by John Buchan
At the time which we are now considering only one of the Kirk’s foundations had been securely built — her dogmatic creed, which was the Calvinism of Knox’s Confession of Faith, accepted by the reforming Parliament of 1560. That stood without cavil, though in the interpretation of its articles there was considerable difference of emphasis. For the rest, the Kirk was a nominal episcopacy, but the bishops were impotent, and the discipline was in substance Presbyterian: her General Assembly was in abeyance owing to royal encroachments, but it was an integral and established part of her, so that at the right moment it could be revived; she had moved far from the moderate Erastianism of Knox, and had come to regard herself as a self-governing commonwealth, wholly independent in all things which by any stretch of language could be called spiritual, and entitled to interfere even in secular politics; her worship was in the main according to the Genevan form, but not universally regular owing to James’s ill-obeyed decrees. She was a living organism, the only institution which commanded the loyalty of the majority of the people, and she was a national thing — for she was neither Genevan, Gallican, nor Anglican, but Scottish. Among the mediæval lumber of Parliament, Lords of the Articles and Privy Council, the Kirk stood out like a throbbing power-house among tombs. Whether the land were ill or wisely guided, the chief part of the guiding must be hers.
Archibald, First Marquis of Argyll
II
The ecclesiastical structure is much, but we must look closer at that more vital thing, the spirit which inspired it.
The essence of the Reformation was simplification. The great organism of the Catholic Church, with all its intricate accretions of fifteen centuries, was exchanged for a simple revelation — God speaking through His Word to the individual conscience. The Bible was its palladium, but the question presently arose as to how the Bible was to be construed, once the authority of the Church had been rejected. If the individual soul was the basis of the new creed, so apparently must be the individual judgment. That way lay anarchy and anabaptism, and it was necessary, before the Reformed Church could come into being, to establish some canon of interpretation, otherwise Protestantism would go to pieces. The liberal theologians of the seventeenth century held that the Bible was subject to the ultimate tests of conscience and reason. “The authority of man,” said Hooker, “is the key which openeth the door of entrance into the knowledge of the Scriptures.” To him the Bible was not a cyclopædia of all knowledge and all truth. “Admit this and mark, I beseech you, what follows. God, in delivering Scripture to His church, should claim to have abrogated amongst them the law of nature, which is an infallible knowledge imprinted in the minds of all the children of men, whereby both general principles for directing of human action are comprehended, and conclusions derived from them; upon which conclusions groweth in particular the choice of good and evil in the daily affairs of this life. Admit this, and what shall the Scriptures be but a snare and a torment to weak consciences, filling them with infinite perplexities, scrupulosities, doubts insoluble, and extreme despairs.” This was the creed of Laud and Chillingworth, of John Hales and Jeremy Taylor, and from it followed the view that, if human reason were the ultimate guide to interpretation, diversity of opinion was inevitable and indeed essential. But such a foundation was too insecure on which to found a militant church. Calvin took a bolder course. We know that the Bible is God’s Word, not because of the authority of an historic church, but because of the revelation of the Holy Spirit. This revelation must be systematized and made explicit by God’s servants, so that the wayfaring man may understand. From this it is a short step to the foundation of a church which is the direct medium of the Holy Spirit, and a repository of inspired interpretation. The second edition of Calvin’s Institutes — he was only thirty when it was published — definitely claims to be the canon of Scripture teaching; from it alone the reader may learn what Scripture means. Already the Bible is in a secondary place, and we are not far from Tertullian’s doctrine that the regula fidei is not Scripture but the creed of a church.
Calvin was perhaps the most potent intellectual force in the world between St. Thomas Aquinas and Voltaire. Though he rejected in his system whatever the Bible did not warrant, and not, like Luther, only what the Bible expressly forbade, he was in many ways nearer to Catholicism than the German reformer. Like most great men, he was greater than the thing he created. He was a profounder statesman than his followers, and far less of a formalist. He could be so inconsistent as to be accused of heresy: he saw the dangers into which his church might drift, and declared that he had no desire to introduce “the tyranny that one should be bound, under pain of being held a heretic, to repeat words dictated by some one else”; a man to whom Plato was of all philosophers religiosissimus et maxime sobrius, had more affinities with humanism than is commonly believed. But a law-giver must be dogmatic, and the founder of a church must narrow his sympathies. He faced the eternal antinomies of thought — the reign of law and the freedom of human spirit — and provided not a solution but a practical compromise. He begins with the conceptions of an omnipotent God of infinite purity and wisdom, of man cradled in iniquity, and of salvation only through God’s grace. The sinner is foreordained — since God orders all things — alike to sin and to destruction. It is the omnipotence of God that he stresses, rather than the fatherhood, for he faces the problem from another angle than Luther: the triviality of the created and the majesty of the creator; the eternal damnation of man unless lifted out of the pit by God’s election.
These doctrines and this angle of vision were not new. Origen and Gregory of Nyssa might preach a milder code, but they were the orthodox creed of the Fathers of the Church. Men like Tertullian exulted in contemplating the tortures of the damned. Unbaptized infants, a span long, would burn for ever in hell, in spite of the fact that their creation and death were the direct acts of their Maker. It was the universal mediæval belief, in spite of the questioning of a Socinus; it was the common doctrine of all the Reformers except Zuinglius. “This is the acme of faith,” said Luther, “to believe that He is merciful who saves so few and who condemns so many; that He is just who, at His own pleasure, has made us necessarily doomed to damnation. . . . If by any effort of reason I could conceive how God could be merciful and just who shows so much anger and iniquity, there would be no need for faith.” On such a view man’s reason and man’s moral sense must alike be discarded as temptations of the devil.
This was the creed of Augustine, stated by him more passionately and harshly than by any Reformer; from him Calvin largely derived his dogmas, but he took the doctrine and discarded Augustine’s church. Its central principle, the inexorableness of law, the impossibility of free will, has been held by many secular thinkers from Spinoza to Mill, who would have rejected its theological implications. It was the creed of William the Silent and Coligny and Cromwell, of Donne and Milton and Bunyan — men in whom both conscience and intellect were quick. Only by a noble inconsistency and a tacit forgetfulness could it be a worthy rule of life, and this was in fact what happened. Calvin was greater than Calvinism, and the Calvinist was a humaner and a wiser man than his creed. But with all its perversities it put salt and iron into human life. It taught man his frailty and his greatness, and brought him into direct communion with Omnipotence. It preached uncompromisingly the necessity of a choice between two paths; in Bunyan’s words the mountain gate “has room for body and soul, but not for body and soul and sin.” It taught a deep consciousness of guilt, and a profound sense of the greatness of God, so that they who feared Him were little troubled by earthly fears. Historically its importance lay in its absoluteness, for a religion which becomes a “perhaps” will not stand in the day of battle. It claimed to be truth, the whole truth, when everything else was a conjecture or a lie. “In God’s matters,” said Samuel Rutherford, “there be not, as in grammar, the positive and comparative degrees; . . . there are not here true, and more true, and most true. Truth is an indivisible line which hath no latitude an
d cannot admit of splitting.” It brigaded men into serried battalions; the free-lance disappeared; Mr. Haughty, in the Holy War, who declared “that he had carried himself bravely, not considering who were his foes, or what was the cause in which he was engaged,” was duly hanged by the men of Mansoul. A creed which was fighting for its life could not afford to be liberal. “On such subjects, and with common men, latitude of mind means weakness of mind. There is but a certain quantity of spiritual force in any man. Spread it over a broad surface, the stream is shallow and languid.”
Calvin’s fame rests rather on the church which he created than on the creed which he gave it, for he was a greater legislator than a theologian. It was not in belief alone that safety was to be found, but in belief within a church; in his own words, “Beyond the bosom of the Church no remission of sins is to be hoped for nor any salvation” — a strange return to the ecclesiasticism which he had rejected. He might have said, in the words of a recent Vatican decree, “La Chiesa non è un credo; la Chiesa è un impero, una disciplina.” John Knox considered the Genevan Church “the most perfect School of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the Apostles,” and this was the view taken by his successors of the quasi-Genevan edifice which he erected in Scotland. It was divine, guided and inspired by God, and not to be judged by human standards. It could not err, though that fallible thing the human conscience might regard certain of its actions as immoral. It was a complex legal machine, for it was not for nothing that Calvin, like Knox and Donne, was bred to the law, and legal phraseology became the fashion among the divines. Wielding the most awful powers and penalties, acting under the most august sanctions, inspired by a narrow and absolute creed, cunningly articulated so that the whole nation was embodied under its dominion, the Kirk in Scotland was well able to speak with its adversaries in the gate.
In principle it was a noble democracy. The Kirk made no distinction of class; the ministry was not a hierarchy, but issued from the ranks and could be reduced to them again; an educated laity therefore became the pre-condition of an educated ministry. In Scotland, with its decrepit Parliament, which was no better than a machine for registering the edicts of other people, the pulpit was the sole organ by which public opinion could be expressed. Only by means of it could the masses scrutinize the conduct of their rulers. It gave expression to the very ancient and stubborn sense of liberty in the Scottish people, and to their jealous nationalism. The doctrine of divine right had never come to birth north of the Tweed; the Scots were ready to fight for their king, unless they happened to be fighting against him; the monarchy was a useful institution, and their own, but it was hedged about with no divinity. The Reformation had come about through the strife of sovereign and nobles, and the new clergy, already in opposition to the throne, when they came to quarrel with the nobles were compelled to throw themselves upon the people. Scotland had learned from Knox and George Buchanan that the king derived his power from a contract with the nation, and if that contract were broken might be deposed and slain. The passive obedience which Jeremy Taylor preached in his Ductor Dubitantium, and which captured many of the best minds in contemporary England, was a plant which did not flourish on Scottish soil. The claim of Presbytery to authority became yearly more arrogant. There was justice in the complaint of Charles I.: “The nature of presbyterian government is to strike or force the crown from the king’s head, for their chief maxim is (and I know it to be true) that all kings must submit to Christ’s kingdom, of which they are the sole governors.”
But by its very nature the Kirk could not remain a democracy. The theocratic conception is inconsistent with the democratic doctrine of majority rule, for, as Selden pointed out, it is blasphemous to identify the odd man with the Holy Ghost. Buckle has declared that the paradox of seventeenth-century Scotland was that the same people were liberal in politics and illiberal in religion, but the theological narrowness was soon to counteract the political liberalism. Holding the creed they did, the ministers gradually came to rule the nation, and, if it was largely a willing servitude, how could it be otherwise when they possessed such crushing spiritual sanctions? Calvinism, as interpreted by Knox and Andrew Melville, involves a theocracy, and the plain man, out of fear of hell fire, will surrender his conscience and his judgment as absolutely to his minister as any Catholic to his priest. A Kirk so inspired will find itself claiming powers which only supreme genius could wield without disaster, and the atmosphere will not be favourable for the presence of genius. Its leaders are more likely to be of the type which Lord Morley has drawn in Lilburne—”the men whom all revolutions are apt to engender: intractable, narrow, dogmatic, pragmatic, clever hands at syllogism, liberal in uncharitable imputation and malicious construction, honest in their rather questionable way, animated by a rather pharisaic love of self-applause which is in truth not any more meritorious nor less unsafe than vain love of the world’s applause; in a word, not without sharp insight into theoretic principle, and thinking quite as little of their own ease as of the ease of others, but without a trace of the instinct for government or a grain of practical common sense.”
The prime defect of the Kirk was intolerance. It shared this fault with many other communions, but then no communion, save the Church of Rome, claimed its absolute powers. There was no “liberty of cult” in Elizabeth’s Prayer-book, which laid down the only lawful form of worship; and Nowell, Dean of St. Paul’s — Izaak Walton’s “good old man and honest angler” — could clamour for the death of the Marian bishops as savagely as any Scots reformer. Laud was tolerant enough about creeds, but not about church government. In England only the rare few, like Hales and Falkland and Chillingworth, attained to that true toleration which is based not on indifference but on spiritual humility; only a few asserted with Milton the right of private judgment—”if a man believe things only because his pastor says so, . . . though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.”
The question must be viewed in its due historical perspective. The nursing-ground of intolerance is a complete dogmatic certainty about the ordering of the world. To the modern mind, accustomed to think of man as a clot of vivified dust, set on an inconsiderable planet which revolves with an infinity of others in the immensity of space, conscious, too, that human life has relations through countless æons with lower existences, and is kin alike to the brutes and to the stars, it is hard to understand the habit of thought which about everything can pronounce unhesitatingly that here is final truth. Such cosmic assurance requires a simple cosmogony, and this — save in the case of a few advanced thinkers — the seventeenth century possessed. To it the earth and all therein were made purposely by God for man, and man’s journey heaven-ward or hell-ward was the essential purpose of creation. It held that a few thousand years earlier the universe had been fabricated out of chaos in six calendar days, that all history antecedent to our era had been a preparation for the coming of Christ, and that, the supreme sacrifice having been accomplished, at any moment the skies might open, and the trumpets sound, and the short story of the earth be closed. There were mysteries indeed, stupendous mysteries, but, if their content was unplumbed, their limits could be exactly defined. Such a cosmos was both intimate and simple, made according to man’s scale and for his uses; it was without blurred lines or shadowy corners, and the mind which accepted it was ready to pronounce upon its problems as upon matters of ascertained fact.
If the nature of the popular cosmogony predisposed men to dogma, so did the quality of the revelation that illumined it. That revelation was absolute; its acceptance gave eternal life, its neglect eternal torment. Toleration is a high virtue, when it springs from humility and is regarded as in itself a religious act; but it is important to remember that in certain mental states it may be a vice, a synonym for spiritual apathy and moral sloth. “What,” St. Augustine asked, “can be more deadly to the soul than the liberty of error?” The doctrine of exclusive salvation, honestly held, involves intolerance, and finds its logical c
onsequence in persecution. If a man believes that his heart is desperately wicked, that he is doomed to eternal fires but for the interposition of God’s grace, and that to walk in grace it is necessary to observe literally the precepts of the Scriptures without any attempt to rethink them in the light of new conditions — nay, that such an attempt is in God’s eye the unpardonable sin — tolerance must be only another name for lukewarmness, and reason only the temptation of the devil. If he is right, all those who differ from him must be wrong, and it is his duty to enforce his faith with fire and sword. What suffering that man can inflict is comparable to the eternal misery of those who embrace false doctrine? This was the creed alike of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas; it was an integral part of seventeenth-century Protestant theology: in a milder form it will be found in more than one Papal bull of the nineteenth century. Even a liberal thinker like Richard Baxter pronounced toleration to be “soul murder,” and in that era only Cromwell in practice, and men like Harrington, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, and Chillingworth in their writings, propounded a gentler doctrine. It is unhappily true that in such an age the best men, in whom religion is a living fire, are apt to be the narrowest. “The only true spirit of tolerance,” Coleridge has written, “consists in conscientious toleration of each other’s intolerance. Whatever pretends to be more than this, is either the unthinking cant of fashion or the soul-palsying narcotic of moral and religious indifference.” But before such a mood can be attained, there must be a critical breaking-down of the adamantine bulwarks of dogma. Charles James Fox was right when he said that “the only foundation for toleration is a degree of scepticism.” Only the rare few could conceive of a tolerance which was not indifferentism, but a supreme religious duty.
