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of centralization by taking the ecclesiastic jurisdiction into his own hands and stopping its passage of the seas. In the new movement of the time, England tended to become a petty papacy, still unreformed; Europe sought a universal church reformed. Neither aim admitted of realization. To repudiate the supreme pontiff, and substitute a civil head, involved a fatal breach in the sacerdotal system, and carried with it inevitable departures from the integrity of Catholic dogma; so that reformation was found inseparable from schism. And when no council, acknowledged as universal, was called to give authoritative settlement, arrangements
ad interim became consolidated, provisional rights grew into prescriptive; with the spectacle of variety, and the taste of freedom, the idea of unity faded away, till the co-existence of two churches within one land and one Christendom passed into a necessity, and reformation proved impossible without a schism. But, notwithstanding this partial approximation of the English and the Continental movements, the traces remain indelible that their point of departure was from opposite ends. In its origin and earliest traditions, in the basis of its constitution and worship, the Church of England has nothing whatever to do with Protestantism; it is but the Westminster Catholic Church instead of the Roman Catholic Church. Authoritative doctrine, sacramental grace, sacerdotal mediation, are all retained; and throughout the whole of Henry's reign, while the new laws were working themselves into habits, the seven sacraments, the communion in one kind, the Ave Maria, the invocation of saints, with the doctrines of transubstantiation and purgatory, remained within the circle of recognized orthodoxy. The impelling and regulative idea of the whole change was that of a nationalization of Catholicism. This original ascendency of the national over the theological feeling was never lost; and though channels were more and more opened, through the sympathies of exiles and the intercourse of scholars, for the infusion of Continental notions, yet the form given to the Church rendered it not very susceptible to the new learning; whose admission, so far as it took place, was rather induced by political conception than made in the interests of universal truth. The present Anglicans represent the first type of the English
schism; and the High Church in general embodies the distinguishing
national sentiment of the Reformation in this country, as compared with the
cosmopolitan character of the Continental religious change. Doctrine is universal, administration and jurisdiction are local. Where the former becomes the bond of sympathy, as among the Evangelic Protestants, it unites men together by ties that are irrespective of the limits of country, and subordinates special patriotisms to the interests of a more comprehensive fraternity. Where the latter become the objects of zeal, a flavor of the soil mingles itself with the sentiments of honor, and a peculiar loyalty concentrates itself on the inner circles of duty, often with the narrowest capacity of diffusion beyond. Hence the intensely
English feeling which has always prevailed among the parochial—especially the rural—clergy of the Establishment, and the people who form their congregations. They constitute the very core of our insular society, and the retaining centre of our historical characteristics. Their admirations, their prejudices, their virtues, their ambitions, are all national. Their interest in dogma is not intellectually active, or provocative of any proselyting zeal, and is subservient to the practical aim of giving territorial action to the religious institutions under their charge. Their dealings are less with the individual's solitary soul, than with the several social classes in their mutual relations; and to mediate between the gentry and the poor, to keep in order the school, the workhouse, and the village charities—not forgetting the obligation to ward off Methodists and voluntaries,[2]—constitute the approved circle of clerical duties. Their very antipathies, unlike those of Protestant zealots, are less theological than political; they hate Roman Catholics chiefly as a sort of
foreigners, who have no proper business here, and Dissenters as a sort of
rebels, who create disturbance with their discontents; and were old England well rid of them both, the heart of her citizenship, they believe, would be sounder. They stand, indeed, in a curious position, pledged to hold a proud Anglican isolation between two cosmopolitan interests—the Popish theocracy and the Evangelical dogma—refusing obedience to Rome, yet declining the alliance of foreign Protestants. Their enmity to the Papal system is quite a different sentiment from that which animates Exeter Hall; they do not deny the absolute legitimacy of the elder corporation in general, but only its relative legitimacy
here; and Scottish ravings against it as "Babylon" and "Antichrist" offend them more than the confessional and the mass. Twice in their history—under the Stuarts and in our own day—have they seemed to forget their destiny, and make overtures to the Vatican; in both instances it was when Puritanism had threatened to take possession of the Church, and reduce it to a federal member of an Evangelical alliance; and if its separate integrity were in peril, they had rather fling it back into the Apostolic monarchy, than enroll it in the Genevan league. But the first real sight of danger from the Papal side has dissipated this reactionary inclination, and rekindled the instinct of local independence. Thus, in our Church, ideal interests and purely religious conceptions have held the second place to a predominating nationalism. The Church has embodied and handed down the leading sentiment of the Tudor times; and though not guiltless of share in many a Stuart treachery, and often cruel to the stiff-necked recusant, has, on the whole, been true to the English feeling, that the Pope was too great a priest, and Calvin too long a preacher.
The reason then is evident why the Church of England cannot be referred to any of the heads of classification we have given; neither coinciding with Romanism, nor exemplifying distinctively any of the tendencies springing successively out of the disintegration of Catholic dogma. It arose out of an ecclesiastical revolt; other communions, out of a theological aspiration. Its original conception involved no serious modification of belief, no invention or recovery of strange usages, but a mere separation of the island branch from the Roman stem, that it might strike root and be as a native tree of life. The first alterations in doctrine were slight, and merely incidental to this primary end: and the whole amount of change, instead of being determined by the intellectual dictatorship of a Luther or a Calvin, was the illogical result of social forces, seeking the equilibrium of practical compromise. The phenomenon therefore which we observed in the elder Church is repeated in this younger offshoot: the several elements of faith co-exist (though in greatly spoiled proportions) without unity or natural coherence; and the English Church, as the depository of a creed, occupies no place in the history of the human mind: its individual great men must be put here or there in the records of thought, without regard to the accident of their ecclesiastical position. The one real idea which has permanently inspired its clergy and supporters is that of nationalism in religion. To the time of the Restoration they attempted, since then they have pretended, to represent the nation in its faith and worship. Once, their aim appeared to be a noble possibility, struggling still and unrealized, but unrefuted. Now, thousands of Non-conformist chapels proclaim its meaning gone, and its language an affectation and an insolence. The English Church has become an outer reality without an inner idea.
In contrast with the insular feeling predominant in the English schism, we have placed the cosmopolitan zeal of the foreign Puritanism. With this, however, was combined the very opposite pole of sentiment—a certain egoism and loneliness in religion, from which have flowed some of the most important characteristics of Protestantism. Having flung away, as miserable quackeries, the hierarchical prescriptions for souls oppressed with sin, Luther fell back upon an act of subjective faith in place of the Church's objective works. For the corporation he substituted the individual: whom he put in immediate, instead of mediate, relation with Christ and God. The Catholic's unbloody sacrifice had no efficacy, no existence, without the priest; the Lutheran's bloody sacrifice was a realized historical fact, to be appropriated separately by every believer's personal trust. It was not, therefore, the Church which, in its corporate capacity, occupied the prior place, and held the deposit of divine grace for distribution to its members; but it was the private person that constituted the sacred unit, and a plurality of believers supplied the factors of the Church. The grace which before could not reach the individual except by transit through accredited officials, now became directly accessible to each soul: and only after it had been received by a sufficient number to form a society, did the conditions of spiritual office and organization exist. This essential dependence of the whole upon the parts, instead of the parts upon the whole, is the most radical and powerful peculiarity of Protestantism. A system which raises the individual to the primary place of religious importance, places him nearest to the supernatural energy of God, and makes him the living stone without
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