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 Oibili^ation 
 
 BEING THE 
 
 LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 CHURCHMAN'S LEAGUE OF THE 
 
 DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 
 
 IN 1903 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 PUBLISHER 
 
 FOURTH AVE. AND TWENTY-SECOND ST. 
 
 MCMIII 
 
n c c 
 
 -r4 
 
(Bontentis 
 
 Hetture I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The British and English Churches .... 3 
 The Rev, Prof, Thomas Richey, D.D. 
 
 %tttntt II 
 
 The Church as the Educator of the People . 23 
 The Rev, W, J. Guerry, B,D, 
 
 lecture III 
 
 The Church as the Champion of the Peo- 
 ple's Rights 57 
 
 The Rev, WUliam M, Clark. 
 
 Hetture IV 
 
 The Principle of National Churches ... 79 
 The Rev. Prof. William C. Clark, M,A,, 
 D.D., LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S.C, 
 
 Stecture V 
 
 The Church and the Spirit of Liberty . . 99 
 Mr, Joseph Packard. 
 
 28983 
 
preface 
 
 THE question of the mutual relations between 
 Christianity and Civilization, of which the 
 history of the English people affords many 
 instructive illustrations, is one of peculiar interest 
 and importance, and has often claimed the attention 
 of thoughtful minds. While progress in Civilization 
 may be recognized as being a part of the Divine order 
 of things, yet there is much in the principles of Civ- 
 ilization which is antagonistic to Christianity, so that 
 the inevitable conflict, so constantly spoken of in the 
 New Testament, between Christianity and the World, 
 is continually existing. The purifying and refining 
 force of Christianity, however, has been so felt by 
 Civilization, that it is an undeniable fact of history 
 that the most civilized nations are the most Christian, 
 and that Civilization reaches its highest point in those 
 nations which possess the highest ideals of Christian 
 duty and strive to carry their principles into action. 
 
 We shall plainly see, if we read aright the lessons 
 of the past, that true progress will be found in the end 
 to consist, not in the mere attainment of material 
 prosperity, but in the development of character, and 
 that no nation has ever permanently flourished in 
 which that principle has been lost sight of or dis- 
 regarded. 
 
 The purpose of these lectures, delivered in Saint 
 
VI INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 Thomas's Church, Washington, has been to show the 
 powerful part Christianity, as it has found expression 
 in the English Church, has played in the development 
 of Anglo-Saxon Civilization. There have been times, 
 indeed, when the Church of England has not been 
 wholly faithful to her mission, and has experienced 
 the bitter consequences of her failure, but notwith- 
 standing, she has never long forsaken her true ideals, 
 and in training the people in the Christian faith, has 
 produced a noble type of Christian character and high 
 ethical national standards, which go to create the 
 strength of the nation to-day. 
 
 It is worthy of observation that the closeness of 
 the ties existing between Church and State, which in 
 our own country does not impede the Church's free- 
 dom, gave, nevertheless, opportunities of vast personal 
 influence upon the religion of the nation, at periods 
 when leadership was sorely needed, to the temporal 
 and ecclesiastical rulers, not always wisely exercised, 
 but in the hands of great and good men, productive of 
 incalculable benefit. 
 
 Beginning with the formation of the English na- 
 tion, when Christianity, with its universal adaptabil- 
 ity and wonderful unifying power, helped to weld the 
 different racial elements into one homogeneous whole, 
 the lectures trace the Church's influence upon the de- 
 velopment of the English people in their educational, 
 social, and political relations. As we approach more 
 recent times, we are shown the influence of English 
 Churchmen in our own land, before the Revolution 
 as well as in the early days of the republic, reminding 
 
PREFACE VII 
 
 US of the debt we owe to Anglo-Saxon Christianity, 
 and that we too may regard with thankfulness our 
 share in the inheritance of the great and historic 
 Church of England. 
 
 It will thus be seen that the present volume em- 
 braces within its scope an extensive field, highly in- 
 teresting and suggestive, full of matter profitable for 
 meditation, and presenting for consideration some of 
 those wider historical aspects of Christianity so often 
 inadequately realized. 
 
 In their treatment of the wide range of subjects 
 discussed, the views of the different lecturers will be 
 found to have been clearly and ably stated, and the 
 themes assigned handled with learning and literary 
 skill by their respective authors. 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 / 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 IT will be a help to a clearer discrimination of tlie 
 : nature and origin of the British, and English 
 churches, if it be kept in mind, from the outset, 
 that the one was Celtic and tribal in its organization ; 
 the other German, and Teutonic It was not a differ- 
 ence in name only, but of priority in point of time, 
 and in matters of feeling and temperament. The 
 land we are now accustomed to call England was first 
 known as Britain; and its inhabitants were called 
 Britons in Wales, Scots in Ireland, and Cymry in 
 Cornwall. In the course of time a combination of 
 these Celtic churches grew up — the British includ- 
 ing the Church in Wales; the Irish and the Scotch 
 forming a communion of their own. The Irish agreed 
 with the Britons on the Easter question, and in the 
 form of the Celtic tonsure, while the British Church 
 was organized on the basis of a diocesan episcopate; 
 in the Scottish Church, bishops, though respected in 
 their office, were employed by the Abbot of the Mon- 
 astery and a Council of Senior Monks only to perform 
 episcopal functions, such as ordination and the dedi- 
 cation of churches : and as missionaries in the founda- 
 tion of a liew Christian province. Christianity was 
 spread by means of branch houses and preaching sta- 
 tions. The Irish monks, as the result of clan organi- 
 zation, knew nothing whatever of local rights or terri- 
 
 3 
 
* INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 torial limits. Their acts were done in behalf of the 
 Monastic community, and on the responsibility of the 
 Abbot. The Monastery, in other words, and not the 
 Diocese, was the unit of organization. 
 
 When it is claimed, as it sometimes is, that "the 
 Church of Wales is older than the Church of England, 
 and has the proud distinction of standing in the van- 
 guard of the Church of England and Wales, not only 
 in preserving a complete ecclesiastical unity, but in 
 being the mother, rather than the daughter of the 
 Church of England," the claim, so far as the order of 
 time is concerned, is literally true. Whatever may be 
 the legendary character of the story of Joseph of Ari- 
 mathea, and the Holy Grael, or of Prince Arthur 
 and the Knights of the Eound Table, we have the 
 indisputable testimony of a Council of the Church 
 held at Aries in Gaul in the year a.d. 314, that 
 three bishops from Britain were present at the coun- 
 cil and took part in its deliberations, viz: Eborius 
 of York, Eestitutus of London, and Adelfius of 
 (probably) Caerleon-on-Usk, a priest and a deacon 
 being also in attendance. !N'ot only is it true, then, 
 that the British Church at the time was rec- 
 ognized as part and parcel of the Church Catholic: 
 but in the adherence given to the keeping of Easter 
 in the first Canon passed, and the necessity affirmed in 
 the twentieth Canon of the presence of not less than 
 three, and, if possible, seven bishops to take part in 
 laying on of hands, we have the discrimination made 
 between the British Church, in its corporate char- 
 acter, and the Irish and Scottish missionary organiza- 
 
THE BEITISH AND ENGLISH CHURCHES O 
 
 tion, of a later date, when, through the settling of the 
 Jutes and Saxons and Engles in the year a.d. 449, the 
 British Church found itself no longer the Church of 
 Britain, but the Church of the British limited to one 
 comer of Britain: the Saxon having gradually ob- 
 tained possession of the eastern, southern, and midland 
 parts of the country to be hereafter known as Eng- 
 land. It was then, the natural antipathy between 
 conquering Saxons and Engles, and the conquered 
 Britons began to make itself felt. 
 
 But if the British Church failed in its mission as 
 an organized church, the Irish Church made the most 
 of the opportunities placed within its reach to carry 
 oil the work under another form, when through the 
 agency of Saint Columba in the year 663, it succeeded 
 gradually in restoring Christianity to the low- 
 lands of Scotland and the northern districts of 
 Britain. When the British Church was cut off from 
 communication with Home in the fifth century by the 
 hostile and impassable barrier of heathen English, 
 Jutes, and Engles, the Church of Ireland shared its 
 isolation : and while Catholic in doctrine, had assigned 
 to it a singularly independent development, by cher- 
 ishing learning and a high enthusiasm, in complete 
 isolation from the rest of Christendom. It sent forth 
 not only Saint Columba (565) to the conversion of 
 the Picts in British Dalriada, and Saint Aidan to 
 the English !N'orthumbrians (635), but Saint Colum- 
 banus (595) to the Burgundian Jura, the Helvetian 
 Zurich, and the Italian cloisters of Bobbio, Saint Gall 
 (614) to the Alamans and the Lake of Constance — 
 
6 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 the apostle at once of the Gospel and of settled life, of 
 husbandry and tillage. While the Italian monks were 
 attempting, after the Koman fashion, in a political 
 and systematic way, to convert whole kingdoms en 
 Hoc by the previous conversion of their rulers, the 
 Irish preachers went to work with true missionary 
 earnestness to convert the half-Celtic people of !N'or- 
 thumbria man by man in their own homes. Aidan, 
 the Apostle of the N'orth, was among the first to see 
 the mistake of attempting to lord it over the people 
 committed to his care, as Gorman the bishop sent 
 first from lona had done: and transferred the seat 
 of the mission to Lindisfarne, an island on the coast 
 not protected by Koman walls like the royal Bam- 
 borough, but by the natural fortress of the sea and 
 the shifting sands for a barrier. Saint Aidan looked 
 for the conversion of the men of the north by min- 
 gling among the people. He went about his vast 
 diocese, not on horseback, unless necessity compelled 
 him, but on foot. Wherever he saw wayfarers ap- 
 proaching he went up to them at once, whether 
 rich or poor. If they were unbelievers he urged 
 them to receive the faith, if believers he urged 
 them by word and deed — for he lived as he taught 
 others to live — to alms and good works. Aidan had 
 as an aid King Gswald, who had been trained in 
 adversity at lona, and brought up in the Scottish 
 school. When Aidan, who knew little English, 
 preached to the military leaders and attendants of 
 the Gourt, Gswald acted as interpreter in his behalf 
 in the preaching of the Gospel. The effect of the 
 
THE BRITISH AND ENGLISH CHURCHES 7 
 
 change in the working of the mission was soon seen. 
 Churches were built at the various centres of teaching 
 by the help of the Irish missionaries, who, on hearing 
 of the success of Aidan's work, flocked to Northum- 
 bria, and covered the land with Christian teaching; 
 where, through the aid of the king's good offices, 
 property and lands were given for the establishment 
 of monasteries. Other Celtic missionaries penetrated 
 further south. Diuma preached to the Middle Eng- 
 lish of Leicester, and Peada, their Ealderman, son 
 of Penda, embraced the new faith. Ceadda, or Chad, 
 the patron saint of Lichfield, carried the Gospel to the 
 Mercians. Thus the heterodox Church, as it was 
 by some regarded at the time, made rapid strides 
 throughout the whole north. 
 
 It has become so much the fashion, in the reaction 
 from the extravagant claims of earlier writers, to lay 
 stress upon the Gregory the Great and the Italian 
 Mission that we have to thank Bishop Lightfoot for 
 calling attention again to the just claims to recogni- 
 tion by the Scoto-Celtic Church as an offset to the 
 demands of Wilfrid and the Roman school before 
 Theodore had entered on his work. "In spite of the 
 bitter and endless enmity which continued to exist be- 
 tween the remnant of the ancient British people, who 
 had found a refuge among the mountain fastnesses 
 of Wales and Cumberland," it has been well said by 
 Dean Spence, "and the ^N^orthmen conquerors of the 
 island ; in spite of the bloody and ceaseless feuds which 
 separated the kindred tribes of the conquerors, Chris- 
 tianity kept on making a steady, rapid progress in 
 
8 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 wellnigh all the districts of the island. But most of 
 the evangelizing work, we must ever remember, was 
 done by the Celtic rather than by the Roman mission 
 agencies. The stream of the Divine word, which 
 bathed in succession all the Pagan settlements of 
 the Northmen, flowed rather from the northern than 
 from the southern portion of the island — from lona, 
 the Monastery of Columba, on the Scottish coast, and 
 from Lindisfame, on the ISTorthumbrian coast, the 
 Monastery of Aidan, rather than from Canterbury 
 and the Kentish settlements of Augustine and his 
 successors." 
 
 That the Scoto-Celtic Church, apart altogether from 
 its relation to the British, was defective in the matter 
 of organization is undoubtedly true. The defect 
 arose from the fact that the potestas ordinis necessary 
 to valid consecration was not conferred by election, 
 but, in accordance with the clan system of the Irish 
 race, by a kind of right of inheritance from the 
 founder of the family. The communities thus formed 
 were not, in the proper meaning of the word, a 
 hierarchically constituted church, but only alliances 
 of a family kind loosely touching one another, with- 
 out altering their relation to the brotherhood or clan. 
 The difficulty was not a scholastic or theoretical one, 
 but inherent in a system which tended to degrade the 
 spiritual element inherent in the episcopate by placing 
 the bishop in subjection to the abbot, whether in orders 
 or simply a lay brother, if related by family inherit- 
 ance to the clan. And yet the working of the system 
 for missionary purposes had its value, because of the 
 
THE BRITISH AND ENGLISH CHURCHES 9 
 
 check it placed on the temptation to worldliness and 
 episcopal intolerance, on the part of the third order 
 of the ministry. Bishops, through the limitations 
 placed on their functions, were kept in their proper 
 place and used for ministerial purposes until the time 
 came for the adjustment of the relations of the po- 
 testas ordinis through the intervention of the idea of a 
 hierarchy of order. This took place in the time of Con- 
 stantino the Great, when the Germans, for political 
 purposes, were incorporated into the army. A new 
 element in the fourth century — the German national- 
 ity — was at work gradually infusing itself into the 
 Roman world, especially in the west. The Teutonic 
 spirit of individual freedom, as opposed to the Eoman 
 spirit of tyrannical universal law, in which the indi- 
 vidual and his interests were regarded as of no ac- 
 count, found in Christianity an element of assimila- 
 tion which made a marked difference in the treatment 
 of the barbarians as local factors in their rela- 
 tion to the state. While the impulsive, emotional Cel- 
 tic race was made use of as mercenaries Constantino 
 adopted the policy of treating the Germans with great 
 consideration. Not being attached to Roman ideas by 
 hereditary tradition, but having within them the 
 Teutonic attachment to personal freedom of life and 
 action which the Romans regarded as the peculiar 
 German characteristic, the leaders of the Goths val- 
 ued the Empire sufficiently to desire to partake of its 
 superior civilization. The result was the infusing of 
 new life into the effete Empire, ready to perish from 
 the growth of infanticide. Christianity, in the value 
 
10 EFFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 it attached to the sacredness of human life, found in 
 the Germanic races the soil prepared for it to implant 
 the seed from which is to spring the hope of immor- 
 tality. 
 
 Races have their mission, as well as men. The imr 
 pulsive Celt has his place in history as well as the 
 stolid Saxon. Each has his own position and work 
 divinely assigned him. The one is the counterpart 
 and complement of the other. Eor more than a hun- 
 dred years Catholic Christendom had heen divided 
 into three great sections: the Church of the East, 
 with Constantinople as its centre ; the Church of the 
 West, with its centre at Rome, and the Church of the 
 !N'orth-west, with its centre in Ireland. "While 
 Rome," as Mr. Wakeman observes, "was engaged in 
 tJie intellectual struggles of theological controversy, 
 Ireland was sending missionaries to convert the 
 heathen at the very gates of Italy. In Wales the Cel- 
 tic Church was throwing off the weakness and recover- 
 ing from the degradation caused by the long struggles 
 with its English conquerors. Organized, like the 
 Church in the East and West, under territorial bish- 
 ops, it too had developed under Saint David, Saint 
 Dubricius, and Saint Teilo, a real and true life of its 
 own, wholly uninfluenced by Rome." But the time 
 had come that something more was needed, if the 
 English Church, now that the German element had 
 been incorporated with the British, is to make its 
 power felt as the Kingdom of God in the world. His- 
 tory repeats itself. Monasticism is not an accident of 
 Christianity ; it is part and parcel of the preparatory 
 
THE BRITISH AND ENGLISH CHURCHES 11 
 
 work of the reformation which John the Baptist was 
 sent to represent in preparing the way for the setting 
 up of the Kingdom. John knew himself the relation 
 which he bore to Him whose way he was sent to 
 herald, better than his disciples did. His motto was 
 graven on the seal which bore witness to his being a 
 true prophet: — "He must increase, but I must de- 
 crease." For the building up and establishing of the 
 Kingdom new agents are needed, new moral forces are 
 to be called into existence. It was only to a super- 
 ficial onlooker that the stern prophet of the wilderness 
 seemed to stand in the way of Christ and the appear- 
 ing of the kingdom. The object of the law was to 
 rouse the sense of duty, while the function of the 
 prophet was to deepen the consciousness of guilt. 
 This done, the time had come for the proclamation 
 of the setting up of the kingdom by preaching the 
 remission of sins, and the opening of the door of ad- 
 mission to the nations to enter in. I^or could this 
 take effect except by violence, and the operation of the 
 law of catastrophe, as the old order perished and 
 the new development had begun to run its course. 
 It is true that there was a rigor amounting to severity 
 in the Scoto-Celtic monk, but this was combined 
 with the burning enthusiasm and impassioned love 
 of self-sacrifice for the souls of men which made their 
 presentment of Christianity a moral power over the 
 untutored heathenism of the men who yielded to its 
 influence. Their awful severity alternated with a deep 
 and broad tenderness which took by storm the hearts 
 of Engle and Saxon, now that persuasion had given 
 place to force in the extension of the faith. 
 
12 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 The Church of England, in the providence of God, 
 owes its existence to a Greek monk. His antecedents 
 as a memher of the Eastern Church enabled him to 
 harmonize the conflicting claims of the two schools 
 into which the English Church at the time of his 
 advent was divided, and to address himself with broad 
 views of ecclesiastical polity to the task of organizing 
 the Heptarchic churches into a harmonious province 
 of the Catholic Church. So far as culture was con- 
 cerned, Theodore was not in opposition to the Irish ; 
 they attended his schools, Aldhelm tells us, in large 
 numbers : but he took the ground and maintained it, 
 that since he was himself in Roman orders, in matters 
 of discipline whatever was lacking or questionable 
 in the orders of Scottish or British bishops, must 
 be remedied by the imposition of hands on the 
 part of a Catholic bishop. The primacy of Theodore, 
 following close as it did on the conference held at 
 Whitby, under Oswy, the successor of Oswald, and 
 trained in the same Celtic school, marks an epoch of 
 transition in the history of the British and English 
 churches. When he came into power as Arch- 
 bishop, it seemed as if there might be as many distinct 
 and independent churches as there were kingdoms in 
 the Heptarchy itself ; but if others founded churches, 
 Theodore organized them into one national church. 
 His great work consisted in the establishment of a 
 national synod under the presidency of the King 
 of Kent, in the year a.d. 673, at Hertford, under 
 himself as Archbishop of Canterbury. This was the 
 first step ever taken toward unification of England. 
 
THE BRITISH AND ENGLISH CHURCHES 13 
 
 Before the time of Theodore, the archbishops of Can- 
 terbury and all the bishops of the southern kingdom 
 had been Koman missionaries sent forth by Gregory 
 the Great; those of the north had been Scots or in 
 Scottish orders. After Theodore they were all Eng- 
 lishmen in Roman orders. It was the ecclesiastical 
 unity thus established which paved the way for the 
 political unity which was to follow it. Theodore, says 
 Bede, was the first archbishop whom all the English 
 Church obeyed. "Before his time," says the Anglo- 
 Saxon Chronicle, "the bishops had been Romans, but 
 from this time they were English." 
 
 It was left for Boniface, "the Apostle of Ger- 
 many," to complete the work Theodore of Canter- 
 bury had begun. Owing to the zeal and energy 
 of the English missionaries at a time when the 
 Church in the eighth century was losing ground on the 
 Continent of Europe, the schools of Britain and Ire- 
 land, as the result of the efforts of Theodore and 
 Adrian to cultivate the advance of the Greek and Latin 
 tongues, were among the best in Christendom : and of 
 all the schools that of Archbishop Egbert ranked 
 among the first. The English missionaries were not 
 slow to emulate the zeal of their Celtic forerunners, in 
 their efforts to carry the light of the Gospel to the still 
 pagan nations on the Continent. Boniface, in the 
 year T18, visited Rome, carrying with him the com- 
 mendatory letter of the Bishop of Winchester, and 
 obtained the sanction of Gregory II. to his mission 
 among the Hessians and other heathen tribes of Ger- 
 many. When consecrated to his work on a second 
 
14 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUKCH 
 
 visit to Rome, as missionary bishop in 722, Boniface 
 took the oath of obedience to the Roman See. Boni- 
 face has been found fault with for this. But the 
 legitimate claims of the Roman See had to be main- 
 tained for the time being in view of the anarchy which 
 prevailed. When the question of the submission of the 
 English Church to Rome was brought forward, at the 
 Synod of Cloveshoo, in a.d. 747, it was determined 
 that "if there is anything which a bishop could not 
 reform in his own diocese, he was to bring it before 
 the Archbishop in Synod." Boniface himself with- 
 stood the interference of Stephen II. when he felt 
 called upon to do so. 
 
 I have hitherto purposely refrained, in dealing 
 with the subject of the relations of the British and 
 English Churches, upon entering any further than 
 necessary, from an historical point of view, on the 
 controversial questions involved. An impartial judg- 
 ment of the arguments advanced by the contesting 
 parties will result in the conclusion that the com- 
 batants were, for the most part, too much influenced by 
 passion and prejudice to deal fairly one with another. 
 The Easter question, which comes to the front at the 
 conference called at Whitby to settle upon terms of 
 agreement was, in truth, an old issue in a new form. 
 While Victor of Rome had neither the right nor the 
 power, without consulting the Churches of Asia 
 Minor, to fix the date for the keeping of Easter, now 
 that the transition had taken place between Judaism 
 and Christianity, the observance had become a matter 
 of catholic unity, and could no longer be reckoned 
 
THE BRITISH AND ENGLISH OHUKCHES 15 
 
 among things indifferent — to be left to individual 
 choice or caprice. The question of tonsure, so hotly 
 contested between the Eomanizing followers of Wil- 
 frid on the one side, and the British and Scottish 
 schools on the other, was in reality not an ecclesiastical 
 dispute which, on the ground of apostolic tradition, 
 either on the authority of Saint Peter or Saint John, 
 could be settled, but one which had to do with the 
 entrance of the neophyte on the religious life before 
 taking holy orders. The tonsure in itself, like the 
 cutting of hair of the Nazarite, was neither Greek nor 
 Eoman in its Origin, but a mark of separation from 
 the world, whether under the Hebrew dispensation, or 
 the Druidical priest, consecrated to religion. The 
 form of the tonsure it was for the monk, whether 
 Greek or Eoman, Jewish or Pagan, to determine, and 
 had no place in Christian symbolism, properly so- 
 called. Viewed in the light of a ceremonial adjunct, 
 tonsure, as a symbol of separation, was common to 
 all forms of religion, whether Greek, Eoman, or 
 Druidical, alike. 
 
 To Gregory the Great the English Church owes 
 ^e initiative in laying the foundation of its hie- 
 ^^archical superstructure. When Theodore, at the call 
 of Vitalian, first came to Britain the Church was little 
 more than a collection of independent mission sta- 
 tions ; the Primate of Canterbury little more than a 
 diocesan bishop, unknown beyond the bounds of Kent, 
 and in danger of being overshadowed by the great 
 bishopric of l^orthumbria. Bishops and clergy lived 
 together in common in the monasterium. There were 
 
16 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 no parish clmrches and no resident clergy. Theo- 
 dore's work for the first three years of his episcopate 
 was to make a general visitation, with the help of 
 Adrian, asserting his own position as archbishop, and 
 organizing the various dioceses around the See of 
 Canterbury. The next step was to call a provincial 
 synod at Hertford, at which the leading bishops of 
 Britain, with the exception of Wilfrid who was rep- 
 resented by proxies, were in attendance, to help aid 
 Theodore in this first visitation, which ended in 671. 
 The visitation made by Theodore was thorough (in 
 the latest Loudion meaning of the word) : it was like 
 all Theodore's work, conservative and not destructive, 
 conciliatory and not subversive of what had already 
 been done by the authorities in Church and State be- 
 fore his coming into the country. When he found 
 that two British bishops had taken part with the vice- 
 bishop of Winchester in consecrating Chad to Lindis- 
 f arne, Theodore did not allow himself to be influenced 
 by the sentiment of the first time when the union of 
 the two divergent lines had met together in a joint 
 act, but took occasion to supplement whatever was 
 lacking in Chad's acceptance, since he had in his 
 "Penitential" made a rule that "all ordained by 
 bishops of the Scots or Britons who held to the Celtic 
 usages had no orders in the Catholic Church until 
 their orders had been confirmed by the imposition of 
 the hands of a Catholic bishop." When Chad yielded 
 the point in question, and in a spirit of meekness 
 complied with Theodore's pledge given to the Eoman 
 See, he secured for him, at the request of Wulfere, 
 
THE BRITISH AND ENGLISH CHURCHES 17 
 
 the King of Mercia, the See of Lichfield, as a token 
 of reconciliation and a reward for his spirit of self- 
 surrender. 
 
 When we contrast Theodore with Augustine, we 
 can discern the hand of God in the changes which 
 had been gradually at work in the transformation by 
 which the Church of Britain had become the Church 
 of England ; and after a transition period of a hun- 
 dred and fifty years, through the intervention of Greg- 
 ory the Great and Theodore of Tarsus, the Church 
 of England was prepared to transmit to future gener- 
 ations whatsoever was truly catholic in the Greek 
 and Roman Churches, without becoming Byzantine 
 on the one hand, or Roman Catholic on the other. 
 It was by no accident that Gregory the Great was 
 fitted to be a statesman different in liberality of tone 
 and temper from Augustine and Paulinus. I^either 
 was it by chance that a Greek monk, after Adrian had 
 refused the offer of the archbishopric, should be se- 
 lected by Gregory's successor at Rome, Vitalian, to 
 qualify himself to unite with Adrian in the work of 
 organizing the English Church; nor was it acci- 
 dental that the British and Celtic Churches, by 
 their missionary efforts during the interregnum 
 caused by the withdrawal of the Roman occupa- 
 tion of the island, and the invasion of the German 
 tribes, had prepared the way for the Heptarchy 
 to become a nation: and Greek culture and civ- 
 ilization combined with Roman law and imperial 
 organization, under the form of provincial and di- 
 ocesan arrangement with a graduated hierarchy of 
 
18 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 orders, to correct the disintegrating tendency of Celtic 
 impulse and German personality to schism and di- 
 vision, while councils are being held to formulate the 
 doctrines of the faith, and codes of law were formed, 
 by the Penitentials of Theodore of Tarsus and the 
 Pandects of Theodorus and Justinian, to systematize 
 the laws by which the new forces which had been set 
 in motion by the introduction of the barbarians are to 
 be converted and educated for the establishing of the 
 Kingdom of Christ in the world. Bede tells us that 
 the scholars of Theodore and Adrian were as well 
 versed in Latin and Greek as in their own language. 
 Under Theodore the Church of England became pre- 
 eminently a learned church. Before his time students 
 from Britain, as well as from the Continent, had been 
 accustomed to flock to the Irish monastic schools. 
 Theodore brought back the learning which had been 
 banished from Britain by the English conquest. His 
 no less gifted friend, Adrian, Bede tells us, was ex- 
 ceedingly skilled in Greek and in Latin. At the 
 school which Augustine founded at Canterbury, a 
 number of eminent men were educated by Adrian, 
 and the sainted John of Beverly, who became Bishop 
 of Hexham in 687 and of York in Y05. There, too, 
 Aldhelm, under whom as Abbot of Malmesbury the 
 monastery became so famous that scholars from 
 France and Scotland flocked to his teaching; and 
 who, under Ini, King of Wessex, became the first 
 bishop of Sherborne in a.d. 705. It was to Alcuin of 
 York, it will be remembered, that Charlemagne, 
 when he wished to revive the almost extinguished 
 
TKE BEITISH AND ENGLISH OHUECHES 19 
 
 literature of France, turned for help. In the year 
 787 he was, by the invitation of Charles, present at 
 the Council of Frankfort, where the influence of 
 the English Church, as contradistinguished from the 
 Greek and Latin schools of theology, was for the 
 first time felt by the insertion of the catholic verity 
 of the Procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father 
 and the Son, already acknowledged by the English 
 Church by the Council of Hatfield in a.d. 680, and 
 at the command of the Emperor ordered to be sung 
 in the creed. 
 
#f 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 €^t Cljurcft a^ tt^t ^Ducatot of tt^t people 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 €i)e €I)uttt) a^ tt)e (etititator of tfyt people 
 
 THE general subject of which mine is a sub- 
 division is "The Influence of the English 
 Church on Anglo-Saxon Civilization," but as 
 it is manifestly impossible to sever the English Church 
 from the Church of the Apostolic and Post-Apostolic 
 period, so it is equally out of the question to discuss 
 the subject of Christian education and the establish- 
 ment of schools and universities under the control of 
 the Church, apart from the lessons of the Christian 
 centuries which preceded the foundations of learning 
 in the British Isles. 
 
 In all great movements of whatever kind, which 
 have profoundly influenced our civilization, it is well 
 to have an historical perspective, through which to 
 view them, and a background against which to outline 
 the figures, which stand in such bold relief upon the 
 foreground of our canvas. The work of Christian 
 education, which in this paper we will define to be 
 education under the auspices of the Church, took its 
 rise in that period of "acute hellenization," as Mr. 
 Hamack aptly describes it, when the Church formed 
 its first compact with Greek thought and philosophy, 
 and the human intellect was started upon a career of 
 speculation and inquiry from which there was no 
 turning back until an answer had been found in the 
 Catholic creeds. 'No discussion of "the Church as the 
 
 23 
 
24 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 educator of the people" would be complete which 
 failed to note the tremendous impulse which was given 
 to the spirit of inquiry and research throughout the 
 entire Conciliar period. Often, no doubt, we are con- 
 scious of a certain distrust of the metaphysical and 
 exegetical arguments employed by the disputants on 
 either side, but through all the subtleties of meta- 
 physics, and strife of words as to the exact meaning 
 of "substance" and "subsistence," of nature and per- 
 sonality, one fact shines out clear and unmistakable, 
 the triumph of the catholic party was the triumph of 
 human reason guided and illumined by the Spirit of 
 God. The Church during that period of intellectual 
 unrest and perplexity, definitely and once for all com- 
 mitted herself to the principle that learning and phi- 
 losophy may serve as the handmaids of religion in the 
 search for truth. 
 
 Any attempt, therefore, in our own time to dis- 
 parage dogma and to teach that it is of no special 
 consequence what men believe about Christ, so long 
 as they live His life and are animated by His spirit, 
 under whatever name it may cloak itself, is really an 
 attempt to undervalue the part that reason and schol- 
 arship have played in the development of Christian 
 doctrine. The union that was formed in the third 
 and fourth centuries between philosophy and religion, 
 between Hellenism and Hebraism, between Greek 
 culture and the simple, unquestioning faith of a 
 youthful church set free from the trammels of Juda- 
 ism, was God-ordained. 
 
 In the union of reason and faith thus consecrated 
 
THB.CHUECH AS AN EDUCATOR 25 
 
 to the great task of working out a rational theology 
 and Christology, we have the Magna Charta of Chris- 
 tian education in all ages. The intellectual conflict 
 precipitated by the attacks of the Gnostics and early 
 heresies upon the faith of the Church was the price 
 of her intellectual freedom. By the question pro- 
 pounded to His disciples at Csesarea Philippi, "Whom 
 do men say that I, the Son of Man, am ?" our Lord 
 Himself may be justly said to have been the first who 
 started the inquiry concerning His nature and person, 
 which He must have foreseen would engage the mind 
 of His Church for centuries after His Ascension. 
 Once challenge men, as He did, with the searching 
 and pertinent question, "Whom do ye say that I am V 
 and you start the human intellect upon a voyage of 
 discovery which, however perilous, can never be cur- 
 tailed or surrendered as vain and futile. It is useless 
 for theologians, like Harnack, to deplore this fusion 
 of philosophy with religion in the ante-l!Ticene period 
 and to speak of the loss of the "original enthusiasm" 
 and "simplicity of the first converts" of the new re- 
 ligion, as though the hold which Christianity had upon 
 men declined just in proportion as they began to use 
 their brains, and to seek to discover the proper mean- 
 ing of Godhead and Manhood, and of the conditions 
 of their union in the One Person of Christ. 
 
 Such a development of Christian doctrine was in- 
 evitable. It was essential to the very existence of 
 Christianity in the world that the Church should state 
 in distinct and scientific form truths which had been 
 held from the beginning, but which the minds of men 
 
26 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 had not been Exercised in precisely defining. In the 
 Garden of Eden, from which our first parents were 
 cast out for their disobedience, we read that the Tree 
 of Life was planted close to the Tree of Knowledge, 
 to indicate that there can be no complete Christian 
 life without knowledge, and that apart from knowl- 
 edge life is feeble and insecure. In working out a 
 true Christology, the Church did not hesitate to make 
 use of the learning and culture of the ancients. She 
 called to her aid the dialectical skill of the trained 
 disputants of the schools of Athens and Alexandria. 
 She adopted the very language of the philosophical 
 systems by which she was surrounded. She borrowed 
 alike from philosophizing Jew and Greek Platonist. 
 Her ablest defenders were men like Justin Martyr 
 and Clement of Alexandria; men who had travelled 
 through many different countries in search of wisdom, 
 and had studied in the great schools of heathen philos- 
 ophy, and who at last had found a complete answer 
 to their eager questionings in the Faith of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 These men accepted the Gospel, not because all that 
 they had learned in the schools of the Platonists or 
 of the Stoics had been false, but because they found 
 in Christianity the fulfilment of the half truths of 
 Paganism and the realization of ethical ideals which 
 had been partially though imperfectly anticipated in 
 the writings of heathen philosophers like Aristotle 
 and Epictetus. While Tertullian and Irenseus, and 
 even Saint Augustine, in his later years, condemned 
 philosophy as the fruitful mother of heresies, Justin 
 
THE CHURCH AS AN EDUCATOR 27 
 
 Martyr and the Greek theologians of the school of 
 Clement and Athanasius did not hesitate to teach that 
 Christianity was the only true philosophy. 
 
 It is said that Justin Martyr, after his conversion, 
 always wore his philosopher's cloak to signify the 
 continuity of his spiritual history and that, in be- 
 coming a Christian, he had not ceased to be a philos- 
 opher. This attitude of mind was something new in 
 the history of the Church, and is worthy of mention 
 here because it represents the attitude which the true 
 Christian teacher and scholar should assume toward 
 all departments of human learning. 
 
 In the earnestness with which this great Christian 
 apologist sought after the truth ; in the breadth of his 
 culture and freedom from prejudice; in the unity of 
 his knowledge, as well as in the continuity of his re- 
 ligious history, we have the germ of all Christian edu- 
 cation. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that 
 the first Christian school of the early Church, the first 
 great intellectual centre of learning fostered by the 
 Church and presided over by men of distinguished 
 abilities, was the Catechetical School of Alexandria, 
 which tradition says was founded by Saint Mark, and 
 which by the middle of the second century had be- 
 come a seminary for the training of the clergy, and 
 for giving advanced courses of instruction to the more 
 highly educated converts. In the succession of emi- 
 nent scholars and theologians who presided over this 
 school we may see the worthy successors of Justin 
 Martyr and others like him, who had been led to 
 Christianity, not through Judaism, but through a 
 
28 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 long line of philosophers and "seekers after the 
 truth," whose preparatory labors had aided them to a 
 better understanding of the faith of the Gospel. To 
 this orthodox Alexandrian school and to the teachings 
 of Pantsenus, Clement, Origen, and Athanasius, we 
 have the first denial of the alleged opposition between 
 faith and knowledge, which the Gnostics were so fond 
 of maintaining, and which has proved in every age of 
 the Church the greatest foe of progress and the most 
 serious drawback to the cause of higher education. 
 Freedom of thought and the open door of investiga- 
 tion into the foundations of religious belief may prove 
 dangerous weapons in the hands of the irreverent and 
 unbelieving. They were so in the school of Alexan- 
 dria. But, if some of the most dangerous heresies 
 which threatened the faith of the Church emanated 
 from this Christian school, we should not forget that 
 it also produced a catholic theology which completely 
 met and overcame them.* 'No other writer has given 
 us such a complete answer to Gnosticism as Clement 
 of Alexandria, and when the accomplished heathen 
 Celsus attacked the new religion with ridicule and 
 argument, it was from Alexandria that the answer 
 came. And later, when Arianism threatened to sweep 
 away the bulwarks of the ancient faith and poison 
 Christianity at its very source, it was from this same 
 school of Alexandria that Athanasius came and con- 
 tended for the true doctrine of the Incarnation. This 
 great theologian and Christian scholar exposed the 
 sophistry of the Arians, laid bare their fallacious ar- 
 * Allen — "Continuity of Christian Thought." 
 
THE CHUKCH AS AN EDUCATOE 29 
 
 guments, showed men the true outcome of their phi- 
 losophy, and, under God, saved the Church from seri- 
 ous error. 
 
 What a simple and unquestioning faith could not 
 do, enlightened reason and accurate scholarship, 
 guided and illumined by the Spirit of God alone, was 
 enabled to accomplish. The Church found her ablest 
 defender and greatest theologian in this reverent 
 Christian scholar trained in a "Church college," 
 deeply versed in the philosophy and learning of the 
 ancients, borrowing the weapons of his dialectical skill 
 and rhetorical acumen from the heathen schools of 
 Athens and Alexandria. Could there be a better ar- 
 gument for the establishment of institutions of higher 
 learning under the auspices of the Church than the 
 career of Saint Athanasius affords ? The production 
 of one such Christian scholar and theologian would 
 be worth all the labor and all the sacrifice that the 
 Church now gives to maintain them. 
 
 The early Church had no more astute and danger- 
 ous foe than Julian the Apostate. He had learned 
 from the experience of former times that it was use- 
 less to try to suppress Christianity by force. He 
 therefore undertook to reduce its professors to the 
 condition of an illiterate sect. He sought to defeat it 
 and to put a stop to the spread of Christianity in the 
 world by divorcing it from human culture. He issued 
 an edict that no "Galilean," as the Christians were 
 styled by law, should become a teacher of classical 
 literature. He declared that the Greek language be- 
 longed to his own party, and that Christians had no 
 
30 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 share in a literature to which their own writings 
 were opposed. He went so far as to prohibit the chil- 
 dren of Christian parents from attending the public 
 schools or from studying any classical author. 
 
 Thus he sought to deprive the Church of the weap- 
 ons of controversial warfare, which she knew only too 
 well how to turn against the absurdities of pagan 
 mythology. Julian had perception enough to see that 
 the most powerful weapon which the Christian apolo- 
 gist could wield against a decaying paganism was the 
 trained mind and the broad culture of the student fa- 
 miliar with all the learning of his day and yet imbued 
 with the spirit of Christ and holding in its integrity 
 the historic Faith. And whenever the Church has 
 sought to place shackles upon the human mind, or has 
 cut herself off from any avenue of approach to a wider 
 knowledge of God and of His works, she is falling into 
 the traps of her enemies and unconsciously adopting 
 measures employed for her suppression by the apos- 
 tate and unbeliever. 
 
 The antidote for doubt is not authority. It is not 
 dogma divorced from inquiry and research. It is 
 scholarship, free, unfettered, and reverent. To the 
 unbelief which is so prevalent in our own time we 
 can no longer oppose the authority of Scripture or the 
 authority of Church councils. We must show men, 
 as those great Christian scholars of Alexandria in the 
 second and third century sought to show them, that 
 Christianity is the only true philosophy ; that there is 
 not an article of our creed nor a doctrine of the Church 
 which cannot be shown to have a rational basis. 
 
THE CHURCH AS AN EDUCATOR 31 
 
 Nothing could be more characteristic of the attitude 
 of mind of Saint Athanasius and men of his school, 
 than that, in contending for the Nicene formula in 
 the East, he declined to rest its claims to acceptance 
 solely upon the authority of the Council, but preferred 
 to commend it to men's minds by a process of reason- 
 ing. Do not understand me to say that I disparage 
 in the least the noble power of unquestioning faith. 
 The Bible, the Church, God, may be and are the deep- 
 est realities to many simple and devout souls, who have 
 but little or no understanding of the grounds of their 
 religious belief. But Christ has commanded us to 
 love God with all our mind, as well as with the soul 
 and the affections, and that faith can never be the 
 highest faith in which the head is divorced from the 
 heart, nor that love the strongest and most unchange- 
 able which does not bring with it a reverent mind to 
 bear upon the deep things of God. We have dwelt at 
 some length upon this early experiment of Christian 
 education in the great city of Alexandria, because 
 we believe that in the intellectual activity and free- 
 dom which distinguished that ancient foundation of 
 learning, we have the earliest historical beginnings of 
 Christian education and the true lines laid down along 
 which the Church must advance in her work as "the 
 Educator of the people." 
 
 When we pass, in the fourth and fifth centuries, 
 from Greek to Latin theology, we find ourselves in a 
 very different atmosphere. "In the Latin Church, 
 theology was subordinated to the requirements of an 
 ecclesiastical hierarchy." The Roman Church devoted 
 
32 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 its chief energies to the important work of discipline 
 and organization. To her we owe the love of order, 
 ohedience to authority, and the solidarity of the one 
 body of Christ, which enabled the Church to resist 
 successfully the inroads of the barbarians, and to 
 erect upon the ruins of pagan Eome a spiritual em- 
 pire which, in the scope of its influence and in the 
 nations which acknowledged its sway, far surpassed 
 the dreams of the Caesars or the ambition of Alexan- 
 der the Great. The tendency of Latin theology, as 
 set forth in the writings of Saint Augustine, was to 
 regard the reason as an untrustworthy and dangerous 
 guide in matters of faith. Divine revelation was 
 looked upon as a "deposit" to be handed down unim- 
 paired and unchangeable. It was to be received solely 
 upon the authority of the Church, and demanded of 
 all men an implicit and unquestioning acceptance. 
 There can be no doubt that, for the work of evangeliz- 
 ing the rude barbarian hordes that swept over Europe 
 in the fifth and sixth centuries, nothing could have 
 been devised better than the theology and discipline 
 of the Latin Church. ^^sTew races had come forward 
 to take up the work of human progress and to preserve 
 and hand on a Christian civilization, and for these 
 half-civilized and untutored barbarians it was neces- 
 sary that they should first be taught as children, solely 
 upon the authority of the Church and the Scriptures. 
 Like all primitive peoples in the early stages of their 
 ethical and spiritual history, they had first to pass 
 under the yoke of the Law before they were prepared 
 for the spirit and larger liberty of the Gospel. In 
 
THE CHUKCH AS AN EDUCATOR 33 
 
 this work of transition from the old to the new order, 
 Saint Augustine was the leading spirit. His writings 
 continued to be the basis of all subsequent study of 
 theology throughout the Middle Ages, and the princi- 
 ples of ecclesiastical law and authority which he enun- 
 ciated, dominated the mind of Western Europe for a 
 thousand years. 
 
 It is well to keep in mind this long supremacy of 
 Saint Augustine over the thought of Western Chris- 
 tendom if we are to understand in what sense the 
 monasteries of the Middle Ages became the nurseries 
 of learning, and the part that the Church played in 
 the work of Christian education. From the sixth to 
 the ninth centuries the work of evangelizing the new 
 races, and of winning them to the obedience of the 
 Church went on with unabated zeal and diligence. 
 What the arms of the Roman legions under Yalentin- 
 ian and Maximus could not do the Faith and Disci- 
 pline of the Church accomplished. But it is safe to 
 say that in the convulsions that followed the barbarian 
 invasions the intellectual energy of the Church was 
 paralyzed. 
 
 A parting gleam of the old Greek love of learning 
 issued in the sixth century from the court of Theodoric 
 at Ravenna, which was adorned by the genius of 
 Boethius, but after this time, for a long period, liter- 
 ature consisted almost entirely of sermons and of the 
 lives of the saints, which were composed in the mon- 
 asteries. The series of historical events which later 
 led to the political and ecclesiastical separation of the 
 West from the speculative theology and thought of the 
 
34 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUKCH 
 
 East, tended still further to arrest the intellectual de- 
 velopment of the Latin Church and to deprive men 
 of a knowledge of the language of the New Testament, 
 and thus to cut them off from the original sources of 
 information concerning the faith and order of prim- 
 itive Christianity. The complete absence of all curi- 
 osity about the language and literature of the Greeks 
 is shown by the fact that Greek was suffered to become 
 almost extinct in the monasteries of Western Europe, 
 although there was no time since the foundation of the 
 Church in Eome that the Latins had not some rela- 
 tions with the Greek, or when frequent pilgrimages 
 to the Holy Land had altogether ceased. 
 
 That view of God and of the world which regarded 
 all study which does not concern the salvation of the 
 soul as useless and profane, led in time to the aban- 
 donment of all secular learning. Even so distin- 
 guished a scholar as Alcuin rebuked the too eager 
 curiosity of Charlemagne to pry into the secrets of the 
 natural world, and we are told by his old biographer 
 that he would not allow his pupils to read the "false- 
 hoods" of Virgil, as he termed them, though he had 
 once delighted in the study of that Latin author him- 
 self. 
 
 This reactionary spirit against the practice and 
 teaching of the early Greek Church represented by 
 such men as Justin Martyr, Clement, and Origen, is 
 best shown in the attitude of Gregory the Great, who, 
 in a letter to Desiderius, Bishop of Vienne, rebuked 
 him for having taught certain persons pagan litera- 
 
THB^OHUECH AS AN EDUCATOR 35 
 
 ture and thus mingled "the praises of Jupiter with 
 the praises of Christ." 
 
 As showing the general disrepute into which the 
 classics had fallen, it was the custom among the monks 
 of some of the monasteries, when they were under the 
 discipline of silence, if they desired the works of 
 Virgil or Horace, to scratch their ears like a dog, to 
 which animal the literature of the ancients was usu- 
 ally compared. 
 
 The intellectual services which the monasteries ren- 
 dered the cause of learning were not so much in the 
 spirit of inquiry and research which they fostered as 
 in the preservation of Christian and pagan writings 
 and in the perpetuation and cultivation of the Latin 
 language. It is an undoubted fact that for a consid- 
 erable period of time the monasteries of Europe were 
 the only libraries. The monks transcribed the works 
 of classical and Christian antiquity, and were the 
 chief instruments of preserving and keeping alive a 
 knowledge of the classics. But though they rendered 
 incalculable service to the cause of education by the 
 preservation of many ancient manuscripts, yet noth- 
 ing could better describe their manner of regarding 
 them than the zeal which they sometimes displayed 
 in erasing many of the most valuable parchments, to 
 write them over with their own legends and lives of 
 the saints. In considering the part which the monas- 
 tic establishments of the Middle Ages played in the 
 evolution of higher education in Europe, it is well 
 also to remember that their founders intended that 
 
36 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUKCH 
 
 their disciples should be patterns of the highest Chris- 
 tian life, rather than theologians and teachers. In 
 its first inception, inonasticism was primarily an in- 
 stitution for the training and cultivation of the spir- 
 itual life. In the beginning the monasteries were 
 founded by laymen, who had little or no theological 
 training. By many of the monks ecclesiastical office 
 was regarded as inconsistent with the highest spiritual 
 life. Pachomius charged his brotherhood to shun or- 
 dination as a snare, and it was a common saying in 
 Egypt that "a monk ought to avoid bishops and 
 women," for neither will allow him to rest quietly in 
 his cell or to devote himself to the contemplation of 
 heavenly things. Thus, in the beginning, the usual 
 educational and theological requirements for those 
 who entered the ranks of the secular clergy were not 
 required of those who applied for admission to the 
 monastic orders. And it is probable that this absence 
 of all educational tests exercised a lasting influence 
 upon their subsequent history. They were almost 
 exclusively social and religious communities, in which 
 the life of prayer and contemplation was varied by 
 labors for the good of mankind. 
 
 The monks cleared the forests, built roads, re- 
 claimed wastes, cultivated agriculture ; they civilized 
 the rude barbarian population by which they were sur- 
 rounded ; their monasteries served as places of refuge 
 from the slayer and the avenger ; and they stood be- 
 tween the cruelty and rapacity of the feudal lord and 
 his vassal. During the worst of the wild days which 
 followed the Teutonic conquest they kept alive in the 
 
THE CHUECH AS AN EDUCATOR 37 
 
 breasts of men a sense of the Divine justice and right- 
 eousness. Socially, they were on the side of peace and 
 order ; on the side of purity, of liberty for the slave, 
 and protection for the oppressed. In the religious 
 teachings of the clergy — though often confused with 
 error and superstition — the great central verities of 
 the Christian faith were preserved and handed on. 
 This was the inestimable and lasting service which 
 they rendered the cause of Christianity and of civiliza- 
 tion in the world. The part which they played in the 
 intellectual progress of mankind was negative rather 
 than positive. They safeguarded the records of classi- 
 cal and Christian literature and preserved many an- 
 cient and valuable manuscripts, which later served as 
 the basis for the revival of learning and letters in the 
 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A good deal of 
 composition proceeded from the monasteries, but it 
 was a composition which in the range of its ideas was 
 exceedingly meagre and limited. But it cannot be 
 claimed by the advocates of mediaeval monasticism 
 that it fostered the love of learning, except in a very 
 narrow and restricted sense. To love truth sincerely 
 means to pursue it with unflagging zeal, and to be 
 prepared to follow the light of evidence even to the 
 most unwelcome conclusions. This was not the atti- 
 tude of mind that was fostered in the monasteries. 
 The blind and unquestioning obedience which was ex- 
 acted from all who took the "monastic vows," the duty 
 of absolute submission to the teaching and authority 
 of the Church, which rendered all investigation into 
 the original sources of religious belief impious and 
 
38 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 ■/^ 
 
 profane, tlie crowd of superstitions attributed to di- 
 rect inspiration of God, which barred the path of 
 knowledge, the charge of heresy which was so readily 
 brought against every bold inquirer, effectually put a 
 check to all original and independent thinking, and 
 placed fetters upon the human mind which made the 
 earnest pursuit of truth impossible. "It is an open 
 question," says Mr. Lecky, "whether the good that 
 monasteries did the cause of learning as the recepta- 
 cles of literature was not more than counterbalanced 
 by the harm which they did the human mind in di- 
 vorcing it from all secular learning and by inculcating 
 a spirit of abject credulity, which it is the first duty 
 of the true educator to eradicate." In no sense, there- 
 fore, can the monasteries of mediaeval Europe be con- 
 sidered as the precursors of the great universities of 
 England and of the Continent. The free and un- 
 trammelled spirit with which the modern scholar at 
 any of our great universities pursues his independent 
 investigations, is as different from the habit of mind 
 and the blind unquestioning submission to authority 
 which prevailed in the monasteries, as it is possible to 
 imagine. 
 
 We have only to study the career of an independent 
 and inquiring spirit like Eoger Bacon — ^himself a 
 monk — to realize the difference between the intellect- 
 ual freedom of the modem university and the narrow- 
 ness and intolerance of mediaeval Catholicism. At a 
 time when physical science was neglected and dis- 
 couraged by the authorities of the Church, this man, 
 with transcendent genius and inflexible determina- 
 
THE CHURCH AS AN EDUCATOB 39 
 
 tion, applied himself to the study of nature. Four- 
 teen years of his life were spent in prison, and when 
 he died his name was blasted as a magician. Could 
 there be a more striking instance of one who resisted 
 the tendencies of his age and succeeded in spite of his 
 environment ? 
 
 In invention and original research, which are the 
 distinguishing features of modem education, the mon- 
 asteries were singularly barren. The invention of 
 gunpowder and of the mariner's compass, which have 
 exerted such lasting influence upon the history of civ- 
 ilization, are in no way to be attributed to the monks 
 of the Middle Ages. The great intellectual move- 
 ment of the Middle Ages, Scholasticism, which was an 
 attempt to bring the theology of the Church into har- 
 mony with reason and philosophy, originated not in 
 the monasteries, but in the schools established in con- 
 nection with the great cathedrals. The very name 
 "scholasticism" is derived from the episcopal schools 
 of Lyon and Orleans established by Charlemagne and 
 Alcuin in the ninth century. The two great leaders 
 of scholasticism in the Middle Ages, Duns Scotus and 
 Thomas Aquinas, received their education not in 
 monastic establishments, but in the universities of 
 Oxford and ^N'aples. Duns Scotus pursued his studies, 
 first at Oxford, then at Paris, while Thomas Aquinas 
 was educated at the University of l^aples and later 
 in the Dominican school of Cologne. William of 
 Occam and Roger Bacon received their education at 
 Oxford and Paris. Peter Lombard studied juris- 
 prudence and the liberal arts at the University of 
 
40 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 Bologna, while Abelard got his training in dialectics 
 and philosophy at the cathedral school of I^Totre 
 Dame. We look almost in vain for any theologian 
 and scholar of note in the Middle Ages who was solely 
 the product of the monastic system. It was not until 
 education passed from the monasteries to the universi- 
 ties and cathedral schools and a fresh impulse was 
 given intellectual activity by the labors of William 
 of Champeaux and other eminent teachers, that we 
 have anything like the beginnings of modern educa- 
 tion. The cathedral schools like that of Xotre Dame, 
 the school of Seville under Saint Isidore of Spain in 
 the fifth century, the school of Bologna, which tradi- 
 tion carried back as far as the reign of Theodosius 
 II., in A.D. 433, and the cathedral school of York, 
 were later developed into seminaries of general learn- 
 ing, and are the true historic foundations upon which 
 the great universities of Europe and of England were 
 afterward erected. Indeed, as far as our studies have 
 carried us in this paper, we have not been able to find 
 a single instance in which a great monastery devel- 
 oped later into an institution of higher learning for 
 the teaching of philosophy and the liberal arts. The 
 monastic discipline, while it appealed to spirits of a 
 mystical tendency and offered attractions to the culti- 
 vation of the spiritual life, failed to satisfy the men- 
 tal craving of another class of minds that were ex- 
 ercised in bold speculations which often pass beyond 
 the boundaries of orthodoxy, and which naturally 
 therefore, sought a wider arena and a freer intellect- 
 
THE CHUECH AS AN EDUCATOR 41 
 
 ual atmosphere, than were to be found in the seclusion 
 of the cloister and the cell. 
 
 It deserves to be stated here, however, that the 
 monasteries- of Ireland and Scotland, whose mission- 
 aries and teachers in the sixth and seventh centuries/ 
 contributed so much to the evangelization and convert 
 sion of heathen and Saxon England, maintained a / 
 higher standard of scholarship than their European 
 neighbors, and a knowledge of Greek and of Hellenic, 
 culture was cherished among the Irish-Scotch clergyl 
 long after it had disappeared from the Continent. 
 
 John Scotus, whom tradition says was a Scotchman, 
 was one of the few theologians of his time who knew 
 any Greek ; and as showing the greater liberality of 
 their views, it is curious to read of Irish monks pro- 
 claiming in Germany, to the great scandal of Boni- 
 face, the possible salvability of the heathen at a time 
 when it was the universal belief that all who died 
 outside of the Catholic Church were doomed to uni- 
 versal woe. 
 
 The story of Saint Columba, who, when on a visit 
 to his friend and former teacher. Saint Einnian, sur- 
 reptitiously copied a manuscript belonging to his host, 
 may well serve to illustrate the zeal for learning and 
 the fame for scholarship which distinguished this an- 
 cient Church of Ireland. When discovered in his 
 literary theft by Saint Einnian, to whom the manu- 
 script belonged, Saint Columba refused to give up his 
 hard-earned treasure. I^ot until he had instigated a 
 war between the rival kings of Connaught and Diar- 
 
42 INFLUENCE OF THF^ ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 maid, and a council of bishops and abbots had ad- 
 judged him guilty, did this zealous Christian scholar 
 bow to their decree, and crossing over to Scotland with 
 twelve companions, founded the great monastery of 
 lona. This same wonderful Irish Church sent forth 
 in A.D. 614 Saint Gall to Switzerland and Saint Co- 
 lumban as far as the Italian cloisters of Bobbio, and 
 in A.D. 635 Saint Aidan to be the bishop of the ITor- 
 thumbrians. True to the traditions of his Church, 
 we see Saint Aidan choosing as his home the island of 
 Lindisf arne rather than the royal city of Bamborough, 
 and training under his own eye a school of twelve 
 picked boys, who were to be the future teachers and 
 leaders of Christianity in the !N^orth of England. But 
 while it is true to say that monasteries like lona, under 
 Saint Columba, Lindisf arne under Saint Aidan ; Bee, 
 in IsTormandy, under Saint Anselm; Jarrow in the 
 time of Bede, and Glastonbury in the time of Dunstan, 
 became the homes and nurseries of knowledge, yet the 
 pursuit of knowledge and a spirit of inquiry were 
 never of the essence of the monastic life, and a differ- 
 ent organization was needed for the promotion of 
 higher education. So, in the twelfth and thirteenth 
 centuries, grew up the great universities of England, 
 Oxford and Cambridge, as lay corporations, ^o for- 
 mal foundation can be shown for their origin. They 
 did not owe their beginnings to any acts of popes or 
 kings, but to the spontaneous concourse of lecturers 
 and students. 
 
 "The university students of the thirteenth cen- 
 tury," says Wakeman, "were an independent, cosmo- 
 
THE CHURCH AS AN EDUCATOR 43 
 
 politan race, living from hand to moutli, often hun- 
 gry, always imruly, congregated in squalid inns and 
 lodging-houses, without discipline, and sometimes 
 without religion." It is not surprising that this seeth- 
 ing and turbulent concourse of earnest spirits, bent 
 upon the pursuit of knowledge, should have early at- 
 tracted the attention of the friars. Here was the 
 Church's opportunity, and she was not slow to take 
 advantage of it "The Dominicans and Franciscans 
 settled in the grimy purlieus of Paris and of Oxford 
 and soon acquired a commanding influence." Just 
 what control they exercised over the religious and aca- 
 demic life of the students is not known, but we infer 
 that it must have been considerable, and that such in- 
 fluence as they wielded would be in the interest of the 
 Roman Church and papal supremacy. If, therefore, 
 Oxford in the thirteenth century was not to become a 
 mere adaptation and copy of the monastic idea, it was 
 necessary that a different system of education should 
 be inaugurated. Accordingly, in a.d. 1264, we find 
 one Walter De Merton, the real founder of the English 
 college system, establishing within the precincts of the 
 university, "a great seminary for the education of the 
 secular clergy." Among the provisions governing the 
 discipline of his college, Merton forbade any of his 
 students ever to take the monastic vow. "He ordained 
 that they should apply themselves to studying liberal 
 arts and philosophy before entering upon a course of 
 theology," thus raising the standard of education 
 among the clergy. 'No ascetic obligations of any kind 
 were laid upon them. Their sole employment was to 
 
44 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 be study, and he enjoined them to maintain their in- 
 dependence against the encroachments of the friars 
 and of the papacy. Thus did this wise educator and 
 public-spirited man lay the foundations of liberal edu- 
 cation in England, and determine the future constitu- 
 tion which both of the great English universities were 
 destined later to assume. But we must not imagine 
 that the religious orders surrendered the control which 
 they had acquired over the academical studies of the 
 students at Oxford without a struggle. Of their pros- 
 elytizing activity we have abundant evidence during 
 the century which succeeded the founding of Merton 
 College. The lay and secular element continued to 
 rebel against their encroachments, and in a.d. 1358 we 
 find a number of statutes aimed against the mendicant 
 orders. In a.d. 1365 the Pope entered the lists on be- 
 half of the friars, and the University authorities were 
 forced to repeal the obnoxious statutes. But still the 
 feud continued. One cause of Wickliffe's great popu- 
 larity at Oxford was due to his unsparing denuncia- 
 tion of the mendicants, and the decline of their influ- 
 ence is to be attributed in no small measure to the 
 movement which he initiated. In asserting the right 
 of private judgment and in exposing the ecclesiastical 
 abuses of his time, Wickliffe was striking at the very 
 roots of mediaeval Catholicism, and enunciating prin- 
 ciples which bore their legitimate fruit in the Angli- 
 can Reformation. 
 
 In considering the growth of religious liberty in 
 England it is certainly noteworthy that the man who 
 was among the first to challenge the supremacy of the 
 
THE CHUBCH AS AN EDUCATOR 45 
 
 Pope, and to give to the English nation a translation 
 of the Scriptures, was peculiarly the product of the 
 English college system, from which all members of 
 monastic orders were rigidly excluded. It would be 
 correct, therefore, to say that not only were the monas- 
 tic orders in no way responsible for the beginnings 
 of higher education in England, but they were the 
 greatest enemies and opponents of progress that the 
 universities had to contend against, and not until Ox- 
 ford and Cambridge were emancipated from their in- 
 termeddling policy have we anything like a true 
 scholastic atmosphere and tradition. The influence 
 which these two great foundations of learning have 
 exercised upon the development of the national life 
 of the English people is a subject too vast for the nar- 
 row limits of this paper. They have been the train- 
 ing grounds of the English clergy for six centuries. 
 They have stamped their mark upon the national 
 church and upon the national character. They have 
 been foremost in the work of public education, and 
 from them has emanated almost every great religious 
 and political movement which has shaped the policy 
 and guided the destiny of the British empire. It was 
 from Oxford that William of Wykeham, Bishop of 
 Winchester, founder of the English public school sys- 
 tem, got his idea of applying the collegiate system to 
 the training of boys. With the revival of learning in 
 the fifteenth century we find the universities of Eng- 
 land the centres of that great humanistic and religious 
 movement which culminated later in the Reformation. 
 Erasmus, writing from Oxford in a.d. 1497, speaks of 
 
46 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUKOH 
 
 the rich harvest of classical learning already flourish- 
 ing in that institution, and declares that "he could well 
 nigh forget Italy in the society of Colet, Lynacre, and 
 Moore." It is not my purpose here to trace the suc- 
 cessive changes through which the universities of Eng- 
 land have passed from the time when Henry YIIL 
 extorted from the scholars of Oxford an unwilling 
 recognition of his divorce from Katharine of Aragon, 
 through the stormy period of the Civil Wars, down 
 to their present unprecedented efficiency and useful- 
 ness. But in this brief historical survey it will suffice 
 to point out that it was from Oxford that the Meth- 
 odist revival in the eighteenth century took its rise, 
 and later the "Tractarian movement" of a.d. 1835, 
 which has so profoundly influenced the Church's life 
 both in England and this country, and which got its 
 distinctive name, "the Oxford movement," because it 
 originated in Oxford, and received its first impulse 
 from those great scholars like Pusey, Keble, and 
 iN'ewman, who were in attendance upon the University 
 at that time. The most important modification which 
 the universities have undergone in the last thirty years 
 is the abolition of "religious tests," adopted as a Gov- 
 ernment measure and passed by the House of Lords 
 in A.D. 1871. "This great concession to religious lib- 
 erty was brought about," says Mr. Broderick in his 
 delightful history of Oxford University, "by a per- 
 sistent movement chiefly emanating from the univer- 
 sities themselves. Experience has not justified the 
 fears of the opponents of the bill, neither the religious 
 
THE CHURCH AS AN EDUCATOE 47 
 
 character nor the social peace of the University," he 
 continues, "has been in the slightest degree impaired 
 by the admission of non-conformists to its degrees and 
 endowments." 
 
 If all official connection with the Church has been 
 taken away, except as regards the professors of the 
 theological faculty and the obligation laid upon all 
 colleges to attend the daily services of the Church, it 
 cannot be said that the influence of the Church upon 
 the universities has grown less, but rather greater. In 
 ceasing to be clerical and aristocratic they have be- 
 come national and democratic. Never have the uni- 
 versities been more popular than they are to-day — 
 never have they exerted a wider educational and re- 
 ligious influence or been more deeply and strongly 
 enthroned in the hearts of English-speaking peoples. 
 The lines along which their historical development 
 have been traced are the true lines along which all 
 higher education conducted under the auspices of the 
 Church must advance. 
 
 By the removal of theological tests they have not 
 ceased to be less the strongholds of Anglican and 
 Catholic theology. By opening their degrees to non- 
 conformists they have become the great recruiting- 
 stations of the Anglican Communion in England. 
 And if those clergy of the Established Church who 
 are fighting the Education Bill of Mr. Balfour would 
 learn a lesson from the history of universities, they 
 would see that the Church and Christian education 
 have nothing to gain by a sectarian spirit. 
 
48 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 To abolish religious tests in the universities and to 
 retain them in the public schools is an anachronism 
 for which there is no sufficient justification. 
 
 The interests of education and religion must inevi- 
 tably suffer whenever the profession of the teacher is 
 subjected to a religious test, and the freedom of the 
 chair is curtailed by the holding of theological opin- 
 ions about which professing Christians differ. This 
 does not mean that religion should not continue to be 
 taught in the public schools, but it should be upon the 
 broad and catholic basis of the Church catechism, and 
 not in the interests of any party or with a view to 
 proselytizing children of non-conformists who are 
 forced to attend the parochial schools of the Estab- 
 lished Church. 
 
 The history of the Koman C atholic schools of France 
 should afford an instructive warning to the too zealous 
 advocates of Anglican ascendency in the public schools 
 of England. Twenty years ago the Koman Church 
 had virtual control of education in France. The cate- 
 chism was on a par with arithmetic, and Roman Cath- 
 olic prayers were recited several times a day. So 
 great was the power of the clergy that the local priest 
 became the real ruler of the local teacher. But secta- 
 rian narrowness and theological bigotry perverted the 
 purposes of Christian education and subjected the 
 schools to the ecclesiastical domination of the Eoman 
 hierarchy. This was a state of things which could 
 not last. And so, in a.d. 1882, the Chambers, after a 
 long and stormy discussion, voted the secularization 
 of the common schools. Now, "religious instruction,'^ 
 
THE CHURCH AS AN EDUCATOR 49 
 
 so-called, is forbidden by law in the public schools of 
 France, and the Roman Church has lost an opportu- 
 nity for upbuilding the moral life of the nation 
 through its children and for furthering the cause of 
 Christian education in that country which it will 
 never regain, so long as it pursues its present fatuous 
 policy. 
 
 If the history of education under the control of the 
 Church teaches us anything, it is that scholarship must 
 be free and untrammelled. Let the Church contend 
 for the Faith once delivered to the Saints. Let her 
 place her great preachers and doctors in the pulpits 
 of her schools and college chapels as in Saint Mary's, 
 Oxford. Let her preserve the tradition and defend 
 to the utmost the distinctive doctrines of the Anglican 
 Communion, but let the spirit of inquiry be unre- 
 stricted by religious tests, and the pursuit of truth 
 unbiased by party prejudice or theological preposses- 
 sions. IsTever in the history of the Established Church 
 has the value of the universities to the cause of true 
 religion been so manifest as since the Education Act of 
 A.D.I 870, which set them free from the last vestiges 
 of mediaeval Catholicism. Whenever Christianity 
 has been attacked in our own time, the chief burden of 
 defence has fallen upon the shoulders of the English 
 Church. When the authenticity and trustworthiness 
 of the early Christian records have been called in 
 question by the extreme advocates of German criti- 
 cism, the answer to their hasty and ill-considered con- 
 clusions has come from the Cambridge and Oxford 
 schools of biblical scholars. Against the humanita- 
 
50 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 rianism of Strauss and Renan, the agnosticism of 
 Huxley, the pretensions of the Roman hierarchy or 
 the excesses of extremists within the Anglican Com- 
 mimion itself, the scholars of these great Christian 
 universities have been the true defenders of the 
 Church and the safest leaders of the people. The 
 whole history of Anglo-Saxon civilization is the his- 
 tory of the slow development and the gradual emanci- 
 pation of higher education in England. 
 
 And the American Church can never be the Church 
 of the People, until she becomes in this country what 
 the Established Church is in England, the leader of 
 the religious thought and life of the nation. She 
 must produce scholars whose permanent contributions 
 to the cause of learning will command the confidence 
 and admiration of the whole Christian world. She 
 must no longer be forced to borrow her polemics and 
 her text-books of theology from the theological facul- 
 ties of the English Church. 
 
 The American Church produces as earnest and as 
 faithful a body of clergy as are to be found in any 
 Church in Christendom. Among them we have men 
 of distinguished attainments and of marked executive 
 ability. There are many true prophets and pastors 
 among us, but where are our scholars ? 
 
 It is well known that in England the great Protes- 
 tant bodies look to the scholars of Cambridge and Ox- 
 ford for many of their text-books of theology and for 
 their weapons of defence against the infidel and the 
 agnostic Why should not the American Church ren- 
 der the same service to the religious bodies of this 
 
THE CHUECH AS AN EDUCATOR 51 
 
 country ? We have done much to educate the people 
 of the United States through our Prayer-Book and 
 Church Services, in the principles of liturgical wor- 
 ship and reverent ritual, but as yet we have produced 
 no great centre of learning which can be called 
 national or which represents the American Church. 
 The history of our Church colleges is not pleasant 
 reading. It is a record of impoverished treasuries, 
 of inadequate equipment, of insufficient teaching 
 force, of strife engendered by undue diocesan con- 
 trol in the affairs of the college, of heroism and 
 self-sacrifice from poorly paid professors. Wealthy 
 laymen have given millions to build up Harvard, 
 Yale, and Princeton, and but thousands to the ad- 
 vancement of higher education under the control of 
 the Church. When we seek for an explanation of the 
 general apathy and indifference of the Church in 
 this country to the cause of higher education, which 
 is in such striking contrast to the opposite policy pur- 
 sued by the Mother Church of England, the reason 
 is not readily forthcoming. 'No doubt the Church 
 college has had to bear some of the odium which 
 attaches, in the mind of the average American, to 
 the denominational college as such; and while the 
 Church is not in any sense a denomination, yet in this 
 case she has had to suffer for the mistakes of others 
 and for that partisan and sectarian spirit which has 
 so often marred the work of Christian education. 
 Something also may be due to the fact that so many 
 of our Church institutions, especially in their first 
 inception, have been local rather than national, and 
 
52 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 diocesan rather than the result of the united effort and 
 thought of the whole Church. It is not my purpose 
 to dwell further upon the failure of the Church in 
 this country to build up and endow a great Christian 
 university which should adequately express her cath- 
 olic spirit. Perhaps the time was not ripe for that 
 highest achievement of Christian civilization and re- 
 ligious faith. N'ot until we had a united nation as 
 well as a united Church could we have that institution 
 of higher learning which should represent the whole 
 Church and be at once truly catholic and truly na- 
 tional. 
 
 We believe the time has come in the history of the 
 American Church when she must apply herself to this 
 great undertaking in a more serious spirit than she 
 has ever done before. It may be that the Church col- 
 leges which are to-day working for the cause of Chris- 
 tian education may prove the pioneers and feeders of 
 that larger and greater institution which is to crown 
 their labors, and for which they have done a work of 
 needed preparation. 
 
 But I would be blind to the needs of the present and 
 the teachings of the past, did I not seek to impress 
 upon you this lesson of the Christian centuries. The 
 American Church can never be the educator of the 
 people until she has some great centre of education 
 from which to educate. She will never gain the ear 
 of the greatest age for secondary and higher education 
 in the history of mankind, until she leads in the work 
 of education. She can never discharge the high office 
 to which God has called her, as leader and teacher. 
 
THE CHURCH AS AN EDUCATOR 53 
 
 until she has an institution of national and world- 
 wide reputation from whence to teach and mould the 
 thought of the nation and the Church. She will never 
 be adequately or completely presented before the peo- 
 ple of this country until she is presented to them 
 through that which is distinctive of Anglo-Saxon 
 Christianity from the beginning — a university, domi- 
 nated by the spirit of Christ, true to the great verities 
 of the Christian faith, and welcoming every forward 
 advance of science and of reverent scholarship in every 
 department of human learning. 
 
 The Church is fitted, as is no other religious body, 
 by long centuries of training and experience in the 
 work of Christian education, to realize the great ideal 
 of a Christian university. It is peculiarly her mission 
 and her privilege. With her ancient creeds, her his- 
 toric episcopate, the continuity of her life and doctrine 
 extending back through the ages, she stands amid the 
 successive generations of men like some impregnable 
 Gibraltar; she is strongly and grandly conservative, 
 and yet because the Truth which makes her free is 
 not a barren and crystallized product, but a living and 
 growing life, capable of fresh developments, of new 
 applications, and of ever greater comprehensiveness, 
 she is able to welcome every achievement of modem 
 scholarship, as a contribution to the cause of Chris- 
 tianity and Christian civilization in the world. 
 
LECTURE III 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 €i|e C{)urc{| a^ tfyt €t)am{)ion of tt^e 
 
 TKUE Liberty, or to use that peculiarly Anglo- 
 Saxon phrase, "The rights of the people," 
 has a different signification in Anglo-Saxon 
 thought from what it has in the mind or conception 
 of any other race. It means to the Anglo-Saxon some- 
 thing far more dignified and fundamental and far- 
 reaching and conservative than it does anywhere else. 
 In fact, the conception of the people's rights as it ap- 
 pears to the Anglo-Saxon mind, may almost be taken 
 as a race characteristic; a mental note of differentia- 
 tion from all the other races, even those most nearly 
 akin. 
 
 Elsewhere, this idea, where it has any existence at 
 all, is negative and destructive ; it partakes largely of 
 the nature of a protest against something else, and pri- 
 marily, an effort to destroy or pull down or remove 
 that other thing. 
 
 As an illustration of what is meant, we may take 
 the history of the struggle for liberty or popular rights 
 in the development of any race other than the Anglo- 
 Saxon. Any nation of the Latin or Teuton races 
 would equally well serve our purpose. The French, 
 for instance, until almost within a century past, rested 
 under a tyranny rarely, if ever, equalled in the history 
 of the world; certainly without parallel in modern 
 
 67 
 
58 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 times. Teachers it had of liberty, fraternity and 
 equality, and the rights of the people; preachers of 
 revolt and independence ; but they were blind leaders 
 of the blind. They had been caught and dazzled by 
 a name, and had no genuine conception of the meaning 
 of the terms they were using. They were without the 
 historic knowledge or sense of the meaning of the 
 words ; and wanting that view-point, the words are all 
 meaningless from the Anglo-Saxon's ground. In other 
 words, the terms were to the French mind a creation, 
 not a growth, and hence they dijffered absolutely from 
 the Anglo-Saxon meaning. 
 
 Consequently, when the views of these leaders and 
 teachers found expression in acts, those acts were de- 
 structive, not constructive; revolutionary, not evolu- 
 tionary ; a pulling down of what already existed, in- 
 stead of a lengthening of cords and a strengthening 
 of stakes ; a wiping out of all that existed, instead of a 
 strengthening and widening and broadening. To the 
 French mind, the rights of the people meant destruc- 
 tion of rulers, a break with the past, an uprooting of 
 old principles ; a preliminary destruction, before there 
 could be one act of construction. 
 
 The whole history of the struggle for French liberty 
 and popular rights, marks an utter inability to con- 
 ceive of the Anglo-Saxon meaning of the term. In 
 England, for instance, a constitutional monarchy, old 
 palaces occupied by the descendants of historic kings, 
 ancient cathedrals echoing to the sound of historic 
 prayer and praise ; the Tower of London, the natural 
 successor of Eoman fort and mediaeval donjon keep, 
 
THE CHAMPION OF THE PEOPLE^S RIGHTS 59 
 
 and fairly modem fortress ; Westminster Abbey, hear- 
 ing the oath of Edward VII. to obey the law and pre- 
 serve the rights of the people, as it had seen his prede- 
 cessors assume the crown with no promise, pledge, or 
 limitation ; all these are marks and signs of the orderly 
 march and development of the rights of the people, 
 according to the Anglo-Saxon idea. Among the 
 French, on the contrary, the advance of liberty or 
 popular rights is noted by a destroyed monarchy ; an 
 entire break with the historic past; a new regime; 
 barricaded streets ; a bloody mob ; monuments in ruin ; 
 cathedrals used for secular purposes, and the smoking 
 remains of the Tuileries. To the French mind, the 
 Anglo-Saxon meaning of the rights of the people ; its 
 orderly progress and development ; its regard for the 
 rights of the weak as well as the strong ; its profound 
 respect for the rights of the minority ; its conservative 
 holding to the traditions of the past ; its earnest con- 
 serving of the good and useful ; its steady evolution, 
 without break of continuity — to the French mind, the 
 Anglo-Saxon meaning of the rights of the people, in 
 this broad and profound and conservative and whole- 
 some sense, was absolutely an unknown quantity. 
 
 And not only was and is this true of the French 
 race, but it is almost equally true of the Teuton and 
 just as startlingly true of the Latin races in Europe 
 and America ; and true also, to a most painful extent, 
 of the Slavs. 
 
 In Spain, every effort for popular rights has been 
 marked by violence and destruction and bloodshed ; a 
 breaking with the past, a wiping out of the historic; 
 
60 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 revolution instead of evolution. There has been no 
 clear conception of the meaning of liberty, and hence 
 every promise of liberty has failed of realization. So 
 with the many struggles in war-desolated and down- 
 trodden Italy. A vision of liberty has floated through 
 the dreams of its great men and patriots; a "free 
 Italy'' has been the cry of many a country-loving, 
 hungry heart; and more than once the dream has 
 seemed on the verge of realizing itseK in splendid 
 fact. But when almost within the grasp it has again 
 faded back into shadowy unrealities and proved but a 
 vain delusion. Somehow, that great, splendid truth, 
 so long known and loved by all of Anglo-Saxon de- 
 scent, proved beyond their grasp and comprehension. 
 The favored few might see and recognize and love it, 
 but to the great mass its true meaning was unknown. 
 And so, too, with the painful history of Latin- 
 America : liberty has been their dream ever since the 
 Anglo-Saxon of JSTorth America showed them the 
 beauty of the idea and the splendid possibilities of 
 the fact. They have seen with their own eyes, and 
 have knowledge from their own experience, of what 
 this conception of the rights of the people can do. 
 They see how it can give balance and patience and 
 strength and conservatism and persevering progress 
 to a people, and lift them to the very front rank of 
 the nations of the earth. They see what a splendid 
 history it can make, and what mighty deeds it can 
 foster. Further still, it can inspire them with a long- 
 ing which will not down, for those same things. It 
 can rouse them to break with the past, and throw off 
 
61 
 
 old shackles, and break away from old limitations, 
 and to cast out the old tyranny. But, somehow, here 
 all ceases. So far, the vision which materializes so 
 easily and naturally in the Anglo-Saxon mind, goes 
 with the Latin-American ; but beyond this it fails him. 
 Up to this point, it leads him in aspiration and effort ; 
 but when the destructive work is done, the vision fails ! 
 Where lies the trouble ? Whence comes the inability ? 
 Where is the limitation ? Is there something peculiar 
 in the mental make-up of the Anglo-Saxon; does he 
 differ from all other races on earth? Or has there 
 been some formative influence, beginning away back 
 in the infancy of the race and working constantly and 
 systematically all along ; moulding his views, stamping 
 his nature, shaping his character in its plastic period, 
 that has resulted either in making him mentally and 
 spiritually — ^for, after all, these matters we are dis- 
 cussing are as much spiritual as mental — making 
 him, I say, mentally and spiritually unlike all other 
 men ; or at least teaching him some secret that, so far, 
 at least, has not been discovered by any other man? 
 Certainly, it seems perfectly evident from all the 
 teaching of history, that he is either unlike even his 
 nearest kin, or at least has learned some secret or been 
 trained into some mental condition unknown to them. 
 Even his kinsman — ^the Teuton — fails utterly to 
 grasp the Anglo-Saxon conception of the rights of the 
 people. His idea of a "mailed fist," an autocratic 
 ruler, an army that demands and takes the best of the 
 nation for its support ; a peasantry who hardly dream 
 of having a right, and would certainly not dare assert 
 
62 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 that right, unless committed to a revolutionary party 
 and to revolutionary measures ; peasant women whose 
 place and position in life is marked by making them 
 yoke-fellows with the brutes — ^this, the Teuton con- 
 ception, is absolutely foreign to the Anglo-Saxon's 
 conception of the rights of the people; and his point 
 of view, when he speaks of liberty and the rights of 
 the people, is absolutely incomprehensible to the aver- 
 age Anglo-Saxon mind. His meaning — his concep- 
 tion — of liberty and popular rights is something 
 totally different from that of the Anglo-Saxon. 
 
 Hence, if this Anglo-Saxon idea of the rights of the 
 people be in any sense hereditary, it must, at least, 
 have begun after the Anglo-Saxon parted company 
 with his Teuton kinsman, away back in his history. 
 
 But granting that there is this distinction between 
 the mental concept of the Anglo-Saxon and all other 
 races, as to the idea of the rights of the people — and 
 to the speaker, all history seems distinctly to bear out 
 this distinction — ^where did such difference of view 
 originate, and how did it come into existence, and 
 upon what has it been nourished, that it should show 
 such vitality and attain to such vigor ? 
 
 Is it a natural difference — one inherent in the 
 races ? If so, why ? And how can such radical racial 
 difference be accounted for in those so near akin and 
 thrown in such close contact in the course of their de- 
 velopment ? There is nothing in the mere fact of being 
 an Anglo-Saxon, the mere race peculiarity, which can 
 account for this peculiarity of thought ; this peculiar 
 point of view as to the meaning of an idea. 
 
THE CHAMPION OF THE PEOPLE's RIGHTS 63 
 
 More than once the suggestion has been made that 
 it is the result of education. In one sense — the very 
 broadest in which the word "education" can be used — 
 this, of course, is true, if it be not an instinct inherent 
 in the race, and which always has been there. In 
 this broad sense, all acquired ideas and concepts are 
 the result of education, for fundamentally, education 
 is the drawing out of all that is in a man or a race, 
 and of all of which they are capable. 
 
 But if the suggestion as to education refers to what 
 is commonly and technically included under that 
 term, then there is no sufficient reason for holding this 
 to be the fact. 
 
 Education had neither its earliest modern develop- 
 ment nor its highest modern success, speaking techni- 
 cally, among the Anglo-Saxons. 
 
 The Latin probably responded much more promptly 
 to the modern movement in this respect than did the 
 Anglo-Saxon; and the great educational institutions 
 of comparatively modem days had neither their in- 
 ception nor early triumphs, in Anglo-Saxon lands and 
 among Anglo-Saxon people. Great thinkers, great in- 
 tellectual lights and teachers, had graced and adorned 
 other lands and peoples before the Anglo-Saxon began 
 to share in the beauty and glory of the forward move- 
 ments. 
 
 If, away back in the days when the Anglo-Saxon 
 was first emerging from almost barbarism into the 
 beginnings of his own racial civilization, any edu- 
 cated, intelligent citizen of the world had been asked 
 to name the men educationally and intellectually 
 
64 INTLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 capable of leading men and shaping thought and bet- 
 tering the world, he would hardly have turned to the 
 Anglo-Saxon race to find one single name for his list. 
 !N"aj, the citizen of England himself, at that time, 
 would hardly have considered the Anglo-Saxon in the 
 count ; and if required to name an inhabitant of Eng- 
 land at all, he would have chosen some man — priest, 
 prelate, or noble — of French, Latin, or Teuton blood 
 and lineage, so little was the Anglo-Saxon then con- 
 sidered, in matters of intellectual development. Even 
 our children who are old-fashioned enough to read 
 "Ivanhoe" and kindred romances, recognize the truth 
 of this. 
 
 So, I say, education — in the ordinary and technical 
 sense of the word — cannot account for this seeming 
 race-peculiarity. There must be some influence 
 closely touching the life of the Anglo-Saxon ; always 
 accompanying and bearing upon his development; 
 touching him in the closest intimacies of life and 
 thought; influencing him unconsciously and unceas- 
 ingly every year and day of his history ; as unceasing 
 as the tides and as all-pervading as the air he breathes, 
 and almost as powerful as the laws of life ; that has 
 been shaping and moulding his mental and spiritual 
 nature for centuries, that has thus given him a differ- 
 ent point of view from all other races with regard to 
 this idea. And then, too, this influence must of neces- 
 sity have been one that was peculiar to the Anglo- 
 Saxon ; shared by no other race. Else how would it 
 have given him this peculiar concept ? Is there any 
 influence thus peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon ; something 
 
that has belonged to Ms history alone, and in a sense 
 which has been shared by no other race? I think 
 there is. And I think that this influence is so plain 
 and self-evident that it can be read on every page of 
 his history, and seen in all his mental structure, and 
 found in evidence in all the splendid world's work 
 that he has done. It is this silent, powerful, splendid 
 influence that has made the Anglo-Saxon the world- 
 pioneer, the world-missionary, the world-subduer, the 
 world-enlightener, the man who is bringing freedom 
 and the sense of human brotherhood to the whole 
 world ; the man who can bring the only freedom worth 
 having and that will endure; the freedom based on 
 respect for fellow-man as the child of the same God, 
 and as a brother in the best and noblest possible sense. 
 
 And this influence, I think, is the Anglican Church. 
 
 The Church of England, just as far as we can trace 
 its course, stands in a relation to the people of Eng- 
 land peculiar to itself ; entirely different in its position 
 and relation from that of any other nation. 
 
 Erom the very first, it seemed to be a part of the 
 people ; as essential a part of their lives as it is possi- 
 ble to conceive. When and how it came to be, no man 
 knows to this day. Whence came the hierarchy, fol- 
 lowing on the mission of Augustine, we all know. But 
 whence came that church that the earliest writers 
 found there in purity and vigor, no man can tell. 
 There it was in the earliest history of the race ; there 
 it is, and there it always has been ; the peculiar pos- 
 session of the people ; loved and sustained by the peo- 
 ple; teaching and moulding and leading the people; 
 
66 
 
 INFLUEJS^CE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 loyally believed in by the people; the most splendid 
 instance of a people's church ever known in the history 
 of the world. More than once, its open and avowed 
 enemies — from both extremes — ^have been in power 
 and have determined to wipe it out of existence, and 
 have tried their very utmost to carry their purpose 
 into effect ; but always the people — whose friend and 
 champion she has always been — friend and champion 
 against either wild and reckless democracy, or tyran- 
 nous monarchy, or narrow aristocracy — have asserted 
 their love for and loyalty to her, and restored her to 
 her proud position of spiritual teacher and leader of 
 the nation. 
 
 The reason for this mighty hold on the popular 
 heart is not far to seek. To say that the Anglican 
 Church may have been guilty of mistakes or errors, 
 is simply to say that those who have done her work 
 have been human — making no claim to even a hazy, 
 indefinable "Ex Cathedra" infallibility, whatever 
 that may be. But for any or all of these things, the 
 relation of the Anglican Church to the Anglo-Saxon 
 race has been one peculiar to itself ; differing entirely 
 from the relation between any other race or nation 
 and church. 
 
 Elsewhere — for instance, in Italy, France, Spain, 
 or Germany in the not so very distant past — ^the 
 Church belonged essentially to a class — ^king, prince, 
 bishop, cardinal, abbot, all belonged by blood and 
 lineage to the same race or family. One brother ruled 
 in the halls of state ; one bore the insignia of command 
 on the field of battle ; one wore the red or purple of the 
 
Church's highest dignity, nay, might aspire to wear 
 the triple crown itself, and, if he were sufficiently 
 powerful and prideful and masterful, he might even 
 succeed to the splendid humility of sitting in the seat 
 of the lowly fisherman of Galilee. 
 
 The prince of the church boasted as long a pedigree 
 and as high a lineage and as noble an ancestry as the 
 prince of the state; and the leader of the church's 
 hosts was of the same stock and held the same views 
 and shared the same purposes as he who led the hosts 
 of the state. The Church militant was indeed a mili- 
 tant church in a very natural and real way, and the 
 term needed no explaining under those circumstances 
 — unless the spirit moved some lowly churchman to 
 explain that militant did not mean just what the 
 church's "Prince-Bishops" seemed to make it mean. 
 
 As a result of these conditions, it was simply im- 
 possible that the church should have any great hold 
 on the common people. Its leaders belonged to the 
 classes who neither knew of nor cared for the common 
 people. They were of noble blood themselves, and 
 naturally their sympathies and views and feelings 
 went with their own class and kin. Hence, when there 
 was revolution or uprising or effort for popular free- 
 dom, church and rulers were joined together. In the 
 Gallic mind, bishop and Bourbon, religion and mon- 
 archy, were bound together ; and if one must perish, 
 the other must perish with it. 
 
 So, too — in the mind of the Italian lover of liberty 
 and seeker of the rights of the people — the castle of 
 Saint Angelo might mean a bulwark of the church and 
 
68 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 a metaphorical tower of tlie spiritual Sion ; but it also 
 meant a very material obstruction to a united and free 
 Italy, and an outward and visible sign of the alliance 
 between spiritual and material things — ^the joining 
 together, in the bonds of sympathy, of the church and 
 the secular opponents of the rights of the people. 
 
 In England, the case was absolutely and entirely 
 different. For a while, after the ISTorman Conquest, 
 this Continental idea was imported into England, but 
 it quickly passed away. The old spirit of the land 
 passed back into the Church again, and she stood, as 
 always, aligned and sympathizing with the people. 
 Her leaders were rarely men of the aristocracy, the 
 kin of princes and kings, the poor relations of the 
 great nobles. Strong leaders she had ; men who feared 
 neither king nor commonalty ; neither papacy nor bar- 
 onage; but oftener than otherwise they were men 
 whose name and fame were unknown to college of 
 heraldry or students of pedigree. They were men of 
 the people, with good, clean Anglo-Saxon blood, hard 
 Anglo-Saxon sense, and dauntless Anglo-Saxon cour- 
 age; filled with powerful convictions and ready to 
 stand by those convictions to the end, even though 
 a coward king should tempt his time-serving courtiers 
 to bloody deeds for his craven relief. 
 
 The great settlements of these churchmen became 
 the centres of social life and of trade and of intelli- 
 gence for the common people. Here, the Anglo-Saxon, 
 scorned by N^orman noble and foreign courtier, found 
 the strong rallying point, around which, sooner or 
 later, all his best interests centred. Here, he found 
 
69 
 
 a market for what he had to sell, and here he received 
 what he could get from neither king nor noble — an 
 honest price for what he had to barter. Here, he 
 found occupation, and pay for his work. Here, he 
 could find help for his distressed, medical treatment 
 and care for his sick, and succor in his worst needs. 
 From these places came what teaching and instruction 
 he ever received; and naturally, to these places he 
 turned, whenever he needed aid or assistance of any 
 kind. In connection with these settlements he came 
 in contact with higher thought and nobler types and 
 forms of life than he ever had known before. They 
 were the sources from whence he derived all his higher 
 and better aspirations, and ideals of a nobler form 
 of existence. Here he saw what could be made of life, 
 and how it could be bettered, and in what way im- 
 provement could come. 
 
 Royalty and nobility and all the courtier life were 
 far removed from him, not only by the bar of means 
 or education and such material matters, but by the 
 far stronger bar of race difference and race antipathy. 
 In the court and in the camp he found the pride and 
 insolence and contempt and tyranny of E'orman- 
 I'rench ; an alien race that knew nothing of him and 
 cared nothing for him, except what he was worth as a 
 beast of burden ; and thought nothing of him but in- 
 solent contempt. 
 
 But in very many of the great religious settlements 
 all was different. Here, he often found men of his 
 own blood and race ; men akin to him not only by the 
 ties of a common descent, but by the much stronger 
 
70 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 ties of a common inheritance, a common experience, 
 common hardships and troubles, a common sympathy 
 in feeling against a common oppressor. Hence, in 
 these settlements, the Anglo-Saxon, first looking up 
 toward the light of better things, found first his sym- 
 pathizers, and then his helpers, and finally his leaders. 
 These men knew who he was, and what his capabilities 
 were, and what were his aspirations ; and they were 
 ready with their aid and guidance. 
 
 Hence, because of the historic and racial differ- 
 ences, when the great struggle for liberty came, the 
 Gaul looked on church and nobility and monarchy as 
 his common enemies ; and dazed and confused and 
 maddened by his age-long sufferings, he struck indis- 
 criminately at them all, and struck to kill. With king 
 and crown went not only prince and nobleman, but 
 cardinal and bishop and priest, and all the outward 
 and visible sign of church power. 'Not only bishop 
 and cardinal, but abbot and cure, had too often been 
 associated in his mind with those who made common 
 cause against him, for him to make any distinctions 
 between them. So far as he knew, the church had 
 collected its tithes as mercilessly and by as ruthless 
 means as had king or courtier collected their taxes 
 and rents. It had never taken his side, or taught him 
 and his children, or lightened his burden, or bright- 
 ened his path in life. So he not only owed it no debt 
 of gratitude, but he had no slightest kindly feeling 
 for it. Not once, in all his long history, had he or his 
 forebears ever known it to stand against royal aggres- 
 
71 
 
 sion or priestly oppression, for him and his sacred 
 rights. 
 
 But with the Anglo-Saxon the case was entirely 
 different. The Church, for a time, might be allied 
 with king against baronage and people, but this alli- 
 ance was always temporary; and the time would 
 equally come when it was allied with baronage and 
 common people against the king. And yet again, it 
 would stand for the rights of the people, as against 
 both king and baronage. In a word, it belonged to no 
 class or condition, but was an independent factor in 
 the nation; and though often contaminated by evil 
 companionships, and sometimes controlled by evil 
 men, oftenest of all stood for right and truth and 
 righteousness ; the people's friend and counsellor ; the 
 conserver of the rights of all, as against the claims of 
 any class or party. 
 
 Because of this historic attitude of the Church, 
 because she has been the Church of the race, the 
 Anglo-Saxon, in all his upheavals and efforts for free- 
 dom and progress, has respected and loved and con- 
 served that Church. To-day she is one of the strong, 
 historic links which binds him to his mighty past; 
 and to-day, no matter from what land the world- 
 wanderer hails, and by what sectarian name he calls 
 himself, he cannot stand unmoved beneath the roof of 
 ancient abbey or massive cathedral or historic church ; 
 for though he may claim no present part in her, he 
 knows that her glorious past belongs equally to him, 
 as to every man in whose veins flows Anglo-Saxon 
 
72 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 blood. She is his mother-church in a sense unknown 
 to the man of any other race. There may have been 
 periods in her history when she seemed to lose her 
 high aim, and to become, temporarily, a party to his 
 oppression ; but he remembers the bishops haled to the 
 Tower for withstanding a reckless tyrant ; bishops and 
 mighty leaders testifying at the stake for the religious 
 and civil rights of the nation; noble and godly men 
 gtricken down for fearlessly defying king and nobil- 
 ity ; nay, he remembers most of all, and most glorious 
 of all, that Magna Charta itself was drawn by the 
 hand of the Church's chosen leader, and that the most 
 splendid heritage of all the race was the work of a 
 churchman who dared to stand with the people and 
 for the people, when none else but churchmen con- 
 sidered the people worth standing with or for. 
 
 This Magna Charta, then, and this man Stephen 
 Langton, who drew it, and whose name stands first 
 on this splendid roll of signers, are fair examples of 
 all that your speaker has been saying, and fair illus- 
 trations of the truths he has been trying to make clear. 
 How comes it that the Anglo-Saxon race alone, of all 
 the races of the world, has a Magna Charta, or any- 
 thing answering to that great monument of historic 
 popular rights? How comes it that away back in 
 their past, this race alone conceived this splendid in- 
 strument ; so great that at thirty-eight separate times 
 since, it has been re-enacted as the basis of all consti- 
 tutional Anglo-Saxon rights ? 
 
 Where lay the point, and what was the fact in the 
 history of this race that gave them this great conserver 
 
73 
 
 of popular rights, unknown to any other race, and 
 which has been the pattern from which all other races 
 have more or less copied ? 
 
 The simple difference was that the Anglo-Saxon 
 race had as its guardian and guide and helper, the 
 great Anglican Church; strong enough to be fearless 
 of king and baronage; wise enough to see that only 
 when all rights were respected would any rights ulti- 
 mately be preserved; faithful enough to hold to the 
 fundamentals of her faith through all vicissitudes, 
 and brave enough, in time of stress, to stand four- 
 square for God and fellow-man. This Church, stand- 
 ing always between tyranny and anarchy, extreme 
 power and extreme laxity, between a blind democracy 
 and a tyrannous aristocracy, has been the balance- 
 wheel of the race in its development; the motive 
 power, when progress was needed; the brake, when 
 there was need for conservatism. Had the struggle, 
 in the thirteenth century, been merely between king 
 and baronage, it would simply have added one more 
 to the long list of such bloody and useless and result- 
 less and futile struggles that stain and disfigure the 
 pages of history. A triumph for the king would have 
 meant stronger shackles and a sterner tyranny, and a 
 longer lease for unlimited monarchy. But under the 
 same circumstances, the triumph of the barons would 
 have meant an equally useless and purposeless victory, 
 so far as the future of the race was concerned. It 
 would simply have been a change in the name and 
 personnel of the tyrant in either case, so far as the 
 people were concerned. Had this struggle for the 
 
74 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 mastery again had no parties to it, save aristocracy 
 on the one hand and the people on the other, it would 
 simply have been a battle for absolute mastery on the 
 one side or the other, a precursor of the French Revo- 
 lution — one party to triumph; the other to be de- 
 stroyed. 
 
 But the existence in this century-long struggle of 
 a factor unknown in other countries and among other 
 nations and races, was the very thing which made 
 possible the outcome of the struggle. The presence 
 of the English Church, in the persons of her archbish- 
 ops and her leaders, was what really made Runny- 
 mede classic ground, and constituted it the birthplace 
 and cradle of all modem rights of the people. 
 
 The great central figure of Runnymede is not the 
 mighty monarch of a great nation, surrounded by all 
 the panoply of royalty ; nor yet the stem and sturdy 
 baronage in all the pomp and circumstance of war; 
 but the fearless churchman, strong in his knowledge 
 and deep-rooted in his loyalty to God and fellow-man ; 
 the representative of that splendid Church whose 
 proud mission it was to mete out even-handed justice 
 to high and low, rich and poor, alike ; to demand equal 
 homage from the king on his throne, the baron in his 
 moated castle, and the peasant following his plough or 
 tending his flocks. 
 
 This was, in the last analysis, the determining fac- 
 tor in this thirteenth-century struggle; this the ele- 
 ment that differentiated it from all other struggles in 
 history, and made it progressive, constructive, and 
 evolutionary, instead of reactionary, destructive, and 
 
THE CHAMPION OF THE PEOPLE's EIGHTS 75 
 
 revolutionary. It was the presence of this factor, this 
 splendid conserver of the old, as well as promoter of 
 the new, that caused this struggle to result in Magna 
 Charta and the dawning of the day when the rights 
 of the people was to be one of the most sacred of all 
 things known to the great Anglo-Saxon race. It was 
 the presence of this factor which made Magna Charta 
 a possible conception, and then gave that noble con- 
 ception a realization in fact. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon thirteenth-century struggle dif- 
 fered from all other struggles for liberty in that it was 
 guided, as the race always has been guided, by a pro- 
 found influence, impartial, fearless, and fit by its nat- 
 ure and history to mediate between all classes, and 
 see that each not only received justice itself, but ren- 
 dered like justice to others. 
 
 This splendid influence was and is the Anglican 
 Church, which, from its nature, its history, and its 
 faith, was and is and always must be, not the repre- 
 sentative of a class, but the guardian and champion 
 of the rights of all. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 €f)e principle of l^ational €f^mtf^tfi 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 €&e principle of l^ational Cfturtfteief 
 
 KvKXdxrare ^ca)v xal irepiXd^eTe avrrjv, Birjyija-aa-de 
 ip T0t9 irvfjyoL^ avTfj<;* Oiade Ta<; KaphCa^ vficjv €l<s rrjv 
 BvvafjLCv auT^9, Koi KarahieKeaSe Ta<; ^dpecf; dvT7J<i, 
 
 " Walk about Sion, and go round about her : and tell the towers 
 thereof. Mark well her bulwarks, set up her houses." — Psalm 
 xlviii. 11. 
 
 IT is never quite easy for communities or individ- 
 uals to be judges in their own cause; and the 
 subject which we are now called upon to con- 
 sider has a very deep interest for all of our race. 
 Yet, on the other hand, we can hope but little from 
 those studies which are begun in a spirit of indiffer- 
 ence, and we may hope that we are willing to receive 
 the truth concerning those things in which we are 
 most deeply interested. 
 
 To those who love the land they live in, the people 
 to whom they belong — ^who are interested in the ex- 
 tension of the Kingdom of God — there can be few 
 subjects of deeper and more abiding interest than the 
 theme which has been brought before our notice in the 
 series of lectures on the "Influence of the English 
 Church on Anglo-Saxon Civilization." Many of the 
 thoughts presented to you, under one or other of the 
 topics brought forward, will doubtless be found ap- 
 plicable to some of the other subjects ; but perhaps we 
 
 79 
 
80 INFLUEI^CE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 may find this no disadvantage, since we may gain 
 something from the presentation of the same thoughts 
 under different aspects. 
 
 We have this evening to consider a subject which 
 can hardly be thought inferior in interest and impor- 
 tance to any other in this series — the Principle of 
 National Churches; and it may be well for us to con- 
 sider at once what we mean by this expression. 
 
 And here we are at once confronted by an alterna- 
 tive, and required to take a side. On the one hand, 
 we have national churches existing and claiming a 
 right to exist with at least a certain degree of inde- 
 pendence ; and on the other, we are confronted by a 
 system which claims to be universal and denies every 
 kind or degree of independence to local and national 
 churches. 
 
 To some the solution of this problem seems very 
 simple. The Church of Christ is one, they tell us, 
 and in this fact there should be an end to the contro- 
 versy. Do we not profess our belief in One Holy 
 Catholic and Apostolic Church ? Did not our Blessed 
 Lord pray that His people might be one, as He and the 
 Father are one ? How, then, can it be lawful to break 
 up the unity of the Church by the establishment of 
 communions separated from that unity ? How easily 
 are such questions asked! how obvious seems the an- 
 swer to them! Alas! there are few fallacies so far 
 removed from the truth as those which put on the ap- 
 pearance of obvious and unquestionable truths. 
 
 But surely the Scriptures may settle such a question 
 without any reasonable doubt being left. Have you 
 
THE PRINCIPLE OF NATIONAL CHURCHES 81 
 
 ever thought how many questions the Scripture seems 
 to leave unsettled — giving us the principles on which 
 all settlements must be made, but seldom giving us 
 the rules which we are required to deduce from those 
 principles ? Have we here forgotten the teaching of 
 our great Hooker? 
 
 Well, but surely we hold that there is one Catholic 
 Church, and that there must be a certain unity between 
 all the portions of the Church which claim to belong 
 to the one Church. Undoubtedly there are Christian 
 and Catholic principles uniting all parts of the Cath- 
 olic Church, just as there is a certain Jus Gentium 
 uniting all civilized countries and nationalities. But 
 just as this law of nations sets forth the common prin- 
 ciples of human civilization, but does not interfere 
 with the independence or special legislation of par- 
 ticular countries, so there is a common faith in which 
 the separate national churches find their unity, whilst 
 their right of independence and local legislation is in 
 no way interfered with. So it was from the begin- 
 ning, and so it should remain under the actual cir- 
 cumstances of the Church. 
 
 Let us look back for a moment to the original con- 
 stitution of the Church under the government of the 
 Apostles of Christ, and ask whether we have departed 
 from the example there given ; whether there is any- 
 thing in the essential character of a national Church 
 which differs from the first types, or from the consti- 
 tution of the various individual churches in the age 
 nearest to that of the Apostles. 
 
 There can be but one answer to this question. 
 
82 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 There was no central authority claiming supremacy 
 over the other churches ; there is no hint of any Chris- 
 tian Communion arrogating to itself a right to 
 guide or control another. A church might refuse to 
 admit another church to its Communion for reasons 
 which prevailed with itself, but it did not dictate to 
 the other church. Take the first difiiculty that arose 
 in the Church with regard to the conditions to be 
 imposed upon the Gentiles. We know how this was 
 dealt with at the first Council of the Church, held in 
 Jerusalem, not long after the reception of the Gentiles 
 into the Church. At this council Apostles were pres- 
 ent and took part in the debates. James, the Bishop 
 of Jerusalem, apparently not an Apostle, but a brother 
 of the Lord Jesus, presided. We know the conclu- 
 sions at which they arrived — conclusions adopted with 
 great and tender regard for those on whose behalf they 
 were legislating. Here is the decision as announced 
 by the presiding bishop: "It seemed good to the 
 Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater 
 burden than these necessary things : ^that ye abstain 
 from things sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and 
 from things strangled, and from fornication.' " 'Now 
 these ordinances were partly of the nature of moral ob- 
 ligations, partly ritual ordinances ; and although they 
 were promulgated by apostolic authority, they were 
 so far from being imposed upon the whole Church 
 that Saint Paul, soon afterward, could speak of some 
 of them as being binding only under certain circum- 
 stances, and more especially for the avoiding of any- 
 thing that might wound the conscience of a weak 
 
THE PEINCIPLE OF NATIONAL CHURCHES 83 
 
 brother. This first Christian Council at Jerusalem 
 has often been taken as the type of all that were to 
 follow; and although we may not perhaps lay down 
 any such principle as universal, yet the example then 
 given was largely followed. 
 
 Let us turn our attention for a moment to the (Ecu- 
 menical Councils, which were regarded as representing 
 the whole Church. Even in the Church of Rome, un- 
 til the time of the Vatican Council, it was a lawful 
 opinion to hold either of two views of the relation of 
 the Bishop of Rome to such a Council. Up to that 
 time a doctrine was not held to be binding and en- 
 forceable until, after being promulgated by the Coun- 
 cil, it was received by the whole Church. Indeed, it 
 was the consent of the Church that made the Council 
 to he regarded as oecumenical, and not its being sum- 
 moned by emperor or pope, or by its having among 
 its members bishops from all parts of the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 A very slight reference to the early history of the 
 Councils will make this point clear. The first Coun- 
 cil of Constantinople, held in 381, has been received 
 by East and West as oecumenical. On what grounds ? 
 !N'ot because it was convoked with this view, nor be- 
 cause of its numerical importance; but because its 
 decrees were accepted by the whole Church. On the 
 other hand, the second Council of Ephesus (a.d. 449) 
 was convoked by the Emperors Theodosius II. and 
 Valentinian III. as an CEcumenical Council ; but its 
 proceedings were so violent and shameful that the 
 Church rejected it from a place among its synods, 
 
84 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 and branded it with the name of Latrocinium — the 
 Robber Council. The first Council of Constantinople 
 is accepted as oecumenical because it was received by 
 the Church ; the second of Ephesus is refused that rank 
 because the Church rejected it. 
 
 And perhaps we may see here something analogous 
 to what is still going on in the Church. We no longer 
 hope for an (Ecumenical. There has been none re- 
 garded as such since the second of Nicaea (a.d. 787). 
 But the same kind of process goes on. The conscience 
 and the experience of the Church, illuminated and 
 guided by the Divine Spirit, still tries the opinions 
 which claim for themselves the acceptance of the 
 Christian community ; and silently the great articles 
 of the Church are established in the convictions of 
 men, and the errors and superstitions which have long 
 struggled for existence fall away. The test of truth 
 is still and always will be the acceptance of the 
 Church. Here is the truth of the maxim to which Dr. 
 Newman paid such regard: "Securus judicat orbis 
 terrarum'^ — the universal judgment is safe. 
 
 To return to the relations between the various dio- 
 ceses and national churches. These admonished one 
 another, and sometimes refused communion to one 
 another, but not because of any supposed authority 
 that the one had over the other, but because the other 
 was supposed to hold false doctrine or to use un- 
 lawful rites. Of the one case the Arian controversy 
 will aiford many illustrations. Of the other we have 
 an example in the case of the bishops of the East, 
 whom Bishop Victor of Home endeavored to have ex- 
 
THE PRINCIPLE OF NATIONAL CHURCHES 85 
 
 communicated, because they celebrated the Feast of 
 Easter at a different time from the Church of Eome, 
 following, as they alleged, the tradition of Saint 
 John. The fact that Saint Irenseus rebuked the 
 Roman bishop for his intolerance sufficiently shows 
 that no kind of authority was conceded to the latter. 
 
 But it is time to pass from these early examples to 
 the history of our own Church, and consider its claim 
 to a national character and a national independence. 
 
 'No one who has the most superficial acquaintance 
 with the history of the Middle Ages can doubt or for- 
 get the immense debt which the English people and 
 the English Church owe to the See of Rome. It is 
 enough to mention the names of Augustine and Theo- 
 dore, to go no further. But it would be equally ab- 
 surd and unhistorical to imagine or to concede that 
 the English Church of the first ages was subject to the 
 Roman See. 
 
 There was in the state of the Middle Ages much to 
 foster such an idea. The kingdoms and states of Eu- 
 rope had not yet taken form and shape. Moreover, 
 the mind of Europe, and the best mind of Europe, 
 was possessed by the great idea of one State and one 
 Church ; one State embracing the political world, over 
 which the Emperor should be supreme, and one Church 
 embracing the spiritual world, over which the Pope 
 should be supreme. It was a magnificent idea, and 
 possessed the heart and the imagination of men like 
 Dante. There were differences of opinion with regard 
 to the relations of the two heads, some holding that 
 the Pope was supreme, and others that the Emperor 
 
86 
 
 II^LUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 was, and others that they held a kind of co-ordinate 
 jurisdiction under Christ as the Lord of both. 
 
 But the moment it was attempted to give life and 
 energy to the conception, it began to grow evident 
 that it could not be worked. And it was precisely at 
 the moment that the idea was most dominant that its 
 weakness became most manifest and its downfall was 
 preparing. Let us note for a moment the conflict as 
 seen in the English State and Church. 
 
 The case of Wilfrid of York in the seventh century 
 is one of the most remarkable and most instructive 
 as proving the independence of the Anglo-Saxon 
 Church. The Roman side in that controversy was 
 one of the strongest. Wilfrid was a man of the highest 
 excellence. His contention, that he ought to have 
 been consulted before his diocese was divided, was not 
 unreasonable ; and when he appealed to Rome to see 
 him righted, he might have pleaded the dignity of the 
 Apostolic See and the greatness of the missionary 
 work which it had accomplished in England. But 
 what was the result of his appeal ? A Roman Synod, 
 presided over by the Pope, restored Wilfrid to his 
 See; and, armed with this document, he presented 
 himself before the King of !N"orthumbria. With 
 what result? Did this English kingdom or Church 
 bow to the decisions of the Sovereign Pontiff ? On the 
 contrary, they sent Wilfrid to prison for having car- 
 ried his cause to Rome. 
 
 The attitude taken by William the Conqueror tow- 
 ard the Papal See was no less striking and instruc- 
 tive. The Roman bishop had a considerable claim 
 
>ITV 
 
 I UN ^' * 
 
 THE PEINCIPER^ii£jg^LS»OT^L CHUBCHES 87 
 
 upon the Conqueror. When the great E'orman took 
 in hand the invasion of England, he gladly availed 
 himself of the support of the Pope. When, however, 
 the latter made demands which to the King seemed in- 
 consistent with his royal authority, he refused to give 
 way. Customary payments, the arrears of Peter's 
 pence owing to the Pope should be made good; but 
 the homage demanded for his kingdom — and the 
 man who made the demand was Gregory VII., the 
 great Hildebrand — he would in no way concede. 
 "Homage," he said, "I have never willed to pay, nor 
 do I will it now. I have never promised it, nor do I 
 find that my predecessors ever did it to yours." The 
 King further declared that no Pope was to be rec- 
 ognized without the approval of the crown, nor any 
 letters or bulls from Rome promulgated without his 
 consent. 'No synods were to be held without his 
 license, nor could their decrees be accepted until they 
 had received his confirmation. There was the asser- 
 tion, in the plainest terms, of the independence of the 
 l^ational Church. The alliance with Rome was at 
 that time recognized as an advantage and a benefit to 
 the local churches ; and even we can understand that 
 many advantages accrued to them through this union ; 
 but never, except in moments of danger and difficulty, 
 or under the weakest of the kings, was the absolute 
 supremacy of the Roman pontiff recognized. 
 
 Kever was the claim of the Apostolic See urged 
 with greater force and with more manifest advantage 
 than in the conflict between Pope Innocent III. and 
 King John ; and yet in the issue the insufficiency of 
 
88 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH OHUBCH 
 
 the papal pretensions was completely demonstrated. 
 We may, indeed, say that no English king ever sub- 
 mitted to such humiliation, or even degradation, as did 
 John in his hour of sore distress ; when, forsaken and 
 detested by his people, he threw himself upon the pror- 
 tection of the Roman pontiff, doing homage to him 
 for his kingdom of England and Ireland, and thereby 
 declaring himself to be the vassal of the Pope. 
 Surely, if there was any moment in the history of our 
 people when there could be no sense of national 
 ecclesiastical independence, that moment had now 
 arrived. And yet it was not long before the national 
 spirit of the people asserted itself in defiance of the 
 arrogant pontiff and the pusillanimous king. When 
 Pope Innocent declared the barons who were contend- 
 ing for the great charter to be wicked rebels, and pro- 
 ceeded to release King John from his oath of con- 
 firmation, they treated his anathemas with contempt 
 and proceeded to assert their legal rights by arms, 
 with Stephen Langton of Canterbury, the nominee of 
 the Pope himself, at their head. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to point out that through 
 these ages, from the time of the Norman conquest to 
 the period of the Reformation, the pretensions of the 
 Roman See were never lowered ; whilst on the other 
 hand they were steadily resisted by princes and peo- 
 ples. Not infrequently, indeed, the popes stood on 
 the side of justice and humanity, and even when they 
 were most imperious and domineering, they were 
 often animated by high and noble motives. But even 
 then, and making all allowance for the advantages re- 
 
THE PBINCIPLE OF NATIONAL CHURCHES 89 
 
 suiting from alliance with Rome, there was ever the 
 danger of servitude to a foreign power ; and the leaders 
 of the people were not unconscious of the danger. 
 
 Those who could understand to what heights the 
 pretensions of the Papacy sometimes rose, may see 
 the expression of them in such papal utterances as 
 those contained in the bulls "Clericis Laicos" (a.d. 
 1296) and "Unam Sanctam" (a.d. 1302) of Boni- 
 face VIII. 
 
 In the former of these — Clericis Laicos — the cler- 
 gy were forbidden, under pain of excommunication, 
 to pay without consent of the Holy See, any subsidy 
 or tax on any ecclesiastical property, and the ex- 
 communication was extended to the emperors, kings,, 
 or princes who should impose such subsidy. 
 
 In the latter — ^the bull Unam Sanctam — ^the Pope 
 goes so far as to declare, "Igitur ecclesise unius et 
 unicae unum corpus, unum caput, non duo capita 
 quasi monstrum." But such arrogance received an 
 almost immediate check from the civil power; and 
 although Boniface proceeded to excommunicate the 
 king — Philip IV. of France, surnamed the Fair — 
 the estates of the kingdom stood by their sovereign, 
 declared the pontiff a criminal and a heretic, and 
 proceeded to take him prisoner. 
 
 The course of affairs in England is well known. 
 Up to the time of the Reformation every aggression 
 on the side of Rome was met by resistance on the part 
 of the nation, until finally the supremacy of the Bishop 
 of Rome was denied, and his primacy became a dead 
 letter. 
 
90 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUKCH 
 
 It has sometimes been said that the various acts of 
 Parliament passed in England were acts of conscious 
 rebellion against an authority which they could not 
 refuse to recognize ; but this is an evident misrepre- 
 sentation. Here, as elsewhere, the English Parlia- 
 ment were watching over their national rights and 
 liberties. Here, as elsewhere, they were ready to re- 
 sist encroachments and to oppose to them the strong 
 barrier of the law. 
 
 Prominent among these anti-papal enactments were 
 the statute of Provisors (1351) and the statute of 
 Prcemunire (1353), both passed in the reign of Ed- 
 ward III. and subsequently renewed. Both of these 
 statutes were drawn up for the purpose of putting an 
 end to manifold abuses resulting from papal interfer- 
 ence in the government of the Church. The first — the 
 statute of Provisors — forbade the sending of the in- 
 comes of monasteries out of the kingdom, asserted the 
 rights of patrons, and enacted that, in case of the 
 Pope collating to any office, the appointment should 
 be null, and the king should have the gift for one 
 turn. It was further enacted that if any person 
 should procure provisions from the Pope, they were 
 to be imprisoned until they had paid the fine in satis- 
 faction of the king and the patron whose rights had 
 been invaded. The statute of Prcemunire was, if 
 possible, of a more important character, striking as 
 it did at the Eoman claim to overrule the decisions 
 of the national government. The aim of this law was 
 to prevent vexatious appeals from being carried to 
 Eome, in order to supersede the authority of the king's 
 
THE PEINCIPLE OF NATIONAL CHURCHES 91 
 
 court and set aside its decisions. The statute there- 
 fore enacted that if any English subject should lodge 
 any such plea in courts not within the realm, he should 
 have two months' notice to answer for contempt in the 
 king's court; and if he did not appear, he should be 
 outlawed, his property confiscated, and his person im- 
 prisoned during the king's pleasure. 
 
 It is quite true that these statutes were not imme- 
 diately or generally enforced. But they showed con- 
 clusively the view taken by Englishmen of their eccle- 
 siastical position and of their relation to the other 
 churches, and they remained on the statute books, 
 ready to bear fruit in the future. 
 
 When we turn our attention to the period of the 
 Reformation, we can see at once how the measures 
 then taken find their explanation and their justifica- 
 tion in the principles which had been operative 
 throughout the whole history of the Anglican Church, 
 even although they may not always have been con- 
 sciously held. It is no part of our duty to defend the 
 character or the conduct of King Henry VIII. But 
 it must be clearly understood that the attitude finally 
 taken by him and the country rested, and found its 
 justification, in the principle of the legislation which 
 restrained the authority of the Roman See within 
 the Kingdom of England. There was a question con- 
 fronting the mind and conscience of Christendom as 
 it had never done before, and this a question which 
 had to be answered. The question was this: "Has 
 the Lord Jesus Christ given to the Bishop of Rome 
 supreme authority over all parts of the Christian 
 
92 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH OHUECH 
 
 Church ? Does one who resists the authority of the 
 Roman pontiff endanger his everlasting salvation? 
 Must we say that he who is out of Peter is out of 
 Christ?" This was the question which was heing 
 asked in Germany, in France — even in Italy and 
 Spain. This was the question which had to be an- 
 swered by the English king and people, by the Eng- 
 lish clergy and laity. It was not quite so easy for 
 many men to answer the question in those days as 
 it is in our own. But it received its answer slowly, 
 firmly, certainly. 
 
 On March 31, 1534, the Convocation of Canterbury 
 declared that the Roman bishop has no greater juris- 
 diction given to him by God in this kingdom than 
 any other foreign bishop ; and the same doctrine has 
 been held ever since by the descendants of the men 
 by whom it was then promulgated. True, there was 
 a brief interval of ^ve years when the English people 
 seemed to return to the Roman obedience and to re- 
 nounce the idea of national independence; but, even 
 in this short period, that very Mary Tudor, who sacri- 
 ficed so much for the Holy See, fell back on the anti- 
 Roman legislation of her forefathers, and warned the 
 papal legate that he was not to set foot on the shores 
 of England, and that, if he did so, she would bring 
 Mm, and all who should acknowledge his authority, 
 under the penalties of the statute of Prcemunire. 
 
 While we thus maintain the principle of a national 
 Church, and deny that such a position involves the 
 slightest disloyalty to Christ or the Gospel, we have 
 no thought of interfering with the liberties of those 
 
THE PEINCIPLE OF NATIONAL CHURCHES 93 
 
 who find in the Roman communion a satisfaction 
 which, they say, they could not obtain among our- 
 selves. But, for ourselves, we have no doubt of the 
 lawfulness of our position, and we believe that the 
 blessing of God has rested and does rest and will rest 
 upon the work which we purpose and endeavor to do 
 for Him. 
 
 And, further, we are fully assured that our posi- 
 tion, as that of a national Church, a church which, 
 while claiming to be truly catholic, yet also represents 
 the spiritual side of the great race to which we belong 
 — we believe that this position is defensible, not only 
 on theoretical grounds, but also and equally on 
 grounds of experience. [At this point we are re- 
 minded that we are intruding into ground already 
 occupied by previous speakers in this course ; so that 
 our remarks must be restricted.] Yet we believe that, 
 in no spirit of boastfulness, but with hearts full of 
 gratitude to the Giver of all good, we may acknowl- 
 edge the blessings secured to our people by the Eng- 
 lish Reformation. The English Reformation has 
 made the modern English people. The Christian 
 Church, as reformed among the English people, has 
 given to the world a type of character without which 
 mankind would have been poorer. 
 
 It was said of the worshippers of the heathen dei- 
 ties, that they made gods in their own image; and 
 that, on the other hand, they reflected the characters 
 of the gods whom they worshipped. Something anal- 
 ogous to this has taken place in the types of religion 
 developed among the different nations of the earth; 
 
94 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUKCH 
 
 and so it has been with our own people. If we com- 
 pare the different types of reformation followed by 
 the different nations of Europe, we shall see how the 
 national character of the people was represented in 
 their Church, and how the spirit of the Church re- 
 acted upon the character of the people. So it has been 
 in a remarkable degree among ourselves. The sober 
 moderation, the balanced judgment, the freedom from 
 prejudice, the love of liberty — all these qualities 
 which have distinguished our forefathers, have been 
 reproduced in our Church ; whilst, in turn, the Church 
 has become our teacher and our guide and the moulder 
 of our character. 
 
 Those who have read the "^N^otes on England" by 
 the late M. Taine — a man who understood our people 
 as few foreigners have ever done — must have been 
 struck by his criticisms of our national religion. We 
 are not altogether admirable in the eyes of the brill- 
 iant and accomplished Frenchman; but he declares 
 that the sermons of our parish clergy, although not 
 distinguished by the rhetorical grace of the Erench 
 orators, are probably more practically useful ; and he 
 notes that it is probably from recitation of the Psalms 
 in our public worship that we owe that deep sense of 
 righteousness which is one of our characteristics as 
 a nation. "Thanks be to God for His unspeakable 
 gift." "!N"ot unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto 
 thy Name give the glory." 
 
 It is in no spirit of vainglory that we contemplate 
 the past or the present, or look forward to the future ; 
 ;but with a deep sense of responsibility and with an 
 
THE PKINCIPLE OF NATIONAL CHURCHES 95 
 
 earnest prayer that we may not be unworthy of our 
 privileges, or of those who, under God, have procured 
 these privileges for us. 
 
 There is a beautiful saying, taken from Euripides 
 (Tr. 695) — XirdpTf^v eXaxe^, Keivrjv Koa/iei, — ^better 
 known under its Latin form, "Spartam nactus es, 
 banc orna''; that is, "You have got Sparta; adorn 
 it." May we not apply these words to ourselves? 
 We are members of the great Anglican Communion. 
 It came to us by no merit or act of our own. Let 
 us see that we hand it on unimpaired, strengthened, 
 adorned, to the generations that shall come after us. 
 
 This is the work which is now assigned to us by the 
 providence of God. It is not by mere words, however 
 fitting and excellent, that the work is to be done — 
 not by language of self -congratulation, or even of sin- 
 cere thanksgiving for the blessings of the past that the 
 future of our Church and our people is to be made 
 secure. It is by the actual working out of the prin- 
 ciples of truth and righteousness and consecration to 
 worthy ideals in thought and word and deed. It is by 
 calm, persistent devotion to duty, the fulfilment of 
 duty to God and to man ; by loyalty to our Father in 
 Heaven and our brethren upon earth. For this we 
 must labor ; for this we must pray ; nor shall we labor 
 and pray in vain, "Then shall the earth bring forth 
 her increase ; and God, even our own God, shall give 
 us His blessing." . 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 €&e €l)urtl) anti tfyt spirit of atBettp 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 €t^t Cfturelj anH tfte J^pirtt of 3tiBertp 
 
 Charter and Instructions of James I. — First Colonial Assem- 
 bly AT Jamestown, 1619 — Vestries, and their Influence 
 IN Favor of Self-Go vernment — Patrick Henry and Saint 
 John's Church, Richmond— The American Revolution as 
 Aided by Members of the Church of England — Their 
 Influence on the Constitution and the Constructive 
 Period. 
 
 WE cannot say that the Church of England, 
 as such, was the leader in the colonizing 
 enterprises of the last part of the sixteenth 
 and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Re- 
 ligious motives and ecclesiastical relations undoubt- 
 edly added to the momentum, but it can scarcely be 
 held that they set the wheels in motion. 
 
 The primary motive is to be found, I think, in the 
 natural impulse to better one's condition, and in the 
 love of adventure. The long fight for existence which 
 England and the Netherlands had waged during more 
 than two generations was ended by the defeat of the 
 Spanish Armada in 1588. The western lands, tow- 
 ard which for a hundred years had been turned the 
 longing eyes of those in the Old World who panted 
 for a wider and a freer air, were now clear of the 
 domination of the Spaniard, and at the same time the 
 bold spirits who had followed Drake and Hawkins 
 .and the other sea-fighters of England were discharged 
 from their long service against Spain and ready to 
 
 99 
 
100 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 take up other adventures. The treaty of peace being 
 concluded in 1605 between England and Spain, "the 
 then only enemy of our nation and religion," it was 
 determined by many in England to take advantage of 
 "this opportunity" for carrying out Sir Philip Sid- 
 ney's scheme "to check the dangerous and increasing 
 power of Spain and Eome in the I^I'ew World by plant- 
 ing English Protestant settlements there, which would 
 increase until they extended from ocean to ocean." 
 Thus speaks an early writer quoted by Alexander 
 Brown in his "First Kepublic in America." 
 
 These first adventurers were, as a matter of course, 
 members of the Church of England, the Puritan se- 
 cession not having as yet attained to considerable pro- 
 portions. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the 
 Bishop of London were among the early members of 
 the London Company under whose auspices the first 
 successful and enduring attempt at colonization was 
 made. Under such conditions it is not surprising that 
 the charter of the Colony of Virginia granted by 
 James L, on April 10, 1606, declared, as one of the 
 chief motives of the enterprise, "the furtherance of 
 so noble a work" "as the planting of Christianity 
 amongst heathens." 
 
 In the instructions of the king, in 1606, it was 
 enjoined that "all persons should kindly treat the 
 savages and heathen people in these parts, and use 
 all proper means to draw them to the true service 
 and knowledge of God." 
 
 The latter part of the year 1606 saw the colonists 
 embarked on their three small vessels, the Susan Con- 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY 101 
 
 stant, the Goodspeed, and the Discovery. I repeat 
 their names because they are not as well known as 
 they ought to be; certainly not as well as the May- 
 flower is known. Rev. Robert Hunt accompanied the 
 expedition as chaplain. On May 13, 1607 (old 
 style), they disembarked at Jamestown, having en- 
 tered the Chesapeake Bay between two and three 
 weeks earlier. Among the earliest records of the new 
 settlement is that of Divine Service by Mr. Hunt, and 
 on June 21, 1607 (the third Sunday after Trinity), 
 the diarist records, "Wee had a Comunyon." This is 
 the first recorded instance of the celebration of that 
 holy feast of love on the soil of Virginia, and ever 
 since then, except during the interval of a few months 
 between the death of Mr. Hunt and the arrival of an- 
 other clergyman, there has been no intermission in 
 the regular administration of the Lord^s Supper 
 according to the use of the Church of England and 
 its successor, the Protestant Episcopal Church. 
 
 The infant colony, during all the struggles of its 
 early years, seems to have been well cared for by 
 clergymen. Thus, in 1616, as we learn from John 
 Rolfe's letter to King James, there were at the sev- 
 eral settlements 351 souls in all, including four 
 clergymen : William Wickham at Henrico, Alexander 
 Whitaker at Bermuda Hundred, Richard Buck at 
 Jamestown, and William Mays at Kecoughtan, now 
 known as Hampton. That the mission of the Church 
 to the natives was still kept in view by the colonists 
 appears from the following extract from this same 
 letter of Rolf e. 
 
102 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 "There is no small hope by pietie, clemencie, cur- 
 tesie and civill demeanor, (by which meanes some are 
 wonne to us alreadie*), to convert and bring to the 
 knowledge and true worship of Jesus Christ thou- 
 sands of poore, wretched and misbelieving people on 
 whose faces a good christian cannot looke without sor- 
 row, pittie and compassion, seeing they beare the 
 image of our Heavenlie Creator, and we and they 
 come from one and the same mould." 
 
 There is no evidence that this feeling on the part 
 of the colonists toward the Indians, expressed by 
 Eolfe in so kindly and Christian a manner, suffered 
 any change until after the cruel and deliberate massa- 
 cre by the Indians in 1622. 
 
 Here, then, we have a colony, promoted and founded 
 by members of the Church of England and regularly 
 ministered to by her clergy, in which Christian prin- 
 ciples of justice and fair dealing toward others were 
 held aloft as the standard to which they should con- 
 form. 
 
 We have next to trace how, in such a colony, the 
 principles of civil and religious liberty were worked 
 out. The third charter, granted in 1612 to the Lon- 
 don Company, gave larger powers of government over 
 the colony to the company, and those who were its 
 controlling spirits were men of broad views and earn- 
 est interest in their work. Chief among them stand 
 out the names of the Earl of Southampton, the friend 
 of Shakespeare; Sir Edwin Sandys, son of the 
 Archbishop of York, and Nicholas Eerrar, afterward 
 * Rolfe had shortly before this won Pocahontas. 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY 103 
 
 founder of the monastic establishment of Little Gid- 
 ding, who to a piety of an almost ascetic type added 
 extraordinary common sense, profound study and re- 
 flection on the problems that lay before the company, 
 with constant devotion and courage in carrying out its 
 designs. The "starving time" was over, and the col- 
 ony was steadily growing in numbers and strength, 
 when, in 1619, the company, largely at the instance 
 and following the plans of Sir Edwin Sandys, caused 
 writs to be issued for a general assembly of representa- 
 tive burgesses from the little hamlets which were 
 dotted along each side of the James River from its 
 mouth to near the falls, where the city of Richmond 
 now stands. On July 30, 1619, this House of Bur- 
 gesses met in the commodious and decently appointed 
 church at Jamestown, which had succeeded to the can- 
 vas shelter of the first days of the colony and the log 
 building, which the settlers had been careful to raise 
 as soon as Jamestown was made safe against attack. 
 The Governor and Council sat in the choir, and the 
 Burgesses, with their hats on, according to the usage 
 of Parliament, sat facing them in the nave. In this 
 church building of the Church of England we find 
 in an assembly of her sons the first representative 
 legislative body of our race on this continent, and the 
 prototype, not only in time but in spirit, of those 
 which were to follow in the other colonies. For in 
 1624 we find the General Assembly enacting "That 
 the governor shall not lay any taxes or impositions 
 upon the colony, their lands or commodities, otherway 
 than by the authority of the general assembly, to be 
 
104 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 levied and employed as the said assembly shall ap- 
 point." 
 
 Here, indeed, is the seed which, one hundred and 
 fifty years later, bore fruit in the Kevolution. A 
 refusal to submit to taxation by the governor without 
 the consent of the legislature, embodies the principle 
 of a like refusal to taxation by the king. It took 
 time to grow up to the realization that this was so, 
 because the idea of the supremacy of the royal au- 
 thority had almost a sanctity in the minds of Eng- 
 lishmen of that time. Let us try to trace some of the 
 steps in the educational process. 
 
 The Church of England, as was natural in a com- 
 munity which, as we have seen, was composed, al- 
 most exclusively, of her children, was the established 
 church of the colony. Following the precedents of 
 the mother country, but fitting them to local needs, 
 a subdivision of the counties into parishes was soon 
 made, and the mass of the parishioners was repre- 
 sented by a small body chosen from their number as 
 a select vestry. These vestries in Virginia, as also 
 in Maryland, •after the establishment there of the 
 Church of England in 1692, in addition to their du- 
 ties in regard to the Church and its property, exer- 
 cised certain functions of civil government, such as 
 the determination of disputed boundaries, the care 
 of orphans, and the like. ' 
 
 Their duty in regard to the erection of suitable 
 houses of worship was sedulously performed. Like 
 David, they thought shame to dwell in houses of 
 cedar while the ark of God rested under curtains. 
 
THE CHTKCH AND THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY 105 
 
 And SO, even before they had provided elegance, or 
 even more than bare comfort in their own dwellings, 
 they raised spacious and enduring buildings to the 
 glory of God. Saint Luke's, Smithfield, built in 1632, 
 the ruins of the third church at Jamestown, built in 
 1639, and many another colonial church still stand- 
 ing in Virginia and Maryland, attest their pious zeal. 
 In the evil state into which the clergy in the col- 
 onies speedily fell, it became the duty of the vestries 
 to do more than have a care for the outward fabric 
 merely, and to contend for the purity of the Church 
 and the preservation of Christian morality. If the 
 clergy had been under the authority of a bishop, or 
 anyone authorized by him to administer discipline, 
 as had been invariably the case in the former history 
 of the Church, such questions could not have arisen. 
 In the colonies, however, for more than one hundred 
 and seventy-five years from the settlement at James- 
 town — if we leave out of account the irregular and 
 secret ministrations of Talbot and Welton of the Con- 
 juring line — ^no bishop ever set his foot; the com- 
 missaries had no substantial authority ; the induction, 
 and often the presentation, to a parish was in the 
 hands of the governor, and the result was that a 
 clergyman, once presented and inducted, was secure 
 in the enjoyment of the emoluments of his parish, 
 although he might be a notorious evil-liver. Exam- 
 ples of devoted, pious, and well-learned clergymen 
 were not lacking, but Bishop Meade and Dr. Hawks 
 have not overstated the painful truth when they as- 
 sert that a large number of the colonial clergy were 
 
106 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 unfit to exercise the Christian ministry, while some 
 were steeped in gross vice. The very life of the 
 Church, as a means of godliness, was at stake, and 
 it is creditable to her teaching and her influence that 
 her children rose up to contend against these un- 
 worthy pastors. Their form of worship, often car- 
 ried on in the houses of the pious laity, provided 
 for the hearing of God's word in its completeness, 
 and furnished, as vehicles for their devotion, prayers 
 which had gathered from all the ages the true spirit 
 of reverence, of godly fear, and of aspiration toward 
 righteousness; and thus, in default of the ministra- 
 tions of a proper or sufficient body of clergy, they 
 were yet built up in God's holy faith. 
 
 Along with this went a struggle for the right of 
 the people, through their vestries, to choose their own 
 ministers, and, as many colonial records show, the 
 whole period is full of contests against the clergy, 
 the commissaries, and the governors, on this point. 
 Sometimes these conflicts went beyond wordy wars 
 and formal protests to the authorities in England. 
 Thus Bishop Meade tells us that one, "a man of great 
 physical powers, who ruled his vestry with a rod of 
 terror, wished something done, and convened them for 
 that purpose. It was found that they were unwill- 
 ing or unable to do it. A quarrel ensued. From 
 words they came to blows, and the minister was vic- 
 torious. Perhaps it is fair to presume that only a 
 part — perhaps a small part — of the vestry was pres- 
 ent. On the following Sabbath the minister justified 
 what he had done, in a sermon from a passage of 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE SPIEIT OF LIBERTY 107 
 
 ITehemiah : 'And I contended with them, and cursed 
 them, and smote certain of them, and plucked oS 
 their hair.' This account," says the Bishop, "I re- 
 ceived from two old men of the congregation, of the 
 most unimpeachable veracity, one or both of whom 
 was present at the sermon." 
 
 Other cases may be cited from Maryland. On May 
 4, 1684 (Md. Archives, xvii. 264), Eev. Dr. Wm. 
 MuUett complains to the Lord Proprietor, that Fran- 
 cis Maiden, of Calvert County, carpenter, had refused 
 his demand of the key of the church door. He says : 
 "I urged unto him my ordination lycense, and Institu- 
 tion ; his answer unto me was, that neither the King 
 or Bishop of London should have to doe in the dis- 
 poseing or settling a minister in their Church." 
 Maiden was apprehended and brought before the 
 Council, when he made submission and entered into 
 bond for good behavior. 
 
 The name of the Rev. Bennett Allen has a bad 
 eminence among the colonial clergy of Maryland, and 
 in the recent novel of Richard Carvel he is a con- 
 spicuous figure. He came to Maryland with instruc- 
 tions from his particular friend, the corrupt Lord 
 Baltimore, who was then regnant, to be well pro- 
 vided for. He prepared long and elaborate argu- 
 ments to show that the Maryland law against plurali- 
 ties was invalid, and that he was entitled to hold the 
 livings of two parishes, not adjacent, at the same 
 time. Pending this controversy, he heard of the seri- 
 ous illness of the incumbent of All Saints' Parish, 
 Frederick County, which yielded £800 sterling per 
 
108 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUKCH 
 
 annum, and had himself inducted immediately upon 
 the death of the former rector, so as to forestall the 
 action of the parishioners, who wished to divide this 
 enormous parish. This is the account which, in June, 
 1768, he gives Governor Sharpe of what followed. 
 (Md. Archives. Correspondence of Gov. Sharpe, iii. 
 501.) "On Saturday I got the Keys went into the 
 Church read Prayers the 39 Articles* & my Induc- 
 tion. On Sunday having heard that the Locks were 
 taken off & the Door bolted within I got up at four 
 oclock & by the Assistance of a Ladder unbolted them 
 getting in at a Window & left them on the Jar. I 
 went at 10 oclock & found all the Doors & Windows 
 open. The Vestry came up to me & spoke to me of 
 Breach of Privilege. I said I am not acquainted with 
 Customs I act by the Letter of the Law. The moment 
 the Gover'' signs an Induction, Your Power ceases, 
 I am sorry that any Dissention &c. I saw they drew 
 to the Doors of the Church. I got a little Advantage 
 leap't into the Desk & made my Apology & begun the 
 service. The Congregation was call'd out. I pro- 
 ceeded as if nothing had happened till the Second 
 Lesson. I heard some Commotions from without 
 which gave me a little Alarm & I provided luckily 
 against it or I must have been maim'd if not murderM. 
 they caird a number of their Bravest that is to say 
 their largest Men to pull me out of the Desk I let the 
 Captain come within two Paces of me & clapt my 
 Pistol to his Head. What Consternation ! they ac- 
 cuse me of swearing by God I wo^ shoot him, & I 
 * This was a requisite in the induction proceedings. 
 
THE CHUECH AND THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY 109 
 
 believe I did swear, w'^^ was better than praying just 
 then." 
 
 Bishop Meade's summing up of the effects of such 
 quarrels as these is fully justified. He says : 
 
 "In the history of the vestries we may fairly trace 
 the origin, not only of that religious liberty which 
 afterward developed itself in Virginia, but also of the 
 early and determined stand taken by the Episco- 
 palians of Virginia in behalf of civil liberty. The 
 vestries, who were the intelligence and moral strength 
 of the land, had been trained up in the defence of 
 their rights against governors and bishops, kings, 
 queens, and cabinets. They had been slowly fighting 
 the battles of the Kevolution for a hundred and fifty 
 years. Taxation and representation were only other 
 words for support and election of ministers. The 
 principle was the same. It is not wonderful, there- 
 fore, that we find the same men who took the lead in 
 the councils and armies of the Eevolution most active 
 in the recorded proceedings of the vestries." 
 
 It is not strange that as a result of these frequent 
 contests there should have been a growing feeling 
 against the right of the clergy to hold office as of 
 Divine right. Probably no one questioned that orders 
 in the Church were of Divine appointment. But that 
 a man who had received such orders should be entitled 
 to leadership in a Christian community, even though 
 his life might be notoriously un-Christian and im- 
 moral, was shocking alike to reason and to faith. 
 When people began to question the Divine authority 
 of a vicious clergyman, it was a natural consequence 
 
110 
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 that there should be searchings of heart as to the 
 Divine right of kings, a dogma which, as a rule, was 
 strenuously and frequently urged by the clergy. Dur- 
 ing the time of the Stuart kings the association of the 
 two dogmas was marked. Lecky, in his "History of 
 England in the Eighteenth Century," quotes from 
 Bolingbroke a keen criticism of such teaching : 
 
 "As kings have found the great effects wrought in 
 government by the empire which priests obtain over 
 the consciences of mankind, so priests have been 
 taught by experience that the best way to preserve 
 their own rank, dignity, wealth, and power, all raised 
 upon a supposed Divine right, is to communicate the 
 same pretension to kings, and, by a fallacy common 
 to both, impose their usurpations on a silly world. 
 This they have done; and in the state as in the 
 Church, these pretensions to a Divine right have been 
 carried highest by those who have had the least pre- 
 tension to the Divine favor." {The Idea of a 
 Patriot King.) 
 
 At the time of the Protestant Kevolution, in 1688, 
 two English bishops, Hoadly and Warburton, in 
 treatises of great force, led the opposition to the doc- 
 trine of the Divine Eight of Kings, and when the 
 Georges came in, the acceptance of the doctrine by the 
 clergy was much diminished. That which was clear 
 to their minds under a Stuart, seemed doubtful under 
 a king of the House of Hanover. In the free air of 
 the colonies it never throve. To the dwellers there, 
 remote from the pomps which expressed the power 
 of kings, and learning by their contests with savage 
 
THE CHUECH AND THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY 111 
 
 men and wild nature the dignity and force of their 
 own personality ; to men who, in the order appointed 
 by their Church for the daily worship of God, con- 
 stantly heard that His "service is perfect freedom," 
 it may well have seemed that, as Emerson has ex- 
 pressed it: 
 
 " God said, I am tired of kings 
 1 suffer them no more : 
 
 My angel — his name is Freedom — 
 Choose him to be your king." 
 
 Other methods of dealing with unworthy clergy- 
 men being wanting, the people resorted to a method 
 which affected the good and the bad alike — the dimi- 
 nution of their emoluments by altering the tobacco 
 tax levied for their support, either by lowering the 
 amount or debasing the valuation. A series of con- 
 tests over such laws went on for years, the culmina- 
 tion of them being a law passed by the General Assem- 
 bly of Virginia in 175 8, which, however, within a 
 year or two, was vetoed by the King. Out of this grew 
 the famous "parsons case" in 1Y63, in which a young 
 Virginian, son of a member of the established Church, 
 and nephew of one of its clergy, sprang into a position 
 of prominence in the colony and throughout America, 
 which he held and increased all through his life. 
 Moses Coit Tyler, in his comparatively recent biog- 
 raphy of Patrick Henry, one of the most fascinating 
 biographies of the nineteenth century, has given us 
 an intelligible account of this case, as to which former 
 lives of Henry had made nothing clear, except his 
 
112 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHTJECH 
 
 marvellous power of swaying the minds of men by 
 the spoken word. It thus appears that the court had 
 decided, as it was bound to do, that the royal veto 
 had nullified the Act of 1758 and that the salaries 
 were payable as under the old law. All that remained 
 was for a jury to fix the amount due, and when Pat- 
 rick Henry induced the jury to bring in a verdict for 
 one penny, it was on the bold and theretofore unde- 
 clared ground that the king had no right to veto a law 
 passed in the interest of the people, and that he, "by 
 disallowing acts of this salutary nature, from being 
 the father of his people, degenerated into a tyrant and 
 forfeits all right to his subjects' obedience." Such 
 talk as this had doubtless been for years whispered in 
 gatherings of two or three bold spirits ; this was the 
 first occasion that I know of in any of the colonies, 
 where it was proclaimed in a public place. 
 
 I think no one will rise from the perusal of Tyler's 
 "Life of Henry" without feeling convinced that not 
 only was he the greatest orator who ever spoke the 
 English tongue, but that, more than all others, North 
 or South, he was the mainspring of the Revolution. 
 In the session of the House of Burgesses in 1765, the 
 first which he attended, he succeeded in carrying, 
 against the prejudices of a majority of the members, 
 a set of resolutions which clearly declared that no tax 
 could be levied in the colony without the consent of 
 the General Assembly. Similar language had been 
 used in other colonies, by way of protest, before the 
 Stamp Act was passed ; these resolutions were epoch- 
 making, because they were adopted after the passage 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY 113 
 
 of that Act. After he had gone home the counsels of 
 the timid prevailed, and the last resolution, which 
 contained the pith of the argument, was rescinded. 
 But meanwhile swift couriers had carried north and 
 south the resolutions as first adopted, and they served 
 as a torch to the smouldering fires which had been 
 sleeping in men's bosoms. Thus, in November, 1765, 
 in Frederick County, Maryland, the scene of Rev. 
 Bennett Allen's conflict three years later, the county 
 court declared that the Stamp Act was invalid and 
 directed its clerk to use and accept unstamped paper 
 for legal purposes. 
 
 Ten more years of agitation and appeal to England 
 followed, and then, in 1775, at the Revolutionary As- 
 sembly which, in defiance of the Governor at Wil- 
 liamsburg, met in Saint John's Church, Richmond, 
 Henry made that great argument for armed resist- 
 ance and that splendid appeal for liberty which grows 
 upon us the more its thrilling cadences fall upon the 
 ear. 'No speech that was ever made in any part of the 
 world has produced, in my judgment, such instant, 
 such momentous, and such abiding results. 
 
 I have told how the first legislative assembly that 
 ever sounded the note of freedom in America met in 
 the church at Jamestown in 1619. It is a matter of 
 the deepest interest and significance that in another 
 of the sacred buildings of our Church and from the 
 lips of one of her devout members was heard this 
 second cry for liberty, the clarion call which roused 
 the colonies to the point of taking arms against op- 
 pression. To some it may savor of irreverence to 
 
114 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUECH 
 
 God's house that it should be used for such purposes. 
 We have, however, from Divine lips the statement 
 that ^'the Sabbath was made for man," and surely 
 this includes the teaching that the houses as well as 
 the day set apart for God's worship, shall, in case of 
 need, be used for any service to humanity. In the 
 little town of Richmond, where the Revolutionary 
 Assembly of Virginia met, there was no building so 
 suitable for the gathering as the church, and I rejoice 
 that no spot in this land has such close associations 
 with the sacred cause of liberty as has Saint John's, 
 Church Hill. 
 
 The pre-eminence of Patrick Henry as the apostle 
 of liberty, as well as his transcendent sagacity and 
 power, have led me to speak of him at some length. 
 He has by some, on imperfect information, been 
 thought of as merely a speech-maker. But the world 
 will judge him hereafter as he was judged by his 
 contemporaries. He was thrice during the Revolution 
 governor of Virginia, and, after the Constitution was 
 adopted, Washington — an imsurpassed judge of char- 
 acter — successively offered him the positions of En- 
 voy to France, Secretary of State, and Chief -Justice 
 of the Supreme Court, which his failing health com- 
 pelled him to decline. 
 
 I must speak now of others, like him, members of 
 the Established Church, and many of them vestry- 
 men, who stood for the cause of liberty without falter- 
 ing. Washington is first of all. But where would 
 the cause of the colonies have been; nay, would the 
 issue have been raised at all without their help ? I 
 
THE CHUECH AND THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY 115 
 
 can only refer to George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, 
 Wythe, Pendleton, Jefferson, and Harrison in Vir- 
 ginia; Rutledge and Pinckney in South Carolina; 
 Chase and Johnson in Maryland; Clymer, Wilson, 
 and Morris in Pennsylvania ; Read in Delaware ; and 
 others in less conspicuous station who kept the spirit 
 of liberty alive and glowing in their several com- 
 munities throughout those trying years. 
 
 It was George Mason, a fellow-vestryman with 
 Washington at old Pohick Church, who, in the Dec- 
 laration of Rights prepared by him in 1775 for Vir- 
 ginia, and afterward, in substance, made a part of the 
 organic law of nearly all the States, set forth in a form 
 of sound words the principle of a free church in a 
 free state. 
 
 "That Religion, or the Duty which we owe to our 
 Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be di- 
 rected only by Reason and Conviction, not by Porce 
 or Violence ; and therefore that all men should enjoy 
 the fullest Toleration in the Exercise of Religion, ac- 
 cording to the Dictates of conscience, unpunished and 
 unrestrained by the Magistrate ; unless under Colour 
 of Religion, any Man disturb the Peace, the Happi- 
 ness, or the Safety of Society ; and that it is the mu- 
 tual Duty of all to practice Christian Forbearance, 
 Love and Charity Towards each other." 
 
 Pollowing this up, in 1785, Jefferson prepared the 
 Statute of Virginia "of religious freedom," which he 
 directed should be mentioned in his epitaph along 
 with the authorship of the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence and the founding of the University of Virginia, 
 
116 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHUKCH 
 
 as those acts of his life by which he was willing to be 
 judged by posterity. No sentence that he ever wrote 
 is more pregnant with salutary influence than one 
 which I quote from this famous statute : 
 
 "That truth is great and will prevail, if left to her- 
 self ; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist 
 to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, 
 unless, by human interposition, disarmed of her natu- 
 ral weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceas- 
 ing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to 
 contradict them." 
 
 The war, for some seven years of doubtful issue, 
 at length was brought to a successful close. There 
 followed seven years of adjustment to the new rela- 
 tions; of building up the States whose foundations 
 had been strongly, if hastily, laid at the time of the 
 separation ; of striving for a more perfect union. In 
 all this constructive work the sons of our beloved 
 Church bore their part as faithfully as they had done 
 during the stress of war. About two-thirds of the 
 members of the convention which framed the Consti- 
 tution of the United States were members of the 
 Episcopal Church. Some of them I have already 
 named in connection with the Revolution. I may 
 mention in addition, Alexander Hamilton of New 
 York, James Madison of Virginia, Rufus King of 
 Massachusetts, William Samuel Johnson of Connecti- 
 cut, Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey. 
 
 It is beyond the limits of this discussion to weigh 
 the work of these men against that of others, of dif- 
 fering forms of religious belief, who, in all the col- 
 
THE CHURCH AND THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY 117 
 
 onies, through the Revolution and the period of the 
 establishment of the Constitution of the United 
 States, maintained the cause of a well-ordered liberty. 
 It may be that some may question the statement that 
 the influence of the churchmen whom I have named 
 was predominant ; I think none can doubt, from the 
 recital of facts which I have given, that they were 
 the leaders, both in the sense of being first to move 
 and in the sense of being in command of the move- 
 ment. 
 
 Along with the work on the Constitution of the 
 United States went work to set the Church upon the 
 proper lines. Many of those who have been men- 
 tioned as active in the Revolution and in the making 
 of the Constitution assisted in this, sometimes as 
 members of the gatherings which met for the pur- 
 pose ; of tener, perhaps, by their influence and advice. 
 !N'ow we see engaging in this work the clergy who had 
 been true to the cause of the colonies, such as Provoost 
 in !N'ew York, and Smith of Maryland. Chief of 
 them all was a former chaplain of the Continental 
 Congress, William White, who, in my judgment, has 
 no superior as an ecclesiastical statesman in the his- 
 tory of the Church universal. "The Church of Eng- 
 land as by law established" had ceased to exist. By 
 many legislative acts of Parliament and of the col- 
 onies; by popular usage, particularly in Maryland, 
 it had been known during the colonial period as the 
 Protestant, sometimes as the Protestant Episcopal 
 Church, and every one of the existing clergy, at his 
 ordination, had sworn allegiance to the Protestant 
 
118 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 succession. Protestant was natural enough as the 
 name of the reconstituted organization. But its or- 
 ganizers had seen the evils of a Church whose clergy 
 had episcopal ordination without episcopal over- 
 sight, and they added the word Episcopal in token, 
 as some of the resolutions of the time indicate, that 
 the government of the Church as well as its orders 
 should be episcopal. That they should have done 
 this at a time when bishops were by many thought of 
 rather as members of the British House of Lords than 
 as the chief ministers of the Christian Church, shows 
 commendable frankness, not to say courage. 
 
 They had seen the dire results which had come from 
 the connection of the Mother Church with the state ; 
 which during the times of the Stuarts had turned the 
 clergy from preaching the comfortable Gospel of 
 Christ to upholding tyranny, and, by their doctrine 
 of non-resistance, crushing the spirit of liberty. They 
 would none of this, and in the States where the influ- 
 ence of the Church was dominant, putting down the 
 proposition, which even Patrick Henry approved, of 
 a State tax for the support of religion, equitably di- 
 vided among the various denominations, they followed 
 the lead of George Mason, to which I have already re- 
 ferred, and both in the State constitutions and in the 
 first amendment to the Constitution of the United 
 States prohibited the establishment of religion or in- 
 terference with its free exercise. It is interesting to 
 note that the original constitution of Massachusetts 
 provided that the legislature should "authorize and 
 require the several towns, etc., to make suitable pro- 
 
THE CHUBCH AND THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY 119 
 
 vision, at their own expense, for the institution of the 
 public worship of God, and for the support and main- 
 tenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, relig- 
 ion, and morality." It was not until 1833 that an 
 amendment was adopted declaring that "no subordi- 
 nation of any one sect or denomination to another 
 shall ever be established by law." Thus late did the 
 idea of freedom in religion gain a footing in this 
 Puritan stronghold. 
 
 Our fathers had seen the diflSculties, indeed the 
 anomalies, of the system of government of the Mother 
 Church, whereby, while the laity were well-nigh en- 
 tirely shut out from the direction of the Church, even 
 in matters of routine and of temporal concern, and 
 the parson, often presented by some distant patron 
 of the living, was, as a corporation sole, vested with 
 almost unrestricted control, yet, in the last resort, the 
 supreme authority over the Church depended upon 
 laymen; namely, the king and his ministers and the 
 Houses of Parliament ; the presence of a certain num- 
 ber of bishops in the House of Lords being neither 
 numerically nor virtually a considerable factor in 
 legislation. 
 
 Having this in mind, and guided to a large extent 
 by the considerations which had weighed with the 
 f ramers of the Constitution of the United States, they 
 established a system of government for the general 
 Church, wherein the bishops, the clergy, and the laity 
 should each be represented in legislation, though the 
 perfect equality of the bishops as a co-ordinate body 
 did not come until the first year of the twentieth cen- 
 
120 INFLUENCE OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH 
 
 tury. In the government of the dioceses and of the 
 parishes the same recognition of the function and 
 rights of the laity obtained, so that their voice is 
 potent in all questions of Church government from the 
 admission of candidates for Holy Orders to the ad- 
 ministration of the details of parochial machinery. 
 
 As a result we have a system which Bishop Words- 
 worth, of Saint AndreVs, in his "Outline of the 
 Christian Ministry," declares to be nearer the model 
 of the primitive Church than any now existing in the 
 world. This, our goodly heritage, offers us abundant 
 faculty for entering into "the glorious liberty of the 
 children of God." It is for us to avail ourselves of it 
 in full measure and to extend its privileges as widely 
 as possible to others, remembering with how great a 
 price our fathers obtained this freedom into which we 
 have been bom. 
 
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