Did the Anglican Church reform herself in the Sixteenth century? A tract for the times.

Abstract

Hitherto it has been generally believed that the Reformation in England, during the sixteenth century, was in reality the work of the civil power, which ousted the old Church, and intruded a new Church by act of parliament: and truly, when we read that the actual governors of the Church were changed, the bishops in possession being ejected, and new men put into their places; that the public worship of the Church was changed, the sacrifice of the mass being abolished, and another service substituted for it; and that the acknowledged doctrines of the Church were changed, many of its former tenets and practices being condemned, and new articles of religion promulgated; when, in a word, we behold bishops, worship, doctrine, all swept away, and little remaining of the old establishment but the bare walls of the religious edifices which it had raised and consecrated; we do not see how it was possible for reasonable men to come to any other conclusion.

Lately, however, a new light has burst upon us from Oxford to dispel the darkness which covered the ecclesiastical transactions of former times-we mean those of the reigns of Henry, the meek reformer; of Edward, his theological child, and of Elizabeth, his immaculate daughter. To these distinguished characters, it now appears, that much injury has been done by history as it has been hitherto written. They may, indeed, have filled their own coffers and the purses of their flatterers with ecclesiastical plunder-that is not denied-but placed in this new light, they stand forth to our view, the two first as nursing fathers, the latter as a nursing mother to the Church of their time: they are represented as aiding her efforts with their secular influence, and respecting her spiritual independence. Instead of reforming her by force, as we have been led to suppose, they only enabled her to reform herself: so that the English Church of Protestant times is the very same with the English Church of Catholic times; exactly, says Dr. Hook, "as a man who has washed his face in the morning, remains the same man as he was before he had washed." - Hence it follows, that the Church of the Augustines, the Anselms, the Grossetestes, still rears her venerable front among us : she has never been ousted of her original seat, never replaced by another: she experienced nothing more than the renovation of washing, under the pious sway of the monarchs whom we have mentioned...[Excerpt]