sesses a right of confirmation, that is, the assignment of an ordained minister to a given cure. And though the election of pastors belongs to the church, this may, for good reasons, be taken into the hands of the sovereign. Instances in point are easily found, and the chapter upon the subject contains an interesting historical summary of this part of ecclesiastical law. In every case the sovereign has a right of annulling an election, and also of removing a pastor from the local exercise of his ministry."

Remark upon this theory.

49. This is the full development of an Erastian theory, which Cranmer had early espoused, and which Hooker had maintained in a less extensive manner. Bossuet has animadverted upon it, nor can it appear tolerable to a zealous churchman. It was well received in England by the lawyers, who had always been jealous of the spiritual tribunals, especially of late years, when under the patronage of Laud they had taken a higher tone than seemed compatible with the supremacy of the common law. The scheme, nevertheless, is open to some objections, when propounded in so unlimited a manner, none of which is more striking than that it tends to convert differences of religious opinion into crimes against the state, and furnishes bigotry with new arguments as well as new arms in its conflict with the free exercise of human reason. Grotius, however, feared rather that he had given too little power to the civil magistrate than too much."

50. Persecution for religious heterodoxy, in all its degrees, was in the sixteenth century the principle, as well as the practice, of every church. It was held inconsistent

somewhat modified his Erastianism. And yet he seems never to have been friendly to the temporal power of bishops. He writes in August, 1641, Episcopis Angliæ videtur mansurum nomen prope sine re, accisa et opulentia et auctoritate. Mihi non displicet ecclesiæ pastores et ab inani pompa et a curis sæcularium rerum sublevari. P. 1011. He had a regard for Laud, as the restorer of a reverence for primitive antiquity, and frequently laments his fate; but had said, in 1640, Doleo quod episcopi nimium intendendo potentiæ suæ nervos odium sibi potius quam amorem populorum pariunt. Ep. 1390.

of religious

with the sovereignty of the magistrate to permit any religion but his own; inconsistent with his duty to Toleration suffer any but the true. The edict of Nantes was teuets; a compromise between belligerent parties; the toleration of the dissidents in Poland was nearly of the same kind; but no state powerful enough to restrain its sectaries from the exercise of their separate worship had any scruples about the right and obligation to do so. Even the writers of that century, who seemed most strenuous for toleration, Castalio, Celso, and Koornhert, had confined themselves to denying the justice of penal, and especially of capital inflictions for heresy; the liberty of public worship had but incidentally, if at all, been discussed. Acontius had developed larger principles, distinguishing the fundamental from the accessory doctrines of the Gospel; which, by weakening the associations of bigotry, prepared the way for a Catholic tolerance. Episcopius speaks in the strongest terms of the treatise of Acontius, De Stratagematibus Satanæ, and says that the remonstrants trod closely in his steps, as would appear by comparing their writings; so that he shall quote no passages in proof, their entire books bearing witness to the conformity.

the Armi

51. The Arminian dispute led by necessary consequence to the question of public toleration. They sought claimed by at first a free admission to the pulpits, and in an nians; excellent speech of Grotius, addressed to the magistrates of Amsterdam in 1616, he objects to a separate toleration as rending the bosom of the church. But it was soon evident that nothing more could be obtained; and their adversaries refused this. They were driven, therefore, to contend for religious liberty, and the writings of Episcopius are full of this plea. Against capital punishments for heresy he raises his voice with indignant severity, and asserts that the whole Christian world abhorred the fatal precedent of Calvin in the death of Servetus. This indicates a remarkable change already wrought in the senti

ments of mankind. No capital punishments for heresy seem to have been inflicted in Protestant countries after this time; nor were they as frequently or as boldly vindicated as before."

52. The Independents claim to themselves the honour by the Inde of having been the first to maintain the principles pendents; of general toleration, both as to freedom of worship and immunity from penalties for opinion. But that the Arminians were not as early promulgators of the same noble tenets seems not to have been proved. Crellius, in his Vindiciæ pro Religionis Libertate, 1636, contended for the Polish dissidents, and especially for his own sect. The principle is implied, if not expressed, in the writings of Chillingworth, and still more of Hales; but the first famous plea, in this country for tolerance in religion, on a comprehensive basis and on deep-seated foundations, was the and by Jere. Liberty of Prophesying by Jeremy Taylor. This my Taylor. celebrated work was written, according to Taylor's dedication, during his retirement in Wales, whither he was driven, as he expresses it, "by this great storm which hath dashed the vessel of the church all in pieces," and published in 1647. He speaks of himself as without access to books; it is evident, however, from the abundance of his quotations, that he was not much in want of them; and from this, as well as other strong indications, we may

cry out for liberty of conscience, and deny the right of punishing opinions; yet in all their writings and actions, when they have the power, display the very opposite principles. [The council of Geneva, in 1632, little ashamed of the death of Servetus, had condemned one Nicolas Antoine to be strangled and burned for denying the Trinity. Bibliothèque Raisonnée, ii. 156. I do not distinctly recollect any later case in Protestant countries of capital punishment for mere heresy.-1842.]

De hæreticorum pœnis quæ scripsi, in iis mecum sentit Gallia et Germania, ut puto, omnis. Grot. Epist. p. 941. (1642.) Some years sooner there had been remains of the leaven in France. Adversus hæreticidia, he says in 1626, satis ut arbitror plane locutus sum, certè ita ut hic multos ob id offenderim. P. 789. Our own Fuller, I am sorry to say, in

his Church History, written about 1650, speaks with some disapprobation of the sympathy of the people with Legat and Wightman, burned by James I., in 1614; and this is the more remarkable, as he is a well-natured and not generally bigoted writer. I should think he was the latest Protestant who has tarnished his name by such sentiments.

This short tract, which will be found among the collected works of Crellius, in the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, contains a just and temperate pleading for religious liberty, but little which can appear very striking in modern times. It is said, nevertheless, to have been translated and republished by D'Holbach about 1760. This I have not seen, but there must, I presume, have been a good deal of condiment added to make it stimulating enough for his school.

reasonably believe, that a considerable part of his treatise had been committed to paper long before.

of Prophe

53. The argument of this important book rests on one leading maxim, derived from the Arminian divines, His Liberty as it was in them from Erasmus and Acontius, that sying. the fundamental truths of Christianity are comprised in narrow compass, not beyond the Apostles' creed in its literal meaning; that all the rest is matter of disputation, and too uncertain, for the most part, to warrant our condemning those who differ from us, as if their error must be criminal. This one proposition, much expanded, according to Taylor's diffuse style, and displayed in a variety of language, pervades the whole treatise, a small part of which, in comparison with the rest, bears immediately on the point of political toleration, as a duty of civil governments and of churches invested with power. In the greater portion, Taylor is rather arguing against that dogmatism of judgment which induces men, either singly or collectively, to pronounce with confidence where only a varying probability can be attained. This spirit is the religious, though not entirely the political, motive of intolerance; and by chasing this from the heart, he inferred, not that he should lay wide the door to universal freedom, but dispose the magistrate to consider more equitably the claims of every sect. "Whatsoever is against the foundation of

faith, or contrary to good life and the laws of obedience, or destructive to human society and the public and just interests of bodies politic, is out of the limits of my question, and does not pretend to compliance or toleration; so that I allow no indifferency, nor any countenance to those religions whose principles destroy government, nor to those religions, if there be any such, that teach ill life."

his doc

54. No man, as Taylor here teaches, is under any obligation to believe that in revelation, which is not Boldness of so revealed but that wise men and good men have trines. differed in their opinions about it. And the great variety of opinions in churches, and even in the same church, "there being none that is in prosperity," as he with rather a startling boldness puts it, "but changes her doctrines every age, either by bringing in new doctrines, or by contradicting her old," shows that we can have no term of

union, but that wherein all agree, the creed of the apostles." And hence, though we may undoubtedly carry on our own private inquiries as much farther as we see reason, none who hold this fundamental faith are to be esteemed heretics, nor liable to punishment. And here he proceeds to reprove all those oblique acts which are not direct persecutions of men's persons, the destruction of books, the forbidding the publication of new ones, the setting out fraudulent editions and similar acts of falsehood, by which men endeavour to stifle or prevent religious inquiry. "It is a strange industry and an importune diligence that was used by our forefathers: of all those heresies which gave them battle and employment, we have absolutely no record or monument, but what themselves who are adversaries have transmitted to us; and we know that adversaries, especially such who observed all opportunities to discredit both the persons and doctrines of the enemy, are not always the best records or witnesses of such transactions. We see it now in this very age, in the present distemperatures, that parties are no good registers of the actions of the adverse side; and if we cannot be confident of the truth of a story now, now I say that it is possible for any man, and likely that the interested adversary will discover the imposture, it is far more unlikely that after ages should know any other truth, but such as serves the ends of the representers."

of uncertainty in theological

tenets.

55. None were accounted heretics by the primitive His notions church, who held by the Apostles' creed, till the council of Nice defined some things, rightly, indeed, as Taylor professes to believe, but perhaps with too much alteration of the simplicity of ancient faith, so that," he had need be a subtle man who understands the very words of the new determinations." And this was carried much farther by later councils, and in the Athanasian creed, of which, though protesting his own

b"Since no churches believe themselves infallible, that only excepted which all other churches say is most of all deceived, it were strange if, in so many articles, which make up their several bodies of confessions, they had not mistaken, every one of them, in

some thing or other." This is Taylor's fearless mode of grappling with his argument; and any other must give a church that claims infallibility the advantage.

Vol. vii. p. 424. Heber's edition of

Taylor.