Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/743

723 INDEPENDENTS 723 responsible to Him alone for its beliefs and acts as a Christian society. Its ideal stands distinguished, on the one hand, from Episcopacy by having no gradations of ministerial or clerical orders, or persons above the indi vidual congregation invested with administrative or judicial authority, and, on the other hand, from Presbytery by having no gradation of courts or representative bodies possessed of legislative and judicial functions. These distinctions imply others. Episcopacy and Presbytery are essentially organized and incorporative systems, build ing all the societies they comprehend into a political unity, but Independency is essentially voluntary and individual izing, satisfied with a spiritual unity, refusing to permit its various societies to be built into a political organism, lest it should do violence to the rights of conscience, or prevent or even supersede the duty of the exercise by the individual of his own judgment in matters of religion. Episcopacy and Presbytery regard the collective organiza tion as the church, but Independency the individual congregation, investing it with the attributes and pre rogatives the other systems reserve for the organized whole. Its members possess equal rights, and are bound by equal obligations. They constitute a state whose citizens are all enfranchised, and are so because citizenship is limited to the qualified, who, having sought it voluntarily, voluntarily retain it. Independency may be said to affirm its ecclesiastical in order that it may realize its religious principle, that religion is purely a matter of the conscience, not to be created, extended, or reformed by any political mechanism or agencies, but by moral means, through men who seek to have it believed and embodied by men for reasons that commend themselves to the conscience, free and unconstrained. It thus holds that the best service the state can render to religion is to leave it free to live and act according to its own nature, in obedience to its own laws, prompted by its own impulses, guided by its own spirit and judgment. Independency rose in the reign of Elizabeth, and may be said to have been born of the despair of seeing .religion reformed and vivified on any one of the then followed lines. The peculiar condition of the Anglican Church at this period is well enough known. There were men in it who wished it to be independent of Rome, but to remain as far as possible Catholic while Anglican, and there were men who wished it to be conformed in doctrine and polity to those churches of the Continent that were by pre-eminence the Reformed. These latter were the Puritans, and their endeavour was to reform the church through the state, to persuade or compel the constitutive and sovereign will to make it such as they could conscientiously approve. But it was inevitable in a time of strong religious feeling that some more daring spirits should endeavour to break through the anomalies of the Puritan position. If their consciences demanded, and the civil authority refused, reform, was it either right or dutiful to submit to the civil authority as against the conscience 1 Was there no other way of reformation than by its consent 1 Was the Chris tian man relieved from all responsibility and obligation to obey conscience when the magistrate forbade him to do so 1 ? In so forbidding, was not the magistrate stepping out of his own province 1 Was the church he could so rule as to prevent the realization of the Scriptural ideal a rightly conceived and constituted church 1 ? Was it the apostolical way so to work as to plant, to purge, to organize churches only as Caesar gave consent 1 ? And could any but the apostolical way be right ? These were the questions that created Independency. In the writings of the first Independent, Robert Browne (see BROWN, ROBERT), lies the first crude attempt at an answer. He is possessed with the idea that reformation is necessary, and is to bo accomplished, not by the state, but by the action and cooperation of men who are them selves reformed and renewed. The Puritans have committed two great mistakes : they have imagined that reformation is a thing of polity only, to be carried out by changes in the organism, as it were, or structure of the church, leaving many, perhaps the immense majority, of the individuals who constitute it unreformed ; and they have waited and are waiting to have the work done through and by the magistrate. Browne sets himself absolutely against both positions. &quot; The kingdom of God,&quot; he says, &quot; was not to be begun by whole parishes, but rather of the worthiest, be they ever so few.&quot; 1 This means that a church cannot be created by any political act out of such material as it finds in a parish, but only of the godly, men who are consciously and sincerely Christian. So he defines a church as &quot; a companie or number of Christians or believers, who, by a willing covenant made with their God, are under the government of God and Christ, and kepe his lawes in one holie communion.&quot; 2 This idea of a church was as unlike as possible to the Church of England ideal, and made it as it actually existed so offensive to Browne that he held communion with it to be a cardinal sin. But it also made him particularly impatient with what he called the &quot; wickednesse of those preachers which will not reforme themselves and their charge, because they will tarie till the magistrate commaunde and compell them.&quot; 3 This led him to discuss principles and state positions that curiously anticipate some of the most modern views as to the relation of the civil authority to religion and the church, 4 But the times were not ripe for either the criticism or the realization of Browne s ideas. They were extravagances to his own day; failure attended him everywhere due partly, perhaps, to the angularities of the man, and partly to the prematurity of the system ; his name was covered with ridicule ; and Brownist became the epithet the early Independents most disliked and resented. But the problems that nad exercised Browne were too vital to religion to be his alone. They occupied many minds, and of these not a few looked in a similar direction for a solution. Geneva was at once the strength and the weakness of the Puritans ; their strength, because it gave them their ideal realized ; their weakness, because it made them think that the only method of realization was in and through the state. The Puritan leaders were mainly scientific theologians, like Cartwright and Travers, Perkins and Rainolds, men who strenuously adhered alike in doctrine and polity to the principles and methods of their school. But the earliest Independents were men of simpler minds, educated indeed as well as the English universities could educate them, but of less specific and elaborate training. They studied their own times and interpreted their own duties in the light of the New Testament, and 1 A True and Short Declaration, Both of the Gathering and Joyn- ing together of certain Persons, and also of the Lamentable Breach and Diuision W K fell amongst them, p. 6. This is to a certain degree autobiographical, a story of Browne s struggles and failure to realize his ideal. But see Dexter s Congregationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years, pp. 82, 92 /. 2 See A liooke w* Shen-eth the life and Manners of all trus Christians, and howe rnlike the]/ are vnto Tnrkes and Papistes and Heathen Folke, &c. (Middlebvrg h, 1582), definition 35. 3 So runs the sub-title of one of the tracts he published while aft Middleburg A Treatise of Reformation without Tarying for Anie (1582). 4 &quot;Thus,&quot; he says, &quot;they (the magistrates) may doe nothing con cerning the Church, but onelie civilie, and as civile Magistrates ; that is, they have not that authoritie ouer the church, as to be Prophetes or Priestes, or spirituall Kings, as they are Magistrates over the same ; but onelie to rule the common wealth in all outwarde Justice, to main- taine the right welfare and honor thereof with outwarde power, bodily punishment, and civill forcing of men.&quot; A Treatise of Reformation, p. 12.