tions at the Temple, and as late as 1603 was persona grata with the Puritan nobility.1 Burleigh himself, whom Jewel had claimed as a broad churchman, valued the Establishment only as a testimony of unity', and deprecated in a scathing letter Whitgift's drastic handling of the Puritans. Walsingham, Leicester, Knollys, and Mildmay supported Puritanism in the inner circle of the Government, while the normal opinion of politicians ran preponderantly in the same direction.

The protests of the Millenary Petition in 1603 against the sign of the cross, the surplice, and other usages were anticipated by the Lower House of Convocation exactly forty years earlier, and then only lost by a single vote. In the House of Commons one generation after another opposed the royal policy; in 1572 a bill for rites and ceremonies, in 1587 another to substitute Knox's formulary for the Prayer Book, in 1604 a petition against subscription to all the articles, in 1610 a declaration against the Act of Supremacy-these may suffice to show the persistence of the Commons' Puritanic churchmanship. Protests against the Roman' tendencies of High-churchmen and against the abuses of episcopacy were common, right up till the Civil War, from the most loyal constitutionalists and the most ardent Cavaliers, and no more passionate reproaches were heard in the debates of 1641 than those from Digby, Hyde, Culpepper, and Falkland. Sir Edmund Verney and Lord Sunderland, two of the first and noblest victims of the war, vied with each other in deploring the Papist dominance in the royal councils.

But slow though the growth of the Anglican system was, and slight the hold of the Tudor Church ideal upon Elizabeth's subjects, by 1640 a Church party was really in existence, not, it is clear, entirely at harmony in itself, but still divided from its opponents by a gulf enormously deepened since the death of the Queen. The differences of Churchman and Puritan were the more uncompromising, in that on one great subject they agreed; for, before 1640, no representative type of either school sanctioned the idea of religious toleration. The Church, in Henry VIII's words that part of the body politic called the spirituality', meant to the average mind only the State 1 E. H. R. xxviii. 37 n.; State Trials, ii. 50.

1

under another aspect. The Commons, who in 1604 wished for a perpetual uniformity', declared in 1641 their intention not 'to let loose the golden reins of discipline', and the unity of Jerusalem was Laud's favourite text: 'Divide the minds of men', he said, ' about their hopes of salvation in Christ, and tell me what unity there will be.' 1

Division came, then, not upon the relations of Church and State, but on a prior question-what was the true Church of England?—and though the Cavalier party was not built up on episcopacy nor, still less, in love with Laudianism, its members high or low shared an ideal of the Church which hardly the most moderate Puritan could stomach. This ideal had largely arisen by way of reaction, for the ultimate consequences and implications of the great Protestant upheaval had ended by shocking the conservative and established elements in English thought. They had heard from their fathers warnings against the democracy and anarchy inevitable in sects which were nourished on individual interpretation of Scripture, and, since then, evangelical teaching in England, as previously in France or Scotland, had been applied with explosive effect to the very framework of society. The economic views of Protector Somerset's protégé John Hales, in later life a Marian exile, had been drawn from the Gospel, but they were none the less heresy to the new class of English landowner. The Edwardian Bishop Ponet had, like George Buchanan or Duplessis-Mornay, defended the rightfulness of tyrannicide. Archbishop Parker shuddered at the menace of Protestant democracy. If such principles be spread into men's head', he asked, as now they be framed, and referred to the judgement of the subject to discuss what is tyranny, . . . what lord of the Council shall ride quietly-minded in the streets among desperate beasts, what minister shall be sure in his bedchamber? '2 Elizabeth had denounced Puritans as ' dangerous to a kingly rule', and James repeated the same warning to the tutors of his Palatine grandson, Charles Louis: Above all things, take heed he prove not a Puritan, which

1 Sermon of February 1625, before Parliament.

2 Hales's views in Lamond, Discourse of the Common Weal, xxviii et seq.; S. R. Maitland, Essays (ed. 1899), 79.

is incompatible with princes, who live by order, but they by confusion.'

As time went on, reaction against the Reformation's radical side grew stronger, and even before Elizabeth went to her ✔ fathers the counter-Reformation spirit caught England up in its stride. The Anglican system, originally defended on grounds of expediency or public policy, now began to sink deep shafts to intellectual foundations, and the prosaic argument from legal facts was buttressed, if not supplanted, by appeals to history, reason, and philosophy. Hooker stated in a few words the difference between radical and conservative. How great a difference', he exclaims, there is between their proceedings who erect a new Commonwealth, which is to have neither people nor law, neither regiment nor religion, the same that was, and theirs who only reform a decayed estate by reducing it to that perfection from which it hath swerved. In this case we are to retain as much, in the other as little, of former things as we may': the difference, indeed, put shortly by Laud-' we live in a Church reformed, not in one made new '.1 In the charge of innovating', brought against Laudian bishops, there was, in fact, much substance, if measured simply by early Elizabethan practice, but the answer Laud gave was more profound-' a mighty charge! a "novation" of above thirteen hundred years old '.

Gradually men's eyes turned from the struggling Church of 1558 to the majestic and still dim outline of the first four centuries. As against the Puritans' naked deductions from Scripture, Hooker and Andrewes built up a catholic and reasoned defence of law. Parker had been content to defend the Establishment on the negative ground that it represented 'mediocrity', but they, by distinguishing between things necessary to salvation and things indifferent', settled the Church on a more positive foundation. The Scriptures, they taught, were indeed all-sufficient unto that end for which they were given ', but that end was neither the regulation of a surplice nor the ordering of a Commonwealth: such things were left to the devices of human reason, to be settled by the earthly powers of God's ordaining, and not by individual

1Ecc. Polity, v. 17, 5; Laud, Works, iii. 341.

subjects for, except our own private and but probable resolutions be by the law of public determination overruled, we take away all possibility of social life in the world.' In the Ecclesiastical Polity Hooker painted that magnificent picture of Law as the voice of God, diffusing itself through all His gifts and creations, and building up through the rational work of many generations a prescriptive authority, which must silence the individual's puny protests.

To this prescriptive authority, to intrinsic reasonableness, and to agreement with antiquity, thus making their appeal, the most learned generation in English Church history carried, from Hooker's time onwards, war into the enemy's country, and had by 1640 built up an impregnable position of conservative thought. The strength of this system lay in its width, which contrasted so sharply with the single taut strands of Puritan theology to individual deduction from Scripture they opposed the historic Church's teaching and the country's laws, to predestination the free-will of reason, to the raptures of unaided faith the livelong renewal through the sacraments. If the first generation of Anglicans had pointed out the logical anarchy of Puritanism, the second and third struck deeper, and laid the axe to Puritan dogmatic teaching. With a sure insight the Arminians attacked predestination as the root of Puritan individualism. Religion, they taught, was 'not the jump into glorification' that the Puritan imagined. 'A working and a doing religion', 'the mechanical labouring part of religion',' the work and sweat of the soul '-to such a doctrine of works, performed through the help of the Church, the great Anglicans pointed.1 Would we were all saints!' said Cromwell; it was against this very Puritan notion of a Church of the elect, saved by justification and convinced from the pulpit, that the Anglicans lifted up the image of a Church whose membership covered the nation, both saints and sinners, and whose strength came not from the pulpit but from the choir, the school, and the altar.

Carrying on, simultaneously with this fight against Calvinism in all its branches, another struggle against Rome, the sup

1 Cosin, Works (Oxford, 1843), i. 79, 96; Hammond, Sermons (Oxford, 1849), i. 294.

porters of the via media created in course of years a national pride for the Church established. If isolated in Christendom, its insularity seemed to them both magnificent and justified, and with Hooker's splendid challenge we may leave it. We do rather glorify and bless God for the fruit we daily behold reaped by such ordinances as His gracious Spirit maketh the ripe wisdom of this national church to bring forth, than vainly boast of our own peculiar and private inventions, as if the skill of profitable regiment had left her public habitation to dwell in retired manner with some few men of one livery: we make not our childish appeals sometimes from our own to foreign churches, sometimes from both unto churches ancienter than both are, in effect always from all others to our own selves, but as becometh them that follow with all humility the ways of peace, we honour, reverence, and obey in the very next degree unto God the voice of the Church of God wherein we live.' 1

But who should declare and sanction this voice? Who, surely, but the supreme governor', the overruler, the shepherd of Israel? Faced through this long struggle-for long it was, and victory not yet assured in 1640-by enemies on the right hand and the left, the Church's leaders clung to the Crown as their buckler, evolved a political theory of passive obedience to rulers, and exalted the King's constitutional powers against the two-handed engine of a Puritan Parliament and an allembracing Common Law. It was from this point that the grounds of fidelity to the Crown and obedience to the Church marched together, and though the identification of the two causes was in 1641 far from complete, the work was so far done that fusion was rapid under the stress of common affliction: men, who in that spring had denounced illegal canons, impeached Laud, demanded restrictions on the bishops, and excluded them from Parliament, by the fall of autumn were defending the Prayer Book, and before the leaves reappeared on the trees were up in arms for episcopacy.

Yet the constitutional doctrine of the extreme Churchmen was detestable to the average Cavalier. The absolute obedience preached by Sibthorpe-' whether the prince be a believer or

1 E. P. V. lxxi. 7.