RICHARD HOOKER.
The truest representative of the conservative and comprehensive genius of Anglicanism in doctrine and polity, towards the close of the Elizabethan period, is the 'judicious Hooker' (1553-1600), who to this day retains the respect of all parties. In his great work on the 'Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity' he went to the root of the rising controversy between Episcopacy and Puritanism, by representing the Church as a legislative body which had the power to make and unmake institutions and rites not affecting the doctrines of salvation laid down in the Scriptures and oecumenical creeds.
He defends episcopacy, but without invalidating other forms of government, or unchurching other Churches. He highly commends Calvin's 'Institutes' and 'Commentaries,' and calls him 'incomparably the wisest man that ever the French Church did enjoy.' [1160] He generally agrees with his theology, at least as far as it is Augustinian, and he clearly adopts his view of the eucharist--namely, as he expresses it, that 'Christ is, personally present, albeit a part of Christ be corporally absent,' and 'that the real presence is not to be sought for in the sacrament (i.e., in the elements), but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament.' But he keeps clear of the logical sharpness and rigor of Calvinism, and subjects it to the higher test of the fathers and the early Church. [1161]
His respect for antiquity and his churchly conservatism gained ground after his death in the conflict with Puritanism; and when the Synod of Dort narrowed the Calvinism of the Reformation to a five-angular scholastic scheme, Arminian doctrines, in connection with High-Church principles, spread rapidly in the Church of England. She became, as a body, more and more exclusive, and broke off the theological interchange and fraternal fellowship with non-episcopal Churches. But we hope the time is coming when the Christian communion which characterized her formative period will be revived under a higher and more permanent form.
Note.--My friend, the Rev. Dr. E. A. Washburn, of New York, an Episcopalian divine of rare culture and liberality of spirit, has kindly furnished the following contribution to this chapter, which will give the reader a broad inside view of Anglicanism under the various phases of its historic development:
'The doctrinal system of the English Church, in its relation to other Reformed communions, especially needs a historic treatment; and the want of this has led to grave mistakes, alike by Protestant critics and Anglo-Catholic defenders. It was one in its positive principles, as opposed to the dogmatic falsehoods of Rome, with the great bodies of the Continental Reformation; yet it grew as a national Church, while those were more fully shaped by the theology of their leaders--Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. This fact is the key of its history. England felt the same influences, religious and social, that awakened Europe, but its ideas were not borrowed from abroad; it only completed the growth begun in the day of Wyclif. Its earliest step was thus a national, one. Nor was this, as has been proved by its latest historians from the record, the act of Henry VIII.; for before his quarrel the Parliament annulled forever, by its own decree, the supremacy of Rome. It could not be expected that during his reign the standard of doctrine should be greatly changed; and it should be remembered, that Luther himself renounced only by degrees the idea of Papal authority. The "Articles devised to establish Christian Quietness," probably the original of the later Cotton MSS., and the "Institution of a Christian Man" following it in 1537, show that the dogma of the mass, the seven sacraments, intercessory prayers for the dead, and reverence of the Virgin and saints as mediators, remained. It is worth noting, however, that the "Erudition" in 1543 gives signs of change, as the "corporal" presence is there only the "very body," and the idea of special intercession is modified to prayer "for the universal congregation of Christian people, quick and dead." But the next reign proves that the act of national freedom held in solution the whole result. Ultramontanism meant then, as now, not only the feudal headship of Rome, but its scholastic and priestly system. The Reformation, ripened in the minds of Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and other devout thinkers, bore its fruit in the revised Liturgy and Articles; nor can any thing be clearer than the doctrinal standard of the Church, if we trace it with just historic criticism to the time when these were fixed.
'The Articles ask our first study. It is plain that the foundation-truths of the Reformation--justification by faith, the supremacy and sufficiency of written Scripture, the fallibility of even general councils--are its basis. Yet it is just as plain that in regard of the specific points of theology, which were the root of discord in the Continental Churches, as election, predestination, reprobation, perseverance, and the rest, these Articles speak in a much more moderate tone. It is from a narrow study of that age that they have been called articles of compromise between a Calvinistic and Arminian party. There were some of extreme views, as the Lambeth Articles prove, but they did not represent the body. The English Reformers had been bred, like the great Genevan, in the school of the greater Augustine; and his richer, more ethical spirit appears in not only the Articles, but in the writings of well-nigh all from Hooper or Whitgift to Hooker. There was the friendliest intercourse between them and the divines of the Continent. Melanchthon, Calvin, Bucer were consulted in their common work. But the unity of the national Church, not the system of a school, was uppermost; and we may write the character of them all in the words of the biographer of Field, that "in points of extreme difficulty he did not think fit to be so positive in defining as to turn matters of opinion into matters of faith."
'We may thus learn the structure of the liturgical system. The English Reformers aimed not to create a new, but to reform the historic Church; and therefore they kept the ritual with the episcopate, because they were institutions rooted in the soil. They did not unchurch the bodies of the Continent, which grew under quite other conditions. No theory of an exclusive Anglicanism, as based on the episcopate and general councils, was held by them. Such a view is wholly contradictory to their own Articles. But the historic character of the Church gave it a positive relation to the past; and they sought to adhere to primitive usage as the basis of historic unity. In this revision, therefore, they weeded out all Romish errors, the mass, the five added sacraments, the legends of saints, and superstitious rites; but they kept the ancient Apostles' Creed and the Nicene in the forefront of the service, the sacramental offices, the festivals and fasts relating to Christ or Apostles with whatever they thought pure. Such a work could not be perfect, and it is false either to think it so or to judge it save by its time. There are archaic forms in these offices which retain some ideas of a scholastic theology. The view of regeneration in the baptismal service, decried to-day as Romish, can be found by any scholar in Melanchthon or in Bullinger's Decades. We may see in some of the phrases of the communion office the idea of more than a purely spiritual participation, yet the view is almost identical with that of Calvin. The dogma of the mass had been renounced, but the Aristotelian notions of spirit and body were still embodied in the philosophy of the time. The absolution in the office for the sick, and like features, have been magnified into "Romanizing germs" on one side and Catholic verities on another. The Athanasian Creed, revered by all the Reformers, was retained, yet not as that of Nice in the body of the worship; and it was wisely excluded by the American revisers, as the English Church will by-and-by displace it, because a better criticism shows it to be the metaphysical deposit of a later time, un-catholic in descent or structure. Such is the rule by which we are to know the unity of the English system. The satire, so often repeated since Chatham, that the Church has a "Popish Liturgy and Calvinistic Articles," is as ignorant as it is unjust. All liturgical formularies need revision; but such a task must be judged by the standard of the Articles, the whole tenor of the Prayer-book, and the known principles of the men. In the same way we learn their view of the Episcopate. Not one leading divine from Hooper to Hooker claimed any ground beyond the fact of primitive and historic usage; and Whitgift, the typical High-Churchman of the Elizabethan time, in reply to the charge of Cartwright against prelacy as unscriptural, took the ground that to hold it "of necessity to have the same kind of government as in the Apostles' time, and expressed in Scripture," is a "rotten pillar." The Puritan of that day was as narrow as the narrow Churchman of our own.
'This historic sketch of the English Reformation explains its whole character. It had in it varied elements, but by no means contradictory. Had not other influences dwarfed its design, it would have done much to harmonize the communions of Protestantism, to blend the new life with a sober reverence for the historic past. Lutheranism and Calvinism did each its part in the development of a profound theology. The English Church had a more comprehensive doctrine and a more conservative order. It placed the simple Apostles' Creed above all theological confessions as its basis, and a practical system above the subtleties of controversy. But its defect lay in the policy which sought uniformity instead of a large unity; and the loss of the conscientious men who left the national Church gave its ecclesiastical element an undue growth. Yet it has retained throughout much of its comprehensiveness. It has had many schools of thought, but none has ruled it. Calvinism, although shorn of its early strength, has had always adherents, from the saintly Leighton to Toplady and Venn. The Arminian doctrine entered early from Holland, and in the visit of the divines sent by James to the Synod of Dort, among whom were Hall and Davenant, we have the early traces of the change. Davenant was nominally against the Remonstrants, but the "Suffrages" prove already the milder tone of the English theology. It is with Laud that the system gained strong ground, yet it never led to such quarrels as in the land of Grotius; it represented the growing dislike of a harsh supralapsarianism and the mild spirit of scholars like Jeremy Taylor. The criticism has often been made that Arminianism is more akin to a High-Church system, because it teaches that divine grace is conditioned by works; but if so, perhaps it shows, as in the case of Jansenism, that a metaphysical creed, in losing sight of the moral side of its own truth, will always drive men to its opposite. The English theology of the next period has the like variety. It had its divines of rich learning--Bramhall, Cosin, and others--inclined to a stricter view of the sacraments and ministry than the Reformers; yet it is mere exaggeration to call them the Anglo-Catholic fathers, as if they were the exponents of the whole Church. They belong to one school of their time. Nor is it a less mistake to judge from their opposition, as members of the national Church, to the Dissenters, that they unchurched the Continental Protestants. Bramhall held an episcopate to be of the Ecclesia integra, not vera; and Morton, while bitter towards the Presbyterians, is "not so uncharitable" towards foreign Reformed bodies "as to censure them for no Churches, for that which is their infelicity, not their fault." Chillingworth and Hales are leaders in this period of a more liberal thought. The Cambridge school, which a modern critic calls the herald of broad Churchmanship, begins here with Smith and Whichcote. The theology of England passed into a still more comprehensive growth. Its larger conflict with Deism took it out of the guerrilla war of the past into the field of Biblical criticism, Christian evidence, and history. No party wholly represents it. Such different minds as Tillotson and Waterland, Cudworth and Paley, Arnold and Keble have been of the same communion. Its successive movements have stirred, yet not rent it. The Methodist revival came from the Arminian Wesley, and the wave of spiritual life left its true influence, although a cold establishment policy ignored it. The evangelical movement was Calvinistic, yet it was mainly the protest of devout men like Wilberforce against formalism, and did little for theological growth. Our time has been busy with the Oxford divinity, which has sought to build a theory of Anglo-Catholicism on the basis of an exclusive episcopal succession, a Nicene authority concurrent with Scripture, and a priesthood dispensing grace through the sacraments. It will end as the theory of a passing school. Our sketch will show on what grounds we judge it a contradiction to the standards of the body, the consensus of its fathers down to Hooker, and an utter misstatement of the historic position of the Church of England. It may be hoped that the long strife will lead to a better understanding of its relation to other Reformed communions, and to its place in the common work for the unity of Christendom.'