essentials are Catholic; its accidents and incidents are local and ethnical. When the Church of England is described as "Protestant," the door is opened to a grave misunderstanding. It is certainly true that the great divines of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were accustomed to describe themselves as Protestants. The Tractarians inaugurated the modern dislike of the name, but in justice it must be admitted, on the one hand, that the older Anglican divines, while using the name, and even in some cases admitting on specific grounds of equity the ordinations of non-episcopal Churches,* were careful to emphasise the distinctively Catholic character of their own Church; and, on the other hand, that the course of modern controversy has rendered the language which they used, and the liberty which they allowed, open to certain misconstructions, which then had no likelihood. Jeremy Taylor habitually refers to the Church of England as Protestant, herein, as we have said, following the general practice; but he seems to connect Protestantism specifically with monarchical sentiments and the maintenance of Episcopacy. The Papacy, to his thinking, was the natural foe of the monarch and the bishop. In his great sermon before the Irish Parliament in 1661 he seems to distinguish between "Presbyterians" and "Protestants," and he bases on the fact of their Protestantism a very earnest ex

V. THORNDIKE, Works, vol. i. part ii. p. 503 fol. ; also vol. v. p. 297. BRAMHALL, Works, vol. iii. p. 475: "I dare not limit the extraordinary operation of God's Spirit, where ordinary means are wanting, without the default of the persons." Also p. 517 fol., where he quotes with approval the well-known opinion of Bishop Andrewes: "He is blind who doth not see Churches consisting without it (Episcopacy)." Cosin justified communicating with the Protestants in Paris to avoid scandal. In the sixteenth century there was hardly any question about the validity of ordinations and sacraments in the foreign reformed Churches: but the revolutionary character of that age scarcely admits of the notion that its practice can be accepted as illustrative of anything more than immediate exigency.

SENSES OF THE TERM "PROTESTANT" 9

hortation to his hearers to active support of the restored Bishops.*

"For I beseech you to consider, all you that are true Protestants. Do you not think that your religion is holy and apostolical, and taught by Christ, and pleasing unto God? you do not think so, why do you not leave it? but if you do think so, why are you not zealous for it? Is not the government a part of it? It is that which immures, and adorns, and conducts all the rest, and is established in the Thirty-sixth Article of the Church, in the public service-book, and in the book of consecration; it is therefore a part of our religion, and is not all of it worth preserving ?"†

In the fine sermon, entitled Via Intelligentiae, preached before "the little, but excellent University of Dublin," he says plainly that "perfect submission to kings is the glory of the Protestant cause." It is hardly too much to say that by "Protestant," apart from the notion of opposition to Romanism, Jeremy Taylor meant those very qualities. of the National Church which are most offensive to the "good Protestant" of contemporary agitation. If we deprecate the use of the term, as descriptive of the Church of England, it is certainly with no design of derogating from the greatness of Protestantism, with no reflection on the older usage of English Churchmen, with no desire to claim for the Church of England any other character than that which is assumed in the Prayer-book. Our sole reason is the wish to secure lucidity, and so to escape the numerous confusions which have arisen from no other cause than lack of lucidity. The word "Protestant" is currently used in at least three distinct senses, and it is important to recognise how far, if at all, these senses can be asserted for the Church of England. Thus (i.) it will be

JEREMY TAYLOR's Works, ed. Heber, vol. vi. pp. 348-9. I have been assured by Irish friends that the term "Protestant" still stands in the common parlance of Ireland for a member of the Church of Ireland. Ibid., p. 398.

+ Ibid., pp. 361-2.

universally admitted that in the strict historical sense of the word the Church of England is not Protestant. In that sense the term belongs exclusively to those reformed Churches which subscribe the "Confession of Augsburg," presented to Charles V., in 1530, by the German princes who had "protested" at the Diet of Spires in the preceding year against the Emperor's revocation of the tolerant Edict issued in 1526. Nor (ii.) will it be denied by any candid person that there is a further controversial use of the term, in which it is applied to those reformed denominations which reject the episcopal government and the doctrine of apostolic succession which that government assumes, and that in this sense also the Church of England cannot be called "Protestant."* There remains (iii.) nothing but the broad distinction of the Reformation itself. If "Protestant" be synonymous with "reformed," and carry no further suggestion, then the Church of England is Protestant. All the doctrine which is involved in the specific repudiation of the mediaval conception of Christendom is necessarily Anglican. Thus the proper opposite of "Protestant" is not "Catholic," but "Papist." In this restricted sense it is used in the Coronation Oath and in the Act of Settlement. Neither in the Prayer-book nor in the Articles does it appear. In face of these facts it ought not to carry any offensive suggestion if, in the interest of accuracy, the name is set aside in favour of the term "Anglican," which hardly admits of misconception to the same extent, or of the same degree of gravity.

* Dr. Martineau's acuteness led him to recognise frankly the nonProtestant character of the Church of England. "It is undeniable that the sacramental and priestly doctrine embodied in the Anglican movement is fully authorised by the formularies of the Church, and that no clergyman who disbelieves it can have given a veracious ‘assent and consent,' 'willingly and ex animo,' 'to all things contained in them."" The raison d'être of the Protestant, pure and simple, in the English Church is solely historical, and as such it is adequate.

Anglicanism, then, is a distinctive thing in Christendom, not distinctive in any fatal sense, but necessarily expressing thus the singular historic conditions under which the Church of England was reformed, and filling thus the rôle in Christendom, which neither the Protestant Churches nor the Papal Communion, for different reasons, can fill with the same hope of success. It is worth while to dwell on

these aspects of Anglicanism.

1. The Reformation may be considered and described from many points of view, and it is hardly possible in a few sentences to indicate with any justice its range and gravity. As a political movement, it expressed the maturity of nationhood.

The united Christendom of the crusades had long vanished, and almost suddenly modern Europe discovered itself to view. The English Reformation reflected the comparatively advanced stage of the national develop

Circumstances had favoured English independence; and the Statute-book already contained enactments which, in the hands of Henry VIII., could serve as the effectual instruments of ecclesiastical revolution. It was no mere fiction that in abolishing papal authority he was vindicating for his "imperial" crown its ancient prerogatives, but those prerogatives had in the past been exercised within the sphere of Christendom, under the conditions of Catholic sovereignty. When these terms and limits expired, the royal supremacy took an altogether novel and portentous character. Thus it is not true to infer from the anti-papal legislation of the Middle Ages that the Church of England enjoyed in those times an exceptional measure of independence. Nowhere was the papal claim to spiritual and ecclesiastical sovereignty more fully conceded than in England, and nowhere was it more rigorously enforced. "The evidence of an unquestioned acceptance of the spiritual jurisdiction of the Pope as

head of the Christian Church is simply overwhelming." * But not less overwhelming is the evidence of friction becoming ever more acute between the developing national self-consciousness and the Papacy. The Tudor sovereigns embodied the patriotic sentiment of the English people; and it was no difficult task to utilise in the ecclesiastical sphere the anti-Roman feeling which was traditional in the sphere of politics.† Anglicanism necessarily reflects the influence of that tide of national feeling which has given distinctive colour and character to our constitution, our literature, our social customs, our architecture; but this need not of itself have involved any breach with the theology of mediaval Christendom. The Reformation, however, was not solely or mainly political, though in the early stages of the English movement the political aspect was paramount. It was "an attempt to restore the equilibrium of science and religion, which had been disturbed by the gradual growth of human knowledge,” in consequence of which "a monstrous antagonism had grown up between the conclusions of human reason and the decisions of the Church." In a recent volume Dom Gasquet labours to prove that the Renaissance found its natural ally and most ungrudging patron in the mediaval Church; but he only succeeds in showing what no one disputes-that many eminent ecclesiastics were themselves disciples of the new learning. It is noteworthy that Erasmus, on whom Dom Gasquet builds much, "takes a place of extraordinary prominence" in the first Papal Index. ‡

GASQUET, The Eve of the Reformation, p. 79.

+ Cf. Dr. Gardiner's observation [History, vol. ix. p. 145]: "The divine right of kings had been a popular theory when it coincided with a suppressed assertion of the divine right of the nation."

Official lists of prohibited books are, of course, much older; but in 1557, and again in 1559, Pope Paul IV., through the Inquisition at Rome, published what may be regarded as the first Roman Index in the modern ecclesiastical use of that term," v. Enc. Brit. vol. xii. p. 730. For the modern Index see Urbs et Orbis, by W. Humphrey, S.J., p. 415 fol.