BOOKS.
PROFESSOR DOWDEN ON THE PURITAN AND THE ANGLICAN.* PROFESSOR DOWDEN has something better than a judicial, he has a sympathetic mind. He is able to see many points of view, to approach the same subject from different sides, to perceive in apparent opponents contributors to a great common end, and yet without confounding things that differ or ignoring actual problems in smooth platitudes. Thus, while we cannot say that we have found any strikingly original criticism in these literary and religious studies of seventeenth-century England, we have found a very broad and sympathetic survey of the thought of that era as expressed in its leading writers, embodied in the admirable style of which Professor Dowden is ,a master. There are but few writers who can see the strength and weakness alike of Puritanism and Anglicanism, and who at the same time can see how the one may and should be the complement of the other. It is Professor Doivden's chief claim to attention that he can see this clearly. The two phases of English religious thought correspond to, or are part of, two great universal types, as Professor Dowden, quoting from Dr. Martineau, contends. Anglicanism is a phase of the Catholic conception which "readily finds that sensuous vehicle for its ideas which literature and art demand. It interprets the invisible by the visible; it does not suspect beauty or colour or the delight of life, but seeks to inter- penetrate these with what is divine." Puritanism, on the other band, does not look through Nature to Nature's God, but aspires to an immediate vision. "For the Puritan using the word to describe a type of mind, the natural and the supernatural exist in an immediated dualism, and it is a difficulty with him to clothe the naked idea—religious or ethical—in any sensuous medium or body." To this differentia- tion the simpler early religious thought of England had been brought by the religious cleavage of the sixteenth century. It was a part, of course, of a world-movement, but we are here concerned with England alone.
Of the essentially Puritan type whose ideas we may say lead up to Transcendentalism, Professor Dowden takes Bunyan above all others ; of the Anglican type whose ideas rather take us to the divine immanence, the Anglo-Catholic poets Herbert and Vaughan. Sir Thomas Browne leans to the Anglican side, and Milton more decidedly to that of Puritanism ; yet each is detached, each is too great a thinker to be properly classified, as Carlyle would have said, under any " ist " or " ism." Both accepted the Christian revelation, but both interpreted it under forms of reason not sympathetic either to the Puritan, with his infallible Book, or the Anglican, with his historic Church. In Jeremy Taylor and Baxter we have what Professor Dowden calls "an Anglican and a Puritan Eirenicon." In the person of Hooker we have perhaps Anglicanism at its broadest and best. If the Church of England desired to exhibit her central, strongest, wisest figure, she could scarcely pitch upon a better than Richard Hooker. Not that he was a profound thinker, but that his mind was broad and balanced, and his essentially Anglican principles were as truly fortified by reason as were the Puritan principles of Milton. One other figure, that of Samuel Butler, represents what may
• Puritan and Anglican: Studies in. Literattirt. By Edward Dowden.. London Eagan rata, Trench, and Co. [7a 6d.) be called the reaction of the maff of "common-sense," allied to a certain mental cynicism as of one weary of disputation, against the dominant principles of the "reign of the saints." Professor Dowden has left on one side the Cambridge Platonists and the pure thinkers who lived in cloistral Becht. sion alike from the theological and political controversies of the century; but apart from these he has given us a general survey of the ides wares of that age of storm and stress as expressed in its more abiding literature.
With our author we can see deafly, now that the dust of the controversy has been dissipated, how vitally important were the leading principles on either side. The Anglican idea of visible beauty and order, and, at its best in such a writer as Hooker, of reason and temperance (in the Greek sense) combining with Scriptural authority, may be well regarded as vital. But Anglicanism tends always to a certain quiet con. ventioiaalism, from which the human soul needs to be aroused. In the seventeenth century there was added to this a certain rough earthiness and a reliance on the secular arm. These elements found expression in the Book of Sports and in the harsh Laudian persecution. To save the soul from dead works was the special task of Puritanism, which would abolish idols and would break the sculpture and the staified glass in order to let in a breath of pure air straight from heaven. That movement was vital too. Anglicanism stood at its best for a stately, well-ordered national edifice, partly spoiled and partly rebuilt at the Reformation, but still adorned with the pious gifts of the past, informed with reason, its boundaries in theory at least vide, its piety still retaining more than a touch of medimval beauty. At its weakest, however, it might well prove the sepulchre of faith, the tomb of all that is heroic in Christianity. To save it from that tragic end was the inner purpose of Puritanism. It was not the mere ques- tion of wooden tables as against stone altars, of black gowns against white, of "new presbyter" as against "old priest " ; the vital question was as to a present revelation of God as against dead, historic tradition. As Professor Dowden says, in discussing the most thorough type of Puritan writer, heaven and hell were far more real to John Bunyan than the most familiar daily objects. To make the inner facts of soul- life real, vital, dominant,—that was the essential mission of Puritanism. And for that great purpose it needed and devised the creed of direct, immediate contact with God, without the mediated help of priest, sacrament., or any visible symboL In the order of the world the Puritan conception is an eternal factor, and yet it cannot, as history shows, persist everywhere and always. Mankind, taken as a whole, appears to need no little symbolism in its toilsome path upwards. Puritanism means ever-recurring spiritual ozone from the mighty sea of divine purity and power, but weak souls cannot abide it long. The persistence of the historic Churches and creeds seems to hint at the use and necessity of tradition, of an age-long order into which weary souls, incapable of sus- tained spiritual heroism, fall. Puritanism, nobly effective for the heroic temper which, like Moses, ardently burns to behold the divine glory, fails to rear a permanent edifice where the weaker minds may find rest and beauty. Each serves its part; why dwell on the less defensible aspect of either ? Why not, with Professor Dowden, set forth the strength and service of both? Professor Dowden's defence of Puritanism against igno- rant prejudice is excellent. The leading Puritans were friends of art, culture, social enjoyment, but they blended these elements of life with what Matthew Arnold (who himself, as Professor Dowden says, misjudged the essential Puritan position) called "high seriousness." Now we think that the English character, in the absence of this element, tends to a gross animalism, as our national history assuredly shows. We need, then, in this time of materialism, a Puritan renascence to save our character and ideals, as Milton and Bunyan (spite of Restoration orgies) saved those of our forefathers. In this sense, then, Puritanism is a necessary eternal factor. But on the philosophical as well as the human side, the Anglicanism of Hooker and Taylor has the promise of the future. Our religious thought, rescued from the hard, albeit noble, bonds of Augustinian theology, will rest more and more in the idea of the divine immanence and in the extension of the divine love to a classes of men. Thus, it may be hoped, Righteousness and
Peace will kiss one another, and the spiritual fervour of Puritanism will be blended with the calmer piety, human reeling, and appeal to reason which we associate with Hooker and Taylor. It was to some such ideal that Milton strove (as is shown by Professor Dowden) before he fell on evil days. It would, if realised, avoid the perils both of extreme indi- vidualism and of conventional routine.
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