which we live, cannot fail to a reasonable eye to appear in the highest
degree satisfactory. Never was the life of the Christian Church at once
more intensely earnest and more expansively distributive than at the
present moment. On the one hand, the Roman Church, wisely taught by the
experience of the past, though obstinately cleaving to that stout
conservatism of doctrine and ritual inherent in the very bones of all
sacerdotal religions, has been, in the main, studious to avoid those
causes of offence from which the great rupture proceeded. On the other
hand, the Protestant Churches, shaken free from the distracting
influence of sacerdotal assumption and secular ambition, have found
themselves in a condition to permeate all classes of society with a
moral virtue, of whose regenerative action Plato and Socrates, in their
best hours, could not have dreamed. Some people, while gladly admitting
the immense amount of social good that is done by the various sections
of the Protestant Church, never cease to sigh for a lost ecclesiastical
unity, and to lament the unseemly strifes that arise among those that
should be possessed by one spirit and strive together for a common end.
But the persons who speak thus are either sentimental weaklings, being
Protestants, or are Romanists and sacerdotalists in their heart. Variety
is the law of nature in the moral no less than in the physical world;
and the absorption of all sects into one results in a stagnation which
will never be found amongst moral beings, unless when produced by
weakness of vital force from within, or unnatural suppression from
above. The two dominant types of church polity recognised in this
country since the Reformation--the Episcopal and the Presbyterian--of
which the one boasts a more aristocratic intellectual culture, and the
other a more fervid and forcible popular action, may well be allowed to
exist together on a mutual understanding of giving and taking whatever
is best in each, and thus, in apostolic language, provoking one another
to love and to good works. Competition is for the public benefit as much
in churches as in trades. Dissent from any dominant body, even though it
may proceed from the exaggerated importance given to a secondary matter,
will always produce the good result that the dominant body will thereby
be stirred to greater activity and greater watchfulness; so that, in
this view, we may lay it down as one of the great lessons of history
that the best form of church government is a strong establishment
qualified by a strong dissent. As to the proposals which have in recent
times been made for the formal separation of Church and State, they bear
on their face more of a political than of a religious significance.
Impartial history offers no countenance to the notion that Established
Churches, when well flanked by dissent, and in an age when the spiritual
ruler has ceased to make the arm of the State the tool of intolerance,
are contrary either to piety or to policy; and in the desire so loudly
expressed at election contests to lay violent hands on the valuable
organism of church agency existing in this country, the venerated
inheritance of many ages of patriotic struggle, the student of history,
with a charitable allowance for the best motives in not a few, feels
himself constrained to suspect in all such movements no small admixture
of sectarian jealousy, fussy religiosity, and domineering democracy.
Christianity, of course, stands in no need of an Established Church;
religion existed for three hundred years in the church without any State
connection, and may exist again; but Christianity does, above all
things, abhor the stirring up of strife betwixt Church and Church from
motives of jealousy, envy, or greed; and, along with the highest
philosophy and the most far-sighted political wisdom, must protest in
the strongest terms against the abolishing of a useful ethical
institution to gratify the insane lust of levelling in a mere numerical
majority.
The Church of the future, whether established or disestablished, or, as
I think best, both together, provoking one another to love and to good
works, has a great mission before it, if it keep sharply in view the two
lessons which the teaching of eighteen centuries so eloquently enforces.
Our evangelists must remove from the van of their evangelic force all
that sharp fence of metaphysical subtlety and scholastic dogma, which,
being ostentatiously paraded in creeds and catechisms, has given more
just offence to those without than edification to those within the
Church; the gospel must be presented to the world with all that catholic
breadth, kindly humanity, and popular directness which were its boast
before it was laced and screwed into artificial shapes by the decrees of
intolerent councils, and the subtleties of ingenious schoolmen. And,
again, they must not allow the gospel to be handled, what is too often
the case, as a mere message of hope and comfort in view of a future
world; but they must make it walk directly into the complex relations of
modern society, and think that it has done nothing till the ideal of
sentiment and conduct which it preached on Sunday has been more or less
practised on Monday. In fact, there ought to be less vague preaching on
Sunday, and more specific and direct application through the week of
gospel principle in various spheres of the intellectual and moral life
of the community. If, in addition to this, our prophets of the pulpit
take care to keep abreast of the intellectual movement of the age, so as
not only to stir the world in sermons, but to guide them in the wisdom
of daily life, they have nothing to fear from all the windy artillery
that the speculations of a soulless physical science, the imaginations
of a dreamy socialism, or the dogmatism of a cold philosophical
formalism, can bring to bear upon them. Let them grapple bravely with
all social problems, and prove whether Christianity, which has done so
much to purify the motives of individuals, may not be able also to put a
more effective steam into the machinery of society. If they shall fail
here, they will fail gloriously, having done their best. It is not given
to any people, however great, to solve all problems. When Great Britain
shall have played out her part, there will be scope enough in the
process of the ages for another stout social worker to place the cornice
on the edifice of which she was privileged to raise the pillars.
The End
FOOTNOTES.
[Footnote 1]
Plutarch conjugalia præcepta init.
[Footnote 2]
The word _clan_ is the familiar, well-known Celtic word for _children_.
[Footnote 3]
"Nulli alii sunt homines qui talem in liberos habeant potestatem qualem
nos habemus." _Institut_. i. 9, 2.
[Footnote 4]
Thucyd. ii. 15. The Athenians went further, and attributed to the son
of Ægeus the creation of their democracy (Pausan., _Att_. iii.); but
this, of course, was only the popular instinct, everywhere active, which
loves to heap all graces upon the head of a favourite hero.
[Footnote 5]
See the words of the Latin league, Dionys. Hal. vi. 95, contrasting
strongly with the original collection of autonomous villages described
by Strabo, v. 229, κατἁ κώμας αὐτονομεῖσθαι.
[Footnote 6]
The influence of the great city in centralising the villages and making
a state possible was in Greece philologically stereotyped by the fact
that for _city_ and _state_ the language had only one word, πόλις. The
_city_ was the _state_ in the same sense that the head is the body, for
without the head no living body could be.
[Footnote 7]
ὁ στρατιωτικὸς βίος πολλὰ ἒχει μέρη τῶς ἀρετῆς.--Aristot. Pol. ii. 9.
St. Paul also frequently in the Epistles, and Clemens Romanus (Oxon.
1633, p. 48) refers to the military profession as a great school of
manly virtue.
[Footnote 8]
Spalding's _Italy_, ii. p. 284.
[Footnote 9]
_On Method in Political Science_.
[Footnote 10]
Sismondi, _Etudes sur l'economie politique_, Essai iv.
[Footnote 11]
With which sentence Mr. Freeman agrees. _Comparative Politics_,
Lecture iii. p. 78.
[Footnote 12]
This parallel has been noticed by the thoughtful Germans; see
particularly Zacharia Sulla, i. 40.
[Footnote 13]
τίνος γὰρ ἂλλου ζῴου ψυχὴ πρῶτα μὲν θεῶν τῶν τὰ μέγιστα καὶ
κάλλιστα συνταξάντων ᾔσθηται ὃτι εἰσι: τί δὲ φῦλον ἄλλο ἢ
ἄνθρωποι θεοὺς θεραπεύουσι.--Xen. _Mem_. i. 4.
[Footnote 14]
_Iliad_, iii. 271; and compare Virgil, _Æneid_, iii. 80.
[Footnote 15]
Xen., _Rep. Lac._, i. 15; Herod, vi. 56.
[Footnote 16]
Pollux, viii. 90.
[Footnote 17]
Xen., _Mem_. i. 3.
[Footnote 18]
From the διδαχή τῶν ἀποστόλων, or _Early Teaching of the Apostles_,
lately discovered, ch. viii., we learn that it was the custom of
the early Christians to observe two days of fasting in the
week--Wednesday and Friday.--Edit. Oxford Parker, 1885.
[Footnote 19]
In the διδαχή τῶν ἀποστόλων there is absolutely no dogma. It is all
practice, and this is quite in harmony with the use of διδαχή by Paul
(I Tim. i. 10), and indeed with the whole tone of these two admirable
epistles.
[Footnote 20]
In the διδαχή τῶν ἀποστόλων, c. xiii., the "_prophets_" are said to be
to Christians what the "_high priests_" were to the Jews,--a
phraseology which could not possibly have been used had any priesthood,
in the Hebrew sense, existed in the early Church.
End of Project Gutenberg's What Does History Teach?, by John Stuart Blackie