Principles of western civilisation

ix THE GREAT ANTINOMY: SECOND STAGE 315

In England they were for a period paramount.’ In Scotland, under the influence of Knox, they became the basis of that severe, consistent, ecclesiastical republicanism which moved Moeller to admiration;? in which the ideal of the State from the beginning was a theocracy of the sternest type; in which the civil law was the arm of the Church against offenders; and in which the authorities were expected to purge the State of false doctrine after the manner of the pious kings of Israel.* And this even while at the same time—as during the greater part of the reign of the Stuarts—there was, at the instigation of the Scotch bishops (themselves representing the Reformation movement in another phase), directed against the very doctrines upon which this ideal rested, a persecution which left its mark deep on the Scottish mind and character, in which the Presbyterians were hunted and tortured by the civil power, and transported as criminals to the Barbados.*

But it was in England that the tendency reached its freest and most characteristic development. Here the forces, representing the new ideas, armed themselves almost from the beginning with civil power. This was used at first against those supporting the pre-Reformation principles. But soon the forces representing the various tendencies within the post-Reformation development entered in England upon a struggle amongst themselves of altogether exceptional bitterness, intensity, and

1 “Tn England, at the end of Elizabeth’s reign,” says Professor Gardiner, ‘‘the doctrines taught and accepted by the vast majority of that part of the clergy which was in any real sense of the word religious, was Calvinistic” (Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, Introd. xx.)

2 Fist. of Chr. Church, vol. iii. p. 33 div. ii. ch. ii.; and div. iv. ch. iv.

3 (bed. vol. iii. div. v. ch. iii.

4 The Rise of Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii. p. 41.