WAKEMAN'S HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.* Tins is an
excellent book by a learned, fair, and clear-minded High Churchman. Within the compass of five hundred octavo pages, it presents a well-proportioned, connected, and vivid sketch of the history of the Church of England from the point of view of those who believe in her unbroken essential continuity at the present day with the Church of Augustine, of Wilfrid, of Dunstan, and of Becket. It is almost within the memory of men in middle life that that point of view has spread from being the cherished inspira- tion of a struggling though influential school to the confident faith of the unquestionably dominant portion of the Anglican Church. But though so widely and growingly held, this faith in many cases could not be very intelligently or effectively defended by those who have received it, and who find in it a foundation for much that is most satisfying and helpful in their religion. Mr. Wakeman's book tells the story of their Church in a manner which, while it mast stimulate the desire now felt by the majority of English Churchmen to claim rightful spiritual descent from that branch of the Church Catholic which existed in this country down to the sixteenth century, sets forth clearly the grounds whereon that claim is based by the best-informed and most thoughtful of those who make it.
And as Englishmen would wish, they will find in this book no one-sided statement of the Anglican position, but a frank facing of its difficulties, a frank recognition of the humili- ating character of many of the passages on which the hostile critic may lay his finger, together with definite help towards a firm grasp of those governing facts and principles which justify the Churchman of to-day in holding that the con- tinuous life of his Church is not of contemporaneous origin with that of the great houses founded on the spoil of monastic institutions, but runs up into the pure spring of the organisa- tion founded by the Apostles.
If space allowed we should like to deal at length with the pre-Reformation part of Mr. Wakeman's book. To take one or two examples, his comparison between the work of Wilfrid of York and Theodore of Canterbury in the first century of English Christianity appears to us an admirable example of historical appreciation, and the following sentences
are so full of happy discernment that we must reproduce them:— "With the restoration and death of Wilfrid the story of the organisation of the infant Church of England is complete. It is due mainly to two great men, and due as much to the disagree- ments which arose between them as to the individual capacity
and energy of each The very troubles consequent on the quarrel between the Archbishop and Wilfrid in the end served only to intensify the rule of law, for while all attempts on the part of Wilfrid or the Pope to overturn the decisions and alter the policy of the national Church in the matter of its own territorial divisions were steadily repulsed, it was none the less clear that no Archbishop or King would ever again attempt to interfere with the diocese of a Bishop against his will. Thus by the quarrel itself, the true principles of episcopal authority and national independence were brought into clearer prominence."
• An Introduction to the History of the Church of England from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. By Henry Of Wakeman. London; Hiviagton, Percival, and C3. Again, Mr. Wakeman's summary of the part played by the English Church in the Middle Ages in the development of
English national life is very striking. After touching on Archbishop Stephen Langton's prominent share in winning the Great Charter from John, and Archbishop Winchelsey's action in securing the " Confirmation of the Charters " from Edward I. in 1297—a measure "which placed the control of the national purse in the hands of Parliament, and completed the edifice of English Constitutional liberty "—our author proceeds :-
" In nothing does the history of the English people differ more from that of other nations than in the early acquisition by Englishmen of the blessings of national unity and national liberty. England was united when France, Germany, Italy, and Spain were each but an assemblage of ill-assorted units. England was free before most of the nations of Europe had begun to ask what freedom was. Neither of these blessings would have been hers had it not been for the Church. The unity of the Church in the seventh century led to the unity of the nation in the ninth cen- tury. Liberty, claimed and championed by the Church against William the Red and Henry of Anjou, was secured by the nation under Simon de Montfort and Edward I. The tree of liberty, it is said, grows indigenous on English soil. It would never have grown at all had not the Church been there to plant the seed, protect the tender shoot, and train its matured and vigorous life."
Even if there be, as perhaps there is, a slight tendency to epigrammatic over-statement in this passage, it expresses a large amount of very important historical truth,—truth of which it is well that the memory should be kept green. No English Churchman, we are convinced, can study Mr.
Wakeman's sketch of the position and many-sided work —religious, social, artistic, educational—of the Church of England in the ages preceding the Reformation, shadowed though it was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by a share, but as he vigorously and effectively maintains, by no means a full share, of the moral and spiritual decay general at that period in Western Christendom, without at least wishing that he might feel able to regard the present Church as by law established as the legitimate heir of the Church of those earlier ages. Can it be said that Mr. Wakeman succeeds in establishing such an heirship ? For our part, we should answer that question in the affirmative. Certainly, as has been already hinted, he does not do it by shirking the difficul- ties presented by the sixteenth century. There is no attempt in his pages to defend or gloss over the personal motives by which Henry VIII. was dominated in his commencement and conduct of the struggle which led to a complete rupture between England and Rome, or the brutally violent and essentially unconstitutional character of the methods by which, though observing, whenever compatible with his plans, the forms of the Constitution—ecclesiastical as well as civil—he carried his policy through, and set up a Royal supremacy over the Church incompatible with any genuinely independent life on her part. Nor is there any attempt to conceal or minimise the dangerous lengths to which the thoroughly unconstitutional exercise of the powers of Edward VI.'s Protestant Privy Council went in 1552 in altering the Order of the Communion service established in the excellent Prayer-book of 1549, or the sig- nificance lent to that policy by the repulsive destruction of
altars. Bnt Mr. Wakeman shows, as we think, clearly enough, first, that the "ancient jurisdiction in ecclesiastical matters" restored to Elizabeth by the first Act of her first Parliament was only intended to convey, and was only interpreted by her as conveying, the kind of authority which had been claimed
and exercised by the strongest and best of her father's pre- decessors ; secondly, that in the few but significant alterations introduced by her in the Prayer-book of 1552 she designed to place, and did place, the Catholic character of Anglican sacra- mental doctrine above suspicion, and at least facilitated the restoration of Catholic symbolism ; and thirdly, that the con- tinuity of episcopal Orders in the Church of England is beyond effective challenge. In this last connection a very clear series of notes on Anglican Orders, for which Mr. Wakeman acknowledges his indebtedness to Mr. Lock and Mr. Brightman, are specially opportune in view of the recent Papal deliverance, though doubtless written before that document was published. The points just specified appear sufficient to establish the essential continuity of the Church of England from the time of Elizabeth with that branch of the Catholic Church which had existed in England from the earliest times down to the Reformation. She was reformed, as she much needed to be, and she was reformed without
essential rupture with her past. To say that on those lines, and within those limits, she reformed herself, as is often said, seems to us incorrect. Convocation, as Mr. Wakeman points oat, was not consulted either about the Prayer-book of 1559 or about the Act of Supremacy, and the vote of the (Marian) Bishops in the House of Lords was given unanimously against both the Act of Supremacy and that of Uniformity. Thus "the sanction which the Elizabethan compromise may rightly claim to have from the Church is not that of formal accept- ance, but of subsequent acquiescence." Not, therefore, with flying colours can it be said that the Church of England issues from the welter of the sixteenth century. Largely through the action of a profoundly worldly minded Queen she possesses her peculiar heritage, her special position, which may yet prove a rallying point for Christendom. The fact should make her sons humble indeed, but all the more sensible of the overruling power by which such ends and such possi- bilities were secured through such means.
Into the story of the struggle with Puritanism we cannot. follow Mr. Wakeman. In the main we think that his position as to the essential irreconcilability of Anglicanism and Puri- tanism is a sound one. We regret it. There was an elemental grandeur and strength about Puritanism at its best which Anglicanism can hardly boast. But for "human nature's daily food " we entertain no doubt that Anglicanism makes and has always made infinitely better provision, or that towards the sustenance of the Christian life the Catholic deposit in Anglicanism is of vital value. Puritanism ever hated that deposit, and would not have been content without purging it away. Therefore the Puritanism of the seven- teenth century could not be " comprehended" within the Church of England, and it was right that the attempt should fail, though the failure seemed ineffably sad, and was followed by measures of persecution, of which we are glad to say that Mr. Wakeman speaks in terms of emphatic denunciation. Her deathly torpor in the eighteenth century may perhaps be regarded as in part the Church's punishment for the guilt of that evil policy. Certainly her splendid revival in our own day, of which Mr. Wakeman writes with much sympathetic vigour and insight, has been concurrent with a complete disuse of every secular method of pressure upon those outside her pale.
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