'From virtue first began,The difference that distinguished man from man;He claimed no title from descent of blood,But that which made him noble made him good.'[31]
'From virtue first began,
The difference that distinguished man from man;
He claimed no title from descent of blood,
But that which made him noble made him good.'[31]
Such being the origin of the British titles of nobility, we pass to the origin of the aggregate peerage in their position as a separate and hereditary branch of the legislature. It is well ascertained that the Saxon kings were not authorized to make new laws or impose taxes without the sanction of the 'witan,' in which the Thanes and the prelates of the church had seats. It is also certain that in Normandy there was a council of Norman barons, which the dukes were bound to consult on all important occasions. The Anglo-Norman kings of England continued to recognise the custom, and duly summoned and consulted their great council. All who held land immediately from the Crown had a right to attend, and these were originally designated the king's barons. Besides these, the prelates and the principal abbots and priors were expected to attend. No other persons had the right to appear except in the attitude of petitioners. It is probable that many of the Crown tenants found it inconvenient and expensive to be present as regularly as the great proprietors, and by degrees the title of 'peer' and 'baron,' which at first had been common to all the king's immediate tenants, came to be applied to a few great feudatories of the Crown. This state of things is actually recognised in Magna Charta in these words,—'We shall cause the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, andgreater baronsto be separately summoned by our letters.' Here, then, we have the origin of the temporal peers of the realm in their own House. The temporal peerage was evidently a body of the most powerful landowners. Now, at that time and for many years after, there was no legal power of devising real estates by will. The estates descended from heir to heir, and the successor of a great feudal baron came in course of time to be regardedas standing in the position of his predecessors as to the right to be summoned by letters patent to the royal council. Thus the notion of hereditary descent became associated with the position and privileges of a great baron. At a later period the status of peerage was extended to others, who were not tenants in chief, but were summoned by writ to take their places in the council. Still later, the sovereign took upon himself tocreatepeerages by letters patent, which seem to have conferred the privilege of hereditary descent. Finally, it became a fixed maxim in constitutional laws that the person summoned by royal writ to the House of Lords acquired a right not only to sit in that particular parliament, but the right for himself and certain heirs to become hereditary peers of the realm. Thus a complete inroad was gradually made upon the early connection between the peerage and the tenure of property; and the general result was that Lords of Parliament took their seats by virtue of tenure, of writs, of letters patent, and, in a few isolated cases, by Act of Parliament.[32]In the time of Lord Coke the number of peers was about 100; at the time of the Revolution of 1688 the House consisted of about 150 lay and 26 spiritual peers, and at the present time it reckons nearly 500 members. We found no argument upon the special privileges possessed by the order of nobles. With the exception of their appellate jurisdiction, they are neither numerous nor important, and the judicial functions which are now very efficiently exercised by some of the ablest lawyers of the day will probably be remodelled in the course of the reforms in the administration of justice which are now very near at hand.
The facts and circumstances thus briefly stated form the materials for an answer to our first question, namely, Can the continuance of a purely hereditary branch of the legislature harmonize with the vast democratic change which was described in the earlier pages of this article? The answer is short and simple. Considering the spread of education, the increasing circulation of literature and newspapers, the growing influence of commerce and manufactures, the omnipotent force of public opinion, and the increasing importance of the middle classes, it certainly appears that the House of Lords is not now satisfactorily constituted for a senate. It consists of a large number of members who feel themselves under no obligation to take part in its deliberations. It is acted upon onlyindirectlyby public opinion. Its members belong almost exclusively to one class and interest, and all stand on the same social platform. Moreover, two out of the three chief interests of the nation—that is, the manufacturing and commercial interests—are scarcely represented in that House. Under these circumstances, it appears to us that some alteration in the constitution of this noble House is a mere question of time. In the famous debate of April, 1866, upon Lord Russell's project of reform, Mr. Lowe, in one of the cleverest speeches ever delivered in the House of Commons, used the following words:—
'Let us suppose democracy established more or less in this country: with what eyes would it look upon institutions such as I have described—what would be the relation of this House to the House of Peers? I shall call a witness who will tell you. Eight years ago the honourable member for Birmingham inverted the course he is now taking; he now seeks to secure the means, he then proclaimed the end. Then he said, "See what I'll do for you if you give me reform." Now he says, "Give me reform, and I shall do nothing." His words were, "As to the House of Peers, I do not believe they themselves believe that they are a permanent institution." What do you suppose would become of the House of Peers with democratic franchises?'
Such was the prophecy of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Its realization may be distant, but we venture to say it is certain. What the nature of the change ought to be, we can but faintly hint. And, be it remembered, that it is in no wild spirit of revolution, but rather in the temper of sober conservation, that even a suggestion of this kind is hazarded. We believe, then, that the needful change may be made in perfect harmony with recognised principles of the present Constitution. Surely a more serviceable House would be secured by introducing the same system of election and delegation amongst the peers of the realm that now prevails among the peers of Scotland and Ireland. In the next place, a certain number of high offices of State might be connected with life-seats in the House of Lords. The Crown might be empowered to introduce a limited number of peers for life. Lastly, it might be practicable, though doubtless very difficult, to import into the House the direct influence of public opinion by some kind of public election. The composition of the Herrenhaus, or House of Lords of Prussia, offers the model of a very useful assembly. It consists of princes of the royal family; sixteen chiefs of certain other princely houses; about fifty heads of the territorial nobility; a number of life peerschosen by the king from the class of rich landowners, great manufacturers, andnational celebrities; eight titled noblemenelectedin the eight provinces of Prussia by the resident landowners of all degrees; the representatives of the Universities; the heads of religious chapters; the mayors of towns of more than 50,000 inhabitants; and a few other peers nominated by the king, under certain limitations, for a less period than life. The Upper House in Spain is partly composed of hereditary peers, and partly of peers for life. The peerage of Portugal is for life. And thus we might go on, from Chamber to Chamber, and prove that the British House of Lords is the only legislative Chamber in the world in which the hereditary system alone prevails. This fact alone, taken in connection with the rapid progress of political events, and the other circumstances which have been slightly touched upon, may suffice to justify us in affirming that the continuance of a purely hereditary House of Lords, unmodified by delegation or election, is not in harmony with the rest of our Constitution.
The last question to be answered is this: Ought the further creation of hereditary dignities to be permitted by a people enjoying the wide and liberal franchises of this country? It must not, however, be supposed that this inquiry must needs touch or involve the advantages or disadvantages of an hereditary sovereign. The king or reigning queen of these realms has special functions by virtue of the Constitution, which, under any circumstances, must be intrusted to some hands, and it is hard to imagine any order of affairs more beneficial to the people than the present; for our sovereign is not merely entrusted with attributes which affect the imagination, she holds a position not less useful than splendid as the visible head of this mighty Commonwealth. There ought to be the least possible latitude for the jealousies and rivalries of the leading spirits of the State. But if the most exalted position is open to competition, the most powerful minds may be diverted by evil influences from the line of duty. The hereditary office of the sovereign ought to be tenderly and loyally upheld as being not merely a picturesque decoration of the State, but subserving most important purposes, by preventing intrigue, and by visibly representing the nation in a form most attractive to society. The present question, therefore, has no reference to the sovereign. The inquiry is, whether theminorhereditary dignities can be continuously and freshly created consistently with our apparent advances towards social and political equality. The answer may be found in the lines of Dr. Johnson:
'Let observation with extensive view,Survey mankind from China to Peru.'
'Let observation with extensive view,
Survey mankind from China to Peru.'
He who thus looks from the watch-tower must perceive that the political movement of nations is almost everywhere inonedirection. He might suppose that one transcendental law was slowly overruling the world—the law under which equality is advancing, and artificial inequalities disappearing. It would seem that the desire for equality marches hand in hand with civilization. Nowhere in the world will the inquirer discover thathereditaryprivilegesare being createdexcept in England, though the order of ancient nobility is by no means rare. The defenders of the order of nobility will urge that the distinction of rank is necessary for the reward of public services, and to stimulate and encourage others. Virtuous ambition is, doubtless, a spring of action which produces excellent results. Blackstone says that 'a body of nobility creates and preserves that gradual scale of dignity which proceeds from the peasant to the prince, rising like a pyramid from a broad foundation, and diminishing to a point as it rises. It is this ascending and contracting proportionwhich adds stabilityto any government.'[33]Historical research can alone determine the amount of truth contained in these assertions. The general proposition that public honours of some kind are valuable incidents in every country can hardly be disputed. But does it necessarily follow that those honours should be hereditary? We know that many of the truest patriots in ancient and modern times have desired no other reward than posthumous fame and the esteem of their fellow-citizens. Was Washington, for example, moved by the glitter of any hereditary honours to devote himself to the good of his country? Or Pericles, Epaminondas, or Tell; Pym, Hampden, Peel, or Cobden? Peel had inherited his baronetcy, and by will forbade his heirs to accept the hereditary peerage. Take the case of Mr. Peabody. Society regretted that he declined the riband of the Bath, but how unsuitable a reward for his grand Christian munificence would a coronet and a title have been. It was natural to ask in his case, 'What shall be done to the man whom the king delighteth to honour?' The only answer is, 'Let his memory be embalmed in the loving esteem of two great nations.' To him virtue was its own reward. The mass of mankind are of less elevated quality.It would be unwise, and even dangerous, to dispense with public rewards for public services. But surely it is an unreasonable method of recompensing the services of a great citizen to confer title, dignity, and rank, not only upon himself, but upon his descendants for ever. The services of the great Duke of Marlborough may have merited a high recompense, but it is strange that one hundred and fifty years after his decease his great-great-grandson should be born a duke on the score of his ancestor's merits—
'Honours best thriveWhen rather fromouracts we them deriveThan our foregoers.'[34]
'Honours best thrive
When rather fromouracts we them derive
Than our foregoers.'[34]
It seems monstrous that in a State in which the power of the people is fully recognised, any artificial exaltation of one family above another should be perpetuated apart from personal merit. Far be it, however, from the writer of these pages to desire the abolition of existing dignities. They are vested interests which it becomes us to respect, though it is difficult to tolerate any longer the fresh and needless elevation of more families above the rest in perpetuity. The political exigencies of the State cannot possibly require it, and if it is not necessary it is unjust. It may be said that the House of Lords must be recruited by the infusion of fresh blood; but it has been shown that the House is already too full, and rather needs reduction than expansion. At all events, the grants of peerages for life would enable the Crown to place many 'national celebrities' in the Upper House who, from want of fortune, would decline the honour if it must necessarily descend to a poor son. It may also be urged that the objection to a further creation of hereditary honours has its source in the envy of the human heart; but in truth the objection is simply founded upon a sense of the abstractinjusticeof the inheritance of honour, title, and exalted social rank unless it be justified by merit of some kind. How can it bejustthat if neither policy nor merit justify the ordinance, the State should make one family superior in perpetuity in all the social incidents of precedence and rank to thousands of other families? It is affectation to deny that social circumstances of this nature are greatly valued. They influence the life and fortunes of the men and women of the ennobled families in a high degree.Cæteris paribus, the son of the nobleman and the son of the commoner do not start in the race of life upon equal terms. The younger son of a peer will, in all probability, attain any object he may have in view with less difficulty than the son of a plain esquire. He will have a better chance of entering the diplomatic service, of becoming a member of the House of Commons, of obtaining a nomination for the civil service, of entering the navy, of getting a commission in one of the best regiments, and of preferment in the Church. Is it just that these purely artificial advantages should be accorded to more families than those which already accidentally possess them? There may be enthusiastic admirers of the order of nobles, who will affirm that they are necessary for the safety and balance of society. But such enthusiasts will do well to listen to the weighty words of Bacon, who, treating of 'nobility,' wrote thus: 'For democracies, they need it not, and they are commonly more quiet, and less subject to sedition than where they are stirps of nobles. For men's eyes are upon the business and not upon the persons.... We see the Switzers last well, notwithstanding their diversity of religion and of cantons. For utility is their bond and not respects. The United Provinces of the Low Countries in their Government excel. For where there is equality the consultations are more indifferent, and the payments and tributes more cheerful.'[35]
Thus this great man goes further than the present argument is intended to advance. It is not suggested that a flat social equality is practicable or desirable in civilized life. It may exist in theory, but it fails in practice. Dr. Johnson proved this in his peculiar fashion to a lady who was an enthusiastic republican,—'Madame,' said he, 'I am become a convert to your way of thinking; I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing; and to give you an unquestionable proof that I am in earnest, here is a sensible, civil, well-behaved fellow-citizen—your footman; I beg that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us. I thus, sir, showed her the absurdity of the levelling doctrine. She has never liked me since.' So Count Mirabeau was unable to tolerate his own theory of equality. Returning one day from the assembly in which he had pressed that doctrine with great power, he ordered and entered a warm bath. 'More hot, Antoine.' 'Yes, citizen,' said Antoine. Whereupon Mirabeau seized his man by the head and plunged it into the bath. It may be that Dr. Johnson, who was an earnest advocate for the subordination of ranks, was sound in his views with reference to general happiness. But it must be admitted that the greatest experiment ever made of theoretical equality—thatof the United States—has not been unsuccessful. It may be true, as affirmed by De Tocqueville, that 'the men who are entrusted with the direction of public affairs in that country are frequently inferior, both in capacity and morality, to those whom aristocratic institutions would raise to power. But their interestis identified with that of the majorityof their fellow-citizens. They may frequently be faithless, and frequently mistaken; but they will never systematically adopt a line of conduct opposed to the will of the majority.' If we turn to our own great political experiments—those of our principal colonies—the result is upon the whole satisfactory. No local dignities are there created or inherited. It would, perhaps, be expedient that great public services should be rewarded by the creation of baronetcies for life in the colonies. But though nothing of this kind is known in any of them—except by the casual importation of some poor cadet of a noble British family—prosperity, good order, and all the elements of social and political well-being, are secured and developed more and more. The great colonies of Australia, which enjoy the full rights of autonomy, and are only connected with the mother country by one slender thread, through which no maternal influence really passes, have thus furnished evidence that liberty, equality, and order may exist together.
We have already averred that this article is not intended to promote any levelling assault upon any existing dignity. Nor do we think it is expedient that a flat table-land of social equality should be created in this old country. Let public services be rewarded not only by gratitude and esteem, but by dignities and honours coincident with the life of the grantees. Honorary decorations, too, might be more extensively conferred, and would surely be worn with as much gratification by the deserving plebeian as the blue or red ribbon by the noblest aristocrat of the bluest blood. Let sculpture, painting, and architecture do their best to perpetuate the memory of 'national celebrities.' Let us construct a Walhalla of worthies in which Englishmen shall deem it the highest attainable honour to be reckoned. And as Pericles nobly said to the Athenians,—'I shall begin with our forefathers, for it is fair and right that the honours of commemoration should be accorded to them. For the same people constantly dwelling in this land did by their valour hand it down in freedom to posterity. Well worthy of praise were they, and still more worthy are our own fathers; for they, in addition to their inheritance, won by the sweat of their brow the imperial position we now hold, and transmitted it to us of the present generation.' So let us recall and commemorate every unselfish public life, all genius dedicated to the nation's good, and all thosequasiinspirations of the native mind which set a mark upon their age, and tinge the thought of successive generations. Nor let us shrink and shiver as we see the irresistible advance of the democratic wave. The most timid may take courage by studying the attempted legislation of the Commonwealth. To that period may be traced the source of nearly all our best laws and largest reforms. The reactionary powers blighted the attempted work of enlightened men, and it has only come to maturity within living memory, or is even now ripening. Let us never forget that it is our first duty to educate the democracy, to purify its morals, and so to modify the distribution of public honours that merit and its reward may never be severed. Exalted rank derived from birth alone must be permitted to die out by flux of time, and meritorious industry must be warmly cherished.
'The smoke ascendsTo heaven, as lightly from the cottage hearthAs from the haughty palace. He whose soulPonders this true equality may walkThe fields of earth with gratitude and hope.'[36]
'The smoke ascends
To heaven, as lightly from the cottage hearth
As from the haughty palace. He whose soul
Ponders this true equality may walk
The fields of earth with gratitude and hope.'[36]
Art. V.—The Genius of Nonconformity and the Progress of Society.
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 andcause 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 therearethings 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 conditionof 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 mostclosely 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, ourraison d'êtrewould 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 Nonconformistcommunities; 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 exorcisedor 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 theQuarterly 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 theQuarterly:—'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, inwhich 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 halcyondays 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 KingJames 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 theEdinburgh Reviewadopts 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,—apoor, 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 expressionand 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.