The period of which I am to speak is one of the most trodden grounds of history. It has not indeed the same intense attraction for an Englishman which the epoch of 1789 has for the Frenchman, for the interest in one case is purely historical, in the other it is that of a movement still in progress. Our revolution has long since run its round. The cycle was limited and belonged essentially to another world than that in which we live. Doubtless it was not insulated; its force has been felt throughout the subsequent series of political action and reaction, but the current along which European society is being now carried has another and a wider sweep. In the one we are ourselves too thoroughly absorbed to contemplate its course from without. From the other we have emerged far enough for our vision of it to be complete and steady.

But though this is so, and though the period in question is perhaps more familiar than any other to historical students, it may be doubted whether its character has ever been quite fairly exhibited. By partisans it has been regarded without ‘dry light,’ by judicious historians with a light so dry as not at all to illustrate the real temper and purpose of the actors. In reaction from the latter has appeared a mode of treatment, worked with special force by Mr. Carlyle, which puts personal character in the boldest relief, but overlooks the strength of circumstance, the organic life of custom and institution, which acts on the individual from without and from within, which at once informs his will and places it in limits against which it breaks itself in vain. Such oversight leaves out an essential element in the tragedy of human story. In modern life, as Napoleon said to Goethe, political {278} necessity represents the destiny of the ancient drama. The historic hero, strong to make the world new, and exulting in his strength, has his inspiration from a past which he knows not, and is constructing a future which is not that of his own will or imagination. The providence which he serves works by longer and more ambiguous methods than suit his enthusiasm or impatience. Sooner or later the fatal web gathers round him too painfully to be longer disregarded, when he must either waste himself in ineffectual struggle with it, or adjust himself to it by a process which to his own conscience and in the judgment of men is one of personal debasement.

It is as such a tragic conflict between the creative will of man and the hidden wisdom of the world, which seems to thwart it, that the ‘Great Rebellion’ has its interest. The party spirit of the present day is ill-spent on it. Neither our conservatism nor our liberalism, neither our oligarchic nor our ‘levelling’ zeal, can find much to claim as its own in a struggle which was for a hierarchy under royal licence on the one side, and for a freedom founded in grace on the other. But if our party spirit is out of place here, not less so is our censoriousness. As our critical conceit gets the better of our political insight when we judge of the political capacity of a nation or class by the roughness of its ideas or the bad taste of its utterances, so it masters our historical sense when we treat the enthusiasm of a past age as simulation, its unscrupulousness as want of principle, and the energy which regards neither persons nor formulae in going straight to its end as a selfish instinct of aggrandisement. Yet, again, we do but dishonour God and the rationality of his operation in the world, if, by way of cheap honour to our hero, we depreciate the purposes no less noble than his own which crossed his path, and find nothing but unreason in that necessity of things which was too strong for his control.

It will be my endeavour in speaking of the short life of English republicanism to avoid these opposite partialities, and to treat it as the last act in a conflict beginning with the Reformation, in which the several parties had each its justification in reason, and which ended, not simply, as might seem, in a catastrophe, but was preliminary to a reconciliation of the forces at issue of another kind than could to an actor in the conflict be apparent. If I seem to begin far back, I must trust to the sequel for vindication.

{279} The Reformation, we know, opened a breach in the substantial unity of Christendom, or rather brought to view in a new form one as old as the conflict between the spirit and the flesh. Such a breach lies deep down in the constitution of man, as a spirit self-determined and self-contained, yet related to a world which it regards as external and its opposite, and so related that from this world it receives its character, nay, in the proper sense, its reality. Outward ordinances were in St. Paul’s eyes fleshly and alien to the spirit. Yet had they been the spirit’s schoolmaster, and in outward ordinances it was fain in turn to embody itself when it went forth to recast the world in a Christian society.

The Christianity of the west remained till the Reformation essentially a Christianity of ordinances. The opposition of church and empire, of ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction, was not in any proper sense an opposition of the spirit and the world. The church and its law had not yet been questioned by the reason, and hence their authority had not been recognised as rational. The obedience rendered to them was that of the servant rather than of the son. The Christ who ruled through them was still a ‘Christ after the flesh.’ The two swords which Peter showed to Jesus were taken by medieval fancy as emblematic of the double sovereignty of church and state, and indeed fitly represented the sameness in kind of the two powers. Each was a carnal weapon, nor was there any essential distinction between the objects to which each was applied. Neither touched the spirit, or rather the spirit was not in a state to be conscious of the wound. To the higher intellects of the time, like Dante, the co-ordination of the two seemed an evil, for under the name of a separation between the spiritual and temporal was covered an antagonism of sovereignties equally temporal. The one thwarted, supplemented, combined with the other in the same sphere of outward relations. Together they built up the firmament of custom and ordinance, which the boundless spirit had not yet learned to feel as a limitation.

The Reformation, however, had a history. Not only was it struggling into life during the whole fifteenth century; it was the result of the same spiritual throes which long before had issued in movements superficially most opposite to it; in the impulse to find in Palestine the Christ whom ordinances had hidden, in periodic revulsions from recognised and {280} comfortable usage to monastic poverty and contemplation, in the scholastic effort to rationalise and thus reconcile to the spirit the dogmas of the church. All these movements, however, the church, as an outward authority, had been able to direct. She had been general of the crusades, had stereotyped monasticism into a ceremonial discipline, and had kept the schoolmen to the work of spinning threads of which she held the ends. Thus the very effort of the reason to break its shell had complicated its confinement. As it was growing more conscious of its inward rights, the institutions in which it had to acquiesce were becoming more artificial, and the dogmas to be accepted by it more abstract. The result was such a conscious entanglement in the yoke of bondage, holding back the believer from free intercourse with God, as provoked the spiritual revolt of Luther.

‘Justification by faith’ and ‘the right of private judgment’ are the two watchwords of the Reformation. Each indicates a new relation between the spirit and outward authority. ‘Faith’ in the Lutheran language is raised to a wholly different level from that which it had occupied in the language of the church. It no longer means the implicit acceptance of dogma on authority, for lack of which the ‘infidel’ was out of the pale of salvation. As with St. Paul it expressed the continuous act in virtue of which the individual breaks loose from the outward constraint of alien ordinances, and places himself in a spiritual relation to God through union with his Son, so with Luther faith is simply the renunciation by which man’s falser self, with its surroundings of observance and received opinion, slips from him that he may be clothed upon with the person of Christ. The ghost of scholasticism, no doubt, still haunted Luther, and led him astray into disquisitions on the relation of faith to the other virtues. But according to his proper idea, faith was no positive, finite virtue at all. It was the absorption of all finite and relative virtues, as such, in the consciousness of union with the infinite God. Again the spirit searcheth all things, even the deep things of God, as mysteries which Christ had opened. Again the handwriting of ordinances contrary to us was blotted out. Again the conscience moved freely in a redeemed world. [1]

[1] [This passage, from ‘Justification by faith’ occurs in the essay on Dogma, above, pp. 178-179.]

{281} How was this new consciousness of spiritual freedom and right to be reconciled with submission to institutions which seemed to rest on selfish interest or the acquiescence of the animal nature? How was the dominion of God in the believer’s soul to be adjusted to his dominion in a church which restrained the operations of his spirit, and in a state which only honoured him with the lips? Such was the practical question which the Reformation offered to European society. Raised first and in its rudest form by MÜnzer’s anabaptists, it worked with more subtle influence in all the countries which felt the Reformation. The opposition between the inward and outward, between reason and authority, between the spirit and the flesh, between the individual and the world of settled right, no longer a mere antithesis of the schools, was being wrought into the political life of Christendom. It gives the true formula for expressing the nature of the conflict which issued in the English commonwealth.

This conflict was rightly regarded by the higher intellects that took part in it as but a stage in a vaster one of which all christendom was the arena [1]; as a completion of the Reformation, a struggle against the catholic reaction. In the special form which it assumed in England we shall find the reason why the course of religious, and indirectly of political development, with us has been different from that which obtained severally in protestant Germany, in France, and in southern Europe. It is only by considering the modes in which the spiritual forces brought into play in the Reformation had their relations adjusted elsewhere, that we can appreciate the nature of their collision and reconciliation in England. These modes may be summed as respectively jesuitry, the divorce of the secular from the religious, and the complete assimilation of the religious to the political life of states. The power by which the catholic church met the new emergency, the new demand for personal spiritual satisfaction, was, speaking broadly, jesuitry. So long as human life remained in that ‘wholeness’ which is health, there was no room for such an agency. The catholic of the middle ages had no thought of a spiritual world beyond that presented to him in the outward institutions of the church. His sins were sins against some established ordinance, which the upholder of the ordinance could absolve. But with the awakened conscience of a spiritual world, apart from all {282} ordinances, to which the soul in its individual essence for good or evil was related, came a new need of spiritual direction. Where the reason was strong enough to be a law to itself, this direction was found in the Bible as interpreted by the individual conscience. Where the authority of the church retained its hold, it could only do so by regulating the most secret intricacies of personal experience, and by meeting the importunities of personal fear or aspiration by an answer equally personal. Through the jesuits, as educators and confessors, it was able to do this. It supplied an elaborate mechanism through which the individual might work out his own justification in disregard of recognised outward duties. The protestant idea of an inward light, to whatever extravagances it might be open, stimulated the sense of a universal law which the inward light revealed. Hence it has issued, as among the quakers, in a far-reaching zeal of cosmopolitan philanthropy. Jesuitry, on the other hand, is the ruin of all public spirit. It satisfies the individual soul and reconciles it to the church by casuistical devices which give the guise of reason to the interested suggestions of personal passion. In saving the soul it ruins nations, not because it proposes a higher law than that of which the kingdoms of this world are capable, but because it makes salvation a process of self-seeking no other than the satisfaction of the hunger of sense. In southern Europe jesuitry had its way. Sometimes it might justify the tyrant, sometimes (as in France under the League) the tyrannicide; but it was equally antagonistic to rational freedom. Acting on the ruler, it derationalised the state, which came to be, not the passionless expression of general right, but the engine of individual caprice under alternating fits of appetite and fear. Acting on the subject, again, it gave him over to private interests in the way either of vicious self-indulgence or of the religious zeal which compounds for such indulgence. The creature of the jesuits is no longer spontaneously loyal to the institutions under which he is born, nor yet has he, like the puritan, a new law written on his conscience which he is to enact in society, but he has a transaction of his own to negotiate with a power wielding spiritual terrors. He may be either rake or devotee, but never a citizen, as the Spain and southern Germany of the seventeenth century too plainly testified.

[1] [Amended from “area”. Tr.]

Thus directed, then, the conflict between inward and {283} outward interest ends in such a supremacy of the former as gives the state over to caprice and undermines the outward morality which forms the moral man. So far as catholic countries have escaped, or recovered from, such a result, they have done so by the gradual obliteration or confinement within strict limits of all personal interest in religion. The Romance nations, it has been often remarked, have not the same instinct of spiritual completeness as the Teutonic. They are not distressed by the spiritual divorce which is implied in leaving religion and morality as unreconciled principles of action. Thus in some of them we find a political and social interest growing up in complete independence of the church, and organising itself with a rational regularity which the protestant politician, constantly thwarted in schemes which he deems secular by religious intrusion, may sometimes be disposed to envy. Religion, meanwhile, is regulated, and the agencies such as jesuitry by which it might interfere with secular life are carefully watched. Under such regulation it is left to itself. To the citizen it becomes a mere ceremonial. His attitude towards it is simply passive. At best it does but fill up the vacancies of his social life or comfort him in his final seclusion from it. The devout become a class by themselves, estranged from the activities of civil life. Only for them and for women, as the passive element in society, is religion a permanent influence. Wherever in catholic countries, under the influence of the revolutionary revival of the last century, the reorganisation of society has been achieved, it has only been under the condition of this confinement and passivity of religion. In France, as the source of this revival, the condition has been most fully realised. It is the natural sequel, indeed, of the compromise of interests effected by Henry IV.

To the Germans, as to every other nation, the quickened Christianity of the Reformation brought not peace but a sword. Their religious wars, however, were rather brought on by crowned violence and the ambition of the house of Hapsburg than the result of any strife of principles involved in lutheranism itself. The protestantism of North Germany, growing up under the protection of princes, from the first blended with the existing institutions of the state. It escaped internal rupture, and had not seriously to fight for existence till the time of the thirty years’ war. It then {284} owed its preservation, not to itself, but to the sword of Gustavus and the diplomacy of Richelieu, and Germany emerged from the war in such a state of wretchedness and exhaustion, that popular religion was in no condition to assert itself against princely patronage and control during the ‘constituted anarchy’ which followed the peace of Westphalia. This circumstance, acting on the German instinct of comprehension, prevented the antagonism of the secular and religious from developing itself in the lutheran countries. The German, with his speculative grasp, has no difficulty in regarding church and state as two sides of the same spiritual organism. To him each expresses an idea which is the necessary complement of the other, and each alike commends itself to his reason. How little the reality of either church or state may correspond to the idea, how powerless in action may be the permeating strength of German thought, an Englishman needs not to be told. But it is important to observe the effect of this union of strength with weakness, of the faculty of intellectual fusion with moral acquiescence, in reconciling the freest spiritual consciousness to secular limitations, and in healing the breaches of religious strife. All that we associate with the term ‘sectarian’ is for good or evil unknown in Germany. The conflict of reason and authority has not indeed ceased among the countrymen of Luther. It has its wars and its truces, its conquerors and its victims; but its arena has been the study and the lecture-room, not the market-place or the congregation.

The Reformation in England begins simply with the substitution of royal for papal power in the government of the church. If Henry VIII. had left a successor capable of wielding his sceptre, English religion would scarcely have grown up, as it has done, in the bracing atmosphere of schism. During the minority of Edward, a form of protestant episcopacy, unique among the reformed churches, grew up with a certain degree of independence, while at the same time ideas of a different order, whose mother was Geneva, were working undisturbed. The Marian persecution, while it strengthened the influence of the aggressive Genevan form of protestantism on England, completed its estrangement from the state. Thus when ‘anglicanism,’ episcopal, sacramental, ceremonial, was established by Elizabeth, it had at once to deal with an opposite system, thoroughly formed and {285} nursed in antagonism to the powers of this world. This system is, so to speak, the full articulation of that voice of conscience, of the inner self-asserting spirit, in opposition to outward ordinance, which the Reformation evoked. In this light let us consider its action in England.

The lutheran doctrine, as we have seen, brings the individual soul, as such, into direct relation to God. From this doctrine the first practical corollary is the placing of the bible in the hands of the people; the second is the exaltation of preaching. From these again follows the diffusion of popular education. The soul, admitted in its own right to the divine audience, still needs a language. It must know whom it approaches, and what it is his will to give. But as the intercourse is inward and spiritual, so must be the power which regulates it; not a priest or a liturgy, but the voice of the divine spirit in the bible, interpreted by the believer’s conscience. Religion being thus internalised and individualised, preaching, as the action of soul on soul, becomes the natural channel of its communication. It is the protestant’s ritual, by which the heart is elevated to the state in which the divine voice speaks not to it in vain. Education, again, is the means by which the individual must be rendered capable of availing himself of his spiritual independence.

A people’s bible, then, a reading people, a preaching ministry, were the three conditions of protestant life. The force which results from them is everywhere an unruly one. With the English, who have neither the acquiescence nor the comprehensive power of the Germans, it at once, to use the language of a German philosopher, ‘stormed out into reality.’ It demanded and sought to create an outward world, a system of law, custom, and ordinance, answering to itself. Not only is the law of the bible to be carried directly and everywhere into action; whatever is of other origin is no law for the society whose head is Christ. An absolute breach is thus made between the new and the old. Those who by a conscious, deliberate wrench have broken with the old, and lived themselves into the new, are the predestined people of God. Outside them is a doomed world. They are the saints, and their prerogative has no limits. They admit of no co-ordinate jurisdiction which is of the world and not of Christ. The sword of the magistrate must be in their hands, or it is a weapon of offence against Christ’s people.

{286} Such a system soon builds again the bondage which it began with destroying. Originating, as we have seen, in the consciousness of a spiritual life which no outward ordinances could adequately express, it hardens this consciousness into an absolute antithesis, false because regarded as absolute, between the law of Christ and the law of the world. The law of Christ, however, must be realised in the world, and thus from this false antithesis there follows by an inexorable affiliation of ideas, a new authority, calling itself spiritual, but binding the soul with ‘secular chains,’ which from the very fact of its sincerity and logical completeness, from its allowing no compromise between the saints and the world, is more heavy than the old. It behoves us to note well these conflicting tendencies to freedom and bondage, often almost inextricably convolved, which puritanism contained within itself. It was the temporary triumph of the one tendency that made the commonwealth a possibility, and the interference of the other that stopped its expansion into permanent life. The one gave puritanism its nobility during its period of weakness while it struggled to dominion; the other made its dominion, once attained, a contradiction in fact which no individual greatness could maintain.

Puritanism, in the presbyterian form, had obtained supremacy in Scotland, while it was still struggling for life in England. In execution of its principle that a system of positive law was to be found in the bible, so absolute and exclusive as to leave no room for things indifferent, it not only established an absolute uniformity of church government and worship, but made itself virtually the sovereign power in the state. Without scruple or disguise it pursued ‘the work of reformation’ by conforming under pains and penalties the manners and opinions of men to a supposed scriptural model. In England, though the theory of puritanism was the same speculatively, its position was happily different. No one who believes that the scriptures are to be looked to, not for a positive moral law, much less for a system of church polity and ceremonial, but for moral impulse and principle, can sympathise with the doctrine, which at first was the ostensible ground of puritan opposition to the church of England, that whatever scripture does not command, it forbids. In contrast with this, the position of the early protestant bishops, that the true rule for matters of church {287} polity is practical expediency, if it fitted less aptly the interest of its maintainers, would seem to represent the higher wisdom that gives the world its due, and recognises the continuity of custom and institution which builds up the being that we are. Compared, indeed, with such pedantry as that of Cartwright, the great puritan controversialist under Elizabeth, the ‘judiciousness’ of Hooker becomes real philosophy. But in the confused currents of the world it is not always the party whose maxims are the more rationally complete which has the truer lesson for the present or the higher promise for the future. The reforming impulse, the effort to emancipate the inward man from ceremonial bondage, was with puritanism rather than with the church. Judaic itself, it yet broke the pillars of Judaism. Its limitations were its own, and happily it had no chance of fixing them finally in an outward church. Its force belonged to a larger agency, which was transforming religion from a sensuous and interested service to a free communion of spirit with spirit, and just for this reason it kept gathering to itself elements which its own earthen vessel could not long contain.

From the puritanism of Cartwright to that of Milton is a long step upwards; it answers to the descent from the anglicanism of Hooker to that of Laud or Heylin. The ‘Polity’ of Hooker, under an appearance of theological artifice, covers a statesmanlike endeavour to reconcile the protestant conscience to the necessities of the state and society. The anglicanism of Laud was simply the catholic reaction under another name. The political change corresponded to the theological. Elizabeth had ruled a nation. James and Charles never rose beyond the conception of developing a royal interest, which religion should at once serve and justify. Thus there arose that combination, by which the catholic reaction had everywhere worked, of a court party and a church party, each using the other for the purpose of silencing the demand for a ‘reason why’ in politics and religion. Charles and Laud alike represent that jesuitical conscience (if I may be allowed the expression) which is fatal to true loyalty. As Milton has it, ‘a private conscience sorts not with a public calling.’ Such a conscience may be true to a cause, as Charles and Laud were doubtless, from whatever reason, both true to the cause of a sacerdotal church. But it dare not look into the law of liberty, or {288} conceive the operation of God except in a system of prescribed institutions, about which no questions are to be asked, and in the maintenance of which cruelty becomes mercy and falsehood truth. Through the policy of the fifteen years which preceded the Long Parliament, a policy sometimes outrageous, sometimes trivial, the same purpose runs. The promulgation of the Book of Sports, the torturing of writers against plays and ceremonies, the persecution of calvinism, the suppression of the lectureships by which the more wealthy puritans sought to maintain a preaching ministry uncontrolled by the bishops, all tend to divert the human spirit from the consciousness of its right and privilege to acquiescence in what is given to it from without. Whether this diversion were effected in the interest of court or sacerdotalism, whether the head of the sacerdotal system were the old pope or ‘my lord of Canterbury,’ ‘lineally descended from St. Peter in a fair and constant manner of succession,’ mattered little. The result, but for puritan resistance, must have been that freedom should yield in England, as it had yielded in Spain and South Germany, and was soon to yield in France, to a despotism under priestly direction, which again could end only in the ruin of civil life, or in its recovery by the process which relegates religion to women and devotees.

The body of protestant resistance, however, had no organic unity but that of a common antagonism. Already there was in existence a sect, not yet directly opposed to presbyterianism, but created by the demand for a more free spiritual movement than that system allowed of. The men commonly reckoned as the authors of independency or congregationalism, an influence which more than any other has ennobled the plebeian elements of English life, bore the fitting names of Brown and Robinson. That the brownists were a well-known sect as early as 1600 is shown by the healthy hatred of Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who ‘would as lief be a brownist as a politician.’ It was in 1582, when the puritans were discussing the propriety of temporary conformity, that Brown wrote his treatise on ‘Reformation, without tarrying for any,’ and by way of not tarrying for any in his own case, took to preaching nonconformity up and down the country. After seeing the inside of thirty-two prisons as the reward of his zeal, he betook himself to Holland, carrying a congregation with him. This he afterwards left, and it does not seem {289} certain whether the subsequent brownist congregations were directly affiliated to it. Certain views of church polity, however, were current among them, which formed the principles of independency in later years. The chief of those were the doctrine of the absolute autonomy of the individual congregation, and the rejection of a special order of priests or presbyters. Each congregation was to elect or depose its own officers, the officer who should preach and administer the sacraments among the rest. When tho number of communicants in a congregation became too large to meet in any one place, a new one was to be formed, but no congregation or sum of congregations was to have any control in regard to doctrine or discipline over another.

Such a system of church government may not in itself be of more interest than others. As giving room for a liberty of prophecy which the rule of bishops or a presbytery denies, its importance was immense. This appears already in Robinson’s disavowal of the pretension to theological finality. Robinson, driven from England by episcopal persecution, had formed a congregation at Leyden. Here, in regard at least to the reformed churches of the continent, he gave up the strict separatist doctrine of the original brownists, ‘holding communion with these churches as far as possible.’ In 1620 the younger part of his congregation transferred itself to America, where it founded the colony of New Plymouth. His well-known exhortation to them at parting breathes a higher spirit of christian freedom than anything that had been heard since christianity fixed itself in creeds and churches.

‘If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of his, be as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by my ministry; for I am verily persuaded the Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of his holy word. For my part, I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion, and will go at present no farther than the instruments of their reformation. The lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw; whatever part of his will God has revealed to Calvin, they will rather die than embrace it; and the calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented, for though they were burning and shining lights in their time, yet they penetrated {290} not into the whole counsel of God, but were they now living, would be as willing to embrace farther light as that which they first received. I beseech you remember, it is an article of your church covenant, that you be ready to receive whatever truth shall be made known to you from the written word of God. Remember that … for it is not possible the christian world should come so lately out of such thick anti-christian darkness, and that perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.’ [1]

[1] [Neal, Puritans, i. p. 477, Ed. 1837.]

It is as giving freer scope than any other form of church to this conviction, that God’s spirit is not bound, that independency has its historical interest.

During the period of Laud’s persecution the difference between the presbyterian and independent order of ideas could not come prominently to view. The court and sacerdotal party would recognise no distinction but a greater or less violence of opposition to the ceremonies enforced by the High Commission, and to the arminianism and Sunday sport, which were the great means, one inward, the other outward, of evaporating the consciousness of spiritual privilege and strength. The so-called puritans were mostly of presbyterian sympathies, but their ministers, though under frequent suspensions, adhered to their benefices. They were obliged, indeed, by statute to use no other than the established liturgy, but no statute then existed, like that passed after the Restoration, requiring absolute agreement of opinion with everything contained in the liturgy. The attitude of temporary conformity under protest might therefore be a legitimate one for a puritan minister; at any rate it was the one commonly held. A certain number, however, insisting like the original Brown on a nonconformity that would tarry for no man, formed separate congregations, and these were known as Brownists. Their only chance, however, under Laud, was either to keep in absolute hiding or withdraw to Holland or New England. If there were many of them in England at the meeting of the Long Parliament, their presence was due to an order in council of 1634, a strange instance of the blindness of persecution, which prohibited emigration to New England without royal licence.

In the Long Parliament, at the time of its meeting, the only recognised representative of independency was young Sir Harry Vane. He was not, indeed, properly of the {291} independent or any other sect. Baxter, who hated him as a despiser of ordinances, gives him a sect to himself; but he represented that current of thought which flowed through independence, but could not be contained by it. His ideas are worth studying, for they are the best expression of the spirit which struggled into brief and imperfect realisation during the commonwealth. In his extant treatises, entitled a ‘Retired Man’s Meditations’ and a ‘Healing Question,’ and in extracts from other writings preserved by his contemporary biographer Sikes, we find, under a most involved phraseology and an allegorising interpretation of scripture, a strange intensity of intellectual aspiration, which, if his secondary gifts had been those of a poet instead of a politician, might have made him the rival of Milton. The account of him by Baxter, who, with all his saintliness, was never able to rise above the clerical point of view, may be taken to express the result, rather than the spirit, of his doctrines.

‘His unhappiness lay in this, that his doctrines were so cloudily formed and expressed, that few could understand them, and therefore he had but few true disciples. Mr. Sterry is thought to be of his mind, but he hath not opened himself in writing, and was so famous for obscurity in preaching (being, said Sir Benjamin Rudyard, too high for this world and too low for the other) that he thereby proved almost barren also, and vanity and sterility were never more happily conjoined’ (a clerical pun). ‘This obscurity was by some imputed to his not understanding himself; but by others to design, because he could speak plainly when he listed. The two courses in which he had most success, and spake most plainly, were his earnest plea for universal liberty of conscience, and against the magistrate’s intermeddling with religion, and his teaching his followers to revile the ministry, calling them blackcoats, priests, and other names which then savoured of reproach.’ [1]

[1] [Reliquiae Baxterianae, p. 76.]

His zeal for liberty of conscience and disrespect for ministers were early called into play by his experience as governor of Massachusetts. The eldest son of one of the most successful courtiers of the time, he had, when a boy, shown a soul that would not fit his position.

‘About the fourteenth or fifteenth year of my age,’ he said of himself on the scaffold, ‘God was pleased to lay the foundation or groundwork of repentance {292} in me … revealing his Son in me, that … I might, even whilst here in the body, be made partaker of eternal life.’

In this temper he was sent to Oxford, where he would not take the oath of supremacy, and was consequently unable to matriculate. He then spent some time at Geneva. On his return, his nonconformity gave such offence to the people about court, that the powers of Laud were applied in a special conference for the purpose, to bring him to a better mind. The final result is best stated in the words of a court clergyman: [1]

‘Mr. Comptroller Vane’s eldest son hath left his father, his mother, his country, and that fortune which his father would have left him here, and is, for conscience’ sake, gone to New England, there to lead the rest of his life, being but twenty years of age. He had abstained two years from taking the sacrament in England, because he could get no one to administer it to him standing. He was bred up at Leyden; and I hear that Sir Nathaniel Rich and Mr. Pym have done him much hurt in their persuasions this way.’

Already on the voyage he found that he had not left bigotry behind him. He had, according to Clarendon, ‘an unusual aspect, which made men think there was somewhat in him of extraordinary.’ He seems to have had long hair, a lustrous countenance, and the expression of a man looking not with, but through, his eyes. ‘His temper was a strong composition of choler and melancholy.’ These ‘circumstances of his person’ and his honourable birth, ‘rendered his fellow-passengers jealous of him, but he that they thought at first sight to have too little of Christ for their company, did soon after appear to have too much for them.’ [2] It appeared notably enough in the matter of Anne Hutchinson, with whom he had to deal as governor of Massachusetts, having been chosen to that office soon after his arrival, while still only twenty-three. This brought him into direct relation to the spirit which the clergy called sectarian, and of which he became the mouthpiece and vindicator under the commonwealth. Let us consider what that spirit was. I have already ventured to describe faith in the higher lutheran sense as the absorption of all merely finite and relative virtues, as such, in the consciousness of union with the infinite God. From this principle, as extravagances, if we like, but necessary {293} extravagances, are derived the fanatic sects of the seventeenth century, antinomians, familists, seekers, quakers. We live perhaps an age too late for understanding them. The ‘set gray life’ of our interested and calculating world shuts us out from the time when the consciousness of spiritual freedom was first awakened and the bible first placed in the people’s hands. Here was promised a union with, a realisation of, God; immediate, conscious, without stint, barrier, or limitation. Here, on the other hand, were spirits thirsting for such intercourse. Who should say them nay? Who could wonder if they drank so deep of the divine fulness offered them, that the fixed bounds of law and morality seemed to be effaced, and the manifestation of God, which absorbs duty in fruition, to be already complete? The dream of the sectary was the counterpart in minds where feeling ruled instead of thought, of the philosophic vision which views the moving world ‘sub quadam specie aeterni.’ It was the anticipation in moments of ecstasy and assurance of that which must be to us the ever-retreating end of God’s work in the world. Its mischief lay in its attempt to construct a religious life, which is nothing without external realisation, on an inward and momentary intuition. It is needless to investigate the history of Mrs. Hutchinson’s antinomian heresy, which bears the normal type. It expressed the consciousness of the communication of God to the individual soul apart from outward act or sign. Its formula was that sanctification, i.e. a holy life, was no evidence of justification; and this again was said to lead to a heresy as to the nature and operation of the Holy Ghost. Practically, perhaps, it was the result of reaction from the rule of outward austerity under which she lived. It must have escaped persecution, had she not employed it (in this, again, anticipating the sectaries of the commonwealth) as a weapon of offence against the puritan ministers. It was the custom in the colony to hold weekly exercises, in which lay people expounded and enforced the sermons heard on Sunday. Mrs. Hutchinson was allowed to hold such an exercise for women, and unhappily soon turned exposition into hostile criticism. This roused the fury of the more rigid professors, who demanded her death as a heretic. Vane protected her, and in consequence, though supported by the Boston people, was superseded by Winthrop in the annual election of governor. This led, soon afterwards, to his return {294} to England; not, however, before Roger Williams had, through Vane’s influence with the Indians, obtained a settlement at Rhode Island, and there, for the first time in Christian history, founded a political society on the basis of perfect freedom of opinion. In Rhode Island Mrs. Hutchinson found shelter, but was pursued by the clergy with hideous stories of her witchcraft and commune with the devil. These Baxter with malignant credulity was not ashamed to accept, and to ascribe her cruel murder by the Indians to the judgment of heaven.

[1] [Strafford’s Letters, i. p. 463.]

[2] [The life and Death of Sir Henry Vane, by George Sikes, p. 8, Ed. 1662.]

I dwell at some length on this story, because it exhibits in little the forces whose strife, tempered but not governed by the practical genius and stern purpose of Cromwell, formed the tragedy of the commonwealth. Here we find the puritan enthusiasm by a necessary process, when freed from worldly restraints, issuing in the sectarian enthusiasm, and then weaning and casting out the child that it has borne. We see the rent which such schism makes in a society founded not on adjustment of interests but on unity of opinion, and may judge how fatal this breach must be when the society so founded, like the republic in England, is but the sudden creation of a minority, and exists, not in a new country with boundless room where the cast-off child may find shelter, but in the presence of ancient interests, which it ignores but can neither suppress nor withdraw from, and in the midst of an old and haughty people, proud in arms, whom it claims to rule but does not represent. In detachment from both parties stands the clear spirit of Vane, strong in a principle which can give its due to both alike, yet weak from its very refusal to obscure its clearness by compromise with either. This principle, which became the better genius of independence in its conflict with presbyterianism, I will endeavour to state as Vane himself conceived it.

The work of creation in time, he held, which did but reflect the process by which the Father begets the eternal Son, involved two elements, the purely spiritual or angelic, represented by heaven or the light, on the one hand, and the material and animal on the other, represented by the earth. Man, as made of dust in the image of God, includes both, and his history was a gradual progress upward from a state which would be merely that of the animals but for the fatal gift of rational will, to a life of pure spirituality, which he {295} represented as angelic, a life which should consist in ‘the exercise of senses merely spiritual and inward, exceeding high, intuitive and comprehensive.’ This process of spiritual sublimation, treating the spirit under the figure of light or of a ‘consuming fire,’ he described as the consuming and dissolving of all objects of outward sense, and a destruction of the earthly tabernacle, while that which is from heaven is being gradually put on. In the conscience of man, the process had three principal stages, called by Vane the natural, legal, and evangelical conscience. The natural conscience was the light of those who, having not the law, were by nature a law unto themselves. It was the source of ordinary right and obligation. ‘The original impressions of just laws are in man’s nature and very constitution of being.’ These impressions were at once the source and the limit of the authority of the magistrate. The legal conscience was the source of the ordinances and dogmas of the christian. It belongs to the champions of the covenant of grace as much as to their adversaries. It represents the stage in which the christian clings to rule, letter, and privilege. It too had its value, but fell short of the evangelical conscience, of the stage in which the human spirit, perfectly conformed to Christ’s death and resurrection, crucified to outward desire and ordinance, holds intercourse ‘high, intuitive and comprehensive’ with the divine.

Doctrine of this kind is familiar enough to the student of theosophic and cosmogonic speculation. Whether Vane in his foreign travels had fallen in with the writings of Jacob Boehme we cannot say, but the family likeness is strong. The interest of the doctrine for us lies in its application to practical statesmanship by the keenest politician of a time when politicians were keen and strong. That it should have been so applied has been a sore stumbling-block to two classes of men not unfrequently found in alliance, sensational philosophers, and theologians who find the way of salvation in scripture construed as an act of parliament. The man above ordinances, as Vane was called by his contemporaries, [1] was naturally not a favourite with men whom he would have reckoned in bondage to the legal conscience. Baxter’s opinion of him has been already quoted. To the lawyers, calling themselves theologians, of the next century he was even less intelligible. Burnet had ‘sometimes taken pains to see if I could find out his meaning in his words, yet I could never reach it. And since many others {296} have said the same, it may be reasonable to believe that he hid somewhat that was a necessary key to the rest.’ [2] Clarendon had been more modest; when he had read some of his writings and ‘found nothing in them of his usual clearness and ratiocination in his discourse, in which he used much to excel the best of the company he kept’ (the company, we must remember, that called Milton friend), ‘and that in a crowd of very easy words the sense was too hard to find out, I was of opinion that the subject of it was of so delicate a nature that it required another kind of preparation of mind, and perhaps another kind of diet, than men are ordinarily supplied with.’ [3] Hume was superior to such a supposition; ‘This man, so celebrated for his parliamentary talents, and for his capacity in business, has left some writings behind him. They treat all of them of religious subjects and are absolutely unintelligible. No traces of eloquence, even of common sense, appear in them.’ In this language is noticeable a certain resentment common to men of the world and practical philosophers, that a man whom they deem a fool in his philosophy should not be a fool altogether. From his derided theosophy, however, Vane had derived certain practical principles, now of recognised value, which no statesman before him had dreamt of, and which were not less potent when based on religious ideas struggling for articulate utterance, than when stated by the masters of an elegant vocabulary from which God and spirit were excluded.

[1] [Amended from “cotemporary”. Tr.]

[2] [Burnet, Own Time, p. 108, Ed. 1838.]

[3] [Clarendon on ‘Creasy’s answer to Stillingfleet,’ as quoted in the Biographia Britannica (art. ‘Vane.’)]