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Untitled Article
public life , allowing his biographer to be his own interpreter . It will be somewhat amusing to see how almost invariably the sense of shame has forced out a faint disapproval of each exploit of the prelate ' s life , and how ccnsiantly that disapproval ( which no man who wished to avoid public execration could refnsf ) is followed by a laboured attempt to qualify or deny the effect of the previous concession .
We must premise that Calvinism would seern in our author ' s view to he a recent and baleful heresy , which Laud found springing up as an undoubted weed , choking the pure and explicitly defined creed of the Reformation , and which it became his bounden duty to repress by the rigorous measures which he adopted . Laud ' s " only crime , " he says , " consisted in his being an Anti-calvinist , " and Calvinism is throughout his work synonymous with treason , heresy , and rebellion ; though , by one of his strange inconsistencies , we are afterwards told , when it suits the author ' s purpose , that
c < all he required was conformity to discipline . " Episcopacy is of course a divine institution , which it was a paramount duty to impose upon all men , at whatever risk of destructive reaction . " The pernicious system of private interpretation , " that " principle against which a protest cannot be too often made in these page ? , " is a favourite topic of invective . " Dissension or Sectarianism carries with it the cankerworm of dissatisfaction , discordance , and private interpretation , which eats it in its very vitals . " Of the priesthood in general , he observes ,
" Our Saviour himself , when he declared that his kingdom was not of this world , distinctly taught that the office of the priesthood was to be separate , . distinct , and removed from the secular concerns of the world ; and that they who assume this office must be regularly admitted thereto according to the practice which he lias enjoined , as laid down by the holy apostles . "—I . pp . tjtfm T'Vr *
The church must " be like a well-governed and well-organized kingdom , to . which it is compared in the Holy Scriptures . " And he answers his own inquiry , why the English hierarchy bears so hig h a character and authority in the eyes of the world , by observing , that " It is because in its ordination it follows the dictates of Holy Scripture and the practice of the apostles and the primitive church , in the distinct order of bishops , priests , and deacons , as our Saviour himself set forth in his calling first his twelve disciples , and then in his ordination of the seventy ; and as the
apostles set forth in their election of another by lot in the room of Judas , who ' by transgression fell from bis bishopric ; ' it is because it enforces rigidly that canonical discipline set forth in the General Councils of the Church in the earliest ages . For as the church of the Jews was an hierarchy , so must the Christian Church be also : the former being the type , the other the substance ; the former being the old dispensation , the latter the new , which our Saviour came ' to fulfil ; ' and which hierarchy it can be , and yet , unlike that of the Jews , be * a spiritual kingdom . "—Pp . 109 , 110 .
" If Laud was wrong , " he tells us , " so was the church ; but he chose rather to err with the church than to adopt the private interpretation of any one . " And yet , ashamed of this new canon of Protestant faith , we are told in the same breath , and with admirable consistency , " Not that he did not exercise that freedom of thought which is natural to evevy man ; but he had studied the Scriptures with peculiar care , and the articles appeared to him agreeable to that sacred standard . " It is plain that it required all the meddling self-sufficiency and remorseless policy of Laud to goad the discontented branches oi the Reformed church-
Untitled Article
3 / 2 Life and Times of Archbishop Laud
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1829, page 372, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2573/page/4/
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