The necessities for moral compromise I have traced in the army, in the
law, and in the fields of politics may be found in another form not less
conspicuously in the Church. The members, and still more the ministers,
of an ancient Church bound to formularies and creeds that were drawn up
in long bygone centuries, are continually met by the difficulties of
reconciling these forms with the changed conditions of human knowledge,
and there are periods when the pressure of these difficulties is felt
with more than common force. Such, for example, were the periods of the
Renaissance and the Reformation, when changes in the intellectual
condition of Europe produced a widespread conviction of the vast amount
of imposture and delusion which had received the sanction of a Church
that claimed to be infallible, the result being in some countries a
silent evanescence of all religious belief among the educated class,
even including a large number of the leaders of the Church, and in other
countries a great outburst of religious zeal aiming at the restoration
of Christianity to its primitive form and a repudiation of the
accretions of superstition that had gathered around it. The Copernican
theory proving that our world is not, as was long believed, the centre
of the universe, but a single planet moving with many others around a
central sun, and the discovery, by the instrumentality of the
telescope, of the infinitesimally small place which our globe occupies
in the universe, altered men's measure of probability and affected
widely, though indirectly, their theological beliefs.
A similar change was gradually produced by the Newtonian discovery that
the whole system of the universe was pervaded by one great law, and by
the steady growth of scientific knowledge, proving that vast numbers of
phenomena which were once attributed to isolated and capricious acts of
spiritual intervention were regulated by invariable, inexorable,
all-pervasive law. Many of the formularies by which we still express our
religious beliefs date from periods when comets and eclipses were
believed to have been sent to portend calamity; when every great
meteorological change was attributed to some isolated spiritual agency;
when witchcraft and diabolical possession, supernatural diseases, and
supernatural cures were deemed indubitable facts: and when accounts of
contemporary miracles, Divine or Satanic, carried with them no sense of
strangeness or improbability. It is scarcely surprising that these
formularies sometimes seem incongruous with an age when the scientific
spirit has introduced very different conceptions of the government of
the universe, and when the miraculous, if it is not absolutely
discredited, is, at least in the eyes of most educated men, relegated to
a distant past.
The present century has seen some powerful reactions towards older
religious beliefs, but it has also been to an unusual extent fertile in
the kind of changes that most deeply affect them. Not many years have
passed since the whole drama of the world's history was believed to
have been comprised in the framework of 'Paradise Lost' and 'Paradise
Regained.' Man appeared in the universe a faultless being in a faultless
world, but he soon fell from his first estate, and his fall entailed
world-wide consequences. It introduced into our globe sin, death,
suffering, disease, imperfection and decay; all the mischievous and
ferocious instincts and tendencies of man and beast; all the
multitudinous forms of struggle, terror, anxiety and grief; all that
makes life bitter to any living being, and, even as the Fathers were
accustomed to say, the briars and weeds and sterility of the earth.
Paradise Regained was believed to be indissolubly connected with
Paradise Lost. The one was the explanation of the other. The one
introduced the disease, the other provided the remedy.
It is idle to deny that the main outlines of this picture have been
wholly changed. First came the discovery that the existence of our globe
stretches far beyond the period once assigned to the Creation, and that
for countless ages before the time when Adam was believed to have lost
Paradise, death had been its most familiar fact and its inexorable law;
that the animals who inhabited it preyed upon and devoured each other as
at present, their claws and teeth being specially adapted for that
purpose. Even their half-digested remains have been preserved in fossil.
'Death,' wrote a Pagan philosopher, in sharp contrast to the teaching of
the Church, 'is a law and not a punishment,' and geology has fully
justified his assertion.
Then came decisive evidence showing that for many thousands of years
before his supposed origin man had lived and died upon our globe--a
being, as far as can be judged from the remains that have been
preserved, not superior but greatly inferior to ourselves, whose almost
only art was the manufacture of rude instruments for killing, who
appears in structure and in life to have approximated closely to the
lowest existing forms of savage life.
Then came the Darwinian theory maintaining that the whole history of the
living world is a history of slow and continuous evolution, chiefly by
means of incessant strife, from lower to higher forms; that man himself
had in this way gradually emerged from the humblest forms of the animal
world; that most of the moral deflections which were attributed to the
apple in Eden are the remains and traditions of the earlier and lower
stages of his existence. The theory of continuous ascent from a lower to
a higher stage took the place of the theory of the Fall as the
explanation of human history. It is a doctrine which is certainly not
without hope for the human race. It gives no explanation of the ultimate
origin of things, and it is in no degree inconsistent with the belief
either in a Divine and Creative origin or in a settled and Providential
plan. But it is as far as possible removed from the conception of human
history and human nature which Christendom during eighteen centuries
accepted as fundamental truth.
With these things have come influences of another kind. Comparative
Mythology has accumulated a vast amount of evidence, showing how myths
and miracles are the natural product of certain stages of human
history, of certain primitive misconceptions of the course of nature;
how legends essentially of the same kind, though with some varieties of
detail, have sprung up in many different quarters, and how they have
migrated and interacted on each other. Biblical criticism has at the
same time decomposed and analysed the Jewish writings, assigning to them
dates and degrees of authority very different from those recognised by
the Church. It has certainly not impaired their significance as records
of successive developments of religious and moral progress, nor has it
diminished their value as expressions of the loftiest and most enduring
religious sentiments of mankind; but in the eyes of a great section of
the educated world it has deprived them of the authoritative and
infallible character that was once attributed to them. At the same time
historical criticism has brought with it severer standards of proof,
more efficient means of distinguishing the historical from the fabulous.
It has traced the phases and variations of religions, and the influences
that governed them, with a fulness of knowledge and an independence of
judgment unknown in the past, and it has led its votaries to regard in
these matters a sceptical and hesitating spirit as a virtue, and
credulity and easiness of belief as a vice.
This is not a book of theology, and I have no intention of dilating on
these things. It must, however, be manifest to all who are acquainted
with contemporary thought how largely these influences have displaced
theological beliefs among great numbers of educated men; how many things
that were once widely believed have become absolutely incredible; how
many that were once supposed to rest on the plane of certainty have now
sunk to the lower plane of mere probability or perhaps possibility. From
the time of Galileo downwards, these changes have been denounced as
incompatible with the whole structure of Christian belief. No less an
apologist than Bishop Berkeley declared that the belief that the date of
the existence of the world was approximately that which could be deduced
from the book of Genesis was one of the fundamental beliefs which could
not be given up.[58] When the traveller Brydone published his travels in
Sicily in 1773, conjecturing, from the deposits of lava, that the world
must be much older than the Mosaic cosmogony admitted, his work was
denounced as subverting the foundations of the Christian faith. The same
charges were brought against the earlier geologists, and in our own day
against the early supporters of the Darwinian theory; and many now
living can remember the outbursts of indignation against those who first
introduced the principles of German criticism into English thought, and
who impugned the historical character and the assumed authorship of the
Pentateuch.
It is not surprising or unreasonable that it should have been so, for it
is impossible to deny that these changes have profoundly altered large
portions of the beliefs that were once regarded as essential. One main
object of a religion was believed to have been to furnish what may be
called a theory of the universe--to explain its origin, its destiny, and
the strange contradictions and imperfections it presents. The Jewish
theory was a very clear and definite one, but it is certainly not that
of modern science.
Yet few things are more remarkable than the facility with which these
successive changes have gradually found their places within the
Established Church, and how little that Church has been shaken by this
fact. Even the Darwinian theory, though it has not yet passed into the
circle of fully established truth, is in its main lines constantly
mentioned with approbation by the clergy of the Church. The theory of
evolution largely pervades their teaching. The doctrine that the Bible
was never intended to teach science or scientific facts, and also the
main facts and conclusions of modern Biblical criticism, have been
largely accepted among the most educated clergy. Very few of them would
now deny the antiquity of the world, the antiquity of man, or the
antiquity of death, or would maintain that the Mosaic cosmogony was a
true and literal account of the origin of the globe and of man, or would
very strenuously argue either for the Mosaic authorship or the
infallibility of the Pentateuch.
And while changes of this kind have been going on in one direction,
another great movement has been taking place in an opposite one. The
Church of England was essentially a Protestant Church; though, being
constructed more than most other Churches under political influences, by
successive stages of progress, and with a view to including large and
varying sections of opinion in its fold, it retained, more than other
Churches, formularies and tenets derived from the Church it superseded.
The earnest Protestant and Puritan party which dominated in Scotland
and in the Continental Reformation, and which refused all compromise
with Rome, had not become powerful in English public opinion till some
time after the framework of the Church was established. The spirit of
compromise and conservatism which already characterised the English
people; the great part which kings and lawyers played in the formation
of the Church; their desire to maintain in England a single body,
comprising men who had broken away from the Papacy but who had in other
respects no great objection to Roman Catholic forms and doctrines, and
also men seriously imbued with the strong Protestant feeling of Germany
and Switzerland; the strange ductility of belief and conduct that
induced the great majority of the English clergy to retain their
preferments and avoid persecution during the successive changes of Henry
VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, all assisted in forming a Church
of a very composite character. Two distinct theories found their place
within it. According to one school it was simply the pre-Reformation
Church purified from certain abuses that had gathered around it,
organically united with it through a divinely appointed episcopacy,
resting on an authoritative and ecclesiastical basis, and forming one of
the three great branches of the Catholic Church. According to the other
school it was one of several Protestant Churches, retaining indeed such
portions of the old ecclesiastical organisation as might be justified
from Scripture, but not regarding them as among the essentials of
Christianity; agreeing with other Protestant bodies in what was
fundamental, and differing from them mainly on points which were
non-essential; accepting cordially the principle that 'the Bible and
the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants,' and at the same time
separated by the gravest and most vital differences from what they
deemed the great apostasy of Rome.
It was argued on the one hand that in its ecclesiastical and legal
organisation the Church in England was identical with the Church in the
reign of Henry VII.; that there had been no breach of continuity; that
bishops, and often the same bishops, sat in the same sees before and
after the Reformation; that the great majority of the parochial clergy
were unchanged, holding their endowments by the same titles and tenures,
subject to the same courts, and meeting in Convocation in the same
manner as their predecessors; that the old Catholic services were merely
translated and revised, and that although Roman usurpations which had
never been completely acquiesced in had been decisively rejected, and
although many superstitious novelties had been removed, the Church of
England was still the Church of St. Augustine; that it had never, even
in the darkest period, lost its distinct existence, and that
supernatural graces and sacerdotal powers denied to all schismatics had
descended to it through the Episcopacy in an unbroken stream. On the
other hand it was argued that the essential of a true Church lay in the
accordance of its doctrines with the language of Scripture and not in
the methods of Church government, and that whatever might be the case in
a legal point of view, the theory of the unity of the Church before and
after the Reformation was in a theological sense a delusion. The Church
under Henry VII. was emphatically a theocracy or ecclesiastical
monarchy, the Pope, as the supposed successor of the supposed prince of
the Apostles, being the very keystone of the spiritual arch. Under Henry
VIII. and Elizabeth the Church of England had become a kind of
aristocracy of bishops, governed very really as well as theoretically by
the Crown, totally cut off from what called itself the Chair of Peter,
and placed under completely new relations with the Catholic Church of
Christendom. In this space of time Anglican Christianity had discarded
not only the Papacy but also great part of what for centuries before the
change had been deemed vitally and incontestably necessary both in its
theology and in its devotions. Though much of the old organisation and
many of the old formularies had been retained, its articles, its
homilies, the constant teaching of its founders, breathed a spirit of
unquestionable Protestantism. The Church which remained attached to
Rome, and which held the same doctrines, practised the same devotions,
and performed the same ceremonies as the English Church under Henry
VII., professed to be infallible, and it utterly repudiated all
connection with the new Church of England, and regarded it as nothing
more than a Protestant schism; while the Church of England in her
authorised formularies branded some of the central beliefs and devotions
of the Roman Church as blasphemous, idolatrous, superstitious and
deceitful, and was long accustomed to regard that Church as the Church
of Antichrist; the Harlot of the Apocalypse, drunk with the blood of the
Saints. Each Church during long periods and to the full measure of its
powers suppressed or persecuted the other.
In the eyes of the Erastian and also in the eyes of the Puritan the
theory of the spiritual unity of these two bodies, and the various
sacerdotal consequences that were inferred from it, seemed incredible,
nor did the first generation of our reformers shrink from communion,
sympathy and co-operation with the non-episcopal Protestants of the
Continent. Although they laid great stress on patristic authority, and
consented--chiefly through political motives--to leave in the
Prayer-book many things derived from the older Church, yet the High
Church theory of Anglicanism is much more the product of the
seventeenth-century divines than of the reformers, just as Roman
Catholicism is much more akin to the later fathers than to primitive
Christianity. No one could doubt on what side were the sympathies and
what were the opinions of Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Jewell and Hooper,
and what spirit pervades the articles and the homilies. A Church which
does not claim to be infallible; which owes its special form chiefly to
the sagacity of statesmen; in which the supreme tribunal, deciding what
doctrines may be taught by the clergy, is a secular law court; in which
the bands of conformity are so loose that the tendencies and sentiments
of the nation give the complexion to the Church, appears in the eyes of
men of these schools to have no possible right to claim or share the
authority of the Church of Rome. It rests on another basis. It must be
justified on other grounds.
These two distinct schools, however, have subsisted in the Church. Each
of them can find some support in the Prayer-book, and the old orthodox
High Church school which was chiefly elaborated and which chiefly
flourished under the Stuarts, has produced a great part of the most
learned theology of Christendom, and had in its early days little or no
tendency to Rome. It was exclusive and repellent on the side of
Nonconformity, and it placed Church authority very high; but the immense
majority of its members were intensely loyal to the Anglican Church, and
lived and died contentedly within its pale. There were, however, always
in that Church men of another kind whose true ideal lay beyond its
border. Falkland, in a remarkable speech, delivered in 1640, speaks of
them with much bitterness. 'Some,' he says, 'have so industriously
laboured to deduce themselves from Rome that they have given great
suspicion that in gratitude they desire to return thither, or at least
to meet it half way. Some have evidently laboured to bring in an English
though not a Roman Popery; I mean not only the outside and dress of it,
but equally absolute.... Nay, common fame is more than ordinarily false
if none of them have found a way to reconcile the opinions of Rome to
the preferments of England, and be so absolutely, directly and cordially
Papists that it is all that 1,500_l._ a year can do to keep them from
confessing it.'[59]
No wide secession to Rome, however, followed the development of this
seventeenth-century school, though it played a large part in the
nonjuror schism, and with the decay of that schism and under the
latitudinarian tendencies of the eighteenth century it greatly dwindled.
Since, however, the Tractarian movement, which carried so many leaders
of the English Church to Rome, men of Roman sympathies and Roman ideals
have multiplied within the Church to an extraordinary degree. They have
not only carried their theological pretensions in the direction of Rome
much further than the nonjurors; they have also in many cases so
transformed the old and simple Anglican service by vestments and
candles, and banners and incense, and genuflexions and whispered
prayers, that a stranger might well imagine that he was in a Roman
Catholic church. They have put forward sacerdotal pretensions little, if
at all, inferior to those of Rome. The whole tendency of their
devotional literature and thought flows in the Roman channel, and even
in the most insignificant matters of ceremony and dress they are
accustomed to pay the greater Church the homage of constant imitation.
It would be unjust to deny that there are some real differences. The
absolute authority and infallibility of the Pope are sincerely
repudiated as an usurpation, the ritualist theory only conceding to him
a primacy among bishops. The discipline and submission to ecclesiastical
authority also, which so eminently distinguish the Roman Church, are
wholly wanting in many of its Anglican imitators, and at the same time
the English sense of truth has proved sufficient to save the party from
the tolerance and propagation of false miracles and of grossly
superstitious practices so common in Roman Catholic countries. In this
last respect, however, it is probable that English and American Roman
Catholics are almost equally distinguished from Catholics in the
Southern States of Europe and of America. Still, when all this is
admitted, it can hardly be denied that there has grown up in a great
section of the English Church a sympathy with Rome and an antipathy to
Protestantism and to Protestant types of thought and character utterly
alien to the spirit of the Reformers and to the doctrinal formularies of
the Church of England.
It is not very easy to form a just estimate of the extent and depth of
this movement. There are wide variations in the High Church party; the
extreme men are not the most numerous and certainly very far from the
ablest, and many influences other than convinced belief have tended to
strengthen the party. It has been, indeed, unlike the Tractarian party
which preceded it, remarkably destitute of literary or theological
ability, and has added singularly little to the large and noble
theological literature of the English Church. The mere charm of novelty,
which is always especially powerful in the field of religion, draws many
to the ritualistic channel, and thousands who care very little for
ritualistic doctrines are attracted by the music, the pageantry, the
pictorial beauty of the ritualistic services. Æsthetic tastes have of
late years greatly increased in England, and the closing of places of
amusement on Sunday probably strengthens the craving for more attractive
services. The extreme High Church party has chiefly fostered and chiefly
benefited by this desire, but it has extended much more widely. It has
touched even puritanical and non-episcopal bodies, and it is sometimes
combined with extremely latitudinarian opinions. There is, indeed, a
type of mind which finds in such services a happy anodyne for
half-suppressed doubt. Petitions which in their poignant humiliation and
profound emotion no longer correspond to the genuine feelings of the
worshipper, seem attenuated and transformed when they are intoned, and
creeds which when plainly read shock the understanding and the
conscience are readily accepted as parts of a musical performance.
Scepticism as well as belief sometimes fills churches. Large classes who
have no wish to cut themselves off from religious services have lost all
interest in the theological distinctions which once were deemed
supremely important and all strong belief in great parts of dogmatic
systems, and such men naturally prefer services which by music and
ornament gratify their tastes and exercise a soothing or stimulating
influence over the imagination.
The extreme High Church party has, however, other elements of
attraction. Much of its power is due to the new springs of real
spiritual life and the new forms of real usefulness and charity that
grew out of its highly developed sacerdotal system and out of the
semi-monastic confraternities which at once foster and encourage and
organise an active zeal. The power of the party in acting not only on
the cultivated classes but also on the poor is very manifest, and it has
done much to give the Church of England a democratic character which in
past generations it did not possess, and which in the conditions of
modern life is supremely important. The multiplication not only of
religious services but of communicants, and the great increase in the
interest taken in Church life in quarters where the Ritualist party
prevail, cannot reasonably be questioned. Its highly ornate services
draw many into the churches who never entered them before, and they are
often combined with a familiar and at the same time impassioned style of
preaching, something like that of a Franciscan friar or a Methodist
preacher, which is excellently fitted to act upon the ignorant. If its
clergy have been distinguished for their insubordination to their
bishops, if they have displayed in no dubious manner a keen desire to
aggrandise their own position and authority, it is also but just to add
that they have been prominent for the zeal and self-sacrifice with which
they have multiplied services, created confraternities, and penetrated
into the worst and most obscure haunts of poverty and vice.
The result, however, of all this is that the conflicting tendencies
which have always been present in the Church have been greatly deepened.
There are to be found within it men whose opinions can hardly be
distinguished from simple Deism or Unitarianism, and men who abjure the
name of Protestant and are only divided by the thinnest of partitions
from the Roman Church. And this diversity exists in a Church which is
held together by articles and formularies of the sixteenth century.
It might, perhaps, _a priori_ have been imagined that a Church with so
much diversity of opinion and of spirit was an enfeebled and
disintegrated Church, but no candid man will attribute such a character
to the Church of England. All the signs of corporate vitality are
abundantly displayed, and it is impossible to deny that it is playing an
active, powerful, and most useful part in English life. Looking at it
first of all from the intellectual side, it is plain how large a
proportion of the best intellect of the country is contented, not only
to live within it, but to take an active part in its ministrations.
Compare the amount of higher literature which proceeds from clergymen of
the Established Church with the amount which proceeds from the vastly
greater body of Catholic priests scattered over the world; compare the
place which the English clergy, or laymen deeply imbued with the
teaching of the Church, hold in English literature with the place which
Catholic priests, or sincere Catholic laymen, hold in the literature of
France,--and the contrast will appear sufficiently evident. There is
hardly a branch of serious English literature in which Anglican clergy
are not conspicuous. There is nothing in a false and superstitious creed
incompatible with some forms of literature. It may easily ally itself
with the genius of a poet or with great beauty of style either hortatory
or narrative. But in the Church of England literary achievement is
certainly not restricted to these forms. In the fields of physical
science, in the fields of moral philosophy, metaphysics, social and even
political philosophy, and perhaps still more in the fields of history,
its clergy have won places in the foremost rank. It is notorious that a
large proportion of the most serious criticism, of the best periodical
writing in England, is the work of Anglican clergymen. No one, in
enumerating the leading historians of the present century, would omit
such names as Milman, Thirlwall and Merivale, in the generation which
has just passed away, or Creighton and Stubbs among contemporaries, and
these are only eminent examples of a kind of literature to which the
Church has very largely contributed. Their histories are not specially
conspicuous for beauty of style, and not only conspicuous for their
profound learning; they are marked to an eminent degree by judgment,
criticism, impartiality, a desire for truth, a skill in separating the
proved from the false or the merely probable. Compare them with the
chief histories that have been written by Catholic priests. In past ages
some of the greatest works of patient, lifelong industry in all literary
history were due to the Catholic priesthood, and especially to members
of the monastic orders; even in modern times they have produced some
works of great learning, of great dialectic skill, and of great beauty
of style; but with scarcely an exception these works bear upon them the
stamp of an advocate and are written for the purpose of proving a point,
concealing or explaining away the faults on one side, and bringing into
disproportioned relief those of the other. No one would look in them for
a candid estimate of the merits of an opponent or for a full statement
of a hostile case. Döllinger, who would probably once have been cited as
the greatest historian the Catholic priesthood had produced in the
nineteenth century, died under the anathema of his Church; and how large
a proportion of the best writing in modern English Catholicism has come
from writers who have been brought up in Protestant universities and who
have learnt their skill in the Anglican Church!
It is at least one great test of a living Church that the best intellect
of the country can enter into its ministry, that it contains men who in
nearly all branches of literature are looked upon by lay scholars with
respect or admiration. It is said that the number of young men of
ability who take orders is diminishing, and that this is due, not merely
to the agricultural depression which has made the Church much less
desirable as a profession, and indeed in many cases almost impossible
for those who have not some private fortune; not merely to the
competitive examination system, which has opened out vast and attractive
fields of ambition to the ablest laymen,--but also to the wide
divergence of men of the best intellect from the doctrines of the
Church, and the conviction that they cannot honestly subscribe its
articles and recite its formularies. But although this is, I believe,
true, it is also true that there is no other Church which has shown
itself so capable of attracting and retaining the services of men of
general learning, criticism and ability. One of the most important
features of the English ecclesiastical system has been the education of
those who are intended for the Church, in common with other students in
the great national universities. Other systems of education may produce
a clergy of greater professional learning and more intense and exclusive
zeal, but no other system of education is so efficacious in maintaining
a general harmony of thought and tendency between the Church and the
average educated opinion of the nation.
Take another test. Compare the _Guardian_, which represents better than
any other paper the opinions of moderate Churchmen, with the papers
which are most read by the French priesthood and have most influence on
their opinions. Certainly few English journalists have equalled in
ability Louis Veuillot, and few papers have exercised so great an
influence over the clergy of the Church as the _Univers_ at the time
when he directed it; but no one who read those savagely scurrilous and
intolerant pages, burning with an impotent hatred of all the progressive
and liberal tendencies of the time, shrinking from no misrepresentation
of fact and from no apology for crime if it was in the interest of the
Church, could fail to perceive how utterly out of harmony it was with
the best lay thought of France. English religious journalism has
sometimes, though in a very mitigated degree, exhibited some of these
characteristics, but no one who reads the _Guardian_, which I suppose
appeals to a larger clerical public than any other paper, can fail to
realise the contrast. It is not merely that it is habitually written in
the style and temper of a gentleman, but that it reflects most clearly
in its criticism, its impartiality, its tone of thought, the best
intellectual influences of the time. Men may agree or differ about its
politics or its theology, but no one who reads it can fail to admit that
it is thoroughly in touch with cultivated lay opinion, and it is in fact
a favourite paper of many who care only for its secular aspects.
The intellectual ability, however, included among the ministers of a
Church, though one test, is by no means a decisive and infallible one of
its religious life. During the period of the Renaissance, when genuine
belief in the Catholic Church had sunk to nearly its lowest point, most
men of literary tastes and talents were either members of the priesthood
or of the monastic orders. This was not due to any fervour of belief,
but simply to the fact that the Church at that time furnished almost the
only sphere in which a literary life could be pursued with comfort,
without molestation, and with some adequate reward. Much of the literary
ability found in the English Church is unquestionably due to the
attraction it offers and the facilities it gives to those who simply
wish for a studious life. The abolition of many clerical sinecures, and
the greatly increased activity of clerical duty imposed by contemporary
opinion, have no doubt rendered the profession less desirable from this
point of view; but even now there is no other profession outside the
universities which lends itself so readily to a literary life, and a
great proportion of the most eminent thinkers and writers in the Church
of England are eminent in fields that have little or no connection with
theology.
Other tests of a flourishing Church are needed, but they can easily be
found. Political power is one test, though it is a very coarse and very
deceptive one. Perhaps it is not too much to say that the most
superstitious creeds are often those which exercise the greatest
political influence, for they are those in which the priesthood acquires
the most absolute authority. Nor does the decline of superstition among
the educated classes always bring with it a corresponding decline in
ecclesiastical influence. There have been instances, both in Pagan and
Christian times, of a sceptical and highly educated ruling class
supporting and allying themselves with a superstitious Church as the
best means of governing or moralising the masses. Such Churches, by
their skilful organisation, by their ascendency over individual rulers,
or by their political alliances, have long exercised an enormous
influence, and in a democratic age the preponderance of political power
is steadily passing from the most educated classes. At the same time, in
a highly civilised and perfectly free country, in which all laws of
religious disqualification and coercion have disappeared, and all
questions of religion are submitted to perpetual discussion, the
political power which the Church of England retains at least proves that
she has a vast weight of genuine and earnest opinion behind her. No
politician will deny the strength with which the united or greatly
preponderating influence of the Church can support or oppose a party. It
has been said by a cynical observer that the three things outside their
own families that average Englishmen value the most are rank, money, and
the Church of England, and certainly no good observer will form a low
estimate of the strength or earnestness of the Church feeling in every
section of the English people.
Still less can it be denied that the Church retains in a high degree its
educational influence. For a long period national education was almost
wholly in its hands, and, since all disqualifications and most
privileges have been abolished, it still exercises a part in English
education which excites the alarm of some and the admiration of others.
It has thrown itself heartily into the new political conditions, and the
vast number of voluntary schools established under clerical influence,
and the immense sums that are annually raised for clerical purposes,
show beyond all doubt the amount of support and enthusiasm behind it. In
every branch of higher education its clergy are conspicuous, and their
influence in training the nation is not confined to the pulpit, the
university, or the school. No candid observer of English life will
doubt the immense effect of the parochial system in sustaining the moral
level both of principle and practice, and the multitude, activity, and
value of the philanthropic and moralising agencies which are wholly or
largely due to the Anglican Church.
Nor can it be reasonably doubted that the Church has been very
efficacious in promoting that spiritual life which, whatever opinion men
may form of its origin and meaning, is at least one of the great
realities of human nature. The power of a religion is not to be solely
or mainly judged by its corporate action; by the institutions it
creates; by the part which it plays in the government of the world. It
is to be found much more in its action on the individual soul, and
especially in those times and circumstances when man is most isolated
from society. It is in furnishing the ideals and motives of individual
life; in guiding and purifying the emotions; in promoting habits of
thought and feeling that rise above the things of earth; in the comfort
it can give in age, sorrow, disappointment and bereavement; in the
seasons of sickness, weakness, declining faculties, and approaching
death, that its power is most felt. No one creed or Church has the
monopoly of this power, though each has often tried to identify it with
something peculiar to itself. It maybe found in the Catholic and in the
Quaker, in the High Anglican who attributes it to his sacramental
system, and in the Evangelical in whose eyes that system holds only a
very subordinate place. All that need here be said is that no one who
studies the devotional literature of the English Church, or who has
watched the lives of its more devout members, will doubt that this life
can largely exist and flourish within its pale.
The attitude which men who have been born within that Church, but who
have come to dissent from large portions of its theology, should bear to
this great instrument of good, is certainly not less perplexing than the
questions we have been considering in the preceding chapters. The most
difficult position is, of course, that of those who are its actual
ministers and who have subscribed its formularies. Each man so situated
must judge in the light of his own conscience. There is a great
difference between the case of men who accept such a position in the
Church though they differ fundamentally from its tenets, and the case of
men who, having engaged in its service, find their old convictions
modified or shaken, perhaps very gradually, by the advance of science or
by more matured thought and study. The stringency of the old form of
subscription has been much mitigated by an Act of 1865 which substituted
a general declaration that the subscriber believed in the doctrine of
the Church as a whole, for a declaration that he believed 'all and
everything' in the Articles and the Prayer-book. The Church of England
does not profess to be an infallible Church; it does profess to be a
National Church representing and including great bodies of more or less
divergent opinion, and the whole tendency of legal decisions since the
Gorham case has been to enlarge the circle of permissible opinion. The
possibility of the National Church remaining in touch with the more
instructed and intellectual portions of the community depends mainly on
the latitude of opinion that is accorded to its clergy, and on their
power of welcoming and adopting new knowledge, and it may reasonably be
maintained that few greater calamities can befall a nation than the
severance of its higher intelligence from religious influences.
It should be remembered, too, that on the latitudinarian side the
changes that take place in the teaching of the Church consist much less
in the open repudiation of old doctrines than in their silent
evanescence. They drop out of the exhortations of the pulpit. The
relative importance of different portions of the religious teaching is
changed. Dogma sinks into the background. Narratives which are no longer
seriously believed become texts for moral disquisitions. The
introspective habits and the stress laid on purely ecclesiastical duties
which once preponderated disappear. The teaching of the pulpit tends
rather to the formation of active, useful and unselfish lives; to a
clearer insight into the great masses of remediable suffering and need
that still exist in the world; to the duty of carrying into all the
walks of secular life a nobler and more unselfish spirit; to a habit of
judging men and Churches mainly by their fruits and very little by their
beliefs. The disintegration or decadence of old religious beliefs which
had long been closely associated with moral teaching always brings with
it grave moral dangers, but those dangers are greatly diminished when
the change of belief is effected by a gradual transition, without any
violent convulsion or disruption severing men from their old religious
observances. Such a transition has silently taken place in England
among great numbers of educated men, and in some measure under the
influence of the clergy. Nor has it, I think, weakened the Church. The
standard of duty among such men has not sunk, but has in most
departments perceptibly risen: their zeal has not diminished, though it
flows rather in philanthropic than in purely ecclesiastical channels.
The conviction that the special dogmas which divided other Protestant
bodies from the Establishment rested on no substantial basis and have no
real importance tells in favour of the larger and the more liberal
Church, and the comprehensiveness which allows highly accentuated
sacerdotalism and latitudinarianism in the same Church is in the eyes of
many of them rather an element of strength than of weakness.
Few men have watched the religious tendencies of the time with a keener
eye than Cardinal Newman, and no man hated with a more intense hatred
the latitudinarian tendencies which he witnessed. His judgment of their
effect on the Establishment is very remarkable. In a letter to his
friend Isaac Williams he says: 'Everything I hear makes me fear that
latitudinarian opinions are spreading furiously in the Church of
England. I grieve deeply at it. The Anglican Church has been a most
useful breakwater against Scepticism. The time might come when you, as
well as I, might expect that it would be said above, "Why cumbereth it
the ground?" but at present it upholds far more truth in England than
any other form of religion would, and than the Catholic Roman Church
could. But what I fear is that it is _tending_ to a powerful
Establishment teaching direct error, and more powerful than it has ever
been; thrice powerful because it does teach error.'[60]
It is, however, of course, evident that the latitude of opinion which
may be reasonably claimed by the clergy of a Church encumbered with many
articles and doctrinal formularies is not unlimited, and each man must
for himself draw the line. The fact, too, that the Church is an
Established Church imposes some special obligations on its ministers. It
is their first duty to celebrate public worship in such a form that all
members of the Church of England may be able to join in it. Whatever
interpretations may be placed upon the ceremonies of the Church, those
ceremonies, at least, should be substantially the same. A stranger who
enters a church which he has never before seen should be able to feel
that he is certain of finding public worship intelligibly and decently
performed, as in past generations it has been celebrated in all sections
of the Established Church. It has, in my opinion, been a gross scandal,
following a gross neglect of duty, that this primary obligation has been
defied, and that services are held in English churches which would have
been almost unrecognisable by the churchmen of a former generation, and
which are manifest attempts to turn the English public worship into an
imitation of the Romish Mass. Men have a perfect right, within the
widest limits, to perform what religious services and to preach what
religious doctrines they please, but they have not a right to do so in
an Established Church.
The censorship of opinions is another thing, and in the conditions of
English life it has never been very effectively maintained. The latitude
of opinion granted in an Established Church is, and ought to be, very
great, but it is, I think, obvious that on some topics a greater degree
of reticence of expression should be observed by a clergyman addressing
a miscellaneous audience from the pulpit of an Established Church than
need be required of him in private life or even in his published books.
The attitude of laymen whose opinions have come to diverge widely from
the Church formularies is less perplexing, and except in as far as the
recent revival of sacerdotal pretensions has produced a reaction, there
has, if I mistake not, of late years been a decided tendency in the best
and most cultivated lay opinion of this kind to look with increasing
favour on the Established Church. The complete abolition of the
religious and political disqualifications which once placed its
maintenance in antagonism with the interests of large sections of the
people; the abolition of the indelibility of orders which excluded
clergymen who changed their views from all other means of livelihood;
the greater elasticity of opinion permitted within its pale; and the
elimination from the statute-book of nearly all penalties and
restrictions resting solely upon ecclesiastical grounds,--have all
tended to diminish with such men the objections to the Church. It is a
Church which does not injure those who are external to it, or interfere
with those who are mere nominal adherents. It is more and more looked
upon as a machine of well-organised beneficence, discharging efficiently
and without corruption functions of supreme utility, and constituting
one of the main sources of spiritual and moral life in the community.
None of the modern influences of society can be said to have superseded
it. Modern experience has furnished much evidence of the insufficiency
of mere intellectual education if it is unaccompanied by the education
of character, and it is on this side that modern education is most
defective. While it undoubtedly makes men far more keenly sensible than
in the past to the vast inequalities of human lots, the habit of
constantly holding out material prizes as its immediate objects, and the
disappearance of those coercive methods of education which once
disciplined the will, make it perhaps less efficient as an instrument of
moral amelioration.
Some habits of thought also, that have grown rapidly among educated men,
have tended powerfully in the same direction. The sharp contrasts
between true and false in matters of theology have been considerably
attenuated. The point of view has changed. It is believed that in the
history of the world gross and material conceptions of religion have
been not only natural, but indispensable, and that it is only by a
gradual process of intellectual evolution that the masses of men become
prepared for higher and purer conceptions. Superstition and illusion
play no small part in holding together the great fabric of society.
'Every falsehood,' it has been said, 'is reduced to a certain
malleability by an alloy of truth,' and, on the other hand, truths of
the utmost moment are, in certain stages of the world's history, only
operative when they are clothed with a vesture of superstition. The
Divine Spirit filters down to the human heart through a gross and
material medium. And what is true of different stages of human history
is not less true of different contemporary strata of knowledge and
intelligence. In spite of democratic declamation about the equality of
man, it is more and more felt that the same kind of teaching is not good
for everyone. Truth, when undiluted, is too strong a medicine for many
minds. Some things which a highly cultivated intellect would probably
discard, and discard without danger, are essential to the moral being of
multitudes. There is in all great religious systems something that is
transitory and something that is eternal. Theological interpretations of
the phenomena of outward nature which surround and influence us, and
mythological narratives which have been handed down to us from a remote,
uncritical and superstitious past, may be transformed or discredited;
but there are elements in religion which have their roots much less in
the reason of man than in his sorrows and his affections, and are the
expression of wants, moral appetites and aspirations which are an
essential, indestructible part of his nature.
No one, I think, can doubt that this way of thinking, whether it be
right or wrong, has very widely spread through educated Europe, and it
is a habit of thought which commonly strengthens with age. Young men
discuss religious questions simply as questions of truth or falsehood.
In later life they more frequently accept their creed as a working
hypothesis of life; as a consolation in innumerable calamities; as the
one supposition under which life is not a melancholy anti-climax; as
the indispensable sanction of moral obligation; as the gratification and
reflection of needs, instincts and longings which are planted in the
deepest recesses of human nature; as one of the chief pillars on which
society rests. The proselytising, the aggressive, the critical spirit
diminishes. Very often they deliberately turn away their thoughts from
questions which appear to them to lead only to endless controversy or to
mere negative conclusions, and base their moral life on some strong
unselfish interest for the benefit of their kind. In active, useful and
unselfish work they find the best refuge from the perplexities of belief
and the best field for the cultivation of their moral nature, and work
done for the benefit of others seldom fails to react powerfully on their
own happiness. Nor is it always those who have most completely abandoned
dogmatic systems who are the least sensible to the moral beauty which
has grown up around them. The music of the village church, which sounds
so harsh and commonplace to the worshipper within, sometimes fills with
tears the eyes of the stranger who sits without, listening among the
tombs.
It is difficult to say how far the partial truce which has now fallen in
England over the great antagonisms of belief is likely to be permanent.
No one who knows the world can be insensible to the fact that a large
and growing proportion of those who habitually attend our religious
services have come to diverge very widely, though in many different
degrees, from the beliefs which are expressed or implied in the
formularies they use. Custom, fashion, the charm of old associations,
the cravings of their own moral or spiritual nature, a desire to
support a useful system of moral training, to set a good example to
their children, their household, or their neighbours, keep them in their
old place when the beliefs which they profess with their lips have in a
great measure ebbed away. I do not undertake to blame or to judge them.
Individual conscience and character and particular circumstances have,
in these matters, a decisive voice. But there are times when the
difference between professed belief and real belief is too great for
endurance, and when insincerity and half-belief affect seriously the
moral character of a nation. 'The deepest, nay, the only theme of the
world's history, to which all others are subordinate,' said Goethe, 'is
the conflict of faith and unbelief. The epochs in which faith, in
whatever form it may be, prevails, are the marked epochs in human
history, full of heart-stirring memories and of substantial gains for
all after times. The epochs in which unbelief, in whatever form it may
be, prevails, even when for the moment they put on the semblance of
glory and success, inevitably sink into insignificance in the eyes of
posterity, which will not waste its thoughts on things barren and
unfruitful.'
Many of my readers have probably felt the force of such considerations
and the moral problems which they suggest, and there have been perhaps
moments when they have asked themselves the question of the poet--
Tell me, my soul, what is thy creed?
Is it a faith or only a need?
They will reflect, however, that a need, if it be universally felt when
human nature is in its highest and purest state, furnishes some basis
of belief, and also that no man can venture to assign limits to the
transformations which religion may undergo without losing its essence or
its power. Even in the field of morals these have been very great,
though universal custom makes us insensible to the extent to which we
have diverged from a literal observance of Evangelical precepts. We
should hardly write over the Savings Bank, 'Take no thought for the
morrow, for the morrow will take thought for itself,' or over the Bank
of England, 'Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth,' 'How
hardly shall a rich man enter into the Kingdom of God,' or over the
Foreign Office, or the Law Court, or the prison, 'Resist not evil,' 'He
that smiteth thee on thy right cheek turn to him the other also,' 'He
that taketh away thy coat let him have thy cloak also.' Can it be said
that the whole force and meaning of such words are represented by an
industrial society in which the formation of habits of constant
providence with the object of averting poverty or increasing comfort is
deemed one of the first of duties and a main element and measure of
social progress; in which the indiscriminate charity which encourages
mendicancy and discourages habits of forethought and thrift is far more
seriously condemned than an industrial system based on the keenest, the
most deadly, and often the most malevolent competition; in which wealth
is universally sought, and universally esteemed a good and not an evil,
provided only it is honestly obtained and wisely and generously used; in
which, although wanton aggression and a violent and quarrelsome temper
are no doubt condemned, it is esteemed the duty of every good citizen
to protect his rights whenever they are unjustly infringed; in which war
and the preparation for war kindle the most passionate enthusiasm and
absorb a vast proportion of the energies of Christendom, and in which no
Government could remain a week in power if it did not promptly resent
the smallest insult to the national flag?
It is a question of a different kind whether the sacerdotal spirit which
has of late years so largely spread in the English Church can extend
without producing a violent disruption. To cut the tap roots of
priestcraft was one of the main aims and objects of the Reformation,
and, for reasons I have already stated, I do not believe that the party
which would re-establish it has by any means the strength that has been
attributed to it. It is true that the Broad Church party, though it
reflects faithfully the views of large numbers of educated laymen, has
never exercised an influence in active Church life at all proportionate
to the eminence of its leading representatives. It is true also that the
Evangelical party has in a very remarkable degree lost its old place in
the Anglican pulpit and in religious literature, though its tenets still
form the staple of the preaching of the Salvation Army and of most other
street preachers who exercise a real and widespread influence over the
poor. But the middle and lower sections of English society are, I
believe, at bottom, profoundly hostile to priestcraft; and although the
dread of Popery has diminished, they are very far from being ready to
acquiesce in any attempt to restore the dominion which their fathers
discarded.
In one respect, indeed, sacerdotalism in the Anglican Church is a worse
thing than in the Roman Church, for it is undisciplined and unregulated.
The history of the Church abundantly shows the dangers that have sprung
from the Confessional, though the Roman Catholic will maintain that its
habitually restraining and moralising influence greatly outweighs these
occasional abuses. But in the Roman Church the practice of confession is
carried on under the most severe ecclesiastical supervision and
discipline. Confession can only be made to a celibate priest of mature
age, who is bound to secrecy by the most solemn oath; who, except in
cases of grave illness, confesses only in an open church; and who has
gone through a long course of careful education specially and skilfully
designed to fit him for the duty. None of these conditions are observed
in Anglican Confession.
In other respects, indeed, the sacerdotal spirit is never likely to be
quite the same as in the Roman Church. A married clergy, who have mixed
in all the lay influences of an English university, and who still take
part in the pursuits, studies, social intercourse and amusements of
laymen, are not likely to form a separate caste or to constitute a very
formidable priesthood. It is perhaps a little difficult to treat their
pretensions with becoming gravity, and the atmosphere of unlimited
discussion which envelops Englishmen through their whole lives has
effectually destroyed the danger of coercive and restrictive laws
directed against opinion. Moral coercion and the tendency to interfere
by law on moral grounds with the habits of men, even when those habits
in no degree interfere with others, have increased. It is one of the
marked tendencies of Anglo-Saxon democracy, and it is very far from
being peculiar to, or even specially prominent in, any one Church. But
the desire to repress the expression of opinions by force, which for so
many centuries marked with blood and fire the power of mediæval
sacerdotalism, is wholly alien to modern English nature. Amid all the
fanaticisms, exaggerations, and superstitions of belief, this kind of
coercion, at least, is never likely to be formidable, nor do I believe
that in the most extreme section of the sacerdotal clergy there is any
desire for it. There has been one significant contrast between the
history of Catholicism and Anglicanism in the present century. In the
Catholic Church the Ultramontane element has steadily dominated,
restricting liberty of opinion, and important tenets which were once
undefined by the Church, and on which sincere Catholics had some
latitude of opinion, have been brought under the iron yoke. This is no
doubt largely due to the growth of scepticism and indifference, which
have made the great body of educated laymen hostile or indifferent to
the Church, and have thrown its management mainly into the hands of the
priesthood and the more bigoted, ignorant and narrow-minded laymen. But
in the Anglican Church educated laymen are much less alienated from
Church life, and a tribunal which is mainly lay exercises the supreme
authority. As a consequence of these conditions, although the sacerdotal
element has greatly increased, the latitude of opinion within the Church
has steadily grown.
At the same time, it is difficult to believe that serious dangers do not
await the Church if the unprotestantising influences that have spread
within it continue to extend. It is not likely that the nation will
continue to give its support to the Church if that Church in its main
tendencies cuts itself off from the Reformation. The conversions to
Catholicism in England, though probably much exaggerated, have been very
numerous, and it is certainly not surprising that it should be so. If
the Church of Rome permitted Protestantism to be constantly taught in
her pulpits, and Protestant types of worship and character to be
habitually held up to admiration, there can be little doubt that many of
her worshippers would be shaken. If the Church of England becomes in
general what it already is in some of its churches, it is not likely
that English public opinion will permanently acquiesce in its privileged
position in the State. If it ceases to be a Protestant Church, it will
not long remain an established one, and its disestablishment would
probably be followed by a disruption in which opinions would be more
sharply defined, and the latitude of belief and the spirit of compromise
that now characterise our English religious life might be seriously
impaired.
FOOTNOTES:
[58] _Alciphron_, 6th Dialogue.
[59] Nalsons's _Collections_, i. 769, February 9, 1640.
[60] _Autobiography of Isaac Williams_, p. 132. This letter was written
in 1863.