CHAPTER XI

RELIGIOUS TOLERATION IN ENGLAND

WHEN we speak of toleration, we mean that there is a dominant religion, but that dissent from it is not of itself an offence against the law. As the word was used in the seventeenth century, it fell far short of religious equality; for it did not mean that dissenters were to have the same political rights as others; but it did mean that the State allowed them full civil rights, and protected all peaceable and decent worship. On one side, religious beliefs must not be made an excuse for overt acts of treason, breach of the peace, or scandalous immorality. On the other, they must not be taken as summary proof that such acts have been committed.

Toleration may be universal, in the sense that all beliefs are so protected; but it is more commonly incomplete. Certain sects may be forbidden, or subjected to special disabilities. Thus Protestantism has been tolerated in Spain since 1868, but only on condition that it gives no public sign of its existence. A notice at the street corner, or a Bible exposed for sale, would be illegal. Even in England, a decent and sober expression of atheistic belief still seems to be a crime in law. But law and practice often differ widely. The authorities may limit or disregard the legal rights of an unpopular sect, or stir up the mob to lawless violence; or, again, they may leave persecuting laws unexecuted, or even frustrate them by annual acts of indemnity. But this kind of practical toleration is precarious: and if the dissenter runs little danger, he cannot feel free from stigma till the law is formally repealed.

There could not be much idea of toleration in the Middle Ages, when the Latin Church turned religion into a concrete law, summing up all virtue in obedience, all vice in disobedience, and handing over offenders to the secular arm. Disobedience per se was an ordinary offence for which penance might be done or ordinary punishment ited; and no question of heresy arose till the authority of the was disputed. But then there was no mercy. Heresy was a sin

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that brought down the wrath of heaven on the land, so horrible a sin that even the records of the trials were systematically destroyed.

Of course every persecuted sect pleads for toleration; but nothing is gained till toleration finds advocates in the dominant Church, or at least till the sectaries take some better ground than that error ought not to persecute truth. Neither of these conditions was fulfilled in England before the seventeenth century. Sir Thomas More indeed, on the eve of the Reformation, drew a clear picture of toleration. But that was in Utopia: when it became a practical question, he proved as merciless a persecutor as others. In making Scripture (and therefore its meaning, as determined by sound learning) superior to Church authority, the Reformers made persecution logically indefensible. But they did not see the full meaning of what they had done. They took over ways of thinking from the Middle Ages, and made less of a break with the past than is commonly supposed. If they made the Church national, they fully agreed with the Roman Catholics that there ought to be one Church only, and that no dissent could be allowed. This was the dominant theory from the separation in 1534 to the Toleration Act of 1689. Edward VI established a single form of Common Prayer in 1549, and in 1552 required all persons to attend on Sundays and holy days on pain of ecclesiastical censures, to which Elizabeth added fines in 1559. The system was now complete; and with most persons the only doubt was where to draw the line-what doctrines or practices must be enforced, and what might be left open. Comprehension was a method open to discussion, but toleration was utterly ungodly.

For a few years the system seemed a complete success; but Puritan conventicles began in 1567, Romish after 1571; then first Elizabeth and James struck hard at both parties, and afterwards Charles I struck so hard at the Puritans, who represented much of the best religious life of the time, that he drove over the moderate men to their side. However, it is not surprising that the Roman Catholics generally fared worse than the Protestant sectaries, and were expressly shut out even from the Toleration of 1689.

The English Roman Catholics were commonly loyal enough, and in the Civil War much too loyal to please the Parliament. In fact the Stewarts (after the first years of James I) were not very zealous against them. But there was a real difficulty in the way of toleration, after the Bull of Pius V in 1571 forbade them to be loyal subjects, and still more when, a few years later, seminary priests came over from Douay. If some of these devoted themselves in good faith to spiritual ministrations, there were others who stirred up sedition or encouraged assassination; and it was not easy for the Government to draw the line between them. Besides this, the modern principle that overt acts are needed to constitute treason was not yet established; it is therefore not surprising that some of them should have suffered for refusing to disavow treasonable beliefs

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The Civil War

[1575-1644 which they never dreamed of carrying out in practice. The Roman Catholics came out of the Reformation discredited by the Marian persecution; and this was followed by the Bull against Elizabeth, the Massacre of St Bartholomew, the coming of the Douay priests, the Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, the Irish Massacre, the Popish Plot, and the designs of James II, while the intervals were filled up with plots and rumours of plots which never gave time for suspicion to die away. Till the last danger was dispelled at Culloden, the English were never allowed to forget that the struggle with the Roman Curia was a struggle of life and death for everything of value to the nation.

It was different with the Puritans. Their loyalty was never in doubt before the Civil War, and even the Church was in no serious danger from them for at least a generation after Cartwright's time. Speaking generally, they were sober and serious churchmen, who wanted only a little more liberty inside the Church. Anabaptists and Brownists were the only revolutionaries, and the more violent of these were mostly exiles on Dutch and New England soil. On their behalf pleas for toleration were put forth by Leonard Busher so early as 1614, and by others after him. Of course they had no effect. Toleration was a new idea; the Anabaptists were a specially obnoxious sect; and Busher's first principle, that the State has no right to meddle with religion, ran directly contrary to the main current of English thought.

So things drifted from bad to worse, till at the meeting of the Long Parliament in 1640 the Government had practically no supporters. Reform was pushed into revolution; and indeed revolution is almost unavoidable when a king cannot be trusted. But then it was seen that, however the mass of the nation might resent the administration of Charles and Laud, they had no quarrel with monarchy or with the Church. So the end of the Civil Wars found Church matters in strange confusion. Had the King conquered, there would have been an orderly episcopal Church of some sort; and if the Presbyterians had got their way, the Scotch discipline would have been regularly organised all over the country. In neither case would there have been any question of toleration. In this respect the Presbyterians were narrower than Laud, who had no great dislike of heterodoxy that was not Puritan --witness his patronage of Chillingworth and Jeremy Taylor.

But the Presbyterians did not get their way. The Covenant was forced on England by the military necessities of 1643; but it was never generally liked. It was Scotch; it was newfangled; it was too rigid for some, too morose for others. The Episcopalians awaited their time; but the Independents represent a ferment of thought such as was never seen again till the French Revolution. It was greatest in the army, where every man was welcome who "had the root of the matter in him," and could be trusted to fight against the King. Within these limits, toleration was already established, to the disgust of the Presbyterians. And

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The drift towards Toleration

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the principle of 1647 was that of 1789. Saints and Jacobins both began with the sovereignty of the people; only, the Saints never forgot that they were God's people. It was a principle which could not but profoundly influence the development of politics and society, of religion, and of philosophy. So we see three distinct lines of thought slowly coming out from the enthusiasm of the time, in which they lay confusedly together. First, the Independents proper maintained the right of every congregation to settle its own worship; then, they dealt with the King as a public servant who had betrayed his trust; then, in 1653, they set on foot the far-reaching reforms of the Nominated Parliament. So far Cromwell had gone with them; but now he had to stop them. He could not let them unsettle the whole structure of society in hope of Christ's return on the morrow. The reign of the Saints was over, though the Instrument of Government reflected their ideas, so far as they were consistent with order. The purely religious side of the current enthusiasm came next to the front; and, after a stormy transition period of plots and Fifth-Monarchy dreamings, it was partly absorbed by the great centre party of serious persons, and partly settled down upon the claim of the Quakers for the individual conscience guided by the inner light. Later in character, though scarcely later in date than the other two, a third movement made its appearance. Reaction as it was from the enthusiasm, it was largely shaped by the enthusiasm. It held some of the best religious thought of the time, yet was largely irreligious. For good or bad reasons many were tired of controversy; and the stress laid on personal religion in an age of controversy tended to emphasise the central doctrines which may commend themselves to reason, and to throw the rest into the background. In one direction we have the Cambridge Platonists and the beginnings of the Latitudinarians, in another Biddle and the Unitarians; and in different ways we note foreshadowings of the Deists and the Arians of the next age, with its shallow moralism and indifference to religion.

Now, all these three lines of thought pointed to toleration. If congregations ought to be independent, they must not be restrained by a state Church; if the individual conscience is free, it must not be coerced by others; if reason is to judge, the shibboleths of controversy are not worth enforcing. Accordingly, the first effective demand for toleration in England is contained in the Agreement of the People, presented to Parliament by the officers of the army in January, 1649. They agree that Christianity in its purest form be "held forth and recommended as the public profession in this nation," and that its teachers be paid by the State, but not by tithes. That to this public profession none be compelled by penalties or otherwise, but that all who profess faith in God by Jesus Christ shall be protected in their worship, "so as they abuse not this liberty to the civil injury of others, or to the actual disturbance of the public peace." This means full toleration of all Christian worship; for

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The Commonwealth

[1649-58 the principle is not infringed by the further provision that "this liberty shall not necessarily extend to popery or prelacy." Serious as the excep tion was, it might be defended after the Civil War as a political necessity.

Cromwell is the only man who has ever ruled England with success from an almost isolated position. He crushed the Episcopalians in the first period of civil war, the Presbyterians in the second (1648-51), and separated himself from the Independents, when he allowed the Nominative Parliament to resign its powers (December, 1653). Levellers and Quakers detested him, though he was on terms of personal respect with Fox; and even a man so free from partisanship as Baxter thoroughly distrusted him. But Cromwell was always enough of an Independent to keep in touch with the army; and his policy was that of the Independents, with the unpractical items omitted. At one point he went beyond the toleration they offered to all Christians, for he allowed the return of the Jews, who had been banished from England since the time of Edward I. The Instrument of Government and the Humble Petition and Advice, under which he ruled, simply copy the clause already quoted from the Agreement of the People, but with one significant change. The limitation which the Agreement indicates is now made actual. "Provided that this liberty shall not extend to popery or prelacy, nor to such as under the profession of Christ hold forth and practice licentiousness." The Humble Petition also shuts out those who publish horrible blasphemies, while requiring belief in the Trinity and that Scripture is "the revealed Will and Word of God."

The Episcopalians said that it was the execution of the King which made impassable the gulf between them and Cromwell; but it was quite as much the systematic fines and sequestrations which the financial distress of the Parliament induced it to levy from the "malignants who had fought for the King. Royalists and fanatics never ceased to plot, and could sometimes plot together, against Cromwell. No wonder if he struck at them with harsh measures. Thus his proclamation of November 24, 1655, forbade sequestered or ejected ministers to keep any school either public or private, or either publicly or privately (except in their own family) preach or use the Book of Common Prayer. But Cromwell seems to have meant this rather in terrorem than for serious He was on friendly terms with such an Episcopalian as Ussher, and allowed his daughters to be married by the form of the forbidden Book. In any case, the law was not steadily enforced. Thus Morton, Jeremy Taylor, and others, were left unmolested in their private chaplaincies; and a large proportion of the Episcopalian clergy retained their livings throughout the interregnum, often saying the Prayers of the Liturgy by rote, or disguising them with a few alterations. Even the Roman Catholics were virtually tolerated so far as concerned religion, though they suffered heavily as malignants.

use.

The oppression of Cromwell's government brought together Episco