244

DOGMATICAL POPERY.

who has not meditated well on that to which it is an answer.

Thus, in these ancient creeds, the idea of a kingdom or family, of which this Name was the bond, was never for a moment lost sight of. Hence this Sacrament, by which the union between the members of the kingdom, and its unseen head, was asserted and realized, still continued to be the foundation of the church. There was nothing in its dogmas which robbed them of this dignity; they were still the great pledges of the fellowship between heaven and earth, of which the creeds were the verbal acknowledgment. The case became very different when the belief of this kingdom was lost in the manner I spoke of in my last letter. Then the church began more and more to assume the appearance of a body connected together like an ancient sect, by certain notions and opinions. The question was, who had a right to dogmatize in it? An infallible dogmatism seemed to be needful, else how could men be safe in the opinions which they accepted, or which they rejected? All such pretensions became inevitable, when once the habit had been formed of looking upon Christianity as a set of opinions, a habit sure to arise in such an intellectual age as that of the schoolmen. Yet for a time the extravagant pretensions of the Pope, the dogmatist of Christendom, to be the ruler over the nations, still kept alive the old notion,-still compelled men to feel that there was a Christian kingdom, or at least a mockery of it on the earth.

DOGMATICAL PROTESTANTISM.

245

But when the Papal power had been put down in some of the nations of Europe, and had been scarcely less endangered by the insolent patronage of its supporters in the others, this idea of a kingdom became less and less palpable, both to the Reformers and to their opponents. The former had all the delight of feeling that they could speculate, without any authority to prescribe the course of their thoughts; the latter had no way of asserting their tottering power, but by laying down charts of doctrine, and denouncing all who departed from them. Thus by the Council of Trent, and the Creed of Pope Pius, the Romish Church virtually superseded those old creeds, which it professed to consider the standards of all doctrine; and the Reformers, who had begun with asserting the power of those creeds, and using them astheir text-books, gradually began to look upon their own confessions as containing all that these creeds contained, far more logically wrought out, and augmented by many important positions, of which the early church seemed to have taken no cognizance.

I dwell upon these points, because they are closely connected with all those objections which the early Quakers raised to the tone of religious thought and feeling in their day, and which have been a stumbling-block to their successors ever since. I grant you at once, that for four centuries before the Reformation, a tendency to make Christianity a system of notions, had gradually been gaining more and more ground in the church,

246

ENGLISH REFORMATION.

and that ever since the Reformation, the tendency has been becoming so strong in the minds of all men, that it is the hardest thing possible not to fall into it, nay, even to avoid it, by seeking the opposite, and, I believe, equally dangerous extreme, of dispensing with theological definitions and dogmas altogether. That our modern liberals do not escape the infection, I am very sure;-with all their tolerance, I know not where we can meet with such determined and savage dogmatists as they are. Nor do I think that your Friends, with all their zeal against this tendency, have escaped it. But I believe that a great providential scheme, for averting its evil consequences, has been at work during all the ages that have been most prone to it; and that experience is now teaching us, what need we have of that scheme, and how we may avail ourselves of its blessings. As I proceed to develope it, you will find that I have not forgotten the main subject of this letter; but that I am taking the best method of fulfilling the promises which I made respecting it in my last.

Every one is aware, that the circumstances of the English Reformation were very peculiar. Even those who do not on the whole consider that it took a worse direction here than abroad, are nevertheless often disposed to complain, that while the persons who chiefly influenced its movements there, were sage and holy theologians, to whom a few Electors might be patrons or allies, self-willed monarchs and politicians here moved

PREVIOUS DISCIPLINE.

247

the secret wires, and directed the secret working of the spiritual machine. A little more reflection would have induced Englishmen at least to restrain these unthankful murmurs. By processes of discipline, most worthy the study of every man who reads history as the gradual development of the plans of God, our nation had been trained to uuderstand principles rather by their working in institutions, than by an abstract or doctrinal standard. We had not been without our teachers and schoolmen; we might claim some of the greatest. But higher moral truths than it was given to them to perceive, were gradually elucidated in the history of our Monarchy and of our Parliaments, in the silent progress of our legislation, in the establishment and progress of our Courts of Law and Equity. The student of morals and theology is startled by discovering what profound principles, of which he has in vain sought a verbal expression, have been exhibited with wonderful clearness, in the order and formation of bodies, which appear as if they had only a civil and secular purpose. I throw out

these hints, which may suggest to you many valuable lines of thought hereafter, that I may lead you to one particular reflection now:-It is, that the apparent subordination of doctrine to politics, in our Reformation, was not only a manifest token that a divine hand was at work in it, shaping the ends in despite of men's rough hewing; but also was a reason why the Reformation assumed a less purely intellectual, and a more spiritual character

248

POLITICAL ASPECT

here than abroad. I will add one observation, which may seem still more startling, that in consequence of this difference, the Reformed bodies abroad have been unable to preserve their existence amidst the changes of opinions and society, except by either standing entirely aloof from these changes, or slavishly submitting to them; that the English Church, on the other hand, has been supported through all these changes; and is now, at the moment of her greatest apparent humiliation, able to interpret the wants of human society, to minister to them, and to direct its future progress, as no other body ever hath done.

I will explain what I conceive to have been the difference of the process in the two cases. Our Reformers had read and speculated about the points which were in controversy abroad; but the first practical movement concerned not the right to sell indulgences, the doctrine of penance, the doctrine of transubstantiation, but the Pope's supremacy. That question, which, in the minds of the continental Reformers, was merely consequent upon a number of others, became in our case primary. Nor was it the question, has the Pope a right to dogmatise for Christendom,-but it was the question, has the Pope any right, in a particular nation, over its own appointed king, which mainly occupied their attention. "That is to say," some one who worships the name Personal Religion, to the infinite danger of the thing, will exclaim," That is to say, politics were the first thing in their minds, and religion only the se