Now JAMES II. was followed by William of Orange and Queen Mary. This William proved himself no great admirer of ecclesiastical establishments. He belonged to the school of William the Silent—Holland's great champion of religious freedom and equality of all sects before the law. William of Orange abolished episcopacy in Scotland.
When the clergy of the Church of England saw how William viewed these things they reverted to James II., who had stolen away from his kingdom as a thief in the night. They refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new government, although this course was clearly inconsistent with their doctrine of "Divine Right and Passive Obedience." But William held them to their own doctrine; and because they refused to take the oath of allegiance to the crown, he proceeded to eject them from their sees. Since these sees had always been subject to the crown, and in a certain sense were crown property, his action cannot be criticised. Then the bishops denied the right of the Legislature to pass a law against their order, and they boldly declared that the sovereign had no authority to put such a measure into execution. All of this by advocates of the "Divine Right of Kings and Passive Obedience"! They next proceeded to elect bishops themselves. "In several instances, the unseemly spectacle was exhibited of two bishops for the same place, one nominated by the spiritual power, the other nominated by the temporal power.
There was another piece of chicanery of which these gentle shepherds were guilty. Many of them still retained their affection for James, but they had not enough of the true martyr spirit to face the anger of the government, or to risk the loss of their benefices. So they availed themselves of a "supposed distinction between a king by right and a king in possession." This was the old absurdity of de facto and de jure; as if any man could retain a right to a throne which his subjects prohibited him from occupying. The consequence was that while with their lips they took an oath of allegiance to William, they in their hearts paid homage to James. This was a wretched subterfuge. By it "a large body of the clergy were at once turned into concealed rebels." Writing in 1715, Leslie, by far one of the ablest of them, thus states their position:—
You are now driven to this dilemma,—swear, or swear not; if you swear, you kill the soul; and if you swear not, you kill the body, in the loss of your bread.
Nevertheless these disgraceful proceedings were productive of good—they caused both government and people to lose confidence in the established system. In century sixteen the tide began to turn against it. Since the next century no ecclesiastic has held the office of Lord Chancellor. Says Buckle:—
Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, there has been no instance [in England] of [an ecclesiastic] receiving any important diplomatic appointment, or, indeed, holding any important office in the State. Nor has this increasing ascendancy of laymen been confined to the executive government. On the contrary, we find in both Houses of Parliament the same principle at work. In the early and barbarous periods of our history one-half of the House of Lords consisted of temporal peers; the other half of spiritual ones. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the spiritual peers, instead of forming one-half of the Upper House, had dwindled away to one-eighth; and in the middle of the nineteenth century they have further shrunk to one-fourteenth. . . . Precisely in the same way, more than fifty years have elapsed since any clergyman has been able to take his seat as a representative of the people, the House of Commons having, in 1801, formerly closed their doors against a profession which, in the olden time, would have been gladly admitted, even by the proudest and most exclusive assembly.
Even in later days has the Church of England persecuted. The great King William III. was followed upon the throne by a "foolish and ignorant woman, whose love for the clergy would, in a more superstitious age, have led to dangerous results." I refer, of course, to Anne, who became queen in 1702. New edicts of persecution were issued against dissenters. Hallam says:—
It is impossible to doubt for an instant that if the queen's life had preserved the Tory government for a few years, every vestige of the toleration would have been effaced.
Moreover, soon after the accession of Anne there was a proposal to "debar dissenters of their votes in elections." And in "Ivimey's History of the Baptists," it is said that the death of Anne was an "answer to the dissenters' prayers."
George III. was one of the most despotic monarchs ever occupying the British throne. This is a fact that no American at least can gainsay. There was not a liberal sentiment in his whole make-up. Everything in the line of reform was an abomination to that narrow and ignorant prince. Says Fiske:—
It was the third George's ambition to become a real king, like the king of France or the king of Spain. From earliest boyhood his mother had forever been impressing upon him the precept, "George, be king!" and this simple lesson had constituted pretty much the whole of his education. Popular tradition regards him as the most ignorant king that ever sat upon the English throne. . . . He used to wonder what people could find to admire in such a wretched driveler as Shakespeare, and he never was capable of understanding any problem which required the slightest trace of imagination or of generalizing power.
Nevertheless he was the darling of the clergy of the Church of England. His praises were sounded from every pulpit. The doctrine of "Divine Right" was exhumed and heralded on every side. All of this by the bishops of the Church of England, in behalf of the oppressor of the American people. It was indeed the king, and not the English people, who was anxious to enslave the colonists. Indeed, the American Revolution was known as the "king's war." Said Lord Rockingham in the House of Lords:—
Instead of calling the war, the war of Parliament, or of the people, it was called the king's war, his majesty's favorite war.
And yet in all this great wickedness the clergy upheld him.
Nor in the elder day, did the Church of England behave very well in America. I take for example its doings in Virginia.
This church had taken deep root in Virginia. The early settlers of that colony were cavaliers, and the cavaliers were Church of England communicants to a man.
About the time of the Revolution, however, the Episcopal clergy were falling into discredit.
Many of them were appointed by the British Government, and ordained by the bishop of London, and they were affected by the irreligious listlessness and low moral tone of the English Church in the eighteenth century. The Virginia Legislature thought it necessary to pass special laws prohibiting these clergymen from drunkenness and riotous living. It was said that they spent more time in hunting foxes and betting on race horses than in conducting religious services or visiting the sick. . . . On the whole the system was such as to illustrate all the worst vices of a church supported by the temporal power. The Revolution achieved the discomfiture of a clergy already thus deservedly discredited. The parsons mostly embraced the cause of the crown, but failed to carry their congregations with them, and thus they found themselves arrayed in hopeless antagonism to popular sentiment in a State which contained perhaps fewer Tories in proportion to the population than any other of the thirteen.
At the same time the Episcopal Church itself had gradually come to be a minority in the commonwealth. For more than half a century Scotch and Welsh Presbyterians, German Lutherans, English Quakers, and Baptists had been working their way southward from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and had settled in the fertile country west of the Blue Ridge. Daniel Morgan, who had won the most brilliant battles of the Revolution, was one of those men, and sturdiness was a chief characteristic of most of them. So long as these frontier settlers served as a much needed bulwark against the Indians, the [English] church saw fit to ignore them and let them build meetinghouses and carry on religious services as they pleased. But when the peril of Indian attacks had been thrust westward into the Ohio Valley, and these dissenting communities had waxed strong and prosperous, the ecclesiastical [Church of England] party in the State undertook to lay taxes on them for the support of the Church of England, and to compel them to receive Episcopal clergymen to preach for them, to bless them in marriage, and to bury their dead. The immediate consequence was a revolt which not only overthrew the established church [the Church of England] in Virginia, but nearly effected its ruin. The troubles began in 1768, when the Baptists had made their way into the center of the State, and three of their preachers were arrested by the sheriff of Spottsylvania. As the indictment was read against these men for "preaching the gospel contrary to law," a deep and solemn voice interrupted the proceedings. Patrick Henry had come on horseback many a mile over roughest roads to listen to the trial, and this phrase, which savored of the religious despotism of old, was quite too much for him. "May it please your worships," he exclaimed, "what did I hear? Did I hear an expression that these men, whom your worships are about to try for misdemeanor, are charged with preaching the gospel of the Son of God?" The shamefaced silence and confusion which ensued was of ill omen for the success of an undertaking so unwelcome to the growing liberalism of the time.
But perhaps I have said enough. At any rate I have said all that I care to say in regard to the wrongs perpetrated upon humanity by the Church of England. We possess not the slightest affinity to a desire to blackmail the name and record of this institution, hoary with the frosts of time. But we are writing history now, and historians must deal with facts—hard, cold, pitiless facts, but facts none the less because they fall with a grating sound upon the ear of the Church of England votary. And a historian who will garble facts in order to palliate the guilt attachable to crimes perpetrated in the name of religion, is himself unworthy of his office, and is deserving of the bitterest execration which his injured fellow-beings and the unborn generations can heap upon him.503
In conclusion we can only say that if Justice Brewer, in his famous decision which we are reviewing, intended to prove that "this is a Christian nation" by virtue of the historic place which the Church of England has occupied in it, we must again aver that should she be clothed again with governmental power, persecution would again be rife in the land. If not, then history itself is a meaningless fable. The Church of England has persecuted in the past. Clothe her with political power in America, with all its "dissenting" sects, and we can only sum up the result in the words of the ancients, vae victis—woe to the vanquished.