Transcribed from the 1870 Tinsley Brothers edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org.
THE
RELIGIOUS LIFE OF LONDON.
* * * * *
BY
J. EWING RITCHIE,
AUTHOR OF "BRITISH SENATORS," "THE NIGHT SIDE OF LONDON," ETC.
* * * * *
"'Tis Nature's law
That none, the meanest of created things,
Of form created the most vile and brute,
The dullest or most noxious, should exist
Divorced from good."
WORDSWORTH.
* * * * *
LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND.
1870.
* * * * *
LONDON:
SAVILL, EDWARDS AND CO., CHANDOS STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.
* * * * *
TO
SAMUEL MORLEY, ESQ., M.P.
TO WHOSE UNEXAMPLED ACTIVITY AND MUNIFICENCE
(BY NO MEANS CONFINED WITHIN HIS OWN DENOMINATION)
MUCH OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF LONDON IS DUE,
THIS VOLUME IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED
BY
THE AUTHOR.
INTRODUCTION.
Man is undoubtedly a religious animal. In England at any rate the remark
holds good. No one who ignores the religious element in our history can
rightly understand what England was, or how she came to be what she is.
The fuller is our knowledge, the wider our field of investigation, the
more minute our inquiry, the stronger must be the conviction in all minds
that religion has been for good or bad the great moving power, and, in
spite of the teachings of Secularism or of Positivism, it is clear that
as much as ever the questions which are daily and hourly coming to the
front have in them more or less of a religious element. It is not often
foreigners perceive this. Take Louis Blanc as an illustration. As much
as any foreigner he has mastered our habits and ways--all that we call
our inner life; yet, to him, the English pulpit is a piece of
wood--nothing more. According to him, the oracles are dumb, the sacred
fire has ceased to burn, the veil of the temple is rent in twain; church
attendance, he tells us, in England, besides custom, has little to
recommend it. There is beauty in desolation--in life changing into
death--
"Before Decay's effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers;"
but not even of this beauty can the Church of England boast. Dr.
Dollinger--a more thoughtful, a more learned, a more laborious writer--is
not more flattering. The Church of England, he tells us, is "the Church
only of a fragment of the nation," of "the rich, cultivated, and
fashionable classes." It teaches "the religion of deportment, of
gentility, of clerical reserve." "In its stiff and narrow organization,
and all want of pastoral elasticity, it feels itself powerless against
the masses." The patronage is mostly in the hands of the nobility and
gentry, who regard it as a means of provision for their younger sons,
sons-in-law, and cousins. Our latest critic, M. Esquiros, writes in a
more favourable strain, yet even he confesses how the city operative
shuns what he deems the Church of Mammon, and draws a picture of the
English clergyman, by no means suggestive of zeal in the Master's service
or readiness to bear His yoke. Dissent foreigners generally ignore, yet
Dissent is as active, as energetic as the State Church, and may claim
that it has practically realized the question of our time--the Free
Church in the Free State. In thus attempting to describe the Religious
Life of London, I touch on a question of which I may briefly say that it
concerns the welfare of the community at large.
IVY COTTAGE, BALLARD'S LANE, FINCHLEY,
_April_ 4_th_, 1870.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
ON HERESY AND ORTHODOXY 1
CHAPTER II.
THE JEWS 16
CHAPTER III.
THE REFORMED JEWS 37
CHAPTER IV.
THE GREEK CHURCH 47
CHAPTER V.
THE ROMAN CATHOLICS 58
CHAPTER VI.
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 76
THE DEAF AND DUMB AT CHURCH 87
A SUNDAY IN JAIL 93
HIGH CHURCH REVIVALISTS 100
A SUNDAY WITH THE LUNATICS 107
LAY WORK IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 113
AN EVANGELICAL PREACHER 121
CHAPTER VII.
AMONG THE PRESBYTERIANS:--
AT COLEBROOK ROW 131
PARK CHURCH, HIGHBURY 139
CHAPTER VIII.
CONGREGATIONALISTS AND BAPTISTS 146
THE SEVENTH-DAY BAPTISTS 159
CHRISTMAS MORNING WITH THE YOUNGSTERS 169
DR. PARKER AT THE POULTRY 177
MR. LYNCH'S THURSDAY EVENINGS 187
CHAPTER IX.
THE UNITARIANS 193
AGGRESSIVE UNITARIANS 204
CHAPTER X.
THE WESLEYAN METHODISTS 210
AT A WATCH-NIGHT SERVICE 223
CHAPTER XI.
THE QUAKERS 232
JONATHAN GRUBB AT THE AGRICULTURAL HALL 236
CHAPTER XII.
THE MORAVIANS IN FETTER LANE 244
CHAPTER XIII.
THE SWEDENBORGIANS 252
CHAPTER XIV.
THE IRVINGITES, OR APOSTOLICAL CHURCH 271
CHAPTER XV.
THE FREE CHRISTIAN UNION 279
CHAPTER XVI.
THE LONDON ECCLESIA 291
THE CHRISTADELPHIANS 298
CHAPTER XVII.
SOME MINOR SECTS 306
THE PECULIAR PEOPLE 307
THE SANDEMANIANS 313
THE SOUTHCOTTIANS 320
THE SPIRITUALISTS 328
THE CAMPBELLITES 335
THE MORMONS 344
CHAPTER XVIII.
ADVANCED RELIGIONISTS:--
THE CHURCH OF PROGRESS 352
THE INDEPENDENT RELIGIOUS REFORMERS 359
SOUTH PLACE, FINSBURY SQUARE 365
THE SECULARISTS 371
CHAPTER XIX.
THE IRREGULARS 380
IRREGULAR AGENCIES 381
CHAPTER I.
ON HERESY AND ORTHODOXY.
The original meaning of the word heresy is choice. "It was long used,"
writes Dr. Waddington, "by the philosophers to designate the preference
and selection of some speculative opinion, and in process of time was
applied without any sense of reproach to every sect." The most fruitful
source of speculative opinion is, and has ever been, religion; from the
schools of philosophy to those of theology the term heresy passed by a
very intelligible and simple process. The word is thrice used in the
Acts to denote sect (Acts v. 17, xv. 5, and xxiv. 5), and Paul himself
when on his defence before Felix and in answer to Tertullus confesses
that "after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my
fathers."
In process of time heresy came to have a bad meaning attached to it. It
is easy to see why this should be so. We naturally prefer our own
opinions to those of other people. We naturally prefer the society of
those who hold our own opinions to the society of those who do not. Life
is short, and we do not want to be always disputing. Life to most of us
is hard, and it would be harder still if after a day's toil Paterfamilias
had to discuss the three births of Christ, or His twofold nature, the
AEons of the Gnostics, the Judaism of the Ebionites, the ancient Persian
dualism which formed the fundamental idea of the system of Manes, or the
windy frenzy of Montanus, with an illogical wife, a friend gifted with a
fatal flow of words, or a pert and shallow child. We like those with
whom we constantly associate. They are wise men and sound Christians.
They are those who fast and pay tithes, and are eminently proper and
respectable. As to the heretics--the publicans and sinners, away with
them. Let their portion be shame in this life, perdition in the next.
Thus it is heretics have got a bad name. Church history has been written
by their enemies, by men who have honestly believed that a man of a
different heresy to their own would rob an orphan, and break all the
commandments. The Rev. Mr. Thwackem "doubted not but all the infidels
and heretics in the world would, if they could, confine honour to their
own absurd errors and damnable deceptions." The phrase "absurd errors
and damnable deceptions," is one a real theologian might envy, or at any
rate appropriate. In another sense also that hero of fiction is a type
of the spirit in which orthodox people often (thankfully we record the
existence of a better spirit in our day) have written on theology. "When
I mean religion," cries Thwackem, "I mean the Christian religion, and not
only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion, and not only
the Protestant religion, but the Church of England."
Still the question occurs, What is heresy?
It is not difficult to say what it is not. The African Bishops on one
occasion, in council in Carthage, decided that heretics were not at all
any part of the Church of Christ, but this opinion was modified by a
later council. "Heretics," writes Epiphanius, "are divided into two
kinds: those who receive the Christian religion, but err in parts, who
when they come over to the Church are anointed with oil; and those who do
not receive it at all and are unbelievers, such as Jews and Greeks, and
these we baptize."
According to the Articles of the English Establishment, "the Church of
Christ is a company of faithful people among whom the pure Word of God is
preached and the Sacraments rightly administered according to Christ's
institution." But on this very matter we find the Church divided. Low
Churchmen tell us that the ritualists do not rightly administer the
Sacraments, and the latter say the same of their opponents. The _Record_
suggests that Bishop Colenso is little better than one of the wicked, and
charitably insinuates that the late Dean Milman is amongst the lost. Dr.
Pusey places the Evangelicals in the same category with Jews, or
Infidels, or Dissenters, and has strong apprehensions as to their
everlasting salvation. Dr. Temple was made Bishop of Exeter, and
Archdeacon Denison set apart the day of his installation as one of
humiliation and prayer. Yet all these are of the Establishment. Dr.
Parr gladly associated with Unitarians, and went to Unitarian chapels to
hear Unitarian ministers preach. Would Dean Close do so? Yet Dr. Parr,
as much as Dean Close, was of the Church as regards solemn profession,
and deliberate assent and consent. Mr. Melville believes Dissent to be
schism, and one of the deadly sins, while the Deans of Westminster and
Canterbury hold out to Dissenters friendly hands. If we take the
Articles, the Church Establishment is as orthodox as the firmest
Christian or the narrowest-minded bigot can desire; if we turn to its
ministers, we find them as divided as it is possible for people
professing to take their teaching from the Bible can be. If there be any
grace in creeds and articles, any virtue in signing them, if their
imposition be not a solemn farce, it is impossible that heresy should
exist within the Established Church. It is in the wide and varied fields
of Dissent that we are to look for heresy.
Yet the Church of England is tolerant, to a certain extent, of heresy.
The judicious Hooker writes, "We must acknowledge even heretics
themselves to be a maimed part, yet a part, of the visible Church. If an
infidel should pursue to death an heretic professing Christianity only
for Christian profession's sake, could we deny unto him the honour of
martyrdom? Yet this honour all men know to be proper unto the Church.
Heretics, therefore, are not utterly cast out from the visible Church of
Christ. If the Fathers do, therefore, anywhere, as often they do, make
the true visible Church of Christ and heretical companies opposite, they
are to be construed as separating heretics not altogether from the
company of believers, but from the fellowship of sound believers. For
where professed unbelief is, there can be no visible Church of Christ;
there may be where sound belief wanteth. Infidels being clean without
the Church, deny directly and utterly reject the very principles of
Christianity which heretics embrace, and err only by misconstruction,
whereupon their opinions, although repugnant indeed to the principles of
Christian faith, are notwithstanding by them held otherwise and
maintained as most consistent therewith." The Privy Council by its
Judgment of "Essays and Reviews" has decided that a Churchman may hold
heretical opinions.
In popular language, the Congregationalists, the Baptists, the
Presbyterians are orthodox; the Quakers, the Methodists, Wesleyans and
otherwise, are orthodox; for our purpose popular language is sufficient.
Heresy, says Tertullian, is the result of wisdom, real or assumed. He
writes: "The philosophers are the fathers of the heretics." It is
computed that there have been no less than five hundred distinct
heresies. Happily for us, most of them are dead and buried in Greek and
Latin folios, rarely read and still more rarely understood. The East was
the land of heresy. Every day saw the birth of a new one amongst a
people of subtle intellect and endowed with a language wonderfully
contrived to express the most delicate and phantasmal forms of belief.
We laugh at the schoolmen, at their barbarous Latin and incomprehensible
disputations. No one now ventures to discuss how many angels could stand
upon the point of a needle, but in the early ages of the Church the
Fathers wasted their lives in disputations equally windy and barren of
practical result. "Greek Christianity," writes Dean Milman, "was
insatiably inquisitive, speculative. Confident in the inexhaustible
copiousness and fine precision of its language, it endured no limit to
its curious investigations. As each great question was settled or worn
out, it was still ready to propose new ones. It began with the Divinity
of Christ, still earlier perhaps with some of the gnostic cosmogonical or
theophanic theories, so onward to the Trinity; it expired, or at least
drew near its end, as the religion of the Roman East, discussing the
Divine light on Mount Tabor." Extinct long ago are the questions to
settle which Church councils were held, fanatic monks swarmed into
Constantinople by hundreds from far away--Syrian, or Arabian, or African
deserts--and armies took the field. Even a vowel might stir up strife
and bloodshed. The enmity of the Homoousian to the Homiousian was as
bitter as that between Guelph and Ghibelline, as that of Capulet and
Montague; and only the pen of a Swift could do justice to the brawls
"Bred of an airy word."
Heresy can be put down in two ways. You may argue it out of existence,
or you may crush it out with the sword. As soon as ever the alliance
between Church and State was formed, the latter was the favourite mode of
dealing with heretics; it saved so much trouble. If you cut off a
heretics head, you are certain to stop his heretical tongue. There is an
end of his pestiferous logic. Continue the process, and heresy is
exterminated, as Unitarianism was in Poland--as the Huguenots were by the
massacres of St. Bartholomew--as Protestantism was crushed out in the Low
Countries by Alva, and in Spain by Torquemada and the _auto da fes_ of
Madrid. After a similar fashion, Bombastes Furioso proposed to
annihilate his enemies single-handed. His plan was to take them
half-a-dozen at a time, and when he had cut off the heads of the first
division, a second was to follow to receive a similar favour at his
hands, and so on till all were slain. Power has always dealt with
heretics after this fashion; in this way Churchmen endeavoured to put
down Puritanism in England, Presbyterianism in Scotland, Popery in
Ireland. To Henry IV. is due in this country the first permission to
send heretics to the stake. The Preamble of the Act of 1401, _De
Heretico Comburendo_, is as follows: "Divers false and perverse people,
of a certain new sect, damnably thinking of the faith of the sacraments
of the Church, and of the authority of the same, against the law of God
and of the Church,--usurping the office of preaching,--do perversely and
maliciously, in divers places within the realm, preach and teach divers
new doctrines and wicked erroneous opinions contrary to the faith and
determination of Holy Church. And of such sect and wicked doctrines they
make unlawful conventicles, they hold and exercise schools, they make and
write books, they do wickedly instruct and inform people, and excite and
stir them to sedition and insurrection, and make great strife and
division among the people, and other enormities horrible to be heard
daily do perpetrate and commit. The diocesans cannot by their
jurisdiction spiritual, without aid of the king's majesty, sufficiently
correct these said false and perverse people, nor refrain their malice,
because they do go from diocess to diocess, and will not appear before
the said diocesans; but the jurisdiction spiritual, the keys of the
Church, and the censures of the same they do utterly condemn and despise,
and so these wicked preachings and doctrines they do from day to day
contrive and exercise to the destruction of all order and rule, right and
reason."
The Bishops by this Act received arbitrary power to arrest and imprison
on suspicion, without check or restraint of law, at their will and
pleasure. Prisoners who refused to abjure their errors, who persisted in
heresy or relapsed into it after abjuration, were sentenced to be burnt
at the stake.
So much deadlier a thing was heresy deemed than evil-living on the part
of the clergy, that, previous to the reign of Henry VII., Bishops, who
had no power to imprison priests even though convicted of adultery or
incest, had, as Mr. Froude points out, power to arrest every man on
suspicion of heresy, and to detain him in prison untried. Constantine
was the first Christian Emperor who had recourse to this system; and it
was against the Arians, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, that
his enmity was directed. Death was the penalty for any one guilty of
concealing an Arian book. Of course the Arians, in their turn, were
equally ready to draw the sword. In those passionate and contentious
times it was hard consistently and constantly to be orthodox. Justinian,
whose laws against heretics were more severe than those of Constantine,
and who was hailed by the Church as "the most Christian Emperor,"
actually died a heretic. A controversy arose as to whether the body of
Christ was or was not liable to corruption. A new sect of course was
formed, known as the Corruptibles and the Incorruptibles. The latter
were considered heretics. Justinian gave them his support, and was on
the point of persecuting others of a different way of thinking when he
died. One of his successors, Theodosius, was just as ready to persecute
the holders of equally unimportant opinions. He it was who put down the
Tascodragitae, "who made their prayers inwardly and silently, compressing
their noses and lips with their hands, lest any sound should transpire."
Fortunately for our readers, religious London is not thus minutely
divided and subdivided. We have still absurd squabbles, that for
instance whether Mr. Mackonochie was kneeling or only bending, being
pre-eminently so; yet on the whole in Western Europe and among the German
races the tendency is more and more to practical, and less and less to
speculative life. In another way also may the comparatively speaking
undisturbed orthodoxy of Western Europe be accounted for. For the
orthodox there have been cakes and ale, and even the ass knoweth his
owner and the ox his master's crib. Nothing so keeps men from religious
speculation as a good endowment. In his "History of Latin Christianity,"
Dean Milman very significantly writes: "The original independence of the
Christian character which induced the first converts in the strength of
their faith to secede from the manners and usages, as well as the rites
of the world, to form self-governed republics, as it were, within the
social system; this noble liberty had died away as Christianity became an
hereditary, an established, a universal religion." The poet asked, and
he might well do so--
"What makes all doctrines plain and clear?
About two hundred pounds a year."
To have an opinion of his own, and to express it, was utterly impossible
to any man whose heart was set upon church preferment. One illustration
will suffice: Many--many years ago there was in the old city of Norwich a
Bishop known by the name of Bathurst. His connexions were good, and when
George III. was king there was an Earl Bathurst and a Lord Chancellor
Bathurst, and a Sir Benjamin Bathurst. This clerical scion had thus on
his entry into public life every chance in his favour. He lived to a
great age: he was born in 1744, and died in 1837; but to the last he was
only Bishop of Norwich. Why was this? Well, on the 27th of May, 1808,
Lord Granville moved for the House of Lords to resolve itself into a
committee "to consider the petition of the Irish Catholics." The
petition was not a prayer for political equality, simply for employment
in military and civil situations. The Bishop of Norwich had the audacity
to lift up his single voice from the episcopal bench on behalf of Lord
Granville's very moderate motion. The heavens did not fall--nor did the
earth open its mouth and swallow him up--but the light of the royal
countenance was lost to him for ever. His daughter writes: "A friend of
my father's happened to mention in the presence of Queen Charlotte that
the Bishop of Norwich ought to be removed to the see of St. Asaph, as the
emoluments were better and the duties less numerous. 'No,' said her
Majesty, quickly; 'he voted against the king.'" Some years afterwards it
was said by those about the Court that the Bishop "might have commanded
anything in the Church if he had taken the right line."
It has thus come to pass that heresy in London and the country has been
confined within narrow bounds. Whatever Churchmen may have thought, the
creed and the public utterances of the Church have been orthodox.
Popular dissent has followed suit--heresy has been avoided by some as a
temptation of the devil, by others as an obstacle to worldly success, but
no religious life can exist without it. In the religious world, as a
rule, heresy is life, orthodoxy death. "Are you a Christian?" asked one
well-known man of another. "When I am a good man," was the reply; but,
say the orthodox, it is on his belief or rejection of dogmas that a man's
Christianity depends. One cheering sign of the times is that the
religious public is beginning to realize the fact, that it does not
follow that because a man holds heretical opinions he will pick your
pocket, elope with your wife, or make away with your silver spoons. It
is well when people come to think that there may be something purer,
higher, holier, than unreasoning uniformity of opinion or than a blind
assent to scholastic terms and definitions. Mental stagnation is not
Christian life, neither does sterile orthodoxy deserve the name. It was
the recognition of this idea that gives to the Apostle John a special
claim to admiration and regard. "If," says he, "a man say I love God and
hateth his brother, he is a liar; for he that loveth not his brother,
whom he hath seen, how can he love God, whom he hath not seen?" It was
under the influence of the same spirit that the Master rebuked the zeal
of his disciples when they would have hindered one who was according to
their own account doing good, merely because "he followed not us." The
passage is worth transcribing. "And John answered him, saying, Master,
we saw one casting out devils in thy name and he followeth not us, and we
forbade him, because he followeth not us. But Jesus said, Forbid him
not, for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name that can
lightly speak evil of me; for he that is not against us is on our part.
For whosoever shall give you a cup of water in my name because ye belong
to Christ, verily I say unto you he shall not lose his reward."