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and surplices had been more generally worn than in the previous half century, and with less objection. The fasts and festivals were better observed. On the whole, during the years, 1604-1610, the repairing and beautifying of the churches had progressed rapidly throughout the East and South, and to some extent in the West and North, while in London many new edifices had been erected. The glass broken by the zealots of Edward VI's and Elizabeth's time was in a measure replaced, and some fine stained glass was put in. A great effort was made at Lambeth to place in every parish a copy of the Prayer Book, Bible, and Canons, and of Jewel's works; and to see that the royal printer provided cheap copies for sale.

In other directions, the results of reconstruction had been none the less considerable. The outward form of the Church-its Canons, its liturgy, its statement of faith in the Thirty-Nine Articleswas so complete that it has not yet received serious alteration. The administrative constitution, as revived by Bancroft, also lasted until the nineteenth century. By 1610, the High Commission had attained its final form, and had amply demonstrated its usefulness. For the time being, too, the battle with the common law, though technically lost, had been practically won, and, in the main, the outlines of the agreement between Coke and Bancroft were followed in later decisions; the few alterations in it have been in Bancroft's favour. The period of reconstruction, then, saw the completion of the institutional form of the English Church.

The struggles of those thirty years had, moreover, trained a corps of skilled administrators who guided the official policy of the Establishment long after Bancroft was dead. They continued his administrative traditions, followed his precepts, and in the main were responsible for such progress as was made in the next quarter of a century. Sir John Lambe, Sir Charles Cæsar, Sir John Bennett, became the backbone of Abbot's administration, and practically controlled the High Commission and the ecclesiastical courts. But far more important than this had been the awakening in the clergy as a whole of a new spirit of corporate life and of a realisation of the necessity for interdependence. Where under Elizabeth every clergyman, from the bishop down to the meanest curate, had been scheming and contriving to keep his own post, regarding only his individual comfort, each clergyman had

now come to realise the beauty of the Church as an institution, the sanctity of its buildings, the mysticism of its service, the nobility of its mission. For the first time since the breach with Rome, the Church as an institution became admirable in the eyes of its clergy as a whole. The ecstatic mysticism of George Herbert was a logical consequence of the teachings of Richard Bancroft, the full expression of one of the greatest results of the period of reconstruction. The Church, which the grandfathers had scorned, which the fathers had tolerated, became an object of enthusiastic loyalty to the sons. No less a change had taken place in the attitude of the nation. In 1583, there had been three comparatively small bodies of ardent, enthusiastic men-the Churchmen, the Puritans, and the Catholics -all seeking to win the allegiance of the great mass of the people, who, indifferent, apathetic, and bewildered by the variety of possible views, embraced none with fervor. By tradition and habit the majority still inclined in 1583 to the old mass; but their growing loyalty to Elizabeth, their hostility to Spain, and the pressure of the penal laws, induced them to give a more or less passive allegiance to the Establishment. Such a condition of affairs could not continue long. If the majority were at heart Catholic, the national Church would be transformed to express their beliefs; if, on the other hand, Presbyterianism had struck the dominant note in the hearts of Englishmen, the Church would inevitably have been Puritan as soon as its members became conscious of their real beliefs. Only that settlement would endure which should be clear, undeniably legal, and above all, in harmony with the traditions and aspirations of the majority. Such an institution was the Church as reconstructed by Bancroft and to it the great majority of the people gave their sincere allegiance. Later events proved its sincerity. The outbreak of the Civil War was conclusive evidence that Englishmen were not ready to support Catholicism or Arminianism. The fall of the Commonwealth demonstrated conclusively that England was not Puritan. The Restoration restored neither the old monarchy nor the old Parliament, neither the old courts nor the old law, but the Church as Bancroft left it.

Nor was the constituency of the Church by any means narrow and exclusive. Bancroft's settlement erected no barriers and founded no new distinctions. Based upon a union of the moderates of all

parties, Puritan, Catholic, and Episcopalian, it tolerated all but the most extreme. The Archbishop had seen that, in view of the necessary existence of a strong minority with whom hostility to the Church was the very basis of its creed, no hard and fast test of ecclesiastical loyalty could be successful. The most that could be hoped for would be the tacit acceptance of the legal position of the Church as the established religion of the realm. Those who would stay in the Church if not too closely pressed, must be kept in, whether Puritan or Catholic; those who would not come in, but who asked only to be allowed to worship quietly and unobtrusively according to their own ritual, should be tolerated by State and Church alike; but those who would neither come in nor remain peaceably without, should be chastened with the rod and driven from the land. Although for many decades the State denied Dissenters and Catholics legal recognition of any sort, in practice it admitted tacitly from this time on the existence of these alien views and the right of their adherents to worship quietly. It demanded from both in return unswerving temporal loyalty, unfeigned public recognition of the legality of the Established Church, and respectful conduct toward its officers, adherents, and services. During the period of reconstruction, then, was created and established that policy of tolerating illegal worship which has existed to the present moment and which is so characteristically English. What it meant was, that Bancroft obtained the adhesion to the Church, not only of the mass of the nation who saw and believed, but of the past enemies of the Church, those who saw, but, unbelieving, acquiesced. His greatest triumph was that, from that moment, the whole English nation has recognised the legality of the Establishment.1

The reaction against the Book of Discipline and dogmatic Calvinism, together with the friendliness to the Catholics and the endeavour to draw as many of them as possible into the Establishment, laid the foundations of that theological movement known as Arminianism, whose first clear traces are found in 1607 and 1608, but, whose full fruition was not realised for nearly fifteen years. Among the great mass of the people now brought to acquiesce in the existence of the Church, and to take on the whole a sort of pride in it, there were many who were strongly drawn

1 From the point of view of ecclesiastical history, the period of the

Civil War and Commonwealth is an episode a temporary experiment.

by the old traditions toward Catholic ritual and doctrines; and, as their comprehension of what dogmatic Calvinism involved became clearer, so the expression of their dissent became more decided. Then, the pressure of the penal laws upon the laity had caused many to enter the Church, who, forced by circumstances to renounce the papal supremacy, were unable to renounce Catholic ritual and dogma. Probably after the defeat of the Armada in 1588, many gave their adhesion. The quarrels of the Jesuits and seculars and the accession of James I had resulted in further gains; but the Gunpowder Plot was responsible for the defection of the largest number. Thus it was that in 1608 the presence in the Church of these quasi-Catholics (if they might be so called) had produced a perceptible influence on its theological beliefs. Inasmuch as the Catholic had already renounced the Pope by actually taking the oath of allegiance or by receiving the Anglican communion, why should he not free himself from the weight of the penal laws and secure his family from alarms and surveillance by joining the State Church altogether? And if he found there observed very nearly those liturgical forms which he valued so highly, there was even less reason to hesitate. To make his adhesion as easy as possible and the wrench from his old associations as slight as possible was clearly the best way to ensure the stability of the new compromise. How little of his previous ideas a Catholic must renounce to feel at home in the English Church now became the vital question of ecclesiastical policy.

The movement gained its real currency with the clergy and laity because it was the natural expression of a tendency which had already shown great strength on the Continent. Arminianism was the English equivalent of the Catholic Counter-reformation. As the dogmatic Reformation itself had come late in England so the Counter-reformation came years after the first appearance of similar impulses in Europe; and while in Europe it took the form of the reinstallation of Catholicism, in England the strength of political Protestantism precluded its achieving more than the emphasising of those resemblances to Catholic ritual and dogma which Elizabeth had so carefully preserved. Where the Elizabethan prelates had been wont to lay stress upon the Calvinistic side of the Elizabethan settlement, it was now those affinities to Catholic practices and beliefs which received attention. In the succeeding

period of English ecclesiastical history, then, the controversial issues are more often dogmatic and ritualistic than administrative; and its general tone is not unlike that of the last quarter of the sixteenth century in Europe. Here was begun that alliance of Catholic and Episcopalian in support of the Establishment which was so conspicuous a factor of the Civil War.

Great and significant as these results were, the remodelled Church was neither uniform in law nor consistent in practice; nor was it as precise and logical in the statement of its new position as might have been desired. Being essentially English, it lacked that theoretical perfection, that symmetry of outline, that logical arrangement which modern thinkers admire. Like all English constitutional settlements which have endured, it was a collection of makeshifts for obviating certain very practical difficulties. The Puritans complained loudly at the time that the bishops temporised and refused to "lay the axe to the root of the tree.' In a sense, the charge was true. But they did not because they could not. The greatest difficulties of all-the lack of sufficient maintenance for the clergy, the lack of coercive force in the ordinary administrative fabric-had not been remedied because they could not be. They had been the result of the natural causes operating during a period of transition. Like the Reformation of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, Reconstruction was a stage in the growth of the religious consciousness of the English people and of its institutional expression. It was caused in reality by the working of deeplying natural forces which were quite beyond human control. The worst difficulties resulted from agricultural and financial changes which affected all Europe, and which could be remedied only by those same economic forces which had given them birth. Thus, the amelioration of ecclesiastical incomes, and the consequent improvement in the character and learning of the clergy, was really effected by the subsequent economic development of England. The ecclesiastical property, which had been insufficient in 1603, was in 1832 enormously valuable, but the increase in value had not been voted by Parliament. It came from the growth of cities where villages had been; from the rise of factories among the gorse and heather on the hillsides; from improved methods of agriculture and grazing; from the growth of a merchant marine and the expansion of foreign trade. From all these varied

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