sacerdotal party to adopt definitely either of these positions. That inability, I venture to assert, is now clearer than ever. The theories upheld by Dr. Hook and Mr. Blunt, and revived by Mr. Aubrey Moore,* are those, in the main, of Mr. Wakeman † and Mr. Nye, who strive to minimise the changes in the sixteenth century. Prominent on the other side is such a writer as the Rev. Nicholas Pocock, who, although one with Mr. Wakeman in aim, knew, as an expert on the Prayer-book, that no honest historian could so treat those changes, and therefore preferred to treat them as now of mere academic interest. + Dr. Lee, who (whatever we may think of his position) cannot be ignored as a writer on the Reformation period, has gone further in not only recognising, but accentuating, by evidence of his own, the changes then effected. § It is probable that, in spite of the craze for "continuity" at all costs, the facts of history would have forced the party to abandon what has been termed by Dr. Lee the Reformation romance, had not the controversy on Anglican Orders forced them to uphold the "orthodoxy" of those who framed and who accepted the Edwardine Ordinal. So the early reformers, after

all, appeared in the character of their "fathers."

The historian, of course, seeks only to learn what really happened in the Reformation period. So long as the sacerdotal party does not tamper with history, but confines itself to urging that the National Church is in no way bound by changes effected under Elizabeth, be is not directly concerned. We have, however, the great authority, on this subject, of Mr. Gladstone for holding that the Restoration settlement "was, as to all main interests [? intents] and purposes, an acceptance and revival of the Elizabethan settlement. On this, therefore, in giving an account of herself, the Church of England must fall back."¶This is a significant admission, on "the great Elizabethan settlement,' from one who had so deeply studied the subject, and who held on Church matters the views of "the Oxford Movement."

Nor, indeed, is it easy for those who have so sturdily maintained it, to abandon the ludicrous theory, constructed in the teeth of the facts, that what took place at the English Reformation was merely the rejection of the Pope's authority, which authority had been usurped, and the return to the state of things prevailing before that usurpation. As that theory is expressed in Mr. Nye's book:

"The casting off of a foreign Power which had held at its mercy both

CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, Nov. 1892, lxii. pp. 737–740.

+ Who dedicates his book to the memory of Mr. Aubrey Moore.

"English Historical Review," i. 681.

§ "The Church under Queen Elizabeth: an Historical Sketch."

Even now the Archbishop of Canterbury is telling his clergy, amidst cheers, that

they must not stop short of 1661, which is virtually such an abandonment.

Nineteenth Century, xxiv. 1. Canon MacColl ridicules Sir William Harcourt (Fortnightly Review, August, 1898, p. 281) for holding the same view.

*

Ibid. p. 5.

Church and nation for centuries was not soon to be forgotten.

It was

only by the providence of God that the Church of England came out of the fire in substance as she went in the glorious old Church of England, which she was for centuries before Reformation times-which she remains to this day."

"I was not going to risk my position," said Mr. Rhodes before the Raid Committee, "to change President Krüger for President J. B. Robinson." It is equally certain that the Protestant martyrs did not give their bodies to be burned merely because they wished to substitute the supremacy of the King for the supremacy of the Pope. And yet I do not hesitate to say that the children who are taught, in Church schools, from the Popular Story of Mr. Nye would not realise that a Protestant Reformation had ever taken place. What impression, for instance, is conveyed by the statement that among the "effects of the Reformation" was "the issue of an English Prayer-book in place of the service books then used in the Latin tongue"? There is, perhaps, a hidden meaning in the author's words at the outset, that "nothing which the people ought to know about this Church has been. kept back by the writer" (p. 6).

Everything, in fact, is sacrificed to the great "continuity" juggle, the confusion between the legal and institutional, and the doctrinal continuity of the Church. Of the Reformation Mr. Nye assures

us that

"It did not invalidate the continuity of the Church. . . . By the Reformation the Church lost, as we have seen, much of its worldly possessions, but one thing it preserved-its identity. Nothing is more certain than the fact that the Church of England before the Reformation, and the Church of England after the Reformation, was the same identical Church."

I have only space for one of the arguments and for one of the facts by which he supports his case. If a drunken man becomes sober, he does not, we read, lose his "identity." No doubt. We may add that if a Romanist becomes a Protestant he undoubtedly remains "the same man." His existence is continuous: his religion is not. So much for the force of Mr. Nye's argument. There remains his fact, namely, that "the Bishop of Durham, Tunstal, retained his See through all the changes." § Tunstal, as a fact, vehemently opposed the religious changes under Queen Elizabeth,|| and was deprived of his See in consequence. Mr. Froude

observes:

*The Church and Her Story," p. 132.

On p. 41, the successive revisions of the Prayer-book are similarly mentioned without the slightest hint of the marked doctrinal changes.

"The Church and Her Story," pp. 142-3. See Nineteenth Century, Feb. 1897, p. 200.

§ lbid. p. 143.

"Tunstal might have yielded, as he yielded before, had the question been merely that of the supremacy; but he informed Cecil that he could not agree to receive or allow any doctrine in his diocese other than Catholic."

Mr. Nye describes his work, at the beginning, as a "book of FACTS" (p. 2), and insists, at the end, that he is combating the "IGNORANCE of FACTS" (p. 220). I have now dealt with one of these "facts," published under the patronage of the Church Defence Institution, in a book "recommended for circulation" by "nearly all the bishops."

I have, unhappily, only space to deal in detail with a few points; and these I had better take from the history of the Reformation.

On the subject of the Protestant martyrs in Queen Mary's reign I desire to come to close quarters with Mr. Wakeman's book. They went to the stake, he tells us, " for anti-sacramental doctrine " (p. 226). That their doctrine was that which, under Queen Elizabeth, became the doctrine of the National Church is a fact which no one doubted at the time, but which, of course, Mr. Wakeman and his friends would deny with indignation and horror. He describes them in these words:

"The vast majority of those who suffered were not people even of religious influence. They were illiterate fanatics, convinced that the Pope was Antichrist and Transubstantiation idolatry" (p. 305).

Some such term as "illiterate fanatic was doubtless that which the Pharisees applied to those Galilean peasants whose northern patois betrayed them. But to come to the point, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Bancroft the great anti-Puritan, sanctioned, we shall find, so late as 1607, an authoritative statement that the Church of England had abandoned the "anti-Christian religion of the Church of Rome," in which, we read, "the Sacrament is most idolatrously adored."+ (p. 177).

Mr. Wakeman himself elsewhere admits that "the divines of the seventeenth century," whose "Catholicity " he exalts, sometimes went so far as to look on the Church of Rome "as nothing less than Antichrist" (p. 471). Were these also "illiterate fanatics"?

If there is one point more certain than another, it is that bishops of the Church of England have openly, solemnly, deliberately condemned the "idolatry" of the mass for more than three centuries. In the very earliest days of "the Elizabethan settlement" (1559),

* Ed. 1863, vii. 91.

The capitals are his own.

The same work exults in the fact that the Pope was proclaimed Antichrist by a Council (p. 97).

Guest, to whom sacerdotal apologists appeal as the one man who was really sound on the Sacrament, denounced Transubstantiation as a doctrine that hath caused much idolatrie." The anti-Puritan work to which I have referred above similarly asserts (1607) that Transubstantiation "hath bin the occasion of much superstition and idolatrie " (p. 174). Even at the height of the Laudian movement, the canons of 1640, passed under the Archbishop's own influence, denounce "the idolatry committed in the mass." Full three centuries after Guest's words (1862) there died an Archbishop of Canterbury, who had solemnly declared "in the presence of God," like his predecessors before him, when he first took his seat among the bishops, that the Sacrifice of the Mass, in the Roman Church, was "superstitious and idolatrous." "The Homilies which," Mr. Wakeman writes, "suggested to preachers the line of teaching which the bishops desired they should follow " (p. 315) denounce "this gross idolatry. . . . this mummish massing," and exhorted their hearers to be the cause of no idolatry, of no dumb massing." Lastly Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, whom Mr. Wakeman has described as a man "of the highest ability and reputation," and as "actuated by lofty and broad-minded sentiments," insisted, in merciless fashion, and in a standard theological treatise, § that Transubstantiation inevitably involved, through the adoration of the Host, "the sin of idolatry."

It would be an insult to Mr. Wakeman's intelligence to suppose that he is not perfectly aware of this standing accusation of "idolatry. And yet, if he is aware of it, what are we to say of his honesty?

Let us take one of his "illiterate fanatics," and learn the actual ground on which he was condemned for heresy. The curious record is preserved in the "Act Book of the Consistory Court of Norwich," (Vol. II.).|| On June 22, 1555, in the parish church of All Saints, Dunwich, before the vicar-general:

"Jacobus Abbes . . . dixit ut sequitur, 'that in the Sacrament of the altar, after the words of consecracion, there is non' other substance but the substance of brede and wyne, and that who so ever worship the same Sacrament worship an Idoll.' . . Sententiam per quam eundum Jacobum Abbes hereticum obstinatis et pertinacon' fuisse et esse.'

Here we have the teaching of the English Church, which rejects "the change of the substance of bread and wine," ** which asserts that "the sacramental bread and wine remain still in their very natural substances, and therefore may not be adored, for that were idolatry to be abhorred of all faithful Christians"; tt and which solemnly

* Died Bishop of Rochester, 1571.

+ Letter to Cecil on the Prayer-book. Homily on the Sacrament.

"The Principles of the Christian Religion Explained" (ed. 1700), pp. 172-5. Quoted in "East Anglian " (N.S. i. 97). I cite the Latin as it is given.

Article xxviii.

+ The "Black Rubric."

proclaimed, through its bishops for a hundred and fifty years, that "there is not any Transubstantiation of the Elements of Bread and Wine into the Body and Blood of Christ at or after the Consecration thereof by any person whatsoever." * Again, Pilkington's † phrase that, in the Mass, "they will give thee an idol of their own making which they call their God," echoes the words of the Protestant martyr, which, indeed, continued to resound in the Church, Archbishop Wake, in the last century, declaring it idolatrous " to give Divine Worship to a bit of bread," and a Bishop of Oxford, in the present one, admitting, though an anti-Puritan, that he had sworn "the sacrifice of the mass to be "idolatry." § One wonders whether this former Regius Professor of Divinity would also be described by Mr. Wakeman as an "illiterate fanatic."

As I stated at the outset, no one at the time could doubt that the doctrine of the Church was that of the Protestant martyrs. The invaluable work to which I have referred as issued under Bancroft's auspices in 1607 contains a passage insisting on the fact, which deserves to be quoted in full:

"The whole world is to knowe that the Church of England is not in religion changed or variable like the Moone; nor affecteth novelty or newe lessons, but holdeth stedfastly and conscionably that truth which by the Martyrs and other Ministers in this last age of the world hath bin restored unto this kingdome; and is grounded upon God's written word, the only foundation of our Faith.

"And being the same, all men again may see that we are still at Vnitie with the neighbour churches abroad in all matters of chiefest importance. . . . So our Church is the same." ||

...

Such was Anglican "continuity," as understood at the time itself. The Church was indeed "the same," as Mr. Nye so strenuously insists, but the same with that which had been "restored" by the Protestant martyrs and reformers, not, as he asserts, with that which "for centuries before Reformation times." existed Well might even a writer in the Church Quarterly Review "freely admit that no such idea could have existed in the days of Elizabeth.” ** Let us now turn to a subject of the very highest importance, I mean the destruction of the altars. No one could insist more strongly

on the meaning of this destruction than does Mr. Wakeman himself (pp. 288-291). Heading his paragraphs "Destruction of Altars," "Attack upon the doctrine of the Real Presence," he writes:

*See Nineteenth Century, May 1897, p. 847. + Bishop of Durham, 1561-1576. The Principles of the Christian Religion Explained" (ed. 1700), p. 172. "Hansard" (1829), vol. xxi. p. 82. Preface, sec. 29. "The Church and Her Story," p. 132. The "Church," of course, in what I say above is used in the sense of "doctrine" or "religion," not in what I term its institu

tional sense.

** Vol. xxxi. (1890) p. 152.