been in the First Prayer-Book of Edward VI.
While in the Second Prayer-Book of King Edward the officiating minister was commanded to say while giving the Bread:
"Take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on Him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving,"
and while giving the Cup, to say:
"Drink this in remembrance that Christ's blood was shed for thee, and be thankful;"
the words were altered in the Elizabethan book to:
"The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on Him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving;"
"The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. Drink this in remembrance that Christ's Blood was shed for thee, and be thankful."
The additions in no way detracted from the Evangelical doctrine of the Sacrament. They rather brought the underlying thought, into greater harmony with the doctrine of the Reformed Churches. But they have had the effect of enabling men who hold different views about the nature of the rite to join in its common use.
When the Act of Uniformity was passed by Parliament, the advanced Reformers, who had chafed at what appeared to them to be a long delay, were contented. They, one and all, believed that the Church of England had been restored to what it had been during the last year of the reign of Edward VI.; and this was the end for which they had been striving, the goal placed before them by their friend and adviser, Henry Bullinger of Zurich.[563] Their letters are full of jubilation.[564]
Yet there were some things about this Elizabethan settlement which, if interpreted as they have been by some ecclesiastical historians, make it very difficult to understand the contentment of such men as Grindal, Jewel, and Sandys. "Of what was done in the matter of ornaments," says Professor Maitland, "by statute, by the rubrics of the Book, and by Injunctions that the Queen promptly issued, it would be impossible to speak fairly without lengthy quotation of documents, the import of which became in the nineteenth century a theme of prolonged and inconclusive disputation."[565] All that can be attempted here is to mention the principal documents involved in the later controversy, and to show how they were interpreted in the life and conduct of contemporaries.
The Act of Uniformity had restored, with some trifling differences clearly and definitely stated, Edward VI.'s Prayer-Book of 1552, and therefore its rubrics.[566] It had at the same time contained a proviso saying that the ornaments sanctioned by the authority of Parliament in the second year of Edward VI. were "to be retained and be in use" "until further order shall therein be taken."
Men like Grindal and Jewel took no exception to this proviso, which they certainly would have done had they believed that it ordained the actual use in time of public worship, of the ornaments used in the second year of King Edward. The interpretation they gave to the proviso is seen from a letter from Sandys to Parker (afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury), written two days after the Act of Uniformity had passed the Lords. He says:
"The last book of service has gone through with a proviso to retain the ornaments which were used in the first and second year of King Edward, until it please the Queen to take other order for them. Our gloss upon the text is that we shall not be enforced to use them, but that others in the meantime shall not convey them away, but that they may remain for the Queen."[567]
Sandys and others understood the proviso to mean that recalcitrant clergy like the Warden of Manchester, who carried his consecrated vestments to Ireland, were not to make off with the ornaments, and that churchwardens or patrons were not to confiscate them for their private use. They were property belonging to the Queen, and to be retained until her Majesty's pleasure was known. The whole history of the visitations goes to prove that Sandys' interpretation of the proviso was that of its framers.
When the Prayer-Book was actually printed it was found to contain some differences from the Edwardine Book of 1552 besides those mentioned in the Act as the only ones to be admitted; and early editions have not always the same changes. But the one thing of importance was a rubric which, on what seems to be the only possible interpretation, enjoins the use in public worship of the ornaments (i.e. the vestments) in use in the second year of King Edward.[568] How this rubric got into the Prayer-Book it is impossible to say. It certainly was not enacted by the Queen "with assent of Lords and Commons." We have no proof that it was issued by the Privy Council.[569] The use and wont of the Church of England during the period of the Elizabethan settlement was as if this rubric had never existed. It is directly contradicted by the thirtieth Injunction issued for the Royal Visitation of 1559.[570] It was not merely contemptuously ignored by the Elizabethan Bishops; they compelled their clergy, if compulsion was needed, to act in defiance of it.
Contemporary sources abundantly testify that in the earlier years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth the English clergy in their ministrations scarcely ever wore any ecclesiastical garment but the surplice; and sometimes not even that. The Advertisements[571] of 1566, which almost all contemporary notices speak of as prescribing what had been enjoined in the Injunctions of 1559, were drafted for the purpose of coercing clergymen who were in the habit of refusing to wear even the surplice, and they enjoined the surplice only, and the cope[572] in cathedrals. In the Visitation carried out in accordance with the directions in the Injunctions, a clean sweep was made of almost all the ornaments which were not merely permitted but ordered in the proviso of the Act of Uniformity and the Rubric of 1559 on the ordinary ritualistic interpretation of these clauses. The visitors proceeded on a uniform plan, and what we hear was done in one place may be inferred as the common practice. The Spanish Ambassador (July or August 1559) wrote to his master: "They are now carrying out the law of Parliament respecting religion with great rigour, and have appointed six visitors.... They have just taken the crosses, images, and altars from St. Paul's and all the other London churches."[573] A citizen of London noted in his diary: "The time before Bartholomew tide and after, were all the roods and Maries and Johns, and many other of the church goods, both copes, crosses, censers, altar cloth, rood cloths, books, banners, banner stays, wainscot and much other gear about London, burnt in Smithfield."[574] What took place in London was done in the provinces. At Grantham, "the vestments, copes, albs, tunicles, and all other such baggages were defaced and openly sold by the general consent of the whole corporation, and the money employed in setting up desks in the church, and making of a decent communion table, and the remnant to the poor."[575]
It is true that we find complaints on the part of men like Jewel of ritualistic practices which they do not like; but these in almost every case refer to worship in the royal chapel. The services there were well known, and both friends and foes of the Reformation seemed to take it for granted that what was the fashion in the royal chapel would soon extend to the rest of the realm.[576] Historians have usually attributed the presence of crosses, vestments, lights on the altar, to the desire of the Queen to conciliate her Romanist subjects, or to stand well with the great Roman Catholic Powers of Europe. It is quite likely that the Queen had this thought in her mind. Elizabeth was a thrifty lady, and liked to bring down many birds with the one stone. But the one abiding thought in the mind of the astute Queen was to stand well with the Lutherans, and to be able, when threatened with papal excommunication, to take shelter under the ægis of the Peace of Augsburg.
When the Government had secured the passing of the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, they were in a position to deal with the recalcitrant clergy. Eleven of the English Episcopal Sees had been vacant at the accession of Elizabeth, among them that of the Primate; for Cardinal Pole had died a few hours after Mary, In the summer and autumn of 1559 the sixteen Bishops were called upon to sign the Oath of Supremacy, in which the papal rule over the Church of England was abjured, and the Queen declared to be the Supreme Governor of the Church. All the Bishops, more or less definitely, refused to take the oath; although three were at first doubtful. They were deprived, and the English Church was practically without Bishops.[577] Some of the deprived Bishops of King Edward's time survived, and they were restored. Then came discussion about the manner of appointing new ones. Some would have preferred a simple royal nomination, as in Edward's time; but in the end it was resolved that the appointment should be nominally in the hands of the Deans and Chapters according to mediæval rule, with the proviso, however, that the royal permission to elect had first to be given, and that the person named in the "leave to elect" should be chosen. Then the question of consecration gave rise to some difficulties; but these were got over in ways which were deemed to be sufficient. Matthew Parker, after more than one refusal, was nominated and consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury. Lists of clerical persons suitable for promotion were prepared for the Queen,[578] and the other Sees were gradually filled. The Elizabethan episcopate, with the exception of the few Edwardine Bishops, was an entirely new creation. A large number of the Deans and members of the Cathedral Chapters had also refused to sign the Oath of Supremacy; they were deprived, and others who were on the lists were appointed in their place. The inferior clergy proved to be much more amenable, and only about two hundred were in the end deprived. The others all accepted the "alteration of religion"; and the change was brought about quietly and without the riotings which had accompanied the alterations made in the days of Edward, or the wholesale deprivations which had followed upon those made by Queen Mary--when almost one-third of the beneficed clergy of the Church of England had been removed from their benefices. A similar passive acquiescence was seen in the introduction of the new Book of Common Prayer, and in the fulfilment of the various orders for the removal of images, etc. The great altars and crucifixes were taken away, and the pictures covered with whitewash, without any disturbances to speak of.
The comparative ease with which the "alteration of religion" was effected was no doubt largely due to the increased Protestant feeling of the country; but the tact and forbearance of those who were appointed to see the changes carried out counted for something; and perhaps the acquiescence of the Roman Catholics was due to the fact that they had no great leader, that they did not expect the Elizabethan settlement to last long, and that they waited in expectation that one or other of the two Romanist Powers, France or Spain, would interfere in their behalf. The religious revolution in Scotland in 1560 saved the Elizabethan settlement for the time; and Philip of Spain trifled away his opportunities until a united England overthrew his Armada, which came thirty years too late.
The change was given effect to by a Royal Visitation. England was divided into six districts, and lists of visitors were drawn up which included the Lords Lieutenants of the counties, the chief men of the districts, and some lawyers and clergymen known to be well affected to the Reformation. They had to assist them a set of Injunctions, modelled largely, not entirely, on those of Edward VI., drafted and issued by royal command.[579] The members of the clergy were dealt with very patiently, and explanations, public and private, were given of the Act of Supremacy which made it easier for them to accept it. The Elizabethan Bishops were also evidently warned to deal tenderly with stubborn parish clergymen; they would have been less patient with them if left to themselves. One, Bishop Best, Bishop of Carlisle, is found writing to Cecil about his clergy, that "the priests are wicked impes of Antichrist," for the most part very ignorant and stubborn; another, Pilkington, the Bishop of Durham, in describing the disordered state of his diocese, declared that "like St. Paul, he has to fight with beasts at Ephesus"; and a third, Scory, Bishop of Winchester, wrote that he was much hindered by justices of the peace who were Roman Catholics, and that when certain priests who had refused to take the oath were driven out of Exeter and elsewhere, they were received and feasted in the streets with torch-lights.[580]
Elizabeth's second Parliament was very much more Protestant than the first, and insisted that the Oath of Supremacy must be taken by all the members of the House of Commons, by all lawyers, and by all schoolmasters. The Convocation of 1563 proved that the clergy desired to go much further in the path of Reformation than the Queen thought desirable.
They clearly wished for some doctrinal standard, and Archbishop Parker had prepared and laid before Convocation a revised edition of the Forty-two Articles which had defined the theology of the Church of England in the last year of King Edward VI.[581] The way had been prepared for the issue of some authoritative exposition of the doctrinal position of the Elizabethan Church by the Declaration of the Principal Articles of Religion--a series of eleven articles framed by the Bishops and published in 1561 (March), which repudiates strongly the Romanist doctrines of the Papacy, private Masses, and the propitiatory sacrifice in the Holy Supper. The Spanish Ambassador, who had heard of the meetings of the Bishops for this purpose, imagined that they were preparing articles to be presented to the Council of Trent on behalf of the Church of England.[582] The Archbishop's draft was revised by Convocation, and was "diligently read and sifted" by the Queen herself before she gave her consent to the authoritative publication of the Articles.
These Thirty-nine Articles expressed the doctrine of the Reformed or Calvinist as distinguished from the Evangelical or Lutheran form of Protestant doctrine, and the distinction lay mainly in the views which the respective Confessions of the two Churches held about the Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Holy Supper. By this time (1562) Zwinglianism, as a doctrinal system, not as an ecclesiastical policy, had disappeared;[583] and the three theories of the Presence of Christ in the Sacrament had all to do with the Presence of the Body of Christ and not with a spiritual Presence simply. The Romanist theory, transubstantiation, was based on the mediæval conception of a substance existing apart from all accidents of smell, shape, colour, etc., and declared that the "substance" of the Bread and of the Wine was changed into the "substance" of the Body and Blood of Christ, while the accidents or qualities remained the same--the change being miraculously effected by the priest in consecrating the communion elements. The Lutheran explanation was based upon a mediæval theory also--on that of the ubiquity or natural omnipresence of the "glorified" Body of Christ. The Body of Christ, in virtue of its ubiquity, was present everywhere, in chairs, tables, stones flung through the air (to use Luther's illustrations), and therefore in the Bread and in the Wine as everywhere else. This ordinary presence became an efficacious sacramental Presence owing to the promise of God. Calvin had discarded both mediæval theories, and started by asking what was meant by substance and what by presence; he answered that the substance of anything is its power (vis), and its presence is the immediate application of its power. Thus the substance of the crucified Body of Christ is its power, and the Presence of the crucified Body of Christ is the immediate application of its power; and the guarantee of the application of the power is the promise of God received by the believing communicant. By discarding the Lutheran thought that the substance of the Body of Christ is something extended in space, and accepting the thought that the main thing in substance is power, Calvin was able to think of the substance of the Body of Christ in a way somewhat similar to the mediæval conception of "substance without accidents," and was able to show that the Presence of Christ's Body in the sacrament could be accepted and understood without the priestly miracle, which he and all Protestants rejected. Hence it came to pass that Calvin could teach the Real Presence of Christ's Body in the Sacrament of the Supper without having recourse to the mediæval doctrine of "ubiquity," which was the basis of the Lutheran theory. They both (Calvin and Luther) insisted on the Presence of the Body of Christ; but the one (Luther) needed the theory of "ubiquity" to explain the Presence, while the other (Calvin) did not need it. But as both discarded the priestly miracle while insisting on the Presence of the Body, the two doctrines might be stated in almost the same words, provided all mention of "ubiquity" was omitted. Calvin could and did sign the Augsburg Confession; but he did not read into it what a Lutheran would have done, the theory of "ubiquity"; and a Calvinist statement of the doctrine, provided only "ubiquity" was not denied, might be accepted by a Lutheran as not differing greatly from his own. Bishop Jewel asserts again and again in his correspondence, that the Elizabethan divines did not believe in the theory of "ubiquity,"[584] and many of them probably desired to say so in their articles of religion. Hence in the first draft of the Thirty-nine Articles presented to Convocation by Archbishop Parker, Article XXVIII. contained a strong repudiation of the doctrine of "ubiquity," which, if retained, would have made the Articles of the Church of England more anti-Lutheran than even the second Helvetic Confession. The clause was struck out in Convocation, probably because it was thought to be needlessly offensive to the German Protestants.[585] The Queen, however, was not satisfied with what her divines had done, and two important interferences with the Articles as they came from Convocation are attributed to her. The first was the addition of the words: and authoritie in controversies of fayth, in Article XX., which deals with the authority possessed by the Church. The second was the complete suppression for the time being of Article XXIX., which is entitled, Of the wicked which do not eate the Body of Christe in the use of the Lordes Supper, and is expressed in terms which most Lutherans would have been loath to use.
The Queen's action was probably due to political reasons. It was important in international politics for a Protestant Queen not yet securely seated on her throne to shelter herself under the shield which a profession of Lutheranism would give. The German Lutherans had won legal recognition within the Empire at the Diet of Augsburg in 1555; the votes of two Lutheran Electors had helped to place the Emperor on his throne; and the Pope dared not excommunicate Lutheran Princes save at the risk of offending the Emperor and invalidating all his acts. This had been somewhat sternly pointed out to him when he first threatened to excommunicate Elizabeth, and the Queen knew all the difficulties of the papal position. One has only to read an account of a long conversation with her, reported by the Spanish Ambassador to his master (April 29th, 1559), to see what use the "wise Queen with the eyes that could flash"[586] made of the situation. The Ambassador had not obscurely threatened her with a papal Bull declaring her a bastard and a heretic, and had brought home its effects by citing the case of the King of Navarre, whose kingdom was taken from him by Ferdinand of Spain acting as the Pope's agent, and Elizabeth had played with him in her usual way. She had remarked casually "that she wished the Augsburg Confession to be maintained in her realm, whereat," says the Count de Feria, "I was much surprised, and found fault with it all I could, adducing the arguments I thought might dissuade her from it. She then told me it would not be the Augsburg Confession, but something else like it, and that she differed very little from us, as she believed that God was in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and only dissented from three or four things in the Mass. After this she told me that she did not wish to argue about religious matters."[587] She did not need to argue; the hint had been enough for the baffled Ambassador.
Article XXIX. was suppressed, and only Thirty-eight Articles were acknowledged publicly. The papal Bull of excommunication was delayed until 1570, when its publication could harm no one but Elizabeth's own Romanist subjects, and the dangerous period was tided over safely. When it came at last, the Queen was not anathematised in terms which could apply to Lutherans, but because she personally acknowledged and observed "the impious constitutions and atrocious mysteries of Calvin," and had commanded that they should be observed by her subjects.[588] Then, when the need for politic suppression was past, Article XXIX. was published, and the Thirty-nine Articles became the recognised doctrinal standard of the Church of England (1571).
What the Queen's own doctrinal beliefs were no one can tell; and she herself gave the most contrary descriptions when it suited her policy. The disappearance and reappearance of crosses and candles on the altar of the royal chapel were due as much to the wish to keep in touch with the Lutherans as to any desire to conciliate the Queen's Romanist subjects.
The Convocation of 1563 had other important matters before it. Its proceedings showed that the new Elizabethan clergy contained a large number who were in favour of some drastic changes in the Prayer-Book and in the Act of Uniformity. Many of them had become acquainted with and had come to like the simplicity of the Swiss worship, thoroughly purified from what they called "the dregs of Popery"; and others envied the Scots, "who," wrote Parkhurst to Bullinger (Aug. 23rd, 1559), "have made greater progress in true religion in a few months than we have done in many years."[589]
Such men were dissatisfied with much in the Prayer-Book, or rather in its rubrics, and brought forward proposals for simplifying the worship, which received a large measure of support. It was thought that all organs should be done away with; that the ceremony of "crossing" in baptism should be omitted; that all festival days save the Sundays and the "principal feasts of the Church" should be abolished;--this proposal was lost by a majority of one in the Lower House. Another motion, leaving it to the option of communicants to receive the Holy Supper either standing, sitting, or kneeling, as it pleased them, was lost by a very small majority. Many of the Bishops themselves were in favour of simplifying the rites of the Church; and five Deans and twelve Archdeacons petitioned against the use of the surplice. The movement was so strong that Convocation, if left to itself, would probably have purified the Church in the Puritan sense of the word. But the Queen had all the Tudor liking for a stately ceremonial, and she had political reasons, national and international, to prevent her allowing any drastic changes. She was bent on welding her nation together into one, and she had to capture for her Church the large mass of people who were either neutral or who had leanings to Romanism, or at least to the old mediæval service. The Council of Trent was sitting; Papal excommunication was always threatened, and, as above explained, Lutheran protection and sympathy were useful. The ceremonies were retained, the crucifixes and lights on the altars were paraded in the chapel royal to show the Lutheran sympathies of the Queen and of the Church of England. The Reforming Bishops, with many an inward qualm,[590] had to give way; and gradually, as the Queen had hoped, a strong Conservative instinct gathered round the Prayer-Book and its rubrics. The Convocation of 1563 witnessed the last determined attempt to propose any substantial alteration in the public worship of the English people.
At the same Convocation a good deal of time was spent upon a proposed Book of Discipline, or an authoritative statement of the English canon law. It is probable that its contents are to be found in certain "Articles for government and order in the Church, exhibited to be permitted by authority; but not allowed," which are printed by Strype[591] from Archbishop Parker's MSS. Such a book would have required parliamentary authority, and the Parliament of 1563 was too much occupied with the vanishing protection of Spain and with the threatening aspect of France and Scotland. The marriage of the Queen of Scots with Darnley had given additional weight to her claims on the English throne; and it was feared that the English Romanists might rise in support of the legitimate heir. Parliament almost in a panic passed severe laws against all recusants, and increased the penalties against all who refused the oath of allegiance or who spoke in support of the authority of the Bishop of Rome. The discipline of the Church was left to be regulated by the old statute of Henry VIII., which declared that as much of the mediæval canon law as was not at variance with the Scriptures and the Acts of the English Parliament was to form the basis of law for the ecclesiastical courts. This gave the Bishop's officials who presided over the ecclesiastical courts a very free hand; and under their manipulation there was soon very little left of the canon law--less, in fact, than in the ecclesiastical courts of any other Protestant Churches. For these officials were lawyers trained in civil law and imbued with its principles, and predisposed to apply them whenever it was possible to do so.
The formulation of the Thirty-nine Articles in the Convocation of 1563 may be taken as marking the time when the "alteration of religion" was completed. The result, arrived at during a period of exceptional storm and strain, has had the qualities of endurance, and the Church of England is at present what the Queen made it. It was the Royal Supremacy which secured for High Church Anglicans the position they have to-day. The chief features of the settlement of religion were:
1. The complete repudiation within the realm and Church of England of the authority of the Bishop of Rome. All the clergy and everyone holding office under the Crown had to swear to this repudiation. If they refused, or were recusants in the language of the day, they lost their offices and benefices; if they persisted in their refusal, they were liable to forfeit all their personal property; if they declined to take the oath for a third time, they could be proclaimed traitors, and were liable to the hideous punishments which the age inflicted for that crime. But Elizabeth, with all her sternness, was never cruel, and no religious revolution was effected with less bloodshed.
2. The sovereign was made the supreme Governor of the Church of England; and that the title differed in name only from that assumed by Henry VIII. was made plain in the following ways:
(a) Convocation was stript of all independent legislative action, and its power to make ecclesiastical laws and regulations was placed under strict royal control.[592]
(b) Appeals from all ecclesiastical courts, which were themselves actually, if not nominally, under the presidency of civil lawyers, could be made to royal delegates who might be laymen; and these delegates were given very full powers, and could inflict civil punishments in a way which had not been permitted to the old mediæval ecclesiastical courts. These powers raised a grave constitutional question in the following reigns. The royal delegates became a Court of High Commission, which may have been modelled on the Consistories of the German Princes, and had somewhat the same powers.
3. One uniform ritual of public worship was prescribed for all Englishmen in the Book of Common Prayer with its rubrics, enforced by the Act of Uniformity. No liberty of worship was permitted. Any clergyman who deviated from this prescribed form of worship was liable to be treated as a criminal, and so also were all those who abetted him. No one could, under penalties, seek to avoid this public worship. Every subject was bound to attend church on Sunday, and to bide the prayers and the preaching, or else forfeit the sum of twelvepence to the poor. Obstinate recusants or nonconformists might be excommunicated, and all excommunicated persons were liable to imprisonment.
4. Although it was said, and was largely true, that there was freedom of opinion, still obstinate heretics were liable to be held guilty of a capital offence. On the other hand, the Bishops had little power to force heretics to stand a trial, and, unless Parliament or Convocation ordered it otherwise, only the wilder sectaries were in any danger.[593]
Protestant England grew stronger year by year. The debased copper and brass coinage was replaced gradually by honest gold and silver.[594] Manufactures were encouraged. Merchant adventurers, hiring the Queen's ships, took an increasing share in the world-trade with Elizabeth as a partner.[595] Persecuted Huguenots and Flemings settled in great numbers in the country, and brought with them their thrift and knowledge of mechanical trades to enrich the land of their adoption;[596] and the oppressed Protestants of France and of the Low Countries learnt that there was a land beyond the sea ruled by a "wise young Queen" which might be their city of refuge, and which was ready to aid them, if not openly, at least stealthily. England, formerly unarmed, became supplied "more abundantly than any other country with arms, munitions, and artillery." Sound money, enlarged trade, growing wealth, and an increasing sense of security, were excellent allies to the cause of the Protestant Religion.
So long as Mary of Scotland was in Holyrood and able to command the sympathy, if not the allegiance, of the English Roman Catholics, the throne of Elizabeth was never perfectly secure; but the danger from Scotland was minimised by the jealousy between Catherine de' Medici and her daughter-in-law, and the Scottish Protestant Lords could always be secretly helped. When Philip II. of Spain, in his slow, hesitating way, which made him always miss the turn of the tide, at length resolved to aid Mary to crush her rebels at home and to prosecute her claims on England, his interference had no further consequences than to afford Elizabeth an honourable pretext for giving effectual assistance in the conflict which drove Mary from her throne, and made Scotland completely and permanently Protestant.[597]
Book V
ANABAPTISM AND SOCINIANISM
I. REVIVAL OF MEDIÆVAL ANTI-ECCLESIASTICAL MOVEMENTS
The revolt of Luther was the occasion for the appearance--the outbreak, it might be called--of a large amount of irregular independent thinking upon religion and theology which had expressed itself sporadically during the whole course of the Middle Ages. The great difference between the thinkers and their intellectual ancestors who were at war with the mediæval Church life and doctrine, did not consist in the expression of anything essentially new, but in the fact that the Renaissance had introduced a profound contempt for the intellectual structure of ecclesiastical dogma, and that the whole of the sixteenth century was instinct with the feeling of individuality and the pride of personal existence. The old thoughts were less careful to accommodate themselves to the recognised modes of theological statement, they took bolder forms of expression, presented sharper outlines, and appeared in more definite statements.
Part of this thinking scarcely belongs to ecclesiastical history at all. It never became the intellectual basis of an institution; it neither stirred nor moulded the lives of masses of men. The leaders of thought remained solitary thinkers, surrounded by a loose fringe of followers. But as there is always something immortal in the forcible expression of human thought, their opinions have not died altogether, but have affected powerfully all the various branches of the Christian Church at different periods and in divers ways. The old conceptions, somewhat disguised, perhaps, but still the same, reappear in most systems of speculative theology. It therefore demands a brief notice.
The greater portion of this intellectual effervescence, however, did not share the same fate. Menno Simons, aided, no doubt, by the winnowing fan of persecution, was able to introduce order into the wild fermenting elements of Anabaptism, and to form the Baptist Church which has had such an honourable history in Europe and America. Fausto Sozzini did the same for the heterogeneous mass of anti-Trinitarian thinking, and out of the confusion brought the orderly unity of an institutional life.
This great mass of crude independent thought may be roughly classified as Mystic, or perhaps Pantheist Mystic, Anabaptist, and anti-Trinitarian; but the division, so far as the earlier thinkers go, is very artificial. The groups continually overlap; many of the leaders of thought might be placed in two or in all three of these divisions. What characterised them all was that they had little sense of historical continuity, cared nothing for it, and so broke with the past completely; that they despaired of seeing any good in the historical Church, and believed that it must be ended, as it was impossible to mend it; and that they all possessed a strong sense of individuality, believing the human soul to be imprisoned when it accepted the confinement of a common creed, institution, or form of service unless of the very simplest kind.
Pantheistic Mysticism was no new thing in Christianity. As early as the sixth century at least, schools of thought may be found which interpreted such doctrines as the Trinity and the Person of Christ in ways which led to what must be called Pantheism; and if such modes of dissolving Christian doctrines had not a continuous succession within the Christian Church, they were always appearing. They were generally accompanied with a theory of an "inner light" which claimed either to supersede the Scriptures as the Rule of Faith, or at least to interpret them. The Scriptures were the husk which might be thrown away when its kernel, discovered by the "inner light," was once revealed. The Schwenkfelds, Weigels, Giordano Brunos of the sixteenth century, who used what they called the "inner light" in somewhat the same way as the Council of Trent employed dogmatic tradition, had a long line of ancestry in the mediæval Church, and their appearance at the time of the Reformation was only the recrudescence of certain phases of mediæval thought. But, as has been said, such thinkers were never able, nor perhaps did they wish, to form their followers into a Church; and they belong much more to the history of philosophy than to an ecclesiastical narrative. They had no conception whatever of religion in the Reformation sense of the word. Their idea of faith was purely intellectual--something to be fed on metaphysics more or less refined.
By far the most numerous of those sixteenth century representatives of mediæval nonconformists were classed by contemporaries under the common name of Anabaptists or Katabaptists, because, from 1526 onwards, they all, or most of them, insisted on _re-_baptism as the sign of belonging to the brotherhood of believers. They were scattered over the greater part of Europe, from Sweden in the north to Venice in the south, from England in the west to Poland in the east. The Netherlands, Germany,--southern, north-western, and the Rhineland,--Switzerland, the Tyrol, Moravia, and Livonia were scenes of bloody persecution endured with heroic constancy. Their leaders flit across the pages of history, courageous, much-enduring men, to whom the world was nothing, whose eyes were fixed on the eternal throne of God, and who lived in the calm consciousness that in a few hours they might be fastened to the stake or called upon to endure more dreadful and more prolonged tortures,--men of every varying type of character, from the gentle and pious young Humanist Hans Denck to Jan Matthys the forerunner of the stern Camisard and Covenanter. No statement of doctrine can include the beliefs held in all their innumerable groups. Some maintained the distinctive doctrines of the mediæval Church (the special conceptions of a priestly hierarchy, and of the Sacraments being always excluded); others were Lutherans, Calvinists, or Zwinglians; some were Unitarians, and denied the usual doctrine of the Person of Christ;[598] a few must be classed among the Pantheists. All held some doctrine of an "inner light"; but while some sat very loose to the letter of Scripture, others insisted on the most literal reading and application of Biblical phraseology. They all united in maintaining that true Christians ought to live separate from the world (i.e. from those who were not rebaptized), in communities whose lives were to be modelled on the accounts given in the New Testament of the primitive Christians, and that the true Church had nothing whatever to do with the State.
Curiously enough, the leaders in the third group, the anti-Trinitarians, were almost all Italians.
The most outstanding man among them, distinguished alike by his learning, his pure moral life, a distinct vein of piety, and the calm courage with which he faced every danger to secure the propagation of his opinions, was the Spaniard Miguel Servede (Servetus),[599] who was burnt at Geneva in 1553. He was very much a man by himself. His whole line of thought separated him from the rest of the anti-Trinitarian group associated with the names of the Sozzini. He reached his position through a mystical Pantheism--a course of thought which one might have expected from a Spaniard. He made few or no disciples, and did not exert any permanent influence.
The other anti-Trinitarians of the first rank were all cultured Italians, whom the spirit of the Renaissance prompted to criticise and reconstruct theology as they found it. They were all men who had been driven to reject the Roman Church because of its corruptions and immoralities, and who had no conception of any other universal Christian society. Men of pure lives, pious after their own fashion, they never had any idea of what lay at the root of the Reformation thought of what real religion was. It never dawned upon them that the sum of Christianity is the God of Grace, manifest in Christ, accessible to every believing soul, and unwavering trust on man's part. Their interest in religion was almost exclusively intellectual. The Reformers had defined the Church as the fellowship of believers, and they had said that the marks of that fellowship were the preaching of the Word and the right use of the sacraments--the means through which God manifests Himself to men, and men manifest their faith in God. These men never apprehended this; the only idea which they seemed able to have of the Church was a school of definite and correct opinions. Compelled to flee from their native land, they naturally took refuge in Switzerland or in the Grisons. It is almost pathetic to see how they utterly failed to understand the men among whom they found themselves. Reformation to them was a criticism and reconstruction of theology; they were simply carrying the criticism a little further than their new neighbours. They never perceived the real gulf fixed between them and the adherents of the Reformation.
They were all highly educated and cultivated men--individual units from all parts of Italy. Camillo Renato, who proclaimed himself an Anabaptist, was a Sicilian. Gentili came from Calabria; Gribaldo from Padua; Bernardino Occhino, who in his later days joined the band, and the two Sozzini from Siena. Alciat was a Piedmontese. Blandrata (Biandrata), the most energetic member of the group save Fausto Sozzini, belonged to a noble family in Saluzzo which had long been noted for the protection it had afforded to poor people persecuted by the Church. They were physicians or lawyers; one, Gentili, was a schoolmaster.
The strong sense of individuality, which seems the birthright of every Italian, fostered by their life within their small city republics, had been accentuated by the Renaissance. The historical past of Italy, and its political and social condition in the sixteenth century, made it impossible for the impulse towards reform to take any other shape than that of individual action. The strength and the impetus which comes from the thought of fellow-man, fellow-believer, and which was so apparent in the Reformation movements beyond the Alps and in the Jesuit reaction, was entirely lacking among these Reformers in Italy. In that land the Empire had never regained its power lost under the great Popes, Gregory VII. and Innocent III. The Romish Church presented itself to all Italians as the only possible form under which a wide-spreading Christian Society could be organised. If men rejected it, personal Christian life alone remained. The Church dominated the masses unprepared by any such conception of ecclesiastical reform as influenced the people in Germany and Switzerland. Only men who had received some literary education were susceptible to the influences making for Reformation. They were always prevented by the unbroken power of the agencies of the Church from organising themselves publicly into congregations, and could only meet to exchange confidences privately and on rare occasions.[600] We hear of several such assemblies, which invariably took the form of conferences, in which the members discussed and communicated to each other the criticisms of the mediæval theology which solitary meditation had suggested to them. They were much more like debating societies than the beginnings of a Church. Thus we hear of one at Vincenza,[601] in 1546, where about forty friends met, among whom was Lelio Sozzini, where they debated such doctrines as the Satisfaction of Christ, the Trinity, etc., and expressed doubts about their truth. It was inevitable that such men could not hope to create a popular movement towards Reformation in their native land, and also that they should be compelled to seek safety beyond the bounds of Italy. They fled, one by one, across the Alps. In the Grisons and in Reformed Switzerland they found little communities of their countrymen who had sought shelter there, and their presence was always followed by dissensions and by difficulties with the native Protestants.
Their whole habits of life and thought were not of the kind calculated to produce a lasting Christian fellowship. Their theological opinions, which were not the outcome of a new and living Christian experience, but had been the result of an intellectual criticism of the mediæval theology, had little stability, and did not tend to produce unity. The execution of Servede and the jealousy which all the Reformed cantons of Switzerland manifested towards opinions in any way similar to those of the learned Spaniard, made life in Switzerland as unsafe as it had been in Italy. They migrated to Poland and Transylvania, attracted by the freedom of thought existing in both lands.
Poland, besides, had special attractions for refugees from Italy. The two countries had long been in intimate relationship. Italian architects had designed the stately buildings in Crakau and other Polish cities, and the commercial intercourse between the two countries was great. The independence and the privileges of the Polish nobles secured them from ecclesiastical interference, and both Calvinism and Lutheranism had found many adherents among the aristocracy. They, like the Roman patricians of the early centuries, gave the security of their halls to their co-religionists, and the heads of the Romanist Church chafed at their impotence to prevent the spread of opinions and usages which they deemed heretical. In Transylvania the absence of a strong central government permitted the same freedom to the expression of every variety of religious opinion.
The views held by the group of anti-Trinitarians were by no means the same. They reproduced in Poland the same medley of views we find existing in the end of the third century. Some were Sabellians, others Adoptianists, a few were Arians. Perhaps most of them believed in the miraculous birth of our Lord, and held as a consequence that He ought to be adored; but a strong minority, under the leadership of Francis Davidis, repudiated the miraculous birth, and refused to worship Christ (non-adorantes). For a time they seem to have lived in a certain amount of accord with the members of the Reformed communities. A crisis came at the Polish Diet of 1564, and the anti-Trinitarians were recognised then to be a separate religious community, or ecclesia minor. This was the field in which Fausto Sozzini exercised his commanding intellect, his genius for organisation, and his eminently strong will. He created out of these jarring elements the Socinian Church.
The Anabaptist and the Socinian movements require, however, a more detailed description.
II. ANABAPTISM.[602]
The old monotonous mode of describing Anabaptism has almost entirely disappeared with the modern careful examination of sources. It is no longer possible to sum up the movement in four stages, beginning with the Zwickau prophets and ending with the catastrophe in Münster, or to explain its origin by calling it the radical side of the Reformation movement.[603] It is acknowledged by careful students to have been a very complicated affair, to have had roots buried in the previous centuries, and to have had men among its leaders who were distinguished Humanists. It is now known that it spread over Europe with great rapidity, and attracted to itself an enormously larger number of adherents than had been imagined.
It is impossible within the limits of one brief chapter to state and criticise the various theories of the origin and roots of the movement which modern investigation has suggested. All that can be done is to set down succinctly the conclusions reached after a tolerably wide examination of the sources--admitting at the same time that more information must be obtained ere the history of the movement advances beyond the controversial stage.
It is neither safe nor easy to make abrupt general statements about the causes or character of great popular movements. The elements which combine to bring them into being and keep them in existence are commonly as innumerable as the hues which blend in the colour of a mountain side. Anabaptism was such a complicated movement that it presents peculiar difficulties. As has been said, it had a distinct relation to two different streams of mediæval life, the one social and the other religious--the revolts of peasants and artisans, and the successions of the Brethren.
From the third quarter of the fifteenth century social uprisings had taken place almost every decade, all of them more or less impregnated with crude religious beliefs. They were part of the intellectual and moral atmosphere that the "common man," whether in town or country district, continuously breathed, and their power over him must not be lost sight of. The Reformation movement quickened and strengthened these influences simply because it set all things in motion. It is not possible, therefore, to draw a rigid line of separation between some sides of the Anabaptist movement and the social revolt; and hence it is that there is at least a grain of truth in the conception that the Anabaptists were the revolutionaries of the times of the Reformation.
On the other hand, there are good reasons for asserting that the distinctively religious side of Anabaptism had little to do with the anarchic outbreaks. It comes in direct succession from those communities of pious Christians who, on the testimony of their enemies, lived quiet God-fearing lives, and believed all the articles in the Apostles' Creed; but who were strongly anti-clerical. They lived unobtrusively, and rarely appear in history save when the chronicle of some town makes casual mention of their existence, or when an Inquisitor ferreted them out and records their so-called heresies. Their objections to the constitution and ceremonies of the mediæval Church were exactly those of the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century; and if we do not find a universal repudiation of infant baptism, there are traces that some did not approve of it. They insisted that the service ought to be in the vulgar tongue; they objected to all the Church festivals; to all blessing of buildings, crosses, and candles; they alleged that Christ did not give His Apostles stoles or chasubles; they scoffed at excommunications, Indulgences, and dispensations; they declared that there was no regenerative efficacy in infant baptism; and they were keenly alive to all the injunctions of Christian charity--it was better, they said, to clothe the poor than to expend money on costly vestments or to adorn the walls of Churches, and they kept up schools and hospitals for lepers. They met in each other's houses for public worship, which took the form of reading and commenting upon the Holy Scriptures.[604]
As we are dependent on very casual sources of information, it is not surprising that we cannot trace their continuous descent down to the period of the Reformation; but we do find in the earlier decades of the sixteenth century notices of the existence of small praying communities, which have all the characteristics of those recorded in the Inquisitors' reports belonging to the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth centuries. They appeared in Basel in 1514, in Switzerland in 1515, in Mainz in 1518, and in Augsburg somewhat earlier.[605] By the year 1524 similar "praying circles" were recorded as existing in France, in the Netherlands, in Italy, in Saxony, in Franconia, at Strassburg, and in Bohemia. They used a common catechism for the instruction of their young people which was printed in French, German, Bohemian, and perhaps Italian. In Germany, the Bible was the German Vulgate--a version retained among the Anabaptists long after the publication of Luther's. They exhibited great zeal in printing and distributing the pious literature of the Friends of God of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Many of them taught Baptist views, though the tenets were not universally accepted, and they were already called Anabaptists or Katabaptists--a term of reproach. Some of their more distinguished leaders were pious Humanists, and their influence may perhaps be seen in the efforts made by the Brethren to print and distribute the Defensor Pacis of Marsiglio of Padua.
This quiet Evangelical movement assumed a more definite form in 1524. Before that date the associations of pious people acted like the Pietists of the seventeenth or like the Wesleyans of the eighteenth century. They associated together for mutual edification; they did not obtrusively separate themselves from the corrupt or slothful Church. But in June 1524, delegates representing a very wide circle of "praying assemblies" or Readings met at Waldshut, in the house of Balthasar Hübmaier,[606] bringing their Bibles with them, to consult how to organise their Christian living on the lines laid down in the New Testament. No regular ecclesiastical organisation was formed. The Brethren resolved to separate from the Papal Church; they published a Directory for Christian living, and drew up a statement of principles in which they believed. Amongst other things, they protested against any miraculous efficacy in the Sacraments in general, and held that Baptism is efficacious only when it is received in faith. This led afterwards to the adoption of Baptist views. A second conference was held at Augsburg in 1526, which probably dates the time when adult baptism became a distinctive belief among all the Brethren. This conference suggested a General Synod which met at Augsburg in 1527 (Aug.), and included among its members, delegates from Munich, Franconia, Ingolstadt, Upper Austria, Styria, and Switzerland. There they drew up a statement of doctrinal truth, which is very simple, and corresponds intimately with what is now taught among the Moravian Brethren. Their Hymn-book[607] does not bear any traces of the errors in doctrine usually attributed to them. Its chief theme is the love of God awakening our love to God and to our fellow-men. Instead of infant baptism they had a ceremony in which the children were consecrated to God. Baptism was regarded as the sign of conversion and of definite resolve to give one's self up to the worship and service of God. It was administered by sprinkling; the recipient knelt to receive it in the presence of the congregation. The Holy Supper was administered at stated times, and always after one or two days of solemn preparation. Their office-bearers were deacons, elders, masters and teachers, or pastors. They distinguished between pastors who were wandering evangelists and those who were attached to single congregations. The latter, who were ordained by the laying on of hands, alone had the right to dispense the Sacraments. All the deacons, elders, and pastors belonging to communities within a prescribed district, selected from among themselves delegates who formed their ecclesiastical council for the district, and this council elected one of the pastors to act as Bishop or Superintendent. It was the Superintendent who ordained by laying on of hands. The whole of the Brethren were governed ecclesiastically by a series of Synods corresponding to those in the Presbyterian Churches. This organisation enabled the Anabaptists to endure the frightful persecution which they were soon to experience at the hands of the papal and Lutheran State Churches.
The chief leaders were Balthasar Hübmaier and Hans Denck. Hübmaier was a distinguished scholar. He became, at an unusually early age, Professor of theology at Ingolstadt (1512); he was Rector of the famous High School in that city (1515); and Cathedral preacher at Regensburg (Ratisbon) (1516). In 1519, feeling that he could no longer conscientiously occupy such positions, he retired to the little town of Waldshut. Hans Denck was a noted Humanist, a member of the "Erasmus circle" at Basel, and esteemed the most accurate Greek scholar in the learned community. Conrad Grebel, another well-known Anabaptist leader, also belonged to the "Erasmus circle," and was a member of one of the patrician families of Zurich. Like Hübmaier and Denck, he gave up all to become an evangelist, and spent his life on long preaching tours. These facts are sufficient to refute the common statement that the Anabaptists were ignorant fanatics.
Perhaps Denck was the most widely known and highly esteemed. In the summer of 1523 he was appointed Rector of the celebrated Sebaldus School in Nürnberg. In the end of 1524 he was charged with heresy, and along with him Jörg Penz, the artist, the favourite pupil of Albert Dürer, and four others. Denck was banished from the city, and his name became well known. This trial and sentence was the occasion of his beginning that life of wandering evangelist which had among other results the conferences in 1526 and 1527, and the organisation above described. Denck had drunk deeply at the well of the fourteenth and fifteenth century Mystics, and his teaching was tinged by many of their ideas. He believed that there was a spark of the divine nature in man, an Inner Word, which urged man to walk in the ways of God, and that man could always keep true to the inward monitor, who was none else than Christ. The accounts given of some of his addresses seem to be echoes of Tauler's famous sermon on the Bridegroom and the Bride, for he taught that the sufferings of the faithful are to be looked upon as the love-gifts of the Saviour, and are neither to be mourned nor resisted. We are told in the quaint Chronicle of Sebastian Frauck, that the Baptist current swept swiftly through the whole land; many thousands were baptized, and many hearts drawn to them. "For they taught nothing but love, faith, and crucifixion of the flesh, manifesting patience and humility under many sufferings, breaking bread with one another in sign of unity and love, helping one another with true helpfulness, lending, borrowing, giving, learning to have all things in common, calling each other 'brother.'"[608] He adds that they were accused of many things of which they were innocent, and were treated very tyrannically.
The Anabaptists, like the earlier Mystics, displayed a strong individuality; and this makes it impossible to classify their tenets in a body of doctrine which can be held to express the system of intellectual belief which lay at the basis of the whole movement. We have three contemporary accounts which show the divergence of opinion among them--two from hostile and one from a sympathetic historian. Bullinger[609] attempts a classification of their different divisions, and mentions thirteen distinct sects within the Anabaptist circle; but they manifestly overlap in such a way as to suggest a very large amount of difference which cannot be distinctly tabulated. Sebastian Franck[610] notes all the varieties of views which Bullinger mentions, but refrains from any classification. "There are," he says, "more sects and opinions, which I do not know and cannot describe, but it appears to me that there are not two to be found who agree with each other on all points." Kessler,[611] who recounts the story of the Anabaptists of St. Gallen, notes the same great variety of opinions.
It is quite possible to describe the leading ideas taught by a few noted men and approved of by their immediate circle of followers, and so to arrive with some accuracy at the popularity of certain leading principles among different parties, but it must be remembered that no great leader imposed his opinions on the whole Anabaptist circle, and that the views held at different times by prominent men were not invariably the sentiments which lay at the basis of the whole movement.
The doctrine of passive resistance was held by almost all the earlier Anabaptists, but it was taught and practised in such a great variety of ways that a merely general statement gives a misleading idea. All the earlier Anabaptists believed that it was unchristian to return evil for evil, and that they should take the persecutions which came to them without attempting to retaliate. Some, like the young Humanist, Hans Denck, pushed the theory so far that they believed that no real Christian could be either a magistrate or a soldier. A small band of Anabaptists, to whom one of the Counts of Liechtenstein had given shelter at Nikolsburg, told their protector plainly that they utterly disapproved of his threatening the Austrian Commissary with armed resistance if he entered the Nikolsburg territory to seize them. In short, what is called "passive resistance" took any number of forms, from the ordinary Christian maxim to be patient under tribulation, to that inculcated and practised by the modern sect of Dunkers.
The followers of Melchior Hoffman, called "Melchiorites," held apocalyptic or millenarian views, and expected in the near future the return of Christ to reign over His saints; but there is no reason to suppose that this conception was very widely adopted, still less that it can be called a tenet of Anabaptism in general. All the Anabaptists inculcated the duty of charity and the claims of the poor on the richer members of the community; but that is a common Christian precept, and does not necessarily imply communistic theories or practices. All that can be definitely said of the whole Anabaptist circle was that they did keep very clearly before them the obligations of Christian love. The so-called Communism in Münster will be described later.
When we examine carefully the incidental records of contemporary witnesses observing their Anabaptist neighbours, we reach the general conclusion that their main thought was to reproduce in their own lives what seemed to them to be the beliefs, usages, and social practices of the primitive Christians. Translations of the Bible and of parts of it had been common enough in Germany before Luther's days. The "common man," especially the artisan of the towns, knew a great deal about the Bible. It was the one book he read, re-read, and pondered over. Fired with the thoughts created in his mind by its perusal, simple men felt impelled to become itinerant preachers. The "call" came to them, and they responded at once to what they believed to be the divine voice. Witness Hans Ber of Alten-Erlangen, a poor peasant. He rose from his bed one night and suddenly began to put on his clothes. "Whither goest thou?" asked his poor wife. "I know not; God knoweth," he answered. "What evil have I done thee? Stay and help me to bring up my little children," "Dear wife," he answered, "trouble me not with the things of time. I must away, that I may learn the will of the Lord."[612] Such men wandered about in rude homespun garments, often barefooted, their heads covered with rough felt hats. They craved hospitality in houses, and after supper produced their portions of the Bible, read and expounded, then vanished in the early morning. We are told how Hans Hut came to the house of Franz Strigel at Weier in Franconia, produced his Bible, read and expounded, explained the necessity of adult baptism, convinced Strigel, the house father, and eight others, and baptized them there and then. He wandered forth the same night. None of the baptized saw him again; but the little community remained--a small band of Anabaptists.[613]
These wandering preachers, "prophets" they may be called if we give them the early Christian name, were not drilled in any common set of opinions. Each conceived the primitive teaching and social life as he seemed to see it reflected in the New Testament; and no two conceptions were exactly the same. The circumstances and surroundings produced an infinite variety of thought about the doctrines and usages which ought to be accepted and practised. Yet they had traditional modes of interpretation handed down to them from the praying circles of the "Brethren." Compare what the Austrian Inquisitor says of the "Brethren" in the thirteenth century, with what Johann Kessler tells about the Anabaptists of St. Gallen, and the resemblance is striking so far as external appearance goes. "Hæretici cognoscuntur per mores et verba," says the Inquisitor. "Sunt enim in moribus compositi et modesti; superbiam in vestibus non habent, nec pretiosis, nec multum abjectis utuntur.... Doctores etiam ipsorum sunt sutores et textores. Divitias non multiplicant, sed necessariis sunt contenti. Casti etiam sunt.... Temperati etiam in cibo et potu. Ad tabernas non eunt, nec ad choreas, nec ad alias vanitates. Ab ira se cohibent; semper operantur, discunt vel docent, et ideo parum orant.... Cognoscuntur etiam in verbis præcisis et modestis. Cavent etiam a scurrilitate et detractione, et verborum levitate, et mendacio, et juramento."[614] Kessler tells us that the walk and conversation of these Anabaptists was "throughout pious, holy, and blameless"; that they refrained from wearing costly apparel, despised luxurious eating and drinking, clothed themselves in rough cloth, wore slouch hats on their heads. Franck relates that they refused to frequent wine-shops and the "gild" rooms where dances were held.
As they lived again the life of these mediæval sectaries, so they reproduced their opinions in the same sporadic way. Some of them objected to all war even in self-defence, as did some of the earlier Lollards. Their Lord had said to His first disciples: "Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs in the midst of wolves." They flung from them the sword, with which peasant and artisan were then alike girt, and went about as the apostles were ordered to do, with staves in their hands--the Stäbler or staffmen who would have nothing to do with the weapons of wolves. Others, also like some of the Lollards, would not enter the "huge stone houses with great glass windows which men called 'churches.'" The early Christians had preached and "broken bread" in houses; and they would follow their example; and in private rooms, in the streets, in the market-places, they proclaimed their gospel of peace and contentment. The infinitesimal number who taught something like "free love," and who were repudiated by the others, were reproducing the vagaries of the mediæval Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, who gave Meister Eckhart so much trouble centuries before in the Rhineland. All the more extravagant ideas and practices which appear among small sections of these Anabaptists of the sixteenth century can be found among the sectaries of the Middle Ages. For the whole Anabaptist movement was mediæval to the core; and, like most of the mediæval religious awakenings, produced an infinite variety of opinions and practices. The one idea common to all was, that the Christians of the sixteenth century were called to reproduce in thought and life the intellectual beliefs and usages of the primitive Christians. It is simply impossible to give any account of opinions and practices which were universally prevalent among them. Even the most widely spread usages, adult baptism and the "breaking of bread," were not adopted in all the divisions of the Anabaptists.
What is more, they were modern enough, at least in the earlier stages of the movement, to be conscious of this (which the Mystics were not), and to give it expression. All felt and thought as did a "simple man," Hans Müller of Medikon, when brought before the Zurich magistrates: "Do not lay a burden on my conscience, for faith is a gift given freely by God, and is not common property. The mystery of God lies hidden, like the treasure in the field, which no one can find but he to whom the Spirit shows it. So I beg you, ye servants of God, let my faith stand free."[615] And the Anabaptists, alone of all the religious parties in those strenuous times, seem to have recognised that what they claimed for themselves they were bound to grant to others. Great differences in opinion did not prevent the strictest brotherly fellowship. Hans Denck held a doctrine of non-resistance as thoroughgoing as that of Count Tolstoy, and fully recognised the practical consequences to which it led. But this did not prevent the ardent and gifted young Humanist working loyally with Hübmaier, who did not share his extreme opinions. The divergences among the leaders appeared in their followers without destroying the sense of brotherhood. Franck tells us in his Chronicle[616] that some, but very few, held that no Christian could enter the magistracy, for Christians had nothing to do with the sword, but only with spiritual excommunication, and that no Christian should fight and slay. The others, he says, including the very great majority, believed that Christians might become magistrates, and that in case of dire necessity and when they clearly saw the leading of God, might take their share in fighting as soldiers.
Melchior Hoffman, while he believed in the incarnation, held that Jesus received His flesh directly from God, and did not owe His body to the Virgin Mother, through whom He passed "as light through a pane of glass." He also held that the whole history of the world, down to the last days, was revealed in Scripture, and could be discovered through prayer and meditation. He was an eloquent and persuasive preacher, and his views were accepted by many; but it would be a great mistake to assume that they were shared in by the Anabaptists as a community. Yet even contemporaries, who were opponents, usually attribute the extreme opinions of a few to the entire body.
It ought to be observed that this tolerance of different opinions within the one society did not extend to those who remained true to the State Churches, whether Romanist or Reformed. The Anabaptists would have nothing to do with a State Church; and this was the main point in their separation from the Lutherans, Zwinglians, and Calvinists. It was perhaps the one conception on which all parties among them were in absolute accord. The real Church, which might be small or great, was for them an association of believing people; and the great ecclesiastical institutions into which unconscious infants were admitted by a ceremony called baptism long before they could have or exercise faith, represented to them an idea subversive of true Christianity. They had no wish to persecute men who differed widely from them, but they would not associate with them. This enforced "separation," like everything else connected with Anabaptism, differed considerably in the way in which it was carried into practice. In some of the smaller sections it appeared in very extravagant forms. Wives and husbands, Anabaptists whose partners belonged to the State Churches, were in some small sections advised to refuse cohabitation. It is more than probable that some recorded sayings on which opponents have founded charges of encouraging sexual irregularities,--that it was better for women to have connection irregularly with members of the brotherhood than to cohabit with unbelieving husbands,--were simply extravagant ways of expressing this duty of separation.
It is also true that as time went on and sects of extreme opinions multiplied, the excommunication of members for their views came to be a common practice. It was as frequent among some of the smaller divisions as it is among modern Plymouth Brethren; but the occasion was, as a rule, difference of opinion about the way to express and exercise the duty of not returning evil for evil--was it permitted to pay taxes or not? was it lawful to see without protest their protectors using force to prevent their enemies from attacking them, etc.?
The earlier ideas of non-resistance, whatever practical shape they might take, gave way before the continuous and terrible persecution which the Anabaptists had to endure. They were first definitely condemned by Melchior Hoffman and his followers. They believed in the speedy establishment on earth of the millennial kingdom of Christ, and they declared that they were ready to fight for it when it appeared. With them the conception was simply a pious opinion, and they had no occasion to reduce it to action. The Anabaptists, however, who followed the teaching of Jan Matthys and of his disciple Jan Bockelson, repudiated passive resistance both in theory and in practice.
Of course, there are many things about some, perhaps all, great religious awakenings which critics can lay hold of to their disparagement; and it was so with the Anabaptist movement. Everything, from the scientific frame of mind to the religious sensibility, has the defects of its qualities. When a man is seized and possessed by a new spiritual emotion which seems to lift him above all previous experience of life or of thought, all things are new to him, and all things seem possible. His old life with its limitations has departed. He is embarked on a sea which has no imprisoning shores. He is carried along on a great current of emotion, and others are borne with him. Human deep calleth unto deep when they exchange confidences. He and his fellows have become new creatures; and that is almost all that they know about themselves. Such experiences are quite consistent with soundness of mind and clearness of vision of God and Divine things--that is usual; but sometimes they are too powerful for the imperfect mind which holds them. The converts are "puffed up," as St. Paul said. Then arise morbid states, distorted vision, sometimes actual shipwreck of mental faculties, not seldom acute religious mania. Leaders in a great religious awakening have always to reckon with such developments--St. Paul, Francis of Assisi, Eckhart, Tauler, to say nothing of modern instances. The Apostle addressed morbid souls with severe sarcasm. Did any man really think, he asked, that to commit incest, to take to wife his father's widow, was an example of the freedom with which Christ had made them free?
The Anabaptist movement had its share of such cases, like other religious movements; they grew more frequent as the unfortunate people were maddened by persecution; and these exceptional incidents are invariably retailed at length by historians hostile to the movement.
The Anabaptists, as a whole, were subjected to persecutions, especially from the Romanists and the Lutherans, much more harsh than befell any of the religious parties of the sixteenth century. Their treatment in Zurich may be taken as an example of how they came in contact with the civil authorities, and how their treatment grew in severity.[617]
The Swiss Anabaptists were in no sense disciples of Zwingli. They had held their distinctive principles and were a recognised community long before Zwingli came from Einsiedeln, and were the lineal descendants of the mediæval Waldenses. They welcomed the Reformer; some of them were in the company who challenged the authorities by eating meat during Lent in 1522; but a fundamental difference soon emerged. After the Public Disputation of 1523, when it became clear that Zurich meant to accept the Reformation, a deputation of the Brethren appeared before the Council to urge their idea of what a Reformed Church should be. Their statement of principles is an exposition of the fundamental conceptions which lay at the basis of the whole Anabaptist movement, and explains why they could not join either the Lutheran or the Reformed branch of the Reformation Church. They insisted that an Evangelical Church must differ from the Roman Church in this among other things, that it should consist of members who had made a personal profession of faith in their Saviour, and who had vowed to live in obedience to Jesus Christ their Hauptmann. It could not be like a State Church, whether Romanist or other, to which people belonged without any individual profession of faith. They insisted that the Church, thus formed, should be free from all civil control, to decide for itself what doctrines and ceremonies of worship were founded on the Word of God, and agreeable thereto, and should make this decision according to the opinions of a majority of the members. They further asked that the Church should be free to exercise, by brotherly admonition and, as a last resort, by excommunication, discipline on such of its members as offended against the moral law. They also declared that the Church which thus rejected State control ought to refuse State support, and proposed that the tithes should be secularised. The New Testament, they said, knew nothing about interest and usury, tithes, livings, and prebends.
These views were quite opposed to the ideas of the Zurich Council, who contemplated a State Church reformed from Romanist abuses, but strictly under the control of the State, and supported by the tithes, as the mediæval Church had been. They refused to adopt the ideas of the Anabaptists; and this was the beginning of the antagonism. The Council found that the great majority of the petitioners had doubts about infant baptism, and were inclined to what are now called Baptist views; and they brought matters to a crisis by ordering a Public Disputation on Baptism (Jan. 17th, 1525). Among the Anabaptists who appeared to defend their principles, were young Conrad Grebel the Humanist, Felix Manz, and Brother Jörg from Jacob's House, a conventual establishment near Chur, who is always called "Blaurock" (Blue-coat). They were opposed by Zwingli, who insisted that infant baptism must be maintained, because it took the place of circumcision. The Council decided that Zwingli's contention was right, and they made it a law that all children must be baptized, and added that all persons who refused to have their children baptized after Feb. 1st, 1525, were to be arrested. The Anabaptists were not slow to answer the challenge thus given. They met, and after deliberation and prayer Blaurock asked Conrad Grebel to baptize him in a truly Christian fashion, "there being no ordained person present," and Grebel did so. "When this had been done the others entreated Blaurock to baptize them, which he did; and in deep fear of the Lord they gave themselves to God." They resolved to preach and baptize, because in this they ought to obey God rather than men.[618]
When the Council heard that adult baptism had begun, they enacted that all who had been rebaptized after Feb. 8th (1525) were to be fined a silver mark, and that whoever was baptized after the issue of their decree should be banished. They also imprisoned the leaders. When they found that neither fines, nor threats, nor imprisonment, nor banishment had any effect on the Anabaptists, the Town Council thought to terrify them by a death sentence. Two were selected, Manz and Blaurock. The latter was not a citizen, and the sentence of death was commuted to one of public scourging and being thrust out of the town; but Felix Manz, a townsman, was put to death by drowning (1527). Zwingli insisted that this judicial murder was not done because of baptism, but because of rebellion!
What was done in Reformed Switzerland was seen all over Roman Catholic and Lutheran Germany. It is only fair to say that the persecution was more murderous within the Romanist districts; but the only Lutheran Prince who refused to permit a death penalty on Anabaptism was Philip of Hesse. He was afterwards joined by the Elector of Saxony.
In 1527 (Aug. 26th), the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria published an imperial mandate threatening all Anabaptists with the punishment of death. Two months later, two thousand copies of this proclamation were sent to the provinces of the German Empire, calling on the authorities to extirpate these unfortunate people. The rulers in Salzburg and in the Tyrol obeyed the order at once, and a fierce persecution soon raged. The minds of the population were inflamed by infamous calumnies. It was said in Salzburg that the Anabaptists had planned to massacre all the priests and monks within the principality. The well-known dislike of the brethren to war was tortured into the accusation that on a Turkish invasion they would side with the enemy against all loyal Germans. A certain Leopold Dickius, who wrote an atrocious book against the Anabaptists, demanded that all the men should be slain and the women and children suffered to perish from starvation; in this way only, he said, could their errors be stamped out.
The Salzburg chronicler, Kilian Leib, a Romanist, gives details of the persecution. He tells us that men, women, and young maidens suffered death by fire, beheading, and drowning, not only uncomplainingly, but with solemn joy. He dwells on the case of "a beautiful young girl" of sixteen, whose gentle innocence excited universal compassion, and who utterly refused to recant. The executioner pinned her hands to her sides, plunged her head downwards into a horse trough, held her there till she was suffocated, and then took her body away to burn it. The official lists show that the victims came from all classes in society. Noblemen, girdle-makers, wallet-makers, shoemakers, a town clerk, and ex-priests.
The persecution in the Tyrol was severe and thorough. A large number of the miners of the district were Anabaptists, and it was resolved to root out the so-called heresy. Descriptions were published of prominent Anabaptists, who wandered from place to place encouraging their brethren to steadfastness. "One named Mayerhofer has a long brown beard and wears a grey soldier's coat; a companion, tall and pale, wears a long black coat with trimming; a third is shorter; a fourth, thin and of a ruddy complexion, is known as a cutler." Conrad Braun, an assessor to the imperial Chamber and an eye-witness to the persecutions, wrote,--"I have seen with my own eyes that nothing has been able to bring back the Anabaptists from their errors or to make them recant. The hardest imprisonment, hunger, fire, water, the sword, all sorts of frightful executions, have not been able to shake them. I have seen young people, men, women, go to the stake singing, filled with joy; and I can say that in the course of my whole life nothing has moved me more."[619] In the Tyrol and Görz the number of executions by the year 1531 amounted to a thousand, according to the chronicler Kirchmayr. Sebastian Franck reckons the number in Enisheim, within the government of Upper Austria, at six hundred. Seventy-three martyrs suffered in Linz within six weeks. The persecution in Bavaria was particularly severe; Duke William ordered that those who recanted were to be beheaded, and those who refused were to be burned. The general practice, made a law by Ferdinand of Austria in 1529 (April 23rd), was that only preachers, baptizers, Baptists who refused to recant, and those who had relapsed after recantation, were to be punished with death.[620]
In these bloody persecutions, which raged over almost all Europe, most of the earlier leaders of the Anabaptists perished; but the great body of their followers were neither intimidated nor disposed to abjure their teaching. Persecution did not come unexpectedly. No one was admitted into an Anabaptist community without being warned of the probable fate which lay before him. Baptism was a vow that he would be constant unto death; the "breaking of bread" strengthened his faith; the sermon was full of exhortations to endurance unto the end. Their whole service of worship was a preparation for and an expectation of martyrdom.
The strain of Christian song seemed to rise higher with the fires of persecution. Most of the Anabaptist hymns belong to the time when their sufferings were greatest. Some are simply histories of a martyrdom, as of Jörg Wagner at Munich, or of the "Seven Brethren at Germünd." They are all echoes of endurance where the notes of the sob, the trust, the warning, the hosanna of a time of martyrdom, blend in rough heroic strains. They sing of Christ, who in these last days has manifested Himself that the pure word of His Gospel may again run through the earth as it did in the days of the early Church. They tell how the arch-enemy of souls seeks to protect himself against the advancing host of Jesus by exciting bloody persecutions. They utter warnings against false prophets, ravening wolves in sheep's clothing, who beset all the paths of life leading towards the true fold, who pour forth threats and curses against the people of God, and urge on the rulers of this world to torture and to slay. They depict how the evil world storms against the true Church, shrieks out lies against the true followers of Jesus, and threatens them with burnings and all manner of cruel deaths. They mourn that the disciples of Jesus are slaughtered like sheep who have lost their shepherd; that they wander in wildernesses full of thorns that tear; that they have their homes like the night-birds among the cliffs or in the clefts of the rocks; that they are snared in the nets of the fowler; that they are hunted with hounds like the hares. Others, inspired by the internal hope which lives undying in every Christian heart, tell how Christ the Bridegroom seeks the love of the soul His bride, and how He wins her to Himself by His love-gifts of trial and of suffering, till at last the marriage feast is held, and the soul becomes wholly united to her Lord. The thoughts and phrases of the old Hebrew prophets, of the Psalmist, of the hymns of the Apocalypse, which have fed the fears and the hopes of longing, suffering, trusting generations of Christian people, reappear in those Anabaptist hymns. Life is for them a continuous Holy War, a Pilgrim's Progress through an evil world full of snares, of dangers, of temptations, until at last the weary feet tread the Delectable Mountains, the River of Death is passed, and the open gates of the heavenly Jerusalem receive the wayfarer who has persevered to the end.
These poor persecuted people naturally sought for some city of refuge, i.e. a municipality or district where baptism of children was not enforced under penalties, and where the rebaptism of adults was not punished by imprisonment, torture, and death. For a time they found many such asylums. The Anabaptists were for the most part good workmen, and patient and provident cultivators of the soil, ready to pay all dues but the unscriptural war-tax. They were a source of wealth to many a great landed proprietor who was willing to allow them to live their lives in peace. Moravia, East Friesland, and, among the municipalities, Augsburg, Worms, and Strassburg gave shelter until the slow determined pressure of the higher authorities of the Empire compelled them to act otherwise. All that the Anabaptists desired was to be allowed to live in peace, and we hear of no great disturbances caused by their presence in any of these "cities of refuge."
This brings us to what has been called "The Kingdom of God in Münster," and to the behaviour of the Anabaptists there--the communism, polygamy, and so forth, which are described in all histories of the times.
Münster was the capital of the large and important ecclesiastical principality which bears the same name. The bishop was a Prince of the German Empire, and ruled his principality with all the rights of a secular prince. Clergy filled almost all the important posts of government; they levied taxes on imports and exports; the rich canonries of the cathedral were reserved for the sons of the landed gentry; the townspeople had no share in the richer benefices, and chafed under their clerical rulers. The citizens lived in a state of almost permanent disaffection, and their discontent had frequently taken the form of civic insurrections. They rose in 1525, in 1527 (in which year the name of a wealthy burgher, Bernardin Knipperdolling, first appears as a leader of his fellow-citizens), and in 1529, the dreadful year of famine and plague.[621] Many have been disposed to see in these emeutes, anticipations of the struggle which followed; but nothing in the sources warrants the conclusion. They were simply examples of the discontent of the unprivileged classes which had been common enough in Germany for at least a century.
The city of Münster had been slow to receive the religious Reformation, but in 1529 the people began to listen to the preaching of an obscure young chaplain attached to the Church of St. Maurice, built outside the walls of the town.[622] Bernhard Rothmann was a scholar, imbued with Humanist culture, gifted with the power of clear reasoning, and with natural eloquence. It is probable that he had early been attracted by the teaching of Luther;[623] but while he dwelt upon justification by faith, his sermons were full of that sympathy for the down-trodden toiling masses of the community which was a permanent note in all Anabaptist teaching. His sermons were greatly appreciated by the townsfolk, especially by the artisans, who streamed out of the gate to hear the young chaplain of St. Maurice. Was he not one of themselves, the son of a poor smith! The cathedral Canons, who, in the absence of the Bishop, had the oversight of all ecclesiastical affairs, grew alarmed at his popularity. Their opportunity for interference came when the mob, excited, they said, by Rothmann's denunciations of relic and image worship, profaned the altars, tore the pictures, and destroyed the decorations in St. Maurice on the eve of Good Friday, 1531. Rothmann's influence with the townsmen might have enabled him to defy the Canons, especially as the Prince Bishop, Friedrich von Wied, showed no inclination to molest the chaplain, and was himself suspected of Evangelical sympathies. But he quietly left the town and spent a year in travelling. He visited Wittenberg, where he made the acquaintance of Luther, Melanchthon, and Bugenhagen; went to Marburg, Speyer, and Strassburg. At Strassburg he had long intercourse with Capito and with Schwenkfeld the Mystic, who is frequently classed with the Anabaptists. An irresistible impulse seems to have drawn him back to Münster, where he was welcomed by the people, and the church of St. Maurice became henceforth the centre of a movement for religious Reformation; the preacher was supported by the "gilds" of artisans and by most of the citizens, among whom the most noted was Bernhard Knipperdolling.
An energetic protest by the Canons induced the Bishop to inhibit Rothmann from preaching in St. Maurice. He continued his addresses in the churchyard of St. Lambert (Feb. 18th, 1532), and a few days later he was placed in possession of the church itself. St. Lambert's had been built by the municipality, and was the property of the town. Rothmann was appointed by the Town Council Evangelical preacher to the town, and was given one of the town's "gild" houses for a parsonage.
Two months later the Bishop resigned, and was succeeded by Duke Erich of Brunswick-Grubenhagen, already Bishop of Osnabrück and Paderborn. The new Bishop determined to get rid of Rothmann. He made representations to Hesse and Electoral Saxony and other Evangelical Powers, and persuaded them to induce the more moderate of the reforming party in Münster to abandon Rothmann; and, this done, the preacher was ordered to leave the city. The "gilds" of artisans refused to let their preacher depart, and, under the leadership of Knipperdolling,[624] drafted a letter to the authorities declaring their determination to retain him at all hazards. The democracy of Münster and the religious movement for the first time openly combined against the authorities of the city.
While things were at this pass, the Bishop died (May 13th, 1532). The Chapter elected (June 1st) Count Franz von Waldeck, already in possession of Minden, and made Bishop of Osnabrück a few days later (June 11th)--a pluralist of the first rank. The reforming party in Münster expected the worst from their new ruler. A full assembly of the "gilds" of the town was held, and by an overwhelming majority the members pledged themselves to defend their pastor and his Gospel with body and goods while life lasted. A committee of thirty-six burghers was elected to watch the course of events and to take counsel with the civic rulers and the presidents of the "gilds." Rothmann published theses explaining his teaching, and challenging objectors to a public disputation. Public meetings were held; the Town Council was formally requested to hand over all the parochial churches to Evangelical preachers; which was done--the Cathedral alone remaining for Roman Catholic worship.
These proceedings produced unavailing remonstrances from the Bishop. The nobles in the neighbourhood tried to interfere, but to no purpose. In October (1532) the Bishop's party within the town began to take action. They attempted to sequester the goods of the more prominent disaffected citizens; chains were placed across the principal streets to prevent communication between the different quarters; an attempt was made to isolate the town itself. These things meant war. The "gilds," always a military organisation in mediæval cities, armed. A party of knights sent to invade the town retired before the armed citizens. While the Bishop sought to strengthen himself by alliances and to beguile the townsmen by negotiation, a thousand armed burghers marched by night to the little township of Telgte, where a large number of the ecclesiastical and secular nobles were encamped, surrounded it, captured the Bishop's partisans, and returned to hold them as hostages. This act afforded the occasion for the intervention of Philip of Hesse. An arrangement was come to by which Münster was declared to be an Evangelical city and enrolled within the Schmalkald League. The history of Münster up to this time (Feb. 14th, 1533) did not differ from that of many towns which had adopted the Reformation. Rothmann had been the leader in Münster, like Brenz in Hall, Alber in Reutlingen, or Lachmann at Heilbron.
It is usually assumed that up to this time Rothmann was a Lutheran in his teaching, that he had won Münster for the great Lutheran party, and that his future aberrations from the Evangelical theology were due to his weakness before the Anabaptist mob who later invaded the city. This seems to be a mere assumption. He had certainly taught justification by faith; but that did not make him a Lutheran. The dividing line between the various classes of objectors to the Roman Catholic theology in the sixteenth century was drawn at the meaning of the Sacraments, and especially of the Lord's Supper. There is absolutely no evidence to show that Rothmann was ever a follower of Luther in his theory of the Holy Supper. He had visited Luther and Melanchthon during his year of absence from Münster, but they had never been quite sure of him. He has confessed that it was at Strassburg and not at Wittenberg that he got most help for his future work and received it from Capito, who was no Lutheran, and from Schwenkfeld, who was an Anabaptist Mystic. It was Strassburg and not Wittenberg that he called "the crown of all Christian cities and Churches!" In his confession of faith he says that the Mass is no sacrifice, but only a sign of the true Sacrifice; and that the Mass and the Lord's Supper have no other meaning than to remind us of the death of Christ, and to awaken in our hearts a certainty of the freely given grace of God. That is not Lutheran doctrine, it is not even Zwinglian; it is much nearer the Anabaptist. It is also pretty clear that he held the doctrine of the "inner light" in the sense of many Anabaptists. It may be safely said that if Rothmann was not an Anabaptist from the beginning, his was a mind prepared to accept their doctrines almost as soon as they were clearly presented to him. Heinrich Roll, a fugitive from Jülich who sought refuge in Münster, convinced Rothmann of the unlawfulness of infant baptism. No sooner had this conviction laid hold on him than he refused to baptize infants--for Rothmann was always straightforward. His views annoyed a large number of the leading citizens, prominent among whom was Van der Wieck, the syndic of the town. These men, all Lutherans, besieged their pastor with remonstrances, and finally brought him before the Town Council. The matter came to a head on Sept. 7th (1533), when Staprade, the assistant preacher at St. Lambert's, refused to baptize the children of two Lutheran members of the Town Council who had been brought to the church for the purpose. When the preachers were brought before the Council, they were informed that such things would not be allowed. Staprade, the chief offender and a non-burgher, was banished, and Rothmann with the other clergy who agreed with him were threatened with the same fate if they persisted in declining to baptize infants. They refused to obey the Council; they were promptly deposed, and their churches were closed against them. But the mass of the citizens were attached to Rothmann, and their attitude became too threatening for the Magistrates to maintain their uncompromising position. Rothmann was permitted to remain, and was allowed to preach in the Church of St. Servatius. The Lutheran Magistrates brought preachers into the town to occupy the other places of worship.
The Magistrates, Van der Wieck being the leading spirit among them, resolved to hold a public disputation on the subject of Baptism. They had brought to Münster the famous Humanist, Hermann von dem Busche, now a professor in Marburg and a distinguished defender of the Lutheran Reformation, and they counted on his known learning and eloquence to convince their fellow-citizens that the views of Rothmann were unscriptural. The conference was to be perfectly free. Roman Catholic theologians were invited, and took part. Rothmann appeared to defend his position. The invitations had been signed not only by the Magistrates, but by the heads of the "gilds" of the town.[625] Van der Wieck confessed that the result of the disputation was not what he expected. So far as the great mass of the people were concerned, Rothmann appeared to have the best of the argument, and he stood higher than ever in the estimation of the citizens. Rothmann, whose whole career shows that opposition made him more and more advanced, now began to dwell upon the wrongs of the commonalty and the duty of the rich to do much more for their poorer brethren than they did. He taught by precept as well as example. He lived an openly ascetic life, that he might abound in charity. His sermons and his life had an extraordinary effect on the rich as well as on the poor. Creditors forgave debtors, men placed sums of money in the hands of Rothmann for distribution. There was no enforced communism, but the example of primitive Church in Jerusalem was followed as far as possible. Among these thoroughgoing followers of Rothmann, a wealthy lady, the mother-in-law of Bernardin Knipperdolling, was conspicuous.
The Magistrates became seriously alarmed at the condition of things. They knew that so long as they remained a Lutheran municipality, even nominally, the great Lutheran Princes, like Philip of Hesse and the Elector of Saxony, would protect them against their Romanist Bishop; but Lutherans and Romanists alike disliked and distrusted Anabaptists, and the imperial edict would surely be enforced against them sooner or later. Rothmann's preaching, which they could not control, and the power he exercised through the "gilds," made it impossible for them to maintain that Münster was a member of the confederacy of Lutheran cities. On the other hand, the news that Münster had practically become Anabaptist, spread far and wide among these persecuted people, who began to think that it was destined to be a conspicuous city of refuge, perhaps the Zion or New Jerusalem whose establishment Melchior Hoffman had predicted. They gathered from all parts to place themselves under the protection of its walls. The great majority naturally came from the Netherlands, where the persecution was hottest. The refugees were almost all Melchiorites--men who looked for a speedy termination of their sufferings in the establishment of the kingdom of God upon the earth; and the majority of them were Dutch Melchiorites, men to whom freedom was a tradition, ready to fight for it, disciples of Jan Matthys, who had taught them to abandon the doctrine of passive resistance so universally held by all sections of the earlier Anabaptists.[626] Rothmann had long been acquainted with the books and tracts of Hoffman, and had great sympathy with them. He as well as the Magistrates foresaw trouble for himself and for the city. He went the length of advising friends who did not share his opinions to leave the town; for himself, his manifest duty appeared to be to risk all on behalf of the poor people whom God had given into his hand.
The last months of 1532 saw Rothmann and the Lutheran Town Council facing each other with growing mutual suspicion. On Dec. 8th, a journeyman smith, Johann Schröder, began preaching Anabaptist doctrines in the churchyard of St. Lambert's, and challenged the Lutheran pastor, Fabricius, to a disputation. This was more than the Town Council could endure. They prohibited Rothmann preaching, and declared that they withdrew their protection--a sentence of virtual outlawry (Dec. 11th). He calmly told the messenger of the Council that he depended on the help of higher powers than his masters, and preached publicly in the Church of St. Servatius. Schröder had begun to preach again, and was apprehended. The "gild" of the smiths rose, and, headed by their officials, forced the Council to release their comrade. The Anabaptists and Rothmann had won a notable triumph, which was soon widely known. Banished Anabaptist pastors returned to the town.
Events marched quickly thereafter. Bartholomaeus Boekbinder and Willem de Kuiper, sent by Jan Matthys, appeared in Münster (Jan. 5th, 1533). We can infer what their message was from what followed. Rothmann denounced the Council and its Lutheran preachers. Riots were the consequence, many of the rioters being women, among whom the nuns of the Überwasser convent were conspicuous. It was declared that all believers ought to be rebaptized, and that a list of the faithful ought to be made. The document contained fourteen hundred names within eight days. The mass of the people enthusiastically believed in the near approach of the Day of the Lord.
Soon afterwards (Jan. 13th, 1533), Jan Bockelson (John of Leyden) entered the town. He was the favourite disciple and alter ego of Jan Matthys. He brought with him the famous Twenty-one Articles, and called upon the faithful to unite themselves into a compact organisation pledged to carry them out. He was received with enthusiasm.
The Council, feeling their helplessness, appealed to the Bishop, who contented himself with ordering them to execute the imperial mandate against Anabaptists. He was as much incensed against the Lutherans as against the Anabaptists, and hoped that the two parties would destroy themselves. Within the town, Anabaptists fought with the combined Evangelicals and Romanists, and on two occasions the tumults were succeeded by truces which guaranteed full liberty of worship to all persons (Jan. 28th and Feb. 9th). Then the Council abandoned the struggle. The principal Burgomaster, Tylbeck, was baptized, and Van der Wieck, with many of the principal citizens, left the town. Van der Wieck fell into the hands of the Bishop, who slaughtered him barbarously.
A new Council, entirely Anabaptist, was elected, with Bernardin Knipperdolling and Gerhard Kibbenbroick, a leading merchant, as Burgomasters (Feb. 28th). The complete rule of the Anabaptists had begun. This date also marks the beginning of the investment of the city by the Bishop's troops. It should never be forgotten, as it frequently is, that during the whole period of Anabaptist domination in Münster the town was undergoing the perils of a siege, and that military considerations had to be largely kept in mind. Nor should it be forgotten that during its existence the Bishop's troops were murdering in cold blood every Anabaptist they could lay their hands on.
Jan Matthys himself had come to Münster some time in February, urged thereto by a letter from Bockelson, and the citizens had become accustomed to see the long lean figure of the prophet, with his piercing eyes and flowing black beard, pass to and fro in their streets. They had learned to hang breathless on his words as his sonorous voice repeated the message which the Lord had given him to utter, or described the visions which had been vouchsafed to him. When an Anabaptist Council ruled the city they were but the mouthpiece of the prophet. His reign was brief, but while it lasted he issued command after command.
Separation from the world was one of the ideas he dwelt upon in his addresses; and to him this meant that no unbelievers, no unbaptized, could remain within the walls of an Anabaptist city. The command went forth that all adults must be baptized or leave the town. It is scarcely to be wondered that, with the great likelihood of falling into the hands of the Bishop's soldiers as soon as they got beyond the walls, the great majority of those who had not yet received the seal of the new communion submitted to the ceremony. They were marched to the market-place, where they found "three or more" Anabaptist preachers, each with a great vessel full of water before them. The neophytes knelt down, received the usual admonition, and a dish of water was thrice emptied on their heads in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This done, they went to the Burgomaster's house and had their names entered on the roll.[627]
It was also by Matthys' orders that what is called the communism of Münster was begun. The duty of systematic and brotherly charity had from the first been an outstanding one among the Anabaptists. Like all other principles which find immediate outcome in action, this one of brotherly love had found many ways of taking actual shape. In a few of the smaller sections of the brethren it had appeared in the form of communism so far as food and raiment went. In some of the communities in Moravia the Brethren subscribed to a common fund out of which common meals were provided; and these payments were compulsory. We have seen how Rothmann's sermons had produced an extraordinary outburst of benevolence in Münster before the coming of the prophets. It does not appear that Matthys' commands went further than the exhortations of Rothmann. Münster was a beleaguered city. When the siege began it contained about seventeen hundred men, between five and six thousand women, besides thousands of children. The largest proportion of these were refugees. It is evident that numbers could not support themselves, but were absolutely dependent upon the charity of their neighbours. The preachers invited the faithful to give up their money, and what provisions they could spare to feed the poverty striken. Large numbers thus appealed to brought all their portable property; others gave part; some refused, and were denounced publicly. The provisions stored in the monasteries or in private houses abandoned by their proprietors--were taken for the common good. When the siege had lasted long, and the enemy were deliberately starving the inhabitants into surrender, the communism in food became stricter, as is the case in any beleaguered fortress. No attempt was ever made to institute a thoroughgoing communism. What existed at first was simply an abundant Christian charity enforced by public opinion,[628] and latterly a requisitioning of everything that could be used to support the whole population of a besieged city.
Jan Matthys did not long survive his coming to Münster. On the evening of the 4th of April, as he sat at supper in a friend's house, he was observed to spend long minutes in brooding. At last, sighing heavily, he was heard to ejaculate, "Loved Father, not my will but Thine be done." He rose quietly from his seat, shook hands with all his companions, solemnly kissed each one; then left the house in silence, accompanied by his wife. Next day with about twenty companions he went out by one of the gates of the city, fell fiercely on the enemy, was overpowered by numbers, and received his death-stroke. A religious enthusiast and a singularly straightforward and courageous man!
His death depressed the defenders of Münster greatly; but they were rallied by the persuasive eloquence of Jan Bockelson, the favourite disciple of the dead prophet. It was under the leadership of Bockelson--Jan of Leyden he was called--that the Town Council of Münster was abolished; that twelve elders were chosen to rule the people; that Jan himself became king, and had his Court; that the old miracle plays were revived, etc. The only one of the many actions of this highly talented and eloquent young Dutchman which need concern us was the institution of polygamy, for which he seems to have been almost solely responsible.
Polygamy is the one dark stain on the Anabaptists of Münster, and one that is ineffaceable. Not unnaturally, yet quite unjustly, the fact of its institution has been used continually to blacken the character of the whole movement. It was an episode, a lamentable one, in the history of Anabaptism in Münster; it had nothing to do with the brethren outside the town. The whole question presents difficulties which, with our present information, cannot be removed. That men whose whole past lives had been examples of the most correct moral behaviour, and who had been influenced by deep and earnest religious feelings, should suddenly (for it was sudden) have given the lie to their own previous teaching and to the tenets of every separate section of Anabaptism, that they should have sullied the last few months of an heroic and desperate defence within a doomed city by the institution of polygamy, is an insoluble puzzle.[629]
We are not now dependent for our knowledge of the Anabaptist movement on the writings of embittered opponents, or upon such tainted sources as confessions of martyrs wrung from them under torture. The diligence of archæologists has exhumed a long list of writings of the leaders in the rising. They give us trustworthy accounts of the opinions and teachings of almost every sect classed under the common name. We know what they thought about all the more important matters which were in controversy during the sixteenth century--what they taught about Free Will, Original Sin, Justification, the Trinity, the Person of Christ, and so on. We have clear glimpses of the kind of lives they led--a genuinely pious, self-denying, Christian walk and conversation. Their teaching was often at variance with the Romanist and the Lutheran doctrinal confessions; but they never varied from the moral life which all Christians are called upon to live. Their writings seldom refer to marriage; but when they do it is always to bear witness to the universal and deeply rooted Christian sentiment that marriage is a sacred and unbreakable union of one man with one woman. Nay more, one document has descended to us which bears testimony to the teaching of the Anabaptists within the beleaguered city only a few weeks before the proclamation of polygamy. It is entitled Bekentones des globens und lebens der gemein Criste zu Monster,[630] and was meant to be an answer to calumnies circulated by their enemies. It contains a paragraph on Marriage which is a clear and distinct assertion that the only Christian marriage is the unbreakable union of one man with one woman.[631]
It is true that the Anabaptist thought of "separation," when carried out in its most extreme way and to its utmost logical consequences, struck a blow at the sanctity of the marriage tie. All taught that the "believer," i.e. he or she who had been rebaptized, ought to keep themselves separate from the "world," i.e. those who had not submitted to rebaptism; and in the more extreme sects it was alleged that this meant that spouses ought not to cohabit with "unbelieving" partners. This was held and practised among the Melchiorites, and was stated in its extremest form in the Twenty-one Rules sent to Münster by Jan Matthys by the hand of Bockelson. They contained two prescriptions--one for the unmarried, which exhorted them only to marry in the Lord; another for the married, which implies that marriage contracted between husband and wife before rebaptism ought to be repeated. This meant that marriages contracted by persons yet "in the world" were not valid, and, of course, destroyed the sanctity of all marriages outside the circle of the brethren. But when a Melchiorite at Strassburg, Klaus Frey, whose wife was not an Anabaptist, carried out the principle to its logical consequences and married an Anabaptist woman, his "unbelieving" wife being alive, he was promptly excommunicated.
When the information to be gathered from the various sources is combined, what took place in Münster seems to have been as follows. Sometime in July (1534), John Bockelson summoned the preachers, Rothmann at their head, and the twelve elders to meet him in the Rathaus. There he propounded to them his proposal to inaugurate polygamy, and argued the matter with them for eight successive days. We are told that Rothmann and the preachers opposed the scheme in a determined manner. The arguments used by the prophet--arguments of the flimsiest nature--have also been recorded. He dwelt on the necessity of accepting certain biblical expressions in their most literal sense, and in giving them their widest application. He insisted especially on the command of God, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth; he brought forward the example of the patriarchs and other examples of polygamy from the Old Testament; he went the length of saying that when St. Paul insisted that bishops must be husbands of one wife, the phrase implied that all who were not bishops were free to take more than one; he dwelt on the special conditions existing among the population within the town,--the number of male refugees, either unmarried or who had left their wives behind them in the places from which they had fled; the disproportionate number of women (more than three women for every man),--and the difficulties thereby created to prevent them from obeying the command of God to be fruitful and increase; and he urged that in their present condition the command of God could only be obeyed by means of polygamy.
In the end he brought preachers and elders round to his opinion; and in spite of opportunities given them for revolt, they remained steadfast to it. They preached upon its advantages for three days to the people in the Cathedral square; and it was Rothmann who proclaimed the decree commanding polygamy to the people. How were the preachers persuaded to forego their opposition? What one of the threadbare arguments used by the prophet convinced them? Had he proclaimed polygamy as a divine command received by him as a prophet, we might imagine the preachers and people, such was the exalted state of their minds, receiving it with reverence; but the prophet did not announce that he had received any such message. He relied solely upon his arguments. They did not convince all the people. The proclamation of polygamy awoke violent protests upon the part of the native townsmen, who, headed by a "master-smith" named Möllenbecke, felt that they would rather hand over the city to the Bishop's forces than live in a polygamist society, and the revolt was almost successful; but the preachers stood firm in their support of the prophet and of his polygamy; and it was the women who were mainly instrumental in causing the revolt to be a failure.
If we are to judge by the use made of it in Rothmann's Restitution,[632] which defends the introduction of the new marriage laws, the preachers seem to have been most impressed by the argument which dwelt on the condition of the city--the large proportion of men whose wives were in the towns they had abandoned to take refuge in Münster, and the great multitude of women. It is just possible that it was this economic argument that affected both them and the prophet himself. This is the view taken by such writers as Kautsky, Belfort Bax, and Heath. The explanation is confirmed by the fact that the decree was more than a proclamation of polygamy. It provided that all marriageable men must take wives, and that all women must be under the care of a husband. The laws against sexual irregularity were as strong during the reign of polygamy as before its introduction. But there is this to be said against it, that the town of Münster, notwithstanding its abnormal conditions, was singularly pure in life, and that polygamy, so far from improving the moral condition, made it distinctly worse.
Detmer, whose opinions are always worthy of respect, believes than Jan of Leyden had fallen violently in love with the young, beautiful, and intellectual Divara, the widow of Jan Matthys, and that, as he could not marry her apart from polygamy, he persuaded his preachers and elders to consent to his proposals. His wonderful magnetic influence overbore their better judgment.
What is evident is that the decree of polygamy was suddenly conceived and forced upon the people. If Jan of Leyden[633] took no share in its proclamation, he set the people an example of obedience. He promptly married Divara as soon as it was lawful to do so. He used the ordinance to strengthen his position. His other wives--he had sixteen in all--were the daughters or near relations of the leaders in Münster. There is evidence to show that his own character deteriorated rapidly under the new conditions of life.
The siege of Münster went on during all these months. The Bishop's soldiers attempted several assaults, and were always beaten back. They seem latterly to have relied on the power of hunger. The sufferings of the citizens during the later weeks were terrible. At length Heinrich Gresbeck, deserting to the besiegers' camp, offered to betray the city to its enemies. He showed them, by plans and models in clay, how to get through the defences, and himself prepared the way for the Bishop's soldiers to enter. The Anabaptists gathered for one last desperate defence in the market-place, under the leadership of Bernardin Knipperdolling and Bernard Krechting, with Rothmann by their side. When the band was reduced to three hundred men, they capitulated on promise of safe-conduct to leave the town. It is needless to say that the bargain was not kept. Rothmann was believed to have perished in the market-place. The city was given over to pillage, and the streets were soon strewn with dead bodies. Then a court was established to try the Anabaptist prisoners. The first woman to suffer was the fair young Divara. She steadfastly refused to abjure, and met her fate in her own queenly way. No man who had been in any way prominent during the siege was allowed to escape death. Jan Bockelson, Bernardin Knipperdolling, and Bernard Krechting were reserved to suffer the most terrible tortures that the diabolical ingenuity of mediæval executioners could devise. It was long believed that Rothmann had escaped, and that he had got away to Rostock or to Lübeck; more than one person was arrested on the suspicion of being the famous preacher of Münster--"a short, dark man, with straight brown hair," was his description in the Lübeck handbills.
The horrible fate of Münster did not destroy the indomitable Anabaptists. Menno Simons (b. 1496 or 1505 at Witmarsum, a village near Franecker), "a man of integrity, mild, accommodating, patient of injuries, and so ardent in his piety as to exemplify in his own life the precepts he gave to others," spent twenty-five laborious years in visiting the scattered Anabaptist communities and uniting them in a simple brotherly association. He purged their minds of the apocalyptic fancies taught by many of their later leaders under the influence of persecution, inculcated the old ideas of non-resistance, of the evils of State control over the Church, of the need of personal conversion, and of adult baptism as its sign and seal. From his labours have come all the modern Baptist Churches.
III. SOCINIANISM.[634]
The fathers of the Socinian Church were the two Sozzini, uncle and nephew, Lelio and Fausto, both natives of the town of Siena.
The uncle, Lelio Sozzini (b. 1525), was by profession a lawyer. He was a man of irreproachable moral life, a Humanist by training, a student of the classics and also of theology. He was thoroughly dissatisfied with the condition of the Romish Church, and early began to entertain grave doubts about some of its leading doctrinal positions. He communicated his views to a select circle of friends. Notwithstanding the precautions he had taken, he became suspected. Cardinal Caraffa had persuaded Pope Paul III. to consent to the reorganisation of the Inquisition in 1542, and Italy soon became a very unsafe place for any suspected person. Lelio left Siena in 1547, and spent the remaining portion of his life in travelling in those lands which had accepted the Lutheran or the Reformed faith. He made the acquaintance of all the leading Protestant theologians, including Melanchthon and Calvin. He kept up an extensive correspondence with them, representing his own personal theological opinions in the form of questions which he desired to have solved for him. From Calvin's letters we can learn that the great theologian had grave doubts about the moral earnestness of his Italian correspondent, and repeatedly warned him that he was losing hold on the saving facts of heart religion.
All the while Sozzini seems to have made up his mind already on all the topics introduced into his correspondence, and to have been communicating his views, on pledge of secrecy, to the small communities of Italian refugees who were settled in Switzerland. He can scarcely be blamed for this secretiveness; toleration, as the sad example of the burning of Servede had shown, was not recognised to be a Christian principle among the Churches of the Reformation. Lelio died at Zurich in 1562 without having published his opinions, and without his neighbours and hosts being aware of his real theological position.
He bequeathed all his property, including his books and his manuscripts, to his nephew, Fausto, who had remained at Siena. This nephew was the founder of the Socinian Church.
Fausto Sozzini (b. 1539) was, like his uncle, a man of irreproachable life, a lawyer, a diligent and earnest student, fond of theology, and of great force of character. How early he had come to think as his uncle had done, is unknown. Report affirms that after he had received his uncle's books and papers, and had given sufficient time to their study, he left Italy, visited the places where Lelio had gathered small companies of secret sympathisers, to confirm them in the faith. His uncle had visited Poland twice, and Fausto went there in 1579. He found that the anti-Trinitarians there had no need to conceal their opinions. The Transylvanian Prince, Stephen Báthory, protected them, and they had in the town of Krakau their own church, school, and printing-press. But the sect as a whole was torn by internal divisions. Fausto bent his whole energies to overcome these differences.
Before his arrival in Poland he had published two books, which are interesting because they show the pathway by which Fausto arrived at his theological conclusions. He started not with the doctrines of the Trinity or of the Person of Christ, but with the doctrine of the Atonement--a fact to be kept in mind when the whole Socinian system of theology is examined.
He believed that the real cause of the divisions which wasted the sect was that the Polish Unitarians were largely Anabaptists. They insisted that no one could be a recognised member of the community unless he was rebaptized. They refused to enroll Fausto Sozzini himself, and excluded him from the Sacrament of the Supper, because he would not submit to rebaptism. They declared that no member of their communities could enter the magistracy, or sue in a civil court, or pay a war tax. They disagreed on many small points of doctrine, and used the ban very freely against each other. Sozzini saw that he could not hope to make any progress in his attempts to unite the Unitarians unless he was able to purge out this Anabaptist leaven. His troubles can be seen in his correspondence, and in some of his smaller tracts in the first volume of the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum.[635] In spite of the rebuffs he met with, he devoted all his energies to the thankless task of furthering union, and in the end of his days he had the satisfaction of seeing that he had not laboured in vain. Shortly before his death, a synod held at Krakau (1603) declared that rebaptism was not necessary for entrance into a Unitarian community. Many of the lesser differences had been got rid of earlier. The literary activity of Sozzini was enormous: books and pamphlets flowed from his untiring pen, all devoted to the enforcing or explaining the Socinian theology. It is not too much to say that the inner history of the Unitarian communities in Poland from 1579 until his death in 1604 is contained in his voluminous correspondence. The united Unitarians of Poland took the name of the Polish Brethren; and from this society what was known as Socinian theology spread through Germany (especially the Rhineland), Switzerland, and England. Its principles were not formulated in a creed until 1642, when the Racovian Catechism was published. It was never formally declared to be the standard of the Unitarian Church, but its statements are universally held to represent the views of the older Socinians.
Socinianism, unlike the great religious movement under the guidance of Luther, had its distinct and definite beginning in a criticism of doctrines, and this must never be forgotten if its true character is to be understood. We have already seen[636] that there is no trace of any intellectual difficulties about doctrines or statement of doctrines in Luther's mind during the supreme crisis in his spiritual history. Its whole course, from the time he entered the Erfurt convent down to the publication of the Augsburg Confession, shows that the spiritual revolt of which he was the soul and centre took its rise from something much deeper than any mere criticism of the doctrines of the mediæval Church, and that it resulted in something very much greater than a reconstruction of doctrinal conceptions. The central thing about the Protestant Reformation was that it meant a rediscovery of religion as faith, "as a relation between person and person, higher therefore, than all reason, and living not upon commands and hopes, but on the power of God, and apprehending in Jesus Christ the Lord of heaven and earth as Father."[637] The Reformation started from this living experience of the believing Christian, which it proclaimed to be the one fundamental fact in Christianity--something which could never be proved by argument, and could never be dissolved away by speculation.
On the contrary, the earliest glimpse that we have of Lelio Sozzini is his meeting with friends to discuss and cast doubts upon such doctrines as the Satisfaction of Christ, the Trinity, and others like them.[638] Socinianism maintained to the end the character with which it came into being. It was from first to last a criticism and attempted reconstruction of doctrines.
This is sufficient of itself to discount the usual accounts which Romanist controversialists give of the Socinian movement, and of its relation to the Protestant Reformation. They, and many Anglicans who have no sympathy with the great Reformation movement, are accustomed to say that the Socinian system of doctrines is the legitimate deduction from the principles of the Reformation, and courageously carries out the rationalist conceptions lurking in all Protestant theology. They point to the fact that many of the early Presbyterians of England and Puritans of America have furnished a large number of recruits to the Unitarian or Socinian ranks. They assert that the central point in the Socinian theology is the denial of the Divinity of our Lord, which they allege is the logical outcome of refusing to accept the Romanist doctrine of the Mass and the principle of ecclesiastical tradition.
The question is purely historical, and can only be answered by examining the sources of Socinian theology and tracing it to its roots. The result of such an examination seems to show that, while Socinianism did undoubtedly owe much to Humanism, and to the spirit of critical inquiry and keen sense of the value of the individual which it fostered, most of its distinguishing theological conceptions are mediæval. It laid hold on the leading principles of the Scotist-Pelagian theology, which were extremely popular in the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, and carried them out to their logical consequences. In fact, most of the theological principles of Socinian theology are more akin to those of the Jesuit dogmatic-which is the prolongation of Scotism into modern times--than they are to the theology of Luther or of Calvin. It is, of course, to be remembered that by discarding the authority of the Church the Socinians are widely separated from both Scotists and Jesuits. Still the roots of Socinian theology are to be found in the Scotist doctrines of God and of the Atonement, and these two doctrines are their starting-point, and not the mere negation of the Divinity of Christ.
In three most important conceptions the Socinian thought is distinctly mediæval, and mediæval in the Scotist way.
Their idea of faith is intellectual. It is assensus and not fiducia. "In Scripture," says the Racovian Catechism, "the faith is most perfectly taught, that God exists and that He recompenses. This, however, and nothing else, is the faith that is to be directed to God and Christ." It is afterwards described as the way in which one must adjust himself to the known commands and promises of God; and there is added that this faith "both makes our obedience more acceptable and well-pleasing to God, and supplies the defects of our obedience, provided it be sincere and earnest, and brings it about that we are justified by God." This is good Scotist doctrine. These theologians were accustomed to declare that all that the Christian needs is to have faith in God as the recompenser (i.e. to assent to the truth that God does recompense), and that with regard to all the other doctrines of the Church implicit faith (i.e. submission to the Church's teaching) is enough. Of course the extreme individualism of the Socinians coloured their conception of faith; they cannot accept an implicit faith; their assent to truth must always be explicit; what they assent to must recommend itself to their individual reason. They cannot assent to a round of truths which are presented to them by the Church, and receive them implicitly on the principle of obedience to authority. But what is to be observed here is that the Socinian type of faith is always assent to truths which can be stated in propositional form; they have no idea of that faith which, to use Luther's phrase, throws itself upon God. They further declare, quite in accordance with Scotist teaching, that men are justified because of their actual obedience to the known commands and promises of God. There is not a trace of the Evangelical attitude. The accordance with Scotist theology descends to very minute particulars, did space permit to trace it.
The Socinian conception of Scripture corresponds to their idea of faith. The two thoughts of Scripture and saving faith, as has been already said,[639] always correspond in mediæval theology they are primarily intellectual and propositional; in Reformation thinking they are, in the first instance, experimental and personal. The Socinian conception allies itself with the mediæval, and discards the Reformation way of regarding both faith and Scripture. With the Socinians as with mediæval theologians, Scripture is the divine source of information about doctrines and morals; they have no idea of Scripture as a means of grace, as the channel of a personal communion between God and His trusting people. But here as elsewhere the new individualism of the Socinians compels them to establish both the authority and the dogmatic contents of Scripture in a way different from their mediæval predecessors. They had rejected altogether the authority of the Church, and they could not make use of the thought to warrant either the authority of Scripture or a correct interpretation of its contents. In the place of it they put what they called reason. "The use of right reason (rectæ rationis) is great in things which pertain to salvation, since without it, it is impossible either to grasp with certainty the authority of Scripture, or to understand those things that are contained in it, or to deduce some things from other things, or, finally, to recall them to put them to use (ad usum revocari)." The certitudo sacrarum litterarum is accordingly established, or attempted to be proved, by a series of external proofs which appeal to the ordinary reasoning faculties of man. The Reformation conception of the Witness of the Spirit, an essential part of its doctrine of Scripture, finds no place in Socinian theology. They try to establish the authority of Scripture without any appeal to faith; the Confessions of the Reformation do not recognise any infallibility or divine authority which is otherwise apprehended than by faith. The Reformation and the Socinian doctrines are miles apart; but the Socinian and the mediæval approach each other closely. It is somewhat difficult to know what books the older Socinians recognise as their rule of faith. They did not accept the Canon of the mediæval Church. They had no difficulty about the New Testament; but the references to the Old Testament in the Racovian Catechism are very slight: its authority is guaranteed for them by the references to it in the New Testament.
When we turn to the Socinian statements about God, and to their assertions about the nature and meaning of the Work of Christ, we find the clearest proof of their mediæval origin. The Scotist theology is simply reproduced, and cleared of its limitations.
A fundamental conception of God lay at the basis of the whole Scotist theology. God, it maintained, could best be defined as Dominium Absolutum; man as set over against God they described as an individual free will. If God be conceived as simply Dominium Absolutum, we can never affirm that God must act in any given way; we may not even say that He is bound to act according to moral considerations. He is high above all considerations of any kind. He does not will to act in any way because it is right; and action is right because God wills to act in that way. There can be neither metaphysical nor moral necessity in any of God's actions or purposes. This Scotist idea, that God is the absolutely arbitrary one, is expressed in the strongest language in the Racovian Catechism. "It belongs to the nature of God that He has the right and supreme power to decree whatsoever He wills concerning all things and concerning us, even in those matters with which no other power has to do; for example, He can give laws, and appoint rewards and penalties according to His own judgment, to our thoughts, hidden as these may be in the innermost recesses of our hearts."
If this thought, that God is simply Dominium Absolutum, be applied to explain the nature and meaning of the work of Christ, of the Atonement, it follows at once that there can be no real necessity for that work; for all necessity, metaphysical or moral, is derogatory to the Dominium Absolutum, which is God. If the Atonement has merit in it, that is only because God has announced that He means to accept the work of Christ as meritorious, and that He will therefore free men from the burden of sin on account of what Christ, the Saviour, has done. It is the announced acceptation of God which makes the work of Christ meritorious. A meritorious work has nothing in its nature which makes it so. To be meritorious simply means that the work so described will be followed by God's doing something in return for its being done, and this only because God has made this announcement. God could have freed men from the guilt and punishment due for sin without the work of Christ; He could have appointed a human mediator if He had so willed it; He might have pardoned and accepted man as righteous in His sight without any mediator at all. He could have simply pardoned man without anything coming between His act of pardon and man's sin. This being the case, the Scotist theologians argued that it might seem that the work of Christ, called the Atonement, was entirely superfluous; it is, indeed, superfluous as far as reason is concerned; it can never be justified on rational grounds. But, according to the dogmatic tradition of the Church, confirmed by the circle of the Sacraments, God has selected this mode of getting rid of the sin and guilt of man. He has announced that He will accept this work of Christ, Atonement, and therefore the Scotist theologians declared the Atonement must be believed in and seen to be the divinely appointed way of salvation. Erasmus satirised the long arguments and hypotheses of the Scotist theologians when he enumerated among the questions which were highly interesting to them: "Could God have taken the form of a woman, a devil, an ass, a gourd, or a stone? How could a gourd have preached, done miracles, hung on the Cross?"[640]
It is manifest that this idea of Dominium Absolutum is simply the conception of the extremest individualism applied to God instead of being used to describe man. If we treat it anthropomorphically, it comes to this, that the relation of God to man is that of an infinite Individual Will set over against a number of finite individual wills. If this view be taken of the relations between God and man, then God can never be thought of as the Moral Ruler in a moral commonwealth, but only as a private individual face to face with other individuals; and the relations between God and man must be discussed from the standpoint of private and not of public law. When wrong-doing is regarded under the scheme of public law, the ruler can never treat it as an injury done to himself, and which he can forgive because he is of a kindly nature; he must consider it an offence against the whole community of which he is the public guardian. On the other hand, when offences are considered under a scheme of private law, they are simply wrongs done to a private person who, as an individual, may forgive what is merely a debt due to himself. In such a case the wrong-doer may be forgiven without infringing any general moral principle.
The Socinians, following the mediæval Scotist theologians, invariably applied the principles of private law to the relations between God and man. God, the Dominium Absolutum, the Supreme Arbitrary Will, was never regarded as the Moral Ruler in a moral commonwealth where subjects and rulers are constrained by the same moral laws. Sins are simply private debts due by the individual finite wills to the One Infinite Will. From such premises the Scotists deduced the conclusion that the Atonement was unnecessary; there they stopped; they could not say that there was no such thing as Atonement, for the dogmatic tradition of the Church prevented them. The Socinians had thrown overboard the thought of a dogmatic tradition which had to be respected even when it appeared to be irrational. If the Atonement was not necessary, that meant to them that it did not exist; they simply carried out the theological premises of the Scotist-Pelagian mediæval theologians to their legitimate consequences.
In these three important conceptions--faith, Scripture, the nature of God, involving the character of His relations to man--the Socinians belong to a mediæval school of thought, and have no sympathy whatever with the general principles which inspired Reformation theological thinking.
But the Socinians were not exclusively mediæval; they owed much to the Renaissance. This appears in a very marked manner in the way in which they conceived the very important religious conception of the Church. It is a characteristic of Socinian theology, that the individual believer is considered without much, if any, reference to the Church or community of the saved. This separates the Socinians not only from mediæval Christians, but from all who belonged to the great Protestant Evangelical movement.
The mediæval Church always regarded itself, and taught men to look to it, as a religious community which came logically and really before the individual believer. It presented itself to men as a great society founded on a dogmatic tradition, possessing the Sacraments, and governed by an officially holy caste. The pious layman of the Middle Ages found himself within it as he might have done within one of its great cathedrals. The dogmatic tradition did not trouble him much, nor did the worldliness and insincerity often manifested by its official guardians. What they required of him was implicit faith, which really meant a decorous external obedience. That once rendered, he was comparatively free to worship within what was for him a great house of prayer. The hymns, the prayers, many of the sermons of the mediæval Church, make us feel that the Institution was for the mediæval Christian the visible symbol of a wide purpose of God, which embraced his individual life and guaranteed a repose which he could use in resting on the promises of God. The records of mediæval piety continually show us that the Church was etherealised into an assured and historical fellowship of believers into which the individual entered, and within which he found the assuring sense of fellowship. He left all else to the professional guardians of this ecclesiastical edifice. Probably such are the unspoken thoughts of thousands of devout men and women in the Roman and Greek communions to-day. They value the Church because it represents to them in a visible and historical way a fellowship with Christ and His saints which is the result of His redeeming work.
This thought is as deeply rooted in Reformation as in mediæval piety. The Reformers felt compelled to protest against the political form which the mediæval Church had assumed. They conceived that to be a degradation from its ideal. They saw the manifold abuses which the degradation had given rise to. But they always regarded visible Christendom as a religious community called into being by the work of Christ. They had always before them the thought of the Church of Christ as the fellowship which logically and really comes before the individual believer, the society into which the believer is brought; and this conception stood with them in close and reciprocal connection with the thought that Jesus, by His work of Atonement, had reconciled men with God, had founded the Church on that work of His, and, within it had opened for sinners the way to God. They protested against the political form which the Church had assumed; they never ceased to cling to the thought of the Catholic Church Visible which is founded on the redeeming work of Christ, and within which man finds the way of salvation. They described this Church in all their creeds and testimonies; they gave the marks which characterised it and manifested its divine origin; the thought was an essential part of their theology.
The Socinians never felt the need of any such conception. Jesus was for them only the teacher of a superior kind of morality detailed in the commands and promises of God; they looked to Him for that guidance and impulse towards a moral self-culture which each man can appropriate for himself without first coming into a society which is the fellowship of the redeemed. Had they ever felt the burden of sin as the Reformers felt it, had they ever yearned for such a fellowship with Christ as whole-hearted personal trust gives, or even for such as comes in the sense of bodily contact in the Sacrament, had they ever felt the craving to get in touch with their Lord somehow or anyhow, they would never have been able to do without this conception of a Church Catholic of some kind or other. They never seemed to feel the need of it. The Racovian Catechism was compelled to make some reference to the kingly and priestly offices of Christ. It owed so much to the New Testament. Its perfunctory sentences show that our Lord was for the Socinians simply a Prophet sent from God to proclaim a superior kind of morality. His highest function was to communicate knowledge to men, and perhaps to teach them by example how to make use of it. They had no conception that Jesus came to do something for His people, and that what He did was much more valuable than what He said, however precious that might be. They were content to become His scholars, the scholars of a teacher sent from God, and to become members of His school, where His opinions were known and could be learned. They had no idea that they needed to be saved in the deeper sense of that word. They have no need, therefore, for the conception of the Church; what they did need and what they have is the thought of a school of opinions to which they could belong.[641]
In this one thought they were equally far apart from the circle of mediæval and of Reformation theological thinking. In most of their other theological conceptions their opinions were inherited from mediæval theology. They had little or no connection with Reformation theology or with what that represents--the piety of the mediæval Church.
Book VI
THE COUNTER-REFORMATION.
Chapter I
THE NECESSITY OF A REFORMATION OF SOME SORT UNIVERSALLY ADMITTED.[642]
In the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries the urgent need for a Reformation of the Church was recognised by all thoughtful men everywhere throughout western Europe, and was loudly expressed by almost everyone outside the circle of the influence of the Roman Curia. Statesmen and men of letters, nobles and burghers, great Churchmen as well as monks and parish priests--all bewailed the condition of the organised Christian life, and most of them recognised that the unreformed Papacy was the running sore of Europe. The protest against the state of religion was not confined to individual outcries; it found expression in the States-General of France, in Diet of Germany, and in the Parliament of England.
The complaints took many forms. One of the most universal was that the clergy, especially those of higher rank, busied themselves with everything save the one thing which specially belonged to them--the cure of souls. They took undue share in the government of the countries of Europe, and ousted the nobles from their legitimate places of rule. Clerical law-courts interfered constantly with the lives of burghers; and the clergy protested that they were not bound to obey the ordinary laws of the land. A brawling priest could plead the "benefit of clergy"; but a layman who struck a priest, no matter what the provocation, was liable to the dread penalty of excommunication. Their "right of sanctuary" was a perpetual encouragement to crime.[643] They and their claims menaced the quiet life of civilised towns and States. Constitutional lawyers, trained by Humanism to know the old imperial law codes of Theodosius and Justinian, traced these evils back to the interference of Canon Law with Civil, and that to the universal and absolute dominion of a papal absolutism. The Reformation desired, floated before the minds of statesmen as a reduction more or less thorough of the papal absolutism, and of the control exercised by the Pope and the clergy over the internal affairs of the State, even its national ecclesiastical regulations. The historical fact that the loosely formed kingdoms of the Middle Ages were being slowly transformed into modern States, perhaps furnished unconsciously the basis for this idea of a Reformation.
The same thought took another and more purely ecclesiastical form. The papal absolutism meant frequently that Italians received preferments all over western Europe, and supplanted the native clergy in the more important and richer benefices. Why should the Churches of Spain, England, or France be ruled by Italian prelates, whether resident or non-resident? It was universally felt that Roman rule meant a lack of spirituality, and was a source of religious as well as of national degradation. Men longed for a change, clergy as well as laity; and the thought of National Churches really independent of Rome, if still nominally under the Western Obedience, filled the minds of many Reformers.[644]
The early mediæval Church had been a stern preacher of righteousness, had taught the barbarous invaders of Europe lessons of pure living, honesty, sobriety; it had insisted that the clergy ought to be examples as well as preachers; Canon Law was full of penalties ordained to check clerical vices. But it was notorious that the higher clergy, whose duty it was to put the laws in execution, were themselves the worst offenders. How could English Bishops enforce laws against incontinence, when Wolsey, Archbishop, Cardinal, and Legate, had made his illegitimate daughter the Abbess of Salisbury? What hope was there for strict discipline when no inconsiderable portion of a Bishop's annual income came from money paid in order to practise clerical incontinence in security? Reformers demanded a reformation of clerical morals, beginning with the Bishops and descending through all grades to monks and nuns.[645]
Humanism brought forward yet another conception of reform. It demanded either a thorough repudiation of the whole of Scholastic Theology and a return to the pure and simple "Christian Philosophy" of the Church of the first six centuries, or such a relaxation of that Scholastic as would afford room for the encouragement of the New Learning.
Lastly, a few pious souls, with the clear vision of God which purity and simplicity of heart and mind give, declared that the Church had lost religion itself, and that the one reformation needed was the rediscovery of religion and the gracious enlightenment of the individual heart and conscience.[646]
The first conception of a reformation which looked for a cure of the evils which all acknowledged to the supremacy of the secular over ecclesiastical rule, may be seen in the reformation of the local Churches of Brandenburg and Saxony under Frederick of Brandenburg and William of Saxony. Archbishop Cranmer believed that the only way of removing the evils under which the Church of the later Middle Ages was groaning was to subordinate the ecclesiastical to the secular powers. The reformation of the Church of England under Henry VIII. carried out this idea to practical issue, but involved with it a nominal as well as a real destruction of the political unity of the mediæval Church. His actions were carefully watched and admired by many of the German Romanist Princes, who made more than one attempt, about the year 1540, to create a National Church in Germany under secular guidance, and remaining true to mediæval doctrine, hierarchy, and ritual.[647] The thought of a reformation of this kind was so familiar to men of the sixteenth century, that the probability of Henry VIII.'s separation from Rome was matter of discussion long before it had entered into the mind of that monarch.[648]