geon, "that the Puritans, who had been like the spring buds and blossoms, were getting into the sere and yellow leaf, and the Independents and Baptists and other sects, who were at times thoroughly and even remarkably spiritual, were getting worldly, political, and vainglorious. They had an opportunity of grasping the carnal sword, and they embraced that opportunity;' and from that very moment many of them lost the spirituality SPURGEON ON FOX. for which they had been eminent. The danger was AND CARLYLE lest the evangelical sects should quietly settle down into one State Church, make a scramble for the good things of the ecclesiastical establishment, and preach, each one after its own fashion, in the numbness of death rather than in the power of life. At that very moment God sent into the world George Fox, who must have been the most troublesome man in the world to those good easy souls who counted on a quiet season of sleep. They had said, 'Soul, take thine ease, thou hast much goods laid up for many years.' It was by the mouth of George Fox that God said to each one of them, Thou fool.' George Fox, it seems to me, was a blessing, not to you alone, but to the whole of Christendom. He stood up in the face of the Christian world and said to it, No, thou shalt not do this. Thou shalt not conform thyself to the world. Thou shalt not go into unholy alliance with the State, there shall still be in the midst of thee a spiritual people, who shall bear their protest that Christ's kingdom is not of this world, and that religion standeth not in form and ceremonies, but is a matter connected with the inner man, and is the work of God's Spirit in the heart.' I look upon George Fox rather as a practical than a doctrinal man." Thomas Carlyle speaks of the "farewell service of his awl," the leather suit of clothes which George Fox made for himself. "Stitch away, thou noble Fox: every prick of that little instrument is pricking into the heart of slavery, and World-worship, and the Mammongod. Thy elbows jerk as in strong swimmer-strokes, and every stroke is bearing thee across the prison-ditch, within which Vanity holds her workhouse and Ragfair, into lands of true liberty, where, the work done, there is in broad Europe one Free Man, and thou art he. 1 He refers to the inclusion of the Congregationalists and Baptists in Cromwell's comprehensive Church scheme, their taking their position as State-protected bodies, and enjoying the dignity and rewards which came from their semiunion with the State. * Lecture on George Fox, quoted by Barclay, p. 191. 3 Sartor Resartus, bk. iii, ch. i. CHAPTER X. THE ROMAN CATHOLICS. THE history of the English Catholics from the close of the Reformation to the opening of the recent period is relatively monotonous and unimportant. They had little to do with the enrichment of English life, religion, theology, literature, science, or art. This, however, can hardly be laid against A SMALL BODY. them, because they existed as a small, despised, persecuted sect, decimated and kept down by unrighteous laws, which were sometimes enforced with rigor and at other times allowed to slumber. UNDER When James I came to the throne, in 1603, the Roman Catholics had reason to believe that their lot would be improved. They founded this (1) on the consideration that the king would naturally not care to persecute those of his mother's faith; (2) on his assurances that he was averse to bloodshed; (3) on his JAMES I. distinct promise that he would not molest them so long as they remained in quiet loyalty to his government. In fact, James was, in his way and according to his light, a kind of apostle of toleration. He deliberately entered into correspondence with the pope to see if some common platform could be secured on which he and the Roman Catholics might live together in peace. He proposed that the pope should promise to excommunicate any who rose in rebellion against him. The pope, of course, could not agree to govern his censures according to the dictates of a Protestant, but he promised to discourage all such risings. For a time James kept his promise. Everything looked favorable to the Roman Catholics; at least, it seemed that they were now to have a cessation of the Elizabethan horrors. The question of toleration for Roman Catholics was not so simple then as now. (1) They themselves did not believe in toleration. Every Catholic government in Europe was visiting Protestants not only with fines and imprisonments, but with death, and sometimes with wholesale massacre or extermination. (2) Self-preservation is the first law of governments. If the hand of repression were removed from the Roman Catholics, might they not so increase that they would TOLERATION become dangerous to the State? In the first days of James's reign this increase became an actual fact, so that the authorities were alarmed. (3) Catholicism had stood for a theory of Church and State which made all governments suspicious. It is true that the new State Church of England was logically carrying out a similar theory, though the very action of that State Church in breaking from universal Catholicism made her tyrannical attitude a selfstultification. Europe had not worked itself free from the spell of mediæval traditions, much less of medieval memories. Catholic countries were still faithful to the old history, and we may not wonder that in England Catholic emancipation did not come in that century or much later. Protestant emancipation in some Catholic countries yet lingers. James made good his promise that the Catholics would not be molested. This meant much when we remember that then and long after the profession of Catholicism by attending mass was a capital crime. That is, the mere fact of saying mass was sufficient to bring a priest under the penalties of treason, and those penalties were extended to all who should assist or comfort him. As every Catholic at some time or other attended mass, it was evident that the life of every one of them might be forfeited, if the government were determined to proceed against them, and could find evidence. But this horrible law was rather held over their heads in terrorem than actually put into effect on any large scale. The authorities were ordinarily content with the fines for recusancy-that is, for not attending Episcopal Church. Catholics were always liable to imprisonment and these fines, "and they dare not complain, as they were allowed to escape without suffering the full penalty of the law.” 1 At first James allowed the fines to rest, but soon aban FINES 1 Gardiner, Hist. of England, 1603-42, i, 96. So far as laws were concerned, the Catholics had little hope. The Supremacy act of 1559 threatened with death anyone who would not acknowledge the spiritual headship of the sovereign. The act against the Jesuits and Seminarists, 1585, threatened with death all priests who were in the kingdom after a certain date, and made all persons who should relieve or aid them in any way also liable to death. This act was reinforced by another in 1603, and proclamations of similar tenor were issued in 1604, 1606, and 1625. The Test act of 1673 provided that no one could hold office who would not receive the Anglican sacrament, that no one not born a Catholic could train up their children in Catholicism, and that all persons to whom the act applied should be obliged to make a declaration against transubstantiation. See the text of these and other acts in Gee and Hardy, Nos. 79, 85, 120. doned this, and ordered them collected. This, with other reasons, led a hare-brained priest, William Watson, to form a plot for the seizure of the king's person, in order to compel him to grant better measures to Catholics. Another priest, however, disclosed the plot to the government, and this soap-bubble conspiracy came to nothing.' Under this tolerant policy the Catholics rapidly increased. The missionary priests were active, no less than one hundred and forty having landed in the nine months since Elizabeth's death. The increase led to the promulgation of a decree that by March 19, 1604, the priests should have left England. About the same time MORE the king made a speech in parliament in which he outlined his policy. The Catholic laity were not to be molested so long as they remained quiet and would not try to win converts, and if any unjust laws oppressed the innocent, these laws would be revised. As to the clergy, they must be banished the kingdom unless they would disown the doctrine that the pope possessed an "imperial civil power over all kings and emperors," and the doctrine that an excommunicated king might be lawfully assassinated. The laws fining the laity and banishing the clergy, which were now renewed, were soon put into effect. A priest was executed at Salisbury for saying mass, 1604, and a layman suffered the same fate for encouraging him. At Manchester several persons suffered death, September 21, 1604; such priests as were in prison were sent over the sea. The recusancy fines were put in execution, and James and his council became more than determined to proceed against all dissenters— Puritans and Catholics. These severe measures were met by one of the most celebrated plots in the history of the world—a plot unsurpassed for its daring and diabolical intent. This was the Gunpowder Plot, in which it was determined at the opening of parliament on Novem THE GUN- ber 5, 1605, to blow up the king and queen and family, and the Lords and Commons-Catholic and Protestant. This was to be followed by a rising of the Catholic gentry, and a succession to the throne under guarantees of justice to the Catholics. The plot was discovered the day before the fifth, owing to an anonymous letter received by one of the Catholic lords warning him against attending parliament that day-a letter which he immediately turned over to the 1 Tierney, Dodd, vol. iv, App., and Gardiner, l. c., i, 108 ff., give full particulars of Watson's plot. authorities. Of this famous plot it should be said: (1) Outside the half dozen men in the plot, and a few who had been entangled into the rising, the Catholics not only knew nothing of the plot, but would have regarded it with horror. (2) This applies to the Jesuits and all the clergy, it might fairly be said, even although the conspirators received the communion binding each other to secrecy from the Jesuit Gerard, who was not, however, let into the plot, and although the head of the Jesuits in England, Garnet, knew of the plot by confession, and might have known of it outside of confession if he had allowed the information to be communicated. (3) From the fact that the Jesuit Greenway knew of the plot by confession, gave absolution to the plotters, and refrained from forbidding their crime or thwarting it, but rather indorsed it, and from the fact that his chief, Garnet, took substantially the same attitude, though he said he looked upon their deed with abhorrence, the Order of Jesus and the Church are indirectly implicated as accomplices and abettors. (4) Perhaps equally damaging to the constructive treason and murder chargeable to Garnet was his use of equivocation at his trial, founded as it was on a treatise on equivocation corrected by his own hand, and therefore not to be understood as the effort of a desperate man to clear himself, but rather as the legitimate carrying out of an ethical principle. Garnet held that it was not only right for a prisoner to use falsehood, on the ground that a magistrate had no right to compel him to accuse himself, but he held the immoral doctrine of equivocation, that the speaker could put any meaning upon his words, and he was not responsible if the hearer understood them in the ordinary or probable sense.' (5) The effort of Father Gerard, S. J., as a part of the general movement of Catholic scholars to revise the judgments of history, to throw dust on the reality of the Gunpowder Plot by trying to show that the evidence is not sufficient to prove it, or is capable of another explanation, or that the whole plot was manufactured by James's prime minister to induce the king to proceed further against the Catholics, has been shown by Gardiner in a fair and unbiased investigation to be an instance of special pleading which breaks down at all critical points. The history of the whole plot can be traced with minuteness by contemporary evidence.' 1 Gardiner, i, 280, 281; Jardine, Gunpowder Plot, p. 334. 2 Wm. Gerard, S. J., What Was the Gunpowder Plot? Lond., 1897; 2d ed., 1899. This is answered by The Edinburgh Review, Jan., 1897, pp. 183 ff., and by S. R. Gardiner, What Gunpowder Plot Was, Lond. & N. Y., 1897. Gerard |