has not escaped him that disestablishment, however compensated as some
sanguine people hope, would be a great disaster and ruin. It would be
the failure and waste to the country of noble and astonishing efforts;
it would be the break-up and collapse of a great and cheap system, by
which light and human kindliness and intelligence are carried to vast
tracts, that without its presence must soon become as stagnant and
hopeless as many of the rural _communes_ of France; the blow would at
the moment cripple and disorganise the Church for its work even in the
towns. But though "happily improbable," it may come; and in such a
contingency, what occupies Mr. Gladstone's thoughts is, not the
question whether it would be disastrous, but whether it would be
disgraceful. That is the point which disturbs and distresses him--the
possibility that the end of our later Church history, the end of that
wonderful experiment which has been going on from the sixteenth
century, with such great vicissitudes, but after every shock with
increasing improvement and hope, should at last be not only failure,
but failure with dishonour; and this, he says, could only come in one
of two ways. It might come from the Church having sunk into sloth and
death, without faith, without conscience, without love. This, if it
ever was really to be feared, is not the danger before us now.
Activity, conviction, energy, self-devotion, these, and not apathetic
lethargy, mark the temper of our times; and they are as conspicuous in
the Church as anywhere else. But these qualities, as we have had ample
experience, may develop into fierce and angry conflicts. It is our
internal quarrels, Mr. Gladstone thinks, that create the most serious
risk of disestablishment; and it is only our quarrels, which we have
not good sense and charity enough to moderate and keep within bounds,
which would make it "disgraceful."
The main feature of the Letter is the historical retrospect which Mr.
Gladstone gives of the long history, the long travail of the later
English Church. Hardly in its first start, under the Tudors, but more
and more as time went on, it instinctively, as it were, tried the great
and difficult problem of Christian liberty. The Churches of the
Continent, Roman and anti-Roman, were simple in their systems; only one
sharply defined theology, only the disciples and representatives of one
set of religious tendencies, would they allow to dwell within their
borders; what was refractory and refused to harmonise was at once cast
out; and for a certain time they were unvexed with internal
dissensions. This, both in the case of the Roman, the Lutheran, and the
Calvinistic Churches of the Continent, requires to be somewhat
qualified; still, as compared with the rival schools of the English
Church, Puritan and Anglican, the contrast is a true and a sharp one.
Mr. Gladstone adopts from a German writer a view which is certainly not
new to many in England, that "the Reformation, as a religious movement,
took its shape in England, not in the sixteenth century but in the
seventeenth." "It seems plain," he says, "that the great bulk of those
burned under Mary were Puritans"; and he adds, what is not perhaps so
capable of proof, that "under Elizabeth we have to look, with rare
exceptions, among the Puritans and Recusants for an active and
religious life." It was not till the Restoration, it was not till
Puritanism had shown all its intolerance, all its narrowness, and all
its helplessness, that the Church was able to settle the real basis and
the chief lines of its reformed constitution. It is not, as Mr.
Gladstone says, "a heroic history"; there is room enough in the
looseness of some of its arrangements, and the incompleteness of
others, for diversity of opinion and for polemical criticism. But the
result, in fact, of this liberty and this incompleteness has been, not
that the Church has declined lower and lower into indifference and
negation, but that it has steadily mounted in successive periods to a
higher level of purpose, to a higher standard of life and thought, of
faith and work. Account for it as we may, with all drawbacks, with
great intervals of seeming torpor, with much to be regretted and to be
ashamed of, that is literally the history of the English Church since
the Restoration settlement. It is not "heroic," but there are no Church
annals of the same time more so, and there are none fuller of hope.
But every system has its natural and specific danger, and the specific
English danger, as it is the condition of vigorous English life, is
that spirit of liberty which allows and attempts to combine very
divergent tendencies of opinion. "The Church of England," Mr. Gladstone
thinks, "has been peculiarly liable, on the one side and on the other,
both to attack and to defection, and the probable cause is to be found
in the degree in which, whether for worldly or for religious reasons,
it was attempted in her case to combine divergent elements within her
borders." She is still, as he says, "working out her system by
experience"; and the exclusion of bitterness--even, as he says, of
"savagery"--from her debates and controversies is hardly yet
accomplished. There is at present, indeed, a remarkable lull, a "truce
of God," which, it may be hoped, is of good omen; but we dare not be
too sure that it is going to be permanent. In the meantime, those who
tremble lest disestablishment should be the signal of a great break up
and separation of her different parties cannot do better than meditate
on Mr. Gladstone's very solemn words:--
The great maxim, _in omnibus caritas_, which is so necessary to
temper all religious controversy, ought to apply with a tenfold
force to the conduct of the members of the Church of England. In
respect to differences among themselves they ought, of course, in
the first place to remember that their right to differ is limited
by the laws of the system to which they belong; but within that
limit should they not also, each of them, recollect that his
antagonist has something to say; that the Reformation and the
counter-Reformation tendencies were, in the order of Providence,
placed here in a closer juxtaposition than anywhere else in the
Christian world; that a course of destiny so peculiar appears to
indicate on the part of the Supreme Orderer a peculiar purpose,
that not only no religious but no considerate or prudent man
should run the risk of interfering with such a purpose; that the
great charity which is a bounden duty everywhere in these matters
should here be accompanied and upheld by two ever-striving
handmaidens, a great Reverence and a great Patience.
This is true, and of deep moment to those who guide and influence
thought and feeling in the Church. But further, those in whose hands
the "Supreme Orderer" has placed the springs and the restraints of
political movement and of change, if they recognise at all this view of
the English Church, ought to feel one duty paramount in regard to it.
Never was the Church, they tell us, more active and more hopeful; well
then, what politicians who care for her have to see to is that she
shall have _time_ to work out effectually the tendencies which are
visible in her now more than at any period of her history--that
combination which Mr. Gladstone wishes for, of the deepest individual
faith and energy, with forbearance and conciliation and the desire for
peace. She has a right to claim from English rulers that she should
have time to let these things work and bear fruit; if she has lost time
before, she never was so manifestly in earnest in trying to make up for
it as now. It is not talking, but working together, which brings
different minds and tempers to understand one another's divergences;
and it is this disposition to work together which shows itself and is
growing now. But it needs time. What the Church has a right to ask from
the arbiters of her temporal and political position in the country, if
that is ultimately and inevitably to be changed, is that nothing
precipitate, nothing impatient, should be done; that she should have
time adequately to develop and fulfil what she now alone among
Christian communities seems in a position to attempt.
VI
DISENDOWMENT[8]
[8]
_Guardian_, 14th October 1885.
This generation has seen no such momentous change as that which has
suddenly appeared to be at our very doors, and which people speak of as
disestablishment. The word was only invented a few years ago, and was
sneered at as a barbarism, worthy of the unpractical folly which it was
coined to express. It has been bandied about a good deal lately,
sometimes _de coeur léger_; and within the last six months it has
assumed the substance and the weight of a formidable probability. Other
changes, more or less serious, are awaiting us in the approaching
future; but they are encompassed with many uncertainties, and all
forecasts of their working are necessarily very doubtful. About this
there is an almost brutal clearness and simplicity, as to what it
means, as to what is intended by those who have pushed it into
prominence, and as to what will follow from their having their way.
Disestablishment has really come to mean, in the mouth of friends and
foes, simple disendowment. It is well that the question should be set
in its true terms, without being confused with vague and less important
issues. It is not very easy to say what disestablishment by itself
would involve, except the disappearance of Bishops from the Upper
House, or the presence of other religious dignitaries, with equal rank
and rights, alongside of them. Questions of patronage and
ecclesiastical law might be difficult to settle; but otherwise a
statute of mere disestablishment, not easy indeed to formulate, would
leave the Church in the eyes of the country very much what it found it.
Perhaps "My lord" might be more widely dropped in addressing Bishops;
but otherwise, the aspect of the Church, its daily work, its
organisations, would remain the same, and it would depend on the Church
itself whether the consideration paid to it continues what it has been;
whether it shall be diminished or increased. The privilege of being
publicly recognised with special marks of honour by the State has been
dearly paid for by the claim which the State has always, and sometimes
unscrupulously, insisted on, of making the true interests of the Church
subservient to its own passing necessities.
But there is no haziness about the meaning of disendowment. Property is
a tangible thing, and is subject to the four rules of arithmetic, and
ultimately to the force of the strong arm. When you talk of
disendowment, you talk of taking from the Church, not honour or
privilege or influence, but visible things, to be measured and counted
and pointed to, which now belong to it and which you want to belong to
some one else. They belong to individuals because the individuals
belong to a great body. There are, of course, many people who do not
believe that such a body exists; or that if it does, it has been called
into being and exists simply by the act of the State, like the army,
and, like the army, liable to be disbanded by its master. But that is a
view resting on a philosophical theory of a purely subjective
character; it is as little the historical or legal view as it is the
theological view. We have not yet lost our right in the nineteenth
century to think of the Church of England as a continuous, historic,
religious society, bound by ties which, however strained, are still
unbroken with that vast Christendom from which as a matter of fact it
sprung, and still, in spite of all differences, external and internal,
and by force of its traditions and institutions, as truly one body as
anything can be on earth. To this Church, this body, by right which at
present is absolutely unquestionable, property belongs; property has
been given from time immemorial down to yesterday. This property, in
its bulk, with whatever abatements and allowances, it is intended to
take from the Church. This is disendowment, and this is what is before
us.
It is well to realise as well as we can what is inevitably involved in
this vast and, in modern England, unexampled change, which we are
sometimes invited to view with philosophic calmness or resignation, as
the unavoidable drift of the current of modern thought, or still more
cheerfully to welcome, as the beginning of a new era in the prosperity
and strength of the Church as a religious institution. We are entreated
to be of good cheer. The Church will be more free; it will no longer be
mixed up with sordid money matters and unpopular payments; it will no
longer have the discredit of State control; the rights of the laity
will come up and a blow will be struck at clericalism. With all our
machinery shattered and ruined we shall be thrown more on individual
energy and spontaneous originality of effort. Our new poverty will spur
us into zeal. Above all, the Church will be delivered from the
temptation, incident to wealth, of sticking to abuses for the sake of
gold; of shrinking from principle and justice and enthusiasm, out of
fear of worldly loss. It will no longer be a place for drones and
hirelings. It is very kind of the revolutionists to wish all this good
to the Church, though if the Church is so bad as to need all these good
wishes for its improvement, it would be more consistent, and perhaps
less cynical, to wish it ruined altogether. Yet even if the Church were
likely to thrive better on no bread, there are reasons of public
morality why it should not be robbed. But these prophecies and
forecasts really belong to a sphere far removed from the mental
activity of those who so easily indulge in them. These excellent
persons are hardly fitted by habit and feeling to be judges of the
probable course of Divine Providence, or the development of new
religious energies and spiritual tendencies in a suddenly impoverished
body. What they can foresee, and what we can foresee also is, that
these _tabulae novae_ will be a great blow to the Church. They mean
that, and that we understand.
It is idle to talk as if it was to be no blow to the Church. The
confiscation of Wesleyan and Roman Catholic Church property would be a
real blow to Wesleyan or Roman Catholic interests; and in proportion as
the body is greater the effects of the blow must be heavier and more
signal. It is trifling with our patience to pretend to persuade us that
such a confiscation scheme as is now recommended to the country would
not throw the whole work of the Church into confusion and disaster, not
perhaps irreparable, but certainly for the time overwhelming and
perilous. People speak sometimes as if such a huge transfer of property
was to be done with the stroke of a pen and the aid of a few office
clerks; they forget what are the incidents of an institution which has
lasted in England for more than a thousand years, and whose business
extends to every aspect and degree of our very complex society from the
highest to the lowest. Resources may be replaced, but for the time they
must be crippled. Life may be rearranged for the new circumstances, but
in the meanwhile all the ordinary assumptions have to be changed, all
the ordinary channels of activity are stopped up or diverted.
And why should this vast and far-reaching change be made? Is it
unlawful for the Church to hold property? Other religious organisations
hold it, and even the Salvation Army knows the importance of funds for
its work. Is it State property which the State may resume for other
uses? If anything is certain it is that the State, except in an
inconsiderable degree, did not endow the Church, but consented in the
most solemn way to its being endowed by the gifts of private donors, as
it now consents to the endowment in this way of other religious bodies.
Does the bigness of the property entitle the State to claim it? This is
a formidable doctrine for other religious bodies, as they increase in
influence and numbers. Is it vexatious that the Church should be richer
and more powerful than the sects? It is not the fault of the Church
that it is the largest and the most ancient body in England. There is
but one real and adequate reason: it is the wish to disable and
paralyse a great religious corporation, the largest and most powerful
representative of Christianity in our English society, to exhibit it to
the nation after centuries of existence at length defeated and humbled
by the new masters' power, to deprive it of the organisation and the
resources which it is using daily with increasing effect for impressing
religious truth on the people, for winning their interest, their
confidence, and their sympathy, for obtaining a hold on the generations
which are coming. The Liberation Society might go on for years
repeating their dreary catalogue of grievances and misstatements.
Doubtless there is much for which they desire to punish the Church;
doubtless, too, there are men among them who are persuaded that they
would serve religion by discrediting and impoverishing the Church. But
they are not the people with whom the Church has to reckon. The
Liberationists might have long asked in vain for their pet
"emancipation" scheme. They are stronger men than the Liberationists
who are going in now for disendowment. They are men--we do them no
wrong--who sincerely think Christianity mischievous, and who see in the
power and resources of the Church a bulwark and representative of all
religion which it is of the first importance to get rid of.
This is the one adequate and consistent reason for the confiscation of
the property of the Church. There is no other reason that will bear
discussion to be given for what, without it, is a great moral and
political wrong. In such a settled society as ours, where men reckon on
what is their own, such a sweeping and wholesale transfer of property
cannot be justified, on a mere balance of probable expediency in the
use of it. Unless it is as a punishment for gross neglect and abuse, as
was alleged in the partial confiscations of the sixteenth century, or
unless it is called for as a step to break down what can no longer be
tolerated, like slavery, there is no other name for it, in the estimate
of justice, than that of a deep and irreparable wrong. This is
certainly not the time to punish the Church when it never was more
improving and more unsparing of sacrifice and effort. But it may be
full time to stop a career which may render success more difficult for
schemes ahead, which make no secret of their intention to dispense with
religion. This, however, is not what most Englishmen wish, whether
Liberals or Conservatives, or even Nonconformists; and without this end
there is no more justice in disendowing a great religious corporation
like the Church, than in disendowing the Duke of Bedford or the Duke of
Westminster. Of course no one can deny the competence of Parliament to
do either one or the other; but power does not necessarily carry with
it justice, and justice means that while there are great and small,
rich and poor, the State should equally protect all its members and all
its classes, however different. Revolutions have no law; but a great
wrong, deliberately inflicted in times of settled order, is more
mischievous to the nation than even to those who suffer from it.
History has shown us what follows from such gratuitous and wanton wrong
in the bitter feeling of defeat and humiliation lasting through
generations. But worse than this is the effect on the political
morality of the nation; the corrupting and fatal consciousness of
having once broken through the restraints of recognised justice, of
having acquiesced in a tempting but high-handed wrong. The effects of
disendowment concern England and its morality even more deeply than
they do the Church.
VII
THE NEW COURT[9]
[9]
_Guardian_, 15th May 1889.
The claim maintained by the Archbishop in his Judgment, by virtue of
his metropolitical authority and by that alone, to cite, try, and
sentence one of his suffragans, is undoubtedly what is called in slang
language "a large order." Even by those who may have thought it
inevitable, after the Watson case had been so distinctly accepted by
the books as a precedent, it is yet felt as a surprise, in the sense in
which a thing is often a surprise when, after being only talked about
it becomes a reality. We can imagine some people getting up in the
morning on last Saturday with one set of feelings, and going to bed
with another. Bishops, then, who in spite of the alleged anarchy, are
still looked upon with great reverence, as almost irresponsible in what
they say and do officially, are, it seems, as much at the mercy of the
law as the presbyters and deacons whom they have occasionally sent
before the Courts. They, too, at the will of chance accusers who are
accountable to no one, are liable to the humiliation, worry, and
crushing law-bills of an ecclesiastical suit. Whatever may be thought
of this now, it would have seemed extravagant and incredible to the
older race of Bishops that their actions should be so called in
question. They would have thought their dignity gravely assailed, if
besides having to incur heavy expense in prosecuting offending
clergymen, they had also to incur it in protecting themselves from the
charge of being themselves offenders against Church law.
The growth of law is always a mysterious thing; and an outsider and
layman is disposed to ask where this great jurisdiction sprung up and
grew into shape and power. In the Archbishop's elaborate and able
Judgment it is indeed treated as something which had always been; but
he was more successful in breaking down the force of alleged
authorities, and inferences from them, on the opposite side, than he
was in establishing clearly and convincingly his own contention.
Considering the dignity and importance of the jurisdiction claimed, it
is curious that so little is heard about it till the beginning of the
eighteenth century. It is curious that in its two most conspicuous
instances it should have been called into activity by those not
naturally friendly to large ecclesiastical claims--by Low Churchmen of
the Revolution against an offending Jacobite, and by a Puritan
association against a High Churchman. There is no such clear and strong
case as Bishop Watson's till we come to Bishop Watson. In his argument
the Archbishop rested his claim definitely and forcibly on the
precedent of Bishop Watson's case, and one or two cases which more or
less followed it. That possibly is sufficient for his purpose; but it
may still be asked--What did the Watson case itself grow out of? what
were the precedents--not merely the analogies and supposed legal
necessities, but the precedents--on which this exercise of
metropolitical jurisdiction, distinct from the legatine power, rested?
For it seems as if a formidable prerogative, not much heard of where we
might expect to hear of it, not used by Cranmer and Laud, though
approved by Cranmer in the _Reformatio Legum_, had sprung into being
and energy in the hands of the mild Archbishop Tenison. Watson's case
may be good law and bind the Archbishop. But it would have been more
satisfactory if, in reviving a long-disused power, the Archbishop had
been able to go behind the Watson case, and to show more certainly that
the jurisdiction which he claimed and proposed to exercise in
conformity with that case had, like the jurisdiction of other great
courts of the Church and realm, been clearly and customarily exercised
long before that case.
The appearance of this great tribunal among us, a distinctly spiritual
court of the highest dignity, cannot fail to be memorable. It is too
early to forecast what its results may be. There may be before it an
active and eventful career, or it may fall back into disuse and
quiescence. It has jealous and suspicious rivals in the civil courts,
never well disposed to the claim of ecclesiastical power or purely
spiritual authority; and though its jurisdiction is not likely to be
strained at present, it is easy to conceive occasions in the future
which may provoke the interference of the civil court.