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through them Christ extends to the faithful the power of His incarnate life, how is God incarnate in Christ? Thus we are led step by step to the divine Unity in Trinity. Hooker wrote more prophetically than he knew or his own contemporaries understood. We shall see in the fifth lecture how Calvinism in England and America was dogged by Unitarianism. The divorce from nature, the depreciation of outward things in the service of God, the reduced value attached to sacraments, combined to deprive the doctrines of the Atonement, of the Incarnation, of the Trinity, of their proper lines of defence, and minister after minister, congregation after congregation, abandoned the Christ of the New Testament for the idols fashioned by Arius, Socinus, and Priestley.

There is room in the Church for all that is noble in the Puritan's view of the sovereignty and the majesty of God, but it needs combining with the truth that He declares His almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity to all His children. There is room for the fear of the Puritan that attention to things that are seen may divert us from the things that are eternal, but this fear must be balanced by the assurance that our Lord Jesus Christ has made all this visible world a Holy Land, and that, as the Fathers so often taught, His redeeming work is not in opposition to the original creation. The best Catholicism has always contained, and must contain, what we may call a Puritan element. But is there one among us who would say that Archbishop Laud and the other Caroline divines were wrong in refusing to believe that God has created multitudes who are not ethical agents and must inevitably be damned?

Free or not free, that is the question. Our bishops, in appealing to the faith and practice of the primitive Church, were appealing to certain great principles of permanent authority. It is quite true that we find many and serious diversities

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of opinion in the ancient Fathers. But we also find a noble unity as to the nature of Christian life and salvation, and the character and object of Christian worship. This unity in experience and worship gradually expressed itself in a growing unity of creed, Lex orandi, lex credendi. And our present Prayer Book, that of 1662, is a fine exponent of that law. It was faithful to the best religious thought of that time and has continued to exercise a beneficent influence on a multitude of Christians. If our enlarged knowledge makes us conscious of its very rare defects, and desirous of its future enrichment, let us remember that the Scripture ascribes the power of rightly divining things to come only to that Wisdom which is conversant with God and knoweth things of old '.

English ecclesiastical art of the end of the seventeenth century, like all real ecclesiastical art, is an index to the religious sentiment of the time that gave it birth. If we turn back to the earlier years of that century we can see in the beautiful chapel of Wadham College a Gothic survival; it is just archaic, intentionally so, because its archaism has a spiritual value. But in the work of Sir Christopher Wren we find the same art taking a new form developed by a distinct individual talent. If his fame mainly rests upon the great cathedral church that he built in London, his smaller churches have the same quality of dignity and fitness; they show the same mastery of conditions, the same skill in harmonizing the old and the modern. The chapel of Trinity College, probably designed by Aldrich, but certainly modified to meet the suggestions of Wren, has the same excellence. A portion of Wren's mantle fell upon his immediate successors. There are provincial towns and poverty-stricken districts in outer London containing refined and vigorous churches designed by this school, churches with towers and spires that recall the unique beauty of the work of Wren. The elements of their design

are Roman, but Rome has no spires like these spires of England. As they lift themselves from and above the noisy streets, with their white stone against the grey sky, let them tell us of a worship which is not the worship of Mammon, and remind us not only of the inheritance which we have already by grace received, but also of an inheritance incorruptible, reserved in heaven for all who will.

III

CONTINENTAL PROTESTANTISM FROM

1520 TO 1700

Ps. cxix. 105: Thy word is a lantern unto my feet and a light unto my paths.

THE different forms which the Reformation assumed in different countries followed at first the national and political characteristics of those countries. The Reformation is therefore as complex as the Church life of the later Middle Ages, and it would be misleading to speak of it in England and Scotland, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, and Scandinavia, as if it were in each case the result of the same causes or led everywhere to the acceptance of the same principles. Yet one main cause was everywhere the same; it was the determination to submit no longer to a rule which constantly invoked God's sanction for actions which were not religious and sometimes not moral. Everywhere therefore there was a denial of the alleged right of the Pope to exercise such an authority as was claimed for him by the early mediaeval False Decretals which Rome now acknowledges to be false, and a repudiation of the late mediaeval indulgence system which Rome acknowledges to have been connected with grave abuses.

Everywhere there was a fresh appeal to the Scriptures, a revival of translation of the Scriptures into vernacular languages, and a use of the Scriptures to which the Roman Catholic Church is now extending a rather belated toleration.1 Together with the revival of Bible study came a wide

1 See G. G. Coulton, The Roman Catholic Church and the Bible. Published by the author at Great Shelford, Cambs., 1921.

though not quite universal use of the language of the people in the services of the Church. Communion in both kinds was everywhere asserted to be the right of all communicants and was permitted after the Council of Trent in several dioceses of the Roman Catholic Church, though it was afterwards withdrawn from all those of the Latin rite.1 It was everywhere permitted to the clergy to marry either before or after ordination, whereas the Roman Catholic Church only permits marriage, and that before ordination, to priests of the Oriental Churches which are united with Rome. This brief list nearly exhausts the common features of the Reformation in matters strictly religious and of serious importance. The practice of asking the saints now with Christ for their prayers, a practice which the Council of Trent too feebly safeguarded against the recrudescence of grave abuses, became almost entirely abandoned in all countries where the Reformation prevailed. This abandonment formed no part of the original English Reformation. And if these requests for the prayers of Christ's friends had been maintained, together with prayers for the faithful departed, within the limits laid down by our Church in the time of Henry VIII, less injury would have been done to the doctrine of the communion of saints and less stimulus would have been given to the unwholesome necromancy which has led so many dupes from the medium to the madhouse.

The Reformation in Great Britain we have already considered, and some features of the Reformation on the Continent now demand our attention.

The Lutheran Reformation embraced a very large part of what was recently the German Empire, including East Prussia from which it spread farther east along the Baltic.

1 Papal briefs of April the 16th, 1564, to the Archbishops of Mainz, Köln, Trier, Salzburg, Prague, and Gran, permitted the chalice to the laity.

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