THE MOTHER OF JESUS IN THE FIRST AGE AND AFTER BY J. HERBERT WILLIAMS Οὗτοι πάντες ἦσαν προσκαρτεροῦντες ὁμοθυμαδὸν τῇ LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO. LTD. DRYDEN HOUSE, GERRARD STREET, W. PREFACE THE English people holds perhaps naturally the favour of Heaven. Providence rules the world, and the country is evidently destined to achieve, and has actually achieved, a great work in the order of the Providence that rules the world. What is the future in store for it? Accordingly, no doubt, as it corresponds with the designs of that Supreme Ruler. But at least in the matter of religion, the English people dares not only to expect but to claim the divine favour.1 England is in the main without religion, without knowledge of God or of Christ; it has been so any time these 350 years; in Origin of the time of Shaftesbury, in the time Protesof Queen Caroline, in our own time. But that is in small degree the fault of the English English tantism. The matter was misunderstood by the Tractarians, and by others before and after them, as if it were the Established Church that received at least divine toleration. A closer and more candid scrutiny discovers easily the truth of the facts. Apart from England and the English this Episcopalian Protestantism has no success, and at home the Nonconforming sects are equally or more prosperous. people. Heresy is the wilful choice of error, and the English people are accordingly no heretics. Their religion was plundered and demolished by a banded conspiracy of Machiavels ; the people did not reject, no section of them rejected, Christ or Christianity, as could unhappily not be said of other nationalities then or later; they took up arms for their religion, they were masters of the field—and they were cajoled by perjury and the last degree of human depravity.1 The ministrations of religion were excluded by penal laws, the penalties being hanging and quartering. The press was muzzled. Every vestige of Missal or Catechism was hunted up and destroyed; the printing and publishing of anything Catholic involved fine and imprisonment; the Catholic faith was stamped out by severe and organised repression. After two generations the bulk of the population, the people of England, were, it is true, not Catholic, because they had never heard of any such thing, they had no opportunities of hearing. And then, after all is done, in this nineteenth or ' In the Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536, the king had no forces on which he could rely to check the insurgents, and must capitulate. He promised in the most solemn terms the pardon of all concerned and the redress of their grievances, and thereupon the gathering dispersed. Within a fortnight the leaders were all burnt or hanged and the Protestant profanity and pillage proceeded as before. See Green, History of the English People, and Bright, History of England. twentieth century, there are poor purblind creatures who rail against the Catholic Church on the score of obscurantism, oppression, persecution; who denounce the Catholic Church in the name of freedom of inquiry, free speech and free writing! God bless my soul! if there had been this freedom observed in the past, England would be Catholic to-day. Or at least you cannot deny it, you who dragooned her into freethought, forsooth; into unbelief, unbelief in God and Church attendance left to hypocrites and women! 'Moi,' exclaims a French country cobbler in our day, with enthusiasm, to the English tourist, 'moi, je suis Protestant aussi; je ne crois à rien !' 1 character. Yes, Christianity in England is mostly dead and forgotten. The notion of a Revelation is lost. Forgotten all the old beliefs, the Its old devotions, like the fashions of a century ago, like the roses of the bygone year. What is to be done? The fortunate and favoured isles reduced to such a pass! How is the Gospel to be preached at the end of the second millennium in favoured England? Obviously the forgotten 1 It must be allowed that revivals have occurred, of emotional religious sentiment, as, e.g., in Methodism. But the influence does not strike deep and is evanescent. What percentage of the adult male population regularly attends upon public worship from a sense of religious duty? A very small one. |