St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, has done what it is a very hard thing to do,
created a sensation in this our phlegmatic and eating and drinking and
money-making and merry-making age. It professes to be a Puseyite, and
not a Protestant, place of worship. Puseyism, says a red-haired Saxon,
foaming with indignation, is next door to Roman Catholicism, and a
Puseyite Church is half-way to Rome. True, my perturbed brother--true.
But what of that? Some are inclined to think that Church of Englandism
is akin to Roman Catholicism, and that all its churches are halfway to
Rome. That brutal old tyrant, Henry the Eighth, was a Roman Catholic at
heart, and had faith in himself as an infallible Pope. His genuine
daughter did the same. Laud, who lacked the discretion of that
strong-minded woman whose
'Christ was the Word that spake it,
He took the bread and brake it,
And what the Word did make it,
That I believe and take it,'
is a splendid specimen of ingenious mystification on the _vexata questio_
of transubstantiation,--I question whether Charles James Bloomfield,
Bishop of London, could have returned a more confused and unmeaning
response,--died for his Roman Catholic tendencies. To this day England
remembers who it was, with red, swollen face, and brown apparel, and
collar with a spot of blood on it, made his maiden speech in Parliament
by indignantly informing the House that Dr. Alabaster had preached flat
Popery at St. Paul's, and in our own day Mr. Gorham has failed in
obtaining a legal decision against the Roman Catholic doctrine of
baptismal regeneration. The mistake is, in supposing that the Church as
by law established is Low Church. If it were so, then, of course, out
ought to go the whole crop of Puseyite priests, in spite of the tears and
hysterics of female piety. On the contrary, the Church of England is
like the happy family in Trafalgar-square. Beasts of the most opposite
description there dwell together in peace and unity. Dogs and cats there
sleep side by side. In the prospect of a common maintenance natural
enmities are forgotten. Conformity is impossible. I cannot use my
brother's words with his exact meaning. I must put my own interpretation
on the creeds and articles to which I subscribe, and so long as the State
Church is a chaotic mass of heterogeneous materials--so long as it has no
definite voice, nor law--so long as bishop clashes with bishop, and at
times with himself,--for we may have here a Puseyite, there an
Evangelical, here a fox-hunting divine,--there must be everywhere
heart-burning and scandal, and the degradation of Christianity itself.
But, exclaims my vehement red-faced Saxon friend, you are making Papists
by letting the Puseyites remain. I don't know that. Papacy is alien to
human nature, or it is not. If it is not, you cannot get rid of it. If
cut down to-day, it will sprout up again to-morrow. It springs from a
tendency, I take it, in the human heart. In a mild form, that tendency
gently blooms as Puseyism. A cold in one man may, by means of gruel, be
removed in a week. In another man, it may deepen into deadly decline.
Puseyism may retain as many in the English Church as it may send to Rome.
Your Low Churchman may say the Puseyite has no business in the Church at
all. Well, the other may say the same of him, and there is no one to
decide as to who is right. King James II. said, Hooker's Apology made
him a Papist, but Hooker was not responsible for this, and is still
rightly looked on as one of the brightest ornaments of the Church of
England as by law established. Men make strange leaps. Many a convert
to Rome has been won from the ranks of Methodism. Many an infidel has
been born and bred in the very bosom of the Roman Church. A Puseyite may
become a Papist, but he also may not, and so may other men. Some people
say there is Popery everywhere. I listen to a Wesleyan Reformer, for
instance, and he tells me that the Conference is Popish, and that the
President is the Pope. If so, it is hard to blame the Puseyites for
exhibiting the priestly tendency, more or less apparent, as some affirm,
in all priests.
I imagine the crime of Puseyism, in the eyes of most churchmen, is the
crime of a pretty woman in an assembly of haggard crones. The Puseyite
place of worship is always neat and clean, and worth looking at, and it
attracts when others fail to do so. The causes of it must be various.
Why does one graceful woman robe herself in simple muslin, and another
dazzle you with her gorgeous attire? You may be a philosopher. If that
woman can be your companion, can feel as you feel, and love as you love,
you care not for her attire. But she knows that the world has a
different opinion. The Puseyite becomes an object of interest. On a
small, very small scale, he is a hero. True, to fight about little
ceremonials argues the possession of a brain of but limited power, but
his opponents are in a similar position. If you deny worship to be the
simple genuine feeling of the heart--if you make no provision for
that--if you turn it into a form, why then, possibly, the more of a form
it is the better. I confess the way in which they intone the service at
St. Paul's is pleasant to listen to. It is not worship, I grant.
Neither is mumbling the thousandth time over a printed form of words
worship. What a dull thing an opera would be, read, and not sung. It is
true people do not make love, or do business, or address each other in
music, in real life, but in an opera they do, and the effect is great.
So it is with the Church of England service. Intoned it may be
unintelligible or theatrical, but it is attractive nevertheless. It is
not natural, but what of that? The soul bowed down with a sense of sin,
yearning for peace and pardon, in its agony and despair will vent itself
in broken sentences, and will turn away from all ceremony--from even the
sublime liturgy of the Church of England, as poor, and cold, and vain,
inadequate to the expression of its hopes and fears. But why those who
go to church as a form find fault with the people of St. Paul's because
their form is a little more attractive than their own, I confess I cannot
understand.
But I have forgotten the Hon. and Rev. R. Liddell, M.A., a man of small
mental calibre, who has done the next best thing to achieving greatness,
and has achieved notoriety. In a letter he wrote to the late Bishop of
London (in which he wickedly told his lordship if he had 'any _distinct_
wish upon the subject, he is ready to comply with it,' as if Charles
James ever had any distinct wish with reference to Church matters), he
styles himself a loyal son of the Church. At any rate, he is a brother
of Lord Ravensworth, and perhaps that is almost as good. His public
career is now of about twenty years' standing. Originally, he was curate
of Barking, Essex; thence he removed to Hartlepool; and when it was found
desirable to send Mr. Bennett to Frome (not Rome), Mr. Liddell was
selected to fill his vacant place. It is questionable whether any
successor could have been appointed more agreeable to Mr. Bennett. Mr.
Liddell has certainly followed most religiously in the steps of his
predecessor. St. Barnabas is what it was pretty nearly in Mr. Bennett's
time. In St. Paul's a little more discretion is shown, and if you are
struck with any difference in the manner of _performing_ divine service
at St. Paul's to that used in other places, you draw a comparison in
favour of the former. The congregation is exceedingly wealthy and
aristocratic. You are struck as much with its air of high life as with
its High Church appearance, and having thus a double charm, I need not
add that St. Paul's is crowded in every part. If success be a true test,
Mr. Liddell is most indisputably in the right.
As a preacher, Mr. Liddell does not shine. Pale, with light hair and
complexion--rich, for the place is worth 1500 pounds a-year at the
least--he would all through life have remained an obscure, gentlemanly
man, had he not fortunately fallen in with the Puseyite tendencies of a
large and influential section in the English Church. His voice is clear
but not full; and, as one of his bitterest opponents told me, he can
preach a good sermon when he likes. But his teaching is not that which
can do the man much good. Eschewing the common evangelical doctrines,
and holding views inconsistent with free inquiry and the growth of manly
thought, he has but little left him to do in his discourses but to
expatiate on the sanctity of the priestly office, and the mysterious
powers possessed by the Church. These are his favourite topics. To win
the truth--to lead a god-like life--to bring back man, the wanderer, to
heaven and to God, seem minor matters at St. Paul's, so long as the
pillars are wreathed with costly flowers, and that the service is
intoned. And to this teaching the world of fashion in its unfathomable
puerility submits, and men who are our legislators, men who are high in
rank and influence, men whose example is law all over the land, take it
for truth. Mr. Liddell styles his congregation highly educated and
devout. He is right in that statement. Men who have sat under him and
his predecessor, who have believed them with unshrinking reverence, who
have taken every statement as the truth, have been highly educated, but
in a wrong direction. Granting that Mr. Liddell is right, what avails
his teaching? Is not his mission grander and more comprehensive than he
deems it? Has not man something better to do than to learn to bow, to
intone, to admire flowers, and to look at painted glass? In the universe
around him, can the priest find no voice more audible than his own? Does
not his own Church convey to the listening ear sublimer revelations? If
it be not so, Puseyism is a thing worth fighting for--worth dying for; if
it be so, the minister and the 'highly educated' and devout congregation
at St. Paul's have made a terrible mistake--a mistake which the friends
of pure and undefiled religion may well mourn and lament.