with the industrial revolution 160 years ago. The cancer of
industrialism has begun to mortify, and the end is in sight. Within 200
years, it may be--for we must allow for backwashes and cross-currents
which will retard the flow of the stream--the hideous new towns which
disfigure our landscape may have disappeared, and their sites may have
been reclaimed for the plough. Humanitarian legislation, so far from
arresting this movement, is more likely to accelerate it, and the same
may be said of the insatiate greed of our new masters. It is indeed
instructive to observe how cupidity and sentiment, which (with
pugnacity) are the only passions which the practical politician needs to
consider, usually defeat their own ends. The working man is sawing at
the branch on which he is seated. He may benefit for a time a minority
of his own class, but only by sealing the doom of the rest. A densely
populated country, which is unable to feed itself, can never be a
working-man's paradise, a land of short hours and high wages. And the
sentimentalist, kind only to be cruel, unwittingly promotes precisely
the results which he most deprecates, though they are often much more
beneficial than his own aims. The evil that he would he does not; and
the good that he would not, that he sometimes does.
For, much as we must regret the apparently inevitable ruin of the upper
and upper middle classes, to which England in the past has owed the
major part of her greatness, we cannot regard the trend of events as an
unmixed misfortune. The industrial revolution has no doubt had some
beneficial results. It has founded the British Empire, the most
interesting and perhaps the most successful experiment in government on
a large scale that the world has yet seen. It has foiled two formidable
attempts to place Europe under the heel of military monarchies. It has
brought order and material civilisation to many parts of the world which
before were barbarous. But these achievements have been counterbalanced
by many evils, and in any case they have done their work. The
aggregation of mankind in large towns is itself a misfortune; the life
of great cities is wholesome neither for body nor for mind. The
separation of classes has become more complete; the country may even be
divided into the picturesque counties where money is spent, and the ugly
counties where it is made. Except London and the sea-ports, the whole of
the South of England is more or less parasitic. We must add that in the
early days of the movement the workman and his children were exploited
ruthlessly. It is true that if they had not been exploited they would
not have existed; but a root of bitterness was planted which, according
to what seems to be the law in such cases, sprang up and bore its
poisonous fruit about two generations later. It is a sinister fact that
the worst trouble is now made by the youngest men. The large fortunes
which were made by the manufacturers were not, on the whole, well spent.
Their luxury was not of a refined type; literature and art were not
intelligently encouraged; and even science was most inadequately
supported. The great achievements of the nineteenth century in science
and letters, and to a less degree in art, were independent of the
industrial world, and were chiefly the work of that class which is now
sinking helplessly under the blows of predatory taxation. Capitalism
itself has degenerated; the typical millionaire is no longer the captain
of industry, but the international banker and company promoter. It is
more difficult than ever to find any rational justification for the
accumulations which are in the hands of a few persons. It is not to be
expected that the working class should be less greedy and unscrupulous
than the educated; indeed it is plain that, now that it realises its
power, it will be even more so. In some ways the national character has
stood the strain of these unnatural conditions very well. Those who
feared that the modern Englishman would make a poor soldier have had to
own that they were entirely wrong. But as long as industrialism
continues, we shall be in a state of thinly disguised civil war. There
can be no industrial peace while our urban population remains, because
the large towns are the creation of the system which their inhabitants
now want to destroy. They can and will destroy it, but only by
destroying themselves. When the suicidal war is over we shall have a
comparatively small population, living mainly in the country and
cultivating the fruits of the earth. It will be more like the England of
the eighteenth century than the England which we know. There will be no
very rich men; and if the birth-rate is regulated there should be no
paupers. It will be a far pleasanter age to live in than the present,
and more favourable to the production of great intellectual work, for
life will be more leisurely, and social conditions more stable. We may
hope that some of our best families will determine to survive, _coûte
que coûte_, until these better times arrive. We shall not attempt to
prophesy what the political constitution will be. Every existing form of
government is bad; and our democracy can hardly survive the two diseases
which generally kill democracies--reckless plunder of the national
wealth, and the impotence of the central government in face of
revolutionary and predatory sectionalism.
Meanwhile, we must understand that although the consideration of mankind
in the mass, and the calculation of tendencies based on figures and
averages, must lead us to somewhat pessimistic and cynical views of
human nature, there is no reason why individuals, unless they wish to
make a career out of politics (since it is the sad fate of politicians
always to deal with human nature at its worst), should conform
themselves to the low standards of the world around them. It is only 'in
the loomp' that humanity, whether poor or rich, 'is bad.' There are
materials, though far less abundant than we could wish, for a spiritual
reformation, which would smooth the transition to a new social order,
and open to us unfailing sources of happiness and inspiration, which
would not only enable us to tide over the period of dissolution, but
might make the whole world our debtor. No nation is better endowed by
nature with a faculty for sane idealism than the English. We were never
intended to be a nation of shopkeepers, if a shopkeeper is doomed to be
merely a shopkeeper, which of course he is not. Our brutal commercialism
has been a temporary aberration; the quintessential Englishman is not
the hero of Smiles' 'Self-help'; he is Raleigh, Drake, Shakespeare,
Milton, Johnson, or Wordsworth, with a pleasant spice of Dickens. He is,
in a word, an idealist who has not quite forgotten that he is descended
from an independent race of sea-rovers, accustomed to think and act for
themselves. Mr. Havelock Ellis, one of the wisest and most fearless of
our prophets to-day, quotes from an anonymous journalist a prediction
which may come true: 'London may yet be the spiritual capital of the
world; while Asia--rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord
of lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police
regulations, glorious in all material glories--postures, complacent and
obtuse, before a Europe content in the possession of all that matters.'
For, as the Greek poet says, 'the soul's wealth is the only real
wealth.' The spirit creates values, while the demagogue shrieks to
transfer the dead symbols of them. 'All that matters' is what the world
can neither give nor take away. The spiritual integration of society
which we desire and behold afar off must be illuminated by the dry light
of science, and warmed by the rays of idealism, a white light but not
cold. And idealism must be compacted as a religion, for it is the
function of religion to prevent the fruits of the flowering-times of the
spirit from being lost. Science has not yet come to its own in forming
the beliefs and practice of mankind, because it has been so much
excluded from higher education, and so much repressed by sentimentalism
under the wing of religion. The nation that first finds a practical
reconciliation between science and idealism is likely to take the front
place among the peoples of the world. In England we have to struggle not
only against ignorance, but against a deep-rooted intellectual
insincerity, which is our worst national fault. The Englishman hates an
idea which he has never met before, as he hates the disturber of his
privacy in a steam-ship cabin; and he takes opportunities of making
things unpleasant for those who utter indiscreet truths. As Samuel
Butler says: 'We hold it useful to have a certain number of melancholy
examples whose notorious failure shall serve as a warning to those who
do not cultivate a power of immoral self-control which shall prevent
them from saying, or even thinking, anything that shall not be to their
immediate and palpable advantage.' To do our countrymen justice, it is
often not self-interest, but a tendency to deal with the concrete
instance, in disregard of the general law, that blinds them to the
larger aspects of great problems. Those who are able to trace causes and
effects further than the majority must expect to be unpopular, but they
will not mind it, if they can do good by speaking. The logic of events
will justify them, and science has a new weapon in official statistics
which will register at once the disastrous effects upon wealth and trade
which the insane theories of the demagogue will bring about. No agitator
can explain away ascertained figures; if we go down hill, we shall do it
with our eyes open. It may be that reactions will be set up which will
render the anticipations in this article erroneous. Things never turn
out either so well or so badly as they logically ought to do. Prophecy
is only an amusement; what does concern us all deeply is that we should
see in what direction we are now moving.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] In the small islands round our coast increase has
ceased for some decades. The vital statistics of these
islands furnish an excellent illustration of automatic
adjustment to a state of supersaturation.
BISHOP GORE AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
(1908)
The strength and the weakness of the Anglican Church lie in the fact
that it is not the best representative of any well-defined type of
Christianity. It is not strictly a Protestant body; for Protestantism is
the democracy of religion, and the Church of England retains a
hierarchical organisation, with an order of priests who claim a divine
commission not conferred upon them by the congregation. It is not a
State Church as the Russian Empire has[24] a State Church. That is a
position which it has neither the will nor the power to regain. Still
less could it ever justify a claim to separate existence as a purely
Catholic Church, independent of the Church of Rome. A community of
Catholics whose claim to be a Catholic and not a Protestant Church is
denied by all other Catholics, by all Protestants, and by all who are
neither Catholics nor Protestants, could not long retain sufficient
prestige to keep its adherents together. The destiny of such a body is
written in the history of the 'Old Catholics,' who seceded from Rome
because they would not accept the dogma of Papal infallibility. The
seceders included many men of high character and intellect, but in
numbers and influence they are quite insignificant. The Church of
England has only one title to exist, and it is a strong one. It may
claim to represent the religion of the English people as no other body
can represent it. 'No Church,' Döllinger wrote in 1872, 'is so national,
so deeply rooted in popular affection, so bound up with the institutions
and manners of the country, or so powerful in its influence on national
character.' These words are still partly true, though it is not possible
to make the assertion with so much confidence as when Döllinger wrote.
The English Church represents, on the religious side, the convictions,
tastes, and prejudices of the English gentleman, that truly national
ideal of character, which has long since lost its adventitious connexion
with heraldry and property in land. A love of order, seemliness, and
good taste has led the Anglican Church along a middle path between what
a seventeenth-century divine called 'the meretricious gaudiness of the
Church of Rome and the squalid sluttery of fanatic conventicles.' A keen
sense of honour and respect for personal uprightness, a hatred of
cruelty and treachery, created and long maintained in the English Church
an intense repugnance against the priestcraft of the Roman hierarchy,
feelings which have only died down because the bitter memories of the
sixteenth century have at last become dim. A jealous love of liberty,
combined with contempt for theories of equality, produced a system of
graduated ranks in Church government which left a large measure of
freedom, both in speech and thought, even to the clergy, and encouraged
no respect for what Catholics mean by authority. The Anglican Church is
also characteristically English in its dislike for logic and
intellectual consistency and in its distrust of undisciplined
emotionalism, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was
known and dreaded under the name of 'enthusiasm.' This type is not
essentially aristocratic. It does not traverse the higher ideals of the
working class, which respects and admires the qualities of the
'gentleman,' though it resents the privileges long connected with the
name. But it has no attraction for what may be impolitely called the
vulgar class, whose religious feelings find a natural vent in an
unctuous emotionalism and sentimental humanitarianism. This class, which
forms the backbone of Dissent and Liberalism, is instinctively
antipathetic to Anglicanism. Nor does the Anglican type of Christianity
appeal at all to the 'Celtic fringe,' whose temperament is curiously
opposite to that of the English, not only in religion but in most other
matters. The Irish and the Welsh are no more likely to become Anglicans
than the lowland Scotch are to adopt Roman Catholicism. Whether Dissent
is a permanent necessity in England is a more difficult question, in
spite of the class differences of temperament above mentioned. If the
Anglican organisation were elastic enough to permit the order of
lay-readers to be developed on strongly Evangelical lines, the lower
middle class might find within the Church the mental food which it now
seeks in Nonconformist chapels, and might gain in breadth and dignity by
belonging once more to a great historic body.
The Church of England, then, can justify its existence as English
Christianity, and in no other way. It began its separate career with a
series of (doubtless) illogical compromises, in the belief that there is
an underlying unity, though not uniformity, in the religion as well as
in the character of the English people, which would be strong enough to
hold a national Church together. The dissenters from the Reformation
settlement were numerically insignificant, and their existence was not
regarded as a peril to the Church, for it was recognised that in a free
country absolute agreement cannot be secured. The Roman Catholics, after
some futile persecution, were allowed to remain loyal to their old
allegiance in spiritual matters, while the Independents and similar
bodies were anarchical on principle, and upheld the 'dissidence of
Dissent' as a thing desirable in itself. But the defection of the
Wesleyan Methodists was another matter. This was a blow to the Church of
England as irreparable as the loss of Northern Europe to the Papacy. It
finally upset the balance of parties in the Church, by detaching from it
the larger number of the Evangelicals, particularly in the tradesman
class. It gave a great stimulus to Nonconformity, which now became for
the first time an important factor in the national life. Till the
Wesleyan secession, the Nonconformists in England had been a feeble
folk. From a return made to the Crown in 1700, it appeared that the
Dissenters numbered about one in twenty of the population. Now they are
as numerous as the Anglicans. Their prestige has also been largely
augmented by their dominating position in the United States, where the
Episcopal Church, long viewed with disfavour as tainted with British
sympathies, has never recovered its lost ground, and is a comparatively
small, though wealthy and influential sect. Within the Anglican
communion, the inevitable religious revival of the nineteenth century
began on Evangelical lines, but soon took a form determined by other
influences than those which covered England with the ostentatiously
hideous chapels of the Wesleyans. The extent of the revival has indeed
been much exaggerated by the numerous apologists of the Catholic
movement. The undoubted increase of professional zeal, activity, and
efficiency among the clergy has been taken as proof of a corresponding
access of enthusiasm among the laity, for which there is not much
evidence. In spite of slovenly services and an easy standard of clerical
duty, the observances of religion held a larger place in the average
English home before the Oxford Movement than is often supposed, larger,
indeed, than they do now, when family prayers and Bible reading have
been abandoned in most households.
The Oxford Movement claimed to be, and was, a revival of the principles
of Anglo-Catholicism, which had not been left without witness for any
long period since the Reformation. The continuity is certain, as is the
continuity of the Ritualism of our day with the Tractarianism of seventy
years ago; but the development has been rapid, especially in the last
thirty years. Those who can remember the High Churchmen of Pusey's
generation, or their disciples who in many country parsonages preserved
the faith of their Tractarian teachers whole and undefiled, must be
struck by the divergence between the principles which they then heard
passionately maintained, and those which the younger generation, who use
their name and enjoy their credit, avow to be their own.
In the Tractarians the Nonjurors seemed to have come to life again, and
one might easily find enthusiastic Jacobites among them. Unlike their
successors, they showed no sympathy with political Radicalism. Their
love for and loyalty to the English Church, which found melodious
expression in Keble's poetry, were intense. They were not hostile to
Evangelicalism within the Church, until the ultra-Protestant party
declared war against them; but they viewed Dissent with scorn and
abhorrence. They would gladly have excluded Nonconformists from any
status in the Universities, and opposed any measures intended to
conciliate their prejudices or remove their disabilities. Archdeacon
Denison, in his sturdy opposition to the 'conscience clause' in Church
schools, was a typical representative of the old High Church party. But
still more bitter was their animosity against religious Liberalism. Even
after the feud with the Evangelicals had developed into open war, Pusey
was ready to join with Lord Shaftesbury and his party in united
anathemas against the authors of 'Essays and Reviews.' The beginnings of
Old Testament criticism evoked an outburst of fury almost unparalleled.
When Bishop Gray, of Cape Town, solemnly 'excommunicated' Bishop
Colenso, of Natal, and enjoined the faithful to 'treat him as a heathen
man and a publican,' for exposing the unhistorical character of portions
of the Pentateuch, he became a hero with the whole High Church party,
and even the more liberal among the bishops were cowed by the tempest of
feeling which the case aroused. In the same period, many Oxford men can
remember Bishop Wilberforce's attack upon Darwinism, and, somewhat
later, Dean Burgon's University sermon which ended with the stirring
peroration: Leave me my ancestors in Paradise, and I leave you yours in
the Zoological Gardens!' From the same pulpit Liddon, a little before
his death, uttered a pathetic remonstrance against the course which his
younger disciples were taking about inspiration and tradition.
Reverence for tradition was a very prominent feature in the theology of
the older generation. They spent an immense amount of time, learning,
and ingenuity in establishing a _catena_ of patristic and orthodox
authority for their principles, reaching back to the earliest times, and
handed down in this country by a series of Anglo-Catholic divines. This
unbroken tradition was conceived of as purely static, a 'mechanical
unpacking,' as Father Tyrrell puts it, of the doctrine once delivered to
the Apostles. The Church, according to their theory, was supernaturally
guided by the Holy Ghost, and its decisions were consequently
infallible, as long as the Church remained undivided. Thus the earlier
General Councils, before the schism between East and West, may not be
appealed against, and the Creeds drawn up by them can never be revised.
Since the great schism, the infallible inspiration of the Church has
been in abeyance, like an old English peerage when a peer leaves two or
more daughters and no sons. This fantastic theory condemns all later
developments, and leaves the Church under the weight of the dead hand.
On the question of the Establishment the party was divided, some of its
members attaching great value to the union of Church and State, while
others made claims for the Church, in the matter of self-government,
which were hardly compatible with Establishment. Their bond of union was
their conviction of 'the necessity of impressing on people that the
Church was more than a merely human institution; that it had privileges,
sacraments, a ministry, ordained by Christ Himself; that it was a matter
of highest obligation to remain united to the Church.'[25]
As compared with their successors, the Tractarians were academic and
learned; they preached thoughtful and carefully prepared sermons; they
cared little for ecclesiastical millinery, and often acquiesced in very
simple and 'backward' ceremonial. Their theory of the Church, their
personal piety and self-discipline, were of a thoroughly medieval type,
as may be seen from certain chapters in the life of Pusey. They fought
the battle of Anglo-Catholicism, at Oxford and elsewhere, with a
whole-hearted conviction that knew no misgivings or scruples. Oxford has
not forgotten the election, as late as 1862, of an orthodox naval
officer to a chair of history for which Freeman was a candidate.