A HUNDRED YEARS AGO: A GLANCE AT THE FORMER POSITION OF English and Irish CatholICS. THE HOLY EUCHARIST IN PRE-REFORMATION TIMES SCOTLAND IN PENAL DAYS: A HISTORICAL SURVEY 327 347 ENGLAND UNDER THE OLD RELIGION1 A wl the T the dawn of the sixteenth century one form of religion only was recognised in the greater part of the Western World. Christian Europe, with the solitary exception of the Muscovite territory, at that time professed to be one in faith and one in ecclesiastical government, the various nations and peoples forming parts of a single organised Church with its centre at Rome. Here and there, indeed-as in Bohemia for example-small bodies of men and women had broken away from the visible unity of the Catholic Church. But on all hands these were regarded merely as sectaries with no call for consideration except as heretics such as the Church had frequently cast off from itself in the course of its long existence. In less than half a century change had come: the state of things, which whether for good or evil had in fact lasted for many hundreds of years, had passed away like a dream, and the ecclesiastical unity of Europe was broken apparently beyond remedy. The present sketch deals with the ecclesiastical condition of England whilst as yet the country remained linked in the closest bonds of unity of faith and practice 1 A paper written in 1903, but not then printed. B with the other churches of Western Europe. It is necessary at the outset to define clearly the standpoint from which it is proposed to take a general survey of the country and people. We are concerned here only with England as a unit of Catholic Christendom: that is to say, with England whilst it still remained under the sway of the undoubted influences which had been exerted on the country and people for nearly a thousand years by the ecclesiastical system, which had existed up to this time in the land. For our present purpose affairs of state, social and political movements, commercial progress and prosperity, foreign and domestic diplomacy and the like, even the action and influence of individual princes and statesmen may be disregarded. Our range of view is here necessarily limited to the condition of England at this period in its religious aspect; or rather, to put it more definitely, our present concern is with the world of life and thought at the period immediately preceding the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century, when as yet the most potent influence upon the popular mind morally and intellectually was the existing ecclesiastical system. At this period the far-reaching power and commanding influence of the English Church may be admitted as an undoubted fact, whatever view we may prefer to hold as to the worth of the system itself or of the truth of the principles it upheld. Its vast organisation in the course of the centuries of its existence had spread itself over the land and had struck its roots deep into the soil. It manifested its external greatness in the majestic cathedrals and stately abbeys which its spirit had created, and in the really noble structures which still " even in remote parochial districts, fill the spectator with aston ishment, as if their founders out of worldly vanity built temples to God ten times larger than the requirements of the population." The energy of its being was patent to the world in the hospitals, colleges, and schools which either owed their existence to its initiative, or had grown and multiplied under its fostering care; whilst in its parochial system the pulse of its life beat with vigour and regularity in every hamlet in the land, and gave light and courage and strength, even human interest and corporate existence, to thousands of obscure villages scattered over the length and breadth of the country. As an organisation it went back into the past beyond the ken of history. It had survived amid turmoil and trouble, amid national danger and disaster, and it had witnessed the fall, as before it had witnessed the rise, of the various dynasties which for periods more or less lengthy had ruled over the destiny of England. All this may, and indeed must, be admitted as a fact by the student of history wholly apart from the question of the worth of the system itself. Upon this matter opinions will differ; the existence of the system is not open to doubt. We are not at present concerned with the details of this vast organisation; nor, indeed, to examine the purely ecclesiastical action of the Church at this period. Our desire is mainly to gauge the extent and character of the influence exerted by the Church on the English people at the close of the mediaeval portion of our history, and to determine its position before the full dawn of the modern period had scattered what is called "the darkness" of the preceding ages, and the new light had brought about many and perhaps inevitable changes. Brewer, ii, 471. 1 |