III

The Nonjuring schism was by no means the only difficulty which the Church of England had to confront in these troubled years. The definition of her relationship with State and nation, if at the moment it aroused less bitterness, was in the long run more intricate in its nature. That some sort of toleration was inevitable few, save a group of prejudiced irreconcilables, would have denied. But greater things were in the air, and there were still many who dreamed of a grand scheme of Comprehension, by which all save the more extreme Dissenters would have been admitted to the Church. It is this which explains the acrimonious debates of the next two years. The hatred of the Church for dissent can only be understood by those who study with care the insults heaped upon her by the sectaries during the Civil Wars. That men who had striven for her dissolution should be admitted to her privileges seemed to Churchmen as tragic as ironical. Nor must we miss the political aspect of the matter. William had received an eager, if natural, support from Nonconformists; and since the vast majority of them was Whig in temper, the greater the degree of toleration, the greater likelihood there was of an attack upon the Church. Exclusion thus became a fundamental article of the Tory creed; and it was the more valued because it enabled them to strike at their opponents through an institution which at the trial of Sacheverell, in 1710, still showed an overwhelming hold upon the mass of the people.

The reasons for the hatred of dissent go back in part to the Civil War and in part also to the feeling of common ground between the dissenting interest and Rome which was born of the struggle under Elizabeth and James. The pamphlets are innumerable; and most of them deserve the complete obliquity into which they have fallen. We are told, in the eighteenth as in the seventeenth century, that the Presbyterian theory of government is inconsistent with the existence of the civil power. "They claim," said Leslie, "power to abrogate the laws of the land touching ecclesiastical matters, if they judge them hurtful or unprofitable... They require the civil magistrate to be subject to their power." Of Knox or Cartwright this is no unfair account; but of the later Presbyterians it is the merest travesty. It supposes that they would be willing to push to the utmost limit the implications of the theory of the two kingdoms—a supposition which their passive submission to the Act of 1712 restoring lay patronage decisively refutes. Bramhall had no doubt that their discipline was "the very quintessence of refined popery," and the argument is repeated by a hundred less learned pamphleteers. Neither the grim irony of Defoe nor the proven facts of the case could wean either the majority of Churchmen or the masses of the people from the belief that the Revolution endangered the very existence of the Church and that concession would be fatal. So stoutly did the Church resist it that the accession of George I alone, in Lecky's view, prevented the repeal of the Toleration Act and the destruction of the political benefits of the Revolution.

But nowhere was the temper of the time more clearly displayed than in the disputes over Convocation. To William's advisers, perhaps, more than to the Church itself their precipitation is due; for had they not, at the outset of the reign, suggested large changes in the liturgy suspicions then aroused might well have slumbered. As it was, the question of the royal supremacy immediately came into view and the clergy spared no effort to meet the issue so raised. And this they felt the more bitterly because the upper house of Convocation, two-thirds of which were William's nominees, naturally inclined to his side. Both under William and Anne the dispute continued, and the lower clergy shrank from no opportunity of conflict. They fought the king, the archbishop, the upper house. They attacked the writings of Toland and Burnet, the latter's book since recognized as one of the great treasures of Anglican literature. In the main, of course, the struggle was part of the perennial conflict between High Church doctrine and latitudinarianism. But that was only a fragment of the issue. What really was in question was the nature of the State's power over the Church. That could be left unanswered so long, as with James I and Charles, the two powers had but a single thought. The situation changed only when State and Church had different policies to fulfil and different means for their attainment.

The controversy had begun on the threshold of William's accession; but its real commencement dates from 1697. In that year was published the Letter to a Convocation Man, probably written by Sir Bartholomew Shower, an able if unscrupulous Jacobite lawyer, which maliciously, though with abounding skill, raised every question that peaceful churchmen must have been anxious to avoid. The Letter pointed out the growth of infidelity and the increasing suspicion that the Church was becoming tainted with Socinian doctrine. Only the assembly of Convocation could arrest these evils. The author did not deny that the king's assent was necessary to its summons. But he argued that once the Convocation had met, it could, like Parliament, debate all questions relevant to its purpose. "The one of these courts," said Shower, "is of the same power and use with regard to the Church as the other is in respect to the State," and he insisted that the writ of summons could not at any point confine debate. And since the Convocation was an ecclesiastical Parliament, it followed that it could legislate and thus make any canons "provided they do not impugn common law, statutes, customs or prerogative." "To confer, debate and resolve," said Shower, "without the king's license, is at common law the undoubted right of convocation."

Here was a clear challenge which was at once answered, in The Authority of Christian Princes, by William Wake, who was by far the most learned of the latitudinarian clergy, and the successor of Tenison in the see of Canterbury. His argument was purely historical. He endeavored to show that the right to summon ecclesiastical synods was always the prerogative of the early Christian princes until the aggression of the popes had won church independence. The Reformation resumed the primitive practice; and the Act of Submission of 1532 had made it legally impossible for the clergy to discuss ecclesiastical matters without royal permission. Historically, the argument of Wake was irrefutable; but what mostly impressed the Church was the uncompromising Erastianism of his tone. Princes, he said, "may make what laws or constitutions they think fit for the Church.... a canon is but as matter prepared for the royal stamp." In this view, obviously, the Church is more than a department of the State. But Wake went even farther, "I cannot see why the Supreme Magistrate," he wrote, "who confessedly has a power to confirm or reject their (Convocation's) decrees, may not also make such other use of them as he pleases, and correct, improve, or otherwise alter their resolutions, according to his own liking, before he gives his authority to them."

So defined no Church could claim in any true sense the headship of Christ; for it was clearly left at the mercy of the governmental view of expedient conduct. Wake's answer aroused a sensation almost as acute as the original Letter of Shower. But by far the ablest criticism it provoked was that of Francis Atterbury, then a young student of Christ Church and on the threshold of his turbulent career. His Rights, Powers and Privileges of an English Convocation Stated and Vindicated not only showed a masterly historic sense in its effort to traverse the unanswerable induction of Wake, but challenged his position more securely on the ground of right. The historical argument, indeed, was not a safe position for the Church, and Wake's rejoinder in his State of the Church (1703) is generally conceded to have proved his point, so far as the claim of prescription is concerned. But when Atterbury moves to the deeper problem of what is involved in the nature of a church, he has a powerful plea to make. It is unnecessary now to deal with his contention that Wake's defence of the Royal Supremacy undermines the rights of Parliament; for Wake could clearly reply that the seat of that power had changed with the advent of the Revolution. Where the avoidance of sympathy is difficult is in his insistence that no Church can live without an assembly to debate its problems, and that no assembly can be real which is subject to external control. "Their body," as he remarks, "will be useless to the State and by consequence contemptible"; for its opinions will not be born of that free deliberation which can alone ensure respect. Like all High Churchmen, Atterbury has a clear sense that Church and State can no longer be equated, and he is anxious to preserve the personality of the Church from the invasions of an alien body. To be real, it must be independent, and to be independent, it must have organs of self-expression. But neither William nor Anne could afford to forego the political capital involved in ecclesiastical control and Erastian principles proceeded to their triumph.

Here, as elsewhere, it was Charles Leslie who best summed up the feeling of High Churchmen. His Case of the Regale (1701) is by far the ablest of his many able performances. He saw at the outset that the real issue was defined by the Church's claim to be a divine society, with rights thus consecrated by the conditions of its origin. If it was divine, invasion did not touch its de jure rights. "How," he asked, "can rights that are divine be given up? If they are divine, no human authority can either supersede or limit them.... How can rights that are inherent be given up? If they are inherent, they are inseparable. The right to meet, to consult, to make rules or canons for the regulation of the society, is essential to every society as such ... can she then part with what is essential to her?" Nor could it be denied that "where the choice of the governors of one society is in the hands of another society, that society must be dependent and subject to the other." The Church, in the Latitudinarian view was thus either the creature of the state or an imperium in imperio; but Leslie would not admit that fruitful stumbling block to the debate. "The sacred and civil powers were like two parallel lines which could never meet or interfere ... the confusion arises ... when the civil power will take upon them to control or give laws to the Church, in the exercise of her spiritual authority." He did not doubt that the Church should give securities for its loyalty to the king, and renounce any effort at the coercion of the civil magistrate. But the Church was entitled to a similar privilege, and kings should not "have their beneficence and protection to the Church of Christ understood as a bribe to her, to betray and deliver up into their hands the powers committed into her charge by Christ." Nor did he fail to point out the suicidal nature of Erastianism. For the church's hold upon men is dependent upon their faith in the independence of her principles. "When they see bishops," he wrote wisely, "made by the Court, they are apt to imagine that they speak to them the court language; and lay no further stress upon it than the charge of a judge at an assizes, who has received his instructions beforehand from the Court; and by this means the state has lost the greatest security of her government."

That this is the meaning of the struggle did not appear until the reign of George I. What is known as the Bangorian controversy was due to the posthumous publication, in 1716, of the papers of George Hickes, the most celebrated of the Nonjurors in his generation. The papers are of no special import; but taken in connection with the Jacobite rising of 1715 they seemed to imply a new attack upon the Revolution settlement. So, at least, they were interpreted by Benjamin Hoadly, then Bishop of Bangor, and a stout upholder of the Latitudinarian school. The conflict today has turned to dust and ashes; and few who read the multitude of pamphlets it evoked, or stand amazed at their personal bitterness, can understand why more than a hundred writers should have thought it necessary to inform the world of their opinions, or why the London Stock Exchange should have felt so passionate an interest in the debate as to cease for a day the hubbub of its transactions. Nor can any one make heroes from the personalities of its protagonists. Hoadly himself was a typical bishop of the political school, who rose from humble circumstances to the wealthy bishopric of Winchester through a remarkable series of translations. Before the debate of 1716, he was chiefly known by two political tracts in which he had rewritten, in less cogent form, and without adequate acknowledgment, the two treatises of Locke. He clearly realized how worthless the dogma of Divine Right had become, without being certain of the principles by which it was to be replaced. Probably, as Leslie Stephen has pointed out, his theorizing is the result of a cloudy sense of the bearing of the Deist controversy. If God is to be banished from direct connection with earthly affairs, we must seek a human explanation of political facts. And he became convinced that this attitude applies not less completely to ecclesiastical than to secular politics. Of his opponents, by far the ablest was William Law, the only theologian whom Gibbon may be said to have respected, and the parent, through his mystical writings, of the Wesleyan movement. Snape, then Provost of Eton, was always incisive; and his pamphlet went through seventeen editions in a single year and provoked seven replies within three months. Thomas Sherlock would not be either himself or his father's son, were he not caustic, logical and direct. But Hoadly and Law between them exhaust the controversy, so far as it has meaning for our own day. The less essential questions like Hoadly's choice of friends, his attitude to prayer, the accuracy of the details in his account of the Test Act, the cause of his refusal to answer Law directly, are hardly now germane to the substance of the debate. Hoadly's position is most fully stated in his Preservative against the Principles and Practice of Nonjurors which he published in 1716 as a counterblast to the papers of Hickes; and they are briefly summarized in the sermon preached before the King on March 31, 1717, on the text "My Kingdom is not of this world," and published by royal command. Amid a vast wilderness of quibbles and qualifications, some simple points emerge. What he was doing was to deprive the priesthood of claims to supernatural authority that he might vindicate for civil government the right to preserve itself not less against persons in ecclesiastical office than against civil assailants. To do so he is forced to deny that the miraculous powers of Christ and the Apostles descended to their successors. For if that assumption is made we grant to fallible men privileges which confessedly belong to persons outside the category of fallibility. And, exactly in the fashion of Leslie in the Regale he goes on to show that if a Church is a supernatural institution, it cannot surrender one jot or tittle of its prerogative. It is, in fact, an imperium in imperio and its conflict with the state is inevitable. But if the Church is not a supernatural institution, what is its nature? Hoadly here attacks the doctrine which lies at the basis of all ecclesiastical debate. The Church, he claims, is not a visible society, presided over by men who have authority directly transmitted by Christ. There are not within it "viceregents who can be said properly to supply his place; no interpreters upon whom his subjects are absolutely to depend; no judges over the conscience or religion of his people. For if this were so that any such absolute viceregent authority, either for the making of new laws, or interpreting old ones, or judging his subjects, in religious matters, were lodged in any men upon earth, the consequence would be that what still retains the name of the Church of Christ would not be the kingdom of Christ, but the kingdom of those men invested with such authority. For whoever hath such an authority of making laws is so far a king, and whoever can add new laws to those of Christ, equally obligatory, is as truly a king as Christ himself. Nay, whosoever hath an absolute authority to interpret any written or spoken laws, it is he who is truly the lawgiver to all intents and purposes, and not the person who first wrote and spoke them."

The meaning is clear enough. What Hoadly is attacking is the theory of a visible Church of Christ on earth, with the immense superstructure of miracle and infallibility erected thereon. The true Church of Christ is in heaven; and the members of the earthly society can but try in a human, blundering way, to act with decency and justice. Apostolic succession, the power of excommunication, the dealing out of forgiveness for men's sins, the determination of true doctrine, insofar as the Church claims these powers, it is usurping an authority that is not its own. The relation of man to God is his private affair, and God will ask from him sincerity and honesty, rather than judge him for his possession of some special set of dogmas. Clearly, therefore, if the Church is no more than this, it has no supernatural pretensions to oppose to the human claims of the State. And since the State must have within itself all the means of sufficient life, it has the right to resist the ecclesiastical onslaught as based upon the usurpation of power assumed without right. And in later treatises Hoadly did for ceremonial exactly what he had done for church government. The eucharist became a piece of symbolism and excommunication nothing more than an announcement—"a mere external thing"—that the rules of the fellowship have been broken. It at no point is related to the sinner's opportunity of salvation.

In such an aspect, it would clearly follow that the Church has no monopoly of truth. It can, indeed, judge its own beliefs; but reason alone can demonstrate the inadequacy of other attitudes. Nor does its judgment preclude the individual duty to examine into the truth of things. The real root of faith is not the possession of an infallible dogma, but the arriving honestly at the dogma in which you happen to believe. For the magistrate, he urges, what is important is not the table of your springs of action, but the conduct itself which is based upon that table; from which it follows that things like the Test and Corporation Acts have no real political validity. They have been imposed upon the State by the narrow interpretations of an usurping power; and the Nonconformist claim to citizenship would thus seem as valid as that of a member of the Church of England.

All this sounds sensible enough; though it is curious doctrine in the mouth of a bishop of that church. And this, in fact, is the starting-point of Law's analysis of Hoadly. No one who reads the unsparing vigor of his criticism can doubt that Law must have been thoroughly happy in the composition of his defence; and, indeed, his is the only contribution to the debate which may claim a permanent place in political literature. In one sense, indeed, the whole of Law's answer is an ignoratio elenchi, for he assumes the truth of that which Hoadly sets out to examine, with the inevitable result that each writer is, for the most part, arguing from different premises. But on the assumption that Hoadly is a Christian, Law's argument is an attack of great power. He shows conclusively that if the Church of England is no more than Hoadly imagines it to be, it cannot, in any proper historic sense, be called the Church of England at all. For every one of the institutions which Hoadly calls an usurpation, is believed by Churchmen to be integral to its nature. And if sincerity alone is to count as the test, then there cannot, for the existing world, be any such thing as objective religious truth. It subverted not merely absolute authority—which the Church of England did not claim—but any authority in the Church. It impugned the authority of the Crown to enforce religious belief by civil penalties. Hoadly's rejection of authority, moreover, is in Law's view fatal to government of any kind. For all lawful authority must affect eternal salvation insofar as to disobey it is to sin. The authority the Church possesses is inherent in the very nature of the Church; for the obligation to a belief in Christianity is the same thing as to a belief in that Church which can be shown to represent Christ's teaching.

Here, indeed, the antagonists were on common ground. Both had denied the absolute character of any authority; but while Hoadly virtually postulates a Church which logically is no more than those who accept the moral law as Christ described it, Law restricts the Church to that society which bears the traditional marks of the historic institution. On Hoadly's principles, there was no reason why anyone not hostile to the civil power should not enjoy political privilege; on Law's there was every reason simply because those who denied the doctrines of the High Church refused a truth open for their acceptance. Law, indeed, goes so far as to argue that in the light of his principles Hoadly should be a Deist; and there is ground for what, in that age, was a valuable point to make. The sum total of it all is that for the bishop the outward actions of men alone concern the State; while Law insists that the root of action and the test of fitness is whether men have seen a certain aspect of the truth and grasped it.

The result, to say the least, was calamitous. In May of 1717, convocation met and the Lower House immediately adopted an unanimous report condemning the "Preservative" and the sermon. But Hoadly had the government behind him and the convocation was prorogued before further action could be taken. Snape, Hare, Mosse and Sherlock, all of whom were chaplains royal, and had been drawn into the conflict, were dismissed from their office; and for more than one hundred and thirty-five years convocation was not again summoned. It was a striking triumph for Erastianism, though the more liberal principles of Hoadly were less successful. Robert Walpole was on the threshold of his power, and, as a manager of Sacheverell's impeachment, he had seen the hold of the Church upon the common people, may even, indeed, have remembered that Hoadly's own dwelling had been threatened with destruction in the popular excitement. Quieta non movere was his motto; and he was not interested in the niceties of ecclesiastic metaphysic. So the Test Act remained immovable until 1828; while the annual Act of Indemnity for its infractions represented that English genius for illogical mitigation which solves the deeper problems of principle while avoiding the consideration of their substance.

In the hundred and twenty years which passed between the Bangorian Controversy and the Oxford Movement, there is only one volume upon the problem of Church and State which deserves more than passing notice. Bishop Warburton was the Lord Brougham of his age; and as its self-constituted universal provider of intellectual fare, he deemed it his duty to settle this, amongst others of the eternal questions. The effort excited only the contempt of Leslie Stephen—"the peculiar Warburton mixture," he says "of sham logic and bluster." Yet that is hardly fair to the total result of Warburton's remarks. He tried to steer a middle path between the logical result of such Erastianism as that of the Independent Whig, on the one hand, and the excessive claim of High Churchmanship on the other. Naturally enough, or the writer would not be Warburton, the book is full of tawdry rhetoric and stupid quibbles. But the Alliance between Church and State (1736) set the temper of speculation until the advent of Newman, and is therefore material for something more than contempt. It acutely points out that societies generate a personality distinct from that of their members in words reminiscent of an historic legal pronouncement.[12] "When any number of men," he says, "form themselves into a society, whether civil or religious, this society becomes a body different from that aggregate which the number of individuals composed before the society was formed.... But a body must have its proper personality and will, which without these is no more than a shadow or a name."

And that is the root of Warburton's pronouncement. The Church is a society distinct from the State, but lending to that body its assistance because without the sanction of religion the full achievement of the social purpose is impossible. There is thus an alliance between them, each lending its support to the other for their common benefit. The two remain distinct; the union between them is of a federal kind. But they interchange their powers, and this it is which explains at once the royal supremacy and the right of Churchmen to a share in the legislature. This also it is which explains the existence of a Test Act, whereby those who might injure that which the State has undertaken to protect are deprived of their power to evil. And, in return, the Church engages to "apply its utmost endeavors in the service of the State." It becomes attached to its benefactor from the privilege it receives; and the dangers which might arise from its natural independence are thus obviated. For a federal union precludes the grave problem of an imperium in imperio, and the "mischiefs which so terrified Hobbes" are met by the terms upon which it is founded.

It is easy enough to discover the loopholes in the theory. The contract does not exist, or, at least, it is placed by Warburton "in the same archive with the famous original compact between monarch and people" which has been the object of vast but fruitless searches. Nor does the Act of Submission bear upon its face the marks of that tender care of the protection of an independent society which Warburton declared a vital tenet of the Union. Yet such criticisms miss the real significance of the theory. It is really the introduction into English politics of that notion of the two societies which, a century before, Melville and Bellarmine had made so fruitful. With neither Presbyterian nor Jesuit was the separation complete, for the simple reason that each had a secret conviction that the ecclesiastical society was at bottom the superior. Yet the theory was the parent of liberty, if only because it pointed the way to a balance of power between claims which, before, had seemed mutually exclusive.

Until the Toleration Act, the theory was worthless to the English Church because its temper, under the ægis of Laudian views, had been in substance theocratic. But after 1692 it aptly expressed the compromise the dominant party of the Church had then in mind. They did, indeed, mistake the power of the Church, or, rather, they submitted to the State so fully that what they had intended for a partnership became an absorption. So that the Erastianism of the eighteenth century goes deep enough to make the Church no more than a moral police department of the State. Saints like Ken and preachers like South are replaced by fashionable prelates like Cornwallis, who made Lambeth Palace an adjunct to Ranelagh Gardens, and self-seeking pluralists like Bishop Watson. The Church could not even perceive the meaning of the Wesleyan revolt; and its charity was the irritating and complacent patronage of the obstrusive Hannah More. Its learning decayed, its intelligence slumbered; and the main function it fulfilled until Newman's advent was the provision of rich preferment to the younger sons of the nobility. It is a far cry from Lake of Chichester and Bishop Ken to a church which was merely an annex to the iniquities of the civil list.

No one can mistake the significance of this conflict. The opponents of Erastianism had a deep sense of their corporate Church, and it was a plea for ecclesiastical freedom that they were making. They saw that a Church whose patronage and discipline and debates were under the control of an alien body could not with honesty claim that Christ was in truth their head. If the Church was to be at the mercy of private judgment and political expediency, the notion of a dogmatic basis would have to be abandoned. Here, indeed, is the root of the condemnation of Tindal and of Hoadly; for they made it, by their teaching, impossible for the Church to possess an ethos of her own. It was thus against the sovereignty of the State that they protested. Somewhere, a line must be drawn about its functions that the independence of the Church might be safeguarded. For its supporters could not be true to their divine mission if the accidental vote of a secular authority was by right to impose its will upon the Church. The view of it as simply a religious body to which the State had conceded certain rights and dignities, they repudiated with passion. The life of the Church was not derived from the State; and for the latter to attempt its circumscription was to usurp an authority not rightly its own.

The real difficulty of this attitude lay in the establishment. For here the Church was, at bottom, declaring that the State life must be lived upon terms of her own definition. That was possible before the Reformation; but with the advent of Nonconformity and the growth of rationalism the exclusive character of the Church's solution had become unacceptable. If the Church was to become so intimately involved with the State as an establishment implied, it had no right to complain, if statesmen with a genius for expediency were willing to sacrifice it to the attainment of that ideal. For the real secret of independence is, after all, no more than independence. The Church sought it without being willing to pay the price. And this it is which enabled Hoadly to emerge triumphant from an ordeal where logically he should have failed. The State, by definition is an absorptive animal; and the Church had no right to complain if the price of its privileges was royal supremacy. A century so self-satisfied as the eighteenth would not have faced the difficulties involved in giving political expression to the High Church theory.

Yet the protest remained, and it bore a noble fruit in the next century. The Oxford movement is usually regarded as a return to the seventeenth century, to the ideals, that is to say, of Laud and Andrewes.[13] In fact, its real kinship is with Atterbury and Law. Like them, it was searching the secret of ecclesiastical independence, and like them it discovered that connection with the State means, in the end, the sacrifice of the church to the needs of each political situation. "The State has deserted us," wrote Newman; and the words might have been written of the earlier time. The Oxford movement, indeed, like its predecessor, built upon foundations of sand; and when Lord Brougham told the House of Lords that the idea of the Church possessing "absolute and unalienable rights" was a "gross and monstrous anomaly" because it would make impossible the supremacy of Parliament, he simply announced the result of a doctrine which, implicit in the Act of Submission, was first completely defined by Wake and Hoadly. Nor has the history of this controversy ended. "Thoughtful men," the Archbishop of Canterbury has told the House of Lords,[14] "... see the absolute need, if a Church is to be strong and vigorous, for the Church, qua church, to be able to say what it can do as a church." "The rule of the sovereign, the rule of Parliament," replied Lord Haldane,[15] "extend as far as the rule of the Church. They are not to be distinguished or differentiated, and that was the condition under which ecclesiastical power was transmitted to the Church of England." Today, that is to say, as in the past, antithetic theories of the nature of the State hinge, in essence, upon the problem of its sovereignty. "A free church in a free state," now, as then, may be our ideal; but we still seek the means wherewith to build it.

With the accession of George I, there ensued an era of unexampled calm in English politics, which lasted until the expulsion of Walpole from power in 1742. No vital questions were debated, nor did problems of principle force themselves into view; and if the Jacobites remained in the background as an element invincibly hostile to absorption, the failure of their effort in 1715 showed how feeble was their hold on English opinion. Not, indeed, that the new dynasty was popular. It had nothing of that romantic glamour of a lost cause so imperishably recorded in Scott's pages. The first Georges were heavy and foreign and meagre-souled; but at least they were Protestant, and, until the reign of George III, they were amenable to management. In the result, an opposition in the classic sense was hardly needed; for the only question to be considered was the personalities who were to share in power. The dominating temper of Walpole decided that issue; and he gave thereby to the political struggle the outlines in which it was encased for a generation.

It is a dull period, but complacent; for it was not an unprosperous time. Agriculture and commerce both were abundant; and the increasing development of towns shows us that the Industrial Revolution loomed in the near distance. The eager continuance of the deistic controversy suggests that there was something of novelty beneath the calm; for Tindal and Woolston and Chubb struck at the root of religious belief, and Shaftesbury's exaltation of Hellenism not only contributed to the Aufklarung in Scotland, but suggested that Christian ideals were not to go unchallenged. But the literature of the time is summarized in Pope; and the easy neatness of his verses is quaintly representative of the Georgian peace. Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and the latter had withdrawn to Ireland to die like a rat in a hole. Bishop Berkeley, indeed, was convinced of the decadence of England; but his Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721) shows rather the effect of the speculative mania which culminated in the South Sea Bubble upon a noble moral nature than a genius for political thought. Certainly no one in that generation was likely to regard with seriousness proposals for the endowment of motherhood and a tax upon the estate of bachelors. The cynical sophistries of Mandeville were, despite the indignation they aroused, more suited to the age that Walpole governed. It is, in fact, the character of the minister which sets the keynote of the time. An able speaker, without being a great orator, a superb administrator, eager rather for power than for good, rating men low by instinct and corrupting them by intelligence, Walpole was not the man, either in type of mind or of temperament, to bring great questions to the foreground of debate. He was content to maintain his hold over the respect of the Crown, and to punish able rivals by exclusion from office. One by one, the younger men of talent, Carteret, Pulteney, Chesterfield, Pitt, were driven into hostility. He maintained himself in office by a corruption as efficiently administered as it was cynically conceived. An opposition developed less on principle than on the belief that spoils are matter rather for distribution than for concentration. The party so formed had, indeed, little ground save personal animosity upon which to fight; and its ablest exertions could only seize upon a doubtful insult to a braggart sea-captain as the pretext of the war it was Walpole's ambition no less than policy to avoid. From 1726 until 1735 the guiding spirit of the party was Bolingbroke; but in the latter year he quarrelled with Pulteney, nominally its leader, and retired in high dudgeon to France. But in the years of his leadership he had evolved a theory of politics than which nothing so clearly displays the intellectual bankruptcy of the time.

To understand the argument of Bolingbroke it is necessary to remember the peculiar character of his career. He had attained to the highest office under Anne at an exceptionally early age; and his period of power had been distinguished by the vehemence with which he pursued the ideal of a strict division of parties and the expulsion of all alien elements from the government. But he had staked all his fortunes upon a scheme he had neither the resolution to plan nor the courage to execute; and his flight to France, on the Hanoverian accession, had been followed by his proscription. Walpole soon succeeded alike to his reputation and place; and through an enormous bribe to the bottomless pocket of the King's mistress St. John was enabled to return from exile, though not to political place. His restless mind was dissatisfied with exclusion from power, and he occupied himself with creating an alliance between the Tories and malcontent Whigs for Walpole's overthrow. The alliance succeeded, though too late for Bolingbroke to enjoy the fruits of success; but in effecting the purgation of the Tory party from its taint of Jacobitism he rendered no inconsiderable service. His foundation, moreover, of the Craftsman—the first official journal of a political party in England—showed his appreciation of the technique of political controversy. Most of it is dead now, and, indeed, no small part of its contemporary success is due to the making of comment in terms of the immediate situation, as also by its consistent use of a personal reference which has, save in the mass, no meaning for today. Though, doubtless, the idea of its inception was derived from journals like Defoe's Review and Leslie's Rehearsal, which had won success, its intimate connection with the party leadership was a novel element; and it may therein claim a special relation to the official periodicals of a later generation.

The reputation of Bolingbroke as a political philosopher is something that our age can hardly understand. "A solemn trifler," Lord Morley has called him; and it is difficult to know why his easy declamation was so long mistaken for profound thought. Much, doubtless, is due to that personal fascination which made him the inspiration of men so different as Pope and Voltaire; and the man who could supply ideas to Chatham and Disraeli cannot be wholly devoid of merit. Certainly he wrote well, in that easy elegance of style which was the delight of the eighteenth century; and he is consistently happy in his choice of adjectives. But his work is at every point embellished with that affectation of classical learning which was the curse of his age. He sought no general truths, and he is free from the accusation of sincerity. Nor has he any enthusiasm save that of bitter partisanship. He hated Walpole, and his political writings are, at bottom, no more than an attempt to generalize his animosity. The Dissertation on Parties (1734) and the Idea of a Patriot King (1738) might have betrayed us, taken alone, into regarding their author as a disinterested observer watching with regret the development of a fatal system; but taken in conjunction with the Letter to Sir W. Windham (1717), which was not published until after his death, and is written with an acrid cynicism fatal to his claim to honesty, they reveal the opinions as no more than a mask for ambition born of hate.

The whole, of course, must have some sort of background; and the Letters on the Study of History (1735) was doubtless intended to supply it. Experience is to be the test of truth, since history is philosophy teaching by example. But Bolingbroke's own argument supplies its refutation. His history is an arbitrary selection of instances intended to illustrate the particular ideas which happened to be uppermost in his mind. The Roman consuls were chosen by annual election; whence it is clear that England should have, if not an annual, at least a triennial parliament. He acknowledges that the past in some degree unknown determines the present. He has some not unhappy remarks upon the evils of an attitude which fails to look upon events from a larger aspect than their immediate environment. But his history is intended less to illustrate the working of principle than to collect cases worthy of citation. Time and space do not exist as categories; he is as content with a Roman anecdote as with a Stuart illustration. He is willing, indeed, to look for the causes of the Revolution as far back as the reign of James I; though he shows his lack of true perception when he ascribes the true inwardness of the Reformation to the greed of the monarch for the spoils of the clergy. At bottom what mainly impresses him is the immense influence of personal accident upon events. Intrigue, a sudden dislike, some backstairs piece of gossip, here is the real root of great changes. And when he expresses a "thorough contempt" for the kind of work scholars such as Scaliger and Petavius had achieved, he shows his entire ignorance of the method whereby alone a knowledge of general principle can be attained.

A clear vision, of course, he has, and he was not beguiled by high notions of prerogative or the like. The divine right of kings is too stupid to be worth the trouble of refutation; all that makes a king important is the authority he exerts. So, too, with the Church; for Bolingbroke, as a professed deist, has no trouble with such matters as the apostolic succession. He makes great show of his love of liberty, which is the true end of government; and we are informed with a vast solemnity of the "perpetual danger" in which it always stands. So that the chief end of patriotism is its maintenance; though we are never told what liberty is, nor how it is to be maintained. The social compact seems to win his approbation and we learn that the secret of the British constitution is the balance of powers and their mutual independency. But what the powers are, and how their independence is preserved we do not learn, save by an insistence that the safety of Europe is to be found in playing off the ambitions of France and Austria against each other; an analogy the rejection of which has been the secret of English constitutional success. We learn of the evil of standing armies and the danger of Septennial Parliaments. We are told that parties are mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and vast patronage; and a great enough show is made of his hatred for corruption as to convince at least some critics of distinction of his sincerity. The parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no difference save that of interest; and herein, at least, he shows us how completely the principles of the Revolution had become exhausted. He wants severe penalties upon electoral corruption. He would have disfranchised the rotten boroughs and excluded placemen from Parliament. The press was to be free; and there is at least a degree of generous insight in his plea for a wider commercial freedom in colonial matters. Yet what, after all, does this mean save that he is fighting a man with the patronage at his disposal and a majority upon the committee for the settlement of disputed elections? And what else can we see in his desire for liberty of the press save a desire to fight Walpole in the open, without fear of the penalties his former treason had incurred?

His value can be tested in another way. His Idea of a Patriot King is the remedy for the ills he has depicted. He was sixty years old when it appeared, and he had then been in active politics for thirty-five years, so that we are entitled to regard it as the fruit of his mature experience. He was too convinced that the constitution was "in the strictest sense a bargain, a conditional contract between the prince and the people" to attempt again the erection of a system of prerogative. Yet it is about the person of the monarch that the theory hinges. He is to have no powers inconsistent with the liberties of the people; for such restraints will not shackle his virtues while they limit the evil propensities of a bad king. What is needed is a patriot king who will destroy corruption and awaken the spirit of liberty. His effective government will synchronize with the commencement of his reign; and he will at once dismiss the old and cunning ministers, to replace them by servants who are wise. He will not stand upon party, but upon the State. He will unite the forces of good counsel into a single scheme. Complaints will be answered, the evildoers punished. Commerce will flow on with uninterrupted prosperity, and the navy of England receive its due meed of attention. His conduct must be dignified, and he must acquire his influence not apart from, but on account of, the affection of his people. "Concord," says Bolingbroke in rhapsodical prospection, "will appear breeding peace and prosperity on every hand"; though he prudently hopes also that men will look back with affection upon one "who desired life for nothing so much as to see a King of Great Britain the most powerful man in the country, and a patriot King at the head of a united people."

Bolingbroke himself has admitted that such a monarch would be a "sort of standing miracle," and perhaps no other comment upon his system is required. A smile in Plato at the sight of his philosopher-King in such strange company might well be pardoned. It is only necessary to point out that the person whom Bolingbroke designates for this high function was Frederick, Prince of Wales, to us the most meagre of a meagre generation, but to Bolingbroke, by whose grace he was captivated, "the greatest and most glorious of human beings." This exaltation of the monarch came at a time when a variety of circumstances had combined to show the decrease of monarchical sentiment. It bears upon its every page the marks of a personal antagonism. It is too obviously the programme of a party to be capable of serious interpretation as a system. The minister who is to be impeached, the wise servants who are to gain office, the attack on corruption, the spirited foreign policy—all these have the earmarks of a platform rather than of a philosophy. Attacks on corruption hardly read well in the mouth of a dissolute gambler; and the one solid evidence of deep feeling is the remark on the danger of finance in politics. For none of the Tories save Barnard, who owed his party influence thereto, understood the financial schemes of Walpole; and since they were his schemes obviously they represented the triumph of devilish ingenuity. The return of landed men to power would mean the return of simplicity to politics; and one can imagine the country squires, the last resort of enthusiasm for Church and King, feeling that Bolingbroke had here emphasized the dangers of a régime which already faintly foreshadowed their exclusion from power. The pamphlet was the cornerstone in the education of Frederick's son; and when George III came to the throne he proceeded to give such heed to his master as the circumstances permitted. It is perhaps, as Mr. A.L. Smith has argued, unfair to visit Bolingbroke with George's version of his ideal; yet they are sufficiently connected for the one to give the meaning to the other. Chatham, indeed, was later intrigued by this ideal of a national party; and before Disraeli discovered that England does not love coalitions he expended much rhetoric upon the beauties of a patriotic king. But Chatham was a wayward genius who had nothing of that instinct for common counsel which is of the essence of party government; while it is necessary to draw a firm line between Disraeli's genial declamation and his practice when in office. It is sufficient to say that the one effort founded upon the principles of Bolingbroke ended in disaster; and that his own last reflections express a bitter disillusion at the result of the event which he looked to as the inauguration of the golden age.

The fall of Walpole, indeed, released no energies for political thought; the system continued, though the men were different. What alone can be detected is the growth of a democratic opinion which found its sustenance outside the House of Commons, the opinion the strength of which was later to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king. An able pamphlet of the time shows us the arrival of this unlooked-for portent. Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts (1742) was, though it is anonymous,[16] obviously written by one in touch with the inner current of affairs. The author had hoped for the fall of Walpole, though he sees the chaos in its result. "A republican spirit," he says, "has strangely arisen"; and he goes on to tell how the electors of London and Westminster were now regarding their members as delegates to whom instructions might be issued. "A new party of malcontents" had arisen, "assuming to themselves, though very falsely, the title of the People." They affect, he tells us, "superiority to the whole legislature ... and endeavor in effect to animate the people to resume into their own hands that vague and loose authority which exists (unless in theory) in the people of no country upon earth, and the inconvenience of which is so obvious that it is the first step of mankind, when formed into society, to divest themselves of it, and to delegate it forever from themselves." The writer clearly foreshadows, even in his dislike, that temper which produced the Wilkes affair, and made it possible for Cartwright and Horne Tooke and Sir Thomas Hollis to become the founders of English radicalism.