the passions, prejudices, and contradictory judgments of writers and readers. It is a succession of tragedies; it abounds in actions and reactions, in crimes and punishments, in changes of fortune, in men and women elevated to the pinnacle of power and happiness and hurled to the abyss of disgrace and misfortune. It furnishes a striking illustration of the truth that the history of the Church, as well as of the world, is a judgment of the Church. This idea of righteous retribution imparts a thrilling moral effect to the tragedies of Shakspere, who lived at the close of these shifting scenes, and gathered from them his marvelous knowledge of human nature, in all its phases and conditions, such as no poet ancient or modern ever possessed.

The richest fruit of the British Reformation is the translation of the Bible-the work of three generations, the best ever made, and to this day the chief nursery of piety among the Protestant denominations of the English-speaking race; and next to it that noble responsive liturgy which animates and regulates the devotions of the Episcopal communion on land and sea. These two works are truly national institutions, and command a veneration and affection above all other books, not only by their sacred contents, but also by their classical diction, which sounds in the ear like solemn music from a higher and better world.

EPOCHS OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION.

The history of the English Reformation naturally divides itself into four periods:

1. From 1527 to 1547. The abolition of the authority of the Roman See over England and the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. This was chiefly a destructive process and a political change of the supreme governing power of the Church, prompted by unworthy personal motives, but it prepared the way for the religious reformation under the following reign. The despotic and licentious monarch, whom Leo X. rewarded for his book against Luther with the title 'Defender of the Faith,' remained a Catholic in belief and sentiment till his death; he merely substituted king-worship for popeworship, a domestic tyranny for a foreign one, by cutting off the papal tiara from the episcopal hierarchy and placing his own crown on the bleeding neck; but he could not have effected so great a revolution

without the sanction of Parliament and a strong clerical and popular current towards ecclesiastical independence and reform, which showed itself even before his breach with Rome, and became dominant under his successor.

2. From 1547 to 1553. The introduction of the Reformation in doctrine and worship under Edward VI., Henry's only son, and the commencing conflict between the semi-Catholic and the Puritan tendencies. The ruling genius of this period was Archbishop Cranmer, the Melanchthon of England, who by cautious trimming and facile subservience to Henry had saved the cause of the Reformation through the trials of a despotic reign for better times.

1

3. From 1553 to 1558. The papal reaction under Henry's oldest daughter, Mary Tudor, that 'unhappiest of queens and wives and women.' She had more Spanish than English blood in her veins, and revenged the injustice done to her mother, Catharine of Aragon. Her short but bloody reign was the period of Protestant martyrdom, which fertilized the soil of England, and of the exile of about eight hundred Englishmen, who were received with open arms on the Continent, and who brought back clearer and stronger views of the Reformation. The violent restoration of the old system intensified the hatred of Popery, and forever connected it in the English mind with persecution and bloodshed, with national humiliation and disgrace. The tale of Protestant sufferings was told with wonderful pathos and picturesqueness by John Foxe, an exile during the persecution, and his "Book of Martyrs," which was (under the following reign) set up by royal order in the churches for public reading, passed from the churches to the shelves of every English household.'

4. From 1558 to 1603. The permanent establishment of the Reformed Church of England in opposition both to Roman Catholic and to Puritan dissent during the long, brilliant, and successful reign of Queen Elizabeth.

This masculine woman, the last and the greatest of the Tudors, inherited the virtues and vices of her Catholic father (Henry VIII.) and her Protestant mother (Anne Boleyn). She was endowed with rare

1 Tennyson, in Queen Mary, act v. scene 2.

Her character is admirably drawn by Froude, and by the latest historian of England, J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People (London, 1875), pp. 362–370.

gifts by nature, and favored with the best education; she was brave and bold, yet prudent and cautious; fond of show, jewelry and dress, yet parsimonious and mean; coldly intellectual, high-tempered, capricious, haughty, selfish, and vain, and well versed in the low arts of intrigue and dissimulation. She trusted more in time and her good fortune than in Almighty God. She was destitute of religious enthusiasm, and managed the Church question from a purely political point of view. She dropped the blasphemous title 'Head of the Church of England,' and was content to be the supreme 'Governor' of the same. But with this limitation the royal supremacy was the chief article in her creed, and she made her bishops feel her power. 'Proud prelate,' she wrote to the Bishop of Ely, when he resisted the spoliation of his see in favor of one of her favorites, you know what you were before I made you what you are! If you do not immediately comply with my request, by God! I will unfrock you.' As a matter of taste she liked crucifixes, images, and the gorgeous display of the Roman hierarchy and ritual; and, being proud of her own virginity, she disliked the marriage of the clergy; she insulted the worthy wife of Archbishop Parker by refusing to call her 'Madam,' the usual address to married ladies. But she had the sagacity to perceive that her true interests were identified with the cause of Protestantism, and she maintained it with a strong arm, aided by the ablest council and the national sentiment, against the excommunication of the Pope, the assaults of Spain, and the intrigues of the Jesuits at home. This is the basis of the popularity which she enjoyed as a ruler with all classes of her subjects except the Romanists.

Her ecclesiastical policy at home was a system of compromise in the interest of outward uniformity. It was fortified by a penal code which may be explained though not justified by the political necessities and

'Parliament, in the act of supremacy (1534), declared King Henry, his heirs and successors, to be the only supreme head, on earth, of the Church of England, called the Anglicana Ecclesia.' For denying this royal supremacy in spiritual matters, More and Fisher suffered martyrdom. The thirty-seventh of the Elizabethan Articles modifies it considerably, but still claims for 'the Queen's Majesty the chief power in this Realm of England, . . . unto whom the chief government of all estates, whether they be ecclesiastical or civil, in all causes doth appertain,' etc. Elizabeth disclaimed the sacerdotal character which her father had assumed, but retained and exercised the vast power of appointing her prelates, summoning and dissolving convocations, sanctioning creeds and canons, and punishing heresies and all manner of abuses with the civil sword.

the general intolerance of the times, but which was nevertheless cruel and abominable, and has been gradually swept away by the progress of a nobler and more enlightened policy of religious liberty.

As in the case of her predecessors, we should remember that the policy of Elizabeth was merely the outward frame which surrounds the true inward history of the religious movement of her age. The doctrinal reformation with which we are concerned was begun in the second and completed in the fourth period.

With the reign of Elizabeth ended the great conflict with Rome. It was followed by the internal conflict between Puritanism and Episcopacy, which, after a temporary triumph of the former under Cromwell, resulted in the re-establishment of the Episcopal Church and the expulsion of Puritanism (1662), until another revolution (1688) brought on the final downfall of the treacherous Stuarts and the toleration of the Dissenters, who thereafter represented, in separate organizations, the left or radical wing of English Protestantism.

877. THE DOCTRINAL POSITION OF THE ANGLICAN CHURCH AND HER RELATION TO OTHER CHURCHES.

The Reformed Church of England occupies an independent position between Romanism on the one hand, and Lutheranism and Calvinism on the other, with strong affinities and antagonisms in both directions. She nursed at her breasts Calvinistic Puritans, Arminian Methodists, liberal Latitudinarians, and Romanizing Tractarians and Ritualists. This comprehensiveness of the Church as a whole is quite consistent with the narrowness and exclusiveness of particular parties. It repels and attracts; it caused the large secessions which occurred at critical junctures in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, but it also explains the individual accessions which she continually though quietly receives from other Churches.

The English mind is not theorizing and speculative, but eminently practical and conservative; it follows more the power of habit than the logic of thought; it takes things as they are, makes haste slowly, mends abuses cautiously, and aims at the attainable rather than the ideal. The Reformation in England was less controlled by theology than on the Continent, and more complicated with ecclesiastical and political issues. Anglican theology is as much embodied in the episco

pal polity and the liturgical worship as in the doctrinal standards. The Book of Common Prayer is catholic, though purged of superstitious elements; the Articles of Religion are evangelical and moderately Calvinistic. The hierarchical, sacerdotal, and sacramental systems of relig ion are congenial and logically inseparable; they moderate and check the Protestant tendency, and if unduly pressed they become Romanizing. In great minds we often find great antagonisms or opposite truths dwelling together unreconciled; while partisans look only at one side. Augustine, Luther, and even the more logical Calvin, believed in divine sovereignty and human responsibility, free election and sacramental grace, and combined reverence for Church authority with independence of private judgment. The English Church leaves room for catholic and evangelical, mediæval and modern ideas, without an attempt to harmonize them; but her parties are one-sided, and differ as widely as separate denominations, though subject to the same bishop and worshiping at the same altar. She is composite and eclectic in her character, like the English language; she has more outward uniformity than inward unity; she is fixed in her organic structure, but elastic in doctrinal opinion, and has successively allowed opposite schools of theology to grow up which claim to be equally loyal to her genius and institutions. She has lost in England by those periodical separations which followed her great religious movements (the Puritan, the Methodist, the Anglo-Catholic) nearly one half of the nation she once exclusively controlled; yet she remains to this day the richest and strongest national Church in Protestant Christendom, and exercises more power over England than Lutheranism does over Germany or Calvinism over Switzerland and Holland. In the United States the Protestant Episcopal Church is numerically much smaller

'The ingenious and sophistical attempt of Dr. John Henry Newman, in his famous Tract Number Ninety (Oxford, 1841), to un-Protestantize the Thirty-nine Articles, has been best refuted by his own subsequent transition to Rome. As a specimen of this non-natural interpretation we mention what he says on Art. XI., which teaches as 'a most wholesome doctrine' 'that we are justified by faith only.' This means that faith is the sole internal instrument of justification, while baptism is the sole outward means and instrument; it does not interfere with the doctrine that good works are also a means of justification (pp. 21 sqq.). That is, the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone, which the Council of Trent condemned, is identical with the Romish doctrine of justification by faith and works, which the same Council taught. A more learned and elaborate work, which minimizes the Protestantism of the Articles and makes them bear a catholic sense, is the Explanation by the late Bishop Forbes of Brechin, above quoted.

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