PREFACE. THE following paper was not intended for publication at the time it was delivered; and would not have been published in its first rough state, but for circumstances which had been caused without my knowledge. Nevertheless I thought it better to let it go as it then stood. Since its publication, a great many answers and objections have been made to it from various quarters. I therefore think it well briefly to reply to the more important of them; but as I wish to avoid all appearance of personal controversy, I omit the names of the public journals in which such answers and objections have appeared. 1. I affirmed that wheresoever the civil and spiritual powers have been united in one temporal sovereign, civil despotism and religious persecution have followed. In answer, it was objected that the state of this country is a refutation. In the context of the passage objected to, I had expressly precluded this answer: first, by pointing out that civil despotism and religious persecution prevailed in this country for two hundred years; that is, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thereby excluding the present time; secondly, that the reaction against the excessive prerogatives of the Crown and its ecclesias tical supremacy had vindicated a complete religious freedom for Scotland, Ireland, and one-half of the people of England. In the outset of the paper, I referred to a previous Essay read by me before the Academia, from which I insert the following passage as a full reply to the above objection: 'In opening our proceedings of the year before last, I made certain observations on the state and tendency of religious thought in England, and on the temper and spirit in which we ought to meet it. And now, in addressing you at the outset of our eighth year, I do not know that I can do better than to take up the same subject where I left off. In the conclusion of the paper I then read were these words: "The Royal supremacy has perished by the law of mortality, which consumes all earthly things." I need hardly guard my words by saying that I spoke only of the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown. The civil and political supremacy was never contested. The power of the Crown, if less absolute in its mode of procedure, was never more supreme and never so widely spread as now. Its indefeasible prerogatives in the order of civil Government have become more evident and irresistible in proportion as it has disengaged itself from the monstrous pretensions of Henry VIII. The theory of established Churches demands an ecclesiastical supremacy in the civil power. The two come and go together; and when the ecclesiastical supremacy is declining, the days of establishments are numbered. In the year before last, I pointed out the fact that the Tudor statutes have almost passed away. The greater part are actually erased from the Statute-book. Those that remain are almost equally dead. The mind of the country is against them. In Ireland, all the tyranny of Tudors and Stuarts failed to impose the Royal supremacy upon a Catholic people. Penal laws could not accomplish it. The Established Church has not only utterly failed to conciliate the people of Ireland to the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Crown, but it has rendered the name and thing more than ever intolerable.1 In Scotland, the whole people rose against it. In England, half the population has gradually rejected it. The remaining half of the people passively endure it; but in the Established Church itself, a large class profess to limit the jurisdiction of the Crown in ecclesiastical matters to the temporal accessories of spiritual things, denying altogether its competence to touch any matter purely spiritual, and reject all Royal acts exceeding these limits as abuses or excesses of power. Now, though this theory is manifestly not the law of the land, it is nevertheless worthy of our sympathy and respect. It is an additional evidence of the cancelling of the Tudor supremacy from many of the best and highest minds in the Established Church. They who hold this theory protest against all such judgments as that in the case of Mr. Gorham, and of the Essays and Reviews. They treat them as tyrannical acts of the State, external to the Church of England. They contend that the Church of England is persecuted, but not committed, by such acts of the 1 Since this was written the Established Church in Ireland has ceased to exist. |