Mn. HUTTON and Canon Henson have produced books so dissimilar
in structure, literary method, and theological out- look that a study of both will give us a closer approximation to historical truth than can be obtained from either. The importance of the seventeenth century as a Church epoch is perhaps capable of exaggeration, and its true significance is too often subordinated to the baser uses of controversy. The real thing that Churchmen have to consider as a means of corporate life is the Reformation, with its legitimate con- sequences. The theological events of the seventeenth century in England form a fascinating record of human passion and human obstinacy, and will therefore always have a singular attraction for those to whom the drama of history is the one play worth watching. But as functional acts in the life of a Church their value lies neither in the precedents they created nor in the passions they aroused, but in their relationship to that spiritual aspect of the Renaissance which we call the Reformation, and their place as legitimate or illegitimate consequences of that great movement. If the Church of England is to-day a mighty factor in the progress of civilisation, it is not because it is a Laudian Church, or a pre-Laudian Church, or a Puritan Church, but because it is "a congregation of faithful men," empowered by the reforming spirit of the Renaissance to fulfil the universal functions of the visible Church. Recently, when noticing the Reformation volume of The Cambridge Modern History, we pointed out that if the Church ceased to be inspired by this spirit, it would as certainly lose its place as the instrument of the culminating effect of the Renaissance on the lives of the masses as the Roman Church lost its place when it separated itself from the Reformation movement. The practical value of the events of the seventeenth century consists, therefore, in the fact, if it is a fact, that they kept alive in the nation the forces of the Reformation.
Mr. Hutton's volume is an invaluable literary record of those events, and is a book of reference that every student of Church history must possess ; for while it gives us an exhaustive study of contemporary documents, the personality of the Church, so to speak, as the author sees it, dominates the entire work. Nor are we less inclined to praise Mr. Hutton's book from the fact that he finds in Archbishop Laud the depositary of the spirit of the Reformation. We may disagree with this position, as to a great extent we frankly do disagree, and yet recognise that a learned book written from that standpoint is likely to shed a flood of light on many modern developments of the Church. The real greatness of Laud is too often forgotten in the political and religions controversies which have raged round his name; and if the principles we have laid down above are true, it is certain that it is as impossible to accept the Puritan attitude towards Laud as it is to accept the Laudian attitude towards the advanced " left " of the Protestant position. Whatever else he was, Laud was not a reactionary towards Rome. Nor was he, on the other hand, the author of the doctrine of the divine right of Kings. As the ecclesiastical complement of Strafford, he was, it is true, not unnaturally hated, and not the less that, "an energetic man in all he undertook, his work, and his theory of work were thorough.' But he was much less of a politician than the people fancied, and his political platform was the platform of his masters, of Hooker, and Bodin, and Aristotle." But Land went beyond his masters. He did not understand the Reformation. To him it was simply a house-cleaning.
" (1) Ths English Church from the Accession of Charles I. to the Death of Anna (1696-1714). Part VI. of A History of the English Church. By the Bev. William Holden Hutton, B.D., Tutor of St. John's College, Oxford. London : Macmillan and Co. [7a. 6d.]—(2) Studies in English Religion in the Seven- teenth Century,: Et. Margaret's Lfctures, 290a. By H. Hensley Hensel; 13.1)., Canon of Westminster. London : John, Murray. [6s. net.]
He failed to realise that it was in fact a resurrection from the dead. A new spirit had entered the house of the Church, and not a political charwoman. Laud would have kept the Church of England swept and garnished in much the same way that the Counter-Reformation swept and garnished the Church of Rome. He could not realise that the Reformation was something far more than that, and he totally neglected the signs and tokens which Scotland, England, and the Continent presented to the minds of men. Yet it is mere foolishness to belittle Laud and his work, and to confuse him with the political dross that obscured his ecclesiastical polity. When Canon Henson speaks of Land's "small mind aflame with an immense conviction" he shows a strange want of appreciation of an adversary whose gifts would have adorned any Church in any age, and whose statesmanship, for good or evil, survives to this day.
Canon Henson is as frankly anti-Laudian as Mr. Hutton is Laudian. The fact appears quite clearly in these really charm- ing essays, which are full_ of literary merit and pleasant style, but which possess the fault—at least, it is presumably a fault —that they are written by one who sees the seventeenth century from without, and not, as in the case of Mr. Hutton, from within. The criticism is perhaps, in view of Canon Henson's preface, not to be pressed too far, for while Mr. Hutton's work is a weighty historical book, illuminated by voluminous authorities, Canon Henson's studies are admittedly intended rather for suggestion and mental stimulation than as a standard work. We fancy that his Laudian friends will be stimulated, and possibly amused, by his strictures on Laud, who at any rata did not base his policy on that "indis- pensable opportunism of politics" which Canon Henson finds also absent from the policy of the Presbyterian of that day. It would seem, indeed, to the average thinker impossible for two historical writers to come to such contrary con- clusions about this great ecclesiastical figure of the seven- teenth century as are to be found in these two books. Canon Henson is unable to realise the tolerance and liberality of the mind that protested against superstition and declared : "I will never take upon me to express that tenet or opinion, the denial of the foundation only excepted, which may shut any Christian, even the meanest, out of heaven." To assert that such a man was fatuous, small-minded, and at the best "oddly pathetic," is to look at the seventeenth century with- out historic instinct, to be unable to unravel Christianity from ecclesiastical statesmanship, and such statesmanship from the politics of the hour. On the other band, if Canon Henson is unable to look without bias back and into the true spirituality which the Laudian movement, as he admits, possessed—the spirituality which ultimately shone forth in the Nonjuring Bishops—our complaint against Mr. Hutton is certainly not less serious. He is so absorbed in his period, so fascinated by the personalities of Laud and the King,' that he finds it possible to declare that "Charles, with all his failings, died for the Church." This is only true in a very negative sense. That his death was good for the Church may be true, for there is much to be said for Canon Henson's assertion that "under the Laudian administration Episcopacy became gener- ally suspected of inherent incompatibility with Protestantism, and this happened when Protestantism was fighting a desperate battle against the forces of the Counter-Reformation." Had Charles lived, it is more than probable that a reformed Episcopal Church in England would no longer have been possible. But surely in no other sense can the "King and Martyr" be said to have "died for the Church." He died through sheer incapacity to rule, and through that extraordinary want of appreciation of the meaning of the Reformation which he shared with Laud, an inappreciation which led him to neglect those social and religious forces of Puritanism that were a direct product of the Reformation movement, and at the time the fundamental strength of England. But if the Landians of yesterday and to-day were and are in- capable of appreciating the Puritan leaven, the same charge may be made with scarcely less justice against the school to which Canon Henson belongs. To that school "the pre. Laudian Church" is an object of almost singular veneration. We are told that "the pre-Laudian Church had the strength, the weakness, and the promise of a genuinely national character. It stood with the English people, sharing their prejudices, endorsing their ideals, consecrating their efforts, lifting their normal life." This " pre-Landian Church," or "older Anglicanism," means, it appears, the Church of England during the latter half of the reign of Queen Elizabeth,—a brief period in the history of the Church when there was a pause in the movement of the Reformation, and when the seeds of the Conformity legislation were being sown by Elizabeth herself. Without questioning, though we might easily question, Canon Henson's assertion that the Church at this period was interwoven with the life of the nation while to-day it is not, it is necessary to point out that the period was in no sense one of static rest. Nothing was equilibrated. The Church was poising for either the Puritan or the Laudian settlement, and no historian can seriously assert that the later Elizabethan Church was "a wider and worthier version of Christianity than that which for the last two centuries and more has monopolised the name." No position of insta- bility is either wide or worthy, and this position, moreover, imposed upon Christians that "disadvantage of governing conduct by reference to external authority" to which Canon Henson strongly objects,—a disadvantage which he feels to be the fundamental weakness of the Laudian position. With the disappearance of the "older Anglicanism," and the rejection of the Laudian Church, thinkers of Canon Henson's school are left with the Puritan position, if they care to base themselves at all on historic theological descent. The fine tribute to Puritanism—" home-born, redolent of the English soil, akin to the English character "—as the force which has enabled the English clergy to maintain, if they have main- tained, "a higher conception of pastoral duty than has pre- vailed elsewhere," is one of the many suggestive truths that are set forth in these interesting pages. But we doubt if Canon Henson regards the Puritan leaven, as a living force in the Church to-day, with any more respect than it is regarded by the merest Laudian. The Puritan appeal to the Bible as an "external authority" of final jurisdiction is perhaps not more satisfying to him than the appeal to any other external authority, and he must therefore feel that it may lead, as in the case of those Presbyterians whom Canon Henson carefully segregates from other Puritans, to "a rigid dogma [which] readily commends itself to the acceptance of men of a low moral type."
Meanwhile, among all these conflicting waves of views and feelings, the visible Church is forging its way ahead under the still urging motive-power of the Reformation. It is surely better not to give the Church of England so many Christian names. It has its destiny to fulfil as the eldest product of the Reformation, and it is truly national. It includes many parties, and all these parties may be, and we believe are, forces that have one end : the desire to make the whole Empire, in the words of the Nineteenth Article, "a congregation of faithful men."
THE NAPOLEONIC EMPIRE IN SOUTHERN ITALY.*
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