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

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 portions of it even to-day most attractive and instructive reading. For the first time in the history of religious controversy, reason is extolled above any and every authority, and accepted as supreme judge and arbiter of spiritual, as well as of temporal, affairs. Though Hooker thought it fit that the reason of the individual should yield to that of the Church, he did not hesitate to declare "that authority should prevail with man either against or above reason, is no part of our belief. Companies of learned men, be they never so