Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

duced to practice, still as large a compre- | Church of England has not gone the length hension as could be contrived, within the of asserting in her Articles; but neither narrower limits of the kingdom, became, for has she gone the length of explicitly contrathe same reasons which first suggested the dicting those opinions; insomuch, that idea, at once an object of prudence and there is nothing to hinder the Arminian duty in the formation and government of and the highest supralapsarian Calvinist the English Church.' from walking together in the Church of England and Ireland as friends and brothers, if they both approve the discipline of the Church, and both are willing to submit to it. Her discipline has been approved; it has been submitted to; it has been in former times most ably and zealously defended by the highest supralapsarian Calvinists. Such was the great Usher; such was Whitgift; such were many more, burning and shining lights of our Church in her early days (when first she shook off the Papal tyranny), long since gone to the resting-place of the spirits of the just."-(Bishop HORSLEY's Charges, p. 216.-pp. 25, 26.)

"After dwelling on the means necessary to accomplish this object, the Bishop proceeds to remark:-'Such evidently appears to have been the origin, and such the actual complexion of the confession comprised in the Articles of our Church; the true scope and design of which will not, I conceive, be correctly apprehended in any other view than that of one drawn up and adjusted with an intention to comprehend the assent of all, rather than to exclude that of any who concurred in the necessity of a refor

mation.

"The means of comprehension intended were, not any general ambiguity or equivoeation of terms, but a prudent forbearance So that these unhappy Curates are in all parties not to insist on the full extent turned out of their bread for an expoof their opinions in matters not essential sition of the Articles which such men or fundamental; and in all cases to waive, as Sherlock, Cleaver, and Horsley as much as possible, tenets which might di- think may be fairly given of their vide, where they wish to unite." (Remarks meaning. We do not quote their auon the Design and Formation of the Articles thority, to show that the right interof the Church of England, by WILLIAM, pretation is decided, but that it is Lord Bishop of Bangor, 1802. pp. 23-25.) doubtful-that there is a balance of We will finish with Bishop Horsley. authorities- that the opinion which "It has been the fashion of late to talk Bishop Marsh has punished with poabout Arminianism as the system of the verty and degradation, has been conChurch of England, and of Calvinism as sidered to be legitimate by men at something opposite to it, to which the least as wise and learned as himself. Church is hostile. That I may not be mis- In fact, it is to us perfectly clear, that understood in what I have stated, or may the Articles were originally framed to have occasion further to say upon this subject, I must here declare, that I use the prevent the very practices which Bishop words Arminianism and Calvinism in that Marsh has used for their protectionrestricted sense in which they are now they were purposely so worded, that generally taken, to denote the doctrinal Arminians and Calvinists could sign part of each system, as unconnected with them without blame. They were inthe principles either of Arminians or tended to combine both these descripCalvinists, upon Church discipline and tions of Protestants, and were meant Church government. This being premised, I assert, what I often have before asserted, principally for a bulwark against the and by God's grace I will persist in the Catholics. Assertion to my dying day, that so far is it from the truth that the Church of England is decidedly Arminian, and hostile to Calvinism, that the truth is this, that upon the principal points in dispute between the Arminians and the Calvinists-upon all the points of doctrine characteristic of the two sects, the Church of England maintains an absolute neutrality; her Articles explicitly assert nothing but what is believed both by Arminians and by Calvinists. The Calvinists indeed hold some opinions relative to the same points, which the

"Thus," says Bishop Burnet, "was the doctrine of the Church cast into a short and plain form; in which they took care both to establish the positive articles of religion and to cut off the errors formerly introduced in the time of Popery, or of late broached by the Anabaptists and enthusiasts of Germany; avoiding the niceties of schoolmen, or the peremptoriness of the writers of controversy; leaving, in matters that are more justly controvertible, a liberty to divines to follow their private opinions without thereby disturbing the peace of the

of England is made, in elucidation of the charity and wisdom of such policy. Speaking of men who act upon a contrary principle he says, O quantum potuit insana piλartia!

These passages, we think, are conclusive evidence of the practice of the Church till 1719. For Wake was not only at the time Archbishop of Canterbury, but both in his circular recom. mendations to the Bishops of England, and in his correspondence with foreign Churches, was acting in the capacity of metropolitan of the Anglican Church. He, a man of prudence and learning, publicly boasts to Protestant Europe, that his Church does not exact, and that he de facto has never avowed, and never will, his opinions on those very points upon which Bishop Marsh obliges every poor curate to be explicit, upon pain of expulsion from the Church.

of Arminianism) to bishoprics and archbishoprics-so little did a Calvinistic interpretation of the Articles in a man's own breast, or even an avowal of Calvinism beyond what was required by the Articles, operate even then as a disqualification for the cure of souls, or any other office in the Church. Throughout Charles II. and William III.'s time, the best men and greatest names of the Church not only allowed latitude in interpreting the Articles, but thought it would be wise to diminish their number, and render them more lax than they are; and be it observed that these latitudinarians leant to Arminianism rather than to high Calvinism; and thought, consequently, that the Articles, if objectionable at all, were exposed to the censure of being "too Calvinistic," rather than too Arminian. How preposterous, therefore, to twist them, and the subscription to It is clear, then, the practice was to them required by law, by the machinery extract subscription, and nothing else, of a long string of explanatory ques- as the test of orthodoxy-to that Wake tions, into a barrier against Calvinists, is an evidence. As far as he is authoand to give the Arminians a monopoly rity on a point of opinion, it is his conin the Church! viction that this practice was wholeArchbishop Wake, in 1716, after some, wise, and intended to preserve consulting all the Bishops then attend-peace in the Church; that it would be ing Parliament, thought it incumbent on him "to employ the authority which the ecclesiastical laws then in force, and the custom and laws of the realm vested in him" in taking care that "no unworthy person might hereafter be admitted into the sacred Ministry of the Church;" and he drew up twelve recommendations to the Bishops of England, in which he earnestly exhorts them not to ordain persons of bad conduct or character, or incompetent learning; but he does not require from the candidates for Holy Orders or preferment any explanation whatever of the Articles which they had signed.

The Correspondence of the same eminent Prelate with Professor .Turretin in 1718, and with Mr. Le Clerc and the Pastors and Professors of Geneva in 1719, printed in London, 1782, recommends union among Protestants, and the omission of controverted points in Confessions of Faith, as a means of obtaining that union; and a constant reference to the practice of the Church

wrong at least, if not illegal, to do otherwise; and that the observance of this forbearance is the only method of preventing schism. The Bishop of Peterborough, however, is of a different opinion; he is so thoroughly convinced of the pernicious effects of Calvinistic doctrines, that he does what no other Bishop does, or ever did do, for their exclusion. This may be either wise or injudicious, but it is at least zealous and bold; it is to encounter rebuke, and opposition, from a sense of duty. It is impossible to deny this merit to his Lordship. And we have no doubt, that, in pursuance of the same theological gallantry, he is preparing a set of interrogatories for those clergymen who are presented to benefices in his diocese. The patron will have his action of Quare impedit, it is true; and the judge and jury will decide whether the Bishop has the right of interro gation at all; and whether Calvinistical answers to his interrogatories disqualify any man from holding preferment in

the Church of England. If either of these points are given against the Bishop of Peterborough, he is in honour and conscience bound to give up his examination of curates. If Calvinistic ministers are, in the estimation of the Bishops, so dangerous as curates, they are, of course, much more dangerous as rectors and vicars. He has as much right to examine one as the other. Why, then, does he pass over the greater danger, and guard against the less? Why does he not show his zeal when he would run some risk, and where the excluded person (if excluded unjustly) could appeal to the laws of his country? If his conduct be just and right, has he anything to fear from that appeal? What should we say of a police officer, who acted in all cases of petty larceny, where no opposition was made, and let off all persons guilty of felony who threatened to knock him down? If the Bishop value his own character, he is bound to do 1 ss,-or to do more. God send his choice may be right! The law, as it stands at present, certainly affords very unequal protection to rector and to curate; but if the Bishop will not act so as to improve the law, the law must be so changed as to improve the Bishop; an action of Quare impedit must be given to the curate also-and then the fury of interrogation will be calmed.

We are aware that the Bishop of Peterborough, in his speech, disclaims the object of excluding the Calvinists by this system of interrogation. We shall take no other notice of his disavowal than expressing our sincere regret that he ever made it; but the question is not at all altered by the intention of the interrogator. Whether he aim at the Calvinists only, or includes them with other heterodox respondents -the fact is, they are included in the proscription, and excluded from the Church, the practical effect of the practice being that men are driven out of the Church who have as much right to exercise the duties of clergymen as the Bishop himself. If heterodox opinions are the great objects of the Bishop's apprehensions, he has his Ecclesiastical Courts, where regular process

may bring the offender to punishment, and from whence there is an appeal to higher courts. This would be the fair thing to do. The curate and the Bishop would be brought into the light of day, and subjected to the wholesome restraint of public opinion.

His Lordship boasts that he has excluded only two curates. So the Emperor of Hayti boasted that he had only cut off two persons' heads for disagreeable behaviour at his table. In spite of the paucity of the visiters executed, the example operated as a considerable impediment to conversation; and the intensity of the punishment was found to be a full compensation for its rarity. How many persons have been deprived of curacies which they might have enjoyed but for the tenour of these interrogatories? How many respectable clergymen have been deprived of the assistance of curates connected with them by blood, friendship, or doctrine, and compelled to choose persons for no other qualification than that they could pass through the eye of the Bishop's needle? Violent measures are not to be judged of merely by the number of times they have been resorted to, but by the terror, misery, and restraint which the severity is likely to have produced.

We never met with any style so entirely clear of all redundant and vicious ornament as that which the ecclesiastical Lord of Peterborough has adopted towards his clergy. It, in fact, may be all reduced to these few words-"Reverend Sir, I shall do what I please. Peterborough."-Even in the House of Lords, he speaks what we must call very plain language. Among other things, he says that the allegations of the petitions are false. Now, as every Bishop is, besides his other qualities, a gentleman; and as the word false is used only by laymen who mean to hazard their lives by the expression; and as it cannot be supposed that foul language is ever used because it can be used with personal impunity, his Lordship must therefore be intended to mean not false, but mistaken—not a wilful deviation from truth, but an accidental and unintended departure from it.

The Bishop of Peterborough is po

His Lordship talks of the drudgery | When once the ancient faith-marks of of wading through ten pages of an- the Church are lost sight of and swers to his eighty-seven questions. despised, any misled theologian may Who has occasioned this drudgery, launch out on the boundless sea of but the person who means to be so polemical vexation. much more active, useful, and important, than all other Bishops, by pro-sitive, that the Arminian interpretation posing questions which nobody has of the Articles is the right interpretathought to be necessary but himself? tion, and that Calvinists should be But to be intolerably strict and harsh excluded from it; but the country to a poor curate, who is trying to earn gentlemen who are to hear these mata morsel of hard bread, and then to ters debated in the Lower House, are complain of the drudgery of reading to remember, that other Bishops have his answers, is much like knocking a written upon these points before the man down with a bludgeon, and then Bishop of Peterborough, and have abusing him for splashing you with his arrived at conclusions diametrically blood, and pestering you with his opposite. When curates are excluded groans. It is quite monstrous, that a because their answers are Calvinis inan who inflicts eighty-seven new tical, a careless layman might imagine questions in Theology upon his fellow-that this interpretation of the Articles creatures, should talk of the drudgery of reading their answers.

had never been heard of before in the Church-that it was a gross and pal pable perversion of their sense, which had been scouted by all writers on Church matters, from the day the Articles were promulgated, to this hour - that such an unheard-of monster as a Calvinistical Curate had never leapt over the pale before, and been detected browsing in the sacred pastures.

The following is the testimony of Bishop Sherlock :

"The Church has left a latitude of sense

A Curate-there is something which excites compassion in the very name of a Curate!!! How any man of Purple, Palaces, and Preferment, can let himself loose against this poor working man of God, we are at a loss to conceive,—a learned man in an hovel, with sermons and saucepans, lexicons and bacon, Hebrew books and ragged children-good and patient a comforter and a preacher-the first and purest pauper in the hamlet, and to prevent schisms and breaches upon yet showing, that, in the midst of his every different opinion. It is evident the worldly misery, he has the heart of a Church of England has so done in some gentleman, and the spirit of a Chris- Articles, which are most liable to the hottian, and the kindness of a pastor; test disputes; which yet are penned with and this man, though he has exercised that temper as to be willingly subscribed the duties of a clergyman for twenty by men of different apprehensions in those matters." (SHERLOCK's Defence of years-though he has most ample tes-Stillingfleet's Unreasonableness of Separa timonies of conduct from clergymen tion.) as respectable as any Bishop-though an Archbishop add his name to the list of witnesses, is not good enough for Bishop Marsh; but is pushed out in the street, with his wife and children, and his little furniture, to surrender his honour, his faith, his conscience, and his learning-or to starve!

An obvious objection to these innovations is, that there can be no end to them. If eighty-three questions are assumed to be necessary by one Bishop, eight hundred may be considered as the minimum of interrogation by another.

Bishop Cleaver, describing the difficulties attending so great an undertaking as the formation of a national creed, observes :—

"These difficulties, however, do not seem to have discouraged the great leaders in this work from forming a design as wise as it was liberal, that of framing a confes sion, which in the enumeration and method probation, and engage the consent of the of its several articles, should meet the apwhole reformed world.

"If upon trial it was found that a com prehension so extensive could not be re

hension as could be contrived, within the narrower limits of the kingdom, became, for the same reasons which first suggested the idea, at once an object of prudence and duty in the formation and government of the English Church.'

duced to practice, still as large a compre- | Church of England has not gone the length of asserting in her Articles; but neither has she gone the length of explicitly contradicting those opinions; insomuch, that there is nothing to hinder the Arminian and the highest supralapsarian Calvinist from walking together in the Church of England and Ireland as friends and brothers, if they both approve the discipline of the Church, and both are willing to submit to it. Her discipline has been approved; it has been submitted to; it has been in former times most ably and zealously defended by the highest supralapsarian Calvinists. Such was the great Usher; such was Whitgift; such were many more, burning and shining lights of our Church in her early days (when first she shook off the Papal tyranny), long since gone to the resting-place of the spirits of the just."-(Bishop HORSLEY's Charges, p. 216.—pp. 25, 26.)

"After dwelling on the means necessary to accomplish this object, the Bishop proceeds to remark:- Such evidently appears to have been the origin, and such the actual complexion of the confession comprised in the Articles of our Church; the true scope and design of which will not, I conceive, be correctly apprehended in any other view than that of one drawn up and adjusted with an intention to comprehend the assent of all, rather than to exclude that of any who concurred in the necessity of a reformation.

"The means of comprehension intended were, not any general ambiguity or equivocation of terins, but a prudent forbearance So that these unhappy Curates are in all parties not to insist on the full extent turned out of their bread for an expoof their opinions in matters not essential sition of the Articles which such men or fundamental; and in all cases to waive, as Sherlock, Cleaver, and Horsley as much as possible, tenets which might di- think may be fairly given of their vide, where they wish to unite." (Remarks meaning. We do not quote their auon the Design and Formation of the Articles of the Church of England, by WILLIAM, Lord Bishop of Bangor, 1802.—pp. 23–25.) We will finish with Bishop Horsley. "It has been the fashion of late to talk about Arminianism as the system of the Church of England, and of Calvinism as something opposite to it, to which the Church is hostile. That I may not be misunderstood in what I have stated, or may have occasion further to say upon this subject, I must here declare, that I use the words Arminianism and Calvinism in that restricted sense in which they are now generally taken, to denote the doctrinal part of each system, as unconnected with the principles either of Arminians or Calvinists, upon Church discipline and Church government. This being premised, I assert, what I often have before asserted, and by God's grace I will persist in the assertion to my dying day, that so far is it "Thus," says Bishop Burnet, "was the from the truth that the Church of Eng- doctrine of the Church cast into a short and land is decidedly Arminian, and hostile to plain form; in which they took care both Calvinism, that the truth is this, that upon to establish the positive articles of religion the principal points in dispute between the and to cut off the errors formerly introduced Arminians and the Calvinists-upon all in the time of Popery, or of late broached the points of doctrine characteristic of by the Anabaptists and enthusiasts of the two sects, the Church of England main- Germany; avoiding the niceties of schooltains an absolute neutrality; her Articles explicitly assert nothing but what is believed both by Arminians and by Calvinists. The Calvinists indeed hold some opinions relative to the same points, which the

thority, to show that the right interpretation is decided, but that it is doubtful-that there is a balance of authorities-that the opinion which Bishop Marsh has punished with poverty and degradation, has been considered to be legitimate by men at least as wise and learned as himself. In fact, it is to us perfectly clear, that the Articles were originally framed to prevent the very practices which Bishop Marsh has used for their protection they were purposely so worded, that Arminians and Calvinists could sign them without blame. They were intended to combine both these descriptions of Protestants, and were meant principally for a bulwark against the Catholics.

men, or the peremptoriness of the writers of controversy; leaving, in matters that are more justly controvertible, a liberty to divines to follow their private opinions with out thereby disturbing the peace of the

« AnteriorContinua »