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LECTURE VII.

THE ELEMENTS OF RESTORATION.

1. THE TRANSITION YET INCOMPLETE.

UT of Lake Leman comes

66 the arrowy

OUT Rhone," beautiful as light from the clear

blue sky. You may have stood on the little promontory where the Arve issues forth to meet it, a red torrent from the Alps, once the crystal of melted snows but now arrayed like a papal legate. How the purer river writhes and refuses to be tainted! how the red ruffian presses and pushes it to the wall! Still the Rhone keeps up the contest as best he may. For a time he holds his own, but, alas! the red wins, and the sapphire disappears. What is visible to the common eye is no longer the blue Rhone, but only the blood-coloured Arve. Is the nobler river lost? By no means. It becomes the Rhone again, and rolls on superbly, through the broad lands where Irenæus planted the Gospel, under the walls of Lyons and Arles, and so to the sea. Behold a parable, that illustrates the Nicene Church in England, in her original glory and in her restored identity.

We have not yet reached the point where the stream runs red, precisely. To drop the figure, we must give a full century to the mischief done.

by the Norman primate who became a nominal "legate," and so let in the foreign element.1 As yet the struggle is kept up. The Normans are pushing the English aside, and they give way little by little. Here comes the first Plantagenet.

2. THE PLANTAGENETS.

But it was still the Normans under another name. When Henry II. has reigned twelve years, the Norman century is complete, and so is the Transition Period. Its landmark is found in the date of the "Constitutions of Clarendon "; not their acceptance in A. D. 1163, but their arrogant rejection in behalf of the Papacy two years later. Let us see how things stand, just here.

The moment of Henry's accession is marked by an event till then without example, and never duplicated since. An Englishman is made Pope, Nicholas Breakspear his honest Saxon name, but he is known as Adrian IV. Such an event was enough to turn the head of every ambitious priest in England. What might not happen next? The son of a London merchant, who had mingled his blood with that of a Saracen wife in the veins of his boy, proved just the character to be fired by such an event. The lad was sent to Italy for his education, where he had for his tutor that Gratian who compounded the Decretals with the Canon Law. This remarkable youth had become the Primate of all England when he subscribed the Constitutions; but in two years he not only recanted, but excom

1 Supra, page 208.

municated everybody that maintained them. But England did not recant. The Constitutions were destined to grow with her growth, and strengthen with her strength. There was in them a principle of life; they proved that native liberties died hard,

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— nay, were not doomed to die. The Constitutions were not pillars of the Church, but they were buttresses, and shored up her holy walls from outside. In the conflicts that followed, we cannot wholly sympathize with either party. Henry had prescribed the Constitutions, because they strengthened his powers to control the Church, under colour of the old Anglo-Saxon constitutions. Becket resisted his encroachments on the Anglican liberties; and so far, so good. But he did so to transfer us, hand and foot, to the Papacy, which was now a Paparchy also, wherever the new Canon Law was received. Such was the crisis, and thus the Constitutions of Clarendon become a landmark of vast significance. Feeble in themselves, they yet embodied the free principles of Frankfort and of Alcuin, capable though they were of abuse under a bad king. Enough, Becket detested them. With papal approval, he mounted the pulpit on Whit-Sunday at Vezelay, in France, and with dramatic pomp pronounced his anathemas. He read the Constitutions, and excommunicated the King's ministry who had framed them. The bells were rung backward, crosses turned upside down, and torches extinguished. King Henry was called upon to repent, or to expect a like anathema upon his own head.

3. THE SUBMISSION.

The Hildebrandine policy had triumphed, and the Anglican Church was under the Paparchy. No need to follow out the tragedy of the personal conflict between prince and primate. Every schoolboy knows how Henry at last compassed the murder of Becket, and with what heroic fortitude he fell. Our pictured primers of history made even childhood familiar with the penitent Henry, prostrate at Becket's tomb, and flogged on his bare back by grinning monks and acolytes. No doubt he deserved it, and possibly kings were not made any worse by finding that there was a power on earth that could "lay their honour in the dust." Hence the fallacy that enables a certain class of writers to eulogize the Popes. They miss the point. The horse, to be revenged on the stag, in Æsop, was delighted to call in a man and to submit to the saddle, while the man punished his enemy. done, the horse was greatly obliged to his rider, and wished him farewell. But no, he was saddled for life, and stalled besides, a slave to his deliverer. So, at this period, whoever called in the Pope to punish a tyrant soon found that he had a rider on his back whose little finger was heavier than a prince's loins.

This

Before this long reign came to a close, one incident is a token of vitality. The primate Baldwin was arrogantly overruled by the pontiff, so sudden was his assumption of power over the metropolitan. The good primate took no notice of the aggression, but legates were sent from Rome with

mandates, inhibitions, and excommunications. The parochial clergy rose to uphold their primate, and fearlessly proclaimed to their flocks that such a sentence from foreign parts had no force in England. Yet the yoke of the Decretals was upon her. Not by any action of hers, not by any definition of pontifical powers or rights, but passively, she became as the strong ass of Issachar, "couching down between two burdens," the burden of the Norman invaders and the far heavier pack of the papal usurpation.

4. TWO FORCES.

Henceforth we have two organized forces in conflict, more or less, without rest, for four centuries. I cannot affect neutrality in such a quarrel. When, in all the light of what followed, I find the foreign usurpation uniformly labouring to destroy the Nicene Constitutions, the ancient liberties of the Anglican Church, the purity of the Holy Gospels, and the dearest rights of humanity in the household and in the state, I take my stand without a doubt as to the right. These conflicts are my conflicts. My forefathers fought them out in my behalf. the long struggles of the Anglican Church I read the history of our own Church, and my spiritual and intellectual origin. I am identified with past generations, and with all who frame their thought. Here are my own antecedents. If I had lived in those times, I should have been involved in all the difficulties of my sires. I should have shared their ignorance, their honest credulity, their enslave

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