English Reformation

“ The essentially English reformation of the seventeenth century was less a struggle between churches than between sects, often subdivided by questions of discipline and self-regulation rather than by dogma. ”

“ Such has been the method which they have pursued here in our so-called English Reformation, and by the same rule and by the same authority it can be still further diversified and changed into as many forms and figures as there are different imaginations in the heads of men. ”

“ The advanced section in popular movements is usually unwise. The characteristic excellence of the English Reformation is, that throughout its course it was restrained by the law, and the Six Articles Bill, tempered as it was in the execution, was a permissible, and perhaps useful, measure in restraint of intemperance. ”

“ It does not pretend in any sense to be a history of the English Reformation, to give any consecutive narrative of the religious movements in this country during the sixteenth century, or to furnish an adequate account of the causes which led up to them. The volume in reality presents to the reader merely a series of separate studies which, whilst joined together by a certain connecting thread, must not be taken as claiming to present any complete picture of the period immediately preceding the Reformation, still less of that movement itself. ”

“ The English reformation was not consummated until constitutional liberty was heralded by the reign of William and Mary, when the nation became almost unanimously Protestant, with perfect toleration of religions opinions, although the fervor of the Puritans had passed away forever, leaving a residuum of deep-seated popular antipathy to all the institutions of Romanism and all the ideas of the Middle Ages. The English reformation began with princes, and ended with the agitations of the people. The German reformation began with the people, and ended in the wars of princes. ”

“ When Church writers no longer felt bound to exert all their powers of argument against Rome or rival modes of Protestantism, and when disputes about forms of government, rites, and ceremonies, and other externals of religion ceased to excite any strong interest, attention began to be turned in good earnest to the deeper and more fundamental issues involved in the Reformation. ”

“ But the direct and personal interest of every man seemed to lie in the right holding of religious truth, and thus the theological aspect of the Reformation tended more and more to supersede its political one. ”

“ The temper of compromise is characteristic of the English as contrasted with the foreign Reformation. It is visible, not only in the Articles, but in the polity of the English Church, which clung so obstinately to the continuity and forms of the ancient hierarchical system, it is visible in the sacramental offices of the Prayer Book, which left so much out to satisfy the Protestants, and left so much in to satisfy the Catholics. ”

“ The degree in which afterward any individual within the communion of the English Church was prompted to pursue what he regarded as the work of reformation, whether he were prelate, noble, gentleman, scholar, husbandman, or artisan, and whether it drove him to conformity or to any phase of Puritanism, or even Separatism, depended mainly upon the estimate which he assigned to the Scriptures, whether as the sole or only the co-ordinate authority for the institution and discipline of the Christian Church. ”

“ Reformation was not being pressed onward too hastily for the great majority of the English laity. England did not produce in the sixteenth century a great spiritual leader inspired by a prophetic conviction that he was speaking the truth of God, and able to create a like conviction in the hearts of his neighbours, while he was never so far before them that they could not easily follow him step by step. ”

“ It would be interesting to speculate what the Renaissance of the sixteenth century would have done for Europe had it been unaccompanied by a Reformation of religion. Without the Reformation, we may aver there would have been for the British nation no Bible of 1611, no Pilgrim Fathers to America, and no Revolution of 1688, along with all that these things imply of progress many-fold. ”

“ History, it is true, does repeat itself, but not on precisely identical lines, and the newer Reformation will be the disestablishment and disendowment of an unworthy Church, and free-trade in religion. ”

“ With the single exception of the period which covers the introduction and first marvellous triumphs of Christianity, the Reformation of the sixteenth century must be owned as perhaps the greatest and most glorious revolution in the history of the human race. ”

“ That the sixteenth century belongs wholly to the Protestant Reformation; that that Reformation is its centre, its heart, its vital principle; that everything of that period—theology, letters, science, art, the discoveries of human genius, political and military power—all came of the Reformation. ”

“ Greater men than he deny that grace underlies the whole original movement of the reformers, and they talk of the Reformation as a mere revolt from Rome, as a war against papal corruption, as a protest against monkery and the dark ages, brought about by the spirit of a new age, the onward march of humanity, the necessary progress of society. ”

“ In studying the history of the Reformation in England, nothing is more necessary than to keep its different stages distinct from one another. We are too apt to think of the Reformation as if it had been all one process, or at least as if some person or persons had deliberately set it going, with a distinct perception of the results to which it was to lead, and had consciously adapted the means employed to the production of those results. ”

“ When the Protestant Reformation came, it brought with it a manly Theology. It put the Bible into all men's hands, and asserted for each the right of private judgment and liberty of conscience. Therefore the Reformation was the cause of a great forward movement in human affairs. ”

“ The great ideas of the Reformation began now to agitate the mind of England,—not so much the logical doctrines of Calvin as the emancipating ideas of Luther. The Renaissance had begun, and the two movements were incorporated,—the religious one of Germany and the Pagan one of Italy, both favoring liberality of mind, a freer style of literature, restless inquiries, enterprise, the revival of learning and art, an intense spirit of progress, and disgust for the Dark Ages and all the dogmas of scholasticism. ”

“ The teachings, claims, and crimes native to Rome, nay, even the imported refinements of the arts and letters and elegancies of Paganism did what legions of full-blown Luthers could not have done.
The Reformation, with its complex causes, its complex methods, its complex products, is, more than other great movements, brimful of matter for observation, thought, and inference. ”

“ In trying, therefore, to gauge the mental attitude of Englishmen towards the ecclesiastical system existing on the eve of the Reformation, it is important not to neglect any faint glimmer of light which may be reflected from the records of the past, the brightness of which in its setting has been obscured only too well by the dark storm-clouds of controversy and prejudice. ”

“ The more we read of the history of past ages, the more we observe the signs of our own times, the more do we feel our hearts filled and swelled up by a good hope for the future destinies of the human race.
The history of the Reformation in England is full of strange problems. The most prominent and extraordinary phenomenon which it presents to us is the gigantic strength of the government contrasted with the feebleness of the religious parties. ”

“ Now, when a few more years are past, when researches have been still further extended, and there has been time and opportunity to see that the new side of the question is no more the only side than the old one was, we may hope that a more judicial and rational view may be taken, and that we may learn that the ideas of the value of the Reformation which prevailed for almost three centuries in England were, on the whole, nearer the truth than those which have for the moment almost superseded them ”

“ The Relation of the Reformation to the Renaissance.—The series of revolts from the Catholic Church, generally known collectively as the ‘Reformation,’ may be regarded as closely connected with the Renaissance. As shown in the last chapter, humanism in the North led to a renewed study of the Scriptures and a reform of ecclesiastical doctrines and abuses, and took on a moral and religious color. Reformers arose, like Wimpfeling and Erasmus, who, while remaining within the Church, sought to purify it of corruption and obscurantism. ”

“ I admit the secondary causes of the Reformation, which are very important,--the awakened spirit of inquiry in the sixteenth century, the revival of poetry and literature and art, the breaking up of feudalism, fortunate discoveries, the introduction of Greek literature, the Renaissance, the disgusts of Christendom, the voice of martyrs calling aloud from their funeral pyres; yea, the friendly hand of princes and scholars deploring the evils of a corrupted Church. ”

“ Even the Reformation, that other great movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had far less unity, far less of combined action, than is at first sight supposed; and the Renaissance was infinitely less united, less conscious of combined action, than the Reformation. ”

“ It is absurd to say that the revolution of the sixteenth century was a reformation, if by that it is meant that it re-established the primitive doctrines of Christianity, purified the morals of the people, or gave birth to a better ecclesiastical government, it did no such thing. ”

“ If the spirit they obeyed, or the principle to which they yielded, led them or pushed them step by step in the way of destruction, to the total denial of the authority of the church, or to transfer it from the pope and hierarchy to Cæsar or the laity, which we know was universally the fact, it is clear proof that the spirit or principle of the Reformation was radical, revolutionary, destructive, not conservative. ”

“ The Church of to-day represents some results of the great Reformation. That Reformation was due to the intelligence of those men who perceived that it had become the enemy to freedom; the enemy to the development of thought; the enemy to the aspirations of a great nation. ”

“ The course of the Reformation in each country must be described separately, and yet it is the one story with differences due to the accidents of national temperaments, memories, and political institutions. ”

“ All that can be pointed out here is that the facts of intellectual history represent an exact contradiction to the usually accepted impression that whatever is best in the modern time can be traced to the Reformation. ”

“ By what has been said, we may judge of the condition of the Reformed after the Edict of Grace. They had, at intervals, days of repose, which permitted them to apply themselves to theological learning, to develop their ordinary instruction, and to cultivate the industrial arts. But this rest was uncertain, this calm unquiet, so to speak, and persecution soon went on increasing, until the favourable moment appeared for the annihilation of the French Reformation. We shall only relate what is most important. ”

“ Those who know most about this portion of our national history will best understand how impossible it is as yet for any one, however well informed, to write the history of the Reformation itself or to draw for us any detailed and accurate picture of the age that went before that great event, and is supposed by some to have led up to it. ”

“ The Cause and Leading Principle of the Reformation.—In my opinion the Reformation neither was an accident, the result of some casual circumstance, or some personal interests, nor arose from unmingled views of religious improvement, the fruit of Utopian humanity and truth. It had a more powerful cause than all these; a general cause to which all the others are subordinate. It was a vast effort made by the human mind to achieve its freedom ”

“ It was indeed a world-historical movement, that old reformation of the Sixteenth century, snapping as it did the fetters of a Church that arrogated to itself all power in heaven and on earth, and defiantly asserting supremacy over the papacy. But the reformation of our day is much more radical and universal. ”

“ Again, some readers may be ready to accuse us of placing the Roman Catholics of those times in too favourable a light. We can only reply that the same undoubted authorities have guided our pen. We will yield to no man in our attachment to Protestant principles, nor in our estimation of their paramount truth and value. We regard the liberation of mind effected by the Reformation as the source of all our present blessings, and our national preeminence. ”

“ The Reformation is simply the turning-back of that tide of Roman culture which, for five hundred years, had set steadily forward and had progressively dominated the insufficient by the sufficient, the slower by the quicker, the confused by the clear-headed. ”

“ The strenuous endeavours put forth by the Roman Catholic church to restrict within the narrowest limits possible the victorious course of the Reformation, and so far as might be to reconquer lost ground, bulk so largely in its sixteenth century movement, that we may review that entire era in its history from the standpoint of the counter-reformation. ”

“ When we remember the century and a half of wars, so largely excited by ecclesiastical motives, which desolated Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, few can withhold their sympathy from the Christian Humanist idea that the path of reformation lay through a great readjustment of the existing conditions of the religious life, rather than through ecclesiastical revolution to a thorough-going reconstruction ”