THE EJECTMENT OF THE PURITANS IN 1662

Evening Star, Issue 14965, 27 August 1912, Page 8

THE EJECTMENT OF THE PURITANS IN 1662

At All Saints' Church on Sunday evening Dean Fitchett presented the Church of England view of this event. After referring to the Reformation as a movement essentially noble in its purpose—that of freeing the Church from errors, superstitions, abuses developed during the Dark Ages—and as an inevitable consequence of the Revival of Learning, he said that although such a movement necessarily involved conflict, the confusion and strife marking the whole Reformation period must be charged mainly against the reformers themselves, their dissensions, their excesses and extravagances, faults to which no Christian to-day should look back < without pain and shame. Emancipation from the accustomed restraints of ecclesiastical authority had left each man to become his own Pope, sufficient in himself, intolerant of others. In England, under the Tudor sovereigns Henry VIII;, Edward VI., Mary, Elizabeth, the struggle between the old and the new fluctuated wildly, each side persecuting the other in turn and as opportunity offered—burning bishops at the stake, hanging clergy from their own church towers, the Romanist a heretic in one reign, the Protestant in the next. When, in the reign of Elizabeth, severance from Rome became complete and final, these alternations ended, and the Reformation in England entered upon its second stage; characterising which the historian Hallam says: "Those ominous symptoms which had appeared in its earlier stage—disunion, virulence, bigotry, intolerance—far from yielding to any benignant influence, grew more inveterate and incurable." In the English Church three parties defined themselves—those who clung to episcopacy and the prayer book; those who wished to vest church government in the congregation ; and those who wished to vest it ill the elders of several congregations acting together. These latter two, the Independents and the Presbyterians, were collectively the Puritan party. It may be said of all parties alike that religious toleration in the modern sense was to them a thing unknown ; nothing could be more remote from their spirit and system. Under the Stuart kings James I. and Charles I. this distracted condition of the English Church continued, and under the Commonwealth culminated in the triumph of the Puritan party. In 1644 the Long Parliament made the use of the prayer book illegal, and at the same time enforced on all persons subscription to the Scottish Solemn League and Covenant. Under this law a large proportion of the episcopal clergy—about 7,000, it is estimated—were ejected from their livings. Eleven years later, in 1655, a law of the same Parliament forbade the use of the prayer book in private houses, and prohibited the ejected clergy from acting as tutors or schoolmasters. And so, as Lord Maeaulay writes, "it was a crime in a child to read by the bedside of a sick parent one of those beautiful collects which had soothed the griefs of forty generations of Christians. Clergymen of respectable character were ejected from their benefices by thousands. Churches and sepulchres, fine works of art. and curious remains of antiquity were brutally defaced." In how many other ways Puritan tyranny made itself odious—for instance, in prohibiting all sports and games, and in decreeing that Christmas Day should be observed not as a festival but as a close fast—may be read in the pages of any secular history dealing with the period. But in the nature of things these absurdities could only be shortlived. The temper of the nation changed; in 1660 monarchy was restored ; and in the following year Parliament passed an Act of Uniformity, requiring all persons ministering in the Church of England to be episcopally ordained and to use the prayer book. A date was set—August 24, 1662, St: Bartholomew's Day—on which the Act was to come into force. Many Puritan ministers conformed and retained their parishes, submitting to episcopal ordination if they had not already received it; the nonconforming section—to the number of 2,000, it is said—ceased automatically to be ministers of the Church of England. Continuing, the Dean said:—" This is the Black Bartholomew, so called, as though the day were marked by some great calamity or crime. We do not accept the name. Pity for the Puritan ministers who in 1662 were ejected from Church of England pulpits and parsonages must be tempered by the consideration that these men had usurped the place of lawful ministers of the Church ejected by a Puritan Parliament only a few years earlier. If it may be said that extreme had generated extreme, as indeed it always does, it remains, nevertheless, that by the Act of 1662 substantial justice was done. At this distance of time we regret the. exclusion of the Puritans. The true note of the Church is comprehension; Christians widely differing should school themselves to live together in ono communion in charity, each a modifying influence upon the other. If in some things there must be uniformity—and every modern denomination enforces it —the Church of 1C62 set it at the minimum. Before the breach in that year attempts at compromise were made and had failed. At the Savoy Conference in the previous year the_ Puritan leaders showed some disposition to accept episcopacy, but alleged difficulties of conscience about the praj'er book, objecting to the use of the cross, in baptism and of the ring in marriage"; the wearing of surplices, and the practice of kneeling at the holy communion —on these four points they held out for conscience' sake. Perhaps not even yet do we easily recognise that conscience is simply the man's own judgment, and that his judgment in things religious is of no more sanctity than his judgment in things secular. If conscience were infallible, a divine voice within the man, its testimony would bealways and everywhere the same. We should not find, as we do, the conscience of ono man commanding what the conscience of another man forbids. The truth needs asserting that conscience is often merely another name for the conceit of ignorance and the obstinacy of self-will. Looking back at the whole wretched story' of Reformation controversies, we may thank God that a better spirit now rules; and that although Christians have not yet attained to uniformity, they have made some real approach towards spiritual unity. The past is the past, and we may let the dead bury its dead. Our plain duty is to discourage and resent any attempt to revive to-day amongst Christian communities dwelling side by side in peace the rancors and animosities of that disastrous time."