98 CHURCH OF ENGLAND, The, Sylvester Hassell The birthday of ‘the Lutheran Church,” when it began its existence as a distinct organization, was August 27th, 1526, the last day of the first Diet of Spires, when each German State was permitted by the emperor, Charles V., to act in religious matters according to its own convictions, and when the Lutheran territorial churches were thus legitimized.
The birthday of the “Church of England” (or Episcopalian Church), when it began its existence as a distinct organization, was November 3rd, 1534, the date of the passage, by the British Parliament, of the “Act of Supremacy,” extirpating the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Pope in England, and making King Henry VIII. the “Supreme Head of the Church of England.”
And the birthday of the “Church of Scotland” (or Presbyterian Church), when it began its existence as a distinct organization, was August 17th, 1560, when the Scotch Confession of Faith, drawn by John Knox and his compeers, was formally adopted by the Scotch Parliament.
All these three bodies were born from the “Roman Catholic Church,” and therefore acknowledged that body to be a true church of Christ, and her ordinances to be valid.
The “Church of England,” as Macaulay, the best-informed English historian of the nineteenth century, himself an Episcopalian, tells us, was “the fruit of a union between Protestantism and the British government” — the result of “a compromise huddled up between the eager zeal of reformers and the selfishness of greedy, ambitious and time-serving politicians; from the first considered by a large body of Protestants as a scheme for serving two masters, as an attempt to unite the worship of the Lord and the worship of Baal.
As for the Church of England having the apostolical succession, the proofs of this for fifteen hundred years are buried in utter darkness; as for her having apostolical unity, she is a combination of a hundred sects battling within one organization.” The elder William Pitt, more than a hundred years ago, well described her as a body with “a Calvinistic creed, a popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy.”
The able and accurate church historian, Prof. Philip Schaff, says:—“The despotic and licentious monarch (Henry VIII.), whom Pope Leo X. rewarded for his book against Luther with the title, “Defender of the Faith,” remained a Catholic in belief and sentiment till his death; he merely substituted king-worship for pope-worship, a domestic tyranny for a foreign one, by cutting off the papal tiara from the Episcopal hierarchy, and placing his own crown on the bleeding neck.”
Because the pope would not sanction his divorce from his wife Catharine of Aragon, he abolished the papal supremacy in England, and made himself virtual pope, assuming to decide all questions of doctrine and worship, and putting to death those who dared to differ from him. In 1543 he decreed that none under the rank of gentlemen and gentlewomen should be allowed to read the Scriptures.
Under Edward VI., Henry’s son (1547-1554), the forty-two Articles of Religion, mostly written by Archbishop Cranmer, and after reduced to thirty-nine, were adopted. If the seventeenth Article is not predestinarian, the ablest historians are at fault, and language is meaningless.
Henry’s oldest daughter, Mary Tudor (1553-8), revenging the injustice done her Spanish Catholic mother, the divorced Catharine, instituted a papal reaction. “Her short bloody reign was the period of Protestant martyrdom, which fertilized the soil of England, and of the exile of about eight hundred Englishmen, who were received with open arms on the Continent (especially at Geneva), and who brought back clearer and stronger views of the Reformation. The violent restoration of the old system intensified the hatred of popery, and forever connected it in the English mind with persecution and bloodshed, with national humiliation and disgrace.
John Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” is a pathetic account of these sufferings, the author himself having been an exile during the persecution. The Protestant Reformation was permanently established in England under Elizabeth (1558-1603), the masculine daughter of Henry VIII., and the Protestant Anne Boleyn. Declared illegitimate by the pope, who would not sanction the divorce of Henry and Catharine, and excommunicated by the pope, and continually plotted against by the Catholics, she ably and successfully maintained the Protestant cause.
Her motives were entirely political. She herself was “wholly unspiritual,” says Mr. J.R. Green, “a brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child of earth and the Pagan renascence,” and yet the “Supreme Governor of the Church of England.” She had the discretion to drop the blasphemous antichristian title of “Head of the Church.”
The shipwreck and defeat of the great Spanish Armada, sent in 1588 by Philip II. of Spain for the conquest of England, transferred naval and commercial supremacy from Catholic Spain to Protestant England and Holland. The “Church of England” is at present boastfully declared to be “the strongest and richest national Church in Protestant Christendom”—very much then like the “Church of Rome,” and to the same extent unlike the church of the New Testament.” (Hassell’s History ppg 500-502)
Sylvester Hassell: The “Church of England” for a long time imitated the tyrannical and persecuting spirit of her old mother Rome. “Created in the first instance by a court intrigue,” says Mr. W.E.H. Lecky, “pervaded in all its parts by a spirit of the most intense Erastianism (representing the church to be a mere creature of the State, dependent upon the State for its existence and authority), and aspiring at the same time to a spiritual authority scarcely less absolute than that of the (Romish) church which it had superseded, Anglicanism was from the beginning at once the most servile and the most efficient agent of tyranny.
Endeavoring by the assistance of temporal authority and by the display of worldly pomp to realize in England the same position as Catholicism had occupied in Europe, she naturally flung herself on every occasion into the arms of the civil power. No other church so uniformly betrayed and trampled on the liberties of her country. In all those fiery trials through which English liberty has passed since the Reformation, she invariably cast her influence into the scale of tyranny, supported and eulogized every attempt to violate the Constitution, and wrote the fearful sentence of eternal
condemnation upon the tombs of martyrs of freedom.
When Charles I. attempted to convert the monarchy into a despotism, the English Church gave him its constant and enthusiastic support. When, in the gloomy period of vice and of reaction that followed the Restoration, the current of opinion set in against all liberal opinions, and the maxims of despotism were embodied even in the Oath of Allegiance, the Church of England directed the stream, allied herself in the closest union with a court whose vices were the scandal of Christendom, and exhausted her anathemas, not upon the hideous corruption that surrounded her, but upon the principles of Hampden and of Milton.
All through the long series of encroachments of the Stuarts she exhibited the same spirit. It was not till James II. had menaced her supremacy that the church was aroused to resistance. Then, indeed, for a brief but memorable period, she placed herself in opposition to the Crown, and contributed largely to one of the most glorious events in English history. But no sooner had William mounted the throne than her policy was reversed, her whole energies were directed to the subversion of the constitutional liberty that was then firmly established, and it is recorded by the great historian of the Revolution that at least nine-tenths of the clergy were opposed to the emancipator of England.
All through the reaction under Queen Anne, all through the still worse reaction under George III., the same spirit was displayed. In the first period the clergy, in their hatred of liberty, followed cordially the leadership of the infidel Bolingbroke; in the second they were the most ardent supporters of the wars against America and against the French Revolution, which have been the most disastrous in which England has ever engaged. From first to last their conduct was the same, and every triumph of liberty was their defeat.
The despotic and persecuting spirit of the “Church of England” was manifested against its own Puritan, or Non-conformist members; and against the Independents (or stricter Puritans, who formed churches separate from the Established Church); still more against the Covenanters (or Covenanted Presbyterians who entered into a compact to resist the imposition of Episcopacy upon Scotland); and most of all against the Baptists and Quakers.
And this spirit was manifested both in the early part of the seventeenth century, when the leading clergy of the Establishment were Calvinistic, and in the later part, when they were Arminian; but the Arminian persecutions far surpassed the Calvinistic both in number and atrocity— persecution being more logically consistent with Arminianism, especially when, as in this case, the latter was blended with ritualism and sacerdotalism.” (Hassell’s History 517, 518)