riage, but at no specified date. The whole case admits of this solutionthat Rufinus and some of his family had been defiled with the vices of the Gentiles in a degree, of which we read in Apuleius the rhetorical exaggeration; and which, having been as scarlet, were come forth white as snow from the laver of their regeneration. These sins were never remembered or spoken of in the Sicinian family; for why should they remind them of things which had happened before they were born? “ Οὔτε πύρνοι, οὔτε εἰδωλολάτραι, οὔτε μοιχοί, οὔτε μαλακοὶ, οὔτε ἀρσενοκοῖται, οὔτε κλέπται shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified." (1 Cor. vi.) But the ignorant multitude, not excepting therefrom the stoic Claudius Maximus and the Platonist Apuleius, who dated the birth of Rufinus from the time of his quitting the carnal womb, had no conception of this adorable truth. Consequently, the plaintiffs were had at a great advantage by Apuleius, from which no eloquence or ingenuity could have extricated them. The absence of any one charge, strictly preferred in the time present, greatly favours this solution. Without contending that Herennius Rufinus had been a disinterested party to this suit, or absolving him from all disingenuousness in his proceedings, we may nevertheless conclude him and his family to have been Christians. The above remarks may guide us to the solution of that which would otherwise be a moral mystery. We know from the Apology of Justin Martyr that, during the reign of Antoninus Pius, the Christians were everywhere the objects of contempt and outrage; and though not persecuted by direct authority, under that equitable sovereign, exposed to every other sort of injustice. Yet here we see the rhetorician Apuleius vehemently pleading for his reputation, if not for his life, and straining every nerve to crush his opponents, yet abstaining from even the slightest mention of that detested sect, to belong to which was almost to stand condemned; we see him contented with the calm observation that a man who did not worship the gods would probably take little interest in their mysteries, and mistake the object of them. The religion, at which he barely glances once, in his mention of Moses, was the religion of his own wife Æmilia Pudentilla, a woman whom he professed to love and honour, and who had separated herself from the church under no circumstances indicating change of doctrine, but merely in compliance with a sensual passion. It was probably still her faith, and would have been still her communion, but for reasons which even pagans could not respect. * The Greek epistle of Pudentilla certainly does appear to have been quoted by Rufinus in a garbled form, and so as to yield a sense directly opposite to her meaning. And if it did not arise from ignorance, this conduct must be ascribed to dishonesty. Perhaps the ignorance and illiterateness so often objected to the accusers may here raise a doubt in favour of Rufinus. Apuleius had previously asserted of Tannonius, Græcam Pudentillæ epistolam legere nequivisse, p. 460. But, against the unimpeachable, his best Topicum was ignorance, while the stronger topic of fraud was available against the character that seemed vulnerable. 9 TIMES OF THE REFORMATION, FROM THE CONTEMPORARY PULPIT. NO. X.-THE ENGLISH SCHISMS. IF political calamities cast before them a visible and appalling shadow, the bitterness and wrath of the Elizabethan pulpit was that projected from the great rebellion; if, on the other hand, this shadow is the soul which gives animation to yet inert matter, then was the doctrine of the preachers in question that soul, and the great rebellion the body to which it imparted life. For the first years of Elizabeth, perhaps the blame was too evenly divided between parties to fall with overwhelming weight on either, but when the generation of the oppressed and the oppressors had lain down side by side in the common churchyards, their children were without excuse in accepting as an inheritance the enmities of their fathers. The first decided step towards this lamentable issue was the formal separation of various sectarian bodies from the national church; while England, intoxicated with party violence, reeled from one extreme of religious opinion to another, under the guidance of a primate who had not the power to stay his companions' steps, even if he ever saw that they were approaching a precipice, and a cardinal who was drawn by his Spanish allies into a most atrocious persecution, there could be little avowed schism in the church. In the former period, numerous priests and congregations pursued their former courses as nearly as might be, only disturbed, perhaps, for a day by some preacher or visitor; and so, in Mary's time, many who did not think the differences between protestant and papist worth a schism, continued to preach as before, while tamely complying with the orders received from authority. It pleased divine Providence that beside the zealous persons who sought martyrdom, many were driven to a point beyond which their consciences would not allow them to comply, and perished at the stake rather than assent to an unauthenticated dogma of the Romish church. While the government was pursuing such a course as this, no doubt many of those conscientious persons, who had lost, in their contemplation of enormous abuses, that strong love of church unity which should characterize every Christian, would consider themselves at perfect liberty to accept the ministrations of preachers whose opinions harmonized with their own. Much had been done in the reign of Edward to pave the way for schismatical worship under the sanction of those whose right to guide the opinions of their contemporaries could not be disputed. A congregation-nay, a regularly organized conventicle-of foreigners, had been encouraged to settle in England, established in a city church, and aided with pecuniary supplies. The Bishop of Gloucester, a close friend of a Lasco, the superintendent, sympathized more with it than the church of which he was a reluctant prelate, and a strong English party sought shelter in nonconformity by gaining, under various pretexts, admission among the strangers. This party received accessions from Hooper's "unseasonable and too bitter sermons," as his friend described them, in which he taught doctrines utterly subversive of all church authority, of which hatred to ecclesiastical vestments may be fairly considered as the type; that the constitution of a church depended entirely on the purity of its doctrine; and when anyone supposes this purity lost, he has no need to wait for any ordinary authority before taking the responsibility of the priesthood upon himself. Such, at least, seems a fair inference from passages like the following: "Ordinarily, where there is no corruption of the ministry in the church, neither in doctrine nor in the right ministration of the sacraments, which are as seals and conclusions of God's holy word; where this integrity, I say, remains in the church, no man ought, without the appointment of the higher powers, to intrude or appoint himself to preach or minister, even as it was in Moses' time and the apostles."-1st Serm. on Jonah. "I would wish that the magistrates should put both the preacher, minister, and the people into one place, and shut up the partition called the chancel, which separates the congregation of Christ one from the other."-4th Serm. on Jonah. Such doctrines are evidently subversive of all imaginable discipline, since a pure church has never been anything but a beautiful idea, and reformations have rarely restored one part without damaging another. Accordingly, a separation took place in London and some other cities during the reign of Mary, of about two hundred persons, led by a succession of pastors— "Each stepping where his comrade stood, and cold must be the heart which does not glow at the recital of their trials. Five teachers superintended the London society during this melancholy period-Scambler, Fowler, Rough, Bernher, and Bentham, successively assembled them in private houses, inns, alleys, lofts, and on shipboard, and generally accompanied to the stake such as suffered during their presidency. Rough, returning from the martyrdom of Austoo, was met by a merchant, who inquired where he had been. "I have been," said he, "where I would not for one of mine eyes but I had been. I have been, forsooth, to learn the way." He trod it soon; and Bentham, after Bernher, assumed his perilous office. He, when the last seven were burned in Smithfield, and all were forbidden to pray for them, went up to the just kindled pyre, and exclaimed, "We know they are the people of God, and therefore we cannot choose but wish well for them, and say, God strengthen them. mighty God, for Christ's sake strengthen them!" He preached many longer sermons, but never one more striking. The whole multitude cried, Amen.* Al The moderation of Elizabeth, while it satisfied none, kept all in sufficient suspense to prevent them from rushing into separation. The fewness of those who thought that she had kept the golden mean, encouraged each to hope for ultimate ascendancy; and after a struggle for popery by the bishops, and a struggle against everything they could imagine to be a relic of it by the returned exiles, the church seemed * Fox, 1967. fast settling down into unity and peace. The Romanists came orderly to church, and found nothing needlessly offensive where the laws were obeyed; nothing which the learned of their own clergy could pronounce heretical, and prove it. The puritan, too, though little pleased with concessions which enabled such to kneel beside him in the house of God, still owned the catholicity of the church he would gladly have improved. Thus both agreed with the same, and so with each other. The first schism of the reformed church was perpetrated by the precisians. Symptoms of it had appeared in 1565; in 1567 a conventicle was discovered in Plummer's Hall, and the congregation apprehended. Cartwright, the Margaret Divinity Professor at Cambridge, began to inculcate his schismatical views in 1570, and soon organized his followers into a sect, which met with so much sympathy from at least two-thirds of the best preachers, that its insolence and rapid propagation are by no means surprising : a cap, "It is not," says Buckley, preaching at Paul's Cross in 1571, “ tippet, or surplice only, which are but small matters, and the smallest of many matters which are to be reformed in the church of England; and yet my meaning is not that small account should be made of these things, for hereof I am well assured, that how small soever they seem, they do no small hurt in the church of God; for to clog men's consciences, to hinder the course of the gospel, to breed contentions among brethren, is no small hurt." And then he proceeds to harp upon Jewel's simile, "the grain of the grape that killed Anacreon," and advance the theory which has been echoed by dissent from his day to ours. "When God at the first did restore unto us the comfort of his gospel, then was it a convenient time to have made a right reformation of religion, but our eye was not then single nor our doings simple. Then we drew not out of the book of God a right plat, neither laid we a sure foundation of right reformation; we did not then utterly abolish all superstitious vanities, which now, by God's judgment, are pricks in our eyes and thorns in our sides." Six years afterwards a clergyman in the same pulpit observed, "I fear me we have yielded too much unto them in retaining divers ceremonies to turn them [the papists], and it will not be, for they are not the better, but the worse; and as it hath done them no good, so it is to be feared that it hath done many of us harm, and they are obstinate still, you should not have so many go to mass else as they do, and mass being so dear too." The answer to this is, that the wise and moderate concessions of the government were never fairly tried. Men who found the actions of devotion to which long use had familiarized them, almost necessary to its exercise, were treated with outrageous contumely; and adiaphorists, who could detect the element of truth indicated by contrary doctrinal statements of contending parties, were universally held worthy of the Laodicean curse. "How many poisoned protestants and maimed professors have we (I mean for opinion, for otherwise who is whole and sound?) You shall have a gospeller, as he will be taken, a jolly fellow, to retain and maintain such patches of popery and infection of Rome, that methinks I see the serpent's subtlety as plain as by the claw you may judge the lion; one holdeth faith justifieth, and yet works do no harm; another saith prayer for the dead is charity, and though it do no good, yet it doth no hurt; * J. White. sermons," as his friend described them, in which he taught doctrines utterly subversive of all church authority, of which hatred to ecclesiastical vestments may be fairly considered as the type; that the constitution of a church depended entirely on the purity of its doctrine; and when anyone supposes this purity lost, he has no need to wait for any ordinary authority before taking the responsibility of the priesthood upon himself. Such, at least, seems a fair inference from passages like the following: "Ordinarily, where there is no corruption of the ministry in the church, neither in doctrine nor in the right ministration of the sacraments, which are as seals and conclusions of God's holy word; where this integrity, I say, remains in the church, no man ought, without the appointment of the higher powers, to intrude or appoint himself to preach or minister, even as it was in Moses' time and the apostles."-1st Serm. on Jonah. "I would wish that the magistrates should put both the preacher, minister, and the people into one place, and shut up the partition called the chancel, which separates the congregation of Christ one from the other."-4th Serm. on Jonah. Such doctrines are evidently subversive of all imaginable discipline, since a pure church has never been anything but a beautiful idea, and reformations have rarely restored one part without damaging another. Accordingly, a separation took place in London and some other cities during the reign of Mary, of about two hundred persons, led by a succession of pastors— "Each stepping where his comrade stood, The instant that he fell;" and cold must be the heart which does not glow at the recital of their trials. Five teachers superintended the London society during this melancholy period-Scambler, Fowler, Rough, Bernher, and Bentham, successively assembled them in private houses, inns, alleys, lofts, and on shipboard, and generally accompanied to the stake such as suffered during their presidency. Rough, returning from the martyrdom of Austoo, was met by a merchant, who inquired where he had been. "I have been," said he, " where I would not for one of mine eyes but I had been. I have been, forsooth, to learn the way." He trod it soon; and Bentham, after Bernher, assumed his perilous office. He, when the last seven were burned in Smithfield, and all were forbidden to pray for them, went up to the just kindled pyre, and exclaimed, "We know they are the people of God, and therefore we cannot choose but wish well for them, and say, God strengthen them. Almighty God, for Christ's sake strengthen them!" He preached many longer sermons, but never one more striking. The whole multitude cried, Amen.* The moderation of Elizabeth, while it satisfied none, kept all in sufficient suspense to prevent them from rushing into separation. The fewness of those who thought that she had kept the golden mean, encouraged each to hope for ultimate ascendancy; and after a struggle for popery by the bishops, and a struggle against everything they could imagine to be a relic of it by the returned exiles, the church seemed * Fox, 1967. |