The additions in no way detracted from the Evangelical doctrine of the Sacrament. They rather brought the underlying thought, into greater harmony with the doctrine of the Reformed Churches. But they have had the effect of enabling men who hold different views about the nature of the rite to join in its common use.
When the Act of Uniformity was passed by Parliament, the advanced Reformers, who had chafed at what appeared to them to be a long delay, were contented. They, one and all, believed that the Church of England had been restored to what it had been during the last year of the reign of Edward VI.; and this was the end for which they had been striving, the goal placed before them by their friend and adviser, Henry Bullinger of Zurich.[563] Their letters are full of jubilation.[564]
Yet there were some things about this Elizabethan settlement which, if interpreted as they have been by some ecclesiastical historians, make it very difficult to understand the contentment of such men as Grindal, Jewel, and Sandys. “Of what was done in the matter of ornaments,” says Professor Maitland, “by statute, by the rubrics of the Book, and by Injunctions that the Queen promptly issued, it would be impossible to speak fairly without lengthy quotation of documents, the import of which became in the nineteenth century a theme of prolonged and inconclusive disputation.”[565] All that can be attempted here is to mention the principal documents involved in the later controversy, and to show how they were interpreted in the life and conduct of contemporaries.
The Act of Uniformity had restored, with some trifling differences clearly and definitely stated, Edward VI.’s Prayer-Book of 1552, and therefore its rubrics.[566] It had at the same time contained a proviso saying that the ornaments sanctioned by the authority of Parliament in the second year of Edward VI. were “to be retained and be in use” “until further order shall therein be taken.”
Men like Grindal and Jewel took no exception to this proviso, which they certainly would have done had they believed that it ordained the actual use in time of public worship, of the ornaments used in the second year of King Edward. The interpretation they gave to the proviso is seen from a letter from Sandys to Parker (afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury), written two days after the Act of Uniformity had passed the Lords. He says:
“The last book of service has gone through with a proviso to retain the ornaments which were used in the first and second year of King Edward, until it please the Queen to take other order for them. Our gloss upon the text is that we shall not be enforced to use them, but that others in the meantime shall not convey them away, but that they may remain for the Queen.”[567]
Sandys and others understood the proviso to mean that recalcitrant clergy like the Warden of Manchester, who carried his consecrated vestments to Ireland, were not to make off with the ornaments, and that churchwardens or patrons were not to confiscate them for their private use. They were property belonging to the Queen, and to be retained until her Majesty’s pleasure was known. The whole history of the visitations goes to prove that Sandys’ interpretation of the proviso was that of its framers.
When the Prayer-Book was actually printed it was found to contain some differences from the Edwardine Book of 1552 besides those mentioned in the Act as the only ones to be admitted; and early editions have not always the same changes. But the one thing of importance was a rubric which, on what seems to be the only possible interpretation, enjoins the use in public worship of the ornaments (i.e. the vestments) in use in the second year of King Edward.[568] How this rubric got into the Prayer-Book it is impossible to say. It certainly was not enacted by the Queen “with assent of Lords and Commons.” We have no proof that it was issued by the Privy Council.[569] The use and wont of the Church of England during the period of the Elizabethan settlement was as if this rubric had never existed. It is directly contradicted by the thirtieth Injunction issued for the Royal Visitation of 1559.[570] It was not merely contemptuously ignored by the Elizabethan Bishops; they compelled their clergy, if compulsion was needed, to act in defiance of it.
Contemporary sources abundantly testify that in the earlier years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth the English clergy in their ministrations scarcely ever wore any ecclesiastical garment but the surplice; and sometimes not even that. The Advertisements[571] of 1566, which almost all contemporary notices speak of as prescribing what had been enjoined in the Injunctions of 1559, were drafted for the purpose of coercing clergymen who were in the habit of refusing to wear even the surplice, and they enjoined the surplice only, and the cope[572] in cathedrals. In the Visitation carried out in accordance with the directions in the Injunctions, a clean sweep was made of almost all the ornaments which were not merely permitted but ordered in the proviso of the Act of Uniformity and the Rubric of 1559 on the ordinary ritualistic interpretation of these clauses. The visitors proceeded on a uniform plan, and what we hear was done in one place may be inferred as the common practice. The Spanish Ambassador (July or August 1559) wrote to his master: “They are now carrying out the law of Parliament respecting religion with great rigour, and have appointed six visitors.... They have just taken the crosses, images, and altars from St. Paul’s and all the other London churches.”[573] A citizen of London noted in his diary: “The time before Bartholomew tide and after, were all the roods and Maries and Johns, and many other of the church goods, both copes, crosses, censers, altar cloth, rood cloths, books, banners, banner stays, wainscot and much other gear about London, burnt in Smithfield.”[574] What took place in London was done in the provinces. At Grantham, “the vestments, copes, albs, tunicles, and all other such baggages were defaced and openly sold by the general consent of the whole corporation, and the money employed in setting up desks in the church, and making of a decent communion table, and the remnant to the poor.”[575]
It is true that we find complaints on the part of men like Jewel of ritualistic practices which they do not like; but these in almost every case refer to worship in the royal chapel. The services there were well known, and both friends and foes of the Reformation seemed to take it for granted that what was the fashion in the royal chapel would soon extend to the rest of the realm.[576] Historians have usually attributed the presence of crosses, vestments, lights on the altar, to the desire of the Queen to conciliate her Romanist subjects, or to stand well with the great Roman Catholic Powers of Europe. It is quite likely that the Queen had this thought in her mind. Elizabeth was a thrifty lady, and liked to bring down many birds with the one stone. But the one abiding thought in the mind of the astute Queen was to stand well with the Lutherans, and to be able, when threatened with papal excommunication, to take shelter under the ægis of the Peace of Augsburg.
When the Government had secured the passing of the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, they were in a position to deal with the recalcitrant clergy. Eleven of the English Episcopal Sees had been vacant at the accession of Elizabeth, among them that of the Primate; for Cardinal Pole had died a few hours after Mary, In the summer and autumn of 1559 the sixteen Bishops were called upon to sign the Oath of Supremacy, in which the papal rule over the Church of England was abjured, and the Queen declared to be the Supreme Governor of the Church. All the Bishops, more or less definitely, refused to take the oath; although three were at first doubtful. They were deprived, and the English Church was practically without Bishops.[577] Some of the deprived Bishops of King Edward’s time survived, and they were restored. Then came discussion about the manner of appointing new ones. Some would have preferred a simple royal nomination, as in Edward’s time; but in the end it was resolved that the appointment should be nominally in the hands of the Deans and Chapters according to mediæval rule, with the proviso, however, that the royal permission to elect had first to be given, and that the person named in the “leave to elect” should be chosen. Then the question of consecration gave rise to some difficulties; but these were got over in ways which were deemed to be sufficient. Matthew Parker, after more than one refusal, was nominated and consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury. Lists of clerical persons suitable for promotion were prepared for the Queen,[578] and the other Sees were gradually filled. The Elizabethan episcopate, with the exception of the few Edwardine Bishops, was an entirely new creation. A large number of the Deans and members of the Cathedral Chapters had also refused to sign the Oath of Supremacy; they were deprived, and others who were on the lists were appointed in their place. The inferior clergy proved to be much more amenable, and only about two hundred were in the end deprived. The others all accepted the “alteration of religion”; and the change was brought about quietly and without the riotings which had accompanied the alterations made in the days of Edward, or the wholesale deprivations which had followed upon those made by Queen Mary—when almost one-third of the beneficed clergy of the Church of England had been removed from their benefices. A similar passive acquiescence was seen in the introduction of the new Book of Common Prayer, and in the fulfilment of the various orders for the removal of images, etc. The great altars and crucifixes were taken away, and the pictures covered with whitewash, without any disturbances to speak of.
The comparative ease with which the “alteration of religion” was effected was no doubt largely due to the increased Protestant feeling of the country; but the tact and forbearance of those who were appointed to see the changes carried out counted for something; and perhaps the acquiescence of the Roman Catholics was due to the fact that they had no great leader, that they did not expect the Elizabethan settlement to last long, and that they waited in expectation that one or other of the two Romanist Powers, France or Spain, would interfere in their behalf. The religious revolution in Scotland in 1560 saved the Elizabethan settlement for the time; and Philip of Spain trifled away his opportunities until a united England overthrew his Armada, which came thirty years too late.
The change was given effect to by a Royal Visitation. England was divided into six districts, and lists of visitors were drawn up which included the Lords Lieutenants of the counties, the chief men of the districts, and some lawyers and clergymen known to be well affected to the Reformation. They had to assist them a set of Injunctions, modelled largely, not entirely, on those of Edward VI., drafted and issued by royal command.[579] The members of the clergy were dealt with very patiently, and explanations, public and private, were given of the Act of Supremacy which made it easier for them to accept it. The Elizabethan Bishops were also evidently warned to deal tenderly with stubborn parish clergymen; they would have been less patient with them if left to themselves. One, Bishop Best, Bishop of Carlisle, is found writing to Cecil about his clergy, that “the priests are wicked impes of Antichrist,” for the most part very ignorant and stubborn; another, Pilkington, the Bishop of Durham, in describing the disordered state of his diocese, declared that “like St. Paul, he has to fight with beasts at Ephesus”; and a third, Scory, Bishop of Winchester, wrote that he was much hindered by justices of the peace who were Roman Catholics, and that when certain priests who had refused to take the oath were driven out of Exeter and elsewhere, they were received and feasted in the streets with torch-lights.[580]
Elizabeth’s second Parliament was very much more Protestant than the first, and insisted that the Oath of Supremacy must be taken by all the members of the House of Commons, by all lawyers, and by all schoolmasters. The Convocation of 1563 proved that the clergy desired to go much further in the path of Reformation than the Queen thought desirable.
They clearly wished for some doctrinal standard, and Archbishop Parker had prepared and laid before Convocation a revised edition of the Forty-two Articles which had defined the theology of the Church of England in the last year of King Edward VI.[581] The way had been prepared for the issue of some authoritative exposition of the doctrinal position of the Elizabethan Church by the Declaration of the Principal Articles of Religion—a series of eleven articles framed by the Bishops and published in 1561 (March), which repudiates strongly the Romanist doctrines of the Papacy, private Masses, and the propitiatory sacrifice in the Holy Supper. The Spanish Ambassador, who had heard of the meetings of the Bishops for this purpose, imagined that they were preparing articles to be presented to the Council of Trent on behalf of the Church of England.[582] The Archbishop’s draft was revised by Convocation, and was “diligently read and sifted” by the Queen herself before she gave her consent to the authoritative publication of the Articles.
These Thirty-nine Articles expressed the doctrine of the Reformed or Calvinist as distinguished from the Evangelical or Lutheran form of Protestant doctrine, and the distinction lay mainly in the views which the respective Confessions of the two Churches held about the Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of the Holy Supper. By this time (1562) Zwinglianism, as a doctrinal system, not as an ecclesiastical policy, had disappeared;[583] and the three theories of the Presence of Christ in the Sacrament had all to do with the Presence of the Body of Christ and not with a spiritual Presence simply. The Romanist theory, transubstantiation, was based on the mediæval conception of a substance existing apart from all accidents of smell, shape, colour, etc., and declared that the “substance” of the Bread and of the Wine was changed into the “substance” of the Body and Blood of Christ, while the accidents or qualities remained the same—the change being miraculously effected by the priest in consecrating the communion elements. The Lutheran explanation was based upon a mediæval theory also—on that of the ubiquity or natural omnipresence of the “glorified” Body of Christ. The Body of Christ, in virtue of its ubiquity, was present everywhere, in chairs, tables, stones flung through the air (to use Luther’s illustrations), and therefore in the Bread and in the Wine as everywhere else. This ordinary presence became an efficacious sacramental Presence owing to the promise of God. Calvin had discarded both mediæval theories, and started by asking what was meant by substance and what by presence; he answered that the substance of anything is its power (vis), and its presence is the immediate application of its power. Thus the substance of the crucified Body of Christ is its power, and the Presence of the crucified Body of Christ is the immediate application of its power; and the guarantee of the application of the power is the promise of God received by the believing communicant. By discarding the Lutheran thought that the substance of the Body of Christ is something extended in space, and accepting the thought that the main thing in substance is power, Calvin was able to think of the substance of the Body of Christ in a way somewhat similar to the mediæval conception of “substance without accidents,” and was able to show that the Presence of Christ’s Body in the sacrament could be accepted and understood without the priestly miracle, which he and all Protestants rejected. Hence it came to pass that Calvin could teach the Real Presence of Christ’s Body in the Sacrament of the Supper without having recourse to the mediæval doctrine of “ubiquity,” which was the basis of the Lutheran theory. They both (Calvin and Luther) insisted on the Presence of the Body of Christ; but the one (Luther) needed the theory of “ubiquity” to explain the Presence, while the other (Calvin) did not need it. But as both discarded the priestly miracle while insisting on the Presence of the Body, the two doctrines might be stated in almost the same words, provided all mention of “ubiquity” was omitted. Calvin could and did sign the Augsburg Confession; but he did not read into it what a Lutheran would have done, the theory of “ubiquity”; and a Calvinist statement of the doctrine, provided only “ubiquity” was not denied, might be accepted by a Lutheran as not differing greatly from his own. Bishop Jewel asserts again and again in his correspondence, that the Elizabethan divines did not believe in the theory of “ubiquity,”[584] and many of them probably desired to say so in their articles of religion. Hence in the first draft of the Thirty-nine Articles presented to Convocation by Archbishop Parker, Article XXVIII. contained a strong repudiation of the doctrine of “ubiquity,” which, if retained, would have made the Articles of the Church of England more anti-Lutheran than even the second Helvetic Confession. The clause was struck out in Convocation, probably because it was thought to be needlessly offensive to the German Protestants.[585] The Queen, however, was not satisfied with what her divines had done, and two important interferences with the Articles as they came from Convocation are attributed to her. The first was the addition of the words: and authoritie in controversies of fayth, in Article XX., which deals with the authority possessed by the Church. The second was the complete suppression for the time being of Article XXIX., which is entitled, Of the wicked which do not eate the Body of Christe in the use of the Lordes Supper, and is expressed in terms which most Lutherans would have been loath to use.
The Queen’s action was probably due to political reasons. It was important in international politics for a Protestant Queen not yet securely seated on her throne to shelter herself under the shield which a profession of Lutheranism would give. The German Lutherans had won legal recognition within the Empire at the Diet of Augsburg in 1555; the votes of two Lutheran Electors had helped to place the Emperor on his throne; and the Pope dared not excommunicate Lutheran Princes save at the risk of offending the Emperor and invalidating all his acts. This had been somewhat sternly pointed out to him when he first threatened to excommunicate Elizabeth, and the Queen knew all the difficulties of the papal position. One has only to read an account of a long conversation with her, reported by the Spanish Ambassador to his master (April 29th, 1559), to see what use the “wise Queen with the eyes that could flash”[586] made of the situation. The Ambassador had not obscurely threatened her with a papal Bull declaring her a bastard and a heretic, and had brought home its effects by citing the case of the King of Navarre, whose kingdom was taken from him by Ferdinand of Spain acting as the Pope’s agent, and Elizabeth had played with him in her usual way. She had remarked casually “that she wished the Augsburg Confession to be maintained in her realm, whereat,” says the Count de Feria, “I was much surprised, and found fault with it all I could, adducing the arguments I thought might dissuade her from it. She then told me it would not be the Augsburg Confession, but something else like it, and that she differed very little from us, as she believed that God was in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and only dissented from three or four things in the Mass. After this she told me that she did not wish to argue about religious matters.”[587] She did not need to argue; the hint had been enough for the baffled Ambassador.
Article XXIX. was suppressed, and only Thirty-eight Articles were acknowledged publicly. The papal Bull of excommunication was delayed until 1570, when its publication could harm no one but Elizabeth’s own Romanist subjects, and the dangerous period was tided over safely. When it came at last, the Queen was not anathematised in terms which could apply to Lutherans, but because she personally acknowledged and observed “the impious constitutions and atrocious mysteries of Calvin,” and had commanded that they should be observed by her subjects.[588] Then, when the need for politic suppression was past, Article XXIX. was published, and the Thirty-nine Articles became the recognised doctrinal standard of the Church of England (1571).
What the Queen’s own doctrinal beliefs were no one can tell; and she herself gave the most contrary descriptions when it suited her policy. The disappearance and reappearance of crosses and candles on the altar of the royal chapel were due as much to the wish to keep in touch with the Lutherans as to any desire to conciliate the Queen’s Romanist subjects.
The Convocation of 1563 had other important matters before it. Its proceedings showed that the new Elizabethan clergy contained a large number who were in favour of some drastic changes in the Prayer-Book and in the Act of Uniformity. Many of them had become acquainted with and had come to like the simplicity of the Swiss worship, thoroughly purified from what they called “the dregs of Popery”; and others envied the Scots, “who,” wrote Parkhurst to Bullinger (Aug. 23rd, 1559), “have made greater progress in true religion in a few months than we have done in many years.”[589]
Such men were dissatisfied with much in the Prayer-Book, or rather in its rubrics, and brought forward proposals for simplifying the worship, which received a large measure of support. It was thought that all organs should be done away with; that the ceremony of “crossing” in baptism should be omitted; that all festival days save the Sundays and the “principal feasts of the Church” should be abolished;—this proposal was lost by a majority of one in the Lower House. Another motion, leaving it to the option of communicants to receive the Holy Supper either standing, sitting, or kneeling, as it pleased them, was lost by a very small majority. Many of the Bishops themselves were in favour of simplifying the rites of the Church; and five Deans and twelve Archdeacons petitioned against the use of the surplice. The movement was so strong that Convocation, if left to itself, would probably have purified the Church in the Puritan sense of the word. But the Queen had all the Tudor liking for a stately ceremonial, and she had political reasons, national and international, to prevent her allowing any drastic changes. She was bent on welding her nation together into one, and she had to capture for her Church the large mass of people who were either neutral or who had leanings to Romanism, or at least to the old mediæval service. The Council of Trent was sitting; Papal excommunication was always threatened, and, as above explained, Lutheran protection and sympathy were useful. The ceremonies were retained, the crucifixes and lights on the altars were paraded in the chapel royal to show the Lutheran sympathies of the Queen and of the Church of England. The Reforming Bishops, with many an inward qualm,[590] had to give way; and gradually, as the Queen had hoped, a strong Conservative instinct gathered round the Prayer-Book and its rubrics. The Convocation of 1563 witnessed the last determined attempt to propose any substantial alteration in the public worship of the English people.
At the same Convocation a good deal of time was spent upon a proposed Book of Discipline, or an authoritative statement of the English canon law. It is probable that its contents are to be found in certain “Articles for government and order in the Church, exhibited to be permitted by authority; but not allowed,” which are printed by Strype[591] from Archbishop Parker’s MSS. Such a book would have required parliamentary authority, and the Parliament of 1563 was too much occupied with the vanishing protection of Spain and with the threatening aspect of France and Scotland. The marriage of the Queen of Scots with Darnley had given additional weight to her claims on the English throne; and it was feared that the English Romanists might rise in support of the legitimate heir. Parliament almost in a panic passed severe laws against all recusants, and increased the penalties against all who refused the oath of allegiance or who spoke in support of the authority of the Bishop of Rome. The discipline of the Church was left to be regulated by the old statute of Henry VIII., which declared that as much of the mediæval canon law as was not at variance with the Scriptures and the Acts of the English Parliament was to form the basis of law for the ecclesiastical courts. This gave the Bishop’s officials who presided over the ecclesiastical courts a very free hand; and under their manipulation there was soon very little left of the canon law—less, in fact, than in the ecclesiastical courts of any other Protestant Churches. For these officials were lawyers trained in civil law and imbued with its principles, and predisposed to apply them whenever it was possible to do so.
The formulation of the Thirty-nine Articles in the Convocation of 1563 may be taken as marking the time when the “alteration of religion” was completed. The result, arrived at during a period of exceptional storm and strain, has had the qualities of endurance, and the Church of England is at present what the Queen made it. It was the Royal Supremacy which secured for High Church Anglicans the position they have to-day. The chief features of the settlement of religion were:
1. The complete repudiation within the realm and Church of England of the authority of the Bishop of Rome. All the clergy and everyone holding office under the Crown had to swear to this repudiation. If they refused, or were recusants in the language of the day, they lost their offices and benefices; if they persisted in their refusal, they were liable to forfeit all their personal property; if they declined to take the oath for a third time, they could be proclaimed traitors, and were liable to the hideous punishments which the age inflicted for that crime. But Elizabeth, with all her sternness, was never cruel, and no religious revolution was effected with less bloodshed.
2. The sovereign was made the supreme Governor of the Church of England; and that the title differed in name only from that assumed by Henry VIII. was made plain in the following ways:
(a) Convocation was stript of all independent legislative action, and its power to make ecclesiastical laws and regulations was placed under strict royal control.[592]
(b) Appeals from all ecclesiastical courts, which were themselves actually, if not nominally, under the presidency of civil lawyers, could be made to royal delegates who might be laymen; and these delegates were given very full powers, and could inflict civil punishments in a way which had not been permitted to the old mediæval ecclesiastical courts. These powers raised a grave constitutional question in the following reigns. The royal delegates became a Court of High Commission, which may have been modelled on the Consistories of the German Princes, and had somewhat the same powers.
3. One uniform ritual of public worship was prescribed for all Englishmen in the Book of Common Prayer with its rubrics, enforced by the Act of Uniformity. No liberty of worship was permitted. Any clergyman who deviated from this prescribed form of worship was liable to be treated as a criminal, and so also were all those who abetted him. No one could, under penalties, seek to avoid this public worship. Every subject was bound to attend church on Sunday, and to bide the prayers and the preaching, or else forfeit the sum of twelvepence to the poor. Obstinate recusants or nonconformists might be excommunicated, and all excommunicated persons were liable to imprisonment.
4. Although it was said, and was largely true, that there was freedom of opinion, still obstinate heretics were liable to be held guilty of a capital offence. On the other hand, the Bishops had little power to force heretics to stand a trial, and, unless Parliament or Convocation ordered it otherwise, only the wilder sectaries were in any danger.[593]
Protestant England grew stronger year by year. The debased copper and brass coinage was replaced gradually by honest gold and silver.[594] Manufactures were encouraged. Merchant adventurers, hiring the Queen’s ships, took an increasing share in the world-trade with Elizabeth as a partner.[595] Persecuted Huguenots and Flemings settled in great numbers in the country, and brought with them their thrift and knowledge of mechanical trades to enrich the land of their adoption;[596] and the oppressed Protestants of France and of the Low Countries learnt that there was a land beyond the sea ruled by a “wise young Queen” which might be their city of refuge, and which was ready to aid them, if not openly, at least stealthily. England, formerly unarmed, became supplied “more abundantly than any other country with arms, munitions, and artillery.” Sound money, enlarged trade, growing wealth, and an increasing sense of security, were excellent allies to the cause of the Protestant Religion.
So long as Mary of Scotland was in Holyrood and able to command the sympathy, if not the allegiance, of the English Roman Catholics, the throne of Elizabeth was never perfectly secure; but the danger from Scotland was minimised by the jealousy between Catherine de’ Medici and her daughter-in-law, and the Scottish Protestant Lords could always be secretly helped. When Philip II. of Spain, in his slow, hesitating way, which made him always miss the turn of the tide, at length resolved to aid Mary to crush her rebels at home and to prosecute her claims on England, his interference had no further consequences than to afford Elizabeth an honourable pretext for giving effectual assistance in the conflict which drove Mary from her throne, and made Scotland completely and permanently Protestant.[597]
The revolt of Luther was the occasion for the appearance—the outbreak, it might be called—of a large amount of irregular independent thinking upon religion and theology which had expressed itself sporadically during the whole course of the Middle Ages. The great difference between the thinkers and their intellectual ancestors who were at war with the mediæval Church life and doctrine, did not consist in the expression of anything essentially new, but in the fact that the Renaissance had introduced a profound contempt for the intellectual structure of ecclesiastical dogma, and that the whole of the sixteenth century was instinct with the feeling of individuality and the pride of personal existence. The old thoughts were less careful to accommodate themselves to the recognised modes of theological statement, they took bolder forms of expression, presented sharper outlines, and appeared in more definite statements.
Part of this thinking scarcely belongs to ecclesiastical history at all. It never became the intellectual basis of an institution; it neither stirred nor moulded the lives of masses of men. The leaders of thought remained solitary thinkers, surrounded by a loose fringe of followers. But as there is always something immortal in the forcible expression of human thought, their opinions have not died altogether, but have affected powerfully all the various branches of the Christian Church at different periods and in divers ways. The old conceptions, somewhat disguised, perhaps, but still the same, reappear in most systems of speculative theology. It therefore demands a brief notice.
The greater portion of this intellectual effervescence, however, did not share the same fate. Menno Simons, aided, no doubt, by the winnowing fan of persecution, was able to introduce order into the wild fermenting elements of Anabaptism, and to form the Baptist Church which has had such an honourable history in Europe and America. Fausto Sozzini did the same for the heterogeneous mass of anti-Trinitarian thinking, and out of the confusion brought the orderly unity of an institutional life.
This great mass of crude independent thought may be roughly classified as Mystic, or perhaps Pantheist Mystic, Anabaptist, and anti-Trinitarian; but the division, so far as the earlier thinkers go, is very artificial. The groups continually overlap; many of the leaders of thought might be placed in two or in all three of these divisions. What characterised them all was that they had little sense of historical continuity, cared nothing for it, and so broke with the past completely; that they despaired of seeing any good in the historical Church, and believed that it must be ended, as it was impossible to mend it; and that they all possessed a strong sense of individuality, believing the human soul to be imprisoned when it accepted the confinement of a common creed, institution, or form of service unless of the very simplest kind.
Pantheistic Mysticism was no new thing in Christianity. As early as the sixth century at least, schools of thought may be found which interpreted such doctrines as the Trinity and the Person of Christ in ways which led to what must be called Pantheism; and if such modes of dissolving Christian doctrines had not a continuous succession within the Christian Church, they were always appearing. They were generally accompanied with a theory of an “inner light” which claimed either to supersede the Scriptures as the Rule of Faith, or at least to interpret them. The Scriptures were the husk which might be thrown away when its kernel, discovered by the “inner light,” was once revealed. The Schwenkfelds, Weigels, Giordano Brunos of the sixteenth century, who used what they called the “inner light” in somewhat the same way as the Council of Trent employed dogmatic tradition, had a long line of ancestry in the mediæval Church, and their appearance at the time of the Reformation was only the recrudescence of certain phases of mediæval thought. But, as has been said, such thinkers were never able, nor perhaps did they wish, to form their followers into a Church; and they belong much more to the history of philosophy than to an ecclesiastical narrative. They had no conception whatever of religion in the Reformation sense of the word. Their idea of faith was purely intellectual—something to be fed on metaphysics more or less refined.
By far the most numerous of those sixteenth century representatives of mediæval nonconformists were classed by contemporaries under the common name of Anabaptists or Katabaptists, because, from 1526 onwards, they all, or most of them, insisted on re-baptism as the sign of belonging to the brotherhood of believers. They were scattered over the greater part of Europe, from Sweden in the north to Venice in the south, from England in the west to Poland in the east. The Netherlands, Germany,—southern, north-western, and the Rhineland,—Switzerland, the Tyrol, Moravia, and Livonia were scenes of bloody persecution endured with heroic constancy. Their leaders flit across the pages of history, courageous, much-enduring men, to whom the world was nothing, whose eyes were fixed on the eternal throne of God, and who lived in the calm consciousness that in a few hours they might be fastened to the stake or called upon to endure more dreadful and more prolonged tortures,—men of every varying type of character, from the gentle and pious young Humanist Hans Denck to Jan Matthys the forerunner of the stern Camisard and Covenanter. No statement of doctrine can include the beliefs held in all their innumerable groups. Some maintained the distinctive doctrines of the mediæval Church (the special conceptions of a priestly hierarchy, and of the Sacraments being always excluded); others were Lutherans, Calvinists, or Zwinglians; some were Unitarians, and denied the usual doctrine of the Person of Christ;[598] a few must be classed among the Pantheists. All held some doctrine of an “inner light”; but while some sat very loose to the letter of Scripture, others insisted on the most literal reading and application of Biblical phraseology. They all united in maintaining that true Christians ought to live separate from the world (i.e. from those who were not rebaptized), in communities whose lives were to be modelled on the accounts given in the New Testament of the primitive Christians, and that the true Church had nothing whatever to do with the State.
Curiously enough, the leaders in the third group, the anti-Trinitarians, were almost all Italians.
The most outstanding man among them, distinguished alike by his learning, his pure moral life, a distinct vein of piety, and the calm courage with which he faced every danger to secure the propagation of his opinions, was the Spaniard Miguel Servede (Servetus),[599] who was burnt at Geneva in 1553. He was very much a man by himself. His whole line of thought separated him from the rest of the anti-Trinitarian group associated with the names of the Sozzini. He reached his position through a mystical Pantheism—a course of thought which one might have expected from a Spaniard. He made few or no disciples, and did not exert any permanent influence.
The other anti-Trinitarians of the first rank were all cultured Italians, whom the spirit of the Renaissance prompted to criticise and reconstruct theology as they found it. They were all men who had been driven to reject the Roman Church because of its corruptions and immoralities, and who had no conception of any other universal Christian society. Men of pure lives, pious after their own fashion, they never had any idea of what lay at the root of the Reformation thought of what real religion was. It never dawned upon them that the sum of Christianity is the God of Grace, manifest in Christ, accessible to every believing soul, and unwavering trust on man’s part. Their interest in religion was almost exclusively intellectual. The Reformers had defined the Church as the fellowship of believers, and they had said that the marks of that fellowship were the preaching of the Word and the right use of the sacraments—the means through which God manifests Himself to men, and men manifest their faith in God. These men never apprehended this; the only idea which they seemed able to have of the Church was a school of definite and correct opinions. Compelled to flee from their native land, they naturally took refuge in Switzerland or in the Grisons. It is almost pathetic to see how they utterly failed to understand the men among whom they found themselves. Reformation to them was a criticism and reconstruction of theology; they were simply carrying the criticism a little further than their new neighbours. They never perceived the real gulf fixed between them and the adherents of the Reformation.
They were all highly educated and cultivated men—individual units from all parts of Italy. Camillo Renato, who proclaimed himself an Anabaptist, was a Sicilian. Gentili came from Calabria; Gribaldo from Padua; Bernardino Occhino, who in his later days joined the band, and the two Sozzini from Siena. Alciat was a Piedmontese. Blandrata (Biandrata), the most energetic member of the group save Fausto Sozzini, belonged to a noble family in Saluzzo which had long been noted for the protection it had afforded to poor people persecuted by the Church. They were physicians or lawyers; one, Gentili, was a schoolmaster.
The strong sense of individuality, which seems the birthright of every Italian, fostered by their life within their small city republics, had been accentuated by the Renaissance. The historical past of Italy, and its political and social condition in the sixteenth century, made it impossible for the impulse towards reform to take any other shape than that of individual action. The strength and the impetus which comes from the thought of fellow-man, fellow-believer, and which was so apparent in the Reformation movements beyond the Alps and in the Jesuit reaction, was entirely lacking among these Reformers in Italy. In that land the Empire had never regained its power lost under the great Popes, Gregory VII. and Innocent III. The Romish Church presented itself to all Italians as the only possible form under which a wide-spreading Christian Society could be organised. If men rejected it, personal Christian life alone remained. The Church dominated the masses unprepared by any such conception of ecclesiastical reform as influenced the people in Germany and Switzerland. Only men who had received some literary education were susceptible to the influences making for Reformation. They were always prevented by the unbroken power of the agencies of the Church from organising themselves publicly into congregations, and could only meet to exchange confidences privately and on rare occasions.[600] We hear of several such assemblies, which invariably took the form of conferences, in which the members discussed and communicated to each other the criticisms of the mediæval theology which solitary meditation had suggested to them. They were much more like debating societies than the beginnings of a Church. Thus we hear of one at Vincenza,[601] in 1546, where about forty friends met, among whom was Lelio Sozzini, where they debated such doctrines as the Satisfaction of Christ, the Trinity, etc., and expressed doubts about their truth. It was inevitable that such men could not hope to create a popular movement towards Reformation in their native land, and also that they should be compelled to seek safety beyond the bounds of Italy. They fled, one by one, across the Alps. In the Grisons and in Reformed Switzerland they found little communities of their countrymen who had sought shelter there, and their presence was always followed by dissensions and by difficulties with the native Protestants.
Their whole habits of life and thought were not of the kind calculated to produce a lasting Christian fellowship. Their theological opinions, which were not the outcome of a new and living Christian experience, but had been the result of an intellectual criticism of the mediæval theology, had little stability, and did not tend to produce unity. The execution of Servede and the jealousy which all the Reformed cantons of Switzerland manifested towards opinions in any way similar to those of the learned Spaniard, made life in Switzerland as unsafe as it had been in Italy. They migrated to Poland and Transylvania, attracted by the freedom of thought existing in both lands.
Poland, besides, had special attractions for refugees from Italy. The two countries had long been in intimate relationship. Italian architects had designed the stately buildings in Crakau and other Polish cities, and the commercial intercourse between the two countries was great. The independence and the privileges of the Polish nobles secured them from ecclesiastical interference, and both Calvinism and Lutheranism had found many adherents among the aristocracy. They, like the Roman patricians of the early centuries, gave the security of their halls to their co-religionists, and the heads of the Romanist Church chafed at their impotence to prevent the spread of opinions and usages which they deemed heretical. In Transylvania the absence of a strong central government permitted the same freedom to the expression of every variety of religious opinion.
The views held by the group of anti-Trinitarians were by no means the same. They reproduced in Poland the same medley of views we find existing in the end of the third century. Some were Sabellians, others Adoptianists, a few were Arians. Perhaps most of them believed in the miraculous birth of our Lord, and held as a consequence that He ought to be adored; but a strong minority, under the leadership of Francis Davidis, repudiated the miraculous birth, and refused to worship Christ (non-adorantes). For a time they seem to have lived in a certain amount of accord with the members of the Reformed communities. A crisis came at the Polish Diet of 1564, and the anti-Trinitarians were recognised then to be a separate religious community, or ecclesia minor. This was the field in which Fausto Sozzini exercised his commanding intellect, his genius for organisation, and his eminently strong will. He created out of these jarring elements the Socinian Church.
The Anabaptist and the Socinian movements require, however, a more detailed description.
The old monotonous mode of describing Anabaptism has almost entirely disappeared with the modern careful examination of sources. It is no longer possible to sum up the movement in four stages, beginning with the Zwickau prophets and ending with the catastrophe in Münster, or to explain its origin by calling it the radical side of the Reformation movement.[603] It is acknowledged by careful students to have been a very complicated affair, to have had roots buried in the previous centuries, and to have had men among its leaders who were distinguished Humanists. It is now known that it spread over Europe with great rapidity, and attracted to itself an enormously larger number of adherents than had been imagined.
It is impossible within the limits of one brief chapter to state and criticise the various theories of the origin and roots of the movement which modern investigation has suggested. All that can be done is to set down succinctly the conclusions reached after a tolerably wide examination of the sources—admitting at the same time that more information must be obtained ere the history of the movement advances beyond the controversial stage.
It is neither safe nor easy to make abrupt general statements about the causes or character of great popular movements. The elements which combine to bring them into being and keep them in existence are commonly as innumerable as the hues which blend in the colour of a mountain side. Anabaptism was such a complicated movement that it presents peculiar difficulties. As has been said, it had a distinct relation to two different streams of mediæval life, the one social and the other religious—the revolts of peasants and artisans, and the successions of the Brethren.
From the third quarter of the fifteenth century social uprisings had taken place almost every decade, all of them more or less impregnated with crude religious beliefs. They were part of the intellectual and moral atmosphere that the “common man,” whether in town or country district, continuously breathed, and their power over him must not be lost sight of. The Reformation movement quickened and strengthened these influences simply because it set all things in motion. It is not possible, therefore, to draw a rigid line of separation between some sides of the Anabaptist movement and the social revolt; and hence it is that there is at least a grain of truth in the conception that the Anabaptists were the revolutionaries of the times of the Reformation.
On the other hand, there are good reasons for asserting that the distinctively religious side of Anabaptism had little to do with the anarchic outbreaks. It comes in direct succession from those communities of pious Christians who, on the testimony of their enemies, lived quiet God-fearing lives, and believed all the articles in the Apostles’ Creed; but who were strongly anti-clerical. They lived unobtrusively, and rarely appear in history save when the chronicle of some town makes casual mention of their existence, or when an Inquisitor ferreted them out and records their so-called heresies. Their objections to the constitution and ceremonies of the mediæval Church were exactly those of the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century; and if we do not find a universal repudiation of infant baptism, there are traces that some did not approve of it. They insisted that the service ought to be in the vulgar tongue; they objected to all the Church festivals; to all blessing of buildings, crosses, and candles; they alleged that Christ did not give His Apostles stoles or chasubles; they scoffed at excommunications, Indulgences, and dispensations; they declared that there was no regenerative efficacy in infant baptism; and they were keenly alive to all the injunctions of Christian charity—it was better, they said, to clothe the poor than to expend money on costly vestments or to adorn the walls of Churches, and they kept up schools and hospitals for lepers. They met in each other’s houses for public worship, which took the form of reading and commenting upon the Holy Scriptures.[604]
As we are dependent on very casual sources of information, it is not surprising that we cannot trace their continuous descent down to the period of the Reformation; but we do find in the earlier decades of the sixteenth century notices of the existence of small praying communities, which have all the characteristics of those recorded in the Inquisitors’ reports belonging to the end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth centuries. They appeared in Basel in 1514, in Switzerland in 1515, in Mainz in 1518, and in Augsburg somewhat earlier.[605] By the year 1524 similar “praying circles” were recorded as existing in France, in the Netherlands, in Italy, in Saxony, in Franconia, at Strassburg, and in Bohemia. They used a common catechism for the instruction of their young people which was printed in French, German, Bohemian, and perhaps Italian. In Germany, the Bible was the German Vulgate—a version retained among the Anabaptists long after the publication of Luther’s. They exhibited great zeal in printing and distributing the pious literature of the Friends of God of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Many of them taught Baptist views, though the tenets were not universally accepted, and they were already called Anabaptists or Katabaptists—a term of reproach. Some of their more distinguished leaders were pious Humanists, and their influence may perhaps be seen in the efforts made by the Brethren to print and distribute the Defensor Pacis of Marsiglio of Padua.
This quiet Evangelical movement assumed a more definite form in 1524. Before that date the associations of pious people acted like the Pietists of the seventeenth or like the Wesleyans of the eighteenth century. They associated together for mutual edification; they did not obtrusively separate themselves from the corrupt or slothful Church. But in June 1524, delegates representing a very wide circle of “praying assemblies” or Readings met at Waldshut, in the house of Balthasar Hübmaier,[606] bringing their Bibles with them, to consult how to organise their Christian living on the lines laid down in the New Testament. No regular ecclesiastical organisation was formed. The Brethren resolved to separate from the Papal Church; they published a Directory for Christian living, and drew up a statement of principles in which they believed. Amongst other things, they protested against any miraculous efficacy in the Sacraments in general, and held that Baptism is efficacious only when it is received in faith. This led afterwards to the adoption of Baptist views. A second conference was held at Augsburg in 1526, which probably dates the time when adult baptism became a distinctive belief among all the Brethren. This conference suggested a General Synod which met at Augsburg in 1527 (Aug.), and included among its members, delegates from Munich, Franconia, Ingolstadt, Upper Austria, Styria, and Switzerland. There they drew up a statement of doctrinal truth, which is very simple, and corresponds intimately with what is now taught among the Moravian Brethren. Their Hymn-book[607] does not bear any traces of the errors in doctrine usually attributed to them. Its chief theme is the love of God awakening our love to God and to our fellow-men. Instead of infant baptism they had a ceremony in which the children were consecrated to God. Baptism was regarded as the sign of conversion and of definite resolve to give one’s self up to the worship and service of God. It was administered by sprinkling; the recipient knelt to receive it in the presence of the congregation. The Holy Supper was administered at stated times, and always after one or two days of solemn preparation. Their office-bearers were deacons, elders, masters and teachers, or pastors. They distinguished between pastors who were wandering evangelists and those who were attached to single congregations. The latter, who were ordained by the laying on of hands, alone had the right to dispense the Sacraments. All the deacons, elders, and pastors belonging to communities within a prescribed district, selected from among themselves delegates who formed their ecclesiastical council for the district, and this council elected one of the pastors to act as Bishop or Superintendent. It was the Superintendent who ordained by laying on of hands. The whole of the Brethren were governed ecclesiastically by a series of Synods corresponding to those in the Presbyterian Churches. This organisation enabled the Anabaptists to endure the frightful persecution which they were soon to experience at the hands of the papal and Lutheran State Churches.
The chief leaders were Balthasar Hübmaier and Hans Denck. Hübmaier was a distinguished scholar. He became, at an unusually early age, Professor of theology at Ingolstadt (1512); he was Rector of the famous High School in that city (1515); and Cathedral preacher at Regensburg (Ratisbon) (1516). In 1519, feeling that he could no longer conscientiously occupy such positions, he retired to the little town of Waldshut. Hans Denck was a noted Humanist, a member of the “Erasmus circle” at Basel, and esteemed the most accurate Greek scholar in the learned community. Conrad Grebel, another well-known Anabaptist leader, also belonged to the “Erasmus circle,” and was a member of one of the patrician families of Zurich. Like Hübmaier and Denck, he gave up all to become an evangelist, and spent his life on long preaching tours. These facts are sufficient to refute the common statement that the Anabaptists were ignorant fanatics.
Perhaps Denck was the most widely known and highly esteemed. In the summer of 1523 he was appointed Rector of the celebrated Sebaldus School in Nürnberg. In the end of 1524 he was charged with heresy, and along with him Jörg Penz, the artist, the favourite pupil of Albert Dürer, and four others. Denck was banished from the city, and his name became well known. This trial and sentence was the occasion of his beginning that life of wandering evangelist which had among other results the conferences in 1526 and 1527, and the organisation above described. Denck had drunk deeply at the well of the fourteenth and fifteenth century Mystics, and his teaching was tinged by many of their ideas. He believed that there was a spark of the divine nature in man, an Inner Word, which urged man to walk in the ways of God, and that man could always keep true to the inward monitor, who was none else than Christ. The accounts given of some of his addresses seem to be echoes of Tauler’s famous sermon on the Bridegroom and the Bride, for he taught that the sufferings of the faithful are to be looked upon as the love-gifts of the Saviour, and are neither to be mourned nor resisted. We are told in the quaint Chronicle of Sebastian Frauck, that the Baptist current swept swiftly through the whole land; many thousands were baptized, and many hearts drawn to them. “For they taught nothing but love, faith, and crucifixion of the flesh, manifesting patience and humility under many sufferings, breaking bread with one another in sign of unity and love, helping one another with true helpfulness, lending, borrowing, giving, learning to have all things in common, calling each other ‘brother.’”[608] He adds that they were accused of many things of which they were innocent, and were treated very tyrannically.
The Anabaptists, like the earlier Mystics, displayed a strong individuality; and this makes it impossible to classify their tenets in a body of doctrine which can be held to express the system of intellectual belief which lay at the basis of the whole movement. We have three contemporary accounts which show the divergence of opinion among them—two from hostile and one from a sympathetic historian. Bullinger[609] attempts a classification of their different divisions, and mentions thirteen distinct sects within the Anabaptist circle; but they manifestly overlap in such a way as to suggest a very large amount of difference which cannot be distinctly tabulated. Sebastian Franck[610] notes all the varieties of views which Bullinger mentions, but refrains from any classification. “There are,” he says, “more sects and opinions, which I do not know and cannot describe, but it appears to me that there are not two to be found who agree with each other on all points.” Kessler,[611] who recounts the story of the Anabaptists of St. Gallen, notes the same great variety of opinions.
It is quite possible to describe the leading ideas taught by a few noted men and approved of by their immediate circle of followers, and so to arrive with some accuracy at the popularity of certain leading principles among different parties, but it must be remembered that no great leader imposed his opinions on the whole Anabaptist circle, and that the views held at different times by prominent men were not invariably the sentiments which lay at the basis of the whole movement.
The doctrine of passive resistance was held by almost all the earlier Anabaptists, but it was taught and practised in such a great variety of ways that a merely general statement gives a misleading idea. All the earlier Anabaptists believed that it was unchristian to return evil for evil, and that they should take the persecutions which came to them without attempting to retaliate. Some, like the young Humanist, Hans Denck, pushed the theory so far that they believed that no real Christian could be either a magistrate or a soldier. A small band of Anabaptists, to whom one of the Counts of Liechtenstein had given shelter at Nikolsburg, told their protector plainly that they utterly disapproved of his threatening the Austrian Commissary with armed resistance if he entered the Nikolsburg territory to seize them. In short, what is called “passive resistance” took any number of forms, from the ordinary Christian maxim to be patient under tribulation, to that inculcated and practised by the modern sect of Dunkers.
The followers of Melchior Hoffman, called “Melchiorites,” held apocalyptic or millenarian views, and expected in the near future the return of Christ to reign over His saints; but there is no reason to suppose that this conception was very widely adopted, still less that it can be called a tenet of Anabaptism in general. All the Anabaptists inculcated the duty of charity and the claims of the poor on the richer members of the community; but that is a common Christian precept, and does not necessarily imply communistic theories or practices. All that can be definitely said of the whole Anabaptist circle was that they did keep very clearly before them the obligations of Christian love. The so-called Communism in Münster will be described later.
When we examine carefully the incidental records of contemporary witnesses observing their Anabaptist neighbours, we reach the general conclusion that their main thought was to reproduce in their own lives what seemed to them to be the beliefs, usages, and social practices of the primitive Christians. Translations of the Bible and of parts of it had been common enough in Germany before Luther’s days. The “common man,” especially the artisan of the towns, knew a great deal about the Bible. It was the one book he read, re-read, and pondered over. Fired with the thoughts created in his mind by its perusal, simple men felt impelled to become itinerant preachers. The “call” came to them, and they responded at once to what they believed to be the divine voice. Witness Hans Ber of Alten-Erlangen, a poor peasant. He rose from his bed one night and suddenly began to put on his clothes. “Whither goest thou?” asked his poor wife. “I know not; God knoweth,” he answered. “What evil have I done thee? Stay and help me to bring up my little children,” “Dear wife,” he answered, “trouble me not with the things of time. I must away, that I may learn the will of the Lord.”[612] Such men wandered about in rude homespun garments, often barefooted, their heads covered with rough felt hats. They craved hospitality in houses, and after supper produced their portions of the Bible, read and expounded, then vanished in the early morning. We are told how Hans Hut came to the house of Franz Strigel at Weier in Franconia, produced his Bible, read and expounded, explained the necessity of adult baptism, convinced Strigel, the house father, and eight others, and baptized them there and then. He wandered forth the same night. None of the baptized saw him again; but the little community remained—a small band of Anabaptists.[613]