CH. XIII. SUBSCRIPTION TO THE ARTICLES. 497 an office which they could not legally fill without going through a ceremony repugnant to their conscience. This doctrine was at last finally overthrown in 1767 by a judgment of the House of Lords. After consultation with the judges, and after one of the most admirable of the many admirable speeches of Lord Mansfield, the House decided that the Toleration Act took away the crime as well as the penalty of Nonconformity, and that no fine could be legally imposed on Nonconformists who refused to serve in offices to which conscientious Dissenters were ineligible by law.' The next important question relating to religious liberty was one to which I have already adverted in another connection. The movement for abolishing the subscription to the Thirtynine Articles was defended mainly on the principles of Locke and of Hoadly. Though not absolutely coextensive, it was at least closely connected with the growth of the Arian school of which Clarke, Sykes, Clayton, and Lindsey were prominent representatives, and it received a great impulse in 1766 from the publication and the popularity of the 'Confessional' of Archdeacon Blackburne. In 1771 a society called the Feather's Tavern Association was formed for the purpose of applying to the Legislature for relief. Blackburne and Lindsey were its most active members, and in February 1772 a petition, drawn up by Blackburne and signed by 250 persons, was presented to the House of Commons by Sir W. Meredith. Of those who signed it about 200 were clergymen, and the remainder were lawyers and doctors, who protested especially against the custom which prevailed at the universities of obliging students who came up for matriculation, at the age of sixteen or even earlier, and who were not intended for the Church, to subscribe their consent to the Articles. It was remarked that Oxford was strongly opposed to the movement, while a powerful party at Cambridge supported it. Watson, who was afterwards Bishop of Llandaff, and who was at this time Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, published two letters in favour of it, under the signature of A Christian Whig,' which were presented to every Member of ParStephens on the Constitution, pp. 337, See the noble speech of Lord Mansfield, Parl. Hist. xvi. 313-327. Campbell's Chief Justices, ii. 511–514. 338. 2 Parl. Hist. xvii. 250. 2 liament the day before the petition was taken into consideration. Paley, who was then rising to prominence as a lecturer at Cambridge, refused to sign the petition on the characteristic ground that he was 'too poor to keep a conscience,' but he fully concurred in it, and he wrote anonymously in its support. It was signed by Jebb and Edward Law, who were prominent tutors at Cambridge, and it was countenanced by the Bishop of Carlisle, who was father of Edward Law, and also it is said in some degree by Bishop Lowth.3 Lord North was anxious that the petition should be received and silently laid aside; but Sir Roger Newdigate, who was violently opposed to it, insisted upon moving its rejection, and a very interesting debate ensued. On the side of the petitioners the chief topics were the obscurities, the absurdities, and inconsistencies of the Articles, the manifest severity with which they pressed upon many clerical consciences, the folly of asking schoolboys of sixteen to declare their assent to a long series of complicated dogmatic assertions, the individual right and duty of every Protestant to interpret Scripture freely for himself, the essentially Popish character of all attempts to prescribe religious opinions by human formularies, the danger and the immorality of holding out temptations to dissimulation and prevarication by annexing rewards or punishments to particular opinions, the duty of opening the Church as wide as possible to all conscientious men. The petitioners were quite ready to assent to Scripture as the inspired Word of God, and to abjure all popish tendencies, but they refused to be bound by any merely human formularies. Among the arguments on the other side may be mentioned the appearance, perhaps for the first time, of two political doctrines which were afterwards destined in connection with Irish politics, and with the Roman Catholic question, to attain a great importance. It was contended that the Corona 1 Watson's Autobiography, i. 65, 66. ? Meadley's Life of Paley, pp. 4750, Append. 3-46. In his Moral Philosophy, book iii. ch. xxii., Paley justified subscription, but strongly denied that it bound the subscriber to believe every proposition contained in the Articles, or all the theological opinions of their compilers. The Articles, he maintained, were intended by the Legislature to exclude abettors of Popery, Anabaptists, and members of sects hostile to episcopacy, and the intention of the Legislature is the measure of the obligation of the subscriber. Walpole's Last Journals, i. 7–13. CH. XIII. DEBATE ON THE SUBSCRIPTION. 499 tion Oath made it unlawful for the Sovereign to give his assent to any law which changed the form or character of the Established Church, and that a similar incapacity was imposed upon Parliament by the articles of the Scotch Union, which enacted the permanent maintenance of the then existing Church establishments in the two countries. It is remarkable that Burke, while strongly opposing the petition, took great pains to disclaim all sympathy with these arguments, and asserted that the Coronation Oath only bound the Sovereign to respect the religion which his Parliament had sanctioned, and that the Act of Union was no bar to the right of the united Parliament to revise and modify the ecclesiastical conditions of the country.2 The King was very strongly opposed to the prayer of the petitioners, and Lord North, in a temperate speech, opposed it as disturbing what was now quiet, and as likely to introduce anarchy, confusion, and dissension into the Church. The petition was supported among others by Lord George Germaine, Sir George Savile, and Thomas Pitt, the nephew of Chatham, who belonged to different political connections, and its advocates appear to have been chiefly Whigs. Dowdeswell, however, and Burke on this question severed themselves from their friends,4 and the speech of Burke was by far the ablest in the debate. He urged the great danger of religious alterations, which usually pave the way to religious tumults and shake one of the capital pillars of the State. He dwelt upon the complete indifference of the great majority of the people to the subject, and he laid down very emphatically the principle which always governed his own attitude and that of the section of the Whig party which he inspired, towards proposed reforms. 'The ground for a legislative alteration of a legal establishment is this and this only; that you find the inclinations of the majority of the people, concurring with your own sense of the intolerable nature of the abuse, are in favour of a change.' No such desire existed 1 See both of these arguments in the speech of Sir Roger Newdigate, Parl. Hist. xvii. 255, 256. 2 Ibid. 276-279. 3 Correspondence of George III. with Lord North, i. 89; ii. 378. Burke, in a letter to Lady Huntingdon, promising to oppose the peti tion, says, " in the present case. While strongly asserting the right of every man to follow his own convictions in religion, he as strongly maintained the undoubted right of the Legislature 'to annex its own conditions to benefits artificially created,' and 'to take a security that a tax raised on the people shall be applied only to those who profess such doctrines and follow such a mode of worship as the Legislature representing the people has thought most agreeable to their general sense, binding as usual the minority not to an assent to the doctrines, but to a payment of the tax.' The present question, he said, is not a question of the rights of private conscience, but of the title to public emoluments. He drew a vivid picture of the utter unsuitability of the Bible to be treated as a bond of union or a summary of faith,' and he dilated upon the impossibility of maintaining a religious organisation without any fixed code of belief, and the confusion and anarchy which an abolition of subscription would probably produce. By a majority of 217 to 71 the House refused to receive the petition.2 The question was again introduced in 1773 and 1774, but it made no progress either in the House or in the country, though the subscription of students at Cainbridge was soon after modified. Several of the leaders of the movement seceded from the Church of England to Unitarianism, and the school of Hoadly was in its decadence, and a new spirit was arising in the Church. It was a significant fact that the Methodists, and the section of the Anglican clergy who were most imbued with their principles, were the most ardent opponents of the relaxation of subscription,3 and the strongly dogmatic character of What is that Scripture to which they are content to subscribe? They do not think that a book becomes of Divine authority because it is bound in blue morocco, and is printed by John Basket and his assigns? The Bible is a vast collection of different treatises. A man who holds the Divine authority of one may consider the other as merely human. There are some who reject the Canticles-others six of the Epistles. The Apocalypse has been suspected even as heretical, and was doubted of for many ages. The Scripture is no one summary of doctrines regularly digested, in which ... a man could not mistake his way. It is a most venerable but most multifarious collection of the records of the Divine economy, a collection of an infinite variety of cosmogony, theology, history, prophecy, psalmody, morality, apologue, allegory, legislation, ethics, carried through different books, by different authors, at different ages, for different ends and purposes.'-Burke's Works, x. 20, 21. 2 Parl. Hist. xvii. 246-296. Burke's Works, x. 3-21. Life of the Countess of Huntingdon, ii. 285-288. Walpole's Last Journals, i. 376. CH. XIII. DISSENTERS' SUBSCRIPTION. 501 the Evangelical school, and the Calvinistic theology which soon became dominant within it, tended to attach its members to the Articles. The opposition to them soon died away, and when it was next revived it was by the school which was beyond all others the most opposed to that of Hoadly, by the school of Newman and Keble, who justly looked upon the Articles as the stronghold of that Protestant faith which they desired to extirpate from the Church. In the course of the debates on the subscription, Lord North said that if the application for relief had come from Dissenting ministers, who received no emoluments from the Establishment, he could see no objection to it, and this remark encouraged the Dissenters to apply for a relief from their subscription. As we have seen, their ministers, schoolmasters, and tutors were compelled by the Toleration Act to assent to thirty-five and a half of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England. No such subscription had been exacted in the Irish Toleration Act of 1719, which legalised the position of the Irish Protestant Dissenters, and it was on various grounds unpopular among the Dissenters in England. Many had drifted far from the orthodoxy of their fathers, many had adopted the views of Hoadly, that all subscriptions to human formularies were wrong, and many others who cordially believed the doctrinal articles, regarded the subscription to them as a humiliating act of homage to a rival Church. The law indeed appears to have been very rarely enforced, and there was a party among the more orthodox Dissenters who desired its maintenance, and even petitioned against the abolition of the subscription to the Anglican Articles as tending to encourage the growth of Arianism. The prevailing Dissenting opinion, however, was on the other side, and the relief Bill was extremely well received in the House of Commons. The ministers, though they did not take it under their own charge, appear to have favoured it, or at least to have been divided on the subject. On the side of the Opposition, Burke spoke strongly in its favour, and the great body of the Whigs supported it. It was carried through the House of Commons by large majorities in 1772 and 1773, but the bishops-strongly countenanced by the King, and ap 1 Parl. Hist. xvii. 441, 443, 770-772, 786-790. |