^m^% ATTITUDE
"%^^ ¦ " TOWARDS ^^,
EMGUSH ROMAMmXHOUGS
THE PAPAL GmJEt

ARTHUR GALTON, ll,JL^

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George L. Fox
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OUR ATTITUDE
TOWARJDS ENGLISH ROMAN CATHOLICS
AND THE PAPAL COURT.

THE CHURCH'S OUTLOOK FOR THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY.

Vol. I. — In crown 8vo, bound in cloth, 2/6 net.
THEOLOGY, OLD AND NEW.
BY
REV. F. W. COBB, D.D.,
Rector of St. Ethelburga, Bishopsgate.
This Work is the First Volume of the New Series of
Handbooks on Current Ecclesiastical Problems, entitled
THE CHURCH'S OUTLOOK FOR THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY. 
"Dr. Cobb approaches his subject in a liberal spirit. His grasp
of many fundamentals is strong, and his tone reverent. " — Churck-
7nan. " The work altogether is a most suggestive and capable contribu
tion to that great work of theological reconstruction which religious
thinkers of every Church and party realise as the immediate work
before them." — Christian World.
"Up to a certain point we cordially agree with Dr. Cobb." —
The Record.
*'If the other volumes of the series are as broad-minded and
courageous as this one, they will merit a high place in the current
literature of religious thought." — Presbyterian.
"The thoughtful man will be thankful for this book, and its
main result will be to make for peace among the controversies of
our age." — St. Andrew's Church Magazine.
"The work is of a character that is valuable to all schools of
thought." — The Rock.
"The book is ably written. It is learned and moderate." —
Christian Cov7vionwealih.

ELLIOT STOCK, 62, Paternoster Row, London, E.C.

OUR ATTITUDE
TOWARDS
ENGLISH ROMAN CATHOLICS, AND
THE PAPAL COURT.

BY
ARTHUR GALTON, M.A.,
New College, Oxford,
Domestic Chaplain to the Lord Bishop of R ipon,
and soTttetinte Curate of IVinderjnere.
CHEAP EDITION.

London :
CALVINISTIC PROTESTANT UNION,
74, Strand, W.C;
AND
ELLIOT STOCK, 62, Paternoster Row, E.C.
1902.

^

hj3a

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G13)

^^.

'^.^

TO
EDWARD PECHE STOCK,
RECTOR OF WINDERMERE ;
BY
WHOSE WORDS AND LIFE
THE GENTLE AND GRAVE TRADITIONS
OF OUR FATHERS IN DIVINITY
ARE STILL CONTINUED AMONG US ;
FROM
THE AUTHOR:
WITH GRATITUDE, AND GREAT AFFECTION.

PREFACE.

THE following pages give, so far as it is possible
in the space allowed, an account of the relations
between England and the Papacy, from the seventh
century until our own time. The purpose of this
volume is to show what the attitude of a patriotic
Englishman should be towards his Roman Catholic
fellow citizens, and the rulers of their Church. He can
not form a just or sound opinion in this matter without
some knowledge of the past. I have tried to give him
that knowledge concisely and clearly. I have tried, still
more, to give it fairly. It has been my endeavour to
record facts, and to let them speak for themselves.
The result, it must be owned, is not favourable to the
origin, the development, the principles, the methods, or
the consequences of the papal system and authority; but,
if any one is to be condemned for that result, it must
be the makers of the history recorded, and not the
historian who has merely presented the evidence, as
he finds it, to the best of his knowledge and abiUty.
Definite opinions are not necessarily prejudiced.
Opinions may be strong without bias, if the facts
upon which they rest will support the deductions that

viii Preface.
are made from them. I bear witness gladly to the
amount of active and practical good which is always
being done, in abundant measure, by adherents of the
papal Church in England. Some of the best people
I have ever known belong to that Church. Many of
my dearest friends are Roman Catholics. These facts
and opinions, however, do not prevent me from thinking
that my friends hold a theology which has no valid
basis in Scripture or in history : nor do the personal
excellences of Roman Catholics, both as Christians and
as English citizens, blind me to the political, social, and
intellectual dangers, as I regard them, of the papal
hierarchy and organization.
So, too, in the past, I distinguish clearly between
English Romanists and their ecclesiastical superiors
in Italy. The latter, as I think, have been persis
tent and dangerous enemies to England, as well as
treacherous and cruel advisers to their own subjects.
The former have an heroic and a loyal record, of
which every Englishman may be proud, and for which
all of us are the better. I regard that distinction as
the key-note of my volume. It has always been present
to me as I wrote. I wish to bring it clearly before
my readers from the beginning. I have written, too,
only as a student of our political and constitutional
history. My volume is not meant to be a theological
treatise. I have avoided, so far as it was possible, all
reference to merely theological and sectarian disputes.
My one object has been to examine the various relations
between England and the Papacy, and to exhibit the

Preface. ix
attitude of the Papacy towards the natural growth of our
principles and institutions.
I may add, that I speak with the experience of one
who has known English Romanism from within ; who
accepted the papal claims in his youth, but who was
compelled to reject them by fuller and more accurate
information. My experience of English Romanists leads
me to those same conclusions which I have gathered
from historical investigation. I admire and honour indi
vidual English Romanists : I abhor that foreign and
mundane organization which, as I think, deceives them
by religious pretexts and professions.
My special gratitude is due to one who appears to
think very much as I do about history, but who finds
himself able to remain in a theological position which I
was forced by honour and honesty to repudiate. My
reference is to Father Taunton, whose admirable
" History of the Jesuits in England " I have used so
frequently and freely. He has collected a vast mass of
scattered materials, with immense industry : he has used
them, as I think, with consummate skill, and with an
even more commendable accuracy and fairness. His
work is a much needed contribution to English history,
and should win him a conspicuous place among our
leading historians. He has increased my gratitude to
himself, since this volume went through the press, by
his excellent biography of Wolsey. Seeing that he
writes professedly as an Anglo-Roman ecclesiastic, I
must draw attention to the significance and value of his
conclusions. If my own position, action, and opinions

X Preface.
be challenged, as unduly personal or prejudiced, I may
point to the conclusions of a learned and impartial
Roman ecclesiastic ; which, with regard to many of the
most important events and personages mentioned in
this volume, are similar to those I now lay before
my readers.
The Palace, Ripon ;
Christmas., rgoi.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

PAGE

Preface 

vii
I.
Introductorv 
I
IL
The Patriarchates ...
3
IIL
The Roman Patriarch
7
IV.
British and English Christianity...
II
V.
The Foundations of the
Papal
Legend
...
IQ
VI. The Norman and Papal Conquest
OF England ... ... ... 30
VII. The New Learning and the English
Reformation ... ... ... 43
VIII. The Disendowment of the Religious
Orders ... ... ... ... 50
IX. The Reformation of the Church... 55
X. Henry VIII  60
XI. The Council of Trent and the
New Romanism ... ... ... 64
XII. Elizabeth's Battle against the
Papacy  74
xii

Contents.

CHAPTER

page

XIIL

The Stuarts and the Revolution...

104

XIV.

The Society of Friends, and the

Suppression of the Jesuits
117
XV.
The Revival of the Papacy, and the
Infallibility of the Pope
125
XVI.
The Principles of the Modern Papacy
Unchanged ...
138
XVII.
The Effects and Future of the
Papacy
149
XVIII. The Present Position of Roman
Catholics in the British Empire 153
CHAPTER I.
Introductory.
WE have to consider in this volume the
relations which ought to prevail now
between educated Englishmen, who do not
recog-nise the Pope's authority, and English
men who do. Besides this, we have to explain
the attitude which patriotic Englishmen, who
know the history of our country, who under
stand and value our institutions, must adopt
towards the methods, aims, and spirit of the
Roman Court ; for the distinction between
Roman Catholics and the papal Curia should
never be forg^otten. To put the case in another
way, what should be the attitude of unpreju
diced and Christian Eng^lishmen, who are not
Romanists, towards their Roman Catholic fellow
subjects, as well as towards that political and
centralized organization which claims the obe
dience of all Romanists in the name of their
belief? The answers to these questions are the sub
ject of the present volume ; and satisfying-
answers to them can only be given by an
unbiassed examination of the past. We must
see what the various relations between England
and the Papacy have been, since they came first
into contact with one another. We must show
what effects the Papacy had upon our Church

England and the Papacy.

and nation, when its authority among us was
greatest. We must examine and explain the
causes which produced the gradual changes in
our relationship to the Court of Rome, leading
up to the subjection of our monarchy and
almost of our nation, but ending finally in a
complete official severance of all connexion,
both in civil and ecclesiastical affairs. Then
we must expose the consequences of that sever
ance, and the attitude assumed by Rome in
its efforts to regain the abused and forfeited
supremacy. We must also consider the neces
sity of self-protection which was forced upon
our own Government by the warlike diplomacy
and acts of the papal Curia.
When we have sifted and pondered all the
elements in a very long and complex problem,
we shall be more likely to form a juster esti
mate of what our attitude to the Roman system
should be at present ; and, though we cannot
unroll the future in detail, we may at least
acquire from examining the past some general
principles for our guidance as' we look forward
into the unknown.

CHAPTER II.
The P.\triarchates.
TO understand the Papacy, we must examine
the various organizations and polities of
that which usurps the name of historical Chris
tianity, as they have risen, and developed, and
declined, and fallen, in successive ages, under
the influence of different modes of thought and
of environment. The primary documents in
that enquiry are, of course, the books of the
New Testament ; but they serve to show more
generally how far organized Christianity has
wandered from its primitive and simpler stan
dards, rather than to justify the various organi
zations and polities by which Christianity has
been tainted and encumbered. These books
appear to tell us that ' ' the Church of Christ
received from the Divine Founder no rig^id and
detailed constitution.. Neither the faith, nor the
g-overnment, nor the discipline of the Christian
society were (sic) defined in advance."* In
other words, the Founder of Christianity and
his immediate followers confined themselves
to broad statements of principle. They seem
to have left us an almost boundless free
dom of application and of detail. A living
faith was put into a world of livine;; men, and
* Canon Henson : "Apostolic Christianity.'' I — 2

England and the Papacy.

they were intended to apply it to their various
and changing needs.
When we pass from the books of the New
Testament to the writings of the sub-Apostolic
and of the following ages, we are on very
different ground, and in a still more dubious
atmosphere. Between the New Testament and_
the earliest Church histories there yawns__a
great gulf, which we cannot either illuminate
or bridge. We~can only traverse it as through
a tunnel, in the dark. The clerical historians
are far from satisfactory. There are many
statements in them which do not seem to be
borne out by facts that we meet with elsewhere.
Theological disputes, the acts of martyrs, the
persecutions, the alleged triumph of ecclesiasti
cal Christianity, the sudden collapse of official
paganism, and the miraculous conversion of
the Imperial Government, are all matters which
we cannot accept from the ecclesiastical records
without a great deal of hesitation and reserve.
We are obliged to admit the existing accounts
as a working hypothesis, simply because we
have no others ; but we should not build our
religion upon these foundations of sand, or the
whole of our structure may fall to ruin before
the winds and floods of critical and scientific
history. Christian thought and institutions are
to be connected with the New Testament by
records and studies which are very different
from those supplied to us by the ecclesiastical
historians. We may, however, put all these deeper
questions on one side. We are not concerned
here with the origins of Christianity, but only
with the current ecclesiastical accounts of it.
Our present enquiry, therefore, may begin at

England and the Papacy.

the period of the great councils and th6 Nicene
Creed, in the fourth century. At that time,
the highest ecclesiastical government of the
Church had become vested in four or five
Patriarchs : of Jerusalem, of Antigch. of Rome,
of Alexandria, of Constantinople ; though t"he
word Patriarch does not seem to~have acquired
a fixed and technical meaning until much later.
These five ecclesiastics were all equal in rank,
and they had co-ordinate powers. Each of
them, within his own district and in his own
affairs, was independent of all the others ; and
his authority within those limits was narrowed
still more by the canonical freedom and juris
diction of every bishop, as well as by those
rights of popular election and of congregational
action which still existed.
The ecclesiastical organization of the Church
may be described, loosely, as a confederation
of almost independent Patriarchates. The only
authorities to which they all submitted were
the supremacy of the Emperor, and the unani
mous decisions of the whole Church in council.
As Rome had been the cradle and metropolis
of the Empire, the bishop of Rome naturally
took precedence of the other Patriarchs ; but
he had no authority over any of them, nor
over any of their people and concerns. All
persons, clerical and secular, acknowledged the
legislative and executive supremacy of the
Emperor, both in civil and ecclesiastical affairs.
The civil power was held, in the Apostolic
phrase, to be "ordained of God," and there
fore to be spiritual, to have a religious juris
diction. Neither in the ecclesiastical nor in the civil
sphere, during the first ages of the alliance

England and the Papacy.

between Church and State, was there any
notion of those claims which were made after
wards, and are made still, by the Roman
bishops. The terms "ecclesiastical" and
"spiritual" had not then been confused, to
the great damage of the Church, and in defiance
of New Testament Christianitv.

CHAPTER III.
The Roman Patriarch.
THE next stage in ecclesiastical affairs was
brought about by the decay of the Roman
power in the West, through the invasion and
victories of the Barbarians, and by the Maho
metan conquests in the East. By the latter,
Grecian Christianity was almost blotted out.
It persisted only in a diminishing area round
Constantinople, until that place was conquered
by the Turks in 1453 ; but the Churches and
Patriarchs of Jerusalem, of Antioch, of Alex
andria, disappeared. Through ecclesiastical
rivalry and political necessities, the Patriarchs
of Rome and Constantinople were more and ^ I
more estranged from one another, and finally C^/*-^
all communication between them was broken Ck
off. The old Patriarchal confederation was
thus destroyed ; and, in place of it, we find the • 1 Q/'^J^
remnants of the Church divided sharply into ^^"^
East and West, each part regarding the other
as heretical and hardly Christian.
We must now, unfortunately, put aside the
whole Greek Church from our consideration.
The Greek language ; the original New Testa
ment ; the Greek Fathers, with their broad and
philosophical notions of Scripture and theo
logy ; the old worship and constitution of the
Church ; above all, the flexibility and fecundity

<9<^r^

K

8 England and the Papacy.
of the Greek spirit, were banished out of
western Europe for more than a thousand years.
Indeed, they have not yet come back into wes
tern Christianity, whether papal or reformed ;
nor can they return until clergy and laity both
escape from the hard and narrow bondage of
Augustine. At the beginning of the middle ages, all true
knowledge of Christian thought and literature
and antiquity was blurred. The remembrance
of the old Patriarchal constitution was forgotten.
The cruel and crafty legal spirit of pagan
Rome, hardened and narrowed still more by
the Augustinian theology, was left face to face
with the ignorance and ferocity of the Barbarian
masters of the Empire. Out of these unspiri-
tual and unenlightened elements mediseval eccle
siasticism was evolved. On these worldly foun
dations the mediaeval Papacy was built. Italy
and all the western provinces fell into confusion.
They were a prey to ignorance and violence.
The only survival of the ancient order and civili
zation who remained was the Roman bishop,
and he soon began to undertake civil responsi
bilities, though always in dependence on the
Emperor or on his nominal representatives.
That, which began as a duty, soon became
a pleasure and a source of profit, then an object
of ambition, of intrigue, or of battle, and at
last a divine right. The bishops of Rome
were gradually immersed in temporal concerns,
and soiled by the cares of government. They
had no time for theology; and, for nine hundred
years, "not a single work of any importance"
was composed in Rome.* Twenty-four papal

Bollinger : " Chapters of European History.''

England and the Papacy.

wars may be enumerated in the earlier middle
ages, and the Papacy was bought oftener than
it was battled for. The old severity of penance
was commuted into money payments ; and, by
the ninth century, the whole system of papal
administration had assumed that financial char
acter to which it has alwavs clungT
Nevertheless, much good was done by the
bishops of Rome in the early middle ages, and
especially by Gregorv the First, the best of the
whole succession. In him, the bishop was not Q ->v . j
forgotten in the magistrate. He made no claim \ '"M. "^M
to sovereign power or to papal prerogatives -t~ *
and attributes, as they were developed later. ¦_
Indeed, he repudiated the title of "Universal
Patriarch," and rebuked his rival at Constanti
nople for aiming at it. He was a pastor, and
not a diplomatist. His desire was not for tem
poral power or for ecclesiastical supremacy, but
for souls and missions. The modern world
owes much to him ; and we in England are,
in a special way, his debtors.
To no single body of men does modern
Europe owe so much as to Gregory's mis-
sioners, the Benedictines. They were the great
civilizers and teachers of those dark and violent
ages, when modern society was being schooled.
Through the good work of the Benedictines,
but also through the prevailing ignorance and
darkness, the Latin Patriarchs, by causes which
were not solely ecclesiastical, obtained a growing
influence over the young nations and Churches
of the West. It was that influence which even
a low civilization must obtain over a lower, the
rudest law over an absence of any law, a mother
Church over her missionary colonies. By these
means, and through these causes, the Latin

lo England and the Papacy.
Patriarchs were able to lay the foundations of the
mediaeval Papacy. The ecclesiastical courtesies
of these ages became the customs of the next ;
these customs, in their turn, grew into pious
and necessary laws, and then were enforced as
rights or divine prerogatives of the Apostolic
See.

CHAPTER IV.
British .\nd English Christianity.
WE may now turn to the affairs of our
own country. We do not know how
or when Christianity was brought here. The
Celtic tribes, however, possessed a form of it
which had come to them at some immemorial
time, in some unrecorded way. In Ireland
and in Brittany, the Celtic Churches seem to
have been organized on a tribal or a clannish
basis. The monastery, and not the diocese,
appears to have been the instrument of organi
zation : the abbot, and not the bishop, was the
spring of energy and growth. "There were
no bishops," M. Renan declares, among the
refugees from Britain, who fled into Armorica
before the Scandinavian invaders: "the autho
rity of Rome, and the religious institutions
which prevailed in the Latin world, were
wholly unknown in these regions, which were
isolated from the remainder of Christendom."*
In all these matters, we are in a region of
uncertainty and of conjecture. There were,
however, significant and suggestive differences
of organization and of practice, if not of belief,
between the Christianity of the more indepen
dent Celts, and the Christianity of Romanized
* Renan: "Souvenirs d'Enfance.''

12 England and the Papacy.

Gaul and of the less Romanized Britain. The
current theory, that bishops were kept on the
abbots' premises, in a dependent state, merely to
convey Orders, is too ridiculous and incredible
an explanation to be taken seriously. It could
only have been devised after the later mediaeval
theories of the Papacy, of Episcopacy, and of
Orders had become generally established. Celtic
Christianity, or at any rate the Celtic Church,
so far as eastern and southern Britain are con
cerned, was utterly destroyed by the Scandi
navian invaders and conquerors of the fifth
century. So complete was the destruction, or so
slight was the Christianity of Britain, that hardly
a single archaeological fragment belonging to the
period of Roman occupation, and beyond all
doubt of Christian origin, has yet been dis
covered in England.
On all sides, the question of primitive Chris
tianity in Britain is enveloped in mysteries ; and
the only records left are documents whose paren
tage and treatment are liable to grave suspicion.
The passing of Druidism into Christianity is a
suggestive and an interesting problem, which
we have no present means of solving.
From the old Celtic sources, however, Chris
tianity appears to have spread again, after the
Prankish invasions, into Holland, and Ger
many, and Switzerland, and to have penetrated
even to the Scandinavian homes of Thor and
Odin. Irish and British missionaries were
zealous and successful in these labours. The
more Romanized Celts of Gaul kept their re
ligion, such as it was, and gave it to their
conquerors, by whom it was changed materially
in form and spirit.
In Britain, the Scandinavians of the north-

England and the Papacy. 13
east and the settlers in Mercia were converted
from Scotland. The West; that is, Cornwall,
Wales, Cumbria, and Strathclyde ; had re
mained nominally Christian, if we may believe
the ecclesiastical historians. The conquerors
of south-eastern England were gained over by
missionaries from Gaul and Italy. These three
elements or sources of Christianity ; the old
British or Welsh, the Irish or Scotch, the
French and Italian ; were a long while settling
down into one organized and united Church.
It is going much too far to say that England
owes its Christianity and Church~to^,oirL£, It
is defying history and law to say that the Eng
lish Church was from the beginning, or should
be now, a dependency of Rome. The Italian
preachers, who came to us under Augustine in
597, were indeed sent by Gregory the First; but,
as soon as Augustine had been made a bishop in
Gaul, he and his suffragans became the consti
tutional heads of independent Churches, subject ^j^ i
only to the prevailing canons and laws of **^*yr-
Christendom. Those laws, in the seventh cen
tury, knew nothing of the papal organization, as
it was developed in the feudal and later middle
ages. They knew still less of modern papal
attributes and claims. Even judged by the laws
and customs of the seventh century, the Churches
of the English Peoples were not subjected in
any special way to the Roman bishop, merely
because some of their dioceses were founded or
restored by missionaries who had come from
Italy. In our own days, many missionaries are
sent out from England. As long as they are
pioneers, they depend on the mother country.
When they are successful and strong enough to
be organized into dioceses, they gain all the

14 England and the Papacy.

rights and freedom of their position. So it was,
too, thirteen centuries ago.
Ever since then, the Churches of the English
Peoples have had an unbroken corporate and
constitutional existence. The various elements
of Scottish, British, and English Christianity
came to a working agreement among themselves
at the conference of Whitby, in 664 ; and, a few
years later, under Archbishop Theodore, they
were consolidated and organized into a single
Church. During the four centuries between 668
and the Norman Conquest in 1066, the English
Church went on its own way, quietly, under
going little change, preserving its original
character and habits. There was much per
sonal devotion to the relics and shrines of'
Rome ; and this devotion was utilized to en
large the papal influence and revenues. Contri
butions and endowments for the use of English
pilgrims, oblations and gifts made to the Roman
sanctuaries, were diverted by the Romans, and
were finally demanded by the Popes as a tribute,
under the name of Peter's Pence. The official
and ecclesiastical connexion with Rome was
much less than any modern Papist cares to
realize, and was much more than some timid
and superficial Anglicans venture to admit.
The bishop of Rome claimed, and, so far as he
could, exercised, by illegally extending, the con
stitutional powers of his Patriarchate. He
called himself, improperly, the Patriarch of the
West, or the Latin Patriarch ; although, in strict
law, his patriarchal powers had not been granted
to him over the whole of Italy. His patri
archal claims, like his papal claims afterwards,
were really an unhistorical, an arbitrary, and a
lawless usurpation. In the seventh century.

England and the Papacy. 1 5
however, the bishop of Rome had not trans
formed his Patriarchate out of all recognition,
though he had extended his authority beyond
its legal bounds.
Papal powers and jurisdiction, in the modern,
and even in the later mediaeval sense, were un
known in England during the four centuries we
are considering. Thanks to our distance from
Italy, and to our estranging sea, papal encroach
ments, both against the civil power and the free
dom of national churches, were developed in
Gaul and Germany long before they obtained a
footing here. The English Sovereigns before
the Conquest exercised the Royal Supremacy,
very much as the early Christian Emperors had,
and as the term was understood again among
ourselves in the sixteenth century. Even so late
and timid a sovereign as Edward the Confessor
did not hesitate to use the title, "Vicar of the
Most High King." Bishops might be appointed
without any reference to the Pope. Matters of
discipline, re-arrangements of dioceses, liturgies
and rubrics, appear to have been settled by
councils of the English Church ; saving always
the Supremacy of the Crown, by which alone
any ecclesiastical decisions acquired the force of
law. The clergy were national in feeling, and
had not yet become a privileged and sacerdotal
caste. In spite of periodical agitations by inno
vators and so-called reformers, it would seem
that the parochial clergy were generally married,
as, too, in many cases, were canons and mem
bers of collegiate bodies. At any. rate, marriage
was open to all the clergy who had not taken
monastic vows. We find the King, the nobles,
and the bishops consulting and legislating about
doctrine and discipline. Matters of worship, of

1 6 England and the Papacy.

discipline, of organization were entirely in the
hands of the national authorities, subject only to
the supreme authority of Scripture and the
creeds. The interference or advice of Rome
was sometimes asked ; it was never admitted
unasked, and it was ignored at least as often as
it was accepted. There were no separate or
special courts for ecclesiastical persons and
affairs. The Bishop sat in the royal or provin
cial courts by the Sheriff and the Earl. The
clergy, individually and collectively, were sub
ject to the laws and customs of the realm ; they
were subjected without any privileges or reserva
tions to the King's authority. The Kings
themselves used the title of Imperator, and some
times of /Sao-tXeus, to prove their complete indepen
dence of any and every foreign power ; as well
as to assert their lordship over out-lying and
vassal states, and to mark their supremacy over
all persons and causes within their imperial
dominion. The point to seize and keep hold of is that the
English Peoples were brought into the Catholic
Church while the bishop of Rome was still a
Patriarch, and was not yet a Pope in the later
mediaeval and feudal sense. Our polity in
Church and State, before the Norman Con
quest, was modelled according to those notions
which had prevailed throughout western Chris
tendom in the sixth and seventh centuries.
Between those ages and the eleventh century,
the old Roman Patriarchate had developed into
the mediaeval papacy, and was fast becoming
a feudal organization, whose chiefs not only
claimed temporal dominions and authority, but
went on to challenge the supremacy of all
sovereigns and the integrity of the civil power.

England and the Papacy. 17
For the reasons indicated, England before the
Conquest stood outside these developments. In
the middle of the eleventh century, it was still
living ecclesiastically in the notions and accord
ing to the Church order of the seventh. It had
been affected very little by those ecclesiastical
and social developments which were being
evolved on the Continent, and which were
transforming the whole fabric of society. These
changes in political and social affairs no doubt
were good, both in themselves and in their
results. In ecclesiastical affairs, too, their in
tention was good, but their effects on the whole
were corrupting and disastrous. Moreover,
they prevailed ever}'where in western Europe
from the eleventh century until the sixteenth.
They were then expelled out of some countries
by a destructive and revolutionary process ; and
they were re-imposed upon some churches
through a more centralized, tyrannical, anti-
national, and mischievous organization. Eng
land alone was able to resist both revolution and
reaction, by a conservative, a constructive, and a
constitutional procedure. Our Church was not
swept away into ecclesiastical anarchy; our mon
archy was not allowed to become despotic. The
Church was able to keep herself from anarchy
and revolution without succumbing to the papal
autocracy ; and, by the same constitutional and
historic methods, the country was able to escape
the nearer peril of a royal absolutism. The
Church returned to the sounder and freer model
of the seventh century ; and, upon that secure
foundation, we have constructed something
better. Our English polity thus bears witness
against the encroachments of the papacy in
Church and Sute. This is the value and the

England and the Papacy.

strength, historically and theologically, of our
Anglican position. To maintain and to hand
on this great inheritance of order and of liberty
is the duty, the singular privilege, of our Church
and Commonwealth.
We have now to describe how the continuity
and full exercise of our inheritance were invaded,
imperilled, and for a time impeded, though
never wholly abolished either in fact or theory.

CHAPTER V.
The Foundations of the Papal Legend.
IN theory, the Church is often compared to a
rock, immovable and changeless in a fluc
tuating world. This comparison mav be tnip of
the broad principles of Christ's religion. It is.
not true of those human organizations which
have too often annexed or exploited Christianity,
and been mistaken tor it. In tact, the Uhurch.
as a theological and political organization, has
always more resembled a chameleon than a rock,
by invariably, successively, and slavishly reflect
ing its environments :
"The thin chameleon, /eci wzl/i air, receives
The colour of the thing to which he cleaves."
Indeed, the Church has gone beyond the chame
leon in the past, and has taken not only the
colours, but the forms of the various polities and
institutions which have surrounded it. The
patriarchal constitution of the Church, in the
fourth century, reflects the Imperial administra
tion when Christianity entered officially into
the fabric of the Empire. The patriarchs, the
metropolitans, the archbishops, the provinces,
the dioceses, the whole ecclesiastical hierarchy
and organization, were parallel to the civil and
magisterial administration of the Emperors. In
earlier ages, too, when the position, experiences.

c^

20 England and the Papacy.
and opportunities of the Christians were more
suited to their origin and social rank, as well as
to their genuine spirit, the functions and titles of
their ministry are all found in the Synagogues
or in the charitable Clubs and Brotherhoods of
the Greek and Roman working classes. So,
too, again, when the Roman Empire and civili
zation gave way to the Barbarians, and society
was re-constituted upon a military basis, we
find the Church gradually assuming that feudal
aspect and organization upon which the new
governments and societies were modelled by the
necessities of a rude and violent age.
The spiritual power of the Papacy is founded,
ultimately and solely, upon the words in the
Gospel attributed to Matthew, "Thou art Peter,
and on this rock I will build my Church." The
connection between Peter and the Papacy, which
is not obvious in the words themselves, is
worked out thus. There is a tradition that Peter
was crucified at Rome in the time of Nero.
This tradition grew into the legend that he was
bishop of Rome for twenty-five years, and that
he handed on all his prerogatives, as "Prince
of the Apostles," to his successors in the bishop-
rick. This legend cannot be made to fit in with
the meagre facts which are recorded, or with
any practical scheme of dates. There were pro
bably no bishops, in the current meaning of the
term, during the first century. Certainly there
were no territorial bishops until much later. As
to the words in "Matthe%v," not ,ojQe...of_those
early and grave authoxiti.es, whom we call the
Fathers, interpreted , that text in the' moderji
papal sense ; and they are the only reliable wit
nesses" for the belief of their own times. Not
only with regard to this text, but in treating the

England and the Papacy. 21
whole range of Scripture, theology, and Church
affairs, they are ignorant of the Roman claims
and of the prerogatives of Peter.
The famous passage in Irenaeus, unless it be
mis-translated, is against the theological claims
of the Roman See, though it bears witness to
the political supremacy of the Imperial Metro
polis. Irenaeus does not say, as the Papists
urge, that all Churches tnust agree with Rome.
He does say that every Church ; that is, the
Christians from the whole Roman world ; must
resort incessantly (convenire) to the capital : and
by this concourse, or circulation from all sides,
the apostolic faith and teaching may be tested at
the centre. In other words, the prevailing and
universal faith of Christendom, quod ubique quod
ab 07tinibus, might then be tested most con-
venientlv and certainly in Rome, because all
Churches corresponded with or resorted to the
capital of the Empire. Rome was not to teach
them, as in the papal theory. They were to
keep Rome from everything contradictory and
strange. By reversing this process, the papal
doctrines have become what they are ; and Rome,
instead of being corrected by the Churches, has
corrupted and then dominated every Church in
her communion.
Augustine alone of the great Fathers ever
applied the term "this rock," as the foundation
of the Church, to Peter ; but he himself cor
rected what he judged to be an immature and
a wrong conclusion, and he held finally that the
"rock" was Christ. The papal theory and
application of this text were unknown in the
fourth century. Scripture, the Fathers, Church
history. Church organization, are all against
them and all exclude them. Even the con-

2 2 England and the Papacy.
tinuance and violence of controversy, and the
difficulties in settling it, show that this means
of settlement had not been thought of in that
stormy period.
To Peter obviously, according to the narrative
in "Matthew," belongs the advantage of first
acknowledging the Messiahship of Christ. That
personal primacy and privilege cannot be denied
him, or given to another. His reward is the gift
of the symbolical keys ; which, we must remem
ber, were given to all rabbis or teachers when
they were qualified officially to teach. Peter
was thus qualified and commissioned first to
teach that belief which had been shown him.
The same commission was given later to those
who were qualified later ; and so the process
has continued through the centuries. The
Messiahship of Christ, and all that may be
involved in it, was the foundation of the Mes
sianic Society or Kingdom. This was the large
and living rock, or ncVpa, on which it was to
stand secure, and by which it was to inherit the
apocalyptic promises. Simon was the XIcVpo?,
or fragment of rock, a stone in the figurative
building ; and, with regard to time and person,
the first stone. The Greek words bear this
interpretation, but they will not bear any inter
pretation which ignores the distinction between
IJeVpa and IIcTpos, or which reverses the natural
meaning of the phrase by making the more
important word subordinate to the less.
Besides, in the text, whatever may be said of
Peter, nothing is said of any successors to him ;
and, if anything that is written in this passage
be applied to a succession of men, we must be
critical in our methods and complete in our
application. We must not pick and choose

England and the Papacy. 23
arbitrarily to suit a theory. We must apply the
whole passage to Peter's successors as well as
to himself. We must not remember the i8th
verse of "Matthew's" chapter, when we think
of the PopeSj and forget the 23rd, in which our
Lord said also to Peter, "Get thee behind me,
Satan : thou art an offence to me ; thou savourest
not the things that be of God, but those that be
of men." If the former of "Matthew's" verses
may be applied to the Papacy, then the other
must ; and this verse applies with destructive
and stinging accuracy to a large number of the
two hundred-and-fifty-seven Popes, as well as to
the spirit, methods, and policy of the Roman
Court throughout its history.
The whole papal interpretation of this text is
based on a tradition which is as unhistorical as
the "Donation of Constantine," or the romance
of the Three Kings of Cologne, or the voyage of
Joseph of Arimathea to Glastonbury. It has
no more weight in serious theology than any
other mediaeval legend has in sober history. It
is, however, the sole foundation of the papal
system. All the arguments for and against the
papal authority, for and against every innova
tion which depends on it, come back at last to
this one text ; which was misunderstood by the
mediaeval theologians, in their ignorance of
Greek and of antiquity ; which has to be strained
and manipulated by the Ultramontanes.
The temporal power of the Popes, and their
invasions of the Imperial supremacy, are based
upon another fiction which could only have
been made use of in a time of ignorance and
credulity. By the "Donation of Constantine,"
as the legend calls it, that Emperor, when he
was baptized in Rome, left his capital to the

24 England and the Papacy.
Popes and founded another at Constantinople.
In most legends there is a kernel of truth, and
there is in this. Constantine did found a new
capital, but not for the Popes' convenience and
advantage. He was not baptized until long
after his mythical "conversion"; and, appar
ently, the Popes were ignorant of his bequest
for more than three centuries. ' This fiction,
however, enforced by many wars, by systematic
and scandalous diplomacy, and fortified by some
legacies of territory, which were probably all
void in feudal law, is the sole origin of the
Popes' temporal power and of their sovereignty
over the Papal States.
The supremacy and importance of the old
capital ; the notion of Peter's supremacy, of the
prerogatives conveyed to him by the words in
"Matthew," the legend of his bishoprick in
Rome, and of the inheritance of his imaginary
prerogatives by succeeding bishops ; the ro
mance of " Constantine's Donation"; the real
possession of delegated civil power, the gradual
acquisition of territorial possessions and of inde
pendence ; the separation from Constantinople,
the disappearance of the other Patriarchs, and
the isolated importance of the bishops of Rome ;
all these elements combined in evolving the
mediaeval Papacy out of the old Roman Patri
archate. The notion of Peter's prerogatives,
and of the Roman bishops being his heirs, took
a theoretical and recorded shape under Leo I.
(440-461). The Leonine school manipulated and
extended these visionary claims. It was a long
while, however, before they became effective and
practical. Gregory I. (590-604) repudiated the
notion of an universal patriarch, saying, truly,
that it would destroy the episcopate. Leo III.

England and the Papacy. 25
(795-816) acknowledged the supremacy of his
master and sovereign, the Emperor Charle
magne. Nicholas I. (858-867) may perhaps be con
sidered as the founder of the mediaeval Papacy ;
and the Popes were able to extend their influ
ence during the century and a quarter of weak
ness and confusion which prevailed between
Charles the Great and Otho the First. During
those long ages of darkness and of civil discord,
the bishops of Rome were enabled, through the
Petrine or papal fictions, to rebel against their
sovereigns the Emperors, to annex parts of their
territory, to challenge their sovereignty and the
independence of the civil power, and finally to
usurp the old Imperial supremacy in ecclesias
tical affairs. Fortified by their new temporal
position, and still extending their papal claims,
they went on to diminish the freedom of other
bishops, to annex many of their old preroga
tives, and to threaten the independence of all
the national Churches.
Although the Popes no longer had any rival
Patriarchs, their former peers, to check their
ambitions and innovations, there was still some
remembrance of liberty and of ancient law
among the national Churches, ignorant as they
had become of antiquity and of the older consti
tution. To bear down this opposition, other
fictions were devised ; and a series of forgeries,
though manufactured for a very different pur
pose, was adopted and used for the advantage
of the Papacy. Archives were discovered in
Rome, as they were needed, asserting the new
papal authority against all the former laws and
customs of the Churches. Canons and Acts of
early Councils were forged or tampered with for

2 6 England and the Papacy.

the same purpose, and by the same unscrupulous
methods. Letters of early Popes were fabricated
to bear out these spurious laws and canons.
Passages of the Fathers were invented, and
interpolated into their authentic writings. In
other cases, by manipulations of the text, and
by still bolder omissions, passages which were
wholly opposed to the papal claims and innova
tions were made to witness in their favour.
These various documents, which were known
finally as the "Forged Decretals," began to be
circulated about the middle of the ninth century.
They had become accepted and authoritative
about the middle of the tenth. A century later,
they were woven into the canon law, and were
held to be an essential part of the ecclesiastical
fabric. These forgeries were so clumsy and
unscholarly that, when learning revived, their
origin was soon discovered : thus, in the end,
they defeated their own purpose, and, instead of
helping Rome, they are a clear witness to the
aggressions made by it upon the old rights and
freedom of the national Churches. They help
to mark the stages in the papal usurpation.
The defence made for the false Decretails is
that, if the papal claims had not had some real
foundation, these forgeries would never have
been able to succeed. This argument does not
meet the facts. Every one of the papal claims
has been resisted at some time or in some place,
but the resistance was never organized and
systematic. The conservative churchmen never
united against the innovator. The civil and
ecclesiastical authorities never combined against
the usurper. The advantage was always with
the centralizing power, which was able to utilize
defeats and even enemies for its ultimate

England and the Papacy.

advantage. The lower clergy were made use of
to curtail the ancient constitutional authority of
bishops. The grievances and appeals of bishops
were utilized to humble the metropolitans. The
exemptions of the monasteries were utilized to
weaken and impoverish the diocesan organiza
tion ; as, latfer, the privileges of the Friars
damaged the paYochial morality, discipline, and
revenues. Kings and churchmen were played
one against the other, to the lowering of both.
The quarrels of nations and sovereigns were
turned to the advantage of the Papacy.
In all this, there must have been some delibe
rate misdoing ; but the process is only another
instance of natural development, by an organized
and a centralizing power. The error is in jus
tifying this development, by attributing it to
supernatural or divine authority. The Papacy,
no doubt, like all centralizing powers, would
have developed its authority, and to a large
extent, without the " Forged Decretals." Never
theless, these outrageous frauds, and the ignor
ance which alone made them successful, contri
buted very largely to build up the feudal Papacy
of Gregory VII. and Innocent III.
We may now record a few of the more
important stages in the development of the
mediaeval and feudal Papacy. In 680, Pope
Agatho, notwithstanding the denunciations and
repudiation of Gregory I., assumed the title of
" Universal Patriarch." In 752, Pope Zachary
began to send out legates, thus asserting his
authority over other bishops. In 840, the false
Decretals were published. Twenty years later,
they were used by Nicholas I. to challenge and
lessen the old authority of archbishops.
In 1050, celibacy was imposed by law upon all

2 8 England and the Papacy.
persons in holy orders : a scandalous infringement
of ancient liberty. In the same year. Interdicts
began; and they were a still graver invasion
of the liberties and rights of laymen. In 1061,
Alexander II. claimed the right of confirming
the appointment of all bishops ; that is, he
asserted a right of veto on all appointments. In
1059, the election of Popes, which had been the
act of the Roman people, was usurped by the
Cardinals ; and by iioo the laity were excluded
from choosing any bishop. The old popular
and democratic nature of the Church was thus
destroyed, and it was narrowed into a clerical
and an hierarchical institution. In 1066, monas
teries began to be exempted from episcopal
visitation and control. This was a heavy blow
to the episcopate ; and it not only added enor
mously to the wealth and patronage of the Popes,
but it gave them powerful adherents in every
diocese and kingdom.
In 1073, Gregory VII. began to reign. He
had long ruled, and he established all the new
prerogatives claimed by the Roman Court. His
life was an unceasing battle with the civil power.
His pretext was the investiture of the clergy, by
laymen, with the temporalities of their benefices.
In reality, he deprived the Emperors of their old
supremacy over the Church ; and he secured for
the Popes their independent sovereignty over
the papal states, as well as their superiority over
all other sovereigns. In effect, he turned the
medieval Papacy into a rigid feudal organiza
tion, of which the Pope was not only the eccle
siastical chief, but he claimed to be the temporal
lord, so far as Church property and clerical
persons were concerned. The clergy were thus
separated in feeling and interest from the laity.

England and the Papacy.

They were made into a caste, with laws and
privileges of their own. Before long, the
secular tribunals were forbidden to deal with
ecclesiastics ; and the Popes went on to claim the
rights of taxation, of patronage, and of appellate
jurisdiction.

CHAPTER VI.
The Norman and Papal Conquest of
England.
THE Norman adventurers in Italy had done
much to establish the temporal power of
the Popes. In Normandy, they had been zea
lous for those reforms which, as an ironical and
indirect consequence, had extended the papal
authority. From all the developments and
reforms which have been mentioned, England
stood aloof. Our stolid conservatism was very
offensive to the advancing Papacy, and was
indeed a standing protest against its usurpations.
Accordingly, the plan of conquering England
through the Normans was welcomed eagerly
by the Roman Court. The Pope blessed and
encouraged William's expedition. If the term
Crusade had been invented, it would have been
applied to the invasion of England. It was, in
fact, a papal crusade against our spiritual liber
ties, as well as a Norman attack upon our
national independence. The effect of it was to
place our government, both in Church and
State, in the hands of foreigners.
Such culture as we had among us was foreign,
and not English, for nearly three centuries.
The Church, the great instrument of culture,
which touched the national life and thought at
every point, was even more affected than the

England and the Papacy. 3 1
State by this amazing revolution. The rulers of
the Church, the bishops and abbots, were almost
invariably foreign. The old religious orders
were reformed by Norman and alien superiors.
New orders came into the island, bringing with
them foreign methods and foreign thought.
The English clergy lost, to a large extent, their
national feeling ; and also, we must own, their
insularity. They became, more fully than before,
members of an international organization.
There were, however, compensations as well
as losses in these changes. The political and
intellectual gain to us was, in the end, great.
The chief loss was in the growth of clericalism
and the decline of religion. The clergy became
more separated from the laity, more of a caste.
This change was shown outwardly in the new
constitution of the law courts, in which the
higher clergy no longer sat as judges. The
bishops had courts of their own for ecclesiastical
affairs. This alteration was not made by the
Pope, but by the King.
William I. clung tenaciously to all the rights
of his predecessors. He exercised the Royal
Supremacy as they had. He refused to inno
vate, to relinquish any of the old prerogatives,
or to recognize any of the new papal claims.
He refused to swear fealty to the Pope, or to pay
any tax which had not been customary, or to
allow any change in the relations between the
Crown and the Papacy. The Conqueror and
his sons maintained the old rights of the Church
and Nation, and handed them on unimpaired in
form. The foreign and innovating spirit of the
clergy was, however, irresistible. There were
serious quarrels between the Crown and the

32 England and the Papacy.

1*

papal clergy under Rufus and Henry I. ; and,
in the anarchy of Stephen, the position of the
•/^ftV churchmen was materially strengthened. The
/\j5cJ' final battle was fought under Henry II. That
* Q- ^— great sovereign contended for law and justice.
y\ He wished to make all men equal before the law
->\_ — and amenable to justice. The clergy, led by
Sf*^ Becket, resisted him. Through the accident of
Becket's murder, their resistance was successful.
Henry was clearly in the right, so far as prin
ciples are concerned. The immunities which
Becket claimed were unknown here before the
Conquest ; they were also incompatible with
justice, and the rights of the civil power. The
Constitutions of Clarendon represented the old
freedom and practice of the national Church.
As usual, the Papacy was the innovator, and
the English King stood out for the older rights
and constitution of the Church. Becket's argu
ments were founded upon a mere quibble ; his J
principles led to injustice and corruption. They I
contributed, more perhaps than any other single!
cause, to make the Reformation both inevitable/
and anti-clerical. /
The principles of Henry II. are approved ancf
practised now in eyer}^ civilized country, without
any darig-er ^o Religion or any injustice^ to the
clergy. The immediate victory of Becket has
proved that nothing is more disastrous for a
State, and still more for a Church, than a clergy
which considers itself above and outside the
common law, or separate in any way from the
general interests and life of the community.
From the clerical victory over Henry II. ;
that is, from about 1170 ; we may date the more
complete subjection of the Anglican hierarchy
to the See of Rome. From that date, the papal

England and the Papacy. t,;^
canon law and the papal theology were current
and unquestioned here, as in the other Churches
and kingdoms of the West. The nation, how
ever, as distinguished from the hierarchy, never
lost the memory of its ancient freedom. It never
accepted the papal usurpations without protest.
Its protests are marked clearly in the statutes
of the realm ; and the scandalous mis-use of
authoritv bv the Roman Court, its continual
aggressions and encroachments, its greed and
its venality, its abuse of patronage, and its
opposition to all reform, are borne witness to
during the three-and-a-half centuries in which
the papal jurisdiction was imposed upon the
English clergy.
The necessities of Richard I. and the reck
lessness of John increased the Pope's authority
in England. John, among his many blunders,
quarrelled with the Pope ; and then, to secure
peace, as well as to gain a protector, he made
himself a vassal of Innocent III., and his king
dom into a fief of the Papal States. He had ^^>..fi^^j^_
no legal and constitutional rig^ht nr powers Q
to do either. Innocent, instead of rebuking
jonn tor violating his coronation oath, accepted
the illegal donation, with the homage and a
tribute. As this tribute was claimed until long
afterwards, with arrears, John's illegal proceed
ings were taken seriously by Rome, and claims
to suzerainty were founded on them. Innocent
always took the part of John against the Eng
lish People and their liberties. He condemned
Magna Charta as wrong in itself, and as a rebel
lion against his own feudal supremacy. John
was released by the Pope from all the engage
ments he had entered into with his people. The
so-called spiritual arbiter judged and acted in
3

34 England and the Papacy.
this case entirely in his own interests, from the
standpoint of his own immediate and temporal
advantage. In the end, these temporal and feudal claims
of the papal Court roused the national spirit, and
made it easier to expel the usurped ecclesiastical
jurisdiction of the Roman See. By the irony of
fate, it is only in countries which are ruled upon
the principles of the offending Charter that the
adherents of the Pope are now quite free from
State control or from active political hostility.
Innocent III. completed, organized, and ex
tended the feudal ecclesiasticism of Gregory VII.
The essence of feudalism is not in the method of
inheritance or descent, but in the mode of tenure
and the fact of subordination. It is useless to
argue, as some apologists do, that the celibacy
of the clergy saved the Church from being a
feudal institution. It saved the clergy from
being, ostensibly and generally, an hereditary
caste. It did not save the ecclesiastical organi
zation from copying the feudal system. The
analogy of military fiefs was applied to bene
fices. The beneficed clergy, in their various
grades, from parish priests to the archbishops,
became practically the "men" of the Pope;
just as in England the landowners, great and
small, became the "men" of the King. Inno
cent III. wrote and spoke like a supreme feudal
over-lord ; ignoring, when it suited him, the
rights of all subordinates, as in the appointment
of Archbishop Langton, which was so happy
in its results though so indefensible in its
procedure. During the minority of Henry III., various
efforts were made by the Popes to utilize John's
vassalage, by extending their authority over

England and the Papacy. 35
political as well as ecclesiastical affairs. We
were saved by the patriotic wisdom and spirit of
the Baronage, aided by a few bishops, from
becoming a dependency of Rome, governed by
Roman legates. Langton, Hubert de Burgh,
Grosseteste, Simon Earl of Leicester, and Bishop
Cantilupe of Worcester, defended the liberties of
England against the Crown and the Papacy
during the various periods of Henry's long and
miserable reign. The papal exactions and ag
gressions were incessant. during those fifty years.
As feudal superior, the Pope demanded a tribute
from the whole kingdom ; as head of the Church,
he claimed the power of taxing ecclesiastical
persons and property. He claimed the right of
appointing to benefices, and he gave or sold
them continually to foreigners. Bishoprics were
taxed heavily at every change of occupant. The
monasteries were allowed to appropriate livings ;
and they provided inefficiently, where they pro
vided at all, for the cure of souls.
The exemption of certain monasteries did
immense harm to the diocesan organization and
to the parochial system. The special powers and
licences granted to the Friars increased the mis
chief, and were the cause of a more active super
stition and corruption. Pardons for any crime
and exemptions from every obligation were
to be had for money. Papal collectors were
over here continually, arranging these financial
matters and sending their profits to the Roman
Court. To that court, also, went an increasing
number of appeals, as the more serious and
paying business was gradually withdrawn from
the local authorities and transferred to Rome.
This state of things began, for England,
under Innocent III. (1198-1216), and it lasted at
3—2

36 England and the Papacy.
its height until Boniface VIII. (1294-1303). By
that time, the Papacy had made itself intolerable.
A strong anti-papal opposition was roused in
England ; it was gradually organized and found
expression, and it never died away. The Great
Schism, the migration of the Popes to Avignon,
the war with France, the dependence of the
Pope upon our French enemy, the exportation
of money into his country, the presence of his
adherents and subjects in our alien priories, as
well as in many positions of trust and wealth,
all added to the national discontent and the
sense 'bf danger. Both of these feelings are
recorded in the statutes of the realm, and in what
is reported of our parliamentary discussions.
The discipline and morals of the mediaeval
Church in England were destroyed in this
period of papal misrule and usurpation. Not a
single measure of reform was suggested by
Rome. On the contrary, the Court of Rome is
invariably accused, by rulers and ecclesiastics
everywhere, as the chief cause of all corruption,
especially of simony, and as the great obstacle
to reform.
A reformation, without Rome, or in spite of it,
was inevitable. It was deferred, in England, by
the hundred years war with France, and then by
our dynastic batdes. But for these urgent occu
pations, the Papacy and the Religious Orders
would probably have been dealt with before the
sixteenth century. They did not, in- fact, long
survive the restoration of order, and the re-estab
lishment of a firm central administration.
From the fourteenth century. Reformation
had been in the air ; not only in England but
throughout Europe, and especially in those
countries where the Hussites had carried

England and the Papacy. 2)7
Wyclif's teachings into practice. The councils
of the fifteenth century spoke much about
Reform, and they tried in vain to begin with
the Court of Rome. The mediaeval clergy were
dying of their own corruption. From the head
downwards, they had no healing power in them
selves. Bishop Stubbs points clearly to their
deterioration through the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, as well as to the growing want of
sympathy and touch between the higher clergy
and the people. In place of the national and
popular bishops of the thirteenth century, we
find in the prelates of the following ages cour
tiers, mere creatures of the administration. The
feudal churchmen, like the feudal baronage, had
had their day. They had done good work in
the earlier middle ages, but they merely cum
bered the ground and hindered progress, after
the thirteenth century.
Everything proves that the English Refor
mation was no sudden storm, and no mere
theological episode. Its causes went deep into
every sphere of national and social life. Politi
cally and ecclesiastically, it was a deliberate
revival of that sounder and more national
condition which had prevailed in Church and
State before the Norman and papal Conquest.
Theologically, it was a revolt against false and
unhistorical Catholicism ; against the material,
sacerdotal, innovating dogmas and practices of
Innocent III. and his Lateran Council. It was
a deliberate return to more primitive ways of
belief and worship ; a deliberate repudiation of
the mediaeval Papacy and its theology. Spiritu
ally, it meant a desire to regain Christianity as
it is found in the New Testament, and as it
was not found in the papal and medieval

o

8 England and the Papacy.

Church. Intellectually, it meant the revival of
sound learning, the recovery of Greek, of the
original Scriptures, of Christian history and
literature ; a release from the limitations and
ignorance of the middle ages.
This ignorance was not the fault of indivi
duals, nor altogether of institutions. It was a
misfortune caused by the whole condition of
western Europe during the middle ages. Not
only were the language, literature, and Church
organization of the earlier centuries lost, but
the freedom, flexibility, and fruitfulness of the
Greek spirit were lost as well. Western Europe,
composed entirely of unformed and barbarous
peoples, was shut up within itself for nearly a
thousand years, with a debased form of Latin
for its one vehicle of thought and speech, and
with only a few scattered and perverted shreds
of knowledge as its inheritance from the great
past. Naturally, in this ignorance and isola
tion, its point of view was narrowed and dis
torted. All sense of proportion and connexion
was destroyed. Every true standard of judg
ment and comparison was removed. Those
ages could only look at the past through them
selves, and through their own inadequate experi
ences. They applied this curious and wrong
perspective to every species of knowledge : to
their religion and theology, no less than to their
history and science. Hence that strange ming
ling of Christianity and the classics which we
find in Dante. No difference was perceived by
mediaeval thinkers between history and legend,
between facts and fancies. Theories were often
mistaken by them for proofs, phrases for reali
ties, syllogisms for truths. Most outrageous
of all were their blunders in philology or

England and the Papacy. 39
grammar, and most fatal in their results. The
true values of their knowledge had been lost.
They had no perspective, no criticism, no sense
for historical shades of difference. We can still
realize their point of view as we look at early
paintings. The heroes of Greece and Rome,
the characters of the Old and New Testaments,
were made to wear the clothes, and speak the
language, and think the thoughts of the middle
ages. They were made to use mediaeval terms,
and mediaeval notions were read into their
genuine words and thoughts. History, philo
sophy, theology, the holy Scriptures themselves,
all wore a mediaeval dress and were regarded
solely from a mediaeval point of view.
It is fatuous to dispute whether people in the
middle ages had, or had not, the Bible. Con
ceding they had it, and used it as freely as some
controversialists try to prove, it was of little
use to them so long as they could only read it
through mediaeval glasses. The clergy were in
the same case as the laity, in spite of their
textual knowledge, their frequent and happy use
of Biblical phrases. They had no clue to Scrip
ture or Church history, until Greek learning and
scholarly methods were restored. The earth
and the whole material universe were limited in
a similar way by mediaeval ignorance.
We must always allow for the mediaeval
point of view, and the limitations of mediaeval
thinkers, when we examine their institutions and
their thought. We must not let them bias or
dominate our own wider and truer knowledge of
the past. We have all allowed for, and escaped
from, their deficiencies in secular history and
literature. We have by no means all escaped
from them yet in theology and Church govern-

40 England and the Papacy.

ment. Nor will a large number of Christians
be able to escape from these consecrated blunders
until they realize that the papal and Petrine
claims, the " Donation of Constantine," and all
that depends on these legends, are precisely on
the same level, are of as much or as little value,
as any other mediaeval, ignorant, or childish
interpretations of history, philology, and the
classics. To form an equitable notion about the papal
and mediaeval Church is neither an easy nor a
simple matter. Too many extreme and exag
gerated notions have been presented to us from
both sides. It would be difficult to say which
extreme has done greater mischief. A fair notion
can only be gained by a vast number of indepen
dent and scattered facts, gathered from many
sources, some direct, some indirect, differing
much in value and in kind, but all converging in
the same direction, and all uniting at last into a
great and solid mass of evidence, which must be
accepted if we are to accept anything in history.
Sift it, minimise it, make every allowance for
error and exaggeration, every allowance for pre
judice or half-knowledge in our own time, for
credulity and malice in the past, enough remains
to form a case which cannot be substantially
altered by ourselves. That was the case with
which the Reformers had to deal, and they dealt
with it in peril of their lives. It is easier for us
to blame them than to imitate their courage and
their wisdom. That case formed then, and it
forms now, a terrible indictment against the
Roman Court ; against its origin, its develop
ment, its principles, its methods, and its results.
These broad conclusions of history may not
be acceptable to modern Romanists ; but, if

England and the Papacy. 41
they be not accepted as substantially true, then
the best theologians of the fifteenth century, and
the ecclesiastical authorities of the sixteenth, by
their policy, by their own statements about the
nature and necessity of a reform in discipline,
were themselves the authors of a deliberate
and monstrous libel against the whole body of
the clergy, Secular as well as Regular, and
especially against the papal Court. Their
apologists and successors may take whichever
alternati\e they choose.
But, putting morality and abuses on one side,
the most serious indictment against the papal
and mediaeval Church, so far as we are con
cerned, may be brought to a simpler test, and
one not open to dispute. The mediaeval Popes
and their theologians did not know either the
Old or the New Testament in the original.
They knew little of the times and circumstances
in which the Scriptures rose, or to which they
referred. They knew as little of the ages fol
lowing the New Testament, and of Christian an
tiquity. Their general knowledge of the Fathers
was through translations ; and even these, to a
large extent, were spurious or garbled. Their
knowledge of the acts and canons of the impor
tant councils was tainted by forgeries and mis
translation. They had forgotten many of the
laws and the whole organization of the earlier
and united Church, and they had outraged most
of those laws which they had not forgotten.
Their own ecclesiastical fabric was built up on
forgery, and chicanery, and successful usurpa
tions. It had culminated, quite logically from
such premisses, in the Papacy of Boniface VIII.,
with all his impious attributes and claims.
Would any man or any institution, with such

42 England and the Papacy.
credentials as these, be accepted now as of the
least authority in any science or any branch of
learning? Yet this is precisely the case of the
mediaeval and papal Church. It is out of court
as an authority on the sole plea of incompetence.

CHAPTER VII.
The New Learning and the English
reform.a.tion.
WITH Henry VIII., we seem to enter upon
a new and a larger world. Indeed, a
new world was opening in many senses, and
upon everv side, at the dawn of the sixteenth
century. Copernicus had enlarged and cor
rected men's notions of the material universe.
Columbus had found another hemisphere, al
though the Inquisition had proved it could not
exist. Constantinople had fallen in 1453 ; and
the Greek treasures so long imprisoned and
isolated in it were scattered over western
Europe. Printing enabled all this fresh and
vivifying knowledge to be circulated wholesale.
The recovery of Greek re-opened a greater
world of human experience and thought. It
not only restored the ancient literature, and
broader ways of conceiving life, but it revived
that free, flexible, reasonable tone of mind,
which was the strength and glory of the Hellenic
civilization, though perhaps a cause of weakness
to the Grecian States.
The nations of the West were able at last
to escape out of their mediaeval prison ; to
handle things and living facts, instead of play
ing with syllogisms, and weaving idle theories.
They were enabled to judge the present by

44 England and the Papacy.
the past ; that is, by a standard higher and
truer than their own. Their perspective was
corrected and enlarged. Weapons almost of
precision were put into their hands. The origi
nal New Testament was restored to them, as
well as a truer knowledge of Christian antiquity
and of the great Fathers. They were able to
breathe again the free air of Scriptural and
primitive Christianity. "The patlis trodden
by the footsteps of ages were broken up ; old
things were passing away, and the faith and
life of ten centuries were dissolving like a
dream. The abbey and the castle were soon
together to crumble into ruins; and all the
forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old
[mediaeval?] world were passing away, never to
return. A new continent had risen up beyond
the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid
with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss
of immeasurable space ; and the firm earth
itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to
be but a small atom in the awful vastness of
the universe. In the fabric of habit which they
had so laboriously built for themselves man
kind were to remain no longer."
That process began, at any rate, in the
sixteenth century : it still continues, with un
checked, enlarging, and irresistible advances
against the whole dominion of error, of ignor
ance, and of spiritual bondage. There are
three or four separate elements in the English
Reformation, which must not be confused by
those who wish to understand it rather than
to blame or praise it. First, there was the
King's divorce, which, on both sides, brought
a narrow, an irritating, and a personal factor
into the dispute between the Crown and the

England and the Papacy. 45
Papacy. Following this, and embittered by it,
was our repudiation of the papal claims and
jurisdiction. Next, and most important, there
was the Reformation proper of the English
Church, in doctrine, discipline, and constitu
tion : its restoration to Catholic, primitive.
Scriptural, and therefore apostolic or evangeli
cal Christianity. Depending from this, partly
ecclesiastical, but much more social and politi
cal, was the dissolution of the Religious Houses
and the resumption of their property.
As to the divorce, it must be remembered
that Henry's marriage was dubious and un-
edifying from the beginning. It was always
doubtful whether Julius II. had not exceeded
his powers in granting a dispensation for the
marriage with a brother's widow. It is not
credible, in the teeth of facts and custom, in
spite of Katharine's oath, that the condition was
not violated upon which alone Pope Julius
owned that he could lawfully dispense, and
upon which the validity of the dispensation was
based. The whole question turned upon the
extent and limits of the Pope's authority ; and
of this, it is impossible to think that the Pope
himself could be a satisfactory, a final, or an
impartial judge. Moreover, the question was
raised at the very time when the Pope's authority
itself was being challenged, and when the
Roman Courts had been long notorious for
venality, for extortion, for cynical delays and
miscarriages of justice.
The matter of the succession was undoubtedly
genuine and serious. It filled the country with
anxiety and fears, especially after the recent ex
perience of civil war. There was no precedent
for a female sovereign, except the disputed and

46 England and the Papacy.
ill-omened case of Henry the First's daughter.
Had the cause been judged dispassionately,
on its merits, even though the marriage had
been beyond suspicion, there can be little
doubt that the succession would have been held
sufficient to justify a divorce. It is the fashion,
juggling with words, to assert that the " Catholic
Church " does not allow divorce : nevertheless,
under different and less honest names, dissolu
tions of marriage were perpetual, easily obtained,
and generally scandalous, throughout the middle
ages. Henry undoubtedly had a good case. With
as little doubt, he spoilt it and behaved shame
fully. This does not alter the impersonal
merits of his case. The Pope, too, as we must
remember, was not free from partialities and
selfish interests. Henry's wife and sister-in-law
was also the Emperor's aunt. The Pope had
been the Emperor's prisoner, and was his help
less tool, his puppet in a large scheme of policy.
The Papal States and the territories of the
Pope's family were at the mercy of Charles V.
Clement was not, therefore, either a free or an
impartial judge. The personal element vitiates
not only Henry's case, but Katharine's case,
and still more the Pope's handling of it. Most
of all, it disqualifies the judge and his tribunals.
It proves, amongst other things, that the Papal
States are an insuperable barrier to the Pope's
freedom, and to Roman impartiality. Besides
all this, it was unprecedented, and under the
circumstances it was both dangerous and in
tolerable, that the King of England should be
summoned personally to plead in Rome, where
he would be in the power of the Emperor.
So much, then, for the Divorce, which cer-

England and the Papacy. 47
tainly proved the need of reforming the papal
courts and jurisdiction ; but which was not the
origin, though it was one of the provocative
causes, of the English Reformation.
The repudiation of the Pope's authority
followed as a consequence from the doubts
and quarrels raised by the Divorce. In 1529,
a Parliament met, which sat for seven years,
and carried through our deliverance from the
Roman Court and bishopric. In 1533, all
appeals to Rome were forbidden. Parliament
then decreed that the payment of Annates
to Rome should cease ; and this revenue was
confiscated from the Pope in 1534. The same
year, another Act was passed abolishing the
whole of the papal jurisdiction in England.
Convocation voted that "the bishop of Rome
hath no greater jurisdiction conferred on him
by God in this kingdom of England than any
other foreign bishop." In 1535, the Act of
Supremacy was passed ; and the King was
entitled "Supreme Head of the Church of
England." In all this, there was nothing new
or revolutionary. It was a return to the ancient
ways, a re-assertion of older freedom, a carrying
into effect of that which had long been thought,
and expressed in legal form.
In the eleventh century, William I. forbad
excommunications, the calling of synods, or the
entrance and acceptance of papal documents,
without his leave. These enactments met the
whole papal usurpation, so far as it had then
developed. In the next century, the question
of Investitures was settled in England by a
compromise, which abated nothing of the Royal
Supremacy over all persons. It was the position
maintained by the Conqueror, which Henry

48 England and the Papacy.

II. re-affirmed in the Constitutions of Clarendon.
The Pope's demand for taxes from the clergy
was rejected in 1226, but he levied a tenth in
1229. The extortion of Annates was obtained
under false pretences in 1256.
In the next century, however, the Statute of
Provisors was enacted to restrain the abuses
and encroachments of papal patronage ; and
the Statutes of Praemunire were aimed at the
usurped and growing jurisdiction of the Roman
courts. Weak sovereigns often gave up the
interests of the clergy to the Popes ; but the
Royal Supremacy was always exercised both in
theory and in practice. The Crown always
limited the papal jurisdiction. It reserved to
itself the right of admitting or rejecting papal
decrees, and of authorising or refusing the
exercise of legatine and other delegatal powers.
No new principle was thus initiated by Henry
VIII. He only made more effective those prin
ciples which had been asserted continuously
since the eleventh century, and which before
that had not required an assertion. The Royal
Supremacy did not replace a papal supremacy,
as is too often supposed.
There is no parallel whatever between the
mediaeval Church of England and the modern
papal Church in England, with regard to the
Papacy. Between the twelfth century and the
sixteenth, the papal jurisdiction was allowed,
grudgingly, partially, always under protest.
In the sixteenth century it was frankly and
honestly abolished, according to the spirit of
those laws which had been passed in the four
teenth to restrain and protest against it. A
lawless usurpation was put down in a legal and
constitutional way, by a return to older and

England and the Papacy. 49
sounder practices. In this matter, the Pope and
the mediaeval theologians were the innovators.
The legislation of Henry VIII. and the Re
formers was, so far as the Papacy is concerned,
a conservative and constitutional reaction.

4

CHAPTER VIII.
The Disendowment of the Religious
Orders.
^"'¦HE Papacy might be described, in one
of Matthew Arnold's phrases, as "the
eternal mundane spectacle." It forces every
question with which it is concerned to be more
political than religious. It soils religion with
diplomacy, politics, and sordid financial inter
ests. This inherent defect of the papal theory,
system, and methods is illustrated by the his
tory of the Religious Orders in England. The
Benedictine monks and monasteries had been of
great use to England in the centuries of settle
ment. They did good work for learning, for
agriculture, for trade, for the development of
towns. After the Conquest, there was a rapid
growth in the numbers and nature of the Reli
gious Orders. We find the various reforms
of the Benedictines, such as Carthusians and
Cistertians, entering the country ; and, in the
thirteenth century, the Franciscans, the Domini
cans, the Carmelites, and other Friars increased
the number of the Religious Houses. The new
Orders, unlike the Benedictines, were centra
lized, and governed from Rome.
There were about six hundred houses of men
and women in England at the Dissolution. The
great majority had been founded before the
reign of Richard II. ; that is, between 1066 and
1366. Only eight houses were founded in the
fifteenth century, as agairtst one hundred-and-

England and the Papacy. 5 1
fifty-seven in the reign of Henry III. On the
other hand, sixty foundations for charity and
learning were endowed in the fifteenth century.
From the time of Edward III. onwards, we find
colleges, schools, hospitals, and alms-houses
being endowed in the place of monasteries.
These figures show that the monastic founda
tions had outgrown their usefulness. They had
also, in consequence, to a large extent outgrown
their popularity.
The Peasants' Rising in the fourteenth cen
tury shows how unpopular the monks were as
landlords, and how they obstructed progress.
They clung to antiquated rights and customs,
which had grown into flagrant injustices. They
were the slowest of the landowners to abolish
serfdom. They obstructed the freedom and
progress of the towns on their estates. In
the reactionary and repressive measures which
followed the Rising, the monks were both vin
dictive and treacherous. The destruction of
monastic property was in many cases a popular
vengeance, long delayed, but carried out heartily
and thoroughly in the end.
The revenues of the Orders, too, were both
excessive in themselves and a danger to the
State. The revenues of the clergy under Henry
VIII. might be put at ;^500,C)00 a year ; and of
this, the Religious Orders probably enjoyed
over ;^300,ooo. The landed estates and rentals
of the clergy are recorded accurately; their extra
revenues, which came from innumerable sources,
form the difficulty in estimating. The revenue
of Henry's Government has been estimated at
;^i25,oooa year. We are quite safe in multi
plying by ten, if we wish to estimate the current
or spending values of these incomes.
4—2

52 England and the Papacy.

Now the clerical revenues were so heavily
taxed by Rome that they could not pay their
due proportion of taxes to the Crown. The
Friars were not taxed at all ; as, by a papal
fiction, they possessed no real property. The
incomes of the clergy, over and above their
endowments in land, and their exportations of
produce, were neither estimated nor taxed.
The whole amount paid by them to their
absentee sovereign in Italy, and to his non
resident nominees, was a dead loss to the king
dom. In the time of the French war, it had
proved a serious danger. In any collision with
the Papacy, England was occupied by wealthy
and numerous corporations, whose interests
were more papal than patriotic, whose persons
and properties were at the disposal of an alien
authority. The wealth of the Religious Orders
was really a social question. Their position,
their dependence on Rome, made the question
political. Besides, the financial state of the
Religious Houses was neither edifying nor
possible to mend. Many of the smaller houses
were bankrupt in money, and mortgaged beyond
recovery. All the greater houses were bank
rupt in men. They failed to attract subjects, in
spite of all they had to offer. At Saint Alban's,
for instance, with an income of ;^20,C)C)0 a ye^r,
in current value, there were only thirty-seven
monks. Glastonbury had an income of more
than ;^30,ooo a year, and very few monks. It
is difficult to see why small communities of
clergymen should require these vast incomes
to practice poverty.
The morality of the Religious Houses is a
more disputable question. In any case, it was
not above suspicion. It had been the subject

England and the Papacy. 53
of much and of long complaint. It could not be
dealt with regularly e.xcept through the Pope ;
and, in this case, as in all others, Rome was the
standing obstacle to Reform. It would not act
itself ; it had exempted many of the monks from
episcopal visitation and control ; it would not
allow a lay authority to interfere. In this policy,
Rome has persisted to the present day. Pius
IX. was asked in vain to reform the Italian
Orders. He refused ; and the State, in despair,
abolished them. The Pope is reported to have
said, in private, that "their destruction was the
only reform possible." The present conflict in
France, the dangers and damage caused to the
State by active and wealthy corporations depend
ing on a foreign power, may show us how far
more real and serious were the dangers incurred
by Henry VIII. in his battle with the Papacy for
civil freedom and ecclesiastical reformation.
In the process of dissolution, there was no
doubt much to be regretted and blamed. There
was much unavoidable distress and suffering to
individuals. There was much injustice, and
there were many high-handed proceedings.
There must have been considerable dishonesty
among the agents who carried it through, and
the petty local authorities who had so many
opportunities for jobbery and plunder. These
blemishes do not affect the general question, nor
the broad principles involved in it. Is the
Crown of England sovereign or dependent?
Had the Crown a lawful right to deal with this
vast question of persons and property, which
affected the health and safety of the nation ; or
could it only act in dependence on a foreign
power, whose financial and political interests
were concerned in opposing all reform ? These

54 England and the Papacy.
are the broad principles involved ; and there
could only be one solution of them.
Dissolutions were as old as Richard 1 1., and
the originator of them was Bishop Wykeham.
The alien priories had been confiscated under
Henry V. Wolsey had dissolved many Reli
gious Houses, and transferred their revenues to
his educational foundations.
Henry VIII. did not, fortunately, as it is
often asserted, seize the monastic revenues him
self ; or the Crown would have become indepen
dent, and we know it remained poor. Nor did
he squander them on worthless courtiers. The
new families, established throughout the country
by Henry VIII., on the monastic lands, were a
firm barrier against reaction during the six
teenth century. They were the backbone of
Parliament in the revolutions of the seventeenth.
Henry VIII. thus gave us the supporters of
Elizabeth, the opponents of the Stuarts, the
leaders of the Whig Oligarchy in 1688 and 1714.
No better use could probably have been made,
at the time, of these endowments. The paro
chial needs of the country were more than pro
vided for by the church accommodation and
revenues of the sixteenth century. Education
was fairly provided for by the endowments of
Edward VI. The country would have been
pauperized if the monastic revenues had been
given to charity. It is unfair to blame Henry
and his Government because they did not foresee
the population and the complex needs of our own
time. Some of the monastic property, too, was
employed by Henry VIII. in building forts, fur
nishing arsenals, and resisting those invasions
which the Roman Court stirred up against him.

CHAPTER IX.
The Reformation of the Church.
THE Reformation proper could not have
been carried out unless the monasteries
had been dissolved. It would not have been
complete or logical unless the chantries, and
many practices favoured by the Religious
Orders, had been suppressed. The English
Reformation was, above all things, an appeal to
sound learning, to primitive belief and practice,
to ancient freedom. The corporate life and
fabric of the old national Church were not
touched. There was no break in continuity,
no change in the ancient form and machinery
of government. Scripture was made the final
standard and arbiter of belief, as it had been to
the early Church. Everything which could not
meet the test of Scripture was judged to be
merely human. It might be advisable as a
matter of sentiment and order. It could not be
binding as a matter of faith or conscience.
The results of the New Learning were ac
cepted, and applied both to Scripture itself and
to antiquity. By these aids, our first generation
of Reformers abolished a great many papal
and mediaeval accretions upon the ancient faith.
Their model of belief and practice was the
primitive Church, and not the mediaeval. They
deliberately rejected the ritual, beliefs, theology.

56 England and the Papacy.
liturgies, and practices of the thirteenth cen
tury. They repudiated all the papal claims
and usurpations. They re-asserted those liber
ties which had once been possessed by every
national Church, and which our own Church
had enjoyed until the eleventh century.
These were the ends set by Cranmer and his
fellow workers before themselves. They strove
to attain them with utter honesty, carrying their
lives in their hands. We must admire their
learning, which was obtained by them in spite
of many difficulties, which was used with so
much sobriety and judgment, which was guided
by an instinct or insight that amounts to
genius ; for we must remember that the False
Decretals and various other Romanizing for
geries were not exposed fully until the reign
of Elizabeth.
The aims and attitude of the reformed Church
of England are expressed very well, through
the mouth of Cranmer, in Tennyson's " Queen
Mary." "Your creed will be your death,"
Peter Martyr says to the Archbishop ; and,
indeed, the nation had to fight, almost to the
death, to maintain its freedom in religion, upon
which its civic liberties and its sovereignty
over its own affairs depended also. Cranmer
replied : " Step after step,
Thro' many voices crying right and left,
Have I clim'd back into the primal Church,
And stand within the porch, and Christ with me."
That consciousness of the divine presence ;
that honest striving after the truth ; that reach
ing back through controversy, through all the
centuries of ignorance, of official deceits, and

England and the Papacy. ^y
of blind corruption ; that effort to regain the
"primal Church," to restore as far as possible
the Christianity of the New Testament : these
were the aims of our Reformers. The determi
nation to secure these good things enabled them
to carry on that struggle which won our theo
logical and historical position ; and which,
though it was not seen clearly at the time,
ensured our national independence, as well as
our political and civil freedom.
The English Reformation was a long process,
going through many experiments, advancing
and receding, influenced from without and from
within. It began in 1529, and was not finished
until 1662. Under Henry VIII., the Crown
recovered its old and unquestioned supremacy
over all persons and causes within its dominions.
Henry revived no powers which had not been
used by our native rulers before the Conquest ;
which had not been claimed by all our Sove
reigns, at least in theory, after it. The Church
of England asserted and regained those ancient
liberties which all Churches had by right, and
used by law, before the Papacy encroached upon
them. In doctrine and ritual, the Reformers
went back, as far as possible, to the standard of
the early Church, rejecting papal and mediaeval
innovations. There are three stages in the development of
the papal authority, or of the Roman usurpa
tion, which must be distinguished from one
another, and separated clearly in our thought,
if we would understand the Anglican position.
There is, first of all, the bishopric of Rome,
between 323 and the end of Justinian's reign.
In that period, the Roman bishop was one
among four or five patriarchs, who all had

58 England and the Papacy.
equal and co-ordinate powers, who all recog
nized the Imperial Supremacy, and the final
authority of the Church in council. There was,
next, the period between 565 and 1061, when
the Roman bishop stood alone, cut off from the
Greeks, exercising dependent secular authority.
He extended his patriarchal jurisdiction, ille
gally, and gradually developed the mediaeval
Papacy. In the early part of this period, the
English Church was organized, and entered
upon those relations with the Roman See which
prevailed here between Gregory I. and Alexan
der II. This was the utmost extent of commu
nion with Rome which the English Nation and
Church ever accepted willingly, and perhaps
legally. Communion with the Roman bishop
must always be distinguished from subjection
to the papal Court.
Between 1061 and 1300, the mediaeval Papacy
developed into the feudal Papacy of Gregory
VII., Innocent III., Boniface VIII. This
feudal Papacy encroached upon all States and
Churches, including our own. In this period,
new doctrines were defined, new discipline was
imposed, the constitution and conceptions of the
Church were transformed almost out of recog
nition. England met the whole course of this
development with constitutional protests. We
did everything that was possible to resist its
progress. That resistance was not of much
practical use, though it was by no means
ineffectual. It served, at any rate, to mark the
stages of the papal usurpation, and to preserve
the memory of our ancient freedom. It enabled
the Reformers to appeal from the feudal Papacy
to an older, freer, and purer state of things.
They could point to Rome as the innovator, the

England and the Papacy. 59
aggressor, and take their stand" upon the earlier
constitution of the Church.
The Church of England stands now precisely
where it stood then, though encompassed with
numerous descendants and allies; all witness
ing, historically and theologically, against the
mediaeval and the later stages of papal develop
ment, just as the various eastern Churches
witness, doctrinally and historically, against
the earlier.

CHAPTER X.
Henry VIII.
HENRY VIII. was a strong man, who
guided us, without any disaster, through
a dangerous and an inevitable crisis. It was
inevitable, if we were to remain true to our
national traditions. He did a rough and neces
sary piece of work, with as little violence as was
possible in that age, with those agents, and
against the most unscrupulous of enemies. He
kept us from serious invasion^ and from a theo
logical civil wan Ihe executions of individuals
in nis reign must never be judged without
remembering the grave dangers of the State ;
without a minute knowledge of plots and parties
within the realm, as well as of the intrigues
and designs of our various foreign enemies.
Henry accomplished a difficult and a dangerous
work, in the face of some internal opposition,
of much external and powerful hostility. He
"broke the bonds of Rome," and secured our
freedom as a Church and Nation. He gave us
our place and function in the modern world.
We have no right to accept that great and
responsible inheritance without making every
allowance for the dangers and difficulties of
those who gained it. After all, nothing greater
has been done in the history of England ;
nothing which has contributed so largely to

England and the Papacy. 6i
make us, and all the peoples descended from
us, what we are. The Papacy was a stronger
and a more dangerous enemy to our growth and
freedom than were the Stuart kings.
Henry's faults are only too obvious ; but they
do not outweigh his political services, nor do
they cancel our obligations to him. Besides,
Henry VIII. had no irresponsible or despotic
authority. He had neither a revenue, nor an
army, by which he could overawe his people, or
act independently of them. Without national
support, he could not have ruled the clergy,
expelled the Pope, and suppressed the monks.
Some parts of the country were, no doubt,
against the suppression of the monasteries,
and any changes in public worship ; but the
moie intelligent and prosperous parts, such as
London, the towns generally, the more flourish
ing eastern and southern counties, were on the
side of liberty and progress ; that is to say, they
were strongly national in feeling, and therefore
anti-papal. The distinction between Catholicism and pa-
palism was perceived clearly, and held firmly,
not only by Henry himself, but evidently by
the nation as a whole ; for we must remember
that both Houses of Convocation, and all the
bishops, including Fisher, accepted Henry's anti-
papal measures. They were glad to be freed
from the papal exactions and usupations, as well
as from the exempted and Romanizing clois
tered associations.
The attitude of the more conservative English
bishops towards Rome may be established from
the earlier writings and policy of Gardiner.
Henry VIII., both in what he removed and in
what he retained, was theologically conservative.

62 England and the Papacy.
and he was a typical representative of the
national feeling in religion. He took the country
with him, in the various stages of his policy ;
or, it might be said as truly, the nation took
him. During his reign, there was not any
national sympathy or movement for the papal
cause. Henry intended to be and to remain a Catholic,
as that word was used, understood, and applied
to the Church by the makers of the Nicene
Creed ; though his knowledge of what was
really Catholic and primitive was necessarily
incomplete, and he accepted various beliefs and
practices which a sounder scholarship proved
later to have been papal and mediaeval in their
origin. Henry always repudiated the term Pro
testant, as it was misunderstood and usurped
by sectarians, whether Lutherans or Calvinists.
But, whether he recognised it or no, Henry was
a Protestant in the historical and original mean
ing of the word ; that is to say, while repudiat
ing any new confession of faith, or any changes
in the ancient polity of the Church, he took his
stand firmly upon holy Scripture, as the makers
of the creeds had before him. He appealed
from the usurped authority of the Pope to the
final authority of Scripture in all matters of
belief and controversy.
After Henry's death, much new light was
thrown, both upon Scripture and Christian
antiquity, by more competent scholarship and
research, as well as by experience and the drift
of practical affairs. For instance, the Roman
ism which emerged at Trent, which moulded
and dominated the papal Church from the time
of Henry's death, was very different from the
spirit which had prevailed at Constance, or from

England and the Papacy. 63
the "Catholicism" which had grown up during
the middle ages. The problems which had to
be faced by Jewel, by Hooker, and by Usher
were not quite the same as those with which the
first Reformers had been obliged to deal. The
knowledge available in the latter half of the
sixteenth century was fuller and surer than the
knowledge of Cranmer or even of Erasmus.
The changes thus produced were, however,
changes of detail and not of principle. The
broad way of Reformation which was begun
by Henry and his advisers was taken up and
continued under Elizabeth, in spite of the
two narrow and violent reactions which came
between. Henry VIII. died as the Council of
Trent began to sit ; and the churchmen held a
service of thanksgiving for the removal of so
dread an enemy. Henry's work, however, has
lived on, and has proved itself the most for
midable opponent to the false history and theo
logy of Trent. His death and that Council
inaugurate a new departure.

CHAPTER XI.
The Council of Trent and the New
Romanism.
THE attitude of the Papacy to the Reforma
tion has now to be considered. It was
very different from the attitude of the English
People. In the fifteenth century, the Council
of Constance ended the Great Schism. It
asserted the old and catholic principle that the
Church in council is of higher authority than a
Pope. It deposed the three rival occupants of
the papal chair, whose conflicting titles, in their
several degrees of badness and uncertainty, could
not by any means be adjusted. The only prac
tical course was to put all the claimants on one
side ; and a fresh start was made by the election
of Martin V. The Roman Court, however,
was able to obstruct all other efforts at reform,
though every national Church and Government
desired it. The last chance of a constitutional
reformation was thus destroyed by the Roman
Court itself; and the Churches went on, help
lessly and hopelessly in their corruption, until
they were destroyed or purged by the storms
and fires of a revolution.
Martin V. returned to Rome, and to the
enjoyment of the Papal States, in 1420. The
Popes who followed him resembled the Italian
Despots of that age ; fighting and scheming

England and the Papacy. 65
against their neighbours for additions of wealth
and territory ; drawing immense revenues also
from their ecclesiastical position, and thus hold
ing a great advantage over all other rivals by
their spiritual prerogatives and claims. Their
supernatural reputation, however, was dimmed
and tarnished by the Schism, and by all the
scandals which had been connected for so long
with the Roman Court and its administration.
These scandals, both official and personal, did
not grow less during the remainder of the fif
teenth centur\-. The Pontiffs, at the end of that
century and the beginning of the sixteenth, in
creased their territories, increased and endowed
their families, and enjoyed almost incredible
wealth and splendour ; but this apparent good
fortune wais dearly bought by the abuses which
were sapping the health and credit of the
Church. The barque of Peter was like that
"gilded vessel" in Gray's ode, " proudly riding"
over the golden waters, with "Pleasure at the
helm," careless of the gathering and rumbling
storm. The Popes of that age welcomed the tastes
and fashions of the Renaissance. They were
not averse from the architecture, the decorations,
or the titles of their predecessors, the heathen
Emperors and Pontiffs. The Breviary, even in
its now expurgated form, shows that they had
no prejudices against the phraseology of the old
Pantheon. They admired some things which
were truly admirable in the manners and society
of ancient Rome, but they imitated others which
they should not even have admired. They are
credited, however, too easily and commonly,
with a zeal for the New Learning ; with being
its chief patrons and promoters. These Popes

66 England and the Papacy.
did, in truth, employ sculptors, and jewellers,
and painters, and florid builders, and honeyed
Latinists ; the Court of Rome played and even
rioted with the toys of the classical revival : yet
the very same Popes, with an horde of scurril
and ferocious ecclesiastics, opposed the more
serious consequences and fruits of the Renais
sance ; that is, the application of the New Learn
ing to Scripture, to theology, to church history
and government, to the natural sciences, to
political and social questions, to intellectual and
individual freedom. Scholars like Erasmus
were alternately caressed and slandered by
the upholders of the Papacy and of mediaeval
ignorance. The Council of Trent was the final answer of
the Papacy to the demand of Europe for a refor
mation. The reprisals and repressions which
followed that Council showed what the spirit and
methods of the new Romanism were to be. The
Council met in 1545, and it continued inter
mittently for 18 years. In 1540, Paul III. had
confirmed and authorized the Society of Jesus.
The theology of Trent, the methods by which it
was manoeuvred through the Council, and pro
pagated in Europe afterwards, were due chiefly
to the Jesuits ; whom we must regard as the
foremost champions of the Papacy, and as the
incarnation of that new papalism, which was
determined at all costs, not only to reconquer
its lost authority, but to conquer the human race
more thoroughly than before.
To this end, the papal authority had, by any
and every means, to be re-affirmed, strength
ened, and extended. The Council, therefore,
could not be allowed to go behind the middle
ages and the theology of Innocent III. The

England and the Papacy. 67
theologians of Trent could not adopt the New
Learning honestly, with its recovered know
ledge of Scripture and of Christian antiquity ;
simply because that knowledge undermined the
mediaeval Church and the foundations of the
Pope's authority. The mediaeval errors in theo
logy were all re-affirmed, extended, and codified,
notwithstanding the exposure of all the forgeries
and frauds upon which the papal system had
been erected. Beliefs and practices, which the
mediaeval theologians had accepted in ignorance
and good faith, were re-affirmed in bad faith and
against the light by the wire-pullers of Trent,
who imposed them even more rigorously upon
their Church. The definitions of Trent were
moulded and carried through by the Jesuits,
solely in the interests of the Papacy, by the votes
of illiterate, venal, dependent" Italian bishops,
the tools and creatures of the Pope.
The numbers and nationality of the Tridentine
bishops go far to explain the methods and theo
logy of this papal assembly, which cannot be
accepted as a mouthpiece of Catholic opinion
and beliefs. During the final sessions there
were present 189 Italians, who for the most part
were dependent on the Roman Court, and were
not conspicuous for learning. There were 31
Spaniards, 6 Portugese, and 26 Frenchmen.
Germany and Flanders had two bishops each ;
and there was one Englishman. That is to say,
the Teutonic nations, who were most anxious
about reform, had five representatives. The
so-called Council was, for all practical purposes,
a packed synod of Italians, who were neither
^--fi'ee nor competent. The committees were so
shuffled that a papal majority was always assured
in each of them. The general sessions of the
5—2

68 England and the Papacy.
Council were guided by skilful and unscrupulous
presidents, who manipulated all the discussions
and votes in favour of the Papacy.
Even so, the Council often embarrassed and
alarmed the Roman Court. It was delayed,
suspended, removed into papal territory, cajoled,
bribed, and threatened. Its business was inter
rupted continually while instructions were sought
from Rome ; whence, as an ambassador re
ported, the Holy Ghost was sent regularly in a
mail-bag to the presiding legate. There was a
serious discussion, when the Council opened, as
to whether bishops received their commission
immediately from God, or mediately through
the Pope. That question struck at the episcopal
office and authority. In the ages of the great
Councils and the Patriarchates, this question
could not have been raised, as there was no
Papacy. In more primitive times, the bishops
were regarded only as witnesses to the faith ;
they represented their congregations, and re
ported their beliefs. The dubious compromise
about this difficulty left the Pope master of the
situation : since Trent, the papal authority has
never been seriously questioned in an assembly
of the Latin Church ; and it has increased
steadily, until the episcopal office has become
little more than a delegated power, exercised,
as the Romanized bishops now themselves
proclaim, " by favour of the Apostolic See."
The methods of controversy which were neces
sitated by the attitude assumed at Trent, that is
by the defence of an unhistorical position, and the
advocacy of a damaged case, have been perpe
tuated in the apologetics of the Roman Church ;
and they have been more seriously burdened
by the later definition of papal infallibility. They

England and the Papacy. 69
are a cause of intellectual and moral weakness.
The advocates of the Papacy dare not appeal to
the broad facts of history, or live at ease in the
free and bracing air of modern thought, accept
ing the canons of scientific history and criticism.
They are bound to be advocates manipulating a
case, forcing it by any shifts to a foregone con
clusion. They cannot be disinterested or impar
tial enquirers, allowing facts themselves to speak
impersonally, and deciding finally by the laws
of evidence. The Roman Church " triumphs
over history " bv ignoring or outraging the facts
which history records. It relies upon authority,
and dehes truth. It wanders in a vicious circle,
appealing helplessly, when it is pressed, to the
Pope's authority and office, which are always
the ultimate question in dispute. The papal
authority is not, as Milner boasted, "the end of
controversy," but is merely the end, as it is the
starting-point, of all the Roman arguments.
There was more talk than reality at the Papal
Court in the matter of reform. The precedents
and habits of Sixtus IV., Alexander VI., Julius
II. , and Leo X. were no longer followed openly
or in the magnificent way of those gorgeous
Pontiffs ; but the names of the Farnese, the Al-
dobrandini, the Borghese, the Barberini, and of
many other families, whose fortunes and palaces
were quarried out of Saint Peter's rock, prove
that the affections and expenditure of Christ's
Vicars were very little changed or chastened by
the Catholic Reaction. The Curia lost many
sources of revenue, but its methods and proce
dure were not perceptibly or radically improved.
Stricter laws were drawn up at Trent for the
bishops ; but the Roman Catholic episcopates in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries do not

JO England and the Papacy.
show that those regulations had much effect.
The state of the Religious Orders during the
same period forces us to a similar conclusion.
The Philosophers and the Revolution of the
eighteenth century were much more effective
instruments of reform than the so-called Catholic
Reaction. That Reaction meant, not so much
a reform in morals, as a concentration of all
authority in Rome, a stern intellectual repres
sion within the papal Church, and savage
reprisals, wherever they were possible, against
those who had renounced the Papacy.
In our own country, when the firm guidance
of Henry VIII. was removed, there were two
interludes of weakness and reaction ; and then
England entered upon a struggle of life and
death with the militant and renovated Papal
Court. We were battling for civil, political,
and religious freedom, or even for our existence
as an independent nation. The Papacy made
war upon us, according to its new methods, for
its new creed, for its confiscated income and its
forfeited authority, and by means of its new
instrument, the Society of Jesus. The battle on
our side was directed by one of the greatest and
most courageous of our sovereigns : the ministers
whom she chose were worthy of herself, and of
our cause. In Burghley and in Walsingham, the
Jesuits, and even Parsons, their greatest Eng
lish representative, found opponents who could
beat them at their own weapons ; though Eliza
beth and her advisers never stooped to those
criminal and dastardly methods which some
agents of the Papacy allowed themselves to use.
Walsingham baffled plots and spies by one of
the most perfect organizations of a secret service
that was ever known ; but the Queen and her

England and the Papacy. 71
ministers did not resort to poison, to assassina
tion, or to the wiles of casuistry and equivo
cating. When it came to hard and open
fighting, the sailors of Elizabeth swept her
enemies from the sea. If the Armada carried
the ambitions of Philip, the desires and bles
sings of the Papacy, the methods and machinery
of the Inquisition, the fleets of Elizabeth bore
the fortunes of the Reformation, of our national
and imperial growth, of our coming freedom
and progress ; of that life and greatness which
could not have been developed under obedience
to Rome, which is irreconcilable with the spirit
and methods of the Papacy as they were enun
ciated and organized by Trent.
Of Edward the Sixth's reign we need say
only two things. One is, that advantage was
taken of the King's minority, by unscrupulous
and greedy politicians, to advance themselves
and their families under the pretext of religion,
and of a more zealous reformation. The other
is, that in spite of this favourable opportunity,
no individual or sectarian reformer, whether
English or foreign, was able to intrude his
private opinions into the official utterances of
our Church.
The opposite reaction under Mary was due
principally to the sympathies and feelings of
the Queen herself; but also to the fears and
uneasiness caused by the disturbance and mis-
government of Edward's reign. The orderly,
quiet, and patriotic majority, who wanted stabi
lity and a reformed Catholicism, were alienated
finally from all sympathy with a papal reaction
or restoration by the greater violence and mis-
government of Mary. This Queen was Spanish
and not English, both in her nature and her

72 England and the Papacy.
sympathies. She made England a satellite of
Spain, and reduced us to the lowest and weakest
state politically which we have ever reached.
She was possessed by a personal and petty
rancour, for which there had been too much
provocation during her soured and unhappy
life ; but, in conceding this to the woman, we
necessarily condemn the Queen. She relied
upon the Spaniards, instead of on her People,
and she took naturally to Spanish methods.
She would have given up much more to Spain,
to the new Romanism of Trent, and to their
arbitrary methods, if the Privy Council had not
restrained her. The country would not endure
any restitution of the monastic lands ; but Mary
was allowed to restore the papal jurisdiction,
as well as to revive and extend the laws against
heretics. Between 1555 and 1558, at least three hundred
persons were burnt in England, an average of
about a hundred a year, or two a week. Our
experience of the counter-reformation and its
methods was short and slight. As many vic
tims, almost, have been displayed sometimes
on a single Spanish holiday ; and we never
tolerated among us the injustice, the indignities,
and the cruelties which were inflicted by the
Spanish Inquisition upon its victims before they
were finally dispatched.
The country, however, was sickened with
blood ; and Mary did England a real service by
showing it the spirit and methods of that new
Romanism which was established by the Coun
cil of Trent. The lesson thus learnt from the
misuse of power by Romanized ecclesiastics was
brought home to the country in another way,
¦when the Papacy was deprived again of all

England and the Papacy. ^2)
jurisdiction here, and tried to regain its influence
by policy and plotting. The manoeuvres of the
Papacy and its accomplices against Elizabeth
are even more odious and criminal than their ex
ploits against helpless and conscientious victims
under Mary.

CHAPTER XII.
Elizabeth's Battle against the Papacy.
ELIZABETH resolved to be Queen of an
united people, and not the leader of any
faction or sect, especially in religion. She was
entirely British in feeling, as in descent. Her
patriotism and statesmanship were of the high
est order. Her courage was magnificent. She
restored good government, security, and pros
perity at home. By the most skilful diplomacy,
she maintained an outward peace with all her
neighbours, and avoided an open war with
Spain for almost thirty years. The Act of
Supremacy was renewed when she succeeded ;
and the Crown thus recovered its lawful and
sovereign authority over all persons and all
national affairs. The Act of Uniformity in
Worship established the reformed Prayer-Book.
Elizabeth's ecclesiastical policy was accepted,
more or less willingly, by a large majority of
the nation. Out of nine thousand beneficed
clergy, rather less than two hundred resigned,
or were expelled for disobeying. The great body
of the people were contented with the English
and legal service in their parish churches ; or,
at any rate, they submitted, and attended it.
In those days, there was no rigid uniformity
of service among the Churches in communion
with Rome, and many local rites were used

England and the Papacy. 75
without question. The scrupulous minority,
who held aloof, were not molested in their per
sons, so long as they could prove that they were
peaceable and loyal subjects. Elizabeth wished,
above all things, to heal the religious differences
of her kingdom, and she relied on time as the
great healer. For twelve years, her efforts were
allowed to go on quietly and successfully. They
were, indeed, so successful as to displease and
alarm the Roman Court, which had no grievance
against her, except that she would not allow the
Pope to interfere either with our freedom in
religion or with our choice of a sovereign.
In 1570, therefore, Pius V. issued a Bull,
excommunicating and deposing the Queen as
an heretical usurper, releasing her subjects from
their allegiance, excommunicating those who
remained loyal, ordering those who accepted the
Pope's authority to carry out this his judgment,
and forbidding them to attend the established
worship. This was a declaration of open war ; and
the Popes were henceforth allies or instigators
of all our foreign enemies in turn : of the
Spaniards especially, of the House of Guise
in France, of their descendant and tool Mary
Stuart, and of the native Irish. The Popes and
their agents intrigued ais well with every element
of disaffection and disorder within the kingdom.
A small number of Englishmen accepted the
Bull, so far as worship was concerned, and
separated themselves from the national Church.
By this proceeding, a schismatical popish sect or
faction was inaugurated among us. In date,
it is thus the second among recognized bodies
of Nonconformists : the Independents taking
precedence of the Romanists. In size, it is

76 England and the Papacy.
very much smaller now, relatively to the popu
lation and to other religious bodies, than it was
under Elizabeth.
This new papal sect was divided immediately
into two main factions, with regard to political
and national affairs. Its internal quarrels were
more numerous and petty. They were also
interminable, exceedingly bitter in spirit, as well
as tyrannical and treacherous in method.
One of these factions, the larger and worthier,
was honestly religious and patriotic. Its ad
herents wished only to go their own way quietly,
following their conscience in Church govern
ment, being in all other matters loyal to their
Queen and country. These Romanists are
worthy of all honour. They held to their faith,
as they conceived it, heroically, through danger
and much suffering. They maintained their
loyalty, and proved it abundantly, in spite of
grievous ill-usage and provocation. They repre
sented the traditional, though erroneous, Catho
licism which had prevailed in England between
the fourth Lateran Council and the conservative
Church legislation of Henry VIII., and which
as a living system of theology had passed away
from us for ever. It was overwhelmed, on one
side, by that revived and reformed national
Catholicism which the New Learning had pro
duced : on the other side, it was undermined
and supplanted by the narrowed, centralized,
and more definite Romanism of Trent.
A revived patriotic and national Catholicism,
which we owe chiefly to the wisdom and courage
of Elizabeth, and the political, violent, sec
tarian papalism, which the Jesuits organized and
manipulated, were thus brought into active con
flict with one another ; and their irreconcilable

England and the Papacy. yy
differences ended that compromise between pa
triotism and Popery, between the Royal Supre
macy and the papal claims, which had satisfied
our mediaeval ancestors. The political, national,
and ecclesiastical forces which were brought
into open and irreconcilable hostility, by refor
mation and reaction, by the New Learning and
obscurantism, by the claims of knowledge and
of liberty against a corrupt and usurped autho
rity, left no place or function for those who
represented, and still desired, the old spirit of
mediaeval freedom and compromise. Their
sufferings were piteous, but they were as inevit
able as thev were undeserved. Their troubles
were due chiefly to the political temper and
the criminal methods of the more violent papal
agents, who obeyed the Roman Court, who
represented the methods and spirit of modern
Romanism. These extremists, led and misguided by the
Jesuits, were violently and actively hostile to
Elizabeth's person and policy. The Queen was
described by these men as "the usurper who
now occupies the kingdom." They acknow
ledged the Pope's right to depose English
sovereigns, chosen lawfully and constitutionally
by the nation ; and to dispose of the succession
according to his political and sectarian interests.
In these matters, the old school of English
Romanists, like More and Gardiner, were tho
roughly sound and constitutional. The Jesuit
leader. Parsons, on the other hand, writes of
"the Pope, who, besides the universal power
given to him by God for defending religion, has
a particular right of majesty, and supreme
dominion in England." In other words, Parsons
accepted the spiritual claims of the Papacy, with

78 England and the Papacy.
all their consequences, as well as those temporal
and feudal claims upon the Crown of England
which were based upon John's homage and sur
render. Parsons and his adherents were eager
to carry out the Pope's intentions, and to make
the Bull of Pius V. an effectual weapon. He
and his agents were in sympathy with all our
foreign enemies, and especially with Spain.
They fomented rebellion and discontent within
the kingdom. They intrigued with every claim
ant to the throne ; and, as we can see now by
their own correspondence, they used and duped
them all in turn.
The chief object of the Jesuits was to be on
the winning side, and to make the best use of
events for the advantage and domination of their
Society. The famous Pere La Chaise, writing
to Father Petre in 1688, says that Aquaviva,
ithe General of the Jesuits, allowed Parsons to
\support the claims of King Philip ; and another
jagent, Creighton, to support the succession of
King James VI. ; "so that the Society should
be on the winning side whether James or Philip
won. Parsons has been flattered in a modern Jesuit
publication as "animated throughout by sincere
patriotism ;" but, from his writings and policy,
we can only understand his "patriotism" as a
desire to subject England to the papal religion
and authority. He seems to have disliked any
true political or civil freedom, and to have
ignored the question of our national indepen
dence. From his own point of view, he was
right. He acted logically from his premisses.
He was far more logical and loyal in his reason
ing than those who shrink from the full applica
tion of the papal theory, or who deny the natural

England and the Papacy. 79
results of it. Unfortunately, he was thoroughly
disloyal and unscrupulous in his methods.
Parsons appears to have been indifferent to
the succession, so long as the interests of the
Papacy and of his own Society were served.
" Right," he says, "is the least important ele
ment in the claim ; " and he probably thought
even less of the rights, interests, and constitu
tional wishes of the nation than of the supposed
hereditary rights of any claimant. He lived and
laboured for the purpose of " reducing England
again to the Church," that is to the Pope, and
to his Spanish masters ; and he was quite willing
to accept a Spanish sovereignty as the instru
ment of this reduction. In his " Memorial for
the Reformation of England," he advocates the
restoration of the monastic lands, not however to
the original Orders which had owned them, but
to a council of "principal bishops and prelates
and others most Jit for tke purpose." These others
were, it would seem, the Jesuits ; who were to
handle the Church revenues, to direct the
prelates, and to monopolise clerical and secular
education. The Council devised by Parsons
was to be, really, the Inquisition ; though not
called so openly, as its title " may be somewhat
odious and offending at the beginning."
Parsons thus aimed at a stronger and more
complete application of the methods and policy
of Queen Mary, "of good memory;" under the
Spaniards if necessary, in any case under the
Jesuits, and according to the newest papal
fashions of vengeance and repression. The
political method of Parsons, the spirit and
procedure of the Jesuits, or indeed of that
new papalism which they represented, were
abhorrent to the old-fashioned English Roman-

8o England and the Papacy.
ists, both to ecclesiastics and to laymen. "The
old Marian priests, as a body, were somewhat
suspicious of the new men. What they had
learnt of them from the seminary priests (now
some fourscore or more) who had come to
work in England, made them apprehensive of
danger. The ways and ideas of the Society
were so different from anything hitherto seen
in England ; and then, besides, there was more
than a feeling that their coming had some
political meaning which would only bring more
trouble and persecution on the already sorely
tried flock."*
This was undoubtedly the feeling of the older
clergy, who were thoroughly English in senti
ment and education. This patriotic and loyal
feeling was shared by the majority of Roman
Catholic laymen, who were stirred up to dis
loyalty, if possible, by the Jesuits and their
agents, or were persecuted by them if they held
aloof from political and disloyal methods. The
Jesuit Tichborne writes of a patriotic layman :
" Sir Thomas Tresham, as a friend of the State,
is holden among us for an atheist, and all others
of his humour either so or worse, "i*
The violent party hesitated at nothing which
might rid them of Elizabeth. Some of the
Popes themselves possibly. King Philip, the
Duke of Guise, several cardinals and nuncios
and bishops, certainly, and various Jesuits, were
all implicated in more than one plot to assassi
nate the Queen. There were innumerable plots
devised or attempted against her life, between

* Taunton; " History of the Jesuits in England," p. 55.
I Law : " Conflicts between Jesuits and Seculars in the reign of
Elizabeth. ''

England and the Papacy. 8i
1570 and 1603; some of them were certainly
fictitious, but others were as certainly genuine.
The methods of Parsons and his accomplices
were wholly unscrupulous, un-English, criminal,
and cowardly. These conspirators did not
shrink from poison and assassination. Some of
the Jesuit theologians defended regicide ; and
we find their teachings carried into practice by
weak-headed and fanatical partizans. Within a
few years, two kings of France and the heroic
Prince of Orange were murdered by such
instruments as these.
From all these methods and designs, the
secular clerg}-, the Benedictines, and the great
body of English Romanists stood honourably
aloof. They made no concession to the Govern
ment about their beliefs, but their attitude was
constitutional and loyal. They obeyed the
Sovereign who was recognized by Parliament.
They held that no foreign potentate had any voice
in the choosing of our rulers, or any right of
interference in our domestic and temporal affairs.
They were loyal both to the old creeds of the
Church, and to the State. Most of them were
willing to resist even the Pope himself in any
warlike and political attempt against the Queen
or the Realm. Unfortunately, these notions did
not prevail among the more active and leading
Romanists ; and those who held them had to
suffer in the inevitable struggle between the
new, militant Romanism and the maintenance
of our rights to political, national, and spiritual
freedom, as those rights were then practised and
understood. These were the problems which confronted
Elizabeth ; and, it must be owned, the situation
was distressing and difficult. In spite of the
6

82 England and the Papacy.

violent and unscrupulous methods of the leading
papal agents, Elizabeth's advisers were exceed
ingly mild and patient. From the publication
of the Bull, in 1570, to the year 1581, only three
Romanists are claimed by Challoner as martyrs
under the penal statutes. We can add the
names of four others, who were executed for
criminal and treasonable acts. The penal sta
tutes themselves, at any rate so far as the death
penalty was concerned, were far more rigorous
in expression than in execution.
From 1 58 1 to the destruction of the Armada,
Elizabeth was fighting desperately for her life
and throne, as well as for the liberty of
England, against the Spaniards and the Pope.
These enemies and their agents, especially the
Jesuits, and the Seminary priests who were
trained or influenced by them, grew more
treacherous and active. Of these, as Parsons
tells us in 1584, there were at least three hundred
in England, and two hundred more at Rheims
waiting to come over : a body of spies and
incendiaries amounting to five hundred men.
Of the Seminaries, especially of those estab
lished by Parsons in Spain, Cardinal d'Ossat
wrote, "The object of these institutions is to
instil into the minds of the missionaries the
Spanish political creed; and for that, rather
than the Catholic faith, were they, if necessary,
to suffer martyrdom."*
Throughout the reigns of Charles V. and
Philip II. , the Papacy was dominated by Spain,
and was infected by Spanish methods of govern
ment and policy. Clement VII., as we have
seen in the matter of Queen Katharine's divorce,
* Taunton : " History of the Jesuits in England," p. 134.

England and the Papacy. 83
was a tool and partizan of Charles V. The
following Popes, until the rise of Louis XIV.,
were, as Archbishop Bancroft described them,
" Chaplains to the King of Spain." The Jesuits,
we must remember, were of Spanish origin, and
they came into power while Spain dominated
the Papacy. It was the object of Parsons that
the new Romanist clergy in England should be
" hispaniolated ;" that is, made into adherents
of Philip ; though Philip himself was often an
noyed and injured in his diplomacy by the
meddling of his Jesuit allies. It is impossible
to separate the political from the theological ele
ment in these missionaries and pseudo-martyrs.
Indeed, as Cardinal d'Ossat puts it, so clearly
and honestly, the "political creed" of these
emissaries was more important to their em
ployers than the "Catholic faith;" and there
fore it is difficult to see where martyrdom,
properly speaking, comes in.
As all these matters were understood clearly
by the Government of Elizabeth, it is also diffi
cult to see how they could have acted otherwise
than they did, without betraying the highest
interests of the nation. They never allowed
religious phrases and pretexts to blind them to
the political methods, aims, and nature of their
Italian enemy and his Spanish masters.
The feeling of the nation ran high, in the
face of these dangers and conspiracies. It was
wholly in favour of the Queen; and, in 1584, a
national association was formed to protect her
from assassins, or to avenge her death. Mary
Stuart, the cause or the pretext of continual and
criminal intrigues, was more closely watched.
The detection of Babington's conspiracy, in 1586,
was followed by Mary's trial and condemnation ;
6—2

84 England and the Papacy.
and she was beheaded the following year, when
the Spanish invasion was expected immediately,
and when her presence would certainly have
been dangerous to the State.
It must be remembered that Mary was deposed
and expelled by her own people : that Elizabeth
disliked those proceedings, and tried honestly
to save Mary from the consequences of her
follies and misgovernment in Scotland. Mary
then began a new career as claimant or next
heir to Elizabeth's crown. She was not content
to wait for the succession, and she pretended to a
sounder title than Elizabeth. How far she was
involved personally in conspiracies is a debatable
question ; that she was involved to some extent
is proved abundantly. There is no doubt also
that her name, her cause, and her religion were
made use of by other conspirators. It was
equally impossible for Elizabeth to leave her
free in England, or to let her go out of the
country. It would have been even more
perilous for Elizabeth to acknowledge Mary as
her successor.
Mary herself was persuaded to disinherit
James, "considering the great obstinacy of my
son in his heresy ;" and she made over her tide
to the King of Spain. The succession of Philip
was more promising for the designs of Parsons
and the Jesuits ; and they regarded the death of
the unfortunate ex-Queen of Scotland as a gain
to their policy, and a removal of many compli
cations. Olivarez, the Spanish minister, wrote :
"They (Parsons and Allen) do their best to
convince me that it is not only no loss, but that
by her death many difficulties had disappeared
which could only have been removed with great
labour while the enterprise was proceeding and

England and the Papacy. 85
with still greater trouble after our Lord had
given it success."*
Thus was Mary regarded by those for whom
she sacrified everything ; who sacrificed her life
and fortunes unscrupulously to attain, if pos
sible, their own designs. Her principles of
government, her proved incompetence, her reli
gion, and above all her subjection to those who
exploited her religion, would have made her
succession to the Crown a cause of danger, of
disturbance, and probably of disaster. Mary
certainlv knew of Babington's conspiracy, and
the King of Spain approved it. He wrote :
"The affair is so much in God's service that it
certainly deserves to be supported, and we must
hope that our Lord will prosper it, unless our
sins be an impediment thereto. "-f Moreover,
the Xuncio in Paris, a bishop, wrote to a car
dinal, nephew of Gregory XIIL, that the Dukes
of Guise and Mayenne, in the interests of Mary
Stuart, "have a plan for killing the Queen of
England, by the hand of a Catholic, though not
one outwardly, who is near her person." This
man, or his heir, was to have 100,000 crowns,
of which 50,000 were deposited with the Arch
bishop of Glasgow. The Nuncio added: "As
to putting to death that wicked woman, I said
to him [the Duke of Guise] that I will not write
about it to our Lord the Pope (nor do I), nor tell
your most illustrious Lordship to inform him of
it; because, though I know our Lord the Pape
would be glad that God should punish -i-ri^ny
way whatever that enemy of His, still it would
be unfitting that His Vicar should procure it
by these means."
* Taunton : " History of the Jesuits in England," page 125.
t Martin Hume : " Philip II. of Spain," page 201.

86 England and the Papacy.
The failure of Babington's conspiracy, and
the execution of Mary which was caused by it,
were followed in 1588 by the sailing of the
Armada. Before it started, Sixtus V. issued
a new Bull, in which he proclaimed a crusade
against Elizabeth and England. He sent his
benediction to the Spanish invaders, as Alex
ander II. had to the Normans. As the Legate,
Cardinal Allen, wrote to the English Romanists :
"His Holiness confirms and renews the sen
tence of his predecessors against Elizabeth. He
discharges you of your oath of allegiance. He
expects all of you, according to your ability, to
hold yourselves ready on the arrival of his
Catholic Majesty's powers to join them. This
if you do, your lands and goods will be assured
to you."
Fortunately, the English Romanists were not
exposed to the doubts and temptations which
might have been caused by a Spanish landing,
or a Spanish victory. They showed themselves
loyal and patriotic in rallying to the Queen,
and in preparing to resist invasion. Neverthe
less, the head of their Church advised and
ordered disloyalty, he aided our enemies with
money and spiritual weapons. His Legate
described the Queen in words of unpardonable
grossness and scurrility. Parsons and his fac
tion were engaged actively on the side of
Philip. They were prepared to carry out the
Bull of Sixtus, and to subject their country to a
foreign power. They did their utmost to rouse
the English Papists, and to tamper with their
loyalty. They were not successful with the
great body of English Roman Catholics. They
did corrupt a few unhappy individuals. For
instance, in 1587, Sir William Stanley, who

England and the Papacy. 87
held the fortress of Deventer for Elizabeth,
betrayed his trust and his troops by handing the
place over to the Spaniards. Parsons proved
his " patriotism " by writing a treatise in defence
and praise of this foul treason. He also wrote
a treasonable and scurrilous book against
Elizabeth, as a preparation for the Armada,
in which he defends the papal sentence, and
describes her as "the Usurper and pretended
Queen." During all these dangerous and stormy years,
from 1570 onwards, defensive measures were
necessarily more frequent and severe ; but,
considering the length and fierceness of the
struggle, the vile methods of the enemy, and
the outrageous provocation, Elizabeth executed
very few Papists throughout the forty-five years
of her reign. The whole number of deaths in
prison and on the scaffold ' ' after the accession
of Elizabeth," that is from 1558 to 1691, is
given by Mr. LaWj in his " Calendar of English
Martyrs," as two hundred and sixty : a number
considerably less than that of the executions
during the three fiery years of Mary. We must
remember the grave poli ical troubles and dan
gers which prevailed among us during that long
period. It includes the great battle of Elizabeth ;
the desperate and alarming episode of the
Gunpowder Plot ; the troubles and violences of
Charles I., and of Cromwell ; the insidious
plottings under Charles II. ; the undisguised,
but stupid, lawlessness and tyranny of James ;
the anxious period of the Revolution, and of the
Jacobite conspiracies which followed it. Abroad,
we have to remember the theological civil wars
and massacres in France ; the wars and mur-
derings in Holland ; the Thirty Years War in

88 England and the Papacy.
Germany, with all its horrors ; the crimes and
intrigues of the Catholic Reaction in Poland
and various parts of Austria; the repression of
all political and intellectual health in Italy ; the
revolting cruelties or " devildoms " of Spain.
Compared with these stupendous crimes
gainst human life, liberty, and progress, all
committed in the interests of the Papacy, and
many of them by the instrumentality of the
Jesuits, the punishment inflicted upon the
adherents of the Papacy in England is very
small. To the 260 deaths between 1558 and
1691, we must add 82 Executions of Romanists
under Henry VIII. ; making a total of 34^/
during a hundred and fifty years. Those wlio
were executed after the accession of Elizabeth
cannot be claimed fairly, without qualification,
as martyrs for religion. Some were guilty of
active treason. All of them were allied with open
enemies of the State in a time of rebellion and war.
The- active and responsible agents of the
Papacy, whenever they were caught, professed
their loyalty, and protested they had nothing to
do with politics. These professions and protests
were, naturally, held to be incredible and worth
less, so long as the Bulls of Pius and Sixtus,
which set up a state of war, which challenged th ;
rights and liberties of the nation, which attacked
the person and denied the title of the Sovereign,
were not repudiated or cancelled. Merely to
suspend the operation of the Bull, was not an
evidence of peace. These papal Bulls, and th«
Jesuit methods of propagating the Roman faith,
that is "the. Spanish political creed," were
really answerable for the death of every Papist
who suffered under Elizabeth, after the Bull of
1570 was published.

England and the Papacy. 89
We may distinguish clearly, now, between
the political agents of the Roman Court and
those other Romanists, their dupes and victims,
whose piety they mis-used ; who dwelt among
us peaceably, or who came among us honestly
as missionaries. We may pity these emissaries
of the gospel, as they imagined themselves to
be : we may admire those who received and
harboured them, as religious teachers ; but it
was impossible for the Government of Elizabeth
to make any such distinction. It was forced to
act as all governments must act in a time of war.
The innocent have to suffer with and for the
guilty. The Papacy chose to assail us by war
like and treacherous methods, using the carnal
weapons of politics, and the unlawful shifts of
casuistry. All the adherents of the Papacy had
to risk the consequences that followed, naturally
and inevitably, from these methods of attack. k
The apologists and defenders of the Papacy
have no right to ignore these elements in the
question, when they present their case. The
consequences of the Jesuitical and political
methods of trying to "reduce" England re- ,
coiled, unfortunately, upon many loyal and /
, moderate Romanists : not so much by bringing
them to the scaffold, as by making their lives
uneasy, by impoverishing their estates, and in
some cases by dispersing their families and
breaking up their homes. The loyalty and
patriotism of these victims were often beyond all
praise. They deserved a better cause, a more
spiritual faith, and worthier guides. Their chief
misfortune was that they accepted a political
organization for a Church, and its intriguing or
ambitious leaders for ministers of religion.
They failed to see that the political methods of

90 England and the Papacy.
the Curia were incompatible with Christianity,
and that its principles are irreconcilable with
patriotism and civic liberty.
Besides the Romanist laity and the survivors
of the ancient clergy, there was another class of
men whose fate we must consider. Of these,
the Jesuits /^€arnpii:Hl— and Walpole _are typical
examples. THey^ere botlrenthusiasts, honest ac
cording to their lights, burning with zeal for their
convictions, blindly obedient to their Superiors;
of whose real designs and methods we can, per
haps, assume that they were wholly or partially
ignorant. How far their ignorance was culpable
or invincible is a dubious question, upon which
we need not enter ; but we can only acquit their
intentions at the expense of their understandings.
Campion's ending was far more heroic than
Walpole's. Campion entered upon the English
mission with Parsons, who was his Superior.
He was caught, tried, condemned, and executed.
Personally, he may not have been implicated in j
the methods and conspiracies of Parsons. We]
must hold, nevertheless, that he was morally
and legally responsible for the undoubtedly
treasonable designs and ways of his Superior,
and for everything that was necessarily involved
in furthering the papal cause while the Papacy
was stirring up wars against the State and con
spiracies against the Queen. Campion wrote an
address to the Council, as an apology for him
self and his labours, in which he set forth the
spiritual and non-political nature of his mission.
In the fourth clause, he says: "I never had
mind, and am straitly forbid by our fathers that
sent me, to deal in any respects with matters of
State or policy of this realm, as those things
which appertain not to my vocation, and from

England and the Papacy. 91
which I do gladly estrange and sequester my
thoughts." As to this, we must hold either that Campion
equivocated, which is difficult and shocking to
believe ; or that he, personally, was forbidden
to deal with politics ; or that Parsons and the
Superiors in Rome kept him unfairly in the
dark ; or that the designs and methods of
Parsons were not precisely those of the Superiors
in Rome : in other words, that he practised
"economy" with them, as with everyone else.
Of this, there is sufficient proof in his own
writings. Whatever the solution, whatever the nature or
motive of Campion's assertion, it could not pos
sibly be accepted by the Government as a plea
of innocence. In the second clause. Campion
had written : "At the voice of our General Pro
vost, which is to me a warrant from heaven and
an oracle of Christ, I took my voyage . . . from
Rome to England." Any man in those days
who took the voice of the Papacy, expressed
through any of its agents, especially through
1 the Jesuit Superiors, as " a warrant from heaven I
'and an oracle of Christ," was bound to be mis--'
trusted by the English Government, and held to
be both an enemy and a dangerous conspirator.
Against this general and unreserved admission
of blind obedience, no assertion of personal
innocence could be of any value or credibility.
The Bull of Pius V. was sufficient of itself to
stultify any active agent of the Papacy in Eng
land. In addition to this, the Government was
thoroughly well informed about the political
designs and methods of Parsons and his em
ployers. They were never deceived about the
men and methods with which they had to deal.

92 England and the Papacy.
When Campion was asked at his examination
"whether he doeth at the present acknowledge
Her Majesty to be a true and lawful Queen, or a
pretensed Queen, and deprived, and in posses
sion of her crown or\\y de facto ?" he answered
that "this question dependeth upon the fact of
Pius Quintus, whereof he is not to judge, and
therefore refuseth further to answer."
No Government could possibly accept such an
answer as a proof of loyalty, or as anything but
a challenge to its own authority and rights.
Campion was, therefore, charged in that he did
"at Rome and Reims, and in diverse other
places, in parts beyond the seas, falsely, mali
ciously, and traitorously conspire, imagine, con
trive, and compass, not only to deprive, cast
down, and disinherit the said Queen from her
regal state, title, power, and rule of her realm of
England, but also to bring and put the same
Queen to death and final destruction, and to
excite, raise, and make sedition in the said
realm." He was charged also with intending
to alter the government of the realm, and the
establishment of religion ; as well as with induc
ing "divers strangers and aliens" to invade the
realm and make war against the Queen. On
all these charges. Campion was found guilty.
With the knowledge at the disposal of the
Government, there could be no other verdict.
The sentence is justified completely by the docu
ments at our disposal, and especially by the
writings of those for whom Campion was work
ing, however blindly. His defence was that
"if our religion do make us traitors, we are
worthy to be condemned."
Campion may not have been personally or
knowingly a traitor ; but it was precisely his

England and the Papacy. 93
"religion," as he was deceived in it, that is
" the Spanish political creed " of his employers,
which made him first the tool, and then the
victim, of Englishmen who certainly were
treasonable, and of foreigners with whom we
were at war. " It was they who fastened round
his neck the fatal cord, and gave the Govern
ment some grounds, at least, to suspect his
complicity in treasonable attempts. His very
death was used by his friends as a furtherance
to their endeavours to subjugate England to
a foreign Power; and while using other and
unworthy means to bring about the conversion
of England, took credit to themselves for Cam
pion's apostolical spirit and steadfastness."*
The political Jesuits, like Parsons, covered
their own evil designs and made their own
profit out of the genuine piety and zeal of dupes
like Campion. In this way, the Jesuits manage
to possess the wisdom of the serpent, and to
profess the nature of the dove : by dividing those
qualities among different persons ; appropriating
the virtues of some individuals for the benefit
and reputation of the whole Society ; ignoring
all that is dubious and bad in other individuals,
and attempting to conceal it under the blindness
of the ignorant. This combination can hardly
have been intended by the Master. By such
methods, the moral law can be evaded, and the
Sermon on the Mount explained away.
It was impossible for Campion himself, it
was impossible for the Government of Elizabeth,
it is equally impossible for an historian, to dis
entangle the "religion" of subordinate Jesuits
from the politics and practices of those Superiors
* Taunton : " History of the Jesuits in England," pp. 83-4.

94 England and the Papacy.
to whom they acknowledged a blind obedience ;
making themselves, according to their principles,
"like a staff in a man's hand," or " as a corpse "
in the hands of living men.
/ To regard the orders of the Papacy "as a
^'arrant from heaven and as an oracle of Christ;"
to be certain about the Pope's authority, and to
be uncertain about the Queen's right and title ;
could not be accepted in those days as a satis
factory and sufficient proof of loyalty. More
over, when the Pope had verbally deposed
the Queen, roused her subjects so far as he
could against her, and engaged in active war
fare against the realm, those Englishmen who
favoured the pap^l cause, and acknowledged the
Pope's authority, could not escape being re
garded by the Government as agents of an
enemy who was in arms against us. Father
Southwell was condemned under an Act which
ordained that all English subjects, born after
Elizabeth's accession, who took Roman Orders,
and who entered into and remained within the
realm, were traitors, and were to suffer the
penalties of treason. After the Bull of Pius V.,
and while the Papacy was at war with our
Government, it is impossible, without ignoring
the most essential facts, to maintain that suchi
persons were "condemned for the mere crime'
of Catholic priesthood." Under the circum
stances which prevailed in England from 1570
and onwards, a complete acknowledgment of the
papal authority and claims was incompatible
with true obedience to the civil power.
The suspicions and perplexities of the Govern
ment, in every single case, were aggravated
by those methods of equivocation to which the
Jesuits and their pupils had recourse. The

England and the Papacy. 95
notorious Garnett, for instance, swore, "upon
his priesthood," that he had not written a certain
letter. The letter was intercepted, and shown
to him: whereupon he said, "He had done
nothing but that he might lawfully do ;" adding
coolly that it was "evil done" of his judges to
ask him, when they had the letters. " To these
and similar avowals, I ascribe his execution,"
Lingard writes with his invariable honesty. It
was, indeed, impossible for Garnett's judges
to believe anything he said. Tresham, his
accomplice, and his pupil in equivocation, first
owned that Garnett knew of the Powder Plot :
then he retracted, and said he had only con
fessed this "to avoid ill usage;" and he
added, "upon his salvation," that he had not
" seen Garnett for sixteen years." Nevertheless,
it was proved that Garnett and Tresham had
been together constantly while the Plot was
hatching, and even a few days before it was
discovered. Garnett's evidence was little better
than a tissue of misleading words. Unfor
tunately for him, the Government had proofs
that his evidence on oath was not trustworthy.
These principles and practices were not pecu
liar to Garnett. They were allowed, and to a
large extent devised, by members of his Society.
Parsons was a master in these arts ; and we
find him practising them not only against the
Queen's Government, but against all those
Romanists who opposed his schemes, and even
in some cases against his Superiors and the
Pope himself. Father Gerard protested in his
examination that he acknowledged Elizabeth
" as the true Governor and Queen of England,"
in spite of the excommunication. He added
afterwards, to his friends, that in saying this he

96 England and the Papacy.
knew the operation of the sentence had been
suspended, ^^ till suck time as its execution became
possible." Father Southwell held "that no man
is bound to answer every man that asketh him
unless he were a competent judge."
For those who accepted the Pope's deposing
sentence, it was easy and natural to argue,
when it suited them, that none of Elizabeth's
judges were technically and legally competent.
Such theories as these are practical anarchy :
and Parsons went on to argue that heretical and
apostate rulers, that is rulers who do not acknow
ledge the Pope, "fall at once from all power
and dignity," even before any sentence be passed
against them "by the supreme pastor and
judge." More than this, there were Jesuit theologians
who taught that " It is a probable opinion that
it is no mortal sin to bring a false accusation
for the sake of preserving our honour;" and
what was probable to this writer was certain to
Parsons, if we may judge by his correspon
dence and his methods of slandering opponents,
especially the unfortunate Secular and Appellant
clergy. Mariana, Bellarmine, and other theo
logians allowed regicide and lauded those who
practised it. Bellarmine says that "Heretics
condemned by the Church may be afflicted with
.temporal punishments and even death." He
only qualifies his opinion by adding, "if the
Catholic party be the stronger." In that case,
might gives the full right to kill ; just as, in
the case of Elizabeth's deposition, the sentence
was "deferred" until it could be carried out.
Bellarmine also argued in the case of Garnett
and the Powder Plot, that "it was not lawful
for him to declare a treasonable secret to an

England and the Papacy. 97
heretical king, who had no reverence for the
sacrament of confession, and who could have
constrained him by torture to declare the person
who had confessed the criminal design. Upon
this Bishop Andrewes in his reply caustically
remarks : ' Therefore it follows from this argu
ment that it is lawful and justifiable to blow up
such a king with gunpowder ;' and (he might
have added) that fear of punishment is a suffi
cient excuse for disobeying the moral law."*
It must be remembered that these extreme
opinions were not professed by all the Jesuits, that
they were denounced by the majority of English
Romanists, and were condemned by ecclesias
tical authority. Nevertheless, they were held
and acted on by some Jesuits. In spite of con
demnations, they prevailed ; because censures
were evaded, and objections were refined upon,
by later casuists. In view of all these facts, the
answer of the Jesuit emissaries to the English
Romanists, when they first entered the country,
and were accused of coming "for matters of
State, not for religion," is not worth very much
as evidence of their real principles and inten
tions. We must judge of the denial by their
practices, and by their acknowledged economy
in the use of words and oaths, as well as by so
much that is revealed to us in their corres
pondence. To the accusation of meddling in politics,
"The Jesuits said they had only one answer
to make. They made oath there and then
before all the assembly that ' their coming was
only apostolical, to treat of matters of religion
in truth and simplicity and to attend to the

Taunton : " History of the Jesuits in England,'' page 248.
7

98 England and the Papacy.

gaining of souls, without any pretence or know
ledge of matters of State.' In case they fell into
the hands of the State they would defend
themselves on oath, and challenge anyone to
prove anything against them ; and if the matter
went, as was likely, by mere conjecture, they
would bring conjecture against conjecture, and
probability against probability. They argued,
if they were political agents they must be sent
to Catholics ; and what Catholics would listen
to them, or give credence to what they said, if,
after the solemn oath they had just taken, they
were to be found dabbling in politics?"* To do
the majority of English Romanists justice, they
did not "listen to them." Parsons was one
of those who made this oath. We have seen
how he understood his own words ; how he and
others like him acted upon them.
The unfortunate English Romanists were
most cruelly deceived and ill-used by Parsons
and his accomplices. Into the details of that
sordid quarrel we need not enter ; though they
must have influenced the Government con
siderably, and have helped it to understand the
class of men with whom it had to deal in the
Jesuits and the Seminary priests. The aim of
Parsons was to get sole authority over all the
Romanist clergy in England, and to manage all
the funds raised by the English Papists. The
resistance to these plans was great, and the
quarrel extended to Rome, as well as to all the
English colleges abroad. The calumnies, the
equivocations, the treachery shown upon all
sides, and the tyranny exercised by Parsons
upon all who thwarted him, form an interesting
* Taunton : " History of the Jesuits in England," page 56.

England and the Papacy. 99
study in Roman methods, and are a strange
example of quarrelling in the face of a common
danger. So bitter were the Romanist factions, and so
fatal were the "apostolical" methods of the
Jesuits, that the old Marian clergy threatened
at one time to hand over Parsons to the
Government ; and he was obliged to escape
out of the country. At a later time, we find
Parsons corresponding with Cecil, slandering
and betraying his opponents to the English
Government. One of these opponents, Watson,
a Secular priest, was literally betrayed into the
hands of the Government by Garnett, and
executed for his share in the Bye Plot. These
unedifying transactions were not calculated to
make the English Government think better of
the Pope and his devotees.
Elizabeth and her advisers thus had to deal,
not only with an enemy who made and fomented
war against the realm, but with an impalpable
enemy whose principles virtually destroyed the
foundations of society and the fabric of civil
government. No oath, no engagement, made
by the Jesuits and their accomplices, could be
received as binding ; no evidence given by
them could be believed. Their appeals to their
Priesthood were not sacred to them, nor their
declarations made with their dying breath.
They utilized the confessional to encourage
plotters, and they misused its privileges to
shelter conspirators and traitors. They asserted
the right of the Pope to depose heretical
sovereigns, and of the Pope's agents to murder
them ; and they shrunk from no methods of
carrying these theories into practice. Individual
Papists, even Jesuits, may have been innocent
7—2

too England and the Papacy.

of all these opinions and practices ; but the
Government was forced, by those who were
guilty, to act as though every Papist might
hold these opinions, with all their consequences.
Nevertheless, the state of Romanists in Eng
land was much better than we should imagine
from many so-called "Records" and other
partizan accounts. We read of High Mass
being celebrated with great pomp, and of large
congregations being assembled for services and
sermons. A pilgrimage was made openly and
even ostentatiously to Holywell, near Flint, by
thirty persons who started from Buckingham
shire. Priests were not hunted about con
tinually like vermin, and slain off-hand when
they were caught. Their occupation and their
residence were generally well known ; and they
were seldom disturbed unless the Government
heard rumours of some definite plot, or had
information about the movements of some noto
rious and dangerous conspirator. Many, even
of these, were caught, and were sent out of the
country unharmed, but with a warning not to
enter it again.
Elizabeth herself was appealed to as an arbi
trator by the Seculars in their conflict against
the tyranny and tricks of Parsons. A deputa
tion of them appeared before her at Court, and
begged for her good offices in Rome. "The
results of the appellant controversy were un
doubtedly of national importance. The King
dom owed, perhaps, more than is generally
admitted to the Appellant priests for the failure
of the later Spanish attempts, and for the peace
ful accession of James. By their firm resistance
to a policy of aggression and violence, and their
known readiness to divulge any treasonable pro-

England and the Papacy. loi
jects, they thwarted the Spanish faction at every
point. The views which they were the first to
broach in opposition to the deposing power, and
which ultimately prevailed among the [English]
clergy in general, were at least indirectly a gain
to the country on the side of liberty and peace."*
When Elizabeth was dying, the Secular clergy
signed a protestation of their loyalty to the
Queen, which does honour both to their pa
triotism and to their religious integrity: "For
as we are most ready to shed our blood in
defence of her Majesty and our country, so we
will rather lose our lives than infringe the lawful
authority of Christ's Catholic Church." The
signatories, in writing thus, were honest and
patriotic. How far they were logical and clear
sighted is another question. Their declaration,
as regards the Queen, cannot be reconciled with
a full acceptance of the deposing Bull, or with
an unreserved acknowledgment of the papal
claims. In these matters, the principles and attitude of
Parsons must be owned to be far more logical
and consistent with the papal theory. That
theory, if it be carried out, is, in reality, not
consistent with nationalism, with patriotism, or
with perfect allegiance to any civil power.
Parsons, as we have seen, did not recognise
any of these human claims and limitations. He
could not be censured, by anyone who upholds
the rights of conscience, if he had asserted his
principles in an honourable way, and had ac
cepted their consequences in a Christian spirit ;
as the Quakers did, with finer heroism, in their
tremendous battle. Parsons chose, however, to
• Law : " Conflict of Jesuits aad Seculars."

I02 England and the Papacy.
do neither. He persuaded himself by sophistries
to use methods and to encourage practices for
which no defence is possible, which are equally
destructive in the end to religion and to civil
government, which are bound to corrupt social
and individual morality.
There is little difference, either in principle, in
procedure, or in results, between the methods of
Parsons and the methods of a modern anarchist.
The ethics and casuistry of Parsons are, indeed,
more deliberately and systematically corrupting.
Even our own theories of toleration are not
extended to anarchical principles and practices.
We cannot fairly blame Elizabeth and her
Government for dealing sternly with those who
made war upon their country, and upon society
itself, by such methods as Parsons used and
sanctioned. We have not ourselves any remedy
but force in dealing with such men and such
principles. In the matter of toleration, we must remember
that our standard was very different from the
standard of the sixteenth century. No party, in
those days, understood or really desired tolera
tion, in our meaning of the word. They all
wanted supremacy, as a means of repressing the
beliefs of others. The attempts at a partial
toleration, as in France and Germany, probably
caused in the end more suffering and bloodshed
than they averted. Elizabeth's expedient of a
State Church, with a rigid exterior conformity,
but with little interference about opinions, unless
they resulted in disorderly or treasonable acts,
was perhaps the best solution possible for the
times and problems with which she had to deal.
On the whole, she carried out her policy with
great moderation, and with greater tact. She

England and the Papacy. 103
cannot be blamed for the mistakes of those who
followed her, nor for the severity and caution
with which she repressed extremists of every
sort, Puritans as well as Papists. The extreme
F^apists, and their unlawful methods, are answer
able for the worst sufferings which befel the
moderate English Romanists.
Elizabeth's policy must be judged finally by
the greatness of her achievement; by the vast
difference between the weak, disunited country
she received from Mary, and the prosperous,
contented, patriotic England she handed on to
James. In no country, whether it went through
a Reformation or through a more violent
Catholic Reaction, was there so little bloodshed
and suffering in the name of religion : and, we
may add, no ruler, even in that stormy period,
had graver difficulties to meet, or more dan
gerous, unscrupulous, and numerous enemies
to overcome. She left her country stronger and
more courageous than it had ever been. She
gave her people faith in themselves and in their
destinies ; she indicated the lines which those
destinies were to follow, and some of the
methods by which they were to be fulfilled.
' ' Out of the forty years of struggle a potent
empire had emerged, determined to choose its
own form of faith, and able successfully to resist
all dictation from the foreigner, even though its
degenerate sovereign had forgotten the dignified
traditions of Elizabeth."*

Martin Hume : "Treason and Plot."

CHAPTER XIII.
The Stuarts and the Revolution.
THE great battle with Philip was really
ended by the defeat and wreck of the
Armada. Elizabeth had not only saved her
own country, but she proved to all Europe the
weakness and incompetence of Spain. These
truths, however, plain as they are to ourselves,
as we look back, were not seen by many of the
actors in those great events. The warlike policy
of Philip was continued, after his defeat in
1588; though a great deal more was planned
and threatened by him than the Spanish re
sources could achieve. Parsons was his accom
plice and instigator in more than one projected
invasion between 1589 and 1603.
Elizabeth, it was evident, could not be dis
possessed by treason or rebellion. She had
placed her "chiefest strength and safeguard,"
under God, " in the loyal hearts and good will "
of her subjects ; and she had earned the grati
tude of a "thankful people." Nevertheless, the
struggle for Roman Catholic ascendancy went
on, and it was waged over the succession to the
Crown. The Scotch and English Courts were
seething with intrigues. James played with
every party in turn, and made large promises
to them all. Much was expected from him by
the Romanists, and many hopes were built

England and the Papacy. 105
upon the sympathies of Anne of Denmark.
James was, in reality, duped, used, and put
aside by Parsons and his Jesuit agents, as Mary
Stuart had been before. Both sovereigns and
"the Irish savages," as Parsons described those
who suffered much for him, were pawns in the
great game of the Society; to "be encouraged
by some trifling help in money or arms."
The real hopes and policy of the Jesuits were
all founded on a Spanish conquest, and on their
subjugation of England by means of a Spanish
or an hispaniolated ruler. The Jesuits plotted
for this, "at the expense of England's inde
pendence." "They carefully enmeshed Mary
Stuart in the toils, until she had solemnly
disinherited her son for heresy, and made
Philip of Spain her heir." Then they dissemi
nated throughout Europe the notion of Philip's
descent from John of Gaunt, so that he might
claim the Crown himself, or hand on the claim
to a tool who would be dependent on them
selves. There was to be no "huddling up," as
Parsons described it : his policy was to be
"Thorough." The monastic properties were to
be disgorged, and placed under the control of
the Society : ' ' There was to be no political
paltering with that question, as there had been in
Mary's time; and 'some good, sound manner of
Inquisition ' must be established. It is plain to
see that the only Catholic England with which
Parsons would be contented was one modelled
on Catholic Spain :"* though, in the matter of
an Inquisition he wavered between the Roman
and Spanish models, or something between the
two which might suit England better. His
* Martin Hume : " Treason and Plot."

io6 England and the Papacy.
notions, at any rate, were clear and logical, if
we grant his premisses. Nothing less is honestly
compatible with a complete submission to the
claims and principles of the Papacy.
To the papal claims and principles, both
toleration and moderation are equally detestable
and ridiculous. Father Tichborne rejoiced in
what he describes as the "persecutions" in
England ; that is, the troubles forced upon the
English Romanists by the methods of their
violent and criminal representatives abroad.
He dreaded, above all things, liberty of con
science, as leading probably to peace and
settlement. This is a high tribute to the
wisdom of Elizabeth's policy and patriotism, as
conceived at her accession, and only frustrated
by the warlike methods of the Papacy and its
unscrupulous representatives.
Practically, however, the methods of Parsons
were not workable. Whenever politics are
obtruded into religious affairs, religion is made
subservient to political necessities. Parsons
and his Superiors had but one object, which is
well summed up by Mr. Martin Hume. We
may abhor some of the methods which they
allowed to themselves in trying to attain it ;
but, assuming the honesty of their intentions,
the object in itself, theoretically, was high and
noble. Its defect is, that it ignored human
nature, and practical affairs, and the imperfec
tions of all human agencies. It would have
violated the inherent rights and necessities of
men ; and would have caused far more evil and
misery than it aimed at curing. " Dominion of
the State was what they [the Jesuit faction]
aimed at, in which the whole national life was
to be bound up with and subjected to the sole

England and the Papacy. 107
over-lordship of Christ — of whom they were
the officers. Kings, potentates, even Popes
were to be dwarfed finally by the rule of Christ
alone; and when Jesuits served kings, as they
served Philip, it was only for the purpose of
using his power to humble in the long run the
caste to which he belonged. No doubt the
Dominican order had similar dreams, with the
Inquisition as its instrument in Spain, but the
Secular sovereigns had been able to turn this
great engine to their own ends. The Society
of Jesus was founded on principles specially
devised to prevent this in its own case ; and it
was perfectly consistent with those principles in
utterly rejecting and opposing the efforts of the
Secular and regular clergy to arrive at a modus
Vivendi in England which might leave the ques
tion of Catholic Supremacy in the country to be
decided in the future."
In pursuance of this ideal, the Jesuits were
ready to sacrifice everything which governed
the affections and motives of other men. Father
Creswell, for instance, wrote that he was "so
free from personal or national bias in the
matter, that if I heard that the entire destruc
tion of England was for the greater glory of
God and the welfare of Christianity, I should
be glad of its being done."
These extreme theories, which are the logical
conclusion from the papal premisses, ruined the
papal cause in England, and weakened it every
where. In France, the League was defeated
because it was seen to be unpatriotic and anti-
national. In England, these principles made
the Romanists feared and hated with a violence
which requires neither explanation nor excuse.
Even the great majority of English Romanists

io8 England and the Papacy.
were alienated by the un-English methods and
principles of the Jesuits, and by their advocacy
of a Spanish sovereign. The Pope himself saw
at last that Philip's zeal for the Church was a
cloak for Spanish aggrandisement. A similar
reason always kept the French Government
from joining with the Pope and the Spaniards
in any serious hostilities against Elizabeth.
All these mundane reasons and causes united
in the end to bring about the succession of
James the First. The Jesuits, in fact, mis
read English feeling completely, even among
their co-religionists. The Romanist exiles were
wholly out of touch with their countrymen at
home, both Papists and Protestants. The
Kings of Spain were misled by Parsons, and
by all those dreamers and theorizers who
ignored human nature, and practical affairs as
they really were.
Elizabeth was true to the end in her broad,
moderate, and healing policy, so far as ex
tremists of either side allowed her to act freely.
The narrower Puritans were as troublesome to
her as the disloyal Papists. The Cecils always
stood for a moderate and conciliating policy,
both in religion and in foreign affairs, between
two fanatical extremes. The intrigues and
violence of the extreme Puritan politicians, such
as Essex, only brought disaster and defeat upon
their authors. The English Romanists, apart
from the Spanish faction, hoped much from the
accession of James. The majority would have
been satisfied with a small measure of tolera
tion ; and they would have been glad to pur
chase it, according to the French precedent, by
the expulsion of the Jesuits, and a renunciation
of all political attempts to restore their abused

England and the Papacy. 109
and forfeited supremacy. Such compromises
were resisted by the Jesuits and their supporters.
James had only too much reason to know how
worthless and unreliable the engagements of
this faction were ; and, as long as they had any
influence over the English Papists, he was not
able, however willing he might have been
otherwise, to relax the penal statutes.
The disappointment caused by this policy
was, of course, utilized by the extremists ; and
the results were the Main and the Bye Plots,
and finally the Gunpowder Treason. This was
followed by a new oath of allegiance, which
was refused by all those English Papists who
accepted the guidance of the Jesuits. The oath
asserted the lawful right and title of King
James. It repudiated the deposing power of
the Pope, his right to make or to cause invasions,
to releaise English subjects from their allegiance,
and to stir up rebellion. A further clause was
added, in which everyone taking the oath was
made to swear that " I do from my heart abhor,
detest, and abjure as impious and heretical this
damnable doctrine and position ; that Princes,
which may be excommunicated or deprived by
the Pope, may be deposed or murdered by their
subjects, or any other whatsoever."
The papal claim to absolve from oaths, and
all equivocation, mental evasion, or secret reser
vation in using and interpreting the words, were
also repudiated. The spiritual authority of the
Pope was not mentioned in this oath. No
detail of the Christian faith, even in any pecu
liar Roman form of it, was censured. The oath
was aimed only at certain temporal claims of
the Papacy, which were clearly irreconcilable
with patriotism and the rights of the civil

no England and the Papacy.
power. Bellarmine, however, pronounced that
this oath could not be taken lawfully by Roman
ists ; and, granting the papal authority and
claims, he was right. Blackwell, the arch-priest,
a tool of the Jesuits, held that it could be taken
"in present circumstances:" that is, he ad
mitted an equivocation, although those who
accepted the oath swore to observe it "according
to the plain and common sense " of the words,
and expressly repudiated equivocation. It was
really hopeless to deal with people whose words
and oaths could not be trusted ; who, according
to their own principles and practice, could not
be bound by any form of engagement.
Parsons died in 1610. His "continual viola
tions of truth and justice and honesty" are com
mented upon with great fairness and severity by
Tierney, the Roman Catholic historian. These
characteristics, as well as his despotic temper
and unscrupulous methods, are plain enough
even from his casual appearances in this sum
mary of Church affairs. He was undoubtedly
the greatest of all the English Jesuits. In one
point of view, he was the most honest, or at
least the most consistent, because he had the
logic and courage of his opinions. He never
shrank from carrying out thoroughly, logically,
to their utmost consequences, those principles
which he understood so clearly, and accepted so
unreservedly. We may condemn his methods,
and abhor his notions of " patriotism," as " The
Month" describes his utter indifference to all the
claims and rights of England. Nevertheless,
as the principles of equivocation and assassina
tion were accepted by his Society, it is missing
the point to blame him personally for doing what
he believed was lawful ; that is, for equivocating.

England and the Papacy. i i i
and tampering with schemes of murder. All
our blame should be reserved for those prin
ciples and institutions which can so deceive men
by sophistries and syllogisms, as to persuade
them to outrage the evangelical and moral law.
Parsons was a magnificent and typical Jesuit :
a splendid personification of the principles of
Popery. He caused untold misery and loss to
his own sect and party in England. He did
a great deal to strengthen that courage and
patriotism which the reign of Elizabeth pro
duced. He stands out in history as a warning to
Englishmen, by showing them how Jesuit ethics
and papal theology work out in practice, when
they are applied consistently. Everything that
we abhor and condemn in Parsons follows natu
rally and logically from the system of Roman
casuistry, and from accepting the papal claims
as they have been continuously issued, asserted,
and explained by the Popes themselves in their
official utterances. Fortunately, the great bulk
of Romanists are neither logical nor zealous.
Parsons was both, in an eminent degree ; and
we should be very grateful to him, as one of the
truest exponents of the papal system and prin
ciples. The most useful way of proving our
gratitude is to take care that his example and
teachings be neither forgotten nor misunder
stood. The memory of them is indispensable
in forming an opinion about the Papacy ; and
an understanding of them will help us materially
to decide upon our attitude towards the spirit,
methods, and policy of the papal Court.
Under Charles L, the majority of English
Romanists sided, naturally, with the King, as
against the Parliament ; and, as we must own,
the Irish Papists had as much right as the

112 England and the Papacy.

Scotch Presbyterians to get all the advantage
they could out of our troubles. Some of the
Jesuit faction, however, were not friendly to- the
Court. Their Spanish sympathies led them to
dislike or to distrust Henrietta Maria. No
doubt, they were pleased and filled with hope
by the overthrow of the bishops, and the altera
tions in the national Church. Moreover, they
played, as usual, to be on the winning side.
Some of them, certainly, intrigued with the
Puritan leaders. Parsons' "Book of the Suc
cession " enunciated doctrines which were very
convenient to the deposers and executioners of
Charles ; and parts of his volume were reprinted
and circulated by order of Parliament.
A Jesuit called Netterville "was on terms of
great intimacy with Cromwell, often dining at
his table and playing chess with him."* These
strange hospitalities occurred in Ireland, where
the Jesuits appear to have intrigued against the
Royalists, the Irish bishops, and the Nuncio.
The latter says that "the Jesuits, as usual
devoted to their own interests, have declared
against us." The Jesuits are accused of having
betrayed and deserted Charles, and of having
staked everything on Cromwell, hoping for
"great matters from him when he shall make
himself King." The readers and admirers of
"John Inglesant " will remember that this was
the policy of the Jesuit, Hall, in Mr. Short-
house's masterly and accurate romance.
Quarrels between the Jesuits and the other
Romanists went on as usual under Charles II.
Perhaps we may still find evidence which will
throw more light upon the plots and counter-
* Taunton: " The Jesuits in England."

England and the Papacy.

plots of that bewildering time. For what is
called "the Popish Plot," twenty-six persons
were executed, and four died in prison. Thirty
were condemned, and then reprieved. The
numbers of the Jesuits in England, during the
civil war, are given at 335 ; and during a parti
cular year, namely, 1645, one of " extreme need,"
their revenue is calculated at ;^3,9i6 2s. 6d. ;
worth, in current value, about ;^25,ooo. They
had two noviciates, and they carried on other
works and institutions, more or less publicly.
Among their enterprises, had been a manufac
tory of soap, in Westminster. Their hopes and
ambitions ran so high, when James succeeded,
that they overshot the mark, ruining their patron
and their own cause.
James and his wife were crowned privately
by a Roman ecclesiastic, and anointed with holy
oil from Rheims. The Jesuits not only alarmed
the Protestants, and alienated them from James,
but they showed bitter and unwise hostility to
other Orders, and to all Romanists who were
not of their own faction. As a Romanist com
plains, the Jesuits "have ten thousand mouths
beside their own to open against any person
whom interest or passion persuade them to
persecute."* The Jesuits,, in fact, made a last
effort to carry out Parsons' ' ' Memorial for the
Reformation of England." James put himself
blindly into their hands, against the advice of
wiser Romanists^ and of the Pope himself.
When Innocent XI. refused a cardinal's hat
to Father Petre, James was instructed by his
Jesuit advisers to say that "he could be a good
Roman Catholic and yet separate himself from
the Court of Rome."
* Quoted by Taunton: " The Jesuits in England." 8

114 England and the Papacy.

The King intruded Romanists into offices of
authority and trust, both in the public service,
in the university, and in the army. For these
purposes, he was obliged to over-ride the law,
by asserting and exercising a dispensing power.
If this claim had been allowed, there would
have been no limit, to his autocracy. Some
of the bishops, in spite of their extravagant
loyalty and their theories of Divine Right, were
patriotic enough to resist the dispensing claim ;
and their attitude brought on that Revolution
which they were not all so consistent in support
ing. It is almost incomprehensible to us that
the Non-Jurors could not distinguish between
their loyalty to the Crown, and their oaths to a
person who had forfeited it by breaking all his
own engagements.
The Protestant Nonconformists, to their great
honour, refused the King's offers of toleration ;
not merely, as is too often asserted, because the
Popish Dissenters were included in the benefit,
but because the grant of Toleration was illegal,
since it depended on the King's arbitrary dispen
sation, and not upon a lawful measure obtained
through Parliament. By this conduct, they
showed their political wisdom, though it was
tainted in many cases with theological bigotry
and rancour. We may also add that a pretended
"toleration of liberty of conscience on the part
of the Prince" was among the methods recom
mended by the Jesuit Contzen, for re-establishing
Roman Catholicism among nations that were in
such circumstances as England was under Tames
II. The result of James' tyranny and blundering
was that the throne was declared vacant ; because
the King "having endeavoured to sulDvert the

England and the Papacy. 115
constitution of the Kingdom by breaking the
original compact between him and the people,
and having by the advice of Jesuits and other
wicked persons violated the fundamental laws,
and having withdrawn himself out of the King
dom, had abdicated the government." The
representatives of the Commons went on to say
that "Experience had shown it to be inconsis
tent with the safety and welfare of the Protestant
religion to be governed by a popish prince."
Thus our Monarchy was established upon a
broader and more constitutional basis ; and our
constitution itself passed through another stage
in its natural and logical development, gaining
strength, making both for stability and freedom,
by ridding itself of ecclesiastical interference and
intrigue. The political schemes of the Jesuits were
shattered to pieces by the Revolution Settle
ment. Their blundering intrigues led up to the
exclusion of all Papists from the throne, and
ended in the establishment of a Protestant Suc
cession. That succession, and the order of it,
depends on the Act of Settlement, by which
alone our Sovereigns have any right or title to
the Crown. The King's Declaration had been
imposed to exclude, if possible, a Papist from
the throne. It was not intended to be a theo
logical document ; nor was it drawn up for the
sake of expressing any speculative opinions
about the Eucharist. It was framed solely to pro
tect the Regal Office and the Royal Supremacy
against the papal authority and claims, as
well as to guard the Sovereign's mind and
person against the open or secret influence
of the Roman Court. The experiences of the
nation under Charles II. and James II. prove
8—2

II 6 England and the Papacy.

that its fears of Roman influence were not
imaginary. The course of this history will have shown
that some kind of security was needed ; but also
that any oath, so far as Roman Catholics are
concerned, may be wholly ineffectual. Until
those principles of equivocation, which we have
seen obtruded into our national affairs, be de
nounced, condemned, and altogether repudiated,
we must agree with Cardinal Vaughan that any
Declaration, "as a guarantee for the religion of
the Crown," so far as a Romanist is concerned,
" is a sham " and " is next to worthless." This
is the conclusion which must be drawn after an
exhaustive and impartial enquiry into English
Roman Catholic affairs during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. It is gratifying that Car
dinal Vaughan should accept this historical
conclusion, and acknowledge the truth of it so
unblushingly.

CHAPTER XIV.
The Society of Friends, and the
Suppression of the Jesuits.
THAT measure of toleration, which the loyal
English Romanists had so vainly desired,
which James the Second had tried to give them
illegally "an^ perhaps dishonestly, was granted
by Parliament, under William III., to all Dis
senters except the Romanists. It extended only
to religious beliefs and practices, and many civil
disabilities and privileges were still maintained
by means of theological tests. The Romanists
were excluded from the Toleration Act, and were
liable to the Penal Statutes. For this exclusion,
they had to thank, in the first place, that evil
reputation which the political, anti-English, and
unprincipled methods of the Jesuits had brought
upon their whole body, and for which many
excellent and loyal persons had to suffer.
Next, the Romanists, as a body, were sus
pected, nafttiially enough, of sympathising with
the banished family. The Pretenders belonged,
even ostentatiously, to the papal Church: Rome
was the centre of their activity, where they
found an asylum and gathered followers, whence
they received encouragement and material aid.
The attempts of James II. in Ireland, and of
the two Pretenders in Scotland, showed that
Romanists in the British Isles were willing to

ii8 England and the Papacy.

fight for the Stuarts, and that they connected
their religious interests with the fortunes of the
excluded branch.
The causes of national independence, of civil,
political, and religious liberty, as expressed by
the Revolution of 1688, were only secured by the
genius and victories of Marlborough ; and the
Protestant Succession itself was not unassailable
until the Jacobites were beaten finally in 1746.
After that time, but not until then, there was no
more political danger to be expected from the
English Romanists. Their history was quiet
and uneventful; and, in about thirty years, the
question of their fuller Relief began to be urged
in Parliament.
For the distinction made, in 1689, between the
English Papists and all other Nonconformists,
there were reasons which had nothing to do with
theological intolerance or hatred. The English
Romanists, by acknowledging the Pope, were
necessarily on a different footing from all other
Dissenters. They were not merely a sect within
the nation, which differed theologically from the
Established Church. They were that, of course;
but they were also a body of men who acknow
ledged the claims and jurisdiction of a foreign
power. That power had been a dangerous and
unresting enemy to the State, and to the whole
spirit of our institutions, for more than a century.
Its adherents, both British and foreign, were
still, under William IIL, opposing the Govern
ment and the wishes of the majority.
It was for these reasons that the Papists were
excluded from the Toleration Act of 1689, and
were included in the severe Penal Act of 1700.
The intention of that measure was political, and
not theological. It was not passed in a blind

England and the Papacy. iig
hatred of Popery, but as a protection against
those who, rightly or wrongly, were held to be
enemies of the Government.
The populace were not so far wrong when they
coupled the Pope and the Pretender, or when
they connected each of them with designs against
the religion and liberties of the nation. The
papal system cannot avoid mingling religion
and politics in an inextricable confusion, to the
gross injury of both. Indeed, in the past, it
has too often encouraged that confusion, and
utilized it for its own political advantage, not
hesitating to sacrifice, in the pursuit of such
schemes, its most loyal supporters. That was
the fate brought upon English Romanists by
the Bulls of Pius and Sixtus, and also by the
attitude which the Roman authorities prescribed
in the matter of the oath to James the First.
Toleration was not won, but was only hindered
and made impossible, by these principles and
methods. Those who persisted in them were
excluded from toleration for one hundred and
forty years after all other Dissenters had obtained
it. Toleration for all Protestant Dissenters was
really won by the Christian methods, the passive
resistance, the unconquerable goodness, the
orderly and blameless conduct of the Society
of Friends. The great battle, if we may venture
to describe it so, of George Fox and his disciples
lasted about forty years. In the course of it,
13,000 Friends were imprisoned in Great Britain ;
322 of them died in gaol ; many were sold into
slavery, and transported ; all of them were im
poverished by fines, by damaged properties, and
by interrupted business. Nothing could over
come their invincible patience. If they were

I20 England and the Papacy.

ejected through the doors of their Meeting, they
climbed in again through the windows. If the
walls were pulled down, they meditated among the
ruins. Neither altars, nor candles, nor vestments,
nor even books were required for their spiritual
worship. The Inner Light shone clear to them
in every time and place ; it could not be hidden
by darkness or disturbance: " Nothing plotting,
naught caballing, unmischievous synod! con
vocation without intrigue ! parliament without
debate!" as Lamb describes them. Against
such Christians as these, there could be no
effectual coercion. Their high principles and
their faultless behaviour gained the cause of
Toleration, though at an heroical expenditure of
life and suffering. No bloodshed, however, can
be laid to their charge : they planned no inva
sions, and plotted no assassinations. They never
slandered their foes or their allies. They had
no political ambitions, no lust of power. They
were soiled by no intrigues. Instead of equi
vocating, they declined all oaths ; and their
affirmations were inviolable.
There is no more striking contrast, in prin
ciples and methods, than between Parsons and
George Fox. There can be no question which
of the two men lived, thought, spoke, and
laboured more literally in the spirit of the New
Testament, or more simply according to the
precepts of the Master. Even in this world,
Fox and his disciples had their reward. Their
victory was as conspicuous as the failure of
Parsons and all his methods.
The popular estimation in which the Friends
and the Jesuits were held respectively is equally
creditable to the sound instincts of the nation.
The early Friends stood for that which was

England and the Papacy. 121
honest, simple, truthful, honourable, and worthy
of the fullest confidence in every sphere of
human intercourse ; and, as a body, the English
Quakers have never forfeited that reputation.
It still remains to be won by several denomina
tions of professing Christians.
The way chosen by the Friends is the only
way in which a nation can be lawfully "sub
jected to the sole over-lordship of Christ." To
attempt it by intriguing or by fighting for the
"dominion of the state" is to violate the first
principles of Christ's kingdom. An apparent
victory, gained by the vilest methods of this
world, could only result in the loss or corruption
of all genuine Christianity. Such a victory
would be the most irreparable of all disasters
for religion.
The political methods of the Jesuits, their
incessant quarrels with other ecclesiastics, their
incurable meddling with affairs of State, their
dubious reputation with regard to finance and
trade, and many other accusations, in which no
doubt both fact and imagination had a share,
wearied out most Roman Catholic Governments
towards the middle of the eighteenth century.
The Society was suppressed by Clement XlV.
in 1773. The Popes had long felt that they
possessed, if not a master, yet a dangerous and
unreliable servant, in the Jesuit organization.
Innocent XI. had tried to end the Society by
forbidding it to enlist more novices. Many
Popes had wished to restrain or to reform it ;
but there was neither method, nor vigour, nor
continuity in their proceedings. "It required
the calm determination of so firm a Pontiff as
Clement XIV. to do the deed. He saw that the
time had come when the Society no longer

122 England and the Papacy.

served the Church. Hence he was bound to
consider the interest of the whole body of the
faithful before that of a mere Society. In the
past, other religious orders had been suppressed
when they had become a hindrance. The Jesuits
were in no way necessary to the divine mission
of the Church, under whose name they had
sought their own ends. So, after a long en
quiry, over which he would not be hurried by
the clamour of the Bourbon Courts, after scrupu
lously weighing the whole case, he issued, on
2ist July, 1773, his famous Breve, Dominus ac
Redemptor noster, and suppressed the Jesuits."*
The Pope was attacked in the most scurrilous
way by Jesuit lampoons and slanderers, accord
ing to the approved methods of the Society.
His motives, his character, his origin, his family
were all traduced. " I do not repent of what I
have done," he said: "I did not resolve upon
the measure until I had well weighed it. I
would do it again ; but this will be my death
blow." He died, in fact, a year and two months
afterwards, declining mysteriously in the vigour
of his age. After he was struck down, he said :
"When a man goes to the trenches, he must
expect a cannon-ball." To the physician, who
was baffled by his complaint, he said: "You
will find it described in the 91st Psalm, as
' the pestilence that walketh in darkness.' " To
others, who asked if he did not suspect certain
people of having attempted his life, he answered :
" Do you not know that my name is Silence?"
Clement XIV. may be numbered among those
benevolent and reforming sovereigns of the
eighteenth century, who tried in vain to amend
* Taunton : " History of the Jesuits in England."

England and the Papacy. 123
and serve a political and social order that was
paist saving. He was respected by his subjects
for his excellent and honest administration. He
avoided all nepotism, that persistent and suspi
cious habit of the papal dynasties. He used to say,
"that to render Nepotism odious, he had taken
Benedict XIV. for his model." He was a scholar,
as well as a statesman ; and his Letters bear wit
ness to his cultivated and kindly nature. They
also show his admiration for England, as well as
his remarkable knowledge of our institutions.
"The English have principles to go on," he
said; "and therefore with them alone will the
love of their country never be extinguished."
For Newton, he had a profound esteem : " Never
did man unite, like him, science with simplicity."
"I sometimes pay a visit to Newton by night.
While all nature seems to sleep, I sit up to read
and admire him."
The document suppressing the Jesuits should
be read by everyone who desires to understand
why the methods and principles of the Roman
Court, as represented by its most active and
consistent agents, were suspected and feared by
every Government, and by all moderate Ro
manists. The charges against the Society show
what was tolerated, and even utilized for so
long, by the Papacy. Clement proves himself to
be an exception in the policy and line of the
Roman Pontiffs, both by suppressing the Jesuits
and by moderating the papal claims for the sake
of peace with the civil governments. Optimus
Pontificum, he might well be named. None of
his accusations, it should be noted, were dis
proved or even challenged when the Society
was revived in 1814.
As Mr. Taunton has pointed out: " The Jesuits

124 England and the Papacy.
had had the education of Catholic Europe prac
tically in their own hands in the seventeenth
century ; and it was precisely from the descen
dants of their pupils that there arose a revolt
against a yoke which had become unbearable.
What brought about the suppression of the
Society brought also the Revolution."
Perhaps it might be truer to say that the
serious tampering with morals, which the casu
istry of the Jesuits allowed ; their venal and
tyrannical mis-use of power ; their alliance with
the ruling classes, and their pernicious influence
upon them ; as well as their opposition to
reforms, and to every enlargement of intellec
tual, religious, or civic liberty, were all among
the chief causes which led inevitably to revolu
tion ; and that the remedy of the Suppression
was applied too late to be a cure for the diseases
of a corrupt and perishing society.

CHAPTER XV.
The Revival of the Papacy, and the
Infallibility of the Pope.
A STRANGE revival of mediaevalism and
papalism followed the downfall of Napoleon
in 1814. It was caused partly by political
reaction or fatigue after twenty-five years of
revolutionary effort and excess. The Roman
Pontificate was accepted as a symbol of order
and stability, as the oldest representative of
legitimate and absolute monarchy. The Con
gress of Vienna restored the Papal States. The
Holy Alliance regarded the Popes as brother
sovereigns and allies. These notions gave a
new life and importance to the Papacy, which,
throughout the eighteenth century, had sunk to
the level of all the other corrupt and worn-out
monarchies.* On the other hand, after 18 14, there was a
growing sense of nationality, of democracy, of
socialism. The spirit of the Revolution was
fermenting and fructifying below the conserva
tive and repressive surface. This movement,
too, has been advantageous to the Papacy. The
Curia, with its invariable adroitness, utilized the
reverence of the kingly and imperial dynasties,
• Walpole's Letters, IV., 264 : Cunningham's edition.

126 England and the Papacy.
for legitimacy and absolutism, to strengthen its
own territorial position in Italy; as well as its
administrative authority, over its adherents, in
all other countries. It also utilized the growing
democratic spirit, by posing as the friend of
liberty, and the opponent of arbitrary power.
The Vatican had one set of opinions and politics
for the government of its own States, and
another for its adherents in several foreign coun
tries. It repressed liberalism in Rome, and
nationalism throughout Italy. It fomented both
in Poland, for example, or in Ireland. The
result has been an immense growth of the papal
authority and influence.
In England, all fear of the Romanists, as a
political body, ceased after 1745. The Penal
Statutes were not repealed, but they were not
enforced. Their modification and repeal began
to be urged systematically in Parliament. From
the time of Walpole onwards, the governing
and more enlightened classes would have been
willing to grant a large measure of toleration to
the Papists ; but they were hampered by popular
passion on one side, by Royal and middle class
prejudices on the other. The passions of the
mob flamed out in the Gordon Riots of 1780,
which were a protest against the concessions to
the Romanists gained by Sir George Savile in
1778. There was also an esthetic movement
of interest and sympathy towards the middle
ages, which did a great deal to soften prejudice
against the supposed representadve of the
mediaeval Church. Gray and Horace Walpole
were the pioneers of this movement in England.
Sir Walter Scott did a great deal more to popu
larise and spread it. The social aspects of the
middle ages were also attracting thinkers and

England and the Papacy. 127
reformers : they were rousing an interest which
soon passed on to imitation.
In all these movements there was more
zeal than scholarship, more heat than light.
They were carried on by men who saw the
middle ages, not as they really were, either
ecclesiastically, intellectually, or socially, but as
they pictured them in a golden halo of chivalry
and of romance. These yearnings for a larger
and fuller life, which it was thought the middle
ages could inspire or satisfy, popularised and
spread a theoretical and very unhistorical
Catholicism. The English Government helped
the Pope, as an Italian sovereign, during the
troubles of the Revolution and the Napoleonic
wars. The nation extended much kindness and
hospitality to the fugitive clergy, and to other
refugees from France. The English Romanists
themselves had been governed for a long while
by an Arch-priest, whose appointment the Jesuits
opposed bitterly ; whose person and office, when
the appointment was made, they endeavoured to
influence and utilize for their own advantage.
The Arch-priests were succeeded by Vicars
Apostolic ; that is, by Bishops in Partibus, whose
jurisdictions were known as districts instead
of dioceses. Under their guidance, English
Roman Catholic affairs went on quietly ; and
they were creditably represented in the spheres
of learning and administration by Challoner,
Milner, Alban Butler, Berington, and Lingard.
Emancipation was carried gradually under all
these favourable influences, and it was com
pleted by the passing of the Relief Bill in 1829.
The value of that concession was diminished,
because it was granted in the end to popular
clamour and threats of violence. The wisdom

128 England and the Papacy.

of it is even more questionable ; because, as
Nippold has observed, "Wellington's Tory
ministry, in their desire to outdo the Whigs,
carried the emancipation through in a manner
which did not stop with satisfying the just
demands of the times, but tore down bulwarks
indispensable for the protection of the State."
What he means is, that the Government, in
granting Emancipation, made no terms with the
papal authorities, exacted no pledges from them,
obtained nothing in return, by way of patronage
or veto, which gave them any control over
those who exercised ecclesiastical jurisdiction
and guided the policy of the English Romanists.
With a native sect, this complete surrender
would have been natural and harmless. In the
case of a body which is controlled by a foreign
power, which is moved ultimately by political
and mundane agencies, this complete surrender
was dangerous, and it has placed the Govern
ment at a serious disadvantage in negociating
with the agents of the Vatican. The disadvan
tage has been more apparent since the establish
ment of a papal hierarchy in 1850. This foreign
organization, as a body, and with respect to
the Crown, is in a very different position from
our national hierarchy in the middle ages. One
body is not the successor of the other, and there
is no comparison between them. In the middle
ages, the Crown limited the Pope's jurisdiction,
both as regards persons, patronage, legislation,
and papal utterances. Now, there is no limit to
the exercise of the Pope's authority. A violent
and foolish outcry was made about the territorial
designations of the new bishops, while the more
dangerous and objectionable aspect of their new
position was left unnoticed;

England and the Papacy. 129
It would be against our principles of toleration
to interfere with the spiritual functions and titles
of the papal bishops. They are as indifferent in
themselves, and should be as free, as those of all
other dissenting ministers. Titles and honours,
however, which are derived from the papal
Court are on a different footing. It seems to be
forgotten that the Crown is the sole fount of
honour for English subjects ; and they can not,
legallv, accept foreign titles without leave from
their own sovereign. No mediaeval bishop
would have been allowed to accept or to use
the dignity of the cardinalate without the leave
and dispensation of the Crown. Cardinals,
Monsignori, papal titles of nobility, have of
themselves no rights of precedence and recogni
tion within the dominions of the Crown. They
are temporal decorations of the papal Court, and
are clearly to be distinguished from the spiritual
or ministerial functions and titles of the Roman
Catholic Church.
When Emancipation was granted to the Eng
lish Romanists, they were, as Newman says,
with his incuralile and deceptive rhetoric, "not
a sect, not even an interest," "not a body,"
"but a mere handful of individuals." The
Government, in its blindness, probably never
contemplated the establishment of an Italian
hierarchy, or the altered position of the Ro
manists through Irish immigration, and the vast
growth of population. There had been some
uneasiness about the claims and policy of the
Roman Court ; because the Irish bishops, before
the granting of Emancipation, and with the
assent of the papal Legate, declared officially
that the theory of papal infallibility was not in
accordance with the teaching and theology of

130 England and the Papacy.
the Catholic Church. This episcopal declara
tion was made in 1828, to remove difficulties
about Emancipation. Within fifty years, papal
infallibility was defined. Catholic teaching and
theology were defied, the Irish episcopate had
to recant their opinion, and all the papal
catechisms had to be re-edited. This change of
front, so far as it is theological, only concerns
the Romanists ; but the political consequences
of it affect the relations of the Papacy with
every national episcopate, and with every civil
Government. Throughout the century of papal development
and expansion, from the reign of Pius VII.
until now, statesmen and Governments have
shown a fatal and an inexcusable ignorance about
the nature and principles of Romanism. They
have been disunited, they have worked upon no
system, they have adopted no common policy,
in dealing with a centralized and yet universal
power. They have been defeated, time after
time, in detail ; and the defeats or concessions
of any one Government have been quoted as pre
cedents, or used as the pretext for new demands,
against all the others. In these unchanging
and skilful tactics, "which count, not by years,
but by decades and by centuries," all the advan
tage is with that organized and central adminis
tration, with its immense experience and its
unswerving policy, which foresees everything,
and never despises or neglects the smallest
detail. The power and influence of the Curia, its
position in the world, its relation to all civil
Governments, and to all the Christian Churches,
including those which owe obedience to it,
have been changed by the new doctrine of

England and the Papacy. 131
papal infallibility. According to the Vatican
decree, "the declarations of the Roman Pontiff
are of themselves, and not merely by the assent
of the Church, absolute and irrevoca.ble" (trrefor-
mabiles). In other words, the Pontiff, personally,
is now superior to the Church in council. He
stands outside and above it, separated from it :
an external authority, who may dictate his own
opinions to it and impose his own will upon it,
but who need receive nothing from it.
General Councils are now both cumbersome
and superfluous. The episcopate rnay add to
the ritual and state with which a Pope can pro
mulgate his definitions. It has no longer any
necessary voice or function in deciding what
the Roman faith has been, or should be. Thus
the Papacy, in striving by devious methods for
an external unity of organization, as a means of
aggrandizing and concentrating its own power,
has transformed the Roman Church into an
ecclesiastical autocracy over which the Pope is
theoretically supreme. The old warning of
Gregory I. has come true. His successors have
become universal Pontiffs, and in so doing they
have practically annihilated the episcopate.
The chief agents in this revolution, in this
coup d Eglise, have been the Jesuits. The organi
zation and theology, which they fabricated and
launched at Trent, has culminated quite logically,
and even necessarily, in the decree of papal
infallibility. The Jesuits, restored by Pius VII.,
and since then carrying everything before them,
are held, rightly or wrongly, to be the influence
behind the throne. They are supposed to direct
that system and policy which they initiated and
organized. They are suspected of dictating to
the Curia, and of directing the Pope. The next
9—2

132 England and the Papacy.
move in their political campaign is expected to
be a definition of the Temporal Power as an
article of faith.
The effects of the new belief in papal infalli
bility upon the Roman Church are chiefly of
interest to Romanists themselves; though they
cannot and should not be indifferent to any
observers of theology and politics. Students of
Church history may wonder, nevertheless, how
the new beliefs and principles of the Ultra
montane leaders are compatible with mediaeval
Romanism ; how the procedure and beliefs of
Constance, for example, can be reconciled with
the Vatican decrees; how the decisions and
actions of many Popes can be squared with
these new theories of personal infallibility in the
whole succession. To reconcile these new papal
dogmas with the old principles, faith, procedure,
and records of historical Catholicism is altogether
impossible. The effects of papal infallibility on politics,
on the relations between Church and State,
between the Curia and the Governments of the
world, are very decidedly of supreme interest to
all men. Many writers have urged that the
new decree was nothing short of revolutionary ;
that the dormant and theoretical infallibility of
a corporation scattered through the world,
moderated in its action by complex and con
flicting interests, which as a matter of experience
met and spoke rarely, at long intervals, is
quite a different thing from the active and
effectual infallibility of a single person, who
represents a centralized organisation in per
manent existence. Such writers argue that
the principles of Vaticanism, if pushed to their
logical conclusion, are incompatible with civic

England and the Papacy. 133
liberty and the rights of temporal governments.
Moreover, as they go on to show, there is no
guarantee that these principles may not at any
time be so applied and pushed as to become a
serious danger. History and experience all point
to that danger as more than theoretical.
From these arguments, there have been many
ingenious evasions. There has never been any
reply which meets or disposes of the objections
raised. The principles of Vaticanism are full of
danger, and are liable to all these objections.
The only element of safety and protection for
the civil power is that the great majority of
Papists, like the professors of all other theo
logies, are never prepared, at any one time, to
carry out their principles consistently.
By the Vatican decree, all the activity and
authority of the papal organization have become
centralized in Rome, as they never were before.
Even the Benedictine Order, which hitherto,
throughout its long and honourable history, has
been so liberal in its administration, so conserva
tive and primitive in its traditions, so national in
its government and spirit, is being attacked and
changed by the craze for centralization and for
the Italianization of everything in the papal
Church. The activity of the papal propaganda
among the various nations has probably never
been so great, or in some directions so effective.
The Press and the Bourse are both manipulated,
to a dangerous extent, in the interests of the
Curia. In wealth and influence, the Papacy, at the
opening of the twentieth century, is in a very
different position from the Papacy at the opening
of the nineteenth. Leo XIII. has realized many
things which Leo XII. appears to have foreseen

134 England and the Papacy.

and planned. The loss of the Temporal Power
has been more than compensated by that growth
of diplomatic influence and interference which
has been caused by the acquisition of personal
infallibility; but these gains are thought little
of in themselves, by the Vatican and its agents,
except as a means for winning back those
territorial dominions upon which, as they think,
the existence of the whole papal sovereignty and
system ultimately depends.
The direct and melancholy influence of these
temporal ambitions upon Italy, the indirect and
disturbing effects of them upon other European
countries, especially upon Austria and France,
do not belong properly to our present subject;
but they should be noted and examined by all
those who wish to understand the Papacy. The
mundane policy and interests of the Vatican
have a decided influence upon its attitude
towards the English Government and all our
Imperial affairs. A world-wide Empire must
come into contact with an organization which is
scattered through the nations. The primary
interests of those who rule that organization are
secular, and not religious ; and this conclusion,
which is so amply confirmed by history, should
never be forgotten by those who are dealing
politically with Romanists and their concerns.
There is no more cruel and shameless impos
ture, in this world of delusions, than the claim to
infallibility made by the Roman ecclesiastics.
That claim is deduced, first, from the words
which are reported to have been said to Peter;
but, even granting the certainty and accuracy of
the text itself, the words as we have them will
not bear the papal interpretation. The claim to
theological infallibility is deduced, next, from

England and the Papacy. 135
the assertion that the gates of Hades shall not
prevail against the Church.
As far as morality and righteousness are
concerned, we can say that, on the whole and
speaking generally, this promise has been
fulfilled. Even in the darkest and the worst
of times, the Church has professed officially to
uphold, and some of her members have always
borne witness to, the divine righteousness. No
claim to theological infallibility can, however,
be sustained by any truthful and competent
enquirer, if he understand or deal honestly with
the records of the past. This is true of the
Church as a whole: it is far more true of the
new and narrower claim to infallibility made by
the Roman Pontiffs.
Neither theoretically in its origin, nor practi
cally in its exercise, will the papal claim to
infallibility bear investigation. The infallible
Roman Church has no satisfying answer for the
scriptural, or scientific, or social problems of
modern thinkers. Far from resolving such
problems, it increases and complicates them ;
because it imposes on its adherents and apolo
gists all the weight of its own compromising and
stultifying past. They are encumbered on one
hand by the illimitable claims of Rome, and on
the other by a melancholy record of blundering
and crime. These are added to all the difficulties
which are inherent in Christianity itself, as in
every other systematic explanation of the super
natural, and of our relation to it.
If we may judge by the past, the infallible
Papacy has not helped, but has hindered, and
has often endangered, the progress of knowledge
and of liberty. It has too often mis-used and
injured the benefactors of mankind. Human

136 England and the Papacy.
progress has been won in spite of the Papacy,
not by means of it. In the sphere of politics,
too, the Papacy has often proved itself a blind
and a treacherous guide. In the matter of Eliza
beth's excommunication and of the oath of alle
giance to King James, it certainly betrayed and
probably deceived, those who trusted it.
According to some of its modern apologists,
the Papacy had no right to depose a sovereign,
or to interfere with our succession ; yet it ordered
its adherents to act as though it had those
rights, and it left them to bear the consequences
of acting. During the reigns of John and Henry
III., of Mary I. and of James II. , no English
man can hold that the Papacy was on the right
side, or that its principles and policy would have
been advantageous to the country, or even to
religion. There is no reason to suppose that
the Popes are likely to be sounder and surer
guides with respect to modern politics. The
Papacy has not been less mistaken in the regions
of Church history and theology.
As far as results and practice are concerned,
the Papacy can hardly claim, in the face of
history, to have been a leader in morals : and
when it proclaims its omniscience in the regions
of the unseen and the unknown, we may well
doubt its competency if we judge it by those
matters in which we have experience.
The papal claims and office, moreover, are
not found in Christianity from the beginning.
We can point to an age when they did not
exist ; to a polity and a theology which both
exclude them. They rose gradually. We can
show at every stage the causes and progress
of their acceptance. " Z« monde se paye de
paroles," as Pascal writes: "The world cheats

England and the Papacy. 137
itself with phrases ;" and it has allowed itself to
be disturbed and cheated for about eight centuries
by these claimants to theological infallibility.
As we read the disputes and controversies of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the posi
tions and arguments of the ecclesiastical dispu
tants appeal to us no longer. They are equally
vain and inconclusive on both sides. We cannot
accept their notions of the universe, their valua
tion of documents, their attitude towards autho
rity, their use of evidence, or their standards of
knowledge. In all these matters, we have moved
entirely out of their plane.
Neither papal, nor puritan, nor Calvinistic
arguments, as they were used in those days of
controversy, can weigh with us, who must
accept modern standards of knowledge, who are
influenced by critical and scientific methods,
who have inherited that historical spirit which
alone enables us to reconstruct and comprehend
the paist. Theologians and their systems must
submit to these tests, or they will perish. They
will no longer be taken by the world at their
own valuation ; and, the higher their claims, the
more rigorously will their history, their prin
ciples, and their practice be examined.

CHAPTER XVI.
The Principles of the Modern Papacy
Unchanged.
IT may be thought by non-Romanists, and
it is often asserted by the agents of the
Vatican, that the methods and principles of the
Papacy have changed ; that the papal claims are
not what they were. There has, indeed, been
a change, but it is all in the direction of abso
lutism and retrogression. The claims of Rome
have not diminished, but increased, and the
decree of papal infallibility has made them far
more dangerous and effective than they were
before. It is true, that public opinion is, at
present, against the methods and procedure of
the Inquisition, and active intolerance is not
allowed. The temper, however, which allows
and approves those methods is encouraged in
many Roman Catholic nations by a scurrilous
and influential press. We are not in danger,
as yet, from persecution or repression ; but, in
some countries, non-Romanists are liable to
outbreaks of hostility and fanaticism ; and the
opponents of the Papacy are subjected, wherever
the clerical press is flourishing, to the most
wanton and scandalous accusations.
Individual Romanists, here and there, may
profess Liberalism and toleration ; but these are
merely individual opinions. They must always

ELngland and the Papacy. 139
be balanced against individual opinions of the
opposite kind, which are also professed by
many Romanists, and inspire too many organs
in the clerical press. These Liberal opinions
are often served up for the benefit of non-
Romanists, especially in England and America.
Those who profess them, even when they are
bishops, may be personally quite honest; but
their personal opinions are also quite worthless.
They bind no one but the individual writer or
speaker; and he may be forced at any time to
withdraw his words and sympathies, as Arch
bishop Ireland was forced. As Hergenrother
says: "The Church doth not on principle
renounce rights which she has once exercised,
and whose exercise might become necessary
again." When the Bullarium Romanum is expurgated
and re-edited; when the extravagant claims of
such Popes as Gregory VII., Innocent HI.,
Boniface VIII., are repudiated officially; when
the blasphemous epithets which have been ap
plied to them are withdrawn and condemned ;
when their acts are denounced, and are proved
in detail to have been unlawful ; when all that
intolerant and virulent language is removed,
which circulates at present in the Moral Theolo
gies, and in other text books which are used to
educate the clergy ; when all this is done by the
highest authority, that is, by Roman Congrega
tions speaking officially, then, and not until
then, can we believe that the Curia has changed
its principles and methods. Until this happen,
we can only think, unless we wish to be deceived,
that the Papacy is lying low, and is concealing
its true designs, and is merely waiting for its
chance to speak openly, and to act up to its

140 England and the Papacy.
opinions. We have seen instances of that
policy in the conflict with Elizabeth.
The principles of the modern Papacy are,
surely, exhibited in the Syllabus of 1864, so far
as its attitude to modern thought and institutions
is concerned. The Roman Court has not,
fortunately, the power to carry its principles
into practice ; but there can be no doubt, from
its official utterances, what its principles and
predilections are. It is opposed to toleration,
to liberty of conscience, to free enquiry, to the
rights of individuals and of minorities, to the
equality of all religions under the protection of
the State. All these things are condemned as
pernicious errors. Force is advocated and justi
fied as a remedy against theological differences.
The model State, according to the Vatican, is
one in which the ecclesiastical authority is so
predominant that the civil power must carry out
its orders against all dissentients. These princi
ples lead, necessarily, to an Inquisition; to the
polity and procedure which have resulted invari
ably when such principles have been accepted.
These principles are not only adhered to, they
have not only been expressed clearly in official
utterances by the reigning Pope and his pre
decessor, but, so far as is practicable, they are
still acted upon. They are acted upon, for
example, by the publication of an Index of
prohibited books. If the principle of an Index
be sound and justifiable, it should be enforced
by the ecclesiastical authorities, and welcomed
by those who accept their guidance. If it be
unsound and really anti-Christian, it is an
abominable tyranny, and a crime against our
human intellect and progress. Yet there are
Roman apologists who will not accept frankly

England and the Papacy. 141
and fully either one alternative or the other.
They are really afraid of their own principles,
and are equally afraid to renounce them.
An authority which claims to be infallible
cannot have the right to play with edged tools
in this way; asserting, merely according to its
own convenience, or to its audience, sometimes
that they are effective and obligatory, sometimes
that they are obsolete. Such methods and such
weapons must be fatal, either to the authority
itself, or to those who trust in it. It was this
unscrupulous policy which was responsible, as
I have pointed out, for all the executions of
Romanists under Queen Elizabeth.
A similar method is used, notwithstanding a
great parade of impartiality and of historical
research, in describing the relations of England
to the Papacy since the Reformation. The
violences and the aggressive acts of the Papacy,
its alliances with foreign enemies or domestic
rebels, and its repressive policy abroad wherever
it was in power, are all ignored, and the whole
weight of the so-called historian is laid upon
the sufferings and the blameless lives of the
English Romanists. The result is a false and
very deceptive presentation of history, which in
the end must defeat its own object, and injure
its own cause.
More and more, it is probable, as the historical
spirit grows, as historical methods are pursued
and the scientific mind is acquired, men will
desire to know impartially what really happened.
They will be dissatisfied with partizan histories
of events and institutions. The popular con
ception of the Papacy must be affected by
these causes. The Papacy will be judged by
history, instead of judging it : it will no longer

142 England and the Papacy.
be accepted blindly at its own valuation by
apologists and partizans; nor will it be mis
judged by ignorant, blatant, and prejudiced
opponents. The Jesuit historians and apologists have still
much to learn about the methods of historical
research and statement. Mr. Taunton has to
complain, in his excellent " History of the
Jesuits in England," of Brother Foley's unfair
and deceptive handling of documents. " Foley's
eight volumes of Records cannot be taken as a
history of the body to which he belonged.
They are only a collection or, rather, selection
of documents. Foley's value consists almost as
much in his omissions as in his admissions.
And I am bound to remark that I have found
him, at a critical point, quietly leaving out,
without any signs of omission, an essential part
of a document which was adverse to his case.
His volumes of Records cannot, I regret to have
to say it openly, be taken as trustworthy, unless
corroborated by more scrupulous writers."
Mr. Taunton's experience must be shared by
all enquirers who search the original documents
for themselves, instead of trusting printed
authorities. To such enquirers, the "value" of
partizan writers like Foley is apparent and
suggestive ; but such practices grievously mislead
the unsuspecting general reader, who cannot
investigate for himself, but who has as much
right as the professional historian to know the
truth. Besides direct and deliberate violations
of historical truth, there is still to be found in
the prefaces to some Church histories a com
mendation of scientific methods and impartial
scholarship, while in the body of such works
all these principles are flagrantly and systemati-

England and the Papacy. 143
cally violated. These principles and practices
are not a monopoly of the papal controversialists.
However, the Jesuit apologists are open to
a more serious charge with respect to honesty
and truth. They have sanctioned and adopted
a system of casuistry, of mental reservation, of
manipulating words and phrases, which strikes
at all the laws of evidence and honour, which
destroys all confidence in human words, and
conduct, and motives. These principles must be
allowed for, and guarded against, in all Jesuit
controversialists, by those who do not wish to be
deceived and tricked. No quotation of theirs
should ever be accepted unless it be verified,
and be found in agreement with the context.
No assertion or denial should ever be trusted,
unless it can be supported by external and
independent evidence.
Jesuit controversialists have themselves to
thank for the distrust with which they are
regarded. When their current principles of
casuistry are officially repudiated, exposed, and
condemned by the papal authorities, then their
assertions may be accepted, like those of all
other authors. At present, they cannot have
the right to these principles and also the right
to be believed. They must choose between the
two. They cannot have the advantage of
casuistry, and of implicit confidence. Those
who allow such principles, even in theory, must
not have that same right to be believed which
is conceded without suspicion or reserve to those
who repudiate casuistry and equivocation in all
its forms.
A similar argument applies to all the diplo
matic utterances and engagements of the Papacy
and its representatives. Both historical ex-

144 England and the Papacy.
perience and the accepted principles of casuistry
must lead us to suspect the statements of papal
¦ officials and partizans. It is asserted bravely,
no doubt, in theological manuals and cate
chisms, that to lie is a mortal sin, and that
lying is never permissible even to serve the
Church ; but the casuists prove easily that
hardly any manipulation of the truth need
technically be a lie. The principles and precepts
which guided Parsons are still accepted, on the
whole, by his successors. His practices are not
obsolete among them. The old controversial
methods of suppressing or manipulating what is
true, of suggesting and insinuating what is
false, of blackening the motives and character
of opponents whose case is unassailable by
argument, are still to be found among papal
controversialists. Our long enquiry has shown, I think, that
our English nature and institutions are irrecon
cilable with the papal system, and that they
always have been. The enmity between Eng
land and Rome is not merely theological. It is
caused by a deep repugnance of nature, and by
principles which cannot be accommodated to one
another, or held consistently and simultaneously
by the same person. This repugnance is found
through all our history. The incompatibility
between Roman and English principles, between
the Papacy and freedom, is as strong as ever,
though the hostility may be less violent and
obtrusive. It will, however, flame out again at
any time, and upon the slightest provocation.
Theology is only the commonest, and perhaps
not the deepest, cause of these conflagrations.
As we examine the past, we find the Papacy, at
every stage of our progress, in conflict with our

England and the Papacy. 145
liberties and the whole spirit of our institutions.
It was allied with the Norman conqueror; and
we may resent the alliance, although the Con
quest proved itself a blessing in disguise. The
Pope supported John, and Henry IIL, and
Mary Tudor, and Charles I., and James II. He
opposed Henry II., and the Reformation, and
Queen Elizabeth, and Cromwell, and William
III. That is to say, he supported every cause
and person which has been opposed to the
growth and development of our Constitution,
or of our greatness. He has opposed every
cause and principle which we regard as having
helped us to be what we are.
The Papacy and the English spirit are incom-
patibles ; because the Italian Curia has never
understood and has always mistrusted our free
institutions. "Liberty to Latins means licence.
It never enters into their mind that the best
remedy for the abuse of Liberty is more Liberty,
which brings more responsibility. But the idea
of the Society was to reduce, by obedience, the
individual to nothing. Thus Liberty is espe
cially antagonistic to Jesuit ideas."* The Jesuit
system and the Jesuit notions have been imposed
upon the government and theology of the whole
papal Church. That Church now, therefore,
more than ever, is incompatible with our Eng
lish nature, spirit, and institutions. In propor
tion as a man accepts one theory of life and
thought, he must be out of sympathy with the
other. The two systems cannot be accepted
fully and loyally by the same person. There
must be, as there has always been, a conflict.
By the terms ' ' Rome " and ' ' Roman Church, "
* Taunton : "Jesuits in England." 10

146 England and the Papacy.
I mean exclusively the local Church or Court of
Rome, the Curia. I do not mean the peoples
who make up the various national Churches in
communion with Rome. These peoples, and
even their hierarchies, have been the dupes and
victims rather than the accomplices of the Roman
See, both in the past and in the present. The
personal goodness and devotion, the innocence,
and the genuine piety, of too many individuals
and nations are being utilized by the dominant
faction for its own political aggrandisement.
When it is suspected or accused of political
aggression, it invariably points to the blameless
and pious lives of individuals; who, in truth,
have nothing to do with politics and plotting,
but whose piety is utilized for their own ends by
those who have.
The Roman Curia is chiefly a political and
financial organization, which disguises its real
purposes under pious and theological expres
sions. Outsiders, as well as many devout
Romanists, are deceived by the pious locutions
of the Pope, not knowing or forgetting that they
are merely the conventional or diplomatic appa
ratus of the Holy See; and that, of old time,
the most tortuous plans were disguised, the
most ferocious edicts were garnished, for the
sake of appearances, with these unctuous and
hollow phrases.
We should have no quarrel with individual
Romanists, we need feel no bitterness towards
them. We should always distinguish between
the great body of Roman Catholics, scattered
through the world, and that official, mundane
organization which rules them from the centre.
With the latter, no terms of any sort are possible.
It gives no quarter, and it deserves none. It

England and the Papacy. 147
keeps no engagements, and it is unworthy of
all trust. It is merely a political and financial
organization, masquerading as a Church, ex
ploiting the faith and goodness of its dupes.
Its tortuous methods, its ambitious aims, its
tyrannical and repressive notions, its arbitrary
Congregations and their secret procedure, are
all equally abhorrent to our English methods,
principles, and nature. As long as the spirit,
methods, principles and institutions of England
and of the papal Curia remain unchanged,
they will be as irreconcilable with one another
in the future as they have always been in the
past. The principles of the Curia, like the
declarations of the Pontiffs, are to all appearance
'¦'¦ irreformabiles," " incapable of reform."
These conclusions, it would appear, are being
forced more and more upon English Romanists.
Many events abroad, and the violent hostility of
the continental Press, among which the clerical
organs have been most outrageous in their
Anglophobia, have made the more thoughtful
of the English Roman Catholics uneasy and
suspicious. Our examination enables us to
distinguish clearly between the principles of the
Vatican, and the religious beliefs of those among
us who accept the Pope's ecclesiastical authority.
We may believe that the Vatican is opposed to
our English principles and institutions without
accusing the English Romanists, either as a
body or individually, of disloyalty and want of
patriotism. Their loyalty has been proved
abundantly in the past. It has been proof
against suffering and ill-usage. Their heroism
has been magnificent, in holding to that which
they have believed to be religious truth. Very
few of them, it is probable, read the continental
ID — 2

148 England and the Papacy.
Press, or know what the methods and policy
of the Curia really are. Still fewer have any
competent knowledge of Church history and
theology ; and the history of England has never
been presented to them in an impartial way.
These defects are being slowly though surely
modified by scientific methods of thinking, and
by the application of the same standards of
knowledge to all who pass through public
examinations.

CHAPTER XVII.
The Effects and Future of the Papacy.
IT would be untrue and unfair to hold that
the Papacy has been altogether bad. The
traditions of Roman law and administration were
preserved in the old metropolis, and they were
the cause of immense good to the barbarian con
querors. The Papacy, as representing law and
order, did a great work in the evolution of a
new society. The Benedictine missionaries, and
Popes like Gregory the First, spread civilization
and education throughout Europe. The Church
affected every sphere of intellectual and social
progress. The Popes of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries no doubt furthered the cause of moral
reform and of spiritual improvement ; but their
success, and the position they gained, brought
on the moral and political ruin of the Papacy.
The feudal organization and the immoderate
claims of Gregory VII. led on directly to
conflicts with the civil power, to clerical immu
nities, to the ambitions of Innocent III., to all
the blasphemous attributes and pretentions of
Boniface VIII.
The papal supremacy in England, between
1 1 70 and 1535, was a period of aggression, of
extortion, of danger to the State, and of cor
ruption in faith and morals. The diplomacy of
the Curia was a by-word for chicanery and

150 England and the Papacy.
fraud. It sold, delayed, and denied justice. It
trafficked openly in sacred things. The Popes,
by their claim to absolve from oaths, that is, to
release one party to an engagement secretly,
behind the back of the other, destroyed the
foundations of political confidence and of public
faith. The Papacy might have -been a cause of
incalculable good : it was, in fact, a cause of
deplorable mischief and disturbance. In the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it was the
chief obstacle to Reform. In the sixteenth cen
tury, it caused all the worst mediaeval errors to
be reaffirmed and systematized. Since then, it
has been the insuperable barrier to a reunion
of Christendom. As long as the Curia be
governed by the present methods, and the papal
claims be asserted with their present extrava
gance, there can be no reunion by means of the
Papacy, without a betrayal of all that is most
worth having both in Christianity and in civic
life. Moreover, the Papacy is, in one important
aspect, a most uncatholic and narrow institution.
Since the Reformation, only Italians have been
Popes; and the higher administration of the
papal Church has been entirely in the hands, or
under the interference, of that race. Nationality
is always vilified by the papal advocates as
anti-catholic; but what institutions can be
described as more jealously exclusive and pro
vincial than the Papacy itself, and the whole
government service of the Curia?
The papal question, however, cannot be re
garded as a petty or a sectarian dispute. It is a
matter of high principle, and of truth: a test,
it may even be, between Christ and Anti-Christ.
Newman tells us that, although the base of St.

England and the Papacy. 151
Peter's Rock may be poisonous with malaria,
and vexed with storms, yet the air on the
summit is ever serene and pure: this was his
opinion, in print, though his talk and his
manuscripts were not so complimentary. It
is not the conclusion forced upon impartial
students of the Papacy, from the tenth century
to the eighteenth. With regard to the existing
Papacy, Manning's "Life" scarcely demon
strates to us that the atmosphere of the Vatican
is pure and peaceful; that it is free from guile
and plotting; that the papal Curia is governed
by the maxims and methods of the New Testa
ment. If the Pope be really the Head of such
an organization as Manning describes, then he
and his system should be rejected and con
demned together by all those who value Chris
tianity. If the Pope be merely a Figurehead,
he is very much to be commiserated, and is
not worth considering. He cannot, on either
supposition, be helpful to the higher and more
permanent interests of Christianity.
Papalism, surely, is but an episode, in the
long development of our Christian progress. It
is not a permanent or a necessary factor. The
Christianity of the future appears likely to be
more social than political or theological ; and, if
so, all the existing schemes of Church organiza
tion will be altered, or may even disappear.
There will be no place in them for any claimant
to theological infallibility and autocratic power.
All such claims will be destroyed by the his
torical spirit, by scientific methods of li.e and
thought, by the fuller establishment of intelli
gence, of equality, of liberty, of practical and
primitive Christianity.
However these things may be, we can be sure

152 England and the Papacy.
that the papal Curia, as it exists at present, and
the whole Anglo-Saxon world will find them
selves to be as incompatible with one another
as England and Rome have shown themselves
through all the heroic and tortuous conflicts
between them in the past. " England," as Mr.
Taunton says in his admirable book on Wolsey,
" has always been a puzzle to Rome:" and, ever
since the eleventh century, Rome has been a
scandal, a hindrance, and a danger to the
English People.
Our attitude towards the Papacy has been de
cided for us by a long course of events, of which
this volume has been designed to summarize
the history. The past cannot be unmade ; and
our English attitude towards the Roman Court
is not likely to be altered in the future. Our
Anglo-Celtic brethren, in Australasia and in the
United States, will probably find more and more,
as our forefathers did, that the domination of
Rome is a cause of perpetual friction, and a
hindrance to their progress in civil and intel
lectual freedom. If we may judge by the past,
it is inconceivable that these democratic and
intensely national members of the Celtic family,
living, as they are compelled, in the full tide of
human progress, enjoying all and more than all
that our predecessors gained for us, will allow
their ecclesiastical affairs to be manipulated for
ever by the scheming officials and nominees
of a retrograde Italian Oligarchy.

CHAPTER XVIII.
The Present Position of Roman Catholics
Lv THE British Empire.
THE future of the Papacy lies, as the
Odyssey has it, ' ' on the knees of the
gods." The tendency of mankind to be deceived
appears to be illimitable; but the whole ten
dency of the future appears, also, to be slowly,
though surely, setting away from the Papacy,
as we have known it in the past, and see it in
the present. The New Learning was quenched,
to a very large extent, within the papal organi
zation, during the sixteenth century. The
mediaeval theology was re-established and even
strengthened by the Council of Trent. Histori
cal and theological documents were tampered
wiin, in ine interests ot the ecclesiastic"al authori
ties, ay tnese means, the papal claims were
reasserted, and the question of their true origin
and foundation was deferred. This question,
however, is now before the world again ; and the
answer cannot be evaded as it was in the past.
Our historical spirit, our scientific temperament,
our critical and rigorous methods of enquiry,
our knowledge about the growth of institutions,
our discoveries about the evolution and the com
parative history of religions, must all tell in the
end upon Christianity. The gold in it will be
separated from the dross. It will emerge from the

154 England and the Papacy.
crucible stronger and purer than before ; but the
traditional Papacy, that mediaeval, feudal, semi-
pagan, wholly mundane organization, mani
pulated at present by the Jesuits, with its claims
to universal domination and theological infalli
bility, must assuredly be purged away. If the
Founder of Christianity had provided the world
with an infallible guide in faith and morals, it is
incredible that that guide should have the record,
and should produce those results, which the
Papacy has invariably shown. These records
and results condemn the Papacy, and are a
sufficient refutation of the papal claims and
theories. We may wait with confidence for the
inevitable verdict of the future.
Meanwhile, it is the duty of Englishmen to
remember the origin of this institution, its
nature and its methods in the past, as well as
the history of its relations to our country, and
its invariable policy towards our forefathers :
remembering, too, that the principles of the
Roman Curia are unchanged, that its organiza
tion is more centralized and dangerous than ever,
that its true policy and aims are rather dis
sembled than reformed. It is still, and always
must be, the uncompromising foe of our nature
and institutions.
But it is our duty, also, and a much pleasanter
one, to distinguish in the present, as well as in
the past, between the rulers of the Vatican and
the great body of English Roman Catholics.
Our fellow subjects, who are Roman Catholics,
are on the whole distinguished, as their fore
fathers were, for devotion to their country. In
these days, that devotion is thoroughly well
earned ; because the Romanists are not so free
under any other government as they are through-

England and the Papacy. 155
out the British Empire. Our complete justice
and toleration do not secure the gratitude of the
papal authority, because they are contrary to
the principles and spirit of the Curia; but they
have secured the loyalty and attachment of the
English Romanists. The memories of ancient
hostility are dying out among them. The
privileges they enjoy, the atmosphere in which
they live, their fuller mingling with the large
world of English life and thought, have made the
present generation of English Roman Catholics
ver\' different from their immediate predecessors.
In proportion to their numbers, they rank high
for distinguished and useful service to the State.
As they have thus broken down the old barriers
which once existed between themselves and their
fellow-countrymen, so we, in our turn, should
break down any barriers of theological or social
prejudice which may still remain between our
selves and them. That is the most certain way
to minimise the influence of the Vatican.
There are many questions, no doubt, in which
the great majority of Englishmen cannot agree
with the Romanists theologically; but the num
ber of questions in which we can agree with
them and work with them, socially, politically,
philanthropically, are continually increasing.
There are many questions, too, in which we
have much to learn from the English Romanists.
Their organization, their loyalty to their leaders,
their efforts and sacrifices in the cause of charity
and education, are deserving of the highest
praise, and may put most other religious bodies
to shame. The Jews and the Quakers alone,
perhaps, surpass the Romanists in the extent of
their charity, and in the personal care bestowed
upon the recipients of it.

156 England and the Papacy.
The education of the Roman clergy in Eng
land leaves very much to be desired, both as
to the nature and standards of their learning,
and their attitude towards the State as citizens.
But, as in other countries, so also in England,
the seminaries cannot be cut off wholly from
modern thought. Modern theories, modern
methods, the historical and scientific spirit, are
all touching the papal theology, as well as the
opinions of every other Church. Whatever else
may be the result of this process, it must dissolve
and undermine the foundations of the papal
monarchy. History and the Papacy are incom-
patibles. The scientific spirit and clericalism
cannot subsist together. English principles of
liberty and autocratic methods of Church govern
ment cannot be combined; and the future
appears, on the whole, more likely to favour
our principles than those of the Papacy. In the
past, victory has certainly been with the English
People, and against their ancient foe. We
gained our civil, intellectual and religious liberty
in spite of him. The future also will be with
the English People, as against the forces repre
sented by the Vatican, so long as we are true to
ourselves and to the traditions of our heroic
past. This is the experience and the legacy
which we must hand on to our descendants
here, and to the larger communities of our
kinsmen beyond the seas.

Elliot Stock, 6z, Paternoster Row, London, E.C.

3mpmaf ^tottBtant ^t^txation.

CONSTITUTION.
objects.
I. To federate Evangelical Protestant Churches and Societies
within the British Empire, for the purpose of facilitating fraternal
intercourse and co-operation between them.
2. To strengthen the federated organizations, and to defend
their rights.
3. To promote the formation of branches of the federated
organizations, and to unite such branches in District Federations.
4. To ascertain the opinions and desires of the federated
organizations, and to determine how best to carry them out.
5. To render financial aid to any federated organization
which is in urgent need of funds.
6. To publish tracts, books, and newspapers; and to make
free grants of literature to the federated organisations.
7. To oppose all attempts to : —
(a) Alter the Coronation Oath and the Declaration against
Transubstantiation.
(i) Open the Throne of England to a Romanist.
(f) Repeal the Bill of Rights or the Act of Settlement.
{<i) Throw open the offices of Lord High Chancellor of
England and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to Roman
Catholics.
(e) Grant State aid of any description for the furtherance of
Romish or Ritualistic objects.
{/) Give any increased powers — political or otherwise — to
the Church of Rome.
(^) Open diplomatic relations with the Vatican.
8. To labour for the : —
(a) Suppression of Romanism in the Church of England.
(6) Exclusion of the Jesuit Order from the British Empire.
(c) Periodical inspection by Government officials of all con
vents and monastic institutions, and the liberation of
such of their inmates as are forcibly detained therein.
(rf) Return of Protestant members to the British House of
Commons and the Colonial Legislatures, to County
Councils, Vestries, Boards of Guardians and School
Boards.
9. To take any action required for the protection or advance
ment of Protestant interests, provided such action is sanctioned by
the Imperial Council.

limitations.
10. The Federation shall not act independently as a separate
society. II. It shall not seek to represent individual opinion.
12. Donors and subscribers shall not be represented upon the
Imperial Council; and they shall not participate in the manage
ment of the Federation.
13. No attempt shall be made to destroy, injure, or weaken
the individuality of the federated organizations.
14. The federated organizations shall not be required to
guarantee the income of the Federation.
BASIS. 15. The Federation shall be composed only of those organiza
tions which : —
(a) Accept the Bible as the Word of God, and as the one,
only, and all-sufficient Rule of Faith.
(6) Accept the doctrine of the Trinity, that there are three
Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — in the one
Godhead.
{c) Accept the doctrine of the Incarnation, that God the Son
took upon Him the nature of man, so that He is per
fect God and perfect man.
[d) Accept the doctrine of justification by faith only, through
the merit and sacrifice of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus
Christ ; and not for our own works or deservings.
(«) Believe that the offering of Christ, once-for-a!l off-ered
upon the Cross, was a full, perfect, and sufficient
sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for sin; and can
never be continued, repeated, nor re-presented.
(/) Believe that regeneration, or the new birth, is the work
of God the Holy Ghost, and not dependent on any
ordinance or human agency.
IMPERIAL COUNCIL.
16. The Imperial Council shall consist of two representatives
annually appointed by each independent federated organization,
one representative annually appointed by each District Federa
tion, and one representative annually appointed by each Colonial
Federation. 17. The Imperial Council shall have power to give increased
representation to any organization which, in its opinion, is entitled
to a greater influence in the management of the Federation ; pro
vided always that the total number of representatives appointed by
any organization shall not exceed four, and that any proposal to
give increased representation to an organization shall be approved
by at least two-thirds of the members present at the meeting of the
Imperial Council at which it is brought forward.
18. The Imperial Council shall meet not less than once a
month, excepting during the months of August and September.
19. It shall be responsible for maintaining the Federation in
working order; shall carry out its objects; and shall exercise
supreme control over its affairs.

20. It may be specially convened at any time : —
(a) By the Chairman of the Imperial Council.
{6) On the requisition in writing of not less than three of the
federated organizations.
21. The non-representative members (not exceeding twenty)
elected before the adoption of this Constitution shall retain their
seats upon the Imperial Council ; but no similar appointments shall
be made in the future, and as vacancies occur they shall not be
filled.COMMITTEES. 22. The Imperial Council may appoint Committees when
necessar)', and may entrust to them such duties and powers as it
considers advisable.
CHAIRMAN.
23. The Chairman of the Imperial Council shall be appointed
by the Imperial Council.
DISTRICT FEDERATIONS.
24. District Federations may be formed in the Metropolis,
and in cities, towns, and Parliamentary divisions ; and they shall
consist of independent Protestant societies, branches of societies,
and congregations. 25. The Committee of each District Federation shall consist
of two representatives annually appointed by each federated
organization. 26. Each District Federation shall annually appoint one
representative to attend the meetings of the Imperial Council.
27. The District P'ederations shall adhere to the Constitution
of the Imperial Protestant Federation, and they shall locally carry
out its objects.
COLONIAL FEDER.\TIONS.
28. Efforts shall be made to form in each British Colony
a Federation of Evangelical Protestant Churches and Societies.
29. The Grand Council of each Colonial Federation shall con
sist of two representatives annually appointed by each independent
federated organization, and one representative annually appointed
by each District Federation.
30. Each Colonial Federation shall, if possible, annually
appoint a representative to attend the meetings of the Imperial
Council ; and it shall appoint a Corresponding Secretary, who shall
keep in constant communication with the London office.
31. The Colonial Federations shall adhere to the Constitution
of the Imperial Protestant Federation, and they shall locally carry
out its objects.
32. The Colonial Federations shall promote the formation of
District Federations within their spheres of influence.
PRESIDENT. 33. The Imperial Council shall annually appoint a President,
who siiall subscribe not less than ten guineas per annum.

34. The post of Chairman of the Imperial Council may be
held by the President, provided he is appointed thereto by two-
thirds of the members present at a meeting of the Imperial
Council. VICE-PRESIDENTS. 35. The Imperial Council may appoint Vice-Presidents, who
shall each subscribe not less than three guineas per annum ; and it
may also appoint Hon. Vice-Presidents.
36. The Vice-Presidents shall not participate in the manage
ment of the Federation.
FINANCE. 37. Each federated organization represented upon the Imperial
Council shall subscribe not less than one guinea per annum.
38. The Imperial Council shall have power, when necessary,
to give representation to organizations without payment of an
annual subscription.
39 Each society, branch of a society, and congregation, shall
subscribe not less than five shillings per annum to the District
Federation upon which it is represented.
40. The Committees of the District Federations shall have
power, when necessary, to give representation to societies, branches
of societies, and congregations, without payment of an annual
subscription. 41. Each federated Colonial organization shall subscribe not
less than one guinea (or its equivalent in Colonial coinage) per
annum to the Federation upon which it is represented.
42. Colonial Federations shall have power, when necessary, to
give representation to organizations without payment of an annual
subscription.CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS.
43. Any amendment of this Constitution must be made either
on the motion of the Imperial Council, or on the motion of one of
the federated organizations.
44. Notice of any Constitutional amendment by a federated
organization must be given to the Secretary of the Federation at
least thirty days before the meeting of the Imperial Council.
45. AU proposed Constitutional amendments must be sent to
each federated organization at least fourteen days before the meet
ing of the Imperial Council.
46. . Constitutional amendments shall not be adopted unless
they are approved by at least two-thirds of the members present at
the meeting of the Imperial Council at which they are brought
forward. The Imperial Protestant Federation has the warm sympathy
and active co-operatio7i of over 200 Protestant Organizations, and
its Council is composed of representatives officially appointed by the
jj United Protestant Societies.
3, Palmer Street, Queen Anne's Gate, London, S.W.

Now Ready, in large 8vo, bound, price 1/6.
Baptism and Regeneration
WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
THEM •?
BY
WERNER H. K. SOAMES, M.A.
Vicar 01 St. George's, Greenwich.
In the existence of so many antagonistic views upon the two Sacra
ments, the author sees a proof that, in all probability, all the common
theories respecting them contain certain elements of error. In total
disregard therefore, of all existing views, his object has been, by a' fresh,
independent, and prayerful study of the New Testament, to do in
Theology in respect of the two Sacraments, what Copernicus did in
Astronomy in respect of the Solar System — to correct common but
erroneous theories by sound and true ones.
He is disposed to think that his conclusions may not be accepted, ,;
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of God is patient, because eternal, and can afford to wait for re
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show that lohn III. 3-8 has been too exclusively dwelt upon by
commentators, to the neglect of other and- equally important places
in the New Testament which treat of " birth of God " aiid of "entrance
into the Kingdom of Heaven."
He then draws out carefully and at length, the teaching of the
New Testament respecting these two things, and also the analogy
that exists between '• birth " physical and "birth" spiritual. The
proper places of Baptism of Water, of Baptism of the Spirit, and
of Confirmation, are then demonstrated from the New Testament,
and John III. 3-8 has a chapter all to itself. In conclusion, the
author thinks it high time, now that there is such a hankering after
the many-century-ai;o exploded errors of Sacerdotalism, for those who
really care for the 1 ruth of God in Revelation respecting the Sacraments,
to strive after a more clear perception and grasp of it than has hitherto
prevailed.
ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.

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What does the Church of Engl and say about
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A REPLY TO PART OF THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY'S
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" This plain and carefully reasoned out pamphlet may be confidently
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ELLIOT STOCK, 62^ PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.

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Our One Priest on High.
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