Read Ebook: Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham by Laski Harold J Harold Joseph

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 137 lines and 61959 words, and 3 pages

BIBLIOGRAPHY 317

INDEX 321

INTRODUCTION

The eighteenth century may be said to begin with the Revolution of 1688; for, with its completion, the dogma of Divine Right disappeared for ever from English politics. Its place was but partially filled until Hume and Burke supplied the outlines of a new philosophy. For the observer of this age can hardly fail, as he notes its relative barrenness of abstract ideas, to be impressed by the large part Divine Right must have played in the politics of the succeeding century. Its very absoluteness made for keen partisanship on the one side and the other. It could produce at once the longwinded rhapsodies of Filmer and, by repulsion, the wearisome reiterations of Algernon Sidney. Once the foundations of Divine Right had been destroyed by Locke, the basis of passionate controversy was absent. The theory of a social contract never produced in England the enthusiasm it evoked in France, for the simple reason that the main objective of Rousseau and his disciples had already been secured there by other weapons. And this has perhaps given to the eighteenth century an urbaneness from which its predecessor was largely free. Sermons are perhaps the best test of such a change; and it is a relief to move from the addresses bristling with Suarez and Bellarmine to the noble exhortations of Bishop Butler. Not until the French Revolution were ultimate dogmas again called into question; and it is about them only that political speculation provokes deep feeling. The urbanity, indeed, is not entirely new. The Restoration had heralded its coming, and the tone of Halifax has more in common with Bolingbroke and Hume than with Hobbes and Filmer. Nor has the eighteenth century an historical profundity to compare with that of the zealous pamphleteers in the seventeenth. Heroic archivists like Prynne find very different substitutes in brilliant journalists like Defoe, and if Dalrymple and Blackstone are respectable, they bear no comparison with masters like Selden and Sir Henry Spelman.

Nor is the reason for this preoccupation far to seek. The advance of English politics in the preceding two centuries was mainly an advance of structure; yet relative at least to continental fact, it appeared liberal enough to hide the disharmonies of its inner content. The King was still a mighty influence. The power of the aristocracy was hardly broken until the Reform Bill of 1867. The Church continued to dominate the political aspect of English religious life until, after 1832, new elements alien from her ideals were introduced into the House of Commons. The conditions of change lay implicit in the Industrial Revolution, when a new class of men attained control of the nation's economic power. Only then was a realignment of political forces essential. Only then, that is to say, had the time arrived for a new theory of the State.

The political ideas of the eighteenth century are thus in some sort a comment upon the system established by the Revolution; and that is, in its turn, the product of the struggle between Parliament and Crown in the preceding age. But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic. From no accusation were its statesmen more anxious to be free than from that of a belief in democratic government. Whether Whigs or Tories were in power, it was always the great families who ruled. For them the Church, at least in its higher branches, existed; and the difference between nobleman and commoner at Oxford is as striking as it is hideous to this generation. For them also literature and the theatre made their display; and if Dr. Johnson could heap an immortal contumely upon the name of patron, we all know of the reverence he felt in the presence of the king. Divine Right and non-resistance were dead, but they had not died without a struggle. Freedom of the press and legal equality may have been obtained; but it was not until the passage of Fox's Libel Act that the first became secure, and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have recently illumined for us the inward meaning of the second. The populace might, on occasion, be strong enough to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king, or to shout for Wilkes and liberty against the unconstitutional usurpation of the monarch-ridden House of Commons. Such outbursts are yet the exception to the prevailing temper. The deliberations of Parliament were still, at least technically, a secret; and membership therein, save for one or two anomalies like Westminster and Bristol, was still the private possession of a privileged class. The Revolution, in fact, meant less an abstract and general freedom, than a special release from the arbitrary will of a stupid monarch who aroused against himself every deep-seated prejudice of his generation. The England which sent James II upon his travels may be, as Hume pointed out, reduced to a pathetic fragment even of its electorate. The masses were unknown and undiscovered, or, where they emerged, it was either to protest against some wise reform like Walpole's Excise Scheme, or to become, as in Goldsmith and Cowper and Crabbe, the object of half-pitying poetic sentiment. How deep-rooted was the notion of aristocratic control was to be shown when France turned into substantial fact Rousseau's demand for freedom. The protest of Burke against its supposed anarchy swept England like a flame; and only a courageous handful could be found to protest against Pitt's prostitution of her freedom.

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION

For William had come over with a definite purpose in view. James had wrought havoc with what the Civil Wars had made the essence of the English constitution; and it had become important to define in set terms the conditions upon which the life of kings must in the future be regulated. The reign of William is nothing so much as the period of that definition; and the fortunate discovery was made of the mechanisms whereby its translation into practice might be secured. The Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement are the foundation-stones of the modern constitutional system.

What, broadly, was established was the dependence of the crown upon Parliament. Finance and the army were brought under Parliamentary control by the simple expedient of making its annual summons essential. The right of petition was re-affirmed; and the independence of the judges and ministerial responsibility were secured by the same act which forever excluded the legitimate heirs from their royal inheritance. It is difficult not to be amazed at the almost casual fashion in which so striking a revolution was effected. Not, indeed, that the solution worked easily at the outset. William remained to the end a foreigner, who could not understand the inwardness of English politics. It was the necessities of foreign policy which drove him to admit the immense possibilities of the party-system as also to accept his own best safeguard in the foundation of the Bank of England. The Cabinet, towards the close of his reign, had already become the fundamental administrative instrument. Originally a committee of the Privy Council, it had no party basis until the ingenious Sunderland atoned for a score of dishonesties by insisting that the root of its efficiency would be found in its selection from a single party. William acquiesced but doubtfully; for, until the end of his life, he never understood why his ministers should not be a group of able counsellors chosen without reference to their political affiliations. Sunderland knew better for the simple reason that he belonged to that period when the Whigs and Tories had gambled against each other for their heads. He knew that no council-board could with comfort contain both himself and Halifax; just as William himself was to learn quite early that neither honor nor confidence could win unswerving support from John Churchill. There is a certain feverishness in the atmosphere of the reign which shows how many kept an anxious eye on St. Germain even while they attended the morning levee at Whitehall.

The theorist of the Revolution is Locke; and it was his conscious effort to justify the innovations of 1688. He sought, as he said, "to establish the throne of our great Restorer, our present King William, and make good his title in the consent of the people." In the debate which followed his argument remained unanswered, for the sufficient reason that it had the common sense of the generation on his side. Yet Locke has suffered not a little at the hands of succeeding thinkers. Though his influence upon his own time was immense; though Montesquieu owed to him the acutest of his insights; though the principles of the American Revolution are in large part an acknowledged adoption of his own; he has become one of the political classics who are taken for granted rather than read. It is a profound and regrettable error. Locke may not possess the clarity and ruthless logic of Hobbes, or the genius for compressing into a phrase the experience of a lifetime which makes Burke the first of English political thinkers. He yet stated more clearly than either the general problem of the modern State. Hobbes, after all, worked with an impossible psychology and sought no more than the prescription against disorder. Burke wrote rather a text-book for the cautious administrator than a guide for the liberal statesman. But Locke saw that the main problem of the State is the conquest of freedom and it was for its definition in terms of individual good that he above all strove.

Much, doubtless, of his neglect is due to the medium in which he worked. He wrote at a time when the social contract seemed the only possible retort to the theory of Divine Right. He so emphasized the principle of consent that when contractualism came in its turn to be discarded, it was discovered that Locke suffered far more than Hobbes by the change so made. For Hobbes cared nothing for the contract so long as strong government could be shown to be implicit in the natural badness of men, while Locke assumed their goodness and made his contract essential to their opportunity for moral expression. Nor did he, like Rousseau, seize upon the organic nature of the State. To him the State was always a mere aggregate, and the convenient simplicity of majority-rule solved, for him, the vital political problems. But Rousseau was translated into the complex dialectic of Hegel and lived to become the parent of theories he would have doubtless been the first to disown. Nor was Locke aided by his philosophic outlook. Few great thinkers have so little perceived the psychological foundations of politics. What he did was rather to fasten upon the great institutional necessity of his time--the provision of channels of assent--and emphasize its importance to the exclusion of all other factors. The problem is in fact more complex; and the solution he indicated became so natural a part of the political fabric that the value of his emphasis upon its import was largely forgotten when men again took up the study of foundations.

The state of nature is thus, in contrast to the argument of Hobbes, pre-eminently social in character. There may be war or violence; but that is only when men have abandoned the rule of reason which is integral to their character. But the state of nature is not a civil State. There is no common superior to enforce the law of nature. Each man, as best he may, works out his own interpretation of it. But because the intelligences of men are different there is an inconvenient variety in the conceptions of justice. The result is uncertainty and chaos; and means of escape must be found from a condition which the weakness of men must ultimately make intolerable. It is here that the social contract emerges. But just as Locke's natural state implies a natural man utterly distinct from Hobbes' gloomy picture, so does Locke's social contract represent rather the triumph of reason than of hard necessity. It is a contract of each with all, a surrender by the individual of his personal right to fulfil the commands of the law of nature in return for the guarantee that his rights as nature ordains them--life and liberty and property--will be preserved. The contract is thus not general as with Hobbes but limited and specific in character. Nor is it, as Hobbes made it, the resignation of power into the hands of some single man or group. On the contrary, it is a contract with the community as a whole which thus becomes that common political superior--the State--which is to enforce the law of nature and punish infractions of it. Nor is Locke's state a sovereign State: the very word "sovereignty" does not occur, significantly enough, throughout the treatise. The State has power only for the protection of natural law. Its province ends when it passes beyond those boundaries.

Such a contract, in Locke's view, involves the pre-eminent necessity of majority-rule. Unless the minority is content to be bound by the will of superior numbers the law of nature has no more protection than it had before the institution of political society. And it is further to be assumed that the individual has surrendered to the community his individual right of carrying out the judgment involved in natural law. Whether Locke conceived the contract so formulated to be historical, it is no easy matter to determine. That no evidence of its early existence can be adduced he ascribes to its origin in the infancy of the race; and the histories of Rome and Sparta and Venice seem to him proof that the theory is somehow demonstrable by facts. More important than origins, he seems to deem its implications. He has placed consent in the foreground of the argument; and he was anxious to establish the grounds for its continuance. Can the makers of the original contract, that is to say, bind their successors? If legitimate government is based upon the consent of its subjects, may they withdraw their consent? And what of a child born into the community? Locke is at least logical in his consent. The contract of obedience must be free or else, as Hooker had previously insisted, it is not a contract. Yet Locke urged that the primitive members of a State are bound to its perpetuation simply because unless the majority had power to enforce obedience government, in any satisfactory sense, would be impossible. With children the case is different. They are born subjects of no government or country; and their consent to its laws must either be derived from express acknowledgment, or by the tacit implication of the fact that the protection of the State has been accepted. But no one is bound until he has shown by the rule of his mature conduct that he considers himself a common subject with his fellows. Consent implies an act of will and we must have evidence to infer its presence before the rule of subjection can be applied.

We have thus the State, though the method of its organization is not yet outlined. For Locke there is a difference, though he did not explicitly describe its nature, between State and Government. Indeed he sometimes approximates, without ever formally adopting, the attitude of Pufendorf, his great German contemporary, where government is derived from a secondary contract dependent upon the original institution of civil society. The distinction is made in the light of what is to follow. For Locke was above all anxious to leave supreme power in a community whose single will, as manifested by majority-verdict, could not be challenged by any lesser organ than itself. Government there must be if political society is to endure; but its form and substance are dependent upon popular institution.

Locke follows in the great Aristotelian tradition of dividing the types of government into three. Where the power of making laws is in a single hand we have a monarchy; where it is exercised by a few or all we have alternatively oligarchy and democracy. The disposition of the legislative power is the fundamental test of type; for executive and judiciary are clearly dependent on it. Nor, as Hobbes argued, is the form of government permanent in character; the supreme community is as capable of making temporary as of registering irrevocable decisions. And though Locke admits that monarchy, from its likeness to the family, is the most primitive type of government, he denies Hobbes' assertion that it is the best. It seems, in his view, always to degenerate into the hands of lesser men who betray the contract they were appointed to observe. Nor is oligarchy much better off since it emphasizes the interest of a group against the superior interest of the community as a whole. Democracy alone proffers adequate safeguards of an enduring good rule; a democracy, that is to say, which is in the hands of delegates controlled by popular election. Not that Locke is anxious for the abolition of kingship. His letters show that he disliked the Cromwellian system and the republicanism which Harrington and Milton had based upon it. He was content to have a kingship divested of legislative power so long as hereditary succession was acknowledged to be dependent upon popular consent. The main thing was to be rid of the Divine Right of kings.

We have thus an organ for the interpretation of natural law free from the shifting variety of individual judgment. We have a means for securing impartial justice between members of civil society, and to that means the force of men has been surrendered. The formulation of the rules by which life, liberty and property are to be secured is legislation and this, from the terms of the original contract, is the supreme function of the State. But, in Locke's view, two other functions still remain. Law has not only to be declared. It must be enforced; and the business of the executive is to secure obedience to the command of law. But Locke here makes a third distinction. The State must live with other States, both as regards its individual members, and as a collective body; and the power which deals with this aspect of its relationships, Locke termed "federative." This last distinction, indeed, has no special value; and its author's own defence of it is far from clear. More important, especially, for future history, was his emphasis of the distinction between legislature and executive. The making of laws is for Locke a relatively simple and rapid task; the legislature may do its work and be gone. But those who attend to their execution must be ceaseless in their vigilance. It is better, therefore, to separate the two both as to powers and persons. Otherwise legislators "may exempt themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit the law, both in its making and its execution, to their own private wish, and thereby come to have a distinct interest from the rest of the community, contrary to the end of society and government." The legislator must therefore be bound by his own laws; and he must be chosen in such fashion that the representative assembly may fairly represent its constituencies. It was the patent anomalies of the existent scheme of distribution which made Locke here proffer his famous suggestion that the rotten boroughs should be abolished by executive act. One hundred and forty years were still to pass before this wise suggestion was translated into statute.

Though Locke thus insisted upon the separation of powers, he realized that emergencies are the parent of special need; and he recognized that not only may the executive, as in England, share in the task of legislation, but also may issue ordinances when the legislature is not in session, or act contrary to law in case of grave danger. Nor can the executive be forced to summon the legislature. Here, clearly enough, Locke is generalizing from the English constitution; and its sense of compromise is implicit in his remarks. Nor is his surrender here of consent sufficient to be inconsistent with his general outlook. For at the back of each governmental act, there is, in his own mind, an active citizen body occupied in judging it with single-minded reference to the law of nature and their own natural rights. There is thus a standard of right and wrong superior to all powers within the State. "A government," as he says, "is not free to do as it pleases ... the law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men, legislators as well as others." The social contract is secreted in the interstices of public statutes.

Its corollary is the right of revolution. It is interesting that he should have adopted this position; for in 1676 he had uttered the thought that not even the demands of conscience can justify rebellion. That was, however, before the tyranny of Charles had driven him into exile with his patron, and before James had attempted the subversion of all constitutional government. To deny the right of revolution was to justify the worst demands of James, and it is in its favor that he exerts his ablest controversial power. "The true remedy," he says, "of force without authority is to oppose force to it." Let the sovereign but step outside the powers derived from the social contract and resistance becomes a natural right. But how define such invasion of powers? The instances Locke chose show how closely, here at least, he was following the events of 1688. The substitution of arbitrary will for law, the corruption of Parliament by packing it with the prince's instruments, betrayal to a foreign prince, prevention of the due assemblage of Parliament--all these are a perversion of the trust imposed and operate to effect the dissolution of the contract. The state of nature again supervenes, and a new contract may be made with one more fitted to observe it. Here, also, Locke takes occasion to deny the central position of Hobbes' thesis. Power, the latter had argued, must be absolute and there cannot, therefore, be usurpation. But Locke retorts that an absolute government is no government at all since it proceeds by caprice instead of reason; and it is comparable only to a state of war since it implies the absence of judgment upon the character of power. It lacks the essential element of consent without which the binding force of law is absent. All government is a moral trust, and the idea of limitation is therein implied. But a limitation without the means of enforcement would be worthless, and revolution remains as the reserve power in society. The only hindrance to its exertion that Locke suggests is that of number. Revolution should not, he urges, be the act of a minority; for the contract is the action of the major portion of the people and its consent should likewise obtain to the dissolution of the covenant.

Locke himself covers the whole ground; and since his opinions on the problem were at least twenty years old, it is clear that he was consistent in a worthy outlook. He proceeds by a denial that any element of theocratic government can claim political validity. The magistrate is concerned only with the preservation of social peace and does not deal with the problem of men's souls. Where, indeed, opinions destructive of the State are entertained or a party subversive of peace makes its appearance, the magistrate has the right of suppression; though in the latter case force is the worst and last of remedies. In the English situation, it follows that all men are to be tolerated save Catholics, Mahomedans and atheists. The first are themselves deniers of the rights they would seek, and they find the centre of their political allegiance in a foreign power. Mahomedan morals are incompatible with European civil systems; and the central factor in atheism is the absence of the only ultimately satisfactory sanction of good conduct. Though Church and State are thus distinct, they act for a reciprocal benefit; and it is thus important to see why Locke insists on the invalidity of persecution. For such an end as the cure of souls, he argues, the magistrate has no divine legation. He cannot, on other grounds, use force for the simple reason that it does not produce internal conviction. But even if that were possible, force would still be mistaken; for the majority of the world is not Christian, yet it would have the right to persecute in the belief that it was possessed of truth. Nor can the implication that the magistrate has the keys of heaven be accepted. "No religion," says Locke finely, "which I believe not to be true can be either true or profitable to me." He thus makes of the Church an institution radically different from the ruling conceptions of his time. It becomes merely a voluntary society, which can exert no power save over its members. It may use its own ceremonies, but it cannot impose them on the unwilling; and since persecution is alien from the spirit of Christ, exclusion from membership must be the limit of ecclesiastical disciplinary power. Nor must we forget the advantages of toleration. Its eldest child is charity, and without it there can be no honesty of opinion. Later controversy did not make him modify these principles; and they lived, in Macaulay's hands, to be a vital weapon in the political method of the nineteenth century.

Any survey of earlier political theory would show how little of novelty there is in the specific elements of Locke's general doctrine. He is at all points the offspring of a great and unbroken tradition; and that not the least when he seems unconscious of it. Definite teachers, indeed, he can hardly be said to have had; no one can read his book without perceiving how much of it is rooted in the problems of his own day. He himself has expressed his sense of Hooker's greatness, and he elsewhere had recommended the works of Grotius and Pufendorf as an essential element in education. But his was a nature which learned more from men than books; and he more than once insisted that his philosophy was woven of his own "coarse thoughts." What, doubtless, he therein meant was to emphasize the freshness of his contact with contemporary fact in contrast with the technical jargon of the earlier thinkers. At least his work is free from the mountains of allusion which Prynne rolled into the bottom of his pages; and if the first Whig was the devil, he is singularly free from the irritating pedantry of biblical citation. Yet even with these novelties, no estimate of his work would be complete which failed to take account of the foundations upon which he builded.

What differentiates Locke from all his predecessors is the manner of his writing on the one hand, and the fact of the Revolution on the other. Every previous thinker save Sydney--the latter's work was not published until 1689--was writing with the Church hardly less in mind than the purely political problems of the State; even the secular Hobbes had devoted much thought and space to that "kingdom of darkness" which is Rome. And, Sydney apart, the resistance they had justified was always resistance to a religious tyrant; and Cartwright was as careful to exclude political oppression from the grounds of revolution as Locke was to insist upon it as the fundamental excuse. Locke is, in fact, the first of English thinkers the basis of whose argument is mainly secular. Not, indeed, that he can wholly escape the trammels of ecclesiasticism; not until the sceptical intelligence of Hume was such freedom possible. But it is clear enough that Locke was shifting to very different ground from that which arrested the attention of his predecessors. He is attempting, that is to say, a separation between Church and State not merely in that Scoto-Jesuit sense which aimed at ecclesiastical independence, but in order to assert the pre-eminence of the State as such. The central problem is with him political, and all other questions are subsidiary to it. Therein we have a sense, less clear in any previous writer save Machiavelli, of the real result of the decay of medieval ideals. Church and State have become transposed in their significance. The way, as a consequence, lies open to new dogmas.

The historical research of the nineteenth century has long since made an end of the social contract as an explanation of state-origins; and with it, of necessity, has gone the conception of natural rights as anterior to organized society. The problem, as we now know, is far more complex than the older thinkers imagined. Yet Locke's insistence on consent and natural rights has received new meaning from each critical period of history since he wrote. The theory of consent is vital because without the provision of channels for its administrative expression, men tend to become the creatures of a power ignorant at once and careless of their will. Active consent on the part of the mass of men emphasizes the contingent nature of all power and is essential to the full realization of freedom; and the purpose of the State, in any sense save the mere satisfaction of material appetite, remains, without it, unfulfilled. The concept of natural right is most closely related to this position. For so long as we regard rights as no more than the creatures of law, there is at no point adequate safeguard against their usurpation. A merely legal theory of the State can never, therefore, exhaust the problems of political philosophy.

No thinker has seen this fact more clearly than Locke; and if his effort to make rights something more than interests under juridical protection can not be accepted in the form he made it, the underlying purpose remains. A State, that is to say, which aims at giving to men the full capacity their trained initiative would permit is compelled to regard certain things as beyond the action of an ordinary legislature. What Stammler calls a "natural law with changing content"--a content which changes with our increasing power to satisfy demand--is essential if the state is to live the life of law. For here was the head and centre of Locke's enquiry. "What he was really concerned about," said T.H. Green, "was to dispute 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong.'" The method, as he conceived, by which this could be accomplished was the limitation of power. This he effected by two distinct methods, the one external, the other internal, in character.

The external method has, at bottom, two sides. It is, in the first place, achieved by a narrow definition of the purpose of the state. To Locke the State is little more than a negative institution, a kind of gigantic limited liability company; and if we are inclined to cavil at such restraint, we may perhaps remember that even to neo-Hegelians like Green and Bosanquet this negative sense is rarely absent, in the interest of individual exertion. But for Locke the real guarantee of right lies in another direction. What his whole work amounts to in substance--it is a significant anticipation of Rousseau--is a denial that sovereignty can exist anywhere save in the community as a whole. A common political superior there doubtless must be; but government is an organ to which omnipotence is wanting. So far as there is a sovereign at all in Locke's book, it is the will of that majority which Rousseau tried to disguise under the name of the general will; but obviously the conception lacks precision enough to give the notion of sovereignty the means of operation. The denial is natural enough to a man who had seen, under three sovereigns, the evils of unlimited power; and if there is lacking to his doctrine the well-rounded logic of Hobbes' proof that an unlimited sovereign is unavoidable, it is well to remember that the shift of opinion is, in our own time, more and more in the direction of Locke's attitude. That omnicompetence of Parliament which Bentham and Austin crystallized into the retort to Locke admits, in later hands, of exactly the amelioration he had in mind; and its ethical inadequacy becomes the more obvious the more closely it is studied.

The internal limitation Locke suggested is of more doubtful value. Government, he says, in substance, is a trustee and trustees abuse their power; let us therefore divide it as to parts and persons that the temptation to usurp may be diminished. There is a long history to this doctrine in its more obvious form, and it is a lamentable history. It tied men down to a tyrannous classification which had no root in the material it was supposed to distinguish. Montesquieu took it for the root of liberty; Blackstone, who should have known better, repeated the pious phrases of the Frenchman; and they went in company to America to persuade Madison and the Supreme Court of the United States that only the separation of powers can prevent the approach of tyranny. The facts do not bear out such assumption. The division of powers means in the event not less than their confusion. None can differentiate between the judge's declaration of law and his making of it. Every government department is compelled to legislate, and, often enough, to undertake judicial functions. The American history of the separation of powers has most largely been an attempt to bridge them; and all that has been gained is to drive the best talent, save on rare occasion, from its public life. In France the separation of powers meant, until recent times, the excessive subordination of the judiciary to the cabinet. Nor must we forget, as Locke should have remembered, the plain lesson of the Cromwellian constitutional experiments. That the dispersion of power is one of the great needs of the modern State at no point justifies the rigid categories into which Locke sought its division.

Locke might, indeed, claim that he had a part in this renaissance; but, once the influence of Burke had passed, it was to other gods men turned. For Bentham made an end of natural rights; and his contempt for the past was even more unsparing than Locke's own. It is more instructive to compare his work with Hobbes and Rousseau than with later thinkers; for after Hume English speculation works in a medium Locke would not have understood. Clearly enough, he has nothing of the relentless logic which made Hobbes' mind the clearest instrument in the history of English philosophy. Nor has he Hobbes' sense of style or pungent grasp of the grimness of facts about him. Yet he need not fear the comparison with the earlier thinker. If Hobbes' theory of sovereignty is today one of the commonplaces of jurisprudence, ethically and politically we occupy ourselves with erecting about it a system of limitations each one of which is in some sort due to Locke's perception. If we reject Locke's view of the natural goodness of men, Hobbes' sense of their evil character is not less remote from our speculations. Nor can we accept Hobbes' Erastianism. Locke's view of Church and State became, indeed, a kind of stepchild to it in the stagnant days of the later Georges; but Wesleyanism, on the one hand, and the Oxford movement on the other, pointed the inevitable moral of even an approximation to the Hobbesian view. And anyone who surveys the history of Church and State in America will be tempted to assert that in the last hundred years the separateness for which Locke contended is not without its justification. Locke's theory is a means of preserving the humanity of men; Hobbes makes their reason and conscience the subjects of a power he forbids them to judge. Locke saw that vigilance is the sister of liberty, where Hobbes dismissed the one as faction and the other as disorder. At every point, that is to say, where Hobbes and Locke are at variance, the future has been on Locke's side. He may have defended his cause less splendidly than his rival; but it will at least be admitted by most that he had a more splendid cause to defend.

Wherein, perhaps, the most profound distinction between Locke's teaching and our own time may be discovered is in our sense of the impossibility that a final answer can be found to political questions. Each age has new materials at its command; and, today, a static philosophy would condemn itself before completion. We do not build Utopias; and the attempt to discover the eternal principles of political right invites disaster at the outset. Yet that does not render useless, even for our own day, the kind of work Locke did. In the largest sense, his questions are still our own. In the largest sense, also, we are near enough to his time to profit at each step of our own efforts by the hints he proffers. The point at which he stood in English history bears not a little resemblance to our own. The emphasis, now as then, is upon the problem of freedom. The problem, now as then, was its translation into institutional terms. It is the glory of Locke that he brought a generous patience and a searching wisdom to the solution he proffered to his generation.

CHURCH AND STATE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The Revolution of 1688 drew its main source of strength from the traditional dislike of Rome, and the eager desire to place the Church of England beyond the reach of James' aggression. Yet it was not until a generation had passed that the lines of ecclesiastical settlement were, in any full sense clear. The difficulties involved were mostly governmental, and it can hardly even yet be said that they have been solved. The nature of the relation between Church and State, the affiliation between the Church and Nonconformist bodies, the character of its internal government--all these had still to be defined. Nor was this all. The problem of definition was made more complex by schism and disloyalty. An important fraction of the Church could not accept at all the fact of William's kingship; and if the larger part submitted, it cannot be said to have been enthusiastic.

Nor did the Church make easy the situation of the Nonconformists. Toleration of some kind was rapidly becoming inevitable; and with a Calvinist upon the throne persecution of, at any rate, the Presbyterians became finally impossible. Yet the definition of what limits were to be set to toleration was far from easy. The Church seemed like a fortress beleaguered when Nonjurors, Deists, Nonconformists, all alike assaulted her foundations. To loosen her hold upon political privilege seemed to be akin to self-destruction. And, after all, if Church and State were to stand in some connection, the former must have some benefit from the alliance. Did such partnership imply exclusion from its privilege for all who could not accept the special brand of religious doctrine? Locke, at least, denied the assumption, and argued that since Churches are voluntary societies, they cannot and ought not to have reciprocal relation with the State. But Locke's theory was meat too strong for the digestion of his time; and no statesman would then have argued that a government could forego the advantage of religious support. And William, after all, had come to free the church from her oppressor. Freedom implied protection, and protection in that age involved establishment. It was thus taken for granted by most members of the Church of England that her adoption by the State meant her superiority to every other form of religious organization. Superiority is, by its nature exclusive, the more especially when it is united to a certainty of truth and a kinship with the dominant political interest of the time. Long years were thus to pass before the real meaning of the Toleration Act secured translation into more generous statutes.

We are not here concerned with the wisdom of those of William's advisers who exacted an oath of allegiance from the clergy. It raised in acute form the validity of a doctrine which had, for more than a century, been the main foundation of the alliance between throne and altar in England. The demand precipitated a schism which lingered on, though fitfully, until the threshold of the nineteenth century. The men who could not take the oath were, many of them, among the most distinguished churchmen of the time. Great ecclesiastics like Sancroft, the archbishop of Canterbury and one of the seven who had gained immortality by his resistance to James, saints like Ken, the bishop of Bath and Wells, scholars like George Hickes and Henry Dodwell, men like Charles Leslie, born with a genius for recrimination; much, it is clear, of what was best in the Church of England was to be found amongst them. There is not a little of beauty, and much of pathos in their history. Most, after their deprivation, were condemned to poverty; few of them recanted. The lives of men like Sancroft and Ken and the younger Ambrose Bonwicke are part of the great Anglican tradition of earnest simplicity which later John Keble was to illustrate for the nineteenth century. The Nonjurors, as they were called, were not free from bitterness; and the history of their effort, after the consecration of Hilkiah Bedford and Ralph Taylor, to perpetuate the schism is a lamentable one. Not, indeed, that the history even of their decline is without its interest; and the study, alike of their liturgy and their attempt at reunion with the Eastern Church, must always possess a singular interest for students of ecclesiastical history.

Yet the real interest of the Nonjuring schism was political rather than religious; and its roots go out to vital events of the past. At the bottom it is the obverse side of the Divine Right of kings that they represent. That theory, which was the main weapon of the early secular state against the pretensions of Rome, must naturally have commanded the allegiance of members of a church which James I, its main exponent, had declared of vital import to his very existence. Its main opponents, moreover, were Catholics and Dissenters; so that men like Andrewes must have felt that when they answered Bellarmine they were in substance also defenders of their Church. After the great controversy of James I's reign resistance as a duty had come to be regarded as a main element in Jesuit and Nonconformist teaching; with the result that its antithesis became, as a consequence of the political situation, no less integral a part of Church of England doctrine. For it was upon the monarchy that the Church had come to depend for its existence; and if resistance to the king were made, as Knox and Bellarmine had in substance made it, the main weapon of the dissenting churches there was little hope that it would continue to exist once the monarchy was overthrown. And it is this, unquestionably, which explains why stout ecclesiastics like Barrow and Jackson can write in what seems so Erastian a temper. When they urge the sovereignty of the State, their thesis is in truth the sovereignty of the Church; and that means the triumph of men who looked with contemptuous hatred upon Nonconformists of every sect. The Church of England taught non-resistance as the condition of its own survival.

How deep-rooted this doctrine had become in the course of the seventeenth century the writings of men like Mainwaring and Sanderson sufficiently show; yet nothing so completely demonstrates its widespread acceptance as the result of the Revolution. Four hundred clergy abandoned their preferment because James ruled by Divine Right; and they could not in conscience resist even his iniquities. An able tract of 1689 had collected much material to show how integral the doctrine was to the beliefs of the Church. Had William's government, indeed, refrained from the imposition of the oath, it is possible that there might have been no schism at all; for the early Nonjurors at least--perhaps Hickes and Turner are exceptions--would probably have welcomed anything which enabled the avoidance of schism. Once, however, the oath was imposed three vital questions were raised. Deprivation obviously involved the problem of the power of the State over the Church. If the act of a convention whose own legality was at best doubtful could deprive the consecrated of their position, was the Church a Church at all, or was it the mere creature of the secular power? And what, moreover, of conscience? It could not be an inherent part of the Church's belief that men should betray their faith for the sake of peace. Later thinkers added the purely secular argument that resistance in one case made for resistance in all. Admit, it was argued by Leslie, the right to disobey, and the fabric of society is at a stroke dissolved. The attitude is characteristic of that able controversialist; and it shows how hardly the earlier notions of Divine Right were to die.

These theories merit a further examination. Williams, later the Bishop of Chichester, had argued that separation on the basis of the oath was unreasonable. "All that the civil power here pretends to," he wrote "is to secure itself against the practices of dissatisfied persons." The Nonjurors, in this view, were making an ecclesiastical matter of a purely secular issue. He was answered, among others, by Samuel Grascom, in an argument which found high favor among the stricter of his sect. "The matter and substance of these Oaths," he said, "is put into the prayers of the Church, and so far it becomes a matter of communion. What people are enjoined in the solemn worship to pray for, is made a matter of communion; and if it be simple, will not only justify, but require a separation." Here is the pith of the matter. For if the form and substance of Church affairs is thus to be left to governmental will, then those who obey have left the Church and it is the faithful remnant only who constitute the true fellowship. The schism, in this view, was the fault of those who remained subject to William's dominion. The Nonjurors had not changed; and they were preserving the Church in its integrity from men who strove to betray it to the civil power.

This matter of integrity is important. The glamour of Macaulay has somewhat softened the situation of those who took the oaths; and in his pages the Nonjurors appear as stupid men unworthily defending a dead cause. It is worth while to note that this is the merest travesty. Tillotson, who succeeded Sancroft on the latter's deprivation, and Burnet himself had urged passive resistance upon Lord William Russell as essential to salvation; Tenison had done likewise at the execution of Monmouth. Stillingfleet, Patrick, White Kennett, had all written in its favor; and to William Sherlock belongs the privilege of having defended and attacked it in two pamphlets each of which challenges the pithy brilliance of the other. Clearly, so far as consistency is in question, the Nonjurors might with justice contend that they had right on their side. And even if it is said that the policy of James introduced a new situation the answer surely is that Divine Right and non-resistance can, by their very nature, make no allowance for novelty.

The root, then, of this ecclesiastical contention is the argument later advanced by Leslie in his "Case of the Regale and the Pontificate" in which he summarized the Convocation dispute. The State, he argues, has no power over bishops whose relationship to their flock is purely spiritual and derived from Christ. The Church is independent of all civil institution, and must have therefore within herself the powers necessary to her life as a society. Leslie repudiates Erastianism in the strongest terms. Not only is it, for him, an encroachment upon the rights of Christ, but it leads to deism in the gentry and to dissent among the common people. The Church of England comes to be regarded as no more than the creature of Parliamentary enactment; and thus to leave it as the creature of human votes, is to destroy its divinity.

It is easy enough to see that men who felt in this fashion could hardly have decided otherwise than as they did. The matter of conscience, indeed, was fundamental to their position. "I think," said the Bishop of Worcester on his death-bed, "I could suffer at a stake rather than take this oath." That, indeed, represents the general temper. Many of them did not doubt that James had done grievous wrong; but they had taken the oath of allegiance to him, and they saw in their conscience no means of escape from their vow. "Their Majesties," writes the author of the account of Bishop Lake's death, "are the two persons in the world whose reign over them, their interest and inclination oblige them most to desire, and nothing but conscience could restrain them from being as forward as any in all expressions of loyalty." In such an aspect, even those who believe their attitude to have been wrong, can hardly doubt that they acted rightly in their expression of it. For, after all, experience has shown that the State is built upon the consciences of men. And the protest they made stands out in the next generation in vivid contrast to a worldly-minded and politically-corrupt Church which only internal revolution could awaken from its slumbers.

The argument has a wider history than its controversial statement might seem to warrant. At bottom, clearly enough, it is an attack upon the new tradition which Locke had brought into being. What seems to impress it most is the impossibility of founding society upon other than a divine origin. Anything less will not command the assent of men sufficiently to be immune from their evil passions. Let their minds but once turn to resistance, and the bonds of social order will be broken. Complete submission is the only safeguard against anarchy. So, a century later, de Maistre could argue that unless the whole world became the subject of Rome, the complete dissolution of Christian society must follow. So, too, fifty years before, Hobbes had argued for an absolute dominion lest the ambitions and desires of men break through the fragile boundaries of the social estate.

What really defeated the Nonjurors' claims was commonsense. Much the ablest attack upon their position was Stillingfleet's defence of the policy employed in filling up the sees vacated by deprivation; and it is remarkable that the theory he employs is to insist that unless the lawfulness of what had been done is admitted, the Nonjuror's position is inevitable. "If it be unlawful to succeed a deprived bishop," he wrote, "then he is the bishop of the diocese still: and then the law that deprives him is no law, and consequently the king and Parliament that made that law no king and Parliament: and how can this be reconciled with the Oath of Allegiance, unless the Doctor can swear allegiance to him who is no King and hath no authority to govern." All this the Nonjurors would have admitted, and the mere fact that it could be used as argument against them is proof that they were out of touch with the national temper. What they wanted was a legal revolution which is in the nature of things impossible. We may regret that the oath was deemed essential, and feel that it might not have been so stoutly pressed. But the leaders of a revolution "tread a path of fire"; and the fault lay less at the door of the civil government than in the fact that this was an age when men acted on their principles. William and his advisers, with the condition of Ireland and Scotland a cause for agitation, with France hostile, with treason and plot not absent from the episcopate itself, had no easy task; what, in the temper of the time, gives most cause for consideration, is the moderate spirit in which they accomplished it.

The Nonjuring schism was by no means the only difficulty which the Church of England had to confront in these troubled years. The definition of her relationship with State and nation, if at the moment it aroused less bitterness, was in the long run more intricate in its nature. That some sort of toleration was inevitable few, save a group of prejudiced irreconcilables, would have denied. But greater things were in the air, and there were still many who dreamed of a grand scheme of Comprehension, by which all save the more extreme Dissenters would have been admitted to the Church. It is this which explains the acrimonious debates of the next two years. The hatred of the Church for dissent can only be understood by those who study with care the insults heaped upon her by the sectaries during the Civil Wars. That men who had striven for her dissolution should be admitted to her privileges seemed to Churchmen as tragic as ironical. Nor must we miss the political aspect of the matter. William had received an eager, if natural, support from Nonconformists; and since the vast majority of them was Whig in temper, the greater the degree of toleration, the greater likelihood there was of an attack upon the Church. Exclusion thus became a fundamental article of the Tory creed; and it was the more valued because it enabled them to strike at their opponents through an institution which at the trial of Sacheverell, in 1710, still showed an overwhelming hold upon the mass of the people.

The attitude of mind herein implied is in large part the reaction from the Erastian temper of the government. Under William, that temper is intelligible enough; for unless he held the Church in strict control, he must have felt that he was giving a large handle to his enemies. Under Anne, the essence of the situation remained unchanged, even though her eager sympathy with the Church was beyond all question. William had relieved Nonconformists from the burden of penal statute; the Occasional Conformity Act of 1713 broadly continued the exclusion of all save the more yielding of them from political office. When the Hanoverians succeeded they were willing to repeal its more rigid intolerance; but the Test Act remained as evidence that the Dissenters were not yet regarded as in a full sense part of the national life.

The reasons for the hatred of dissent go back in part to the Civil War and in part also to the feeling of common ground between the dissenting interest and Rome which was born of the struggle under Elizabeth and James. The pamphlets are innumerable; and most of them deserve the complete obliquity into which they have fallen. We are told, in the eighteenth as in the seventeenth century, that the Presbyterian theory of government is inconsistent with the existence of the civil power. "They claim," said Leslie, "power to abrogate the laws of the land touching ecclesiastical matters, if they judge them hurtful or unprofitable... They require the civil magistrate to be subject to their power." Of Knox or Cartwright this is no unfair account; but of the later Presbyterians it is the merest travesty. It supposes that they would be willing to push to the utmost limit the implications of the theory of the two kingdoms--a supposition which their passive submission to the Act of 1712 restoring lay patronage decisively refutes. Bramhall had no doubt that their discipline was "the very quintessence of refined popery," and the argument is repeated by a hundred less learned pamphleteers. Neither the grim irony of Defoe nor the proven facts of the case could wean either the majority of Churchmen or the masses of the people from the belief that the Revolution endangered the very existence of the Church and that concession would be fatal. So stoutly did the Church resist it that the accession of George I alone, in Lecky's view, prevented the repeal of the Toleration Act and the destruction of the political benefits of the Revolution.

But nowhere was the temper of the time more clearly displayed than in the disputes over Convocation. To William's advisers, perhaps, more than to the Church itself their precipitation is due; for had they not, at the outset of the reign, suggested large changes in the liturgy suspicions then aroused might well have slumbered. As it was, the question of the royal supremacy immediately came into view and the clergy spared no effort to meet the issue so raised. And this they felt the more bitterly because the upper house of Convocation, two-thirds of which were William's nominees, naturally inclined to his side. Both under William and Anne the dispute continued, and the lower clergy shrank from no opportunity of conflict. They fought the king, the archbishop, the upper house. They attacked the writings of Toland and Burnet, the latter's book since recognized as one of the great treasures of Anglican literature. In the main, of course, the struggle was part of the perennial conflict between High Church doctrine and latitudinarianism. But that was only a fragment of the issue. What really was in question was the nature of the State's power over the Church. That could be left unanswered so long, as with James I and Charles, the two powers had but a single thought. The situation changed only when State and Church had different policies to fulfil and different means for their attainment.

The argument is powerful enough; though it should be noted that some of its implications remain undetermined. Leslie does not say how the spheres of Church and State are to be differentiated. He does not explain the methods whereby an establishment is to be made compatible with freedom. For it is obvious that the partnership of Church and State must be upon conditions; and once the State had permitted the existence of creeds other than that of its official adoption, it could not maintain the exclusive power for which the Church contended. And when the Church not only complained of State-betrayal, but attempted the use of political means to enforce remedial measures it was inevitable that statesmen would use the weapons ready to their hand to coerce it to their will. The real remedy for the High Churchmen was not exclusiveness but disestablishment.

The meaning is clear enough. What Hoadly is attacking is the theory of a visible Church of Christ on earth, with the immense superstructure of miracle and infallibility erected thereon. The true Church of Christ is in heaven; and the members of the earthly society can but try in a human, blundering way, to act with decency and justice. Apostolic succession, the power of excommunication, the dealing out of forgiveness for men's sins, the determination of true doctrine, insofar as the Church claims these powers, it is usurping an authority that is not its own. The relation of man to God is his private affair, and God will ask from him sincerity and honesty, rather than judge him for his possession of some special set of dogmas. Clearly, therefore, if the Church is no more than this, it has no supernatural pretensions to oppose to the human claims of the State. And since the State must have within itself all the means of sufficient life, it has the right to resist the ecclesiastical onslaught as based upon the usurpation of power assumed without right. And in later treatises Hoadly did for ceremonial exactly what he had done for church government. The eucharist became a piece of symbolism and excommunication nothing more than an announcement--"a mere external thing"--that the rules of the fellowship have been broken. It at no point is related to the sinner's opportunity of salvation.

In such an aspect, it would clearly follow that the Church has no monopoly of truth. It can, indeed, judge its own beliefs; but reason alone can demonstrate the inadequacy of other attitudes. Nor does its judgment preclude the individual duty to examine into the truth of things. The real root of faith is not the possession of an infallible dogma, but the arriving honestly at the dogma in which you happen to believe. For the magistrate, he urges, what is important is not the table of your springs of action, but the conduct itself which is based upon that table; from which it follows that things like the Test and Corporation Acts have no real political validity. They have been imposed upon the State by the narrow interpretations of an usurping power; and the Nonconformist claim to citizenship would thus seem as valid as that of a member of the Church of England.

From Law's own point of view, the logic of his position is undeniable; and in his third letter to Hoadly, the real heart of his attack, he touches the centre of the latter's argument. For if it is sincerity which is alone important it would follow that things false and wrong are as acceptable to God as things true and right, which is patently absurd. Nor has Hoadly given us means for the detection of sincerity. He seemed to think that anyone was sincere who so thought himself; but, says Law, "it is also possible and as likely for a man to be mistaken in those things which constitute true sincerity as in those things which constitute true religion." Clearly, sincerity cannot be the pith of the matter; for it may be mistaken and directed to wrong ends. The State, in fact, may respect conscience, but Hoadly is no more entitled to assume the infallibility of private belief than he is to deny the infallibility of the Church's teaching. That way lies anarchy.

Here, indeed, the antagonists were on common ground. Both had denied the absolute character of any authority; but while Hoadly virtually postulates a Church which logically is no more than those who accept the moral law as Christ described it, Law restricts the Church to that society which bears the traditional marks of the historic institution. On Hoadly's principles, there was no reason why anyone not hostile to the civil power should not enjoy political privilege; on Law's there was every reason simply because those who denied the doctrines of the High Church refused a truth open for their acceptance. Law, indeed, goes so far as to argue that in the light of his principles Hoadly should be a Deist; and there is ground for what, in that age, was a valuable point to make. The sum total of it all is that for the bishop the outward actions of men alone concern the State; while Law insists that the root of action and the test of fitness is whether men have seen a certain aspect of the truth and grasped it.

It is easy enough to discover the loopholes in the theory. The contract does not exist, or, at least, it is placed by Warburton "in the same archive with the famous original compact between monarch and people" which has been the object of vast but fruitless searches. Nor does the Act of Submission bear upon its face the marks of that tender care of the protection of an independent society which Warburton declared a vital tenet of the Union. Yet such criticisms miss the real significance of the theory. It is really the introduction into English politics of that notion of the two societies which, a century before, Melville and Bellarmine had made so fruitful. With neither Presbyterian nor Jesuit was the separation complete, for the simple reason that each had a secret conviction that the ecclesiastical society was at bottom the superior. Yet the theory was the parent of liberty, if only because it pointed the way to a balance of power between claims which, before, had seemed mutually exclusive.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet