(1876.)
The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council has delivered judgment in
the case of Jenkins v. Cook. Many of the highest personages in the
realm, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the great law-lords,
were present to give weight and solemnity to the decision, which was
read by the Lord Chancellor. It was reported at full length in the
_Times_ of the following day, Feb. 17, 1876, the length being two
columns of small print.
I must try to indicate briefly the main facts of the case, before
hazarding any comments on it. Mr. Jenkins, of Christ Church, Clifton,
brought an action against his vicar, the Kev. Flavel S. Cook, for
refusing him the Sacrament of the Holy Communion. Mr. Cook justified the
refusal on the ground that Mr. Jenkins did not believe in the Devil, all
passages relating to the Devil and evil spirits having been excluded
from a bulky volume published by Mr. Jenkins, entitled “Selections from
the Old and New Testaments.” By the evidence of Mrs. Jenkins, who
attempted an amicable arrangement, it appears that Mr. Cook said to her:
“Let Mr. Jenkins write me a calm letter, and say he believes in the
Devil, and I will give him the Sacrament.” Whereupon Mr. Jenkins wrote
on July 20, 1874: “With regard to my book, ‘Selections from the Old and
New Testaments,’ the parts I have omitted, and which has enabled me
[meaning, doubtless, and the omission of which has enabled me] to use
the book morning and evening in my family are, in their present
generally received sense, quite incompatible with region or decency (in
my opinion). How such ideas have become connected with a book containing
everything that is necessary for a man to know, I really cannot say; I
can only sincerely regret it.” Mr. Cook replied in effect: “Then you
cannot be received at the Lord’s table in my church.” Mr. Jenkins, a
regular communicant, and admittedly a man of exemplary and devout life,
answered: “Thinking as you do, I do not see what other course you could
consistently have taken. I shall, nevertheless, come to the Lord’s table
as usual at ‘your’ church, which is also mine.” Accordingly he presented
himself, and was repelled, whereupon he brought an action against Mr.
Cook.
The case was first tried in the Court of Arches, and the dean dismissed
the suit and condemned Mr. Jenkins in costs, saying, “I am of opinion
that the avowed and persistent denial of the existence and personality
of the Devil did, according to the law of the Church, as expressed in
her canons and rubrics, constitute the promoter [Mr. Jenkins] ‘an evil
liver,’ and ‘a depraver of the Book of Common Prayer and Administration
of the Sacraments,’ in such sense as to warrant the defendant in
refusing to administer the Holy Communion to him until he disavowed or
withdrew his avowal of the heretical opinion, and that the same
consideration applies to the absolute denial by the promoter of the
doctrine of the eternity of punishment, and, of course, still more to
the denial of all punishment for sin in a future state, which is the
legitimate consequence of his deliberate exclusion of the passages of
scripture referring to such punishment.”
So far, so well; the Church of England was assured of the Devil and the
eternal punishment it has always held so dear. But Mr. Jenkins appealed
to the highest court, and this has reversed the decision of the lower,
admonished Mr. Cook for his conduct in the past, monished him to refrain
from the like offence in future, and condemned him in the costs of both
suits. Do you think, then, that the Church of England is authoritatively
deprived of her dear Devil and her beloved eternal punishment? Not at
all; the really important problem is evaded with consummate lawyerlike
wariness; the points in dispute are most shiftily shifted like slides of
a magic lantern; we have a new decision essentially unrelated to that
which it cancels; we have a judgment which concerns not the Devil—except
that he would chuckle over the too clever unwisdom which fancies it can
extinguish “burning questions” with legal wigs.
Their most learned lordships in the first place observe that the learned
judge of the Court of Arches appears to have considered that the canon
and the rubric severally warrant the repulsion from the Lord’s table of
“an evil liver,” and “a depraver of the Book of Common Prayer,” whereas
the terms are “an open and notorious evil liver,” and “common and
notorious depravers.” This is a most pregnant distinction, teaching us
that an evil liver and a depraver of the said book, as long as he is not
notoriously such, is fully entitled to the Holy Communion, fully
entitled to the privilege of “eating and drinking damnation to himself?”
a privilege from which the notorious evil liver and depraver is
righteously debarred.
Now, their most learned lordships find that there is absolutely no
evidence that the appellant was an evil liver, much less an open and
notorious evil liver. The Question follows, Was he a common and
notorious depraver of the Book of Common Prayer? It was contended that
the Selections, coupled with the letter of July 20, proved him to be
this. But the letter was not written spontaneously. He was invited by
the respondent, Mr. Cook, to write it. It was a friendly and private, as
well as a solicited, communication. Therefore, whatever be the
construction of the letter, and even if there be in it a depravation of
the Book of Common Prayer, still it would be impossible to hold that the
writing of such a letter in such circumstances could make the appellant
“a common and notorious depraver.” Whence it is clear that a man may
deprave the Book of Common Prayer as much as he pleases in private
conversation and letters, yet retain the precious privilege of “eating
and drinking damnation to himself” in the Holy Communion; he can only
forfeit this by common and notorious depravation of that blessed
book—for instance, by a depravation repeatedly published in a newspaper,
or persistently proclaimed by the town-crier.
So far the law seems most clear, and the judgment quite incontestible.
But leaving the strait limits of the law, and looking at the facts in
evidence, there is one part of the judgment which to the common lay mind
is simply astonishing. Their most learned lordships “_desire to state in
the most emphatic manner that there is not before them any evidence that
the appellant entertains the doctrines attributed to him by the Dean of
Arches_;” wherefore their most learned and subtle lordships “do not mean
to decide that those doctrines are otherwise than inconsistent with the
formularies of the Church of England.” Nor, of course, do they mean to
decide that those doctrines _are_ inconsistent with, those formularies.
No, “This is not the subject for their lordships’ present
consideration.” Indeed, “If they were [had been] called upon to decide
that [whether] those opinions, or any of them, could be entertained or
expressed by a member of the Church, whether layman or clergyman,
consistently with the law and with his remaining in communion with the
Church, they would have looked upon this case with much greater anxiety
than they now feel in its decision.”
Mr. Jenkins compiles and publishes a book of “Selections from the
Bible,” carefully excluding all passages relating to the Devil and evil
spirits. The book is bulky; and, in fact, though this is not expressly
stated, seems to contain pretty well all the Bible except such passages.
He further exhibits in the case a book of selections from the liturgy of
the Church of England, apparently compiled on the same principle of
exclusion.. Mr. Cook sends through Mrs. J. a message: “Let Mr. J. write
me a calm letter, and say he believes in the Devil, and I will give him
the Sacrament.” Mr. J. replies, as we have seen, that the parts he has
omitted are, in his opinion, quite incompatible with religion or
decency, _in their generally received sense_; such generally received
sense being evidently (to all of us save their most learned and subtle
lordships) that in which the Church of England receives them. Mr. C.
replies, “Then I must refuse you the Communion.” Mr. J. answers,
“Thinking as you do, I do not see what other course you could con-.
sistently have taken;” and resolves to test the question of legality.
With these facts staring them in the face, their most learned and most
subtle lordships can, with the utmost solemnity, and in the most
emphatic manner, declare that there is not any evidence before them that
Mr. Jenkins does not believe in the Devil in the common Church of
England sense! What the eyes of laymen, however purblind, cannot help
seeing clearly, their far-sighted lordships, putting on legal
spectacles, dim with the dust of many ages, manage not to discern at
all.
The question cannot be left thus undecided. As matters stand, the poor
Church does not know whether, legally, it has a Devil or not. Its Devil,
its dear and precious old Devil, is in a state of suspended animation,
neither dead nor alive; a most inefficient and burdensome Devil. He must
either be restored to full health and vigor, or buried away decently for
ever; decently and solemnly, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the
presence of all their lordships of the Judicial Committee of the Privy
Council, reading the appropriate Church service over his grave. That
would be touching and impressive!—“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty
God (with the sanction and authority of the Judicial Committee of the
Privy Council) of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our
dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground;
earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope
of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ.” At
present it appears that every clergyman and layman in the Church has the
legal right to sing as a solo in private, especially if solicited,
Beranger’s refrain, “_The Devil is dead! The Devil is dead!_” while it
is doubtful whether he is at liberty to chant it publicly and in
chorus—a state of things anomalous beyond even the normal anomalism of
all things in this our happy England. It is urgent that some one, lay or
cleric, should compel the decision which the suit of Mr. Jenkins has
failed to obtain.
In considering the question whether disbelief in the Devil would
“deprave” the Prayer Book, we must refer to this book itself. It
contains three creeds—the Apostles’, the Nicene, and that called of
Athanasius. Of these the Nicene (the creed in the Communion Service, by
the way) mentions neither the Devil nor Hell; the Apostles’ and the
so-called Athanasian mention hell but not the Devil. In No. III. of the
Thirty-nine Articles hell is solidly established, but again there is no
mention of the Devil. It may be argued that hell implies the Devil, as a
fox-hole implies a fox; but his existence is not authoritatively
averred. Strangely enough, the only personage who, according to the
creeds and articles, has certainly been in hell, is Jesus Christ
himself: “He descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the
dead; he ascended into heaven.” What took _him_ to hell? The Prayer Book
does not inform us. But we learn from the Epistle called 1 Peter, chap.
iii., 19, 20, and chap. iv., 6: “By which also he went and preached unto
the spirits in prison, which sometime were disobedient, when once the
long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a
preparing, wherein few, that is eight souls, were saved by water.... For
this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are dead, that they
might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God
in the spirit.” Whence it appears that the spirits in prison were not
the Devil and his angels, but the spirits of those who were drowned in
the Flood for disobedience; and it furthermore appears that these
spirits were saved by the preaching of Christ; so that in this famous
harrying of hell, he seems to have left it as empty as the mosstroopers
in their forays left farmsteads. It is true that No. VI. of the Articles
settles the canon of the Old and New Testaments, and that anyone daring
to exclude from belief anything in this canon might be convicted of
depraving the Prayer Book. But in that case all the best scholars and
divines of the Church are guilty of this dreadful sin; and not only
guilty, but openly, commonly and notoriously guilty: and therefore all
merit repulsion from the Lord’s table. Let the truly faithful clergy,
those who believe all without question or distinction, do their duty to
the Articles of religion of their Church (the Creeds, as I have pointed
out, are neutral), and they will shut out from their Communion nearly
all the intelligent piety and learning which lend it whatever dignity it
still retains. Granted the canon in its integrity, and the existence of
a personal Devil, and the doctrine of eternal punishment cannot be
fairly disputed. Without multiplying texts, I may refer to Revelation,
chap. xx., as decisive on these points.
From these considerations it follows that if the Church of England is
bound by her own articles she will hold fast to the Devil and hell, and
deny the privilege of her Communion to any one who depraves the
Prayer-Book by common and notorious disbelief in them. And for my own
part, I do not see how the Church could get on at all without a Devil
and hell, especially in competition with the other Christian sects,
which make unlimited use of both. The Devil is in fact as essential to
the Christian schemes as a leader of the opposition to that great
political blessing, government by party. If he were to die, or be
deposed, it would be necessary to elect another to the vacant dignity.
You cannot put the leadership in commission as the unfortunate Liberals
were taunted with doing, in their demoralisation after their disasters
of the General Election and Mr. Gladstone’s sudden retirement. Just as
Mr. Disraeli lamented the withdrawal of Mr. Gladstone, complaining of
the embarrassment caused to the Government by having no responsible
leader opposed to it, so we can imagine dear God lamenting the absence
of a Devil, and declaring that the Christian scheme could not work well
without one. His utter loss would make the government of the world
retrograde from an admirably balanced constitutional monarchy to a mere
Oriental absolute despotism. You must choose some one to lead, if only
in name and for the time, as the Whigs chose Lord Hartington. But though
Lord Hartington is still tolerated by us English, a Lord Hartington of a
Devil, be it said with all respect to both his lordship and his
Devil-ship, would scarcely be tolerated by either the celestial or the
infernal benches.
In Beranger’s authentic record, already alluded to, of “The Death of the
Devil”—which, however, relates only to the Church of Rome—we read how,
on learning the catastrophe:—
“The conclave shook with mortal fear;
Power and cash−box, adieu! they said;
We have lost our father dear,
The Devil is dead! the Devil is dead!”
But while they they were in this passion of grief and despair, St.
Ignatius offered to take the place of the dead Devil; and none could
doubt that he with his Jesuits for imps would prove a most efficient
substitute. Wherefore the Church threw off its sorrow and welcomed his
offer with most holy rapture:—
“Noble fellow! cried all the court,
We bless thee for thy malice and hate.
And at once his Order, Rome’s support,
Saw its robe flutter Heaven’s gate.
From the angel’s tears of pity fell:
Poor man will have cause to rue, they said;
St. Ignatius inherits Hell.
The Devil is dead! the Devil is dead!”
Thus matters continued well for the Church of Rome, and, in fact, became
even better than before. But if the Devil should die in the Church of
England, whom has she that could efficiently take his place? She has no
saints except the disciples and apostles of the New Testament, and these
have long since gone to glory. Would Mr. Gladstone undertake the office?
or Mr. Beresford Hope, with the _Saturday Review_ for his infernal
gazette? or the editor of the _Rock?_ or he of the _Church Times?_ or
the man who does religion for the _Daily Telegraph?_ Each of these
distinguished gentlemen might well eagerly accept the candidature or a
post so lofty: but I fear that none of them could be considered equal to
its functions. Perhaps Mr. Disraeli has the requisite genius, and
probably he would be very glad to exchange the Premiership of little
England for that of large hell: but unfortunately he has already
committed himself to the side of the angels, meaning by angels the
humdrum Tory angels of heaven—for, as Dr. Johnson said, the Devil was
the first Whig. On the whole, the Church of England had better keep
loyal to its ancient and venerable Devil, being too impoverished in
intellect and character to supply a worthy successor.
I have ventured to compare the government of the world in the Christian
scheme, by a God and a Devil, with our own felicitous government by
party. There is, however, or rather there appears to be, a striking
difference between the two. In our government, when the Prime Minister
finds himself decidedly in a minority, he goes out of office, and the
Leader of the Opposition goes in; in the Government of the World the
Leader of the Opposition seems to have always had an immense majority
(and his majority in these days is probably larger than ever before,
seeing that sceptics and infidels have multiplied exceedingly), yet the
other side is supposed to retain permanent possession of office. I say
“supposed,” because the Bible itself suggests that this popular opinion
is a mistake, the Devil (if there be a Devil) being entitled by it the
prince of this world, which surely implies his accession to power.
Although the Godhead or governing power of the world, according to the
Christian scheme, is usually spoken and written of as a trinity, it is,
in fact, quarterary or fourfold for Protestants, and quinary or fivefold
for Roman Catholics. The former have God the Father, God the Son, God
the Holy Ghost, and God the Devil; the latter supplement these with
Goddess the Virgin Mary. Both formally acknowledge the first three as
collectively and severally almighty, but Protestants implicitly
acknowledge the fourth, and Roman Catholics the fifth, as more almighty
still (these solecisms of dogma cannot be expressed without solecisms of
language). With the Roman Catholics I am not concerned here. With regard
to the Protestants, and those especially professing the Protestantism of
the Church of England, I may safely affirm that the Devil is not less
essential to their theology than is any person of the Trinity, or, in
fact, than are the three persons together. Indeed, the Father and the
Holy Ghost have been practically dispensed with, leaving Christ and
Satan to fight the battle out between themselves.
As this is a gloriously scientific age, nobly enamored of the exact
sciences, I will endeavor to expound this sublime subject of the
divinity of the Church of England mathematically, even after the manner
of the divine Plato in Book VIII. of “The Republic,” treating of divine
and human generation; and in the “Timæus,” treating of the creation of
the universal soul. His demonstrations, indeed, are so divinely obscure
as to confound all the scholiasts; my demonstration, however, shall be
so translucent that even the most learned and subtle lords of the
Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, with their legal spectacles on,
shall not be able to help seeing through it. And whereas the figures,
which are shapes, are more intelligible to most people than the figures
which are numbers, let the exposition be geometrical. We will say, then,
that the Church of old conceived the divinity in the form of an
equilateral triangle, whereof the base was Christ as the whole system
was founded on belief in the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Father and the
Holy Ghost were the two sides, leaning each on the other; and the Devil
was the apex, as opposed to, and farthest from, our blessed Savior. But
in course of time the theologians (perhaps merely wanting some
occupation for their vigorous talents, perhaps deeming it undignified to
have two persons of the godhead supporting each other obliquely like a
couple of tipsy men, perhaps simply in order to make matters square) set
to work, and pushed up the two sides, so that each might stand firm and
perpendicular by itself. This process had two unforeseen results; it
expanded the apex, which was a very elastic point, so that it became the
crowning side of the square, and it so unhinged the sides that after a
brief upright existence they lost their balance, and were carried to
Limbo by the first wind of strange doctrine which blew that way; and the
Devil and Christ, or Christ and the Devil (arrange the precedence as you
please), were left alone confronting each other. These two are of course
equal and parallel, the main distinction between them being that Christ
is below, and the Devil above, or, in other words, that the Devil is
superior and Christ inferior (the Devil seems entitled to the
precedence). Thus matters have continued even to the present time, the
divinity showing itself, as we may say, without form and void; and we
are free to speculate on the momentous questions: Will the crown (which
is the Devil) fall into the base (which is Christ)? Will the base float
up into the crown? Will the two coalesce half way? Will they both,
unknit from their sides, be carried away to Limbo by some blast of
strange doctrine? One thing is certain, they cannot long remain as they
are. Rare Ben Jonson chanted the Trinity, or Equilateral Triangle; rare
Walt Whitman has chanted the Square Deific (with Satan for the fourth
side); no poet can care to chant the two straight lines which, in the
language of Euclid, and in the region of intelligence, cannot enclose a
space, but are as a magnified symbol of equal—to nothing.
P. S.—It may be appropriately added that the books of Euclid are really
symbolic and prophetic expositions of most sublime and sacrosanct
mysteries, though in these days few persons seem aware of the fact. Thus
the very first definition, “A point is position without magnitude,”
exactly defines every point of difference between the theologians. So a
line, which is as the prolongation of a point, or length without
breadth, represents in one sense (for each symbol has manifold meanings)
the history of any theological system. An acute angle is, say, Professor
Clifford; an obtuse angle, Mr. Whalley; a right angle, the present
writer: _non angeli sed Angli_. The first proposition, “To erect an
equilateral triangle upon a given finite straight line,” indicates the
problem solved by Christianity, when it erected the Trinity on the basis
of the man we call Jesus. This pregnant subject should be worked out in
detail through the whole eight books.