Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 328, February, 1843. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
faintest gleam of public virtue. Owing to the success of Cæsar, the civilized world exchanged the dominion of several tyrants for that of one, and the opposition to his design was the resistance of the few to the many.
Or we may take another view of the subject. By freedom do we mean the absence of all restraint in private life, the non-interference by the state in the details of ordinary intercourse? According to such a view, the old government of Venice and the present government of Austria, where debauchery is more than tolerated, would be freer than the Puritan commonwealths in North America, where dramatic representations were prohibited as impious, and death was the legal punishment of fornication.
These are specimens of the difficulties by which we are beset, when we endeavour to obtain an exact and faithful image from the troubled medium through which human affairs are reflected to us. Dr Arnold dwells on this point with his usual felicity of language and illustration.
"This inattention to altered circumstances, which would make us be Guelfs in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, because the Guelf cause had been right in the eleventh or twelfth, is a fault of most universal application in all political questions, and is often most seriously mischievous. It is deeply seated in human nature, being, in fact, no other than an exemplification of the force of habit. It is like the case of a settler, landing in a country overrun with wood and undrained, and visited therefore by excessive falls of rain. The evil of wet, and damp, and closeness, is besetting him on every side; he clears away the woods, and he drains his land, and he, by doing so, mends both his climate and his own condition. Encouraged by his success, he perseveres in his system; clearing a country is with him synonymous with making it fertile and habitable; and he levels, or rather sets fire to, his forests without mercy. Meanwhile, the tide is turned without his observing it; he has already cleared enough, and every additional clearance is a mischief; damp and wet are no longer the evil most to be dreaded, but excessive drought. The rains do not fall in sufficient quantity; the springs become low, the rivers become less and less fitted for navigation. Yet habit blinds him for a long while to the real state of the case; and he continues to encourage a coming mischief in his dread of one that is become obsolete. We have been long making progress on our present tack; yet if we do not go about now, we shall run ashore. Consider the popular feeling at this moment against capital punishment; what is it but continuing to burn the woods, when the country actually wants shade and moisture? Year after year, men talked of the severity of the penal code, and struggled against it in vain. The feeling became stronger and stronger, and at last effected all, and more than all, which it had at first vainly demanded; yet still, from mere habit, it pursues its course, no longer to the restraining of legal cruelty, but to the injury of innocence and the encouragement of crime, and encouraging that worse evil—a sympathy with wickedness justly punished rather than with the law, whether of God or man, unjustly violated. So men have continued to cry out against the power of the Crown after the Crown had been shackled hand and foot; and to express the greatest dread of popular violence long after that violence was exhausted, and the anti-popular party was not only rallied, but had turned the tide of battle, and was victoriously pressing upon its enemy."
The view which Dr Arnold gives of the parties in England during the sixteenth century—that great epoch of English genius—is remarkable for its candour and moderation. He considers the distinctions which then prevailed in England as political rather than religious, "inasmuch as they disputed about points of church government, without any reference to a supposed priesthood; and because even those who maintained that one or another form was to be preferred, because it was of divine appointment, were influenced in their interpretation of the doubtful language of the Scriptures by their own strong persuasion of what that language could not but mean to say."
And he then concludes by the unanswerable remark, that in England, according to the theory of the constitution during the sixteenth century, church and state were one. The proofs of this proposition are innumerable—not merely the act by which the supremacy was conferred on Henry VIII.—not merely the powers, almost unlimited, in matters ecclesiastical, delegated to the king's vicegerent, that vicegerent being a layman—not merely the communion established by the sole authority of Edward VI.—without the least participation in it by any bishop or clergyman; but the still more conclusive argument furnished by the fact, that no point in the doctrine, discipline, or ritual of our church, was established except by the power of Parliament, and the power of Parliament alone—nay, more, that they were established in direct defiance of the implacable opposition of the bishops, by whom, being then Roman Catholics, the English Church, on the accession of Elizabeth, was represented—to which the omission of the names of the Lords Spiritual in the Act of Uniformity, which is said to be enacted by the "Queen's Highness," with the assent of the Lords and Commons in Parliament assembled, is a testimony, at once unanswerable and unprecedented. We have dwelt with the more anxiety on this part of Dr Arnold's work, as it furnishes a complete answer to the absurd opinions concerning the English Church, which it has been of late the object of a few bigots, unconsciously acting as the tools of artful and ambitious men, to propagate, and which would lead, by a direct and logical process, to the complete overthrow of Protestant faith and worship. Such, then, being the state of things "recognized on all hands, church government was no light matter, but one which essentially involved in it the government of the state; and the disputing the Queen's supremacy, was equivalent to depriving her of one of the most important portions of her sovereignty, and committing half of the government of the nation to other hands."
At the accession of Henry VIII., the most profound tranquillity prevailed over England. The last embers of those factions by which, during his father's reign, the peace of the nation had been disturbed rather than endangered, were quenched by the vigilance and severity of that able monarch; during the wars of the Roses, the noblest blood in England had been poured out on the field or on the scaffold, and the wealth of the most opulent proprietors had been drained by confiscation. The parties of York and Lancaster were no more—the Episcopal and Puritan factions were not yet in being—every day diminished the influence of the nobles—the strength of the Commons was in its infancy—the Crown alone remained, strong in its own prerogative, stronger still in the want of all competitors. Crime after crime was committed by the savage tyrant who inherited it; he was ostentatious—the treasures of the nation were lavished at his feet; he was vindictive—the blood of the wise, the noble, and the beautiful, was shed, like water, to gratify his resentment; he was rapacious—the accumulations of ancient piety were surrendered to glut his avarice; he was arbitrary—and his proclamations were made equivalent to acts of Parliament; he was fickle—and the religion of the nation was changed to gratify his lust. To all this the English people submitted, as to some divine infliction, in silence and consternation—the purses, lives, liberties, and consciences of his people were, for a time, at his disposal. During the times of his son and his eldest daughter, the general aspect of affairs was the same. But, though the hurricane of royal caprice and bigotry swept over the land, seemingly without resistance, the sublime truths which were the daily subject of controversy, and the solid studies with which the age was conversant, penetrated into every corner of the land, and were incorporated with the very being of the nation. Then, as the mist of doubt and persecution which had covered Mary's throne cleared away, the intellect of England, in all its health, and vigour, and symmetry, stood revealed in the men and women of the Elizabethan age:—
"To say," observes Dr Arnold, "that the Puritans were wanting in humility because they did not acquiesce in the state of things which they found around them, is a mere extravagance, arising out of a total misapprehension of the nature of humility, and of the merits of the feeling of veneration. All earnestness and depth of character is incompatible with such a notion of humility. A man deeply penetrated with some great truth, and compelled, as it were, to obey it, cannot listen to every one who may be indifferent to it, or opposed to it. There is a voice to which he already owes obedience, which he serves with the humblest devotion, which he worships with the most intense veneration. It is not that such feelings are dead in him, but that he has bestowed them on one object, and they are claimed for another. To which they are most due is a question of justice; he may be wrong in his decision, and his worship may be idolatrous; but so also may be the worship which his opponents call upon him to render. If, indeed, it can be shown that a man admires and reverences nothing, he may be justly taxed with want of humility; but this