СНАР. VI. 1624. The Commons refer Abbot. not because he doubted that the holy dead retained a loving sympathy with those who were yet living, but because he was unconvinced that there was any way of reaching their ears so as to excite their pity, and further, because we may well be blamed of folly for going about, when we may go direct; unto them, when we may go to God.'1 Such opinions were not likely to pass long unchalthe book to lenged. Two clergymen, Yates and Ward, complained to a Committee of the Commons in the last Parliament of James, and, as the session was drawing to a close, the Commons referred their complaint to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot's proceedings. He remonstrates with With the objections taken to the New Gag, Abbot warmly sympathised. But he did not much like the responsibility thrust upon him by the House of Commons. If the idea, prevalent with modern writers, that he was still under disgrace in consequence of the accidental homicide committed by him in Lord Zouch's park, finds little countenance from contemporary evidence, it is certain that James far preferred the chatty, secular-minded Williams, to the Calvinistic, clerical Archbishop. Abbot therefore thought it best, as soon as he had read the book, to ask James what he had better do, and was recommended to send for the author. Abbot took the hint. "Mr. Montague," he said, Montague. "you profess you hate Popery, and no way incline to Arminianism. You see what disturbance is grown in the Church and the Parliament House by the book by you lately put forth. Be occasion of no scandal or offence; and therefore this is my advice unto you. Go home, review over your book. It may be divers things 1 New Gag, 229. MONTAGUE AND ABBOT. VI. 209 1624. have slipped you, which, upon better advice, you will CHAP. reform. If anything be said too much, take it away; if anything be too little, add unto it; if anything be obscure, explain it; but do not wed yourself to your own opinion, and remember we must give an account of our ministry unto Christ." Cæsarem. Such advice, which might perhaps have been of some avail with a young man whose opinions were as yet unformed, was of course thrown away upon a practised writer who was simply asked to cast the whole treasure of his intellect in a new mould. Montague too went to the King, and found in James a sympathising auditor. "If that is to be a Papist," said James, "so am I a Papist." By the King's permission Appello he prepared a second book, entitled Appello Cæsarem, in which he vindicated more fiercely than ever his claim to be the true exponent of the doctrine of the Church; and this book, having been referred by James to Dr. White, Dean of Carlisle, was by him declared to contain nothing but what was agreeable to the public faith, doctrine, and discipline of the Church of England, and was accordingly licensed for the press. Before it was ready for publication, James died, and it was issued with a dedication to his successor. And now, on July 1, as soon as the question of supply had been settled, the Commons sent a deputation to Abbot to know what steps he had taken. The deputation found him much vexed. After telling them all that had happened, he complained that he had not even been informed of the intended publication of the second book till it was actually in the press. But he had no legal jurisdiction over Montague on the mere complaint of the House of Commons. All that he could say was that he would gladly give his judgment 1625. The Com July 1. mons apply to Abbot. CHAP. VI. 1625. July 1. The books referred to a Committee. English Story of upon the Appello Cæsarem whenever he should be 'orderly directed to it.' The attempt of the Commons to obtain the unofficial support of the Archbishop having thus fairly broken down, they referred the whole subject to the Committee by which the petition on Recusancy had been prepared. That the report of the Committee would be adverse to Montague was clearly to be foreseen. His opinions had made but little way amongst the lawyers and country gentlemen-the two most conservative classes in the nation-of whom the House was mainly composed. Nor indeed was it to be expected that the prevailing Calvinism would surrender its ground without a struggle. It had done great things for Europe. At a time when the individual tendencies of Protestantism threatened to run riot, it had given to men a consistent creed and an unbending moral discipline, which was yet Protestant to the core, because it was built upon the idea of the divine choice resting upon the individual soul, without the intervention of any priest or ecclesiastical society. Wherever the struggle with Rome was the deadliest, it was under the banner of Calvinism that the battle had been waged. Wherever in quiet villages, or in the lanes of great cities, any one woke up to the consciousness that a harder battle with sin was to be waged in his heart, it was in the strength of the Calvinistic creed that he had equipped himself for the contest. Alone with his God, the repentant struggling sinner entered the valley of the shadow of death. Alone with his God he stepped forth triumphantly to hold out a hand to those who had passed through the like experience with himself. The strength of the English Calvinists lay mainly in the humble peaceable men who found in it a safeguard against a life of sin. Such a one was the father 6 ENGLISH CALVINISM. of Richard Baxter. Around his Shropshire home, in the last ten years of James's reign, there was but little preaching at all. In one village there were four readers successively in six years' time,' ignorant men, and two of them immoral in their lives! In another there was a reader of about eighty years of age that never preached.' He said the Common Prayer by heart, and got a day-labourer or a stage-player to read the psalms and lessons. These were succeeded by others, one of whom obtained a living in Staffordshire, and, after preaching for twelve or sixteen years, was turned out on the discovery that his orders were forged. Then came an attorney's clerk who was a drunkard, and who took orders, or pretended to have done so, because he could not make his living in any other way. On Sundays and holidays these men read prayers, and taught school and tippled on the week days,' often getting drunk and whipping the boys. The villagers did not prosper under such shepherds. As soon as the hasty service was over on Sunday morning, they gathered round the maypole on the green and spent the rest of the day in dancing and jollity. To take no share in these riotous amusements was to incur the mockery of the little community, and to be called a Puritan, a word which then carried the deadliest reproach. Not that the elder Baxter had any wish to separate himself from the Church. He never scrupled Common Prayers or ceremonies, nor spoke against Bishops, nor ever so much as prayed but by a book or form, being not ever acquainted then with any that did otherwise; but only for reading Scripture when the rest were dancing on the Lord's Day, and for praying -by a form out of the end of the Common-Prayer Book-in his house, and for reproving drunkards and swearers, and for talking sometimes a few words of 211 CHAP. VI. 1625. July 1. CHAP. Scripture and the life to come, he was reviled commonly by the name of Puritan, Precisian, and hypocrite.' 1 VI. 1625. July 1. Reaction against 1 For most of those who took part in the conflict with Rome and the conflict within themselves, there was no disposition to shake off the Calvinistic doctrine. They felt it as a support rather than an incumbrance. They had no wish to probe it to its depths or to search out its weak points. Its moral strength was enough for them. Yet this could not last for ever. There was sure Calvinism. to come a time in every land when this feeling that religion was a conflict would die away, at least with some; when those who grew up strengthened by the surrounding influences of habitual piety would look to their religion rather as an intellectual framework to the quiet morality of their lives than as a struggle or an effort. In England it had come when men like Laud and Montague set themselves free from the bonds of Calvinistic dogmatism. They claimed to think for themselves in cases in which no decision had been pronounced, and to search for goodness and truth on every side. They were offended not merely by this or that doctrine of Calvinism, but with its presumption in repelling half the Christian Church of the present, and almost all the Christian Church of the past, from participation in the divine favour. They were offended with its dogmatism, with its pretensions to classify and arrange men's notions of mysteries which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, and they claimed the right to say that there were things on which the popular religion had pronounced clearly, which were nevertheless beyond the domain of human knowledge. Not a popular Even if, like the Arminians of the Netherlands, the moven.ent. rebellion against Calvinistic dogmatism had taken a 1 Baxter's Life, 1. |