Archbishop Laud, in his conference with Fisher, the Jesuit, when he
was Bishop of St. David's, sets forth the ample basis and
justification of Nonconformity. It is impossible that the platform can
be laid for our principles and action more broadly and firmly than by
this highest of High Churchmen in the following admirable and explicit
words:--
'Another Church may separate from Rome if Rome will
separate from Christ. And so far as it separates from them
and the faith, so far may another church sever from it....
The Protestants did not get that name by protesting against
the Church of Rome, but by protesting (and that when
nothing else would serve) against her errors and
superstitions. Do you but remove them from the Church of
Rome, and our protestation is ended, and the separation
too. The Protestants did not depart, for departure is
voluntary; so was not theirs. I say, not theirs, taking
their whole body and cause together.... The cause of
schism is yours, for you thrust us out from you because we
called for truth and the redress of abuses. For a schism
must needs be theirs whose the cause of it is. The woe was
full out of the mouth of Christ, ever against him that
gives the offence, not against him that takes it, ever....
It was ill done of those, whoever they were, that made the
first separation. But then A. C. must not understand me of
actual only, but of causal separation. For, as I said
before, the schism is theirs whose the cause of it is. And
he makes the separation, that gives the first just cause of
it; not he that makes an actual separation upon a just
cause preceding.'--(Works, vol. ii. sec. 21.)
We cordially adopt the definitions and allegations of the great
Anglican. He describes perfectly the necessity which has constrained
and the spirit which has animated the great party, which seems at
length to stand on the very borders of that Canaan of religious
liberty and equality towards which for three centuries it has been
struggling through the wilderness, and in which it hopes to find rest
and the free play of its life at last.
'Schism is separation--cutting off; cutting ourselves off
from that to which we ought to be united. The root of
schism is the separation of man from God. He is thereby out
of harmony with the universal and ruling system of things.
In this way he is out of harmony with all that remains
under that presiding system. And the crime of schism lies
in this; that it is a contest with Him who has instituted
that system--that it arises out of our repugnancy to Him,
or (to take the lowest view of it) out of our want of
understanding of the principles which he has established
for the unity of the world which He has made.'--(A. J.
Scott, 'Discourses,' p. 230.)
Schism, then, is separation from that with which God made us to be
united. The only schism about which we need be anxious is separation
from the truth which can make Divine order in our lives; to which by
inward affinities we are related; to which we are bound to attach
ourselves, or rather to maintain our attachment, under penalty of
perpetual unrest, harm, and loss. The fundamental question of schism
is truth--the truth which God has made known as the one basis of the
vital fellowships and activities of mankind.
The only principle which could fairly rob us of the justification
which the Anglican Archbishop's words afford to us would be, that the
State is absolutely the highest expression of the Lord who made and
who rules the world, as to the conduct of man's life in the spiritual
as well as in the secular sphere. There are secular sects in Europe
who lay down this dogma as the fundamental principle of the
constitution of society. The State, in their view, has the sole right
and the sole power to organize everything, from industry to worship,
and there is no higher will than that of the community known to or
knowable by man. But this principle presupposes the abolition of the
spiritual. Worship and the whole region of man's religious activity
must have been already relegated to the domain of senseless
superstition, before such an idea could reign. Religion ceases to be
an intrusive and disturbing element in the secular realm under such
conditions, because it has already ceased to have an independent life.
We have no need to spend time in controverting this position. Amongst
Christian politicians, lay or ecclesiastical, there can be no need to
demonstrate the falseness of a principle which would make Christ and
His Apostles the chief schismatics of the world. Even Mr. Arnold, who
is as hard upon Nonconformity as a man can be, allows that there _are_
things which may compel separation; and where those are found, by
Laud's own definition, the word schism can no longer apply.
Man, like all things, animate and inanimate, is made in concord. There
are relations with beings and with things, with the world, with man,
and with God, in which his nature moves freely and all his powers are
drawn forth to their full strain of work. The secret of free movement
in the universe is equipoise. It is not otherwise with man. He is made
to sustain certain relations, to exchange certain influences, to
fulfil certain functions. There is a condition conceivable in which
man would be in entire harmony with all things around him, would move
with perfect freedom, and give full expression to all the functions
and possibilities of his life. Out of that condition he has fallen; to
it he hopes and aspires to return. Schism is that which breaks the
harmony, which places him in a wrong relation with all around him, and
sets him at war with himself. The first, the fundamental schism, as we
have seen, is sin. The Archschismatic, the father of schism, is the
Devil. Next, that is of the essence of schism which prevents man
struggling back into the harmony; which introduces any unnatural
limitations or compulsions into the movements of his soul with regard
to that Being, the righting of his relations with whom sets him right
with himself and with all the world. Whatever hinders the free
movement of man's spirit in relation to God, or limits or thwarts the
relations with his fellow-men into which he is drawn by the Spirit;
whatever, in fact, makes an order which is not spiritual in the sphere
of his duties and life, is schismatic. The first condition of the
higher order, the order of the Spirit, is liberty; the free movement
of the spiritual element, the free play of the spiritual life, is the
essential condition of that unity of the Church for which the Saviour
prayed, and for which the Spirit is striving still. When human orders
or forms are established as essential bases of communion, schism is
inevitable, simply because no human arrangement of man's relations can
be co-extensive and conterminous with the plan by which the Spirit is
working out the unity of the Church, and which is realizable only
through the entire freedom of the movement of His energy in individual
human hearts. The cause of schism, adhering to Laud's definitions, is
inherent in the very constitution of a system like that of our
national Established Church. It is but the repetition, within the
limits of a nation, and under national auspices, of the Roman
endeavour to found and to govern a church which should be conterminous
with Christendom. That which broke up the Roman system and shattered
the Roman idea of the Church, was the development of a true national
life in the countries of the west, which, speaking roundly, we may
date from the thirteenth century. The national development of France
in that century really broke up the Mediæval idea of unity, whether
conceived of, as by the nobler spirits, under the form of the Holy
Roman Empire, or by the commoner under the form of the Holy Roman
Church. The great Papal schism which immediately followed, and the
seventy years' captivity at Avignon, were the beginning of the end.
The dream was dreamed out. The vision of the unity of Christendom
under a visible vicar of Christ vanished for ever.
The vision which has replaced it is that of a Federal Christendom--a
confederation of national churches, each under its national head,
establishing in the spiritual some such order as the Commune dreams of
establishing in the political sphere. But it is the same enterprise.
We wish our able advocates of Establishment would consider it. It is
the endeavour to build the Church on a basis of authority, whether
external to the nation, as the Pope, in the ages in which Christendom
was conceived of as a visible kingdom, or internal to the nation, as
is necessary when the nation rises to the consciousness of
individuality, and the assertion of the independence of the national
life. It is an aiming at a kind of order in Christ's kingdom which has
the root of all disorders in the heart of it; and it has for three
centuries blocked the way of the true successor to the Mediæval idea
of the unity of Christendom, a unity of spirit unexpressed in
formularies or organizations, reigning in all the provinces of man's
social, political, and national life.
The Mediæval idea of the unity of the Church was a noble and beautiful
vision; far nobler and more beautiful, broader, deeper, grander, than
anything that is proposed or that can be proposed under the conditions
of a Law-established National Church. The movement of the Reformation
both in England and in Germany was a grand step of progress as regards
the actual condition and relations of men. The overthrow of the Roman
System, the branding it as of the Devil and not of Christ, was an
unspeakable gain and progress. But, yet as regards the idea of the
Church, in the form which the Reformation assumed in both countries,
we hold that it was distinctly a fall. That which England had to
substitute for the idea of a Church co-extensive with the Christian
name, ruled by a power which professed and was believed to rest its
rights and to draw its influence from a sphere beyond this world,
perpetuating in Christendom the tradition and the right of apostolic
rule, was a miserably narrow, shallow, and selfish assertion of the
right of a class to represent Christ in legislating or the Church, and
of a James I. to represent Him in ruling it. The inner life of the
Church System which the Reformation established in England shines
brightly only against the background of Roman atrocity; it is dark
enough against any conception of Christ's Kingdom inspired by the
Spirit or drawn from the word of God.
If the Establishment principle, as some of its passionate advocates
seem to imagine, is to be the permanent form of church life which is
to supplant in Christendom the idea which the Roman Church enshrined,
but marred and murdered in embodiment, then we say deliberately,
Europe, in the long run, will have lost immensely by the Reformation;
then the hope of the establishment of a Kingdom of Christ, in which
the weary heart of humanity shall realize the fulfilment of the hope
which poets and prophets have kept bright before the mind of the
world, will be forever dead.
The words Dissenter and Non-conformist are in one sense ugly words;
and Protestant must be put in the same category. They define unhappily
by negation, that which in its essential nature is strongly
affirmative, that which has the spirit of the 'Everlasting Yea' in it
as fully as any belief which has ever been formulated by or
promulgated among men. It is most unfortunate that the creeds and
principles which are most closely related to the political and
industrial, as well as to the spiritual progress of mankind, have by
accident, as it were, assumed this negative shape in their
proclamation of themselves to the world. It is their aspect to their
opponents which has become their definition; and this has affixed to
them a kind of stigma which has acted most injuriously on their
progress. We little realize how this negation has stood in our way.
The 'Dis' or the 'Non' is the essential part of us in the estimation
of a large number of Churchmen; while the Romanist still finds in the
word Protestant a perpetual justification of his antipathy, and a mark
for the shafts of his scorn. We have in all generations been regarded
as a dissatisfied and dissident race; strong only in opposition, and
living by envy and hatred of that which commands the support of the
great majority of mankind. It has been believed, in fact, that we
rather nurse our grievances, and make the most of them, lest if they
were to cease, our _raison d'être_ would at once expire. We believe
that this has been to a very large extent the popular notion of us
among the members of the Establishment; and the main reason for the
impression, were it probed, would be found to be the negation implied
in our name. To this day the term Protestant is perhaps the gravest
difficulty in the way of the spread of Evangelical ideas and of the
Evangelical spirit among the Latin nations of the West.
But in truth the 'yea' is with us rather than with our opponents. The
Establishment is the natural home of the true 'Negative Theology.'
'The moderation of the Church of England' is the chief boast of her
children--that is, of those who are most loyal to her principle of
Establishment, and to whom the term Erastian conveys nothing of which
they feel the slightest disposition to be ashamed. And it describes
something which is very characteristic of her policy, and which fills
a large place in the various 'Apologies' which several schools of
Essayists have recently given to the world. Moreover, it seems to us
to set forth something which must be maintained if the Established
Church is to endure. Just in the measure in which Church parties feel
themselves possessed by very positive convictions, and inspired by
burning zeal, so the limits of the system grow irksome; while the
strongest parties which have arisen within her communion, those with
the most intense convictions and the most spiritual aims, have been
driven to develope themselves outside her pale.
At this moment the party in the Church which is the most strongly
devoted to the Establishment principle is, theologically, the most
colourless. The most solid argument, as it seems to us, which sustains
the Establishment platform, would lead us to regard its ministers as a
kind of Levitical order--the clerisy, as Coleridge has it--which would
aim at little higher than a civilising, humanizing mission to the
ignorant, the vicious, and the wretched in the land. God forbid that
we should for a moment speak slightingly of such a service, rendered
by such men as are now at the disposal of the State for this most
blessed work. But it is no longer specially clerical work. The world
is busy about it by a thousand agencies, which more than compete with
the clerical; and it is hardly a question whether the world at large
would be prepared to maintain a costly and highly-favoured order of
men to do the work which in these days is the general charge of
society. But the work of the Gospel, of which St. Paul strikes the
key-note in the first chapters of his first Epistle to the
Corinthians, is of a widely different order. The school of which we
have spoken deals chiefly with the diffused light of Christianity
which is abroad in the atmosphere of a Christian state; the preacher
after the Pauline type (and the world cannot spare him yet) unveils
the solar light and fire. The affirmative force, the penetrating,
searching fire of Christianity, has from the first been mainly with
the communities which have been unable to find room within the bosom
of the moderation of the Church of England for their truth and for
their zeal. The moderation paled the one and chilled the other, and
drove them forth into a separation which seemed to them in those days
as bitter and unnatural as the violent disruption of a Christian home,
so strongly did the idea of the family life of a nation possess men's
hearts, so strongly did man's imagination cling to the visible unity
of the Church.
Few who love the truth of the Gospel would, we imagine, be disposed to
question that the higher life of the Church, that which makes its
gospel the power of God unto salvation, was more fully represented in
the early days of King James by men like Dr. Rainolds than by Bancroft
and the party which he and Whitgift represented at the Conference at
Hampton Court; by the Nonconforming clergy rather than by the Court
party in the early days of the Restoration; by the Methodists rather
than by the bishops and clergy of the Georgian Church; by the Free
Churchmen rather than by the residue of the Established clergy of
Scotland in the early days of our Queen. The affirmative side, the
energy of strong belief, strong assertion, strong purpose and
endeavour, has been seen mainly in the Nonconformist communities;
while the Established Churchmen have on the whole cultivated, with a
fair measure of energy and with conspicuous ability, the broad fields
of thought and life which the energy of more enterprising and earnest
communities has won. We claim for our fathers that they represented on
the whole the affirmation of the Gospel; the belief which sets a man's
face like a rock against the tide of worldly temptations and
seductions, which so few churches find strength to stem, while it
nerves his arm to wield effectually that sword of the Spirit which
cuts its way most deeply into the camp of the Devil, which the Lord
came to storm and to destroy. Apology and exposition have been the
main strength of Anglican Church literature and activity. The words
which have been the advanced guards as it were of liberty and
progress; the pointed, pungent, vivid, stirring treatises which have
laid hold most powerfully on the popular heart, and have been the
chief auxiliaries of the Gospel in turning men from darkness to light,
and from the power of Satan unto God, have come forth mainly from the
Nonconformist schools. Not that there has been, or can be, any
monopoly of gifts or functions in a country in which classes and
orders are so happily mixed and forced into association as in England.
The Church has not neglected the Sword of the Spirit, the
Nonconformists have not laid by the implements of culture; but still,
on the whole, taking a broad view of the character and work of the two
communions, we believe that there is substantial justice in the
distinctions which we have laid down.
The culture of the Church of England is a favourite topic with her
apologists. And most justly. On the whole, she has probably been the
most learned, polished, and politic Church in Christendom. We
Nonconformists have no long list of names of the first eminence in the
ranks of scholarship which may compare with the long line of able
scholars and champions of the faith whom the Anglican Church has sent
forth. But then the conditions of life in the Church of England are
precisely those which are most favourable to this special development;
and unfavourable, we think, in no small measure, to the growth and
free activity of yet higher things. Our men in all generations have
had in the main yet higher work on hand than theological scholarship;
and work, we venture to think, still more profoundly important to the
best interests of the community. The exiles in Holland in the early
years of the 17th century produced works of scholarship which may
compare with anything, save such a master-piece as Hooker's, which
emanated from the Anglican divines of their time. Henry Ainsworth was
one of the ablest Biblical scholars in Europe. He was 'living on
ninepence a week and some boiled roots' as a bookseller's porter, when
his master discovered his skill in Hebrew, and put him in the way of
more congenial work. In Moreri's Dictionary full justice is done to
Henry Ainsworth--'the able commentator on the Scriptures;' while he is
carefully distinguished from 'Ainsworth the heresiarch, one of the
chiefs of the Brownists;' nothing being more indubitable than that the
two were the same man. John Robinson, too, was a man of large culture
as well as conspicuous intellectual power. His controversial works
reveal a learning, a wisdom, a breadth of view, a foresight, a
large-hearted charity, joined to the most intense conviction on the
points which made him a separatist, which are rarely to be found in a
great theological champion in any age of the world.
But, after all, these men had higher and harder work on hand than
thinking and writing as scholars, and work which the world could less
easily spare. Those exiles in Holland, by their toil and their
suffering, were nursing and training that spirit which created the
American Republic, and which rules it still. The world probably wanted
that work just then more than the rarest scholarship; though
intellectual power was at a low ebb at that particular crisis in the
Anglican Church. And the world found what it supremely wanted, the
simplest, purest, toughest, noblest band of colonists ever sent forth
from any country. In the rude, rough times which succeeded, the
leaders of the great action which settled on a sure basis for ever the
liberties of our country, were of the Nonconformist Schools. The men
who did such work for England as the conduct of that long and
tremendous struggle to its glorious issue, might well be pardoned if
their culture were of a poorer type than that of their antagonists.
But it is really marvellous how, during the storm of the Civil War,
Nonconformist learning and intellectual ability flourished. Lord Brook
and Peter Sterry, leading spirits among the Independents, were deeply
tinctured with Platonic learning; they drew their large and liberal
ideas from a deeper than an Arminian spring. In John Howe strong
traces of the same Platonic element may be discovered. There seems to
have been a certain native affinity between this young Independency
and the thoughts of the great master of ideal philosophy in the
ancient world. At the time of the Restoration, probably the most
many-sided, variously-accomplished, and masterly man was Richard
Baxter. His position in relation to the Church and Nonconformity
through the most active part of his career, was not unlike the
position which Erasmus held during the Reformation between
Protestantism and Rome. But most certainly, despite his views 'on
National Churches,' it was mainly from the Nonconformist springs that
his life was nourished, and the weight of his influence was thrown
practically into the Nonconformist scale.
But perhaps of all the able men who were busy about things theological
and political, about the time of the Westminster Assembly, there was
not one who thought so freely and wrote so liberally as John Goodwin,
the Independent.[37] Far from feeling himself shut up, as we
Independents hear that we are shut up, to the traditions of the
elders, which were unquestionably strongly Calvinistic, he discerned
and grasped whatever good there might be in the Arminian scheme of
doctrine; while his views on public affairs, on political and
religious liberty, on toleration, on the welfare and progress of
states, were more in the key of modern ideas than anything else which
is to be met with in the literature of those times. A man must have
had a far sight and a brave heart who could write concerning the
Scriptures in those days and in such an atmosphere, 'The true and
proper foundation of the Christian religion is not ink and paper, not
any book or books, not any writing or writings whatsoever, whether
translations or originals, but that substance of matter, those
glorious counsels of God concerning the salvation of the world by
Jesus Christ, which are indeed represented and declared both in the
translations and the originals, but are distinct from both.'
Passing on to the midst of the next century, the Nonconformist
evangelists of the great Methodist revival were busy in other work
than that which occupied the scholars and divines of the not
over-earnest or spiritual Georgian Church. But it was more distinctly
church work; and it lay far nearer to the heart of the true welfare
and progress of the state. The men who established a strong Christian
influence over those classes of the population who in times of
political ferment are truly the dangerous classes, were mainly
Nonconformist. What England owed, socially and politically, to the
leaders and ministers of the great Evangelical revival, when the storm
of the Revolution swept through Europe, has never been calculated,
and never can be. The work of the evangelists among the colliers and
miners, and generally among the poorest of the poor, was a grand
safeguard to us when our turn of revolutionary trial came. The chief
reason why the Revolution in England ran in the main a peaceful and
orderly course, while in France it was convulsive and destructive, is
to be found in the nexus of the classes which the great Evangelical
movement established, and in the gleam of hope which it kindled in the
popular heart.
And it is not a little noteworthy that the party in the Church of
England which is seeking to repeat, though under widely different,
and, as we judge, quite lower forms, the Methodist revival, and is
striving hard, and not unsuccessfully, to bring some Christian
influence (though many would deny its right to the name) to bear on
the vast heathen class in our cities which perplexes and saddens all
churches, is that which bears most uneasily the yoke of Establishment,
and talks enthusiastically of Disestablishment as emancipation. One of
its orators the other day at St. James's Hall, young and enthusiastic,
no doubt, but the meeting cheered him to the echo, thus delivered
himself: 'Nothing is so fatal as this Establishment, and if the
suspension of Mr. Mackonochie should lead to the overturning of that
rooks'-nest, so much the better.' (Tumultuous cheering.)
But it may be said, and with a specious colour of truth, that one of
the chief virtues of the Establishment principle is, that it
comprehends these extreme parties and keeps them under some moderating
control. It seems to us that in the past it was entirely for the good
of England that the Church did not comprehend the Puritan, the
Nonconformist, the Methodist elements. Happily, it was not in the
nature of the Church to comprehend them in any sense. Had she been
capable of retaining them and subjecting them to her moderating hand,
the nation would have lost its ablest leaders, and the Church the most
glowing breath of its life. And the best thing that could happen now
would be that the High Anglicans should be let alone, to work out in
entire freedom their ideas. The State influence lends importance and
power to their movement with one hand, while it maddens them by
limiting and crippling their freedom of action on the other. There is
a spirit working within them which, whether we like it or not, has a
definite meaning and purpose, and is destined to become a power. It
may be trammelled, cramped, crippled by the action of authority, but
it cannot be exorcised or expelled. In the present temper of the
public mind, it has a distinct vocation of its own, which it would be
well for itself and for the world that it should work out freely. The
sooner that it is set perfectly free to try with its own resources
what its method is worth, the better for itself, and the better for
the people whom it dreams that it can lead and save.
We have spoken casually of the Calvinistic and Arminian creeds. The
subject is worthy of some close examination from the point of view of
the present article; inasmuch as it is often urged by the advocates of
the Establishment, as a strong point in its favour, that the leading
Anglican divines of King James and King Charles led the reaction
against Calvinism, and made room for Arminian doctrine and influence
in the Established Church. It is a point which is urged in the able
and temperate article on the Church and Nonconformity which appeared
in the last number of the _Quarterly Review_, which, as well as its
liberal rival, evidently feels that the question is no longer
speculative but practical, and must be dealt with as one of the
leading and most pressing public questions of the day. The tone of
both those articles is most significant and assuring to
Nonconformists. They both recognise most cordially the large service
which the free churches of England have rendered to the cause of
liberty and progress, though they do not, of course, yet see their way
to make the principle of religious freedom supreme in the conduct of
our ecclesiastical affairs. Hear the _Quarterly_:--'The sects of
Nonconformity have been of great service to English progress; it does
not follow from this that it would be a great gain to England if there
were nothing but sects in which its religion could take refuge and
find expression.' (_Quarterly Review_, No. 260, p. 234.) The change of
tone surely is most significant here.
But to return to our immediate subject. King James had no sooner
reached England and tested the adulation, so grateful to his coarse,
vain nature, with which the Anglican prelates were ready to welcome
him, than he discovered that Presbytery agreed with monarchy 'as God
agreed with the devil.' Still he was a strong Calvinist, and held the
Genevan doctrines in common with Whitgift and the leading doctors of
the Anglican Church. He was not without shrewd native wit, and in the
Hampton Court Conference, bitter and even brutal as he was to the
Puritans, his strong common sense rebelled against the policy which
the Bishops would have forced upon him. We owe probably to him that
the Lambeth Articles were not incorporated in the formularies of the
Church. But before the end of his reign he found that Calvinism agreed
with monarchy as ill as Presbytery, and the Church lapsed slowly but
steadily, or rose as some may prefer to call it, into Arminian
doctrine. But the remarkable thing about the matter is that Calvinism
declined and Arminianism rose in favour, just in the measure in which
the clergy lent themselves to be ministers of the Court. As matter of
history, the vaunted reaction against Calvinism was coincident and
consonant with the cry, 'Church and King.' And this opens out an
important truth on which it is worth our while for a moment to dwell.
Mr. Froude has recently indulged, in a wild, vigorous way, in a
glorification of Calvinism, before an audience whose traditional
sympathies, at any rate, must have been strongly on his side. He
suggests a pregnant question: How is it that a system which is so
terribly dishonouring to the goodness and righteousness of God, should
have afforded such an inspiration to some of the very noblest men who
have ever left their trace on the history of mankind? He gives a list
of great names, noble names, among the noblest of our race; and with
regard to most of them, at any rate, the claim or charge of being
strongly under the influence of Augustinian ideas of the Divine
government cannot be denied. And yet there is something horrible in
the picture of the Divine principles and methods of action, which
Calvinism in its pure and naked form presents. It is difficult for us
to contemplate, without shuddering, the ideas of divine and human
things which seem to have been adopted with grim satisfaction by some
of the very strongest and most high-minded men who have ever swayed
the destinies of the world. How are we to account for it?
Surely the solution of the difficulty is to be found in the fact that
the great Calvinists held more vitally to the affirmations than to the
negations of their creed. Its bearing on them and their lives, in an
age of strong swift action, was the thing of vital personal moment;
its bearing on their fellow-men and the universal government of God,
though expressed in terribly clear and logical formularies, held a
very secondary place in their minds. The grand idea, God's
election--man the chosen agent of God, raised up, though all unworthy,
for the setting forth of His counsels, and the execution of His
will--seized and possessed them wholly; and the outside bearing of the
truths, so to speak, appeared but partially to their moral sight. The
world was then a great camp, in which the fiercest martial passions
were raging. Sections of society, as well as nations, were in chronic
and stern antagonism; and it was not so unnatural to regard in those
days as reprobate children of the devil those whom it was almost a
matter of religious duty to afflict and to destroy. A man easily
persuades himself that an enemy is a child of darkness when his sword
will soon be at his throat. Terms have changed; but the language and
thoughts of the French army and the National Guards in Paris about
each other, repeat in substance the relations of Protestant and
Romanist, Englishman and Spaniard, Cavalier and Roundhead, in the
Elizabethan and Caroline days. The thing appeared to them quite
otherwise than to us, who have been studying for ages the Christian
doctrine of the brotherhood of mankind; a doctrine which, to our shame
be it spoken, was first forced on the public notice of peoples by
profane and godless writers who laid the train of the first French
Revolution.
We need only read the language in which Hawkins or Raleigh utter the
thoughts of their hearts about the Spaniards, to comprehend how easy
it was for them to regard themselves as elect instruments for the
overthrow of the devil and his works, in their daring, but
semi-piratical forays into the harbours and the treasure fleets of
Spain. Hawkins, with his cargo of slaves on board, crowded so close
that fever began to rage among his crew, could hardly have comforted
himself so complacently, in the midst of a terrible calm in the
tropics, with the thought that 'God never suffers His elect to
perish,' unless his whole thought had been occupied with what he was
doing against those whom he believed to be ministers of darkness,
while his relations and duties to his hapless fellow-creatures were
dropped out of sight. Calvinism easily inspires men, that is, the
larger sort of men, who are capable of the inspiration, with the sense
of a Divine call to a Divine service, and it makes them sharp as flint
and hard as iron in working out their mission. And these great
Protestants and Puritans in the age of the struggle for life saw,
partly, no doubt, through prejudiced eyes, so much moral foulness in
those with whom they were contending, that reprobation did not seem so
dread a doctrine in their sight as it seems in ours; who sit down
calmly, after the great battle is over, to think out the system in all
its bearings, and to examine its principles in the light of modern
cosmopolitan sympathy and charity. To us much of it seems simply
revolting, and we marvel how it could ever have commended itself as
of God, as it unquestionably did commend itself, to some of the
wisest, noblest, and most merciful of our race.
The Calvinism of the Reformers, as a body, is of course
unquestionable. Even Whitgift, bitterly as he hated, and hard as he
struck the Puritans, shared their profoundest convictions as
theologians, as the Lambeth Articles fully reveal. So long as the
battle with Rome was a life and death struggle, that is, through the
whole reign of Elizabeth, Calvinistic ideas strung the courage and
energy of the chief actors to the keenest tension. When the Church had
won its position, and was settling down into a respectable
institution, one of whose chief functions seemed to be to sustain the
dogma of the divine right of kings, then the Arminian bed was made
ready for it; and most of the chief actors in the next stage of the
drama in which the Church was the main prop of the monarchy, leaned
strongly to the Arminian side. The men, on the other hand, who had to
fight the battle of liberty--liberty of body, liberty of thought,
liberty of spirit--against all the force which the world of authority
could bring to bear against them, were Calvinist to the backbone.
God's elect they held themselves to be, weak, unworthy instruments, by
whom He was yet pleased to manifest His glory, and to accomplish His
will. And this was the backbone of their strength, '_'Not I, but the
grace of God which is in me._'
It may well be questioned whether anything weaker than this sense of a
personal call, a personal inspiration, to which the Calvinist readily
opened his soul, could have borne the conquerors through that
tremendous struggle which assured the liberties of Englishmen forever,
first against the spiritual tyrant at Rome, next against the domestic
tyrant on the throne of their own realm. Perhaps the Puritan struggle
against episcopal and regal tyranny, which brought the Independents to
the front, was the sternest ever fought out in the world. The best
measure of the grandeur of Cromwell's proportions is to be found in
the measure of the men whom he ruled. The English under Elizabeth
proved themselves, in the Narrow Seas, on the Spanish Main, amid
Arctic ice, and all around the world, the most masterful race upon
earth. The spirit had not died out in the Caroline days. The Puritan
party nursed its traditions and cherished its fire, as, among other
significant signs, these words of Pym reveal:--'Blasted may that
tongue be, that in the smallest degree shall derogate from the glory
of those halcyon days which our fathers enjoyed during the government
of that ever-blessed, never-to-be-forgotten, royal Elizabeth.'
The struggle within the bosom of such a nation demanded powers of the
highest and strongest order, and drew them forth. And the man who
could conduct that struggle to a successful issue and rule such a
strong-handed, imperious race as the English of the Commonwealth,
could have found little beyond his strength in any enterprise in any
age of the world; and nothing but that spirit which from the positive
side of their Calvinistic creed entered into Cromwell, and the men of
whom he became the organ and the head, could have borne them through
the tremendous pressure. No 'sweetness and light' of intellectual
culture, no sense of 'natural human power' could have borne John
Robinson's company of pilgrims first to Holland, and then across the
stormy Atlantic, and given them strength to hold together, as they say
of themselves touchingly, 'in a most strict and sacred bond and
covenant of the Lord, of the violation of which we make great
conscience; and by virtue whereof we do hold ourselves strictly tied
to all care for each other's good, and of the whole by every, and so
mutual.'--(Letter of Robinson and Brewster to Sir E. Sandys.) It was
this spirit, which no conformity to an Elizabethan, still less to a
Jacobean church, could have nurtured, which made New England, and
through New England made America.
Calvinism was so profoundly associated through that age with the
advancing cause of the spiritual and political liberties of our
country that the Arminian bias of the dignified clergy of the
Establishment, which began to manifest itself after the settlement of
the Church and the kingdom under King James, is by no means a noble or
beautiful feature in its history. Arminianism in the Church went hand
in hand with worldly compliance, slavish homage to princes, idolatrous
rites, gorgeous ritual, and episcopal tyranny; and it went down with
the Church righteously to ruin under the shock of the men who did
believe themselves called, quickened, and raised up as witnesses, by
the God of righteousness and truth.
We look too little at these doctrinal developments in the light of the
political life of the times which produce them. The connection is a
profound one between schemes of doctrine and political ideas. A point
too little considered is the truth of a scheme of doctrine for its
times. They must be blind indeed who cannot see that with the
Calvinistic Puritans, and not with the Arminian Anglicans, rapidly
tending to the Laudian Church, were stirring through the whole of
that struggle the motive forces of the progress of society.
But the question now arises, and it is the central point of this
discussion of the genius of Nonconformity in its relation to the
progress of society, What is this affirmation of Nonconformity which
has made it in all ages a factor of supreme importance in the culture
and development of mankind? It stands as a witness against the State
organization of Christianity, but that is not its strength. Not what
it stands against, but what it stands for, is the secret of its power.
Briefly, then, it witnesses for the ancient historic and Christian
idea of the Church, as the manifestation and the organ of the Spirit
working freely in individual consciences and hearts. It is
Nonconformity which truly inherits and cherishes the legacy of early
and mediæval Christian society, which the Roman organization of
Christendom did its best to destroy. Throughout the whole of the
Mediæval period the true development of the Church was carried on, not
on the basis of authority, or by the application of accepted doctrines
and methods, but by the original energetic action of individual men
and the disciples whom they might gather round them, who brought new
ideas into the Church, and leavened it with their own independent
life. The antagonism of constituted Church authorities to all the
leaders of new modes of Christian activity and development, is
precisely parallel to the treatment which original men of genius in
all ages have met with at the hand of the constituted authorities of
society. The young monasticism had to fight its way desperately into
the hallowed sphere of Church organization. 'It is the ancient advice
of the Fathers,' says Cassianus, 'advice which endures, that a monk at
any cost must fly bishops and women.' And the bishops repaid the
antipathy with interest. The struggles of the monks and bishops in the
West, in the sixth and seventh centuries, form the most interesting
and pregnant chapter of their ecclesiastical history. The monks had to
fight hard for their independence, and to fight their way into
influence. But no intelligent student of the history of that period,
we imagine, can doubt that the higher life and aim of the Church was
on the whole more fully represented in the irregular than in the
regular line.
How far such a man as St. Bernard was in his day a Nonconformist,
would be an interesting subject to discuss. Champion of orthodoxy as
he was, and maker of Popes, his position was far more like that of the
Puritan in the Anglican Church of King James than at first sight
appears. But the discussion of this question would lead us too far out
of the direct line of our argument. What hard work St. Francis had to
wring recognition for himself and his tattered mendicant company from
Pope Innocent III., great and far-seeing man as he was, is well known
to all students of Mediæval history. And yet St. Francis and holy
poverty for the time saved the Church. Though the mendicant orders
soon grew fearfully corrupt, and made the Reformation doubly
imperative, yet their brief career of purity and power added, it is
not too much to say, two centuries to the life of the Roman system,
and staved off the Ecclesiastical Revolution till the Western nations
were full-grown, and were strong enough to use nobly the freedom which
they might win. The life of the Church has been cherished, and its
influence has been fed in all ages, by men who drew fresh ideas, fresh
inspiration, from the life of the Saviour as set forth in the Divine
Word. And the Mediæval Church had room for them. There was nothing out
of tune with its professed organization in this direct appeal to the
fountain head of truth. It could include its Nonconformists, and find
room and work for them; though it had but a dim eye to distinguish
between its Nonconformists and its heretics, and was prone to harry
the last with fearful brutality,--a brutality which would be blankly
incomprehensible, for they were often far from brutal men who
exercised it, but for the idea which filled the minds of Churchmen,
that heresy was the spawn of hell. When the Catholic Church, like the
Anglican in after ages, was unable to comprehend its Nonconformists,
could only cast out its Luthers, as Anglicanism cast out its Barrowes,
its Robinsons, its Baxters, its Whitfields, it ceased to be Catholic
and became Roman, and all the living energy of the Church, and all its
promise, passed over to the opposite side.
A church like the Anglican, in which its judges of doctrine confess
frankly that really they have nothing to do with Scripture or with
truth in settling Church controversies, but simply with the legal,
and, therefore, we freely allow, the liberal construction of certain
documents settled by the legislative authority of the State centuries
ago, would have been regarded with simple horror by the great Mediæval
Churchmen, on whose limited views of things we somewhat loftily look
down. The belief did then survive in the Church that the Spirit of the
Lord is a free Spirit; and that the Church is constituted, not by
documents, but by the perpetual presence and manifestation of that
Spirit, though it came at last to believe that He dwelt in a shrine so
narrow and foul as the Roman Court. This idea the Anglican Church has
deliberately renounced, while the Nonconformists have upheld it. The
constitution of the Establishment is distinctly not by the Spirit, but
by the letter of legal documents; and those in whom the Spirit stirs
new energies, and moves to new agencies, have no choice but to pass
outside her pale.
The great churchmen of Mediæval Christendom--Benedict, Boniface,
Dunstan, Anselm, Bernard, Francis--would have found themselves not out
of tune with the Independent, John Robinson, when he said to his
pilgrims as he sent them forth, that he
'miserably bewailed the state and condition of the Reformed
Churches who were come to a period in religion, and would
go no further than the instruments of their reformation.
As, for example, the Lutherans, they could not be drawn to
go beyond what Luther saw; for whatever part of God's will
he had further imparted and revealed to Calvin they will
rather die than embrace it. And so also you see the
Calvinists, they stick where he left them--a misery much to
be lamented; for though they were precious shining lights
in their times, yet God had not revealed his whole will to
them; and were they now living, they would be as ready and
willing to embrace further light as that which they had
received. I beseech you to remember it, it is an article of
your Church Covenant, that you be ready to receive whatever
truth shall be made known unto you from the written Word of
God.'... 'I am very confident the Lord hath more truth yet
to break forth out of his holy word.'[38]--_Robinson's
Farewell Address to the Pilgrims._
But we think that these great Churchmen would have found themselves
entirely out of tune with the ablest doctors who should seek to settle
the faith on the basis of legal authority, and whose Church courts
could give no dispensation to the word of the Bible, or the
illumination of the Spirit, to move men to think and speak in the
Church otherwise than it had been determined that they should think
and speak three centuries ago. We hear much of historic Churches. It
is, we believe, Mr. Arnold's term. The writer of the very able and
liberal article in the current number of the _Edinburgh Review_ adopts
the term with high approval, and sustains Mr. Arnold's argument
against us, that by separation we cut ourselves off from history. We
answer that the Church of England made a new thing in history at the
Reformation,--a poor, base image of a Divine idea; while the
Nonconformists maintain and cherish the traditions of history, and are
in full tune with all that has been deepest and strongest in the life
of Christendom, in holding fast this liberty, to watch for, to
entertain, and to reflect, the 'fresh light that is ever breaking
forth from the word of God.' It was the Article of the Church Covenant
of the Pilgrims, it is in our Church Covenant still, and it will
remain in our Church Covenant while Independency endures.
And herein our Church Covenant is at war with the idea which Sir
Roundell Palmer developed briefly, in his able and earnest argument
for establishment in the debate on Mr. Miall's motion. His speech was
probably the ablest which was delivered on his side of the question.
He seemed to think that there was a certain fixity in religious truth,
which offers a strong contrast to the continually progressive
character of scientific truth, and which renders Establishment a more
feasible thing in relation to religion than it would be in relation to
truths belonging to the continually shifting and expanding scientific
sphere. There can be no question, we imagine, that this idea of fixity
possessed the minds of the men who created the Anglican formularies,
and is behind the defence of their integrity which a powerful party in
the Church so strenuously maintains. Some of the ablest and most loyal
of English Churchmen hold firmly this finality doctrine; indeed it is
the only logical justification of the subscription which has hitherto
been the imperative demand of the Church. Lord Bacon's remarks on this
point are interesting and important. He presses the question, 'Why the
civil state should be purged and restored by good and wholesome laws
made every three or four years by Parliament assembled, devising
remedies as fast as time breedeth mischief; and contrariwise the
Ecclesiastical Estate should still continue upon the dregs of time,
and receive no attention now for these five and forty years and more?'
With Bacon in his question stand Greenwood, Barrowe, Ainsworth,
Robinson, Jacob, and the long line of Nonconformists; while the
principle of finality has ruled in all ages the policy of the National
Church, and has been decisively and even vehemently expressed at
critical periods of its history. New adjustments of doctrinal belief
establish themselves within the Anglican pale; but it is by doing
violence to the fundamental principle on which the Church is founded,
for it is unquestioned in our ecclesiastical courts that the Articles
of Religion were intended to fix the form of truth to be developed in
the teaching of the Church of England so long as that Church should
endure.
But there is a complete confusion in this notion between the subject
matter of theology and the modes of its manifestation in the forms of
human thought. In the sense in which theology takes its place among
the creations of the human intellect, the highest, the noblest, the
most influential on the culture of mankind, it is subject to movement
and progress like the rest. Because the science of divine things has
been treated systematically as a fixed form of truth, capable of at
any rate approximately complete expression in the propositions which
form the creeds of the Church; because the measures of bygone
centuries are rigidly applied, and all excursion of the reason beyond
their logical pale is treated with stern repression, theology has
fallen from the upper heaven of man's intellectual sphere, and grovels
weakly and painfully in the dust. Theology learns nothing and forgets
nothing, like the Bourbons; and, like the Bourbons, she has fallen out
of the march of the world. There is no province of human thought about
which men so shrug their shoulders as about theology.
We believe that those champions of the Church of England who glory in
their formularies, as containing and maintaining the 'form of sound
words once delivered to the saints,' and who regard them as the
strongest bulwarks of the truth, are glorying in her weakness. She has
followed systematically the policy against which the great Founder of
the empire of modern thought so energetically protested. She suffers
no revision, no readjustment, except by tricks of interpretation which
fill timid men with distress and honest men with shame. And yet
readjustment is imperative. Theology, in the very nature of things,
must progress with the progresses of the world or fall out of its
march. The connection is a profound one, as we have said, between the
secular life of an age and its religious beliefs. The history of the
growth of the Augustinian, the Calvinistic, and the Arminian
theologies is profoundly interesting, when studied in the light of the
vital secular movements of the ages which gave them birth. The present
collapse of the Augustinian theology has its springs distinctly in the
secular sphere. Because the world has been progressing so rapidly,
enlarging its views of all things around it, searching out the secrets
of nature and of man, theology must move on or perish. And, in truth,
in no province of human thought and life is there stronger
fermentation; spirit working out new forms of expression and action,
and working so strongly that the old vessels of the State creed can
contain it no longer; they must be unbound, or it will burst them to
pieces. The belief of this age about God, man's relation to God, God's
work for man, God's way in the government of the world, demands
readjustment quite as much as the biography, the chemistry, the
geology which our fathers handed down to us; and the idea that this
new spirit must be made to let theology alone, that theology is too
sacred, too settled in a fixed form by a Divine hand, to be capable of
progress or expansion, is the nurse of atheism and the mother of
despair.
But it seems to us that a State Churchman, to be entirely consistent,
is bound to maintain this as the fundamental principle of the
constitution of his Church. Room for vital growth and progress cannot
be afforded openly without involving the destruction of the whole
system. The ultimate test is not the word of truth or the mind of the
Spirit, but the construction, more or less liberal, and this is
largely a matter of accident, of formal, and on some points narrowly
dogmatic documents, formulated in the heat of intense controversy
three centuries ago. We recognise fully and cordially rejoice in the
progress of belief which the thinkers and writers of the Anglican
Church have practically secured, in spite of their bonds. There is no
little truth, to our shame be it spoken, in the boast which is often
on their lips, that the progress of theology in our generation is due
far more largely to the labours of Anglican than of Nonconformist
divines.
But the reason of this does not lie in our system; it was founded in
freedom, and to maintain and develop freedom; it lies in our own weak,
timid, and faithless hearts. But the very fact of the large
development of liberal ideas, of an expansive and progressive theology
in the Anglican Church, must surely call not only serious but decisive
attention to the miserably uncertain and insufficient basis on which
it rests. There is nothing broader and firmer for an Anglican of the
liberal school to rest upon than the chance of a liberal
interpretation of stringent articles, by a court the composition of
which is always changing, the most influential member of which is the
State officer, who has risen to the proud pre-eminence of the first
lay subject in the realm by the arts and services of legal and
political life. A latitudinarian chancellor, a Gallio, it may be,
'caring for none of these things'--not but that Gallio was in his day
and with his duties quite right--may pronounce a judgment which fills
one great party in the Church with dismay, and strains the system
nigh to bursting on that side. A pious and conscientious chancellor
may, by another judgment, strain the system as strongly on the other.
But recently the pious and able Lord Hatherley pronounced a judgment,
in which he laid down certain propositions concerning the penal
character of the sufferings of Christ, which led to much searching of
heart, and a great deal of anxious correspondence, before it could be
settled whether with a good conscience the Broad Churchman could
remain in the Church if the dicta of the Voysey judgment were to be
accepted as law. And these swayings on one side or the other are pure
matter of accident. A Dean of the Arches with one bias gives offence
to one party, a Dean with another bias offends equally their
opponents. And Churchmen are kept in constant and painful uncertainty
as to the authoritative decisions which may at any moment be laid down
on matters which they feel to be of supreme, of sacred importance, and
on which they believe that a man, rather than be untrue to his own
convictions, should be prepared to die.
It appears to us that this growing freedom in the Church, the fact of
which we gladly recognise, is revealing, by the new decisions which it
is constantly challenging, the miserably narrow and uncertain basis on
which this boasted culture and liberty rest. What progress the advance
of society compels Church teachers to make is made in violation of the
fundamental pact on which the community rests; and it seems to be
inevitable that sooner or later this fact will become so glaring, that
the attempt to maintain the articles of religion in face of the
opinion of Churchmen will be abandoned in very shame.
So much the better, many broad Churchmen will say. The articles are
the skeleton of a dead theology, it would be well if it were buried
out of sight. Not so, say Sir R. Palmer and the great body of zealous
Churchmen whom he represents so ably. And of the rest--the synagogue
of the Libertines, we might call them--we may surely say that a Church
in which all sorts of opinions are endowed and invested with such
sanction and influence as a State establishment can impart, would
become in time more like a synagogue of Satan than a Church.
We contend, then, strenuously for an _honest_ liberty of thought,
bounded only by the broad limits of Scripture and the teachings of the
Holy Ghost; and we hold that it is only possible to realize it under
our independent conditions. The attempt to square the free movements
of the Christian mind of the community with the legal construction of
ancient Church documents must grow increasingly impracticable, and in
the end hateful to all upright, earnest, truth-loving souls.
But it is not as the minister to the intellectual progress of the
community, though the progress of an age is never secure until it is
keyed by its theology, that the genius of Nonconformity has rendered
the most conspicuous service to the world. Its great mission in all
ages has been to care for the purity and intensity of the spiritual
life of society. Power to live in holier, closer fellowship as
Christians, to make the Church more like what Christ meant it to be,
and through the Church the world, has been the one thing which
Nonconformists have striven to secure by separation, and to cherish
for the help and salvation of mankind. They have done much for the
light of divine truth; they have done more for the life of God in
society. It may be said of them with a truth of which Lucretius little
dreamed, noble dreamer as he was--
'Et quasi cursores vitäi lampada tradunt.'
And to estimate this fairly we must turn again to the past, to the
_fons et origo_ of our power.
The English Reformation differed in one most essential point, be it
for good, be it for evil, from all the other Reformations of Europe.
It was distinctly a constitutional movement, carried out from the
commencement to the close by the constituted authorities of the land.
It was not forced on the rulers by a burst of popular enthusiasm,
stirred by some great preacher; nor on the other hand, and on this
point we often do it scant justice, was it forced by the rulers on a
careless or unwilling people. In the first and second Parliaments of
Elizabeth, the House of Commons was far in advance both of the Lords
and of the Queen. It was fairly the movement of the nation acting
through its political organs. Hence it had a character of compromise
here in England which it bore nowhere abroad. Various interests had to
be conciliated, as is inevitable in government under a mixed
constitution like ours. The laggards had to be thought of as well as
the vanguard. Catholics as well as Puritans had to be considered in
every bill that was passed through Parliament; and thus our cumbrous
incoherent Church system, the child of policy and compromise, was
shaped and grew.
This method was the parent of many miserable evils. The monarchical
and aristocratic influence was altogether too potent. Had the House of
Commons under Elizabeth been free to carry out its judgment, a Church
might have grown up pure, noble, beautiful, compared with the
present, and might have spared the nation some of the sorest pains of
Nonconformity. A hint of what might have been possible we see in the
curious account of the Church at Northampton in 1571; and still more
perfectly in the first draft of the Constitution of the Hessian
Church. But then the result would have been gained most probably, and
none knew it better than Elizabeth, at the cost of a tremendous and
premature civil war. The key of Elizabeth's policy, and the secret of
the great work which she accomplished, was that beyond even Cecil she
was a national politician. But on the whole, and in the long run, we
are bound to confess that the evils were not without at any rate some
counterbalancing advantages. It is always thus with all great human
institutions and movements. More or less of evil mingles with the good
in all of them; and even in those in which the evil seems largely to
preponderate, there are always some elements of blessing to be set in
the opposite scale.
Now this feature of our English Reformation has had one remarkable
result. Being essentially a compromise, a concession to parties on
this side and on that; being the fruit, not of the toil and travail of
our most spiritual men, but of the politic judgment, of the average
intelligence and spiritual life of the community, the purer spirits,
the men of the higher order, touched with the diviner fire, were from
the very first driven into opposition. Instead of resting in the
movement and ruling it, they found that it stopped miserably short of
what they believed to be practicable, and were sure was right. The
foremost men of the nation in point of spiritual insight and power
from the first were discontent, and then, as time wore on, malcontent,
through the earlier days of the Puritan struggle; and then, when time
brought no reform, but rather tightening of bonds, they were
constrained to become Separatists. A pure and intense, if not
powerful, Nonconformist party began to organize itself, of whose life
and aims in the early days we could say much did our space allow,
which, sealing its testimony with its tears and its blood, handed down
its sacred legacy to succeeding generations. We owe it to the special
constitution of the Anglican Church, the method of whose growth we
have glanced at, that in all generations since the Reformation there
has been a considerable, earnest, enthusiastic body of Christian men
and women in England devoted to the cause of political and
ecclesiastical reform.
This state of things, the coincidence of political and ecclesiastical
tyranny on the one side, and of political and ecclesiastical
Nonconformity on the other, due to the special organization of the
National Church, has had two notable and benign results. It has
identified the spiritual and the secular progress of society in
England. With us the great political questions fell early into
spiritual hands. The men who sympathized with the 'Millenary
Petition,' were the men who commenced under James the Parliamentary
struggle which was conducted to a triumphant issue under Charles. And
if we contrast our own revolutionary struggles with the French, the
last--dare we say the last?--the ghastliest, and most horrible act of
which is but now complete, we shall estimate the full significance of
the fact which we have noted. Then, and not less important, it has
kept our best and most earnest men constantly in opposition--in the
wilderness as it were, voices crying in the desert--whereby the purest
life of the nation has been kept free from the corruption which never
fails to attend on worldly prosperity and power. Thus it has been able
to preserve its life pure, its light intense, to illumine the darkness
and enlighten the dulness of the whole community.
We hear much of what the culture of the Church has done for
Nonconformity; and we gladly acknowledge it. We hear less of what the
life of Nonconformity has done for the Church. The balance of the
exchange would show the largest debt, the debt of life, due to the
Nonconformist side.
And this great Nonconformist party has been in all generations the
salt of our national life, politically as well as spiritually. The
resistance of the seven Bishops to the despotic tolerating edict of
King James, is often quoted by Church writers as a noble contribution
of the Establishment to the cause of political liberty; and justly,
though the Non-jurors must be set in the opposite scale. But we cannot
but think of the nobler Nonconformists, persecuted and ground down, to
whom the edict would have offered a door of escape from grievous ills,
but who stood with the party of resistance, because they cared more
for the liberty of the nation than for their own welfare, and
preferred to suffer still if the constitutional liberties of England
might thereby be sustained. This despised and persecuted band has at
the critical moment ruled our revolutions, it has kindled our
revivals, it has won and watched our liberties. By the stimulus it has
afforded, and the confidence it has created, it has saved us the
tremendous catastrophes, the cataclysms, through which alone progress
has won its way in less favoured countries. And this is one of the
high elements of our happy estate as a people, which we owe
incidentally--no thanks, however, to the founders of the
Establishment--to the special form which the Reformation assumed in
England, and to the organization of our national Church.
Whether the incidental good has or has not been counterbalanced by the
very grave and palpable evils which our establishment of religion
generated, we have no time here to consider. But a comparison of the
actual state of religion, the vigour and vitality of the religious
life in England at this moment, with that of Germany, Scandinavia,
Holland, and Switzerland,[39] where we should say that the Reformation
had at once freer course than in England and more decisive results,
may suggest the question whether, looking at the matter on a large
scale, and through a long day, the loss is altogether on our side.
Now, it is just this Nonconformist element, this light, this leaven,
as we contend, of our national life for ages, which it is proposed by
an able and influential party to bring into the national
Establishment, making it thereby partaker of the fatness of the olive
tree of the State Church. But if our argument is worth anything, it is
just the missing this through all these ages which has been its
salvation. Bring it in, make it rich and powerful, give it State props
and stays, and you will rob it of all that makes its life so pungent
and stimulating, and will rob the nation thereby of an element which
nothing else can supply, and which it would most surely miss. Endow
it, and write over its temple, 'Ichabod: The Lord has left it, the
glory is gone.'
But why should it be so? Here we approach the core of the controversy
between ourselves and the ablest and most liberal of our opponents,
with a glance at which we shall conclude. It may be said, and is said,
by the broadest of the advocates of Establishment: This spirit has
done its work as Nonconformist, and done it bravely; but in that form
its work is done. The time is come, we are told, when it should leave
the wilderness and enter the pale of society, to work from within,
inside the legal pale, at the building up of the Christian State.
Surely, it is urged, there is something unhealthy in the life of a
community when so much that is purest and most intense is
Nonconformist; the more it can be brought in, the better manifestly
for the State. On this point the real controversy with those of our
opponents whom we most respect and sympathize with, hinges; and it can
only be dealt with by opening a yet deeper question, out of which the
true answer must come. In such a world as this, the purest spirit, the
spirit of Christ, must always to a large extent be Nonconformist. It
was so with the Patriarchs, it was so with the Judges, it was so with
the Prophets, it was so with the Lord, it was so with the Apostles, it
was so with the founders of the great Orders, it was so with all the
chief leaders of Reformations and Revivals, who at critical moments
have brought salvation for a nation or for the world.
And it must be so, at least, until some far off millennial day.
Perfect amalgamation of elements is not possible in a world
constituted like this. Unity of form, a visible body comprehending all
the higher movements of the life of society, is a thing we may dream
of, but shall never see. Just as spirit and flesh keep up an interior
antagonism, and progression is possible only through this inward
conflict, so there must be this interior discord in every human
political society; and its progress will be realized by the action on
its mass, its material, of some finer spirit, which must in some
measure dwell apart, feeding its life from a diviner spring.
And this separation is the reverse of isolation. 'In the world, not of
the world,' is the Christian rule, and it is the very opposite of that
of the ascetic. It is the glory of England that there is the freest
opportunity for the play of the influence of the smaller communities,
which are held together by some special sympathies and beliefs, on the
great community at large. And now at last the nation, by opening the
Universities, has allowed to these communities the fullest advantages
for the culture of their own individual life. It appears to us, to sum
up the argument, that the subjection of the free Christian spirit,
which seeks and strives to gather light and inspiration continually in
fellowships which rest on the word of truth and watch for the guidance
of the Spirit, to the regimen of legal authority, just destroys that
in it which makes it mordant to the lust and the selfishness of the
world around it, that which has been kept in comparative purity
through all these ages by being Nonconformist, and which will remain
Nonconformist, or, at any rate--for when there is no Church there can
be no Nonconformity--will remain free with the freedom which reigns
where the Spirit of the Lord is, while the world endures.
No doubt it is at first sight a fair vision, this inclusion of all
decently orderly and decently Christian ministries in the land within
one pale of order and law: one service, one liturgy, one recognised
ministry, one administration of ordinances, throughout the whole
country,--the whole people taught out of the same books, at the same
time, and by men who have the same claim to their attention, until the
nation, in the visible uniformity of its religious acts and
expressions, presents a fair image of one visible Church. But it is a
mere _mirage_, a mocking image, no more. The kind of spiritual order
which would grow up under such conditions would be deathlike and not
lifelike; and the visible uniformity could be maintained only by the
strong repression of all that makes the life and progress of a Church.
There is, in the intellectual sphere, something very like this in
France. The course of instruction for the youth of France, in all the
institutions which are sustained and directed by the State, is very
elaborately and admirably organized. It used to be said of a recent
Minister of Public Instruction, that it was his glory to reflect that
he could sit in his bureau and read from a manual on his table the
lesson which was being taught at that particular moment in all the
public schools in France. Now, the French Government manuals are
admirable. There has been an immense improvement in our English
schoolbooks since their compilers condescended to look into the
schoolbooks of France. The lesson thus given at a particular hour
throughout the country would probably be in every way excellent--the
best of its kind. But what is the broad result of this monstrous
uniformity, this _par ordre supérieur_, in every department of a
youth's education? It turns out admirable scholars, devoted to
scholarship, and admirable theoretical politicians educated in the
philosophy of citizenship above every nation in the world. But when a
tremendous shock, as at this moment, has broken up their accustomed
order, and thrown each in a measure on his own resources to choose the
wisest course in perilous emergencies, an utter want of the highest
faculty--the faculty of self-guidance in emergencies--is revealed; the
people have been as shepherdless sheep, and for want of the higher
leadership, we may say, France has been lost.
We see, then, all that is fair in aspect in this vision of one happy,
united, and prosperous Church in the country, leaving no room for
Nonconformity; but we see too plainly the disastrous cost at which it
would be purchased. And we turn to gaze upon another vision, fairer,
nobler, more fruitful by far, which would realize our aspiration for
the religious future of our land. The country full of a zealous and
independent ministry of the Gospel, independent in the highest sense,
which includes dependence on Christ; each community working out in
entire freedom its conception of what a Church ought to be and what a
Church ought to do, and under the guidance of one whom it recognises
as Christ's minister, ordained for its service by the manifest unction
of the Spirit: diversities of gifts, diversities of methods,
diversities of operations, diversities of results; but each Christian
company honouring the other and rejoicing in its work, recognising
that each one is adding a contribution to a great whole which can be
built up only of these independent cells of spiritual life; the whole
spiritual body, the Church of England, having no visible form of
unity, but manifesting itself spiritually in the whole social estate,
the commercial, intellectual, and political activity of England; a
fair image, it seems to us, whose grand and solemn aspect could only
be parodied by the most elaborate and comprehensive pattern of a
law-made National Church.
The broad truth about our times from a spiritual point of view is--and
it is a truth on which both Churchmen and Nonconformists may
stand--that we have utterly outgrown the power of Establishment to
help us, if it ever had any; and that the spiritual conversion and
education of the community must be carried on by some higher method,
or abandoned in despair. We are struggling out of the _pupa_ state of
protection, when the ark of our religious estate was slung tenderly by
a net-work of bands and ligatures to the government wall. Slowly, with
sore effort and pain, as is the way with all these supreme acts of
development, we are emerging into a higher, because freer and more
spiritual stage of our religious life as a people. Anxiously and
fearfully those who have been trained under the shadow of Protection
watch the process. We Independents, who have been nursed in a freer
school, look calmly on the pains and struggles: we have faith in the
destiny of the fair, bright-winged creature which is being born.