ENGLISH PURITANISM AND ITS LEADERS

INTRODUCTION

THE history of English Puritanism is the history both of a theological movement and of a great national struggle. The spirit of which Puritanism is the symbol has entered deeply into the national life, and strongly coloured many of its manifestations. It has given depth and passion not only to the religion, but to the literature and patriotism of the country; it has largely contributed alike to its intellectual lustre and heroic fame. No one, therefore, can understand the sources of our mixed civilisation without studying the great Puritanical movement of the seventeenth century. It is necessary to penetrate to the heart of this movement, and find some sympathetic point of connection with it, before we can appreciate some of the most powerful influences which have moulded the English people and made them what they are. Otherwise, as with some of our historians, the face of the facts may be observed and delineated, but their genuine meaning will be missed, and the moral forces out of which they grew and consolidated into history will remain unintelligible.

A

Britain was the national soil in which the seeds of the Reformation were destined to take the deepest and most enduring root. Germany did far more to originate and strengthen the movement in its beginnings; France, in many of its highest minds, showed a more ready receptivity and welcome to the new religious ideas; England could boast neither a Luther nor a Calvin but the spiritual impulses out of which the movement grew, and which constituted its real life. and strength, found in the Anglo-Saxon character their most congenial seat, their highest affinities, their most solid nutriment. Slowly, and under many hindrances, they spread, unaided by the powerful influence of any great teacher, but sinking always more into the depths of this character, and gaining a firmer hold of it. While dying out in Germany, and hardly able to maintain themselves in France against the fierce odds with which they had to contend, they continued to propagate and gather force in England amidst all obstacles, and only attained, after the lapse of a century, and under many modifications of struggle and conquest, to their full development.

The English Reformation had a double origin. It sprang at once from the people and the court. It was the effect of a renewed spiritual excitement in the Church and in society; it was also the creature of statecraft and royal policy. Erasmus's Greek Testament, and Tyndall's Bible, were the great agents on the one side; Henry VIII's matrimonial necessities, and the traditional anti-Romish policy of the Crown, were the moving springs on the other. In its earlier stages, and for long, the latter element assumed and exercised the predominance. The Reform movement in England became characteristically an official movement: the sovereign

was its guide and head; the State aimed to direct and regulate the course of innovation, and to mould the new Protestantism into conformity with the historical constitution and venerated usages of the old Catholicism. But, under all this official guidance, there had lived from the first a religious earnestness and active zeal for reform, impatient of control. The spiritual individualism which the Reformation everywhere called forth was in England held in check, but not extinguished, by the jealous watchfulness of the State. Even the firmness of the Tudor policy was not able to destroy, however it restrained, this moral force. Whether, if this policy had been persevered in, it might have proved successful, and the spiritual element of the Reformation coalesced more completely with the temporal, it is hard to say. The close of Elizabeth's life was not without some signs of such an issue. But, as it was, the spirit of religious reform gathered fresh impulse from the very circumstances which were meant to crush it; and, after years of insult and oppression, it first matched and then mastered the royal policy with which it had been so long in conflict.

It was characteristic of the aggressive spirit of the English Reformation, that it should ally itself with that branch of continental Protestantism which was most thorough and logical in its expression and results. As it was the aim of the state-party, while breaking with the Pope, to preserve unbroken the continuity of Catholicism, so it was the aim of the more radical Reformers to depart as far as possible from Popery. The one side desired to preserve the historical traditions, the medieval forms of worship, and the hierarchical framework of the Church of England; the

other side desired, in the spirit of the Swiss and French Protestants, to base the reformation, both of doctrine and discipline, anew and directly upon Scripture. This was a natural consequence of the profound evangelical consciousness quickened by Scripture, and appearing to be everywhere reflected in its pages, out of which the deeper movement sprang. It was the consequence, also, in a great degree, of the peculiar tendencies of the time, and the special character of the Calvinistic Reformation.

Unlike Lutheranism, Calvinism maintained a vigorous and progressive influence long after its first reforming excitement was spent. Less broad and magnanimous in its beginnings, it was far more concentrated and impulsive in its aims. Eliciting in a far less degree the welcoming humours of a free and sympathetic humanity, it found in its very narrowness and inward intensity, rather than genial fulness, its chief strength. It attained to more clear and systematic aims; it knew its own resources and husbanded them; while its dogmatic consistency and intellectual masterliness exercised a powerful charm over many minds at a distance, and gave to its principles a systematic and well-directed efficiency. The result was, that while Lutheranism, after little more than a quarter of a century's living action, was wasting itself in controversy equally violent and feeble, and rapidly passing into a barren dogmatism, Calvinism was still making vigorous conquests, and drawing to itself fresh accessions of force. It came to represent the cause of Protestantism abroad more prominently and boldly than the older movement; and the Protestant spirit of England, amidst its conflicts, instinctively turned to Geneva, as its great model and