produce a mixed effect on the appearance of the English churches, and the character of public worship. Her chief advisers manifested little or no sympathy with continental theologians, or at least in ritual matters, as in doctrine, sided rather with the Lutheran than the Swiss Reformers. Hence, although the interdicts of Edward were re-issued so as to displace a large majority of the altars, and eject all images and paintings that were deemed propitious to the reign of superstition, the old vestments" were now authorised afresh and other changes introduced, which plainly indicate a leaning towards the position assumed by the Reformers in the first Edwardine Prayer-Book. Church Yet, owing to the scruples generated in the school of Permanence of two parties in Hooper, and still more to new antipathies which some of the English the Marian exiles had brought back with them from Switzerland, the English Church continued to be torn by hostile factions, which allowed her little rest for the remainder of the century. On the one side, public worship was 6 Above, pp. 247, 249, 251. 7 Cf. above, p. 251, and n. 6. The Elizabethan Puritans at first objected most to the cap, the surplice and the tippet,' the use of which alone appears to have been pressed by the authorities: but all the other vestments were equally prescribed in the new edition of the Prayer Book and the Act of Uniformity. Hence in An Answere for the Tyme, put forth in 1566, [copy, with other kindred tracts, in the Camb. Univ. Lib. G, VI. 84] the writer sums up his grievances as follows: 'Cope, surplese, starch-bread [wafers], gospelers, pistlers, kneling at communion, crossing at baptisme, baptisme of [by] women, cap, tippet and gowne: Item; by authoritie of parliament, albes, alters, vestments, &c. these few things are more then may well be borne." 8 'Descenderant Angli in partes: aliis cordi erat, ut, servata apostolicæ ecclesiæ atque Anglicanæ cohærentia et antiquæ disciplinæ virtutibus recte æstimatis, Anglia Christiana, non in Romana sed in catholica religione constanter perseveraret; alii impetum suum convertebant in majorum instituta totamque Angliam Calvino vindicare studebant.' Daniel, Codex Liturg. Eccl. Reform. p. 295. He then adds in a note: Quo factum est ut Anglicana Ecclesia, Rebeccæ consimilis, in utero ferat prolem gemellam, sed valde disparem atque pugnacem. Et necessitate quadam versabatur in controversia ac contentione usque dum eventum habuerit vaticinium: "Duæ gentes in utero tuo et duo populi ex ventre tuo dividentur, populusque populum superabit et major serviet minori."' conducted so as to exhibit principles like those of Parker, Whitgift, Hooker, and Saravia; on the other, it was made to harmonise with the ideas of Whittingham, of Cartwright, and of Walter Travers. Here the feeling was, that innovations had been carried to the utmost verge of Christian prudence: there, that all which had been hitherto accomplished should be welcomed only as the starting-point of more decisive measures, or, in other words, the Reformation must itself be thoroughly reformed. The disposition, on the one side, was to commune freely with the past, to recognise the visible continuity of the Church as an organic system, even where its life was paralysed by grievous errors and corruptions, and to estimate alike the excellencies and demerits of our Christian predecessors in a large and generous spirit, from a consciousness that, where the tares had been most thickly scattered, wheat continued to grow up among them, and repay the culture of the Husbandman. Whereas, the rival theory of the Church denied this visible continuity, or, at the most, concluded that religion had for ages found its only shelter from the violence of Antichrist, in the recesses of some Alpine valley, or the bosom of some persecuted sect,-conclusions which impressed their author with the deepest hatred of all Medieval forms of worship as connected in his mind with the ascendancy of anti-christian influences. On the one side it was felt that church-authority, at least as to its spiritual properties, had been transmitted through a line of bishops, who were therefore specially entrusted with the exposition of Christian truth, as well as with the conservation of Christian order: on the other, such authority was held to be the voluntary gift of each congregation; and accordingly the favourite model of government was that which left no room for prelates, by investing all the ministers with equal rank and jurisdiction. Like differences are often traceable in their mode of handling some of the more vital principles of Christianity, though these divergencies were never marked so strongly in the sixteenth as in the following century. With lax ideas respecting the dogmatic statements of the œcumenical councils, such as we have seen in Zwingli and in Calvin also, grew a tendency to innovate upon the ancient terminology of the Church in speaking even of the Holy Trinity, and the Incarnation of our blessed Lord; while the profound relationship which many of the opposite school had traced between this latter doctrine, rightly apprehended, and the orthodox view respecting the efficacy of the sacraments, was overlooked, if not entirely contradicted, in the writings of the English Puritans. But notwithstanding these intellectual conflicts and this busy strife of tongues, itself, with all its melancholy consequences, a plain index of reviving thought, of manliness and Christian fervour, truth, in the more personal and practical bearings of it, went victoriously upon its mission: it continued to exalt, invigorate, and humanise: it furnished nurture to a multitude of thirsting spirits; it was ever the support, the joy, the solace of the simple-hearted and uncontroversial. Many a parish in the distant nooks of England, which had never been disturbed by vestment-troubles, nor the boisterous sermons of some disaffected churchman, was administered by pastors whose prime object was the edification of the souls committed to their keeping, and the glory of the Lord, to whom they must hereafter give account of all their Christian talents. Many a church, despite the outbreaks of irreverence on the one side, or the vestiges of superstition on the other, had been cleansed and garnished with affectionate care, and won the praises of the passing traveller by the chastened beauty of its ornaments. And many a household, tended by such pastors, and excited in the way of holiness by worshipping in such well-ordered sanctuaries, became the favourite haunt of angels, and the centre of religious blessing to the neighbourhood: their sons grew up like the young plants, their daughters were like polished corners of the temple. CHAPTER X. GROWTH OF THE CHURCH. Missions. THOSE agencies which operated so powerfully in narrowing Paucity of the field of general study had prevented the expansion of the Church of Christ beyond her ancient limits. There was now indeed a keener and more stirring sense of the importance of the Gospel, and the vastness of the human family for whose illumination it was promulgated: but the various sections of the western Church were so completely occupied until the middle of the sixteenth century with their own domestic conflicts, with promoting the purification of their doctrine or establishing fresh bulwarks for their self-defence, that nearly all the missions of this period were ‘home-missions,' instead of being aimed at the conversion of the heathen. The miserable remnant of the Jews who lingered in Jews. the Spanish peninsula, were subjected, as in the former period1, to most brutal persecutions: and in Germany the hatred of their race was no less deep and universal, being stimulated, more especially, by machinations of the rude Dominicans at Cologne2. The menacing attitude of the Turks was, on the con- Turks. trary, a source of daily terror to the western potentates3, and the necessity of wrestling with their armies on the 1 See Middle Age, pp. 341, 342. 2 The members of this order, satirized so mercilessly in the Epistola Obscurorum Virorum, had even the ingenuity to invent a legal authority for their persecution of the Jews. They declared that it was necessary to examine how far R. P. the Jews had deviated from the Old FF |