A SKETCHOF THEREFORMATION IN ENGLAND.
A SKETCHOF THEREFORMATION IN ENGLAND.
BRITISH AND ANGLO-SAXON CHURCHES.—INTERCOURSE WITH ROME.—EARLY CORRUPTIONS.
The Reformation is not to be regarded as a great and sudden event which took the nation by surprise. It was merely the crisis to which things had been tending for some centuries; and if the fire did at last run over the country with wonderful rapidity, it was because the trees were all dry. It is a mistake to suppose that whilst the Roman catholic religion prevailed all was unity. True it is, that the elements of discontent were as yet working for the most part under ground, but they were not on that account the less likely to make themselves eventually felt. The strong man armed was keeping the house, and therefore his goods were at peace; but he was in jeopardy long before he was spoiled. Luther was the match that produced the explosion, but the train had been laid by the events of generations before him.
It may not then be the least useful, nor, perhaps, the least interesting portion of a History of the Reformation in England, to trace some of the causes that led to it; someof the incidents that made it practicable, and some of the abuses that rendered it necessary. And here there is no need to conceal the obligations we were under in the first instance to the church of Rome. Neither Gregory himself, nor Augustin his messenger, appears to have been influenced by any other than a truly Christian spirit in seeking the conversion of England, then no very tempting prize; and though there can be no doubt that Christianity had been introduced into this island much earlier, whether by any of the apostles themselves; whether after the persecution on the death of Stephen, by some of the Syrian Christians, “who were scattered abroad, and went every where preaching the word;”[12]or whether by devout soldiers of the same nation, whom the famine foretold by Agabus might have driven into the armies of Claudius, and who might have come with him into Britain;[13]or whether by some of the Jewish converts dispersed over the world, when that same emperor “commanded all Jews to depart from Rome;”[14]—whether from these or from other sources unknown to us, England was in some degree Christianised, the existence of a British church before the arrival of Augustin in the year 597 is a fact clearly established. Its independent origin is sufficiently attested by the subjects of controversy between the Anglo-Roman and British Christians; the time of Easter, in which the Britons followed, as they said, St. John and the eastern Christians, a point of heterodoxy, it may be observed, in which the Irish also concurred,[15]who in some other respects accorded with the British church, building their places of worship, for instance, with wood, and thatching them with reeds;[16]the tonsure, whether it should be that of Peter orPaul, or none whatever;[17]the rite of Baptism, with regard to which, however, the nature of the difference between the churches does not appear, though a difference there was,[18]and the same may be said of the celibacy of the clergy. The Britons had churches of their own; built after a fashion of their own; their own saints; their own hierarchy,—the British bishops attending a council as such; and holding no intercourse with the Angles even in Bede’s time, but looking on them as Samaritans.[19]Moreover, the jealousy with which the Welsh long afterwards regarded all ecclesiastical interference on the part of England, their resolute assertion of their right to a metropolitan of their own at St. Davids, and their actual exercise of that right till the time of Henry I, argues the same difference in the rock from which the English and British churches were originally hewn.[20]Let, however, tribute be paid to whom tribute is due: Augustin was the founder of the English church as distinguished from the British, for the Britons made a conscience of leaving the Pagan invaders to die in their ignorance and their sins: and it is probable that both in doctrine and discipline the religion of this country owed to the great Apostle of England (as he has been called) its revival, extension, and permanent establishment. But Gregory was no pope in the more modern sense of the word; it was his desire that the church of Rome should be followed by the church of England when there was reason for it, not otherwise; he would have some errors reproved; some he would have tolerated; some he would not have seen, that all might be done away; ecclesiastical property he would have recovered where it had been plundered; but that more should be exacted than had been taken away, or that a merchandiseshould be made of the loss, that was to be far from the church.[21]No wonder that the Gospel, mixed though it certainly was even then with some alloy, should have made its way in England, recommended by a spirit like this, and that kings should have been found its nursing fathers;[22]accordingly they erected crosses; built and endowed churches and monasteries, and the fierce superstitions of the Saxons made way for the religion of Jesus. But the mystery of iniquity had begun to work even in Bede’s time.[23]His portrait of Aidanus or Madoc, a missionary from Ikolmkill to the Angles near a century before, is clearly meant to contrast with the ecclesiastics of his own day. He might have been the prototype of Chaucer’s “poore parson of a towne.” He was chaste; he lived as he taught others to live; he travelled through the villages teaching the word, not on horseback, but on foot. Those whom he met, if believers, he confirmed in the faith; if unbelievers, he initiated in it; unlike the idlers of these times (says Bede), all who were in his company, whether priests or people, were busied in reading the Scriptures, or learning the Psalms by rote. There was a stirring amongst the dry bones through his exertions; the people flocked to hear the word of God; churches were built in many places, and monasteries were enriched by the bounty of the king. Such is the picture drawn by Bede, coloured perhaps somewhat too highly; for it seems unlikely that such effects, to their full extent, should have been produced by a teacher who spoke the language of his hearers but imperfectly, and had occasional need of an interpreter.[24]Much, however, might have been done, in a popular cause, even in spite of such an obstacle. Giraldus tells us that when he preached the crusades to the Welshmen at Haverford West, he could gain 200 recruits at a sermon in French or Latin, of whichthe people did not understand one word, though they knew and approved its object.[25]Still in a sketch which Bede gives us of the state of a convent (consisting as was not uncommon both of monks and nuns), at a period not much later than Madoc, there is a sad falling off. The case is indeed spoken of as a flagrant one, and the facts are to be gathered out of a fabulous story of a warning sent by an angel to a monk of that house; signifying that a judgment was coming upon it; for that of its inmates none (save one only) were occupied with the good of their souls; all were asleep, or only awake to sin, both men and women; the cells intended for study and prayer had been converted into chambers of revelry and excess; the virgins who had dedicated themselves to God, having no respect unto their vows, employed all their leisure hours in adorning their persons, as though they were brides, or wished to be.[26]Indeed, on one occasion about the same time, when a panic prevailed through the country by reason of the plague, it was actually attempted in one quarter of the island where Christianity had been received, to repair the temples and restore idolatry.[27]Whatever, therefore, the wheat might be that had been sown by Augustin and his companions, the tares, it seems, were growing about it apace, and were ready to choke it. The truth, however, appears to be, that as yet there was no well-organised church in England. There was wanted a system in matters ecclesiastical, what was done was done chiefly by good and zealous individuals. Rome might have supplied the defect; but the relation in which England stood to Rome is not easily determined from the history of Bede; it was probably ill defined, fluctuating, and uncertain, depending in a great measure upon the accidentof the day. Pope Gregory is indeed represented as speaking with some authority in the answers which he returns to Augustin, who consults him on the regulations of the infant church;—he may furnish him with sacred vessels, ornaments, robes, relics, books, and give him power to consecrate Bishops in Britain, and directions for using it. Reference may be made to the pope from time to time, in any crisis of difficulty, or doubt, or hardship; wholesome decrees with regard to the method of filling up the sees in case of death may be received from him; his influence may be asked to protect the liberties of a religious house; but distance and the turbulence of the times rendered the intercourse difficult, and subjected it to much interruption. Rome was in those days pestilential;[28]the Alps were formidable, often fatal to travellers; the seas were full of danger in the actual state of navigation; it was a weary way from Calais to Marseilles (one of the usual routes), and if the political aspect of things rendered a mayor of the palace suspicious, it might be worse than a weary way;—a journey to Rome for the sake of gaining religious knowledge was reckoned in the middle of the seventh century a labour of uncommon merit.[29]The church of England, therefore, was left a while pretty much to itself; and though great good came of this, it was not without its mixture of evil. On the one hand, the liberties of the rising church were fostered by this non-intercourse with Rome; it threw the nation very much upon its own resources, and gave to the king, and above all, to synods of the clergy, an authority in ecclesiastical affairs, to which they might not otherwise have attained. Perhaps, too, it cultivated a better understanding between the princes and prelates, who seem to have gone hand in in hand these early times; the formerinviting, welcoming, and establishing, by grants of land for ever, the residence of these Christian pastors amongst their own people—a measure of which they might not have thought the advantages so obvious, had they thereby subjected themselves and their conduct to the perpetual animadversion of a third party at Rome; for it is curious to observe that, within 200 years after the foundation of the Anglo-Saxon church, Aldfrid, a king of Northumbria, feels himself called upon to resist the interference of the pope in a case of appeal, and actually refuses to listen to his recommendation. On the other hand, a want of combination and co-operation (a defect so injurious to every great undertaking, and not the least so to the successful preaching of the word of God,) made itself sensibly felt in the religious establishment of England. Canons seem to have been published, but not to have been rigidly observed. The order of episcopal succession appears to have proceeded upon no very settled or intelligible plan; not that it was vitiated by any incompetency of the parties to administer the rite; but that the exercise of the episcopal office was desultory—a synod, or an individual, or a king soliciting it, a native bishop, or a foreigner, as it might happen, conferring it;—so that, shortly before Bede’s time,[30]there was only one canonical bishop throughout all England. All this worked confusion in the church; it impaired its efficiency; it gave the ancient prejudices of Paganism, and other causes of corruption, time to rally, and to debase the Gospel, if they could not destroy it. Accordingly Oswi, king of Northumbria, and Ecbert, king of Kent, thought it high time to bestir themselves. They consulted together on the actual condition of the church, and came to a determination, in which the churchitself concurred, to send a priest of their common choosing to Rome, to be there consecrated archbishop of Canterbury, who might thenceforth supply the sees of England canonically, and set in order its ecclesiastical rites. The office, however, of reforming the Anglo-Saxon church was not destined to the man of their choice—he, and all his, died, probably of the malaria; and Theodore, a monk “of Tarsus, a city of Cilicia,” was finally fixed upon by the pope, consecrated archbishop of Canterbury, and despatched to England. He seems to have been one of those persons whose spirit and talents give a character to the times in which they live. He made a visitation of all England, correcting abuses, establishing discipline, ordaining bishops, re-ordaining those whose commission was irregular, introducing music generally into the churches, the use of it having been as yet confined to Kent, and encouraging the study of Greek and Latin, of which the effects were felt in the days of Bede. Thus did he reduce to order a very disorderly state of things; and, in spite of the various independent kingdoms into which the island was divided, and by which misrule had been perpetuated, was an archbishop (and he was the first) to whom the universal church of England submitted.[31]That he might consolidate his acts, and render the unity of his church lasting, he convoked a synod of the bishops and clergy at Heorutford (Hereford[32]) about the year 673, and proposed for their adoption several canons, which, as they throw considerable light on the state of ecclesiastical affairs at that period, are here inserted:—1. That all persons should keep Easter in common, on the Sunday after the full moon after the vernal equinox. 2. That no bishop should interfere with the diocese of another, but be content with governing his own. 3. That no bishop should be at liberty todisturb a religious house in any way, nor to take from it any portion of its property by force. 4. That monks should not migrate from one monastery to another without the certificate of their own abbot, but should continue under the rule to which they at first professed obedience. 5. That the clergy should not withdraw themselves from their own proper bishop to wander about at large; nor should be received elsewhere unless provided with letters commendatory from that bishop, under pain of excommunication. 6. That bishops and clergy, who are strangers, should be treated hospitably, and be therewith content abstaining from the exercise of their office, unless permitted by the bishop of the diocese, in which they are staying to do otherwise. 7. That a synod should be held twice a year; on which, however, an amendment was moved and carried, that it should be once a year only, and on the first of August. 8. That the bishops should take precedence according to the priority of their consecration. 9. That the number of bishops, in consideration of the multitudes added to the church, should be augmented: and, lastly, that license should be allowed to no man to contract an unlawful or incestuous marriage; that no man should put away his wife, but as the Gospel permits—for the cause of fornication; and that whoso should put away his wife should never be joined to another, if he would not forfeit the name of Christian; but either remain single or be reconciled to the same. From these provisions it may be conjectured what were the prevailing defects of the church establishment in the seventh century; and it is not difficult to see in them, though as yet undeveloped, several of the evils which were destined to call for a reformation eight centuries later. On the whole, the Anglo-Saxon church was now more perfectly modelled upon the Roman than it had yet been; and, accordingly, some years afterwards, a certain king of the Picts, Naiton by name, sent to Englandfor instructions on church architecture, and the right observance of Easter, having heard (as he said) that the English had conformed to the example of the holy apostolical church of Rome.[33]As years roll on the intercourse between this country and Italy increases[34];—a pilgrimage to Rome, which, in the middle of the seventh century, was unusual[35], at the close of it was common enough. Thus Ceadwalla, king of the West Saxons, abdicated, and repaired to Rome for baptism; took the name of Peter; died, and was buried in the church of that apostle. His successor, Ine, commending, in like manner, his kingdom to the care of younger men, after a reign of thirty-seven years, repaired to the threshold of the blessed apostles, desiring to sojourn for a season upon that holy ground whilst on earth, that he might thereby secure to himself a more friendly reception among the saints in heaven. Cœnred, king of the Mercians, and Offa, heir-apparent of the kingdom of the East Saxons, pursued the same course; which, indeed, was now adopted both by noble and ignoble priests and people, men and women, with the utmost emulation.[36]
Rome, however, had by this time, corrupted the simplicity of the faith, as it was taught there by St. Paul in his own hired house; and whilst, no doubt, the English pilgrims who returned brought away with them much to civilise and something to edify, they brought away with them, too, much to corrupt the church at home. For Rome was under a temptation to mingle sacred and profane together; it did not, like Constantinople, rise at once a Christian capital. The Gospel was introduced into it, and had to win its way by slow degrees through the ancient sympathies and inveterate habits of the Pagan city. It was a maxim with some of the early promoters of the Christian cause to do as little violenceas possible to existing prejudices. They would run the risk of Barnabas being confounded with Jupiter, and Paul with Mercurius. In the transition from Pagan to Papal Rome much of the old material was worked up. The heathen temples became Christian churches; the altars of the gods, altars of the saints; the curtains, incense, tapers, votive tablets, remained the same; the aquaminarium was still the vessel for holy water; St. Peter stood at the gate instead of Cardea; St. Rocque or St. Sebastian in the bed-room, instead of the “Phrygian Penates;” St. Nicholas was the sign of the vessel, instead of Castor and Pollux; the Mater Deûm became the Madonna; alms pro Matre Deûm became alms for the Madonna; the festival of the Mater Deûm, the festival of the Madonna, orLady Day; the Hostia, or victim, was now the host; the “Lugentes Campi,” or dismal regions, Purgatory;[37]the offerings to the Manes were masses for the dead. The parallel might be drawn out to a far greater extent; indeed, so much of the Roman had been grafted upon the Roman catholic system during the dark ages (as they are called) that the confusion of ideas and of terms resulting from it forms quite a feature in the writings of the Italian authors who lived at the revival of letters. Images, holy and unholy, are by them crowded together without the smallest regard to decency, though evidently without any intention to offend against it in the parties themselves. Such was the process of deterioration which the Gospel was undergoing at Rome (progressive because profitable) at the time when our Anglo-Saxon ancestors were improving their acquaintance with that city by repairing to it for purposes of devotion.
What were the doctrines and practices which at present prevailed in the Anglo-Saxon church, and how far it was exempt from the errors of later times, it is not easy to determine; more especially as the ecclesiastical history of Bede, and the early Saxon homilies and canons, quoted by his commentators, would often lead us to conflicting conclusions:—
I. With regard to the doctrine oftransubstantiation, we read in Bede of the “bread of life,” “the holy bread;”[38]of a man dying without the “viaticum salutis;”[39]of another, inquiring, when at the point of death, of his attendant in a monastery, whether they had the “eucharist in the house?”[40]and though, on one occasion, the mass is spoken of as asacrifice(mysteriiimmolatio)[41], yet it may be contended that the term is Gregory’s own (for it occurs in the answer returned by him to Augustin’s queries), and that it cannot be fairly ascribed to the venerable historian himself. Meanwhile a canon, said to be of the age of archbishop Theodore, (and if so, more ancient than the history, and though written in Latin, accompanied by a Saxon translation, which, at any rate, pleads some antiquity in its favour,) argues the body of Christ to be present in the elements, not substantially, but spiritually; adding, that this mode is recognised by St. Paul, who speaks of the Israelites as “eating all of the samespiritualmeat, and drinking of thatspiritualrock which followed them, and that rock was Christ.”[42]
II. On the subject ofimage worship, the Anglo-Saxon church does not seem to have been altogether blameless. In the preface to the Laws of Alfred, though the othercommandments are enumerated in their order, the second is omitted, only there is added after the rest.—“Thou shalt not make gods of silver or gold.” There must have been a reason for such a change in the positive terms and relative position of this law; and it is difficult to assign any reason but one.[43]
III. Purgatory was a part of the Anglo-Saxon creed. This, indeed, was established on authority. Drithelme, a famous saint (as he proved) of Northumbria, died and was buried; but he was born to refute the apophthegm that dead men tell no tales, for he returned to life, and gave an account of his travels.[44]He had been conducted by an angel in white raiment towards the sunrising to a valley of vast depth and interminable extent; the one side of it glowing with fire, the other pelted by fierce and incessant storms of snow and hail. Between these two conflicting elements he beheld the souls of miserable mortals bandied to and fro, anxious to escape from the intolerable anguish of the moment, and thus perpetually leaping from side to side in this unhappy valley. Such was Purgatory. But though Drithelme made these matters known to one Hæmgils, an Irishman, and through Hæmgils they were communicated to Bede, the doctrine does not appear to have been universally held in the Saxon church, or, at least, to have held a very prominent place in its articles of faith. Certain it is, that in some Anglo-Saxon sermons and confessions yet extant, no mention is made of it, where mention of it might be expected.[45]Still, the doctrine was clearly abroad; and in the form it had assumed the Platonic purgatory was improved upon, and the poets, from Cædmon[46]downwards,availed themselves of these fearful images, conjured up by the morbid imagination of the early monks, and consigned, in their turn,
——“the delighted spiritTo bathe infieryfloods, or to resideIn thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice.”[47]
——“the delighted spiritTo bathe infieryfloods, or to resideIn thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice.”[47]
——“the delighted spiritTo bathe infieryfloods, or to resideIn thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice.”[47]
——“the delighted spirit
To bathe infieryfloods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice.”[47]
IV. Purgatory, of course, brought other doctrines in its train—penance for the living, that they might never come into it;[48]confession, that penance might be enjoined and adjusted;[49]masses for the dead, that they might be delivered from it.[50]These acts were not, perhaps, for a while, considered obligatory. The abuses of the Roman catholic church did not come of observation, but crept into the world by stealth, till, having at length established themselvesde facto, they were confirmed by the decrees of some general council, and thenceforth becamede jurea part and parcel of the catholic creed. Thus the use of images by degrees prevailed, till it was eventually authorised by a decree of a council at Nice in the year 787. The doctrine of transubstantiation gained a footing in credulous times, and was encouraged from interested motives, (for who should set bounds to the authority of a priest who had power to produce the Deity himself at his bidding?)[51]till it was pronounced orthodox at the council of Placentia in 1095. The communion, in one kind only, had become customary (from whatever cause,) and the practice received the placet of the church in 1415, at the council of Constance.
V. The Virgin appears to have been held in great, perhapsin idolatrous, honour by the Anglo-Saxon church. It is true that—
Thecrosspreceding Him who floats in air,The pictured Saviour!
Thecrosspreceding Him who floats in air,The pictured Saviour!
Thecrosspreceding Him who floats in air,The pictured Saviour!
Thecrosspreceding Him who floats in air,
The pictured Saviour!
was to be seen in the processions of Augustin, and not the Virgin;[52]and in general her name but seldom occurs in the Ecclesiastical History of Bede; still even here some shadow of the glories that were coming upon her advance to meet us. Eadbald the son of Ethelbert, Augustin’s friend, is said to have founded a church after his extraordinary conversion (for he had not in early life walked in the ways of his father) to “the Holy Mother of God;”[53]and Bishop Wilfrid is declared by an angel (so the legend runs) to have been delivered from death by our Lord, at the prayers and tears of the Bishop’s disciples and brethren, and “theintercessionof his own blessed virgin-mother Mary.”[54]
VI. But, indeed, the office of intercession was not confined to the Virgin.[55]The Saxonsaintswere powerful both in heaven and earth; nothing was too great or too mean for their interference. They could recover a man from the brink of the grave, or cure a horse of the colic.[56]They could clear an island of evil spirits, though it had been over-run with them like a warren; and fill it with springs of water though it had been dry and desolate.[57]They could mend a fractured skull, and tell whether the party had been baptised imperfectly, ineffectually, or not at all, by therate of the recovery.[58]A hair of their heads could cure a wen.[59]They could disperse an abscess on the arm (without recourse to surgery,) though large as a man’s two hands, and though it should have been occasioned by bleeding when the moon was four days’ old, which (it seems) was an act of incredible folly.[60]Nor was this all; they could unfold the secrets of the grave with the utmost minuteness. One could tell of his encounter with the soul of a sinner in the other world, which was flung at him red-hot and burnt his shoulder and cheek, though when relating his adventure, even if it were in the depth of winter, and however light might be his dress, the saint would sweat as if it were the dog-days.[61]Another could speak of a journey, under the safe conduct of a guardian angel to the same mysterious region; of his approach to the brink of the bottomless pit, through an atmosphere of insufferable stench and darkness; of the balls of fire which were shot upwards out of the abyss and fell into it again, scintillating with the spirits of the damned; of the sudden disappearance of his heavenly guide; of his hearing behind him in this joyless solitude the hollow shrieks of dead men’s souls, as they were led to the the pit’s mouth, mixed with the loud and jubilant laughter of the fiends who conducted them; of their plunge into the burning bottomless gulf; of the dolorous moanings and peals of merriment dying away as they went down into the deep together; of the legion of hideous forms which now encompassed him about threatening to seize him with their fiery pincers, but having no power over him to hurt him; of his casting around a wistful eye to see if there were any to help him; and of his discovering in the distance, as it twinkled through the darkness, the light, as itwere, of a star; of its rapid approach and gradual development, till the guardian angel again stands confessed before him; the devils retire; and he is rewarded for his alarm by a translation to the harmonious sounds, the Sabean odours, the pure and placid beams of Paradise.[62]
Whilst, however, we gather these exploits of the early saints of our country from the pages of Bede, it is only just to the memory of that veracious and single-hearted writer to observe, that numerous as may be the lying wonders which he relates and believes on the testimony of others of his own actual knowledge he does not pretend to one. But wherefore are they touched upon at all? Simply because they are characteristic of the times whereof they are told: they supply a gauge by which we can measure the degree and the progress of those corruptions from which the Reformation finally delivered us. Monstrous as these legends are, they were the faith of the nation; for if Bede receives them as facts, were his countrymen in general, so much less enlightened than himself, likely to reject them as fictions? Moreover, they are curious as specimens of a vast magazine of materials, which supplied poetry when it revived after the barbarous ages with much of its wild as well as ludicrous imagery. Dante worked them up into his Divina Comedia. His Inferno, especially, is the offspring of an imagination that had dieted with these monkish mysteries; and it may be observed by the way, that even our own Paradise Lost may have felt their influence, and that Milton may be indirectly indebted for many of the dark and terrible features of this hell to early hagiography. Romance, if it did not owe its existence, owed much of its furniture to the same common stock. The poets of romance drew from it, either directly or through the chroniclers, the adventures that suited them.Turpin, a fictitious archbishop, is constantly introduced by them with solemn sneers, as a voucher for the most extravagant feats of their favourites, and thus the dishonest fictions of the priesthood were made eventually to recoil upon their own order, and swell the cry for reformation; for these popular writers, without, perhaps, intending it, or caring much about the matter, did, undoubtedly, lend a helping hand to the great cause by laughing at much that was fairly ridiculous in the doctors and doctrines of their day; happy had they known where to stop, and not to rush upon things truly sacred with the temerity of fools.
But one conservative principle there was in the economy of the Anglo-Saxon church that opposed itself to still further corruption of the faith of Christ, and that was, the free use of the word of God. The Scriptures might not, indeed, be very generally read; Bede complains that they were not; but there was no hinderance thrown in the way of reading them, quite the contrary: he himself gave a translation of the Gospel of St. John; one of the Psalter had appeared already; and in the interval that elapsed before the Norman conquest, other portions of Holy Writ were put forth from time to time in the same vernacular language. Virtue, no doubt, went out of these, narrow as might be the limits within which they circulated; and it is no unusual matter to find in the pages of Bede, and in the midst of the legends, relics, visions, and superstitions, of which they are full, occasional glimpses of better things, and some of the cardinal doctrines of Christianity still struggling vigorously for their lives.[63]