fundamental principle of the English Church and which alone justifies the Reformation in England-whilst this appeal was persistently made in the English Church, it was either not made at all, or if made gradually dropped by the foreign reformers. In fact, it came to be strenuously repudiated by the Puritan party, and in place thereof a rigid reference to the letter of the Bible only, as variously interpreted by the individual conscience, was substituted, to the utter confusion of the religious world. Thus individualism came into conflict with authority, becoming the fruitful parent of endless heresies and schisms lasting on to our own times, the disgrace of modern Christianity, the fatal obstacle to the conversion of the world to the dominion of Jesus Christ. The destruction of the Spanish Armada in the year 1588, which followed ten years after the publication of Pius the Fifth's bull, excommunicating and deposing Elizabeth, finally settled that the Christianity of the English nation was to be no longer Roman: but the question as to what form it should take, remained to be solved-Was its characteristic to be Catholic, or was it to be Protestant? or, on the other hand, was English Christianity to be henceforth a compromise, combining, if it might so be, the Catholic and the Protestant elements in its comprehensive embrace? The answer to these questions must be sought in history; and no little light is to be found in the biographies and writings of the eminent churchmen of the latter half of the sixteenth, and of the following century, which it is the aim of this Series to present to the reader. From a study of history, one fact at least prominently emerges the indisputable fact that the Catholic party, as distinguished from the Roman party, has ever held a thoroughly tenable and recognized position in the English Church in post-Reformation times; a position from which no power has been able to dislodge it. To ignore this fact is to deal dishonestly with our authoritative records. It is the failure to recognize this fact, which has led to much of the lamentable confusion and controversy of recent years. It is quite inadequate to say, that the Catholic party in the English Church may perhaps be tolerated, and permitted to remain on sufferance, within the Anglican fold. The facts of the case are quite the other way. If, in our own day, the question of toleration be raised, judged by the standard of the Book of Common Prayer, it is the Protestant element, and not the Catholic, which has to sue for inclusion as an abnormal intruder, and which has to seek naturalisation. If the Church of England tolerates a certain amount of Protestantism, as undoubtedly in practice she does, she is nevertheless fundamentally and authoritatively Catholic in ideal and in theory, as the Book of Common Prayer abundantly testifies. A familiar illustration may suffice to describe the ecclesiastical situation under discussion. It is well known that the cuckoo deposits its eggs in the nests of other birds' building, and along with their eggs. When the rival broods are hatched, it becomes an acute question whether the intruder or the lawful possessors shall be ejected from the nest ; or whether or not a compromise can be effected, and both live in harmony for a season in joint occupation. And in the case of the Church, it is not without significance that the efforts in the direction of exclusion have been, particularly in more modern times, on the part of the Protestant intruder within the sphere of the Catholic heritage, and not on the part of the ancient and lawful possessors. In Elizabeth's reign the combination of the two types, referred to above, was the task: which the reformed Church set itself to accomplish. There then existed a large amount of simple Catholicism in contact with a certain amount of violent and extreme Protestantism. How to amalgamate the two, and conciliate the Puritans, without compromising essentials of the Church's life and character, this was the perplexing problem to be solved. For a time the attempt appeared to succeed, but only for a time. Anyway it produced what Dr. Sanday has described as "a new type, the type which most of us associate with the Church of England, from Hooker and Andrewes onwards. And this type, whatever its faults, has also had great excellencies and great attractions." 1 It is hoped that this Series of Lives of Great Churchmen, of which the Life of Richard Hooker (the greatest theologian of the Elizabethan age, one of the finest and noblest writers of English prose, "the one great divine, in whose writings we trace-drawn out in explicit perfection, and defended with a massive strength of thought and learning the principles implied in the Elizabethan settlement.") 2 fittingly forms the first volume, may do something to exhibit these “great excellencies and great attractions " of the Anglo-Catholic type of churchmanship. The present volume is to be followed by Lives of Archbishop Laud, Bishop Andrewes, Bishop 1 Minutes of Evidence taken before The Royal Commission . . . 1906. Vol. III. p. 23, § 16378. 2 Masters in English Theology, Lond. 1877. Bp. Barry's Lecture on "Richard Hooker," p. 3. |