CHAPTER XIII.

ELIZABETH.—HER ACCESSION.—HER CAUTION.—REFORMATION AGAIN TRIUMPHANT.—RETURN OF THE EXILES.—JEWEL.—INJUNCTIONS OF ELIZABETH COMPARED WITH THOSE OF EDWARD.—PROGRESS OF THE PURITANS.—THE REFORMATION NOT COMPLETED. CONCLUSION.

Such was the great agony through which the Reformation was doomed to pass. But that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die, and so it proved in this instance. The reign of Mary was the grave of the cause for a short season, and that of Elizabeth was now to be its triumphant resurrection. It will not, however, be necessary to pursue our subject much further, which, from a History of the Reformation, would soon run into a History of Puritanism, the extreme to which it degenerated for a while. Into this question it is not our intention to enter. For the present, little remained to be done, but to repeal the several laws by which Mary had superseded the acts of Henry and Edward, and to resume the use of those services and rituals which the martyrs had provided, and of which the nature and number have been already told. But Elizabeth proceeded warily. Well as her religious sentiments were understood, none but the most attentive observer could have at first detected them in her conduct. A figure of Truth greets her with a translation of the Bible in its hand; she takes the book and reverently kisses it. A court buffoon beseeches her to restore to freedom four prisoners long bound in fetters, Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John; she answers that she must first endeavour to knowthe minds of the prisoners themselves. At her coronation in Westminster Abbey, she partakes of the mass;[457]on Christmas day, which was about a month later, she demurs to hear it.[458]The puritans make haste to pull down the images; she bids them hold their hand. Unlicensed preachers, be they of what denomination they may, Catholics or Protestants she silences alike. The marriage of the clergy, much as the measure was desired by the leaders of the Reformation, she refuses, connives at, at last reluctantly concedes. She offends the zealots of both parties, for she openly espouses the cause of neither;[459]but she makes that party her own, which represents the sober, the stable, the somewhat phlegmatic good sense of the English people; a party without which no government, however brilliant, can be safe; and with which none, however unattractive, can be long in danger. Such policy was natural to herself;—“My sweet sisterTemperance,” was the name by which her brother loved to call her; and, moreover she had been nursed in the school of caution, and for years one word or deed of indiscretion might have cost her her head. Such policy, too, was after the heart of Cecil, perhaps the sagest of her counsellors, who now taught his mistress to thread her way, as he had hitherto threaded his own, through most dangerous and difficult times, with the sagacity of a wizard. The outset of Elizabeth’s reign, indeed, was perhaps the masterpiece of his tactics; and years afterwards, when the crisis was passed and the Reformation established, he appealed to that period, as well he might, in proof of his successful devotion to the cause of truth.[460]Still Elizabeth was working her way underground, and by measures whichwhilst they did not provoke notice, would not fail to produce fruits. Thus, though she would not exclude Roman Catholics from her privy council, she would yoke them with such colleagues as were friendly to the Reformation, and were at the same time of talents so extraordinary as would readily obtain the mastery in debate. Though she would not weed out of the commission of the peace Roman Catholic magistrates, she would regulate her new appointments with a view to serving the cause she had secretly at heart. She would not compel, or attempt to compel, a Roman Catholic parliament by force to make the laws she desired, but she would take care to influence the elections in such a manner as to secure the return of members who would do so. Her first object appears to have been to soothe the country: to maintain the authority of the law, be it as yet what it might; to establish her own position as monarch; and thus to possess herself of a basis on which she might proceed to build, at her leisure, the permanent prosperity of her realm.

Her parliament assembled, and never did a parliament meet under circumstances more imperative: to its wisdom it was left to order and settle all things upon the best and surest foundations; and accordingly it passed the two great acts by which the alliance between church and state was established, those of Supremacy and Uniformity; neither of them, indeed, now enacted for the first time, but both statutes of Henry or Edward, with certain amendments, revived.

Against the Act of Supremacy some objections were urged in the parliament, and some scruples out of it; both, no doubt, proceeding from the same quarter. It was a scandal to place a woman at the head of the church, whose voice was not to be heard in it; yet the principle (it was argued) was acknowledged in a degree by the Catholics themselves, who had no difficulty in recognising the authority ofan abbess, though of a nature in many respects much more strictly ecclesiastical, than that with which it was proposed to invest the queen.[461]Neither was there any disposition in her Majesty to challenge an authority to minister in the church (as was maliciously given out,) or, indeed, any other authority than such as had been enjoyed by her father and brother of famous memory.”[462]By the Act of Uniformity, the exclusive use of the Book of Common Prayer in the public services was enjoined under pain of imprisonment, and eventually of deprivation; whilst a respect for it was further exacted by penalties against those who should teach or preach to the disparagement of the same; and (what was a measure of more questionable expediency, as well as right) against those who should refuse to resort to their parish churches to hear it.[463]Meanwhile, it should be added, some few alterations had been made in the liturgy, dictated by a wish not to give needless offence to the Roman Catholics, but to win them, if possible, still to remain in a church which ever professed to be the restoration rather than the rival of their own. In the end, all the parochial clergy, with the exception of eighty individuals, took the oath of supremacy, and conformed. Not so the bishops: they all, save one, were recusants, as were also many deans, heads of colleges, and prebendaries, and were consequently deprived. It is unfair to attribute an act apparently conscientious to an unworthy motive, but it was suspected that a recusancy so general amongst one order of ecclesiastics, and that the highest, was preconcerted, more especially as many or all of them had subscribed to the supremacy of Henry and Edward; and that it was not wholly independent of the notion that the Queen would find it difficult, in the actualcondition of the church to fill up their places to her satisfaction, and would descend to a compromise.[464]The difficulty, too, whatever it was, was augmented, it might be thought, by the numerous vacancies which the sickness recently prevailing in the country had created amongst the upper ranks of the clergy. If such, however, were the speculations, they were fallacious. That great company of preachers was overlooked, who had been living in exile, and were now eager to return;—persons but ill qualified, by their long habits of necessary frugality and retirement, to succeed to the purple of their episcopal predecessors,[465]and not having that in their looks which men would willingly call master, yet scholars ripe and good, Christians, moreover, sobered by adversity, and in many instances found to possess, under a mean aspect, perhaps, a genius that was vast. Out of these were drafted many recruits; Jewel, the Coryphæus of them all, a man, indeed, of matchless learning, which he nevertheless wields, ponderous as it is, like a plaything: of a most polished wit; a style, whether Latin or English, the most pure and expressive, such as argues a precision in the character of his ideas, and a lucid order in the arrangement of them, quite his own. His “Apology” and his “Defence” of it, were the crowning works of the Reformation, and may be regarded, on the whole, as those in which its doctrines are put upon record by one the best qualified of all men to assert them with authority, both from his intimate knowledge of the subject, the personal intercourse he had enjoyed with its chief promoters, and the favourable moment at which he wrote. But whilst some of these exiles were thus the pillars of their church, others were the reeds. Such were Cartwright, appointed to theMargaret professorship in Cambridge, and Sampson, to the deanery of Christ-church. What could come of these ministers, or of others like to these, but a plentiful harvest of non-conformity in the generation of students brought within the influence of their example and teaching; destined themselves to impart it in their turn to the several parishes throughout England in which their lots might happen to be cast? Here, then, was a schism, violent enough to endanger even a long-established church, much more one so recently settled as our own. But besides the Sampsons and Cartwrights, extravagant schismatics, there was another and a larger class behind, good men indeed, but, perhaps, too gentle for the times, the class of lukewarm churchmen, who still strengthened the hands and ministered to the purposes (however unwittingly) of spirits more determined than themselves.[466]Such was Pilkington, bishop of Durham,[467]and even Grindal, bishop of London,[468]both Marian exiles, and neither of them very cordial fellow-workers with Parker, himself not an exile. For here was the origin of these religious distinctions: the former leaning to the puritan;—Grindal himself being the Algrind of Spenser, whose praises of him bespeak the party with which he was identified;[469]—the latter leaning to the Roman Catholic. Nor did the division expire with this generation; Abbot and Laud still presenting the same contrast in the next, when the church was upon the eve of that dissolution which was the issue of the whole. Still the puritan principle, violently as it worked, subversive as it was of much that was innocent and much that was holy, had this to redeem it, that it purged out of the kingdom, effectually and for ever, thepopery (we can use no other word to express our meaning) which lingered in its veins, and which, without the application of a strong antidote, might once more have penetrated to its vitals. For the spirit of popery, properly so called, always active, and now the more so from the ill-disguised claims of the Queen of Scots to the throne of England, had been recently recruited, it must be remembered, by the institution of the order of Jesuits, which, springing up in the age of the Reformation, aimed at directing the general movement, both in religion and politics, to the advantage of the Bishop of Rome, whose devoted servants they professed themselves. The rules, the activity, and the learning of this society rendered them formidable to any Protestant state, and added not a little to the perplexities of Elizabeth’s position, who, whilst she feared the levelling and anti-monarchical principles of the Puritans, otherwise her natural allies against these champions of the Pope, was in still greater jeopardy from a hostile order, universal in its influence, secret in its operations, sagacious as herself in its councils; and if at length her government proved that it bore not the sword in vain, but smote with somewhat of a ruthless hand, it was rather in self-defence against political agitators that it so acted, than in violation of the rights of conscience. For certainly the severity did not begin till after her subjects had been absolved from their allegiance by a Pope’s bull,[470]neither did it ever manifest itself against woman or child; a distinction this, between the punishments of Elizabeth and the persecutions of Mary, sufficient in itself to point out that it was the disloyalty, and not the creed, of the parties that drew upon them the vengeanceof the Queen; and to confirm the assertion of Cecil in his “execution of justice,” that no one was put to death by Elizabeth for his religion only,[471]as well as a similar vindication of her policy advanced with much detail in a letter of Walsingham’s—a policy which, he contends, was ever regulated by two rules, “to deal tenderly with consciences, but not to suffer causes of conscience to grow to be matters of faction.”[472]

The two important statutes of which we have spoken were followed up in the same year by injunctions of the Queen, after the manner of those of her brother. They are expressed, indeed, so far as the case admits, in the very same words as those of Edward twelve years before. Wherever, therefore, a change is introduced, there must have been a reason for it, and an index is thus obtained of the progress of opinion, the more satisfactory because quite incidental.[473]Thus, on a comparison of the two sets, it will be found, that the Roman catholic religion is treated with less courtesy by Edward than by Elizabeth. In the injunctions of the former we read “of kissing andlickingof images:” in those of the latter the offensive expression is expunged. So again, in the first, the power of the Pope is said to be justly “rejected,extirpated, and taken awayutterly:” in the others, it is thought enough to declare that it is “justly rejected and taken away.” These denounce the abuses of the Sabbath—“a day on which God is more offended than pleased, more dishonoured than honoured, because of idleness, pride, drunkenness, quarrelling, brawling, which are most used on such days; the people, nevertheless, persuading themselves sufficiently to honour God on thatday, if they hear mass and service; and then is suggested a more excellent way of keeping the Sabbath holy: in those of Elizabeth the wholesome suggestion is retained, but the sabbatical picture is suppressed.” It may be questioned, however, whether this omission was made altogether in deference to the feelings of the Roman Catholics: perhaps the progress of puritanism had already begun to correct such gross disorders; for it must be admitted, we apprehend, that the more decent and devout observance of Sunday, for which England is still remarkable, not only above catholic, but even above other reformed countries, is to be greatly ascribed to this all-powerful principle; its stern decrees still felt to impart to the character of that day a sobriety, though not longer a gloom. For, pursuing the same comparison, we shall find other symptoms of the puritan being now in the ascendant. Thus, according to Edward’s commands, images, shrines, pictures, and the like are to be destroyed, nor any memory of the same to be left in walls and glass windows. Elizabeth, however, adds, that “the walls and glass-windows shall be nevertheless preserved,” as though the crusade against all ecclesiastical ornaments had already begun. Again, by Edward’s injunctions, unlicensed preachers are not to be admitted into a pulpit. Those of Elizabeth, however, go farther, not allowing even licensed preachers to officiate out of their own parishes, unless they have a special license for this, as though itinerancy had commenced. Then, in the latter, we find certain supplementary clauses not in the injunctions of Edward, all pointing to the same conclusion. One against the growth of heresies, contrary to the faith of Christ and his Holy Spirit; still a foretaste of the speculative imaginations of the next century. Another against disturbing the congregation in the time of sermon; a practice afterwards so common, and of which Bishop Bull’s debate with the brawling Quaker is a characteristicinstance.[474]A third, for the better regulation of singing in churches; not, indeed, absolutely forbidding the use of music, but reducing it to much greater simplicity; a concession, as far as it went, to the same party, who would willingly have ejected all organs, and allowed no psalmody whatever, but such as was strictly congregational.[475]Meanwhile the secret of this growing strength of the puritan cause is discovered in other allusions, contained in the same injunctions, to the penury of the church, and the ignorance of its ministers; the natural effect of the late pillage and misapplication of its revenues: for here we encounter, not without some feelings of humiliation, such provisions as these (ex pede Herculem): that no priest shall marry without permission given by the bishop and two justices of the peace living next to the place where the woman hath made her most abode before marriage, nor without the good will of her parents or next kinsfolk; or, for lack of such, of “her master or mistress where she liveth.” And again, that “such as are butmean readersshall peruse over before once or twice the chapters and homilies, to the intent they may read to the better understanding of the people, and the more encouragement of godliness.” This is a glimpse of a sad picture; but it is such as the sketch given in a former chapter[476]of the condition of the clergy under King Edward must have prepared us to expect. The Reformation was still too recent an event, and had been effected by means too violent, for the great good that was in it to have developed itself. The fountain had been thoroughly troubled, and time was wanting for it to defecate, as well as an infusion, perhaps, of some fresh elements that should expedite the process of precipitation. These Cranmer would have suppliedhad he been allowed to complete his own idea. But his untimely death, and the selfish passions of men too strong for him, thwarting him whilst he lived, scanted the Reformation of much that should have belonged to it, and consigned it to posterity a noble but still an unfinished work—a work in which there is every thing to admire, and yet something to desiderate.

Thus it has been said that the Reformation left the church withoutdiscipline; a defect which our commination-service confesses and laments; but it was one from which the Roman catholic church itself was not exempt, for the rivalry which existed between the secular and regular clergy, and again between the several orders of the latter, was, as we have seen, fatal to discipline. Still, whatever the defect was, it was not the fault of the reformers that it was suffered to remain. The canon laws were, indeed, no longer strictly applicable to the church, constructed as it now was: but an attempt was made to accommodate them, or to substitute for them such as were thought better. A code, which he called Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, was drawn up by Cranmer, consisting of fifty-one titles, with an appendix, after the manner of the Digest of Justinian. It underwent many revisions in private during the reigns of Henry and Edward, but was not produced. It was revived, with a view to its legal enactment, by the Puritans in the lower house of parliament under Elizabeth; but the Queen thought it trenched upon her supremacy, and would not hear of it. It was reprinted, and no more under Charles I., and was suggested once again to public notice by Bishop Burnet.[477]All, however, would not do; it fell to the ground; whether originally from the mere accident of the deaths of Henry and Edward before it was fully matured; whether from thedifficulty of maintaining penal statutes in general in a church founded upon the principles of the Reformation; or whether, as some have thought, from the extreme severity of the code itself. That the latter circumstance was the cause of its non-enactment it is difficult to believe; for, severe as it may seem to us, and as it undoubtedly is, the distinction which is made in it between the essential and unessential doctrines of Christianity, and the exclusive application of the capital laws against heresy to the former, was the first instance of any such discrimination being exercised.[478]and may be fairly considered as a step in the progress of the principles of toleration; as the mitigation rather than the approval of penal excesses; for so little was that age prepared to revolt at the provisions laid down in it, that Bishop Jewel, who must have ranked rather with the liberal than the dogmatical party of his own day; who had lived in exile at Frankfort, a liberal school; himself, therefore, a victim of persecution; and who wrote many years after Cranmer; seems to approve the same theory of punishment, and perhaps the same scale of it; for whilst he vindicates freedom of opinion up to a certain point, still such as have awickedopinion either of God the Father, or of Christ, or of the Holy Ghost, or of any other point, of Christian religion, they being confuted by the Gospel of Christ, he would plainly pronounce detestable and damned persons, and would defy them even unto the devil; neither would he leave them so, but would also severely and straitly hold them in bylawful and politic punishments, if they fortune to break out any where and bewray themselves.[479]These are very strong words. And what is more remarkable still, a similar line was adopted,nearly a hundred years later, by one who has been considered the great champion of religious liberty, and in a work expressly dedicated to the extension of it, and though it is more than probable that Jeremy Taylor, here, as elsewhere, would not have had the courage to follow out his own argument to its practical results, and would have shrunk from “putting to death or dismembering” the professing Christian, even for “impiety or blasphemy,” or for opinions (if only such), however “destructive of the foundation of religion;”[480]yet the theory itself, re-asserted after so long an interval, and by such an advocate, is enough to prove that Cranmer was rather in advance of his generation than behind it; and that he is still to be regarded as the reformer, and not as the bigot.

But there is reason to think that the capital penalties even of his code would have been mitigated, had he ever actually presented it to the legislature. Cranmer was becoming daily more tolerant, as he gradually fell under the influence of a more charitable faith. He had been shocked, it is said, by the solemn manner in which Edward made him responsible before God for the life of Joan of Kent; he expressed himself shortly afterwards of Gardiner in terms significant of a repugnance to severities;[481]and he was one of those who advised connivance at the use of the mass by the Princess Mary. With these tokens of temper before us, it seems fair to infer, that however greatly Cranmer coveted the establishment of discipline, he would scarcely have bought it at the price of blood; and that his own character, by nature one of the most gentle, was asserting itself more and moreeven in matters calculated to put it most of all to the proof. But if discipline, properly so called, be lacking, so much the rather should those ecclesiastical regulations which are of imperfect obligation perhaps (and there are many such) be diligently observed by the clergy, both towards those set over them, and towards those committed to their charge; the respect or neglect of which is just that which constitutes the decency or disorder of a church; a distinction not easy to describe in detail, yet sufficiently intelligible in itself; nor is it unreasonable to expect that the laity on their part should see the advantage of such rules, which cannot be onerous, and cordially co-operate with the clergy to the maintenance of them.

Another particular in which the Reformation was left incomplete, was in a provision for the sufficient education of the people. The demand, indeed, for education had not hitherto been great; few boys but such as were intended for ecclesiastics were made scholars; so that even Latimer reckons the sons of great laymen or esquires, as he calls them, interlopers in the universities.[482]The churchman, and no other, was the clerk; and the convent was in general the academy; it was so, at least, in ahundredinstances, if we understand an expression used by the speaker of the lower house, in the fourth year of Elizabeth, aright; who, in his address to the Queen laments the loss of such a number of places of education.[483]Schools, therefore, in the present sense of the word, there were few; not more than three, we believe, in all London. And when Dean Colet founded that of St. Paul’s on the eve of the Reformation, it was a thing regarded with some jealousy.[484]Hence it probably was, that the numbers sent to Oxford and Cambridge (the two great nationalschools, as they were then considered) were so extraordinary—thousands where there are now hundreds; and that the age of the students was so tender. For on the rapid multiplication of foundation schools throughout the country in the century after the Reformation, the character of the universities, we shall find, became changed; the number of students diminishing, in spite of an increasing population, and the age at which they entered greatly advanced. Milton’s is said to be the last instance of corporal punishment in either university—a tradition which, whether true or false as to the individual, may serve to date the period of the transition from the past to the present system of academical education. But of the few schools that existed before the Reformation, some were seized and sold by the rapacious courtiers, particularly under the feeble reign of Edward; here was one channel of education cut off:—the convents were destroyed; here was another:—the universities were decayed; here was a third:—they were decayed, because the yeomen who might have been able to send their children to a school in the neighbourhood, if there had been one, were quite unable, from a disastrous change in their circumstances, to send them, as they often had done heretofore, to Oxford and Cambridge:[485]an education so remote, frugal as the times then were, being comparatively costly, and such as rendered even the ten groats which Jewel bestowed upon Hooker, when he called upon the good bishop on his way to his college on foot, not unwelcome. They were still further decayed from the same cause as the schools; powerful individuals intercepted and appropriated their revenues—accordingly very many students were actually unable to stay “for lack of exhibition and help,”—others did indeed stay, but in extreme penury. They rose in the morning betweenfour and five o’clock; at ten they dined, having “a penny piece of beef amongst four, a few potage made of the same, with salt and oatmeal, and nothing else:—at five in the evening they had a supper not much better than the dinner; and, before they went to bed, which was at nine or ten, being without fire, “they were fain to walk or run up and down half an hour to get a heat on their feet.” Such was the condition of what students there were in Cambridge in the days of Edward the Fifth.[486]Now this declension in the means of national instruction was the more calamitous because it happened at a moment when the thirst for knowledge was becoming intense, and when it was more than commonly desirable that it should be slaked from cisterns of wholesome waters. Of this our reformers were aware; but again they were baffled, both they and their king. The larger benefices were, indeed, charged with the support of one scholar at the university for every hundred pounds of their annual value: but this was a very limited provision for the wants of the times.[487]The chantry lands would have furnished a considerable, perhaps a sufficient, fund for the purpose, and Edward did so apply them in part, and would gladly have done so more extensively; but they were devoured by the nobles, and the moment for royal endowments went by. Happy would it have been, had it been otherwise. Such grammar schools as he would have planted over England would have been found “seminaries of soundlearning,” and (what was the first consideration of the founder) “ofreligiouseducation.” They might have raised up a more literate clergy. They might have checked, perhaps, the rising extravagances of the Puritans. They might have sustained the church by the direction they would have given to public opinion; and dispersed the storm which already threatened, by conducting, quietly and not unfruitfully, to the earth, the fierce elements with which the political and religious atmosphere was already so heavily charged. For they would have been the natural feeders of the church of England; the visitor, probably one of its prelates; the teachers, its more learned ministers; the prayers, those of its services; the catechism, its manual of doctrines—that which Dean Nowell composed in Latin, and which was afterwards translated into Greek by Dr. Whitaker, his nephew, for the express use of such schools, having been approved in convocation, and been acknowledged to speak the authorised language of the reformers. A few such schools King Edward did establish, as we have said; but in numbers quite inadequate to the demands of the nation, which must have been abandoned to gross ignorance, and to the delusions of every theological empiric (which was in a great degree the case after all), but for the many private foundations, still however very insufficient, by which the reign of Elizabeth, who incorporated them, was distinguished. For these, the country was indebted to the generous efforts not of ecclesiastics only, but also of opulent yeomen and tradesmen, the last of whom, having made an ample fortune, generally in London, the first-fruits of the commerce of England, often retired to spend it in the place which had given them birth, and of which they piously endeavoured to relieve the intellectual and religious wants by erecting a school, connecting it with the universities by scholarships,and with the church by the qualifications of its masters. In these institutions, whether of royal or private foundation, most of our yeomen, shopkeepers, and small householders who resided within reach of them, besides many of a higher rank, were heretofore educated; a class of persons which both the recollection of living men, and still more the records of our domestic history, lead us to think not less sound in knowledge, nor less sage and sober in sentiments, not less loyal subjects or less virtuous citizens, than the more enlightened generation, as it has been called, which has succeeded them, the sons of our commercial schools. Whilst by means of those same institutions a way has been commonly opened to youths of promise, though it may be of humble parentage, into the two great seats of learning, of which they have often become the brightest ornaments; and into the church, of which they have no less frequently proved themselves the most conspicuous and valuable ministers. Perhaps it may be added, that in either capacity, whether as nurseries of our laymen or of our clergy, such schools, productive as they have been of men duly qualified to serve God and their country, would have been far more so, had the principles upon which they were first founded been more rigorously observed in times past (for the error has been discovered, and some pains are now taken to remove it); had religion in general, its evidences and substance, entered still more largely into their regular studies; and that particular form of it established in this kingdom been made a theme of their more habitual instruction and parental concern.

Another defect imputed to the Reformation is the inadequate support it provided for the lower orders of the clergy. Four thousand livings, and upwards, of less than one hundredand fifty pounds a year each, many very far less, with no parsonage houses whatever, or with such as the most Sabine economist would pronounce unfit for a clergyman to occupy;—this is the forlorn condition, as to temporals, in which the church has stood for a long season; a condition to which it could not have been reduced, had even a portion of the vast revenues dispersed at the Reformation been husbanded, and applied to the legitimate purpose of bettering the situation of the inferior clergy. This, Cranmer most earnestly desired; but his entreaties and regrets were alike unavailing. The evil continued, and Jewel took up the subject in his turn; and pressed the redress of it upon Elizabeth and her nobles, in his sermons at Paul’s Cross (very curious pictures of the times); but the spoil was then divided, and restitution was looked for in vain.[488]Laud made another effort; one of whose projects it was to move Charles for a grant to buy in impropriations, two of which he hoped thus to redeem every year; but his chance of success best appears from the very intention (of which the record was found in his diary) being made matter of charge against him at his trial. Had the exertions of these prelates been effective, the very great, but, as things at present stand, the necessary evil of pluralities and non-residence would have been prevented, or left without cause or excuse. As it is, to proscribe the pluralist altogether, would in many cases, be to visit with utter poverty the meritorious labourer in the vineyard, him and his little ones; and to insist, in all cases, upon residence, would be, in some, to say that the village handi-craftsman more lettered than his fellows, should be again the officiating minister, as he once was in Edward’s days, and as he was forbidden to be, from the mischief it occasioned, under Elizabeth. The evil of which we speak is grievous;but it has been and is decreasing. By help of Queen Anne’s bounty, of which the origin and history has been briefly told already, a sum of money advanced for the augmentation of a small living is met with an equal sum, when the whole is invested in land, so soon as land can be found; and thus is the income of the poor incumbent improved. And, by a modern and excellent act of the legislature, empowering him to mortgage his benefice to the amount of two years’ income, and to bind his successors as well as himself for the gradual liquidation of the debt, he is enabled to build a new house, or make an old one habitable; and thus is his residence encouraged. The beneficial operation of these two instruments of gradual church reform is more and more manifest every day. By virtue of them the modest but not mean parsonage is beginning to appear in many rude and secluded hamlets where before there had been none: and the advantages of a pastor on the spot, frugal, indeed, of necessity, but carrying with him the respect which superior intelligence commands, and the sympathies of those amongst whom he walks not unseen; whose adviser he is in difficulties, and peace-maker in disputes; whose houses he visits in sickness and sorrow, and whose children he teaches the way in which they should go;—these charities, the attendants upon a resident ministry, are diffusing themselves over districts where they were once unfelt, and attaching the inhabitants to our church by the strongest of all ties, “the cords of a man.” But, alas! the residence must depend upon the house, and the house upon the income of the benefice: to the improvement of the latter, therefore, should our efforts be first directed, as the moving-spring of all; and if, by any equitable means, the fund at the disposal of the commissioners of Queen Anne’s bounty could be enriched, great would be the gain. But if lay patrons of small livings, where they happen to be also impropriators, could be inducedto co-operate with the clergy for this same great object, which is national; if the generous spirit which animated their fathers, during half a century, after the Restoration,[489]when they had learned in the day of suffering the value of their church, and in the moment of joy at its re-establishment welcomed it with gifts,—if that spirit would stir in them also; if they would re-annex, as was then done so commonly, to these their own livings (we ask no more), some portion, however small, of the tithes which they enjoy, and which were all wrung from the church; a sacrifice which, from its amount, would scarcely be felt by many patrons, and which would not, in fact, be an alienation of so much property, but rather a regulation of the course in which it should run; a reduction, perhaps, of fifty or a hundred pounds a year from an elder brother’s rent-roll, to the augmentation to the like amount of a younger brother’s benefice;—if the patron and impropriator could be persuaded thus to act, the necessity for non-residence and pluralities would be still more rapidly diminished, and the national church would soon be placed in a more impregnable position than she has ever assumed in this particular, either since the Reformation or before it. And without urging higher motives, without urging even the feudal nature of all property in one sense, held, under God, the Lord of all, on condition of suit and service to be done, and not as an absolute possession to be dealt with altogether according to the pleasure of the occupant—without pressing this consideration (which is nevertheless a sound one), we shall be borne out in saying, that the possessor of property best secures the permanent enjoyment of it by securing a righteous population to his country; that the respect or contempt of the laws of the land in our parishes, and particularly in our rural parishes, is not a little dependenton the presence or absence of the village pastor; that to insure the local benefit of his residence, therefore, may be worth the while of any man who has a stake to lose; and that, though it may entail upon him the relinquishment of a trifle which he may strictly call his own; and with which he may certainly do what he will; still, it may be for his consideration whether there is not that scattereth and yet increaseth, and whether there is not that withholdeth more than is meet, and it tendeth unto poverty.

Such is our sketch of this great religious revolution: for which, that it came when it did, we have surely, in these days, reason to give God hearty thanks. For to the Reformation we owe it, that a knowledge of religion has kept pace in the country with other knowledge; and that, in the general advance of science, and the general appetite for enquiry, this paramount principle of all has been placed in a position to require nothing but a fair field and no favour, in order to assert its just pretensions. We are here embarrassed by no dogmas of corrupt and unenlightened times, still riveted upon our reluctant acceptance by an idea of papal or synodical infallibility; but stand with the Bible in our hands, prepared to abide by the doctrines we can discover in it, because furnished with evidences for its truth (thanks to the Reformation for this also!) which appeal to the understanding, and to the understanding only; so that no man competently acquainted with them need shrink from the encounter of the infidel; or feel, for a moment, that his faith is put to shame by his philosophy. Infidelity there may be in the country, for there will ever be men who will not trouble themselves to examine the grounds of their religion, and men who will not dare to do it; but how far more intense would it have been, and more dangerous, had the spirit of the times been, in other respects, what it is, and the Reformation yet to come, religion yet to be exonerated of weights which sunk itheretofore in this country, and still sink it in countries around us; enquiry to be resisted in an age of curiosity; opinions to be bolstered up (for they may not be retracted) in an age of incredulity; and pageants to be addressed to the senses, instead of arguments to the reason, in an age which, at least, calls itself profound. As it is, we have nothing to conceal; nothing to evade; nothing to impose; the reasonableness, as well as righteousness, of our reformed faith recommends it; and whatever may be the shocks it may have to sustain from scoffs, and doubts, and clamour, and licentiousness, and seditious tongues, and an abused press, it will itself, we doubt not, prevail against them all, and save, too (as we trust), the nation which has cherished it, from the terrible evils, both moral, social, and political, that come of aheartof unbelief.

THE END.

Back to Index Next