opinions about grace and predestination? that many members of it did not
rather incline, as a matter of speculative opinion, to the notions of
Pelagius? Does any one imagine that all who stood with the Church and
did not join themselves to the Arians, were speculatively Athanasians?
It was not so; but they had a true feeling for what purpose the Gospel
and the Church were given them, and for what they were not given them;
they could see that 'impious and pious living,' according to that
sentence of Epiphanius we have quoted from Hammond, 'divided the whole
Christian world into erroneous and orthodox;' and that it was not worth
while to suffer themselves to be divided for anything else.
And though it will be said that separatists for opinions on points of
discipline and dogma have often asserted, and sometimes believed, that
piety and impiety were vitally concerned in these points; yet here again
the true religious instinct is that which discerns,--what is seldom so
very obscure,--whether they are in truth thus vitally concerned or not;
and, if they are not, cannot be perverted into fancying them concerned
and breaking unity for them. This, I say, is the true religious
instinct, the instinct which most clearly seizes the essence and aim of
the Christian Gospel and of the Christian Church. But fidelity to it
leaves, also, the way least closed to the admission of true developments
of speculative thought, when the time is come for them, and to the
incorporation of these true developments with the ideas and practice of
Christians.
Is there not, then, any separation which is right and reasonable? Yes,
separation on plain points of morals. For these involve the very essence
of the Christian Gospel, and the very ground on which the Christian
Church is built. The sale of indulgences, if deliberately instituted and
persisted in by the main body of the Church, afforded a valid reason for
breaking unity; the doctrine of purgatory, or of the real presence, did
not.
However, a cosmopolitan church-order, commenced when the political
organisation of Christians was also cosmopolitan,--when, that is, the
nations of Europe were politically one in the unity of the Roman
Empire,--might well occasion difficulties as the nations solidified into
independent states with a keen sense of their independent life; so that,
the cosmopolitan type disappearing for civil affairs, and being replaced
by the national type, the same disappearance and replacement tended to
prevail in ecclesiastical affairs also. But this was a political
difficulty, not a religious one, and it raised no insuperable bar to
continued religious union. A Church with Anglican liberties might very
well, the English national spirit being what it is, have been in
religious communion with Rome, and yet have been safely trusted to
maintain and develop its national liberties to any extent required.
The moral corruptions of Rome, on the other hand, were a real ground for
separation. On their account, and solely on their account, if they could
not be got rid of, was separation not only lawful but necessary. It has
always been the averment of the Church of England, that the change made
in her at the Reformation was the very least change which was absolutely
necessary. No doubt she used the opportunity of her breach with Rome to
get rid of several doctrines which the human mind had outgrown; but it
was the immoral practice of Rome that really moved her to separation.
And she maintained that she merely got rid of Roman corruptions which
were immoral and intolerable, and remained the old, historic, Catholic
Church of England still.
The right to this title of _Catholic_ is a favourite matter of
contention between bodies of Christians. But let us use names in their
customary and natural senses. To us it seems that unless one chooses to
fight about words, and fancifully to put into the word _Catholic_ some
occult quality, one must allow that the changes made in the Church of
England at the Reformation impaired its Catholicity. The word _Catholic_
was meant to describe the common or general profession and worship of
Christendom at the time when the word arose. Undoubtedly this general
profession and worship had not a strict uniformity everywhere, but it
had a clearly-marked common character; and this well-known type Bede, or
Anselm, or Wiclif himself, would to this day easily recognise in a Roman
Catholic religious service, but hardly in an Anglican; while, on the
other hand, in a Roman Catholic religious service an ordinary Anglican
finds himself as much in a strange world and out of his usual course, as
in a Nonconformist meeting-house. Something precious was no doubt lost
in losing this common profession and worship; but the loss was, as we
Protestants maintain, incurred for the sake of something yet more
precious still,--the purity of that moral practice which was the very
cause for which the common profession and worship existed. Now, it seems
captious to incur voluntarily a loss for a great and worthy object, and
at the same time, by a conjuring with words, to try and make it appear
that we have not suffered the loss at all. So on the word _Catholic_ we
will not insist too jealously; but thus much, at any rate, must be
allowed to the Church of England,--that she kept enough of the past to
preserve, as far as this nation was concerned, her continuity, to be
still the _historic Church of England_; and that she avoided the error,
to which there was so much to draw her, and into which all the other
reformed Churches fell, of making improved speculative doctrinal
opinions the main ground of her separation.
A Nonconformist newspaper, it is true, reproaching the Church with what
is, in our opinion, her greatest praise, namely, that on points of
doctrinal theology she is 'a Church that does not know her own mind,'
roundly asserts, as we have already mentioned, that 'no man in his
senses can deny that the Church of England was meant to be a thoroughly
Protestant and Evangelical, and it may be said Calvinistic Church.' But
not only does the whole course of Church-history disprove such an
assertion, and show that this is what the Puritans always wanted to make
the Church, and what the Church would never be made, but we can disprove
it, too, out of the mouths of the very Puritans themselves. At the Savoy
Conference the Puritans urged that 'our first reformers out of their
great wisdom did at that time (of the Reformation) so compose the
Liturgy, as to win upon the Papists, and to draw them into their Church
communion _by varying as little as they could from the Romish forms
before in use_;' and this they alleged as their great plea for purging
the Liturgy. And the Bishops resisted, and upheld the proceeding of the
reformers as the essential policy of the Church of England; as indeed it
was, and till this day has continued to be. No; the Church of England
did not give her energies to inventing a new church-order for herself
and fighting for it; to singling out two or three speculative dogmas as
the essence of Christianity, and fighting for them. She set herself to
carry forward, and as much as possible on the old lines, the old
practical work and proper design of the Christian Church; and this is
what left her mind comparatively open, as we have seen, for the
admission of philosophy and criticism, as they slowly developed
themselves outside the Church and filtered into her; an admission which
confessedly proves just now of capital importance.
This openness of mind the Puritans have not shared with the Church, and
how _should_ they have shared it? They are founded on the negation of
that idea of development which plays so important a part in the life of
the Church; on the assumption that there is a divinely appointed
church-order fixed once for all in the Bible, and that they have adopted
it; that there is a doctrinal scheme of faith, justification, and
imputed righteousness, which is the test of a standing or falling church
and the essence of the gospel, and that they have extracted it. These
are assumptions which, as they make union impossible, so also make
growth impossible. The Church makes church-order a matter of
ecclesiastical constitution, is founded on moral practice, and though
she develops speculative dogma, does not allow that this or that dogma
is the essence of Christianity.
'Congregational Nonconformists,' say the Independents, 'can never be
incorporated into an organic union with Anglican Episcopacy, because
there is not even the shadow of an outline of it in the New Testament,
and it is our assertion and profound belief that Christ and the Apostles
have given us all the laws that are necessary for the constitution and
government of the Church.'[108] 'Whatever may come,' says the President
of the Wesleyan Conference, 'we are determined to be simple, earnest
preachers of _the gospel_. Whatever may come, we are determined to be
true to _Scriptural Protestantism_. We would be friendly with all
evangelical churches, but we will have no fellowship with the man of
sin. We will give up life itself rather than be unfaithful to _the
truth_. It is ours to cry everywhere: "Come, sinners, to _the
gospel-feast_!"' And this _gospel_, this _Scriptural Protestantism_,
this _truth_, is the doctrine of justification by 'pleading solely the
blood of the covenant,' of which we have said so much. Methodists cannot
unite with a church which does not found itself on this doctrine of
justification, but which holds the doctrine of priestly absolution, of
the real presence, and other doctrines of like stamp; Congregationalists
cannot unite with a church which, besides not resting on the doctrine of
justification, has a church-order not prescribed in the New Testament.
[Footnote 108: Address of the Rev. G. W. Conder at Liverpool, in the
_Lancashire Congregational Calendar_ for 1869-70.]
Now as Hooker truly says of those who 'desire to draw all things unto
the determination of bare and naked Scripture,' as Dr. Newman, too, has
said, and as many others have said, the Bible does not exhibit, drawn
out in black and white, the precise tenets and usages of any Christian
society; some inference and criticism must be employed to get at them.
'For the most part, even such as are readiest to cite for one thing five
hundred sentences of Scripture, what warrant have they that any one of
them doth mean the thing for which it is alleged?' Nay, 'it is not the
word of God itself which doth, or possibly can, assure us that we do
well to think it his word.' So says Hooker, and what he says is
perfectly true. A process of reasoning and collection is necessary to
get at the Scriptural church-discipline and the Scriptural Protestantism
of the Puritans; in short, this discipline and this doctrine are
developments. And the first is an unsound development, in a line where
there was a power of making a true development, and where the Church
made it; the second is an unsound development in a line where neither
the Church nor Puritanism had the power of making true developments. But
as it is the truth of its Scriptural Protestantism which in Puritanism's
eyes especially proves the truth of its Scriptural church-order which
has this Protestantism, and the falsehood of the Anglican church-order
which has much less of it, to abate the confidence of the Puritans in
their Scriptural Protestantism is the first step towards their union, so
much to be desired, with the national Church.
We say, therefore, that the doctrine: 'It is agreed between God and the
mediator Jesus Christ the Son of God, surety for the redeemed, as
parties-contractors, that the sins of the redeemed should be imputed to
innocent Christ, and he both condemned and put to death for them upon
this very condition, that whosoever heartily consents unto the covenant
of reconciliation offered through Christ shall, by the imputation of his
obedience unto them, be justified and holden righteous before God,'--we
say that this doctrine is as much a human development from the text,
'Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,' as the doctrine of
priestly absolution is a human development from the text, 'Whosesoever
sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them,' or the doctrine of the real
presence from the text, 'Take, eat, this is my body.' In our treatise on
St. Paul we have shown at length that the received doctrine of
justification is an unsound development. It may be said that the
doctrine of priestly absolution and of the real presence are unsound
developments also. True, in our opinion they are so; they are, like the
doctrine of justification, developments made under conditions which
precluded the possibility of sound developments in this line. But the
difference is here: the Church of England does not identify Christianity
with these unsound developments; she does not call either of them
_Scriptural Protestantism_, or _truth_, or _the gospel_; she does not
insist that all who are in communion with her should hold them; she does
not repel from her communion those who hold doctrines at variance with
them. She treats them as she does the received doctrine of
justification, to which she does not tie herself up, but leaves people
to hold it if they please. She thus provides room for growth and further
change in these very doctrines themselves. But to the doctrine of
justification Puritanism ties itself up, just as it tied itself up
formerly to the doctrine of predestination; it calls it _Scriptural
Protestantism_, _truth_, _the gospel_; it will have communion with none
who do not hold it; it repels communion with any who hold the doctrines
of priestly absolution and the real presence, because they seem to
interfere with it. Yet it is really itself no better than they. But how
can growth possibly find place in this doctrine, while it is held in
such a fashion?
Every one who perceives and values the power contained in Christianity,
must be struck to see how, at the present moment, the progress of this
power seems to depend upon its being able to disengage itself from
speculative accretions that encumber it. A considerable movement to this
end is visible in the Church of England. The most nakedly speculative,
and therefore the most inevitably defective, parts of the Prayer
Book,--the Athanasian Creed and the Thirty-nine Articles,--our
generation will not improbably see the Prayer Book rid of. But the
larger the body in which this movement works, the greater is the power
of the movement. If the Church of England were disestablished to-day it
would be desirable to re-establish her to-morrow, if only because of the
immense power for development which a national body possesses. It is
because we know something of the Nonconformist ministers, and what
eminent force and faculty many of them have for contributing to the work
of development now before the Church, that we cannot bear to see the
waste of power caused by their separatism and battling with the
Establishment, which absorb their energies too much to suffer them to
carry forward the work of development themselves, and cut them off from
aiding those in the Church who carry it forward.
The political dissent of the Nonconformists, based on their condemnation
of the Anglican church-order as unscriptural, is just one of those
speculative accretions which we have spoken of as encumbering religion.
Politics are a good thing, and religion is a good thing; but they make a
fractious mixture. 'The Nonconformity of England, and the Nonconformity
alone, has been the salvation of England from Papal tyranny and kingly
misrule and despotism.'[109] This is the favourite boast, the familiar
strain; but this is really politics, and not religion at all. But
righteousness is religion; and the Nonconformists say: 'Who have done so
much for righteousness as we?' For as much righteousness as will go with
politics, no one; for the sterner virtues, for the virtues of the Jews
of the Old Testament; but these are only half of righteousness and not
the essentially Christian half. We have seen how St. Paul tore himself
in two, rent his life in the middle and began it again, because he was
so dissatisfied with a righteousness which was, after all, in its main
features, Puritan. And surely it can hardly be denied that the more
eminently and exactly _Christian_ type of righteousness is the type
exhibited by Church worthies like Herbert, Ken, and Wilson, rather than
that exhibited by the worthies of Puritanism; the cause being that these
last mixed politics with religion so much more than did the first.
[Footnote 109: The Rev. G. W. Conder, _ubi supra_.]
Paul, too, be it remembered, condemned disunion in the society of
Christians as much as he declined politics. This does not, we freely
own, make against the Puritans' refusal to take the law from their
adversaries, but it does make against their allegation that it does not
matter whether the society of Christians is united or not, and that
there are even great advantages in separatism. If Anglicans maintained
that their church-order was written in Scripture and a matter of divine
command, then, Congregationalists maintaining the same thing, to the
controversy between them there could be no end. But now, Anglicans
maintaining no such thing, but that their church-order is a matter of
historic development and natural expediency, that it has _grown_,--which
is evident enough,--and that the essence of Christianity is in no-wise
concerned with such matters, why should not the Nonconformists adopt
this moderate view of the case, which constrains them to no admission of
inferiority, but only to the renouncing an imagined divine superiority
and to the recognition of an existing fact, and allow Church bishops as
a development of Catholic antiquity, just as they have allowed Church
music and Church architecture, which are developments of the same? Then
might there arise a mighty and undistracted power of joint life, which
would transform, indeed, the doctrines of priestly absolution and the
real presence, but which would transform, equally, the so-called
_Scriptural Protestantism_ of imputed righteousness, and which would do
more for real righteousness and for Christianity than has ever been done
yet.
Tillotson's proposals for comprehension, drawn up in 1689, cannot be too
much studied at the present juncture. These proposals, with which his
name and that of Stillingfleet, two of the most estimable names in the
English Church, are specially associated, humiliate no one, refute no
one; they take the basis of existing facts, and endeavour to build on it
a solid union. They are worth quoting entire, and I conclude with them.
Their details our present circumstances would modify; their spirit any
sound plan of Church-reform must take as its rule.
'1. That the ceremonies enjoined or recommended in the Liturgy or Canons
be left indifferent.
'2. That the Liturgy be carefully reviewed, and such alterations and
changes be therein made as may supply the defects and remove as much as
possible all ground of exception to any part of it, by leaving out the
apocryphal lessons and correcting the translation of the psalms used in
the public service where there is need of it, and in many other
particulars.
'3. That instead of all former declarations and subscriptions to be made
by ministers, it shall be sufficient for them that are admitted to the
exercise of their ministry in the Church of England to subscribe one
general declaration and promise to this purpose, viz.: _That we do
submit to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Church of England
as it shall be established by law, and promise to teach and practise
accordingly_.
'4. That a new body of ecclesiastical Canons be made, particularly with
a regard to a more effectual provision for the reformation of manners
both in ministers and people.
'5. That there be an effectual regulation of ecclesiastical courts to
remedy the great abuses and inconveniences which by degrees and length
of time have crept into them; and particularly that the power of
excommunication be taken out of the hands of lay officers and placed in
the bishop, and not to be exercised for trivial matters, but upon great
and weighty occasions.
'6. That for the future those who have been ordained in any of the
foreign churches be not required to be re-ordained here, to render them
capable of preferment in the Church.
'7. That for the future none be capable of any ecclesiastical benefice
or preferment in the Church of England that shall be ordained in England
otherwise than by bishops; and that those who have been ordained only by
presbyters shall not be compelled to renounce their former ordination.
But because many have and do still doubt of the validity of such
ordination, where episcopal ordination may be had, and is by law
required, it shall be sufficient for such persons to receive ordination
from a bishop in this or the like form: "If thou art not already
ordained, I ordain thee," &c.; as in case a doubt be made of any one's
baptism, it is appointed by the Liturgy that he be baptized in this
form: "If thou art not baptized, I baptize thee."'
These are proposals 'to be made by the Church of England for the union
of _Protestants_.' Who cannot see that the power of joint life already
spoken of would be far greater and stronger if it comprehended Roman
Catholics too. And who cannot see, also, that in the churches of the
most strong and living Roman Catholic countries,--in France and
Germany,--a movement is in progress which may one day make a general
union of Christendom possible? But this will not be in our day, nor is
it business which the England of this generation is set to do. What may
be done in our day, what our generation has the call and the means, if
only it has the resolution, to bring about, is the union of Protestants.
But this union will never be on the basis of the actual _Scriptural
Protestantism_ of our Puritans; and because, so long as they take this
for the gospel or good news of Christ, they cannot possibly unite on any
other basis, the first step towards union is showing them that this is
not the gospel. If we have succeeded in doing even so much towards union
as to convince one of them of this, we have not written in vain.
THE END.
Transcriber's Notes:-
Text originally written in Greek has been transliterated and framed
between plus marks, thus: +hagiasmos+.
Minor punctuation errors and omissions corrected.
End of Project Gutenberg's St. Paul and Protestantism, by Matthew Arnold