'If I saw,' wrote John Sterling to Archdeacon Hare, in 1840,--'if I saw
any hope that Maurice and Samuel Wilberforce and their fellows could
reorganize and reanimate the Church and the nation, or that their own
minds could continue progressive without being revolutionary, I think I
could willingly lay my head in my cloak, or lay it in the grave, without
a word of protest against aught that is.' Since then Wilberforce has
become a bishop, and there is no danger of his becoming revolutionary;
Maurice has gone on seeking to reanimate the Church, and the Church now
raises the cry of heresy, and the Council of King's College deprive him
of the Professor's Chair.
The real difficulty--which Sterling deemed invincible--which has proved
too strong for Professor Maurice, is that, whilst there is such a thing
as development in religion, the Church of England is not the place for
it. The Church of England was a compromise; but it was a compromise
between Geneva and Rome, and a compromise now dating three hundred years.
It was never deemed that it would require a wider platform, or that it
would have in its pulpits men of larger vision or of more catholic view
than the men it had already. If it had a view at all, it took, like
Lot's wife, a backward glance to the tabernacle and its service--to the
law delivered amidst thunder and lightning on Sinai's sacred head. It
looked not to the future. It knew not that there were,
'Somewhere underneath the sun,
Azure heights yet unascended, palmy countries to be won.'
It made no provision for the growth of man's free and unfettered thought.
Consequently it is the Church of England only in name. Out of its pale,
divorced from it, there is more of intellectual life and independent
thought than there is in it. This is the condition of its existence. It
is associated with certain creeds and articles and rites: harmonizing
with them, you have a position in society, you have a certain yearly
stipend, and chances of something better, as Samuel of Oxford knows well.
The Church of England was never meant to be the nursery for thought. You
have made up your mind immediately you matriculate at her Universities.
Your career for the future is to maintain those articles. In a word, you
must conform. The task has been hard, and few great men have stooped to
it, and fewer still have done so and lived.
But a man must not quarrel with the conditions he has imposed on himself.
You have your choice. You wish to preach the truth. Well, you can do
so, in the Church or out of it; but in the one case you are more or less
tied. You may preach the truth; but it must be Church's truth, if you
take the Church's pay. Of course, this is a disagreeable position to an
independent man; at the same time, it is not without its corresponding
advantages. You get into good society, you have a respectable living,
you may marry an heiress, or become tutor to a Prime Minister or a
Prince. Outside the Church men of intellect generally have taken their
stand, for it is perilous to tamper with convictions in order to maintain
a position.
It is easy to see how, in Maurice's own case, what power has been thrown
away in this tantalizing task. Had he started fresh, with no creed for
him to conform to, with no position to maintain, he would have been a far
more vigorous thinker than he has ever been. But he has ever had to come
back to the Church--to the doctrines and teachings of men. A Church that
shall embrace the religious life and thought of England, coexistent with
the nation, after all is but a dream. Were there such a Church, Maurice
would hold no mean rank in it. But the State Church is not such, and
cannot be such, unless its articles and creeds be glossed over with a
Jesuitry not more ingenious than fatal to all moral growth. But each
generation tries the hopeless task. The men of intellect and purpose in
the Church have felt themselves in a false position, and have laboured to
get out of it. They have trusted to one and then another. For a long
time Mr. Maurice has been the coming man. The Church was once more to be
a power--to have the nation's heart--to enlist the nation's intellect on
its side. Writing in his usual bitterness, Carlyle says:
'The builder of this universe was wise,
He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles!
The plan he shaped his worlds and _aeons_ by,
Was--Heavens!--was thy small Nine-and-Thirty Articles.'
Mr. Maurice has accepted this language as sober truth, and has made that
truth the pole-star of his ministerial life.
Most of our readers know Lincoln's-inn-fields. It abounds with lawyers.
In one part of it surgeons are plucked, and in another, clients. It has
a small chapel not far from Chancery-lane, and if the residents of
Lincoln's-inn-fields attended it, there would be but little room for
strangers. However, this is not the case, and thus I managed to get in.
It is a curious old place. It was built by Inigo Jones; and the then
popular and admired, but now forgotten, Dr. Donne, preached the
consecration sermon. The walls have reechoed to the oratory of Secker
and Tillotson. The windows are of stained glass, and one of them,
containing St. John the Baptist, was executed at the expense of William
Noy, the famous Attorney-General of Charles I. In the crypt, underneath
the chapel, are buried, Alexander Broome, the cavalier song-writer;
Secretary Thurloe, who had chambers in the Inn; and that stern Puritan,
William Prynne, who wrote about 'The Unloveliness of Love Locks.' During
Term time this chapel is open for worship every afternoon at three; and
the preacher is the Rev. Mr. Maurice.
Considering the position Mr. Maurice has attained, and the notoriety
attaching to his name, your first feeling is one of wonder that he has
not a larger congregation. After writing more books on theology than any
other clergyman of the day--after teaching more youth--after mixing up
himself more with the working classes than almost any other man I know
of--one is surprised that Mr. Maurice's audience is not larger; and I can
only account for it by supposing that his task is impossible, and that he
is fighting a hopeless fight; or on the supposition that, after all, Mr.
Maurice's place is not the pulpit, but the professor's chair: yet that he
has a numerous class of followers, the sale of his books is an
unanswerable proof--a sale, however, much commoner amongst Dissenters, I
have good reason to suppose, than amongst the clergy of the Established
Church. Mr. Maurice has the true appearance of the professor--short dark
hair, sallow face, precise manner: all indicate the man of study and
thought. His voice is clear and agreeable, though not strong. His
reading is very rapid, but, at the same time, emphatic. As to action, he
has none. He aims more at what he says than how he says it; and, if you
listen, you will find food for thought in every phrase. You can hardly
imagine that the man before you has been charged with heresy, he seeming
to differ in no other respect from other clergymen, save in his superior
power of ratiocination and in the wider inductions on which he bases his
doctrines.
What Mr. Maurice's opinions are he has taken full care to place before
the world. He is a churchman in the fullest sense of the term. 'I have
contended,' he writes in his 'Kingdom of Christ,' 'that a Bible without a
Church is inconceivable; that the appointed ministers of the Church are
the appointed instruments for guiding men into a knowledge of the Bible;
that the notion of private judgment is a false notion; that inspiration
belongs to the Church, and not merely to the writers of the Bible; that
the miracles of the New Testament were the introduction of a new
dispensation, and were not merely a set of strange acts belonging to a
particular time; lastly, that the Gospel narratives must be received as
part of the necessary furniture of the Church.' One would have thought
such churchmanship as this would have satisfied any one. However, the
cry of heresy has been raised, principally, it seems, because he denies
the doctrine of eternal damnation--an awful doctrine, we do not venture
to affirm or condemn here. Because he has done this, he has been branded
with infidelity; and _The Record_, and _The Morning Advertiser_--neither
of them journals distinguished for talent, but rather the
reverse--hounded on the public indignation against Mr. Maurice,
forgetting that no man has so earnestly laboured to Christianize--not the
dark tribes of Polynesia, for then these journals would have been
redolent with his praise--but the savages with white faces and dark
hearts that we meet in our streets every day.
It is melancholy to think that wretched theologians may aim their small
shot at such a man, merely because his idea of God and Christianity may
be less fearful, more loving and humane, than their own. Surely a man
may love God and his neighbour as himself--may believe Christ suffered
for the sins of the world--without being hooted by every ignorant or
unreasoning fool, because, on other matters--matters merely
speculative--matters too dark for man ever to fully inquire into or
completely to understand--his opinions differ from their own. Proud as
we are of our press, yet such exhibitions should make us mourn, that at
times it can so far forget Christian charity and common sense, and
descend so low. One thing is clear, that there is no tribunal in the
Church that can satisfactorily settle the question of heresy; and another
thing is clear, that whilst so many men differing so widely from each
other are in the Church, the question with the majority of them cannot be
one of principle but of pay. Churchmen should be the last to raise the
cry of heresy, for it is a revelation to the world of what must ever be
their weakness and their shame.
Mr. Maurice, after all, is thrown away where he is: all his life he has
been in an uncongenial position. The son of a dissenting minister, the
habits he acquired have clung to him from his earliest youth. Hazlitt
tells us how a man so nurtured grows up in a love of independence and of
truth; and such a one will find it hard to retain a connection long with
any human organization and creed. Then, as the brother-in-law of
Sterling, Maurice would naturally be led to modes of thought and action
other than those the Church had been in the habit of sanctioning.
Eminently religious, he never could have been what he was to have been, a
lawyer; but as an independent writer on religion, as a co-worker with
Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, for instance, what might he not have done?
Another mistake of Maurice's is, that his mission is to the poor. His
style is the very last that would be popular with such. In the pulpit or
out, Maurice preaches not to the public, but to the select few--to
literary loungers--to men of ample time and elevated taste--to men of
thought rather than of action--to men freed from the hard necessities of
life, and who can leisurely sit and listen to his notes of 'linked
sweetness long drawn out.' Hence is it that he is more a favourite with
intellectual dissenters than with churchmen, and that I believe at
Lincoln's-inn-fields his congregation is made up more of the former than
the latter. They love his efforts at self-emancipation; they admire his
scholarship, his piety, his taste. They eminently appreciate him, as he,
like the intellectual power of the poet,
'Through words and things
Goes sounding on a dim and perilous way.'
The absence in him of all that is cold and priestly--his human
sympathies--his love to the erring and the weak and the doubting, whom he
would reclaim, are qualities with which the better class of religionists
would heartily sympathize, and with which perhaps they would sympathize
all the more that they come to them couched in language of dream-like
beauty, all glorious, though misty with 'exhalations of the dawn.'
As a writer, Mr. Maurice is well known for his 'History of Metaphysical
Philosophy,' his 'View of the Religions of the World,' his 'Articles of
the Church considered with Reference to the Roman Catholic Controversy,'
and his 'Essays,' which are more especially intended to grapple with the
difficulties Unitarians feel in connection with orthodox doctrine. They
have all obtained an extensive sale; but they are not for the public; not
for the men who buy and sell and get gain--who rise early and sit up
late; but for the student and divine. Hence it is that Maurice and the
school with whom he acts, such as Kingsley, Hare, and Trench, can never
reanimate the Church of England, nor win the operatives over to it. That
they do great good, I admit; that they have a mission, I grant; but not
where they fondly deem it to be. There is a destiny that shapes their
ends, and the issues, I doubt not, must be for the good of man's soul,
for the cause of truth, for the glory of God.