England, CHURCH OF. There is no trustworthy information as to the original preaching of the gospel in the British Isles; all that is forthcoming is either conjecture or legend. To the former category belongs the theory that St Paul was the first missionary thither—an opinion which rests only upon the apostle's own mention of his intended journey into Spain (Rom. xv. 24, 28) and the statement made by his convert and friend, Clement of Rome, that in his missionary travels he proceeded as far as 'the limit of the west' (Epist. ad Corinth. i. 5), words which have been construed as signifying Britain, because the farthest western boundary of the Roman empire. But that they do not in fact denote anything except the Spanish peninsula (much of which lies farther west than Britain) is made all but certain by the latter alone finding mention in the reference to St Paul in the Muratorian Canon, a document of the 2d century. To the class of mere legend belong no fewer than nine distinct accounts, specifying other apostles and saints as having evangelised Britain, one only of which—that which brings St Joseph of Arimathea to Glastonbury, and makes him shrine the Sangreal there—found popular acceptance. The most tenable theory which a consideration of all the factors of the problem suggests is that Britain was evangelised from Gaul, and that rather by sporadic and intermittent action than by means of an organised mission from Lyons or any other of the Gallic churches. Gildas, the earliest extant British historian (circa 516-570), acknowledges that he has no information to give upon the subject, since all the documents which might have cleared the matter up had either been destroyed by the Saxon invaders, or carried out of the country by the exiles who fled before them. And this testimony serves as specific disproof of one of the legends—that which ascribes the conversion of Britain to missionaries sent by Pope Eleutherius (177-193), at the request of Lucius, king of Britain; for this story is based solely on an interpolation made in 530 into the record of the pontificate of
Eleutherius in the Catalogus Pontificum Romanorum, a date too near that of Gildas's history for him to have been ignorant of the fact if then credibly attested. The story of the martyrdom of St Alban, said to be the protomartyr of Britain in the persecution under Diocletian, though incrustated with mythical details, may probably contain a germ of fact, as the scene of his death was a place of pilgrimage at the beginning of the 5th century: but the first tangible historical item in the annals of British Christianity is the record of the presence of three British bishops (Eborius of York, Restitutus of London, and Adelfius of Caerleon) at the Council of Arles in 314. Others attended the Council of Sardica in 347, and that of Ariminum in 360. And from this time forward we find definite allusions to a settled church in Britain made by writers such as St Chrysostom, St Jerome, and Sozomen.
At the beginning of the 5th century, Pelagius (Morgan?), a native of Britain, originated the heresy which bears his name, and it spread so rapidly in his own country that his opponents were obliged to invoke the assistance of the Gallican Church against it. Accordingly, Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, and Lupus, Bishop of Troyes, were sent in 429 to combat the new heresy, and Germanus paid a second visit with the same object in 447.
This controversy exactly synchronises with the earliest Saxon invasions, which, though carried on unsystematically by detached bands of adventurers, met with no effective resistance, and gradually overthrew the Romano-British civilisation, forcing the native population steadily, if slowly, back into the western parts of the island, apparently extirpating the church and Christianity itself in the process of conquest. Thus England forms the sole exception to the rule visible in all other parts of the Roman empire, that the Teuton invaders submitted to the creed of the conquered, and adopted as much of their civilisation and polity as they were capable of assimilating.
But what the British Church failed to effect, perhaps even to attempt, was achieved by external agencies. Kent, the oldest kingdom of the Heptarchy or Octarchy, was also the earliest to receive the gospel; and Bede's picturesque narrative tells how Gregory, Archdeacon of Rome, was attracted by the appearance of some fair-haired Saxon slave-children exposed for sale in the forum, and on inquiry into their race and country was seized with a desire to become a missionary thither. He could not obtain the necessary sanction, because his services at home were too valuable to be dispensed with; but when he was elected pope he determined to take effectual steps for carrying out his original plan with other instruments. He chose Augustine, prior of St Andrew's monastery on the Cælian Hill, a foundation of his own, as head of the mission he projected, and sent him, accompanied by forty monks of the community, with supplies and with letters of recommendation to the bishops and sovereigns of Gaul. This policy directed the course which the mission was to take, for Charibert, king of Paris, had given his daughter Bertha in marriage to Ethelbert, king of Kent, though a heathen, on condition that she should be permitted the free exercise of her religion, and be attended by a body of domestic chaplains. Ethelbert accepted the conditions, and repaired a ruined Christian church just outside Canterbury for their use, and was thus likely to receive Christian missionaries more readily than any other of the Anglo-Saxon kings. Moreover, he held the honorary precedence amongst them denoted by the title of Bretwalda, so that his example, if he could be induced to encourage the strangers, would be exceptionally influential throughout the country.
Augustine and his companions landed in Thanet on August 7, 596, and were granted an audience by the king in a few days under a great oak, to which they advanced in procession, preceded by a silver cross, bearing a picture of Christ, and singing the Litany. They were favourably received, and given permission to preach and make converts of such as chose to listen to them, while Ethelbert himself, about a year after the arrival of the mission, accepted their teaching, informed the Witan of his proposed change of religion, and obtained its sanction, besides inducing several of its members to follow his example, as did also great numbers of the commons. Hereupon Augustine, in compliance with directions given him by Pope Gregory before his departure from Rome, went to Gaul to obtain episcopal consecration as Archbishop of the English, which he obtained at the hands of Virgilius, Archbishop of Arles (November 16, 597). He sent news of his success to Rome, asking for additional men and supplies, which were promptly sent, together with the distinction of the archiepiscopal pall for Augustine himself, and a commission empowering him not only to erect twelve suffragan sees in southern England, but to do the same in the north, and appoint any one he pleased as metropolitan over them at York. But in fact little solid advance was made outside Kent for a considerable time, since a conference between Augustine and representatives of the British Church broke down through prejudice and misapprehension on both sides; and the apparent success which attended the missions in the kingdoms of Essex, Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria proved unsubstantial, for even those of them which had been most unanimous in accepting the gospel relapsed into heathenism after the death of the convert kings.
The recovery of these regions is due to the Celtic missionaries from their headquarters at Iona, an Irish colony, and notably to Aidan and his successor Finan. All northern and central England was evangelised by their agency, and also Essex, so that about two-thirds of the whole area of the country owes its Christianity to this source. The remainder is thus accounted for: East Anglia was converted by Felix, a priest from Burgundy, whom Augustine then raised to the episcopate; Wessex, by Birinus, an Italian, who obtained a mission from Pope Honorius, independently of St Augustine's, in 634; and Sussex, the last part of England to receive the gospel, by Wilfrid, Bishop of York, then exiled from his own diocese (681-685), the Isle of Wight being actually the latest scene of conversion. No difficulty was raised by the Scoto-Celtic missionaries in accepting the primacy of Canterbury, and in fact the several missions were welded into a single church during the life of Theodore, seventh Archbishop of Canterbury, who sat from 668 to 693. He it was who at the Synod of Hertford in 673 broke up the existing dioceses, each of which was contiguous with one of the Saxon kingdoms, into sixteen more manageable areas, all of them suffragan to Canterbury. In 735 York was made an archbishopric and metropole of the northern part of the island, though with precedence after Canterbury; but this distinction was not given formal expression until 1093, when the title 'Primate of All England' was attached to the holder of the latter see. The Welsh Church remained separate for a much longer time than that of Northumbria. It is not till 875 that there is proof of the intervention of Canterbury within its limits, for which the lack of any Welsh metropolitanate gave the occasion, and not till 1188 was the union with the Church of England fully effected.
Save for the sufferings inflicted during about a century by the piratical invasions of the pagan Danes, who treated the Saxon Christians much as the British Christians had been treated by the forefathers of those Saxons, the Anglo-Saxon Church remained peaceful and undisturbed till the Norman Conquest, living a life of its own, having scarcely any intercourse or relations with the continental churches, and ministered to by an episcopate and clergy with slender claims to learning, culture, or activity.
The Conquest, albeit attended with much hardship and oppression of the subjugated nation, and with some extrusion of Saxon prelates the moment William felt himself firm on his new throne, proved almost an unmixed benefit to the church of the country. The Norman clergy, while no less devout than the most pious Saxons, were far their superiors in learning and intellectual gifts, and the men whom William intruded into the places of the deprived Saxons, whether as bishops or abbots, were for the most part of high mark, in proof of which it will suffice to name Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, Osmund, Bishop of Sarum, and Anselm, Lanfranc's successor, though his accession to the primacy was under William II. in 1093. The great Norman nobles as a rule exercised their patronage with similar discernment; they founded abbeys and churches, cathedral and parochial, larger and statelier than had been known in England; they invited over monks from the most celebrated foreign monasteries to occupy the new foundations, and they brought the English Church, after several centuries of virtual isolation, again into touch with the rest of Latin Christendom. One factor in this last change, however, had results which no one could then forecast, for it was the Conqueror himself who availed himself of the opportunity given by the abortive Saxon revolt of 1069 to depose the Saxon primate Stigand. For this purpose he invoked the assistance of the pope, who sent two cardinals as legates. Under their presidency a synod was held at Winchester in 1070, wherein the deprivation of Stigand was effected, and the first precedent established for the internal jurisdiction of the papal authority in England. When William's own strong personality was removed, difficulties at once arose from this cause, as in the disputes concerning the investiture of bishops between William II. and Henry I. on the temporal side, and St Anselm upon the ecclesiastical part, which ended in a compromise whereby the king abandoned the claim to invest bishops by the delivery of the pastoral staff and the episcopal ring, and the church agreed not to treat the act of homage on the part of a bishop-elect as disqualifying him for consecration. This was a practical victory for the civil power, and the beginning of that mode of its nominating English bishops by uniting a letter-missive in favour of a specified person to the congé d'élire, or license for election, which still prevails.
Graver troubles arose when Henry II. endeavoured to abolish the privilege of clergy, which exempted all members of the clerical body from the jurisdiction of the civil courts, even for the most serious offences against the laws. He availed himself of a vacancy in the see of Canterbury to nominate his chancellor, Thomas Becket, to the primacy, in the expectation that he would assist in bringing about this desired change. At first the new archbishop gave some support to the plan, but at the Council of Clarendon, where the new laws were synodically voted, he refused to validate the acts of the council by affixing his official seal to them, to the great anger of Henry, who was present, and who imme- diately took action which drove Becket into exile for six years. On his return to England, he excommunicated the Archbishop of York, the Bishop of London, and the Bishop of Salisbury for usurping his functions during his absence, and they at once proceeded to Normandy to complain of him to the king. The hasty words which the news drew from him were caught up by four knights of the court, who hurried over to England, and murdered the archbishop in his own cathedral. The crime proved fatal to the proposed measures, which Henry was compelled to abandon; and though some limitation of the privilege of clergy took place in the reign of Edward III., and again in that of Henry VII., it was not till the Reformation statutes of 1536 and 1541 that it was finally abolished.
The Papacy was even more successful in the reign of John than in that of his father. The pope then was Innocent III., one of the ablest and most ambitious of the Roman pontiffs, who set aside a disputed election to the see of Canterbury, and appointed Cardinal Stephen Langton instead of either claimant. The king refused to accept the nomination of Langton, and the pope at once put the kingdom under an interdict, which involved the cessation of the offices of religion throughout the country. But as John proceeded to retaliate by acts of violence against the clergy, a sentence of excommunication was fulminated against himself, quickly followed by one of deposition, whereby his subjects were released from their allegiance, and the kingdom was granted to Philip, king of France, who was enjoined to invade England with an army. Although John called out a military force to resist the threatened invasion, he was afraid to trust himself to his alienated subjects, and made secret terms with Pandulf, the papal legate at the French court, in accordance with which John signed a deed of resignation of his insular dominions into the hands of the pope, to be held from him as his feudal vassal on payment of a thousand marks yearly, and actually executed this undertaking in the church of the Templars at Ewell, near Dover, in 1213, kneeling before the seated legate, laying the crown at his feet, and taking the oath of homage to the pope as his lord paramount. The exiled prelates hereupon returned, and Cardinal Langton gave absolution to the king. But although Langton was thus forced upon the country by external influence, he at once identified himself with the popular party, headed the confederacy of the barons formed to extort reforms from John, disregarded the pope's attempt to protect his vassal, and compelled the signature of the Great Charter at Runnymede in 1215, refusing to publish the bull with which Innocent III. attempted to quash it. Nevertheless, the vassalage of the kingdom was not suffered to remain a mere dead letter of titular dependence on the Papacy; it continued as a very potent fact during the long reign of Henry III., when the church patronage was almost monopolised by the popes, in virtue of 'mandates' and 'provisions,' and exercised chiefly in favour of Italians; while the revenues drawn to Rome from England, as vouched by a complaint lodged at the Council of Lyons in 1274, largely exceeded those of the crown. This policy, which at once affected the people generally in their religious relations throughout the parishes all over England, and the state in its corporate character, did much to beget a temper of revolt against the Roman claims, as those of an alien and even hostile power, and had much to do with the spread of Lollardism at a somewhat later period, and even with the permanent success of the Reformation.
There was, however, an event of a very different kind which also marked the 13th century: the introduction of the new institute of friars, then but lately founded by Francis of Assisi and Dominic Guzman on a basis differing in several important particulars from the older monasticism which had played so great a part in church history. The Dominicans, or Friars-preachers, reached England about 1219, the Franciscans about 1224, being soon followed by the Carmelites and Augustinians. For a time they worked as marked a revival as they had already brought about in religion on the Continent, and the Franciscans became in addition famous for their learning, not only furnishing the ablest teachers to the universities, but producing men of such exceptional eminence as Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. For a time the influence of the friars was wholly healthful and stimulating, but the very popularity which they enjoyed crowded their ranks with unworthy members, and the greed which they soon evinced, as well as the anti-national attitude they assumed in consequence of their exemption from local jurisdiction, as holding directly from the pope, so that they viewed themselves as his liege-men and acted as papal garrisons in England, marred the fair promise of their advent, and made them additional factors in the growing alienation from Rome. This change of attitude towards the friars appears as early as the episcopate of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (1235-53), who had been one of the first to welcome their arrival, but became their steady opponent towards the close of his life, as he also was of the papal usurpation of English church patronage.
Edward I. renounced that fealty to the Papacy which his father and grandfather had accepted, besides checking the transfer of land by the Statute of Mortmain in 1279; and his own grandson, Edward III., carried resistance much further—in 1350, by the Statute of Provisors, which put an end to the pope's encroachments on the rights of patrons; in 1353, by forbidding appeals to Rome under pain of outlawry; in 1367, by refusing to continue payment of the tribute with which John had saddled the kingdom; and in 1374-75, by an inquiry into the number and value of the benefices occupied by aliens, succeeded by an embassy to the pope to complain of the abuses. One member of that embassy, John Wyclif, Master of Balliol, Oxford, had a powerful, if temporary, influence in fostering opinions adverse to the current system, and the popularity of his translation of the Bible contributed much to the same end. His teaching, though officially condemned both by the university and the church, found many supporters both amongst the educated and the masses, and probably helped the enactment of the Statute of Premunire in 1393, as it certainly did the spread of Lollardism after his death in 1384. Active measures were taken for its repression under Richard II. and Henry IV., and the first execution by burning for heresy in England was that of William Sawtré, a London rector, in 1401. He was the earliest of many victims (including Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham) during a persecution which lasted with little intermission till the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses; but meantime the reaction against Rome was holding its course both in church and state, and was much increased by the high-handed action of Pope Martin V., who endeavoured to revive the abuses which successive kings and parliaments had abated or removed.
Some recovery of Roman influence, however, took place in the weak reign of Henry VI., and Cardinal Kemp, Archbishop of Canterbury, was not only nominated by the pope to the primacy, but avowedly governed the church as papal legate; a policy wherein he was followed by his successors Cardinals Bouchier and Morton, under the last of whom (1487-1501) the long struggle of the nation against papal encroachments seemed to end in final defeat, and in the reduction of England to a mere appanage of Rome. With the accession of William Warham, a patron of learning, to the primacy in 1502, some abatement of this subjection becomes visible; but the time for a far wider and deeper revolt was near at hand, seeing that the Lutheran movement, destined to influence the whole Western Church, took place during Warham's primacy, and rapidly affected even those who were most opposed to its principles. In particular, the widespread anger it aroused against practical abuses strengthened the hands of Cardinal Wolsey in undertaking the reform of the monastic houses in England, by purging the greater monasteries of their scandals, and suppressing small and useless foundations, drafting their inmates into the larger societies, and applying their revenues to educational purposes. But rougher hands were to carry on the work in a very different fashion from his temperate measures. The failure of Henry VIII. in obtaining a divorce at the pope's hands from his queen, Catharine of Aragon, since her nephew, the Emperor Charles V., was too powerful to be thus braved, led to his determination to break with Rome; and though Wolsey declined to assist his plans, and was disgraced in consequence, yet in Thomas Cranmer, whom, on Warham's death in 1532, he raised to the primacy, he found a ready instrument for his purpose. Cranmer declared the marriage with Catharine void, and the king's private marriage to Anne Boleyn valid; while Henry retorted upon the pope's verdict of 1534 against this union by hastening on the proceedings of the famous 'Reformation Parliament,' which continued from 1529 to 1536. Herein papal licenses and bulls were prohibited, the king's ecclesiastical supremacy declared the law of the land, and its impugment punishable with death; the submission of the clergy, compelling them to accept a revision of the canons by a royal commission and to assemble in their convocations only when summoned by the king's writ, was extorted; the payment of annates to Rome was forbidden; and the statute in 'Restraint of Appeals,' terminating all ecclesiastical suits within the kingdom by prohibiting the carriage of any suit before the pope, was enacted.
These changes seem to have been received, not only without resistance, but with real approval, even by the clergy as a whole; and, except for the breach with Rome, little alteration was made in the ordinary routine of church teaching and discipline, though some slight advance was made in the reforming direction by the issue of the Ten Articles in 1536 and the Institution of a Christian Man, or The Bishops' Book, in 1537, re-cast and re-issued in 1542 as the Necessary Erudition of a Christian Man, or The King's Book. A greater practical change was carried out by the wholesale spoliation and suppression of the monasteries, mainly by the agency of Thomas Cromwell between 1536 and 1539, and the devolution of their great revenues, including the impropriated titles of parish churches, into the hands of the king and the secular landlords. The Act of the Six Articles in 1539 was aimed at the more advanced Reformers, and made several of their favourite tenets heresy at statute law, so that it was no longer possible for the accused to save his life by abjuration, as it had been under the previous system. Some modification of its severity was made in 1543 and in 1544, and the beginnings of vernacular services appear in the publication of the Litany in English, in addition to an earlier permission for the private use of the Psalter, Creed, Lord's Prayer, and Hail
Mary. Such was the posture of affairs at the death of Henry VIII. in 1547.
Under the child-king Edward VI., the reforming movement was pushed on much more rapidly, and is sharply divisible into two distinct periods: an earlier one, whose landmarks are the Order of Communion of 1548, and the First Book of Common Prayer in 1549, both of them the work of the native clergy, and drafted on mainly conservative lines; and a later one, when the influence of the foreign Reformers domiciled in England, and notably Bucer and Peter Martyr, became dominant with the king's advisers, and resulted in the destruction of the altars of the churches in 1550, the issue of 'the Second Prayer-book in 1552, by royal and parliamentary authority only, and without the assent of the church, and the compilation of the Forty-two Articles, the first draft of the present Thirty-nine, in 1553. So much wanton havoc had been wrought under colour of reformation in the closing years of Edward's short reign that Mary's accession was received without alarm, and even with welcome, and that by the clergy no less than by the laity, with the exception of those who felt themselves imperilled. But though she immediately set herself to undo all the work of the preceding quarter of a century, aided by her husband Philip II. and her kinsman Cardinal Pole, so that she was enabled with the assent of parliament to bring the church and nation back into the relations with the see of Rome which had prevailed up to 1529, yet her impolitic eruptions and the fierce persecution of which Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and Hooper were the most conspicuous victims, alienated the national sympathies from her, and led to a fresh reaction, which at once took shape under her successor Elizabeth. In 1559 the Act of Uniformity re-establishing the Common Prayer-book, and also a statute reviving the royal supremacy, were enacted; the Thirty-nine Articles were published in 1563, and the Church of England placed in a position midway between the attitudes in the two periods of Edward VI.'s reign already referred to. The Marian bishops, who refused to accept the changes, were deprived, but not otherwise harshly treated, and only 189 of the whole clerical body, inclusive of these fourteen prelates and six abbots, out of a total of 9400, declined to conform; while there was no separatist Roman Catholic body in England till after Pius V. issued his Bull of Excommunication against Elizabeth in 1570, nor were they organised in anywise till 1598. See ARCHPRIEST.
The Puritan section in the country, however, was far from content with the amount of reform achieved, and quickly came into collision with the authorities in church and state, mainly upon minor details of ceremonial. The first secession on these grounds took place in 1563, and was generally condemned by the leading foreign Reformers; but nevertheless Puritan principles spread very fast, and became powerful in parliament, though not sufficiently so to prevent the enactment of a severely repressive statute in 1593, when the Puritans' own violence and intractability had provoked a reaction against them, and they remained quiescent during the remainder of Elizabeth's reign. They revived in activity under James I., and had high hopes of success; but the Hampton Court Conference, wherein an attempt was made to arrive at an amicable understanding between them and the church, proved abortive; and while their disciplinary proposals were checkmated by the Canons of 1604, their doctrinal aspirations were even more effectually and permanently defeated by the rise of the Anglo-Catholic school of theology, which exchanged the destructive and innovating temper which had inevitably prevailed during the crisis of the Reformation, when the removal of abuses was the main object, for a constructive and conservative one, making constant appeal to the standards of the ancient undivided church, and being especially opposed to the tenets of Calvinism and Zwinglianism. But the king's feebleness of nature made him ill able to guide the country at such a time, and his political blunders brought about an alliance between the Puritans and the patriot party, who were aggrieved by many acts of misgovernment. The authorities of the Church of England, contrariwise, both under James and his successor Charles I., lent themselves to the support of absolutist views, and thus incurred much odium, which was considerably increased by the dissatisfaction aroused by the action of Archbishop Laud, whose good intentions were not accompanied with practical discretion, but were marked with much high-handed intolerance. The reaction was swift and violent: the Westminster Assembly of Divines met in 1643, and adopted from Scotland the Solemn League and Covenant, one detail of which is the total abolition of prelacy, and which parliament made binding on all persons in England over the age of eighteen; in 1645 the Book of Common Prayer was forbidden under severe penalties, and the Directory of Public Worship substituted for it; in the same year Archbishop Laud was brought to the block, and the Church of England, as a body holding a recognised national position and free to exercise its functions, disappeared from view for the fifteen following years. The restoration of Charles II. in 1660 was attended by the return of the exiled clergy and the reinstatement of the church, while the Savoy Conference in 1661 decided the issue as to the general aspect of the revived communion in favour of the High Church or Anglo-Catholic view, by revising the Prayer-book in its present form, which was enforced by an Act of Uniformity in 1662, a measure followed by the resignation of a number of the ministers admitted to benefices under the Commonwealth, estimated variously at from 800 to 2000. This was virtually the last settlement of ecclesiastical affairs in England by the joint action of church and state, and the many events which have since occurred to condition them have not materially altered its broad features. The illegal exercise by James II. of a dispensing power in issuing the 'Declaration of Indulgence,' which, though ostensibly meant for the relief of all Nonconformists, was designed to cover the legalisation of Roman Catholicism, and the trial of the seven bishops who refused to give it circulation in their dioceses, directly caused James's deposition, and resulted hurtfully in some respects for the church.
For the Nonjuring schism under William III. deprived the church of many pious and some able men whom it could ill spare, and contributed something to the gradual cooling of zeal and the laxity of doctrine which marked the Hanoverian period and were furthered by the influence of such prelates as Hoadly and White Kennett. But socially the Church of England touched its highest point of influence just before the season of decay. At the close of Queen Anne's reign it appeared to be strong and successful everywhere, and there was practically no competitor in the field, as both Roman Catholics and Nonconformists were few and powerless. But with the silencing of Convocation under George I. in 1717 (made feasible by its impolitic surrender in 1664 of the right of the clergy to vote all taxes payable by them), and the steady encouragement given to the ultra-Broad Church section of the clergy, a blight came upon the church, and it rather vegetated than actively lived thenceforward till nearly the close of the 18th century; for the Methodist movement, begun by John and Charles Wesley in 1727 on the footing of a guild within the church, and given formal shape in 1740, began to assume the status of an external sect in 1760, and soon afterwards became the active rival of the church. The Evangelical revival towards the close of the century owed much of its success to the alarm caused by the French Revolution, since the adoption of freethinking opinions in England was thought likely to lead to results similar to those of the Terror; but though it did much for individual piety, the notion of working in and for the church at large, or as a national institution, does not seem to have so much as crossed the minds of its leaders, and it did thus nothing whatever to promote any corporate reforms, though achieving much in raising the standard of clerical devoutness.
It was reserved for the factor variously known as the Oxford or Tractarian movement, or by its advocates as the 'Catholic Revival,' to make this omission good, and to stimulate the energies of the whole Anglican communion. The movement itself was immediately occasioned by a statute enacted in 1833 suppressing ten bishoprics in the Church of Ireland, which at once prompted the question, 'If the like policy should at any time prevail in England also, and lead to the overthrow of the church as an establishment, what would it have to fall back upon for its very existence as a corporate body?' The answer to this question was given in the 'Tracts for the Times,' issued from Oxford at intervals during 1833-41, and chiefly written by Newman, Keble, Pusey, Isaac Williams, and Richard Hurrell Froude. They at once excited active controversy, seeing that they not only traversed the Low and Broad Church positions, but also that of the contemporary High Church school itself, which was content to acquiesce in a theology bearing clear marks of 18th-century influence, and differing materially from that of the great Stuart divines, which the Tract-writers aimed at reviving. Although at first the line adopted by the school as a whole may be roughly described as a via media between Roman Catholicism and Reformation doctrines, although at first the former system was freely criticised, yet two great waves of secession to the Roman Church, in 1845 and 1850, the earlier occasioned by the condemnation of Tract XC., written by Dr Newman, and the latter by the Gorham Judgment, drew considerable numbers of its more distinguished members with them, and not only weakened it seriously at the time, but seemed to justify all the adverse criticism it had met, and to discredit it altogether. Nevertheless, it stood the shock firmly, and proceeded on the lines originally sketched out, and that with such energy and success as to entirely change the face of the Anglican Church during the succeeding half-century. The great development of church building and restoration, the revivals of convocation and of sisterhood life, the creation of a copious and learned ecclesiastical literature, the impetus given to the foundation of colonial and missionary dioceses and to the increase of the home sees, at first merely suffragan, but later as separate dioceses, the introduction of a higher standard of clerical life and work, and the embellishment of public worship, are the chief results of its labours; and what might have been less anticipated from its origin, it has shown itself not less ready in adapting agencies of nonconformist birth and usage to the purposes of the church. That it has in fact been the determining factor in these respects, and has rather drawn the remaining schools into the current than been anticipated or aided by them, is vouched by the date, not less than by the character, of the reforms, since they do not begin to be manifest, even in germ, till the Oxford movement became powerful, and was translated from theory into practice. As regards the alleged tendency towards Roman Catholicism, that must be judged not by the degree in which the school is in sympathy with Roman Catholics rather than with Protestants on certain issues, nor yet by counting up individual secessions in that direction, but by the broader inquiry into the growth of the Roman Church in England since the Oxford movement has affected the condition of religion in the country. And the fact is, as attested alike by the marriage returns (especially trustworthy in the case of Roman Catholics, because of their strict discipline in this matter) and by the calculations made by the Roman Catholic authorities themselves, they do not increase at the same rate as the nation at large, and constitute, despite their threefold sources of increase—births, immigrants, and conversions—a slowly but steadily diminishing factor in its ratio to the population, and chiefly dependent, even so, upon the Irish element to maintain its numbers.
In marked contrast with the torpor of the last century and the earlier years of the present one, the history of the Church of England for fifty years past has been as crowded with events profoundly affecting it as any corresponding period of time during the Reformation era; with this notable difference, the absence of the Erastian character which the direct intervention of the crown and the civil power in general gave then to the aspect of ecclesiastical affairs. In the modern revival of the Church of England the court has had neither share nor sympathy, there has been rather more opposition than aid from parliament, owing to the temper of the large nonconformist element in the House of Commons, and the legal tribunals have been actively hostile; but no serious check or delay has been interposed to the movement by any or all of these adverse influences. It is possible to name only the most salient events of the half-century in the briefest fashion to complete this historical outline. The beginning of Queen Victoria's reign was marked by the enactment of the Pluralities and Non-residence Act in 1838, and of the Church Discipline Act in 1840. The development of the colonial episcopate (which, though initiated in 1787, had increased to no more than five sees down to 1836) began in 1841, and was steadily rapid in operation. The Gorham case, decided against the ruling of the Court of Arches by the Judicial Committee of Privy-council, synchronised with the establishment of a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England by Pius IX. in 1850, professedly as a restoration of the pre-Reformation episcopate. Convocation was revived in 1853, through the action of Lord Aberdeen, then premier, and has met regularly ever since. In 1860 Essays and Reviews was published, and was soon followed by kindred but bolder writings of Dr Colenso, Bishop of Natal; and though both the Essays and the bishop were condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities, these sentences were reversed, the former in 1864, the latter in 1865, by the Judicial Committee; against which findings strong protests were made (in the case of Essays and Reviews by 11,000 clergymen), and the Convocation of Canterbury affirmed synodically the contrary condemnations. The Church Congresses, which have done so much to make the outer public familiar with the working of the English Church, began in 1861; the Pan-Anglican Conferences, equally powerful in welding together the separated parts of the vast Anglican communion, in 1867. Contrasting with the license allowed to the Low and Broad Church schools by the Privy-council decisions, the judgment in the suit of Liddell v. Westerton (1857) was largely, and those in the suits of Martin v. Mackonochie (1869), Hebbert v. Purchas (1871), and Clifton v. Ridsdale (1877), were entirely hostile to the High Church lit- gants, condemning various ceremonial adjuncts of public worship which they held to be permitted or enjoined by the formularies. But these findings have been so riddled with destructive criticism by eminent jurists and other experts as miscarriages of justice that they have never commanded respect or obedience, nor has the imprisonment of some of the clergymen affected been found to deter others from pursuing the same course. Indeed, the failure of the suit of Sheppard v. Bennett (1872), instituted for the purpose of excluding the tenets supposed to underlie the condemned ceremonial usages from toleration within the Church of England, deprived them of the only plausible defence which could be set up for them, that of the ultimate inconsistency of those usages with the dogmatic standards of the church. The restoration of the long dormant class of suffragan bishops took place in 1870, and they now form a considerable factor in the home episcopate; while the increase in the number of English dioceses, originating with the foundation of the sees of Manchester and Ripon in 1836, was promoted by the passage of a bill for that purpose in 1878, which has been acted on by the erection of the sees of Liverpool, Newcastle, St Albans, Southwell, Truro, and Wakefield.
The polity of the Church of England is episcopal, and the area is territorially distributed into two provinces, Canterbury and York, each presided over by an archbishop, having severalty twenty-three and nine dioceses subject to their jurisdiction, in several of which there are suffragan bishops acting, making the number of employed bishops about forty. There are about 13,500 benefices, and the whole body of the clergy, inclusive of those unemployed, is estimated at 23,000 members. The gross income of the church from all sources is roughly estimated at about £7,250,000, and the church accommodation at 6,250,000 sittings. The colonial dioceses and missionary jurisdictions in connection with the English Church are 65 in number, with about 80 bishops and 3400 clergymen; and of the allied sister or daughter churches, that in Scotland has 7 bishops and 266 clergymen; that of Ireland, 2 archbishops, 11 bishops, and 1773 clergymen; that in the United States, 71 bishops, and about 3300 clergymen; making, exclusive of retired bishops, a gross total of 211 bishops and 33,000 clergymen. The Church of England claims that its bishops are the legitimate and canonical successors of the pre-Reformation hierarchy, and has carefully fenced the episcopal office with safeguards to insure its regular continuance. But Roman Catholic controversialists allege that there was a complete solution of continuity at the accession of Elizabeth, when Matthew Parker was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in the room of the recently deceased Cardinal Pole. Yet not only has the regularity of the English succession been acknowledged by such eminent authorities as Bossuet in the past and Döllinger in the present day, but there is decisive proof that the objections now alleged are merely factitious afterthoughts. The question of the necessity of papal confirmation to validate the status of bishops was debated in the Council of Trent, November 30, 1562, and objections were adduced against its obligation. But it was argued on the other side that to rule against it would be dangerous, because the only argument adducible against the orders of the English bishops was that they had not papal confirmation, since they proved that they had due call, election, mission, and consecration; and the whole council accepted this view of the situation (Le Plat, Monum. Cone. Trident. dcclxxi.).
The doctrinal standards of the Church of England are primarily the Book of Common Prayer, including the three Creeds occurring therein; and secondly, the Thirty-nine Articles. The first four general councils are also part of her legal system, and there is a general appeal to Holy Scripture as interpreted by 'the Catholic Fathers and ancient bishops.' She differs from the Roman Catholic Church by the rejection of the distinctively Roman tenets embodied in the modern articles of the Creed of Pope Pius IV., and from the Eastern Church in a less degree, and chiefly in respect of the invocation of saints and the cultus of images, as not warranted either by Scripture or by the church of the first five centuries. On the other hand, she differs from the societies which have sprung up since the Reformation by requiring episcopal ordination for all her clerical members; by the structure and tone of her Liturgy, which is simply a translated and abridged revision of the pre-Reformation Missal, Breviary, and other office-books; and by her refusal to admit into her formularies any tenets which have not the warrant of antiquity, whatever plausible arguments may be adduced for them from the letter of Scripture. She has always exercised strong attraction upon the educated classes, and has probably a larger proportion of cultured laymen actively interested in and working for her than any other communion of the day, and in England she has also retained the agricultural class. But the lower middle class and the town artisans have been less influenced by her, and, in fact, constitute the strength of English Nonconformity. The revival of the last fifty years has, however, begun to tell upon this class also, and nearly every large town can show congregations formed of such materials; while the advance of the daughter-church in the United States is notably rapid and permanent.
The most convenient books for the student to consult upon the history and position of the Church of England are Perry, Student's English Church History (1878); Dixon, History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction (1877-85); Abbey and Overton, The English Church in the Eighteenth Century (1878); Sadler, Church Doctrine, Bible Truth (1872); Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, Theophilus Anglicanus (1865); Curteis, Bampton Lectures on Dissent (1872); Howard, The Church of England (1885); Moore, The Englishman's Brief (S.P.C.K.); Forbes, Explanation of the Thirty-nine Articles (1878); Overton, The English Church in the Nineteenth Century (1894); Makower, The Constitution of the Church of England (trans. 1895). See also GREAT BRITAIN, Vol. V. 379.