Note 357 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 4)

This he pictures in a strange engraving prefixed to his book, and representing a crowned figure, whose description will be found in the note, p. 440. It is remarkable that when Hobbes adopted the principle that the ecclesiastical should be united with the sovereign power, he was then actually producing that portentous change which had terrified Luther and Calvin; who, even in their day, were alarmed by a new kind of political Antichrist; that “Cæsarean Popery” which Stubbe so much dreaded, and which I have here noticed, p. 358. Luther predicted that as the pope had at times seized on the political sword, so this “Cæsarean Popery,” under the pretence of policy, would grasp the ecclesiastical crosier, to form a political church. The curious reader is referred to Wolfius Lectionum Memorabilium et reconditarum, vol. ii. cent. x. p. 987. Calvin, in his commentary on Amos, has also a remarkable passage on this political church, animadverting on Amaziah, the priest, who would have proved the Bethel worship warrantable, because settled by the royal authority: “It is the king’s chapel.” Amos, vii. 13. Thus Amaziah, adds Calvin, assigns the king a double function, and maintains it is in his power to transform religion into what shape he pleases, while he charges Amos with disturbing the public repose, and encroaching on the royal prerogative. Calvin zealously reprobates the conduct of those inconsiderate persons, “who give the civil magistrate a sovereignty in religion, and dissolve the Church into the State.” The supremacy in Church and State, conferred on Henry VIII., was the real cause of these alarms; but the passage of domination raged not less fiercely in Calvin than in Henry VIII.; in the enemy of kings than in kings themselves. Were the forms of religion more celestial from the sanguinary hands of that tyrannical reformer than from those of the reforming tyrant? The system of our philosopher was, to lay all the wild spirits which have haunted us in the chimerical shapes of nonconformity. I have often thought, after much observation on our Church history since the Reformation, that the devotional feelings have not been so much concerned in this bitter opposition to the National Church as the rage of dominion, the spirit of vanity, the sullen pride of sectarism, and the delusions of madness.