Note 333 — Chapter X

The Erastians were named from Erastus, a German physician in the sixteenth century. The denomination is often used in the present age ignorantly, and therefore indefinitely; but I apprehend that the fundamental principle of his followers was this: That in a commonwealth where the magistrate professes Christianity, it is not convenient that offences against religion and morality should be punished by the censures of the church, especially by excommunication. Probably he may have gone farther, as Selden seems to have done (Neal, 194), and denied the right of exclusion from church communion, even without reference to the temporal power; but the limited proposition was of course sufficient to raise the practical controversy. The Helvetic divines, Gualter and Bullinger, strongly concurred in this with Erastus; "Contendimus disciplinam esse debere in ecclesiâ, sed satis esse, si ea administretur a magistratu." Erastus, de Excommunicatione, p. 350; and a still stronger passage in p. 379. And it is said, that Archbishop Whitgift caused Erastus's book to be printed at his own expense. See one of Warburton's notes on Neal. Calvin, and the whole of his school, held, as is well known, a very opposite tenet. See Erasti Theses de Excommunicatione, 4to, 1579.

The ecclesiastical constitution of England is nearly Erastian in theory, and almost wholly so in practice. Every sentence of the spiritual judge is liable to be reversed by a civil tribunal, the court of delegates, by virtue of the king's supremacy over all causes. And, practically, what is called church discipline, or the censures of ecclesiastical governors for offences, has gone so much into disuse, and what remains is so contemptible, that I believe no one, except those who derive a little profit from it, would regret its abolition.

"The most part of the House of Commons," says Baillie, ii. 149, "especially the lawyers, whereof there are many, and divers of them very able men, are either half or whole Erastians, believing no church government to be of divine right, but all to be a human constitution depending on the will of the magistrate." "The pope and king," he says in another place (196), "were never more earnest for the headship of the church than the plurality of this parliament." See also p. 183; and Whitelock, 169.