Moderate rule

We have seen in Part II the rule of moderation in broadly constitutional debates concerning authority in and over the Church. The essential problem was a catch-22 familiar since antiquity: government consists in the restraint of excess, but the power to restrain excess itself requires restraint. Yet, however timeless this agonism, Englishmen building their Church confronted it within unique institutional and ideological contexts. First, the English Reformation established the primacy of civil over ecclesiastical government, erecting a superstructure that all participants had to accept or else step beyond the pale of political legitimacy; for all the theological subtleties used to define religious moderation, it was hard to trump obedience to lawfully constituted authority. Second, humanism and Protestantism converged to emphasise the regenerative powers of virtue or godliness in the world; given the centuries that England had wallowed in anti-Christian corruption, the goal of government was not merely stability but improvement. Third, while both Christian liberty and strong government were essential, belief in the depravity of man and the fallen nature of all human institutions severely attenuated what both liberty and authority might be taken to mean. Time and again, then, the solution offered by English Protestants for navigating these conflicting imperatives was the rule of moderation: government was in some significant sense authorised by its limitation, but the government such limitation authorised was intrinsically interventionist, committed to the goals of discipline and regeneration through the active restraint of its subjects. Since external moderation needed to take over where internal moderation failed, the rule of moderation was committed to peace and harmony through restraint and exclusion, with routinely coercive and sometimes violent results.