37. THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. It is difficult to define the characteristics of the Church of England so as to enable an outsider to understand it. In much that concerns its external form and traditions it is probably the most mediaeval institution in Europe. In much that concerns its religious teaching and life it is more abreast of modern thought than any other religious body. The former character istic may be illustrated by the fact that its property is held in some cases by direct gift of Anglo-Saxon kings, and that many of its institutions are feudal in their origin. Again it differs from any of the Protestant churches of the continent by the fact that it does not express as they do the teaching or influence of one individual reformer. In a very true sense its history has been continuous. It is an institution which has grown and developed with the history of the English people. It has been modified and changed to meet the needs of each age. It is an institution which has created a theology, not one which is the out come of its theology. It is therefore clear that the Church of England can only be described by its history.
history of the Church of England dates from the mission of Augustine in 597 A.D. This mission was the direct action of the Church of Rome, but almost from the beginning there were other elements. A large part of England was as a matter of fact con verted by missionaries from Scotland and Ire land, representatives of the old Celtic Church. Although the organization introduced by Augustine and Theodore ultimately prevailed through the whole island, yet the Church con tained elements and traditions derived from Celtic sources. Gregory the Great had used language in his letters to Augustine which im plied that a considerable degree of independent development was to be left to the newly founded Church, and from the first its rites and ceremonies differed from the Roman. Dur ing the Anglo-Saxon period there were two elements in its history. The kings and the people of England were full of admiration for the Church of Rome to which they owed Christianity, but, on the other hand, the Church developed more and more as a national insti tution and its ecclesiastical laws were the work very largely of secular councils, on which the bishops sat. The Norman Conquest brought the British Isles very much into the swim of European life, and gradually two opposing cur rents of policy asserted themselves strongly. On the one side a series of able ecclesiastics aimed at securing the independence and privi leges of the Church and at bringing it into dose obedience to the central organization at Rome.
On the other side the national development tended to assert the insularity and independence of the English state and sovereigns. There was a strong opposition to foreign ecclesiastics, to payments to foreign courts and to the influence of foreign monastic orders. Legislation such as the Act of Praemunire was introduced, limit ing ecclesiastical authority and in the reign of Henry V the property of alien priories was confiscated. Throughout the Middle Ages there is literary evidence of criticism on much con nected with the Church, which reached its head in the work of Wycliffe who comb:ned opposi tion to the monastic body and the Church of Rome with a good deal which would be called in the present day Radicalism.
Like the Church of England the history of the Reformation (q.v.) is a complicated story. The final result was produced by various in fluences. There was the old national feeling as opposed to the claims of the papal curia ex pressed in the Reformation Acts by the state ment that the realm of England was and al ways had been an Empire; there was the in fluence of the Humanism of Colet, More and Erasmus, which demanded a Conservative Ref ormation; there was the popular objection to the rights and privileges of the clergy; there was the strong conservative element which has always been characteristic of the English peo ple and which checked any great tendency to change; and especially during the reign of Eliza beth there was the influence of the foreign re formers. The result was a Conservative Ref ormation. No attempt was made to sweep away the Old Church and reconstruct it, either doctrinally or as regards the constitution de novo. Such changes were made as were found necessary to express the different influences which prevailed. This might be shown in vari ous ways and will appear as we proceed with our account. For example by a statute law which has never been repealed, the whole of the canon law which had been accepted in England before the Reformation is still the law of the Church, except in so far as it is con trary to Act of Parliament. By the time of Queen Elizabeth's reign the various parties had become clear. It was clearly the aim of the rulers of the time to unite as many elements as possible in one national church and the ulti mate reform settlement was based therefore on a policy of modeling a national church which should include very varied elements. The re sult of the Reformation was to modify and reform the existing institutions, not to create a new church in accordance with any system of doctrine. See GREAT BRITAIN - THE REF ORMATION.