Part 1

THOMAS HILL GREEN

FOUR LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION,

From Vol. III of Green’s _Works_, edited by R.L. Nettleship Longman, Green & Co., London, 1888

From the Editor’s Preface:

The four lectures on ‘The English Revolution’ were delivered for the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution in January 1867; he did not intend them for publication, but they are printed on the recommendation of competent judges. ... I am also indebted to Mr. C.H. Firth for revising the lectures on ‘The English Revolution.’

OXFORD, August, 1888.

Transcriber’s Note: Page numbers are the same as in the _Works_, so commence at {277}. All of the footnotes appear to have been added by the editor, and have been located under the paragraphs or quotations to which they relate, and renumbered accordingly, with a few transcriber’s notes, which are marked “Tr.”

CONTENTS

LECTURE I 277 LECTURE II 296 LECTURE III 323 LECTURE IV 345

LECTURE I.

The period of which I am to speak is one of the most trodden grounds of history. It has not indeed the same intense attraction for an Englishman which the epoch of 1789 has for the Frenchman, for the interest in one case is purely historical, in the other it is that of a movement still in progress. Our revolution has long since run its round. The cycle was limited and belonged essentially to another world than that in which we live. Doubtless it was not insulated; its force has been felt throughout the subsequent series of political action and reaction, but the current along which European society is being now carried has another and a wider sweep. In the one we are ourselves too thoroughly absorbed to contemplate its course from without. From the other we have emerged far enough for our vision of it to be complete and steady.

But though this is so, and though the period in question is perhaps more familiar than any other to historical students, it may be doubted whether its character has ever been quite fairly exhibited. By partisans it has been regarded without ‘dry light,’ by judicious historians with a light so dry as not at all to illustrate the real temper and purpose of the actors. In reaction from the latter has appeared a mode of treatment, worked with special force by Mr. Carlyle, which puts personal character in the boldest relief, but overlooks the strength of circumstance, the organic life of custom and institution, which acts on the individual from without and from within, which at once informs his will and places it in limits against which it breaks itself in vain. Such oversight leaves out an essential element in the tragedy of human story. In modern life, as Napoleon said to Goethe, political {278} necessity represents the destiny of the ancient drama. The historic hero, strong to make the world new, and exulting in his strength, has his inspiration from a past which he knows not, and is constructing a future which is not that of his own will or imagination. The providence which he serves works by longer and more ambiguous methods than suit his enthusiasm or impatience. Sooner or later the fatal web gathers round him too painfully to be longer disregarded, when he must either waste himself in ineffectual struggle with it, or adjust himself to it by a process which to his own conscience and in the judgment of men is one of personal debasement.

It is as such a tragic conflict between the creative will of man and the hidden wisdom of the world, which seems to thwart it, that the ‘Great Rebellion’ has its interest. The party spirit of the present day is ill-spent on it. Neither our conservatism nor our liberalism, neither our oligarchic nor our ‘levelling’ zeal, can find much to claim as its own in a struggle which was for a hierarchy under royal licence on the one side, and for a freedom founded in grace on the other. But if our party spirit is out of place here, not less so is our censoriousness. As our critical conceit gets the better of our political insight when we judge of the political capacity of a nation or class by the roughness of its ideas or the bad taste of its utterances, so it masters our historical sense when we treat the enthusiasm of a past age as simulation, its unscrupulousness as want of principle, and the energy which regards neither persons nor formulae in going straight to its end as a selfish instinct of aggrandisement. Yet, again, we do but dishonour God and the rationality of his operation in the world, if, by way of cheap honour to our hero, we depreciate the purposes no less noble than his own which crossed his path, and find nothing but unreason in that necessity of things which was too strong for his control.

It will be my endeavour in speaking of the short life of English republicanism to avoid these opposite partialities, and to treat it as the last act in a conflict beginning with the Reformation, in which the several parties had each its justification in reason, and which ended, not simply, as might seem, in a catastrophe, but was preliminary to a reconciliation of the forces at issue of another kind than could to an actor in the conflict be apparent. If I seem to begin far back, I must trust to the sequel for vindication.

{279} The Reformation, we know, opened a breach in the substantial unity of Christendom, or rather brought to view in a new form one as old as the conflict between the spirit and the flesh. Such a breach lies deep down in the constitution of man, as a spirit self-determined and self-contained, yet related to a world which it regards as external and its opposite, and so related that from this world it receives its character, nay, in the proper sense, its reality. Outward ordinances were in St. Paul’s eyes fleshly and alien to the spirit. Yet had they been the spirit’s schoolmaster, and in outward ordinances it was fain in turn to embody itself when it went forth to recast the world in a Christian society.

The Christianity of the west remained till the Reformation essentially a Christianity of ordinances. The opposition of church and empire, of ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction, was not in any proper sense an opposition of the spirit and the world. The church and its law had not yet been questioned by the reason, and hence their authority had not been recognised as rational. The obedience rendered to them was that of the servant rather than of the son. The Christ who ruled through them was still a ‘Christ after the flesh.’ The two swords which Peter showed to Jesus were taken by medieval fancy as emblematic of the double sovereignty of church and state, and indeed fitly represented the sameness in kind of the two powers. Each was a carnal weapon, nor was there any essential distinction between the objects to which each was applied. Neither touched the spirit, or rather the spirit was not in a state to be conscious of the wound. To the higher intellects of the time, like Dante, the co-ordination of the two seemed an evil, for under the name of a separation between the spiritual and temporal was covered an antagonism of sovereignties equally temporal. The one thwarted, supplemented, combined with the other in the same sphere of outward relations. Together they built up the firmament of custom and ordinance, which the boundless spirit had not yet learned to feel as a limitation.

The Reformation, however, had a history. Not only was it struggling into life during the whole fifteenth century; it was the result of the same spiritual throes which long before had issued in movements superficially most opposite to it; in the impulse to find in Palestine the Christ whom ordinances had hidden, in periodic revulsions from recognised and {280} comfortable usage to monastic poverty and contemplation, in the scholastic effort to rationalise and thus reconcile to the spirit the dogmas of the church. All these movements, however, the church, as an outward authority, had been able to direct. She had been general of the crusades, had stereotyped monasticism into a ceremonial discipline, and had kept the schoolmen to the work of spinning threads of which she held the ends. Thus the very effort of the reason to break its shell had complicated its confinement. As it was growing more conscious of its inward rights, the institutions in which it had to acquiesce were becoming more artificial, and the dogmas to be accepted by it more abstract. The result was such a conscious entanglement in the yoke of bondage, holding back the believer from free intercourse with God, as provoked the spiritual revolt of Luther.

‘Justification by faith’ and ‘the right of private judgment’ are the two watchwords of the Reformation. Each indicates a new relation between the spirit and outward authority. ‘Faith’ in the Lutheran language is raised to a wholly different level from that which it had occupied in the language of the church. It no longer means the implicit acceptance of dogma on authority, for lack of which the ‘infidel’ was out of the pale of salvation. As with St. Paul it expressed the continuous act in virtue of which the individual breaks loose from the outward constraint of alien ordinances, and places himself in a spiritual relation to God through union with his Son, so with Luther faith is simply the renunciation by which man’s falser self, with its surroundings of observance and received opinion, slips from him that he may be clothed upon with the person of Christ. The ghost of scholasticism, no doubt, still haunted Luther, and led him astray into disquisitions on the relation of faith to the other virtues. But according to his proper idea, faith was no positive, finite virtue at all. It was the absorption of all finite and relative virtues, as such, in the consciousness of union with the infinite God. Again the spirit searcheth all things, even the deep things of God, as mysteries which Christ had opened. Again the handwriting of ordinances contrary to us was blotted out. Again the conscience moved freely in a redeemed world. [1]

[1] [This passage, from ‘Justification by faith’ occurs in the essay on Dogma, above, pp. 178-179.]

{281} How was this new consciousness of spiritual freedom and right to be reconciled with submission to institutions which seemed to rest on selfish interest or the acquiescence of the animal nature? How was the dominion of God in the believer’s soul to be adjusted to his dominion in a church which restrained the operations of his spirit, and in a state which only honoured him with the lips? Such was the practical question which the Reformation offered to European society. Raised first and in its rudest form by Münzer’s anabaptists, it worked with more subtle influence in all the countries which felt the Reformation. The opposition between the inward and outward, between reason and authority, between the spirit and the flesh, between the individual and the world of settled right, no longer a mere antithesis of the schools, was being wrought into the political life of Christendom. It gives the true formula for expressing the nature of the conflict which issued in the English commonwealth.

This conflict was rightly regarded by the higher intellects that took part in it as but a stage in a vaster one of which all christendom was the arena [1]; as a completion of the Reformation, a struggle against the catholic reaction. In the special form which it assumed in England we shall find the reason why the course of religious, and indirectly of political development, with us has been different from that which obtained severally in protestant Germany, in France, and in southern Europe. It is only by considering the modes in which the spiritual forces brought into play in the Reformation had their relations adjusted elsewhere, that we can appreciate the nature of their collision and reconciliation in England. These modes may be summed as respectively jesuitry, the divorce of the secular from the religious, and the complete assimilation of the religious to the political life of states. The power by which the catholic church met the new emergency, the new demand for personal spiritual satisfaction, was, speaking broadly, jesuitry. So long as human life remained in that ‘wholeness’ which is health, there was no room for such an agency. The catholic of the middle ages had no thought of a spiritual world beyond that presented to him in the outward institutions of the church. His sins were sins against some established ordinance, which the upholder of the ordinance could absolve. But with the awakened conscience of a spiritual world, apart from all {282} ordinances, to which the soul in its individual essence for good or evil was related, came a new need of spiritual direction. Where the reason was strong enough to be a law to itself, this direction was found in the Bible as interpreted by the individual conscience. Where the authority of the church retained its hold, it could only do so by regulating the most secret intricacies of personal experience, and by meeting the importunities of personal fear or aspiration by an answer equally personal. Through the jesuits, as educators and confessors, it was able to do this. It supplied an elaborate mechanism through which the individual might work out his own justification in disregard of recognised outward duties. The protestant idea of an inward light, to whatever extravagances it might be open, stimulated the sense of a universal law which the inward light revealed. Hence it has issued, as among the quakers, in a far-reaching zeal of cosmopolitan philanthropy. Jesuitry, on the other hand, is the ruin of all public spirit. It satisfies the individual soul and reconciles it to the church by casuistical devices which give the guise of reason to the interested suggestions of personal passion. In saving the soul it ruins nations, not because it proposes a higher law than that of which the kingdoms of this world are capable, but because it makes salvation a process of self-seeking no other than the satisfaction of the hunger of sense. In southern Europe jesuitry had its way. Sometimes it might justify the tyrant, sometimes (as in France under the League) the tyrannicide; but it was equally antagonistic to rational freedom. Acting on the ruler, it derationalised the state, which came to be, not the passionless expression of general right, but the engine of individual caprice under alternating fits of appetite and fear. Acting on the subject, again, it gave him over to private interests in the way either of vicious self-indulgence or of the religious zeal which compounds for such indulgence. The creature of the jesuits is no longer spontaneously loyal to the institutions under which he is born, nor yet has he, like the puritan, a new law written on his conscience which he is to enact in society, but he has a transaction of his own to negotiate with a power wielding spiritual terrors. He may be either rake or devotee, but never a citizen, as the Spain and southern Germany of the seventeenth century too plainly testified.

[1] [Amended from “area”. Tr.]

Thus directed, then, the conflict between inward and {283} outward interest ends in such a supremacy of the former as gives the state over to caprice and undermines the outward morality which forms the moral man. So far as catholic countries have escaped, or recovered from, such a result, they have done so by the gradual obliteration or confinement within strict limits of all personal interest in religion. The Romance nations, it has been often remarked, have not the same instinct of spiritual completeness as the Teutonic. They are not distressed by the spiritual divorce which is implied in leaving religion and morality as unreconciled principles of action. Thus in some of them we find a political and social interest growing up in complete independence of the church, and organising itself with a rational regularity which the protestant politician, constantly thwarted in schemes which he deems secular by religious intrusion, may sometimes be disposed to envy. Religion, meanwhile, is regulated, and the agencies such as jesuitry by which it might interfere with secular life are carefully watched. Under such regulation it is left to itself. To the citizen it becomes a mere ceremonial. His attitude towards it is simply passive. At best it does but fill up the vacancies of his social life or comfort him in his final seclusion from it. The devout become a class by themselves, estranged from the activities of civil life. Only for them and for women, as the passive element in society, is religion a permanent influence. Wherever in catholic countries, under the influence of the revolutionary revival of the last century, the reorganisation of society has been achieved, it has only been under the condition of this confinement and passivity of religion. In France, as the source of this revival, the condition has been most fully realised. It is the natural sequel, indeed, of the compromise of interests effected by Henry IV.

To the Germans, as to every other nation, the quickened Christianity of the Reformation brought not peace but a sword. Their religious wars, however, were rather brought on by crowned violence and the ambition of the house of Hapsburg than the result of any strife of principles involved in lutheranism itself. The protestantism of North Germany, growing up under the protection of princes, from the first blended with the existing institutions of the state. It escaped internal rupture, and had not seriously to fight for existence till the time of the thirty years’ war. It then {284} owed its preservation, not to itself, but to the sword of Gustavus and the diplomacy of Richelieu, and Germany emerged from the war in such a state of wretchedness and exhaustion, that popular religion was in no condition to assert itself against princely patronage and control during the ‘constituted anarchy’ which followed the peace of Westphalia. This circumstance, acting on the German instinct of comprehension, prevented the antagonism of the secular and religious from developing itself in the lutheran countries. The German, with his speculative grasp, has no difficulty in regarding church and state as two sides of the same spiritual organism. To him each expresses an idea which is the necessary complement of the other, and each alike commends itself to his reason. How little the reality of either church or state may correspond to the idea, how powerless in action may be the permeating strength of German thought, an Englishman needs not to be told. But it is important to observe the effect of this union of strength with weakness, of the faculty of intellectual fusion with moral acquiescence, in reconciling the freest spiritual consciousness to secular limitations, and in healing the breaches of religious strife. All that we associate with the term ‘sectarian’ is for good or evil unknown in Germany. The conflict of reason and authority has not indeed ceased among the countrymen of Luther. It has its wars and its truces, its conquerors and its victims; but its arena has been the study and the lecture-room, not the market-place or the congregation.

The Reformation in England begins simply with the substitution of royal for papal power in the government of the church. If Henry VIII. had left a successor capable of wielding his sceptre, English religion would scarcely have grown up, as it has done, in the bracing atmosphere of schism. During the minority of Edward, a form of protestant episcopacy, unique among the reformed churches, grew up with a certain degree of independence, while at the same time ideas of a different order, whose mother was Geneva, were working undisturbed. The Marian persecution, while it strengthened the influence of the aggressive Genevan form of protestantism on England, completed its estrangement from the state. Thus when ‘anglicanism,’ episcopal, sacramental, ceremonial, was established by Elizabeth, it had at once to deal with an opposite system, thoroughly formed and {285} nursed in antagonism to the powers of this world. This system is, so to speak, the full articulation of that voice of conscience, of the inner self-asserting spirit, in opposition to outward ordinance, which the Reformation evoked. In this light let us consider its action in England.

The lutheran doctrine, as we have seen, brings the individual soul, as such, into direct relation to God. From this doctrine the first practical corollary is the placing of the bible in the hands of the people; the second is the exaltation of preaching. From these again follows the diffusion of popular education. The soul, admitted in its own right to the divine audience, still needs a language. It must know whom it approaches, and what it is his will to give. But as the intercourse is inward and spiritual, so must be the power which regulates it; not a priest or a liturgy, but the voice of the divine spirit in the bible, interpreted by the believer’s conscience. Religion being thus internalised and individualised, preaching, as the action of soul on soul, becomes the natural channel of its communication. It is the protestant’s ritual, by which the heart is elevated to the state in which the divine voice speaks not to it in vain. Education, again, is the means by which the individual must be rendered capable of availing himself of his spiritual independence.

A people’s bible, then, a reading people, a preaching ministry, were the three conditions of protestant life. The force which results from them is everywhere an unruly one. With the English, who have neither the acquiescence nor the comprehensive power of the Germans, it at once, to use the language of a German philosopher, ‘stormed out into reality.’ It demanded and sought to create an outward world, a system of law, custom, and ordinance, answering to itself. Not only is the law of the bible to be carried directly and everywhere into action; whatever is of other origin is no law for the society whose head is Christ. An absolute breach is thus made between the new and the old. Those who by a conscious, deliberate wrench have broken with the old, and lived themselves into the new, are the predestined people of God. Outside them is a doomed world. They are the saints, and their prerogative has no limits. They admit of no co-ordinate jurisdiction which is of the world and not of Christ. The sword of the magistrate must be in their hands, or it is a weapon of offence against Christ’s people.

{286} Such a system soon builds again the bondage which it began with destroying. Originating, as we have seen, in the consciousness of a spiritual life which no outward ordinances could adequately express, it hardens this consciousness into an absolute antithesis, false because regarded as absolute, between the law of Christ and the law of the world. The law of Christ, however, must be realised in the world, and thus from this false antithesis there follows by an inexorable affiliation of ideas, a new authority, calling itself spiritual, but binding the soul with ‘secular chains,’ which from the very fact of its sincerity and logical completeness, from its allowing no compromise between the saints and the world, is more heavy than the old. It behoves us to note well these conflicting tendencies to freedom and bondage, often almost inextricably convolved, which puritanism contained within itself. It was the temporary triumph of the one tendency that made the commonwealth a possibility, and the interference of the other that stopped its expansion into permanent life. The one gave puritanism its nobility during its period of weakness while it struggled to dominion; the other made its dominion, once attained, a contradiction in fact which no individual greatness could maintain.