Meanwhile the two Secretaries of State
were constantly labouring to draw their master in diametrically
opposite directions. Every scheme, every person, recommended by one
of them was reprobated by the other. Nottingham was never weary of
repeating that the old Roundhead party, the party which had taken
the life of Charles the First and had plotted against the life of
Charles the Second, was in principle republican, and that the Tories
were the only true friends of monarchy. Shrewsbury replied that the
Tories might be friends of monarchy, but that they regarded James as
their monarch. Nottingham was always bringing to the closet
intelligence of the wild daydreams in which a few old eaters of
calf's head, the remains of the once formidable party of Bradshaw
and Ireton, still indulged at taverns in the city. Shrewsbury
produced ferocious lampoons which the Jacobites dropped every day in
the coffeehouses. "Every Whig," said the Tory Secretary, "is an
enemy of your Majesty's prerogative." "Every Tory," said the Whig
Secretary, "is an enemy of your Majesty's title."
At the treasury there was a complication
of jealousies and quarrels. Both the First Commissioner, Mordaunt,
and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Delamere, were zealous Whigs
but, though they held the same political creed, their tempers
differed widely. Mordaunt was volatile, dissipated, and generous.
The wits of that time laughed at the way in which he flew about from
Hampton Court to the Royal Exchange, and from the Royal Exchange
back to Hampton Court. How he found time for dress, politics,
lovemaking and balladmaking was a wonder. Delamere was gloomy and
acrimonious, austere in his private morals, and punctual in his
devotions, but greedy of ignoble gain. The two principal ministers
of finance, therefore, became enemies, and agreed only in hating
their colleague Godolphin. What business had he at Whitehall in
these days of Protestant ascendency, he who had sate at the same
board with Papists, he who had never scrupled to attend Mary of
Modena to the idolatrous worship of the Mass? The most
provoking circumstance was that Godolphin, though is name stood
only third in the commission, was really first Lord. For in
financial knowledge and in habits of business Mordaunt and Delamere
were mere children when compared with him; and this William soon
discovered.
Similar feuds raged at the other great
boards and through all the subordinate ranks of public
functionaries. In every customhouse, in every arsenal, were a
Shrewsbury and a Nottingham, a Delamere and a Godolphin. The Whigs
complained that there was no department in which creatures of the
fallen tyranny were not to be found. It was idle to allege that
these men were versed in the details of business, that they were the
depositaries of official traditions, and that the friends of
liberty, having been, during many years, excluded from public
employment, must necessarily be incompetent to take on themselves at
once the whole management of affairs. Experience doubtless had its
value: but surely the first of all the qualifications of a servant
was fidelity; and no Tory could be a really faithful servant of the
new government. If King William were wise, he would rather trust
novices zealous for his interest and honour than veterans who might
indeed possess ability and knowledge, but who would use that ability
and that knowledge to effect his ruin.
The Tories, on the other hand,
complained that their share of power bore no proportion to their
number and their weight in the country, and that every where old and
useful public servants were, for the crime of being friends to
monarchy and to the Church, turned out of their posts to make way
for Rye House plotters and haunters of conventicles. These upstarts,
adepts in the art of factious agitation, but ignorant of all that
belonged to their new calling, would be just beginning to learn
their business when they had undone the nation by their blunders. To
be a rebel and a schismatic was surely not all that ought to be
required of a man in high employment. What would become of the
finances, what of the marine, if Whigs who could not understand the
plainest balance sheet were to manage the revenue, and Whigs who had
never walked over a dockyard to fit out the fleet.
The truth is that the charges which the
two parties brought against each other were, to a great extent, well
founded, but that the blame which both threw on William was unjust.
Official experience was to be found almost exclusively among the
Tories, hearty attachment to the new settlement almost exclusively
among the Whigs. It was not the fault of the King that the knowledge
and the zeal, which, combined, make a valuable servant of the state
must at that time be had separately or not at all. If he employed
men of one party, there was great risk of mistakes. If he
employed men of the other party, there was great risk of treachery.
If he employed men of both parties, there was still some risk of
mistakes; there was still some risk of treachery; and to these risks
was added the certainty of dissension. He might join Whigs and
Tories; but it was beyond his power to mix them. In the same office,
at the same desk, they were still enemies, and agreed only in
murmuring at the Prince who tried to mediate between them. It was
inevitable that, in such circumstances, the administration, fiscal,
military, naval, should be feeble and unsteady; that nothing should
be done in quite the right way or at quite the right time; that the
distractions from which scarcely any public office was exempt should
produce disasters, and that every disaster should increase the
distractions from which it had sprung.
There was indeed one department of which
the business was well conducted; and that was the department of
Foreign Affairs. There William directed every thing, and, on
important occasions, neither asked the advice nor employed the
agency of any English politician. One invaluable assistant he had,
Anthony Heinsius, who, a few weeks after the Revolution had been
accomplished, became Pensionary of Holland. Heinsius had entered
public life as a member of that party which was jealous of the power
of the House of Orange, and desirous to be on friendly terms with
France. But he had been sent in 1681 on a diplomatic mission to
Versailles; and a short residence there had produced a complete
change in his views. On a near acquaintance, he was alarmed by the
power and provoked by the insolence of that Court of which, while he
contemplated it only at a distance, he had formed a favourable
opinion. He found that his country was despised. He saw his religion
persecuted. His official character did not save him from some
personal affronts which, to the latest day of his long career, he
never forgot. He went home a devoted adherent of William and a
mortal enemy of Lewis.
The office of Pensionary, always
important, was peculiarly important when the Stadtholder was absent
from the Hague. Had the politics of Heinsius been still what they
once were, all the great designs of William might have been
frustrated. But happily there was between these two eminent men a
perfect friendship which, till death dissolved it, appears never to
have been interrupted for one moment by suspicion or ill humour. On
all large questions of European policy they cordially agreed. They
corresponded assiduously and most unreservedly. For though William
was slow to give his confidence, yet, when he gave it, he gave it
entire. The correspondence is still extant, and is most honourable
to both. The King's letters would alone suffice to prove that he was
one of the greatest statesmen whom Europe has
produced. While he lived, the Pensionary was content to be the most
obedient, the most trusty, and the most discreet of servants. But,
after the death of the master, the servant proved himself capable of
supplying with eminent ability the master's place, and was renowned
throughout Europe as one of the great Triumvirate which humbled the
pride of Lewis the Fourteenth. The foreign policy of England,
directed immediately by William in close concert with Heinsius, was,
at this time, eminently skilful and successful. But in every other
part of the administration the evils arising from the mutual
animosity of factions were but too plainly discernible. Nor was this
all. To the evils arising from the mutual animosity of factions were
added other evils arising from the mutual animosity of sects.
The year 1689 is a not less important
epoch in the ecclesiastical than in the civil history of England. In
that year was granted the first legal indulgence to Dissenters. In
that year was made the last serious attempt to bring the
Presbyterians within the pale of the Church of England. From that
year dates a new schism, made, in defiance of ancient precedents, by
men who had always professed to regard schism with peculiar
abhorrence, and ancient precedents with peculiar veneration. In that
year began the long struggle between two great parties of
conformists. Those parties indeed had, under various forms, existed
within the Anglican communion ever since the Reformation; but till
after the Revolution they did not appear marshalled in regular and
permanent order of battle against each other, and were therefore not
known by established names. Some time after the accession of William
they began to be called the High Church party and the Low Church
party; and, long before the end of his reign, these appellations
were in common use.
In the summer of 1688 the breaches which
had long divided the great body of English Protestants had seemed to
be almost closed. Disputes about Bishops and Synods, written prayers
and extemporaneous prayers, white gowns and black gowns, sprinkling
and dipping, kneeling and sitting, had been for a short space
intermitted. The serried array which was then drawn up against
Popery measured the whole of the vast interval which separated
Sancroft from Bunyan. Prelates recently conspicuous as persecutors
now declared themselves friends of religious liberty, and exhorted
their clergy to live in a constant interchange of hospitality and of
kind offices with the separatists.
Separatists, on the other hand, who had
recently considered mitres and lawn sleeves as the livery of
Antichrist, were putting candles in windows and throwing faggots on
bonfires in honour of the prelates. These
feelings continued to grow till they attained their greatest height
on the memorable day on which the common oppressor finally quitted
Whitehall, and on which an innumerable multitude, tricked out in
orange ribands, welcomed the common deliverer to Saint James's. When
the clergy of London came, headed by Compton, to express their
gratitude to him by whose instrumentality God had wrought salvation
for the Church and the State, the procession was swollen by some
eminent nonconformist divines. It was delightful to many good men to
learn that pious and learned Presbyterian ministers had walked in
the train of a Bishop, had been greeted by him with fraternal
kindness, and had been announced by him in the presence chamber as
his dear and respected friends, separated from him indeed by some
differences of opinion on minor points, but united to him by
Christian charity and by common zeal for the essentials of the
reformed faith. There had never before been such a day in England;
and there has never since been such a day.
The tide of feeling was already on the
turn; and the ebb was even more rapid than the flow had been. In a
very few hours the High Churchman began to feel tenderness for the
enemy whose tyranny was now no longer feared, and dislike of the
allies whose services were now no longer needed. It was easy to
gratify both feelings by imputing to the dissenters the
misgovernment of the exiled King. His Majesty-such was now the
language of too many Anglican divines- would have been an excellent
sovereign had he not been too confiding, too forgiving. He had put
his trust in a class of men who hated his office, his family, his
person, with implacable hatred. He had ruined himself in the vain
attempt to conciliate them. He had relieved them, in defiance of law
and of the unanimous sense of the old royalist party, from the
pressure of the penal code; had allowed them to worship God publicly
after their own mean and tasteless fashion; had admitted them to the
bench of justice and to the Privy Council; had gratified them with
fur robes, gold chains, salaries, and pensions. In return for his
liberality, these people, once so uncouth in demeanour, once so
savage in opposition even to legitimate authority, had become the
most abject of flatterers. They had continued to applaud and
encourage him when the most devoted friends of his family had
retired in shame and sorrow from his palace. Who had more foully
sold the religion and liberty of his country than Titus? Who had
been more zealous for the dispensing power than Alsop? Who had urged
on the persecution of the seven Bishops more fiercely than Lobb?
What chaplain impatient for a deanery had ever, even when preaching
in the royal presence on the thirtieth of January or the
twenty-ninth of May, uttered adulation more gross than might easily
be found in those addresses by which dissenting congregations had
testified their gratitude for the illegal
Declaration of Indulgence? Was it strange that a prince who had
never studied law books should have believed that he was only
exercising his rightful prerogative, when he was thus encouraged by
a faction which had always ostentatiously professed hatred of
arbitrary power? Misled by such guidance, he had gone further and
further in the wrong path: he had at length estranged from him
hearts which would once have poured forth their best blood in his
defence: he had left himself no supporters except his old foes; and,
when the day of peril came, he had found that the feeling of his old
foes towards him was still what it had been when they had attempted
to rob him of his inheritance, and when they had plotted against his
life. Every man of sense had long known that the sectaries bore no
love to monarchy. It had now been found that they bore as little
love to freedom. To trust them with power would be an error not less
fatal to the nation than to the throne. If, in order to redeem
pledges somewhat rashly given, it should be thought necessary to
grant them relief, every concession ought to be accompanied by
limitations and precautions. Above all, no man who was an enemy to
the ecclesiastical constitution of the realm ought to be permitted
to bear any part in the civil government.
Between the nonconformists and the rigid
conformists stood the Low Church party. That party contained, as it
still contains, two very different elements, a Puritan element and a
Latitudinarian element. On almost every question, however, relating
either to ecclesiastical polity or to the ceremonial of public
worship, the Puritan Low Churchman and the Latitudinarian Low
Churchman were perfectly agreed. They saw in the existing polity and
in the existing ceremonial no defect, no blemish, which could make
it their duty to become dissenters. Nevertheless they held that both
the polity and the ceremonial were means and not ends, and that the
essential spirit of Christianity might exist without episcopal
orders and without a Book of Common Prayer. They had, while James
was on the throne, been mainly instrumental in forming the great
Protestant coalition against Popery and tyranny; and they continued
in 1689 to hold the same conciliatory language which they had held
in 1688. They gently blamed the scruples of the nonconformists. It
was undoubtedly a great weakness to imagine that there could be any
sin in wearing a white robe, in tracing a cross, in kneeling at the
rails of an altar. But the highest authority had given the plainest
directions as to the manner in which such weakness was to be
treated. The weak brother was not to be judged: he was not to be
despised: believers who had stronger minds were commanded to soothe
him by large compliances, and carefully to remove out of his path
every stumbling block which could cause him to offend. An apostle
had declared that, though he had himself no misgivings about
the use of animal food or of wine, he would eat herbs and drink
water rather than give scandal to the feeblest of his flock. What
would he have thought of ecclesiastical rulers who, for the sake of
a vestment, a gesture, a posture, had not only torn the Church
asunder, but had filled all the gaols of England with men of
orthodox faith and saintly life? The reflections thrown by the High
Churchmen on the recent conduct of the dissenting body the Low
Churchmen pronounced to be grossly unjust. The wonder was, not that
a few nonconformists should have accepted with thanks an indulgence
which, illegal as it was, had opened the doors of their prisons and
given security to their hearths, but that the nonconformists
generally should have been true to the cause of a constitution from
the benefits of which they had been long excluded. It was most
unfair to impute to a great party the faults of a few individuals.
Even among the Bishops of the Established Church James had found
tools and sycophants. The conduct of Cartwright and Parker had been
much more inexcusable than that of Alsop and Lobb. Yet those who
held the dissenters answerable for the errors of Alsop and Lobb
would doubtless think it most unreasonable to hold the Church
answerable for the far deeper guilt of Cartwright and Parker.
The Low Church clergymen were a
minority, and not a large minority, of their profession: but their
weight was much more than proportioned to their numbers: for they
mustered strong in the capital: they had great influence there; and
the average of intellect and knowledge was higher among them than
among their order generally. We should probably overrate their
numerical strength, if we were to estimate them at a tenth part of
the priesthood. Yet it will scarcely be denied that there were among
them as many men of distinguished eloquence and learning as could be
found in the other nine tenths. Among the laity who conformed to the
established religion the parties were not unevenly balanced. Indeed
the line which separated them deviated very little from the line
which separated the Whigs and the Tories. In the House of Commons,
which had been elected when the Whigs were triumphant, the Low
Church party greatly preponderated. In the Lords there was an almost
exact equipoise; and very slight circumstances sufficed to turn the
scale.
The head of the Low Church party was the
King. He had been bred a Presbyterian: he was, from rational
conviction, a Latitudinarian; and personal ambition, as well as
higher motives, prompted him to act as mediator among Protestant
sects. He was bent on effecting three great reforms in the laws
touching ecclesiastical matters. His first object was to obtain for
dissenters permission to celebrate their worship in freedom and
security. His second object was to make such changes in the Anglican
ritual and polity as,
without offending those to whom that ritual and polity were dear,
might conciliate the moderate nonconformists. His third object was
to throw open civil offices to Protestants without distinction of
sect. All his three objects were good; but the first only was at
that time attainable. He came too late for the second, and too early
for the third.
A few days after his accession, he took
a step which indicated, in a manner not to be mistaken, his
sentiments touching ecclesiastical polity and public worship. He
found only one see unprovided with a Bishop. Seth Ward, who had
during many years had charge of the diocese of Salisbury, and who
had been honourably distinguished as one of the founders of the
Royal Society, having long survived his faculties, died while the
country was agitated by the elections for the Convention, without
knowing that great events, of which not the least important had
passed under his own roof, had saved his Church and his country from
ruin. The choice of a successor was no light matter. That choice
would inevitably be considered by the country as a prognostic of the
highest import. The King too might well be perplexed by the number
of divines whose erudition, eloquence, courage, and uprightness had
been conspicuously displayed during the contentions of the last
three years. The preference was given to Burnet. His claims were
doubtless great. Yet William might have had a more tranquil reign if
he had postponed for a time the well earned promotion of his
chaplain, and had bestowed the first great spiritual preferment,
which, after the Revolution, fell to the disposal of the Crown, on
some eminent theologian, attached to the new settlement, yet not
generally hated by the clergy.
Unhappily the name of Burnet was odious
to the great majority of the Anglican priesthood. Though, as
respected doctrine, he by no means belonged to the extreme section
of the Latitudinarian party, he was popularly regarded as the
personification of the Latitudinarian spirit. This distinction he
owed to the prominent place which he held in literature and
politics, to the readiness of his tongue and of his pert, and above
all to the frankness and boldness of his nature, frankness which
could keep no secret, and boldness which flinched from no danger. He
had formed but a low estimate of the character of his clerical
brethren considered as a body; and, with his usual indiscretion, he
frequently suffered his opinion to escape him. They hated him in
return with a hatred which has descended to their successors, and
which, after the lapse of a century and a half, does not appear to
languish.
As soon as the King's decision was
known, the question was every where asked, What will the Archbishop
do? Sancroft had absented himself from the Convention: he had
refused to sit in the Privy Council: he had ceased to confirm, to
ordain, and to institute; and
he was seldom seen out of the walls of his palace at Lambeth. He, on
all occasions, professed to think himself still bound by his old
oath of allegiance. Burnet he regarded as a scandal to the
priesthood, a Presbyterian in a surplice. The prelate who should lay
hands on that unworthy head would commit more than one great sin. He
would, in a sacred place, and before a great congregation of the
faithful, at once acknowledge an usurper as a King, and confer on a
schismatic the character of a Bishop. During some time Sancroft
positively declared that he would not obey the precept of William.
Lloyd of Saint Asaph, who was the common friend of the Archbishop
and of the Bishop elect, intreated and expostulated in vain.
Nottingham, who, of all the laymen connected with the new
government, stood best with the clergy, tried his influence, but to
no better purpose. The Jacobites said every where that they were
sure of the good old Primate; that he had the spirit of a martyr;
that he was determined to brave, in the cause of the Monarchy and of
the Church, the utmost rigour of those laws with which the
obsequious parliaments of the sixteenth century had fenced the Royal
Supremacy. He did in truth hold out long. But at the last moment his
heart failed him, and he looked round him for some mode of escape.
Fortunately, as childish scruples often disturbed his conscience,
childish expedients often quieted it. A more childish expedient than
that to which he now resorted is not to be found in all the tones of
the casuists. He would not himself bear a part in the service. He
would not publicly pray for the Prince and Princess as King and
Queen. He would not call for their mandate, order it to be read, and
then proceed to obey it. But he issued a commission empowering any
three of his suffragans to commit, in his name, and as his
delegates, the sins which he did not choose to commit in person. The
reproaches of all parties soon made him ashamed of himself. He then
tried to suppress the evidence of his fault by means more
discreditable than the fault itself. He abstracted from among the
public records of which he was the guardian the instrument by which
he had authorised his brethren to act for him, and was with
difficulty induced to give it up.
Burnet however had, under the authority
of this instrument, been consecrated. When he next waited on Mary,
she reminded him of the conversations which they had held at the
Hague about the high duties and grave responsibility of Bishops. "I
hope," she said, "that you will put your notions in practice." Her
hope was not disappointed. Whatever may be thought of Burnet's
opinions touching civil and ecclesiastical polity, or of the temper
and judgment which he showed in defending those opinions, the utmost
malevolence of faction could not venture to deny that he tended his
flock with a zeal, diligence, and disinterestedness worthy of the
purest ages of the Church. His jurisdiction extended over Wiltshire
and Berkshire. These counties he divided into districts which he
sedulously visited. About two months of every summer he passed in
preaching, catechizing, and confirming daily from church to church.
When he died there was no corner of his diocese in which the people
had not had seven or eight opportunities of receiving his
instructions and of asking his advice. The worst weather, the worst
roads, did not prevent him from discharging these duties. On one
occasion, when the floods were out, he exposed his life to imminent
risk rather than disappoint a rural congregation which was in
expectation of a discourse from the Bishop. The poverty of the
inferior clergy was a constant cause of uneasiness to his kind and
generous heart. He was indefatigable and at length successful in his
attempts to obtain for them from the Crown that grant which is known
by the name of Queen Anne's Bounty. He was especially careful, when
he travelled through his diocese, to lay no burden on them. Instead
of requiring them to entertain him, he entertained them. He always
fixed his headquarters at a market town, kept a table there, and, by
his decent hospitality and munificent charities, tried to conciliate
those who were prejudiced against his doctrines. When he bestowed a
poor benefice, and he had many such to bestow, his practice was to
add out of his own purse twenty pounds a year to the income. Ten
promising young men, to each of whom he allowed thirty pounds a
year, studied divinity under his own eye in the close of Salisbury.
He had several children but he did not think himself justified in
hoarding for them. Their mother had brought him a good fortune. With
that fortune, he always said, they must be content: He would not,
for their sakes, be guilty of the crime of raising an estate out of
revenues sacred to piety and charity. Such merits as these will, in
the judgment of wise and candid men, appear fully to atone for every
offence which can be justly imputed to him.
When he took his seat in the House of
Lords, he found that assembly busied in ecclesiastical legislation.
A statesman who was well known to be devoted to the Church had
undertaken to plead the cause of the Dissenters. No subject in the
realm occupied so important and commanding a position with reference
to religious parties as Nottingham. To the influence derived from
rank, from wealth, and from office, he added the higher influence
which belongs to knowledge, to eloquence, and to integrity. The
orthodoxy of his creed, the regularity of his devotions, and the
purity of his morals gave a peculiar weight to his opinions on
questions in which the interests of Christianity were concerned. Of
all the ministers of the new Sovereigns, he had the largest share of
the confidence of the clergy. Shrewsbury was certainly a Whig, and
probably a freethinker: he had lost one religion; and it
did not very clearly appear that he had found another. Halifax had
been during many years accused of scepticism, deism, atheism.
Danby's attachment to episcopacy and the liturgy was rather
political than religious. But Nottingham was such a son as the
Church was proud to own. Propositions, therefore, which, if made by
his colleagues, would infallibly produce a violent panic among the
clergy, might, if made by him, find a favourable reception even in
universities and chapter houses. The friends of religious liberty
were with good reason desirous to obtain his cooperation; and, up to
a certain point, he was not unwilling to cooperate with them. He was
decidedly for a toleration. He was even for what was then called a
comprehension: that is to say, he was desirous to make some
alterations in the Anglican discipline and ritual for the purpose of
removing the scruples of the moderate Presbyterians. But he was not
prepared to give up the Test Act. The only fault which he found with
that Act was that it was not sufficiently stringent, and that it
left loopholes through which schismatics sometimes crept into civil
employments. In truth it was because he was not disposed to part
with the Test that he was willing to consent to some changes in the
Liturgy. He conceived that, if the entrance of the Church were but a
very little widened, great numbers who had hitherto lingered near
the threshold would press in. Those who still remained without would
then not be sufficiently numerous or powerful to extort any further
concession, and would be glad to compound for a bare toleration.
The opinion of the Low Churchmen
concerning the Test Act differed widely from his. But many of them
thought that it was of the highest importance to have his support on
the great questions of Toleration and Comprehension. From the
scattered fragments of information which have come down to us, it
appears that a compromise was made. It is quite certain that
Nottingham undertook to bring in a Toleration Bill and a
Comprehension Bill, and to use his best endeavours to carry both
bills through the House of Lords. It is highly probable that, in
return for this great service, some of the leading Whigs consented
to let the Test Act remain for the present unaltered.
There was no difficulty in framing
either the Toleration Bill or the Comprehension Bill. The situation
of the dissenters had been much discussed nine or ten years before,
when the kingdom was distracted by the fear of a Popish plot, and
when there was among Protestants a general disposition to unite
against the common enemy. The government had then been willing to
make large concessions to the Whig party, on condition that the
crown should be suffered to descend according to the regular course.
A draught of a law authorising the public worship of the
nonconformists, and
a draught of a law making some alterations in the public worship of
the Established Church, had been prepared, and would probably have
been passed by both Houses without difficulty, had not Shaftesbury
and his coadjutors refused to listen to any terms, and, by grasping
at what was beyond their reach, missed advantages which might easily
have been secured. In the framing of these draughts, Nottingham,
then an active member of the House of Commons, had borne a
considerable part. He now brought them forth from the obscurity in
which they had remained since the dissolution of the Oxford
Parliament, and laid them, with some slight alterations, on the
table of the Lords.
The Toleration Bill passed both Houses
with little debate. This celebrated statute, long considered as the
Great Charter of religious liberty, has since been extensively
modified, and is hardly known to the present generation except by
name. The name, however, is still pronounced with respect by many
who will perhaps learn with surprise and disappointment the real
nature of the law which they have been accustomed to hold in honour.
Several statutes which had been passed between the accession of
Queen Elizabeth and the Revolution required all people under severe
penalties to attend the services of the Church of England, and to
abstain from attending conventicles. The Toleration Act did not
repeal any of these statutes, but merely provided that they should
not be construed to extend to any person who should testify his
loyalty by taking the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, and his
Protestantism by subscribing the Declaration against
Transubstantiation.
The relief thus granted was common
between the dissenting laity and the dissenting clergy. But the
dissenting clergy had some peculiar grievances. The Act of
Uniformity had laid a mulct of a hundred pounds on every person who,
not having received Episcopal ordination, should presume to
administer the Eucharist. The Five Mile Act had driven many pious
and learned ministers from their houses and their friends, to live
among rustics in obscure villages of which the name was not to be
seen on the map. The Conventicle Act had imposed heavy fines on
divines who should preach in any meeting of separatists; and, in
direct opposition to the humane spirit of our common law, the Courts
were enjoined to construe this Act largely and beneficially for the
suppressing of dissent and for the encouraging of informers. These
severe statutes were not repealed, but were, with many conditions
and precautions, relaxed. It was provided that every dissenting
minister should, before he exercised his function, profess under his
hand his belief in the articles of the Church of England, with a few
exceptions. The propositions to which he was not required
to assent were these; that the Church has power to regulate
ceremonies; that the doctrines set forth in the Book of Homilies are
sound; and that there is nothing superstitious and idolatrous in the
ordination service. If he declared himself a Baptist, he was also
excused from affirming that the baptism of infants is a laudable
practice. But, unless his conscience suffered him to subscribe
thirty-four of the thirty-nine articles, and the greater part of two
other articles, he could not preach without incurring all the
punishments which the Cavaliers, in the day of their power and their
vengeance, had devised for the tormenting and ruining of
schismatical teachers.
The situation of the Quaker differed
from that of other dissenters, and differed for the worse. The
Presbyterian, the Independent, and the Baptist had no scruple about
the Oath of Supremacy. But the Quaker refused to take it, not
because he objected to the proposition that foreign sovereigns and
prelates have no jurisdiction in England, but because his conscience
would not suffer him to swear to any proposition whatever. He was
therefore exposed to the severity of part of that penal code which,
long before Quakerism existed, had been enacted against Roman
Catholics by the Parliaments of Elizabeth. Soon after the
Restoration, a severe law, distinct from the general law which
applied to all conventicles, had been passed against meetings of
Quakers. The Toleration Act permitted the members of this harmless
sect to hold their assemblies in peace, on condition of signing
three documents, a declaration against Transubstantiation, a promise
of fidelity to the government, and a confession of Christian belief.
The objections which the Quaker had to the Athanasian phraseology
had brought on him the imputation of Socinianism; and the strong
language in which he sometimes asserted that he derived his
knowledge of spiritual things directly from above had raised a
suspicion that he thought lightly of the authority of Scripture. He
was therefore required to profess his faith in the divinity of the
Son and of the Holy Ghost, and in the inspiration of the Old and New
Testaments. Such were the terms on which the Protestant dissenters
of England were, for the first time, permitted by law to worship God
according to their own conscience. They were very properly forbidden
to assemble with barred doors, but were protected against hostile
intrusion by a clause which made it penal to enter a meeting house
for the purpose of molesting the congregation.
As if the numerous limitations and
precautions which have been mentioned were insufficient, it was
emphatically declared that the legislature did not intend to grant
the smallest indulgence to
any Papist, or to any person who denied the doctrine of the Trinity
as that doctrine is set forth in the formularies of the Church of
England.
Of all the Acts that have ever been
passed by Parliament, the Toleration Act is perhaps that which most
strikingly illustrates the peculiar vices and the peculiar
excellences of English legislation. The science of Politics bears in
one respect a close analogy to the science of Mechanics. The
mathematician can easily demonstrate that a certain power, applied
by means of a certain lever or of a certain system of pulleys, will
suffice to raise a certain weight. But his demonstration proceeds on
the supposition that the machinery is such as no load will bend or
break. If the engineer, who has to lift a great mass of real granite
by the instrumentality of real timber and real hemp, should
absolutely rely on the propositions which he finds in treatises on
Dynamics, and should make no allowance for the imperfection of his
materials, his whole apparatus of beams, wheels, and ropes would
soon come down in ruin, and, with all his geometrical skill, he
would be found a far inferior builder to those painted barbarians
who, though they never heard of the parallelogram of forces, managed
to pile up Stonehenge. What the engineer is to the mathematician,
the active statesman is to the contemplative statesman. It is indeed
most important that legislators and administrators should be versed
in the philosophy of government, as it is most important that the
architect, who has to fix an obelisk on its pedestal, or to hang a
tubular bridge over an estuary, should be versed in the philosophy
of equilibrium and motion. But, as he who has actually to build must
bear in mind many things never noticed by D'Alembert and Euler, so
must he who has actually to govern be perpetually guided by
considerations to which no allusion can be found in the writings of
Adam Smith or Jeremy Bentham. The perfect lawgiver is a just temper
between the mere man of theory, who can see nothing but general
principles, and the mere man of business, who can see nothing but
particular circumstances. Of lawgivers in whom the speculative
element has prevailed to the exclusion of the practical, the world
has during the last eighty years been singularly fruitful. To their
wisdom Europe and America have owed scores of abortive
constitutions, scores of constitutions which have lived just long
enough to make a miserable noise, and have then gone off in
convulsions. But in the English legislature the practical element
has always predominated, and not seldom unduly predominated, over
the speculative. To think nothing of symmetry and much of
convenience; never to remove an anomaly merely because it is an
anomaly; never to innovate except when some grievance is felt; never
to innovate except so far as to get rid of the grievance; never to
lay down any proposition of wider extent than the particular
case for which it is necessary to provide; these are the rules which
have, from the age of John to the age of Victoria, generally guided
the deliberations of our two hundred and fifty Parliaments. Our
national distaste for whatever is abstract in political science
amounts undoubtedly to a fault. But it is, perhaps, a fault on the
right side. That we have been far too slow to improve our laws must
be admitted. But, though in other countries there may have
occasionally been more rapid progress, it would not be easy to name
any other country in which there has been so little retrogression.
The Toleration Act approaches very near
to the idea of a great English law. To a jurist, versed in the
theory of legislation, but not intimately acquainted with the temper
of the sects and parties into which the nation was divided at the
time of the Revolution, that Act would seem to be a mere chaos of
absurdities and contradictions. It will not bear to be tried by
sound general principles. Nay, it will not bear to be tried by any
principle, sound or unsound. The sound principle undoubtedly is,
that mere theological error ought not to be punished by the civil
magistrate. This principle the Toleration Act not only does not
recognise, but positively disclaims. Not a single one of the cruel
laws enacted against nonconformists by the Tudors or the Stuarts is
repealed. Persecution continues to be the general rule. Toleration
is the exception. Nor is this all. The freedom which is given to
conscience is given in the most capricious manner. A Quaker, by
making a declaration of faith in general terms, obtains the full
benefit of the Act without signing one of the thirty-nine Articles.
An Independent minister, who is perfectly willing to make the
declaration required from the Quaker, but who has doubts about six
or seven of the Articles, remains still subject to the penal laws.
Howe is liable to punishment if he preaches before he has solemnly
declared his assent to the Anglican doctrine touching the Eucharist.
Penn, who altogether rejects the Eucharist, is at perfect liberty to
preach without making any declaration whatever on the subject.
These are some of the obvious faults
which must strike every person who examines the Toleration Act by
that standard of just reason which is the same in all countries and
in all ages. But these very faults may perhaps appear to be merits,
when we take into consideration the passions and prejudices of those
for whom the Toleration Act was framed. This law, abounding with
contradictions which every smatterer in political philosophy can
detect, did what a law framed by the utmost skill of the greatest
masters of political philosophy might have failed to do. That the
provisions which have been recapitulated are cumbrous, puerile,
inconsistent with each other, inconsistent with the true theory of
religious liberty, must be acknowledged. All that can be aid in
their defence is this; that they removed a vast mass of evil without
shocking a vast mass of prejudice; that they put an end, at once and
for ever, without one division in either House of Parliament,
without one riot in the streets, with scarcely one audible murmur
even from the classes most deeply tainted with bigotry, to a
persecution which had raged during four generations, which had
broken innumerable hearts, which had made innumerable firesides
desolate, which had filled the prisons with men of whom the world
was not worthy, which had driven thousands of those honest, diligent
and godfearing yeomen and artisans, who are the true strength of a
nation, to seek a refuge beyond the ocean among the wigwams of red
Indians and the lairs of panthers. Such a defence, however weak it
may appear to some shallow speculators, will probably be thought
complete by statesmen. The English, in 1689, were by no means
disposed to admit the doctrine that religious error ought to be left
unpunished. That doctrine was just then more unpopular than it had
ever been. For it had, only a few months before, been hypocritically
put forward as a pretext for persecuting the Established Church, for
trampling on the fundamental laws of the realm, for confiscating
freeholds, for treating as a crime the modest exercise of the right
of petition. If a bill had then been drawn up granting entire
freedom of conscience to all Protestants, it may be confidently
affirmed that Nottingham would never have introduced such a bill;
that all the bishops, Burnet included, would have voted against it;
that it would have been denounced, Sunday after Sunday, from ten
thousand pulpits, as an insult to God and to all Christian men, and
as a license to the worst heretics and blasphemers; that it would
have been condemned almost as vehemently by Bates and Baxter as by
Ken and Sherlock; that it would have been burned by the mob in half
the market places of England; that it would never have become the
law of the land, and that it would have made the very name of
toleration odious during many years to the majority of the people.
And yet, if such a bill had been passed, what would it have effected
beyond what was effected by the Toleration Act?
It is true that the Toleration Act
recognised persecution as the rule, and granted liberty of
conscience only as the exception. But it is equally true that the
rule remained in force only against a few hundreds of Protestant
dissenters, and that the benefit of the exceptions extended to
hundreds of thousands. It is true that it was in theory absurd to
make Howe sign thirty-four or thirty-five of the Anglican articles
before he could preach, and to let Penn preach without signing one
of those articles.
But it is equally true that, under this arrangement, both Howe and
Penn got as entire liberty to preach as they could have had under
the most philosophical code that Beccaria or Jefferson could have
framed.
The progress of the bill was easy. Only
one amendment of grave importance was proposed. Some zealous
churchmen in the Commons suggested that it might be desirable to
grant the toleration only for a term of seven years, and thus to
bind over the nonconformists to good behaviour. But this suggestion
was so unfavourably received that those who made it did not venture
to divide the House.
The King gave his consent with hearty
satisfaction: the bill became law; and the Puritan divines thronged
to the Quarter Sessions of every county to swear and sign. Many of
them probably professed their assent to the Articles with some tacit
reservations. But the tender conscience of Baxter would not suffer
him to qualify, till he had put on record an explanation of the
sense in which he understood every proposition which seemed to him
to admit of misconstruction. The instrument delivered by him to the
Court before which he took the oaths is still extant, and contains
two passages of peculiar interest. He declared that his approbation
of the Athanasian Creed was confined to that part which was properly
a Creed, and that he did not mean to express any assent to the
damnatory clauses. He also declared that he did not, by signing the
article which anathematizes all who maintain that there is any other
salvation than through Christ, mean to condemn those who entertain a
hope that sincere and virtuous unbelievers may be admitted to
partake in the benefits of Redemption. Many of the dissenting clergy
of London expressed their concurrence in these charitable
sentiments. |