The problem of Church and State demanded a separate discussion; and it is difficult not to feel that the great Letter on Toleration is the noblest of all his utterances. It came as the climax to a long evolution of opinion; and, in the light of William's own conviction, it may be said to have marked a decisive epoch of thought. Already in the sixteenth century Robert Brown and William the Silent had denounced the persecution of sincere belief. Early Baptists like Busher and Richardson had finely denied its validity. Roger Williams in America, Milton in England had attacked its moral rightness and political adequacy; while churchmen like Hales and Taylor and the noble Chillingworth had shown the incompatibility between a religion of love and a spirit of hate. Nor had example been wanting. The religious freedom of Holland was narrow, as Spinoza had found, but it was still freedom. Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Massachusetts had all embarked upon admirable experiment; and Penn himself had aptly said that a man may go to chapel instead of church, even while he remains a good constable. And in 1687, in the preface to his translation of Lactantius, Burnet had not merely attacked the moral viciousness of persecution, but had drawn a distinction between the spheres of Church and State which is a remarkable anticipation of Locke's own theory.

Locke himself covers the whole ground; and since his opinions on the problem were at least twenty years old, it is clear that he was consistent in a worthy outlook. He proceeds by a denial that any element of theocratic government can claim political validity. The magistrate is concerned only with the preservation of social peace and does not deal with the problem of men's souls. Where, indeed, opinions destructive of the State are entertained or a party subversive of peace makes its appearance, the magistrate has the right of suppression; though in the latter case force is the worst and last of remedies. In the English situation, it follows that all men are to be tolerated save Catholics, Mahomedans and atheists. The first are themselves deniers of the rights they would seek, and they find the centre of their political allegiance in a foreign power. Mahomedan morals are incompatible with European civil systems; and the central factor in atheism is the absence of the only ultimately satisfactory sanction of good conduct. Though Church and State are thus distinct, they act for a reciprocal benefit; and it is thus important to see why Locke insists on the invalidity of persecution. For such an end as the cure of souls, he argues, the magistrate has no divine legation. He cannot, on other grounds, use force for the simple reason that it does not produce internal conviction. But even if that were possible, force would still be mistaken; for the majority of the world is not Christian, yet it would have the right to persecute in the belief that it was possessed of truth. Nor can the implication that the magistrate has the keys of heaven be accepted. "No religion," says Locke finely, "which I believe not to be true can be either true or profitable to me." He thus makes of the Church an institution radically different from the ruling conceptions of his time. It becomes merely a voluntary society, which can exert no power save over its members. It may use its own ceremonies, but it cannot impose them on the unwilling; and since persecution is alien from the spirit of Christ, exclusion from membership must be the limit of ecclesiastical disciplinary power. Nor must we forget the advantages of toleration. Its eldest child is charity, and without it there can be no honesty of opinion. Later controversy did not make him modify these principles; and they lived, in Macaulay's hands, to be a vital weapon in the political method of the nineteenth century.

Any survey of earlier political theory would show how little of novelty there is in the specific elements of Locke's general doctrine. He is at all points the offspring of a great and unbroken tradition; and that not the least when he seems unconscious of it. Definite teachers, indeed, he can hardly be said to have had; no one can read his book without perceiving how much of it is rooted in the problems of his own day. He himself has expressed his sense of Hooker's greatness, and he elsewhere had recommended the works of Grotius and Pufendorf as an essential element in education. But his was a nature which learned more from men than books; and he more than once insisted that his philosophy was woven of his own "coarse thoughts." What, doubtless, he therein meant was to emphasize the freshness of his contact with contemporary fact in contrast with the technical jargon of the earlier thinkers. At least his work is free from the mountains of allusion which Prynne rolled into the bottom of his pages; and if the first Whig was the devil, he is singularly free from the irritating pedantry of biblical citation. Yet even with these novelties, no estimate of his work would be complete which failed to take account of the foundations upon which he builded.

Herein, perhaps, the danger is lest we exaggerate Locke's dependence upon the earlier current of thought. The social contract is at least as old as when Glaucon debated with Socrates in the market-place at Athens. The theory of a state of nature, with the rights therein implied, is the contribution, through Stoicism, of the Roman lawyers, and the great medieval contrast to Aristotle's experimentalism. To the latter, also, may be traced the separation of powers; and it was then but little more than a hundred years since Bodin had been taken to make the doctrine an integral part of scientific politics. Nor is the theory of a right to revolution in any sense his specific creation. So soon as the Reformation had given a new perspective to the problem of Church and State every element of Locke's doctrine had become a commonplace of debate. Goodman and Knox among Presbyterians, Suarez and Mariana among Catholics, the author of the Vindiciæ and Francis Hotman among the Huguenots, had all of them emphasized the concept of public power as a trust; with, of course, the necessary corollary that its abuse entails resistance. Algernon Sydney was at least his acquaintance; and he must have been acquainted with the tradition, even if tragedy spared him the details, of the Discourses on Government. Even his theory of toleration had in every detail been anticipated by one or other of a hundred controversialists; and his argument can hardly claim either the lofty eloquence of Jeremy Taylor or the cogent simplicity of William Penn.

What differentiates Locke from all his predecessors is the manner of his writing on the one hand, and the fact of the Revolution on the other. Every previous thinker save Sydney—the latter's work was not published until 1689—was writing with the Church hardly less in mind than the purely political problems of the State; even the secular Hobbes had devoted much thought and space to that "kingdom of darkness" which is Rome. And, Sydney apart, the resistance they had justified was always resistance to a religious tyrant; and Cartwright was as careful to exclude political oppression from the grounds of revolution as Locke was to insist upon it as the fundamental excuse. Locke is, in fact, the first of English thinkers the basis of whose argument is mainly secular. Not, indeed, that he can wholly escape the trammels of ecclesiasticism; not until the sceptical intelligence of Hume was such freedom possible. But it is clear enough that Locke was shifting to very different ground from that which arrested the attention of his predecessors. He is attempting, that is to say, a separation between Church and State not merely in that Scoto-Jesuit sense which aimed at ecclesiastical independence, but in order to assert the pre-eminence of the State as such. The central problem is with him political, and all other questions are subsidiary to it. Therein we have a sense, less clear in any previous writer save Machiavelli, of the real result of the decay of medieval ideals. Church and State have become transposed in their significance. The way, as a consequence, lies open to new dogmas.

The historical research of the nineteenth century has long since made an end of the social contract as an explanation of state-origins; and with it, of necessity, has gone the conception of natural rights as anterior to organized society. The problem, as we now know, is far more complex than the older thinkers imagined. Yet Locke's insistence on consent and natural rights has received new meaning from each critical period of history since he wrote. The theory of consent is vital because without the provision of channels for its administrative expression, men tend to become the creatures of a power ignorant at once and careless of their will. Active consent on the part of the mass of men emphasizes the contingent nature of all power and is essential to the full realization of freedom; and the purpose of the State, in any sense save the mere satisfaction of material appetite, remains, without it, unfulfilled. The concept of natural right is most closely related to this position. For so long as we regard rights as no more than the creatures of law, there is at no point adequate safeguard against their usurpation. A merely legal theory of the State can never, therefore, exhaust the problems of political philosophy.

No thinker has seen this fact more clearly than Locke; and if his effort to make rights something more than interests under juridical protection can not be accepted in the form he made it, the underlying purpose remains. A State, that is to say, which aims at giving to men the full capacity their trained initiative would permit is compelled to regard certain things as beyond the action of an ordinary legislature. What Stammler calls a "natural law with changing content"[4]—a content which changes with our increasing power to satisfy demand—is essential if the state is to live the life of law. For here was the head and centre of Locke's enquiry. "What he was really concerned about," said T.H. Green, "was to dispute 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong.'" The method, as he conceived, by which this could be accomplished was the limitation of power. This he effected by two distinct methods, the one external, the other internal, in character.

The external method has, at bottom, two sides. It is, in the first place, achieved by a narrow definition of the purpose of the state. To Locke the State is little more than a negative institution, a kind of gigantic limited liability company; and if we are inclined to cavil at such restraint, we may perhaps remember that even to neo-Hegelians like Green and Bosanquet this negative sense is rarely absent, in the interest of individual exertion. But for Locke the real guarantee of right lies in another direction. What his whole work amounts to in substance—it is a significant anticipation of Rousseau—is a denial that sovereignty can exist anywhere save in the community as a whole. A common political superior there doubtless must be; but government is an organ to which omnipotence is wanting. So far as there is a sovereign at all in Locke's book, it is the will of that majority which Rousseau tried to disguise under the name of the general will; but obviously the conception lacks precision enough to give the notion of sovereignty the means of operation. The denial is natural enough to a man who had seen, under three sovereigns, the evils of unlimited power; and if there is lacking to his doctrine the well-rounded logic of Hobbes' proof that an unlimited sovereign is unavoidable, it is well to remember that the shift of opinion is, in our own time, more and more in the direction of Locke's attitude. That omnicompetence of Parliament which Bentham and Austin crystallized into the retort to Locke admits, in later hands, of exactly the amelioration he had in mind; and its ethical inadequacy becomes the more obvious the more closely it is studied.[5]

The internal limitation Locke suggested is of more doubtful value. Government, he says, in substance, is a trustee and trustees abuse their power; let us therefore divide it as to parts and persons that the temptation to usurp may be diminished. There is a long history to this doctrine in its more obvious form, and it is a lamentable history. It tied men down to a tyrannous classification which had no root in the material it was supposed to distinguish. Montesquieu took it for the root of liberty; Blackstone, who should have known better, repeated the pious phrases of the Frenchman; and they went in company to America to persuade Madison and the Supreme Court of the United States that only the separation of powers can prevent the approach of tyranny. The facts do not bear out such assumption. The division of powers means in the event not less than their confusion. None can differentiate between the judge's declaration of law and his making of it.[6] Every government department is compelled to legislate, and, often enough, to undertake judicial functions. The American history of the separation of powers has most largely been an attempt to bridge them; and all that has been gained is to drive the best talent, save on rare occasion, from its public life. In France the separation of powers meant, until recent times, the excessive subordination of the judiciary to the cabinet. Nor must we forget, as Locke should have remembered, the plain lesson of the Cromwellian constitutional experiments. That the dispersion of power is one of the great needs of the modern State at no point justifies the rigid categories into which Locke sought its division.[7]

Nor must we belittle the criticism, in its clearest form the work of Fitz James Stephen,[8] that has been levelled at Locke's theory of toleration. For the larger part of the modern world, his argument is acceptable enough; and its ingenious compromises have made it especially representative of the English temper. Yet much of it hardly meets the argument that some of his opponents, as Proast for example, had made. His conception of the visible church as no part of the essence of religion could win no assent from even a moderate Anglican; and, once the visible church is admitted, Locke's facile distinction between Church and State falls to the ground. Nor can it be doubted that he underestimated the power of coercion to produce assent; the policy of Louis XIV to the Huguenots may have been brutal, but its efficacy must be unquestionable. And it is at least doubtful whether his theory has any validity for a man who held, as Roman Catholics of his generation were bound to hold, that the communication of his particular brand of truth outweighed in value all other questions. "Every Church," he wrote, "is orthodox to itself; to others, erroneous or heretical"; but to any earnest believer this would approximate to blasphemy. Nor could any serious Christian accept the view that "under the gospel '...there is no such thing as a Christian commonwealth'"; to Catholics and Presbyterians this must have appeared the merest travesty of their faith.

Here, indeed, as elsewhere Locke is the true progenitor of Benthamism, and his work can hardly be understood save in this context. Just as in his ethical enquiries it was always the happiness of the individual that he sought, so in his politics it was the happiness of the subject he had in view. In each case it was to immediate experience that he made his appeal; and this perhaps explains the clear sense of a contempt for past tradition which pervades all his work. "That which is for the public welfare," he said, "is God's will"; and therein we have the root of that utilitarianism which, as Maine pointed out, is the real parent of all nineteenth century change. And with Locke, as with the Benthamites, his clear sense of what utilitarianism demanded led to an over-emphasis of human rationalism. No one can read the Second Treatise without perceiving that Locke looked upon the State as a machine which can be built and taken to pieces in very simple fashion. Herein, undoubtedly, he over-simplified the problem; and that made him miss some of the cardinal points a true psychology of the State must seize. His very contractualism, indeed, is part of this affection for the rational. It resulted in his failure to perceive how complex is the mass of motives imbedded in the political act. The significance of herd instinct and the vast primitive deeps of the unconscious were alike hidden from him. All this is of defect; and yet excusably. For it needed the demonstration by Darwin of the kinship of man and beast for us to see the real substance of Aristotle's vision that man is embedded in political society.

Once Locke's work had become known, its reputation was secure. Not, indeed, that it was entirely welcome to his generation. Men were not wanting who shrank from his thoroughgoing rationalism and felt that anything but reason must be the test of truth. Those who stood by the ancient ways found it easy to discover republicanism and the roots of atheistic doctrine in his work; and even the theories of Filmer could find defenders against him in the Indian summer of prerogative under Queen Anne. John Hutton informed a friend that he was not less dangerous than Spinoza; and the opinion found an echo from the nonjuring sect. But these, after all, were but the eddies of a stream fast burying itself in the sands. For most, the Revolution was a final settlement, and Locke was welcome as a writer who had discovered the true source of political comfort. So it was that William Molyneux could embody the ideas of the "incomparable treatise" in his demand for Irish freedom; a book which, even in those days, occasioned some controversy. Nor is it uninteresting to discover that the translation of Hotman's Franco-Gallia should have been embellished with a preface from one who, as Molyneux wrote to Locke,[9] never met the Irish writer without conversing of their common master. How rapidly the doctrine spread we learn from a letter of Bayle's in which, as early as 1693, Locke has already became "the gospel of the Protestants." Nor was his immediate influence confined to England. French Huguenots and the Dutch drew naturally upon so happy a defender; and Barbeyrac, in the translation of Pufendorf which he published in 1706, cites no writer so often as Locke. The speeches for the prosecution in the trial of Sacheverell were almost wholesale adaptations of his teaching; and even the accused counsel admitted the legality of James' deposition in his speech for the defence.

More valuable testimony is not wanting. In the Spectator, on six separate occasions, Addison speaks of him as one whose possession is a national glory. Defoe in his Original Power of the People of England made Locke the common possession of the average man, and offered his acknowledgments to his master. Even the malignant genius of Swift softened his hate to find the epithet "judicious" for one in whose doctrines he can have found no comfort. Pope summarized his teaching in the form that Bolingbroke chose to give it. Hoadly, in his Original and Institution of Civil Government, not only dismisses Filmer in a first part each page of which is modelled upon Locke, but adds a second section in which a defence of Hooker serves rather clumsily to conceal the care with which the Second Treatise had also been pillaged. Even Warburton ceased for a moment his habit of belittling all rivals in the field he considered his own to call him, in that Divine Legation which he considered his masterpiece, "the honor of this age and the instructor of the future"; but since Warburton's attack on the High Church theory is at every point Locke's argument, he may have considered this self-eulogy instead of tribute. Sir Thomas Hollis, on the eve of English Radicalism, published a noble edition of his book. And there is perhaps a certain humor in the remembrance that it was to Locke's economic tracts that Bolingbroke went for the arguments with which, in the Craftsman, he attacked the excise scheme of Walpole. That is irrefutable evidence of the position he had attained.

Yet the tide was already on the ebb, and for cogent reasons. There still remained the tribute to be paid by Montesquieu when he made Locke's separation of powers the keystone of his own more splendid arch. The most splendid of all sciolists was still to use his book for the outline of a social contract more daring even than his own. The authors of the Declaration of Independence had still, in words taken from Locke, to reassert the state of nature and his rights; and Mr. Martin of North Carolina was to find him quotable in the debates of the Philadelphia Convention. Yet Locke's own weapons were being turned against him and what was permanent in his work was being cast into the new form required by the time. A few sentences of Hume were sufficient to make the social contract as worthless as the Divine Right of kings, and when Blackstone came to sum up the result of the Revolution, if he wrote in contractual terms it was with a full admission that he was making use of fiction so far as he went behind the settlement of 1688. Nor is the work of Dean Tucker without significance. The failure of England in the American war was already evident; and it was not without justice that he looked to Locke as the author of their principles. "The Americans," he wrote, "have made the maxims of Locke the ground of the present war"; and in his Treatise Concerning Civil Government and his Four Letters he declares himself unable to understand on what Locke's reputation was based. Meanwhile the English disciples of Rousseau in the persons of Price and Priestley suggested to him that Locke, "the idol of the levellers of England," was the parent also of French destructiveness. Burke took up the work thus begun; and after he had dealt with the contract theory it ceased to influence political speculation in England. Its place was taken by the utilitarian doctrine which Hume had outlined; and once Bentham's Fragment had begun to make its way, a new epoch opened in the history of political ideas.

Locke might, indeed, claim that he had a part in this renaissance; but, once the influence of Burke had passed, it was to other gods men turned. For Bentham made an end of natural rights; and his contempt for the past was even more unsparing than Locke's own. It is more instructive to compare his work with Hobbes and Rousseau than with later thinkers; for after Hume English speculation works in a medium Locke would not have understood. Clearly enough, he has nothing of the relentless logic which made Hobbes' mind the clearest instrument in the history of English philosophy. Nor has he Hobbes' sense of style or pungent grasp of the grimness of facts about him. Yet he need not fear the comparison with the earlier thinker. If Hobbes' theory of sovereignty is today one of the commonplaces of jurisprudence, ethically and politically we occupy ourselves with erecting about it a system of limitations each one of which is in some sort due to Locke's perception. If we reject Locke's view of the natural goodness of men, Hobbes' sense of their evil character is not less remote from our speculations. Nor can we accept Hobbes' Erastianism. Locke's view of Church and State became, indeed, a kind of stepchild to it in the stagnant days of the later Georges; but Wesleyanism, on the one hand, and the Oxford movement on the other, pointed the inevitable moral of even an approximation to the Hobbesian view. And anyone who surveys the history of Church and State in America will be tempted to assert that in the last hundred years the separateness for which Locke contended is not without its justification. Locke's theory is a means of preserving the humanity of men; Hobbes makes their reason and conscience the subjects of a power he forbids them to judge. Locke saw that vigilance is the sister of liberty, where Hobbes dismissed the one as faction and the other as disorder. At every point, that is to say, where Hobbes and Locke are at variance, the future has been on Locke's side. He may have defended his cause less splendidly than his rival; but it will at least be admitted by most that he had a more splendid cause to defend.

With Rousseau there is no contrast, for the simple reason that his teaching is only a broadening of the channel dug by Locke. No element integral to the Two Treatises is absent from the Social Contract. Rousseau, indeed, in many aspects saw deeper than his predecessor. The form into which he threw his questions gave them an eternal significance Locke can perhaps hardly claim. He understood the organic character of the State, where Locke was still trammelled by the bonds of his narrow individualism. It is yet difficult to see that the contribution upon which Rousseau's fame has mainly rested is at any point a real advance upon Locke. The general will, in practical instead of semi-mystic terms, really means the welfare of the community as a whole; and when we enquire how that general will is to be known, we come, after much shuffling, upon the will of that majority in which Locke also put his trust. Rousseau's general will, indeed, is at bottom no more than an assertion that right and truth should prevail; and for this also Locke was anxious. But he did not think an infallible criterion existed for its detection; and he was satisfied with the convenience of a simple numerical test. Nor would it be difficult to show that Locke's state has more real room for individuality than Rousseau's. The latter made much show of an impartible and inalienable sovereignty eternally vested in the people; but in practice its exercise is impossible outside the confines of a city-state. Once, that is to say, we deal with modern problems our real enquiry is still the question of Locke—what limits shall we place upon the power of government? Rousseau has only emphasized the urgency of the debate.

Wherein, perhaps, the most profound distinction between Locke's teaching and our own time may be discovered is in our sense of the impossibility that a final answer can be found to political questions. Each age has new materials at its command; and, today, a static philosophy would condemn itself before completion. We do not build Utopias; and the attempt to discover the eternal principles of political right invites disaster at the outset. Yet that does not render useless, even for our own day, the kind of work Locke did. In the largest sense, his questions are still our own. In the largest sense, also, we are near enough to his time to profit at each step of our own efforts by the hints he proffers. The point at which he stood in English history bears not a little resemblance to our own. The emphasis, now as then, is upon the problem of freedom. The problem, now as then, was its translation into institutional terms. It is the glory of Locke that he brought a generous patience and a searching wisdom to the solution he proffered to his generation.

The Revolution of 1688 drew its main source of strength from the traditional dislike of Rome, and the eager desire to place the Church of England beyond the reach of James' aggression. Yet it was not until a generation had passed that the lines of ecclesiastical settlement were, in any full sense clear. The difficulties involved were mostly governmental, and it can hardly even yet be said that they have been solved. The nature of the relation between Church and State, the affiliation between the Church and Nonconformist bodies, the character of its internal government—all these had still to be defined. Nor was this all. The problem of definition was made more complex by schism and disloyalty. An important fraction of the Church could not accept at all the fact of William's kingship; and if the larger part submitted, it cannot be said to have been enthusiastic.

Nor did the Church make easy the situation of the Nonconformists. Toleration of some kind was rapidly becoming inevitable; and with a Calvinist upon the throne persecution of, at any rate, the Presbyterians became finally impossible. Yet the definition of what limits were to be set to toleration was far from easy. The Church seemed like a fortress beleaguered when Nonjurors, Deists, Nonconformists, all alike assaulted her foundations. To loosen her hold upon political privilege seemed to be akin to self-destruction. And, after all, if Church and State were to stand in some connection, the former must have some benefit from the alliance. Did such partnership imply exclusion from its privilege for all who could not accept the special brand of religious doctrine? Locke, at least, denied the assumption, and argued that since Churches are voluntary societies, they cannot and ought not to have reciprocal relation with the State. But Locke's theory was meat too strong for the digestion of his time; and no statesman would then have argued that a government could forego the advantage of religious support. And William, after all, had come to free the church from her oppressor. Freedom implied protection, and protection in that age involved establishment. It was thus taken for granted by most members of the Church of England that her adoption by the State meant her superiority to every other form of religious organization. Superiority is, by its nature exclusive, the more especially when it is united to a certainty of truth and a kinship with the dominant political interest of the time. Long years were thus to pass before the real meaning of the Toleration Act secured translation into more generous statutes.

The problem of the Church's government was hardly less complex. The very acerbity with which it was discussed proclaims that we are in an age of settlement. Much of the dispute, indeed, is doubtless due to the dislike of all High Churchmen for William; with their consequent unwillingness to admit the full meaning of his ecclesiastical supremacy. Much also is due to the fact that the bench of bishops, despite great figures like Tillotson and Wake, was necessarily chosen for political aptitude rather than for religious value. Nor did men like Burnet and Hoadly, for all their learning, make easy the path for brethren of more tender consciences. The Church, moreover, must have felt its powers the more valuable from the very strength of the assault to which she was subjected. And the direct interference with her governance implied by the Oaths of Allegiance and of Abjuration raised questions we have not yet solved. It suggested the subordination of Church to State; and men like Hickes and Leslie were quick to point out the Erastianism of the age. It is a fact inevitable in the situation of the English Church that the charge of subjection to the State should rouse a deep and quick resentment. She cannot be a church unless she is a societas perfecta; she cannot have within herself the elements of perfect fellowship if what seem the plain commands of Christ are to be at the mercy of the king in Parliament. That is the difficulty which lies at the bottom of the debate with Wake in one age and with Hoadly in the next. In some sort, it is the problem of sovereignty that is here at issue; and it is in this sense that the problems of the Revolution are linked with the Oxford Movement. But Newman and his followers are the unconscious sponsors of a debate which grows in volume; and to discuss the thoughts of Wake and Hoadly and Law is thus, in a vital aspect, the study of contemporary ideas.

We are not here concerned with the wisdom of those of William's advisers who exacted an oath of allegiance from the clergy. It raised in acute form the validity of a doctrine which had, for more than a century, been the main foundation of the alliance between throne and altar in England. The demand precipitated a schism which lingered on, though fitfully, until the threshold of the nineteenth century. The men who could not take the oath were, many of them, among the most distinguished churchmen of the time. Great ecclesiastics like Sancroft, the archbishop of Canterbury and one of the seven who had gained immortality by his resistance to James, saints like Ken, the bishop of Bath and Wells, scholars like George Hickes and Henry Dodwell, men like Charles Leslie, born with a genius for recrimination; much, it is clear, of what was best in the Church of England was to be found amongst them. There is not a little of beauty, and much of pathos in their history. Most, after their deprivation, were condemned to poverty; few of them recanted. The lives of men like Sancroft and Ken and the younger Ambrose Bonwicke are part of the great Anglican tradition of earnest simplicity which later John Keble was to illustrate for the nineteenth century. The Nonjurors, as they were called, were not free from bitterness; and the history of their effort, after the consecration of Hilkiah Bedford and Ralph Taylor, to perpetuate the schism is a lamentable one. Not, indeed, that the history even of their decline is without its interest; and the study, alike of their liturgy and their attempt at reunion with the Eastern Church, must always possess a singular interest for students of ecclesiastical history.

Yet the real interest of the Nonjuring schism was political rather than religious; and its roots go out to vital events of the past. At the bottom it is the obverse side of the Divine Right of kings that they represent. That theory, which was the main weapon of the early secular state against the pretensions of Rome, must naturally have commanded the allegiance of members of a church which James I, its main exponent, had declared of vital import to his very existence. Its main opponents, moreover, were Catholics and Dissenters; so that men like Andrewes must have felt that when they answered Bellarmine they were in substance also defenders of their Church. After the great controversy of James I's reign resistance as a duty had come to be regarded as a main element in Jesuit and Nonconformist teaching; with the result that its antithesis became, as a consequence of the political situation, no less integral a part of Church of England doctrine. For it was upon the monarchy that the Church had come to depend for its existence; and if resistance to the king were made, as Knox and Bellarmine had in substance made it, the main weapon of the dissenting churches there was little hope that it would continue to exist once the monarchy was overthrown. And it is this, unquestionably, which explains why stout ecclesiastics like Barrow and Jackson can write in what seems so Erastian a temper. When they urge the sovereignty of the State, their thesis is in truth the sovereignty of the Church; and that means the triumph of men who looked with contemptuous hatred upon Nonconformists of every sect. The Church of England taught non-resistance as the condition of its own survival.

How deep-rooted this doctrine had become in the course of the seventeenth century the writings of men like Mainwaring and Sanderson sufficiently show; yet nothing so completely demonstrates its widespread acceptance as the result of the Revolution. Four hundred clergy abandoned their preferment because James ruled by Divine Right; and they could not in conscience resist even his iniquities. An able tract of 1689[10] had collected much material to show how integral the doctrine was to the beliefs of the Church. Had William's government, indeed, refrained from the imposition of the oath, it is possible that there might have been no schism at all; for the early Nonjurors at least—perhaps Hickes and Turner are exceptions—would probably have welcomed anything which enabled the avoidance of schism. Once, however, the oath was imposed three vital questions were raised. Deprivation obviously involved the problem of the power of the State over the Church. If the act of a convention whose own legality was at best doubtful could deprive the consecrated of their position, was the Church a Church at all, or was it the mere creature of the secular power? And what, moreover, of conscience? It could not be an inherent part of the Church's belief that men should betray their faith for the sake of peace. Later thinkers added the purely secular argument that resistance in one case made for resistance in all. Admit, it was argued by Leslie, the right to disobey, and the fabric of society is at a stroke dissolved. The attitude is characteristic of that able controversialist; and it shows how hardly the earlier notions of Divine Right were to die.

These theories merit a further examination. Williams, later the Bishop of Chichester, had argued that separation on the basis of the oath was unreasonable. "All that the civil power here pretends to," he wrote "is to secure itself against the practices of dissatisfied persons." The Nonjurors, in this view, were making an ecclesiastical matter of a purely secular issue. He was answered, among others, by Samuel Grascom, in an argument which found high favor among the stricter of his sect. "The matter and substance of these Oaths," he said, "is put into the prayers of the Church, and so far it becomes a matter of communion. What people are enjoined in the solemn worship to pray for, is made a matter of communion; and if it be simple, will not only justify, but require a separation." Here is the pith of the matter. For if the form and substance of Church affairs is thus to be left to governmental will, then those who obey have left the Church and it is the faithful remnant only who constitute the true fellowship. The schism, in this view, was the fault of those who remained subject to William's dominion. The Nonjurors had not changed; and they were preserving the Church in its integrity from men who strove to betray it to the civil power.

This matter of integrity is important. The glamour of Macaulay has somewhat softened the situation of those who took the oaths; and in his pages the Nonjurors appear as stupid men unworthily defending a dead cause. It is worth while to note that this is the merest travesty. Tillotson, who succeeded Sancroft on the latter's deprivation, and Burnet himself had urged passive resistance upon Lord William Russell as essential to salvation; Tenison had done likewise at the execution of Monmouth. Stillingfleet, Patrick, White Kennett, had all written in its favor; and to William Sherlock belongs the privilege of having defended and attacked it in two pamphlets each of which challenges the pithy brilliance of the other. Clearly, so far as consistency is in question, the Nonjurors might with justice contend that they had right on their side. And even if it is said that the policy of James introduced a new situation the answer surely is that Divine Right and non-resistance can, by their very nature, make no allowance for novelty.

It is easy enough to see that men who felt in this fashion could hardly have decided otherwise than as they did. The matter of conscience, indeed, was fundamental to their position. "I think," said the Bishop of Worcester on his death-bed, "I could suffer at a stake rather than take this oath." That, indeed, represents the general temper. Many of them did not doubt that James had done grievous wrong; but they had taken the oath of allegiance to him, and they saw in their conscience no means of escape from their vow. "Their Majesties," writes the author of the account of Bishop Lake's death, "are the two persons in the world whose reign over them, their interest and inclination oblige them most to desire, and nothing but conscience could restrain them from being as forward as any in all expressions of loyalty." In such an aspect, even those who believe their attitude to have been wrong, can hardly doubt that they acted rightly in their expression of it. For, after all, experience has shown that the State is built upon the consciences of men. And the protest they made stands out in the next generation in vivid contrast to a worldly-minded and politically-corrupt Church which only internal revolution could awaken from its slumbers.

No one represents so admirably as Charles Leslie the political argument of the case. At bottom it is an argument against anarchy that he constructs, and much of what he said is medieval enough in tone to suggest de Maistre's great defence of papalism as the secret of world-order. He stands four square upon divine right and passive obedience. "What man is he who can by his own natural authority bend the conscience of another? That would be far more than the power of life, liberty or prosperity. Therefore they saw the necessity of a divine original." Such a foundation, he argued elsewhere, is necessary to order, for "if the last resort be in the people, there is no end of controversy at all, but endless and unremediable confusion." Nor had he sympathy for the Whig attack on monarchy. "The reasons against Kings," he wrote, "are as strong against all powers, for men of any titles are subject to err, and numbers more than fewer." And nothing can unloose the chain. "Obedience," he said in the Best of All, "is due to commonwealths by their subjects even for conscience' sake, where the princes from whom they have revolted have given up their claim."

The answer is clear enough; and, indeed, the case against the Nonjurors is nowhere so strong as on its political side. Men cannot be confined within the limits of so narrow a logic. They will not, with Bishop Ken, rejoice in suffering as a doctrine of the Cross. Rather will oppression in its turn arouse a sense of wrong and that be parent of a conscience which provokes to action. Here was the root of Locke's doctrine of consent; for unless the government, as Hume was later to point out, has on its side the opinion of men, it cannot hope to endure. The fall of James was caused, not as the Nonjurors were tempted to think, by popular disregard of Divine personality, but by his own misunderstanding of the limits to which misgovernment may go. Here their opponents had a strong case to present; for, as Stillingfleet remarked, if William had not come over there might have been no Church of England for the Nonjurors to preserve. And other ingenious compromises were suggested. Non-resistance, it was argued by Sherlock, applied to government in general; and the oath, as a passage in the Convocation Book of Overall seemed to suggest, might be taken not less to a de facto monarch than to one de jure. Few, indeed would have taken the ground of Bishop Burnet, and allotted the throne to William and Mary as conquerors of the Kingdom; at least the pamphlet in which this uncomfortable doctrine was put forward the House of Commons had burned by the common hangman.

What really defeated the Nonjurors' claims was commonsense. Much the ablest attack upon their position was Stillingfleet's defence of the policy employed in filling up the sees vacated by deprivation; and it is remarkable that the theory he employs is to insist that unless the lawfulness of what had been done is admitted, the Nonjuror's position is inevitable. "If it be unlawful to succeed a deprived bishop," he wrote,[11] "then he is the bishop of the diocese still: and then the law that deprives him is no law, and consequently the king and Parliament that made that law no king and Parliament: and how can this be reconciled with the Oath of Allegiance, unless the Doctor can swear allegiance to him who is no King and hath no authority to govern." All this the Nonjurors would have admitted, and the mere fact that it could be used as argument against them is proof that they were out of touch with the national temper. What they wanted was a legal revolution which is in the nature of things impossible. We may regret that the oath was deemed essential, and feel that it might not have been so stoutly pressed. But the leaders of a revolution "tread a path of fire"; and the fault lay less at the door of the civil government than in the fact that this was an age when men acted on their principles. William and his advisers, with the condition of Ireland and Scotland a cause for agitation, with France hostile, with treason and plot not absent from the episcopate itself, had no easy task; what, in the temper of the time, gives most cause for consideration, is the moderate spirit in which they accomplished it.