treatment of the questions connected with property. Christianity is
certainly not pledged to uphold any particular form of property as
such. Whether property had better be held by individuals, or by small
groups, as in the case of the primitive Teutonic villages, or of the
modern Russian or Indian village communities, or again by the State,
as is the proposal of Socialists, is a matter for experience and
common sense to decide. But where Christian ethics steps in is,
firstly, to shew that property is secondary not primary, a means and
not an end. Thus, in so far as Socialism looks to the moral
regeneration of society by a merely mechanical alteration of the
distribution of the products of industry or of the mode of holding
property, it has to be reminded that a change of heart and will is the
only true starting-point of moral improvement. On the other hand, it
cannot be too often asserted that the accumulation of riches is not in
itself a good at all. Neither riches nor poverty make men better in
themselves. Their effect on character depends on the use made of them,
though no doubt the responsibility of those who have property is
greater, because they have one instrument the more for the purposes of
life. And so, secondly, Christianity urges that _if_ there is private
property, its true character as a trust shall be recognised, its
rights respected and its attendant duties performed. These truths it
keeps steadily before men's eyes by the perpetual object-lesson of the
life of the early Church of Jerusalem, in which those who had property
sold it, and brought the proceeds and laid them at the Apostles' feet,
and distribution was made unto every man according to his needs[435],
an object-lesson enforced and renewed by the example of the monastic
communities, with their vow of voluntary poverty, and their common
purse. So strongly did the early Fathers insist on the duty, almost
the debt, of the rich to the poor, that isolated passages may be
quoted which read like a condemnation of all private property[436],
but this was not their real drift. The obligation which they urged was
the obligation of charity.
(2) So far we have considered the way in which Christianity has
strengthened and defined on the side of duty, which itself is one form
of charity or love, the motives which make men good citizens, good
property-holders, and so has supplemented the moral forces of the
State, by raising the common standard of opinion and conviction on
which ultimately all possibility of State-action rests. But the word
charity is used not only in the wider, but also in a narrower sense,
of one special form of love, the love of the strong who stoops to help
the weak.
It is admitted on all hands that charity in this sense has been a mark
of the Christian type of character, but the uniqueness of Christian
charity has probably been exaggerated. The better Stoics recognised
the active service of mankind, and especially of the poor and
miserable, as part of the ideal of a perfect life. Their severity was
crossed by pity. As Seneca puts it in one pregnant phrase, they held
that 'wherever a man is, there is room for doing good[437].' And so
Stoicism had, its alimentationes, or homes for orphan children, its
distributions of grain, its provisions for the sick and for
strangers[438]. Christianity and Stoicism, it may seem, were walking
along the same road; but the difference was this, 'what pagan charity
was doing tardily, and as it were with the painful calculation of old
age, the Church was doing, almost without thinking about it, in the
plenary masterfulness of youth, because it was her very being thus to
do[439].' She did it with all the ease and grace of perfect
naturalness, not as valuing charity without love, for 'if I bestow all
my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but
have not love, it profiteth me nothing[440],' but because love
forthwith blossomed forth into charity. 'And the disciples were called
Christians first in Antioch. And in these days came prophets from
Jerusalem unto Antioch. And there stood up one of them named Agabus,
and signified by the spirit that there should be great dearth
throughout all the world.... Then the disciples, every man according
to his ability, determined to send relief unto the brethren which
dwelt in Judæa[441].'
And so it became the recognised and traditional duty of the Church to
maintain the cause of the weak against the strong, of the poor against
the rich, of the oppressed against the oppressors. The Bishops of the
fourth and fifth centuries exercised 'a kind of religious
tribunate[442].' In the Middle Ages, the Church urged on those in
public and private stations the duties of charity, pity, humanity. The
author of the latter part of the _De Regimine Principum_[443] ascribed
to S. Thomas Aquinas lays down as one of the chief duties of a king,
the care of the weak and the succour of the miserable. Nor did the
Church in England in pre-Reformation times fail in her duty in this
respect. She pleaded for the manumission or at least the humane usage
of the serfs. She undertook through her monasteries the relief of the
poor. Her prohibition of usury, however mistaken it may seem to us,
was a real protection to debtors against one of the worst forms of
tyranny, that of the unscrupulous creditor. Since the Reformation her
record has not been so clean. The shock of the Reformation left her
weak. The traditional sanctions of her authority were shaken. In the
long struggle of the seventeenth century her close association with
the Stuart cause left her powerless to touch the stronger half of the
nation. She was not independent enough to act as arbiter, and in
committing herself without reserve to opposition to the national claim
for freedom she was untrue to her earlier and better traditions. At
the same time allowance must be made for the licence, the disorder,
and the recklessness with which the claims of liberty were associated,
and for the identification of the popular party with views of
religion, which, whatever else may be said for them, are not those of
the Church. The leading churchmen believed that its triumph meant the
disappearance of that historical Church, which they rightly regarded
as the only effective safeguard of English Christianity. After the
Restoration the Church was stronger, and the increase of strength
shews itself on the one side in greater independence of the Crown, and
on the other in the outburst of numerous religious and charitable
societies and foundations. Queen Anne's Bounty is an instance of the
charity, if it be not rather the justice, of one distinguished
daughter of the Church. The 'Religious Societies' which in a quiet and
unassuming way were a great influence in social life, had among their
objects the visiting and relief of the poor, the apprenticing of the
young, the maintenance of poor scholars at the University. Charity
schools were established throughout the country: hospitals and
parochial libraries founded, while societies like the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and the Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge date back to the last years of the
seventeenth and the first of the eighteenth centuries[444]. Then as
the Georgian period begins, all this vigorous life seems for a long
period to die down, or only to find vent in the great Wesleyan
movement which, beginning within the Church, passes out beyond it, and
ultimately becomes stereotyped in more or less pronounced separation
from her communion. It was the policy of the ruling Whig oligarchy to
keep down the Church, and they succeeded--to the grave loss of English
morality. If in some degree the Church in England at the present time
is speaking with firmer accent on questions of personal and class
morality, and giving more effective witness against the luxury and
neglect of their work-people, which are the besetting sins of the
great English manufacturing classes, it is due partly to the revival
in England of the true idea of the Church as a great spiritual
society, and partly to the fact that English statesmen, from sheer
inability owing to the conditions of political life to do otherwise,
have left her more free to manage her own business and to develop her
mission to the English people in accordance with the laws and
aspirations of her own inner life.
It is especially necessary in a great industrial society such as that
of modern England that the Christian law of self-sacrifice, which
crosses and modifies the purely competitive tendency leading each
individual to seek his own interest and that of his family, should be
strongly and effectively presented. No doubt it is true that the
increased knowledge of the structure and laws of social life which we
possess, have made charity more difficult than in the Middle Ages:
they have not made it less necessary, or a less essential feature of
the Christian character. And so, in a democratic age, the protection
of the weak and the oppressed will take a different colour. Whether
supreme control is in the hands of one or many, it may be used
tyrannically. And the most effective exercise of the tribunate of the
Church will lie in guarding the rights of conscience and the great
national interest of religion against hasty and unfair pressure. And
this brings us to our next point.
(3) The drift of the argument has been to shew the incompleteness and
inevitable limitations of the State, considered as a moral guide of
the social life of mankind. But that incompleteness rises to its
maximum, those limitations press most closely when we pass from
morality to religion. If it is the highest duty of the State to
maintain true and vital religion[445], it is a duty which of itself it
is altogether incompetent to perform. If the experience of the Middle
Ages shewed conclusively that the subordination of the State to the
Church did not tend either to good government, or to the maintenance,
pure and undefiled, of the Christian religion, the experience of
English post-Reformation history has as conclusively shewn that the
subordination of the Church to the State leads on the one hand to the
secularization of the Church, and on the other to a grave danger to
national life, through the loss of a spiritual authority strong
enough, as well as vigilant and independent enough, to reprove social
sins and to call to account large and influential classes. The
conditions under which the Tudor idea of a Christian commonwealth was
possible have passed away, and there seem to remain two possible
conclusions from the premises.
The first is that it is expedient in the interests of both that Church
and State should be separate from one another, as e.g. in America, and
left free to develop, each on its own lines, their respective missions
in the national service--'a free Church in a free State.' The current
of opinion in England in favour of disestablishment, undoubtedly a
strong, though probably not at the present time an increasing one, is
fed from many smaller streams. There are Agnostics who believe that
religion is the enemy of progress, and that Christianity especially
shackles free thought, and hinders the advance of social reformation,
and to whom therefore it seems a clear duty to undermine by every
means open to them the hold of Christianity on the centres of social
and intellectual life, on schools and universities, families and
states. They favour disestablishment as one means to this end. Two
principal causes seem to move those who are primarily statesmen in the
direction of disestablishment. One is the conception of the State as
the great controlling and guiding organization of human life[446],
supreme over all partial societies and voluntary associations formed
to guard parts or sides of life, and the attempt to mould national
life by this guiding idea and its logical consequences. This attempt
is encouraged by the extreme simplicity of the English Constitution in
its actual working, and by the legally unlimited power of
Parliament[447]. The other is their practical experience that in view
of the divided condition of English Christianity, the most stubborn
and intractable difficulties in legislation arise from, or are
aggravated by, religious differences. They suppose that these would be
lessened if the State took the position of impartial arbiter between
rival denominations. Among Nonconformists there are no doubt some who,
looking at the Church as the natural rival of their own society, think
to weaken her by disestablishment, but there are also many who believe
that disestablishment would be a gain to English religion, and that
the life of the Church would be more real, more pure, more governed by
the highest motives, if she were freed from all direct connection with
the State. Lastly, there is no doubt that the idea of the return to
the looser relations between Church and State which prevailed in the
earliest Christian centuries, has a great attraction for a
considerable body of churchmen. They would perhaps have been willing
enough to accept the royal supremacy under a religious sovereign in
thorough harmony with the beliefs and modes of working of the Church,
but the revolution by which the House of Commons has risen to supreme
power in England, has given it, not in the theory, but in the actual
working of the constitution, the ultimate control over matters
ecclesiastical as well as civil, and they hold that by stifling the
free utterance of the voice of the Church the House of Commons is
doing an injury to religion compared to which disestablishment would
be a lesser evil.
On the other hand, if we look beyond our own country, we have the
opinion of the venerable Dr. Döllinger, reported by Dr. Liddon, that
the disestablishment of the Church in England would be an injury to
the cause of religion throughout Europe. And so weighty an opinion may
well make us carefully scrutinize those difficulties and tendencies
which make for disestablishment. It is no doubt true that from one
point of view the _idea_ of the Church as a great spiritual society
seems to require her entire freedom to control her own development,
and therefore the absence of all formal connection with the State. But
there is nothing more deeply illogical and irrational, in any sense of
logic in which it is near to life and therefore true, than the attempt
to solve a great problem, spiritual, moral, political, social, by
neglecting all its factors but one, even if it be the most important
one. Nor does it follow that, because we recognise that in a certain
condition of things, more harm than good will be done by a particular
application of a truth which we accept, therefore we have ceased to
hold that truth. It only shews that our ideal is complex.
And so from another point of view the most perfect ordering of things
would seem to be one in which Church and State were two parts of one
whole, recognising one another's functions and limits, and mutually
supporting one another. Thus religion would be put in its true place
as at once the foundation and the coping stone of national life. And
the State with all its administration would be given a distinctly
Christian character. The difficulty in England is to maintain this
point of view in connection with the increasingly non-religious (not
necessarily anti-religious) colouring of the State, and of the fierce
struggles of party government which destroy the reverence which might
otherwise attach to the State and its organs. As the State has become
increasingly lay, its moral weight has sunk, its hold on consciences
become less. But the truth remains that religion is an element in the
highest national life. 'A national Church alone can consecrate the
whole life of a people[448].' And a national Church can only mean an
established Church, and a Church which either has great inherited
wealth of its own, or is supported in part by national funds. 'Of all
parts of this subject,' says Mr. Gladstone[449], 'probably none have
been so thoroughly wrought out as the insufficiency of the voluntary
principle.' It is insufficient (i.e. for maintaining national
religion), first, because after a certain level of moral deterioration
has been reached by individuals or masses of people, the demand for
religion is least where the want is greatest; and secondly, because in
consequence of the structure of social life there are always large
classes of the community who, while just provided with the bare
necessaries of life, have not sufficient means to enable them to
sustain the expense of the organs of the higher life in any form. We
recognise this in the case of education; we can hardly refuse to
recognise it in the case of religion.
For these reasons we are thrown back on the second possible conclusion
from the data, viz. that it is desirable that there should be some
definite and permanent connection between Church and State, but not
such connection as will either subordinate the State to the Church or
the Church to the State. And such a result would seem to be best
attainable by some such system of relations as that between the
Established Church and the State in Scotland, or the Roman Catholic
Church and the State in France. Thus in Scotland, on the critical
point of jurisdiction, the position is this. The Church Courts are
final: there is no appeal to a Civil Court except on the ground of
excess of jurisdiction. And the judgment of the Church Courts, so far
as it involves civil consequences, may be enforced by application to
the Civil Courts[450]. In France we have to distinguish the relations
of Church and State as constitutionally defined from those relations
in their actual working. No constitutional relations, however
admirable, can work when the State constantly encroaches, and where
its whole attitude is one of hostility to the Church. In theory,
however, the position in France is, except on one point, much the same
as in Scotland. There is a complete system of ecclesiastical
jurisdiction in the Roman Catholic Church based on the Canon Law and
administered by the bishops acting as judges. From their decisions
there is no appeal to the Civil Courts except on the ground of abuse
(appel d'abus). On the other hand, the Ecclesiastical Courts have no
coercive jurisdiction, nor are their sentences carried out by the
Civil Courts[451]. They bind, therefore, only _in foro conscientiae_
and this is found sufficient. There is one point worthy of special
notice in the French system, that while the relations of the State to
the Roman Catholic (once the Gallican) Church are regulated by a
special Concordat, two leading Protestant bodies, the French Reformed
Church, and the Church of the Augsburg Confession, as well as the
Jewish body, are also endowed. Alongside of a system by which the
Church is established there is a concurrent endowment of other
Christian and even non-Christian denominations.
In Scotland the relations of Church and State rest on the Act of
Union, in France on the Concordat made by Napoleon with the Pope in
1801. In England there is no definite formulated agreement; and any
such agreement would be entirely contrary to the English genius. But
in a deeper sense, there is a contract, which is the product of 1200
years of history, of which the terms vary from generation to
generation, and which is commended by each age to the forbearance and
the statesmanship of its successors. The terms of that contract are in
the main fixed by the State. In any case, whether the Church remains
established or not, the State has ultimate power over her temporal
possessions, as over all temporal possessions held within its
territory. But, if the Church is to remain connected with the State,
perpetual difficulties must arise, unless means are found to leave the
Church free, in matters as well of doctrine as of ritual, both to
legislate through her own organs, and to exercise an independent
spiritual jurisdiction. It is for the interest of the State that the
Church should be allowed to make her service for the English nation as
fruitful, as powerful, and as little a hindrance to her own
spirituality as possible.
III. Lastly we may consider the way in which the Church, quite
irrespective of any direct connection with the State, as a natural
consequence of its position as a spiritual society and of its teaching
as to fundamental moral and spiritual truths, acts as a purifying and
elevating agent on the general social life of mankind, on all its
manifestations and organs.
If man is 'metaphysical _nolens volens_,' it is equally true that he
is metapolitical, to use Martensen's happy word, _nolens volens_. And
metapolitic means 'that which precedes the political as its
presupposition, that which lies outside and beyond it as its aim and
object, and by which the political element is to be pervaded as by its
soul, its intellectually vivifying principle[452].' Every statesman,
every real leader of men, has consciously or unconsciously, such a
metapolitic; he holds, that is, certain views as to man's place in the
world, as to the meaning and possibility of progress, as to the aims
as distinct from the machinery of government, as to the relations of
nations to one another and to humanity, which determine his general
attitude towards all kinds of questions with which he has to deal. It
is clear, for instance, that the groups of ideas which govern the
fatalist, the pessimist, and the humanitarian, are widely different.
Now the Church is the home and dwelling-place of certain great
regulative ideas as to man's destiny and function, and his relation to
God and other men, the treasure-house to which they were committed, or
the soil in which they germinated. These ideas, if accepted and acted
on, or so far as accepted and acted on, must transform and remodel,
not only the inward life, but also the whole outward life in all its
spheres. Thus S. Paul deduces from the Christian conception of man,
the duties of husbands, wives, fathers, children, masters, servants,
subjects, rich persons, old men, old women, young men, young women.
And so, now rapidly, now slowly, according to the vigour and purity at
successive periods of the Christian society, now thrown inwards by
periods of persecution or by the rising tide of evil, now borne
outwards in periods of rapid expansion and missionary enterprise, now
brought to bear on new conditions of life and new social groupings,
now traced back to their source, and tested by the life and words of
the Word of God, the Christian ideas of man, and of his relation to
God radiate through the life of mankind, at once sustaining and
correcting its aspirations, and its ideals of righteousness.
The root ideas of this Christian anthropology rest on the Christian
conception of God as one yet threefold. Thus on the one side,
Christianity attaches to the individual personality a supreme and
infinite value as the inmost nature of one made in the image of God,
redeemed by the self-sacrifice of Christ, and indwelt by the Spirit of
God. And thus it develops the sense of separate personal
responsibility. It is on this basis that what is true in
humanitarianism rests. Behind all class and social differences lies
the human personality in virtue of which all men are equal[453]. But
on the other side it frankly recognises man's inherently social
nature. It is not good for man to be alone. And family, State, and the
Church on earth are training places for a perfected common life in the
City of God.
The effect of this conception of man and his destiny is to place the
State and its associations in their true position as not ultimate but
secondary, as means and not ends. Alongside of the earthly kingdom,
with its wealth, its honours, its ambitions, its wide and far-reaching
influence, it sets another kingdom, the City of God, with its own
standards, its own principles, its own glory, its own blessedness, as
the end of mankind, the goal of history. 'The nations shall walk
amidst the light thereof, and the kings of the earth do bring their
glory into it[454].' And, in so doing, it judges and corrects the
splendour of earthly States.
In thus contrasting the earthly State with the City of God,
Christianity is no doubt exposed to the old accusation, that it makes
men bad citizens. And the old answer is still true, 'let those who
think that the doctrine of Jesus Christ cannot contribute to the
happiness of the State, give us soldiers and officers such as it bids
them to be, subjects and citizens as faithful as Jesus Christ
commands, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, children, masters,
servants, kings, judges, living according to the laws of religion, men
as punctual in their payment of taxes, as pure in their handling of
public funds as are the true Christians: they will be soon forced to
admit that the maxims of the Gospel when practised cannot but give a
State great happiness and great prosperity[455].' It is not too much
but too little Christianity which destroys States; for passion and
wilfulness are the great disintegrating forces of the world, and
everything which strengthens individuals to resist them, so far
strengthens the bonds of social union. But the service which
Christianity renders to States goes far beyond this negative result.
If the true meaning of progress be moral, and not material, there can
be no greater contribution to the well-being of society than that of
maintaining the Christian type of character with its humility, its
purity, its sincerity, and again its strong and beneficent activity.