This Letter professes to contain an "exact question," which is somewhat
singularly inexactly put. In its strict grammatical form it asks for a
definition of the members of a Clerical Council, and their business as
such. This "exact question" is in fact an illustration of the fallacy of
asking two questions in one, though a question demanding to be answered
with "mathematical" precision should have been set with mathematical
accuracy. But here at the outset a protest must be entered against being
called upon to answer a question set in ambiguous words and misleading
phrases, and based upon assumptions which those questioned would reject.
It is impossible to deal with a so-called "axiomatic" question which
instantly passes into a cloudy rhetorical illustration.
"The attached servants of a particular State." Does that expression
mean, "England, with all thy faults, I love thee still"? or, is it used
in the same sense as "attached to the staff"? But are there many of the
clergy who would say, "I am an attached and salaried servant of the
State, and nothing more?" Are there many who would allow that they were
"salaried" by the State at all? Are there many who would grant that they
had been "examined" and "numbered" and admitted into a "body of
trustworthy persons" either by the State or by its agents? And yet all
these previous questions must be answered before we can consider at all
the "axiomatic" question which the clergy are "earnestly called upon" to
solve. The question set down for solution implies some such inquiries as
these: Is not the Church of England merely a Department of the State of
England? Does not a clergyman belong to the Ecclesiastical Service just
as an _employe_ of the Treasury, or the Home Office, or the Post Office,
belongs to the Civil Service? For example, the authorities at Chamouni
examine and approve of certain men as guides for mountaineering: does
not the English State similarly examine and approve of certain men as
guides for England and the English "in the way known of all good men
that leadeth unto life"? A most fallacious employment of a "universal"
for a "particular," for either the clergy must be excluded from the
number of "all good men," or the assertion that all good men agree in
their knowledge falls to the ground, seeing that in the fourth Letter
the clergy are charged with not having "determined quite clearly" what
the way that leadeth unto life may be.
But taking this Alpine illustration for what it may be worth, we may
ask, "What does it mean?" Is it not intended to exalt practical
questions, and to depreciate all doctrine and dogma and theological
opinion, either from its liability on the one hand to be narrow or
insular, "Chamounist or Grindelwaldist," or on the other from its
tendency to be vague and transcendental, dealing with "celestial
mountains" and unfathomable "crevasses"? Will it not admit of some such
paraphrase as this, "Your teachings as to Episcopacy or
Congregationalism, seven sacraments or two, and the like, are mere local
opinions, and so away with them; your doctrines as to the Holy Trinity,
the Incarnation, and the like, are mere transcendentalism, and so away
with them also,--
'For modes of faith let zealous bigots fight,
He can't be wrong whose life is in the right.'"
Still it may be allowable to hint that the qualifications of a "guide"
as laid down in this Letter are somewhat peculiar. It might have been
supposed by a plain man that a Chamounist guide was expected to know at
least something as to the localities of the Mer de Glace, the Jardin, or
the Grand Mulets, but he is seemingly to rise superior to any
"Chamounist opinions on geography," and to be prepared to rely only upon
a universal science of locality and athletics, a reliance which has been
the fruitful cause of mountaineering fatalities.
The reply which most Clerical Councils would return respecting the
"axiomatic" question of this Letter would probably be, "We cannot answer
a fallacy; we are not careful to answer thee in this matter."