Every one who has been at Rome has been taken to see the Church of St. Paul, rebuilt after a destruction by fire forty years ago. The church stands a mile or two out of the city, on the way to Ostia and the desert. The interior has all the costly magnificence of Italian churches; oh the ceiling is written in gilded letters: 'Doctor Gentium.' Gold glitters and marbles gleam, but man and his movement are not there. The traveller has left at a distance thefumum et opes strepitumque Romæ; around him reigns solitude. There is Paul, with the mystery which was hidden from ages and from generations, which was uncovered by him for some half score years, and which then was buried with him in his grave! Not in our day will he relive, with his incessant effort to find a moral side for miracle, with his incessant effort to make the intellect follow and secure all the workings of the religious perception. Of those who care for religion, the multitude of us want the materialism of the Apocalypse; the few want a vague religiosity. Science, which more and more teaches us to find in the unapparent the real, will gradually serve to conquer the materialism of popular religion. The friends of vague religiosity, on the other hand, will be more and more taught by experience that a theology, a scientific appreciation of the facts of religion, is wanted for religion; but a theology which is a true theology, not a false. Both these influences will work for Paul's re-emergence. The doctrine of Paul will arise out of the tomb where for centuries it has lain buried. It will edify the church of the future; it will have the consent of happier generations, the applause of less superstitious ages. All will be too little to pay half the debt which the church of God owes to this 'least of the apostles, who was not fit to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the church of God.'[103]
In the foregoing treatise we have spoken of Protestantism, and have tried to show, how, with its three notable tenets of predestination, original sin, and justification, it has been pounding away for three centuries at St. Paul's wrong words, and missing his essential doctrine. And we took Puritanism to stand for Protestantism, and addressed ourselves directly to the Puritans; for the Puritan Churches, we said, seem to exist specially for the sake of these doctrines, one or more of them. It is true, many Puritans now profess also the doctrine that it is wicked to have a church connected with the State; but this is a later invention,[104]designed to strengthen a separation previously made. It requires to be noticed in due course; but meanwhile, we say that the aim of setting forth certain Protestant doctrines purely and integrally is the main title on which Puritan Churches rest their right of existing. With historic Churches, like those of England or Rome, it is otherwise; these doctrines may be in them, may be a part of their traditions, their theological stock; but certainly no one will say that either of these Churches was made for the express purpose of upholding these three theological doctrines, jointly or severally. A little consideration will show quite clearly the difference in this respect between the historic Churches and the churches of separatists.
People are not necessarily monarchists or republicans because they are born and live under a monarchy or republic. They avail themselves of the established government for those general purposes for which governments and politics exist, but they do not, for the most part, trouble their heads much about particular theoretical principles of government. Nay, it may well happen that a man who lives and thrives under a monarchy shall yet theoretically disapprove the principle of monarchy, or a man who lives and thrives under a republic, the principle of republicanism. But a man, or body of men, who have gone out of an established polity from zeal for the principle of monarchy or republicanism, and have set up a polity of their own for the very purpose of giving satisfaction to this zeal, are in a false position whenever it shall appear that the principle, from zeal for which they have constituted their separate existence, is unsound. So predestinarianism and solifidianism, Calvinism and Lutherism, may appear in the theology of a national or historic Church, charged ever since the rise of Christianity with the task of developing the immense and complex store of ideas contained in Christianity; and when the stage of development has been reached at which the unsoundness of predestinarian and solifidian dogmas becomes manifest, they will be dropped out of the Church's theology, and she and her task will remain what they were before. But when people from zeal for these dogmas find their historic Church not predestinarian or solifidian enough for them, and make new associations of their own, which shall be predestinarian or solifidian absolutely, then, when the dogmas are undermined, the associations are undermined too, and have either to own themselves without a reason for existing, or to discover some new reason in place of the old. Now, nothing which exists likes to be driven to a strait of this kind; so every association which exists because of zeal for the dogmas of election or justification, will naturally cling to these dogmas longer and harder than other people. Therefore we have treated the Puritan bodies in this country as the great stronghold here of these doctrines; and in showing what a perversion of Paul's real ideas these doctrines commonly called Pauline are, we have addressed ourselves to the Puritans.
But those who speak in the Puritans' name say that we charge upon Puritanism, as a sectarian peculiarity, doctrine which is not only the inevitable result of an honest interpretation of the writings of St. Paul, but which is, besides, the creed held in common by Puritans and by all the churches in Christendom, with one insignificant exception. Nay, they even declare 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.' To saddle Puritanism in special with the doctrines we have called Puritan is, they say, a piece of unfairness which has its motive in mere ill-will to Puritanism, a device which can injure nobody but its author.
Now, we have tried to show that the Puritans are quite wrong in imagining their doctrine to be the inevitable result of an honest interpretation of St. Paul's writings. That they are wrong we think is certain; but so far are we from being moved, in anything that we do or say in this matter, by ill-will to Puritanism and the Puritans, that it is, on the contrary, just because of our hearty respect for them, and from our strong sense of their value, that we speak as we do. Certainly we consider them to be in the main, at present, an obstacle to progress and to true civilisation. But this is because their worth is, in our opinion, such that not only must one for their own sakes wish to see it turned to more advantage, but others, from whom they are now separated, would greatly gain by conjunction with them, and our whole collective force of growth and progress be thereby immeasurably increased. In short, our one feeling when we regard them, is a feeling, not of ill-will, but of regret at waste of power; our one desire is a desire of comprehension.
But the waste of power must continue, and the comprehension is impossible, so long as Puritanism imagines itself to possess, in its two or three signal doctrines, what it callsthe gospel; so long as it constitutes itself separately on the plea of setting forth purelythe gospel, which it thus imagines itself to have seized; so long as it judges others as not holdingthe gospel, or as holding additions to it and variations from it. This fatal self-righteousness, grounded on a false conceit of knowledge, makes comprehension impossible; because it takes for granted the possession of the truth, and the power of deciding how others violate it; and this is a position of superiority, and suits conquest rather than comprehension.
The good of comprehension in a national Church is, that the larger and more various the body of members, the more elements of power and life the Church will contain, the more points will there be of contact, the more mutual support and stimulus, the more growth in perfection both of thought and practice. The waste of power from not comprehending the Puritans in the national Church is measured by the number and value of elements which Puritanism could supply towards the collective growth of the whole body. The national Church would grow more vigorously towards a higher stage of insight into religious truth, and consequently towards a greater perfection of practice, if it had these elements; and this is why we wish for the Puritans in the Church. But, meanwhile, Puritanism will not contribute to the common growth, mainly because it believes that a certain set of opinions or scheme of theological doctrine isthe gospel; that it is possible and profitable to extract this, and that Puritans have done so; and that it is the duty of men, who like themselves have extracted it, to separate themselves from those who have not, and to set themselves apart that they may profess it purely.
To disabuse them of this error, which, by preventing collective life, prevents also collective growth, it is necessary to show them that their extracted scheme of theological doctrine is not reallythe gospel; and that at any rate, therefore, it is not worth their while to separate themselves, and to frustrate the hope of growth in common, merely for this scheme's sake. And even if it were true, as they allege, that the national and historic Churches of Christendom do equally with Puritanism hold this scheme, or main parts of it, still it would be to Puritanism, and not to the historic Churches, that in showing the invalidity and unscripturalness of this scheme we should address ourselves, because the Puritan Churches found their very existence on it, and the historic Churches do not. And not founding their existence on it, nor falling into separatism for it, the historic Churches have a collective life which is very considerable, and a power of growth, even in respect of the very scheme of doctrine in question, supposing them to hold it, far greater than any which the Puritan Churches show, but which would be yet greater and more fruitful still, if the historic Churches combined the large and admirable contingent of Puritanism with their own forces. Therefore, as we have said, it is out of no sort of malice or ill-will, but from esteem for their fine qualities and from desire for their help, that we have addressed ourselves to the Puritans. We propose to complete now our dealings with this subject by showing how, as a matter of fact, the Church of England (which is the historic Church practically in question so far as Puritanism is concerned) seems to us to have displayed with respect to those very tenets which we have criticised, and for which we are said to have unfairly made Puritanism alone responsible, a continual power of growth which has been wanting to the Puritan congregations. This we propose to show first; and we will show secondly, how, from the very theory of a historic or national Church, the probability of this greater power of growth seems to follow, that we may try and commend that theory a little more to the thoughts and favour of our Puritan friends.
The two great Puritan doctrines which we have criticised at such length are the doctrines of predestination and justification. Of the aggressive and militant Puritanism of our people, predestination has, almost up to the present day, been the favourite and distinguishing doctrine; it was the doctrine which Puritan flocks greedily sought, which Puritan ministers powerfully preached, and called otherscarnal gospellersfor not preaching. This Geneva doctrine accompanied the Geneva discipline. Puritanism's first great wish and endeavour was to establish both the one and the other absolutely in the Church of England, and it became nonconforming because it failed. Now, it is well known that the High Church divines of the seventeenth century were Arminian, that the Church of England was the stronghold of Arminianism, and that Arminianism is, as we have said, an effort of man's practical good sense to get rid of what is shocking to it in Calvinism. But what is not so well known, and what is eminently worthy of remark, is the constant pressure applied by Puritanism upon the Church of England, to put the Calvinistic doctrine more distinctly into her formularies, and to tie her up more strictly to this doctrine; the constant resistance offered by the Church of England, and the large degree in which Nonconformity is really due to this cause.
Everybody knows how far Nonconformity is due to the Church of England's rigour in imposing an explicit declaration of adherence to her formularies. But only a few, who have searched out the matter, know how far Nonconformity is due, also, to the Church of England's invincible reluctance to narrow her large and loose formularies to the strict Calvinistic sense dear to Puritanism. Yet this is what the record of conferences shows at least as signally as it shows the domineering spirit of the High Church clergy; but our current political histories, written always with an anti-ecclesiastical bias, which is natural enough, inasmuch as the Church party was not the party of civil liberty, leaves this singularly out of sight. Yet there is a very catena of testimonies to prove it; to show us, from Elizabeth's reign to Charles the Second's, Calvinism, as a power both within and without the Church of England, trying to get decisive command of her formularies; and the Church of England, with the instinct of a body meant to live and grow, and averse to fetter and engage its future, steadily resisting.
The Lambeth Articles of 1595 exhibit Calvinism potent in the Church of England herself, and among the bishops of the Church. True; but could it establish itself there? No; the Lambeth Articles were recalled and suppressed, and Archbishop Whitgift was threatened with the penalties of apræmunirefor having published them. Again, it was usual from 1552 onwards to print in the English Bibles a catechism asserting the Calvinistic doctrine of absolute election and reprobation. In the first Bibles of the authorised version this catechism appeared; but it was removed in 1615. Yet the Puritans had met James the First, at his accession in 1603, with the petition thatthere may be an uniformity of doctrine prescribed; meaning an uniformity in this sense of strict Calvinism. Thus from the very commencement the Church, as regards doctrine, was for opening; Puritanism was for narrowing.
Then came, in 1604, the Hampton Court Conference. Here, as usual, political historians reproach the Church with having conceded so little. These historians, as we have said, think solely of the Puritans as the religious party favourable to civil liberty, and on that account desire the preponderance of Puritanism in its disputes with the Church. But, as regards freedom of thought and truth of ideas, what was it that the Church was pressed by Puritanism to concede, and what was the character and tendency of the Church's refusal? The first Puritan petition at this Conference was 'that thedoctrineof the Church might be preserved in purity according to God's Word.' That is, according to the Calvinistic interpretation put upon God's Word by Calvin and the Puritans after him; an interpretation which we have shown to be erroneous and unscriptural. This Calvinistic doctrine of predestination the Puritans wanted to plant hard and fast in the Church's formularies, and the Church resisted. The Puritan foreman complained of the loose wording of the Thirty-nine Articles because it allowed an escape from the strict doctrine of Calvinism, and moved that the Lambeth Articles, strictly Calvinistic, might be inserted into the Book of Articles. The Bishops resisted, and here are the words of their spokesman, the Bishop of London. 'The Bishop of London answered, that too many in those days, neglecting holiness of life,laid all their religion upon predestination,—"If I shall be saved, I shall be saved," which he termed a desperate doctrine, showing it to be contrary to good divinity, which teaches us to reason ratherascendendothandescendendo, thus: "I live in obedience to God, in love with my neighbour, I follow my vocation, &c., therefore I trust that God hath elected me and predestinated me to salvation;" not thus, which is the usual course of argument: "God hath predestinated and chosen me to life, therefore, though I sin never so grievously, I shall not be damned, for whom he once loveth he loveth to the end."' Who will deny that this resistance of the Church to the Puritans, who,laying all their religion upon predestination, wanted to make the Church do the same, was as favourable to growth of thought and to sound philosophy, as it was consonant to good sense?
We have already, in the foregoing treatise, quoted from the complaints against the Church by the Committee of Divines appointed by the House of Lords in 1641, when Puritanism was strongly in the ascendent. Some in the Church teach, say the Puritan complainers, 'that good works are concauses with faith in the act of justification; some have oppugned the certitude of salvation; some have maintained that the Lord's day is kept merely by ecclesiastical constitution; some have defended the whole gross substance of Arminianism, that the act of conversion depends upon the concurrence of men's free will; some have denied original sin; some have broached out of Socinus a most uncomfortable and desperate doctrine, that late repentance,—that is, upon the last bed of sickness,—is unfruitful, at least, to reconcile the penitent to God.' What we insist upon is, that the growth and movement of thought, on religious matters, are here shown to be in the Church; and that on these two cardinal doctrines of predestination and justification, with which we are accused of unfairly saddling Puritanism alone, Puritanism did really want to make the national religion hinge, while the Church did not, but resisted.
The resistance of the Church was at that time vanquished, not by importing strict Calvinism into the Prayer Book, but by casting out the Prayer Book altogether. By ordinance in 1645, the use of the Prayer Book, which for churches had already been forbidden, was forbidden also for all private places and families; all copies to be found in churches were to be delivered up, and heavy penalties were imposed on persons retaining them.
We come to the occasion where the Church is thought to have most decisively shown her unyieldingness,—the Savoy Conference in 1661, after King Charles the Second's restoration. The question was, what alterations were to be made in the Prayer Book, so as to enable the Puritans to use it as well as the Church party. Having in view doctrine and free development of thought, we say again it was the Puritans who were for narrowing, it was the Churchmen who were for keeping open. Their heads full of these tenets of predestination, original sin, and justification, which we are accused of charging upon them exclusively and unfairly, the Puritans complain that the Church Liturgy seems very defective,—why? Because 'the systems of doctrine of a church should summarily comprehend all such doctrines as are necessary to be believed,' and the liturgy does not set down these explicitly enough. For instance, 'the Confession,' they say, 'is very defective, not clearly expressing original sin. The Catechism is defective as to many necessary doctrines of our religion, some even of the essentials of Christianity not being mentioned except in the Creed, and there not so explicit as ought to be in a catechism.' And what is the answer of the bishops? It is the answer of people with an instinct that this definition and explicitness demanded by the Puritans are incompatible with the conditions of life of a historic church. 'The Church,' they say, 'hath been careful to put nothing into the Liturgy but that which is either evidently the Word of God, or what hath been generally received in the Catholic Church. The Catechism is not intended as a whole body of divinity.' The Puritans had requested that 'the Church prayers might containnothing questioned by pious, learned, and orthodox persons.' Seizing on this expression, wherein is contained the ground of thatseparatism for opinionswhich we hold to be so fatal not only to Church life but also to the natural growth of religious thought, the bishops ask, and in the very language of good sense: 'Who arepious, learned, and orthodox persons? Are we to take for such all who shall confidently affirm themselves to be such? If by orthodox be meant those who adhere to Scripture and the Catholic consent of antiquity, we do not yet know that any part of our Liturgy has been questioned by such. It was the wisdom of our reformers to draw upsuch a liturgy as neither Romanist nor Protestant could justly except against. Persons want the book to be altered for their own satisfaction.'
This allegation respecting the character of the Liturgy is undoubtedly true, for the Puritans themselves expressly admitted its truth, and urged this as a reason for altering the Liturgy. It is in consonance with what is so often said, and truly said, of the Thirty-nine Articles, that they arearticles of peace. This, indeed, makes the Articles scientifically worthless. Metaphysical propositions, such as they in the main are, drawn up with a studied design for their being vague and loose, can have no metaphysical value. But no one then thought of doing without metaphysical articles; so to make them articles of peace showed a true conception of the conditions of life and growth in a church. The readiness to put a lax sense on subscription is a proof of the same disposition of mind. Chillingworth's judgment about the meaning of subscription is well known. 'For the Church of England, I am persuaded that the constant doctrine of it is so pure and orthodox, that whosoever believes it and lives according to it, undoubtedly he shall be saved; and that there is no error in it which may necessitate or warrant any man to disturb the peace or renounce the communion of it.This, in my opinion, is all that is intended by subscription.' And Laud, a very different man from Chillingworth, held on this point a like opinion with him.
Certainly the Church of England was in no humour, at the time of the Savoy Conference, to deal tenderly with the Puritans. It was too much disposed to show to the Puritans the same sort of tenderness which the Puritans had shown to the Church. The nation, moreover, was nearly as ill-disposed as the Church to the Puritans; and this proves well what the narrowness and tyrannousness of Puritanism dominant had really been. But the Church undoubtedly said and did to Puritanism after the Restoration much that was harsh and bitter, and therefore inexcusable in a Christian church. Examples of Churchmen so speaking and dealing may be found in the transactions of 1661; but perhaps the most offensive example of a Churchman of this kind, and who deserves therefore to be studied, is a certain Dr. Jane, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford and Dean of Gloucester, who was put forward to thwart Tillotson's projects of comprehension in 1689. A certain number of Dr. Janes there have always been in the Church. There are a certain number of them in the Church now, and there always will be a certain number of them. No Church could exist with many of them; but one should have a sample or two of them always before one's mind, and remember how to the excluded party a few, and those the worst, of their excluders, are always apt to stand for the whole, in order to comprehend the full bitterness and resentment of Puritanism against the Church of England. Else one would be inclined to say, after attentively and impartially observing the two parties, that the persistence of the Church in pressing for conformity arose, not as the political historians would have it, from the lust of haughty ecclesiastics for dominion and for imposing their law on the vanquished, but from a real sense that their formularies were made so large and open, and the sense put upon subscription to them was so indulgent, that any reasonable man could honestly conform; and that it was perverseness and determination to impose their special ideas on the Church, and to narrow the Church's latitude, which made the Puritans stand out.
Nay, and it was with the diction of the Prayer Book, as it was with its doctrine; the Church took the side which most commands the sympathy of liberal-minded men. Baxter had his rival Prayer Book which he proposed to substitute for the old one. And this is how the 'Reformed Liturgy' was to begin: 'Eternal, incomprehensible and invisible God, infinite in power, wisdom and goodness, dwelling in the light which no man can approach, where thousand thousands minister unto thee, and ten thousand times ten thousand stand before thee,' &c. This, I say, was to have taken the place of our old friend,Dearly beloved brethren; and here, again, we can hardly refuse approval to the Church's resistance to Puritan innovations. We could wish, indeed, the Church had shown the same largeness in consenting to relax ceremonies, which she showed in refusing to tighten dogma, or to spoil diction. Worse still, the angry wish to drive by violence, when the other party will not move by reason, finally no doubt appears; and the Church has much to blame herself for in the Act of Uniformity. Blame she deserves, and she has had it plentifully; but what has not been enough perceived is, that really the conviction of her own moderation, openness, and latitude, as far as regards doctrine, seems to have filled her mind during her dealings with the Puritans; and that her impatience with them was in great measure impatience at seeing these so ill-appreciated by them. Very ill-appreciated by them they certainly were; and, as far as doctrine is concerned, the quarrel between the Church and Puritanism undoubtedly was, that for the doctrines of predestination, original sin, and justification, Puritanism wanted more exclusive prominence, more dogmatic definition, more bar to future escape and development; while the Church resisted.
And as the instinct of the Church always made her avoid, on these three favourite tenets of Puritanism, the stringency of definition which Puritanism tried to force upon her, always made her leave herself room for growth in regard to them,—so, if we look for the positive beginnings and first signs of growth, of disengagement from the stock notions of popular theology about predestination, original sin, and justification, it is among Churchmen, and not among Puritans, that we shall find them. Few will deny that as to the doctrines of predestination and original sin, at any rate, the mind of religious men is no longer what it was in the seventeenth century or in the eighteenth. There has been evident growth and emancipation; Puritanism itself no longer holds these doctrines in the rigid way it once did. To whom is this change owing? who were the beginners of it? They were men using that comparative openness of mind and accessibility to ideas which was fostered by the Church. The very complaints which we have quoted from the Puritan divines prove that this was so. Henry More, saying in the heat of the Calvinistic controversy, what it needed insight to say then, but what almost every one's common sense says now, that 'it were to be wished the Quinquarticular points were all reduced to this one, namely,That none shall be saved without sincere obedience;' Jeremy Taylor saying in the teeth of the superstitious popular doctrine of original sin: 'Original sin, as it is at this day commonly explicated, was not the doctrine of the primitive church; but when Pelagius had puddled the stream, St. Austin was so angry that he stamped and puddled it more,'—this sort of utterance from Churchmen it was, that first introduced into our religious world the current of more independent thought concerning the doctrines of predestination and original sin, which has now made its way even amidst Puritans themselves.
Here the emancipation has reached the Puritans; but it proceeded from the Church. That Puritanism is yet emancipated from the popular doctrine of justification cannot be asserted. On the contrary, the more it loosens its hold on the doctrine of predestination the more it tightens it on that of justification. We shall have occasion by and by to discuss Wesley's words: 'Plead thou solely the blood of the Covenant, the ransom paid for thy proud stubborn soul!' and to show how modern Methodism glories in holding aloft as its standard this teaching of Wesley's, and this teaching above all. The many tracts which have lately been sent me in reference to this subject go all the same way. Like Luther, they hold that 'all heretics have continually failed in this one point, that they do not rightly understand or know the article ofjustification:' 'do not see' (to continue to use Luther's words,) 'that by none other sacrifice or offering could God's fierce anger be appeased, but by the precious blood of the Son of God.' That this doctrine is founded upon an entire misunderstanding of St. Paul's writings we have shown; that there is very visible a tendency in the minds of religious people to outgrow it, is true, but where alone does this tendency manifest itself with any steadiness or power? In the Church. The inevitable movement of growth will in time extend itself to Puritanism also. Let it be remembered in that day that not only does the movement come to Puritanism from the Church, but it comes to Churchmen of our century from a seed of growth and development inherent in the Church, and which was manifest in the Church long ago!
That the accompaniments of the doctrine of justification, the tenets of conversion, instantaneous sanctification, assurance, and sinless perfection,—tenets which are not the essence of Wesley, but which are the essence of Wesleyan Methodism, and which have in them so much that is delusive and dangerous,—that these should have been discerningly judged by that mixture of piety and sobriety which marks Anglicans of the best type, such as Bishop Wilson,[105]will surprise no one. But years before Wesley was born, the fontal doctrine itself,—Wesley's 'Plead thou solely the blood of the Covenant!'—had been criticised by Hammond thus, and the signal of deliverance from the Lutheran doctrine of justification given: 'The solifidian looks upon his faith as the utmost accomplishment and end, and not only as the first elements of his task, which is,—the superstructing of good life. The solifidian believes himself to have the only sanctified necessary doctrines, that having them renders his condition safe, and every man who believes them a pure Christian professor. In respect of solifidianism it is worth remembering what Epiphanius observes of the primitive times, thatwickedness was the only heresy, that impious and pious living divided the whole Christian world into erroneous and orthodox.'
In point of fact, therefore, the historic Church in England, not existing for special opinions, but proceeding by development, has shown much greater freedom of mind as regards the doctrines of election, original sin, and justification, than the Nonconformists have; and has refused, in spite of Puritan pressure, to tie herself too strictly to these doctrines, to make them all in all. She thus both has been and is more serviceable than Puritanism to religious progress; because the separating for opinions, which is proper to Puritanism, rivets the separatist to those opinions, and is thus opposed to that development and gradual exhibiting of the full sense of the Bible and Christianity, which is essential to religious progress. To separate for the doctrine of predestination, of justification, of scriptural church-discipline, is to be false to the idea of development, to imagine that you can seize the absolute sense of Scripture from your own present point of view, and to cut yourself off from growth and gradual illumination. That a comparison between the course things have taken in Puritanism and in the Church goes to prove the truth of this as a matter of fact, is what I have been trying to show hitherto; in what remains I purpose to show how, as a matter of theory and antecedent likelihood, it seems probable and natural that so this should be.
A historic Church cannot choose but allow the principle of development, for it is written in its institutions and history. An admirable writer, in a book which is one of his least known works, but which contains, perhaps, even a greater number of profound and valuable ideas than any other one of them, has set forth, both persuasively and truly, the impression of this sort which Church-history cannot but convey. 'We have to account,' says Dr. Newman, in hisEssay on Development, 'for that apparent variation and growth of doctrine which embarrasses us when we would consult history for the true idea of Christianity. The increase and expansion of the Christian creed and ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart, and has had any wide or extended dominion. From the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas. The highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients; but, as admitted and transmitted by minds not inspired, and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation.' And again: 'Ideas may remain when the expression of them is indefinitely varied. Nay, one cause of corruption in religion is the refusal to follow the course of doctrine as it moves on, and an obstinacy in the notions of the past. So our Lord found his people precisians in their obedience to the letter; he condemned them for not being led on to its spirit,—that is, its development. The Gospel is the development of the Law; yet what difference seems wider than that which separates the unbending rule of Moses from the grace and truth which came by Jesus Christ? The more claim an idea has to be considered living, the more various will be its aspects; and the more social and political is its nature, the more complicated and subtle will be its developments, and the longer and more eventful will be its course. Such is Christianity.' And yet once more: 'It may be objected that inspired documents, such as the Holy Scriptures, at once determine doctrine without further trouble. But they were intended to createan idea, and that idea is not in the sacred text, but in the mind of the reader; and the question is, whether that idea is communicated to him in its completeness and minute accuracy on its first apprehension, or expands in his heart and intellect, and comes to perfection in the course of time. If it is said that inspiration supplied the place of this development in the first recipients of Christianity, still the time at length came when its recipients ceased to be inspired; and on these recipients the revealed truths would fall as in other cases, at first vaguely and generally, and would afterwards be completed by developments.'
The notion thus admirably expounded of a gradual understanding of the Bible, a progressive development of Christianity, is the same which was in Bishop Butler's mind when he laid down in hisAnalogythat 'the Bible contains many truths as yet undiscovered.' 'And as,' he says, 'the whole scheme of Scripture is not yet understood, so, if it ever comes to be understood, before the restitution of all things and without miraculous interpositions, it must be in the same way as natural knowledge is come at,—by the continuance and progress of learning and of liberty, and by particular persons attending to, comparing, and pursuing intimations scattered up and down it, which are overlooked and disregarded by the generality of the world. For this is the way in which all improvements are made; by thoughtful men's tracing on obscure hints, as it were, dropped as by nature accidentally, or which seem to come into our minds by chance.' And again: 'Our existence is not only successive, as it must be of necessity, but one state of our life and being is appointed by God to be a preparation for another, and that to be the means of attaining to another succeeding one; infancy to childhood, childhood to youth, youth to mature age. Men are impatient and for precipitating things; but the author of nature appears deliberate throughout his operations, accomplishing his natural ends by slow successive steps. Thus, in the daily course of natural providence, God operates in the very same manner as in the dispensation of Christianity; making one thing subservient to another, this to somewhat further; and so on, through a progressive series of means which extend both backward and forward, beyond our utmost view. Of this manner of operation everything we see in the course of nature is as much an instance as any part of the Christian dispensation.'
All this is indeed incomparably well said; and with Dr. Newman we may, on the strength of it all, beyond any doubt, 'fairly conclude that Christian doctrine admits of formal, legitimate, and true developments;' that 'the whole Bible is written on the principle of development.'
Dr. Newman, indeed, uses this idea in a manner which seems to us arbitrary and condemned by the idea itself. He uses it in support of the pretensions of the Church of Rome to an infallible authority on points of doctrine. He says, with much ingenuity, to Protestants: The doctrines you receive are no more on the face of the Bible, or in the plain teaching of the ante-Nicene Church, which alone you consider pure, than the doctrines you reject. The doctrine of the Trinity is a development, as much as the doctrine of Purgatory. Both of them are developments made by the Church, by the post-Nicene Church. The determination of the Canon of Scripture, a thing of vital importance to you who acknowledge no authority but Scripture, is a development due to the post-Nicene Church.—And thus Dr. Newman would compel Protestants to admit that which is, he declares, in itself reasonable,—namely, 'the probability of the appointment in Christianity of an external authority to decide upon the true developments of doctrine and practice in it, thereby separating them from the mass of mere human speculation, extravagance, corruption, and error, in and out of which they grow. This is the doctrine of the infallibility of the Church, of faith and obedience towards the Church, founded on the probability of its never erring in its declarations or commands.'
Now, asserted in this absolute way, and extended to doctrine as well as discipline, to speculative thought as well as to Christian practice, Dr. Newman's conclusion seems at variance with his own theory of development, and to be something like an instance of what Bishop Butler criticises when he says: 'Men are impatient, and for precipitating things.' But Dr. Newman has himself supplied us with a sort of commentary on these words of Butler's which is worth quoting, because it throws more light on our point than Butler's few words can throw on it by themselves. Dr. Newman says: 'Development is not an effect of wishing and resolving, or of forced enthusiasm, or of any mechanism of reasoning, or of any mere subtlety of intellect; but comes of its own innate power of expansion within the mind in its season, though with the use of reflection and argument and original thought, more or less as it may happen, with a dependence on the ethical growth of the mind itself, and with a reflex influence upon it.'
It is impossible to point out more sagaciously and expressively the natural, spontaneous, free character of true development; how such a development must follow laws of its own, may often require vast periods of time, cannot be hurried, cannot be stopped. And so far as Christianity deals,—as, in its metaphysical theology, it does abundantly deal,—with thought and speculation, it must surely be admitted that for its true and ultimate development in this line more time is required, and other conditions have to be fulfilled, than we have had already. So far as Christian doctrine contains speculative philosophical ideas, never since its origin have the conditions been present for determining these adequately; certainly not in the mediæval Church, which so dauntlessly strove to determine them. And therefore on every Creed and Council is judgment passed in Bishop Butler's sentence: 'The Bible contains many truths as yet undiscovered.'
The Christian religion has practice for its great end and aim; but it raises, as anyone can see, and as Church-history proves, numerous and great questions of philosophy and of scientific criticism. Well, for the true elucidation of such questions, and for their final solution, time and favourable developing conditions are confessedly necessary. From the end of the apostolic age and of the great fontal burst of Christianity, down to the present time, have such conditions ever existed in the Christian communities, for determining adequately the questions of philosophy and scientific criticism which the Christian religion starts?God,creation,will,evil,propitiation,immortality,—these terms and many more of the same kind, however much they might in the Bible be used in a concrete and practical manner, yet plainly had in themselves a provocation to abstract thought, carried with them the occasions of a criticism and a philosophy, which must sooner or later make its appearance in the Church. It did make its appearance, and the question is whether it has ever yet appeared there under conditions favourable to its true development. Surely this is best elucidated by considering whether questions of criticism and philosophy in general ever had one of their happy moments, their times for successful development, in the early and middle ages of Christendom at all, or have had one of them in the Christian churches, as such, since. All these questions hang together, and the time that is improper for solving one sort of them truly, is improper for solving the others.
Well, surely, historic criticism, criticism of style, criticism of nature, no one would go to the early or middle ages of the Church for illumination on these matters. How then should those ages develop successfully a philosophy of theology, or in other words, a criticism of physics and metaphysics, which involves the three other criticisms and more besides? Church-theology is an elaborate attempt at a philosophy of theology, at a philosophical criticism. In Greece, before Christianity appeared, there had been a favouring period for the development of such a criticism; a considerable movement of it took place, and considerable results were reached. When Christianity began, this movement was in decadence; it declined more and more till it died quite out; it revived very slowly, and as it waxed, the mediæval Church waned. The doctrine of universals is a question of philosophy discussed in Greece, and re-discussed in the middle ages. Whatever light this doctrine receives from Plato's treatment of it, or Aristotle's, in whatever state they left it, will anyone say that the Nominalists and Realists brought any more light to it, that they developed it in any way, or could develop it? For the same reason, St. Augustine's criticism of God's eternal decrees, original sin, and justification, the criticism of St. Thomas Aquinas on them, the decisions of the Church on them, are of necessity, and from the very nature of things, inadequate, because, being philosophical developments, they are made in an age when the forces for true philosophical development are waning or wanting.
So when Hooker says most truly: 'Our belief in the Trinity, the co-eternity of the Son of God with his Father, the proceeding of the Spirit from the Father and the Son, with other principal points the necessity whereof is by none denied, are notwithstanding in Scripture nowhere to be found by express literal mention, only deduced they are out of Scripture by collection;'—when Hooker thus points, out, what is undoubtedly the truth, that these Church-doctrines are developments, we may add this other truth equally undoubted,—that beingphilosophicaldevelopments, they are developments of a kind which the Church has never yet had the right conditions for making adequately, any more than it has had the conditions for developing out of what is said in the Book of Genesis a true philosophy of nature, or out of what is said in the Book of Daniel, a true philosophy of history. It matters nothing whether the scientific truth was there, and the problem was to extract it; or not there, and the problem was to understand why it was not there, and the relation borne by what was there to the scientific truth. The Church had no means of solving either the one problem or the other. And this from no fault at all of the Church, but for the same reason that she was unfitted to solve a difficulty in Aristotle'sPhysicsor Plato'sTimæus, and to determine the historical value of Herodotus or Livy; simply from the natural operation of the law of development, which for success in philosophy and criticism requires certain conditions, which in the early and mediæval Church were not to be found.
And when the movement of philosophy and criticism came with the Renascence, this movement was almost entirely outside the Churches, whether Catholic or Protestant, and not inside them. It worked in men like Descartes and Bacon, and not in men like Luther and Calvin; so that the doctrine of these two eminent personages, Luther and Calvin, so far as it was a philosophical and critical development from Scripture, had no more likelihood of being an adequate development than the doctrine of the Council of Trent. And so it has gone on to this day. Philosophy and criticism have become a great power in the world, and inevitably tend to alter and develop Church-doctrine, so far as this doctrine is, as to a great extent it is, philosophical and critical. Yet the seat of the developing force is not in the Church itself, but elsewhere; its influences filter strugglingly into the Church, and the Church slowly absorbs and incorporates them. And whatever hinders their filtering in and becoming incorporated, hinders truth and the natural progress of things.
While, therefore, we entirely agree with Dr. Newman and with the great Anglican divines that the whole Bible is written on the principle of development, and that Christianity in its doctrine and discipline is and must be a development of the Bible, we yet cannot agree that for the adequate development of Christian doctrine, so far as theology exhibits this metaphysically and scientifically, the Church, whether ante-Nicene or post-Nicene, has ever yet furnished a channel. Thought and science follow their own law of development, they are slowly elaborated in the growth and forward pressure of humanity, in what Shakspeare calls,—
. . . . . the prophetic soulOf the wide world dreaming on things to come;
. . . . . the prophetic soulOf the wide world dreaming on things to come;
. . . . . the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come;
and their ripeness and unripeness, as Dr. Newman most truly says, are not an effect of our wishing or resolving. Rather do they seem brought about by a power such as Goethe figures by theZeit-Geistor Time-Spirit, and St. Paul describes as a divine powerrevealingadditions to what we possess already.
But sects of men are apt to be shut up in sectarian ideas of their own, and to be less open to new general ideas than the main body of men; therefore St. Paul in the same breath exhorts to unity. What may justly be conceded to the Catholic Church is, that in her idea of a continuous developing power in united Christendom to work upon the data furnished by the Bible, and produce new combinations from them as the growth of time required it, she followed a true instinct. But the rightphilosophicaldevelopments she vainly imagined herself to have had the power to produce, and her attempts in this direction were at most but a prophecy of this power, as alchemy is said to have been a prophecy of chemistry.
With developments of discipline and church-order it is very different. The Bible raises, as we have seen, many and great questions of philosophy and criticism; still, essentially the Church was not a corporation for speculative purposes, but a corporation for purposes of moral growth and of practice. Terms likeGod,creation,will,evil,propitiation,immortality, evoke, as we have said, and must evoke, sooner or later, a philosophy; but to evoke this was the accident and not the essence of Christianity. What, then, was the essence?
An ingenious writer, as unlike Dr. Newman as it is possible to conceive, has lately told us. In an article inFraser's Magazine,—an article written with great vigour and acuteness,—this writer advises us to return to Paley, whom we were beginning to neglect, because the real important essence of Christianity, or rather, to quote quite literally, 'the only form of Christianity which is worthy of the serious consideration of rational men, is Protestantism as stated by Paley and his school.' And why? 'Because this Protestantism enables the saint to prove to the worldly man that Christ threatened him with hell-fire, and proved his power to threaten by rising from the dead and ascending into heaven;and these allegations are the fundamental assertions of Christianity.'
Now it may be said that this is a somewhat contracted view of 'the unsearchable riches of Christ;' but we will not quarrel with it. And this for several reasons. In the first place, it is the view often taken by popular theology. In the second place, it is the view best fitted to serve its Benthamite author's object, which is to get Christianity out of the way altogether. In the third place, its shortness gives us courage to try and do what is the hardest thing in the world, namely, to pack a statement of the main drift of Christianity into a few lines of nearly as short compass.
What then was, in brief, the Christian gospel, or 'good news'? It was this:The kingdom of God is come unto you. The power of Jesus upon the multitudes who heard him gladly, was not that by rising from the dead and ascending into heaven he enabled the saint to prove to the worldly man the certainty of hell-fire (for he had not yet done so); but thathe talked to them about the kingdom of God.[106]And what is the kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven? It is this:God's will done, as in heaven so on earth. And how was this come to mankind? BecauseJesus is come to save his people from their sins. And what is being saved from our sins? This:Entering into the kingdom of heaven by doing the will of our Father which is in heaven. And how does Christ enable us to do this? By teaching usto take his yoke upon us, and learn of him to deny ourselves and take up our cross daily and follow him, and to lose our life for the purpose of saving it. So that St. Paul might say most truly that the seal of the sure foundation of God in Christianity was this:Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity: or, as he elsewhere expands it:Let him bring forth the fruits of the Spirit,—love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.[107]
On this foundation arose the Christian Church, and not on any foundation of speculative metaphysics. It was inevitable that the speculative metaphysics should come, but they were not the foundation. When they came, the danger of the Christian Church was that she should take them for the foundation. The people who were built on the real foundation, who were united in the joy of Christ's good news, naturally, as they came to know of one another's existence, as their relations with one another multiplied, as the sense of sympathy in the possession of a common treasure deepened,—naturally, I say, drew together in one body, with an organisation growing out of the needs of a growing body. It is quite clear that the more strongly Christians felt their common business in setting forward upon earth, through Christ's spirit, the kingdom of God, the more they would be drawn to coalesce into one society for this business, with the natural and true notion that the acting together in this way offers to men greater helps for reaching their aim, presents fewer distractions, and above all, supplies a more animating force of sympathy and mutual assurance, than the acting separately. Only the sense of differences greater than the sense of sympathy could defeat this tendency.
Dr. Newman has told us what an impression was once made upon his mind by the sentence:Securus judicat orbis terrarum. We have shown how, for matters of philosophical judgment, not yet settled but requiring development to clear them, the consent of the world, at a time when this clearing development cannot have happened, seems to carry little or no weight at all; indeed, as to judgment on these points, we should rather be inclined to lay down the very contrary of Dr. Newman's affirmation, and to say:Securus delirat orbis terrarum. But points of speculative theology being out of the question, and the practical ground and purpose of man's religion being broadly and plainly fixed, we should be quite disposed to concede to Dr. Newman, thatsecuruscolitorbis terrarum;—those pursue this purpose best who pursue it together. For unless prevented by extraneous causes, they manifestly tend, as the history of the Church's growth shows, to pursue it together.
Nonconformists are fond of talking of the unity which may co-exist with separation, and they say: 'There are four evangelists, yet one gospel; why should there not be many separate religious bodies, yet one Church?' But their theory of unity in separation is a theory palpably invented to cover existing facts, and their argument from the evangelists is a paralogism. For the Four Gospels arose out of no thought of divergency; they were not designed as corrections of one prior gospel, or of one another; they were concurring testimonies borne to the same fact. But the several religious bodies of Christendom plainly grew out of an intention of divergency; clearly they were designed to correct the imperfections of one prior church and of each other; and to say of things sprung out of discord that they may makeone, because things sprung out of concord may makeone, is like saying that because several agreements may make a peace, therefore several wars may make a peace too. No; without some strong motive to the contrary, men united by the pursuit of a clearly defined common aim of irresistible attractiveness naturally coalesce; and since they coalesce naturally, they are clearly right in coalescing and find their advantage in it.
All that Dr. Newman has so excellently said about development applies here legitimately and fully. Existence justifies additions and stages in existence. The living edifice planted on the foundation,Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity, could not but grow, if it lived at all. If it grew, it could not but make developments, and all developments not inconsistent with the aim of its original foundation, and not extending beyond the moral and practical sphere which was the sphere of its original foundation, are legitimated by the very fact of the Church having in the natural evolution of its life and growth made them. A boy does not wear the clothes or follow the ways of an infant, nor a man those of a boy; yet they are all engaged in the one same business of developing their growing life, and to the clothes to be worn and the ways to be followed for the purpose of doing this, nature will, in general, direct them safely. The several scattered congregations of the first age of Christianity coalesced into one community, just as the several scattered Christians had earlier still coalesced into congregations. Why?—because such was the natural course of things. It had nothing inconsistent with the fundamental ground of Christians,Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity; and it was approved by their growing and enlarging in it. They developed a church-discipline with a hierarchy of bishops and archbishops, which was not that of the first times; they developed church-usages, such as the practice of infant baptism, which were not those of the first times; they developed a church-ritual with ceremonies which were not those of the first times;—they developed all these, just as they developed a church-architecture which was not that of the first times, because they were no longer in the first times, and required for their expanding growth what suited their own times. They coalesced with the State because they grew by doing so. They called the faith they possessed in common theCatholic, that is, the general or universal faith. They developed, also, as we have seen, dogma or a theological philosophy. Both dogma and discipline became a part of the Catholic faith, or profession of the general body of Christians.
Now to develop a discipline, or form of outward life for itself, the Church, as has been said, had necessarily, like every other living thing, the requisite qualifications; to develop scientific dogma it had not. But even of the dogma which the Church developed it may be said, that, from the very nature of things, it was probably, as compared with the opposing dogma over which it prevailed, the more suited to the actual condition of the Church's life, and to the due progress of the divine work for which she existed. For instance, whatever may be scientifically the rights of the question about grace and free-will, it is evident that, for the Church of the fifth century, Pelagianism was the less inspiring and edifying doctrine, and the sense ofbeing in the divine handwas the feeling which it was good for Christians to be filled with. Whatever may be scientifically the merits of the dispute between Arius and Athanasius, for the Church of their time whatever most exalted or seemed to exalt Jesus Christ was clearly the profitable doctrine, the doctrine most helpful to that moral life which was the true life of the Church.
People, however, there were in abundance who differed on points both of discipline and of dogma from the rule which obtained in the Church, and who separated from her on account of that difference. These were the heretics:separatists, as the name implies,for the sake of opinions. And the very name, therefore, implies that they were wrong in separating, and that the body which held together was right; because the Church exists, not for the sake of opinions, but for the sake of moral practice, and a united endeavour after this is stronger than a broken one. Valentinians, Marcionites, Montanists, Donatists, Manichæans, Novatians, Eutychians, Apollinarians, Nestorians, Arians, Pelagians,—if they separated on points of discipline they were wrong, because for developing its own fit outward conditions of life the body of a community has, as we have seen, a real natural power, and individuals are bound to sacrifice their fancies to it; if they separated on points of dogma they were wrong also, because, while neither they nor the Church had the means of determining such points adequately, the true instinct lay in those who, instead of separating for such points, conceded them as the Church settled them, and found their bond of union, where it in truth really was, not in notions about the co-eternity of the Son, but in the principle:Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.
Does any one imagine that all the Church shared Augustine's speculative 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 ofCatholicis 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 wordCatholicsome occult quality, one must allow that the changes made in the Church of England at the Reformation impaired its Catholicity. The wordCatholicwas 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 wordCatholicwe 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 thehistoric 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 communionby 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 howshouldthey 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 ofthe gospel. Whatever may come, we are determined to be true toScriptural 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 tothe truth. It is ours to cry everywhere: "Come, sinners, tothe gospel-feast!"' And thisgospel, thisScriptural Protestantism, thistruth, 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.
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 themScriptural Protestantism, ortruth, orthe 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 itScriptural 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 exactlyChristiantype 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.
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 hasgrown,—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-calledScriptural Protestantismof imputed righteousness, and which would do more for real righteousness and for Christianity than has ever been done yet.