Church and State in England

exercise any power of discipline over its members. He compared a minister of the Church to a professor of any science, who can only instruct students, and he taught, in short, that the Church is only a department of State. The connotation of the term has somewhat gained by long use (see J. N. Figgis in Journal of Theological Studies, October 1900, pp. 66-101), and perhaps the best definition of its modern meaning is the following, by R. I. Wilberforce: 'By Erastianism I understand that system of opinions and that course of action which deprive the Church of Christ of independent existence, and resolve it into a function of the Civil Government.' It is in this sense that the word is used in this book.

NOTE 2.-The communicant test for membership of Church Councils has been objected to as being liable to degrade the Communion into a mere sign of voting privileges. It would indeed be sad if people came to the Blessed Sacrament merely to gain the right to vote. But the objection assumes that occasional Communion would qualify, which need not be the case. Some regulations might be made which would ensure that the voter should be a bona fide and regular communicant. See on this subject a pamphlet by the Rev. Darwell Stone, The Bearing of Church History on the Proposed Representative Church Council. Parker.

APPENDIX F

THE LATE DR. T. G. LAW

Confirmation of the statements in chapter xi. on the socalled martyrdom of Romanists is afforded by the works of the late Dr. T. G. Law, referred to in an article in the Monthly Review, February 1905.

Dr. Law, who died in 1904, was an Oratorian, and author

of a dissertation on the Vulgate, which was prefixed to the 1877 edition of the Douai Bible. On account of his ripe scholarship he was appointed a member of the commission formed to prepare biographies of the Roman Martyrs' in England.

The result of his investigations, however, was that he formed quite another opinion of the question, and in 1878 he left the Roman Church. By the influence of Mr. Gladstone he was made Custodier of the Signet Library at Edinburgh, and continuing his investigations he wrote a book on the treatment of the Jesuits at this period, besides several articles, which have been published in a collected form, under the title of Collected Essays and Reviews.

Dr. Law makes it quite clear that until the Bull of Deposition in 1570 there was no persecution of Romanists at all; even after that there was little until the concerted attack upon the Queen's power, and the plots against her life began to take effect, about 1580; and it was not until after these political designs had become manifest, about 1585, that persecution became severe.

He further shows how the machinations of Cardinal Allen and the Jesuits were behind the northern rebellion. Allen organised plots to kill the Queen, whose escape from assassination is little short of miraculous. Father Knox, the editor of Allen's Letters and Memorials, approves these murderous attempts; he surmises that the Pope approved them; they were indeed the only logical outcome of the Bull; and he defends them on the ground that it is legitimate to kill 'a chief of banditti who seizes an unoffending traveller (Mary Queen of Scots) . . . and demands an impossible ransom.'

Dr. Law further describes the continual plotting that went on both in England and in Scotland; he says that 'King James would at any moment have welcomed the alliance of Spain against England if only he could have been sure that circumstances would not force him in self-defence

to become a Catholic, or that Philip would not snatch Elizabeth's crown for himself.' James even drew up a memorial (which is preserved at Hatfield amongst the Cecil papers) carefully weighing the pros and cons of such a project in his own interest.

All this is strong testimony to the truth of what we have quoted from Hallam, Hume, Dixon, and others, that Elizabeth was beset with enemies on every side, and was therefore forced to take vigorous measures of self-defence, involving the severe punishment of men whose claim to be religious martyrs is shown to be historically non-proven.