The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth | Page 9

We shall have occasion to refer to some of these doctrines again later
on. It may be well, however, to mention here that the views that no
Christian ought to be a magistrate; that magistrates should not meddle
with religion; that no man ought to be compelled to faith, or put to
death for his religion; that war is unlawful to Christians; that their
speech should be yea or nay, without any oath: seem to have been
accepted by Anabaptists generally, as they were by the primitive
Christian communists of the fourteenth century.[18:2]

To return to our immediate subject. To the development of religious
and political thought in England, as to the inevitable struggle due to the
inherent antagonism of Catholic and Protestant ideals and aspirations,
we can refer only very briefly. The former can perhaps best be traced in
the writings of three eminent theological writers, Jewel, Hooker, and
Chillingworth. Though in 1567 we hear of the first instance of actual
punishment of Protestant Dissenters, still during the earlier portion of
the reign of Elizabeth, to the year 1571, there seems to have been a
gradual growth of national sentiment toward a simpler form of worship,
resulting in a modification of those rites and usages disliked by
Protestants of all shades and sects, and against the established policy of
forcible suppression of religious differences. In 1571, a Bill having
been introduced imposing a penalty for not receiving the communion, it
was objected to in the House of Commons on the grounds that
"consciences ought not to be forced." The same Parliament "refused to
bind the clergy to subscription to three articles on the Supremacy, the
form of Church Government, and the power of the Church to ordain
rites and ceremonies, and favoured the project of reforming the Liturgy
by the omission of superstitious practices."[19:1] In 1572, however, the
appearance of Thomas Cartwright's celebrated Admonition to the
Parliament stemmed the course of religious reform, and produced a
reaction of which Elizabeth and her Primates were not slow to avail
themselves. The establishment, in 1583, of the Ecclesiastical
Commission as a permanent body, wielding the almost unlimited
powers of the Crown and creating their own tests of doctrine, put an
end to the wise spirit of compromise which had hitherto characterised
Elizabeth's religious policy. The "superstitious usages" were
encouraged; subscription by the clergy of the Three Articles, which the
Parliament of 1571 had refused to enforce by law, was exacted; and the
non-conforming clergy were relentlessly harried and persecuted: with
the result that the Presbyterians within and the Puritans without the
National Church were temporarily united by the pressure of a common
persecution.
It was Cartwright's political rather than his religious views that alarmed
Elizabeth and her Ministers. As against their theory of a
State-controlled Church, he advocated a Church-controlled State. In

fact, the most arrogant and insolent pretensions of the Papacy were
surpassed by this Presbyterian divine. Of course, all his demands were
based on the authority of Scripture and the ways and customs of the
primitive Christian Church. The rule of bishops he denounced as
begotten of the devil; the absolute rule of presbyters he held to be
established by the word of God. All other forms of Church government
were ruthlessly to be suppressed, and heretics were to be punished by
death. For the ministers of the Church he claimed not only all spiritual
power and jurisdiction, the decreeing of doctrines, the ordering of
ceremonies, and so on, but also the supervision of public morals, under
which every branch of human activities was included. In short, the
State, as well as the individual, was to be placed beneath the heel of the
Church. The power of the prince, the secular power, was tolerated only
so that it might "protect and defend the councils of the clergy, to keep
the peace, to see their decrees executed, and to punish the contemners
of them." Such doctrines aroused no responsive echo in the minds of
the English people. The nation whose revolt against the papal
supremacy had made the Reformation possible, were not disposed to
accept Presbyterian supremacy in its place. The national impatience of
ecclesiastical power was not likely suddenly to be removed by any
attempt to re-impose it under a new name and in a new garb. In fact,
Cartwright's work almost seems as if specially written to warn the
nation against a possible, if not an imminent, danger, to warn them, in
truth, that--"New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large."
Cartwright's narrow-minded dogmatism was crushingly answered in
Richard Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, the first volume of which
appeared in 1594. This remarkable book forms, indeed, an important
landmark in the history of English political and religious thought. Its
forcible exposition of the basic principles of constitutional civil
government makes many