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CHAPTER IX

PURITANISM BECOMES A POLITICAL FORCE

ALTHOUGH Elizabeth was a Protestant, the Church was still filled with the practices of Rome, and as the Pope regarded himself as the spiritual head of the Catholic world, so Elizabeth constituted herself the head of the Church and would permit no interference in its direction by her subjects. Elizabeth understood the temper of her people better than did her successor, James I, and had more tact than to put into words what he expressed,—“as it is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do; so it is presumption and a high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do," but she was fully as strong in her faith in the divine right and omnipotence of kings. This was abhorrent to the reformers, who wished to see the Church entirely divorced from Rome. They objected to the use of the sign of the cross in baptism, of the ring in marriage, of bowing at the name of Jesus, of the use of certain vestments; they demanded a more strict observance of the Sabbath. The Church had fallen into a low estate and many of its ministers were unworthy to be its servants. In 1571 the reformers presented a petition to the queen alleging these grievances:

"Great numbers are admitted ministers that are infamous in their lives, and among those that are of ability their gifts in many places are useless by reason of pluralities and non-residency, whereby infinite numbers of your majesty's subjects are like to perish for lack of knowledge. By means of this, together with the common blasphemy of the Lord's name, the most wicked licentiousness of life, the abuse of excommunication, the commutation of penance, the great number of atheists, schismatics daily springing up, and the increase of papists, the Protestant religion is in imminent peril." Another petition complained that the ministers who were competent had been silenced for non-conformity, and that such as were left were unfit for the office, "having been either popish priests, or shiftless men thrust in upon the ministry when they knew not how to live, — serving men, and the basest of all sorts, men of no gifts. So they are of no common honesty, rioters, dicers, drunkards, and such like, of offensive lives." 2

But Elizabeth, as Campbell points out, was unmoved. She did not believe in freedom of speech on any subject. She was the head of the Church, and it was her province alone to decide such questions and not to have them decided for her by Parliament. As the law prohibited a Catholic from sitting in the House of Commons, the Puritans were

1 Campbell: The Puritan in England, Holland, and America, vol. i, p. 466. Byington: The Puritan in England and New England, p. 53.

in a majority in that body during the reign of Elizabeth, but the power of the Crown was greater even than that of the Commons. The independence of members was stifled by bribe and imprisonment, and legislation was throttled by the lords spiritual and temporal. Reforms which the people demanded, the queen, by the exercise of her great power, was able to prevent.

Unconsciously a religious movement was now about to become a great popular movement in protest against the arbitrary exercise of power by the sovereign. The word "unconsciously" is used with deliberation, for the great historical movements in the life of a nation take hold of a people long before they are discerned; they exercise their influence imperceptibly and without any external indication of the change of character that has taken place. Sometimes a people flash into revolt or rebellion with as little warning as a volcano throws out its molten lava, and in the one case as in the other the damage may be swift and terrible; but seldom is the damage so great that it cannot be repaired by time. The agencies that change the character of a race are as gradual and as unperceived as the conversion of wood and swamp land into coal, hidden for centuries and then changing the destinies of mankind.

The Church, not any particular sect, but the Church as an institution, has always been an aristocratic fellowship. Professing the principles of

equality, recognizing the universality of man, it has depended for its existence upon caste. Popes and sovereigns, cardinals and bishops, priests and pastors, constitute the hierarchy of the Church, elevated according to their degree over the heads of the masses to whom they minister. In this is to be found one of the secrets of the perpetuation of the Church and its power, for man needs a master, and men are willing to obey those set over them until the pressure from above becomes too severe.

The English, Campbell says, are little influenced by theories; they respect hard facts and not ideas; and Boutmy's deduction is that the Englishman "has no time to follow vain phantoms; they are too far removed from earth, too alien to life here below, to its conditions and necessities." In other words, the Englishman is not metaphysical like the German, nor imaginative like the Latin, and what is known as the deep-rooted conservatism of the English character is simply an acceptance of the established order - the facts of society and a reluctance to indulge in experiments that may overturn the established order; and it is only when that order is threatened, when liberty is in danger or the freedom of conscience is denied, that he can be induced to offer resistance. Compare, for instance, the English and French revolutions. The English had a definite purpose to accomplish. The rights of the people, rights which had been theirs from time immemorial and had become indefeasi

ble and constituted the basis on which society was organized, were menaced by Charles I, who attempted to subvert the Commons and magnify the power of the Crown. There was only one thing to do, and that was to resist encroachment, then to fight against it, finally to remove the sovereign whose existence threatened the destruction of society. It was all done in a grim, stolid, rather matter-of-fact way, with as little noise and disturbance as possible. It was reform from within and not from without; it was not necessary to overthrow the social order to correct abuses; it was folly to burn down the mansion to purify a single room. In England the revolution was not accompanied by a reign of terror, and an incautious word did not sign a death warrant. Now, the French are differently constituted, and they resisted oppression and brought their king to the guillotine in quite another fashion. They must needs do their killing to the accompaniment of the sham philosophy of the encyclopædists, to "deluges of frantic Sansculotism," as Carlyle says; they prate much of liberty and equality, and they wear the bonnet rouge as symbolic of that liberty upon which they trampled.

In the reign of Elizabeth those Englishmen who had broken away from the Church of Rome were Calvinistic in their theology — and Calvin has been described as "Half Old Testament prophet, half Republican demagogue" — but still aristocratic in their church system. The bench of bishops, created

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